Table of Contents

"Canst thou by searching find out God?"

Writings of various authors

The Cross

The Railway Tracts

The Son of God: His Word or Man's Word?

The Handcuffs: or the Deserter

"Smashed to pieces"

The Lost Ticket: or is your Life insured?

"Just in Time"

"Conversation;" or "The Commercial's Way to be Saved"

"What a Contrast"

"Progress"

"An Interesting Question"

"The Explosion"

"I have my Ticket"

"Over-Luggage"

"How does a Man become a Soldier?"

That Sad, Sad Face

"Must I not strive?" or the Poor Man's Dinner

The Lunatic and his Keeper

God and the World

A Student Story;

Seekers for Light.

A Fisherman's Discovery

Truth — What is it?

A Publican's Guest

A Ruler's Difficulty

A Thief's Confession

Grace — What is it?

A Chancellor of the Exchequer's Dilemma

Eternal Life- How to get it.

A Soldier's Desire.

Faith — What is it?

A Jailor's Enquiry

A Rich Man's Perplexity

A Prisoner and a King

"No Man Can Serve Two Masters"

Gospel Papers

God's Glad Tidings

The Old Old Story

Gospel Tracts

The Great Salvation

Forgiveness

Justification.

Redemption.

Reconciliation.

Salvation

Sanctification.

The New Birth.

Quickening

The Gift of the Holy Spirit.

New Creation.

Gospel Tracts

Gospel Words.

Gospel Words — First Series.

Gospel Words - Second Series.

Gospel Words - Third Series.

Gospel Words - Fourth Series.

Gospel Words — Fifth Series.

Gospel Words - Sixth Series.

Gospel Words — Seventh Series.

Gospel Words — Eighth Series

Gospel Words — Ninth Series.

Gospel Words — Tenth Series.

Gospel Words — Eleventh Series.

Gospel Words — Twelfth Series.

Glad Tidings

Conversion: What is it?

Decision for Christ.

Different Conversions.

"The Gospel of God"

Fundamental Truths of Salvation

A Gospel Address.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Salvation Possessed and Known

"We believe and are sure."

“You must prove the Bible true before I accept it.”

Streams of Refreshing from the Fountain of Life.

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Story of our English Bible

1. The Scriptures are Divine and the Text Divinely Preserved.

2. The Perfection of and Verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures.

3. The Books and Canon of the Old Testament.

4. The Books of the Old Testament.

5. The Books and Canon of the New Testament.

6. History of the Various English Versions of the Bible.

7. Specimens of Translations and Peculiar Renderings.

8. The Bible: Its Divisions, Chapters, Verses, Titles, and Subscriptions.

From Scottish Moors To African Swamps.

The Boyhood of Well-known Christian Men.

Stories of East London

Martyr Tales and Sketches

Mayken Karlzon's Diary.

Wycliffe's Work for England

Outlines of the Story of Christianity in Britain.

A Concise History of the Church;

Persecution and Profession:

Darkness of the Dark Ages:

Lights and Shadows of the Reformation.

Light Amid the Darkness

Heroes of the Reformation

Christian Privileges

Our Father's Will: Being a Short History of the Text of the New Testament

Our Father's Will

Introduction.

No need for Alarm.

The Various Forms of Evidence.

The Material of the Greek Manuscripts.

The Style of Writing.

GOD IS NOWHERE.

Causes of Variations.

List of Greek Copies.

List of Uncial Manuscripts.

Cursive Manuscripts.

Lectionaries.

The Fathers.

The Versions.

The Editor at Work.

Review of a Few Passages.

Various Readings in the Revelation.

Printed Greek Testaments.

The Order of the Books.

Divisions of the New Testament.

Headings and Subscriptions to the Books.

The Canon of Scripture.

The Authorised Version of 1611.

Verbal Inspiration.

Four truths Every Christian Should Know About Salvation

You can have a happy life

Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment

"Canst thou by searching find out God?"

The Authority of the Word of God

Notes on Genesis

Colossians

A Short Summary of the Epistle to the Colossians

Colossians 1.

Colossians 2.

Colossians 3.

Colossians 4.

Christ and the Assembly

Ministry for the Church of God

Messiah the Prince

Letters and Papers

"Thou remainest"

Moses - The Man of God

The Eternal Son

Peace and Joy in Time of Trials

Needed Needs

Sanctifying Solitude

The Eternal Son of the Father

The Incarnation of the Son

The Altar of Ed

"A Christian Conscience."

Do All Believers Receive The Holy Spirit?

The Sonship of Christ

Christ Everything

Inclusive and Exclusive

Disciples Indeed

A KING GOING TO MAKE WAR.

The Old Paths

Psalm 23. A Paean of Praise

The Holy Scriptures and Creation

Assembly Order

Our Path and our Associations

Various - Poetry

Various

This document may be found online at www.stempublishing.com

You are welcome to freely access and use this material for personal study or sending to other Bible students, compiling extracts for notes etc, but please do not republish without permission.

With the prayerful desire that the Lord Jesus Christ will use this God-given ministry in this form for His glory and the blessing of many in these last days before His coming. © Les Hodgett (contact@stempublishing.com)

STEM Publishing : Various : Poetry Index

The Story of the Glory

And Other Poems

By James Boyd.

Contents

Prefatory Note

The Story of the Glory

The Trumpet of Grace

Hallelujah

The Great Day

Attraction

In Hope

Resignation

Ready

Awake

The Father's Love

The Love of Christ

The Great Shepherd

The Morning Star

Satisfaction

Dulcamara

The Grace of the Lord Jesus

A Contrast

The Heart's Desire

Christ Everything

Christ Only

Praise Him

He Maketh the Storm a Calm

The Same

Azazel

Talks by the Way

The Voice of Jesus

Christ Triumphant

A Vision of the World to Come

My Beloved

Time's Flight

Come

The Risen Christ

Written on Board the Lucania

The Faithful God

Thine Only

Morning Breaks

The Burden of Dumah

True Knowledge

A Medley

Salvation

Forward

Eternity

The "First-Born"

To a Floral Calendar

Jehovah my Shepherd

The Ways of God with Man

Despair

Victory

The Sceptic

A Hymn

The Christian's Hope

The Watchers' Cry

Death's Terrors

Deliverance

Discipleship

Confidence

The Necromancer

A Child's Prayer

The Jewels of the King

The Trumpet of Salvation

Poems of Grace and Glory

By James Boyd.

Contents

Foreword

Our Redeemer

Solomon

Sleeper Awake!

Christ Our Delight

Lest I Forget

God�s Temple Defiled

Hope�s Rejoicing

The Firstborn

Not Your Own

The Father�s Purpose

Laodicea

The Mystery

Thine the Glory

Sought and Bought

Song of Salvation

Press On

Praise

Patience

Deus Vobiscum

Congratulations

Redemption

None But Christ

God�s Searchings

Chaos

Self-distrust

Good News

My Hiding-place

Praise ye the Lord!

A Man of Sorrows

Present with the Lord

Made Fit

The Heart�s Longing

Till the Morning Breaks

A Vision of the Future

Arise

Our Father

The Tabernacles of God

The Old and New

David

What think ye of Christ?

Home-coming

Remember Me

Revelation versus Speculation

Many Happy Returns

Thine Am I

Sovereign Love

Talks by the Way (Part 1)

Talks by the Way (Part 2)

He Is Worthy

Congratulations. (E.C.)

Our Outlook

Misunderstood

Homeward-bound

Home

The Wisdom of God

What Seek Ye?

Where Dwellest Thou?

Come and See

A Little Nearer

Maranatha

A New Year�s Breathing

A Cry from the Trenches

Shelter Me

Hear, O Lord

God Our Refuge

The Mighty Hand of God

Lord, Establish Peace

Hope

Attraction

Counsels of Love

The Son

A Retrospect

Au Revoir

Trust

Christ Everything

The Compassions of Christ

The Pre-eminence of Jesus

Eternal Love

The Bright Morning Star

Confidence

Desire

God Is Love

Love Unspeakable

The Father

An Eastern Song of Love

Depart from Us

Depart from Me

And Not Another

Request for Light

The Story of the Glory — Prefatory Note.

Having had the privilege of assisting in revision of the proofs of this volume of poems, the author has kindly suggested that I should write a few lines by way of preface; and whilst assenting with some diffidence it is nevertheless a real pleasure to thus identify myself with the truth contained in its pages. I do so the more gladly too as knowing how readers far and wide have appreciated Mr. Boyd's regular articles in the monthly magazine, "Scripture Truth," with the conduct of which I am permitted to be associated.

The poems have been written in leisure moments, on land and sea, throughout a great number of years, whilst their author was moving about in various parts of the world preaching and teaching the things of Jesus Christ; and were committed to paper more to give shape and expression to the writer's own meditations than with specific intent to publish. But several friends, who, with myself, had seen the verse in manuscript, felt that it would be a distinct loss were they to remain inaccessible to the general reader; and it is in response to these representations that the present volume is published.

The poems have their own literary charm and beauty, but it is in their able reiteration of the truth as to the Son of God, that the believer will especially delight: and in this consists their abiding value. Many in number, they have but one theme — the Lord Jesus Christ, the many hued glories of His person and redeeming work. Does the writer depict in scathing language the fallen and corrupt state of every child of Adam's race, it is but to serve as the dark background against which to bring out the infinite perfections and worth of the loving and lowly Saviour of the lost; does biting satire here have place, as it has in Holy Writ, it is, as there, but that clear way may be made for the truth; do we find here and there poetic description of the beauties of nature around, or the wonders of the heavenly bodies in their courses, it is but a prelude to the unfolding of glories that are above the heavens.

In a volume of over three hundred pages, touching on the widest possible range of subjects in the moral universe, it were strange indeed if every expression used were exactly such as one would one's self employ; but these must always be read with their context, and, so read, one cannot but feel deeply thankful to God for the body of sound and healthful doctrine here so convincingly stated.

Especially useful to those who may have lent a careless ear to modern sceptical notions will be such poems as "Talks by the Way," which is really a keen analysis of all the most prevalent philosophies of the day — meeting the erroneous arguments advanced, first on their own ground in such wise as to show their folly, and then unwaveringly presenting the Christ of God as the true solution of every question, and the only real Satisfier of the heart.

May God graciously bless these writings to the uplifting of the name of His Son our Lord, who alone is worthy.

H. D. R. Jameson.

Poems of Grace and Glory — Foreword

After many years of true friendship with the Author, it gives me pleasure, in response to a request by him to write a few lines at the opening of this Volume.

Those who were fortunate enough to procure a copy of the previous Volume by the same writer �The Story of the Glory, and other Poems� (which is now out of print), will be glad of the opportunity of having another Volume somewhat similar in character, and those who desired to get a copy but could not, will also appreciate this fresh Volume. In the following pages will be found Poems of high spiritual tone and also varied spiritual experience, and there will be found many other beautiful Poems which will suit the taste of a large circle of poem lovers. Poems�like Poets�are born, not made, and there is therefore a particular freshness and originality in all Mr. Boyd�s compositions.

The many friends in this and other lands who have appreciated the ministry, both oral and written, of the Author, will be pleased to have this book, which is a good example of Mr. Boyd�s activities in a field less familiar to them.

It is earnestly hoped that the blessing which has accompanied Mr. Boyd�s labours for so many years, will also, through the goodness of God, accompany this Volume.

Robert Whyte

�Belverley�

Trinity,

Edinburgh

"Canst thou by searching find out God?"

"Canst thou by searching find out God?"

Henry Wilson, Inkongo.

CANST thou by searching find

The Almighty God? Can puny man

Take in the One who was ere time began,

With his own finite mind?

I use a microscope, and scan

A tiny parasite,

Brought to the light

Of my research and vision as a man;

Yet is that tiny mite

Unable quite

To understand that I not only see

And know it, but control its destiny.

So it would seem that puny finite man

Can never scan

Or know the mighty God, who fills eternity.

Some say God can be found

In Nature; and 'tis true indeed

We there His wisdom and His might can read,

And see His skill abound.

The tiny animalculae,

More wonderful by far

Than man's inventions are,

Display His handiwork with certainty.

Each plant that grows

Most plainly shows

The imprint of a wise Creator's hand,

On viewing which amazed and awed I stand.

But 'tis His work, not God Himself I see,

Nor can it be

That viewing Nature only I shall understand.

Behold the starry sky!

What human mind can comprehend

Where the beginning is or where the end

Of such immensity?

What do the many names convey?

The 'Serpent' shining bright,

The 'Cross,' emblazed in light,

The 'Crown,' the 'Wounded Conqueror,' what are they?

Again I stand amazed;

The mind is dazed

Before the sky's expanse, so great, so wide:

And yet one's longing rests ungratified;

And life's hard problems and its deepest need

Remain indeed

Unsolved, unmet. The heart is not thus satisfied.

Turn now and view with me

A group of humble men gathered around

A central One, for in that One are found

A lofty majesty,

Surpassing wisdom, gentleness,

A knowledge of men's needs,

A tenderness that heeds

The faintest cry of sorrow or distress.

Then Philip speaks this word-

'Show us the Father, Lord,'

And thus the Lord replies with voice serene

'He that hath seen Me, hath the Father seen.'

O wondrous, glorious mystery, that God,

The eternal God,

Has revealed Himself in this our earthly scene.

Then onward to the Cross,

Displaying God's great love to you and me,

Behold the Lord, advance unflinchingly,

Unmoved by shame or loss.

But, risen now at God's right hand,

Upon His glorious face

God's glory we can trace,

And seeing Him, our hearts can understand.

He knows our every need,

And He can read

Even the longing we can scarce express,

And knowing, 'tis His great delight to bless,

The weary heart can find in Him its rest,

And, fully blest,

Be filled with heavenly peace and joy and happiness.

While He is still away,

His people here are left to set Him forth,

And show His glory and His matchless worth,

And God Himself display.

We well may own with grief and shame

How much we fail to show

God's nature here below,

And how we do dishonour to His Name.

Yet let us fix our gaze

On Him, whose rays

Will brighten, change us, cause us now to be

More like Him, so that all around may see

In us a little of that radiant light,

And glory bright,

Which we shall bear throughout a glad eternity.

Writings of various authors

The Gospel!

The Cross A Gospel Address (A. Dockerty)

The Railway Tracts (C. Stanley) There is much more from this author.

God and the World (J. Mawson) There is much more from this author.

Gospel Narratives (W. Wolston) There is much more from this author.

Seekers for Light 14 Addresses to Edinburgh Students (W. Wolston)

Gospel Papers (W Turpin)

God's Glad Tidings. 16 Gospel Addresses (W. Fereday)

The Old Old Story. 19 Gospel Addresses (W. Fereday)

Gospel Tracts 5 Gospel Tracts (W. Fereday)

The Great Salvation 10 Aspects of Salvation (F. B. Hole)

Twenty Gospel Tracts (Wm. Reid & Robt. Wilson)

Gospel Words 144 Gospel Tracts (W. Kelly)

Glad Tidings (C. Mackintosh)

Conversion: What is it? (C. Mackintosh)

Decision for Christ (C. Mackintosh)

Different Conversions (J. Bellett)

"The Gospel of God" (N. Anderson)

Fundamental Truths of Salvation (Edward Dennett)

A Gospel Address (G. V. Wigram)

God's Evangel Gospel Papers (F. Grant)

Salvation Possessed and Known (W. Hocking)

"We believe and are sure." (C. Knapp)

You must prove the Bible true (W. Lowe)

Streams of Refreshing (H. Snell)

The Gospel of Our Salvation (H. Witherby)

The Story of our English Bible (W. Scott)

Histories and Biographies for the Young

From Scottish Moors To African Swamps. Missionary Life in Uganda (C. J. L.)

The Boyhood of Well-known Christian Men. (G. W.)

Stories of East London or, Peeps into Busy Places. (C. J. L.)

Martyr Tales and Sketches for the young (G. W.)

Mayken Karlzon's Diary, A story of the Inquisition in Spain and Holland. (C. J. L.)

Wycliffe's Work for England (L. Laurenson)

Christianity in Britain (L. Laurenson.)

A Concise History of the Church; Apostolic Era to the Reformation. (Alfred E. Knight)

Persecution and Profession: Church History to the Fifth Century. (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

Darkness of the Dark Ages: Church History: A.D. 500 - Reformation. (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

Lights and Shadows of the Reformation (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

Light Amid the Darkness, as Seen in the Life of Luther (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

Heroes of the Reformation: Their Trials and Triumphs. (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

For the Young

Christian Privileges (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

Our Father's Will, History of the Text of the New Testament. (Publisher: Geo. Morrish)

Four truths Every Christian Should Know About Salvation (E. C. Hadley)

You can have a happy life (E. C. Hadley)

Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment (G. Cutting)

"Canst thou by searching find out God?" (Henry Wilson)

Other Books

The Authority of the Word of God (James Boyd)

Notes on Genesis (E. L. Bevir)

Summary of Colossians (A. P. Cecil)

Christ and the Assembly (Various)

Ministry for the Church of God (Various)

Messiah the Prince: Matthew's Gospel (L. Laurenson)

Letters and Papers (T. Powerscourt)

"Thou remainest" (J Wilson Smith)

Moses - The Man of God (G. Andre)

The Eternal Son (E. C. Hadley)

Peace and Joy in Time of Trials (E. C. Hadley)

Needed Needs (J. B. Stoney)

Sanctifying Solitude (J. B. Stoney)

The Eternal Son of the Father (W. R. Dronsfield)

The Incarnation of the Son (W. R. Dronsfield)

The Altar of Ed (J. W. H. Nicols)

"A Christian Conscience"

Do All Believers Receive The Holy Spirit? (A. J. Pollock)

The Sonship of Christ (R. F. Wall)

Christ Everything

Inclusive and Exclusive (H. J. Vine)

Disciples Indeed (A. Mace)

The Old Paths (J. Mueller)

Psalm 23. A Paean of Praise (Bible reading)

The Holy Scriptures and Creation (L. Gaussen)

Assembly Order (B. C. Greenman, S Ridout and others)

STEM Publishing : Various :

The Cross

Matthew 27: 33-36; John 19: 25-30, 38-42.

A. Dockerty.

An Unedited Gospel Address.

I want to read tonight, first of all, in the twenty-seventh chapter of the Gospel by Matthew, verse thirty-three. "And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull, They gave Him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when He had tasted thereof, he would not drink. And they crucified Him, and parted His garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted My garments among them, and upon My vesture did they cast lots. And sitting down they watched Him there."

Nineteenth chapter of John's Gospel, verse twenty-five. "Now there stood by the cross of Jesus His mother, and His mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and disciple standing by, whom He loved, He saith unto His mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith He to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home. After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a spunge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to His mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, He said, It is finished: and He bowed His head, and gave up the ghost."

Verse thirty-eight: "And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave Him leave. He came therefore, and took the body of Jesus. And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews' preparation day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand."

I want to take you with me tonight, and we want to stand by the Cross of Jesus — the familiar story, perhaps, to everyone of us here tonight; but I am assured, not a familiar story to everyone in this country, as it is not in the country from which I come — England itself. There was a brother told us of an incident that happened at one of the high schools in the south of England. There was a new teacher arrived at this school and she was set over a class of girls fifteen to seventeen. She was a Christian woman; and when it came to the Scripture lesson, she began to tell them the story of the Cross. She arrived at the place where He was taken into Pilate's hall, and before she could get much further in her address to the girls in that high school, the bell rang. School was to be dismissed. There were four girls in that class that crowded around the teacher, and this was the question that they asked, "Did He get off?" Could you credit that? Did He get off? My friend, I'm going to assume here tonight that you know very little about the Cross, and I'm going to speak to you about it. I want your heart to be affected by the story of the Cross; and if you stand by it with me tonight, I trust that that stony heart of yours is going to be broken.

I realize here tonight, dear friends, that there's no appealing on my part that's going to affect anything. It's such a story as we have here tonight, the story of the Cross. If it doesn't affect your heart, if it doesn't break you down in true repentance to see that this Blessed One whose love has been so great toward you, if you don't see that that love demands your love and your obedience, there's no appealing on my part that will be any way successful.

They led Him out to this place of a skull, Golgotha, to crucify Him. There are two sides to this question, dear friend: He was delivered by the determined counsel and foreknowledge of God, but men with wicked hands took and crucified the Lord of Glory. And here in the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew we have what they did to Him in great detail. We learn, perhaps, a different story, or a different aspect of the story when we come to John's Gospel.

The first thing that they want to do, as no doubt they did to other criminals who were to be put to death, they gave them this stupefying drink that would make them insensible to all that was going on. But my friend, Jesus refused that. Peter tells us that "Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." A wonderful verse, that. Three wonderful things in that verse, you know. When men want to write to impress you and me, they write volume upon volume. But listen to what God puts into the space of this short verse: "Christ also hath once suffered for sins" — propitiation; "the Just for the unjust" — substitution; "that He might bring us to God" — reconciliation. And think of it, dear friend, the Word of God — it has a majesty, it has a dignity of its own that men needn't elaborate on it whatsoever. It's a word that comes from God Himself. And it's dynamited with mighty power to grip the heart and consciences. You know, that's the confidence of the preacher as he seeks to make known the story of the Cross to men and women. He's not depending upon his ability. What a poor thing it would be. But He's depending upon the mighty power of God, and the use of that precious Word, simple as though it may be spoken, to reach hearts and consciences. I trust it's going to reach yours tonight, dear friend.

He refused the stupefying drink. He was quite sensible to all that was going on, and they took Him there and they nailed Him to that accursed Tree. You know what the Word of God says? "Cursed is everyone that hangeth upon a tree." I want to say, dear friend, because of your sins, you're in a cursed position; but there's One who has borne the curse by hanging upon Calvary's Tree,

They heaped upon Him every indignity He was stripped of everything, even of His clothes. One thing they couldn't take from Him, that was His body. And listen, friend, the Bible tells us He gave His body. And listen, friend, the Bible tells us He gave that, He gave it. He gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time, in due season. And the reason of the testimony going forth, of Him giving Himself a ransom for all, it is dear friend, that you might receive it. The testimony comes to you for your obedience. It's looking for an answer in the hearts of men and women here this evening. That's what God is looking for.

But they heaped upon Him every indignity: mocked Him and scourged Him, spit in His blessed face. My friend, I say to you here tonight, Does this not touch your heart — to think of the Lord of Glory suffering such indignity, such hatred and enmity from the heart of man in all wickedness that was expressed there at the Cross of Calvary? Does it not touch your heart tonight? Oh, I want you with me to come near to the Cross tonight, to see it as you have never seen it before.

You know, there was a young fellow got converted in Northumberland. He wasn't very long in seeing his place, and he asked the saints, "What about me taking my place to remember the Lord?" Oh, they could see he was in dead earnest. They gave his name out that very Lord's Day, and the next Lord's Day he broke bread. He remembered the Lord, the One who died for Him upon the Cross of Calvary. He'd only been converted about three months. After the Breaking of Bread the others got up and they began to discuss how much they had sold their cows for at one of the farm sales. They were discussing anything and everything, but the Lord Himself. He was still sitting in his seat, with tears — tears rolling down his cheeks. You know what he said to them? He said, "Have you got used to this?" Have you got used to this? I make no further comment to that. It speaks for itself.

I say to you tonight, young friend, how many Gospel Meetings have you attended? How many times have you heard this story of the Cross of Jesus in His wonderful love, going there and dying for you and suffering all these indignities at the hands of men, as well as the judgment of a righteous and holy God, because of your sins? How many times have you heard it? Let me ask you, Have you got used to it? Have you got so used to listening to this story that it means nothing to you? Jeremiah the prophet, in his Lamentations says, "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger."

Oh, friend, to rightly value the Cross of Jesus and His sacrifice in laying down that sinless, spotless, holy life, as a sacrifice for your sins. I say to you, is your heart not affected by it?

We read of these people, "And sitting down they watched him there." It seems as though they had come to the end of their tether. There wasn't another thing that they could think about that they could do; and in cold blood they sat down, and they watched Him there in His agony.

I just want to emphasise these two words: Him there. Why was He there? Pilate's wife wanted to give her husband a bit of good advice, as she thought. "Have thou nothing to do with this just person, for I have suffered many things in a dream because of Him." Advice that Pilate couldn't take, and advice that you can't take either, friend. You've got to do with Jesus just as much as Pilate had.

Pilate says, "I find no fault in Him." His wife said He was just a person. Those weren't the only witnesses, you know — witnesses that you and I would have never thought of bringing forward. Judas says, "I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood." Pilate here says, "I find no fault in Him."

Him there? Why was he there, friend? He was there because you and I should have been there. He was there answering to the holy God in your place and in my place. He became, as the Proverb said, "He became surety for a stranger and He was made to smart." Listen, friend, this is no cheap salvation that we are preaching to you tonight. It's a salvation that cost God Himself, the very best, the very choicest of heaven's store for you, the rebel sinner.

Visiting one of the villages in the lake district over in England, and after having a Gospel Meeting in the open air, we went around the doors, giving out little gospel booklets; and I knocked at a door, and the lady's voice inside shouted, "Come in," and in I went. She said, "What is it?" "Oh," I said, "I've brought you a little gospel booklet to tell you the way to heaven." "Oh," she said, "you know, I've had a good bringing up." And she began to tell me of the good bringing up that she had. She said that from a girl, as far back as she could remember, she was taken to church three times each Sunday. She said that she had real good parents, they themselves were church members, and she had been brought up to attend church regularly

You know, dear friend, it's not a good bringing up that many people want, it's a good bringing down. I said to her, "Oh," I said, "yes, I've had a good bringing up too." And I quoted her from Psalms forty: "He brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God." I said, "That's the good bringing up that I've had." I had no good bringing up, friend. I was dragged up. Not speaking in any way disrespectfully of my parents. Brought up in a Christian home? Never cease to thank God for it. You know what I was used to? — a drunken fight, that started from Saturday night and went right over until about the Tuesday until everything was spent up, and our clothes were put into the pawn, and that money was spent as well. That's the bringing up I had. Thank God for the other bringing up. "He brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings And He hath put a new song in my mouth."

I tell you here tonight, dear friend, I appreciate the grace of God that picked me up, saved my precious soul, and gives me to stand before you here tonight. Have you been affected by the Cross of Calvary, by Jesus dying for you?

In the nineteenth chapter of John we have a company of them standing by the Cross. But before we go there, again let us remind ourselves of these two words — I didn't want to pass over them so easily — Him there. Listen, friend those are two words that you'll never forget if you go to hell for all eternity. Him there! Christ, hanging upon the Cross of Calvary for you a sinner, and you refused Him as your Saviour. Don't come away with any idea that God is a sort of a kind, old grandfather, that's going to say to you, you know, that after having set to one side the gospel message, and neglected this salvation, don't think that as an old, kind grandfather he is going to pat you on the back and say, "Well, of course, you weren't a good lad; you could have been better, but come on in," and He's going to take you to heaven.

My friend, there's no such representation of God in the Scripture of Truth. God is a righteous God, and if you want to know how that God is going to deal with you about your sins, God has demonstrated that at the Cross of Calvary. He didn't spare our first parents in the Garden of Eden for one sin; he turned them out. He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins. He cast down the angels that sinned, and they're reserved in everlasting chains of darkness unto the day of judgment. Listen, friend, He didn't spare His own Son when He took your place and mine. The very heavens above Him were as brass, and in anguish He sobbed out those words, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" He was forsaken, friend, that you might be accepted. The judgment was poured upon His blessed head that you might go free. Do you appreciate that? He's looking into your heart tonight. He's searching places that I cannot see. He's looking into your heart tonight, and He knows just exactly what your attitude is. Friend, I trust that it's affected, that it's melted with the story of the Cross of Jesus dying.

In the nineteenth chapter of John we have this little company at the Cross, and we have Jesus speaking down from the Cross to that company. You know, there's a verse in the epistle to the Hebrews that says this, "He endured the Cross, despising the shame," and it says it was for the joy that was set before Him. This was His concern for His loved ones, even there upon the Cross. I'm going to say to you here tonight, referring back again to Matthew twenty-seven, those very persons that were sitting down in cold blood, having done all that they could; — He was dying to save them, but He died to save you, dear friend, even in spite of your attitude here toward Him tonight.

He spoke to His mother, "Woman, behold thy son!" Oh there's a touch here of the love that pervades the Christian company. He said to John, "Son, behold thy mother!" John understood it. From that moment he took Mary into his own house. Christian love? I tell you, dear friend, there's nothing like it in the world. I've got some friends that I'm hoping to see, blood relation — very shortly after this conference, if the Lord wills. There are men and women in this audience tonight who are far more dear to me than even those blood relations. This is the Christian circle of love and fellowship that's being bound up in that one bundle of Life.

But listen, dear friend, in John's Gospel, I dare say you have noticed it as well as I have, the Lord, the Lord is not forsaken in John's Gospel. It's just like what we have in connection with Abraham and Isaac. The father and the son, they go together. And the moment has been reached dear friend, when this work — that was going to be so glorifying to God — it was nearing its completion. What a moment for this world, the nearing of the completion of the work that was not only going to save sinners like you and me, but the work that was going to clear sins out of the whole universe of God. And that's the work that I'm resting upon tonight for the forgiveness of my sins: that work which is going to clear the whole universe of sin. Jesus said, after having received the vinegar, "It is finished." Three words in the English language, but they tell me that in the Greek language it's just one word. And you know, it wasn't the cry of a man, whose life was ebbing out. Jesus didn't die like the two thieves, you know; Jesus dismissed His Spirit. We sometimes sing, "The storm that bowed Thy blessed head." The storm didn't bow His blessed head; He bowed His head in the storm. He was superior to it all. He was able to accomplish the work that He came to do. "Once in the end of the age hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." And there upon the Cross of Calvary, dear friend, He was able to say "it is finished" and completed. And in the seventeenth chapter of this very Gospel, speaking to the Father — you and I are privileged to hear — it's a privilege to hear each other praying, but what a privilege to listen to the Lord praying! He said, "I have glorified Thee on the earth: I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do."

Friend, we present to you tonight, the Saviour who has completed the work that was necessary for your soul's salvation. You're not asked to add anything to what He has done; He's completed it to God's glory. Don't tell me, don't tell me that you expect something more than God expects! A little hymn says, "GOD is satisfied with Jesus, I am satisfied as well." Will it satisfy your heart tonight, dear friend? You know, I read those verses from the end of chapter nineteen to show you the reaction that it had upon two men, and I trust that it's going to have this effect in your heart tonight. Did you know that in that verse where we read at the end of the chapter it says, "And after these things" — after what things? — after what things? — After Jesus had been crucified; after they had witnessed all that had been done to Him; after they had listened to the seven cries that came from His blessed lips upon the Cross, beginning with "Father" and ending with "Father"; "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." And the last one, "Father into Thy hands I commend My Spirit." After these things, something takes place.

Here are two men, to me who were secret disciples — men who were not bold enough to come out and to confess the Saviour. After these things they come out, true witnesses of the Saviour. Joseph of Arimathaea, a rich man, a counsellor. Who are you friend? You've perhaps gone to a high school; you perhaps might have a good education. Here is a man who was in a high position — Joseph of Arimathaea a rich man, a counsellor. He couldn't vote openly when the whole world was against the Saviour, and he associated himself with the Christ of God who had died and he begs His body.

Oh, I trust, dear young friend, that after these things you've been hearing tonight, that perhaps your parents are not quite sure whether you're a Christian or not. You're going to make it known tonight, aren't you? You say, "What shall I say? What shall I do?" Listen, you perhaps know the verse, "The Word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart. That is the word of faith which we preach, That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." "The Word is nigh thee." You needn't move from the seat where you are. "Even in thy mouth and in thy heart." That's not very far away is it? Right where you're sitting now you can confess with your mouth. It's a good thing to confess Jesus. You know what He says? "He that shall confess Me before men, him will I confess before the holy angels." Would you like to be talked about in heaven, friend? If I thought they were talking about me in Buckingham Palace, where the Queen of our country lives, me chest measurement would be expanded — to think that they would be speaking about me in Buckingham Palace.

Listen, you've got the privilege here tonight of being spoken about in heaven — Christ confessing you after your having confessed Him here as your Lord and Saviour. What a privilege! But mark what He says — the confessing with your mouth and the believing with your heart. God says, "Thou shalt be saved." We can depend upon that, friend. You can depend upon God's Word, whatever He says to you. You can set your feeling to it, whatever God says, it is true.

We're coming to the end. I want to tell you a true incident: Way down in the centre of England there's a place called Worksop  -  it's in Nottinghamshire. Just outside Worksop, there's a little village called Whitwell. There was a young woman there — eighteen years old, brought up in a Christian home, and she knew the way of salvation, perhaps just as well as the preacher could tell it. She had gone away with some friends, like the prodigal did, you know, and not only the prodigal but his brother too. You remember his brother said to his father, "Thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends." He seemed to have friends that his father didn't know anything about. I wonder if you've got some friends that your father and mother don't know anything about? They are not going to do you much good. This young woman, she had some friends too, that her parents knew nothing at all about; but what they did know — they knew that the friends she had were keeping her away from the meeting. And she was invited over and over again to come to the Gospel Meeting, and they did get her along this Sunday evening. And the gospel preacher, he certainly reached her conscience and she was troubled about her sins.

Listen, friend, it's amazing how far some people can get. But listen, the Lord had to say with regard to one young man — do you remember him? — "Thou art not far from the kingdom," he was on the very threshold. Listen, friend, you're on the very threshold here tonight. And this young woman, she sat in that meeting, spellbound as she heard the story of the Cross and of the love of Jesus and she was really affected and the preacher saw it. He spoke to her after the meeting. He said, "Now, what about it? Are you going to decide for Christ tonight?" You know what she said? She said, "No, not tonight." She had made arrangements to go to a dance with this friend that she had taken up with. She went to bed on Sunday night: she couldn't sleep. She was troubled, mightily troubled about this preaching which she had been listening to earlier in the evening. She lay, tossing in her bed. Eventually she got up. There was a voice speaking in her ear, and speaking so loudly that tears were rolling down her face; she was in such distress, that she was roaming up and down her bedroom, not knowing what to do. She had a Bible in her hand, because what the voice was saying to her was this: "Ezekiel seven and eight! Ezekiel seven and eight! Ezekiel seven and eight!" And I'll read it to you. Before I read it, let me tell you what happened. Her mother, who was sleeping in the adjoining room, heard the commotion that was going on, and she came in. Seeing her daughter in such distress, she was very anxious about it, and seeing the Bible in her hand and hearing her exclaiming, "Ezekiel seven and eight, Ezekiel seven and eight." She couldn't find it for the blinding tears. Her mother took the Bible from her. She sat her daughter down in the chair and this is what she read: "Now will I shortly pour out my fury upon thee, and accomplish mine anger upon thee: and I will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense thee for all thine abominations." And her mother turned to the chair where that young woman was sitting, and she was dead.

That's not something I've read in a book, friend. That's an incident that I heard of definitely at Whitwell in Nottinghamshire, just outside of Worksop. Friend, I say to you tonight, how long, how long is God going to suffer you? The number of times that He has spoken to you! Is this going to be the last voice that He's going to give you in this meeting tonight? Oh, I say to you — be wise, be wise, friend. I'm coming to a close with this meeting. I'm going to take it no further. I say to you right now, friend: Don't wait until we've sung the closing hymn. Bow your head, bow your heart before the blessed God and tell Him how thankful you are tonight for sending Jesus to die for you; and take your place along side the Cross and be able to say like the great apostle Paul, "Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Oh, may you, may you come to Him tonight.

Friend, you're being prayed for. These meetings have been held up to the Throne of God on your behalf. There's prayer ascending even at this very moment as we come to the close of our meeting. And I want to say to every Christian friend here tonight — don't let the devil in at the end of the Gospel Meeting. It's just then that He takes advantage, at the end of the meeting, to get us all conversing together and the whole thing confusing to anyone under deep exercise before God. Oh, let us not be ignorant of his devices, but let us prayerfully and quietly leave this auditorium, and leave it with the solemn thought that there might be someone like that young girl, that we just mentioned, here tonight, that may be saying NO to the Saviour; and going to her bed, and perhaps being found dead in the morning. I know, I know what people say — it could happen to anybody but you, eh? My friend, don't be just so sure. Make sure of this, make sure of this: that you get right with God before it's too late. Trust the Saviour and trust Him NOW, and make it known. Openly confess Him. Make it known to every one in the auditorium.

Friend, Christ was out in the open for you. He was crucified there in the midst of a mocking crowd. Are you afraid, are you afraid to confess Him as your Saviour in the company of Christians? My word, how easy He's made it for you! — hard for Him, easy for you. Don't miss the opportunity. Trust Him, trust Him NOW, and go on your way rejoicing — for His Name's sake.

Now we're going to sing together hymn number thirty-five — hymn number thirty-five. We're not going to sing all the hymn. We're going to sing two verses of it; and I want to, I want to give you the opportunity afterwards, dear friend, of making known to us that you're going to trust the Saviour tonight. Don't put it off, friend. Don't be out of this blessing. God wants you to have it, and it's here for you tonight. "Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me, see on the portals He's waiting and watching, watching for you and for me." We're going to sing the first and the third verses. "Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing." The first and the third verses of hymn number thirty-five.

Listen, before we close in prayer: you know, I want to give you every opportunity that we can. If there's anybody here tonight that would like to openly confess Christ as their Saviour tonight for the first time, you do so! Is there one who would openly like to confess Christ as their Saviour for the first time tonight and own Him as their Lord and Saviour? Is there one? An opportunity that we thought we'd give you, friend. We want to do everything in our power to put you into the way of salvation. I commend you to God in prayer.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts

The Railway Tracts

1 The Son of God

2 The Handcuffs

3 “Smashed to Pieces”

4 The Lost Ticket

5 “Just in Time”

6 “Conversation”

7 “What a Contrast”

8 “Progress”

9 “An Interesting Question”

10 “The Explosion”

11 “I have my Ticket”

12 “Over Luggage”

13 How does a man become a Soldier?

14 The Sad, Sad Face!

15 “Must I not strive?”

16 The Lunatic and his keeper

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : The Son of God

The Son of God: His Word or Man's Word?

I had taken my seat one afternoon in a train Liverpool for Southport, when a Romish priest entered the carriage, and sat down on the seat opposite to me. Having long had a desire to speak to a priest, I felt that this was my opportunity. I said, "Sir, I have long had an impression on my mind, and I should take it as a favour if you would allow me to ask you a question." He very politely said, "I shall be most happy to answer you to the best of my ability." I said, "Well, sir, if I am rightly informed, there is a very serious question at issue, between you and the Son of God." "Indeed," he replied, and all eyes were turned towards us, and all ears were opened to know what this could be. "The question is this, sir; the Son of God says (John 5:24), 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth my words, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life;' — now, sir, I have been told that all you priests say, 'Verily, verily, we say unto you, he that heareth our words, and believeth on Him that sent us, can never know that he hath everlasting life, — shall never in the present life know whether he shall come into condemnation or not, nor whether he is passed from death unto life or not.' Now, sir, I wish to know from you, whether there is so flat a contradiction in your teaching, to the words of the Son of God." I shall never forget the man's look. He said, "May I ask who you are?" "Oh," said I, "through the mercy of God, I am one who had heard and received the words of Christ, and I have found them words of life. I do believe that God send Him to die the sacrifice for my sins. I do believe that God raised Him from the dead. I have redemption through His precious blood — even the forgiveness of sins; yes, and His blood cleanseth me from all sins. Oh, yes! I do believe these precious words, and I have everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation. I have passed, from death unto life, — hearing His words I have all this; — What should I have if I believed your words?" "Ah," says the priest, "you must be mistaken in supposing it possible in this life to know that you are saved, or what could St. Paul mean, when he said, 'No man knows whether he is worthy of favour or hatred?'" I reached the Bible which I had in my hand, towards him, and said, "Will you kindly shew me where St. Paul says any such thing." "Oh," says he, "I think you know more about it than I do, you can find it sooner than I can." I replied, "Indeed I cannot find what is not in his writings — but I will gladly read what he does say. In the Acts 13:38, 39, after speaking of the death and resurrection of Christ, he says 'Be it known unto you, therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins; and by him all that believe are justified from all things,' &c. In Rom. 5:1, he says, 'Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' (Col. 1:14) 'In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.' Why, my dear sir, there is nothing makes a man so happy as to know that his sins are forgiven." "But do you mean to say there is no such passage in the Bible as the one I named?" asked the priest. "On the subject of salvation there is not such a text," I replied. "Solomon, when speaking of the vanity of this life, did say, 'No man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them.' (Eccl. 9:1.) He did not mean to deny the Gospel by this passage but urged the usual mistake." "I think," said he, "that man must be very presumptuous, who thinks himself so holy and so good as to be quite sure he is saved. He may have many of the fruits of the Spirit in him, but yet it becomes him humbly to doubt." "Yes, indeed," said I, "and if that were the ground of salvation, it would become him for ever to doubt — but, sir, you make a fatal mistake in supposing that a Christian's hope is based on his goodness or holiness, or even on the work of the Spirit in him. There are thousands who are seeking peace with God this way, I know, but there never was one that found it thus. No, sir, it is not my work, or the work of the Spirit in me but the work of the Son of God for me, on which I must rely. He loved me, and gave Himself for me. Now, I ask, is it presumption to believe on Him whom God raised from the dead? He is the rock that shall never be moved. Have you never read, sir, in chapter 10 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the offering of the body of Jesus Christ for ever perfects, and that the Holy Ghost is to bear witness of this? (Heb. 10:14, 15.) 'For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. Whereof the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us.' Yes, and however men may reject his witness, still it is true that we 'have boldness to enter into the Holiest by the blood of Jesus.' This peace can never be interrupted. Now, sir, would you not be very happy if you were quite sure that God had for Christ's sake, forgiven your sins — as He certainly had forgiven the Ephesian believers, and every believer mentioned in the New Testament?" "Ah," he said, "if you will come up to my house at Birkenhead, I will teach you." He said this as he left the train. My last words to him were these: — "That would be poor teaching where all is uncertainty and darkness." Just as the priest had left the carriage, a young man who had listened with the deepest attention, said, "Will you speak to me a little further, of the difference between resting on the finished work of Christ for me, and the work of the Spirit in me?" He said, that "he had for many years been an anxious seeker of salvation, but had looked for a sufficient depth of the Spirit's work in him, to be sure he had the witness of the Spirit and was saved." A friend who was with me, from Manchester, showed him from the Word, that the Spirit did not bear witness how good we are, but how exceedingly bad, utterly ruined we are by sin; but that God Himself has sent His Son to be offered up for our sins — and that the moment we cease from our own foolish efforts to be saved by our works, and come to Christ with all our sin and misery, just as we are, then we have peace, according to His own words, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." In short, that the Spirit bears witness to the glory and worth of Christ. Light burst into the young man's soul, and at once he found peace through the precious blood of Christ.

And now, dear reader, with eternity before you, may I ask, Are you saved? If not, when and how do you expect to be saved? If not saved, you belong to that world which has rejected and put to death the Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God. The Romish priest has no salvation for you. He does not even know that that he is saved himself. If you know a priest, ask him if he knows himself to be saved, and you will find on this most important question all is uncertainty with him.

Come to Christ: all is certain. "My peace I give unto you." Oh, don't delay; to-morrow may be too late. Do you ask, What shall I do? Oh, hear the words of Christ — let no man hinder you from searching the Scriptures. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Behold Him now, His work of redemption finished, He, has sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. As sure as you are reading this paper — so sure is it, that He who died for sin is in the glory alive from the dead, raised for our justification; — even so sure is it, that he that believes on Him who raised Christ from the dead (Rom. 4:24), is justified, is saved. Let go doubt, lot go works, lot go self, let go all; receive Christ, trust Christ — oh, is it so? is Christ your all? If so, you have life — risen life, the life of the risen victorious Christ, the Son of God, — for he that hath the Son hath life. If you be risen in Christ, seek to give body, soul, and spirit to Him, not that you may be saved, but because He so loved you as to save you by His own death. Oh, the love of Christ! the love of God! We love Him because He first loved us.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : The Handcuffs

The Handcuffs: or the Deserter

I was walking along the Birmingham platform for a few minutes before the train started for Bristol, when my attention was drawn to a deserter, handcuffed, and seated between a private and a sergeant. His features betrayed distress of mind. The thought suddenly occurred to me, if my Master were here, He would take His seat by the side of this man. Yes, blessed Jesus, Thy heart was too full of compassion, ever to pass by a distressed sufferer. These thoughts led me to take my seat opposite the poor man. I sat some time in silence, thinking of the mercy of God, in delivering me from Sergeant Satan, and the handcuffs of sin. Reader, if you are delivered, thank God — if not, then sit down with me a little, and listen attentively. The poor deserter appeared to be about forty years of age. He had been a deserter many years, but had become so exceedingly miserable, that he had given himself up to the authorities. Having been thus severed from those most dear to him on earth, and that probably for ever, I found his heart was too full of sorrow to bear much conversation; but the following, as nearly as I can remember, took place with the sergeant.

"You seem to have brought your captive some distance?"

"Oh yes, sir, from beyond Glasgow!"

"Indeed! It must be very painful to have had the hands in that bound position so far."

"Oh yes, sir."

The man's heart seemed nearly as hard as the bayonet by his side.

"Well, sergeant," said I, "have you got your handcuffs off yet? or are you still led captive by the devil? He knows that sin will handcuff a man, and draw him along to judgment and to hell. — It's sore work, sergeant, to be dragged like that, Eh?"

"Well, sir, I'll tell you, I think a soldier will have less to answer for than anybody. He is not tempted to rob and cheat, like the commercial man; and, indeed, he's a good-hearted follow, only he gets a little sup too much grog sometimes."

"Ah, there you may be mistaken. I think I can show you a greater sin than taking the drink. I will suppose this prisoner, first to have been led to enlist through the influence of drink. Granted, then, that drink has made him what he is. He may cast a look far behind him and say, My sin in drinking has broken the heart of my poor wife, has dragged me from my crying children;" — (here the tears began to run down the face of the poor deserter) — well now, sergeant, if an officer from the Horse-guards were to meet you on your way, say at Cheltenham, with the good news for our friend here, that a great ransom had been paid — that the Queen had sent down his discharge — now, sergeant, which would be the greater sin? the drunkenness that has brought all this misery on himself and his poor family, or the hard-hearted cruel sin of refusing to trust to the ransom purchased at so great a price? O let me tell you, sin has brought us into bondage, misery, and death. Satan has thus handcuffed man to himself. This man might sleep, and dream there was no sergeant here, and no handcuffs; but when he wakes up he finds it is only a dream. You are still there. And men may dream there is no devil, to whom they are bound by sin, and dragged by lust; but, when they truly awake, they find this bondage a terrible reality. But ah! if you knew the love of God, to us poor handcuffed sinners! Even whilst we were yet sinners, God gave a great price for our ransom. Yes; "whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for us." The ransom price is paid — God has accepted it, even the precious blood of Christ; for God hath raised Him from the dead, and sends a free discharge to every sinner that believeth. And now, sergeant, how long would it take you to unfasten the handcuffs of this poor man? (Here the sergeant took out a little key, and shewed me how soon it could be done.) That little key is like faith. Yes, even so soon; the soul that believes God's testimony, that on the cross, the ransom has been paid — that through Jesus is preached the forgiveness of sins — that by Him all that believe are justified — yes, even so soon, that soul is free. The chains of sin and condemnation are broken for ever. Now, sergeant, which is the worst sin? — that which brought the guilt and condemnation, and which is hurrying man to judgment and to everlasting destruction; or, that cruel sin of rejecting and despising the wondrous love of God in giving His only-begotten Son? Yes, rejecting the only ransom, even the blood of the Son of God?" The sergeant seemed never before to have heard these "words of life." And oh, how comforting it was to my heart, to see the face of that poor deserter brighten up with joy! The Lord opened his ear at least, to hear the gospel of the grace of God. Reader, are you still a bond-slave of Satan, hurrying on to hell? Let me ask you, Who can deliver you but Christ? The handcuffed prisoner could not deliver himself. I asked him what he could do. Ah, he could scarcely get his hand to his eyes to wipe off the tears. I asked the sergeant what he would think of a would-be officer who should deny the sufficiency of that ransom which had been accepted by the Queen, and should begin to speak thus — "Ah, true, it was a great price; but do not believe the Queen will discharge you, without you do something, to increase the value of that ransom, and when you have done all that you can you may merely hope for liberty. Do not be so presumptuous as to believe that message of the Queen." The sergeant could not endure even the thought of such cruel lies.

Ah, this reminds one of Paul, who said, Let such perverters of the gospel be accursed. It was with this loyal zeal for God he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians. And is not this the great lie of the day? You are virtually told not to believe the all-sufficiency of the finished work of Christ, though God Himself has accepted the ransom, and proved this by raising Him who offered it from the dead. These wolves in sheep's clothing tell you that God will not pardon your sins for Christ's sake only; that He will not give you a free discharge from the power of sin and Satan, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ alone. Oh flee! flee from such dreaming liars! "Do the best you can"! — best, eh! — when there is no best in a handcuffed sinner. "Keep the law!" — when God Himself says, If that were possible, Christ has died in vain. Away with such lies! Turn to the word of God. Read Romans 3; 1 John 4; Hebrews 10. Believe the testimony of God to the value of the blood of Christ. He is sincere. It is true that he that believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.

But you ask, Are there to be no good works? Oh yes! But are the handcuffs on or off? — that is the question. The soul that has really been delivered from the power of Satan, will never forget its liberation. "We love him, because he first loved us." "God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." Believe, then; believe and live.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "Smashed to pieces"

"Smashed to pieces"

I had left Birmingham for Derby, in company with a friend, and after we had travelled some distance, he gave away a few tracts. I observed an old man reading the one given to him with very marked attention. Though a working man, his wrinkled forehead and careworn face bore marks of mental anguish, of no ordinary character. I felt a strong desire to speak to the old man, but could not make a beginning. I mentally offered a short prayer; it was this, — "Lord, if it be Thy will that I should speak to this man, cause him to speak to me first." I sat still a few minutes, when he put up his finger for me. I went and sat by him. He said, "I want to speak to you." (If the reader does not know what prayer is, he will perhaps wonder at this.) I looked at his anxious face, as he said, "When I was a young man, I read Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and many such; and their writing suited me well then, for I liked to have my full fling in sin; and I had it, both here and far away, across the seas. I travelled both on the continent, and also in South America; and what scenes have I been in! But now" (pointing to his grey hair), "oh, this remorse! it smashes me to pieces." I shall never forget the look with which these words were spoken. Oh, my soul! thought I, how much like hell is the anguish of remorse. Almost before I could speak, he went on to say, "I think the deceitful ways of professors make more infidels than all the writings that infidels themselves have written." "Well," I said, "if it were not for an old book I have in my pocket, which tells all about that, I should be staggered myself." "Indeed," said he; "what book is that?" "Oh," said I, "it is the Bible; and there is not an evil in the professing church which was not plainly foretold. But you have looked long enough at man; there is nothing in him to heal your broken, smashed heart; I want you to look at another object and that object is God. You will find no deceit in Him; indeed all is sincere love. I don't ask you to do this or that to get to God, but I want, to tell you, smashed under sin and guilt as you are, what God has done to get to you. I want to tell you what He is, and what He has done, as displayed through the cross of Christ. The love that is seen there is all sincere, and it is all the work of God. Man put Christ to death, but God so loved. Yes, it is the cross of Christ alone that heals the broken heart. It has been truly said, that to heal the broken heart, Christ's own heart must be broken first. It was broken. He died for us, 'the just for the unjust, to bring us to God.'" I pointed out the difference between our having to seek and to serve God, in order to be saved, and God's having sent His Son to seek and to save that which was lost. I told him the following anecdote to illustrate this most important difference: — A man I knew, in Derbyshire, was walking in a dangerous mine, with a candle in his hand, when a drop of water from the roof fell upon his candle, and put out the light. The mine was a very dangerous place, and he, alone and without light, could not find his way out. He remained a long time in this dreary condition, until he became greatly alarmed; indeed, such was the effect on his mind, that he was in danger of losing his reason. Whilst in this state, he thought he saw the glimmering of a light. It was a light; he fixed his eyes on that light; it came nearer and nearer, until at last he saw the face of his own brother, who had come to seek him. His friends having become alarmed on account of his long absence, his brother had descended into this pit of darkness to seek and to save him that was lost. "Mind you," said I, "he did not stand at the pit's mouth calling out, that if his lost brother would but come out of that pit of darkness, he would then save him, as many falsely represent Christ as doing. No; he came to the very place where that brother was, and who needed his help." I said to the old man, "You are in the dark pit of sin and death; your candle of youth has been put out; you are beginning to feel something of the fearful solitude; alone without God. Do you catch a glimmering of the light in the face of Jesus Christ? Fix your eye there. The light will come nearer and nearer, till it shews you, in that blessed One, the face of a Saviour, who does not tell you to come out of the pit first to save yourself, and that then, when you do not need saying, He will save you. Oh, no, He knew we were too far lost for that. He descended into the very pit of sin and death; He bore sin's curse and condemnation, that there might be none for us; and He alone can, and does, deliver from sin's power. He comes to you in the pit; give Him your hand, He will lead you to eternal day."

There was power in the name of Jesus; a change passed over the old man's countenance; the raging storm was calming down; the goodness of God was leading him to repentance. He had never thus seen God manifest in the flesh, as the God of love. He had long been trying to get out of the pit, like many others, but had never before seen Jesus coming into it to save him. Our conversation was suddenly stopped — we parted at Derby. I trust we shall meet again at the great and glorious terminus — the coming of the Lord.

Well, reader, what say you to these things? Have you been "smashed to pieces?" Have you felt the bitter sting of remorse? Judas felt that. But I will ask another question, Have you ever felt the power of the love of Christ? Judas felt the one — Peter felt both. You may be saying, "I am too bad to be saved; I have tried so often; and oh, my sins! If I could but undo what I have done!" Were you not saying this to yourself the other day? You can never return to innocence. You can never have peace, but through the blood of Christ. If you could be ever so good to the end of life, still those past sins come as fresh as ever before you; and, as the old man said, "The older we get, the heavier they become." Ah, this will be true in hell for ever. Oh, let me tell you, there is no relief but by locking at the blood of Christ; this only gives me relief; my sins were laid on Him; they have broken His heart. But you say you have tried so often. How have you tried? Have you tried to prove yourself better than God's word says you are? Or, have you tried to get out of the pit, and cannot? God well knows you cannot. If you could have been saved in your way, Christ need not have died. You have tried and failed. Christ did not fail. He finished the work of redemption. This is most certain, for God raised Him from the dead. Forgiveness of sins is preached in His name, and by Him all that believe are justified from all things. (Acts 13:38, 39; Rom. 5:1.) My friend, this is a great salvation, it is worthy of all acceptation, yes, of your acceptation, "that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." Now, you trust Him, and see if it cannot be done; nay, if you trust Him, it is done. "He that believeth hath everlasting life." "We have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins." Reader, dost thou believe on the Son of God? Having no confidence in thyself, praise Him for all that is past, trust Him for all that is to come. He says, "Sin shall not have dominion over you." There may be falterings and faintings, but faith, that has done with self, and takes hold only on Christ, shall overcome to the very end.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : The Lost Ticket

The Lost Ticket: or is your Life insured?

The London train was just about to leave the Exeter platform, when a lady exclaimed, "I have lost my ticket." Her concern became so great, that guards and passengers searched the train, but the ticket could not be found. After the confusion had subsided, I said to my fellow passengers, "Is it not very strange that there should be such anxiety about this ticket, which is but the passport of a day, and may soon be forgotten, while so many have no concern whatever about the journey of life, or whether they have a ticket that will pass them into heaven at last? You may see a man get his insurance ticket, post it to his friends, and look as if he had done a very prudent act." "Is it not," I said again, "strange that man should be so prudent and thoughtful for present things, and yet not care to have eternal life insured? Oh, that there were the same desire to have the passport of salvation, and to know it." A man in the next compartment stood up, and said, "Will you have the kindness to tell me how a person is to have eternal life insured, and how he is to know it with certainty; in other words, what is his ticket for heaven, and how is he to know when he has got it?" It was evident from the man's manner, that he felt the question to be of the utmost importance. I said, "We will take the case of a life insurance for illustration: — A man insures his life in a certain office; he believes the large figures, stating the amount of capital paid up, to be real; the policy is deposited in the safe keeping of his banker, lest he should lose it himself. Now, I ask, how does he know for certain that his life is, as it is called, 'insured?'" "Oh," said the man, "he cannot doubt it, if he have confidence in the company, and in his bankers." "Very well, to carry out the figure — when I look to God for salvation, I am assured that the capital has all been paid up. Neither gold nor silver, words nor figures, can express the priceless value of the precious blood of Christ: — and, mind you, the Cross was no instalment, leaving future calls to be met by sinful man. Oh, no! — all was paid. The price of redemption was paid to the full, and paid for ever." "But what is the life policy, and how am I to know that I have it?" "Christ risen from the dead is the life policy. God has shown His full and eternal satisfaction and joy by raising that Blessed One from the dead, and exalting Him to the highest glory. Now, as Christ thus died for our iniquities, His being raised again, declared that His death had put away our sins. Yes, His resurrection was as really for our justification, as His death was for our sins. Unless the question of sin is seen to be for over settled by Christ for us, we never can have full assurance of faith, as to final salvation. Christ having finished the great work of atonement, and having ascended up on high, the Holy Ghost came down from heaven, with the glad tidings of salvation, through the blood of Christ, and of eternal life, in Him who is alive from the dead. All who have, through grace, believed this testimony, have been saved. The illustration then holds good; just as when the capital of an insurance company is real, and a life policy deposited in safe keeping, where it can neither be lost nor stolen, even so the believer knows by faith in God's word, that the atonement for sin has been made; and that Christ is his life policy; for 'He is our life;' — 'he that hath the Son hath life.' He is at God's right hand for us, where we can neither lose Him, nor can aught possibly take Him away. Faith says, 'because He lives, we shall live also.' Christ alive from the dead — raised to glory — is the believer's life policy, — his passport to heaven. If my salvation were in my own keeping, I should be sure to lose it. 'Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Yes, this simple heart confidence in God removes every doubt. The love of God is shed abroad in the heart, and the Spirit bears witness that I am a child of God." "This seems very clear," said the man; "but will you allow me to state a difficulty I have had for many years?" "Oh, certainly." "Well, sir, it is this: — I read in the Epistle to the Romans, that 'justification is entirely through Christ, by faith, without the works of the law,' and this hath given me comfort, but then, I read in James, 'Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.' Now, sir, this has perplexed me for many years." "At first sight," said I, "there seems a contradiction, but it is only in appearance. In Romans the great question of justification before God is discussed; and before Him nothing short of absolute perfection can stand; and hence, Christ alone being perfect, we can only be justified by and in Him. But in James it is, justification before men: 'Ye see brethren;' and men can only judge by works. Abraham was justified before God by faith, at the birth of Isaac; but he was justified by works before men thirty years after, when he offered him up. True faith is sure to work by love, and is sure to produce fruits. If you believe the kindness of a person to you in your need, you are sure to be affected by it. We love God because He first loved us. But where so many make a fatal mistake is, in the vain attempt to produce work before justification. When you see your neighbour's chimney smoke in a morning, what do you think? Why, that the fire has been kindled. There is sure to be smoke if the fire is applied — but you don't make smoke first. One person might speak of the kindling of the fire within; another might speak of the smoke seen without. There would be a great difference — but no contradiction. The Spirit of God, by Paul, speaks of the kindling of eternal life within; by James, He speaks of its manifestation without; surely both are true. You put the seed in the earth, and with God's blessing you expect the plant, and then the fruit. If salvation were by works, then could none be saved." The man left the train with an expression of real thankfulness; his last words were, "I hope to tell to others the gospel I have heard this day — Salvation first, and works after." Reader! is your life insured in heaven? Can you look by faith at Christ Jesus, in the presence of God, and say, He is my righteousness, my passport. He has taken possession of heaven for me? Does Christ dwell in your heart the hope of glory? Or, are you gliding along the rails of life without a ticket? You may be a professor; you may be trying by self-righteousness to buy a ticket, and hope some day to get one — that is, to be saved. It won't do. If God deals with you on that ground, you are lost. However you may deny the death of Christ, God never can. No, no, He will not sell you the ticket. It must be a free gift. The gift of God is eternal life, even Christ, — God's greatest gift of love."God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life." (1 John 5:11-13.) The New Testament is full of this assurance of salvation. It is no use saying, you are doing the best you can. What I do you mean you are doing the best you can whilst seeking to be saved in some other way than by God's free gift to lost sinners? — eternal salvation, in, through, and by Christ? Oh, but you say, "my frames and feelings." Ah, you will never be saved by looking at frames and feelings. Look away from your feelings — simply to Christ. A person does not say, "I feel nice and happy — so it's all right — I dare say I have my ticket." No; he first finds his ticket, and then feels happy. So, my reader, may you never rest till you have found Christ to be the all-sufficient passport to the haven of eternal rest.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "Just in Time"

"Just in Time"

Sometimes God is pleased to use a few words in the awakening of a soul. Such was the case some years ago, in the following remarkable manner. The porters at the Sheffield station had cried, "Take your seats for Derby and the South," when I observed a man making the utmost exertion to reach the train before it started. It was a struggle. "All right!" shouted the guard. The driver answered with a whistle. The train moved. The man was just in time. He took his seat by my side; smack went the door. I said, "And the door shall be shut." I do not remember that another word passed between us. Two years afterwards, when I had quite forgotten the circumstance, a friend of mine met with the same man, who told him that those words, "And the door shall be shut," produced such a solemn impression on his mind, that he could not, by any means, forget them. When he awoke in the morning, and all day long, they sounded in his ears. The madness and danger of delaying his salvation to the last moment became so evident, that he believed that circumstance had been used of God in bringing him to Christ.

Reader, those are, indeed, solemn words, in that prophetic parable of the ten virgins, "And the door was shut." The gospel train is fast filling; the last person will soon be in it; and then, can you tell what you would feel, not to be just in time, but just too late? Would you like to be one who shall cry, "Lord, Lord, open unto us?" when the only answer will be, "Depart from me, ye that work iniquity; I know you not."

Hark you, the gospel porters cry "Take your seats." But you say, "I have not paid my fare; and worse still, I cannot pay it." Do you really own this to be true? Have you tried to pay your fare to heaven by good works, and do you own that you are still a vile and worthless sinner? Whether you say so or not, God says so: "The scripture hath concluded all under sin." Yes, you stand at the station, and though the price required is immense to pass you from the kingdom and power of Satan to God, yet, strange as it may seem, those only can take their seats, who have nothing of their own to pay. The full price has been paid, even the precious blood of Christ. That which many a poor soul wants to be done, has been done. "It is finished!" Yes, the full fare has been paid. Ask God Himself, if the death of Christ for your sins is not enough to justify you in taking your seat, and enough to justify Him in receiving you to glory? The resurrection of Christ is God's answer to both these questions. If God gave Jesus to die for our sins, and thus to pay the fare in the giving up of His own life, God also raised Him from the dead for our very justification. Take your seat, then, and who shall condemn you? "It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God; who also maketh intercession for us." Take your seat, rest in the finished work of Christ. Who dare, or can, take us out of God's train of grace? "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" But you say, "This is very strange; a porter told me that I had to do much by prayer and amendment of life, and by deep repentance, before ever I could take my seat in God's train. I have been trying for years, but I do not know how much would satisfy God for my fare. I never before heard that it was all done, and that my ticket must be a free gift, because my fare has been paid, even the blood of God's Son." The porter that told you this story of works for salvation belongs to another company, and you will not find a passenger in his train who knows his fare is paid for heaven. I was once on that line myself, but I never was happy. I found it all tunnel, and we had no light in our carriage, and then it was down-hill, and so fast, and all uncertainty as to where we were going, that I do thank God for stopping the train, and making known to me His free grace. But you say, "There must be repentance." Yes, and what repentance is like that change of mind when a person believes the testimony of God — to the death and resurrection of Christ — that is, that all who believe are justified from all things? And you say, "There must be a forsaking of sin and the world." True, but I never saw a person get faster away from the place, than by taking his seat in a train. Would you really give up sin and the world? Then believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and, without money and without price, take your seat in a finished salvation. Do you want to be fifty miles from a given place in two hours? The power of steam can take you; you quietly trust this power; the train takes you. It is not you who take the train. Ah! men can trust anything but God! you want to be far away from sin, then take your seat, believing the death of Christ has paid your fare, and the mighty power of God shall bear you onward far away.

The devil has many lines, all of which lead to hell. There is only one to heaven. Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. You may say, "Do not bother me. I will not travel on any line." In that you are greatly mistaken. Travel you must. Every day is a day nearer heaven or hell. Look at the crowd about you; and let me ask, where is the crowd that thronged this world a hundred years ago? But hark again! there is one speaks from heaven: "Behold, I come quickly!" His words are fast fulfilling. The professing church is as He said it would be: "While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept." Some are saying, "We will not believe He is coming." Others, "We will not have Him to reign over us." Few, very few, are waiting for the Son of God from heaven. But the word of God assures us, He will suddenly come, and take the world with as great a surprise as the flood in the days of Noah, or the destroying fire of God, that fell when the sun had arisen on Sodom.

Men may laugh now, as men laughed then; and scorners may say, "Where is the promise of his coming?" But, after years of prayerful searching of the scriptures, I take God at His word; and tell you plainly that "they that are ready shall go in, and the door shall be shut." And how soon no one knows. "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." What an event!

Ah, reader! are you ready? Can you say, "Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly?" You tremble at the thought. Your sins! Ah! you could not bear to meet the Lord with them unpardoned. Oh! bring them at once to the cross. None over sought forgiveness and were denied. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." There are thousands of professors whose lamps are gone out, or going out, and who have no oil in their vessels. Think of the midnight cry! awake from that fatal slumber! Fellow believer, go to Christ for oil. Trim your lamp; gird up your loins; be like one that waits for your Lord. "For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry." And then, farewell, poor world of sorrow, sin, and death: welcome, bright eternal joy! for ever with the Lord!

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "Conversation"

"Conversation;" or "The Commercial's Way to be Saved"

There are few opportunities so favourable for candid conversation as railway travelling; and though a commercial traveller myself, I think I may be allowed to say, there are few persons better qualified than commercial travellers for sustaining intelligent conversation. A short time ago I was travelling with two, who for intellectual ability might not be surpassed by any on the road. I felt an anxious desire to know what were their thoughts on that most important of all subjects, the salvation of the soul.

In course of conversation, I inquired of one of them, "How do you really think a man is to be saved?" He replied, "No doubt the man who keeps the ten commandments is a happy man, and I believe that is the way to be saved." His fellow-traveller remarked, "I did think so, but I heard Dr. Some-one, of Leeds, preach a sermon which convinced me that it was only necessary to keep the last six." This was said in all seriousness. I replied, "I will not say ten, nor six; but now, if one had to be kept for salvation, tell me who could be saved? If Adam, happy in innocence, did not keep one, but fell, would it not be a fearful thing for us, fallen in sin, and surrounded by innumerable temptations, as we are, to have our eternal salvation to depend on our perfect obedience even to one command? No! my friends, redemption through the blood of Christ is a very different thing from our trying to keep the commandments. We must have redemption first through the blood of Christ, even the forgiveness of sins; and obedience will come after. Not the obedience of law-keeping for salvation. That is impossible when you have got it first. It would be utterly impossible to be in this carriage, and at the same time have something to do to get in. Just as impossible is it to receive Christ as my salvation, and yet have to keep the law to get saved." "I never saw it in that light," said my friend opposite.

Well now, reader, of course I do not know your religious sentiments, but, ten to one, you are on the same ground as the commercial. If I were to ask ten persons in any carriage the same question, very probably nine of them would have some indistinct thought, that it is something we have to do for God which will save us, and that if we do it worthily we shall be saved. And if one out of the ten were to say, "Oh! no, it is what Christ has done for me that has saved me," I should be glad to hear even one out of ten give the glory to Christ. Well, now, is it not a miserable thing to be tormented with uncertainty year after year? and not only uncertainty, but often the person who tries most to keep the commands, feels more keenly the gnawing of conscience, and the burthen of sin. Yes, no words can describe the anguish of heart that some feel who are thus trying to get saved by keeping the law. Oh, the weight of guilt! The law can give you no relief. It can only curse you. For "as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them." (Gal. 3:10) And you know well that you cannot continue in them. Again and again you have tried, but all in vain. You cannot even be what you wish to be, much more what the holy law of God requires. But you hope to be better yet. You hoped that long ago; but still you are rather worse than better. Some try to get saved this way, until, tired out, they give all up in despair, plunge headlong into sin, and perish in infidelity. There are few infidels but who were made so by false religion. Just as salvation by works is preached, infidelity increases, until, as in popish countries, you can hardly tell which is which. Is it not a solemn thing, that so few, even in England, know the difference between the saving gospel and the cursing law? Well, you say, "If man cannot keep the law, why was it given?" It was given because of transgression, that sin might be manifested, that every mouth might be stopped, and all the world proved guilty before God. (See Rom. 3; Gal. 3.) But the gospel sets Christ before us sent down from heaven. God having concluded all under sin, He now brings Christ, and sets Him forth, the righteousness of God. This holy Jesus became the substitute for sinners; and now it is not they who must do something to live; but He must die that they may live: and He has died for our sins according to the scriptures, God declaring His acceptance of that sacrifice for our sins by raising Him from the dead. Mark, this is not a question of men's opinions, but the very righteousness of God is at stake: the word of God puts it so. (Rom. 3:21-28.) "Whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins," &c. Yes, the death of Christ is God's own remedy for my sins; to deny it or doubt it is to make God a liar. Dare you say God is not just, and the justifier of him that believeth? How is it, with the record of God in our hands, as given by the Holy Ghost through the preaching of the apostles and in all the epistles, that believers are saved entirely by grace through Christ Jesus, and not by works of their own: I say, is it not marvellous that men will not believe God Himself?

Reader, was this not an instance of the truth of that statement of the word of God, "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" Just think of two commercial travellers, bright, intelligent men, but as ignorant of God's way of saving sinners as any Jew or Mahomedan on the face of the earth. The commercial's way to be saved, by keeping the law for salvation, is the thought of every unconverted person, however ignorant, or however learned. It is the professed doctrine of the millions of the Greek and Romish churches. In principle it is the same with every shade of heathenism, something that man can do to satisfy the god or gods of his own choice. Some wonder that so many are going over to Romanism. The wonder is that all who are on the ground of works for salvation do not go over to it. No doubt this will be the case, or worse. (See 2 Thess. 2:11.) But though hell and earth have so long, and in every variety of way, tried to extinguish the light of the gospel, it is still the power of God to salvation to every one that believeth.

Reader, if you do not care for your poor soul's salvation, then throw my paper away; say plainly you will have sin and hell. Are you really concerned? Have you long desired to be saved? What has hindered you? Two things. First, you have not believed God's testimony about yourself, and secondly, you have not believed God's testimony about Christ. As to yourself, you do not really believe that you are utterly ruined by sin. If you did, you would see at once the folly of trying, as you try, to mend yourself. That which is partly ruined may be mended. If your hat fell into the water and was injured, it might be restored; but, if ruined, it is past mending. Sin has not merely injured man, but ruined him. But now as to the second — God's testimony of Christ. God Himself has accepted the mighty ransom — God Himself has raised Him from the dead. God Himself declares that all who believe on Him are justified from all things. Ponder these words: "If righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain." Every attempt to keep the law for righteousness is an attempt to prove that Christ died in vain — that you are not so ruined, and do not need such a gift as Christ. Certain it is, without righteousness you cannot enter heaven; you have none of your own. If you do not receive God's righteousness as a free gift, even Christ, what on earth or in heaven can save you? Oh, fellow-believer, what wondrous love was that "made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "What a Contrast"

"What a Contrast"

We had been delayed a considerable time one morning at a station a little north of Derby, when several of the passengers on the platform became exceedingly impatient. I made a remark to the following effect. It was much better quietly to bear what we could not alter. And some could even thankfully do so, believing what the scripture said, "that all things work together for good to them that love God." Surely it would be better to wait on the platform than be killed on the line: every passenger might not be quite ready to quit this life. An old countryman came up to me, and told me the following circumstance. He said, "A few days ago I was walking across a field with an old friend of mine, our village blacksmith; and though a blacksmith, he felt so much of the love of Christ, that he would frequently be found visiting the sick and dying, and pointing them to Christ: and not only them, but he would often call to see Christians, and was very useful to those who were of a doubting sort. He would show them it was not their feelings or their doings that would save them, but that Christ was all. Well, we two were walking over the fields. Now he was of a tender turn of mind, which grieved much over the state of the world and the church. As we were walking he became sorely depressed at the thought of so much division and carnal strife amongst Christians. Suddenly he stopped, looked up with such a gaze at heaven, his face beaming with joy, and said, 'Oh, what a contrast! there Christ is all.' His face became brighter, his eyes fixed, as though looking at Christ in heaven; his body gently lowered on the grass, the pale shadow of death passed over his face, the spirit departed to be with Christ."

I need not say I was thankful for the delay. I felt that it had worked together for my soul's good. The departure of this honoured pastor had given a reality to eternal things, which produced such a thrill in my soul that I can never forget. Yes, I call him the honoured pastor, for He who called the fisherman of Galilee, called also the blacksmith of Derbyshire, to feed His sheep. The Holy Ghost alone can teach and convince of the sublime truth contained in those few words, "It is not your feelings or your doings that can save you. Christ is all." Are you mourning over sin, and longing for assured forgiveness? Christ is all! "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall have remission of sins." Do you want peace with God? Christ is all! "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Do you want righteousness? Christ is all! "For he hath made him sin for us, who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." Do you want to be sanctified? Christ is all! "By the which will we are sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once." Do you want to be kept from sin and Satan? Christ is all! "Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them." Do you want to be certain, unworthy as you are, that you are an accepted person with a holy God? Christ is all! "Having, therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus." Now what can you want more? "Oh," says the trembling believer, "I want to be quite sure that I shall be with him at last." Christ is all! "We know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2.) If you look at your feelings and your doings for salvation, it is like a person trying to climb a steep mountain of sand — every effort slides him lower. Our poor feelings and our doings are as unstable and shifting as the sand: there is nothing in either for faith to lay hold of. But when faith, looking away from our feelings and doings, takes fast hold of Christ, we are at once on the Rock of Ages. This is the difference between saving faith and all mere spurious faith, which really is only unbelief. If you have obtained the precious faith of God, you look at Christ. If false faith, you axe looking at yourself, your feelings and your doings.

The departure of this servant of Christ reminds one of the death of Stephen. A glorified Christ in heaven was the object of faith to each of them. Neither of them had a single hope below. Christ, rejected on earth, glorified in heaven! What a contrast! Yes, the rejection or acceptance of Christ makes this immense difference. It is quite true that all the wretchedness and misery of this world came by sin, but it is the rejection of Christ that is the cause of its continuance. You see the wretched drunkard, reeling from the alehouse, led by a thin, pale-faced, half-starved child, its mother having sunk in the grave, slowly murdered by him who called himself a father and a husband. Ah, poor drunkard, drunk or sober, the cause of all thy misery is this — thou art a rejecter of Christ. Christ in thy family would have turned a hell into heaven. Look where you will on earth, it is a Christ-rejecting world. For eighteen hundred years has Christ been rejected by the succeeding generations of men. [Written in the XIXth century.] The few who through grace have received Him have all been hated by the world, and many of them persecuted to death. You may have as much of the world's false religion as you please, and the world will praise you. But if Christ is your all, the world will hate you, even as it hated Him. When Jesus looked upon the city of the Pharisees, he wept. The sectary may fight and wrangle, and stamp and storm; but, like the blacksmith, the true Christian, when he looks at the masses of rejecters around him, will not fight, but weeping, seek to save. And what grieved him most was, that much which calls itself the church dishonours Christ quite as much as the world. What deceit, what covetousness, what selfishness, hatred, malice, cruelty, and oppression. But enough! Look up. Oh, what a contrast in heaven! Jesus is all and in all. No rejecters there! No deceivers there! No sting of sin is felt there! No drunkard walks the golden streets! No liar there! No slave-driver there! No sorrow, no pain, not a sigh, a groan, nor a tear there! God is there, and in His presence there is fulness of joy; at His right hand pleasures for evermore. There is a moment fast approaching when all who are Christ's shall be taken, not from the body, as was the dying blacksmith, but when "we who are alive and remain shall be caught up." Yes, "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." Our vile body shall be changed and fashioned like unto the glorious body of Christ. Reader, this is my blessed hope. What is yours? It is not that I am better than you, and therefore worthy of such a place. Oh, no! I am a sinner — the very chief of sinners; but Christ is my all. Do you ask, "What can fit me for that happy, holy place?" My answer — nay, God's answer — is, Christ alone. Yes, it is the unquestionable privilege of all believers to "give thanks unto the Father, who hath made them meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light," &c. (Col. 1:12-14), "and ye are complete in Christ." Believer, this is all true, whether you enjoy it or not. The more you walk with God in the light, the more you will enjoy it. Remember, it is not your feelings or your works. Christ is all!

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "Progress"

"Progress"

I was travelling on the Birmingham and Derby line some time ago, when a gentleman was speaking, with evident satisfaction, on the wonderful improvement and rapid progress of society. I quietly listened as he boasted of the development of man. At last I said, "You seem to have overlooked one thing." "And what is that, sir?" he said. I replied, "Why, sir, it is this: you forget that this world has yet to answer for the murder and rejection of the Son of God. That is the end of this world's progress." The man appeared struck with surprise, and I thought alarm. I showed him that however man may dream of this world's gradual improvement, God's word speaks out without mistake. Christ distinctly foretold that He would be rejected. (Luke 22:25-30.) For eighteen hundred years this world has treated the mercy of God, in giving Christ, with contempt. I asked him if he thought God would bear this for ever? But my question was quite outside his philosophy. Finite reason knows nothing of the infinite God, but what He Himself reveals. What a revolution took place in that man's thoughts in a moment! He said, "I never thought in that way about the death of Christ." This reminds me of a question a young man once asked me; it was this: "If God knew for certain that men would reject Christ, where was the use in sending the gospel?" "Well," I said, "I will answer by an illustration. Suppose some nation — say America — were to murder the British ambassador; of course that would at once cut off all relations with England. Well, there would be one of two things for it — immediate judgment, or forbearing mercy. England would be just in demanding instant satisfaction. But now, instead of that, though England might well know that such was the inveterate hatred of that nation which had deliberately murdered her ambassador, that the offer of pardon would be rejected with disdain; — yet would there be no meaning, no use, if, instead of demanding immediate satisfaction, she sent the most conciliatory message of reconciliation? Yes, England's character would be manifest to the whole world; and when she ever did proceed to extremities, still her clemency would be acknowledged by all." "Oh," said the young man, "I see the point; the character of God is manifested." "Just so," said I. "And, oh, think of the person of Christ, the Son of God, heaven's ambassador! and is it not even so that men by wicked hands have murdered Him? And God did know that such was man's hatred, that he would reject Him. Yes, and having murdered and rejected Him, talks of progress. God knew it all, and most certainly all relations with God are cut off by the murder of Jesus. It is impossible for God to talk to men about keeping His law that are murderers of His Son. No, no, the whole world stands guilty before God. Surely man cannot be more guilty than the murder and rejection of Christ proves him to be. But, oh! the wonder of all wonders, God did not proceed at once to righteous judgment, but infinite love and grace burst through the very wounds of Christ, and God speaks peace and pardon to black vile man through the very blood of His murdered Son. Yes, He knows man will reject oven this mercy; yes, all men. But out of these very rejecters God is, by the power of the Holy Ghost through the gospel, gathering His church. And is He not glorified in that very world that still rejects Him? Yes! yes! Oh, the longsuffering forbearance, the grace that still beseeches men to be reconciled to God." "Ah!" said the young man, "I never saw how God would be thus glorified in all His ways."

Now, reader, what think you? Just look for a moment at the world, filled with wickedness and violence. Oh! what a scene! and if you look at what bears the name of Christian — nay, it will not bear looking at — I say, do you think God will bear this for ever? He bore long in the days of Noah. But did not the judgment come at last? He bore long with Sodom and Gomorrah, and men made progress; but at last God rained fire and brimstone. Has not Jesus said, "Even thus shall it be when the Son of man cometh?" Why did He say that that day should come as a thief in the night? Why does the scripture say that this solemn event shall come at a time when men are saying, "Peace and safety?" Ah! He well knew that men would believe a lie — yes, that lie of Satan, when he persuades men to say, "The Lord delayeth his coming;" and therefore the word of God, is full of warnings, lest that day should take any of us unawares. The only progress that the scripture reveals is that of increasing iniquity. (See 2 Thess. 2:7, 8; 2 Tim. 3, &c.)

But you ask, "Do not you believe the world will be converted by the preaching of the gospel?" Oh, no, reader, I do not indeed. I just believe what the word of God says, that the world will become so wicked, and the professing church so corrupt, that Christ will come again in judgment. Having first taken up the real church, that is, all the true members of Christ, wherever found, living or sleeping, then that great day of the wrath and vengeance of Almighty God will come. I do believe all that scripture says, too, about the happy state of this earth during the millennium, after Christ has come in judgment.

A preacher, who had long preached the conversion of the world by the gospel, said to me the other day, that nothing had surprised him so much as to find there was not a single passage in the whole Bible to prove that doctrine.

But come, it is time for me to ask you a plain question or two.

Are you ready to meet Christ? Your heart may be set on something. What will that something be worth when Christ appears? The Jews preferred a robber to Christ. Is there some secret sin, pleasure, money, or the world that you prefer to Christ? Oh! my reader, is it possible, are you a wicked rejecter of Christ? If so, the coming of Christ is a terrible day to you. And come it will. Oh! let me tell you, vile as man was in crucifying Jesus, God so loved the world that He gave Him — Jesus so loved that He thus died for our sins. Oh, blessed Jesus! Thou art precious! Can you say so? Have you tasted the sweetness of pardoning love? Do you say, that is what my soul longs to know? My friend, if so, God put that desire into your heart, and Jesus says, "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out." Since Jesus has died for your sins, can anything give God so much joy as pardoning them for His sake? When Jesus, alive from the dead, came into the upper room, His heart was so full of joy, that His first words were, "Peace be unto you." What joy Christ has in speaking; may you have joy in hearing those words of life, "Peace be unto you; and he showed them his hands and his side." This is enough for God, and you need no more. By grace ye are saved. My fellow-believer, what a day awaits us — what a change — to be with Jesus, to see Him as He is, and to be like Him! Even so, come Lord Jesus!

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "An Interesting Question"

"An Interesting Question"

"What do you think you have to do to get your sins forgiven?" I have very often put this question to my fellow-passengers, and I nearly always get in substance the same answer. I was travelling the other day with a farm servant, on my way to London, when the following short conversation took place. "Well," I said, "I suppose you have some desire at times to be saved?" "Yes, sir, I have at times." "Then you would not like the thought of being lost for ever — would you?" "I should not," was the reply. "No; however light a man may make of it in health, it is a sad sight to see a man die with the terror of hell upon him. Well, now, what do you think you have to do to get your sins forgiven?" The young man replied, "To give them up." "That is a very common answer," said I, "and at first sight seems a very true one: but then you have tried to give them up, and you have found you could not; and you have tried again, and again you could not give up sin." "When did I try?" "Oh, often: when you were ploughing or driving your horses, have you not wished you could give up all sin, and be a saved man?" "Yes, it's true."

Reader, is it not true that you too have wished and tried, and wished and tried in vain? How is it, think you? It is the most serious question that can occupy your thoughts — Are you quite sure that this trying to give up sin, this making resolutions and breaking them, until you almost despair of ever getting saved — are you quite sure that this is God's way of saving a sinner? You may have given up some sin or sins; but still the fountain, your very heart, is corrupt, and out of it still flows the most hateful sin; for if one channel has been stopped, it finds another; and you are hasting on to eternity, and still not saved. I ask, Are your sins pardoned? Your conscience answers, No! Are you justified? No! Are you prepared to meet God? No! Are you certain to be with God in heaven? No! You may have every earthly comfort, but to-morrow you die — without hope! Fearful, fearful state! What will it profit you to gain the whole world, and lose your own soul?

But I think I hear you saying, "What can you mean? Is not this the gospel of God, 'If the wicked turn from his wickedness, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall live thereby?'" No, my friend, that is not the gospel at all. It is the law, by the which if a man can be saved, Christ died in vain. Do you say, "What then must I do? Can I go to heaven in my sins?" No, my friend, that you certainly cannot. "There shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie." "But the fearful and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."

How awful the fact that every one of us is described in this verse. Yes, born in this very condition, and held fast prisoners by the devil, the god of this world — so fast that, however you, my reader, may desire to deliver yourself from the power of sin, you cannot. Every effort is utterly vain. I believe that such is the awful dominion that sin has over man, that if all the men in the world, and all the angels in heaven, were to unite to deliver one soul from the power of sin and Satan, they could not do it. I think I hear you saying, "If that's the case, I must have been dreaming. I thought a man could repent at any time, and give up his sins, and then God would forgive him; and so I have not been particularly troubled about it. I have thought there is time enough yet." My reader, if this is your thought, you could not well be under a greater mistake. How awful if you should go on in this fatal delusion until the door is shut, and you are lost! Now, come, try your plan. Try to repent — try to give up all your sins — try to love God with all your heart — try to keep His holy law. The effort, sincerely made, will soon convince you of your hopelessly sinful state; but even if you could succeed in such all effort, there would still be the fearful weight of past sins. No amount of bitter remorse could uncle, or wipe away, one past sin. Judas is a solemn beacon as to this; he tried this way; but he found it the way to hell. Sorrow for sin is but a very small part of true repentance. Your mind must be entirely turned from sin to God. There is but one only way by which this can be done. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." To repent before you believe would be as if the bitten Israelite had to be healed before he looked at the brazen serpent. No, no. Faith in the love of God, as seen in the death of Jesus, alone can produce true repentance. The moment I believe in Jesus, my mind must be changed toward God. If you have been brought to look at Jesus lifted up on the cross, dying for your sins, and now lifted up to the highest glory — if He is your entire trust — you are, and shall be, certainly saved. "For through him is preached the forgiveness of sins; and all that believe are justified from all things." But if you have not looked, and do not thus look, on Jesus lifted up — if you are trusting in anything else — you are as certain, should you die in this state, to perish, as though you were just now in hell.

Do not deceive yourself any longer. If your sins are not pardoned, why should you put on a smiling face, as if you were happy? You are not — you cannot be. Nothing in this world has yet made, nor ever can make, you happy. God so loved the world as to give His beloved Son to die the death of the cross, and what for? To make His very enemies happy for ever. And the world is trying its utmost to be happy without Christ. Is this your case, my follow-passenger? May God in mercy stop you, just now as you read. How little idea you have of the terrible wickedness of your life, if you are thus despising and trampling underfoot the Son of God. Do you ask, "What must I do to get my sins pardoned?" Just what the insurgent troops in India would have to do if a general pardon were proclaimed — believe it.* "The blood of Jesus, Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin." "Through him is preached the forgiveness of sins." Believe it — believe it.

* [Written in the XIXth century]

Dear reader, one word, in conclusion, as to the question, "What must I do to get my sins pardoned?" Until you give up those words, "What must I do?" they prove that you have not yet felt the real necessity for the death of Christ. It is not, "What must I do?" but "What has Jesus done?" And what does God say? The believer hears God speak to him in His word: "The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." "Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification." "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

All! all! has been done! done by the Son of God! "It is finished." Look at the cross. Behold the dying Lamb of God. See what was done by Him, and to Him. All this was done that every poor sinner who believes in Him might have his sins forgiven. Blush, then, to ask, "What must I do?" Instead of vainly trying to do, may you, my reader, by the power of the Holy Ghost, be led to "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "The Explosion"

"The Explosion"

I was travelling on the South Yorkshire line, on my return from Lund Hill, soon after the fearful explosion there, when a gentleman put the following difficulty. He said, "How is it that a person may try his utmost to escape from sin, and still sin has the mastery, and he, of course, has no peace?" The following illustration may help to explain the difficulty.

On my first visit to Lund Hill Colliery, I called at several houses, and found in each widows and orphans, whose fathers and husbands were shut up in that burning pit; One, woman said, "My husband and two sons are in the pit." In another house I found four women — three had lost their husbands, and the fourth her brother. But when the widows and orphans assembled to hear the gospel, never did I see such a sight of sorrow. Amid such sorrow, there is a power in the name of Jesus that can be found in none other. The last of seventeen persons, who were got out alive before closing the pit, was there. I said to him, "Well, how did you feel as you lay at the bottom of the shaft?" He replied, "Oh, sir, I cannot describe my feelings, as I lay, half dead, suffocating and unable to stand." "Suppose you had heard some one at the top of the shaft shout down, and say, 'I have brought you good news: you must do the best you can to get out;' would that have made you happy?" "Oh no, sir; it would have been of no use at all. Get out? Why I had not strength to stand." "Then, after you had waited three hours and a half in that fearful place of death, how did you feel when those three valiant men descended to the very bottom where you lay, to seek the lost, the dead, the dying?" "Nobody can tell what I felt when the cage was going up for the last time, and I knew that if I was I a not put in it I could never get out; but they did lift me up, and put me in the cage, and I was drawn out at the top."

Here we have an illustration of the two gospels of our day. Man's gospel is, that he must do the best he can to get out of the pit of sin. He thinks his condition is not so bad, but that he can still do something to save himself. The gospel of God is the very contrary of this. The word of God plainly shows man's condition so utterly bad that he cannot help himself. Just as the gas at the bottom of the pit had stupefied the men, and taken away their strength, even so has sin stupefied all men, and taken away their strength. In proof of this, in Romans 5, God's love is commended, in that whilst men were "without strength," "whilst we were sinners," "ungodly," "when we were enemies," God did not send word, we were to do the best we could to get out of this condition. Oh, no! But just as the three men descended to save those poor, lost, dying men in the pit, so did God send His own most glorious Son to save lost sinners. "Yes, when we were without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." What a striking illustration this is! If you had seen that sight, when more than 200 poor men and boys were all deep down in that pit of fire-damp and death! Every effort was made to save them. It was enough to melt a heart of stone to hear the sobs and cries of the women and children. What an expression of the love of man for his fellow man, when those three men descended, at the risk of their own lives! And have you never read that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life?" And this was not at the risk of his own life, but with the certainty that nothing but the offering up of that precious life could atone for sin and save the soul. Now it is most certain that if those poor men were not got out they must perish. It was awful when the last man was out, to see the last ray of hope destroyed by the closing the mouth of the burning pit. God is sovereign — seventeen were taken out, and nearly 200 left in. Oh, if this solemn fact were but more thought of — God is sovereign. The whole world lies in darkness, sin, and death. Few are saved; many perish. Reader, are you one of the few, or one of the many? Do not be deceived. Do not think that you need not be alarmed; that when you begin to feel the pit too hot, you will then get out. Do not dream about getting out by ordinances, or by your own self-righteous works. You are too deep down. If you knew your condition, you would cry out this moment, "Lord, save, or I perish." This is a solemn thing, that unless Christ saves you, you must perish.

There was one poor man dreadfully burnt, and when they brought him to the cage, he mistook them for his enemies, and rushed back again to the dark works of the pit. They pursued him again, and caught him, and brought him again to the cage; and now you would have thought him safe; but again he rushed up the dark old works, and perished in the pit. What a lesson for a backslider! It is a sore grief to see a person, that one thought saved, go back again to the dark works of sin and death. Reader, if that is your case, what a fearful looking forward for judgment you have! I need not ask, Are you happy? Sin and happiness are eternal strangers.

But do not despair; if by reading this little paper God shews you your utterly dreadful, lost condition, let me tell you that for eighteen hundred years not a person has ever known his need of Christ, and trusted in Him, but that person has been saved. And if you really know your need, that you are an ungodly sinner, without strength to be better, you are just the one for Christ.

The last thing I would notice, and not the least, is, those who were saved from the pit were saved clean out at the top. They were not drawn half-way up, and then told to do their part; that it all depended on themselves whether they were finally saved. Some are told to work out their salvation, as though that meant that Christ had finished about one half of their salvation, and they had to do the other half. It is a great mistake. God's salvation is clean out at the top. No! no! not drawn half-way out of the pit; but the Christian gives "thanks unto the Father who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins." Read that over again, will you?

The man I talked with was out of the pit. He know he was. He did not hope to get out. If he had done so, that would have been a flat denial of the kindness of those who had got him out. They were drawn out together, the deliverer and the delivered. It is so with the believer and Christ. "God hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places, in Christ Jesus." Christ took my place in death for my sins; but God hath raised us up together; so that the believer is as clean out of sin and death as Christ is. My fellow-believer, there is just as much condemnation to Christ now at God's right hand, as there is to you in Him. Read the first and second chapters of the Ephesians, and the fifth and sixth of the Romans, and you will there see that the believer is as clear of sin and condemnation as Christ Himself is clear. O for more faith in the out-and-out salvation of God, through Christ Jesus our Lord.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "I have my Ticket"

"I have my Ticket"

I was passing Worcester station the other day, when a young man entered my carriage. As he sat down I took out my ticket, and showed it to him, saying, "Young man, I have my ticket." "Yes, sir," he replied, "I see you have it." I said further, "I do not hope to have it sometime. I have not now to ask for one, or wish I had a ticket; I have it — that is a certainty. Just so, also, I have salvation. I do not hope I may be saved; I have not to ask now to be saved — I have salvation. Through God's unspeakable mercy I am saved." The young man looked with astonishment, and said, "Well, this is very strange: I could have got to Birmingham for about half the fare by the other line; but somehow I could not book that way. Something said I must come by this train, and I felt I must get into this carriage. Now I'll tell you: there is a man works in the same shop with me, and he says the same thing you say. He says he has eternal life; and mind you, he not only says so, but everything he does shows he has. Bless you! he has no fear of death at all; and when he has any trouble, this having eternal life makes him so quiet and happy, that I cannot help feeling that he has got something that I have not, do you see? And no matter how we chaff him at the shop, we cannot touch him, for he has eternal life. He tells us he has found eternal life by reading and believing the Bible. For myself, must tell you, I used to read Tom Paine and Voltaire; but somehow, when I got reading at night, I said, 'Tom Paine, thou canst not give me eternal life;' and I felt so miserable, I banged the book on the floor." As he said these words, he suited the words by action, with great earnestness, and then, putting his hand in his side pocket, he brought out a beautiful edition of a pocket Bible, and said, "I have now got the book that makes known eternal life, but I cannot say that I have eternal life. I want to feel that I have it!" I said to him, "When the clerk laid your ticket on the window-board this morning, did you say I must first feel that I have it before I take it; or did you first take it, and then feel that you had it?" "Oh," he said, "I see now how simple it is. I must first receive salvation, and then I shall feel that I have it."

I dare say many a reader of this paper has the very same difficulty that this person had. Instead of believing the word of God, in His glad tidings of pardon and life through Jesus Christ, you look, and look within, wishful to find some unknown amount of feelings in which you may rest, or at least on which you may base a hope of being saved. Thus you stand at the window, waiting for feeling, and all the while refusing the grace of God. Now what do you want to feel? "Why," perhaps you say, "I must feel very sorry for my sins, and I must feel that I have forsaken them, and I must feel that now I love God. I have often tried to feel all this; but I have always failed. And yet I must feel all this before I can be saved — must I not?" No, my friend, if these feelings were God's conditions of salvation, not one soul would be saved. Now let us look in the New Testament, and see. I cannot find one place where it says, If you feel sorry for your sins you shall be saved. The answer to the jailor's question, "What must I do to be saved?" was not "Be or feel sorry for thy sins, and thou shalt be saved." Nothing of the kind. They pointed him to a very different object than himself or his feelings — even to Jesus. They said,"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." And that same hour "He rejoiced, believing in God with all his house." On another occasion (Acts 8), as Philip preached Jesus to the eunuch, and set forth the great sacrifice for sins, the eunuch, said, "See, here is water, what doth hinder me to be baptized?" Did he reply, If thou feelest sufficiently sorry for thy sins? Was this the condition? Were his feelings needed to add to the atoning value of the blood of Jesus? Oh, no. Nothing but faith was needed to connect him with Jesus, or to warrant his showing forth that union in death and resurrection, by baptism. "If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest; and he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." He was at once baptized, "and he went on his way rejoicing."

The apostle Paul does not say, "The gospel which I preached unto you, 'by which also ye are saved,' was that you should feel this or that." No, he says, "How that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures."

Now, my reader, if there were no barriers then to exclude the sinner from Christ, why should you put your feelings now as a perpetual hindrance to your receiving Christ as your entire Saviour? Then Jesus and the resurrection was preached — never human feeling — never amendment, resolutions, or sorrow for sin, as conditions of God's free gift — eternal life.

The gospel finds man blind as to God's character of love, and morally dead in sin. It reveals God in the blessed Jesus, God is love. The cross — ah! there the sinner sees the goodness of God. The infinite love of God — what a sight! This, and this alone, leads to repentance, or, as the word in the Greek always means, a change of mind. When Jesus, saving from the curse of sin by the death of the cross, is revealed to the soul, there is then that change of mind toward God — that knowing God which is eternal life. This is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ — this is repentance toward God. It is only as I gaze on the cross of Jesus that I can either learn or feel what sin is. Blessed Jesus! Thy precious blood cleanseth me from the guilt, and delivers me from the power, of sin! If I look back at my feelings or my doings, all is failure and sin; and hence, if these have aught to do with my salvation, all is darkness and uncertainty. But looking at the cross of Jesus my Lord, I find no failure. "It is finished." With all my coldness, and unworthiness, and sin, I do believe; and hence I can say I am saved. "The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin." My reader, if you have been brought to give up all dependence on self, your feelings, your sorrows, or your tears, then hear the words of Jesus. He says, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, HATH everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life." Again, He Says, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand."

Think of those words — "eternal life," "hath everlasting life," "shall never perish neither shall any pluck them out of my hand."

Is this your present and eternal portion? Then can you say, "Worthy is the Lamb?" and "I have eternal life?" Do not rest satisfied with a mere hope of being saved. It will not do to tell the collector you hope you have a ticket.

The believer has redemption through the blood of Christ, and his hope is the coming of the Lord.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "Over-Luggage"

"Over-Luggage"

A short time ago, I was waiting at the Stoke station, when I overheard a violent dispute about a gentleman's over-luggage. The owner of the luggage evidently wished to defraud the company; and an officer was very properly refusing to allow him to proceed until the amount was paid. I felt pleased with the manly conduct of the officer, a tall Irishman; and after the noise had subsided, I entered into the following conversation with him. I said, "Then I suppose the passenger cannot go on unless the over-luggage is paid to the full. How much is it?" "Seven and sixpence," was the reply; "and it would not be right for me to take less than the full amount." "Very true," I replied; "but if a friend were to pay the full amount, would you hinder him then?" "Oh dear no, sir! should I not be very glad to see him go along?" "And the porters all along the line, do you think they would stop him?" "Oh, not at all, sir; he would be as welcome to travel on as though he had paid every farthing himself." "Well, now," I said, "suppose you and I were about to take a journey to-day, say from this world to the next, what about the over-luggage — I mean our sins; if put on the scale of divine justice, do you really think you would pass?" "Well, now, sir," he said, "that is what often troubles me when I come to think of dying. I goes to church, you know, sir, on Sundays, but still I fear my sins would be too heavy for me to pass on to heaven." "Then what have you towards paying the over-luggage?" "Oh, sir, I have nothing at all, for I am a sinner." "Let me, then," I said, "tell you what another has done. When God weighed our sins on the scale of divine justice, such was the weight, that the lever went higher and higher, until the price demanded was the Son of God. And blessed it is that I can tell you that God spared not His own Son; 'for God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' Now, just as it would not be right for you to let the passenger pass on until his over-luggage is paid to the full, neither would it be righteous if God were to allow the sinner to pass on to heaven until his sins were met to the full. But, then, also, just as it is perfectly right for you to allow the passenger to pass on when his over-luggage has been paid for by another, how much more is God perfectly righteous in receiving the sinner, the awful weight of whose sins has been met by the death of Jesus Christ, His own beloved Son! The amount claimed by divine justice has been paid to the full. 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' Yes, and then if called upon to take your journey to-day, you may look at the cross, and pass on to glory."

My train moved on, the man thanked me for the conversation, and God only knows whether I shall meet him amongst the redeemed above.

Well, reader, what about your over-luggage? Sinner you are, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." If God were to let you feel the real weight of only one of your sins, it would sink you in everlasting despair. Yet, strange as it may appear, I find many of my fellow-travellers who seem to think that God is far more indifferent about our sins than the railway officer was about the over-luggage. They know they are sinners, yet with some of them sin is a very light matter, and yet they expect to get into heaven somehow. They think if they begin to reform some day, and do the best they can, all will be right at last. Reader, if this is your state of mind you are not far from the lake of fire. Sometimes I meet with persons in the very opposite state of mind from this. I will tell you of one case. I was coming to Tetbury station in the omnibus. My fellow-traveller was a young person who appeared distressed in mind. After some conversation, I inquired the state of her soul. I shall never forget her reply. "It is no use. I have tried so often to give up my sins and the world, and serve God, and I have failed every time. I only keep adding to the weight of my sins. I have given up the attempt." As she said these words, tears rolled down her face. I said, "I am glad to hear you say so." She appeared greatly surprised, and wished for an explanation. I read to her Mark 2:1-5. I told her the one sick of the palsy had to be let down in his entire helplessness to the very floor at the feet of Jesus. It was then, but not till then, he heard those precious words of Jesus, "Son, thy sins be forgiven thee." She had made this mistake; she had tried to climb a little higher by her best endeavours. There must be this letting down; and God had by every failure let her down a little lower; and now is she was helpless at the feet of Jesus, I was glad to be able to set forth a full and eternal salvation through Him. She said she had never seen it in that way. Her mother, on seeing us enter the omnibus, had retired to pray that God would use that opportunity for the conversion of her child. How little did I think that in a few days she was to return to her mother's house to die. I passed through the same town seven months afterwards. I found her pale on her dying bed. She had now found peace through the precious blood of Christ. The visits of a Christian had been blessed to her soul. She is now with the Lord.

The cross of Christ meets both these states of mind. Are you careless about sin? Look at the cross; in it God says it is impossible for Him to be indifferent about sin.

Is your soul burthened with sin? Do you feel like the person with his over-luggage, that with your sins you must pass on to the presence of God? Oh, how overwhelming is the weight and guilt of sin — still pressing the soul down, down, down! Yet, how ever much we may fool its weight, it is only at the cross of Jesus that we can really learn what sin is. The cross of Christ was the scale of divine justice on which sin was weighed to the utmost. God there laid its utmost weight on Jesus. "The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." The thought of it made Him, even the Son of man, sweat as it were great drops of blood. Oh, dwell on the solemn hour of the cross, when His soul was made an offering for sin! Blessed Jesus! in that hour of darkness, thou didst endure the full weight, the utmost curse of sin! Pass on, my soul, pass on; the ransom is fully paid: it is finished. The price of thy fearful over-luggage is paid; fully, divinely paid — paid to the utmost. Jesus is risen. Thou art justified. God, who laid thy sins on Jesus, has justified thee. Pass on. That same Jesus is coming again shortly to receive thee to Himself.

Reader, nothing can discharge thy over-burthened soul but the cross of Christ. Thy best works can help thee no more in this matter than thy greatest sins.

Believer, why doubt? Pass on with holy confidence. God is divinely and eternally righteous in justifying thee from all sin, and receiving thee to glory. "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "How does a Man become a Soldier?"

"How does a Man become a Soldier?"

I was leaving the Birmingham station for Manchester the other day, when I noticed three soldiers walking on the platform. I felt an inward conviction that my Master had something for me to say to these men. Taking my seat in the carriage beside their three knapsacks, I looked up in prayer, that the right man might come and sit next to me. They took their seats. I remained silent for some time. At last I saw tears begin to roll down the face of the man next to me. It is often better to pray than talk; one gets to see more of God that way. After a while I said to him, "When I saw you three walking on the platform, I felt assured that the Lord had a message for one of you; and I asked Him to bring the right man next to me; and now, will you tell me what is giving you so much grief this morning?" He looked very much surprised, and said, "Oh, sir, it is eighteen years since I ran away from home; my father was a man of prayer; I never saw him again; he has been dead many years now, but I can never forget his prayers for me. I have been abroad most of my time since I enlisted — have never seen my dear mother from that day to this — she does not know whether I am dead or alive; but I am going, to-day to see her; I have got her address in Manchester; and this brings to my mind those happy days when my father had a prayer-meeting in our house." He also showed me a worn-out letter, written by his sister, on leaving his native shores. No, words can tell the value he set upon this tender treasure; he had worn it near his heart in every part of the world he had seen. He also opened his knapsack, and shewed me a well-worn Bible: his two companions, I found, also had each his Bible. They were, in fact, three praying soldiers. I read their testimonials, and three more noble, upright men I seldom met. The thrilling interest of that conversation I shall not easily forget. One point, however, I must name. Though these three soldiers were, like Lydia of old, men of prayer, and I trust the Lord had opened the heart of the one next me, yet they were totally ignorant of God's plan of salvation. In order to meet this ignorance, I put the following question: — "How does a man become a soldier? Doe he go to some old rag-shop, and buy old cast-off regimentals, and try to imitate the soldier, until he gets to be one?" "Well, well," said one of them, a pretty soldier "that would be, wouldn't he, now?" "But," said I, "then tell me, how does a man become a soldier?" "How, why simply by receiving the shilling,* to be sure." "Just so," said I, "does a sinner become a Christian. It is not by going to some religious rag-shop, and buying the rags of self-righteousness; and trying to imitate the Christian, until he gets to be one. No, it is simply as a lost sinner receiving Christ, as the man receives the shilling." "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." "

What!" said one of the soldiers, "do you mean to say then that a man does not ought to do his duty to God, to read His word, and pray?" "Oh, yes! the Christian earnestly desires to do all this; but you have to do your duty, you have to keep your regimentals bright, and to obey your orders; but tell me, have you to do your duty to get to be a soldier, or because (since you received the shilling) you are one? Just so the Christian. He loves to keep his regimentals bright, to walk with garments undefiled, and to obey, as a son delights to obey, the will of his Father. But this is not to get to be a Christian, but because he is one."

* [Written in the XIXth century]

"I never saw it in that light before," said he. "I know you never did; and after all your sincere desires to live to God, and thus get to be a Christian, when you come to look back at your past life, have you not often done the things you most hate? Don't you often feel you are as far from being what you wish to be as ever — sin has such terrible power? Now, has it not?" "That's all true, sir. But what is a poor fellow to do? You have no idea, sir, of the temptations of a poor soldier! Why, now, we three, because we are steady men, are sent to be recruiting sergeants. It makes my very heart sick to think of the dens we shall have to go into to get our men." "Oh," said I, "what a world of sin and wretchedness! and how much there is in every fallen man that answers to the iniquity around. If God had not known it all, and sent His own dear Son to die, the sacrifice for sin, on the cross, so that salvation might be as free, yet as binding, as the soldier's shilling, who could be saved? Who, with such a fallen nature, in such a world, could imitate the Christian, until he got to be one?"

At Crewe, two old pensioners got into the same carriage one, of whom appeared to have tried hard and long to make himself a Christian. This man, I believe, found blessing to his soul through the conversation. As an old soldier, he remembered well the shilling; and he remembered he had not to buy his regimentals; and he remembered well that he had to do his duty, not to get to be a soldier, but because he was one. But he had never known that it is just the same with every sinner that is brought to God. When a man is enlisted, he is stripped of everything — not a rag is left. He then stands in royal uniform — but that royal suit is a gift — he has not to pay a penny for it. He only receives it. No matter how dirty his old rags were. Every man in the regiment stands in the same cloth. It will be so with thee, poor, lost sinner, no matter how filthy thy life has been; no, if even thou hast been like the thief on the cross, or a very Mary Magdalene. If the Holy Spirit shall open thy heart to receive Christ as thy entire salvation, thy royal clothing shall be the very righteousness of God. Yes, every soldier of Christ wears the same spotless robe. "For he hath made him sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." (2 Cor. 5:21.) "But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption."

Perhaps one of the dealers in old rags of self-righteousness will say, "Won't you come to my shop, and try my sacraments and ordinances? I will teach you how to imitate the Christian best, and then you may hope to get to be one. I assure you my shop is the oldest in the line?" No, thank you; no religious rags for me. I have put on the Lord Jesus — He is my only trust — I need no more; for God says of all that are in Him, "There is, therefore, now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." And, "Ye are complete in him." What God says is complete, let not man try to mend. No, no! fellow-soldier of Christ, don't be tempted into the rag-shops of the day; thou hast not to put on old regimentals to get to be a soldier of Christ. Watch and pray, that thou mayest walk worthy of thy royal uniform. As says the word of God, "I will that thou affirm constantly that they which have believed in God (those that are saved) might be careful to maintain good works." (Titus 3:4-8.)

It is impossible to describe that poor soldier, as he came within sight of Manchester. I spoke of the return of the prodigal son. Whatever might be the joy of that poor mother's heart, in receiving her long-lost son, still infinitely greater is the joy of God, in receiving the long-lost prodigal. Oh! careless sinner, what a God of love dost thou despise! Thou art starving in wretchedness, and there is bread enough and to spare. See, see, He comes to meet thee with outstretched arms of love; fall into them, crying, "I have sinned." The first words the prodigal heard were these, "Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hands, and shoes on his feet."

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : That Sad, Sad Face

That Sad, Sad Face

I was travelling on the Midland some time ago. Amongst my fellow-passengers were a commercial, an aged general, a major, an aged lady, a sister of mercy, or nun, and a young girl, who, from her agitation, I feared, was being tempted from her home to take the veil. A more sad face than that of the unhappy-looking nun was seldom seen. As I looked at her, I thought if she had but peace with God, oh, how her misery would be turned into joy! I sat longing for an opportunity to tell her of the finished work of Christ. By-and-by she felt for her ticket — she could not find it. I helped her to seek it. At last she found it, after much excitement, in her cloak sleeve. I then said, "It would be a fearful thing at the end of the journey of life to find that we were without the passport to heaven." "Indeed it would," she replied. I said, "Can you tell me what the passport is to the holy presence of God?" "A good conscience," she replied. I said again, "God says in His word that 'there is none righteous, no, not one,' that 'there is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.' Will you then tell me how a sinner can have a good conscience?" The nun was quite at a loss to know how to answer this question. "I should think you ought to know," said the aged lady at my left, and, pointing to the Word of God in my hand, she said, "That book will tell you." "You are quite right," I said. "This book tells me that 'the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth me from all sin,' that every believer has 'boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.' It tells me my sins are forgiven for His name's sake, that believers have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace (Eph. 1:1-7), that God is infinitely righteous in thus justifying a poor sinner, and that without works." (Rom. 3:19-23.)

"What!" said the major, "you do not mean to say that a man may know in this world that his sins are forgiven. I cannot think that a man can be quite sure of that." "Certainly, Major; and now let me give you an illustration in your own line. Suppose your regiment in rebellion, and you give yourself up to make reconciliation for your men, telling them that if you do not succeed you shall never return, but that if you do return, they may be quite sure of their pardon the moment they see you — that the reconciliation will then have been made. Now suppose you do thus make a complete and satisfactory reconciliation — you do return — and you call your regiment on parade, and announce a free pardon to every soldier; and now a man steps up, and says, 'I suppose,' your honour, I must not be quite sure that what you say is true?' Now, Major, would you not consider that an insult?"

"That is right," says the old general.

"And now, if it is an insult to doubt the word of a fallible man, what is it to doubt the testimony of the infallible God? Has not the blessed Jesus given Himself the propitiation for sin, 'to make reconciliation for the sins of the people?' 'He died for our sins according to the scriptures, and he was buried, and he rose again the third day.' (1 Cor. 15:3, 5.) He never could have returned from the cold chambers of the dead if the reconciliation had not been perfectly made. But believers can say with triumph, 'He was raised from the dead for our justification, therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace, with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Do you not see, Major, your return to your regiment would be a proof that reconciliation was made? And the resurrection of Christ is God's proof that the atoning work of Christ is perfectly finished. And if your own word should be enough for your men to believe, what can I want more than the word of God? God hath raised up that very Jesus who groaned and bled on the cross beneath the weight of my sins and guilt. And that is not all. That very Jesus is gone up on high, and sits at the right hand of the majesty on high. This is what gives me the answer of a good conscience, as Peter says, 'And be ready always to give an answer to every mall that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear, having a good conscience.' But how? By good works? No, these will do before men, 'but the answer of a good conscience toward God is only by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is gone into heaven,' &c. (1 Pet. 3:15, 22.) The sacrifices of the law could never make the conscience perfect, much less can the bloodless sacrifices that men pretend now to offer. But the offering of Jesus on the cross — His one offering of Himself — perfects the conscience for ever, so perfects it that there needs 'no more sacrifice for sins.'" (Heb. 10:1-23.)

"Major, would you not be happy now if you knew your sins were forgiven?" "Oh yes, indeed, nothing on this earth could make me so happy." And then, addressing the nun, I said, "And would not you be happy if you also know, like the believing Ephesians, that God had for Christ's sake forgiven your sins?" She said, "I do not know how to answer you." The commercial man now spoke: "I have no doubt that a man is justified, as you have said, by faith; but will you tell me when a man may conclude with certainty and safety that he is saved?" "That is a very important inquiry," said I. "Many make a fatal mistake by concluding, because they have passed through a religious excitement, that they may hope they are saved. There is no safety in such a conclusion. Neither can a person be sure he is saved by fasting, and prayers, and works of kindness. No, there is sin mixed up with it all. Neither dare the person conclude that he is saved by keeping the holy law of God; for the more sincerely he strives to keep it, the more miserable and desponding he is, for he finds an evil heart that is still breaking it. But when a person sees himself so great a sinner that there is no remedy for him but death, and that God has met his need as a sinner in the death of Christ, and that being risen from the death the sinner deserved, He is now his justification and life — in plain words, when stripped of all dependence on himself, he is brought by the Spirit of God to trust alone in Christ, he may then conclude with certainty and safety that he is saved."

Yes, my reader, nothing can be so sure as the word of the living God: "Be it known unto you that through this risen man, Christ Jesus, is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins, and by him all that believe are justified from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses." "Are justified" — not may be after death. No, the believer is now beyond death, Jesus having died for him. If you are brought to give up all self-righteousness, and as a lost sinner to receive Christ as your entire salvation, you may be most certain you are saved. A person may be deceived in doing and enduring anything to save himself, but no man will trust alone in Christ, but, by the Holy Ghost. If this is your faith, you may be certain it is of God. You may be certain, therefore, you are saved. If you are trusting partly in Christ, and partly in something else, you never on that ground can be saved. It must be all Christ, or no Christ at all.

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : "Must I not strive?

"Must I not strive?" or the Poor Man's Dinner

I had a long conversation the other day with a butcher, on the rail to Derby, on the reason why men smoke and drink. This led us to the subject of the bitter misery that sin produces, even in this life; and the various attempts that men make to smother conscience, and drown sorrow. The butcher had just lost his wife, was left with two little children, had passed through some trouble of conscience; but, what was worse, he often took too much drink. In short, we were both agreed that one great reason why men drink is the misery and burthen of sin. He owned it was a wretched thing thus to go on from sin to sin; and that solemn word of God sounded heavy in his ears, "The drunkard shall not inherit the kingdom of God." I found him much interested in the things of religion, and wishful to converse upon them. I found he purposed, at some future time, to make a firm resolution to cast off his sins, and become religious. Alas! how many are now in hell who once had the same intention as this butcher! He evidently thought a little striving of his own, at any time, would do all that is required.

"Well, now," said I, "man is certainly in a wretched condition through sin; but how do you think he is to get saved from this guilt and misery?" "Well, you know," said the butcher, "it will not do for a man to go on in his sins until he dies, will it? He must strive hard to give up all his bad ways, and live to God." I replied, "He will never save himself by his striving in that way." "What!" said he, "do you mean to say a man must not strive?" "As long as he does strive in that way," said I, "he is a rejecter of Christ." I saw the poor man was evidently trusting in his future strivings. "Explain yourself," said he: "whatever do you mean? — A man striving is a man rejecting the gospel of Christ! What can you mean?"

I replied, "I will illustrate what I mean. Suppose you have gone on in sin and drunkenness, until you have brought your family to starvation; you have not a farthing to buy them food, and you are too ill to make the least effort; when a friend comes to your house, spreads your table with plenty, and begs you to eat. If, then, you say, 'No, I must strive to got food myself,' would not you be rejecting the kindness of your friend? And would not this rejection of his love continue as long as ever you continue your striving? And is it not so with the lost sinner? Man is so bad, that he really does go on sinning until he dies. Is he not as helpless as the starving man? God has come to his rescue — God has given His own Son to meet his deepest need as a lost sinner, by the death of the cross. He died to deliver us, because we could not possibly save ourselves. God, the Friend above all friends, has come in Christ to our house of wretchedness and sin; and He, in pure love and pity, has spread the table of salvation — all things are ready. Oh! it is God that beseeches poor dying sinners to eat the bread of life spread before them. 'Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us; we pray you, in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.' The kindness of God to perishing sinners has now been shown by the death of Jesus. Now pardon and deliverance are preached through Him. Surely, then, the longer I strive to save myself, the longer I reject the kindness of the God of all love."

The man's countenance fell; his last prop, he felt, was being taken from under him; his heart rose in rebellion against the free grace of God. If he could but have had the honour of a little striving, as a merit, to bring to God, he would have been well pleased. But to bow to God meeting him through the finished work of Christ, in pure, undeserved pity and love, this he would not do. He now tried to ridicule me, "Perhaps," said he, "you are not so good as you pretend, to be." "You very much mistake me," said I, "if you suppose I pretend to be good. No, I put myself along with you; I say we are both sinners; only I feel I am a greater sinner than you, because I know more about my own sins than I do about yours. But this is the difference between us — I have been brought, like the famished man, to receive Christ, the salvation of God. I can assure you it is through His blood alone I am pardoned and washed. I have nothing else before God. It is His life from the dead, that is my life. It is not in myself I boast, but in Christ. Jesus the Lord." "I have had enough," said he; "I will hear no more." A young man to my right, who had been deeply interested in the conversation, put forth his head, and said, "Will you tell me that illustration again?" I repeated to him again the parable of a friend going to the famishing household, as an illustration of the work of Christ for perishing sinners. I showed him it was not that we had to do one thing for God — it was not even that we had to present the sacrifice of Christ to God, and believe, until God would save us, as though there were any virtue or merit in our so presenting it. No, salvation was entirely from God; like the poor man's dinner, which was entirely from the friend. That it was God who had provided that great propitiation for sin, the sacrifice of Christ — that it is God who meets the sinner in his deepest wretchedness and helplessness — that the moment I believe, and receive the kindness of God, I am saved. That young man's face now lit up with joy — it was the joy of a new-born child of God. God had, during the repeating of those words, met his weary, anxious soul, and spoken peace, through the finished work of His own Son. To the one, the precious gospel had proved the savour of death unto death; to the other of life unto life. I found the Lord had been preparing him for three months for this message of mercy and love. Ah, there is often a striving and a struggling before the heart is made to really give up all hopes in self, and accept Christ as its entire salvation. This is the work of God by the Holy Ghost.

My reader may perhaps say, "Well, after all, I intend myself, some day, to strive hard to give up all my hateful sins, and serve and love God with all my heart — would it not be right to do so?" Oh, yes, certainly it would. But have you not tried to do so, and failed? and may you mot continue to fail until it is too late, and you are lost?

Perhaps you may say again, is not that what Christ meant, when He said, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate?" No; certainly He could not by that striving mean self-righteousness. He was speaking to the self-righteous Jews; nay, it was their very self-righteousness that made it so difficult to enter the "strait gate." Surely the death of Christ is too strait a gate or door to admit one particle of self-righteousness. His own sheep, even amongst or in the Jewish fold, had to be led out through that door: and no sinner on earth can be saved in any other way than through the death, burial, and resurrection of Him who is the door — of Him who gave His life for the sheep.

God grant that many of my readers may be thus stripped of all pretensions to self-righteousness, and self-striving, and self-dependence, and self-intentions, and own themselves so utterly, hopelessly bad, that God has well met their deep need, by the death of His adorable Son. "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent."

C.S.

STEM Publishing : C Stanley : Railway Tracts : The Lunatic and his Keeper

The Lunatic and his Keeper

On leaving the Gloucester station the other day, I found that one of my fellow-passengers was a lunatic, in the care of a keeper. I soon found that this keeper held some most dangerous opinions respecting the Temperance movement. With him temperance was a John the Baptist, to prepare sinners for Christ; and, as near as I could make out his meaning, he thought it was about one-half of a sinner's salvation; a sentiment as much like blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, whose blessed work it is to bring sinners to Christ, as anything I have heard.

I should be most sorry to speak one word against temperance as a great social benefit amongst men. Right glad should I be, where drunkenness is such a frightful evil, if there were not a drop of drink to be got in the land. Entirely apart from the question of a sinner's salvation, there can be no doubt the moral government of God so orders things, that a sober man must enjoy a greater amount of social happiness than a drunkard. But when the foundation of the gospel is attacked, is a Christian to be silent? God forbid. This caused me to speak very strongly of the use that Satan may make of the Temperance movement. This may startle my reader; but lot me remind you that it is ever Satan's policy to use the best things adapted to accomplish his purposes. He is wont to appear as an angel of light. I will just refer to a parallel case. No one can question that the law of God is holy, just, and good. No one can question the immense benefit of that law in God's moral government of the world; or that in this respect, and for this purpose, to abolish it would be to turn this whole world into one wide hell. And yet it was this very law that the ministers of Satan were seeking to mix with the work of Christ, for justification before God. The Epistle to the Galatians was written for the very purpose of meeting this work of Satan. Now, if he took up so good a thing as the law, is it any wonder that he should take up so good a thing as temperance, and use it in the same way? It was not enough, said they, for salvation, that a man should believe in Christ, he must also be circumcised and keep the law. This keeper was just saying the same thing over again; trying hard to prove that it was not enough for a poor, lost sinner to believe in Christ. He must take the pledge first, and be a temperance man; then he was fit to believe in Christ. Mix the two together, and the man might be saved. A man must have poor eyes that cannot see this to be the devil's work over again.

And now mark the rebuke of the lunatic. He suddenly stopped his keeper with these words, "Christ must be all." Yes, my reader, in the business of thy soul's salvation these are the words of truth. I felt they were the words of God, though through a deranged man. He spoke again, "Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils;" and when I put the question to all in the carriage, "What is it to be a Christian?" one said, "It is to do all the good I can to my neighbours;" another said, "It is to love God all I can;" another said, "I do not know much about it." "Ask me," said the lunatic. "Very well, what do you say it is?" "To have a broken heart!!" was the reply. "Is not a Christian," said he, "like a tree? Is not Christ the root, from which the tree gains the sap, which produces and support all the twigs, the leaves, and fruit? Christ is all." What remarkable words from a man who had to be watched every minute!

Suppose my reader had to cross a fearful mountain current, rolling deeply beneath a solid, firm bridge, built at great cost by the government, and stretched across the frightful gulf. A man sees you, and, pretending to be your friend, he brings a plank, far too short to reach across. He tells you the bridge is not sufficient, that you must walk first on his plank, or that, at all events, you must walk a little on one, and a little on the other; what would you say to such a proposal?

The plank might be useful enough for other purposes; but if you trusted it for crossing the gulf, you would find it a fearful mistake. Christ is the bridge across the gulf of destruction, and temperance is man's plank. It is useful in its place, but far too short to lay across the gulf. Trust it, and you are lost. Shall I say that Christ is not able to save to the uttermost? that He who converted the mad persecutor, Paul, cannot convert the poor drunkard until he has half saved himself? I tell thee thou art welcome this moment to Christ. Did He ever send a sinner away? Never. He is the only one who can deliver thee from thy hateful sins.

"But, oh!" say the modern ministers of Satan, "the bridge so often falls, and lets its travellers into the gulf — there are so few of its travellers get safe over, that you had really better try the plank." Find me a stone loose in that foundation which God hath laid! Christ fail! Christ let a soul perish that trusts in Him! Do you mean to say that? It is plain enough, if a traveller falls in who is on the bridge, that the bridge itself must fall first. It is plain enough, too, that whatever plank man or Satan brings, it is calling in question the all-sufficiency of Christ Jesus, for the sinner's entire and eternal salvation. But perhaps you may say, "Do all who are on that bridge, that is, who are saved by Christ alone, go safe to God?" Yes; if one were lost, then Christ would have failed. Their going safe over is the proof that they are saved by Him. "Then how is it that so many who profess do fall, and perish at last?" Profess what? Many are in this day walking on a plank of their own. They can only walk until their own weight sinks them in; and then they say the bridge has let them in. The fact is, they never were on the bridge. Suppose the plank you are walking, or trying to walk on, is the law — the keeping of the commandments. You have believed Satan, that Christ is not enough for your salvation. He gently lays you down the plank — the law. Can you walk across the gulf on that plank? It is far too short to carry a sinner across. You feel your sins are getting heavier and heavier; another step, and the plank sinks lower. Hold! stop! man, you will be in! Another is trusting to his sacraments, ordinances, and the like. He goes back to Judaism, and calls it High Church. He is walking on his own plank; it is sure to let him in, and all that are blind enough to follow him. Yes, and if thou art trusting to thy pledge, to thy temperance, to thy morality, or to thyself, in any form, thy plank is too short, and keeping to it, thou wilt perish for ever. I do not frustrate the grace of God; for if righteousness come by the law, or by the pledge, or by anything that man can do for himself, "then Christ is dead in vain." Yes, if any plank could have been found able to carry the sinner across the fearful gulf and torrent of iniquity and sin, God would have spared His Son — those words would never have been heard from the holy lips of Jesus, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Oh, what has that bridge, cost God? The death of His only-begotten Son. It is not my loving God with all my heart that makes me a Christian, but believing that God has loved me with all His heart — so loved, that He spared not His beloved Son! It is not my doing all the good I can to my neighbour that makes me a Christian. No, it is God that has done all the good He can to me, when an enemy. As the lunatic said, it is learning this love at the foot of the cross that breaks my proud heart.

Reader, hast thou thus got a broken heart? Is Christ thy root? thy bridge? Is Christ thy all? If not, beware of Satan's planks. It is quite true what the apostle says of "Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like; of the which [says he] I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." But it is also true that Jesus is the Saviour who shall deliver, who hath delivered, and who doth deliver His people from their sins.

Fellow-believer, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord."

C.S.

STEM Publishing : J T Mawson : God and the World

God and the World

J. T. Mawson.

Contents

Chapter 1 The Text and How Received

"I don't want it." — On Board the Mauretania. — "It's the Best Text in the Bible." — Eternal Life.

Chapter 2 "Behold the light"

The Prince and the Untouchables. — The Old Story. — The Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ. — Old Mr. Honest.

Chapter 3 The source of the blessing

Above the Clouds. — Track it from its Source. — From the Glory to the Cross.

Chapter 4 The Gospel begins with God

Sir James Jeans and the Stars. — God is Great and I am small, can He Think of Me? — How we may Know that He Cares. — The Souls of Men are of More Value than the Stars.

Chapter 5 The Gospel and the Law

The Gospel begins with God, the Law begins with you. — The One who spoke at Sinai came into the World to tell us of God's Love. — The Lawful use of the Law. — How Aidan won the Northumbrians.

Chapter 6 What sort of love is God 's love?

Is it a pallid, palliating, polite sort of thing? — A Great Sacrifice was called for. — David's Lament for Absalom.

Chapter 7 God's Love our only hope

Salvation has come from Heaven. — "His Unspeakable Gift." — What it cost. — The Effect of it.

Chapter 8 What the giving of the Son meant

Nicholas I and the Rebellion. — "They will reverence My Son." — If the death of Christ was Predetermined, why should Men be Charged with the Guilt of it? — The Death of Christ was an Atoning Death.

Chapter 9 God's kiss of love

The Death of Princess Alice. — What held the Saviour to the Cross. — The Kiss of Forgiveness. — The Devil's lie Exposed.

Chapter 10 It is the world that God loves

The World and not a part of it. — The Lady who Thought she had Sinned Away her Day of Grace. — What sort of a World is it?

Chapter 11 How the Love of God changes men

The Man who ran away. — The Text on the Wall. — Could a man who killed another be Saved? — How God's Love Changed J —

Chapter 12 "His only begotten Son"

The Only Begotten Son. — Buddha and Christ. — The Unique Glory of the Saviour.

Chapter 13 "That whosoever believeth in him"

What "whosoever" means. — Duncan Mathieson's Story. — The Mistakes that People make. — The self-righteous old Yorkshire Man.

Chapter 14 What is it to believe?

Believing a Historical Fact. — The Plague in the City and your Need. — A Northumbrian Farmer and How he Believed.

Chapter 15 What does it mean to perish?

"I'll never believe in Hell." — The Words of the Son of God. — The "Whosoever" of Revelation 20.

Chapter 16 Everlasting Life

What is everlasting Life? — "Sanctifying Doubts." — "He said it." — A Saved Jewess. — A place in God's Family. — Glory.

Chapter 17 An Appeal

A Personal Matter. — "I never knew before that God Loved me." — The Devil's Lure. — Too Late. — The Last Judgment. — Longsuffering Love.

Chapter 1

The Text and How Received

"I don't want it." — On Board the Mauretania. — "It's the Best Text in the Bible." — Eternal Life.

I do not know what it was that made the old Yorkshire woman say, "There's naught so queer as folk," but I have often said the same thing myself, when I have seen the way in which people have treated the story of God's great Love. Quite recently I was giving away Gospel booklets in a South London suburb, and I handed one to the proprietor of a prosperous-looking tobacco and sweets store. He greeted me with a smile, but when he read "God so loved the world" on the cover of the tract, he pushed it back into my hand and shouted, "I don't want it." "But," I said, "it's a message of love and friendliness." "I don't want it, take it out," he raged, and he literally danced as though I had dropped a seven-pound weight on his toes. I was sorry I had annoyed him, but very sad that he felt like that at the sight of my text, and I had to say to myself, "Some folk are queer."

I had another experience. It was on board the fine old Mauretania in mid-Atlantic. The western sky was ablaze with the glory of the setting sun, and shafts of crimson beauty were shot from the horizon across the waves. By my side stood a gentleman, delighted as I was with the splendid picture, and he talked of it as only an artist and an admirer of great sights could talk. I said to him, "Do you know, sir, that the God whose hand painted that glowing sky, loves you and me?" He drew back and looked at me for a moment with a look of anything but pleasure in his eyes, and then without a word, turned on his heel, and went to the other side of the ship, and for the rest of the week he avoided me as though I had the plague. It is a marvellous thing — it is queer, yes, queer is the word for it — that the mention of God's love should affect a man in that way, and yet we need not be surprised, for it is explained in one sentence in the Bible, "The carnal mind is enmity against God." Yet John 3: 16 remains upon the page of His Word, and is as true to-day as ever, and what a wonderful declaration of His feelings towards men it is. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." And there is no person, man or woman, rich or poor that may not find room in that "whosoever."

But the great text is not always rejected, to thousands it has been a savour of life unto life. "It's the best text in the Bible," a happy old man said once to me, and I was not surprised that that was what he thought about it, when he went on to tell me that fifty years before it had changed everything for him. It had been used by God's Holy Spirit to turn him from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, and had made his life worth living when it had promised to be a big failure. He had not heard any words in his long life in which there was so much blessing and sweetness, and it was with reverence and affection that he went over them. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." But, good as it was to hear him repeat these words, and to feel the hearty grip of his hand, which showed that, while he was old in years, he was still young in spirit, they did not affect me so much as when I heard them in very different circumstances.

I had spent the afternoon in the large ward of an Infirmary in a northern city. Every bed in that ward was occupied by a suffering man. I had sat and talked for a few minutes with each of these, and had left them all some books to read, when I came to the last bed in the ward. On it was lying a young fellow, not yet twenty. He looked very wan and ill, and as his eyes were closed, I thought he was sleeping. So I sat down by his side, hoping he might awake before I had to go. Soon he opened his eyes, and looked at me with an inquiring look as much as to say, "Who are you?" I said, "I have been giving the men some Gospel books, but I'm afraid you are too ill to read." "Yes," he said, "I am, and the doctor says there is no hope for me, but I am in the Lord's hands." Those last words came out so unexpectedly, and with so much feeling that the lump came into my throat, and I could not immediately command my voice. When I managed this, I said, "And in the very best hands you are, my dear, for He has said of all who trust in Him, 'I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any one pluck them out of My hand.'" "Yes," he answered, "He did say that, and He also said, 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.'" And then, exhausted by the effort, he closed his eyes and lay still, and I sat silent and thrilled. Then he began to speak again, as though oblivious of my presence; slowly but with an indescribable sweetness he repeated "Everlasting life, everlasting life." I listened for a while to that sacred communion between his ransomed soul and his God; then, giving his hand a gentle squeeze, I withdrew from his side, and the last sound from his lips that I heard was "Everlasting life." That happened on Friday afternoon, and on the following Tuesday he entered the Glory.

That dying lad had found in John 3: 16 what all the gold in the bank of England could not have gained him. Could I have carried to him the highest honours that the King could bestow, or poured out at his side the choicest treasures of the world, and this earthly life, they would have been worse than useless in the Infirmary ward; but John 3: 16 had enriched him, and God's love had put a peace into his heart that the approach of death could not disturb. "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift," and "Thanks be unto God that giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ," and thanks be unto God for everlasting life.

Chapter 2

"Behold the Light"

The Prince and the Untouchables. — The Old Story. — The Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ. — Old Mr. Honest.

An incident during the Prince of Wales' visit to India, which was a great event in the history of the pitiful "untouchables" in that land, has been well told by Katherine Mayo in her famous book "Mother India." The fact of the Prince's kindness of heart had reached the ears of these poor outcasts and says the author of that remarkable book:

"When he turned back from his transit of the Great North Gate — the Khyber Pass itself — a strange thing awaited him. A swarm of Untouchables, emboldened by news that had reached them, clustered at the roadside to do him reverence.

"'Government ki jai!"Hail to the Government!' they shouted with cheers that echoed from the barren hills. And when the Prince slowed down his car to return their greetings, they leaped and danced in their excitement.

"For nowhere in all their store of memory or of legend had they any history of any Indian Magnate who had noticed an Untouchable, except to scorn him. And here was a greater than all India contained — the son of the Supreme Power — to them almost divine, who deigned not only to receive, but even to thank them for their homage. Small wonder that their spirits soared, that their eyes saw visions, that their tongues laid hold on mystic words.

"'Look, look!' they cried to one another; 'behold, the Light! the Light!'

"And such was their exaltation, that many of them somehow worked through to Delhi, to add themselves to the 25,000 of their kind, who there awaited the Prince's coming. The village people from round about flocked in to join them — the simple people of the soil, who know nothing of politics, but much of friendship as shown in works. And all together haunted the roadside, waiting, and hoping, for a glimpse of his face.

"At last he came, down the Grand Trunk Road, toward the Delhi Gate; and in the centre of the hosts of Untouchables, one, standing higher than the rest, unfurled a flag.

"'Yuvaraj Maharaj ki jai! Raja ke Bete ki jai!' 'Hail to the Prince! Hail to the King's son!' they all shouted together, as if to burst their throats. And the Prince, while the high-caste Indian spectators wondered, and revolted within themselves, at his lack of princely pride, ordered his car to be stopped.

"Then a spokesman ventured forward to offer, in a humble little speech, the love and fealty of the 60,000,000 of the Unclean, and to beg the heir to the throne to intercede for them with his father, the King Emperor, never to abandon them into the hands of those who despised them and would keep them slaves.

"The Prince heard him through. Then, whether he realised the magnitude of what he did, or whether he acted merely in the impulse of his natural friendly courtesy toward all the world, he did an unheard-of thing. He stood up — stood up for them, the 'worse than dogs'! — spoke a few words of kindness, looked them all over, slowly, and so with a radiant smile, gave them his salute.

"No sun that had risen on India had witnessed such a sight. As the car started on, moving slowly, not to crush them, they went almost mad. And again their Eastern tongues clothed their thought. 'Brother — that word was truth that our brothers brought us — behold, the light is there indeed! The light, the glory, on his face!'"

It was not much that the Prince could do for those almost hopeless people; he did what he could, and won their hearts by what he did. But I would seize upon the incident to illustrate what I want to tell in this book. God-so-loved-the-world. It is an old story that I am telling, and these are familiar words that I am repeating, but I ask you to consider them afresh; you know them well, but look at them again. The heart of God is behind what He has done, and it is more than sinful to ignore that fact. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." He sent Him into the world, not to condemn it, but with the light of His love shining in His face.

To the angels in heaven, this world must have seemed an unlikely place for their Creator and Lord to visit; and they must have marvelled as they saw His sacred, sinless feet treading the filthy streets of those Eastern cities; and when He touched the lepers, and looked kindly upon the outcasts, and spoke in tones of mercy even to the vilest, they must have wondered as to what the end would be. It is recorded that "He was seen of angels." But most men were unmoved by His presence among them. Proud Jerusalem asked scornfully, "Who is this?" But some beheld the glory in His face, and they bore witness and said, "He dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." God's love smiled upon sinners through the eyes of Jesus. In Him was the light. He is the Light, and those that follow Him "shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."

His progress in this world was not through admiring multitudes to a glorious throne, it ought to have been, but it wasn't. Instead, He was despised and rejected of men, and God knew that He would be when He sent Him, and every step that He trod, took Him nearer to the Cross.

"That path uncheered by earthly smiles

Led only to the Cross."

And the wonder of all ages is that that Cross is the supreme witness of God's love to men. I must repeat that it is an old story that I am telling, but to those who have believed it, its charm endures, and it will live to be rehearsed when the exploits of the greatest and kindliest of men are forgotten. It is the story of a love that is eternal and unmeasurable.

"You might count all the days of the ages,

All the snowflakes come down from above,

All the flowers of summers departed —

But you cannot measure this love."

And it shines still in the face of Jesus, for, though He died, He lives again — risen from the dead, and exalted to the throne in Heaven there still shines from His face the glory of the love and grace of God to men; and I take up the words that those astonished and enraptured Untouchables spoke of the kindly Prince. I say to you, "Brother — that word was truth that our brothers brought us — behold the light is there indeed! The light, the glory, on His face!" And I can give you more reliable authority than that of any man, or of any brother of ours who has spoken to us, though tens of thousands would willingly bear their witness to you, and their witness would be true; but I turn to the Bible, the infallible Word of God, and tell you that it tells us that, "The light of the knowledge of God is in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4: 6).

And if that light shines into a heart, what is the result? Have you read the story of old Mr. Honest in John Bunyan's wonderful book? He wanted to join the Pilgrim band that was travelling to the Celestial City, and Greatheart, the leader of the band, asked him to give an account of himself. "I come," said he, "from the town of Stupidity, it lieth about four degrees beyond the City of Destruction."

"I have often wondered," said Greatheart, "that any should come from your place; for your town is worse than the City of Destruction."

"Yes," said old Honest, "we lie more off the sun, and seem more cold and senseless. But were a man in a mountain of ice, yet if the Sun of Righteousness will rise upon him, his frozen heart shall feel a thaw. THUS IT HATH BEEN WITH ME."

"I believe it, Father Honest, I believe it," cried Greatheart, "for I know the thing is true."

Yes, it is true, if but one ray of light shines from the face of Jesus into a man's heart, it melts and warms and changes it, and he becomes a new creature in Christ Jesus, a lover of God and a possessor of eternal life.

Chapter 3

The Source of the Blessing

Above the Clouds. — Track it from its Source. — From the Glory to the Cross.

I had to cross a high mountain range in a distant land. It was early morning, and the rising sun had not yet dispersed the snow-white clouds that rolled beneath me, and which were pierced here and there by giant peaks that reared upward to the tropical sky. It was a most wonderful prospect, and a new and thrilling experience for me, but what moved me most, and left the deepest impression on my mind was a fountain of water, cool as the night and clear as crystal, that sprang up from the rock, thousands of feet above the sea, and went flowing down to the sun-parched plains beneath. As I stood in those glorious surroundings, the music of that fountain got into my soul, and I felt that I must sing, and so, raising my voice, I sang to the accompanying of the flowing waters, part of William Cowper's hymn of praise to our great Saviour:

"E'er God had built the mountains

Or raised the fruitful hills,

Before He filled the fountains

That feed the running rills,

In Thee, from everlasting,

The wonderful I AM

Found pleasures never wasting,

And WISDOM is Thy Name.

"And could'st Thou be delighted

With creatures such as we?

Who, when we saw Thee, slighted

And nailed Thee to a tree!

Unfathomable wonder!

And mystery divine!

The voice that speaks in thunder

Says, 'Sinner, I am thine!'"

As I finished my song by that fountain above the clouds, I was moved to deeper praise for I thought of that greater fountain of blessing and life that is springing up and flowing forth to unhappy, sinful, thirsty, dying men. Where will you find it? If you would discover it, you must arise and travel in your search by Calvary and Bethlehem, you must pass upward above the clouds, you must go from earth to heaven and away into the heights of eternal glory to the heart of the blessed God. Then, and not till then, will you reach the fountain, the source of blessing. It springs up in the very heart of God, for God is love. In those three words we are told what God is in the absolute perfection of His eternal Being. But what is that to us, unless His love can reach us in blessing? And how can it do that? We are sinners, which is only another name for rebels; we were guilty and dead towards God; no pulse of love stirred in our souls towards Him; we had turned every one to his own way, and gone so far from Him that we needed only to take one more step and our souls had been plunged into hopeless and everlasting perdition. What could God's love do for us, and how could He show it to us? The answer comes as clear as human words, divinely chosen, can state it. "In this is manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him." But can God love sinful men, who never loved Him, and yet maintain His holiness?

And if He does love them and shows it, what of His eternal justice, upon which the pillars of His moral universe are founded? Again there comes the answer, sure and sufficient, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4: 8, 9, 10).

Burdened and weary sinner, unsatisfied and thirsting, be glad and rejoice, that, though you have not loved God, He has loved you; and though you have not sought Him, He has sought you. He has anticipated your deep need, and has taken the only way by which you could be saved, to save you. Ponder my text again. For, "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Begin at the source of it, and track the way that the love of God has taken to reach you; see Him who was in the form of God descending from His high glory to earth; pause for a moment at the manger in Bethlehem, and join your adoration there with the worship of the shepherds from the hills, for the Babe before whom they bow is Emmanuel, the only begotten Son of God — given for the world. Travel further, for Jesus must go further if we were to be saved from perishing; keep His company as He moves amid the miseries of men, rising up day by day before the sun, to be ready to heal their sicknesses and assuage their sorrows; travel with Him through Gethsemane; it is a rough way for His feet to go, but He does not refuse to tread it, see Him move onward with steadfast face, despised and rejected of men, spit upon, scourged and crowned with thorns; follow Him through the gates of David's city as He bears His cross to Calvary. Do not stand with the mocking multitude lest you partake of their spirit, but with the mother of Jesus, and His mother's sister, and Mary Magdalene, out of whom He cast seven devils, and the disciple whom Jesus loved; you will be in good company if you stand with them to "Behold the Lamb of God" crucified for a world of sinners.

You have yet to learn the meaning of it, you have yet to learn why the giving of God's only begotten Son should have meant sorrow and sacrifice and death for Him, and salvation and life for you; but it was only on this road that the love of God could reach you. He had loved the world in vain apart from this.

Chapter 4

The Gospel Begins with God

Sir James Jeans and the Stars. — God is Great and I am small, can He Think of Me? — How we may Know that He Cares. — The Souls of Men are of More Value than the Stars.

Our text begins with God, and God is great; it tells us that He loved the world, and the world is small. Even to us it appears to be small in comparison with what we used to feel about it, now that men can fly round it in a few days; but how small it is in comparison with the universe.

Sir James Jeans commences one of his books with a staggering paragraph. He says, "A few stars are known, which are hardly bigger than the earth, but the majority are so large that hundreds of thousands of earths could be packed inside each and leave room to spare; here and there we come upon a giant star large enough to contain millions and millions of earths. And the total number of stars in the universe is probably something like the total number of grains of sand on all the sea shores of the world. Such is the littleness of our home in space, when measured up against the total substance of the universe."

Those who believe the Bible, and they are wise men who believe it, know that God, and not accident, is the Maker of those mighty stars, for the Bible begins with, "in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," and as to the stars and their number and their names, it also tells us that "He calleth them all by their names" (Ps. 147: 4). And the question may well arise in the mind, "How can God, who is so great, care for a world that is so small?" and, further, and more puzzling still, how can He have a personal interest in any one of the two thousand millions of people who live on it? It was this that puzzled a man with whom I talked. He had imbibed more learning at Continental Universities than comes within reach of most English-speaking men, and he was not an atheist. He had a reverent and humble mind, and believed in the existence of God, but he could only conceive a God who was great and distant. He was impressed with the greatness of God, for he had studied. astronomy, and he owned that only an omnipotent God could be the Maker of those countless worlds that bear their silent testimony to His eternal power and divinity; but he said, "How can God, who is so great, take any notice of such an insignificant and useless man as I am?"

How shall we answer his question? There is only one way, we must believe God's Word as to it. We receive the witness of men, but the witness of God is greater. If a man brings us tidings that we are glad to hear, we believe him; why should we not believe God when He speaks? Or do we imagine, as some do, that God, having made us, is unable to communicate His thoughts to us? The notion is absurd. He that made the mouth, can He not speak? He has spoken, and His words tell of a love that exceeds all our comprehension. We may not understand it, but we may believe it, and "he that believeth not God hath made Him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son." And what is the record? It is that to all that believe, "God hath given eternal life, and this life is in His Son.

There is no other way of knowing this great fact; we cannot arrive at it by studying the stars or by digging into the secrets of nature. The philosophies of men do not reach to this. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?" No, here the best intellects are baffled, and the wisest men are fools, for the things of God knoweth no man, until they are revealed to him, but God has revealed them, and they are very real to the man who believes. God has revealed His love, and that revelation is contained in the words of John 3: 16. And they stand out, even amongst the words of Holy Scripture in an unsurpassed glory. The man whose mind is blinded by the god of this world will refuse the revelation, but the heart in which faith has awakened will receive it, and sing:

"How Thou canst think so well of us

Yet be the God Thou art,

Is darkness to my intellect,

But sunshine to my heart."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet, spent a night behind a telescope at the Greenwich Observatory, and afterwards remarked, "That's the sort of thing that makes one think little of county families." And indeed it is as well to be impressed with the littleness and futility of men, who strut and pose in their pride, yet we must not judge of things by their size. We are impressed with the vastness of the stars, as astronomers descant upon them, but when we come to the Bible, they are treated in a mere incidental way. The creation chapter tells us, "He made the stars also."

And we may be sure that they were all made for a great purpose, the fact that God calls them all by name means that, and that purpose will be revealed when "the mystery of God is finished." But the souls of men are evidently of more value to God than the stars, for, for their salvation He gave His only begotten Son. It is to man that He has revealed His love in JESUS, and "there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."

We are, indeed, small and insignificant, one blast of God's indignation against us for our sins would have been our utter extinction, yet of such value were we in His sight that He gave His only begotten Son for us, yes, for ungrateful rebellious men He gave His Son!

For men, both vile and guilty, the living stream of blessing flows! It is a wonderful story, but is it true? "If only what you have been telling us were true," said one of my hearers to me, at the close of a Gospel service. "Yes," I said, "wouldn't it be good?" He admitted that nothing would equal it in goodness. "Well," I said, "you may stake your immortal soul upon it, it is as true as it is good, and it is as good as it is true; for it is 'the Gospel of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.'"

Chapter 5

The Gospel and the Law

The Gospel begins with God, the Law begins with you. — The One who spoke at Sinai came into the World to tell us of God's Love. — The Lawful use of the Law. — How Aidan won the Northumbrians.

Again I want you to notice that our text begins with God, and in this it is unlike the law, which God gave at Sinai. The law began with you. The Lord Himself summed up its ten commandments in two marvellous sentences, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." We need not trouble just now about the second part of the law, important as it is, for no man can be right as to that, who is wrong as to the first part of it, and alas, all men have been wrong there. The first part of the law is the crux and test; and it begins with you and ends with God. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." It was like a golden ladder set up on the earth, and reaching up to the throne of God, but never did sinful feet mount one rung of that ladder; every man has turned away from it, for every man has loved himself more than he has loved his God.

If God's dealings with men had ended with the law, our case would have been hopeless, for its just condemnation would have been our doom; but thank God, the law was not the end. The law was given for a wise and just purpose. God had a right to say how His creatures should live, and what He expected them to be, and to refrain from doing. And every right-thinking man owns that the law is good and just and perfect. A life lived according to its standard would be a good life, even though its commandments are, with perhaps two exceptions, only prohibitive. But every man has failed, if not in every point of the law, at least in one, and having failed in one, he is guilty of all.

Now the law is like a plumb-line that exposes the crooked wall, but does not put it straight; it is like the mirror that shows a man that his face is dirty but does not wash it; it can do nothing more for a man than expose and condemn him, for "whatsoever things the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law, that every mouth might be stopped and all the world become guilty before God." It is good for a man to face the law; to stand in those awe-inspiring chapters, Exodus 19 and 20, and to behold the Mount Sinai wrapt in a cloud of darkness, out of which the lightnings flashed, and the thunders spoke; and to hear the voice of God there, so majestic and terrible, that even Moses did exceedingly fear and quake. It is well to consider the law, and bow before its just demands upon sinful men, for nothing could be so well calculated to make us fly from its curse to God for refuge as He is revealed to us in John 3: 16.

Could it be the same Lord who spoke in the thunders of Sinai, who, in tender accents, told Nicodemus, the Pharisee, that, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son"? Yes, it was the same, for Jesus is Jehovah. And the man who denies it does not know God, but his mind is blinded by his great foe, the devil, lest he should believe and be saved.

Our text is not like the law, it begins with God and comes down to you; it does not set you climbing up to God, but shows you how He has come down to you, to save you, and what it has cost Him to do it.

Do I then despise the law? Most certainly not. I take up Paul's words, "We know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully," and a lawful use of it would be to bring its lash upon the consciences of the ungodly, to show them their sins, and how far they have come short of its righteous requirements, then they might realise and learn that, "by the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in God's sight," for so Romans 3: 20 declares. But the man who preaches the law as a means of gaining God's favour, and as a way of salvation and life opposes the Gospel, and casts a slight upon God's great gift of His Son; he despises the great love of God, or is grossly ignorant of it and what it has done. And the man who puts himself under law in the hope of getting blessing by it, brings upon himself a curse instead, as Galatians 3: 10, 11 distinctly tells us. We have yet to meet a man whose heart was won for God by the preaching of the law; and we have never heard of a multitude of people singing, "We've found our way to God by the law. Hallelujah!"

It is the Gospel, and not the law, that puts joy into the heart, and the new song on the lips. It is the revelation of God's love that wins men from their sins as ten thousand voices from the past can tell us. I give an instance. After the death of Edwin, the first Christian king of Northumbria, the country was overrun by pagans, and the people sank down into the grossest superstitions. A well-meaning, but austere Irish missionary was sent by the Christian colony in Iona to win them from their darkness to the Christian faith; but he was so appalled by the vileness of their lives and their unashamed debauchery, that he thundered the law at them and denounced their sins. They listened to him with a certain amount of curiosity, but were unmoved by his fierce words. After a while, he abandoned his mission and returned to his brethren, a disappointed man. Amongst those to whom he told the tale of his failure was a Christian brother named Aidan, who was a shining example of one who knew the Lord. He said, "Ah, Lord Jesus, if he had told them of the love of God, and of Thy Cross, they would have hearkened," and constrained by that love, he decided to go and tell the Northumbrians what he knew. He did not speak the tongue of the people, but Oswald, who was Edwin's nephew and successor, had spent some years in Ireland, and knew the language that Aidan spoke, and, his heart being first won by the matchless story of the love of God, he became the interpreter of the message to the people. Aidan's mission was not a failure as had been that of his predecessor, for the story he told enthralled the people, and what the preaching of the law failed to do, God's great love did, for multitudes "turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven;" and Aidan spent the rest of his life in that kingdom gathering those heathen hosts to the feet of the Saviour, and exhorting them to keep themselves in the love of God.

Chapter 6

What Sort of Love is God's Love?

Is it a pallid, palliating, polite sort of thing? — A Great Sacrifice was called for. — David's Lament for Absalom.

What sort of a love is this love of God? I knew a mother who said one day to her wilful daughter, "Go to your bedroom and tell God all about your naughtiness, and don't come down again until He has forgiven you." I need not say that she was not a wise mother. After a few minutes' silence, the little lady, in very pert fashion, returned to the drawing-room. "Well," said the mother, "did you tell God what a naughty girl you have been?" "Yes, I did," came the reply, "and He said, 'O, Miss E—, don't mention it.'" Does the child's fancy provoke a smile? It saddened me, for behind it, I saw that a false impression had been made upon her mind as to God and His character. To her, as to thousands of people who are grown up, and consider themselves intelligent, God is an indulgent easygoing Being, to whom sin is a minor affair, that nobody should trouble about at all, unless, of course, it becomes a menace to society — then give the sinner short shrift. God's love in their view is a pallid, palliating, polite sort of thing, as vague and invertebrate as they suppose His justice to be, so that it does not matter whether they please Him or not, He does not care, and if He does it does not matter; it will be all the same in the end.

The love of God is not like that; it is not the love of a weak and indulgent parent; it is a holy love, there is a force and energy and vigour about it that can only be found in God. His love transcends our highest thoughts, it baffles all illustration, but it reaches out to all men, and the meanest and most unintelligent may receive it, and the blessing of it. It is a love that hates sin, and yet has set itself to rescue men from its power and its penalty, and to do this righteously, in the only way in which it can be done, and at its own cost.

God must be against sin, for sin is rebellion against Himself; it would climb up to His throne, and cast Him from it if it could and crown the devil in His place; it has ruined God's fair creature man, for it has blinded his eyes to His goodness, and poisoned the very springs of his being; it has carried the multitudes who have died into death and the grave; it has forged the chains that bind souls in everlasting darkness; out of its foul womb have come forth sorrow, and crying, and pain, and death; it is the mother of weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. How could God tolerate sin as though it did not matter? And men are sinners, and willingly so, for all have sinned, and in this there is no difference.

God has come forth in Christ to woo the sinner and win him, and yet He must deal with his sins in uncompromising justice, and so we find that our great text is inseparably bound to the words that precede it, and those words are about THE CROSS OF CHRIST. There would have been no Cross if God had not loved the world, and His love could not have been effective for the world without the Cross.

Let us have, then, the words that precede our text, for they are essential to its meaning: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life." A great sacrifice was called for, and it must be holy and of infinite value. A Son of Man must stand up as the Substitute and Representative of men; but He must be sinless. He must be one who did no sin, in whom was no sin, and who knew no sin. He must be holy, harmless and undefiled, or death and inexorable justice would claim Him as they had claimed all others. He must be one over whom death had no rights, and yet able to give His life a ransom for others, and He must be "lifted up," that upon Him the righteous condemnation of sinners might fall. He must make expiation for sins to deliver men from sin's penalty, from Satan's bondage, the fear of death and everlasting perdition; and that God's eternal justice might remain unchallenged, and His throne retain its inflexible integrity. Where could this Son of Man be found? God has found Him, and given Him for the salvation of men, for the Son of Man who was lifted up at Calvary is God's only begotten Son.

There never was a more tragic and more poignant story penned than that of David and Absalom. That wayward son of an indulgent father had slain his brother, and fled the country, for he knew well that if his father acted in justice, as a king should act, he must die for his crime, even though in his case there were extenuating circumstances. And David's heart yearned for his son, and at last he sanctioned his return and kissed him. The father and the king were in conflict in the one person, and the king was beaten; a weak love triumphed over stern justice, and brought disaster on a kingdom. That son was soon in open revolt against the father from whose nerveless hand the sceptre had fallen, and nothing would satisfy him but his father's life, and his father's throne; rebellion would be king. He failed, as sin must also finally fail in its revolt against God and His throne, but when the news was brought to the aged father that that godless son of his hung dead from the branches of an oak tree in the wood, the sorrow of it broke his heart, and to his chamber over the gate he went, sorely weeping, and saying, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" Ah, yes, now he realised the only way; if he could himself have borne the penalty of his son's crime! if only he could have done that, but he could not, for he himself was a murderer, his own life was forfeited, and that by his own sentence; he could not have paid the price for his guilty son. But what David could not do for Absalom, God has done for us, and He commends His love to us in this, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And this was the only way in which we could be righteously free from sin's penalty.

"Inscribed upon the Cross we see

In shining letters, 'God is love.'"

At that Cross of Christ mercy and truth met together, righteousness and peace kissed each other; through the Cross God can be a just God and a Saviour. The Cross of Christ is the measure and the pledge of God's love, and at the same time it is the revelation of His holiness. God is love and God is light. How great is the splendour of the Cross, the light of it drives out the darkness from every heart that believes. And nothing else can do that.

"O the Cross of Christ is wondrous;

There I learn God's heart to me,

'Mid the silent deepening darkness

God is light, I also see.

Holy claims of justice finding

Full expression in the scene.

Light and love alike are telling

What yon woes and sufferings mean."

Chapter 7

God's Love our Only Hope

Salvation has come from Heaven. — "His Unspeakable Gift." — What it cost. — The Effect of it.

Who would have thought that our salvation would come from heaven? Naturally that would have been the last place from which we should have expected it, for it was against heaven that we had sinned. "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight," cried the penitent prodigal, and that is true of us all. Our sins were a slur upon God's majesty, a challenge to His supremacy, and a proof that we hated Him. We might have expected judgment from heaven, and wrath, and fire, and brimstone, but not love and salvation. But the unexpected has happened, and the truth must be told to all the world, that God so loved us that He gave His only begotten Son. It is more than wonderful, and it cannot be explained by any standard of human conduct; it is what God is; it is the revelation of His very heart.

And yet, to whom could we have looked for salvation if not to God? Certainly no man could give a ransom for his brother; and all have sinned, hence all were under condemnation, and no one could save another. There could have been no hope for any man apart from God. If He had not intervened for our salvation, we must all have perished. He has intervened, and we who believe, wonder and worship. He "gave His only begotten Son." This was the greatest and the best He could do, and nothing less than this would have availed.

It is by words that things are explained and understood by us, yet we feel that even the richest and fullest human words that we can command are altogether feeble and cold when this great love has to be told out. Even the Holy Spirit of God, who with divine wisdom selected and gave the best words that could be given to convey to us great truths, declared the inadequacy of all human language to express the greatness of this love gift, when He inspired Paul to exclaim, "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift!"

Paul knew how to use acceptable words, wise preacher that he was, and when occasion demanded, he could pile superlative upon superlative, as when he wrote of "the exceeding greatness of God's power," and "the exceeding riches of His grace," and His ability "to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think," and of "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." But when he wrote of this gift of God, there were no words that could describe it. If there had been any in human language that could have conveyed to human intelligence the fullness and immensity of it, the Holy Spirit would have known them and given them to him, but there were none. We try to encompass this great gift with words, and we call it "great," "ineffable," "wonderful," "incomparable," "boundless," and "perfect," but they all fail. All these, or their equivalents in the languages of Paul's day were duly considered and found wanting by the divinely-inspired writer. Overwhelmed by the character of the gift, he tells us in one brief sentence that it defies definition and baffles all description, that it is inexpressible, unspeakable. "Thanks be unto God," he says, "for HIS UNSPEAKABLE GIFT."

The gift is the proof and measure of God's love. We may consider it, but never fully comprehend it; we may know it, yet it surpasses knowledge; we may speak of it, yet it is unspeakable; we may search the breadth, length, depth, and height of it; yet it is unsearchable; its dimensions and magnitude are for ever beyond the creature's range! The incarnation and the Cross, the rough way that Jesus trod, His sighs and sorrows, His suffering in Gethsemane, and the shame of Golgotha, the darkness, the woe, His death and blood-shedding, were all God's voice to men, speaking with a growing intensity; they were God's utterance of unutterable love; His love declared by His unspeakable gift. Whether we think of the love that gave the gift, or the gift that the love gave, or the flood of blessing that flows to men, and will yet flow to them as a result of it, there is only one thing we can do, unless we are hardened and blinded by the devil, and that is to give thanks unto God for His unspeakable gift.

"Unto me, the vile, the guilty,

Flows the living flood;

I, an enemy, am ransomed

By the precious blood.

Prostrate at Thy feet I lie,

Lost in Love's immensity."

Who can tell what it cost God to give this great gift? Mark well how language labours and strains to express the preciousness of God's Son to Him. He is spoken of as "His only begotten Son." His only one, the object of His full and undivided love, and He was this eternally. "Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world" are the words of JESUS to His Father. There never was, and never shall be a moment in Eternity or in Time when He did not dwell in the bosom of His Father, "the only begotten Son that is in (or exists in) the bosom of the Father," is the way He is described. The Father's bosom was, and is, His dwelling place. It is by such language that we are told how dear, infinitely dear He is to the Father, and worthy of that Father's love. But He came forth from the Father to be the Saviour of sinners! And again, I ask, who can tell what it cost the Father to send Him forth? And having come into the world, how inexpressible is the love that flowed between the Father and the Son. The Father loveth the Son so well that He holds back nothing from Him, He gives Him all things (John 3: 35), and He shares all His thoughts with Him; the flow of communion was not diminished or interrupted when He came, a Man to earth (John 5: 20). And as He lived His life, fresh causes were continually emerging that called forth fresh expressions of that love, and most of all when He laid down His life, for the Lord Himself said, "Therefore doth my Father love Me, because I lay down My life" (John 10: 17). And on the part of "the SON of His love," there ever rose up a perfect responsive love to His Father. "He that sent Me is with Me: the Father hath not left Me alone; I do always the things that please Him", He said. And again, "That the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father hath given Me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence." "God is angry with the wicked every day," but in Jesus He found unceasing, never-failing delight, and Him He has given to save us and have us for Himself; so great is His love!

If there had been any other way by which sinners could have been saved, would He have done this? We are sure that He would not. If they could have saved themselves, would God have given His Son to save them? if they could have done it, He being the just God that He is, would have encouraged them to do it, and when they had accomplished the great feat, He would have put the crown upon their heads and said, "Well done"; but it was because we were without strength that Christ died for us; and "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." There was no other way by which we could be rescued from darkness and destruction. Only the only begotten Son could save us, the work was too great for man, angel, or archangel; and God gave Him that that work might be done, and that we might not perish, but have everlasting life.

This unspeakable gift produces an unspeakable joy in all those that believe. Appreciate the gift and let it be kept by the Spirit's power before the heart, and an answering joy will be there; a joy that the heart knows for itself, deep, silent and unspeakable. It is the joy of faith, the joy of love, the joy of eternal life, the joy of the knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ, His sent One.

Chapter 8

What the Giving of the Son meant

Nicholas I and the Rebellion. — "They will reverence My Son." — If the death of Christ was Predetermined, why should Men be Charged with the Guilt of it? — The Death of Christ was an Atoning Death.

Long before the power in Russia was seized by apostate Jews, and the last of the Romanoffs, and his family were butchered in a cellar, the people were restless, and often on the verge of a revolt; for, though the Tsars were styled "the little father," they were tyrants with few exceptions, and some of them well deserved the title "terrible." Nicholas I was one who ruled the people with an iron hand, and early in his reign they rebelled against him. A roaring mob surrounded the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, threatening death to the Tsar and his consort, who were watching them from within. It looked as though their last hour had come, when suddenly Nicholas took up his six months-old child, the heir to the throne, and stepping out upon the balcony, he faced the multitudes that surged like an angry sea in the vast palace square. He was a young man, handsome, tall and splendid in his strength. He did not speak, he just stood there with the babe in his arms. A silence fell on the mob, which seemed more awful than its rage. Then came sobs, and then a tempest of cheers. An emotional people were moved by the sight of the solitary Tsar and his mute babe, by this confidence that he showed in them, and they sensed that the babe in his arms most surely meant peace and not war, that it was an ambassador and pledge of good-will, and not oppression. The people were won, and the dynasty was saved, and it was the showing by the Tsar of his only son to the people that saved it.

The world that God loved was in rebellion against Him, and it had no cause for its rebellion, for He is no tyrant, but the faithful Creator, and He had never left men without a witness as to His kind thoughts towards them. Paul told this to the worshippers of the idol Jupiter in the city of Lystra. Said he, "He did good, and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness." And again, he told the great philosophers at Athens that "He giveth to all, life and breath and all things." But men were not thankful for His gifts, they did not acknowledge Him as the Giver of them, they hated Him and would not hear His word. Then He said, "I have one Son, I will send Him. They will reverence My Son." It was as though God said, "I will show them My very heart, I will prove to them that I am not against them. My Son shall be the pledge and proof of My love to them. I cannot do more; this is My last and My best."

And Jesus came — He came as a Babe in the manger, the great sign that God would be at peace with men. The Babe was God's love gift to the world; His only begotten Son. He came full of grace and truth; He came preaching peace; He came not to condemn the world, but to save it. He stood before the world showing forth the heart of God who sent Him; He was not silent, but spoke of love that passes all bounds of human thought. But men had no ears to listen to His message. When they saw Him, they hated Him and His Father who sent Him, and they had no pity, but cried, "Let us kill Him," "Away with Him," "Crucify Him." The world's rebellion was not quelled by the sight of God's only begotten Son, nor was its heart changed by it; instead, His coming brought that rebellion to its culmination and they murdered Him. But the murder of the Son of God did not turn back the tide of blessing that sprang up in the heart of God; instead, it opened wide the flood-gates, that the living waters might flow forth in ever-lasting blessing. God turned the evil and hatred of men to His own ends, so that now, "Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." That blessing is flowing still, and though millions have been supplied, it flows as fresh as ever, for it is as inexhaustible as it is blessed.

There is a question that is sometimes raised, and it is an important one, as to why, if the crucifixion of the Son of God at Calvary only fulfilled what God intended, and was the great evidence of His love to the world, why should that act be looked upon as the greatest crime of the world? Why, for instance, since "the Son of Man must be lifted up," should Jesus Himself charge the Jews with being guilty of the act, when He said to them, "When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He"? Could man be held responsible for that which God had predetermined?

God knew beforehand, of course, that the revelation of His best would only provoke the worst that was in men, for He knew all that was in man from the beginning, though it required the supreme test to bring it out. But it had to come out, for the truth as to all things must be manifested; the truth as to God, the truth as to men, and the truth as to the devil. And all did come out at the cross, there the thoughts of many hearts were revealed. God was not responsible for the evil that was in the hearts of men, but He showed His supremacy over all by restraining that evil for a while, and then when the hour came, and it gushed forth in unrestrained and determined hatred against Him, by turning it into the channel by which it became the means of glorifying Him, and more wonderful still, the way of blessing for men. He knew what men would do, and predetermined that their act should thus turn to a triumph of His love.

But, let one suppose that what the Lord Jesus suffered at the hands of men secured redemption for us. When it says that He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, we must think deeper than of His flesh torn and bruised by the nails and thorns, and if we can say, "by His stripes we are healed," we must think of something other than the scourging to which Pilate so unjustly condemned Him. "It pleased the Lord to bruise Him," i.e. instead of the unsparing judgment of God coming with its crushing weight upon us, God chose that it should fall upon Him and He gave Him to be our Substitute and to bear it in our stead. He was lifted up by men, the object of their hatred and derision, but when they had done their worst, the sixth hour came, tolling in the darkness that was denser than that that enshrouded Egypt, and such as creation had never seen before; then there took place what no creature mind will ever fully understand, His soul was made an offering for sin, and God made Him, our sinless Substitute, to be sin for us, and He bore our sins in His own body on the Tree. "Through the Eternal Spirit He offered Himself without spot to God." It is this that explains — what is, indeed, beyond all our comprehension — that cry that will never be forgotten, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" which being interpreted is, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" The more we consider that, and the more its meaning enters our souls, the greater will be our wondering appreciation of our great text and the love of God which it reveals to us.

The death of Jesus was an atoning death; there never was, there never will be another like it. He suffered, the Just One, for us the unjust, to bring us to God, and that is why we shall sing to Him, "Thou art worthy, for Thou hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue and people and nation." For the efficacy of His atoning blood extends to the whole world, and whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

Chapter 9

God's Kiss of Love

The Death of Princess Alice. — What held the Saviour to the Cross. — The Kiss of Forgiveness. — The Devil's lie Exposed.

Princess Alice, the greatly beloved daughter of Queen Victoria, was married to the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt. She had nursed her husband and daughters, the youngest of which, just a babe, had died, through the then greatly dreaded diptheria, when her only son was sorely stricken. Though worn out by nursing, she insisted upon taking full charge of her suffering boy. One day, when the fever was at its height, he stretched his hands out to her and said, "Kiss me, mother," and she, breaking through the restraints of prudence, pressed upon his parched lips a mother's love-kiss. That kiss cost her her life. God has stooped down to put the kiss of His love upon the world, but it cost Him the life of His Son; He knew that it would when He gave Him. "He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." He sent Him into the world, not with flaming fire to judge it, but in lowly grace to put His kiss upon it to save it. The Son of God came forth from His Father with a commandment, and that commandment was to lay down His life and take it again. It was the only way. I will quote the very words of the Lord Jesus, for the Gospel story would be incomplete without them. He said, "I lay down My life for the sheep. . . . Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from Me, I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of My Father" (John 10: 15-18).

Let no one think that it was an easy thing for the Father to give that commandment, or for the Son to carry it out. Nothing but infinite and divine love, the love of God, could have done it. In His agony in the Garden, Jesus cried, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me." It was not possible, the commandment must be carried out. It was the measure of God's love to men; He so loved the world.

But see what these words of JESUS mean. "No man taketh My life from Me." It was impossible for men to slay Him. In intent they did it, on their part no effort was wanting to bring Him down into death; their malice and cruelty knew no pity; they were indeed from that point of view His murderers, they slew the Holy One and the Just; and yet, when they had done their worst, He voluntarily laid down His life, a sacrifice for sin. He anticipated that spear thrust that ripped His side, and offered up Himself without spot to God. In their mocking of Him, they cried, "Come down from the cross and we will believe on you." He could have come down from the cross. It was not the nails that were driven through His hands and His feet that held Him there. I could not admit that, unless I am allowed to spell out one word upon them. Then the nail in His right hand shall be L, and the nail in His left hand shall be O, and the nail in the right foot shall be V, and the nail in the left foot shall be E. It was LOVE that held Him there, the love of a Saviour-God. He did not die by the violence of men, though they could not have been more violent; nor did He die from any natural cause. He cried, "It is finished," with a loud voice and yielded up His own life. So that, when the soldiers came to finish the work of that brutal day, they marvelled that He was dead already. One act on their part remained to be done, that the ancient word might be fulfilled, and that the sacrifice might be complete. One of them stepped back a pace and thrust his spear into the side of the dead body of the Saviour, and forthwith came there out blood and water. "And he that saw it bare record, and, his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true, THAT YE MIGHT BELIEVE" (John 19: 35).

He carried out His Father's commandment by yielding up His life, He had the power to do it because of who He was; but He had also received commandment to take it again, and this He has done. And if He had not done this, God's love would have been an impotent love, it could not have saved us. "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins." If Christ be not raised, God has lost His Son for ever, and we have no Saviour. But His resurrection is an integral part of the Gospel, for "Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures; and was buried, and rose again from the dead the third day, according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor. 15: 3, 4).

Death has met its Master, the power of the grave has been broken, and Jesus lives. He has carried out His Father's commandment and finished the work that He gave Him to do, and God has glorified Him with the glory that He had with Him before the world began. And all this is involved in our text; if that commandment had not been carried out, and if that work had not been finished, sinners never could have felt the kiss of God's love, and it never could have been said, "Whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Prince Ernest Louis would never forget that kiss of love that cost his mother her life, he would have been an unnatural, unfeeling son if he had; but the world cared nothing at the time for the love of God that made Him give His Son, and it cares nothing for it now. It is indifferent to the kiss of God's love. Yet if any will hear and believe the story, to them flows the rich blessing that is the result of it. And multitudes have heard and believed it, and every one of them has been kissed by the kiss of forgiveness and love. Let no one suppose that when God gave His Son His love to the world ceased. The gift did not exhaust the love; it fills His heart now as ever it did, and when a sinner, weary of his sins turns towards Him, God sees him when he is yet a great way off for the eyes of love are very keen; and He has compassion on him — for the heart of love is very tender; and He runs — for the feet of love are swift, and He falls on his neck and kisses him. Each sinner is kissed for himself and can say, as the love of God is shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost, that is given to him, "God who knows all, has forgiven all, and He loves me, yes, even me."

And what has the devil to give in comparison with that? He lied to Adam and Eve in the garden. He told them that God did not love them, that He was withholding something from them that would exalt them and do them good, and if they would but listen to him he would make them happier and higher than God had made them; he would make them as gods, knowing good and evil. They listened to his lying words, and turned their backs upon God who did love them, and followed the devil who hated them, to their ruin! John 3: 16 is the answer to the devil's lie, and the truth of it dispels the darkness that lies as a black pall upon the souls of men. For when a man believes the Gospel, he is saved and set free, the Son makes him free, for the Son came to undo the works of the devil, and set his captives free. It is the kiss of God's love that awakens dead souls to life, and that dissolves the shackles that bind them; they are no longer the dupes of the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience, but they know that God is rich in mercy, and they know His great love wherewith He has loved them, and they know that He has quickened them together with Christ (Eph. 2. ), and they know that they are united to the One who has died for them, and they know that they can never be separated from Him for ever.

Chapter 10

It is the World that God Loves

The World and not a part of it. — The Lady who Thought she had Sinned Away her Day of Grace. — What sort of a World is it?

It is the world that God so loved; not a part of it, nor any class or race or colour in it. There is a notion abroad, and we fear what is called "organised religion" must bear some of the blame of it, that God loves the cultured, and the rich and the religious, and merely tolerates the rest; but our text sweeps away such a false conception of God and tells us that He loved the world. He is no respecter of persons. His love reaches out to all men, even to the uttermost part of the earth.

But a man may accept that as a fact because he has heard it since he was a child, and yet be unaffected in any way by it, because he does not see that he personally is involved in it; or he may refuse to believe anything about it at all because any thought of God disturbs his complacency, or he may pose as an infidel; yet it is certain that no man was born an infidel. Many a man has argued himself into infidelity simply because he "did not like to retain God in his knowledge," as Romans 1 tells us. But whether indifferent, or infidel, or whatever else he may be, there is no man in the world to whom these words cannot be spoken, and they will come home in their life-giving, saving power to all who feel their need of them.

I remember meeting a young lady who thought she was an exception to this wonderful fact. She was obsessed with the idea that she had sinned away her day of grace, and that there was no hope for her. She did not doubt that others might be saved, but she, so she thought, had had her opportunity and missed it. Naturally she became very depressed, so much so that the family doctor diagnosed the case as religious mania, when it was actually deep soul trouble. He advised that she should not be allowed to attend any religious service or read the Bible. I was preaching the Gospel in the town, and a happy Christian friend obtained permission to bring her to one of the meetings. I was told about her and introduced to her. I said, "I am glad that you have come to the meeting to-night, for I have found a text in the Bible that should suit you exactly." Her face brightened for a moment at the suggestion that after all there might be a text that she had not seen, which might yield her some comfort; but when I read John 3: 16 to her, she showed great disappointment, and said rather impatiently, "I've read that text many times." "I know that." I said, "but listen to it once more. 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever in believeth Him should not perish but have everlasting life.' What is it that God has loved?" I asked, "The world," she answered. "Are you in the world?" I asked. "Of course I am," she replied, and her manner showed that she thought it a very silly question. "You ought to be very glad for that," I said, "for, being in the world, this great love of God is for you, and the blessing of this wonderful verse is for you, and if you want to get out of the reach of it, you must fly to the moon, or take lodgings in one of the planets, or drop down into hell; then you will be able to say, 'There's no hope for me, I cannot be saved. ' But as long as you are in the world God's love reaches even to you." "Let me look at it," she said, and taking my Bible, she eagerly read over the familiar words, and as she did so, the cloud departed from her face; she was transformed; for the light that shone into her heart dispelled the darkness of unbelief, and showed itself in a happy and grateful smile. She begged the loan of my Bible for the night, and returned it to me the next day, a happy woman. Eleven years after I received a message from her through a friend in Scotland, She wondered if I remembered the woman who borrowed my Bible to read over John 3. 16. I certainly did remember it, and she will never forget it.

But what a world it is that God has loved! It reeks with moral putrefaction, and prefers its sins and miseries to His great love and eternal life. When His Son came into it, though He was its Maker, it did not know Him, and the leaders of it crucified Him, Clearly is their guilt recorded in the Word of God; it says, "The princes of this world crucified the Lord of glory." It was not the rabble that took the lead in that great crime, but the princes, the best the world had ever produced. The rabble joined in it, for the universal cry was, "Away with Him." But the great men first raised that cry. That was what the world thought about the only begotten Son of God, but it did not change God's love to hatred, nor the purpose of His beloved Son to save men. They laid the cross upon His shoulders, but He went forth bearing it. There was no resistance on His part, for He had come to do His Father's will, and that will was that He should die for sinners. And in this was manifested the great victory of God's love over man's hatred. And now the word is going forth to all the world, to men of every colour and race, "that whosoever believeth Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their transgressions unto them, nor is He imputing their transgressions unto them now, if He did, it would mean for them unsparing judgment and everlasting banishment from His presence; but He is sending the word of reconciliation unto the world, and its message is of forgiveness and eternal life, but it must be heard and received, it is the whosoever believes that do not perish, and to them alone the blessing comes, all others grope onward in the darkness to death and judgment and the lake of fire.

Chapter 11

How the Love of God Changes Men

The Man who ran away. — The Text on the Wall. — Could a Man who Killed Another be Saved? — How God's Love Changed J—.

I remember a Gospel meeting in my native town. We had been inviting the people in the neighbourhood of the Hall to come in and hear the word of God, and among some who responded was a man who sat like a surprised listener until the preaching was over; when, waiting for nothing else, he got up and ran, and did not stop until he had reached his house. When asked why he had run away from the Gospel like that, he said, "God is in that place." But would he have run away if he had believed John 3: 16? I can understand a man running away from Sinai, but if he had realised the meaning of the words, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son," would he have fled?

And yet this fear of God must precede the knowledge of this great love. I know that from my own experience. When I was a boy, there hung in our home a Scripture text. There were only four words in it, but those four words fastened themselves on my mind and made me tremble with fear at the most unexpected times. They were, "THOU GOD SEEST ME." I was afraid as I thought of them, and wished sometimes that there was no God. I am sure that I could have repeated John 3: 16 correctly in those days, and yet I was afraid of God. Why should any boy or man, girl or woman be afraid of God and of His eyes of love? Ah, that's the question, for it is certain that the man who ran away from the Gospel preaching and I who trembled when I thought of God and His all-seeing eye, were not alone in this. Why? It is a searching question, and the answer was, I knew that I was a sinner and that God was holy, and that man knew and felt this too; and the heart of the sinner "which is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" is enmity against God and has no desire to meet Him in any way; and in this all are alike, there is no difference.

But do I tremble now as I think of God's all-seeing eye? No, I do not, for now I know that He loved me and gave His Son for my salvation. He who saw all has forgiven all, and thus He has won my heart and I love Him because He first loved me. His perfect love to me has cast out all fear from my heart.

The Bible that tells us of God's love to men also tells us, and that just as plainly, of men's hatred of God and of His Son, whom He sent to be their Saviour. The Lord Jesus said, "They have both seen and hated both Me and My Father," and, "They hated Me without a cause." These are the two facts that stand out above all others in the Bible. God loves men and men hate God, and these two facts show what a unique place man has in God's creation.

I have met men who believed they were nothing more than beasts — cleverer, of course, than the rest of the animal kingdom through the kindly efforts of a mysterious force which they call Evolution, but still beasts to live and die and be forgotten; but one thing is certain, the beasts are not enmity against God, they do not hate Him; and another thing is certain, there has been no revelation of God's love to them, though He feeds the young lions and cares for the sparrows. It is men that God has loved,

"For man, O miracle of grace!

For man the Saviour bled."

When this great fact gets into a man's heart, it revolutionises his whole life. It changes his thoughts and feelings towards God, first of all. The hatred is cast out of his heart, and he is reconciled to God by the death of His Son. Instead of running from God, it makes him run to Him; for what could be so attractive as the love of God as seen in Jesus? If God so loved us, why should we hide with fear from Him? It is this wonderful love which makes us trust Him wholly.

I knew an old man in the North of England who was not overburdened with this world's goods, indeed he was a poor man, an old age pensioner, but a happy one. We were holding an open-air meeting, and he stepped into the ring to speak. What had he to tell us? "Friends," he said, "it's just fifty years since I came out of gaol first time. The W—s got hold of me, and I'm not going to say anything against them, they were very kind to me, but they never told me that Jesus died for me, and I was very ignorant. They told me to be a good lad, but I could not manage it; it was too big a job for me; and it was seventeen years before I found out that God loved me. Seventeen years! I've come here to tell you what it took me seventeen years to find out. God loves you, my friends, God loves you. It was this that changed things for me, and it will do the same for you."

When eighteen years old, that man, then a poor pit lad, unable to read or write, was condemned to five years penal servitude for man-slaughter. In defending a friend in a drunken row, he had killed a man. In his northern prison, the prisoners talked about their chances of heaven, and they were unanimous in declaring that Geordie had no chance at all; he had killed a man; his case was hopeless. And he, poor fellow, believed them, and thought that there was nothing but a life of sin for him and hell at the end of it. Until, during his last term in gaol, the truth reached him, that "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." What a revelation that was to that poor ignorant pitman! It changed his life and filled him with an enthusiasm for the Gospel that burned in his soul to the end of his days. I know of no one in the North of England who preached it more persistently than he, and there will be many in heaven as a result of the testimony of rough old Geordie M—.

And hear the story of another man in the same northern district, whose life was transformed by the same wonderful love. He cursed the Gospel preachers who came into his street to tell the glad tidings to the people. He sat at his window and cursed them while they preached. "J—, my man," said one of them, "God loves you." Those words went home to his miserable heart and the next night that hardened sinner turned in to the service in the nearby Gospel hall and there was saved. I met him after three years of Christian life. He had been away from home for the week-end preaching the Gospel that had saved him. It was the first week-end that he had been away from home since his conversion. He was telling me this and he said, "Before I was saved, my wife used to pray that I might break my neck, I was such a drunken brute, but when I came home this morning after being away since Saturday, she said, "J—, you'll never have to go away again, this has been the most miserable week-end I've ever spent." Yes, that is what the Gospel of God's great love can do for a man, it changes him, and it changes his home as well.

Chapter 12

"His Only Begotten Son"

The Only Begotten Son. — Buddha and Christ. — The Unique Glory of the Saviour.

I shall take it for granted that my readers are thoroughly interested in our great text, and that they will wish to consider further the One who is spoken of in it as God's "only begotten Son" the One whom God has given, and in whom they are to believe. The title is of the highest glory, there does not seem to be any higher. It is used five times, in John 1: 14, 18; 3: 16, 18; and 1 John 4: 9. I should like to quote a paragraph from an old writer that has impressed me. He points out that John, the beloved disciple who leaned on the Lord's breast at the Supper, is the only one of the New Testament writers that speaks thus of the Lord; and the reason for that may be that he being the last of the New Testament writers, was inspired by the Holy Spirit to give special emphasis to the full Deity-glory of Jesus, and of His eternal relationship with the Father in God-head, which even then was being challenged. He says: "When he would impress the minds of his readers with a deep sense at once of the inscrutableness of the divine nature, and the certainty and perfection of the manifestations of God in Christ, he declares, 'No man' — no being of created mould — 'hath seen God at any time; the ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, who exists in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.'" When, again, he would exalt to the utmost glory of the Word in flesh, he styles it, "the glory as of the ONLY BEGOTTEN from the Father." When he would illustrate the benevolence of God with the highest splendour, he says, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his ONLY BEGOTTEN SON into the world, that we might live through Him." With a similar purpose is the epithet used by Christ Himself, "God so loved the world, that He gave His ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." And, finally, when our Lord would represent unbelief as the last extreme of human guilt, and as anticipating the judgment of a future world, He finds no stronger argument than that conveyed in this appellation, "He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the NAME OF THE ONLY BEGOTTEN SON OF GOD." And this is He whom God hath given and in whom we are to believe unto eternal life.

There have been and will still be many anti-christs in the world. Men who will challenge the unique place that the only begotten Son of God fills. The devil will see to that, for the one thing that he hates above all others is that the Son of God, the One who has stormed his stronghold of death and mastered him, should be magnified and praised. And the devil's work is clearly manifested in the fact that in these last days there are those who call themselves Christians, who put Confucius, and Mahomet, and Buddha, and other historical figures, on the same platform as the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our ship put in to Colombo for a day for coal and supplies, and we all were glad to go ashore after three weeks of ship board life. When we returned at night everybody was full of the day's adventures. One lady told me that she had been to a Buddhist temple, on the walls of which were paintings depicting scenes in the life of Buddha — they had all been explained by the priest in charge, "And," said the lady, "they were so much like what we read about Christ, that I have come to the conclusion that there was no difference between Buddha and Christ, and if these people believe in Buddha, that is all that is required." "And what about your believing in Buddha, too, if there is no difference between him and Christ?" I asked. "Well, of course, I belong to the West, and so I believe in Christ, but I do not see any difference between them," she replied. "In those pictures depicting incidents in the life of Buddha," I asked, "did you see one of Buddha dying on a cross for sinners?" "No," she said; "there wasn't one like that." "Then, of course, there would not be one of Buddha, having died, rising again from the dead." "No," she said, "there was not." "Then," I said, "Buddha cannot be like Christ, for the two great facts of Christ are that He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures." I was glad that the lady finally agreed that Buddha was not like Christ.

I proclaim the unique glory of the only begotten Son of God. In Time and Eternity He has no rival. "There is none other Name given under heaven among men, whereby we must be saved," for He only could die for sinners, and rise up again from the dead. O that men would understand this and turn to Him wholly!

It is 6,000 years since Adam opened the door for sin to enter into the world and death came in with sin (Rom. 5: 12). At his surrender to Satan in the Garden he became a sinner by nature and practice, and he has transmitted that nature to his posterity, and death has passed upon them all, "for all have sinned." Great men have arisen in the world's history, who have dominated other men, like Nimrod, and Buddha, and Mahomet, but they have all died, because, like Adam, they were all sinners. Not one of them, even if he had desired to, could stand up as the substitute for others, and bear sin's penalty so as to take from death its dominion. The dark tide of death has rolled on and risen up against every man, sweeping away the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the wise and the fool. There was no hope or help for men in any of Adam's children. Then it was that God intervened by giving His only begotten Son.

His coming was predicted of old. "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His Name Immanuel." This was the sign. It was the sign of man's utter impotence for his own redemption, and that God would undertake his cause, and that this should proceed from Himself and be entirely apart from any aid that men could give. "A virgin shall conceive." "It is impossible," cries the infidel. Yes, it is impossible with men; that is the very lesson that God would teach us by the manner of His intervention. It is impossible that men should devise or evolve any scheme or system of redemption, or deliver and uplift themselves from the damning effect of sin; they cannot set themselves free from the law of sin and death, with men it is impossible, but not with God. He stepped into the scene of man's utter ruin, and said, "Stand still, stand aside, and see the salvation of God," and so, in due time, Mary brought forth her firstborn Son, "And His Name was called Jesus." He was Immanuel — the only begotten Son — "Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting." The Son of the Father's love by whom all things were made (Col. 1). "Who is over all, God blessed for ever." "How do you know that Jesus Christ is God?" asked a scoffer of a man who had confessed the Saviour's Name. "How do I know that Jesus Christ is God? Why, He saved me," was his simple, yet conclusive, answer.

It is He, the Son in the God-head, who came forth from the Father in whom we are asked to believe. The epithet "the only begotten Son of God" tells us how eternally near and dear He is to the Father who sent Him, and He sent Him to be the Saviour, and being who He is, His mission cannot fail.

Of every other child born into the world there was a doubt as to his career and destiny. What will he become? was the question that sprang to the mind in respect to every one of them.

One might have been born a king, but who could tell whether he would ever be enthroned, or that accomplished, whether he would not be dethroned again by a more powerful rival. But Jesus came into the world to fulfil a great purpose, He came to die and rise again, and to become by His death and resurrection the Saviour of men. He has accomplished the work that God gave Him to do: It is finished; and He has gone back again to heaven, that from thence He might give everlasting life to all who believe in Him. "Now He that ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things." Of which of the great names in human history could that be said? Buddha means the Enlightened, but those who follow him grope in impenetrable darkness. Jesus is the Light of the world, and He appeared once in the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, and to dispel the darkness, and reveal what God is in the fullness of His love. He is the eternally worthy object of the Father's love, He is the worthy object of every sinner's trust.

Chapter 13

"That Whosoever Believeth in Him"

What "whosoever" means. — Duncan Mathieson's Story. — The Mistakes that People make. — The self-righteous old Yorkshire Man.

The first half of the verse is God's side of it, the second half is yours. God's love is for the world, but it is the "whosoever that believeth" that receives the blessing of it. You had no hand in moving God to love and to give, but everything depends for you whether you do or do not believe. That "whosoever" is a great word and wonderful; it stretches out its long arms of welcome to all men and would enfold them all in its embrace of love. It makes its appeal to the reader of this book, as it made its appeal once to the writer of it, in his case not in vain. It tells us that God is no respecter of persons, "but that the same Lord is rich unto all that call upon Him"; for there is no difference now, Jew and Gentile, bad and good, poor and rich, old and young may all come and believe and be saved, but every man must do it for himself.

The happy and believing "whosoevers" are being gathered out of all nations, for in these days the word of the Gospel is running with swift feet; it is travelling north, south, east, and west; and multitudes who have been bred in heathen darkness are hearing it with amazement and joy, and they shall sit down in the kingdom of God, for faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. It would be well if the men and women of these "Christian" lands awoke to the solemn fact that they are in danger of being shut out of the blessing for ever because of their indifference and unbelief. "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out."

It was by this "whosoever" of John 3: 16 that light dawned upon the heart of Duncan Mathieson, the Scottish evangelist, who carried the Gospel to the suffering Britishers in the Crimean war, and did for their souls what Florence Nightingale did for their bodies. For many weary days he had searched for faith, which he thought was some mysterious thing that he would have to possess if ever he was to be saved from perdition and have peace with God. He often told the story of how the blessing came to him, and I will give it here in his own words:

"I was standing at the end of my father's house," he said, "and meditating on that precious word that has brought peace to countless ones: 'God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' I saw that God loved me, for I was one of the world. I saw the proof of His love in the giving of His Son. I saw that 'whosoever' meant anybody and everybody, and, therefore, me, even me. I saw the result of believing, that I would not perish, but have everlasting life. I was enabled to take God at His word. I saw no one but Jesus only — all in all in redemption. My burden fell from my soul, and I was saved. Yes, saved! That hour angels rejoiced over one more sinner brought to the Saviour, and new songs rang through the courts of that city to which I had now got a title, and of which I had now become an heir. Bunyan describes his pilgrim as giving three leaps of joy as his burden rolled into the open sepulchre of Christ. I could not contain myself for joy. I sang the new song, 'Salvation through the blood of the Lamb.' The very heavens appeared as if covered with glory. I felt the calm of a pardoned sinner; yet I had no thought of my safety. I saw only the person of Jesus. I wept for my sins that had nailed Him to the Cross; but now it came freely as the tear that faith wept. I had passed from death unto life; old things had passed away, and all things had become new.

"I wondered that I had stumbled at the simplicity of the way. I saw everything so plain that I longed to go and tell all the world. I felt that if I had met a thousand Manassehs I could say, 'Yet there is room.' I went everywhere telling the glad story. Some even of the saints looked incredulous. Others, like the elder brother of the parable, did not like the music and the dancing. They had never left their Father's dwelling; they had never been sin-sick, and knew not what it is to be healed; no fatted calf had been killed for them. These warned me against enthusiasm and exhorted me to be sober-minded. One old man told me that I was on the mount, but that I would soon be down again. Another said I needed great humility. But I went on singing my song. Prayer had given place to praise, and night and day I continued to thank God for 'His unspeakable gift.'"

But though the words are so plain, thousands miss the meaning of them, or are so blinded by their own opinions, or it may be by the devil, that they treat them as of no value; they prefer their own way to God's. They are acting as though the word was "whosoever worketh," when it is "not of works"; or "whosoever does his best," when "there is none that doeth good;" or "whosoever prayeth, or payeth, or does penance," but it is none of these things but, "whosoever believeth." It does not say whosoever loves God, it is God who has done the loving; or, whosoever giveth, it is God who has done the giving: but, whosoever believeth. But it is not whosoever believeth a text, even this greatest of all texts, or whosoever believeth in the Bible, or in the Christian faith, it is whosoever believeth in HIM; a living Person, the Son of God!

The text tells us about Him, the Bible tells us about Him. We should not, and could not, know anything about Him at all if we had not the text and the Bible; we who have believed, thank God for the Bible; it is a priceless treasure. We do not wonder that men who loved it in former days preferred to burn in the fires of Smithfield rather than give it up. It is God's own Word to us and we value it as such. But you may have the Bible and remain unsaved; you may say that it is a good Book, and yet perish. It is JESUS alone that saves. The Bible holds Him up to us as the object of faith; it says, "Whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish"; in Him alone can you find everlasting life; "neither is there salvation in any other," so the Bible tells us, and the Bible is true; it is the infallible Word of God.

That self-righteous old sinner in Yorkshire who told a friend of mine that he would go boldly up to the gates of Heaven, and show himself there, and expect to be welcomed, because he had done no harm to anybody, was as silly as he was proud, he was duped by the devil; but so also are all who hope to reach Heaven by any other way than this. The "whosoevers that believe" are those who have abandoned self-trust; they have thrown away their own self-righteousnesses as filthy rags. They have come to the Saviour as perishing sinners with:

"Naught to plead

But God's great love

And their exceeding need."

And they have got Christ instead of self; and through Him they have everlasting life, and shall not perish. Is not this what the Word of God tells us? It is, and happy is he who believes that sure Word. "Blessed is she that believed," said the saintly Elizabeth of her young cousin Mary; "for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her of the Lord."

Chapter 14

What is it to Believe?

Believing a Historical Fact. — The Plague in the City and your Need. — A Northumbrian Farmer and How he Believed.

I have met people who have said, "You talk about believing; I believe; but it has made no difference to me, what does it all mean?" And their belief has turned out to be something about Jesus and not faith in Him at all. This sort of belief is the same as they have in regard to some outstanding character in history. I, for instance, have read of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell; that period of English history always interested me more than any other, and I often debated in my mind as to whether Cromwell was a regicide and traitor or a benefactor and liberator: it was an exhilarating mental exercise, but, of course, nothing more, and that is how it is with these "believers" in the Bible facts about the Lord Jesus Christ. Many of them are orthodox, religious and estimable, they are not infidels; they believe that Jesus lived and died and rose again and ascended into heaven, these are all items in the Creed, and they do not question them. They will tell you that these are very interesting facts that have had a decided effect upon the history of the world, but they are unmoved and unchanged by them: they have yielded them a mental assent, but not the faith of their hearts that saves; and if thou shalt believe in thine heart, is an important word. Their idea is that since they have lived what they call a moral life, and do not altogether neglect religion, nothing more can be expected. The Son of God is not to them a vital reality; they do not believe that without Him they must perish, that He is indispensable to their eternal salvation.

But what is this living faith in Him that is so necessary; the faith that appropriates the blessing, and without which it is impossible to please God? Let me illustrate it. The plague is raging in your city, and the people are dying by scores and hundreds, and all the efforts of the doctors to check its ravages are in vain, for they have discovered neither the cause of it nor the remedy. One day you awaken to the fact that you are stricken; there can be no doubt about it, the symptoms are unmistakable. You are surely doomed, and are on the verge of despair, for this fell disease has rarely, if ever, been known to release its grip upon any of its victims. But just when you have abandoned all hope there steps into your room a man of whom you have often heard; he is a great physician, and as kind as he is great. He tells you that after long research he has discovered the virulent germ, and has conquered it, and that if you will submit your case to him he can and will cure you. Do you hesitate? Not for a moment. How eagerly you watch him as he measures out the dose of the precious fluid that is to heal you. And when he hands it to you and says, "Now drink that," do you say, "All right, doctor, I believe all that ever I heard about you, and I believe what you say about this medicine, put it down there, I'll take it sometime, but I want a little while to think about it"? No, you don't! That dose, and that only, as far as you know, can save your life, and you waste no time in vain talk, but with your heart beating at more than its usual rate, you stretch out your hand and take the life-giving draught and drink it down, and as all the doctor has said is proved to be true, how sincerely you thank him. You are a very grateful man, and never tire of telling others of the doctor's skill and of his infallible remedy.

Do you understand the illustration? Sin, like a plague, has stricken you: your only hope is the great Physician, who "came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." Have you awakened to the fact that your soul is in danger of perishing, and that it must perish unless God's only begotten Son saves it? If so, you will want Him; your soul will cry out for Him; you will not rest until you find Him; you may even take up the cry of the disciples in the storm, "Lord, carest Thou not that we perish?" Of course He cares, and you will realise that He cares for you, if you will put your case in His hands and trust Him wholly to save you. That is what believing in Him means, and nothing less than that. And He has never failed one who has believed in Him like that.

An old friend of mine proved this, when he discovered that he was a sinful man and in danger of perishing. It was Christmas Eve, and he had been invited to join in the festivities of the season. There was to be dancing and drink and music and singing, and though very miserable, he started out for the great house at which the night was to be spent, but he hesitated at the gate. One of his mates took him by the arm and said, "What's the matter with you? Come on." And that did it. He told me that it seemed to him as though the very devil was in that tug at his arm, and that that "Come on" was the devil's invitation to him to forget that he was a sinner and that his soul needed saving, and to reject the Saviour. He pulled away from the temptation, and leaving his friends he ran home to his bedroom. He was alone in the house, and falling on his knees he cried out, "Lord, I'm in danger of perishing for ever, and I deserve to perish because of my sins, but if I have to perish, I'll perish at Thy feet." Did he perish? No, how could he when he cast himself like that into the Saviour's hands? Does not our text say, "that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish"? He did not perish, but became one of the brightest, happiest farmers in the county of Northumberland. He is now with His Saviour whom he trusted, but his happy Christian life was spent in pressing on others the claims of the Lord, and telling them of the joys of everlasting life that He gives to those who believe.

And how does a man acquire this faith that saves? It comes by hearing, for the Scripture says, "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God;" and Jesus said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life."

Believing in Him is a vital thing. It is living faith in a living Saviour. Simon Peter had it, when speaking on behalf of his friends, he said to the Lord, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."

Chapter 15

What does it Mean to Perish?

"I'll never believe in Hell." — The Words of the Son of God. — The "Whosoever" of Revelation 20.

God has done a great thing that men might be saved from perishing. He could not have done a greater. He has given His only begotten Son. And after such a proof of His love, who would dare to question what Peter tells us in his second Epistle, chapter 3: 9, that He is "not willing that any should perish." Yet our text and many another show plainly enough that men are in danger of perishing; and if this is so, it is surely an end to be escaped if that is possible, and since it is possible, no man ought to be indifferent about it.

But what is it to perish? I heard a preacher spell out the word like this P-E-R-I-S-H — to Pass Eternally Ruined Into a Sinner's Hell, What a terrible doom that must be! And almost too solemn a matter to be turned into an acrostic, Yet that is exactly what it is to perish. Let me hasten to say that hell was not prepared for man, the paradise of God in Eden was his prepared dwelling place; I am quoting the Lord's own words as to hell: He spoke of "everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels" (Matt. 25. 41). Then why should men be condemned to such a doom? Because they will follow the devil in his revolt against God. The turnover from God to the devil was deliberate on Adam's part, for he does not seem to have been deceived as Eve was, and by him sin entered into the world and death by sin, and death has passed upon all men for that all have sinned. There has been no difference in this, we have every one turned to his own way. The devil was the first to take that self-willed rebellious road, and Adam was the first man to follow the devil's lead, and, like sheep, we have all gone the same way; and the end of that road is hell.

I own that this is not a subject upon which I can write with pleasure; it is a solemn and awesome subject. Men do not like it, and I do not wonder; and many modern preachers, in order to be popular, and please men, have cast it out of their theology; but can they stamp the fear of it out of the consciences and souls of men? Some years ago, I was introduced to a man in a Yorkshire town, who wanted a talk with me. He was a working man with more than ordinary intelligence, and instead of backing horses and handing his weekly surplus over to the bookmaker, he spent it in books and possessed a library of which he was proud. But most of his books were on Eastern philosophy, for he had become a Theosophist. I pressed upon him the great fact that God had highly exalted JESUS, and given Him a Name above every name, and that every knee must one day bow to Him and every tongue confess that He is the Lord. He, on his part, was quite willing to own that He must have been a good man — His teaching and works he thought proved that, but he would admit nothing more than that. As I had not spoken of hell, it seemed strange to me that he should declare several times during our conversation, "I'll never believe in hell," and as often as he did so I replied, "I am not asking you to believe in hell, but to confess Jesus Christ as your Lord."

We parted late that night, and it was a long time before he was able to sleep, his confidence in the "wisdom" that he thought he had acquired had been shaken, and he was perturbed and restless. He dosed off at last, but was suddenly awakened in the early morning to find his bedroom alight with a lurid glow, and his first thought and exclamation was, "I'm in hell." It was a great factory on the opposite side of the road that was ablaze, and it was the flames that were pouring out of the windows of it that lighted up his room. But why should his first thought have been of hell, when but five hours before he had asserted at least half a dozen times that he would never believe in such a place? Ah, it was his conscience that spoke out before he had time to marshal his arguments. Deep down in his soul he knew that there was a hell and judgment to come, and the Eastern philosophy that he had imbibed had been unable to stamp that knowledge out of him. I am glad to say that within a week, he had thrown to the winds his false theories, and had bowed down before the great Saviour; he had become one of the "whosoevers" that believe; and he made a bonfire of the books that had deceived him, for, said he, "Now I have found the solution of all my difficulties in Christ."

It is out of the lips of the Son of God, who came from heaven to tell us of God's great love, that the most solemn warnings as to hell have come. He said to His followers, "In My Father's house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you." If there had been no heaven to win, He would have told us, and if there had been no hell to shun, would He not have told us? But it was He who said to the self-righteous, hypocritical Pharisees, "How shall ye escape the damnation of hell?" He it was who warned men of "Gehenna, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He told His hearers of one rich man who, after death, lifted up his eyes being in torment. You see, I am not giving you my opinions on so solemn a subject as this, I would not do that, for my opinions would be of no more value than yours. I am giving you the words of the Son of God, and His words are truth. He said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away" (Mark 13: 31). Have you believed them? His words are spirit and life, those that warn of judgment to come equally with those that tell of the love that saves.

Why did He who was the gift of God's love to men utter these solemn warnings? Why does a mother warn her child of the dangers of the road, or command him not to play with matches? It is her love for him that makes her do it, and it is the same love that made God give His only begotten Son that men might have a way of escape from perishing, that warns them of the irrevocable and everlasting consequences to them of neglecting His great salvation.

This "whosoever" of John 3. 16 is not the only whosoever in the Bible. It is the whosoever of blessing and salvation and eternal life; but there is another. It occurs in the account of the last judgment, at the great white throne; it is the whosoever of damnation and the second death. We read "The dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works . . . and whosoever was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire." And again, "The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone which is the second death." AND THAT IS WHAT IT IS TO PERISH.

Chapter 16

Everlasting Life

What is everlasting Life? — "Sanctifying Doubts." — "He said it." — A Saved Jewess. — A place in God's Family. — Glory.

Everlasting life is everlasting. It is a life that no one can ever lose who has received it as the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Think of the Giver of it — God; think of the One through whom it comes — Jesus Christ our Lord, and then say whether it can be forfeited or withdrawn. If it were something that was granted to us in return for some merit or faithfulness, then we might fear that if the merit ceased, the blessing would be forfeited, but since it is the sovereign gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, it is ours for ever, for the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. And further, this life has not been deposited in us for us to keep it, with the danger of losing it always near. See what the word of God says about it, "And this is the record that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son" (1 John 5: 11). Can I lose that which is treasured up for me in the Son of God? There is no "Safe Deposit" nor strong room on earth, but what thieves may succeed in breaking in, but what thief can take from Christ what He holds for me? He has met every foe and overthrown every adversary. His hand has smashed the power of death itself, and it is that hand which holds the believer in everlasting security; and to every one of them, He gives eternal life and they shall never perish. We have this life, if we have it at all, by having Him, for "He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (1 John 5: 12).

But again, He Himself is the life, and He is our life. "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14: 16). "Christ who is our life" (Col. 3: 4). "This is the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5: 20). We may not understand what all that means, but if we have believed in Him, we shall delight to consider it and meditate upon it, and the Spirit of God will unfold its meaning to us.

Now God wants every believer to know that this life is his. There are thousands who are believing and doubting; they have an uncertain sort of hope that all will be well in the end, but they cannot go further than that. One old lady in the North of Scotland, who was a sincere and devout believer, declared to a friend of mine that "she would never give up her sanctifying doubts." But hear what the Word of God says, "These things have I written unto you that believe on the Name of the Son of God that ye may know that ye have eternal life" (1 John 5: 13). Not "hope" or "doubt," nor even "feel," but "know." Who amongst all who have cast the burden of their sins at the feet of the great Saviour, and who have looked up to Him in simple, unquestioning faith can doubt His Word? It was He who said of His sheep, of all those who have believed on Him, "I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand." Is not that enough? I remember a woman in Canada, who seemed as miserable as a sinner could be out of hell. And her misery arose from the fact that she knew that she was a sinner, but had not turned wholly to JESUS. One day I met her and saw at once that there was a change in her, and she told me how it happened. It was His Word that had done it. "He said it," she said. He said, "I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish," and that was enough for her, and she was astonished at the wonder and simplicity of it.

But everlasting life is more than a new life that can never be lost; it brings its possessor into new relationships, and herein lies the joy of it. A baby when born into a family does not at first know its father, yet it is a member of the family, and its father's child. And every one that is born into God's family is one of His children. "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the children of God." In God's family the babes know their Father from the very beginning. They can look up to the great God and address Him with the happy freedom with which a child addresses its father, and they may know, not only that God loved them, when they were far from Him, and gave His Son for their Salvation, but now He loves them with a Father's love, they are His children and infinitely and eternally dear to Him.

I met a Jewess. The light of the Gospel had shone into her heart, and she had become a happy believer in JESUS. She had learnt that the Nazarene, whom the leaders of her nation had rejected and crucified was the only Saviour, and that God had made Him both Lord and Christ. I asked her what verse in the Bible she loved most, and she quickly answered," John 3: 16. And she explained to me that she had been reared in the belief that God was great and terrible, and that her nation was suffering under His stern hand, and she had feared Him greatly, and John 3: 16 had shown her how great His love was, and had changed her view of Him entirely, and so she treasured it and loved to repeat it. I said to her, I have another verse for you, which, perhaps, you have not seen, and I read John 16: 27, "The Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved Me, and have believed that I came out from God." It was a few minutes before she began to realise what it meant, but when she did understand it, tears rolled down her cheeks, tears of joy they were, for she saw that she was loved as a child. She was cast off by her relatives, but she was not an orphan, God was her Father. No longer did she stand afar off in fear and trembling, but she could draw nigh, indeed she had been made nigh by the Blood of the Cross, she was a child in God's family, loved with a Father's love.

"So dear, so very dear to God

She could not nearer be.

The love wherewith He loves His Son,

Such is His love to me."

I must quote here the words of the Lord Jesus on the great resurrection day; said He to Mary, "Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God." It is this that He spoke of, when He said to His Father, "This is life eternal to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent."

Eternal life is a most blessed present possession, but it has to say to the future also. Those that believe in the only begotten Son of God shall not perish, death cannot rob them of eternal life. Their destiny is eternal glory with Christ. "When Christ, who is our life shall appear, then shall we appear with Him in glory" (Col. 3: 3). "It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is" (1 John 3: 2, 3). He said, "In My Father's house are many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am, ye may be also" (John 14: 2). When these glorious words are fulfilled, all the ransomed hosts shall have everlasting life in its full and unhindered power, and will be in the home and sphere of it.

But while the believer waits for the full glory of eternal life, he has it now as a life that triumphs over the power of death, if he is called to die. The body of the Christian is still subject to death, but not his spirit, for eternal life is an overcoming life. Death is the king of terrors to them that believe not, but it is not that to those who are God's children through faith in Christ, for death has met its Master; it is a defeated, throneless, crownless king; wrenched from its grasp are the keys of its stronghold; annulled is its power; and delivered from the fear of it are those who were once in bondage to it. The believer shares in the triumphs of Christ, who is his life, and can say, even in view of death, "Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

An old Christian, and a valued friend of mine in Adelaide, Australia, was stricken with paralysis, and it was clear that his service for Christ was done and his life on earth was drawing to its close. The last hour had come, and his family, Christians every member of it, were gathered in his chamber. The paralysis had robbed the dying man of the power of speech, but not of his joy in the Lord; his family could see that, and had no misgivings for him. Yet they longed for some final word, some cheer and comfort that would abide with them when he was gone, and it was quite right and natural that they should. In the hope that, at the very last his speech might be restored to him, they asked if he had anything to say to them. But he could say nothing with his mouth; articulate he could not, yet they were not to be disappointed, for his last word was to be given to them in a more deliberate and thrilling way than by mere speech. He had learned to spell out the deaf and dumb alphabet upon his fingers in order to preach the Gospel to some deaf mutes who lived near his home, and now this knowledge came into blessed use, for upon his fingers he spelt out one word, slowly and with emphasis, and his family, as they eagerly watched the dying fingers, read all they desired, for the word spelt upon them was G-L-O-R-Y.

Chapter 17

An Appeal

A Personal Matter. — "I never knew before that God Loved me." — The Devil's Lure. — Too Late. — The Last Judgment. — Longsuffering Love.

Now I come to the end of my little book, and in this last chapter I must make an appeal to you, my reader. I have not done so before, for I wanted you to read on, and I know that when some readers come to a personal appeal in a book of this sort they will read no further. Yet the matter is intensely personal, for it is certain that no man can be saved by proxy, every man will be saved or lost for himself. It is strange how differently people are affected by this Gospel of God's love, some are entirely unmoved by it; I am reminded when I think of them of the words of an old preacher. He said, "When Jesus died, the rocks were rent and broken, and if a man is unmoved by that death, then his heart must be harder than the rocks," and that is most surely true. How is it with you, my reader? Has your heart been moved by it? If not, you may judge for yourself how hard it must be. Others are profoundly moved and saved by it the very first time they hear it.

I had this story from the lips of a great friend of mine, a retired army officer. It was his own experience. He was a young lieutenant at the time, and as wild as any of his brother officers, when God saved his soul and changed his life. Not only he, but several others were affected in the same way, but his conversion was the greatest surprise because it was the least expected.

These young officers felt they would like to tell others of the love that had blessed them, and preach the Gospel that they had believed. So, they rented a hall in the South of England town in which their regiment was stationed and started their preaching, and my friend's turn came to tell the story. He decided to take John 3: 16 for his text, and I give it for the last time in this book. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

He could not have chosen a better text. But when he had read it and looked up from his Bible to the crowd before him, he could not think of anything to say about it. Anyhow he would repeat the text if he could remember it, and so he began, "God — God — God — loved the world — God, God so loved the world — yes, God so loved the world that — that and that was as far as he got, for, catching sight of an open door at the back of the platform, he made a dash for it and disappeared through it to the astonishment of his audience.

He paced up and down the ante-room, abusing himself for his folly in attempting to preach a sermon, and vowing that he would never do it again, when a knock came to the door and a young woman was brought in. The tears were running down her cheeks, and she could not speak for sobs. "What's the matter with you?" said the would-be preacher, "is your father dead?" "No," came the answer that astonished him, "but Captain, I never knew before that God loved me." It was an astonishing result from what he had thought was a great failure. The stumbling words had gone home and done their work, and there knelt together in that ante-room two astonished people — she that God loved her, he that God should have used his blundering to show her this.

Why should she have believed it so readily while others treat it with such indifference? Certainly her tears of joy and grateful thanksgiving proved that she was wise, and if so, then those who are indifferent to it are fools, for how shall they escape if they neglect so great salvation? Do they hope for another chance, something better than the Gospel? God has nothing better to offer to any man.

This Gospel is God's best and His last. If men have no ear for it, it is because they are listening to the devil. Sin within them answers to his temptations without, and they are lured farther and farther from God by his false words. They go with him one mile, intending then to stop and be saved, but the way seems pleasant and they cannot stop; so he leads them on mile after mile, until the end of the downward road is reached, and the end of it is hell. They cannot see the end as they travel to it, for there are many turns and twists in it, and they come upon it suddenly and unawares, and when it is too late to turn back — TOO LATE.

In the Art Gallery of my native town there used to hang a picture that told a sad tale. The background was a rose-covered cottage. The door of the cottage stood open and within could be seen the form of an aged woman lying dead in her coffin. A young woman stood at the door, the daughter of the dead woman, and approaching the gate was a young man, evidently a wanderer, and a dissipated one, a prodigal son. The young woman pointed with one hand to the dead mother, and the other was stretched out accusingly at her brother, and on her face there was a mingled look of sorrow and reproach. Every figure in the picture cried, "Too late"; but the lines upon it added to its pathos and told of a disappointed love.

"She waited long for you

But now you are too late."

In his case, love had watched, and waited, and died. In your case, my unsaved reader, love is watching and waiting for you. It is not yet too late.

"Long-suffering love waits, wanderer, for thee,

Oh! hear the sound of Heaven's sweet melody.

Come Home, oh! Come,

The love of God believe."

But you may soon pass beyond the reach of that love. It offers you forgiveness, life, and heaven now, but to-morrow may be too late. You are here to-day, and God's Word says, "To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts." To-morrow you may be in eternity. To die is a solemn thing for anyone, but for the one who has despised and rejected the Gospel, it is terrible beyond words. It means to perish, to drop into hell, to be lost without hope, to be for ever without God and without Christ. To-day is the day of mercy; to-morrow may be the day of doom.

And what will you do in the great judgment day when you stand, raised up from the dead, before God, the Judge of all, before whose face the heavens and earth will have fled away; and when the books are opened, and your life's record is unfolded there, for the dead are to be judged out of the things that are written in the books; and when it is plainly shown that your name is not written in the book of life, when it might have been, and would have been if you had believed the Gospel; and when with all those who shared in your rejection of Christ you are cast into the lake of fire? Remember it is the same love that has provided salvation for you that warns you, and as you remember that, face this question.

I was asked, "Why don't you compromise with modern thought on this question?" But how can I, or any one else who believes the Bible, compromise upon it? If it were a theory spun out by a certain school of thought we would abandon it with alacrity, if it were our own opinion, it would be of no more value than any other man's; but since it is the word of God, we cannot compromise. We are only stewards of that faithful Word, and we must pass it on as we receive it, for it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful.

Once more God commends His love to you. He wants you to know the greatness of His interest in you. He could not have saved you at the expense of His righteousness, He must be just; a sacrifice for sin was a necessity, and this called forth the full energy of His love, He gave His Son for your salvation.

God's love led the Saviour to Calvary. God's love finds its delight in blessing the worst and cleansing the vilest. God's love has filled millions with joy and it will be their theme for ever. God's love lingers over you, it yearns for you, yes, even for you. "And there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston: Gospel Narratives

A Student Story;

or Bread Cast Upon the Waters;

And other Gospel Narratives.

by W. T. P Wolston.

Publisher: "Gospel Messenger" and George Morrish.

CBA10766.

Contents

A Student Story

Noah's Carpenters

Divine Openings

A Leap in the Dark

The Rope from Above

Milk without Money

The Comfort of the Blood

Go to Joseph

A Student Story;

or Bread Cast Upon the Waters

The shades of winter evening were rapidly deepening, and flinging obscurity over the subjects which lay upon the tables of a well-known London dissecting-room, a quarter of a century ago, as a group of medical students might have been seen standing round one of these tables, evidently, for the moment, deeply engaged. The fading light, shut books, closed dissecting cases, and somewhat grave faces of the dozen listeners, showed that anatomy was not the topic in hand, as a seated student, who had till then been busy with his "Part," replied to the queries that came from every quarter of the group.

The conversation had been begun by S-, a typically thoughtless, and careless, young would-be medico, who, in passing the seated dissector — known to be a Christian — had railingly said, "Well, Spurgeon, how many have you baptized lately?" Medical students are notorious for their love of bestowing a sobriquet on all and sundry, from professors downwards; so the student thus addressed had, soon after he joined the college, and it leaked out that he occasionally preached the gospel, been dubbed with the name of the well-known and popular preacher.

"I do not baptize; I only preach the gospel, when, and as best I can," was the rejoinder.

"Oh! you don't baptize, you only preach. Come, tell us what you say;" and the loud tone of banter in which this was said quickly gathered, as it was intended it should, a little coterie of kindred spirits, expecting some fun from the roasting of the young Christian. At that moment, however, the senior demonstrator of anatomy, a grave demure man, of whom the students stood rather in awe, joined the group, and took part in the conversation later on.

"You want to know what I preach, do you? I preach glad tidings; the love of God to ruined man; the death and resurrection of His Son the Lord Jesus, and that faith in Him alone secures salvation; that man is guilty, undone, lost; and that the 'Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.' Human efforts are all in vain. Man's so-called good works are all valueless to win salvation. 'Salvation is of the Lord,' and 'the salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles;' whosoever will may have it, without money or price. 'The gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.' The last time I preached I spoke on the 10th of Acts, where it says about the Saviour, 'To him give all the prophets witness, that, through his name, whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.'"

"And do you mean to say that your sins are all forgiven, and that you are saved, Spurgeon?" continued his first interrogator.

"Through God's grace I can most certainly say so. I have had that joy for more than a year now."

"Well, that is presumption, and no mistake," "Did you ever hear the like?" "That's rather good to believe," put in a chorus of voices at once.

Nothing daunted, the assailed one replied, "How can it be presumption to believe God? If my salvation depended on my good works, I might well be filled with doubt and uncertainty; but if it depend, as it does, on the perfectly finished and accepted work of the Lord Jesus for me, it would be presumption to doubt that salvation, when God says so plainly in His Word to every believing soul, 'Thy sins are forgiven; thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace' (Luke 7). When an awakened sinner once asked, 'What must I do to be saved?' God's Spirit replied, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.' And further, He has said in Ephesians 2, 'By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.' It surely cannot be presumption to believe the God of truth, when He says He sent His Son to save me, and that when I trust in Him I am saved."

"But you do not give sufficient place to our works," put in the senior demonstrator, who had been listening quietly till now.

"If God gives them no place, sir, had we not better leave them out of consideration? It says in Romans 4, 'If Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory, but not before God. But what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.' Our works are either 'wicked' (Col. 1: 21) or 'dead' (Heb. 9: 14), and certainly they cannot save us. Christ's work is finished, by it God has been glorified; and it is due to Christ that the one who forswears his own works, and trusts alone in Him, should partake of the benefits and fruits of that atoning work of His, by which alone can sin be put away."

"Ah! that makes it far too easy," said one; "Depend upon it, Spurgeon, you are all wrong," said another; and with varying other such comments the gathering broke up, and the dissector was left alone to pack up his tools in quietness, wondering, the while, what God would bring out of the incident. The bread of life had been simply presented; whether any were hungry enough to eat thereof, was a question. At any rate, the young believer found comfort to his heart in the words, "Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days" (Eccles. 11: 1), and, "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void; but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it" (Isa. 55: 11).

Two days later this young student was again busy with his scalpel and forceps, sitting alone at a table, when one of his seniors, named J-, brought his "part," instruments, and book, and seated himself opposite to him, and began to dissect. Work went on quietly for a little, and then J- said, "That was strange stuff you were telling the fellows the other afternoon. I said nothing at the time, but I don't believe what you were saying. I don't at all pretend to be a religious chap myself, but I am sure a man would need to work hard to get to heaven. Your way of it would not be mine at all, if I cared for that sort of thing, which I don't."

"It is not my way, J-, it is God's, and that makes an immense difference. When the Lord was upon earth, and the Jews came and asked Him, 'What shall we do that we might work the works of God?' do you know what He answered them?"

"No. What?"

"'Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent' (John 6: 29). To believe in the Son of God is all that you or I have to do to get saved."

"But, man, it stands to reason that we ought to do something ourselves. Why, by your way everybody may get saved. Do you believe they will?"

"No, I believe nothing of the sort; for alas, all will not take the place of being lost sinners, and hence do not feel their need of a Saviour, and so do not trust Him. His words are true: 'They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.' The whole, the righteous — or those who think they are such — need Him not, but sinners are welcome to Him. As one of the latter, I have received Him, and He has saved me out and out, blessed be His name!"

"Oh, that's easily said, but I don't believe in your way of salvation at all, and you will never convince me that that is the way to be saved;" and so saying J- relapsed into silence, shortly after left the table, and for the rest of their student life took uncommon good care not to give an opportunity for a tête-à-tête with the man who knew Christ had saved him.

Some years rolled by; student days ceased, the ardently longed-for diplomas and degrees were possessed; and while J- went into practice in the far West, the other went north of the Tweed, to extend his knowledge, while filling the post of house physician in a large hospital. To that same city, in course of time, who should come but J-, attracted, as he supposed, by certain medical advantages of which he would avail himself; but led doubtless by the gracious hand of God, who had not taken His eye off him since the day an arrow, shot at a venture, had pierced the worldly coat-of-mail he wore in the London dissecting-room. Great was J-'s surprise to find his former acquaintance chief in those wards where he wanted to gather clinical information. Flung thus across his path again, J-'s friend felt greatly interested in him, and one Lord's Day said, "Do you ever go to hear the Word of God preached now?"

Sometimes; but I have not been since I came north. Where do you go?"

"I? Oh! I go to — Street."

"Who preaches there?"

"The preachers are various."

"Do they preach well?"

"That would be an open question. I believe they preach the truth, and that is what you and I want. You might do worse than come;" and so saying, a little notice of the meeting was handed to him, which he took, with the remark, "Perhaps I will turn in some night."

That evening the preacher was reading the 7th of Luke, when the door gently opened, and the unbelieving, but evidently interested, young doctor entered. His surprise was not small to find in the preacher the one who had invited him; but the Lord's sermon of twelve words: "THY SINS ARE FORGIVEN. THY FAITH HATH SAVED THEE; GO IN PEACE," soon riveted him; and though he did not go "in peace," he left impressed, and aroused to a sense of his need and danger, such as he had never experienced before.

The next Lord's Day found the doctor again present, as an aged and grey-haired servant of God sweetly unfolded the touching parable of Luke 15, and showed how, when man was lost, Jesus came after him; when he was dead, how the Spirit quickened him; and when he returned repentant, how the Father welcomed and rejoiced over him. Conviction of sin was now evident in the young physician, and two Lord's Days later, when he again heard his medical friend preach from the words, "Wilt thou go with this man?" he felt he must decide for Christ that night. He stayed to the second meeting for anxious inquirers; and then in converse with his friend, as they walked towards the hospital together, admitted that he had never been easy since the conversation in the dissecting-room. Persuaded in his mind that what he had heard was not true, he had gone home, searched the Bible for support, only to find that he was wrong himself, and that what he had heard was the truth. Convinced that he was wrong, and that God's salvation was free to all, by simple faith in Jesus, he had balanced the blessings of the gospel against "the pleasures of sin for a season", the devil had kicked the beam the wrong way, so he shut up the Bible, and turned again to the world with its sin and folly, but had never had an hour's peace. Now he saw he was lost, and was asked, "Do you believe that Jesus came to save the lost?"

"I do; I believe He came to save me, and I believe in Him."

"Then are you not saved?

"That is just the difficulty. I don't feel sure."

"Well," said his friend, "if God is worth believing on two counts, why not on the third? When God says in His Word you are a lost sinner, what say you?"

"I believe Him," he replied.

"Good. And when He says He sent His Son to die for you, and that if you trust in Him you shall be saved, what do you say?"

"I believe Him, with all my heart."

"Quite right. Now then, when He says, 'He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life' (John 3: 36), are you going to doubt Him?"

"That won't do. If He speaks truly on the two counts, He must speak as truly on the third. Yes, I see it. I believe in His Son, and I have everlasting life. He says it, and it must be true. Thank God, I am saved, forgiven, — without any works of my own, — by simple faith in Jesus."

"One question more: 'Wilt thou go with this man?'" "I will go!" was the emphatic reply; and the doctor started for glory, and is yet on his road, sure of the end through grace.

Reader, have you started yet? If not, just start at once.

"We know there's a bright and a glorious home,

Away in the heavens high,

Where all the redeem'd shall with Jesus dwell

But will you be there, and I?

In robes of white, o'er the streets of gold,

Beneath a cloudless sky,

They walk in the light of their Father's smile

But will you be there, and I?

From every kingdom of earth they come

To join the triumphal cry,

Singing, 'Worthy the Lamb that once was slain;'

But will you be there, and I?

If you take the loving Saviour now,

Who for sinners once did die,

When He gathers His own in that bright home,

Then you'll be there, and I.

If we are shelter'd by the cross,

And through the blood brought nigh,

Our utmost gain we'll count but loss,

Since you'll be there, and I."

Noah's Carpenters.

You don't look at all like a patient, Miss Emmie," I said, as a fresh, rosy-cheeked girl of seventeen, the very picture of health — the daughter of Christian parents — came one day into my consulting-room.

"No, Doctor. I'm not come for advice, but mamma said that she thought you would help me with a little subscription;" and at the same time she produced a collecting-book, entitled, "Indian Vernacular Society."

"What is the object of this society?"

"Oh, its object is to teach the little boys and girls in India to read the Bible in their own language; and I am doing all I can to help it forward," she answered most eagerly.

"A capital idea," I replied. "I suppose, then, the real object is that the children may hear of Jesus, and be brought to believe in Him, and thus be saved, and know that they are?"

"Exactly so."

"Well, I hope the Lord will use this effort to the blessing of many of them," I replied; "but before going further, may I ask you, Miss Emmie, did you ever hear of Noah's carpenters?"

"Noah's carpenters! No; who were they?" she replied, rather uneasily.

"They were people who may have helped to build the ark, by which others were saved, and yet never got in themselves."

"I never thought of them before."

"Very likely. But do you not think you are somewhat like them? Here you come trying to help other people to be saved, and yet, so far as I have ever heard, you are not saved yourself. Tell me, do you think you have ever yet come to Jesus yourself, and had your sins washed away? To put it plainly, are you saved?"

This query was followed by a lengthened silence; her face flushed crimson, her eyes filled, and then, with a burst of tears, she replied:

"No, I know I am not saved. I see, I have been like Noah's carpenters."

The bow drawn at a venture had truly entered the joints of the harness, and she was from that moment a spirit-wounded, and convicted sinner. A long and interesting conversation followed, which I need not relate. We looked at the Word of God, and she found out to her utter dismay and distress, that all her own righteousnesses were but as filthy rags in the sight of God, and that she was an utterly lost soul, needing cleansing and pardon. In this awakened state, after prayer with her, she left me.

Some weeks rolled by, and I was wondering what had been going on in my young friend's soul, when she again came at my consulting hour. Her pale anxious face betrayed what her words soon confirmed, viz., that since we parted she had passed through days and nights of deep soul-anguish.

"Mamma said she thought I might come and see you again, for I am so miserable and wretched I don't know what to do;" and, indeed, she looked all she said.

"I am most glad to see you, Miss Emmie. I suppose today you want something for yourself, not for others? "

"Yes. I am most anxious to be saved, if I only knew how to come to Jesus; but I am so wicked, and my heart so hard, and I feel so dead."

"You must just come to Him as you are — in all your sins — for He has said, 'Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.' just believe Him simply. Take Him at His word."

"I do believe on Him, but I don't get any good from it. I don't feel any different."

"You must not look at your feelings; you must just hear what He says, and give heed to His word. Now, look at this verse," and I turned to John 5: 24. "Mark what Jesus says, 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.' Now, tell me, who is speaking here?"

"Jesus."

"And to whom is He speaking?"

"To me."

"Well, do you hear His word?"

"Yes."

"And do you believe Him that sent Him? Do you believe that God sent Him to save you, to die for you, and to wash away your sins?

"Yes, I truly believe He did."

"Now, then, see, you have complied with the two conditions given, you have heard and believed; listen to the three blessed consequences that the Lord says accrue to the one that hears and believes. Such an one 'hath everlasting life,' that is a present possession. Inasmuch as you hear and believe, what does Jesus say you now possess?"

"He says I have 'everlasting life.'"

"Good. Stick to that. But there is more in the verse. He says he that heareth and believeth 'shall not come into condemnation.' That, you observe, provides for the future. There can be no condemnation for the one who believes in Jesus, because He Himself, on the cross, bore that condemnation. Now, since you have heard and believed, what does He say as to your future?"

"He says 'shall not come into condemnation.'"

"If He says you shall not, do you think you ever can?"

"No; of course not. He would not tell me what is not true. He cannot lie."

"Exactly so. Thus you see He meets the present and the future in this verse. Nor is that all. We all lay in death; we were each one 'dead in trespasses and sins,' and out of that state we pass the moment we hear His voice, for He quickens us by His word; and so He adds here that the one who hears and believes 'is passed from death unto life.' Nothing could be simpler or more blessed."

Yes, I see it now. I have heard and believed, and, therefore, I have 'passed from death unto life.' Oh, how simple it all seems now!" and the pent-up feelings again got relief in a shower of tears, not now tears of conviction and distress, but those joyous, gladsome tears that will flow down the cheeks of a redeemed, pardoned, blood-washed sinner, when God's grace is tasted and enjoyed. I prayed with her, and thanked God for His grace in saving her; and she left full of peace and joy in believing.

Many years have elapsed since my young friend found Jesus, but I rejoice to know she holds on her way, a bright, happy witness of the Lord's grace, and is an earnest labourer for Christ, and a true soul-seeker in her own quiet sphere.

Reader, where about are you? Are you a Noah's carpenter or a real genuine Christian? Let not this hour pass away and leave you as it found you.

Did it find you unsaved? As you value your soul, let it not pass away and be for ever a witness against you and your unbelief Be persuaded to come to Jesus now. Then shall your future be bright and joyous, for you shall be saved, sanctified, and satisfied.

"WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?"

NOTHING, either great or small;

Nothing, sinner, no

Jesus did it, did it all,

Long, long ago.

When He from His lofty throne

Stooped to do and die,

Everything was fully done,

Hearken to His cry

"IT IS FINISHED!" Yes indeed,

Finished every jot.

Sinner, this is all you need

Tell me, is it not?

Weary, working, burdened one,

Wherefore toil you so?

Cease your doing; all was done

Long, long ago.

Till to JESUS' WORK you cling

By a simple faith;

"Doing" is a deadly thing

"Doing" ends in death.

Cast your deadly "doing" down —

Down at Jesus' feet;

Stand "IN HIM," in Him alone,

Gloriously "COMPLETE!"

Divine Openings.

"Now, when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape, like a dove, upon him; and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased." — Luke 3: 21, 22.

HEAVEN OPENED ON JESUS.

This scripture presents to us a very wonderful scene, — a Man on the earth on whom heaven is opened. Supposing the heavens were opened again now, and you became conscious that the eye of God rested on you, that He was close to you, how would you feel, my reader? Do you think God could speak of you, as of this blessed One here, as "well pleased" with your ways? God's delight in Jesus was attested by the gift of the Holy Ghost. He was the seal of the Father's delight in the perfect humanity and spotless ways of that lowly, praying Man. The Holy Ghost came on the Lord without blood, without redemption. The believer gets the Holy Ghost now as the direct result of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ; it is the seal of certain redemption, as having been cleansed by His precious blood.

There had never been anything up to this moment, in the history of man, to equal this scene. The birth of Jesus was wonderful, and a messenger from heaven might and did announce His birth; but now the heaven is opened as He emerged from the water, and the voice of God, the Father, is heard saying, "This is my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased." He was the only sinless, holy, perfect, blessed man in this scene of whom God could say, "In thee I am well pleased." Oh! the Christian's heart is refreshed by the sight, so unique, but so perfectly comely and fitting. There is no "hear him" at this point, as in the transfiguration on the Mount. Why? Because His moral worth and blessed words ought to have gained Him every ear, and it is taken for granted that He would be listened to, Further on in the Gospel, the Father's voice is again heard saying, "This is my beloved Son," but adding emphatically, "hear him" (Luke 9: 35).

Jesus was about thirty years of age. Time — the true test of all — had been given to show what He was. Here was One of whom the world was utterly ignorant. God's Son was in their midst, and they knew Him not. Here it is no question of a man coming, and testifying to Him, as John the Baptist had already done, but the Father of that Son speaks, saying, "This is my beloved Son."

Reader, what think you of Him? Can you answer and say, "This is my beloved Saviour." It is a sad thing if you cannot.

Having seen thus heaven opened on the Son of God here on earth, I will now point out to you a few other things in the Word of God that are opened; and I trust, as the result, that your heart may be opened, for if your heart be not opened to receive Christ, hell will yet open its mouth to receive you.

AN OPENED BOOK.

In Luke 4 Jesus is seen, in the power of the Holy Ghost, led into the wilderness, there utterly vanquishing Satan, morally, by dependence and obedience. Thereafter "he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom, was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath-day, and stood up for to read" (ver. 17). He begins at home, where He is known. "And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias: and when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book."

Now the passage, from which this is a quotation, goes on thus: — "To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God" (Isa. 61: 2). But look at the grace of Christ; the moment he gets to that comma — and for the unsaved sinner there is really nothing but a comma between him and hell — He closes the book. If the Lord were to now open the book, it would be all over with you, unsaved reader, for "the day of vengeance" come, "the acceptable year of the Lord" has ended. Now is the "acceptable year of the Lord," — the day of grace, of mercy, of pardon, and salvation; when the Lord again opens the book, it will be "the day of vengeance," and then, where will you be?

When Jesus came to this comma, why does He not read on? Because He says, as it were, the day of judgment is deferred, put back, while grace utters her lovely messages. How long is the acceptable time called? A year! But it is "the day of vengeance." judgment will come in a moment, when you are not thinking of it. judgment is short and swift, — a day suffices for it. It is a year of grace, and will you, therefore, trifle with it? I beseech you not to.

Does a "broken-hearted" one read this? God sent His Son to heal your broken heart. Are you a "Poor" sinner? God sent His Son to enrich you with all the blessings of the Gospel. Have you been a captive to sin and Satan? Jesus came "to preach deliverance to the captives." Oh! it is worth while to have one's heart broken to know what it is to have Him bind it up. Would Mary and her sister have been without those four days at Bethany? "Oh, no," they would say, "our very sorrow, and misery, and necessity, gave an opportunity for showing what He was. We saw the tear in His eye, we heard the words of comfort from His blessed lips, we saw the work of power of His hand; no, those days we would not have been without."

Christ came, He says, "to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind." Christ opens everything. Are you blind? He opens your eyes. Are you in prison? He opens the door and sets you free. Are you in the grave? He unlocks its hold, and lets you out. What could man do for Lazarus? Lay him in the tomb. What could Jesus do for him? Call him out of the tomb, and then say, "Loose him, and let him go." It is life and liberty. This is the gospel. Do you know it? Have you been healed, delivered, set free? This is the day in which Christ can bless you, in which the Lord can receive you, — it is "the acceptable year of the Lord," and it still goes on.

I love to think it was the Lord Himself first came to preach these glad tidings. The listeners were interested for a moment, and "wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth" (ver. 22). But presently, when He began to touch their consciences, it was another thing. God must reach the conscience, for while you learn that He is good, you must also learn that you are utterly bad; while you learn that "God is love," you must also learn that your heart is full of hatred against Him. If you learn the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, you must also learn that He is the truth too. Thus, though the people wondered at His grace, they could not bear the truth, so they "rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong" (ver. 29). Awful exposure of their heart's hatred! What does He do? "He, passing through the midst of them, went his way" (ver. 30). What was His way? It was away of divine mercy and goodness to man in every conceivable condition. Did He meet hungry men — He fed them; blind men — He gave them sight; leprous men — He cleansed them; deaf men — He opened their ears; dead men — He raised them. Whatever the need was, He met it. This was His way. He was the Healer, the Helper, the Blesser, this gracious Son of God.

At length men got tired of being ministered to by Christ, when, along with His grace, the truth as to man and his real state came out, and they made up their minds that they would not bear His presence any longer. They wanted, and plotted, to get rid of Him. This is what men did with this blessed One. They cried, "Crucify him, crucify him." Tired of His presence, they put Him on the cross. Perfect love and goodness personified was in their midst, and they could only say, "Away with him!" When He was presented to them as their king, they cried, "We have no king but Caesar," mocked Him with a crown of thorns and purple raiment, and then having stripped, and nailed Him to a tree, they gambled for His garments beneath His eyes! Who put Him on the cross? Men; men with hearts like yours and mine. Yes, and our sins nailed Him there. Of this expression of perfect goodness, concerning whom God said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," man said, "He is guilty of death," and they put Him on the cross.

Look at the awfulness of the hardness of the heart of man. Dying, and — as they thought Jesus was — dying of thirst, when one more tender than others would have given Him something to drink, the rest said, "Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save him." Seeing Him suffer, they say, "Let Him suffer; give Him nothing to assuage His burning thirst." And He died! And does God at once take vengeance for the murder of His Son? No; God takes that moment, as it were, to say, "I will put away everything that could come between you and Me." He rends the veil of the temple from the top to the bottom. That which stood between God and man, is taken away by God. That death of shame and agony the Saviour suffered, at the hand of man, was the actual means of putting away the very sin of those who crucified Him.

OPENED GRAVES.

A work was at that moment wrought by Jesus that opened the grave itself. Nature was, as it were, more tender than the hearts of men. "The earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose" (Matt. 27: 51, 52). What took man into death? Sin. What took man out of death? Redemption. The graves were opened the moment the Saviour died. Before even Christ's own grave was tenanted, God opened the graves of the saints. Christ has robbed death of its sting, the grave of its victory. By dying, He has annulled death? How do I see that first? By an opened grave. The whole question of sin has been settled by the cross of Christ; and the opened grave and resurrection of the dead, are God's testimony to His estimate of the value of the work of Christ, and now the believer is associated with a risen Christ.

OPENED UNDERSTANDINGS.

The Lord rises from the dead, the work of redemption accomplished. The proof of redemption is in the opened graves, - opened graves the moment He died, and empty graves the moment He is risen. The day the Lord rose from the dead, He took His place amongst His own loved ones, said, "Peace unto you," and "then opened he their understandings, that they might understand the scriptures" (Luke 24: 45).

THE HEAVENS OPENED TO US.

But the work of Christ opens other things besides the grave, for, having ascended into heaven, and sent down the Holy Ghost, that blessed Spirit of truth indwells the believer; and we read of Stephen, that "he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7: 55, 56). Heaven was opened then to a saint to look up and see Jesus at the right hand of God — to see a Man in the glory of God. A Man has gone in there to represent the believer in the glory of God, the Man who took his place, and bore his sins on the cross.

AN OPENED HEART.

These blessed tidings, about a risen and glorified Christ, the Holy Ghost loves to spread; and Paul, led of the Spirit, in Acts 16, finds himself called to Europe to proclaim them; and at Philippi, by the river side, "a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul" (ver. 14).

Has the Lord ever opened your heart, my dear reader?

This woman heard and believed, and then took her stand out and out with the Lord's servants; for "when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there. And she constrained us" (ver. 15). This woman opened her heart to the Lord, and opened her house to His servants. Her heart was the Lord's, and her house was His too.

Christ opened everything; opened heaven, opened the book, opened eyes, opened graves, opened understandings to understand the Scriptures, opened hearts and houses, — and can you have a closed heart still? Oh! listen to this, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3: 20). Now you have the opportunity of opening. It has been the Lord opening hitherto. Is your heart still shut? Look then at Rev. 4, "Behold, a door was opened in heaven." The Lord has there come, and called up His own saints; and so what John sees open, the foolish virgins of Matt. 25 will find shut.

If you refuse to open your heart to the Lord, there is yet another scene that concerns you. In Rev. 19: 11, heaven is opened again, and Christ is seen coming out to "judge and make war;" and then, in Rev. 20, certain "books were opened." The book of the history of your life down here is opened by the hand of Jesus, and what does He read of you? Born in sin, lived in sin, died in sin; born in sin, lived an unbeliever, died an unbeliever. And lest there should be any doubt upon this point, God turns to His own book — the book of life; He looks down His register for your name, to see if your name is recorded there. Alas! it is not there. Oh, what a fearful thing for you! Will you not turn to Jesus today? Will you still shut your eyes to everything that He has opened? If so, you shall yet see two things, — you shall see the Lord when He opens the heavens in glory, and the books in judgment, and you shall see what may well fill you with dismay, for you will behold, and descend into

AN OPENED HELL,

when the prophet's woe is fulfilled on the careless pleasure-loving worldling, according as it is written, "Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them! And the harp and the viol, the tabret and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts; but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his hands. Therefore my, people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge; and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst. Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it" (Isa.5: 11-14).

"A Leap in the Dark."

"Then to you death will be a leap in the dark?"

"Well, yes, just so; I suppose it will be."

The one who made this terrible confession was a shoemaker of middle age, slowly nearing the grave under the fell power of consumption. Worse than this, he was an infidel, — a determined, avowed sceptic. I had been asked to visit him in his attic quarters by an old friend, who was himself a shoemaker, but, through grace, a Christian, and naturally most anxious about his unbelieving acquaintance. His friend obtained his permission for me to call by saying that, as a physician, perhaps I could give him some prescription which would relieve his sufferings; and when he begged me go, told me briefly of the sadly darkened state of the shoemaker's mind, urging me to put Christ before him if I could.

Having carefully examined him, and thus got his confidence by the interest which I displayed in his case, he asked me, at length, if I thought his condition amenable to cure. To this I replied that I was sorry to have to tell him I did not think he could recover.

"Then, how long do you think I have got to live, doctor?" he said.

"A few months, perhaps a year," I replied.

He made no reply, and the stolid look of indifference on his gloomy face was in no way changed by my remark. As he said no more, I continued, —

"And are you ready to die, Mr F-?"

"Of course I am, as ready as you, or any one else."

"And what has made you ready? Are your sins forgiven, and all washed away in the precious blood of Christ?"

"Oh, that's all stuff. I don't believe in any of that nonsense. I'm a freethinker."

"So I regret to perceive; but your being a freethinker will not fit you for God's presence?"

"I tell you I don't believe in a God at all, so I shan't have to meet Him!"

"Your not believing in Him will not help you to evade the solemn certainty of having to meet Him. The Scripture says, 'So, then, every one of us shall give account of himself to God.'"

"But I don't believe in the Bible. It's only fit for old women who can't reason. No reasonable man believes it in these days."

"Well, I am not an old woman, but, I trust, a reasonable man, and yet I am free to confess that I believe the Bible to be the Word of God. I believe it heartily from cover to cover."

"And what good has it done you?"

"Untold good, thank God. It has given me the knowledge of Himself in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. I know from its blessed pages that my sins are all forgiven, that I have eternal life, and, though I am sure of nothing for a moment in this life, I am quite clear and happy as to the future were I to die, or the Lord to come."

"Oh, that's all a delusion. Nobody knows anything about the future. How can they? No one has come back from the dead to tell us what comes after death."

"That is a great mistake. Why, the One who died for me is the very One who has come back from the dead, to assure me as to my future blessedness, as the fruit and consequence of His death for Me."

"I don't believe a word of it. No one can know what will be after death."

"Then to you death will be a leap in the dark?"

"Well, yes, just so; I suppose it will be," was his rather hesitating reply.

"Ah, my friend!" I exclaimed, "I am far better off than you, through God's infinite grace. If I should die, death would be a leap in the light."

"How do you make that out?"

"Because I have got the light now. Christ is my Light. He said, 'I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life' (John 8: 12). And He said also, 'Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light. I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness' (John 12: 35, 36, 46). Both you and I are, alike, sinners before God, but the difference between us is this: — You do not believe in the Lord Jesus, are walking in darkness, and know not whither you are going, viz., to judgment, and the lake of fire; I do believe in Him, have got out of darkness by letting in the light, and know clearly where I am going, viz., 'to be with Christ, which is far better.' Don't you think now that I have the best of it? All I can say is, that a man who takes a leap in the dark, when he may take a leap in the light must be a downright fool. What say you to that?"

He paused a moment or two, and then replied, "Well, sir, I never looked at it quite in that way before. I won't say there's not some reason in your argument."

With this our interview closed. I left him with my heart lifted to God that His Word might do its own work in his heart and conscience. I never saw him again. Upwards of twelve years have rolled away. Last June his friend, who had asked me to visit him, called to see me, and said, "Do you recollect, many years ago, visiting an infidel shoemaker in L- Street?

"Perfectly; and what took place between us too. What became of him?"

"He died in the Royal Infirmary just a year after you saw him."

"Died an infidel?"

"Oh no, thank God, he died a happy Christian, confessing his faith in the Lord, and giving a bright testimony. He dated the beginning of the change in his heart from that morning you saw him. Something you said to him about 'a leap in the dark' stuck to him, and he was never happy till he found the Lord."

"The Lord be praised," was my rejoinder, as I heard, with deep joy, of the Lord's grace to one who seemed so fortified in unbelief. It is, however, but another illustration of His goodness, and of the truth of His Word. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall not return unto me void; but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper whereto I sent it" (Isa. 55: 8-11).

And now, my dear reader, let me, in penning a few concluding lines, ask you, Are you still in "darkness," or have you received Christ as your "light"? When you pass into eternity, will it be for you "a leap in the dark," or "a leap in the light"?

I beseech you, most affectionately, not to put these queries from you. Answer them honestly before God. If you cannot reply, "To me death would be a leap in the light," turn to Jesus now. Trust Him, as you read these lines, and your eternal salvation is sure. "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness," may well win the confidence of your heart towards the blessed One who speaks, and who —

"Suffered in the shadow

That we might see the light."

Yes, He tasted death that we might live; endured the darkness, that we might enjoy the light; and sustained the judgment of God, that we might be freely justified. "Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." Again, "But now once, in the end of the world, hath he appeared, to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment; so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time, without sin, unto salvation" (1 Peter 3: 18; Heb. 9: 26-28).

Trust Him then, simply, my reader; and then when called hence, whether by falling asleep in Jesus, or, better, His coming in the air for His own (1 Thess. 4: 13-18), to you and to me, through infinite grace, it will be  A LEAP IN THE LIGHT.

The Rope from Above.

Some years since I was passing early one morning down one of the thoroughfares of Edinburgh, when I noticed numbers of people hastening rapidly in the direction in which I was going. The cause of the unusual stir I had no need to inquire, for just then the road made a bend, and full in view was a large crowd gathered before a house on fire. Sheets of flame leapt out of the windows, and dense volumes of smoke were rolling forth from the first floor.

Technically speaking, the burning house, itself the centre of a row, was "a first flat" and, fortunately or not as the case may have been, the tenants were out at the time. For the sake of my readers who are not acquainted with the "flat" system of building houses, I may say that the house in question, and two above it, entered from the street by a stair common to them all, each house having its own door opening into the stair at various levels. This being so, ingress to or egress from flats No. 2 and 3 can only be had by passing the door of No. 1, which really answers to the drawing-room floor of an ordinary house, the ground floor being usually, as in this case, a shop.

Drawing near the scene, I saw at a glance what was the state of matters. Neither fire-engine, fire-escape, fireman, nor fire-ladder were as yet at hand, while at the open windows of flat No. 2 stood two females, an aged woman and her daughter. Their dishevelled state and general attire told that from their slumber they had been awakened by the cry of "Fire," Only to find the floor beneath their feet in flames, their house filled with choking smoke, and the common stair, by which they sought escape, a miniature crater through which it was hopeless to attempt to pass.

Baulked in their efforts to leave by the stairs, at the windows they now appeared in company, uttering distressing shrieks of fright, and imploring help from the populace beneath. A fearful agony was on the face of each as they cried, and looked in vain for help from below. True, the help of firemen and ladders had been sought, but they were long in coming. At such a time each moment seems an age!

It was a touching sight as, side by side, they stood, — themselves utterly helpless, — while the devouring flame below seemed only to mock their agony, and with lurid blaze ever and anon leapt madly forth and up, from the window directly beneath them, as though it would gladly devour them where they stood, or drive them back to suffocation. The breeze was fresh, and the snow-white hair of the terror-stricken mother was waving wildly in the air, a strange contrast to the black smoke and lambent flames around. Altogether it was a weird and painful sight.

Just then a cheer rang forth from the crowd, and, looking higher than the women, I saw that some kindly workmen had, by another common stair, managed to get on to the roof, carrying with them a slender rope. To fasten it round a stack of chimneys — fortunately in a direct line behind the open window — was the work of a minute or two, and then, giving the rope a coil, and a well-directed fling over the eaves of the house, right down in front of the terrified, and now surprised women (for they expected no help from above), fell their only way of escape. Loud hurrahs greeted the providers of this way of salvation, while cries of "Lay hold of the rope," "Come down by the rope," indicated plainly to the unfortunate pair what they were expected to do. A way of escape having been provided by others, they were expected and urged at once to avail themselves of it. How right, and how simple this judgment; do you not agree with it, reader?

Quick as thought, I saw the women lay hold of the rope; but now the question arose, who should go first, — in other words, who had faith to trust this slender means of safety. From where I stood I could note an altercation as to who should first avail herself of it, and some minutes I think must have elapsed, while encouraging and hastening words rose thickly from below, — "Make haste," — "Don't waste time," — "You may safely trust it," etc. etc. At length the mother gained her point, — she was stout and heavy, it might not sustain her; the daughter was thin and fragile, she might safely trust it. A mother's love, I doubt not, was under and behind all, — a love only eclipsed by a Saviour's. The daughter took the rope in both her hands and got on to the window-sill. The crowd held its breath. The rope was pulled on first, to see if it held on above. All right. The thirty-five or forty feet beneath was looked at. The rope was long enough, and it was strong enough, and yet she lingered. I saw the reason why; when just about to launch away, doubts and fears evidently rose, and by the heels of her boots she clung to the raised sill. This lasted a moment, and then, with instinctive love, the mother gave her a push, and fairly forth she swung.

Descending too rapidly her hands "fired," and, while still some distance from the ground, she let go the rope and fell. Fearing this event, some strong men had gathered underneath, and into their arms she tumbled, receiving no harm whatever. The mother, encouraged by her child's success, and learning by her fall not to be too hasty in her descent, now committed herself to the trusty rope, and hand under hand slowly coming down, was soon by her daughter's side, right thankful for the rope from above.

At the time, and since, I have often thought how this scene illustrates the state of man as a sinner, and the dealings of God with him in grace. Man has sinned, and his sin has placed him in a position of imminent danger. "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3: 23). This word includes you and me, dear reader. Further, "The wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6: 23). And again God speaks thus, "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment " (Heb. 9: 27). As to what this judgment is which overtakes the dead, we are left in no doubt whatever. Hear God's testimony, "I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. . . . And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire" (Rev. 20: 12, 15).

Here we are told the final doom of the dead. They have no life suited to God. "Dead in sins" delineates their time condition. "Eternal life, the gift of God," they cared not then to accept; hence their eternal condition corresponds to their time state. Solemn truth! The actions of life bring forth fruit for eternity. Read what follows: "But the fearful (i.e., cowards, — those who are afraid or ashamed to trust and confess Christ), and unbelieving (those who are avowed infidels and scoffers, though outwardly moral and well-behaved, — and is it not notable that these two classes should head the list?), and the abominable, and murderers, and whore-mongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death" (Rev. 21: 8). I know men scoff at these solemn words of God. This does not make them less real or terrible, but only manifests the folly of the human heart, which refuses to believe God's testimony as to its present guilt and godless state, and future equally godless condition for eternity, and despises the way of salvation which God in His grace has provided.

The women I have written of were in as much danger while asleep and unconscious of it, as when fully alive to their critical state. Is your case different, O unsaved reader? Not one whit.

But perhaps you bow to God's Word, and seeing your guilt and sin, tremble in view of "judgment to come." It is well with you if so, and better still if you are willing to take God's way of salvation. He it is who alone can save. He has, so to speak, let down a rope from above, long and strong enough to meet any and every sinner's case, no matter how many or heavy his sins may be. Christ is God's way of escape from the lake of fire, and if you would escape the due reward of your deeds, my friend, you must trust to Him.

"Lay hold of the rope," said the crowd, preaching a suited gospel to the women. "Lay hold of Christ," say I. "This is my beloved Son, hear him," says God the Father. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. Come unto me," says Jesus. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. . . . He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life: but the wrath of God abideth on him," says John the Baptist. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," say Paul and Silas. "Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God," says Peter, the fisherman. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins," says John the Evangelist. "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed," says Isaiah, the prophet. "Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him," says David, the Psalmist-king. What a cloud of witnesses to His worth! He has come down to save, — it has all come from His own side, — and is it not strange that sinners will not trust Him?

Dear reader, if you still have your heels hooked on to some window-sill of feelings or hesitancy, oh, let me give you the push just now that shall cause you simply and sweetly to trust the Lord Jesus.

Fear not that you will fall. He will hold you up, the rope will not break; and His grasp of you — when once you commit yourself to Him — will never unloose; and He will land you in glory as the fruit of His work on the cross for you.

"Look to Jesus, look and live

Mercy at His hands receive

He has died upon the tree,

And His words are, 'Look to me.'

Come to Jesus, come and live;

He has endless life to give;

He from sin will set you free;

For His words are, 'Come to me.'

Rest in Jesus, there repose,

Shelter find from all thy foes;

Let His name be all thy plea,

For His words are, 'Rest in me.'"

"Milk without Money;" or,

A Lesson We Must All Learn

"Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money: come ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money, and without price." — Isa. 55: 1.

I was on an evangelistic tour through the north of Ireland, accompanied by a beloved fellow-labourer in the gospel. Being announced to preach at the town of L-, on the 14th September, two routes to our destination lay open to us, — a long detour by rail, or a direct drive of about twenty miles on an outside jaunting-car over some verdant mountains. Taking the wise advice of our host of the previous night — a beloved brother in the Lord — we chose the latter, and being well furnished with little gospel books for the journey, we started. My friend sat one side of the car and I the other, and all along our journey we scattered our precious gospel seeds, giving them to walkers, jerking them to riders in vehicles, and now and then jumping off, as our stout nag toiled up the hills; and handing them to rustic cottagers, and sun-burned reapers in the fields of golden grain which, on all hands, waved under the balmy zephyr breezes of the loveliest day I ever saw in Erin's isle. I am thankful to say our tracts were welcomed on all hands; and one feels sure the fruit of this happy service will show up, in the day of the Lord, in the persons of some precious souls blessed through these little silent messengers.

The sun began to get very hot, and quite naturally, after two or three hours of this sort of work, we became rather thirsty. We had come on no very drinkable water, so, spying a little house where I knew there would be a cow or two, I asked our driver if he thought I could get some milk there. Receiving an affirmative answer, I ran to the door, which was open, and knocked. This brought out from the innermost apartment a sedate but pleasant- looking female, evidently, I should judge, the mistress of the primitive establishment. Looking at me, as much as to say, What do you want? but not speaking, I courteously said, "Will you be good enough to sell me some milk?"

She paused a moment, and then very firmly replied "No!" following up this decided negative with a pleasant smile, and "but I will give you some," putting as strong an emphasis on the "give" as she had placed on the "no."

So saying, she turned back to her little dairy, while I turned to my friend, who had come to my side, saying, "Now, that's the gospel, is it not? God gives, but He will not sell, salvation." We had a most delicious draught of cold sweet milk, for which we most truly gave her thanks, accompanied by some little gospel books, and a few words about God's blessed Son and His great salvation, which was as free to her, by faith, as she had made her milk to us, and then resumed our journey.

Then, and many a time since, I have pondered over this scene as a lovely illustration of God's way of dealing with souls who really want salvation. We did not know, and therefore did not count, on the bounty of the one we appealed to. And so it is with man. Not knowing God, he knows not the grace and love of His heart; and, though needy, and owning it too, fancies he must bring an equivalent to God ere he can get from Him that which he needs. If you, my reader, are of this mistaken class, may God open your eyes to see His way of salvation. His grace provides it, and not your works of any kind. There are two good reasons for this. First, God is too rich to sell salvation; and second, man is too poor to buy it. Hence you must get it as a gift, if you are to get it at all.

The quotation I have made at the head of this paper shows this truth very simply. The "thirsty" are invited. And are not you among this number? You certainly are, if you have not yet found Jesus, for "your labour," whatever its nature, "satisfieth not," our verses say. Thirst is a craving which the suited fluid alone can satisfy. Now the thirst of an anxious soul is really for God and His Christ, though very likely it could not put it in so many words; but the Lord Jesus, who knows the heart well, says, "Whosoever drinketh of this water [the well of this world] shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst" (John 4: 13, 14). Precious words! But not more precious than true. Again, He says, "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink" (John 7: 37); giving also this sweet assurance, "He that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst; . . . and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6: 35, 37).

Now, dear anxious reader, are not you invited? Do not these glorious words of the Saviour encourage you to come to Him? They ought to, if they do not. Listen again, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters." "But," you say, "how can I be sure it means me? Perhaps I am not thirsty enough, not anxious enough, for salvation." Very likely; no one ever was as anxious as he should have been, considering God's view of sin, and the awful danger of the unsaved sinner. But the point is not the measure of your anxiety, but the fact of your being "thirsty" or willing at all. If so, hear the word of the Lord: "I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. . . . Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Rev. 21: 6, 22: 17). What charming words! "I will give . . . freely." That is God's side. "Let him take . . . freely." That is your side. God gives; all you have to do is to take what He gives.

"What must I bring?" say you. Nothing! Come to Jesus as you are. "He that hath no money" is the invited one. You have no equivalent for that which God dispenses, so you are bid to come and buy "without money and without price." Why "buy"? Because it supposes a person in earnest. When a person goes into a shop to "buy" an article, his very presence there shows he really wanted it, or he would not have gone to the trouble of entering the mart. Buying implies direct dealing between two parties. This is the very thing God wants. He wishes you brought into His own presence in real desire to have salvation — the water of life — Christ. You come. What then? You find all is a gift. How simple!

What earnestness is with God, when thrice in this one verse He says "Come!" I cannot refrain from quoting it again, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money: COME ye, buy and eat; yea, COME, buy wine and milk without money, and without price." How blessedly falls that heaven-born word on the ear — Come! come! COME! Who could refuse such grace? Come as you are; come in your sins; come in your guilt. Come in your distress; come in your sorrow, your want, your woe, your misery, your helplessness, your nothingness, your poverty, your hardness of heart, — yea, exactly as you are, as you read these lines. Only come, come to Jesus, and you will be received, blessed, forgiven, cleansed, and saved on the very spot.

More, you will be made the possessor of a new life, for, He adds here, "Incline your ear, and come unto me; hear, and your soul shall live." This, too, is a gift, as is all else that the soul receives from God; for it is written, "The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 6: 23).

Rest assured, if you come in any way but as a simple receiver, you must be rejected, as was Cain. Did you never notice that the Lord Jesus said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20: 35). This being so, who is to have the more blessed place, you or God? Let one speak who knew well this truth, "Without all contradiction, the less is blessed of the better" (Heb. 7: 7). Now, then, what do you say? I will tell you what I say: "Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift" (2 Cor. 9: 15).

The Comfort of the Blood.

"The blood was my first comfort, and I believe it will be my last comfort. . . . I feel as though the Lord were leading me from earth to heaven, by the steps of the 23rd Psalm, 'The Lord is my shepherd, . . . and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.'" The words came slowly from the lips of the dying man — a doctor — passing away from a loving wife and children, in the prime of life, with a rest and joy in the Lord I have never seen surpassed. A few days later he passed away, with "Bless the Lord" on his lips.

Many physicians are infidels. Why, I cannot say. I would that all such could have seen this dear friend of many years patiently pass through months of weakness, always rejoicing in Christ, and then at the last bear witness to the comfort of the despised blood of Jesus.

Ah! there is no real foundation for the soul apart from the blood of Christ. That blood cleanseth from all sin, removes every stain, purges the conscience, purifies the soul, relieves the distressed and sin-burdened heart, and sets the one who trusts it perfectly free in the presence of God. Death is robbed of its sting, the grave of its victory, and "judgment to come" has no meaning for the one who rests only on that which the Holy Ghost calls "the precious blood of Christ."

What folly can exceed that which despises God's only way of salvation — Jesus's blood? No solid real comfort is found apart from Christ and His blood.

What a portion is the Christian's! He has a title without a flaw, and a prospect without a cloud.

Infidel, what comfort will you have on your deathbed?

"Go to Joseph."

Joseph is a most beautiful and complete type of the Lord Jesus in the days of His humiliation and in the days of His exaltation. The day is not come yet, when God will compel men to give Jesus His due; because God has, what Pharaoh had not, long patience, and the long-suffering of the Lord is salvation.

Joseph, you will remember, went out in the guilelessness and love of his heart to meet his brethren (Gen. 37). They plotted against him to slay him, and at length he was sold to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver, the price of the meanest slave. And I need not remind you of Another, who came from His Father's house to see how His brethren fared, and met with precisely the same treatment, — "His own received him not," — and at length for thirty pieces of silver He was betrayed, and sold, and then cast out of this world; not into a dungeon, but into a grave.

It is true loving hands took Him down from the cross, and placed Him in a sepulchre; but wicked hands sealed Him there, and the world hoped never to see Him again; "but God raised him from the dead." The One whom men slew God raised up.

He came in all the love of His heart; but man had no love for Him. I ask you, my reader, Have you any love in your heart for Him? Does He look in and see in your heart affection for Himself? If not, do not you be the one to judge those who cast Him out in the day of His lowliness and humiliation.

As Pharaoh placed Joseph by his own side in his day, and they cried "Bow the knee" before him (Gen. 41: 40-43), so God has placed Jesus at His right hand today, and commands men everywhere to bow to Him. Every knee shall bow to Jesus; but God would have you bow your knee — and more, bow your heart — to Jesus now. Have you gone down in His presence, delighted to own His value now, delighted to call Him Lord? If not, the sooner you do, the better will it be for you.

The humiliation of Jesus gave Him a moral claim on God for exaltation, and He has exalted Him, and "given him a name which is above every name." There is no name like the name of Jesus. God has declared that all shall own Him Lord, — angels, men, and demons, — and you may be sure all includes you. The demons never owned Him Lord when He was on earth, but the day will come when God will compel them to own Him Lord. And for you, my reader, when is to be your day of owning Him Lord? now, when He is waiting on you in long-suffering grace, or in the day of His power, when you must bow? "Bow the knee" is God's word to you now.

Doubtless to many a proud Egyptian noble there was great humiliation in having to bow to this Hebrew servant; but the day of famine came, and neither their pride nor their parentage would meet, the pangs of famine. Then they cried to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh's word was, "Go to Joseph." And many a soul in trouble cries to God. What is God's answer, as it were? "Go to Jesus." Have you, my reader, the sense of soul hunger? God's word is, "Go to Jesus." Do you say, I know what soul hunger is; I would like to be saved, if I knew how to go to Jesus? Look, and see, in this interesting narrative, how they came to Joseph.

He was, according to the meaning of his name ZaphnathPaaneah, "a revealer of secrets," and "the saviour of the age." And is not this what Jesus is?

Look at Him in the 4th of John, when that poor woman meets Him at the well. Does He not show Himself to her as the revealer of secrets, when He said to her, "Thou hast had five husbands"? Ah! Christ knows all about you; Christ knows every sin; and for those who believe in Him He has pardoned every one. Knowing all about us, He loved us; and loving us, He came down to save us.

When the woman found He knew all about her, does she fly? No, she stays and talks with Him, and one moment she is a convicted sinner, and the next Christ reveals Himself to her, and she leaves her waterpot and goes into the city, and says, "Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did; is not this the Christ?" Instead of being afraid of Him, she calls to all to come and know Him too; and they come and find He is not only the revealer of secrets, but the Saviour of the age, — the true Joseph.

Have you come to this Revealer of secrets, this Saviour of the age, yet? Does your conscience answer, No; I have not come to Him yet? Why not, my reader? Perhaps you say in your heart, I do not know how He would receive me if I came.

Let us look at how Joseph received his brethren when they came to him in their need.

"Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons, Why do ye look one upon another? And he said, Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt; get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die. And Joseph's ten brethren went down to buy corn in Egypt" (Gen. 42: 1-3). They heard that there was corn in Egypt. They heard that there was deliverance to be had if they could only get it, and they were perishing. They heard there was salvation, and they felt their need, and felt they would like to be saved, but they could not get salvation without going to the saviour. They could not get deliverance apart from the deliverer; they could not get food in their hunger save from Joseph, — Joseph the despised one, the one they had hated, the one they had cast out and sold, but the one whom God had raised up to have every resource in his power, everything that could meet their need.

And you, my reader, do you feel you are in need of salvation? Have you heard of a deliverance which you would like to be yours? Is your soul hungry, and have you heard of "bread enough and to spare"? Have you heard of salvation that others have known, and would you know it too? Then you must come into living contact with the Saviour. It is from the Saviour only you can get salvation. Jesus is that Saviour, and he waits and longs to save you.

Joseph's brethren are in need now, and they come to Joseph; and you must do just the same — come to Jesus.

"And Joseph was the governor over the land, and he it was that sold to all the people of the land; and Joseph's brethren came, and bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth" (ver. 6).

They come and bow themselves down to Joseph; and it is a blessed thing when you are compelled, even by your need, to bow to Jesus, for He is the only one who can meet that need.

"And Joseph saw his brethren, and he knew them, but made himself strange unto them, and spake roughly unto them; and he said unto them, Whence come ye? And they said, From the land of Canaan to buy food. And Joseph knew his brethren, but they knew not him. . . . And Joseph said unto them, That is it that I spake unto you, saying, Ye are spies. Hereby ye shall be proved: By the life of Pharaoh ye shall not go forth hence, except your youngest brother come hither. . . . And he put them all together into ward three days" (vers. 7-17).

His brethren did not know Joseph, but he knew them. He spake roughly to them. They thought he was a hard man. Do you think Christ is an it austere man"? He will tell you what you are; tell you that you are a sinner full of enmity to God, that there is no good thing in you. People do not like that. They do not like to be shown what is in their hearts.

Joseph deals with his brethren as God does with the sinner, for God must get at our consciences, and must make us feel and know what we have been and are. So Joseph's dealings with his brethren arouse conscience, for they say, "We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us" (ver. 21).

It is a wonderful thing when the soul is brought to this point, to own itself a guilty sinner before God. God must have reality. Have you, my reader, ever seen yourself thus in the light of God's presence? Has your conscience ever been awakened to cry, I am undone; I am verily guilty?

"And Joseph turned himself about from them and wept." And did not Another greater than Joseph weep over guilty Jerusalem; and not only weep, but shed His precious blood because of the love of His heart to guilty man?

"Then Joseph commanded to fill their sacks with corn, and to restore every man's money into his sack" (ver. 25). What is the lesson of the money in the sack? That if you are to get salvation, you cannot buy it. You are too poor to buy it, and God is too rich to sell it. Salvation must be God's free gift, and you must have it as a gift, or not have it at all.

Joseph's brethren come back, and tell their father all that Joseph had said; and Jacob refuses to let Benjamin go down with them, for he says, "His brother is dead, and he is left alone; if mischief befall him by the way in the which ye go, then shall ye bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave."

But the famine increases. Their need increases; food they must have or die. Judah offers to be surety for his brother, and Jacob is constrained to let the lad go; but he says, "Do this: take of the best fruits in the land in your vessels, and carry down the man a present. . . . And take double money in your hand; and the money that was brought again in the mouth of your sacks, carry it again in your hand; peradventure it was an oversight. Take also your brother, and arise, go again unto the man: and God Almighty give you mercy before the man" (Gen. 43: 11-14).

This is man's way of getting salvation. People think they are going to be saved by propitiating God. They will work and give alms, and what not. But it will not do. No money will buy salvation, and God does not want appeasing. He is waiting to be gracious, waiting for the moment when He can display what is in His heart, which is only love.

Joseph's brethren came down again to him, and when he saw Benjamin he gave commandment that they should be brought into his house. "And the men were afraid, because they were brought into Joseph's house." Yes, the soul wakes up to learn it is guilty, and then it fears the presence of God. But Joseph spake comfortably to them to win their hearts, and they sat at meat with him. "And the men marvelled one at another. And he took and sent messes unto them from before him; but Benjamin's mess was five times as much as any of theirs. And they drank, and were merry with him."

Then in Genesis 44 they have to confess their sins. Judah says, "God hath found out the iniquity of thy servants" (ver. 16). This is the point God would bring us to. Not only conscience making us see our state, but also there is the owning of that state. "I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." So said David in Psalm 32, and so must every soul that really turns to God.

In Genesis 45 the wonderful climax is reached. Joseph reveals himself to them. "I am Joseph." The Joseph they had sold as a slave stood before them as ruler over all the land, but meeting them in all the grace of his heart. He caused every one else to go out, and the guilty were left alone in the presence of the saviour. What a lovely picture of divine grace follows: "And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph, your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt" (Gen. 45: 4).

When the work in the conscience is done, then the Lord can come near and reveal Himself. He never comes and reveals Himself till the sinner takes his true place — is angry with himself.

"Be not grieved nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither," he says: "for God did send me before you to preserve life." You have been guilty, Joseph says, but God had a purpose in it.

And man was guilty of nailing the Saviour to the cross; but God had His own thoughts, His own meaning in it all, and that very death, on the cross, of the Saviour, becomes the basis and groundwork, through atonement, of the great deliverance Christ accomplishes for the sinner; salvation for him is the fruit of the sufferings of the Saviour there.

But after all this display of the heart of Joseph to his brethren, and after seventeen years of caring for them, and giving them the best of everything, and rewarding them only love for their hatred, the last chapter of Genesis shows they still did not fully know Joseph.

"When Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him. And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did command before he died, saying, So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto him" (Gen. 50: 15-17).

All this is like some doubting, fearing, unhappy Christians, who tell me they believe on the Lord, and yet they have not peace. They are full of fears; they are not sure He has received them and forgiven them: they do not know His heart; and another thing, they have never had all out with Him. Have no reserves, my reader. Have it all out with Jesus, and do not you be the one to make our Joseph weep; for the heart of the Lord Jesus feels today your lack of trust in Him, after all He has done for you, all the kindness and the love He has shown to you. Wound not then His loving heart by any lack of confidence in Him.

"And Joseph said unto them, Fear not." That is just the way the Lord Jesus loves to comfort the soul. To get the confidence of the heart, He says to the trembling one, "Fear not: I am Jesus."

Joseph says again, "Fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them."

And that is what Jesus says; for we are not only sheltered by His blood, but saved by His life. He will nourish and care for each one all the way along. Oh, my reader, believe Him simply, and never wound His heart again by one single doubt.

SWEET was the hour, O Lord, to Thee,

At Sychar's lonely well,

When a poor outcast heard Thee there

Thy great salvation tell.

Thither she came; but, oh! her heart,

All filled with earthly care,

Dreamed not of Thee, nor thought to find

The hope of Israel there.

Lord! 'twas Thy power unseen that drew

The stray one to that place,

In solitude to learn from Thee

The secrets of Thy grace.

There Jacob's erring daughter found

Those streams unknown before,

The water-brooks of life, that make

The weary thirst no more.

And, Lord, to us, as vile as she,

Thy gracious lips have told

That mystery of love revealed

At Jacob's well of old.

In spirit, Lord, we've sat with Thee

Beside the springing well

Of life and peace, and heard Thee there

Its healing virtues tell.

Dead to the world, we dream no more

Of earthly pleasures now;

Our deep, divine, unfailing spring

Of grace and glory Thou!

No hope of rest in aught beside,

No beauty, Lord, we see;

And, like Samaria's daughter, seek,

And find our all in Thee.

"Which line are you on?"

"You don't think he'll get better, Doctor, do you? I'm sure I don't; he seems like dying tonight."

"While there is life there is hope in a fever case, so we must relax none of our efforts," was my reply.

The sick man had brought a delicate wife from New Zealand to see a noted physician. On arriving in Edinburgh, he found that death, at too early an age, had just swept the illustrious man from the land of the living, and then himself contracting typhus fever, his condition on the fifteenth day quite warranted the remark just given. The speaker was a kindly but shrewd lodging-house keeper, who had offered to the worn-out wife, and nurse of the sick man, to relieve them for a little, wait my midnight visit, and receive any directions I might give, while they got a rest.

Much interested in the welfare of his lodger, he was rather cheered by my reply, and readily took my orders. Seeing this, I added, "Whether he lives or dies is very doubtful, and all will depend on the nursing of the next twenty-four hours; but any way, I can tell you this, that Mr A- is ready to die. He is a true simple believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, has long rejoiced in the knowledge of the Lord, and of a present and eternal salvation; and if he departs, it will be to be with Christ for ever."

"Oh yes, sir, I am sure he's ready to die; he's a very good man," was the rejoinder.

"And I hope you are ready too, my friend," I said, turning to him, "for typhus fever is an ugly occupant of a house, and is no respecter of persons."

"Well, as to that I really can't say; in fact I don't think any one can know that he is ready in this life."

I did not stop at the moment to point out to him the contradiction of his two last speeches, — in one breath assuring me that he was sure the dying man was "ready," and in the next asserting that no one could know he was "ready" while here. It is worthy of notice, however, that this curious condition of matters is very common, when you begin to apply any special truth to a sinner's conscience. Perhaps, my reader, you feel there is safety (it is only fancied safety,) in generalities, and therefore avoid personalities and individualising. But let me assure you, that you must individualise yourself, and find out really where you are.

"Then, in plain language, you are not yet saved?" I went on.

"No; I could not take it on me to say that," was his reply.

"I see. But if you are not yet saved, have you found out that you are lost?"

"Lost? Me lost? No, God forbid! I shouldn't like to think I was lost."

"Well," I argued, "that is strange. You are not saved, and you will not own that you are lost."

"Certainly not. Of course I am not as good as I ought to be, — no one is, — but I am respectable and religious; that is, I go to church now and then; and though I can't say I'm saved, I shouldn't at all like to think I was lost. Because a man is not saved, it surely does not follow that he is lost."

At this moment the shrill whistle of a railway locomotive, about to move in the Waverley Station near by, disturbed the midnight silence of the air.

"What is that?" I exclaimed, hoping to shunt him to a subject which would just illustrate my point.

"That is the whistle of a railway engine."

"So I thought. By the way, can you tell me how many lines there are on a well-conducted railway?"

"Two, of course."

"And what do you call them?"

"The up line and the down."

"Exactly so. Now tell me, did you ever see a man with one leg in an up train and the other in the down?"

"No, of course not, and I never expect to. If a man is on the rails at all, he is either in the up, or in the down train; he can't be half in one and half in the other."

"I quite agree with you; and now I would just ask, Which line are you on? You are either an unbeliever or a believer. If still an unbeliever, you are in your sins, and steadily going on your way towards death, judgment, and the lake of fire, — the awful terminus of the down line. If, on the other hand, you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you are certainly on the up line, and soon will find yourself in the glory to which the Saviour's blood brings every redeemed sinner at last. Now, be honest with yourself, which line are you on?"

The appeal laid hold of his conscience, and after a moment's silence, during which I saw he was convicted, he replied, "I admit your illustration is very apt; I never thought of it in that way before, but I must see to the matter in future."

Whether the Spirit of God used this to his awakening and conversion, I cannot say, as I did not meet him again, but my patient through mercy recovered.

And now, my reader, let me ask you, "Which line are you on?" It is the merest evasion of the truth, and the veriest folly, to say you cannot tell. If your lips will not utter the truth, let God's Word witness against you.

Did not David say, "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me?" (Ps. 51: 5.) Are you other, or better, than the sweet Psalmist of Israel? But, again, he testifies, "God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God. Every one of them is gone back; they are altogether become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one" (Ps. 53: 2, 3). He convicts himself of sin in the first passage, you and me in the second. How solemn!

Hear another witness. What says Isaiah? "But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away" (Isa. 64: 6). This testimony is tremendously solemn as to the natural state of every one.

Again, hear the words of our Lord Christ, and He spoke to a most respectable, religious, and morally excellent man, when He said, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh. . . . Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again" (John 3: 6, 7). What an inexorable "must" is that! It applies to the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the learned and the illiterate, the moral and the immoral, the religious professor and the careless scoffer, to prince and peasant, peer and pauper. It embraces all, and excludes none, from the necessity of the new birth; and it is manifest that all are yet on the "down line" who have not been born again by the Word and Spirit of God.

But, further, the Lord says to Nicodemus, — "God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God" (John 3: 17, 18). Now nothing can be plainer than this. The man who has not truly and really believed in the Son of God, who has not, in other words, been "born again," and turned to God through faith in Jesus, is "already condemned." He is not on trial, and the state of his soul an open question. The trial is over. The judge has spoken. The verdict is given. The unbeliever is "condemned already." The only thing future, is the execution of the sentence, — death; and "after this the judgment," — the lake of fire for ever, "the second death."

The testimony of Scripture then, my reader, is clear as to the line you are upon, if still an unbeliever. You are already a lost sinner, and as such you are treated and addressed by God, in the gospel. "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost," is the glorious news which Jesus Himself first proclaimed, and which the Holy Ghost yet carries forth. As an evangelist, it is my joy to tell you this. You are lost, but Christ came for such as you. He came "to seek and to save that which was lost." Now, I beseech you, let Him save you. If He does not save you now, He must execute judgment on you in a day not far distant. Which shall it be? Will you have salvation, or judgment, from the hands of Jesus? "Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men."

Friend, I urge you, with all the energy of my soul, to open your eyes, see that you are on the down line, call a halt on the spot, turn to Jesus just now, and join that blessed company of saved sinners, who, having believed simply in the Son of God, are "not condemned," and "shall not come into condemnation," but "have everlasting life," and are consequently, through grace, on the "up line."

Just listen simply to the words of the blessed Lord, and believe what He says, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed [from the down line to the up] from death unto life" (John 5: 24).

In view thus of the Word of God, any honest soul can tell, with the greatest certainty, its real spiritual whereabouts and direction. So I beg you, my beloved reader, just look this matter full in the face. If you are not yet Christ's, do not lose a day without turning to Him. If His, through grace, seek to serve and follow Him faithfully.

Reader, "Which line are you on?"

PASSING onward, quickly passing;

Yes, but whither, whither bound?

Is it to the many mansions,

Where eternal rest is found?

Passing onward —

Yes, but whither, whither bound?

Passing onward, quickly passing,

Nought the wheels of time can stay

Sweet the thought that some are going

To the realms of perfect day

Passing onward

Christ their Leader — Christ their way.

Passing onward, quickly passing,

Time its course will quickly run

Still we hear the fond entreaty

Of the ever gracious One"

Come and welcome,

'Tis by Me that life is won."

A Bright Sunset.

"Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." These familiar words fell on my ear, rapidly, and repeatedly uttered, as, at noon on Monday, December 22, 1884, I drew up at a house where I was attending a lady. Another doctor's carriage, and a cab standing at the door, made me think that something was amiss, and I was left in no doubt that something had happened, as again and again "Bless the Lord, O my soul," came from the lobby within.

On the floor of that lobby, his head and snowy locks only supported by a pillow, was the speaker, the owner of the house, my aged and valued friend of many years' standing, Mr B-. I soon learned that he had gone out for a walk that morning, and had just been brought home in a cab, and a passing physician called in.

The frost being keen and the cold intense, we rapidly got the old man, for he was nearly eighty-two, into a bed close at hand, and, surrounding him with hot bottles, hoped that, with other suitable measures, he might get over the deadly chill which was apparent in every member. While thus ministered to, his lips ceased not saying, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." This continued for a little, when he interposed, "Give me air, air, oh for air!" Fanning him briskly with one hand, I rubbed his icy cold hands with the other, which brought forth, "That's good, that's good, thank the Lord, that's fine. Bless the Lord, O my soul."

Judging that he was capable of replying to my queries, I said, "Open your eyes, Mr B-; do you know me?"

"Know you? of course I do. You are my kind friend Dr W-. You've come at the right time; the Lord sent you, I am sure, and He's taught you just what to do for me. Rub away, rub away, that's fine, and doing me good. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul.' Bless Him, bless Him, 'and forget not all his benefits.'"

"Ay, that's right, we can't bless Him too heartily," I replied, "but tell me what has happened; have you had a fall?"

"No, I did not fall; I was just quietly walking over George IV. Bridge when I felt something queer at my heart, so I just slid gently to the ground, and when I came to I asked a gentleman who came to me to call a cab and bring me home, and here I am, and you're looking after me;" and "Bless the Lord, O my soul," again rang through the chamber. It was a touching and never-to-be-forgotten scene, for the joyous and praiseful spirit of the old saint was lovely to witness.

After a little while he again said, "Air, air, give me air;" and putting his hand to his heart, added, "What is this heavy weight I feel here, doctor? I feel something I never felt before, but my dear wife, just before she passed away, said she felt it. Doctor, I think I'm going to follow her. I think I'm going now, going to be with Jesus, going to see my precious Lord Jesus, who loved me and died for me. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul.' I should like to say 'good-bye' to my dear children, but if I can't, never mind. I shall meet them again in glory. I'm only going a little before. The Lord is coming soon, and then we'll meet again. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits; who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies.'"

His strength now began to fail, he said little more, and, as the clock struck one, he quietly passed away to be with his Lord and Saviour, whose love he had known for nearly half-a-century here, and will taste for ever on high.

The worshipful departure of this dear old saint reminds one of the patriarch, of whom it is written, "By faith Jacob, when he was a-dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph: and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff" (Heb. 11: 21).

Reader, could you depart thus? I have little doubt you say, "I would like to." But let me remind you it is of no use joining company with Balaam, and saying like him, "Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!" unless you are numbered with those whom God counts righteous now, by faith in Christ Jesus. As a man lives, so does he usually die. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked."

How different to what I narrated may be your end. Auld Peggie's was different. A Christian friend of mine called, and pressed Christ on her. She put down her pipe, and weighed the matter a little; then, with callous unmoved face resumed her smoking, as she slowly said, "Na, na; I've lived without Him seventy years, and I can live without Him the rest o' my days." Shortly after she was found dead in bed, the pipe broken on the floor, and her withered arms thrown above her head, as if there had been fearful conflict with some unseen foe.

Will you imitate Caesar Borgia? who said, "I have provided, in the course of my life, for everything except death; and now, alas, I am to die, although entirely unprepared."

A dying colonel said, "I would gladly give thirty thousand pounds to have it proved to my satisfaction that there is no such place as hell." Friend, are you going there?

A wealthy manufacturer hearing of the death of an acquaintance, said, "Is he dead? It is very different with me; for my part I am so engaged in business that I could not find time to die." Scarcely were the words uttered than he fell on the floor, a corpse. Sharp work this, my reader; are you ready? You may go next, mind.

A dying queen's last words were, "All my possessions for a moment of time." She had it not, and you may not have another granted to you. How solemn for an unsaved soul!

How terrible to die like Gibbon, saying, "All is dark and doubtful."

Better far be like the one whose sudden and unlooked-for end I have narrated. Another dear friend of mine passed away saying, "As I may not be able to express myself distinctly by-and-by, I wish now to state that I am in perfect peace, resting alone on the blood of Christ. O precious blood of God's Son, which cleanseth from all sin! I find this amply sufficient to enter the presence of God with. 'When I see the blood I will pass over.' Oh the precious, precious blood of Christ!"

Friend, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," is God's way of salvation. You have only to believe. Works cannot save. Faith in Jesus can. Trust in Him then. Trust Him now, just now, as you read this. Delay is dangerous, nay more, it is the veritable doorway to hell. Millions are there who never meant to be, but died just before they believed the truth. They, believe it now, fast enough, when it is too late to avail them. Don't join their company, I beseech you.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston: Seekers for Light

Seekers for Light.

Fourteen Addresses to Edinburgh Students.

by W. T. P. Wolston, M.D.

Contents.

Chapter  1 A Fisherman's Discovery

Chapter  2 Truth — What is it?

Chapter  3 A Publican's Guest

Chapter  4 A Ruler's Difficulty

Chapter  5 A Thief's Confession

Chapter  6 Grace — What is it?

Chapter  7 A Chancellor of the Exchequer's Dilemma

Chapter  8 Eternal Life- How to get it

Chapter  9 A Soldier's Desire

Chapter 10 Faith — What is it?

Chapter 11 A Jailor's Enquiry

Chapter 12 A Rich Man's Perplexity

Chapter 13 A Prisoner and a King

Chapter 14 "No Man Can Serve Two Masters"

Preface.

God takes great interest in young men. Life is before them, and He would have that life devoted to Him. It was an angel who first heard the command, "Run, speak to this young man" (Zech. 2: 4), but, since then, He has often stirred His servants to specially seek them. It was an impulse of that sort which led to the delivery of the addresses in this little volume, and the Lord graciously blessed the spoken word to many a youthful heart.

The knowledge of this has led to their publication. That God may deign, by these simple unvarnished words, to win many more hearts for His dear Son, is the fervent desire, and prayer of the Author.

46 Charlotte Square,

Edinburgh, 16th December 1897.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Fisherman's Discovery

A Fisherman's Discovery

John 1: 35-42; Luke 5: 1-11.

Chapter 1

A Fisherman's Discovery; or, Finding and following.

I propose, dear friends, with the Lord's help, in this course of meetings to speak a little to you on Light, and to show in the history of the various men that will pass before us, the different ways in which the soul gets into light; because no two persons, I believe, get it by the same road. That is what makes Scripture so interesting. It shows us all kinds and sorts of people, describing them exactly as they are. It shows us different classes, and different conditions of soul, all passing through different exercises, and eventually, it shows us how grace leads each soul into the light.

It is impossible to over-estimate the value of light. It is a wonderful thing light. Scripture says, "Whatsoever doth make manifest is light" (Eph. 5: 13). The light shows exactly what the true state of affairs is; and, therefore, until a man is in the light he does not know what he is; and he does not know God. In fact, until a soul is brought into the light it really does not understand its true state before God.

Now, in the Scripture before us you see this brought out. We have elsewhere the wonderful statement, that, "Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3: 19). Light comes first of all, in the Person of Christ, for, "In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not" (John 1: 4, 5). Now, that is a very remarkable statement. You see if you bring in what we call natural light, or physical light into darkness, out goes the darkness. If this room were in darkness at this moment, and some one turned on an electric light, the darkness would vanish at once. If you were in a coal-pit, and your light went out, you would be in darkness, and you could not estimate the relation of things. What would be the natural way of letting you see where you were, and what your surroundings were? Bring in the light; for, when the light comes in, away goes the darkness. That is the truth regarding natural things; but in divine things the solemn thing is this, that although light comes, the darkness remains; for the darkness does not comprehend the light.

But I hear you say, What is the Light? God — "God is Light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1: 5). And what is the darkness? Man. Oh, no! you say; you mean he was in the darkness. No, I do not. Man makes the darkness; the darkness is what his own state as a sinner is. That constitutes the darkness, as we read, "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord" (Eph. 5: 8). It is a wonderful moment when a man gets into the light, and becomes "light in the Lord." I do not know how many of you have got into the light; but, if you never have got into the light hitherto, remember, you may get into the light tonight, and I will say this to you at the outset, you will never get into the light, until you get to Christ.

Remember, then, the light has come. In the Old Testament, I read, "God said, Let there be light, and there was light" (Gen. 1: 3). And I also read that "God divided the light from the darkness" (Gen. 1: 4). It is a wonderful moment in man's history when God says, "Let there be light." I do not mean to say that every man is groping after light, or that every sinner is creeping towards the light. I wish it were so. When God works in the soul, it is always light that the soul craves for. If there is an anxious man here this evening, he wants light. He is looking for light, and would like to get light. He longs for it then. I am in the dark, he cries; I would like to see. He is just like a young man I saw the other Sunday night, when I came home from a big meeting. When I reached my house, there was a young man waiting for me. He was a most exemplary fellow, so far as walk and conversation went. His greeting was, May I have a word with you?" "Certainly," I said and he came into my private room. A minute afterwards he burst into tears. "Oh, pray to the Lord for me," he said. "What is the matter?" I asked. "Oh! I am just a wicked boy; I am such a wicked lad; pray to the Lord to have mercy on me." Thank God! the Lord did have mercy on him. The Lord saved him, but he said he was afraid he would never be able to confess Christ, yet he made a splendid confession. To the first person he met on Monday morning, he confessed the fact that Christ had saved him; and in the workshop, to a man who was thoroughly godless, the first thing he said was, "I have received Christ." You see, my friends, when the light gets into a man's heart, it is a wonderful thing. Let the light into your hearts!

Well, the light has come, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. "God is light" — bear that in mind — and "in him is no darkness at all." But, since God is light, the light reveals the true relation of things. Light first of all shows where man is, and for that purpose Light came into the world. "That was the true Light, which coming into the world lightens every man" (John 1: 9). You must not understand by that statement that every man was converted. Oh, no! The Light was there, and was for everybody, but alas, nobody had eyes to see it, until God had wrought in the heart and opened the eyes; that is the solemn side of the truth. Sin has plunged us in such a condition of distance from God, that really we do not see who Christ is, or what He is, until God opens our eyes. When Paul appears before Agrippa he says, that the Lord had commissioned him to go to "the Gentiles, unto whom I now send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified, by faith that is in me" (Acts 26: 17, 18).

Now would you like to have light? Would you like to have peace? Light will discover to you your lost condition; for it exposes you. Yes, but I will tell you what takes place after the light makes manifest to you that you are a poor, wretched, hell-deserving sinner. The next thing that light will do, is to reveal that "God is love," and that He has given His blessed Son for your salvation. Light will reveal your guilt, and love will blot it all out. Light will make manifest your lost condition, and love will meet it. God is light, and God is love. Both are seen in Jesus.

In the Gospel of John of which I have read a few verses, you see that before the Lord Jesus came out in His public ministry, God sent out a man called John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, to bear witness of Him. "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe" (John 1: 6, 7). Do you not think it is a wonderful thing that God should send a person to bear witness about light. I think if you will reflect, my friends, you will see what an awful state man was in, when it required that somebody should, so to speak, come and say, "I bare witness to the Light." If a man came into this town, and went down Princes Street, pointing, as he did so, to the sun, and crying, "Look up there!" "What is it, man?" the people would say. "Look," he says, "there is the sun, and light coming from the sun," and he keeps on saying that. Why, you would think the fellow was fit for a lunatic asylum. Yes, I hear everybody say, that man has gone off his head. Think of it! There was the Light in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, "and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." So God sent a man to bear witness to the Light. "John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This is he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me; for he was before me" (John 1: 15). Further, the One who is the Light is the Son of God, and He is the Lamb of God. He is the One, who alone can meet the needs of man.

That is what came out in John's ministry, as he pointed to Jesus. A remarkable man was John; he was a little bit of the ascetic, a man sojourning in the wilderness, and living simply on locusts and wild honey. He was a downright, sterling, intensely devoted man. From one end of the land to the other he goes; he has but one message, one word to deliver, and he rings it out all over Israel. What is it? Repent! Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matt. 3: 2). I tell you what it is, men, God bids you repent. Ah! sinner! if you have never repented yet, it is high time you did. Why did John say, "Repent"? Because he saw the end of things coming, when "the axe is laid unto the root of the trees" (ver. 10). If you lay an axe at the root of the tree, what is the next thing? Down comes the tree. The tree may have been good to look at outside, but when it comes down, what is often found then — that it is rotten inside.

That is a picture of man, who is very nice outside, but, at heart, he is at enmity to God; he is rotten inside. I tell you what man is like. I have sometimes gone into a shop, and purchased a beautiful pear. I have taken it away, thinking that it was beautiful, and when I got home I began to pare the skin off, and there was a little bit of a spot in it. Paring it still further, the spot got bigger still. I cut another piece off, it was more rotten still. Ah! you say, it is rotten to the core. Yes, and you, sinner, are the pear; you are the man. You are rotten to the very core; there is not a good thing in you. I know that man says, I will try and do good, but the Holy Ghost says, "There is none that doeth good, no, not one" (Rom. 3: 12). You will have to learn that there is no good thing in you, and that nothing good can come out of you.

It is a grand thing when a man gets down on his knees in real repentance. Some of those who heard John, "were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins." Others, self-righteous people, rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him. At length, when John was upon the banks of Jordan, one day, he sees Jesus coming towards him, his heart swells, his tongue is loosed, and out comes the blessed truth, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29).

In pressing upon sinners to get down and own their sins, John had never told them how they could get rid of those sins. But when he sees Jesus coming, he proclaims these beautiful words, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." The first man brought sin into the world, and this man, God's Lamb, was to take away sin. Have you ever had to do with Him? Have you ever come into contact with Him? This was His character; He was the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. And then the Baptist reiterates his witness, "This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me; for he was before me" (John 1: 30). He was an eternal Being; He was the Son of God. "And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water. And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him. And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God" (John 1: 31-34). He saw Jesus, and, as we read elsewhere, baptized Him, and then saw the Holy Ghost coming down like a dove, and abiding upon Him.

You remember in the days of Noah, when the flood was upon the earth, Noah sent out a dove in order to see what was the state of matters, and in a short time the dove came back, for she found no resting-place. He sent her out seven days after, and again she came back, but this time with an olive leaf in her mouth. When she was sent forth the third time, she did not return, she had whereon to rest. When the Holy Ghost fell upon the blessed Lord Jesus Christ in the form of a dove, what had happened? For over four thousand years the Holy Ghost had been searching in vain over this earth to find a holy, sinless, spotless man on whom to come and abide. At length here was the One upon whom He could rest. He, so to speak, like the dove, had not found any place whereon to rest. And why did not Noah's dove rest? Were there not plenty of bodies upon which it might alight? Yes, the water was, so to speak, alive with carrion; corpses floated upon the water everywhere, but these afforded no resting-place. And the Holy Ghost had brooded over the world all these years, and had seen but moral carrion — man, a wretched, ruined, godless, sinful creature in himself. True He had come upon men like Balaam or Saul, but He left them. He had come upon men like David and Isaiah, but He left them. But here was a holy, spotless man, and He came and abode upon Him. Because Jesus was perfect, sinless, and holy, the Holy Ghost came and dwelt in Him. He was in His moral perfection the delight of the Father, the Lamb of God, the Son of God; and, more than that, He who received the Holy Ghost would baptize with the Holy Ghost. That is, He takes your sins away and gives you the Holy Ghost. What a wonderful thing! The One who can take away the sins of men can also give them the Holy Ghost; can give them the needed power for the enjoyment of His life dwelling in their souls.

John gives this testimony to Jesus, and what takes place? Nobody followed Jesus that day, but on the next day John lost two of his disciples. Then, as he contemplated the Lord, he said, "Behold the Lamb of God!" (John 1: 36.) He does not add, "which taketh away the sin of the world." In contemplative delight, as his eyes fell upon Jesus, his heart meditated upon the precious Person of the Lamb of God, and he simply says, "Behold the Lamb of God!" He had learned to look upon the glory of the Lord. And what now? Two of his disciples left John, and began to follow Jesus. It was the right kind of ministry that; what I call the ministry of a Person. It is that which will lead souls to follow Jesus, and Jesus only. The ministry that attracts men to itself is not what is wanted. What is wanted is the ministry that attracts men's hearts to Christ, and Christ only. That is the finest ministry of all, and I have no doubt John was delighted when he saw the disciples leaving him, and following Jesus.

"Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? "Is not that striking? Now, I do not doubt, but that from glory tonight, Jesus is saying to each heart in this hall, "What seek ye?" Come now, answer it! What seek ye? What is your great object in life? Is it money? Is it pleasure? Is it fame, or is it Christ? What seek ye? What were they seeking? It was Jesus, nothing but Jesus. "They said unto him, Master, where dwellest thou?" Think! What is the meaning of that? He said, "What seek ye?" They reply, "Master, where dwellest thou?" Jesus' dwelling-place was at Capernaum, a very ungodly city. It is called "his own city" in the ninth of Matthew. What did they want? They wanted to know the spot where they would be sure of finding Him. What does He say? "Come and see" (ver. 39). "They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him that day: for it was about the tenth hour." They spent with Him about two hours. Honestly, now, did ever you spend two solid hours with Jesus? Did you? Then I will guarantee that if you spent two hours with Jesus, when you came out you wanted somebody else to do the same. I never knew a man yet that really enjoyed the presence of the Lord that did not want somebody else to enjoy it as well.

That is the peculiar beauty of Christianity. You want to get others to share in its joy. The more you give away the more you get; the more you scatter, the more you receive. You cannot be large-hearted without gaining. Why, those who do not give, have not got much enjoyment themselves. I find people say to me, We never speak about these things. They have, so to say, got their coats buttoned; I know the reason why. There is nothing inside. If they had plenty inside, it would soon come out. The moment you get your heart full of Christ, you cannot keep it to yourself; you must tell it to every one else. If a man tries to keep lit dark, then be sure the light is very feeble. The man who gets right into contact with Christ goes at once to tell others, his nearest friend perhaps, his father, mother, sister, or brother. It is always the same story. You always find the heart that has got hold of Christ wants other people to know Jesus too. I am not addressing you as a preacher, for I do not profess to be a preacher, but I speak to you because I enjoy the presence and love of the Lord myself, and I want others to enjoy the same privilege. It will do you good and will not do me any harm, but give me great joy, if you get to know the blessed Saviour I know.

What took place in our chapter? "One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first findeth his own brother Simon," and what does he say? "We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ" (John 1: 41). We have found Him; come along and get to know Him too. I do not know that he got Peter to go right away; how long he took about the job I do not know, but this I know, he never gave it up until he got him. Have you been converted? Yes! Well! have you a brother who is not? Then start tonight to bring him to Jesus, and give him no peace until you bring him to Jesus. "And he brought him to Jesus" (ver. 42) is what we read of Andrew. I never heard of Andrew preaching, and you hear little more of Andrew in the Gospels — he knew the lad who had the five loaves and two fishes (John 6: 9) — but when you get up into the glory by-and-by, and see the Lord giving the rewards, I think you will find that a big reward will be Andrew's. Do you not see that he was the means of the conversion of the man most used of God in those early gospel days, in bringing blessing to others. Look at it! I think I see Andrew on the day of Pentecost, when Peter is preaching, and the Lord using him to the blessing of three thousand souls, and getting them converted to God. I conclude Andrew would be rejoicing that he was the means of bringing Peter to Jesus. I cannot preach, he might say, but Peter can, and I was the means of bringing him to Jesus. Ah! think of that. Fellow-believer, you might be the means of bringing a great preacher to the Saviour. It was the word of a poor old shoemaker that led Spurgeon to Christ.

I was travelling in the West of England last year, and in the corner of the carriage there was a very distinguished looking English clergyman, with a book in his hands. I soon saw that it was the Bible. Presently the train stopped at a station, and the man sitting beside him got out. In a minute, in got a sweep, fresh from his morning's work, with his brush and bag, and as black as a chimney himself He hesitated, as he noticed that there was room only for one, and said he would stand. "Sit down, my friend," said the parson, and the sweep sat down between me and the clergyman. The train went on, and at the next station the sweep got out. A man in the carriage grumbled out that it was a shame to let a man like that into the carriage; it was against the bye-laws and rules of the company, and they ought to be prosecuted for allowing it. "Oh," said I, "there is nothing in a little clean soot; there are worse things in the world than that." "Indeed there are" said the clergyman, "there is far greater dirt and degradation than that." "What may that be?" said I. "It is the degradation of man's state as a sinner." "And how do you propose to meet that?" I asked. "There is only one way in which it can be met; it is by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ." So the poor sweep was the means of bringing the gospel into that carriage, and it came out splendidly. We talked on, and presently the clergyman said: "I will tell you how I was converted. I was a midshipman on board a ship, and when rounding Cape Horn on a very stormy night, a godly mate on board, in the same watch as myself, took me quietly alone, and spoke to me about Jesus. God blessed the words of the mate, and I was turned to the Lord through his testimony to Christ, on board that ship that night." "Thank God!" I said. "What happened then?" "I came home as soon as I could, for I had a brother here. I told him the gospel as clearly as I could, and, thank God! he too was converted. You perhaps would not recognise my brother, but he has been the means of sending eight hundred missionaries to heathen lands since that day."

At the time I thought that was just like Andrew. That is just the way the gospel spreads. If you enjoy Jesus, you will want somebody else to get to know Him. It does not need great preaching, or brilliant eloquent preachers to get people converted. I have heard of an infidel who was converted most simply. Perhaps you have heard of him. He did not believe in the Lord at all; and he lived in the West Indies. Sunday was a very miserable day with him; it is ever so with the unconverted. It is always a dismal day for them. Why, it is the happiest day of the week for me; the other six days are uncommonly happy, but Sunday beats them all, I find, for one is usually freer to worship, and work for, the Lord. Not so did the infidel find his Sundays, for there was no racing, no theatre, or anything of that kind going on. Now there happened to be a godly minister preaching in a chapel near by, and some of the man's family went there. One Sunday he resolved to go to hear him; not exactly to listen to, but to criticise the preacher. It is the fashion; I do not mind if you do it; you are welcome to criticise me. I am here to warn you to flee from the damnation of hell, and the judgment of God. The infidel came every Sunday afterwards, and the minister thought, I must try to reach him, so he prepared a most wonderful set of sermons. When they were all delivered, lo, and behold! the infidel was converted, and made a happy confession of Christ. Well, thought the minister, he will be sure to come to tell me about it. but day by day went by, and he never came. The parson then resolved to go and see him. He called at the infidel's house, or rather, at the house of the man who had been an infidel, and was received most courteously. "I have heard good news of you," said the preacher. "It is quite true, thank God," was the man's answer, "I have got to know that my sins are forgiven," and he made a most happy confession of Christ. "I am so glad," said the preacher, "pray tell me which of the sermons was instrumental in causing this change?" "The sermons," said the man, "made not a bit of difference. They went over me like water off a duck's back." "Tell me, then, what has wrought the change?" "It happened one night while leaving your chapel. An old negress slipped, and fell upon the steps, and I just put out my hand and picked the old woman up. 'Oh! thank you, Massa,' she said; 'you love Jesus, don't you, my blessed Jesus?' These words went to my heart like an arrow, for I felt that this old black woman knew a Being, a Saviour, of whom I was totally ignorant." "You love Jesus, my blessed Jesus!" was what converted him. That is what will win souls for Christ.

The words, "We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus," tell us Andrew's sermon, and its effect. What a discovery these fishermen made. Andrew discovered the Messiah, and Simon discovered his Lord. I do not think he was easily brought to Jesus. He was a wonderfully natural man, Peter; and hence it is very likely that he was slow to go to Jesus. The last thing a man does is to go to Jesus. But Andrew somehow constrained him, and "he brought him to Jesus." That is just what I want to do tonight; I want to bring you to Jesus. "And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona; thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone" (John 1: 42). Very simple words these! But that change of his name was, I doubt not, the moment of his conversion, the moment of his salvation.

I have no doubt Peter thought it was an extraordinary thing for the Lord to change his name. I have always been known by the name of Simon, and He has taken upon Him to change my name. it Thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone." Let us see, then, the Lord's meaning. The changing of a name always implied that the one whose name was changed was subject to him who changed his name (see Gen. 17: 5-15, Gen. 32: 28, Gen. 35: 10, Gen. 41: 45; Dan. 1: 7, Dan. 5: 12). At that moment the Lord told Simon, You belong to Me; from this minute you are Mine. I do not think Peter forgot it, though he did not take in the truth fully. It was sovereign love that spoke there; and it was a divine Person who spoke to him. He knew what He was saying, and He changed Peter's name. That is what takes place when the Lord meets the sinner. You pass from being a sinner to being a saint. You pass through a change of name, just as Jacob, which means "supplanter," had his name changed to Israel, "a prince with God." What does the Lord say here? "Thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone." And what is a stone? A bit of a rock! And who was the rock? Christ. Did Peter understand that? Perhaps not then; but you remember afterwards, when Jesus asked, "Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?" that presently "Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, That thou art Peter" [He confirms his name], "and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16: 13-18).

What is the rock? Peter? Not a bit of it! Christ is the rock, and Peter is the stone put on the rock. That is a very good place to be. I never knew a stone yet that sunk through a rock. And I never knew anybody that was resting on the Rock of Ages, resting on Jesus, that was lost. Have you become a stone? How do you become a stone? Peter tells us: "To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious; ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 2: 4, 5). From that moment when Simon came to Jesus, and had his name changed to Peter, he became a stone. Though he did not then know what it was to be built in, he learned he was a stone, and soon after he knew what the building was of which he became an integral part. That, he learned, was the house of God, built upon the rock Christ Peter was a stone, and so is every converted soul in this house tonight My brother in Christ, you are a stone; and Christ would like you to know what it is to be a stone in His building. "To whom coming, as unto a living stone . . . ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house."

We become living stones as soon as we come in contact with Christ, who is the Living Stone. This moment the blessed Lord speaks of when He says, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live" (John 5: 25). The voice of the Son of God went down into the heart of Simon, the son of Bar-jona, quickening him, and I think Peter became acquainted with a change within himself, though I do not judge he quite understood what was wrapped up in the Lord's enigmatic expression. Indeed, he was like many a person whom the gospel reaches. He knows a change has come over him, but he cannot explain it. He becomes an altered man, though he cannot tell what has taken place — I think at that moment when Simon found Jesus, he apprehended that there was a tie between his soul and the Saviour. The voice of the Son of God entered into the heart of Peter, and what he heard was this, "Thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone." You and I are stones from the time we derive from Christ. Do you know what a Christian is? He is a little bit of Christ. The Christian derives his life, his righteousness, his grace, and his sanctification from Him. He lives in the life of Christ, before God. I do not think Peter learned all that at that moment, but he learned it afterwards. It was, notwithstanding, a wonderful moment in his history; but he did not follow Jesus straight off.

What we read just now, in the fifth of Luke, showed that the Lord had gone on His way preaching the Word, but I do not think Peter followed Him then. He was like many souls, perhaps there are some here tonight, who though converted have not at once confessed Christ. I trust God's grace will touch their hearts, and lead them to boldly confess, and then fully follow the Lord.

Six months ago a young man came to me and said, "I want to thank you." "What for?" I said. "For the influence you have had on my life," he rejoined. "My dear fellow," I replied, "I never saw you before." "All the same, you have had an influence on my life. You remember sending me a book six months ago." "Oh," I said, "you are a student, and received my book, 'Young Men of Scripture.' Did you attend the students' meetings?" "Yes." "And were you converted then?" "I believe I was; but I made a great mistake — I did not confess Christ. Last night I heard a servant of God preaching, and he pressed upon us the necessity of confession, and I have come to see you about it." He did not follow outright at first, but now, he is a devoted servant of Christ. There are many cases like that.

But now let us look at the way in which the Lord leads Peter more fully to see the light, as recorded in the fifth of Luke. He was busy ministering the Word of God. "And it came to pass, that as the people pressed round upon him to hear the word of God, he stood by the lake of Gennesaret" (Luke 5: 1). Christ was a wonderful minister of the word. He always spoke so that the people could hear Him. He wanted now to address this large company, and He looked round for a place where they could see Him and hear Him; in plain language, He looked for a pulpit. I do not mean a pulpit, as we know such. A platform does as well, so long as the speaker can see the people, and they can hear him. That is the point. And He "saw two ships standing by the lake; but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing their nets. And he entered into one of the ships, which was Simon's, and prayed him that he would thrust out from the land. And he sat down, and taught the people out of the ship" (vers. 2, 3). It was a wonderful scene, by the side of Galilee's blue lake at Bethsaida, "The House of Fish," or as others put it, "The Place of Nets"; where Simon and Andrew resided (John 1: 44), and with their partners James and John, and their father Zebedee, plied their calling along with their hired servants (see Mark 1: 16-20; Luke 5: 10). Evidently, they had a good large fishing business.

They were at that moment mending their nets, when Jesus "entered into one of the ships, which was Simon's, and prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land" (ver. 3). He does not say, Peter, lend me your boat! He took it. What did He teach by His action? Simon, you and all that you have belong to Me; I taught you in the first of John that you belonged to Me. I changed your name, now I must teach you something else — that all you have belongs to Me. Then, "he sat down, and taught the people out of the ship."

I think, if you take the trouble to trace out the gospel narrative, you will find, that what the Lord ministered, was what we have related in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew; the seven parables, beginning with the sower, who went out to sow his seed. That seed fell, some by the wayside, some on a rock, some among thorns, while other seed fell on good ground, bringing forth fruit, some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold. As the Lord poured forth that wonderful ministry, Peter was listening; and doubtless some of that beautiful stream of precious truth went down into the fisherman's heart. It was a lovely scene. Picture the blue waters of the lake of Gennesaret, the surrounding ships, and the "great multitudes who stood on the shore" (Matt. 13: 2), listening eagerly to this Prince of preachers. This was the most populous part of all Israel at the time, and along the western coast of the Sea of Galilee, and specially at Bethsaida, the fishing population was very large. True, they were a simple people, and I wish you were just as simple in heart as they.

Well, the Lord ministered to these poor simple folk, and when it was all over, He, as it were, said, "I am going to pay you, Peter, for the loan of your boat." "Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught" (ver. 4). And what does Simon say? "Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing." That was experience speaking, and what would reason add? When no fish could be taken by us in the night-time, it is not likely they will be taken in the daylight. There were no fish taken there in the night, how then could you expect to catch them in broad daylight? That is what reason would say; but do you know what faith said? Faith is always obedient. Peter illustrates faith in his answer: "Nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net. And when they had this done, they enclosed a great multitude of fishes; and their net brake." Now some of you here tonight may say, I have been letting down the net for a long time, and yet I do not seem to get anything in it; I do not get a blessing. Never mind, let down the net again tonight. And if you let down your net at the voice of Jesus, there will happen in your case just what happened with Simon — you will get such a blessing you will not be able to hold it

But see what happens now in Simon's history. To him this large haul of fish revealed the hand and presence of God. There was no room in Simon's boat for all the fish, and he is about to make another grand discovery as he sees the fish hauled over the boat's side. I think his eye would brighten at the sight, and doubtless his first thought be, What a grand day's fishing is this; this is the best haul we have ever had, for "they came, and filled both the ships, so that they began to sink." Then, as Simon stands in his boat, he forgets all about the fish, and all about his business; he thinks only of Jesus and himself. "When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord" (ver. 8). What a strange scene! What led that man to go down before Jesus in that way? Why fell he at Jesus' knees? I will tell you. It was the light which burst into his soul, the light from God, which entered his heart. As he saw that wonderful catch of fish, the truth flashed into his soul. The light of God went anew into Peter's soul, and the deepest chambers of his heart were made manifest He learns that he is in the presence of God. He learns his own sinfulness, though not a word was said about it, and he falls at Jesus' knees a repentant, self-judged, self-condemned man; and, I think, above all, self-condemned for this — I heard his voice months ago: He changed my name, but I never began to follow Him. Alas! I have never followed Him. He felt the sin of his soul doubly. He was in the power of real repentance and self-judgment.

Let me ask, Have you ever gone through a crisis like this? Have you ever got down at the feet of Jesus, confessing your guilt? If not, friend, you must. Peter was in his right place. Every Spirit-born soul goes through similar exercises. Scripture abounds in instances. Look at Job. Like all the rest of us, he was self-righteous, and self-complacent, till the light of God shone on him, and then see the change. For the first forty chapters of the book he is as busy as he can be justifying himself, but then he sees God, and collapses, saying, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee, wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42: 5, 6). Down comes the patriarch, and down comes this stalwart fisherman. It reminds me of another scene, in Isaiah's history, where he says: "I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isa. 6: 1-3), And when Isaiah saw and heard all this, he cried, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts" (ver. 5). The glory of the Lord's presence broke Isaiah down, even as it did Job, and where the patriarch and the prophet were we now behold Simon, the stalwart Galilean fisherman. Where is he? Down in the dust before Jesus.

My friend, have you ever been brought down there? Thank God if you have. I have been down there, and felt Jesus lift me up. I have known, too, what God said to Job in his day, and what he said to Isaiah. And what was that? just what Jesus says to Simon here — "Fear not!" Jesus said to him, as it were, I am enough for you. That is what Simon got. He found that he could not do without the Lord, all unworthy and sinful, as he learned himself to be. When down in the depths of repentance, and self-judgment, and utterly broken down before the Lord, he learned His grace in a very special way, as Jesus said to him, "Simon, fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men" (Luke 5: 10). In effect He said, "I changed your name last time; I shall change your occupation now." When Simon first met the Lord his name was changed. Before that moment he was a sinner going about in this scene only anxious to catch fish, but now Jesus says to him, "Henceforth thou shalt catch men." Blessed, joyful mission!

But, perhaps you say to me, Have we all to give up our business to become Christians? Certainly not. That is not at all necessary, nor is it the point here. The picture before us here is of one who turns his back upon what was his world. I read now that, "When they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him" (ver. 11). They feel compelled to follow Jesus now. It is not a question of, must I give up my business, nor was it simply a question of turning the back upon the ordinary occupation. Peter, I have no doubt, says, I have done with the fish; I am going to follow the Lord. I am going to catch men. And he began to follow Him, although at that time his trade was more prosperous than ever.

When are you going to begin to follow the Lord? Do I hear you say, I should like to come to Jesus when I am getting near death? You only want to give Him then the remnant of a badly spent life. No, that is not what I care to see; I like when a young man comes to Christ, at the outset of his life, when he is fresh, and when he can give the greater part of his days to the service of the Lord. I sometimes see, as I go down a street, a placard with the words, "Retiring from business." I know what that means. The business is retiring from the man. A man never retires from business when it is prospering. When he thinks of retiring, he sells out. He is not such a fool as to give it up when it is prosperous. If on the wane, most likely he cannot sell it, so he then puts his notice, "Retiring from business," in the window. Business was not retiring from Peter the day he gave it up. Never was it so bright as when he turned his back upon it, and went out to follow the Lord.

There are some here perhaps who have never been the Lord's before Now, I beseech you, yield Him your heart, your life, your whole strength — yourself — spirit, soul, and body. Was it not a proper, and a beautiful thing, in this case that Peter followed Him? I think I can see him go home, and, meeting his wife, tell her, that he means to follow the Master. Possibly she inquired, Have you caught any fish? Yes! Never had such a catch. And, where are they? I left them on the shore; I am going to follow the Master. And who is to keep us if you do that? How are we to be sustained if you have given up fishing, and are going to follow Him? "Come ye after me," were his words (Mark 1: 17), says Peter; He told me to follow Him, and I am now going to obey Him. It must have been a testing time for Peter as well as his wife, for at this moment in his own house "Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a fever" (Mark 1: 30). You see Peter was a nice, kind-hearted man; he took his mother-in-law into his house. Not many young men take their mothers-in-law in; they are often regarded as rather a doubtful blessing. That is the way of the world, my friend. But there she was, sick, and Jesus, going in, cured her, so that the fever left her, and she was able to minister unto them. It is wonderful to see the ways the Lord takes of putting the soul right with Him. Do you think that when Peter started to follow Jesus after this, his wife would raise any objections? I trow not. The Lord had by the saving of her mother's life won her heart. I think she would say, It is all right now. Stick to Him, cleave to Him, follow Him; do not keep any distance from Him, for I can trust Him now. He has shown me that He has an interest in me. That is the way God often works. The Lord came into Peter's house, and the wife's, heart became assured of His deep interest in all that concerned the house. This fisherman is called to follow Jesus, and to make his home circumstances easy, confidence is begotten in the wife's heart by His care of those at home.

Friends, He is a wonderful Lord you and I are called to follow. The Lord give you grace to follow Him. Who will start? But to find Him is one thing; to follow Him is another. You learn what it is to become "a living stone" as you come in contact with Christ, and you learn to follow Him when He eclipses everything else in your soul's vision. Possibly you say, If I were in different circumstances I would follow Christ. No, you would not. Your circumstances are the best if only you knew it. You know what reins are for; you know what they are to the horse. They keep the creature in order, and so do your circumstances. They keep you in order. If the banks are broken down, out comes the river, and spoils everything. If the reins break, what happens? There is generally a smash. Do you see? Do not you be troubled about your circumstances. You will find that the Lord will sustain you in any circumstances, and even make them the channels of His grace. Cleave to the Lord, and be devoted to the Lord. Give Him the right place in your heart here, and He will sustain you. "FOLLOW THOU ME" would seem to be His last word to Peter (John 21: 22). Has it no voice to you and me?

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : Truth - What is it?

Truth — What is it?

John 18: 36-38.

Chapter 2

Truth — What is it?

Pilate's question, "What is truth?" is, I believe, the great question of the moment. It is of vast importance to have the truth. It is a profound mistake not to have it, if it is to be had. Many a man has it not. The Christian has it. The believer in Christ has it. I remember many years ago one of the Professors of this University, with whom I was very intimate, and at whose house I was one evening, after a long conversation, turned, and said to me, "Look here, doctor, I am earnestly seeking after the truth." "I have got it, sir," I replied. "What do you mean?" "I mean this, I have Christ, and He is the truth."

Christ is the truth, and I want to draw your attention tonight to these precious words of the Saviour which I have read — uttered by Him when surrounded by everything that the enmity of man could bring against Him, when betrayed, denied, blindfolded, and passed on from one careless high priest to another, and then trundled away to the judgment-seat of a godless man, as Pilate undoubtedly was. Yet in the face of all this, what was His attitude? Look at Christ! Look how quiet, how calm, albeit how sad. Then it was He said: "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." Pilate carelessly says "What is truth?" and then turns his back on Truth personified. Ah! my friends, there is many a man doing that today. Pilate is not the only man who has turned his back on the Truth.

What I greatly desire, in this course of meetings which I will hold with some of you, is that the truth, God's truth, may simply pass before us, and I shall make no apology for Scripture. I believe it to be the Word of God. I believe it to be a revelation from God, of His mind, of His thoughts, of His purposes, and of His counsels; that we have in the Scriptures the truth written, and that in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ we have truth incarnate. The result is, that the man who receives the truth of Scripture, in the power of the Holy Ghost, will invariably be brought into contact with Christ, who is the Truth.

First then, you may ask me, "What is truth?" I do not know that I can make it plain to you; but so far as I can grasp the meaning of truth, it is this: Truth is the exact, the perfect, and absolute expression and delineation of that which is. It is the identity of the statement and the fact stated. I could not say, that God was the Truth. He is true. God is true, but of the Lord Jesus Christ it is said, "That grace and truth came by him" (John 1: 17). Nay, more, He Himself has said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14: 6). He was the Truth; and I hope to show you that He was the truth about everything — the truth about God; the truth about man; the truth about the heart of God, the nature of God, and the claims of God; and the truth, moreover, about man in every possible relation of his being. He was no mere man, for He was verily God; nevertheless He was a real, true, perfect man. Get hold of that, I implore you. That Jesus, whom we have read about, was a real, true, perfect man, as much a man as I am standing here before you this evening, sin alone excepted. As man He was in this scene to declare God, and to divinely meet man. "To this end," He says, "was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." None could reveal God, none could unveil the love of God, or declare the heart of God, other than He who came from God. There was none who knew the claims of God, and could meet those claims, except the One who came from God. He must come from God, if He is to bring God to me, and He must be a man, a veritable man, to bring me to God; because I am a sinful man, a sinner. So are you. Sin carries its consequences and merits judgment, and the truth as to this alone is seen fully in Christ.

In the Lord Jesus Christ the absolute truth about everything is beautifully blended. The perfect and whole truth about everything is seen in every part, and not one side of the truth more than another. We get the truth that "God is love," for instance, and see the reality of the truth of God's love in Christ's self-sacrifice, for He gave Himself that He might unveil the heart of God to us, and bring us to God by His death.

In the scene before us Pilate is in the presence of Jesus, the Truth, and, when He speaks, turns his back upon Him. I trust you will not imitate him; because we live in a day when men are slighting Christ. I find many young men who are Pilate's followers; in fact I speak the truth when I say that perhaps nine young men out of ten whom I meet are not believers, but, alas! are serious doubters. I want to know if they are happier, if they are better, or if they are holier men; I have never found it to be so yet I can recollect, when I was an unconverted young man, and when the truth was unknown to me. I know, too, what I was after I was converted. I know what a wonderful change came over me when I came to know the Truth, and was brought into contact with the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence I want you to get into contact with Christ.

Now observe this, if Jesus be not what He said He was, if He be not what He declared Himself in the Gospels to be, you must repel Him, and everything about Him altogether. Jesus said that He was the Son of God. Was He the Son of God? He says, "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." Only the Son could make the Father known. Surely, as He Himself says, "No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven" (John 3: 13). This claim must either be accepted or rejected. I must either own what He says, I must acknowledge the truth that He came from heaven, or refuse absolutely to believe it, and proclaim Christ to be not an impostor, but One who knowingly spoke what was not true. If He said a single word which was not true, then He cannot be the Truth. I do not mince matters, for I must either own Him to be what He said He was, or else deny Him all right to the allegiance of my heart and conscience.

Although I thus speak, I delight to acknowledge, and heartily believe that He is what He said He was; and I have proved Him to be what He said He was — a Saviour. If you have never known Him as your Saviour, let me now urge you to put Him to the test. You accept the truth of that which He says concerning Himself, and then you will find out that you need a Saviour, and that He is that Saviour, and He alone. I know well that men would like to set aside His claim on the ground that they do not need saving. But you have to meet God, and where are you going to spend eternity? How are you going to meet God? You have to go into eternity! Where will you spend it? Serious questions these! Again, are you tonight fitted to meet God? Is your conscience purged? Are your sins purged away? Are you fitted to pass into the presence of a God of infinite holiness? I tell you frankly you are not, unless you have had to do with Christ If you have had nothing to do with Him, you are not ready. "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth," said the Lord Jesus, and then He adds immediately, "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."

I come therefore to the question, an important one for you and myself — Have I got the truth? If I am not of the truth, I have not heard His voice. The man who has not heard the voice of the Son of God does not possess the truth. You can hear other voices; for there are plenty of voices nowadays. The voice of the truth is that of Him, who could say, "I am the truth," and who could say to the man, who told Him, he had power to put Him to death, "Thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above; therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin." He it is who says, "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." Then, have you heard His voice?

Well, you say, I do not know that He exists. You would soon know that He exists if you heard His voice. Oh, but, you say, I was never brought into contact with Him. More the pity; because He says, "Every one that is of the truth hears my voice." The confession of a man, that he has not heard the voice of Jesus, is a tacit confession that he has not got the truth. Now, I say again, above all things get the truth. I do not care what things I lose, or what I have not got, if I have got the truth. Give me the truth — the truth about everything, about God, about myself, about righteousness, about the claims, and the heart of God. "God is love!" How do you know that? you ask. He gave His Son. "God is light!" What is the meaning of that? Light reveals all that is unlike, or opposed to itself; it touches the root of things, because light makes manifest "God is love." The birth of Jesus, and the cross — the death of Jesus, prove the love of God. They are the demonstrations of that wonderful truth. "God is light." Will He pass over sin? Impossible! The Word of God is simple and plain upon this point "All have sinned;" furthermore it says, "The wages of sin is death." People try to explain death away, but you cannot. You may gild your hearses, drape your coffins with costliest flowers, decorate your graveyards, and put up magnificent monuments on your tombs, but you cannot get rid of death; and death, we are told, entered into the world by sin (Rom. 5: 12) — the sin of the first man — Adam.

But death is not the end of man. If death were the end of man, then there would be no resurrection; but, I have learned the truth of the resurrection, through Christ. The man Christ Jesus, for God's glory, and the blessing of sinners, reached death and the grave as the end of a pathway of perfect obedience and dependence. God could not do otherwise than raise, and glorify Him, and He has done it The first man reached the grave as the fruit, and penalty of sin, and if you go into death, you will lie there, just because you are a sinner. But I know a Man, who went into death, and came out of it.

I hear His voice tonight, saying, "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." I have also heard Him say, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead" [in their sins, of course] "shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live" (John 5: 25). Oh! what a wonderful thing this is, a man springs into life, into eternal life, by hearing the voice of the Son of God!

The first great truths I learn then, are these, that, "God is love," and "God is light." All is made manifest in Jesus. The end Christ had in view is here stated. He comes down into the scene, and finds man a sinner in his sins, under the sentence of death, and passing on to it, and He passes into death for him, that he might be saved.

Supposing death were to overtake you, what then? You may not be terribly afraid at the thought of death, but what comes after death? No man can tell that, you say. I beg your pardon, I know what comes after death. I know One who has been into death, and has come out of it. The Christian — if he die — departs to be with Christ, who has been into death, and is now at the right hand of God, a living mighty Saviour, who leads the one that trusts in Him, into eternal life, and sets him down in the glory, where He now is. Every one who is of the truth hears His voice. That is it. It is very simple. Until I hear His voice, it is quite clear, I have not got the truth.

Now let us inquire, What is the truth about man? Man is a sinner. "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost" (Luke 19: 10). Is it true that man is lost? It must be true, or Christ has told a lie. He says, "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost" You might turn to me, and say, But who are lost? All, without exception. Have you heard His voice? Have I heard His voice? If not, I am yet lost; you are yet lost. You may say, But surely you do not put us all down as lost? The Son of God says it, and He makes no mistakes.

Not long ago, a friend of mine was preaching in this town to a very large audience. At the close of the meeting, I came in contact with an excessively intelligent, and withal earnest young fellow, one of your own set. I got into conversation with him, and asked him if he were saved. He said, "How can I know?" "Well," I replied," I know that I am saved, thank God. Don't you know it?" "No," he replied, "but I am doing my best to live a proper, moral, straight, and square life." "Quite right," I said, "that is exactly what you should do." "Won't that have some weight with God?" he asked. "Won't that curry favour with God?" "Well," I said, "stop a moment. Will your life compare with the life of Jesus?" He thought a minute, and then said, "What do you mean?" "I mean this — Do you think your life will compare with the life of Jesus?" After thinking a little, he replied, "I could not say that. I am doing my best to live a moral, proper, and square life, but I cannot say that it could compare with that of Jesus." "Well then," I said, "you won't do for God; because only one man will suit Him, and that is Jesus; He is the Truth. He is what a man should be. A man should be holy, spotless, sinless, undefiled, absolutely devoted and true to God. That is what Jesus was." He thought a moment, and then turning round sharply to me, said, "If what you say is true, every man is lost." "Yes," I said, "you have hit the nail on the head this time. That is exactly what Scripture says. Every man is lost, and 'the Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost.'"

So you see, my friends, Christ brings out the truth as to our state. We are sinners; and, if sinners, we are under sentence of death, and lost If you will turn to another portion of Scripture, where, in parabolic guise, the Lord brings out the truth, whether it be the shepherd who sought his sheep, the woman who lost her money, or the father receiving his son, you will find that the one word He uses is "Lost." The sheep was lost, the silver was lost, the prodigal was lost It is man's state before God, and, what I urge upon you is, that He comes to you this evening, and bears witness to the truth of the condition of man — hence your condition.

Pilate turns from Jesus with the question, "What is truth?" Contemptuously, he turns his back upon Him, who is the Truth. Pilate certainly desired to save Jesus. He did not want to put the Lord to death. I do not believe he had any animus against Christ; but, mark, Pilate got an opportunity of knowing the truth, and, missed it That is the point. I do not say he was not touched. I do not say he was not roused. I think he was; he wanted to let the Lord off. He had a feeling of awe, a feeling that he had better not touch Him. At length, when he had made up his mind that He was guiltless, and three times had said, "I find no fault in him," he pronounced sentence against Him. "I have found no cause of death in him; I will therefore chastise him and let him go," gives evidence of how impressed Pilate was. But the Jews clamoured for his death, so he gave way, and was about to sign his death-warrant, apparently, when there came a message from his wife, "Have thou nothing to do with that just man; for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him" (Matt 27: 19). After this, I think, he desired more strenuously than ever to let Jesus go. When he met Jesus, He gave him the opportunity of choosing the truth, but he failed to take it. He then thought he might release Him to the people, for at that time, as an expression of his clemency, he allowed a prisoner to go free. But the people would not have Him: "Not this man, but Barabbas," they cried. They would not have Christ, and Pilate yielded to their demand, for he was afraid of the world.

I will tell you one thing, which would be most difficult for you to do, and that is, for you to stand up for Christ. You would fearlessly expose yourself to disease, you would lead a forlorn hope, and go boldly up to the cannon's mouth, with the chance of having your head blown off; but you would find it next to impossible to stand up for Christ among your comrades. How do you know? I will ask you this question, Have you stood up for Christ? Has the Lord said of you, "There is a man that is really for Me"? I will tell you, by so much, as we are influenced by the world, just so much are we under its thumb. Just, by so much, as one wants the favour of the world, so much are we governed by it. Pilate was going to let Jesus off, but the Jews, whom he professedly governed, really governed him, as they cried out, "If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend." Ah! Pilate did not want to lose the patronage of Caesar. He did not want to lose the favour of the world. Satan knows the weak spot in every man's heart, and knows how to touch it too. The world's approval was worth more to Pilate than the possession of the truth. Caesar's friends must side with Caesar, and Jesus' friends must side with Jesus. Pilate preferred the friendship of Caesar, and, making up his mind irrevocably, parted with Christ. He got a splendid chance, but lost it. Do not you imitate him. You have the chance tonight of taking Christ's side; you have an opportunity, every man in this hall has an opportunity. "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Rom. 10: 9, 10). The man who will take his stand for the Lord Jesus Christ will find what God's salvation is.

Pilate then dooms Him to die. Jesus goes forth wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe. He, who was the Truth, wore upon His head the emblem of the curse. One thing comes out clearly in the cross of Christ, and that is His self-sacrifice. He goes to the cross, and there Jesus brings out the truth as to God's nature when sin is in question. He who knew no sin was made sin, and on that tree God forsook Him. We read elsewhere, "From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour, and about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli! Eli! lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27: 45, 46). He was then bearing witness, as to what the truth regarding God's judgment of sin was. It was this, that sin could only separate the soul from God. He was forsaken by God, when He was bearing the sins of many. In the very moment of bearing those sins He made atonement for them. He presented His precious life to God, and He who knew no sin, was made sin, that He might put it away by the sacrifice of Himself.

Then we notice Jesus cried out, "It is finished." What was finished? By His death He met all the claims of God in righteousness, and consequently can meet all the claims of our consciences. "He suffered for sins once, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3: 18). Christ has accomplished redemption by His sacrifice. He has borne our sins, and put them away. He has annulled death, and met the claims of God. He, as man, went into the grave, and God has taken Him out of the grave; and He is now at the right hand of God, and the Holy Ghost has come down to tell us that He will quickly come again. Have you then heard and believed the gospel of your salvation? Have you heard the Word, believed the Truth, and received the gospel of your salvation? Oh! tonight may you hear Him. I have heard Him, and my heart bows down with gratitude when I hear that dying Saviour utter the words, "It is finished." I believe it as I hear it. "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice."

Well, I am brought down by the sense of my need as a sinner, and, as a sinner, look to Him, and get the knowledge of what He has done. It is all finished, and now the question is very simple, Is Christ to be your Saviour? Are you to be Christ's, is He to be yours. Will you hear His voice tonight? "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life." Oh! wonderful fact. He that heareth His voice is of the truth. What have I heard Him witness? To this — that man was lost, undone. And then I get the other side of the truth, the love of God has come out in the giving up of His only Son to become the substitute of sinners, that He might save every one who believes on Him. Do you think it is a poor thing to become a Christian? You never made a greater mistake in your life. It is the grandest thing in the world. Ah! but you say, "You are old and grey-haired." Well, I was converted when I was twenty, and I am deeply thankful that I have known the Lord all these years. I never regret that I was won for Jesus when I was just turned twenty. You turn to Jesus just now. You could not have a better opportunity, and I implore you, hear the voice of the Son of God. Do not forget this, "Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice." Have you heard it?

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Publican's Guest

A Publican's Guest

Luke 19: 1-10.

Chapter 3

A Publican's Guest; or, Two seekers, and what each found.

Every one in this audience tonight will at once perceive that there are two exceedingly anxious seekers in this passage, and it is not to be wondered at that each found the other. I read of Zaccheus, that "he sought to see Jesus." The Lord Himself says, "For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (ver. 10). These two are the complement, the one of the other. I find a Saviour seeking a sinner,. and I get a sinner seeking a Saviour. Of course they meet. I never knew a man yet, and I never expect to meet one, that really sought to find Jesus, and did not do so. No, I have been hunting for the last seven-and-thirty years for the man in this world that wanted Christ, and could not find Him. The man does not exist.

If you want Christ, dear friend, I have very good news for you; He wants you. You may say to me, But does it not say in Scripture, "There is none that seeketh after God." That is quite true; the Word of God does say so. "There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God" (Rom. 3: 11). That is what man is by nature, but when light breaks in upon man's soul, it sets him seeking to find out God. When divine light breaks in upon the soul of man — I do not say how it comes, for God has wonderful ways of letting the light into the soul — it makes him feel that there is something wrong with him, that there is a void, a vacancy, an emptiness, a want; that he is not satisfied. That is the first thing. Then, very likely, he will find out that he has to meet God. You have to meet Him; so have I. Every sinner has to meet Him sooner or later. The man finds out that he has to meet God, and the next thing he will discover is, that he is not fit to meet Him. Let me ask you, Has the light ever entered your soul yet? Has light from God entered your soul, the dark chambers of your heart, my friend? Have you found out, that you not only have to meet God, but that you are not fit to meet Him? Ah! I will tell you what it is; the man who gets his heart illuminated, gets earnest, begins to get anxious, and says, How can I meet God, and where can I find Him?

Whenever that is the case, God puts the gospel in his way, just as you have it in this remarkable scene here. Here was a man who was very desirous of seeing Jesus. Now, I wonder, if God were writing your history — and you must not think He does not take a note of your work — I wonder if God's recording angel has ever been able to write down, in the page of your life's history, that you are anxious to see Jesus. You have desired much, and you have desired to see plenty of things in this world. There have been many desires in your heart, and perhaps they have been gratified; but has there ever been in your history, such a record by God as this, that you desired to see Jesus. It is a wonderful moment in the history of a man when he wants to see Jesus, and when, in plain language, he sets out to seek the Saviour.

I quite admit that there may have been, and there usually is, some kind of preparation in the man's soul for his search. The heart is quickened, or the conscience is troubled, and there is a desire after Christ. It is a wonderful moment when the soul sets out in search of Christ. It may be through the achings of an empty heart; for some people are led to seek Christ through these. Others, again, are driven to Jesus, through the writhings of a guilty conscience. You will find, all through Scripture, illustrations of this. Look at Nicodemus! What drove him to Christ? His conscience. If I take the woman in the fourth of John, what brought her to Jesus? Undoubtedly, it was the aching of her heart. Her heart was empty. Aye, and there is many an empty heart in this hall tonight. You are having your fill of the world, but you are as empty as a deaf nut, and when the nut is cracked — and the day of doom is coming — its condition is manifest. If you are honest, you will admit your heart is empty and unsatisfied; you know what I mean. There is no satisfaction in it. But what did that woman find, when she came to the Saviour? — satisfaction in Christ.

Now, Zaccheus was drawn to the Lord in a remarkable way. Doubtless he had heard of Jesus previously, for the Lord had passed near, if not through Jericho on a previous occasion. He never passed through it again. That is what gives the story its great force. The man had one last opportunity, and he took it, of getting into contact with Jesus. Mark you, he embraced it; he seized it I can understand why the Lord says, "Make haste and come down, for today I must abide at thy house" (ver. 5). Suppose the man had put it off, and declined the Saviour's call, as you know many of you here have declined His call for many a day, what would have been the result? He would never have got another opportunity. Jesus never passed that way again. Let me say then, before I go further, it may be the last time that God will give you a call; it may be the last opportunity that God will give you of hearing anything about His blessed Son. That is why I reiterate, with all my soul, the words that we sang tonight, "Decide for Christ today." How much is wrapped up in that word "Today! Today!"

Now, in reading Scripture, it is always interesting to observe the context. Sometimes you will find in reading the Word of God, that some circumstance leads to the unfolding of a parable, and then that you get an instructive narrative connected with the doctrine which the Lord enforces. On the other hand, you may find that you get a striking narrative, and out of it flows a statement by the Lord of unspeakable importance. That, I think, we have in this Scripture, when the Lord says, as a reason why He should go to Zaccheus' house that day, that "the Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost" (ver. 10).

Before dwelling upon the narrative, I should like or a few moments to draw your attention to verse 10. That is just what Jesus tells us tonight Though we have not the same kind of opportunity of coming to Jesus, as Zaccheus had, of getting to the Lord — for He was then in this world — still our need, the guilt of our souls, and their state, before God, is described, and marked in verse 10, in the clearest way. What does Jesus say? "For the Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost" Oh, but, you say, you do not mean to tell me that I am lost? I do not tell you, that you are lost, but I will tell you what the Word of God says, "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost" And if you are not a person saved by grace, do you know where you are? If a man be not in the enjoyment of the gospel, and if he has not received forgiveness, then he has not peace, nor eternal life. He is still lost. "If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost." What? Lost? Yes. "If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world" (that is Satan; I hope you know whom you follow, if you are not Christ's) "hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them" (2 Cor. 4: 3, 4). I find, then, the distinct statement, made by the Spirit of God, that the man who has not received Jesus as his Saviour, is lost.

I know there are people, who would say to me, Oh! I thought a man would be lost if he died in his sins? Scripture does not put it that way at all. And you say, Will a man not be lost if he die in his sins? He is lost before he dies; and, if he dies in his sins, then he has to meet something else; he has to meet judgment and damnation, the consequences of those sins. I do not think you and I had better tone down the truth. God knows what is ahead of us. I do not think our Lord Jesus Christ came into this world, "to seek, and to save, that which was lost," and I do not think He went to the cross, and bore the judgment of sin upon it, if there were no judgment, no punishment ahead. To put it simply and plainly, the Word of God declares that we are lost, every one of us, if we have not known Jesus. There is but one word applies to us, it is the word lost! And after death there comes the judgment. It is a solemn word that; I would to God that every man in this hall tonight felt the weight of it. I know we live in a day when men tell us, God will never judge people for their sins; God is too good, too kind, too loving to judge them. Well, I again repeat, dear friends, that you and I had better listen to the words of the Lord Jesus, and I find Him saying here, "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which is lost"

Oh! but, you say, that refers to Zaccheus the publican, and from his occupation — a tax-gatherer — we know what sort of a man he was. Well, do you think your life will compare with his? Do you give half of your goods to the poor? He did. Will any man stand up in this meeting and say, "The half of my goods I give to the poor." No, he cannot. I am not going to stand up and say it, because I do not. Nor do I expect to be saved on that ground. He says, "Lord, the half of my goods I gave to the poor; and, if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold" (ver. 8). I think honestly that Zaccheus' life will compare most favourably with that of any living man here. Every soul, without exception, has to be saved, but not on that ground. The Lord knew that he was lost, and then out came the glorious truth, "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost." Man is a lost sinner. On every man, old or young, rich or poor, learned or illiterate, the Spirit of God fixes that word — "LOST."

You have the same truth brought out in the fifteenth of Luke by the blessed Lord. I find Him, in the figure of the Shepherd, seeking the lost sheep; He goes out to seek and save it. The same idea is present in the lost bit of money. The woman swept the house till she found it. And when the father received back the prodigal, he said, "This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found" (Luke 15: 24). The Lord points out there the truth as to man's condition. He is away from God; he is no longer with God. He is lost; and if he be not delivered by sovereign grace, where is he for ever? He remains where he is. Therefore the Lord announces that He is come "to seek, and to save, that which was lost" I know this is not a very palatable doctrine nowadays. But it is not a question of whether it be palatable or not Is it true? is the question. It is far better to know the truth, because if I do not know the truth, I do not see where I am, I do not learn my state before God, I do not learn what my condition is, and in consequence do not seek to remedy it. Consequently it is of unspeakable importance that every one should know where he is, and what his condition is in the sight of God. Lost, is the emphatic word which describes the condition of every unsaved man.

The Lord Jesus says here, "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost" What does He mean? Let me illustrate it. I was passing along Princes Street a few years ago. It was a fine bright, sunny afternoon. I came to a cross street where a little lassie, about five years of age, was standing. She was in floods of tears, with her hat in her hand, and her hair hanging down her back. The child was the picture of misery and distress. I was naturally touched. "What is the matter, my little one?" I said. She lifted up her hands, and piteously said, "I am lost" That one word "lost" explained all. She was away from home, was alone, and lost, in this big city, with no one to help her. That, dear friends, is where you are. You are away from home, and away from God. It is a great thing to know you are lost. I debated with myself what I should do for the child, and thought of handing her to a policeman, when I noticed a girl of about eighteen running down the street, as hard as she could, and looking this way and that, as if she wanted to find some one she had lost At last she saw the little lass, and rushing up to her she cried, "O Jennie, Jennie, I've found ye." The little creature, immensely relieved, rushed at once into her sister's arms, and I thought, that is just my history. The Saviour has come out to seek, and to save me. That child was found by her sister, and the man who speaks to you, tonight, has been found by the Saviour. Have you been so found? I have got to know the truth, that the Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which is lost. Oh! friends, let us face the truth. It is good to do so. It is an immense mistake not to know the truth. It is of paramount importance to know the truth about ourselves, about our souls. I must know where I am. It is an immense thing to get light as to what my state before God is, for light shows me just what, and where I am, and also reveals to me who, and what Jesus is.

An old man came into my consulting room a few years ago. He was a stranger from the country. "Doctor," said he, "will you give me a little medicine?" "What for?" I asked. "Oh! I do not feel very well." "But," said I, Oh what is the matter? ""I have got a little pain here," putting his hand to his breast "What is the source of the pain? Let me see the place where the pain is?" He opened up his coat and vest, and revealed to me a huge pulsating tumour, which indicated to me that the man's life was in jeopardy. "How long has that been there?" I asked. "What?" said he "That," and I put his hand on it "Dear me," he said, "I never knew it was there. Is it dangerous?" "That is not the point," said I; "how long has it been there?" "Well, Doctor, I never knew it was there at all." "It has been there for many weeks, possibly many months." "Well, I never knew it was there." Then he asked what it was, and I told him that it was an aneurism. He next asked if it was dangerous, and I had to tell the man the truth. "Do you think I shall have long to live," he next asked, and I said, "Do you want to know the truth?" "Yes, I do." Oh! Then I do not think that you will live very long," was my reply. I then asked him, "Are you converted?" "No:" he replied, "I never thought much about those things." "Well," I said, "I do not think that you can be cured, and I think it is about time you got ready for the march." Thank God! he did get ready. He went into the Royal Infirmary, there found Jesus as his Saviour, and soon died, prepared to meet God.

Perhaps you will say, You are a funny doctor! Well! I think it is best to tell people the truth. If you do not want the truth, do not come to me. If you do not want the truth, spiritually, do not come back next Sunday, because we must have the truth. The truth is worth everything. And what is the truth? I was a lost sinner, and so are you, my friend. But by sovereign grace, I know what it is to be saved, or I would not be speaking to you this evening. I know what got into that old man's mind, after I told him the truth as to his body. It was this: I know perfectly well my days on earth are short, and I know I am not fit to meet God. I will lose no time; and he did not lose any time. He was a wise old man. I traced him out, and I heard of his evening days. In these he came to Jesus, and passed away rejoicing in the Saviour's love. I will tell you what it is, my friend, you may not have a malady, that will cut you off so quickly, but you are nothing more nor less than a target for death to shoot his arrows at. And I should not wonder if the archer, Death, were standing, the string of his bow drawn tight with arrow set, and that, ere the morning light, that arrow may have found its target in your heart, and that you have passed into eternity. Tell me, into what kind of eternity would you go, if tomorrow found you there? Whether you are an old man, or a young man, a man gone o'er the summit of life's hill, or a man in the heyday of youth, I put it to you, Are you ready? Not unless you have come to Jesus! If you have come to Jesus, then, thank God, you are ready; you are saved. "For the Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost." It is a great thing for the soul to discover, I am lost. It must be learned sooner or later. The truth must do its work in the soul.

I do not dislike the idea of being lost, and there is no hardship in hearing that truth, when along with it I hear these words, "The Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which is lost." If a man were told that he was lost, and that there was no Saviour, it would be bitter indeed. If there were not a single chance of my returning to God, and if there were no Redeemer, and no redemption, it would be bitter, and bad, my friend; but God tells me I am a lost man in one breath, and in the next, He presents to me a loving, living Saviour. That is the very thing I want. What I need, as a lost sinner, is what the grace of God provides for me — a Saviour. And let me ask you, Did you ever think calmly that the blessed Son of God left the realms of glory, and came into this world to seek you and me? Did you ever ask Him to come? He tells us He came to seek, and to save, that which was lost. It was His own heart that brought Him. His love prompted Him: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3: 16). The blessed Son of God became a man, and came into this scene to seek, and to save, that which was lost. Glorious tidings! And, has He not sought you, worldly man, time and again? Does He not seek to attract you to Him now? I will tell you what has happened. You have hitherto managed to evade His grasp; you have eluded Him; you have kept Him at arm's length. Do you think you are wise; do you think you evince wisdom by this?

It is a startling thing to say, but I know well its truth, that if you draw near to a worldly man, to tell him about God's salvation, he will avoid you. He will shrink from you, as though he feared you wished to infect him with small-pox, or some other terrible disease. This only brings out the real state of the heart, and the blinding, deadening power of sin. It only shows where the sinner is with regard to the Lord.

On the other hand, Christ is the joy of the believer's heart, and there is nothing sweeter to his ear than to hear about Him. If I meet you, and it turns out that I know some intimate friend of yours, who is also a great friend of mine, why, at once, there is a bond of union linking us together. I am a Christian, and every Christian is my brother. I was walking down Leith Walk some time ago, when I overtook two men. One of them remarked as I passed, "It is sweet to hear of Jesus." I was pinned to the spot. Jesus! why, that was the name of my Saviour. I confess I was arrested. I said to myself, These men must be two of my brethren, two of the same family as myself. If you meet a Christian in a tram, or a train, your heart begins to warm up immediately. You say, But my heart does not warm up. No, of course not; you are not a Christian. That is the reason. I will tell you why; you have never learned His grace to you as a lost sinner, but when you learn that He has saved you, a wonderful change will take place.

"For the Son of Man is come to seek, and to save, that which was lost." How does He save? He saves by His death; He saves by the work He accomplished for us on the cross. The only way we can be saved is through the death of the Saviour. Sin is on us; we have all sinned, and our sins must bring us into judgment. But what has taken place? The blessed Lord Jesus Christ has gone to the cross, and borne our sins, and the judgment of God, in respect of sin that He may bring us to God, through the work that He alone could accomplish. It is wonderful news, that the "Son of Man came to seek, and to save, that which was lost."

You do not know how the Lord loves you, how He longs for you. He wants to save you this night; will you let Him? Will you have Him? He has come to seek, and to save, that which was lost. If there be a lost soul here tonight, one consciously lost, you may have Him. But you say, How can I have Him? Let Zaccheus show you the way. It was in a very simple way that he came to Jesus. He was a rich man; chief among the publicans; a kind of commissioner of customs or of taxes. He was evidently a high-placed official, but the publicans, or tax-gatherers, were not loved in those days, nor are they loved in ours. This man desired to see Jesus. His riches did not satisfy him. He knew there was something wanting, something lacking. Jesus had passed that way before, but he had missed Him. just before this, Jesus had opened the eyes of the blind man, and this rich man said in his heart, I would like to see Him. That is a striking word — "He sought to see Jesus, who he was" (Luke 19: 3). The man was in earnest. There is no doubt of that. Do you want to see Jesus? Jesus was the point of attraction for Zaccheus. It was Jesus whom he longed to behold. Say, have you beheld Him? You have heard plenty about Jesus; have you ever seen Him? Oh, no! you say, we cannot see Him now. If you had faith, faith in the blessed Son of God, He would become a reality to you. Faith sees Jesus; faith knows Jesus. There is nothing more real than this knowing Jesus. It is a far more real thing to know the Lord Jesus Christ, than to know anybody else in this world, and to know Him is eternal life.

Zaccheus wanted to see Jesus, "and could not for the press, because he was little of stature." Is that always the case? Invariably. The devil will always do his best to hinder a Christ-seeker. If any man says, I would like to be a Christian, I would like to have Christ, I would like to know Christ, I would like to see Christ, what will be the effect? Why, the devil will put every possible obstacle in his way. Here it was "the press." What sort of press was it? It was a big crowd that day, and Zaccheus was a little man; and I have no doubt the devil suggested to him that a little man like he could never see over the heads of the big people; and if he had not been in downright earnest, he would have said, "Here are hundreds of people gathered, this is not the time to see Him, and I will wait another opportunity." But no, Zaccheus is in downright earnest, so he clears out of the crowd. He sees ahead a sycamore tree, and do you think the devil helped him to get up that sycamore tree that day? I do not think so. In his earnestness Zaccheus had said, I want Him; I must go to Jesus; I desire to see Jesus; and I will see Him, if I have to go up that sycamore tree to accomplish my wish. I think I can see Zaccheus. Then the devil comes along and says: "Zaccheus, if you go up that sycamore tree everybody will laugh at you. You know you are unpopular; you are a tax-gatherer, and it is a most odious tax you have to gather — the Roman tax. You had better not do it." "Never mind," says Zaccheus, "I am in earnest this time; I missed Him the last time. I will see Him this time." And what do I read now? "And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Him" (ver. 4).

He cleared the difficulty, and got out of the crowd. I admire him! Look here, young man, what is your crowd — your difficulty? Your difficulty in becoming a Christian is this, "What would my fellows say? What would my classmates say, if I were to become a Christian? They would laugh at me." Never mind that. When I was converted, my old companions had plenty of laughing at me; but I said to them, "My dear fellows, I have the best of it, depend upon it I have Christ for time and eternity. I am safe for time and eternity. I am happy for time and eternity. You may laugh as you please, but, thank God, when you will be just finishing with the things of this world, and will have nothing but 'the wages of sin' for eternity, I shall be just beginning my joy." My dear friends, that is how the devil tries to hinder a man. Sometimes he says he would not hold out to the end; or, again, that he would not be able to stand against the mockery of his fellows; or, again, he suggests that he would be a contemptible fellow if he began to follow Christ, and did not hold out. In that way the devil seeks to hinder your blessing. Heed him not. My friend, you must get out from all this press; I implore you, break from the press. There is a man in this room who is anxious, but the devil says to him, "Your prospects would suffer, you must not be a Christian." I reply, "Better lose your prospects than lose your soul." "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Mark 8: 36, 37).

Well, Zaccheus got away from the press; he wriggled out of it. He got clear of the thing that entangled him. If there be a convicted sinner here, who wants Christ, I will tell you what that man will do. In his heart he will say in the presence of God, "I will get out of the crowd; I will get clean away from all that hinders me." Zaccheus was a man with downright earnestness about him. He ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see Jesus. He just cleared out of the press. Every soul really has to do similarly.

The night I was converted, there was an awful press on my soul; I will tell you what it was. It was just a week before Christmas, and I was engaged to go down from London to Devon, because I had to sing at a concert during the holidays. This was the point; I was pledged to sing the comic songs, and the devil said to me, "You cannot go and sing comic songs if you become a Christian." I thought it was rather indecorous, and I said to myself, "How can I decide for Christ, and then go and sing comic songs?" Then the devil suggested, that I should put off deciding to be a Christian for a fortnight, that I could well defer for that short time, could go and redeem my pledge, and then return to town and be a Christian. I can tell you that he pressed this procrastination strenuously. However, I am glad to say that I came to the Lord that night.

"And what did you do about the concert?" I hear some one saying. I wrote to the conductor saying that I was converted, and that if I came down to the concert, I must sing about Christ; and I was afraid that would damage the success of his concert. People asked why I was not at the concert, and the conductor let out that I had been converted, and then my old friends said that I was gone wrong in my head. But no, dear friends, the truth was that I had got right in my heart I was not wrong in the head then, nor am I now, as I speak the truth in love to your souls, and say that I want you for Christ. I want every one here tonight, by the grace of God to say, I will be for Christ. You would never regret it. I have been seven-and-thirty years on the road to glory now, and I have never repented of my decision for Christ for one solitary second. Repented it! Why, it is the grandest thing under the sun to be a Christian. If you are not a Christian, you may well be ashamed of yourself.

Now Zaccheus was in earnest, and would to God that you too were in earnest. I have no doubt that he got up into the tree with the thought in his heart, I hope nobody will see me. That is what our hearts say at the first, till we get into the enjoyment of the grace of Christ Then, when the love of God is enjoyed, and His salvation known, we want to tell everybody about it That is always the way. When a man really gets to know Christ as his Saviour, then he wants to let everybody know about it

What happened next? When Jesus got to the spot, He looked up, and saw him. Zaccheus hoped nobody would see him. He sought to see Jesus, and as He moved along in the crowd his wish was gratified; he saw the Saviour. Happy man. At that moment Jesus "looked up, and saw him" (ver. 5). Ah! friend, He has His eye upon you also. Jesus saw him, and then said, "Zaccheus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house" (Luke 19: 5). He knew what was in Zaccheus' heart. He knows what is in your heart; He knows exactly what you want, what you desire. He knows you want Him? Do you want to be His? Do you want to be washed in His blood? Then you will break through the press to get at Him.

"Zaccheus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house." That is a lovely word, "Today!" Ah, friend, do not despise it. Today! That is just now, where you sit at this moment, and the blessed Saviour says to you, "Today I must abide at thy house." He wants your heart for Himself. He wants your heart filled with the knowledge of His own grace, and calls to you to "make haste, and come down, for today I" — Jesus, the Saviour — "must abide at thy house." Is not that sweet? I, Jesus, the living, loving Saviour, must abide at thy house. What then did Zaccheus do? "And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully." Do not you put it off Do not you delay till the morrow. Do not you say, I will think about it; I will give it my best consideration; I will ponder the matter carefully, I would like to be a Christian some day.

Stop, my friend, this will not suffice. The Lord says, Today! If you put it off till another day your fate may be that of a lady, who had been prevailed upon to go to the theatre to hear a well-known preacher. The realities of eternity were brought before her soul, and she was deeply impressed, for her diary revealed that she meant to turn to the Lord. After relating that she had been to the theatre, hearing So-and-so preach, her diary of that day contained these words, "I am determined, this day twelvemonth, to give up the world, and yield up my heart to Christ, and become a Christian." But conscience was not satisfied with twelve months. The delay of twelve months for an immortal soul is a heavy risk, depend upon it. Underneath was written, "This day, six months. I am determined to give up the world and become Christ's, and yield my heart to Christ." Apparently her conscience would not give her peace, and a third time she recorded her decision. This time she wrote, "This day month I am determined to give up the world, and give my heart to Christ." Her conscience was apparently dulled by the prospect of decision within thirty-one days, and she retired to bed. Next morning that lady was found dead in her bed. God says to you, dear friends, "Today." Jesus says, "This day." "Make haste, and come down, for today I must abide at thy house."

And what response did Zaccheus make? We read, "He made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully" (ver. 6). Blessed action. Blessed decision. "He received him joyfully."

And how may we receive Him? you ask. He is not here on earth as He was then, and we cannot receive Him in the same way as Zaccheus did. If you want to receive Him, the Word of God tells us the way: "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name" (John 1: 12). The way we receive Jesus is by believing on His name. If you want to receive Him, He is willing to receive you. You believe on His name, and Christ is yours, and you are Christ's.

But the bough of a sycamore tree is too far away from Christ, and Zaccheus is bidden to come down. His heart is obedient to the call, and he comes down, and receives Him joyfully. The people murmured that He was gone to be the guest of a man that was a sinner. I would like you to take up this position of obedience to Him tonight, and what would be the result? You will hear. What is said here? "This day is salvation come to this house." The moment the will is bent to Jesus, the moment the sinner's heart is bowed at the Saviour's feet, then comes this word to the conscience, "This day is salvation come to this house." It is a present salvation, because it is God's salvation wrapped up in the person of Jesus. This day is salvation come to this house. It is a present salvation; a perfect salvation; a personal salvation. It is a salvation wrapped up in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the moment you receive Jesus, you are a saved person. You have received God's salvation. What a treasure to have in a world of death. Death has dominion over the believer no longer.

The man who receives Jesus receives eternal life on the very spot where he is, and the Saviour whispers to him, "This day is salvation come," not coming. There are a great many people who say, Salvation is coming. I beg your pardon; salvation has come. I will tell you what is coming; judgment is coming. Salvation has come in the Person of Christ, and the man who receives Christ has salvation. Can anything be more simple? "This day is salvation come to this house." The heart that receives Jesus can sing, I have a Saviour. Do not be afraid to confess Him. The difficulty that many a soul has to contend with, is confessing that you have received Christ. You do not need to wait till tomorrow morning to confess Him. You have the feeling, that if you confess Him tomorrow, men will laugh at you. Never mind that; who cares for that? He is a poor weak sort of a man that cannot stand something for Christ's sake. He is a very poor fellow that cannot stand up for Christ, and take his stand for Jesus in this world. Mark, for your soul to simply say, I am on the Lord's side, is to find that the Lord will sustain you, and you will find He will help you. Is there such a young man in this room tonight? God be praised for every man who stands for Jesus, and may you be able to stand for Jesus tonight. You will then find what Zaccheus found. The Saviour had found the sinner, and saved him. The sinner had received the Saviour joyfully. Each found just what he sought, and each had joy in the possession of the other. Have you sought and found the Saviour yet?

"If I could find the oldest heart,

That longest has withstood

The wooings of Almighty love, -

My Saviour could and would

Forgive the awful life of sin,

And take the aged offender in -

My Saviour could and would.

If I could find the hardest heart,

Receiving only good,

And yet returning only ill, -

My Saviour could and would,

With one sweet glance of patient love,

The hardened rebel's spirit move —

My Saviour could and would.

If I could find the coldest heart,

And in its coldest mood,

A stone beneath the brooding wings, —

My Saviour could and would

Put warmth into the icy thing,

And give it life and give it wing —

My Saviour could and would.

If dark despair had sealed the heart,

And like a sentry stood,

And cried, 'Life is impossible'

My Saviour could and would —

He could give life, for He has died;

He would give life, though all denied —

My Saviour could and would.

My heart is charmed to sing this song;

And if perchance it should

Prove music to a hopeless one,

My Saviour could and would

That hopeless one this hour forgive,

If but God's message he believe —

My Saviour could and would."

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Ruler's Difficulty

A Ruler's Difficulty

John 3: 1-21, John 7: 50-52, John 19: 39-42.

Chapter 4.

A Ruler's Difficulty; or, New birth, what is it?

There are three places in Scripture where we learn a little about this interesting man — Nicodemus. First in John, chap. 3, then in chap. 7, and after that again in the nineteenth chapter; and I believe you will find that in these three places we get illustrations of the true spiritual whereabouts of every person. Now I read the third chapter of John, as far as Nicodemus is concerned, as "midnight" The seventh was "twilight," and the nineteenth was "daylight."

Midnight is usually profoundly dark. That is where every man is who has not met Jesus. You are in midnight darkness, my friend, if still unconverted, and there you will be until you meet Him. And when you meet Him, I will tell you what will come after — a perfect flood of light. Light always comes from God, never from man. God is light. Then, you say, what about the "twilight"? In the seventh chapter of John you will find that Nicodemus puts in timidly — sideways — a word for Jesus. I know many people like that, who put in a little apologetic word for Jesus, who would not like to stand openly out for Him. Nicodemus says: Do not you judge Him before you hear Him! Do not be too hard on Him. Are you in His train? the Pharisees ask. Ah! he would not say that exactly. But there came a moment when he saw the Son of Man hanging upon a tree, crowned with thorns, and with all the world against Him, and then he came forward boldly, saying, I am on His side now. I do not care what the world thinks, what the world says, or what the world does. I am on his side. It was "daylight" in his soul.

Joseph of Arimathea came, you know, to Pilate, and asked to be allowed to take Jesus down from the cross, and then Nicodemus brought an hundred pounds of ointment to anoint Him with. He now saw the truth — who Jesus was. I wonder if you have ever seen who Jesus was? I wonder if there has ever been a desire in your heart to know Jesus? I cannot help thinking that you would not be here this evening if you had not. I do not think it was mere curiosity to hear me that brought you here tonight. I trust it was the desire in your hearts to know the Lord Jesus. That was what brought Nicodemus. He was brought into the presence of the Lord. It is quite true he came by night. He hoped nobody would see him. He is like all of us. We are all alike in this respect. Men are the greatest cowards about Christ you can possibly imagine. A man will go coolly up to the cannon's mouth, and run the risk of having his head blown off by the enemy's shot, yet he would tremble like an aspen leaf to own that he was a follower of Christ. A strange thing it is, but it just shows what a dire coward man is where Christ is concerned. It shows, too, where the sinner is.

This man came to Jesus by night. There is no doubt he hoped nobody would see him. This is frequently the case, that when a man comes first to Jesus, he hopes nobody will know anything about it, but when he has found Him he wants everybody to know Him. That is what I find about everybody who has a sense of the forgiveness of the Lord, and is enjoying the blessing of His salvation. They then want everybody else to know it. Not to know about themselves, but to know Christ as their Saviour, and to learn like them to confide in Him. I am perfectly certain every Christian man here will back me up in this. There is not a man who has learned to know Jesus, to know Him as his Saviour, but wants every one else to know Him as such. That is the beauty of Christianity. See how wonderfully it opens and widens the heart. I would have you then get what I have got; because if you get it, you will be immensely richer, while I am none the poorer. On the contrary, I am much happier, because I have somebody else to enjoy Christ with. That is what Christianity does. You have such a treasure, such peace, and such joy in the knowledge of the Lord yourself, that you wish others to share these blessings. My dear fellows, I have tried both sides of the fence. Few of you were perhaps so careless and godless as I was; but I will tell you what God did. He picked me up and converted me, and has filled my heart with deepest joy, and now I would that you knew the joy the knowledge of this blessed Saviour imparts.

Before this knowledge and this joy can be known there must come the sense of need, and what I find in this chapter is this, that Nicodemus came to the Lord absolutely and profoundly ignorant as to the truth about himself. On previous occasions we have been seeing that Christ was the truth, and the perfect expression of grace. Now we must learn from the Lord Jesus a little about ourselves. I find in the second chapter of John — part of which I read — that "many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did." Do you think that saved them? Never. I would not think much of the faith of a man that was only based upon the testimony of visible deeds or miracles. I would not give you any thanks, if you could fill this room with evidences of the truth of Christianity. It is only unbelief that looks for external buttresses, and evidences of Christianity. I do not want them. I want nothing but the revelation of God in His own Word. And, thank God, we have there all the truth. Do you mean to tell me that Christianity requires to be buttressed up by the evidences which a man's senses can furnish? If it wants such buttressing, the sooner it tumbles down the better! Here are God's own Word, God's own Son, and God's own Spirit! What more do you want? Thank God, we have His Word. And in that Word, we have the record of the Son of God coming in grace to earth. Further, in this book I find a sinner, — a religious man, no doubt, but unsaved, — a religious, respectable, decorous, and proper man, and a man well instructed in the Scriptures, but profoundly in the dark as to his own state and God's requirements, — in what I might call nature's blindness, for that was where he was, — coming to Jesus, just as Jesus says, "I cannot trust any man," for "Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men" (John 2: 24).

The great truth of the second and third of John is this — Jesus, so to speak, says, I cannot trust you; but you will have to trust Me, or else you will perish. Well, you say, that is very despotic! Never mind. I like despotism when it comes from the heart of God. I like the sovereignty of God. Because, you see, you and I must be broken down; you and I must be brought down as sinners before God. We must know the truth from God, for if I have not got the truth from God, I have not got the truth at all. I listen to the testimony of absolute truth, and what it says to me is this: "Many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did. But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men; and needed not that any should testify of man; for he knew what was in man." He knew well that the multitudes that followed His steps, and waited to be fed by His Almighty hand one day, would the next, in cold blood, prefer a murderer and robber to Him, would wickedly put a crown of thorns on His head, spit upon Him, smite Him with a rod, and send Him out to death.

Ah, but you say, these were the people of the first century. Do you think the people of the nineteenth century are any better? Let us see. Go to the corner of your street, and attempt to preach Christ. What will you find? You will find that most people do not want Christ. They do not like even to hear of Him. Preach Christ, however, and gather a crowd, and then policeman No. B246 comes and says, "You must not block up the thoroughfare; you must move on." All right. We are subject to authority, move on, go down three blocks, and there find a German band, with a couple of thousand people standing about the place. Does policeman No. B246 move them on? Ah, no. They get leave to stand. The world loves music; it does not love Christ. That is it. Sinners love music, but not Christ.

The truth is, that every man has a nature that is opposed to, and unfit for God. So bitterly opposed is that nature to God, that it is "not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be" (Rom. 8: 7). Since in the very springs of your being you are opposed to God, it is manifest that you will not do for God. You must be new-born, every one of you. You cannot be reconstructed. You cannot be patched up. I know you go in for reformation; but it will not do. It is like painting up a rotten ship, putting in new rigging, and new masts, and sending it out to sea only to sink in the first storm. You must have an absolutely new nature, and you cannot get it from any one but from the blessed Son of God. Self-improvement is a huge delusion. Have I not come across my reformation friends? Lots of them. There are hosts of men who have tried to reform themselves. Did I not try it myself? Long did I try it, and what was the result? I got no better, so I gave it up as hopeless, and what did I then learn? That I was lost. And what then? I believe God caused me to pass through the new birth, and Jesus saved me. And that is what He will do for you tonight. He cannot trust you; you had better trust Him.

I know people like to think there is still some good in man before God. Some years ago I was preaching in this city, and at the close three young men came to me — University divinity students by the same token — and said, "We should like to have a little talk with you." "I am glad to meet you," I replied. "We have listened to your address, and we do not agree with it." "What is the matter with my discourse?" I asked. — "Well," they said, "you have not given man a leg to stand upon." "I could not," I replied, "because he has not got one." "You have declared man to be ruined, lost, and undone, needing a new birth, and that he has not a single good point about him to commend him to God." "It is quite true. The Word of God says so." "Ah, but," they said, "we cannot allow man to come to that level." "My dear fellows," I said, "the point is this, the Word of God says man is lost. What then is the good of your saying he is not? The Son of God says, 'Ye must be born again.' What is the use of your denying it?" "We admit that man is not what he ought to be — We admit the fall; but there is surely a good side to man. And what is wanted is to cultivate and develop that."

Such was their view, and I fear the belief of many, but the Lord Jesus settles that in this chapter, as He says to Nicodemus, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." Educate it. It is educated flesh. Refine it. It is refined flesh. Though I educate it and refine it to the very utmost, it is flesh after all. Flesh will not do for God. Flesh is not spirit. You may sublimate the flesh as you will, you will never distil spirit out of it Do you understand? See that to improve the flesh is truly hopeless? Thank God that it is so. We are all in the same case. "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3: 23), and that was what the religious Pharisee in the darkness of that night in Judea learned, and that he must be born again. You and I too — very likely not so religious as he — must be born again. I do not think your life or mine would bear comparison with that of Nicodemus. Come now, honestly, do you think so? Supposing for argument's sake we could put a pane of glass in your breast, and so let all here see and know the secret sins of your life, that nobody knows but God, and many of which very likely you have forgotten, what would happen? I think I should see you making quickly for the door, for you would not care that the secret sins and deeds of your life should be known. If Nicodemus needed the new birth, how much more do you and I need it? Do I not know what students are? Of course I do. Was I not one myself? Aye, and I know the life of the average young man. There is a good lot of your life you would fain have concealed from man, and you would blush to the roots of your hair if it were exposed. It is sin. You have lived in sin. You have indulged in sin. You are a sinner. If you are ashamed that man should know it, how do you stand with God? You will not do for God. You must be new-born. That is the naked truth.

Now this "man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews," came to the Lord, feeling that all was not right. Religion without Christ can never make a man happy. A large percentage of so-called Christians have got just enough religion to make life miserable.. Do you understand what I mean? They have a name to live, must keep up an appearance, and they have not Christ to satisfy their hearts. They are professors without being possessors of the truth, and their inconsistency of life is what puts numbers of young fellows against the gospel. You must have Christ within your heart, or it is no good. Nevertheless, do not think for a moment that I am giving you a reason for remaining in unbelief, or that any inconsistency in another man can be an excuse for your unbelief.

I remember a brother of mine returning from America, where he had been nearly all his life. I was a boy when he left, and twenty-five years had rolled by. Before he returned I had been converted, and of course I began to speak to him about his soul, as he was still unconverted. After a little conversation, he turned to me and said, "Christians are so inconsistent with their profession that they stumble me." "I admit that," I replied; "but I would ask you, Is my inconsistency going to keep you out of hell?" "I would not think that for a moment," he had to confess. No, for the man who takes this ground I have a simple answer. It is this. You turn to the Lord, and be a consistent Christian. Do not suppose because you see a flaw in the life of somebody else that that will justify your unbelief. Quite possibly you may say, I know somebody who professed to be converted, and he fell away, hence I do not believe in conversion. Very likely. Did you ever see a bad bank-note, or a bad half-crown? Does that bad banknote prove that all bank-notes are bad. You are not such a fool as to believe that. What does a bad bank-note prove? A bad bank-note proves that there are millions of good ones, or the forger would not have troubled to produce it. Similarly the devil produces counterfeits of the real article, called a Christian, and when you think that one inconsistent man proves that all are false, you are guilty of gross folly.

Let us grant that some poor fellow you know has stumbled and fallen. He may have been converted, but not walking near the Lord, Satan has tripped him up, and he has come down. You think he is not genuine. Let me tell you, that at bottom, that man is perhaps much better than the man who has never come down. He will be a better man after he came down than before it When the devil's maid-servant met Peter in the high priest's palace, she tripped him up, and he came down, and denied his Lord. He, no doubt, went out of that court feeling, It is all up with me; and everybody else might well have said, We shall never hear of Simon Peter again. But you hear of Simon Peter again — a great deal more. Three days after he met his Lord and Saviour in resurrection, and got the sweet sense of His forgiveness, and seven weeks afterwards we find him preaching on the day of Pentecost, when three thousand men and women were converted. I know what the devil said then: "I wish I had left him alone in the high priest's palace; the breaking of him has been the making of him." Peter had been picked up by the never-failing grace of the Lord. He never could have preached like that if he had never fallen. Satan often does the Lord's work without knowing it.

But now, what about you, my friend? Have you passed through the new birth? If you have never come to Jesus yet, come now. Nicodemus came by night; but he came to Jesus. Can this be said of you? He came and said, "Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him." Jesus replied, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." He has no eyes with which to discern God's things. "Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" A very foolish question, but it brought out a gracious answer, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." You say, I suppose, that was baptism. No, what did Nicodemus know about baptism? Baptism was not a Jewish rite. It is very simple. It is the Word of God, used by the Spirit of God.

Very frequently in Scripture water is the symbol of the Word of God. For example: "I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed" (Isa. 44: 3). Again: "I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean . . . and a new spirit will I put within you" (Ezek. 36: 25-27). Look at the thirteenth chapter of John, where Jesus washed the disciples' feet with water. Presently Judas goes out, and in the opening of the fifteenth chapter the Lord says, "Now ye are clean," not because I have washed your feet, but "through the word which I have spoken unto you." It is the water of the Word. Clearly, the apostle Paul speaks of it again, when he says, "Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word" (Eph. 5: 25, 26). Again we read, "Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruits of his creatures" (James 1: 18). Peter also says, "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever" (1 Peter 1: 23). It is the Word of God, applied by the Spirit of God to the soul. It is the Spirit of God, taking the Word of God, and using it in the conversion of the man. You will find it so in every case.

If you are acquainted with a Christian, one who is a downright, what I call a backbone Christian — for there are Christians without backbone, they are not out and out — but if you are acquainted with a downright, out and out, backbone Christian, ask him, "How did you get converted?" and I am pretty sure what he will say. He will quote to you some bit of God's Word, and say that through it he was converted. It was a portion of God's Word struck me. It was the last verse in the Bible you would have expected to be the means of a man's conversion. It was this, "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well; the devils also believe, and tremble" (James 2: 19). You say, There is no gospel in that. Not a bit. How then could that convert you? you ask. It simply showed me that I was the companion of devils. "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well; the devils also believe, and tremble," revealed to me that my faith and theirs was identical. They believed all I did, and I saw clearly that they were lost, they were damned. I knew I was going to be; and I am not ashamed to confess, I saw my company and fled. Do you say, "Coward!" I wish you had a little of my cowardice. I fled to Christ, and He saved me.

Do you dare the judgment of God? You say, I do not believe in it. You will be converted yet Christ believed in it, and bore it that He might rescue me. The Word of God is very simple, and the truth plain. "God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." Men do not believe in judgment They will be converted yet. Scripture speaks plainly of "wrath to come." The Lord is coming. judgment is coming. I hear the thunder roll of the judgment of God in the distance. You say, I do not hear it Very likely; there are too many of the devil's drums going to make you attentive to the distant sound of the judgment of God. It is coming nevertheless. God "hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance to all men, in that he raised him from the dead" (Acts 17: 31). Yes, that judgment day is coming. Thank God it is not come. It is yet the day of grace. Christ brings salvation, by preaching, the Word of God goes out, the Spirit of God applies it, and what is the result? The man that hears the Word of God is born again. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; but that which is born of the Spirit is spirit," said the Lord to Nicodemus (ver. 6). Have you been born of the Spirit yet? What do you mean? you say. Ah! the very fact that you have asked the question shows that you have not gone through it. The man who is born of the Spirit can say, "Thank God, I know what it is to be born of the Spirit," and he can very probably tell you the year, the week, the day, and even the hour when the change took place.

Without doubt the Lord's statement greatly puzzled Nicodemus. The necessity of new birth had never entered his soul before. Even then it would seem as if he had but half believed it. His face expressed his profound astonishment, and that led the Lord to say, "Marvel not that I said unto thee, YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN" (ver. 7). This inexorable "must" applies to the whole world; to the highest and lowest, to peer and peasant, to prince and pauper, to old and young, rich and poor. The Lord Jesus addresses these words to this religious man, but they have a universal application to every soul. Have you weighed them?

The new birth is a real thing, and there will be soul exercise till the gospel is really known. Perhaps there is a young man here who says, I thought when a man became a Christian he got very happy. No, do not make any mistake about that. The first effect of the gospel upon a man is not to make him joyous, but serious. He faces God — he faces his sins — he faces the reality of God's judgment, and therefore the first effect of the gospel is to make a man grave. Afterwards it fills him with joy. When God's Spirit and Word first affect a man his conscience is awakened, and he becomes repentant and self-judged. Then he wakes up to the discovery of the goodness of God, and coming to the Saviour, gets forgiveness and pardon. Then joy and peace set in, and deepen as the years roll on. Of the seven-and-thirty years since I was converted this is the happiest of my life. Every year is better than the last, because there is more of Christ and of His grace in it. When first I began to think conscience was at work, and I saw my sin and unfitness for God. I was not happy until I got the sense — the Lord has forgiven me. That is the experience of every one that is born of the Spirit.

I pray you to carefully note what Christ says, "Ye must be born again!" You will say, How does it come about? God takes the most wonderful way of reaching the soul. Marvellously diverse is His acting, but it is always by the Word, perhaps heard years before, and lying, like seed, forgotten in the ground. I know of a man who was living at a place four miles from where I was born in Devonshire. When a lad of seventeen he went into Dartmouth parish church one Sunday, and the pious old minister preached from that text, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" i.e., "cursed when he comes" (1 Cor. 16: 22). He passed out of the church, and God added another eighty-three years to his life. He lived to be a hundred, and was then in the backwoods of America, a very hale specimen of a man one hundred years old. He had felled a tree, and sat down in the heat of the day to rest, and eat his mid-day meal, and as he sat on a log he began to think, "I have had a long life, for I am a hundred years of age today." He then began to think of the past, and travelled back the eighty-three years to that church in Dartmouth, and suddenly remembered the text used by good John Flavel, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" — cursed when He comes. Then the old man said: "I have not loved the Lord Jesus. I shall be cursed when He comes." He was a convicted sinner, and, thank God, became a converted man. God used that word, which had been buried for eighty-three years in his memory, as the means of his conversion. This is always God's way, for a man is ever born again by His Word and Spirit; but as to the when, and where, and how, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit," for God is sovereign.

Do you know how an infidel was once converted? God likes to convert infidels. He likes to convert those who have been defiantly shaking their fists in His face. Yes, instead of condemning such, He meets them, and forces them in grace to acknowledge Him. This is just what He wants to do with you. This infidel was a jeering scoffer, who denied the existence of God. One Sunday he went out into his grounds to while his time, for Sunday is usually a dull miserable day for the godless man, and this infidel found it so. He went for a walk in his park, and in a field adjoining was his favourite cow. The beast, when she saw her master, marched toward him. His hand was resting on the pailing, and the beast came up and licked the back of his hand. And he was converted through that cow. How? Did the cow preach? Yes, the cow preached by touching his memory. "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider" (Isa. 1: 3). The ox brought to his memory that striking verse, which he had learned as a boy, and it went like an arrow to his conscience. "The Bible is true after all," he said to himself. "That beast knows me, and I do not know God." He was converted.

New birth and conversion are always by the Word of God — by some bit of it. You perhaps have been brought to the point of asking, How can this be? It is a grand thing when man asks, How can it be? I like when a man flings down his arguments, and begins to inquire. I never argue. Not even with the infidels? No, I would not waste my breath. Argument never converted a man yet, but Holy-Ghost-applied Scripture does. If I can only get a bit of Scripture in, it is like a sword, it goes through. If a bit of God's Word gets into your conscience, you will never get it out. It is like a two-edged sword. It is the sword of the Spirit, quick and powerful. I was talking to a man the other day, who said he did not believe it was the Word of God. When God applies it to him, it will cut him all to bits. You may say it has no edge. Let me try it on you. It has no point, you say. If it transfixed you, you would know it had a point; because when the light of the Word of God goes through a man, it cuts him down, and he sees it is God's Word.

"How can these things be?" says Nicodemus, and Jesus tells him, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (vers. 14, 15). It is very simple. Jesus therein tells the story of His own death. Look at the two "musts" of this chapter. "Ye MUST be born again" (ver. 7), and, "Even so MUST the Son of Man be lifted up" (ver. 14). If you are to live, I must die, says Jesus. You MUST get life, and I MUST go into death to give you life. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." And who does "whosoever" mean? It means what the boy told the blind man, who inquired whom it meant, "You, and me, and everybody." That is what "whosoever" means. God opens the storehouses of His grace to whosoever believes in him."

Will you believe in Him? I ask you, Will you believe in the Son of Man? I think you will feel an awful fool by-and-by, when the Lord has to say of you — There is a man who would not trust Me, there is a man who would not believe in Me. Note that Gods says that "whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Mark, it is an absolute present possession, the possession of faith. Eternal life is the gift of God. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). Oh, that is a beautiful verse, the 16th verse of John 3. Look at it. It begins with God, and ends with life. You cannot get life save from God, but "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but HAVE everlasting life." You may have it I have it You have in this verse God's side of the action, and man's side also. God's side, loving and giving; and on man's side — my, and your side — believing and having. Really, my dear fellows, the gospel is wonderfully simple. God, loving, and giving; and man, believing, and having. I believe His love, I believe His grace, I believe what He says, I believe on His Son, and what is the result? I get eternal life as His own free gift.

Nicodemus went away from Jesus with his difficulty partly solved; but I do not think he was very happy just then. I think his conscience told him, "I am all wrong, and I shall never be right until I believe in, and then stand up for Him." That is exactly the case with you, if you have not come to Christ, and come out for Christ too. You are all wrong, and my exhortation is, Let in the light, and do not be ashamed to confess the Lord Jesus. Nicodemus came boldly out for Christ, when he had been lifted up, and I hope that you will say, henceforth, "It has been midnight with me hitherto, but, thank God, it is daylight now, I believe in the Son of God, and I have got Christ as my Saviour." Many of us can say that tonight; will you not join us in the confession of His blessed name?

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Thief's Confession

A Thief's Confession

Luke 23: 33-43.

Chapter 5:

A Thief's Confession; or, Faith versus Rationalism.

There is not a more striking instance of grace — the grace of Christ — in all Scripture, than that which is before us this evening, in the case of the dying robber. In all the pages of the Word of God you cannot find anything more touching, or more expressive, of the blessed grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, than the way in which He deals with this man; for every person must admit it was a desperate case. He was a pest on earth, and he certainly was not fit for heaven. His faults nailed him to the tree. He was a man whose history was of such a character, that he was going out of the world in ignominy and shame, a sinner in his sins, to meet God. He was within six hours of his death, and Christ met him, and saved him. Has He met you yet? Has He saved you yet? Perhaps — nobody knows — you may be within six hours, of your death, my friend. Who can tell? I am not a prophet, but I am a physician, and I have in my day seen many a hale man, and known that he has been cut off in less than six hours. Ah, friend! if you have never met that robber's Saviour, if you have never met my Saviour, do not let the few minutes that we shall spend together pass without your coming into contact with Him now.

There is no scene in the history of the world like that which is before us in Luke 23. There is a page in God's Word, and a page in the history of man's world, that stands alone, stands unique, because you have there the death of the only absolutely sinless, spotless, holy Man, by the side of two men who were sinners, and one of them becomes the companion of that sinless Man for eternity. The other got his chance, but missed it. Between these three seen here, each nailed to a cross, there is an immense difference. Of One I can say this — There was no sin in Him; although there was sin on Him. Then I come to the man who had no sin on him, though there was sin in him. And there was the third of these men, who had sin on him, and sin in him. So he died. Ah! do not you be the eternal companion of that third man, I implore you.

You may perhaps say, What do you mean? One of these three had no sin in Him, and yet had sin on Him, when He was nailed to that tree! Yes! that was Jesus. Perfect He was. He was the holy, spotless Man; and the charm of this scene is this, that the thief confesses not only his own guilt and his own sin, but he makes, if I may say so, a public confession of what his faith is in regard to Christ. "This man hath done nothing amiss" (ver. 41), was his true and blessed asseveration. That man reversed everybody's judgment; that man stood alone that day in his witness, and in his testimony, to Jesus. I did not read the whole of the chapter, but if you glance through what went before, you will find that everybody was against Christ, — Judas, Pilate, Herod, priests, scribes, populace, everybody; there was nobody for Him. Not one solitary soul stood for Him in all that company that day. What a scene! Betrayed by a false friend, denied by true friends, and deserted by all His followers; with the chief priests, who instigated the populace to demand His death, against Him; the governor against Him; the king against Him; the world against Him; everybody against Him!

But, at length, there comes a moment when, at His side, a man — almost entering into the jaws of death — boldly says, He is the sinless, the spotless Man, I will cling to Him. Ah, friends! I do not say I envy the dying thief. I admire him; and, by-and-by in glory, if I can find him out, I shall grip his hand, and say, "Thank you, my brother, you cleared my Saviour's character in the day when everybody was against Him."

It was a wonderful scene. Look at it a little bit You know the Lord had been brought before Pilate who got his chance of receiving Jesus that day, but missed it, like many a man now misses it. The people came up, complaining against the blessed Lord; and when they did so, three times over does Pilate say, "I find no fault in this man; I will therefore chastise him, and let him go." But the people would not let Him go. Urged on by the chief priests and religious elders, they cried, "Crucify him, crucify him." I do not doubt Pilate was anxious to let the Lord go; the more so as, when he is seated on the judgment-seat, he gets a warning from his wife, who says, "Have thou nothing to do with that just man" (Matt. 27: 19). But he did not heed that message; he allowed himself to be over-governed by the clamour of the people. He was just going to let the Lord go, when those who knew his weak point cried out, "If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend." Do you know who Caesar was? He was the Roman emperor. And who was Pilate? His delegate; and Pilate was dependent upon Caesar; he was supported by the world. And I would like to say this to you, that just in the proportion that you are supported by the world, so are you afraid of it. Thresh that out, and see if it be not the truth. "If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend," turned the scale for Pilate. Caesar's friends must side with Caesar, while Jesus' friends must side with Jesus. Everybody sided with Caesar that day, and nobody sided with Jesus. Perhaps, you think, if I had been there, I would have sided with Jesus. Would you? Are you quite sure you have done it now, today? Do you think everybody who knows you intimately knows that you are on Jesus' side. I should be glad if I thought so. Caesar's friends must side with Caesar, and Jesus' friends must side with Jesus, now, as then. Whose side are you on?

We read that everybody was against Jesus, and, Pilate having condemned Him, He is carried away from that hall — I would not call it of judgment, but of misjudgment; because righteousness and judgment, mercy and truth, had parted company there, they did not kiss each other. They parted company, and He, who was the Truth, was led away to die; Simon, a Cyrenian, bearing His cross. And I do not doubt it was the cross which had been prepared for Barabbas, another robber. That man was condemned to death; his cross was ready; and when the jailers went down to the cell where he was confined, I have no doubt Barabbas thought he was going to the gibbet; and when he got to the judgment-hall, found the populace a raging mass around the Man he had heard plenty about, and then heard the question put, "Whom will ye that I release unto you, Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?" As robber and Saviour stood side by side, I have not a bit of doubt what was in his mind. The question was put whether they would have Jesus or Barabbas, and I have no doubt Barabbas thought, "Why, of course there will be no doubt about that; they will choose Jesus, not a sinner like me; there will be no chance for a murderer like me. They will not let me go." I think that man was bewildered when he heard the cry go up, "Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas" (ver. 18).

Christ is then led down from the hall, the cross is laid upon the Saviour's shoulders, and He goes out to die. Thank God, He did die; and He died for me, I know. I do not know if you know it yet, but He died for sinners. I do not think Barabbas knew what was wrapped up in that death. As He goes out, a number of women weep and bewail Him; but He turns to them, and says, "Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck" (vers. 28, 29). That is, there is a solemn day of retribution coming; do not suppose that God has forgotten the fact that His Son was murdered. Do you suppose that God forgets that His Son was in this scene, and that the world cast Him out? Has God forgotten that, do you think? No; though, in His patience, He has set His Son on His right hand, and said, "Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool" (Ps. 110: 1), He is coming again. "Lord, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom," was what the thief said; and come back He will. And so the Lord says, "In that day" — mark, their lips will utter a strange prayer — "they shall begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us" (ver. 3 1). You would scarcely believe that men would appeal to nature to hide them from God; but such will be the case, and what a revelation is this of man?

There are four prayers spoken of in this chapter. The prayer of hatred, "Crucify him" (ver. 21); the prayer of fear, "Mountains, fall on us" (ver. 30); the prayer of love, "Father, forgive them" (ver. 34); and the prayer of faith, "Lord, remember me" (ver. 42). The prayer of hatred has been answered. By-and-by there will come the prayer of fear, "Mountains, fall on us: hills, cover us" (see Rev. 6: 15- 17). Anything to keep men out of the sight of God; anything under the sun to keep them out of the reach of God, and from the wrath of the Lamb. They will put anything in between themselves and God; but all in vain, for, says the Lord here, "If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" (ver. 31.) What do you understand by that? Who was the green tree? Why, Christ, of course. Sap, life, verdure, and fruit, all were seen in Him; and God, looking down from above, saw that one fruitful green tree, and — as He looked everywhere else — saw what? Dry trees! There are a good many such in this hall tonight, let me tell you. A dry tree is lifeless. Christ was the green tree, ever presenting that freshness and fruit which suit God.

And what do I take out of this figure for myself? That by nature I am a dry tree, and so are you; there is no life in us. Sinners are the dry trees, and a dry tree makes good fuel. What do you mean? you ask. Well, thresh that out, my friends. A dry tree makes good fuel, and that is really what a man in his sins becomes if he go to the lake of fire. "What shall be done in the dry?" is a serious question indeed. I, says the Saviour, the green tree, am passing through all this, — what is to be the lot of the sinner? If the Holy One passed through God's judgment, because He was bearing the sins of others, what about the sinner in his sins? I appeal to you. If you are a sinner, you will have to meet God, and you will have to answer to God about your sins. Whatever you may be, whatever profession you may make, or do not make, you will have to meet the Lord by-and-by; and there is a solemn question here propounded by the Lord, "If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" There was no answer that day; it will have to come.

And they drew Jesus out of the city. "And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death. And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him." These four words describe the most terrible scene enacted upon earth — "THERE THEY CRUCIFIED Him." The place, a graveyard; the actors, the whole civilised world; the act, the cruellest and most shameful form of death; the victim, God's own beloved Son! The selected spot was a graveyard — Calvary, Golgotha, "the place of a skull." And why there? Had not Jesus talked about life? Had He not raised the dead? Had He not unstopped deaf ears, and given sight to the blind? Had He not done many wonderful miracles? Had He not talked about the Lord of life coming from glory; and had He not spoken about being the Son of God? He had. And why did they take Him there? To insult Him in that graveyard. They use the signs of death on every hand to mock Him who was the Lord of life. They bring Him, who was "the resurrection and the life," to the scene where there is every evidence of death around Him, as much as to say, Let us see if you can avoid death. It was the most solemn mockery. They had crowned Him with thorns, and now they put Him to death.

But see what that death meant as viewed by God. It was this — that He who was Lord of life came into the scene of death that He might bring life to us. As regards the world, it was the violent effort to get rid of God and of His Son. And the world is unchanged today; "There they crucified him" is the declaration of what the world's estimate of Christ is. But, say people nowadays, we have got on a good bit since that day; you are a little bit antiquated in your notions, the world has changed very much since that day. Well, I admit that advance has been made in science; I admit a little advance has been made in art and knowledge too. I am not blind to the progress which has been made in those ways which contribute to men's comfort in this world; but tell me, Are they nearer God? That is the question. Are you nearer God? You know a little more about scientific things than you did some years ago, but are you nearer God? The world was not a baby when it murdered Jesus. It was a full-grown man, if I may say so, when the blessed Saviour was put upon the cross.

Over His head was a superscription, "THIS IS JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS," written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the three dominant languages of the earth. What, you ask me, do you mean by the world being a full-grown man? I reply, Whose books do the students of today read? Why, the books of the men who wrote in that age. Their teachers are careful to give them the books of the men of that day; we must turn to the Homers, and the Virgils, and to the philosophers of that age. It is a strange thing; but if I seek ornate sculpture, or marvellous buildings, I am sent back to these past ages to find them. If I talk about monuments, men turn me back to that age. It was the Augustan age of the world. No, no; the world was no babe, but full grown, in the day that it gladly yet calmly set that superscription there, in the three languages of Rome, Greece, and Judah. The religious Jew, the martial Roman, the learned Greek, all three combined, and said, We do not want Jesus; get rid of Him. That was why the crime of Jesus (which really was being just what He was) was written over His cross in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. United in evil, "there they crucified him." They gave this blessed One, who was the Son of God — yea, who was God incarnate — a felon's death, and a felon's cross; while by His side hung two malefactors, that the scripture might be fulfilled, "He was reckoned among the transgressors" (Luke 22: 37).

What follows now? The Lord prays a remarkable prayer. There was the prayer of hatred, when the people cried, "Away with him." There is coming by-and-by the prayer of fear. But, mark, here is the prayer of love. I will come to the prayer of faith in a minute or so, but here is the prayer of love, and what was it? "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (ver. 34). Go back to that scene in the memory of your heart for a moment. Do not forget it is the cross of Jesus. I would like to guide you to that scene on Calvary, and point out those three crosses. Look at the One in the middle, look at that blessed One, crowned with thorns, hanging on it, while the soldiers are gambling for His garments beneath His eyes, and His enemies are regaling themselves with the very sight of His death agony. Tell me, who is He on that tree? Over His head is written, "This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews," in the plainest language. That was the full inscription clearly. What was His crime? I repeat, simply being what He was. And who was He? Jehovah, the Saviour, and the King of the Jews. And what was His crime? Not that He did anything wrong, but that He was what He was. And what was He? Jehovah, the Saviour, and the King of the Jews.

The Jews would not have Him, you say. I know that; they refused to have Him. There, however, was the truth; for, you recollect, another scripture tells us that when the chief priests came along they said to Pilate, "Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews" (John 19: 21). You know what Pilate replied, "What I have written I have written" (John 19: 22). Ah, Pilate knew he had written the truth that day; but He was more than the King of the Jews — He was Jehovah the Saviour! Mark, friend, He was not alone a holy, spotless Man; but that Man was the incarnate God — God manifest in the flesh, seen of angels, and preached to the world; but, alas! cast out by the world.

In another gospel we read, 'The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1: 14). Here then I find this Man, who was hung upon that tree, crowned with thorns, to be God. And, friends, you have to meet Him. Who hung on that tree? God! And you have to meet Him yet. Oh! you say, He was a man. I know it, and love to own it. And what kind of a man? The thief shall tell you presently. But, mark you, He who was there was God. I will tell you what it is; when the truth of that fact enters a man's soul, it becomes light. And that poor dying thief by His side got light. Whenever the thief got to know who was by his side, it was light in his soul, and it made a wonderful revolution in his history.

But listen to this prayer, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." His enemies have done their work, — and now see the perfection of Jesus, in grace. At the moment when His enemies have done their worst, — spit in His face, smitten Him with a rod, preferred a robber to Him, crowned Him with thorns. and nailed Him to a tree, — then was fulfilled the scripture, "He was numbered with the transgressors." Then, I suppose, there was a little hush in the crowd, and His voice was heard. Listen to it, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." It was the prayer of perfect love, and I have no doubt it was answered, in the second and third chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter came in the power of the Spirit, and preached so effectually. I do not doubt that then the intercessory prayer of the Saviour was blessedly answered. What I want you to notice here is the perfection of the love of the Saviour as He prays for His murderers, and this prayer goes up, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." I believe, as these words fell upon the ears of that dying thief, they came, if I may say so, as a flash of light to his soul, and he became conscious that the One beside him, on the cross, was closely linked with God. Whether he was clear that He was God, I do not say exactly; but manifestly at this moment he got the light that Jesus was the Son of God. That he learned from the words, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

Amazing scene! The man who is dying in his sins, hears this sinless, spotless Man positively praying for His murderers! I believe that was the moment when the rays of blessed, divine light entered his soul, and the man became conscious that God's Son was being crucified by his side. Evidently there was some time for him and others to think, for "the people stood beholding" we read (Luke 23: 35).

Now mark what follows, and observe the contrast between the infidelity and rationalism of man's mind, and the simple faith of this dying thief. Look at the different classes of people who come out here, because what is before us in this scene is just a sample of what is all around us today. I am not surprised that there is infidelity and rationalism in the world today. You have the seed and germ of it all in the scene before us. "And the rulers also with them derided him, saying," tauntingly and jeeringly, "He saved others; let him save himself, if he be the Christ, the chosen of God." That little word "if" has the whole root of infidelity in it. Ah! my friends, you are here tonight with a good many "ifs" in your mind. You are in bad company. The rulers were doing terrible work that day; they were the leaders, and they headed a countless host of unbelievers and doubters, stretching from their day to that in which you live. "He saved others." They did not doubt that; they could not deny it They knew of many deeds of beneficence, and they gave witness to them. I mean to give witness tonight too. He has saved me — has He saved you? "He saved others; let him save himself, if he be the Christ, the chosen of God." Is He the chosen of your heart? That is the question now. God had chosen Him; but they did not believe Him.

How, they asked, if He be the "chosen of God," does It come about that He is crowned with thorns, and gibbeted with malefactors? "Let him save himself, if he be the Christ." Eternal damnation stalks behind that little word "if." The heart full of "ifs" is not full of faith. That "if" is a terrible word; there is want of faith in it And there are many people who have a large number of "ifs" to answer for — they have really no faith. They are certain of nothing, except that they cannot he certain about anything. Thank God, there are no "ifs" in my faith; I am perfectly well aware by whom I am saved, and who He is, and what He is, and what He has done for me. Faith is the most positive thing in the world. Rationalism is just like a bat in the sunlight, and you know what the bat does then? The more light it gets, the more dumfoundered it becomes. You know the bat goes out in the dark; it can only flit easily about in the evening, when the light is gone, and that is where many are today. The bats of infidelity and rationalism are abroad in myriads, and everybody has got at some time into their company. I was among them at one time, but I did not like their company.

Let us go further. "And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar, and saying, If thou be the King of the Jews, save thyself." Again this awful if. They wanted Him to prove that He was the King of the Jews by saving himself. But He would not do that; He would not save Himself, just that He might be able to save others like you and me. Unbelief doubted, faith accepted, then, as now, the superscription, "This is the King of the Jews."

"And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us." You would not have thought that the poor fellow would have talked in that strain; you would not have thought a man in his serious position, in the jaws of death as it were, would have railed in such a manner. Another scripture tells us that both the malefactors did it (Mark 15: 32). I do not doubt both of them were hardened enough to mock at the Saviour; they did not, you will notice, taunt each other; they both, however, twitted Christ. Why, there is not a man that does not hate Christ at the bottom of his heart to begin with. Even a dying robber, just going to drop into a lost eternity, will spend his last breath in abusing Christ. But note this, Christ will spend His last breath in praying for those who have abused Him. If sin leads a man to abuse Christ, He in the goodness of His heart, spends His last breath praying for His murderers; and I think that was what wrought the great change in the heart of one dying thief, while the other dying wretch, untouched by grace, and abiding in unbelief, says, "If thou be Christ, save thyself and us." There was, alas! no faith in him towards Christ.

At this moment a charming scene takes place, under the most difficult circumstances. When everything was against Christ, and when there was every reason why he should not believe in Jesus, the other thief comes out in a magnificent way. It is quite evident that the Spirit of God works in him, as he is heard speaking to his neighbour. Three hours ago you might have heard him railing against the Saviour. But what has happened? Light has come into his heart. I would like you, my friend, to get light into your heart. I cannot give it to you; I can only say, that when light comes into a man's soul, he learns himself, and he learns to know God. If you do not know God, it is because you have not got light. He turns, and mark what he says: "But the other answering rebuked him" (ver. 40). It is not a godless man rebuking a godless man. No, it is a godly man now rebuking the godless. That man was converted, I have no doubt. Oh! you say, I do not believe in sudden conversion. I will tell you why; because you are not converted yourself. An unconverted man never believes in sudden conversion; and more, I never knew a converted man yet that was not converted suddenly. When light gets into a man's soul, he is a changed man at once. Here was this dying thief, who had been cursing and blaspheming the Saviour just a little while back, he hears the prayer of the Lord, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," and the man is changed — converted! Do not you tell me he was not converted then. If he was not converted then, he was never at any other time; but he went to Paradise that day, mark that! Be certain of this, that the prayer of Christ was light to his soul. He recognised that he had God's Son by his side, yea, before his eyes. Others may gibe and jeer, but he looks into the face of God incarnate, into the face of Jesus, and sees grace, kindness, perfect love, and forgiveness there; and, as he listens to that prayer, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," a wonderful change takes place in him. The Holy Ghost works in him, and presently, when his neighbour again breaks out abusing Jesus, he turns and says, "Dost not thou fear God?" (ver. 40.) Ah! you say, what a pretty fellow to talk that way. My dear friend, it is the man that is converted who can talk; and the reason why you cannot talk, is because you are not converted. The moment you are converted, your lips will soon be urged to talk, and your feet to walk in the way of righteousness.

Take a good look at that thief! See the change in him. He is now bold for God, and fearless of man. "The wicked flee," says Scripture, "when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion" (Prov. 28: 1). And here is a man with that kind of character. Until now he was such a pest that his fellows had to get rid of him; but now, touched and changed by grace, he turns round and says to his neighbour, "Dost not thou fear God?" It is a fine thing when a man fears God. Perhaps you do not fear God. Well, I know what the Psalmist says of the man who does not. "The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there is no fear of God before his eyes" (Ps. 36: 1). There was no fear of God in my heart for many a day, but at length, like this thief, I found out that it is a wonderfully blessed moment when a man begins to fear God. It is not cringing fear I mean, but the sense of what is due to God. "Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, that delighteth greatly in his commandments" (Ps. 112: 1).

Do you know what is the fear of the Lord? I find it well described in a sevenfold way by the wisest man that ever lived — except Jesus — Solomon. He says,

(1) "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;" and by way of antithesis he adds, "but fools despise wisdom and instruction" (Prov. 1: 7). You know where you are, my friend; I do not know. But you know your company, and your companions will tell you where you are. I will read it again, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction." Then, again,

(2) "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil" (Prov. 8: 13). The thief was getting into his proper place, and approaching the beginning of knowledge, as he showed his hate of evil. I go a little further, and I find,

(3) "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding" (Prov. 9: 10). The thief was set for this, and is getting on, you see. I go still a little further,

(4) "The fear of the Lord prolongeth days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened" (Prov. 10: 27). The two thieves illustrate that. One was cut off for ever, the other passed into eternal blessedness. Again I read,

(5) "The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death" (Prov. 14: 27). The believing thief proved that also. And now I read,

(6) "The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom" (Prov. 15: 33). That the thief illustrates too, as he gives it to his neighbour. There is only one more, and it reads thus,

(7) "The fear of the Lord tendeth to life; and he that hath it shall abide satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil" (Prov. 19: 23). That the thief fully entered into, as he passed that day into Paradise. I tell you what it is, it would be well for you to get into the company of that thief who had the fear of the Lord.

"Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?" was a wonderful query, coupled as it was with, "and we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds." What genuine repentance is there manifested! He took God's part against himself. You are a dying man, and I too, and we are justly punished. The man who is divinely converted always condemns himself. "We indeed justly" is the language of real repentance. When we are not right ourselves we never employ "we." We can then use the word "you." This man, divinely taught, says, "We indeed justly;" and then, conscious of the glory of the One who hung by his side, sinless but suffering, adds, "but this man hath done nothing amiss."

It was a very striking confession. The world heard it, God heard it, Satan heard it, and tonight you hear it. Do you think he was a fool or a wise man? Nay! he was a wise man; and the man who is not his companion is a fool. You say, That is bold. It is true; it is right. That man was right, and every man, who is unbelieving, is wrong. That repentant thief accepts the judgment of God upon him, condemns himself, and clears the character of Christ, when all had condemned Him. His life had been a sinful one, and he owns it, saying, I have sinned, and I am getting what I deserve; and then boldly confesses his faith in Jesus. "This man hath done nothing amiss," is his triumphant allegation. He says to his neighbour, so to speak, "YOU AND I NEVER DID A RIGHT THING, BUT HERE IS A MAN WHO NEVER DID A WRONG ONE. He is dying, but I am going to cleave to Him. I reverse the world's verdict. Judge and jury, I reverse your verdict. You declared Him to be a 'malefactor' (John 18: 30), you adjudged 'He is guilty of death' (Matt. 26: 66); I declare, This MAN HATH DONE NOTHING AMISS." Thank God for the bold, true, glorious confession of that dying malefactor on the cross beside Jesus.

That dying thief changed his company at that moment He fell in line with God, and His servants, in rich appreciation of Christ There was a moment when a strange man by the side of Jordan saw coming to him another Man, and from the Baptist's lips came the exclamation, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." It was Jesus; and, as John baptized Him, the heavens were opened, and another voice was heard, saying, "This it my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt 3: 17). On the mount of transfiguration, again, the heavens were opened, the Father declared, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him." The thief heard Him, and confessed His worth. Even out of the mouths of His enemies the confession of His excellence was made. When the servants of the high priest were sent to take Him, they returned, saying, "Never man spake like this man!" And Pilate, three times, as we have seen, declared, "I find no fault in him." But "he, who knew no sin, was made sin for us." There was no sin in Him, and yet He was made sin for us. The fact was this — in the moment when the poor thief discovered the perfection of Jesus, his sins were shifted on to Jesus, and He bore them, and blotted them out.

I ask you, Is not the testimony of this recent convert beautiful? "This man hath done nothing amiss." What think you of the testimony of the dying thief? He confesses his own sin, and judges it too, and at the same moment gets a glimpse of, and proclaims the glories of the Saviour's character, "This man hath done nothing amiss." Grand old thief! Ah! my friends, in the way of faith, there is nothing like this in the world's history. This man, in the very jaws of death himself, and when every possible evidence was against Christ, discovers His worth, and proclaims alike His excellences, His Lordship, and His Kingly rights, saying, as it were, I will guarantee His life, I will guarantee His character, I will guarantee His history, I will go bail for His perfection — He has done nothing amiss. He is Lord and King, and although He is dying now, He will rise and come in His kingdom. Splendid testimony of faith!

The next moment he says, "Lord, remember me when thou comest in (not into) thy kingdom." I know Thou art dying, but I know Thou art the King. Thou art going out of the scene, but Thou wilt come back again. Remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom. That is all the length his faith got then; but mark the Lord's answer, "Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." Oh! look at the Saviour's grace to the man who confides in Him. That other thief, hand and glove with the world, was railing against Him — infidelity, rationalism, and reason were working in all save one, as they stood, or hung, taunting Him to save Himself, if He were the Christ, and if He were the King. The poor thief sees that He is a King; sees that He is the Christ the Son of God, and then owns that He is his Lord!

I verily believe that men nowadays have not a thousandth part of the faith which that poor thief had. He trusted Jesus when every possible evidence why He should be trusted was gone — He was dying, refused of man, and forsaken of God, yet then it was the thief confided in Him. We have all the evidence about the Lord Jesus Christ — that He is risen from the dead, has passed into glory, and is thus accepted of God. This the Holy Ghost has come down to tell us, and we have, for the assurance of our faith, all that is given us in the Scriptures. The dying robber, touched by grace, and wrought on by the Holy Spirit, says, "Lord, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom," at a moment when all this was unrevealed. Will you, my friend, trust that blessed Saviour, and give Him the confidence of your heart? Notice now the Lord's answer, "Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou he with me in paradise." The dying believer got the assurance of present salvation. And observe this, ye who are fond of ritual, he was never baptized, and he never took the Lord's Supper either. And where did he go without either? To paradise that day. How do I know? Because Christ said he should, — "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." It was that day, not the day after, not tomorrow, but that day. Such is grace; and such the reward of faith.

Now see what follows immediately after this. The Lord Jesus was forsaken of God. You do. not get that account in the Gospel by Luke, but we read that "it was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour" (ver. 44). Up to this point you have the human side of the cross. From the sixth hour to the ninth hour there was darkness over the land, and in that darkness do you know what took place? The sun refused to yield his light that day — darkness shrouded the sun, while the Saviour was in that darkness taking up with God the whole question of man's sin. He had said to the thief, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise," and here comes the moment when the Saviour bears sins, is made sin, suffered for sin, and died for sinners, so that, the work being completed, the thief can go there. The redemption work of Jesus is the ground and basis of all blessing on the one hand, while the work of the Holy Ghost in the soul of the thief is evident on the other, as he first trusted, and then boldly bore testimony to Christ. I do not know if there is a man here who would bear such a testimony. There, first of all, you see the work of the Spirit of God in him, and then you see the atonement, which the blessed Lord came to make, wrought and completed, so that he could be righteously saved. One scripture says, "He was made sin for us, who knew no sin;" while another says, "He came to bear the sins of many;" and yet another, "The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquities of us all." He bore in His body, at that moment, the sins of many, and, as the result of bearing the sins of many, He is forsaken of God, and then He cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

What a cry is that which comes from the dying Saviour! Listen to it. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If you cannot give an answer, I can. He was forsaken, blessed be His name, that I might be accepted. And that is what every heart in this hall who knows Him says. He bore the judgment of my sin, because "he was made sin, who knew no sin." I said just now there was no sin on the thief, though there was sin in him. How is this? His sins were laid on Christ; they were taken off the poor thief who trusted Him. I now see the poor thief's sins borne by the thief's substitute. Though that dying thief was, in himself, what he was, the atoning efficacy of the blood of Christ is laid to his credit, and the work of the Saviour, in atoning for that robber's sins, is effectual. "Today," says Jesus, "thou shalt be with me in paradise." He gets the knowledge of his eternal safety. He is the first trophy of the Redeemer's sacrifice. The sins of the thief are laid upon the Saviour, and He atones for them, and for ever puts them away.

With what unspeakable interest did all heaven that day watch that scene, when heaven's Lord becomes man's Saviour, and dies! And who is the first trophy of redeeming grace? It is a poor dying thief — it is this poor robber. Oh! it was a wonderful scene, as heaven looked down upon that cross, and watched what the result would be. And when the Shepherd came home, what had he got? He had got the lost sheep truly on His shoulders, and He brought him in, the trophy of His victory. And now I ask, Are you not going to let that Saviour save you? He would not save Himself; but He saved the dying thief. And in grace I can say, He has saved me. Will you not trust Him? The dying thief trusted Him; I trust Him; and, oh! I implore. you to trust Him. Take one look at that cross. See Jesus there for you. Well wrote the poet -

"There, from His head, His hands, His feet,

Sorrow and love flow mingled down;

Did e'er such love and sorrow meet,

Or thorns compose so rich a crown?"

Did He die for me? Faith replies, He died for me. Sinner, He gave Himself for you. The poor thief as he prayed, "Remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom," thought of blessing in a far-distant day — for the Lord has not yet come in His kingdom; but perfect love replied, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise."

The first man turned out of an earthly paradise was a poor thief, his name was Adam; and the first man who enters the heavenly paradise through Jesus was a poor thief Grace is a wonderful thing, and it was by God's sovereign grace that the robber was brought into paradise that day. He tasted it for a few hours on earth, and then unhinderedly for ever. I have tasted grace — will you not taste it? I implore you to receive that Saviour. Believe Him, and then go forth and confess Him.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : Grace - What is it?

Grace — What is it?

John 1: 1-17.

Chapter 6

Grace — What is it?

You will observe in the 17th verse that the Spirit of God says, "For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." On a previous evening we were occupied a little with Christ as the Truth. Tonight I want to say a few words on Grace. Both came by Jesus Christ, and therefore I know not the truth, nor have tasted grace, nor have you, unless we have to do with Him. The question raised must be, "Have you had to do with Him?" You know not the truth, nor apprehend what grace is, unless you have.

"The law was given by Moses." And what did the law do? It convicted, and condemned man. That is all the law can do — convict a man, and condemn him. "Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ," and grace is a wonderful thing. Would it not be a wonderful thing if grace picked you up, converted you, and turned you to know the living God, and made you a present and everlasting witness of God's goodness? That would be grace. It would not be a question of desert, because grace is always the activity of the love of God, when sin is present. The moment you hear of grace, you must recognise the fact of sin. I know people do not like to talk about sin, they do not like to think about sin, and they do not like to admit sin. They try to deny it; but mark this — deny sin, and you shut out grace. The man who is not content to own himself to be what Scripture affirms about him, knows not what grace is.

You ask me, What is grace? I do not know that I can exactly explain it. I know it; I have tasted it; I have enjoyed it; and I wish you to enjoy it too. Grace is God's coming to a man that has sinned, and taking him out of the condition in which his sin has placed him, a condition out of which he cannot by any possibility extricate himself by his own efforts. Now I was saying once before to you that you could not say that God was the truth. God is true; but Christ is the Truth, because He is the perfect revelation and exhibition of what God is. I do not read in Scripture that "God is grace." I read that "God is love." That is what He always was, before man was on this scene at all, or before man fell. God is love. That is what He is in His eternal existence. And God is light These are the two absolute terms by which God is described. Love is His absolute character of goodness. Light is more relative to evil. He cannot tolerate evil. After man sinned, what do I find? That God stepped into the scene where man had sinned. Grace is the love of God putting on a new colour, and a new character, entering the scene where man has sinned, and entering for the purpose of blessing the man, who, by his sin, had put up a barrier between himself and God.

Now there is no good blinking the matter. You and I are both sinners. You may deny sin, but you cannot deny its consequences. The Word of God says, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5: 12). Elsewhere we read, "The wages" — the consequences — "of sin is death" (Rom. 6: 23). You cannot deny death. It is all round about you; and I will tell you more, it is the thing you least like. There is nothing a man dislikes so much as the thought of death. It is a strange thing. You never saw a dog afraid of death. I have seen hundreds of men afraid of it. No beast, no animal, is afraid, of death. The only creature that is afraid of death is man; and why? Because man has a conscience, and has a deep inherent consciousness — that there is something after death. Said a wretched man lately, "If it was not for what comes after death I would have committed suicide surely." Scripture tells us what it is, "But after this the judgment" (Heb. 9: 27). Yes! God must deal with sin. He must judge sin, and we have all sinned. The Holy Ghost has said, in the plainest possible language, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3: 23). That takes you and me in.

But you may ask, What is sin? Scripture does not leave us without a definition of what sin is. "Sin is lawlessness" (1 John 3: 4, R.V.) — that is, the creature doing his own will. Now, I think I cannot go beyond the truth in saying that every one of us likes our own way. There is not a man in this audience but likes his own way. The Spirit of God in describing our condition, says in the Old Testament, "All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way" (Isa. 53: 6). One man takes his way — it is the wine-cup, and shameless orgies; another, the race-course, and dissolute company; another, the card-table, and the gambling-hell; and another, the billiard-room, and its concomitant waste of time and money. Sin may take any shape you like. It may take the shape of what men would term "innocent pleasures," but which they would not care should come out in the light of day. The point is this, you and I like our own way. I acknowledge it. I liked my own way, ay, and I took it too. What happened? I am thankful to God for it, He stopped me. How did He stop me? He stopped me by the revelation to my heart of what His grace was — the grace that came by Jesus Christ.

"The law was given by Moses." It came, and made claims upon us. It made claims for the right reason that the law is a revelation of what the creature ought to be. As I gaze on the ten commandments I see what I ought to be. My conscience tells me that I am not it. Consequently I am condemned by the law. It naturally condemns me whenever I learn its spirit and its power. But what does the gospel do? It brings the revelation of what God is, not what man ought to be. The chapter we are looking at tells beautifully how God has come into this scene in the Person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. It says, "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." And who is that Word? The opening verse tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." I want you to look at this, "In the beginning was the Word." Then the next thing is, that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." By "the Word" what am I to understand? The Eternal Word of God! It is Jesus — the Son of God entering into this scene and becoming a man. Men have said, "God was made flesh." Scripture does not say so. It says the "Word was made flesh;" and the reason is very simple. If I think of God as given to me in the Bible, I have presented to me the Triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If I say "God was made flesh," then I should not express the truth, because the Father was never incarnate, and the Spirit of God was never incarnate; but the Son of God, the Word, "became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth" (ver. 14). The Eternal Son has come into this scene, humbling Himself, and becoming a man, in order that, in the form of a man, He might reveal to us the heart and nature of God; and moreover, that God, in the condition in which He was found as a man, might find all He looked for in man. That is the charm of these beautiful words, "full of grace and truth." The law Moses might bring, but "grace and truth" came only by the Son of God.

Now I admit that the truth will convict a man. The first effect of truth on a man is to trouble him. I do not think the first effect of the gospel will be to make a man happy. Oh! you say, I thought the gospel would make him happy. Nay! The first effect of the truth is to make a man serious before God, in the conscious sense, I am a sinner; I am an undone sinner. I will tell you more — If you ask any one who is in this hall tonight, who is a converted man, how he got on at first, what his experience was, he will tell you, that while the gospel is now filling his soul with joy and gladness, yet when the truth first met him, it did not make him happy, but made him serious and thoughtful. Why? Because the truth that he was a guilty undone sinner entered his soul like a red-hot iron.

Truth, then, will convict a man. When I am convicted by truth, what is the next thing? Grace wins me. Grace attracts me, and I turn to Him, in whose presence I find myself to be a poor, ruined, good-for-nothing sinner. I turn to Him, and learn that I am unfit for God. I learn also in that blessed Man, who is the image of God, and the eternal Son of God, in His life and death, what grace is — grace personified. I learn how the love of God can go out after a good-for-nothing, ungrateful, sinful, and self-willed man, until it has overtaken him, and poured blessing into his soul. Many a man in this audience tonight can tell you the same thing. I was pursuing a course of self-will until arrested. My friend, you must be arrested sooner or later. The day of your arrest is at hand. Sooner or later! Infinitely better is it to be arrested in this moment, when grace is active, when God in grace is blessing man, — when God in grace is coming out to meet us, than be arrested by-and-by in your sins, when righteousness can only condemn you. Now God, in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, comes to meet us in grace, with a view to our present and eternal blessing.

Grace, then, is the activity of the love of God to us, after we have sinned, and before the day when He deals with our sins as the righteous, moral governor of the universe, because God must judge sin. He would not be God if He did not judge sin; He would be no better than us if He did not judge sin. I know perfectly well that men try to get rid of the judgment of God; but the truth is this, God judges sin, and must do so, because He is God, and is infinitely holy. But what has He already done? After you and I have sinned, and before the day of judgment, when He must deal with men about their sins, He has stepped into this scene, in the Person of His own beloved Son. Grace has come in, and what do I find? That the very One, who is going to be judge by-and-by, anticipates the day of judgment, enters into the scene, dies in the room of guilty man, bears his judgment, and delivers him, not only from the consequences, of his sin, but brings him into the enjoyment of the love of God, makes him a child of God, and makes him the happy possessor of the forgiveness of sins, and of eternal life.

That is what Christ does. That is love. What was He in Himself? He was the expression of perfect grace. Track Him where you will, during His lifetime on earth, and you will find nothing but grace. Ah, but you say, He exposed the hypocrites. Yes, He did. Do you think Christ would do anything else? It was absolute grace that exposed hollowness. Do you think it would be gracious of me, if I knew you were thoroughly false, not to tell you? No. It was so with Christ. It was His grace that exposed those who came near Him. It was righteousness also; but Christ was the Truth, and the Light, and nobody who came into contact with Him could fail of being exposed. That is why men do not like Him, and will not come to Him, because, if they come to Him, their true condition is necessarily made manifest to themselves, and that they dislike.

After the truth convicts us, grace meets us perfectly. Have you ever tasted that the Lord is gracious? The Lord is abundantly gracious. Take any illustration you please from the history of His pathway through the world. Look how His grace went forth to that poor guilty woman caught in an act of the most heinous sin (John 8: 2-11). The law could only condemn her, and her crime should be visited with death. You know what took place? The scribes and Pharisees brought the woman, taken in adultery, to Jesus, and said, "Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned; but what sayest thou?" They sought to put Him on the horns of a dilemma. That was their wickedness. They thought to have occasion to accuse Him. If He said, "Let her go," He would be acting in defiance of the law of Moses; while if He said, "Stone her," they would have turned on Him, and asked Him what had now become of His doctrine of grace, for He was dealing in judgment. Jesus was the light, and He said, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast the stone at her." You know what took place, They all went out. The light drove them all out, and the woman was left all alone with Jesus. "Woman," He asks, "where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more."

That was grace. Christ was acting on the ground of that which He Himself was going to accomplish; He anticipated the atoning effect of His death. Grace can only be active now, save on the ground of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. The wages of sin is death, and just because of what He is, God must judge sin. There was nothing binding on Christ, save His purpose to glorify God; but, in grace, He took the place He did, and He who knew no sin, became sin for us, and the Just died for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. The spotless One took the sinner's guilt, and died in the room and stead of the poor sinner. What then? God raised Him from the dead, and in another part of Scripture that speaks of grace — where the Spirit of God, by the pen of Paul, is unveiling the way in which God now justifies, and saves men — I read this: "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 5: 20, 21).

Now observe this, grace came in the Person of Christ; and as the consequence of His death what do I find now? I find grace is reigning. Who is on the throne today? Christ. By-and-by He will be the judge. The day of judgment has not come yet Who is on the throne today? If I may use the figure — Grace. The apostle is careful in this same chapter to point out that sin and death have reigned. Death and sin reigned, and I might add another — Satan. There was a fearful triumvirate of evil reigning — Satan, sin, and death — up to the coming of Jesus. What since then? They have been deposed. Grace has entered the scene, and now reigns "through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." Is sin abounding? Who will deny it? Has it not abounded in your history and mine? How blessed then to know that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound."

I heard lately how grace abounded in a remarkable case. It was the custom of a certain family to meet all together about Christmas time. It happened one year that the meeting took place in the house of the eldest son Henry, who at the time was an infidel. When the whole family had gathered there, the old grey-haired father, who was a pious man, as he sat at his son's board, returned thanks for the meal they were about to partake of. The son angrily said to his father: "You have no right to say that in my house; you have no right to give God thanks. I bought that food, every bit of it; and I will not have you thanking God for what I bought and paid for. There is no God. I don't believe there is any God at all. Look here! If there is a God I'll give Him a chance. I will give Him five minutes to cut me down." He took out his watch, and put it on the table. The whole family sat aghast. They knew what God could do, but would He? was the question. Is there an atheist here tonight? My friend, yours is a poor creed. One minute went by, two, three, four, and five, and the defier of God was not cut down. "There," said he," where is your God? He has had His chance, and lost it." "Ah, my son," said the old man, "when you put the watch on the table, I began to pray to the Lord for you. When you were a child I gave you to God, my son, and I have never taken you back. I believe God will save you yet, my lad."

The meeting broke up, and very soon after the old father died. Is your father dead, and gone to heaven? Then you had better follow him. Henry took his own way. He knew better than his father. Most young men think so; and he went into courses of evil and sin. He became a frequenter of public-houses. You often find infidelity and atheism are joined with dissipation and debauchery. After fifteen years he was seen walking in the street with tattered garb. He had his last shilling in his pocket. "What shall I do with it?" he thought. "I will have two glasses of whisky, and carry home a bottle of beer with me." He turned to go to the nearest gin palace, but when he was quite near it the recollection of the family scene struck him, and an arrow of conviction from heaven entered his soul. He exclaimed, "O, Spirit of God, have mercy upon me, and answer my dear old father's prayer!" He did not go into the public-house. He went back to his house and wife, and got down on his knees before God, and cried for mercy. God answered his dear old father's prayers, and blessed him. He was saved. That was grace! That is like God.

Oh, you say, I expected you would tell us he was cut down. That is what you or I would have done. That is the way of man. But God did not cut him down. He spared him, and then saved him. Grace so wins its proudest victories over its foes. Ah, the grace of God would like to save you this evening. It has saved me. It has saved many who are in this. meeting tonight. It can save you. Did you ever hear that remarkable expression, "The grace of God that bringeth salvation to all men hath appeared"? (Titus 2: 11) Righteousness will bring judgment by-and-by. Grace brings salvation just now. "Where sin abounded grace did much more abound; that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." Mark, it is grace — sovereign grace. I hear a man say, "Surely to get salvation I must labour for it. Are there not some works to be done?" I have often heard a man say, "I will turn over a new leaf." It is easy, if you have been careless, and heedless of the things of the Lord in the past, to say you will turn over a new leaf for the future. But observe, though you turn over a new leaf it is still the old book. What about those old pages blotted with the sins of bygone years? Blotting no more will not erase the existing blots. You do not want reformation, you need reconstruction. You need exactly what the apostle gives you here, "Grace reigns, through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." It is a new life communicated, given — not some patching up of the old life. You have to learn that "eternal life is the gift of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 6: 23).

But, again, I hear some one say, "Must not I do something towards salvation?" Well, I will read to you a scripture from the fourth of Romans: "Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 3-5). That is a very remarkable scripture, is it not? I will read it to you again. "To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." If I pay a man a professional visit, I do not think it an act of grace that he should pay a fee. It is a question of righteousness. If a man does a week's work for me, it is no act of grace on my part if I pay what is the proper amount for the week's work. I am in the labourer's debt until it be paid. How was Abraham justified? "Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness." It was faith on Abraham's part, and grace on God's. But carefully note, "Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." I hear some one say, "I thought God would justify the godly." No, He justifies the ungodly, in absolute grace, on the ground of righteousness, i.e., the atoning work of His Son. It is only God that can do this. It is His own work, and He rejoices in it. I know perfectly well the thought usually comes into a man's mind that he must do something — he must work. Profound mistake.

I was very much struck lately with a passage in the eleventh of Romans: "Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more of grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work" (Rom. 11: 5, 6). How then am I saved? By pure sovereign grace. So wrote the apostle Paul to the Ephesians: "By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Eph. 2: 8, 9). It is the blessed, precious, sovereign grace that has come to all of us in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. What we need, as sinners, is salvation. That salvation the grace of God has brought to us. If grace then has brought salvation, what have I now to do? I have to avail myself of that which God brings to me in the Person, and through the work, of the Lord Jesus Christ, — in plain language, I have to accept, by faith, the eternal salvation which grace brings to me.

The death of the Saviour is the only foundation and basis of acceptance of every one before God, because, in the cross, we have God's judgment of sin, executed on His sinless Son. There I see Him, who knew no sin, made sin for us. There I find that, "all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." The cross is God's righteous way of delivering our souls out of the difficulty and danger into which sin had plunged us. The cross, whereon Jesus died, is the expression of the love of God, as well as the demonstration of the fact that "God is light." If, without bringing in the cross, He had condemned man where were His love? And if He had passed and glossed over sin, without judging it, where were His holiness? The cross of Christ meets both difficulties. It is a great thing to see that the truth of Christianity rests upon two solid pillars, love and light, i.e., what God is in His own nature. He must judge sin; but, to save the sinner, He has given His own Son as the expression of His love, to bear his sins, and to die in the room of those upon whom the sentence of death and judgment rested. The whole superstructure of revelation rests upon these eternal buttresses of truth. Light displays man's sin, and love removes it. Man had sinned, and was going on to the righteous judgment of God; but God steps in, and gives His Son, who becomes a man, that He may be enabled to die as the substitute, and in the room of guilty man.

We have God demonstrating His love, in giving His Son, and manifesting His righteousness and holiness, in that His Son, when bearing sins, and made sin, was judged on the cross. Christ owned and felt the weight of that terrible load of sin, as, on the tree, He says, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" As the righteous consequence of that atoning work wrought by Jesus, God declares that whoever believes on Him receives eternal life. That man has the gift of God. That man receives forgiveness of sins. That man gets salvation. That man gets pardon, and the blessing of the Lord. if you want an illustration, just look at the dying thief That man got salvation. "Lord," he says, "remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom." You know what Jesus said, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." He was saved by the sovereign grace of God. Light entered his soul, and he trusted Jesus, and deep joy must have filled it as he heard where he was to go that day, and in what company.

But whom was Jesus dying for? For sinners, therefore He died for me. Do not you believe that He died for you? If you have been ashamed to confess Him hitherto, my friend, away with that cowardice. Ashamed of Jesus! Ashamed to confess Him! God forbid! Oh, may you have grace to believe in Him, and confess Him too. If you believe in His vicarious death for you, you will get what I have got — eternal life, through His precious name. You and I die because we are sinners. He became a man, that He might die, and meet the claims of God. As man, triumphant over sin, death, the grave, and Satan's power, He is sitting there in glory, as a living Saviour, and He says, "Look unto me, and be ye saved."

Grace wins wonderful victories — victories over sinners like you and me. Those victories consist of winning careless hearts, turning them to Christ, who in His grace blesses, and saves us. Well do I remember how God won one of your fellow-students once. I do not think his match is in this hall tonight. I knew him during all his course at Edinburgh University. He was the finest cricketer of his day, and the best football player in the University, and had a cupboard full of prizes. He was foremost in his classes, and everywhere else, and became resident physician in the Royal Infirmary. He was the son of a widow, a fine handsome fellow, and a general favourite. I had often spoken to him about his soul. He did not much like it, but when he was sick he would always send for me. It was a curious thing that, though he did not want me to talk to him about his soul, he sent for me when sick. I recollect perfectly well one Saturday night getting a little pencilled note from him, "Will you come up to see me in the Infirmary? I am very ill." He had been playing football, and in a tremendous mélée had fallen and injured his knee. Plucky fellow that he was he attempted to carry on the game, but fell down in a dead faint. He was brought up to the old Infirmary, where he was still a resident physician, and had been three weeks ill before I knew of his accident. When I got to him that Saturday night, I found him in bed suffering from one of the worst attacks of rheumatic fever I ever saw. Two nurses were with him, one during the night, and the other by day, busily employed mopping the perspiration that formed on his brow.

He had lost all power to turn himself, except the moving of his head, and knew very well that eternity was in the distance. I was very sorry to find him in such a condition, and asked him what I could do for him. "I want you to write to my mother," then living in the West Indies. He gave me certain instructions, and then I said, "And may I tell her that you have found the Lord?" "I wish I could say that, I would give all the world, if I had it, to find Him; but I fear it's too late now." I assured him that was a mistake, and then he said, "But it would be a shabby thing to come to Jesus now, after neglecting Him so long." "Never mind," I said, "He will bless you, and save you now, if you will believe Him." I put the gospel before him, and left, with further instructions, to tell, his mother that he was now "anxious to be saved."

One Sunday, four weeks later, I got a message again asking me to come. I went up, and saw plainly enough that death had marked him as its victim. The dew of death was on his brow. I sat down by the dear fellow's bedside. He was truly anxious to be saved, and I went over the story of the prodigal son with him, the history of the dying thief, and then quoted, "THIS IS A FAITHFUL SAYING, AND WORTHY OF ALL ACCEPTATION, THAT CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS, OF WHOM I AM CHIEF" (1 Tim. 1: 16). Presently, when I had stopped, I saw his lips moving, and I knew he was praying. It is a wonderful moment when a man prays — when God can say, "Behold, he prayeth." At length he said: "My life has been a mis-spent life, but I believe Him now, I can trust Him now. I see it all."

I spent that night with him. To his nurse he said: "I was not too great a sinner for Jesus to save. I am dying, and I am not afraid to die. I am dying happy." To me he once said, "Do you think He will let me slip at the last?" "Oh, no!" I said, "it is not like Him. Do you think He would care for you, and die for you, love you, and then drop you at the last? Hear his own words, 'My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I GIVE UNTO THEM ETERNAL LIFE; AND THEY SHALL NEVER PERISH, NEITHER SHALL ANY PLUCK THEM OUT OF MY HAND'" (John 10: 27-29). "Comfort my mother, tell her I am going to be with Christ," fell from his lips, and his last words were, "IF I DIE, ALL IS WELL."

That was sovereign grace, was it not? Thank God! it was grace That same grace will save you tonight, if you have never tasted it before.

"The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" Will you trust Him now? I think some of you will. If so, we might well sing that hymn

"Jesus, I will trust Thee, trust Thee with my soul;

Guilty, lost, and helpless, Thou can'st make me whole.

There is none in heaven or on earth like Thee;

Thou hast died for sinners — therefore, Lord, for me.

Jesus, I may trust Thee, name of matchless worth,

Spoken by the angel at Thy wondrous birth;

Written, and for ever, on Thy cross of shame,

Sinners, read and worship, trusting in that name.

Jesus, I must trust Thee, pondering Thy ways,

Full of love and mercy all Thy earthly days;

Sinners gathered round Thee, lepers sought Thy face —

None too vile or loathsome for a Saviour's grace.

Jesus, I can trust Thee, trust Thy written word,

Though Thy voice of pity I have never heard:

When Thy Spirit teacheth, to my taste how sweet —

Only may I hearken, sitting at Thy feet.

Jesus, I do trust Thee, trust without a doubt:

'Whosoever cometh, Thou wilt not cast out.'

Faithful is Thy promise, precious is Thy blood -

These my soul's salvation, Thou my Saviour God!"

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Chancellor of the Exchequer's Dilemma

A Chancellor of the Exchequer's Dilemma

Acts 8: 26-40.

Chapter 7

A Chancellor of the Exchequer's Dilemma; or, The value of Scripture.

There is a peculiar charm about the story of this eunuch, and for this reason. The most cursory glance will give every person to understand how particularly deep is the interest of God in the man thus seeking light. Now, there is not the shadow of a doubt about it, that the man who is to be the subject of the remarks I have to make this evening, was a man in downright, deep-seated earnestness in his desire to get what he felt he needed. He had not the knowledge of God. No man would journey a thousand miles under a burning sun for a mere foible, and this man had certainly taken a journey of that length — if not greater. He was returning, not, however, having found what he wanted.

I believe, without any doubt whatever, that the eunuch was an anxious, awakened, inquiring soul, seeking light, and when he returned from Jerusalem, whither he had gone up "to worship," clearly he had not got it. And, further, I am certain, that the man was in a great dilemma. "I thought" we can hear him saying, "that when I went to Jerusalem, I should find the light as to the true and living God. I have been there, and yet I have not got it." Somehow he had possessed himself of a copy of the Scriptures. Happy man! And he read them. Wise man! I wonder if you, my friend, have a copy of the Scriptures. Yes, oh, yes! Then do you read them? It is an immense thing to read the Scriptures.

I frequently come across people who have difficulties about the Scriptures, but these people are generally those, I find, who do not read them. I tell you that, because there are many such young men here, tonight. Nowadays, the learned and critical would-be friend of the young man says, The Bible is not for you to read, young man; there are so many difficulties in it, so many inconsistencies, so many flaws, and so many mistakes. Indeed! Well, I have been reading the Scriptures now for longer than many of you here have years. For seven-and-thirty years I have been studying them, and I have not found any of the discrepancies that the learned man has found out. But I found out, when I began to read the Scriptures, that I was a great blockhead at understanding them. I was little able to understand them, for I was rather like the man in this incident, I could not understand them till a teacher came along. But, as I have gone on reverently reading, I will tell you what has happened. I have found that God has given me what He gave that man. He gave light, and the Scriptures were made plain. What used to be difficulties to me, I find now, to be exceedingly important, and exceedingly instructive; and that, what were apparently inconsistencies, really constituted some of the brightest gems of revelation that lie scattered, from the first of Genesis, to the last of Revelation, all along the page of inspiration.

No, depend upon this, God loves us a great deal too well to put into our hands a book that cannot be trusted. I say this soberly, and seriously, and I have no hesitation in saying — spite of the infidelity of the day — that I believe that the Scriptures are the Word of God, from cover to cover. And, in spite of all that is said against it, the more I study the Bible, the more do I find out its unity, its completeness, its reliability, its absolute impregnability against all the attacks of the enemy; and that it is the revelation of God to my soul. I have found light, and always increasing light, through the Scriptures. And to you I commend them most earnestly and fervently.

One reason, why I am pretty sure that this man was marked for blessing, is that he had got hold of a copy of the Scriptures, and though he did not get much light from them, he was reading them most attentively. We have the Scripture in our day, but shall I be charging you wrongly if I were to say to you, that you do not read them much? Now, you just learn a lesson from this man, I pray you.

One great charm of the passage before us is this — I see that God has His eye upon an anxious man; and He will, in a certain sense, interrupt the blessed work of His grace elsewhere — at least through a special channel — in order to meet that anxious man. My friend, you do not know how God loves you; it is not till your heart is awakened that you really know the deep interest that God has in the salvation of man. What could be more lovely than God's interest in this anxious soul. See what He does; He calls Philip away from his remarkable evangelistic work in Samaria, and sends him down into the desert to meet a man. That is God; it is not the only time He has done so. He has repeated this over and over again, but this is just a sample of the deep delight which God shows when He bends His eye upon the earth and sees the sinner groping after light, the sinner who will put himself to great labour and cost to obtain the light.

Let us look for a moment at Philip, and see what he was about at this time. Our narrative occurs just after the tremendous persecution, following upon the death of Stephen, who was rejected, and sent to heaven with a message from the Jewish nation to their King. Without doubt Stephen was the messenger who carried up that remarkable message of which the Lord speaks in the nineteenth of Luke. "A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return . . . but his citizens hated him, and sent a message after him, saying, We will not have this man to reign over us" (Luke 19: 12- 14). Jesus had come to His own (the Jews) full of grace, but they refused Him, and cast Him out. Not content with that, when the Holy Ghost came down, they refused the further message of grace, which was unfolded in Acts 2, 3 by Peter; and afterwards referred to by Stephen, in Acts 6, 7, where he narrates the guilt of the nation, and charges them with their sin. While "they gnashed on him with their teeth," he lifted up his eyes, saw the heavens opened, and "the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God." In plain language, he beheld the glory-crowned Saviour. The Man whom they refused, and put to death, he saw crowned in glory, at the right hand of God. When he said that, they could stand it no longer. "They cast him out of the city, and stoned him" (Acts 7: 58). They sent him after the Saviour, whom they had crucified, with the message, "We will not have this man to reign over us."

That was the end of the dispensation of God to the Jews. Though guilty of the murder of their Messiah, grace yet lingered over them, till Stephen's death completed the breach between the nation and God. You will remember that our Lord Jesus Christ, after He rose from the dead, commanded His apostles "that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24: 47). Further, He said, "And ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth" (Acts 1: 8). But why begin at Jerusalem first? Because God always begins with the worst spot, and the worst man in this hall tonight will, most likely, be the one who will be saved tonight Jesus said to them, Begin at the spot where My blood was shed; where they clamoured for My death: preach forgiveness there, and then go to Samaria, and after that to the uttermost parts of the earth.

In fulfilment of this command, then, we find that Philip has gone down to Samaria. The gospel began to be preached in Jerusalem; but the Jew would not have it The Holy Ghost's testimony was refused, and Stephen was sent up with the message, We do not want Jesus at all. Then the Spirit of God works in the widening circle, and down goes Philip to Samaria. He is elsewhere called "Philip the evangelist" (Acts 21: 8), but he was not an evangelist to begin with. His was a case of a man faithful to his trust, and then developing the gift God gave him. Philip was one of seven men set apart to look after the treasury and the poor (see Acts 6: 1-61 That is what you would call a deacon. He was appointed to look after the money, and to see to the poor; but after Stephen's death "there was a great persecution against the church which was in Jerusalem: and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. . . . Therefore they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word" (Acts 8: 1 -4).

Philip finding himself at Samaria, sees he has nothing to do as a deacon, and thinks, I can tell the people about Jesus; and we read of him that he "preached Christ unto them" (Acts 8: 5). Mark that! It is very instructive. It was not the first time Samaria had heard the gospel. You remember, that one day the blessed Lord sat by the well of Sychar, weary, and out came a wretched sinner, a woman, with an empty heart, and an empty water jug — figurative of her condition. She met Jesus; and He began to speak to her, in the fulness of His grace, about "the gift of God," "living water," and "eternal life" (see John 4: 1-42). At length, in the conversation, He touched her conscience, as He said, "Go, call thy husband, and come hither." Come back to Me. She answered, "I have no husband." Oh! no, said the Lord, I know it, you are living in open sin. "Thou hast well said, I have no husband: for thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband." Go, and call your husband, and come back to Me; come back to the Light. Light was beginning to work in her soul.

A little more conversation followed, and then you recollect she took refuge in ignorance, and that is what many a soul delights to do today. "I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things" (John 4: 25). "Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee, am he" (ver. 26). It is very noticeable that there are only two people to whom the Lord in His travels through this earthly scene made a revelation — a positive declaration of Himself. One was this outcast sinner of John 4, the other the outcast saint of the ninth of John. The blind man is cast out, and Jesus asks him, "Dost thou believe on the Son of God? He answered, and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee." It is not a bad thing to be an outcast. that is my experience. I know something about it. And what do you find when outcast? That you are in Christ's company, and cannot get along without Him.

The Lord reveals Himself to this woman, and she at once goes into the city and says to the people, "Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?" (John 4: 29). She was not afraid of Him. No, His grace won her heart. And was not she a sinner? I do not think there is one here worse morally than that woman. There is perhaps no person here tonight but fancies she was infinitely worse than they are, and yet this woman trusted Christ, and she went and said to everybody who knew her, "Come, see a man, that told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?" And the Samaritans came out of the city, and got the Lord to go into it, and abide for two days. And then, you remember, they said to the woman, "Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world" (John 4: 42). There was a good deal of work done in Samaria then, and it did not stop when Jesus left. It went on, and in Acts 8 I find the illustration of the words used by the Saviour in John 4, "One soweth, and another reapeth" (ver. 37). Philip, coming down into Samaria with the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ, reaps, for we read, "And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake" (Acts 8: 6). There must have been a marvellous work. People nowadays do not believe in conversion; but when I come to Scripture I find a whole city moved. And Samaria was no small city, though not perhaps as large as the town you and I dwell in.

Well, the evangelist came down and preached Christ. Why Christ? for you will see presently that he preached Jesus to the eunuch. Why Christ? Because He was the ascended One. The Samaritans were to know that the One whom the Jew had refused — the Jesus whom they had once had in their midst — was now the exalted One at the right hand of God. Philip preached Christ, and what was the result? "There was great joy in that city" (ver. 8). It was a charming scene. I do not know what you feel, but if there be a place you can point out to me as the spot where God is blessing the preaching of His Word to the saving of souls — that place has a great attraction for me. Here, then, you see the work of God going on. Philip, used of God, preaches Christ, and Christ is being believed on, with the result that there is "great joy" in the city. I will ask you, my friend, have you found great joy from the preaching of Christ? I do not say, Have you ever heard the gospel? as who has not heard the gospel over and over again; but I will ask you, Has it produced great joy in your heart? May it do so tonight, if never before, as it did in the city of Samaria, with its populous multitudes, and in the solitary desert with its single anxious soul. Whether it be Christ proclaimed, or Jesus unfolded, the result of the tale, in either case, was joy.

And. now, we read, "And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south, unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert" (ver. 26). Observe that it was the angel of the Lord. Presently when he comes within sight of the eunuch the Spirit speaks. The reason is this — the angel, in Scripture, is often used in the way of providence to direct people to the light, whereas the Spirit deals always with the soul. I will quote a scripture to you on this point. Perhaps you do not believe in the ministry of angels. Do you not? I do. "But to which of the angels said he at any time, Sit on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool? Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?" (Heb. 1: 13, 14.)

I think the angel who was sent forth to minister to this eunuch would indeed be a happy angel, because he was sent forth to be a ministering spirit to an heir of salvation. That. angel had the sense that he had a most important commission, as he came to Philip and bade him take that journey, and carry to that man the news that he was one of the "heirs of salvation." Are you, my friend, an heir of salvation? You say, How can I tell? I think if you were in earnest you could tell. Am I an heir of salvation? I would not dream of speaking to you tonight if I were not sure I was an heir of salvation.

The angel of the Lord tells the evangelist to leave his blessed work in Samaria and "go toward the south, unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert" (ver. 26). The journey was between fifty and sixty miles, and Philip might naturally think that nobody would be there. There were two roads he might have gone by, but Philip took the right road. When God sends a messenger to meet an anxious soul you may depend upon it He will see to it that His servant takes the right road. Here I see Philip took the right road. Perhaps you do not believe in the guidance of God in these minutiae. Well, you have only to read Scripture, and you will see how He leads His servants to meet an anxious soul. Let us follow this obedient servant.

"And he arose and went" (ver. 27). That is a lesson for every Christian. There is no hesitation in Philip's mind. The only business of the servant is to obey. When I have been preaching the Word in a certain town, people have often said, "You will come again?" "I do not know." "But surely you will come again?" "I do not know." "Why?" "I will wait till the bell rings," said I. "What do you mean?" A true servant does not move of his own free will, so to speak, he waits till the bell rings. The bell rings here, and the man of God, the servant who is called, is ready. The command is, You leave all this wonderful preaching and conversion in the city of Samaria, and go down to the desert. The desert! Reason may have said, Why, there is nobody to preach to there; there is nothing to be seen in the desert. What does Philip do? "He arose and went" He obeyed. That is the point. He was a good servant, an obedient servant, and thus was fitted to meet His Master's mind. God had His eye upon an anxious, light-seeking man, and He had an obedient servant ready to carry the light to him.

"And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet" (vers. 27, 28).

Some people would tell me he was not her Chancellor of the Exchequer. Well, I am not very careful about the label put upon him, but here I read, he "had the charge of all her treasure." He was a man thoroughly trusted, with an immense amount of money going through his hands. He had evidently a high place in the confidence of his royal mistress; but, notwithstanding all that, there was a want in his heart. This man, we find, had gone up to Jerusalem to worship. No doubt he was a Jewish proselyte. That is to say, he had heard of Judaism, had heard of the law, and that the land of Israel was the spot where God was to be worshipped. Seeking after God, he had taken this thousand-mile journey from beyond the southernmost confines of Egypt — how long he took the scripture does not tell us — but he reached Jerusalem. There was where he expected to find light, and to find God. What did he find? What many people find in Christendom today — ritualism, formalism, sacramentalism, but not the light of God. No, he did not get that. I do not doubt he found the temple full, and the priests sacrificing. But what had taken place? Why, the One who was Himself the antitype of every sacrifice had been there, but had been rejected! The temple was turned into a den of thieves, and the very house of the Lord had become a house of merchandise. The Lord Himself had been rejected; and I think I can see that Ethiopian looking for the manifestation of the presence of God, but seeing nothing but plenty of form, and plenty of ceremony. Of life — life according to God — he saw nothing. There was moral and spiritual death everywhere.

After a little he turned to go down to his house — disappointed — yes, I am free to say, in a perfect dilemma. "What shall I do now?" he thinks. "I have left the land of heathen darkness, to go to a place where I expected there would have been light, but there is none." What had taken place? He, who was the light, was rejected. You recollect Jesus said, "I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life" (John 8: 12). He also said, "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world" (John 9: 5). When the eunuch reached Jerusalem, the light of the world was not there; He had been transferred to heavenly glory. There was no light in Jerusalem. There was plenty of form, plenty of ceremony, plenty of ritual; but the whole thing was empty profession; and this poor man, disappointed, and in a deep dilemma as to where the truth and the light of God were to be found, turned his steps homewards, not having gained one single bit by going to Jerusalem! Dear man! what he really wanted, was not Jerusalem, but Jesus. That is what you want too, my anxious friend. What does Jerusalem represent? What I find people in great numbers believe in today — religious forms, and observances. Stop a bit, though. Have you Jesus? Do you know Jesus? The eunuch knew not where to find Him. He may possibly have heard of the death of the Lord. He may have heard how He was refused by the people. He may also have heard of Stephen's death. These things I cannot say. He makes himself, however, the possessor of a portion of Scripture, and with this priceless treasure in his possession, though he did not yet know its value, he takes his way home.

We find him in his chariot, reading the prophet Esaias; and, depend upon it, now as then, if you can only find a man that has got hold of the Scriptures, and is reading them, you will notice that God will send some Philip to that man's side, sooner or later. Yes, if you are in downright earnest to get the truth, you will get it. This man was in earnest in seeking for light, and the knowledge of God. God saw this, and prepared the way for his receiving what he sought. Do you say this is a strange case? I could tell you of numberless cases such as that. Let me tell you one.

Not very long ago, one Monday morning, there was a telegraphist at work in the west of England. The young man was in very deep anxiety about his soul. He had been awakened by God's Spirit, and he was an anxious, troubled man. He knew he was not right. He longed to have Christ. On the Lord's Day previous he had gone to three separate places of worship, in deep desire that he might get something for his troubled soul. He got nothing. Monday morning came, after he had spent a sleepless night in anxiety about his soul, and he went to his duties.

Feeling that he would go mad if he did not get relief and forgiveness, he was in the act of prayer to God when he heard the peculiar tick-tick that let him know his station was called for. He went to his instrument, took out his pencil, and wrote down the name and address of the sender of the message, and then the name and address of the addressee. Then came the message, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29). "In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace" (Eph. 1: 7). Repeating the message, he cried, "Thank God, I am saved: I have got it: I see it!" And he said, telling a friend of mine afterwards, "That 'LAMB OF GOD,' that 'REDEMPTION,' that 'BLOOD,' that 'RICHES OF HIS GRACE,' went right down into my poor heart, and no one in the whole world could have had greater joy than I had that Monday morning."

God caused that telegram to be the means of bringing peace to that young man. What did he do then? He wanted to see to whom the telegram was sent, and so, instead of giving it to the telegraph boy to deliver, he went himself with it, so that he might see who was the recipient of the message. He carried the telegram to a house not far off, and to the young girl who opened the door he said he had a telegram for So-and-so. "Ah! that's for me," said the girl. She read it, and she found peace also. Asked the meaning of the telegram, she said that she had been anxious about her soul for a fortnight. Her master was not a Christian, but his brother, who was a decided Christian, had been staying at the house for some time. Through his reading of the Scriptures with the family in the mornings and evenings, the servant girl became quite anxious. In her distress of soul on Sunday afternoon, she made bold to write to her master's brother, telling him that she was very anxious about her soul, and begging him to kindly write, and tell her what to do to be saved. The Christian man sent the telegram instead of writing. Why? Because God wanted to give the young man peace. God is good; God is love; God is light; and God loves to bless you. He delights in blessing. That was a strange case, you say; I do not think it was any stranger than the eunuch's.

"Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot" (ver. 29). It is a very nice thing when the Spirit guides you to the right person. He always does direct us to the right person, if only we are subject, and ready, like Philip, to go at the Lord's bidding. Well, he goes near, and as he runs along by the side of the chariot he heard the traveller read. "Go near." God does not say, Go into the chariot Oh, no! God says, "Go near, and join thyself to this chariot" I see the evangelist; he runs along, and gets up to the chariot. The man in the chariot is deeply interested, and as Philip is running along he hears him reading. What was he reading? "The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: in his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth" (Acts 8: 32, 33; Isa. 53: 7, 8). As he reads, all of a sudden he is startled by a voice, which he had never heard before, asking, "Understandest thou what thou readest?" (ver. 30.) His answer was very simple, "How can I, except some man should guide me?" He owns his ignorance, and then he does another thing, "he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him" (ver. 31). I should like if you would invite me to come that I might speak to you; do not you do it, if you do not mean it. If you do not want Christ, do not ask me; nothing gives me greater pleasure than to get a letter saying, "May I have half an hour with you? May I I see you?"

But this man "desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him." He was in earnest. If he had not been in earnest, do you know what he would have said? He would have replied, "What business have you got to put such questions to me?" That is the sort of answer you get from careless people, when you ask them about Christ They say, "What right have you got to speak to me about these matters? I keep these things to myself." I will tell you why, my friend. Because you have not got very much to keep. I find that the people who, as soon as you draw near them, button up their coats tight, so to speak, do so because there is not very much inside. If there was much inside, it would burst out You will always find, in the person who has received the truth of the grace of the Lord, that his heart expands to others. That was just so in the instance of the telegraph clerk; the man got blessing himself as the telegram passed his way, and he wished to communicate it to others.

I do not ask you to request me to have a talk with you; but take this advice from a saved man: If you are not saved, let me implore you, get a downright, red-hot Christian, that is the kind of Christian to get, and set him down beside you. Will you do it? Oh! you say, I do not think I would like that. Ah! then you are not very keen. Take a lesson from the keenness of this man; he takes a thousand miles' journey to get the truth, and is willing to take up beside him this unknown man, if only he be able to open the Scriptures to him.

Well, Philip, I read, goes up, takes his place by his side, and then the passage of Scripture was discussed. It was a remarkable one, in the fifty-third of Isaiah, a part of Scripture which describes the terrible rejection of Jesus by the Jew. "He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth." You have only to go back to the gospel history to see the fulfilment of the prophecy. When Jesus was taken before Pilate, He answered nothing before His judges. "In his humiliation his judgment was taken away." He was dealt with most unrighteously. "And who shall declare his generation?" Everybody refused him. "For his life is taken from the earth."

The eunuch does not understand the scripture, and now he says, "I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man? Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus." It was a lovely start he got — I mean, a beautiful starting-point for the evangelist The scripture points to the very moment when the Lord, dying on the cross, was bearing the curse and sin of man upon Him. Beginning at that scripture, he "preached unto him Jesus." I have no doubt he carried on the story down through other scriptures; for I am sure of this, there is nothing helps a man to understand Scripture like other scriptures. It is all the Word of God, and you cannot give too much value to the Word. It is all sacred, and if you have to deal with doubting souls, let them have nothing but Scripture, and plenty of it.

He "began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus." Why Jesus? Why not Christ? He brings before him all the personal grace of Him who bears that name. Jesus means, Jehovah the Saviour; and what a wonderful awakening it was for that heathen proselyte. He had gone to Jerusalem to find light, and the knowledge of God, but he found nothing there but formalism and ritualism. They had not satisfied his heart. But now Philip tells him of Jesus, the Son of God, who came to earth to suffer and die for sinners, and who, before His birth, was named Jesus — "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." Philip unfolds to him how Jesus came into this world that He might save man. He opens up the Scriptures, and preaches unto him Jesus. It is a charming name, the name of Jesus! Has it sounded sweetly in your heart yet? Oh! that name of Jesus; think of the grace of His life, His holy, spotless, sinless life! Think of what His death was; think of how He gave Himself in love for you, for me!

He told him of Jesus — Jesus the Saviour. Friend, I want to tell you of Jesus; it is Jesus you need, and Jesus that wants you, and Jesus who alone can save you. Jesus was the answer to the deep dilemma of the eunuch's heart That is to say, he had not found anything in Jerusalem, and he. could not understand the Scriptures; but he has here unfolded to him the story of the birth, the life, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus; his eyes are opened, and light gets into his soul. He begins to understand the truth. All he sought, he found wrapped up in the person of Jesus. Oh! the blessed name, the charming name — Jesus! Is it attractive to your heart? Do you love the name of Jesus? Is His name precious to your heart? If you are a Christian, the name of Jesus is very precious to you. If you are not one of the Lord's children, you know Very little about Him. I ask you this, however, What are you going to do with this mighty Saviour? Are you going to bow to Jesus? Are you going to render your heart up to Jesus? There is a day coming when you will be glad to render up your heart to Him. I ask you to receive Him tonight, for you cannot tell what is to be the next thing in your soul's history.

Christ is worth knowing as your Saviour; and I am sure if you had met that eunuch a little later, a few miles down that sandy road, and asked him about Jesus, he would have told you a marvellous tale of the joy the knowledge of that Saviour gave him. As they went on their way, I have no doubt Philip told the eunuch much about the death and ascension of Jesus, as well as the atonement that He had made; how He had met the needs of man as well as all the claims of God; how He had destroyed Satan's power, and put away sin; and how the grave had been opened, and the stone rolled away, not to let Jesus out, but to let you and me look in to see there the proof and trophy of His victory. The folded grave-clothes tell us that He annulled death. That, and much more, would Philip tell him. Presently they come to "a certain water," and what does the man say? I do not read that Philip said anything about baptism, but the eunuch says, "See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?" Now, what did he mean by this? He had heard of the life and death of the Lord, and he learned that Jesus had gone into the grave and risen again. He seems to say, "He came into this scene for me, and has died out of it; and now I should like to identify myself with Him, even if it be only in the figure of baptism. In this water I would like to put on His name." That is what the eunuch practically said, as he enlisted on the, side of the rejected Jesus. So to speak, he took the shilling in his chariot, and he donned the red coat, and went at once on the parade-ground, as he was baptized. He took up this position, — I would like to be stamped from this hour forward as a man who has got the name of the Lord Jesus upon him. That was the meaning of his being baptized. The eunuch took the name of Christ upon him, and he carried the Word into his own country.

It is not said that Philip told him to be baptized. No; but the man's heart was right, and he easily learned the truth. As they came up out of the water, we read that "the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip." No doubt this was a miraculous intervention of God; and mark, it was not only the eunuch who saw it. That man was not driving his own chariot that day; somebody else was driving it He had a good equipage, and I expect there were a good many servants looking on. It is a fine thing when the master takes a stand for Christ; you will generally find that then a blessing comes to the servants as well.

And what is recorded next? "The eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing." I can say honestly, that I have gone on my way rejoicing for thirty-seven years now since the Lord saved me; and if you receive the Lord tonight, you can go on rejoicing as well. You get into your soul the sense — the Lord has loved me, and saved me by the value of His atoning work. If you do that, and believe God's Word, then you may go on your way rejoicing. Let me say this, a Christian is a man who really is entitled to be happy. I know people say to me, Christianity is a dull thing. Dull! why you never made a greater mistake! I remember a fashionable young lady coming to me and telling me she wanted to come to Christ. I met her some days afterwards, and I put it to her, "Have you come to Christ?" She looked the reverse of happy. "I am trying to give up the world," said she. "Just that," I said, "you have not come to Christ." "Well," she said, I have made a sort of profession of Christ, but I am not happy." That is not it at all. If you yield your whole heart to Christ, and believe the gospel, then you may go on your way rejoicing, as well as the eunuch or the man who addresses you, because every Christian knows he is saved through the blood of his Saviour, and hence is entitled to rejoice in the Lord.

The truth is, that Christ has died, and risen again for us, and the Christian lives in the ascended Saviour. What gives a person joy and peace? Looking at Christ, feeding on Christ, and dwelling in Christ. There is nothing more blessed than to be a downright — what I call a backbone Christian. Do you understand me? I said to a young medical student today, "My dear fellow, you have no backbone in you." And he said, "I quite feel that you are right, doctor; there is no earnestness, no go about me." A man without backbone, you know, is a helpless sort of article. There is no fervour, no rigidity, no energy about him. What is wanted is the spirit which says, Let me know what I have to face, and by grace I will face it.

Now if you are converted, young man, hoist your colours. You say it was all very well for the eunuch, no one saw him. I do not agree with you there; I am sure a good many people looked on, and, what is more, he became the carrier of the gospel to his own country — for that it got in, there is no mistake. Would it not be a happy thing, my friend, if you were to take the gospel where you live? Let me encourage you. You make up your mind to believe this night; trust the Lord Jesus, and confess Him. Remember, "that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Rom. 10: 10). If you were to do that, you would go on your way rejoicing.

This chancellor's dilemma is over. Jerusalem yielded him nothing save the Scriptures. From them he hears of Jesus, believes Him, confesses Him, and witnesses for Him, and then goes on his way rejoicing. God give you, my friend, to do exactly the same.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : Eternal Life - How to get it.

Eternal Life- How to get it.

John 5: 20-47.

Chapter 8

Eternal Life- How to get it.

Notice the words of the Lord, at the close of this chapter, where He says: "Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" We live in a day when people think that what Moses wrote is not to be received. There are doubts about his words. I just want to say to you, before we go into the subject before my mind tonight, that the Lord Jesus Christ puts His stamp upon the writings of Moses, as He says: "Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me." Observe, He distinctly says, Moses wrote of Him. Do not you tell me that Moses did not write that which bears his name, for then Christ was wrong in saying he did? I do not think the Lord Jesus was wrong. Ah no! And He says, Moses wrote of Him. I say this, because we live in a day when so much doubt exists as to the authenticity of Scripture, and many young men are caught in this snare of Satan. It will be a good thing for you if you get your doubts dispelled. Our Lord says, authoritatively: "Moses wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" (vers. 46, 47). Are we to credit Christ, or not?

Now the point I would fain press on you this evening is the value of the word of the Lord Jesus Christ I think it is important to notice these words of Christ. "If ye believe not his (Moses') writings, how shall ye believe my words?" Do you believe the writings of Moses? You reply, I have my doubts. Thank God, I have not. I am very sure that the Lord Jesus, the Eternal Truth, the Son of the Father, knew exactly what He was saying when He so distinctly stated, — that the writings of Moses bore witness to Himself Moses was a witness, a distinct witness, to Christ; and you will find that the Old Testament Scriptures are in full accord with what we call the New Testament, while the New Testament Scriptures fling great light upon the Old. The New Testament, if rightly apprehended, throws a wonderful light upon what God has given us in figure, type, and shadow in the Old Testament.

But a person may say, — What is the object of the Old Testament? Well, it is really the picture-book of Christ. You will find in it, if you search, that which brings out, by way of illustration, the most precious truths concerning the Lord Jesus Christ.

In the chapter now before us, the Lord adduces four witnesses to Himself, and it is of vast importance that you and I should pay heed to what Jesus says. (1) John the Baptist bore witness of Him: "Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness unto the truth" (ver. 33). (2.) "But I have greater witness than that of John: for the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me" (ver. 36). (3.) And then, again, "The Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me" (ver. 37). (4.) And, last of all, the Scriptures bear witness of Him: Ye "search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me" (ver. 39). But He adds, very solemnly, "and ye will not come to me, that ye might have life." Ye "search the scriptures": I can commend you for that, He says; but eternal life is not found in Scripture. "They are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life." This fourfold testimony to Christ might well convince any heart.

I have no doubt He was then addressing a company of cavilling Jews. I am not addressing a company of cavillers, I trust. I do not think many of you young fellows are of that hopeless class, who despise grace, and refuse the truth. I trust and believe you have come here with a desire to really learn that which will meet the need of your souls, for time, and eternity. I think you are in earnest. I am in earnest, by grace; and trust, by God's help, to show you that the knowledge of Christ is transcendently important. Now, many a young man thinks that it is a poor thing to be a Christian. I say it is the grandest thing possible to be a Christian; and there could not be a better time, for a man to become a Christian, than when he is young. Why? Because, if God spare you to have a long life, how much better will that life be, if spent in the service of the blessed Son of God, than spent in a routine of sin, folly, and unsatisfying pleasure, which never give any real blessing to the soul, even though at the close of your days you may turn to the Lord. I do not think any man who turns to Christ, in the last hours of his life, can look back on his life with pleasure.

Is there a man here this evening who says, I will go on with the things of the flesh and the devil until I am about to be called out of the world, and then I will turn to Jesus? And what will you then give Him? You will give to Jesus the dregs of a badly spent life. What do you think of yourself? I know what you think. You would judge a man who did that to be a downright poltroon. Nevertheless, such is Christ's grace, that even so, you would be received. He says He will not cast out any one that comes to Him. But what I want you to do is to possess Christ as a present, living, loving Saviour. You may have Him, my friends, where you are, this evening. You may have the knowledge of eternal life now, and may go on your way in the sweet and happy service of the Lord, and in the enjoyment of His love; and you may depend upon it, the possession of a good conscience is a great thing; and the possession of eternal life is a wonderful thing. To be in the service of Christ, is infinitely better than being in the service of the devil.

The god of this world knows all his troops; he knows all his subjects. I admit, my friends, he may keep you in peace, and may not make you aware of his government; but our Lord says, "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace" (Luke 11: 21). And who is the strong man? The devil. And what is his palace? The world. And who are his goods? Sinners. I was, at one time. Thank God! I am not. If you are not on the Lord's side, you are. Each one is marked. Ah! but you do not like to own the hall-mark. You may depend upon it, God knows those who are His, and the devil knows who are his. Yes, it is very simple. You are either on the Lord's side, or not. Which side are you on? If you have never been to the blessed Lord hitherto, let me urge you tonight to have to do with Him now. For, mark! you must at some time. Every man that faces me tonight must have to do with the Lord Jesus Christ, sooner or later. It may be today. It may be tomorrow. You have no lease of life. You may have taken your lodgings, or your house, for a month, or on a lease; but you have no lease of life, and you cannot tell when you may pass into eternity. Either then, or now, you must have to do with the One whose blessed words we have before us this evening. I pray you to hear them. Oh, hear the words of the blessed Lord! It is of vast importance to give heed to His voice.

You may observe that our Lord speaks of two hours in this fifth of John. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live" (ver. 25). Again, "Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment" (vers. 28, 29). You have here brought out the absolute contrast of the two hours; the hour of grace, and the hour of judgment. Mark this! there is a very great difference between "the resurrection of life," and "the resurrection of judgment." It is a common thought that there is going to be a general resurrection by-and-by. Such is not what Scripture teaches; there is no general resurrection. There are two resurrections; the resurrection of life, and the resurrection of judgment.

"Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection," saith Scripture (Rev. 20: 6). The two resurrections are separated by at least a thousand years. There is no doubt about it. In Revelation 20: 4, 5, the risen saints are spoken of as living, and reigning for a thousand years with Christ; and then we read, "But the rest of the dead lived not until the thousand years were finished." The first resurrection takes place before the millennial reign of the Lord Jesus Christ, the second resurrection is after the close of that reign. Be certainly assured that the Lord Jesus will yet reign. He is King of kings, and Lord of lords, and He is going to reign over the earth. The first man lost it; the second Man redeems it. The first man brought the curse into it; and the second Man, the last Adam, will remove that curse, and bring in universal blessing when He comes to reign as King.

The resurrection of life, and the resurrection of judgment, are as different as light and darkness. The resurrection of life is the portion of the man who has Christ, and if dead, when Jesus comes again, he is raised to life. The man who has lived and died in his sins, and has not known Christ, is raised to judgment. And what will that be? Oh! do not you face it. Do not you risk it. Stop, friend, I implore you, do not risk it. I will not attempt to delineate it; how could I? No tongue of man can depict that awful moment when God raises man for judgment. Enough that it is a resurrection of judgment, and every sensible man should flee from it. Every man who has his senses exercised before God will flee from it. The resurrection of life is a resurrection unto blessing. It is the moment when the Lord shall come, and shall take up from the grave His own people, bought by His own blood, and who, through grace, have found Him to be their Saviour. The resurrection of judgment is when unblessed men will stand before the great white throne, and be judged according to their deeds.

Do you think, for a moment, that a man who has spent a life in sin will not be judged? How can he get off in the judgment day? How can you get off then, if the question of forgiven sin be unsettled? The whole genius of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ makes that impossible; because the great truth of the gospel is that, after sin entered into the scene where man had fallen, and before the moment when God must judge it, Christ has stepped in, and borne that judgment. Consequently the believer never goes into judgment, which is exactly what our scripture affirms. Jesus says, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live" (vers. 24, 25).

And what is the result of hearing the Son of God? "They that hear shall live." What kind of life? It is life eternal! Not life in this world! Not life in this scene! You have that already, but it is forfeited. You cannot tell how long you may have it. Thank God, the believer has eternal life. In that 24th verse our Lord Jesus Christ brings before us the present, the past, and the future. About the present, He says, "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life;" then as regards the past, He says the believer "is passed from death unto life;" and if he look at the future, "shall not come into condemnation." The whole horizon of the soul is filled up by that one verse. How beautiful! How simple! "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me." Do I hear His voice? Do I hear His word? Do I believe the Father sent Him? I do, from the bottom of my heart, and I confess that He is what He says He is. I confess Him Son of God, and Son of Man. I confess my need of Him, and my faith in Him. And who sent Him? The Father sent the Son. What a wonderful thing that the Father, the Eternal Father, should have sent His Son to be the Saviour of the world. Yes, Scripture says, "The Saviour of the world." Wonderful and amazing truth! Yes, the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world, and that Son went into death to take you and me out of it. He died on the cross, and presented His own precious blood as an atonement for sin, so that man might be washed in that precious blood, and be presented to God, in all its cleansing efficacy, the recipient of eternal life.

Observe that the Lord says here, "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life." Life possessed, is the point here. And what was our state before we lived? Dead. Mark that. You may have natural life; I admit it. You may have plenty of it. Perhaps it is not a life you would care to have exposed. You would, most probably, not like everybody to know what the deeds and doings of that life have been. That is not my concern. God knows that. My friend, look here, you have not spiritual life; but the Gospel of John brings before us the blessed truth of Jesus coming into this world, revealing God to us, and bringing to us the very thing we had not. There are two sides of the gospel. There is what I call the negative and the positive side of the gospel. What is the negative side? The negative side is the meeting of my need. And what is the positive side? That which comes to me, and becomes mine in the Person of Christ. I will show you what I mean.

In the First Epistle of John, we read, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." He brings us what we had not got — life. That is the positive side. But then it adds, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." There is the negative side of the gospel. Christ takes away what we had got — our sins. You see the gospel, when it comes to a man, tells him of his sins. That is naturally the first thing. When a man is touched by the Spirit of God, is quickened and awakened, he immediately thinks of his sins. Quite right! Think about your sins, for sins you have. You are a sinner, and you ought to know how you have sinned. The first thing that is touched is your conscience, and it is a blessed thing when conscience whispers, "Thou art the man."

But what do I see the grace of Christ doing for my sins? I see them all blotted out in His own precious blood. My conscience accuses me of sin, and then comes the thought, I have not a life that will suit God; I have not one thing suitable to God. I get the sense that I am dead towards God, and then I hear, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." God proposes to give you life, eternal life; and observe, "the gift of God is eternal life." You cannot win it, or earn it. You cannot buy it, and do not deserve it. But God gives us it.

I know the wages of sin is death, but what do I see? Christ, if I may so speak, taking those wages, that you and I might be saved. I see the cross, and the work He has done on the cross. He has taken all the penalties and demerit of sin, borne sins, atoned for them, and, thank God I blotted them out. "Now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself" (Heb. 9: 26). Look, look at the cross. There my sins have been borne, and have disappeared.

See then, as the fruit of the cross, how God can righteously and freely give us life, eternal life. My dear fellows, have you this life? The man who has it not is in a poor case. How frail is the life you have. Only this week some one told me of one of your comrades who died just a week ago. He felt ill; a little operation was performed, and in three days he was gone into eternity! That is number two this session. My dear friend, do not you think you had better be ready for eternity? Do you think you would be a worse man for being a Christian? Suppose you are going to be a doctor, do you think you would be a worse doctor for being a Christian?

But, says some one, I am going into a line of life where I cannot be a Christian. Well then, clear out of it; that is all I have to say. Why ensure your soul's eternal damnation? If I cannot take Christ into the line I am going to take up, then I will clear out of it. The point is this, I have to go into eternity. You have eternity before you. How will you spend it? Where will you spend it? And with whom will you spend it? You may not know; I know what my eternity is going to be. It is to be an eternity with Christ Thank God! I know that I have eternal life, and every Christian should know that, for "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life; and shall not come into condemnation," shall never be judged, "but is passed from death unto life," says the Saviour.

Now how does this come to pass? The Lord tells us, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live." This hour began with His own ministry on earth, and is not finished; though He has finished the work of redemption, and is now at the right hand of God in glory. But who are the dead? All who have not heard and believed Him are dead. Those who have, live, for "the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live." Nothing could be simpler, nor more sure. "Verily, verily," is a good foundation for faith to repose on. It is not often we got that in Scripture; but rarely did Jesus use those words. I conclude that the Lord so speaks to press us to listen to Him. Mighty indeed are the results of hearing the voice of the Son of God. "They that hear shall live." Blessed is the man that has heard the voice of the Son of God. I know it. I believe there are some sitting here tonight, who can say, I have heard the voice of the Son of God speak to me in these students' meetings. They were human lips through which it came, but it was His voice I heard, the voice of the Son of God. His word sank into my heart, and I am quickened.

It is important to notice the difference in the character of the two hours of which our Lord speaks here. During the first hour He quickens into life by His word: "For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself;" and beside this the Father "hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of Man. Marvel not at this; for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth." There is the second hour, the hour of judgment Do you suppose the patience of God will always last? Do you think the first hour is endless, and that the long-suffering of God with man's sin is to be infinite and eternal? Make no mistake, the first hour is about to close. "The long-suffering of our Lord is salvation" (2 Peter 3: 15); but the hour-glass is to be turned. When, God only knows; but the turning thereof will introduce judgment in place of grace. God is giving you now the opportunity of being saved. Hear what the Lord Jesus says: "These things I say, that ye might be saved" (ver. 34). Are you saved? Not yet! Do you not want to be saved? He wants you to be saved. How may you be saved? Only by Him. Will works do it? A dead man cannot work, and that is what you are. Works cannot do it. I know people think they can be saved by works. That is an egregious mistake!

I recollect the time when I was not converted. I began to think of my soul, and I thought I must do something. I used to set myself a hard Bible-task, which I thought was meritorious. I tried to master the prophecies of Isaiah; but I soon got tired of them. I was only a poor dead man, trying to work out a salvation I did not possess. I was dead when I began, and dead when I finished. Of course I failed; but God stepped in, and the Son of God spoke to me shortly after. Blessed be His name, I heard His voice. Have you heard it? Oh, my friend, hear it now. "The hour is coming, and now is." That is the hour of grace. It is a long one, I admit. Take the figure of the hour-glass. The hour of God's grace has been running on from the moment in which Christ then spoke. His death, resurrection, and ascension to glory have transpired, and still that hour has run on. But it is well-nigh spent, and our Lord says another "hour is coming," and what will then take place? The hour-glass is turned, and what has been the hour of mercy and salvation becomes the hour of judgment. Do not you think that it is a great mercy that hour-glass is not yet turned, because you are not saved yet? When turned, the unbeliever will be found without salvation, and without the possibility of being saved. It might be turned tonight. In the meantime, thank God, it is not turned, and there is yet another opportunity for you and me to reach the Saviour, if we have not yet done so.

If you have not yet come to Him, who says in the tenth of John, "I am the door," hear His voice now. You may be saved tonight if you will enter in. Christ says, I am the door. Come, He says, enter in by Me. It is Christ you must know. It is Christ you need. I believe many of you have a longing, and a desire for Christ. You have a longing desire for rest that the world cannot give. I will ask you a simple question, Has the world satisfied you? No. I find a man saying, "I am going to a ball tomorrow night, and to something else on Tuesday, and I would like something else on Wednesday — I must have a little fun." A little will not do for me. I must have something that is perpetual; I must have something that is perennial; and what is that? The grace and love of Christ. That grace and love of Christ fill the heart with peace and joy. Perhaps you say, I thought it was a dull thing to be a Christian. That is a thorough mistake. The only really bright thing I know is to be a Christian. Everything connected with Christ is blessed and durable. Every earthly joy is transient The world's laughter is vanity, for "as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool. This also is vanity" (Ecc. 7: 6). That fire soon burns out, that is the meaning of it The laughter of the fool is like the crackling of thorns under a pot, there is no durability about it. There is no durability in what you are engaged in. There is no durability in the pleasures of sin. They are only for a season, and you have to meet their consequences and pains in eternity; but the love of Christ fills the heart with joy in this world and for ever. He saves you and lets you know that you are saved.

But you say, Is it not presumption to say that? How can it be presumption, if He does it? Suppose some one were to jump into the water and seize you when you were drowning, would you think it was presumption for you to say, you owed your life to the man who risked his own to save yours? The reason you are not sure of your salvation is, because you have been thinking you have something to do in regard to it. It will not do. You have not been brought to the point of seeing that you can do nothing whatever, and that you must rest alone on the love and work of Christ. Until I see I am hopelessly lost, I shall never give up my struggling. Let me illustrate my meaning. A man had fallen overboard. The harbour was deep, and there were no boats about. The man was drowning, for he could not swim, and the cry rang out for help. There was one man, a capital swimmer, near at hand, who had saved many from drowning, and he was called. "Jim, you are wanted, there is a man overboard." When Jim came down to the spot, everybody thought he would jump in at once. Instead of that, he quietly looked at the struggling man. There he was in the water, splashing, and using all his strength to keep afloat The crowd eagerly cried to Jim, who held his peace. "Go in, man. It is a shame. That man will be drowned."

The man went down, but he came up again, and when he came up the first time, he came up pretty strong. He could splash a good bit, and showed a good deal of strength. Again the crowd urged Jim; "Coward," they called him; but Jim held his peace, and the man went down again. Then Jim took off his jacket and his boots. The man came up the second time, and still did a good deal of splashing and struggling. At last he flung up his hands, exhausted, and was about to sink again, when like an arrow Jim dashed to his side, put him on his shoulder, and brought him ashore, and saved him. He was then asked, "Why in the world did you not go in sooner?" His reply was simple: "Because he was too strong; if I had gone in at first, he would have dragged me down, and I should not have been able to drag him out."

That is just the difficulty with many as to their souls. You are too strong. You have been doing too much. You think you must bring something, and you must do something. That is not it. You are without strength, a poor sinner, and must let Jesus save you. The gospel is very simple, and very blessed. Listen! "When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly" (Rom. 5: 6). It is all the work of Christ. There is no work on your, or my side. Salvation is by faith, and faith only, not by works. "Unto him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 5). It is the work of Christ, done for us, that meets the claims of God. Then comes the sweet word of the gospel, which convicts me as a lost, ruined, and undone sinner, and then I listen to Christ's blessed voice, saying, "Come unto me and I will give you rest." I listen and believe, and, as I believe, I pass from death unto life. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming. and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live." You receive life, eternal life, from the Son of God. But there is a second hour coming, and a very solemn hour it is, for it is the hour of judgment. Will the Christian come into it? Never. The Christian will not be judged. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation (or judgment), but is passed from death unto life" (ver. 24). And why will not the Christian be judged. Because the Saviour has been judged for him; and, so the Lord says here, the man who believes in Me will not be judged, he shall not come into judgment.

Elsewhere we read, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8: 1). The second resurrection is unto judgment, but the first resurrection is unto life. Then the Lord will come for His own people, and rescue all those whose hearts have been yielded up to him, not merely in word, but in reality. Is there a link between your heart and the Saviour, who lives in glory? If so, He says, "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life." On the other hand, the man who does not believe the gospel is on his way to judgment. That is a poor look-out, a dark look-out. If you are a wise man, you will gladly say, Christ for me. Let others make their choice as they will, but Christ for me! is the language of my heart; and believing on Him, I hear Him say, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth in me hath everlasting life" (John 6: 47). That is most assuring. Not less so is that verse with a top and a bottom, but no middle: "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3: 36). Which half of the verse are you in, the top or the bottom half? If the bottom, the wrath of God abides on you; if the top, you possess eternal life. Make sure of where you are.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Soldier's Desire.

A Soldier's Desire.

Acts 10, Acts 11: 1-18.

Chapter 9

A Soldier's Desire; or, Prayer and its answer.

This is rather a long story, perhaps some of my hearers may say tonight, but it is a very interesting one. If it has no interest to you, my friend, it has a very deep interest for me; and for this reason, that the Spirit of God describes to us, in this remarkable narrative, the way in which the gospel of the grace of God first went out to the Gentiles. You must bear in mind that the Jew was nationally in relationship with God, but the Gentile — the heathen, for that is the meaning of the word — had no link with God. It is to such that the apostle Paul says, "Wherefore, remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision, by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; that at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world" (Eph. 2: 11, 12). As Gentiles, they had no link with God, and therefore you will not understand this chapter unless you see clearly, that God was beginning a new work of grace. It was an entirely new departure in the ways of God. He was sending out, and was determined to send out, beyond the limits of Israel, the gospel — the good news of His love. He was going to proclaim that glad tiding to nations who had never heard it before.

I do not know what you feel, but I can say, from the bottom of my heart, Thank God, that He has done so; because, I happen to be one of them, and, I suppose, you are too. If you are a Jew, there is a Saviour for you, but here is the first time that the news is proclaimed, that there is a Saviour, and an eternal salvation for the Gentiles, and we are introduced here to the first company of Gentiles who, as such, heard and received the gospel.

The first trophy of grace among the Gentiles was this remarkable centurion, Cornelius by name. Evidently he was an Italian, for he belonged to the Italian band. He was a Roman centurion, and a man of remarkable character, but then living in Palestine, at Caesarea, which was a most important military post, viewed from the standpoint of the Romans. He was there in charge of a company of soldiers. Somehow or other this man had a great longing to know God's salvation. He was a man seeking light, and no person can read this scripture without being impressed that this man was in downright, dead earnest; absolutely, red-hot earnest, as I might say. His character was quite unique for a Roman soldier, for he was "a devout man, and one that feared God, with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway" (ver. 2).

Now what about the man that never prays? God can save even that man, but it is interesting to see that this man was prayerful. He was not only prayerful, but it comes out that he was fasting until the ninth hour of the day. The man was, as I said, in downright earnest: he had not broken his fast until three o'clock in the afternoon. What was he about? He had spent his time in looking to God for light. No wonder that man got blessing: he was in such deep, downright earnestness, I repeat, before God. He wanted blessing, and he got it. Do you want blessing? For any sake, be in earnest then!

I see here the value of prayer. It is not that I would tell you, that you must pray in order to be saved: that would be to make salvation depend upon prayer, which it does not But I find when a man is really awakened by the Spirit of God, and is exercised before God about his soul, that the longings of his heart will come out in prayer. He has not got much light; but he can pray. He wants Christ: he knows there is something to be had, which he does not possess. The centurion was a man, I have no doubt, who at this point was already converted, but had not peace with God. He had been quickened by the Spirit of God, but did not know the gospel. He was not a formalist, a cold Pharisee, dependent upon rites and ceremonies: he was a man whose outward character, I think, would bear very favourable comparison with that of any person in this building tonight. I do not know whether you are known as "a devout person; one that feared God with all his house" (mark that, for it was apparently a pretty big one), "which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always." He was a devout man, a God-fearing man, a benevolent man, and a prayerful man, and yet he was not saved.

But, you say, if that does not save a person, what will? Not all that, nor ten thousand times all that. That does not save. Yet, you say, you said yourself that he was a converted man. Yes, I believe he was: he was a man who had turned to God; but, when I say "saved," I use the word advisedly. I use it, as it is used in the New Testament, and by being a saved man, I mean, a man who is in the liberty of the new creation: a man who knows the liberty of the grace of God, who knows what it is to be brought to God: a man who knows that his sins are forgiven, that he is accepted of God, is His child, and can call Him Father. That is what Cornelius did not know. Oh, you say, could a man be converted, and yet not know that he was saved? There are hundreds of men, who are truly converted, and yet do not know that their sins are forgiven. Possibly, friend, you are one of them: you have had longings after Christ, and light for weeks past: you fear God: you are longing deeply to possess the blessing of God, you have turned your back upon the world, and still you have not peace. Why? You ought to have it. The fact is, you are not simply resting on Christ's finished work, and God's testimony to His satisfaction therein. That alone gives the soul solid peace.

Now Cornelius was a man who had never heard the gospel. You must not compare Cornelius with the men of Edinburgh; because the centurion was a man who had no right, or rather, felt that he had no right to salvation. He knew God was the God of the Jews, and he knew that salvation was of the Jews, and he no doubt said, I am a Gentile, and therefore have no right to it. You see, his very uprightness and honesty were the source of his distress. Look then how God loves to meet this anxious man! Look how He desires to meet the man who is in earnest He takes all this trouble, if I may so speak, in order to bring liberty, and blessedness, and peace to this troubled man. My friends, I would that you knew the deep interest God takes in man's salvation. Oh! worldly man, you who think little of the Lord, if you only knew the love of His heart, and the infinite interest He takes in you, your heart would be captured by Him right away.

Look at this chapter! He sends an angel to the troubled man, and sends a vision to His praying servant, Peter.

In this chapter you have Cornelius on the one hand, praying at Caesarea, and another man praying forty miles away, on the house-top. Both are being prepared by God for each other. He sends to the anxious man an angel, and says, so to speak, I know what you want, Cornelius; you will get what you want. And He says, by the vision, to Peter on the house-top, I want you to get rid of all your old Jewish ideas; you must get all your old ideas and prejudices knocked out of your head, and you must go and do what I bid you. "Thus He prepares the servant, ere he comes in contact with the poor troubled Gentile, to whom he is to carry the gospel news.

Now a man may be turned to God, and his soul be quickened by the Spirit of God, he can have holy desires, and he may fear God, and yet he may never really know what the gospel is. You may say to me, "What is the gospel?" I think this chapter will unfold it; but, in brief, let me tell you what I mean by the gospel. The gospel that comes from God now is the fruit and result of the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and, by His grace now upon earth, there is the ministry of the Spirit of God, come down from heaven, a true and blessed witness who tells of forgiveness, and of redemption, and assures you that, if believing in the Lord Jesus, you are saved, that your sins are forgiven, and that you are a child of God. You, as a child of God, receive the Holy Ghost, who brings you into the joy, and the satisfaction that is provided by Christianity.

My idea of a Christian is that of a man who is brimful of joy from one year's end to another. You say, I do not meet many of that stamp. I admit that; but you have not got the right stamp before you. Look at Paul: you find him full of joy and peace. But you say, he was an apostle. I know that, but it was not his apostleship that filled him with joy; it was the knowledge of Christ dwelling in him. And what will fill your heart with joy? What has filled my heart with joy during these seven-and-thirty years? Christ! Aye, and He will fill your heart with joy: He will forgive your sins, where you sit, and He will save you, and will let you know you are saved through the work He has accomplished for you.

Let us see how Cornelius received blessing. He was in prayer, and evidently saw a vision, about three o'clock in the afternoon, of "an angel of God coming in to him, and saying unto him, Cornelius" (ver. 3). He was frightened; so is every man when God gets near to him. Sinner, you will get frightened when you have the sense that God draws near to you. Jacob was afraid when God drew near that night on which he was left alone by the river's side. The shepherds were afraid when the angels were sent to tell them of the birth of the Saviour. Cornelius was afraid. There never was a man yet who was not afraid when the Lord drew near, because conscience tells him — just what conscience told me — that a sinner in his sins is not fit for God.

The angel addresses Cornelius, and says to him, "Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God" (ver. 4). Cornelius says, "What is it, Lord?" He is evidently surprised that God should visit him. The greatest surprise that ever I got in my life was when the Lord saved me. I never had such a surprise all my days as on the night the Lord saved me; and I believe if you get God's salvation now that it will be a most wonderful surprise to you, that He in His great and infinite goodness should save a wretched, ruined sinner like you.

I understand the man's feelings as he expresses them in these words, "Lord, what is it?" And what is God's answer? This, if I may put it into other language, I am going to bless you, Cornelius. He says: "Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God. And now send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon, whose surname is Peter: he lodgeth with one Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the sea-side: he shall tell thee what thou oughtest to do" (vers. 4-6).

And when Simon does come to the troubled soul, do you observe what he does tell him to do? "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name, whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins" (ver. 43). What the messenger says to the troubled soul, when he gets into his presence, is, Believe in God's Son: believe in the One, whom the world has refused, and whom God has taken into glory. He tells him, that all the prophets bear witness to this blessed truth, that from Christ he will obtain forgiveness of his sins, and all he has "to do" is to believe in Him.

Well, what do I find the man does? The angel departs, and Cornelius, now in downright earnestness of soul, immediately calls "two of his household servants, and a devout soldier of them that waited on him continually, and when he had declared all these things unto them, he sent them to Joppa" (vers. 7, 8). Not tomorrow — no! that same day, clearly. They went off that day. Cornelius was not like a great many lazy sinners nowadays, who put off the salvation of their souls until tomorrow. I met a young man of this sort some time ago, perhaps he is here tonight A fortnight ago a friend of his died, and after he came home from the funeral, he said to a Christian: "That young man was converted on his death-bed. Do you believe in death-bed repentance?" "Yes," said the Christian. "Oh! then," said the young fellow, "that is capital, it will do." "What will do?" asked his friend. "I will put off being a Christian till my death-bed." Awful folly!

Friend, I suppose you mean to be converted some day? Do not put it off: no, no, do not put it off till your death-bed. There is only one death-bed repentance given us in Scripture, that no man may presume; but there is one, that none may despair. I have little faith in them. Rowland Hill called them not death-bed conversions, but death-bed fear of hell and damnation. He was not far wrong.

Oh! you say, I believe in the goodness of God. Yes, He is good, and infinitely better than you dream of, but is that a reason for you to refuse His grace, and put off your soul's eternal salvation till the moment of your death-bed? If so, you are like another foolish man I have heard of, and he was like you. He procrastinated, and he meant to come to Christ in the future, for he believed in the goodness of God. He was surrounded by Christian friends, and they often pleaded with him to come to the Lord. But he was like you — he loved the world, and he would do anything for the world. His world was pretty much wrapped up in the hunting-field: he did not care for anything but hunting. When his friends pressed on him to turn to God he replied: "Would not God bless me if I went to Him on my death-bed? I believe so in His goodness that if I were to turn to Him on my deathbed, the Lord would have mercy upon me; and then I will do it." So he calmed his soul, if troubled somewhat by the words that were spoken to him. One day he was hunting: he was on the back of an exceedingly fine horse, and, to make up to the hounds, he had to take a hedge. His horse sprang through the brushwood, but on the other side was a flock of sheep, which were frightened as he came over. They scampered right and left, and the horse was startled. It stumbled, and threw its rider. As he fell he was heard to say — not "God have mercy upon me" — not a bit of it! what he said was, "Devil take ye." He broke his neck, and died on the spot. Oh! procrastinating sinner! remember the last words of this man — so like you — were not, "God have mercy upon me," but, "Devil take ye." The devil did not take the sheep, but he took the godless rider that day. Take care, that he does not take you, my friend.

Now, Cornelius may well teach us a lesson here. He sends at once, when he learns that there is one who can tell him the way of salvation. That is what he wanted, and immediately he despatches his servants on their journey of about forty miles, for that was the distance between Caesarea and Joppa.

"On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the house-top to pray, about the sixth hour." It is interesting to see how the Lord prepares His servant, in this chapter. He let him fall into a trance: he was not asleep; he was in a trance. God was going to teach Peter a wonderful lesson, and he sees this remarkable sheet coming down from heaven. Mark, it says, "And saw heaven opened." We find heaven opened four times in the New Testament.

Do you know that heaven is opened just now. It was once opened for the Father to look down upon Jesus on earth; to see the man in whom God delighted (Matt. 3: 16). In the seventh of Acts it is opened for faith to look up, and see Jesus there. Stephen says, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7: 56). Here Peter "saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him," and he says in the eleventh chapter, when he tells the story to the Church at Jerusalem, "And it came even to me" (Acts 11: 5). It was a lesson to him; and there comes a lesson from heaven to you tonight, that Jesus is willing to save you where you are in this hall. "And it came even to me" — what was the lesson? That there was no limit to the grace of God. Peter(' saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet, knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air" (vers. 11, 12). I do not doubt but that God here presents man as he is in his natural characteristics, but saved by grace, and taken to heaven. The fourth time heaven is seen opened is in the Book of Revelation, when the King of kings comes to reign, and all His saints with Him (Rev. 19: 11).

But Peter says presently, "The vessel was received up again into heaven." God takes it back again, and that is just what one would expect; nothing goes into heaven but what comes out of it. And how, you ask me, do you expect to get to heaven? I will tell you. My Saviour came for me: He bled and died for my sins, and put them away, and the Spirit of God has begun His work of grace in my soul. Were it not so, I could not go to heaven. There Is nothing in either you or me that fits us for heaven. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh," the third of John tells us; that is to say, man as such cannot go into heaven; he must be born again; there must be a work of God's Spirit in his soul, as well as a work wrought for him by the Son of God on the cross. The contents of the vessel just show us that there is no limit to the grace of God. His grace meets and saves the most unlikely, and the apparently most unsuited.

God's grace prepares Peter for the work before him, but he does not learn his lesson very quickly. He finds out, however, that the goodness of God is going to override all his former ideas, and that the blessed gospel is going into other spheres than the Judaism, of which he had thought so much. This lesson he does not learn immediately, for he "doubted in himself what this vision that he had seen should mean" (ver. 17). But "while Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold, three men seek thee." Observe "the Spirit said," — it is not an angel who speaks. When it is a question of dealing with the soul, and carrying the truth to the soul, the Spirit speaks. The Holy Ghost whispers to Peter, and what does He say? "Behold, three men seek thee. Arise, therefore, and get thee down, and go with them, doubting nothing, for I have sent them" (vers. 19, 20). Immediately Peter goes down. There are the men at the door. They have found out the place where Simon lives: they are in search of the Evangelist, and meantime the Evangelist has been prepared by God to carry His message to an anxious soul.

Ah! friend, are you anxious tonight? Good! it is a sweet message I have for you — Pardon, Peace, Salvation! Nothing is so charming as preaching the gospel. Why do you preach? I have been asked. Well! I tell you honestly, I cannot say that I was bred, trained, or authorised by man to preach, but I have the sense of God's love to me, and I want you to share it, that is why I have asked you to come here tonight Immediately you know what the grace of God is, you want others to have that knowledge too: you want others to have the same joy as yourself. Even Cornelius illustrates this, for when he knew he was to hear the way of salvation, he "called together his kinsmen and near friends" (ver. 24) to share the blessed news with them.

But let us follow Peter down from the house-top. He goes to the door and asks the men," What is the cause wherefore ye are come?" (ver. 21.) Peter greatly interests me: although he is so slow at his work. He had not fully realised this new departure in the ways of God. To this interrogation the three men reply: "Cornelius the centurion, a just man, and one that feareth God, and of good report among all the nation of the Jews, was warned from God by an holy angel to send for thee into his house, and to hear words of thee" (ver. 22).

The ways of God with souls as presented in Scripture are beautiful, and you who are Christians, I think, will enjoy what I am now going to speak about, if you have not noticed it before. When God was going to send the gospel of His grace to the Gentiles, whom does He select as the first vessel, if I may so speak, into which He will put His treasure? It is not a scandalous man: it is not a blasphemer, or a cursing man. That would have been to awaken Jewish opposition. He selects a man, concerning whom the Jews had already issued a "good report," since he was a "devout man." Ah! said God, you go and tell that devout man the gospel, Peter! That is the man whom God selects here. If we be spared till another Lord's Day evening, we will see how His grace will go out to a man, who has not one single thing to commend him.

It is beautiful to see how the Lord sends His messenger to one whose outward character was blameless: even the Jews bear record of him, that he was a just man, and one that feared God, notwithstanding the fact that he was a Gentile, and a Roman, and very likely oppressing them in the execution of the laws of his master, the Emperor of Rome, — still the whole nation said he was a just man. He had not the gospel, it is true; but he was now to get it

Peter lodges the strangers over-night, "and on the morrow Peter went away with them, and certain brethren from Joppa accompanied him" (ver. 23). His action in taking them was remarkable, for I should not have said that caution was Peter's leading feature; but on this occasion for manifest reasons he does not like to go into the business alone. Three men come to ask for the truth, Peter takes with him six brethren to be witnesses of what was going on. I have often said I should have liked to have been the seventh man to go down with Peter that day, and see the wonderful tide of blessing that was about to roll into the house of Cornelius. If any one here is bound on a gospel mission, and you are sure you are going to a household of downright anxious souls, if you will invite me, I will go with you. I do not know anything more charming than the scene I get in this chapter, as Peter goes down to this household of anxious souls: it is a most lovely sight.

It was clearly a two days' journey from Joppa to Caesarea, and four days had elapsed from the time the men were sent off for Peter, until he returned with them to Caesarea. "And Cornelius waited for them, and had called together his kinsmen and near friends. And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and fell down at his feet, and worshipped him" (vers. 24, 25). A wonderful thing that for a Roman to do: they would scarcely even salute a stranger, that is a well-known fact But here, Cornelius actually falls at the feet of this messenger, who, he knew, was the messenger of God to his soul: this only shows how earnest the man was. "But Peter took him up, saying, Stand up: I myself also am a man" (ver. 26). You are a man, and so am I: we are on the same level. "And as he talked with him, he went in, and found many that were come together" (ver. 27). You will always find it so: when a person is interested in the truth, about which they are not clear, they want some one else to come and hear about it too. I should not be surprised if there are men in this hall, who though not clear themselves as to the gospel, have said to others, Come along with us: we will go and hear what this preacher has to say. That was exactly Cornelius' position: he had not got the light himself, but he could say, I know I am going to get it: I have had a message from God, and light is coming, so he fills his house with his friends and kinsmen.

Peter "found many that were come together." I have seen many audiences, and I have seen many a multitude; but, to tell the truth, the one multitude that chains my eye, and charms my heart, is a multitude of men and women that want to hear about Christ. People have often said to me, "Have you been to the picture gallery this year yet, doctor?" "No!" "Why not?" "Because, I should not see the pictures I want to see." "And what are you looking for?" "I will tell you the pictures I want, — one is a company of happy saints enjoying Christ, and desirous to hear more of Him, and the other is a company of anxious sinners, longing to find Him. If you can show me these pictures I will come."

Here we have this beautiful picture, — a company of anxious souls, waiting to hear about Jesus, and in comes the preacher. He begins with a word of explanation: "Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean. Therefore came I unto you, without gainsaying, as soon as I was sent for: I ask therefore for what intent ye have sent for me?" (vers. 28, 29.) I must say that I never quite understood that question. I cannot understand a man, who knows the grace of God, and is in the presence of anxious people, asking, "For what intent ye have sent for me?" I think, if I got into such a gathering, I should know, and I would say, I know what you want; you want the gospel: the Lord help me to give it to you.

Cornelius stands up, and tells his story. He merely says, An angel came to me while I fasted, and prayed, and told me what to do, and immediately I did it, Perhaps, some of you thought I was going beyond Scripture when I said, Cornelius sent his servants off immediately; but I was not, for I read: "Immediately therefore I sent to thee; and thou hast well done that thou art come. Now therefore are we all here present before God" (I wonder if these words can be applied to the company here tonight) "to hear all things that are commanded of thee of God" (ver. 33). He had the sense that they were to hear from God, and that this servant of God had to declare His message.

"Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him. The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ: (he is Lord of all:) that word, I say, ye know" (vers. 34, 35). Peter was evidently perfectly conversant with what had taken place: that Cornelius and his household had heard some of the truth in regard to Israel; but, as I said before, whatever blessing or inheritance was Israel's, Cornelius, being a Gentile, in his uprightness of character, knew did not belong to him. He longed for peace, but thought only the Jew could get it. But what does the gospel bring to all now? Peace! When the Saviour was born, on that very day, the heavenly messengers proclaimed, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace." What a priceless boon to weary sin-burdened souls! Peace! Let me ask you, Have you peace? Do you possess peace? Are your sins forgiven? Are you clear with God? Are you clear that you have escaped judgment? Answer these questions.

Beware of a false peace: I cannot deny that there are many men living in this city today, who have a false peace, for "when a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace" (Luke 11: 21). What does our Lord mean by these words? I think I understand. That palace is the world, and the strong man, who has his goods in peace, is the devil: he keeps his goods in peace. Young man, were you never troubled about your soul? Certainly not; why should I be? Your answer just illustrates this scripture, "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace." The devil, let me tell you, has an uncommonly good, a very diversified, a splendid armoury. He does not hold every one with the same suit, if I may say so. He knows how to meet every one. He will give you what you want.

He will hold some with the wine-cup; others, he will snare with a pack of cards; others, he will entangle with the theatre, or, it may be, with the novel, or the love of gold, or the power of lust, or the charms of knowledge, or something of that sort. You have never perhaps felt sorrow for your sins; nor will you if he can keep you from thinking of these sins, and of the serious fact that you are a sinner. He will try all he can to keep you from being awakened to the fact that you are a guilty man, and by all means in his power rob you of the blessing of being born again, and brought to God. For many a long day a man may go on in false peace, thinking all is right, when all is wrong, for mark," When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace." That is a false peace; the devil's lullaby for souls deceived by sin, and oft-times helped hell-ward by a Christless religion. Thank God! if you are troubled now about your sins and your lost estate. Better far is it for a man to be in soul-trouble now, and thus get the peace which God gives, than to go on through life in the delusive peace which the devil ministers, only to wake up in eternity to the awful discovery that the peace was a fraud, and that God's judgment of sin is everlasting.

What we have before us in this scripture, is God's peace — peace by Jesus Christ — the peace of the weary — the peace of the troubled — the peace that God alone can give. And what is that? The knowledge that He has nothing against me, and that there is nothing between Him and me; that the claims of His infinitely holy throne have all been met in regard to myself, and my sins, and I can look at that throne with the sense, I am perfectly fit for it; — I am ready to stand before it You say, How? Because He is pleased with what I have done? No! But because of the finished work of Christ. The knowledge of that work has let me see that there is not a single thing left between the infinitely holy God, and the infinitely sinful man, whose sin has been divinely and definitively met by the atoning death of the blessed Son of God. Christ took my place in death and judgment, that God might give me His in life and glory. When that knowledge enters the heart, peace, like a river, surges through the soul; and that is the peace I have got.

But you say, Have you never any doubts? Doubts! What should I have doubts about? I do not doubt that by nature I am a guilty, godless, hell-deserving sinner, and till Christ met me I was bound there: I have not a doubt about that. Have you, as regards yourself? But since grace met and saved me, by the work of Another, why should I have a doubt? Have you any doubts, my friend? If so, I hope the Lord will dispel them tonight If not saved you are on your road to hell; there can be no doubt as to that surely. If grace does not deliver you from the grip of Satan and the power of sin, you will spend eternity there. Oh, you say, I do not believe in such a place. You will have to believe it yet, mark that, my friends. You will be converted some day, on that point, depend upon it. See to it that it be not too late.

That is a fine stratagem of the devil to tell you that there is no judgment — no hell — no punishment hereafter. The pathway of Christ refuted that folly. Jesus, the Son of God, came down from heaven to earth, and died to deliver men like you and me from hell. He agonised on the cross that He might rescue me from the consequences of my sin, and blessed be His name, He has rescued me! Why do you not allow Him to rescue you tonight? "He is Lord of all." Not merely of the Jew, but of the Gentile as well. "He is Lord of all." Lovely word! He is my Lord: the time was when I was under another master, and I served him faithfully, but now my master is changed. Time was when I had a bad master, and he had a very good servant. But now, I have an infinitely blessed Master, and He has a poor servant Thank God! He is my Lord. Can you say the same? Do not be ashamed to say it.

A young woman came to me the other day, and said, "Four and a half years ago I was converted through your preaching, but I was ashamed to confess Jesus." "Ashamed of Jesus! Ashamed of the Lord! And what are you ashamed of now?" I asked. "Oh," said she, "I am ashamed now to confess that I ever was ashamed to own Him." Are you, my friend, ashamed of Jesus: ashamed to own your Lord: ashamed to own the Son of God? Wake up! wake up! There is an immense privilege open to you, to be on the Lord's side. "But," says somebody, "I am such a sinner." Never mind that: the deepest-dyed sinner may be saved by Jesus' grace. Let Him save you, and deliver you, and send you through this world as a witness of what grace can do.

People sometimes think it a poor thing to be a Christian. I think it a paltry thing not to be one: that is my decided conviction, and I advise every young man without any further delay to yield himself up to Him this evening, and be on His side, out-and-out I do not like half and half work — a backboneless kind of Christian is no good at all. Such are like the salt the Lord speaks of; they are of no use for the field, and of no use for the dunghill (Luke 14: 34, 35). There are a good many of this kind in the professing Church. They do not do the Church any good, and they do the worldling much harm, for their inconsistency and apathy encourage men in unbelief; in fact, they are stumbling-blocks over which sinners stumble into hell. They have too much of the world to really enjoy Christ, and witness for Him, and their consciences will not let them go the whole way in the world. A young convert said to me this morning, "I like to see the people of the world downright." "So do I," I replied, "and you can tell them that hell is the end of their journey." "And, sir," said he, "I like to see a Christian out-and-out." That is just exactly what I like. I want it for myself, and I want you to be out-and-out too.

Having announced Him as "Lord of all," Peter goes on to tell the history of Jesus, and unfolds three great truths — God with us; God for us; and God in us. First of all, you find the truth of God with us: "How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, and with power; who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which he did, both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem: whom they slew and hanged on a tree" (vers. 38, 39). There you see the fulfilment of the scripture, "A virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted, is God with us" (Matt. 1: 23).

Then Peter, from verse 40 to verse 43, brings out the truth, "God for us," while verse 44 gives us the truth, "God in us." "God for us" is shown in the death of Christ, and all the consequences of blessing which accrue to us from it. As the Holy Ghost falls upon all this assembly (ver. 44), we see the truth of "God in us." You must not forget that the Christian is a man in whose body the Holy Ghost dwells; and therefore it is a very solemn thing to be a Christian.

Just a word or two then, as to verse 40 and onwards. "Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly." In the moment of His death Christ wrought atonement, when He bore the sinner's sins, and was made sin that we might escape its consequences. He sacrificed Himself, and thus infinitely glorified God; and what was the result? God raised Him up. I can tell you therefore of a risen, triumphant, victorious Saviour. That is the Saviour I know. He triumphed over sin, Satan, death, the grave, and the power of darkness; and as the risen man He lives before God. "Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead." There was unmistakable evidence of the reality of His Person. "And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he, which was ordained of God to be the judge of quick and dead."

Observe, my friend, if you do not let Him save you, He will have to judge you. And you say, Will He not judge you too? No! blessed be His name, never! Why? Because He is my Saviour; that is the whole point. Judgment will not be a mockery. I quite admit, I shall have to give account of my walk and ways as a Christian; but, when you talk about judgment, that raises the question of the imputation of guilt; and do you think He is going to impute guilt to those for whom He died? Let Scripture answer: "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Rom. 8: 33, 34). I have no fear of judgment; — fear is gone out of my heart, because Christ is my Saviour. Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? is the challenge. Let Satan accuse; the devil will do it if he can, but God will justify the believer, and He will silence the accuser. Christ died, and He died for me that I might be delivered, and saved; and, what He died to do, blessed be His name, He has done. He died for me that He might be my Saviour, and He has saved me, for I trust Him. Do you not trust Him? If so, you are saved by Him, as the fruit of His perfect love, and finished work. Well wrote Steele —

"He took the guilty culprit's place,

And suffered in his stead;

For man (Oh miracle of grace!)

For man, the Saviour bled."

As the righteous outcome of His finished work, Peter now declares: "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins" (ver. 43). That is the very thing I wanted; and the very thing you need — Every prophet bears witness that the one who trusts Jesus has forgiveness of his or her sins. Are these not sweet words? "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins." And what did the listeners to that lovely gospel do? They were dear, simple people, and they believed the gospel, for "while Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the Word." This was the fulness of grace indeed. The triumph of grace is seen here.

There is nowhere in the ways of God with man, in which His grace sparkles with greater brilliancy, than in this scene, where the Gentile who had no claim on, and no link with Him, hears the gospel, in all its fulness, and the Holy Ghost falls on the believer, without either baptism, as in the case of the Jew (Acts 2: 38), prayer, as in the case of the Samaritans (Acts 8: 15), or laying on of hands, as in the case of the Jewish proselytes at Ephesus (Acts 19: 6). The hearing of faith secured the blessing when the "words" Peter spake fell from his lips.

"Send men to Joppa and call for Simon, whose surname is Peter, who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved" (Acts 11: 13, 14), was the command Cornelius received, and the obedience of faith soon heard the words of life. I sometimes say that the little letter K is responsible for a good deal of mischief WORDS and WORKS differ only in one letter. Knock out the D, and put in the K, and there is all the difference possible. WORDS were what Cornelius was to hear. He was not told to do any WORKS. Have you thought you had to do some WORKS, to obtain salvation? Not so, my friend. What you need is to hear words. You must knock that letter K out of your religion, or you will never be saved. But I hear some one say, Must I do nothing? Nothing, Christ has done everything; that is the whole point "Who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved," is God's way of salvation. When saved you are careful to "maintain good works," not in order to salvation, but just because you possess it.

Peter told them lovely words. What were the words? Listen! "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name, whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins." The forgiveness of sins, through the precious name of the Lord Jesus Christ, is the present possession of every soul, man or woman, that receives Him, and the Holy Ghost seals the faith of the believing one — He comes, and indwells all such. Peter's address was very short; but it had no sooner fallen from his lips, than the "Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word."

The Holy Ghost always seals the faith of a soul that trusts in Jesus. How then does a man get the Holy Ghost? By believing. He not only gets the forgiveness of his sins, but the Holy Ghost comes down and seals his faith. If I were you, I would not go away from this place without having the knowledge in your soul, that your sins were forgiven, and that you had received the Holy Ghost It is your portion if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Hear what Paul says, "In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise" (Eph. 1: 13). When a man buys sheep, he is only wise to put his own mark upon them: but observe, the mark does not make the sheep his: the purchase-money makes them his. He puts his mark upon them, to show that the sheep do belong to him, and so God marks every one of His children by giving them the Holy Ghost He has put His mark on every one in this hall that really believes in Jesus.

And you, my friend, can soon find out if you have His mark upon you; if you truly know that Jesus loved you, and died for you, and you simply trust in Him, I believe you have the Holy Ghost sealing the forgiveness of your sins. And now, I want you to join the choir tonight. What choir? The choir of the ransomed. People sometimes say, We have been asked to join the choir. Are you converted? I ask. If not, you cannot be in the choir of the redeemed, and that is the choir I want you to sing in. Every one who really believes in the name of Jesus, let him join in singing

"Come sing, my soul, and praise the Lord,

Who hath redeemed thee by His blood;

Delivered thee from chains that bound,

And brought thee to redemption ground.

Redemption ground, the ground of peace!

Redemption ground, oh, wondrous grace!

Here let our praise to God abound,

Who saves us on redemption ground!

Once from my God I wandered far,

And with His holy will made war;

But now my songs to God abound;

I'm standing on redemption ground.

Oh, joyous hour when God to me

A vision gave of Calvary:

My bonds were loosed, my soul unbound;

I sang upon redemption ground.

No works of merit now I plead,

But Jesus take for all my need;

No righteousness in me is found,

Except upon redemption ground.

Come, weary soul, and here find rest;

Accept redemption, and be blest:

The Christ who died, by God is crowned

To pardon on redemption ground."

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : Faith - What is it?

Faith — What is it?

Romans 10.

Chapter 10

Faith — What is it?

I want to speak to you a little tonight about faith — what it is, and what it leads to. There is a great deal in this chapter you observe about faith, and we are told in verse 17 that "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."

God is; and another scripture says, "He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him" (Heb. 11: 6). I have first of all to get in my soul the sense that God is. You may say, I do not know Him. That is quite true, and the question is, How can you know Him? You cannot learn Him from nature; but He reveals Himself by His Son and by His Word. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son" (Heb. 1: 1, 2). The great thing to get hold of is this, that God has spoken. What you and I have to do is to listen, and I am certain of this, if you listen, you will believe, because faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. If you listen to God's Word, it will have an effect upon you, it will produce a deep, real mark upon you — a mark which reason will not produce, because reason may turn a man away from God, and often does; but faith, the fruit of the reception of the Word of God, always leads a man to God.

Scripture is full of instances of faith, and of what faith can do. Remember, it "cometh by hearing, and bearing by the Word of God." In that statement is contained the true value to the soul of the sound of God's own blessed Word. A man may ask me, What is faith? I do not know that I can define faith to you, but I will read you a scripture, which I think gives us a perfect definition of faith. This is found in the third chapter of the Gospel of John. I find there these words concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, "He that cometh from above is above all; he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth." He that cometh from above can tell us what things please Him who is above; while he that is of the earth — you and I — I take it, one and all of us, could discourse about the earth, though perhaps you could not tell me a word about heaven. But continue: "He that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony. He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true" (John 3: 31-33). Very striking that! You must receive first of all what the Lord says of you. There is not a man — a Christian man — in this room, but will confess, I was forced to it. Man's heart naturally sets itself against God, but faith accepts his testimony. "He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true." There I believe you get the real definition of what faith is.

God has spoken by His Son the Lord Jesus, and the man that receives His testimony, "sets to his seal that God is true." That is faith. What evidence have you got of the truth of what is alleged? you ask. None at all! There is no evidence to the senses, nor does faith ask it. Ask any person who is a believer, question any of your friends who have been born of God through grace, and have had their eyes opened, to know the blessedness of the love of God, the value of the cleansing of the blood of Christ, and the joy of knowing that they are saved — ask them how they first really got to know that they were saved, and they will tell you, by giving God credit for speaking the truth, by taking Him at His word, which is faith. Human reasoning and wisdom of words cannot manufacture faith; it comes by hearing the Word of God. A young man said to me, when coming to the meeting tonight, "I hope you will make it plain, doctor!" I cannot do that. I cannot make it plain to any man's mind, and I will tell you why, because the gospel is divine. It comes from God, and no human mind can explain it; and no human mind will receive it. Faith is the result of hearing God's Word, and the Spirit of God working upon the heart. The Word of God goes through a man, it convicts him, converts him, and gives him a new life somehow. He does not know how, but his eyes are opened, and he believes. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."

This simple faith is a very blessed thing! It puts the soul wholly in touch with God. You are brought to have to do with God. Indeed, you must meet Him sooner or later. It is in vain for a man to endeavour to avoid this. Unbelief and nineteenth century scepticism may lead you to say, "Perhaps there is no God, and I shall not have to meet Him." Make no mistake, you will have to meet God sooner or later. You are a responsible creature — a sinner. It is the essence of responsibility that the creature, man, should have to meet God, his Creator, sooner or later. Why not meet Him now? Why not know Him now? The aversion men have to this shows something is radically wrong. Sin has produced strained relations, distance, and dread of God, and when you try to get near a man with the gospel, and want to put the blessed things of the Lord Jesus Christ before him, he is frightened at, or indignant, with you. He draws back, as if you were about to inflict some great injury upon him. That just shows that there is a natural repugnance in the heart of man to have to do with God. I do not deny it it is perfectly true. I can remember the time when there was repugnance in my own heart to the things of the Lord Jesus. Thank God, that day has gone by, and I can echo the language of one of your companions, who said to me this day, as he confessed that he had got his eyes opened a week ago, "This has been the happiest week of my life!" I do not doubt it. It is bound to be the happiest week in a man's life when he comes to know the living God as his Saviour. If there be those here tonight without the knowledge of the Lord, and of His salvation, I trust they may learn from God's own Word, God's way of salvation, and how very blessed and simple it is. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God."

Now, observe how our chapter opens. In the first verse I find the apostle Paul saying, "My heart's desire and prayer for Israel is, that they might be saved." In that verse salvation is seen to be that which the apostle greatly desired Israel to know, and salvation is what you and I need. Why? Because the naked truth as to the condition of man is that he is lost Man is a lost sinner. There is no making a mistake as to that There are only two classes in this hall tonight — the saved and the lost. There is no intermediate stage, no middle ground anywhere in Scripture. The Lord Jesus Christ brought that plainly out in His lifetime. You recollect in the fifteenth of Luke, He speaks of the Shepherd going out to seek the sheep which was lost; secondly, He gives us the figure of the woman who swept the house diligently for the bit of silver because it was lost; and thirdly, when the son comes back to his father's house, the father saw him afar off, ran to meet him, kissed him, and brought him into his house, saying, "Let us eat and be merry, for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." Three times do I get that solemn description of man's condition — lost.

But in blessed contrast with man's awful condition, we get the activity of God — the Son, the Spirit, and the Father. The Son seeks the lost sheep, the Spirit liberates the wanderer from the death that lies upon him, and the Father receives the lost one, when he comes back. We have there not three parables, but one. "He spoke this parable," it says. Why? Because He was bringing out the activity of the love of God to man, the lost sinner. The gospel met me as a lost man, and convicted me of being lost, and when I took the place God gave me, He saved me on the spot.

The condition in which man is renders it an absolute necessity that he be born again. He needs not reformation, but new birth. Reformation will not do. Have not I seen many a young man try to reform? Did not I try it myself? I recollect well the time when, on a sick-bed, I thought I was dying; and I was very near it. I remember well, when I thought I might soon die. and felt my unfitnesss to die, that I turned to the Lord and cried, "If Thou wilt spare my life, I will serve Thee." God answered my prayer, and I recovered from my sickness; but I was more than ever the child of hell after than before. You see I was going to turn over a new leaf. I tried it for a time, but the fact was I was a lost sinner, and the devil was too strong for me, and I was soon worse than ever. Man has no strength in himself. He has to be brought to this point sooner or later — and you have to be — that he is a sinner, ungodly, without strength, and therefore a lost man.

People say to me sometimes, We thought a man was lost only if he left this world in his sins, and so passed into eternity. Scripture does not say so. When a man passes into eternity without the knowledge of God, I will tell you what he finds, — that he is damned. He finds out that he has to be judged by God, and none can rise out of that judgment All men are lost now, and that is why Paul says, "Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved." That was the very desire that filled my heart for you in having these meetings, and that I might shake hands joyfully with those who are saved, for I know there are a good many among you that are already on the Lord's side, My heart's desire and prayer to God is, that you might be saved tonight, if you have never been saved before, and faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.

Have you heard God's Word, and bowed down before it, believing what it puts before you. I do not ask you to believe a word of mine. I want you to believe God's Word. I am certainly seeking to unfold that Word, and make it simple, and I love to point out to you that salvation is that which the gospel brings to a lost, undone, and irrevocably ruined creature, like you or me. The gospel meets me as I am, and after it has met me and shown me what I am, it shows me what Christ is, and what He has done for me. If you believe it, you will get what I got — salvation through the blessed Son of God.

Observe that Paul says here of Israel, "For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge." I think there are still a great many men of this class. They have a zeal of God. They have thoughtful minds, and all young fellows are not careless. I believe students are considered a careless lot. That is quite true in the main, but a great many are thoughtful. A large proportion of those who come to hear my voice are thoughtful men. The apostle says, "I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge." Now, such a man is doing his best to get saved. He has zeal, but not according to knowledge. Are you hard at work trying to mend your ways, and to do what you think is necessary for your salvation? I commend you for your zeal, but it is not according to knowledge, because the man who has had his eyes opened to the truth has learned this, I can do nothing.

The apostle further says, "For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God." What does that mean? That the man is ignorant of what God has done, and is ignorant of that which God has brought in through the Lord Jesus Christ. God can now justify a sinner who believes in Jesus, righteously, because He has been glorified about his sins by the death of Jesus, and His righteousness is manifested in raising Christ from the dead, and saving the one who trusts in Him. But the one who is it going about "to establish his own righteousness is in exactly the same position as the young man who went once to a monastery. He was a young fellow of noble birth, and splendid fortune. Like many another in that position, he thought he would enjoy life, and soon found himself the prey of every harpy in a world like this. He very quickly ran through his money, and through his friends. It is a strange thing, but true, that when you have plenty of money you are the jolliest fellow alive; but when you get knocked about a bit, have run through all your coin, and lost your credit, and your coat gets shabby, and your hat worn, then, those who used to think you such a charming chap, do not know you. They pass you by blindly, or cross to the other side of the street, and turn their eyes away lest you should accost them. Why? You cannot give them anything, and they have nothing for you. That is the world, and this poor fellow found it out The result was he got exercised, and God spoke to him. He got to the end of his resources, and then God spoke to him, and he became deeply anxious about salvation. He was convicted of sin. He found out that he was a sinner. He had sinned against God. So have you and I. The sense of his sin rooted itself in his conscience, and he thought the only thing he could do was to enter a monastery, so he walked hundreds of miles in order to get his guilty soul saved.

To that monastery he walked, begging his food on his way, and on the road became the perfect picture of misery. Unkempt, and ill-fed, he at length reached the monastery. The porter came in reply to his knock, and asked him what he wanted. "I want to see the Father Superior," he said. "Very well," said the porter, as he slammed the door in his face, and locked it. The Father Superior, a kindly old monk, went to the door. "Well, my son," he asked, "what do you want?" "My father," replied the young man, "I want you to let me in. I want to become an inmate of this monastery." "Why?" asked the old man. "I have lived an evil life," and then he told the story of his wicked life, "and now," he said at the finish, "I hope it is not too late. I hope I may be able to atone for my sins, and escape from the just judgment of God." The old man listened, and when he had come to the end of his story, he said, "My son, it is too late!" "Oh, father!" cried the young man, "let me in. I will do the most menial tasks, and will perform any penance you may order, so that I may atone for my sins." "My son, it is too late." "Oh, tell me not, it is too late!" said he. "My son, it is too late. All that you propose to do, has been done already by Another before you." The old man knew the gospel. He knew the love of Christ, and he told the young man the simple story of Christ, and of the cross, where the sinless Son of Man atoned for the sinner's sin. He told him of that which Paul brings out here, — "the righteousness of God," — how the sinless Substitute had died in the room and stead of the guilty sinner. He told him the story of the gospel, as I hope to tell it to you tonight.

Do not you "go about" trying to establish your righteousness! You are too late. The work has been done by Another, who has been here on earth, and who on the cross finished the work by which God has been glorified, and sin been put away. Jesus, the sinner's friend, has died for us, and nothing but His precious blood can wash away your sins. How foolish then are they who "being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth." What did the law bid me do? The law bade me be holy. I was not. The law bade me be righteous, and I was not. The law bade me love God with all my heart, and soul, and mind, and strength; but then I have not done it. It bade me love my neighbour as myself. I have not done it Have you done it? Do you think you are going to get salvation in that way? You have a poor chance. Have you loved God with all your strength? Well I leave God out altogether. What about your neighbour? Have you loved him as yourself? I doubt it.

But you say to me, Are you saved? Yes, thank God, I am, but not on that ground. Not long since my next-door neighbour's house was on fire. It was late at night, and I was out, attending a patient, in a hotel near my residence. While seeing this gentleman, there was a knock at the door, and when I left the room, a waiter said to me, "Doctor, your house is on fire." Of course I ran downstairs, and out of the hall as quickly as I could, for my dear wife was very ill, and I thought of her. When I got out I could see what I thought was the roof of my house all ablaze, and I can tell you my heart was in my mouth. As I ran up the hill some one met me and said, "It is not your house, doctor, but your neighbour's." "Thank God!" I exclaimed. Did I think of my neighbour as myself? I did not. That expression came out honestly enough. I was not sorry that it was not my house, though I was sorry for my neighbour. I could never get to heaven if it depended on loving my neighbour as myself.

My dear fellows, you will never get blessing in that way. Do not try that ground. The law may curse, but it cannot save you. Legal righteousness is a delusion. Give up all thought of attempting yourself to repair the distance between your guilty soul and God. See how God has repaired it by Christ See how God has repaired, and bridged over the chasm that sin has brought in, by the death of Jesus. "Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, that the man which doeth those things shall live by them." The law only proposed to man long life on earth. The law never offered him eternal glory. No, the offer of eternal glory comes through the Son of God. The law proposed long life on earth; the gospel gives the believer association with the glorified Saviour, at the right hand of God. "Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, that the man which doeth those things shall live by them." He shall live by them, if he continue to do them, and if he fail he must bear the penalty. That is just what Scripture says! "The soul that sinneth, it shall die" (Ezek. 18: 4). That means that the fathers should not die for the sins of the sons, nor the sons for the sins of the fathers. Every man should die for his own sin. The man who sinned would be the man who died.

Now, the gospel proposes eternal life to those who, although they have sinned, and deserve to die, bow to the righteousness of God. "The righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise — Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above)." Why must I not say that? He has come down. Love brought Him down. Neither your, nor my prayer, nor cry brought Jesus down. I admit our necessity was before His eye, and His heart, but His love brought Him down from above to meet us. Nor say in thine heart, "Who shall descend into the deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead)." No, that will not do either; for He has already come up. He has come down in love, gone into death, and annulled it, and He has come up from among the dead. Love brought him down, and He has been taken up in righteousness. Do you see? Love and righteousness are the two things which appear in the gospel — the love of God, and the righteousness of God. These are the two foundations or pillars on which the whole superstructure of the gospel rests. It reposes upon these two wonderful pillars — the love, and the righteousness of God. Love gave the Son of God, and sent Him to earth to die in the sinner's stead, and righteousness raised Him, because He had glorified God infinitely in dying for sin, and the sinner.

Love and righteousness, which are the two great pillars of the Christian faith, are lacking, at least one or other of them is, in every other religion under the sun. You just inquire whether what I say be true or not. You are surely well acquainted with the mythology of the heathen. Was there much holiness in it? You know pretty well that nearly all the gods of the Greeks and the Romans were deified lusts. Who was Bacchus? Who was Venus? You know they were but deified lusts. Holiness was not there. On the other hand, where was love? You get Jupiter, a thoroughly vengeful deity; and Mars, the god of war. These are but samples of the many gods of the heathen, in every case the creation, in men's minds, of what they thought God must be, and in their religion either love or holiness was lacking. If they allowed lust, they did not judge sin. If they judged sin, there was no love. Now the charm of the gospel of Christ is that, while God is Love, He is also Light; and while He judges sin unsparingly, He loves the poor sinner infinitely. Before the day of judgment has come, when He must judge sin eternally, and the unforgiven sinner bear the fruit and consequences of his sin, His own blessed Son has come into this scene, and in love has died on the cross. His work done, atonement made, and redemption accomplished, He has been raised from the dead in righteousness for our justification. The claims of God have all been met. God's righteousness and hatred of sin have been met in the judgment of the cross. "He who knew no sin, was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." And now the worst sinner who looks to Jesus as his Saviour, is saved.

But what says this gospel? "The word" — the word of righteousness and the word of faith — "is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith, which we preach." Is not that very simple? A young man wrote me lately, saying, he had been listening to many voices. I inquired what the voices were, and was told the voices of men; the mere outcome of the brains of men. And in this case these voices had led this young man into perfect agnosticism, which only brought sorrow and distress into his heart and conscience. Nihilism gives the affections nothing to feed on; God's gospel gives you Christ. Friend, you and I must listen to the voice of God, and when we listen we shall get the truth. "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith which we preach." What says this word? "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."

Does anybody in this hall desire to be saved? Does any one in this meeting tonight really want to be saved? If you want to be saved, you may learn the simple truth how, and if the Word of God is to be believed, you may be saved now. God desires that you may be saved. If any one wants to be saved, let him listen. First of all, note God's two conditions to salvation — (1) "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus." I think that is difficult; for confession of the mouth does not, I judge, refer so much to getting up in a meeting like this and confessing Christ, as the walk day by day, — "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and (2) shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." The second condition is very simple. I sometimes call this tenth of Romans "A simple gospel for simple souls." It is very simple indeed. If I had never been converted before, I think I should be tonight I think I should get it standing on this floor now. I see so clearly what the gospel, which I am to believe, is. The Son of God has come down into this scene, and died the just for the unjust, and, in dying, He has met the claims of God on me. He has gone to the cross, and He who knew no sin, was made sin for us, and has had laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. He was forsaken by God, that we might be accepted. He died for us. God has raised Him from the dead, and I see the effect of His death God-wards. It meets God's claims. The resurrection of Jesus is the demonstration that the claims of God have all been met by His death. Upon the treasury bench of heaven has been laid down the ransom-price of my redemption; I believe that in my heart, and know that I am saved.

"If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (vers. 9, 10). Mark it is first the heart, then the tongue. It is not head-work. That will not do here. It is all head work with zoology, geology, or physiology, but when you come to the knowledge of the Lord, it is heart-work. You have all got hearts, let Christ fill them. Think of His love — do you not believe that blessed One? Do you ask me if I believe? Yes, I believe Him from the bottom of my heart; I believe He loved me, as the apostle Paul says, "The Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2: 20). What is the result of knowing and believing that? The tongue is loosed. When a man's heart is touched, he believes, and then confesses Christ "For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." It is exceedingly simple. "Confession is made unto salvation." You get right with God first in your heart, and then put yourself right with men by your mouth. Your tongue exalts Christ The man who is saved, tells of it to other people. He rejoices to speak of Christ's grace, and to Christ's credit. There is no credit to him. It is all to the glory of Christ.

You believe in Him with your heart, and with your mouth confession is made to salvation, for the Scripture says, "Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed." God does not suppose that the man who believes in His dear Son is going to be ashamed of Him, and if any of you have found the Lord as your Saviour, and have learned that His death has washed your sins away, and delivered you from judgment to come, do not be ashamed to confess Him. Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed is a fine word. I do not think he need be ashamed. The man who has believed will never be put to shame; but for the man who has not Christ, there is nothing before him but dreadful shame. He will be ashamed of himself; ashamed that he missed the light; ashamed that when he had the chance to take Christ, he did not take Him. It is far better to be His now, and each of you may be, "for there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (vers. 12, 13).

Mark this verse with which I close, "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?" It is a very simple and a very blessed thing that, "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved;" but some put that off until too late. I admit, God may meet a man, as he did the poor fellow who dreamt he found Him as he fell from his horse, and broke his neck in falling —

"'Twixt the saddle and the ground,

I mercy sought, and mercy found,"

he tritely put it afterwards. If he called on the name of the Lord, he was certain of salvation; but do not you run away with the idea that you have a long time before you. Will you not call upon Him now? In the quiet of your chamber this night turn, and call on the Lord.

Believe on Him now, for you will not call unless you believe in Him, and you will not believe in Him unless you have heard of Him, and this you have. "How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach except they be sent? as it is written, how beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!" (vers. 14, 15.) This is a beautiful circle. First of all God sends out the preacher; as the evangelist preaches, the sinner hears — as he hears he believes; the gospel of peace first goes into his heart, and then comes out of his mouth, and he says, "Lord, I believe." It is like touching the button of an electric bell, the circle is completed. I want the circle completed tonight. How is it to be completed? By simple faith, for "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." You just receive simply what the Lord has told you, and then the bell of your heart and lips will ring. The circle is completed. The Lord sends out the Word — the gospel of peace; you believe it; as you believe it, it works into your heart You say, Lord, I believe; and then you confess Him to men, with your mouth, unto salvation.

The apostle adds here, "But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Esaias saith, Who hath believed our report?" And I ask you, Who has believed our report? What man in this room has believed the report of the Lord Jesus Christ? It is for you to say. The man who confesses with his mouth and believes in his heart is the wise man. Again let me repeat, "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." Have you faith in that blessed One, who died and rose again? If so, confess Him boldly.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Jailor's Enquiry

A Jailor's Enquiry

Acts 16: 6-40.

Chapter 11

A Jailor's Enquiry; or, Europe's first convert.

There is a peculiar interest attached to the scene before us, on this ground, that the Spirit of God records here the entrance of the gospel into Europe. No European should make light of such a weighty fact as that. It is a wonderful thing the gospel, because it is the revelation of God to men; moreover it brings men to God. And understand clearly, you do not know the gospel unless you know God, and unless you have been brought distinctly, and personally to God, so that your heart can rejoice in God, just as the poor jailor did. I think I had better call him "rich jailor" now, for indeed he was a wealthy man from that night onward.

This scene is one of the most beautiful in this way, that it shows that there is no limit to the grace of God. Europe was perhaps not more godless than other regions, but it was in heathen darkness, and wallowing in the squalor of sin, governed by Satan. If I may so speak, God says, I will begin at the bottom: I will begin with the very worst man I can find. Now, the man we looked at lately, Cornelius, was what you would call a good man; a prayerful, pious, almsgiving man; a benevolent man; but here you have what would be called a downright, hardened servant of the devil. If there be a man here tonight who feels, I have served Satan thoroughly, my friend, you may get great hope from this chapter. The fact is there are none too bad for Jesus; but there are a great many people too good for Jesus. I have met scores of them; and there are some of that hoodwinked class in this hall tonight. They are too good for Jesus; they do not need salvation; they are not lost, hence they do not need Him. But here was a man who knew he was lost; but he was not too bad for Jesus.

Now see the way in which God brings grace to this needy man. We read in the verse which I commenced with, that Paul and his fellow-travellers "had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia." They were evidently pushing on to preach in the surrounding district when they "were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia." That is very remarkable; because, if they had been left to themselves, they would have been working in Asia, and they would not have crossed the water at all into Europe. But the Holy Ghost stops them. I believe, friends, in the leading of the Holy Ghost: I hope you do. I believe in the wonderful fact, that the Spirit of God, the third Person of the Trinity, is upon the earth. I never pray to God to send Him; I hope you do not either. I never ask the Lord to send the Spirit Why? Because He is here.

That is the great truth in the Acts of the Apostles, that from the day of Pentecost onwards, the Holy Ghost had taken up His abode on earth in the Church. Our Lord announced this wondrous fact in John 14, saying, "I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever" (ver. 16). He came to do two things — to reveal the glory of Christ, and to minister blessing to those who believe; and in spite of the sin of the Church of God, the Spirit of God is here now. Sometimes people say to me, Why do you not pray, that the Spirit may come? Because I know that He is here. I pray that I may not grieve Him (Eph. 4: 30); I pray that He may not be quenched in the assembly (1 Thess. 5: 19, 20); but I never ask — and I hope if you have done it hitherto, you will never do it again — for the Holy Ghost to come. He is here, and I will further add, that I believe the crying sin of Christendom is infidelity as to the presence of the Holy Ghost. That, however, is by the way.

The Spirit more than once forbade these dear servants of God to go in the direction they themselves thought to labour in, for "after they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia; but the Spirit suffered them not. And they passing by Mysia, came down to Troas" (vers. 7, 8). This was a large mercantile city, a very important one too, from man's point of view, being populous, and opulent. While there, "a vision appeared to Paul in the night There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us" (ver. 9). What a touching petition for an evangelist to hear, "Come over and help us!" Ah! it is a fine thing when a man knows that he needs help. "And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them" (ver. 10). A happy conclusion! A most blessed inference! A conclusion charged with the deepest import for those who come before us in the after-part of the chapter.

Paul recognises that the Spirit had called him into an entirely new sphere, and over he goes into Macedonia. Thank God! he does go, and preach the gospel there. And now it has come to Edinburgh: I wonder if it has got into your heart; that is the point. The gospel is round about you in these days, but has it reached you? Are you a saved man yet? Ah! the Lord save you tonight, my friend; and if you have never known what His salvation is, may you know it tonight. I am not ashamed of the gospel. Why? It is the power of God unto salvation; and mark you, you cannot be saved by anything but the gospel; and you will be damned eternally if you do not receive the gospel.

Ah! you reply, I do not believe in damnation. I know you do not: you are one of a very large company, who will join hands with you in your infidelity, but that proves nothing. It is usually a multitude who run to do evil. But you may depend upon it, if man did not need salvation, God would never have sent His Son: He never would have sent the gospel. Therefore if I do not receive the gospel it is perfectly clear that there is nothing before me, but the righteous judgment of God in respect of sin. The point is this, man has sinned, and God will not make light of sin: we have all sinned, but before the day when He judges man's sin, God, in the most blessed grace, has sent His own Son into this scene to bear that sin, and sustain the judgment it demanded, that He might deliver the man who receives the gospel.

Here He sends Paul into Europe. I think his heart was immensely cheered that day, and that he said when he got his message, Thank God! I have got a new field. Nothing warms my heart like the opening up of a new field for the gospel, and seeing God work in it. I know that many of you are, what is called "gospel-hardened"; but, still, it is the simple story of the gospel that you need. You have heard it all your days; but there is nothing for you but the old simple gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing will take you to glory but it. You may have science and learning, but these cannot take you to heaven. You may polish your acts up as you like, but they will never get you an entrance into the glory of God. I will tell you what will give you an entrance — the precious blood of the Son of God, shed on the tree for sinners: that is the gospel. I think you had better accept this gospel. God give to you, to receive it tonight!

I am quite aware that this blessed old gospel is nowadays quite out of date, and therefore I am not up to date at all; perhaps you have discovered that already. Be it so; I have no wish to be up to date, which simply means gilded infidelity as regards God's Word. I prefer to believe the Scriptures, and I want to go back, and to carry you back to the faith of the people, who first heard the good news, and received it; who enjoyed it; who lived on it; who lived for it, and who would have died for it, if God had called them to do so. "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ" (Rom. 1: 16); so wrote the man whom we are reading about just now. Are you ashamed of it? I tell you, there is a day before you, when you will be ashamed that you were ashamed of it. Ashamed of Jesus! God forbid! You may be ashamed of yourself: I will go with you there. You may be ashamed of your life, of your heart, of your ways and of your unbelief: I will go with you there, But ashamed of Jesus: God forbid! Nothing can reach your heart and fill it, except the gospel. It comes with the glad tidings of the love of God on the one hand, and the holiness of God, maintained in the cross of Christ, on the other hand. God's love is manifested in giving His Son, and the Saviour's love manifested in His death. By that death He met the righteousness of God; nay more, He bore our sins, that He might in righteousness deliver us. He has gone into death, and, by so doing, has annulled death, defeated the power of Satan, and delivered the believer.

Now, the Holy Ghost has come down to proclaim this. It is very good news to me; and you and I are in exactly the same position. You may think not, but it is the case. You are a poor sinner like me. You may have a little more money; you may have a little more learning; you may have a better status than I have; but when you are stripped of all these, and when you are revealed to yourself, as God sees you, you are a poor sinner in your sins. And that is what I was, and then Jesus saved me. And He wants to save thee. You had better let Him. You do not love the gospel! But the God of the gospel loves you; the Jesus of the gospel loves you; and the Holy Ghost, that proclaims the gospel, loves you, for "God is love." Hallelujah!

It was love, therefore, that sent up these men from Troas to Philippi; let us follow them. "Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis " (ver. 11). I think that is very interesting. As soon as the Spirit of God came with the message to go to Macedonia, Paul and his companions went down to the harbour, and quickly found a vessel going to Europe. It was not a very long voyage, for they took only a day and a half. When on this gospel errand, they, so to speak, got a fair wind, and got over the distance in a day and a half; but, when they were coming back, it took five days: they then had contrary winds, I suppose (see Acts 20: 6). Ah! God loves to send peace to the anxious, troubled soul. God delights in that, and often gives His evangelists a fair wind, to carry the message of peace the quicker to the troubled soul. His keen eye and loving heart note every soul craving for light pardon, and peace. Such is God.

Well, they got to Neapolis, the seaport for Philippi, which was about nine miles distant And they went "from thence to Philippi, which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, and a colony: and we were in that city abiding certain days" (ver. 12). I suppose when they got to the city they looked for the man who had said, "Come over into Macedonia and help us!" I have no doubt Paul looked this way and that way, saying in his heart, "Where is the man who wants the gospel?" Are you the man, my friend, who wants the gospel? I am looking for my man tonight Paul looked for his man, but he did not find him immediately. But we read, "And on the Sabbath we went out of the city by the river-side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither" (ver. 13). He could not find his man anywhere, but he found a lot of prayerful women. Thank God for the women that pray!

Women are often more earnest than men, and have much less of the coward about them. Young man, you are afraid of being thought a Christian, while that young woman of your acquaintance is bold for Jesus. You know perfectly well, that if she were to try and speak to you about Him, you would try to get away: I know you would. Young men think they are fine fellows when they play the fool, drink, curse, swear, and blaspheme; and yet lots of them are the greatest cowards possible, and would blush ruby if they were requested to stand up for Christ, and own Him before their fellows. Do not I know it? Does not your conscience tell you that you are a moral coward, young man? Oh, you say, but what would the fellows in the class think of me? They would laugh at me. Well, I say, let them! I was a Christian before I became a medical student: I used to be studying for the law, I was going to be a lawyer; but when I became converted I did not think that the law and grace mingled very well, and so I went to medicine. That is the real truth. Where I was, studying in London in 1861, at first there was no young fellow-Christian: none of the students were on the Lord's side. And, you say, what did you do? Well, I tried to make them Christians; though, of course, I could not; but I spoke to them of Christ, and looked to God to bless them, and I am thankful, some of them turned to the Lord. Of course they made fine fun of me: they twitted me, and jeered at me; but I just turned to them, and said: "All right, my boys; you are welcome to your fun; but I am better off than you are, because I have got a Saviour, and you have not I have salvation, and you have not." They soon gave me a wide berth.

If there is any one here tonight afraid of hoisting his colours, I would like to tell him what an old Christian lady said to me. She has been a Christian for over fifty-two years, and as she sat this evening at my tea-table, she said, "Doctor, I think there is one thing we ought to do!" "And what is that, madam?" I asked. "We ought to be loyal to our colours." "That is exactly it," I said. First of all, my friends, get Christ; get to know Him, and then confess Him. Be loyal to your colours. Ah! but you say, I would not care to be seen at a prayer meeting. No, you say, it is only fit for women. Thank God! for the women that pray, I say again. Thank God! for the praying mothers, praying sisters, and praying wives. I say this from the bottom of my heart, for when the Lord converted me, though I did not know it then, I found out afterwards that I was fairly netted in prayer. There were people praying for me all over the country, although I did not pray for myself. Others prayed for me, and there were a good many women amongst them. My dear old mother, who has gone to heaven since, prayed for me, and how glad she was when she heard that I was converted. And do you not think your mother would be glad if you were converted tonight, my friend? When mine read the letter that I sent, telling her that the Lord had saved me, I understand she wept for joy for three days even on: the tears rolling down her cheeks as she read again, and again, the letter, telling her that her youngest boy was turned to the Lord. When is your mother going to have that joy? When is she going to know that you are turned to the Lord?

At Philippi these women were praying, and let me tell you, I never knew much work going on without prayer; while, on the other hand, much work has often been the fruit of the prayers of women. One of the most interesting revivals I knew, took place a few miles from here, and more than two hundred souls turned to the Lord. I found out afterwards, when I came to inquire, that three simple elderly women had met for nine long months, and had been praying to the Lord to send somebody into their district, to preach the gospel; and without my having any knowledge about it, the Lord said to me, You go and preach in that place. I never saw such a work before or since, and it was all due to these three women, who had been praying to God during those nine months. God always answers prayer. Fellow Christians, pray on! You will get God's answer of blessing in due time.

"And on the Sabbath we went out of the city by the river-side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither." They had not much light, but they were anxious clearly, to get the gospel, and God's messengers very wisely sat down, and spake unto the women. I sometimes say, I think the gospel got into Europe in the character of an after-meeting. I mean, in what should be the character of an after-meeting. There was no preaching. I do not find that either Paul, or Luke, or Silas preached. They "sat down and spake unto the women." Do you know, if you Christian young men were to go in a little more for that conversational evangelising, you would be amazed at what would be the outcome I was talking to a young man coming to the meeting tonight He has only been converted six weeks, and he said to me, "Doctor, I think we who are turned to the Lord, ought to be showing our light" "Yes, certainly," I replied. "And do you not think we should try to turn others about?" "Most surely," I answered. "Well," he said, "it strikes me that Christians do not do that very much." I replied: "You are quite right We should bear testimony to other people, but I am afraid we are too much inclined to relegate our testimony to other people, — people called preachers, — and think that it is their duty alone to do so." But that is not so; if you know Christ and love Him, you will tell anybody you know about Him. That is the way to spread the gospel, and it is wonderful how it will spread.

"They sat down, and spake to the women." Here there was a simple colloquial unfolding of the truth. No doubt, that is what took place, and what was the result? "A certain woman, named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us; whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul" (ver. 14). This earnest woman had her heart opened. It is a great thing when the heart is opened: what do you think takes place when the heart is opened? The Lord gets His right place there. "And when she was baptized" — she publicly owned the Lord — "and her household, she besought us, saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there; and she constrained us" (ver. 15). Well done, Lydia! There is a nice woman for you. She is not afraid to identify herself with the Lord. She is the first in Europe to do so. I believe, in Lydia you have the first convert to Christ, in Europe. She identifies herself with the Lord's servants. First of all, her heart is opened, and then the next thing is her house is opened. Is your house used for the Lord? If so, it is a very happy thing. If you do not use your house for the Lord, even though it be but one room or two, I do not think He has got a very big place in your heart. What can I do? You can take in some servant of the Lord — not necessarily to stop with you — nor does it imply that you require to be able to extend hospitality. The thought is this: I mean to identify myself thoroughly with the work of the Lord. Lydia was a genuine woman: would that every man who hears me were as earnest and real.

And now I read, "And it came to pass, as we went to prayer "the prayer-meeting was kept up — "a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying; the same followed Paul and us, and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation. And this did she many days. But Paul, being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour" (vers. 16- 18). Why did the apostle, Paul do that? may I ask. Why does he refuse the testimony of this deluded girl? She was simply a servant of the devil: she was possessed by the spirit of Python. Satan was governing her absolutely, although she went after them day by day, crying, "These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation!' Why would Paul not accept this testimony? The fact was simply this; he was spiritual enough to recognise that this was the devil trying to get his hand into the work of God; the devil, in plain language, was going to patronise the work of Christ, and that would not do at all.

I daresay, some of us, had we been followed about by that girl, crying, "These are servants of the most high God," might have thought that we were doing pretty well; and we would have been tempted to accept her help. But the devil can never help the work of God. Satan wanted to get his hand in, so that he might frustrate the work of the Spirit of God. Paul, however, says to the spirit, "Come out of her." It was Satan in his deadly opposition to the gospel, endeavouring to spoil the work. There are two principles you find all through Scripture — they are corruption and violence. In the garden of Eden the devil corrupts Eve; and what is the next thing? Cain slays Abel, i.e., violence. It is the same in the scene before us. Satan tries to corrupt God's work, before Paul develops it. When Paul refuses the devil's help, note the change in his tactics. Satan tries to crush the servants of God, and violence comes out.

"And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the market-place unto the rulers" (ver. 19). The fact is, if you want to touch a man of the world most effectually, the spot to touch is his pocket. There is scarce a man here tonight, but can be touched through his pocket These men were touched there, for when Paul commanded the spirit, he came out of the girl. She was, in fact, delivered from the power of the devil, and that is what you want, my friend. I do not say you want to be delivered in exactly the same way. You may say you have no spirit of divination, which I quite admit, but nevertheless it is a solemn truth that the man who is not under the power of the gospel, is under the power of Satan. When Paul was converted, the Lord commanded him to go to the Gentiles, "to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me" (Acts 26: 18). Therefore you see that, until you and I are brought to Jesus, we are in Satan's power. I frankly admit that men do not like to own it. I know I did not care to own it, nor would I have owned it when I was unconverted, but I own now where I was till Christ delivered me.

But here was a woman completely under the power of the devil, and when she is delivered from it by the power of the Holy Ghost, there arises a storm. Her masters "caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the market-place, unto the rulers, saying, These men, being jaws, do exceedingly trouble our city" (ver. 2,01 All sorts of false accusation are made; they do not get a fair hearing; their clothes are rent off them, and after that they are beaten. "And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them into prison, charging the jailor to keep them safely: who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks" (vers. 23, 24).

I have no doubt the devil thought, I have put a stop to the gospel now. I have put a conclusion to the work of the Lord, now that I have got His servants shut up. Do you know when grace wins its finest victories? In the moment when everything seems against God, and against His servants. There was a victory to be won on this occasion; but the way to it was painful. The man whom Paul had seen in vision was in the precincts of that Roman prison. God had His eye upon him, and he must be got at somehow. He was not likely to come out to hear the gospel, so Satan, in attempting to stop its course, is made to carry it in to him.

The apostles are thrust into the inner prison, and their feet are put in the stocks. The jailor seems to take a brutal pleasure in his treatment of them. He does not say, "Come along; I am sorry I must lock you up;" but apparently serving his then master gleefully, he "thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks." Then, clearly, he went to get a sleep. "And at midnight, Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them" (ver. 25). What a wonderful thing is faith! Look at the faith and energy of these servants of God. Think of their condition with bleeding backs, and cramped limbs, in that damp, miserable, wretched dungeon of a prison. The prisons which the Romans prepared for their prisoners were awful places. And yet, if you had been passing by that old prison, I think you would have stopped, with the question, What is that I hear? Why, they are having a really good time of it in there! Singing, do I hear? They seem to be very happy! What has happened? They seem uncommonly well off in that prison. True, they were profoundly happy, hence they "prayed and sang praises." Ah! you cannot crush or shut up the heart of a man that has Christ in it You cannot spoil his joy. Do not you see that the Holy Ghost always brings joy to the heart of the persecuted? Persecution does not damp joy: the very contrary, the more men persecute you, the brighter will you get. A little persecution would brighten us up wonderfully, my friends. I could not find a better illustration of that than is found here.

Now what do you think was the burden of those midnight prayers? I do not think their prayer was, "Lord, let us out." I believe their prayer to God was, "Lord, turn this to Thy glory; turn this to the salvation of souls; turn this to the blessing of precious souls in this prison; and, O Lord! keep those who have believed, and especially Lydia, keep them firm." Besides they sang. Songs ascended to God in the night seasons. Had it been you and me, my friend, I am not sure we should have been like Paul and Silas. We should probably have turned to each other, and said:" This is a very blue look-out indeed. Instead of going on with the preaching, here we are in prison." Indeed, we are very wishy-washy Christians nowadays, I fear; but look at the sturdiness of these men; look at their boldness and confidence in God. It is lovely.

But not only did God hear their prayers and songs, for we read, "and the prisoners heard them." I think I can hear the others saying amongst themselves, "Uncommon kind of prisoners these; poor chaps, they came in just a short time ago, and they had an awful beating outside; now their feet are in the stocks. Still, here they are, praying and singing, as if they were in a palace, instead of a prison." They were doubtless a great enigma to their fellow-prisoners, but they were simply acting as holy priests, just as they acted as royal priests a little later in the night. A Christian is a most remarkable person. He is indeed a wonderful man. He is a holy priest, and a royal priest What do you mean by a holy priest? you ask. He has the privilege of offering the sacrifice of praise to God; and as a royal priest, he has something for other people. He holds up one hand to God in praise; he is a worshipper. In the other, he holds out to the poor and needy that which he has to give them; he is a benefactor. (See Heb. 13: 15, 16, and 1 Peter 2: 5-9.) The Christian is the most independent creature under the sun, as regards man, but hangs on God. He has salvation through the blood of the Son of God; he knows God; and he is here to witness for God. I wish I were a little more of the backbone Christian myself, for in this scripture I read how unlike myself were these men.

Here then they were sending up their music to God; and what a sight for heaven that must have been! The servants of heaven's Lord were shut up in prison by the devil, but he could not shut their lips, so they prayed, and sang praises to God, and the prisoners heard them.

That God heard them is blessedly manifest, for we read, "And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loose." God steps in, and the prison is shaken to its very foundations at His command. This was God's answer to the prayer of His servants. It was God's tribute to the cheerful song of His beloved witnesses: it was God's testimony to the name of His blessed Son. I do not think it was the earthquake that converted the jailor. There were two great quakes that night The earthquake woke up the jailor, as you will see presently, from his slumbers; the second, which I had better call a soul-quake, woke him as to his state before God. It was not the physical danger that did that. God steps in: the old prison is shaken to its foundations; the doors are opened, and the bands are loosed. That is a sort of figure of what the gospel does; I will tell you, it produces a moral earthquake in a man. When you get under the power of the gospel, you collapse. You are laid hold of by God, and reduced to nothingness. A man told me not long ago: "I was in a meeting last night, where you were preaching about the precious blood of Christ, and it just seemed as though God laid hold of me, and brought me down, down, down; till I got down to the very dust in the sense of my sin, and guilt, and danger before God." It is the same principle here. It is a wonderful thing when God deals with a man; when you have the sense in your soul that the eye of God is upon you.

"And every one's bands were loosed." That is what the gospel does. It comes out, and sets the captives free. Emancipation is emblazoned on. the flag of the gospel. Emancipation for the captive, the slave of Satan. That is what I get in this chapter: and the first thing is everybody is loosed from their bands. Have you received the gospel? Will you be the Lord's tonight?

"And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled" (ver. 27). The jailor is awakened. He became conscious that the doors were open. In a minute he says to himself, They are all gone; my life is forfeited. He draws his sword, and is about to commit suicide. He knows that his life will be taken in the morning, for that was the Roman law. If a jailor allowed a prisoner to escape, he had to forfeit his life for that of the man he had allowed to escape. Historians tell us that Philippi was the most wonderful place for suicides. It was quite the fashion, and this poor man was about to launch himself into eternity. Is there a wretched sinner, a would-be suicide here tonight? Ah, friend! are you fit to go into the presence of God? Can you go into God's presence, above all, with the sin of self-destruction upon you? Is there a man here — I have sometimes met them — who has determined to hurl himself into eternity, as this poor wretch was going to do? Stop! man, are you fit to go into the presence of God? No, you are not fit, unless you are saved.

Just as this man's sword touches his breast-bone there comes out from the darkness a loud voice. The voice of a royal priest utters these wonderful words, "Do thyself no harm: for we are all here" (ver. 28). That woke the jailor up. It was not the earthquake that produced the state of exercise in his soul, that you read of. It was the word from the lips of the royal priest, "Do thyself no harm: for we are all here." He would ask himself, no doubt, How in the world could he know I was going to commit suicide? Here it is thick darkness, yet he has seen me. The Spirit of God was the Author of that word. "Do thyself no harm: for we are all here." You, who are going on your way to eternal ruin, do you know what God says to you? You, sinner, who are going on in your own way, sporting with the things of this I life, and turning your back upon Christ, do you know what He says by my lips tonight? "Do thyself no harm." That is just what man is doing. The jailor heard the voice, and we read, "Then he called for a light." Is that not very striking? When a man is touched by the Spirit of God, he always wants a light. I like to see the man who wants God's light. You know what light does? It makes things manifest. True, this man called for a physical light; but do you not want spiritual light? If you do, you will get it. The jailor had the physical, and desired spiritual light, and he got it.

He was just at the doorway, and he "sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas; and brought them out." And at that moment there burst from the lips of the awakened man, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" Who had said a word to him about salvation? Who had said a word to him about his sins? Who told the man that he was lost? Who pressed upon him the necessity for salvation? God can do a wonderful work in a very short time; and even this night, since you came into this meeting, I trust He has wrought in your souls, to make you feel that you need salvation. "What must I do to be saved?" is a wonderful query. He had received light from God, and the first discovery in his soul was this, I am a lost man; and so he cried, "What must I do to be saved?"

Have you ever taken your place before God with a query like that? Have you — let me affectionately ask you — ever put such a query as that? Have you ever, in the presence of God, asked, "What must I do to be saved?" If you have not, I believe the truth is that you have not discovered what the jailor discovered, that you are a lost soul. Oh! may God show you that you are a lost sinner, and give you grace to turn to Him with a similar query; that is to get light, and knowledge, and salvation. "What must I do to be saved?" is the sinner's inquiry. How beautiful is God's answer! "And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." How charming is that answer! Was he to do some great thing? No! He was to believe the good news of the love of God, made manifest in His precious Son. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." There was not one word about works; works come in, in their proper place: there is no doubt about that, — in the history of the Christian. But you do not work in order to be saved. As the hymn puts it —

"I would not work my soul to save,

For that my Lord has done;

But, I would work like any slave,

For love of God's dear Son."

What works could you do, sinner? As a careless sinner, you bring forth "wicked works"; and as a religious unconverted man you can only bring forth "dead works." Both wicked and dead works must be judged of God. Not to him that worketh, but "To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 5), is God's way of salvation, and that the jailor heard that night.

But what did this jailor know about the Lord Jesus Christ? Till then nothing, so "they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house." The Lord Jesus Christ he was bade to believe on. His full name was given. Why was it not believe on Jesus; or believe on Christ? It was the Lord Jesus Christ he was to know: He was the Lord; the Lord of all. Is He not your Lord? If not, oh! let Him have dominion over you in future. He was also Jesus! What does that mean? Jehovah, the Saviour! "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." And further, He was the Christ, the anointed One, the exalted One.

But this was not all the jailor heard, for by the statement, "they spake unto him the word of the Lord," I have no doubt, Paul brought out the tale of the birth of Jesus, and of His holy, gracious life; the story of His death on the cross when men put Him there; and how at that moment, was accomplished the work of redemption, which He only could accomplish; and how God laid upon Him the iniquity of us all; how He who knew no sin, was made sin for us; and how, after His suffering was ended in His atoning death, and the shedding of His blood, He was laid in the grave for three days. How that after the third day He was raised from the dead, and was received up into glory at the right hand of the Father. I think Paul told him more than that. He told him that, after Jesus had gone to the right hand of God, the Holy Spirit came down to testify of Him, to proclaim forgiveness of sins in His name, and to seal the faith of the believer.

This, then, is the answer to your question: if you want to be saved, you must believe on God's Son. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." Mark you! it is Christ, you must know. It is the Person of Christ who is the object of belief, the object of faith. Christ, personally, is the object of the soul's faith, and the one who believes in Him gets the benefit of all the work He has done. I do not agree at all with an old woman, in Arran, who said to a friend of mine, who was pressing the gospel on her, "You make far o'er muckle o' that word, believe, believe." That let out a great deal. You cannot make too much of believing. If Christ has not hitherto been the object of your faith, may God give you now to believe on His blessed Son, and you will get what the jailor got. "Thou shalt be saved," is God's assurance to the believing soul.

The moment you turn to Christ, the moment you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, that moment you get salvation. The moment the sinner accepts Him, acknowledges Him, and confesses Him, that moment is salvation the present, and eternal portion of the believing one. You get what the jailor got. He got salvation; for, I find: "And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his straightway. And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house" (vers. 33, 34). He was told to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I read he believed in God. Why was that? What he had heard led him to see that the blessed Man, the Lord Jesus Christ, of whom he had been told, was really God; that the blessed One, who became Man, that He might die for his sins, and save him, was the eternal, blessed Son of God. Accepting that truth, and believing that truth, in the simplicity of a little child, he believed in God it with all his house." Mark that! Not only he himself, but all his house were marked for blessing. Paul had found his man, but he got a good many besides.

Truly this is a charming scene. The first man converted in Europe is just a sample of what God's grace is still doing. Look at the contrast — at one moment the slave of Satan, and in the very pay of the enemy. One moment doing the devil's work, as he thrusts the Lord's servants into the prison, and makes their feet fast in the stocks; and the next he is suddenly awakened — awakened by God — and is about to hurl himself into eternity, when he hears a word that arrests him, and he cries, as a lost man, "What must I do to be saved?" He hears the gospel, believes on the Lord Jesus Christ, confesses the name of the Lord, and then identifies himself with the work of the Lord. He is a saved man, a trophy of grace, indeed. A wonderful trophy was that man — do you resemble him at all?

The next morning the magistrates sent to him, saying, "Let those men go," and he came and said to Paul, "The magistrates have sent to let you go; now therefore depart, and go in peace" (ver. 36). What a change between the way he received the Lord's servants, and the way he dismissed them. Indeed, a wonderful change comes over a man when the gospel is received, and the jailor knew it full well as he said "Go in peace," the very words his Lord and Saviour had often used to others.

My friends sometimes talk about transformation scenes. I think this is one of the finest transformation scenes. The man has been a servant of Satan till that hour. In a moment he is transformed. He comes out, and is identified with the Lord's interests, and he takes up this position, while discharging his daily duties as a jailor.

You say that you are converted, and yet there has been no change in your life. I doubt very much if you have been converted, if there is no change in your life. Converted! What are you converted to, if your ways, your habits, and your manners are unchanged. Converted! No, no. Whenever God is working, Satan has a number of false converts about, in order to spoil the work. Ah! says some one, that is what upsets me. I do not think I shall ever make any profession, because those who do so do not walk differently. I do not think there is any reality in conversion. Why? Because you think some people inconsistent. Do not let that upset you. If the Spirit of God were not making real, genuine converts, the devil would not make false converts in order to spoil the work. Do not you be a false convert. Do not you profess what you do not possess. But if you know Christ, own Him boldly, hoist your colours, and confess Him.

The Lord give you to be on His side from this night forward, and not ashamed to confess the Lord Jesus Christ as your Saviour.

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Rich Man's Perplexity

A Rich Man's Perplexity

Mark 10: 17-52.

Chapter 12

A Rich Man's Perplexity; or, "What shall I do?"

There is a very striking contrast, in this scripture, between the question of the young man to the Lord, "What shall I do?" (ver. 17), and the question of the Lord, to the poor blind man at the close of the chapter, "What wilt thou that I should do?" (ver. 51.) You do not read in this gospel, that the first questioner was a young man; but in the corresponding narrative, given to us in the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 19: 20), we read that it was a young man, who came to Jesus with this deeply important question.

The young man was a ruler, and he was rich; but, ruler though he were, and rich also, the question of the possession of eternal life had not been settled satisfactorily in the history of his soul. Clearly, he was an earnest young man. It is a nice thing to see an earnest young man, and this one was distinctly so. He was running: "There came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" (ver. 17.) Clearly, he thought of eternal things. Evidently the question crossed his mind as to how eternal life was to be obtained. He had it not; he wished it. He wanted it, and desired, seriously, and earnestly, to know how he was to get eternal life.

Now, I trust there is a young man here — perhaps more than one — who really desires to know how to get eternal life; but, I do not doubt, that, till our eyes are thoroughly opened to see where we are, the same kind of question as this rich young man put to the Lord, would be put by us. He says, "Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" Do you suppose that eternal life is to be inherited by doing? We have all thought so, at some time. But, some one says, does not the Lord answer him, and bid him do certain things? No doubt He does; but, it is just like this, the Lord, when this young man comes to Him, says, as it were, I will find out what you are prepared to do. And what comes out is this — he was not prepared to do that which would have given him eternal life, had it been obtained by doing. That is clear. In reality, he was tested; the Lord took him on the ground upon which he came to Him. And so will the Lord do now. I believe He takes us all at first upon the ground upon which we have accosted Him.

This ruler came to Jesus, apparently in immense earnestness, for he ran, and knelt to Him. Have you ever knelt to Jesus yet? to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God? I do not mean as a form, but with a sense in your heart that there was an immense need, which only He could meet. "He kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" It was a most important question. No more important question could fall from his lips, and I am sure the Lord took a deep interest in him, for we read, "Jesus beholding him, loved him" (ver. 21). Beautiful words, "He loved him!" I have no doubt there were moral features, and natural characteristics in this young man, that would make him a most desirable friend, and desirable companion. There was a fervour, an earnestness, a genuineness, and simplicity about him, that was charming, and, looking on his mere natural qualifications, the Lord "loved him."

But, he came with this thought, you see, that he must "do" something. We have all thought similarly. When we think of possessing eternal life, the first thought always is, "What shall I do?" The Lord immediately replies, "Why callest thou me good?" He does not answer his question straight; He puts another question to him, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God." That ought to have smitten his conscience at once with the sense, if there be none good but one, I am not that one, and therefore I cannot do any "good thing." Another gospel tells us that he said: "Good Master, what good thing shall I do?" (Matt 19: 16.) Do you think you can do any good thing? I sometimes hear men talking about being better; nay, I have even heard them sometimes talk about "doing their best" What folly!

The Lord Jesus Christ says here, "There is none good but one, that is, God." And Scripture says, "There is none that doeth good, no, not one." Here Christ asks, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God." I think the Lord gave him the opportunity of saying, "But thou art God." Had he really known, and clearly discerned the Person of Jesus, he would immediately have said, "Thou art God." But, I take it, he saw no more in Christ than that He was a teacher of religion, hence when the claims of the Lord on him are presented to him, he does not rise to them. He could not, so he turned away sorrowfully.

First of all, the Lord says to him, since he came on the ground of doing, "Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery." There are men in this hall tonight, who could truthfully say, I never did that. Perhaps there are some here who have committed it. Well, let even the adulterer learn this, that Christ can forgive him that sin, and the blood of Jesus can wash out that awful moral stain upon the soul. "Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and thy mother." The Lord presents to him that table of the law which bears specially on his neighbour, and what he was to his neighbour. Then he says, "Master, all these have I observed from my youth." That is, his outward conduct toward man had been perfect But, my friend, let your conduct be never so perfect outwardly before man, that does not put you right before God. That does not fit your soul for God; and this young man felt he was not right before God.

"Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me" (ver. 21). He had a deep interest in him. I love to think that the Lord has a deep interest in every young man in this hall tonight I may go further, and say, He loves you. Whether you love Him is another question. I do not think you have loved Him, until you have found out that He loves you. "We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4: 19). The heart of Jesus was deeply interested in this apparently anxious young man, this thoroughly anxious inquirer. "Then Jesus beholding him loved him." Your conduct has been beautiful, He seems to say, but "one thing thou lackest."

Matthew's gospel tells us, that when the Lord had put the details of the law before him, he replied, "All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?" (Matt. 19: 20.) He himself, conscious of deficiency, propounds the question, "What lack I yet?" I will tell you what he lacked. He lacked the real knowledge of Christ, and, my friend, if you have not Christ, no matter how beautiful and moral your life may be, you lack everything. Let a man have and be what he may in this world, if he do not possess Christ, he lacks everything really worth having. The man who is not right about Christ, is wrong about everything else; be certain of that. The man who is right about Christ will be the man right about most things; but the man who is not right about Christ, is wrong about everything.

The Lord knew his condition, and expressed it in the words, "One thing thou lackest." And what was lacking? Attachment to Himself. You have not attached yourself to Me, and there are certain things in the road which hinder you so doing. "One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me." No man likes to take up the cross. First of all, do not you see what a difference it would make in this life? He was something in this life, because a rich man is always thought more of than a poor man; every one knows that. Far more is usually thought of the student that has heaps of money, than of the man who has only enough to pay his lodgings, and his class fees. We know that perfectly well. We know what men are, and riches are distinctly obstacles in the road of blessing.

But I pray you to carefully note that I do not think the Lord desires to teach you or me here, that eternal life is to be got by our giving up earthly things; that is not the way the gospel speaks. The gospel does not say we must give up in order to get. No, men are "turned to God from idols," as Scripture says (1 Thess. 1: 9); and turned to know Christ through grace, and possess Him; then, as they possess Him as their Saviour, what they are engaged in drops from them as autumn leaves. The reason why the Lord presented the truth as He did in this narrative, was because the young man came upon the ground of doing. He, so to speak, says, I must test you, whether you are prepared to do that which will at least put you on the way of getting eternal life. "Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor;" because, observe, he took the ground of loving his neighbour.

There are two tables of the law. The first is that summed up in, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind" (Luke 10: 27). And the other table is, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Had he loved his neighbour as himself? He had not committed adultery; he had not murdered; he had not stolen; he had not borne false witness; he had not defrauded; and he had honoured his father and his mother. He was most estimable; but did he love his neighbour as himself? Certainly not. Why? Because he was wealthy. If he had loved his neighbour as himself, he could not have been wealthy.

Let us take an illustration! If I have got £1,000, and I love my neighbour as myself, I shall give him half of it I cannot keep it to myself. I love him as myself. I must give him a share equal with myself. But, you ask, where would that land you presently? Just where the Lord would have this young man land. I have £1,000; I see my neighbour, who has not so much. If I love him as much as myself, then I go and hand him over £500. I have got £500 left, but again I see another neighbour without any, and I give him the £250; but there is another neighbour whom I see, who gets the £ 125, and so on. Why, you say, you will be stripped. That is the point. The Lord does not take a long time in reaching it He says to the rich youth, If you mean to get eternal life on that ground, you go right away, and sell all you have, and give it to the poor; and thus illustrate the principle of the man who loves his neighbour as himself. Further, you will then have got rid of that which is a hindrance to your coming after Me.

Alas! he loved his money more than his soul. He loved his riches more than eternal life. He loved more, what he had got, than what he might have got — that is, Christ The test was too great. What was he told? "Come, take up the cross, and follow me." What does the Lord mean by this? I am the rejected Saviour. Do not you shut your eyes; let no man delude, or deceive himself. It is a rejected Saviour that is preached today. Jesus is not popular. He could not be. The cross is not popular. It could not be. Oh no! "Take up the cross, and follow me," was a hard saying, although coupled with "and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." He had treasures on earth, and they entangled his heart. What do we then find? "He was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions" (ver. 22). He said to himself, I cannot part with my money, my being something on earth, even though promised blessing in heaven, so he "went away grieved." He was simply tested; and I believe we all get tested. I have been tested, and you will have to be.

But if there be one here tonight who wants eternal life, do I tell you, that you have to give up everything to get eternal life? I do nothing of the sort. That is not the gospel. The incident of this young man is a good illustration of the sad fact, that man is wrapped up in what makes much of himself, and further that he will not drop the thing that is seen, and temporal, for what is unseen though eternal. He will not give up the present things, seen and temporal, for what is unseen and eternal. The young man loved his money better than Christ; he loved what he had got better than what he might have got He loved the bounties Providence had given him, and he clung to earth, to its wealth, to the things of time. He was as near salvation as you are tonight, but alas! he missed it. Do not you miss it. He was very near getting it; when coming to the feet of the Saviour, and hearing Him say, "Come, and follow me." What is His answer? No, I cannot do that He goes away with a sad heart. He kept his money, and his lands, but he parted with Christ, and, as far as Scripture tells us, never met Him again. I gravely question whether you and I, if we be found in everlasting glory, with treasure there, by-and-by, will find that young man there.

Mark what the Lord says now: "Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished." Then again he says: "Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?" (vers. 23-26.) That is a grave question, "Who then can be saved?" If these earthly things come in as such insuperable difficulties, who can be saved? Let me reply. You may be saved if you will have salvation in God's own way. If you are going on the tack of doing good, so as to give God a meritorious reason why He should bless you, then you will never get it If you take the place which the man in the end of the chapter takes when he comes to Jesus in his need, you will have it.

You will have been struck with the contrast between the rich man who comes and asks, "What shall I do?" and the man in the end of the chapter, the poor blind beggar, to whom Jesus says, "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" What a difference between the "What shall I do?" of the sinner to the Saviour, and the "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" of the Saviour to the sinner. Who can be saved? Any one who lets Jesus save him; any man who will let Jesus play the Saviour's part, — that is the man who will be saved. if you have not been saved, why not? Do not you want to be saved? Are you not desirous of being saved? The disciples may anxiously inquire, "Who then can be saved?" What is the answer, — Every one who takes his place as one incapable of doing that which will save himself; and, who feels that he cannot earn eternal life for himself; and, who will draw from the Saviour's grace, and fulness, and goodness. You come to Jesus; you heed the lovely voice that calls you, and come to Him, and you will have treasure in heaven. Who can be saved? The man who hears the voice of Jesus, comes to Him, trusts Him, and gets all that His blood can purchase for him, and all that the Saviour's heart can minister to Him. The man who will let Jesus bless him, that is the man who will be saved.

"Who then can be saved?" the disciples exclaimed in wonder. "And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible." You ask, What does that mean? It is not possible for you and me to be saved by our own efforts. Why is it impossible? Because we are sinners, and cannot save ourselves. How can you meet the claims of God in righteousness? You must be more than a man to do that. You may think your case is not a bad one. It is not the verdict of the sinner as to his own condition that settles it You are no judge of your case. God has judged you, and me, to be sinners in our sins, lost, and undone. He has judged us to be what we are, incapable of extricating ourselves from the condition in which sin has landed us; and, the thing which is not possible with us, is possible with Him. "Who then can be saved?" said the disciples. Well, says Christ, "with men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible." Whom then am I cast back upon? I am cast back upon God. How can you be saved? You must let God save you. You must bow down before God, and let Him save you. You say, How? It is very simple. It is by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is by the atoning work of the Saviour. There is no other way.

At this point Peter broke in, and said, "Lo, we have left all, and have followed thee." I think it was rather a pity that Peter said that, but the Lord's reply amounts to this: "You have made a very good thing by it. It is a good thing for you that you did, Peter." Indeed, it is quite true. If you have left all, and followed Jesus, you have made a good thing by it You have not really lost anything. What have you lost? He says, "There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake and the gospel's" — (see how beautifully he personifies the gospel) — "but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life" (vers. 29, 30). There is a string of blessings for you, with persecution, if you stand for Christ I never knew a man, who stood for Christ, who did not get into trouble.

When I was a student myself I got plenty of roasting. There was no Christian Association, and there were no Christians among the men in the college, that I knew of, at least, at first. There were plenty of fellows on the world's side, and they gave me a good deal of the petty persecution that godless men can furnish a young disciple of Christ with. I got my share of it, and it was a first-class thing for me. It kept me humble and clinging to Christ. Do not you be afraid of a little persecution. It will do you far more good than a little flattery. Depend upon it, this is true. The man who gets persecuted, and by grace is enabled to walk in lowliness, and to remain true to Christ shows that his conversion is genuine, and his faith real. Persecution will do him good.

A good many young men are like Jonathan, when he did not fully follow David. They do not stand for the Lord. They escape persecution, but they escape more than that They escape the support of Christ; they escape, the enjoyment of the love of Christ; and they escape the privilege of being a witness for Christ. Here we are to enjoy His salvation, "with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life."

Well, now, have you left anything for Christ? I recollect perfectly well about three weeks after I was converted in London, that an old servant of God came to me, and said, "I hear you have been converted recently." "Yes, sir," I said. Then he told me to follow the Lord fully, and quoted these two verses (29, 30). I did not see him again for many long years, but, twenty years afterwards, I reminded him of the scriptures he had given me when I had been a Christian but three weeks. "And was what I quoted true?" he asked. "I daresay you have got some persecution for the Lord's sake, but have you not proved His support?" I could only say how true were the words of my Lord, and to you let me commend them. I found the blessing of the Lord upon everything. I found myself outside the world, but in the family of God. I found myself to be a brother to all who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. I found I had ten thousand unknown brethren. As it is put here, "Ye shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren." If you follow the Lord you will find yourself among the people of God, amongst those who will take a deep interest in you.

I must bear witness to the truth of the principle, which the Lord unfolds here, that, the man who leaves anything for Christ, and for the gospel's sake, is compensated for it by the Lord. The Lord also sustains him in the enjoyment of His own heavenly blessings as he passes through this scene. If there be a young fellow here desirous to follow the Lord, be encouraged, my friend, to do so. You will never regret decision for Christ, nor discipleship in following Him.

What follows is very interesting. The Lord was going up to Jerusalem, to die; and He tells the disciples, as they were going up, what things were to happen. He went before them, and I doubt not the disciples were very much astonished at the Lord going out of their company, and going ahead. They followed and were afraid. Then He took them apart and showed them the things that should happen to Him. "Behold, we go up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man shall be delivered unto the chief priests, and unto the scribes; and they shall condemn him to death." If you and I are to live, Christ, the holy man, upon whom death had no claims, must go into death; and here He unfolds, in the most distinct way, that there is no way into the glory of God, except through His own death. There is no way to get eternal life but through His death. If we are to possess eternal life, it is not by any doing on our part. It is by His dying. The Jews, He says, "shall deliver him to the Gentiles: and they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again." He was rejected of the Jews then, and He is a rejected Saviour still, for Christ is as much rejected in the nineteenth century as when He spoke these, words. You stand for Christ, believe on Him, and be a man for Christ, and you will find this out. But what will He give you? His support. It is such joy to be on the Lord's side. It is a blessed, and a wonderful thing, to be on the side of the rejected Saviour.

But in the moment when men rejected Him, He in love gave Himself for them. He died, and His work accomplished, He has gone to the right hand of God, where He is now glorified. There He sits; but He is the same Jesus tonight, as when He passed Bartimaeus that day, in the chapter before us, — the same tender Saviour, though now in glory. Get you to the feet of that risen, ascended, victorious Saviour, and let Him bless you. If you want Him, you will find Him just as did the blind man. There he was, poor fellow, sitting by the wayside. He heard of Jesus, and so have you tonight. He was sitting there, hoping to get a little money, and, as he heard the crowd approach, I have no doubt, he said to himself, "I shall have a prosperous day, and get a good deal of money from this passing multitude." But he was curious to know the meaning of that crowd. He was told, "Jesus of Nazareth passeth by." No doubt he had heard of His miracles, and of how He had opened other men's eyes, and he concluded He could open his.

In a minute the filling of his purse, and the getting of money are forgotten, and his voice rings over the crowd: "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." That is what he says. The people said: "Hold your peace, be quiet; do not make a noise. Do you think He will stop for you?" But we read, "He cried the more, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." And that voice of need falls on the Saviour's ear, and touches His heart, and Scripture says, "Jesus stood still." He was on His way to Jerusalem to perform the wonderful work of the cross, of which I have spoken, but the cry of need arrested Him. He is now in heaven, in glory, but, the voice of need touches Him now, just as the voice of misery and need touched Him then. "Jesus stood still, and commanded him to be called. And they called the blind man, saying unto him, Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee."

And what do we then find? "And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus." The thing that hindered him, he cast away. Picture to yourself that blind man, sitting by the roadside, with the people all around him. When his cry is heard he felt, If I am going to get to Him through that crowd, I must cast off my garment — it will but hinder me; and so he cast away his garment. He got rid of the thing that hindered him. Every man has hindrances. Do you likewise get rid of your hindrances, and come to Jesus. Read it again: "And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus." He was in earnest; he came to Jesus. He got through the crowd, until he stood in the presence of Jesus. "And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" That is the point: "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" "The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might receive my sight." He wanted to see; he wanted his sight.

What do you want? Your sins forgiven; your soul saved; pardon, love, and acceptance with Him? You may have all. What Christ does, is to put down a blank cheque, with His name at the bottom, and you can fill it in for any amount you like. He says to you tonight, "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" What is it you desire? That you may see the Saviour, the Son of God, who died but rose again? "Lord, that I might receive my sight," said the blind man. "And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight." His eyes were opened, and what was the first object he saw? Jesus! And that is what happens when the eyes of the sinner are opened. He sees Jesus.

The Lord says to him: "Go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way." He did what the rich young man did not do. Jesus said to the rich young man, "Come, take up the cross, and follow me." And he went away sorrowful. To this man, with his eyes now open, what did Jesus say? "Go thy way." Observe the Lord never makes a man follow Him. He would not make him a compulsory follower, if I may so speak. He who follows Him must love to follow, and that is just Bartimaeus' case. What do I read? "He received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way." He quickly made up his mind that henceforth the way of Jesus was to be his way. He followed Jesus. That was right There is no compulsion. Did I tell you that you must follow Jesus, you would not do it. But you may follow Jesus. If you learn His love, you will follow Him. You will say from this night, Christ for me, and I am going to follow Christ, through evil report, and good. I am going to be for Jesus, and to follow Him in the way.

You have true discipleship here. The Lord help you to follow Him too. That is the right and wise thing to "do."

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : A Prisoner and a King

A Prisoner and a King

Acts 26.

Chapter 13

A Prisoner and a King; or, Almost a Christian.

It is worthy of note that this is the third time that the Spirit of God is pleased to record the conversion of Saul, afterwards named Paul, when, as an aged man, with outstretched hand, and manacled wrists, he addressed the king. Whether or no the king was converted by the prisoner's address, is a question; but that Agrippa got the opportunity of receiving Christ as his Saviour, on that occasion, is undoubted. That you will have the opportunity, friend, of receiving Christ as your Saviour tonight, I believe, is as certain; and I would like at the outset to urge you not to do as Agrippa did. He did not absolutely decide for the Saviour, of whom he had heard.

Now, I say, this is the third time that Paul's conversion is given us (see Acts 9: 1-30, Acts 22: 1-16). Could God write about your conversion yet? Sometimes people say to me, You should not speak about yours. Well, friends, I cannot help it. If I live till the 16th inst., it will be my birthday: I shall be thirty. seven years old. Perhaps you think I am a little grey for a man of thirty-seven years. It is seven-and-thirty years since I began to live truly, and I always keep my birthday. I do not ask my friends to do it But I do it, and when the 16th of December comes round, I remember, This is the day that Christ met me in 1860. I am not tonight going to tell you of my conversion, however, I am going to tell you of Paul's, and I hope, friend, that if you have never been able to say you were converted, that you will be able to turn back to this night and say, God converted me then by the revelation of light from heaven, in the Oddfellows' Hall.

Did I hear you say, I, do not believe in conversion? It is a real thing, nevertheless. I admit it is not a very fashionable topic, and perhaps you do not often hear about it. You do not like it. Well, I would just like you to understand this; you must either be converted, or damned; you must either be converted to God, and brought to face His grace, and to know His voice, or you will have to taste the judgment of God, in respect of your sin. If I did not believe that, I should not stand upon this platform to address you, I assure you. You may tell me you do not believe it I know it, and that is the reason why God sends the gospel to you. It was when we did not know His grace, and did not believe His gospel, and when the love of God was nothing to our hearts, and the tale of Jesus but an empty sound in our ears, that God's Spirit, in holy love to us, convicted us of our sins, and broke us down before God. The gospel did that for me, and, thank God! it has reached many a heart in this hall tonight besides mine. I hope it may reach you tonight; for, mark, your heart is no harder than Paul's was.

You are no further away from the arm of the Saviour than Saul of Tarsus was; because, he tells us elsewhere that he was "the chief of sinners." He says, "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief" (1 Tim. 1: 15). Now he did not pen that in mock modesty. I quite admit that his life outwardly would bear comparison with anybody's here tonight. There is not a man in this hall this evening whose outward life could compare at all with Paul's (or Saul's, as he was then called). But yet, when he comes to see it in the light of the Saviour's estimate of what he was when the grace of Christ met him, he says distinctly — and the Holy Ghost has penned it, and the Holy Ghost never writes what is not true, — "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." Wherein lay the sin of this moral, religious man, who was yet the "chief of sinners"? It was this; he was persecuting Christ. He was no drunkard; outwardly he was a perfectly moral man. He was no loose liver; he was a most careful man. He was no profligate, no debauchee. You may be that, but Christ can save you notwithstanding; because the chief of sinners has been saved.

Wherein, then, was it that Paul was the chief of sinners? I repeat, it was in this: He had bitterly and deeply hated the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, and had done his best to blot that name out of the earth. As he tells us himself here, his malignity against the followers of Jesus had reached such a level, that he was engaged upon a missionary enterprise of extermination. He wanted to blot the name of Jesus from the face of the earth, and also every man or woman who believed in Jesus; and, therefore, as we now read from this scripture, his missionary zeal became so violent that he secured credentials from the chief priests and travelled over the burning deserts to Damascus, that he might lead the Christians to Jerusalem, there to blaspheme the name of Christ; or, if they did not do that, to taste certain and violent death. What a lovely business that was for an intelligent man! It was while on such an enterprise and mission that this man was met; light shone upon him from heaven, and he was converted. Oh! the grace of Christ! Think of the grace of the Saviour; for we have all been opposed to Him, more or less. There is no man, no hearer, in this hall tonight who has not, more or less, been opposed to the Saviour; unless, indeed, he has been brought to Christ in early and tender years.

The grace of Christ met Saul of Tarsus, and the same grace waits on you. Oh, that you might taste it now!

When this scene before us occurred, Paul was a prisoner. He had been converted for over a quarter of a century. The historical account is given in the ninth chapter of the Acts, and his own account he has given in the twenty-second of Acts, when the Jews caught him with the intent of killing him. After that he had appealed to Caesar, so to Rome he must go. Festus could not send a prisoner to Rome without giving some substantial indication of the crime that was laid to his charge. King Agrippa having come to Caesarea with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, Festus takes the opportunity of bringing Paul out of Herod's judgment-hall, that he might examine him, and have something certain to write regarding the prisoner whom the Jews demanded should be put to death, because he was preaching Jesus.

In this way God brings this simple, fervent evangelist-apostle into the presence of royalty. Look at him, as he stands there with the chains upon him. That he was bound there can be no doubt, for he himself says, he wishes them all to be such as he was, "except these bonds" (ver. 29). He did not want them to be manacled as he was for the truth's sake. He was "the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for you Gentiles," as he puts it in the third of Ephesians; and here a prisoner in bonds.

He was in the presence of royalty, and was given permission to speak. And we hear him tell how he was converted, "I think myself happy, King Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this day before thee, touching all the things whereof I am accused of the Jews: especially because I know thee to be expert in all customs and questions which are among the Jews: wherefore I beseech thee to hear me patiently" (vers. 2, 3).

I have to ask of you the same favour tonight — hear me patiently! I have a difficult subject in hand, but hear me patiently; and I think if you believe what God may let fall from my lips tonight, you will do as this man did — praise the Saviour from this night forth. "My manner of life, from my youth, which was at the first among mine own nation at Jerusalem, know all the Jews; which knew me from the beginning, if they would testify, that after the most straitest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee" (vers. 4, 5). That is, outwardly he was a most religious man. As he elsewhere says, "Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless" (Phil. 3: 6). He was, legally, a spotless man: he was a man who had done everything that could be expected to give him a place before God, yet he had to give all up. You may have never so much righteousness in yourself, my friend; but it will not do for God. A man came to me during last week in soul exercise. He had heard me preach last Sunday night, and the difficulty in his soul was this, he was trying to get a little bit of righteousness, something to cover himself with; but the Word of God showed him that, "all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (Isa. 64: 6).

None of you would care to appear in this company tonight clothed in filthy rags? How then could you appear in the presence of God so apparelled — in "filthy rags"? It is not your bad deeds that are thus spoken of — it is your very best deeds, even these are unfit for God. Paul did not know that; he had to learn it, and we shall tonight see how he learnt it. He says to Agrippa, "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" Paul had learned that Jesus died, and rose again; he had learned that the Lord had risen from the dead. He had seen Him in glory, and the result was that he preached His name. "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" Whom did he refer to? Christ. He had died. And why did Christ die? He died for sinners. That is the wonderful news which the gospel brings to us, that "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly" (Rom. 5: 6). Paul had got hold of she blessed news that the Son of God had become incarnate; had become a man in this world; that He passed through it a blessed, holy, sinless man; and that at length, in grace, He died on the cross for man.

It is quite true, man put Him there, but when there He died to make atonement for sin. But God raised Him from the dead. Wickedness nailed Him to the tree. Hatred slew Him; love took Him down from the cross, and buried Him; and fear sealed Him in the tomb. Do not forget that! They rolled a great stone to the mouth of the tomb, and set a watch over it. Was not that a strange thing? They put a guard around a dead man. And why? Because, they were afraid He would rise; and thank God, that was what happened. He has been raised. If hatred slew Him, love buried Him, and fear sealed Him in the tomb, what raised Him? Righteousness. It was His due, and He got it. The glory of the Father raised Him, as we read, "Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father" (Rom. 6: 4). God took that sinless man out of death, and put Him into glory. Paul had seen Him there, and been commissioned to proclaim the news. He had been preaching it to the Gentiles, and for that dire offence he is accused of the Jews, and cast into prison. Strange that man should refuse the most blessed tidings that ever fell on mortal ears!

I pray you to carefully note his question, "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" Resurrection is the very backbone of the gospel: it is the evidence that the work of redemption is accomplished; that the power of the enemy has been broken; that death has been annulled; that sins are wiped away; that God's claims in righteousness are met. The fruit of the cross is that the door of heaven is opened, so to speak, to allow of the outflowing of the rich grace of God, to a guilty world. Satan could not stand that: therefore he used these Jews to silence, if' possible, the witness, and crush the "chosen vessel" of this heavenly testimony. "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?" I hear some one saying, "Of course God can raise the dead." Let me ask you, my friend, How do you expect to be raised? Do you expect to be raised up to be judged? I pity you if you are expecting that. Are you going to be raised from the dead, and then have the question of your sins and your standing before God settled? There is no salvation, in that case, for you. Thank God! I know this; that the Man who knew no sin, and who did no sin, and on whom death had no claim, because He had never sinned, died for sinners, and God has raised that Man from the dead. What, then, is the outcome of that for the heart that trusts in Him? Absolute association with Himself He has paid the penalty that I should have paid. The debt that I should have met, He has liquidated. I often hear people talking about dying, and "paying nature's debt" I shall never do that, I am glad to say. What then, you say, will you not die? I do not say that, my friend. All I say is, I need not; because Another has died for me. Blessed be His name, Another, upon whom death had no claim, has gone down to death for the man on whom it had a claim; and God has taken that Man out of the grave, and has put Him into glory after He bore the sins of the man for whom He died. That is the point, do you not see? God has put Jesus into glory, after He bore my sins on the cross. "The wages of sin is death:" that He bore for me, passed into the grave, and God has taken Him out of it, and put Him in glory. That is how I know I am saved.

I was dealing with an anxious man last Monday night. He had much difficulty about the gospel. "If anybody is going to be kept out of heaven for my sins," said I, "do you know who it is?" He thought for a minute, and said," You?" "No," I replied. We had just been talking about Christ being once offered "to bear the sins of many." He saw the truth, and said, "If anybody be kept out, it will be Jesus." I said, "Exactly so." "But," he replied, "you cannot keep Him out." "No," I said, "He has gone in for me, and that is why I know I am going in. You cannot keep Him out; He is gone in, but before He went in He had taken up the question of sin. He bore the judgment of God for sin, and He settled for ever the question of sin upon the cross for all who trust in Him. He has made Himself responsible for my liabilities; and, thank God, I am clear in the clearance of Christ. I hang on Him, and fall or rise with Him. I am clear in this fact, that what He has done, has infinitely glorified God, and the whole question of sin has been settled on the cross. Christ 'was delivered for our offences and was raised again for our justification' (Rom. 4: 25). And what is the result? 'Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ"' (Rom. 5: 1).

Christ's work was complete in what He did for sinners, and in respect of sin; and when He goes into the grave in the fulfilment of Scripture, God comes in righteousness, and takes Him out of the grave, and puts Him into glory. He is now the life and righteousness of every one who believes in Him. Be clear as to that, Christ is our righteousness before God. If I do not get Christ for my righteousness, then I cannot be in God's presence. There is only One Man who perfectly suits God, and that spotless Man adorns the throne of God this night, crowned with glory. That Man is my Saviour. Oh! that you could say the same. The resurrection of Jesus, I repeat, is the backbone of the gospel; and that is just what Satan could not stand, when the apostles preached it; and therefore there was a stir got up among the Jews. The apostles taught not merely the resurrection of the dead, but the resurrection from among the dead. God's resurrection of Jesus was a witness to the value of the work that He did, not for Himself, but for others, — for you and for me. There must be resurrection. But is it going to be a resurrection unto judgment? That is the question. I have in the work that Christ has accomplished, and through His resurrection, a right to appear before God, and that means peace, pardon, and deliverance to my soul, and to everyone that gets hold of Christ.

Now, Paul had been busy working out his own righteousness, and he learns that he has to give it all up. "I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests: and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them" (vers. 9, 10). In all this, he was the chief of legalists, as well as the chief of sinners. His persecution of the Church was the full measure of his sin. So, he says to the legalists, you will have to give all up, and let Jesus save you; and he says to the poor despairing sinner, You may be sinner number two, friend; but you cannot be number one. I was sinner number one, and Jesus saved me. Do you see? You and I may be numbers two and three, but we cannot be chief: there are not two chiefs, — and Paul says, "Sinners, of whom I am chief." You and I may have second and third place, but we cannot be number one. If number one has been saved, then there is hope for you.

He here unfolds what made him chief of sinners, and how the Lord arrested him. "And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities. Whereupon as I went to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests at midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me" (vers. 11-13). In one moment, as he is breathing out threatenings and slaughter, and going to hale those simple, faithful Christians to Jerusalem, really for their murder, in a moment a light, brighter than the sun at noonday, shines about him and those with him. Now, mark that! The noonday sun with us is often not very bright We have often a murky sky; but, picture to yourself the wonderful brilliancy of the Eastern noonday sun, when in undimmed splendour, it casts its rays over all the land. And yet that light was dimmed by a brighter light; and what was the mightier light? Have you ever thought what that light was? I will tell you! "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4: 6).

Where did that light come from? It came from the face of the Man in glory; and the effulgence of the glory from that Man's face eclipsed the light of the sun at noonday. Its effect was all-powerful towards Paul. "And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me." It smote him to the ground. It brought this self-confident, self-righteous man to the conclusion of the history of his self-will. It was light from heaven that did it: it was not an earthquake; it was not a lightning flash; it was not a hand that struck him; it was light that struck him down. Has light ever struck you? I shall never forget when light struck me, and illuminated me! I shall never forget when light from heaven showed me what I was, where I was, and where I was going. And, my friend, when you have been struck by the light, you will speak similarly.

We read that the whole party were struck to the earth, but only Saul heard the Lord's voice. "I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks" (ver. 14). Fancy hearing your mother tongue from glory. That is what Saul heard that day. It would not do you much good, if I were talking to you in Arabic: you would not understand a word of it. But you can understand plain English. Paul was in a similar position. He heard a voice speaking to him in his mother tongue; that is, in Hebrew. An unknown voice, in that language, speaks to the smitten man. And, friend, be sure of this, when God speaks to a sinner, He always makes him understand. I quite admit, there were along with Saul those who did not understand what was said, for elsewhere we read, "They that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me" (Acts 22: 9). When God speaks to a man, he is individualised: he is like a stricken deer. The deer-stalker goes out, and a herd may go by; but he only takes aim at one, and when the deer is wounded it will leave the herd to go alone to die. When a man is convicted of his sin by the Holy Ghost, he gets alone with God. Paul says, "I alone heard the voice." And what did it say? "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" What did that mean? It meant that Christ in glory, the head of the Church, owned His beloved people on earth as part of Himself — as forming His body; in plain language He says, Touch them, and you touch me. "Why persecutest thou me?"

"And I said, Who art thou, Lord?" He does not say, "Who art thou?" No, he asks, "Who art thou, Lord?" In a moment he has the sense, I am in the presence of One who knows all about me. I am in the presence of One who Himself is God. He knew very well who it was; though, perhaps, he dared not mention His name. He was in the presence of God, — in the presence of the exalted Son of Man. "Who art thou, Lord?" His will is broken, after he has come to recognise the Lord. Have you ever, dear friend, recognised such a Lord? "Who art thou, Lord?" What does that mean? I have come down; I am broken down; my will is broken. Yes, he was wonderfully broken down.

And then from glory there came these touching words, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest" (ver. 15). Friend, He speaks to you tonight from glory. That blessed, loving Saviour, who was crucified on the tree, speaks now to each heart in this hall. "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest." Perhaps you would not like to take that ground. Ah! you did not laugh at that young fellow, who said he was a Christian, did you? Oh! yes, you say, I poked a little fun at him. Why? Because he was a Christian; that was why. "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" What ill has Jesus done you, my friend? What ill has the Lord done to you? If I could get the oldest heart, the hardest heart, or the coldest heart that hears me, to have the sense of the Saviour's love, how that would change it "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest" Oh! hear His blessed voice this night. Saul heard it, and said, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" (Acts 9: 6.) And what does the Lord tell him to do? "Rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee. Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee" (vers. 16, 17).

Here this "chosen vessel" gets his commission and a wonderful commission it was. I quite admit he did not get peace at that moment. He had not yet the knowledge of forgiveness. We are told in another scripture, that he neither ate nor drank for three days (Acts 9: 9). And I suppose he did not sleep for three nights either. Then Ananias comes to him. You get these details in the ninth of Acts. He gets peace from the testimony of Ananias, who comes, in to him. And in this case also, you see how wonderful is the grace of Christ. Saul has a vision of Ananias coming to him, and Ananias gets word to go to him. There is on the one side the anxious man, and on the other the slow-moving servant; for Ananias, when commissioned, says, "Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem." Never mind, says the Lord, "Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles." I am going to make him a messenger, and a witness of My name amongst the Gentiles. In came Ananias then, and put his hands upon him, saying, "Brother Saul." What a thrill went through that man's soul as Ananias called him "Brother Saul." I can understand it well; for when some simple Somersetshire Christians, the week after I was converted, gave me the right hand of fellowship, and let me take my place with them at the Lord's Supper, there was a deep thrill of joy went through my soul that they should acknowledge that I was a child of God. Can we call you "Brother," my friend? I mean, honestly and truly, or are you ashamed of the name? The name Brother, simply brother, will do for me. A brother of what? Of that company of whom it is said, "He is not ashamed to call them brethren." I would be ashamed to call Him Brother. I would not even use the term "Elder Brother." He is our Lord, and our God. True, Christ calls us His brethren: "He is not ashamed to call them brethren;" but, beloved Christian friends, He is our Lord and Master, our Saviour and our God. Let us ever have the deepest reverence for Him, and give Him his right place and title.

Here then, comes in Ananias and says, "Brother Saul"; and the latter gets peace, as he was filled with the Holy Ghost, and the scales fell from his eyes. Thereon he began to carry out the commission which the Lord had given him. And what was it? "Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee. To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified, by faith that is in me" (Acts 26: 17, 18). What a wonderful commission! "To open their eyes." That is the first thing we need. I wonder if your eyes have ever been opened yet When a man's eyes are opened he is conscious that he has no light, and that he is in darkness. A man may have never so good eyes, but he cannot see with them in the darkness, and he gropes about. That is just how I felt the night I was converted. I felt like a man groping in a dark night; I wanted light, I wanted truth, I wanted Christ, and I wanted salvation. I did not know how or where I was to get Him.

Let your eyes be opened, and you will soon find you are all wrong; that you are a sinner in your sins, and that you are on the wrong road. It is a wonderful thing when a man is turned "from darkness to light." It is a great change. I quite understand that some of you do not think so, and I will tell you why. You have never gone through the change. Now, my Christian friend, you, who were converted five years ago, what happened when you were converted? "I was in midnight darkness," you say, "when the glorious light of the gospel burst upon me. I saw that Jesus had loved me, and died for me; that He had forgiven me, and that through faith in His name, I got into peace and liberty." Exactly so; and do you tell me, my unsaved friend, that you do not believe that testimony? I will tell you why. You are in the darkness, and the very fact that you do not believe that you are, is the most powerful evidence that you are there. I will tell you why. I was once where you are; thirty-seven years ago, I was standing on the same ground as you are on this minute. I was a sinner in my sins. I do not mince matters. There are only two classes in this hall tonight — hell-bound sinners, or glory-bound saints. What makes the difference? One class is in sin, and unbelief; the other is in Christ, and all their sins are washed away in His precious blood. A great change took place in the moment of my conversion; it was as if I had slipped from darkness into light, and I have enjoyed the latter ever since.

This was a wonderful commission that Paul received, and I am quite clear upon this point, if the Lord had not known the necessity of it as regards the souls of men, He never would have given it. All need to be turned "from the power of Satan unto God." Every man is absolutely under the power of Satan, until he is under a sense of the grace of God. I hear some one say, I do not believe that. For many a long day, I did not believe it; but I believe it now, because I have learnt what the blessedness is of getting out of darkness into light, and of knowing the Saviour's delivering power.

What is the result when you are turned from Satan to God? Your heart at once gets into the enjoyment of peace, in the knowledge that you are forgiven. The moment you turn from Satan to God, what do you get? The due reward of your sins? judgment for your sins? No! You "receive forgiveness of sins." Think of that! What will you get, if you turn just now to the Saviour? You will get your sins forgiven. That is not to be lightly esteemed; but there is still more, for you receive "inheritance among them which are sanctified, by faith that is in me." That is, you get a portion and a place among God's people. You may think that too great and good a transition. Not so, and you cannot move too soon from the platform of the sinner on to the spot where the saint is, by grace. But you say, I thought the saints were all in heaven. A great many are; but I believe that there are a good many in this hall tonight. What! saints, you say; I did not think people were saints on earth. Then you are mistaken, my friend. Saint is the family name; that is the name by which God's children are called in Scripture. The word is used by Ananias when he does not want to go to Saul. He says, "Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem" (Acts 9: 13). Let a man turn to the Lord, and he is then and there given, though he may not immediately take, his place among the saints.

Friend, are you to be henceforth classed among the sinners, or among the saints? You say, I would not like to take the name of saint. Why? Because if I were to take the place, and be known as a saint, people would look for a saintly walk on my part That is quite right; I do not object to that. If you accept Christ, there ought to be a walk and conversation becoming the gospel. Do not be afraid, young fellow-believer, you will find that if you follow the Lord He will help you. I do not mean to say that the Christian does not sin, but he is told not to (1 John 2: 1). His sins are forgiven the moment he becomes a believer, and if he should sin he has to go and confess all to God, as his Father. The gospel meets you where you are, as a sinner, through the atoning work of the Saviour; and through the precious blood of Jesus all your sins are washed away and forgiven, for the heart that trusts in Him gets all the benefit of the work He has done. I want you to see this, for your help and comfort. Do not think that it is a mistake, if you are a Christian, to boldly confess that you are such. The seven-and-thirty years that have passed since I was converted, have been years of profound happiness, and joy. I will say more; the last year was the best, and I am expecting better still, as I get into my thirty-eighth year. Let me encourage you, my friend.

Paul then passes on to say, that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but went out at once calling upon Jew and Gentile to repent, and turn to God. The Jews opposed him, but having "obtained help of God," he can add, "I continue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come: that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead, and should show light unto the people, and to the Gentiles" (vers. 22, 23). As he went on, Festus broke out. His conscience was a little bit touched; he felt that if he did not stop him, he would very likely be converted. I know some of you would like me to stop, and I will shortly, but what a mercy it would be if you were converted, and if you turned to the Lord. Listen to me. Come to Jesus; yield your heart to Him now. Do not be like the foolish king, and governor here. "And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad. But he said, I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness." What had he said? He had only told them of the Son of Man in glory. He knew his own sins were forgiven: he had been on the road to eternal judgment when he had been turned to God; and from that time forth he began to bring forth fruits meet for repentance, and warned others to follow in his steps.

Jesus, risen from the dead, had commissioned him as a light-bearer. Thus commissioned to carry a light from God unto the world, he had with deathless energy gone on in His blessed service. Happy man! Splendid servant! You are a madman, says Festus. "I am not mad, most noble Festus," he emphatically but very courteously retorts. "I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness." Sometimes people have said of me, I think that man is mad. I wish you had only half my malady, my dear friend; from the bottom of my heart I wish that Nay, I will go further — I would be deeply thankful if you had ten times as much fervour and earnestness for Christ as I, and God give it to you. If you had only half the peace and joy I have, you would be a downright happy man from this time forth, and I too speak the words of truth and soberness, when I thus affirm the blessedness of knowing and seeing Christ I think Paul was quite sane as he spoke to Festus. What he was before he was converted, he tells us himself: "And being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities" (ver. 11). Then he was mad, if you like, but, as a witness for Jesus, he was in his right mind. Oh! my friend, you come to Jesus tonight, and thus bear witness for Him, and though your friends call you mad, never mind. You will be on the winning side of the field. The man who follows Christ is sure to win.

Hear him speak again: "I am not mad . . . but speak forth the words of truth and soberness. For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner" (vers. 25, 26). Then he turns round on the king and asks: "King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know that thou believest. Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." Almost! Ah! poor man, not altogether. Almost! Is that your position, my friend? I want to know, as I draw these meetings to a close. For several nights past I have been speaking to you; have you believed on Jesus? Has He saved you, pardoned you, forgiven you? Or are you a miserable, procrastinating sinner, who will yet work your way into hell, with a determination worthy of a better cause? Men abound who cannot be in earnest; who may be touched by the gospel sometimes, yea even impressed, but yet let the whole thing pass away again. What a lot of followers Agrippa has! "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian," said he to Paul, and so say all his followers to the soul-seekers, who would fain win them for Christ.

Well did Paul reply, "I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds" (ver. 29). That was a grand rejoinder, and I would like to say a word on it. "Almost" and "altogether" in this conjunction are like a coin of the realm. You have the Queen's head on one side, and on the reverse, some other design. What is the obverse of "almost a Christian"? Do not forget, it is "altogether lost." The soul that is only almost decided, is altogether lost. Oh, let me urge you, with all the fervour and affection of my soul, from this hour, be decided. What is wanted is decision. What you want, what I want, Is deep, downright, decision of heart for Christ. God give it to you. Oh! do not continue to be "almost a Christian" any longer. Be "altogether" persuaded. I glory in being a Christian: may you do so too.

May God enable you to begin your Christian course tonight: you cannot be too devoted to Christ, and it is better far, be your life long or short, to be able to look back upon that life as spent in the service of the Lord. Forgive me, if I speak of myself. But if I had not come to the Lord thirty-seven years ago, what should I have been doing all my life? I should simply have been serving the devil, sin, and the world, just pleasing myself, whereas now by grace, for these seven-and-thirty years I have been seeking to serve Jesus, my blessed Saviour. Oh! that He were your Saviour, and Lord, and Master, as well. In Him there is such greatness, such tenderness, such encouragement! I have a wonderful Master; and I commend Him to you. Oh! that He were yours.

Make up your mind tonight. On bended knee, before the Lord, offer yourself to Him, ere you leave this hall tonight. Turn, and say to Him, "Lord, I believe." "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian" will not suffice. Away with the word "almost" Let "altogether persuaded" be the language of your soul. Let there be a true ring in your voice as you say: "Lord, I believe; I am decided. Christ for me, from this night forth." God grant it, for His name's sake!

STEM Publishing: W. T. P. Wolston : Seekers for Light : "No Man Can Serve Two Masters"

"No Man Can Serve Two Masters"

James 2: 19; Matthew 6: 24.

Chapter 14

"No Man Can Serve Two Masters;" or, How I found the Lord.

On this, our closing meeting, I will tell you, my friends, as promised, how, by the infinite grace of God, I learned to know, the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour. I am thirty-seven years of age tonight. You look a little older than that, perhaps a man says; you have surely lived longer in the world than thirty-seven years. Yes, but I was like you — dead, while I lived. Young man! you have not begun to live unless you are converted. If you are not born of God, you have not begun to live; you are yet dead in your sins. I was dead for a good many years. I know some of you think, that a man could not be converted in one night. That is a great mistake; it takes but one moment to pass from death unto life. It takes but one moment to go through the door; and so I found it in my case.

For twenty years, I believe, I was about the most thorough-going young worldling you could have met with. There is not a man in this hall tonight, who was more deeply immersed in the world, in its pleasures, its sin, and its enticements, nor a more downright, out-and-out slave of the devil, than the man who speaks to you tonight And yet in one hour God saved me. Hence, I love to sing -

"Jesus sought me when a stranger,

Wand'ring from the fold of God;

He, to rescue me from danger,

Interposed His precious blood."

I thank God that I had a pious mother — a praying mother. Perhaps you have one, and she has gone to heaven. Mine has, thank God, and I shall meet her again. Will you meet yours, if she has gone there? It is an inestimable boon for a man to have a praying mother, and much, I know, mine prayed for me. But for twenty years I knew nothing of the grace of God, nothing whatever!

My first real spiritual impression was when I was a schoolboy. I had a brother going out to the Crimean War in 1855. He was passing where I was at school, and I was to have met him at the train; but I missed the train. I was far more interested in other things, I may say. I had gone off to buy some new stumps for a coming cricket match, and spent too long over that, and so missed the train. I was very sorry, I know, at being a minute or two late, and the thought entered my mind, We may never meet again, perhaps he will be slain in the Crimea. I thought he was a Christian, and I knew I was not, and the thought that we might never meet again made such an impression upon my mind that it led me to what I then considered to be very meritorious. I set to work to read the Bible, as a sort of offset against my sins. I know perfectly well that I chose Isaiah, as being the most difficult part of the Bible, and therefore, in my opinion, the most meritorious thing I could do. But when I got to the end, I was just where I was before I began, — an unsaved sinner, in my sins.

School life passed by, and I got into an office in the town in which I lived. I had meant to be a lawyer at that time; and, although Blackstone did engage my attention in office hours, my heart was far more in everything that concerned the world, and its enjoyments, than anything else. There was not a ball or a concert, a regatta, or a cricket match, or a worldly entertainment of any kind, within twenty miles of where I was staying, that I was not in, if I could get to it. I just want you to see where I was before Christ met me.

But God spoke to me again, when I was about nineteen. A fine hearty young Christian — oh! it is a grand thing for a young man to be bold for Christ — came to see my father, from a distance. When he was leaving, my father said to me, "Show him down to the carriage gate." I went down the avenue with him, and at the gate he quietly turned to me, and said, "Well, Walter, are you a Christian?" "No!" "Then, had you not better come to the Lord?" I got very angry with him for talking to me in that way, and rapidly closed the gate. Ah! I was on my way down to hell, and my anger just showed how bitter was my hatred against Christ, and against His servants. Spite of that I was touched by his faithfulness, and if there were any young man I respected it was he, for no other ever dared to speak to me in that way. God had His eye upon me, blessed be His name!

In December 1860, it was arranged that I should go to London, to pursue my legal studies there. I accordingly quitted my home in Devonshire on the 4th of the month, leaving behind me a good many engagements for the Christmas week. The national volunteer movement had just sprung up, and I flung myself, heart and soul, into the organisation of the local artillery corps. We wanted a band, and money was not easily found, so we thought we would raise the funds by a concert. I recollect how tremendously I threw my heart into the concert, and I was set down for the comic songs, which suited me admirably in those days. We had one concert, and it was an immense success, so we arranged to have another at Christmas, because so many people could not get seats at the first. We arranged a new programme, and I remember very well, the conductor said to me, "If you go to London, you will not come back." "On my oath," I said, I promise you that I will come down and sing." Remember we cannot put another in your place." "Have no fear," I replied, "I will come down, for I have half-a-dozen most charming engagements for Christmas week, which I must keep."

I went up to London on Tuesday, 4th December, and I have no doubt God used this as a link in the chain of blessing, for I was leaving home really for the first time, and felt correspondingly that I was taking a serious step in life. Some of you fellows have left home, and know what that is. In the boarding-house, where I at first put up in the City, there was a young man, Tom W-, who came from the same county as I, and we naturally were drawn together, when we found that we came from towns within ten miles of each other, and that our parents were acquainted. He was going to study engineering, and I was going in for the law, but we soon agreed that we would lodge together. The next day we hunted about for lodgings, and on Saturday we took up our lodging together in Islington.

On Lord's Day we lay abed, just as some of you fellows do, till late on in the forenoon, thinking that if we went to church in the evening that would suffice in the way of religion. Sunday is really an awfully dull day for an unconverted man. I had received a letter from my dear old mother, urging me to go and hear the gospel, and my friend, Tom, asked me: "Where are you going? What do you say, shall we go and hear Richard Weaver? I see in the papers he is going to preach in Surrey Theatre tonight." To this I agreed, and about five o'clock we set out for Blackfriars Road.

I shall never forget that scene. The street was crowded outside the door. God was working in those days wonderfully, and souls were being saved in hundreds and thousands; and, I believe, that the man we went to hear was the means of awakening thousands of souls to their real condition before God, and of bringing them to a knowledge of Christ, and salvation. When the doors were opened, the flood of people poured in. I was separated from my comrade. He was carried to the pit, while I got to the dress circle, and then into one of the stage boxes. The theatre was crammed, and to 3,500 souls did that simple collier preach the blessed gospel of the grace of God. My memory will always retain some of the things I heard that night from him, as, from the crowded stage, he read Mark 5: 25-34, and then told us the simple story of the woman with the issue of blood, and how all her disease and distresses were healed, when she simply touched the hem of the garment of Jesus. I saw clearly enough that salvation was by the simple touch of faith; but then, you see, he was only a common man, I thought, and I was a gentleman, and I could not be converted by a common man. Such was the pride of my poor sinful heart Ah, my friend, take care lest you be damned through your pride. Take care lest you are damned, because you will not be saved in God's own way. But God had His eye upon me that night, and I was in measure impressed.

At the close it was intimated that if any were anxious they might go to the pit. I went down to the pit, not because I was anxious, but because, somehow, I thought that my friend might be anxious, and would be found there. I was not there three minutes before a young man, a simple fellow, came to me and said, "Sir, are you a Christian?" "No, I am not," I replied. "Would you not like to be one?" he next asked me. "I do not know," I said. "Oh, surely you had better be a Christian, and it is very easy to become one. I became one last Sunday evening. I went to Exeter Hall, and there I was converted by Richard Weaver's preaching." He began soon, that young man; he was not long converted before he began to tell others about it, and I hope you young fellows, who have been converted, will not be long in telling others about it too. He began well, you see.

I found out then who he was, and that he was a working tailor. He then said to me, "Will you not pray?" and I replied, "I never could pray." Then he said, "I shall pray for you," and he got down on his knees in the theatre, and prayed most fervently to God to bless, and save me. Thank God, he answered that young man's prayer; though I was too cowardly to get down on my knees then. I had to get down on my knees afterwards — and you will have to get down on your knees, be sure of that — but I was too proud to bend my knees at that moment. Tom W — had been in the pit, saw me, and came over. At that moment another young man, very earnest and intelligent looking, came over, and joining in the conversation, spoke a few words to me. I then rose to leave, and this stranger asked, "Which way do you go, gentlemen?" "Towards Islington." "Our way lies together then, as I live there, and if I may I will accompany you." To this we agreed, and outside the theatre he turned and said to us, "May I ask, Are you Christians?" We both replied, "No." "And would you not like to be Christians?" he next asked. I said, I would, for I began to think it was worth while being a Christian. "Then," said he, "you must be in earnest about it." "I hope we will be," I replied, "but what must I do to become a Christian?" "If you are in earnest about it, and really mean to he one, you must give up the world." Give up the world! Oh! how I clung to it at the moment when he suggested that; but, earnest as he was, he did not then know the gospel clearly. Then there came before my mind the memory of my engagements in Christmas week, and the uppermost thought was, How can I give them up?

Well, we walked up the three miles to Islington, and when near our lodgings I said, "Will you come in and have a cup of coffee with us?" He came in, and before going away he asked, "May I read a little bit with you?" "Certainly," we said, and then he read a portion of Scripture, and prayed with us. He was a nice young man, we thought, and so he was, and he became a great friend afterwards.

When he had left, my companion and I sat quietly at the sides of the fireplace, each thinking. All of a sudden, I remember, I said, "Tom, I think, if you and I are going to live together, and have God's blessing, we had better have family reading." "Dear me, Wolston," he replied, "that was the very thing I had on my mind, but I did not like to say it. We will buy a book tomorrow, and begin." "No books," said I; "if a man is going to pray to God, he should pray himself. I do not believe in praying other men's prayers; we ought to pray for ourselves. I do not believe in books, except the Bible. If we are going to pray, we will pray ourselves." Then Tom said, "How shall we begin?" "One of us will read, and the other will pray," I said. "I will read tomorrow, and you shall pray." He agreed, and next morning, when we came downstairs, I read the first of Matthew, and my friend prayed. I thought he did it splendidly. The next day it was my turn; he read the Bible, and I had to pray. I shall never forget what I felt when it was my turn to pray. My heart was in my mouth; but I was in downright earnest. I wanted to be saved, and he wanted to be saved too. I wish you were in the same mind. If you are anxious to be saved, you will be.

That week was a remarkable one, because we did pray earnestly in the morning, and in private too. There came over our souls a deep sense of our sins. We cried to God, too, for our relatives. "God save our relations," was frequently our prayer, for we had such a sense of our own sins, that, though we prayed, we had the fear we were too bad, too wicked, too sinful to be saved. This impression was deepened by the fact that though we read, and prayed earnestly in the mornings, I should be ashamed to say where we were found in the evenings. We were fresh from the country, and must needs see London life, so its music-halls and other hells tempted us at night, for the devil has hell-traps of every kind in abundance for young men there, and God only kept us from being engulfed that week. So the week went round, and then the next Sunday came. My mother had besought me before leaving home, and again by letter, to go and hear her friend, Mr Miller, a Scotchman, a well-known evangelist, preach; and intent on this, we started out on the Sunday morning, but, when well on the way, I remembered that the morning meeting was for the breaking of bread, and worship of the Lord, and that would not do for us, what we wanted was the gospel, and we must wait for that till night.

Accordingly we waited till night, and then started again, but, oh, what a hunt we had to find the place. It was a murky, misty, cold night, and we went on, and on, until at length, — and I cannot help thinking the devil knew what was coming, — Tom W- said, "I am not going a step farther." "You may go home," I said, "if you like, but I will find this place, even if I have to go till midnight" It was William Street, in the north of London, we were seeking, and just as Tom said he would not go another step, we were in it, but we could not see the name for the mist. "Is this William Street, where Mr Miller preaches?" "Yes," said a voice, "but he is not preaching tonight. He has gone down to Scotland; but Mr Charles Stanley is preaching." That name awakened old memories. When I was a boy of ten, that gentleman came to spend a day or two at my father's house. He wished to go to Dartmouth on some business, and my father told me to drive him, which I did. When we came home, he put his hand in his pocket, and then gave me a pearl-handled, four-bladed knife. "Take that, my boy," he said, and I was quite proud of the gift. Ten years had rolled by, but the name, Charles Stanley, reminded me of the gift. "That is the man who gave me a knife," I said to myself; "let us go in and hear him."

The place was crammed; and we stood in the aisle. The preacher was speaking very simply from the story of Solomon building the temple. Stones, three hundred tons in weight, were taken to build the temple. He told us where they came from, a cavern below Jerusalem, and how they were hewn out of the quarry, and then taken out, and built into the temple. Then he pointed out that God was building a spiritual temple; that the world was the quarry, and sinners were the stones. They were so deeply embedded in the quarry, however, that a good deal of blasting was needed to get them out. It often took trouble, and distress, and sorrow to break up a man, and dislodge him from the world. Then, again, his sins had to be pressed on him, and by-and-by he got a little bit anxious. just as Hiram shaped the top and sides of his stones, so did God's Spirit act on a sinner, to shape him to receive the gospel. But how were these stones, three hundred tons in weight, got into position? I shall never forget the preacher's remark as to this. Supposing Hiram had gone to these stones and said: "You great stones, I want you up out of this quarry. Get up this ladder, with only ten steps, and get into the temple." How could those stones move? They were lifeless. The application was easy. The ladder was the law, the ten commandments. Could I keep them? Could I reach God's temple now, and heavenly glory hereafter, by keeping them? I saw that I could not. I began to get convicted; I began to get really anxious. I wish you were getting anxious. My brow became clouded. The brow of every man is clouded when he becomes serious about his soul. I was serious that night, and I will tell you why. I was a downright awakened sinner, I saw my sin, I saw my guilt; I saw the holiness of God. I knew if there was any one on earth who had righteously earned his way to the pit of hell, I was that man. I do not deny that I was deeply serious.

Then the preacher told us that, just as Hiram brought tackle and purchase, and lifted his big stones out of the quarry, and put them into the temple, without sound of hammer or chisel, so God was building His temple, composed of sinners, saved by grace, through the redemption of Jesus Christ. He showed us that God's Son had done the work for us, and His Spirit wrought in us; that the blood of atonement had been shed, and the claims of God had been all met by the Saviour on the cross. Jesus had died that the sinner might live. Christ's blood had been shed that the sins of the sinner might be washed away. I began then to think, Can this be for me? for I was deeply convicted of sin.

The meeting closed. Then the preacher said, "I will be glad to see anybody anxious, in the side room." Turning to my comrade, I said, "What are you going to do?" I shall never forget Tom's answer. "I am going home, to have it out with God." What had happened? He, too, was a convicted sinner. "Well," I said, "you can go home; I shall stay and speak to Charles Stanley." I went round the back of the buildings into the little vestry, and there had a little conversation with dear Mr Stanley. He then introduced me to a Christian lady, the wife of the man I had gone to hear. She told me she had been expecting to see me, as she had heard of my being in London through my aunt, then living in Somersetshire. Presently she said to me, "Are you a Christian?" "No" I replied. "Would you not like to be one?" she next asked. "I should very much like to be one," I replied, "but I do not know how to become one." Then she said, turning to her daughter, "Fetch Tom," and she went in search of her brother. He was a light-haired young man, who, I noticed, had been very active in putting people into seats, and giving out hymn-books. He was active also in the after-meeting.

After being introduced, he said: "I am glad to meet you. We heard from your aunt in Somerset that you were coming, and now we shall be very happy to see you at our house, any time you can come." I thanked him for this courtesy, and then he turned to me, and said, "May I ask, Are you a Christian?" "No, I am not, and I cannot profess to be what I am not." "Do you not want to be a Christian?" "Yes, I should very much like to be a Christian." "And how are you going to become a Christian?" "I suppose by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ." "Yes, there is no other way," said he. "Do you believe in Him?" "Yes, of course," I replied, "we all believe." "What do you believe?" he next asked me. I was never so puzzled in all my life, as by that question, and after a little pause, I replied, "I believe that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." "Quite true, and are you a sinner?" "Oh, yes, I know that I am a sinner." "And did He come to save you?" "I hope so." "You hope so? and has He saved you?" "Oh, no!" "Why not?" "Because I do not feel saved," I said.

My friend thought a moment, and then continued, "You want to be saved, but you do not feel it?" "Exactly so," I replied, "I do not feel it." He then said: "You have not got to feel saved; all you have to do is believe what the Lord tells you. Do you believe He is able to save you?" "Yes." "And that He is willing to save you?" "Yes." "And are you willing to be saved?" "I am most desirous," I replied; "I would give all the world, if I had it, to know that I were saved, but how can I know it if I do not feel it? You surely do not expect me to believe a thing which I do not feel." "Indeed I do; I expect you to believe, because God says it, that the one who believes in His dear Son is forgiven, and saved." "Well," I replied, "I do believe." "What do you believe?" "I believe He is able, and willing to save me." "And that you are saved?" "No, I don't feel it." "Ah," said my friend, "I see where you are;" and he quoted to me that remarkable verse, in the Epistle of James, which runs thus, "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble" (James 2: 19). Then he added, "That is where you are."

Oh! my friends, never in all my history shall I forget the effect of that verse of God's Word on me. It was the means of my eternal salvation, although there is no gospel in it at all. "Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble." It was a revelation from God; it was light to my soul. I saw my company, and I am not ashamed to confess it, I fled. I fled! I saw I was the companion of devils. I had just the traditional faith of Christendom; I believed there was one God; the devils also believed. They trembled; I was trembling. They were not saved; I was not saved. I was on the same ground as the damned devils in hell. Their faith had not saved them; mine, being just like theirs, could not save me. I was overwhelmed. I confess the Word of God broke me to pieces; and I trembled yet more. I am not ashamed to say it, my knees smote together. I saw myself to be what God knew me to be, a man going to hell in his sins, and with a conventional faith that would not avail. Is that the position you are in? Wake up then tonight, I pray you, I implore you.

I was utterly staggered, and like the awakened jailor in Philippi's prison, I cried, "What must I do to be saved?" My friend saw the effect of the scripture on me, and replied: "Stop, there is a difference between you and the devils. They are past mercy; you are still on ground, where mercy will meet you, if you will take God at His word." "I will gladly take it, if I can get it. What am I to do?" "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." "What! only believe?" "Yes, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." "But," I said, "I do not feel it." "Man," he replied, never mind your feelings; fling your feelings overboard as useless, just as you would an old coat. If you trust in your feelings you will wake up in hell some day, and then you will know what your feelings are worth. You are not told to feel, you are told to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. You must take God at His word."

I was just on the point of believing the gospel, when an old acquaintance stepped up to me, and whispered in my ear. His voice was very audible, and what he said was so emphatic that for the time being I lost all consciousness of earthly voices, and surroundings. What he said was this: "Stop! do not be in a hurry. Do not decide tonight; you know you have to attend a number of things in Devon. You have to sing at that concert, you know; you have already hired your piano; you have got your new comic songs, and you have been practising them for some time; and, besides, you have sworn to the conductor you would attend and sing. If you become a Christian you could not sing those songs. Then you are engaged for So-and-so's dinner party, and ball. You are engaged seven-deep in the Christmas week. Put it off for a fortnight, and get over the Christmastide. Go down to Devonshire, fulfil all your engagements like a gentleman, and then come back to London, and be a Christian." Then he craftily wound up his exhortation, and capped this diabolical advice with this bit of Scripture, "No man can serve two masters" (Matt 6: 24).

That last word settled me. I said to my old master, the devil, "You are right, no man can serve two masters; you have been a bad master, and I will serve you no longer; Christ for me henceforth." I got saved there, thank God! on the spot. The very scripture which the devil would have bound me with, and thought to drag me down by, was the very scripture that snapped my chains and set me free. No sooner had I said, "I will serve you no longer," than I again became conscious that my young light-haired friend was still talking to me. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," again fell on my ear. The clock was striking ten, and our conversation had been long, and now I asked, "Have I only just to believe that Jesus died for me on the cross, bearing my sins, and if I believe in Him, am I saved?" "That is it," he said. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." I paused a moment. Could I believe in Him, still feeling nothing? "Lord, I believe," sprung from my heart, and fell from my lips, and I was saved on the spot. And so may you be on the spot where you now are, if you will believe in Him.

Yes, there and then I got the knowledge that I was forgiven; I met the blessed Saviour, who had overcome death for me. He filled my heart with peace and joy in the same moment, and we have been fast friends for seven-and-thirty years; and I am longing to be eternally with Him. Oh! will you not come with me? Will you not join me? He is a good Master; I can commend Him to you. But you must do as I did; I had to believe before I felt.

I went home that night to my lodgings as happy as a man could be. I was forgiven, saved, emancipated, taken out of darkness into light, brought from distance into nearness. I knew it, and enjoyed it. My soul began to cry out under the sense of the favour of the Lord, and of the love of the Lord; for I had the consciousness that my Saviour had made atonement for my sins, and had washed them all away in His blood.

When I got home, there was Tom, poor fellow, weeping as if his heart would break. "Well, Tom," I asked, "how is it now?" He looked at me, and said, "Man, I see how it is with you by your face." "Yes," I said, "thank God, I am saved, and I know I am saved." "But how did you get it?" he asked. Oh! what easy work now it was to tell him, and what happy work too. We sat up until three o'clock on Monday morning, reading, praying, and praising, and though Tom did not find Jesus that night, he did next day. I can never forget December 16, 1860.

I had been asked to go to a prayer-meeting, that evening, and went. My dear young fellow-believers, be sure and go to the prayer-meeting; get among Christians. It was a great thing for me that I got among Christians at the start. I remember that night at the prayer-meeting, it had got abroad that I had been saved over-night, and many a Christian came, and gave me a hearty greeting in Christ's name, which much cheered me. When I got home at eleven o'clock, Tom greeted me with a smile, and a warm grip of the hand. It was all right. He had found the Lord, all alone, just before I got in. "Thank God!" I could only say. God saved both of us. Two comrades, now two brothers in the Lord, who had saved us both.

Well, you say, what was the next thing you did? I did not mention my conversion in the office on Monday, as I thought it might be excitement, for I was not a little moved. I would that you could be moved just in the same way, and have the same joy as I had. On Tuesday, my master, a lawyer to whom I was to have had my articles transferred, sent me to Lincoln's Inn, with a message to another lawyer. When I got there, he was not in, and would not be back for an hour, his clerk told me. My business demanded that I should wait, and see his master, so I asked if he would favour me with pen, and paper, and ink, and there in that old musty quarter of London, — Lincoln's Inn, — I wrote to the conductor of the concert, the man to whom I had sworn faithfully I would come down and sing, and told him of the very remarkable thing that had happened to me. I told him the story as briefly as I could, how God had met me, a hell-going sinner, and saved me, and blessed me; and, I said, that if I went down to sing I must sing about Christ. If I could not sing about Christ, I could not sing at all. My songs had all been changed, and I must be permitted to sing about Christ, if present. I was afraid if I did so I should spoil his concert, so suggested that he had better let me off I gave him all the gospel I knew, and at the end of the letter I wrote, "Be sure and read this letter to the whole of the Glee Club." Did he do it? Not he. He was one of those professing Christians who sail with the world, and who consequently are a dishonour to the name of Christ, and a stumbling-block in the way of many a young man. He who owns Christ as his Lord must break with the world to be really a witness for Him.

He did not read the letter to my fellow-singers, as I wished, but, as I did not appear at the concert, he told enough of its contents to let the people understand that I had "become religious," and gave them to understand that the reason I was not there was, because I had gone wrong in my head. My dear friends, I wish you had the same disease. I had not gone wrong in my head, but I had got right in my heart, that night. Some people may think me a little mad. I wish you had the same madness. If you think I am making a fool of myself for Christ's sake — godless man — you will find out by-and-by, that you made a great mistake in laughing at me, when I, and all the other people you have laughed at, are with Christ in glory. Where will you be then? Where will you spend eternity?

Let me assure you of this, that the Christian's life is the happiest, because the holiest. I have been seven-and-thirty years converted, and I find that my portion gets better every year. Christ is dearer, and heaven is nearer, and the gospel is sweeter every year. If you want to have a happy life, you must be on Christ's side. Decide for Him now. Trust the Saviour, and start with Him tonight. But if you start with Him, the next thing will be, you will go out to speak of the Lord. People often say to me, What set you preaching? Well, I never set up to be a preacher; all I can say is, that being filled with the joy of the Lord, I have not been able to contain it; I must tell of it to other people; and that is why I am here tonight; that is the secret. Conversion is just like scarlet fever; it is infectious. If you get converted yourself, you tell others of your new-found joy, and others will get converted also.

You, my dear young man, who have decided for Christ, be firm for Him. I do not say, Follow me, but I say, Follow Christ. Seek to serve the Lord, and put yourself, from this hour, absolutely under Him.

And you, my dear friend, if you have never decided for the Lord before, be decided tonight. If you have not been a Christian before, may the simple tale of my conversion lead you to decision, and set you on your way seeking to serve the Lord. He is coming back, and we shall soon see Him face to face. May we each heed His word, "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (Rev. 2: 10).

STEM Publishing : W T Turpin : Gospel Papers

Gospel Papers

Edited by W T Turpin.

Contents

1 "The Persecutor Surprised"

2 A New Well, or will the Old Well do?

3 "The, Day of the Lord, the Night of the World"

4 "Conviction and Confidence"

5 "The Storm-cloud Behind"

6 "The Blood-sprinkled Lintel"

7 The First Word of the Risen Saviour

8 Christless Religion!

9 There is a Saviour in Glory

10 The Record of God

11 Despising and Perishing

12 "Rejected Convictions"

13 Saved Now and for Ever

14 "It Behoved Christ to Suffer and to Rise"

15 "Caught Away, or Left Behind"

16 The Wreck and the Island

17 Fragment

18 "A Feast of Fat Things"

19 Perfected for Ever

20 "Life or Judgment"

21 "Who is on Our Side — Who?"

22 The Lord Jesus in Moses, the Prophets, and all the Scriptures

23 "God was in Christ"

24 "The Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ

25 "The Conscience and the Heart"

26 "The Jailer Liberated"

27 The Prodigal's Reception

28 "He Died for Me"

29 Jordan: or Death Abolished

30 A Word to Anxious Ones

31 The Good Samaritan

32 The Dumb to Speak; or, the Mouth Closed and Opened

33 A Path through Grace to Glory

34 The Old Creation and the New

35 The Syrophenician

36 A Voice from the Deep

37 "Touch this Rock;" or the Heart made Light as a Feather

38 Too Late

39 "Fast Asleep"

40 "Rest . . . Rest"

41 "The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God"

42 "Salvation, Liberty, Food and Safety"

43 "I Shall Lie Down Happy To-night!"

44 Crucifixion and Mortification

45 Simeon; or, the Reception of Christ

46 She Fell Asleep

47 Christ Our Peace; or the Only Foundation

48 "Is it Peace?"

49 "Without Hope"

50 The Glory of the Cross

51 "No, No"

52 Sowing and Reaping

53 God Speaking from Heaven

54 "The Master of the House Risen Up, and the Door Shut"

55 The Light and the Blood

56 The Veil Rent, the Rocks Riven, the Graves Opened

57 "What hath God Wrought?"

58 The Harvest Past, the Summer Ended

59 Death, Guilt, and the Power of Satan

60 The Three Crosses

61 "Peace with God"

Poetry

62 "In His Hand"

63 Righteous in Him

64 "Complete in Him"

65 "Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain"

66 A Saviour in Glory

67 The Lord hath Triumphed Gloriously

68 "The Glory of that Light"

69 "Received"

70 "I will Trust"

71 "All Things are Ready — Come!"

72 "He is Our Peace"

73 The Touch of Faith

74 "The Closed Door"

75 "Chiefest among Ten Thousand"

76 "Jesus in Glory"

77 "Come"

78 "The Light from Heaven"

"The Persecutor Surprised"

Acts 9.

I would desire particularly to ask the question, why was it that God said to Moses, who was a good man, as we would popularly term it, "Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet"? (Ex. 3: 5.) But that to a wretched rebel like Saul of Tarsus, in the hour when his malignity against Christ was at its height, God, as it were, draws nigh to him, addresses him by name, and then and there takes him up to make him a pattern of the grace that is in His own heart. There surely must be some weighty reason to account for the different way in which God acts in both these cases; — let us look a little at each. Moses, as I have said, was a man in his day remarkable for the very opposite of that which distinguished Saul of Tarsus, raised up as well as fitted of God to lead forth Jehovah's people out of Egypt; and yet when he ventured to draw nigh and look at the burning bush, he is not permitted. God Himself insists on distance between Moses and Himself; now it is not that the blessed God is in any sense indifferent to the sorrows or afflictions of enslaved Israel: what a blessed word that is, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people, which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;" and yet, to the man who is to carry out all that is expressed in such words, God says, "Draw not nigh," and Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.

The very contrary, and contrast of all this, is supplied in what is commonly called the conversion of Saul. Why is it that God keeps up distance with Moses, and Himself draws nigh to a persecutor like Saul? The answer is at once simple and plain, because His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had died upon the cross, and in death had not only made atonement, but so glorified God, that what God was not free to do, in consistency with His own character, in the day of Moses, He is perfectly free to do in the day of Saul of Tarsus. In the day of Exodus 3, and up to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, man, as a child of Adam, was tested by God, and because under law, had demands made upon him by God in righteousness; in other words, God was demanding from man what man was both unable and unwilling to give. Man was still on his trial, and because so, to him, as such, God says you cannot come near me, "draw not nigh hither;" the blessed God may, and does bear with man, test him, and proves him in every way, but nearness to God is that which cannot be known, while as yet the first man is on his trial before God; but it may be said, Why could not God have granted that nearness to Himself, or Himself drawn nigh to a sinner, as in the case of Saul of Tarsus, on the ground of the sacrifice of Christ TO BE offered? The answer is as simple as it is plain; so long as the history of the first man (or man as connected with Adam) is not closed or ended, on the contrary, is allowed a place, though on trial, God must, while demanding from him, keep him at a distance, else we should have a wilful rebellious creature allowed on that ground, and brought into that relationship, which is true only of the one who is in Christ a new creation; — and beside all this, as long as the first man is a recognised existence before God, God must, in consistency with Himself, demand from man; but this very demanding from him is in itself keeping man at a distance, as he cannot answer to the claims of a holy God. When I speak of the first man, I mean man as he is by nature connected with Adam, who brought ruin upon the race; and when I speak of a recognised existence, and God making demands upon it, I mean that judgment had not been executed upon it; God looked at it as still to be tested and tried, and consequently looked for what became Him from it.

But to turn to the history of Saul of Tarsus; how different it is there! God comes to give righteousness, not to look for it, or demand it. His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, had been to earth, had died on the cross, and by His precious death had made propitiation, and as well as ending in God's sight the first man He supplied an answer to every righteous claim of a holy God. God can now come out and express His love for the sinner, yea for the very chief of sinners; and here it may be well to look at what made Saul of Tarsus the chief of sinners. It surely was not that he was an immoral man, or an outcast from society, as they say: were he so he would never have been selected for, and charged with, the mission on which he was running, when God stopped him; on the contrary, Philippians 3 tells us that Saul was one unequalled among his fellows for morality. "If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin; an Hebrew of the Hebrews, as touching the law a Pharisee; concerning zeal, persecuting the church, touching the righteousness which is in the law blameless." What made him chief of sinners was, not immorality, but the dreadful will and purpose with which he set himself against the purpose and mind of God. Listen to his own account of it;" I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth; which thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them. And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities." (Acts 26: 9-11.) Who could conceive wilfulness or wickedness more desperate than this, to force from city to city the scattered saints of God, and not this only, but to compel them to blaspheme the one who was to them above every one; on whose account they are suffering at the hands of this relentless hater of Jesus of Nazareth. Oh, what contrasts rise up before the soul as we think of it! With the natural thought of God and His ways, how would you predicate the course He would adopt with a wretch like Saul, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the object of his terrible hate? Why, of course, you say, Almighty power would sweep from the earth a plague like Saul; the sword of divine vengeance and justice would be unsheathed to overtake such a one in his wild wickedness. But oh, how different from all this natural thought of God, His blessed way with poor Saul! Stop him God will, but with what? With the pit? No, but with glory! A light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shone round about him; at mid-day, when the sun is brightest, Saul is arrested by what is brighter still! What a sight! A scorner, despiser, hater of Christ in heaven, awakened, arrested, spoken to by that very blessed One Himself: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me"? That very One Himself who had been on the cross, under the judgment, because of man's sin; that very One Himself, who, in that wonderful moment, knew what it was to be forsaken of God, that such as Saul might never be forgotten of Him; now risen up from among the dead, received up into glory, causes the rays of that glory to fall upon the persecutor's path, draws nigh to him, speaks to him, comes not to hurl him into the bottomless pit, but to take him up; to give him forgiveness, righteousness, glory; to make a pattern man of him, a chosen vessel unto Himself; to bear his name before the Gentiles, kings and children of Israel. Such is the way of His grace now, even to the vilest sinner. Christ has died, and by His death righteousness has been established, the love of God which was not liberated to travel out to sinners until righteousness is established now goes out world wide. There is not only salvation for the vilest sinner, but glory; it is the joy of the heart of God to minister everything now from Himself to sinners. May there be, by the Holy Ghost, in the hearts of all who read these pages, a desire to accept and receive what the blessed God delights to bestow. W. T. T.

A New Well, or will the Old Well do?

A circumstance, which aptly illustrates the great truth of Christianity, happened not long since in a small village on the west coast of Scotland. The sewerage of the place needed improvement and cleansing; and in the progress of the work, one of the principal wells in the town, from which pure water had been supplied to families in the vicinity, became polluted by contact with the sewer. As soon as the cause of the disaster was discovered, remedial measures were set a-going, in the hope of restoring the now foul spring to its original purity. Every effort which skill and ingenuity could suggest was taken into consideration, but to no purpose. It was thought possible to clean and wash out the old well as far as it could be seen, but this was abandoned as useless. It was next suggested that if the old building of the well, stones, sand, &c., were removed, and a new well built instead thereof, the desired object would be attained. Many conflicting opinions prevailed as to the possibility of success, should this plan be put into execution — some for, others against; at last, it was resolved to call in a man whose occupation had been that of a constructor of wells, and whose experience justified the expectation that his counsel would lead to a proper decision. Nor did he disappoint this hope; for when called and questioned, his reply was unequivocally, "It is not possible to procure pure and sweet water from a spring polluted as this by sewerage, either by cleansing it out, as far as you can see, or by removing the old building and constructing a new one. You must build a new well, with new stones, new sand, and in an entirely new place." I happened to walk into the shop were these facts were being told, and when I heard them, it struck me, what a picture of Christianity that is! and it also struck me how little known or understood Christianity is! And now, do you not see, dear reader, how true all this is, that man, in his natural state, is the polluted well — defiled in his spring, his nature corrupt? What is to be done? God's heart is overflowing in its love for guilty man, while man's heart is overflowing with hatred to, or indifference toward the blessed God. What is to be done? God must set that filthy well — man — aside, there is nought else for it. The spring is polluted at its source, man is irreparable. So God sends His own blessed Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, into this world, the scene of the dishonour done to Himself, as well as the witness of man's ruin and degradation, and here where man had utterly failed to glorify God, He, that blessed One, that beautiful and perfect Man, perfectly glorified God, "I have glorified Thee on the earth," and thus exhibited what a dependent and subject man ought to be: and not only this, but as He walked this world, He manifested God His Father, "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." What a wonderful thought, "the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him," is the One who comes into this poor world which was at distance from God, to tell out the secrets of that bosom towards poor man on it; and, inasmuch as judgment is resting on man by reason of sin, and that he is, moreover, walking the world in a forfeited life, God's Son bears the judgment, gives up His own life for man's that was forfeited, and at the same time presents His own personal excellency to God. Man's history is now closed, the old well is declared, as to its standing and state, to be irremediable; but this is not all, for He who in grace thus gave Himself, "is raised from the dead by the glory of the Father," and becomes now in Himself, thus risen, the new standing for the new well. Therefore is it written, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new, and all things are of God."

Dear reader, what wonderful words these last five are, "all things are of God:" the position is of God, the building on it of God, the builder, God. Even as in the case of the well, the old position, mortar, stones, and sand were all set aside as good for nothing, so in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, the believer once a sinner, as a child of Adam, was entirely judged and put away out of God's sight; not only his sins but that which did them, his nature; and in the Lord Jesus Christ risen from the dead, the new era or second volume of our history is opened, and on the title page of this volume is inscribed — "All things are of God."

May the Lord the Spirit open hearts to see the great salvation of God, how He has settled the question of the old well with its corrupt spring, and what a magnificent well He has opened in His Son risen from the dead, the second Man, the last Adam, the ender of the old creation, and Head of the new. W. T. T.

"The, Day of the Lord, the Night of the World"

1 Thessalonians 5: 2-5.

Nothing is more solemn than the description given us in the above scripture, of that character of things which we find now in the world around us, and which shall usher in the "Day of the Lord," "when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child, and they shall not escape." Now peace and safety is that which is secured for all who accept it from Christ; fruit of His cross; but the world who have rejected Christ and refused His peace, will accept the devil's peace, and it will be the subject of universal congratulation in the hour of speedy judgment. When the Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again, righteousness was established, and peace made, therefore it is said that He made peace by the blood of His cross; and His first word when He stood in the midst of His disciples after His resurrection, was "Peace be unto you." He had in death vanquished every enemy, He only proclaimed it when He said, "Peace be unto you," beside all this, He Himself alive from the dead was before them their peace: Now this is what the world will not have at any cost, the peace and safety desired by it and looked for by it, is prosperity, ease, luxury, indifference, in a word it is a peace procured by getting rid of all thought of God. If the world could blot out God, it would; the safety it wants is immunity from all that would interfere with its downward course. What a solemn thought that it shall eat of the fruit of its own ways, it shall have peace and safety, then sudden destruction! When the Lord Jesus Christ came at first it was to bear judgment, and so doing to put away sin. When He comes again in the day of the Lord, it will be to execute judgment upon them that know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me press upon my reader the striking likeness between the world now, and the world of Noah's time. If we turn to Luke 17: 26, 27, we are told that all went on in Noah's day in its customary rotation, eating, drinking, and marrying until the day Noah entered the ark, and then was the night of the antediluvian age; solemn fact, no precursor was there of a coming flood, save the testimony and act of Noah, which was refused and disbelieved. The morning of the day that Noah entered the ark the sun rose, as it was ever wont to do. No cloud, surcharged with rain, cast its shadow upon the scene, and yet sudden destruction overtook the world of that day. We are told in the epistle to the Hebrews, that it was of things not seen as yet, that Noah's faith was warned about; he believed God, contrary to any evidence of senses, and resisted the reasoning of men around him. We are told in the book of Genesis that it was a mist which went up from the earth that watered it, and that God had not caused it to rain upon the earth. (Chap. 2: 5, 6.) What they had not seen they would not believe, and this is the character of the world and the people on it to-day. The testimony of God is not credited — what is not seen is not believed. Of the world's rejecting the Holy Ghost, it is said, "Whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not." (John 14: 17.) God has given testimony abundant in His word that His Son, the Lord Jesus, will come and execute judgment upon the despisers of His grace and rejecters of His love. Prior to this, that same blessed One will come to the air for His people; for all who have believed in Himself He will come and receive them to Himself, even as God, before the flood, took up Enoch to Himself. There are two things, my reader, either of which might happen at any moment. One is death, which would seal the doom of all who are not in Christ; the other is the Lord's coming for His people, which would equally seal the doom of all who, in this professing christian land, have, nevertheless, not believed in Christ, and who would be left behind for that terrible night, which will overtake the world, and surprise man on it as a thief. What a solemn thought, that at any moment eternal destinies might be fixed. Have you given it a thought? Let not, I beseech you, flattering words and fair speeches beguile you. Be assured of it, for God has said it, "The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night." Sudden destruction will fall upon all who know not God, and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Children of the night and of darkness, hearken to the voice of God, turn not a deaf ear; every pulsation of your heart, every beat of the pendulum of the clock of time brings you nearer to the moment of judgment.

The gospel is the good news of God about His Son the Lord Jesus Christ, for a sinner such as you, that for you, even for such as you, God has forgiveness, peace, glory, a place with Christ where Christ is now. It is His joy to give, to receive; His delight to make you a child of day, and of light. Christ has died, has risen again, is now in glory, the author of eternal salvation to every poor soul that looks to Him. W. T. T.

"The Light from Heaven"

Straight down from the throne of glory

Shone the light that enter'd Saul;

His wild wickedness for ever

Ended in that wondrous fall.

What subdued him? was it judgment

In his worst and maddest hour?

Did earth open, as on Korah,

And the rebel worm devour?

God arrests him, but 'tis blessing,

Not destruction that is given;

Love comes to the chief of sinners,

Glory raises him to heaven.

Yes, that Jesus, Saul so hated,

Had redeem'd that very Saul;

'Twas his Saviour he was smiting,

In "that light" he saw it all.

Oh! he found that glory brighter

Than the Eastern noon-day blaze,

For it gave him blessed vision

Upon Jesu's face to gaze.

Yes, a Saviour in the glory

Did the sinner see that day,

Found a sun to light him ever,

Found "the new and living way."

Sinner, wilt thou come and read it,

Read "the glory of that light"?

'Tis the heart of God out-flowing,

Coming to thee in thy night.

Learning here how Calv'ry ended,

All that hinder'd love before,

That which shone on Saul can reach thee,

Light thy path for evermore.  —  O. R.

"Conviction and Confidence "

Leviticus 13: 38-46; 14: 1-7.

Nothing can be more wonderful than that we should be able to say to a poor sinner here on earth, in the midst of his leprosy and misery, "Well there is one on the throne of God who loves you," "there is one up there in glory whose heart is full of pity for you." Just conceive for a moment what such tidings would be to a poor, friendless, hopeless, homeless rebel, whose sins and sorrows had reached to such a height that nothing but despair was left, for him to hear that any one thinks of him, or cares for him, is good news so wonderful that he almost fears it too good to be true. A Saviour in glory who died for rebels on earth is a contrast indeed, and yet such is the testimony of God at this moment — a testimony to be repeated wherever there is a sinner, a rebel, a lost one, on the face of the whole world. In calling attention to the scriptures above quoted, my object is to point out as simply as I can the place the word of God has in convicting and assuring the soul — to press upon the conscience the all-important fact that the discovery of our misery, or of the one who has heart and power to meet us in it, are in no way consequent upon our feeling or sense, but upon the unchanging word of the living God. I have heard the question asked, "Do you feel you are a sinner?" Yet I could not say it is the first question. It would be felt, no doubt, if the testimony of God about man as a child of Adam were believed. Let my reader be assured that the testimony of God is as clear and distinct as can be. By nature man is a leper before God, without Christ, without hope, without God in the world; an unclean rebel, with a mind and will set against God. Hear His word "There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues have they used deceit, the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood: Destruction and misery are in their way, and the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes." (Rom. 3: 10-18.)

Nothing could be more decisive or convicting. It is the great antitype of the leper, who is convicted and shut out of the camp of Israel by the word of the priest. It was not a question of his feeling his leprosy; the question was what the priest had said, or his word, who knew the fatal plague spot. The leper in Israel, with rent clothes, his head bare, a covering upon his upper lip, crying, Unclean, unclean, goes outside the camp, that is, takes the position the priest of Israel by his word placed him in. What a solemn picture of the condition of man as a child of Adam now! God has shut every man's mouth, has pronounced man unclean, unfit for His presence; but along with this (of which no adequate picture could be given), that same blessed God assures man that there are in Himself springs of compassion and mercy, of which He has the heart to make guilty rebels, loathsome lepers, the object. This, God has announced to sinners, has demonstrated in His Son the Lord Jesus, and bestows now wherever there is the faith that casts itself on Him. How wonderful to know that I have a Saviour in glory! A Saviour who came to earth and died for me, rose again from the dead, having in death closed my history as a leper before God; and because He righteously met all the claims of the throne of God, took His seat on high in glory, from whence He lets His voice be heard and His light seen, from whence all that I need comes, and to which glory it is the purpose of His heart to bring me. It is the word of God that convicts me of my condition as seen and judged by Him in righteousness, and it is the same word that bids me take comfort, because He who shuts my mouth, if I may so say, opens His, to tell me of the grace and mercy that is in Himself for me, as well as the full provision He has made in the blood-shedding of Christ, to take me out of the state in which by nature I am at a distance from Him, and to bring me unto Himself. What a message to be put in trust with to poor man in this world, declaring to him in his leprosy and ruin, a love so wonderful, that it rests satisfied with nothing short of his complete deliverance from condemnation and death, and his full satisfaction in the place where God would have him, justified from all things, accepted in the beloved, and united by the Holy Ghost to Christ in heaven. Oh! how wonderful this is, God's own joy, accomplished in and through His own Son the Lord Jesus Christ. Once again, let me press it upon my reader, all this is on the testimony of God, borne in the word of God to man's ruin and God's love; the picture of the former being the leper in Israel placed outside the camp by the word of the priest.

I turn now to look at the second scripture, and there we shall find the same in principle. The leper being cleansed is once again to be brought back; but how? "Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed, two birds, alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet, and hyssop. And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water; as for the living bird he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water; and he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field." (Vers. 4-7.)

In the above verses which describe the cleansing of the leper, we have a striking picture of the principle on which God now justifies the ungodly; namely, on the ground of the death of Christ, by which sin is put away, and righteousness established, and the resurrection of Christ, which proclaims God's satisfaction and our justification.

The bird killed in an earthen vessel, over running water, is, in picture, Christ crucified, and the living bird let loose, Christ risen and glorified, and all this the result of that which was in God's heart respecting poor sinners on earth, helpless and hopeless in their ruin. What a comfort to be able to show all this to a poor sinner as God's testimony, that the word which silences him on his side opens the door of hope on God's side. Wonderful message, yet more wonderful messenger He who came from heaven to make it all good in His death and resurrection for us.

One point more and I close: we have seen, I trust, that it is God's testimony to man's ruin, not man's feelings or thoughts about it; and that God has likewise given testimony to all that was in His heart in the gift, death, resurrection, and glory of His Son the Lord Jesus Christ. There is one other point of testimony to which I would direct attention — how did the leper know he was cleansed? On the same authority as that which convicted him of leprosy. As at first he was pronounced unclean by the priest, so now being cleansed, he is "pronounced clean." As at first, on the word of the priest, he took his place outside, so now on the word of the priest, he takes his place inside; in both cases it was the word of the priest. How important, how blessed is this! Many a soul perplexes itself from want of simply taking God at His word, which is the true source and spring of all known enjoyment, as it is written, "The God of hope fill you with all joy, and peace, in believing." And on the other hand many a soul is blinded and deceived, judging its state by its own apprehension of it or its own feelings, and not the complete ruin all are in, and the wonderful provision God has in love made in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to meet us where we are. Should any such eye fall on these pages, may it be opened to see the ruin and the Saviour; a "Saviour, and a great one," who died on the cross for sinners, even the chief, who by His death has made atonement, and has risen again from the dead and gone into heaven, the author of eternal salvation to all who look to Him. W. T. T.

"The Storm-cloud Behind"

A traveller on the great Atlantic is sure to meet with objects not seen elsewhere; it was so with one crossing that ocean who was quite unaccustomed to sea life, and whose concern, or indeed alarm, was awakened by beholding an expansive mass of angry-looking cloud, gathering together, as he thought, all its forces ere it burst upon them. As he walked the deck of the vessel, watching rather nervously this strange appearance, he was relieved in no small measure by one of the sailors, to whom such sights were familiar, and who quieted all his fears by telling him that the cloud was neither over them, nor before them, but behind them. "Sir," said the sailor, "that cloud has burst behind us."

It is just so at this present time in the history of souls: many a one needs similar intelligence, to quiet the rising fears of the heart. There is a very popular and wide-spread delusion on this subject, which it is well should be exposed. It is said by some, and thought by many, that sinners, being unable to meet the righteous claims of a Holy God, may take comfort when they are told that in mercy God is not now pressing His claim (as we would say). It is not denied that God has a righteous claim, which if not answered by man, will bring judgment upon him; but what is stated and thought by many is, that God has allowed, in compassion, His full claim to stand aside, as it were, giving sinners credit for doing their best. Now, nothing could be more false, or destructive of all peace and comfort to the soul; the best it can do is to postpone the evil day, like a man deeply sunk in debt, whose creditors are kind and patient, but who yet passes many weary days and sleepless nights, because the unmet charge stares him in the face. Such, reader, is not the good news of God proclaimed to sinners in the gospel; it is neither forbearance on God's part as to His claim upon you, nor your doing your best, to be placed, as it were, to your account; but it is, oh, wondrous good news! that God has in grace supplied an answer to His own righteous claim, and bestows that answer upon every sinner who believes in Christ. God Himself is the blessed source and spring of it all; it was He who gave His Son out of His bosom; it was He who sent "his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him;" that blessed One came down to earth that He might do the will of God: "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." While He lived and walked here, He did the will of God; when He by the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, He did the will of God; He was the only one who knew the extent of man's sin and alienation from God, and He dies on the cross to put it away; and He is the only one who knew what was in the heart of God toward poor lost sinners, and He comes down to manifest it. How blessed, the storm-cloud has burst and is behind me! Do you ask me how I know? — Well, gladly do I answer you. He on whom it did burst is now seated in glory, appears there in righteousness transcendent, showing the blood of His atonement as my title to be there: but oh, more blessed even yet! how can I speak of it! He has set God free in righteousness to act according to the love of His heart. God now brings the poor returning prodigal to His house, His home, His joy; spreads His feast there, bids him welcome there; and there for ever and for ever in the circle of His favour, in the circle of a Father's love, is the rest and peace and joy of the wanderer brought back.

Yes, in the fulness of His grace,

God put me in the children's place,

Where I may gaze upon His face —

O, Lamb of God, in Thee.

Not half His love can I express,

Yet, Lord, with joy my lips confess,

This blessed portion I possess —

O, Lamb of God, in Thee.

W. T. T.

"The Blood-sprinkled Lintel"

Exodus 12: 22, 23.

The gospel is God's own answer to the question He Himself has raised about man and his sin. None could raise the question, and none could answer the question but Himself; the answer is Christ, given by God freely in His love, Christ lifted up upon the cross as a sacrifice for sins, Christ raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, and Christ ascended into the heavens.

Now Exodus 12 speaks about a lamb, whose blood, shed and sprinkled upon the houses of the children of Israel, secured them when God passed in judgment through the land of Egypt. My reader, the Lord Jesus Christ is the great substance, of which the lamb of Exodus 12 was only the shadow. What a blessed wonderful spring the soul gets, when it has believed that the Lamb whose blood must be shed as an atonement for sin is the only begotten Son of God, provided, given, sent by God into the world for this very purpose. As it is written, "in this was manifested the love of God toward us, in that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." There is one point of great value and importance in Exodus 12; everything is done under the hand of God, He provides all, so to speak, and then assures by His word — this is very blessed to know. The security of an Israelite in that night consisted in his being in a house whose lintel was marked with the blood of the appointed lamb previously shed in death; the sense of his security, or the known enjoyment of it, consisted in his simply believing God's testimony, "when I see the blood I will pass over you." I would say a little about the security. Nothing less than that mysterious mark on the lintel would suffice, and nothing more was required; the blood shed told of atonement made; "it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul." (Lev. 17: 11.) It is no question as to what an Israelite was, or what he felt; what God looked for as He passed through the land that night was the lintel sprinkled with the blood of the appointed lamb; wherever that was before His eyes, God was satisfied, and they were secure; "When I see the blood I will pass over you," proclaimed both one and the other. So it is now, reader; the security now consists in my having to do with Christ, who went down into death to put away sin, nothing less would meet our dreadful case than the blood-shedding of Christ, He bore the judgment in His own body on the cross, He gave up His life; in His death we can say, "Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other;" every righteous claim of God has been met by the death of Christ; all that was contrary to God has been for the believer put away for ever. How secure is the soul in such an answer!

Now, in order to bring this out more clearly, allow me to put a case. We will suppose an Israelite who has followed out in every particular the direction of God as to the lamb, and also as to the sprinkling of the blood upon the lintel; he retires into his house, and passes that terrible night in fear and anxiety. Whether he will be the next to fall under the judgment he knows not; if he dared, he would go outside the door of his house and satisfy himself by gazing on the blood, but this he cannot do, and follow out the direction of God, and so he passes a wretched night, comfortless and miserable. But I take another case of an Israelite who, equally with the former, has followed out the commands of God as to the lamb and its blood; he, having also sprinkled the lintel, retires in restful quiet, happy and assured: the thought of judgment awakens no alarm in his breast. Which of the two is safest? The latter, do you say? if so, the security does not consist alone in the blood being on the lintel. But do you not see that because in both cases the blood was there, both were equally safe, equally secure? Both were not equally happy, both were not equally certain of their security: and why? Simply because they did not equally credit the testimony or word of God. The blood outside made both equally secure, but the testimony of God, carried inside and believed, was needed to make both equally assured — when I say equally assured, I mean as far as any could be at that time. Thus, I trust, we have seen that testimony to our ruin as sinners is borne by the word of God equally with testimony to our safety, if we believe on Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead. W. T. T.

"In His Hand"

John 10.

Still'd each tremble, hush'd each murmur,

We, whose portion lieth here,

In His Hand, oh! holy refuge,

Where "love casteth out all fear."

What can hurt them, what can touch them?

Can the fierce wolf scatter now?

In His Hand who spoil'd the strong man,

His — to whom each knee must bow!

Better this than Israel's sheepfold

Wall'd and fenced around by law,

Pastures here, and peace and safety,

Joys that Israel, never saw.

God's own presence, sweet communion,

Better this than Canaan's land,

Need we earthly rules and barriers,

We, thus gather'd in His Hand?

In His Hand who laid His life down,

In His Hand who gave His Son;

Thus the wondrous mystery learning,

Gift and Giver both are One.

One their gracious purpose usward,

Christ but shows the heart of God,

Heart whose love was bound by justice,

Till the Son atoned with blood.

"Therefore doth His Father love Him;"

Give all glory to His Name,

For God's love can reach the sinner,

Since His justice smote the Lamb.

This the joy Christ set before Him

When He turn'd His face to go —

Willing victim to the death-scene;

Where He drain'd the cup of woe.

Spirit-taught we bow and worship

Abba Father, Saviour Lord,

In His Hand we learn to know them,

Heark'ning to the Shepherd's word.

No more stranger voices follow —

Ever-guided now by One,

In His Hand — so strong — so loving,

Till the pilgrimage be done.

Then the many-mansion'd dwelling;

Gates of pearl, and jasper wall,

Harps of gold for ever telling

How His Hand hath done it all. — O. R.

The First Word of the Risen Saviour

John 20.

The disciples had known the Lord Jesus as the One who had for them the words of eternal life. They felt they could not go away from Him. "To whom shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life?" but now He had left them to do a work for them — to give His life a ransom for many. What a thought! That is, God had it in His counsels before the world began, to give His Son to die for the world that rejected Him. And the Son (as the pure and spotless One) not only had the will to go through it all, but He was capable as a divine Person of being made God's Lamb, to deal with the whole question of sin. There was no veil to hide the wrath of God, no veil to hide what sin was in His sight. It was all brought out in the light of God. There was no avoiding of the full cup of wrath, no avoiding of the Father's will, and His will was to put away sin. Here was the immense question of sin, before God, answered in the blessed sinless One made sin — taking this place not only for us, but for God's glory; going into it to deal with sin according to the holiness and righteousness of God, He looked at sin without a veil, put Himself before God to be made sin, and drank the full cup of wrath! He puts away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, went under death as God's Lamb to deal with it all, to bear it all, to bear it all in His own Person — wholly alone in it — that work went on between God and His anointed, for man had no share in the work of His salvation, but the wickedness that nailed Him to the cross! It was all accomplished between God and Christ alone. Once in the end of the world He appeared to put away sin, when man's sin from the garden of Eden onward had been fully and distinctly brought out — his wilfulness and law-breaking, and rejection of Christ. Man had been fully tried, and his heart fully proved to be enmity to God. And now the stability of all things, from your individual soul up to the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, rests in this, that God hath obtained an eternal redemption for us! that the whole question of sin is eternally and perfectly settled, according to the holiness and righteousness of God, and Christ is raised from the dead according to the eternal immutable righteousness on which all is based, redemption, eternal glory, and the new heaven and new earth, there is nothing like the cross in this way; as a fact in eternal history, nothing at all like it — the centre of all God's thoughts and purposes as revealed in love. And as soon as the Lord has finished that work immutable in righteousness, raised from among the dead the public witness that God had accepted His work — His first thought is of His poor disciples. They were together, the doors shut for fear of the Jews, but Jesus comes into their midst, and what is His word to them? Peace! He brings them peace — the peace that He has made by the blood of His cross. It is as if He said to them, I have been there, dying on the cross, made sin for you, I have drunk that terrible cup of wrath for you, I have accomplished eternal salvation for you, and now there is peace for you, for you, (dear reader,) I bring it to you Myself — the peace that I have made — your sins all gone; because He bore them in His own body on the tree. The work is done, and the only thing He has to do is to bring them this peace; loving His own that were in the world, He comes to announce it to them. And, oh, let His word reach your conscience, and sink down and take root there. Did He deceive them when He said that there was peace with God for them? Did He know what He had made! Did He know that He had accomplished redemption? He who had come out from under death, from under that dreadful cup, into the full joy of His Father's countenance. Oh, well He knew it. It is the very thing that He sings praises for (see Psalm 22), for an accomplished redemption, and we have to sing with Him. We see this blessed One coming in perfect love to tell them what He knows He has wrought for them, and it is as He knows it, and that is an immense comfort for us, because we may say, I am afraid my poor wretched heart has not accepted Him enough; I do not value His work enough; and I have forgotten half the sins I have done. I do not see sin as God sees it; but that is not the ground of my peace: what gives me peace is the knowledge that God knows the full value of the work of Christ, that not a sin has escaped His eye. God has estimated it all. There is nothing of the horribleness of sin not known by Him. God has seen it all, and God has put it all away, and peace is made according to God's knowledge of sin, and according to God's putting of it away, that is the ground of my peace before Him; and when Christ says peace to me now, it is as sure as if He had judged me already on the great white throne. The offended Person has found satisfaction for my whole offence. Oh, if God is satisfied, I am! In the resurrection of Christ, God has put His seal upon Christ's accomplished work; now that all that concerned my simple state is gone, and done with before God — nothing remains but the carrying out of Divine love in righteousness. I have got peace, faith believes it, believes that God cannot see a spot on me unless He denies the work of Christ. This peace is an immense thing; the very title God is pleased to take is, God of peace, for we are reconciled to God. The Lord completes the position of those who are brought into this condition before God, He breathes on them, and says, receive ye the Holy Ghost. He gives the living power of life in us in order to enjoy it, and in order that we may know that we are in Him who is gone up to His Father, and now our Father, to His God, and now our God; and mark the place this life in Christ in glory sets us in, in the world which has rejected Him: as the Father has sent Him, so He sends us with forgiveness of sins into this poor world. Now I can turn round and tell you about remission of sins — because I have got it for myself. I echo this blessed testimony to the world. I have got a Saviour; I have got a divine life in Him; I have got it, I am not 'hoping' to get it, I have it all now in that risen Christ; I have drunk of the living water; I say to you, will you come and drink; Christ could say, come to ME, but I can say, whosoever thirsteth, come, I know that there is living water there. And now, have you such a possession of Christ, that you can go and say to the world, I have got what you have not a bit of; I have got a thing from Christ in glory? If not, you have not got the peace that God gives, that Christ made, and that Christ brings. * * * * *

Christless Religion!

Matt. 7: 22, 23.

The above title would, no doubt, offend many an eye, to others it would appear quite out of place at the present time; the growing goodness of the age, the increase of religion among men is pleaded on every side as a reason for rejecting the hard thought of the world becoming more wicked every day and man in general on it more hardened and indifferent. It may appear harsh to some who read this paper to have it stated that Christ is left out of the religion, or so-called Christianity of the great bulk of professors. Christianity is a word used to signify that a man is neither a Jew, Turk, infidel, nor heretic, but without any sense of a soul really brought out of the world to God. In the popular use of the word, a man is said to be a good Christian though he has never believed on Jesus, has never known the forgiveness of his sins, has never known Christ. Then religion, too, is said to be the common portion of nearly all decent professors. They attend their place of worship on the Sabbath or Sunday, they receive the sacrament once a month, or twice a year; they give their money to spread the scriptures, or to convert the heathen, and they feel better for it all: yet are they unchanged, the very same in every respect; or, if differing from those whom they term profane persons, it is by no means to their own credit, being as "whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness." (Matt. 23: 27.)

What can be more solemn than the words of the Lord Jesus, as His eye travelled over the wide world of profession? "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye workers of iniquity." How dreadful this word, for the die is cast, the doom is come! Let me be faithful and straightforward. Look around you at this moment, and what do you see? A great piece of hypocrisy being played by men, religion without reality, a noisy and a showy profession, by which souls are deceived and dragged down respectably and religiously to hell. This is that religion of which some one affirms, "that it has slain its ten thousands." Shall there then be no warning word? Shall we not beseech men to pause upon the brink of so terrible a precipice? Shall we not hold forth the word of truth? Away with such thoughts.

Reader, there are two words in scripture, and if they do not describe you, be assured your Christianity is Christless, and your religion vain — "born again" are the words. Have you been? "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again," are the words of Him who also said, "the Son of man must be lifted up." "MUST BE BORN AGAIN." Not must be religious, or must be moral, or must turn over a new leaf (as is said), or must mend your ways, but "must be born again." What a cutting, searching word. It sets man in his best state or worst state aside altogether; it brings in a new life, a new nature. There is necessity here, for ye must be born again; such necessity that "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

There are two grand reasons why ye must be born again. First, because nothing less would suit God, righteous, holy as He is.

Secondly, nothing less would meet the case of man, ruined and lost, in himself irreparably bad. But do you say, where am I to get this other life, this other nature of which I hear so much in these days? The very same scripture that shuts you out in your natural state, supplies the answer to your question. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so, must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Reader, soon all unreality will have passed away; soon will this day of empty profession be over. Where shall you be found then? Where are you now? W. T. T.

There is a Saviour in Glory

God has visited this world, has manifested Himself in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. He came down from glory on this heavenly mission of making known to man all the grace and love that was in the heart of His Father.

He laid aside His glory, and took upon Himself the form of a man — the most gracious, the most accessible of men. "Never man spake like this man," His enemies confessed. He carried with Him that which poor lost man could get nowhere else. The only man that could ever stand upon this earth and say, "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." What an announcement to make! He had more; He had life — eternal life for man, but man would not come unto Him that he might have this life — this everlasting life.

This blessed One was "hated without a cause." He was "the light of the world," and this did not suit man; for man "loved darkness rather than light, because his deeds were evil." Hence they did not rest until they had got rid of this Jesus, so that they might go on undisturbed in their own path of iniquity. A robber was preferable to Jesus the Son of God. Their cry was, "Away with him, crucify him." But the blessed God made this crowning act of man's hatred against Himself to be the only way of salvation; and where man made this blessed One a martyr, there God made Him to be a victim,; and the precious blood that flowed from the side of that crucified Christ gave God eternal satisfaction about sin. That precious blood was of such infinite value in God's sight that the sinner, be he who he may, that rests in the value of this blood to God, is cleansed from every stain. Thus, where sin abounded, grace has much more abounded. (Rom. 5: 20, 21.)

But, dear reader, that blessed One that died upon the tree now sits upon the throne in glory! God raised Him from the dead, and has exalted Him, having declared that at the name of Jesus "every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

My desire in presenting this paper to you is to press home upon your soul the fact that there is a Saviour in glory. Reader, do you know Him there?

Have an interview with Him you MUST — either now in grace, or presently in judgment.

The dying thief had an interview with Him when He hung upon the cross.

Saul, the enemy of Jesus, had an interview with Him when He was in heavenly glory, — the same Jesus, but in different circumstances. The thief turns to the Saviour on the cross, owns his true condition, and asks to be remembered in the coming kingdom. The Saviour's answer to his cry was, "THIS DAY shalt thou be with me in paradise." Saul, on the other hand, on his way to Damascus, endeavouring to wipe out the memory of the name of Jesus from the earth, is met by that same Jesus in heavenly glory.

What a contrast between the two! the one full of hatred against Christ, the other full of grace towards Saul. The Saviour asks him — "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou ME?"

Saul, tell Him WHY

Saul, in the light of that glory, has fallen to the ground, and exclaims, "Who art thou, Lord?" The answer is, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest." Not one word of reproof fell from the Saviour's lips. What a reception was this for Saul! His course on earth was changed. No longer the persecutor of the saints of God, but henceforth to be an ambassador for that Saviour here, and a preacher of Him as glad tidings among the nations. (Gal. 1: 16.) He announces what that Saviour is in Himself as glad tidings to those around him.

And thus to you, dear reader, do I now declare not only what that Saviour has done, how that He has finished the work of salvation, that He has paid an adequate price for the salvation of all (1 Tim. 2), and that God is satisfied with that work which He accomplished on the cross, having raised Him up from among the dead; but I also declare unto you what He is Himself. Do you want rest, peace, righteousness, life? All are found in Christ in glory.

Will you then avail yourself of this great salvation by sheltering yourself under what He has done, and resting in what He is, instead of in what you can do, or in what you are? If you would rest in the presence of a holy God, it must be by resting entirely on what that Saviour has done, and in what that Saviour is.

The self-righteous Saul knew how unsuitable he was in himself in that glory. He knew, moreover, how suitable it was to that Saviour that was in it: and thus I no longer trust in myself, but make my boast in Christ Jesus.

One solemn word with you, dear reader, and I have done. Are you an enemy or a friend of Christ? The word is, "He that is not with me is against me.

To refuse present grace is to incur future judgment, and then there will be no mercy. "Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation."

"For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory in the face of Jesus Christ." E. P. C.

Righteous in Him

Father, Thy name I bless,

Strong in Thy righteousness,

Vast is Thy love.

What hast Thou done to me?

Made me a son to Thee —

Near to Thyself to be

With Thee above.

Fountain of life Thou art —

Well-spring of love Thy heart,

Else had I lain

Steep'd in my misery,

Under death's penalty —

Wrench'd every link with Thee,

'Neath Satan's chain.

Who could such woe address?

Who could such love express?

Who but the Son?

Thou Thine own Son hast sent,

Through Him Thy love, once pent,

Now finds a righteous vent

T'wards Thine undone.

Lo! in His blessed face

Shines all Thy truth and grace

Hark! how He saith —

Father, Thy holy will

I, only I, fulfil,

Cost what it may or will,

E'en unto death.

Oh! what that will entail'd!

Depths from man's reason veil'd,

Known, Lord, to Thee,

When in the sinner's stead,

Thou didst Thy spotless head

Bow 'neath the judgment dread,

Resting on me.

Raised from that judgment sea,

Life-giving Lord, in Thee!

Righteous I stand!

In Thee, — the Righteous One

Of Thee, — the Holy One —

With the Beloved One,

At God's right hand.

The Record of God

1 John 5: 9, 11, 12.

There are few scriptures which contain more comforting testimony for anxious, troubled souls than the above; they present the very truth which can meet the poor burdened heart, writing bitter things against itself. Nothing can be more distinct than this fact, that the evidence of the soul's acceptance is outside of us altogether; nothing we can either do or feel is any ground of security or rest for our souls; what an unspeakable mercy and comfort it should be so! For, just reflect a moment; this day all might be favourable and bright around me — happy frames, sweet experiences, and the like, simply produced by our circumstances; then to-morrow, on the contrary, all is as dark as yesterday it was bright; coldness and deadness within, and all that I prized so much and valued as evidence has vanished in a night. What a state of destitution and misery am I now plunged into, in a moment too!

Reader, this is not a supposed case, it is a real and a common one; is it yours? I have heard of some one who formed his judgment of the sun by looking at it in a pool of water; now and then was the water moved and agitated, every breath of wind more or less troubled it, consequently this man thought the sun moved as often as it appeared to stand still; but as soon as he learned no longer to judge of the sun by the water on which it shone, then he discovered his mistake, and that the sun was ever the same — stedfast and fixed. Oh! how blessed for poor weak things like us to know that our security is in what God has done, and our consciousness of security, or certainty of it, in what God has said; this cannot be too often insisted on, or pressed upon souls — this alone can meet the rage and fury of Satan — this alone can silence the troubles and thoughts of the heart.

"Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself." (Luke 23: 38, 39.)

The risen Saviour knew well what perplexed the heart, troubles and thoughts; how does He meet them? By turning the mind out on Himself, from themselves.

Let us look then a little at the testimony I have spoken of, and found in the scriptures given above.

First, then, we have "God hath given to us eternal life:" what a sentence that is! It begins with the giver, "God hath given;" it closes with the gift, "Eternal life;" and this, bear in mind, God's own witness, record, testimony. What is eternal life? Nothing less than the very life of the One who died on the cross as substitute for His people, and rose again from the dead; in His death He closed their history as children, not only of wrath, but of Adam; and in resurrection He became the Head of a new race, and as such communicates His own life; "He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost." (John 20: 22.) So now of all who believe in Jesus, who receive the record, testimony, witness of God, it is true they have passed from death to life, they have Eternal Life — they are not in the flesh. So then under the first head or testimony we have God's record of Himself, His Son, His gift; the blessed giver God Himself — the source and spring of it all; His Son the Lord Jesus, the One in whom it is all made good, for it is in Him all that God bestows is found; and then His gift, Eternal Life.

Now the second testimony or record of God is found in verse 12, "He that hath the Son hath life." It is similar to that beautiful verse, the word of Christ Himself, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth my word, and believeth in him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but is passed from death unto life." (John 5: 24.) Now observe in the first record which has been before us, God Himself, His Son, and His gift, were all presented; here in the second place, it is God's pledged word. God Himself affirms that he that believeth hath; God has given me testimony not only to the love that was in His heart towards me, but also to the fact that in believing in Christ I have present eternal life; faith hears Christ's word, believes the Father who sent His Son, possesses Christ, and has everlasting life. Do you not see how the eye of the soul is turned out on God, and on Christ, not in on self? and do you not see that it is the heart of God, the Son of God, the gift of God, and the word of God that are all the subject of testimony? Can you not trust such testimony rather than your feelings, frames, experiences, all of which are like the surface of yonder lake, agitated and swept by every wind, even in its gentlest whispers or its wildest fury? But there is something even beyond the comfort and satisfaction of my heart, and that is that I do not make God a liar; "he that believeth not God, hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son." We receive in this world everything for the most part on testimony; when in ordinary conversation people say they cannot believe such and such a thing, it is because the testimony is deficient in some way, generally because of the character of the persons bearing testimony; and on the contrary we find no difficulty in giving credit to testimony from one who is trustworthy and reliable. "If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater."

"That which can shake the cross,

May shake the peace it gave —

Which tells me Christ has never died,

Or never left the grave.

Till then my peace is sure,

It will not, cannot yield;

Jesus I know has died and lives:

On this firm rock I build.

I change, He changes not,

My Christ can never die;

His love, not mine, the resting-place,

His truth, not mine, the tie."  —  W. T. T.

Despising and Perishing

Acts 13: 41.

Reader, have you received Christ? Have you been born again? If not, you have not life; you can never see the kingdom of God. This is a terribly solemn truth, and it behoves you to consider it. There are thousands around us who have been brought up religiously, and learned in their earliest years to lisp the name of Jesus; daily they pray to God, and read His word, but they have no life, they are dead. And what is to be the end of them? I must speak plainly here: — the end of all this is death, and judgment, and hell for ever. If you have not life in the risen Christ, it matters little what else you have, you are going down to an eternal hell as surely as God lives. These things are written not harshly, but in solemn earnest, in the hope that the Lord will use the word in warning to some who are thus deceived. God's sentence of death against sin, and the curse of the broken law rest upon you, and in Christ alone is there deliverance. The most perfect life of religiousness is of no avail here. "They that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8: 8); and you are "in the flesh," if you have not been born of the Spirit and are now in Christ. All your knowledge and your blessings tend but to increase your responsibility, and if, like Capernaum, you are raised to heaven by privilege, you shall be thrust down to hell. Oh! that man would consider these things! Why is it that you, who are shrewd enough in other things, are such fools here? You go on year after year with a carnal Christless religiousness, and refuse to look before you and see the end. God is warning you and beseeching you; but all to no avail. He has given up His only begotten Son to die a cruel shameful death, and bear His wrath against sin in order that you might have life; and what is it all to you? Have you ever wept one unselfish tear because of it? Oh! has your heart ever glowed with love to Him? Did you ever spend a single hour over His word with the longing desire of knowing what He has said as to how you may be saved? No, truly; but you pray to Him; you read His word; you are earnest, sincere, and live a moral religious life, and hope for salvation because of it as well as through the merits of Christ, forsooth! And when one tells you that the end of all such is eternal hell, you are ready to turn round upon God and say hard things of Him, as though you deserved better. He has no pleasure in your death: — He has life for you, and peace, and joy, and heaven, and glory, — all in Christ: and He presses His blessings upon you, and entreats you to have them. But what comes of it? You will still cling to your own religiousness, as if such filthy rags could be a fit covering for you in the presence of God. Oh! one cannot be satisfied to say soft and smooth things in such a case as this. All these things in which you trust will serve only to increase your condemnation if you die as you are, or if the Lord should come and find you as you are. For every time you have named the name of Jesus, God will bring you into judgment; for every time that you have ever opened the word that tells of life and love; for every appeal He has ever made to your conscience, or your heart; for every prayer you have ever prayed; for every ray of light that has ever entered your dark soul — stroke after stroke of the eternal wrath will fall upon you for ever when you are cast into the lake of fire, the long long home of the Christless soul.

Oh! be persuaded to pause and consider these things while there is yet time. What have you for eternity? "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha," — accursed in the day of the Lord. (1 Cor. 16: 22.) And your heart tells you it is a stranger to love, a personal affection to Him, risen and glorified.

This is no part of your religion. What, then, is to be the end? A few more years, at most, of a heartless, Christless, religion; and then! then the thundercloud of wrath, that now hangs on the horizon, shall close in for ever on the blackness of darkness upon your soul. Satan, like a wily seducer, comes to you now with fair promises and false smiles; but when the willing dupe has become his victim, he will throw off the mask, and show himself to be the enemy of your soul, a liar and a murderer. God calls, but you refuse; He stretches out His hand, but you regard it not; but you set at nought all His counsel, and will none of His reproof. He beseeches you to be reconciled, but you turn your back upon Him. And when the end comes, and you are lost, damned, you will have yourself to blame; and if this be the end of a life of Christless morality and religion, what will be the end of a life of sin? Thus saith the Lord: —

"The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone — this is the second death." (Rev. 21: 8.) But why should one write such terrible things as these, if there were no glad tidings of salvation? Blessed be God, He has sent us good news about His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. God is love; and His love reached even to this sin-ruined world.

Though man despised and hated Him, He loved the world. But, while sin was unatoned for, God could deal with us only to condemn; and, therefore, when the fulness of the time was come, He sent His only begotten Son into the world; and it is a saying worthy of all acceptation, that He came to save sinners; not to condemn, but to save. He took sin upon Himself, and bore the sentence of death pronounced against us. He was made a curse for us, to redeem us from the curse of the law. And now, through the cross of Christ, there is life for the dead; salvation for the lost one; there is peace with God and glory through the Lord Jesus Christ. We have redemption through His blood; not our religion, but through His blood, the precious blood of Christ. Nothing can avail in this matter but DEATH, for it is death alone that can satisfy the righteous sentence of God against sin. If, as the eye rests upon these words, the heart yearns for a place to which it has been hitherto a stranger, and longs for something to satisfy the cravings, that may indeed be quenched, but never can be satisfied by the husks of the world's religion, or its pleasures, or its sins: — turn to the tenth chapter of Romans, and, for the first time, read the words as a message to your own soul from a living loving God, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Yes, it is for you, read it again.

"We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." (2 Cor. 5: 20, 21.)

W. T. T.

"Rejected Convictions"

The following solemn fact was some time ago related by one who could attest its truth. It is inserted here, with the earnest hope that any who read it may be warned by it not to resist the dealings of God with conscience. Man's way and wish seems to be to work upon the feelings; God's invariable way is through the conscience: —

A young person who had been a hearer of the truth from the lips of one recently brought himself to know it, was conscience smitten and arrested. She had deep convictions, she told her mother, and she, a woman of pride and fond of the world, determined as far as she could to hinder what she saw plainly enough in her child; for this purpose she set every kind of worldly trap and snare for her feet, and when the child would plead her unhappy state of soul with her mother, she made her think lightly of it, saying, religion was never intended to make people gloomy or morbid; that she must go into society, that she must enjoy herself, and the world around her. Accordingly, she did go into society; but it was only for a little, as she sickened and drew near to death. As she lay on her dying bed, she called her mother and said, "Mother, when I am dead, and in my coffin, when my coffin is put down into the grave, do not allow any tombstone to be placed over me; neither let there be any epitaph chiselled on my grave stone, but let me be simply buried. And when I am in my coffin, and covered up under the sod, and you are in this room, open that wardrobe, dear mother; and you will see my last ball dress, and when you look upon that dress, you will see the sign of your sin, and of my doom." Thus she died. Oh reader, be warned; be entreated to pause and reflect ere you say like Felix, "Go thy way for this time." Remember, TO-MORROW is the word by which Satan blinds and deceives.

W. T. T.

"Complete in Him"

Now I live in resurrection,

Death and judgment past for me;

Jesus bore it all in person,

Bare the cross, and set me free.

Once I stood in condemnation,

Waiting thus the sinner's doom;

He in death has wrought salvation,

God hath raised Him from the tomb!

Once I lay in death's dark prison,

Bound in fetters fast and strong;

He who took that place, now risen,

Shares with me His victory won.

Once I was to God a stranger,

Fill'd with enmity and fear;

He, the Father's great Revealer,

Made Him known, and brought ME near.

Now I see in Christ's acceptance

But the measure of my own;

He who lay beneath my sentence,

Seated high upon the throne.

Quicken'd, raised, and in Him seated,

I a full deliverance know:

Every foe has been defeated,

Every enemy laid low.

Now, I have a life in union

With the risen One above,

Now, I drink in sweet communion

Some rich foretaste of His love.

Love so great that none can measure,

Length, nor breadth, nor depth, nor height —

Love, which found in me its pleasure,

Which has turn'd to day my night.

Soon, O Lord, in brightest glory,

All its vastness I'll explore;

Soon I'll cast my crown before Thee,

Whilst I worship and adore.

Saved Now and for Ever

Luke 23: 39-46.

In Luke 23: 39-46 is described the manner of God's grace to a thief on the cross. It is the great instance of the grace of God to a sinner; that of Saul of Tarsus is the greatest. The popular idea that it refers to a death-bed repentance is not correct; it is to show the grace of God, and what it does for a sinner in his most extreme state. Here is a thief cast out of the world, righteously put out according to law. He had transgressed grievously — his state could not be worse — the world could not endure him any longer. This is a lesson to many in the present day. Here is a man who is so incorrigible that there is no attempt to reform him, the only remedy is to put him to death. It is remarkable, while man feels in this way of a criminal who acts badly towards his fellow man, he has not got the sense in his soul, I have sinned against God, and have incurred His righteous judgment. When man finds his fellow is incorrigible, he says there is no help for it but to get rid of him — we must put him to death. It is right; the law of God sanctions it. God, in His righteousness, inflicts the same on man — a sinner. God said to man in the garden of Eden, "of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die:" that is, in my righteousness, if you act according to your own will in contradiction to my will, you must die. If you see a thief punished, you say it is just what he deserves. Why? Because he is incorrigibly bad. Now, you see how it is with God. If you set up a will contrary to His will you are incorrigible — you must die.

One knows in his heart that he is under the sentence of death — even a child is aware of that — no animal has the suspense of it but man. Animals can enjoy the earth, but the moment man is true to himself he loses his enjoyment. Learned men tell us the deepest thought is allied to melancholy. What a statement! Why? Because it has gone down to the root of things. Man has capacity for enjoyment, but a deep thought must be melancholy, because he sees his doom. People are not awakened to the fact that the life they have, as men, is under judgment. Adam did not adhere to the will of God, but set up his own will; his mind is alienated from God, and righteously he must die. And man has the sense in his soul that he must suffer judgment at the hand of God, and that he cannot meet it. What then? God comes in and meets it, and gives His Son to bear the judgment upon us. "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Christ sheds His blood, the propitiation for our sins. He has taken upon Himself all the judgment that rests on me, hence he says (John 12: 24), "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit." Here is the thief on the cross; man is putting him out of the world, but man's judgment cannot go beyond this world. "Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do; but I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear. Fear him which, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, fear him." This is the distinction between what man can do, and what God can do. Here is man putting a criminal to death in righteousness, and grace bringing this sinner to heaven through the death of the Son of God. The thief dies, his legs are broken, not one bit of his temporal punishment is remitted, yet the Lord says to him, "To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."

There are two sides to grace. They are both brought out in the same passage. (Luke 14.) Grace provides everything. "All things are ready." the doors are open — that is one side. The other is, Compel them to come in." It is God's doing; God makes all ready, and He compels. "He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters." I say, who sent the earthquake to the jailer? Was it to let out the apostle? Not merely, but to bring the jailer on his knees to learn salvation. Who sent the famine to the prodigal? Who comes with bright light to the soul of Saul of Tarsus, and flashes it in, in spite of all the force of Satan? Who was it that suddenly arrested a poor woman in the city of Nain, so that she says, Though I am a notorious sinner, Jesus is my Saviour? Where did that come from? The grace of God compelling her to come in. It is not only that all is ready, and all the doors open, and the message is sent forth, but you must come in and find out the things that are prepared. Christ, at the end of His course, effects the reversal of all the damage that Satan had done in Eden. Here is this man, a sinner not tolerated among men, deprived of his life — the dearest thing to a man. God's Son comes in and says, I bear the judgment, and he takes the man the world cannot tolerate in a new nature to the third heaven. "To-day shalt thou be with me." This is what Christ's death achieves for the sinner. When done with this scene, like the thief, you pass into a perfect, blessed state, into paradise with Christ. Now, if you do not believe that this is the grace of God to one still on earth, something must be imperfect in the way you see the righteousness brought in. If you think the way cannot be quite clear until you are dead yourself, then you do not see that you are as yet dead in the sight of God. If you are dead righteously, you cannot be regarded as alive righteously. You say, I am alive in myself. I admit it, but settle the question of God's righteousness. Was God righteous to give the thief association with His Son? Yes; because he was dead, and all was gone that had brought in the judgment. Then you do not believe that, in the eye of God, you are as dead as that man was. If you do not believe that God's righteousness is complete till you are dead, it must be imperfect as it stands. If I, a believer in Christ, am not as dead in the sight of God as ever I will be, God's righteousness is not complete. God says you are dead; you say, "I am a sinner every hour of the day." Quite true; but if you say God is not perfectly free to make you conscious of His salvation till you are in the grave, you call in question the righteousness of God. Why put it off till you are a corpse? Because you do not believe that judgment is complete till you are one. Now, God "hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin;" hence He says, "If one died for all, then were all dead, and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them and rose again." A believer has to do with a risen One. If all the judgment is not borne, there is not righteousness; if all is borne, then there is righteousness. I am dead with Christ. The apostle says, "ye are dead." There is no question about it. The moment I look at Christ risen I know I am "a new creature" in Him, breathing the peace of His life as distinctly by the Spirit as the thief did in the third heaven.

We do not get resurrection in Luke, but we get it in Romans 4: 25. Christ was "delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God;" and hence, in chapter 8: 2, "the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." I am free; it is plain to any exercised conscience. God's Son not only bears the judgment, but it is complete. The life I live in the body shall pass away, but I breathe life in Christ distinctly by the Spirit of God. If I only find acceptance when I die, then judgment is not complete till I die. I say it is complete in the cross, if not so I am not justified: "He was raised again for our justification." (See Romans 5: 1.) I get beyond Luke 23. Christ is a Man out of judgment. I had to do with a man under judgment, now I have God's Son out of judgment, and righteousness is imputed to me if I believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead. I have to do with the God that raised Him, "being justified by faith." I am on new ground — resurrection ground — with Christ. There is nothing to offend God's eye there! Are you there? That is the point. Are you in the Man out of judgment? "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature." You were in the man who was under judgment, now you are by faith connected with the One who went under judgment, and has risen out of it — dead with Christ, and alive in Him.

You never have perfect peace till you see every atom of you has been judged in the cross. If every atom has been judged, where is the atom to rise against you? We are on an island; everything is perfect, God has judged everything in the cross of Christ. "We glory in tribulations." I am in a scene of sorrow, but I endure. The very roughness hardens me, and brings out patience. I have to do with God, and my very difficulties become opportunities for God to show His grace and mercy to me, "knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, ['Experience' means testing], and experience hope." I hope, I do not despair because of the pressure, "it maketh not ashamed." I fall back to the foundation of everything; hope is not at the bottom, but at the top. "And the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us."

"When we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." That brings us back to the thief on the cross. "God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." The thief is an example; he dropped the thief-life and got another — an endless life, a perennial life — that never fails, never wearies; he got life in Christ. "To-day shalt thou be with me."

Now, will you, my reader, say "I do not want this great salvation. I will go to my domestic comforts, and turn my back on what God in His grace provided for sinners?" God sends forth the tidings of His grace, and will you say, "I refuse His offer"? J. B. S.

"It Behoved Christ to Suffer and to Rise"

Luke 24: 46.

There are two thoughts of immense moral power in these words, "one man should die . . . . that the whole nation perish not," — they bring before the heart the great truth of man's ruin and God's salvation in a striking way.

Caiaphas, the high priest (in this the unconscious mouth-piece of the Holy Ghost), gives expression to it in the above words: "It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people;" and as you read those words and ponder them, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ come to your mind, "ought not Christ to suffer?" — "it behoved Christ to suffer."

Let us now examine a little together, wherein consists this "ought not" — this divine moral necessity, if I may thus reverently speak.

First. It was because of what God in His own Being is, and ever was, a righteous, holy, sin-hating God; at the same time a gracious, merciful, long-suffering God, who would spare sinners; a God of love.

In the second place, it was because of what man was, and is, a self-willed, rebellious, sin-loving creature. God had made the world, and all was very good; last of all, He made man in His own image; placed him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it, surrounded him with the tokens of God's care, and restricted him from eating the fruit of one tree, viz., the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Here in this garden, where everything was a perpetual reminder of the interest and care of his Creator, man willingly believes the lie of Satan, harbours in his breast a slander against God, and, acting under its influence, sets up his own will; and in the exercise of it appropriates to himself what God under penalty had restricted. What a picture! the creature of the handiwork of God, in opposition to the will of his Creator, has acted for himself, and has forfeited the place of blessing in which God had placed him, and the life in which he was to enjoy the blessing given him there. He has subjected himself to the penalty which God has announced, and is driven out from the presence of God — a fallen man.

We now have man, the head of God's creation, outside of Eden, in the wide waste of this world, having a nature at variance with God, and with only a forfeited life between him and the judgment, which ends in being cast into the lake of fire! What a scene! What a desolation!

What now is to be done? On whose side would you say the first movement towards reconciliation should take place ? Of course on man's; because it was he who brought about this distance from God. It was man, therefore, that was bound in every way to repair the breach, which the following of his own will had introduced, between him and his Creator. Instead of this, from God Himself in His wondrous rich grace, super-abounding grace from God, the offended One, the first movement comes! He discloses that He desires not that the distance should continue; and as man would not, and still further cannot repair it, the blessed God undertakes to do so, and hence it becomes necessary that the divine requirements should be met, and the penalty which man had incurred should be borne. Hence the blessed God gave His Son, who was perfect and spotless, to be chargeable with His people's guilt; and He, the Lord Jesus Christ, bore the judgment, endured the penalty in grace, gave up His own life in order that the love of God, who gave Him to die, might travel out worldwide to all

Now we can understand the "ought not Christ to suffer, and enter into his glory?" The expediency that one man should die. What a penalty, and with what a price was it not paid! God's dear Son laying down His life for us: and more, that He might read out to us the heart of the living God! W. T. T.

"Caught Away, or Left Behind"

1 Thessalonians 4; 2 Thessalonians 2.

These are the words by which God is pleased to describe the condition of all who shall be alive when the Lord comes; for there will be a people positively alive on earth, some of whom shall be caught up or rapt away to meet the Lord in the air, and some of whom shall be left behind, to be deceived and destroyed, to believe a lie because they would not receive the love of the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness: words fail to describe the blessedness of the one or the terrible nature of the other.

In the 4th chapter of 1 Thessalonians we are told the order of the first, namely, the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ for His own. This might happen at any moment, at most a little while, and "He that shall come will come, and will not tarry." Reader, I challenge your heart, are you ready? Can you say in truthfulness and honesty of soul, "Come, Lord Jesus"? I feel this is a searching matter for a Christian, and it ought to be; but if one, whose title is clear to say it, hesitates before using such words, with what a chill ought they to fall on the ears of the one who is not ready, and has no title whatever. When the Lord comes and takes away His own, the rest are left behind. What a thought that! To survive all that is worth living for is terrible indeed. To be an inhabitant of the world when Satan is allowed to put forth his man in unrestrained power will be the lot of all in Christendom who are found outside of Christ when He comes for His own. Listen to what is said of Satan's man, "whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved." Reader, should Christ come now, would that be your lot, your portion? Listen to what is said of the end of such: — "That they all might be damned who believe not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." The blessed contrast is in those who have believed the gospel, the good news of God about His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and who, in consequence, are entitled to look for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, His coming, and our gathering together unto Him. It is said of the Thessalonian saints, that they "turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven." Reader, have you?

W. T. T.

"Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain"

Lamb of God! we bow before Thee.

Calv'ry's tale creation awed;

Well may Thy redeem'd adore Thee,

While we sound this note abroad —

Calv'ry's Victim

Vindicates the throne of God!

Saviour God! the altar's craving

Thou hast satisfied with blood!

Now in heaven fresh incense waving

Sweetly sounds this note abroad —

Calv'ry's Victim

Fills with joy the heart of God!

Man of sorrows! God of glory!

Wondrous path Thy foot hath trod;

Cross and crown rehearse the story,

Joyous sounds this note abroad —

Calv'ry's Victim

Now adorns the throne of God!

The Wreck and the Island

Man in himself is born to die. He comes forth in bloom and freshness like a flower, to droop and wither away under the very influences which at first he successfully resists.

Man in his history is like a ship at sea, at first riding triumphantly over the waters in which he at last (be the voyage long or short) sinks and disappears! "Death hath passed on all men, for all have sinned." (Rom. 5: 12.) "It is appointed unto men once to die" (Heb. 9: 27), and however brightly or usefully man may pursue his course here, mastering the power under which eventually he will succumb; yet the time comes, when he must bow to the power of death. Man in his brightest day is but the ship in trim, with all her sails set; but it must become a wreck sooner or later; and the greater or grander the ship, the greater the wreck. The end of man must be wreck, for he is a sinner, and death is the wages of sin. Death is the judgment on man.

God so loved the world, that He sent His Son, who was not a man until He came here. He enters on this scene, born of woman, in order to bear the judgment resting on man. He went under the sea of death and judgment, — the very sea in which man is sinking, and rising out of it in the power of His own life, He is now the Island, for every one who believes in Him to land on. Believing in Him I leave the wreck, or the ship which is doomed to be a wreck, for the Island, and then, in a new region, I enjoy peace, and receive life in the Holy Ghost from the Lord Jesus Christ. If you do not believe in the Island, you continue on the wreck; but if you do — if you believe in Christ, who has risen out of death and judgment — you will abandon the man who is under judgment, and, like the thief on the cross (Luke 23: 41), you will say, and I indeed justly (I, the man — the wreck), I receive in condemnation the due reward . . . . but this man (Christ) hath done nothing amiss. I leave the wreck for the Island.

"This man" is the one for me for evermore, my life and eternal portion. J. B. S.

Fragment

"There is nothing like the cross. It is the meeting of the perfect sin of man with the perfect love of God: sin risen up to its highest point of evil, and gone, put away, and lost in its own worst act. God is above man even in the height of his sin — not in allowing it, but in putting it away by Christ dying for it in love. The soldier's insulting spear, the witness if not the instrument of death, was answered by the blood and water which expiated and purified from the blow which brought it out." J. N. D.

"A Feast of Fat Things"

Luke 14: 15-24.

In verses 7-12 of this chapter the Lord exposes man; whether it was the invited guest, or the inviting host, they were alike marked by a feature common to both, namely, self-seeking. This has been the character of man from the very first, and it will characterise man as such to the very end. Is it not a comfort to your soul to turn away from such a picture to the blessed contrast which these words afford! "when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind:" is not that a short and simple statement of what the blessed God has done in the gospel of His Son, the Lord Jesus? The gospel or good news of God always makes God prominent; those two words in verse 13 "make" and "call," declare to us what He, and He alone could do — they also drew forth from some one present the expression, "blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God," which words gave an opportunity to the Lord, in a parable, to set forth what was in the heart of God.

First. — The supper which God made was an expression of His heart — of Himself; in all the freeness of His love He makes it, and in all the largeness of His heart it is a great supper. If I think of what it cost the blessed God to spread this feast, who can say how vast it was? If I think of the supper itself, who can measure its greatness? Have you, my reader, ever thought of this? the blessed God purposed in His heart, and in righteousness performed it — unasked, unsought, He Himself would spread the feast; and that He may do it in a way worthy of Himself, He gives up His only begotten Son to come down and here to taste death and judgment, the whole righteous indignation of God against sin, in order that God might have His way of love. The barriers which man's sin had set up between himself and God, God undertakes to remove at cost to Himself, in order that He may bring poor lost man (in a new condition and in a new life) into the full circle of His favour, of His love. Can anything be more wonderful, can anything equal it? His Son, the Lord Jesus, thus given and sent forth, comes, and in this world where God had shown His interest in man, but where man displayed his disregard of God and dishonoured Him, He, that blessed One, glorified God, as I have said, goes in grace under the waves of death and judgment, and establishes God's righteousness in order that He may declare God's love.

Secondly. — We have the estimate which man forms of all this — the manner in which he treats this unmatched grace of God. Man has no heart for it; the things of earth are chosen in preference to the supper of God. What a picture of man! is it a picture of you, my reader? All that is here has its place and interest, but what the blessed God has provided, and at cost, man has no desire for it. And here do you not see how that things here have the tendency to turn the heart away from Christ? It is not that things are wrong in themselves; all that are here pleaded as having a prior claim on man are not unlawful but lawful things — but their tendency is to make man refuse God's supper. (See Deut. 8: 7-20.)

Lastly. — The love which spread the feast will also bring in the guests, will compel them to come in; many and varied are the ways by which this is effected, but what the heart of God purposes, the hand of God accomplishes, His right hand of power is the servant of His love. It may be an earthquake, as with the jailer at Philippi; or light from heaven above the brightness of the sun flashed into the heart, as with the persecutor on his mission of death; yet they both come from the same blessed source, from Him who awakens fear in the heart, and then takes it out of it; from Him who gives the sense of need, in order that He may bring the soul into a region where need is unknown; from Him who will have His house filled with a company who shall be eternally debtors  to the grace which not only provided such a feast for them, the full circle of the joys of God, the fatted calf, but which also sought them out in the highways and hedges, poor and maimed, and halt and blind. Oh, blessed grace that would take no refusal, but compelled them to come in.

Not half His love can I express,

Yet Lord with joy my lips confess —

This blessed portion I possess,

O Lamb of God, in Thee.

Thy precious name it is I bear,

In Thee I am to God brought near,

And all the Father's love I share,

O Lamb of God, in Thee.  —  W. T. T.

Perfected for Ever

Hebrews 10: 14.

In the 9th chapter (the previous one) is set forth, unfolded, the manner in which sins are put away, by the one offering of Jesus Christ; whereas in this chapter, the subject is, how this is applied to the conscience, so purging it, that no dread of God's judging because of sins any longer remains — so full, perfect, and sufficient is Christ's offering, that by Him all who believe are not only justified from all things, but are entitled to be within the holiest, and to know it. Could anything be more wonderful or excellent? Within the veil, where of old only one man, of one tribe, of one nation, on one day of the year could enter; there, too, not by sufferance, but in right and title, and suited for such a place, having a conscience so purged that it is fit for the presence of God. I may just observe in passing, that the Hebrews shows the twofold position of a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. As regards heaven, he is, as in this chapter, within the holiest now; as regards this world, his place is outside the camp, as in chapter 13. On this latter I do not now enlarge, it does not come within my present purpose.

Let us look a little at the foundation of this great salvation. — First, as we have it in verse 10, "By the which, will we are sanctified." God willed not, and had no pleasure in the death of a sinner, nor had He pleasure in the sacrifices offered by the law, which could never make the worshipper perfect. In these repeated sacrifices there was a remembrance of sin every year, "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins, wherefore when he cometh into the world he saith, Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me: in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure [which are offered by the law], then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me) to do thy will, O God" — thus we are let into the secrets that passed between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world. It was the will of God, and the Son sets Himself to do that will: "a body hast thou prepared me." Oh, how different from the natural conceptions of God! how eclipsed, even the very best thoughts about His character and love! He willed it, and what His heart conceived, the Son of His love will undertake to accomplish. Will you, my reader, say what are your thoughts about God? Who ever could have stooped so low, in a love that removed all that hindered its expression out of the way, at the cost of all that was dear to itself? Such then was His will, which is the great source and spring of this wonderful display of grace. Second, we have the Person and work by which it has been accomplished. The Person, [the Lord Jesus, the Eternal Son of God; He it was who took a body prepared for Him by God, and in it glorified His Father, as well as established a righteous ground upon which God can be "just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus." Listen to His own words, "therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. I have glorified thee on the earth, I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." He was the one who shed His blood, the righteousness of God demanded the blood of a victim perfect and excellent. Sin could be put away by nothing less, and for the purging of the conscience there was wanted nothing more. He it was who by the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God — (as He alone could) — and now that very same righteousness of God raises Him up from the dead, from the very death wherein He glorified God, and sets Him in glory, and likewise rends the veil from the top to the bottom! Could anything be more wonderful! "This man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God . . . . for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." This one offering accomplished what the blood of bulls and of goats, shed from the beginning of the world, could never do; this one offering needed no repetition, so there remaineth no more offering for sin.

Lastly, we have the way by which it is known and enjoyed in those words, "whereof the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us . . . . their sins and iniquities I will remember no more." Reader, have you the knowledge and enjoyment of this? could there be anything equal to the blessed certainty in the soul, founded on God's will, Christ's offering, and the Holy Ghost's testimony? The Holy Ghost could not have come down until Jesus was glorified; but Christ being glorified out of the very judgment by which He for ever put away sin — the Holy Ghost comes down. Wherever I look, I see infinite power, and infinite love — the love that gave Christ, and brought Him down to the grave, and the power that raised Him up and set Him at the right hand of glory. W. T. T.

"Life or Judgment"

John 5: 21-27.

The Lord Jesus Christ is set forth in these scriptures as the One who gives life and judgment. He occupies that position in respect to man as such, that every child of Adam must receive from Him one or other. The fullest and most blessed testimony had been given to the fact that in Him was life, and the condemnation of men consisted in this, that they would not come to Him that they might have life. That He is despised and refused, is even now the condemnation where the name of Christ is named. Man was in death, but judgment was not yet executed. It is the same now. But whenever a person has listened to Christ's voice, and owned the Father in sending Him, he hath everlasting life; he is passed from death unto life. Here is the escape; and here begins all the exercises of holy affections towards God. A child cannot love its parents before it is born, but it does love long before it can express it. There is life and love before there is intellectual explanation. Here is the difference between law and gospel. Law sets a man to do before he gets life, whilst christian holiness and affections flow from the fact of having life. We get life first, and then begin to walk. Christ is the life-giver to His people: first to soul, and then to body. The Son comes forth from the Father, dies, and then communicates His life. That into which life so communicated brings us is immense, namely, all the Father's purposes in the Son. But the link to the soul is as simple as possible. What is the effect? Why, that Christ becomes everything. There is a distinction between judgment and life. Now, Christ gives life. When He comes as a judge, He does not give life; He comes then for judgment. There is no confusion or mingling of the two. If judgment comes in before grace has given life, no man can stand it. (See Ps. 143: 2.) Christ now gives life in grace, then He will exercise judgment. Man might have continued in paradise, but he did not, he gave ear to Satan, exalted himself as God, followed his own lust and was disobedient, and consequently he first flies away from God, and then is judicially driven away. Man, whilst in enjoyment of blessing, trusts Satan. The suggestion of the devil was, "ye shall be as gods," and God said, "the man is become as one of us." Satan can tell the truth if it subserve sin. If we have the truth, nothing can touch us; but Satan can tell a great deal of truth if he can deceive by it. Here Satan did not tell the consequences of their eating. The first Adam listened, and he came by the ways of Satan to know good and evil; but it was by disobedience, and he continued not with God. Thus lust worked, disobedience followed, and consequently exclusion from God's presence.

Until Christ actually came, sin and Satan's power over man's heart is revealed throughout the word; for being a sinner he was driven out of paradise; but instead of becoming better by this judgment, Cain kills his brother. Then comes the flood: the world, save eight persons, is destroyed; yet afterwards they are as bad as ever. Noah gets intoxicated, and Ham dishonours his father. After this, idolatry enters. In the same way afterwards, the whole history of the children of Israel as a nation is stamped with this truth, that the principle of the heart was wrong; nay more, the nearer a man is to God externally the worse he is, unless there is a godly principle — that is, if the soul has not living fellowship with God. And how awfully can conscience deceive itself! The chief priests took the silver pieces and said, it is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood (Matt. 27: 6), but there was no scruple about giving the money which was to buy it. They were exact about external ceremonial points, but callous as to moral pravity.

But grace has risen over the whole state of man; however bad man may have been proved to be, the Son of man comes down in grace. But here we find the final proof of the evil principle which governs his heart put to the test by the ways of God towards him. His testimony is rejected: "ye will not come unto me that ye might have life." What is the consequence? "another shall come in his own name; him ye will receive." Here is a new form of evil. Man becomes an adversary. Man shall set himself up, and shall be received because he comes in his own name. It is the same principle as in the beginning of the world, only it is after Christ has appeared, so as to be without excuse or hope. Then man exalted himself to be as God to act after his own will, but he was really the tool of Satan. And the same thing will happen again, because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved.

Previous to this open manifestation, Satan introduces himself by a form of godliness. He does not show himself all at once. He would introduce all that would lead away from the simplicity of reliance upon the death of Christ and so ensnare.

How are we to detect all this? First, the believer must be set in heaven, not in body but in spirit, in the presence of God Himself. It was not so with the Jew. God was, so to speak, not then revealed in His full estimate of good and evil; but now the Holiest of all is open. The veil is rent. "The true light now shineth." There is nothing between us and God. Nothing will do that cannot stand in the light of His holiness. There were many things before which God did not approve, but which he permitted (see Mark 10: 5), but when Christ died, the full light of God was revealed. In Him divine goodness made its brightest exhibition in the world, displaying itself in all grace. The death of Christ was the expression of man's deliberate hatred to God. The full evil of the world and the full grace of God both came out at the cross; here God's perfect love was shown. The case of man before God since the death and resurrection of Christ, is, that if man stand before God at all, he must stand in the full light of His holiness. It shone out in the absolute putting away of sin, and that by the worst act of man's sin. Trusting to the perfect work of Christ, the more the searching eye of God rests upon me, the more does He discover the perfect value of the blood of Christ. The clearer the light, the more it is to show that not a spot is on me. He sees the efficacy of the blood of His own provided Lamb — His own Son — in putting sin away. The same light that detects it, manifests its being utterly put away, yea, has burst forth and shone in the putting of it away. J. N. D.

A Saviour in Glory

What wondrous tale of love and grace,

Faith readeth in the Saviour's face

Enthroned in glory now!

Things hidden from the curious ear

That hung upon His words down here,

Shine there upon His brow.

Yea, blessed One, we see Thee there,

The Victor's crown is resting where

Once press'd the crown of thorn;

Centre and Sun of heaven art Thou,

Who once beneath its wrath did bow,

God's wrath, and human scorn.

'Tis joy to know Thy travail done

Rememb'ring all Thy blood hath won

In righteousness divine,

Thy happy saints look up and praise,

Words fail us fitting song to raise,

For such a love as Thine.

But we can dwell within the bright

Unhinder'd cloudless glory light,

That shineth down from God,

And call to fellow-sinners round

To taste the blessing we have found —

Fruit of that toil and blood.

Oh! 'tis a wondrous blessed tale

That breaks upon earth's trouble wail,

Points rebel souls to heaven:

Tells them the King upon His throne

Loves them — can have them for His own

In righteousness forgiven.

Then tell the wonder through the earth

In homes of sorrow, halls of mirth,

A Saviour in the glory —

Yea, sound it in the deaden'd ears

Of travellers through this vale of tears,

That men may hear the story.

"Who is on Our Side — Who?"

Romans 8: 31-39.

In the ward of a city hospital lay a young man, whose emaciated form and pallidly-worn face spoke of days and months of suffering. Yet there was a peaceful, quiet, calm expression in the features of this child of pain. As the hour of release drew near — for death was evidently at hand — the question was put, What about your peace? Without the slightest hesitation, the answer came from the lips that were soon to be hushed in the silence of death, "Oh, sir, I have got peace; sure God is for me." It often struck me since how significant was such testimony from one who did not seem to have the least joy — indeed, he often said that perpetual suffering left him bereft of everything but his peace. It is a grand point, dear reader, to have the feet on such ground. "God is for me" — and, indeed, where redemption is fully underneath the soul, what other conclusion can we arrive at? It is the grand conclusion of the doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans. "If [or since] God be for us, who can be against us?" What do I see in God's giving His Son? I see God for me. What do I see in God's forsaking Christ? (Why hast Thou forsaken Me?) I see God for me. What do I hear in that cry, "My God, my God"? I hear the words — God is for me; and how plainly I see it and hear it in Him, who went down into the judgment, endured the whole of divine wrath against sin, rose again, the Head of a new creation, and announces that peace which He had made in His cross, in those words, "Peace be unto you." It is a wonderful rest to the heart to find out after all our natural misgivings, after all Satan's lies, God is for us; it is a tower of strength which is invincible; it is a fortress which never yet was taken. "God for us." Reader, do you hesitate about it? Do you question it? Listen to how God Himself pleads the truth of it with you: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all" — it is a simple, undeniable, convincing fact. "He spared not his own Son." Do you remember the scene of Genesis 22, where the faith of Abraham is tested, and rises to the claims and demands of God? Do you remember how every word expressing the demand of God upon him, must have penetrated to the quick the soul of the Father? "Take now thy son," not only so, but "thine only son Isaac," and not only so, "but whom thou lovest." As if God had said, I ask you to break the tenderest link, the dearest tie and bond you have, destroy your connection with the promise (in Isaac shall thy seed be called). And do you remember what the testimony of God from heaven was concerning the faith that rose triumphant above everything to God Himself? "Now I know," says God, "thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me." And, reader, has not that same God put like words into your mouth? For standing on the resurrection side of the cross, with death, judgment, and hell behind you, gazing by faith on Him who once hung bearing the judgment on that cross, on Him who there, by His death, not only established divine righteousness, but also the ground of relationship with His Father, now our Father — I say do not these words spring up from the moved depths of your soul: now I know God is for me, seeing He has not withheld His Son, His only Son, from me? W. T. T.

The Lord Jesus in Moses, the Prophets, and all the Scriptures

Luke 24: 27.

How blessed to have Himself thus brought before the soul, and that, too, by Himself! What a scene the above must have been, the Lord Jesus showing Himself in Moses, all the prophets, and the scriptures! Is not the Holy Ghost here for this very purpose now? Come, then, aside for a little from the vain strife and contentions of this hour, and see if He will not recall scattered thoughts and confused minds from all else, and present an object that is worthy — oh, how worthy! — of our entire occupation, adoration, and praise. The Lord help us while we search the scriptures for "the things concerning himself."

It is impossible not to observe the prominence which that one word Himself has all through scripture: for instance, if I think of the cross, and all connected with it; of the love of God, the righteousness of God, or of that which necessitated the death of the Son of God; if a fallen guilty rebel like man was ever to be reconciled and saved, how do I find it brought before me? Is it not the presentation of that blessed One Himself, whose love carried Him into death, that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death? and so it is that we read such words as "who gave himself for our sins." (Gal. 1: 4.)

"Gave himself for me." (Gal. 2: 20.)

"Who gave himself a ransom for all." (1 Tim. 2: 6.)

"When he had by himself purged our sins." (Heb. 1: 3.)

"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree . . . . by whose stripes ye were healed." (1 Peter 2: 24.) Do you not observe how Himself is the centre of it all? Oh, how blessedly special and particular the Spirit of God is! — it is not the benefit, but the blessed Benefactor Himself; it is "His own self," "His own body," "His stripes!" What language most suits such as you and me in the presence of Himself so presented? Is it not "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing?"

Again: If I think of the resurrection, and all connected therewith and proclaimed thereby, the perfection of the atoning work of Himself, and the proclaimed vindication of righteousness established in the cross of Himself, how do I find it brought before me? It is the Person still and not the fact. "He is not here, for he is risen." (Matt. 28: 6.)

"The Lord is risen indeed." (Luke 24: 34.)

"Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again." (Rom. 8: 34.)

"Now is Christ risen from the dead." (1 Cor. 15: 20.) "Who by him do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead and gave him glory, that your faith and hope might be in God." (1 Peter 1: 21.) Such is the way Himself risen from the dead is presented in the word of God; but look how the Lord Jesus announces this wondrous fact to His disciples. To them His death had been as the blighting of every hope and the scattering of every prospect; if in His death their hopes had died, they buried them in His grave, never, as they thought, to rise again; and when tidings of His being risen reached them, carried by the women who visited the sepulchre very early in the morning, the first day of the week, it seemed to the disciples as idle tales, and they believed them not; consequently when He Himself, the risen One, appears, fear and terror seize their hearts: resurrection they may have treated as an idle tale, but now the One who is the resurrection is before them. What a subject! Oh, the grace, the tenderness of the Lord Jesus! How does He reassure their hearts? How does He restore confidence? "Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself." It is Himself again; "He showed them his hands and his feet," and joy takes the place of fear and dismay. Is that all? Is it only joy? "They worshipped him with great joy." (Luke 24: 52.) But now observe, further, He has gone away from earth — "He is not here;" what a blank! Alas, that it is not more felt and realised! We are here in a hostile scene, amid the descendants of those who crucified as well as themselves rejecters of Himself: has He left us orphans? Do we not know that if faith follows Him into the heavens, and beholds Him highly exalted there, faith also follows the Holy Ghost sent forth from the heavens, to connect us here with Himself there in glory? Do I call those who are united by the Holy Ghost to Christ in glory, orphans? Do I call them for whom Himself is now preparing a place in the heavens, orphans? And is that orphanage whose prospect is this: "I will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also? "But do you not observe that it is Himself that is all? "Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift." (2 Cor. 9: 15.) W. T. T.

The Lord hath Triumphed Gloriously

On resurrection ground I stand,

Where death and judgment roll between

My soul and that dark dismal land,

Where once my life and hopes had been;

Those floods which fill'd me with alarm,

My every foe doth now disarm.

The Lord hath triumph'd gloriously;

The horse and rider, where are they?

Engulf'd beneath a surging sea,

Which rolling back bars up the way;

No foe can reach me in this place,

Nor yet can I my steps retrace.

A Man of war, Jehovah is,

And He hath triumph'd gloriously;

His strength is mine, my foes are His,

Who then, my soul, can harm thee?

Thus shelter'd by the sprinkled blood,

On eagle's wings I'm brought to God.

Redeem'd by blood, redeem'd by power,

Farewell to Egypt's dark abode;

I press me onward to that hour

When, face to face, I'll see my God;

And then my theme shall ever be,

"The Lord hath triumph'd gloriously."

"God was in Christ"

2 Corinthians 5.

There are two great aspects of the gospel in this chapter, first, That to which we are called, and for which we are made fit; second, The testimony God has brought out of sin in us, and Christ's work meeting it. It is good to apprehend what the calling of God is, in order to know what is needed to be in it. There is no reconciliation of the old thing as such, but complete reconciliation in the new man. The judgment of man is pronounced, "now is the judgment of this world." God's dealings with man in the flesh are over, the flesh is set aside for ever. In the new state of things brought in by Christ in resurrection, "all things are of God." As to the body we are not in it yet, therefore it is good to be "absent from the body and present with the Lord." The moment we get hold of our calling "to his kingdom and glory" (1 Thess. 2: 12), we are brought into the presence of God, He is also enabling the soul to apprehend the glory. It sees that a work entirely of God must be done in order that man may enter glory. Could you put yourself into Christ's glory? "He that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God." The presence of God revealed to the soul, gives true thorough conviction of sin. It does not mind what man thinks, because it knows what God thinks. Sin is a shameful thing, but the presence of God produces thoughts that are beyond shame. The moment the soul is before God, it hates, judges sin, cannot think of hiding it, would rather be in truth before God" there is truth in the inward parts; "shame before man leads to the concealment of sin. God's true light manifests everything, but when the heart is set right, it takes God's side against sin — there is forgiveness; all is right when looking at what we are in the presence of God. We are called to "God's kingdom and glory" to be conformed to the image of His Son. We have a life; divine glory belongs to that life. It is God that justifies. He says that is right in my eyes, God Himself pronounces. That is what I want; this full blessed justification connects itself with glory: "Whom he justified them he also glorified." "We wait for the hope of righteousness." (Gal. 5: 5.) This is what God is calling us into in Christ. That which is announced in the gospel is Christ as man is in divine glory. It is "the gospel of the glory of Christ." That has been done which has put man into the glory of God. This new thing is man, the centre of all the glory of God. It will be accomplished of course in Christ by-and-by, "that in the dispensation of the fulness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth" — or as it is expressed in Revelation, "the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." It is to this glory of Christ we are called. It shines in upon the soul. Are you fit for this glory? If not, what are you fit for? You can't stay here on earth for ever. Where are you going? If not into the light it must be into the darkness, that is opposite to it. There is no medium. We have this in the parable of the king's son — Jesus had spoken of seeking fruit before; now He is speaking of grace that seeks nothing, it is a feast prepared. Those bidden are from the highways and hedges, and no matter what they were before, but they must have the wedding garment. The prodigal must have the best robe to enter the house — he must be suited to the house. Have you, my reader, got that? We see what the calling is; can you say, "I have got what is fit for the glory I am going into"?

You may be getting it, the Lord leading you into it, but without it what are you fit for? you must either be outside or with the wedding garment inside. "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." Did He not suit Himself to all to win their hearts? He came with the invitation to turn back to God; but no — they would not: for His love He got hatred — terrible witness of man's entire ruin — he is dead: alive indeed for himself and for his fellow-men, but there is no movement of his heart toward God. "He came to his own and his own received him not." Yet in Christ there is perfect love — no reproach. Paul saw the terribleness of the judgment and set about to persuade men. The love of Christ is still pressing upon men the truth that we are dead: the link between man and God is broken and cannot be formed again. Does the cross say, "Christ had set the world right"? "One died for all," unspeakable love, "then were all dead." Has your soul been brought to the conviction, "that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing"?

Could you say you would not have put Christ to death? Could you say, "He would not have died for me, He might have helped me, purified me"? If not, then you must say, "I am dead, lost, I have no link in heart with God!" The old creation is a judged condemned thing — you as children of Adam belong to it; the question is, whether you get out of it? Man has emancipated himself from God; what infidelity does, is, justify and proclaim the fact: set up and cultivate man's will. Cain began this world without God. He went and built a city and called it by his son's name. They had instruments of music artificers there — all to make the world a pleasant place without God; and that is what man is doing still. He says it is with the faculties God has given — true: but what is the moral state of man's heart? Is he not away from God? Jesus came "to seek and to save that which was lost." I do not ask whether you recognise yourself as wicked, but whether you see yourself to be lost — dead? By nature we reject Christ, all our thoughts cluster round self. We prefer pleasure — everything in the world, our own will — to Christ. This is the condition of all naturally, was the condition of every one of us, but the One who was not dead, who was acceptable to God, the only One who could be, who was made sin for us. He stood in our place. He, the Holy Blessed One, was made sin. The quickening power of God shows us sin, but we see the whole thing closed on the cross. I see what flesh is, it crucified Christ — but I am not in it any longer, I belong to the new creation; I am in Christ, who is my righteousness, and gives me the title to enter in. We find the calling into God's kingdom and glory. We see the veil rent, and Christ is within as man, and in getting there, He has put away all that we were in the flesh. We have to contend with the flesh daily as an enemy, but as to our standing before God it is ended. In Christ we have entered into the new place: "you hath he reconciled." (Col. 1: 21.) There is not a thing left between me and God. We are brought into the glory of God. We wait for it indeed as to our bodies, and He has given us the earnest of the Spirit. We have the reconciliation — reconciliation to what? to God. He did it according to what God is, and we must judge sin according to what God is. When do we know it? now by faith; but we cannot receive it, till we have judged darkness to be darkness. God says, "where is My Son?" The world must plead guilty of His death; it saw no beauty in Christ, and now prefers pleasure, dress, money, science, anything to Him. I may have to learn a great deal, to go through much conflict, but if I belong to Christ, I am reconciled to God. "The love of Christ constraineth us" — is the ground of all our walk. You may have been living to yourself; it may have been very decently, none of what the world calls great sins, but there are plenty of decent enemies of God, and will reputation stand in the judgment? A Christian cannot live to himself in purpose, but are you living to yourself in practice ? You may say you are occupied in innocent things, but nothing can be innocent away from God. Have you judged yourself as belonging to a world that has rejected Christ? We have to leave it in detail — the flesh continually showing itself in unexpected ways. But God has condemned sin in the flesh. He forgives sins, but the state He has condemned, not forgiven. Have you known Him, made sin and yourself the righteousness of God in Him? Can you say, I am reconciled to God, brought back to Him? Can you say, I am glad to know all about my sin, "search me O Lord, and try my heart?" J. N. D.

"The Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ"

Acts 7: 55-60.

These verses bring the cross pointedly before the soul. Many have read them and have never seen it; many read them still and do not see it. There are two new facts found here, which the cross and the cross alone can explain. The glory of God and the inability of man on earth even to look on it are old facts; a man in the glory of God, there too as alive out of death, the death by which He glorified God and made atonement for sin, and a man on earth having in consequence a title and a capacity to look at it steadfastly, are the new things found here. If we turn for a little to Isaiah 6 there the glory of God carried terror and conviction and self-judgment into the breast of a real prophet of God, verse 5. "Woe is me for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." As if he said, prophet and people are exposed before Him, and I have no standing ground; and because of what he is, a provision is made as in verses 6, 7 . . . . Again the same with Ezekiel, as he tells us in chapter 1 of his prophecy, and after describing it says, in verse 28 — "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake." There is no sense of a title whatever, he falls down on his face, he cannot stand, there is no place for him to stand on, therefore his falling on his face only expresses his moral standing or condition. I turn to Daniel and I find the same with him, "a man greatly beloved" as he was, yet when he saw, he tells us, "there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words; and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground. And behold an hand touched me, which set me upon my knees, and upon the palms of my hands." (Chap. 10: 7-9.)

Is not this all very striking? Each of these servants of God, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, in themselves declaring their unfitness, as well as their sense of it, when in the presence of the glory of God; and let me draw especial attention to this one point, with each and all of them, it is not a question for an instant of what they had done, but of what they were, and this as told out to themselves by the glory of God.

Now, in striking contrast with all this, I find in Acts 7 that Stephen, not overtaken or surprised by the glory of God, so that he falls on his face, and says, "woe is me," but full of the Holy Ghost, he himself looks up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; there is no fear or terror, either with regard to what he sees in heaven, or to what is going on round about him on earth! What a wonderful sight, a poor weak lonely man as he is, able to look steadfastly at the glory of God, and able patiently to endure the murderous hatred of men. Will you, my reader, say wherein consists Stephen's power as compared with the inability of the prophets of old? One word will answer the question, namely, the CROSS — that Jesus, whom Stephen saw in the glory of God, had on the cross borne all the wrath of God against sin, and had so fully and perfectly glorified God, that God had glorified Him; Himself had said so, "If God be glorified in him, God shall glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him." (John 13: 32.) And scripture now bears testimony to the fact, namely, "raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father." (Rom. 6: 4.) . . . . "God who raised him up from the dead, and gave him glory." (1 Peter 1: 21.) Stephen sees in the glory of God then, his Saviour; He, that same Blessed One, who had been on the cross bearing the judgment, and in that hour had been forsaken of God, is now seen by Stephen in the glory of God; the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, was that by which Stephen had a righteous title to look at, what could but repel previous to the death of Christ; and it was from Jesus glorified, that blessed Spirit came down, who now turned Stephen's eye up. Such then is the divine fulness of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. He who once was there crucified by man now lives in power, glorified out of the place He took as the substitute of His people, and they have in virtue of His death a righteous title, and through the Holy Ghost a power to look up steadfastly into heaven.

"The Person of the Christ,

Enfolding every grace;

Once slain, but now alive again,

In heaven demands our praise."

"Oh fix our earnest gaze,

So wholly, Lord, on Thee;

That with Thy beauty occupied,

We elsewhere none may see." — W. T. T.

"The Conscience and the Heart"

John 4.

How the Lord shows in John 4, that conscience is the inlet to intelligence in divine things! and thus the heart becomes engaged. Rejected and driven out from Judea, He sat weary on the well of Sychar. A woman lonely (it was not the hour when women go forth to draw water) and weary with sin, evidently a strong and ardent nature that had sought happiness with eager pursuit, and sunk through it into sin, and had not found rest to her spirit (how many such there are in the world!) dragged on a life of toil, and in the midst of it, thought sometimes on Gerizim and Jerusalem, and knew there was a Messiah to come. There might be happiness and rest somewhere; she had none. Toil and weariness she had, and the last, evidently in spirit as well as body. Jesus had toil and weariness too, but through love, not through sin, save the sin of others, and this could not weary love, and He knew where rest was — He was it. The Son of God, the judge of all, had, humanly speaking, put Himself in a position where He was debtor to this woman for a drink of cold water. But He soon draws her out; He speaks of the gift of God, of a well of water springing up into everlasting life. All was dark in the Samaritan woman's mind. She moved in the circle of her own weariness; thus she felt the fruit of her sin and toil after happiness, and with all the moving within that predominated and filled her mind; for in fact, what had she else? What does the Lord do? "Go call thy husband and come hither." "I have no husband." "Thou hast well said," replied the Lord, "I have no husband; thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that speakest thou truly."

Now, a ray of light breaks in, "Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet." The word of God by the Lord had divine authority in her heart, because it has reached her conscience. She has found a man who has told her all that ever she did. Who knew that? The prophet's words had divine authority. Yet she does not yet get to wells of water. The divine com munications made to her were quite unintelligible; but much was done. He who knew all her life, all her sin, had been sitting in grace by her, willing to be helped by her. Grace was there as well as truth. She had found the Christ, and leaves her water-pot and her care with it, and becomes a messenger of that which is good news for all. Gerizim and Jerusalem are all alike, and alike nothing. The Father is seeking worshippers in spirit and in truth. — (Extracted.)

"The Jailer Liberated"

"And at midnight, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed. And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. But Paul cried out with a loud voice, saying, do thyself no harm; for we are all here. Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." (Acts 16.)

"The Glory of that Light"

I was journeying in the noon-tide,

When His light shone o'er my road;

And I saw Him in that glory —

Saw Him, Jesus, Son of God.

All around in noon-day splendour,

Earthly scenes lay fair and bright;

But my eyes no longer see them,

For the glory of that light.

Others in the summer sunshine,

Wearily may journey on;

I have seen a light from heaven,

Past the brightness of the sun.

Light that knows no cloud, no waning —

Light wherein I see His face;

All His love's uncounted treasures —

All the riches of His grace.

All the wonders of His glory,

Deeper wonders of His love;

How for me He won, He keepeth,

That high place in heaven above.

Not a glimpse the veil uplifted —

But within the veil to dwell,

Gazing on His face for ever,

Hearing words unspeakable.

Marvel not that Christ in glory,

All my inmost heart hath won;

Not a star to cheer my darkness,

But a light beyond the sun.

All below lies dark and shadow'd,

Nothing there to claim my heart,

Save the lonely track of sorrow,

Where of old He walk'd apart.

I have seen the face of Jesus,

Tell me not of aught beside;

I have heard the voice of Jesus,

All my soul is satisfied.

In the radiance of the glory

First, I saw His blessed face —

And for ever shall that glory

Be my home, my dwelling place.

Sinners! it was not to angels

All this wondrous love was given,

But to one who scorn'd, despised Him;

Scorn'd and hated Christ in heaven,

From the lowest depths of evil,

To the throne in heaven above;

Thus in me He told the measure

Of His free, unbounded love.

(Voice to the Faithful, Vol. 3.)

The Prodigal's Reception

In Luke 15: 11-24, the blessed Son, here on earth, is telling out the nature of the Father's love. It is a parable of the Father's feelings about a prodigal son. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, only knew the extent of our ruin, and He only knew the love that is in the heart of God. These two things were known to Him alone. There is no use in a person going to pay a debt unless he knows the amount of it. This blessed One came to bear our sins, to put Himself under the whole judgment that was on us, and to declare the love of God. Nothing can be more wonderful than this. The Son of God comes into this world, knowing the whole extent of our offence against God, and suffers for it. He only knows the heart of God, and He declares it to us. I may see that I have offended a person, but I must be in that person's mind in order to know how he estimates and feels the offence. Christ knows this, and suffered for it. A sinner could not know what Christ endured, because he never knew the countenance of God. The One who best knew that countenance could tell of the terrible agony it was to have it hidden.

Man's sin began with distrust of God. Satan came into the garden of Eden. And there in that wonderful group of divine mercies the doubt of God's love was engendered in the heart of man. Satan suggested to Eve that the reason God would not allow her to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was because it would advance her position. He poisoned her mind with the thought that man could do better for himself than God would do, and thus Satan gave man an evil idea of God. Then Christ comes to declare God, to vindicate Him whom Satan has maligned. What delight it was to Christ to tell out the heart of God to a returning prodigal here on earth, to a thief on the cross, to a Saul of Tarsus, to bring the saved one into the sphere of the Father's delight! Christ was beside the thief upon the cross, to disclose to him the heart which Satan had maligned.

In this parable (Luke 15) it is the Father's way of receiving back the prodigal. Who unfolds it? His own Son, the only One who could. The prodigal is not a person who has fallen from grace. It was not grace he squandered. Not one single thing of what he squandered was restored to him. What he gets is all new. His first thought is that there is bread enough and to spare in his father's house. He is thinking of WHAT IS IN GOD for him, and that is faith. It is the beginning of all blessing. Thus we see the point of departure is the point of recovery. In the garden of Eden the point of man's departure was distrust of God. To count on God is faith, and that is the point of recovery. If I think a friend who has power will not use his power on my behalf, I think worse of that friend than if I know he has no power to do anything for me. The point of man's recovery is to believe in God's nature — that He is love.

Dear reader, have you still Satan's opinion of God? It is terrible to think that by nature we as sinners are lost, because we hold to Satan's opinion of God. What a fearful thing to be going about the world with Satan's thought of God! Now, to have the best opinion of God is what His own blessed Son teaches me, and to receive it is faith. Faith is — that I reckon, not on what is in me, but on what is in God. The moment you turn to Christ you see that there is love in God. When the prodigal was yet a great way off his father saw him, and had compassion on him, and ran and fell on his neck, and kissed him. The vagrant son is surprised; yes, at every step is a surprise, so great, so unexpected, the love that met him. The Father first greets him with a kiss — the figure of that which was accomplished when Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor, was saluted by Jesus from the glory. The prodigal never thought he would be kissed. No more did Saul of Tarsus think a light above the brightness of the sun would shine upon him, and Jesus appear to him. I give God credit for His love; I have faith and He surprises me. The moment you trust Him He surprises you. He tells you you have touched a reality that is beyond all measure. The prodigal comes back from necessity, but the Father, in His love, runs to meet him. The kiss is the intimation of the love of God. It is an immense thing to know what God is. God is love. Two things Christ came to do — the one to suffer for our sins, the other to tell out the Father's joy in being able to receive into His own sphere the poor returning wanderer. Oh what delight to learn it! I must let love have its way. The greatest favour you can render love is that you answer to it; the greatest pain is not to value it. Confidence builds on the feelings that I know exist in another; presumption is acting from my own feelings; nothing gratifies the heart that truly loves me more than confiding in it. Confidence is greater than devotion. It is a greater thing to know that Christ gave Himself for me than that I would give all for Him. Nothing love likes so well as to get credit for its existence. Therefore God commends His love towards us, "in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."

The defect in souls is the making their necessity the measure of God's grace. "But when yet he was a great way off his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." When kissed, he exclaims "I am not worthy," and then a fresh expression of love comes out to meet that distress. Again he is surprised, and now completely silenced. The Father says, "bring forth the best robe and put it on him." He is not to carry relics of the far country into the Father's dwelling-place. "Bring forth the BEST robe." Invest him with new and beautiful garments. Declare him in every way fit to come into the Father's house! He must enter in all the consciousness of his welcome, and of his meetness, too. The robe is brought to him from within the house. It confers on him a new condition; we now put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man. Many a one says, "I am a poor unworthy creature." Have you the best robe on? If you have you are in a new condition, you can say, "I am a magnificent creature, one of the very highest order; an order above angels, so that Christ is not ashamed to call us brethren." You are "a man in Christ." Is that a poor, miserable creature? "Oh," you say, "we are all sinners." True, the old man is all sin, hence it is the new man that I have to think of, and of the Father who has made us meet to be partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light. Then we read "that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." All the counsels of God open out to me. "Filled with all the fulness of God." What a wonderful condition!

"Put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet." He is not to be like Moses, who was told to take off his shoes in the presence of God. No, the prodigal is to have shoes put on; he is to be thoroughly at home in his Father's sphere, and he enters it in the condition suitable to the position. All feelings of unfitness are corrected — love is never satisfied until it does its utmost for its object. If I want to do anything for one I love, I do the best I can — that is the way divine love acts.

There are three things that the prodigal receives —

1, The kiss, a known communication of the father's love.

2, The investing — robe, and ring, and shoes, the new condition suited to enjoy the love of the Father and His things, without which you could not feel yourself at home.

3, The fatted calf — the thing reserved. "Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found."

The greater the depth to which God goes down in mercy, the greater the height to which His grace will rise. If God has cleared the ground, He occupies it. The fatted calf does not set forth the sacrifice of Christ. The wanderer has been already received; the best robe is already on him. The fatted calf is the sphere of delight in which God places the saved one. He is brought back, not only kissed, but in a new condition; a new creature now brought into the circle of God's festivities. The figure made use of is that of a great entertainment; the fatted calf is something reserved until a special occasion should arise. The sinner saved by grace is brought into the fullest expression of what God is in His love. "Eye hath not seen it," Isaiah says, "but God hath revealed it unto us by his Spirit." It is the love of the Father made known to the soul while here. The secret of God is made known to the one saved by grace. The wanderer is brought to know what before had been hidden in God. Survey it! May we set our hearts on it. May the world see in us a living representation of what is described in this scripture. It is the joy of the saint that arouses the sinner here on earth. Nothing has such weight with others as seeing that "I have a joy beyond anything they know." "They began to be merry!" That is the last we hear of this scene. It is rejoicing with God; delight in the greatest thing He had to give. "Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." What a delight to the Lord Jesus Christ, to come forth to me here on earth and tell out what is in a Father's heart for me — a returning prodigal! J. B. S.

"He Died for Me"

A gentleman, while travelling lately in the Southern States of America, came to a place where there was a newly-made grave. Bending over it was a man planting flowers, which as he set them in a new-turned soil, he watered with his tears. After observing him for a time, and noticing his deep sorrow, the traveller said, "I suppose you are mourning over the grave of a wife?" "No," replied the man, "I have not lost my wife." "Perhaps," said the traveller, "your tears water the tomb of a much loved child?" "No," repeated the mourner, "I have lost neither wife nor child." "May I ask then," said the traveller, "whose death it is that causes you so much sorrow?"

"I plant these flowers, and shed these tears for one who died for me," said the mourner. "I was called to serve as a soldier in the late war. I had a wife and children, who would be left uncared for if I fell. My friend came forward; he said, 'I have no wife and children — I will go instead of you.' He did so, and was wounded on the battle-field. Hearing that he was lying in hospital in a dangerous state, I came to see him, but came only in time to find him in his grave. He lies buried here. He has gone down into the tomb for me, and I plant these flowers and water them with my tears in remembrance of him."

The mourner afterwards had a tombstone set up on the grave, and upon it was carved the simple but touching sentence —

"He Died for Me" — (Extracted.)

I suppose there are few who would not be affected by this touching story, but, reader, how few there are who have been touched by that which is far more wonderful, more touching: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends;" but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, laid down His life for His enemies; "if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son," &c. He died for us to make us His friends. Can you say, reader, you are one whom He has won for Himself; can you say He died for me? and not only died for me, but lives at God's right hand for evermore for me; and can you say, in Him, I have died out of the state or condition in which, as a child of Adam, I was born, and I now live in Him the risen one, and am one with Him the glorified one? W. T. T.

"Received"

This is Thy love, my God!

Joy never-ending I, in Thee begin!

Thou sawest me, afar from Thine abode!

Thou hadst compassion! Thou hast brought me in!

It was one great surprise

Along the way, beneath that noonday sun

Since first I falter'd forth "I will arise!"

And groan'd: "I am not fit to be a son."

Rapt to my Father's heart —

I felt His kiss, ere I could speak my shame:

Love, acting out its own amazing part —

Me, in my guilt, my ruin, overcame.

Thou didst provide the Robe!

Didst tell Thy servants to bring forth the best,

The ring, the shoes, Thy gift upon the road,

Prepared me, home-returning, for Thy Rest.

Oh, it is holy ground!

Nought that defiles can ever touch me more.

Thy lost one, once the prodigal, is FOUND.

My distrust, the Famine time, is o'er.

Now is the Banquet spread;

The fatted calf, reserved for me, is kill'd;

I — perishing erewhile for want of bread,

Sit at Thy Feast: my cup by Thee o'erfill'd.

Thy Festival I share!

Where guests, at home in all Thine own delight,

With symphonies, with choral dance, declare

THEE in Thy grace, Thy glory — LOVE and LIGHT!

"Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first-begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth — unto him that loves us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever, Amen." — Rev. 1: 5, 6. W.T.T.

Jordan: or Death Abolished

The passage of Jordan was the fulfilment of the purpose of God announced to Moses (Ex. 3) — that He had come down to deliver His people out of Egypt, and to bring them to a good land, and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey.

It is a great thing to tell a person who is in sorrow because of conscious distance from God, God "gave his Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" — and that His purpose towards us is that this should be known distinctly now while we are on earth. Many put it off to a future day, but scripture sets forth to us that the favour of God is to be known now, and known best where it is most needed. "God commendeth his love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." It is not a question of your purpose, but of God's purpose, and Christ has come to carry out that purpose. He says, "Lo I come to do thy will," and He announces to us the delight of the Father's heart in the reception of a returning prodigal. The prodigal may say, "It is too great," and so it is; but Christ's work must not be measured by the need of the sinner, but by the purpose of God.

Look at the poor captives in Egypt. The living God addresses Moses — (type of Christ) — and says, "I know their sorrows." I know how they suffer in their iron bondage, and I am come to deliver them. Let the soul think of that, and ask, — Is that God's thought about me? Does God know my sorrow? Is that His purpose towards me? And who has carried out His purpose? God's Son has carried it out. The last barrier is gone, Jordan is crossed — death is passed, not merely as to my future safety, but an open way is made for me through death, and the soul is brought through grace into the knowledge of the place of rest which God has secured for us in Christ — "a land flowing with milk and honey." Canaan was a figure of the place in which we are now set in Christ.

The Israelites passed the Red Sea, and saw there the death of their enemies. But Jordan had still to be crossed. Jordan is a figure of our dying with Christ. Israel wandered forty years in the wilderness, because they would not go up and possess the land, and, instead of getting in as Abram and Caleb did, without crossing Jordan, they were to pass through the deepest part of it; but there is a way made for them through it. Now, what this type sets forth to me is, that a way through death is accomplished for me according to the mind of God, and which sets me on heavenly ground. The law was weak through the flesh, but, "God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh." Christ has died for me, and opened a way out of the ruin of myself.

Jordan was the last barrier in the way of the blessing God would bring His people to, and in Joshua 3 we read, "When ye see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests the Levites bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after it. Come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go, for ye have not passed this way heretofore," and "as they that bare the ark were come unto Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in the brim of the water, the water which came down from above stood and rose up upon an heap and the priests that bare the ark of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed clean over Jordan." There is a clear and perfect way for the people through the waters, and Joshua calls them to come and survey what has been done. The thing presented to faith is, that the work is accomplished. Christ the true Ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth has gone down to death for us. Before leaving the world He says, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. This is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life." Christ has made the way thoroughly open, and if you do not enjoy it, it is because you are not looking at Him. "To as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." It is a simple thing, when the soul looks at Him, it is taken up with Him. Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus; the thief on the cross is occupied with Him; the woman in the Pharisee's house came to Him; Saul of Tarsus is overwhelmed with the glory and brightness of a light above the sun, and the only relief to his heart is, that he finds Jesus is in the glory.

If I want to learn what is accomplished, I learn it by seeing the Accomplisher.

It is not that the way will open when you come to it. If a soul does not see that it is open, he does not see how God has dealt with him, and he fears to approach death; he is standing, as the hymn says, "shivering on the brink, and fears to launch away;" but if his eye is on the Ark, he sees the way open, and it is known as definitely to him now on earth, as it was to Saul of Tarsus, or to Stephen. There is not a single barrier on God's side between me and the throne of God. My own self stands in the way, if I have not died with Christ, and am free from judgment; but scripture says I am dead with Him; if not, I could not get to this place of rest! If you say the way is not open till you die, you do not believe that it is open now; you think something has not been accomplished by Christ's death — you do not regard Him as the perfect accomplisher. Perhaps you say, "I am not afraid of judgment, but I fear death — the breaking up of the body." Then you do not see the way through death. Stephen sees the way clear up to glory. Did Stephen make the way? "No, Jesus made it; and if so, death is no king of terrors for him; he can say, if they kill me, I go straight to glory; if I die, the way is open;" and he suffers the most bitter death that ever man was exposed to, without a murmur; on the contrary, he prays for those who inflict the suffering.

The gospel is not merely to deliver us from Egypt; the gospel is the good tidings that God brings us to His own ground — to Himself, where we can rest in the enjoyment of His eternal love, and are set up in the power of Christ, to sustain us here on earth.

You will never really get rest to your soul till you see the wondrous purpose in the heart of God toward you — that out of His own love He sent His Son; He found a Person who was perfectly adequate to carry out every item of that purpose. When you see this you magnify the One who has removed every barrier; He becomes the distinct commanding object of the heart, and you can say with one of old, "My spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

The Lord alone can make the soul comprehend the goodness of His grace, but as the eye turns to Him, it sees by faith all He has accomplished. J. B. S.

A Word to Anxious Ones

Romans 15: 13.

This paper is addressed to any who are exercised as to their state before God, but who have not settled peace, and the abiding consciousness that their sins are for ever put away. Beloved reader, if not as yet happy in Christ, be now intreated to rest on His finished work, otherwise you practically deny that His precious blood was shed for you, and thus you dishonour Him.

We seek to point you to a RISEN CHRIST. Why risen? This is most important. Read carefully Romans 6: 3 and 11. Christ was made "sin" for us. (2 Cor. 5: 21.) Having thus, as a sin-bearer, been "smitten of God" (Isaiah 53: 4), and forsaken on the cross (Mark 15: 34), He was buried. Sin was thus put away out of God's sight. But having no sin in Him (Heb. 4: 15) the grave could not hold Him, and He was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father. (Rom. 6: 4.) See also 1 Corinthians 6: 14.

He who was thus made "sin" and "a curse" was raised again (having perfectly glorified God) for our justification. (Rom. 4: 25.) And by Him all that believe are justified from all things. (Acts 13: 39.)

The fact of the Lord having been raised again is a proof that God's claims of justice have been met, and thus he can righteously express to us all His love! (Luke 12: 50.)

Christ is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. (1 Cor. 1: 30.) Thus, it is not what the sinner is, but what Christ is for him, and the believer, being in Christ, is spotless before God. (Col. 2: 10.) He is our life. (Col. 3: 3, 4.) From this the reader will see that it is of the utmost importance to have right views regarding what is meant by a "risen Saviour."

People often look for the witness of the Holy Ghost in them whilst they have not believed the witness of the Holy Ghost to them. (See 1 John 5: 9-13, and Heb. 10: 15.) Satan would have us occupied with our hearts of unbelief, looking at our failures and feelings, thus depriving us of peace. Instead of being thus occupied with our wretched evil natures, we should be occupied with Him who is our life.

The reader is entreated to look out — not in. Thus are we enabled to live unto Him who died for us and rose again. (2 Cor. 5: 15.) One look of faith at a risen Saviour, and the sinner passes from death unto life. (John 5: 24.) Without faith it is impossible to please God. (Heb. 11: 6.) Dear reader, do not doubt God's love. Has He not proved it? Did He not give His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth should not perish, but have everlasting life? (John 3: 16; see also John 3: 36.) Oh! why so much doubt and distrust of God's love, grace, and mercy? Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child he shall not enter therein. (Mark 10: 15.) Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. (John 6: 37.) Again, "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will let him take the water of life freely." (Rev. 22: 17.) Again, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matt. 11: 28.)

Anxious, troubled one, COME! Now is the day of grace. (2 Cor. 6: 1, 2.) To-day, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. (Heb. 3: 7, 8.) "How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?" (Heb. 2: 3.) The night is far spent. (See also Peter 3: 9.) "But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." (John 4: 14.) And yet again, "He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (John 7: 38.) How frequently the Lord says in the gospel: "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!" "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they SHALL NEVER PERISH." (John 10: 27, 28.)

The reader is earnestly requested to read all the texts referred to: those given wholly as well as those given partially. (John 5: 40.)

"Peace with God"

I feel that God has given me, since I returned from R— the time before last, a great lift in the deeper understanding and enjoyment in the Spirit of His grace. Chiefly through seeing the fearful dishonour of not making Christ all my salvation, so as to joy in Him at all times as Saviour; for if I am not doing so, I am casting discredit on His blood, and denying its value before God, as far as in me lies. This is a most subtle evil; and one that nothing but the mighty power of God can detect and make present to the soul, so that it should not have one rag to cover it, except filthy ones; and not one good thought of even the whole past life, to commend it before God; but naked, be compelled to receive all in Christ as a gift; to receive the kingdom of God as a little child. Our dear A— did nothing to get this place. No more can we. "Ah! but —" But what? "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein." (Luke 18: 17.) What is grace? It is the GIFT of God. "But —" Well, but what? Doesn't it suit you? If not, you have not been brought to know yourself a vile sinner, and nothing but a sinner, who, if ever you are to be in glory, must be there by the pure mercy and sovereign grace of God; not one particle of your own, going before, going along with, or coming after — all grace, and all Christ. "That I may be found in him." Precious righteousness, the righteousness of God! for we are "made the righteousness of God in him." In HIM. But it is divine righteousness that I am made in Him — nothing of the creature in it — none of its imperfections, as well as none of its sin. Ah! What God am I to be with throughout all eternity? What am I with now, if not the "Holy, holy, holy Lord God," who cannot look upon sin at all? I must be absolutely without sin, if I am to be with Him. Is that what it is to be saved — to be brought to God! Yes. If I am yet in my sins, I am not with Him. For He could not look on me in my sins. It would be everlasting perdition to me if He did. He could not look on Christ when He was bearing my sins — when He made Him to be sin for me. How then could He look on me in my sins? My dearest A — , this matter must be settled, once for all, and thoroughly, in the presence of God, and by God, and then we shall have peace — everlasting peace with God; a peace which no subsequent exercises of soul will touch; but on which, in truth, they will all be founded.

I have no proper christian experience or exercise of heart until I know that I am saved by GOD, in Christ; saved, so that I never never can be lost. God Himself my Saviour. It is here Christ comes in, just here —

"As food the hungry soul receives,

As choice perfumes delight the smell,

So, mercy from the cross revives

Man sinking in the jaws of hell."

Ah! it is sinners sinking in the jaws of hell that know the preciousness of Christ and His perfect work. It is sinners, who are but sinners in the presence of holiness — for God does not lower His holiness in His dealings with me a sinner — the thought would be blasphemous. He cannot cease to be what He is. But, O, blessed for ever be His name, if He is holy, unchangeably holy, He is love; love found a way of letting holiness have free course against my sins, and yet of sparing me, the sinner. Now here again it is that Christ comes in. He devoted himself to death for my sins, that holiness might have free course and be glorified; and that I, wretched one, who committed those sins, and who, for one moment, could not have stood before the wrath of God, if it fell on me, might be the ransomed trophy of His love — the blood-bought witness of His obedience unto death. Now I see perfect holiness dealing with my sins in judgment and death in the blessed One who took them on Himself in grace. I see the judgment of God against me falling on the Lamb of God. I see Him drinking the whole cup; alone with God, for ever settling this question of sin, and leaving not one thing as to sin and its judgment ever to be settled by me! How is sin settled? BY DEATH. Am I to settle sin with God, so? Well, if not, it is settled long ago — for ever settled by God, in Christ.

And now note another point. Not merely did Jesus devote Himself to death for this end, because none other could do it, but this was the grace and love of God to us. It was to do the will of God that Jesus came thus to die: "God so LOVED the world! Oh, that blessed, blessed text! Not half believed by one Christian in a thousand. All is of God. It is He who thought of saving us; He, from whose wrath we were to be saved; He who knows what everlasting perdition is. And oh! what unutterable anguish the soul that dies in its sins must endure! He it is who thinks of saving me — us — the world. Yes, the world — though men are afraid to say it — the world from perishing.

But what will become of His truth, His threatenings against sin, His majesty and righteousness, if He shelters such altogether sinners from the due reward of their deeds? Ah! here again Christ comes in. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son," — "to put away sin, by the sacrifice of himself" — "that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Here then I see righteousness and all God's judgment against sin magnified in a way it never could have been if the sinner had for ever suffered. But oh! I see love — I see God — for "God is love." "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4: 10.) Now I see how God can be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." (Rom. 3: 26.)

"I will Trust"

Jesus, I will trust Thee, — trust Thee with my soul,

Guilty, lost, and helpless, Thou canst make me whole;

There is none in heaven, or on earth, like Thee:

Thou hast died for sinners, therefore, Lord, for me.

Jesus, I may trust Thee, — Name, of matchless worth,

Spoken by the angels at Thy wondrous birth;

Written — and for ever — on Thy cross of shame

Sinners, read and worship, trusting in that Name.

Jesus, I must trust Thee, — pondering Thy way,

Full of love and mercy, all Thine earthly days;

Sinners gather'd round Thee, lepers sought Thy face, —

None too vile or loathsome for a Saviour's grace.

Jesus, I do trust Thee, — trust without a doubt —

Whosoever cometh, Thou wilt not cast out;

Faithful is Thy promise, precious is Thy blood,

These, my soul's salvation, Thou, my Saviour, God.

The Good Samaritan

Luke 10: 20-35.

In this parable we have delineated, in the simplest way and most exact manner, how Christ is a neighbour to a needy one on earth. There is nothing about heaven in it. There is the salvation which entitles me to heaven; but it is not there that we shall want a neighbour, but here, in this scene of distress. The question is put to the Lord, "Who is my neighbour?" and His answer implies that it is the one who needs Him; and He points out the condition of the one whom He helps, and the character of the help which He gives; not merely what the law requires, but according to the goodness and greatness of God, He unfolds the wondrous relief which He brings to the most needy one on earth, and shows that the very same power that will carry such an one to heaven is that which bears him along the road. He transfers him into a new condition, and places him for ever under His own care; that is, Christ's SALVATION.

"A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead."

This is a picture of man's state. He may not be aware of it; so much the worse. This poor man was not dead: he had enough of life left to make him feel his sufferings and his powerlessness, and so powerless was he that he could not refuse the favour offered. The help comes to man, but he resists it. He is not so consciously powerless as to remain passive, because of weakness. Souls are not saved by Christ, because they are resisting Him in some way. Christ is neighbour to the one who wants Him. Zacchaeus wanted Him; he desired to see Him; and he was met beyond his desire. "The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them who believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." If you admit your helplessness — make no secret of it — then comes the blessing. "I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." (Ps. 32: 5.)

The Lord here represents Himself by a Samaritan — one on whom the Jews had no claim. We had no claim on Christ; but He has come, and takes the place of loving His neighbour as Himself. He does not confine Himself to the law, but He goes further. He serves the needy one, not for the one or many occasions only, but ALWAYS — not merely according to the law, which was God's standard for man, but according to His own standard — "the will of God."

Here is a helpless one with nothing to commend him. He has no power even to resist. "But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine." That is the manner of the Lord's love to the needy one. He saw what man was in himself, and it brought Him to the cross, as we know. He came to minister life and comfort to the needy on earth, pouring oil and wine into our death wounds, recovering us from our lost estate. Restored life, or new life, is thus expressed by the figure "oil and wine." The needy one is cured where he suffered. We find our wounds are cured here, where we suffer from them.

Do you ever want a neighbour? Whom do you go to in your trouble? If you believed that God's Son was in this world, would you ever turn to any but to Him? He came where the poor man was: the priest and the Levite passed by; but He sees and enters into the whole character of the evil on suffering man. He fulfilled all the counsel of God, and He alone was the one to remove the evil. He comes to meet you in your distress, not stretching out His hand and sending favours from a distance, but entering into all the circumstances, having intimate acquaintances with the necessity of the one who needs the help. Do you value a neighbour? Have you found one? He has come to help us, not after a human fashion only, but to manifest the love of God, which, once it has to do with us, will never leave us. We must always be the objects of it — "for ever." Will you pass on and say, I do not want to know Him?

Every one has a death-wound — a suffering of some kind — a sense of what a bitter world it is. All the neighbour was bound to do by the law was to help out of trouble. But this wonderful neighbour says, I bring you to my side and to my state, having first saved you from your own. "He set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him." You first get His power and then His care. Of course this is all figurative; but it shows how the Lord cares for us in a world of difficulty and trial. No one doubts that Christ's power carries the believer to Heaven, but do you expect Him to take you off your own feet, and transfer you to the power which is in Himself? He turns us from darkness to light, not when we get to Heaven, but here on earth where a neighbour acts in the very place where we are. He does not put you on your own feet, as He did when down here, as we read in the Gospels, with those who were lame and palsied. Now He transfers you to another condition. The same character of power that wrought in Christ is given the needy one. Scripture is definite as to this. (See Eph. 1: 19, 20.) You are on new ground — set on his own beast. He gives us power to rise out of the condition in which He finds us. Whose power is it? It is not mine; the wounds are mine. Not only are the wounds healed — not merely is there a sense of relief from what would terrify and distress, but there is the consciousness of having His power — the mighty power that wrought in Christ and raised Him from the dead. Does it not attract and interest you to know that Christ came down to where you were; that He is near to you, as your neighbour, to pour oil and wine into your death-wounds, and to give you a power which you had not before — His own power — setting you on His "own beast"?

Christ magnified the law, did the will of God, and fulfilled His love. Now, He says, the power that wrought in Myself is the very power I give you. We are quickened together with Christ." (Eph. 2: 5.) Is it meant that we should know nothing of it down here? No; "it worketh in us." (Eph. 3: 20.) His power brings you to "the inn," (the place where He will take care of you,) not to a home; heaven is our home. "And on the morrow, when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."

Now, I have His care. You find the nature and manner of that care all through His life on earth. "While I was with them in the world I kept them in Thy name." It was not riches He gave them. They were so poor they had to shell ears of corn in their hands for food; yet, when He asked, "When I sent you without purse and scrip and shoes, lacked ye anything?" they said, "Nothing."

An inn is for a stranger, a traveller. People do not like this; they like to have a home, a rest, in this world. All would like to have their wounds cured; but they do not care to be set on "his own beast," to be on the new ground with Christ. It is there that He will take care of you, and that your soul will have the sense of what it is to be brought to a place where Christ is chargeable for you all the journey through. The charge is His, and He never relinquishes it. He would have us know that we are always in His charge — not dependent on any other person. Look at the state in which the needy one was found, and the state in which Christ sets him. Does it not draw the heart to Christ? He has come to open out to us the heart of God, — to be the exponent of it. Do not be afraid to trust Him in the path of trouble and distress. He will show you that it is not power only that He will exercise on your behalf — not only a strong hand stretched forth to save you, but the care of a loving heart, to nurture and to cherish you all the way. Is there a heart that knows anything of the sorrow of the world who will say, "I will not look to Him, I will resist Him," or who does not long to say, "I am going through this world as an inn, only seeking a night's lodging, finding I am still without a home, yet having the unspeakable solace of being cared for by Christ, my Saviour, while a stranger and a traveller in this weary world"? J. B. S.

The Dumb to Speak; or, the Mouth Closed and Opened

Romans 3: 10.

The gospel sets before a sinner what God is, having shown out what man is. The cross, which has displayed God in His own nature, has also established the guilt of man. It declares that man has no righteousness for God, nor ever can have in himself; but that God has provided for man, though outside of him altogether, a righteousness worthy of Himself. Man is so bad that it is impossible to make him any better, and God has declared man to be such, having tried and proved him, from the garden of Eden up to the cross. God has made trial of man from the very first. God knew what was in him, but God would have it shown out, openly manifested; and it is very solemn what came out at the close of the probation of man, as it is called. It is a dreadful picture, but true. He broke the law, slew the prophets, murdered Christ, and resisted the Holy Ghost! and all this, because it was in his heart — in his nature, as we say. Man has been proved guilty, and hence the words, "there is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good; no, not one." What follows is a description of the kind of fruit which this bad tree has produced; but here I desire to point out how that the bad fruit is only natural to the bad tree, for many are willing to confess that they have been guilty of bad, wicked actions, who will not confess that they themselves are bad, lost. Have you, my reader, bowed to this fact — that you are by nature lost, that you deserve to be sent to hell for ever? Can you say, God would be righteous in condemning me; I have nothing to say; He has closed my mouth? Were I to open it, it would be to justify Him, and condemn myself. So far we have looked at the guilt and ruin of man in his own nature, as established, proved by God, and his mouth closed. Let us look a little at how God acted from Himself for His own glory and the benefit and blessing of the one so lost. First He gave His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the delight of His heart, that His love might shine forth, and that in Him all might be made good, according to Himself. He, the just, died for the unjust. He glorified God in His life and in His death. By Him "all that believe are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." To Him give all the prophets witness, that whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins, and Him hath God set forth to be a propitiation or mercy-seat, through faith in His blood, to declare at this time God's righteousness, that He might be just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.

You will observe that the prophets spoke of all this as about to come; the gospel declares it is come. There is no room left for boasting, for man has had no part in it; all is of God, in and by Jesus Christ, and that is the reason why it is said, "if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thy heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." On our side the mouth is closed, but on God's side it is opened; but to make mention of Him, the blessed One who gave Himself for us, what a contrast! In Romans 3 the heart is the seat of all wickedness, and the mouth utters it, "full of cursing and bitterness," while here in Romans 10 it is the heart's acknowledgment of God and of Christ, and the mouth's confession of it. He, the blessed Son of God, died for sin, was raised again from the dead by the glory of the Father, and is in glory; and now whosoever receives Him receives life and righteousness and glory. Reader, have you believed Him, received Him, confessed Him? W. T. T.

A Path through Grace to Glory

"The glorious gospel of the blessed God."

God so loved the world, that HE gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in HIM should not perish, but have everlasting life.

To you is the word of this salvation sent.

The Gospel of your salvation.

The Gospel of God; . . . . the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; . . . the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood; . . . redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.

It is the BLOOD that maketh an atonement. Without shedding of blood there is no remission. The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth from all sin.

Life which is in the blood.

He gave his life a ransom for many.

God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.

He that hath the Son hath life.

He that believeth on ME hath everlasting life.

He that spared not His own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?

BEHOLD what manner of love!

God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ, according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world (that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love), having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved. (Eph. 1: 6.) Giving thanks unto the Father, who hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son.

If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him.

For this we say unto you, by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them that are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore, comfort one another with these words.

The Old Creation and the New

At a little meeting near S—, a beautiful answer was given by one who, that night, had believed the record that God gave of His Son. When asked if she had peace with God, she said, "Yes." It was so, indeed. "Jesus died to take me out of the old creation and put me into the new." And what did such an answer mean? Can you see any connection between deliverance out of the old creation, etc., and peace with God? My fellow-sinner, if you belong to the old creation — if you are still as you always were — as you were born into this world, a child of Adam, you are at war with God. Speak not of peace; no terms can be made with you: you are on the enemy's ground. Nay, you are even now under the judgment of God, which must shortly overwhelm you.

For the Lord Jesus Christ, God's well-beloved Son, endured that judgment on the cross; and from the hour of His death, the whole scene to which you belong, which is your home, has lain under the judgment of God. God is not trying you to see if you will improve — as if any good can be got out of you. It is too late to think of improvement. Previous to the cross God gave man plenty of opportunity for improvement. But all in vain. There is an end to that now. And in the death of the Lord Jesus, God has for ever closed up in judgment the history of the first Adam and his race. Do you think that if you had one more chance, you would make better use of it than your fathers did? Poor dupe of Satan! Is your understanding so darkened by the mists of the bottomless pit that you would plead for an opportunity of fitting yourself for God, when at this very moment you are despising the blood of His Son? Yes, you are doing what Cain did in an earlier day — refusing to bow to God's sentence on you, and offering Him the fruit of a nature He has judged.

But there is a new creation. I see Him in whose death the history of the first was closed, rising from the dead on the third day, and communicating that life with which He rose to others. Ah! this then is a life beyond death, beyond judgment, — a life that can be touched by neither. It does not belong to the children of Adam. It has no connection with the old creation. It is life in the Son of God. Sin does not attach to it, nor penalty for sin. Sin had suffered its judgment, had been put away before you or I could share this life. Behold, I set before you this day life or death, blessing or cursing; death and cursing if you abide in the old creation — life and blessing in the new creation. For "this is the record that God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son: — He that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son of God shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." Now you can understand how, being delivered from the old creation, you have peace with God. The old creation lies under His wrath. The new creation is life in His Son. The old creation is Satan's dominion. There is no salvation out of the new. But "if any man be in Christ he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things have become new." Oh, I beseech you, consider where you are. To which do you belong? Now God is preaching deliverance — soon, if you despise His message, you shall be for ever shut up to Satan, Oh, reject not the love that led Him to give His Son for you, in the hopelessness of your condition. Bow to His judgment upon all that you are, and accept life in His Son.

The Syrophenician

Matt. 15: 10-28.

In this beautiful scripture the Lord unfolds to us, in a striking way, what is in the heart of man, in contrast with what is in His own heart. There is nothing but badness in the one, and nothing but goodness in the other.

Men in general, like the Pharisees here, are occupied about what is outside: the washing of hands before eating bread, the washing of cups, the traditions of the elders, have the first place in their thoughts. With what amazing power must these words of the Lord Jesus have fallen on their ears: — "Hear and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man." What a picture of a man's heart! the seat of all wickedness and folly, the cage of every unclean bird! a filthy, polluted swamp, out of which issue the streams of sorrow and death. My reader, this is your heart! Have you owned it, bowed to it, submitted yourself to the judgment of God so expressed? so much so that to you it is a comfort past description to turn away from yourself to Him — that blessed One, whose heart, full of goodness, is towards you, and whose word to you is, "I cannot trust you; you may trust me"? Have you so turned to Him? It is not a little remarkable that, immediately after exposing the heart of man, the Lord left the place of boasted privilege for the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, which were outside the region of earthly blessing, and the people in covenant relationship with God; and here, in the defiled place, as it were, He manifests the heart of God as fully as previously in the place of outward privilege he exposed the heart of man. The boasted goodness of the land of Israel could not change the heart of man, and the known wretchedness and contempt connected with Tyre and Sidon could not take away from what was in the heart of God. A woman of Canaan, belonging to a cursed race, a descendant of Ham, in her distress cries after Him: "Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David! my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil." He who was tenderness itself answers her not a word! What can it be; is there no pity in Him?

His disciples, in the selfishness of their nature, say to Him, "Send her away;" that is, "give her what she wants;" "she crieth after us;" she is a trouble to us; or, it is distressing to hear her. He who alone was the Servant of the various needs of men was also Jehovah's Servant; and as she without right claims from him as Son of David, he replies, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

She will not give Him up though He is silent to her; and again she comes, worshipping Him, and saying, "Lord help me!" What will He say to this? As Jehovah's Servant, He will not only own the rights of Jehovah, but will have all do likewise; hence He replies, "It is not meet to take the children's bread (i.e., what belongs to Israel) and to cast it to dogs" (i.e., to Gentiles). What will she say to this? Is she content to be blessed as a dog, as an unclean, outside one? She replies, "Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master's table." She is satisfied to be a dog! she is satisfied to receive a crumb! He had it in His heart to bless her according to His heart; His best is what was in His heart for her. Gently and graciously, yet truly, did He lead her on step by step, first, off from false ground that she had taken in the wildness of her distress (for as Son of David she had no claim upon Him), and then on the full acknowledgment that even a dog in the house of such a Master was not forgotten; so that to be such to Him, and to receive from such an One as Him a crumb, was heaven on earth!

Beloved reader, what do you think of Him who, in this blessed way of His own love, attracted her, instructed her, blessed her, according to all that was in His own heart — "led her forth by the right way"?

Have you been drawn to Him and blessed by Him; have you turned to Him in your distress and misery; and have you now that full confidence in Him that He has done, and will do, His best for you?

"We have known and believed the love that God hath to us." W. T. T.

A Voice from the Deep

On the 6th of January, 1866, a ship left Plymouth with as good a prospect before her as any that ever sailed from that port. On the 10th of that same month, or about that time, the "London," with the exception of the few who escaped, was engulfed in the depths of the ocean. The following letter, written on board shortly before the vessel sank, and sent to a relative, has a voice of its own. It was brought on shore by one of the survivors in the boat: —

STEAMSHIP "LONDON,"

January 10, 1866.

My dear brother, — Before your eyes will look on this, your brother Frederick and I will be engulfed in the depths of the sea. We left Plymouth on the 6th. The weather was then stormy, but not such as to render any fear of danger. However, as we proceeded, the gale increased; and while I am penning these few lines the awful rocking of the vessel is such, that it is with the utmost difficulty I can hold my pen. I cannot describe to you the state of agitation which is written on every countenance; some awaiting with the utmost composure their fate; others so alarmed at the prospect of death that their shrieks are truly heartrending. But, amidst it all, I am resigned to my fate. Blessed be God, I am resting on the Rock. I know in whom I have believed. Christ is precious to me. I do not know whether by any means you will receive this. Oh that I could see all those with whom I have been acquainted! I mourn now over my own indifference towards their spiritual welfare; and now, with death staring me in the face, I feel I could do anything, if by any means I might save some. Tell S. not to neglect the salvation of her soul. Tell J. to give his heart to the Saviour at once. I want to meet all in heaven.

And now, my dear brother, farewell. Many have been the happy meetings we have had together on earth; our next meeting will be, I trust, where not a wave of trouble shall roll over us. I cannot say any more. God bless you, and keep you. — Your affectionate brother,

George T—.

And now, reader, where are you going? to what company do you belong? In the "London" many went down; one at least (God grant there were more) went up. Not long since you may have read a paper called "The Wreck and the Island." On which are you standing? The wreck is yourself, in your own nature, like the "London," going down; the island is the Lord Jesus Christ risen from the dead, in whom is righteousness, eternal life and glory. Where are you? W. T. T.

"Touch this Rock;" or the Heart made Light as a Feather

Nothing to be seen in nature, not even the difference of light and darkness, or of life and death, presents a contrast so striking, so wonderful, as that which is seen when, in certain cases of deep exercise of soul and gropings after God, He commands "the light to shine out of darkness," giving "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Very vividly and very blessedly has this been exhibited before my soul in the recent conversion of two old men. The first of the two is the case of a man who in his younger days had been a soldier, but being a good penman had in his latter years been employed as a clerk. He had frequently been to the preaching, and when visited would sometimes seem impressed under the word; but he became "hardened through the deceitfulness of sin," and ceased to come to hear the glad tidings. Failing health and severe sciatica obliged him to go to the infirmary, where I visited him. When I asked him about his soul, I was unspeakably thankful to find that his conscience was in exercise, and he was under great dread of being lost. There could be no doubt he was really in earnest now — God had stirred up the very depths of his soul. "I am praying," said he, "night and day; scarcely a minute that I am awake that I am not crying to the Lord for mercy." I at once asked him in what special way he expected mercy to be shown him, pressing upon him that God had manifested His mercy in the gift of His Son, and by virtue of the work of the cross in the gift of everlasting life through Him to every one that believeth; and showing him that salvation consisted not in crying for mercy, but in believing the good news of God's love as revealed in Christ, who by His precious work had set God free to impart blessing to every needy soul; and so far from our having to wear out our strength in entreaties to Him, it is He who with open arms is beseeching poor sinners to be reconciled to God! He drank all this into a heart the Lord had opened. How true is it the entrance of Thy word giveth light! His reply was, "Oh! I see now — instead of begging Him for mercy, I ought to be thanking Him for all He has done, for the work is finished." "Exactly," said I, "with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation"! And so the load was removed for ever, and another ransomed soul set free to begin to worship "the Lamb that was slain;" the worship that then, for the first time, broke forth faintly from the sufferer's lips in the wards of that hospital, will help to swell the mighty volume of praise that shall reverberate in heaven through all eternity. Shortly after this he was removed from the infirmary, and lies on his humble bed not far from where I write, racked with pain night and day; but oh! so happy; oh! so bright; his heart filled with praise; his frequent exclamation, "Oh! blessed Saviour; oh! precious Lamb." He longs now to go to Him; not a doubt, not a fear obtains. "There's not a cloud above, not a spot within!"

The other case is that of dear P—. He had been a hard-working but rough, noisy fellow, employed at gasworks. Induced by my dear wife to come to a cottage preaching near his house, he was evidently struck by the word, and without much solicitation came very frequently afterwards, becoming more and more interested — but nothing beyond. He was still "afar off." This continued for some months, when God was pleased during the severe weather of this winter to lay His hand upon him in sickness, and when the writer visited him he found the big, strong man lying on his bed with a distressing cough. On this and several subsequent occasions, during a period of some weeks, he assented to all that was said, was glad to be visited, thankful to be read to or prayed for, and professed to be a convicted sinner, anxious for salvation. Yet nothing seemed to help him; his soul made no progress; his conscience got no relief; his heart no rest. It was the stagnation of death and the darkness of the grave — no life, no light! On one occasion after this I spoke severely to him, saying I believed he was trifling with God, dealing lightly with His mercy and His grace, hardening himself against a Saviour's love, and grieving a heart that was well nigh weeping over him for sorrow at his continued resistance to divine activity in goodness. He said nothing, and I left him with intentional abruptness. On another occasion, subsequently, I thought I had at length found some clue to the impediment to blessing, viz., that he was waiting for some special action of the Holy Spirit. This I met in a way similar to that related in the previous case, and I assured him that if an angel from heaven announced to him God's grace in Christ, it would add not a particle of weight to the authority of the divine declaration that "whosoever believeth hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life." Still no result visible. But shortly after this He did it, to whose name be all the praise eternally. P.'s wife had gone for medicine, and he, being somewhat better, was up, and reading his Bible and praying alternately. Getting on his legs after prayer, he stood as it were transfixed, saying out aloud, "This will never do, to get up and be just what I was;" and again he cried to God as he stood, "Lord, help me; Lord, have mercy; touch this rock, Lord, touch this rock!" smiting his breast. Again he went on his knees. "I can't tell," said he, "what I said then, but He heard me, and I shouted out aloud; for my load was gone, and I got up a new man; and now, blessed be His name, my heart is as light as a feather!" And while he told this simple tale of God's great deliverance, the tears coursed down his swarthy cheek, and he cried and praised alternately! What hath God wrought? Such a change as God only can effect — a mightier contrast than light and darkness, death and life; for it is the contrast between sin and holiness, between hell and heaven, between Satan and God! Dear reader, ponder these cases of God's salvation, and through His mercy may they be the means of illustrating to your soul — if you know Him not as a Saviour-God how instantly ready He is to give deliverance, and joy, and peace in believing when we take Him at His word; and He only it is who can touch the rock of man's hard and heavy heart, and make it light as a feather.

Too Late

Many have so often refused the gospel, so put off the soul's salvation to some future time, that when they have been, as it were, surprised into the reality of death, they have exclaimed, in deep and bitter remorse of conscience, "I have sold my soul for a straw:" or, "Too late! too late!" Others have been so sensible of their being eternally lost, that they have spoken of their going to the bottomless pit almost with the last breath. Reader, beware of procrastination! "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" The following account of one who put off this momentous matter until he had to exclaim, in bitter anguish, "Too late!" is only, I am pained to say, one of a long list that might be given.

"D— was a young man of twenty-five years. When I saw him first he was just recovering from fever, and seemed very anxious about his soul. He realised, in some measure, his deliverance from an early grave, and now his mind was exercised about eternal things. I endeavoured to set before him God's simple way of salvation. He said, 'Oh, if I am spared, how differently I would live.' I tried to show him that that was a device of Satan; that it was his duty now to trust the Lord Jesus.

"He recovered, and as strength returned his anxiety disappeared, and he now only seemed to rest in the vain hope of 'turning over a new leaf.' To my surprise, on entering the ward one day, I found him again ill. He was very much alarmed, and I again spoke to him. My visits were earnestly sought, and as cheerfully paid, hoping that now he would be brought, not to rest on 'turning over a new leaf,' but, resting only on Jesus, become at once a new creature. He was brought very low, but once more restored, and after a few weeks was again walking about convalescent, hoping to be dismissed in a few days from the building where his life had been in so much jeopardy. He had as yet not embraced the free message of the gospel, but waited for the convenient season.

"I had just entered the hospital one afternoon, when the nurse of the ward where D— was a patient came to me. I followed her to his bedside. There he lay; every limb trembled, his eye wandered wildly, his lip quivered. I spoke to him of the compassion of Jesus — His work for the lost, His willingness to save. He listened for a few minutes; but as if my words could no longer be borne, he gave me such a look that I cannot soon forget it. Oh! the despair and terror that seemed mingled in that gaze, and his voice almost filled the ward with the cry, IT'S TOO LATE! IT'S TOO LATE!' And before the sun went down the lifeless form of the procrastinator was carried away."

Dear reader! now think of God's word, that "He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Now, then, turn to God; believe His word about Jesus, and rejoice that you have everlasting life.

"All Things are Ready — Come!"

Safe, myself, within the Ark,

How my spirit yearns o'er thee,

Tossing in thy fragile bark,

Out in life's tempestuous sea.

Safely I in Christ abide,

Raised above the floods of sin;

While the door is open wide,

Oh! that thou wouldst enter in.

Rev. 22: 17; John 6: 37.

Safe, myself, within the fold,

Yet my spirit cannot rest

While thee wand'ring I behold,

Still, alas! unsaved, unblest.

Oh! that thou wouldst take the place

Of "the lost" — this Jesus craves;

For "the lost," in pitying grace,

Still the Shepherd seeks and saves,

Luke 19: 10, 41, 42.

Once I also went astray,

Loved the world and sin too well,

Madly follow'd my own way,

And a tale of woe could tell.

Grace it was that rescued me —

Drew me to the Father's home,

Grace is pleading now with thee,

Oh, that thou wouldst also come!

Eph. 2: 18; Luke 14: 22, 23.

What a welcome would be thine,

What a Father's kiss of love!

His a deeper joy than mine,

Shared by angel hosts above.

Oh! the bliss can ne'er be told,

We must enter in to see,

In the home, the ark, the fold,

All is ready — WHAT OF THEE?

Luke 15; Mark 5: 18-20.

"Fast Asleep"

Jonah 1: 2

The remarkable history of Jonah is a picture of Israel's history — that people are at present at the bottom of the sea, as it were; but there will be, in the coming day, a restoration of the nation.

But the prophet is more than a type of the Jew; he is a perfect picture of man in his natural state; and it is in this light I would call attention to it.

"Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord."

Here, then, we have him, as a fallen child of Adam, setting up his will against God. Selfwill marks him at the very start; in the pride of his heart too, like Adam, he will take his own way to accomplish his own ends; and instead of going to Nineveh, where God had sent him in the exercise of a ministry in which all the power of God would sustain him, he rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, like Adam again, who hid himself from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden after he had set up his will.

Sin is the having an independent will which is ever opposed to God's will, and this leads to distance from God. Adam went out from God's presence; Cain and Jonah likewise. This is the unvarying path that flesh walks in — it cannot abide the light of God's presence, and God cannot suffer the exercise of this will. The prophet having thus acted in self will, and fled from the presence of the Lord, in the independence of the flesh paying his fare to Tarshish, presents a sorrowful picture of the condition of many a sinner at this present time. Death and ruin all around him, and none to help, in a ship well-nigh broken up by the violence of the waves, while the very heathen call on their god, he alone of all others "lay" "fast asleep." Oh, what a picture! Alas! no uncommon one at this moment. My reader, a picture of yourself, if as yet you have never been awakened to your true state before God. "Lay" "fast asleep" are the simple but expressive words by which the Holy Ghost describes this most solemn condition; it is not only selfwilled and independent, but when the awful consequence is upon him, and death stares him in the face, he alone is indifferent. Here, then, is the condition of the professing multitudes around us. In the midst of religious observances of all kinds, and religious appliances of every shape — open churches, fast days, and sacraments, synods and religious societies — the vast mass lie in the boasted cradle of privilege, and the devil rocks them fast asleep. "What meanest thou, O sleeper?" is the only suited language when pondering such a state of things. Awakened at last, in the mercy of God, to a sense of his perishing condition, the prophet passes the sentence of death upon himself — "Take me up, and cast me into the sea." And Jonah is soon wrapped among the weeds of the sea, down in the bottoms of the mountains, the waters compassing him about, the depth closed around his head. Now, there are two points of immense beauty here: —

First, Who was it thought of Jonah in his self-willed independence and indifference? Oh! the wondrous grace of our Saviour God, who in His own persevering love pursues in awakening tenderness the failing prophet, or a poor sinner now! Yes, reader, the very same God who shook to its foundations the prison of Philippi, to awaken the jailer, now blows his mighty storm upon the ocean to awaken the sleeping Jonah, and, it may be, in His grace, may use these poor lines to awaken you.

Secondly, Who was it provided for Jonah a salvation worthy of Himself? Who but God? Now, mark it well, the prophet passes sentence of death on himself; nothing less would suit; it must be death, and it must be accepted. "Take me up, and cast me into the sea:" and so when death had its victim the sea ceased from its raging. But is that all? What of Jonah? If left to the consequences of the death he has accepted, he must perish; but here is exactly where the blessed God comes in, and that in a way worthy of Himself. He does not remit the sentence; to do so would be to clear the guilty; but He does bring salvation, and this is grace — a salvation, too, which, while it maintains all the righteous character of God, and vindicates Him to the uttermost, most blessedly delivers the sinner from all the consequences of his rebellion against God. And so we read, "Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah!" In the life of another, which can go down into the element where Jonah could not live, the prophet is saved. Beautiful type of the salvation of Him who in grace took our judgment and endured it! He who alone could bear it went into death — passed through its dark raging flood for us. And so Jonah's sin is all that is left in the bottom of the sea, and left there for ever. Thus, in this scripture, we have a striking picture of man's rebellion and God's salvation. On man's side, as in the case of Jonah, nothing but selfwill, independence, indifference, death; on God's side, a compassion that can move the very elements to awaken the sleeper to a sense of his danger, and a grace which provides a salvation, so complete, so perfect, so full, that while He is demonstrated to be just there is also deliverance for the sinner; the sin is judged, and the perishing one is saved. W. T. T.

"Rest . . . . Rest"

Matthew 11: 28-30.

There is something very remarkable in the place we find those well-known verses, and there is a great contrast between what the blessed Lord proposes to the soul in them and His own circumstances at that moment. Indeed, it is this, I feel certain, that clothes them with the beauty that surrounds them. The Lord called around Himself His twelve disciples, and instructed them in view of all that lay before them in their path. This occupies chapter 10. As soon as He had finished, He Himself departed to teach and preach; for He was, while on earth, not only the faithful servant of Jehovah, but the unwearied servant of men, ministering to all the needy around Him.

John the Baptist, Christ's messenger, who was in prison, heard of His works; and, forgetting that it was not the day of Christ's power as yet, but the day of His grace, he allows a doubt to cross his heart. Can this be the Messiah of Israel after all? "Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?" The Lord, in sending His answer, refers John to the works, which were those which only the Messiah could do; but it must have been a grief to the heart of Christ to find the confidence of His forerunner and messenger thus shaken.

Next, the state of the nation of Israel, His own people, passed before His heart and grieved Him. He compares them to "children sitting in the market, and calling unto their fellows, and saying, 'We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.'" Israel would not have the ministry of either John the Baptist or Christ — they cast the one into prison, and in the end they crucified Christ. John the Baptist came and preached law, and they refused him; Christ came and preached grace, and they cast Him out. What a picture of the heart of man!

Then there were places on earth which witnessed Christ's mighty works — places where His glory shone out in a remarkable way — Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum. His thoughts turn with sadness to such, as He announces the woe which rests on abused and despised privilege; the heaven-exalted Capernaum should become the hell-doomed city. Reader, I entreat you to ponder such deeply solemn words as these, uttered by the sorrowing Saviour, in regard to slighted opportunities and despised long-suffering. Never was there a period like this in the history of Christ as a man on earth, when His labour seemed so in vain — doubted by John, refused by Israel, despised in the scenes of His mightiest works. Yet at this moment it is He rises in the perfection of a man whose meat it was to do the will of Him that sent Him, and He says, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him." And then it is, having let us, as it were, into the divine secret, He comes out with words which have fallen as healing balm upon many a troubled heart "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will rest you." It is now no longer a question of responsibility to accept or receive; it is free sovereign grace that acts from itself and for itself, finding the weary and burdened that it may rest them. Oh, how blessed all this is! Say, my reader, does it meet you? He who spoke those words knew what man was, what the world was, what the most privileged were. He knew that in a scene in which God was not, where His name had been dishonoured and His grace refused, there was weariness and there were burdens enough, but rest there was none. He Himself stands here as the only One in whom there is a place for the sole of the foot to rest on; and, looking out over all time since, and poor breaking hearts in it, He says, "Come to me." The invitation is world-wide; those to whom it is addressed are found everywhere, "Ye that labour and are heavy laden." He knew what that was, and He alone could meet it. Reader, does it not suit you? You cannot deny it — however you may despise or refuse, you cannot say it does not suit you. I would here seek to meet one who says, "Well, what you say is very true; but I am greatly troubled by another little word of Christ which often comes up before me, namely, 'All that the Father giveth me shall come to me;' and I begin to think within myself, am I given of the Father to Christ? and so my burdens and labour of soul are increased." Reader, is this your state? If so, the way out of your difficulty is simple, and the end of your sorrow of heart near at hand; for do you not see that there is no condition or qualification — it is simply, "Come unto me," and going to Jesus is the proof of the Father's giving and drawing. It is to Himself I go, for He says, "Come." He does not say how He will give me rest. He presents Himself, and the rest for my poor sin-stricken soul and sin-burdened conscience is in connection with Himself and the revelation of the Father. He never said "come" until He Himself had come first from heaven to earth, that He might be in this sense "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Reader, are you seeking rest? "Come unto me, and I will rest you."

The second rest is a further and needed thing too. It is connected with submission, with taking Christ's yoke upon us — it is rest after rest. But my business is at present with the first rest; it must be known first. Dear reader, most earnestly do I desire it for you. If you have never had it, you are, like Noah's dove, out of the ark, in a scene of judgment, without a spot for the sole of your foot to rest on. Safety, rest, peace and plenty were inside the ark; destruction, death, restlessness, and sorrow outside.

He who, when on earth, stood and said, "Come unto me," has since passed through death and the grave, and ascended up on high. In His death, He put away sin; in His resurrection, He proclaimed peace; from glory, where He is, He speaks. He is the same; death has not changed Him; glory has not changed Him. Rest is what you want, reader; it is in Him, and He says, "Come." May the beauty and attractiveness of Himself so surround you, so fill your heart, that, forgetting your feelings, sins, and sorrows, you may rise and go to Jesus, who is "a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat" — the only island of rest in the midst of an ocean of perpetual trouble. W. T. T.

"The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God"

I was asked the other day to call and see an old pensioner, who, I was told, was dying, and apparently unsaved. He was able to speak but little on account of his cough, but he seemed very intelligently to enter into what I said to him. The Lord enabled me to tell him the gospel very simply and fully; and in doing so, I made use of the following illustration: —

"Suppose," I said, "a soldier was sentenced to be flogged for breach of discipline, and the colonel's son came to his father and used his influence to get the sentence cancelled, wouldn't you understand it if, although there were no reason why the culprit should not be punished, the colonel let him go entirely free for his son's sake? Now," I went on to say, "is not that like the gospel? There is no reason in the sinner why God should not condemn him, but He forgives him for the sake of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ."

"Yes," said the old man, "I see it — that's just it."

That is just it — just the only gospel most people know of, a gospel wanting in all that is indeed good news to an awakened conscience. It would be more like it, as I explained to the sick old man (and perhaps the illustration may pass here, far-fetched and imperfect though it be), it would be more like the gospel if the colonel's son, at his father's request, bared his own back to receive the lashes, and thus secured the soldier's pardon.

"The glorious gospel of the blessed God" — and it well deserves the name — is, that God found us in our sins, and righteously condemned us for them; found us estranged from Him, and enmity against Him; and yet, when there was no eye but His own to pity, and no other arm to save, He gave up His only-begotten Son, the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His Person; and He came down into the midst of our trials, and was Himself the Man of sorrows. He was a reproach of men, and despised of the people, the song of the drunkard; and through all this He manifested what God was to the sinner. He went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed, for God was with Him.

But in all this, though it makes glad the heart, the conscience seeks in vain a resting-place. Turn your thoughts to the cross of Calvary, and behold there the righteous ground of the sinner's pardon, and the unchanging ground of his peace. Stand by faith before that cross, and though all seem dark to the soul, hearken to that bitter cry that pierces thus the darkness, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" Oh, what is this! the "despised and rejected of men," at last forsaken by His God! Yes, forsaken, because of the sin He bore — the sin of the sinner whom He came to save. The Holy One of God, He who knew no sin, made sin for us! (Deut. 21: 23; marg. 2 Cor. 5: 21.) Oh, weary hearts, troubled consciences, here is a calm and secure resting-place, and you need no dove's wings to bring you hither! This same Jesus is risen from the dead, and has sat down on high, having "by himself purged our sins;" and He is there the proof that they are purged. Look off, then, right off to Him, and in spite of cold heart, dead affections, want of feelings, want of everything you think you ought to have, say it out calmly, fearlessly, with the eye resting upon the risen Christ, "who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree." (1 Peter 2: 24.) And why not add, — "by whose stripes I am healed"!

"He is Our Peace"

In Thy death my soul reposes,

Holy, spotless Lamb of God;

Sweet the truth that death discloses,

Pardon through Thy precious blood.

Here by faith I see Thee bearing

All my sin, and curse, and woe;

All my breach with God repairing —

Washing me as white as snow.

Freed from wrath and condemnation,

Set with Thee in heaven above;

In Thee I have full salvation,

Life, and peace, and endless love.

O my Saviour! I would praise Thee,

Bend and worship at Thy feet;

Every grace and every beauty

In Thy blessed Person meet.

I shall see Thee in Thy glory,

When the race, the war is past;

Tell in light the blissful story

Of Thy grace from first to last.

Mighty One! the Resurrection!

In Thee glorying, in Thee blest,

Soon Thy saints shall shout Thy praises

In a scene of endless rest.

Oh, I long to hear Thee saying,

"Come up hither, rise to Me;

Leave thy bondage, leave thy sorrow;

I have call'd thee — thou art free."

Yes, beloved Lord and Saviour,

We shall meet Thee in the sky —

Share Thy bliss, Thy joys for ever,

In the home prepared on high.

Now we wait for Thine appearing —

Wait in hope, in peace, in trust;

Thou wilt come to perfect blessing,

Thou, the Holy, True, and Just.

"Salvation, Liberty, Food and Safety"

John 10.

This beautiful scripture brings before us, first, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself; next, His actings in grace. It is a great thing to know who He is, and what He is, who laid down His life for the sheep, and has put them for security in His hand. This, then, is what we learn in the commencement of John 10; Christ simply declares Himself here to be the true Messiah of Israel, the One who should come. He it was who entered by the door into the sheepfold; that is, He came by divine appointment and sanction to be the Shepherd of Israel, who were the people of God's pasture, and the sheep of His hand. He did not climb up some other way, as all the false ones did; they were at best but thieves and robbers, claiming unlawfully that to which they had no right. Not so Christ. He came in by the door, submitting to every rule and ordinance appointed by the owner of the flock — the Jehovah of Israel. Beloved reader, how blessed to think of Him, the eternal Son of God as He was, yet He comes down and humbles Himself to be a man, and as a man submits Himself perfectly! But Israel would not have Him; they slighted, despised, and rejected Him. So He leaves. He goes outside the fold of Israel, the enclosure which was peculiar to it. This is what is meant by "He goeth before them" — as rejected and despised of His own people. He Himself goes first, and then He puts forth His own sheep, and they follow Him, for they know His voice. This was exactly the case of the blind man in the 9th chapter, who was cast out, and had been found by Jesus. What a blessed Shepherd by whom we are led and fed! How good to be under His care outside all man's religion, and the whole array of those ordinances which belonged to Israel!

Having thus set Himself forth in this way — His person the only ground of connection with God — He then opens out most blessedly what it is that replaces the old Jewish thing, Himself the foundation and accomplisher of it.

First — There is salvation. "By Me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved." He now presents Himself as the door. He, and He alone is the door; to enter in by that door was to be saved. He had laid down His life, costly and precious as it was. His blood was shed. It was His own voluntary act to shed His blood, lay down His life; no one had taken it from Him. As to necessity, there was none on His side, save indeed that blessed love of His, which would remove every barrier to its full expression.

Again, think of Him in contrast with a hireling. The hour of danger or of difficulty would find the latter thinking of himself, Him, the Shepherd of His sheep. If He then interposes, if He lays down His life, sheds His blood, the first thing that meets us at the door is salvation. "By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved."

Again, there is also liberty. " He shall go in and out." Slavery and bondage is the birthright of every child of Adam. He is born into the world a slave. The moment he has to do with Christ, he is met with salvation and liberty — he is liberated, he is free, and there is also food — "shall find pasture." Oh, for ability to describe the richness of the food! Saved, liberated, brought into a region where want is unknown — "I shall not want." Not only this, but filled, satisfied; and hence it is "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures." And observe, it is, "if any man enter in." It is not only now the children of Abraham, the nation of Israel; the door of grace in Himself is wide open to all. Will you say, my reader, if you know what it is to be blessed in this way under this gracious Shepherd Lord? Have you had to do with Him? It must be He; for it is "by Me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved." Oh, what a contrast to all our purely natural thoughts of God and His Christ! What a contrast to all that was to be found in the law or ordinances! Neither the one nor the other could carry the first need to a poor outcast of either Jew or Gentile. The law required, not saved — the law brought in death, not life — but, "by Me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved;" and "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," is grace in its fulness.

Once more: we have here also eternal security. The life which Christ gives is eternal everlasting; but not this only, for of His sheep He says, "they shall never perish." But, then, where will He put them to secure them against enemies from without? He makes them as strong outside as inside. No weakness within could endanger, for it was "eternal life," He gave, and no enemy outside could harm them, for He has the sheep in His hand. The hand that was nailed to the cross is the secure shelter and rest for all the sheep. Oh, what contrasts are awakened in the soul as we read that word, "My hand" — "My Father's hand!" Not the walls and barriers, the laws and ordinances of Israel of old, the fold; but His hand, His Father's hand. The thought of their security is linked with the eternal power of God, for the sheep are in His Father's hand. "I and my Father are one." Could anything be more wonderful than the infinite grace, boundless love, and almighty power which are all in Christ, in His own Person exclusively, and yet wide enough, most surely; for it is, "by me if any man enter in;" and Christ is here all, and in contrast with all. It is no longer the ancient sheepfold of Israel, with its walls and ordinances, but the Person of the Christ, the Good Shepherd, the living Lord, who died; and it is Himself in contrast with the thief, the robber, and the hireling — they seeking to enrich themselves, or to escape danger, at the expense of the sheep, He, in that blessed, peculiar love of His, giving His life for the sheep. It is no longer Judaism, but salvation, liberty, food, and eternal security; it is no longer the darkness of death, but the light of life. Oh, reader, have you had personally to do with Christ? Have you by Him, the door, entered in? Have you turned away from yourself, your sins, and your sorrows, as well as your goodness, and gone to Jesus? Has He not made good a claim on your heart?

The Lord, by His Spirit, set Him in all the attractiveness of His grace so before you, that you may by Him enter in, and so know the richness and fulness of that salvation, liberty, food, and security which are in Him and by Him.

"When blood from a victim must flow,

This Shepherd, by pity, was led

To stand between us and the foe,

And willingly died in our stead.

Our song, then, for ever shall be

Of the Shepherd who gave Himself thus;

No subject's so glorious as He,

No theme so affecting to us."

W. T. T.

"I Shall Lie Down Happy To-night!"

One day, while visiting the poor women in the workhouse of a large town, I was more disheartened than ever by the amazing ignorance and lack of interest shown by the poor creatures in the things which concern salvation. They lay there in the different stages of their various diseases, some in great pain, others in comparative ease, but almost all utterly careless of a future state. True, there were now and then bright spots in this dreary scene, and a little conversation with one of God's children (of whom a few are to be found even here) was most cheering and refreshing. But the greater number of those to whom I spoke of the Lord Jesus Christ, and His glorious work for poor sinners, either turned the conversation to other topics — sufferings, troubles, or private affairs — or else, by their replies, showed they did not in the least understand what I was saying; or, by answering as they supposed I wished, thought to get rid of me the sooner. Feeling very much troubled by all this, I came to the bedside of one whom I knew to be a true believer in the Lord Jesus. She had lately had a stroke of paralysis, and though in some measure recovering, her speech was almost unintelligible. However, I understood that she would like me to read to her, which I did, taking part of the 9th and 10th chapters of Hebrews. We afterwards had a little conversation together, and then I left her, much refreshed and strengthened for my work.

There lay a poor woman in the opposite bed, to whom I had never before spoken, but that day I went up to her, and asked her if she had found peace, or on what foundation she was building for salvation. She told me she was trying to do her best, and be a good woman; that she was ninety years old, and her mother had lived to be a hundred, and that she had never done any one any harm, and she thanked the Lord for having given her such a long life. "But," said I, "do you know what God said when He looked down out of heaven upon every one? He said, There is none that doeth good; no, not one.' And, you know, He saw the good ones, as we call them, as well as the bad; and yet He said there was not one good." "Oh, no," said the old woman, "I know there are none good; I wouldn't trust in anybody." "Well, but, my friend," I said, "you are trusting to yourself to be good, though God says there are none good." She repeated once more that she would not trust any one; that she had done no harm, and had always tried to be a good woman; and all this in a sort of querulous, complaining voice. We had some further conversation, in which I endeavoured to show her how useless works were towards the attainment of everlasting life; and at last I left her, more hopeless than ever, and strongly inclined to give up visiting at the workhouse, thinking it could not be the work intended for me. I laid the matter before the Lord, and asked Him to send me, if He would have me go, and the next week I went again. When the old woman recognised me, she began saying, "I have been thinking about what you told me, and I read the little book; and, oh, I'm ninety years old; do come and talk to me." These were the words, as nearly as I can remember. There was not a word this time about her attempts to make herself better, but the utmost agony at the thought of her great age, and consequent nearness to death, for which she felt herself unprepared. I therefore spoke to her of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, and repeated to her several times the well-known lines —

"Nothing, either great or small — nothing, sinner, no;

Jesus did it — did it all — long, long ago."

The last two lines I said over many times as distinctly as possible, for the old woman was very deaf. I told her how the work had been all done for her more than eighteen hundred years ago; how the Lord Jesus Christ had "put away sin by the sacrifice of himself," and that through this Man is preached the forgiveness of sins, etc. I spoke to her very earnestly in this way for some time — the poor creature sitting up in her bed silently listening, with a look of great interest. At last she lay back on her pillow, saying, in a tone of complete satisfaction and rest, "I shall lie down happy to-night!" Shortly after this I left her, feeling very much happier on her account, but scarcely daring to think she had already found rest in the Lord. On visiting her the next week, I inquired if she was still happy. She replied, "I have been happy ever since you told me." I asked, "What makes you happy; is it because you know all your sins are forgiven?" She said, "That's it; I've been happy ever since you told me." And then she began thanking and blessing me for having spoken to her, adding, in a childlike, simple manner, "and I don't think I should mind if I were to die now." I told her it was God who had sent her the message, and she must thank Him; and that now, indeed, she could bless Him for the long life He had given her, but more especially for having discovered Himself to her as a "just God and a Saviour." The last time I saw her, before leaving the town, she was still happy, praising and blessing the Lord for having called her "out of darkness into his marvellous light."

Crucifixion and Mortification

"Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it." What rest there is in this! It is the perfection of God, and of His work, which is the very essence of the gospel, and which gives such solidity to the heart of the believer in Christ.

"By one offering he has perfected for ever them that are sanctified." "Now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." "So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many." He came, indeed, to do the will of God: "by the which will we are sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once." It is a perfect atonement, for it avails for the "sin of the world." It is a finished work, for it can never, nor need ever, be repeated.

Christ crucified for sinners is the foundation of the gospel message; it is also the foundation of the sinner's peace. His work is indeed the very work of God. One mind and purpose were in the Father and the Son in counsel; one heart in the carrying out the work of redemption; and it is "for ever." "There remaineth no more sacrifice for sins." The heart that trusts Christ's finished work, trusts that which, for time and for eternity, has met its deepest need.

But not only does the cross represent the death of Christ for the sinner when he believes, it also necessarily represents the penalty due to the sinner himself. If death and judgment be the sinner's due, whether that penalty be borne by himself, or by his substitute, it is still his penalty that is paid, and, as the penalty is death, it is virtually his death. Christ died not for His own (for He was without sin), but for the sins of others. In believing, then, we acknowledge that death is the "due reward of our deeds," the "wages of our sin," and we see the blessed Lord in love dying that very death for us upon the cross. When faith grasps this fuller view of substitution — of the atoning work of Christ — it can say, indeed, with Paul, "Our old man was crucified with him" (Rom. 6: 6); and, again, "I am crucified with Christ." (Gal. 2: 20.) His cross thus becomes mine, His death mine. By faith I identify myself with Him there, and rest in the certainty that the judgment of God which passed upon Him there has for ever passed away from me. "I am crucified with Christ." Can this act be repeated? Never. Christ can never be crucified again. "In that he died, he died unto sin once." The work of atonement has once and for ever been accomplished by Him, and God has once and for ever "laid on him the iniquities of us all." "He bare our sins in his own body on the tree."

Thus we find that the word of God contemplates the believer's crucifixion with Christ as a completed and never to be repeated act. He died once, and we were then, and there, and for ever identified with Him; and so it is said, "I am crucified with Christ." "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh." "By whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." "Our old man was crucified with him." Deeply important it is for the peace and establishment of our souls to grasp these conclusive statements of God's word. The believer is never told to crucify himself or his flesh; it is always accounted to have been accomplished. "Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever."

But we may be asked, Are not the flesh and its workings to be subdued, and is there not a continual and necessary conflict to be maintained? Yes, most assuredly, is the reply; and for this very reason, that we can already say, we are "crucified with Christ." Because, by faith, we reckon ourselves dead with Him, and so, "dead unto sin," we are called on to "mortify our members which are upon earth," but not to crucify them.

In the sight of God, and in our account by faith, we are crucified with Christ — never without Him. His crucifixion was ours. If we endured for ourselves what He on the cross endured for us, it would be eternal condemnation to us. But as to the "members which are upon the earth," they are not said to be crucified. The old mortal body and its members, prone to evil, are yet present, and they have to be subdued. "Mortification," is the process by which they are to be controlled. "If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." (Rom. 8: 13.) "Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth." To mortify is to put to death. We cannot put to death what is already dead. Mortification, then, is a perpetual killing, if one may so say, of the members and of their deeds.

The believer can say, Because my old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth I might not serve sin, because God, in His infinite grace, has reckoned the death of Christ to my account, and I am in His sight as one who has died to sin — has died with Christ; because of this precious and peace-giving truth, I will with gladness and determination mortify every motion of sin in these members of my body which are yet upon the earth. By the power of the Spirit who dwells in me through God's grace, and who enables me to judge between flesh and Spirit, between good and evil, between the precious and the vile, I will bring the cross of Christ (whereon He died for me) to bear upon everything with which I come in contact, and on all the motives and desires of my heart and of my mind, and "bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus," will treat as worthy only of death all the workings of the flesh in my members, whether in thought, or word, or deed.

May God grant, then, to our readers to grasp the difference between "crucifixion" — Christ's finished work for us, the blessed and peace-giving truth of identification with Him on the cross, who hath loved us, and given Himself for us — and "mortification," the daily and hourly subduing, by the only divinely-appointed or possible means, of the workings of sin in the members. For, beloved friends, by death, and death alone, can the old man escape judgment, and this is by crucifixion. By death alone can sin in the members be overcome and subdued, and this is by mortification.

"Knowing this, that Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once; but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin; but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under law, but under grace." (Rom. 6: 9-14.)

H. C. G. B.

Simeon; or, the Reception of Christ

Luke 2: 25-38.

There are two things which are very distinct in connection with the reception of Christ. In the gospel a Person is set before us. Paul says, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me." And there are two distinct things connected with this: one is, a renunciation of the state you are in; the other, an unfolding of that to which you have come. Simeon (Luke 2) is an instance of this. He turns his back on everything in connection with the hopes of man. When he has the Saviour in his arms, he says, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." It is an immense thing for the soul to understand what the reception of Christ means. Paul's word to the jailer is, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." A Person is brought in. The more truly I have received Christ, the more I must abandon that which is antagonistic to Christ. It is not merely to say, "I believe," and to go on as usual — that is impossible. What I really receive must characterise me. It so characterised Simeon, that he can completely surrender everything of man's hopes and fears, and say, "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."

What a wondrous thing it is that God has sent His Son to bear the judgment that rested upon us! Instead of holding to that man on whom the judgment lay, I receive the One who bore the judgment, and delivered me out of it.

When the Israelites were coming out of Egypt, the blood of the lamb was put outside the door. That tells what the history of grace is. But are they to go on as usual in Egypt? No; they are brought clean out of Egypt. They first put the blood of the lamb outside, to meet the eyes of the Judge, and with it came the death of the Egyptian firstborn. Death was destroying the grasp of thraldom! But the people of God at the same time are eating the lamb, and in the strength of it they are driven out of Egypt; but they never are out of fear until they are across the Red Sea, and they see the Egyptians dead on the shore. In Christ I am clean away from the thing from which He has saved me, and the more I realise this, the more I shall value it. A person who never had bad health does not value health as does the one who has recovered. He who has got new and good health is delivered from the bad health, and he is careful of his health, because he knows what it is to lose it. A person who believes in Christ must break with the first-born of Egypt, that is, the sinful man who is under judgment. The Israelites knew what Egypt was, and never were happy until they were all clean out of reach of the Egyptians. The further they got away the better, for they do not reach up to the purpose of God for them until they are across Jordan. When they come to Jordan (Joshua 3) they see the ark in it, and they pass clean over. Do you shrink from death? If you do, it is because you are looking at it instead of at the ark. Death was nothing to Simeon. He takes the child in his arms, and says, "Mine eyes have seen thy salvation." I have the Saviour in my arms. I am clean done with everything.

God gave His Son. He was a man here on earth, and in death He bore the judgment that lay on man, to remove it from the believer, and to transfer him from the kingdom of Satan into the kingdom of the Son of His love, "to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God." Are you blind, or have you been blind? If a blind man were assured that he could recover his sight, he would submit to any sacrifice to secure it, and, after he had recovered it, surely he would shrink from everything that would injure his sight again? The glory of that light made Paul blind. The light of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, shone into his soul; and could Saul receive this light, and continue as he was before? Surely not! As light is distinct and separate from darkness, so is a soul that receives Christ morally separate from all that is not of Christ.

Do you think it melancholy — was it melancholy for Simeon to close his eyes on this scene when Jesus was in his arms? Was it melancholy for Paul to turn from this scene when he saw the glory of that light? Or for Stephen, when he saw the glory of God and Jesus? You may say that is an advanced state; but Saul of Tarsus was not advanced when he began his course thus.

How differently the heart would be affected by the Lord's grace towards us, if the soul had the consciousness that not only is there a work done for me, but the Person who did the work occupies my heart. As the apostle puts it, "it pleased God to reveal his Son in me." It was not melancholy to Paul. On the contrary, he says, "I live Christ." It is not merely the effect of a thing done, but "Christ liveth in me," and that in the very scene where I am. It was not that Saul was improved, but a new plant, a Plant of Renown, was in him, and he has this One, and no other, before him. Oh! does not your heart tell you if you had this One — if, like Simeon, you so possessed Christ — what a place and what a portion it would be! It is impossible to receive Christ, and to go on in the world. In receiving Him the whole thing is changed — there is a new plant, a new Person in you. Christ is formed in you. It may be small at first. The largest oak was once very small. But if you accept Christ, you cannot go on as you were before. He diverts you from everything that you are as a natural man. The thief on the cross gave up himself when he turned to the Man who had done nothing amiss. Self is the great thing to give up, the sum of everything. He dropped himself, and took up Christ. Christ was the one absolutely before his soul. You cannot enjoy the thing from which you have been delivered, and hold to the One who has delivered you. Impossible! Simeon is told that he shall not see death until he has seen the Lord's Christ; and the effect of grace in his soul leads him to say, "Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." He is done with all connected with this scene, and his eyes are filled with the glory of the Saviour. "Christ in him the hope of glory." "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God."

It is not a sad thing. The light of the glory of Christ is above the brightness of the sun. Had you that light shining into your heart, you would find that the brightness of the sun in nature was surpassed and eclipsed! If you have received the light which is above the brightness of the sun, you are not to be pitied because other lights are gone out. He only is to be pitied who has not got it, and has only the sparks of his own kindling. J. B. S.

She Fell Asleep

The following derives all its interest from the remarkable leading of God's Spirit in bringing the writer and subject of this paper together a very few days before the Lord took her home to Himself. She was a child of sorrow and suffering indeed, the mother of a family, all of whom had fallen under death's hand, leaving herself and her partner a solitary couple. The weight of her sorrow pressed her down, and disease of a trying nature began to develop itself. Living now next door to her, and seeing the frequent visits of the medical attendant, and occasionally the clergyman of the parish, I felt a deep interest, and a yearning anxiety, which they only know who have had it, as to her true state and condition. Did she know a Saviour's love? — was she looking to Him? — was the prospect before her dark or bright? — were often weighed questions in my mind; and many a time did I speak to the Lord about her, and found my only solace and comfort there; for I should say this pressure on my spirit about one of whom I had known nothing personally, and whom I had never seen, was new to me; for I am not an evangelist, in the true sense of the word, though I greatly desire to have a deeper interest in, and concern for, souls.

Thus matters went on for weeks, until at last, on my return home one afternoon, I heard she was much worse, and that death was evidently very near. After looking to the Lord, I sat down and wrote a very few lines to her husband, asking for her, expressing my deep sympathy for him, and also the earnest hope that she knew the Saviour, whose blood cleanseth from all sin; adding, that I myself, as a poor needy one, had known what it was to trust Him. I had occasion to make a call a little way from the house, and on my return, found that she had meanwhile sent a message to me, requesting me to call and see her. I hastened to her bedside, and, as I took her hand, she said with great earnestness, "Oh, I have been longing for some weeks to see you, and now I feel so thankful the Lord has sent you to help me on my way." As it was advanced in the evening, and she was very weak, I did not remain long with her. When leaving, she requested me to see her again next morning. I did so, and again the same evening, and so on, almost each day until she fell asleep. From the first evening I saw her, I found out that she was a soul awakened to a sense of her need of Christ and His sufficiency for the deepest need. I have since found out that the gracious Lord wrought this in her in various ways, mostly, perhaps, through sorrow and family bereavement, of which she had no small share. I was in nowise instrumental in this; but I had the joy of seeing in her the power of God's delivering grace and the blessedness of His word, in quieting her natural fear of death. One little circumstance of this kind I may record: she expressed to me, on one occasion, her fear in prospect of death; not, she said most decidedly, as to her acceptance in any way, but she had a shrinking from death and the suffering of it. The nature of her disease, too, was very likely to lead to such suffering. I read her part of Joshua 3, calling her attention to the fact, that when the children of Israel were crossing Jordan, it was on the ark, not on the waters of the river, their eyes and thoughts were to be fixed. "When ye see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after it." As soon as I had finished, she said with great earnestness, "That ark is Christ." I said, "Thank God, it is so." She never lost sight of that, and it comforted her many a time afterwards. The last time I saw her she had all her family around her bedside. It was the last time they saw her. She herself wished and arranged it so. Her simple acknowledgment of perfect confidence in Christ, and rest in Him, was very sweet. And then she asked for the hymn —

"How sweet the name of Jesus sounds

In a believer's ear;

It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,

And drives away his fear."

And the earnest way in which she sang it, weak though she was, and exhausted, was very touching. This was my last visit to her. I called, as usual, next day, but she was unable to see me; and that evening, without the struggle she at first dreaded, peacefully and calmly she fell asleep, so quietly, so gently, that "they thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died."

Reader, do you know that Saviour who shed His blood? What is all the world to you, if you have not Christ? Where are you going to spend your eternity? Reader, Christ is coming; are you ready? Or death is at hand; are you ready? "He that hath the Son hath life." Have you? W. T. T.

Christ Our Peace; or the Only Foundation

And now, believing in the name of the Son of God, and simply resting on the faithful word, you can say, "My sins are forgiven. I have eternal life. I am saved." Praise the Lord! Even now there is joy over you in the presence of the angels. And no wonder! Saved from such a hell! Saved for such a glory! Not only forgiven, but made righteous, justified from all things

God your Father! Christ yours! and the Comforter to dwell within you! For, having believed in Christ, you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit until the day of full redemption, when the Lord Jesus will come back again to take us to Himself, to be ever with Him and like Him, to see Him as He is, to behold His glory. Lift up your heart to Him in praise!

But remember the ground of all this. Our one resting-place is Christ — not our joy, or love, or inward feelings. Nothing connected with self can be a ground of peace with God. Jesus Christ Himself is our peace. And it is not frames or feelings that bring us the knowledge of peace — no, nor even the fruits of the Holy Spirit in us; but the testimony of the Holy Spirit to Christ. Sin was the cause of the enmity between us and God; the blood of Christ has put away sin, and so made peace. But it is easy to say, "Christ is my peace — I rest only on the word" — when the heart is filled with love, and joy, and praise. How will it be if your heart grow cold, and your joy have ebbed, and all seem dead within? Oh! beware of the wiles by which Satan will then try to make you doubt God. Will you listen to the Tempter, and begin to say within yourself, "I thought I was a Christian, I felt such peace, and love, and joy; I had such delight in the word and in prayer; but now I fear it was all a delusion. I was deceiving myself." Or will you then boldly stand by the word of God, and give the lie to every sinful doubt? Oh! forget not that Christ, and not self, is the ground of peace. Self may change, but Christ never; feelings may fluctuate, but the faithful Word is still the same.

Our "old man," that is, the nature we have received from Adam by natural descent, is "corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;" and think not that it has been changed in your conversion. It will remain with you unchanged, lusting against the spirit, and contrary to the spirit, till you lay down the body in death, or until the Lord come. (Eph. 4: 22; Gal. 5: 17.) But God tells you that He has searched to its depths the filthy source of all your sins, and knowing all, He has loved you and saved you. You, however, are ignorant of the extent of your sinfulness; and, as day by day you make fresh discoveries of it, Satan will try to stumble you.

God points you to the cross as the ground of peace with regard to all; for there, not only has condemnation passed upon your sins, but God has dealt in judgment with yourself as a child of Adam, and all your responsibilities have been met, and every claim against you satisfied in death. God has gone into the whole question of the sin of your very nature, the polluted source of every transgression, and He has once and for ever settled it.

Be sure that Satan will struggle hard to gain this point against you; but cling to the truth of God — "Christ for me, my peace." And if he fail to raise within you a fear of condemnation, he will try a yet more subtle device, and point to your sin as a proof that you are not fit for heaven, not holy enough to meet God; and thus set you to spin out for yourself a kind of spurious holiness, without either power to enable you to be holy, or blessing in the attempt.

When such temptations and assaults of Satan come upon you, remember the one solid, unchanging ground of confidence, "He is our peace" — "having made peace by the blood of his cross." What shall we say then to these things? "If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him freely give us all things? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom. 8: 31-39.)

The Touch of Faith

Mark 5: 24-34.

Oh, who is that among the throng,

Who so calmly walks alone,

Love resting in His face?

'Tis Christ the Lord, God's blessed Son,

Responding to the call of one

Who needs His healing grace.

One, too, there is amid that crowd,

Beneath the weight of suffering bow'd,

Unknown to all beside.

For twelve long years she bore her pain,

Spent all she had, could nothing gain,

Till Jesus she descried.

But when she sees Him drawing near,

How bounds her heart with hope and cheer,

Resolved the crowd to brave!

To touch that bless'd One's garment's hem

She knows is to "be whole;" — and then —

The touch of faith she gave.

Immediately her pains depart,

What joy, what comfort fills her heart!

She would not have it known!

She little thought that feeble touch

Had cheer'd her Saviour's heart as much

As it had heal'd her own.

He felt the virtue flowing o'er

That He was trusted, which was more

Than aught she e'er could do.

And can He let the heal'd one go

Without a word or look to show

That He had loved her too?

He will not heed the callous press,

He longs to hear her lips confess

The secret of her soul.

To tell Him is to get release,

His gracious answer, — "Go in peace,

Thy faith hath made thee whole."

Lord Jesus! Thou art still the same

As when that lowly woman came

To have her pain removed.

Since Thou ascendedst to Thy throne,

How many a heart, unseen, unknown,

Thy healing power has proved!

Yes! now the streams of virtue flow

Unhinder'd, for our sin and woe —

Has all been borne by Thee.

God's glory in Thy face doth shine

While righteousness and grace combine

To set the suff'rer free.

The feeblest look of faith on Thee

Secures salvation full and free,

And gives Thee joy and cheer,

As much in glory bright above,

As in Thy walk of lowly love,

The "Man of Sorrows" here.

"Is it Peace?"

2 Kings 9: 17.

One of the most important questions that could possibly engage the attention of a man stands at the head of this paper, and yet it would seem that in proportion to its importance is the indifference with which fallen man treats it.

Not so the world, with regard to its interests, or kingdoms and nations, respecting their welfare; wise and far-seeing with reference to time, man is a fool, and plays the fool, in the things of God and of eternity. Peace is the great desire of nations, to maintain it on honourable terms with surrounding neighbours is the great desire of every well-ordered State; and to live in peace with his neighbours and friends is the mark of a great and good man. How often and anxiously breathed was the word "peace" lately! How desired and longed for, both by conquerors and conquered! And when at last it came, how was it not flashed along the telegraph wire from country to country, and from continent to continent! What interest and anxiety, long on the watch, did it not find in every land! Alas, how different if I speak about "peace with God!" — a peace which Christ made by the blood of His cross; a peace which nothing can break; a peace, without which man is miserable in life, and hopeless in death. Reader, "is it peace" with you? If not, give me your attention for a little.

First. Let me tell you what peace is not. A truce is not peace; it may be very well so long as it lasts, but it is not intended to be permanent or lasting. It is, at best, but a temporary abstaining from hostilities by the mutual consent of two contending powers, and as soon as the prescribed limit is passed, war and bloodshed break out as terrible and destructive as ever.

Again. Gaining victories is not peace; it is, on the contrary, a proof that hostilities are going on, though one may be victorious in them. What, then, is peace, if it be not a truce, or gaining the day, as we say?

Peace is the complete and final overthrow of every hostile foe, so that there is no enemy to show. We shall take two illustrations; the first you will find in Exodus 15, where the children of Israel celebrate the triumphs of Jehovah over all their enemies. "I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation." . . . . "Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea. The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone." The 30th verse of chapter 14 tells you the spring of this note of praise, namely, "Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore."

There was no enemy to lift up his head; all their enemies, the glory and flower of Egypt, had gone down like "lead in the mighty waters." They are a liberated people; they have seen the salvation of the Lord; consequently they can celebrate its triumphs. But observe the point of importance. There was no enemy to lift up his head, and for this simple reason, there were none left; the mighty waters of the Red Sea, through which Israel passed in safety, returned and flowed over the glory of Egypt. "The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them."

Let us now look at a more magnificent victory and triumph; you will find the account of it in John 20. The Lord Jesus Christ is the victor, and sin, death and hell the vanquished. It is a wonderful sight. He is standing above all that He has risen out of, in the magnificence of His triumph! He had been under death and judgment, though not for Himself. The whole array of hostile enemies had put forth their might against Him, and He, blessed One, in the matchless grace of His own nature, had given Himself to meet it all; and He did meet it, and that perfectly, in His cross, glorifying God so perfectly, that the glory of the Father "raised him up from the dead, and glorified him, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenlies;" in His cross putting away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, as well as through death; destroying him that had the power of death. In John 20, then, He is seen standing in the fulness of His triumph, dispensing the spoils of victory, and His first word to the assembled disciples is, "Peace." It announced the overthrow of all their hostile foes, and proclaimed the fulness of His victory; but He goes further, for He not only announces peace, but likewise communicates life. He breathed on them, and saith unto them, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Further, if we chose to pursue it, we should find that from Him the victorious risen, ascended One, the Comforter, was sent down to dwell in all who believe in Him. Will you say, reader, what are your thoughts of such a triumph? Are you a partaker of it ? Can you say, as you look up from the empty grave of Jesus to the occupied throne of the Father, "being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ" ? Not only this, but the consciousness of present favour, the hope of the glory of God filling the heart, while you joy in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, what a wonderful thing, not only peace of conscience, but peace with God as God is! Reader, "Is it peace?" If not, "acquaint, now thyself with him, and be at peace; thereby good shall come unto thee." For "He is our peace," having "made peace by the blood of his cross."

Reader, are you indifferent, thoughtless, careless? Listen! "When they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them . . . . and they shall not escape." The Lord in His mercy grant you so to know Him, that your heart shall be full, yea, even to overflowing! W. T. T.

"Without Hope"

Ephesians 2: 12.

These are very solemn words. "Having no hope, and without God in the world," is the language used by the Spirit of God when He would describe the condition and position of Gentiles in the flesh, dead in trespasses and sins; and the contrast is equally striking: "In Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off; are made nigh by the blood of Christ." On the one side it is "no hope," and "without God;" on the other side it is "in Christ Jesus" — "made nigh by the blood of Christ."

Not many days since, I was asked to visit a young lad who was supposed to be dying. As soon as I reached his bedside, I found him, in every sense of the word, in a terrible state. He had been, along with his father and other members of his family, working in a mill hard by where he lived, and was keeping his bed just a week the day I saw him. Disease had made dreadful havoc of his body during those six days; a living corpse is the only language suited to describe him. I could see very well, as I sat beside him, that every moment was precious, as he was fast sinking; and I spoke to him earnestly about the Lord Jesus and His finished work, and his own need of such a Saviour. He could not speak much, but to this he said nothing; he only looked about the room with a kind of wild, vacant stare, which truly told a tale for itself. I then spoke to him more personally about his soul, and the prospect before him, when he answered me in the words which stand at the head of this paper. "No hope, no hope!" he said; further, that he had not thought of the Lord all his short life (for he was only eighteen years old), and he did not believe that Christ was then willing to receive him. I endeavoured, from scripture, to set Christ before him in His true character, as well as the sufficiency and fulness of redemption; but, apparently, as far at least as I could judge, to no purpose. With his family, most of whom were present, I knelt by his bedside. My only comfort in such a case was in looking up to the One who is on high. I left him, knowing well I should never see him again, for he was rapidly becoming comatose, the precursor of death; and at six o'clock that evening he breathed his last. What may have taken place in his soul, the Lord alone knows, but he left behind him nothing on which one ray of hope could shine. Reader, where are you? "Without Christ," or "in Christ Jesus," which is it? Remember, the time may not be far distant for you; and if you die in your sins, you are lost for ever. May the Lord, by His Spirit, make use of this solemn, simple circumstance to awaken any careless and Christless one whose eye rests upon it W. T. T.

The Glory of the Cross

Whether we think of God's glory, or Christ's glory, or the practical effect on our hearts, it is Christ's cross, as being a real sacrifice for sin, that is really efficacious. It glorifies God, infinitely honours Christ, and perfectly blesses man, telling him he is the object of God's infinite love, and yet maintaining righteousness in His heart. Jesus was God manifest in the flesh, and, as to His Person, supremely glorious in dignity. This, indeed, enabled Him to do such a work; but never, as to His work and service, was He so glorious as He was upon the cross. I speak to you feebly, beloved reader, but is it not the truth, words, as Paul says, of truth and soberness? And this thing was not done in a corner. And now mark, too, the blessed efficacy of it for me, a poor sinner. There stood sin, death, judgment, just wrath, in my way. My conscience told me it was so, and God's word plainly declares it. Satan's power bound it down, so to speak, upon my soul, while his temptations encouraged me to go on in what led to it. God's law even did but make the matter worse for me, if I pretended to meddle with it, for its holiness condemned my transgressions. And now, for him that believes, all is taken out of the way. Sin gone, death gone, as the terrible thing I awaited — Christ has gone into it. Judgment — Christ has borne it. Wrath — there is none for me; I am assured of perfect love. Christ, in making me partake of the efficacy of His death, has set me, beyond all these things, in the light, as God is in the light — having loved me, and washed me from my sins in His own blood, and made me a king and priest to God and His Father. In rising, He has shown me this new place into which He has brought me; though, as yet, of course, I have it only by faith, and participation in that life in the power of which He has risen. Yes, dear reader, the believer is saved — he has eternal life — he is justified; he waits, no doubt, to be glorified, but he knows Him who has obtained it all for him, and that He is able to keep that which he has committed unto Him until that day.

"No, No"

John 6: 37.

It is related of the great Bishop Butler that in his closing hours his uneasiness and restlessness manifested itself, and he gave utterance to what passed through his mind, thus: "Though I have tried to avoid sin, and to please God to the utmost of my power, yet, from being conscious of my constant weakness, I am afraid to die." "My lord," said his chaplain, "you forget that Jesus Christ is a Saviour." "True," replied the bishop; "but how shall I know that He is a Saviour for me?" The chaplain replied, "It is written, 'him that cometh to me I will in no wise (ou me) cast out.'" "True," said the bishop, "and I have read that scripture a thousand times, but I never felt its full value till this moment. Stop there, for now I die happy."

I am more than ever struck with the way in which scripture gives prominence to the Person of Christ, as the testimony of the gospel; a Christ who is in the glory of God, having by His death first settled the question of sin. A Christ who is in the glory of God, as the proof that God is completely glorified in the putting away the sins of all who believe in Jesus, and in whose face shines the glory of God, is the Saviour for a poor sinner to-day and for ever. Just think a moment what an immense thing it is to be able to point a sinner to a Saviour in glory; a Saviour who was on the cross, over whose soul all the waves and billows of judgment rolled; who passed through death's dark raging flood, a Saviour who was dead, but who is now "the living One;" a Saviour who now occupies the throne of the Father, soon to be on His own throne.

It was a Saviour that Philip preached; a Saviour the jailer at Philippi received; a Saviour the poor thief on the cross vindicated and trusted in; a Saviour Lord; a Saviour he went to be with that very day in paradise. It was a Saviour in glory who was revealed in the heart of Saul of Tarsus, while he was wasting and persecuting the saints. I have a heart to be satisfied, as well as a conscience to be met. The Saviour whose blood alone can perfectly purge my conscience, can alone meet and satisfy my heart. Such a Saviour says, "Him that cometh to me I will in nowise cast out." W. T. T.

Sowing and Reaping

Proverbs 1: 24-26.

What makes this passage so very solemn is, that it is the close, the finish, as we say. This is very serious indeed. The Book of Proverbs refers to the government of God upon the earth; and therefore the judgment here, though of God, and final, does not go beyond judgment in this world. It is man in this world, dealt with in his responsibility.

1st. The call, or voice of God, now comes from the place where Christ is witness to the perfection and completion of His work. Let me say the present call of God is based on the perfection of Christ's finished work. The One who put away sin is now on the heavenly side of the grave. He died unto sin once, now He liveth unto God. Besides, the presence of the Holy Ghost here on earth is a testimony to the completeness and sufficiency of the cross. But, besides all this, the call of God is sent forth in many channels. Did He not speak to you by your recent sorrow? Has that late suffering of yours nothing of God's voice in it? Is there not in your very conscience, at this moment, a voice that tells you that if you were now to die you would be lost for ever? Be assured, reader, God has not left Himself without abundant witness to the patient, long-suffering character of His grace.

2nd. We have here also man's refusal: "I have called, AND YE REFUSED." How solemn this is! Refused is the word the blessed God uses to describe the way in which man treats His call. This refusal does not always take the same shape or form, but refusal it is: sometimes, in so many words, it is an open avowal of dislike to the subject at all costs; very often it is a kind of indifferentism; and most frequently it is a procrastination, which promises to itself a more convenient season — a season, let me add, which in most cases never comes; but let the character be what it may, it all ranks in God's eyes as refusal. "I have called, and ye refused." Reader, if you are still out of Christ, there is a little hell within you at this moment, even as the ebbs and pulsations of the sea within the harbour walls are but an indication, a reminder of the dread roll of the ocean a thousand miles outside. Reader, think of these words; you in your turn calling, but the call is too late. The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and you are not saved. No more insensibility now! no more procrastination now! No gospel no peace, no hope! One voice rolls its long sadness over ages of ages for ever: "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me: for that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord: they would none of my counsel; they despised all my reproof. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices."

This, as I have stated, is the doom of those who hearken not to wisdom. There was no love, or submission to the truth: their ease and prosperity and carelessness will be their destruction. As regards those who walk in a different road, in wisdom's ways, how striking the contrast! — "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her. Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." (Chap. 3: 13-17.) W. T. T.

"The Closed Door "

Late! late! too late!

Ye cannot enter in.

The door is shut, in vain ye wait,

The Bridegroom's gone within.

The hour of mercy now is o'er;

Judgment hath closed the open door;

Judgment from Him whose grace before

Ye spurn'd from love of sin!

Late! late! too late!

Ye cannot enter now.

The music wakes within the gate,

The garlands crown the brow.

The heavenly strains that reach your ear,

Their very sweetness makes most drear;

Filling your hearts with boding fear,

Ye cannot enter now!

Late! late! too late!

Why came ye not before?

Did He not long with patience wait,

And open keep the door?

Did He not many a message send?

Did He not woo you as a friend?

Why did ye not His voice attend?

The day of grace is o'er!

Late! late! too late!

Ye cannot enter now.

Barr'd, and for ever, is the gate —

Mercy averts her blow.

The voice that call'd you to repent

Hath sworn, and He will not relent;

Your day of mercy all is spent,

Ye cannot enter now!

God Speaking from Heaven

Hebrews 12: 18-29.

The apostle contrasts Mount Sinai and Mount Zion, and warns them what the present testimony is. It is a mistake we very often make that we are so many responsible persons going on to judgment, and there must give an account of ourselves. That is true of us, but that is very far from all. There has been a dealing of God with man, and He is now dealing with them for the last time; that makes it the more solemn.

It is not now a question of good and evil in us. What the Lord presents to our souls now is, that that question is all settled; there is none righteous, no, not one; that is the way He is dealing now. If His grace is refused, judgment is pronounced upon their state; that is what I mean by settled. Now, He comes either in judgment or in warning, and if that is slighted there is condemnation. The contrast between the two Mounts is exceedingly striking. People do not believe they are in this state of condemnation. There the law is exceedingly useful in awakening — if they judge of good and evil they cannot judge of what is beyond themselves. Man's judgment is no higher than the evil he has done. A man brought up in dirt sees nothing in dirt; so with the natural mind, it judges according to its own state. God brings in His estimate of what man ought to be. That is what the law is — as a hammer, it breaks the rock in pieces. Therefore, Moses said, "I do exceedingly fear and quake." "Felix trembled," not that he was saved, but the word of God awakened his conscience, because conscience is there. God has dealt probably with every heart here. The word breaks us up, and shows us we are not what God wants; but that is not the will being converted. The flesh abuses everything. God gave the law to convict of sin; man takes it to work out righteousness. But God is not leaving you to the day of judgment; He is dealing with you now, and this is the day of grace.

When the word of God comes home to man — what man really ought to be — who could answer Him one of a thousand? Wherever the word reaches the conscience you see that it is a present dealing; not put off to the day of judgment, because it reaches it now. He knows perfectly well he is not it. You know you have not loved God with all your heart to-day; you have not loved your neighbour as yourself one day in your life. My conscience tells me the law is right — I may kick against it.

You must not have any thought of your own righteousness in the day of judgment, because you have not got any.

The young man in Matthew 19: 16 did not say, "What shall I do to be saved?" but "that I may have eternal life." The Lord's answer is, not if you want to be saved, but if you want to live, "This do and live." The young man said, "This I have done, and what lack I yet?" "Sell all, and come follow me." This tested him, for his heart was set on his possessions; he went away from grace. So, in John 8: 9, one by one they went away from grace, because they dreaded the eye that could detect them. That is what people do still — they cannot bear conviction. It is getting away from God, because the heart and conscience cannot bear that which comes out in the presence of God. What a terrible thing that is, if your only hope of comfort is to keep away from God — to keep out of His sight!

Verse 22. — We are come, not to Mount Sinai, but to Mount Zion. Zion is a word of immense import, if we have read it spiritually. Zion was not simply mercy and patience. The ark was the only possible means of intercourse with God that Israel had, and they had sent it away; so have we — so to speak — looking at our natural state. The importance of Zion was, that Israel had been already tested and failed. Eli was a godly old man, but did not keep his sons in order, and when he found the ark was taken, that it was all over, he falls back and dies.

You have to be brought to the conviction that it is all over. Then God comes in, not merely in mercy and patience — that He had all through — but God comes in when all the responsibility is closed by the total failure of man, and takes the ark out of the hands of the Philistines, and places it on Mount Zion, by David, as by Christ, now David's seed.

Verses 22, 23. — The whole scene of millennial glory on earth and in heaven is exceedingly interesting, but I do not speak of that now.

Verse 25. — How does Christ speak from heaven? Is it, there is a day of judgment, and you must prepare yourself for it? He comes and speaks to man, and deals with man on the ground of His being a Man in heaven. If He speaks from heaven, He speaks not merely of mercy, but of grace, on the ground of an accomplished work. He appeals to our hearts upon the ground of what He is and has done. Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, because He has nothing more to do as to making out a righteousness for us. As to the question of righteousness, that work that He has finished is the righteousness that brings us into glory, who, through grace, have believed in Him. I get these two things, the place that Christ speaks from, and the work that brings the people in. He does not reproach you. He comes and tells you, Do you think I do not know what sin is? I bore it. He knows what the consequence is as none other can know it. "The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary." Are you learning God in the presence of grace? The hearts of the sons of men are wholly set in them to do evil. Man's history is a terrible one. Because Christ humbled Himself in grace, man profited by the occasion, in order that He should be despised and rejected of men. And is there not a rejection of Him now? Do not some of you reject Him — do not people know that they are sinners, and go on sinning? That is despising Him. But where the heart has been brought down, what do I find? Suppose I am coming to God by Him, why, He tells me, I am in heaven, because your sins are put away. And what can God say if Christ, who bore my sins, is in the presence of God? the thing before me is not judgment, but Christ. If I come to God as a judge, why, Christ is there. He cannot but own that they are all put away — Christ appearing in the presence of God as a personal witness that the sins have been put away.

The judgment day would be according to my works, but the present day is according to the efficacy of Christ's work; so we see what a great thing it is for Him to speak to us from heaven. It is an appeal that ought to put to shame and confusion every one that does not bow to it. "By him all that believe are justified from all things." That is the only faith God will have. Christ is so perfectly glorified that He says, I will not have any other. If I own Christ, I am nothing, that is the thing that is wanted. Do you want to have a little share of your own pretension in the presence of a dying Saviour? If you could get in a bit of your own righteousness, it would be like the dead flies, causing the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour.

Thank God, that voice, if it is in the soul, is eternal life; it is God's way of communicating life.

Now, have you all taken this ground that God has taken with you, telling you, you are all lost — still telling it in grace? Beloved friends, it is not waiting for the day of judgment, when judgment will be executed. He is speaking to you from the right hand of the Majesty on high, where He sat down when He had by Himself purged our sins. Are you going to refuse Him that speaks? I know our hearts drag us down, and the things around us are contrary to us, but it is Christ who has come and presented Himself before our eyes. Remember how He speaks; and are you going to refuse to hear Him, like the deaf adder? Are you going to take God in judgment, when you have despised Him in grace?

The Lord give us to see the truth, and taste the unspeakable love of Him who gave Himself for us! Will He not with Him freely give us all things? He who has come in grace will come in judgment. J. N. D.

"The Master of the House Risen Up, and the Door Shut"

Luke 13: 25.

These solemn words of the Lord Jesus were part of His reply to one who said unto Him, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" As was usual with the blessed Lord, He answers the man, not his question. It was just such a question as a man might engage his thoughts with, solemn though it be, without any personal exercise whatever; a question which many a man would gladly discuss, and eagerly argue, without any special reference to himself in the matter. Hence, no doubt, the blessed Lord made it a most personal, searching, individual matter. "Strive to enter in at the strait gate." He gives three powerful reasons for this word —

1st. The gate, road, or way, is at present open, and it is strait, that is, narrow, the real entrance being faith in Christ, and conversion to God. The striving to enter in does not imply an energy in return for which entrance is granted as a reward, but it is a man's casting himself upon the grace of God in Christ; a man cannot bring anything of himself in by such a gate; all that belongs to that must be left outside for ever.

2nd. The Lord says, "For many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able." This means clearly that many would seek to get in some other way beside the strait gate, either by good works, or ordinances, or something of man which brings dishonour upon Christ and His work. Is it not largely so at the present time? Are there not multitudes who wildly fancy that they can make good a claim upon God? Reader, do you belong to that class? Listen to the solemn word of Christ, "Shall not be able." Oh, how it bars and shuts up every avenue on that side, closing the door for ever against all that would not only destroy the sinner's hope, but cast a slur upon the alone sufficiency and work of the Lord Jesus Christ!

3rd. Another and most solemn reason is, that the door which is now open, and for every poor sinner who has a heart for Christ, will not always be open. "When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath, shut to the door," leaves no question as to that. At the present time Christ is seated and expecting. He is now an exalted Prince and Saviour. "I am the door; by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved." So long as His present session in the heavens continues, He where He is in the glory of God, and the Holy Ghost on the earth sent forth from Him where He is, bear testimony to the completeness, fulness, and perfection of that redemption which is in Christ Jesus. In virtue of Christ's death there is salvation, present and eternal, for all who believe. "By him all that believe are justified from all things." But — and, reader, mark it well — as soon as He leaves His present position, when He rises up as it were, the door is closed for ever. Were such to take place at this moment, where would you be? Do these words describe you? "Ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are: Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity."

Reader, that moment is speeding its way, He who now sits on the right hand of God will soon rise up. If you should be found without at that moment, how solemn, how dreadful, to knock when the door is closed for ever against you, and to carry into an eternity of misery the memory of a slighted Saviour and a despised salvation! W. T. T.

The Light and the Blood

That God is light is a truth more universally recognised, in some sense, than perhaps any other truth of God. We do not mean that it is known, or intelligently confessed, as God's truth, but we mean that every man's conscience is aware of it, and every man's ways evidence the conviction he has within. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." It is because of this that the wicked hate Him, and natural religion seeks to conciliate Him. A natural man cannot think about God without also thinking about his own sins. Of this we are convinced, that though men may speak of, and in measure recognise God in goodness, in power, in mercy, yet this thought must intrude, if even it be not uppermost, that if God be all this, yet sin is in them, and they are sinners. The extent of this sense of sinfulness varies greatly from the careless recognition of the fact, to the deep consciousness of it as wrought in a soul by the Spirit of God. But we repeat, no one in his natural condition, no one apart from Christ, known and trusted in by faith, can think of God calmly and quietly for many moments, without also the thought of sin, or sins, arising in the mind.

"God is light;" but this great and solemn fact, which makes the sinner's heart and conscience quail, is the foundation of the deepest blessing to the believer's heart and mind.

But light manifests, for "whatsoever doth make manifest is light." As in natural, so in spiritual things, in the dark nothing is rightly discerned. In a dark room there is no difference between a chair and a table, between a black man and a white. The difference exists, but it is not seen. So in the spiritual darkness of nature, "the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God." Good and evil, the things of God and the things of the world, all are blended and confused. The evil is there, but apart from the grace of God it is not judged. Bring the light of the sun into the dark room, and everything is discovered. Bring the light of God's truth into the soul, and everything is spiritually discerned, for God is light.

It is a terrible moment when the light of God first shines into a sinner's heart, and shows him what he is, and upon the sinner's ways, and shows him what they truly are in God's sight. "In him is no darkness at all." In His light all is light, and darkness is reproved. Man himself is seen and known through and through — not as he has been accustomed to regard himself in self-complacency, or as his fellows may have regarded him, in ignorance, it may be, of the workings of his wicked heart, even as of their own.

And who could abide that light, its intense, all-searching power, but for the provision which grace has made in the blood? The blood of Christ is God's provision for, and it is also the peace and the plea of the sinner's conscience when brought into the light of God. Blessed and perfect, because divine provision, through faith, in which the sinner is justified, and the conscience is at rest.

The light manifests the sin, the darkness of the sinner. The blood puts away the sin, and sets the sinner at peace in the light.

The light even of God Himself can manifest nothing which the precious blood cannot put away, for the "blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth from all sin." "The life is in the blood," and "it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul."

How perfect the harmony thus existing in all the provisions of divine grace! "God is light," and would have men to be in the light in communion with Himself.

It was not God who hid Himself from Adam, but Adam from God. So now He hides not Himself from sinners, but poor sinful man, fearful of the light, and ignorant of the blood, withdraws himself from God.

Beloved reader, if the light has not yet shined in your heart, "to give you the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we beseech you in Christ's stead, be reconciled to God." For "God hath made Christ to be sin for us, [he] who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." Shrink not from the light; let its beams pour into your heart and conscience, for that word of light which tells you of God's holiness, and of your own sin, tells you also of the blood of the Lamb without blemish and without spot — the blood of that blessed Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, and Son of man, which was shed for you and for me, to save us from sin and the world now, and from the wrath to come, and to fit us for that place in glory where the same Lord Jesus Christ now dwells, "having abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel," from whence also He will soon descend to take His believing people to Himself, that where He is, there they may be also. "For as Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many, unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation."

"Chiefest among Ten Thousand"

When first I heard of Jesus' name,

I only then for refuge came:

I heard that He for sinners died —

And from His pierced and wounded side

Had flow'd the water and the blood —

To bring the sinner near to God.

I found Him meet my every need,

That He a Saviour was indeed;

By Him my every want supplied,

Whene'er I have to Him applied.

Of grace, the storehouse full and free,

All fulness dwells in Him for me.

But, oh! I have such glories viewed

In Him who as my surety stood;

Such beauties, human and divine,

In all His words and actions shine,

That now I sing, with rapturous heart,

"Thou altogether lovely art."

And all He is, He is for me!

So meek in all His majesty,

So tender in Almightiness,

So sympathising in distress,

So liberal — all He has He gave,

Yea, e'en Himself, my soul to save!

It is not terror makes me flee,

Saviour of sinners, Lord, to Thee;

Thy excellencies me constrain

To seek Thee as my greater gain;

Thy presence, my eternal home,

Come, blessed Lord, oh quickly come!

Amen.

The Veil Rent, the Rocks Riven, the Graves Opened

Matthew 27: 51, 52.

These verses relate what took place when Jesus yielded up the ghost. The blessed Lord died, surrendered the life which He had, and which none had title to take from Him. "No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." Such are His own blessed words. The moment that was done results came forth which nothing else could accomplish, which even His own blessed and beautiful life on earth could never have produced. But the giving up of His life, His surrendering Himself as a willing victim to death, as the just judgment of God due to sin, as well as wielded by the power of Satan, is followed by the veil of the Temple being rent in twain from the top to the bottom, by the earth quaking, the rocks rending, the graves opening, and many bodies of the saints which slept, coming forth out of the grave after His resurrection. Heaven, earth, and hell, felt a power they had never owned before.

"By weakness and defeat

He won the meed and crown;

Trod all our foes beneath His feet

By being trodden down.

He hell in hell laid low,

Made sin, He sin o'erthrew;

Bow'd to the grave, destroy'd it so,

And death, by dying slew."

•        •        •        •        •

The "Holy of Holies" was separated from the rest of the temple by a veil, made of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen work; it signified the distance of man as a sinner from God, and set forth the impossibility on the part of God to have any intercourse with man in his sins. The Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest; God could not come out, and man could not go in. But now all is reversed, the veil was rent; that veil of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, typified the spotless humanity of the Lord Jesus. It must be rent before the full moral glory of God can come out, and before we can go in. The new and living way was consecrated for us "through the veil, that is to say, his flesh."

Once more, observe the manner in which it was rent, namely, "from the top to the bottom;" thus declaring that no hand but God's could rend it. He declares that He does not wish the distance, which up to this moment existed, any longer to continue, and not only so, but undertakes Himself to remove it, and in such a way as to display all the righteousness, holiness, truth, and love of His nature. The life of Jesus, beautiful, and perfect, and blessed as it was, His services to man, His obedience to God, could never have rent the veil or opened the graves. If there were no Saviour who died, whose blessed body was given, and whose blood was shed, God were still concealed behind that veil. Man, even at his best, was still at a distance; hell still unconquered, and he that held the power of death still unsubdued. But, blessed be God, it is not so, now that Christ has died. All of God has come out, sin in its root has been judged, the way into the holiest has now been made manifest. The Christ who died is risen and glorified, and in His face shines the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. W. T. T.

"What hath God Wrought?"

Numbers 23: 18.

The thought is that our state should answer to the state into which we have been brought. Where the conscience is good this is the case; we enjoy the thing into which we have been brought in the measure in which we enter into it. The soul must be broken down, the pride of man, that would meet God face to face, that must be broken down — that pride is the worst of all. (I am not speaking of brutish sins.) In his course man has no idea that sin separates him from God.

But when we come to righteousness, that will not do. We all know we have sinned, and that heaven is a holy place, and yet we expect to get there. Call it mercy, or what you will, but man would rather be something else than what he is if going to be judged now. The conscience must be awakened by a present revelation of God. The light comes in, and makes everything manifest, and puts us just as we are in the presence of God. There is no pride in the conscience when we are before God; pride of heart is just being without God altogether. Who am I to be afraid of if God is not in all my thoughts? When I have to do with God there is fear, right fear; that is the beginning of wisdom. There is never any pride in the conscience when we have to do with God. In these verses we find the most absolute justification; God sees no sin at all.

When we look at it as it is here — an absolute judgment outside of what we have done — what hath God wrought? I don't prescribe any particular course of experience, but the pride of heart must be gone to enjoy this.

All the failures of the wilderness had gone before this. (Chap. 23.) Could the enemy, the accuser of the brethren, take up all that Israel had done, and make it a barrier to their entering the land — hinder our getting into heaven? — for this is heaven for us. He could not. (Deut. 9.) They were there at the same moment as when this question was raised by the accuser, Can you go in or not? Well, what is Moses' account? Incessant murmuring. "Ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you." What is the normal state of a Christian? The Christian's path is clearly living up to his privileges — Christ our life, walking in the Spirit, accepted in Him.

We must either be before God in the lowliness of the sense of the grace of God, or meet a God that breaks us down. What is man's place with God? Lowliness. And being nothing, all the man's delight is being nothing, and receiving everything.

The judgment of the Spirit in a saint is another thing from the judgment about him. By the Spirit of God I see such a thing was not meekness, not gentleness on my part. The Spirit of God judges me according to what I am; that is all right, but when God judges me it is according to what Christ is, and has done.

The Spirit of God judges everything in us that is contrary to God; but when the question arises with the accuser, you see what God's judgment actually, absolutely is about me, and that is according to what Christ is and what He has wrought. "God is not a man that he should lie." All the hostility comes to nothing. Why? Because it met God.

Verse 21. "He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel." Why, Moses had seen nothing else! In one sense God had seen it all. Why hath he not seen it? Because He had put it away Himself; there is no such thing seen when you come to the judgment of God about us.

It was not that He allowed the evils. He had humbled them, and proved them, to know what was in their hearts. They had gone all through the wilderness thus. He had chastened them about their sins. You get all God's gracious dealings with them. in Deuteronomy 8. But here it rests with God Himself, and for us I find Christ there, the Lamb that was slain, in the presence of God. Suppose I am broken down, and humbled, and go to God about it, what do I find there? I find the Lamb slain there; a Man there. What tale does that tell? That Christ has finished the work and gone back there, having put our sins away. "Once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." If I come at the beginning, or at the end, I find Christ there. God does not see iniquity in me. Why? Because Christ has put it away. It is what hath God wrought, not what I have wrought. He undertook that work, and there I find that "by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." Christ could not allow sin. Well, then, did He put me away? No; He put my sin away!

We cannot judge ourselves too much and too earnestly. The converted man loves holiness.

The question is now, Is God satisfied with what He has wrought? That, of course, is simple. It overrides all experience. Experience is the work of the Holy Spirit in us, but that is desert work. "Thou hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed." Experience is right; but when you come to the end of all experience, it is, what has God wrought!

Chapter 24: 6. "As the trees of lign aloes which the Lord hath planted." Well, He hath wrought in our hearts that we should follow Him in righteousness and true holiness. When God has wrought, that is the effect. He has taken me in hand, brought me out of Egypt. Who is to condemn? Condemn yourself when you are wrong. But what matter who condemns if God justifies; that is the true side. Are you satisfied with yourself? Then you don't know God at all. Satan may accuse, so as to bring chastisement for our good, but no judgment.

Verse 24. Now you get strength. "Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion."

There I get a picture of power. "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." Consequent on this we get power against the evil.

Reader, is your heart or conscience on that ground? When you stand before the judgment seat of Christ, are you there in your heart according to what God has wrought? or are you looking to the ground of your acceptance for what is done in the plain?

Are you judging of yourself, by yourself, down in the wilderness, or by God, up in the mount? It is God that justifies; the whole thing is God's work: that is a blessed thing.

Our hearts are able to rest and see there is an end, an utter condemnation of all that is of the old Adam state. The whole thing for the heart to rest in is, "what hath God wrought?" The human heart kicks against that, for man likes to be something. The more we look into it, the more we shall see the value of it. Let us judge ourselves, and walk, according to what God hath wrought, in practical holiness. I am going to be like Him. Well, I must be like Him here, bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.

The Lord break us down thoroughly; empty us of ourselves, of all thought that we can do anything! Keep us in His presence, that we may know that joy now; that we may stand there in peace. J. N. D.

The Harvest Past, the Summer Ended

I had just entered on my labours in the hospital at —, when a messenger came saying I was required in ward No—. It was my first visit. I felt my personal weakness, and in my heart said, "Who is sufficient for these things?" as my eye glanced along a ward where on each side were ranged beds, occupied by pale sufferers, young and old.

I soon discovered the person for whom I was specially sent. She was a young woman in the last stage of consumption. Her mother stood beside her wiping the large drops of sweat from her brow. After a question or two, I knelt to ask divine guidance and blessing upon what might now be said to this helpless one. My words were few, and when I rose to speak her ears were deaf, her eyes were fixed, her heart had ceased to beat, and there lay the lifeless form of the subject of my first visit.

As I stood looking upon that lifeless body, something seemed to whisper, "There is no room for trifling here, be diligent, the night is far spent; see around, all are hastening on to eternity; set before them life and death — the way of escape from the wrath to come."

I could only speak a few words of comfort to that bereaved mother, and then turn to tell of Him who through death conquered death, and by whom all that believe are delivered from its sting.

The person who lay in the next bed heard of that mighty One, His finished work for sinners, of whom she felt herself to be one, trusted all to Him who is able to save, and rejoiced with joy unspeakable.

J. — became exceedingly happy, she gave daily increasing evidences of having passed from death unto life.

During the last few days of her sojourn here, she was heard repeatedly going over that beautiful hymn, commencing —

"Jesus, lover of my soul,

Let me to Thy bosom fly;

While the raging billows roll —

While the tempest still is high."

And she dwelt with emphasis upon these two lines,

"Other refuge have I none,

Hangs my helpless soul on Thee."

And when she could no longer articulate the words, she loved to hear them repeated. As death drew near, her joy increased; it was manifested in looks and broken sentences, in which the name of the refuge of her soul sounded again and again: and in a few weeks after I had stood at the first bedside, Jenny's departure took place in fulness of joy.

To those who witnessed it, who were chiefly Romanists, it was a matter of wonder. They said they had never witnessed anything like it. I hope it was the beginning of "good things to come" to many of them.

But how many have passed away in such a manner that it pains my memory now to recall those dreadful scenes!

Death, Guilt, and the Power of Satan

Psalm 22.

There were three things which the Lord Jesus had to encounter, and to triumph over, and which were ever before Him — Death, Guilt, and the power of Satan. The union of these against Him was the "power of darkness," which He acknowledges to the multitudes who came to apprehend Him, "This is your hour, and the power of darkness."

Now, these were the three great enemies which were against us. We had sinned, and God had declared, "The wages of sin is death." We were guilty, and condemnation could not be put away, but by the removal of the occasion of it; and Satan was manifestly against us, as an adversary to our final freedom. Now, the Lord Jesus Christ had just to meet all these, as the federal Head and representative of His people; then there was liberty — glorious and everlasting liberty. We find, then, that Christ had really these three to contend with. He came to be the sin-bearer; and bearing sin, He must necessarily subject Himself to its wages, which was death. Thus bearing sin, guilt was necessarily imputed to Him, and He must suffer its condemnation, until God was satisfied; and, finally, He must, as the Head of His people, overcome him under whom Adam, and all mankind in him, had failed. This Christ did; these He met, took, sustained, remained steadfast under, and overcame; conquered them all, obtained the victory — with wounds and bloodshed indeed; but, having triumphed, He rose with the full blessedness of the enjoyment of God's countenance, death having passed, and guilt removed, and Satan overcome by Him, in the name and for the eternal blessedness of His people.

This was fully manifested at His resurrection, which was a seal of His perfect accomplishment and acceptance, when He rose, a living witness to the full satisfaction for sin having been asked and obtained, and God's faithfulness being manifested. "Thou hast heard me," said Christ, "from the horns of the unicorns," and then without any delay, He immediately adds, "I will declare thy name unto my brethren," as if the enjoyment He possessed was incomplete until the knowledge of it was communicated to those whom He had made part of Himself.

— Extracted.

"Jesus in Glory"

Rise, my soul! behold 'tis Jesus,

Jesus fills thy wondering eyes;

See Him now in glory seated,

Where thy sins no more can rise.

There in righteousness transcendent,

Lo! He doth in heaven appear

Shows the blood of His atonement,

As thy title to be there.

All thy sins were laid upon Him,

Jesus bore them on the tree

God who knew them laid them on Him,

And, believing, thou art free.

God now brings thee to His dwelling,

Spreads for thee His feast divine,

Bids thee welcome, ever telling

What a portion there is thine.

In that circle of God's favour,

Circle of the Father's love,

All is rest — and rest for ever,

All is perfectness above,

Blessed, glorious word for ever,

Yea, for ever is the word;

Nothing can the ransom'd sever,

Nought divide them from the Lord.

The Three Crosses

Luke 23: 27-49.

These verses detail the solemn circumstances connected with the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ. I would invite your earnest attention to it, reader, and to some of the lessons which may be learned from them: —

"And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him."

Have you ever pondered over all that is unfolded in that little word Him? Who was He? The only-begotten of the Father, the Son of God, the brightness of His glory, the Christ, the wisdom of God, and the power of God. He whom they thus crucified was all this, and much more beside.

Have you ever pondered over all that is unfolded in that little word "they"? Who were they? The religious world of that time, the heads of the nation of Israel, the chief priests and scribes — but it was man in his rebel hatred of God and His Christ, letting out his true character, showing there was not a spark of latent good in his heart. If, then, I look at "Him," I learn, 1st, what sin is. Reader, do you know what sin is? The evil deeds of men whose names darken the calendars of crime will not teach you; the wail of the lost and damned, even if you could hear it, would not teach you; but the sorrow of the soul of Him, the Christ, the God man, as He cried, when under the judgment due to sin, and forsaken of God, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" This and this alone tells me what sin is in its own nature, and how intolerable to a holy and righteous God it is. Oh, reader, is it not sufficient to make you blush to think it was on your account that blessed One suffered all this terrible judgment? 2nd, I learn what God is. He it was who gave His only-begotten Son; He it was who undertook to remove the distance which man by his sin brought in between himself and God. I learn what His love to the poor sinner is at the same place where I see that He cannot tolerate sin. It was man who introduced the distance, and, therefore, it was man who was bound to repair the breach thus made, but man had neither the ability nor the will to do so. Oh, how it magnifies the riches of His grace to know that on the side and part of the blessed God was the thought of removing the distance, as well as the providing, at the cost of His own Son, the only way by which it could be effected.

But there are two other crosses. Let us look a little at each.

In one I see a blessed and wonderful illustration of what God meant by the cross of Christ. He means a salvation, that is, pardon and forgiveness, and a place in Paradise with Christ, for the very vilest sinner that believes in His blessed Son. Observe the change which has taken place in this man —

1st, He has the fear of God in his heart; he rebuked the insolent mocking of his companion with these words, "Dost thou not fear God?" This is what man has not in him by nature. "There is no fear of God before their eyes."

2nd, He justifies Christ in words which tell out the simple story of His life, "This man hath done nothing amiss," at the same time that he fully condemns himself, for he says, "We indeed justly (are condemned), for we receive the due reward of our deeds."

3rd, His simple confidence was in the person of the Lord Jesus; his request was to be remembered when Christ came into His kingdom; he asks for no present relief in his suffering; he urges no plea; he seeks not to make good a claim; his simple utterance is perfectly magnificent, "Lord, remember me." And, reader, mark well the answer, "Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." This is what God's salvation is and means — a full deliverance, and a place with the Saviour, all on the ground of the blessed redemption accomplished by the death of the Son of God.

But there is another lesson, and a deeply solemn one, which may be learnt at the cross of the other thief. Mark it well, reader, how near a man may be to Christ and perish. Here was one that witnessed all that we have had before us, one who being beside the Son of God, who was in that sense outwardly, at least, near to Christ, and yet he perishes. He spends the last moments of a life of shame and infamy in railing on the Saviour, and the tongue which soon would be silent in death is raised to revile and mock. Oh, reader, are there not many who pass away from the busy scenes of life, like him, who have left no memory after them but that which brings pain and sorrow with it? Some who have been in their day as outwardly near to Christ, surrounded with privileges, making a profession of Christianity, religious it may be and respectable, who have never known Christ, and who died as they lived, and are now lost for ever; over whose tombstone the truthful inscription would be, "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and they are not saved."

I write these few words, reader, amid the closing hours of a dying year, with the earnest prayer that you may be warned to flee from the wrath that is coming, if you have never yet trusted in Christ, and to find Him, not only your salvation, but your full and abounding portion for ever. W. T. T.

"Come."

Come to the Father, come!

Oh why so long delay?

He calls His wanderers home,

Why should you absent stay?

Have you not sorely proved

How base is Satan's claim;

That all you've sought and loved

Is emptiness and pain?

Come! come! come!

Come to the Father, come!

His message now receive;

He yearns to have you home,

His pardoning love believe.

His arms are open'd wide

To clasp you to His breast;

For you His Son hath died,

Return, and be at rest.

Come! come! come!

Come, all ye lost and dead,

Ye starved and naked, come;

Come, for the feast is spread,

There's bread enough at home.

The fatted calf is kill'd,

The wine and milk abound;

With joy your Father fill'd,

To see you safe and sound.

Come! come! come!

Come from the far off land,

Where death and darkness reign,

Why should you halting stand?

Eternal life you'll gain.

The best robe you shall wear

Of righteousness divine,

Acknowledged son and heir,

In glory you shall shine.

Come! come! come!

Come to the Father, come!

He wants His child to greet.

Come to His happy home;

What welcome shall you meet!

The dance and music wait

To wake their liveliest strain,

When entering through the gate

You're safely home again.

Come! come! come!

London: G. Morrish.

STEM Publishing : W. W. Fereday : God's Glad Tidings

God's Glad Tidings

(Gospel Addresses)

W W Fereday

The Sword of God (Gen. 3: 24, etc.),

Two Great Questions (Gen. 4: 10, etc.),

The Ass and the Lamb (Ex. 13: 13),

Face to Face with Death (1 Sam. 28: 19, etc.),

"Is it Peace?" (2 Kings 9: 22)

"Me" and "My Sins" (Psalm 41: 12, etc.)

"Good News from a Far Country" (Prov. 25: 25)

Human Insensibility (Isa. 1: 3, etc.),

Peace: False and True (Jer. 6: 14, etc.)

An Imperial Convert (Dan. 4: 1, 2)

Joshua the High Priest (Zech. 3: 2)

A Divine Complaint (John 5: 40-45)

Man's Mouth (Rom. 3: 14, etc.)

"No Difference" (Rom. 3: 22, etc.)

"So Great Salvation" (Heb. 2: 3)

Creator: Saviour: Father (1 Peter 4: 19)

To the reader.

The little volume of addresses, entitled "The Old, Old Story," has been so much appreciated that it seems desirable to issue another volume similar in character. If these pages are used of God to help anxious souls into peace and blessing, or if they afford suggestions to those who preach the Word, the writer will be truly thankful.

THE SWORD OF GOD.

"He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim and a flaming sword." — Gen. 3: 24.

"Awake, O sword, against My Shepherd, and against the Man that is My fellow, saith Jehovah of hosts." — Zech. 13: 7.

&";Out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword." — Rev. 1: 15.

There is a tender side, and there is also a stern side, to the divine character, for God is both light and love. Rom. 11: 22 bids us "behold therefore the goodness and severity of God." But who is competent to declare either? Who is able to sound the depths of the matchless statement that "God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son? (John 3: 16). Or who can adequately gauge the meaning of the solemn warning, "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever?" (Rev. 14: 11) .

Men are always apt to think of God with a bias in their minds. Some perceive the tender side of His character and imagine that because God is love there cannot possibly be an eternal hell; others again fail to see the tender side at all, and think of God like the man in Matt. 25: 24, who said: "Lord, I know Thee that Thou art a hard man, reaping where Thou hast not sown, and gathering where Thou hast not strewed." Neither the one nor the other really know God in their hearts.

Our theme just now is the sword of God. The first mention of it in Scripture is in Gen. 3: 24. The Lord God placed at the gate of Eden, a Cherubim and a flaming sword. This marked the close of the first chapter in the history of man — a sorrowful close surely. The Creator  made man for His pleasure. He endowed him richly, placing him in the most delightful surroundings, and granting him manifestations of Himself. It was needful that some test should be imposed, in order that it might be seen whether this responsible being would continue in faithfulness or not; the test took the form of a divine prohibition of one tree. Against this, the man, led by the woman, who was herself deceived by Satan, rebelled, and thus fell from his first estate. He could no longer be suffered to continue in the garden, and was accordingly expelled, though not until words of hope were sounded in his ear in the curse upon the serpent. The Cherubim and the sword were then placed at the cast of Eden to keep the way of the tree of life. Man has thus forfeited all claim to life. Life — eternal life — can only now be had as the gift of sovereign grace. What a moment for the heart of God when He found Himself compelled to draw His sword against His favoured creature man, posting also at the garden gate the administrators of His judgement!

But we pass to Zech. 13: 7: "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd." Who is the speaker? Jehovah of hosts, the God of the flaming sword. Of whom is He speaking? Of His beloved Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We have thus the sword of God directed against the sinner in Gen. 3 and against Christ in Zech. 13. Mark how this passage speaks of the person and sufferings of the Lord Jesus. Jehovah calls Him "My fellow." He is thus divine. In no sense and at no time was He ever inferior to Him. "I and My Father are one," said He in the days of His flesh — one in majesty, power, wisdom and glory. But Jehovah of hosts calls Him "the man." He became this in His grace — the seed of the woman, that He might bruise the serpent's head.

We thus think of the Saviour as uniting Godhead and manhood in His one sacred person. But He must needs suffer; for incarnation could not of itself suffice to procure our salvation. So we hear the awful words, "Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow, saith Jehovah of hosts; smite the shepherd." This was at Calvary. There the good Shepherd did not merely risk His life for the sheep, like David when he pursued the lion and the bear, but He laid down His life. Well knowing all that would befall Him in this world, He came from heaven's glory, and did not pause in His downward course until He closed His eyes in death upon Calvary's tree. What a moment it was when God felt Himself obliged to sheath His sword in the heart of the Son of His love! But in the hour that He was thus smitten of God He wrought a full and efficacious atonement for our sin and guilt.

In Rev. 1: 15 we have a sword proceeding out of the mouth of Christ. This time the sword is directed against the foes of God and His Son. The language is necessarily symbolical, as occurring in the book of Revelation, but its meaning is plain enough. It is judgement executed at His command. When will this be? When He rises up from the throne upon which He is now seated, and comes forth in His majesty and might. Rev. 1: 11-21 gives us a graphic description beforehand of that terrible day.

It is God's way before drawing His sword to sound the trumpet. Turn, please, to Ezek. 33: 4, 5, and you will see this plainly. "Whosoever heareth the sound of the trumpet, and taketh not warning; if the sword come; and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and took not warning;" etc. Thus before God destroyed the earth by water, He sounded the warning trumpet by means of Noah: and in our own time, ere the last stroke falls, His trumpet resounds in the Gospel call. Will you not heed it, and seek salvation while you may? "Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid?" (Amos 3: 6). Will you not be afraid, and flee from the wrath to come? Does the Gospel trumpet sound in your ears in vain? I conclude by quoting Prov. 2: 1: "He that being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy." God grant this may not be your doom!

TWO GREAT QUESTIONS.

"What hast thou done?" — Gen: 4: 10.

"What think ye of Christ?" — Matt. 22: 42.

It has frequently been remarked that there are two great questions concerning which God is dealing with the children of men — the sin question and the Son question. Both are before us in these passages of Scripture. With neither the one nor the other do men care to burden themselves. Gladly would they shelve them altogether. It is the business of the preacher to arouse men's consciences both as to sin and as to God's beloved Son.

We have the question of sin raised in Gen. 4: 10: "What hast thou done?" True, the words were addressed to Cain by the Lord God after the murder of his brother Abel. But the challenge comes home to us all. Let us review our lives in the light of God. We have spent so many years in this world — 20, 30, 40 or more, as the case may be. They have been years of responsibility to Him who created us. But what have we done? If it be asked what we should have done, and how our lives should have been regulated, our Lord's words in Luke 10: 27 supply the answer. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself."

There is no mistaking such language as this. Every nook and cranny of our moral being should be filled with devotion to God, and from this should flow unselfish love to all others. But "what hast thou done?" Who amongst us would dare to affirm that he has so lived? What then? Rom. 3: 22 puts us all in our place: "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God." As the Prayer Book expresses it: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us."

Some will doubtless affirm that they are not so bad as others. So said the Pharisee of Luke 18. But the question still remains, Have you sinned at all? I have lying before me a curious calculation cut from the pages of a magazine. One sin in thought, one in word, and one in deed, committed daily, amounts to 10,950 sins in ten years, 21,900 sins in twenty years, and so on. Thus the youth of 20 has 21,900 sins standing to his debit in the book of God, reckoning upon the low basis of one sin in thought, one in word, and one in deed daily. 21,900 sins! This is a pretty serious matter is it not? Young man, is it not time for you to seek divine pardon?

Someone will perhaps say: "I wish you would change your tune, sir. Why do you so persistently bring forward this question of sin?" Herod doubtless said something of the same sort to John the Baptist. The King frequently sent for the great preacher, but his one text was: "It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife." The imperfect tense in the Greek of Mark 6: 18 shows this to have been John's habitual theme with the wicked monarch. One of Charles II's chaplains, who was wont to sternly denounce sin, is said to have been warned by the King to alter his manner of preaching. The faithful chaplain replied: "I will, your Majesty; when you alter your manner of living." The guilt of sin is the first divine lesson every man has to learn. Until this has been learnt no other lesson is possible.

We come now to the second great question: "What think ye of Christ?" Observe, please, the context of the passage. Our blessed Lord had been beset with cavilling questions from Sadducees, Pharisees, and lawyers. He had silenced them every one; not only giving direct answers to their inquiries, but making home thrusts at their consciences also. When they had said their last word, His opportunity came, and He turned upon them thus: "What think ye of Christ?"

This is a question altogether out of the ordinary, for every man's eternal future depends upon the answer which his heart gives thereto. The question of the Son is inter-woven in a remarkable manner with the question of sin. We shall see this presently. Some think of Him as a wonderful teacher. They say that if men would only live according to the principles inculcated in the Sermon on the Mount we should soon have an ideal condition of society. Others think of Him as an example. They speak of His life in the highest terms, and express their conviction that all who follow His example can never go far wrong. All this sounds very excellent. Surely men who speak thus must think highly of Christ!

But if the Son of God is no more than a teacher or exemplar, of what benefit is He to me a sinner? I ask the question with all reverence. His life and teaching rebuke, but do not help me in the smallest degree. "What think ye of Christ?" Let us hear John the Baptist's account of Him. As to His person, he says: "He it is who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose" (John 1: 27). Truly human, yet truly divine; greater than the greatest of the prophets. As to His character, we hear John saying to Him in Matt. 3: 14: "I have need to be baptised of Thee, and comest Thou to me?" All others who came to John at Jordan had sins to confess, but not this One. As to His work, let us listen to John once more: "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29). This means a propitiatory sacrifice. Now listen to Paul as he expresses himself concerning God's Christ. As to His person, he says: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for by Him were all things created; . . . and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist" (Col. 1: 15-17). To Paul He was thus the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. As to His work, hear the apostle in 1 Tim. 1: 15: "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief."

In the eyes of both John and Paul the Christ was thus the divine Son of God, who stooped from Godhead glory to the death of the cross in order to make atonement for human sin and guilt. Only those who regard Him thus in faith have true thoughts concerning Him.

What think ye of Christ? All manner of sin may be forgiven. The blood of the Lamb is sufficient to cleanse the reddest stains. But the rejection of Him is unpardonable. "He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the Only begotten Son of God" (John 3:18).

THE ASS AND THE LAMB.

"Every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck, and all the firstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem." — Ex. 13: 13

The instructions here are of a remarkable character, and they are repeated in Ex. 34: 20. To call a man "an ass" would be the reverse of complimentary, and yet in these passages Jehovah indicates an analogy between the firstborn of an ass and the firstborn of man, for both had to be redeemed in the selfsame way. So serious a suggestion demands our earnest consideration.

First, let us see how the ass of Scripture is described. We shall then be able to say how far this animal is the representative of ourselves. To begin with, it fell into the category of unclean beasts. To be accounted clean, an animal must divide the hoof and chew the cud (Lev. 11: 26). The ass does not belong to this class! Is man a clean creature, or an unclean in the eyes of God? Long ago Bildad asked: "How can man be justified with God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? "Listen also to Job's pitiful wail: "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one" (Job 25: 4; Job 14: 4). Then hear David's broken-hearted confession: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Ps. 51: 5). These men evidently had a deep sense of their own moral uncleanness. Now notice how Isaiah, speaking representatively, describes the condition of his nation: "We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." Not only did the prophet thus declare the evil of others; in an earlier chapter he says of himself: "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips" (Isa. 64: 6; 6: 5). It was the sight of the glory of Jehovah that so filled him with dismay at his own condition. The most frequent type of sin in Scripture is the loathsome disease of leprosy. Let us not deceive ourselves. In the eye of God, man with all his vaunted light and learning is as unclean as the ass that he despises.

In the Word of God the ass is not only represented as unclean; it is also the very synonym for self-will. Read Jehovah's account of him in his expostulation with His servant in Job 39: 5-8. And what is sin? It is correctly defined in the Revised Version of 1 John 3: 4: "sin is lawlessness." In other words, sin is doing our own will to the neglect of the will of God. Who can plead exemption here? Who amongst us does not love to have his own way at whatever cost? The life of the natural man is described in Eph. 2: 3 as "fulfilling the will of the flesh and of the mind." In Ps. 12: 4 haughty, insubject men are represented as saying: "Our lips are our own; who is lord over us?" Job 11: 12 is very pointed when it says: "Vain man would be wise, though man be born a wild ass's colt." Gen. 16: 12, correctly rendered, says of Ishmael, "He will be a wild ass of a man."

The analogy is thus complete between the unclean and self-willed ass and our poor fallen race. In one point man has sunk even lower than the ass, as Isa. 1: 3 shows. "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass him master's crib; but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider." In other words, these beasts at least know to whom they belong; man, on the contrary, in the stupidity of his unbelief, fails to perceive that his owner and master is God.

What a wonderful work is conversion! It is a turning right round. Horrified at their previous perverseness and self-will, converted ones humbly acknowledge, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53: 6).

The law of Sinai was given as a curb upon the flesh. It fenced man about with prohibitions. "Thou shalt not" do this; "thou shalt not" do that. But it was all of no avail. The law only develops the evil of the human heart by provoking it. Its prohibitions wake up all the latent devilry in man. So the apostle argues in Rom. 7: 7-8. This being true, he calls the law "the strength of sin" in 1 Cor. 15: 56. How hopelessly and incorrigibly evil is flesh if the holy law of God has such an effect upon it! Yet some plead that there is good in every man if only it be looked for!

For both the firstborn of the ass and also of man a lamb must be sacrificed in Israel. The lamb typified Christ. "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29). In its characteristics the lamb is the very opposite of the ass. Clean, it typifies Him who, though born of a sinful mother like ourselves, yet entered the world unstained in nature. All His ways too, were holy. His very judge had to say of Him: "I find no fault in this man." The lamb is also the symbol of meekness. How suitably do we read in Isa. 53: 7 of the Lord Jesus: "He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth." This is the passage that the Ethiopian was quietly pondering in his chariot when Philip accosted him. With charming simplicity he inquired of the Evangelist: "I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this? Of himself, or of some other man?" (Acts 8: 34). With all readiness "Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same Scripture, and preached unto him Jesus."

The meek and clean One must needs die for the self-willed and the unclean — even ourselves. God "hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. 5: 21). Now He asks nothing from the conscience-stricken sinner but the humble acknowledgment of the mighty fact that Jesus died and rose again. But what of those who refuse to take the place of perishing ones before God? Destruction, as in the case of the unredeemed ass in Israel. Concerning a scornful rejecter of long ago, it was said: "He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, dragged and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem" (Jer. 22: 19). In other words, he was cast out of God's dwelling place as unclean. Of the new Jerusalem it is written: "There shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth" (Rev. 21: 27). Happier far to take the place of the ass here and accept redemption by the blood of the Lamb than be thrust into the ass's outside place for evermore.

FACE TO FACE WITH DEATH.

"To-morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with me. ... Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel." — 1 Sam. 28: 19, 20.

"We are confident and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord." — Paul, in 2 Cor. 5: 8.

These passages show us two men face to face with death and the feelings which possessed them at the great crisis. Remarkably each bore the same name, and each had a violent death before him. Death is always a solemn thing. It marks the close of one stage of a man's being, and it is the gateway into the indefinite beyond. It is thus a test for every man. Mistakes made on earth cannot be rectified in eternity. Even the believer in Jesus realises the solemnity of the great change. Whatever opportunities of usefulness have been missed here will never recur again; and they must be accounted for to the Lord whom we serve. But the ungodly man has every reason to quake when death lays its icy hand upon him; for in his case "the last enemy" is the policeman come to bring him up to judgement. It is what comes after death that guilty ones dread (Heb. 9: 27).

Let us briefly consider the circumstances of King Saul. His forty years' reign of self-will and disobedience to God was now ending. The Philistines had declared war against him, and he was to meet them in battle on the morrow. Filled with foreboding, the unhappy King appealed to God, but without avail. Then he inquired for someone possessed of a familiar spirit, and learning that there was such a person at Endor, he went by night in a disguise and asked her to bring up Samuel. Some will perhaps say: "That is somewhat like what Spiritualists do to-day." They do absolutely nothing of the kind. The claim to put the living in communication with the dead is a monstrous fraud. The keys of Hades are in divine hands alone. Neither the just nor the unjust can be disturbed by Spiritualistic mediums. Yet it is not denied that such persons are in communication with the invisible world, but it is with demons they have to do; and it is with demons the mediums link up their miserable dupes.

No one was more astonished than the woman of Endor herself when Samuel really appeared. Never having known such a result from her previous incantations, she at once discerned the hand of God, and concluded that her visitor must be King Saul. Samuel forthwith challenged his disturber: "Why hast thou disquieted me, to, bring me up?" A dead man speaking! Certainly Samuel was not in the resurrection state (for that he must wait until the Lord's coming); he simply appeared in some form by divine permission. It has been asserted that the dead are in a condition of unconsciousness. Ecc. 9: 5 is quoted in proof — "the dead know not anything." But the writer of that book is concerned with things "under the sun"; and in the passage referred to he means that the dead are no longer able to follow the course of things down here. The story of the rich man and Lazarus (to which may be added such passages as Isa. 14: 9; Ezek. 32: 21) is sufficient to show that both saved and lost are fully alive to the reality of their condition in the unseen world. Besides, the apostle says as to himself that to be absent from the body was to be present with the Lord.

"To-morrow shalt thou be with me." Samuel did not mean by this that Saul would be found in the same place and circumstances as himself. Between saved and lost "there is a great gulf fixed," which is impassable from either side. Samuel simply meant that Saul would be in the death-state next day; that is to say, numbered amongst the dead like the departed prophet.

There is no trace of tenderness in Samuel's words. Time was when he had cried to Jehovah all night on behalf of Saul (1 Sam. 15: 11). But Saul had sinned away his day of grace, and nothing remained but to pronounce sentence upon him. "Jehovah is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy." So said the prophet. "God is departed from me," wailed Saul, "and answereth me no more." Solemn position in which to be found! Saul had had many opportunities. His early reign was blessed with the light of God's presence, and with the counsel and support of the prophet. Yet his privileges were as nothing compared with those of men to-day who are permitted to hear the Gospel of Christ proclaimed in their ears. How awful should God say of anyone amongst us: "Let him alone" (Hosea 4: 17).

Let us ask ourselves what our feelings would be if some such message as was delivered to Saul was delivered to us. What if from the realms of the dead we heard the words: "To-morrow shalt thou be with me?" The believer in Jesus would say with rapture: "To depart and to be with Christ is far better" (Phil. 1: 23). But the football enthusiast and the lover of the theatre — what would they say? Dr. Johnson, of Uttoxeter fame, once remarked after visiting a place of amusement: "It went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think, but that the thoughts of each individual there would be distressing when alone."

When Saul heard of his impending death he "fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid." We are reminded of Jacob when he learned that he must now meet the one against whom he had sinned: "Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed" (Gen. 32: 7). Now mark the contrast to all this in Paul the apostle. His life was in jeopardy for the Gospel's sake. But was he dismayed? The very reverse. "We are confident, and willing rather to be absent from the body and present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5: 8). It is such an unusual thing to find men willing to be absent from the body (even the devil once said, "All that a man hath will he give for his life"), that we are constrained to inquire as to the ground of the apostle's confidence. His own words in Rom. 5: 8 tell us all we need know as to this: "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Here we have that which, when known and believed, banishes from the soul all dread of death. Christ has been into death for us, thus making complete atonement for all our sin and guilt, and breaking the power of the enemy once and for ever.

"IS IT PEACE?"

"It came to pass, when Joram saw Jehu, that he said, 'Is it peace, Jehu?' And he answered, 'What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel, and her witchcrafts, are so many?'" — 2 Kings 9: 22.

There is anxiety, and even alarm, discernible in the inquiry of Joram, "Is it peace, Jehu?" The sequel proved that there was ample occasion for these sentiments. It was a time of upheaval in Israel. A revolution was in progress, which presently cost King Joram both his throne and his life.

The circumstances may be briefly stated. Israel and Syria were at war over Ramoth-Gilead. Joram, being wounded, had been obliged to return to Jezreel in order to consult his physicians, leaving his officers to prosecute the campaign. One day there arrived in the camp one of the sons of the prophets, who informed Jehu that it was Jehovah's will that he should be King over Israel. Nothing loth, Jehu sought the co-operation of his fellow captains, and forthwith set out for Jezreel to overturn the throne of his master. The watchman on the tower of the royal city reporting the rapid approach of a company, two horse-men were sent forth to inquire if all was well. The messengers not returning, the King set out himself to meet Jehu with the anxious question in our text. "Is it peace?" Note the reply. "What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel, and her witchcrafts, are so many?" The meaning is that no peace could be expected with so much unjudged sin in the land.

Joram, who thus rode out to his death, had been a very privileged person. Jehovah had taken great pains with him. See this King in 2 Kings 3, turning, with two other sovereigns, to the prophet in circumstances of dire distress. No water was available for their hosts. Their need was graciously met in the goodness of God. Then we have him in 2 Kings 5 made aware of Jehovah's wonderful healing power in the matter of Naaman's leprosy. In the following chapter we find God warning him on several occasions of designs against his life, and thus safeguarding him. 2 Kings 7 gives the story of the siege of Samaria, and the marvellous intervention of God on behalf of the famine-stricken people; and 2 Kings 8 shows us the King in conversation with Gehazi, and learning from him all the wonderful works of Elisha his master. In these various ways Jehovah spoke to this man's heart and conscience, if haply he would turn from his evil ways and live. But with all these divine privileges, Joram perished. How often has God spoken to us? Let us ask ourselves, how many privileges He has mercifully vouchsafed unto us?

There is a present-day application of our text. We are living in a time of universal disturbance. Revolutions in both East and West; wars and threats of wars in various directions. In the industrial sphere there is unrest everywhere. Thinking men are pretty much in the state of mind described by the Saviour in Luke 21: 25-26: "Upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity . . . men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth." The anxious inquiry on every hand is: "Is it peace?" How relieved men are to learn that the atmosphere in the direction of Germany is somewhat clearer than formerly! With what thankfulness do men hear of a strike averted here or settled there! How would all England feel if to-morrow's newspaper reported a settlement of the coal dispute? Yet everyone realises that these questions are not really being laid to rest, that the difficulties are only being bridged over, to surge up again at some future date. No one believes the root is being reached.

"Is it peace?" is the anxious question to-day, as in the time of Joram. The answer to men now must be upon the same lines as the answer to him so long ago. Peace is impossible with sin unjudged. There is a sin lying at the door of the world to-day compared with which even Jezebel's whoredoms and witchcrafts were the veriest trifles. What sin is that?

Go back with me in your thoughts 1,900 years in the world's history. In the village of Bethlehem a Babe was born of whom it was written centuries before: "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace" (Isa. 9: 6). Outside in the fields the angelic host celebrated His birth thus: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men" (Luke 2: 14). He came from heaven to bring peace into a scene long distracted by sin. Judgement was not His mission. As Peter put it in Acts 10: 36, God was "preaching peace by Jesus Christ." Aged Simeon, as he beheld the wondrous Babe, blessed God, saying: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word: for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation." The sight of the Saviour dispelled from his mind all fear of death, and filled his soul with peace.

But men rejected the Prince of peace. "Depart from us was men's cry to God before the flood" (Job 22: 17); the cry was the same when the Son came to earth. Since the Son was the revealer of the Father, the rejection of the Son involved the rejection of the Father also. "They have both seen and hated both Me and My Father" (John 15: 24). This explains the Saviour's words in Matt. 10: 34: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." His mission was peace, but men's refusal of Him has made peace impossible, and they have to suffer the sword instead. When the Lord Jesus thought of the consequences to men, He wept, saying: "if thou hadst known . . . the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes" (Luke 19: 42). And so it has become true of men everywhere: "the way of peace have they not known" (Rom. 3: 17).

There are not wanting those who prophesy smooth things. In Jeremiah's day some said "Peace, Peace" while Jehovah's sword hung suspended over the land, and we have similar false prophets amongst us at the present time. If such may be believed, the upheavals that are going on in every sphere are the birth throes of a new and better day. Man is emerging from the chrysalis stage, and will presently be a more glorious being than ever before. All who speak thus are deceivers of men's souls. More to the point are Isaiah's words in Isa. 57: 20-21: "The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, said my God, to the wicked."

What is the Scripture outlook? Smash upon smash, catastrophe upon catastrophe until the whole of man's order of things has been ground to powder. Then God will bring upon the scene His Man, the world-rejected Jesus, and He will establish His throne upon the ruins of everything human.

Suffer me now to appeal to every individual heart! Why should not you be right with God? Then you need fear no ill, whatever may befall. Christ has "made peace through the blood of His cross" (Col. 1: 20). Here we have the settlement of the sin question, a matter of greater moment to you personally than any political or industrial question in the world. God's claims as to sin have been met by the atoning blood. Accordingly peace is preached "to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh" (Eph. 2: 17); that is to both Gentiles and Jews alike. The believer in Jesus is justified by faith, and has peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 5: 1). More than this, every believer is invited to bring his every request to God, with the sweet assurance that "the peace of God! which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4: 7). In 2 Thess. 3: 16 at the close of an epistle which deals with the horrors of the last days, we find the comforting words: "The Lord of peace Himself give you peace always by all means." Amid the crash of empires and kingdoms, the overturning of every ancient institution, and the subversion of all law and order, the man who is right with God in virtue of the cross of Calvary can afford to be in perfect peace. It will suffice to close with the words in Job 22: 21: "Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace, thereby good shall come unto thee."

"ME" AND "MY SINS."

"As for me, Thou beholdest me in mine integrity, and settest me before Thy face for ever." — Ps. 41: 12.

"Thou hast cast all my sins behind Thy back." — Isa. 38: 17.

It is a wonderful thing that the Psalmist should say, evidently with pleasure, "Thou settest me before Thy face for ever." No man naturally wishes to be brought face to face with God. The whole history of the human race proves this conclusively. Adam and his wife, as soon as they were conscious of having sinned, "hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden." Cain, after his fearful crime, "went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod." Jonah in his self-will fled to Tarshish "from the presence of the Lord." Scripture abounds with instances of men being brought into the divine presence, and being forthwith filled with the deepest distress. Isaiah's case (Isa. 6) will suffice for an example.

This is a truly awful condition of things when we consider the end and object for which man was created. This is well expressed in the opening words of the Westminster Catechism. Question: "What is the chief end of man?" Answer: "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever."

Men shrink from God's all-searching eye. As Heb. 4: 13 puts it: "There is no creature that is not manifest in His sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." There is much that we can hide from one another, and even from ourselves; there is nothing that we can hide from God.

Yet the Psalmist says with rapture: "Thou settest me before Thy face for ever." To understand this, we must go back somewhat in the book of Psalms. In the thirty-second the same writer says, "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered." The Holy Spirit's comment upon this passage is found in Rom. 4: 6: "David describeth the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works." This is the first step towards being happy and free in the presence of God. But upon what equitable basis is He able to impute righteousness to a man apart from works? Ps. 40 will answer. There we hear the Incarnate Son saying: "Sacrifice and offering Thou didst not desire. Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God." The atoning sacrifice of Calvary, which has superseded for ever all the offerings of the Levitical order, enables God to righteously pardon and justify every sinner who believes in Jesus. The Psalmist was evidently in the sweetness of justification when he penned our text. "Thou upholdest me in mine integrity." Imagine mortal man thus addressing his Maker! It is the Old Testament way of expressing the truth of Rom. 8: 33: "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth: who is he that condemneth?"

There is thus something to be got rid of ere any man can enjoy God and be at home in His blessed presence. That something is guilt. How beautifully our two Scriptures run together. "Thou hast cast all my sins behind Thy back." "As for me, Thou . . . settest me before Thy face for ever."

Ps. 41 has a first and primary reference to the Lord Jesus Himself. HE is before the face of God — justified, accepted, in eternal favour and love. Divine grace has associated me with Him, so that what God has made true of that blessed Man is true of me also. I am "in Him," accepted in His acceptance, blessed as He is blessed, and loved as He is loved. No wonder we read in Ps. 84: 9: "Look upon the face of Thine anointed," i.e., Thy Christ. According to the worthiness that God sees in Him, so is every believer favoured for evermore.

Let us take notice of the words "before Thy face." Not "before Thy throne." The "throne" is suggestive of distance, the "face" of knowledge and intimacy. Character is declared in the face. Through eternity God will be telling out His perfections to His redeemed, and we shall ever be learning what a God He is with whom we have to do. Ps. 21: 6 says: "Thou hast made him exceeding glad with Thy countenance." Ps. 27: 4 describes the heart's deep longing in this connection: "One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple."

"Thou settest me before Thy face for ever." The first man commenced with the knowledge of God, and before sin entered he enjoyed Him according to his measure and circumstances. All this he lost by his transgression. But grace sets the believer in Jesus upon a new footing altogether. Everything now depends upon the triumphant Second Man, and upon what He has accomplished. Thus everything is secured beyond the possibility of forfeiture or loss. "For ever" is my place and portion in the favour and love of God.

GOOD NEWS FROM A FAR COUNTRY.

"As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country." — Prov. 25: 25.

Water is a symbol of the Gospel. We find it so used in the last chapter of Scripture: "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."

In the parable of the Pounds in Luke 19 the Lord likens heaven to "a far country." Why is this? In the opening chapters of Genesis heaven seems very near, and God a neighbour at hand. We read there of a garden planted by the hand of the Creator, containing everything that was pleasant to the sight and good for food. This was the home of the first man and his wife, and there the Lord God used to come, and hold sweet converse with them. But all this was quickly changed. There came the day when Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Sin was the cause of this. It was said to Israel at a later date: "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God" (Isa. 59: 2). Sin having thus entered, the divine pleasure in man ceased, and heaven from that moment has seemed "a far country." There is no moral affinity now between heaven and earth.

But there has been a visitor from the far country. John 1: 14 tells us: "The Word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us . . . full of grace and truth. This is the glorious Person of whom we read higher up in the same chapter that He was in the beginning with God, and was God. Moreover, "all things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made." What a Visitor! In John 6: 38 we hear Him saying: "I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me." His unbelieving hearers stumbled at this, and said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it, then, that He saith, I came down from heaven?" In their blindness they saw in Him nothing more than a carpenter's son.

The people of Great Britain are accustomed to distinguished visitors. From time to time Emperors and Kings come to their shores. They are always well received, and they invariably return home well pleased. But how was the Son of God received when He came to earth? "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." Long before, Isaiah had written concerning Him: "He is despised and rejected of men; a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."

The Son of God was not only rejected when He came; He was murdered. In the parable of the Vineyard, He showed this vividly before the dreadful deed was committed. Having sent many servants to the husbandmen without avail, last of all the master of the vineyard sent his son, saying, "They will reverence my son." The master is God, the son is the Lord Jesus. But when the husbandmen saw the son they said: "This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance" (Matt. 21). This is how men treated the Lord Jesus. Spite of His unique words and works, they hated and slew Him (John 15: 22-24).

What next? The young Prince of Wales has recently been touring on the Continent. He has been treated with respect everywhere, but supposing he was murdered, and that by the sanction of the authorities, what would happen next? Surely the heavy hand of retribution would fall somewhere? When the statue of the Emperor Hadrian was destroyed in a riot at Antioch, the people trembled at the thought of the consequences. But what happened when Christ was slain? In Acts 1 we see Him ascending up where He was before, carrying the wounds which men had inflicted upon His sacred Person right up to the throne of God — sight of all sights for the angelic host! What response did God give to this? For ten days there was a lull. Then heaven opened once more, and the Holy Ghost came forth. What for? To destroy the guilty sons of men? No, but to preach the Gospel. Accordingly in Acts 2 we hear Peter charging home upon his hearers their dreadful sin in the murder of Christ, and concluding by offering them all forgiveness in His name. The Saviour, before He went on high, said that repentance and remission of sins were to be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem (Luke 24: 47). His very murderers were thus to have the first opportunity of blessing. Surely the message of forgiveness of sins for everybody is "good news; from a far country." We deserved wrath, and lo, we are offered pardon and peace!

Why are not men keen for such blessings? Our text tells us. They are not "thirsty." Cold waters are only acceptable to thirsty souls. Thirsty ones are most tenderly invited. Rev. 22: 17 says: "Let him that is athirst come." In John 7: 37 we hear the Saviour's call: "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink." But men are not thirsty. There is with them no sense of need, and so they are not interested. Yet when "good news" of another kind comes along men are interested enough. Suppose someone in our town fell heir to a fortune or a peerage, would it not quickly become the general topic of conversation? Or, to come closer home, suppose some man amongst us became notified of an inheritance left to himself, how keen he would be. Down would go his tools for ever, and he would start forth to take possession of his own. Yet when "good news from a far country" are addressed to men concerning the forgiveness of sins and eternal blessing they are not interested at all! They see nothing in it worthy of a thought!

One word more. The Visitor from the far country is coming again. The world has not seen the last of Him. The parable of the Pounds says so plainly. But how will He return? Not in lowly grace, upon a second mission of mercy, but in kingly power, to take vengeance upon all His foes. Hear the terrible words from His own blessed lips: "Those Mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before Me" (Luke 19: 27). This is not mere parabolic language, but the setting forth of a dread reality. He who is at present proclaimed as Saviour to all is the divinely appointed Judge of quick and dead. The quick (i.e., the living) He will deal with at His appearing; the dead He will call before Him when time is ended.

HUMAN INSENSIBILITY.

"The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib; but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider." — Isa. 1: 3.

"Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle-dove and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but My people know not the judgement of the Lord."  - Jer. 8: 7.

Of all the creatures with which we are acquainted, man is by far the most gifted and the most privileged. Moreover, he has been established by God lord and head over the whole system in which he moves. This being so, it is painful that a comparison should be divinely instituted between man and beasts and birds, with the result altogether unfavorable to man. In both Isa. 1 and Jer. 8 we have throughout the language of complaint. The Creator complains of His creature man. Our texts expose his insensibility — insensibility to both grace and judgement.

Isa. 1: 3 was addressed to a people of pastoral habits. It was not yet the day of great manufacturing cities. Every man possessed oxen and asses. Accordingly Jehovah bids His people go to their own stockyards and learn a lesson there. "The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master's crib; but Israel doth not know, My people doth not consider." These are not the most intelligent of the domestic animals, but even so they offer a rebuke to man.

The ox knows to whom it belongs, "but Israel doth not know." Are men more intelligent to-day? Every man belongs to God, but are men alive to the fact? "In Him we live, and move, and have our being . . . we are His offspring" (Acts 17: 28). Daniel denounced the wretched Belshazzar thus: "The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified" (Dan. 5: 23). Are men more mindful of their position in relation to God now?

The administration of the universe has been committed to a Man. "The head of every man is Christ" (1 Cor 11: 3). The Father has given Him authority over all flesh (John 17: 2). Sooner or later every created being will be constrained to acknowledge this. At the name of Jesus every knee must bow, and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2: 10-11). Oh, the blindness that hinders men from perceiving to whom they belong until compelled to do so when time is no more, and salvation has become impossible!

The ass knows who feeds it, "but My people doth not consider." The beast knows from whose hand its bounties come, but not man! Yet, as Paul told the men of Lystra in Acts 14: 17, God has never left Himself without witness, in that He has done men good, giving rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling men's hearts with food and gladness. But do men acknowledge His hand? It would be interesting to know in how many homes in this so-called Christian England men have given thanks at the meal table to-day. The old-fashioned "grace" is dying out, in keeping with the growing infidelity of our time. If men fail to own God in His lesser gifts, what is their bearing towards the stupendous gift of His Son? Is Christ appreciated?

Thus in Isa. 1: 3 God complains of man's insensibility to grace; in Jeremiah 8: 7 He complains of his insensibility to judgement. The stork, the swallow, etc., know their times, "but My people know not the judgement of the Lord." The birds named in this passage are all migratory. They take notice of the seasons. They perceive when the period of sunshine is over, and when the clouds and storms of winter are approaching, and they have the instinct to know when they should move off. But alas, for man! What was the character of the times in which Jeremiah prophesied? It was the last days of the Kingdom of Judah. The northern ten-tribe kingdom had already been overthrown, and "the destroyer of the nations" (Nebuchadnezzar) was now on his way to overthrow Judah also. Judgement was thus imminent, but the people understood it not. And so there was no repentance.

In our Lord's day men could discern the face of the sky, but were unable to discern the signs of the times (Matt. 16: 3). They were too obtuse to see that it was their great day of opportunity. They had the long expected Messiah in their midst, and if they failed to recognize Him they must lose Him, and have the Roman scourge instead.

The men of Jeremiah's time and our Lord's day find their contrast in Noah. "By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house" (Heb. 11: 7). Like the crane and the swallow, he saw the dark clouds approaching, and judged it wisdom to seek a place of safety. The men of Nineveh read us an even more striking lesson. The whole city was profoundly stirred at the preaching of Jonah, so that the King came down from his throne, and humbled himself before God in common with all his people. They recognized a warning from heaven in the denunciations of the strange man who walked through their streets. There has never been a more solemn moment in the history of the world than the present. The portents around us are of the gravest character. Everything is suggestive of coming disaster. A point is being reached in human affairs. Statesmen and leaders of every sort perceive this. But what is the point that is thus almost in sight? The end of man's day, and the ushering in of the day of the Lord. "Man's day" is that long period during which man has been allowed to have his own way without manifest intervention from heaven; the day of the Lord is the coming kingdom of the Lord Jesus, which will be introduced abruptly, and with desolating judgements. His appearing will dash to pieces the whole fabric of man's godless civilisation, and upon the ruins thereof He will establish an order of things that will perfectly suit the eye and the heart of God. The wise man says: "A prudent man foreseeth the evil and hideth himself: but the simple pass on and are punished" (Prov. 22: 3). In view of the break-up that is coming, are you "prudent" or "simple"? Must the swallow and her fellows be your reprovers in the great day?

PEACE: FALSE AND TRUE.

"They have healed the hurt of My people slightly, saying, Peace, Peace, when there is no peace." — Jer. 6: 14.

"And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh." — Eph. 2: 17.

Two preachers of peace are seeking to gain the attention of the children of men. Both are in earnest? and in each case the preaching is intended to produce eternal results. These preachers are Satan and Christ. Neither is, of course, in person upon the earth speaking with audible voice. Both make their appeal to men by means of human instruments. There are thus two orders of preachers amongst us, both energised by supernatural power, and both preaching peace to men. Hell energises the one; heaven energises the other. The one order proclaims a false peace — a peace resting upon rotten foundations, and from which there must sooner or later come an awful awakening; the other proclaims a true peace — a peace founded upon the immutable basis of the Saviour's atoning blood.

Let me remind you of a remarkable parable which once came from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ. You will find it in Luke 11: 21-22. "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace; but when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils." The strong man here is Satan; the stronger than he is Christ Himself. The strong man's palace is this world; and his goods are the men and women who live therein. It is Satan's policy to keep these in peace, to lull them to sleep, so that serious thoughts may never disturb their minds. As 1 John 5: 19 puts it: "The whole world lieth in the wicked one." He has his arguments for all classes and for all ages, and all designed to keep souls in a state of unconcern and death. Suppose a young person to become awakened to the great realities of God and eternity. Satan at once preaches peace by saying, "Time enough yet. Life is before you. Don't spoil your pleasures by serious thoughts." Suppose a middle-aged man to be aroused, again comes along the destroyer with the suggestion that now is the time to make money and the man who fills his head with solemn considerations will fall back in the commercial struggle. "Time enough yet" is once more the text. Or suppose a religious person to become exercised as to whether all is well for eternity, Satan at once protests that one so morally excellent, and so devoutly religious, can have nothing to fear, for all must be well. Yet the wise man has said: "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death" (Prov. 14: 12). The man or woman who is trusting in religion or morality for salvation is building upon sand. Woe to them if they heed the lulling voice saying, "Peace, Peace," when indeed there is no peace.

Hezekiah says in Isa. 38: 17, "Behold, for peace I had great bitterness." It is a mercy from God when a false peace is smashed up. The "great bitterness" which results is not pleasant, but it is nevertheless the way to God. See Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9: 9 three whole days unable to eat and drink. When a man goes off his food thus his mind must surely be deeply agitated. The fact is, Saul had made the fearful discovery that with all his blamelessness of life and his religious zeal he was at heart an enemy of God and His Son. The best man of his time saw himself to be "the chief of sinners!" Oh, the bitterness of it? Have we been in the depths thus?

Our first text thus speaks of a false peace; our second tells us of a true peace, proclaimed by the Christ of God. "He came and preached peace," says the apostle, "to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh." He is manifestly speaking of Christ in resurrection. But what lies behind resurrection? Death. Christ has been down into death, and this on behalf of sinners. At Calvary the storm of divine judgement broke upon His holy head. All the waves and billows of God's wrath rolled over Him. But the storm has spent itself now; sunshine has come, and the Christ who died is alive again from amongst the dead, and glorified on high. The God of peace has brought back from the tomb the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the everlasting covenant. He is now righteously able to preach peace to men everywhere. The peace He proclaims is not a mere soporific for the conscience, but the blessed knowledge that every question has been equitably settled by His atoning blood, and that, in consequence, every storm cloud has been dispelled for ever. "He is our peace," says the apostle. The very fact that He is now accepted in heaven is the public proof that the horizon Godward has been cleared once and for all for those who believe in His name

Hence the absurdity of bidding a man make his peace with God. The thing is impossible. No man can of himself get rid of a single sin. But in truth there is no peace to make. Christ has "made peace through the blood of His cross" (Col. 1: 20), and this He now proclaims to all in the Gospel by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. He "was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 4: 25; Rom. 5: 1).

Would you have peace with God? It is good to be at peace with our fellow-creatures to feel as we walk up and down the street that there is no enmity between ourselves and a single living soul; but it is better far to be at peace with our God. This happy position may be realized to-day by all who will humble themselves at the divine feet, and consent to be saved by grace alone.

AN IMPERIAL CONVERT.

"Nebuchadnezzar the King unto all peoples, nations and languages that dwell in all the earth . . . I thought it good to show the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me." — Dan. 4: 1, 2.

Nebuchadnezzar had recently been exalted to an imperial position by the hand of God. Kings and kingdoms had fallen before him, and he was now supreme amongst the nations. It was God's original purpose to govern and bless the nations of the earth by means of the people of Israel and the house of David; but Israel proving grossly unfaithful, and David's house becoming very evil, this purpose was put aside until the day of Christ, and power was meanwhile placed in Gentile hands. Accordingly Nebuchadnezzar was raised up, and to him was granted "the kingdom, power, and strength and glory."

Dan. 4 gives us the story of his conversion, as related by himself in a proclamation to all his subjects. What is conversion? A change of religious opinions? Nebuchadnezzer's views undoubtedly underwent a complete change. Bel and Nebo were to him gods no more. But conversion is more than this. A man might be severely orthodox in his opinions and yet perish for ever. Conversion is a mighty moral work in the soul whereby a man is turned right about face. One moment he has his back towards God and the next he finds himself face to face with Him, and he begins to regard sin and judgement as God regards them. "Except ye be converted, and become as little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18: 3). Conversion is an absolute necessity for all who would have to do with God in peace and blessing. Have we all experienced it?

Nebuchadnezzar's conversion was as remarkable in its way as that of Saul of Tarsus. There are indeed some points in common in the two cases. Both were persecutors of God's saints; both were stopped abruptly by a voice from heaven; and both published the story of their conversion.

There were three great steps in the dealings of God with Nebuchadnezzar. We find the first in Dan. 2. The vision of the great image, when expounded by Daniel, after all the magicians had acknowledged their impotency, so impressed the King that he exclaimed, "Of a truth it is that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldst reveal this secret." He thus acknowledged Jehovah as superior to all other deities, but he was not yet prepared to transfer his allegiance to Him. He was Daniel's God — " your God"; but Nebuchadnezzar was not yet able to call Him "my God." The second step is in Dan. 3. After the marvellous rescue of the three Hebrews from the fiery furnace the King said: "Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego . . . therefore I make a decree, that every people, nation and language, which speak any thing amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort." There is progress here as compared with chap. 2. He has come to respect Jehovah, and will not allow anyone to speak amiss of Him, but still He does not know Him. He is "the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego," but not yet the God of Nebuchadnezzar.

Dan. 4 records the final step, and here we have a complete capitulation. Let me repeat that this chapter is an imperial proclamation. Such documents are not often read by the people at large, but here is a proclamation which must have excited the deepest interest amongst the many peoples who composed Nebuchadnezzar's empire. The King converted, and then telling the whole story in this public manner! Would that such proclamations were more frequently published. The King's story is very simple. In a dream he saw a mighty tree, with room in its vast branches for the fowls of heaven, and with shadows beneath for the beasts of the field. He also saw a watcher and an holy one come down from heaven directing the tree to be hewn down, with its stump alone remaining. The magicians being helpless as usual, Daniel was called in, who told the King that the tree represented himself, whose ways had been noted in heaven, and who was about to be visited by God in judgement unless he repented. Men forget that there is a Watcher who sees their every act and hears their every word. In Noah's day "God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth," and in David's time He looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand and seek God, but could find none that were not wholly unprofitable in His sight (Gen. 6: 5; Ps. 14: 2-3). How would any of us stand if the word went forth, "Hew down the tree?"

So solemn a dream should have brought Nebuchadnezzar to his knees, but it did not. Yet God, who is long-suffering to all, granted him twelve months respite before the stroke fell. At the end of that time the King, in all the pride of his heart, walked upon the roof of his palace, and as his magnificent capital with its mighty walls and brazen gates spread itself out before him, he exclaimed: "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdoms, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?" While the words were yet in his mouth, a voice from heaven said, "O King Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; the kingdom is departed from thee." He was forthwith deprived of his reason; and imagining himself a beast, he was driven out into the fields, where for seven weary years he ate grass as oxen; and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws. This visitation broke him down utterly, and when reason was graciously restored, he who once impiously said to Shadrach and his fellows, "Who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?" now in his proclamation to all his subjects says, "I blessed the most High; and I praised and honoured Him that liveth for ever and ever."

Let us individually learn the lesson. Every man must sooner or later come down from his pedestal and prostrate himself at the divine feet. It is happy and wise to do so to-day, and then as lost sinners who have naught of our own to plead seek refuge in the Son of God, the only Saviour. His precious blood suffices to meet the need of the greatest transgressor.

JOSHUA THE HIGH PRIEST.

"Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" — Zech. 3: 2.

Zech. 3 gives us the fourth of a series of eight visions which were granted to the prophet on a single night. He was thus shown the whole future history of his people. Israel is yet to be restored to Canaan, all their enemies are to be destroyed, and Jehovah will once more take up His abode in Zion. Our chapter deals with a very important question in connection with all this. Is Israel worthy of such blessing? And if not worthy (as indeed the people are not), on what ground will God grant them such inestimable good? This chapter cannot but be of the deepest interest to all who, in every age, realize that they merit nothing but judgement at the hands of a holy God.

The vision shows us a man in the divine presence. Surely a serious position for anyone. How would we feel to find ourselves there? Job was overwhelmed when he found himself, as it were, face to face with God. "I abhor myself," cried he, "and repent in dust and ashes." Isaiah, again, when granted a vision of God, exclaimed, "Woe is me! for I am undone." In what condition was Joshua found? As High Priest of Israel he was the representative of the people; accordingly his condition was the living picture of that of the people. The Scripture says, "Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments." In what better condition are men found today? Our very righteousnesses are as filthy rags; what then our unrighteousnesses? "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."

Look again at our chapter. Not only was Joshua in the divine presence; Satan was there also, "standing at his right hand to resist him." It was the great adversary objecting to the exercise of divine mercy. Short shrift should we all receive if left to the commissions of Satan. With energy he denounces men before God emphasising their sin and guilt, and protesting against favour being shown to any. There is no more effective minister of righteousness than Satan when it pleases him to play that part.

Now mark the activity of divine grace. No word proceeded from the mouth of Joshua. What indeed could he say? The filth was there, in all its hideousness to the eyes of God. "Every mouth must be stopped," says Rom. 3: 19. Accordingly Joshua said nothing, and did nothing. God took up his cause, and rebuked the foe. "Is not this," said He, "a brand plucked out of the fire?" Like to be burned, but snatched from the burning. This is just the picture of all who believe in the name of Jesus. Next, the Lord commanded, "Take away the filthy garments from him." Then, "Behold I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee." The garments of Joshua thus represented his iniquity with which the eye of God saw him to be covered from head to foot. Nothing gives our God greater delight than to justify the ungodly. When a sinner takes his true place before Him, confessedly guilty, and without one word to say in self-defence, with joy He says now as of old, "Behold I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee." The cross of Calvary explains this marvel. The sacrifice of Christ is so divinely efficacious that, on the ground of it, God is righteously able to clear from all charge of guilt, once and for ever, the soul that pleads it before Him.

In Joshua's case there was not only a stripping off; there was also a putting on. "So they set a fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments." Here let us notice an important distinction. In Zech. 3: 4 iniquities are called "filthy garments"; in Isaiah 61: 10 righteousnesses are described as "filthy rags." Garments cover us; rags are things with which men seek to cover themselves, but in vain. Our iniquities cover us indeed; to change the figure, not a sound place can God find in our whole moral constitution, as Isaiah 1: 6 shows. But when we foolishly seek to cover our nakedness by works of our own, it is but tatters we put on, which in reality cover us not at all. But God puts upon the returning prodigal "the best robe," and that is Christ. As He is, so are we in the divine sight henceforward and for ever.

Mark, God had a direct word for the sinner himself. "Behold I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee." If God were to keep His purposes of grace locked up in His own great heart, how could any amongst us experience the comfort and blessedness of them? But He has not done this. On the contrary, He has told Himself fully out in the Gospel of His Son. By the testimony of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven we know that He who once suffered for our sins is now accepted on high, and that in consequence "there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8: 1). John's first epistle was written in order that Christians might have divine certainty as to all things. "That ye may KNOW," is John's characteristic word.

A DIVINE COMPLAINT.

"Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life. . . . There is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust." — John 5: 40, 45.

We seem to detect something in the nature of a sob in the Saviour's complaint — "Ye will not come to Me." Nothing is more painful than to be made to feel that one is not wanted. Some of us have perhaps had such an experience. But none have known this bitterness like the Son of God. His life on earth was one perpetual snub. He was despised and rejected of men; and, in consequence, was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. When He considered what this must involve for those who thus coldly passed Him by His heart groaned within Him. In Luke 19: 41 we have Him weeping over the blindness and obstinacy of men.

But who was this "Me" to whom men would not come? We learn something as to Him in the first chapter of this Gospel. He is the eternal Word, the Only-begotten of the Father, the One by whom all things were made. Our present chapter tells us more concerning His dignity and glory. He is the quickener of men's souls, the raiser of men's bodies, and the final Judge of all (John 5: 25-29). When on earth He was well attested, and divinely recommended. The Baptist bore witness of Him, the Father's voice spoke publicly out of the heavens concerning Him, His own miracles testified to Him with no uncertain sound, and the Scriptures which the people read spoke of Him in their every part. All this He pointed out in the verses which precede our text. Yet with such an One men would have nothing to do. The awfulness of this becomes the more apparent if we think for one moment of all the honours which have been heaped of late upon King George in both East and West. Everyone has been keen to get near him, foreign squadrons acclaim him on his journey home — scarce a dog moves his tongue against him. Yet when the Sovereign of the universe visited our poor earth He was despised and rejected of men. "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not" (John 1:10-11).

What was the character of His mission that men shunned Him thus? Had He come here in majesty and wrath, men, conscious of their guilt, might well have sought cover from Him wherever they could find it. But "God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3: 17). As our text says, He came that men "might have life." He was standing in the midst of a scene in which sin had long reigned unto death (Rom. 5: 21). In order that life might be available for men, He was prepared to give His flesh for the life of the world. So He says in John 6: 51. And yet men did not want Him!

Who were the "ye" who so scornfully refused Him? Men who were the creatures of His hand, and who were moreover the objects of His special favour, for since the days of the Exodus no people had been so privileged as Israel. And what was their condition? They were "the slaves of sin," spite of their false boast that they had never been in bondage to any man (John 8: 33-34). Their peril was thus deadly, and their need great; yet they rejected the Son of God.

But there is another side to this matter. There was one in whom they did put their trust, as the Lord Jesus pointed out in verse 45. Hear them saying in John 9: 28: "Thou art His disciple, but we are Moses' disciples." Moses then was their confidence and boast. Now Moses was a type of Christ in some respects. In his circumstances — as lifted out of the waters of death and set in association with the throne; and in his mission, as mediator between God and the people. But in other respects he was a contrast. After the dreadful sin of Israel in the matter of the Golden calf, we hear him saying "Now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin" (Ex. 32: 30). No such language of uncertainty ever rested upon the Saviour's lips. He first made complete atonement for His people's guilt, and then went up on high in the power of it.

John 1: 17 shows the contrast between the missions of these two: "The law was given by Moses; but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." The law, as 2 Cor. 3 tells us, was a ministration of condemnation and of death because of the utter inability of sinful flesh to render its righteous requirements. Yet men love the Moses principle! It is as true as ever what Peter said in Acts 15: 21: "Moses hath in every city them that preach him." That is, there are those in every quarter who proclaim works as the ground of blessing before God. Men's confidence in Moses is really the expression of their confidence in themselves, for men cling to the notion that there is some good thing in flesh if only a fair chance be given to it.

The rejected Saviour was soon to leave His scornful hearers. Accordingly He warned them of the Antichrist. "I am come in My Father's name, and ye receive Me not; if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive" (John 5: 43). The Saviour's voice, now heard in the Gospel, will soon be silent. The next thing will be the last great deception, when men, who would not come to Him that they might have life, will hail with delight the Antichrist of the Devil, to their eternal ruin. Let us ask ourselves how far His bitter complaint applies in our own case.

MAN'S MOUTH.

"Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness." — Rom. 3: 14.

"Every mouth stopped." — Rom. 3: 19.

"With the mouth confession is made unto salvation." — Rom. 10: 10.

"With one mind and one mouth glorify God."  - Rom. 15: 6.

The mouth both takes in and gives out. It is the avenue to the stomach and the outlet for the heart. The wise man has said: "All the labour of man is for his mouth" (Ecc. 6: 7). In this he spake truly. The Pharisees of our Lord's time were more fastidious concerning that which goes into the mouth than that which comes out of it. Hence their contention with the Lord in Matt. 15 because His disciples ate bread with unwashed hands. In His reply He said: "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man." Then, after sternly denouncing the hypocrisy of these religious folk, He added an awful description of what the human heart contains. "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries," etc.

It is not my intention on this occasion to run through all the Scripture passages which speak of the mouth. I propose to confine myself to the four passages in the epistle to the Romans in which it is mentioned. These all regard it from the moral side — as the outlet for the heart. In Rom. 3 we have the divine indictment of man, presented in a string of quotations from the Prophets and the Psalms. Amongst them we find these terrible words from Psalm 10: "Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness." If the heart did not contain these evils the mouth could never give them forth. Here then we have an insight into the human heart. Let it be noted also that this awful quotation occurs in the apostle's description of religious Jews, not in his account of heathen Gentiles. We are reminded of James' exposure of the inconsistency of the tongue: "Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God." It is possible therefore to sing the praises of God on Sunday and be guilty of cursing and bitterness towards men on Monday. Oh, the appalling corruption of the human heart! Well might the Saviour say: "How can ye, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matt. 12: 34). Yet it is one of the hardest of all lessons to learn that the heart of every man is incurably wicked.

But we pass on to Rom. 3: 19. Here the apostle concludes his detailed accusation of the whole human race, Gentiles and Jews alike. "That every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God." The meaning is that not one single word can be said in extenuation of man's universal condition of guilt and ruin. Not a single reason can be justly assigned why God should not pass sentence forthwith. How would a man feel in whose defence nothing can possibly be urged as he stands in the presence of His Majesty's judge? This is exactly man's position in relation to God. Convinced he may not be; convicted he is beyond all controversy. It is a happy thing when a man acknowledges the truth as to himself, and feels constrained to say: —

"Nothing but mercy will do for me;

Nothing but mercy, full and free:

Of sinners chief, what but the blood

Could calm my soul before my God? "

In Rom. 10 we have God's principle of salvation —  faith in contrast with works. Two kinds of righteousness are presented to us: "the righteousness which is of the law" in verse 5, and "the righteousness which is of faith" in verse 6. The first is what men love most, because it gives a place to human effort; the second, however, is what God sets forth in the Gospel of Christ, and it calls for no human effort at all, but instead magnifies what God and Christ have done. Does any soul long to be saved, crying out with the Jailer of Philippi: "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16: 30). Here is God's answer to this tremendous question: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord (R.V.), and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." To confess Jesus as Lord is to renounce once for all our own self-will, the root of our every sin. It was a great moment in the history of the writer of the epistle to the Romans when he first lay broken and humbled at the feet of Jesus, and contritely called upon Him as Lord. God demands this from us all as the first step towards eternal blessing. Why does the apostle add, as a second condition, if thou "shalt believe in thine heart that God raised Him from the dead"? "Some perhaps would have preferred him to say, "If thou shalt believe that Jesus died." But the apostle does not so express himself. The reason is very simple. Resurrection pre-supposes death. The two great cardinal truths of the Gospel are given to us in 1 Cor. 15: 3, 4 thus: "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures . . . and He was raised again the third day according to the Scriptures." Incidentally it is added, "And He was buried," as if to emphasise the reality of the Saviour's death.

Now see the magnificence of the statement in Rom 10: 9. The Christ who died for the ungodly according to Rom. 5: 6, has been raised from the dead, and that by the very One to whose righteous throne His great sacrifice was presented as an atonement for our sin and guilt. This is the grand public proof that all the divine claims have been once and for ever satisfied. Thus "if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." The mouth gives expression to the peace and delight which now prevail in the heart when God becomes known as a Justifier and Saviour.

Our last text is really an exhortation to Christian unity. "Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus; that ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 15: 5- 6). Such a passage serves to illustrate the marvellous fruits of God's salvation, when it is known and enjoyed in the soul. It brings together into one holy bond a great variety of persons who, apart from divine grace, would never have wished to know one another at all. Moreover, it enables them to sink their natural selfishness, and walk together in mutual consideration and love. Occupied not with themselves, nor with one another, they are free to glorify God with one mind and one mouth. Here we have a purifying of the mouth indeed. That which was full of cursing and bitterness in Rom. 3. is full of praise in Rom. 15. Outward reformation could not effect so great a transformation. The mighty work of the Holy Spirit in the heart, whereby God and Christ become known and appreciated, can alone suffice for it.

NO DIFFERENCE.

"There is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." — Rom. 3: 22, 23

"There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him." — Rom. 10: 12.

When reading the opening chapters of the epistle to the Romans one seems to be breathing the atmosphere of a court of law. All classes and conditions stand arraigned there. We hear the witnesses called, guilt proved, and then the verdict. In Rom. 1: 18-32 we have the condition of the Gentile world discussed; that is, the Gentile world as it appeared in the day of the apostle. Debasing idolatry and frightful moral corruption are the charges laid. The witnesses against these transgressors are the things which the Creator has made, whereby are declared His eternal power and Godhead. The sun and the moon in the heavens are a standing protest against idolatry by their perpetual witness to the reality of the supreme God. The Gentile world of the apostle's day finds its answer in the profligates of our own time —  those who cast aside all divine restraint, and who not only themselves commit things worthy of death, but take delight in others who do the same.

In Rom. 2: 1-16 philosophers are addressed. These would denounce sin and propound good moral ideas, but their lives were no better than those of their fellows. Macaulay, in his essay on Bacon, remarks that "these teachers of virtue had all the vices of their neighbours, with the additional vice of hypocrisy." Wesley, in his "journal" comments upon Homer's words concerning the liar. "My soul abhors him as the gates of hell," that "he himself, on the slightest pretence, tells deliberately lies over and over." We have moralists in our own time also — men who speak well, but live ill. But God will not be put off with good words and fair speeches; He demands reality.

The last class charged in Romans 2 are the Jews. These were the professing people of God, into whose hands the Scriptures had come. They correspond to the multitudes who throng the "places of worship" of to-day. In his arraignment of the Jews the apostle does not cite creation as his witness, but produces passage after passage from their own Scriptures (Rom. 3: 10-19) . Those who are privileged to possess the Bible in any age must be judged thereby if they do not submit to its holy teaching.

The summing up follows — "every mouth stopped — all the world guilty before God." "There is no difference; for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Let us not misunderstand the apostle here. He does not say all have sinned equally. Some have been so mercifully placed that all the innate devilry of their hearts has not been drawn forth, and this is cause for thankfulness. Our Lord in Luke 7 told of two debtors, one who owed five hundred pence and the other fifty. There was thus a difference in the amount due, but both were on the same level in this respect, that neither had anything wherewith to pay. I was once addressing a congregation of lepers in Barbados, and amongst a number of deplorable cases I observed two smart young men wearing gold watches, and looking the picture of health. At the close of the service I inquired what these were doing in such company, and was told that the dread disease had but recently manifested itself in them. Whatever their general appearance, they were thus lepers like all the rest.

Why does the apostle say, "come short of the glory of God?" The reason is this. Man has lost the earth irretrievably; it is now for him a question of heaven or hell. But who is able to meet the requirements of God's glory, so as to be free and at home there? In Isaiah 6 we have a man terror-stricken because for one moment he found himself in the presence of the glory of God. There has been but one man in this world whom the glory could acknowledge as worthy of it. To Him there came a voice from the excellent glory: "this is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (2 Peter 1: 17). In Him then we see what the glory of God requires in a man. Do we correspond to Him? Here alone is the true standard whereby we may measure ourselves aright. Suppose a young man sought entrance amongst his Majesty's guards, it would be vain for him to plead that he is the tallest person in the town if he falls below the fixed standard. In like manner it is useless to compare ourselves with other sinners. The Pharisee of Luke 18 committed this folly, and in consequence went home unblessed. Sin is a great leveller. God has said it, and from His sentence there is no appeal: "There is no difference; for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." The religious man and the atheist; the High Conservative and the Socialist; the moral man and the adulterer stand upon one common platform of guilt before God.

Thus salvation must be altogether of grace; and if of grace, distinctions are impossible. Here our second text comes in most blessedly. The atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus has one value for all who believe, whether Jews or Gentiles. The "no difference" doctrine angered the Jewish people deeply. Paul, as its chief exponent, was fiercely persecuted by them on this account. Even Peter, when charged to preach to Cornelius and his company, was slow to admit that the grace of God was for all alike. "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." Remark in passing one of the many incidental proofs of the Deity of Christ. This verse is cited from Joel 2: 32, where manifestly the reference is to Jehovah; in Rom 10 it is applied to the Lord Jesus. Then He is Jehovah! Were He not, He would not possess the competency to be the Saviour of men. He is moreover "Lord over all." Thus every one must bow to Him, either now or in the great hereafter.

What is required of men in order that they might be saved? Simply to "call" upon the name of the Lord This was all Israel could do in the midst of their misery in Egypt. To shake off Pharaoh was impossible; to get rid of the taskmasters was out of the question; but they could cry to God. In like manner to-day, he who calls upon the name of the Lord, acknowledging Him thus as his only hope, will be saved. To all such He is "rich." The blessings bound up in the salvation of God are neither few nor small; no creature tongue could declare them in their blessed fullness.

Now turn to a passage in Ex. 11: 7, by way of contrast to this. "Against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel." If there is "no difference" amongst men in the matter of guilt, and "no difference" in the dispensing of God's saving grace, there is a difference, deep and eternal, between God's saved ones and all others. As light from darkness, day from night, and life from death, so may be distinguished those who are saved from all who are unsaved. In Ex. 11 it was a question of the judgement of God. The destroyer was about to pass through the land. For the Egyptians there was to be divine judgement, but for Israel none. Christ is the line of demarcation to-day between those who are hastening to eternal doom, and those upon whom no judgement can ever fall. How do we all stand in relation to Him!?

SO GREAT SALVATION.

"How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?" — Heb. 2: 3.

In the course of his ministry the apostle had to do with all sorts and conditions of men. He was a chosen vessel unto Christ to bear His name before the Gentiles and kings, and the children of Israel (Acts 9: 15). His theme everywhere was the same — Christ as the one and only provision of God for the need of men. But his presentation of the theme necessarily varied according to the circumstances of those to whom he addressed himself from time to time. Thus at Lystra, amongst ignorant heathen, we find him speaking of the goodness of the living God in giving men fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness (Acts 14: 15-17). At Athens, amongst learned heathen, we hear him insisting upon the unity and supremacy of the Creator, and the origin and unity of the human family, and from these truths reasoning against the folly of idolatry (Acts 17: 21- 31). With the heathen he felt constrained to begin upon the very lowest rung of the ladder of truth.

Our text is from the epistle to the Hebrews. These were a people possessed of the Scriptures. For fifteen centuries the Hebrew nation had been in special relationship with God. Their minds were familiar with the many prophetic announcements of the coming Christ, and their eyes had witnessed the offering of multitudes of sacrifices which all pointed to His great atoning work. Moreover, the Saviour Himself had been in their midst. Neither in Rome, nor in Great Britain, was the Saviour born, but in the tiny land of the Hebrews. There He lived, suffered, and died, and from a hill in that most favoured of all lands He ascended into the Father's glory. It was thus to a people who were conversant with the mightiest of divine facts that the apostle put the solemn question: "How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? "

Let us dwell awhile upon this word "great." First, how great the need! The whole human race in revolt against its Creator! Jew and Gentile, high and low, rich and poor — all brought in guilty in the divine sight. No exceptions admitted anywhere; "there is no difference, for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3: 22-23). Moreover, no man naturally wishful for a different condition of things, for the carnal mind is enmity against God (Rom. 8: 7); and to complete the tale of ruin no man able either to help his brother or save himself. How great, then, the need that God should intervene in mercy with salvation for His rebellious creatures.

And how great the peril! Man being possessed of the divine inbreathing, he has eternity to face. When the grave is reached every man's condition and destiny becomes unalterable. Men are perishing; let us be quite clear as to this awful fact. Who can estimate what this means? How urgent, then, the need that God should provide a way of salvation for men since none could provide one for themselves.

How great the Saviour! Paul in his epistles to Timothy and Titus loves to speak of "God our Saviour." A salvation provided by One so exalted must needs be great and marvellous — worthy of His name. David, in 2 Sam. 7 when meditating upon the divine disclosures concerning himself and his house felt that a "great" God must of necessity do great things for those to whom He manifests His grace. God, then, the One against whom we have sinned, is the One who has undertaken our cause.

How great the cost! Hear it described in the words of the Lord Jesus. "For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). Well might the poet sing: —

"Ours is a pardon bought with blood;

Amazing truth! the blood of One

Who, without usurpation, could

lay claim to heaven's eternal throne."

Nothing could expiate sin but the blood of Christ. Silver and gold are valueless here. Meritorious works and tears of repentance are alike unavailing. Not even the holy life of the Son of God could suffice to bridge the terrible gulf that sin has made between man and his Maker. "Apart from shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. 9: 22). How evil is Satan's slander that God is an austere person! Wonder of wonders! He who seemed to deny an apple to man unfallen has given His Son to man a sinner. Let men beware how they behave in the presence of God's "unspeakable gift." He who refuses the Son of God does so to his eternal loss.

How great the blessing! The salvation of God goes far beyond the mere forgiveness of sins, inestimable as this initial blessing is. The believer in Jesus is washed, sanctified, and justified; he is brought into the family of God and given a place amongst the many sons; he becomes an heir of God and joint-heir with Christ; he is blest with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ; and presently the whole blood-washed throng will be lifted right out of the present evil world and be set down in the Father's house on high, there to enjoy divine favour and blessing for evermore. Well does the apostle say — "so great salvation!" What creature tongue is able to declare what God saves His people from, and all that to which He brings them in Christ our Lord?

Let us now take account of the words which precede our text. "If the word spoken by (or through) angels was steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward; how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord," etc. The apostle's first reference is to the law, which was given by angelic ministry at Mount Sinai. Judgement must needs fall upon those who set it at defiance. But if the transgression of the law brought men under judgement, how much more the refusal of grace? Such is the argument. Nothing could be more solemn. The God who would not have His law set at naught can never consent to have His Son treated with contempt.

What must men do in order to perish eternally? Go out and commit some fearful sin, such as would scandalise the town? There is no need to do anything of the kind. People have but to attend the preaching of the Gospel, and neglect to appropriate the Christ of God for themselves in faith, and their ruin is certain for evermore. "How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?" To "reject" is not necessary; to "neglect" is sufficient.

CREATOR: SAVIOUR: FATHER.

"A faithful Creator." — 1 Peter 4: 19.

"God our Saviour." — 1 Tim. 1: 1.

"God our Father." — 1 Tim. 1: 2.

God is declared to us in three characters in the Holy Scriptures — as Creator, as Saviour, and as Father. In each of these characters we may know Him and confide in Him, if so our hearts desire.

In our time "Creator" has become a merely complimentary title upon men's lips. The theory of evolution represents the various forms of life as we know them to be just developments of lower forms, ever struggling upward in virtue of some power inherent in themselves. This view makes God at best a mere superintendent. That man is an independent creation, absolutely and essentially distinct from every other, is no longer believed by the many. But how does Scripture speak as to this? The sacred oracles most unquestionably represent God as the source and originator of everything — not only of everything that we see, but of "all things that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible" (Col. 1: 16). Six times in Gen. 1 the word "created" is used of His handiwork. "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Heb. 11: 3). Not "by geological research" (good and useful as this may be in its place), but "by faith" we understand. Matter is not eternal; it was created by the hand of God. But, what is of greater moment to us, man also was divinely created. Daniel used no figure of speech when he said to Belshazzar: "The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified." He was seeking to impress upon the guilty man the fact that he was a creature of God, with deep responsibilities to Him, which he had never acknowledged. This was the truth which Paul insisted upon with the learned men of Athens in Acts 17. He quoted with approval their own poet's words, "We are also His offspring," and himself added, "He giveth to all life and breath and all things." To these learned dreamers the apostle judged it necessary to teach that man came forth from the workshop of the Almighty. The process is described in Gen. 1: 2. First we hear God saying, "Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness," and then we have the different stages in the work. "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." The divine Potter first formed the body, and then into the inanimate frame He breathed His own breath. Man is thus a being totally distinct in nature and character from every other creature of God's hand.

"God our Saviour" is a wonderful title. It is found only in the epistles to Timothy and Titus. That He should Himself seek to save rebels against His own majesty is a marvel indeed. Though there is infinite variety in God's works, He has only been pleased to create two orders of moral beings — angels for the heavens and men for the earth. Both of these have revolted against Him. For angels He has provided no Saviour; for men He has. Who can explain so great a mystery? He was under no obligation to save any of His rebellious creatures. He might have declared Himself "God our Judge" to men as to angels. But the Incarnate Son has told us: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3: 16-17). And so "the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men" (Titus 2: 11). "The kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man has appeared," as we read in another place. "God our Saviour" is not so familiar a thought to some as "Jesus our Saviour." The popular conception is a severe God, and a gracious Jesus. Popery goes even further in its misrepresentation making even Jesus severe, and needing words from Mary to render Him favourable to sinners. "God our Saviour" means that the very One against whom we have transgressed has in His great love Himself provided all that His throne demanded. Who would distrust such a God?

Some were falsifying the Gospel in the apostle's day by preaching the law. Of these he says contemptuously: "Understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm" (1 Tim. 1: 7). In the same way would he speak of the religious leaders of our own time who put men under law, and encourage them to go into the presence of God with vows upon their lips which none are able to perform. The Gospel reveals Him, not as an exactor but as a giver. It is a solemn thing to falsify His testimony.

Now if it be indeed true that "God is our Saviour," and that "the grace of God that bringeth salvation to all men hath appeared," the question arises, are we saved? Paul could say in 2 Tim 1: 9, "Who hath saved us," and in 1 Tim. 1 he blesses God for saving the chief of sinners. Can you thank God for the same inestimable blessing?

We read in our third text, "God our Father." Not the great universal Father, as some say, coupling with it the idea of the universal brotherhood of man. This is not God's truth, but one of Satan's most dangerous lies. He is the Father of all who believe in the Lord Jesus, but of no others. His name of Father was revealed by the Son. Israel knew Him as Jehovah, and the early patriarchs as the Almighty; we are privileged to know Him as Father. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him" (John 1: 18). But the unfolding was gradual. During His earthly ministry He taught His disciples to say "Our Father, which art in heaven," and "heavenly Father," but these titles do not express the full grace of Christianity. Not until He was risen from the dead did He say "My brethren," and "My Father and your Father, and My God and your God" (John 20: 17). Such words put all His own into His place and relationship with His Father and God. Godward we are "many sons;" Christward we are "many brethren," amongst whom He is Firstborn. Well might the apostle say: "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called children of God" (1 John 3: 1). The Lord's own touching parable in Luke 15 shows how the Father delights to lavish His love upon those who come to Him in repentance. His love as "God our Saviour" is a love of compassion; His love as "God our Father" is a love of tenderest relationship.

STEM Publishing : W. W. Fereday : The Old Old Story (Gospel Addresses)

The Old Old Story

(Gospel Addresses)

W W Fereday.

Fig-Leaves

Lame on Both His Feet

The Queen of Sheba

Kiss The Son

Four Things Exceeding Wise

The Great Election

What Think Ye of Christ?

New Garments, etc.

The Strong Man Armed

The Pharisee And The Publican

Three Men of Jericho

Moses or Christ?

Lord, to Whom Shall We Go?

This Same Jesus

The Gospel

Anathema-Maranatha

He Became Poor

The Victory of Christ

One God and One Mediator

To the reader.

This unpretentious little volume contains condensed reports of Gospel addresses delivered on Lord's Day evenings in different places in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The addresses were greatly appreciated by those who listened to them; and it is hoped that they will now yield blessing to those who read them. Our great aim has been to

Make the message clear and plain

That Christ receiveth sinful men.

That the Gracious Spirit of God may speed the book on its happy mission is our earnest prayer.

"FIG-LEAVES."

There are but two religions in the world, and both are found in Gen. 3, for both commenced in the Garden of Eden. Man's religion is described in Gen. 5: 7; God's in Gen. 5: 21. Man's religion may assume many forms, as Brahmanism in India, Buddhism in China, Mohammedanism in Turkey, and Romanism in Spain; but one principle is common to them all, and is expressed in the little word "Do." Man is thrown upon his own resources, to work out his own salvation as best he may. God's religion, in contrast with this, is happily expressed in the word "Done." His grace has so perfectly supplied every need, that a finished work is now proclaimed to man; nothing is demanded of him but acceptance of it in simple faith.

The story of Gen. 3 is no allegory, but sober, historical fact. It is God's own account of the greatest disaster that has ever befallen the human family. The wily foe gained the ear of the woman, and then through her the ear of the man, and so brought about revolt against God. The sceptic scoffs at the notion that all the world's misery is traceable to the eating of an apple; but what lay behind that simple act? Disobedience to God; self-will; treason against the Creator. Herein we have the essence of sin.

The guilty pair became aware of their condition before they were challenged as to it by the Lord God. "They knew that they were naked." In like manner men today feel within themselves, spite of their frequent boastings, that they are sinners against God. Who ever met a man perfectly satisfied with himself, who would not, when pressed, admit that he is not quite all he should be, or would wish to be? What is this but an acknowledgment of sinnership, even though the depth of the heart's evil may be utterly unknown? Conscious of nakedness, Adam and his wife "sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons." They had each a conscience now, and a bad conscience withal; accordingly they laboured to make themselves presentable to the eye of God. But it was self effort entirely; God had absolutely no part or lot in the device. From that day onwards multitudes have followed in their steps. In so far as sacraments, temperance, benevolence, etc. (things excellent enough in themselves) are trusted in as contributing in the smallest degree to the salvation of the soul, they are just aprons of fig-leaves and nothing more.

The sound of the divine voice blasted Adam's whole scheme. Spite of their aprons "Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden." They were consciously unfit to stand before Him. Scripture abounds with instances of men who became utterly undone when the light of God streamed upon them. Isaiah cried, "Woe is me"; Job said, "Behold I am vile." Peter exclaimed, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." It is happier far to discover one's moral nakedness now, than when this world is left behind for ever. The apostle hints in 2 Cor. 5: 3 at the awful possibility of some being found "naked" in the resurrection state.

Our hope, as sinful men, is in God alone. When He came upon the scene of the first great sin, He spoke forthwith of Christ, the Seed of the woman, who should bruise the serpent's head. Further, "unto Adam and his wife the Lord God made coats of skins, and clothed them." Aprons of fig-leaves! Coats of skins! What a contrast! Not a trace of divine handiwork in the one; not a trace of human handiwork in the other. Here we have the first notice of death in Adam's world. Man's sin occasioned it, for the guilty ones must now have a covering such as would satisfy the eye of God. Every bullock, lamb, etc., that has ever been sacrificed on account of human guilt, pointed in its way to the cross of Calvary, where in God's due time the Son of His love suffered "once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3: 18). On the basis of Christ's redemption, God is able to impute righteousness to the most ungodly rebel who believes in His Son. As Rom. 3 expresses it, He is "just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." Away then with all our human devices. Let us no longer go about to establish our own righteousness; let us rather submit ourselves unto the righteousness of God. "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth" (Rom. 10: 3-4). The man who was once more diligent than any in sewing fig-leaves together — Saul of Tarsus — counted all his accomplishments in that direction as "loss" and "offal" when he came to know Christ Jesus the Lord. It was from his pen, as guided by the Holy Ghost, that the fine declaration has come down to us: "to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 5). Oh, the blessedness, for time and for eternity, of the man to whom God imputeth righteousness apart from works!

"LAME ON BOTH HIS FEET."

The story of Mephibosheth (2 Sam. 9) is a charming representation of the Gospel of God. It was no mere human kindness which David proposed to bestow upon the man, but kindness after the divine pattern. "Is there yet any of the house of Saul, that I may show the kindness of God unto him?" It is remarkable the prominence given to the name of Saul in this story. It was rather as the representative of Saul than as the heir of Jonathan that Mephibosheth was blessed. Now Saul was David's relentless foe. For years he hunted him, thirsting for his blood. Yet David speaks of showing grace to his seed. How like our God is this! "Beginning at Jerusalem," was the Saviour's word when sending forth His disciples with the gospel of divine forgiveness (Luke 24: 47). The city guilty of His blood was not merely to have an opportunity of blessing; it was to be approached first of all with the mercy of God. Deep down in every man's heart there is enmity to God and to His Son. But even so, grace abounds. "When we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son" (Rom. 5: 10).

Mephibosheth was a cripple. When he was but five years old, he had a fall as his nurse fled with him after the battle of Gilboa. In consequence of this, he was "lame on both his feet." In like manner, man, in the very childhood of the race, experienced the grave moral fall described in Genesis 3, and has been a poor lame creature ever since. The doctrine of the fall is distasteful to the pride of the present day. The theory of evolution is more palatable, because it represents man as going forward, instead of backward. But if the record of Genesis 3 is the truth of God as every pious soul believes, then the theory of evolution is a lie of Satan, ruinous in its effects for all who imbibe it.

Mark, Mephibosheth was lame on "both" his feet. Even so man, since the fall, has been incapable both toward God and toward his fellow. Neither of the tables of the covenant is he competent to keep. As to the first, he can neither walk with God, nor run in the way of His commandments (Gen. 5: 24; Ps. 119: 32). As to the second, he fails at every step. Every man is ready to object to so humiliating a conclusion in regard to himself, while recognising it carefully enough in his dealings with all others. Who would care to transact serious business without having everything secured in writing, with the signatures properly attested? What is this but a confession that man is a fallen creature, to be watched in all his words and ways? It is wisdom on our part to acknowledge our total moral ruin. It is not sufficient to admit that there may be shortcoming here and there; the bottom is never reached until a man owns that he is absolutely "without strength," dependent alone for salvation upon Christ who died for the ungodly (Rom. 5: 6).

Mephibosheth's condition, as representative and heir of a great enemy and transgressor, and lame on both his feet, is thus the exact picture of every man's moral condition by nature. Now observe his position. He was resident in "Lo-Debar," which means "no pasture." The world is a veritable Lo-Debar for us all. Absolutely nothing is contained therein that can satisfy our highest needs. He who makes the world his pursuit, whatever his advantages, must sooner or later come round to the wise man's opinion that it is all "vanity and striving after wind."

"Then King David sent and fetched him." Mephibosheth might well have approached David and pleaded before him the name of Jonathan. The King would certainly have honoured his covenant with the departed, and shown favour to his son. But Mephibosheth did not thus take the initiative. Even so, it is not man that takes the first great step towards the soul's blessing. The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost; and now it is the Holy Spirit who speaks the first word in the soul which leads to reconciliation with God. If God were to wait for man to act voluntarily, so deep is the enmity of the heart toward everything divine, that God and man would remain estranged eternally. Once Mephibosheth found himself in the presence of David, he learned that he was being blessed for another's sake, which put everything upon a sure basis as far as personal merit was concerned. It is the comfort of every believing heart to-day that all blessing depends solely upon what Christ is, and has done. The thought of this delivers the mind from self-contemplation, which engenders despair. Never again could Mephibosheth long after Lo-Debar; his place henceforward was with the King, in happy enjoyment of his grace. Similarly the Christian is lifted by the mighty power of divine goodness right out of the world. He becomes a heavenly man now, with his whole soul aflame with the powerful attractions of the Lord Jesus.

In the following chapter we hear David again proposing to show kindness. The King of Ammon died, and David sent messages of condolence to Hanun, his successor. But this time his kindness was rejected. Evil counselors urged upon the young King that David only meant mischief by his embassy. Accordingly the messengers were maltreated, and their overtures repulsed. Swift judgement resulted, as was meet. Every man who has Christ presented to his attention must needs play the part either of Mephibosheth or of Hanun. The one appreciated "the kindness of God," as shown by David; the other refused it to his ruin. It is a wonderful thing to be told of the Saviour's name, and of the precious blood which alone could reconcile sinners to God, but it is a solemn thing to reject the heavenly message. The man who cannot appreciate the love of the divine heart must yet experience the severity of the divine hand.

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.

Royal visits are always interesting, and frequently excite considerable enthusiasm amongst the people; but it does not often happen that such visits are instructive, leaving a testimony behind them to men of all succeeding generations. Yet this was the result of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, King of Israel (1 Kings 10). Her visit was not one of courtesy, such as monarchs sometimes pay one to another; nor was it a political visit, designed for the arrangement of treaties which might be to the advantage of her dominion; still less was her visit one of curiosity in order that she might see and hear the most remarkable man of his time. Her journey to Jerusalem was altogether an affair of the soul; "the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord." Like Nicodemus later, she had a sense of need within, which she felt conversation with God's servant might remove. Accordingly she thought it worth her while to travel a thousand miles in order to lay her difficulties before him. In her case was strikingly answered Solomon's prayer concerning "the stranger" at the dedication of the temple (1 Kings 8: 41-43). The Son of God once held up this zealous queen as a rebuke to the indifference of men in His day (Matt. 12: 42).

We will divide our subject thus: (1) what she heard; (2) what she saw; and (3) what she received.

What she HEARD. She came to prove Solomon with hard questions. "She communed with him of all that was in her heart; and Solomon told her all her questions." Precisely what her difficulties were is not recorded; it is enough for us to know that they were all removed. The soul in every age has its "hard questions." To whom can men turn to-day with their heart problems but to the Son of God? The Samaritan said concerning the expected One: "When He is come He will tell us all things" (John 4: 25). Some of the soul's "hard questions" are distinctly noticed in Scripture. We find one in Job 9: 2: "How should man be just with God?" This is the guilty man's "hard question." Bildad's remarks drew this forth from Job. He had just said: "Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man." To this Job replied: "I know it is so of a truth; but how should man be just with God? If He will contend with him, he cannot answer Him one of a thousand." It was all very well for Bildad to say "God will not cast away a perfect man." No one ever supposed He would, but where is the perfect man to be found? Certainly Job felt that he was not that man. The divine answer to the guilty man's "hard question" is found in Rom. 3: 21-26. The redemption that is in Christ Jesus enables God to justify freely by His grace every confessedly guilty one who believes in His Son.

Another of the soul's "hard questions" is noticed in Ps. 4: 6: "There may be many that say, "Who will show us any good?" This is the language of disappointment. The world has been searched, as it were, for satisfaction, and in vain. Accordingly the poor votary of pleasure exclaims in despair, "Who will show us any good?" The Son of God, of whom Solomon was a type, can alone answer this "hard question." Hear His apostle in Phil. 3: 8: "I count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but offal that I may win Christ." The heart of such a man was evidently at rest; in the knowledge of Christ he had found eternal good. Apart from Him the search for satisfaction is but strivings after the wind. The WORK of Christ is thus God's answer to the guilty man and the PERSON of Christ to the disappointed man.

Let us now consider what the queen SAW. First, she SAW the most glorious monarch of his time — " Solomon in all his glory." But this will not compare with what faith sees to-day. "We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour" (Heb. 2: 9). What a sight! Then she observed that all Solomon's servants were well fed. The meat of his table" struck her. With what food does Christ nourish those who are His? Hear Him saying in John 6: 51 — "the bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." Do not read the Lord's Supper into this chapter, for it had no existence at the time of speaking. By eating His flesh and drinking His blood the Saviour meant faith's appropriation of Himself as the One who once was slain. I partake of the Lord s Supper on the first day of the week but I am privileged to feed upon Christ every day and every hour of the day. Moreover, if to eat His flesh and drink His blood is to have eternal life, and if these words must be applied to a sacrament, then it follows that whoever has once partaken, however evil, is saved, and all who have not partaken, however pious, are lost. What thoughtful person would contend for anything so manifestly absurd? The Queen of Sheba noticed also the apparel of Solomon's servants; they were all well clothed. Christ's servants are clothed with "the best robe" of divine righteousness (Luke 15: 22), conferred by grace alone. Everyone around Solomon seemed satisfied and happy. "Happy are thy men," exclaimed the delighted queen. In like manner all who are Christ's have been made happy for evermore, and outside of their circle happiness is nowhere to be found.

Here we must note some points of contrast between the Queen of Sheba and the believer in Jesus. She said: "I heard . . . but I beheld not until . . . mine eyes had seen." We believe while as yet our eyes do not see. "Whom not having seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory" (1 Peter 1: 8). She said moreover: "The half was not told me." Concerning the divinest of all themes, God revealed in human flesh, we read: "Even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written" (John 21: 15). No finite mind could entertain even "the half" of what the Holy Spirit could tell concerning the Christ of God.

A few words now as to what she RECEIVED. It is true that she brought large presents to Solomon, but she went home enriched nevertheless. "King Solomon gave unto the Queen of Sheba all her desire . . . beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty." In like manner, our God not only meets the actual need of the sinner who comes to Him, but He forthwith enriches him with all the blessing of Christ Himself. Hence Christians are described in Rom. 5: 17 as "they which receive abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness." There are two things here. Righteousness is our actual need; without it we must perish; "the abundance of grace" corresponds with the "royal bounty" of Solomon. As we read in Eph. 1: 7. "Forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace." As men in Christ, we are endowed with all the blessing of Christ. According to His worthiness and the merits of His atoning work is our wealthy portion for evermore.

"KISS THE SON."

Christ is everywhere the theme of the Spirit in Holy Scripture. Not only in the Gospels, which tell of His past humiliation; not only in the Epistles, which speak of His present glory; but throughout Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, Christ is the one theme of the Spirit of God. Happy the man who has eyes to perceive this, and a heart to appreciate it. It is the fruit of the gracious work of God Himself within.

Perhaps no book is better known than the book of Psalms. For centuries it has occupied a peculiar place in the religious services of Christendom. But perhaps there is no book less understood. It is commonly regarded as containing only devotional exercises. Certainly the heart tells itself out in the Psalms as nowhere else in the Book of God. But beyond the devotional aspect lies the prophetic; and unless this is seen, there is much in the Psalms that can never be comprehended. The whole book looks onward to the day of the Lord — that momentous day when God will abandon His present attitude of reserve, and interfere once more in the affairs of men.

The theme of Psalm 2, is Christ's future appearing. The Spirit asks in the opening verses why men are so enraged against Jehovah and His Anointed, and why they are determined to cast away their cords from them. At man's impotent rage Jehovah laughs, and insists that He will yet set His King upon His holy hill of Zion. When the moment comes for Christ to ask for His inheritance, the work of judgement will begin, and every foe will be swept out of His path.

In view of this, the Spirit in verses 10-12 offers counsel to men. "Be wise now." "Be instructed." Let us examine carefully verse 12. "Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish in the way, for His wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him" (R.V.). There are four things here: — An exhortation, a warning, an announcement, and a beatitude.

(1) An EXHORTATION. "Kiss the Son. It is not the kiss of affection that is meant, but the kiss of allegiance It is the reverent acknowledgment of His title and claims. It is the moment when the heart exclaims, "My Lord and my God." Two different words are used for "Son" in this Psalm. In verse 7 we have "Ben "; in verse 12 "Bar." According to Gesenius, the one is the term of love, and the other the regal term. In other words, His relation to God as the object of His heart's delight; and His relation to men as the appointed universal Ruler to whom all must bow. Pride blocks men's path when Christ comes into view. We all like to receive homage, but we are not so ready to render it. Man's haughty mind cannot brook the thought of a superior. But God has made Jesus, whom men crucified, both Lord and Christ, and has decreed that to Him every knee must bow, and that every tongue must own Him Lord. The most stubborn heart that ever beat will be constrained to humble itself at the feet of the despised Jesus: those who bow in faith now receive salvation; those who do not bow until compelled to do so in another world will be lost eternally.

(2) We have next a WARNING, "Lest He be angry, and ye perish." Is it possible that the Son of God can ever be angry — He who sat by Sychar's well, and spoke so tenderly to a sinful woman there; He who suffered a conscience-stricken transgressor to shed tears of repentance upon His feet, and turned her not away; He who comforted even a thief in the hour of death, and took him with Himself into the Paradise of God? Can He indeed be angry? Let us remember that the divine nature is twofold: "God is Light" and "God is Love." He was angry in Noah's day, and the earth was in consequence swept clean of its transgressors; He was angry in Lot's and the guilty cities fell. He will not for ever address His Gospel to the children of men.

(3) There follows an ANNOUNCEMENT. "His wrath will soon be kindled." So the Revised Version correctly reads. Nothing is more certain than judgement, however unwilling men may be to believe it. It is "because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He hath ordained," that God "commandeth all men everywhere to repent" (Acts 17: 30-31). The moment will assuredly come when the divine attitude towards men will undergo a total change, and He who now sits enthroned in patience at God's right hand will arise to the execution of His solemn work as Judge of quick and dead.

(4) Our text closes with a BEATITUDE. "Blessed are all they that put their trust (or, take refuge) in Him." Christ is the only refuge for sinners. He alone is our hope. It was He who suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust; and in Him alone may we confide. There will be found no refuge FROM Him when He appears, but refuge may be found IN Him by all who desire to flee from the wrath to come. But if Scripture presents Him thus to us as refuge from divine wrath, is He not necessarily GOD? Who else could shield us from the judgement of God? What mere creature could screen us from His uplifted hand? He who once was slain is indeed our Lord and our God, worthy of our heart's adoring love for evermore.

FOUR THINGS EXCEEDING WISE.

It is natural to us to connect wisdom with greatness, but in Prov. 30: 24-28 we are divinely bidden to learn lessons from little things. The Lord Jesus also bade His disciples learn from lilies, sparrows, and even from the hairs of their head. The four little things of Prov. 30 are said to be "exceeding wise." Who amongst us would not desire to be exceeding wise, especially in matters spiritual and eternal?

Four suggestions concerning faith may be gathered from this portion of Holy Scripture. First, faith takes account of the future. This is illustrated in the ants. "The ANTS are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer." These little insects know that summer is not eternal. In like manner men's opportunities are fleeting. In the brief span of life here we determine our everlasting destiny. There are two cases held up for our warning in the Scriptures of men who lived only for the present. Esau for a mess of pottage sold his birthright, and is called a profane person for so doing; the rich farmer of Luke 12 who surveyed his possessions with such complacency, thinking nothing of the life beyond, is called a fool. Let us note it well; "profane" and "fool" are God's titles for men who live only for the present. Alas, how full the world is of such. Would that they might become "exceeding wise"!

Second, faith seeks a place of refuge. The CONIES illustrate this. They are "but a feeble folk, yet they make their houses in the rocks." The Syrian hyrax is here intended, a timid, cautious creature ever on the alert for danger. Noah by faith recognised that wrath was approaching, and availed himself of the shelter of the ark; the Israelites believingly sprinkled the blood of the lamb upon their houses on that night of judgement in Egypt; Ahab, on the contrary, defiantly slighted divine warning, and perished miserably at Ramoth-Gilead. The wise man has said: "A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished" (Prov. 22: 3) Men are living in peril at the present hour. The day of judgement hastens on. Divinely "prudent" are they who have fled to Christ for refuge; distressingly "simple" (however wise in their own conceit) are they who slight Him and His great salvation.

Third, faith values fellowship. "The LOCUSTS have no King, yet go they forth all of them by bands." A child may crush an individual locust; but an army of them is irresistible. Desolation attends their progress. There is no individualism in Christianity. By the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven a divine unity has been created between believers here and Christ in glory. Every saved soul belongs to that great spiritual organisation called in Scripture "the Church of the living God." Abraham, and all other pious ones in the world's earlier ages, were just believing units; one of the reasons for which Christ died was that He might "gather together into one the children of God that were scattered abroad" (John 11: 52). One of our choicest privileges here is Christian fellowship. When Peter and John were released from prison "they went to their own company." In the assembly of the saints they found their consolation and strength.

Fourth, faith leads to glory. The spider (or more correctly the lizard) suggests this. "Thou takest hold of the LIZARD with thy hands, yet is she in King's palaces." In tropical countries these little creatures are ubiquitous. They may be seen crawling up the walls of both hut and mansion. Every blood-washed soul is marked for heavenly glory. God has called us by the Gospel to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. The feeblest and most insignificant believer will not miss this magnificent consummation. Neither the violence nor the craft of the enemy can hinder it.

Oh, to be "little" yet divinely "wise"! The foolish, the weak, the base, and the despised has God chosen. "Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called" (1 Cor. 1: 26-29).

THE GREAT ELECTION.

Man's entire history upon earth has been, in a manner, an election time. From the beginning until now two persons have been seeking the confidence and allegiance of the children of men. Those persons are God and Satan. God is entitled by every right to the confidence and allegiance of our hearts. To our confidence, because of the absolute truthfulness of His character (for it is "impossible for God to lie " — (Heb. 6: 18), and also because He is the source and spring of all our blessings. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1: 17). He is entitled, moreover, to our allegiance, for He is at once our Maker and our Judge. Satan has no rightful claim to service from us, being but a creature like ourselves; a creature, too, in revolt against the God who made him.

Looking back over the past six thousand years of human history, three special occasions may be clearly marked when men were called upon, in the most pointed manner, to choose between God and Satan. On each occasion they made "the wretched choice." Turn first to Gen. 3. There we have Adam and his wife in the garden, surrounded by everything that was calculated to fill their hearts with joy and gladness. They had every inducement to remain loyal to their God. One simple condition was laid upon them as a test of their obedience — of the fruit of the tree which was in the midst of the garden they were not to eat. The consequence of rebellion was clearly stated: "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Presently the tempter came along, and, after a short parley with the woman, he boldly said: "Ye shall not surely die." This language made the position perfectly plain. It was a question of "whom will you believe" — God or Satan? Alas, for the decision! Our first parents decided to credit the tempter rather than the Creator, with all the dire results of which the world is full unto this hour. Ever since that day in Eden infidelity has been inherent in the human heart; man would prefer to believe anyone rather than his God.

Turn next to Matt. 2. The story of that chapter is familiar to us all. A Babe had been born in Jerusalem, concerning whom wise men from the East came up to make inquiry. At the mention of one born King of the Jews Herod was troubled, which was no wonder, seeing that he was accustomed to bear that title himself. No rival could be welcome. But mark the further statement "he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him." "All Jerusalem" is comprehensive enough, surely. The expression would include learned and unlearned, old and young, clergy and laity. All Jerusalem was troubled! Herod acted promptly. "He gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, and demanded of them where the Christ should be born." With the utmost readiness these men of the Bible turned up Micah 5: 2, and read out to the King the well-known words: And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Judah: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule My people Israel." Yet not one step did these men take in the direction of Bethlehem to see if the promised King was there. There is nothing more heartless than mere Bible knowledge without faith. Strange as it may seem, it is possible to go down to an eternal hell with the mind crammed with Bible truth. The indifference of Jerusalem's priests and people is the more awful when we remember that Micah added concerning the promised One, "whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting." It was thus God Himself who was coming into the world, and men did not want Him! The question in Eden was, "Whom will you BELIEVE?" At the Incarnation the question evidently was, "Whom will you SERVE?" To this the human heart gave answer, "Herod, Caesar — anyone rather than God and His Christ."

Turn now to John 18. Once more a choice is submitted to men, and all are called upon to record their vote. Pilate has the Son of God upon his hands, and would fain be quit of the heavy responsibility. Falling back upon the custom of releasing a prisoner at the Passover, he brought forth Barabbas, murderer and robber, and bade the multitude choose between him and Jesus. Urged on by their religious chiefs, the people fiercely clamoured "Not this Man, but Barabbas." The question on this occasion clearly was: "Whom will you RECEIVE?" Alas! anyone but Jesus was welcome. It is not that the multitude had the smallest regard for Barabbas; the point was that they did not want Jesus. Remarkably, on each of the voting days of which we have spoken, men chose a murderer. Satan, Herod, and Barabbas were all murderers (John 8: 44; Matt. 2: 16; Acts 3: 14).

The Christ question is with us still, and every man must give his answer thereto. No neutrality is permitted, and indeed no neutrality is possible. Whatever men may say with their lips, or whatever they may refrain from saying, every one has his opinion of Christ, and in his own heart at least every man has recorded his vote, for or against Him. The Saviour Himself has said: "He that is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12: 30). Neglecters of Him are in as desperate a position as outspoken rejecters, and will share together for eternity (Rev. 21: 8).

God will yet compel obedience to His Son. He has decreed that to Him every knee shall bow. In the day of His power not a tongue will be permitted to move against Him. Even hell itself will be constrained to yield respectful homage to Him. But in this there is no salvation. Blessed is the man who to-day confesses Him as Saviour and Lord, preferring to believe, serve, and receive Him to every other.

"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST?"

The Christ had long been promised. Ever since the fall God had been speaking of Him to the children of men. Psalmists sang of Him, and prophets foretold His appearing and mission. He had now come, and the great test question for everyone was, "What think ye of Christ?" (Matt. 22: 42). His presence in the world caused "the thoughts of many hearts to be revealed" (Luke 2: 35). Men of necessity fell into their respective ranks, either for or against Him.

Our Lord's question was uttered in the temple, at the close of a day of questioning. The Herodians with their political query, the Sadducees with their doctrinal quibble, and the Pharisees with their legal inquiry had all been successively silenced by the Saviour. It was the last of their questioning. No man "durst from that day forth ask Him any more questions." His time had now come. While all His objectors were gathered together, He turned upon them saying, "What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?"

This is the great question of the age, and every man's eternal future depends upon the answer that his heart gives thereto. The question is not as to religion, whether Christianity is to be preferred to any other belief; nor is it as to preachers, their excellence or otherwise. Concerning these things it is possible to hold correct opinions and yet perish for ever. The great root question is as to a Person — God's beloved Son. Upon the attitude of our hearts toward Him everything turns, whether for blessing or for Woe.

In the Scriptures we have many hearts telling themselves out concerning Him, and it may be to our advantage to look briefly at some of them. Take first Simeon of Jerusalem (Luke 2). That aged saint had it revealed to him by the Holy Ghost that he should not taste death before he had seen Jehovah's Christ. At a given moment he entered into the temple, where a humble village couple were presenting their offerings in connection with the birth of the Babe under their care. Instantly Simeon took up the Child into his arms, and blessed God, saying, "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace . . . for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation." To him that wondrous Babe was the salvation of God, and the very sight of Him banished from his spirit all dread of death. Take next the wise men of Matt. 2. After their long journey from the East they at last found themselves in the presence of the new-born Christ. What was He in their eyes? Manifestly He was to them the mighty God, the everlasting Father of Isaiah 9: 6, and the Governor of Micah 5: 2, "whose goings forth have been from of old," for they fell down and worshipped Him, pouring their treasures at His feet. Simeon blessed the parents, but not the Babe; the wise men worshipped the Babe, but not the parents. Both in what they did, and in what they refrained from doing, these pious men of old were guided by the blessed Spirit of God, who knew perfectly what was just and meet for the wondrous Child.

Hearken to Peter in Matt. 16: 16. Others were speculating as to who the Saviour might be, whether Elijah, Jeremiah, or some other (not really caring in the smallest degree); Peter, having learned of the Father, exclaimed with rapture, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Listen also to the once-blind man of John 9, when the Saviour found him in the temple, and said "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" When he learned that it was He who was addressing him, he cried, ''Lord, I believe." And he worshipped Him.

What did Mary of Bethany think of Him as she poured her pound of ointment upon His feet? (John 12). To her He was the Son of God, the Quickener of the dead. Others, as in John 13, might need their feet to be washed; His were worthy to be anointed, let the spikenard be never so costly. Her adoring appreciation of Him was most grateful to His heart in an hour of sorrow.

Even at Calvary itself one heart told out its faith in Him. One of the dying thieves, at first as blasphemous as his fellow, afterwards confessed Him as the spotless Lord (Luke 23: 42). In his eyes, as taught of God, the Sufferer by his side was the stainless One who had done nothing amiss, and for whom the Kingdom must yet be in a day to come. In the face of all the world, as it were, he thus acknowledged Him, and then followed Him, through infinite grace, into the Paradise of God.

We go further. On the Resurrection morning we behold a weeping woman at the tomb of Jesus (John 20). She was dull in her spiritual apprehension, and she utterly failed to understand the import of what had happened, but she unfeignedly loved her Lord. In her outburst of grief, she said: "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." So much was He to her heart that the world was a desolate waste without Him. One week passes, and we find unbelieving Thomas in the presence of his Master. He had spoken very sceptically concerning His resurrection; but the sight of Him standing in the midst of His own, with the marks of Calvary in His sacred person, drew forth from Thomas the fervent cry, "My Lord and my God." To this let us add the confession of the man (Paul, I mean) who heard Him speak from heavenly glory. In Gal. 2: 20 he calls Him "The Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me."

"What think ye of Christ?" To Herod the king He was just an intruder, to be swept out of the way, if possible; by murder or otherwise. To the religious leaders around him, who were able to tell the king where the Christ should be born, He did not possess sufficient attraction to draw them to Bethlehem to seek Him (Matt. 2: 4). In the eyes of Herod Antipas, at a later date, He was a mere wonder-worker who might perchance entertain him by the performance of a miracle (Luke 23: 8). But "What think ye of Christ" is the question for us all, and every individual amongst us will have to face it sooner or later. To the men of His time the Saviour said: "If ye believe not that I am, ye shall die in your sins" (John 8: 24). And; to Nicodemus He solemnly declared: "He that believeth on Him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the Only-begotten Son of God" (John 3: 18). All manner of sin may be forgiven; the vilest offender may be purged from his sins in His precious blood. That which ruins men's souls beyond all recovery is their rejection of the Christ of God.

NEW GARMENTS, ETC.

A fast was in progress in Judea, and both the Pharisees and the disciples of the Baptist were observing zealously. Noticing that those who followed the Saviour bid no heed to it, some challenged Him concerning the matter. After He had shown them in His reply how incongruous it would be for the children of the bride chamber to fast while the Bridegroom was with them, He added a parable, wherein He set forth the new order of things which His coming into the world had introduced for all who believe in His Name. The Son of God had not come forth from His glory in order to patch up those things which man has spoiled by sin.

Accordingly in Luke 5: 36-39 He speaks of three "new" things — new garments, new wine, and new bottles. Concerning garments, men are found in three different conditions Godward. First, there are those who have not a rag upon their back, and who don't pretend to have. These are the careless folk, who make no religious profession whatever, and who never trouble themselves as to how they appear in the eyes of God. You may see this kind in multitudes parading the streets, or disporting themselves upon the golf ground, when the Word of God is being preached. Second, there are those who are possessed of a garment of a sort, but it consists only of filthy rags, could they but see it. These are the people who are going about to establish their own righteousness, never having submitted themselves to the righteousness of God (Rom. 10: 3). Third, there are those who stand before God in a righteousness which is divine, unimpeachable before His throne. These are the souls who believe in Jesus the Lord, upon whom divine grace has put "the best robe" of Luke 15.

"No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old." The old garment of human effort is described in Rom. 10: 5 as "the righteousness which is of the law"; the new garment — gift of grace — is called in the verse following "the righteousness which is of faith" Paul, who had proved experimentally the value of both, in Phil. 3: 9 calls the old garment "mine own righteousness, which is of the law"; and the new, "that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." Ever since our first parents sewed fig-leaves together in Eden men have been busily occupied with their own efforts to hide their nakedness from the eyes of God and of every other. Many would reduce Christ to the level of a mere helper, making up by His perfections for their shortcomings and imperfections. Never will God suffer His Son to be put in any such place. He has not given Him from above to be just a patch for the dilapidated garment of man's righteousness; to everyone to whom the Gospel comes, Christ must be all or nothing. The cross has so perfectly met all the divine claims that God, in absolute consistency with His own righteousness, is able to justify for ever the sinner who believes. Christ risen from amongst the dead, and accepted on high, is the measure and security of our blessing in righteousness before the face of God. With Christ, the best robe, upon me, covered thus with His matchless perfections, my right is unchallengeable to be for ever in the divine presence above.

The Lord Jesus spoke not only of a new garment, but also of "new wine." Wine is the familiar emblem in Scripture of joy. In Ps. 104: 15 we read: "Wine that maketh glad the heart of man." Christ has introduced new joys for His people. Everything "under the sun" has been marred by sin. All around us the hiss of the serpent resounds in our ears. Foolish indeed are they who seek to content themselves with things here. Now, Christ has gone up on high, and has entered into that scene where there is fullness of joy, and where there are pleasures for ever more (Ps. 16:10). To that scene of fadeless delight He would lead the hearts of His own to day. Let us not defer the joys of heaven until the present world is no more; let us rather rise upon the wings of faith and live now in the spirit of our minds where we shall find our home throughout eternity. In order that this may be, the exalted Lord has poured out upon us the Holy Spirit from above. He is the living link between our souls here and Christ in His present glory. It is His office to minister His things to us, and to maintain our hearts in perpetual peace and joy. Notice the effect on the day of the Spirit's coming. So full of ecstasy and power were the disciples that some, mocking, said: these men are full of new wine" (Acts 2: 13). They were indeed full of new wine, but it was not the vintage of earth. It was the new wine of heaven.

The Christian who is in real enjoyment of his heavenly portion is a standing riddle to the man of the world. He absolutely refuses the world's sports and lies, and yet is happy. He even finds pleasure in a prayer meeting. How can this be? The observer wonders, but understands not. "New wine must be put into new bottles." This explains everything. Until a man becomes born again, and thus gets a new life from God, he is altogether incapable of understanding and appreciating divine joys. It is a world to which his heart is an absolute stranger. The "new man is according to God created in righteousness and true holiness" (Eph. 4: 24) . Here we have the new bottle, which alone can contain the new wine of Christianity.

Alas, for the infatuation of the multitude! "No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, 'the old is better.'" That is to say, Christ is presented to the soul, with all the wealth of blessing and joy which is the fruit of His atoning work, and men turn away from Him into the world behind saying, "The old is better." For what the world has to offer to-day men are not unwilling to blast their souls for eternity.

THE STRONG MAN ARMED.

"When the strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace; but when the stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils" (Luke 11: 21-22). This parable was uttered under peculiarly solemn circumstances. The Lord had just cast a demon out of a man; His observers, instead of praising God for the deed of mercy, went so far in their wickedness as to attribute His power to Beelzebub. It was not the ignorant folk who did this, but the religious leaders of the people. The parable was given in order to show the true state of affairs between the Lord Jesus and the great enemy. The strong man is Satan. In all ages he has proved himself too strong for his victims. Take the drunkard. However deeply he may long at times to be free from the awful influence which controls him, he finds within himself no power to shake it off. The opium smoker of the East would tell the same dismal story. Take again the modern Spiritualist. From that diabolical snare some would doubtless extricate themselves, but it is impossible. Satan is far too strong for man.

His palace is this world — "His own palace," as the Revised Version puts it. The world was made for Christ, and it will yet be His; but for the time being, Satan is in possession. The Lord Himself twice spoke of him as the "prince of this world." Many blunder as to this. Even some true Christians imagine that because Christianity has come in, Satan's hold upon the world is not what it was in pagan times. Instead of this being true, the Spirit calls him "the GOD of this age" (2 Cor. 4: 4), i.e., of the present Gospel era. God having come to earth in human flesh and been rejected, Satan has usurped His place in the minds of men.

The strong man's palace is thus the world: "his goods" are the men and women therein. Awful thought! Independence of God was the bait offered in Eden. Unlawfully grasping at this, man became the slave of Satan. Yet how little is this realised!

"His goods are in peace." We all love peace, but a false peace is terrible to contemplate. The cemetery is a peaceful place, but it is the peace of death. Religion is largely responsible for the false peace with which many are afflicted. Religious observances and sacramental privileges apart from faith in Christ, are a terrible snare. All who are resting in these things need to be aroused. Some would rebuke those of us who would sound an alarm. We should consider it our bounden duty to arouse, however roughly, a man sleeping in a burning house; how much more serious is the peril of those who are going religiously down to destruction!

Christ is our only hope. He is the stronger than the strong, and has overcome the enemy. In Ex. 3. we have God coming down to bring temporal deliverance to His people; in Christ He came down to bring eternal salvation. In Isa. 49: 24 we have the inquiry: "Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered?" And the answer is given: "Thus saith Jehovah, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered." But how has the deliverance been wrought? How has the victory been obtained? By death. Through death the Saviour annulled him who had the power of death (Heb. 2: 14). Isaiah 53: 12 puts it thus: "Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong; because He hath poured out His soul unto death." By submitting to death for one brief moment He has broken the power of Satan for ever. Like David with Goliath, He has cut off the enemy's head with his own weapon.

Resurrection manifested His victory. The cross was in appearance His defeat. But on the third day He arose triumphantly, death being powerless to retain Him in its grasp. "Having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it" (Col. 2: 15). He who once descended into the lower parts of the earth has ascended up far above all heavens, that He may fill all things (Eph. 4: 9, 10).

None need remain in captivity to the strong man. The Deliverer has come and the victory has been gained. When Israel in Egypt felt the bitterness of being treated by Pharaoh as "his goods," they cried by reason of their bondage, and so deliverance came. In like manner today, "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Rom. 10: 13).

THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN.

We have here one of the many moral contrasts which are so strikingly characteristic of the Gospel by Luke. Two men are shown to us as standing in the presence of God, with the ground each took before Him. In their respective ways, these men illustrate the two contrasted righteousnesses of which the apostle speaks in Rom. 10: 5-6 — "the righteousness which is of the law," and "the righteousness which is of faith." They are the Cain and Abel of the New Testament.

The Pharisee comes before us first. He went up into the temple professedly to pray, yet not a word of true prayer passed his lips. Instead, he paraded his fancied goodness before his Maker, and merely thanked Him that such excellencies were found in him. "God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican." Thus far he speaks negatively, proclaiming what he was not; next he speaks positively. "I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess." Surely he was twin-brother to the man who said: "Lo, these many years do I serve Thee, neither transgressed I at any time Thy commandment" (Luke 15: 29). But what a spectacle is here! A man in the presence of the Discerner of all hearts, yet conscious of no sins to confess; addressing the Giver of all good, yet sensible of no need to spread out before Him. Neither the holiness nor the goodness of God seem to have crossed his proud mind. Little wonder that he got nothing; for with God the rich are sent empty away (Luke 1: 53).

Let us seek to understand this man's case, for the lessons of it are meant for us all. He does not appear to have been insincere. Surely if a man is real anywhere he is so in the presence of his God! The Pharisee may indeed have been all that he claimed to be. But a terrible possibility is suggested by this story — a man's religion may be his ruin! Alas, how often is this the case! Religion and morality are frequently used by men to hide from themselves their true condition as fallen children of the first Adam, and personally guilty withal. "There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not" (Ecc. 7: 14). The Pharisee, though standing in God's house, and using His name, had no sense of WHO it was with whom he was having to do; else "Woe is me" would have burst from his terrified lips, as from the lips of Isaiah of old. Self-righteousness bursts like a bubble when once the reality of God's presence lays hold of the soul. Saul of Tarsus experienced the truth of this most solemnly.

The publican (or tax-gatherer) took wholly different ground before God. Whether the Pharisee realised it or not, the publican felt deeply in WHOSE presence he stood. Accordingly he smote upon his breast, saying, "God be merciful to me the sinner." His act was the confession that the heart is the spring of all iniquity, and his words were an acknowledgment that his only hope lay in God. "THE sinner" is what he said, for his whole attention was concentrated upon his own personal condition, without regard to the Pharisee or any other. To this point every man must come, ere God can meet him in blessing. "Be merciful" means "be propitious." The lamb then being burnt upon the altar in the temple court shows how God can be propitious to the guilty. The altar and the sacrifice speak of Christ and His cross. "The redemption that is in Christ Jesus" warrants God in granting pardon and justification to every contrite believing soul. We have it from the Lord Himself that the publican went down to his house justified rather than the other. That is to say, the one was justified, and the other was not. It is a clear case of righteousness being imputed apart from works (Rom. 4: 5-6). In the day of reckoning many a wastrel of earth will be found amongst the saved, while many a religious devotee will be numbered amongst the lost. For the one class feel their need of the Saviour, and bow to Him in faith; while the other class, in the pride of their hearts, pursue their own course of self-justification, in despisal of the Saviour's grace.

THREE MEN OF JERICHO.

The city of Jericho has an unique place in Holy Scripture. And no wonder, for it is a remarkable type of the present world. Men said of it in the days of Elisha: "The situation of this city is pleasant, but the water is bad, and the ground barren" (2 Kings 2: 19). In like manner, there is pleasantness all around us in the world in which we live; but there is nothing to satisfy the heart, and there is no fruit for God.

In connection with Jericho, three names are made specially prominent in Scripture — Zaccheus, Bartimeus, and Hiel. These are representative characters. Every man in the world may be classified under one or other of them. These men may be described thus: — Zaccheus the Pharisee, Bartimeus the beggar, and Hiel the infidel. It may be objected concerning the first that he was not a Pharisee but a tax-gatherer (Luke 19: 1-10). But a man may easily be a Pharisee in spirit without belonging to that ancient sect. Have we not those amongst us to-day who plume themselves upon their own goodness, and who expect God to accept them accordingly?

It was a fine feature in Zaccheus that he had some interest in the Son of God, for many in that day, as in this also, passed Him by with cold contempt. Hearing that the Saviour was approaching Jericho, Zaccheus determined that he would at least get a look at Him. Hence, at whatever cost to his dignity, as one well-known and wealthy, he climbed a sycamore tree by the roadside. His amazement must be imagined when the Lord paused at that very tree, and addressed him by name. He was soon to learn that the Prophet of Galilee was the Searcher of all hearts — God revealed below. As the Lord entered the man's house, critics murmured "that He was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner." But though outsiders might say this of him, this was by no means Zaccheus' opinion of himself. "He stood and said unto the Lord: 'Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.'" It was intolerable to his soul that one so benevolent and honourable as himself should be dubbed a sinner! One cannot help contrasting him with the centurion of Luke 7. Others said he was worthy; HE said, when he got into the Lord's presence, "I am not worthy." Here we have what the Parable of the Sower describes as "an honest and good heart."

It is humiliating indeed, but it is nevertheless true, that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Some men owe five hundred pence, and others fifty, but none amongst us have aught wherewith to pay. Godward, we are all bankrupt together. To this point the Saviour sought to reduce Zaccheus. He brushed aside all his self-parade, and at once spoke of salvation. He had not left heaven's glory, and come to earth simply to hear men tell Him how good they were; He had undertaken that mighty journey, which was soon to end at Calvary's tree, in order to bring salvation to the lost. "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." Thrice happy is the man who is prepared to relinquish all thought of merit, and then take his place as a perishing one at His feet.

Bartimeus was in every way a contrast to Zaccheus. The one was wealthy; the other was a beggar. The one felt he had much to plead; the other was conscious of nothing but the direst need, which he was determined should be met that very day (Luke 18: 35-43). A blind beggar! Yet so pitiable an object is a faithful representation of every man's condition by nature, could men but perceive it! "Nothing to pay": such is the Lord's account of us all, and what is this but beggary? "The god of this age hath blinded the minds of them which believe not," is the Apostle's sad description (2 Cor. 4: 4). The fact that men everywhere are found pursuing that which can only be to their hurt, while seeing absolutely nothing desirable in that which would be to their eternal advantage, should be sufficient proof that moral blindness prevails universally. Bartimeus was needy, and he knew it. Unlike Zaccheus, he had no self-righteousness to get rid of; his one business was to submit his need to the Son of God at the first opportunity. Never before had the Saviour visited Jericho; and He never passed that way again. A week later He lay dead in the tomb. Hear the beggar making strenuous use of his one chance, "Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me." In vain did men bid him be still; the Saviour was near, and he would reach Him if possible. Oh, that men everywhere would individualise themselves as this poor fellow did! "Have mercy on ME." It is not sufficient to approach the divine presence with the multitude who vaguely call themselves "miserable sinners"; each must face his own personal condition before God ere salvation is possible. To-day, as of old, we may hear the Saviour saying to every seeking soul: "What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?" Life, light, pardon, and salvation are blessings within the reach of all who seek them in His name.

Hiel was a Bethelite, but his name stands for ever associated with Jericho as its re-builder in the days of Ahab (1 Kings 16: 34). When that vile city was destroyed in the days of Joshua, a divine curse was pronounced against any man who would restore it. "He shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it" (Joshua 6: 26). During some five centuries this terrible imprecation had been respected, and Jericho had continued a ruinous heap. Now arises one to whom the fear of God was naught. Jericho shall be rebuilt; why should so pleasant a situation be without human inhabitant? But what of the word of Jehovah? What of the judgement pronounced? At all this the infidel sneered; he believed none of it. But the divine sentence was fulfilled nevertheless. Both his firstborn and his youngest sons were sacrificed upon the altar of his impiety. "He laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the Word of the Lord, which He spake by Joshua the son of Nun." The man whose sons were thus smitten to death is the standing representative of all who set at nought the revealed judgement of God. Never was this more commonly done than in our own day. From both pulpit and pew comes the loud disavowal of all belief in eternal punishment. But men's infidel folly will no more set God's future judgement aside than Hiel's bravado set aside His judgement in the past. "According to the Word of the Lord" it will assuredly be.

Under one or other of these representative characters each one of us must classify himself. Happy is the man who takes the place of Bartimeus, acknowledging his need, and seeking blessing alone at the hands of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

MOSES OR CHRIST?

The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" (John 1: 17). Two principles are stated in this passage, as diverse as possible the one from the other; and two men are named who respectively represent them. The principles are law as contrasted with grace and truth; the men who represent them are Moses and Jesus Christ. Long ago it was affirmed that "Moses hath in every city them that preach him" (Acts 15: 21); which means that in every city there are those who insist on the performance of works as the means of blessing. It is also true, blessed be God, that throughout the world Christ is preached as men's only Saviour apart altogether from works of every kind. Every man in Christendom is thus ranged under either Moses or Christ. Said the Pharisees to the man to whom Jesus had given sight: "Thou art His disciple, but we are Moses' disciples" (John 9: 28). This was at least a clear enunciation of the ground upon which the speakers stood.

Let us be sure that we understand the significance of the terms employed in our text. The different terms may be defined thus. "Law" is the declaration of what man ought to be; "grace" is the activity of divine love; and "truth" is the revelation of all things as they really are — God, man, etc.

Nothing is so generally misunderstood as the law. We mean of course the law of God as given from Mount Sinai. Many to this hour regard it as the appointed means of blessing for men, and so they pursue it zealously. But what saith the Scripture? The PURPOSE of the law is to convict. "By the law is the knowledge of sin" (Rom. 3: 20). As a faithful monitor it brings guilt home to the person who submits himself thereto. Its EFFECT is to provoke. "The motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death" (Rom. 7: 5). Flesh being abominably evil, the law by its prohibitions only stirs up its devilry. The very thing the law forbids is the very thing flesh longs to do. "I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known covetousness, except the law had said, 'Thou shalt not covet' (Rom. 7: 7). This being its effect on man, the law is called in 1 Cor. 15: 56 "the strength of sin " — a tremendous passage for those who seek either salvation or holiness by means of works. The POWER of the law is to slay. Says Paul in Rom 7: 10, "I found it to be unto death," and in 2 Cor. 3 he calls it "the ministration of condemnation" and "of death." Since man cannot render its righteous demand, the law can but pass its stern sentence upon him.

The law has thus nothing for me as a sinner. It holds blessing before the eyes of those who can respond to it, but upon all others its inexorable sentence falls. Moses avails me nothing, unless to show me my deep need of Christ.

"Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" — two things, and yet one, for neither could subsist without the other. The Saviour was the very embodiment of grace. His every word and deed expressed it. "Never man spake like this Man," declared the officers who were sent to seize Him (John 7: 46). The men of Nazareth "wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth" (Luke 4: 22). Before His coming, the Spirit of prophecy testified: "Grace is poured into Thy lips; therefore God hath blessed Thee for ever" (Ps. 45: 2). He was "full of grace and truth," and the moral glory of it was before the disciples from day to day during the wonderful years of their companionship with Him upon the earth. He came neither demanding nor threatening. Not with the majesty of a King, nor with the terror of a judge, did He walk amongst men, but with all the grace of a Saviour. He who spake at Sychar (John 4) was the same Person who spake amidst flame and smoke at Sinai; yet at Sychar He only sought to attract a sinner's heart. Again in Luke 7 we have a guilty one at His feet; receiving, not the stern condemnation of the law-giver, but the Saviour's pardoning grace.

The circumstances under which law and grace were introduced amongst men were in keeping with the character of their respective missions. In the midst of the most terrifying circumstances the law was promulgated. Even Moses said, "I exceedingly fear and quake." Is this suggestive of blessing — of man being brought home to God to enjoy Him for ever? Far from it. But mark how grace came. The manger of Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary have nothing in them to terrify the heart; on the contrary, these wondrous facts appeal to the tenderest affections, and assure us of God's good-will even to the vilest of His creatures.

Truth, as we have said, is the revelation of things as they really are. The law, though true, was not "the truth." It did not tell God out to us; its stern bearing hid, rather than revealed, Him. Nor did it show what man is, but rather what man ought to be. But Christ's coming has brought all out into the light. God is fully declared. He no longer dwells "in thick darkness." His love, mercy, holiness, and righteousness, have all been perfectly expressed in Christ and His cross. Man, too, stands fully declared. I need not go the round of the prisons to learn what man is capable of; the cross tells the story more completely and truly. Infinite love received for its return spittle upon the face, the crown of thorns, and the cross of shame. Nothing more remains to be told as to what man is. Satan also stands fully declared. Liar and deceiver from the beginning, Christ's presence here brought out the murderer in him. Seeing his Creator upon earth in human form, he treasonably united all sorts and conditions of men in order to compass His rejection and death.

"The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." The law cannot help us; no blessing can it bestow upon the guilty and lost. We need grace; shall we not seek it? The truth has come; shall we, as Pilate, turn contemptuously from it? It is the divine desire that all men should be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2: 4).

LORD, TO WHOM SHALL WE GO?

"Peter was the speaker, and the words were spoken at the close of our Lord's discourse in the synagogue in Capernaum (John 6). It was a time of deep disappointment to many in Israel. The Messiah had indeed come, but in a form altogether unexpected. They had looked for a King, and lo, a carpenter's Son! Moreover, he hinted from time to time of His impending death. In the synagogue discourse He had spoken of giving His flesh for the life of the world. What this might mean the many utterly failed to understand, but the words made it sufficiently plain that their cherished visions of earthly glory were not to be realised. And so they were stumbled. "They stumbled at that stumbling-stone," said the Apostle later (Rom. 9: 32). Those who followed the Lord Jesus in a merely carnal way forthwith threw it up. If death really lay before Him, there was nothing in Him to interest them. "There are some of you that believe not," said He. "From that time forth many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him."

Defections test us all. The unreal have frequently insinuated themselves amongst the people of God, only to turn away in due season. Such sifting times make manifest where all hearts really are. At this juncture Jesus said to the twelve, "Will ye also go away?" Peter, ever the ready spokesman of the band, instantly responded, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and know that Thou art the Holy One of God" (John 6: 67-69, R.V.). It is not that Peter understood the Lord's position much better than the seceders. There was much in His teaching which perplexed him, and which disappointed his own expectations, but he at least recognised the good Shepherd's voice, and so clave to Him through all. He felt that there was no other in the universe of God to whom his heart could rightly turn.

The question has its significance for our souls to-day. "To whom shall we go?" To Moses? Certainly "Moses hath in every city them that preach him" (Acts 15: 21). That is, there are in every quarter those who would put men under the law as the means of their justification before God. But for undone sinners this is of no avail. Corrupt human nature can never render the righteous requirements of the law; upon this principle can no flesh living be justified. For sinners Moses has nothing but curse and condemnation.

"To whom shall we go?" To Mary? Scripture does not so instruct us. We may well imitate her faith, and as lost ones take shelter in God our Saviour (Luke 1: 47). This lesson we may learn with advantage from the mother of our Lord. Nowhere does Scripture speak of mediation and intercession on her part for sinful men. Remarkably, in the sacred records we have Mary but twice seeking favours from the Lord, and in each case He rebuffed her as stepping out of her appointed place. See John 2: 4; Matt. 12: 46-50. Our last view of her is in Acts 1:14 as one of the praying band in Jerusalem who waited for the Holy Spirit after the Lord Jesus went on high. Not praying FOR, but WITH, her fellow-believers in the Saviour.

"To whom shall we go?" Everyone who has ever known Him has been filled and satisfied. David, when he saw His day in anticipative faith, burst forth in the language of holy rapture: "Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into Thy lips: therefore God hath blessed Thee for ever" (Ps. 45: 2), Solomon, so despondent when surveying things "under the sun" in the book of Ecclesiastes, expressed himself ecstatically in The Canticles when the promised Christ rose up before his eyes. Paul, whose Christian career began with the sight of the Lord in glory, counted all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus (Phil. 3: 8). For us to-day, as for these men of old, it must be Christ or nothing. Apart from Him all is a dreary waste.

Peter, in his reply to the Saviour's challenge, speaks of what He has (5:68), and of what He is (5: 69) The one meets our need as sinners, and the other for ever satisfies our hearts as saints. "Thou hast the words of eternal life." This is what the Lord had been setting forth in the synagogue in Capernaum. It will suffice to quote verses 53-54: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day." Let us beware of carnalising our Lord's words by importing a Sacrament into them. The Lord's Supper, so dear to every believing heart, was not instituted when these words were uttered. What then did the Saviour mean? Just this: that such was man's guilty and alienated condition in the sight of God that nothing could avail for his blessing but His death. Himself as the slain One must be appropriated in individual faith. In this way His flesh is eaten and His blood drunk, and the believing soul receives eternal life. The writer of the familiar words, "the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2: 20), was eating His flesh and drinking His blood as he adoringly penned the words.

"To whom shall we go?" What is the Christ of God to our hearts? To some of those who followed Him in the days of His flesh He said: "There are some of you that believe not." They wanted Christ and the world. Their hearts were not ready to renounce all for Him. What would He say if he were to come into our midst at this hour? And what would we say to Him? Oh, that with divinely-taught Peter, we could each one exclaim: "Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life."

"THIS SAME JESUS."

In the present world everything and everyone is liable to change. Everything that we touch has a tendency to decay; nothing really abides the same. TIMES change, and we shake our heads regretfully. PLACES change. We revisit the scene of our birth after an absence of many years, and lo, the whole district has undergone a complete transformation. The old familiar landmarks have disappeared, to be seen no more. FRIENDS change. Those who delighted in our company once pass us in the street now with averted head, and we feel the smart of it within. We OURSELVES change. The child becomes a youth, the youth develops into a man, and then the gray hairs appear. "Change and decay in all around I see."

Our text speaks of One who is ever the same. As touching His deity, He remains when heaven and earth have passed away (Ps. 102: 25-27); and as touching His humanity, He is the same Jesus to-day as when He trod this earth below. He is "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever" (Heb. 13: 8). This comes home to us the more sweetly when we consider the circumstances under which the words of our text were spoken. The Son of God had just disappeared from the view of His disciples into the glory on high. Their eyes followed Him anxiously until the words of the two men in white apparel reached their ears. The disciples had known the Saviour in circumstances of poverty and shame. Together they had endured reproach and scorn. Now He had left all these humiliations behind Him, and had ascended up to the highest seat in the universe of God. But the angels assured them that He was the same Jesus! What comfort is here! How often among men he who has outstripped his fellows in wealth and honours coldly drops the companions of his humbler days. So common is this that we appreciatively speak of the exception as "not having a bit of pride.

Since the Saviour abides the same, we may learn what He is to-day from what He was when present amongst us on earth. Mark His grace as He permitted the city sinner of Luke 7 to rain her tears of contrition and love upon His blessed feet. His religious host would have dismissed such a person with disgust, but not He! He was the "Friend of publicans and sinners." See Him again in conversation by the well of Sychar (John 4) with one whose whole life He knew to be evil, but whom nevertheless He did not repel. The divinely appointed Judge of quick and dead setting Himself to win the heart of a gross offender against His laws is a spectacle that should move the most indifferent heart. He is the same Jesus to-day. His attitude towards sinners is still that of grace, and "Whosoever will may come."

Mark, too, His tenderness when confronted with the condition of men as the fruit of sin. At the graveside of Lazarus He wept — tender tears of sympathy with those whose spirits were wounded and torn (John 11: 35). And when He looked down upon proud, scornful Jerusalem which was bent upon refusing His grace, He wept for the people's hardness and impenitence of heart (Luke 19: 41). He is the same Jesus still; the same in His tender sympathy with distressed saints, and in His yearning over perishing sinners. His invitation is still, "Come unto Me"; the solemn words of dismissal, "Depart from Me" have not yet come upon His lips (Matt. 11: 28; Matt. 7: 23).

But the angels predicted His return. "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven." A tremendous fact lies before us in these words. The world has not seen the last of the Son of God. A day is approaching when the heavens will be rent asunder, and He will be seen coming forth in majesty and power. Each one of us should challenge our hearts as to this. Would joy or horror possess us if confronted forthwith with the once-crucified Jesus? It is as certain as the sun in the heavens that every created being must yet look upon Him, and every knee must bow to Him, and every tongue own Him Lord. To him who has been cleansed from his sins by His atoning blood the prospect of beholding the Saviour face to face is "joy unspeakable." And when we thus gaze upon Him it will be the same Jesus of whom we have so often read in the Sacred Scriptures, and to whom our hearts have been drawn by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven.

"THE GOSPEL."

On this occasion I propose to give a rambling talk concerning the Gospel, showing its source and character, and endeavouring to elucidate the meaning of the various titles under which it is presented to us in Holy Scripture. Our English word "Gospel" is simply a contraction of the Anglo-Saxon "God's Spell," which means "God's Story." The Greek word represented by it means "good tidings," and it is sometimes so translated. Luke 2: 10 is an example. How wonderful is "God's Story," and how "good" are the "tidings" contained therein will become manifest as we proceed.

It would be a mistake to suppose that every time the word "Gospel" appears in our English Bible the present divine proclamation is intended. For example, in Gal. 3: 8 we read that "the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the Gospel unto Abraham." This does not mean that Abraham was told of the forgiveness of sins through a dead and risen Saviour; his good tidings were to the effect that through his Seed the predicted blessing should come. Again, when Heb. 4: 2 tells us that the Gospel was preached unto Israel, it is not meant that the present proclamation of grace sounded in their ears. The good tidings announced to them had reference to the rest in Canaan at the close of their desert journey.

It would also be a mistake to confound the Gospel with which we are familiar in Christianity with the messages of God to men in other ages. John the Baptist and our Lord and His apostles preached "the Gospel of the Kingdom," announcing the Kingdom of heaven as at hand (Matt. 3: 2, etc.). This has reference to the earthly blessing predicted by the Old Testament prophets, and which is now being held over as the result of the rejection of the Lord Jesus. When Christianity is finished, this testimony will be revived, and the glory of the Kingdom will be established (Matt. 24: 14). "The everlasting Gospel" is also a distinct divine message. It will be proclaimed in the midst of the Antichrist's reign, and its burden is "Fear God, and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgement is come" (Rev. 14: 7). Manifestly no such solemn pronouncement is being made at the present time.

Coming to the Gospel as we now know it, it is called first of all, "the Gospel of God" (Rom. 1: 1). Here we have the source and the spring of the heavenly message which has brought peace and gladness to myriad hearts. No creature mind could have formulated so wondrous a scheme; neither could fallen man have dared to suggest so audacious a plan as that the Eternal Son should be sacrificed in atonement for human sin and guilt. From the divine heart of mercy the thought flowed forth. There is no room for man in the scheme, save as the humble recipient of the blessing. What God purposed, He has Himself carried out, apart from creature aid of any kind whatsoever. In consequence, the glory of it redounds to Him alone, and that for ever. The Gospel is the full revelation of all that God is; therein is told out all His love, righteousness, holiness, truth and mercy.

In Rom. 1: 9 it is called "the Gospel of His Son," and elsewhere "the Gospel of Christ." This means that if God is the source of the heavenly message, His Son is the theme of it. The Gospel is the proclamation of divine facts — the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Here we have something substantial upon which both conscience and heart can safely rest. He whose utterances are not charged with these great facts should never speak of "preaching the Gospel." Mere ethical teaching is not the Gospel, still less is a political harangue, even though delivered from a pulpit. Let the discourse be ever so erudite, let it be the greatest possible "intellectual treat," if Christ is not its burning theme it is a travesty to call it "the Gospel." The deep need of the human heart is not to be met by the wit of men.

In 2 Cor. 4: 4 we read of "the Gospel of the glory of Christ" (R.V.). God's proclamation tells us not only of Christ crucified, but also of Christ glorified. He who bore our sins in His own body on the tree is now sitting as Man on the right hand of the throne above. This is the public proof that the sin question has been eternally settled for all who believe in the Saviour's name. If even one of my sins remained unatoned for, since the Son of God made Himself answerable for them all, He could not be accepted in His present glory. In connection with this, the apostle speaks in 1 Tim. 1: 11 (R.V.) of "the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God." This aspect of things was so characteristic of Paul's ministry that he calls it in 2 Tim 2: 8 "my gospel." He was converted by the revelation of Christ's glory; and he delighted to proclaim the mighty fact, with all its blessed consequences, that the glory of God now shines in the face of Jesus Christ.

The Gospel is also called "the Gospel of peace" (Rom. 10: 15). The first grand result of believing the testimony of God concerning His Son is "peace with God" (Rom. 5: 1). This means, not merely a happy frame of mind, but the blessed knowledge that every question between God and the soul has been settled by the death of Christ, and that every cloud has been thereby dispelled from the horizon for ever. Our joy may fluctuate continually, for this depends very much upon ourselves — our conduct, and the measure of our daily trust in God; but peace knows no fluctuation, for it depends, not upon anything within us, but upon divine facts outside of us, the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. There have been two proclamations of peace on the part of Christ; first, during His life here (Acts 10: 36); and second, after His resurrection (Eph. 2: 17). The first was the announcement of God's attitude towards men, even though rebellious; the second is the declaration of the assured result of Christ's atoning sacrifice for all who believe God.

The Gospel is also "the Gospel of our salvation" (Eph. 1: 13). It not only proclaims to us the forgiveness of past offences — it tells us also how God has lifted us entirely out of the position in which we once stood as children of Adam, and put us into a new position "in Christ" before Him. The deliverance of the Christian is as complete as the deliverance of Israel from the land of Egypt.

But by far the most comprehensive title of all is that found in Acts 20: 24 — "the Gospel of the Grace of God." In God's precious message to men concerning His Son, all His heart is declared. Grace beyond the utmost bounds of human imagination is therein proclaimed — grace which picks up the vilest of earth, and fits them for the eternal companionship of the First-born Son in glory. In the coming ages God will display "the exceeding riches of His grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 2: 7).

"ANATHEMA-MARANATHA."

"If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema-Maranatha." A truly extraordinary passage to find in such a common-place chapter as 1 Cor. 16. It was manifestly the outburst of a flaming soul. Upon the subject in question the writer felt strongly, and accordingly he expressed himself strongly. Christ was everything to him. He was his Saviour, Lord, Object, and Hope — the Centre indeed of his whole spiritual system.

It was not always thus with Paul. He told King Agrippa "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which thing I also did," etc. (Acts 26: 9-10). No man ever despised the name of Jesus more intensely than he; no one ever devoted himself so earnestly to the extermination of all who loved His name. But the transaction outside the gate of Damascus changed everything for Paul. From that moment the Son of God became his all-in-all.

"If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ." Knowledge must precede love. I cannot love a person whom I do not know. A man may know all the facts about Christ, and yet not know Him. Historical faith cannot save. I know WHOM I have believed (2 Tim. 1: 12). To know the Lord Jesus is to trust Him; and to trust Him is to love Him. ''Faith worketh by love" (Gal 5: 6). But why should I love Him? What claim has He upon my affections? Has He accomplished anything on my behalf? Oh, let us heed the apostle's glowing words: "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" (1 Tim. 1: 15). Is there anything in this that should appeal to the heart? Hear the apostle again: "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5: 8). Callous indeed must the heart be that can remain unmelted in the presence of such grace as is herein expressed.

Our text is very sweeping in its denunciation. "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema.'' "If any man." He spares no one. Yet the apostle had met all sorts of people. Persons religious and persons irreligious; persons moral and persons immoral; persons honest and persons dishonest. He makes every thing turn upon Christ. A man may be both moral and religious, yet be lost for ever. John Newton's lines are true enough —

What think you of Christ? is the test

To try both your state and your scheme;

You cannot be right in the rest

Unless you think rightly of Him.

He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the Only-Begotten Son of God" (John 3: 18).

"Anathema" means "accursed." The devoted apostle waxed indignant at the thought that anyone could hear of the Lord Jesus Christ and yet not love Him. Contrast with this his meekness under personal injury. Everything of that kind he could bear without one word of angry retort; but let Christ come into the question, let His name be involved, and his whole soul was immediately in a flame.

Let us not misunderstand the apostle's anathema. It is not that he desired the destruction of any. Indeed, he had drunk too deeply into the Spirit of Christ to entertain any such sentiment. Concerning his own rebellious fellow-countrymen his heart's desire and prayer to God for them was that they might be saved. He had even on one occasion wished himself accursed from Christ for them (Rom. 10: 1; 9: 1). He yearned over the souls of men everywhere. The point in 1 Cor. 16: 22 is his holy indignation against men upon whom full Gospel light had shone, and who found no place in their hearts for Christ. How far would this apply to the dwellers in Great Britain?

One cannot but connect his solemn curse here with another in Gal. 1: 8. "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." He had proclaimed the Gospel to the Galatians in its entirety; every pretended development of it on the part of others could be error only. What would this strong-speaking apostle say could he walk up and down in the midst of Christendom at this hour?

"Maranatha" is a compound of two Aramaic words, meaning "the Lord cometh." He thus brings to bear upon men's consciences that great day when everything will be brought to an issue for eternity. The Lord's descent into the air will remove to glory every believing soul; His public manifestation in the clouds of heaven will seal the doom of every foe. The door may soon be shut; the Gospel day may soon be over; happy the man who has found shelter in Christ the Lord. The long-neglected truth of the Lord's coming may well thrill every believing heart, while calculated to strike terror into the bosom of every rejecter of His grace.

"HE BECAME POOR."

Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich. — 2 Cor. 8: 9.

There are three things in this remarkable passage concerning which no creature mind can give us any really adequate account: first, the original riches of our Lord Jesus Christ; second, the depth of poverty to which He condescended; and, third, the wealth of blessing which is now the portion of every believer in His name

"He was rich." There are various ways in which riches may be measured. Many would estimate them by material possessions. Take an illustration. You and I are out walking together, and presently we notice a mansion standing in the midst of its grounds, and you tell me that such an one is the owner of it. I reply, "He must be a rich man." "Oh, but," you say, "that is not all he possesses. He has other estates dotted about in England, Scotland, etc." I remark, "He must be rich indeed!" But what are any man's material possessions compared with all that belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ? Col. 1: 16 tells us, "by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him." Who can tell us all that such a verse means? Men are finding out that they do not yet know all that may be known of the "visible"; what then of the "invisible"? As the Creator and Sustainer of all, everything belongs to Christ. Not every man, however, would estimate riches by material possessions; with some, moral surroundings would count far more. A millionaire in a loveless, selfish home might conceivably feel poor indeed if he were to look into the cottage of a labourer, and see love and happiness reigning there, and his heart would tell him that the poor man has the better portion. But what was the moral atmosphere in which the Son of God moved ere this world knew Him? Who can describe the brightness and blessedness of that heavenly scene where love eternal reigns? And that scene was His everlasting home.

But, "though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor." Here we need to tread very cautiously. Of what did He impoverish Himself when He came into this world? Certainly not of His deity. During His sojourn here, "all the fullness in Him was pleased to dwell" (Col. 1: 19). Not a single divine attribute did He abdicate in becoming human. Omnipotence displayed itself in His command of winds and waves, and also in His supremacy over death. Omniscience was manifested in His perfect ability to read the thoughts and hearts of men. Neither, in becoming poor, did He leave "the bosom of the Father," as some have said. This is not a geographical, but a moral, expression (John 1: 18), and it shows the unique place which He had in the Father's love. This He never for one moment left, neither did He forfeit it. Yet "He became poor." Let us content ourselves with noticing the actual circumstances of His pathway here. He was born in a stable, and cradled in a manger. The condescension would have been amazing had He consented to be born in the palace of the Caesars, but what shall we say of Bethlehem and the manger? Who amongst us has known such circumstances as these? Observe Him also in Matt. 17 in the matter of the tribute money. Though but a coin was required to cover both Peter and Himself, the fish of the sea had to furnish the sum. He had it not. During His progress through the land there was no demand for Him in the mansions of the rich and noble. "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head" (Luke 9: 58). But what were all the painful experiences of His pathway when compared with the cross of Calvary?

Friendless and robeless in the hour of His supreme grief! And when all was over, He had but a tomb that was lent by another. God would not suffer His beloved Son to be buried with the thieves. Isa. 53: 9, rightly rendered, beautifully expresses this: "His grave was appointed with the wicked, but He was with the rich in His death, because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth." Accordingly, Joseph of Arimathea came along, and craved the honour of burying the body of Jesus in his own new tomb. One thing that impressed me greatly in America was the sumptuous tombs of certain millionaires. They would be more suitably called temples. Their own wealth supplied these; but the Son of God was laid in the lent tomb of another. "For your sakes" was all this. Have we, one and all, been at His feet in humble acknowledgment of His matchless grace? Can each individual amongst us say, "the Son of God loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2: 20)?

"He became poor," says the apostle, "that ye through His poverty might be rich." Who is there, throughout the length and breadth of the Church of God, who can adequately declare the wealth of blessing which Christ has secured for all who believe in His name? The first of blessings is the forgiveness of sins. How do we regard that? When the four men of Luke 5 brought the palsied man to the Saviour their hope was that He would heal his body. Yet His first word was, "man, thy sins are forgiven thee." A sound body is much to be preferred to a fortune; but even a sound body will not compare with the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness is, however, only the initial blessing of Christianity. It is the first expression of a grace which knows no limit. Hence the apostle speaks of forgiveness "according to the riches of His grace" (Eph. 1: 7). In the same chapter we get the magnificent statement, "He hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ." Moreover, "in the ages to come He will show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 2: 7). What a spectacle will the bloodwashed host present to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places! An innumerable multitude of the base and despised of earth brought into eternal association with the Son of God, accepted in His acceptance, and loved as He is loved.

Beyond all the blessings which He bestows, there is the knowledge of Himself. Well may we sing: —

Were the vast world our own

With all its varied store,

And Thou, Lord Jesus, wert unknown

We still were poor.

Happy are the people to whom it may be truly said: "YE KNOW the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ."

THE VICTORY OF CHRIST.

There is something exhilarating in the thought of victory. Take a lesson from the battle-field. Two armies have met in conflict, and both are now going their several ways. The one host is dispirited and panic-stricken, cursing perhaps, the commander who has led them to defeat and shame; the other host is exultant in triumph and filled with cheer. The troops acclaim their leader, and are proud of their association with him. It makes all the difference to men's feelings whether they are on the side of victory or on the side of defeat.

Now on which side are we — we who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? Without hesitation we reply, on the side of victory. Let us now, in a brief way, go over what Christ has wrought.

First, observe the point from which He started forth. That point was God-head glory. The opening verse of John's Gospel in three terse sentences proclaims the eternity of His being, the distinctness of His personality, and His true divine nature. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." When present on earth He could say to the Father in the hearing of His disciples, "Glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was" (John 17: 5). Every Christian loves to seize every opportunity to confess the true deity of the Lord Jesus.

Next, observe the point to which He went down. Our text tells us "He descended into the lower parts of the earth." That means the grave. But what were the steps which led Him into such depths? Go with me to the manger of Bethlehem, and whom have we there? It is the Son of God, Maker of heaven and earth, Judge of quick and dead. What brought Him down from the glory that was proper to Deity to such circumstances of humiliation and shame? It was our salvation. Follow Him another step — to the cross of Calvary. We see His lifeless body taken down from the tree and laid away in Joseph's tomb. What is the meaning of such a spectacle, which might well fill the angelic host with amazement? The meaning is this: if He would deliver poor sinful man, lying under the doom of death and the power of Satan, He must enter and break the very citadel of the foe. What apparent triumph for Satan when he had his Maker and Lord sealed up in a tomb! But "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." Of what avail were all the devices of the creature? When the third day came the Saviour arose; and the stone rolled away, with the angel sitting as if in contempt upon it, testified to the reality of His glorious victory.

Now observe the point to which He has gone up. "He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things." He has gone up as Man to the highest seat, and the whole universe is destined to be flooded with His glory. Such is the purpose of God concerning the Son of His love. What a magnificent sweep we have here! From the degradation of death and the grave to the right hand of God, far above all heavens. What delight for all who believe; but what confusion for the foe! This is the Christ in whom we have put our trust. Can we not therefore sing with exultation, "the victory is ours"? In His triumph we read our own.

Let us consider some of the results of Christ's great victory. First, our sins have been completely put away. In this connection Heb. 10 attaches the deepest significance to the present seat of the Lord Jesus at the right hand of God. The very fact that He is there is the public proof that the sin-question, as far as His believing people are concerned, has been settled for ever. Seeing that He made Himself answerable for all our sins and iniquities at the cross of Calvary, He could not now be in heaven's glory had not every one of them been perfectly expiated. But not only have our sins been put away, but the power of death has for us been broken. Christ's empty tomb attests this. To John in Patmos He could reveal Himself as the living One, dead once, but alive for evermore, and having the keys of death and of Hades (Rev. 1: 18, RV.). Prior to the consummation of Christ's great victory even pious souls dreaded death. Job called it "the King of terrors"; and Hezekiah, when told to put his house in order because he was to die, and not live, turned his face to the wall and wept sore. But the language of Job and the conduct of Hezekiah would be alike unsuitable for the believer to-day. Heb. 2: 14 tells us the Saviour took part in flesh and blood "that through death He might destroy (or annul) him that had the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." He has acquired the right to take His own into heaven's glory without passing through death at all, and this right he will exercise in the moment of His coming again (1 Thess. 4: 16-17). As the Resurrection He will raise every sleeping believer; and as the Life He will transform every living one (John 11: 25-26). If meanwhile He suffers any of His own to fall asleep, death is but the caretaker of the body until He wants it; and the happy spirit, freed from all earthly care, is at rest in the peace and delight of His heavenly presence. Truly "the victory is ours!" Whatever the circumstances of the moment, however painful the experiences through which we may be called to pass, however suggestive of defeat these may be, we are yet on the side of triumph, and this the exalted Lord will make manifest in His day.

ONE GOD AND ONE MEDIATOR.

The great truth stamped upon the opening verses of 1 Tim. 2 is that God is every man's sincere well-wisher. He desires all men to be saved, and to come to a knowledge of the truth. It is a lie of Satan that some persons come into the world marked out beforehand for eternal ruin. If this were true, every Gospel overture in Holy Scripture would be but a mockery and a sham. "As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezek. 33: 11).

Christians are responsible to take their character from God Himself. This is why the apostle urges that prayer be made for all men, and for rulers in particular. If God wishes well to all, Christians must seek the blessing of all in like manner. In this connection, two weighty truths are affirmed. "There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, a man, Christ Jesus." It is humiliating indeed that God should need to insist upon the reality and the uniqueness of His being with the creatures of His own hand. But ever since the deluge men have been guilty of devising gods of their own, to their folly and ruin. The nation of Israel was called out into a position of separation from all others to bear testimony to the unity of the God-head. In Deut. 6: 4 we have Moses saying to them: "Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah." But Israel miserably failed as a witness for God, copying the ways of the Gentiles, and becoming as idolatrous as they. This has resulted in the severest discipline for that unfaithful people.

The unity of the God-head was thus the distinguishing testimony of the Mosaic age; to this is added, now that Christ has come, the unity of the Mediator. It is not enough for sinful men to know that there is one God; the heart yearns to understand how that God may be reached and known. Job in his distress said: "He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgement. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both" (Job 9: 32, 33). Realising that man cannot bridge the gulf that sin has made between himself and God, Job felt the need of a mediator. Christ alone meets this need. From God-head glory He stooped to manhood in His ineffable grace. This enables Him to "lay His hand upon us both." But His incarnation could not of itself remove one single sin. "The extension of the benefits of Christ's incarnation," of which men of the Ritualistic sort speak so sagely, is nothing but meaningless jargon. Remission is impossible apart from blood. Accordingly the apostle adds: "Who gave Himself a ransom for all." The manger was a necessary step to the cross, where the foundation of all blessing for the guilty children of men was by Him well and securely laid. He is now risen and exalted. "Christ Jesus" is His resurrection title. His resurrection is the public proof before all the universe that every claim of the throne of God has been met by His atoning sacrifice. When Moses, the mediator of the old covenant, went up to God after the affair of the golden calf, he said to the people: "You have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto Jehovah; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin" (Ex. 32: 30). No such language of uncertainty could rest for one moment upon the lips of the Lord Jesus. The cross of Calvary admits of no "peradventure." In this world He made atonement, full, ample and perfect; and then, in the power of it, He went up to God on behalf of all His people.

The Mediator is one. No other dare we profanely put alongside Him, be it Mary, saints, or apostles. This would be to His public dishonour, and to the injury of our own souls. Christendom has been as grossly unfaithful in relation to the truth of the unity of the Mediator as ever Israel was in relation to the truth of the unity of the God-head. This sin God will not fail to judge when His present long-suffering is exhausted. Meanwhile, Christ may be universally proclaimed. He is Mediator, not between God and Israel, as Moses in the past, but between God and men. He gave Himself a ransom, not for a single nation, but for all. For this reason, Paul the apostle, once the most conservative of Jews, loved to describe himself "a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth."

STEM Publishing : W. W. Fereday : Gospel Tracts

Gospel Tracts

W. W. Fereday.

A Lost Tomb.

The old Abbey Church at Waltham, Essex (twelve miles from London) was founded by the sons of Earl Godwin in the eleventh century. The last Saxon King, Harold II, lies buried there. After the disastrous defeat at Hastings in 1066, two Waltham monks asked permission of Duke William to recover the King's body for burial. Being unable to identify it amongst so many mangled corpses, they called in the help of the notorious Edith, surnamed the Swan-necked. She found it, and it was duly interred in Waltham Abbey.

But the tomb is lost! No one to-day can say with any certainty just where it was placed.

We are reminded of another tomb, the whereabouts of which no one can speak positively — the tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was in a garden, quite near the walls of Jerusalem and its owner at the time was a member of the Jewish Council named Joseph. (John 19: 38, 42). Nothing more can well be said about it. But while the tomb of the Saxon King is only of historical interest, and even that to but a limited number, the tomb of the Lord Jesus is of vital interest to every soul on earth.

Let us suppose that both tombs could be identified with certainty. What should we find? The one would contain the dust of him who was placed there; the other would be absolutely empty. The Saxon King awaits his resurrection at the last day; the Lord Jesus had His resurrection nineteen hundred years ago. There is no greater fact in the history of the world than this, and, in mercy to the children of men, God took careful pains to put it beyond all controversy. The risen Lord did not ascend up on high the day He left the tomb. He remained on earth nearly six weeks (Acts 1: 3); and during that time He showed Himself many times to His friends, some of whom were sceptical at first, not expecting such a marvelous work of God, but all ended in worshipping at His feet (John 20: 25; Matt. 28: 17). On one occasion more than five hundred brethren saw Him together. (1 Cor. 15: 6).

The Son of God is thus risen! The tomb has been rifled of its precious charge, to know it no more for ever. But here arises a question of the utmost importance. How came the Son of God to enter the tomb? What caused Him to die? Let God Himself answer the question for us. "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom. 5: 8). Listen also to John the Apostle. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but, that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins . . . And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world" (1 John 4: 10, 14).

Thus it was our sins that involved the Son of God in the anguish of the tree and the disgrace of the tomb! Was there no other way whereby sinners might be saved from the consequences of their sins? Could not righteousness be satisfied otherwise? Clearly not, or God would not have gone to the extreme length of sacrificing His Son — His well beloved.

How offensive then is sin in the sight of God! How direful its consequences? Has the reader ever faced the sin question? Contemplate it, we beseech you, in the light of the cross and the tomb! you might well exclaim, with another:

"Oh, how vile my lost estate

Since my ransom was so great!"

It is delightful to the conscience-stricken sinner to meditate upon the love that shines out in the great sacrifice of Calvary. But how can we be sure that the sacrifice was sufficient — that the claims of divine righteousness have been truly met by it? The resurrection of Christ is the proof this. The stone was not rolled away in order that He might go forth, it was rolled away for our sake that we might know that death has been constrained to yield its prey. On the resurrection morning, the Angel said to the women, “He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay." (Matt. 28: 6)

Faith can now see even more than this. The risen Chris is now on high, accepted in all the value of His great atoning work. So that we may add to the Angel's words, "We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour." (Heb. 2: 9).

Reader, is your soul burdened with the guilt of sin? Learn then that it was for just such an one the Saviour died. His resurrection is the great discharge, not only for the Holy One Himself, but for every sinner who believes in His name. The vacant cross and the empty tomb are the joint proof that all the claims of the throne of God have been met once and for ever. Righteousness shall be imputed to us, if we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 4: 24-5: 1)

A Rock Sermon.

Early in the last century, the first European steamship, the "Comet," was launched on the River Clyde. Its inventor was Henry Bell, to whose memory a monument may be seen standing on the banks of the Clyde, a little to the east of Dumbarton Castle. At the base of the monument is inscribed upon the rocks the following sentences: —

"God is Love."

"Eternity — Where?"

"Flee from the wrath to come."

When we consider the large number of pleasure steamers which pass the spot in the summer season, and the many ocean liners which go by all the year round, it  seems certain that thousands of eyes have read this abiding rock sermon. What will the harvest be? The great day will tell.

The person who designed so public a testimony evidently judged there was something worth thinking about in the words thus inscribed, and we quite agree with him. "God is love,"  weightiest of all weighty truths, and yet how little is it understood! How many regard God as a severe Being, exacting hard things from His creatures, and taking pleasure in condemning those who fail to render His demands! But "God is love" (1 John 4: 8). The cross of Calvary has declared His love in all its vast extent. God's Son, His only and Well-Beloved, sacrificed  for the salvation of rebellious sinners; was ever love like this? Is anything like it known among men? Reader, have you considered the application of it to your own case? Have you ever thanked God for His love to yourself, a sinner only worthy of eternal flames? "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom. 5: 8).

Well might the rock-preacher add: "Eternity-where?" A mere breath separates every one of us from it. All is well for him who believes on the Lord Jesus Christ: but what of the man (or woman) to whom this glorious Person is only a name? Eternity means destruction for all such; not extinction of being as some who love their sins fondly hope but desolation and ruin for ever and ever. Everlasting banishment from the presence of God where all is light and song — reader, can you bear to think of this? With all our powers we urge every unsaved one into whose hands this paper may fall to "Flee from the wrath to come." Before the storm of Divine judgment bursts, "Whosoever will" may find shelter in the Saviour: when the storm begins (and the dark clouds are gathering on every hand) His Saviour character will come to an end, and His enemies must meet Him as Judge. In their terror men will say to the mountains and rocks: "Fall on us, hide us from the face of Him that sitteth upon the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of His wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?" (Rev. 6: 16, 17). Beloved reader, in what character do you wish to know the Son of God?

"He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that obeyeth not (R.V.) the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him " (John 3: 16).

W. W. Fereday.

"What is a man profited…"

In the terrible retreat from the city of Mexico on the night of July 1st, 1520, Cortes urged his followers to carry as little as possible with them. He told them that those would fare best who travelled lightest. Many of the soldiers however preferred to take with them as much as possible of the gold they had looted; but the weight of it dragged them down to death as they endeavoured to swim the lake. For the sake of the treasure they risked and lost their lives, and that in spite of the warning of their Commander.

Men are just as foolish today. As the Lord Jesus expressed it in Luke 8: 14 they "are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life." The last of the three is the most deadly of all at the present. The pleasures of this life are abundant. Never was there such variety, and multitudes are simply intoxicated with them. Long queues standing outside picture houses, and massed thousands gaping and cheering at football matches, are sufficient of themselves to prove how deeply pleasure has eaten into the hearts of the people. They think of little else; by these things they live. That they have souls that must live for ever is a thought that never gives them a moments concern. That which is of vital importance, is as nothing in their esteem, while that which is worthless is, in their eyes, of the highest account.

Oh, fools, to throw away your souls thus! Well did our Lord ask, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matt. 16: 26) What indeed! The rich man of Luke 16: 19, when he found himself in torments, would have given all he ever possessed for an opportunity to retrieve his wasted past. When on earth his one thought was to "have a good time." He was "clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day." In selfish enjoyment he spent his days, ignoring even the poor diseased mendicant who lay at his own gate. He was too absorbed in his own pleasures to have room in his mind for others. So he lived, and so he died, and perished forever.

Reader, this brief span that we call "time" is not everything. For each one of us there is a boundless beyond. Are you indeed willing to so load yourself with business, pleasure, or anything else of an earthly character that you must needs be lost for ever? Hear the voice of your Maker and God. Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is not bread? And your labour for that which satisfyeth not? hearken diligently unto Me... incline your ear and come unto Me; hear, and your soul shall live. (Isa 55: 2, 3) In His most Holy Word, He tells you plainly of your sin and guilt, and of the peril in which you stand. Moreover in His Word, He tells you of the wondrous mission of His Beloved Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. From heaven He came in search of sinners lost and undone, and upon Calvary's cross, He suffered once for sins, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. (1 Peter 3: 18)

Reader, what have you to say to this? Is the eternal future worthy of your consideration or not? Is it wise to throw away eternal bliss in order to enjoy the corrupt pleasures of this present short life? A gracious God waits to bless you, are you willing to be blessed?

Apron Factories

It was remarked one day by a servant of Christ that "many places of worship in these times are just apron factories, and nothing more."

The speaker had in mind of course, what is written in Genesis 3: 7. Genesis 3 is God's account of the most terrible catastrophe that ever befell the human family. The story is related in the very simplest terms, in order that everyone may understand. It is the story of the fall of man — of his revolt against his Maker, and how God met the sinners need. No sooner had Adam and his wife sinned, than they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. Yet, in spite of their device, so conscious were they of their nakedness, that at the first sound of the voice of God they hid themselves as unfit to stand in His Holy presence.

There we have the beginning of what has long since developed into an enormous evil - sinners endeavouring to work out a righteousness of their own. But however industrious and sincere the workers may be, it is all to no avail, for, "by the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in His sight." Rom 3: 20. All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Isa 64: 6.

Note what happened when God entered Eden. Having convicted the man and his wife of their sin, He spoke to the Suffering Seed, The Lord Jesus, and forthwith made coats of skin and clothed them. Here we have grace indeed. If man has no covering suitable for God, God is able to furnish all that the guilty one needs. So, in Rom 3 (already quoted) we go on to read that the righteousness of God has now been manifested unto them that believe; that righteousness which is by faith of Jesus Christ, and which is founded upon His atoning blood.

Death furnished the coats of skin; the death of Christ has made it possible for God to be just, and the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.

Is this what is being universally preached to-day? Or are not the people being diverted to sacraments and other pious works, rather than to Christ, and the work He accomplished? Are not the multitudes being told that it is "character" that counts with God? This is just to repeat the egregious blunder of our first parents who "sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons." And it is ruinous to the soul. What a contrast there was between there aprons and the coats which God supplied! Not a divine stitch was in the one, not a human stitch was in the other. In like manner, in mans efforts after righteousness, there is nothing of God, and in the righteousness divine which grace confers, there is nothing of man.

Now reader, on what ground do you stand with God? Are you spending precious time sewing fig leaves together? That is to say, are you doing your best to make yourself presentable to God? If so, you are on a false line altogether, and we entreat you to renounce your own efforts as worse than worthless, and put your whole trust in the Lord Jesus, and in the great work which He has done. This is what God says to those who believe. "By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works lest any man should boast. (Eph. 2: 8, 9) This is what believers say in response: Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us. (Titus 3: 5) Beware of "apron making." Beware of "apron factories."

A Well Balanced Budget,

and something still better

The Budget of 1932 caused more anxiety to all classes in Britain than any that had ever preceded it. The warning sounded by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in February, 1931, that matters were going wrong, and that drastic steps should be taken, passed unheeded. Then came the great wake-up in August when the nation realized that it stood upon the verge of bankruptcy. Stringent measures were immediately taken in order that Britain might maintain its standing in the world. "The Budget must be balanced," was said by both rulers and people. During those anxious months every right-minded person wished well to the men in the seat of authority, and those who knew God and had access to His throne of grace, did not fail to make intercession for them there.

It is a serious matter for a nation to default. Everyone is thereby plunged into disaster from the King down to the meanest subject. In a moment all that men have set their hearts upon, and all that their industry has accumulated, disappears in overwhelming ruin. But God sometimes uses the disappointments of life for the blessing of men's souls. Some, as they behold everything slipping away from them, feel so keenly the transitoriness of everything earthly that they turn to God, and thus get into touch with the things that really matter, and that abide evermore.

In Psalm 4: 6, David says:

"There be many that say, who will show us any good?"

This is the cry of disappointed hearts. They have tried so many things that have yielded no satisfaction that they are at their wits end what next to try, or in what direction to turn. But David was able to answer the pitiful cry for himself:

"Lord lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us. Thou has put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased."

He knew God, and that was enough. In his day he was the mightiest king on earth, but he was not always mighty. Commencing life as the youngest son of a farmer, and sent into the fields to tend sheep, he was, while yet a youth, privately anointed king by Samuel in substitution for the miserable failure who then ruled. Then followed years of persecution while his relentless foe sought his life, before he actually sat upon the throne of Israel. During those years he sometimes knew neither where to lay his head, nor where to turn for bread to eat, but those were his best years spiritually.

Reader, can you say anything at all like it? Have you proved the blessed reality of having to do with God? It is most certain that whatever measure of relief may be granted to us by a balanced Budget, everything is shaking beneath our feet. A glance at world-conditions generally makes this plain. Awful indeed for those who have nothing outside this world!

If you are seriously seeking what this world cannot give, you must first have to do with God about your sins. The sin-question is fundamental, and a holy God cannot pass it by. If there were no sin in the world, there would be no trouble, financial or otherwise. God looks to both you and me for a frank acknowledgment of this.

"Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." (Ps. 51: 5).

Terrible is it not?

"The wicked are estranged from the womb, they go astray as soon as they are born." (Ps. 58: 3).

This is true of everyone of us, like silly sheep we have all turned our backs upon the God who made us — our best friend really.

On what ground can God receive the sinner? Romans 5: 8, will tell us:

"God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

This is truly amazing. God's own Son, has suffered for my sins! All the judgment that I deserved was poured out upon Him, and, believing in Him, I am free!

W. W. Fereday.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Forgiveness

The Great Salvation

F. B. Hole.

Contents

Forgiveness

Justification

Redemption

Reconciliation

Salvation

Sanctification

The New Birth

Quickening

The Gift of the Holy Spirit

New Creation

Foreword.

The Scriptures themselves speak of the "great salvation," which has reached us through the Gospel. We, who have experienced the saving grace of God, know something of its greatness, but it is only as we search the Scriptures and investigate its details that the magnitude of what God has brought to pass begins to dawn upon us.

In these pages the main details are taken up one by one. If all be put together, the great salvation of God is before us; and it is important to remember that each is but one part of a great whole. They are considered separately in order that we may gain a fuller understanding of each part, and thereby more fully understand the whole.

We can no more apprehend the whole Divine plan at one moment than we can see all four sides of a building from one viewpoint. We have to content ourselves with one thing at a time. If this book helps any Christians to a deeper appreciation of the wonders wrought of God through the Gospel, not only will they be spiritually helped but God will be glorified.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Forgiveness

Forgiveness

F. B. Hole.

When the first stirrings of the Spirit of God took place within us, the effect in almost every case was that we became conscious of our sins and of the guilt that attached to them, and consequently we became seekers after forgiveness. We wanted to be forgiven, and to know it.

The reader has, we trust, the knowledge of forgiveness, yet it may be well if we begin by surveying the teaching of Scripture on this subject, and thus aim at obtaining an orderly understanding of this great, fundamental blessing of the Gospel.

First of all then, let us observe that when sin entered into the world by the transgression of Adam, and the human race consequently lapsed into an utterly fallen and sinful condition, its effects were manifold and went far beyond the incurring of guilt. Yet the first and most obvious effect was that Adam became a guilty and conscience-stricken man. As men multiplied it had to be said that, "all the world" was "guilty before God" (Rom. 3: 19), and this means, since guilt is an intensely individual matter, that every individual composing the world, every one of us, is guilty.

But the Scripture speaks of, "them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth" (Rom. 2: 8). Many such are to be found, who are by no means disposed to acknowledge their guilt, but rather challenge the foundations on which rests the very idea of being guilty before God. They assert on the contrary the innate goodness of all men, who are, so they say, always struggling upwards. Some of these contentious folk go so far as to deny all fixed standards of right and wrong. Good and evil are words of only relative force, since to them "good" is that which is approved by the most enlightened sections of humanity in any given age, and "evil" is that which their mind repudiates. It therefore follows that "right" and "wrong" are values which fluctuate according to the fashions of the age in matters of morality. The human mind is left the whole arbiter of such questions, and consequently the only guilt they know is that which may be incurred before men as the result of flouting the standards erected by the most enlightened and advanced amongst them. The utmost verdict that they can approve of is therefore, guilty before men.

The epistle to the Romans, on the other hand, begins with GOD, and we do not have to travel far into its contents before we arrive at the verdict against us of, "guilty before God."

In its opening chapter we read of,

"The Gospel of God"

"The Son of God"

"The power of God"

"The righteousness of God"

"The wrath of God"

"The glory of God"

"The judgment of God"

and God, whose power and righteousness and wrath and glory and judgment are revealed, is "the Creator" (Rom. 1: 25). At once therefore we leave the quagmire of human standards and opinions for the sure rock of divine truth, and we find ourselves standing in the presence of the Creator, who is marked by fixed and unalterable righteousness.

Much may be needed indeed before the conviction of guilt is driven home effectually into the consciousness of the individual sinner. This may not be so difficult a matter with peoples who have lapsed into the barbarism that so frequently accompanies heathenism. Such are in view in Romans 1: 18-32, and they stand without excuse, and consequently their mouths are shut. The mere recital of the enormous evils into which they had fallen, as a result of turning away from the knowledge of God, is sufficient. In their case no reasoning is necessary in order to convict and silence.

But at different times in the world's history, nations, though pagan, have evolved amongst themselves systems of natural culture and civilization. Such were the ancient Greeks, and to these Romans 2: 1-16, is addressed. In their case the dark cesspool of iniquity was partly covered up by fine systems of philosophical thought and ethical teaching. They condemned the poor, unlettered barbarian yet they themselves did the same things in a more refined way. They too are pronounced to be "inexcusable," yet some very pointed reasoning, coupled with sharp home-thrusts of the keen blade of truth, is necessary before the conviction of it can be driven home. In the course of reasoning they are reminded that, "The judgment of God is according to truth;" that the day is coming for the revelation of "the righteous judgment of God;" and that "there is no respect of persons with God."

By the combination of these three facts their escape from the judgment of God is rendered impossible. If His judgment were sometimes according to mere outward appearances, or if it occasionally lapsed from strict righteousness, or deviated because of favouritism or other personal considerations, then there might be some chance of escape. It is however "according to truth," and hence the exact reality of things will be dragged into the light of day. It is "righteous," and hence absolute and inflexible justice will prevail. There is "no respect of persons," hence nothing will turn God from a judgment of absolute righteousness in the light of absolute truth. This must shut the mouth of the most civilized and the most cultured, and convict them too as "guilty before God."

Lastly there were the Jews, a people brought under a culture which was not merely natural but divine. Romans 2: 17 - 3: 20, is addressed to such, and in this passage we have not merely reasoning but the decisive evidence of their own Scriptures. Their indictment is couched in terms culled from their own law, and at the close the weight of this Scriptural evidence is driven home into their consciences by the fact that "what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law;" that is, to the Jews. The sweeping accusations and condemnation of the law was aimed therefore, not at the barbarian nor the Greek, but at the opinionated and self-righteous Jew, that even his mouth might be stopped, and thus all the world become "guilty before God."

Guilt being established, forgiveness becomes an urgent necessity. Hence we find it placed in the very forefront of the instructions given by the risen Lord to His disciples. In Luke 24: 45-48 He told the eleven that "remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations." In Acts 26: 16-18 we have the apostle Paul's account of how in a heavenly vision he heard the voice of the Glorified One, sending him to the Gentiles, "to open their eyes . . . that they may receive forgiveness of sins." How these commissions were carried out the Acts bears witness. To the multitude in Jerusalem, who on the day of Pentecost were pricked in their heart, Peter spoke of "the remission of sins" (Acts 2: 38). Before the council he again testified of "forgiveness of sins" (Acts 5: 31). Again to the Gentile Cornelius and his friends he proclaimed that "through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins" (Acts 10: 43). To the mixed crowd in the synagogue at Antioch Paul declared, "Be it known . . . that through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins" (Acts 13: 38).

In each case, of the six quoted above, the same Greek word occurs in the original, though translated both as remission and forgiveness in the Authorized Version. It signifies simply "a sending away" or "a release" and this is just what a guilty sinner needs as regards his sins. Let them be sent away or dismissed by the One against whom his guilt has been incurred, and what a happy release is his! Now this is just what every child of God is entitled to enjoy. "I write unto you little children" said the aged apostle John, "because your sins are forgiven you [are dismissed and sent away] for His name's sake" (1 John 2: 12).

It is in the epistle to the Romans, as we have seen, that the Holy Ghost pronounces the verdict of "guilty before God" against the whole human race. We might naturally have expected therefore that immediately following this we should have found a full unfolding of forgiveness. As a matter of fact however the word for forgiveness only occurs once in the whole epistle, and that when the Apostle cites David's words from Psalm 32. The blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness without works is described by David saying, "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven" (Rom. 4: 6, 7). This shows us however that the imputation of righteousness — i.e justification — is in this passage practically equivalent to forgiveness.

The words that are so much used in the early chapters of Romans are righteousness and justification, and they are on the whole words of great fulness. One cannot have one's sins forgiven without being justified, nor vice versa; yet in the main the force of forgiveness is negative — we lose our sins: the main force of justification is positive — we gain righteousness.

It has been asserted that everybody is forgiven. Is there any sense in which such a statement is true?

No. It is of course a wonderful fact that, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Cor. 5: 19). Hence the Lord's words to the sinful woman, "Neither do I condemn thee" (John 8: 11). God's overtures of mercy, in Christ present upon earth, were however rejected. It is also a wonderful fact that, His overtures being rejected, He has taken advantage of the death and resurrection of Christ to send out a world-wide message of forgiveness, so that in the Gospel today forgiveness is preached to all, and He is presented as a forgiving God. (See Luke 24: 46, 47).

Instead of the rejection of Christ being followed by a declaration of war, and the hurling of Heaven's thunderbolts against a rebellious world, God has, as it were, established a lengthy armistice, during which time an amnesty for all rebels is being proclaimed. If any rebel humbles himself and turns to the Saviour in faith, he is forgiven. It is true therefore that there is forgiveness for everybody; but in no sense is it true that everybody is forgiven.

In His parable of the two debtors in Luke 7, the Lord did teach however that both were forgiven by the creditor. Was not Simon, the self-righteous Pharisee, as much forgiven therefore as the repentant sinner?

"He frankly forgave them both." Both therefore were frankly forgiven. The two words "frankly forgave" are the translation of one Greek word — not the usual word for forgiveness but a word meaning, "to show grace to." The Lord Jesus therefore in His parable represented God as acting in a forgiving spirit and showing grace towards men, no matter what the depth of their sin. This is exactly God's attitude to-day.

Later in the story the Lord did utter the usual word for forgiveness. He said of the woman, "her sins, which are many, are forgiven." To her He said, "Thy sins are forgiven." Her sins, then, were definitely dismissed, for she believed in the Saviour and came to Him.

Grace was indeed shown even to proud Simon, and he was not brought instantly and summarily into judgment for his sins. In that sense he was "frankly forgiven," but the Lord never told him that his sins had been definitely dismissed. Only the repentant sinner is thus forgiven, in the ordinary meaning of the word.

Is it a fact that when a sinner repents and believes he receives forgiveness once and for all?

Certainly it is. In the argument on the subject of sacrifice, contained in Hebrews 9: 1 - 10: 18, that fact is one of the main points. In that great passage it is affirmed no less than six times that the sacrifice of Christ was one and offered once. It is also asserted that those who approach God as worshippers on the ground of His sacrifice are purged once, and consequently draw near with perfected consciences (Heb. 10: 1, 2). The perfection of which the first verse speaks is "pertaining to the conscience" (Heb. 9: 9), and founded upon the one perfect cleansing, or purging, that has reached them. We stand before God in an eternal forgiveness.

To this it is objected by some, that if a believer is taught that at his conversion he obtained complete forgiveness, it is sure to provoke him to carelessness and license. Might it not be better to say that all is forgiven up to the point of conversion?

No one would object in this way but those who deny, or at least overlook, the fact that we are not converted without being born again and thereby becoming possessed of a nature that hates evil. Once give this fact its due weight and the whole case wears a different aspect. Further, not only are we born again and forgiven but we receive the Holy Spirit of God to dwell in us, and we come under the teaching of grace, of which Titus 2: 11-14, speaks.

We must remember that though forgiveness is ministered to us when we believe, yet it was procured for us by the sacrifice of Christ; and all our sins not only those up to the point of conversion — were future, when He died and rose again.

We must remember also that God, as Father, does deal with us, His children, as and when we

sin. Upon confession we are forgiven and cleansed, for "we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 1: 9 - 2: 1). But this is the Father's forgiveness, restoring us to communion, and not the eternal forgiveness, which we receive at the outset from Him as Judge of all.

What then is meant by, "the remission of sins that are past," which we read of in Romans 3: 25?

All depends upon what is the fixed point, in relation to which the sins are past. If verse 26 be also read, it will be apparent that the contrast is between what God did as to sins in the past time and what He does "at this time;" the great event dividing the two times being the first advent of Christ. It is evident therefore that in speaking of "sins that are past" the apostle Paul referred to the sins of the believers who lived in the past dispensation. His words had no reference to certain sins of a believer being past, if viewed from the standpoint of his conversion.

The sins of these pre-Christian believers were remitted by God. "Remission" here is not the ordinary word for forgiveness, but one which means, "a passing by." The meaning of the passage is, that when the propitiatory work of Christ became an accomplished fact, it at once showed forth that God had been righteous in passing by the sins of Old Testament believers, just as it also vindicates His righteousness in this Gospel age in justifying the believer in Jesus.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Justification.

Justification.

F. B. Hole.

To be justified is to be cleared from every charge that could be brought against us. That this is the meaning is very apparent in the Apostle's words, recorded in Acts 13: 39, "By Him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses." The law could most effectually impeach us. It could lay sins to our charge and bring a righteous condemnation upon us. Only by Christ can the believer be righteously cleared from every charge in the impeachment, so that the sentence of condemnation is lifted off him.

Condemnation then is the state and position from which we pass when we are justified. It is evidently the opposite to justification, just as guilt is the opposite to forgiveness. Yet justification, as set before us in Scripture, implies more than the negative blessing of our being completely and righteously extricated from the condemnation under which we lay: it involves our standing before God in Christ, in a righteousness which is positive and divine.

We must again turn to the Epistle to the Romans. In Romans 3: 19 we find that, "all the world" stands convicted as "guilty before God." In verse 20 we find that the law can only convict: there is no justification for us in it. In verse 21, begins the unfolding of God's way of justifying the ungodly.

Inasmuch as "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God," it is not surprising that God should bring into manifestation His righteousness. Man having manifested his sin in all its blackness it was to be expected that, by way of contrast, God would manifest His righteousness in all its brightness; condemning the sinner, and thus clearing Himself of the smallest suspicion that He in any way condoned the sin. What is so wonderful is that now God's righteousness has been manifested in such a way as to be "unto" or "towards all, and upon all them that believe." Righteousness, God's righteousness, is, as it were, stretching out its hands benignly towards all men instead of frowning upon them; and as for those that believe, it descends upon them as a robe, so that in the presence of God they stand invested in it. And all this is done without righteousness in any way losing its own proper character, or ceasing to be what it is.

Upon first hearing this, our impulse might be to exclaim, "Impossible! Such a thing as this is absolutely impossible!" We might be disposed to reason that, while mercy might act in this fashion, but at the expense of righteousness, righteousness itself could never do so.

Yet righteousness does so act, since it has now been manifested in Christ, who has been set forth by God as a "propitiation," or "mercy-seat," (verse 25). When upon the cross His blood was shed, there was fulfilled the Antitype of the blood-sprinkled mercy-seat of Tabernacle days. Redemption was wrought "in Christ Jesus," (verse 24), and the greatest display of divine righteousness, which the universe will ever witness, took place. By and by the righteousness of God will be manifested in the judgment and everlasting overthrow of the ungodly. That solemn hour will witness no mean display of divine righteousness, yet not so profound and wonderful as in that yet more solemn hour when God judged and put to grief His own spotless Son for us. The cross of Christ will remain to all eternity the greatest manifestation of the righteousness of God. It manifested equally His love of course, as Romans 5: 8 declares, but had it not manifested His righteousness it could not have manifested His love.

The death of Christ has displayed the righteousness of God in a twofold way. First, as regards His dealings as to the sins of believers in the past dispensation (verse 25); and second, as to the sins of believers in this present age (verse 26). Before Christ came God passed over the sins of His people, though as yet no perfect satisfaction for them had been made to Him. In this present time He is justifying the believer in Jesus. Have all these dealings on God's part been conducted in strict righteousness? They have, and the death of Christ declares it; showing that when God passed over sins during the bygone dispensation He was absolutely justified in doing so, as also He is just in justifying the believer to-day.

The death of Christ was primarily the offering of Himself to God as a sacrifice of infinite value and fragrance. Propitiation was thereby effected, and satisfaction made, so that the claims of divine righteousness have been met and vindicated in regard to the whole matter of man's sin.

Secondarily, however, His offering was for us, i.e. for all true believers. Such are entitled to view the Saviour as their Substitute, and to translate Romans 4: 25 out of the plural into the singular, and say, He "was delivered for my offences, and was raised again for my justification." He was delivered to death and judgment with our sins in view: He was raised again from the dead with our justification in view.

Many there are who in this matter cut the Gospel in half, and ignore the second part of it to their own great loss. Full assurance cannot be enjoyed if the meaning of Christ's resurrection be overlooked. The bearing of our sins and their penalty was indeed accomplished in His death, but the declaration and proof of our clearance is in His resurrection. Without this second part settled peace cannot be known.

To illustrate the point, let us suppose a man condemned to six months' imprisonment for an offence, and another as a substitute permitted to take his place. When the prison gates swing to, shutting the substitute within and leaving the offender in liberty without, the latter might well exclaim of his friend, "He has been delivered to prison for my offence," but further than that he cannot go for the moment. It would be premature for him to add, "and consequently it is impossible that I should ever see the inside of that prison, as the penalty for what I have done."

What if his good friend breathed his last at the end of two months, leaving four months of the sentence unexpired? The Authorities would righteously lay their hands on the original offender and demand that he himself should work out the remainder of his term.

But, on the other hand, if a week or so before the six months were up he should suddenly come upon his kindly substitute walking in the street, and on expressing his surprise, learn that, having by good behaviour earned a small remission of the sentence, he was really discharged as a free man, he would instantly be able to say, "Why, you are released from prison for my justification!" He would argue in his own mind, and rightly, "If he is discharged from prison as free from all further liability, completely cleared in regard to my offence, then I am discharged, I am free, I am cleared!"

Viewed in this light, the resurrection of Christ is seen to be the Divine declaration of the complete clearance of the one who believes in Him. It is, we need hardly say, much else besides.

Having said this much, we must now observe that God Himself is not only the Source of our justification but He who justifies us. "It is God that justifieth" (Rom. 8: 33). From His lips came the sentence against us as sinners. Equally from His lips comes forth the declaration of our clearance as believers in Jesus. Our justification therefore is complete and authoritative. No one can condemn us.

But on our side faith is necessary; for only believers are justified. In this sense we are, "justified by faith" (Rom. 5: 1). Only as yielding "the obedience of faith" to our Lord Jesus do we come in under the benefits of His work. He is "the Author of eternal salvation" only to "all them that obey Him" (Heb. 5: 9). Faith is the link which connects us with Him and the justifying merits of His blood.

One further thought as to justification is presented to us in Romans 5: 18. In nearly every other passage where justification is mentioned it stands in relation to our sins — "of many offences unto justification," as Romans 5: 16 puts it. In verse 18, however, another view of the matter appears, and sin, the root, rather than sins, the fruit, is in question. The one righteousness of the cross has its bearing "towards" all "unto justification of life" (New Trans.).

To understand this phrase, the whole passage — verse 12 to the end of the chapter — must be considered. By nature all men stand related to Adam, as the head and fountain of their race. By grace, and through Christ's death and resurrection, all believers stand related to Him, as the Head and Fountain of that spiritual race to which they now belong. As grafted into Christ, if we may so speak, they participate in His life and nature; and as in the life of Christ they are cleared judicially from all the consequences that formerly lay on them as in the life of Adam. A very wonderful thing, this, and one that is too often overlooked by us all.

Justification then, as the Epistle to the Romans presents it, not only means a complete clearance from all offences and the condemnation they deserve, but goes to the length of a complete clearance from all the condemnation attaching to our fallen Adamic nature, inasmuch as now, by God's act, we stand in Christ risen from the dead. Blessed be God, for such a clearance as this!

You have not alluded to the righteousness of Christ being imputed to us? Why?

Because that idea is not found in Scripture. There is no difficulty in finding there the righteousness of Christ. That was absolutely perfect, and hence, being without blemish, He was qualified to be the "Lamb" of sacrifice on our behalf. But we are justified by His blood and not by His perfect life. He died far us, but in no place is it said that He kept the law for us. Had He done so we should after all be standing in a merely legal righteousness before God; and by that we mean, a righteousness which merely goes to the length of keeping the law of Moses. Our righteousness before God would after all be just that righteousness of the law, of which Moses speaks (see Rom. 10: 5); though worked out, not by ourselves, but by Christ on our behalf.

The righteousness in which we stand is, "the righteousness of faith," described in verses 6 to 9 of that chapter; and that is connected, not with Christ on earth keeping the law for us, but with God raising Him from the dead after He had died for our sins.

But surely righteousness is imputed, for we read in Romans 4 that, "God imputeth righteousness without works," and again that, "it was imputed to him for righteousness.  What then do these expressions mean?

If that chapter be carefully read it will be noticed that the words, counted, imputed, reckoned, occur several times. They all three have the same force, being translations of the same word, which is most nearly expressed by the word reckoned. "Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness." That is, Abraham was reckoned righteous or held to be righteous by God, in virtue of his faith. The little word "for" is apt to mislead, as it may suggest the idea of faith being a kind of substitute for righteousness, something which may be transmuted into righteousness. "Reckoned to him as righteousness," more nearly gives the sense. If you have a New Translation (J. N. Darby) with full notes, turn up this verse and consult the footnote as to the translation, which is very illuminating.

The argument of Romans 4, then, is that whether it be Abraham of old, or believers in Christ today, there is only one way by which we may be reckoned righteous before God, the great Judge of all; and that is, by faith without works. Without works, mark you! Not even the perfect works of Christ, everyone of them done in righteousness, come in here: another proof, if it were needed, that we are not made righteous by a certain quantity of His law-keeping being imputed to us. What does come in is His death and resurrection. This underlies the whole of the chapter, and is plainly expressed at the end. Read verse 25 and see.

That verse has been taken to mean that just as Jesus died because we were sinners, so He was raised again because we had been justified in His death. Is this a correct view of it?

You have but to read on into Romans 5 to find that it is not correct. Our chapter divisions are sometimes not natural but artificial, breaking into the middle of a paragraph. This is a case in point. He "was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God."

The interpretation you mention presents our justification as an accomplished fact when Jesus died, and His resurrection to be the consequence of it. But this entirely eliminates our faith from the question; and our faith cannot be eliminated thus, in view of the first verse of chapter 5. His death was in view of our sins, and is the basis of our justification; but that is another matter.

His resurrection was, in the first place, the declaration of the blessed fact, that He who stooped under the weight of God's judgment against sin, is for ever clear of it. In the second place, it was in view of the clearance of all who believe in Him.

This we have just been enforcing and illustrating. He was delivered to death with our sins in view: He was raised again with our justification in view. But the justification of each individual only becomes effective as and when they believe.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Redemption.

Redemption.

F. B. Hole.

Not only has sin plunged us into guilt, and brought us face to face with condemnation, but it has entangled us in bondage of a very fearful sort; a bondage from which we are utterly unable to extricate ourselves.

Then, as regards the Gospel, not only does it proclaim forgiveness in relation to our guilt, and justification instead of condemnation, but it reveals to us God, acting as a Redeemer, delivering His people from bondage, and thereby freeing His inheritance from all the encumbrances under which formerly it lay.

There is a good deal about redemption in the Old Testament, and one of the words used for it has the meaning, it is said, of, "freeing, whether by avenging or repaying."

In Exodus we find the great type of redemption. To the children of Israel, who were just downtrodden slaves, Jehovah said, "I will redeem you with a stretched-out arm, and with great judgments" (Ex. 6: 6). So this was clearly a case of redemption by avenging their wrongs upon Egypt; though we also see the repayment of what they owed to God as sinners in the steed blood of the lamb. When all was effectively accomplished we find Israel on the further banks of the Red Sea, singing, "Thou in Thy mercy hast led forth Thy people which Thou hast redeemed" (Ex. 15: 13).

A striking illustration of redemption is given to us in the book of Ruth. Boaz redeemed Elimelech's inheritance by payment, and this involved the raising up of the name of the dead by the taking of Ruth. Boaz took both to himself — the wife and the inheritance — by right of redemption.

Both in the type and in the illustration bondage of one sort or another was in question. In the type, Israel were in sore bondage under Pharaoh, and again and again in reference to them Egypt is called, "the house of bondage." In the illustration, the inheritance of the dead Elimelech was in danger of passing into other hands, and the widow and daughter-in-law of lapsing into a condition of servitude. This disaster was averted by the action of Boaz as their kinsman-redeemer.

Turning to the New Testament, we find that redemption as well as justification is mentioned in Romans 3. We are said to be, "justified . . . through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." This serves to emphasize an important point; namely, that these different aspects of the work of Christ and its effects are most intimately connected, so that we cannot have one without the other. Yet, though never to be divided the one from the other, they are clearly to be distinguished. The earlier part of Romans 3 has brought before us not only the guilt and condemnation of sin, but also its bondage. The word itself is not actually used until chapter 8 is reached, yet the idea is there, for the Apostle says, "We have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin." To be "under sin" is to be under the power of it, that is, to be in bondage to it. Christ has done the great work which avails to pay off all the liabilities under which we lay, and thus redemption is in Him for us.

If we read on through the Epistle to the Romans, we discover, in Romans 6, 7 and the early part of 8, how we are actually set free from the tyranny of sin and the yoke of the law; all of which had proved us to be in "the bondage of corruption." This phrase is actually used in Romans 8: 21, where we learn that the whole earthly creation lies under its thrall, but that all shall be delivered and brought into "the liberty of the glory of the children of God." When the Lord comes and the children of God stand forth in their glory, then there will be proclaimed a jubilee of liberty for all creation.

For that moment we wait, and in verse 23 it is said that for us it will be, "the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." Here again redemption appears, since the point in question is deliverance from bondage; and the redemption of our bodies is presented to us as a freedom gained by avenging, as it says, "I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction" (Hosea 13: 14). This scripture is alluded to and applied to the resurrection of the body in 1 Corinthians 15: 55. In that glad day the bodies of all God's saints will be delivered from the grip of death, the last enemy.

The redemption work of Christ also comes rather prominently before us in the Epistle to the Galatians. We read that, "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law" (Gal. 3: 13), and this was by paying the price on our behalf, for it adds, "being made a curse for us."

But not only did we lie under the curse of the law but the law itself held us in bondage. We were "in bondage under the elements of the world" (Gal. 4: 3). Lower down in the chapter, Paul speaks of, "the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage" (Gal. 4: 9). The word translated "elements" has the force of "principles," and is so translated in Hebrews 5: 12. We may at first be inclined to wonder that such terms as these — almost contemptuous terms — should be applied to the law, which was given of God, but the "we" of Galatians 4: 3, clearly indicates Jews, just as the "ye" of verse 6 indicates the Galatian Gentiles. Both were under bondage to the principles of the world. The law of Moses made no difference as to this. It brought in the demands of God, but they were to be met according to the principles of the world. The root principle of the law was that the favour which men were to receive from God was to be wholly determined by what they rendered to Him in obedience. This is altogether a principle of the world, whereas grace is not. There was no bringing in of principles which lie outside the world altogether, as is the case in Christianity.

From the principles of the world, whether found in Judaism or elsewhere, weak and beggarly as they are, Christ has redeemed us that we might receive the adoption of sons. Such is the mighty grace of God.

Redemption, as we have seen, extends even to the resurrection of the body, and this side of the matter we again find in the Epistle to the Ephesians. While we read of, "redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins" (Eph. 1: 7), we also read of the earnest of the Spirit being, "until the redemption of the purchased possession" (Eph. 1: 14), and of our being, "sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4: 30). The first of these passages speaks of that which is ours today, and which never will be more ours than it is to-day. The second and third speak of redemption in a form for which we wait. All that Christ has bought by His death shall be taken from beneath the sway of the usurper and of every adverse power. As far as our bodies are concerned the moment will arrive at the coming of the Lord Jesus for His saints. That having taken place, the Lord will set His hand to the work of redeeming by power from the hand of the enemy all the rest of the possession which. He purchased by His blood.

This coming redemption by power is a great theme of Old Testament prophecy. It is particularly prominent in the latter part of Isaiah. Israel needed redemption for he was being trodden down by the Gentiles and hence is addressed as "thou worm Jacob;" and Jehovah announces Himself as, "thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel" (Isa. 41: 14). Having introduced Himself in this light, He continues to speak of Himself as Redeemer until Isaiah 63 is reached, where the prophet sees Him in vision, coming forth from Edom and Bozrah, because at last, as He says "The day of vengeance is in Mine heart, and the year of My redeemed is come." The redemption of the true Israel of God means vengeance upon all their foes.

Yet in the midst of these striking chapters with their many promises of a coming redemption by means of the avenging might of God, we get a most marvellous prediction concerning the yet deeper matter of redemption by means of the death of Christ. We read, "Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and ye shall be redeemed without money" (Isa. 52: 3). This is followed by the heart-moving chapter wherein the blessed Servant of Jehovah is portrayed as the suffering, dying One, whose soul is made an offering for sin by Jehovah Himself. The Redeemer is going to "come to Zion, and to them that turn from transgression in Jacob;" (Isa. 59: 20), but this is only possible inasmuch as He has first redeemed them without money as the result of the travail of His soul.

It is to this scripture perhaps that Peter referred when he wrote, "Ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold . . . but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Peter 1: 18-19). Isaiah 52 speaks of our being "redeemed without money." Isaiah 53 of the One who "had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth," and yet "He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter" for our redemption.

We sometimes hear people speak of "the finished work of redemption." Is it quite correct to speak thus in view of the fact that we still wait for the redemption of our bodies?

Not quite correct, no doubt. But when people speak thus they are probably dwelling in their minds exclusively upon the work of redemption by blood. That part of the great work is indeed finished, and never to be repeated. Propitiation has been made once and for ail, so when it is a question of that, or of forgiveness, or of justification, there is no future aspect to be considered. But there is a future aspect of redemption, as we have seen. And it is well to remember that, and to speak with care lest we obscure the finishing touches which are to be given to the work of redemption in the days to come.

On the other hand, seeing there is this future aspect of redemption, is it quite right if we speak of ourselves as having been redeemed? Ought we not rather to speak of ourselves as being redeemed?

"We have redemption through His blood." So says the Scripture twice over — in Ephesians 1 and Colossians 1. Therefore we cannot be wrong if we say with all boldness that we have it. But it is through His blood, you notice. Redemption, in that aspect of it, is wholly in the past. The redemption of our bodies is wholly in the future. But redemption is never presented in Scripture as a process which is going on. It is never said that we are being redeemed day by day, though there is such a thing as day-by-day salvation.

Is it not a rather uncomfortable doctrine that redemption, a certain part of it at least, lies in the future? Might there not be a loophole here for just a little uncertainty to creep in?

If redemption were a human work, or if even a small human element entered the question, there would be uncertainty right enough — not just a little creeping in, but floods of it sweeping everything before them. We may well thank God that it is a work not human but Divine. God never leaves His work uncompleted: this we may see in the history of the typical redemption which He wrought in Egypt. He did not redeem the children of Israel by the blood of the Paschal lamb and then forget them, so that they remained under the taskmasters of Egypt. No. All those whom He redeemed by blood He also redeemed by His mighty power clean out of Egypt. Each, down to the youngest child, had to go; not even a hoof was to be left behind. God will complete His work concerning us. Every one redeemed by the precious blood of Christ will be there when at His second coming He redeems the bodies of His saints.

Is redemption the great end that God has in view for His people?

No. It is not the end in view, but rather the all-important means to that end. In the old dispensation the purpose that God had in view was that Israel should be His own peculiar nation, serving Him in the land He had given them. He had to redeem them out of Egypt in order that this might be brought to pass, for they could not serve Him so long as they were in servitude to Pharaoh. In our case the end in view is of a much higher order.

It is His purpose that we should be sons before Him in love. Ephesians 1: 5-7 speaks of this; and we find that redemption is necessary as a means to that end. Colossians 1 shows that we are made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light; and again redemption is mentioned as necessary for this. Peter, in his first epistle, instructs us that God purposes to have us as a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to Him by Jesus Christ; but as a preliminary to this he speaks of our having been redeemed by the precious blood of Christ.

Other scriptures to the same effect might be cited. God has many thoughts for us His people, but their fulfilment is only possible upon the basis of redemption. First we must be redeemed from every adverse power. Then God has His way with us to carry out His bright designs.

The book of Ruth shows us that in Israel only certain kinsmen had the right of redemption. Has this any significance for us?

Undoubtedly it has. To purchase was one thing — anyone might do that: to redeem was another. The nearest kinsman had the first right, but one had to be a kinsman to have any right of redemption at all. There is no kinship between angels and men: hence no angel could redeem a man even if he had possessed the power to do so. The Lord Jesus did not become an angel; He became a Man and thereby established that kinship which qualified Him to become our Kinsman-Redeemer. How important then is the true Manhood of our Lord.

Hebrews 2 does not contain the word redeem. But it tells us that He did not take hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham, when He undertook through death to annul him that had the power of death and deliver us — that is, to accomplish our redemption.

We read in Ephesians 1: 14 of "the redemption of the purchased possession." Should we then draw a distinction between purchase and redemption?

We believe that we should. We might put it in this way — redemption involves purchase, but purchase very often has nothing to do with redemption. Believers are said to be "bought with a price" (1 Cor. 6: 20). But false teachers will go so far as "denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction" (2 Peter 2: 1). The buying of believers involves their redemption. The buying of the false teachers, who go to destruction, did not involve their redemption; had it done so destruction would not be their end. By His death the Lord Jesus has acquired purchase rights over all things, even where He has not redeemed them.

In Ephesians 1: 14 however the point is not exactly this, but rather that what He has purchased by His death He will ultimately redeem by His power from every adverse force. It is really the distinction between redemption by blood and redemption by power.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Reconciliation.

Reconciliation.

F. B. Hole.

A number of different words have been employed by the Spirit of God to convey to us the far-reaching effects of the work of Christ. Reconciliation is one of them, and it possesses great definiteness of meaning. It carries us further into the positive blessings of the Gospel than do justification or redemption. The very idea it expresses belongs to the New Testament.

At first sight this hardly appears to be the case. A good concordance (such as "Young's") shows us that the word occurs nine times in the Old Testament; but on closer inspection we discover that in seven of these it is used to translate the ordinary word for "atonement." In one case it is used for a word that has to do with offering or receiving a sin offering. The remaining occurrence of the word comes nearer to the New Testament meaning (in 1 Samuel 29: 4), but there God is not n question.

In the New Testament there are three passages that deal with reconciliation — Romans 5, 2 Corinthians 5, Colossians 1 — and there is also a reference to it in Ephesians 2.

Justification is needed by us because of the guilt of sin and the condemnation thereby incurred. Redemption is needed because of the bondage which sin has produced. Reconciliation to God we must have because one of the gravest effects of sin has been the way it has alienated us from God, producing utter estrangement of heart on our side. The word "alienated" occurs in Colossians 1: 21, where it stands in full contrast to the fact that we now have been reconciled. We shall better understand the fulness of the reconciliation if we begin by grasping the full tragedy of the alienation.

One other passage refers to the state of alienation into which man has fallen — Ephesians 4: 18. We get right to the bottom of things when we discover that we have been "alienated from the life of God." Connected with this alienation are such things as vanity, darkness, ignorance, blindness, lasciviousness, uncleanness. This is not surprising for the life of God is the exact opposite of all these things. Sin, having alienated us from God, has cut us off from all the things that go to make up life according to Him.

Alienated from God, we have naturally no desire for Him, nor for the light and life that His presence brings. This came out most clearly directly sin had entered and the alienation had come to pass. Genesis 3 bears witness to it; the action of Adam and his wife plainly declared it. Directly the voice of the Lord God was heard in the garden they hid themselves. God did not instantly destroy them. He dealt with them in mercy; still they had erected a barrier between themselves and Him which nothing on their side could surmount, and which He ratified by placing a barrier on His side in the shape of cherubim and a flaming sword.

Sin thus spoiled the Divine pleasure in man. To say this puts the matter too mildly. We have only to turn on to Genesis 6 to find that, mankind having been given sufficient time in which to develop their sinful propensities, an utterly unbearable state of affairs was produced, so that, "it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart." At the end of Genesis 2 everything, man included, was pronounced to be "very good." Once man had been very good in the Divine eye, now he was a perfect grief to contemplate. The alienation was complete.

And it was complete on man's side also. God had become as distasteful to man as man had become to God. The latter part of Romans 1 unfolds the dreadful story of man's alienation from God. The sunken state of mankind is attributable to this, "they did not like to retain God in their knowledge" (verse 28). Romans 3 corroborates this by telling us that, "there is none that seeketh after God." When we get to Romans 5 it is plainly stated that when the reconciliation reached us we were "enemies."

Here we must carefully draw a distinction. On our side the alienation was not only in life but in heart also. On God's side the alienation in life was felt far more acutely than ever we could feel it, but there was no alienation in heart. In other words while we as sinners hated God, He never hated us. Had He hated us He could have just damned us, and left it at that. Instead of which He has Himself made available for us the reconciliation; a reconciliation brought to pass at so great a cost as "the death of His Son."

The Lord Jesus came into the world in the spirit of reconciliation. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Cor. 5: 19). This characterized His life and ministry. Not judgment but forgiveness was His work; and even where guilt was most pronounced and manifest, He did not impute it: see for instance John 8: 11, and Luke 23: 34. All that God could do was done by Him, yet every overture was rejected by men and He was crucified. But it was just then that God's reconciling mercy registered its most signal triumph.

Then it was that God "made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Now it is evident that if we are made in Christ — in the Christ who died and rose again — the very righteousness of God, there can be no longer before Him that which is obnoxious and distasteful to Him. It cannot be any longer a grief to His heart to look down upon us, but the exact reverse. Christ was identified with us and our sin under the judgment of God. We are identified with Him and His acceptance as risen from the dead.

In Colossians 1: 21, 22, the same truth is stated, but in other words. We have been reconciled "in the body of His flesh through death," for He became a Man, thereby possessing Himself of the body of His flesh, in order that He might die. As the result of reconciliation we can now be presented "holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight."

"In the body of His flesh" may seem a rather peculiar expression, but a similar form of words occurs elsewhere; Romans 7: 4; Ephesians 2: 15; Hebrews 10: 10 and 20. If we understand the matter aright, the thought is that the Lord Jesus in His grace identified Himself with our place and condition in assuming Manhood apart from sin, so that He might lay down His life, presenting His sacred body as a sacrifice for sin; and then take up life again in resurrection, in which life believers may now be identified with Him. His death was thus the judgment and judicial ending of the old order; His resurrection the real beginning of the new.

This mighty change then has been brought about for us "in the body of His flesh through death;" and consequently our whole standing before God is manifestly altered. Once we were exactly in the position of fallen Adam, and nothing could be worse than that, nothing more repugnant to God. Now, being in Christ, we have the position that is Christ's as risen from the dead, and nothing could be better, nothing more delightful, more pleasing to God than that. This is what we may call God's side of reconciliation; the work which He has Himself effected in the death of Christ. It is perfect and absolute; accomplished for us, accomplished for ever. It is work of a new creation order, as 2 Corinthians 5: 17 shows.

But there is our side of the matter which had equally to be met. It was we who were "alienated and enemies in mind by wicked works," and consequently there had to be a complete and fundamental change of mind and attitude as regards God with every one of us. There was no need that His heart should be turned towards us, but there was every need that our hearts should be turned towards Him. Hence the Gospel was committed to the Apostles as "the word of reconciliation." They carried on that ministry as "ambassadors for Christ," praying men "in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5: 19, 20). When we believed the Gospel, the ministry of reconciliation became effective with us, and it could be said, "we have now received the reconciliation" (Rom. 5: 11, margin). As the fruit of having received the reconciliation we "joy in God," whereas formerly we feared and even hated Him.

We may sum up, then, this most blessed truth by saying that everything about us which was obnoxious to God and deserving of judgment has been judged in the death of Christ; and as the fruit of reconciliation we stand in a perfect acceptance before Him. His work it is, for "He hath made us accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1: 6). Christ's acceptance is the measure of our acceptance: and the measure of His acceptance may be discerned in the title given to Him — "the BELOVED." And further, since we do not believe the Gospel apart from the work of the Spirit in us, by which new birth is effected, we receive the reconciliation in believing. Our thoughts Godward are altogether altered; the enmity that once filled our hearts is removed, and we joy in Him. A new day has dawned in which He can look down upon us with complacency, and we look up in answering love to Him.

We can now see more clearly perhaps how reconciliation does carry us more fully into the positive blessings of the Gospel. As forgiven, we know that our sins have been dismissed. As justified, that we have been cleared from all charge. As redeemed, that our days of slavery are over. But as reconciled, we have full entrance into the wealth of the favour and love of God. It is the introduction into blessing of the highest order.

An old hymn states the matter thus:

"My God is reconciled,

His pardoning voice I hear."

that is hardly in keeping with what we have been seeing, is it?

It is not. It was we who needed to be reconciled. It was God who did the reconciling through the Lord Jesus Christ. But though this is so, we must not overlook the fact that God had to be propitiated in regard to sin. The publican of our Lord's parable knew this, for he said, "God be merciful [propitiated] to me a sinner" (Luke 18: 13). God had to be propitiated inasmuch as sin was an outrageous challenge to His righteousness and holiness. He never hated us however. His heart was not estranged from man, for had it been He would never have sent His Son to be the propitiation, which was needed to meet the claims of His righteousness and holiness.

Do we understand then that reconciliation has more to do with our state before God than with the guilt of our sins?

It certainly has. It is worthy of note how the fact of our enmity comes into view when reconciliation is in question. The passage in 2 Corinthians 5 is an exception to this, but even here enmity, though not mentioned, is inferred, for it says, "old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." Old things are passed away wherever new creation comes to pass, though they are very much in evidence in the world at present. As new creation beings we are reconciled to God. Nevertheless we must not overlook the fact that "the blood of His cross" is the basis of the reconciliation, for it was there that sin met its judgment, and everything in us that was offensive and obnoxious to God was condemned. Our guilt is not overlooked, but even here it is more a question of the judgment of our sinful state than the expiation of our innumerable sins.

Why then, in Hebrews 2: 17, do we read of Christ as "a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people"?

Simply because the translators of the Authorized Version inserted here the wrong word. It is "to make propitiation for the sins of the people," as the Revised and other versions show. Under the law Aaron the high priest made atonement by sprinkling the blood of the sacrifice on the mercy-seat. The Lord Jesus has fulfilled the type, but on an infinitely grander scale. It is an interesting fact that in the Old Testament the word for "mercy-seat" is one closely allied to the word for atonement; whereas the word in the New Testament is as closely allied to propitiation. This shews that the propitiation of the New Testament embodies the idea of atonement, yet going beyond it. Reconciliation is to be distinguished from both, though not to be disconnected from either.

We have been dwelling on the fact that believers are reconciled now. What about the reconciliation of all things, spoken of in Colossians 1: 20?

That far-reaching reconciliation is coming in its season. You will notice that the verse limits the blessing to "things in earth, or things in heaven." The "things under the earth," of Philippians 2: 10, who are to bow at the name of Jesus, are not mentioned here. The blight of sin has affected certain parts of the heavens, through the fall of angelic beings. Wherever sin has been, there reconciliation is needed. A time is coming in which all that is evil will be swept into the place of judgment, there to lie under God's fiery indignation; and then all things purged and reconciled both on earth and in heaven will be delightful to God, and themselves delight in God.

The blood of His cross, that has already brought us into reconciliation, has power and value to accomplish even this.

There seems to be a sense in which the world is already reconciled, according to Romans 11: 15, What does that passage mean?

The whole passage has to be read and carefully considered if we would arrive at the Apostle's thought. He is discussing God's ways with Israel as a nation, showing how they have been set aside for the present in order that He may pursue His purpose of extending mercy to Gentiles. Throughout the dispensation of law, God concentrated His favour and His dealings exclusively upon Israel: they were in the light of His countenance, and the nations were left in their darkness — the darkness which they had chosen for themselves, according to Romans 1: 21. But with the advent of Christ and His rejection by Israel a great change in God's ways came to pass. Israel is fallen from their place of national favour, and this has led to what is called "the riches of the world," in verse 12, and to "the reconciling of the world," in verse 15.

The "world" here has evidently the force of the Gentile world as distinguished from Israel. The reconciling has been brought to pass by the change in God's dealings which has led Him to set Israel aside from their special place of national favour, and to bring the Gentile world before Him for blessing. Formerly the position was that the Gentiles had deliberately turned their faces from God, and He had turned His from them. Now He has turned toward them; and as Paul elsewhere said, "The salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles, and . . . they will hear it" (Acts 28: 28). This dispensational reconciliation has taken place and Paul was the chosen servant, sent to offer salvation to the Gentile world.

Does the reconciliation which we receive today involve more than this?

Most evidently it does. When we receive it we "joy in God," as we are told in Romans 5: 11. This is a thing which the world cannot do, in spite of the fact that the mercy of God is active towards it in connection with the Gospel. When God gave His only-begotten Son He had the world in view' and love to the world was behind the gift. This dispensational reconciliation brings to all the ministry of reconciliation, of which 2 Corinthians 5 speaks; and that is not dispensational but intensely vital. Believers are really brought to God in righteousness and love, with every stain and discord removed, and every fear banished for ever.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Salvation

Salvation

F. B. Hole.

We now come to a word of very large meaning, so large indeed that it may be used in a sense that covers other gospel words such as justification, redemption, reconciliation. An instance of the large meaning which may be attached to it is found in Hebrews 2: 3, where the mighty intervention of God on man's behalf, which first began to be spoken by the Lord Himself, is spoken of as "so great salvation." In Acts 13: 26, the Apostle Paul speaks of "the word of this salvation," using the term in just the same broad sense. So also in Ephesians 1: 13, the whole deliverance which has reached us, in all its parts, is summed up in that one word. The Gospel which announces that mighty deliverance is, "the Gospel of our salvation." It is with this large meaning that we use the word in the title of this book.

Salvation is largely spoken of in both Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament it is nearly always salvation from enemies that is before us, as Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, stated. In his prophecy he declared that the holy prophets, raised up since the world began, had said that Israel should be saved from their enemies and from the hand of all that hate them. (See Luke 1: 70, 71). The New Testament in its very first chapter speaks of Jesus saving "His people from their sins" (Matt. 1: 21). This at once lifts the whole matter on to a much higher platform.

But, whether in the Old or the New, the very fact that salvation is offered infers that those to whom it is offered are in peril of some sort: they are in danger of perishing. Indeed in 1 Corinthians l: 18, the contrast is drawn between "them that perish, and "us, which are saved;" and the same contrast in almost exactly the same words appears again in 2 Corinthians 2: 15: Again we read, "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19: 10). "Lord save us: we perish," was the cry of the disciples when in the storm on the lake of Galilee. It was only a matter of temporal deliverance, but then it was only in view of temporal danger Salvation and perishing are clearly directly opposed as to their meaning.

As guilty, we need forgiveness. As under condemnation, we need justification. As having lapsed into bondage, we need redemption. As enemies in our minds by wicked works, utterly alienated from God, we need reconciliation. As lost and perishing, it is salvation we need.

When we considered ourselves as guilty or condemned, we had a perfectly crisp and definite thought before our minds. We saw ourselves arraigned at the bar of God. We stood, as it were, in a criminal court, charged with our sins. The thought was equally definite when we thought of ourselves as being in bondage to sin and Satan or as being alienated from God. Sin now appeared to us as a taskmaster on the one hand, and as a dark cloud, shutting us out from God, on the other.

But now we have to consider ourselves as lost, as threatened by innumerable dangers both present and future, and consequently in danger of perishing. We cannot deal with this matter in quite the same crisp way. But what we have lost in definiteness we have more than made up in largeness and breadth of thought. God's salvation is a deliverance from every peril which in the past or present or future could possibly threaten us.

Still, though there is this comprehensiveness of meaning about the word, we must not miss the fact that it always carries the thought of deliverance from peril; and inasmuch as sin lies at the root of every peril that threatens us, the New Testament very appropriately opens with salvation from sins. This salvation is not merely from the penalty of sins, but from the power of sins, and even from the love of them. The Gospel does not offer an exemption from sin's penalty while leaving us free to continue under the power of sin, or in the enjoyment of sin's temporary pleasures. Were it to do so, it would be no true salvation, for it would just encourage us to continue in sin: which God forbid!

Yet again and again we find in Scripture that salvation does mean exemption or deliverance from the wrath of God. The Gospel is "the power of God unto salvation, to every one that believeth . . . for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven" (Rom. 1: 16-18). A little later in the same epistle we read, "We shall be saved from wrath through Him" (Rom. 5: 9). Again we read, "God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. 5: 9). And yet again in 2 Thessalonians 2: 12, 13, we find that salvation is put in direct contrast with damnation.

The fact is that the Old Testament has as its chief theme the dealings of God with Israel His people in view of the coming of the Messiah. Hence the consequences of sin as regards God's governmental actings are mainly in view. When Israel sinned, God in His government brought up enemies against them, and when they repented He saved them. The New Testament brings into view the eternal consequences of sin, and the way in which every individual soul of man is subject to God's judgment and the infliction of wrath from heaven. From that wrath we are saved.

It is in this connection that salvation may be spoken of as a past and completed thing, so that believers can speak of themselves as, "us, which are saved." The Lord Jesus is our Deliverer from the wrath to come, and we can never be more secure than we are to-day, before the wrath actually falls. Yet when we speak of ourselves as saved the emphasis seems mainly to lie on the fact that once we were engulfed in every kind of evil and defilement and now we are rescued out of it all. "We ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another. But . . . He saved us" (Titus 3: 3-5).

It is very evident however, that though we can speak of God as the One who "hath saved us," (2 Tim. 1: 9), we are still in a world that is full of seductions, with the treacherous flesh within us, and Satan the astute adversary without. Hence we need salvation daily — salvation of practically a continuous sort. Scripture speaks very plainly of this present salvation. The Lord Jesus is living in heaven as our High Priest to minister it to us. He is able to "save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Heb. 7: 25).

The present salvation, which we need and get as believers, is of course based upon the death of Christ, but it actually reaches us by His priestly activities on our behalf as He lives for us on high. We are being "saved by His life" (Rom. 5: 10); and inasmuch as He ever lives we shall be saved to the uttermost. We shall be saved completely, to the extremes" point of time; to the moment when the last foe has disappeared, and we are beyond the need of any further salvation forever.

In order that we may enjoy this practical, everyday salvation we are granted the instruction which is furnished by the Word of God. The Holy Scriptures are able to make us "wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 3: 15). The next verse speaks of the Scriptures being profitable not only for teaching but also "for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." This shows the kind of salvation that was in Paul's mind when he wrote, and emphasizes the great part which the Scriptures play in our daily salvation.

When Paul wrote these words he of course alluded to the Old Testament Scriptures, which Timothy had known from his childhood. They abound with salutary warnings for us, and if we heed them we shall be saved from a thousand snares and dangers. We need hardly add that what Paul asserts of the Old Testament is equally true of the New, which some of us have been privileged to know from our youth.

We might sum up the matter as regards this daily and present salvation by saying it is ours as the result of Christ's High Priestly intercession, and of our having the Word of God, coupled with the possession of the Holy Spirit, whereby we may understand it and accept its instructions and its warnings.

There remains a further group of Scriptures that clearly speak of salvation as a future thing. It is our hope, and is to be worn "for an helmet" (1 Thess. 5: 8). Our hope of salvation will be realized at the second advent of Christ. It is true that He is coming as the Judge, but we do not look for Him in that character. For us it is written, "We look for the Saviour . . . who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body" (Phil. 3: 20, 21). Hence it is that we are left here to "look for Him" when He shall "appear the second time without sin, unto salvation" (Heb. 9: 28).

This future salvation altogether depends upon the crowning act of mercy which will reach us as the last delivering act of the Lord Jesus on our behalf. It will involve the raising of the dead saints, and the catching away of the living saints before the full storm of God's righteous wrath breaks on the earth. Then all of us — both dead and living — are to be found forever with Christ in bodies of glory like to His own. This will be the final thing. Salvation as regards ourselves will be absolutely completed.

The Philippians were bidden by Paul, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." How do you reconcile this injunction with what we have had before us?

A long passage leads up to this injunction. If we want to get an idea of the context we have to go back as far as Philippians 1: 27. The Philippian believers were threatened by adversaries without and dissension within. The close of Philippians 1 alludes to the one. The opening of Philippians 2 alludes to the other. The former is easily disposed of: to meet the latter the whole weight of the matchless example of Christ has to be brought in. And then the Apostle himself was no longer present for their help, for he was in a Roman prison.

Under these circumstances they were to show their spiritual mettle and work out their salvation from the threatening dangers: but not as being cast upon their own resources, for "it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure" (ver. 13). If the next three verses were fulfilled in them, they would indeed have worked out their salvation.

A present, daily salvation is in question: and our side of the matter is emphasized here. The Divine side must come first — the Priesthood of Christ, the work of God in us by His Spirit, the instruction and correction of His Word. But the human side has its importance. We have to diligently avail ourselves of the grace that God provides.

On the day of Pentecost Peter exhorted the anxious enquirers saying, "Save yourselves from this untoward generation;" and those who received his word were baptized. In his first Epistle he again speaks of baptism as saving us. What is this salvation which baptism effects?

It is salvation from "this untoward generation," as Peter said. Another translation puts it, "Be saved from this perverse generation." Now baptism is, in one word, dissociation. It is only an outward ordinance, yet it has a meaning: and that is its meaning. It is based upon the death and resurrection of Christ, for we are "baptized into His death, " (Rom. 6: 3), and so we are "buried with Him" (Col. 2: 12). Nothing more effectively dissociates us from the present order of things, cutting our links with the world, than death and burial.

The particular point that Peter makes, both in his sermon and his epistle, is that baptism cut the link between the repentant and believing Jews and the unrepentant and unbelieving mass of that nation. That lies upon the surface of Acts 2, and is involved, we believe, in 1 Peter 3: 21; for his epistle was addressed to believing Jews. He tells them that baptism is a "like figure" unto the waters of the flood that of old cut the link between believing Noah with his house and the world of the ungodly. Noah and his house had been saved "by" or "through" the water from the ruin and death that came in upon the godless earth. Those to whom Peter wrote had been saved through baptism from the godless mass of their nation. They suffered much from the ungodly mass but they were saved from their fate, whether in this life, at the destruction of Jerusalem, or in  the world to come.

When a big ship is sinking, it is not enough to let down small boats by ropes and then get into them. Unless the ropes are cut there will be no salvation. Baptism cuts the ropes, and in that sense saves.

"He that shall endure unto the end the same shall be saved." In the light of this is it not premature to speak of ourselves as saved, while we are still on our way to the end?

It certainly would be, IF these words of our Lord referred to the way in which sinful men might receive the salvation of their souls. These words however, which occur in the course of His prophetic discourse recorded in Matthew 24, and Mark 13, do not refer to that. The Lord was not addressing sinners but men who already had been brought into relationship with Himself — His disciples. At that moment they were representative of the chosen remnant of Israel, who will be found on earth at the time of the end.

"The end" in this passage is not the end of this or that individual life, but the end of the whole time of persecution, trial and sorrow, which end will be brought about by the second coming of Christ. Endurance is the supreme virtue which is to mark these saints, for their salvation is sure when Christ appears.

That is the primary bearing of this passage; but there are of course many profitable applications of it which we may make for ourselves. However to apply it so as to teach that one cannot be really sure of salvation until one dies is not one of them.

Why is "confession with the mouth" so definitely connected with salvation in Romans 10: 10?

Because salvation is a term of such wide meaning, and includes deliverance from the world, amongst other things. We believe on Christ as risen from the dead with our hearts, and that means our justification before God. Both these however — the faith and the justification — are not observable by men. Our salvation is observable, for it is not so much a judicial fact as a practical fact — we are really saved from the power of world, flesh, and devil. The very first step towards a salvation of such a sort must be the confession of Christ as Lord, made with the mouth so that men may hear it. A silent confession of Christ in the mind — just thinking it — obviously would not do.

The distinction made in this passage between the faith of the heart leading to righteousness and the confession of the mouth leading to salvation is very striking. It greatly helps to show the special force of salvation.

Is that why Cornelius, God-fearing man though he was, needed Peter to come to him that he might be saved? He was told that Peter "shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved."

No doubt it was so. Until Peter arrived with the Gospel message concerning the risen Christ, Cornelius could not believe in his heart that God had raised Him from the dead. Again, if he had thought of Him in any sense as Lord, it would doubtless have been as Lord of the children of Israel. Peter preached Him in the house of Cornelius as "Lord of all."

Cornelius had turned from his heathenism to the fear of God very sincerely; but salvation came to him when he believed on and confessed the risen Christ as Lord.

You do not wish us to understand then that salvation is a higher order of Christian blessing into which we may come subsequent to conversion? — so that, for instance, a man might be forgiven yet not saved.

Such a deduction as that from the case of Cornelius would be quite unwarranted. Yet we must not miss the instruction conveyed by the fact that though he had the fear of God, and faith in Him, and even knew certain facts about Christ's ministry on earth, he was not saved until he heard and believed the glad tidings of the risen Christ and forgiveness in His Name. Then it was that he was delivered clean out of the old world system which had held him and was brought to God.

Almost all that we have been considering is in connection with what we are saved from. What are we saved to?

We are saved to every blessing that is ours in Christ. And yet, if we carefully follow Scripture phraseology, salvation is mostly, if not always, connected with what we are delivered from; and if it is a question of what we are brought to the word used is "calling." God has "saved us, and called us with an holy calling" (2 Tim. 1: 9).

Israel was saved out of Egypt in order that they might enjoy the land to which God called them. We are saved from the world, the flesh, the devil, and the wrath of God which is to come, in order that we may enjoy God's call to the place of sons and share the coming glory of Christ. The salvation which is ours in Christ is a very mighty and wonderful thing; and thereby we are liberated to enjoy our calling. Yet all those things to which we are called according to the sovereign purpose of God are more wonderful still.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Sanctification.

Sanctification.

F. B. Hole.

The Scriptures have a good deal to say to us as to sanctification, in the Old Testament as well as in the New; and wherever we find it the word has the fundamental meaning of a separation, or a setting apart. In the Old Testament the word is freely used of things as well as persons. In the New Testament it is mainly, though not exclusively, used of persons; and as applying to believers it has a double significance — a primary meaning and a secondary. The trouble with so many is that the secondary meaning has obliterated the primary in their minds. Hence the difficulties which they feel in relation to this important subject.

The sanctification of believers means to many people, perhaps to most, a process by which they are made more and more holy and pleasing to God; whereas its primary meaning is that by an act of God they have been set apart for Himself, and according to this their growth in holiness becomes a necessity.

The root idea of the word then, whether we take its Old or New Testament use, is that of setting apart for God. A sanctified person or thing is one set apart from ordinary uses to be for God's own possession and use and enjoyment. In contra-distinction to sanctification stands profanation. The priest of Aaron's time was not to "defile himself . . . to profane himself" (Lev. 21: 4). The priests of the coming millennial day are to "teach My people the difference between the holy and profane" (Ezek. 44: 23). The very word used there means "common or polluted," and of course it is just when a thing is put to common use that it does get polluted. That is easily seen in connection with the ordinary affairs of life. When a piece of ground is thrown open freely to the public it becomes a "common," and at once rules must be made to keep it decent. Left to itself it would soon become more or less of a rubbish heap.

In the primary sense of the word, every believer has been set apart for God. It is a fact of an absolute nature. We may speak of it as positional sanctification.

In the secondary sense, every believer is to be set apart for God. It is not positional but progressive sanctification.

The primary is an objective fact: the secondary is a subjective experience, which must always follow and flow out of the objective fact. Things are bound to get out of place and distorted in our minds, if we allow the subjective experience to eclipse the objective fact, as so many do.

If any of our readers are inclined to doubt what we have just laid down as to the primary meaning of the word, let them consider three facts.

(1) Inanimate things — altar, laver, vessels — were sanctified under the law. There could be no subjective change, no increase in holiness, in them. But they could be put in a separate position, wholly devoted to the service of God.

(2) The Lord Jesus Himself was "sanctified, and sent into the world" (John 10: 36); and again leaving the world He said, "I sanctify Myself" (John 17: 19). There could be no subjective change in Him — no sanctification in the progressive sense. Holiness of the most intense order, divine and absolute, was ever His. But He could be set apart by the Father for His mission as Revealer and Redeemer, and then sent into the world. Also, as leaving this world and entering the world of the Father's glory, He could set Himself apart in a new position as the pattern and power of the sanctification of His followers.

(3) The instruction comes to us, "Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts" (1 Peter 3: 15). Here too the only possible sense of "sanctify," is to set apart positionally. In our hearts we are to set the Lord God apart in a position altogether unique. He is to be exalted without a rival there.

Now as to ourselves we have to begin with this absolute and positional sanctification which is ours by the act of God. If we do not, we are sure to get defective, if not perverted, ideas of the practical and progressive sanctification which is to be ours, since the one flows out of the other. The practical sanctification expected is according to the character of the positional sanctification conferred.

The first mention of sanctification in the Bible is in connection with creation, when God sanctified the seventh day in which He rested (Gen. 2: 3); the second is in connection with redemption, when He brought Israel out of Egypt. Here persons were in question, for He said, "Sanctify unto Me all the firstborn" (Ex. 13: 2). Those who had been redeemed by blood were set apart for God positionally, and because they were, a very special manner of life became them, or rather became the Levites, who later on were substituted for them (see Num. 3: 45; Num. 8: 5-19).

The type, with which the book of Exodus furnishes us, is a very instructive one. In Exodus 12 the children of Israel are sheltered from judgment by the blood of the lamb, which foreshadows the forgiveness and justification which reaches us by the Gospel. In Exodus 15 they are brought right out of Egypt, the power of Pharaoh being broken, which illustrates salvation. Both chapters together foreshadow redemption. But in Exodus 13 we get sanctification. The people justified by blood are set apart for God; and because He claims them for Himself, He will brook no rival claim. He made good His claim against Pharaoh's claim. He broke the might of Egypt and, delivering His people, He brought them to Himself. All their later history had to be governed by this fact.

In all this God showed very plainly that when He intended to bless a people He would set them apart for Himself, instead of allowing them to be common, polluted profaned. They were sanctified to Himself.

How utterly man has been profaned by sin, His mind, his heart, the whole course of nature with him, has been overrun with every kind of evil. If grace sets itself to win him, he must, in the very nature of things, be set apart for God.

We begin then by laying hold of the great fact that we have been sanctified. Scripture is very definite and plain as to this point, and perhaps the most striking example it furnishes us with is the case of the Corinthians. Of all the Christians of the apostolic age, that we have any knowledge of, they stand out as the least marked by sanctification of a practical sort. Their behaviour was open to much censure, and they got it from the Apostle Paul in very plain language. Yet in his first epistle to them he calls them "saints," as "sanctified in Christ Jesus,'' (1 Cor. 1: 2). Later in the same epistle, after mentioning many of the abominations that filled the heathen world, he said, "And such were some of you: but . . . ye are sanctified" (1 Cor. 6: 11).

Nothing could be clearer than this. We do not become God's sanctified people by attaining to a certain standard of practical holiness. We are God's sanctified ones, and because of it, holiness, or practical sanctification, is incumbent upon us. If the former were God's way it would be according to the very principle of law. The latter is God's way and it is according to the principle of grace.

This absolute sanctification reaches us in a twofold way. In the first place it is by the work of Christ. "We are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. 10: 10). "Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered without the gate" (Heb. 13: 12). Believing in Him, we stand in the value of His offering and are thereby set apart for God just as fully as we are justified.

In the second place we are sanctified by the Holy Spirit. To the Thessalonians Paul wrote in his second epistle, "God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth" (2 Thess. 2: 13). Peter also wrote in his first epistle, "Elect . . . through sanctification of the Spirit" (1 Peter 1: 2). There are the workings of the Spirit in our hearts, culminating in the new birth of which we read in John 3, when "that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Then further, when the Gospel is received in faith the Spirit indwells the believer, sealing him until the day of redemption. By that seal the believer is marked off as belonging to God: he is sanctified as set apart for Him.

To the Corinthians Paul wrote in his first epistle, "Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us . . . sanctification" (1 Cor. 1: 30). We are set apart in Him, inasmuch as His was the blood shed for us, and also we have received the Spirit as the fruit of His work. We, as well as the Corinthians, have been, "sanctified . . . in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God" (1 Cor. 6: 11).

When once we have laid hold of the fact that we have been sanctified in this absolute sense we are prepared to face our responsibilities as to practical sanctification, which are based upon it. One of the requests for His own, uttered by the Lord, as recorded in John 17 was, "Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy Word is truth." Hence the importance of giving all due heed to the Word of God, for the more we really know it the more its sanctifying power is exerted in our lives.

"This is the will of God, even your sanctification," is what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 4: 3), showing that it is not something that is optional for the Christian, something to be pursued or avoided as fancy dictates. Moreover God Himself works it out for His saints, and it is all-embracing in its scope, for Paul went on to pray for them, "The very God of peace sanctify you wholly" (1 Thess. 5: 23). Everything about us is to come under the sanctifying touch of the God of peace.

But, on the other hand, there is our side of the matter. There are measures which we are to take for the promotion of it. We are to "shun" certain things; we are to "depart from iniquity;" we are to "purge" ourselves from vessels unto dishonour, who teach error of a sort that overthrows faith; then we may be vessels "unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the Master's use" (2 Tim. 2: 21).

In all these ways the practical work of sanctification progresses. Indeed it is the great work which the Lord is carrying on with His church; His object being to "sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word" (Eph. 5: 26). The work of sanctification and cleansing is taking place to-day in the individuals of whom the church is composed.

Again and again in the Scriptures we are exhorted to holiness. What is the difference between this and the sanctification we have been considering?

There is no real difference. The same Greek word is translated by both English words, and like sanctification holiness is spoken of (1) as positional and absolute, and (2) as practical and progressive. For instance, when we read, "Wherefore holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling . . ." (Heb. 3: 1), we are not to understand this to mean that they were far advanced in practical holiness, but that they were a people set apart for God as partaking in the heavenly calling. Hebrews 5: 11-14, indicate that they were not very far advanced, and presently we find that they are exhorted to "follow peace with all men, and holiness" (Heb. 12: 14), which infers the same thing. The holy brethren are to follow holiness. In the first epistle of Peter we find just the same thing. He says, "Be ye holy," (1 Peter 1: 15) to the very people to whom he says, "Ye are . . . an holy nation" (1 Peter 2: 9).

Because we are holy we are to be holy. The holiness, which is to characterize us practically, is according to the holiness which is ours by the call of God.

Believers in Christ are frequently called "saints" in the New Testament. Is the popular use of this term in keeping with the Scriptural use?

By no means. A "saint" is popularly supposed to be an eminently holy person. The Romish authorities still make saints by a lengthy process called "canonization." If we lived amongst Romanists and spoke of "going to visit the saints" they would probably imagine we are going to visit some local shrine and invoke the aid from the spirit world of some of these canonized people. And many who are not Romanists have not quite shaken off these ideas. A saint is not a person of unusual piety, who after death is entitled to be represented in effigy or picture with a halo round his or her head, but the ordinary, simple believer — each one who has been set apart for God by the blood of Christ, and by the possession of the Holy Spirit.

Every true believer being a saint means that we each are responsible to pursue holiness. Perhaps one reason why the Romish idea lingers so strongly is that it leads people to feel that holiness is no particular concern of theirs, but only of a few. These special ones may pursue holiness; the rest of us can live easy-going lives in the world!

Let us be careful to maintain the scriptural thought.

Do justification and sanctification go together?

They do, as far as positional sanctification is concerned. In 1 Corinthians 6: 11, where the work wrought "in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God," is in question, sanctification is mentioned even in advance of justification. The Corinthians had been cleansed and set apart for God on the same ground and by the same agency as they had been justified, and so also have we.

Seeing that they do go together, are we right in speaking of sanctification by faith, just as we speak of justification by faith?

We have in Scripture the definite statement that we are "justified by faith" (Rom. 5: 1), but we do not anywhere read that we are sanctified by faith. Nevertheless, just as, having been justified, we know it by faith and not by our feelings, so too we know that we have been set apart for God by faith and not by feelings. God declares us to be justified as believers in Jesus, and we believe Him. He declares us to be sanctified to Himself as believers in Jesus, and again we believe Him.

If practical sanctification be in question it is another matter. That is progressive, and there should be increase in it to the end. We are to be "perfecting holiness in the fear of God" (2 Cor. 7: 1), and Paul prayed for the Thessalonians to the end that they might be sanctified "unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Holiness is not, of course, apart from faith, but to speak of holiness by faith, as though faith alone produced it, is to shut out elements of Christian living which ought by no means to be excluded.

What then are these elements? How is practical sanctification or holiness produced?

In the latter part of Romans 6, holiness is presented as being the "fruit" of our being emancipated from the slavery of sin. Now it is "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" which makes us free from the law of sin and death" (Rom. 8: 2). The more we are under the law, or control, of the Spirit the more do we enjoy freedom from the control of sin. Evidently therefore the control of the Holy Spirit is a very important element in practical sanctification,

Again, when the Lord was praying for His own, as recorded in John 17, He said, "Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth" (verse 17). The Spirit of God and the Word of God are intimately connected. They were in creation, as the first three verses of Genesis 1 show. They are together also in the new birth, and again in the matter of practical sanctification. We can speak of holiness by the Word of truth as well as of holiness by the Spirit.

We can also speak of holiness by love in the light of 1 Thessalonians 3: 12-13. As love increases so are our hearts established in holiness.

And yet again there is holiness by separation from all that is unclean, coupled with cleansing from all filthiness of flesh and spirit. 2 Corinthians 6: 14 - 7: 1 tells us this And 2 Timothy 2: 16-22, tells us the same thing, but in a somewhat different setting.

Here then are four elements in addition to faith by which holiness is produced.

We sometimes meet those who speak of being "wholly sanctified," in a way that suggests a claim to entire freedom from the presence of sin. Is there any support for this in the Bible?

There is 1 Thessalonians 5: 23, to which we have already referred. But the context shows that the word, "wholly" refers to the whole man in his tripartite nature — "spirit and soul and body." There is nothing partial about God's gracious work. Its sanctifying influence reaches every part of us, and is carried on "unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." When He comes the sanctification of the whole man will be carried to its completeness and perfection; but not before.

As long as we inhabit these bodies, derived from Adam, sin is still in us; yet the more we experience God's sanctifying work the less we come under its power. There is no excuse for the believer when he sins, inasmuch as ample power is at his disposal to preserve him. Yet we all often offend, as James has told us in his Epistle; and we shall all confess it, unless our sense of what is sin is sadly blunted, or we are just deceiving ourselves.

A life of practical holiness is indeed proper and normal Christian life; but the one who most lives it talks least about his holiness. He does not live to himself nor talk about himself. The end of his living and the theme of his tongue is CHRIST.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : The New Birth.

The New Birth.

F. B. Hole.

We are introduced to this theme by the Lord Himself, who put it in the very forefront of His teaching when He had the talk with Nicodemus by night. It is alluded to by John in the preface to his Gospel (John 1: 13), but not in any way expounded until we come to John 3. Having heard of it more fully from the lips of the Lord, we find further details as to it both in 1 Peter and 1 John. We also discover from what the Lord says to Nicodemus that Ezekiel 36 alludes to it, though the term, "born again," is not used there.

Nicodemus was amongst those who were convinced that Jesus was "a Teacher come from God," but he went further than the men spoken of at the end of John 2, by becoming an enquirer. Nicodemus himself was "a master [i.e. teacher] of Israel," and it was something that he should recognize in Jesus a Teacher, who spoke and acted with an authority far above his own. But recognizing it, he came as one who would make a very good scholar, being a privileged person, a member of the most favoured nation. To such a man as this the pronouncement was made that, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

The word translated "again," in this passage has also the meaning of "from above;" it is so translated in John 3: 31, and elsewhere; but evidently Nicodemus did not understand it in this sense, or he would hardly have asked the question recorded in verse 4. In Luke 1: 3 the same word is translated, "from the very first," and in Acts 26: 5, "from the beginning," and that seems to be the force of it here. Nicodemus needed a birth which should be new in the very beginnings of its origin. Nothing short of that would do.

He had been born of the stock of Abraham, and so his pedigree was of the best. He was a very fine specimen of the Abrahamic strain of humanity, yet he would not do for God. The Lord's words clearly put the sentence of condemnation upon him as a child of Abraham, for if that first birth had sufficed there would have been no need for a new one. We Gentiles cannot boast of being children of Abraham, the friend of God: we are just the children of Adam, the man who disobeyed and fell. The new birth cannot be less necessary for us than it was for Nicodemus. He too, of course, was a child of Adam, just as Abraham was.

Adam's nature was corrupted by his sin, and all his race, generation after generation, partake of that fallen and corrupt nature. Spiritual blindness is one of the forms that the corruption takes, and so we are quite unable to "see the kingdom of God." When Jesus was on earth the kingdom was present amongst men, for He was the King; but men did not see this apart from the new birth. Nicodemus only saw a Teacher in Him, and needed to be born again to see Him in the true light. It is just the same to-day though Jesus is no longer here. Men see in Him a religious Teacher or a Reformer, but they do not see God in Him, nor do they see the kingdom of God, unless they have come under Shat Divinely wrought process of cleansing which the new birth involves.

In John 3: 5, the Lord carries His teaching a step further. We need not only to see the kingdom but to enter it, and for this we must be born "of water and of the Spirit." The water is the agent employed, and the Spirit the Actor who employs it. These further statements apparently only puzzled Nicodemus the more, and he asked incredulously, "How can these things be?" The Lord's reply took also the form of a question, "Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?" His teaching on this point was not something entirely new — unheard of up to this point. It had its roots in what the prophets had testified, and notably Ezekiel in his thirty-sixth chapter, where both water and the Spirit are mentioned. The surprising thing was that Nicodemus had remained in ignorance of the prophet's meaning.

The meaning of the word, "water," in John 3 has been much in dispute. We believe its true meaning is to be discerned by referring back to the Scripture to which the Lord alluded. He doubtless used the word as being just that which ought to have put Nicodemus into possession of the key which should unlock His meaning. We ought to read at this point Ezekiel 36: 21-33.

Having read it, we note that the passage speaks of what the Lord will do when at last He gathers Israel His people out of the lands of their dispersion and brings them into their own land. Then He will sprinkle "clean water" upon them and they shall be clean. All their filthiness and their love of idols shall be gone, for He will thereby have put "a new heart" and "a new spirit" within them. The cleansing effected by the water will be of so radical and fundamental a nature that their whole nature will be different. Once this mighty work has taken place they will look back on that which formerly they were with disgust — "Then shall ye remember your own ways, and your doings that were not good, and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and for your abominations" (verse 31). A moral renovation will have been accomplished.

By discarding bad habits and acquiring good habits, men sometimes achieve a considerable measure of that kind of moral alteration which lies on the surface. The moral renovation which Ezekiel predicts goes down to the deepest foundation; putting a man into possession of a new heart and a new spirit, so that instinctively he desires what is good and walks in obedience. Verse 27 shows this. No wonder then that the Lord Jesus spoke of it as a new birth; inasmuch as it is not the altering of a nature already existing, but the impartation of a nature which is entirely new. The new heart is "given." The new spirit is "put within you." It is to start anew from the very first.

Verse 27 speaks of "My Spirit" which is to be put within born-again Israel in that day. Though not printed with a capital in our Bibles, it clearly should be, as it refers to the Spirit of God, and hence is to be distinguished from "a new spirit" in the previous verse. So the prophet clearly shows us that only when Israel is born again and receives the Spirit of God will they see and enter into the kingdom of God.

All this Nicodemus should have known, though the Lord's words to him carry the truth concerning it a good deal further. Now we discover that new birth is actually produced by the Spirit of God. He who is born again is born of the Spirit, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit as to its own nature and character. In other words, the new heart and new spirit, of which Ezekiel tells us, is the product of the Holy Spirit and partakes of His holy nature. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, in spite of all that may be done to it in the way of refinement, education, civilization, or Christianization. When all is done, flesh it still remains: it cannot be transmuted into spirit. That alone is spirit which is born of the Spirit. It cannot be found apart from the new birth.

When Ezekiel prophesied of how God would "sprinkle clean water" upon Israel in the coming day in order that they might be clean, the mind of those who read his words would have been carried back to the book of Numbers where twice we get the sprinkling of water mentioned. In Numbers 8 we get the way in which the Levites were cleansed in order that they might enter upon their service. Moses was told to "Sprinkle water of purifying upon them." In Numbers 19 we get the way in which the ordinary Israelite was cleansed from various defilements which he might contract. From the ashes of a red heifer "a water of separation" was to be made, and that water was to be sprinkled upon people and things that were defiled. The "water of separation" which purified was made from "the ashes of the burnt heifer" — typical of the death of Christ — and "running [or, living] water" — typical of the Spirit.

So we pass from the type in Numbers to the prophecy in Ezekiel, and from thence to the Lord's declaration in John 3. Putting all together the significance of the "water" begins to appear. It is the Word of God which brings the death of Christ in its separating and purifying power to bear upon the soul. Of that Word, as well as of the Spirit, we must be born if we are to enter the kingdom of God. In later chapters of the Gospel we find the Lord connecting water with His Word in a way that confirms the matter. Compare the scene recorded in John 13: 5-11, with His words, "Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you" (John 15: 3). A further confirmation occurs in Ephesians 5: 26, where "water" and "the Word" are brought together as identical.

Man needs, then, to be born anew from the very beginning. The agent used for this is the Word of God, which applies to us the cleansing virtue of the death of Christ. And He who acts in this matter is the Spirit of God. In John 3 the water is mentioned but once: the remainder of the instruction concerns the action of the Spirit.

But when we turn to 1 Peter 1: 22-25, we find that though the Spirit is mentioned, the main emphasis lies upon that which the water symbolizes  - the Word of God. We have obeyed the truth by the Spirit, and thereby purification has reached us — verse 22 views that which is accomplished from our side. Verses 23 25 view it from God's side. The purification is effective by reason of His work in us by His Word, which, as we know from John 3, is wrought by the Spirit. We are born "by" the Word, but also "of" incorruptible seed; and we must not confuse these two things. "By" indicates agency; "of" indicates origin.

As children of Adam we were born of seed which is not merely corruptible but actually and fatally corrupted. We are born again of seed which is incorruptible, because Divine. Isaiah the prophet was given a glimpse of the Servant of Jehovah, who should die and rise again; and he predicted, "When Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed" (Isa. 53: 10).

He shall see those who take their spiritual origin from Himself. A thought akin to this seems to lie in these words in Peter. As born again we have a new origin which is incorruptible in nature; and the Word by which we are born again, "liveth and abideth for ever." That which is produced as the result of new birth is characterized by these wonderful things — life, eternity and incorruptibility.

From all that we have seen it is very evident that new birth is that work of the Spirit of God in us which is necessitated by the corruption of our nature through sin. It was not enough that a work should be wrought for us which should bring us justification and reconciliation; there must also be this work of moral cleansing, this lifting us out of the corruption of our nature. No external work of cleansing would meet the case; nothing short of our becoming possessed of a new nature springing from an incorruptible source. No deeper or more fundamental purification than that could be conceived.

From the passage in Peter, with its statement as to our being born of incorruptible seed, we pass on naturally to 1 John, where we read, "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for His seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God" (1 John 3: 9). This verse gives us perhaps the fullest development of the whole matter. No mention is made of the agent employed, the Word of God. Nor is the Spirit of God, who acts in the work, mentioned. The emphasis is concentrated upon God Himself as the Source of all. As born of God, His seed remains in us; it is irrevocable. And we partake of His sinless nature. The born again one cannot sin, just because he is born of God.

In so speaking John views us abstractly, according to the essential character of the new nature which is ours. He is entitled to do so, inasmuch as when God has completed His work concerning us we shall be this not merely abstractly but absolutely. The last trace of the Adamic nature will be gone when our very bodies are glorified. Elsewhere John views us practically, and insists that we have sin in us, and that we do sin: — see, 1 John 1: 8 - 2: 2. This practical view of things is very necessary of course; but so also is the abstract view, which we have before us. It is most important that we should know the sinlessness of the nature that is ours as born of God.

Not only is it sinless — for that is a negative virtue: it is also righteous (1 John 2: 29), and loving (1 John 3: 10, 11). It is marked by faith (1 John 5: 1), and by overcoming the world (1 John 5: 4). These are positive features of great worth. Only let these characteristics come clearly into display in the believer and it becomes manifest to all men that a mighty moral renovation has been effected: a thorough-going cleansing and purification has been accomplished indeed.

We read of cleansing by the blood of Christ in 1 John 1: 7. Do you differentiate between this and the cleansing we have been considering? And, if so, how?

The blood of Christ signifies His holy life laid down in death for the bearing of the judgment due to us. Thereby we are cleansed judicially. The cleansing wrought by new birth and presented as accomplished by water, touches our characters, and involves our having a new nature. We are cleansed morally. We could not do without either. Both are ours as having received the grace of God.

You do not think then that the "water," in John 3, has anything to do with baptism?

We are sure that the Lord did not allude to baptism in using the word "water." There would have been nothing surprising in Nicodemus not knowing about it, had that been His meaning. No, He alluded to Ezekiel 36, which Nicodemus ought to have known, and that has nothing to do with baptism. John 3: 5 has no more to do with baptism than John 6: 53 has to do with the Lord's supper: though in both cases we may be able to discern in the outward ordinances some reflection of the truth stated in these passages. In both cases however we have not the ordinance but the truth, to which the ordinance makes some reference.

We have had before us different terms: — "born again," "born of water and of the Spirit," "born of God." Do they all mean the same thing?

They all refer, we believe, to the same great work of God, wrought in us by His Spirit. There is no such thought in Scripture as there being two more different kinds of "new birth;" as though, for example, one might be "born again," according to John 3, and yet not "born of God," according to 1 John 3. On the other hand, each of these different expressions has its own significance and force. The first emphasizes the new and original character of the birth. The second, who accomplishes it, and the agent employed. The third, the Source whence all springs. Indeed we think an orderly progress of doctrine may be observed in the four passages, beginning with Ezekiel.

New birth is evidently an act of God; but is it wrought by the Spirit altogether apart from the preaching of the Gospel?

There is a plain answer to that question in the passage in Peter. It says, "Born again. . . by the word of God. . . and this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." Whatever may have been the word by which the Spirit worked in the past dispensation, in this day the word by which we are born again is that which reaches us in the Gospel.

Then are we born again by simply believing the Gospel? Some hold that we believe to be born again, others that we must be born again to believe.

That is so. He who inclines to Arminianism would hold the first view. He who inclines to Calvinism would hold the second. This raises the whole question of how to adjust in our minds the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man. We should answer the question by saying, No, not by simply believing the Gospel; for, if by believing only, we should be shutting out factors of even greater importance. But of course we should be equally wrong if we said it was simply by the Spirit; for then we should be shutting out the Gospel, which must not be excluded according to the passage in Peter.

The fact is we need carefully to note the word of our Lord in John 3: 8, where He warns us that the Spirit's work in new birth is something beyond us. We can no more gather it all together in our minds than we can gather the winds in our fists. The passage in Peter gives us a view of things from the human side — especially verses 22 and 23 — and the Arminian seizes them. The passage in John's Epistle views things from the Divine side, and the Calvinist seizes it. For ourselves, we seize both, and are not troubled by finding that we can no more mentally adjust the two sides to perfection than we can adjust and explain the Divine and the Human in Christ Jesus our Lord, or in the Scriptures of truth.

But is not new birth the very beginning of God's work in the soul? Are we not absolutely dead, without the smallest motion Godward, until we are born again?

We all of us started in a state of absolute spiritual death: there was no hope for us except God began to work. The story of God's work in blessing men begins with God and not with man. We are as sure of this as we are that the story of creation began with God and not with man. God took the initiative with each of us, and His Spirit began to move on our hearts just as of old He moved on the face of the waters. But, in the light of the scriptures we have considered, we can hardly call that first moving of the Spirit new birth. New birth is a larger and more comprehensive thing, if we take it as presented in Scripture.

And further, new birth is not the antithesis to a state of death, but to a state of corruption. The word which in Scripture stands in antithesis to death is quickening. By new birth we become possessed of a nature which cannot sin, and, hence we have "escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2 Peter 1: 4).

Are new birth and regeneration — as in Titus 3: 5 — the same thing?

They are not. The word translated "regeneration" only occurs twice in Scripture, and both times it has the significance of the new order of things to be brought about in the millennial age. Titus 3: 5 however speaks of "the washing of regeneration," and we believe that though the regeneration is not the new birth, the "washing" is; and that verse is just Ezekiel 36: 25 - 27 put into New Testament language. Israel will be born again, and thus cleansed from their corruptions in view of the millennial age. We have not had to wait till that age dawns. The washing connected with that coming age reached the heathen Cretians so that they might be cleansed — no longer, "liars, evil beasts, slow bellies," — and therefore should "live soberly, righteously and godly."

That same washing has reached us. We are no longer dominated by corruption, since born of incorruptible seed.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : Quickening

Quickening

F B Hole

Only when we take a wide view of our fallen estate can we realize in an adequate way the complete havoc that has been wrought by sin, or the fulness of God's answer to it all which reaches us in the Gospel. We have already seen that sin has brought in: —

guilt, and so forgiveness must reach us;

condemnation, so justification is needed;

bondage, and we need redemption;

alienation from God, so we need reconciliation;

peril of many kinds, so we need salvation;

profanation and pollution, so we need sanctification;

corruption, which has affected the deepest springs of our nature, so we need the new birth.

We have now to see that it has plunged us into spiritual death, and we must be quickened if we are to live to God.

Our state is set forth in Ephesians 2: 1, as "dead in trespasses and sins." The next verse remarkably enough goes on to speak of walking in those trespasses and sins; but that is because the death there spoken of is death towards God. Those who are dead Godward are very much alive to "the course of this world," and "the prince of the power of the air," who operates in the "children of disobedience." To be dead towards God is entirely consistent with being alive towards the world and the devil: indeed the one springs out of the other.

This is the fact that underlies the solemn statement made in Romans 3: 11, that, "there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God." That there should be none righteous (verse 10) is bad: it is worse that none should understand, for that means a state not only of ignorance but insensibility. It is worst of all that none should desire to understand or seek after God, with whom is righteousness and understanding and life. To the natural man there is nothing that is desirable in God. Man is not right: he does not understand that he is not right: he has no desire after God who is right. In one word he is dead towards God.

Once these solemn facts lay hold of us, we realize that our only hope is in God taking the initiative with us in His sovereign mercy. We are quite well able to take the initiative in evil, but as regards all that is of God we are dead; and hence all movement must spring from Him.

God then must act. But how must He act? Will reformation, education or instruction meet our case? By no means: there can be nothing until He quickens, for quickening simply means the giving of life. The very word translated "quicken" in the New Testament is one compounded of the noun "life," and the verb "to make" — to make to live.

Now it is a striking fact that Ezekiel 36, which shows the corruption and moral filth in which Israel lay, and prophesies as to the new birth which consequently must be theirs, is followed by the vision of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37. This sets forth the death towards God, in which Israel lies as a nation, and it prophesies concerning God's work of quickening, which must touch them before they enter into millennial blessedness. They will be brought up by Him out of the graves among the nations where they lie. There will be a national resurrection, and, says the Lord, "Ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it" (verse 14). Once they are quickened they will understand and they will at once seek the Lord.

The "wind," or "breath," of verse 9 seems to be identified with "My Spirit," of verse 14: indeed, the same Hebrew word is translated, wind, breath or spirit, according to the context. It is interesting to compare these verses with John 3: 8. There the blowing of the wind is connected with the Spirit's action in new birth. Here it is connected with His action in quickening. This should show us how closely new birth and quickening are connected one with the other, and that they must not be divided from each other, though they should be distinguished and separately considered, as they are in chapters 36, and 37 of Ezekiel.

Now if John 3 answers to Ezekiel 36, John 5 answers to Ezekiel 37. That chapter opens with the cure of the impotent man. It was as though a fresh stream of life entered his powerless limbs, and he took up his bed and walked. When challenged as to this miracle, the Lord Jesus proceeded to speak of far greater works than this which were His to do — the quickening of whom He will and the raising of all men. The former is a limited work. Those among the spiritually dead who hear the voice of the Son of God — and only those — shall spiritually live. The latter is universal. All in the graves shall hear His voice and come forth in two classes, to life and to judgment respectively. This will take place at different times, as we learn from other scriptures.

In verse 21 of this marvellous chapter in John, quickening is attributed to both the Father and the Son whereas in the next verse the work of judgment is said to lie wholly in the hands of the Son. The Son, and the Son alone, came forth into this world to suffer and be set at naught. To Him alone then shall the supremacy and majesty and honour of executing judgment belong. In the giving of life however the Son acts according to His own will equally with the Father and — we hardly need add — in fullest accord with the Father. Equally with the Father is He the Source of life, for verse 26 is evidently parallel with verse 21 in its sense. As 1 Corinthians 15: 45 says, "the last Adam . . a quickening Spirit."

Verses 24 and 25 give us the way in which the Son acts in life-giving power at the present moment. He quickens by means of His word. There are those who really hear His word; that is, they hear in it "the voice of the Son of God," and consequently they believe on the Father who sent Him, and they live. Quickening is not presented here as a work of the Son altogether apart from the use of means. Were it so presented we should read, "they that live shall hear." But what we read is, "they that hear shall live." Life is indeed His gift, but it reaches us in the hearing of His voice in His word.

In the light of this chapter we believe we may speak of quickening as the most deep-seated and fundamental aspect of God's work in us. Such is its importance that the Father and the Son act together as to it in a special way. A wrong use is sometimes made of our Lord's statements in verses 19 and 30; "The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do;" and " I can of Mine own Self do nothing." These words do not mean that He disclaimed all power, just as a mere prophet might have done. They expressed in the first place the fact that in becoming Man the Son had taken the place of dependent service, acting wholly by the Spirit in subjection to the Father. This thought seems specially prominent in verse 30. But in the second place they also emphasized the fact that His essential place in the unity of the Godhead was such that it was impossible that He should act apart from the Father. This thought seems more prominent in verse 19.

From this inner and more hidden aspect of things it was as though He said, "I am so essentially one with the Father that it is in the nature of things impossible that I should act apart from Him." It was really the strongest possible affirmation of His essential Deity. The Father and the Son must ever act together as the end of verse 19 says. Thus did the Lord accept the charge of "making Himself equal with God," and not only accept it but amplify the thought of it. So both the Father and the Son act together in life-giving power.

In John 6: 63, we discover that the Spirit of God also quickens. The fist occurrence of the word "Spirit" in that verse should evidently be printed with a capital, the second occurrence of the word is rightly printed without a capital. Comparison may be made with verse 6 of chapter 3, where the distinction is rightly made. The very words of the Lord are spirit and life but it is the Spirit Himself who quickens. We may say therefore that the whole fulness of the Godhead — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — is involved in the work of giving life to such as ourselves.

One further thing has to be noted. We meet with it both in Ephesians 2: 5, and Colossians 2: 13 — we have been quickened "together with Christ." Being "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2: 1), and. "dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh" (Col. 2: 13), nothing short of quickening would meet our case. Quickening was thus a necessity, but there was no necessity that we should be quickened together with Christ: that is the fruit of the counsels of God in grace.

Life "together with," — in association with  - Christ was His thought for us, and this goes far beyond the bare necessity of the plight we were in. Life of some sort we must have, if ever we were to be in conscious blessedness; but life of this sort is the highest and most intimate that can be known by the redeemed creature. Therefore it is that we read of this quickening as being the fruit of the richness of God's mercy, and because of His great love wherewith He loved us. Rich mercy and great love are thus expressed.

We have been made to live in association with Christ, inasmuch as our life as quickened is of His own order — His life is ours. Since this is so, it is possible for us to be raised up and made to "sit together in heavenly places" in Him. Having life of such an order as this, we are fitted for such exalted seats. The wonderful story of our quickening ends in our sitting in heavenly places in the life of our Quickener.

In the Old Testament we read of quickening. Ten times or more the Psalmist speaks of it in Psalm 119. Are we to differentiate between that and what we find in the New Testament?

We believe that we have to do so. The Psalmist says that God's Word has quickened him in verse 50, yet again and again he desires to be quickened. The word is evidently used more in the sense of being revived, of being restored to more vigorous life. In Old Testament times man was still under probation. The law had been given to test him, and life on earth was still proposed as the result of perfect obedience to the law. Only when we come to the New Testament is the probation period over, and man formally pronounced to be dead in trespasses and sins. Hence only in the New Testament does the full truth of quickening appear.

Some have thought that quickening is very advanced truth; that, for instance, a man may be born again and yet quickening lie ahead as something to be reached much later, as a kind of climax to God's work in him. Does Scripture indicate this?

It clearly does not. Until quickened by Divine power we are dead. It is the very beginning of God's work in us rather than the climax. It would however be true to say that it is truth into the full import of which we are slow to enter. Almost invariably we begin by understanding truth as to the forgiveness of sins and salvation. This matter of life, and more especially life together with Christ, begins to impress us later in our spiritual history. We must not however attribute to the thing itself, what may quite rightly be stated as to our apprehension of the thing. The thing itself is the fruit of a Divine act: our apprehension of it the fruit of Divine teaching.

In John 5: 26, we read that the Father (1) raises up the dead, and (2) quickens them. Are we right in differentiating between the two things? And, if so, what is the difference?

We believe that there is a distinct difference. In John 11: 25, the Lord Jesus says, "I am the resurrection and the life." Resurrection is one thing and life another; though for us they are very intimately connected. For the unconverted dead they will be divorced. They will be raised and their once dead bodies reanimated, though not quickened, since their resurrection will be that of judgment and not of life, as verse 29 shows. Colossians 2: 12, 13, also presents resurrection and quickening as quite distinct things We are quickened already but resurrection in its fulness is before us. When that moment comes our bodies will be instinct with life, in keeping with what has already taken place as to our souls.

We have in Romans 8: 11, a word about the quickening of our "mortal bodies." Is that something that takes place in the present, or is it to be in the future?

That is in the future. It is that God "shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you." In the previous verse we have, "The Spirit is life because of righteousness." Both statements refer to the indwelling Spirit. He is life to us in an experimental and practical way now. He will quicken our mortal bodies presently, whether He does it in resurrection, for the saints who have died, or by the change of which 1 Corinthians 15: 51 speaks, for the saints alive when Jesus comes.

Some people however claim that this quickening of our mortal bodies has to do with the healing of disease: that it is what shall be done for us in the present, if only we claim the fulness of the Spirit.

Yes; and in so saying they read into the passage what is not there. There is nothing about disease or healing in the context. It is not our diseased bodies but our mortal bodies that are to be quickened. In our present condition our bodies are liable to death; when quickened they will no longer be subject to death. If the mortal body of the believer really were quickened now, he would be immortal as to his body; that is, beyond death, and not merely beyond disease.

So our reply can be twofold. First, there is an "if" in the verse, but it is not, if we claim the fulness of the Spirit, but, if the Spirit dwell in us — which He does, if we really are believers. Second, it is not healing that is in question but the giving of life from a Divine source. When quickened the mortal body is no longer mortal. It is perfectly obvious that this has not yet taken place with any saint living on earth. If Paul's mortal body had been quickened, for instance, the heads-man's axe would never have laid him low. He would  still be walking amongst us!

The Lord Jesus, as the Last Adam, quickens  according to 1 Corinthians 15: 45. We are right, are we  not, in connecting this with the present?

Certainly. He stands in contrast to the first Adam  in that verse; not merely in being "spirit," in contrast  with "soul," but in that He is not merely "living," but  the Life-giver. Verse 36 of this chapter reminds us  that quickening only applies to that which is dead.  Now we were dead spiritually, and quickening of a  spiritual sort has already reached us from the last Adam. As the Head of a new race, He has already  imparted life — His own life — to us who are of His race.

But then this chapter goes on to consider the case  of our bodies which are still mortal. We must bear  the image of the heavenly Adam even as regards our  bodies, and so the great change will reach us at the  coming of the Lord. Then "this mortal" will "put on immortality," and this will be the quickening of our  mortal bodies, of which Romans 8: 11 speaks.

When that is accomplished, and "Death is  swallowed up in victory" (verse 54), the work of  quickening as regards ourselves will be carried to its  final completion. Then the word that we "shall reign  in life by One, Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5: 17), shall be  fulfilled. Not only in life, but reigning in it, and  that for ever.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : The Gift of the Holy Spirit.

The Gift of the Holy Spirit.

F. B. Hole.

We have considered many of the direful consequences of sin; there remains one further effect to be emphasized. It has reduced men to a state of powerlessness. Not only are we fallen into bondage to sin, as we saw when considering redemption, but we are totally without power to please God or to serve Him. Now one thing is certain: the creature should within its own limits perfectly serve the Creator.

Power we must have; both to deliver us from the paralysis internal to ourselves, which sin has produced, and to enable us to go rightly through external circumstances, as those who serve the will of God. Power is conferred upon us, and the wonderful thing is that it should be by the indwelling of the Spirit of God. Something much less than this might have sufficed for us, but nothing short of it has been given of God. The risen Christ, about to go on high, said to His disciples, "Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto Me" (Acts 1: 8). This promise was fulfilled ten days later on the day of Pentecost, as Acts 2 records.

In Ezekiel 36 and 37, as we have seen, there are prophecies as to the work of new birth and quickening, which will be wrought in the remnant of Israel in a coming day, preparing them for millennial blessedness. In both chapters there is mention also of the gift of the Holy Spirit — "I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them" (Ezek. 36: 27): "And shall put My Spirit in you, and ye shall live" (Ezek. 37: 14). As a consequence of this there will be spiritual life in Israel, which will express itself in active obedience to God's will. As God directs, so they will do. Other Old Testament scriptures have similar predictions, notably the end of Joel 2, which Peter quoted on the day of Pentecost, saying that what had just occurred in their midst was a sample of what Joel had foretold. We shall see however that the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost has in it a fulness and permanence hardly contemplated in Old Testament times.

New birth is produced by the Holy Spirit, and in result we have, as John 3: 6, indicates, a new nature which is "spirit" in its essential character. That which is produced by the Spirit's action partakes of His own nature. This must of course be distinguished from the Spirit indwelling men already born again, which is what occurred at Pentecost; and it is very necessary to observe that power is connected, not with the new nature produced by the Spirit, but with the Holy Spirit as a Person, actually indwelling the believer's body. This is quite manifest in the passage, Romans 7: 7 - 8: 4.

In Romans 7 we are given the experience of one who is born again, for he possesses "the inward man," which delights in the law of God (verse 22). Consequently he approves what is good and earnestly desires it, yet finds himself unable to practise it. It is not until we reach the Deliverer in "Jesus Christ our Lord" (verse 25), and go on to read of "the law [or, control] of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," that we find power to overcome "the law [or, control] of sin and death" (Rom. 8: 2), and to fulfil those things which the law so righteously required (Rom. 8: 4). The power that delivers is found in Christ, and in His Spirit, who has been given to us.

This passage in Romans shows us the power that delivers us from the internal paralysis that sin induces, and this of course is a prerequisite, it we are to be marked by power in witness to our risen Lord, which is what is contemplated in Acts 1: 8, and also in Luke 24: 49. It should be a very sobering thought for all of us, that even as saints no power is vested in us. All power for us is vested in the Spirit of God, who has been given to us.

The eleven men to whom the Lord spoke were Apostles, on whom as a foundation the church has been built. There had been a powerful work of the Spirit in them, and for three years or more they had been under special instruction, such as no men before had ever had. Yet none of these things conferred the necessary power upon them. However eager they may have been to start their great work of witness, they were at a standstill until the Spirit was given. Not one word of witness did they utter until then. But then, their mouths were immediately opened, and with what astonishing results!

We must not overlook the fact that on the day of Pentecost the disciples not merely received the Spirit to indwell them, but "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2: 4); and when a believer is filled with Him there is no force active within, as a check on His power. This filling of the Spirit is not permanent like His indwelling, for Peter was again filled with the Spirit in Acts 4: 8, and yet again, as we find in verse 31 of the same chapter. When the Spirit does thus fill a believer, the flesh in him is judged and quiescent, and His power is irresistible. Stephen illustrates this; for being full of the Holy Ghost, he was "full of faith and power," and his opponents "were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake" (Acts 6: 8, 10). Unable to resist, they flew to violence, and their stones battered his body to death, thus destroying that "temple" of the Holy Spirit.

Though the history, recorded in Acts, shows that in practice the filling of the Spirit was occasional, even with the Apostles, we must not forget that all Christians are exhorted to be filled with the Spirit, in Ephesians 5: 18. It may surprise us to find such a thing put in contrast with being "drunk with wine," but the fact is that when wine is taken in excess it assumes control of the man and carries him outside himself. All that is from beneath and is evil. The Spirit of God however can control, and carry a man outside himself, in a way that is good and divine. The very good is contrasted with the very evil. If filled with the Spirit, all that is not Himself and of Him obviously must be excluded.

Now it is in these other things, that fill so much of our thoughts and time and energies, that the hindrances to the realization of power are to be found; and in this connection we have to contemplate not only things positively evil but many things that are trivial and profitless. Hence we get the word, "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God" (Eph. 4: 20). If we grieve Him, we do not lose His indwelling presence, for the verse continues, "whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." We do however lose much of the benefit of His presence. Both spiritual joy and spiritual power are lost until the grieving thing is put away. Some of the things which grieve are mentioned in the verses which precede and which follow. How much the Spirit of God has been grieved by malice, evil-speaking and bitterness amongst saints. The wonder is that His power is manifested at all!

The Apostle Paul was called and saved that he might be a pattern to us. This 1 Timothy 1: 16 informs us. So in his life of service and witness we can see how the power of the Spirit wrought.

Romans 15: 15 shows the extraordinary range of his service. From Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum — the modern Albania — he fully preached the Gospel. Within about 25 years he had fully evangelized peoples living in territories covering hundreds of thousands of square miles, travelling on foot with the occasional help of a boat on the sea and an animal on the land. A miraculous feat indeed! One only possible for him as energized by the Spirit of God.

1 Corinthians 2: 1-5 shows the simplicity of his preaching. All merely human adornments were discarded, that the central fact of the Cross of Christ might be the more plainly revealed. What marked his preachings was "demonstration of the Spirit and of power:" so that as regards those who received his message, their faith should stand not in "the wisdom of men, but in the power of God."

2 Corinthians 3: 1-6, and 2 Corinthians 4: 1-7, show us the life-giving power of Paul's new covenant ministry. His converts were "the epistle of Christ," written "with the Spirit of the living God," and, says he, "the Spirit giveth life." Both life and light are connected in this passage, for he says, "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" shines through "earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us."

2 Corinthians 10: 1-6 shows us the power of spiritual weapons in the aggressive conflicts of the Gospel. Satanic powers have entrenched themselves in human minds and formed strongholds of human reasonings and lofty thoughts, which can only be overthrown by such weapons as are employed by the Spirit of God.

1 Thessalonians 1 and 2 give us a lovely picture of the spiritual fruits in the characters and lives of the converts, when the Gospel comes "not . . . in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance." The Thessalonian believers became followers of the Lord, ensamples to all other believers, and propagators of the Word that had saved them; as they served the living and true God and waited for His Son from heaven.

2 Timothy 1 shows us the Holy Spirit as characterized by "the spirit . . . of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (7); so that the believer is enabled to be a "partaker of the afflictions of the Gospel according to the power of God" (8), and also to "keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us" the good deposit with which he has been entrusted (14). The Spirit of God is the power of endurance and for fidelity.

The gift of the Spirit on God's part, as well as the gift of His Son, may well be spoken of as "unspeakable" (2 Cor. 9: 15).

At the outset the power of the Spirit was very largely displayed in signs and wonders. Seeing that He is God and unchangeable, should it not be so to-day?

God is indeed the unchangeable One, but this does not mean that He cannot vary His ways and dealings according to His wisdom, as He meets the changing situations that arise amongst men. He has most evidently done so in past dispensations. The display of His power in miracles has never been constant, indeed only in three great epochs has it been manifested thus. First, when through Moses He intervened to bring Israel out of Egypt and into Palestine, inaugurating the law system. Second, when He intervened through Elijah and Elisha, recalling the people to the broken law, and testifying of His goodness. Third, when He intervened in Christ, and the church was subsequently formed through the Apostles. Practically all the miracles that Scripture records come into these three periods. Of John the Baptist we read, "John did no miracle" (John 10: 41). His lot was cast just before the third great miracle epoch began in connection with Christ.

But are not these miraculous signs the very greatest display of His power?

By no means. Most of these visible displays of miraculous energy were only temporal in their effects. In Acts 9, for instance, Aeneas was raised up from his sick bed, and Dorcas from her bed of death; but in both cases the passage of years brought them into death, and the miracles were as though they had never been. That chapter opens with the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. His fellow-travellers were speechless with amazement, yet they do not seem to have discerned the miracle. It was of course a spiritual miracle of the first order, the effect of which is felt all over the earth today — just nineteen centuries later. Every true conversion is a miracle which abides to eternity; and miracles of this sort are taking place today.

Paul's preaching was in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Can we speak of modern preaching in this way?

Only in a very minor degree, we fear. The fact is that so much modern preaching is marked by the very things which Paul tells us he avoided, in order that his preaching might be in the power of the Spirit. He not only renounced the things of deceit and evil, as he tells us in 2 Corinthians 4: 2, but also things of a very reputable sort, such as excellency of speech, and wisdom according to man.

But even where the Gospel is faithfully preached, and that without reliance upon these human expedients, there does not seem to be much power manifested. How can we explain that?

There are two scriptures which may help to explain it — Ephesians 4: 30, and 1 Thessalonians 5: 19. All too often the Spirit is grieved in the servant of God who labours, and hence there is little fruit in what he does. And even when this is not the case, the Spirit is grieved by the state of things that prevails amongst the mass of professing Christians. There is also a quenching of the Spirit by the introduction of much human organization, which gives no place to His free action. Then beyond this there is the terrible incubus of unbelief, and often utter infidelity, on the part of multitudes of professed servants of God, who deny practically everything they are pledged to uphold. The Spirit is grieved and quenched in the bosom of the church, and this fact alone would account for His withholding any great manifestation of His power.

However, it is happily a fact that He is still working, and souls are being blessed, though His work is proceeding in quieter and less noticed ways.

Power for service, though important, is by no means everything. How may we know the Spirit's power for victory in our lives?

By walking in the Spirit, as Galatians 5: 16 bids us. We learn from Ephesians 1: 13, that He is given to us when we believe the Gospel of our salvation. He marks us off as belonging to God. But also we are to walk in Him; that is, He is to be in a practical way the Source and Energy of our life and activities. Walking is the first and earliest activity of mankind, hence it becomes a figurative expression for our activities. Our thoughts, speech and actions are to be under the Spirit's control. Then we shall not be fulfilling the desires of the flesh, as otherwise we should. This is what Galatians 5: 17 says. The Spirit of God wields a power that is superior to the downward drag of the flesh; and we experience it, if we walk in Him.

Some of us would say that though we desire to "walk in the Spirit" we hardly know how to set about it. how does it work out practically?

Galatians 6: 7-9, may help to answer this. Our lives in a practical way are made up of sowing and reaping. It is as though we go forth each day with a seed basket on either side of us. We may put our hand into the basket of the flesh on that side and sow to the flesh, or into the basket of the Spirit on this side and sow to the Spirit: that is we may be yielding to the things which merely gratify the flesh, and so scatter the seeds of the flesh, or we may give ourselves to the things of the Spirit, and sow seeds that will be fruitful to His glory.

This is not something that God does for us, but what we do ourselves. All day long we are doing it in one or other of these two directions. In which direction does our choice lie? Into which basket are we continually placing our hand? The resolute refusal of the one, and the cultivation of the other, is the secret. That is the way to set about it.

Still, many a Christian who is not guilty of serious lapses in outward conduct, is not particularly marked by the liberty or power of the Spirit. How is that to be accounted for?

Such are probably marked by lack of concentration upon the things of God, or by positive laziness. They are easily diverted to things of trifling worth. The Spirit is here to take of the things of Christ and show them unto us, and He may be grieved by inattention or sloth on our side. If you went to an acquaintance with important tidings from a much roved friend, and in a few moments he were to interrupt your glowing story with irrelevant remarks about trivialities, or you found him inclined to sleep in his chair, you would cease your story, grieved and indignant.

The Spirit of God is sensitive as to that which concerns the glory of Christ. Inattention will grieve Him as well as open sin. Let us each ask God to show us how much of our spiritual poverty and powerlessness is to be traced to this.

STEM Publishing : F. B. Hole : Great Salvation : New Creation.

New Creation.

F. B. Hole.

As we have considered in detail most of the features that go to make up the "great salvation" which has reached us, we have hitherto been able to point out how each is designed of God to meet and overcome some particular result or penalty of sin. But now as we reach the last, this feature has to be absent. We have left "new creation" until the last as it seems to be the ultimate thing to which the Gospel conducts us, but at the same time it is evident that God is going to establish it, not because it meets some definite need on our side, but because it meets the need of His holy nature — it is the thing which is suitable to Himself.

The havoc wrought by sin has been such that we needed forgiveness, justification, reconciliation, redemption, salvation, sanctification; and all these are brought to us in the Gospel as the fruit of the work done for us by our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross. Equally did we need the new birth, the quickening, the gift of the Spirit; and the first two of these are ours by the work of the Holy Spirit in us, while His indwelling follows the other two, and is based upon the work done for us. We could hardly say however in the same way that we needed to be newly "created in Christ Jesus;" that wondrous event has taken place to satisfy the heart of God.

As in other cases so again here, we can go back to the Old Testament and discover prophecies which foreshadow the full truth, which can only be discovered in the New. For instance, we read, "Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth" (Isaiah 65: 17): yet when we examine the context we soon see that what is predicted in Revelation 21: 1-5, is hardly contemplated in the passage, for the prophet goes on to speak of the new conditions that will prevail in Jerusalem in the millennial age, when death may possibly take place; whereas in the scene pictured in Revelation death is gone for ever.

The fact seems to be, that just as with new birth and quickening, so again here, God introduces His thought; but in a limited way as befitted a dispensation in which His government of the earth was the prominent thing. In this Gospel age, life and incorruptibility have been fully brought to light, and in connection with that His full thought and action, both as regards the work of Christ for us and the work of the Spirit in us, has been manifested. The New Testament does not stop at the millennial age but carries us into the eternal state.

The first mention of new creation in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 5: 17, where we find that every one "in Christ" is brought into it. It is "new creation" in this verse rather than "a new creature," and the language of Paul here appears to be very vigorous and emphatic. He omits the verb altogether, and exclaims, "So that, if anyone in Christ — new creation!" as one who exults in this glorious fact. Nothing short of this is involved in our being in Christ Jesus.

That the believer is in Christ Jesus and beyond all condemnation is made very plain in the Epistle to the Romans, but we are not carried on to the full implication of that fact until we reach this scripture. We are in Him because we are of Him, and this by an act of God Himself. This comes very definitely to view when we reach Ephesians 2: 10, "We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus." The old creation of which we read in Genesis 1, was God's workmanship and created by the Son. It was created by Him, but not created in Him, as the new creation is, at least as regards ourselves. Sin was able to gain an entrance into the old creation, but it will never enter the new, which derives its life and nature from Christ.

The passage in 2 Corinthians 5 shows that there is a very close connection between reconciliation and new creation. The former is one of the fruits of the work of Christ for us; the latter the fruit of God's work in us. Yet of course the act of God in making "Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin," with which the chapter closes, is the basis on which rests new creation no less than reconciliation. There must be the complete meeting of every liability and the whole state characterizing the old creation, if the new creation is to be introduced on a righteous basis.

There is no patching up of the old things in connection with new creation. They pass away, and new things which are wholly "of God" are introduced. Once even Christ Himself stooped into old creation circumstances, when He was amongst us "after the flesh," though His flesh was holy and without the least taint of sin. Now, in His risen glory, he has entered into new creation circumstances, and from Him as Head the new creation proceeds.

The main point in this passage however seems to be the subjective effect of new creation in ourselves. We know Christ in a new way, all things are become new to us, our lives are diverted into a totally new channel, so that we live not unto ourselves but unto Him — all this, because of God's new creation work wrought in us. As an illustration we might take the Apostles, as they were in the Gospel and as they became in the Acts. Between the two came the new creation in-breathing of the Last Adam, of John 20: 22, and the indwelling of the Spirit, of Acts 2. Formerly they knew Him after the flesh; now their knowledge of Him is according to the Spirit of God. There was undoubtedly a change in His condition, but we must not overlook the great change in their condition.

This side of things is emphasized by the fact that we are said to "know . . . no man after the flesh." Now with the great mass of men there is no change at all in their condition, the only change is in ourselves. It is because we are a new creation in Christ that we know everyone in a new way. We look upon all men and everything with new creation eyes — if we may so put it.

What we have just been looking at is the new creation mind found in the saints; whereas Ephesians 2: 10 brings us to new creation practice and action. We are created "unto good works," in which God purposes we should walk. James, in his second chapter, speaks not of good works but of the works of faith; that is of work energized by faith, and consequently manifesting it before the eyes of men. Here we do have good works; that is, works that express the goodness of God. Being God's workmanship, created by Him in Christ Jesus, we have the inward capacity to do works of this exalted character, and the obligation to do them rests upon us. These good works were supremely and perfectly done by Christ, and as created in Christ, we are to walk in them — works of that order, though of course not in the same measure as He.

What we find in Ephesians 4: 21-24, and in Colossians 3: 10, is in keeping with this. The former passage agrees with the latter, for the New Translation renders it, "Your having put off.... and being renewed.... and your having put on;" that is, in both passages the great transaction is viewed as one accomplished in every believer. Formerly we belonged to the old order of man and wore his corrupt character: now we belong to the new order of man and wear his character, marked by holiness, righteousness, truth. It is not something merely external, for the very spirit of our minds is renewed. The passage in Colossians corroborates this, though it has distinctive differences. It also speaks of the new man as created.

It is because we have put on this new creation character that we are to behave as indicated in the context of both passages. The things to be utterly repudiated, and the things to be cultivated, are all determined by the character we wear by God's new creation act.

We may go one step further, and in the light of Ephesians 2: 15, speak of the church as God's new creation production. By the Gospel, God is calling an election out of both Jew and Gentile, and of the two He is making "one new man." The word translated in that verse "make" is the word for "create." That one new man is God's creation by the Lord Jesus, for He is the Actor in that verse. And He creates this one new man, which is virtually the church, "in Himself." So we may speak of the church, as well as the individual saint, as a new creation in Christ Jesus.

Lastly, in Revelation 21: 1-6, we are permitted to know that there are to be new heavens and a new earth, and amidst these new creation scenes the new creation church will have her eternal home, as the tabernacle of God, when He dwells with men.

Are we right, in dealing with the new creation, if we give the same literal and full meaning to the word "create," that we give to it when dealing with the creation of Genesis 1?

We believe that we are. Any difficulty that is felt about it probably springs from the fact that as yet God's new creation work has not touched any of the material things round about us. It has so far only affected us spiritually: we are renewed in the spirit of our minds. It is quite certain we are not yet newly created as to our bodies, and that probably accounts for the scripture saying, "renewed in the spirit of your mind," rather than, "renewed in your mind;" for the mind cannot be altogether dissociated from the brain, which is a part of the body. When we are in our glorified bodies, in the likeness of Christ, and dwelling in the new heavens and new earth, we shall see that no word short of "creation" will meet the case. But what we are to-day in a spiritual way, as the fruit of God's workmanship, is exactly of that order. God says it, and we may happily believe it.

The fact that we have been created "in Christ Jesus" has been mentioned. Are we to deduce from this the stability of the new creation?

We certainly are: but more than that also, we believe. Since it is created in Him, it will be as stable as He is; but also it will bear His character in other things. It originates in Him, for He is the Source whence it springs. He is "the beginning, the Firstborn from the dead" (Col. 1: 18), "the Beginning of the creation of God" (Rev. 3: 14). Even the inanimate things of the new heavens and the new earth will spring from Him, yet we are created in Him in a deeper sense. He has entered heaven in His risen Manhood, and we now are men of His order, participating in His life, "all of one" with Him, as we are told in Hebrews 2: 11. Hence the church is His body, for in it corporately He is to be expressed. The new creation will be expressive of Christ and as stable as He.

In Hebrews 8: 13. it is pointed out that the fact of a new covenant being introduced makes the first covenant old, and the deduction is, "Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away." Can we reason in the same way in regard to the new creation?

We believe so; with this modification perhaps, that not all the heavens created in Genesis 1, have been touched by sin, consequently not all will be newly created. All that has been spoiled by sin is old and ready to vanish away. Nothing less than new creation will meet the case, just as nothing short of it meets our spiritual needs to-day, because all has to be lifted to the level of the Divine thoughts. In principle it is so to-day, as we see in Galatians 6: 15. The Galatians were being diverted to the ordinance of circumcision as practised under the law. But any such ordinance or other fleshly observance is entirely beside the mark to-day. It might be all right so long as men "in Adam" were recognized as having a standing before God; but "in Christ Jesus" neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any account; a new creation alone avails. Because of what God is, once a thing has been touched and tarnished by sin, it has to go and a new creation take its place.

Are the new creation scenes predicted in the opening part of Revelation 21,  to be distinguished from the scenes of millennial blessedness, of which the prophets have so largely spoken?

The two scenes are clearly distinguished in that chapter in Revelation. Verses 1-8, deal with the eternal state, whilst verses 9-27, gives us a more detailed description of the heavenly Jerusalem in its relations with the millennial earth. Hence in the second section we read about nations and kings of the earth, and walls and gates which shut out any defiling thing. This supposes of course that there are defiling things which might enter. In the earlier part all sin and sorrow and death are gone from God's fair new creation, and all evil lies under God's judgment, segregated in its own appointed place.

Nations, too, only exist as the result of God's judgment upon men at Babel; so they disappear, and God will revert to His original thought and just dwell with men. He will dwell as their God in holy freedom because righteousness will then be dwelling, as 2 Peter 3: 13 tells us, and not merely reigning, as it will in the millennial age. As long as there is anything to challenge its supremacy it must reign: when the last challenge is met, it will dwell in undisturbed repose.

Will all differences between men disappear in the new creation?

It may be that on the new earth they will: as to that we cannot dogmatize. But at all events there will be the difference between those whose seat is to be in the heavens and those on the earth. In that day the holy city, symbolic of the church, will be the dwelling-place of God.

Again, in 1 Corinthians 15, where we find that already we have been quickened by the Last Adam, we also learn that His great work with us will reach its completion when we "bear the image of the Heavenly." It is a most marvellous fact that we, who belong to the church, shall enter those new creation scenes bearing the image of our Head even as regards our bodies. We do not find this asserted of others, besides the heavenly saints.

It is quickening which is actually mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, though we have referred to it in connection with new creation. This rather raises the question as to what is the relationship between the two things; and indeed between all the things we have considered. How can we put them all together?

There are things connected with our most holy faith which are quite beyond our powers, and this is one of them. We contemplate our Lord Jesus, we confess His Deity, whilst recognizing His true Humanity, yet our minds are not equal to the task of explaining how both go together. We see the sovereignty of God plainly taught in Scripture, and the responsibility of man taught with equal plainness, yet how exactly to adjust them together we know not. This inability of ours does not disturb us. We expect it, because the faith, which we believe, comes from God. Could we bring it all within the compass of our little minds we should thereby prove it was not Divine.

Now how can we put together all the things we have been surveying in cursory fashion? We may do so in part, but we cannot do so in any complete way, especially when we deal with the work wrought in us. The attempt to do so in the past has often led to unprofitable contentions, as might be expected. We repeat that we can no more see all round the subject at the same moment than we can see all four sides of a house at once.

The truth is one; of that we are sure. It is given to us in parts; and as we trace out these parts in Scripture we are instructed and profited. If we fail to distinguish things that differ, and lump them all together in a kind of indiscriminate mass, we lose a great deal. On the other hand if we divorce and divide the various parts we soon run into erroneous notions, as also we do if we attempt to work out theories as to the order in which they take place.

Without dividing we distinguish, and thereby understand more fully how rich and varied is the great salvation which has reached us. And the more we do understand, the more our hearts are moved in praise and thanksgiving to God.

STEM Publishing : Various : Twenty Gospel Tracts

Gospel Tracts

Edinburgh Series Wm. C. Reid.

1, Redemption.

2, Forgiveness.

3, Reconciliation.

4, Deliverance.

5, Salvation.

6, Justification.

7, Peace.

8, Joy.

Cumberland Series J. Wilson.

1. An Officer's Faith

2. Brought Down on Reconnaissance

3. A Storm at Sea

4. The Wrong Uniform

Preach The Word Series Wm. C. Reid.

The Counsel of Peace.

The Cup of Salvation.

An Anchor of the Soul.

No More Conscience of Sins.

Be Reconciled to God.

A Grave Warning and Its Sequel Robt. B. Wilson.

A Message from the Sea Robt. B. Wilson.

Original Distributors:

Galashiels — T. Oliver, 90 Channel Street.

Sydney — Tract Depot, 302 Pitt Street.

New York — Bible Truth Depot, 19 West 21st Street.

Redemption.

Redemption brings to light the power and glory of God, and presents to the believer in Christ the forgiveness of sins. The first chapter of Colossians sets forth a rich array of the glories of the Son of the Father's love, and these are introduced with "In Whom we have redemption — the forgiveness of sins." Before the glories of the Son, and the grace, power and glory of God can be known, the forgiveness of sins must first be enjoyed.

After crossing the Red Sea, where they had seen the display of God's power and glory, Israel sang, "Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast redeemed." They had been redeemed from Egypt and from the thraldom of Pharaoh by the blood of the paschal lamb and by the mighty hand of God. Similarly those who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ are redeemed from their sinful estate by the precious blood of Jesus, and from the authority of Satan by the mighty power of God, Who translates them into the kingdom of the Son of His love.

Jewish believers were told in 1 Peter 1, that the precious blood of Christ had redeemed them from the vanities of a corrupted Judaism. In the same way, Gentile believers have been set free from all the corruption of the human religions in which the Gospel found them, that they might live for God's good pleasure in the obedience of Jesus Christ, having come under the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. Silver and gold could never secure this great redemption; but God has procured it at infinite cost to Himself.

Shortly before Jacob's death, in blessing Joseph and his sons he said, "The angel which redeemed me from all evil bless the lads." Redemption for Jacob evidently meant his deliverance from all the dangers and troubles of his tortuous path. Christians too can count upon the strong arm of the Lord to bring them safely through all the vicissitudes of the wilderness they have been called to pass.

Although already enjoying the blessed fruits of redemption in our souls, as having bodies of humiliation, we are hindered from full enjoyment; but this imperfect condition will be done away when the Lord Jesus comes to give us that for which we wait, "The adoption (or sonship), the redemption of the body." (Rom. 8: 23).

In glorified bodies the saints of God shall enter into the full blessedness of the joys of the Father's House, and shall possess the inheritance that God has given them in Christ. This immense possession has already been purchased at the price of Jesus's blood, and at His coming the Lord Jesus will redeem the possession He has purchased by removing from it those who have taken unlawful tenancy. Till that great and glorious day for which the Christian longs, God has given to the heirs His Holy Spirit as the earnest of the inheritance. (Eph. 1: 14).

Forgiveness.

Throughout the Christian ages, great and successful efforts have been made by Satan to rob believers in the Lord Jesus Christ of the knowledge of forgiveness of sins. When on earth the Lord Jesus said to a man, "Thy sins are forgiven thee" (Luke 5: 20); and to a woman, "Thy sins are forgiven." (Luke 7: 48). These two would therefore be assured that their sins were forgiven. All true believers should possess the same assurance for it is written in the Scriptures, "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake." (1 John 2: 12).

The forgiveness of sins rests on the foundation of the great redemptive work of Christ, and all the efficacy of the accomplished work abides in Him where He dwells before the face of God. No other could atone for sins. When Israel sinned at the foot of Mount Sinai, Moses pleaded with God for them saying, "If thou wilt forgive; and if not, blot me, I pray thee out of thy book which thou hast written." But Moses could not be accepted as a sacrifice, even for one sin. His zeal for Israel was wonderful; his sentiments were noble; but how could a sinful man, even though he was the meekest man on all the earth, die for sinful men? At the appointed time, God sent forth His Son, Who became Man, and as the holy, spotless Lamb of God laid down His life and shed His precious blood, so that a righteous and Holy God might be able in perfect consistency with His character and nature to forgive sinners who believe in Him.

With the sacrificial work of Christ in view God was able beforehand to forgive sinners of a previous dispensation. This is taught in Romans 3: 25; and in Psalm 32: 5. David in confessing his sin to God availed himself of this great benefit, even although, he could not know the glorious plan of redemption that was in the mind and heart of God. David said, "I acknowledged my sin to thee — and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin"; and this is an excellent example for all. That all may receive the same forgiveness as David is clearly taught in John 1: 9, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Scripture also teaches governmental forgiveness of sins. This character of forgiveness was really granted to the man in Luke 5: 20; and is also indicated in John 5: 14 and 8: 11. God not only deals with His people in grace, but chastens them in His government; and some may be laid upon a bed of sickness because of some particular sin. James 5: 15 shows that such may be healed and governmentally forgiven. On this line Peter received authority from the Lord to bind and loose sins on earth, and his actions were to be ratified in heaven. This of course is governmental; and the case of Ananias and Sapphira demonstrated how heaven ratified the sin that Peter bound upon them.

Reconciliation.

Reconciliation is getting right with God. When Adam sinned, moral distance separated him from God, and he became an enemy of God. To be reconciled, man must be brought back to God with the enmity removed from his heart. Perhaps the outstanding picture of reconciliation in the New Testament is found in Luke 15. The need of bread, and the realisation of his Father's goodness awoke within the Prodigal the desire to return; but he had no idea of the reconciliation that the Father had prepared for him. A servant's place would have sufficed the Prodigal but the kisses, the best robe, the ring, the shoes, the fatted calf, and the music and dancing revealed the resources of the Father for the satisfaction of his love. These things were all enjoyed by the erstwhile wanderer when the distance had gone, and the enmity displaced from his heart by the Father's love.

Old Testament incidents also help us to understand the truth of reconciliation. Absalom's murder of Amnon alienated him from the house of David, and although he was ultimately brought home he was not really reconciled. His rebellion against David proved there was enmity in his heart towards his Father. Absalom never confessed his guilt, and a reconciliation without confession and repentance will never do for God. With Mephibosheth it was very different. When brought from the distance of Lodebar, the kindness of God lavished upon him by David dispelled his enmity; and this was evinced in his mourning for David during his absence in rejection.

God reconciles sinners by bringing them near to Him in Christ, His Beloved, and by displacing the enmity from their hearts with the knowledge of His love. The love of God and enmity towards Him cannot remain in the heart together. Christ's wonderful death has fully manifested God's love for ungodly sinners who were His enemies, and this love has been shed abroad in the hearts of believers by the Holy Spirit. (See Romans 5).

But reconciliation is also connected with the truth of the new creation. This is taught in 2 Corinthians 5; where the Christian is seen "In Christ" before God. The new creation describes the new conditions of life in which the believer exists; where death cannot come, and where there is no distance and no enmity. Every feature of this new existence in which saints have been created is portrayed in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Soon the Lord will return to reconcile all things to the fulness of the Godhead; which shall be completed when every sphere of government and authority on earth and in the heavens is recovered to God. By the exercise of His mighty power the Lord will remove His foes from these spheres and fill them with His glory, that God might be glorified in all things for the ages of ages.

Deliverance.

Elihu told Job that God speaks to man in various ways to instruct him, and to keep him from his purpose and pride. God speaks by dreams, by preserving men from violent deaths, by pain, sickness and disease, and by bringing men to the very point of death. All these things are to teach men the grace of God, and that they might hear Him saying, "Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom." (Job 33). To be the subject of this deliverance from divine judgment, the sinner must acknowledge his sin, saying as in this chapter, "I have sinned and perverted that which was right"; then "He will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light." (v. 28).

Deliverance from the bondage of the law is realised by the knowledge that we have become dead to the law by the body of Christ; and this liberty is given to Christians that they might live for the will of God to give Him pleasure. This is taught in Romans 7; the next chapter shows that the individual believer can enjoy deliverance from the law of sin and death. Before God, every true believer is looked at as liberated both from the law and from the bondage of sin; but the practical experience of these things is another matter. To enjoy deliverance from sin we must reckon ourselves as dead indeed unto sin, and alive unto God in Christ Jesus. Having learned to do this the Christian will be able to say with Paul "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death." Like Israel under the bondage of Pharaoh in Egypt the sinner is under the yoke of Satan as the god and prince of this world. It is the privilege of the saints of God to know that the Father has delivered them from the power of darkness, and has translated them into the kingdom of the Son of His love. (Col. 1: 13).

Our God and Father desires that we should be delivered from this present evil world. (Gal. 1: 4). We learn how this is brought about in the same epistle, (Gal. 2: 20 and Gal. 6: 14). "I am crucified with Christ" is the experience of one who has allowed the truth of the cross to affect his whole moral being; and "I live by the faith of the Son of God" meant that Paul's whole life and being were bound up in communion with Jesus his Lord. Then in chapter 6 we see a man who realises that the world has been completely exposed and judged in the cross, and that that same cross which measured the world's hatred of God and His Son revealed the world's estimate of him as Christ's disciple. These are the lessons to be learned if deliverance from this present evil world is to be realised. When this guilty world receives its just judgment for the murder of God's Son, we shall not be here, for Jesus is "our deliverer from the coming wrath." (1 Thess. 1: 10).

Salvation.

Jonah, the prophet, had remarkable experiences, and doubtless made great discoveries during his sojourn in the whale's belly; but his release from such a prison would be the most blessed of all his experiences, and this was when he discovered that "Salvation is of the Lord." The discovery that we need salvation may be very painful, accompanied with anxiety and deep distress, as with Jonah. This will occur if we realise before God that we are ruined, guilty and lost; and powerless against sin and Satan.

Salvation is not procurable by human efforts, for Titus 3: 5-6 points out that we are saved by God's mercy, and not by works of righteousness which we have done. This is also emphasised in Ephesians 2: 8-9, "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works lest any man should boast." God in sovereign love has secured this great salvation for us in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Aged Simeon knew this when he said, "Mine eyes have seen Thy salvation." The Samaritans learned it when they heard Jesus speaking, for they said, "We know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." There must be personal contact with the Son of God to know Him as the Saviour. Peter, the great apostle, who truly knew the Lord said of Him, "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."

Many true believers have doubts and fears about salvation, not having in their souls the assurance that God gives in His word. The woman in Luke 7 would not have the slightest doubt on this question after the Lord said to her, "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace." Nor should we have the semblance of a dread, for the Scripture tells us that "God — hath saved us." (2 Tim. 1: 9). The word is not "may save" or "will save," but "hath saved." But we need to be preserved amid the dangers and snares of the world, and for this the Lord Jesus Christ has become our Great High Priest; and as such "He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them." (Hebrews 7: 25).

Complete salvation will be effected for us by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ for His saints. Then we shall be delivered from our present circumstances, and shall be taken to heaven to be for ever with the Lord. While awaiting this momentous event, we "are kept by the power of God through faith." (1 Peter 1: 5). If this salvation in all its parts is to be ours, we must heed the word spoken by Paul to the Jailor at Philippi, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

Justification.

When Job contended with his friends, who ignorant of God's dealings with him, falsely accused him, the cry was wrung from his grief-stricken but self-righteous heart, "How should man be just with God?" His three "comforters" could not rightly answer this question, but the true answer was given when God revealed Himself to Job, and when he replied, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." To tell God that we are loathsome sinners deserving only divine judgment is the way to be just with God. The same lesson is learned from the Pharisee and the Publican in Luke 18. Proud in his self-righteousness the Pharisee justified himself before God, but the Publican condemned himself, saying, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Of the self-judged man the Lord said, "I say unto you that that man went to his house justified rather than the other."

Justification is simply to be righteous in the sight of God: to be cleared from the imputation of guilt. No man is free from guilt, for "all have sinned"; and none can redeem himself, for we are without strength." Therefore if sinners are to be justified, a means for its accomplishment must be found outside of themselves. God in infinite wisdom has devised the means, which manifests His great love and the riches of His grace. On the cross, the Lord Jesus endured the divine judgment merited by sinners, and shed His precious blood; and this enables God in perfect righteousness to clear from every charge of guilt those who believe on Him.

But there are those like the haughty Jews of Romans 10, who, seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. Like the man at the wedding feast they refuse the wedding garment provided by the King. Unlike the Prodigal they will not confess, "I have sinned," and so lack the best robe and all else provided by a loving Father, and remain like the elder brother outside the Father's house with its merriment and joys. The apostle Paul had once sought to establish his own righteousness, and thus be just before God; but his interview with the Lord Jesus on the way to Damascus disclosed to him the unsuitability of such a garment when exposed in the light of the glory shining from the face of Jesus. He desired thereafter "to be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith." (Phil. 3: 9). While those who have neglected or refused the righteousness of God are sorrowing in the darkness for eternity, those who have received the abundance of grace will be displayed with the Lord Jesus in glory as "The righteousness of God in Him." (2 Cor. 5: 21).

Peace.

No one will gainsay that all the prodigious efforts of men to procure peace for the nations have ended in failure; but few realise that the explanation of this failure lies in the world's rejection of the Son of God. With the coming of the Babe of Bethlehem the entry of peace into the world was celebrated by the praising heavenly host saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace"; but the portending departure of peace was proclaimed just before Christ's final rejection, by the multitude crying, "Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest." Not until the Lord returns as Prince of Peace will peace be found on earth again.

But God in infinite wisdom and compassion used the very occasion of the cross to secure for men a more wonderful peace than that brought to earth in the Son's incarnation. This peace was made by the blood of His cross, and it is proclaimed in the Gospel. Indeed, in Ephesians 2: 17, Christ is presented as the great Preacher of peace both to Jew and Gentile. It is because of this peace received from Him that we can have our feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace when standing in conflict in the evil day.

The troubled sinner needs peace for his conscience, and he receives this when he believes the Gospel. Romans 5: 1, unfolds this, "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." The woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment illustrates this beautifully. Trembling she came to Jesus, only to hear from His lips, "Thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace." (Luke 8: 48).

Those enjoying peace with God soon realise that if faithful to Christ they will share the reproach of His rejection, and be the object of the world's malice and opposition. When forewarning His disciples of this the Lord said, "These things have I spoken unto you that in me ye might have peace." (John 16: 33). There is no peace for the Christian here; but while passing through tribulation for the Lord's sake he can have the bounty left by the Lord, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you."

Although brought into divine favour the Christian is not relieved from the trials that are common to men; and these are apt to bring anxious care. For such circumstances the believer may have the peace of God which passes all understanding, and this by making his requests known to God by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. (Philippians 4: 6-7). God's peace is not disturbed by the unrest and conflicts of the world, and this is the peace that is held out to His people. To enjoy this divine peace in its varied aspects, the Christian must abide in communion with the Lord Jesus Christ, for "He is our peace."

Joy.

Natural joy is very precious and according to the Preacher in Ecc. 2: 26, it is one of three things that God gives to a man that is good in His sight. Natural goodness, in the government of God brings its own reward of natural joy. But the joys of nature quickly fade before the trials and sorrows that man inherits, and the exercised soul at length discovers that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. The transient character of natural joy was demonstrated at the marriage feast of Cana of Galilee, when the wine ran out; but it was there the Lord Jesus revealed that in the best wine of His providing there was a source of an entirely new kind of joy. This new joy is from God, and is known in the reception of the Gospel. As a result of Philip's ministry at Samaria, where he preached Christ unto them, we read, "And there was great joy in that city." (Acts 8: 8). In the same chapter, Philip spoke to the Ethiopian about the Lord Jesus, and having believed the word spoken, it says of him that "He went on his way rejoicing."

Many new things bring joy at their reception or beginning, and afterwards the joy is displaced by distresses that eat like a canker. But Christianity is very different. Having saved us from our sins, God brings us into His kingdom. This kingdom is characterised by "Joy in the Holy Spirit," and in order that we may possess the joy constantly, God has given us the source of it by shedding His love abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which He has given to us. One of the precious fruits of the Spirit as delineated in Gal. 5: 22, is joy.

The joys of nature are dependent on circumstances. If a man's circumstances are grievous, his joy disappears. But the joy given by the Lord is independent of circumstances, and therefore persists in seasons of trial and sorrow. Although the Lord Jesus on earth was "A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" it is written of Him "He rejoiced in spirit." His joy was from communion with His Father, in spite of His rejection by men. The apostle Paul following in the steps of His Master, shared His rejection and sorrow but knew the blessedness of His Master's joy, and commended this joy to others. In his epistle to the Philippians more than once he says "My joy," and he exhorted them to "Rejoice in the Lord alway."

On the night of His betrayal the Lord Jesus spoke of many things to His disciples. He warned them of the tribulation they should receive from the world, but He also promised them His joy. He said, "These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." (John 15: 11). From 1 John 1: 1-4 we see that this joy is realised as we learn the reality of eternal life in communion with the Father and the Son. May we truly know His joy in communion with Him.

Cumberland Series

1. An Officer's Faith

2. Brought Down on Reconnaissance

3. A Storm at Sea

4. The Wrong Uniform

An Officer's Faith.

The searchlight of God's gracious dealings with men in this world of darkness allows its beam to pause upon particular incidents in Holy Writ and for the gaze of all holds in its ray God's attitude towards His creature estranged from Himself by sin. So, in the Gospels there are recorded many instances of the Grace of God reaching men through the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ who, as the Vessel of Grace, was alone competent to fulfil such a work. Whether in preaching the Gospel to the poor, healing the broken-hearted, delivering captives, recovering sight to the blind, He is presented in the Gospel of Luke as the Perfect Man in the activity of grace. It is not to call attention to the kind of faith, viz., an officer's, that this incident from Luke 7 has been chosen but to show that in the Scriptures the military forces are not excluded from the many walks of life in which examples of the gift of God (Eph. 2: 8) are found. What marked the unnamed centurion was a faith which surpassed any found amongst a people privileged above all others as to the things of God (v. 9) and which got an answer (v. 10). We do well then to consider this soldier's reaction to faith if we would be pleasing to God (Heb. 11: 6). Here was a man with a deep need but he was in the favourable circumstances whereby he could hear of Jesus (v. 3). His sphere of service as a soldier happened to be cast in the very territory which was graced by those Divine footsteps. How often privileges are taken for granted! How often is the opportunity of hearing of Jesus in this favoured Island Home of ours spurned! But the centurion was not content with simply hearing of Jesus, faith was in exercise, for he approached Him in such a way as to bring out the glory of the Perfect Man which is the particular theme of Luke's Gospel. He thus solicited the aid of the elders of the Jews (v. 3) and clearly indicated the ground of repentance for he took sides with God against himself (v. 6). Moreover, there was the recognition both of the ability (v. 7) and the authority (v. 8) of the One to whom he addressed his appeal in his deep need. It may be that news of the man who was healed of the palsy (Luke 5: 18) had reached the ears of this centurion and, as his servant was suffering from the same complaint (Mat. 8: 6), he had concluded that Jesus might cure him. However, this would only have involved the exercise of natural intelligence. What the Lord recognised and answered was the faith which expressed itself in such a way, the need being felt, as to produce repentance on the part of the centurion and appreciation of the power of the Lord to help him.

Dear reader, may it be yours in all your deep need as a sinner to exercise repentance toward God, i.e., taking sides with God against yourself, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, i.e., bringing in God as He has been pleased to reveal Himself (Acts 20: 21). In this way you may have the assurance of the forgiveness of your sins, which is undoubtedly your deepest need (Acts 13: 38). The One who met the centurion in his extremity is the only One who can meet you in yours. "He is the same yesterday, and to-day and for ever" (Heb. 13: 8). J. Wilson.

Brought Down on Reconnaissance.

The title of this tract will doubtless divert thought into the avenue of aerial activity and to the brave men engaged in the hazardous work suggested, but such is not its aim. The desire is to isolate the principle of ascent, and, through clothing it in a moral garb, show that it originated with Satan himself and which has been manifested ever since by men as fallen creatures. We do not wish to detract from the value of reconnaissance work in the ways of men nor to belittle those who display natural courage, but to stress that in the ways of God the practice by men of ascendency in a moral sense never leads to salvation or blessing; this is the thought of God for all men for "God our Saviour who will have all men to be saved and come unto the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2: 3-4). To trace the principle to its source we must go back to the fall of Satan from heaven. God has carefully recorded this incident in Isaiah 14: 13. "For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven. . . ." As a fallen creature and under the dominion of sin (Rom. 6: 14) man has never ceased to give expression to the rule. In Genesis 11 the Tower of Babel is a monument to the desire and efforts of men to enjoy the atmosphere of heaven in their own way. The confederacy would be the witness to the former and the brick an indication of the latter. Then, as though to guard against the fallacy that the principle had been eradicated either by the passage of time or the transition from the Old to the New Testament, Zacchaeus is introduced in Luke 19. Evidently there was still the desire after what was of God for "he sought to see Jesus who he was" and the efforts to satiate that desire was seen in his own scheming for he climbed into a sycamore tree, noted for the thickness of its foliage; only to find, however, that his own efforts were but taking him farther from the place of blessing. The higher he climbed the greater was the distance he had to come down.

Dear reader, if hitherto you have been seeking to merit salvation by anything you are doing, no matter how commendable it may appear, take warning from what God has recorded in His Word in connection with this little man! "Zacchaeus, make haste and come down" indicated the way of salvation, on the line of his humbling himself before the One who had become Man that He might bring salvation within the reach of men in their lost estate. "A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise" (Psalm 51: 17). Moreover, far from being obtained by the efforts of men, the blessing was to be had only on the principle of faith "forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham" and that in the Son of Man who came to create the sense of need in the soul and to satisfy it. Have you humbled yourself before the Saviour in the confession of your lost condition and through the exercise of faith in Himself received the salvation which he waits to impart? If not, learn the lesson taught in the Scriptures of Truth by Zacchaeus who was brought down on reconnaissance to have the word of salvation spoken by the Saviour Himself. J. Wilson.

A Storm at Sea.

In these days when engineering seems to have reached the peak of accomplishment it is difficult to understand the dangers which attended a storm at sea in bygone days. However, history shows that the destinies of nations have been moulded by such an event. For instance, the Spanish Armada was one of the most outstanding events in that connection, but the destiny of a nation pales into insignificance in comparison with an individual soul in the sight of God. "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Thus the sea storm described in Matt. 14: 23-33 is concerned largely with the Lord and Peter. In these few verses there is given a beautiful example of the Lord's help to His own in distressing circumstances.

But ere we pass on to develop this a little, let us consider for a moment the character of the one who reaps the benefit of the Lord's gracious support. He, who is presented in Matthew 14 is the same as is dealt with in Luke 5. It is important to grasp this, bearing in mind that Peter's experience in Luke 5 is antecedent to that in Matthew 14, for it clearly shows that the man the Lord was dealing with in the latter instance had judged his sinful condition in His presence. "Depart from me for I am a sinful man, O Lord." But Peter stayed where he was at the knees of Jesus until the words of peace had been spoken to his conscience. "Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men." He had made his confession to the only One Who had authority to set his conscience at rest. Peter was to prove the truth of these words on many occasions subsequently; this is one from Matthew 14. But Peter is only taken up representatively to show that the Lord's support can be enjoyed by all who have judged their sinful condition before Him and who have had the word of assurance spoken to the conscience.

The Lord goes up into a mountain to pray, indicating the place of exaltation which He occupies to-day (Heb. 9: 24) on behalf of His own who are left below where the rough seas are encountered. But it is blessed to notice that He is mindful of them in all their toil and comes to them in the fourth and last watch, which suggests that all during the night of His absence, the Lord's own people can count upon Himself. Surely it is a word of encouragement to them to-day for Scripture clearly represents this as having the character of night! (Rom. 13: 12; Rev. 22: 16). But there is One who is able both to succour and to sympathise in connection with all the weakness and infirmity which abound. In spite of all that is calculated to disturb, there is One who moves above these things for the sustenance of His people. Jesus comes to them walking on the sea!

May the Lord give you, dear reader, if you have not already done so, to judge your sinful condition before Him, that when the storms come you may know where to turn for the Pilot! J. Wilson.

The Wrong Uniform.

The wearing of the correct uniform is a matter of prime importance to-day if we would move through our country with impunity. The donning of an enemy uniform would probably lead to immediate enquiry, if not arrest and imprisonment. Care is, therefore, exercised that our clothing is so regulated as not to offend the eyes of men. But how careful we may be sometimes about suiting the eyes of men who, after all, can only touch the body, and forget to consider our suitability to the eyes of God who is concerned with the soul! A consideration of the parable spoken by Jesus in Matt. 22: 1-14, therefore, may help in the latter matter which is infinitely more important as it raises eternal issues.

In the parable we are told of a King who has designs of blessing for His Son and, with this in view, proposes a wedding. The necessary accompaniments which attend such a desire are then considered and the invitations are given verbally by the servants. The result, however, is startling! The would-be guests refuse to accept the King's invitation and are much more concerned with the mundane routine of earthly toil (one went to his farm and another to his merchandise). This is almost unbelievable until we remember that we are considering a parable which portrays the refusal, on the part of the Jews, of all God's overtures of grace. Man's history from the commencement shows that he has always been much more concerned about earthly things than heavenly things! But the King would not be thwarted and we are beautifully introduced into that which God is doing amongst men to-day, by the Gospel, that the wedding may be furnished with guests. God is inviting men and women to-day to the marriage of His Son, a marriage which, as yet, has not taken place (Rev. 19: 7), but the guests must be arrayed suitably. Moreover, they are held individually responsible for being so; the guest in the parable was speechless when questioned for he knew quite well what was required but he evidently thought that his own clothes would do. They may have been ever so nice and well-fitting but they did not meet with the approval of the King and this, after all, was the acid test.

Dear reader, do you think that any righteousness which you may suppose you possess will be suitable clothing for the marriage of His Son to which God now invites you? If so, be warned by what God has recorded here and elsewhere in the Holy Scriptures. "All our righteousness are as filthy rags" (Isa. 64: 6). "There is none righteous, no, not one" (Rom. 3: 10). The guest who is taken as an example only made one mistake — he failed to avail himself of the wedding garment — but it resulted in "outer darkness." Dear friend, are you garbed in the righteousness of God for of such does the wedding garment speak? If not, turn to Romans 3: 21, 22 and learn that the righteousness of God which has been manifested . . . by faith of Jesus Christ is unto all so that it may be yours but it is only possessed by those who exercise faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, for it is upon all who believe. It is here on earth that the question is settled for we are told in the parable that the servants gathered in both bad and good and there will be certainly no bad connected with heaven and its glory (Rev. 21: 27). J. Wilson.

Preach The Word Series

The Counsel of Peace.

The Cup of Salvation.

An Anchor of the Soul.

No More Conscience of Sins.

Be Reconciled to God.

The Counsel of Peace.

If there is one thing needful for the troubled nations of the world, or for the distressed individual, it is lasting peace. For the world there can be no abiding peace until the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to put down all evil, and establish His kingdom in righteousness. Peace was offered to the world when God's Son came into it as the Babe of Bethlehem, even as recorded in the angelic praise, "Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace." This divine overture was rejected when the world put the Son of God upon the cross; and this shameful rejection is the cause of the world's incurable wounds of sorrow and distress. So far as the individual soul is concerned, peace of conscience and heart are unknown until Christ has His true place in the heart and life. Man is by nature a sinner, and at a distance from God, subject to divine judgment because of his sins, from which he cannot escape by his own efforts. Apart from God's intervention on his behalf, in sovereign mercy, man must perish for ever in his sins; and the thought of this troubles the conscience and distresses the mind of the awakened soul.

We may well thank God for the deep interest He has shown in His erring creature. "The counsel of peace" (Zechariah 6: 13) tells how God and His beloved Son have devised the means for securing the blessing of peace for the repentant sinner. This wonderful plan involved the coming down into this world of God's own Son, so that He might go to the cross to suffer for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God (1 Peter 3: 18). This great work was completed; peace was made by the blood of His cross; the efficacy of the work is infinite and eternal, and through it, whosoever will may come to God and receive the blessings of the counsel of peace.

So that men might partake of the fruits of the counsel of peace, God has sent forth His gospel. To the Jews, who crucified His Son, and said "His blood be on us and on our children," God offers peace in the gospel; and many of Jacob's troubled sons and daughters have found their rest in this deep peace. This blessed message of peace comes to you and me, poor sinners of the Gentiles, far from God by nature and by practice; a peace that dispels every bit of dread from the heart, and brings the tranquil soul to delight in the presence of God.

Have you peace with God? Do not say that this is impossible to have. We read in Romans 5: 1, "Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God." There is no need for you to continue in doubts and fears if you desire the peace of God. But there is only one way of procuring this inestimable blessing. You must come to God, as a poor sinner, confessing your guilt, and bowing the knee in true repentance before the Lord Jesus Christ. Come to Him NOW; and hear Him say to you, as He once said to a poor repentant sinner, "Thy faith hath saved thee, go in peace" (Luke 7: 50). (R. — Wm. C. Reid.)

The Cup of Salvation.

God desires the salvation and blessing of his fallen creature, man; but, like the writer of Psalm 116, we have to be brought low in the presence of God before we are ready to accept the cup of salvation that He offers. Describing the experience through which he had passed, the Psalmist says, "The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow." This was surely a dreadful plight; when in the extremity of human weakness, and beyond all creature aid, the gates of death and hell were open wide before him, ready to receive him. What could he do but throw himself upon the mercy of God? Therefore he says, "Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech Thee, deliver my soul."

Man's extremity is verily God's opportunity, as witnesses the Psalmist. After extolling the Lord for His grace, righteousness, and mercy, he can say, Thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling." And this is also the blessed experience of all who, on being brought low before God, cast themselves upon His mercy. God has no pleasure in the sorrows of men, but in His great mercy and wisdom He often brings them into ways of sorrow and distress, so that they might come to the end of themselves, and trust wholly in Him. We are poor guilty sinners, deserving only death and hell; but God has procured salvation for us through the death of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ; and this is the blessing He desires that we should drink from the cup of salvation that He offers.

The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that this is a "Great salvation," and that it began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him. Do you remember the tragic story of Lot's wife? Salvation was almost hers. She was actually out of the doomed city of Sodom, but on disobeying the divine command, she was turned into a pillar of salt. Salvation may be almost yours, and yet you may miss the blessing. It may be that you mean to be saved; yet you still neglect the great salvation preached to us in the Gospel. Listen to the solemn warning of Scripture, "If the word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompence of reward; how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?"

Perhaps you would like to work for salvation? The word of God tells us, "For by grace are ye saved through faith . . . it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast." This clearly shows that we cannot get salvation apart from receiving it as God's free gift. Our Psalmist asked "What shall I render unto the LORD for all His benefits towards me?" His own answer was, "I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the LORD." This is the simple way into the blessing. Take then that blessed cup now; for "Now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation." (R. — Wm. C. Reid.)

An Anchor of the Soul.

A wise man, in considering a new position or job, is concerned about its prospects, knowing that it will probably determine how he is to be occupied, and perhaps where he is to reside for the rest of his natural life; but how few give consideration to, or have concern for the prospect beyond the grave. And yet this is a matter of much greater import, involving the eternal destiny of the soul. Many refuse to face the eternal prospect, and if questioned about it, endeavour to evade it, clearly manifesting that they do not have the Christian's hope "As an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast" (Hebrews 6: 19).

God, in His word, has plainly spoken of the judgment awaiting those who have neglected the blessings of the Gospel, or who have refused His grace. This world is guilty of the death of God's Son; and all who form part of the world will share its judgment. When on the cross, the Lord Jesus said, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do;" and because of this wonderful intercession, God is prepared to treat us as manslayers rather than as murderers. Those who refuse this offer of divine mercy will have to answer to God for the murder of His Son.

The true believer in the Lord Jesus Christ has "fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us," and this hope is the God-given anchor of the soul. Of old, the manslayer was sheltered in the city of refuge (Numbers 35); and the Christian is sheltered from judgment in Christ, even as we read in Romans 8: 1, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." God Himself provided the cities of refuge; He would not have the manslayer treated as a murderer; nor will He have you treated as guilty of the murder of His Son, if you flee to Christ, the refuge He has provided in the richness of His mercy. The hope of the manslayer was liberty through the death of the High Priest; those divinely sheltered now have the blessed hope of actually entering God's presence and glory at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Alas! many do not realise their need of the refuge God has provided; nor have they the blessed hope that God has given to the believer in Jesus. They may be willing to admit that all are sinners, but say they hope to get to heaven at last because they are no worse than many. There is no place in all their thoughts for the refuge and the hope God has provided. A sure anchor is one properly formed and fashioned, one that can hold. Has your anchor been formed aright? Has it come from God, or is it the creature of your own thoughts and imagination? A stedfast anchor must be holding on proper ground. Is your anchor secure within the vail of heaven, or does it rest on the shifting ground of man's philosophy and false hopes? See to it that you get the anchor that God gives, a hope that will never fail: be sure that your hope for eternal blessing rests on Christ, Who is sitting at God's right hand in heaven. (R. — Wm. C. Reid.)

No More Conscience of Sins.

Why did Adam hide himself among the trees of the garden of Eden after his sin against God? Was it not because of the sense in his soul that he was guilty? The Scripture tells us that "All have sinned" (Romans 3: 23), and the guilt of our sins resting upon the conscience makes us dread the searching light of God's presence. The very best of men have confessed themselves altogether unfit for the presence of a holy God. At Sinai, Moses said, "I exceedingly fear and quake" (Hebrews 12: 21); Job, the best man of his day, said "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear but now mine eye seeth Thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 1: 8; Job 42: 5-6). Isaiah, who had just been pronouncing woes on evildoers, on entering God's holy presence, said "Woe is me! for I am undone" (Isaiah 6: 5). Before God, Daniel, a truly lovely character, said of himself, "My comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength" (Daniel 10: 8). And how do we compare with these holy men? Are we better than they?

If God has brought our guilt before us, it is not to have us ever conscious of it; but rather that confessing it we might avail ourselves of the wonderful blessing of "No more conscience of sins" (Hebrews 10: 2). To bring this inestimable blessing to men, the Lord Jesus Christ, God's own dear Son, came down from heaven, and on the cross offered Himself a sacrifice for sins. That one offering has glorified God, completely satisfying the claims of His holy and righteous throne; enabling Him to clear the guilty from every charge of sin, if they will but confess their guilt and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. So clear can we be, that not one stain remains on the conscience; and we can enter with holy boldness the very presence of the God against whom we had sinned.

In the sacrifices of the Jewish law, God had indicated His desire to take away sins; but such sacrifices could never take sins away; their blood had no intrinsic value, but they pointed forward to the spotless victim, the Lord Jesus Christ, Whose precious blood can remove our sins. Let no one be deceived, there is no other way of having "no more conscience of sins," but by resting in that one sacrifice, the death of Jesus.

The time must surely come, when each one of us will leave this world, and appear before God. When your time comes, will you go with the guilt of your sins upon your conscience, or with "no more conscience of sins?" This is a most solemn question, which should be faced without delay. So many put the matter off until it is too late. You may never have warning that your end is near; even if you have, the poor body languishing in pain or sickness may leave you unable to consider this all-important matter. Be wise therefore, and have the question of your sins answered before God while still you have the opportunity, by trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ. (R. — Wm. C. Reid.)

Be Reconciled to God.

There are few who realise that by nature and practice man is far away from God, with very wrong thoughts and feelings of God. In His well-beloved Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, God has perfectly expressed His attitude towards poor sinful man, for "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Cor. 5: 19). Alas! instead of receiving the Lord Jesus, men took Him, and with wicked hands crucified and slew Him. But man's crowning sin has not impeded the outflow of divine grace, for God is still sending forth His messengers with the Gospel, bidding men to get right with God. The day rapidly approaches when the glad news of the Gospel will cease, and God will require the blood of His Son at the hands of men and every one who has refused or neglected the message of grace must give account to Him.

When Adam sinned, he not only became guilty of disobedience, but the principle of sin entered into his nature, and he became estranged from God. Every child of Adam inherits his sinful nature with its enmity towards God, and is born in the distance from God. Coming down to Eden, after man's fall, God called to Adam, "Where art thou?" God had not only come to convict the sinner, and to pronounce His righteous judgment, but, in wondrous compassion, to seek the lost ones and rescue them from the consequences of their dreadful sin. Before men can be saved and brought near to God, they must first realise the enormity of sin, and be found in confession and repentance. A just and holy God cannot overlook sin; and the cross shows how God maintains His righteousness and holiness while pardoning the repentant sinner. There, the Lord Jesus Christ became the sin offering, and accomplished the redemption that enables God to offer pardon to every sinner.

Have you availed yourself of this offer of pardon? You will never be right with God unless you do so. You may try to overlook the consequences of your sins: God cannot. God could never fill heaven with unrepentant sinners! Do you remember what happened when King David brought back the unrepentant Absalom? He plotted against his Father, and sought to kill him. If Absalom had confessed his sin, and repented of it, there would not have been enmity in his heart towards David. How could God have sinful men in the heavenly courts of light and love with dark hatred and enmity filling their hearts?

In Luke 15 the Lord Jesus gave a lovely illustration of one truly reconciled. Having learned that the pleasures of sin are but for a season, the Prodigal remembered the goodness of his Father, and this brought him back to ask for a servant's place. Instead, the Father kissed the Prodigal, gave him the best robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf and rejoiced in receiving the lost one safely home. If you will come to God, like the Prodigal, in true repentance, confessing your sin, God will give you a wonderful reconciliation. (R. — Wm. C. Reid.)

A Grave Warning and Its Sequel.

1. The Warning.

Some years ago the writer was spending a holiday at one of our large East Coast resorts. There he made the acquaintance of a local resident who kindly offered to conduct him round the town and surrounding district, visiting specially the beauty spots. One place he considered to be particularly charming and a special day was arranged for our visit thereto. We were glad that the day, when it dawned, proved an ideal one as far as the weather was concerned. The sun shone in all its brilliance and on reaching the railway station we observed that others besides ourselves were

apparently bound for the same destination. When we left the train, we found ourselves after a short walk, in a lovely wood. The writer well remembers what a pleasing sight it was to look upon the blue expanse of the North Sea; the view being broken in places by the trunks of fine old trees, whose contrasting colour seemed to enhance the beauty of the sea beyond. But sore disappointment was in store for us. We had not been there long before the sky suddenly became overcast. Darker and darker grew the prospect, and the sea which just a few moments before had gladdened our vision, now reflected and emphasized the threatening aspect of the sky above it. We concluded that a severe storm was about to overtake us, and as neither of us had made any preparation for this unexpected change in weather conditions, we set off with all speed to reach a shelter of which the writer's friend was aware. We were just in time. Already a goodly company had gathered, but there was enough standing room for us to have the protection we so much needed. The rain descended in torrents, the frequent flashes of lightning almost blinding us, and the responding peals of thunder making us feel that the earth trembled beneath our feet. My friend and I were well placed to view the faces of those who had gathered, and we could see that many of them bore the signs of mingled fear and disappointment. A solemn silence prevailed, a silence intensified by the contrasting thunder and the falling rain outside, and one felt that God was speaking silently yet powerfully to the hearts and consciences of the people.

The writer himself was moved by the circumstances of the occasion, and he thought of another storm and another shelter, both of which he felt impelled to speak. Before so doing he prayed to God that a suitable message might be given him for the people, and also courage to proclaim it faithfully and fearlessly. Quicker even than the lightning flash the message came, but before delivering it, he sang the words of a well-known hymn, most suitable for the occasion: —

"The Lord's my Rock, in Him I hide,

A shelter in the time of storm,

Secure whatever ill betide,

A shelter in the time of storm,

Oh! Jesus is a Rock in a weary land

A shelter in the time of storm."

After singing the hymn the speaker was encouraged to find that every one seemed ready to listen to his God-given message. He reminded his audience that the storm which raged around them in all its fury, had overtaken them very suddenly and unexpectedly, and being without protection of any kind, they had all hastened to this welcome refuge. He also suggested that every one present, including himself, must feel in their hearts that they owed a debt of gratitude to those whose kindness had prompted its erection.

These introductory remarks led him to the theme that burdened his heart. This was none other than the solemn fact of the coming storm of God's judgment, and His wonderful and gracious provision for all who desired a shelter from it. It is an appalling fact that there are multitudes to-day who never think of eternity, and consequently have no regard for the welfare of their precious souls, nor of the precious salvation God is offering them through the death of His own beloved Son. Their brief span of life which God's word declares to be "even a vapour that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away" (James 4: 14) is so engrossed with the pursuit of pleasure, or wealth, or fashion or one of the many other things wherewith Satan lures his victims to destruction, that all thought of eternity and the all-important matters relating thereto, are quite excluded. The same gross folly was seen in the days of Noah, as Matthew 24: 38-39, states: — "For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage . . . and knew not until the flood came and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be."

How solemn are these words of the Son of God! How strongly they refute the claims of those who maintain that the world is getting better, and that we are on the threshold of a glorious age! Let there be no mistake, this world, far from showing any repentance towards God, is ripening fast for judgment.

Towards the close of his remarks, it was the speaker's joy to turn from the note of warning (necessary though it was to arouse his hearers to a sense of their danger) to the sweet notes of the Gospel. God is holy, He is righteous, He cannot look upon sin, yet He is a God of wondrous love with infinite compassion for His creatures. It is not His will that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. He provided a shelter for the people in the days of Noah, and such was His long-suffering that He pleaded with that wicked generation for one hundred and twenty years. But all His pleadings were in vain, and His plan for their salvation was rejected. Only Noah and his family, eight souls in all, were saved. Man's only hope of salvation from the flood of judgment was the ark. Man's only hope of Salvation from the future judgment is Christ. Those outside the ark perished when judgment fell, and, just as surely, those outside of Christ, will have no shelter, to which they can flee from the coming storm. Blessed are those who can sing: —

"Death and judgment are behind us,

Grace and glory on before,

All the billows rolled o'er Jesus,

There they spent their utmost power."

Urging his hearers to flee to Christ and to put their trust in Him, and His atoning death, the speaker concluded.

The storm now began to abate and while the clouds were lifting he had much pleasure in speaking to individuals and giving gospel booklets to all before they left. Time and space forbid him to recount all that was said, but it was evident that the message had been appreciated. One dear woman whose heart was filled to overflowing with the love of Christ, and a love for perishing sinners, could not refrain from giving utterance to a song of praise. Sweetly she sang: —

"Jesus, the very thought of Thee,

With sweetness fills the breast,

But sweeter far Thy face to see,

And in Thy presence rest."

On reaching the place where she stood, the writer was privileged to engage in conversation with one of the most devoted Christians he had ever met. She told him that when she arrived at the shelter and observed the disappointed and sad looks on many faces, she prayed silently to God asking Him to send a message of love and warning through the lips of one of His servants, should such be present. At once, she said, I saw you remove your hat and I thanked God, for I knew my prayer was answered. Her parting words were that she would pray for God's blessing on the solemn message, and doubtless the interesting sequel about to be given, is one result of the prayers of this devoted woman.

2. The Sequel.

Holidays were over. The writer returned to home and friends in the North, to whom he related his holiday experiences, including the thunderstorm incident. Some years afterwards, one of these friends was on a train journey to a town in Lancashire. Evening was approaching and he became anxious about reaching his destination before darkness closed in. Two young ladies sat opposite to him in the compartment, and he gathered from their conversation that they were travelling to the same town to which he was going. He ventured to explain to them that he was a stranger to the district and would be glad if they could direct him to a certain street. In reply they informed him that they knew where it was, and they would be pleased to show him the way to it. A most interesting conversation followed.

After warmly thanking them for their kindness, he asked if he could be of any service to them by showing them the way to Heaven. To his great surprise and joy they told him they knew the way. Struck with their ready and happy response, he expressed the desire to know how and when they found the way thither. With keen attention he listened to their story. One of them said that three years before she had gone to S— for a holiday. While visiting a pleasant spot in the district she was overtaken by a severe thunderstorm. She hurried to a place of shelter and while there heard some one singing "The Lord's my Rock in Him I hide, a shelter in the time of storm." (Needless to say, my friend was now most interested, but did not interrupt as she continued her story). After singing the hymn he warned the people of another storm and of the good news that God had provided a shelter which was available, for all. On the Cross Jesus had borne the judgment our sins deserved, and the speaker urged every one to flee to Christ, God's only refuge. She felt that the message was meant for her, and though up to that moment she had trusted in her own good works she found that these were hopeless to afford her soul any protection from the coming judgment. At once she took the advice given, she fled to God's shelter and trusted Jesus as her own personal and precious Saviour. Having finished her story, great was her joy to learn that the man to whom she had been relating the glad news of her Conversion was a personal friend of him who had spoken during the thunderstorm three years previously. As to her companion, it appears that when her friend returned from her holiday looking so bright and happy and testifying to her "Conversion" she was astonished. She could not comprehend why one who was the most zealous of church workers and the most devoted of Sunday School teachers should need to be "Converted." But after a time of misery and doubt, she also confessed her need of a Saviour, and put her whole trust in Jesus and His Salvation.

To the Reader.

Dear Friend! I know not what your opinion is after reading this booklet. Some people, no doubt, will consider the storm, the provided shelter, the company, the speaker, his remarks, the remarkable meeting in the railway train, to be all due to mere chance and unworthy of further consideration. Certainly the happy women my friend met three years afterwards, would entirely disagree, for evidently God ordained everything for their salvation. And, by whatever means this booklet has reached you, please do not attribute your possession of it to mere "chance," for a God of love is seeking your welfare and waiting to bestow on you His richest blessing for time and eternity.

There is a tendency among men to leave everything to chance — even their future destiny. A short time ago five words on a wayside pulpit riveted my attention. They were

"Choice, Not Chance, Determines Destiny."

How solemn! how true their message! They mean nothing less than the fact that it is left to every man, and woman, to fix their own eternal destiny and their decision is final. Christ said to the people

"Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life" (John 5: 40).

In closing, I would urge you to choose your destiny and to do it now. Is it to be with Christ and the myriads of redeemed in Heaven — or in that place of endless remorse where hope and mercy are unknown? Oh! flee to the Saviour, and if words fail you in His holy presence, just repeat the well-known words of Charlotte Elliott —

"Just as I am, without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me,

And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee,

O Lamb of God! I come."

Robt. B. Wilson.

A Message from the Sea.

As a boy the writer well remembers an incident, recorded in one of his school books, which made such a deep impression on his youthful mind, that the ups and downs of a busy life of over seventy years have not effaced it. The story narrated the loss by fire of a large vessel outward bound from this country to some Eastern port. It had been long overdue, and no one knew what calamity had befallen the gallant ship and her crew and passengers, among whom were several notable people. A bottle, washed up by the waves some time afterwards, revealed the terrible secret. Inside was a piece of paper bearing this brief message: —

"THE SHIP 'EAST INDIAMAN' IS ON FIRE. ELIZABETH, JOANNA AND MYSELF COMMIT OUR SOULS INTO THE HANDS OF OUR BLESSED REDEEMER. HIS GRACE ENABLES US TO BE QUITE COMPOSED IN THE AWFUL PROSPECT OF ENTERING ETERNITY."

This was the only news received from the doomed ship. Many years must have elapsed since this note was penned, and many hearts must have been touched when its pathetic message was read. God grant, that, at this far distant date, many more hearts may be constrained to follow the example set by the writer of the message and his two companions, as they committed their souls into the hands of their blessed Redeemer.

The message is a very brief one, yet surely it merits the most earnest consideration on the part of all who are privileged to read it. Note: —

Firstly. — In the presence of death, their only concern was

Their Souls' Eternal Welfare.

Everything else was apparently forgotten. All their ties with this world were severed. Their friends, their wealth, their pleasures, their ambitions, were no longer of any avail to afford satisfaction to their hearts or occupation for their thoughts in that dread hour.

Reader! In view of the uncertainty of life, a fact which must have been impressed on every one during the late terrible war; when many thousands of people — soldiers and civilians — were launched into eternity without any warning, would you not be well advised to consider your own soul's eternal welfare? King Solomon spoke wisely and solemnly when he said "Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth" (Prov. 27: 1).

Do not follow the example of the young man who asked a divinity professor how long before death ought a man to prepare himself for it. "About five minutes," said the professor. The young man turned away with relief, making up his mind to see life, to sow his wild oats, to enjoy the pleasures of the world and then turn to God at the end of his days. "Stop," said the professor, "when are you going to die?" "That I cannot tell," said the young man. "Then you had better prepare for death now, for you may not have five minutes to live."

One can only hope that the young man took to heart the sound advice given to him.

Secondly. — They speak of One whom they knew as

Their Blessed Redeemer.

With no earthly voice to cheer them, no out-stretched arm to save them, and the pitiless waves waiting to engulf them, yet in the company of their Redeemer they awaited their end in perfect calmness of mind and spirit. In the message they cast on the waves, no sign or expression of fear is traceable. The Christian's confidence as expressed in the lines: —

"Peace, perfect peace, death shadowing us and ours,

Jesus has vanquished death and all its powers,"

seems to have been theirs in full measure.

How wonderful is the peace which God imparts to His people! The world with all its allurements and attractions knows nothing of it, nor has it anything to compare with it. Not only do they enjoy the companionship of their Saviour throughout life's journey, with its many trials and temptations, but as the end of that journey approaches, the comfort and presence of their Lord, become sweeter and stronger than ever before. Death, that dread monster, whose approach strikes terror into the stoutest heart, has no terror for the believer. To him, death is only his servant, come to usher him into the presence of his Lord.

Now, it is most important to note that the little company on the doomed vessel speak of Christ as their "Redeemer" and not as their "Exemplar." In many religious circles there is the belief that Christ came into the world merely to be our example, and that, if we seek to live as He lived, God will pardon our little short-comings and failures, and that all will be well with our souls for eternity. However pleasing such a doctrine may be in the estimation of men, there is not a verse of Holy Scripture to support it. No man, either of the present day, or of the past, has possessed the power to live as Christ lived, unless indwelt by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God only dwells in those, who, like the Apostle Paul freely admit that "in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing" (Romans 7: 18). Further, they endorse with all their heart the fact, that "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly" (Romans 5: 6).

How can any accomplish their own salvation when Scripture declares definitely that they have not the strength to do so? It is utterly impossible. Hence our dire need of a "Redeemer" not an "Exemplar." How true and precious the words: —

"I would not work my soul to save,

That work my Lord has done,

But I would work like any slave,

From love to God's dear Son."

Thirdly. — On the burning ship the little company were sustained by the

Grace of their Redeemer.

Grace is surely one of the sweetest themes that fill with joy the hearts of the redeemed. How they delight to sing: —

"Grace is the sweetest sound,

That ever reached our ears,

When conscience charged and justice frowned,

'Twas grace removed our fears."

"Grace taught our wandering feet,

To tread the heavenly road,

And new supplies each hour we meet,

While travelling home to God."

Grace is heavenly in its origin, it is like a mighty river whose source is the very heart of God. It speaks of God's boundless liberality in contrast to man's utter unworthiness. It was the grace of God that sent His Son Jesus Christ into the world, not because we merited such a glorious visitation, but as another has said "Man's misery, not his merit, was the magnet that drew the Saviour from the skies."

Only those whose hearts have been touched by the love of Christ, and whose knees have been bowed in true repentance at His feet, know anything at all of the beauty and perfection of grace, and of the wondrous gifts it bestows on its humble recipients. One of the greatest of these is the knowledge of salvation, for we read "By grace are ye saved" (Eph. 2: 8), and it is through Christ that grace reaches us for in the Gospel of John 1: 17 we read "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

How beautifully does grace shine forth in all the words and works of the Lord Jesus as recorded for us in the Gospels. Anyone who can read that wonderful story and yet remain unmoved by it must possess a heart of stone. Those who heard Him "wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth" (Luke 4: 22). As to His works they had to admit "He hath done all things well" (Mark 7: 37).

But the grace that was manifested so wonderfully during His life could not avail to save us from our sins, nor open wide the gates of Heaven for our admission there. Only His death on the Cross could accomplish that. The tide of grace that flowed so gently, yet so deeply, during His life, was destined to burst forth in a mighty cleansing flood at His death. Yes! for the salvation of mankind, the mighty, the glorious Son of God submitted to an ignominious death upon a cross. Blind unbelief would aver that this is the end of the story. But what meaneth that triumphant cry "It is finished," uttered by Him in the moment of His death, a cry that has brought eternal peace to millions of sin-sick hearts? What means that earthquake, and the rending of the rocks? What means the opening of the tombs, and the appearance of their former occupants in the holy city? What means the rending of the temple veil?

They are all the tokens of a mighty victory over sin, death and the grave; a victory unequalled in its results, in the records of Heaven, earth and hell.

And to think that the first trophy of His victory, — the first of the mighty host of redeemed sinners — was a poor repentant malefactor on a nearby cross. What wonderful grace! Unsearchable in its heights! unfathomable in its depths! Many there are who would reckon such an outcast as the dying thief to be utterly unworthy of the Saviour's saving grace. Suffice it to say in reply "This is the Lord's doing it is marvellous in our eyes."

Fourthly. — It was the knowledge of the Redeemer's grace that enabled them to be

Quite composed in the awful prospect of entering Eternity.

This prospect lies before every member of the human family. The writer, and every reader of this narrative, whoever he or she may be, must enter eternity. There is even the possibility that we may be like the subjects of our story, on the very threshold. The old hymn-writer says: —

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away."

Away! Yes! But whither? Is it not a lamentable fact that many of the sons of time are living in ignorance of the awful truth that their heritage is not one of Time only, but also that of Eternity?

What are the fleeting years of time compared to the long ages of eternity? One may well repeat the lament of God's servant in a past day: —

"O that men were wise. . . . that they would consider their latter end."

"I have no time," said the railway guard, as he rudely pushed aside the loving hand that offered him a little gospel tract just as he stepped on to his train. But his foothold was insecure, and in a few moments his mangled and lifeless body lay across the rails. No time for God, no time for Christ, no time, no care for his soul. How terrible his remorse, if he has now a long eternity to mourn his own neglect! Remember the solemn question in Hebrews 2: 3,

"How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?"

In closing, dear Reader, allow me as one who has a care for your soul, to counsel you to get alone into the presence of God, and face the fact of eternity. If you are yet without the knowledge of the Redeemer's grace, the prospect may well make you tremble, yea, it may even produce a state of soul agony. But, thank God, this is often the first step on the way to Heaven, leading you to repentance toward God, and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work on the Cross.

May the calm unruffled peace that filled the hearts of the little company on the "East Indiaman" be yours in the prospect (be it near or distant) of entering eternity. This is the heartfelt wish of the writer for every reader of this true story. Robt. B. Wilson.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words

Gospel Words.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

First Series.

1 The gift of God

2 Who it is that saith to thee

3 Living water

4 A Well of water

5 Go call thy husband

6 Worship of the Father

7 The Father seeking

8 Worship in spirit and truth

9 I that speak unto thee am He

10 The Woman then left her waterpot

11 We have heard Him ourselves.

12 The Saviour of the world

Second Series.

1 Justified by faith

2 Peace with God

3 This grace wherein we stand

4 Hope of the glory of God

5 We glory in tribulations also

6 The love of God

7 Christ died for the ungodly

8 God's own love

9 Justified by His blood

10 Reconciled to God

11 We shall be saved

12 We also joy in God

Third Series.

1 God created

2 God said

3 Adam

4 The two Trees

5 Woman

6 The Tempter

7 Eve Tempted

8 The Fall of Man

9 Naked

10 Where art thou?

11 Convicted

12 The woman's Seed

Fourth Series.

1 The Jewish leper

2 The Gentile centurion and his servant

3 Peter's mother-in-law

4 The Paralytic healed

5 The Tempest, and unbelief rebuked

6 The Demoniac delivered

7 The Woman healed and sent away in peace

8 The Daughter of Jairus raised

9 The Healing of the blind in the house

10 The early Haul of fishes

11 The Water made wine

12 . Nobleman's son healed

Fifth Series.

1 The Sower

2 The Darnel of the field

3 The Mustard seed.

4 The Leaven

5 The Treasure hidden in the field

6 One Pearl of great price

7 The Dragnet

8 The merciless Bondman

9 The Labourers hired

10 The two Children

11 The guilty Husbandmen

12 The Marriage feast

Sixth Series.

1 The Fig-tree

2 The Household Servant

3 The Ten Virgins

4 The Talents

5 The Seed left to grow

6 The two Debtors

7 The Samaritan

8 The importunate Appeal

9 The Blasphemy of God's Power in Christ

10 The rich Fool

11 Waiting for the Lord

12 Working for the Lord

Seventh Series.

1 The Wicked Servant

2 . The Fruitless Fig-tree

3 What is God's kingdom like

4 The Uprising of the Housemaster

5 The Guests

6 The Host

7 The Great supper

8 The Lost Sheep

9 The Lost Drachma

10 The Lost son

11 The Prudent Steward

12 The Rich man and Lazarus

Eighth Series

1 Unprofitable Bondmen

2 The Persistent Widow

3 The Pharisee and the Tax-Gatherer

4 Christ returning to Reign

5 The Shepherd of the sheep

6 The Door

7 The Good Shepherd

8 Feet-washing

9 The vine

10 Christ the Bread of Life

11 Eating Christ's flesh, and drinking His blood

12 Christ the corn of Wheat

Ninth Series.

1 The Demoniac Mute

2 The Withered Hand healed

3 The Blind and Dumb

4 The Five Thousand fed

5 Jesus walking on the sea

6 The Canaanite woman

7 The Four Thousand Fed

8 The Transfiguration

9 The Lunatic Son

10 The Fish, and the Temple-tax

11 The Deaf and stammering man

12 The Blind Man of Bethsaida

Tenth Series.

1 The Widow's Son raised

2 The Unclean Demon cast out

3 The woman with a spirit of Infirmity

4 The Dropsical Man Cured

5 The Ten Lepers

6 The Lord at Bethesda

7 The Blind at Siloam

8 Lazarus Raised

9 Blind Bartimaeus

10 The Power and the Grace of  the Name

11 Malchus healed

12 The Unbroken Net

Eleventh Series.

1 Two Masters

2 The Prudent builder

3 The ways, N. and W.

4 The Salt and the Light

5 The Beatitudes

6 Prayer for Disciples

7 Grace in Practice

8 Treasures?

9 Christ come to fulfil

10 The Father in secret

11 The Lamp of the Body

12 Be not anxious.

Twelfth Series.

1 The Kingdom of God

2 Judge not

3 Confidence

4 The Narrow Gate

5 Fruits

6 Bare Profession

7 Christ and the Law

8 Anger

9 Reconciliation

10 Impurity

11 Purity in Divorce

12 Swear not at all

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - First Series.

Gospel Words — First Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The gift of God

2 Who it is that saith to thee

3 Living water

4 A Well of water

5 Go call thy husband

6 Worship of the Father

7 The Father seeking

8 Worship in spirit and truth

9 I that speak unto thee am He

10 The Woman then left her waterpot

11 We have heard Him ourselves.

12 The Saviour of the world

1."If thou knewest the gift of God." John 4: 10.

Gospel Words, 1st Series. No. 1.

(B.T. Vol. 18, p. 346. Gospel No. 1: 1.)

The woman of Samaria knew it not, nor did the Jews a whit more; nor does the natural man in Christendom. It is wholly beyond the heart and mind till renewed from above. The heathen could not but regard their deities as the projected image of themselves, of like passions and lusts, envious of man's complete happiness. Had men known them to be as they really are, demons availing themselves of man's guilty conscience to set themselves up as gods and turn away their votaries from the true God, they would have understood that demons could only reflect the hatred and malice of the devil.

God is love, as well as light. In Him is no darkness at all; but being love He sent His Son to shine in this world darkened as it is through sin. Nor is this all the love He shows, but rather the beginning of what is infinitely superior to every difficulty and want. God is not demanding but giving, and only this, as regards eternal life and redemption. Both are His gift in Christ. Thus only, must He be known by the sinner, not as a receiver but as the Giver. It would be beneath His majesty to take any other place; it denies His nature, falsifies the truth, and leaves no room for love.

This was not at all manifested under the law. There man is prominent. "Thou shalt not do this," "Thou shalt do that." Man was by it required to do his duty to God and man, in order to prove that, being fallen, he could not; and so force him, if he bad a conscience as to his own state and faith in God's word, to look to another, the Messiah, as all the saints did from Adam downwards. But the law, as it made nothing perfect, so it fell in with the natural thought of man that all depended on him, on the obedience he should render to God. As law, it excluded grace; and therefore those who saw nothing beyond the law stood on their own merits, not on the coming Messiah. All taught of God whether under the law or before rested their hopes on Christ, not on themselves. Therefore man as he is may admit the reasonableness of the law, as he doubts not his own competency to fulfil it; but, grace he hates and understands not. The gospel flows from God's love in Christ to the world. It is not a call for man to love God, but the revelation that "God so loved the world."

The Samaritans were only heathen who adopted somewhat of Jewish elements and were darker still than the Jews. But the True Light was that which, coming into the world, sheds its light on "every man," not on Israel only, but on any, be they the vilest. This is the moral glory of Christ, as also of the gospel, God's testimony concerning Him and His work.

The woman who came and found the Lord sitting at the well was just the one to prove the virtues of grace. In truth He was there to find her as she was, and to bless her according to the riches of grace for ever. It was not the time when women came to draw water. She was alone, and might well in her circumstances shun the society of others. She had ardently sought happiness in the flesh and had not found it. She could not now but feel herself degraded, despised, and wretched. But here was One yet more alone in the world He had made; with a heart toward all to bless them, but the loneliest Stranger through man's selfishness.

But grace sought her. "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not." He sought her wholly ignorant of Him, He perfectly knowing her, as He knew and knows all men. Bent on giving her "living water," He asks a drink, as one wearied with the journey; for indeed though true God He was not less really man. She was astonished that a Jew would so humble himself. Ah! had she known that He was the Lord of glory; but this was as unknown to her as to the princes of this age, who crucified Him. No doubt He was athirst, but He sought an avenue to her heart and would not work a miracle for Himself. He would give the best gift, and have her learn that every good giving and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.

Are not you as dull and dark as she of Samaria? Do you really know "the gift of God" any more than she did when the Lord accosted her? Do you believe in Him as a giver, and not an exactor? He is giving eternal life in Christ to every needy soul that hears the Shepherd's voice, as the Samaritan did. It is therefore without money and without price. It is wholly independent of the demerits it finds. Who could be more depraved than this sinful woman? God in the gospel is a giver of His best. What more blessed than eternal life? What more necessary to enjoy God and please Him, to serve and to worship Him here and in heaven?

This is Christianity. There may be and there is much more; but less than this is not Christianity. Beware lest you rest on some external sign, which your unbelief exalts into an idol to your extreme peril, perhaps to your utter ruin. Eternal life is inseparable from faith in Christ. "He that believeth hath" that life, and none else. Therefore is it of faith, that it might be according to grace, as every eternal blessing is. For God will not give up His love and glory as a Giver. When you have received life in Christ, He loves to accept your little offerings and to graciously put honour on that which lacks it. "Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations," said the blessed Lord to His feeble disciples. Why! to every other eye it was He Who deigned to continue with them, to sustain and uphold them in all pitiful love: else had they too gone back and walked no more with Him.

Yes! Jesus our Lord alone vindicated and set ,out in attractive brightness the grand essential truth, so new to mankind in all states and ages, "the gift of God" — the truth that every soul needs to face and learn for itself, — that God is the Giver and will be nothing else to sinful man. Our pride likes it not: rich or poor, high or low, we want to earn of Him, and are unwilling to be debtors to nothing but mercy in Christ. "If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? "is the feeling of the heart now, as truly as of Naaman the Syrian. May you, if yet unblest, give up "Behold, I thought," and, believing in Christ, be enabled to say, "Behold, now I know."

2 Who it is that saith to thee

"AND WHO IT IS THAT SAITH TO THEE, GIVE ME TO DRINK." John 4: 10.

Gospel Words, 1st Series. No. 2.

It is not only that God reveals Himself now as a Giver, but a Giver of what the sinner needs for earth and heaven, for time and eternity; and He reveals Himself in His Son. The glad tidings He sends are concerning His Son; but His Son became man on behalf of man, His Son Jesus Christ a propitiation for our sins, that there might be a perfectly righteous ground for God to justify the believer, however evil and guilty he might have been before.

And so the Lord Jesus, the lowliest of men could not disguise the all-importance of His person when speaking to the woman of Samaria. She wondered that a Jew would condescend to ask a favour of a Samaritan. She was at an immeasurable distance from suspecting that in the humble Jew the Creator was before her eyes; and this too that you or any other might "hear and live."

But so it was, and so it must be, if God was to be glorified in the salvation of sinners. Of this she had as yet not the remotest conception, any more than the natural mind in Israel, or even in Christendom. The truth no doubt is confessed in the ordinary creeds; but people in general assent without heart or conscience. They repeat what their forefathers repeated; they believe what the church believes. So the Jews believed in Jesus when they saw the signs He wrought in Jerusalem at the first passover of which the fourth Gospel speaks (John 2); they believed on evidences as much as, or more than, the mass of the christened in our land or any other. But it is written that "Jesus did not trust Himself unto them, for that He knew all men, and because He needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man." He knew that man in his best estate is altogether vanity, for all is said when he is pronounced a sinner, as all are. Now Jesus, God Himself, cannot trust sinful man. The real question is, will sinful man trust Jesus? Man is best — indeed is only aright — trusting God by believing in Jesus, in Jesus come, not merely to work signs but to save sinners at all cost to Himself, a sacrifice to God for them.

Therefore does the Lord present to the Samaritan this great truth, without a miracle, and far beyond miracles. "If thou knewest . . Who it is that saith to thee, Give Me to drink." This she was as far as possible from knowing, any more than the grace of God. But He was there to make known the truth; and He is Himself the truth, and became man that it might come in divine love to man. Could there be asked a better proof that "grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" than the one here afforded to her, and through her to any needy, guilty, soul on earth? For as creation throughout has divine design, and not a single thing happens day by day without our Father, so is scripture written with divine adaptation to every soul that reads or hears, that they may know what God is to a sinner, which can only be known perfectly in Jesus, the image of the invisible God.

Oh! have you weighed these words for your own soul? If you despise them now, learn from His lips that he who rejects Him and receives not His sayings "hath one that judgeth him: the word that I spake, the same will judge him in the last day" (John 12: 48). You know that you are a sinner, utterly unfit to sit down with Jesus in the presence of God. Where then must your portion be if you reject the Saviour Son of God? Whose sayings are comparable to His for light and love, for God and man? Very likely you think yourself far better than the poor Samaritan He was addressing, in order to reveal God and win her to God, that she might not perish but have everlasting life. You will scarcely say that you are so much worse that His grace to her has no voice for your soul. She was at that moment living out of all moral relationship, indifferent to God's known will. If grace did not produce what it can never find in a single sinner, it would indeed be all over with every one of us. If we are all guilty and lost, as scripture declares, it is in vain and unwise comparing ourselves among ourselves. We need a Saviour, and we find the only adequate Saviour in Him Who, as the Jews with murderous hatred said, made Himself equal with God (for He was God); Who became flesh — man; Whom, absolutely free of sin, God made sin on the cross that we might become God's righteousness in Him.

And Him, in this mystery of His person, we believe in and confess, to have the blessing. "If thou knewest . . . Who it is that saith to thee, Give Me to drink." If thou knewest that He, the Eternal no less than the Father Who sent Him, emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, coming in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death — yea, even the death of the cross. All this the Samaritan could not yet know; but He was on the way to death, come to do God's will. For without the offering of Christ sacrificially His will was not done and no soul could be saved. His asking of such a one as the Samaritan was no small, no obscure, sample of that humiliation which culminated in His cross. Hence the bearing of His words to her, "If thou knewest . . . Who it is (there is the glory of His person) that saith to thee, Give me to drink" (there is the grace of His humiliation, as far as could be then).

On Him thus revealing God, her soul, in due time learning the wonderful wisdom of His ways, rested that day. How is it with you who have heard more of His glory and of His grace than she then could? May you believe, as she believed. If you despise Him and refuse His words, you must see Him on the great white throne of eternal judgment and prove God's truth in your perdition.

WK.

3 Living water

"THOU WOULDEST HAVE ASKED OF HIM, AND HE WOULD HAVE GIVEN THEE LIVING WATER." John 4: 10

(B.T. Vol. 18, p. 375. Gospel No. 1: 3.)

The Lord proceeds to lead on the woman and inspire confidence in her heart; and the Holy Spirit records it for others who were to hear His words when written: for they surely are spirit and life, words of life eternal. As yet she was spiritually dull and dark. She saw not the True Light, she believed not yet on Him in Whom is life, the light of men — guilty but favoured men. Had she known God as the Giver (not exactor, as all hearts naturally conceive), had she believed in the glory of Him Who had humbled Himself to save (of which she had a sample in His asking of her a drink of water), she would have asked of Him, and He would have given her living water.

For the blessing of the grace of life to a needy lost sinner (and so it is with every child of man) is no question of self-effort or even self-sacrifice, of a charm or a rite, but of faith in the Son of God to Whom the word of God boars witness. On the one hand, "what is born of the flesh is flesh," and sinful man, Jew, Greek, Samaritan is dead before God. On the other hand, life comes solely to us in the Light of life, it is in Jesus the Lord. Hence said He (John 5: 24), "he that heareth My word and believeth Him that sent Me hath life eternal, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life." The Lord therefore, Himself the quickening Spirit (1 Cor. 15), said not a word to her of baptism; nor did the disciples any more than the Lord baptise her in fact. Whatever the importance of baptism, to impart life is never attributed to it once in all scripture. "He that believeth," says the Lord (John 6: 47), hath life eternal;" and so in substance often, and never otherwise. "I thank God," says the apostle Paul, "that I baptised none of you but Crispus and Gaius, lest any should say that I baptised (or, that ye were baptised) unto mine own name. . . . For Christ sent me not to baptise but to preach the gospel" (1 Cor. 1: 14-17). "In Christ Jesus I begat you through the gospel" (1 Cor. 4: 15). So James 1: 18, and 1 Peter 1: 23-25, and 1 John 5: 1. The divine testimony is uniform and full, clear and conclusive.

But the word was not yet mixed with faith in the Samaritan's soul. Else self-judgment had been produced, and such a sense of sin in herself, and of goodness (if not yet salvation) in Him, as would have drawn her to the Son of God in earnest. To be saved the individual soul must meet God now, and meet Him about its sins: otherwise it cannot evade Him in the person of the Son of man, the Judge of quick and dead, on the great white throne. Then it is too late. Judgment is irreparable and everlasting perdition. To hear Christ's word, to believe God Who sent Him, is to have life, eternal life. This was exactly what the sinner needed, but had not yet. If His word had penetrated, she would have asked of Him, and He would have given her living water.

But it will be asked, What of the church? what of the sacraments? Now it is a notable fact that in the Gospel of John, where eternal life is pre-eminently set out, not a word is said of either. There is always harmony in divine truth. The church, baptism, and the Lord's supper, are fully treated in the apostle Paul's Epistles, to say nothing of the inspired history in the Acts. But nowhere does scripture connect eternal life with the church any more than with the public Christian institutions. As everything is ordered aright in scripture, so are souls inexcusable who fall into so grievous an error as to stake life eternal on church or sacraments. It is contact with Christ by faith, it is His word applied by the Spirit, that gives life in the Son of God. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.

Faith therefore is always individual, even if a thousand believed at the same instant out of a multitude listening to the word of God. The church does not preach, but a servant of Christ or as here the Lord Himself; and when the soul accepts it not as the word of men but, as it is in truth, the word of God, it effectually works in such as believe. Its earliest effect is deep anxiety before God and calling on the Lord. "Thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water."

"By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God."

Eph. 2. Such is the blessed standing and assurance of the Christian in due time. Nor is it otherwise now than it has ever been, though far greater light and privileges be now enjoyed. "For therein [i.e., faith] the elders had witness borne to them," or obtained a good report, as the A.V. says. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. There was not, there certainly cannot be, another Saviour; and by God's word and Spirit He was always received. Righteousness, as the apostle proves, was reckoned to Abraham himself in uncircumcision. He was circumcised afterwards, as a seal in the flesh. He believed God long before; and this was reckoned to him for righteousness. It is the same now in principle, when souls are baptised, not circumcised.

Salvation like faith is individual. From first to last one must come to God believingly, for without faith it is impossible to please Him; with genuine faith ever is genuine repentance. We judge and condemn ourselves when we truly believe Him, and trust His grace in giving His Son. "Already are ye clean because of the word I have spoken to you." John 15. We are born of water and of the Spirit. The truth thus sanctifies; which a ceremony never can, nor a body, were it even the church, however important and of immense moment in other ways. "He that disbelieveth shall be condemned," i.e. damned, even if baptised by Peter or Paul.

In believing God's word the soul hears and answers the call of God. All the blessing may not be at once; but the Lord is confided in and the heart goes out to Him Who came to die for us, for our sins. "Thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water." And in truth it is not only life in believing, but the Holy Ghost subsequent on it, that peace and joy might be full, and God's love be shed abroad in the heart. The gift of the Holy Spirit is more than life, however blessed life may be. It is the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. It is the Spirit not of fear or bondage: but of power and love and soberness.

Dear reader, have you got this blessing? or do you still lack it, like the Samaritan at first?

4 A Well of water

"IN HIM A WELL OF WATER" John 4: 14.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 9-10. Gospel No. 1: 4.)

To the unrenewed mind there is nothing so foreign as grace. God's grace to a sinner seems to a moral man making light of sin; and therefore the higher his idea of divine holiness, and the greater his reverence, the less is it credible. The sinner himself regards it as too good to be true. Only when we stand convicted in our own consciences before God, revealed as He is in Jesus, do we believe it; and only as we walk by faith, are we enabled to use His grace without abusing it. Nothing so needful to the sinner, nothing so blessed to the saint, as grace unless it be the God of grace in Christ, the source and fulness and display of it all in the Only-begotten. Here the woman of Samaria was at first bewildered, though struck and attracted by the wondrous Man that brought God so near her in compassionate love to meet her sin, misery, and want. She answers the expression of infinite grace with the difficulties she considers insuperable. "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: whence then hast thou this living water?" Art thou greater than our father Jacob who gave us the well, and drank of it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?" (vers. 11, 12.) It was but natural thought and natural religion; wholly inadequate for man's case, now that he was sinful and an outcast from God; and how much less adequate for God, dishonoured and disobeyed, unknown and disliked, because He must judge sins? What then must become of the sinner? How can he save himself?

Jesus spoke of another well incomparably deeper, of which as yet she had no comprehension. Jesus had  yea, — was — everything to draw with; Jesus has and gives the living water. He is the Son of the Father, and entitled to give the believer eternal life, and, more than that, the Holy Spirit as the power of enjoying it in fellowship with the Father and the Son; and all this on earth now, in spite of what we naturally are, by virtue of His redemption. He is both the life eternal and the propitiation for our sins. He had the living water as the Son; He could and would give it to the poorest sinner that believes the gospel as the Saviour of the world, fruit of His sufferings unto death of the cross, and of His resurrection.

"Greater than our father Jacob"! ay, immeasurably greater than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; than Moses, Aaron, and Samuel; than Noah, Daniel, and Job; than all the saintly men and women that ever were; than Michael and all angels and principalities, to say nothing of powers. For He is God, the eternal Word, the Only-begotten of the Father. He is therefore divinely competent as He is absolutely reliable. And He is full of grace and truth — the very thing that lost man has not and can find nowhere else. Could the law, truly of God as it was, save the guilty? It could only condemn; and to this. an awakened soul sorrowfully but humbly and thoroughly submits. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost. Is not this grace, the saving grace of God?

But no one receives it who doubts the full glory of Christ's person. For indeed there is otherwise no sufficient basis before God for sinful man. No mere man could dispense the living water. The Samaritan saw Jesus wearied with the journey, sitting just as He was at the fountain; and she heard Him to her surprise ask of her to drink, though then she judged Him but a Jew, though she could not but feel increasingly as He spoke how extraordinary He was. Come of woman indeed He was to save lost man, come under law to redeem those under law, that either and both might receive sonship as a gift of God's grace, and not this only but the Spirit of God's Son sent out into their hearts, crying Abba, Father. This could only be because Jesus is the Son of God, as no other is or could be, though by grace every believer is truly child and by adoption son of God.

Hence, that the faith should be of divine source and character, the necessity of believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (1 John 5: 1, 5). As yet, the Samaritan was in the dark, though moved and drawn by His gracious ways and words; and so she understood not His words no less plain than marvellous. God's grace was no more believed than Christ's person, and thus the blessing was to her inscrutable. Yet to her unbelieving and unintelligent question the Lord replies with what, when she did believe, would prove a truth full of comfort to man as of goodness from God. "Every one that drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinketh of the water which I shall give him shall never thirst. But the water which I shall give him shall become in him a well [or, fountain] of water springing up into eternal life" (vers. 13, 14).

The Lord thus explains more clearly than ever how the living water is the great supernatural gift man needs. The water of an earthly spring, however good, like every natural boon, lasts but for the moment. It quenches thirst, only to recur soon and constantly, as is the nature of all things seen and temporal. The soul, immortal as it is, needs more to satisfy, as God delights in giving when He is looked to in felt want. But here the Lord vouchsafes what satisfies the believer and God Himself, what forms a blessed and permanent and intimate relationship with the Son and the Father. It is not only eternal life, as in John 3, but the Spirit of adoption given, and therefore said to become in him, the believer, a fountain of water springing up into eternal life. Not only are creature things no longer an object of desire, but a fountain of divine refreshment is within through the indwelling Spirit, Who ever leads the believer to worship by His own power, to rejoice in Christ Jesus, and to have no confidence in the flesh. It is not holy longings only as of old, but present possession and enjoyment by virtue of Christ come and redemption. It is inexhaustible and leads the soul to the sources on high.

My reader, have you thus found rest and everlasting joy in the Son of God? The Holy Spirit is given, now that His atoning blood is accepted for the believer, to glorify Him. It is as free as air, but only to faith in Christ. "Whosoever"! Forsake not your own mercies; despise not God's grace. Receive Christ, believing on His name: and all is yours for ever. For God Who calls is faithful.

5 Go call thy husband

"GO, CALL THY HUSBAND." John 4: 16-18.

Gospel Words. Series 1, No. 5.

It is the way of grace to speak and act in a love beyond creature thought to one that deserves only blame. This had the Lord Jesus shown thus far to the Samaritan. In every way He is the image of the invisible God. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life."

Nevertheless grace alone suffices not; for man is fallen, evil, and hostile to God without knowing it aright if at all. Now his ruin morally must be known if he is to be saved and blessed. He must therefore know himself as well as God, and himself in God's presence as God sees him. How can this be? Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. And He is "full" of grace and truth. Grace and truth came by Him; and both shine as none can deny, through His person and words on the Samaritan. She felt already in a measure His grace; but truth enters through the conscience in order that both grace and truth should be really known in the soul. Therefore, when the woman betrays by her dark request in ver. 15 ("Sir, give me this water that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw") that she was still outside the marvellous light of God, "Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband and come hither." It seems abrupt and at first sight strange. It was the direct path to her conscience and divinely wise. For grace cannot accomplish its purpose, God's purpose of love, till man is brought to see and own the truth of his own state. Then only can one appreciate the truth of what God is in the holy mercy that saves the unholy through Christ our Lord; and righteously too, for sin must be judged as it deserves.

The woman was still walking like the rest of the world in a vain show. From this the Lord delivers her. "Go, call thy husband, and come hither." "I have no husband," she answers quickly. "Jesus saith unto her, Thou saidst well, I have no husband; for thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband. This thou hast said truly" (ver. 18). How overwhelming, yet how gracious! Not a reproach in His mouth, but He Who knew all men drew from her, by a word of His, the confession of her actual state of sin and shame, and set before her such a sketch of her life as testified to her conscience, that in her case at least all things were naked and laid bare to His eyes with Whom she had to do.

Her answer proves that His words had entered her conscience, and that her soul fell under them. There was no effort to parry, no attempt to excuse, no seeking to hide or escape from His presence. On the contrary, she stood there a convicted sinner and owned, not merely that He spoke truly, but that she perceived Him to be "a prophet" (ver. 19). It was the word of God living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart. She was manifest in His sight, but by the grace now applied, however humbled to the dust, content to own what she really was and to receive from Him as from God's mouth. For His is not man's word, but, as it is truly, God's word, which also works in every soul that believes.

Thus divine light must act on the soul now, in order that for it all things may be real before God. Hence where His word enters, discovering a life of sin and self, yet in full grace on God's part, the soul bows to God in confession. There is moral reality truly begun, however little developed in detail. How wondrous is God's intervention in Christ, as worthy of Him as suitable and cleansing to the sinner! It is the washing of water by the word, as says the apostle, speaking of Christ's love to the church all the way through. And this the woman here proves.

So it ever is. The message of God to sinners (and all are such), when by grace received, deals with the conscience and not merely with the affections. Repentance ensues no less than faith, repentance by God's word judging all within, and faith in receiving God's word and God's gift from without. This now is fully revealed in Christ; and He is life, " Christ our life." For the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining, and in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, and consequently the seal of the Spirit. For it is of God that the soul, repentant and believing, should know grace and truth, beyond even what the Samaritan could then bear. Nor does any falsehood more dishonour the gospel than the dim religious light or rather darkness, which would plunge souls and even believing souls in uncertainty, and belie the God of all grace as if He begrudged the blessing to the contrite spirit.

Listen not, dear reader, to those enemies of the cross of Christ, who are so blinded as to teach that our Lord practised reserve about His own precious work. It was He that announced, even before His Galilean ministry, that the Son of man must be lifted up (that is, on the cross) that whosoever believeth on Him may have eternal life; and that God so loved the world, the sinful, guilty, Christ-rejecting world, as to give His Only-begotten that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have eternal life. It was He, that in its course and in the presence of incredulous and blaspheming scribes, would have a most crowded company to know that the Son of man hath power, yea rightful title, on earth to forgive sins — a title assuredly not less since He died and rose, and has all authority given Him in heaven and on earth, saying to His servants, Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all the creation. It was He Who even before this lovingly rebuked the aspiring or murmuring twelve, who were in danger from vain-glory, with the words, "The Son of man came not to be ministered to but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." That Satan would stick at nothing to cloak from needy souls such words of grace is as certain as that the Holy Spirit was sent at Pentecost, among other ends worthy of God, to empower those that preach the gospel unto all the nations, beginning from the city wherein our Lord was crucified.

It is thus that the soul meets God, not in truth only but in grace; it is in His Son, Jesus Christ. "This is the true God and eternal life." It is after the sin, but before the judgment, that the dead may hear and live — believing, have eternal life and come not into judgment, but have passed from death into life. Less than this is not the gospel of God — is not Christianity — as the Holy Spirit has revealed it.

W.K.

6 Worship of the Father

John 4: 20-22.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 41-42. Gospel No. 1: 6.)

When the conscience is awakened, the need and the duty of Worship are felt. So we  see of old in Naaman when cured of leprosy by the prophet Elijah (2 Kings 5: 27). Yet the difficulty is great for souls, as men differ in nothing more, and too often plead this patent fact to excuse themselves from all concern. Not so does the Samaritan now at least. He Who had told her the truth and brought her conscience before God could surely solve the dilemma. Directly therefore after owning Him as a prophet, she presents the case. Divine authority must clear up what was contested so stoutly. And she is the more bold to ask after the wondrous persevering grace she had experienced.

"Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship, Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what; we worship what we know, for salvation is of the Jews" (vers. 20-22).

A venerable antiquity has a strong hold on human feeling, and especially in religion. Even a Samaritan could go back a long way and boast of succession. "Our fathers . . . in this mountain." It was a serious thing virtually to condemn their race and ancestors! It is more serious still to leave God out of a question which He has the right to answer. The Samaritans after all never had been a great nation. Yet what great nation ever had God so nigh to them as Israel had their covenant God Jehovah whensoever they called on Him? But did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as Israel heard, and live? They alone were His chosen nation, as Jehovah is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath: there is none else.

Therefore the Lord Jesus could not but allow the plea for Jerusalem as against "this mountain" of Samaria. The Samaritans worshipped that which they did not know. The Jews were used to worship that which they knew; and this on a firm foundation, because "salvation is of the Jews." Theirs are the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the law-giving, and the service, and the promises; theirs the "Fathers" in the best sense; and of them as concerning the flesh is the Christ, Who is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen. He as the woman's seed, as David's and David's Lord, Son of God (Ps. 2) and Immanuel, had been evermore the One to Whom Israel looked and on whom faith rested; and this Himself here vindicated.

"Salvation is of the Jews"; in that line only is the promised Seed in Whom dead and risen shall all the nation be blessed. For if the promise be to the Jews, pre-eminently to their Messiah, never was it for them alone, but that the grace of God might bless faith wherever it wrought, and so in particular where need was greatest and man could least boast.

So did the Lord now deal with the woman, guiding her to boast only in the Father, the only true God, far from the vain confidence of man; and assuredly Samaria had nothing better than others. The truth comes not by succession. Natural descent is no guarantee, any more than human priests or sacred places, still less scribes and lawyers. Jerusalem was proving itself as far from the Father as Gerizim; for His Son was "rejected by men," and by none so bitterly as by the Jews. This gives occasion to the richest display of grace in the gospel; and the Saviour announces it more fully than ever before, not to Nicodemus who heard much but to her of Samaria who heard far more. "Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father."

That hour is now come. When the crucified Lord died, the veil of the temple was rent from the top to the bottom. This solemn act on God's part ratified the Saviour's sentence. The place of worship is changed from earth to heaven. The earthly people refused, even to the death of the cross, the Lord of all the earth. But He is no less the Lord of heaven; and on high God has highly exalted Him Whom not man only but His own people chiefly cast out, and thus proved their own evil and ruin to the uttermost. This is just the moment for God to prove His own good; for through that very death of Christ propitiation was made for sins. Thereon the Holy Spirit was sent down to proclaim God's glad tidings to guilty sinners; so that the vilest may be forgiven by the faith of Christ and His blood, yea become thereby sons of God, free and called to worship the Father. Even the babes or little children of God's family know the Father (1 John 2: 13), and are capable of worshipping Him, not as Jehovah now, but as Father.

Nor is any other worship now acceptable. For God is thus fully revealed: the Only-begotten Son Who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. The partial measure of Judaism has passed away, no less than Samaritan pretension or any other. Grace and truth came through Jesus; and the testimony of the Holy Spirit is to Him as the sole way to the Father.

My fellow-sinners, renounce self, renounce man; for all sinned, all are lost, and are seen to be so when the true light shines as it does now, as truly as in the day of judgment. This, however true, would be the saddest news, were it all. But the Son of God is come and has given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true; and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. If we believe in Him, our sins are forgiven us for His name's sake. For this is He that came by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because He is the truth. The Son of God is the Son of Man Who came to seek and to save that which is lost.

Say not that you are too bad for Jesus to receive and bless, and bring you to God. You are indeed too bad for anyone but Jesus, Who has assured us that "him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out." Fear not then to cast your soul on His grace just as you are. Beware of Satan and his ministers who would persuade you to make yourself more worthy before you believe on His name: there is no surer way to put Him oft and lose your own soul for ever. Undoubtedly your sins apart from Jesus deserve perdition; but Christ and His death have infinitely glorified God as to sin, so that the door of salvation is open to you or any other that believes in Him. Then and not till then will you worship the Father. There is nothing higher in heaven; yet you on earth begin that worship, which is of heaven and will never end.

7 The Father seeking

THE FATHER SEEKING WORSHIPPERS. John 4: 23.

(B.T. Vol. 18, p. 314-5. Gospel No. 1: 7.)

This chapter shows God's grace and truth in dealing with a sinner by Jesus His Son; and the sinner not convicted only, but brought to worship the Father in the relationship of a child, to worship God according to His nature as a saint. It is the revelation in short of Christianity; and this the more impressively, because the one thus blessed on the spot was just before a wretched guilty woman of Samaria, saved to worship Him Who is God and Father in spirit and in truth.

Doubtless men ought to worship, as they ought to obey and love God. But their state unfits them: they are sinners, in their sins, and alienated from Him. As they are, to take the place of worship and of obeying the law is to deny their ruin. For it is too late to talk of your duty when you are all wrong and lost, as His word declares, in order to bring men to repentance. Again, it is worse than vain, "in the hour that now is," to pretend to worship our God and Father unless we are genuine worshippers. The apostle adds, that the worshippers, having been once purged, or cleansed, have no more conscience of sins (Heb. 10: 2). Adam, now that he had conscience of his sin, hastened to hide from God when he heard His voice in the garden. So would all unpurged worshippers, if they heard His voice today. It is no question of sincerity, but of salvation; cleansing by the blood of Jesus is absolutely requisite. Impossible to worship Him in spirit and in truth, till we know Him by faith as revealed by and in His Son; and we never know Him thus till convicted of what we have done and are by His word as the Samaritan was.

Nor are any so guilty as those who seem so near in Christendom. Christening or a catechism does not purge the conscience. The servant who knew his lord's will, and made not ready nor did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes: but he that knew not, and did things worthy of stripes (the heathen), shall be beaten with few. God is not mocked: evil unjudged and unremoved cannot escape His judgment; and none are so far from Him really as those that hear the gospel and despise it, unless it be those who profess the Lord's name hypocritically, or such as from a bad conscience become apostates from Christian profession.

For there is grace enough in Christ to meet and save the vilest, as this chapter proves. Hear Him, "wearied with His journey," sitting at the well, and asking a drink of the sinful woman, to win her heart to God's love, to awaken a just sense of her state, to give her faith in Himself, and in fact to make her a true worshipper. And the Father, as He told her, is seeking such: wondrous truth! not they seeking Him, but He them. Sinners, convicted and believing, are made true worshippers. They contribute nothing but their sins. Grace does and gives all that is of price. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all take part. The sinner has but to abhor his sins and submit to be blessed by God's grace. No wonder, that the result is immense, as the work is; but it is of faith that it may be according to grace, that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, Whose is the glory and the dominion unto the ages of the ages, Amen.

And this is "the hour that now is." Have you yet listened to the Saviour Son of God, as did the Samaritan? Then you too are a true worshipper, bound to worship God in spirit and truth, not formally like a Jew, nor of course falsely like a Samaritan. Yea, if a simple-hearted believer, you are entitled to adore Him evermore as Father; for you are a child of God by faith in Christ Jesus. Grace does not find in any sinful man what pleases God; it creates and confers all that pleases Him, when it has brought us to confess that in us, that is in our flesh, dwells no good thing. Naturally I am a man, a wretched man that needs a deliverer; and this is none other than the Lord Jesus, Who went down below man's sin and God's judgment that we might be set free in His righteousness, yet all in pure and sovereign grace. For grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our. Lord.

But have you owned your sins, your life of sin, as the Samaritan did when convicted by the word of Jesus? Or will you hide your sin like Adam and set yourself as far as you can from God? Oh the infatuation! Do you not know that you must be made manifest another day before Christ? For He is the appointed Judge. What will it be with you then? Assuredly everlasting perdition, unless you have all out with Him now and here. But repenting, and believing God's love in Him, you become the true worshipper that the Father is seeking. So the Samaritan became that very day: why should not you today? Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. The mountain of Samaria can bring you no blessing, nor can Jerusalem, or those that follow in the wake of either, remove your curse: none but Jesus can avail, Who became on the cross a curse for all under curse. But He is all-sufficient; He is the Giver of the living water. The water that He gives the needy one that asks of Him shall become in him a fountain of water springing up unto eternal life. Such are the true worshippers that the Father seeks; and they only then worship God in spirit and in truth.

"To him that worketh the reward is not reckoned as of grace but as of debt; but to him that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness." It is God reckoning righteousness apart from works; yet it is the only principle that produces good works as its fruit. Oh let not the pride of unbelief blind you to your truly lost estate; but may you turn to God as you are, a poor lost sinner, and find in the grace of Christ all you want!

Then and thus, met with the free-giving of God, and sealed of His Spirit, as one resting solely on Christ and His finished work, your heart will go out in praise and adoration. This is to be a true worshipper; and such is the Father seeking to the praise of His Son, Whose things the Holy Spirit takes and declares to us who believe. As the Son glorified the Father, so does the Father glorify the Son on high; and the Spirit glorifies Him here below and bears witness of Him. Are you a witness of Jesus, God's Son, the Saviour of the world — ay, of a poor unworthy Samaritan? Or are you, alas! a witness of yourself or of other men? Such are not those to be saved. The saved are true worshippers.

8 Worship in spirit and truth

John 4: 24.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 57-58. Gospel No. 1-8.)

God never accepted in His worship the efforts of man or the imitations of self-will. But He gave a system of beautiful and instructive forms to Israel, who had His law till Christ came to Whom they all pointed, and, Who superseded all by a fulfilment which more than accomplished all. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believes. The law, having a shadow of the good things to come, not the very image of the things, can never, with the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, perfect those that approach. Else would they not have ceased to be offered, because the worshippers, having been once purged, have no longer conscience of sins?

Totally different is the standing of the christian through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Who came to do perfectly the will of God. "He taketh away the first (i.e. Levitical offering) that He may establish the second (i.e. God's will), by which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. 10: 9, 10.) Yea more; "for by one offering He hath perfected for ever (uninterruptedly) them that are sanctified" or set apart to God (ver. 14).

Our Gospel here views Christian worship from another point of the highest importance, the need and blessing of eternal life in Christ and of the consequent gift of the Spirit that dwells henceforth in the believer. The Epistle views him as in himself at a distance from God, needing propitiation, and his conscience to be purified from dead works to serve religiously (or worship) the living God. Both blessings attach to faith. They are the portion of the believer only. For Christ is his life; and his sins are forgiven for His Name's sake; and the Holy Spirit seals him as having believed the glad tidings of his salvation.

Thus pardoned, furnished, and blessed by grace, the Christian draws nigh to God, instead of standing far off like a Jew; he is exhorted to approach with boldness, as may well be, since it is "unto the throne of grace"  (Heb. 4), to enter into the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, a new and living way which He dedicated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh. There alone is a Great Priest over the house of God. All others are human pretenders over their own society, even if they have ambition enough to claim the whole of Christendom, or all the world. In this respect an apostle or a prophet takes common ground with all the faithful; for the blood of Christ is equally efficacious for all that believe. It perfects them each and all before God, and this here and now; so that all various efficacy of that blood is excluded, whatever the different positions in the church the sovereign will of God may assign as He does (1 Cor. 12: 28), and whatever the differing place in glory, as we know from Matt. 25: 14-22, Luke 19: 15-19, 1 Cor. 3: 8, and elsewhere. But the inspired word to all brethren is, Let us approach " with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an' evil conscience and, our body washed with pure water."

And what is worship but thanksgiving and praise? Thanksgiving for what God has done in Christ and gives freely to us who believe; praise for what we know by His word and Spirit He is, not only to us, but in Himself, His majesty, holiness, truth, goodness, mercy, love, and delight in us, the eternal self-existing One, now revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?

Dear reader, do you know the only true God? Do you know the Father? From 1 John 2: 13 we learn that the little children, the babes of God's family, know the Father. But Only he that confesses the Son has the Father also. God is no party to His Son's dishonour. "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father." Faith is the operation of the Holy Spirit by the word. But to worship we need, besides, the gift of the Spirit, which is received when we rest on Christ's redemption; as in the O.T. oil was put where the blood (not merely the water) had been. Indeed as we see in Lev. 8, though Aaron alone had the oil without blood (12), Aaron's sons as well as he were sprinkled with the oil and the blood after the blood sprinkling (23, 24).

Is it so with you? Are you resting by faith on the sacrifice of Christ? Then you are anointed also; you are sealed with the Holy Spirit for the day of redemption — the redemption of the body, as you already have in Christ redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of your offences.

See then that you worship the Father in spirit and truth. We have in the N.T. the clear impression how the believers worshipped since redemption. No doubt there were at first the effects of their old religious associations. But the fresh grace and mighty truth of a risen and exalted Saviour led them out surely if slowly. And the Lord's Supper became by His institution the central symbol and ever recurring observance every Lord's day at least. Nor did the now sent and ever abiding Spirit fail to work in the assembly, not only in teaching, and exhorting and edifying but in singing, blessing, and giving thanks. Flesh might deceive and intrude; but the holy responsibility of all was to worship in spirit and truth-to worship the Father in that near and blessed relationship, as the Son revealed Him and the Spirit gives us to enjoy, to worship God in that holy nature and majesty Whose perfect love has cast out our fear; for He has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ made sin for us that we might become God's righteousness in Him.

It is not enough to be "true worshippers," blessed though this is. "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship in. spirit and truth." How sad for the true worshippers to swamp themselves with notorious men of the world, and in acts and words suited to a mixed multitude! This He called not for nor accepts. It is not worship in spirit and truth which our Lord declares "must" be.

It is a necessity of His nature, and of theirs too, seeing that believers are become partakers of it in His grace (compare James 1: 18, 2 Peter 1: 4, 1 John 3: 9). If true worshippers, look to it that your worship be, according to His will, "in spirit and truth," not in forms or falsehood, but as we have been taught by the Lord ]Himself and His, inspired servants. Since the Son of God is come and has given us understanding that we may know Him that is true, formal and false worship is hateful to Him and a shame for "true worshippers" who have the Spirit and know the truth, and are, called to worship consistently.

9 I that speak unto thee am He

John 4: 26.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 72-73. Gospel No. 1: 9.)

Now that the conscience of the Samaritan was reached and in exercise before God, the grace of the Saviour was not in vain for her heart. She had listened to words that brought home to her unmistakeably the love of God, whereof His Son was at once the witness and the fulness. One thing more she needed, which He was waiting to grant, the knowledge of Himself come, the Father's sent One, without which there is no Christianity. He is "all," as He is "in all" that are His; but He is also for any, as the gospel announces, and the woman here discovers. She felt that the flood of light which the Lord shed on the worship that was at hand, was too much for her apprehension, and accordingly says to Him, "I know that Messiah cometh (which is called Christ): when He is come, He will tell [declare] us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am He."

The Lord had declared the Father's name, little as she took it in; He had also confessed and denied not but confessed, that He Himself was the Christ. And we have His word for it, whatever the difficulty and the darkness unbelief pours over all, that this is life eternal, that they may know the Father, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom He sent. For such knowledge is of the Holy Spirit, and, unlike all other knowledge, is inseparable from life. "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God." Grace had opened her heart, the truth had searched her soul; and the Lord laid hold of the confession she made (however feebly) of a coming Messiah, to declare Himself the satisfying object of trust. It was far from being His highest title; it was not the everlasting glory of His person; it was what He became as man on earth the promised One, and what He, rejected of men, is now also made on high. For His death that seemed to disappoint all hopes was essential if only to efface our guilt, and His resurrection restored (and more) what death took away. Thus He graciously met her, in that recognition of what He truly was, to her unspeakable comfort and rest.

Faith always meets Christ. He is the great divine discovery to the soul. All must meet Him on the throne one day; but this will be everlasting ruin to such as do not meet Him now. For them it will be judgment. Now it is the grace of God which gives and forgives. The unbeliever refuses Him now and comes into judgment then. To meet Him now by faith is life and salvation, as the Samaritan proved. Thousands saw and heard Him while on earth; but where no faith was, there was no life. It was when the woman believed that she received the blessing. And this blessing is no less offered to all that believe on Him without seeing or hearing. Indeed there is emphatic blessing as He told Thomas, for those who have not seen and have believed.

The Holy Spirit has recorded the tale for your soul, dear reader, that you too may believe, and be saved if you are not already. To you the word of salvation is sent; for Jesus is still a Saviour, not yet a Judge. By and by He will be Judge and not Saviour. Never are the two functions mixed. Nor does the believer, as He assures us, come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. His work fails no more than His person; and he that believes has eternal life. The unbeliever will hear Him pronounce all, but too late. "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." (2 Cor. 6.) "See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh; for if they escaped not who refused Him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape if we turn away from Him that speaketh from heaven" (Heb. 12). He is the truth: rely on Him.

The unworthiness of the Samaritan up to that very day did not hinder His race nor her blessing Why should you doubt His willingness to receive and help you just as you are? For the blessing depends entirely on Him and His sacrifice. To receive it through Him, confessing your guilt and need, is to submit to the righteousness of God; to prefer your own efforts and sacrifices is going about to establish your own righteousness, as the unbelieving Jews did. Those who are indifferent to their sins, God's warning, and Christ's salvation, defy judgment and despise mercy. Alas! they assuredly must meet the due reward of their deeds and unbelief. For God is not mocked; and those that sow to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.

Hear then His words in faith. He pleads with your soul. "I that speak unto thee am He." And He is the same, yesterday, and today, and forever. Doubt yourself; for indeed you have the gravest reason. Believe on Him; for God's word bears the fullest witness, that as He declares all, so He endured all to save the foulest sinner and His worst enemy, if they repent and believe the gospel. His was all the worth, His all the suffering, His all the grace. Give Him then all the glory, as He willingly gives you all the blessing. This is God's truth, God's love, and God's way. It is His gospel, His glad tidings, sent that you may believe. He does not begrudge you life and salvation in Christ; He delights in blessing; and this too, most rich and needed blessing.

But He warns too. "If the word spoken by angels (i.e. the law) was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward, how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? " Thus judgment at the close vindicates the God Whose saving love in His Son is set at nought. The sanction is as solemn, as the blessing is full and plain, immediate and everlasting.

The message meanwhile bespeaks God for its author; He is the God of all grace. But it is grace reigning through righteousness, for Christ suffered for sins, Just for unjust. Not otherwise could the defiled and guilty be brought to God. Our ransom is not with corruptible things, as silver and gold, but with Christ's precious blood as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. And faith honours both Christ and the God Who gave Him, as unbelief adds rebellion and contempt of God to our other sins which are many and deep. No doubt you deserve nothing from God but judgment, which, without faith in Christ, is perdition. But Christ deserves, and has secured by His work, that every believer should be saved. If this does not gratify man's pride, it suits God's love and glory, in which the believer finds his everlasting blessedness.

10 The Woman then left her waterpot

John 4: 28.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 86-7. Gospel No. 1: 10.)

Blessed effects follow faith when it is the work of God's Spirit as here. "He that believeth hath everlasting life;" and life from God does not fail to show itself in ways pleasing to Him if not to man. A faith of mere tradition, or founded on evidences, is powerless. The conscience being untouched, in no case is it before God; nor is He trusted for everlasting life.

Little acts as well as matters of great moment disclose the work of God in a believer. The Holy Spirit notices both in the Samaritan woman. In the opening of the interview her pre-occupation with present things was evident. When the Lord seized the figure of living water in contrast with that before her, we see her total insensibility. She was unable to rise above earthly wants and desires. Only when her conscience was reached, did God and His word deal with her soul, however amazed and attracted she might be by the grace of Christ. Even when her life was suddenly laid  bare by the wondrous stranger, so as to convince her that everything was known to Him divinely, she has no wish to escape into the darkness in which she had heretofore lived; she desires light in what most nearly touches the right state of the soul with God. She is assured that He could and would guide her aright in the worship of God, where men differ most and so keenly. She had to learn of a new worship superseding Jerusalem no less than her vain traditional mountain — the worship of the Father. This He, the Son, was alone competent to announce; as also the Holy Spirit is the needed power to enable the worshipper, even the true worshipper, to render it suitably to God's nature as well as His relationship as Father. But the work in her soul was not complete till He stood revealed in her spirit as Messiah come, the Declarer of all things to us: so she expected and confessed, and yet how much more the reality and fulness!

At this point, the most solemn and blessed for every soul that knows it, when God reveals Himself in Christ to the needy and guilty but now the sinner repentant, came His disciples marvelling that He was speaking with a woman. For even they still shared the Jewish pride which despised the sex. How much greater their astonishment, had they known what she was, and what were His communications of infinite grace! "The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men, Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?"

It was the simple effect of divine truth acting on her heart, now that her conscience was before God. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose, or matter, under heaven, a time to seek, and a time to lose. So she rightly felt the all-importance of the moment, not for herself only but for others. Her ordinary duty could well wait. It was nothing to her now to avoid the concourse of women at the well, for she clearly had been alone there. What were censorious tongues now? She had heard the Shepherd's voice. Had He not called her, knowing all she was and had done? She left her waterpot therefore. To know Him was the great business. Another time was equally good for the waterpot. But here was the Messiah, the Christ; and if He deigned in His compassionate love to make Himself known to her, convicted as she was, surely no sinner need despair. Without a command, as the fruit of His grace, she leaves aside what was earthly and perishing, she seeks to spread the blessed news, which filled her soul and made her forget herself and every consideration but of Christ and His goodness to such as she had been. "Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation," just expressed her new-born feelings, the activity of that life she had in Christ.

And so it is with souls born of God, who learn from Christ that the Father seeketh such to worship Him. As yet she was ignorant of dogma, but by grace She had received Christ, the despised Messiah, and the more despised because He was and is infinitely more, the Son of God, the Only begotten, full of grace and truth. Little she knew of "Him ; but she believed in Him as the Promised One, the destroyer of Satan, the Redeemer, not merely to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel, but given for a light to the Gentiles, that He might be God's salvation unto the end of the earth.

The Samaritan woman had already proved that His divine knowledge of her sins did not in the least hinder the outflow of divine grace to her soul. Grace had used truth to search her and put her in her true place, that she might be fully blessed of God and able to draw near in adoration as a true worshipper. Nor is there anything so humbling as the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ When the prodigal came to himself, he made up his mind to say, "Make me as one of thy hired servants." Had he adequately judged himself, he could not have asked even this; he must have felt his unworthiness (so far as he was concerned) of any place whatever. But when his father ran and fell on his neck and kissed him in his rags, he owned his sin and unworthiness; but not a word of being made an hireling. It was, he now learned, no question of himself, but of the Father's love. So is it with our God and Father. He acts in His own love and for His own glory. And Christ alone has made it possible righteously by His propitiation; as He alone is the truth, the way, and the life, revealing Him as Father and God, that we may know the true God Whom we adore.

The woman in the energy of faith, not only leaves her waterpot for a more fitting season, but in her own way shows the effect of the truth that the Father is seeking true worshippers, as she also knew that grace can and does make poor sinners such. So it was with her. Now the positive power of the truth discloses itself. She seeks others, any, in the faith of His grace. "She saith to the men (that is, of the city), Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?" And she was right, truly guided, where human learning and genius have utterly failed and prove their possessors to be but blind guides who only lead and fall into the ditch. She was right and testified of, and in, the grace that blessed her. For Christ is man, yet as truly God, the only Man Who  ever thus told all to the sinner, the only bearer of his sins on the tree, that we being dead to sins should live unto righteousness. It is a suspicious faith that does not subordinate earthly claims to Christ, and that burns not to make Him known to the lost.

11 We have heard Him ourselves.

John 4: 42.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 104-105. Gospel No. 1: 11.)

There is no salvation without the revelation of God to the soul, and this is in Christ His Son. The warrant is the word of God, and now the written word (or scripture) on which rests all the authority of what is preached or spoken. This the Holy Spirit in quickening power carries borne to the soul, not only convicting the conscience but winning the heart to God through faith in the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

God graciously employs, not an angel, but a sinner born anew to convey the truth to others, as we see herein Samaria. "And out of that city many of the Samaritans believed on Him because of the word of the woman testifying, He told me all things that I did." It was a true work of God, and in the ordinary way of grace through the word dealing with the conscience. There was no miracle, any more than persuasive words of human wisdom, but demonstration of the Spirit, that their faith might stand in God's power.

And the Lord Jesus acted in that grace which the apostle only learnt in their measure years afterward when propitiation was made and the Spirit was sent down. For when the Samaritans came to Him, they besought Him to abide with them, and He abode there two days. "And many more believed because of His word, and said to the woman. No longer because of thy speaking do we believe; for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world."

It was the simple and blessed fact for these Samaritans, the beautiful foreshadowing of the true and unchangeable ground of faith for all that should hear and believe the gospel when the Lord would not be personally on earth. Any one and any thing may arrest souls by revealed truth; a man, a woman, a child; a sermon, a conversation, a book or a tract. But whatever the means, the soul believes God; and without believing God there is no true faith, no divine authority and grace over heart and conscience.

Hence the Samaritans, struck by the converted woman's testimony, justly bore witness to the word of the Lord Himself. Hearing Him, they knew and believed the love that God has to us. Having received His testimony, they set to their seal that God is true. And as they thus believed God in the full revelation of Himself in Christ, we may surely say of them what scripture attests of Abraham when he believed God in a far less measure of light, that it was counted to them for righteousness. For living faith ever brings the soul before God, where it has His light whereby to judge itself. But God revealed in Man, and that Man His only-begotten Son, brings His love near to the heart in a reality beyond all thought, and rises above all sinfulness, proved (as we can add) in His death, that we might possess known remission of sins through His blood, and thus the conscience purged from dead works to serve a living God.

It is a, universal truth, in short, that the sheep hear the Shepherd's voice, and that they follow Him, for they know His voice. What these Samaritans enjoyed as a literal fact is no less true of all who believe the gospel. And Christ came that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly; or, as His servant wrote, died for all, that they that live should not henceforth live to themselves but to Him that for them died and was raised. Thus all things are of God Who reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ and gave us the service of reconciliation, the spirit of which is plain for the Samaritan woman; as the contrary of it appears in such as place themselves or other men between God and the soul, denying His grace and intercepting His right.

The Lord Jesus was just the One to do the work of God; for as on one side He was God, so on the other He was Man, in one person, come here below to declare God and reveal the Father, to bear the sins in His own body on the tree and thus enable the believer to draw near to God without fear and assured of His perfect love. "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God" said the psalmist prophetically (Ps. 40) of Jesus. More than a thousand years after inspired David, wrote one equally inspired to expound him, "by the which will we have been (and are) sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. 10.).

Christ alone reveals God as light and love. By Him alone mercy and truth are met to-ether; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. All other systems, all adversaries of Him, are but thieves and robbers whom the sheep hear not. But His word is as divine as His work. As one of them said, Thou hast words of eternal life; as He said Himself, The words I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. When He went away on high, the Holy Ghost was sent down to abide for ever with those that believe, to glorify the Son that glorified God the Father, and to guide into all the truth. So that no excuse for unbelief is valid on the score that Jesus is gone. It is expedient for you, said the Lord, that I go away: for if I go not away, the

Comforter (Advocate) will not come unto you but if I go, 1 will send Him unto you. Thus the Spirit ever fully takes of the things of Jesus and declares them to us, teaches all things, besides bringing to remembrance all that He had said, bears witness of Christ far beyond what the apostles saw or heard though with Him from the beginning. For the Spirit was sent forth from heaven where Christ is now exalted, as He had indeed many things to say to them, which they could not hear till He was glorified.

How blessed then that, when we hear the apostles' words, it is still Christ speaking in them! If any believe not, it is because they are not of His sheep, the test of whom is that they hear His voice. But He adds "I know them, and they follow Me; and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall pluck them out of My hand. My Father who gave them to Me is greater than all; and no one is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand. I and the Father are one" (John 10: 27-30).

12 The Saviour of  the world

John 4: 41, 42.

Gospel Words Series 1, No. 12.

The Samaritans besought the Son of God to abide with them, and there He did abide two days (ver. 40). What confidence on their part! what grace on His! Others more favoured, who despised them, besought Him with one consent to depart from them (Luke 8: 37). Who else are recorded as ever preferring such a request for His presence? But those who asked received a blessing both now and evermore, as faith in Him ever does. "And many more believed because of His own word, and said to the woman, No longer because of thy speaking do we believe, for we have heard ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world."

Truly a noble and most suited confession! No Jew did or could then have uttered it. It was God choosing the foolish things of the world that He might put to shame the wise, it was God choosing the weak things of the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong; and the ignoble of the world and the despised things God chose, the things that are not, that He might bring to nought the things that are; so that no flesh should boast before God.

It was an anticipation worthy of His personal dignity, which faith saw and testified, as grace created and sanctioned it. The Son of God is recognised in the fullest sphere of divine mercy. It is the more striking because He had maintained the place God had given the Jews as compared with Samaritan pretension. As surely as He was the Messiah, so salvation is of the Jews. But the Jews, blinder than their blind whose eyes He so often opened, were rejecting Him though trusting their own thoughts and indulging their own will. And the rejected Messiah, about to taste its bitterness to the uttermost, was displaying grace and truth open to any needy soul, and pressing home the reality of that need, that He might bless according to the love of the Father. His own word deepened the conviction which the woman's testimony had awakened, and the faith of the many that believed expressed itself in the confession, "This is indeed the Saviour of the world."

Was it not all worthy of God and His Son? The sin of His ancient people, in despising the grace of the Messiah because He did not come in power and glory to exalt their nation and confound their foes, only gave occasion to more grace. So the Samaritans believed without a miracle, and entered into the blessing all the more deeply. They take their own place: not a word of rivalry with the Jew. They were sinners: Jesus is the Saviour. They were of the world. But "this is indeed the Saviour of the world." God saves not because we deserve but because He, Jesus, does; and we believe on Him.

As long as the Jew was under probation, this could not be manifested. But one of the peculiarities of the Gospel of John (and each has its special design, not merely from the writer's style, but from the particular purpose of the inspiring Holy Spirit) is that the Jews received not Christ, as we learn, from the very first. Hence a larger and deeper scope of blessing begins to shine through the clouds, even before the Lord's public testimony and right through it. This chapter is an unmistakable witness.

And is it all nothing to you, dear readers? Is not this, and more than this, expressly written that "ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through (in) His name"? John 20: 31. Is it in vain that the Holy Spirit has perpetuated for you the grace that reached the many Samaritans? Or are you disposed to follow the proud and stiff-necked Jews in nullifying as to yourselves the counsel of God? If so, beware of perishing, as they did.

Beyond doubt, as all scripture declares, whatever be the grace of God, you forfeit it by unbelief. It is of faith that it might be according to grace. It is here you have sinned, and now you must be saved; and there is no means other than believing on Jesus. You in Christendom have heard more than either the Jews who refused, or the Samaritans who believed. And whoever you are, whatever you may have been, their testimony is for you, for anyone: "This is indeed the Saviour of the world." Such is the spirit of the gospel that went forth in due time to all the creation, as the Lord came expressly to call not righteous men, but sinners "To him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt; but to him that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 4, 5). Were it otherwise, no sinful man could be justified. Whereas, "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." It is the distinctive blessedness that God loves with no motive in the object loved, but because He is love. Hence says the apostle, "God commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

And as the Samaritans at the beginning were divinely led to own the Saviour of the world, so the apostle John in his First Epistle, avowedly written for the dangers and evils of the last time, repeats the testimony when unfolding the love of God superior to all changes. "And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son as Saviour of the world" (1 John 4: 14). Yes, but how am I to receive certainty for my own soul? "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God" (ver. 15). It is the Spirit of God anticipating conscientious difficulty and satisfying the just desire of assurance from above in one who might otherwise be overwhelmed with the sense of sin. One cannot too much judge one's self, provided that along with it there is no distrust of grace. The person and the work of Christ account for salvation and the highest privileges to him that believes, were he chief of sinners. God puts all honour on the name of His Son, whether in blessing the believer or in punishing the unbeliever by-and-by.

To believe God's testimony is the first of duties, and Christ is the object of that testimony. So, when the trembling jailer at Philippi fell down before Paul and Silas he said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" The answer was, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." The way is simple, the warrant sure, the salvation rich and full. The call of God is to believe on His Son, the Lord Jesus, the result is salvation for all that believe, the house no less than its head. Hence it is His commandment that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ: loving one another follows, as He gave us commandment. But it is in vain to urge love, holiness, or anything else till we believe on Him.

W. K.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Second Series.

Gospel Words - Second Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 Justified by faith

2 Peace with God

3 This grace wherein we stand

4 Hope of the glory of God

5 We glory in tribulations also

6 The love of God

7 Christ died for the ungodly

8 God's own love

9 Justified by His blood

10 Reconciled to God

11 We shall be saved

12 We also joy in God

1. Justified by faith

Rom. 5: 1.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 134-135. Gospel No. 2: 1.)

"How should a man be just with God?" Solemn question! to which man can give no satisfactory answer. If righteousness rule, love is annulled; if love govern, righteousness is swamped. Man can devise no way which does not sacrifice the one to the other. The anxious soul is thus left a prey to fear, apt to drown his doubts in religious efforts if not in the pleasures of sin for a season. Self is unjudged, and conscience unpurged; God unknown. Christ a mere make-weight or help and an impossible example. In such a state (and nothing is more common even in Christendom), the very gospel is turned into a law more galling than that of Moses; and some souls sink into indifference or despair, whilst others clothe themselves with the rags of their own righteousness, to find out too late that they are naked in God's sight.

Christ, Christ's redemption, alone meets the dilemma, alone puts in their true places God and man, guilt and judgment, peace and holiness. Without Him all for the sinner is a hopeless chaos of contradiction. By Christ's death, as God is glorified, so remission of sins is proclaimed to man: mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed.

But man, hitherto living to himself and without God, even if an observer Of forms and duties, is summoned to believe the gospel, not merely that there is grace and truth in Christ, but to believe on Him and His work for his own soul before God. This necessarily involves repentance toward God, as indeed is often expressly insisted on (Matt. 21: 32, Mark 1: 15, Luke 24: 47, Acts 2: 38, 17: 30, 20: 21). The word of faith, which we preach, says the apostle, is "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Rom. 10: 9, 10). His words in Rom. 4: 23- 25 set the truth in the clearest light. "Now it was not written for his (Abraham's) sake that it was imputed to him, but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus from the dead, Who was delivered for our offences and was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith," etc.

None need ask language more precise, none can desire more authoritative. It is scripture (2 Peter 3: 15, 16); and scripture is the word of God, whatever the human instrument, communicated by the Holy Spirit for permanent use, written not for their sakes only to whom it was originally given, but for us also. Being God's word, it binds the conscience of every man whom it reaches: his abuse of it, his refusal to heed it, will but aggravate his condemnation. Cavilling will not blot out his sins nor rescue him from the wrath to come. Faith is the reception of God's word, and now pre-eminently of His message to every man, the gospel of His grace. We are called to believe that God raised Jesus our Lord from among the dead — Jesus expressly declared to be given up for our offences and raised for our justification or justifying. The efficacious work was entirely on God's part. We had contributed alas! our trespasses: He gave up His Son Who suffered for them, Just for unjust, and raised Him from the dead, the sure proof that the sacrifice was wrought and accepted for those that believe. Do you ask further demonstration? Rom. 8: 34 adds, "Who is even at the right hand of God, Who also maketh intercession for us." His resurrection and glory on high are the answer, not only to His person but to His work, glorifying God as to sin and suffering for our sins. God is righteous in thus raising and glorifying Him. But His righteousness avails much more, and Justifies him that believes in Jesus (Rom. 3: 26).

Here is the blessed ground of the gospel. Fallen and guilty, man has no righteousness for God (Rom. 1, 2). But God justifies freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Who bore the judgment of our sins on the cross, and now risen declares the believer free. Hence it is "by faith of Jesus Christ unto all, and upon all them that believe." It is open "to all," but for this very reason far worse off with God is he who rejects Christ and the gospel of God. He who believes on Him is justified, yea is made God's righteousness in Christ (2 Cor. 5: 21). He is justified by faith. There is no other way. It is not a process going on, but a fact accomplished and made known by that surest of testimonies-God's word. For He loves that we should know what Christ has done for us, and what He can afford to give in consequence. If we believe in Him, He would not have us doubtful, or burdened, but enjoying the inestimable favour of being justified in His sight. It is the fundamental blessing, anticipated in the Psalm (32), accomplished in Christ, and proclaimed in the gospel.

It is "upon all them that believe." The weak believer as well as the strong, may rest on the Saviour, Whom God set forth a propitiatory, or mercy seat, by faith in His blood. And why was the blood sprinkled seven times before it, if not to furnish the fullest confidence to every soul that believes? The veil is now rent; all is manifest, not only your sins in the light of the cross, but the blood upon the mercy seat, the witness of atonement for ever accepted. For God has before Him, not your sins, but the blood that cleanses from every sin.

More than that, it was to declare God's righteousness; and this doubly. It was first to vindicate in the pretermission or passing over of the foregone sins in the forbearance of God. How else could He have dealt as He did with such as Abel, Enoch, and Noah, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with crowds of others named and unnamed of old? But it is also to show His righteousness in the present time when He sends the glad tidings to all the world, to bear fruit and grow in all that bear and know the grace of God in truth. For it is no longer His ancient people under the law, but the gospel sent to all; no longer man's righteousness claimed, to convict of sin and powerlessness and ruin, but God's righteousness in Christ's death, that Himself might be just and justifier of him that has faith in Jesus.

Therefore, as the apostle triumphantly challenges in Rom. 8: 33, "It is God that justifieth: who is he that condemneth?" Christ Jesus by His suffering work alone accounts for it. For our sins afforded righteous ground against us; but Christ bore them in His body on the tree, as His resurrection proves them to be altogether and righteously gone. It is God's righteousness, as the Epistle to the Romans lays down, not only to raise Him from the dead, but to justify all who believe in Him. His righteousness goes far beyond, even to heavenly glory for Christ and those that are His. But here the Holy Spirit urges the foundation alike for God and for the soul through faith. May it be your portion, dear reader, through sovereign grace!

2 Peace with God

Rom. 5: 1.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 151-152. Gospel No. 2: 2.)

The sinner is at war with God Whose judgment he cannot but dread. He is guilty and knows it, but the effort for him to forget it always is vain, still more so to hide it from God. Even conscience recalls the sins long committed, just when the remembrance is most painful and overwhelming. Nor does the Holy Spirit fail to apply the word of God where there is an ear to hear, All things that are reproved are made manifest by the light. This aggravates the darkness, and makes evident the unbeliever's total unfitness for God's presence. For indeed His glory is the standard; and how far sinful man comes short!

But the Lord Jesus is a perfect Saviour, and the only one. And as He came from God, so is He gone to God. He came down in love; He is gone up in righteousness, and between the two He could and did say, "I if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto Me." John 12: 32, For He made peace through the blood of His cross. Col. 1: 20. For whom did He make peace, if not for those who deeply need it? And as God sent His Son for this end, His heart welcomes the troubled penitent that looks to Him for it. Yea, God anticipates poor doubting man, and sets him at ease by gracious tidings which He now sends everywhere, preaching peace by Jesus Christ.

Of old God told His ancient people, "There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none that understandeth; there is none that, seeketh after God. They have all turned aside; they are together becomes unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is, under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are, in their ways; and the way of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes." So the apostle quoted from Psalms 53 and others, and from Isa. 59. Is it not as true of you in Christendom? Are you not as bankrupt in righteousness, in spiritual intelligence, in any real care even about God? Nay, it is true of all that they have swerved, and together been unprofitable in His sight, and not even one practising good. Nor is there a member of man's body untainted by corruption or violence. What then but destruction and misery in such ways, and peace's way unknown? Ah! how true that no fear of God is before men's eyes.

But why perish in your sins? Why persist .in guilty wretchedness, when God is calling to you, and calling you to Himself? The apostle in 2 Cor. 5 declares that God was in Christ reconciled, not worthy men, nor His ancient people but the "world" to Himself; nay, more, not reckoning unto them their trespasses. May you believe it! He represents himself and others labouring in the gospel as ambassadors on behalf of Christ. For the counsel of peace is between Them both, Who would win you from the enemy and sin and its judgment, that you might have peace with God. We beseech you, says he, Be reconciled to God. Him Who knew no sin, Christ, He made sin for us that we might become God's righteousness in Him. There is no barrier on God's part, and He declares that in the cross of Christ He has made, full provision for you, spite of all your evil. If you bow as a sinner and call on the name of the Lord, God assures you that Christ took your place in divine judgment of sin there to give you His place in righteousness and glory.

Thus the ground of peace, for the soul that is troubled before God, is Christ the propitiation for sins (1 John 2: 2). Him therefore has God forth a propitiatory or mercy seat through faith in His blood (Rom. 3: 25). You might, as you are, justly dread His judgment seat. But divine grace has interposed, after the sins, and before the judgment. Oh, trifle with neither! Unbelief will not save but destroy you. Hear His word and believe Him now. "Behold now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation." (2 Cor. 6.) For all that believe Christ bore the sins in His own body on the tree; and you may draw near in faith to God's own presence, for the veil is rent, and the blood. is upon the mercy seat and before it. And why was the blood sprinkled seven times before it (Lev. 16), if not to give complete assurance to him that thus and now approaches God in the true sanctuary?

No wonder that you, believing God's testimony concerning His Son, are entitled to peace, to peace with Him now and evermore, Undoubtedly your sins were many and great, yourself unworthy and sinful. But the Son of Man, it is written, came to seek and save that which is lost. Salvation is therefore yours if on the warrant of God's word you believe on Him. It is all well if your soul has been deeply concerned as you weighed your evil life in God's sight. But no such exercises can ever give you peace; any more than the harrowing of a field can itself yield a harvest. Nothing but the blood of Jesus can avail for you. But if we believe God's estimate of His blood as in Rom. 3, Rom. 4 points us to His resurrection as God's proof of our justification. "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Justification comes out of faith, not out of works of law. The soul is justified on that principle, and on none other. But having been thus justified, we know that the burden of guilt is rolled away by a divine work brought home to us, and "we have peace with God." It is through Christ alone meritoriously, but it cannot be ours save by faith. Believing, we have peace with God.

So Christ, with His death in view, left peace as His legacy to His own (John 14: 27); and as He promised, so He performed (John 20: 19, 21), on the resurrection day saying, "Peace be unto you." He repeated it, both for their own souls, and for His work as His envoys to others. Without peace resting on God's word we cannot enjoy our real relationship as children of God, nor can we draw near to worship the Father in spirit and truth; the conscience is unpurged, and the affections have no due exercise, To have peace with God is the normal privilege of a Christian.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 46.)

Peace with God is a state of mind in the unclouded consciousness of what God is (but necessarily according to His nature) to us according to the value of Christ's work, and in Him.

There is another order of peace from the conformity itself to this nature — a subjective peace. "The mind of the Spirit is life and peace."

3 This grace wherein we stand

Rom. 5: 2.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 168-169. Gospel No. 2: 3.)

Faith then receives God's testimony to Christ and His work. He Who believes on Him is justified. My sins are no obstacle. It was for sins and for sinners that Jesus died; and they are blotted out and forgiven to him that believes the gospel. At God's call doubt no longer, but believe His word. This is not only to turn to Him from self and sin and the creature in every form, but to honour God Whom You have slighted hitherto, believing His love and submitting to His righteousness. Not that faith is an object: Christ is what God presents to the needy and guilty soul, Confess Him as God reveals Him; neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no different name under heaven that is given among men whereby we must be saved. That divine Saviour cannot fail; and it is because you have utterly failed in yourself that you need Him, Him only, to save you. For as God the Father sent Him to be Saviour, so does the Holy Spirit bear witness to Him alone. Cast away every doubt and fear; only believe.

But justification, wondrous boon as it is for a sinner is far from all that God gives through our Lord Jesus Christ. The apostle adds, "Through Whom also we have* access by faith into this grace wherein we stand." How many souls, after really believing on Him, take the ground of law in their newborn relationship with God! And what is the result? Dissatisfaction and uneasiness, doubt and fear not without torment. Self-judgment is thoroughly right; but in such a case it is apt to be as superficial as the faith, even supposing both to be of God's Spirit. Neither can be deep, unless the soul rest by faith on God's estimate of Christ's blood and of its own guilt and abject need: when one does, the conscience is purged, the heart confides in God, and self-judgment proceeds habitually and unreservedly as we walk in the light.

*We "have" peace is simply possessing as a present thing; we "have" access is the continuance of what is past, and so is "we stand."

Christ by His work entitles the believer to a constant approach and standing in the favour of God. This is part, and a most important part, of the salvation which the gospel proclaims. When justified, we are not placed, as the Jews were by their own choice (Ex. 19), under law; we have the well-known, near, and real access to God which is proper to the Christian (Eph. 2: 18, Eph. 3: 12). Before the redemption that is in Christ, it was not enjoyed, nor could it be given; and when Christ comes to reign over the earth, it will no longer be the portion of those here below. It is a privilege peculiar to the gospel of sovereign grace; and he who now believes since Pentecost has it and ought to enjoy it.

Only consider how immense the blessing is to him that believes, whatever the license that the hypocrite takes to his own destruction. It is not only that righteousness is reckoned to you, but that you have got and so possess as a settled thing access by faith into this favour in which we stand: not a blot left on you, not a cloud hanging or rising over you, but divine favour without stint, change, or end. Christ and Christ's accomplished work alone account for it; as thus only was it rendered possible to faith. For it is not simply the love of God. He loves the angels, He loves His creatures. The gospel is the glad tidings of His grace for all, not Israel merely, but all men indiscriminately, that appeared when Christ died, rose, and went to heaven; grace rising over sins, and where sin abounded, over-exceeding grace reigning through righteousness unto life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This grace of God in the Saviour, not law, is what meets us as our assured portion in our approach to God. Nor indeed can there be true approach to God on any other ground than one of perfect favour in Christ. Grace and truth came to pass through Jesus Christ. It was not so before; it is the fact now. The law was given through Moses: grace and truth came into being for man here below through Christ, the only-begotten Son, Who alone could make either good, Who made both good to God's glory. The blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from every sin. More than that, we are through Him made welcome to the presence of God, we have boldness. Weigh the word which the Holy Ghost gives (Heb. 10: 19); weigh well the word, ye timid believers, for your souls' joy and blessing Weigh it solemnly, ye who believe in superstition and tradition and human reasoning, not in the gospel of the grace of God; weigh it and tremble for your dishonour of God's will, and of Christ's work, and of the Holy Spirit's witness.

For, if we believe in Christ, God's word tells us that we have boldness for the entrance into the Holies by the blood of Jesus, which fresh and living way He dedicated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh. Without this it would indeed be madness and presumption. But now that He is come and has found everlasting redemption, the presumption is on their side who deny it against those who believe in Him; and, if believing in Him they deny it, what folly as well as presumption

Only God can tell us infallibly what He has done for us and given to us in His Son; and He it is Who tells us beyond a doubt that, as believers in Him we have obtained, and do possess, access into this grace wherein we stand. For it is not like the characteristic blessing of Israel contingent on the obedience of the law. The gospel is founded on redemption in Christ as the great fact beyond all others save His person Who achieved it. And justification is a fact attested by God's word and Spirit to him that believes; and so is the access we have into this favour wherein we stand. They rest on Christ and His redemption, and they are ours as believing in Him. Nor do they pass away, like Jewish privileges; they abide like Christ.

But may not the believer become careless and sin grievously? Alas! it is too true; yet God does not change nor forsake His child (as other scriptures declare), but chastises him faithfully, and, if need be, even to the death of the body. See 1 Cor. 11, Heb. 12, etc., 1 John 5. Nevertheless, as these very scriptures show, He does not change from His grace even when He thus deals in His moral government. "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous." The Christian's failure brings out the loss not of relationship but of his enjoyment of communion; and Christ's advocacy works to restore his soul by self-judgment before God. For as the Christian, once darkness but now light in the Lord, walks in the light as God is in the light, so he comes under the dealing of God as a Father judging day by day, that he may walk according to the light. But he received and has access to God. "He that followeth Me," says our Lord, "shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life."

4 Hope of the glory of God

Rom. 5: 2.

Gospel Words. 2nd Series No. 4.

Here is another privilege of faith, to rejoice in hope of the glory of God. To the natural man this may seem beyond all measure. But God, Who has given His own Son, does not bless by halves. It could not be so, nor ought it to be; for Christ now is the title of him who believes. One's own name is merged in that of the Son of God. He is the first to own his sinfulness and his ruin without Christ; but now that he has received Christ, he has the title to become a child of God. He is justified by faith. He has access to God ever open; and he stands in His perpetual favour. And now he learns from God's word that, if he look onward into the everlasting future, he may and ought to rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

This hope beyond all doubt is an immense thing to boast. But is it not a well-founded boast, if it rest upon Christ and Christ's work by faith? Nevertheless it is as simple as it is sure. It is no question of man's desert, but of Christ's; and Christ will not leave His own separate from Himself in heaven. He has already entered glory, and He will have those that are His own in the same glory as Himself. "The glory which Thou hast given me, I have given them" (John 17: 22). Therefore it is that in Revelation 21: 10, 11, the holy Jerusalem, the symbol of the glorified church, is seen "having the glory of God" in the day that is coming.

But we are also called to rejoice in the assured hope of the glory of God even now. It is now that we want its power in our souls. It strengthens us against the false and vain hopes of the world. There are few greater snares than human honour and praise ; for they destroy faith. "How can ye believe," said our Lord, "who receive glory one of another, and seek not the glory which is from God alone?" John 5: 44. So in John 12: 42, 43, we are told that, although from among the rulers many believed on Him, yet on account of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory of men rather than the glory of God.

When Adam was in Paradise, the glory of God was not set before him as a hope. He was placed in a garden of delights, where all was very good. He had a test of dependence and obedience. He was forbidden to eat of the tree of knowing good and evil, whilst free to eat of every other tree in the garden. Under this tenure he was to keep his first estate; but he fell, and all was changed. He became an outcast from Paradise, subject to death, and after death to judgment: as scripture elsewhere declares, both appointed to men, neither to man in original innocence. But even then grace interfered and held out another. man in prospect, the Second man — the last Adam. From that day all permanent blessing from God is by faith, the faith of Christ; and till He came, it was altogether in hope, nor could it be otherwise.

But now the Son of God is come and salvation is a fact; a reality to faith before the day of glory when it will be manifested to every eye. Hence it is written that all sinned, and do come short of the glory of God. Mankind are on a footing quite different from Adam. They are born in a state of sin, and they add their own sins. They are out of the first estate of man, being exiles from Paradise. The goodly garden is not their portion, and of the glory of God they come short. There was no abiding in pristine innocence: can men stand before the glory of God? This is the only alternative now: to be lost as men are in unbelief, living and dying in their sins; or, believing in Christ, to be saved and to exult in hope of the glory of God.

Only Christ, only the gospel of God, can save any by faith. Hence the believer is now called by glory and virtue (2 Peter 1: 3), by God's own glory and by virtue. It is the love of God in Christ which breaks down the proud heart ("by grace ye are saved"). But the glory of God in the future has the most powerful influence in the midst of present snares. Therefore has God revealed it as our hope through Christ and with Christ, to lift the soul above all existing attractions and depressions. He has called us by His own glory, and the virtue or moral courage that refuses the gratification of self, which is opposed to the will of God. We are therefore said to be sanctified unto the obedience of Jesus Christ no, less than to the sprinkling of His blood. 1 Peter 1: 2.

How blessed then is the believer's portion! Though he had been in God's sight without righteousness of his own, positively unrighteous, he is now justified by faith. Such is the righteousness of God, Who gave His Son, and gave Him to die, that he might be not only forgiven but justified. He has therefore peace with God. He is humbled to the dust when he looks back on himself; but Christ is his peace; and it was made by the blood of His cross. Nor this only; he can approach God in perfect favour as his present standing, and he can boast in the hope of the glory of God for his unending future.

How strong the contrast with man as he is naturally, even if highly moral, benevolent, and religious after the flesh! For such men are either self-satisfied, because insensible to God as He is and to themselves as they are, easily compounding with Him for what they deem a little and inevitable sin; or they are in gloom and terror when they think of God as their Judge, and strive to earn mercy or a mitigated sentence by hard labour and penance beforehand. The true God is unknown, because the word of Christ is not believed, and the soul has never learnt from the Spirit's teaching His value for the sacrifice of Christ. So precious is it in His sight that it procures peace for all that is past, favour for the present, and a place in the glory of God for all that is to come.

W. K.

5 We glory in tribulations also

Rom. 5: 3-5.

Gospel Words. 2nd Series, No. 5.

No wonder that the apostle was not ashamed of the gospel; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes (Rom. 1: 16). Justified by faith we have peace with God; we received and have access by faith into this grace wherein we were placed and stand; and we boast in hope of the glory of God. This expressly covers, with blessing unmistakably divine and wholly undeserved by us, the entire past, present, and future, for every believer.

Can the Spirit add more? This is just what the text before us does. God in Christ alone accounts for it all; and His love, through Him Who died and rose again, finds its joy in blessing us to His own glory. He delights in blessing man, and can afford to bless him righteously and according to all His heart through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

How are you treating such a God and such a Saviour? Does His goodness lead you to repentance? or according to your hardness and impenitent heart are you treasuring up to yourself wrath in a day of wrath and revelation of God's righteous judgment? After the sin of man, yea when it rose up to its climax against His Son sent and come in love, God has answered this crowning sin by His own grace, so far exceeding, that, instead of judging all the guilty world which crucified Jesus, He is reconciling every one that believes, howbeit hitherto His evident and proved enemy, by the death of His Son. And why not you? Is it a small thing in your eyes, that though He declares you "lost" in yourself, He is willing to save you by grace through faith (Eph. 2: 8)? Oh! hear the word of reconciliation; for so He calls the gospel (in contrast with the law, however holy, just, and good in itself, which must condemn the ungodly). He has commanded His ambassadors for Christ even to beseech, Be reconciled to God. Man cannot himself become meet for His presence in light; but God made Christ Who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become God's righteousness. Neglect no more so great salvation. Beware in that case lest the worse befall you.

The Holy Spirit never uttered, never wrote, a word to sanction doubt, but to produce faith in God land His Christ. Let no one glory in men. For all things are yours (if you believe), whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ's and Christ is God's (1 Cor 3: 22, 23).

It is therefore not only in His counsels going on to glory through redemption that He blesses and we boast, but in His ways through this wilderness world. Sometimes the believer is at his wit's end: difficulties so thicken. We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession with groanings unutterable; and He that searches the hearts, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because He intercedes for saints according to God. But we do know that, to those who love God, all things work together for good.

So in our text the apostle, after saying that "we rejoice in hope of the glory of God," adds "And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also," and explains clearly how it is: "Knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope; and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost that was given to us." It is the path of trial into which we are ushered when we are no longer slaves in Egypt, God's judgment being staid by the blood of the Lamb.

Are we then to murmur because, while Christ is on high, we see not yet all things subjected to Him? He is crowned with glory; but Satan is still the god and prince of the world, and hence the enmity to all who have faith, and the greater in proportion to their fidelity.

In Rom. 5: 3-5 the true way of God is briefly traced in the discipline of the soul, full of profit for all exercised thereby. It all supposes and follows our justification by faith. There maybe, as there was of old, a shirking of God's will; but He knows how to deal with His children when refractory; and as of old, so now He chastens whom He loves, and scourges every son whom He receives. Nor is discipline the only end of God. He tries us, as He did Abraham ; and blessed is the man that endures temptation, for after being proved he shall receive the crown of life which He promised to those that love Him.

So the apostle Peter says, that ye greatly rejoice in the salvation ready to be revealed in the last time, though now for a little while, if need be, put to grief by various temptations, that the trying of your faith, more precious than gold that perisheth, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ. But in our text the apostle dwells on the present fruit for the soul. "We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience" (or endurance) etc. This is hindered if we question our justification and so our peace be unsettled. But starting on our pilgrim journey with assurance of faith, we interpret the tribulations by the light of redemption, and confide in Him Who justifies the ungodly man (Rom. 4: 5), having raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, Who was delivered for our offences and was raised again for our justification. Our acceptance of tribulation at His hand works out endurance or patience on our part.

Again, "patience [works out] experience." It is not yet the experience of what is within, which is formally and fully discussed in a later part of this Epistle from Rom. 5: 12 to Rom. 8 inclusively. Here endurance works out what God is along the road; which is missed just so far as we allow impatience. And this "experience" works out "hope." In quietness of spirit and the proof of what God is towards us, let the world and present trials oppose as they may, we learn to have our, eyes habitually above. Hence it is that the hope of the glory of God which was accepted as a truth becomes more influential, consolatory, and cheering practically. Nor does it whatever its heavenly brightness, put us to shame, for the blessed reason, that the love of God has been and is shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us.

No greater power of enjoying Himself than this, we may boldly say, could our gracious God give to the believer. Our blessed Lord, in the days of His. flesh, had the Spirit given Him, and so without blood. The Holy One of God, He needed no, sacrifice as He had no sin. The Spirit of God descending and abiding on Him was the sign and witness of His personal perfectness as He walked here below. Him, the Son of man, God the Father sealed. We receive the Holy Spirit because in Christ we have redemption; as, in the type of the O.T., the oil followed the blood on the sons of Aaron, already washed in the water, the high priest alone being anointed without blood (Lev. 8: 12); afterward, he and they together (ver. 23, 24, 30). This was a beautiful shadow, though of course not the very image. Christ is the truth. If the love of God, spite of our imperfect condition, has been thus shed abroad in our hearts in virtue of redemption, what surprise can there be that, when risen or changed it the coming of Christ, we should share with Him God's eternal glory? Even this hope does not make us ashamed because of His love pervading the heart.

W. K.

6 The love of God

Rom. 5: 5.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 215-216. Gospel No. 2-6.)

"The love of God"; wondrous truth! When one knows in any true measure what He is, and what we are, how much more wonderful! Here it assuredly means not our love to Him, but His to us. Had He not justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus? Was it not by faith, apart from works of law, and so open to Gentile no less than Jew?

It is noticeable that here first in this Epistle is there mention of God's love, and of the Spirit given to the, believer, the power of enjoying that love. Assuredly this is not the manner of man, yet just as it should be. In the early chapters the apostle urges man's guilt and ruin because of his manifest evil. It is no longer a question; scripture has decided it. Every Jew was ready to admit that the condition of the Gentiles, philosophers like the rest, was desperate; but rejoins the apostle, what about your own state? If thou art named a Jew and restest on law and makest thy boast in God, and yet in fact dost transgress in this or that sort of ways, God's name is blasphemed on this very account among the heathen. Hence, as the law condemned, so the psalms and the prophets openly testify against Israel. For when the law says that there is not even one righteous, it speaks to those under the law; it is definitely and expressly therefore to the Jew; that every mouth may be stopped and all the world be under judgment to God.

But the cross of Christ, the full and flagrant proof of the world's inexcusable wickedness in unbelief, of the Jew yet more guilty than the Gentile, laid the basis by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God for a new kind of righteousness. This is God's righteousness, in contrast with man's which the law demanded but never could get from the fallen. Christ came, Jesus Christ the Righteous. "When ye have lifted up the Son of man," said Himself to the Jews, "then ye shall know that I am He, and do nothing of Myself, but as the Father taught Me, I speak these things. And He that sent Me is with Me; He hath not left Me alone, for I do always the things that are pleasing to Him . . . Which of you convicteth Me of sin?" But would He be made sin for us? Would God make Him, Who knew no sin, responsible for sin, to bear its consequences as truly as if He were guilty? This is what was done, not on man's part but on God's for man, in giving His Son to die as propitiation for our sins. And this is love, not that we loved Him, which we ought to have done but did not, but that He loved us, and proved it in the death of His Son, the sacrifice for sinners, a, sacrifice open to all, available for any, efficacious once and evermore for those that believe. God is just in justifying him that has faith in Jesus.

No doubt God is love, as He is light; and this appears throughout His dealings with man originally and when fallen, as well as in His ways with the chosen people, though they were under His moral government Who could by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation. Still was He a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. Nor had He left Himself without witness before the heathen in that He did good, and gave from heaven rains and fruitful. seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness; neither is He served by men's hands, as though He needed anything, as the apostle preached to the Athenians, seeing He Himself giveth to all life and breath and all things; or, as our Lord taught, maketh His sun to rise on evil and good, and sendeth rain on just and unjust.

But how immeasurably more is God known in His Son! There and then only did He reveal Himself as He is, far beyond His governmental dealings with a fleshly people controlled by His law, which, avowedly, made nothing perfect. Yet His full revelation in Christ brought out the utter evil of man, beyond doubt save to the blind; and the very rejection of Christ, which closed the proper probation of man by the proof of his inexcusable guilt (John 15: 22-25), in the, cross became under God the ground and display of sovereign grace, which saves the most rebellious, the darkest, and the vilest through faith in His Son. Truly it is God's righteousness, not man's; for it only came forth in all its fulness when favoured man was indisputably the enemy of God, not merely failing in his duty altogether and in every way, but hating Him when He was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them. Alas! to proud self-sufficient man grace is more repulsive than law, because it makes nothing of his own righteousness (yea, denies it), everything of God's; and Christ is all, Who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Thereby should no flesh glory in His presence; but he that glorieth, as it is written, let him glory in the Lord. Was it not a great love wherewith God loved?

Here it is God's love not merely demonstrated to sinners as such, in the gift and death of Christ, but enjoyed and meant to be enjoyed to the full by the believer. Hence it is given as the reason which explains in general why we glory in tribulations, and in particular why hope even of God's glory does not put us to shame meanwhile. Assuredly it would if we measured its brightness with any degree of our love as we journey on. But God's love! All, this wholly differs. It is as perfect and unvarying as unmerited on our part, being simply and solely according to His complacency in Christ our Lord. Hence it is said to have been, and is, abidingly shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us. If the gift was a transient and complete act, the result is permanent. The Holy Spirit, the divine witness of Christ and of His redemption, the power of enjoying God's love, was (as our Lord assured the disciples) to be in them and abide with them for ever.

Further, that love is said to be shed abroad, or poured out, in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us. Our affections are pervaded by His love, which is secured in power by the presence of His Spirit in us. And He is thus shown to be given to those who rest by faith on the Lord Jesus, the remission of their sins. being by His blood. But the great unfolding of His action on individuals is only added in Rom. 8, after the experience of indwelling sin and of law, as well as our place in Christ, have been distinctly set out.

Now have you, dear reader, the love of God shed abroad in your heart? Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you receive God's testimony to His Son? Christ declares that he that does has eternal life (John 5); as the apostle preached that every believer is justified from all things (Acts 13). You are called on to believe this too, for your own soul. When you bow in simple faith, God's love fills your heart, not before nor otherwise. The love of Him Who gave. His only-begotten Son, no less than of Him Who gave Himself for us, causes us to overflow within; and no wonder, for it is by the Holy Spirit given to us, alike springing up into everlasting life in worship, and streaming forth in witness to parched and perishing souls by the way.

Till one thus rests on Him Who for us died and rose, and on God's love Who sent Him, there may be spiritual desires, there may be an awakened conscience and piety Godward, there maybe earnestness about man, blind and lost in his sins. But the gospel is God's answer in Christ to these desires of pious anxiety; it gives purification to the conscience, satisfaction to the heart, with rest in the glory of God as the assured prospect; so that we may boldly say grace, God Himself, could vouchsafe no more. His love accordingly is shed abroad in our hearts; and this could only be through the Holy Spirit given to us; not through new birth simply, but also the gift of the Spirit, when and because we are children of God. For the Spirit thus given is the seal of redemption, the power of liberty, the witness of sonship, and the earnest of the inheritance; and He never was thus given to believers till the atoning work was done. Compare 2 Cor. 3: 17, Gal. 4: 6, Eph. 1: 13, 14.

7 Christ died for the ungodly

Rom. 5: 6.

Gospel Words. 2nd Series, No. 7.

When the love of God shed abroad in the heart is a question, men habitually look into themselves for an answer. But they can find no satisfaction from within; and it is well that they do not, for the Holy Spirit will never help a soul to find rest in himself or his affections. There is no real rest for conscience or for heart in one's own internal state. Call it trusting to the Spirit of God, it will not deceive Him or even an upright soul. For to stand good against every strain and challenge, rest must be on the ground of perfection; and the only work that perfects the sinner in God's sight is the sacrifice of Christ. The Holy Spirit accordingly bears witness to Christ and His work on the cross (Heb. 10), as the only satisfactory answer to the sense of need He awakens in the soul, whatever the testimony He may afterwards bear with our spirits as believers (Rom. 8: 16).

Therefore it is that the apostle immediately turns in our verse to the proof of God's love on our behalf, entirely outside ourselves, in the death of Christ. "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." Here indeed is a righteous resting-place for one ever so guilty, burdened, and exercised before God. His love provided it. The sinner contributed nothing to it save his sins. Divine goodness rose above all human evil, and all Satan's malice. One, and but One, was capable of the infinite enterprise; One Who from the beginning, when there was no creature, was with God, and was God; One Who in due time came from God, and was sent in His love as a propitiation for our sins. Love in the Father, love in the Son, — divine love — undertook a work beyond all thought of man or angel till God revealed it And Christ was just the One to give it effect to the glory of God the Father (without which nothing had been right), to the efficacious justifying of the most defiled who bows to God and believes on Jesus.

For He was God's only-begotten Son that is in the bosom of the Father, His delight evermore, expressly so when He deigned to become man on earth, for the accomplishment of that most worthy and gracious purpose, and for the glories which should follow His sufferings. For as He could meet the Father on co-equal ground, so He had come down to man in the deepest reality, Son of man as the first Adam was not: born of woman, born under law, made sin on the cross, that the vindication of God might be as absolute as the righteousness of God which justifies the believer and flows out to meet every sinner.

Such is the Saviour God has sent; such is the standing proof of His love when the soul is sorely tried, and needs a clear, sure, and irrefragable object. It is not a promise, but an accomplished fact, and a fact of immeasurable and unending value, with which nothing can compare in time past or future, on earth or in heaven.

And it was "in due time." God had tried man innocent; and a brief space sufficed — man fell. God bore with man an outcast, left to himself though not without a blessed and blessing revelation ; and man became so corrupt and violent that He sent a deluge to take all away, save a few in the ark who began the world as it is. And then He gave promises to Abraham, and to his seed ; after that, His law to Israel, who forsook Him for false gods "till there was no remedy." "He had yet one (as the parable says), a beloved son; he sent him last unto them, saying, They will reverence my son." Him they crucified and slew. It is the measure of the world's sin: not transgression only, or idolatry, but the ignominious rejection of God's Son.

Yet that worst sin of man met the love of God which rose above all his enmity, making Christ on the cross a propitiation for sins; as He sent the Holy Spirit to proclaim the gospel, the glad tidings of His grace, to the whole creation. Is not this love worthy of God and of His Son? Is not this the love which alone can, alone ought to, reassure your troubled spirit? Was it not exactly in due time that Christ died for ungodly persons? If you know that you are so, make this your plea — that Christ died for ungodly ones. Be assured that God, Who honours His word above all His name, will accept it and you in the name of Jesus.

Do you plead your powerlessness? God has anticipated this also in His grace, as you may see for yourself in this very verse. "When we were yet without strength, Christ died for the ungodly." Were you making efforts first to reform yourself and to please Him, the Holy Spirit would in no way help, save to convince you of utter weakness and sinfulness. In such a condition He treats such efforts as self-righteous and Satan's substitute for genuine repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. To Him only look as you are, and because you are both weak and ungodly: He can and will save every one that calls on His name.

It is a denial of grace and truth to allege that you are not trusting to yourself but to the Holy Spirit working in you what is good and acceptable to God. Till you have given up yourself as both ungodly and without strength, till you give up unwittingly seeking to establish your own righteousness and are subject to the righteousness of God, the real work of the Holy Spirit is to overwhelm you with such a sense of your sins as compels you to look only to Christ and His redemption. Without knowing it, you are striving to be a saint in order to win, not to say deserve, the remission of sins; and the blood of Jesus would come in, thus as the reward and crown of your efforts. But the Holy Spirit never lends Himself to such a disguise of your true condition; He lays bare to your own soul that you are powerless and ungodly, but also that Christ died for such. This alone maintains God's grace and man's sinfulness. For souls in your condition He is a witness to Christ's blood-shedding; by which received in faith there is remission, without which there is none. Practical holiness follows, and does not precede, faith in the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation. When you rest on Christ and His death, the Holy Spirit works as a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind; yea, He joins His help to our weakness, but in no way till we abandon self, and we rest, where God rests for us, in the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

W.K.

8 God's own love

Rom. 5: 7, 8.

Gospel Words. 2nd Series, No. 8.

Yes, it is not more wondrous than true that, while we were yet without strength, Christ died for ungodly persons. Such are fallen men. Jew or Gentile made no difference as to man's nature. The law gave no power; religious form is not godliness. And because man is what he became through sin, in due time Christ died for us, powerless and ungodly persons. This was beyond all creature love.

Man needs a motive to draw out his love to its object. He sees grounds, perhaps mistaken, for his affection; otherwise he does not love. And so the apostle writes, "For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die." Possibly the one known as the generous benefactor might embolden a man drawn by it, even to die on his behalf. For goodness is rare and moves the heart mightily.

But God is sovereign in His love to guilty man. Far from aught congenial, there is every thing in him suited to repel God. Fallen man is corrupt or violent, proud or vain, self-seeking or independent, the sad contrast of Him Who is not more light than love. Yet "God commendeth his love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Such love is peculiar to Him. He loves from His own nature with no motive in the object. He loves notwithstanding the utmost unworthiness. He loves where no goodness is, nor yet rectitude, where men are sinners and nothing else, where there is only misery and guilt; yea, He commends His own love to such as were still far from Him and opposed to Him, giving the highest and most solid proof of it, in that Christ died for us who were in that evil case.

Thus God and man now stand face to face as they really are. The time of probation is over: man after full trial is lost. It is not merely that in every way and degree he has proved disobedient to God. Last of all he rejected and crucified the Lord of glory. In the person of the Son he cast God out of the world — God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. The proof of it is the death of Christ at man's hand.

But the love of God was signally shown in sending Christ, not as Judge but as Reconciler; so it is, still more deeply and conspicuously, in making His death a sacrifice to blot out the sinner's guilt. "Christ died for us." None but God was capable of such love. Only He could rise perfectly above all the evil of the world. All this was ever before Him. Throughout all His dealings with man, with Israel in particular though never exclusively, God had intimated His mercy, and faith always received it. This gave meaning to pledges and offerings from the first. This was associated even with His acts in judging the world by a deluge or in destroying the firstborn of Egypt; there was divine love in exempting Noah's family in the one case, Israel's sons in the other. In the Levitical economy, whatever the judgment under which transgressors fell, nothing was clearer than the bright shadows of atonement in a variety of form, which found no answer worthy of God, no cleansing of the conscience from sins or dead works, till "Christ died for us." God is glorified thereby in any case; if we believe not, He abideth faithful. He cannot deny Himself.

The gospel makes all now as clear as even God can, consistently with His love and glory, till the judgment. Then it will be proved that not lack of light from God was at fault, but man's will who loves darkness rather than light, because his deeds were evil. But now before the judgment, God commends His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. It is Christ's death which efficaciously and for ever atones for guilt. It. is by Christ's death that enemies are reconciled to God. All is yours if you believe on Him; all is lost if you turn from Him.

How could it be otherwise if Jesus be the Word made flesh, the Son Whom God sent in His love, Whom Jews and Gentiles slew (proving what they were), Whom (thus slain God in yet fuller love made a sacrifice for sin? It is righteous with God to justify you as a believer in Jesus (Rom. 3: 26). Surely it is not unjust to judge you for all your sins, if you aggravate. them all by spurning the Saviour God has given in His infinite love.

I implore you, my reader, if you have never thus submitted to the righteousness of God in saving you, to search honestly what hinders you. It is certainly not on God's part; for the apostle declares that God is as it were beseeching you in the Sent One. Will you slight His call longer? How blessed, in life or death, to have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ! Vain for us to think of making it. He made it through the blood of His cross: so says the scripture. What a proof of God's love no less than Christ's! If you refuse to accept it, who is to blame but yourself? It is the preference of sin and Satan to God and His Son. It is contempt of Christ's sufferings and blood, as it is unbelief of God's word and His own love.

Undoubtedly God looks for a holy walk in His children, He looks for the fruit of light in all goodness and righteousness and truth. But He looks for nothing of the kind till you are justified by faith: to ask such fruit from you in your unbelief would deny Himself, His truth, and His grace. Man deceives by vain words, if he says that one who believes but walks wickedly "hath inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ." Such faith can save none. It is beneath that of the demons, who at least tremble (James 2). But the faith which comes to God through Christ as a guilty sinner, and yet rests on His work for the purification of sins through Christ's death, is of His Spirit, and works by love and receives its end, soul-salvation (1 Peter 1). It is by faith in Christ Jesus that all or any are God's sons (Gal. 3). Now we must be. in the relationship of sons before we can really walk as such. Till we are God's sons, we simply deceive ourselves by pretending to a walk which pertains only to faith. The relationship is of grace on His part, and so to us of faith, not for man's desert, but in spite of all demerit. Our duties, as His sons, begin when we are sons and know it: otherwise they are hindered through questions and fears. His own love in Christ answers every question and casts out fear.

W. K.

9 Justified by His blood

Rom. 5: 9.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 265-266. Gospel No. 2: 9.)

That there is none just, no not one, the apostle had proved from the Psalms (Rom. 3: 20). Those under law are, no less than those without law, all under sin. There is no difference in this: all sinned and come short of the glory of God. Such is the condition of mankind, and authoritatively so declared. As being then guilty, of themselves none can enter heaven, none escape hell.

Therefore did God, after revealing at the beginning the coming destroyer of the enemy, at length send His Son, Who so glorified Him in obedience unto death for sin, that God can righteously send the good news of remission of sins, and life in His name, to every soul that bows in faith. Thus does He justify freely or gratuitously as far as man is concerned, by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

The grace of God is the motive or proximate cause for justifying the unjust; and this is what is meant in such scriptures as speak of justifying any by the grace of God (Rom. 3: 24, Titus 3: 7). In His pure, spontaneous, unmerited favour it originated. We ware not only not just but ungodly, even if moral or religious after a fashion "we were yet sinners." But God

commendeth His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. There only was the efficacious sacrifice for the defiled; there the ransom most precious to

God. This lays the ground for a new kind of righteousness — for God's righteousness in justifying him who, having no righteousness for God, believes in Jesus at the call of God. It was righteous in God to raise from the dead Jesus Whom unrighteous man crucified; it was righteous to set Him at His own right hand in heaven (John 16: 10). But, further, it is His righteousness to justify the ungodly one, not in working for it, but in believing on Him as the God of grace in Christ (Rom. 4). For to him that works for it the reward is not reckoned for righteousness. For this cause it is of faith, that it may be according to grace; and this, not more that the glory may be to God, than that the blessing may be sure to the soul that believes. For, as the Lord Himself taught us in the parables, it is the joy of God to save the lost (Luke 15). By His grace the believer is justified.

Hence we are also said to be justified by (or out of) faith (Rom. 5: 1). The Jew, and indeed the natural man, is apt to think that justification must be out of works. But clearly if a soul could be justified by works, Christ died in vain; and the grace of God would be made void. Hence the gospel is preached to us expressly as lost and powerless; and Jesus our Lord was delivered up for our trespasses and was raised again for our justification. "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God." There is no other principle or way for a sinner; and sinners we have all been, enemies in mind by wicked works, utterly unfit for the presence of God. Therefore did Christ suffer for sins, Just for unjust, that He might bring us to God; Who can meet us, as we are, on the ground of that atoning death, and justify us by the faith of Jesus. By Him, as the apostle at Antioch of Pisidia, preached to souls who had never heard such good news before — by Him "every one that believeth is justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses" (Acts 13: 39).

But there is a further connection in our text. We are said to be "justified by His blood." Here it is the apostle's design to express the power or virtue of that which has justified the believer; and he declares it unequivocally to be the blood of Christ. There is no room for mistake. Where the apostle speaks of the efficacious basis for that immense change of relationship, which is called "justification," he says it, is by or in His blood, Thus only does God account the believer righteous. "The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin." So it was, not with blood of goats and calves, He entered once for all into the sanctuary, having obtained eternal redemption. It is a work done and accepted by God, outside the believer, yet for him and in full view of his sins, which Jesus bore in His own body on the tree, — bore away unto a land not inhabited, never more to be. The believer once purged has no more conscience of sins. When awakened by the quickening voice of Christ in the word, his sins lay overwhelmingly on his conscience, and he judged himself in repentance before God. But now by faith he rests on the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot; he rests on God's estimate of that blood as proclaimed in the gospel; he believes that God has found. a ransom; and he himself has, what Scripture calls, no more conscience of sins.

My reader, turn not away, because you think such news too good to be true. Too good to come from man, undoubtedly; but what can be too good for the God Who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son? — gave Him, that whosoever believeth should not perish but have eternal life. God feels, speaks, acts, worthily of Himself in justifying the ungodly. His grace prompted the wondrous work on behalf of sinners; faith is the empty hand, which receives the boon; and the blood of Jesus is the mighty sacrifice, by which you have your sins blotted out and yourself brought nigh to the living God as your Father. Forget not that despisers shall perish.

10 Reconciled to God

Rom. 5: 10.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 283-284. Gospel No. 2: 10.)

Reconciliation with God is a rich result of the gospel. It is equally simple and sure. In the nature of things God alone can be the unerring judge of it. He accordingly bears witness to it as a spiritual fact due to the death of Christ, and true of every believer. The guilt and the enmity were entirely in us, as we were naturally. In His love God intervened on our behalf when we lay in our sins, evil, helpless, hopeless. He intervened in His Son Who died for us that we might be justified in virtue of His blood; for He sent Him as propitiation for our sins. No other way could glorify Him or justify us. Here only is love conciliated with justice; but it is God's love and God's righteousness, for in us, ungodly and sinners, was neither. Therefore it is for His glory, and according to His grace, and hence not of works but of faith, that no flesh should glory, but "he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." So speak both O. and N. Testaments.

What can be plainer than the testimony of scripture? "For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by (or, through) the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life" (Rom. 5: 10). The Holy Spirit presents the efficacy of Christ's death unambiguously, that the believer may give to the winds his fears and treat his doubts as of the enemy. God's love is the source of the blessedness; Christ's death guarantees it as not only of grace but righteous. Only so is God just and justifying him that has faith in Jesus. Thus is the alienation met holily. Divine love laid the sins on the head of the sole adequate Victim; on Him, not on the sinner, was our evil judged unsparingly by God; and the glad tidings of that mighty work He sent far and wide, that through Christ's name everyone that believeth on Him should receive remission of sins (Acts 10: 43).

Only with remission there is far more. As we read here, the believer is "reconciled to GOD." Not that God was alienated; for He so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son. But He abhorred, and cannot but judge, sin. Therefore must the Son of man be lifted up. "Christ died for us," that we, not our sins, might be spared; that our sins, not ourselves, might be put away from before God; that we might be reconciled to God, and expiation be made for our sins. Christ has effected both for every believer; yea, He has wrought a work of such God-glorifying and infinite value, that God can righteously send a message of reconciliation into all the world and to all the creation. And on what a wondrous basis! Him Who knew no sin Be made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Him (2 Cor. 5: 21).

Undoubtedly, when a soul repents and believes the gospel, there is a marked moral change. Faith knows God and Him Whom He sent as never before, and by the Holy Spirit cries, Abba Father; while repentance means a real self-judgment in the sight of God. But reconciliation goes farther, and is the establishing of a new, near, and known relationship of favour with God according to the purposes of His grace and through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Now that Christ is come and the will of God done, all that raised a barrier and provoked flesh is gone by our death with Christ; and we are His Who is risen, that we may bear fruit unto God, and serve in newness of spirit, not in oldness of letter.

When Christ appears and the revelation of the sons of God takes place, the creation (which, as the apostle tells us, is now groaning together and travailing in pain together) shall be delivered. It is now in the bondage of corruption as it shared the consequences of Adam's fall, its head. But the Second man. as He now delivers those who believe in Him, will by-and-by deliver creation also into the liberty of the glory we shall then have. Before He comes in power and glory, it is ours, to enjoy already, as creation cannot, the liberty of grace. In that day God will reconcile to Himself through Christ all things (having made peace by the blood of His cross), whether the things on earth or the things in the heavens. But it is all-important to know that, whatever we may once have been in the sad and wicked past, God has now reconciled us in the body of Christ's flesh through death (Col. 1: 21, 22). Impossible to do more for our souls now than He has already. done in Christ, always supposing that we believe in Him and continue in the faith grounded and settled.

Do you believe now, dear reader? Is it your peaceful, settled, assurance from day to day, that you are thus "reconciled to God"? It could be the portion of none without the perfect and accepted work of Christ; whereby, as Heb. 10: 10 tells us, we have been sanctified once for all. Nay more, by that one offering He has perfected for ever (i.e. without a break) the sanctified (ver. 14). It is God Who reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5: 18). It is therefore as complete as is due to His person and His work. Believing that God is thus good to you now in His Son has a powerful effect on the inner man, its affections and its mind, as well as the outer ways and words, the whole life. But reconciliation is God's work in setting us who believe in our right relationship to Him, sins forgiven, ourselves justified and standing in His favour as His beloved children. Without Christ's death for us it was impossible for sinful man to be thus blessed. But if by grace I believe on Him, all is mine, as God's word declares. If then your soul rests on Him, on God's testimony to Him and His work, be assured that you are reconciled to God. What God reveals, we receive without doubt in Christ's name.

11 We shall be saved

Rom. 5: 9, 10.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 297-298. Gospel No. 2: 11.)

Salvation is a great word and a great thing, especially in its force as interpreted by Christ. Israel often knew deliverances of divine mercy, saviours not a few; but they were national, for time and this world. Even then faith looked for things better and more enduring through the Messiah that was coming. So much the more were souls astonished that, when He came, He did not restore the kingdom to Israel nor destroy their enemies; for He was Himself rejected by men, in particular by the Jews, far more than His herald John the Baptist had been.

But thus was God's counsel accomplished, His love displayed, and His word magnified; thus was man and Israel proved to be altogether guilty and lost; but no less was room left for sovereign grace, and divine righteousness, and everlasting salvation. All met in the cross of Christ, where the worst evil of the creature rose up against the perfect goodness of God, Who laid the burden of sin on His Son, the suffering Son of man, a sacrifice for sins, a propitiatory through faith in His blood for showing forth God's righteousness. And now, Christ being raised for the believer's justification, he is assured of salvation,

If sins set to any man's account by God must ensure judgment, never did one stand forth as a sufferer to the utmost like the Saviour. He was man, born of woman, as truly as any, not so the first Adam who was created, not born. He, the Son, was God as truly as the Father, or the Holy Spirit. He was the Holy One of God; which Adam was not, even untainted and fresh from God's hand, innocent and upright, but never said to be holy, though he had no sin then in his nature when tempted. Christ was in all things tempted like as we are, sin excepted. Such was the One, God and man, the absolutely obedient One, Who undertook to suffer and die, Just for unjust: the only, the adequate, the perfect sufferer for sins, that He might bring those who believe to God (1 Peter 3). But God raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, that our faith and hope might be in God. What could be a grander demonstration of the sacrifice accepted, of sirs effaced?

Yet you are not justified by His blood, unless you believe the testimony God brings in the gospel; nay, you are worse than heathen; you add to all your other sins contempt of God's grace, and of Christ's atoning death, and of the Holy Spirit, the present and divine though unseen Witness. If the word of the law spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received just retribution, how shall those escape who either reject so great salvation when presented, or neglect it by a heartless profession of the Lord's name?

Do you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead? Then fear not to rest on the inspired assurance; "thou shalt be saved" (Rom. 10: 9). He that spared not but gave up His own Son for us all, when we were ungodly and enemies, is worthy of all trust, as His word is of all acceptation. To rest on it is "obedience of faith," the root of all the practical obedience that follows.  The soul that receives His testimony sets to his seal that God is true. Why should you fear that He' in Whom you believe for the remission of your sins will abandon you afterwards? No doubt, you are weak; but what is Christ? Is He a little Saviour? is He not our great God and Saviour (Titus 2: 13)?

Listen to the apostle authorised of God to reason with you. "Much more then, being justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by his life" (vers. 9, 10). Such is the salvation here guaranteed by God. No doubt it is for believers only, but it is for every believer, and not one should doubt it. If you at His Word cast your soul on Christ and His work, God declares the blessing is yours all through. Doubts of Christ and of His salvation come not from God's Spirit, but from the enemy who hates you and Christ yet more. The express aim of the passage is to strengthen your confidence and chase fear away. The love of God in Christ has already met your need when desperate. That love which sought you when an enemy and made you a friend, yea God's child, by faith in Christ Jesus, is still real and active on your behalf. Distrust not His love, nor His word.

It is quite right for the believer to exercise himself, to have a conscience in every thing void of offence toward God and men. Nor can anything happen to him sadder than sin, far more serious in a believer than in another man. Assuredly it calls for self-judgment and humiliation before God in proportion to the offence and the offender. But God provides for the failures and the trials of the way by Christ's advocacy and priesthood, as also in the action of His Spirit and word. Impossible that grace, unless abused, should clash with the righteous government of God, for the Father judges according to the work of each (John 15, 1 Peter 1: 17). Indeed this constant vigilance takes effect on His children, because they know themselves redeemed with Christ's precious blood as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. It is their new responsibility (for as men, on their old responsibility, they were lost) to walk as children of obedience, not fashioning themselves according to the former lusts in their ignorance; but, as He that called them is holy, they too should be holy in all manner of conduct.

In our scripture, however, the apostle would establish souls in the saying grace of God before dealing with the walk; and therefore he instructs those who believe to rest assured from their justification that they shall he saved. That unbelievers should make a principle of doubting is but natural. It is deplorable that any believer should be so dull and negligent of the word before us, if there were no other, or as if all others were not consistent. Of all men, the Christian should be wholly subject to God's word. And here we have a two-fold witness, either of them divinely strong, both conclusive, that believers shall be saved. It would be strange indeed, if after we were justified by Christ's blood, we should not be saved from that wrath which is to fall on all impiety and unrighteousness of men holding the truth in unrighteousness. Not so: the apostle affirms that much more we shall be saved through Christ; and he adds that, if when enemies we were reconciled to God through His Son's death, much more being reconciled shall we be saved by His life. He was crucified of weakness; He lives of God's power. Each is to God's glory, each fraught with blessing. If that depth be so efficacious, what security in this height? Even as Himself said, "Because I live, ye shall live also." "Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end." The believer is called to walk accordingly. His standing is wholly because of what grace has wrought in Christ, and given him freely and fully and abidingly, He is responsible to walk by faith as thus blessed of God, coming under discipline if he fail, but cheered from the start with God's assurance of salvation according to the virtue of Christ's death and in the power of His life.

12 We also joy in God

Rom. 5: 11.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 312-313. Gospel No. 2: 12.)

The grace of God here shines at its brightest, as far as this Epistle goes; and we who believe are meant to enjoy all to the full. Never is this possible, never understood, till we are convinced by divine teaching that all our blessing is in Christ and His redemption. Justified by faith of Him and His work, we have peace with God. This strengthens us to judge ourselves and abhor our sins far more deeply than when, first convinced of our guilt, we cried to God and cast our souls on the sacrifice of Christ. Solid peace with God no soul has till he believes on Him that raised up from the dead Jesus our Lord, Who was delivered for our offences and was raised up for our justification.

Faith is reckoned to the believer now for righteousness, not only as to Abraham of old but more blessedly still. For, as the apostle shows, he believed in hope of what God would do; the Christian believes what God has done for him in Christ. Abraham confided in promise; we under the gospel have accomplishment. The work of God's grace for the remission of our sins and purging our consciences is once and for ever done. It cannot be annulled nor can it be added to. There are resources of grace to meet other wants; but, receiving Him who died for us and rose again, we received the reconciliation.* We know that the love of God was toward us, when we were yet sinners. Then it was that Christ died for us, not when we had a little strength and became godly. For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for ungodly persons.

* This is the true force of what the A. V. here calls "the atonement," which is the right word, not "reconciliation," in Heb. 2: 17.

Such is the unerring word of God: what glad tidings for men! How wicked to despise His message! How blessed to believe! For sin wronged His love and His truth; and Christ vindicated both, while He suffered once for sins that He might bring us to God; and faith receives the boon on God's word to the salvation of the soul. He who so began carries on accordingly. By Christ also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God, instead of being alarmed and shrinking back to perdition.

Nor is this all. We rejoice or boast in tribulations also. This is the promise to the Christian, instead of the earthly prosperity pledged to the Jew if faithful. But grace turns tribulations to the Christian's present good, by breaking his will, and teaching him what the God is that has found him and that he has found. For tribulation works out patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope ; and hope does not make ashamed; because the love of God is then better known, being abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is given to us. His love thus spent on us at all cost to Christ and to Himself, when we were unloveable to any but God, certainly cannot be less when we have repentance toward Him and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. His love- is the assurance to our faith, that, being now justified by Christ's blood, we shall be saved from wrath through the Saviour. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved in virtue of His life.

There is even more than this most comforting assurance as to the future. "And not only so, but we also joy (or boast, the same word as in vers. 2 and 3) in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement" (or rather "reconciliation," referring to ver. 10). It is not now the love of God, but the God of love; and He is our boast, in no way our dread as once. We can glory in Himself, not merely in what He has given us in Christ or will give us in the day when all will be according to His power and goodness. For as we have now received the reconciliation, His perfect love casts out fear, and we know what He is to us in Christ; yea, the very sorrows of the way lead us to know His love better, as well as His word which is thus verified to us not only in our Saviour but in every day's experience. For the Holy Spirit does not fail here below while Christ is on high.

Indeed, this is life eternal, that the Christian should know the Father, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He sent. And he knows Him to be love as well as light, Christ's Father and our Father, Christ's God and our God. Receiving Christ, we have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully. From such crooked ways there was no real deliverance apart from Christ; but now that the Son of God has come, the Deliverer from the coming wrath, He has also given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true; and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. We love, because He first loved us; and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. And it was manifested toward us in this, that God sent His only-begotten Son that we might live through Him, yea more, that He might die for us, a propitiation for our sins.

But it is impossible so to know God and His love without boasting in Him. The heart is cleared of its idols; the living and true God is served. But there is much more than this. For the heart is led up, by the truth of Christ and the love of God displayed toward us in His work, from the blessing to the Blesser, Who sets us in perfect and unchanging favour. His very chastening thenceforth is the effect and proof of His love to His children, as we read in Heb. 12. Hence do we boast in God, even now in this world, as the fruit of "the reconciliation." So in order to it our Lord taught us in the parable that the father deemed it well to make merry and rejoice because the lost prodigal was found; not the sinner only to be saved, but the God Who saved him. Can we but glory in Himself then? We are thereby made true worshippers and worship Him in spirit and truth. Thus do we joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ by whom we now received the reconciliation.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Third Series.

Gospel Words - Third Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 God created

2 God said

3 Adam

4 The two Trees

5 Woman

6 The Tempter

7 Eve Tempted

8 The Fall of Man

9 Naked

10 Where art thou?

11 Convicted

12 The woman's Seed

1 God created

Gen. 1

Gospel Words, 3rd Series. No 1.

He Who "in the beginning" created the universe is also the source of spiritual life, of a divine nature as in 2 Peter 1. Every creature above or beneath is the fruit of His will and power, He sovereign and good, they dependent and subject responsibly if not in fact, for self-will, sin, entered both heaven and earth. As of old, so now, all blessing is in the Son, in Whom life was and is. The Spirit of God took His part then as He does today according to the scriptures. From above is every good giving and every perfect gift, from Him with Whom can be no variation nor shadow of turning. Hence, as sin completed brings forth death, He was pleased to bring forth believers by word of truth that we should be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures. There is for a fallen creature no holiness possible, no walk acceptable to God, save through faith in virtue of life above the creature; and this is now set in the clearest light of God's word. "He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God, the life he hath not." Our Lord here below had presented the matter so fully that mistake is inexcusable. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life" (John 5: 24, R. V.).

This is grace, which the sinner needs to save him, the believer knows it in Christ. But, even as to nature, how the Bible opens as becomes a revelation from God! There is no discussion, no reasoning to prove the being of God, no unfolding of His attributes. He acts in power, and speaks with authority, as the true God. He is good, does good, and pronounces on good, as One that has pleasure in it. If from the world's creation His invisible things, His everlasting power and divinity, are clearly seen, being apprehended through the things that are made, how much more does revelation make known? Science is here blank ignorance, it knows not and never can know anything of origins. Its field is the investigation of phenomena, and it rises by generalisation to the fixed laws which govern what exists in nature. No doubt it may advance, to a fuller degree and a more exact distribution, by a better knowledge. But from the beginning there was a reality in God's creation to be investigated; and man, whatever his hostile will to hide and lose himself in second causes, cannot escape the conviction that there must be a first cause, God the Creator. He it is Who made known His ways to Moses, His doings to the sons of Israel. He it is Who later revealed Himself in Jesus, His Son, His Only-begotten, in Whom is life eternal for the believer, without Whom abides the wrath of God for him that disbelieves. To reject the grace of God in Christ is to remain in unremoved guilt and death, with a fearful expectation of judgment to come.

Only the fool has said in his heart, No God; he is fool morally and in the worst sense. Reasoning, if sound, may argue that so this or that must be; revelation says that so it is. Nothing is so simple, satisfactory, and deep as the truth. This alone in grace meets man's ignorance and his need: the truth answers both, now and for ever. Believers are entitled to say, We know, and this on God's testimony, as sure as it is clear, forming the consciousness of the new man by God's Spirit.

God, and God only, has self-being. He is the "I am," and so speaks of Himself. He is the Most High, the Almighty, and the Eternal, and thus made His name known in due time; and He alone can rightly say "I will." So said the Son when incarnate here below; which could not be, if He were not one with the Father, as truly God, and therefore as competent by the sacrifice of Himself to save righteously as to create.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Here we are not told of all the beings created at the first, for elsewhere we read of the angels of His might. Nor have we particulars first of the states, and then of the denizens, of the earth, before man was created under the new conditions of the six days followed by the sabbath. Previously we have two revealed facts: creative energy originating the universe (Gen. 1: 1); a subsequent state of utter confusion, into which (not the heavens, but) the earth was thrown (Gen. 1: 2), before that reconstitution which made it the suited sphere for the moral dealings of God with mankind, and the display of His own grace in Christ. Then Adam's transgression wrought ruin to himself, the race, and the earth; but God will have His eventual triumph over evil power, as well as weakness, through His own Son, the Word made flesh. For He was the perfect pattern of obedience, in life and death the overcomer of Satan, the accomplisher of redemption already by His blood, about to come again to effect redemption by power, not only for those that are His for heaven and earth, but for all the creation itself, enthralled even yet by reason of the first man's fall, to be delivered for glory by the Second. The Holy Spirit will not restore all, whatever His blessed work in that day, it is an honour reserved for Him Who suffered on the cross: Jesus is Heir of all things.

God thought fit to make and try man, and, as the needed measure with the fallen race, to wash away his corruption and violence in the waters of the deluge. Here He called out Abram and his seed to a land they shall yet truly and for ever enjoy. Here He tested Israel by the law, and gave them priests, prophets, and kings till there was no remedy. Here, as sin had entered by the first man, He sent His Son, a man Christ Jesus, to vanquish in every way the enemy of God and man, and to deliver by His death and resurrection such of Satan's victims as believe. Here therefore was displayed God's moral glory in the humiliation, obedience, and cross of the Son of Man. Here consequently shall His glory be manifested, in Christ and all that are His above and below, to the blessing of the universe, when Jehovah reigns and the earth rejoices, set free from thraldom to Satan and his blinded instruments. No doubt the glory above is higher than what the earth shall enjoy, and those who suffered with Christ on earth shall be glorified with Him on high.

See then, my reader, that as you have heard the word of truth, you believe it; for it is the gospel of salvation to all that receive the Saviour on God's word. If he that disregarded Moses' law died without mercy on the word of two or three witnesses of how much worse punishment shall he be judged worthy that trod underfoot the Son and counted the blood of the covenant a common thing?

2 God said

Gen. 1.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 346-348. Gospel No. 3: 2.)

Great as creation is, God's word embraces far more and deeper things. "Thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name." It is therefore worthy of all acceptation, whatever He may say and whatever the theme. Thereby is revealed the truth by Him Who knows it perfectly.

In Heb. 11: 3 we read, "By faith we understand that the worlds, have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which do appear" (R.V.) Evolution is an hypothesis which leaves out God and denies creation. It is a mere effort of imagination to account for the universe, and an effort that set., aside that definite and universally observed fact which underlies all natural science, the permanence of species.. So the ancients, in the West as well as the East, suggested cosmogonies no less fanciful. But the word of God is now scripture, which alone lets us hear what is worthy of God and satisfactory to man. "He spake, and it was; He commanded, and it stood fast." Details are only revealed when man was about to be created. For scripture is a moral book; and God's good pleasure is in men. Hence, when the "days" begin, how often we read in Gen. 1 "God said."

Alas! sin soon followed. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned" (Rom. 5: 12). As man thus universally failed in uprightness and fell under death, it became thenceforth, if he were not to be abandoned to ruin and despair, a question of divine righteousness and of life superior to death. And no sooner did God appear in judgment of the evil than He spoke of the Saviour, the Second Man, the woman's Seed; Who, Himself bruised, should bruise the serpent's head. This was what "God said" to meet the fallen. And faith received it. So we learn in Abel; so the elders had witness borne to them. They believed God's word; they looked for a deliverer from sin and Satan. It was plain that He Who had authority had power. They in their way saw, as He saw fully, that every thing He had made was very good. They heard that Adam and Eve had violated the LORD God's commandment. But they also learnt that, if they listened to the evil tempter and transgressed, He did not leave them to perish, even though, in consequence of their sin, "He drove out the man."

The Saviour did not come yet, nor for ages afterwards; but the word of God about Him was given at once. "The LORD God said," even when pronouncing sentence on the serpent, that the mysterious Seed of the woman should crush the evil power which had misled man to sin and death. Man never thought of such a consummation, still less could he accomplish it. Nay, his proud unbelief refuses the blessing when accomplished, brought to his door, and proclaimed in his ears. It is of God's grace, the work of His righteousness, and revealed by His word; but man, being guilty, distrusts His good and holy benefactor, dreads in a measure His judgment, yet believes not His mercy in a Saviour, still less that (through His death for sin) it is God's righteousness unto all, and upon all them that believe. Even those who claimed to be God's people and were not idolaters, being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.

Faith alone and always received the blessing; and faith is of hearing, and hearing by the word of God. From the beginning it was so, and so it is still. The word of faith is what the apostle preached. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thy heart that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved; for with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Rom. 10.)

So ever since the fall every believer looked for the One that was coming, the woman's Seed. They did not know much of Him. It was not yet said that He was to be called Jesus, nor that God would raise Him from the dead. But they heard from God that He, the Seed of the Woman, should bruise the Serpent's head: a work altogether beyond man as such. In due time God Who said thus much said more; but the little He said from the first, faith received; and those who believed were blessed. God in the blood of Jesus showed His righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God. Thus was His grace in all past ages vindicated by the same death of Christ, which is the ground of the gospel now sent to every creature under heaven. Those who received what God said, be it less or more, of the coining Saviour got the everlasting profit all through, even as Abel had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God testifying on the ground of His gifts. By faith he offered unto God a sacrifice according to His mind. He believed in the bruised Seed of the woman, and brought to Jehovah a sacrifice on which death passed; whereas Cain never rose above the reasoning of nature or the resource of his own wretched self

Even so is it with the mass now. They trust in themselves or in men like themselves. They confide in human things and sayings. They venerate shadows and shows. They believe in ordinances. They are puffed up by sights and sounds, by ceremonies, processions, and the like. But they hear not Christ's words and believe not Him that sent Christ. They count it presumption for any to have everlasting life, delusion that a believer comes not into judgment, and mystical madness that he has passed out of death into life. The believer trusts God in Christ for eternal life. Self and its works, the church and its ordinances, are the refuge of the fearful and unbelieving, not God's love nor Christ's work as revealed by the Spirit in His word. There is neither repentance nor faith. Whatever good works, or the church, may be for the faithful, it is a snare for the sinner to trust them for salvation.

Development is as false to God's word, as evolution is to His creation. They are the extremes of superstition and of scepticism, alike frigid zones where life and light are unknown. The truth is inseparable from the Son of God; it was manifested in Him, Christ Jesus, a Man; and no lie is of the truth, no matter how long or widely held. Hence we are begotten again, not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible, through the word of God which liveth and abideth (1 Peter 1: 23); and by the same word we grow unto salvation. For if we receive the end of our faith, salvation of souls, we are guarded by the power of God through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time, when our bodies will be saved as our souls now are.

Hence we are told (James 1: 18) that God of His own will begat us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first-fruit of His creatures. By-and-by new heavens and a new earth will display the glory of Him Who is the Father of lights, from Whom every good giving and every perfect gift come down. Believers are now a sort of first-fruit of it, the product and witness of His grace. His will working by His word is the source of the everlasting boon; as our will issues in lust, sin, and death.

But the word cleanses too, as the Lord told His disciples (John 15) that they were already clean because of the word which He spoke to them. Of this water is the well-known symbol, and the Spirit makes it living. Hence the Lord in John 3 explains new birth to be born of water and the Spirit. It is receiving Christ's testimony; and he that has received it has set to his seal that God is true: the blessed reversal of Satan's success at the beginning, when distrust of God entered the heart. Thus is the heart purified by faith (Acts 15: 9).

Assuredly this is not all. For Jesus, the Son of God, came by water and blood: both flowed from His pierced side; and he who believes receives the virtue of both. Purification is by His death, and expiation too; as it is the Holy Spirit Who bears witness in the word of God. Sins are judged and confessed, alike hated and forsaken; the blood of Christ that cleanseth from every sin, and not the guilt of the believer, is before God. Faith rests on the perfect and efficacious death of the Saviour. And he that believes the word of God, His witness, has peace with God and eternal life in His Son.

3 Adam

Gospel Words, 3rd Series. No. 3.

In Rom. 5: 14 Adam is said to be a figure or type of Him that was to come. Such he is strikingly and, as with Aaron in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in contrast even more than resemblance.

Made in God's image, after His likeness, Adam had from God, dominion over bird of the heavens, and fish of the sea, over cattle, over all the earth, and over every living thing that moveth upon it. He, the only one of all here below, became living soul by Jehovah Elohim (the LORD God) breathing into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2: 7). Therefore was his soul alone immortal; and his spirit, instead of going downward to the earth like a beast's, went upward to God that gave it (Eccles. 3: 21, Eccles. 12: 7). Therefore shall each one give account of himself to God, and all be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ, that each may receive the things done through the body according to what he did, whether good or bad (Rom. 14: 12, 2 Cor. 5: 10).

For Adam, not only responsible as he could not but be, soon became an object of judgment. Surrounded by every natural good, he was subjected to the simplest and least irksome of divine commands — to abstain from the fruit of a single tree, the test of his obedience. This he violated at the first temptation of the enemy, following his wife into evil instead of guiding her in good. Hence, as disobedient, he was driven out of Paradise under sentence of death, and when thus fallen became father of the race.

But the good, holy, and righteous LORD God sought Adam the very day he sinned, drew the guilty pair from their hiding-place, and, after bringing home their guilt respectively, in His judgment of the serpent revealed the triumph of His grace in the woman's Seed, the Second Man, and Last Adam (Gen. 3: 15).

And how blessed the contrast of Him Who was thus set forth from that early day, the one Object of faith and hope! For the Son of God is come and hath given us who believe understanding, that we may know Him that is true. Old Testament, no less than New, bears witness to His glory and His humiliation, His pouring out His soul unto death and His exaltation at God's right hand, as eventually and visibly over (not Israel only but) all peoples, nations, and languages, yea, all creation.

Meanwhile, as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned, so the grace of Christ brought in transcendent blessing, presented unto all men in the gracious appeal of the gospel, and taking effect "upon all that believe" (Rom. 3). For as through one offence the bearing was unto all men for condemnation, so through one righteousness the bearing is unto all men for justification of life. For as through the one man's disobedience the many were constituted sinners, so also through the obedience of One shall the many he constituted righteous (Rom. 5: 12-19), Even the incredulous Jew could not consistently resist the truth of the gospel, if he held to the authority of the law. For he could not deny that Adam's trespass involved the race in sin and condemnation. Was it not then worthy of God to bring in for the race a still better, richer, and more enduring good through the one Man, His own Son? And as the blessing is of God's grace unto all, so it is by faith and is preached to all, instead of depending on the law given to Israel. The gospel is universal in its appeal, yet takes effect only in those that believe, but equally in all believers be they Gentiles or Jews.

Adam, innocent, stood only on his obedience; but, swayed by his wife who was deceived by the tempter, he too disobeyed. He sought to be as God, knowing good and evil, and fell. Christ, on the contrary, Who was God, came in flesh to glorify God and save sinners, carrying out His obedience, as Adam his disobedience, unto death. And this He did perfectly and suffering to the utmost in the difficulties and ruin which man's sin had made, as Adam fell tried in the least degree with all circumstances in his favour. Wherefore also God highly exalted Christ, and sends out the glad tidings to all creation. And thus did Christ vindicate God's love, while Adam acted upon Satan's lie which defamed it, as if He kept back a little thing which would do His creatures great good. For that little thing, the forbidden fruit of the tree, Adam gave up God; Who so loved the world as to give His best, His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life.

Further, if Adam believed the enemy that gainsaid God's warning of death, Christ went down under the death of the cross, and (what was infinitely more) under the judgment of our iniquities, which Jehovah laid on His holy head as a sacrifice (Isa. 53). Thus was God's truth vindicated in a way worthy of Himself and of His Son. That He is light was thereby proved; that He is love, no less; both beyond dispute in the gift of His Son to die for the guilty according to His word. All the cost was God's, all the suffering was His Son's: when Man, on behalf of men, with all the value of a divine Person and, for those that believe, its infinite transferable efficacy with God.

And thus as Adam only became a father when fallen, Jesus stands risen from the dead, after having once suffered for sins, Just for unjust, the life-giving Spirit. He comes, as He said Himself, that His disciples might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. It is the life of Him Who bore their sins in His own body on the tree; it is now the life of Him risen when the debt was paid, and the judgment borne. Thus the believer has eternal life, and comes not into judgment, but has passed as his settled state from death into life.

Is it thus with you, whoever you may be, as you read these lines? If you hear His word and believe Him Who sent His Son Jesus, you are entitled to this as the portion which God's grace is now giving to the believer in His name. Beware of the tempter, a liar and murderer from the beginning. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. And the Holy Spirit is now bearing witness to Him. The church is responsibly, and ought to be, the pillar and basement of the truth; the Jew is not, nor still less the philosopher; but that assembly of a living God which owes its being and blessing to His grace, and is bound to confess Him Lord and Saviour. "Hear Him." Moses cannot save, nor Elijah; Jesus only. Believing in Jesus is of the Holy Spirit and to the glory of God the Father "He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father who sent Him " (1 John 5: 23). "Whosoever denieth the Son hath not the Father, he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also" (1 John 2: 23). For indeed Jesus is the Good Shepherd that laid down His life for the sheep, and this in a way beyond all creature thought, after suffering all that man could do unrighteously in His faithfulness to God, suffering atoningly, He alone, from God in His love to lost man.

"Be it known unto you therefore, [men-] brethren, that through Him is preached unto you remission of sins. And in virtue of Him, everyone that believeth is justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses. Beware therefore lest that come upon you which is spoken of in the prophets, Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish; for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though one declare it unto you" (Acts 13: 38-41).

4 The two Trees

Gen. 2: 9.

(B.T. Vol. 19, p. 375-376. Gospel No. 3: 4.)

Scarce any fact of paradise seems less understood than that recorded in the latter half of Gen. 2: 9, none supposed to be more distinctly an early myth. Yet were these two trees, singled out from the rest, a positive fact suited to that day of primeval innocence, and to no other; but embodying divine principles of the deepest and most enduring value for all time; and this without applying force to either, or indulging in imagination of any kind, but in subjection to the indications of the inspired record itself. And the truth conveyed intimately concerns every soul of man.

The first thing to note is that "the tree of life" in the midst of the garden was absolutely distinct from that "of knowledge of good and evil." To eat of the latter was forbidden on pain of certain death (ver. 17). Only when the man did eat of the prohibited tree, the LORD God took care that be should not take also of the tree of life (Gen. 3: 22), It would have been the perpetuated life of sinful man: a calamity, and violation of all order, not a blessing. Apart from that transgression, the tree of life was open to him, and expressly outside the tree of knowledge.

Clearly then the first tree points out the channel of life for man unfallen, the provision of God for Adam in paradise freely given and quite independently of the second tree: so true is this that man forfeited his title to partake of the one tree when he ate of the other. Man was responsible not to eat of the tree of knowledge; if he abstained, he was free to eat of the tree of life. When guilty and fallen, he was debarred, and driven out, with a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life (Gen. 3: 24).

Now the constant effort of man, especially of religious man, is as it were to identify the two trees; that is, to suspend life on the fulfilment of responsibility: a notion which flies in the face of the facts, when man was innocent, and still more manifestly false, when man was a sinner, and expressly excluded from the tree of life. The original relationship was lost through transgression. The only natural religion that ever had or could have reality had ceased to be. All henceforth turned on what God is to man in saving mercy. Man in the most favourable circumstances had wholly failed toward God. Sin morally compelled God to be a judge. Love, divine grace, made Him a Saviour. Even so it was to lie only in and through His Son, His deigning to become man, and His going down into death and judgment for the guilty. The Father hath sent the Son as Saviour of the world (1 John 4: 14); the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke 19: 10).

But consider the intermediate dealings of God before the Advent. The Epistle to the Galatians lays great stress on the promises as given, a covenant previously confirmed by God, 430 years before the law. They, too, were thereby so arranged that the one could not annul, still less be confounded with, the other. Now the promises answered to the tree of life, as the law to the tree of knowing good and evil. The promises were the unconditional and pledged grace of God, designedly long before, and absolutely distinct from, the law, which expressed His righteous demand from man on the ground of his responsibility. If Israel, if any, pretended to stand on that ground before God, the ten words were His terms. Such terms can only be a ministry of death and condemnation to sinful creatures, as Israel were, as all mankind are. The fatal mistake then as always is to seek life by meeting man's responsibility. Israel took that ground and failed utterly, as all sinners must who go the same path. Scripture records the failure in the O.T. and explains it in the N.T., that men now may profit by that solemn lesson of old and betake themselves only to God's grace in Christ.

For Christ alone has solved the problem; and this by accepting the full responsibility of man and bearing the consequences of sin and our sins in death, yea, death of the cross; so that, after glorifying God perfectly, He is risen from the dead, a life-giving Spirit to all believers. Thus there is no condemnation to those that are in Him, in Whom the two trees are thus brought into blessed harmony for our salvation unto God's glory.

As responsible men, we are ungodly and powerless, as the apostle asserts beyond dispute. So the Lord treats even the Jews as "lost," which closes the question of that responsibility. What more presumptuous in our sinful state of fallen nature than to seek life by pretending to fulfil our duty as men? Even to innocent man, as Gen. 2 teaches, life and responsibility were set expressly and altogether apart. But as Christ gives life freely to believers in His name, so is He propitiation by His death for their sins. For both were absolutely needed, if we were to be made meet for sharing the portion of the saints in light; and both are now given of God through faith to every believer, who has eternal life in the Son and through His blood redemption, the forgiveness of our offences. Not that a new responsibility is lacking, but it is the responsibility of a child of God. So Himself said "Because I live, ye shall live also" (John 14: 19); and previously that He gives His sheep eternal life, and they shall never perish, and none shall snatch them out of His hand (John 10: 28), yea the Father's hand also securing them (29). Can any assurance be conceived plainer or stronger?

Thus in Christ alone, by His sacrifice and the sovereign gift of life, we have the principle of two trees, and this in fulness of blessing for all that believe; whereas the unbeliever, despising the word, and as self-confident as he is weak and sinful, repeats the error of Adam and Israel to his ruin. As Christians we have the treasure of Christ in our earthen vessel; and are responsible to be always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus, the new nature, may be manifested in our body.

5 Woman

Gen. 2.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 14-15. Gospel No. 3: 5.)

Alienated as fallen man is from God, nothing is so strange to him as the truth. And no wonder. It brings the true God before him, and reminds him of his departure from God. He is under Satan's lie, and naturally opposes the truth, which he is inclined to treat at best as myth, philosophic or religious. But it is by the word of God's revealed truth, that the Father of lights brought of His own will any forth, that they should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures. His word is truth; and of that word Christ is the great personal object of faith, Who puts every soul that hears the gospel to the test. To this end is He born, and to this end is come into the world, that He should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth hears His voice, and follows Him Who gives the believer eternal life. "He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life" (1 John 5: 12). If a man recognised his ruin and guilt before God, how would he not from his heart receive the Saviour!

But, owning neither his own need nor God's grace in Christ, he stumbles at the word, being disobedient, and judges scripture, instead of being judged by it, as all believers are. Such an one sets Gen. 2 against Gen. 1, because through incredulity he sees God in neither, and is unwilling to learn the truth in each and in both, alike necessary to give us a complete view.

Beyond controversy Gen. 1: 26-28 presents in noble terms the creation of man, the chief of his works here below. Here only did He call Himself into council; as man only He proposed to make in His image after His likeness, assigning dominion over the rest of earth's living creatures. But whatever may be the expression of singular dignity, it is simply mankind's place in creation, notably distinguished, and indisputably the highest, but yet the highest of earthly creatures, "male and female" like the rest of animated nature. It is therefore God, Elohim the Creator simply, of Whom we here read. It could not with propriety be otherwise.

Gen. 2 regards the scene from the point of moral relationship which brings in the name of Him Who governs on earth as revealed to Israel nationally, and so, in the O.T. as a whole, Jehovah, but Jehovah here carefully identified with the Creator, Jehovah Elohim, the LORD God. For there is none other. It is ignorance to account for the different names of God here or elsewhere, and any difference of words, style, etc., by imagining distinct writers, when all is demonstrably due to change of standpoint, and the simple but profound and exquisite accuracy of thought and language in Holy Writ. It is no rival account by another hand, but the same writer guided by the inspiring Spirit to set out man's moral position; the garden of Eden as the scene of his care, and, in the midst of abundance, the prohibition laid on him under penalty of death; the subject beasts, and birds, brought to him and named by him as their, lord; finally a helpmate, in contrast with every other formation, taken out of himself in the wise goodness of Him with Whom we have to do.

All is consistent with the presentation of relationship, beginning with Jehovah Elohim (the LORD God) in Gen. 2: 4, not Creator only but Moral Governor. Hence here, not in Gen. 1, is the garden of delight planted by the LORD God, the testing place of man's obedience. Here only in the midst of the garden we hear of the two trees: one the sovereign gift of life naturally; the other of responsibility. Here only are we told of man formed of the dust of the ground on one hand, and on the other by the LORD God breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. Adam was thus "son of God" (Luke 3: 38), a living soul, not as other creatures by creative power only, but he only by Jehovah Elohim breathing into his nostrils. Nor is the effect lost for the race; for, as Paul quotes to the Athenians, we too are His offspring, as no other earthly creatures are. Therefore is the soul immortal for good or for ill; if saved, it is for ever with Christ; if lost, for everlasting punishment, because He is refused and men die in their sins. Such was man's relationship to Jehovah Elohim; and the test of obedience here therefore follows.

In pointed contrast with the relationship to him of every animal of the field and every bird of the heavens, to which their master gave names by divine authority, no helpmate appeared, till Jehovah Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall on the man. Then He took one of his ribs, and built it into a woman, and brought her to the man (vers. 21, 22). And the man, notwithstanding his deep sleep, recognised her at once as bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. "This shall be called Woman (or She-man), because she was taken out of man." It is the strongest possible statement of her peculiar relationship to himself, and as perfectly suiting chap. 2 as it would have been out of place in chap. 1. How sad that men of learning, professed theologians, should be so dull to discern the mind of God in scripture, so ready to plunge into the dark after any Will-o-the-wisp of rationalism to their own loss and the injury of all who follow them!

The apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 11: 8, 9, tersely sums up the truth of the case as having God's authority: "For man is not of woman, but woman of man; for neither was man created for the woman, but woman for the man." Those who venture to dispute the fact must one day learn what it is to give God the lie. It is the ground of the sanctity of marriage, one woman for one man: such was the order from the beginning of Him Who made her, as He did, of man, and so to be one flesh, alas! too soon forgotten by men generally and even by Israel. But there it was indelibly written to instruct the faithful and shame the rebellious.

And is it nothing for souls that the same apostle in Eph. 5: 25-33 refers to this oracle of God? Yes, the first man Adam foreshadows the Second man and last Adam, on Whom fell a deeper sleep, that a heavenly Eve might be formed, even the church for which Christ in His love cave Himself, that He might sanctify it, having cleansed it by the washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing. No doubt this mystery is great, but it is no less true and blessed. It is infinite grace, and only possible through the death of Christ, by which a poor sinner is reconciled through faith to God.

Oh, despise not the living and abiding word! Despise not the grace of God which sends you His glad tidings in Christ and in His blood which cleanseth from all sin! It is for you, that, believing on the name of the Son of God, "ye may know that ye have eternal life."

6 The Tempter

Gen. 3: 1.

Gospel Words, 3rd Series. No. 6.

It is to be noticed that, when the enemy assails our first parents, he is left in mysterious obscurity. Yet no believer, no serious mind, can doubt, that under the form of a serpent, Satan was at work to deceive and destroy, whatever the misused ingenuity of unbelief may reason to confuse the unwary and credulous. To the first book of the O. T. the last book of the N. T. answers here as elsewhere with singular force, and identifies him from first to last as "the old serpent, that is called Devil (slanderer) and Satan" (the adversary), Rev. 12: 9, Rev. 20: 2. Nor are we left to this symbolic prophecy alone; for the apostle Paul, in 2 Cor. 11: 3, had given no uncertain sound about this evil one long before. If the serpent lured man into his lie against God, grace revealed the woman's Seed, bruised indeed yet bruising the head of the enemy, the Deliverer not only of all that believe but of all creation also (Rom. 8). The Second man will surely triumph.

Along with the restless seduction of man into sin, Satan is shown us in the ancient book of Job and with striking clearness, as the accuser of the saint, in the presence of Jehovah (Job 1: 9, 10; Job 2: 4, 5), with permitted power to afflict and within certain limits even to destroy the body, though not Job's life.

But the issue for God and those that are His by faith is in every case his defeat eventually, in no case apart from the grace of the Lord Jesus. For there is found the personal antagonism. "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3: 8). He may thwart God in each object and plan of His, he may traduce the believer, and for a while seem ever so successful; but he is doomed, as also all who trust him against God and His Anointed, to utter defeat and everlasting ruin.

Under the legal system, as God was hidden, so was the enemy. David first brought out into relief the type of His kingdom; and there we first hear of Satan (1 Chr. 21: 1). Numbering the people in the pride of a national ruler was abandoning dependence on Jehovah and a denial of his own early faith; and the chastening was seventy thousand men of Israel mowed down by pestilence.

In Ps. 109 we see Judas, the leader of the Christ-rejecting Jews against Jesus. Nor was it only a wicked man set over him, but Satan standing at his right hand: the plain prediction of the traitor's deed under the devil's instigation, as the psalm that follows is of Jehovah's exalting the Holy One to sit at His right hand till the word is given to judge. It is the same opposition, seemingly carrying its evil way, but only accomplishing the good counsels of God in honour of His Son.

Zech. 3 has no other voice, though speaking of Messiah's people. Did not their guilt and defilement give title to Satan against the high priest who represented them? Unquestionably and irremediably, had not Messiah been stricken for the transgressions of the people, and bruised for their iniquities. Righteously therefore can Jehovah that has chosen Jerusalem rebuke Satan, and say, Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? Righteously can He cause the iniquity to pass from their representative and clothe him with rich apparel, and set a fair mitre on his head.

In the N.T. the Tempter confronts the Son of God, and in ways more consummately subtle and complete to draw Him out of dependence on God. The last three-fold effort is recorded for our instruction and thanksgiving: the natural, the worldly, the religious temptations utterly foiled by Him Who stands obediently in the truth, as Satan did not because there is no truth in him. The strong one, however fully armed, here found One stronger, Who overcame him, and took his panoply and divided his spoils. But again he appeared as the prince of the world; and as he could not mislead the Messiah out of the path of subjection, he drew the world, the Jews most of all guilty, to kill Him in it: yet this was his own suicidal guilt, as Christ's death was the glorifying of God about sin, and the reconciliation of all that believe, and indeed of all creation, save of course those that reject Him.

But the N.T. is no less clear that the devil and his angels, till judgment is executed, are incessant in their efforts to corrupt and destroy, to accuse the saints and to deceive the whole habitable earth. He works through the world and the flesh; but his own special field is through falsehood, and his direct enmity is against the grace, truth, and glory of His destined Conqueror. Hence the demons whom he commands trembled before the Lord Jesus in terror of His casting them into the abyss, or bottomless pit, where Satan is to be bound when Christ comes in His kingdom. Till then Satan acts as a devouring lion or a beguiler in a serpent-like craftiness, fashioning himself into an angel of light or kindling the fires of persecution, where he fails with his lies. Fallen angels there are already consigned to everlasting bonds under gloom for judgment of the great day. These so audaciously broke through God's order before the deluge that He has imprisoned them ever since; and they ought not to be confounded with those that are still allowed for a season to tempt mankind, and have access to the heavenly places as well as the earth till judgment befalls them. For their leader is the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience; as our wrestling if Christians is declared to be against the principalities, against the powers against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual [hosts] of wickedness in the heaven, lies (or heavenly places). And this conflict will never cease while the church is on earth. But Rev. 12 tells us that they are to be cast out of the heaven, at a day still future, with new and marked consequences for a short time on earth, before the binding in the abyss for a thousand years, followed soon after by casting them into the lake of fire.

O my fellow sinner, heed the voice of the Son of God, that you may receive the remission of your sins and eternal life. He died for sins, and has authority now and on earth to give you remission. In Him was life, and He gives life, His own eternal life, to every one that believes. There is no other way; for He is the way, the truth, and the life. You are a son of disobedience, and by nature a child of wrath. Be not deceived longer by Satan, who cheats into thinking yourself strong and free, whereas you are without strength and his slave already. Christ only can save you; and He is as able as He is willing; and God has His pleasure in it, for He loves the Son and pities you. Satan can easily and will surely keep you to be his companion in punishment, as now his servant in sin. Whosoever believeth on Christ shall not be ashamed.

7 Eve Tempted

Gen. 3: 1-5.

Gospel Words, 3rd Series. No. 7.

The subtlety of the enemy displays itself throughout. The weaker vessel is deceived, being drawn away by plausible appearances. How like our life! What a light is thrown on facts of every day, with their bitter results through unbelief and impenitence! For God is forgotten, and objects in the scene that now is take His place. Such is Satan's aim till the soul be betrayed into open ungodliness and despair, which hardens an act into a habit away from God.

Here, as the beginning of moral evil on earth, the Holy Spirit relates the fact, in its detail of instruction for every child of Adam, with the grand yet deep simplicity of these early books of inspiration.

"And he said, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? (vers. 1) "It was but a question of what God had said. But where this is allowed, He is dishonoured, and a breach is made in the line of defence for the enemy to enter. To doubt God's word is the beginning of the worst evil, it is to sit in judgment on Himself; whereas He only can and ought to judge, and this He does now by His word, as indeed the Lord says will be at the last day. How presumptuous then for man to judge Him!" A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be a father where is mine honour? and if I be a master where is my fear? saith the LORD of hosts" (Mal. 1: 6). Under the seeming modesty of a query Satan was undermining the prime duty of a creature! And what did he seek in particular thereby? To insinuate a doubt of His goodness. What! May you not eat of all the trees? Is it possible that you are forbidden any? How can God love you and withhold a single good thing from you? Surely there must be some mistake. "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" Is it so?

It is written, "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." Eve on the contrary listened and parleyed. The mischief was begun. As the serpent had substituted the more distant and abstract "God" of creation for the Creator in moral relationship with man (Jehovah God), she fell into the trap, and discussed the question raised only to excite desire for what he had prohibited. A rebel himself, he maliciously likes to thwart the Highest and have companions in his sin and misery. Yielding to him, instead of turning away at once, Eve drops notice of the relationship Jehovah had deigned to establish, and becomes a prey while she continues her converse. "And the woman said unto the serpent, Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but of the fruit which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die" (vers. 2, 3).

Had she held fast the sense of her responsibility to obey, she would have resented the question, rather than answered it. And her answer lets us see that the evil intent of Satan did not fail of its effect. She adds to the prohibition, and takes from the penalty. Jehovah had not said a word about touching the forbidden fruit, but had in the most assured terms threatened death in the day of eating it. Exaggeration of truth is no more the truth than diminution of it; either enfeebles, and both are Satan's work. By the truth we are sanctified; and His word is truth.

But knowledge is not truth received in the love of it from God. Eve well knew and could tell the tempter the liberty given as to all other fruit, and the penalty for partaking of the one forbidden tree. Yet she ventured to hear what the serpent had to say when there was already the proof that he was by his question impugning divine goodness. Did not He delight in their happiness? From Whom came their most bountiful provision? Was she cherishing dependence on Him, or confidence in Him? How worthless is knowledge which issues not in grateful praise and simple-hearted obedience! Still more, if it leave one free to distrust Him! Alas! unbelief has grown apace since Eve.

Emboldened by his crafty success the enemy advances. "And the serpent said to the woman, Ye will not surely die; but God knoweth that, in the day ye eat thereof, your eyes will be opened and ye will be as God, knowing good and evil" (vers. 4, 5). It is no longer insinuation against His good will, but open assault on His truth. And it is the same lie which beguiles mankind ever since. Death is hidden diligently from men's eyes; and when it cannot be, its import is explained away. People are willingly ignorant, and are earnest only to enjoy the present. Let us eat and drink, and tomorrow go here or there and get gain. Ah! ye know not what will be on the morrow; but certain it is, now that man is fallen, it is appointed to men once to die and after this judgment. But men lend a ready ear to him who deceived Eve, and, though unable to deny, believe it not: else that dark shadow would paralyse their pursuits and poison their pleasures. For the sting of death is sin, of which all are guilty; and into judgment for all their sins must come those who believe not in the Lord Jesus for remission.

Further, the serpent held out as a bribe the good of evil. In eating the forbidden fruit, your eyes will be opened, and ye will be as God, knowing good and evil. God is jealous; I am your friend. He would keep you ignorant and in leading strings. Take my advice: be independent and know for yourselves as He does. As he veiled the doom of transgression, so did he set off the bribe in glowing colours; and as Eve stayed to listen, she was tainted with his pestilent breath. She received the lying foe as her best friend when his slander of the living and true God entered her heart. Open sin and ruin followed without delay.

The remedy is not in man, but from God in Christ for him, yea, for the most guilty if he repent and believe the gospel. Nor did the law work out deliverance, but on the contrary wrath. The Lord Jesus is the only Deliverer, as indeed this very Gen. 3 foreshows. He vindicated God and vanquished Satan in every respect in which the first man failed. His coming, the gift of Him displayed God's immense love to the world, His death for sin was the irrefragable proof of God's truth no less than of His love; and His personal glory, yet becoming a man to be made sin for us, told out God's majesty as well as His love and truth. O what a contrast with those who, being only human, sought to be as God, and, coveting independence, became Satan's slaves! But thanks be to God Who through Him dead and risen gives the victory to us, even to all that call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is His voice that speaks from heaven, as of old He warned on earth. See that ye refuse not Him that speaks. For our God, whatever His love, is also a consuming fire.

8 The Fall of Man

Gen. 3: 6.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 56-57. Gospel No. 3: 8.)

The woman then was beguiled, quite beguiled as we are told in 1 Tim. 2: 14, and so became involved in transgression; but what of man? Of him we hear not a word in the colloquy of the serpent and Eve. The same N.T. authority assures us that he was not deceived: with his eyes open, he transgressed, swayed by his affection for his wife. It was deliberate disobedience on his part, not here thoughtlessness, or deceived as the weaker vessel by a mightier and subtle rebel; for both and their posterity it was ruin and death, to man irreparable.

Let us then weigh the simple words in which God brings the solemn fact before us. "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat" (ver. 6).

Eve by continuing to hear the tempter's words more and more lost the authority of God's word, which at first she knew clearly and felt to be paramount. But as she listened to one whose object was to draw her away from God and ensnare her into transgression, she became by degrees less sensitive as to God's honour and Satan's crafty malice. Was it so that after all God did not love man perfectly but reserved good from him? Perhaps too they might take this fruit, fair and excellent as it looked like other fruits in Paradise, without a blow so dreadful as death. God would not surely be so stern about so small a matter, He that gave them all else! And was it not strange that they (related so nearly to Himself, His offspring, Whose breath was their life-breath, made in His image, after His likeness) should be refused the knowledge of good and evil, to become so far like Himself-was it worthy of Him? Alas! Eve, when tempted was at length drawn away by lust, by the desire to have what God forbad, and was enticed. She used her eyes against the word, and saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes. Emboldened thus she reflected that the tree was desirable to make wise; and so the lust, having conceived, bears sin, as the sin, when fully completed, brings forth death. Compare James 1: 11, 15; 1 John 2: 16.

The woman had weakly fallen; but the stronger vessel, the man! He well knew the prohibition of the LORD God; he had the fatal yielding of Eve to warn him, if this could be needed; yet he dared to follow her into evil, from which he should have sought to shield her and confirm her soul in allegiance to God; and he too rebelled at her solicitation. All was lost in the fallen head of creation. What dishonour to God! what malignant joy to the enemy! what a root of evil to man! "By one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all sinned" (Rom. 5: 12, R.V.).

The ruin was complete. Distrust of God's love, unbelief of His truth, slight of His glory in seizing it, introduced open self-will and transgression. And so it has been since with ever increasing corruption. For Adam was head of the human race and involved his posterity in his own evil. He became a father only after he was a sinner.

It was not so with those who in a higher sphere rebelled against God without a tempter. They each and all departed from God, though they excel in strength. They therefore are left to suffer the due reward of their deeds. But man, in his weakness and exposure to the subtle foe, is the object of God's richest mercy, and gives occasion for the display of His glory in nature and character, in His ways and counsels, as no other creature does or could enjoy; but this positively and perfectly in Christ alone, the Second Man.

Thus it comes out in His headship to the praise of God's grace. For if through the disobedience of the one man the many (or Adam's family) were constituted sinners, so also shall the many (or Christ's family) be constituted righteous. The head according to God determines the condition of the family. We belonged to the one naturally; we belong to the other by grace through faith. No Jew could deny that so in fact the headship of sin and sorrow was with the human race: how could he question that the headship of blessing was just and worthy of God? If Adam sunk his family into that sad estate, why should not Christ raise those who believe into the good portion which He deserves?

But it is not only that the gospel is thus indicated: no otherwise can the sinner be saved consistently with God and His word. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil." If this was true beyond question of Israel, is it not quite as manifestly of men in general? How blessed then that God has given His Son to be a man, a Saviour, a new head for all that believe! This as a whole scripture testifies from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation. Salvation is in Another, not in the guilty; it is in Christ. And salvation is in no other; for neither is there any other, or a different, name under heaven that is given among men, whereby we must be saved.

Christ glorified God in death as a sacrifice for sin, so as to atone for all that believe in Him; as Adam by his transgression dishonoured God and brought death on himself and his race. It was when Christ carried obedience to the death of the cross, that He, risen from the dead, was proclaimed the new head: God was glorified in Him as to our disobedience and its consequences, and not only in His unbroken life of obedience. He from the highest glory took the lowest place of a slave, and endured the most ignominious death, that of the cross. O what a contrast with the man of dust who sought to be as God and disobeyed unto death!

As the work of Christ was morally glorious in the highest degree, so is it efficacious and unfailing for all that believe, even though ruined in Adam and adding their own sins. But where sin abounded, grace far exceeded; that as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

9 Naked

Gen. 3: 7.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 74-76. Gospel No. 3: 9.)

Here was the immediate effect of sin in our first parents:- "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons," or girdles. There was the sense of shame as well of guilt, and they sought to hide it from themselves and from each other.

It is all in vain. Conscience was at work, but not before God or toward Him: else had they cried to Him in self-judgment and sorrowful confession of the evil they had done. "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight," said the penitent king. Yet it might be said that his iniquity was grievous wrong to a devoted servant and his wife, hitherto blameless. Adulterous seduction of the woman! Planned death for the man! What could be worse offences against one's neighbour? But the contrite heart, even in such a case, justly feels that, whatever the crime before man, sin is against God so as to eclipse all else.

Unabashed innocence was gone. Adam and Eve, once guilty, felt the shame of sin; and their first effort was to cover their persons as they could. They knew that they were naked, when they had disobeyed God. But fig leaves cannot cover sin; and they knew this too, when they heard the voice of the LORD God the same day. For sin is against Him, and His voice when heard awakens terror in the guilty.

How good for such (and we all are, or have been, such) to know David's "instruction" in Ps. 32. "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered; blessed is the man unto whom Jehovah imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile." What a blessing when God covers sin by Christ's sacrifice! Without this all else is vain. For, being sinners, we must come as sinners before God, Who refuses any other approach to Him in the first place. How perverse is unbelief! Men strive to come as saints, which they are not, and refuse to come as sinners, which they are and nothing else. Why do they thus evade the truth to their own hurt as well as God's dishonour? Because they have no confidence in His grace., But His grace brings salvation, for it is possible only through Another. Heaven is through Christ alone, and consequently it is by faith. For faith receives the testimony or witness God has borne concerning His Son. And the witness is this that God gives the believer eternal life, and this life is in His Son. So absolutely true is this, that it is added: "he that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." 1 John 5: 10-12.

The work of Christ, as the fruit of God's grace, takes guile from the spirit. His blood purges the conscience. The useless apron or girdle, the filthy garment, is taken away; "the best robe" is put on. Shame gives place to uprightness, and perfect love casts out fear. Such are the riches of God's grace to him who believes in Christ. The pretension to work for pardon, peace, cleansing, or life, denies the guilt and ruin of the sinner. "Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 4, 5). The ungodly, the sinner, deserves judgment, which is perdition, by his works; but the gospel is sent to him as a lost one, that believing he may be justified and saved. What grace! Yet is it God's righteousness, Who gives the believer what Christ's work deserves; and thus only in the cross of Christ, where man's evil came out to the uttermost, grace reigns through righteousness unto eternal life.

See to it then that you rest on Christ only according to God's word. Without Him faith were as vain, as baptism, to say nothing of works. Else when clothed, as the apostle says (2 Cor. 5: 3), you will be found naked. For all must rise, unjust as well as just. And the clothing of the resurrection body will not hide but disclose the real condition. Christ alone meets the nakedness of the sinner; He washes, cleanses, and clothes for the eye of God. Without Christ, even when clothed, you will be found naked: a paradox in natural things; a certain truth spiritually. For in that day there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known.

10 Where art thou?

Gen. 3: 8, 9.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 91-92. Gospel No. 3: 10.)

The word of God is truth, where and when ever written, be the matter in hand what it may. How solemn when He, from Whom no appeal can be, is personally addressing man! So it was here when man had just fallen. "And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where [art] thou?" (vers. 8, 9).

Man was gone from God; and it was now manifest and undeniable. Even before Jehovah Elohim called Adam and Eve into His presence, the fall was working its evil consequences. They were ashamed for the first time, and they sought to hide their shame from themselves and from one another. When they heard the voice of the LORD God, terror was added exceedingly, yet in vain; for how can man escape if summoned there?

Before the fall, how delightful was His gracious presence, Who planted the garden in Eden, and therein put the man He had formed! And out of the ground made Jehovah Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, besides the two trees in the midst of the garden, the silent witnesses of truth beyond all the others. A river too for watering the garden was not wanting, which after that parted and became four beads. Into this garden then did the LORD God put the man to dress and keep it. More than this He brought every animal of the field and every fowl of the heavens to the man, to see what he would call them; and whatever man called each became its name, But more than all this (the sign of his being the possessor and lord of the lower creation) was the deep interest of Jehovah Elohim in building woman out of the man, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, to be his wife.

But sin now made God's presence most alarming. Man's conscience was bad; and the divine presence, instead of awakening love and gratitude, terrified them to the utmost. The fig leaves failed. Adam and his wife hid themselves among the trees of the garden. The summons told the sad truth: "Where art thou?" Gone from God! Till man sinned, there was no question of judgment. Sin made it necessary for God to judge him. From this man shrinks; his guilt cannot be hidden, and God must judge.

What has man done since? What have you done, dear reader? Added sin to sin. So the Psalmist, writing some thousands of years after, confesses that men are all gone out of the way; and this not of heathen merely who knew not God, but of those that knew Him and His law; for whatsoever the law saith, it speaketh to those that are under the law. But now God commands men that they should all everywhere repent, inasmuch as He has appointed a day in the which He will judge the world, or habitable earth, in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained; whereof He has given assurance to all men in that He raised Him from the dead.

Oh, hear His call, while it is called Today. For this is the day of grace. As God came in quest of man who hid away from Him, convicted him of his sins, yet revealed the Seed of the woman to crush the great enemy of God and man; so Christ has already come, been made sin on the cross, was there and then once offered to bear sins in His own body on the tree. To Him does God direct the eye of faith. He is the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. He is the unfailing Saviour, being God as well as man. He suffered once for all for sins, Just for unjust, that He might bring us to God. And "be it known to you therefore, through this Man is preached [not promised merely, but preached] unto you the forgiveness of sins; and by Him all that believe [to none other is it pledged] are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses" (Acts 13: 38, 39).

You are not only gone from God but lost as you are. For when God in Christ came into the world to reconcile men to God, they would not have Him but cast Him out of His own world; they crucified and slew Him, Such is man's position after all God's dealings: he is lost. But the gospel, which says so, makes known God's salvation in Christ without money or price on man's part, as in truth it cost God everything, His message therefore is that, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up land so He has been], that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

Do you think that this is too easy a way to be saved, too uncertain for you to trust? Alas! the thought betrays your unbelief. For no way was so hard, even for God, as to give His own Son that you might live through Him, and that He might die in propitiation for your sins. And the only certainty a soul on earth can have is from receiving God's witness concerning His Son. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in him; he that believeth not God hath made Him a liar, because he hath not believed in the witness that God hath borne concerning His Son. And the witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life (1 John 5).

11 Convicted

Gen. 3: 12, 13.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 105-106. Gospel No. 3: 11.)

The chapter tells how Adam and Eve fell into transgression, with mutual shame, and with undisguised alarm at the presence of God. There was no Sinai smoking as a whole, because Jehovah came down in fire; neither did smoke ascend like that of a furnace; nor did the earth quake; nor the trumpet sound loud exceedingly. His voice without a reproach or a menace struck the guilty pair with terror; and they hid themselves from before Him among the trees of the garden. Compelled to answer His call, the man owned, not his sin, but his fear because he was naked; but he could not escape the searching question, "Who told thee that thou art naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee not to eat?"

Truly the word of God is living and energetic, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to discern thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature unapparent before Him; but all things are naked and laid bare to His eyes with Whom we have to do. As yet there is not a trace of repentance, but hardness of heart and self-justification. Had there been the least self-judgment, any real sense of dishonour done to the LORD God, they had confessed their sin in listening to the tempter, and humbled themselves at once instead of covering their nakedness in their own way. And when they heard His voice, they would have gone to Him though with bitter sorrow, instead of simply biding from Him in conscious guilt. Each would have said, "Behold, I am vile: what shall 1 answer Thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth." "Now mine eye hath seen Thee, I abhor myself in dust and ashes."

Far otherwise was it as yet with our first parents. "And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat" (vers. 11, 12). What glaring disrespect and ingratitude to God! What utter lack of affection and compassionate care for his wife, whom he ought to have led and shielded if he could from evil, instead of following her into it! What unworthy and impudent reflection on Him Who gave the woman as a helpmeet for his good, not as an excuse for disobeying God! To hear Him was his first and known duty, even before she was made. Both the man and the woman knew the prohibition of the LORD God; both were fully aware of the penalty of disobeying; and both consciously rebelled, though separately, she quite deceived, he not so yet persuaded by her, preferring the creature to the Creator Who had set them blessed in responsibility to Himself.

It is hard to conceive aught lower, and withal more insolent, than the answer of the man:- "The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and 1 did eat." On the surface the words might be true; morally they were false, unworthy, and irreverent, yea blasphemous. Adam was so debased by sin as to seek to excuse himself by the woman's fault, and even to throw the blame on the LORD God; the woman only pleaded the serpent's craft. Neither felt or confessed personal wrong any more than disloyalty to God. The excuses only proved their guilt, and could not but be their conviction. Thus Adam was condemned expressly because he hearkened to his wife's voice (ver. 17); and enmity was put between the serpent and the woman, who had sorrow multiplied instead of the pleasure she sought.

So it is with their offspring to this day. Sin brings in moral ruin; guilt leads to guile. Man without exception ever since is wilful and ungodly. There is no good but always worse evil from palliation or blaming others, as all are prone to do. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; and as if is corrupted through sin, out of that treasure the wicked man brings forth wicked things.

Thenceforward the sole hope for fallen man lay in God; and God's sole available and effectual good for man was in sending His only-begotten Son to become not man only but a sacrifice for the sinful. And so the Lord Jesus is the Saviour of all that believe in Him, as the scriptures abundantly testify: the Saviour of the lost, not the poor notion of a reinstatement of the race in what the first man ruined, but the blessing of the believer with all that God counts worthy of the Second man, His own Son, and of His redemption. What a blessed refutation of "The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me"! God so loved, not His children, nor His people, but "the world," the Christ-rejecting Satan-serving world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

As this is the greatest blessing God could give, not pardon only, nor even peace, but eternal life; so His Son, in Whom that life is, becomes the test of every sinner here below, small or great, civilised or barbarian, wise or unintelligent. All are alike sinners: there is no difference in that awful fact, though some are bolder than the rest. It is appointed to men once to die, and, after this, judgment. Impossible for any one to escape either by any resources of his own or by other men. But Christ, sent of God to that end, went down into death and bore the judgment from God, as propitiation for sins; so that, when He shall appear a second time, it will be to those that wait for Him apart from sin for salvation. So perfectly did He on the cross bear the sins of believers that none of them, as He said (John 5), comes into judgment.

Therefore does God call on you now, if you have not already obeyed His call, to receive life eternal and salvation in His Son. To receive Him is to receive, not only what you need and can find no. where else, but all the blessing God loves to bestow. Seek not to extenuate your case like Adam and Eve. Hide not away from Him Who, knowing all your sins, pities you no less than them, and now sends you the gospel in all its fulness, as could only be when Christ came, and died atoningly, and rose triumphant. It is therefore now not only the grace but the righteousness of God. Through Christ's work He is just and the justifier of the believer. For God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He that believes on Him is not judged: he that believes not has been judged already, because he has not believed on the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness more than the light; for their works were evil. For every one that doeth evil hates the light and comes not to the light, lest his works should be convicted; but he that does the truth comes to the light that his works may be made manifest, that they have been wrought in God (John 3).

12 The woman's Seed

The Serpent and the Woman's Seed.

Gen. 3: 14, 15.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 127-128. Gospel No. 3: 12.)

Of the man and the woman the LORD God inquired; not of the serpent, a known and old rebel. On him judgment was summarily pronounced, but governmental, in accordance with the O.T., rather than everlasting, which was reserved for Christ and the N.T. "Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field. On thy belly shalt thou go and eat dust all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it (he) shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (vers. 14, 15).

What can be more striking or instructive? It is in judging the enemy that the revelation of grace is made, not in what was said subsequently to the woman (ver. 16) or to Adam (vers. 17-19). This was not only just but for the divine glory in Christ. What could morally warrant promise to fallen man or woman? Their transgression just perpetrated called for judgment, and the LORD God did not fail to declare it. He is not slack to reprove sin or to vindicate His majesty. Both are evident here in His own words at the beginning; still more, and perfectly, in the completion of the ages, when Christ has been manifested for putting away of sin by His sacrifice.   Never before had sin been adequately judged, never before had God been absolutely glorified about sin. And the salvation which results to the believer is according to the perfection of Christ's atoning work and of God's glorification thereby (13: 31, John 17: 4, 5 26).

All the pretensions of sinful man are thus swept away and annihilated. No room is left for the dream of man's amelioration. Not so is God vindicated or sin judged or the sinner saved. There is no restoration of the first man, but the revelation of the Second; no promise to the fallen head, but the assurance of the Last Adam, a life-giving Spirit, the woman's Seed, to crush Satan. In Him and His cross meet, as nowhere else, truth and love, righteousness and grace, man to the last degree obedient and submissive, holy yet suffering, and suffering not only for righteousness and truth as well as love beyond all that ever were, but for sins — He alone, when man and Satan had done their worst, suffering for sin from God, His God. "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? . . . . But Thou art holy that inhabitest the praises of Israel" (Ps. 22: 1, 3).

God answered Him, not merely by receiving His spirit committed into His Father's hands but by resurrection from among the dead and seating Him at His own right hand in heaven. We answer it too in our measure by believing in His name and confessing that it was for sin, yea for our sins, He the sin-bearer on the tree was thus abandoned of God, that sin might be judged, and we who believe be completely cleansed, and the glad tidings of repentance and remission of sins be preached in His name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem, the city of all the world most guilty of His crucifixion.

Undoubtedly the blessing of divine grace was for Adam or any of his race, sinful though they were, if they believed; but the utmost care was taken that none could say truthfully that it was a promise to Adam. On the ground of the first man there was sin and ruin and death. Innocence lost is irreparable. There is no possible return to what was lost, any more than ground for hope that fallen man would do better than man innocent.

It is in this judgment on the Serpent that the LORD God pointed out the only hope and the full assurance of victory over the foe. It is wholly and exclusively in the woman's Seed. Christ is Satan's conqueror, Christ is the Saviour of man. It was not yet the due moment to make Him known as the Son of God, as God, yea as Jehovah. All this and more we find in the course of O.T. revelation; and all is most clearly revealed in the N.T., each aspect of His glory just as it was needed and fitting.

Here we may readily see His deep grace, His wisdom, His holiness; yet the simple truth, that the vindicator of God, the avenger of man, and the destroyer of Satan, would be the woman's Seed, not the man's, with a strict propriety that marks out the Lord Jesus from every other born of woman. The responsible man was altogether left out. Weak woman, who had at the beginning listened to the evil one and drawn her husband after her into transgression, was to be taken up in the pure and rich mercy of God. For in man and by man it was His counsel to bring a new and real and abiding glory to His name, and thus only to save the lost and defeat Satan.

There is indeed a true and essential work in the conscience, heart, and ways of every soul that believes unto salvation. Without holiness no man shall see the Lord. But, morally speaking, the beginning of all goodness for a sinner is a divinely given sense and confession of his badness; and it is clear that this alone could give not peace, but despair. He is called therefore in the gospel to look out of himself wholly unto Jesus, the woman's Seed, and to rest in the work He wrought for us, in His suffering for sins on the cross. To this scripture pointed throughout, as the N.T. expresses it with the utmost fulness and precision. Even here we have it in the crushing of His heel: a figure, taken from the serpent's habit, to set forth the acuteness of the wound inflicted on the woman's Seed, yet leave room for the contrast of his own crushed head under the risen Conqueror. The type here was but a shadow, as indeed elsewhere, and could not in this case fully announce that the deliverance of the guilty demanded the Saviour's death. But even this lack was supplied in the intimation of the skins wherewith the LORD God immediately after clothed Adam and Eve. It was a covering, not of mere nature like the fig leaves, to which they first had recourse. The divine clothing of the guilty is founded on death, the application of which to Christ is easy and most intelligible.

Such then is the object of faith presented in Scripture. One believes God when he believes in Christ, the woman's Seed. So deep is the glory of His person, that only the Father knows Him fully. Man's mind, presuming to fathom that depth, breaks away into one heterodoxy or another, on the human side especially, but also on the divine. The only safety is to believe God's testimony concerning Him Who is the Son of God and the woman's Seed. This is the mystery of godliness, not only of truth but of godliness: "He Who was manifested in flesh." It is the abandonment of self, of the first man, the confession of our evil, to find the salvation of God in the woman's Seed, and in the Son, not incarnate only, but in the body of His flesh through death. Thus only has God reconciled us who believe, once in settled alienation and enemies in mind by wicked works, now children and sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Fourth Series.

Gospel Words - Fourth Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Jewish leper

2 The Gentile centurion and his servant

3 Peter's mother-in-law

4 The Paralytic healed

5 The Tempest, and unbelief rebuked

6 The Demoniac delivered

7 The Woman healed and sent away in peace

8 The Daughter of Jairus raised

9 The Healing of the blind in the house

10 The early Haul of fishes

11 The Water made wine

12 . Nobleman's son healed

1 The Jewish leper

Matt. 8, Mark 1, Luke 5.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 141-142. Gospel No. 4: 1.)

In the first of the Gospels this is the earliest miracle given in detail: a suited testimony of Messiah to His people, a testimony that He was Jehovah in their midst acting in power and grace. Indeed even here the account is brief. The fact is in some respects all the more significant. The real state spiritually of the chosen people was no better in God's sight. The law had singled out leprosy as the standing sign of uncleanness and exclusion from His presence. Hence the more manifest was grace toward the Gentile in the action of the prophet of old, when Israel was sinking down more and more into apostacy.

But now a greater than Elisha was here. Immanuel was on earth, in the land; and this unhappy Jew prostrates himself before Him, and makes his appeal: "Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean." The chosen people were morally what he was physically; but they knew it no more than they bowed to His glory. But it will dawn on the remnant by-and-by, when they shall say, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of Jehovah." "In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness." Far different was it in the day of Messiah's visitation.

Even the leper, who did pay Him homage then, feebly apprehended the grace that was in Him "Lord, if Thou wilt." Why question? Why doubt? Wherefore was He come, and come Himself, the Holy One, to dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips? A man, yet the King, Jehovah of Hosts! If the eyes of the blind were to be opened, and the ears of the deaf to be unstopped, and the lame to leap as a hart (and prophecy had bound up this and more with the advent of Messiah) was the leper to be an exception? Was he without the pale of mercy? The leper, abject as he was, acknowledged His power without hesitation.

But grace rises over all difficulty and applies the power to the need, however desperate; and here Luke lets us know, suitably to his own character, that the man was "full of leprosy." But if faith was small, grace comes forth in its own immensity. "And Jesus put forth His hand, and touched him."

It was not always thus that the Lord wrought in cleansing lepers. When the ten met Him, as we hear in Luke 17, they stood afar off, and the Lord cleansed all, but touched none of them. Here we have the beautiful sign of His mercy toward Israel another day, when He will bless them with His gracious presence and heal all their diseases, as He will forgive all their iniquities.

Now, present in humiliation, His glory could not be hid. Had He been merely man under the law, there was no license to touch the leper. Jehovah Messiah was there; and however He might stoop in love, He could not deny Himself. He and He alone could touch the leper, not only undefiled, but banishing the leprosy. How manifestly it was God in Christ winning the overwhelmed heart, and blending power with grace in a way beyond all human thought! Mark tells us that He was "moved with compassion"; and indeed the act was exactly suited to express it.

But He added words, recorded in all three Gospels, of the utmost weight — "I will; be thou clean." None on earth but He was free so to speak. His Person gave Him the right. He, Who could truly say "I am," was entitled to say "I will." In every other born of woman it would have been not only presumption but sin. He could say these words Who does say in John 8, "Before Abraham was, I am." "Be thou clean" was immediately followed with power that could not be disputed. "Immediately" the man's leprosy was cleansed. The Lord Jesus spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.

It was but a sample; and, as the Lord enjoins, "for a testimony unto them." Therefore Jesus said unto the leper, "See thou tell no man, but go thy way, show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded." A greater work was needed for man before God. A deeper want than any created by disease, however fatal, lay upon Israel; but this was "for a testimony unto them." To show himself to the priest ought to have raised the question there, if his lips kept knowledge, or if his heart sought it, Who has healed him? It would have drawn out the answer from faith; Jehovah is here; Jehovah has healed him. For no one knew better than the priest that man is powerless here; and the law has no provision for healing leprosy, only directions for cleansing ritually him who is already healed.

Alas! like people, like priest; all were unbelieving then, save the little remnant which heard the Good Shepherd's voice and followed Him. How is it with my reader? The Gentile professor, though christened, if this be all, is no less a leper in God's sight than the Jew; and the outward bearing of the Lord's name cannot bring to God without living faith. Nay, to possess externally was and is a great danger for the flesh, which goes asleep under privileges now as Israel did of old.

Oh, listen to His voice, that speaks still from heaven, and assuredly with no less power than to the Jewish leper. Why is the tale recorded so fully if it be not a multiplied witness, that you should believe on Him? Your case is no less desperate than the leper's. But the Saviour and His word are the same for ever if your faith may be as small, your appeal as hesitating, as his was of whom we read. The grace of the Lord Jesus meets faith however little and weak, and acts according to God's glory. May you then hear and live!

2 The Gentile centurion and his servant

Matt. 8: 5-13; Luke 7: 2-10.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 156-157. Gospel No. 4: 2.)

In the first Gospel the leper is set immediately before the Centurion, to mark the grace at hand for the Gentile when the defiled people should reject the Messiah. So the Gospel shows from its beginning to its end. Hence it is that in its account of the Centurion (not in the corresponding narrative of Luke), the Lord declares that many should come from east and west and share the feast with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whilst the sons of the kingdom, their seed, should be cast forth into, the outer darkness with its unspeakable anguish.

In the third Gospel, which has a moral object rather than dispensational, the Holy Spirit led to placing the forgiven paralytic after the healed leper (Luke 5: 13, 14, and 18-25): the two striking pictures of sin as needing divine grace to cleanse, and the known remission of sins for power to walk and serve aright. Here too, the case of the Centurion is given in its actual place, which equally fell in with the scope of the Gospel. The Lord had laid down for His disciples in a large way and wholly above human thought or feeling that blessedness which He know in its perfection which grace calls to and forms. Hence it is no question here of scribes and Pharisees, or of those of old time, He urges the principle of God's kingdom in words which leave the Jew out of sight and instruct the man of God where and when ever he may be.

The faith of the Gentile Centurion follows, with a detail of similar propriety. His bondman was dear, yea precious, to him, but sick and about to die. Yet the Centurion did not present himself to the Lord. He came to Him only, as those are said to do themselves what they do by others. He was no heathen; he honoured the Jew, low as they were, because God chose them and entrusted them with His oracles, the scriptures. Therefore did he (a rare thing in a Roman officer) love their nation, as he even built them their synagogue. And so he sent to the Lord elders of that people, who besought Him earnestly on the behalf of one so worthy in their eyes (as rare a thing in a Jewish elder).

But when the Lord was not far from the house, the Centurion sent friends to Him, saying, Lord, trouble not Thyself, for I am not worthy (adequate or qualified) that Thou shouldst come under my roof. The very grace of the Lord, which offered to come and heal the servant, awoke a deeper sense of the Lord and of himself in his heart. This was a morally right feeling in the Centurion toward One Whom he could not but regard as possessed of divine power and title; as the elders were right in their sense of the Gentile's worth and religious feeling. He was in truth a believer. This made him humble as well as reverent. He recognised in Jesus what made himself nothing, yet what encouraged him to lay at His feet his appeal for a dying slave; and this first through Jewish elders, then through friends; for what was he himself to be accounted of? Whereas He, the Lord, has but to say by a word, and his servant shall be healed. He too, a man set under authority, had soldiers under him, and says, to one Go, and he goes, to another Come, and he comes, and to his servant Do this, and he does it.

Can we wonder that the gracious Lord wondered? It was faith simple and strong, the fruit of divine grace. The word of God, for this was read and heard in the synagogue, acquainted the Centurion with God's nature and ways, as none of the Jews learnt who listened with no such sense of need but claiming a monopoly of possession. Not even in Israel, the Lord said, had He found so great faith. Those who were sent returned and found the sick man in sound health.

How is it with you who read these words? If not born of God, you are in the evil and darkness of the fall, and all the more guilty because you have heard not the law only, but the gospel from your tenderest years. Yet you have lived as if you were not a lost sinner, as if God were not a Saviour, as if Christ who died for sinners was not ordained Jude of quick and dead, most of all to be dreaded boy those who hear but neglect so great salvation. You are in a worse and more dangerous case than the sick slave of the Centurion. Only the breath of your nostrils severs you from death, the forerunner of the second death, the lake of fire for ever. Oh! weigh the tale written to save — written by the Holy Spirit to save — a slave of sin. Christ speaks in it to you who read or bear. For Him to speak by a word is ample to save the soul that believes. And He has said many words to give you confidence notwithstanding your many sins. He gives healing, life, pardon, peace, and power. He gives all things worthy of God, all needed by man. But beware of doubting beware of deferring. The "convenient time never comes. Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation. If you put off, beware lest you perish.

3 Peter's mother-in-law

Matt. 8, Mark 1, Luke 4.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 166-167. Gospel No. 4-3.)

We have only to compare the first Gospel with the two which follow, in order to learn not only how reliable in them all Scripture is, but the faithful persevering goodness of the Lord to Israel which was Matthew's task. It is Mark, who by his notes of time, "straightway" and others, gives us the surest clue to the historical order of events in His blessed service. With this we can compare the others, and may by grace gather why that order is left for other objects in the mind of the Holy Spirit. Thus we can see that with Luke, who describes the Lord morally, there was no motive for departure from it; and so here Mark and he coalesce. But the dispensational design, which He used Matthew to make known, required the change to a much later occasion, and therefore a wholly different connection. Hence all can notice that here are no links of time in his account. Both the others bind their narrative of the miracle with the precious and notable facts of that day in the synagogue of Capernaum. Matthew, because of transplanting the case, says nothing of the kind.

"And when Jesus was come into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother laid and sick of a fever. And he touched her hand, and the fever left her; and she arose and ministered unto them" (Matt. 8: 14, 15).

If the Gentile centurion appealed in faith to that gracious power, which had only to speak the word and healing followed, the Lord in no way turned from Israel. His heart yearned over the favoured but guilty people. And Peter's wife's mother laid down in fever gives us to see it clearly. Here He does enter the house, and touch her hand. Luke tells us that she was seized with a great fever (for the sickness differs much); and adds that they besought Him for her; as Mark, that they told Him of her anon or immediately. This was all seasonable on their part; but He was there ready to cure. So Mark lets us know that He took her by the hand and lifted her up. Nor was it only that the fever left her immediately, but that she was serving them (Mark and Luke) as well as Him (R.V. of Matthew).

Such is the Lord to any sinner's need now. His ear is open to every cry direct or indirect to Himself. He was then healing the sick. He is now delivering men for time and eternity. Why should not you, my reader, appeal for your guilty soul? Is not the soul more than food, as the body is more than clothing? He only is the Saviour of both if you believe the gospel: of the soul now, of the body by-and-by. "Fear Him Who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." "Whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven." These words are faithful and true. Beware of unbelief; for now is the hour "when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live." Life is in Him, and He gives it to all that believe. "Verily, verily, 1 say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation (judgment), but is passed from death into life" (John 5).

But you may plead that Peter's wife's mother had the apostle and more to speak for her to the Lord. This is true; but there is no appeal like the needy one's himself to the Saviour. Search and see if He ever refused one. He declares in John 6 that "him that cometh to Me, I will in no wise cast out." Oh, I beseech you, be not faithless but believing. To find Him you need not to ascend the heights where He is, nor to descend where He descended. He is near to every one that calls on Him. Every secret of every heart is bare before His eyes. Doubt not then, but believe.

On the evening of the same day He cured Peter's mother-in-law, and so immediately that she was able to serve Him and His followers, He did yet more for others. "And when even was come, they brought unto, Him many possessed with demons, and He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all that were sick; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses" (vers. 16, 17). (See Isa. 53: 4).

The very aim of that prophetic oracle was to announce that, before He suffered atoningly (which follows in ver. 5- 12), He entered into all that troubled His people even in their bodies, and as we see in the Gospels from Satan's more immediate power. And this He did not in power only but in the tenderest bearing of the burden on His spirit, while He took it away; as it is said elsewhere by the same prophet, "In all their affliction He was afflicted." Here then is more and most ample encouragement for you to bring your need to His feet. If you so come, He will never say you, Nay. Why is all this revealed, but that you may cast your soul on Him now? If you are a great sinner, be assured that He is a greater Saviour.

4 The Paralytic healed

Matt. 9, Mark 2, Luke 5.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 182-183. Gospel No. 4: 4.)

The new and precious feature which betrays itself at the point in this narrative of Matthew is the growing opposition and hatred of the religious leaders toward the Lord. It is not, as in Matt. 8, a certain scribe ignorant of himself and self-confident who proposes to follow Him whithersoever He may go. In Matt. 9 the scribes begin with saying within themselves, This man blasphemeth; and the Pharisees end with their own blasphemy — that it was in virtue of the prince of the demons He was casting out the demons. Through the darkening unbelief the Lord gives His blessed and blessing testimony.

The first incident recorded is the cure of the paralytic as He was speaking the word to a crowd at home in His own city — Capernaum. This malady aptly sets forth the effect of sin in destroying power; as leprosy in its unclean taint before God or man. The occasion was the house filled even beyond the door, as Mark tells us; which accounts for the difficulty the four bearers had of getting near. Eastern buildings, however, furnished easy access to the roof; and this they uncovered, and let down the sick man on his pallet through the tiles, as Luke tells us. The Lord saw their faith and says to the paralytic "son" (or "child" rather), "Thy sins be forgiven."

It was indeed a startling word; and so it was meant to be. The Lord laid bare the root of the evil, and dealt with it at once fundamentally. He alone could thus speak. Not even an apostle approaches its force. It was proper to Him Who was alike Jehovah and Son of Man. The men learned in the law were shocked. They unbelievingly reasoned in their hearts to His dishonour; but He, the ordained Judge of quick and dead, read their hearts as He does, those of all, and answered their unuttered and evil reasoning by the question:- "Which is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Rise up and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power (or, authority) on earth to forgive sins (He saith to the paralytic), Arise, and take up thy bed, and go to thy house." And so the man did immediately before them all. And the crowds at least were filled with fear and said, We have seen strange things today.

Let me plead with you who have sins and cannot avoid foreboding of judgment. Why should not you take hold of such words of divine grace? They are for every soul of man that believes. They were not limited to that age or race or land. They are written in the imperishable word of God, for guilty men wherever they be who bear, that they may believe and be saved. Therefore did He come not yet to judge, but to say still, Thy sins are forgiven. Miracles may cease; but the love never fails which forgives sins to every needy sinner that believes. And if Jews reject, it but gives the opportunity to open the door freely to the Gentile, far and wide. Is God of Jews only? Is He not of Gentiles also? Yea, writes the inspired Hebrew of Hebrews, of Gentiles also. Fear not then, but believe.

"The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins." This the scribes learned in the law did not believe; for they knew not Him, nor the God Who sent Him. They would not have disputed that God forgive sins. They rebelled against the Lord's exercise of any such authority. He claimed it as Son of man, exercised it on behalf of the paralytic, and gave Him immediate powers to rise take up his couch, and walk, before their eyes, as His disproof of their evil doubts, His witness outwardly of that precious boon. He had overcome Satan for this life and was dividing his spoils.

But more: Christ has accomplished redemption since. He took His seat on the right hand of the Majesty on high when He had made purification of sins. Risen from the dead, He has told us that all power (or authority) has been given to Him in heaven and on earth. He has vanquished finally; He has borne God's judgment of sin on the cross; He has borne our sins in His own body on the tree. Is there not all the more urgent ground for you to believe, and all the deeper encouragement for you to confide? He has sent out His servants expressly into all the world, and told them to preach the gospel or glad tidings to the whole creation. But He solemnly warns that he that disbelieves shall be condemned (or damned).

Oh, deceive not your soul, nor slight the Saviour Who is the Lord of glory. If He humbled Himself to become not only man but a sacrifice to God for sin, is there not the best of all grounds for you to bow, and bless and worship Him, even as the Father Who gave Him? And how many, once unbelievers, have become the most devoted of His servants like Saul of Tarsus, afterwards the great apostle? Be not like the proud scribes or bitter Pharisees, who trusted themselves, rejected Him, and perished everlastingly.

Power to walk aright and glorify God is inseparable from knowing your sins forgiven. Till you believe the gospel, you are as powerless as the paralytic was on his couch. When you have redemption in Him through His blood, the forgiveness of your offences, you can enjoy God's love in Christ, His counsels and His ways; and the Holy Spirit will strengthen you to walk worthily of Him, and of the calling wherewith you were called. Ability to walk as a Christian follows faith in Christ and His grace in forgiveness. They reverse God's way and Christ's word whose effort is so to walk as to be forgiven. It is all vain, because it is self and unbelief: a flame of their own kindling. And this shall they have of God's hand: they shall lie down in sorrow.

See then that ye look to Him, Who, if He is exalted now, is still the Saviour. For God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. If you believe not, you will assuredly be judged by Him and lost for ever. So His word declares plainly.

5 The Tempest, and unbelief rebuked

Matt. 8, Mark 4, Luke 8.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 197-198. Gospel No. 4: 5.)

Here is another manifestation of divine power and goodness in the Lord Jesus here below. Matthew wished to take it out of its historic place, after the parables of Matt. 13 were uttered, for that express purpose; or rather the Spirit Who employed him, if one may so say reverently.

"And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves; but he was asleep. And the disciples came to him and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish" (Matt. 8: 23-25).

Thus did the gracious Lord test the faith of His followers, that they might confide in His supremacy over all need, His concern for them in all dangers and difficulties. Was not He with them Whom God had sent to save? Was not the Reconciler not only of all believers but of all the universe, in the ship? He, Who was come to lay the basis of the new creation and everlasting glory? If He could not perish Who was here to rescue from everlasting destruction all that look to Him in faith, how weak and unworthy to wrong His love as if He would leave them to perish? Yet appearances were allowed to prove their hearts. The sudden violent squall, the sea raging, the little ship or boat on which they had gone aboard, the waves beating in so that the ship was already filled, the Lord asleep (not on a pillow but the boat-cushion)!

It was assuredly perilous increasingly, with but one ground of confidence: Jesus was there. But this to faith should have been everything; and it would have been, had they looked away from the wind, sea, and all else, to Him. When they woke Him, it was but with the appeal, "Lord, save us: we perish." Even on the resurrection day they were yet more sad and despairing, if not blinded by alarm, because He had bowed to death and suffered on the cross; and He had then to reproach them as senseless and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets spoke. He, despised and rejected of men, had only to speak the word, and the elements least controllable by man obeyed His voice, Who stooped so low in love, yet was their Creator. "And He arose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still; and the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." But He said also, "Why are ye so fearful, O ye of little faith"? Sinner, or saint, what a word of truth to both! No doubt there is a difference immense, between him that believes and the unbeliever, for the one is in the hand of the Father and the Son; the other lies like the whole world in the wicked one. Yet the unbelief which in the latter resists the Holy Spirit fatally, so far as it works, dishonours the Lord and injures the believer; and scripture abounds with proofs of both, that each may respectively be warned. It was certainly fear that prompted the importunate repetition which Luke records (Luke 8: 24), "Master, Master, we perish." The disciples soon learnt the vanity of their alarm when he arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water; though they to the end of the earthly pilgrimage need to look earnestly to Him, as His love values it, and it is due to His glory. And if a rebuke to unbelief, how strengthening to the heart when we learn afresh His faithful and effectual intervention, whatever the manner of it!

But is this nothing to you, who are perishing in sins and unbelief? The Creator of all things did not become a man save to glorify God and to bless man, as blessing could only be thus; and by nothing short of death, the death of the cross. His incarnation was not only to manifest Him in life, solely doing God's will, as it never had been on earth before, but to suffer for sins in the body God prepared for Him, that sins might be taken away by the all-sufficient sacrifice, and that believers might be sanctified, yea, perfected for ever. For this Heb. 10 declares to be the fruit of the Saviour's work.

And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us. Whatever may be the good things in store for Israel when they repent and look in faith unto their pierced Messiah, the good tidings are now sent by God to any sinner, Jew or Gentile. Oh, take the place of truth, and own to God your sins and ruin, that you may not come into judgment. For His judgment (and the Lord Jesus is the Judge) is holy and righteous, and therefore must be utterly destructive of the guilty. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house" (Acts 16: 31). He is the object of faith set before any, and all by God, that whosoever believeth may not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3).

Listen not to the wiles of the devil, who whispers that you are taking away from God's honour by looking to His Son, the Lord Jesus. Not so; for "he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also," and "whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father" (1 John 2). And this is the reason why "the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son;" that all men might honour Him as the Father (John 5). Those who believe honour Him now, and have eternal life in Him, and by grace walk accordingly; but all who now dishonour the Son, by refusing His word and disbelieving Him Who sent Him, must be raised to a resurrection of judgment which will compel them to honour Him in the solemn endless day of their everlasting ruin. So He declares Who is the way, and the truth, and the life. Sin no more against God and your own souls; but believe on Him Who by the grace of God tasted death for every one. "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus a man, who gave Himself a ransom for all to be testified in due times"; and so He is to you now, that you may no longer neglect so great salvation, but believe on Him to the saving of your soul.

6 The Demoniac delivered

Matt. 8, Mark 5: 1-20, Luke 8.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 212-213. Gospel No. 4: 6.)

There are two very different forms in which the enemy of God and man works: one which may be called extraordinary; the other far more common. It is thus for evil with the spirit that operates in the sons of disobedience, as the Holy Spirit does for good in children of obedience. The history in which the demoniac plays so conspicuous a part illustrates both. The second Gospel enters into affecting details of the man's hopeless misery, and of the Saviour's gracious power; as the first is more general in the display of a present Jehovah-Messiah, taking notice of a second victim as is usual throughout (Matt. 8: 28, Matt. 9: 27, Matt. 20: 30), the least adequate testimony to Israel. Mark and Luke graphically bring before us the more notable of the demoniacs. When the Saviour was here, it would seem that Satan put forth his malignant power beyond all example. But a stronger than he was here to overcome him, take from him his whole armour wherein he trusted, and divide his spoils.

Immediately, on the Lord's quitting the ship from Capernaum to the other side of the lake, there met Him a man with an unclean spirit who had his dwelling in the tombs. None could bind him, not even with chains. Often as he had been bound with fetters and chains, the chains were rent asunder by him and the fetters shattered; and none had strength to subdue him. Continually by night and day in the tombs and in the mountains was he crying and cutting himself with stones. What a depth of unspeakably wretched and appalling degradation! Matthew adds the fierceness and danger to others; Luke, that for a long time he had worn no clothes.

The sight of the Lord Jesus even from afar arrested him, so that he ran and paid Him homage, and with a loud voice cried, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure Thee by God, torment me not. For the Lord said, Come forth, unclean spirit, out of the man. Nor was this all: He asked him, What is thy name? and got the answer, My name is Legion, for we are many. There is a fact outside human ken, on the evil side of the spiritual world, beyond measure horrible: a man with such a host of evil spirits in him as could justify the well-known name of a Roman battalion, and a man with a personal consciousness, yet also merging his personality in theirs! — Legion, for we are many!

But mighty as a spirit is, and especially when in such multitudinous and tyrannical force of evil, demons have no sceptical hardihood. They believe and shudder (James 2: 19). Therefore did they beseech that He would not command them to depart into the abyss; for their sure doom was before their eyes; and they knew that when He reigns, they will be cast there, which they dreaded even now. Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time? is the cry in the first Gospel. So, when they begged to enter a great herd of swine feeding on the mountain side, the Lord gave them leave; and the swine, about two thousand, no sooner received the unclean spirits, than they rushed down the steep and were choked in the sea. It was the witness, to all that believe scripture, of the Lord's delivering power on the one hand and of Satan's destructive energy on the other. It is idle here, as everywhere, to confound possession by demons with either lunacy or disease. Either or both might be also, or neither be, and yet that possession of evil spirits. The reality was thus transparent. The effect on the swine made the objective fact undeniably plain, and the suggestion of a physical or mental derangement inexcusably false.

Nor does the Lord, to Whom all belongs below as on high, need the apology of man to justify His permission, any more than for the sickness and death, the plague and the famine, the tempest and the earthquake, which He employs providentially in this fallen world. To what purposes of grace does He not turn every one of these inflictions for such as hear His word So doubtless it was then whether Jews or Gentiles owned the swine.

And here we face the more ordinary working of Satan's power. For when the swine-herds reported all, the whole city came to meet the Saviour and besought Him to depart out of their borders! They saw the possessed that had the legion sitting, clothed, and sensible; and they were afraid, not of Satan but of the Saviour! The witnesses related what explained all as to the demoniac and the swine; but all the people round about began to beseech Him to depart!

Such is man under Satan's power ever at work, if not so terrific in appearance far more dangerous than the maddening possession in its intensest form; and none is recorded beyond Legion's. Yet his presence never so acted on their fears, as the proof of the Saviour's beneficent power.

O my readers, are you under the same fatal spell? Do you dread to approach the Lord of all, the Saviour for eternity of all who believe? is it Jesus you dread in your soul? Is it from His grace that you shrink back, lest you should be saved now? Consider your most perilous condition. You are slaves of Satan, children of wrath, enemies of God. What must follow as you are? Death, and judgment. So it is laid up for men as they are. Without faith on your part, baptism and the Lord's Supper, blessed as they are to faith, only aggravate your guilt. There is no Saviour but the Lord Jesus, Who, once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to those that wait for Him unto salvation (in contrast with judgment, as He died a sacrifice for their sins).

Not such was the state of the delivered demoniac, who besought Him that he might be with Him. But becoming as the desire might be, the Lord had work for him to do, before that first love is gratified as it surely will be in due season: "Go to thy house unto thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee and showed thee mercy." And he went his way and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus did for him. And he did right, though all were wondering.

Alas! wonder is not faith. Let it not be your lot to fall short of the demoniac. Delivered from the oppressive power of Satan, he was to bear witness of the gracious power of the Lord, even Jesus, shown to himself. But was it not by the hearing to produce faith in souls exposed to Satan in other ways? May you be delivered from the snare that would bid the Lord Jesus to depart. The day is fast approaching when He as King shall sit on the throne of His glory, and say to the faithless nations gathered before Him, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire that is prepared for the devil and his angels.

7 The Woman healed and sent away in peace

Matt. 9, Mark 5, Luke 8.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 230-231. Gospel No. 4: 7.)

Here we have a living picture of a soul smitten incurably for man, every effort fruitless, all medicine and physicians in vain, her resources spent, herself nothing bettered but rather grown worse.

But faith cometh by hearing; and, having heard of Jesus, she came in the crowd behind, and touched His garment, or, as Matthew and Luke say, its hem. Faith is always sure of the Saviour; it may have as feeble knowledge of itself as of Him, but it does not doubt in Whom the virtue lies. Much remains to be learnt and corrected, but it goes straight to its object. For she said, If I but touch His clothes, I shall be made whole. And faith does not fail to receive its answer through grace. Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she knew in her body that she was healed of the scourge.

But the Lord knew the whole case better still, and meant for her no half blessing. She did not question His power; she seems to have connected it in her mind with His person and surroundings physically. She must learn that His soul acted with it, that His mind and heart were engaged in the blessing. It was not a charm, as heathenism made it in thought; nor was it even dependent on His bodily presence, as Jews were apt to conclude. He Who had deigned to become the Servant of divine love, in a world where sin reigned and had wrought fell ruin, would show her the kindness of God.

Touching the hem of His garment stealthily, she would, if the case had been left there, have ever felt that it was underhand and surreptitious. She did not as yet know God, though availing herself of Messiah's healing energy. The Lord could not in His grace consent to so partial a mercy. He is entitled, and He loves, to bless fully all whom He blesses at all; and "him that cometh to Me," said He elsewhere, "I will in no wise cast out." So fully did He come as a servant, that He was here only to do the Father's will, not His own. Whosoever came, He received. And the full blessing He gave from first to last; He would lose nothing, but raise up at the last day.

So even at this day He not only forgives transgression, and covers sin, and imputes no iniquity, but takes guile from the spirit. This the healed woman needed; this the Lord gave. So immediately perceiving in Himself the power from Himself gone forth, He turned round in the crowd and said, Who touched my clothes? The disciples, as so commonly, misunderstood; and Peter, with the rest, talked of the crowds hemming Him with their pressure. But the Lord alone knew in the highest way, that a certain one did touch Him; and He looked about to see who had done this. It was not that He could not have named her, but to give her opportunity to confess the truth. How little she knew the grace that filled Him! For frightened and trembling, conscious of what had been done upon her, she came, and fell down before Him, and told Him all the truth. How little she knew that such was the condition of her better blessing! And He said to her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole: go away in peace, and be well of thy scourge. How transporting to her as yet confused and anxious spirit! What solid abiding comfort for her to be thus in His presence, and to have all out before Him, and to know Him more than confirming all she had got, with a message of peace unfailing for all that is to come!

Such is the Lord to every need that is brought to Him; such is He most of all to that deepest need, which demanded not power only but propitiation in His suffering to the uttermost, the death of the cross. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and for ever. As He does not change, among human shiftings and men's various and strange doctrines, so neither does His power, nor His love. But to be blessed fully we must meet Him face to face, and know from His own lips grace given to us. It was an immense mercy to have the mischief stayed, the living death arrested; but how much more to hear His voice banishing all fear and sending her forth in peace, as we pass through a world of strife, and spite of a fallen nature which ever tends to pleasures that war in our members!

There may be crowds around the Lord. He is not occupied with them, but passing through. The touch of faith, however uninformed or feeble, arrests Him at once. But a blessing, though immediate and rich, is not enough to satisfy Him. The Blesser will be known, that faith may have a blessing, good measure, pressed down, shaken up, and running over: so does God give, not man. If it is for His glory that all be clear and confessed, it is also the condition of peace by faith. When silence is kept, the bones wax old through roaring all the day long, and the Lord's hand is heavy night as well as day, so that moisture is changed into summer's drought. But peace is known, when one's sin is acknowledged to Him; this cannot be while one's iniquity is hid. "I said, I will confess my transgressions to the LORD; and Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin." So it was, so it is, so it must be, as long as grace brings sinners to God. Nature is all wrong in fearing that the Lord begrudges blessing, and the fullest, and for ever. It is no question of our merits who have but sins and death and wrath as we are naturally. It is His grace that saves; and His grace would have us to know that He makes salvation assured with all His heart.

8 The Daughter of Jairus raised

Matt. 9, Mark 5, Luke 8.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 245-246. Gospel No. 4: 8.)

A great request was now laid at the feet of Jesus. The petitioner was Jairus ruler of the synagogue. His daughter, a maiden of twelve years, was dying. "But come" said her father, "lay Thy hand upon her: and she shall live." Nor did our meek Master turn a deaf ear, but arose and followed him.

The dying maiden was a striking type of the daughter of Zion, for whose sake Messiah was here. And the Jewish ruler expressed his faith in engaging His gracious presence and power to restore his daughter at the last gasp.

On the way the woman with a bloody flux for twelve years touched His garment and was healed. And the Lord not only yielded to her deed, but drew her out from her hiding, and sealed her faith and confession with His open approval to her better blessing. It is not otherwise with the Lord now, as we have proved who have gone to Him in out depth of need in this interval, since He came as Messiah to be sought by Israel, and before He reaches the daughter of His people, not sick only but dead. Grace has met us to the uttermost, not merely immediate healing for such as have touched Him on His way, but clearance away of all fear and doubt that we might taste how gracious He is and rest in peace through His word.

Yet this created a delay which must have tried most severely the importunate Jairus. And while the Lord was yet speaking to the healed woman, one comes from the ruler's house saying, Thy daughter is dead: trouble not the teacher. But an answer was given to nourish his drooping faith, Fear not; only believe, and she shall be made well.

So it will be in the day that hastens. Unbelief will do its deadly work among the mass of the Jews. But the desperate condition of the chosen people will draw down the action of grace; and faith will, according to God's word, look to Him that loves to heal, and to Him that smote to bind up; and He will in due time raise them up and cause them to live before Him. Whether it be the long and desperately tried woman or the maid of Israel, faith alone enjoys the blessing. And justly so; for faith renounces all dependence on self and honours God and His Son, giving credit for love as great as the power, and Christ's word as unfailing as either. Faith therefore purifies the heart, us well as relieves and assures it.

Here the Lord, when come to the house, suffered none to enter save chosen witnesses, Peter, James, and John, with the father and mother of the maiden, As for all the rest who were weeping and bewailing, He put them out when They derided His saying, "Weep not: she is not dead but sleepeth." They believed their senses, not His word; and the scornful shall not see the blessing. But He took hold of her hand and called, saying, Maiden, arise. Then her spirit returned (for it was gone), and she rose up immediately; and He directed food to be given her. So in due time will the same Lord raise up the people from the valley of dry bones, as the prophets assure us, no matter how many say, Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost: we are clean cut off. As Jehovah hath spoken, He will perform; and in that day shall it be known through all the earth.

Quickening was no strain on the Lord of glory. It belonged to the Son as to the Father; and now that the Son was here a man to do His will, the Father gave Him to have life in Himself, showing Him all things that Himself doeth. Of these none was more characteristic than awakening the dead and quickening them. His dignified calm is remarkable here as on all such occasions. He took the dead child by the hand, and called; and she arose immediately. He graciously thought of her bodily need, which at such a moment even parents might not unnaturally overlook. Truly "He hath done all things well," and as none other; though many another did like works or even greater in His name, which exalts Him as much or more than if He had done them all Himself.

And has this tale of the Holy Spirit no bearing on you who read these lines, — dead to God while you live? Nay, it was written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name (John 20: 31). How many have heard His voice, since He was here, in the written word! For the hour now is (John 5: 25), as the Lord so solemnly avers, that souls hearing Him may not come into judgment but pass out of death into life.

Leave not such an issue uncertain. You might well despair if it turned on you, as men fancy in the pride and impenitence of their hearts. But the life you need is wholly and solely in the Son of God; and God is calling you to believe that Jesus is He, and that He gives eternal life to every believer on Him through His word.

It is "the dead" who are now called to hear: and they that hear, the Saviour assures us, shall live. Clearly they are not dead physically, but in trespasses and sins; and they are called to hear Him and live. For fife is not in the first man whether profane or religious; it is in the Second; and faith by grace receives it. For such a boon, morality is as vain as ordinances. Those that live do live to God, and honour His institutions; but believers guided by God's word and Spirit testify to Christ as their life, and reject every other dependence as a destructive error and a cheat. He is the way, the truth, and the life, as He Himself declared; and so it is in John 5 with His "verily, verily." Woe is his who despises Him or sets up a rival in His stead. "Whosoever denieth the Son hath not the Father; he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also." And this is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life! It is far better than to be raised to natural life as Jairus' daughter was, though He Who raised her is the same Who quickens those who believe now, and Israel from the dust of death by-and by. Fear not; only believe.

9 The Healing of  the blind in the house

Matt. 9: 27-31.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 260-261. Gospel No. 4: 9.)

Healing of the blind was a marked work of the divine Messiah. So Isaiah predicted in his earlier announcement (Isa. 35: 5): "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened"; nor was it otherwise in his yet more personal anticipation later (Isa. 42: 7, Isa. 61: 1). So in the synagogue of Nazareth the Messiah applied the last scripture to His own service. "Today is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." Without doubt we are justified in giving the largest scope to the language employed; but the figurative in no way supersedes the literal.

Nor was there any act more characteristic of Messiah than giving the blind to see; as the testimony to His Sonship was rendered by, His raising dead men (Rom. 1: 4), most of all in raising Himself from the grave, after the Jews crucified and slew Him by hand of lawless men. Many a wonder had been wrought in days of old by Moses and Joshua, by Elijah and Elisha, and others; but never do we read of eyes given to a single blind man before His advent; so that the Jews justly regarded it as a special sign of the Anointed of Jehovah.

The present miracle is also peculiar to the first Gospel. There are two blind men specified: a fact which made it very suitable to him who was inspired to testify of Jehovah- Messiah to the circumcision. For it was a well established maxim of the law for them to look for at least two witnesses. Hence the mention of the two demoniacs in Matthew's account of the last fact in Matt. 8; whereas for Mark and Luke it sufficed to dwell on the more striking of the two (Mark 5, Luke 8). A similar principle applies also to the two blind whom Matthew shows healed at Jericho (Matt. 20: 29-34: compare Mark 10 and Luke 18).

As the Lord then was quitting the scene of raising up the Jewish ruler's daughter, two blind men followed him, crying aloud and saying, Have mercy on us Son of David. Even Mark and Luke record the like appeal in their account of a similar miracle at the close. In all cases it strikingly attests that He was owned as the Messiah, pre-eminently that Son of David Who alone could avail those so afflicted. Thus they could with assurance appeal to Him on the ground of plain and positive warrant of scripture:- "Have mercy on us, Son of David."

Even the Jewish leper of Matt. 8 made no such appeal; still less the centurion, as recorded next. Nor do we find it in the general account of the healed, any more than the particular case of Peter's mother-in-law in the same chapter. The call of those imperilled in the boat during the tempest on the, lake was, "Lord, save us: we perish." When the demoniacs cried out, it was "What have we to do with thee, Son of God?" It was not the paralytic that cried to the Lord (Matt. 9), but Jesus (seeing their faith) said to him, Child, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven. Even Jairus did not so address Him on Whom he counted for his dying daughter; nor of course did the woman who only approached behind and touched the fringe of His garment.

On the other hand in Matt. 15: 22-28 we have the converse, so full of instruction in the ways of God. The Canaanitish woman, real as her faith was, failed to receive the answer she sought or indeed any at all because at first she called amiss. The grace of the Son of David to the distressed of His beloved people is a clear and blessed encouragement for a Jew; but what had a Canaanite to expect from Him? When He brings in the power of His kingdom by- and-by, it will not be as it was in the day of His humiliation, and as it had been ever since the entrance of Abram. "The Canaanite was then in the land" (Gen. 12: 6); "the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land" (Gen. 13: 7). Even Judah in the days of Joshua failed to purge his portion of that accursed race: those of the hill country were driven out, but not those of the valley. And so it was for others yet less. But the sad issue to their ruin was that "the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites," etc. (Judges 3: 5)

When the kingdom by-and-by is in Messiah's hand. "there shall be no more a Canaanite in the house of Jehovah of hosts" (Zech. 14: 21). Was it then hopeless for the woman of Canaan? By no means; but He answered her not a word, when she cried substantially as the blind men, On that ground judgment for the Canaanite is predicted rather than mercy; and the disciples had nothing better to say than "Send her away, for she crieth out after us." This the gracious Lord did answer with a word that cheered her tried spirit. "I was not sent (said He) but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Therefore there was an answer to the blind who so cried out, and none for her as yet; for she was not only a Gentile but of a race specially cursed (Gen. 9: 25). She drops accordingly a claim of relationship valid for the most wretched of Israel, but wholly void for her, and paid homage, saying, Lord, help me. Then He answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs. The truth fully burst on her, and she submitted to it. Her faith, already real, threw off its hindrance and became great. She abandons claim, for she had none; she confesses sovereign grace, and receives the blessing at once. She said, Yea, Lord; for even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from their master's table. Then the Lord answered her, O woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt.

This helps to give the emphasis of the miracle in our chapter. And when the Lord came into the house, the blind came to Him, and He said, Believe ye that I am able to do this? and they say in reply, Yea, Lord. So it was in that day, and so it will be for the people by-and-by. Jehovah will bring the blind with a deeper blindness by a way that they know not. In paths that they know not will He lead them, when He will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight In the day that is coming the blind will look to Jehovah-Jesus that they may see; as we see a little earnest of it in the two who followed into the house, and confessed their faith. How graciously Messiah touched their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it to you! And their eyes were opened.

Has this no echo of comfort and blessing for you, my reader? Granted that you have eyes to see naturally; but your lack is of the deepest. You see not Jesus for your soul, nor believe in Him. If you too are Gentiles, the gospel is expressly sent to you to open your eyes, and turn you from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God. This is much more and better even than the boon the Messiah gave the blind Israelites. It is the fruit of yet richer grace and of His own unfathomable sufferings. It is what the love of God sends to the poorest of sinners through the redemption that is in Christ. How blessed to see the Son and to believe in Him, and have eternal redemption! May it be your portion now through faith! For this cause is it of faith that it may be according to grace. It is not your righteousness, for then it were of works; it is God's righteousness founded on the redemption of Christ, unto all, and upon all that believe.

10 The early Haul of fishes

Luke 5: 1-11.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 278-279. Gospel No. 4: 10.)

The Holy Spirit transposes the call of Peter and his companions to a later place than the historical order adhered to by Matthew and Mark, which fell in with His design in their Gospels. But it suited His work by Luke to give previously the Lord's preaching in the synagogues of Galilee, His striking procedure in Nazareth on the sabbath day, His deliverance of the demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum, His healing of Peter's mother-in-law with many more, and His preaching in Galilee. He Who arranged the task for each evangelist knew all the truth, which judges every man, and can be judged by none save at his peril.

In beautiful connection with the great work of proclaiming the gospel, we see the Lord standing by the lake of Gennesaret, as the crowd pressed on Him to hear the word of God. Into one of two little vessels there, from which the fishermen had gone and were washing their nets, He entered, and asked Simon (for it was his) to put out a little from the land, and thence He, sitting down, taught the crowds. After that He said to Simon, Put (thou) out into the deep, and let (ye) down your nets for a haul.

What can one conceive to act more powerfully on the mind of Simon and the rest! Sailors, especially fishermen, are apt to trust their own judgment in their craft and to think cheaply of landmen's advice. The circumstances too made any hope naturally forlorn. Master, said Simon (who had already, been led to Jesus and received from Him a name of honour), through a whole night we laboured and took nothing; but at Thy word I will let down the nets. And having done this, they enclosed a great multitude of fishes. And their nets were breaking. And they beckoned to their partners in the other ship to come and help them; and they came and filled both the ships, so that they were sinking.

But great as the wonder was and pointing to the Son of man with all things put under His feet down to the fish of the sea, it was small compared to the spiritual power which let the light of God in Christ into Simon's soul. For when he saw it, he fell down at the knees of Jesus, saying, Depart from me; for 1 am a sinful man, O Lord. He knew himself as he never did before. God in His grace brought thus near filled him with self-judgment, and he pours out the confession of it at the Lord's feet. He believed already, and before the miracle promptly gave up his own thoughts and his discouraging experience at Christ's word. Then the immediate and amazing answer to his confidence not only awed his soul but searched his conscience thoroughly. It seems like a moral dilemma to say at Jesu's knees, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord. It is really what an exercised soul feels on which the light falls with overwhelming power. Nothing farther from one than to depart from the Lord, yet His divine goodness and glory so realised that one feels utterly unworthy to be near Him while clinging to Him. When the work of redemption was done, much more could be enjoyed by the purified conscience and the heart resting on His love known in peace; but for this all had yet to wait. Even now the grace Simon saw in Christ made manifest his sinfulness but filled his heart.

The vast take of fish, the bursting nets, the sinking ships, each of which would have commanded Simon's interest at any previous time, were all unheeded. Jesus was all to his soul. Self-importance dwindled, no less than anxiety, and every earthly desire. He fell before One, a Man on earth, Who presented God with a power which delivered from Satan and the effects of sin for soul and body. As He Himself had read at Nazareth the opening of Isa. 61 and said, Today is this scripture fulfilled in your ears, so His course demonstrated in an outreaching grace which irritated even then all who would limit divine privilege to themselves. Even then it was clear that preaching the kingdom of God was more momentous in His eyes than the mightiest deeds of power: "therefore am I sent." He received not glory from men; He would by the word bring them into living relationship with God; He would not only lead such as Simon into deeper blessing, but call them from every object and tie on earth to Himself and the activities of His grace.

Depart from Simon! from a sinful man! Why, the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost. As His grace made God better known, so it discovered Simon to himself, who would soon learn and own that He the Lord Jesus knew him perfectly, yea all things. Yes, the Lord Jesus knew all when He entered Simon's ship, and heard him own His word; and He so revealed Himself to his soul that Simon could not but follow such a Master and Lord.

And now He Who spoke the word of power for the miracle says to Simon, Fear not, from henceforth thou shalt be catching men. There is a season to everything, a time to fear, and a time not to fear. Nor is this peculiar to Simon. It is for every believer in Christ. Till we know Him by faith we do well to fear. Not to fear before that is impenitence with indifference or presumption. But when grace makes Him known to us, "Fear not" is as truly for us as for him. And so it was for James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were Simon's partners. The word addressed to Simon they took for themselves believingly; and they were right. It was written for us, that we might believe and have the blessing with like assurance. Perfect love casts out fear.

All, no doubt, are not called to "be catching men," as Simon was; and eminently was made good in due time this word of the Lord also. But while the Lord still calls and sends to preach the gospel, neither man nor woman that believes ought to hide the word of His grace, but publish His name far and wide, as they have opportunity, and in all earnestness, though decently and in order. Time was, whilst all the apostles lived too, when the scattered faithful went through the world evangelizing the word; and the Lord's hand was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord (Acts 8, Acts 11). Let us fear neither for ourselves, if we believe on Him, nor to speak a word in season, His word, to the weary, if they too by grace may hear and live.

11 The Water made wine

John 2: 1-11.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 294-295. Gospel No. 4: 11.)

This was the beginning of the miracles, or "signs" as they are called in the fourth Gospel, wrought in Cana of Galilee. In it the "Lord Jesus manifested his glory," a glory truly divine. The occasion was a marriage feast, to which He was invited, and His disciples, His mother also being there. How instructive the grace which thus lighted up with love and holiness from above an institution of God that began in the paradise of man, but apt to sink with the fall of man into levity and licence! The law failed to retrieve it; the Lord alone vindicated it according to the mind of God that had been expressed before the law (Gen. 2; Matt. 19),

The Lord's bearing is a hard thing to those who idolise Mary. It is written for everlasting profit that, when the wine failed, His mother said to Him, They have no wine; and that He replied, Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come (vers. 3, 4). Assuredly if any infer disrespect from these words, they are in error; but so are those who do not learn that the Son of God solemnly objects to dictation where divine glory was in question. He was sent to do the will of God His Father, not to please His mother, as here in her amiable solicitude for a family with whom she was evidently intimate, and at a time which engaged her feelings in their strait. Christ had already as a youth of twelve years testified to Joseph and Mary, after their anxiety, His consciousness of Sonship in the highest sense; now when emerging into public ministry He remonstrates with Mary, who as evidently now alone remained. Not even His mother must interfere with the glorifying of His Father, by a wish of hers however kindly meant.

And Mary understood it, saying to the servants, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. She was still the meek bond-servant of the Lord, if others blasphemously make her the Queen of heaven and claim falsely the honour due to the Eternal Son. He, not she, is the One pre-eminently to be heard; as the Father's voice proclaimed on the holy mount, This is My beloved Son: hear ye Him. No more unworthy thought of fallen nature than to doubt His grace in Whom all the fulness dwells, or to imagine that He the one Mediator needs her intercession to stimulate or strengthen His love. He is Himself full of grace and truth; and He is able also to save to the uttermost (completely) those that draw near to God through Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them. On the contrary she is unable, either to save or so to intercede for others, and needed to pray herself, as she was a sinner like others to be saved by faith. So we find in the last record scripture gives of her in Acts 1: 14: "These all [the apostles] with one accord continued stedfastly in prayer with [several] women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." What a contrast with ecclesiastical development in no long time! How soon men turned from him that called them in Christ's grace to a different gospel, which is not another, but perversion!

According to scripture, to hear His word and believe Him that sent Him, is to have eternal life and not to come into judgment, having passed from death into life. And that life is a life of obedience and love, as 1 John 5 carefully shows. "He that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." He that is not subject to the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. Practical obedience flows from submission to His person, and proves the reality of the heart-subjection of faith.

Christ's hour was not yet come for going down below all depths to glorify God; still less to be set on high with all things put under Him. He was here to give such witness as might please His Father in all dependence. And a worthy witness followed. For as six stone water-pots stood there according to the purification of the Jews, each holding two or three measures (probably the Jewish Bath), He said, Fill the pots with water. And this was done to the brim; whereupon He bade them, Draw out now and bear to the feast-master. Thus the servants and the feast-master became the irrefutable vouchers of the work Christ wrought; as did the bridegroom, who for the moment reaped the credit of reversing man's way, and, instead of supplying what is worse when men have freely drunk the good wine, of keeping it till the last.

But no! It was Christ Who thus made grace to shine; not the first man, but the Second, and this, manifesting His glory, yet never leaving the servant character He had taken, always refusing to allow the honey of humanity in the offering no less than the leaven. If He proved the omniscient to Nathanael, He is here the omnipotent. It was the true transubstantiation of God's word. The water was made wine, and the good wine, as all could see and taste, and bow to the manifestation of His glory. To reject Him is to men's own shame and ruin, who obstinately will not have God or His Son on any terms, even when divine glory veils its splendour with flesh and in lowly grace adapts itself to our every need with power incontestable. Such is the Lord Jesus. He is speaking still to every soul in the gospel. Oh! refuse not Him that speaketh from heaven.

"The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that is, the word that we preach," says the apostle; "because, if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." To he saved from perdition through faith is not a miracle, sensible outwardly; but it is a greater wonder than the water made wine. It is the wonder of grace, yet of divine righteousness through redemption. And it is a wonder God is showing day by day in all who believe, to the honour of His Son. Oh! refuse not Him that speaketh, and is near you on the earth, the Son of man now in glory Who came to seek and to save that which was lost, Jesus the same yesterday, and today, and for ever. Blessed are all those that put their trust in Him.

12. Nobleman's son healed

John 4: 46-54.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 310-311. Gospel No. 4: 12.)

The story of our Lord, in His dealings with the Samaritan woman and the town's people that followed, is all the more admirable, because there was no miracle. It was His power in bringing the conscience face to face with its sins before God and in revealing the Father in the Son, the Saviour of the world by His Holy Spirit.

Here we are in presence of our Lord not only giving a blessed sign of gracious power when all else was hopeless, but correcting unbelief in a Jewish courtier, who came to Him in Cana and appealed for his child sick in Capernaum. "When he heard that Jesus was come out of Judaea into Galilee, he went unto him and besought him that he would come down and heal his son; for he was at the point of death." It was not surprising that those who only looked on Jesus as the Messiah should connect His power with His actual presence. But one of the great designs of our Gospel is to make known in Him God, the Son eternal, superior to all times and circumstances. When the nobleman then entreated him to go down and heal his son, the Lord laid bare the error that demanded a visible wonder; his condition was as yet little different from the Galileans of whom we read in ver. 45, of whom it is written that they received Him, having seen all the things that He did in Jerusalem at the feast. "Unless ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe." This only increased the father's importunity, who says, "Sir, (or Lord,) come down ere my child die." Then comes the word of power, "Go thy way: thy son liveth." The man believed the word that Jesus said to him and went his way. If the Lord did not go with him and lay His hand on the sick child, it was but for better and in a better way. His word was given and believed.

Thus was the blessing wrought, a two-fold one; to the father's soul, and to the son's body. The father believed the word of the Lord Jesus, the son had his fever cured, and the Lord was honoured in both ways. And we readily see how different the case is from the Gentile centurion and his bondman about to die of the palsy. For there the Lord went with the Jewish elders, and was only stopped when not far from the house by friends whom the centurion sent to say, "Lord, trouble not thyself, for I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof. Wherefore neither did I count myself worthy to come to thee. But say with a word, and my servant shall be healed." Yes, his was faith of the simplest and strongest character, formed by the sense given him of the Lord's glory. The word of Jesus was ample: He had but to speak, and it was done. Yet some famous men in early days have confounded these two distinct cases.

But to a similar point of simple faith was the nobleman now brought as the centurion took himself. "Go: thy son liveth" was received in his heart from the lips of the Lord Jesus. And as he was going down, his bondmen met him, saying, Thy child liveth. He enquired therefore from them the hour when he got better; and their answer was, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. It was clear as light, the immediate unmistakeable action of divine power, not beginning but complete. At that very hour, as the father knew, Jesus said to him, Thy son liveth; and himself believed, and his whole house. Here at least it was no form, but a reality without danger of accrediting what might be untrue, and a fact which helps us to understand other statements of like kind.

But how is it with you, my reader? For this is written, like the rest of the Gospel, "that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye way have life in His name." It was blessed when sickness drove men to Jesus for healing; it is more blessed still when sinners feel their sins before God and look to the Saviour for that deepest need. He is the Life as well as the Resurrection; and He gives life eternal now to every one that believes, as He will raise their bodies at the last day. Undoubtedly the Saviour is now in heaven; but this assuredly detracts nothing from His power or His love. The same Jesus is now exalted on high and shall so borne in like manner, as He was seen to go up into heaven: The more urgent is it that you should neither slight God's call to believe, nor forget the consequence of neglecting so great salvation, for either is to brave the judgment.

If you are looking for a sign or wonder in order to believe, profit by the Lord's gracious correction of one far more to be excused than you who have all the word of God, and the N.T. in particular which leaves no room for such an error. Is it not plain to you that all depends on the Lord Jesus, and that His grace is as great as His glory? When He does not answer a word, it is to draw out self-judgment in faith. When He does not comply with a request, it is to lead by His word into faith of the unseen.

Sometimes souls are discouraged by a harsh rebuke of their feebleness at first. Never does the Lord so deal with any. He corrects in order the more to bless and prove and strengthen. Here we perceive faith growing exceedingly, when the mixture of sight, so natural to a Jew and indeed to flesh and blood, was removed by His word. And next we are told that the whole house was brought under the blessing of living faith: a result by no means unexampled in the ways of the God of all grace, but rare enough at any time, yet, where or when ever it is, full of interest and encouragement to those who would learn of Him, and seek the honour that comes from the only God. With Him you must have to do. If you hear Christ's word and believe Him that sent Him, you receive life eternal and do not come into judgment, but have passed from death into life. If you refuse now, you cannot escape the voice of the Lord, when He summons men to stand before the great white throne, and be judged for works of which you may boast now — but oh! the shame and horror when the truth is out. May the goodness of God lead you without delay to repentance at the feet of Jesus.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Fifth Series.

Gospel Words — Fifth Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Sower

2 The Darnel of the field

3 The Mustard seed.

4 The Leaven

5 The Treasure hidden in the field

6 One Pearl of great price

7 The Dragnet

8 The merciless Bondman

9 The Labourers hired

10 The two Children

11 The guilty Husbandmen

12 The Marriage feast

1 The Sower

Matt. 13.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 323-324. Gospel No. 5: 1.)

In the preceding chapter the Lord had pronounced solemnly on the Jews. They had spoken against the Son of man, and there was forgiveness for it; but they were hurrying into that blasphemy against the Spirit which admits of no forgiveness. No sign should be given but that of Jonah the prophet — the death and resurrection of the Son of man. That evil generation must have its last state worse than the first. And thereon the Lord formally disowns His relationship natural, stretching His hand toward His disciples and saying, "Behold, my mother and my brethren!" — only such as do the will of His Father that is in heaven.

Accordingly in the first parable of Matt. 13 the Lord addresses the multitudes which from the beach heard Him in the boat, and presents Himself as a sower. "Behold, the sower went forth to sow and as he sowed, some [seed] fell by the wayside, and the birds came and devoured them. And others fell upon the rocky places, where they had not much earth; and straightway they sprang up, because they had no deepness of earth; and when the sun was risen, they were scorched, and because they had no root, they withered away. And others fell upon the thorns; and the thorns grew up and choked them. And others fell upon the good ground, and yielded fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He that hath ears, let him hear" (vers. 3-9),

The Lord could not, did not, forego the rights of God, as later He made known in the parable of the Householder, and of Himself, the Son and Heir sent to receive the fruits (Matt. 21: 33-41). But, well knowing the sad issue, He was come for the deeper purposes of grace, whatever be man's evil and rebellion. He is "the sower" who "went forth to sow." He begins a new work on God's part, though man cannot escape the responsibility of receiving and rejecting the seed sown, "the word of the kingdom."

Alas! man is indisposed, sinful man, to receive the word that grace sends through Emmanuel, God's Son yet Man in the humiliation of love. And we have light unequalled given by His words; for "never man spake like this Man," His enemies themselves being witnesses. He explains the various cases of human unbelief with a simplicity and depth all His own.

The wayside hearers are those who receive nothing from God. The wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in the heart. Unless the conscience is reached and sin is judged before God, there is no quickening. The man that only hears abides in unremoved death; he is not born anew; he cannot see or enter the kingdom. The seed, instead of taking root, is devoured by the birds, that is, the enemy.

In the second case appearances were better. The seed fell in stony places and forthwith sprang up, where there was little earth. It was but a work in man's nature. And as hasty feeling received the word and it had no root, so when trouble or persecution arose because of the word, they as quickly shirked suffering. When the sun was risen, they were scorched, and withered away. A divine work is laid in the conscience, and life abides. Here all was superficial and evanescent.

The third case looks at first rather more promising, the seed that fell among thorns. But the thorns grew up to their ruin. Here the bad result was slower; for though the word was heard, the anxiety of this age and the deceitfulness of riches choked the word, so that fruit could not be.

It is remarkable that in these instances the word is not "understood." For there is no true spiritual understanding of the word without the work of God, without life; or, as the third Gospel puts it, without believing and being saved. How is it with you, dear reader? Have you so learnt and judged yourself that you listen to Him assured there is only death within? Are you no less sure that life for you or any is solely in Christ? that it is in no institution, still less in the church? Do you know by faith that life is in Christ for every soul that believes in Him? So God declares in His word. This fallen man resists and resents. His confidence is in his own powers, or in something or some one like himself, not God's grace; for, having an evil conscience, he distrusts God.

Christ came on an errand of infinite love from God. In Him man if he had not been blind would have seen what he should have been toward God, and what God is toward man. Christ was the wholly dependent and the unfailingly obedient man; but God was also in Him reconciling the world to Himself, the perfect expression of divine love to the guilty and miserable. But man would have neither: his unrighteousness hated true righteousness; and his enmity to God hated the love that came to save and bless him. As He said Himself, "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloke for their sin. He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other hath done, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father. But [it is] that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause" (John 15: 22-25).

As this is absolutely true, so is man evidently lost. But God declares the truth that He may repent and believe the gospel. It is by the word of truth that we are begotten of God. And this shows itself from the first in our receiving the word, which reveals how evil we are before God, and how good He is to us in giving His own Son to die for the ungodly. Thus it is God commends His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. Such is God's righteousness for the unjust, God's salvation for the lost, as He makes known in the gospel to every one that believes.

So here the beginning of our goodness is in the real owning of our badness, and yet believing God's grace to us in Christ. Here, when the seed is received, it is "into the good ground." The souls hear and understand and bear fruit, one a hundredfold, one sixty, one thirty. For among believers there are differences. When the eye is single, all is bright and blessed; but flesh and the world hinder, so far as they are allowed; and all therefore do not bear fully.

2 The Darnel of the field

Matt. 13: 24-30.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 339-340. Gospel No. 5-2.)

For the due understanding of this parable, observe that it is the first in which the kingdom of the heavens is likened to this or that. The opening parable of the seven contained in the chapter is of such a comparison; it presents the Lord as Sower before that kingdom was set up. The other six suppose its establishment; not in manifested power and glory according to O. and N.T. prophecy, but in mystery, as here made known by our Lord, rejected by men and exalted by God on high, unseen but none the less real and glorious, affording scope for faith no less than unbelief as being a day of profession. It is Christ's ascension which gives occasion to the kingdom of the heavens here revealed to faith and assuming a character of grace in keeping with His rejection.

We have the Lord's own interpretation that "He that soweth the good seed is the, Son of man" (ver. 36). This it was of moment to explain; because His heavenly position might, have seemed incompatible with such activity of grace. There ought to be no doubt that He was the sower before He took His seat on high as in the first parable. Whatever the means or instruments employed, He it is that is still sowing good seed in His field. And as He says, "The field is the world." As He is the rejected but glorified Son of man, it is no longer the land of Israel, but the world. The needy, the guilty, the ruined world is precisely the object of His gracious care. Among the lost sheep of the house of Israel He had laboured in the flesh, and in vain (Isa. 49) for the mass, who refused and hounded Him to the cross. Now from the right hand of power He sowed the good seed in His field, the world. Nothing less was suited to His glorious plans, any more than His love. Undoubtedly He will another day bring Jacob again to Him in sovereign mercy; but meanwhile He is given for a light to the Gentiles, and salvation to the end of the earth. "The field is the world."

O my readers, hear His voice, that you receiving His word, now sent to any and to all, may be sons of the kingdom. Even before the kingdom of the heavens was set up, our Lord said (ver. 9), "He that hath ears, let him hear." So He says still at the end of His interpretation of this first likeness of the kingdom (ver. 43). It is not the law laid down to an ordered people on penalty of death. It is the word, wherever received in faith, to produce fruit. The great principle the Lord introduced when here is individual responsibility. This He reiterates from on high. The kingdom when set up in no way enfeebles it, as we thus learn. And though the church, as we know from elsewhere, brought in communion of saints, common subjection, and common action, yet never does God sanction the giving up of individual responsibility. The presence of the Spirit gives power to the word for conscience and heart to conciliate what self-will under Satan ever seeks to dislocate.

Christ is life, and righteousness, and salvation. If you believe on Him, these are yours in Him; and they are found not otherwise nor elsewhere. Man cannot quicken, nor a minister, nor yet the church. Christ is all: so scripture testifies; and if you receive Him on God's word, this is the work of the Holy Spirit, Who glorifies Him. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are admirable and abiding institutions; but they are perverted to poison when put in the place of Christ and of faith in Him. Hence it is the word for individual reception. If you reject Christ and receive not His saying, you cannot escape One that judges you: the word the Lord Jesus spoke, that shall judge at the last day. Oh! neglect not so great salvation, nor His authority.

And the danger is the greater, because Christ's enemy, while men slept, came and sowed darnel also among the wheat. Indistinguishable at first, they became manifestly different ere long. For the darnel are the sons of wicked ones. They are found all over the field, the world of Christian profession. Such is Christendom, to speak of nothing worse, and there were soon greater abominations from early days too. But these are bad enough and prepare for every evil from beneath. The darnel are the heterodox and the lawless among the baptised.

Yet this does not make the field to be the church but the world, save in their eyes who understand neither, and are so deceived as to confound them. Hence we may see that, when the Lord forbade His servants from uprooting the darnel, He in no way denies in the church the discipline which the Holy Spirit demands (1 Cor. 5). It is the extermination of the wicked professors He prohibits under His figure of gathering up the darnel from the field. And experience falls in with this. Disobedient servants of His have rooted out the good seed, oh! how often, under the plea of getting rid of the darnel. Grace is to reign now. "Let both grow together until the harvest," saith the Lord Who will then send forth the executors of judgment.

The season for harvest will be a marked change: a different work with different workmen. The reapers are quite another class, His angels, whose business is to gather up first the darnel, and bind them in bundles to burn them; but the wheat are gathered into Christ's barn above. It is a vain dream that the world is to improve under the action of the gospel or the church. On the contrary the normal state of the wheat-field was spoiled as a fact from early days; and the servants are forbidden to employ their ineffectual efforts to efface the evil, which must go on till the consummation of the age. Then shall the Son of man intervene with His angels. Revival or reformation can in no way abolish the mischief the devil wrought while men slept, as they quickly did. God secures His own work by grace all through: the good will surely be gathered into the heavenly granary in due time. But the field was soon spoiled through man's lack of care and Satan's craft; and this cannot be adequately dealt with till the Lord come in judgment of the quick.

Look and listen then to Him now. Receive Him at God's word to life eternal. He is the way, the truth, and the life; and there is no other; that you who live may henceforth live not to yourselves but to Him Who for you died and was raised. Thus may you await His coming not only in peace but with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

3 The Mustard seed.

Matt. 13: 31, 32.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 355-356. Gospel No. 5: 3.)

It is well to understand that "the kingdom of the heavens" does not mean heaven itself but its reign over the earth while the King rejected by man is seated on high. The six later parables present successive comparisons of that kingdom in its chief characteristics: three are its public aspect, and so, like the first, were addressed without to the great multitudes; the three last, like the explanation of the first similitude, or Parable of the Darnel, were spoken in the house only to the disciples, as dealing with what needed spiritual intelligence.

Another distinction is obvious. The Parable of the Mustard Seed, like that of the Leaven, shows what the kingdom is like, in marked difference from its predecessor, as it becomes more apparent still in its successor.

"The kingdom of the heavens is like a grain of mustard which a man took and sowed in his field; which is less than all the seeds, but, when it hath grown, is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree so that the birds of heaven come and roost in its branches" (vers. 31, 32).

Here the Lord gives us to see the least and lowliest beginning of Christian profession growing to be a power in the earth. In Luke 17: 6, He employs the same figure of a grain of mustard; as indeed it was a proverbial expression for what is diminutive. But the grain soon shot up so as to leave the pot-herbs behind, and afford shelter to the birds it notoriously attracts.

So it was to be, so it has long been, with that which bears His name here below. The Lord marks beforehand the surprising contrast between the extreme littleness of its first estate when sown, and the height to which it was ere long to advance. He is not here pronouncing on its inner or moral nature. He shows from the first what all the world can see when it came to pass. It is one of "the mysteries (or secrets) of the kingdom of the heavens," but secrets given for the disciples to know. And the Lord here sets out the fact, in due time palpable to all mankind, that what began the most minute was to develop into a conspicuous and protective power on the earth, according to the well known figure of a nation or political system in Isa. 11: 33, 34; Ezek. 31; Daniel 4, etc.

Now this was no mystery for Israel any more than for the Gentile powers. It was expressly allotted to the ancient people of God, as we read in the Psalms and the Prophets. So in the days of depression when captivity befell "the rebellious house," God made use of a tree to illustrate His ways with them, and their ways before Him which drew out His sternest chastening. But He adopted the same figure to assure the believing heart that in His mercy all will be reversed in the day to come, and that He will plant the tender twig on a mountain high and eminent, even the height of Israel. "And it shall bring forth boughs and bear fruit, and be a goodly cedar; and under it shall dwell all birds of every wing; in the shadow of the branches thereof shall they dwell. And all the trees of the field shall know that I Jehovah have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I Jehovah have spoken and will do it" (Ezek. 17). It is all of His mercy; but how could the result in this case be otherwise? For Jehovah of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem and before His ancients gloriously.

Wholly different was to be the proper portion of the Christian on earth. "Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth . . . Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. Blessed are ye when they shall reproach you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven; for so persecuted they the prophets that were before you" (Matt. 5: 3-12). Even those whom God set first in the church were expressly charged by our Lord against power and glory of an earthly sort. "Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Not so shall it be among; you. But whosoever would become great among you shall be your servant; and whosoever would be first among you, let him be your slave: even as the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matt. 20: 25-28).

Thus the Lord lets us know in this parable that, in the face of His revealed will, Christendom would soon manifest a portentous change, and from its primitively low estate vie with the powers of the world in earthly grandeur and influence. We are called now to walk apart from the world, its power and its glitter, content to be hated as our Master was (John 15), cherishing also the secret of God's grace and the relationships it gives us, and suffering with Christ meanwhile. "But if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may he also glorified with Him" (Rom. 8). "Faithful is the saying: for if we died with Him, we shall also live with Him; if we endure, we shall also reign with Him" (2 Tim. 2: 11, 12). Now is the time for us to have tribulation in the world, till He come to take us to the Father's house, and we be manifested also with Him in glory when He is manifested. The day of glory with Christ will make ample amends.

But how is it with you, dear reader? Is Christ the object of your faith? If so, it is well indeed with you now and evermore. If He is nothing to you beyond any other whom men discuss, notwithstanding God's testimony to Him, it were better for you that you had not been born. Refusing God's light and love in Him Who went down below all depths for sinners, you cannot escape the judgment which He will execute on all the impenitent and unbelieving, that despise Him and the saving grace of God in Him. Before that everlasting judgment there shall be a day of Jehovah of hosts upon all that is proud and mighty, and upon all that is lifted up; and it shall be brought low. Jehovah alone shall be exalted in that day. Meanwhile God commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent. Oh, that His goodness may lead you to repentance! The time is short: delay not. Your sins are many and great. The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth from every sin: nothing else can.

4 The Leaven

Matt. 13: 33.

(B.T. Vol. 20, p. 373-374. Gospel No. 5: 4.)

The Lord Jesus here pronounces the fourth parable of the seven, the third likeness of the kingdom in these mysteries.

"Another parable spake he unto them. The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was wholly leavened" (ver. 33).

Individuals are not the question here any more than in the two that precede, especially in that of the mustard seed which is most akin as the structure marks. Individuals had their place in the opening parable, and, hearing, were born again, and were each fruit produced by the seed. If received into good ground, there was life and fruit; if not, the word of the kingdom had no vital effect. But in the parables that follow before the multitude, we have successive states which characterise the kingdom while Christ is hidden on high. The first is the ruin of the harvest here below by the mixture, while men slept, of darnel with the wheat; which mixture must be left for the returning King to deal with at the end of the age. The second is the portentous rise of what was planted an exceeding small thing; but it grew into an earthly power of attractive pretensions. Neither of these clearly has to do with the individual, but, as it suits "the kingdom," with the state of things, and each in its due sequence.

What then signifies "the leaven"? Does the bearing of it revert to the opening parable and its appeal to individuals? Does it not rather continue the line of the comparisons of the kingdom? Surely the latter only, setting forth the assimilating effect of a doctrine, or creed, over a certain measured sphere till it was wholly permeated. This very distinctly differs from seed with a principle of life that bears fruit, a suited and frequent figure in scripture. Never is leaven so employed elsewhere. From earliest days it symbolised a corruption that tended to work and spread, as in the Passover, authoritatively applied in 1 Cor. 5 to evil which must be purged out, By our Lord it was used to set forth the teaching of Pharisees and Sadducces, of which the disciples were to beware. Compare Gal. 5: 9 for doctrine, as 1 Cor. 5 for immorality.

In no case then does scripture warrant leaven as a figure of quickening, in no case identify it with the washing of regeneration, and renewal of the Holy Spirit which God shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Living water is as different as can be from leavening; which, being a process of fermentation, causes dough to rise find makes it pleasanter to the natural taste. If Christ be in Levitical language the unleavened bread the redeemed eat, leaven has its appropriate use in the two wave-loaves which represent the Pentecostal first fruits; for the regenerate have still evil in their nature. Hence the sin offering which always accompanied the wave-loaves; whereas for the wavesheaf, figuring Christ risen, as there was no leaven of course, so no sin offering could be thought of. The same principle explains the leavened bread alone with the sacrifice of peace offerings for thanksgiving. Where fallen nature enters, so does leaven ; whatever the promises of grace, God takes account of it. But quickening is the direct energy of Christ, Who is life acting by the word of faith.

Hence, the best, that can scripturally be said of leaven is of doctrine working among men, as here in three measures of meal till it was wholly leavened. The kingdom was not only from the humblest beginning to become a towering power on the earth, like any worldly state, with its elevation coveted by those that found shelter there. It was also to penetrate men's minds within a definite sphere, forming and fashioning them according to the teaching presented. What the spiritual character of that doctrine might be is hardly within the scope of what is said before the crowds. And we know that what spread over a large part of the shattered Roman empire and beyond, after the Christian profession rose up to worldly power and influence, was a mere creed, and by no means God's gospel for faith obedience: an idolising of the sacraments and of the crucifix, and a setting up, if not of gods, yet of mediators to the dishonour of the One; not the word of the cross as His power to those that are saved. It was no longer God choosing the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, or the weak to shame the strong, but the wise, mighty, and noble choosing the symbol of Christendom as the object of visible homage, and even the means of advantage or ambition. Such was the work of the "woman." The Lord had long been in the back ground.

My reader, see that you be not deceived nor deceive yourself. The unseen enemy has boundless and subtle wiles; and you are exposed, but ought not to be ignorant of his devices. Christ only can avail your soul for salvation. And He is as acceptable, as He is unfailing, Other foundation can none lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. It is not when we become strong or godly; but just as we are that He saves and to the uttermost: while we were yet weak, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. Only hearken to God's call. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house."

5 The Treasure hidden in the field

Matt. 13: 14.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 7-8. Gospel No. 5-5.)

Here the importance of the Lord's speaking to the disciples in the house is manifest. He began with explaining the parable of the Darnel of the field. They are not exterior facts of the kingdom like those said without to the crowds, but spiritual views for His followers only. If those spoken openly have been misinterpreted through the natural mind, the later are yet more exposed to it.

"Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid, and for the joy of it goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth the field" (Matt. 13: 44).

The gospel or the soul's salvation is by no means what this parable or the next presents, though often so interpreted. In reality, one can hardly conceive any thing more opposite. For the gospel is the revelation of God's grace in Christ; salvation is a free gift, like eternal life. It is in no way true that the man, who has it brought before him, sells all that he has to purchase that treasure; still less does he buy the field, which is certainly something else very different, to acquire the salvation of his soul.

Never since the world began has any soul been led by the Spirit to sell all that he had to buy life or pardon, salvation or glory. And if any have sought in this fashion to be delivered from evil or to gain God's favour, we may be sure that their suit was rejected; for it is an ignoring of guilt and ruin, a frustrating of God's grace, and a making void in effect Christ's death. On the other hand it is allowed fully that, in those that are Christ's and have Him as their portion, there may be and there ought to be a like devotedness to any extent in our measure. But this is a very different thing, and not what the parable teaches.

It is overlooked that the soul's need and blessing we have had already in the opening parable of the Sower, as it is indeed a personal question, antecedent to the mysteries of the kingdom, and carefully presented as distinct, before any likeness of the kingdom begins. Those likenesses bring out larger considerations, whether outside or within. And the Lord is the "man" here, as nobody can doubt in His field of wheat spoilt by the darnel (ver. 24).

Thus read, all flows without jar and in accordance with all truth. It is the Son of God incarnate Who is compared to one who found and hid the treasure in the field. And, in this aspect, "the field" retains its significance as "the world," instead of being twisted into "the scriptures," or "the letter" or "the Christian profession"; it is "the world" where Christ found His own, who constitute His "treasure." The meaning is then not only enforced by but agreeable to the rest of God's word. And the Lord's consequent action is no less in harmony. For what can be more certain than that He emptied Himself to become man, and, when found in that fashion, humbled Himself and became obedient unto death-even death of the cross? Nay, we may press the analogy closer still from the known facts of the case. He was as Messiah heir of David's throne, but gave up all in His death, which purchased the world and redeemed His own who were in it. Even His enemies, who blaspheme and deny Him Who bought them (2 Peter 2: 1), are His purchase. But His own have also in Him redemption through His blood. So plain is it that purchase and redemption are not the same, nor equally extensive. For clearly the purchase is not of the treasure only but of the field (or world) wherein the treasure was hid. Redemption is not thus universal but belongs only to those that believe, as all scripture teaches and this parable illustrates. Christ has paid (to say the least) the full price, to reconcile "all things, whether the things on earth or the things in the heavens" (Col. 1: 20); and the day is near, when God will head up the universe in Him (Eph 1: 10), the Heir of all things, at His coming. Christ bought the world, but His joy is in the "treasure" which is to be with Him and like Him in that day.

How then do you stand as to Him? To be bought, as is the field of the world, is only the more. terrible if you deny Him. And all that call not on Him, all that neglect so great salvation, do deny Him, though they may not break into heresies of perdition. You are summoned by God in His word to believe on Him. So believing you shall have mercy: for it is written that whosoever does believe on Him shall not be ashamed. All who reject Him, high or low, poor or rich, must bear their doom to endless shame and woe, Oh, why sin against God and His Christ and your own soul? Why regard lying vanities, whatever they may be, and forsake your own mercy?

Christ, the world-rejected Lamb, is worthy, and He has brought to your door redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. Is not this your deep need whoever and whatever you are? In none other is remission; in Him it is as perfect as Himself. Oh, delay not, nor turn away. It is yielding to His enemy and yours, to the liar and murderer from the beginning. Consider too how your unbelief insults God in all the ways of His grace. "As though God did beseech through us, we pray (says the apostle) on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5: 20). Unbelief directly dishonours the Father Who sent, and the Son Who in love deigned to be sent. And the Holy Spirit is sent down since Christ's ascension to testify of His Person and work and glory. Oh! beware of doing despite to the Spirit of grace. For we know Him that said, Vengeance belongeth to Me: I will recompense.

6 One Pearl of great price

Matt. 13: 45, 46.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 23-24. Gospel No. 5-6.)

As the leaven followed suitably the mustard seed in the parables spoken without, so does the pearl duly come after the treasure in those within, the house. None of these conveys what was shown in the parable of the sower before the likeness of the kingdom. In that first parable did the Lord set out the word as the germ of life and spiritual understanding to the believer. The comparisons of the kingdom of the heavens, external and internal, present subsequent truths and larger considerations; whether of the outward course of the dispensation while the rejected Lord is on high; or of its spiritual aspects for the guidance and enjoyment of the faithful who have the mind of Christ.

After the Lord explained within the house the parable of the darnel to his disciples, the latter class opened, as we have seen, with the treasure. Now is given the far more precise instruction of the "one pearl."

This, which is evidently true as a sketch, helps to save the reader from serious misconception of the particulars. From early times men, having lost the fresh fulness of grace in the gospel, began to bend scripture generally to meet the first need of the soul. Hence the mustard seed was diverted by many to teach the work of grace in the heart from its small beginning, as the leaven was supposed to mean the gradual work of sanctification to bring about a universal change. Even the parables within the house are turned to the same account, only employing great things, instead of small, to show in the treasure the value of what we should make our own, and in the pearl the dream doubled to make it certain.

No believer doubts that the Lord Jesus is the richest of treasures, and the jewel above all price. But as the general structure and the bearing of the discourse point to a different aim, so the special forms of these similitudes are inconsistent with the assumption that the work of divine grace in the heart is intended. How plainly untenable it would be to suppose a sinful or even an exercised soul selling all he has to buy the world! in order to possess the treasure said to be hidden there. Nor can any deny the truth that Christ in His joy over the treasure did, as He alone could, buy the world. in order to have the treasure of a people out of the earth for heaven.

A late dignitary, who treated the parables in a very interesting way, thought this interpretation "strangely reverses the whole matter." What matters overturning an error however old, if we can only receive and enter into the truth with simplicity? The fact is that spiritual men have long felt the inadequacy of popular views. The word of the Lord abides. Be this our criterion. "Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a man of merchandise seeking goodly pearls; and having found one pearl of great value, he went and sold all whatever he had and bought it" (Matt. 13: 45, 46). Now is it not harsh in the extreme to infer that lost sinners are compared to a man inquest of goodly pearls? It is untrue even of the uncommon case of the rich young ruler, irreproachable as his conduct was, who clung to his wealth, and forfeited treasure in heaven, and left Christ full of sorrow. He never knew his ruin and did not even seek to he saved. And never was a greater mistake than that Saul of Tarsus answers to the merchant, "determinate, discriminate, unremitting." He was, as he said, "chief of sinners" and, like every other, saved in sovereign grace.

It is Christ then Who really seeks and buys. It is Christ Who alone has also the perfect discernment of the moral beauty He saw and prized above all. Indisputably He alone of men understood and sought goodly pearls; and this one pearl of great price He saw, in divine counsels, to be saints like Himself holy and blameless in love — yea, one with Him, the church glorious, which He will present to Himself, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing. He alone was in Himself perfectly what the saints are in divine purpose to be; and shall be in fact at His coming again, as in principle they are even now.

He that is in Christ is exhorted, as he has life in Him, to have in himself the moral mind which was in Christ Jesus, to obey and serve in love as He did absolutely, to count all things loss and dung that he may win Christ, and be found in Him, not having his own righteousness but that which is through faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God on the condition of faith. But the parable sets forth what is the ground and pattern and spring of all such effects in the Christian, in the Lord's own love to saints seen as the reflection of His own beauty, the one inestimable pearl, for which He sold all else, glory on high, kingdom below, all whatever He had, to buy that pearl. It might be, it was, in the depths, submerged in what was lowest and vilest; but He saw the end from the beginning, He discerned what grace would effect, loved us and gave Himself for us, as He will have therein the object of His love and rest in His love on high.

O my friend that reads these words, flatter not human nature, nor your own character. In an ungodly family you may have been shocked with the horror of open evil, and have walked morally; in a godly one you may have been guarded from corruption and trained in religious habits. Yet it strangely reverses, not the point of this parable only, but the whole force of revealed truth, and of the gospel particularly, if you compare yourself in your natural state to a merchant in quest of goodly pearls, still more if you credit yourself with such devotion, in your unconverted days, as would give up all you have to win Christ. Since man was created on the earth, never was such an instance; and if it had been, how could it avail for a sinner without new birth or redemption?

The same apostle, who tells us this was his experience as a saint, condemns all he had been previously (though more moral and religious than you) as filth. He also proclaims from God of the entire race, that there is not a righteous person, not even one, that none understands, that not one seeks after God, that peace's way is unknown, and no fear of God is before their eyes. He further declares that it was not merely so among the Gentiles, but that the law expressly pronounces this sentence on those under the law, spite of all their privileges. Now the gospel is sent to all as equally lost. For, says he, there is no difference; for all sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Hence God justifies freely though the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Whom God set forth a mercy-seat through faith in His blood. The very object is to cut off boasting of self in every form, that no flesh should boast before God. He that boasts, let him boast in the Lord.

7 The Dragnet

Matt. 13: 47-50.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 37-39. Gospel No. 5: 7.)

The last similitude of the chapter is the counterpart of the first; for as this is the sowing of the good seed in the world, where the harvest is spoilt by the enemy's darnel, so that is the judicial dealing with the bad fish after the good had been gathered into vessels before the consummation of the age.

"Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a dragnet cast into the sea and having brought together of every sort; which, when it was filled, they drew up on the beach, and, sitting down, gathered the good into the vessels and cast the worthless out. Thus shall it be in the consummation of the age: the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from amidst the righteous, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping, and the gnashing of teeth" (ver. 47-50).

Here again we have what was meant, not for the multitude, but for those who had ears to hear. The Lord speaks to the disciples only in the house. It is for the spiritual mind.

We may notice here as elsewhere how carefully the truth was communicated, so as not to impair the Christian hope. The Jew has had times and seasons set out and discriminated to guard him from being deceived by the cry, The time is at hand. Now that the Christ was rejected of Jew and Gentile, the unequalled tribulation must be before the times of refreshing from the presence of Jehovah and His Christ. But for the Christian it is of all moment not to confound the proper hope with prophecy, but to wait for the Lord to receive us to Himself precisely as the early saints did. Whatever events are revealed, and they are many, varied, and momentous before the day of the Lord, His coming remains immediately before the heart without any predicted events to intervene.

In fact, we now know that many centuries have transpired; but from the parables here and elsewhere we should never have gathered such an interval as might hinder constant looking for Christ. We could not from the letter have gleaned, but that the fishermen, who first cast into the sea the dragnet, at length filled out of every sort, were the same that drew it up on the beach, and sitting down gathered the good into vessels and cast the worthless outside. He Who knew the end from the beginning had all before Him but disclosed with a wisdom self-evidently divine. Mistake there was none: only the rashness or ill-will of unbelief can say so. If taught of God, we wait for the Lord Jesus now, as the apostles did. Our hope, as our faith, is the same. All hangs on His word, which can fail no more than His love. And those who have fallen asleep have in no way missed their hope; for it remains true as ever, that the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we, the living that remain to the coming of the Lord shall in no wise precede those that are fallen asleep, but shall together with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord (1 Thess. 4).

The parable does mark in the first place the fishermen completing their work of filling the dragnet from every kind, and drawing it ashore; next, sitting down and sorting the good fish into vessels, while they cast away those unfit for food. This was the fishermen's work of delicate discrimination; and the more striking as the servants were forbidden in the first similitude to gather the darnel. To deal with the wicked is in both parables assigned to the angels. They are, as the interpretation goes on to say (not only explaining, but adding), to come forth and sever the wicked from amidst the righteous. This is another truth, which must not be confounded with the fishermen's work of gathering the good into vessels. Both are true, but they differ in their nature and objects. We, the servants or fishermen, have to do with the good; the angels will execute judgment on the wicked. The Christian is called to the work of grace. So it was even among the Jews of old. "If thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth," said Jehovah to Jeremiah: not the vile from the precious, but the precious from the vile.

How is it with you, dear reader? To be within the dragnet is no security. Are you Christ's? He Himself welcomes the anxious and the restless and the wretched and the despairing. "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Yea, He declares, "Him that cometh to Me, I will in no wise cast out." And He deigns to give the most lowly and gracious reason: "For I came down from heaven not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me." And His will that sent Jesus is, "that every one that seeth the Son and believeth on Him shall have life eternal; and 1 will raise him up at the last day" (John 6: 37-40).

What more do you want to win your hearts than these words, if you believe the Lord? To honour Him is to honour the Father, Who refuses to be honoured otherwise. And no wonder; for to Him it is that His God and Father is indebted for His glorification morally in a world which had departed from Him, and done Him foul wrong, not only among Gentiles, vain and dark and proud, but in His own people guiltier and prouder still. Then and there it was that the Lord Jesus vindicated Him, not only in emptying Himself and becoming man, but in humbling Himself when man and being obedient unto death — yea, death of the cross. There it was also God made Him Who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become God's righteousness in Him. Then it was He Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree that we being dead to sins should live to righteousness.

Fear not therefore to receive the Lord Jesus at God's word, as your quittance from all that you have done and are, and as your new start; for He Who died is risen, the giver of a life in Him, which speaks to you of victory, and is the pledge of holiness. Fear not: only believe.

8 The merciless Bondman

Matt. 18: 23-35.

Gospel Words, 5th Series. No. 8.

The grace which forgives to the uttermost is characteristic of Christianity. Christ Himself bore witness of it habitually, and expressly to the sinful woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee. It is the prime message of the gospel; and the church assumes it to be settled for the least member of Christ's body.

Peter suggested what he regarded as a perfect limit of forgiveness, and enquired whether seven times satisfied; the Lord answered, Until seventy times seven. Grace declines a stipulated term and demands the widest margin; but the parable indicates solemnly the doom of him who has no heart for it. Whatever the man pretended to, the only true God, the Father, was unknown, and Jesus Christ Whom He did send: life eternal was not his.

"For this the kingdom of the heavens is likened to a king who would make a reckoning with his bondmen. And when he began to reckon, one debtor for ten thousand talents was brought to him. But as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife and the children and all that he had, and payment to be made. The bondman then falling down did him homage, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay all. And the lord of the bondman, moved with compassion, released him and forgave him the debt. But that bondman, on going out, found one of his fellow-bondmen who owed him a hundred denarii, and having laid hold he was grasping his throat saying, Pay what thou owest. His fellow-bondman then, falling at his feet, besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee. And he would not, but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay what was owing. But his fellow-bondmen, having seen what was being done, were greatly grieved, and went and fully explained to their lord all that was done. Then his lord, having summoned him, saith to him, Wicked bondman, all that debt I forgave thee, since thou didst beseech me: oughtedst not thou also to have pitied thy fellow-bondman, as I also pitied thee? And his lord, in wrath, delivered him to the tormentors till he should pay all that was owing to him. Thus also shall my heavenly Father do to you, if ye forgive not from your hearts each his brother" (Matt. 18: 23-35).

But one debtor is specified, and his debt enormous. Even if of silver, Haman offered no more in lieu of destroying the entire Jewish people. Not less guilty is the sinner before God. No wonder he "was brought to Him": of himself he would never come. All depends on the reality of one's submission to God's righteousness. If he be not born of God, it is superficial. Profession may have no root of faith, but spring from the mere feeling of terror on the one hand or of sympathy on the other. It may be but creedism or deference to public opinion. It is often mental apprehension. In all such cases there is no thorough self-judgment, no divinely formed repentance, and hence no true sense of the grace of God, nor real appreciation of Christ and His work, whereby faith knows. But the sentence of judgment (for God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of them that hold the truth in unrighteousness) may alarm souls into the profession of the Lord's name apart from living faith. So it was when our Lord preached; as He warned such as quickly received the word with joy, and soon gave it up in trial. So it was yet more, when the gospel went out in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. A single case is more impressive than a crowd. Further, as individually one believes, so too judgment will be individual.

Here the debtor who did not keep the word, nor bring forth fruit with patience, "on going out," soon betrayed his emptiness. He, being a dead stone, who had never tasted that the Lord is good, ruthlessly assailed his fellow that owed him a comparatively small debt. And his lord incensed at cruelty so selfish after such grace, consigns him not to prison only but to the tormentors in irretrievable ruin.

O my reader, deceive not your soul: God is not mocked. Read not only Gal. 6: 7-10 but Rom. 2: 7-11, which press not the grace that saves, but the indispensable character of those that are saved. "He shall have judgment without mercy that showed no mercy."

How is it then with your soul, my reader? Have you received Christ and believed the gospel to the remission of your sins? For this is the A B C of God's message based on Christ's redemption. There is far more given in His grace; but with this most needed and touching answer to our deep want God begins. He remembers no more our sins and iniquities, as He often assures us; but He would have us to know them blotted out by the Saviour's blood, as we remember Him and show forth His death habitually. What can be conceived more contradictory of His grace than a hard vindictive spirit? Are not we who are forgiven distinctly charged to forgive? Nay more, are we not solemnly warned that Christ's heavenly Father will award unsparing judgment, not to open adversaries only, Jew or Gentile, but to the Christian professor especially, if from his heart he forgives not a brother's trespasses? Can any course be more fraught with danger than glossing over Christ's plain meaning under the fond claim that, whatever come, we are safe? He that believes to the saving of the soul is neither presumptuous nor cowardly where Christ is at stake, but keeps His word and denies not His name, sharing His life and displaying His character.

The bondman with the debt to God of 10,000 talents is historically the Jew, availing himself greedily of a gracious oblivion of all in the gospel, but so little imbued with the Spirit of Christ, as to hate and persecute, forbidding any mercy to the Gentile because of his injustice to Israel, little indeed compared with the Jew's wickedness against God. Therefore, as the apostle shows, is wrath come upon them to the uttermost (1 Thess. 2: 16). So also we see in the Acts of the Apostles, that though the blotting out of their sins was preached to them on their repentance and turning to God, they did not truly profit by His mercy. They dogged enviously and as enemies the steps of His messengers, whom He sent next to the Gentiles. Thus they pleased not God and were contrary to all men, and afford the sad witness that, if the despiser of Moses' law died without compassion on proof of two or three witnesses, much sorer must be the punishment of those that trample down and count unholy the blood of the covenant and do despite to the Spirit of grace.

9 The Labourers hired

Matt. 20: 1-16.

Gospel Words. 5th Series. No 9.

People have little difficulty in understanding the general drift of the answer to Peter, who said, Behold, we have forsaken all and followed Thee: what shall we have therefore? Our Lord shows that God will be debtor to no man, and that for every loss on account of His name every one shall receive again a hundredfold and inherit life eternal. But He adds the cautionary words, Many first shall be last, and last first. For as Christ is the motive where faith is, reward is but the encouragement to him that follows the Saviour, it cheers him when already on the way. Make the reward the object, and all becomes mercenary. Even where Christ is the constraining power, there is danger of clouding Him under an overweening estimate of sacrifices for His sake; and hence the need to think of the shortcoming implied through self-reliance. In every case however God never forgets but assuredly repays.

Why is it that there has been such perplexity and difference from of old to the present about the parable which opens chap. 20? It is because man bulks so largely in his own eyes that room is not left for the sovereign grace of God. Now this is the very thing the Lord here asserts. Pious men might and must more or less distinctly allow it in His saving souls; but the Lord claims it for His dealing with service. And it ought not to be a question that in the parable not salvation but service is the matter in hand. Alas! in all ages the tendency has been and is to confound the two things to the deep injury of both; for if mixed up, no soul who has a due sense of his unprofitable service can or ought to be assured of his salvation; yet without that assurance God's grace is not fully received, nor has Christ's blood practically cleansed the conscience, so that the service is vitiated correspondingly from first to last. And no wonder; for never can exist the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope, which we are exhorted to hold fast firm unto the end.

Now what can be plainer in scripture than the truth that "the free gift of God is life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 6: 23)? In John, Gospel and Epistles, it is no less plain that the believer has that life now. No doubt, it is in the Son, and alone in Him rightly and securely; but "he that believeth on Me hath life eternal" (John 6: 47). And the First Epistle was written that God's children might know, that they believing on the name of the Son of God have life eternal. They do not wait for His coming again to have it; they have it now for their souls, they will have it for their bodies also, and in its proper glorious sphere, when He comes for them. And it is of life eternal by-and-by that the Synoptic Gospels speak.

But the parable contemplates, not conversion, nor life eternal, but labouring in the vineyard. How can those that know the gospel fall into a mistake so evident and profound as to overlook this? It was for Christ that Simon Peter left all and followed Him. Christ drew him, not reward, though reward there is; for God is not unrighteous to forget any work or labour of love shown to His name in the service of the saints or of the gospel. But it is divine love in Christ, seen by faith, which draws the soul after Him, and makes His call effectual. Such alone do work that pleases God; and life eternal is therefore shown in Rom. 2 to come at the end of a fruit-bearing course; but the utmost care is taken in the same epistle to declare that we are justified freely by His grace (Rom. 3: 24). Yea, it excludes any work on our part from that great act of His grace. "Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt, but to him that worketh not but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 4, 5).

In the parable on the contrary it is a question of work done for the householder, who calls and sends into his vineyard.

"For the kingdom of the heavens is like a householder which went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard; and when he had agreed with the labourers for a denary* the day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing in the marketplace idle; and to them he said, Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing; and he saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard. And when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto the steward, Call the labourers and pay them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a denary. And when the first came, they supposed that they would receive more; and they likewise received every man a denary. And when they received it, they murmured against the householder, saying, These last have spent one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat. But he answered and said to one of them, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a denary? Take up that [which is] thine, and go thy way; it is my will to give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? or is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last" (vers. 1-16).

*A denary was a silver coin, and of far more value than our penny. "The denarius a day was the pay of a Roman soldier in Tiberius' time, a few years before this parable was uttered (see Tacitus, Annal. i. 17). Polybius, ii. 15 6 (but in illustrating the exceeding fertility of the country), mentions that the charge for a day's entertainment in the inns of Cisalpine Gaul was half an as. = one-twentieth of the denarius. This we may therefore regard as liberal pay for the day's work." Alford's Gr. Test. i. 200, fifth edition.

Plainly the Lord lays down the true spring and principle of service. It is confidence in him who calls. All is set out with divine wisdom. The workmen first called agreed to the terms. Those at the third hour went to work on his word; "whatsoever is right I will give you," as did those at the sixth and ninth hours. The last batch at the eleventh went there simply at his call: "Go ye also into the vineyard." With these last the steward is directed to begin, giving each a denary. This aroused the murmurs of the earliest workmen, who resented the householder's liberality. But he stopped the mouth of their spokesman at once. The injustice complained of was solely in the complainant. "Didst thou not agree with me for a denary?" Grace reserves its title to bless. "Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last." The despised enjoy the grace that abounds beyond all question of man, and those who indulge in selfish thoughts justly sink. God Who never fails in righteousness maintains His right to act according to His own goodness. He is sovereign even in this where man sets up his claim to his own chagrin. Indisputably just, He is good and will act upon it, as He loves to do: what loss and misery those make for themselves who dispute it!

10 The two Children

Matt. 21: 28-32.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 88-89. Gospel No. 5: 10.)

The proud men who were blind to the glory of Christ, and averse alike to God's grace and truth raised the question of His authority. It is always so with such as value themselves, and love not God's intervention, and are jealous of those that do His work. He could have pointed to witnesses greater than John; though among women-born none had risen greater than John the Baptiser. But the works which the Father gave Him to complete testified yet more. So did the Father's voice. And the scriptures which bore witness of Him He treats as the highest possible, for they have a permanence which no mere words can possess. But here the Lord met their unbelief by appealing to the baptism of John: whence was it? Of heaven, or of men? They saw their dilemma, and fearing man, not God, they answered, We cannot tell. Confessing their incapacity, chief priests and elders though they were, as the cover of their dishonesty, they are left without an answer. The Lord however presents them with a portrait, not of themselves only, but of those they despised.

"But what think ye? A man had two children and he came to the first and said, Child, go work to-day in the vineyard. And he answered and said, I will not; but afterward he regretted and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise; and he answered and said, I [go], sir, and went not. Which of the two did the will of the father? They say, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say to you, that the tax-gatherers and the harlots go before you into the kingdom of God. For John came in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not; but the tax-gatherers and the harlots believed him. And ye, when ye saw, regretted not afterward to believe him" (vers. 28-32).

It is a plain and direct dealing with conscience. For two classes were then before the Lord's eye: the rude and profligate, the careless and profane, who made no pretension to religion and pursued worldly profit and open sin; and the respectable and decorous, who piqued themselves on heeding the rites of religion and on their own decent character. Now mankind in Christendom is the same still, tested by a standard more searching than John's, though his was a mighty work, as the Lord bore witness to him. Viewed in themselves or in the light of testimony, how living is the picture! The one class puts shameless insult on God, and glories in lawlessness. But an appeal comes which convinces the daring sinner of his outrageous evil: he breaks down in self-judgment, he turns to God and serves Him whom he had set at nought. The other class, on the contrary, claims credit for its proper ways; and as conscience is untouched, they are self-satisfied, and God remains unknown. How exactly such souls answer to him who says "I go, sir, and went not!" Are there not many like him now?

Hence when John, who did no miracles nor claimed official position, came preaching a baptism of repentance for remission of sins, people flocked freely to be baptised, confessing their sins. But as the rule, the Lord here shows that it was not those who justified themselves before men that were baptised by John. They disdained to enter the kingdom by the same strait gate and narrow way as was open to the tax-gatherer and the harlot. But there can be no other way to God for the sinner. The grace of the gospel condemns sins and insists on repentance still more than John coming in the way of righteousness; for the gospel proclaims that nothing but the blood of Jesus, God's Son, could cleanse from sins, and that His blood does cleanse us from every sin. How deadly and defiling were our sins that such a propitiation alone could avail! Therein is a test far deeper than John's preaching, excellent and efficacious as it was; for it was repulsive for a moral man and zealous Jew to confess his sins, like a tax-gatherer or a harlot. How intolerable to be put with such on the same common level of guilt and ruin! This is precisely what the gospel does even more thoroughly; and it is therefore of all things most odious to the self-righteous formalist.

When John came, calling men to confess their sins in view of the coming Messiah and the kingdom of the heavens, conscience answered to his call in those who had walked in gross lusts and indifference to the religious world. "The tax-gatherers and the harlots believed him." They knew in their souls that they had led a life of shame and iniquity; and they bowed to a call which they recognised to be of God. But not so those who stood well in their own eyes and in the public opinion of the day. They therefore annulled for themselves the counsel of God, instead of justifying God by being baptised by John as the despised ones did (Luke 7: 29, 30). The self-righteous when they "saw, had no regret afterward to believe him."

Hence too, since that day, when the gospel is preached, men who are boastful of their religion, their church, or their character, are ever its bitterest enemies. The Jews as the general fact not only refused it but tried to stir up the Gentiles against it everywhere. Nothing in their eyes more hateful than that grace which denied the value of their righteousness, and announces God's righteousness that He may be just and justifier of him that has faith in Jesus. For this openly declares that there is no difference, all having sinned and coming short of God's glory; as it also declares to all who believe, that they are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Therefore, being apart from works of law, the gospel is as open to the Gentile as to the Jew, since God is one, Who shall justify circumcision by faith, not otherwise, and uncircumcision through their faith since they believe. Jesus the Lord is the way to the Father: the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And salvation is in none other name under heaven that is given among men whereby we must be saved. Did any wonder at the Lord eating with sinners and the disreputable? His answer was, They that are strong have no need of a physician, but those that are sick. But go and learn what that is, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice; for I came to call not righteous but sinners. Do you, dear reader, know Him thus?

11 The guilty Husbandmen

Matt. 21: 33-14.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 104-105. Gospel No. 5: 11.)

The parable before us is morally historical. It presents briefly but fully the ways of God with His people of old up to their ruin in the rejection of the Christ, and not morally alone but nationally. The Lord even adds from the scriptures His own consequent exaltation, and their setting aside meanwhile, Himself in humiliation the stumbling-stone of unbelief, but about to return in power as the executor of judgment in this world.

"Hear another parable: There was a householder who planted a vineyard, and made a fence round it, and due, a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and left the country. But when the season of the fruits drew near, he sent his bondmen to the husbandmen to receive his fruits. And the husbandmen took his bondmen, and beat one and killed another and stoned another. Again he sent other bondmen more than the first, and they did to them likewise. And afterward he sent to them his son, saying, They will feel respect for my son. But the husbandmen, when they saw the son, said among themselves, This is the heir: come, let us kill him, and get his inheritance. And they took and cast him forth out of the vineyard and killed [him]. When therefore the lord of the vineyard shall come what will he do to these husbandmen? They say to him, He will wretchedly destroy those wretches, and let out the vineyard to other husbandmen who shall render him the fruits in their season" (vers. 33-41).

It is plain that the Lord here takes the ground, not merely of relationship and conscience as in the preceding parable of the two children, but of responsibility to render fruit to God Who had done all possible for His people to that end. The prophet Isaiah had similarly appealed in his chap. 5. Here the Lord adds a great deal more, but on the same ground, and with similar result, only yet more plainly proclaimed. For it is not only that the vineyard, instead of grapes, brought forth wild grapes. Here the upshot was growing enmity manifested to the lord of the vineyard. In both what could have been done on behalf of the vineyard that He had not done? The prophet announced that Jehovah was going to lay His vineyard waste; and so it has been, as the state of the Jews proves. The Lord shows the patience that for ages waited on those active among the Jews, if there might be fruit for Jehovah. But His bondmen, the prophets, whom He sent to recall His people to their duty, met with nothing but contempt, ill-usage, and death. Others He sent increasingly, as the evil grew; but they fared alike contumeliously.

Lastly, He sent His Son. The Lord spoke of Himself. But the dignity of His person and the intimate nearness of His relationship to Jehovah gave the opportunity to the religious leaders among the Jews to demonstrate their contempt and deadly hatred to both the Father and the Son, as the Lord says in John 15. Could evil go farther? Other sins, shameful and ungrateful as they were, became in comparison as nothing. "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. He that hateth Me hateth My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they had not had sin; but now they have both seen and hated both Me and My Father." And they had been fully warned. For they simply fulfilled what was in their law, "They hated Me without a cause." It was not only utter unrighteousness, but deadly enmity to Jehovah and His Anointed, to the Son, their own Messiah.

And the Lord, on the near approach of this fatal result of their rebellious alienation from God, Himself puts the question to them, "When therefore the Lord of the vineyard shall come, what will He do to those husbandmen?" And they could not but answer, "He will wretchedly destroy those wretches, and let out the vineyard to other husbandmen who shall render him the fruits in their seasons." So it is that the guilty own in their consciences their just punishment for positive rejection of One so good and faithful, and of their own obligations to Him, yea, of apostasy carried out to blood.

Is this nothing to you, reader, with the still greater privileges of Christendom? Are you hardening your heart against the truth, and shrinking from the God Who came so near to you in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning to men their offences, and having put in His servants the word of reconciliation? Beware then of a fate not better but worse than what befell and is to befall the Jews. "Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, this was made the corner-stone: of Jehovah this is, and it is marvellous in our eyes. Therefore I say to you that the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits of it. And he that falleth on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter him as dust" (vers. 42-44). Such is the danger of stumbling now; such the judgment the Lord will execute on living man when He appears in glory. And the time hastens. See therefore, lest that come upon you which is spoken in the prophets, "Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish; for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, if one declare it unto you."

12 The Marriage feast

Matt. 22: 1-14.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 117-119. Gospel No. 5-12.)

The parable of the guilty husbandmen at the close of Matt. 21 shows the issue of God's testing men on the ground of His own claims and their responsibility to yield Him fruit. It is just the question raised with the Jew and settled by the rejection of their own Messiah, the Son, yet to be avenged when He comes again.

In the parable with which Matt. 22 begins the Lord handles a wholly different case. It is therefore, what the last chapter nowhere furnished, a likeness of the kingdom of the heavens; and therein God is manifested in the ways of His grace, not man under His just claims. God no longer requires fruit from man, though He may and does produce fruit in those who receive His grace in Christ. But in the gospel it is no question of demanding fruit from man. He is represented as in sovereign majesty making a marriage-feast for His Son. This means a total change in His ways: not God requiring from men what is due, but His own grace blessing them in honour of His Son. "It is more blessed to give than to receive"; and this not the law but the gospel vindicates for God, Who gave His dear and only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have life eternal.

"The kingdom of the heavens is likened to a king which made a marriage-feast for his son; and sent forth his bondmen to call those who had been called to the marriage-feast; and they would not come. Again he sent forth other bondmen, saying, Tell those that have been called, Behold, my dinner I have made ready: mine oxen and my fatlings are slaughtered; and all things [are] ready come to the marriage-feast. But they slighted [it] and went off, one to his own land, another to his traffic; and the rest, seizing his bondmen, insulted and killed [them]. And the king was wroth and, sending his troops, destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then saith he to his bondmen, The marriage-feast is ready, but those that were called were not worthy. Go therefore unto the outlets of the roads, and, as many as ye shall find, call to the marriage-feast. And those bondmen went out to the roads, and gathered together all as many as they found, both wicked and good; and the marriage-feast was filled with guests. And the king on coming in to behold the guests saw there a man not clothed with a marriage-garment; and he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in here not having a marriage-garment? But he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind his feet and hands, and take and cast him out into the outer darkness; there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few chosen" (vers. 2-14).

Here too we have an historical unfolding, not of the past under law, but of God's dealings in grace. We begin with the gospel of the kingdom before our Lord's death in verse 3. Next in verse 4 the gospel goes forth on the ground of His finished work. Only then was the urgent message that "all things were ready"; and then, too, the rebellious hostility ripened into insult and bloodshed; as also in due time retribution came on those murderers and their city (vers. 5- 7).

But grace must reign and do its wondrous work, whatever the hindrances. Accordingly the offence of the Jew is salvation to the nations, and the loss of the one is the wealth of the others. The Jews but filled up their cup of sorrow, and wrath came on them to the uttermost, as far as the gospel is concerned; and this salvation of God has been sent to the nations, who also will bear, as the apostle added. This luminously follows in our parable (vers. 8-10).

Nevertheless God is not mocked under gospel any more than under law; and contempt of His grace brings an even sorer punishment than violation of His law. The acceptance of God's testimony by faith is and always has been the soul's turning-point from death to life, from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God and His kingdom. And His testimony has ever been to Christ, whatever the measure once, whatever the fulness now. Hopeless effort under law was used to drive to Christ those who were not won by promise. Grace and truth came as a fact through Jesus Christ, Who is both life and righteousness to the believer, as He is the image of the invisible God and declared Him. Christ is all, and in all. This therefore becomes the surest of tests, as it is the fulness of grace.

But the King, when He entered to behold the guests, saw one who had not on a marriage-garment. This was conclusive. The King provided all in His royal bounty; but here was a man who preferred his own clothing. It was no question of anything else. The man's robe might be splendid or sordid. But it was not the marriage-garment. It was therefore a direct offence against the grace which alone could and did provide according to the king's majesty and magnificence. Nothing could justify such wanton scorn of the king's honour and goodness; nothing could excuse the man's preference of his own things, especially on an occasion expressly to honour the King's Son. The man was speechless at the charge. The outer darkness must be his portion: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

It is not providential judgment like that which befell the city of murderers; it is personal and absolute, away for ever from Him Who is love and light, from Him Whose grace was so thoroughly despised. To render this all the more impressive, a single individual is thus specified, though the moral at the close prepares us for its applying to individuals far and wide. "For many are called (i.e., by the gospel), but few chosen." In result it is but a "little flock"; not because grace was not ample for them all, but because grace is abused and Christ is in so few, though He is all in such as have Him.

Have you then, my reader, received the Christ, Jesus the Lord? If so, "walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and assured in the faith as ye have been taught [in the written word of God], abounding in thanksgiving." See to it that you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new, renewed into full knowledge according to the image of Him that created him: wherein there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all things, and in all. Remember that there is no putting on Christ on high, unless you have put Him on now here below. Here we have the joy and duty of confessing Christ; as it will be His to confess us before His Father and before the angels.

If baptism be made the marriage-garment, it is only a less destructive delusion than making it the Lord's incarnation. In the one case the baptised in Christendom would be all elect, if it were not a contradiction in terms; in the other case, all mankind would be. The parable is really subversive of both these dreams, and is meant to show that no mere profession can save, that only the reception of God's grace in Christ will stand in that day.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Sixth Series.

Gospel Words - Sixth Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Fig-tree

2 The Household Servant

3 The Ten Virgins

4 The Talents

5 The Seed left to grow

6 The two Debtors

7 The Samaritan

8 The importunate Appeal

9 The Blasphemy of God's Power in Christ

10 The rich Fool

11 Waiting for the Lord

12 Working for the Lord

1 The Fig-tree

Matt. 24: 32-35.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 133-134. Gospel No. 6: 1.)

We have the Lord's authority for regarding the fig-tree here as the groundwork for its parable. "Now from the fig-tree learn the parable. When its branch is already become tender, and putteth forth its leaves, ye know that the summer is nigh; even so ye also, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, at the doors" (vers. 32-35).

It is clear that the Lord treats this tree as symbolic of the Jews. So He had done shortly before, and both so graphically that no believer need miss the meaning. Mark gives details, as often beyond others, illustrating His ministry. Seeing a fig-tree (there was but one, as Matthew says), and being hungry, He came and found nothing but leaves. This was decisive, for it was the season of figs, it was too soon for gathering; so that if none ware there, the tree must have borne none. The Lord therefore said unto it, No one eat fruit of thee henceforth for ever; and His disciples heard. On the morrow, as they passed by, they saw the fig-tree dried up from the roots; and Peter remarked on it, when the Lord's answer dwelt on the all-importance and the power of faith. There is no obstacle too strong to resist; only the grace that forgives all personal wrongs must accompany the faith of him that serves Christ. And so it has been. Not only have the fruitless Jews, as responsible under the first covenant, lost their religious position, but they are no longer a power. They are scattered and swamped in the sea of peoples.

It was one of the two miracles of the Lord which was not an expression of grace but judicial; and both told the destinies impending on Israel because of their evil and unbelief. The one, as we have seen, was their judgment under legal responsibility as barren after all God's care and claim of fruit. The other was set forth by the destruction of the swine, when the demons expelled from Legion entered and drove the herd into the abyss. So it will be in the latter day when the apostate Jews are given over to uncleanness and energised by the powers of darkness. These were the two exceptions. All the other miracles of the Lord displayed the glory of God and grace toward man.

What then is the parable to be learnt from the fig-tree in our chapter? The Lord is opening to the chosen disciples His  appearing for the Jews first (Matt. 24: 4-44) ; then (vers. 45-25: 30) His dealings with professing Christians; and lastly (25: 31-46) His judgment of all the nations or Gentiles.

It will be seen therefore that verses 32-35 concern the Jewish remnant directly, however we may profit by this as by every other scripture. The Jews will be objects of grace once more, and come under the new covenant in that day. Here accordingly the fig-tree falls under no curse. Far from withering away from the roots, Israel, which knew nothing but misery and ruin from trusting its own righteousness, is cast on the Messiah in repentance and faith ; and now mercy henceforward flows as a river. But "the many," the mass, judge themselves unworthy of life eternal and perish with their Antichrist; the godly remnant become the strong nation, and they are "all Israel" that shall be saved. They will have dates which must run their course; and also have successive events which must be accomplished. Times and seasons particularly characterise them.

Here the Lord deigns to give them signs in a way He never did to us of the church who are called to walk by faith, not by sight. So we may observe in the early verses of Matt. 24 and specially in verse 14. Still more emphatic is what follows from verse 15, where Daniel 12 is referred to, and, more than any, verse 11. There is a tribulation without parallel, but no translation to heaven; and the coming of the Son of man is like the lightning. For there is pre-eminently the carcase, whither gather the eagles. Immediately after the tribulation convulsions above and below follow; and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven; and all the tribes mourn, and they see Him coming to the earth. And His angels gather His elect (who seem here to be of Israel, as in Isa. 65, 66); for over these He will reign in the promised land. The heavenly saints are seen in their own place. Here our Lord treats of Israelitish saints.

The fig-tree is no longer barren; for the Son of man received, and the new covenant with Him, will change all. These are early days; end we hear no more than of the branch tender, and putting forth leaves. The time of fruit will come; but as yet, they only know that summer is nigh. "So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, at the doors." Grace will not fail to work its due effects.

How is it with you, dear reader? Have you learnt that you are no better than the barren fig-tree? If you have, it is well. For most deceive themselves and are indifferent If you know that you have neither fruit nor life, oh! look to Him by faith Who is life and gives it to all that believe. It is ruinous to talk of your privileges. The greatest is that you have the New Testament as well as the Old. But only Jesus, the Son of God, can avail; only His blood cleanses from every sin, when you will have the seal of His Spirit and bear fruit by His grace. "Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation." "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." Thus will you welcome His coming Who says, "Surely I come quickly," and you will answer, "Amen, come, Lord Jesus."

2 The Household Servant

Matt. 24: 45-51.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 149-150. Gospel No. 6-2.)

It is the first part in our Lord's prophecy at Olivet which bears directly on Christian profession. This therefore is wholly distinct from the parable of the fig-tree which refers to Israel, as all the preceding discourse did, and accordingly from ver. 15 occupied with the land and the sanctuary, the sabbath day, and the tribulation without parallel for the Jews, with signs before and after, heed being expressly claimed to Daniel the prophet, and illustration drawn from the deluge in Noah preserved through it, not from Enoch caught up before it.

Here begins that which is so general that it applies wherever the Lord's name is called on, Jewish peculiarities being quite dropt. The Lord takes the place of other objects. His service in His house is without restriction or addition the prominent character. Relationship to Him and His rules exclusively. We shall find in the third and last parable of the series His gifts conferred on His servants according to His sovereign will, with which each is called to trade according to the figure of talents committed for profit. But here it is the supply of His house with food in season.

"Who then is the faithful and wise bondman, whom the lord set over his household to give them food in season? Blessed [is] that bondman whom his lord on coming shall find thus doing. Verily I say to you, that he will set him over all that he hath. But if the evil bondman say in his heart, My lord delayeth [to come], and begin to beat his fellow bondman, and eat and drink with the drunken, the lord of the bondman shall come in a day which he expecteth not, and in an hour which he knoweth not, and shall out him in two, and appoint his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth" (vers. 45-51).

It is clear that the Lord looks for faithful and prudent stewardship in His absence from him who is entrusted with the charge of His household, and that, when He is come, He will deal with this responsibility. Did the bondman dispense food in due time? Blessed that bondman whom his Lord on coming shall find thus doing! It is His mind and will and grace about His own. Already elsewhere He had assured His own sheep that entering by Him they should be saved, enjoy liberty, and find pasture. It is in the last particular that the bondman is here made responsible; and this would test him. Faith and love alone render any one faithful and wise; they attach the heart to the household through devotedness to the Lord. Loving Him leads out to feeding His sheep and His lambs; as the Lord puts it to Peter, restored and reinstated after his fall: which by grace would only make him more tenderly considerate of others. And him who thus nourishes duly Christ's household He will set at the head of His inheritance by and by, when He returns the Heir of all things. It is only Christianity which is based on the Lord already come and about to return, while His own serve during His absence; and hence the prominence given to this in the third parable.

But solemn beyond expression is the doom of the man who, professing to be his Lord's bondman, arrogates to himself dominion, and is no model to the flock, but lords it as his possession. What can be conceived more opposed to the mind which was in Christ Jesus? He in infinite pity to the lost and to the glory of God the Father emptied Himself, taking a bondman's form, coming though yet in the likeness of men; and found in figure as a man He humbled Himself, becoming obedient as far as death, yea, death of the cross. The evil bondman, oblivious of all and heartlessly inconsistent, seeks a place of power and pride; he courts the world as one who never died to flesh nor was crucified to the world, but begins to beat his fellow bondmen, and eats and drinks with the drunken. There is both ecclesiastical oppression and commerce with the world, even in its self-indulgent dissoluteness.

Such is just the general aspect of Christendom for long ages, as at the present moment. There way be differences of degree here or there. But the picture applies to Catholics and Protestants nationals and dissenters. They are not separate from the world; nor do they walk in the Spirit, as those that crucified the flesh with its passions and its lusts; they boast in man and his literary elevation and his scientific inventions, like heathen that know not God.

And what does the Lord indicate as the occasion if not cause of so ruinous a departure? "But if the evil bondman say in his heart, My lord delayeth [to come]." No one betrays the evil of his unfaithfulness so much as a faithless professor of Christ. And here the Lord puts His finger on his heart putting off His own coming again as a living practical truth. Abandoning that hope, the heart can soon learn to value and associate with the world, to slight and ill-treat Christ's household.

What is the end? "The lord of that bondman shall come in a day which he expecteth not, and in an hour which he knoweth not, and shall cut him in two, and appoint his portion with the hypocrites; and there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth." God's wrath is revealed from heaven upon. all impiety, and unrighteousness of men holding the truth in unrighteousness. The Jew if wicked is worse than the Gentile; the professing Christian if evil is more guilty than either. His portion shall be, not with bondmen only, but with the hypocrites.

How is it with you, my reader? You, most of you, are neither Jews nor heathen; are you not a professing Christian? Do you not then own your evil if you slight the word of God, and especially the gospel? Any one who disregarded Moses' law died without mercy on the strength of two or three witnesses: of how much worse punishment, think you, shall he be judged deserving that trod under foot the Son of God, and esteemed the blood of the covenant whereby he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace? But the door of grace is still open. Oh! flee for refuge to Him Who is set before you, the only yet sure Saviour of the lost. Delay is proverbially dangerous; and nowhere is danger so great as in putting off the word of salvation which God has sent you. For, as He was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, when He sent Him into it, so even when Christ was rejected, God made Him Who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made divine righteousness in Him.

3 The Ten Virgins

Matt. 25: 1-13.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 166-167. Gospel No. 6-3.)

Here again we have the mysterious likeness of the kingdom of the heavens while Christ rejected but glorified is hidden on high. Only, as the parable looks onward specially to the future, when the difference between those taught of God and mere professors will be manifested, the word is "Then shall the kingdom of the heavens be made like to ten virgins," etc. "Then" refers to the execution of judgment on the evil bondman who embodied the collective responsibility of Christendom, as our parable sets out rather the secret of wisdom or the lack of it individually.

"Then shall the kingdom of the heavens be made like to ten virgins, such as, having taken their torches, went forth to meet the bridegroom. And five of them were foolish and five prudent. For the foolish, when they took their torches, took no oil with them; but the prudent took oil in their vessels with their torches. Now while the bridegroom tarried, they all fell heavy and were sleeping. But at midnight a cry is made, Behold, the bridegroom: come ye forth to meet him. Then arose all those virgins and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the prudent, Give us of your oil, for our torches are going out. But the prudent replied, saying, Nay, lest there be not enough for us and you: go rather unto those that sell, and buy for yourselves. And while they went away to buy, the bridegroom came; and those that were ready went with him unto the marriage feast; and the door was shut. But afterwards came also the rest of the virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us. But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. Watch therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour" (vers. 1-13).

The ten virgins vividly represent the Christian profession. All took their torches and went forth to meet the Bridegroom Who is coming again. But if anyone have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His. The unction of the Holy One is indispensable. The possession of this, symbolised by oil, depends on having faith in Christ and His work. The foolish never knew their ruin; they were content with ordinances and rites and their own heed to them. To be born anew, to receive remission of sins through Christ's blood, to be sealed with the Spirit, they were strangers: Jews or heathen might want these things; but they had every privilege in their religion, the christian religion, and had no cause for alarm: such was their self-deception.

Alas! as with Israel so with Christendom, the forgetfulness of God's work and departure from Him were complete. While waiting for the bridegroom they fell heavy and were sleeping. The true attitude of the Christian was lost; the blessed hope no longer animated any. They ceased to go forth to meet the Bridegroom, and turned in here or there to slumber. Prudent or foolish, all slipped away from the true hope.

But God is faithful, and, when things are darkest, He arouses the sleepers. At midnight is made a cry, Behold the bridegroom. All awake, when even the foolish become uneasy, for they perceive that the prudent have a power which they have not. Torches may burn brightly for a while; but without oil they soon go out. But the believer has the Spirit only for himself; and none can receive that anointing save through God's grace on the faith of the gospel. Hence the appeal of the foolish to the prudent is vain. They must go to Him who sells on the terms of grace, without money and without price. Sinners must have to do with God. The creature cannot avail. The sinner must face his sins before Him, Who points the lost to the Saviour. Those who are religious after the flesh hate grace and shrink from God's presence. They may be zealous; they are willing to do "some great thing" if bidden; but to stand before Him as nothing but guilty ones, and to be saved of divine grace like the worst by a dead and risen Saviour, is repulsive to the old man. They may go their way to buy; but this is all we here learn of these self-deceivers.

Meanwhile the bridegroom came; and those that were ready went in with him to the marriage feast. And the door was shut.

Oh, the horror of finding out the truth too late! In vain then to cry, Lord, Lord, open to us! To such as are refusing a like warning and invitation now, His word then will be, Verily, I say to you, I know you not.

My reader, how would the coming of the Saviour find you? Those who really long and watch for the Saviour have already heard His voice and found in Him redemption, the forgiveness of their sins, through His blood. Hence they are sealed with the Holy Spirit of God unto the day of redemption. They know Whom they have believed, as the Good Shepherd knows such as hear His voice and follow Him. Do not trust in any institution, even of Christ, or any observance of your own, or any class of men however honoured, to fit your souls for God's presence. Nothing but the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses from all sin; but this it does perfectly even now on earth for every believer. And unless you here believe in Him and in the efficacy of His sacrifice for your evil case, flatter not yourselves that He will receive you to Himself or present you to His Father.

But if you are born again and resting on the redemption that is in Christ, you will have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you and strengthening you to render a true witness to Him who is on high and about to return. "This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth." Your hope will be as real as your faith, and Christ the object of both. You will not doubt His love, but long for His coming to receive you to Himself, having the oil in your vessel, and earnest to call the thirsty, or whoever will, to drink of the water of life freely.

4 The Talents

Matt. 25: 14-30.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 179-181. Gospel No. 6-4.)

This is the third of the parables in our Lord's great prophecy, which are distinctively Christian, as compared with the Jewish section (chap. 24: 3-44) and the Gentile that concludes all (chap. 25: 31-46). All three contemplate an absent Lord, Who is to return, and Whom His own are to expect. The first embodies the professor in one bondman set over the household, either wise or evil, The second is a likeness of the kingdom of the heavens in virgins, five foolish and five wise, who went forth to meet the Bridegroom. All slumbered, but were awakened at midnight. But they only who had the oil in their vessels, the indwelling Spirit, were there to meet Him, and go in with Him to the marriage-feast. This applies not to the future remnant, who are not anointed till Christ appears, but to Christians wholly who are now before them. The third is not such a likeness being in no way the general state, but refers nevertheless only to Christians, as is certain from applying to the entrusted servants while the Lord went abroad (that is, to heaven), Who meanwhile delivered to His own His goods.

"For [it is] as a man, going abroad, called his bondmen and delivered to them his goods (or, substance). And to one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one, to. each according to his own ability, and went abroad immediately. And he that received the five talents went and traded with them, and made other five talents. Likewise he also that [received] the two gained other two. But he that received the one went away and dug in the earth and hid the money of his lord. Now after a long while the lord of those bondmen cometh and reckoneth with them. And he that received the five talents came up and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst me five talents: see, I gained other five talents (besides them). His lord said to him, Well done, good and faithful bondman; thou wast faithful over a few things, I will set thee over many things: enter into the joy of thy lord. And he also that [received] the two talents came up and said, Lord, thou deliveredst me two talents: see, I gained other two talents. His lord said to him, Well done, good and faithful bondman, thou wast faithful over a few things, I will set thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. And he also that had received the one talent came up and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou didst not sow, and gathering from where thou didst not scatter; and being afraid I went away and hid thy talent in the earth: see, thou hast thine own. And his lord in answer said to him, Wicked and slothful bondman, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather from where I scattered not; thou oughtest then to have put my money to the bankers, and I on coming should have received mine own with interest. Take then from him the talent and give [it] to him that hath the ten talents. For to everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall abound; but from him that hath not, even what he hath shall be taken. And cast out the useless bondman into the outer darkness: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth" (vers. 14- 30).

It is plain that the substance which the Lord submitted to His servants for work in His absence means gifts of a spiritual kind. For He delivered to each according to his respective ability. They are distinguished from the ability of each, which was natural, and are suited to it. They are not merely "sanctified capacity," or "theological learning," but a gift from the Lord adapted to the ability of each as the vessel. With His goods they were to trade, "each ministering it one to another, as good stewards of God's manifold race; if one speaketh, as oracles of God; if one ministereth, as of strength which God supplieth, that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom is the glory and the might unto the ages of the ages. Amen" (1 Peter 4: 10, 11). The reception of a gift was the ground of exercising it in dependence on the Giver, and for His glory.

Accordingly, where this loyalty ruled, one made five talents, another two: such is the figure in the parable. Without faith it is impossible to please God; and this is no less true of service, than of walk, as it is of salvation too. But God sets Christ before us everywhere: no creature's authority can become the object in any of them, save to His dishonour and our own sin and hurt. Confidence in the Master's grace was the animating spring of the true labourers. They bowed to His sovereignty Who entrusted as He saw fit; and they will in result enter into His joy. The kindred parable of the Pounds in Luke 19 shows individual responsibility, all starting with the like sum, and each rewarded according to the issues of labour. Both are true and important; but each is distinct.

In either case the third servant wronged the Lord. He regarded Him according to his own hard and wicked heart. He did not believe in His grace, and so sought not His pleasure or glory. Such selfish fear as his excludes love. There was no answer to the Master's trust. On his own showing he was inexcusable in hiding the talent in the earth. "Wicked and slothful bondman, thou oughtest to have put my money to the bankers, and I on coming should have received mine own with interest." To yield to fear was to distrust his Lord; and this is fatal. It is unbelief in His goodness. This servant had no sense of grace. A bad unpurged conscience led him to impute to the Lord what wholly denies and mis-represents Him, Who is full of grace and truth. And his end was according to his heart and his works. The evil he falsely attributed to the Master, which was really his own, finds its place in the outer darkness. It rendered him useless for God. He must be cast where the weeping and the gnashing of teeth shall be. His Master's joy was nothing to him.

How is it with you, my reader? Have you bowed to God's word which declares you to be sinful, ungodly, and without strength? If so, you must need a mighty and a gracious Saviour. And God Who pities you has sent in His love His beloved Son-sent Him to die for you, yea, for your sins. Do not presume to think of serving Him till you are brought to God without a spot or stain. Nothing but the blood of Jesus His Son can thus cleanse you: His blood cleanses from all sin. So His word attests, that you may by faith know yourself made whiter than snow. To doubt this is to dishonour both the Father and the Son; as it is to set yourself against the Holy Spirit Who is here to glorify the Saviour. Those who would bid you distrust God in such mercy are His enemies. Those who curse the proclamation of this truth pronounce a curse which will fall upon themselves when the Lord judges them.

5 The Seed left to grow

Mark 4: 26-29.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 197-198. Gospel No. 6-5.)

This is a parable peculiar to the Gospel of Mark, and therefore characteristic of the divine design. It is as far as possible from having any analogy to the leaven in Matt. 13, which a woman took and bid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened. Christ's service is here set out first and last, marking for the kingdom of God the unexpected fact of His seemingly leaving things to take their course between His action at the beginning and that at the end.

"And he said, Thus is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast the seed upon the earth, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, how he knoweth not himself. Of itself the earth beareth fruit, first a blade, then an ear, then full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is presented, immediately he despatcheth the sickle, because the harvest is arrived" (vers. 26-29).

Matthew gives a complete view in its seven parables of the varying phases of the kingdom of the heavens, and especially in view of the rejection of the Messiah by the Jews and of its special form, "the mysteries of the kingdom," while the rejected King is on high, before He returns as the glorified Son of Man in possession of the universal inheritance.

Mark was led to dwell on the Sower, as the fullest expression of the Saviour's personal ministry, thwarted for the most part, but fulfilling the purpose of grace in such as have ears to hear. Then he records like Luke the solemn admonition that follows. The lamp was not to be put under "the bushel" or under "the bed," but to be put on its stand. God's testimony exposes the true character of things, and tests the witness himself; who, if he makes it his own, has more given, and if not, loses what he has. If the lamp was to shine openly, the truth was to be valued personally.

Then Mark alone adds the beautiful comparison of the Lord's relation to the work which has been cited. He would prepare His servants for the trial of faith that awaited them in His absence. He carefully guards against the difficulty which has often been expressed, and sometimes weakly evaded. For those who know Him reject the unworthy thought that He absolutely abandons all care over His work here below, and yet more, that He Who knows all things knows not how it fares with that on which He laboured. Our Lord took pains to say that the kingdom is "as if"; not that He did not watch and work diligently, any more than that the husbandman does no more than sow and reap, without intermediate interest or services. These dealings are through other scriptures fully revealed, which the parable assuredly does not in any way contradict.

The aim was, while affirming His personal work as ushering in God's kingdom and His gathering the. fruits at the end of the age, to mark emphatically how it should be left while He is on high; but this with fullest confidence that His sowing would come to the just and expected result. We have, therefore, here no thought of seed destroyed by the enemy's power, nor of failure through the flesh, nor of the choking influence of the world, any more than of darnel foisted into the field unawares and spoiling the crop. All goes well, though the great Servant is hidden in God: just "as if a man (after sowing) should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, he knows not how."

Jehovah's messenger had been sent before Messiah's face to prepare His way; but he was imprisoned and slain. Messiah came Himself proclaiming the gospel of God's kingdom, and saying that the time was fulfilled, and the kingdom had drawn nigh. The cross, not the throne, was before Him; and He begins to call servants and to make them fishers of men. For though the unclean spirits obeyed Him, and disease vanished at His touch, even then the men of repute and leading taxed Him with blasphemy, because He forgave sins as God only can. He therefore, knowing all that was to befall Him, provides for the progress of God's work in His rejection unto death, and shows how nothing should hinder its completion.

So, even in Isa. 49: 3-6, we have Jehovah saying, "Thou art my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified. But I said, I have laboured in vain. I have spent my strength for nought and in vain: nevertheless my judgment is with Jehovah, and my work with my God. And now, saith Jehovah that formed me from the womb to be his servant, that I should bring Jacob again to him (though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorified in the eyes of Jehovah, and God shall be my strength); and he saith, It is a small thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel; I have even given thee for a light of the nations, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth."

Similarly here too nothing shall destroy the gracious purpose of God in Christ; and His humiliation on one side and rejection on the other only give it lustre and force. "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness." The apparent frustration for a while secures in the end, and glorifies God and Christ all through. It appears as if He who began and will end had no more to do than the man who, having sown his seed, sleeps and rises, yet the seed springs up and grows, he knows not how. God has so ordered this creation that of itself the earth brings forth fruit in the case supposed, first a blade, then an ear, then full corn in the ear. And so it is spiritually, without visible intervention of His righteous Servant on high.

But when the fruit is presented, He despatches the sickle immediately to reap, since harvest is arrived. It is the contrast of His two advents of personal action, with the unseen advance of what He has sown and what He will reap. On this His own can count without hesitation. God's work, of which Christ is the doer, can fail in nothing to glorify Himself.

Have you, dear reader, a sure part and lot in this work? Are you content with flesh and its glory, though God pronounces it all to be as grass? Oh, receive His living and abiding word, that you may be born again, if you have not received it already" This is the word which in the gospel is preached to you. The Lord Jesus sowed what produced fruit; and this goes on still. It is of faith that it might be according to grace. How welcome should this be to one who knows himself a lost unworthy sinner! The word reveals Christ to you as God's gift; and fruits follow when you receive Him and life in Him. Apart from Him you can do nothing. May grace give you while owning yourself ungodly and powerless without Christ, to receive Him on God's word, that you may go on your way rejoicing!

6 The two Debtors

Luke 7: 41-43.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 215-216. Gospel No. 6: 6.)

Among the beauties of this beautiful story is the fact that no name is given to make known who the sinful woman was, now plainly renewed by grace through faith. Many have thought her to be Mary of Magdala. But she first appears only in the chapter following, with a terrible history quite different from the woman "that was a sinner." Others yet more strangely have fancied Mary of Bethany had once sunk into that infamy, because she too at the close anointed the Lord — with marked difference from this. Luke was inspired to leave in the shade, not the trophy of grace, but her name, whose previous life had been so shameful.

Why should any wish to know what the Lord hid? It is enough to hear what she had been; best of all that He who knew and felt all according to God, pleaded the cause of grace, as it was never pleaded before, pronounced her forgiveness, and sent her away in peace. Whether she had heard the Lord before, or only heard of Him, she came in faith. This drew her to the Lord. This made her brave the Pharisee's scorn. This bent the eyes of her heart on the Saviour only, raising her above all fear of the company. The grace of God in Jesus so filled and transported her soul that at all cost she went to pour her precious unguent on His feet washed by her tears, wiped by her tresses, and covered with her kisses. She came behind as He lay at meat in Simon's house, and thus told her love, and devotedness of that heart, once so debased, now repentant and purified by faith. Not a word did she say with her lips; but the Lord Who knew the hearts of all men appreciated every feeling and every act of a new-born soul entranced with the moral glory of Christ while bowing to light and love of God rising above her many sins. Simon too saw enough to manifest his utter distance from God and alienation from His goodness; he judged as a natural man, confiding in his own righteousness, and condemning the Lord from all that passed yet more than the woman that stood at His feet behind weeping., He had gone so far as to have Him at his house, and felt assured that He could be no prophet who allowed such a woman to touch Him

The Lord answered the Pharisee's unuttered thought, and showed Himself not only a prophet of God, but God of the prophets, come in the lowliest humiliation not to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. Only, he that believeth on Him is not judged; but he that believeth not hath been already judged, because he hath not believed on the name of the Only-begotten Son of God. The Lord put the case. "A certain creditor had two debtors: one owed five hundred denaries, and the other fifty. As they had nothing to pay, he forgave them both. Which of these then will love him most?" On Simon's supposition, "He to whom he forgave most," He said, "Thou hast rightly judged," and contrasted the woman's deep, fervent, and humble affection with the Pharisee's scant courtesy, which told the tale sufficiently of those two hearts.

"And turning to the woman, he said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house: thou gavest me no water for my feet; but she wetted my feet with her tears, and wiped them with her tresses. Thou gavest me no kiss; but she, since I entered, ceased not kissing my feet over. With oil thou didst not anoint my head; but she with unguent anointed my feet" (vers. 44-46).

Simeon had in the temple said of Him as a babe that He was set for the fall and rising up of many in Israel, and for a sign spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed. But there was more here. Jesus revealed God's heart, of which the Pharisee proved unconsciously that he knew nothing. The woman had learnt it. His goodness had penetrated her; and her sense of it expressed itself in her profound reverence to the Lord Jesus. There she had met God; there God made Himself known to her as God of all grace. It was not dogma, but a divine person of infinite love Who attracted, filled, and fixed her heart. All her way and bearing testified to her self-judgment, to her faith, and to her love (for she loved much); as Simon's conduct demonstrated, in Jesus slighted and grace misjudged, that he knew not God. But she knew Him, or rather was known of Him.

"Wherefore, I say to thee, her many sins are forgiven. For she loved much; but he to whom little is forgiven loveth little." Simon had unwittingly sentenced himself. Impossible to know God in Christ without discovering His goodness and our own shameful endless badness. "And he said to her, Thy sins are forgiven." O reader, have you heard His voice? This is your need; and this is His grace. May you too believe! Are there those who resent such love to the guilty on God's part? Who resist the Saviour, not knowing that they fight against God to their own ruin? How did He meet this, for well He knew it? "And He said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee: go in peace." May it be your portion.

7 The Samaritan

Luke 10: 30-37.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 230-231. Gospel 6-7.)

This parable is the Lord's answer to the lawyer's question. And who is my neighbour? A conscience not at case finds difficulties; the heart that is animated by love answers at once, because it finds none. Every sorrow or need makes an appeal to it, and never in vain. Flesh under law being self-occupied, has neither room nor time for others.

"A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho; and he fell among robbers, who, having stripped and beaten him, departed, leaving him half dead. And by coincidence a certain priest was going down by that way; and on seeing him passed on the other side. And likewise also a Levite, when he came to the place and saw, passed on the other side. But a certain Samaritan on journey came to him, and when he saw him was moved with compassion, and came up and bound his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and setting him on his own beast he brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow he took out and gave two denaries to the inn-keeper, and said to him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou shalt spend more, I at my coming back will repay thee. Which of these three, seemeth to thee to have been neighbour of him that fell among the robbers? And he said, He that showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him, Go and do thou likewise" (vers. 30- 37).

Grace and truth in Christ changed all. It was not only from earth to heaven now acting on souls who believed, but love that raised above our own things, imitating God, as the Apostle puts it, like dear children, Christ Himself the motive and power no less than pattern.

Man's sad lot is graphically shown in him who was going down from the place of religious privilege and pride to that of the curse, and fell in with robbers who took his all and beat him, leaving him half dead. Earthly priesthood, and earthly ministry, wholly failed. Only the despised One availed; and none was more despised or hated than a Samaritan, unless it were the One Who exceeds all comparisons. He on His errand of love, far from passing by and shutting up His inmost feelings of compassion, came up and bandaged the wounds, pouring on soothing and cleansing grace, dismounted to raise up the wretched one now comforted, and took him under His care. Doubtless it is the Lord's congenial sketch of practical grace for the lawyer's help; but it is the shadow of His own path day by day, and far indeed from exhausting or even describing what was deepest in His work.

Nor is His love satisfied with thoughtful beneficence for the present; He charges himself with the future in terms all the more striking, because the figure is homely. How full and transcendent is the love which is not bounded by ties of flesh or obligations of earthly duty, but flows from a divine and eternal spring from within, and only finds objects of need without to act on, no person too repulsive, no need beyond the resources of grace. "And on the morrow He took out and gave two denaries to the inn-keeper, and said to him, Take care of him, and whatever thou shalt spend more, I at my coming back will repay thee." Yes, His provision while absent is adequate, whatever the unbelief may think of it as of Him; and when He returns, what repayment where He is trusted! What forfeits, where He is scorned! Even the lawyer could not but feel the appeal, and own the superiority of that mercy which the Lord depicted and exemplified. If he ever did in like manner, it must have been through the faith that received the Saviour and realised the truth and love of God in Him.

God Himself is now acting on such love, though shown in a way infinitely more profound in giving His own Son up to compassionate, save, and bless the powerless and ungodly. It is no question of a claim but of ruin in man and of grace in Himself: only the work of Christ makes it righteous in God, and us righteous in Christ. Such is the efficacy of His death on the cross.

How does it affect you, dear reader? It finds you a lost and rebellious sinner. Such you have been really, whoever you are and whatever you may have seemed to yourself or other men. You may have sought and provided a religious veil; but it is of no more value in God's eye than the web the spider weaves. Their webs, says the prophet, shall not become garments, neither shall they cover themselves with their works; their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. For none are prouder or more bitter than natural men under a veil of religion. The way of peace they know not, and there is no judgment in their goings. They have made their paths crooked: whose goeth therein knoweth not peace.

All depends for efficacy on Christ alone. He it is Who brings God to man and man to God; but it is vain for me or you or any that hear the gospel unless we believe on Him. This is to submit to the righteousness of God, Who is ever found in His grace, by him who truly owns his sins in the faith of Christ. Oh, fellow sinner, dare to be thorough in confessing what you have done and are at the feet of Jesus Who never rejects one that comes confiding in the call of God. It is what God delights in; it is to vindicate Him and honour His dishonoured Son, the all-worthy One, in the face of every foe, and of all our own sins and unbelief. Do not drop this call to your soul. You cannot pretend that you do not need the Saviour; or that you are now pleasing God Who summons you to believe in Him. Turn to Him therefore at once, and confess your guilt and evil, but doubt not His grace. Look not away till you rest on Him and His precious blood which cleanses from every sin.

8 The importunate Appeal

Luke 11: 5-13.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 246-248. Gospel No. 6: 8.)

The Holy Spirit at this point in the Gospel of Luke brings together, as is His manner frequently, two things which may have been by no means near historically, to illustrate a great moral truth. The value of the divine word, and of prayer. The one closes chap. 10, the other opens chap. 11.

Of His own will God the Father begot us with the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures (James 1: 18). So Peter in his First Epistle (1 Peter 1: 22) speaks of our having purified our souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit, being born again not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible, by the word of God which liveth and abideth forever. "And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you." Wherefore as new-born babes, we are exhorted, laying aside evil of word, deed, and spirit, to desire the sincere milk of the word that we may grow thereby unto salvation, the salvation ready to be revealed at Christ's appearing. The same word of God that quickened us who believe, nourishes, strengthens, and guards our souls. Paul teaches the same truth. Faith is by hearing and hearing by the word of God (Rom.10:17). "In Christ Jesus I have begotten you by the gospel" (1 Cor. 1), not by baptism, for he had baptised very few, but by the gospel which they received of him and he preached to them. It was the word which corrected their faults and restored their souls, as we see in 2 Cor. For Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, to a sure and glorious end. Nor is John a whit less explicit; for he shows us the disciples already clean because of the word Christ had spoken to them (John 15). They are sanctified through the truth, which the word is (John 17).

But when we have received the word as Mary did in the love of it, and at the feet of Jesus, we none the less but the more need prayer to walk worthily of God, Who called us to His kingdom and glory. And so we find the Lord, as He is seen continually in prayer, teaching His disciples to pray. For the life we receive in Him, as it is of God, so lives in dependence on Him habitually and in obedience of His will made known in His word. Man, as our Lord cited to the tempter, shall not live by bread alone but by every word of God. My meat, said He to the disciples, is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work; and again, As the living Father sent Me and I live (not merely "by" but) on account of the Father; so he that eateth Me, as every true Christian does, even he shall live on account of Me. Christ thus becomes the believer's object and motive. None of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live to the Lord; and whether we die, we die to the Lord: whether we live therefore or die, we are the Lord's (Rom. 14). And He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live to themselves, but to Him Who died for them and rose again (2 Cor. 5).

Hence the great apostle lays down that every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God, and prayer (1 Tim. 4: 4, 5). The word here used goes, no doubt, beyond the ordinary word for prayer and implies that intercourse which is now open to us with God by redemption, and encourages us in all intercession because of the access we have into the grace wherein we stand. But it is thoroughly prayer to God in a way that is as full as it is free which His love sanctions, now that His righteousness is manifested, the word expressing what comes from Him, as prayer what goes up to Him, in the life of faith.

On the details of the prayer here given, and yet more fully in the Gospel of Matthew, we need say little beyond noticing the efforts of unbelief to assimilate them. Each is perfect for the purpose of God where they are given, the shorter one for Gentile instruction no less than the longer for believers of the circumcision. The petition for 'he earth is here omitted, as also about that power of evil, which the Jew must know peculiarly to mark the time which precedes their deliverance and blessing at the end.

But what a stimulus the Lord here adds! "And he said to them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go to him at midnight, and say to him, Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and 1 have nothing to set before him? And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot rise and give thee. I say to you, though he will not rise and give him because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth" (vers. 5-8).

Truly the Saviour needed not that any should testify of man; for He knew what was in man. As really man as Adam, He was always and perfectly above all the taint of fallen humanity, "the born holy Thing." Not only He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth, but in Him, it could be and is said absolutely, is no sin. And He know what is in God, for God He was and is for ever. He was thoroughly aware of man's reluctance to draw near to God, and his indisposition to expect good from God. Man is not a giver himself, least of all does he feel that God gives continually and abundantly in the natural sphere of man's wants. But that God should give His best, the Son of His love, to deliver him from evil and from judgment, to blot out his sins, to give him life eternal, so exceeds all that is in his own heart and all that his conscience justly needs, that he cannot, will not, believe it, even though God has sent the most complete and solemn testimony in the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ His Son. He is averse to the glad tidings, because it makes nothing of man, every-tidings, be thing of God's own goodness in Christ. If it were only a rite or an institution of mysterious efficacy by man and for man, this he could understand; something done for him if not by himself by another, this he could trust, especially if many others accepted the same way. But to own himself only evil, God alone good, most and best of all in giving His Only-begotten that he might live and have Him as propitiation for his sins, this indeed is God's love beyond creature thought, yet the very love we are called to believe in the gospel.

In early days a great persecutor had it revealed to and in him, as he was given to see the glorified Lord and to hear the words of His mouth. What was the immediate effect? "Behold, he prayeth." And so it ever is. Faith in Him leads into new relationships and creates new wants; while the old man is still there, though judicially condemned in the cross and calling for vigilant self-judgment in the practice of every hour here below. But the believer not only was justified by faith and has peace through our Lord Jesus Christ; through Him he possesses access by faith into this grace wherein we stand. No doubt he is called to praise and give thanks continually, but to pray in his weakness and exposure to a world of evil and a sleepless subtle foe. As prayer is due to our God and Father, so is it most necessary for His children. And the Lord illustrates it even from man, evil as he is, and though appealing at midnight, when difficulties were greatest. Yet then, where the want was urgent, and without any resource to meet it, a mere man does not fail to rise and give, not for friendship alas! but because of importunity. How much more should the believer count on God! "Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened. For every one that asketh receiveth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." God giveth to all life and breath and all things; it is His nature.

Relationship only adds to this. "If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if [he ask] a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? or if he shall ask an egg, will he give him a scorpion?" An enemy might, but God is the truest of friends, a Father as none also approaches. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall the Father who [is] of heaven give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him" (vers. 11-13)?

The Lord has in view His own in their new wants and awaiting their special privilege. The Spirit, though ever working in the family of faith, was to be given, as the Son was already; the Son for sinners, the Spirit to saints. The disciples were awaiting the promise of the Father and received the Spirit at Pentecost, when Peter laid down the terms, "Repent, and be baptised each of you on the name of Jesus Christ for remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2: 38). No wonder that they continued stedfastly, as in other holy functions, so "in prayers," fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

9 The Blasphemy of God's Power in Christ

Luke 11: 14-26.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 263-264. Gospel No. 6: 9.)

The casting out of unclean spirits or demons has a great place in the synoptic Gospels, and most justly. It fell to the fourth Gospel rather to set out the positiveness of life eternal in Christ and of the Holy Spirit to be sent in His name on His departure. In the Gospel of Mark it is the first miracle recorded, and it often reappears and with no little detail. Our Gospel begins His ministry characteristically with His words of grace to man, and if His own would not hear, to the Gentile; for grace is sovereign. But the special power of Satan over man (never so manifest as when Jesus was here) immediately follows, as we may readily see the prominent place it has also in Matthew's Gospel.

But Christ's power in expelling demons drew out man's hatred and blasphemy. "Through Beelzebub, the prince of the demons, he casteth out demons," said some; as others tempting sought from Him a sign out of heaven. The folly and wickedness of such an imputation the Lord proved at once. Not only would Satan be at war with himself, but their own sons who cast out demons reproved them. Yet in their case it was rare, in His constant and unfailing, the witness that, if the display of God's kingdom in power and glory is not yet, that kingdom had come upon them in His person. Alas! the old sentence Was renewed only more stringently their heart grown fat, their ears heavy, their eyes closed as asleep, lest they should be converted, and healed of God.

Thereon the Lord states first the case of God's gracious power in Him, next the consequence of unbelief in them.

"When the strong one in arms keepeth his own court, his goods are in peace; but when the stronger than he cometh upon and conquereth him, he taketh away his panoply on which he relied and divideth his spoils" (vers. 21, 22).

This the Lord was then doing before all eyes in the land. The acceptable year of Jehovah was manifest, not yet to all the world, but in Him Who in the wilderness had vanquished Satan in simple obedience and by the written word. This is the moral power of the Spirit in man; and the Lord was the blessed witness of it in perfection. This was followed by the powers of the age to come, manifestations then of that energy which will wholly deliver the coming age from the enemy. Long had the strong exercised his baneful, blasting influence, long were his goods in peace. Now the stronger than he was come and had conquered him. His power was broken before the Seed of the woman; he could no longer retain his possessions. Demons, were they a legion, were cast out. Blind saw, lame walked, lepers were cleansed, deaf heard, dumb spoke, and dead were raised.

It is true that the devil was not yet crushed, and had departed from Him but for a season. He had sought in vain to draw Him out of the path of obedience; he would return to kill Him in it. But this would only turn to a greater victory for God and man, not merely over "his goods" in the present, but in the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the whole world. The question of guilt and evil in the face of judgment and eternity would then he solved as it now is in the precious blood and death and resurrection of Him Who sits at God's right hand in glory.

Still the victory already gained was great, and the ground of confidence for all that would follow in its time, and the wondrous way of God in the cross. If, as Luke says, some from among the crowd, blasphemed; if, as Matthew says, the Pharisees did, and, as Mark says, the scribes, all together show that the Jews did high and low, religious and learned emphatically, to their common and utter ruin, But the Lord points out the crisis for faith. When the worst unbelief works, it is just the moment for bold openness of faith. "He that is not with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth" (ver. 23). With this standard the believer too wins the victory. The middle way here is a delusion. Christ alone is worthy of all trust. Neutrality here is fatal. To be with Him is imperative; to gather save with Him is scattering, however fair man's promise or the appearance for the moment.

How is it with you, my reader? "I am (said He) the light of the world. He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life." "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath life eternal." Dread then above all things not to be with Him. If you are not with Him, you are against Him. Any or every other companion fails to be a security: Christ alone is so.

And He is the True God and eternal life, so gathering with Him alone stands, and is acceptable to God. All that embraces or seeks the world bears on itself the brand of the enemy, and is in no way of the Father. Nay more, there is no gathering of saints that pleases God, unless Christ be the test and the centre. And the claim of infallibility for any man but Him Who is God is most daring sin against God, and a most manifest antichrist, denying the Father and the Son, however secure such think themselves.

What then is the consequence? "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he goeth through dry places seeking rest; and finding none he saith, I will return to my house whence I came out. And having come he findeth it swept and adorned. Then he goeth his way and taketh seven other spirits worse than himself; and entering in they dwell there; and the, last of that man [is] worse than the first" (vers. 24- 26).

It is the failing away, the apostasy followed by the man of sin. The unclean spirit of idolatry among the Jews was the precursor and moral cause of the captivity in Babylon. Since then the Jews have been generally free of that evil, conspicuously so after the Maccabees prevailed. But they no less peremptorily rejected Jesus the Messiah. They were against Him, and, instead of gathering, scattered and were scattered as never before nor so long. And they are still "empty," as Matthew says, empty of the power of God. What avails then to be swept and adorned? The old unclean idolatrous spirit will surely return, with the sevenfold power of the enemy; and how awful the end for the many! A remnant who will then be with Jesus will be graciously owned as His own, and they with Him will be the centre for the gathered peoples of the earth.

In Luke the Holy Spirit does not confine its bearing to "that generation," but widens it to "man." And the end of the individuals and the nations of Christendom will be no better. For God is not mocked. They have not continued in God's goodness and must also be cut off. They are largely idolatrous already, and this will grow to greater ungodliness, to the apostasy and the man of sin for them as for the unbelieving Jews.

Oh! then receive Christ, and the love of the truth that you may be saved, while the door stands open and God calls you to believe in His Son.

10 The rich Fool

Luke 12: 16-21.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 276-277. Gospel No. 6: 10.)

Christ puts before the disciples the consequences of Jewish unbelief. The light of God's testimony shines only the brighter. He is the Son of Man as well as the Messiah, and His rejection by the old people of God but opens the door of grace through His death to all the nations of mankind. Here He warns of not Sadducean evil only but of Pharisaic: their leaven was hypocrisy. But as God is light, so everything covered up shall be revealed.

Such is Christ and Christianity. The veil is rent, and the blood of Christ brings the believer to God, Who alone, not man, is to be feared. And the Son of man is the test. Him who Shall confess Him before men will the Son confess also before the angels. For now it is not a question of the earth, but of hell (Gehenna) and of heaven, of things eternal, not seen and temporal. And the testimony of the Holy Spirit is final: he that blasphemes Him shall not be forgiven. The Holy Spirit deigns to teach the believer; no matter what the emergency, he need not be anxious: the Holy Spirit suffices (vers. 1-12).

Another root of evil is now laid bare thoroughly — covetousness. "Teacher (said one), speak to my brother to divide the inheritance with me. But he said to him, Man, who constituted Me a judge or divider over you?" This the Lord will be in the most glorious way when He comes in His kingdom. It was therefore no unreasonable wish for one, who if he owned Him as Messiah, had no perception of the change His rejection brings. It was in no way for the rejected Messiah to divide earthly inheritances. "And he said to them, See and keep yourselves from covetousness; for, while one may have abundance, his life is not in his possessions. And he spoke a parable unto them, saying, The land of a certain rich man bore fruitfully. And he reasoned in himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have not where to gather my crops? And he said, This will I do: I will take down my granaries, and build greater; and there will I gather all my produce and my good things. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast many good things laid up for many years: rest, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, Fool, this night is thy soul required of thee; and whose shall be what thou didst prepare? Thus [is] he that treasureth up for himself, and [is] not rich toward God" (vers. 13-21).

Are not these evils rife now in Christendom? Do not both abound in what we are apt to think the most favoured lands on earth? Who can deny their sanctioned prevalence among the Anglo-Saxon race? Where are they more unblushing than in England and America? What is a fair show in the flesh but hypocrisy, not merely in Establishments here or there, but quite as really in the dissenting societies? Where is not the influence of money dominant? Where is "the unrighteous mammon" so much discussed, so earnestly sought, and, as far as given, so glaringly vaunted? Money is treated even by pious men as the sinews of the gospel; just as the world counts it the sinews of war. The entire system of religious societies rests on the pillars of gold and silver. Never was there so deep and open and general an affront put on the Holy Spirit; never did Christian effort rest on so debasing a foundation. Never were souls encouraged so distinctly to make money insatiably that they may give more liberally. In this gold and gain-hunting day are not Christians as assiduous and eager to heap up wealth as the sons of this age? And if they spend on themselves and their families, who reproves worldliness, if there be fairly large gifts for the chapel and the societies, for Bibles, for Tracts, and for Missions, to enumerate no more?

Here the Lord presents the picture of an everyday reality. Covetousness implies no dishonesty, and is not even hard or sharp dealing, being no more than the desire of more: the very spring of modern effort, the motive of bettering himself commended to all from the mechanic to the millionaire. Thus the creature becomes the object, not God; and therefore is covetousness declared to be idolatry. It is man looking down, not up in dependence on God. The rich man was not content, but high-minded and trusted not in God but in the certainty of what is most uncertain. Rich in good works he was not, nor liberal in distributing, nor grateful for the abundance which he had, nor disposed to communicate. He aspired after greater things and planned for nothing but his own ease and enjoyment, as if he had a lease for ever. God was in none of his thoughts, but read them all. When the rich man called on his soul to be merry over the many goods laid up for many years, the summons came: "Fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee."

O my reader, rich or poor, is this your folly? For it may be in hope, yet more frequently than in possession; and God is not mocked. Many a rich man perishes in his selfish ease; many would-be rich fall into temptation and a snare, into unwise and hurtful lusts which plunge them into destruction and ruin. Oh! look to Him Who, being rich, for our sakes became poor, that we by His poverty might be enriched. The abiding riches of glory we, changed into His likeness, shall receive and use aright. The riches of His grace He offers you now in His redemption. Despise not them nor Him; for this is to brave or court perdition. Confess your true place as a lost sinner before God, that He may give the salvation of your soul now by the faith of Christ, and by-and-by the salvation of your body at His coming.

11 Waiting for the Lord

Luke 12: 35-38.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 292-293. Gospel No. 6-11.)

Throughout this chapter the Lord is withdrawing His disciples, now that His rejection proceeded and His departure approached, from their thoughts and ways as Jews. This is ever wholesome, for it grounds the believer in Christianity, which nature and the world resist. But then it was absolutely requisite and of the highest value that they should be weaned from the old weak and beggarly elements, to learn, enjoy, and live the new thing. It is not the power of Messiah present and governing here below, but God's word and Spirit. Hence the unseen and eternal things are revealed; hence confession of the truth, of the rejected One, is imperative, as God only is to be feared, and the danger is of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Only the gracious Lord encourages the faith that owns Him by the very things which terrify unbelief. Earthly justice is not His care now; nor should earthly care be theirs. What was the portion of the rich man that forgot his soul?

The disciples are called to confide in Him Who feeds the ravens, and clothes the lilies and the grass, with a glory beyond Solomon's. Why then should they be anxious like the nations of the world? Their Father knows their bodily wants, and adds these things to such as seek His kingdom. Moreover He would have them of good courage; for was it not His delight to give them the kingdom? Hence, far from covetousness, they were called to be kings now in superiority to money. The world was no more their quest, but to use its things in unselfish love. This is to make for themselves an unfailing treasure in the heavens, where also their heart was to be. And thus in practice they become heavenly. "Let your loins be girded about, and your lamps burning, and ye like men awaiting their own lord, when he may return from the wedding, that, when he cometh and knocketh, they may immediately open to him. Blessed are those bondmen whom the lord on coming shall find watching! Verily I say to you, that he will gird himself, and make them recline at table, and come up and serve them. And if he come in the second watch, and in the third, and find them so, blessed are they!" (vers. 35-38.)

Here then beyond just question the Lord lays down the attitude of the Christian. Is it yours? He Himself is the test beyond all else. It is not consistent with faith to be worried with anxiety about the things that perish. It is well to be of good cheer, knowing His love and His purpose of glory for the little flock, tried and exposed as it now is. But to be like men that wait for their own lord is a still more positive and decisive test. It presupposes in a personal way faith working by love. Their treasure is in the heavens where He is. They love Him, because He first loved them. They do not forget Him in His absence; they are not merely occupied with their work, for indeed their loins were girt about and their lamps burning, but themselves awaiting their own Lord. Nor again were they discussing dates, nor on the lookout for political change, nor yet with eyes fixed on signs in the sun, moon, and stars. The Christian watches for Christ. He, his life, his righteousness, his Saviour, his Lord, is gone with the promise of coming to receive him to Himself, one knows not how soon. And He has sent His last message since that He is coming quickly.

Therefore would we not doubt but wait, content with His word Who is the Truth, and the Faithful and True Witness. Long as it may seem, He is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, "but is longsuffering toward you, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." As He is waiting, so should we be; and thus we keep the word of His patience, but assure our hearts in the bright hope. Is He not worthy? is not the hope well worth the while? and is it not deep consolation that meanwhile many hear His voice, believe in His name, and with us wait for Him?

O my reader, if it be not so with you, where are you, and what? You well know whether you are waiting for the Lord Jesus; yea others, even the world, can in fair measure judge whether this is your habitual attitude. The Lord recognises no other object of hope in His own. This is also the chief responsibility as His bondmen. Be assured that other duties will be done all the better, because this has the first and constant place. Read all the N.T. and see if this hope be not bound up with every joy and sorrow, with the walk and work and worship of the Christian, who found in Him the object of faith when he was a lost sinner and now as a saint has none other as his hope. If you believe in Him, be not untrue to Him as your hope, but judge yourself in every thing that hinders your waiting for Him day by day.

If you have no faith in Him, how sad is your estate! Perhaps you are so beguiled by the spirit of the age growingly infidel, as to deny His glory as the Son of God and His humiliation as the Son of man. Perhaps you deny His resurrection, if not His death, yea the death of the cross. You deny all this at your peril; and your peril is everlasting punishment. For it is folly to suppose that, if the Son of God came to be propitiation for our sins, God did not give adequate proof to make mankind responsible to receive Him, and verily, fatally, guilty in rejecting Him. To reject a divine Person, Who in infinite love deigned to die in order to save you and me by faith from judgment, cannot be a secondary thing. It is the truth that God now testifies to all in the gospel, which bears the self-evidence of His holy love as no pretended sacred book does comparably. It has been proved to the peace and joy and salvation of millions as guilty and incredulous as you. Why then be so careless, so mad, so wicked as to fight more against God, and turn His message of mercy, because refused, into a sentence of condemnation righteous and everlasting? Receiving the Lord Jesus by faith, you are entitled by God's grace to salvation, and can then welcome His coming with love and delight; and triumph. You can then join those that are waiting for Him, that, when He knocks, you may open to Him immediately.

_________________

Job 38: 7 appears to express poetically the joy of the orbs of heaven when first ushered in as the hosts of heaven, with the audible acclaim of the angels, who in this book as in Genesis are called God's sons.

12 Working for the Lord

Luke 12: 41-44.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 308-309. Gospel No. 6-12.)

Christ is the fullest test for every soul of man, for sinner or for saint. He is the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him; as he that has seen Him, the Son, has seen the Father. For no one has seen God at any time: the only begotten Son that is in the bosom of the Father — He has declared Him. All blessing for the sinner turns on receiving the Saviour. He only is the propitiation for our sins, as He alone gives the believer life eternal.

So also Christ makes manifest the practical difference between one believer and another. Thus of the two sisters with their brother, whom Jesus loved, Mary was shown to have chosen the good part which should not be taken from her; whereas Martha chose rather that much serving which distracted her, and made her grumble because her sister sat down at His feet, listening to His word.

Not otherwise is it here in the Lord's estimate of waiting for Him with working for Him. Undoubtedly the believer is called to do both. But we readily let slip His mind, and are apt to prefer what gives us importance to what pleases Him most. Now the lack of being filled with the sense of His glory and His grace weakens and injures our service; because it exposes us to the ways, if not devices, of our own activity, instead of dependence on Him and subjection to His word.

Hence our Lord draws the twofold picture of blessedness in this chapter. (1) "Blessed are those bondmen whom the Lord on coming shall find watching: verily I say to you, that he will gird himself and make them recline at table, and coming up will serve them" (ver. 37). And He repeats their blessedness in the following verse. What immense grace on His part! It was love that wrought thus mightily. It was His love that created theirs; His that was seen by faith to be so great in One so glorious that formed and fed theirs, and drew them out in waiting for Him as their chiefest, clearest, and constant hope. At His coming He will not forget their loving and worshipping hearts. He will show in the day of His glory His appreciation of their longing for Him, while others expended it more or less on other objects. It will be His joy, never ceasing His service of love even in glory, to pay them especial honour, girding Himself to serve them.

(2) But there is more than this, though not so near His heart nor so high morally. For when Peter said, "Lord, sayest thou this parable to us or also to all?" the Lord said, "Who then is the faithful and wise steward whom his lord will set over his household to give them the portion of food in season? Blessed is that bondman whom his lord on coming shall find doing thus: verily I say unto you, that he will set him over all that he hath" (vers. 41-44). Here it is working as distinguished from waiting or watching. It is doing Him service, rather than the eyes of the heart fixed on His coming. His interests may be cared for with zeal, His work done faithfully and with intelligence. Sinners are sought earnestly that they may be saved; saints are loved and tended because they are precious to Him. Neither is the Lord unmindful of the service; nor is God unrighteous to forget the work. For that bondman whom the Lord on coming shall find so doing, He will set over all that He has. And has He not pledged Himself so to act, Who is Heir of all things? The servant shall share in the display of His Lord's glory, if he serve faithfully now in the day He is slighted.

Yet great and glorious as will be the day of recompence, and the requital worthy of Him Who is now served, however weakly in the face of the world which crucified the Lord of glory, what are such returns, wondrous as they shall be, compared to the inner scene of His love! Then, according to the graphic figure, He will make them recline in the Father's house and serve them in that loving service that has no end. When Christ our life shall be manifested, then shall we also with Him be manifested in glory. All the world will see and know it. But it is a deeper thing to enjoy His personal love and honour in a way beyond all creature thought and the world's ken, as He here promises to the bondmen who wait and watch for Him.

O my reader, how is it with you as you read these lines? You may not be conscious of enmity to the Lord Jesus. But are you a confessor of His name? Are you following Him openly as well as believing in Him? Remember the ruler so moral from his youth, who could bear neither to part with his large possessions, nor to follow Christ. It is indeed impossible with men, but not with God, as the Lord said; for all things are possible with God. And what has He done for you and your salvation? — given His own Son to become a man, and a bondman, and a sacrifice that you by faith may lay your hand on that all-efficacious Burnt-Offering. "And it shall be accepted for you to make atonement for you." For nothing less than this, but even more, does the gospel of God present to you in His name.

Fear not therefore if you draw near in that Name of Jesus which is above every name; fear not; only believe. You cannot make too much of the one Mediator between God and man. God will honour your drawing on His infinite grace, if you draw in the name of the Lord Jesus. The Son of God became man, Christ Jesus, and gave Himself a ransom for all; and the Holy Spirit in the gospel proclaims it now that you may believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved. This is God's testimony in the good news, and these are its own times. The night comes when none can work and none can hear, when those that refuse to hear must perish. If it be so with you, it is your own sin. God sent His only-begotten Son that you might not perish but have life eternal. Oh! hear His word that you may believe and be saved.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Seventh Series.

Gospel Words — Seventh Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Wicked Servant

2 . The Fruitless Fig-tree

3 What is God's kingdom like

4 The Uprising of the Housemaster

5 The Guests

6 The Host

7 The Great supper

8 The Lost Sheep

9 The Lost Drachma

10 The Lost son

11 The Prudent Steward

12 The Rich man and Lazarus

1 The Wicked Servant

Luke 12: 45-48.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 323-324. Gospel No. 7-1.)

Instructive and solemn is the picture which the Lord draws of the servant in verses 45, 46, rendered still more full and precise in verses 47, 48, when a notable difference comes to light.

When our Lord announced His departure to the Father's house, and the mission of another Advocate, the Holy Spirit to be in and with the disciples, He was no less distinct in promising His own coming again to receive them unto Himself, for the same place as Himself on high. And when gazing into heaven after their ascending Master, they were told. by unimpeachable testimony that He should thus come as they had seen Him go. There is no doubt that in apostolic times the church walked in this hope, and that the mouths of preachers and teachers then spoke of it out of the abundance of their heart. Yet none ever regarded it as a question of date, any more than the Lord Who revealed it as a simple and pure and constant hope from His love to their love. And this difference is the more striking, because, the day of His appearing, which in due time follows His coming for His heavenly saints, is associated with prophecy and its judgments and signs in both the Old Testament and the New.

Hence the earnestness with which the apostle taught the converts, like those in Thessalonica from their first start, to await God's Son from the heavens, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath (1 Thess. 1: 10). Not only did He write of His coming with all His saints in 1 Thess. 3: 13, but of His coming for them to raise and change them, as a necessarily antecedent action in 1 Thess. 4: 12-17. He does much more; for he identifies himself and all saints with it as their proximate hope by saying, not "they" as at a distant future, but "we, the living, that survive" (in contrast with those meanwhile "put to sleep by Jesus") until the coming (or presence) of the Lord, shall not precede those put to sleep. Both were to be caught up together. The aim of the Spirit of truth, Who knew the end from the beginning, and expressly gave the message "in the word of the Lord," was to put the hope over before the heart, made sure of its fruition, but by set purpose not sure when, so that all the saints might be always looking for it. It was impossible otherwise to have the hope common, constant, and living. Infidels and those under their influence mock, as if it was the apostle's error, at that which was really the perfect  wisdom of God in giving "one hope," which never did nor can pass away till His coming shall be its crown.

In the parable the Lord points out from the first that putting off the hope would betray the evil heart of unbelief, the root of other evils.

"But if that bondman say in his heart, My lord delayeth to come, and shall begin to beat the men-servants and the maid-servants, and to eat and drink and be drunken, the lord of that servant will have come in a day when he expecteth not, and in an hour that he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder and set his portion with the unfaithful" (verses 45, 46).

It is not a doctrinal mistake (though this is not a slight thing with God's word and Spirit to direct aright), but the far more serious aberration of the "heart," which is too easy where this doctrine may be held. How sad the soul's state where Christ's coming is unwelcome; and the bondman does what his heart likes! Thus is the separative power of the hope lost, and its attraction to Him Who is coming and His word. Violence ensues towards his fellows, who become disagreeable, as the world with its enjoyments become pleasant company. Can any words more graphically sketch Christendom's practical ruin, of which the first symptom was the heart's plea, My Lord delayeth His coming? This will not hinder but rather hasten His coming unexpectedly, Who will punish his disloyalty and assign his portion with the faithless, notwithstanding all his boast of Christian privileges.

In the verses that follow, the Lord rules, that sad as the heathen's case may be in the day that hastens, incomparably worse is the Christian professor's. "And that bondman who knew his own lord's will and made not ready nor did his will, shall be beaten with many [stripes]; but he who knew [it] not and did things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few. And to every one to whom much has been given, much shall be required of him; and to whom they commit much, of him they will ask the more" (verses 47, 48).

O my reader, forget not that You have an open Bible, hear the gospel, are sometimes troubled when you think of your sins and feel ashamed because you shrink from confessing the Lord's name, as much as you love the world and the things of the world. "The end of those things is death;" after which comes judgment. How will your guilt and the madness of your unbelief seem then when it is too late? Oh, turn not away from Him that speaks from heaven of His cleansing blood, Whose voice will soon shake earth and heaven also. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, end thou shalt be saved." His grace now is as sure to the believer, as His judgment will be shortly terrible for the unbeliever. God is not mocked.

2. The Fruitless Fig-tree

Luke 13: 6-9.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 339-340. Gospel No. 7: 2.)

Men are apt to dwell on shocking events, and to measure the guilt of the victims accordingly. So it was when the Lord warned of the crisis for the Jewish people which His presence could not but  bring about. For He was there in the testimony of the truth and in the humiliation of grace, not yet in the power and glory of the Kingdom; He was there for faith to receive, but for unbelief to refuse or despise. If rejection unto death was before Him, they were on the way to the sure dealings of God in judgment. Then it was that some reported to Him the tragic end of the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. But our Lord in answer corrects their own thought of exceptional guilt in that case, and solemnly warns them that, except they repented, they should all perish in the same way. Nay more, He points to the eighteen men, not slain by an unfeeling and truculent Roman, on whom the tower of Siloam fell. Yet were they debtors beyond all the men in Jerusalem? On the contrary He repeats, "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." This is God's voice to sinful man in the present disorder of the world. Man is no competent judge of the tangled scene; but he is loudly called through such events to judge himself before God, in short to repent. And the Lord gives the call divine force: "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

O my reader, except you repent, worse impends over you than what befell those then occupied with passing sorrows. How often their blood was mingled afterwards with their sacrifices by their own infuriate zealots! Worse, far worse, impends over you than when the burning ruins of the temple buried its multitudes, who vainly trusted the sanctuary instead of repenting of their sins. For what is any judgment in providence compared with the everlasting judgment of God? And what is more inevitable for man? "It is appointed to men once to die, but after this, judgment." How unutterably appalling for the unrepentant! For it surely means no less than everlasting destruction.

The Lord adds a parable also to enforce the truth. "A certain one had a fig-tree, planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, Behold, three years I come seeking fruit on the fig-tree and find none: out it down; why cumbereth it the ground? But be answering saith to him, Sir, let it alone this year also, until I shall dig about it and put manure. And if it produceth fruit thenceforth,-; but if not, thou shalt cut it down" (vers. 6-9).

Can any doubt be that the Lord has in view the elect nation planted, not casually, but in His vineyard, with every advantage of site and of care? But no fruit was found. Of this there was more than adequate witness. For three years it is waited on for fruit, but there is none. It was worse than useless. It was a nuisance. Cut it down, said the owner. But He Who felt for God's rights and called the guilty to repent felt also compassion for man, and urges the plea, "Let it alone this, year also." New and final measures were to be taken. "If it shall produce fruit thenceforth,-; but if not, thou shalt cut it down."

Alas! we know the issue. No wonder the Lord leaves a blank. What had He not done? What had He not suffered? Even on the cross He cried, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." But as they bore no fruit — nothing but leaves, so they in their pride should not be forgiven, rejecting every proof of their need and guilt. Hence they have lost not only their place as a nation but their religious status. The fig-tree is withered away. It was the people under law; never more shall there be fruit of it for ever. Thank God, there will be a generation to come; and it will believe in Him. That generation, not this, will repent. That generation, not this, will say, Blessed be He that cometh in the name of Jehovah. His blood will wash them from their sins, instead of being as now a curse on them and their children. And He will write His laws in their minds, as He will give them to their hearts, never remembering more their sins and their lawlessnesses. For it is the new covenant of God's grace, not of man's works only to show them worthless and evil.

Meanwhile God is sending His glad tidings to you. to Gentile as well as Jew; yea now to the Gentiles emphatically, for it is the day of grace. He now enjoins men that they should all everywhere repent. Oh! hear the call and own yourself lost that you may receive the Saviour. This He is to the uttermost now toward all that repent. How would it be with you if He were come to judge the habitable earth in righteousness? How could you stand before the Judge? It is now His call that you repent. He waits to be gracious to you in all your ruin and to save you from your sins. He can afford and loves to do it, for His blood cleanseth from every sin.

3 What is God's kingdom like

Luke 13: 18-21.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 356-357. Gospel No. 7-3.)

The kingdom of God is no secret hid in Himself. It is a purpose revealed of old in His word. When Moses and the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea which covered Pharaoh's host, they sang, "Jehovah will reign forever." But this, like every thing else under the law, for the present failed through their sins. At length they rejected Jehovah's reign, desiring a king "like all the nations." Saul their choice was their sorrow and shame; but God in pity gave them David and Solomon. Even then all was but provisional, and at best but a type of God's Son, the true King, Who alone will make good His throne on the holy hill of Zion.

When the Lord Jesus presented Himself to the Jews, they proved their evil estate by denying and crucifying Him, as their prophets had foreshown. And He Who knew all beforehand told that they should not see Him henceforth till they should say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of Jehovah. But they surely will, and He will build up Zion, appearing in His glory. So the nations shall fear Him, and all the kings of the earth His glory. This will be the kingdom in the manifest sense, to which all the prophets gave witness, postponed as yet through Israel's unbelief. When their heart shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away; to this day alas! it remains unremoved.

Meanwhile the Lord in His ministry here below announced the mystery or secret of the kingdom of God (Mark 4: 11), while the King, rejected on earth, is absent on high. The consequence is that divine power is not manifested in the removal of Satan and the putting down of all the enemies; it works spiritually in those that believe, whilst a vast system of mere profession grows up and spreads to a certain extent here below. This last and by the Jews wholly unexpected result is what our evangelist was inspired to set out in our Lord's two comparisons.

"And he said, To what is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I liken it? It is like a grain of mustard which a man took and cast into his garden; and it grew and became a great tree, and the birds of heaven lodged in its branches. And again he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened" (vers. 18- 21).

The moral design of our Gospel is well illustrated by the peculiar introduction of the two parables at this point. No intimation marks that they were then uttered. The first Gospel gives them in their place where the seven parables disclose the kingdom of the heavens, or rather its mysteries, as a complete whole. The parable of the Sower is separated from them and given in connection with His own ministry in Luke 8; the others of Matt. 13. Luke does not at all record. Here the object is to enforce the solemn lesson of what man is in presence of "all the glorious things that were done by him" [the Lord] Adversaries might be put to shame; and all the crowd might rejoice. But man is the same as ever, and turns all to vanity and self-exaltation. Christendom with better privileges is not really better than Israel. "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." "Ye must be born again." "If any one be in Christ, [there is] a new creation: the old things are passed away; behold, new things are come. And all things are of God who reconciled us to himself through Christ." What are outward changes in His eyes? Yet man, professing man, without life in Christ, can show or effect nothing more.

As the Lord described, such has been the course of God's kingdom. In chap. 8 Luke tells us of the very different work wrought by the seed that figures the word of God. Even so it does not by any means produce in result what the Sower desired. For the enemy is not yet dislodged from his bad eminence, and he avails himself of both the flesh and the world to spoil and hinder, besides his own destructive wiles. Still grace gives effect in good ground, and fruit is borne a hundredfold.

But in the parable of the mustard seed which a man cast into his garden, we hear of the lofty growth from the lowly beginning of what bore the Lord's name here below. The symbol of a tree is taken, and of one that from a very little shot up to give shelter to the birds of the sky. So earthly potentates as the kings of Egypt and Assyria are described by Ezekiel, and the king of Babylon by Daniel; only that here stress is laid on the incongruity of what was originally small with its towering development in time. None can deny either fact in Christendom. As the philosophic Guizot says in his Lect. ii. on Civilization, "It was the church with its institutions, its magistrates, its power, which strove triumphantly against the internal dissolution which convulsed the empire, and against barbarity; which subdued the barbarians themselves, and became the link, the medium, the principle of civilization, as between the Roman and barbarian worlds." What a mighty factor on earth the little flock became!

In the parable of the leaven, it is not the rise of earthly power out of what was originally despised, but the spread of doctrine till a given sphere was permeated. In it the creed-work of Christendom is portrayed. There is no thought of vital energy, only of a certain quantum assimilated by doctrine. Certainly grace in power is never so symbolised but doctrine such as that of Pharisees, Sadducees, or Herodians. Of this the natural mind is capable. The creed of Christendom, truth even, might be held, and held firmly, without faith and in unrighteousness (Rom. 1). The action of the Holy Spirit appears in neither comparison.

O my reader, hear the word of God. Receive Christ, Who alone is the Saviour and gives life eternal. It is "of faith that it might be according to grace." Ordinances may figure truth but cannot save. On the ground of works you are lost; but Jesus is Lord and Saviour. "Ye are saved by grace through faith; and this not of yourselves [which some might have thought]; it is God's gift; not of works that none might boast." Jesus is the way, the sole and sure way, to the Father. Look to Him only, and call on Him. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek; for the same Lord over all is rich to all that call upon Him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. The word of truth is the gospel of salvation to the believer.

4 The Uprising of the Housemaster

Luke 13: 25-30.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 371-372. Gospel No. 7-4.)

Do you believe these plain words of the Saviour? Do you, my dear reader, believe that the time is short, the Lord at hand, and the solemn change impends from grace to judgment? The scripture before us is but one of many like warnings, The day of grace will close with the "falling away," the apostacy. When once the House-master will have risen up and barred the door, how appalling to stand without and knock in vain! Did it ever come home that this might be your own case? Evade it not.

The appeal arose out of the question, Are those to be saved few? The prophets had intimated such a remnant in terms as searching as they were repulsive to Jewish feeling. The Lord's words are a direct dealing with conscience. "Strive earnestly to enter through the narrow door; for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and shall not be able." Men are ready enough to do or suffer much for salvation. They welcome a means which allows of their efforts if not. deserts. But "ye must be born anew" is hateful, unless it be within their ability to hinge it on an ordinance, which works without bringing the soul into the presence of God. This is what men naturally dread and shirk. They refuse to face God about their sins. Anything but the repentance which accompanies believing Him that sent Jesus. For He treats man, moral or not, as alike lost, and insists that salvation is in none other than Him Whom man despised and crucified. "For neither is there any other name under heaven that is given among men whereby we must be saved." It is therefore by grace through faith ; and this not of ourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works that none might boast. Hence strive earnestly to enter through the narrow door of being begotten by the word of truth. Entrance by any other way, however attractive, is vain and ruinous.

Thereon the Lord intimates the certainty that at an unexpected moment the Master of the house will close the gospel call. "When once the house-master hath risen up and shut the door, and ye shall begin to stand without and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, open to us; and he answering shall say to you, I know you not whence ye are; then shall ye begin to say, We did eat and drink in thy presence, and thou didst teach in our streets; and he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are: depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. There shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves cast out. And they shall come from east and west, and from north and south, and shall recline in the kingdom of God. And behold, there are last who shall be first, and there are first who shall be last" (vers. 25-30).

It is the rejection of Christ that tests souls; Christ in humiliation is the stumbling stone. So it was for the Jew then; so it is at bottom now for others. Yetis it thus that He has both glorified God and made propitiation for our sins. Christ crucified is to Jews a stumbling-block and to Gentiles foolishness; but to the called, both Jews and Greeks Christ is God's power and God's wisdom. There could be no gospel of grace without righteousness. Yet scripture is clear that it is not in the sinner to whom the gospel is preached. For "there is none righteous, no, not one." Hence the gospel is God's righteousness, not man's; and its ground is the redemption that is in Christ. And His righteousness is unto all, that they might hear the glad news, and upon all those who believe, that they might know themselves justified by faith.

But this is not all the truth. He, the Lord Jesus — He will appear in glory to judge the habitable earth. In vain will men in that day say, Lord, open to us. He who now calls in love will sentence the guilty. He will say, I know you not whence ye are. For had they heard the word in faith, they had received, not only pardon and peace, but life in Christ. And His life is the only and the sure source of the fruit of righteousness which is by Him to God's glory and praise. Not receiving Christ to life eternal men are but "workers of iniquity," the baptised no less than the circumcised, the Mahometan quite as much as heathen. Past privileges are pleaded to no purpose. "We did eat and drink in thy presence, and thou didst teach in our streets." Neglected opportunities, slighted mercies, only aggravate guilt. He shall say in reply, "I tell you, I know not whence ye are: depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity." To the wicked, Gentile, Jew, or of Christendom, there is no peace: least of all to those who have heard most.

There indeed shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, when in the kingdom the unbelieving Jews see their boasted fathers and prophets, but themselves cast out. But there is deep cheer for the despised Gentiles. For the Lord adds, "And they shall come from the east and west and from the north and south, and they shall recline in the kingdom of God. And, behold, there are last who shall be first, and there are first who shall be last." Do you say, how terrible and true of unbelieving Israel, how blessedly true of the Gentiles who believe? What will it be for you who have heard the gospel, and neglected so great salvation? What possible hope can be in that day! But blessing in faith there is now and ever.

5 The Guests

Luke 14: 7-11.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 7-8. Gospel No. 7-5.)

It is beautiful and blessed to mark how our Lord turns the least things of daily life to everlasting account. This we find in all the Gospels, in none more than in that of Luke; whose design under the power of the Spirit was to contrast the God of grace with fallen selfish man, that through the faith of Christ and His work he might be saved and walk accordingly. Thus it is that the Lord spoke a parable unto those that were invited i.e. as guests, noticing how they chose out the first places (ver. 7).

"When thou art invited by anyone unto a wedding, recline not in the first place, lest perhaps a more honourable than thee be invited by him, and he that invited him and thee shall come and say to thee, Give this [man] place, and then thou begin with shame to take the last place. But when thou hast been invited, go, put thyself down in the last place, that when he who hath invited thee come, he may say to thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have glory in presence of all that recline with thee. For everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted" (vers. 8-11).

It is a world of evil, and man is fallen under sin and Satan, which gives occasion to grace and its ways, as God was then displaying in Christ. This tests the heart, which naturally seeks its own things, honour or power, ease or pleasure, money therefore as the means of gratifying self, whatever may be its direction. Here it was present honour that men coveted : and it is as true now as then. The true Light, coming into the world, laid every man bare.

But He has done infinitely more. He, the Lord of lords, and King of kings, was the faithful witness, the living exemplar of all He taught, of all that pleased the Father. Who ever took the last place as He? If born in Bethlehem David's city, to mark prophetically the "ruler in Israel," none the less was He the One "Whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting." Yet was He to be smitten with a rod upon the cheek (Micah 5: 1, 2), as He was born in a manger, because there was no room for such in the inn (Luke 2: 7). As the parents fled with Him into Egypt from the face of the destroying king, so did they return with Him to dwell, not only in Galilee the despised, but in its most despised Nazareth; so that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.

So it was throughout the days of His flesh. Son of the highest, and subsisting in the form of God, He did not esteem it a thing to be grasped to be on equality with God, but emptied Himself. He did not and could not divest Himself of deity, but He did of glory, taking a bondman's form, having come in the likeness of men. And who ever humbled Himself as He did unswervingly? Who but He could say, and say with absolute truth, "Lo, I am come to do Thy will, O God?" Others, His servants may have done miracles as mighty, or, as He said, "Greater works than these;" but He and He alone never did His own will, always the Father's. And this is the perfect moral place of man which He took and kept to God's glory.

But more even than this had to be if God were to be glorified about sin, if men were to be saved through faith from their sins? Would He stoop down to a depth unfathomable and bear the divine judgment of evil, so that the guilty might by grace be freed? Therefore it was that having been found in figure as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, death of the cross. Him Who knew no sin God made sin for you, that you might be made God's righteousness in Christ. It was God's perfect way: no other could avail.

Do you believe this, poor soul, miserable in the sense of your guilt, weary under sin's intolerable load, despairing haply of efforts to do the law of God? Not thus, never thus, can you come to God. He waits to be gracious, He can save to the uttermost; He gives all you need without money and without price, but only through your believing on Jesus, Who only is the way, and the truth, and the life; and He is the propitiation for our sins. How could it be otherwise? Did not the prophet say (seeing the great prediction as though come, seven centuries before the great fulfilment), "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53: 6).

Believe God's call on you to doubt in yourself, to hear Christ's word (for the law can only condemn a sinner), and believe Him that sent Jesus in love as a Saviour. And what is His message to you? "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath life eternal, and cometh not into judgment, but is passed out of death into life" (John 5: 24). The bold unbeliever braves the word of God and refuses to humble himself; the serious unbeliever tries to do better, trusting himself and his powers. The true believer owns himself lost, and finds Christ a Saviour indeed and in truth. Oh! look to Him and live.

To the believer Christ is life as well as propitiation; and because He lives, we shall live also. He is our life now while we are on earth. Thus only do we live to God; and we are called all through to have Him as our object, and way, our motive, strength, and end. The apostle knew, and, walking thus, could say, To me to live is Christ (Phil. 1: 21). Obedience, as He obeyed, is what the believer is sanctified to, in that humility which is content to be nothing in the world as it is. Christ took the last place. Let us who love Him seek to be as near that place as grace enables each.

In the regeneration He will say to each of His own, Friend, go up higher. Then shall the poor and despised apostles sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Then shall they that are Christ's, risen from the dead, reign with Him. The Corinthians sought to reign now, as do most in Christendom. But they were humbled, and by grace humbled themselves. Profit by that lesson; and God will exalt you in due time.

6 The Host

Luke 14: 12-14.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 22-23. Gospel No. 7-6.)

The Son of God was the true Light, Who, coming into the world, casts light on every man. It is not that all are enlightened by Him, but that He set each in the light. So here He lays bare alike guest and host. High and low, Jew or Gentile, Pharisee or Sadducee, priest or philosopher, were far from God; according as it is written, There is not a righteous man, not even one; nor he that understandeth; there is not one that seeketh after God: there is no fear of God before their eyes. If the law spoke thus of Israel, as it did, much more palpably did it apply to the heathen with their religious abominations and their unspeakable demoralisations; that every mouth might be stopped and all the world be under judgment to God.

Man seeks his own things and his own will; nor is any thing pleasanter to the natural man than to exalt himself. The Lord Jesus brings before us from first to last a mind wholly different. "For ye know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich" (2 Cor. 8: 9).

Such was the mind in Him and in all its perfection only there. But it is the mind God would have in His own now; and thus it was Christ spoke as we have here. It is an entire reversal of human thoughts generally, of Jewish feeling in particular. Settled down in the earth as it is, men seek present pleasure, worldly honour, earthly advantages. What did this age give Christ? A manger when born, nowhere to lay His head, and a cross to die on. What does Christ give to him that believes? Eternal life, and everlasting redemption. Life was in Him; and He gives it in Himself. Redemption He obtained by His death, and we have it in Him through His blood, the forgiveness of offences. Hearing His word, and believing Him Who sent Jesus, we are thus doubly blessed. Our evil He takes away, and His good He freely imparts for ever.

Thus believing we can profit by all He was and all He says. He has laid the axe to the root of the tree of self- seeking, and shown the blessing of humbling ourselves in a world quite out of course, in plain denial of a nature that seeks to be uppermost. Here He opens out the beauty of unselfishness in faith, love being the spring, glory the recompence and rest.

"And he said also to him that had invited him, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen nor rich neighbours; lest haply they also invite thee in return, and a recompence be made thee. But when thou makest a feast, invite poor, crippled, lame blind; and thou shalt be blessed; for they can not recompense thee; for thou shalt he recompensed in the resurrection of the just" (vers. 12-14).

"It is more blessed to give than to receive," as He Himself not only said but acted on, Who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed by demons. If we have not that power, as things have long been, we are called to walk, as He walked, in love, and in distinct testimony of separateness to God from the pride of the world and the selfishness of the first man. Hence His exhortation would form our hearts for His path here below, instead of walking as men according to public opinion, which is just the spirit and course of the age. For if we are His, we are "heavenly" even now (1 Cor. 15: 48, 49); as we are destined by grace to bear the image of the Heavenly at His coming.

Let our hearts then go forth to welcome the despised and suffering here below, and to show "the kindness of God" to poor, crippled, lame, blind. And the more too, in order to win their ear through the heart to hear of Him Who alone can take away the guilt and power of sin for eternity, Who alone brings through faith in Himself into the place of sons of God even now. Thus is the believer blessed himself; and those who, touched by unworldly love, receive the Saviour by believing on His name. And both will have their portion, when He comes, "in the resurrection of the just."

For scripture never speaks of one common, simultaneous, and indiscriminate resurrection. There shall indeed be a resurrection of both just and unjust. But God's word is clear and positive that the resurrection of the just differs not more in character and consequence than in time from that of the unjust. Hence the Lord calls the former a resurrection of life, the latter a resurrection of judgment (John 5: 29): the one for such as have believed on Him and done good; the other for those that, dishonouring both the Son and the Father, only did ill, and are judged accordingly. In the great prophecy of the Revelation (Rev. 20: 4-15), we find the gap, which severs these two resurrections, to be that special reign with Christ which follows the resurrection of life before the resurrection of judgment.

How is it then with you, dear reader? Had you in your own person spiritually all the disabilities of the poor, crippled, lame, and blind, you are none the less welcome to God's feast, to the glad tidings of His grace. Listen not to the tempter, but to the Saviour. Put not off His call. You are really worse than if yourself had all these bodily ailments together and with no means to alleviate them. For what state can be so awful as that of a lost sinner? And is not this actually yours? He Himself is express that He came to seek and save such. Oh, receive Him now! God's word warrants you. It is the only way a lost sinner can please Him. Doing good will follow here below, and the resurrection of the just at Christ's coming (1 Cor. 15: 23). Fear not, but believe God, Who has no purpose so dear to Him as the honour of His Son. Oh, no longer dishonour Him, the Son of His love, the Saviour of the lost!

7 The Great supper

Luke 14: 16-24.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 37-38. Gospel No. 7-7.)

Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God, said one to the Lord. Far different is the real thought, as was shown in the parable. Grace is repulsive to nature; man shrinks from God and slights His call.

"A certain man was making a great supper, and bade many; and he sent forth his bondman at supper-time to say to those that were bidden, Come, for things are now ready. And they all at once began to excuse themselves. The first said to him, I bought land and must go out to see it; I pray thee, have me excused. And another said, I bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to prove them; I pray thee, have me excused. And another said, I married a wife, and on this account cannot come. And the bondman when he came up reported these things to his master. Then the house-master in anger said to his bondman, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring here the poor and maimed and blind and lame. And the bondman said, Sir, What thou didst command is done, and yet there is room. And the lord said to the bondman, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel [them] to come in, that my house may be filled. For I say to you, that none of those men that were bidden shall taste of my supper" (vers. 16-24).

The corresponding, though scarcely the same, parable in Matthew 22: 2-14 is a likeness of the kingdom of the heavens, which gives prominence to the wedding feast for the king's son, to the dispensational difference of the Jews, and to the judgment that befell their city. Here man's moral roots are more laid bare; and where sin abounded, grace surpassed.

There was no harm in buying land, in acquiring oxen, or in marrying a wife. The evil lay in pleading these things, or any else, to set aside the call of God. The heart is at fault, which makes present interests or even duties a reason for putting God off and neglecting so great salvation. Have you, my reader, no object or pursuit, which stands between you and the knowledge of God and His Son which is life eternal? Be not deceived. Sin gives Satan the means of blinding every soul to the light of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ, as well as to his own ruin and exposure to the Gehenna of fire, where one's worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. Your peril is extreme.

God in the gospel meets you in your need and guilt and danger. He asks nothing, He gives all things; and they are now ready. He provides a great supper; He invites freely. Oh, begin not once more to excuse yourself. Too long have you turned aside. Why should you die in your sins, lost for ever? The Son of man expressly came to save the lost. But it is through faith.

Those who first had the invitation valued what was before them, forgot God's judgment for eternity. The Lord recorded their folly that you might fear God — the beginning of wisdom — that you might hear and live. He would give you another life, which is only in Himself, life eternal; and this life in Him loves the will of God, as it refuses the baits and bribes of the enemy. It begins with faith-obedience, and is sanctified by the Spirit to obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. Thus one becomes a child of obedience instead of fashioning oneself according to the former lusts in one's ignorance. The ball of God is paramount. He calls one to receive His grace in Christ. This is His commandment that we believe the name of His Son Jesus Christ. The first of rights is that God should have His rights; and He commands us to believe on the Lord Jesus.

See the activity of God's love. He is not content with gathering in the poor and maimed and blind and lame from the streets and lanes of the city. He will have His bondman go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them in importunate earnestness to come in. He insists that His house be filled. What a God is ours! A just God and a Saviour. He is assuredly. Why then trifle, when all blessing is proffered in Christ, when all is and must be ruin where He is refused? For does He not say to you, that none of those that were bidden shall taste of His supper? Are you not bidden? Come, then; for He welcomes in the name of His Son. Come without delay — dangerous everywhere, most of all in presence of your sin and of God's everlasting judgment. Now it is all grace, grace reigning through righteousness unto life eternal by Jesus Christ our Lord. Practical love follows, and practical obedience. It is the first step that weighs. That it might be open to you, it cost the Saviour all in unfathomable humiliation and the sacrifice of Himself for you and your sins. Oh, put. off no more, but believe and be blessed in and with Him!

In vain men talk of a larger hope. There is no Saviour but Christ, nor any way to the Father but Himself by faith. For not to believe is to give very deep insult to God and to His Son. There is another evil yet worse; the abuse of His grace, the attaching of indulged lusts and passions, of unjudged pollution of flesh and spirit, to that worthy Name. Should such men taste of His supper?

8 The Lost Sheep

Luke 15: 3-7.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 53-54. Gospel No. 7-8.)

Grace, the grace of God, is hateful to man's pride. The self-righteous take offence. What is the good of their decorous behaviour, of their prayers at home, of their public devotions, if they be no better than loose and open sinners? Yet the Lord (Matt. 21: 31) solemnly assured the chief priests and the elders of the people, who built on their religious character, that the tax-gatherers and the harlots go into the kingdom before them. They are ready to repent and believe. So here the taxgatherers and the sinners draw near to hear the glad tidings, while the Pharisees and the scribes kept murmuring, He receiveth sinners and eateth with them.

Yes, it was true; nor was He ashamed of divine love to the lost, but gloried in it, and vindicates it against all cavillers. Is God to save nobody? If He save, it can only be by His grace through faith. Let us hear the Son plead His God and Father's title to save sinners.

"And he spoke this parable unto them, saying, What man of you, having a hundred sheep and having lost one of them, doth not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after that which was lost until he find it? And having found he layeth [it] on his shoulders rejoicing, and, when come to the house, he calleth together the friends and the neighbours, saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I found my sheep that was lost. I say to you, that thus joy shall be in heaven over one sinner repenting, [more] than over ninety nine righteous, such as have no need of repentance" (vers. 3-7).

Man, selfish man, is not so indifferent about his lost sheep, as he thinks God to be about a sinner. A bad conscience makes him doubt God's love, still more does bad religion. The Lord Jesus alone represents God truly and perfectly. There He was in their midst the Saviour of sinners, the Son of man come to seek and save that which was lost. Did He not proclaim it from the first in the synagogue at Nazareth? Did not the prophet Isaiah predict seven centuries before, that Jehovah's Spirit should be on Him Whom He anointed to evangelise the poor, to preach deliverance to captives, and sight to blind? The miracles of His ministerial life were for the most part signs of His grace to the guilty and wretched: for this His death in atonement would give the ground of God's righteousness; as all proved His unfathomable love for us when powerless and ungodly.

He, the Lord of glory, pursued the wandering sheep till He found it. What did it not cost Him? Teaching the disciples, weaning them from Jewish elements, showing them heavenly things, forming their hearts according to God, exercising their perception to distinguish good and evil, were all blessed to the ninety nine in the wilderness; but what about the lost one? The Good Shepherd leaves the rest safe, inquest of the stray sheep. After it He goes in earnest love, as if He had none else; and having found it, He lays it, on His shoulders rejoicing; and when come to the house He calls together the friends and the neighbours, that they way rejoice with Him over the lost one found, He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. By His stripes were we healed. For we were as sheep going astray. If we returned, as we can now say, it is only because the Shepherd and Bishop of souls came to seek and save us.

The mere idea never dawned on Pagans of old, north, south, east or west. They admitted sympathy between God and His faithful worshippers; but what must befall the unfaithful? What would make and keep faithful? Their gods, on their own showing, had lusts and passions, evil demons self-evidently, and deserving punishment like their adorers. The true God declared Himself in Jesus, Who came to bring God truly known into the world, and to put sin out of it, as He surely will in its season. As God is light and love, so did the Lord prove Himself to be, Whom none could convict of sin, Who died for sinners, suffered for their sins, Just for unjust, that He might bring us to God. Yes, He is the true God, and life eternal.

Why then stay longer? Are you not away from God? Are you fit for His presence? If you know you are not, what is to fit you? Christ is the way, and the only way, to the Father. But what of your sins? He, Who came in love to reconcile you to God, took the load on Himself; He alone could bear it, and bear it away for ever. And God in the scriptures calls you to believe on the Lord Jesus, His Son, your Saviour. God raised from the dead Him Who died for sins and sinners does not this give you confidence?

You hesitate. Why? Do you love darkness rather than light? Alas! is it not because your works are evil, and your heart is proud, and you therefore hate the light which makes all manifest? Hear then His warning word. You cannot escape the resurrection of the unjust; you cannot escape the Judge of quick and dead. Jesus, Whom you now refuse as Saviour, will judge those works of which you now boast; Jesus will prove their worthlessness to your everlasting shame, when He sits on the great white throne. What thenceforward must be your portion, if you reject Him now? "He that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3: 36). May you now hear and live.

9 The Lost Drachma

Luke 15: 8-10.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 68-69. Gospel No. 7-9.)

The parable which follows the lost sheep presents the sinner's case in another form. It is not as that animal foolish and straying, but like a coin without life, a dead thing. Both are true of fallen man. As all are gone out of the way, and none seeketh after God, with destruction and wretchedness in their ways (Rom. 3), so were all dead in their offences and their sins, by nature children of wrath one as another (Eph. 2). But grace goes forth to save and does save; not the creature's grace, but God's. This the Pharisees and scribes disliked; but the Lord demonstrates it, and draws the despised near to hear One so capable of telling out the love, of which He was the brightest witness and the richest gift. These parables are a pair, as the opening word indicates.

"Or what woman having ten drachmas, if she have lost one drachma, doth not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently till she shall have found it? And on finding, she calleth together the friends end the neighbours, saying, Rejoice with me, because I found the drachma which I lost. Thus, I say to you, there ariseth joy in presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth" (Luke 15: 8-9).

Herein is a scene within the house, and a woman is active in seeking out the lost object; as in the former a man strenuous to recover the stray one without. But in both it is divine grace, grace entirely above man or woman, which the Saviour sets before us so vividly; and the lost one is man or woman whom grace seeks and saves.

Is it nothing to you who read these lines that you are "lost"? that you have turned your back on God? and that you are utterly hard and insensible in your alienation? Assuredly He is not cold or indifferent Who so loved the world that He gave His Only-begotten Son; that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have life eternal (John 3). Not hard nor regardless of guilty man is He Who commends His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, — died for the ungodly (Rom. 5). Herein is love, not that we loved Him, but that He loved us and sent His Son as propitiation for our sins (1 John 4). Such is the true God Whose compassion the Lord Jesus here makes known.

He here represents the painstaking of grace by a woman who spares no pains to win back her lost silver piece. She cannot rest about it. If sinners are beguiled by the enemy to disbelieve their ruin, the direct contrast is plain in her. She lights a lamp; she sweeps the house; she searches carefully till she finds it.

It is not otherwise with the Holy Spirit. In the redeemed He is come to dwell, and causes the saints, however opposed in their old natural state as Jews and Gentiles, fitted together, to grow into a holy temple in the Lord, even now being builded together for God's habitation in the Spirit. Also He takes a most energetic part as well as loving interest in awakening the sinner from the slumber of death. It is He that makes the candle of the word shine into the dark recesses of the heart. It is He that probes the guilty conscience. It is He that discovers the fatal evil of darling sins in the light of God.

Oh, have ye not experienced these gracious workings in your souls? Have you not felt as you read or listened to scripture, that somehow God was speaking to your conscience? Beware of turning a deaf ear to Him Who warns and would win you to Himself from all evil. If He press home the certainty that God will have every work and word brought into judgment, He does not fail to remind you of the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering. Do not longer ignore that the goodness of God leads you unto repentance? What goodness can match His spending the Only-begotten on you? What was it for the Lord of all to become Servant of all — yea, to die as a sacrifice for sinners.

Fear not to lay your hand on that infinite offering for sin. If the blood of bulls and goats could be no more than a witness by the way, if their effect could be but provisional and temporary, it is not so with the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus. By His blood peace was made for those who had been at war with God; and who can wonder? For His blood cleanses from all sin. It is God's word which so testifies to you. "See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped not who refused him that spoke on earth, much more shall not we if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven? And his voice then shook the earth; but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I will shake not the earth only but also heaven" (Heb. 12).

It may be remarked, that as the first of these three parables points evidently to the Lord Jesus, so does the second to the Holy Spirit, and the third yet more unmistakably to the Father. How blessed is it, that all the divine Persons of the Godhead are engaged on behalf of the lost one that he may be saved! Who can deny that this the Saviour preached when here? And the Spirit has inspired the scripture for you to hear and believe.

10 The Lost son

Luke 15: 11-32.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 85-86. Gospel No. 7-10.)

The Saviour adds a third parable to complete as well as confirm the truth of God's grace in saving the lost who repent. The first set out the heedless active straying of the sinner; the second, his insensible dead state till the Spirit works through the living word; the third uses the figure, not of a sheep or a coin, but of a man to point the fact of an inward work in the conscience, and of the reception the returning soul finds in the Father's love and the privileges of grace.

"And he said, A certain man had two sons; and the younger of them said to the father, Father, give me the share of the property that falleth to me. And he divided to them the means of living. And after not many days the younger son gathered all together, and went abroad into a far country, and there wasted his property by dissolute living. And when he squandered all, there arose a mighty famine in that country; and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine; and he longed to fill his belly with the husks which the swine were eating; and no one gave him. But coming unto himself he said, How many hirelings of my father's have abundance of bread, and I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go unto my father and will say to him, Father, I sinned against heaven and before thee; I am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hirelings. And he arose and came unto his father. But while he was yet a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him much. And the son said to him, Father, I sinned against heaven and before thee; I am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said unto his bondmen, Bring out the best robe and put [it] on him; and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fatted calf, kill [it], and let us eat and make merry; because this my son was dead and came to life again, he was lost and is found. And they began to be merry" (vers. 11-24).

Impossible to conceive a sketch more graphically true. The younger son indicates very emphatically the sinner's path from his start in self-will and independency to open profligacy and the depths of degradation. Such were "some of you" even very far; such were most in a measure. We shall hear of another form of sin at least as evil before we have done. But this far country " knows what extreme famine is. No one gave him." But as the wasteful feel the pressure of dire want, so that even swine's fare becomes desirable, God turns all for good in His grace.

O my reader, have you known such an experience? Have you ever tried to shake off parental authority, especially where pious? Have you, when you could, plunged into the pleasures of sin, the more eagerly because you were debarred under a father or a mother's eye? Have you fallen into the depths of immorality, and been "almost in all evil?" And in your misery have you learnt what the world feels toward one who has lost all? "And no one gave him." What! none of those who helped to drain the once full purse? No, not one. So the Lord describes the lost son. Are you like him in sin and misery? May you be also in repentance. For coming to himself he saw the folly, evil, and ruin of his life, His mind is made up. He must clear his burdened conscience, and confess his iniquity. He will go to the One before Whom he had sinned, and have all out with Him, to His vindication and to his own shame.

The terror of the Lord may alarm, but the goodness of God leads to repentance as here and always. It produces true self-judgment in His sight. But whatever the hope of mercy that draws, spite of shame and self-loathing and grief at one's own sin, the grace of God much more exceeds. "While he was yet a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him much. And the son said to him, Father, I sinned against heaven and before thee; I am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his bondmen, Bring out the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fatted calf, kill it; and let us eat and make merry; because this my son was dead and came to life again; he was lost and is found. And they began to be merry."

How incomparable is   God's grace! With slow and sad steps came the prodigal, hope mingling with shame and many searchings of heart, in the rags that told the tale of ruin to the uttermost. Not so the father, who saw him a long way off, but moved with pity, ran, fell on his neck, and covered him with kisses just as he was. What was the impression made by such love? If ever such a vile son, certainly there never was such a father. The son speaks out his conscience, but not "make me as one of thy hirelings": the father's love arrests this. Nor was it after all the humility of grace, but rather of law, drawing inferences from his past misconduct.

But in the gospel it is a question of God's love, giving Christ and resting on what is due to Him and His work, before which the sinner's evil vanishes. "Jesus was found alone," the ground of all blessing. Therefore is it God's righteousness, not man's. The best robe is brought out and put on the repentant prodigal, a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. Beyond all re-instatement, the lost son now found is blessed and honoured as never before. He put on Christ, not Adam even unfallen; he became God's righteousness in Him. He feasts, and not he only but all that are of God on the fatted calf; yea God Himself rejoices in it with a joy proper to Himself and far deeper than that of all the rest, put together.

In the elder son the Lord vividly portrays the self- righteous, the murmurers against grace such as the Pharisees and scribes; and they are many in every age, especially where scripture is current and men boast of religion. As he is represented returning from the fields and approaching the house, the music and dancing there struck his ear offensively, when he learnt from a servant that it was his father's joy over his returned brother (25-27). He was angry and would not go in (28). And when his father went out and entreated (for what will not grace do?), he answers with self-complacency that insulted his father and the object of his compassion as much as it exalted himself. "Lo these many years do I slave for thee, and never transgressed thy commandments; yet never didst thou give me a kid to make merry with my friends. But when this thy son came that devoured thy living with harlots, thou killedst for him the fatted calf" (29, 30). What an answer of patient love the father's! "Child, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry and be glad; for this thy brother was dead and came to life again, was lost and is found" (31, 32). It is the day of grace, not judgment. He who despises grace will be judged another day.

11 The Prudent Steward

Luke 16: 1-13.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 102-103. Gospel No. 7-11.)

This parable, though addressed by the Lord to His disciples, is a word of warning and instruction to all. It shows, not the way to the heavenly dwellings, but the character of those who get there.

"There was a certain rich man who had a steward; and he was accused to him as wasting his goods. And having called him, he said to him, What [is] this I hear of thee? Render the account of thy stewardship; for thou canst no longer be steward. And the steward said to himself, What shall I do? because my lord is taking the stewardship from me. I cannot dig; I am ashamed to beg. I am resolved what I will do that when I have been removed from the stewardship, I may he received into their houses. And having called to him each one of the debtors of his own lord, he said to the first, How much owest thou to my lord? And he said, A hundred baths of oil. And he said to him, Take thy bill [writings], and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then he said to another And thou, how much owest thou? And he said, A hundred cors of wheat. He saith to him, Take thy bill [writings], and write eighty. And the lord praised the steward of unrighteousness, because he did prudently. For the sons of this age are for their own generation more prudent than the sons of light. And I say to you, Make to yourselves friends from the mammon of unrighteousness that, when it shall fail, ye may be received into the everlasting tabernacles. The faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and the unrighteous in a very little is unrighteous also in much. If therefore ye were not faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will entrust to you the true? And if ye were not faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own? No servant can serve two lords; for he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (vers. 1-13).

In a general way man, especially the Jew, has wasted the goods entrusted to him, and forfeited his place. But grace gives him the opportunity of turning these earthly things to everlasting account. It is sheer folly to hold fast the brief present, regardless of the unending future. The Lord praises not the past waste any more than the selfish unrighteousness, but the prudence that sacrifices time and its passing interests in view of the unseen eternity and heavenly glory.

Christ by His infinite sufferings for sin and sinners has made this possible. The first man brought in ruin by sin; Israel made bad worse and earned a curse by his transgression and apostasy. Grace and truth came not by law but by Jesus Christ Whom God made sin for us as He bore the curse, that the guiltiest might through the faith of Him go free. He Whose grace opens the way into blessing beyond all thought has been wronged and plundered without measure. It is not the aim of this parable to show the way in which He is vindicated, and the evils of the sinner are blotted out, and His own righteousness by faith takes the place of man's righteousness sought no matter how assiduously, but always in vain. Thus it comes to pass that no flesh can glory, but he that glories truly must glory in the Lord.

It is Christ alone Who, heard in faith, gives a divinely sound judgment of ourselves and of things around us. Conscience alone is powerless to cope with temptation and blinding wiles of the enemy, ever alluring by what is in sight, seemingly fair and desirable. Without faith it is impossible to please God. To believe in Christ, the Word become flesh and dying for us, the Propitiation for our sins, that we might live of His life, how blessed for us! and how worthy of God! This is grace, this is truth. It centres in Christ, the object of faith; Who gives new eyesight to discern, and decision to abandon the sin-stained present, for an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and unfading, reserved in the heavens for the faithful.

How is it then with you, dear reader? Are you setting your mind on earthly things? cleaving to the dust in quest of the unrighteous mammon, instead of making friends out of it that you may be received, when it shall have failed, into the everlasting tabernacles?

Every thing like Judaism is on God's part now obsolete. It is no longer a system of earthly rewards or punishments, of a worldly sanctuary, of present ease, honour, or advantage. Heavenly things are revealed by Him Who was then rejected on earth and is now glorified on high. There alone are the true riches. The bait of Satan is the mammon of unrighteousness. This may procure the pleasures of sin for a season, and present results on the earth. But what will the end be? where must go those who in contempt of Christ lived only for that which is to fail?

The steward's prudence is a lesson for disciples. See the promptness of his course and his careful consideration of the debtors, the generosity too which gave right and left. This, and this alone in the unscrupulous steward, is commended for our imitation. What men call ours is really another's (ver. 12). It is easy to be generous with another's goods; and so faith would consider them. Such is Christ's yoke; and His yoke is easy, His burden light. To accumulate and keep or use for self Is unbelief and covetousness. Faith gives freely, makes friends with what is but mammon, and turns it to everlasting account, when, faithful in a very little, we shall have much. The true riches then shall indeed be ours: for with Christ, His own Son, God will also freely give us all things. We are but stewards now, and are exhorted by the Master to the generosity of grace. It is vain, it is impossible, to serve God and mammon.

12 The Rich man and Lazarus

Luke 16: 19-31.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 117-118. Gospel No. 7-12.)

In the second half of this chapter the Lord still makes known the truth which came into evidence through His rejection. The light of eternal and heavenly things is let in on the present state and life on earth. The first man is fallen, evil and lost. If the Jew pre-eminently had been God's steward, he was unjust, and his occupation gone. Prosperity was no test of divine favour. That which is exalted among men is. abomination in the sight of God. Since John, the Kingdom of God is preached: it is therefore an urgent question of pressing into it, and this on the part of "every one"; for grace opens the door to any. His death was at hand, which gives the believer even from the tribe of Judah or of Levi righteous deliverance from the law; so that there is no adultery, when one 'belongs to Another raised up from the dead, in order to bear fruit unto God, as the apostle wrote to the Roman saints.

How solemn and momentous the issues in the unseen world!

"Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, making good cheer splendidly day by day. And a certain pauper by name Lazarus was laid at his gate-way, full of sores and desiring to be filled with the things that fell from the table of the rich man; nay, even the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass that the pauper died and was carried away by the angels into the bosom of Abraham. And the rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades lifting up his eyes being in torments, he seeth Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. And calling he said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame. But Abraham said, Child, remember that thou in thy lifetime didst fully receive thy good things, and Lazarus likewise evil things; but now here he is comforted and thou art in anguish. And besides all these things, between us and you a great chasm is fixed, so that those desiring to pass hence unto you cannot, nor those from that side may cross unto us. And he said, I beseech thee then, father, that thou wouldest send him unto the house of my father (for I have five brothers), that he may thoroughly testify to them, lest they too come into this place of torment. But Abraham saith [to him], They have Moses and the prophets: let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham; but if one from the dead go unto them, they will repent. And he said to him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, not even if one rise out of the dead will they be persuaded" (vers. 19-31).

The Saviour depicts a man easy and luxurious in a world of misery, without faith in a world of sin, morally decent, outwardly religious, but living to self and practically infidel. Who did not know it in Israel? Who is not familiar with it in Christendom? Lazarus represents the contrast of the pious beggar laid hard by with none to pity his bodily sores but the. dogs. The Conqueror of death lifts the veil. Then appears the truth for eternity: Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, the rich man that enjoyed himself in torments! What mattered the funeral pomp? or if the poor man had not even a grave? The angels carried the godly soul to the bosom of God's friend; the rich man left the vain and transient show of this world, and opened his eyes in the flame of Hades, aggravated by the sight of the blessed afar off — yea, of him there who on earth awakened only his disgust. Now he implores of his father Abraham that Lazarus might allay his burning tongue with the merciful touch of water at the tip of the finger!

It is not a picture of resurrection to come, but of what instantly follows death, though expressed in figures drawn from the body through which we now derive our sensations. The believer once wretched is comforted, the godless is in anguish. Like the parable before, it reveals not the means of salvation, but the character and end, whether of the saved or of the lost. Through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God. If we suffer with Christ, we shall also be glorified with Him. To try to reign now is a danger and delusion: if we endure, we shall also reign together. Even Christ is not reigning yet, but rejected by man He is waiting on the Father's throne.

The latter verses (27-31) bring out the all-importance of faith; as the Jew, long favoured, is now the standing witness of ruin through unbelief. The testimony of God in His word, O.T. or N., is the ground of faith. Even a Lazarus sent from the grave would not avail to convince those who do not listen believingly to Moses and the prophets. In fact another Lazarus was raised by the Lord Jesus not long after; but instead of convincing the Jews, he only provoked the murderous nature of the chief priests and the Pharisees (John 11: 47-53). The carnal mind is enmity against God, and rises, proudly and most of all, against His grace in Christ. Yet by grace only are any saved through faith. Hence it is by hearing the word of truth; and this is now in the richest form and fulness, the gospel of our salvation, as the apostle calls it. For God has gone beyond all thoughts and wishes of man in raising up Jesus our Lord from the dead, Who, as He was delivered for our offences, was raised for our justification.

It is Christ's death and resurrection which alone could save. Therefore is it God's righteousness, not man's, that He might be just and the justifier of him that believeth on Jesus.

There is no other way, no other salvation.. To the poor is the gospel preached; but it had not been God's gospel, unless it were equally open to and reliable for the rich. For the truth of Christ is mighty to make the lowly boast in his elevation, and the rich in his humiliation. To Him be the praise and the glory now and evermore. Amen.

Assuredly for you, my readers, no great gulf is fixed between God and you. Christ is still speaking from heaven as a Saviour that you may believe; and as faith comes by a report, so the report is by the word of God. Your guilty conscience may well dread an impassable gulf; but there is a perfect way, a safe bridge fixed between God and you; and Christ is that way. Oh! take it now, this way to the Father in the Son; for the Holy Spirit deigns and loves to proclaim the glad news to you.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Eighth Series

Gospel Words — Eighth Series

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 Unprofitable Bondmen

2 The Persistent Widow

3 The Pharisee and the Tax-Gatherer

4 Christ returning to Reign

5 The Shepherd of the sheep

6 The Door

7 The Good Shepherd

8 Feet-washing

9 The vine

10 Christ the Bread of Life

11 Eating Christ's flesh, and drinking His blood

12 Christ the corn of Wheat

1 Unprofitable Bondmen

Luke 17: 7-10.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 133-134. Gospel No. 8-1.)

One needs to be saved by Christ before one can serve Him. Salvation is of grace and by faith. It was Christ Who alone bore the burden. We contributed the sins, and nothing else; but awakened by the word and Spirit of God we repented and believed the gospel. How is it with you, dear reader? Beware of going on in dark uncertainty. The true light already shines since the Son of God came. Turn not your back on Him, lest the true character of yourself and your works should be shown as they are. Be honest Godward. Confess yourself a sinner, and your deeds evil. Receive Jesus as the one divine Saviour, expressly sent by and from God to save the lost. We were indeed bondmen of sin; but set free from sin by the Saviour, we would henceforth yield our members in bondage to righteousness unto holiness, each the Lord's freedman, now Christ's bondman.

We are in a world of snares, pitfalls, and evils. Christ is not only the Saviour but the sole path of safety. Hence an exercised conscience, and a spirit of compassion become those who confess Christ and are saved by grace. Self- judgment is the fruit, a careful walk, and readiness to forgive. As we may not weary of well doing, so neither should we of pardoning. Stumbling-blocks abound and work mischief; woe to him through whom they come! A terrible death were better than to cause one to the least disciple. Our Lord's call is, "Take heed to yourselves." Let fidelity to God rebuke sin; let grace forgive it to the repentant, were it seven times in the day. Do we not know it without limit in Christ? It is the kingdom and patience now. By-and-by it will be power and glory, when He reigns.

No wonder that the apostles said, "Lord, increase our faith." All things are possible to him that believes. Were their faith minute as a grain of mustard, He would have it count on God's power that answers the call for His glory, which roots up a tree, say this mulberry, and plants it in the sea obediently. Man may be weakness itself; yet is it God's purpose in and through man to glorify Himself. Is not the Lord Jesus the sure pledge and the manifest proof of it?

Bought with a price (and what a price!) we are here to obey in all lowliness and meekness. God loves to work in us, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. While faith is encouraged to the utmost, self-complacency is absolutely condemned and excluded. Brokenness of spirit is the fitting preparation for the energy of faith. The Christian here is simply witnessing Him Who is not here, his Lord and the Lord of all. We are not fellow-workers with God, but under Him. We are His fellow-workers, but in entire subjection to Him, in no way on a level with Him. The wording in the A, and R. Versions of 1 Cor. 3: 9 and 2 Cor. 6: 1 is equivocal and dangerous; if interpreted as it often has been to put God and His servants on a common plane, it is evil and presumptuous. This, scripture repudiates and the new nature surely resents. The parable which follows reduces such a claim to dust.

"But which of you, having a bondman ploughing or keeping sheep, will say to him when come in from the field, Come in straightway and recline at meat? But will he not say to him, Make ready what I shall sup on, and gird thyself and serve me that I may eat and drink; and after that thou shalt eat and drink? Is he thankful to the bondman because he did what was ordered? I judge not. Thus ye also, when ye shall have done all the things ordered you, say, Unprofitable bondmen are we; we have done what we were bound to do" (vers. 7-10).

It is a shameful perversion of serving Christ to make it either a ground of acceptance with God, or a measure of ease or rank among men. Bring in the Master, and behold every such plea exposed as evil and vanishing away. Even Christ pleased not Himself, but according as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell on Me. And the great apostle of the Gentiles loved to style himself "bondman of Jesus Christ." What an overthrow of human feeling and worldly pride for him, the free-born citizen of Rome, so to introduce himself to all that were in Rome beloved of God, saints by calling! So indeed to the utmost was it with the Lord of all, Who, subsisting in the form of God, did not esteem it robbery to be on equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking a bondman's form, becoming in likeness of men, and being found in figure as man, humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, yea, death of [the] cross.

Here the Lord lays down the servant's place, so readily slipping out of our light hearts. He had shown what faith ever so small can do through God's power. Here He would remind us that we are His bondmen. A great honour it is for us, yet a great reality. It is fellowship with Him in what His love led Him to become.

Time was when we were enemies of God. Death and judgment were then our sure and appointed lot. He interposed and by His sacrifice changed all for those that believe. His love that made Him a bondman constrains us to the same service of love. Whatever our privileges, this is our place: servants not only of Him but for His sake. Has not grace made us debtors to all, to saints and to sinners, to countrymen and to foreigners, to wise and to unintelligent? But pre-eminently and unalienably and always are we Christ's bondmen. In this let us not forget that he who loveth his life shall lose it, and that he who hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. Let us remember that the rule for anyone who may serve Christ is to follow Him, and the issue will be that where He is, there also shall His servant be, and honoured of His Father.

Assuredly the Lord owes us no thanks. It is our privilege as our duty to serve Him in all things great or small, day and night, sick or well. We are His altogether and evermore. Is a master "thankful to the bondman because he did what was ordered? So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all the things ordered you, say, Unprofitable bondmen are we; we have done what we were bound to do." Never did man speak like this Man, our Master. Others without an exception have thought, that it was enough to confess ourselves unprofitable when we fail to do our duty; He teaches us to say it, when we shall have done all the things ordered us.

How completely His word destroys the vain and unbelieving dream of works of supererogation! Not a single saint was other than His bondman; not a single right  work done by anyone of them but was his duty to do. They were God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God before-prepared that they should walk in them. What short-coming themselves found in what others deemed the best! Whatever they were, they had only done what they owed to Him.

2 The Persistent Widow

Luke 18: 1-8.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 149-150. Gospel No. 8-2.)

The closing verses of Luke 17 are occupied with the appearing of the Lord, when He comes in His kingdom and executes judgment on the quick. Hence the comparison is with the days of Noah and of Lot. It is not the heavenly hope dawning, as in Luke 12: 32-38; but "the day that the Son of man is revealed" (2 Thess. 1), when the birds of prey are gathered together over the corpse.

In moral connection with His coming in personal judgment of the earth the Lord intimates the urgent value of prayer.

"And he spake also a parable to them that they must always pray and not faint, saying, There was in a certain city a certain judge, not fearing God and not regarding man; and there was a widow in that city and she kept coming unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he refused for a while; but afterward he said in himself, If even I fear not God and regard not man, yet because this widow is troublesome to me I will avenge her, that she by forever coming may not worry me. And the Lord said, Hear what the judge of unrighteousness speaketh. And shall God in no wise avenge his own elect that cry to him by day and night, and he is long suffering over them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Howbeit, when the Son of man cometh, shall he indeed find faith on the earth?" (vers. 1-8).

As God's call is the warrant of faith, so faith is exercised in prayer, and rests always on the unseen in the midst of seen experience. And when things are most trying through the prevalence of evil, those that believe are encouraged the more to cry, How long, O Lord? He puts faith to the proof; He can never deny Himself, nor disappoint His people. But endurance is to have a perfect work, that they may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

The figures employed were the best possible to encourage: on the one hand a judge of unrighteousness neither fearing God nor respecting man, on the other a widow wronged by an adversary near enough to inflict so much the greater evil, because he should have been her protector. Yet her persevering cry wore out the judge's indifference. He could not stand her continual appeal, and, to escape the annoyance, he let her have justice. The Lord reveals the thoughts and motives of the judge's heart, and draws the believer's attention to the way in which even now God's providential ways act in the most reckless and unprincipled on behalf of the oppressed.

But how much more will it be when God rises up in judgment of the world, as He surely will in the person of the Lord Jesus at the end of the age Then will He shine forth as the Judge of the earth: and the elect will have their cry by day and night at length heard, and the wicked triumph no more. They speak arrogantly now, they boast themselves. They will slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless. But Jehovah will not cut off His people, nor will He forsake His inheritance. For judgment, instead of diverging to the right or the left, shall return to righteousness, and all the upright in heart shall follow it. So it will be in the day of the Lord's appearing. She who had long played Him false and sought many lovers will take by repentance 'the place of the desolate widow, and shall forget the shame of her youth, and the reproach of her widowhood shall He remember no more. For her Maker is her husband in that bright day; and the Holy One of Israel is her Redeemer; the God of the whole earth shall He be called, as indeed He is, and she shall know. He may be long suffering over His own elect in their tribulation; but He will avenge them speedily in that day. For in His hand is a cup, and the wine foameth; it is full of mixture, and He poureth out of the same, Surely the dregs thereof all the wicked of the earth shall wring out, and drink them; and the horns of the righteous shall be lifted up when those of the wicked also shall be cut off. But it will be a dark hour, not only in the land but elsewhere, and faith seems then extinct as regards public profession up to that mighty intervention.

O my reader, forget not that you still hear the gospel. Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. Him Who knew no sin God made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Him. Such is His testimony to you. It is not a promise or a hope; it is the most wondrous of all facts in the grace of God; and you, if you have not already believed God as to it, are now called to believe on Christ Whom He gave and sent that you might be saved. To Him and His work of redemption does the Holy Spirit now bear witness in the gospel, which is God's glad tidings to every one that believes. Trifle not with grace so unparalleled. To put it off is to trifle with the will of the Father, the work of the Son, and the witness of the Holy Spirit. Can there be more glaring or guilty unbelief?

Why do you now delay? The atoning work is done. Be it known to you therefore, that through Christ is preached to you forgiveness of sins; and in virtue of Him every one that believes is justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses. This was no defect of His law, which indeed was God's law and must condemn, not justify, the sinner. But the gospel is from God the good news of Jesus the Lord His Son, the Son of man come to seek and to save that which was lost. Beware then, lest that come upon you which is spoken in the prophets, Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish; for I work a work in your days, a work which ye will in no wise believe if one declare it to you.

3 The Pharisee and the Tax-Gatherer

Luke 18: 9-14.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 164-166. Gospel No. 8-3.)

From the widow's pertinacity prevailing over the injustice of the wicked judge the Lord drew the assurance of God's avenging at length the cry of the elect. Here He turns to God's pitiful estimate of a contrite spirit despised by haughty self-righteousness. What an encouragement to the poor self-judging one! What a warning to such as presume on their own fancied superiority! Both parables illustrate the moral light here cast on man as he is by the Son of man. They are characteristic of Luke who alone gives them.

"And he spoke also this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and set all the rest at nought. Two men went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee, the other a tax-gatherer. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus to himself, O God, I thank thee that I am not as the rest of men, rapacious, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax-gatherer. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I gain. And the taxgatherer standing afar off would not lift up even his eyes unto heaven, but kept smiting his breast, saying, O God, be merciful to me, the sinner. 1 tall you, this [man] went down unto his house justified rather than that; because every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted" (vers. 9-14).

How deeply "Jesus Christ, the Righteous," resented the spuriousness of a sinner claiming righteousness! how He pitied the soul that really felt its sinfulness before God! He is the Saviour of all that believe the gospel, the Judge of all that disbelieve. Simple yet graphic is the scene, and the sentence sound, sure, and conclusive. But in the haze that overhung the temple the Pharisee had as high a repute as the tax-gatherer had none.

There the Pharisee took a position and poured out his complacency in himself. "O God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men." Not a word about his sins or even his need. Not a suspicion of his guilt and ruin. He is lifted up with the sense that he was not this or that, extortionate, unjust, adulterous, "or even as this tax-gatherer." Nor that only; for he boasts his religion. "I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I gain." It was another Cain. Oh, the many that go in the way of Cain! They come before God as they are; they offer their fasts and their tithes, as they feel assured they are better than the rest of men. What have they done to offend God? Why should they doubt His acceptance of them?

So it is that men still deceive themselves, or even make God a liar, as the apostle expresses it. They cloak their own sins; they denounce other people's sins; but God is not mocked. His word is that all sinned, and do come short of His glory. But Abel bowed and brought his sacrifice. Fruits of the ground man laboured on could not avail for sin. Death must come between God and the sinner. So Cain righteous in his own eyes had no right sense of his ruin; Abel who was righteous duly felt and owned ruin in his offering, whereas Gain's denied it. In a word Gain trusted to self, Abel to Another. Sin or death was nothing to Gain, but great to Abel's faith that looked for the Saviour.

And what of the tax-gatherer? He, standing afar off, would not lift up even his eyes to heaven, but kept smiting his breast, saying, O God, be merciful to me, the sinner. It was his evil that pressed on his spirit, as he cried to God. Not a thought had he of good deeds done, of bad ones avoided. He did not dream of hiding himself in a crowd of sinners or a vague confession. He singled himself as the sinner if ever there was one. What did he know of others? or, even if he had a sight knowledge, he knew himself far better and overwhelmingly. "O God, be merciful to me, the sinner." His light from God might be small, but it was real; and as it disclosed his own sinfulness, he owned himself the sinner. He looked out of himself to God about his condition, without a word of self-commendation, or of comparison with others, or of excuse. No, he was the sinner, and before God he lays himself as he is. On God, a God of grace, he relies in simple real acknowledgement of his ruin.

It was the fear of God, and the beginning of wisdom; and the Lord recognises it accordingly. "I tell you, this man went down unto his house justified rather than that." Hence the general principle follows, "because every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."

It was not "justified by faith" so as to have peace with God. The Lord does not describe one who had heard and believed the word of truth, the gospel of salvation. There was not, nor could be yet, the presentation of the great work of grace, Christ's work. God's righteousness in Him had yet to be manifested. But the tax-gatherer was brought where all the godly in Israel had been before him, to look away from himself to God's mercy; he was believingly taught as a sinner, where the godly outside Israel were taught to renounce self- dependence. See a saint like Job thus broken through severe discipline for his greater blessing: "I have heard of thee by the hearing. of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42: 5, 6).

For sinners or saints repentance there is and must be. Even he whom Jehovah commended as a perfect and upright man, that feared God and eschewed evil, needed it, as He alone turned the fiery trial to that good end. For Job thought too well and much of what grace enabled him to do, and exalted himself in consequence. The enemy failed wholly to shake him. Jehovah touched the weak point through his friends (more ignorant of God and of themselves than Job), who at length humbled himself deeply and was exalted in due time. This was when he prayed in a spirit of grace for his proud and harshly judging friends. What a contrast with the Pharisee! There the tax-gatherer was led in his measure, a case of true repentance, if not so deep as that of Job: both precious in the Lord's eyes. "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than that."

In justification through Christ's blood are found no degrees. By Him all that believe are justified from all things (Acts 13: 39). Here it was faith and repentance, and hence a state morally right before God (which the Pharisee's was not), though short of the clearance and liberty which faith in the gospel brings.

4 Christ returning to Reign

Luke 19: 12-27.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 180-181. Gospel No. 8-4.)

The disciples, little knowing God's mind, were impatient for His kingdom. They thought it was immediately to be manifested. They forgot that "first must He suffer many things" and enter into His glory. They overlooked reconciliation by blood as the basis of all: how else could God he glorified or man be saved? The Lord said therefore,

"A certain man of high birth went unto a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and to return. And having called his own ten bondmen, he gave them ten pounds (minae), and said to them, Trade till I come. But his citizens hated him, and sent an embassy after him, saying, We will not that this [man] reign over us. And it came to pass on his coming back again, having received the kingdom, that he bade these bondmen to whom he gave the money to be called to him, in order that he might know what each gained by trading. And the first came up, saying, Lord, thy pound made ten pounds more. And he said to him, Well [done], good bondman; because in a very little thou wast faithful, be in authority over ten cities. And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound made five pounds. And he said also to him, And be thou over five cities. And the other came, saying, Lord, behold, thy pound, which I kept laid up in a napkin; for I feared thee, because thou art an austere man; thou takest up what thou didst not lay down, and reapest what thou didst not sow. He saith to him, Out of thy mouth will I judge thee, wicked bondman. Thou knewest that I am an austere man, taking up what I laid not down, and reaping what I did not sow; and why didst thou not give my money into a bank, and I on coming should have got it with interest? And to the bystanders he said, Take from him the pound and give [it] to him that hath the ten pounds. (And they said to him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.) For I say to you, that to every one that hath shall be given; but from him that hath not even what he hath shall be taken from him. Howbeit those my enemies, that would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay before me" (vers. 12-27).

Redemption by Christ's death must be first, and heaven be opened for the redeemed where He is exalted as its answer. He would receive the kingdom as all things not from man but from God. But He will surely return, having received the kingdom. Then will He take account of their service to whom He gave gifts for trading in responsibility to Him during His absence. For we are here in view, not of His receiving His own to Himself for the Father's house, but of His appearing and His kingdom. And they are rewarded according to their fidelity, one more, and another less. It is not gifts differing according to God's sovereignty, but all alike entering their Lord's joy as in Matt. 25; but here each receives alike a pound and is rewarded respectively according to the different result of their work. The two Gospels present the two sides, but are both true. Both show us also the "evil bondman," without a particle of faithfulness. And why? Because he had no faith in his Lord's grace. On the contrary, he insulted Him Who is full of grace and truth as "an austere man," selfish and dishonest as his own heart; and his end is accordingly.

There is reward then for work that pleases the Master, Who will be no man's debtor, but surely requites all in the coming day. Each bondman shall receive his own reward according to his own labour. But there is a foundation requisite for every one who thus builds; and other foundation can none lay than that laid, which is Jesus Christ. There is and must be faith in His grace for any one to serve Him truly. This the faithful bondmen had, and in the faith of Him they were devoted to His service. This faith the wicked bondman had not, and therefore he served not. He cared only for himself, he wronged his Master and gave the lie to His grace. But he could not escape righteous judgment, and out of his own mouth he was condemned: as those who believed in the Lord's grace receive a righteous reward in the kingdom of glory for their good works.

Take notice, my reader, that it is no question here of heathen but of professing Christians, of the service due to the absent Lord before He appears in His kingdom. Faith in Him, faith in His grace, can alone avail you. Alike is the turning-point for every soul that hears His word; it is the spring of acceptable service, no less than of salvation. How could it be otherwise? The Lord is the Son of man Who came to save the lost at all cost for Himself. God will not tolerate slighting His own Son. Not to believe on Him at God's word is to dishonour both the Father and the Son; and as men thus receive not life eternal, they must come into judgment, and hence inevitably into the second death. "He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." O unbeliever, what bliss do you not lose? what woe do you not gain?

Then the Lord speaks of another guilty class; not the wicked servant, but His citizens sent an embassy after Him when He went on high, saying, We will not have this man reign over us. They are the Jews that hate Him, instead of professing to serve Him. When the true servants shine in the honours of the kingdom, what will be their portion, His open enemies that would not have Him, Messiah their king, reign over them? Those who repent not will fall under His destructive judgment. Bring them hither, says He in the parable, and slay them before Me. For when He shall come to be glorified in His saints and to be marvelled at in all them that believed, there will also be the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven, rendering vengeance to those that know not God, and to those that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus. Jews that hate and Gentiles that despise the Saviour must suffer the due reward of their rebellious unbelief and their evil deeds. How would it be, how is it, with you that read these words? Do not assume that God is indifferent, like you.

5 The Shepherd of  the sheep

John 10: 1-6.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 198-199. Gospel No. 8-5.)

The similitudes of the Fourth Gospel differ from the parables of the other three, and have another name. They are sayings by the way or proverbial allegories, and like all the doings and sayings of John's Gospel, they set out the Lord personally, the grace and truth which came by Him. Here is the first of the cluster.

"Verily, verily I say to you, He that entereth not, by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbeth up elsewhere, he is a thief and a robber; but he that entereth by the door is shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice; and he calleth his own sheep by name and leadeth them out. When he hath put forth all his own, he goeth on before them, and the sheep follow him, because they know his voice. And a stranger they will in no wise follow, but will flee from him, because they know not the voice of strangers. This proverb (or, allegory) spoke Jesus to them; but they understood not what things they were which he spoke to them" (vers. 1-6).

With the solemn formula that occurs so often in his Gospel, the Lord introduces His description, not of the shepherd of the sheep, but of a thief and a robber. He does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up elsewhere. God distinguished the door by plain marks that the sheep might discern the Shepherd, Who came from and was sent by Himself. For they were precious to Him no less than to the Son. And the Son was zealous for the Father's house and would enter by the appointed way and none other. He, the mighty God, deigned to be the Messiah, the Shepherd of Israel, and so to become the Seed of Abraham, the son of David, and born of the Virgin. Through Micah (Micah 5: 2) Jehovah named Bethlehem as the place of His birth. Out of it should He come forth unto Him that was to be ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. Nor was the time left vague. Through Daniel He fixed it by weeks (of years) to elapse, from the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem (issued by Artaxerxes Longimanus), after which Messiah should be (not born nor manifested nor reigning, but) "cut off and have nothing." So also He does not fail to announce in this chapter as in John 3: 14 too.

Others sought their own things by craft or violence. He came in a love unmistakably of God, in an obedience that left nothing to desire, always doing in an evil world the things that pleased the Father. Prophecy pointed Him out no more plainly than the grace and truth which came by Him, or the signs of beneficent power which studded the path of light that could not be hid. He entered by the door, and "to him the porter openeth." The Spirit of God deigned to work in this as in all others to glorify the Lord. Notably we perceive this by the testimony of Simeon, and of Anna a prophetess in early days, but above all by John the Baptist the divinely appointed herald of the Messiah, when the time drew near for His public ministry.

It was for him who was but "a voice of one crying in the wilderness" to say, Prepare ye the way of Jehovah, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Nor was it in vain for those given to see according to God. For "the sheep hear his voice;" and as He said in John 5: 25, "they that hear shall live." There was faith, without which it is impossible to please God; and with faith life. For life was in Him from everlasting to everlasting. It belonged to His eternal person as the Word and the Son (John 1: 3, 1 John 5: 11); and when He took the place of man, as the Sent One, the Father gave Him to have life in Himself, yet not for Himself simply, but that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have life eternal, and this in hearing His voice (vers. 24, 25). It might not yet be life in resurrection, but it was life eternal; for it was in the Son, and the Son has none other for the believer. Verily, verily I say to you, He that believeth on Me hath life eternal (John 6: 47). There is no exception. A robber just converted, and an apostle behind none, have just the same life. Christ lived in both; and He is the true God and the eternal life.

But what tender care in the Shepherd! "He calleth his own sheep by name." His love is in the fullest way personal. His interest is in each personally, and He would have all to know it. What could evince it more than His calling His own sheep by name? So the apostle wrote, for those who believe as well as himself, He loved me, and gave Himself for me.

A change is next announced of great moment, especially for Jews. He "leadeth them out." God had given His ancient people much advantage every way. But they had received not His Son, the Shepherd of Israel, hating Him to the utmost, and about to cry, Crucify Him, crucify Him. And He, knowing the end from the beginning, leadeth His sheep out of the fold, more and more the den of thieves and robbers, already the seat of His enemies. It might be done through the violence of others, as when the blind now seeing was cast out by the reviling Jews. But in effect He leadeth them out, as would be true for all His own in due time.

But there is more; and it is of transcendent importance. "When he hath put forth all his own, he goeth on before them, and the sheep follow him, because they know his voice." Later in the chapter He explains how this was to be. He would give Himself for them. It would be by nothing less than His death and resurrection: such was His love, and such their need. Thus only could they be secured, or fitted for the new place of blessing. For even Caiaphas soon after prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation, and not for that nation only, but that He should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad (John 11: 51, 52) — a yet larger view than ver. 4 presents, and needing ver. 16 to supplement it. And what a safeguard for their difficulties and dangers grace provides the sheep! "They know his voice." This enables them to "follow him," as it preserves them from misleaders.

"And a stranger they will in nowise follow, but will flee from him, because they know not the voice of strangers." So the Lord lays down the truth for His own. He does not here state the possible wandering of any sheep, but presents the only way of life. Others might occupy themselves with errors and evils, a pursuit not without danger of defilement, The wisdom of the Christian is to he content with His voice which gave him life from the first, and to delight increasingly in Christ to the last fleeing from a stranger and knowing not the voice of such.

It was a deep allegory, and looked on to that which was not yet accomplished. We need not, then, wonder that as yet the Saviour's words were not understood.

6 The Door

John 10: 7-10.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 212-214. Gospel No. 8-6.)

In the previous verses our Lord speaks of Himself as the Shepherd of the sheep entering the fold of Israel by the door or God-appointed means.

Here, for the best reasons and the fuller display of the grace and truth which came by Him, He presents Himself as the Door of the sheep, rather than of the fold.

"Jesus therefore said to them again, Verily, verily, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All as many as came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door: through me if any one enter, he shall be saved, and he shall go in and shall go out, and he shall find pasture. The thief cometh not but that he may steal and slay and destroy; I came that they might have life, and have [it] abundantly" (vers. 7-10).

The fold is here left aside. What could Judaism avail for the saints any more than sinners? Christ is the door of the sheep. They might be cast out like the blind man whom He caused to see. Where were they to turn, and whither go? "I am the door of the sheep." He is the entrance to the new and abiding blessings of God for His own, the entrance to the God that blessed them, yea, to the Father, as they learn in due time. He is the object of faith now more clearly than ever; as He had been truly, if dimly, since sin came into the world. All believers looked to Him that was coming, the Messiah; but now He is revealed as incomparably more.

Had any claimed the sheep? "All as many as came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not hear them." For God protects His own. They might boast and say that they were somebody, like Theudas; they might draw after them a people in revolt like Judas of Galilee. But they were thieves and robbers; and none followed whom the Son made free, only Abraham's seed but not his children.

In ver. 9 He describes Himself in fewer words which convey far more, "I am the door." It is not merely "of the sheep"; it is for any. "I am the door: through me if any one enter, he shall be saved, and he shall go in and shall go out, and he shall find pasture." Can words be more precise or more full? Can blessing for a needy soul be more suited, rich, and secure? He is the door absolutely, away from all evil into all good.

It is Christianity in contrast with Judaism or any other earthly religion. To enter through the door is to believe on Jesus the Son of God. He that does is on His word assured of salvation; "he shall be saved." This, mark it well, is given to him that enters through Christ. No such assurance attends another than the Son of God. He is the Saviour, and none else. The church consists of the saved, but cannot save: only Christ can and does. A false church may set up to save; the true church repudiates such a pretension as a lie and a blasphemy. She is but the body, He is the Head; she is the bride, He the Bridegroom. She, being true, is jealous of His honour; she rejects with horror all thought of setting herself in His place as of Satan. She has the Spirit now, as He had when here; but the Spirit does not glorify her but Him. All her privileges are in virtue of Him, and are rightly turned but to His praise.

Salvation then, as it is of God's grace, is through Christ. "Through me if any one enter, he shall be saved." It is not for the Jew only but for the Gentile also; it is for "any one." But he must enter through Christ. Through Me if any one enter, he shall be saved. He may be baptised and be lost; he may take the Lord's Supper, and be lost. If any one enter through Christ, he shall be saved. This He declares; and His words shall endure when heaven and earth pass away.

O my reader, do you believe His words? Do you believe on Himself? Unless He were what He is, unless He were Who He is, neither you nor any other sinner could be saved. But being the Son and becoming the sacrifice for sin, salvation is now open to the poorest of sinners who believes on Him. "Through me if any one enter, he shall be saved." He is the door; and He tells you so. Have you heard Him and entered? Have you taken Him at His word? This is to believe. Do you then believe on the Son of God?

Nor is salvation all that He is now giving. He gives liberty: or as He says here of "any one" that enters through Him, "he shall go in and shall go out." It is in contrast with the penned-up condition of the sheep under Judaism. The law genders bondage; it could not confer freedom. Only the truth, the Son, makes free; and "if the Son therefore makes you free, ye shall be free indeed." So here "he shall go in and shall go out." This is divine emancipation, to us without money or price, to God at the cost of His Son.

There is yet more. For we need now, not salvation nor freedom only, but food; and this He next guarantees. He that enters through Christ "shall find pasture." As He had before taught, the best food is Himself not incarnate only, but dead for us, so that by faith we eat His flesh and drink His blood. This is what most nourishes the soul, communion with His death.

O my reader, turn not a deaf ear to God's glad tidings. Fear to treat such a Saviour with indifference. Beware of putting off to a more convenient season. God is not mocked. To slight God's law was bad; to neglect His gospel is a great deal worse. The enemy is busy and near. "The thief cometh not but to steal and slay and destroy." This Satan loves, and his servants are many. "I came," says the Lord, "that they [believers] might have life, and have it abundantly." Here He makes a brief transition to His death and resurrection, that the saved might enjoy life, as they do now, in the power of His resurrection.

7 The Good Shepherd

John 10: 11-18.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 230-231. Gospel No. 8-7.)

Very direct are these words of the Lord. What blessing to receive them in faith! what guilt and ruin to despise Him and them!

"I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep. But he that is a hireling, and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, beholdeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and fleeth; and the wolf seizeth them and scattereth. Now the hireling fleeth because he is a hireling, and he hath no care about the sheep. I am the good shepherd; and I know mine own and mine own know me, even as the Father knoweth me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have which are not of this fold: those also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall be one flock, one shepherd. On this account doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it again: this commandment I received of my Father" (vers. 11-18).

In Isa. 40: 11, of the Lord Jehovah it is said, "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd, he shall gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom — shall gently lead those that give suck." Here He Himself goes much farther. He proves Himself the Good Shepherd by laying down His life for the sheep: none other would, nor, if any other be conceived, could it avail with God or for man.

Rejected He was, with hatred for His love; but nothing turned Him from His purpose of grace. He was the Good Shepherd; and as such He lays down His life for the sheep. Such love bespoke itself divine; it characterised His person and God's nature, but in man, which alone made it possible. Beyond doubt only thus could they be, only thus were they, reconciled to God; but here His laying down His life is the evidence and acme of devoted love in Him, Who acts freely and never was more consciously God than in His atoning death.

What a contrast with him who is a hireling and not a shepherd; whose own the sheep are not! Beholding the wolf coming, he leaves the sheep and flees, while the wolf seizes and scatters them; And so it is, because a hireling he is and careth not for the sheep.

But Jesus only is the Good Shepherd here. Others there have been who love the sheep in their measure, and so feed and tend them. But here where He is thus introduced, they have no mention but mush vanish away. They were not entitled to call theirs the sheep, which in fact are "the flock of God." The sheep were Christ's own. Even if the wolf should catch any, not even the wolf shall catch them (the same word) out of Christ's hand. To kill the wolf would have been incomparably easier than to lay down life for them; and this He did, Who had no sin but love, no fear any more than selfish object, Who always did the things pleasing to His Father. And as the Good Shepherd He could say, "I know mine own, and mine own know me; even as my Father knoweth me, and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep." It is the fullest evidence of His devotedness in love for them. His knowledge of them, and theirs of Him, He compared with the Father's knowing Him and His knowing the Father. What can be conceived so satisfying and perfect?

Gracious and powerful is the love the O.T. reveals in Messiah for His flock, "His beautiful flock" as it will surely be. But what is even that to a loving and mutual knowledge of the Shepherd and the sheep, so intimate that it could only be matched by the Father's and the Son's knowledge of one another! In this case is absolute and intrinsic excellence beyond thought or question; in the other, oh! what and how many faults on our side! But love in Him never fails; and we are entitled to count on it in our knowledge of Him as in His of us. This is grace divine, superior to all that it finds, and everlasting.

Such is the depth of the Good Shepherd's love; but He intimates a width far beyond His disciples' thoughts. "And other sheep I have which are not of this fold: them also I must bring [or, lead], and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become [or, be] one flock, one shepherd."

Thus He points to the call of Gentiles by the gospel. If most of the Jews turned a deaf ear, many Gentiles have heard and do hear. For no criterion is truer than this. As He deigns to lead them also, "they shall hear my voice."

O my reader, how is this with you? His voice is not of one crying in the wilderness like His herald. He, when here, frequented not the wilderness only but the hillside, and the riverside, and the villages, and the towns, and the cities. He preached the gospel to the poor emphatically; and when His work here was done, He charged His servants to preach the gospel to all the nations, the whole creation. Had Jerusalem been most guilty? To all, said He, "beginning with Jerusalem."

Is not this glad tidings to you, whoever you are, whatever you may have been? Redemption depends on the Redeemer, not on the redeemed, save that they "hear His voice." Oh! then repent and believe the gospel. Never can you truly worship or serve Him, till you receive Him, believing on His name. In vain is every other resource; nay, to trust any ordinance, in order to reconciliation with God, dishonours both the Father and the Son. When you have Him as your life, they find their place.

Of one great added privilege the Saviour speaks here. "They shall (Jews and Gentiles) be one flock, one Shepherd." It was a quite new thing from God: "one flock" (not "fold" as formerly), "one Shepherd." Oh, how sad the change man has made! and how guilty the excuse to cloak it as one flock consisting of many folds! Why do Christians thus defraud the Lord, disguise or corrupt the word, and forfeit their own fidelity and their own fuller blessing? Not so. To set up a fold now is no better than Judaising. There is, as the Lord's will and truth, but one flock, as there is but one Shepherd in the supreme sense. And every Christian is bound to own this One and no other rival. In Him all the fulness dwells.

But let us hear also His own wondrous words. On this account doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again." Christ here omits "for the sheep" and presents His death as in itself furnishing a motive to the Father's love. None but He could; none but His divine person. As such He declares, "no one taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power [or, title] to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." None but the One Who is both God and man in one person could thus speak; and so while He speaks as divine, He does not fail to remember the place of sent One and servant He had taken. "This commandment I received from my Father."

8 Feet-washing

John 13: 1-15.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 244-246. Gospel No. 8-8.)

The Lord was going on high. Of this He treats henceforth till the closing scenes on earth. It was an immense surprise to the disciples, who looked for His restoring the Kingdom to Israel at that time. His departure to the Father would begin that new order of things which we know as Christianity.

"Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own that were in the world, he loved them unto the end. And supper being come, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's [son] to betray him, [Jesus] knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he came from God and goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and layeth aside his garments, and having taken a towel girded himself; then he poureth water into the bason, and began to wash the feet of the disciples, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. He cometh therefore unto Simon Peter. He saith to him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet? Jesus answered and saith to him, What I do, thou knowest not now, but shalt come to know hereafter. Peter saith to him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, if I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. Simon Peter saith to him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him, He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is wholly clean: and ye are clean, but not all. For he knew him that should betray him; on this account he said, Ye are not all clean. When therefore he washed their feet and took his garments, reclining again he said to them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me the Teacher and the Lord; and ye say well, for I am. If I therefore the Lord and the Teacher washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For gave you an example, that ye should do even as I also did to you" (vers. 1-15).

It was a new and profound testimony to His love-love to the uttermost: not in His work on the cross in suffering once for their sins, but in His provision for His beloved ones against every defilement by the way. In this act of washing the disciples' feet we have mystically His advocacy with the Father if any one should have sinned. Was the devil then goading on the traitor? Our Lord Jesus shows what His love would do in heaven for His failing ones. He would fulfil all the meaning of stooping to wash their feet. The glory conferred on Him, the infinite purity that returned to God as unstained as when He came out from Him, only attested His grace and adequacy to their need and what was due to divine majesty. It was a question of restoring communion interrupted by defilement; and the Lord met it by a way as unfailing for the saint, as His atoning death for the sinner. "This is he that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ."

Here it is not blood but water. As His blood alone could cleanse us from all sin before God, so do we need what the water typifies. According to His mercy God: saved us through washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit. Thus are we bathed or washed all over, a new creation in Christ. But this does not dispense with the need of washing for the feet, soiled by walking through this miry world. Only Christ could effect either; and He does effect both through the Holy Spirit and the word. He is the Advocate with the Father.

Saints are apt to misunderstand this, as we see Peter did; and the Lord corrected his hasty thoughts. How much had Peter to learn! how much have you? The Lord's gracious work in heaven is as indispensable as His work once for all on the cross. Not that regeneration is repeated. "He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet." Peter, who understood little as yet, soon learnt what it is to defile his feet, and what it is for the Saviour to wash them. For indeed He prayed that Peter's faith should not fail, though his faithfulness did deeply. But His grace restored him, and made him afterwards such a strengthener of his brethren as he never was before. When Peter reached the lowest point of the mire, "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter; and Peter remembered the word of the Lord." What a witness to this service which the Lord now carries on above for His failing ones on earth! It is the washing of water by the word, which applies for our regeneration at the start, and for our restoration at every occasion of need. It it were not so, one could have no part with Christ; but this He secures by His constant love in washing our feet when defiled.

O my reader, are you then bathed? Are you regenerate and renewed by the Spirit? If not, there is but one door, but one way. Jesus alone can avail you. Believe God's word concerning Him. This is faith, without which it is impossible to please God. All things, says He, are possible to him that believes. Such are washed, sanctified, justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Otherwise you are still in your sins. If you only profess the Lord's name, but believe not in your heart, so much the more awful is your case.

Abide no longer under the wrath of God, as you do if not subject but disobedient to His Son. He is as willing as He is able. Turn not from His grace. He refuses none, but accepts every one who comes to Him, and will raise him up at the last day. From first to last the Lord Jesus undertakes for the believer. His sheep, as He declares, shall not perish, nor shall any one seize them out of His hand.

How wonderful it is that we who believe are called to like grace with one another! Christ would have us wash one another's feet. Is this our way, or our desire, before our God and Father? It is vain, unless we be spiritual. Such alone can restore a fallen brother in a spirit of meekness. Be it ours thus to seek grace from our God.

9 The vine

John 15.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 261-262. Gospel No. 8-9.)

The disciples were used to regard Israel as the vine of Jehovah's planting. He brought it out of Egypt and planted it in the land on which His eyes rested. But the Psalm (80), which tells us so, mourns its actual devastation by the wild beasts of the field, and beseeches Him to visit this vine, as He will by the Son of man. Here the Lord meanwhile sets aside Israel altogether, and substitutes Himself for that empty vine. Christ is the True Vine, and His Father is the Husbandman. This is clearly, not His office in heaven as Advocate (John 13), nor His coming as our Hope to place us with Himself in the Father's house (John 14), but His relation to His own on earth for fruit-bearing. Christ is all.

Hence we see throughout that it is the responsibility of the disciple to depend on Christ, to cleave to Him, to refer all to Him. Thus only is fruit borne to His praise, and the Father glorified. Throughout our abiding has the first place, and it is a question of "if." The very reverse appears invariably where God presents salvation by grace.

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away; and every one that beareth fruit, he cleanseth it that it may bring forth more fruit. Already ye are clean on account of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you: even as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abide in the vine, so neither ye unless ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye the branches: he that abideth in me and I in him, he beareth much fruit; for apart from me ye can do nothing. Unless one abide in me, he is cast forth as the branch and is withered; and they gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask whatever ye will, and it shall come to pass for you. In this is my Father glorified that ye bear much fruit, and ye shall become disciples to me" (vers. 1-8).

Luminous as these words are, bias has misunderstood them, Calvinists and Arminians wresting them, each to his scheme. Both start with the assumption that the figurative language means union with Christ, or membership of His body. But His body is never taught in our Gospel nor indeed by any but the apostle Paul; and though union is elsewhere, it is not here, but communion. Union is a settled fact in the spiritual realm, on the basis of Christ's death (John 11: 52) and by the given Spirit's power (John 17: 11, 21, 22, 23). But communion is conditional, and hence may or may not be, as it depends on abiding in Christ.

For this reason it is not a question here of believing on Christ to life eternal, but of abiding in Him and bearing fruit. Man's will for this wholly fails; the chosen people have no power more than others; the law is in vain; and so is the church. Angels, saints living or departed, the Virgin, are but sinking sand. Christ is the True Vine, Christ only. The branch cannot bear fruit of itself; apart from Him it can do nothing.

It is the responsible position of all that call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. All such have left Gentilism or Judaism for Christ. It may be a heart or a lip confession of Christ; but those that confess Him are all branches in the Vine. He is the True Vine; but they may not be true branches. If they abide in Him, they bear fruit; if they do not, they are sooner or later taken away. They may leave Him, or, if put away, they may never be restored either inwardly or outwardly. So we read (John 6: 66) that many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him. So it was going to be manifest in Judas, one of the Twelve. They were branches in the Vine; they confessed His name. But if they did not abide, they hence bore no fruit for His Father, The truest branch needs pruning, or cleansing, by the Father, that it may bear more fruit; but every branch that is true bears fruit. Those that are untrue prove it by not abiding in Christ, and hence by bearing no fruit, self- confident and active though they may be.

The Lord Jesus is life eternal to those that believe on Him. This however is not the subject which is here treated of. It is rather how to bear fruit; and abiding in Christ is its source and way. He is not only life, but the rule of life; and as He is absolutely what He also speaks, His word expresses it fully. By His word were they begotten afresh; on account of it they were already clean. To abide in Him, and have His words abiding in them, draws out in suited prayer and ensures the answer. There is thus much fruit to the glory of the Father, and Christ is not ashamed of them as His disciples. Not to abide in Him, after knowing and confessing Him, is worse than never to have heard, and leaves those who abandon Him as dried up branches of the Vine, only fit for the burning. Such souls never had life in the Son.

How is it then with you, dear reader? Do you yearn after fruit acceptable to God the Father? Is it in your heart to serve the Lord Jesus? You cannot, unless you abide in Him. If you strive to abide in Him in order to service and fruit-bearing, it will be a failure. And the Lord here solemnly warns of failure, as He explains the secret of realising. Begin with taking the place of a guilty and lost sinner that you may be saved through grace by believing on Christ. Thus only is life eternal given. "Verily, verily I say to you, He that believeth hath life eternal." "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of life eternal."

The responsibility of bearing fruit attaches to all who confess Christ. If you believe on Him at God's word, you have life in Him, and will respond to His call of abiding in Him; if it be but confessing Him on evidence satisfactory to your own mind, you will play fast and loose, and turn away on pressure or to please yourself. This is the reverse of abiding in Him, and it is the prelude to everlasting judgment.

10 Christ the Bread of Life

John 6: 35-51.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 277-278. Gospel No. 8-10.)

From the sign of the miraculously multiplied bread the Lord turns those who sought Him to the true bread which the Father gives out of heaven. They had been of a mind by force to make him King; He would receive the kingdom only in due time from His Father. He therefore goes up on high meanwhile to pray. But now on the other side He explains that during Israel's unbelief it is no question of accomplishing their hope now, but of receiving life eternal for resurrection and the heaven to which He was going. It is Christianity in short, and not yet the kingdom restored to Israel.

"Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He that cometh unto me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. But I said to you, that ye have both seen me, and believe not. All that the Father giveth me shall come unto me, and him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out; because I am come down from heaven, not to do my will but the will of him that sent me. And this is the will of him that sent me that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. For this is the will of my Father that everyone that beholdeth the Son and believeth on him should have life eternal; and I will raise him up at the last day" (35-40).

The Bread of life is not a rite or a sacrament, but the Incarnate Word. He is the object of faith presented, that needy, famishing, souls may have life eternal. The manna in the wilderness was a witness to Him, little as they knew who ate of it and died there. The Lord Jesus is the Bread of God that comes down out of heaven and gives life not to Israel only but to the world. Him the Father God sealed. But so it was the right time to unfold a higher and larger work as the Son of man, rejected by the Jews. Faith receives in Him this rich gift, life eternal. The unbelief of man, yea of the chosen people, only brings out more grace from God the Father in the Son.

But the blessing is only to faith. "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." Nothing but coming to Himself by faith can avail. Those who saw Him without believing were no better for it but the worse. Those who resort to images of Him find only a blind. Those who lean for life eternal on any ordinance, even of Him, set up a rival to their shame. He is the object of faith for life eternal. "He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father that sent Him." And the Father's will is that all honour the Son, even as they honour the Father: if they honour Him not by faith unto life eternal, they must in His judgment of them to everlasting perdition.

It is beautiful to see how perfectly the Son of the Highest becomes His Servant, now to save, as by-and-by to administer the glory. He chooses none for saving; He leaves all with Him Who sent Him. "All which the Father giveth me shall come unto me; and him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out." On the one hand is the security of the children; on the other is the free grace of the gospel. For this has Christ come down out of heaven, Who alone could give either effect according to the Father's will, that none of that He had given should be lost, and that every one who believeth on the Son should have life eternal, Christ raising all up in the last day. For He brings to view not the present power of the kingdom on earth, but life for the soul now, and for the body resurrection.

When the Jews murmured incredulously, the Lord urges the more the need of the Father's drawing those He Himself should raise in the last day, and cites the prophets accordingly. Then He sums up with His solemn asseveration. "Verily, verily, I say to you, He that believeth on me hath life eternal. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness, and died. This is the bread that cometh down out of heaven that one may eat thereof and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven: if one eat of this bread, he shall live for ever" (vers. 47-51).

The Incarnate Saviour thus stands before us, the food of faith in the wilderness world. Have you, dear reader, gone to Him? For He is thus revealed in the written word that you might come to Him and believe on Him. Life is in Him for sinful man, in Him only for him that believes on earth, in Him life eternal for the most guilty, untoward, and proud. So He assures us without hesitation or condition, save that we believe on Him. And this is the one thing the sinner does most of all pleasing to the Father, jealous as He is for His glory Whom man despised for His grace. "Whosoever denieth the Son, hath not the Father either; he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also." All that is good follows faith through grace.

May this be your present and everlasting portion!

11 Eating Christ's flesh, and drinking His blood

John 6: 53-58.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 293-294. Gospel No. 8-11.)

There is a marked change in our Lord's discourse. He turns from His incarnation to His death. In both cases He speaks of eating. It is the well-known figure of scripture for appropriation or communion. He was not only the Living Bread that came down out of heaven, that one might eat and live for ever. He would give His flesh for the life not of Jews only but of mankind, or as He says "for the life of the world."

But not a trace of ordinances is in either. It is a question of Himself, first living, then dead. He only was entitled to speak of giving life to the world. He through Whom the world came into being, He could quicken the dead; and such was and is the moral condition of all through sin (John 5: 24, 25). He, the new Man, is the object of faith giving life. And it is for any, for the Gentile as well as the Jew. Baptism and the Lord's supper have their place by the Lord's institution till He come; but scripture attributes quickening to Him, not to them. In Him, not in them, was life. It is a falsehood of Christendom to claim an attribute which is His for a rite in the hands of men who thereby arrogate a dignity not only unreal but profane. All through this discourse, as in all other scripture, notably in John's Gospel at large and in his great Epistle, life is in the Son; so that he who believes has the Son and has life, as he that has not the Son of God has not life.

Only now He insists on faith in Him dead. This was yet more repulsive to unbelief than faith in Him living. But the Lord did not soften the truth to make it more palatable. He presents it in pointedly strong terms, peremptorily demanding its reception. Did the Jews contend with one another, saying, How can a man give us his flesh to eat? "Jesus therefore said to them, Verily, verily, I say to you, Except ye shall have eaten the flesh of the Son of man and drunk his blood, ye have no life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath life eternal, and I will raise him up at the last day; for my flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, he also that eateth me, he too shall live because of me. This is the bread that came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died: he that eateth this bread shall live for ever" (vers. 53- 58).

Till His death there was no atonement. Sin was not yet judged in an adequate sacrifice, nor was God vindicated, still less glorified. In the cross He was; and remission of sins could be proclaimed in the name of Jesus Christ. Whosoever called on the name of the Lord should be saved. Hence faith in the Incarnate Word, wherever real, received the wondrous tidings of His death, as alone reconciling a sinful soul to God. Fallen man had no title to life eternal; and He Who was eternal life died for sin and to bear the sins of all who believed, that they might have that life without the sins blotted out by His blood. Therefore did all, who received Him incarnate from God, welcome the more deeply Him that died for sins and to sin, that every inconsistency with the new and divine life might be cancelled. How thankfully did they eat His flesh and drink His blood! Those who stumbled at Him thus dead, refusing to eat His flesh and drink His blood, proved thereby that they had no due sense of His grace nor of their own ruin by sin. Their professed faith in Him incarnate was unreal; had it been true, they would have hailed with deeper satisfaction His going down into death to do away with every effect of sin. From this they revolted, because they had no such conviction of their own evil, no such assurance of His love, even God's love.

But the Lord intimates more, and lets us know that if one has eaten His flesh and drunk His blood, he will not be content with once partaking of Him; he will continue to find in Him that best food. "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath life eternal, and I will raise him up at the last day." For His flesh is true food and His blood is true drink (as some of the best MSS. here say). "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him." To have thus partaken of Him dead is life eternal, but more than this: to make Him dead our habitual spiritual food is to ensure the communion of His love to the uttermost. Thus does one abide in Him and He in him; and one lives, not only through Him but on account of Him, as He lived on account of the Father, the motive and reason of being.

We may observe too how carefully the Lord in verse 58 binds together the incarnation and His death. This is quite inconsistent with a rite; it is His person living and dead, the one source of life eternal to the believer. If a rite be fancied here, it would involve the twofold and fatal error: that none who failed to partake of the Lord's supper could have life; and that he who does partake of His supper has life eternal and must rise in the resurrection of the just.

O my reader, be not deceived. The Lord's supper indeed refers to Christ's death, to which this portion of John 6 refers. But He speaks only of faith in Him Who died for sin and sinners, that they believing on Him may have life. Therefore not to the communicant as such, but to the believer is the Lord's assurance of life eternal. Turn away therefore from every substitute for Himself, Who is the only Saviour, the one substitute for your sins. Sacraments are admirable signs, but ruinous when they displace Christ and faith in Him.

12 Christ the corn of Wheat

John 12: 24.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 308-309. Gospel No. 8-12.)

A very characteristic truth in the Gospel of John is the Son of God come, the Word become flesh, Who is life eternal and gives it to the believer. But nowhere have we a fuller witness to the efficacy of His death. His work is for us as necessary and as blessed in itself and in its effect as His person: God's glory is concerned most nearly in both (John 1: 29; John 3: 14, 16; John 6: 51-58; John 8: 28; John 10: 9-11, 15-18; John 11: 51, 52; John 12: 32).

At this point of the Gospel testimony is rendered to Him in three aspects: first, as marked out Son of God in power by resurrection, in John 11; secondly, as Messiah, King of Israel, David's Son and David's Lord, in John 12: 12-16; and lastly, as Son of man with rights over all flesh, yet (as we see in our text) about to die to have others sharing His blessedness and glory. Let us consider this last particular a little more fully.

The Son of God was in the world which He had made; yet the world, boasting of its knowledge, knew Him not, the highest, best, most momentous of all knowledge. He came to His own things, for He was also Messiah, "the born King of the Jews"; yet His own people, if not so ignorant, were more guilty still than the world, and received Him not. Hence, when certain Greeks, of those coming up to worship at the feast of Passover, made known through disciples their desire to see Jesus, He answered, saying, "The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say to you, Except the corn of wheat falling into the earth die, itself abideth alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit." The entire vista of His humiliation unto death and of its blessed result opens before Him and receives suited expression in these wondrous word.

Have you then heard Him in faith? Are you not nearly and deeply concerned? The rejection of the Son, Who is also Messiah, leads in marvellous grace to the fulfilment and disclosure of God's counsels. The Jews and the world at large were verily evil, openly proved enemies. His speaking to them as He did left them without excuse for their sin; His working among them as none other had done made other sin as nothing in comparison: for, as things were, they had both seen and hated both Him and His Father. Did the Jews by hand of lawless Gentiles crucify and slay the Lord of glory? It was by the grace of God He tasted death for every one. The greatest wrong of man confronted the love of God; which triumphed over sin and Satan in effecting redemption by His blood. Then, in being raised from the dead, He only and now is the Second man and Last Adam, by Whom all that believe are justified. Thereon, when the Jews refused the gospel of Him dead and risen, the word of salvation was sent to the nations or Gentiles. It is here for you now. He came to do God's will in His death as the perfect offering and sacrifice, which sums up yet surpasses all others. And again it is God's will that the glad tidings of remission of sins and life eternal should come to you. "Hear, and your soul shall live." Did not God say, even of old looking onward to Him. "Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters"? Be reconciled to God.

Where man saw in the cross shame, and the deepest shame, the Saviour saw glory. If this was moral glory, heavenly glory is its answer: "Wherefore also God highly exalted Him." "The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified." So we read in Psalm 8. If the rejected Messiah of Psalms 2, 8 go down into death (compare Heb. 1, 2), He is the Son of man also crowned with glory and honour on high, though now we see not yet all things subjected to Him. But we by faith see Him in heaven, the pledge that they shall be. This will be when at His coming He raises those that are His to reign with Him, as 1 Cor. 15 declares. And it Agrees with what He Himself here says, "Except the corn of wheat falling into the earth die, itself abideth alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit." That the victims of sin might be delivered, sin itself judged, Satan vanquished for eternity, God Himself glorified in man, and His love free to bless perfectly, He, the true grain of wheat, fell into the earth and died. Without that atoning death the glory had been His alone. But now what abundant "fruit"! They that are His are cleansed whiter than snow by His blood; they live of His life; they are children of God, and shall never perish. They are sealed by the Spirit. Through Christ they have the entry by one Spirit unto the Father; and if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.

The Greeks, like all Gentiles indeed, were apart from Christ, having no hope, and godless in the world; and it would soon be proved that the Jews, notwithstanding their great privileges, were no better but guiltier and therefore worse: all alike children of wrath. Neither living grace nor almighty power in Jesus could meet the desperate need. Nothing short of atoning death could avail. Without death He abode alone; but dying He bears much fruit in resurrection. And how scripture teems with testimony to this truth!

Oh, is it not a great thing to he part of His much fruit"? How blind, wretched, and sinful, to despise Him Who alone makes it good? What must it be to wake up to the awful evil of unbelief, when it is irretrievable?

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Ninth Series.

Gospel Words — Ninth Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Demoniac Mute

2 The Withered Hand healed

3 The Blind and Dumb

4 The Five Thousand fed

5 Jesus walking on the sea

6 The Canaanite woman

7 The Four Thousand Fed

8 The Transfiguration

9 The Lunatic Son

10 The Fish, and the Temple-tax

11 The Deaf and stammering man

12 The Blind Man of Bethsaida

1 The Demoniac Mute

Matt. 9: 32-34.

(B.T. Vol. N1, p. 326-327. Gospel No. 9-1.)

This chapter as a whole shows us not only divine power in goodness displayed in Jesus as in Matt. 8; but how it was received by those who had religious reputation among the Jews. The more He wrought in grace, the less acceptable was the Messiah. Did He forgive the sins of the paralytic? Scribes within themselves resented it as blasphemy. But He who read their hearts answered their wicked unbelief by bidding the man arise, take up his couch, and retire to his house.

So the call of the tax-gatherer to follow Him, and the defence of the disciples to the fault-finding followers of John and the Pharisees, vindicated God's grace. New wine needs new skins. The condition of God's ancient people was, like that of the ruler's daughter, one. of death; but He Who went to raise her up, and at length did so, was open to the touch of faith which got healing at once. Two blind men that appealed to His mercy as Son of David received their sight at His hand and word. These were but samples of what He could and would do for Israel, if there had been faith; but the leaders were increasingly hostile, whatever might be the marvel of the crowds, and His fame spread in all that land.

There remained a final proof. "But as these were going out, behold, they brought to him a dumb man possessed by a demon. And the demon having been cast out, the dumb spoke; and the crowds wondered, saying, It was never seen thus in Israel. But the Pharisees said, He casteth out the demons by [or, in the power of] the prince of the demons" (vers. 32-34).

Nothing slackened the gracious dealing of our Lord, so long as the door was open. The blind who now saw were no sooner going out, than men brought to him a man not only dumb but a demoniac. Luke 11: 14 presents the awful peculiarity of the case yet more precisely: "And he was casting out a demon, and it was dumb." It was not simply the human infirmity: a dumb demon possessed the man. This made it altogether beyond ordinary resource. A spirit evil or good has power that man cannot resist. As with the unhappy man, so with the unhappy people and especially their religious chiefs. At length the people had not a true word to utter of their divine Messiah. His great grace, and their great need, drew out first from the leaders the imputation of blasphemy. Now it reaches a lower depth still opening to devour them. For what can be more heinous than to impute to the Holy One the power of the wicked one? Blasphemers themselves they charge blasphemy against Him, and under Satan's power they impute it to the energy of the prince of demons that He cast out the demons.

Before they were carried to Babylon, Israel had totally failed as Jehovah's servant. Their witness was not to Him but to graven and molten images, to which they said, Ye are our gods. Who so blind and deaf as they to whom Jehovah had laid bare His mighty arm and from the heavens made them hear His voice as no other people ever did? And therefore Jehovah gave Jacob for a spoil, and Israel to the robbers. Now they had Jehovah Messiah present in their midst in the power of beneficent goodness, and in a grace which anticipated the kingdom; and their alienation became yet more deadly. The same unbelief which sought after strange gods (only not nonentities because they were demons), rejected and blasphemed their Anointed, Who was in truth Jehovah. Where not thus active, the people were just as the demoniac mute. Under the power of the enemy they were dumb for Him Whose praise fills the heavens as it will the earth and all the creation.

How is it with you, dear reader? Are you confessing with your mouth the Lord Jesus? Blessed is it, when also the heart believes on Him to righteousness; for then, and not otherwise, is confession made to salvation. He Who created man is Lord and Redeemer. God calls you to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus shall you be saved — thus only; for there is none other name under heaven to save. Other refuge is vain. Other means are a snare and a lie. He is the true God, and eternal life. For the sinner, under Satan's power, only He can avail; but He avails at once and unfailingly. It is true that He is not here, but risen. It is true that the Jews slew Him, hanging Him on a tree; but God exalted Him by His right hand as Leader and Saviour, accepting His death as sacrifice, the only efficacious sacrifice, for sins. The grace now shown exceeds; it reigns through righteousness unto life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do you speak of your subjection to Satan's power? Looking to Jesus, life is given. He also Himself likewise took part in blood and flesh, that through death He might annul him that hath the might of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who in fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. In His name, then, resist the devil; and he will flee from you. He is a conquered enemy through Him Who bore your sins and brings you every spiritual good.

Believing in Him, how immense is the change! As living stones, you are being built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood (which Aaron's sons were only in outward form), to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. What is the worth to God now of sheep or oxen? of incense, or of first-fruits? All such things had their place before He came Who makes us to see that they are no more than the beggarly elements of the world, and that the body is of Christ. The Christian is a true worshipper, he only. They all can worship the Father in spirit and truth in the hour that now is. The multitude keeping holiday, without knowing the Father, without faith in the truth, without having the Spirit, are spurious and in the dark. The true worshippers the Father seeks at this time, who must worship God in spirit and truth, for they alone walk in the light as He is in the light. Assuredly they are no longer dumb. Does any among them suffer evil? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praise.

May this be your lot! Grace alone can make it yours, the saving grace of God which appeared in our Lord Jesus, and blesses through faith in Him.

2 The Withered Hand healed

Matt. 12: 9-14.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 341-342. Gospel No. 9-2.)

The sabbath like everything else was turned by Jewish unbelief against the Messiah. But like everything else the sabbath only told to His glory against man's sin, shame, selfishness, and pride. At that time (Matt. 12: 1) the Lord went through the cornfields on the sabbath, and His disciples, being hungry, began to pluck and eat. Seeing this the Pharisees reproached Him, but He vindicated them by David's act in 1 Sam. 21 generally, and in particular by the priests who do their work in the temple blamelessly on the sabbaths. What value had the show-bread if the anointed of Jehovah and his men were hunted for their life? Yet says He, "a greater thing than the temple is here." Had they known too what Hosea 6: 6 means, they would not have condemned the guiltless. "For the Son of man is lord of the sabbath." The rejected Christ is the Son of man about to come from heaven in judgment. They were guilty not only of transgressing the law, but of refusing Jehovah's Anointed. So He enters on a higher and larger glory which supersedes their boasts and judges their sins.

On a subsequent sabbath he exposes their evil state, hypocritical and murderous.

"And when departed thence he went into their synagogue; and, behold, a man having a withered hand. And they asked him, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath? that they might accuse him. And he said to them, What man of you shall there be who shall have one sheep; and if this fall into a pit on the sabbath, will he not lay hold and raise it up? How much then doth a man exceed a sheep! Wherefore it is lawful on the sabbath to do well. Then he saith to the man, Stretch out thy hand, and he stretched it out; and it was restored sound as the other. But the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him, how they might destroy him" (vers. 9-14).

Here it is not the authority of His person in which He will judge not the Jews only but all the nations; it is the character of Him Who is good and doeth good, let His people be as false and faulty as they may to their ruin. In vain for His people to plead the sabbath against Him Who is lord of it; still more vain to forbid on that day His active goodness for needy suffering man. The poorest Jew was not debarred by the sabbath from extricating his sheep from the pit. God had compassion, if they had none, for their brother fallen under a worse calamity; and here was He anointed of Jehovah to bind up the broken-hearted, let Pharisees rage and plot as they might. "Lo, I am come to do thy will, O God."

Mark presents the scene yet more vividly; for he tells us that the Saviour directed the man to "Stand up" before He uttered His fuller and withering questions: "Is it lawful on the sabbath to do good or to do evil? to save life, or to kill?" And when they held their peace but with malice to the uttermost, He looked round about on them with anger, distressed at the hardening of their heart. What right had selfish murderous men against God's grace? Such they showed themselves; for they went out of the synagogue to plot, Pharisees and Herodians, deadly enemies of each other, against the Son of God, His servant among sinful and suffering men, to minister as none else could, to save souls as well as life.

Oh! how is it with you who read these lines? Is not your case still more deplorable than his of the withered hand? Is not your heart withered Godward? Is it not active only as the source of uncleanness in every kind which defiles you? Do you love your own will and way? and what is this but sin, hateful to God and destructive to you? Yet for you Jesus, the Son of God, came; for you He died. And He died not for any imaginary good in you, but for your sins, too many and too real. Fear not then to commit yourself, just as you are to the Saviour. Hide not any thing of your evil from the eyes of your heart; let your conscience confess all out to God: Christ is the only meeting-place between the sinner and Him. He is all-embracing for such as come as sinners; and as surely a Saviour as they are lost.

Therefore of God's word doubt not, but look to Jesus in your guilt and unworthiness. Seek only to be in the truth of your sins before God; and you will find Christ in the truth of divine grace toward your soul.

If it be so with you, this is true repentance toward God, and true faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. The merit, the grace, the efficacy, the power are in Him. The pardon and peace, the life and blessing, are yours on believing the glad tidings of God about His Son. Till you believe on Him for life and salvation, you have nothing to do with practical love and holiness, incumbent as they are on the Christian. First be settled in faith.

3 The Blind and Dumb

Matt. 12: 22-30.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 357-358. Gospel No. 9-3.)

Sometimes demoniacs met the Lord, as in Matt. 8: 28; sometimes as here and in Matt. 9: 32 one was brought. This made no difference to the Saviour's gracious power: He cast the demons out. In the case before he was dumb; now it is one blind and dumb, who was healed all the same.

"Then was brought to him a demoniac blind and dumb; and he healed him, so that the blind [man] spoke and saw. And all the crowds were amazed and said, Is this the Son of David? But when the Pharisees heard, they said, This [man] doth not cast out the demons but by Beelzebub, prince of the demons. And knowing their thoughts he said to them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand. And if Satan casteth out Satan, he is divided against himself: how then shall his kingdom stand. And if I by Beelzebub cast out the demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges. But if by God's Spirit I cast out the demons, then hath come upon you the kingdom of God. Or how can one enter into the house of the strong [man], and plunder his goods, unless first he bind the strong [man], and then he will plunder his house. He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth" (vers. 22-30).

Aggravated as the malady was, it only furnished the fuller occasion for the Lord Jesus. The growing rejection by Israel, and especially by their chiefs, made more clear Who He was, and what they were. It is hard at first to learn that God's people on earth may be slaves of Satan, spiritually as blind and dumb as the demoniac brought to the Lord. But He that healed the man in circumstances so desperate is yet more willing as He is able to deliver from the still deeper and worse captivity through sin and Satan's power.

"All the crowd" were amazed and said timidly, It is not the Son of David, is it? But the Pharisees repeated yet more strongly the deadly slander which they had uttered before (Matt. 9: 34), "This man doth not cast out the demons but by Beelzebub, prince of the demons." It was not unbelief only, but its darker form, when the beneficent power of God cannot be disputed, and is imputed to the evil one as its source. Such is the inevitable lot of such as enjoy religious reputation as orthodox and righteous without living faith. If they encounter Christ, as here, they must either be subject to the testimony given to His person, or attribute the power of God's Spirit He wields to the arch-enemy. The more people know of divine things, the more fatally they sin against the truth if they brazen out in unbelief; for it then takes the shape of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which shall not be forgiven either in this age or in that which is to come.

Here the Lord pronounces the mind of God. Consciously knowing their thoughts He exposes their malicious absurdity. Whether for kingdom, city, or house, to divide against itself is ruin. If Satan therefore casts out Satan, as they said, he is divided against himself: how then shall his kingdom stand? But as no Jew doubted for a moment its subsisting till Messiah come in power and glory to judge and destroy it, such a plea refutes itself as untenably inconsistent and false. The Lord did not anticipate that glorious day, but was then bearing witness that He is the destined vanquisher of Satan by this sample of the powers of the age to come. When it comes, Satan will be cast into the abyss, as he will be into the lake of fire and brimstone when it ends. But Jesus proves Himself always opposed and superior, though it be only as then in the day of witness.

Further, the Lord appeals to the evidence of God's power in opposition to Satan in Israel; for never has He left Himself without witness. By what power did they act? "If I in [the power of] Beelzebub cast out the demons, in whose [power] do your sons cast them out? Wherefore they shall be your judges." Their folly was as clear as their malice. Were they now and definitively to become God's enemies? "But if I in [power of] God's Spirit cast out the demons, then hath come upon you the kingdom of God. Or how can one enter into the strong one's house and plunder his goods, unless first he bind the strong one? and then he will plunder his house."

Thus all turns on our relation to Christ. "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth." Jesus is the standard. If I am not with Him as God's object and centre for me, I am against Him. He is not only Messiah but God and Jehovah, yet man. Such a One could not be here below without testing all that saw or heard of Him. If I receive Him, it is salvation, for He came to seek and save the lost; and as saved by grace, I am bound to serve Him all the more, His willing bondman yet His freedman. But He is no less the centre for all one seeks to gather. If it be not to Him in our service, we lack the divine centre. We may be earnest and busy; but the result is only "scattering" in God's estimate, which ought surely to be ours as believers.

How is it then with your soul, dear reader? Are you with Christ? Have you heard His voice, and do you follow Him? Blessed are you if you have thus received Him. It is life eternal, as He declares.

Take care then that you have Him as your centre, God's centre, not only for your soul but for your work. It is on God's part for gathering to, as well as for saving. No other name but His is revealed of God for both purposes, which indeed meet in Him.

4 The Five Thousand fed

Matt. 14: 14-21.

(B.T. Vol. N2, p. 372-373. Gospel No. 9-4.)

Only one Gospel connects our Lord's retirement with tidings of John the Baptist's death. The herald's lot only precedes that of Jehovah Messiah's Whose time was not yet come. In the Gospel of Mark (Mark 6: 30, 31) He would give a little rest apart with Himself to His sent workmen. Those who serve Him need not look for better things. In Luke there is no such account, but the fact of John's execution alluded to, as the effect of the report which reached Herod of the Saviour's gracious power.

But Jesus was the same in the desert as in the city, the compassionate healer of the sick. Nor this only; for when the disciples at evening would dismiss the crowd to buy themselves food, He says to them, They need not depart: give ye them to eat. But looking not to Him they were powerless.

"And they say to him, We have here but five loaves and two fishes. And he said, Bring them hither to me. And he commanded the crowd to recline on the grass, took the five loaves and the two fishes, looked up to heaven, and blessed; and having broken he gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples to the crowds. And they all ate and were filled; and they took up what was over of the fragments, twelve baskets full. And the eaters were about five thousand, apart from women and children" (17-21).

He was the true Solomon, though Israel did not yet sing the son. of Ascent. Yet He was there, and not David's Son only, but Jehovah Who chose Zion and will there dwell. Was He not in their low estate giving the manifest testimony that He would abundantly bless her provision, and satisfy her poor with bread? Their unbelief might and did put off the kingdom; nevertheless He was there, the King, and no failure in Him of grace or power. How little those nearest to Him drew on either by faith! How promptly He met the need beyond all thought of men or saints!

This however is revealed for you, my reader, as it was then shown to the needy, that they and you might look to Him and be saved. Beyond doubt the soul is more than the food; and none ever pressed this so much as Himself. None warned as He to fear Him Who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. But who like Him assured guilty man that God so loved the world as to give His beloved Son, that whosoever believes on Him should not perish but have life eternal?

The day comes fast when He will make good every promise, as He will also inflict the judgment which in every form the Father committed to Him, because He is Son of man. As such He was despised and rejected; as such He suffered to the utmost and is exalted on high. But if His sufferings will bring vengeance on His foes, they do also bring salvation to those who believe, and none the less, because they like all others were lost till they believed.

It is not yet the day when He will ask nations for an inheritance, and break them with iron sceptre, as a potter his vessel. Then shall His name be excellent in all the earth, as well as His majesty above the heavens. But it is given now among men, and none other under heaven, wherein we must be saved. He alone is worthy; He is God as well as Jesus Christ the righteous Man. The Word became flesh to glorify His Father and God, Son of man to save the lost. Such a sign as He then wrought was proper to show His compassion to the needy and distressed in Israel. Was it not meant to let you know who read or hear the word, that He pities your deeper need, and is no less ready to bless you with the bread of God, in order that you, believing on Him, may never hunger or thirst more?

This, His discourse to the crowd that followed after Him, as we read in John 6: 1, clearly points out. It is His express application of it to you who read now as to those who then heard. Why then should you doubt that He will make good His word? He declares that the believer has life eternal; He declares elsewhere that His sheep shall never perish, and that none shall pluck them out of His hand. He and the Father are not more one in divine nature than in divine love, to keep His sheep, however exposed in this world to the enemy's malice.

The grace of Christ is sufficient for you, great as is your weakness; indeed it is made perfect in weakness. Fear not therefore to trust in Him. Believe God Who sent Him, that those who receive Him may live eternally, and that those who believe not may be judged everlastingly. He is the giver of life because He is Son of God; He is the executor of judgment because He is Son of man. One or other must be your portion. He gives you life if you believe; He will judge you if you reject Him. It is unwise, it is full of danger, it is in the highest degree sinful, to reject the gracious and saving message of God in Christ to your soul.

5 Jesus walking on the sea

Matt. 14: 23-33.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 4-5. Gospel No. 9-5.)

Bright was the witness, as it is still, to the rejected Messiah. This glory is great, but He is greater still, Immanuel and Jehovah; and it shines out the more that men despise Him.

"And having dismissed the crowds, he went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when even was come, he was there alone. But the ship [or boat] was already in the midst of the sea, tossed by the waves for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them walking on the sea; and when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is an apparition; and they cried out for fear. But Jesus immediately spoke unto them. saying, Be of good cheer: it is I; be not afraid. And Peter answering him said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come; and Peter, going down from the ship, walked on the water to come unto Jesus. But seeing the wind strong, he was afraid; and beginning to sink he cried out, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus  stretched forth his hand and caught hold of him, and saith to him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? And when they had gone up into the ship, the wind ceased. And those in the ship came and paid homage to him, saying, Truly thou art God's Son" (vers. 23-33).

Whatever His own title, and it was truly divine, our Lord had become man, and loyally maintained His dependence on God, of which prayer is a signal expression. It is peculiarly prominent in the Gospel of Luke where His humanity is most brought before us in all its lowliness and sympathy, in all its piety and obedience. And it has its due place in Mark's Gospel of His service. But the disciples on the tempest-tossed sea were as distressed as their boat, and the wind was contrary, so that they toiled in vain at the oar. He waited long enough for them to realise their danger and their powerlessness, and came unto them, walking on the sea. Troubled at what they thought an apparition, they cried for fear, but immediately He bade them take courage. "It is I: be not afraid."

Reader, have you never heard His voice? It sounds in the written word in His own tones of love and compassion. It is for you to hear and live by believing them. The blessing is expressly for faith to receive. When you, judging yourself for your sins, look to Jesus at God's warrant, remission is yours. You are reconciled to God and justified by faith. You are called thenceforth to walk as a child of God and sealed by His Spirit till the day of redemption, when your bodies will have the power of Christ's life, as your souls have now (John 5). All other ways and means are a delusion. Baptism and the Lord's supper are His institutions, most expressive of His death, and of your blessing thereby. But faith is by hearing, and this by God's word. He is best honoured in His Son's honour.

No doubt the enemy stirs up storms of every kind to alarm and endanger the disciples; but what of that, if the Lord sees all with watchful eye and fails not to give His guardian presence? This will be true and sure for His Jewish remnant in days to come as well as then when He was on earth; so is it assured to the Christian and the Christian assembly now, however few they may be. He, Who has His way in the whirlwind and in the tempest, with the clouds as the dust of His feet, was there in the person of Jesus walking the waves to say, Be courageous. It is I: fear not. They ought to have known already that winds and waves obey Him, their Creator.

Peter yields a little intimation of what was at hand. He quits the boat at the word of the Lord, and goes to meet Jesus on the sea; as the church did gathered to His name, apart from the Jews and the Gentiles (1 Cor. 10: 32). But he quickly displays the instability of his faith. To the Christian also Christ is all. If we look away from Him, we begin to sink as he did. What, if the storm raged and the waves rose ever so high? Had the sea been smooth instead of rough, could Peter have walked across it? But he saw the wind strong and began to sink, with the cry, Lord, save me. And the Lord's outstretched hand was the answer, though there was the loving reproof, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? Such is He to us now, faithful, gracious, and superior to all circumstances. But we have to walk by faith, not by sight. Yet if our faith fail, He does not fail to deliver.

By-and-by He will rejoin His Jewish disciples in their unequalled trouble at the end of the age, bespeak a calm which is not the church's portion while on earth, and bring at once the old ship into the desired haven. . . For heaven and for the earth, for the church as for Israel, Jesus is the same yesterday, and today, and for ever. "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth."

6 The Canaanite woman

Matt. 15: 21-28.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 20-21. Gospel No. 9-6.)

It is in the First Gospel we find this most instructive incident, which reveals the Lord, not merely as minister of circumcision for God's truth, but as the display of His sovereign grace where God's curse lay, and Satan's power.

"And Jesus going forth hence retired into the parts of Tyre and Sidon; and, behold, a Canaanite woman coming out from those borders cried out, saying, Pity me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is grievously possessed by a demon. But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and asked him, saying, Dismiss her, for she crieth out after us. But he said in answer, I was not sent save to the lost sheep of Israel's house. And she came and paid him homage, saying, Lord, help me. But he said in answer, It is not good to take the children's bread and cast [it] to the dogs. But she said, Yea, Lord; for even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters. Then Jesus in answer said to her, O woman, great [is] thy faith: be it done to thee as thou willest. And her daughter was healed from that hour" (Matt. 15: 21-28).

The Lord withdrew from the proud religionists of Jerusalem, who made void the law of God for the sake of their tradition. He also laid bare to the disciples that only the plants of His Father take root, while all that issues from man's heart is defiled and defiling. The sinner needs God's grace to save him. This is shown in the otherwise desperate case of the Canaanite, and her daughter sorely possessed of a demon.

Here may many a soul learn why the Lord does not accede to its appeal. Hers was deep and earnest; yet He answered her not a word. What claims on the Son of David had a Canaanite woman? When He reigns, there shall be no more a Canaanite in the house of Jehovah of hosts (Zech. 14: 21). When the two blind cried early or late, saying, Pity us, Son of David, He touched their eyes, which were then opened according to their faith (Matt. 9: 27-30; Matt. 20: 30-34). But repentance has its place as truly as faith; and God will have the soul to judge itself aright. "Cursed be Canaan" is the word from of old; and yet was she not now asking His pity Who is to avenge and deliver Israel!

How many today have said the words, "Father, . . . forgive us our sins"! Yet they too have received no answer; nor would they assert, any more than they believe, that their sins are forgiven. They have gone on ground wholly untenable. They are not His sons by faith in Christ. They are not born of water and Spirit. They stand on law, supplemented by ordinances. They are unrenewed, serving divers lusts and pleasures, a prey to the power of darkness. They do not cry to God in the truth of their estate, but imitate the language of disciples, which they might own they are not in heart, Have we not experienced it ourselves? Our state was below the Canaanite's.

The woman of Canaan evidently knew that no Israelite ever appealed to Christ in vain. She had faith in Him; but she had overlooked her own dismal position. Theirs were "the promises"; but what had she? Not promise, but curse. And He Who is the truth would have her feel it. Not so the disciples; they would have Him dismiss her. This was far from His heart. They disliked the discredit of her importunity, and wished to be rid of her. He meant to bless her; but it must be in the truth as well as the grace of God. For this He waited, and she as yet had no answer; but He answered them, "I was not sent save to the lost sheep of Israel's house."

Now faith where real perseveres; and the woman came and did Him homage, saying, "Lord, help me." He is indeed Lord of all: this is truth without assumption of privilege. To such an appeal He does reply, "It is not good to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs."

Thus does His grace help her to see where she was lacking. The light of God shines into her heart; and she bows at once. For she said, "Yea, Lord; for even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters." She apprehends where and what she really was, and takes her true place before God. She had forgotten that she was not a "sheep" to claim the succour of Israel's Shepherd. She was truly a "dog" before Him, no better than a little dog or whelp. Yet while no longer hiding this from her soul but confessing it freely, she rejoins, "Yea, Lord; for even the whelps eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters."

Oh what refreshment did such faith give to our Lord Jesus! She savoured the things of God. She appreciated, believed, enjoyed the grace of which she was the object. And the Lord owned her "great faith," and gave her all she wished.

How is it with you, dear reader? Have you learnt that you are no better than a dog before Him? Or are you, while in your sins, claiming to be His sheep? Own yourself a sinner, and Him the only Saviour, that you may be saved. He is the same Lord of all, and is rich unto all that call upon Him. Why should you stand without? A better voice than Laban's invites you to come in and be blessed. All depends on Him; but it is not yours save by repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Till then we have no known divine answer to our cry.

7 The Four Thousand Fed

Matt. 15: 32-39.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 37-38. Gospel No. 9-7.)

The miracle here does not merely attest again the divine Messiah's presence and power on behalf of His needy people. Each has its own characteristics for our instruction. Both prove His ready and almighty resources. Had each miracle appeared in a different Gospel only, the sceptics would have insisted on discrepant accounts; but God has cut off such an objection, because Matthew and Mark record both, Luke and John only the first of them. The miracle wrought twice signifies, if one may apply Joseph's interpretation (Gen. 41: 32), that the thing is established by God, whatever be man's unbelief. The distinctions are marked, but in no way favour those of old who imagined a reference in the former to the Jew, in the latter to the Gentile. Both express Messiah's grace to the chosen people.

What then is the true difference? It is defined in detail, as well as in broad features. There were five loaves and two fishes in the first, seven loaves and a few fishes in the last, five thousand fed in one, and four thousand in the other; the surplus then filled twelve baskets, now seven. The very baskets employed had in each instance a differing appellation, meaning respectively a hand-basket and a creel, as expressed without confusion in each account, and maintained in our Lord's recall of both in Matt. 16. The larger distinction will appear presently, though it may here be added that the first was in the spring when the grass was green, the second some months later; and that in the second the crowd had stayed three days, whereas in the first we do not hear of more than one day.

"And Jesus, having called his disciples unto him, said, I have compassion on the crowd, because they continue with me already three days and have nothing to eat; and I would not let them go fasting, lest they faint in the way. And his disciples say to him, Whence should we [have] in a wilderness so many loaves as to fill so great a crowd? And Jesus saith to them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven, and a few small fishes. And he commanded the crowds to lie down on the ground; and taking the seven loaves and the fishes he gave thanks and broke, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the crowd. And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was over of the broken pieces, seven baskets full. And those that ate were four thousand men, besides women and children. And having let go the crowds he went on board the ship and came over into the borders of Magadan" (vers. 32-39).

On the first occasion the disciples took the initiative, and proposed the dismissal of the crowds to buy themselves food in the villages. Their faith was weak indeed. How sad to overlook His presence who was pledged to satisfy Zion's poor with bread! Even His call that they should give them to eat failed to awaken any sense of His fulness. So He took the provision they despised, and abundantly blessed it to the five thousand, and more; yet there remained over of the broken pieces twelve baskets full. Now this answers to the twelve apostles, being the number of full administration by or in man. But it was only a sign in His rejected testimony to Israel; and sending His disciples to go before Him to the other side, on dismissal of the crowds, He went up into the mountain apart to pray, the figure of His priestly place on high. After this comes the wondrous scene of Peter leaving the ship to join Jesus on the water, which is peculiar to Matthew, as alone expressive of the divine design by that Gospel, and having nothing like it on the second occasion.

Here it is the Messiah yearning over His famished people. They were guilty; but He commiserated their distressful state, and gave His disciples a fresh opportunity of drawing on Him by faith. Alas! they were slow to learn. "Whence should we have in a wilderness so many loaves as to fill so great a crowd?" He was there, and full of compassion; but unbelief, even in believers, is ever blind. The seven loaves which He took and distributed through His disciples, and the surplus in the seven baskets here named, point to spiritual, not to administrative fulness. All was ordered of God, all is meant to teach man, if he has cars to hear. It is Jehovah-Messiah acting in His own perfection. Here there is no going on high to pray; nor is there a rejoining the disciples for the other side, when and where all who once rejected Him welcome Him and His beneficent power, as will be in the consummation of the age.

How is it with you, dear reader? Whatever engrosses you, whatever interests you, the first and deepest of all questions is, How are you treating Jesus? He is the Lord of glory, the Son of God Who became man to die for you. How do you regard Him? It concerns you now, and for all eternity. He died to save sinners; but the blessing is for those that believe. If you believe not who have heard His name, you are far more guilty than heathen who have not heard. God the Father resents all dishonour done to His beloved Son, and has given all judgment into His hands, because He is Son of man (John 5), to punish all men who despise Him. Is it not then of incalculable moment that you bow to Him Who will be your Judge by-and-by, if you refuse Him now as Saviour? Remember that His judgment is eternal. Yet how righteous is it also! For the unbeliever in the gospel is not impenitent only but despises God's grace. How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?

8 The Transfiguration

Matt. 17: 1-9.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 53-54. Gospel No. 9-8.)

In the midst of His service of humiliation our Lord was for a little transfigured. It was not like Moses whose face shone from his nearness to the divine Presence. Our Lord was with His own here below. A week before He prepared them for seeing the Son of man coming in His kingdom. After it He takes with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and brings them up into a high mountain apart. "And His face did shine as the sun, and His garments became white as the light. And, behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah talking with them." It is a miniature of His kingdom wherein will be the risen and changed saints with others in their natural bodies, and the Lord the centre of all.

Yet it would seem that the divine aim of Moses and Elijah being there was to mark the surpassing glory of the Lord before Whom the chief representative of the law and the most honoured of the prophets gave place and vanished away. The personal glory of Jesus is most conspicuous as elsewhere in this Gospel. He is Son of God and Son of man.

Peter counted it a great thing to see His Master with saints so renowned and glorious. "Lord," said he to Jesus, "It is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, I will make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He made the natural but fatal mistake of equalising all three. Yet he who had only so short a time before confessed His Master to be not only the Messiah, but the Son of the living God, ought not to have so erred. So easy is it to forget what flesh and blood never truly knows, what is revealed by the Father; just as then too he could not bear to think of His going to Jerusalem, suffering many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and being killed but raised the third day.

Here it was not the withering rebuke of the Lord Who knew that all blessing for man and glory for God, in a ruined world, hung on His rejection. It was the Father's voice out of the excellent glory. "While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and, behold, a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son in Whom I found my delight: hear ye him." The Father then displayed His jealousy for the honour of His Son. He would not allow the law-giver or the law-restorer to be put on such a level. They were servants and to be honoured in the place He set them. But His beloved Son! — there were His delights; and if Christ went down in love infinite to suffer as man, and as man to be exalted, the glory of the eternal Son was precious beyond all thought of man in His Father's eyes.

It is the Son Whom we are to hear. See how the great truth is attested in the Epistle to the Hebrews, both in Heb. 1: 2, and in Heb. 12: 25. Equally explicit is John 5: 25 for quickening, and in John 10 for every day; and not only for the sheep led out of the Jewish fold but for other sheep, Gentiles, not of this fold. Dear reader, does not this reach to you? If the blessing is immense, what is the loss? And what must be the fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries and the indifferent? For Himself has said, "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give to them life eternal; and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand." On the other hand "he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him."

When the disciples heard the Father's voice, they fell on their faces and were sore afraid. They were far from knowing yet His love; but He, Who brought it in His own person, was at hand to strengthen their hearts. "And Jesus came and touched them and said, Arise, and be not afraid." Not less now but more does Jesus cause His word to come home in the power of redemption to those that believe. And the God Who sent Him would fill us with all joy and peace in believing, that we way abound in hope in the power of the Holy Spirit. Is it thus with your souls? Can you. say that you have heard the voice of Jesus by faith, and that you are "not afraid"? This is His will, not only for the three who then heard, but for all that believe the gospel of God. Perfect love casts; out the fear that has torment, and creates the fear of reverence. It is the effort of the enemy to work on the conscious guilt of man that he may distrust the words of Jesus; it is the work of the Spirit from the beginning to efface it all. The entrance of that word dispels darkness before the light of God to the soul, and enables the heart to receive "Be not afraid."

"Lifting up their eyes, they saw no one save Jesus only." Visions were always rare; such a vision is unique. But for the heart's comfort, and the right direction of the eye, there is nothing to compare with having Jesus the Son of God to hear. So has God the Father ruled: "hear Him." And He abides the same yesterday, and today, and for ever. May we by faith look to "Jesus only." It is not only at first that the soul may be saved by faith, but for every day and hour after we do believe. For the only right walk is by faith, and the fight of faith is the only good fight, in which Jesus is the one unfailing Captain. Other fights we may have to our shame, where flesh is not judged, and Satan gains advantage for the moment. To Jesus then may we ever look, to "Jesus only."

9 The Lunatic Son

Mark 9: 17-27.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 69-70. Gospel No. 9-9.)

What a contrast with the manifestation of the excellent glory on the mountain was the actual state of man even in the favoured people here below! Jesus the Son of God was there; yet that the disciples knew not so by faith, as to avail themselves of His victory over the enemy!

"And one of the crowd answered and said, Teacher, I brought unto thee my son having a dumb spirit; and whensoever it taketh him, it teareth him, and he foameth and gnasheth his teeth, and is withering away. And I spoke to thy disciples that they should cast it out; and they were not able. And answering them He saith, O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I bear with you? Bring him unto me. And they brought him unto Him; and when He saw him, straightway the spirit tore him, and falling on the ground he wallowed foaming. And He asked his father, How long time is it that this hath come to him? And he said, From a child. And often it cast him both into fire and into waters to destroy him; but if thou hast any power, help us in thy pitifulness toward us. But Jesus said to him, If thou hast power (is) to believe: all things are possible to him that believeth. And straightway the father of the child cried out and said, I believe: help mine unbelief. And Jesus, seeing that a crowd was running up together, rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, Dumb and deaf spirit, I command thee, come out of him and enter no more into him. And having cried out and torn [him] much, it came out, and he became as if dead, so that the most said, He is dead. But Jesus laying hold of him by the hand raised him up; and he stood up" (vers. 17-27).

It was indeed a mighty deed: and so it fell to our Gospel above the others to give most details. There are differences in the evil spirits; and only to prayer and fasting did the kind in question yield. The lack in that respect was grievous in the Lord's eyes. The distressed parent did not despair, and turned from the failing disciples to Him Who never fails. How humbling when believers thus dishonour their Lord! "O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I bear with you?" This was the overwhelming fact. That the crowd, that the scribes, should have no faith, was bad enough after such ample witness of the gracious power of God in His Son, servant of all need in man, marked out from the first in doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil. Did He not give the twelve, and more than the twelve, authority over the unclean spirits? How was it then that these put shame on His name by failing to draw on Him?

"Bring him unto Me" says the Saviour. Even so, He lets all see the depth of the child's need, the malicious power of the enemy. He manifests His interest in all that dismays the heart of man. He enquires, not as if He did not know the reins and the heart, but that the tried soul may learn the reality of His compassion. He teaches the feeble suppliant that the question of power turns on faith; for faith God will have, whatever may be His own grace. What possible good morally could power insure without believing? On the other hand, all things are possible to him that believes. So even the disciples had to learn; and the father, through his necessities believing the lesson at once, tends to the right way under the Lord's guidance. "I believe: help mine unbelief." How wholesome for the believer to feel and own his unbelief!

How is it with you that read these words? Have you found out what a deadly thing is unbelief? Have you received the declaration from God that you till brought to Him live in the lusts of your flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and are by nature children of wrath, even as the rest of mankind? Judaism did not hinder this of old, whatever its great privileges; nor does Christendom now with its still greater advantages. And has Satan no power over such as are dead in trespasses and sins? Do not such walk according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience? If men but saw by faith, they would discern themselves thus in a plight more appalling than that of the lunatic child under the power of the dumb and deaf spirit. For in itself it was for the life that now is; whereas Eph. 2: 1-3 describes for both time and eternity.

But the Lord, as He wrought in power then, is also the Deliverer according to the rich mercy of God and the great love wherewith He loves. God is now showing the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, as He assures us He will in the ages to come. Let me, following the apostle, entreat that you receive not the grace of God in vain; for vain it undoubtedly is, if you have not faith in God through our Lord Jesus for your own soul as a guilty sinner, powerless in yourself before Him. But He hearkens to the cry of need and distress; yea He sends His word and works in manifold ways to make souls sensible of their ruin, that they may cry and He may answer in the glad tidings of His gospel. Now too it is a day of salvation; and the casting away of Israel is the world's reconciliation. For their fall is our wealth, their loss is our rich gain.

How awful then for men in Christendom to live only for present enjoyment, money, ease, honour, power, like the heathen who know not God! He Who for sins suffered unutterably, not from man only, but from God's judgment on the cross, is the Author of everlasting salvation to all those that obey Him; and faith in God's testimony to Him is the beginning of that blessing which shall never end. Oh, take heed, and put not off the call of grace, which you may not hear again! The spirits, now in prison and awaiting, not another deluge, but everlasting judgment in the resurrection of the unjust, once heard the Spirit of Christ in Noah's preaching while the ark was in preparation. Beware lest you, who have heard a far fuller expression of divine mercy in the gospel of Christ, frustrate the counsel of God against yourselves. For God is not mocked in the end, however men cheat themselves in thinking that He heeds not their words and ways now. Today if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts as in the provocation, throughout the day of the temptation in the wilderness.

10 The Fish, and the Temple-tax

Matt. 17: 24-27.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 85-86. Gospel No. 9-10.)

What had the Lord said in John 8? It is the Son only Who, being free in the highest sense, sets free those who are His disciples abiding in His word. All else, however boastful, are but slaves of sin, the lowest of all slavery. The slave passes; the son abides for ever; but this he derives solely from the eternal Son, though not without faith in the truth which He in grace tells out, as indeed He was it and came that we might hear and receive it. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."

So here what ineffable grace! "Lest we cause them to stumble, go unto the sea, and cast a hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and having opened its mouth, thou wilt find a shekel: that take and give to them for me and thee."

Now it is His omnipotence that is proved; for what else could make itself forthwith obeyed by a fish passing through the paths of the sea? Who but God in man could or would have caused it to rise to Peter's hook with a silverling in its mouth of the exact amount for the temple? Whom but the Son did it befit to say in His grace, lest we cause them to stumble" . . . give to them for me and for thee"? The grand truth is breaking through the clouds of a self-destroying Israel and Judaism, that the Son was emptying and humbling Himself not only to rescue, but to associate with Himself every one that believes in Him. What grace!

This association, as the gospel tells, is based not only on the divine glory of His person, but on the accomplishment of an everlasting redemption. This He found, as Heb. 9 declares, by His own blood. And as it is attested by His ascension glory, so it is the glad message sent to you, my dear reader, if you have not already received it unto salvation. This, and no less, it bears, and, on God's authority and in His love, assures to every sinner who repents and believes the gospel. God is thus honouring His Son, as well He may; for He and He alone perfectly glorified Him, even as to sin on the cross, as before in all respects.

Oh! persevere not in that unbelief which is the most radical and hateful of all evils. Listen no more to the ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan: why die the second death? Christ is the way, the truth, and the life: are you so infatuated as to prefer the pleasures of sin for a season, and make shipwreck for eternity? Can it be that you turn a deaf ear to Him Who suffered once for all for sins, and will not come to Him that you may have life?

The New Testament presents no miracle more striking and instructive than the one before us. Its place too in the First Gospel and there only is precisely appropriate, if the Holy Spirit meant here to bring out the divine glory of Christ, along with His grace in associating the believer with Himself; when, rejected as He is by the Jews, the church and the kingdom of the heavens should replace the things even promised by new things.

"And when they came unto Capernaum, those that receive the half-shekels came to Peter and said, Doth not your teacher pay the half-shekels? He saith, Yea. And when he entered into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? The kings of the earth, from whom do they receive toll or tribute? from their sons or from other folk? He (or, Peter) saith to him, From other folk. Jesus said to him, Well then the sons are free. But lest we cause them to stumble, go unto the sea, and cast a hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and having, opened its mouth, thou wilt find a shekel: that take and give to them for me and thee" (vers. 24-27).

Peter, like most disciples and like all naturally, was slow to distrust himself and to wait on the Lord and His word. He was quick, being zealous for the law, to assure those who took the redemption money (not the tax-gatherers so repulsive to Jewish feeling) that his Master was the same. He did not when questioned bear in mind, either what the Father had revealed to Him of the Lord's personal dignity (chap. 16), or of the glory conferred on Him for the coming kingdom (chap. 17): Jesus was too good an Israelite to neglect the heave-offering to Jehovah, the atonement for the soul! Peter forgot that Jesus was the true temple of God and the true God of the temple; he knew not yet that the visible temple was doomed, as ready to vanish away. He still savoured the things that are of men.

The Lord therefore anticipated him on entering the house by the question, From whom do the kings of the earth take toll or tribute? from their sons, or from other folk? He could not but answer, From other folk; and the Lord rejoined that therefore the sons are free.

The Lord had just shown His omniscience, as He showed every creature subject to Him. He proved to Peter that He knew what had not reached His ear. He graciously corrects His servant's mistake and leads him once more into the truth. He was God, the Son, equally with the Father and the Holy Spirit; but He speaks and acts in perfect grace; as indeed otherwise where could Peter or we be? He says, Then are the sons free. On Him, Who alone is the Son eternally in personal right and title, depends the blessedness of the sons. We are by grace sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus, not Peter only but now, once Jews or Gentiles, all God's sons, all one in Christ Jesus; and because sons, God sent out the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So that each can hear, Thou art no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

11 The Deaf and stammering man

Mark 7: 32-37.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 100-101. Gospel No. 9-11.)

This is one of the two miracles peculiar to the gospel of Mark, the other being the cure of the blind man of Bethsaida (Mark 8: 22). They both illustrate the prophetic service of the Son of God. He had come to the lake of Galilee.

And they bring to him [one] deaf and hardly speaking, and they beseech him to lay his hand on him. And having taken him away from the crowd apart, he put his fingers to his ears; and he spit and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven he groaned, and saith to him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke aright. And he charged them that they should tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more abundantly were they publishing [it]. And they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear and the speechless to speak" (vers. 32-37).

The minute accuracy of the Holy Spirit in recounting Christ's miracles is admirable. This case differs from others, in that the sufferer is not said to have been absolutely mute, but to have had an impediment of speech, or speaking with difficulty, as well as deaf. Nevertheless the Lord takes especial pains with him. The manner reveals the divine Servant's grace. There was no question of His power. Ordinarily He healed all that needed it in a moment, no matter how extreme, as when an unclean spirit was the cause of the dumbness rather than physical inability or defect. Here He was pleased to manifest His tender interest in detail, and His compassionate love no less than His power to heal. He does much more than what those besought who brought the patient to Him. Putting the hand on the needy one was the usual sign of blessing; and less than this, a word, would have been enough, if so the obedient Lord had seen fit to God's glory.

But He took him aside from the crowd apart. For here it is not the crowd He thinks of, any more than the haughty scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem. Just before He had met the desperate need of the Syro-phoenician on behalf of her demoniac daughter on the borders of Tyre and Sidon. Now He had come through the midst of the borders of Decapolis, where, as the prophet had long before predicted, light was to shine for a despised remnant when darkness brooded over the mass with city and temple dead to the rejected Messiah (Isa. 9: 1, 2). So apart from the crowd He took the deaf man, and put His fingers unto, if not into (as the preposition may mean according to the sense required), his ears. But more than this; having spit, He touched the tongue of the stammerer.

He marked in both acts how all depended on bringing Himself personally to bear on the actual wants. He who wrought was man, but no less was He God, the Son incarnate and on earth, in His pitiful love serving God and man. It was not only that He applied what came from within Himself to the man's tongue, but looking up to heaven He groaned, and saith to him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. Power truly went out of Him, and love was its spring in devotedness to God Who is as truly light in His nature as love is the character of its energy, which His own service was manifesting. And thus, if He deigned to touch the man so intimately, He looked up to heaven whence He came in a love that abides unchanging and above all evil, yet groaned in deep sense of it, whilst He said to him, Be opened.

The afflicted man was but an emblem of the state of Israel, unwilling alas! and unable through unbelief to hear God, or to speak out their own misery and His praise. But as brought to Him he set forth the remnant on whom light dawned in a region and shadow of death. And "straightway" (a word so characteristic in the Gospel of His service) his ears were opened, and the bond or tie of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke aright. If the unbelief of the people and its chiefs made their blessing impossible, the poor of the flock prove the all-suffering of His gracious power, and reap the great blessing of faith, be it ever so small. And the love which so wrought will encourage a remnant in a future day, who will re-commence the Jewish history in the land, till it become a strong nation in that faithfulness which is unwearied and will never forget the promise.

For the present all was vain; and He charged them to tell no one, but the more He did, the more a great deal were they its publishers. Yet, true as it might be in word, it was not faith in the heart, but rather extreme astonishment. Even so what a comment on Christ's service! "He hath done all things well; He maketh both the deaf to hear and speechless to speak."

But how is it with you who now read God's testimony to Jesus His Son? Have you heard His voice? For He still speaks in His word; and they live who hear Him; and they follow Him, for they know His voice. Amidst the Babel tongues of Christendom they know it, and there is none like it; for it reveals to their souls God, and God as Father in quite a new way proper not to man even innocent but to the Son already come Who has given us understanding that we may know Him that is true. Truth is in none other; but He is not only the truth, but the way and the life. "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house." His word cannot deceive, His word only; and what he has done is according to the same perfection; above all is that work which He wrought on the cross, by which we that believe have now received the reconciliation.

12 The Blind Man of Bethsaida

Mark 8: 22-26.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 117-118. Gospel No. 9-12.)

This is the later of the two miracles peculiar to the Gospel of Mark. As in the former the Lord led away the deaf man, who could not speak aright, from the crowd apart, so here He took hold of the blind man's hand and conducted him out of the village. The mass of the Jews had already had ample signs in testimony of Who and what He was. It was but for greater hardening of their hearts to see more. They might get their sick healed, they might eat of the loaves He made and be filled; but even the most orthodox sought from Him a sign from heaven, tempting Him; so that He could only groan in His spirit and say, Why doth this generation seek a sign? Had He not given them countless signs? In the sense of their unbelief, which a Syro-Phoenician woman's faith rebuked, the Lord leads aside from the multitude, though He still acts in compassionate grace. This could not fail where they bring distressful need before Him, the Servant not more righteous than gracious.

"And they bring him a blind man, and beseech him that he might touch him. And taking hold of the blind man's hand, he led him forth out of the village, and having spit on his eyes, he laid his hands on him, and asked him if he beheld anything. And having looked up he said, I behold men, for I see [them] as trees, walking. Then he laid his hands again on his eyes, and he saw distinctly, and was restored, and saw all things clearly. And he sent him to his house, saying, Neither enter into the village, nor tell [it] to any one in the village" (vers. 22-26).

It is the gospel of His service; and here, at; throughout, we are made to behold the perfect manner in which His mighty works were done. It is not only the power of God ever ready to heal the sick and those oppressed by the devil. The way in which He answered every such appeal was worthy of the Son of God become servant to glorify God and win man. He put His fingers to the deaf man's ears, He touched the ill-speaking tongue. He laid His hands upon the blind man outside Bethsaida. There was no necessity for any such actions. He had but to speak, and it was done. But love is far beyond power; and when man has power to wield it in ever so limited a range, how little he thinks of love! Least of all does he, conscious however scantily of his sinfulness, look for love from the God he slights and dreads. The Lord in the way He wields divine power manifests divine love, and as Man in the midst of men. Nor is there the smallest ostentation but its marked absence: all is done in genuine simplicity as well as tenderness.

We may notice too that in the two miracles the Lord uses His own spittle, as He did also in the cure of the man born blind (told us in John 9). Whatever the reality and lowliness of the humanity He had taken up in His grace, there was divine efficacy in His person; and the sign of this He applies in all three cases, each having its own distinction. When He touched the tongue, He looked up to heaven with a groan, and says to the man, Be opened; and immediately the happy result follows. When He mixed clay with what came of Himself and anointed the born-blind man's eyes, He told him to go to Siloam and wash; and only then did he come seeing. Here the very intent was to mark by the twofold act of laying His hands on his eyes that the Lord would not have the cure partial. It was much to behold men, like trees, but walking. Yet the Lord would not let him go thus; He would give him to see distinctly. He therefore laid His hands upon his eyes, so that he was restored and saw all things distinctly. It was simply the way of love that the blind man might know the deep interest of His heart Who might have dispensed with any or all of these circumstances, and have effected the perfect cure with a word. But what a blank for the man and for our hearts, if it had been only so!

Indeed the instruction was great for the disciples who were then in a measure learning of His ways with Whom they were, and learnt far more when He was gone and the Holy Spirit come. The former was no unmeet emblem of Israel's state, and had a sample of the powers of the world to come when the weak remnant shall become a strong nation, with ears opened and tongue loosed to speak Jehovah's praise. The latter in the partial cure might well remind the disciples that they during His earthly ministry did not see more clearly than the man when His hands were laid on him once. How different when God raised Him up from the dead whereof they were witnesses! Then, He being exalted by the right hand of God, and having received the promise of the Holy Spirit, how great the blessing! Faith needs to have its perfect work, as well as patience. How often men stop short!

How is it with you who read these words? How are you treating Him, His words, and His works? You have to do with Him, whether you will or not. For the hour now is, when the dead have the voice of the Son of God sounding in their ears, and they that hear live. For this He when here prepared men. If He be the rejected Messiah, He is the Son of man and thus the destined Judge of mankind. How would it be with you if the hour of His judgment were come? Could you stand unabashed and unscathed before Him Whose eyes will be then as a flame of fire? Who searches the reins and hearts? Who will reward each according to his works?

What thanks shall one render, when one believes that the same Jesus is the Son of God, not only the true God but eternal life, ready and willing to give life eternal to you who can find it no where else? This is the way, the best way for a saint, the only way for a sinner, to honour the Son. It is to believe on Him; for indeed He is the way, the truth, and the life. Thus believing you do not come into condemnation, but even now have passed from death unto life. So He declares; so may you believe, and never be confounded.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Tenth Series.

Gospel Words — Tenth Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Widow's Son raised

2 The Unclean Demon cast out

3 The woman with a spirit of Infirmity

4 The Dropsical Man Cured

5 The Ten Lepers

6 The Lord at Bethesda

7 The Blind at Siloam

8 Lazarus Raised

9 Blind Bartimaeus

10 The Power and the Grace of  the Name

11 Malchus healed

12 The Unbroken Net

1 The Widow's Son raised

Luke 7: 11-17.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 134-135. Gospel No. 10-1.)

As this is a miracle peculiar to the Gospel of Luke, it strikingly illustrates God's design therein. Luke alone tells us of the penitent woman sent away in peace, of the good Samaritan, of the tax-gatherer in the parable self-judging and contrasted with the self-righteous Pharisee, of the prodigal son, of Zacchaeus, of the converted robber: all of them cases of overflowing grace. So it is here where the gracious power of God manifested itself, and this in the man Christ Jesus, and with marked commiseration of human grief. All this and more was in the Saviour, as God would have all men know.

"And it came to pass the day after that he went to a city called Nain, and there went with him his disciples, and a great crowd. Now, as he drew near to the gate of the city, behold, there was carried out dead, an only son of his mother, and she a widow, and a considerable crowd of the city was with her. And the Lord seeing her had compassion on her, and said to her, Weep not. And coming up he touched the bier (or, open coffin), and the bearers stopped. And he said, Youth, I say to thee, Awake. And the dead sat up and began to speak; and he gave him to his mother. And fear visited all; and they were glorifying God, saying, A great prophet is arisen among us, and God visited his people. And this report about him went out in the whole of Judea and in all the surrounding country" (vers. 11-17).

The power in which the grace of Christ acted was not limited to sickness, even so extreme as leprosy or paralysis. It was not confined to Israel: faith drew it out mightily in answer to Gentile appeal. Here without an appeal we see it supreme over the ravages of death, and with exquisite tenderness toward sorrow otherwise hopeless. Outside the gate of Nain, still called Nein, and mounting the steep declivity of Jebel Duhy, or Little Hermon, with its many sepulchral caves, the Lord and His disciples, with a great crowd following, met another great crowd drawn together by the funeral of a young man, a widow's only son. With a heart full of pity He said to the mother, "Weep not." They were words in vain from other lips. To men it is appointed once to die; and the young man was really dead, as the inspired physician attests. Man born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. There is hope of a tree, even if it wax old and the stock die in the ground; through the scent of water it will bud and put forth boughs. But man dies and is prostrate; yea, man expires, and where is he? The waters retire from the lake, and the river water dries up; so man lies down and rises not: till the heavens be no more, they awake not, nor are raised out of their sleep.

But now the Second Man was here, the last Adam. The Kinsman-Redeemer was hard by, and uttered words of hope to the widowed mother, stricken afresh and without hope. The strong one fully armed, who had the might of death, thought to keep his own credit and his goods in peace; but a stronger than he had come upon him and overcome him, and would take from him his whole armour wherein he trusted and divide his spoils. As a sample of this the Lord touched the bier, and the bearers stood still; and His voice was again heard. This time He spoke to the corpse, Youth, I say to thee, Awake.

Never was such a call uttered or heard before. The great prophet Elijah prayed and stretched himself over and over again on another widow's child; and Jehovah hearkened to Elijah's importunate supplication (1 Kings 17). He too that asked and received a double portion of Elijah's spirit with no less prayer and urgent effort laboured for another dead child, and was heard for his faith. So in later N.T. days Peter ventured not to say to the body of the deceased disciple, Tabitha, Arise, till he had knelt down and prayed, any more than Paul when he fell on the dead Eutychus and enfolded him in his arms.

How different His bearing Who alone is the Resurrection and the Life! "Youth, I say to thee, Awake." Yet He Who by the act thus done was marked out Son of God in power by resurrection of a dead man, habitually called Himself the Son of man, as it is carefully shown in John 3. And He Who subsisting in the form of God counted it not rapine (or, prize to be clutched) to be on equality with God, in the perfection of human affection gave the youth (no longer dead but sitting up and speaking) to his mother. How able, how willing, is He to help the tried! How suited and ready to sympathise with our infirmities!

Do you, my reader, answer that this was a miracle, and therefore exceptional? Learn then that, though true miracles, His miracles, like His words were written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name. Be assured then of a love in a human heart infinitely beyond man's, even the love of God shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us. His voice now appeals to you in the gospel. For the hour now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live. O you that read, hear Him and live. Why should you die? Why despise grace and truth in not bearing them? Listen to Him again: "Verily, verily, I say to you, He that heareth My word, and believeth Him that sent Me, hath life eternal, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life" (John 5: 24).

2 The Unclean Demon cast out

Mark 1. 23-28; Luke 4: 33-36.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 148-150. Gospel No. 10-2.)

This miracle which Mark records as well as Luke may be noticed as the first wrought publicly on one a demoniac. Indeed it has a striking place in the opening of our Lord's service in the second Gospel, which is devoted to that display of its exercise. What truths are more needful for man to hear than that he is in one way or another under the thraldom of Satan? and that the name of Jesus alone avails to deliver him? Only it is as beautiful as it is blessed to see that the third Gospel depicts from the vision of Isaiah the grace and power in which He came, before manifesting man's wretched subjection to the enemy. It was given to Luke only to tell us of that matchless scene in the synagogue at Nazareth, before the solemn lesson that soon followed at Capernaum. How quickly men turn from wonder at grace in God and His Son to the wrath and hatred of their own offended pride! How slow to allow that their own will opens the door for their slavery to Satan!

"And there was in the synagogue a man having a spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried with a loud voice, Eh! what have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Didst thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out from him. And the demon, having thrown him down in the midst, came out from him, without injuring him. And amazement came upon all, and they spoke together one with another, saying, What [is] this word? because with authority and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out" (vers. 33-36).

No doubt this case like others in the Gospels exhibits the aggravated fact of possession. It was not derangement here, but Satan's command of mind and body. Yet it is also observable that what is ordinary and presents none of the humiliating horrors of possession may be really more ruinous eternally. So we may infer from the Gadarenes, who were not drawn to Jesus by the deliverance of him that had the legion, but on the contrary besought Him to depart from their borders. In any way, how awful is the subjection! How gladly should men hail the true tidings God sends of a Deliverer in Jesus! Only believe on Him; believe God about His Son. Do you not need Him desperately? None less, none other, than Jesus can defeat Satan or save your soul.

Think of the fearful identification of the unclean spirit with the man, which his language reveals. "Eh! what have we to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Didst Thou come to destroy us?" There is no creature in the universe which affords a lair so congenial for a demon as a sinful human heart. As long as you are far from the Lord, you are near and open to the power or wiles of the spirit of evil. He is your great enemy; the Lord Jesus is your greater friend. Reject not the Saviour to your ruin. Be assured that He will receive you; if you cast your soul on Him, He will in no wise reject you. He came to seek and save the lost. If you own yourself lost, as indeed you are, He is just the Saviour for you.

There is another notable word. "I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God." Yes, He was and is "holy," even as God is, the Holy One of Israel. And this most appals these unclean spirits, a Man, yet the Holy One of God! No wonder, that they believe and shudder. How portentous that sinful man when he hears neither believes nor shudders! yea, yet worse, that he believes after a sort without a shudder even at his own state and sure doom, if he abides as he is in his sins, neglecting so great salvation.

But "Jesus rebuked him," refusing a demon's testimony; as the apostle did at a later day. God testifies by His word, as He was then testifying in Jesus, His Son and Servant; and the Holy Spirit is now sent forth to bear witness of Jesus, that you may believe on Him and be saved.

Not content with rebuking the demon, He commanded him to hold his peace and come out from the man he had made his prey. And the demon was compelled to obey. If he threw the man in the midst, as evidence of the powerful spirit, he came out from the man without doing him hurt, to the praise of the Lord Jesus. It was not "word" only, to which they were used; but this word was with authority and power in Jehovah's servant, His chosen. Amazement came on all then; but for a sinner to believe is far better still.

Oh! is not this the Saviour that you want? He that died to annul him that had the power of death, He died for you, that your sins might be blotted out and yourself justified by faith in His name. "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." Such was the due time with God: why is it not your due time? What could God do more to meet your danger and your need? How could He better assure you of His deep compassion? No other sign could match what He has already given in the Crucified? Why should you ask or look for any other? Be sure God gave the very best.

3 The woman with a spirit of Infirmity

Luke 13: 10-17.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 167-168. Gospel No. 10-3.)

This is a miracle which fell to Luke alone to record; and it sets before us the Man Who was Jehovah's fellow accomplishing His mission of grace in the midst of a race not only indifferent or hostile to God but hypocritical. Their perverse iniquity leads on those who ought to be intercessors to become adversaries.

"And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And, behold, a woman having a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and she was bowed together and wholly unable to hold her head up. And Jesus, seeing her, addressed and said to her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. And he laid his hands upon her; and immediately she was made straight, and was glorifying God. But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus healed on the sabbath, said in answer to the crowd, There are six days in which one ought to work; in these therefore come and be healed, and not on the day of the sabbath. The Lord therefore answered him and said, Hypocrites! doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall and leading it away water [it]? And this [woman], Abraham's daughter as she is, whom Satan bound, behold, eighteen years, ought she not to be loosed from this bond on the day of the sabbath? And as he said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed; and all the crowd rejoiced at all the glorious things that were being done by him" (vers 10-17).

The sabbath had often furnished occasion to prove the evil state of the people, especially of those in repute among men, as in Luke 6: 2, 7, 11. Here the Holy Spirit introduces the grace of our Lord, where the context tells of God's moral judgment of Israel, tested and aggravated by His presence, Who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil. But what was God and His grace to such as sought no glory but their own? They were only provoked by a love which condemned their ungodly self- seeking. Their heart was far from Him, and its deceits were veiled from themselves by religious forms. It is not the righteous, still less the self-righteous, but sinners whom our Saviour calls.

While teaching in a synagogue one sabbath, the Lord beheld a woman, so long bowed down that she could not look up, and yet coming to hear God's word. Without an appeal from her or any other, He addressed her with words of wonder-working compassion. "Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity." Not content with what had fully sufficed, "He laid his hands upon her; and immediately she was made straight, and was glorifying God." He had vanquished the strong one, and would take from him all his panoply wherein he trusted, and would divide his spoils. The Lord was entitled to proclaim release to the captives, and to set at liberty those who were bound.

The ruler of the synagogue, instead of owning and blessing God for His manifested goodness and power, was "indignant," hating the grace which he could not deny, and thus proving himself to be under a deeper slavery to Satan than the delivered woman. His wickedness was all the worse for the zeal, in his answer to the crowd, he affected for the sabbath. "There are six days in which one ought, to work; in these therefore come and be healed, and not on the day of the sabbath." It was God Who had wrought in and by His Son; and would he shut one out from His mercy on that day? to say nothing of her lying in the bitter bondage of the enemy so many years.

"The Lord therefore answered him and said, Ye hypocrites! [for he had not a few who shared his half-hearted unbelief] doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead it off to watering? and this [woman], Abraham's daughter as she is, whom Satan bound, behold, eighteen years, ought she not to be loosed from this bond on the day of the sabbath?" It was irresistible for the conscience; and hearts were gladdened by grace as evident as the truth. "All his adversaries were ashamed; and all the crowd rejoiced at all the glorious things that were being done by him."

He, the Lord, has done a far greater and more enduring work. He has given His life a ransom for many. He has suffered once for sins, Just for unjust, to bring you to God, Who points you to Him for a greater deliverance, even redemption for the body with glory on high. Acknowledge then your desperate need; for you too are so bowed down by Satan through your iniquities, that you cannot truly look up. To your guilt and misery add not the hypocrisy of pleading religious obligations, when God proclaims in your ears the glad tidings of His Son, the Rescuer from the wrath to come. Neither working on the six days, nor rest on the seventh, can efface your sins; nor can the synagogue avail, nor saints or Virgin more than yourself, but "Jesus only." He is the "one Mediator between God and men" (1 Tim. 2: 5). "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house" (Acts 16: 31). "In none other is there salvation; for neither is there any other name under heaven that is given among men, wherein we must be saved." So said Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit to the rulers of the people and elders (Acts 4: 12). So say not those who falsely claim to be his successors or their abettors.

4 The Dropsical Man Cured

Luke 14: 1-6.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 187-188. Gospel No. 10-4.)

It is plain that the Spirit is in this context setting out the moral ruin of men who flattered themselves, as far as possible from believing that the kingdom of God was to be taken from them, and given to such as should bring forth the fruits thereof. The various incidents of the chapter bring to light man in his evil confronted by the grace of God in Christ. So it is in the opening scene.

"And it came to pass, when he went into the house of a certain one of the rulers of the Pharisees to eat bread on a sabbath, that they were watching him. And, behold, there was a certain dropsical man before him. And Jesus answering spoke unto the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath, or not? But they were quiet. And he took, healed, and let him go. And [answering] he said unto them, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fall into a well, and will not straightway draw him up on the sabbath day? And they were unable to answer again unto these things" (Luke 14: 1-6).

Neither love nor truth animated these religious chiefs. Under the cover of hospitality, they were hostile. They sought evil, but only proved it in their own ill-will. The dropsical man there present gave the Lord occasion to assert God's title to do good.

Had not Jehovah said before the law, "If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of Jehovah thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his eyes, wilt give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put upon the Egyptians; for I am Jehovah that healeth thee" (Ex. 15: 26). Yet what was the witness of the dropsical man before the Lord and before them? And what meant all manner of disease and of sickness in the land of Israel, as it were crowding round Him to be healed? And why from all Syria brought they all that were sick, suffering under various distempers and torments, and those possessed by demons, with lunatics and paralytics? It was not Jehovah-Rophi who had failed, but man generally and Israel in particular. If the sabbath was a sign between Him and them, how came it, in shining, to disclose such misery and suffering? Why with an object before all eyes to draw out pity and humiliation, were these chiefs, Pharisees, doctors of the law, blind to His glory Who was the Son of God, blind to His grace Who went about doing good and healing all that were overpowered by the devil, for God was with Him? Yea, God was in Him, reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning to them their offences; and they were watching Him with eyes fuller of hatred to Him than to the Gentiles they most despised! Was this then their sabbath honour?

The sabbath was a precious sign from the beginning, and, filling the very centre of the law, the sure pledge of what God would accomplish in due time. But what of man's ways before the law, and under the law? What had he been to God during all the six days? What were his works before Him, and what his life? Did he love Jehovah with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might? Did not the presence of His Son, a man among man, prove the very reverse? Alas! man, sinful man, cannot enter God's rest. His works are evil. There is judgment, not rest, for him; death, and judgment.

The Lord therefore made a special point of healing on a sabbath. All the Gospels attest it, and repeatedly (Matt. 12: 9; Mark 1: 21, 3: 1; Luke 13: 10; John 5: 9, 9: 14). Here, as in chap. 13 cases are special to Luke as displaying divine grace, hateful to the self-righteous. The incurably sick man was the true testimony to man's state. Christ answers the selfish and unbelieving rancour of their hearts by His question. They were abashed and afraid to speak; but their will remained unbroken. And He laid hold of the man, who had not even appealed to Him (that the grace of God might all the more appear), healed him, and let him go. But He added a withering word to those hard and self-complacent sinners, "Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fall into a well, and will not straightway draw him up on the sabbath day"? This was notorious. And had God no interest in healing a sufferer or in saving a sinner? This they virtually denied, and hated Him Who came to give it effect.

And you, dear reader, if you believe not on Him, are in worse case than the dropsical man. Are you not a lost soul? Face your actual state before God; do not palliate; do not forget. In vain the medicine-man; in vain yourself or others; in vain, the saints, the angels, or the virgin. But "the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost." So He said Who is the truth. It is God's word; believe Him, and receive the blessing, even peace and joy in believing. Own the truth of your sins: this is repentance. Own the truth of His grace; this is faith, It is the way of Christ to the Father; and there is no other way from God and to God for a sinner.

5 The Ten Lepers

Luke 17: 11-19.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 201-202. Gospel No. 10-5.)

The Lord in this miracle sets forth the grace, which was soon to supersede the law publicly, as even faith might in a measure enjoy personally. So this Gospel shows the Lord preparing the way in word and deed for the Christianity that was at hand, when Judaism died in His death.

The miracle was striking in its breadth and in its originality, if one may so say. It was not now a single leper prostrate at His feet, and His hand touching him in gracious power as Jehovah-Messiah. Ten leprous men together appealed as they stood afar off, calling aloud for His compassion, and not in vain before Him who came to save that which was lost. But let us hear the instructive account of divine pity and much more here only recorded.

"And it came to pass as He was on the way into Jerusalem, that He was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as He entered into a certain village, there met Him ten leprous men who stood afar off; and they lifted up their voices, saying, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And on seeing He said to them, Go your way, show yourselves to the priests. And it came to pass, as they departed they were cleansed. And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back with a loud voice glorifying God; and he fell on his face at His feet, giving Him thanks; and he was a Samaritan. And Jesus in answer, said, Were not the ten cleansed? but where [are] the nine? Were none found to return and give glory to God save this stranger? And He said to him, Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole" (vers. 11-19).

Faith was put to the test. While still uncleansed, they were told to go and show themselves to the priests. The solitary leper in earlier days was first cleansed, and then sent; but the ten were to go as they were. Assured of His power and unfailing compassion Who never wrecked the hope of the wretched, they acted on His word; and as they withdrew they were cleansed. What could the priests do but pronounce on the cure by the Master, and perform their prescribed ritual? One infinitely greater and better than they had wrought on ruined men to God's glory.

And this truth had spoken in growing faith to one heart among them where it might least have been expected; for he was a Samaritan. How apt even believers are to settle down contented with the needed blessing, and stop short of the Blesser! But one rose above letter and self; but one of them recognised the new responsibility created by grace; but one of the ten felt the immediate and paramount duty of returning to give glory to God, and of honouring the Man, His image and Son, even as the Father is honoured.

Yes, the despised Samaritan alone turned back when he saw that he was healed. The nine might argue and blame the faith that outgrew theirs. "What! you going back to Jesus! Did He not tell us all to go and show ourselves to the priests?" It was plausible to reason, which cleaves to letter; but above letter is spirit, which cannot be satisfied with aught but God's mind; and He is not truly honoured apart from Jesus. The nine remained Jews as they were, relieved bodily by divine power, but the heart in the old precincts of law, neither purified by faith nor enlarged by grace. Not so the Samaritan who turned to the Source and honoured with the deepest homage Him Who is the Channel too of divine goodness.

It was indeed a living sample of Judaism, the refuge now of mere lettered ritual, soon to give place to grace and truth in and by Jesus, the Christianity of the gospel, and the church, believing man being brought to God reconciled and rejoicing. The first becomes last, and the last first. How the Lord fathomed and felt it all! "Were not the ten cleansed? but where the nine? Were none found to return and give glory to God save this stranger?" Truly their loss is the riches of the Gentiles; their casting away is the world's reconciling, as the apostle announced in Rom. 11.

Nor is this all. The Lord instantly proclaims to the grateful Samaritan that liberty which is so essential to the Christian and is now preached to all that believe the gospel. "Arise, go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole (or, saved thee)." The cleansing, marvellous as it was, was but a figure of a deeper cure, even of soul-salvation. God in Christ came out to man in his sins, and man justified can now go in to God, even in the holiest. Earthly priests and temple, sacrifices and rites of law, are all gone in presence of Jesus dead, risen, and ascended.

But how is it with you, my reader? Many Jewish and more Gentile eyes that scan these pages know how true is the gospel to their present and everlasting deliverance. Are you one of those who say that to believe on Christ is one thing, but to realise and appropriate to yourself is another? God says not so; only your human dogma, or your unjudged unbelief, cherishes these churlish thoughts of God. He is better than the strongest faith apprehends; He has declared himself to you in Jesus, full of grace and truth. Believe Him about His Son given for you and testified to you, that you too by grace may be saved through faith.

6 The Lord at Bethesda

John 5.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 215-216. Gospel No. 10-6.)

Throughout this Gospel, and especially these early chapters the Lord is shown eclipsing and superseding all the old objects of honour and trust. The Pool of Bethesda bore witness even then to Jehovah as healing Israel (Ex. 15). Not merely was it occasional only, but incomplete and conditional; like the law, it required strength enough to avail oneself of it. He that was quite powerless lay there in vain. Another stept in before he could be put into the water when troubled by the angel. To will was present with him, but not to do. "O wretched man that I am!" was all he could feel. He needed the only One Who could speak the effectual word, "Arise, take up thy couch, and walk"; then he did so immediately, sabbath as it was. What was an angel's act in comparison?

Such a sight aroused Jewish enmity; for with seared conscience they exaggerated and idolised every form. They disliked the healing power of the True God on a sabbath. The man did not profit by the warning given him of worse than sickness, but learning who it was that healed him, went and told it to the Jews, who persecuted Jesus. His answer was, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." How overwhelming for their evil and pride! how glorifying to God! how full of blessing to every man who truly owns his sin and misery!

It is the revelation of the Father and the Son, Who works as man in the midst of men. This is the truth, yea grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. Let the Jews vainly boast of the law given by Moses, which they kept not, it could not but be a ministration of death and condemnation. But the veil of unbelief was lying on their heart; and they neither judged themselves nor believed on Him Who did indeed say that God was His own Father, making Himself equal with God. And therefore those blindly religious yet wicked men sought the more to kill Him.

O my reader, flatter not yourself. You ware not so tried. You are no less guilty and lost. You may pay homage with the lip; but are you in heart and life slighting Him Who came and died for you? Are you not neglecting so great salvation? Do you not annul the gospel, as if God's proclamation were but a fair and kindly form, and not a message of life and peace to the believer? Does not God pronounce His wrath to abide on him who is not subject to the Son? If you are believing on Him, God's word is that you have life eternal in His Son.

So the Lord then declared that the Son loyally takes as man the place of entire subjection, and does nothing of Himself, save what He saw the Father doing. He emptied Himself of glory, taking the form of a bondman; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death of a cross. From what a height, and to what a depth, that God might be perfectly and at all cost glorified even about sin and ruin! And so He is. Wherefore also God highly exalted Him.

Here the Lord opens the great truth, starting from the sign on the sick man, and going on to His giving life eternal to those who believe, and His executing judgment on those who, not believing, do evil. Thus it is that all may honour the Son even as they honour the Father. The Son quickens whom He will, in communion with the Father who raises the dead and quickens. But He alone of Godhead became man, and suffered man's contempt and hatred even to the Cross. He therefore has all judgment given to Him, for in that full and final sense He alone judges. Bodily healing was but a sign. The real question is between life eternal and future judgment.

Hence we have the solemnly blessed message: "Verily, verily, I say to you, He that heareth my word and believeth him that sent me hath life eternal and cometh not into judgment, but hath (or, is) passed out of death into life" (ver. 24). All turns on hearing Christ's word and believing Him that sent the Saviour Son of God. If one hear and believe, he has life eternal, and does not come into judgment which is no less everlasting, but has passed out of death as it was into life as now given in Him. Life eternal is in contrast with judgment which awaits those who here below only dishonoured the Son, but must honour Him to their own perdition in that judgment.

Next is shown on one side man's real state, not infirm only but "dead " before God; and even now the voice of His Son for men that have heard to live. "Verily, verily, I say to you, An hour cometh and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that heard shall live" (ver. 25). For the Son was come, and as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself. Being man, He receives all from the Father, jealous to honour Him alone, as man's only right place. Thus He quickens now, as at the end He will execute judgment, according to the authority given Him, because He is Son of man.

None should wonder at this. An hour cometh which will demonstrate both His giving life as Son of God, and His executing judgment as Son of man. It is an hour, ,when all that are in the tombs [distinguishing these from the spiritually dead of ver. 25] shall hear his voice, and shall go forth: they that wrought the good things unto a resurrection of life; and they that committed the worthless unto a resurrection of judgment" (vers. 28, 29). There are thus two resurrections of opposed character (not a general one as the unbelief of Christendom feigns). They answer to life and good fruit now had by faith in God's Son, and to the unbelief with its unremoved death and corrupt ways. The Revelation which the Lord gave John adds the fresh light of the kingdom over the earth and all things, in which the changed saints reign with Him for a thousand years, and a little more, before the judgment of the wicked dead and their consignment to the lake of fire. It is a book of times and seasons, which the Gospel of John is not: but both thoroughly agree as to a resurrection of life, and a resurrection of judgment.

O my reader, can any words of man add to the Lord's solemn call? Hear the voice of God's Son now, that you may have life in Him and may not come into that judgment which is woe for ever.

7 The Blind at Siloam

John 9.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 231-232. Gospel No. 10-07.)

On no healing of the blind has the Holy Spirit dwelt so long and impressively as on this. But it is evidently in furtherance of His design in the Gospel of John: to set forth the Son's person as incarnate, but rejected in His work here, as in His word just before (John 8). How blind are all who can now read or hear God's written testimony, and fail to recognise His signature in the address to their souls, that believing in the name of Jesus they may have life eternal!

It was indeed a desperate case, "And as he passed on, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin nor his parents, but that the works of God should be manifested in him. I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day: night cometh when none can work. When I am in the world, I am light of the world. Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle, and smeared the clay on his eyes, and said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is interpreted, Sent). He went off therefore, and washed, and came seeing. The neighbours therefore, and those that used to see him before that he was a beggar said, Is not this he that used to sit and beg? Some said, It is he, and others said, No, but he is like him. He said, I am [he]. They said therefore to him, How then were thine eyes opened? He answered and said, A man called Jesus made clay, and smeared mine eyes, and said to me, Go to Siloam and wash; and having gone off and washed, I received sight. And they said to him, Where is he? He saith, I know not" (vers. 1-12).

The Lord put aside questions, and presents God's working in grace by Himself here, as Light of the world to give it effect. In an action which figured His incarnation in Whom was life, He besmeared the blind man's eyes with that which would have hindered sight, till he washed in the pool (Sent). The humiliation of Christ enables none to see, unless by the word and Spirit they apprehend Him sent of God the Father to do His will; by which will (as Heb. 10 tells us) we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. The word was thus mixed with faith in him who heard.

To confess Jesus Christ come in flesh is by the Spirit of God. Thus only do we, blind by nature, receive the Light of life. Christ becomes all to us, who before had nothing but sins and darkness and death. Till then uncertainty reigns, as we see here among the neighbours. The man is clear as to himself and confesses the Lord more as he learns more. The self-righteous oppose, and seize on the sabbath when the sign was wrought, as proof against the Saviour. The Jews believe not and summon the parents in vain to set it aside. But the great fact remains: Jesus gave the blind to see. Human affection may shirk the confession of the truth. Human religion may frown, revile, and persecute. But grace and truth only shine the more brightly. "One thing I know," the beggar that was answers, "that whereas I was blind, now see" (ver. 25).

Is not this characteristic of the gospel? It is the glad tidings, not only proclaimed in the name of Jesus, but known and enjoyed by the believer. "I write to you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake" (1 John 2: 12). So it is not only that the believer has life eternal, but "these things I write to you, that ye may know that ye have life eternal, to you that believe on the name of the Son of God" (1 John 5: 13). Christendom in its unbelief falls back behind the veil of Judaism, and denies to the Christian the happy certainty of what grace has wrought and now gives freely. The priest and his rites would cloud all peace and joy in believing. They may be disciples of Moses; they are not disciples of Jesus. They claim a sacrifice for ever, continuously offered, instead of confessing that He sat down in perpetuity, because His one accepted sacrifice is so efficacious that God will remember our sins and iniquities no more. To unbelief it is always a-doing, never done.

Faith made the seeing man bold. To the perverse reasoning of unbelief, which refused the evidence of God's gracious power and rejected Him Who alone makes the Father truly known, he replies, "Since the world began it was never heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing." Impotent and incensed, they could only hiss in answer, "Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out" (ver. 34).

"Jesus finding him said, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? He answered and said, And who is he, Lord, that I may believe on him? Jesus said to him, Thou hast both seen Him, and He it is that speaketh with thee. And he said, Lord, I believe; and he worshipped Him" (vers. 35-37). May this be your portion, dear reader. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and the one means of receiving Him is faith. Believe God's testimony to Him; and He is yours. This will enable you to judge yourself truly and confess your sins honestly; without it, you will only render a fair show in flesh. All other things, important as they may be, are subordinate to receiving Jesus. But He once received makes all else an easy yoke and a light burden.

8 Lazarus Raised

John 11.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 250-252. Gospel No. 10-8.)

The Lord Jesus manifested His glory by His "signs"; for such they were, and not wonders only or powers. Here the signs which He did reached a climax in testifying to Him as Son of God. For as the Father raises the dead and quickens them, so the Son also quickens whom He will. This testimony He gave in raising the young daughter of Jairus (as recorded in the three synoptic Gospels), and in raising the widow's son of Nain whilst being carried out for burial. But now, quite close to Jerusalem, a still more glorious sign was seen in raising up Lazarus not only dead but buried. It is also in exact keeping with the special design of the fourth Gospel, and divinely seasonable too at that moment.

The Lord did not come to the sick man at the appeal of the sisters, however truly He loved them all, but abode two days where He was. "This sickness is not unto death (said He) but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby." He waited as ever for divine direction. After this He goes, though the disciples warn of danger, and He intimates that Lazarus was dead, as they failed to catch the meaning of His words. He knew the end from the beginning.

Martha went and met Him, but Mary sat still in the house. Yet the faith of Martha rose no higher than that He was Messiah, and that God would give Him whatsoever He should ask. When Jesus said, Thy brother shall rise again, she only speaks of the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth on Me, though he have died, shall live; and every one that liveth and believeth on Me shall never die. Believest thou this? Martha's answer was quite vague and not to the purpose: "I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, that cometh into the world." And having said this, she went and called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is here, and calleth thee. And she, when she heard it, rises quickly and comes to Him. Yet when she arrived and fell at His feet, she says like her sister, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.

The power of death lay on both, on all their hearts; and Mary wept, and the Jews that came with her. Jesus was deeply pained in His spirit, and was troubled, and wept. It was not only sympathy in love, but profoundly feeling trouble at death's power over not man only but saints. At the grave He speaks and acts in divine power over death, in communion with the Father. Martha's unbelief only draws out the expression of it. He is the resurrection and the life; and with His eyes lifted on high, He says, I thank Thee that Thou hearest Me. And I knew that Thou hearest Me always; but for the sake of the crowd that standeth around I said it, that they may believe that Thou didst send Me. And having thus said, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And the dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith to them, Loose him and let him go.

With this Lord and Saviour you, my reader, have to do now. You are called on by God to honour Him whom man rejected and crucified. You are enjoined to believe on Him. You need Him as much as Lazarus, nay even more; for Lazarus already believed on Him and was beloved by Him. Can you say that you believe on Him? Do you receive Him as the Lord and Saviour sent by God that you may have in Him life eternal? To receive Him thus on God's testimony is to believe on His name. His coming again will prove the power and blessedness of life in Him; for then it is that the sleeping saints shall be raised, and the living saints shall not sleep but be changed. It is the full result of His being the resurrection and the life, of which the raising of Lazarus was the pledge on a small scale. It accords with Christ's own words to Martha, "he that believeth on me, though he should have died, shall live; and every one, that liveth and believeth on me shall never die."

Martha did not enter into this blessed truth, though she believed on Him. She thought she knew all of moment in believing Him to be the Christ, the Son of God, that was to come into the world. And there are many saints who lose much joy and power by like vagueness. But she did believe on Him. And this let me press on you who read these lines, and yet cannot say that you believe on Him. Oh, if He is, as He says, the resurrection and the life, why do you hesitate to rest on such a revelation of Himself? It goes far beyond raising up the dead and buried man to renewed life in this world. It suffices for heaven and for eternity. It was not said only for that occasion; it is written by the Holy Spirit for you, and for every other who reads or hears these wondrous words now.

Do not then aggravate your guilt and state of spiritual death by slighting either the grace of God that appeals to you in the words of the Lord Jesus, or the wrath of God revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men that hold fast the truth in unrighteousness. Such may differ greatly in outward seeming; neither class have life, because they believe not on Him. They are both alike in that they will not come unto Christ, that they may have life. But without Christ, as life and propitiation also, happiness is as impossible as holiness. Life is the first want of one dead in sins. Christ is the only giver of life; and He gives it to all that believe on Him.

9 Blind Bartimaeus

Mark 10: 46-52.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 266-267. Gospel No. 10-9.)

No sight was more characteristic of our Lord's ministry than His grace to the blind. It has the first place given to it in the answer to John the Baptist's message. A special case is presented in Matt. 9: 27, another in Mark 8: 22, and the more general fact in Luke 7: 21 with other cures, but the most marked of all in John 9. Yet there is this striking circumstance common to the three earlier Gospels, that the final testimony which the Lord offers to the Jews in or near Jerusalem opens with the healing of the blind man near Jericho. Only Matthew, as his manner is, tells us of two (compare Matt. 8: 28, 9: 27). Mark and Luke were led to dwell on what was for other reasons the more remarkable of them. It is idle to conceive separate occasions, one on entering and the other in quitting Jericho. For Matthew and Mark are express that the miracle was wrought on going out from the town. The phrase of Luke is so indeterminate as to fall in with that statement. He does not say, "as he drew nigh" or "when he came near" to Jericho; but while in the neighbourhood. This was as true when He went out as when He came in.*

* Nor is there real difficulty in the account of Zacchaeus being placed after the miracle; for Luke puts things in moral order, where required as here, not chronologically. This explains the purposely general language of the third Gospel which called for the incident about Zacchaeus later.

"And they come to Jericho, and as he was going out from Jericho and his disciples and a considerable crowd, the son of Timaeus, Bartimaeus the blind, was sitting by the wayside begging. And having heard that it was Jesus the Nazarene, he began to cry out and say, O Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me. And many were rebuking him that he might be silent, but he cried out so much the more, Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus stood still and said that he should be called. And they call the blind, saying to him, Be of good courage, rise: he calleth thee. And, throwing away his garment, he sprang up and came unto Jesus. And Jesus in answer said to him, What wilt thou that I should do to thee? And the blind said, Teacher (Rabboni), that I may receive sight. And Jesus said to him, Go thy way; thy faith hath healed (saved) thee. And immediately he received sight, and followed him in the way" (vers. 46-52).

Observe how the blind Israelites at the beginning of our Lord's ministry appeal to Him as Son of David. It was a matter of revealed promise that Messiah should open their eyes; and as they believed with their heart, they confessed with their mouth, and got the blessing. It was not so with the Canaanite, though she too believed, and with rare faith. But like many a believer, she at first applied on a wrong ground; from which the Lord led her into the right and true, that she might all the better enjoy the grace that awaited her. Here the call on the Son of David exactly suits the ways of God, when Christ finally presented Himself to the people, about to consummate His rejection to their own utter ruin for the present. It is the starting-point for His last Messianic offer to Jerusalem, where the blind that cried in faith were made to see, and those who said they saw were made blind for their unbelief and enmity.

O my reader, call on the Lord, like the once blind Bartimaeus. Hitherto you have been blind, and have followed blind leaders into the ditch. But Jesus still waits to heal and extricate you. Fear not. Be of good courage, if now you feel your need, and believe that all authority and power are His. Does He not call you as truly as He did the son of Timaeus? Read not His words so unbelievingly. These things are written that you may believe unto life and salvation. Profit by the lesson of his earnest importunity. Many, who felt not their own need any more than his, kept rebuking him. It was not decorum — in their view who were travelling at ease to perdition. Such cries might be well on the sabbath perhaps, and no doubt on a dying bed; but they were wholly objectionable by the wayside and before a crowd.

The Lord heard as He ever does the call of distress and of faith, took His stand, and bade him be brought before Him. And how graphic the sketch, and instructive the eagerness of the blind man casting away his cloak that he might get to the Lord! Poor as he was, he must lay aside every hindrance and go to Him at once. And Jesus answered his heart, and drew out its desire: "Great Teacher, that I may receive sight." And immediately was it given; he also followed Jesus in the way. For this His sheep do. It is their instinct of life in Him; as it is His word to them, that they may be kept in a world of evil, snares, and danger. But the Lord Jesus guides and guards His own, yet not without their hearing His voice and following Him all the way through. And a stranger will they not follow, as the rule (the only right and safe rule), but will flee from him; for they know not the voice of strangers.

Can you say, dear reader, that you have received sight from Jesus? If not, be assured that you are blind as well as in your sins. You are trusting baptism or religious observances or your clergyman in vain, if you suppose that any or all these can give you sight, or life, or propitiation for your sins. Only Jesus avails in answer to your faith, and even Jesus can give you all only by His death for you a guilty sinner. Look to Him, and be saved.

10 The Power and the Grace of  the Name

John 18: 1-9.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 280-281. Gospel No. 10-10.)

How strikingly the divine design of the Fourth Gospel differs from the three Synoptics, as seen in their reports of Gethsemane on the night of the betrayal! Who left to his own feelings would have so dwelt on his Master's agony as the beloved disciple? Yet he says not one word about it, though he alone of the Evangelists was chosen to be near the Lord in that affecting and mysterious scene, when He repaired again and again to them and found them sleeping. It fell to the others to record His exceeding sorrow in realising the depths into which He was just about to enter; because it bore directly on the rejection of the Messiah, on the work the Righteous Servant had in hand, and on the Son of man, as perfectly dependent on His Father in the hour of woe as in all the activities of power in loving service.

Here shines out the glory of His person. Had we only the witness of John, rich as it is, what should we know of His anguish in anticipation of all before Him as He prayed to His Father, and of His entire submission whatever it cost? If most appropriately Luke alone mentions an angel strengthening Him and His sweat as clots of blood, here we see and hear the Son of the Father, to Whom He had commended His own in John 17.

"Jesus having said these things went out with his disciples over the winter-torrent Kidron, where was a garden into which he entered, he and his disciples. And Judas also that betrayed him knew. the place; because Jesus often resorted thither with his disciples. Judas therefore, having received the band and officials from the chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches and weapons. Jesus therefore, knowing all things that were coming upon him, went forth and said to them, Whom seek ye? They answered, Jesus the Nazaraean. He said to them, I am [he]. And Judas that betrayed him stood with them. When therefore he said, I am [he], they went backward, and fell to the ground. Again therefore he asked them, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus the Nazaraean. Jesus answered, I told you that I am [he]: if therefore ye seek me, let these go away; that the word might be fulfilled which he said, Of those whom thou hast given me, I lost not one" (vers. 1-9).

What communion with the Father, what prayer, what intercession, what tender care for the feeble disciples, what self-sacrificing interest on their behalf, what vigilant love of the good Shepherd, what pity for Israel, what outgoing of heart for the sheep not of this fold, had not been known in that garden! Yes, Judas knew it, and took his measures accordingly under Satan to gratify the chief priests and Pharisees. Thither he led the band with lanterns and torches and weapons.

Men who do not know the Lord talk of His "limitations," and forget that He is God, the Word become flesh, but no more ceasing to be God than a man can cease to be man. Jesus knew all things that were coming on Him, the same Jesus Who had gone through all in the profoundest grief yet dependence on the Father, for He was as truly man, the perfect man. Now when horrors began to thicken, what calm pervaded His every word and act! He went forth and said to them, Whom seek ye? They answered, Jesus the Nazaraean; and on His reply, I am [He], they went backward and fell to the ground.

God indeed attested what was due to that Name; for He too was God no less than the Father and the Holy Spirit. Nor was there ever a moment more befitting. So Judas the betrayer stood with them, and he too with them fell to the ground. What a testimony to their conscience, as well as to His glory!

When the wicked Ahaziah sent a captain with his fifty to take the Tishbite prophet as he sat alone on a hill, again and again came fire down from heaven to consume the captains and their fifties. Jesus full of grace and truth came to save the lost. Not a word more did He utter. He owned Himself Jesus the Nazaraean. It was enough. In His name shall bow all beings heavenly, earthly, and infernal, and every tongue confess Him Lord to God the Father's glory. It was but a witness then to that glory; but how blessed and suited and eloquent, if they had not had deaf ears, seared consciences, and hearts harder than stone! He Whose name laid them prostrate could have in a moment consigned them to death for everlasting judgment. But no! He came that God might be glorified in His death for sin, to set free every sinner that believes in Him.

And so it was of His grace that, after the manifestation of power, He asked them again, Whom seek ye? As they gave the same reply, He answered, I told you that I am [He]; if therefore ye seek Me, let these go away. O what grace now manifested on behalf of His own, so unworthy of His love, yet loved unto the end, loved though He knew all would forsake Him and flee, and that one who ventured nearer in that night of desertion would there thrice deny that he knew Him! It was a fulfilment of John 17: 12; but great as it was, how little compared with all that those words mean and guarantee! And indeed such is His love that it covers all things great and small.

How are you who read these lines treating Him and His love? He, the Son of God and Lord of glory, was nothing to Judas and the Jews, but for the one to sell and the other to buy; and He submitted to be the willing prisoner, and the willing sacrifice, that you might hear and live. You have heard, but cannot live without faith in Him Who is the life eternal — life now that you may live of Him now — life evermore that you may have Him your life for the body and heaven as well as now for your soul on earth. But forget not that to hear and not believe on Him leaves you worse unspeakably than if you had never heard. Oh then hear, believe, and live.

11 Malchus healed

Luke 22: 50, 51; John 18: 10, 11.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 295-296. Gospel No. 10-11.)

The moral perfection of the Lord shone only the more brightly in His new and last trial. Satan, foiled in his effort to tempt Him out of His path of obedience, came now to kill Him in it. But nothing moved Him out of that way, nothing provoked Him, even when the disciples slept instead of praying, unable (even Peter and James and John) to watch one hour with Him.

When the crowd of men with swords and staves laid hold on and seized Him, Peter (too hasty to await the answer to the appeal, Lord, shall we smite with sword?) drew his, and smote the high priest's bondman, and took off his ear. This the Lord rebuked: "Return thy sword to its place; for all that take the sword shall perish by the sword. Or thinkest thou, that I cannot now call on my Father, and he will furnish me more than twelve legions of angels? How then should the scriptures be fulfilled that thus it must be?"

He abides the righteous Servant. He came to suffer for sins, Just for unjust, that He might bring us to God, and fit the children of God to share His glory on high when He takes all the creation heavenly and earthly, and reigns over Israel and the nations on earth in His day. Those who believe now are called to suffer with Him, as the Lord had taught His own when correcting their thoughts and desires about His kingdom. "Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and the great exercise authority over them. But it shall not be thus among you; but whosoever will be great among you, he shall be your servant; and whosoever will be first among you, let him be your bondman; as indeed the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Matt. 20: 25-28).

But Peter, ever rash as yet, thought of nothing but his Master's danger; and, in fleshly zeal seeking to defend Him, he stood reproved. It was human nature, but contrary to Christ and His word. If carried out, it would have made redemption impossible, like his warm and hasty error in Matt. 16: 22, for which the Lord bade him, Get away behind me, Satan, and added, Thou art an offence to me; for thy mind is not on the things of God but on the things of men. Peter failed not only to appreciate Christ's death, but to apprehend that the Christian must deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Him. He did in his measure and spirit what the Lord told Pilate was not for His servants to do, because His kingdom is not of this world. It is of heaven, and of no worldly source.

In the Gospel of Luke (22: 51) we first hear that Jesus said in answer, Suffer ye thus far, and with a touch He healed the cut-off ear. Even at such a crisis as this He is thus presented as the gracious Son of man, anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power. If He was no longer going about doing good and healing all that were under the devil's power, because God was with Him, He was just as ready to heal one wounded by His thoughtless follower.

John lets us know particularly the names, not only of His follower but of the wounded man. And here the healing has its significance, like every other word and fact in this Gospel as illustrating His personal dignity. As the mention of His name hurled to the ground the band which came to capture Him, and to which He thereon gave Himself up, with the words, Let these go away; so now the answer to Peter spoke His glory and His grace in a way peculiar to the last Gospel. "Put the sword into the sheath: the cup which the Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?"

Blessed Saviour, as Thou in Thy love and light and lowliness art alone in Thy perfection, so art Thou in the ineffable sufferings which were in that cup for Thee to drink! And Thou didst drain it, that God might be glorified, and we who believe might be saved worthily of God. Yet do we rejoice also that as God was glorified in Thee, and in Thy death especially and infinitely, so did He glorify Thee in Himself, and this immediately in heaven, before the world-kingdom of our Lord and His Christ come, who shall reign unto the ages of the ages.

Nor need poor souls who are in their sins wait for that displayed kingdom. While Jesus is glorified on high is just the time during which the Holy Spirit is sent forth, not only to dwell in the church, but to proclaim the gospel, the glad tidings of God to guilty and perishing man. Doubt not then but believe the witness God bears to the Lord Jesus, His Only-begotten Son. Great as is your need, many as are your sins, His grace is far greater. It is as infinite as His person. Come as you are that you may find Him as He is, full of grace and truth. Does not this suit you who have nothing but sins? Receive of His fulness: it is open to all who believe. Then will you live to Him.

12 The Unbroken Net

John 21: 1-14.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 313-314. Gospel No. 10-12.)

We have seen in Luke 5 the remarkable manner in which the Lord called Simon Peter and his companions, already disciples, to be fishers of men. There was then a miracle wrought, which acted powerfully not on the mind only or the affections, but on the conscience. After a night's toil in which they caught nothing, the Master spoke, and at His word they let down the nets. This done, they enclosed a great multitude of fishes; but their nets were breaking, and their partners came to help them, and filled both their boats, so that they began to sink. It was the beautiful picture of the gospel work to which they were thenceforward called, where they apart from Him could do nothing, and His power wrought. But yet He allowed the weakness of human responsibility to be felt; for the nets were breaking and the boats sinking under the weight of the very blessing given.

Here at the sea of Tiberias after His resurrection we see them at Peter's instance again fishing; and this night too they took nothing. "But when morn was now breaking, Jesus stood on the beach. The disciples however knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus therefore saith to them, Children, have ye aught to eat? They answered him, No. And he said to them, Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes. That disciple therefore whom Jesus loved saith to Peter, It is the Lord. Simon Peter therefore, having heard that it was the Lord, girded his overcoat about him (for he was naked), and cast himself into the sea; and the other disciples came in the small boat (for they were not far from the land, but about two hundred cubits off), dragging the net of fishes. When therefore they went out on the land, they see a fire of coals there, and fish laid on it, and bread. Jesus saith to them, Bring of the fishes ye have now taken. Simon Peter therefore went up, and drew the net to the land full of great fishes a hundred and fifty- three; and though they were so many, the net was not rent. Jesus saith to them, Come, dine. But none of the disciples dared enquire of him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord. Jesus cometh and taketh the bread and giveth it to them, and the fish in like manner. This is already the third time that Jesus had been manifested to the disciples, being risen from the dead" (vers. 4-14).

This was not a miracle only but a sign, as indeed is ever the case in the fourth Gospel, and in special connection with the two fore-going manifestations of the risen Lord, which give the key to what has just been cited. The first was when the Lord made Himself known to the disciples gathered on the first day of the week, His own very resurrection day, when He breathed on them, and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. It was His risen life communicated in the power and character of His resurrection, His blood already shed, peace now given, and themselves sent on a mission of peace. It is the type of the Christian and the church.

Eight days after was the second manifestation, when Thomas, who had been absent before but was now present, was convicted of unbelief; as the Lord took up his words of doubt and bade him reach here his finger and see His hands, and put his hand into His side, and be not faithless but believing. The slow disciple could only answer, My Lord and my God! just as the converted Jews will say at the end of this age. Indeed the Lord intimated the same thing when He said to him, "Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed [as Israel will do by-and-by]: blessed are they who have not seen and believed"; which is the proper faith of the Christian now.

The third manifestation is equally notable. "After these things Jesus was manifested again to his disciples" in Galilee of the Gentiles. It is not said to be on the first day of the week, nor eight days after; but simply after what foreshadowed His work in bringing Israel out of their unbelief. Now He sets forth Himself for their millennial work of bringing to Him from the sea of the nations, in which converted Israel will be honoured by His grace. Here there is no breaking of the nets, no sinking of the boats. The net is drawn to land full of great fishes, as becomes the type of that vast ingathering. Whatever be the ruin of the Gentiles deceived by Satan at the end, there will be no failure among the blessed among the nations any more than in Israel. This is no small contrast with all that has been seen since Pentecost. And it is not without a bearing on that new day for the earth, that they found a fire of coals already there, and fish on it and bread. Those, who are used of grace for bringing in of the Gentiles on a great scale, learn that the Lord has wrought a work before them, and that they are invited to enter into the communion of His love in that previously hidden work; for eating here as elsewhere is its well-known figure. They partook of the fish ashore before what they had just caught on a larger scale.

Is not Jesus a wondrous and unwearied Saviour? Think of it in all these three manifestations of Himself after He rose. What was it to the disciples who forsook Him and fled? What was it to Thomas so gloomily denying the good tidings? What will it be to a Gentile remnant, and to all the nations in the future day? And are you, my reader, to be left out of the blessing? It can only be because you harden your soul against casting yourself on Him now. If you are poor, He is rich; if you have no merit, and sins only, He is All-worthy, and died for you. Is not His death all that God values on your behalf? Believing on Him, you are justified. His work claims it, and God delights to prove that it is not in vain. Therein is his righteousness. He owes it to the cross of Christ; and it is yours if you believe. But beware of slighting the divine message. Put not His word of grace from you, nor thus judge yourselves unworthy of life eternal. God is not mocked in the end. Despise Him not now to your own ruin both now and for ever. It is "the hour when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live." Is any case too desperate?

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Eleventh Series.

Gospel Words — Eleventh Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 Two Masters

2 The Prudent builder

3 The ways, N. and W.

4 The Salt and the Light

5 The Beatitudes

6 Prayer for Disciples

7 Grace in Practice

8 Treasures?

9 Christ come to fulfil

10 The Father in secret

11 The Lamp of the Body

12 Be not anxious.

1 Two Masters

Matt. 6: 25.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 329-330. Gospel No. 11-1.)

When man fell, he abandoned God as Master; he gained by sin another master, even Satan, the great rebel against the true God. The race followed the fallen parents. "Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned" (Rom. 5: 12). Such is the moral history of man, recorded in Genesis, there summarised, here reasoned on by the apostle. So vain, so blind, is every man, that he is apt to go no higher than himself in accounting for sin. But it is not so: neither Jew nor Gentile originated sin. It began with the head of the race, long before those distinctions. It was an innocent man too, though Adam was not deceived, but the woman being quite deceived was involved in transgression (1 Tim. 2: 14). Sin became the state of all, while each added his own sins also. Satan thus became master in fact of the race; and from the first the guilty pair hid away from God's presence, before "He drove out the man."

Henceforth all for good turned on another, the Second man, the Last Adam. Sinful man can neither atone for sins nor get rid of sin. And from the fall Jehovah Elohim clearly intimated the great truth that deliverance can come only from the woman's Seed, who, Himself bruised, should bruise the Serpent's head, that is, destroy the mysterious enemy, Jesus, the Son of God, born of the virgin, alone answers to this earliest oracle, and to every other in scripture. How many besides His incarnation converge in Him and can apply to no other, in His life, death, resurrection, and ascension! Above all He was to suffer once for sins, Just for unjust, that He might bring us who believe to God. For no external rite could adequately meet the dire need. It was not purifying only, but atonement there must be by One who, being God and man in one person, suited and alone could suit God and man, the Holy One whom God made sin for us, that we might become His righteousness in Christ. Hence repentance toward God, and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ, must be in man.

There is thus faith-obedience, the root of all other obedience in practice. It is not mere outward separateness by circumcision or any thing akin. The sanctification of the Spirit is thereby secured in a new life imparted to the believer for Christ's obedience as well as His blood-sprinkling. We thenceforth obey as He did, not as slaves under law like Israel with the solemn sanction of the victim's blood on them and on the book of the law, threatening death on disobedience; we obey as sons, on whom grace rests, and as we are begotten of God, so have we Christ's blood that cleanseth from every sin. As we were in baptism buried with Christ unto His death (for nothing short could suffice even as a starting-point), so we also, as He was raised from the dead, should walk in newness of life. What then? Shall we sin because, even if once Jews, we are no longer under law but under grace? Away with it. Know we not that to whom we yield ourselves bondmen for obedience, we are bondmen to him whom we obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? Through Christ and His work set free from sin, and become bondmen to God, we have our fruit unto holiness and the end life eternal.

Thus it is that sin shall not have dominion over us. Not law but grace gives power; and grace and truth came through Jesus, as John 1 expressly declares in contrast with law, which however good in itself could only slay one in whom sin was and worked. For sinful man salvation hangs on Him. Without His blood is no remission; in virtue of it He washed us from our sins, and in newness of life (His life as risen from among the dead), we are fitted to walk worthily and please God.

But Satan ever seeks to mislead. And no one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will hold to the one and despise the other. "Ye cannot," said our Lord, "serve God and mammon." This tests those who bear His name. Never was mammon more widely sought in Christendom than now. How is it with your own soul? Are you, a professing Christian, a slave to mammon? A divided heart is a disloyal one. No one can serve two masters. Think of the young ruler who in sorrow turned away from following Christ, because he loved his possessions. Think of the apostle who for a paltry sum sold his Master. How true it is that, hating the one, we love the other, or holding to the one, we despise the other! Mammon commands the world; and if we love the world, or the things in the world, we serve mammon. But what does a man profit if he should gain the whole world, and lose his soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Ye cannot serve two masters, God and mammon.

2 The Prudent builder, … and the foolish.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 343-344. Gospel No. 11-2.)

"Other foundation can no one lay than what is laid, which is Jesus Christ," says the apostle (1 Cor. 3: 11). Have you Him as your foundation, dear reader? If it be of faith, you will not doubt of His sufficiency. "He is the Rock; His work is perfect; for all His ways are righteousness." So an Israelite could say of Jehovah; and Jesus is Jehovah. But He is more, and now more is revealed, especially since He the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us, full of grace and truth. Nor this only: "Behold, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world."

He is the One for your soul, for your guilt, for your sins. If the Son of God became the Lamb of God, and you believe on Him, surely you need not, you cannot rightly, question that He avails perfectly for you. Yea, you are bound, if you believe Who He is, to receive without hesitation what God's word declares He undertook and has done. The atoning work is done; it is not future for you; nor is it a-doing either, but is done; and its efficacy is perfect for every soul that believes God about Jesus, His Son. His blood cleanseth from all sin. You who say that you believe do God wrong, if you receive not His word and rest not with confidence on the foundation that is laid. There is none other: Jesus is the one foundation for lost sinners.

God commends His love to us, in that, we being still sinners, Christ died for us. Do we ask more? We being still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. We had nothing but sins: He gives all the good we want, having suffered for all the bad that was in us. Such is the Saviour of sinners. None that is pretended even resembles Him. The Virgin mother needed Him for her soul, as did every other saint. All men need grace to save them through faith; for all are sinners. Neither angels nor the archangel can avail in any degree; they are but upheld by the word of His power. Nor will God save a sinner but through faith in His Son Who humbled Himself unto death, even the death of the cross, to glorify God and to suffer for sins, Just for unjust. Whoever denieth the Son hath not the Father either; he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also (1 John 2).

But in our text, which closes the sermon on the Mount, it is another truth: not redemption (which was not there the object) but the absolute necessity of obedience in all who call Jesus Lord. To say Lord, Lord, without doing His Father's will, is worthless. Many shall say in the future day of account, Have we not prophesied through Thy name, and through Thy name cast out demons, and through Thy name done many works of power? But He will answer, I never knew you: depart from Me, workers of lawlessness. It was hollow profession, whatever the works of power, which only aggravated the guilt and will add to the endless remorse. There was no life possessed in Christ, and consequently no obedience, to which every believer is sanctified (1 Peter 1: 2). Without holiness none shall see the Lord (Heb. 12: 11). The point is here that obedience is indispensable from each one that bears His name.

Hence the Lord concludes, "Whoever therefore heareth these my words and doeth them, I will liken him to a prudent man which built his house upon the rock; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and fell upon that house, and it fell not; for it had been founded upon the rock. And every one that heareth these my words, and doeth them not, shall be likened to a foolish man which built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and fell upon that house, and it fell, and its fall was great" (Matt. 7: 24-27).

It is not redemption only that sinful man needs, but life eternal. In Jesus only are both found, and the believer receives both. Many there are who profess His name, and boast of redemption in Him, the forgiveness of offences, but never think of present life in Him. Alas! they deceive themselves. To the defiled and unbelieving, whatever they profess, nothing is pure; but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but in works deny Him. They say, Lord, Lord; but they are false to His name. Had they believed, they would have had life in His name, and brought forth fruit of righteousness. But not having Christ as their life, they had no fruit unto holiness, and never grew because they had no true knowledge of God. Life, life eternal, as a present ground for serving God in obedience, is as essential as redemption. Woe is to such as have neither. Still more bitter is the woe of such as deny either: they are enemies of the truth.

3 The ways, N. and W.

The Narrow and the Wide Ways.

Matt. 7: 13, 14.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 357-358. Gospel No. 11-3.)

The Lord sets before those who heard Him the energy requisite for entering the kingdom.

When man was unfallen, he had only to abide where Jehovah Elohim set him. A single restriction was laid on him as a test of the obedience that was due. He might freely eat of every other tree in paradise, pleasant to the sight and good for food; but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden on pain of death. The divine Creator was also the moral Governor; and man, to abide blessed, must bow to His word in grateful subjection, assured that His will was good no less than wise. That He forbade was enough. To disobey Him was sin and death. And so man learnt to his sorrow, shame, and ruin, when following the woman deceived by the serpent, he violated the plain commandment and fell.

Since then the race broke more and more into sin. Lawlessness prevailed; till at length Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The end of all flesh came before God; for it was not only that all flesh had corrupted its way here below, but that the earth was filled with violence. Nor was it only Noah finding grace in Jehovah's eyes through faith, but a deliverance from the deluge was granted to him and his house, and a preservation of enough of the creatures in the ark to renew the post-diluvial earth. There the dispensed ways of God were to be displayed, man fully convicted after the most patient trial, and Himself revealed in His Son, but first on the ground of responsibility, till sovereign grace displace all evil, and righteousness reign to His glory; finally, when the kingdom closes, dwelling in holy power and peace and goodness when God is all in all.

Meanwhile, as the course of the world has ever been and is now more than ever man doing his own will and pleasing himself, the path of faith is ever in separation to God and His word. Christ is the One revealed by God and revealing Him in order to make this knowledge good in all who believe.. All saints since sin came into the world looked to Him, and were lightened, and their faces shall never be confounded.

Since the Word became flesh and wrought redemption, grace abounds more exceedingly. Nor is it grace only, but this reigning through righteousness unto life eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord. Remission of sins, yea, peace made through the blood of His cross, is preached to every creature; that whosoever believes may know himself made nigh in virtue of Christ's blood, God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God before prepared that we should walk in them.

Still there are difficulties, dangers, and enemies which each soul that heeds the call of God must face. He who is quickened is sanctified unto the obedience of Jesus Christ (1 Peter). The mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can it be: and they that are in the flesh cannot please God. Such is man's moral bent in his very nature fallen as it is. Nor is this by any means all; for the friendship of the world (and what man has not sought it?) is enmity with God; and this so surely that whosoever would be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Then the power of Satan, the liar and murderer, is the most directly destructive of all. Who is sufficient for these things? It is, and must only be, of God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ.

But every natural influence here below is in Satan's hands, and as hostile to man as to God. Therefore the Lord says, "Come in through the narrow gate; because wide [is] the gate and broad the way that leadeth to destruction, and many are they that come in through it; because narrow [is] the gate and straitened the way, that leadeth to life, and few are they that find it" (Matt. 7: 13, 14).

Follow the multitude, as it follows the wise according to the flesh, the mighty, and the noble, and you are lost. Public opinion may be well enough for things of this life; but it is never founded on God's word. This sets forth Christ and Him crucified, which to the perishing is foolishness, but to those that are saved the power of God, and His wisdom. So faith receives, and enjoys now, and is blessed for ever. It hears Christ's word and believes God that sent Him. It distrusts and turns away from the world which cast Him out and crucified Him. It seeks not ease or pleasure for the flesh, but follows Him who was despised by the vain, and abhorred by the self-righteous, and loathed by such as sought their carnal desires. Hence it is and must be the narrow gate and the straitened way that leads unto life, and few there be that find it.

Those who trust self and the world naturally prefer the wide gate and the broad way. But beware, poor soul! Such is the way that leads to destruction It may look fair now, yet what solace will it be then that many come in through that wide but fatal gate? The proud and the mean, the haughty and the servile, the highest and the lowest, the dissolute and the violent, the superstitious and the sceptical, the self-satisfied and the hypocritical enter through it into the broad road whose end is perdition. O my fellow-sinners, hear Him who is Himself the way, ay the sole and sure way to the Father. Never did He refuse one that cast himself as a lost one on His grace and truth; never does He fail to guide aright each that calls on His name. He is the Saviour of all that believe. His sheep hear His voice, and as He knows them, they follow Him; and He gives them life eternal, and they shall never perish, nor shall any one seize them out of His hand (John 10: 27, 28).

4 The Salt and the Light

Matt.5: 13-16.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 371-372. Gospel No. 11-4.)

In the preceding verses the Lord lays down the character of such as belong to the kingdom of the heavens. Now He states their position here below. Is it truly applicable to you? Do you in unbelief treat it as impracticable or indifferent?

If I own myself a lost sinner, and in me, that is in my flesh, no good thing dwells, neither salt nor light is mine, but sin dwells in me. It would be sheer presumption to claim that I am born either the one or the other. Naturally I am corrupt, and as to God and His things dark as night. Important as baptism is, it in no case according to scripture produces so mighty a change; but life in Christ does, which the believer receives through the Spirit and the word of God. As its fulness and perfection were in the Son, so of His fulness did all we receive, and grace for grace. It is no presumption to believe God, nor what He declares He gives to those who receive Christ.

Let me beseech you, fellow-believer, not to slur over nor shirk the position in which the Lord sets you here below. These are His words:- "Ye are the salt of the earth ; but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing save to be cast out and to be trodden down by men. Ye are the light of the world: a city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do they light a lamp, and put it under the bushel but upon the stand, and it shineth for all that are in the house. Thus let your light shine before men, that they may see your comely works, and glorify your Father that is in the heavens." Let us earnestly seek to make this good, instead of slipping it through or shoving it on to a Jewish remnant.

As there were two broad characteristics among the foregoing "blessed," righteousness and grace, both displayed in Christ and in Christianity, so is it with the position of the disciples. In vers. 3 to 6 are the righteous characters: in 7 to 9 the gracious: followed by the blessing of the persecuted for righteousness' sake in 10, and by those persecuted yet worse for Christ (i.e. grace) in 11, and their joy, exultation, and reward above in 12. The position too is presented accordingly. In ver. 13 we have the righteous side; in 14 and the rest the side of grace, but both to be verified in our practice.

Salt is the righteously preservative principle. It is sharp rather than sweet, but guards from impurity and decomposition. It gives fixity to what is good and wholesome. It proves all things, and holds fast the right. It keeps aloof from every form of wickedness. When then the disciples are called the salt of the earth, the Lord designates them as set apart to God the Father, and in patient continuance of good work seeking for glory and honour and incorruptibility at Christ's coming. They obey the truth, and are to hold fast what they have till then. If they lose the good savour, it is fatal. Saltless salt (and such a change was familiar in those lands) cannot be restored. It is not fit for anything but to be trodden down on the streets, as it often was.

How has it fared with the holy deposit in Christendom? Has the salt there retained its virtue? Did the favoured Gentile abide in goodness, any more than the Jew under law? If not, cutting off is the sentence of God (Rom. 11: 21, 22). All the more should every faithful soul humble himself, repent, and look to the Lord who is as willing as He is able to make Him stand.

But are we not responsible as "the light of the world"? If it is not the property or power of salt to cure corruption, it is for light to illuminate the dark. It goes out and around. And we may notice it is to "the world" at large here in this appropriate diffusion by grace, as the salt is "of the earth," the ordered scene of privileges. As being the light, it is compared to a city set on a hill and not to be hid; and not this only, but as penetrating the home, it is as a lamp (not absurdly under the bushel as its extinguisher, but) upon its stand, that all in the house may enjoy its brightness.

Only let us not forget the Lord's momentous caution as to this. "Thus let your light (your living profession of Him, Who is the true Light and made you light in Him) shine before men, that they may see (not your inconsistencies, but) your comely works, and glorify your Father that is in the heavens." He means the very reverse of men displaying their benevolent works before their fellows, so as to bring glory to themselves. He would have His own let their confession of Him, the one source of their light, shine, so that men may see the goodly fruits, and therefore glorify not the disciples but our Father in the heavens, the Father of lights, of whom is every good giving, and whence comes down every perfect gift from above.

5 The Beatitudes

Matt. 5: 3-12.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 8-9. Gospel No. 11-5.)

In what is called the Sermon on the Mount the Lord does not treat either of new birth or of redemption. He addresses His disciples that came unto Him, and begins with pronouncing who are the blessed in the kingdom. It is a solemn test whereby every disciple may try himself.

"Blessed the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.

Blessed the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed they that hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.

Blessed the merciful; for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed the pure in heart; for they shall see God.

Blessed the peace-makers; for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed are ye when they shall reproach and persecute you, and falsely say every wicked word against you for my sake. Rejoice and exult; for your reward is great in the heavens; for thus persecuted they the prophets that were before you."

Such are the qualities, said the Lord, which suit the kingdom. They are not those of man fallen nor even unfallen. The first man in Paradise had none of them any more than the outcast race. "Ye must be born anew," and even then have your new character formed and impressed by the Lord Jesus. None other He owns (Matt. 7: 21-23), nor can others have to do with the Kingdom save for judgment. Those only do the will of His Father that is in the heavens. But the Saviour Son of God elsewhere shows, and is, the unfailing way. "As many as received Him, to them gave He authority to become children of God" (John 1: 12). Who are they? "Those that believe on His name." They are born of God. They have life eternal, and can each say, "I live, no longer I, but Christ liveth in me; and that which I now live in flesh I live by faith in the Son of God that loved me and gave Himself up for me" (Gal. 2: 20). O, believe Him in Whom is life producing every quality God values! There is none other in His sight. Believe, and it is yours now; and with an evil nature in an evil world as is the fact, here it is indispensable as well as for heaven.

You, my brethren, may not have noticed that there are seven characters, all blessed in vers. 3-9, divided as after into four and three. Four righteous qualities are first, three gracious follow; and they rise respectively in each class. Christ manifested each and all in perfection. Those that follow Him, having Him as their life, must have His qualities reproduced and manifested in them.

Poor in spirit is the first named. It is just the opposite of fallen man's aspiring spirit. Outward forms of poverty will not do. Under that garb what pride may lurk, what self-seeking, what party spirit! "It shall not thus be among you, but whoever would be great among you, let him be your servant; and whoever would be first among you, let him be your slave" in this evil ace and rebel world. Such was the Son of man in life and death. He is the disciple's example; for his is not a present place of honour but the kingdom of the heavens whether to faith now or displayed by-and-by.

And who was such a mourner where His Father was unknown, and His own light and love scorned? Here too the disciple treads in His steps and looks for the comfort wherewith He was comforted and comforts.

Next, as He was meek and lowly in heart, so must he be who takes His yoke and learns from Him, assured of inheriting that earth where the hard and haughty have now their brief portion.

The last of these are such as hunger and thirst after righteousness, which marks not only persevering energy but this in inward personal desire, and they shall have satisfying fruition in and like "Jesus Christ the Righteous."

After this, we have the higher characters of grace, but with righteousness preceding. As Jesus was full of grace and truth, so His followers not only exceed in their righteousness that of scribes and Pharisees, but show mercy not known to these. And truly they shall find mercy, as they have found it plenteously.

Theirs too is purity in heart, and as by faith they see God now, so shall they beyond others by-and-by (Rev. 22: 4).

In fine, they are the blessed peace-makers who now represent the God of peace; and His sons shall such be called as they are.

But observe that the Lord reveals a supplemental blessedness for each of the two great classes. "Blessed they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake" answers to the opening class in 3-6, and so fitly repeats the opening blessing, "for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens." The last of the two rises to the highest, and leaves the abstract for direct personal words of love: "Blessed are ye when they shall reproach and persecute you, and falsely say every wicked word against you for my sake." This was suffering for grace in full. "Rejoice," says the Lord therefore, "and exult, for your reward is great in the heavens; for thus they persecuted the prophets that were before you."

As Christ only is all-sufficient now for evil and lost man, if he believe, so in His day shall the poor in spirit have the true and abiding riches. What then must be the lot of all who despise Him?

6 Prayer for Disciples

Matt. 6: 9-13.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 20-22. Gospel No. 11-6.)

Are you a disciple of the Lord Jesus? Are you born of the Spirit? Are you a child of God entitled to say Abba, Father? Such were they, and no others, whom the Lord taught to pray thus: Our Father that art in the heavens, Sanctified be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done as in heaven also an the earth, Give us today our sufficient bread, and forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors, and bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. If you are a disciple as they were, you too can pray thus, even if like them you could not say that you have in Christ redemption, the forgiveness of your trespasses (Eph. 1: 7). Such too was necessarily their state then, for Christ had not yet suffered for sins. But it ought not to be yours now; for the atoning work is done. If then you believe on the Lord Jesus, be it known to you, that through Him is (not promised, but) proclaimed to you remission of sins, and in Him is every believer justified from all things (Acts 13: 38, 39). You have not appreciated the alphabet of the gospel, if you know not that once purged you have no more conscience of sins.

While in this unformed condition, born of the Spirit but not resting on redemption known as yours (and therefore not yet having the Spirit of adoption, Gal. 4: 4-6, Eph. 1: 13), you do well to pray as the Lord taught His disciples. waiting for the Spirit (Luke 11: 1-3). When the Paraclete was given, they entered into peace and liberty, far beyond their then state (Rom. 5: 1-11, 2 Cor. 17, 18); and so may you prove when thus subject and obedient to God (Acts 5: 32). Nevertheless, though the standing of a Christian will lead you to pray in the Spirit according to the new relationships, how blessed ever is that which the Lord here taught! Do you really know what He meant? Many fail in this. Let us weigh His words.

It is in the First Gospel we hear of the Father who is in the heavens. The aim was to raise the eyes on high of Jews who were used to wait for God to display His glorious power on earth (Isa. 25: 9, 31: 4; Isa. 35: 4. etc.), as He did in measure since the day of redemption from the old house of bondage. Now He is made known as the One who makes His Sun rise on evil and good, and sends rain on just and unjust, yet with special favour to His sons.

The petitions are seven, and divide into two classes; the first three are of righteousness, as the last four are of grace. This is an order intrinsically due to God, and proper for saints. If lost sinners as such were contemplated, all must begin with sovereign grace. But of this we hear not in the so-called sermon on the Mount, but such grace shines appropriately elsewhere.

1. And how right, even our hearts feel, is the opening petition, Sanctified be thy name! It is the foremost desire of the renewed, however young in faith. Without this made good, there can be nothing good.

2. Thy (not My) Kingdom come, the Father's Kingdom (Matt. 13: 43) where the heavenly saints shine forth as the sun in risen glory, the dearest object of His love here as Father, Who will have them there with and as Christ, through Whom alone it could be.

3. Thy will be done as in heaven also on the earth. This is at the same time the Son of man's Kingdom, Who will send His angels to gather out of it all offences and all that work lawlessness (Matt. 13: 41). It is the earthly things of God's Kingdom, as the other the heavenly (John 3: 12), Christ being Head of the church and over all things (Eph. 1: 10, 22).

Then come the petitions of grace.

4. Give us today our sufficient (or, necessary) bread. Thus are they taught to begin with confessing dependence for ordinary wants, as the apostle called us to be content with food and raiment.

5. And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. For indeed all saints are bound to judge self and confess sins, as an antecedent spirit of forgiveness is imperative. See Matt. 18: 35, Luke 17: 3, 4.

6. And bring us not into temptation. So the Lord impresses on the disciples; for He ever knew their weakness as none else did yet. Luke 22: 46. To !endure" temptation is as blessed, as "entering into" it is full of danger.

7. But deliver us from evil in general, if not from the evil one in particular. This was not the sifting, or temptation, deprecated in the clause before, which grace may put us through for good, as we see in Peter; but the power of the enemy in drawing into sin against God. The proper desire was to be kept from the evil, or, if one fell, to be restored from it. Grace in no case fails, if a disciple alas! did. Deliver us from evil.

The doxology is an ecclesiastical accretion and therefore uninspired. Luke was led by the Holy Spirit to omit the special title (2), the earthly Kingdom (3), and the final clause (7), as not so much called for in the case of Gentiles.

Reader, can your state admit of your adopting the prayer for a disciple of Jesus? How sad to use it lightly and untruly!

7 Grace in Practice

Matt. 5: 38-48.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 37-38. Gospel No. 11-7.)

There is nothing that comes before the eyes of men which strikes them more than the meek, lowly, thankful spirit which endures a wrong. The natural man resents, and, if he can, avenges everything of the sort. You might as well tell him to feel otherwise, as to walk in the air a mile or a foot above the ground. To the disciple such grace is a principle of his new life. It is what in its perfection he has beheld in Christ, and what suits his Father who is in the heavens and looks for the reproduction of His own character in His sons. Retaliation is here reversed and uprooted.

"Ye have heard that it was said, Eye for eye, and tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, Resist not evil; but whoever shall strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And to him that would go to law with thee and take thy coat, leave him to take thy cloak also. And whoever will impress thee one mile, go with him two. To him that asketh thee give, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not away.

"Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those that persecute you, that ye may be sons of your Father that is in the heavens; for he maketh his Bun rise on evil and good, and sendeth rain on just and unjust. For if ye should love those that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the taxgatherers the same? And if ye should salute your brethren only, what beyond do ye? Do not even the Gentiles the same? Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

It may be personal lawlessness, an unjust suit, or a hard law; but the disciple of Christ is taught by the Master to bow. What is a brutal insult compared with truly representing Him? Consistency with Him is far more than one's coat, and cloak to boot. Instead of begrudging the service pressed for one mile, add another to please Him who would have us walk by faith, not by Bight, still less selfishly. Luke, who was led to note not the legal side but unauthorised violence only, omits the impressment, and inverts the stripping by letting the plunderer take the inner garment as well as the outer, the Lord no doubt exhorting to both. Nor did He end here, but bade the disciple give habitually to him that asked; for what had not he himself received from the divine Giver beyond all he asked? The object of countless and rich mercies, was he to turn away from one that would ask or borrow?

But the Lord goes farther in His next utterance. Whatever was said of loving one's neighbour and hating one's enemy, His word to His disciples was and is, Love your enemies, and pray for those that persecute you. So too the Epistles insist on those that bear His name. In the Gospel of Luke rightly stand the clauses, Bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you, and pray also for those that use you despitefully. These enlarge the grace which disciples are exhorted to show to hostile man of the world; and from thence they were imported into the copies of Matthew by scribes who were prone to assimilate. The inspiring Spirit was pleased through ]aim to urge loving our enemies, and praying for our persecutors, which last pertained to Jews pre-eminently, because of their hot and proud religious prejudice in the flesh.

Such love and piety, to be of value, must be no mere form but a living reality, that they might be sons of their Father in the heavens; for such is their place of dignity. And what a pattern He sets! For He makes His sun rise on evil and good, and sends rain on just and unjust. What rich grace in the first comparison, and what faithful goodness in the second!

Nor was the Lord content with the pointed reference to His Father and our Father, to His God and our God. He would make them ashamed, as His disciples, of not rising above the practice of Jews and Gentiles. If they loved those that loved them, did not the odious tax-gatherers the same? If they greeted their brethren only, the scorned Gentiles did also the same. This was altogether beneath the Christian according to Christ. "Ye shall be therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." A lower standard of feeling and conduct was to the Saviour intolerable.

Have we such confidence by grace toward God? Assuredly we have no competency as of ourselves: but our competency is of God, according to the spirit of the new covenant, not of the old. The grace of Christ alone suffices the believer. If you reject Him, you are lost. Flee to this the only refuge, if you would be saved; flee to Jesus now, ere the House-master shuts the door, when "Lord, open to us" will be in vain. Then will He judge strictly, instead of saying as He does now in all grace; then will He say, I know not whence ye are: depart from Me, all ye workers of iniquity.

8 Treasures?

Matt. 6: 19-21.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 53-54. Gospel No. 11-8.)

Christ beyond all others knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man, for He Himself knew what was in man. He seeks treasures on the earth. It may not be gold or property. It may be pleasure or power or position. Some set their heart on fame in letters or learning, in science or art. Some court poetry, oratory, or philosophy. The bar and the bench, the army or the navy, civil government or politics, philanthropy or even the pulpit ordinarily, fire the ambition of others. These objects and all akin which attract the heart of man are treasures on the earth, and beneath the faith to which the Christian is called — faith in God unseen and eternal. "Love not the world," wrote His inspired servant," nor the things that are in the world. If any one loveth the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vain-glory of life, is not of the Father but is of the world, And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever" (1 John 2: 15- 17).

Listen to the Saviour's words on the more prevailing snare. "Lay not up for you treasures on the earth where moth and rust consume, and where thieves dig through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust corrupteth, and where thieves dig not through nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there will be thy heart also."

The treasures in heaven are the things that are above, where Christ is seated on the right hand of God. On these things we are to set our mind, not on things that are on the earth. For we died with Christ from its best things, the rudiments of the world which Israel had as their religion; and our life is hid with Christ in God. His cross closed all such shadows and ordinances; and therefore is the world crucified to the Christian, and he to the world. If he is truly Christ's, he is heavenly as united to Christ, though he is still on earth, and bears the image of Adam the earthy till He comes.

Be not moved by the unbelieving sneers of those who try to lower as other-worldliness your true objects. These are far above the world, or the habitable earth to come, blessed as it will be when Christ and His saints reign over it. Our proper portion is in heaven and with Christ there. Be not cheated out of that which is revealed to you by the Holy Spirit sent forth from heaven, on which the Epistles enlarge beyond what the disciples could bear when their Master was here, as He Himself tells us (John 16: 12).

The wisest of mankind is no judge of what God wills for His children now. The New Testament is as clear as possible that He would have His own not of the world; indeed our Lord declares that they are not, even as He is not. And as it is written, Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatever things God prepared for those that love Him: them God revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. These are treasures which the Lord calls us to lay up for us in heaven. And nothing can harm them, like earthly treasures by corruption or violence.

Do not say that such an aim is beyond the believer. It would be assuredly, if there were not the grace of God to enable. But we have Christ as Head above, from Whom all the body, ministered to and united together by the joints and bands, increases with the increase of God. His grace suffices one in the most crushing circumstances. And if we have such an Advocate on high, we have One no less divine to work in us here below that we may be strengthened in the inner man. Thus could one of old boast of weaknesses, never of sins, that the power of Christ might tabernacle upon him.

If you urge that you have doubts about your soul, how can you pass this day without settling that question before God? He sent His Son for you, that you might live through Him, and that He, the Lord Jesus, might die for you — yea, for your sins. Let it be your need, your guilt, your ruin, looking to God in the name of the crucified Saviour. Jesus never said Nay to one that, feeling his sins, appealed to Him. God the Father would have you thus honour the Son, who declares solemnly: Verily, Verily, I say to you, He that heareth My word, and believeth Him that sent Me, hath life eternal, and cometh not into judgment, but is passed out of death into life. Verily, verily, I say to you, The hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that heard shall live." Be not faithless then, but believing; trust His grace that all else you lack, as you surely do, will be given in the like love. It is His joy to bless the believer.

9 Christ come to fulfil

Matt. 5: 17. 18.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 70-71. Gospel No. 11-9.)

From the outset of His ministry our Lord was careful to affirm that He came not to dissolve but to make good divine authority in the law or the prophets. In both He was predicted as the One whom all blessing depended. He only could deliver sinful and seduced man. He was to he the Sacrifice which would justify all previous offerings to God, and render their just interpretation, and furnish their efficacy. Fulfilment of a prophecy is the same word; but the context here points to a larger scope.

The law and the prophets testified to man's unrighteousness and to God's righteousness (Rom. 3: 21). But they could not do more. Christ came, not to enfeeble or undo them as His blind enemies thought, but to make good that divine testimony which left the sinner without excuse and gave what God only in His grace could supply. It was far more than even pious men conceived, a mere making up, by His obedience of the law, what men failed in. This had merely been man's righteousness accomplished by Him for the unrighteous, Here too He has done incomparably more and better. He laid the basis in His obedience unto death for God's righteousness, that God might be just and justify him that believes on Jesus. For He who knew no sin glorified God in being made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Him. Hence God's grace is enhanced, not frustrated; for if righteousness is through law, then Christ died gratuitously. But it is not so: never was anything else contemplated or revealed but that the believers rest their hope on His death.

God took care therefore that promise should long precede and exist independently of it, as the apostle argues in Gal. 3. This at Sinai Israel in their self-confidence overlooked. Instead of asking for the unconditional promise of grace they undertook to stand on their own obedience. As no sinful man can subsist on such a condition, the law written on stones, even when brought down a second time with types of mercy accompanying, could not but be a ministry of death and condemnation (2 Cor. 3: 7-9). For them it is said in the reading of the old covenant the veil remains unremoved; and the veil is more than on the face, being upon their heart. They did and do not look to Christ, law's end for righteousness to every one that believes. They strove to stand on a mixture of law and grace, which only adds to the sinner's condemnation, because the added grace increases his guilt if disobedient. But we look on the glory of the Lord with unveiled face and are transformed to the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit, Who testifies to Him in the glory of God as the fruit not only of His person but of His work. And so the apostle preached the gospel of God's grace and of Christ's glory, as he had been converted.

The Epistle to the Hebrews told the Christian Jews that the "new" covenant of which Jeremiah bore witness held out under Christ a better covenant. It did not, like the old at Sinai, depend on Israel as the party on whose fidelity blessing depended. All hung for the new covenant on the Lord's sovereign grace. "Because this is the covenant that I will covenant for the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord: giving my laws into their mind, I will also inscribe them on their hearts; and I will be to them for God, and they shall be to me for people. And they shall in no wise teach, each his fellow-citizen and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord; because all shall consciously know from little of them unto great Of them; because I will be merciful to their unrighteousnesses and their sins, and their lawlessnesses I will remember no more" (Heb. 8: 10-12).

This was no real way to set aside the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them to God's glory and for man's salvation and blessing. Christ filled up the gap between God and the sinner for him who believes on Him. The law pointed to Him as the coming One who alone could restore the balance which the creature's evil had disturbed by weight overwhelming to all but the Saviour. He alone could by redemption win and give the blessing which God's nature loved to bestow and God's counsels assured in due time. But all this and more Christ was by His word and Spirit bringing in a new and divine life by faith into the soul, before the day arrives when He will transform our body of humiliation into conformity with His body of glory according to the working of His power even to subdue all things to Himself. It was not mere addition, as if the law and the prophets were not intrinsically complete and perfect for the end God proposed; but He is throughout assumed and predicted as essential to give the blessed result. "For verily I say to you, Till the heaven and the earth pass, one iota or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all come to pass" (vers. 18).

So even the N.T. speaks of filling up the gap otherwise left in it by the revelation of the mystery of Christ's headship on high and the church united to Him as His body. And the apostle in Col. 1: 25 tells us of the stewardship of God given Him thereby to complete His word. For this was a secret hidden from ages and generations, and quite distinct from the kingdom, the new covenant, or the inheritance of Abraham's promise. It was a promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel and God's eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord (Eph. 3: 6, 10).

O dear reader, look you by faith to Jesus, the sole accomplisher of what you most want and of infinitely more — what glorifies God and gives the believer a wondrous part in it all. Look not to yourself save to condemn yourself; look to Him who secures from all condemnation which you must otherwise dread. May your heart learn how truly Christ is all. This no man is willing to do, until he is brought to the decided conviction before God, that he is lost, and that in him (that is, in his flesh) good does not dwell.

10 The Father in secret

Matt. 6: 1-18.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 88-89. Gospel No. 11-10.)

Here is a Christian principle, which our Lord puts in contrast with acting so as to be seen. What so suited to exercise and strengthen faith day by day, or to guard from that hypocrisy to which man is prone?

He first lays down the general principle, it would seem, in verse 1, and then applies it to alms in 2-4; to prayer in 5-15; and lastly to fasting in 16-18. Some ancients and moderns have been disposed to regard "righteousness" in verse 1, as equivalent to "alms," as Rabbis and others were prone to do. But the better text and sense point to retaining the inclusive term "righteousness" in verse 1, under which fall the three duties that follow. For if applied there to "alms," it is hard to conceive why the proper term for "alms" should be given in 2, 3, and 4. The different word in verse 1 points to the more comprehensive sense of "righteousness" or consistency in practice with our relationship. This is then shown to embrace three varied forms in which the disciple is called to do the Father's will in the pious course of life here below. Dan. 4: 27 distinguishes mercy to the poor from righteousness; and I am not aware of any confusion of the two in scripture.

Verse 1 calls the disciple to righteousness surpassing that of the scribes and Pharisees, without which none can enter into the Kingdom of the heavens. "Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no reward with your Father that is in the heavens." Here is the large principle for Christian practice. Knowing Him as Christ has revealed Him to us, all acceptable service refers to Him, He is a living and true God whom we serve, and He refuses to share His glory with others. We walk by faith, not by sight. Can anything be more opposite to the ways of Christendom?

1. When therefore thou doest aims, sound not a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be glorified by men: Verily I say to you, They do get their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right doeth, that thine alms may he in secret, and thy Father that seeth in secret will repay to thee" (2-4). If men walk in a vain show religiously quite as much as in the world, the Lord calls His own to shun publicity, and not merely this, but in His vigorous figure, that our own left hand may not know what the right does. The simple and essential aim is to do what we do to Him and His glory.

2. So it is with the prayer here enjoined. "And when ye pray, ye shall not be as the hypocrites; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they should appear to men. Verily I say to you, They do get their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father that is in secret, and thy Father that seeth in secret will repay to thee. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions as those of the nations; for they think they shall be heard through their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like them; for your Father knoweth of what things ye have need before ye beg of him. . . . For if ye forgive men their offences, your heavenly Father also will forgive you [yours]; but if ye forgive not men their offences, neither will your Father forgive your offences" (5-15).

Here the same show before men in prayer is reprehended; nor this only, but the heathen folly of vain repetitions, and of much speaking. Lastly the Lord warns that an unforgiving spirit cannot hope to have its own offences forgiven.

3. "And when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites, downcast in countenance; for they disfigure their faces that they may appear fasting to men. Verily I say to you, They do get their reward. But thou, when fasting, anoint thy head and wash thy face, that thou mayest not appear fasting to men, but to thy Father that is in secret; and thy Father that seeth in secret shall repay thee" (16-18).

In fasting there is even more sedulous care to guard from any display of that self-humiliation before God which forms so great a part of it. The Lord would form in His own a spirit of living faith in having to do with their Father. Fasting is for His eyes, just like their prayer and their alms. Faith in Him that is in secret is thus in each way exercised. What a contrast with all that hitherto characterised a Jew!

11 The Lamp of the Body

"The lamp of the body is the eye." Matt. 6: 22, 23.

(B.T. Vol. N3, p. 102-103. Gospel No. 11-11.)

That Christ. is the Light, and the True Light, is a truth dear to every Christian. He coming into the world manifests every man. Rich or poor, simple or sage, false or faithful, not one escapes His all-searching light. Nor is there the least circumstance in the course of every day, any more than in what pertains to God, and truth, and morals, not for this life only but for eternity, that He does not set in the light of God. Only through Him do we see fully what God is, Satan, man, the sinner, the saint, heaven, hell, everything.

The disciples, as the Lord told them in Matt. 5: 14, are the light of the world, as they are also the salt of the earth (13). They could be neither apart from Christ. It is He who thus assimilates them to Himself; the latter in His character of righteousness, the former in the quality of His grace, as already explained in Series 11-4. In receiving Him by faith they receive a new nature, being born of God; hence there is both righteousness and love in their ways.

But here there is a further though connected truth of great value.

"The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body will be light; but if thine eye be wicked, thy whole body will be dark. If therefore the light that is in thee is darkness, how great the darkness!"

It is a question not of the light, which is perfect but of "the eye." Spiritual condition has an immense deal to do with the disciples seeing aright. Our recipiency and discernment, our actual judgment and our practice, depend on the state of our affections. The Lord presents the ready and effectual test. "If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body will be light; but if thine eye be wicked, thy whole body will be dark."

Christ truly the object before one gives singleness of eye; and where He is simply and exclusively the "one thing" before the soul, the whole body is light. Difficulties vanish. The will of God becomes quite clear. I am surprised and ashamed to have had doubts here and uncertainty there. I recognise to my humiliation that I had been asleep in my ways and had to rise up from among the dead, and then only have Christ shining upon me.

Prayer alone does not ensure singleness of eye, nor yet suffices searching the word accompanied by prayer. There may be a fleshly film that dims the eye. We are too apt to think ourselves of importance for God when it is all of grace that He uses us in this way or that. We fail to appreciate our Lord's waiting on His Father, without taking a single step till He gets the word. Yet it is to His obedience that we are sanctified by the Spirit.

We are not like Jews with every point great or small religiously and in ordinary life, in peace or in war, personal, domestic, or social, all ruled by the statutes and ordinances, prohibitions and injunctions of law. Christ brought in the fuller and deeper obedience of a Son, and makes it by grace the believer's by the gift of life eternal and eternal redemption, with the Holy Spirit indwelling as power and personally also in us. But though thus blessed, there are still the three great enemies, the flesh, the world, and the devil, in the face of which we are responsible to please God as His children. We need therefore to pray, as the apostle did for the Colossians, to be filled with the right knowledge of His will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all well-pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work, and growing by the right knowledge of God (Col. 1: 9, 10).

For this we need the eye single and the whole body light. How is this to be? The Lord tells us in John 15: 7: "If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done to you." Habitual dependence on Him with confidence in His love is to abide in Him: without this all else is vain. But where we abide by grace, His words are needed to direct: for who is sufficient otherwise? and His Spirit is given to guide us thus. Only thus are we sure that we have His mind; for thus the eye is single and the whole body light. Then when we ask, we have our petition. Oh, that so it may be I and that we may be content with nothing less!

What is the issue, where other objects are allowed? The alternative is, "If thine eye be wicked, thy whole body will be dark." How solemn the sentence, and how true! "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great the darkness!" Oh, look to God that it be not so with you, a disciple of the Lord!

See too the impossibility of the Light yours, of the eye single, save by genuine repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus. Doubt yourself, not God; and receive Him who in His grace came to receive you by faith, if you have not already done so.

12 Be not anxious.

Matt. 6: 25-32.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 121-122. Gospel No. 11-12.)

As the Lord charges His own to lay up for them. selves treasures, not on earth, but in heaven, so does He forbid anxiety about their life here below, as His servant did about anything. He lifts our eyes above the seen present to the things unseen and eternal, whence He came and whither He was going, as He is coming to take us shortly. Here He deals with the believer's heart, and the snare of seeking to serve God and mammon which He pronounces morally impossible.

"For this reason I say to you, Be not anxious for your life what ye should eat and what ye should drink, nor yet for your body what ye should put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body more than the raiment? Look at the birds of the heavens, that they sow not, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father nourisheth them. Are ye not more excellent than they? And which of you by anxiety can add to his stature one cubit? And why are ye anxious about raiment? Consider the lilies of the field how they grow: they toil not, nor yet spin; yet I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory put on like one of these. But if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, being today and tomorrow cast into the oven, how much more you, O ye of little faith? Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or what shall we put on? For all these things the Gentiles seek after; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things" (6: 25-32).

Anxiety as to the things which the present life needs is natural. All these things the nations of the earth seek after. In God they have no faith, as the Jews professed loudly, but in works denied. But the disciples had the heavenly Father's name now set before them as the One who is perfect in grace, making His sun shine on evil and good, and sending rain on just and unjust. How true this is! Yet who had affirmed it as a living principle but the Lord on earth, who also set it forth as a model for His own practically, that they might be sons indeed: an astonishing doctrine, especially for those, as they were, trained up in the legal ideas of the Jews. So their righteousness was to be, whether alms, prayer, and fasting, not before men but to their Father that sees in secret.

The name of their Father made anxiety about earthly and bodily wants a painful incongruity, and in particular about what kind the supply should be. From Himself the birds read them one lesson, and the lilies another. He nourishes each fleeting creature, He gives the passing flower its beauty. How much more did He care for His children? It was a touching appeal and carrying with it to every believer the conviction of irresistible truth. They were, they are, called to believe in His sustaining goodness. He never fails in His love: they ought not to fail in resting and counting on it day by day. If tried as to it, let them not doubt that it is for their good. It is impossible for God to lie. Are they to doubt His love Whom the Lord reveals as their Father? He who embraces the least objects of His care will act worthily of His love to the nearest.

Nor does the Lord spare them the humbling proof how little the anxiety of man avails. "Which of you by anxiety can add to his stature one cubit?" It was a very small thing if some would count it a very great addition. Yet even for this how powerless is man! Why then be anxious about a garment? The herbage of the field rebukes the vanity of a child of God; for as the Lord called their attention to the lilies, he pointed the moral by the plain fact that God clothed even these transient creatures, lower in the scale than the birds, with a beauty far beyond Solomon's array in all his glory.

Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or what shall we put on? Here the Lord urges two considerations which we do well to heed. One is to guard us against sharing the unbelief of those who do not even know God, How compromising to share the thoughts and feelings of the Gentiles! "For all these things the nations seek after." The other is to assure the doubting heart. "For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things," "Not one sparrow falls to the ground without Him: but of you even the hairs of the head are all numbered" (Matt. 10: 29, 30).

Now are you, who read these words, a child of God by grace? Believe not such as say that all mankind are so. They deny the fall; they ignore sin; they oppose the solemn testimony of scripture, that, however favoured by privileges, we are by nature children of wrath, even as others (Eph. 2: 3). Believe not others who say that baptism quickens those dead in trespasses and sins. Christ quickens by faith of His word and the working of the Spirit. He is the Life, as He is the Way and the Truth. You have His words, not merely to instruct His own, but to show how the dead may live, yea have eternal life; for this it is He gives to those who believe. "Verily, verily, I say to you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life " (John 6: 47). Why wonder? Is He not the Son, the I am? "He that believeth on the Son hath life eternal (or, everlasting): and he that is unsubject to the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3: 36). O sinner, beware lest this be your portion.

STEM Publishing: William Kelly: Gospel Words - Twelfth Series.

Gospel Words — Twelfth Series.

A Series of 4pp. Gospel Tracts by W.K. for distribution after preaching.

1 The Kingdom of God

2 Judge not

3 Confidence

4 The Narrow Gate

5 Fruits

6 Bare Profession

7 Christ and the Law

8 Anger

9 Reconciliation

10 Impurity

11 Purity in Divorce

12 Swear not at all

1 The Kingdom of God

Matt. 6: 33, 34.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 135-136. Gospel No. 12-1.)

The kingdom of the heavens is an expression derived apparently from Dan. 4: 26. Its inauguration also is foreshown in Dan. 7: 13, 14; in 22 not only the Heir of all but the heavenly joint-heirs, and in 27 the "people" under the whole heaven to whom the chief dominion is given. Such will be the manifested kingdom when the Son of man comes with power and glory; and there will be earthly things and heavenly (John 3: 12). But He came first as the great moral. test in humiliation; and His rejection and cross brought out higher than earth through redemption therein accomplished. This too, refused by the unbelieving people, left the door open for the mystery of that kingdom and its mysteries while the rejected King is on high, and the gospel of indiscriminate grace, till the church is complete. Then all Israel shall be saved on their repentance, and the blessing of all the nations as such shall fully come.

Plainly, "the kingdom of the heavens" is a dispensational phrase peculiar to the first Gospel, as in contrast with the incredulity of the Jews who looked only for an earthly one. Mark and Luke use "the kingdom of God" for it, and in a general sense; John exclusively for what is real. But Matthew, for that very reason, when he does say "the kingdom of God," does not mean the dispensational view, either in future manifestation or in present mystery, but the power of God ruling in Christ when here, or now in the Spirit's action morally in those that are His. Hence the same term which is so comprehensive elsewhere has here this force all the more marked because of Matthew's general employment of the dispensational phrase

Here occurs the first instance; the others are, Matt. 12: 28, Matt. 19: 24, Matt. 21: 31, 43, of which this is not the place to speak more particularly.

"But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Be not careful (or, anxious) for the morrow for the morrow will be careful about itself: sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."

Throughout the discourses on the Mount the Lord is not preaching the glad tidings to the lost but instructing His disciples who already believed. Earthly care is a great bane and unworthy of faith. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." Where could they find that kingdom and righteousness most truly, plainly, and fully set out before their souls? Surely nowhere as in Himself. It was even more wondrously by God's Spirit in His moral power than by His casting out demons. "Lo, I am come to do thy will, O God," was far beyond all the miracles together that ever had been wrought. Who but He was the "man that lived by every word of God" unswervingly?

Nor is it too much to ask of such as were born of God. Indeed the principle was always true. Jehovah's people were to be holy because He is holy. And this applies all the more strongly now that we have the relationship of sons, with redemption through Christ's blood, and the gift of the Spirit. For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking; nor yet abstinence from flesh or wine; but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Making God's kingdom and righteousness our first concern, we are entitled to expect that all the things needful and good will be added to us. For our God and Father never overlooks our wants. If faithful in the greatest and deepest things, He loves that we should confide in Him as to our least things. Do we believe the Lord, that "all these things [about which unbelief worries] shall be added unto us?" Let us not forget the condition: "seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." What can be more due to God, or more comely for us as His sons? The Lord's yoke is easy, and His burden is light.

It is unbelief, accompanied by loving the world or the things in the world, which produces anxiety, darkness, and doubt, as in the Gentiles who knew not God. If we know Him, and the blessedness of His kingdom, and the perfection of His righteousness, why be careful for the morrow? For the morrow, says the Lord, shall be careful for itself. Has He failed us today, or in the past? What evil has He ever done us, what good thing withheld from us? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Even if the hardest trials come, do we not know that all things work together for good to those that love God, to those called according to purpose?

Do you, my reader, say that you love Him not, but dread Him because of your sins? Then why do you not flee for refuge to Him that stretches out to you His strong and gracious arms? Come unto Me, He cries, all ye that labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out. He is full of grace and truth. Is not this the only Saviour for a sinner? What does "grace" mean but unmerited favour? You are justly condemned if you refuse to come at God's word.

2 Judge not

"Judge not that ye be not judged." Matt. 7: 1-6.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 149-150. Gospel No. 12-2.)

There ought to be no question of the Lord's meaning here. No fault was more prevalent then or now. Censoriousness is not only the habitual bane of religious professors, but the snare to which true disciples are too prone. Gracious men who set their face in general against detraction are often bitter against what they themselves dislike, and thus slip into judging motives wrongly like others. He who is Judge of quick and dead discerns every heart, and enjoins what is comely and just on His followers. For this sin tends to hypocrisy; and what saint would regard such a thing lightly?

"Judge not that ye be not judged; for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye measure, it shall be measured to you. And why lookest thou on the mote that [is] in the eye of thy brother, but observest not the beam in thine eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote from thine eye; and, behold, the beam [is] in thine eye? Hypocrite, pull out first the beam out of thine eye, and then wilt thou see clearly to pull out the mote out of the eye of thy brother."

The indulgence in a hasty, severe, and suspicious spirit provokes reprisals, and such as wantonly impute evil to others in ignorance or unkindness do not fail to bring on themselves unsparing imputation. For here the Lord turns from the lack of confiding in our Father's care and love, and warns of our danger from many an unkind impression and expression. To surmise wrong motives is itself a wrong. It is natural for such as live in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another; and such once were we ourselves. But since the kindness and love to man of our Saviour God appeared (no premium for our deserts), but according to His own mercy He saved us through washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, which He poured on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, are we not bound by the family character, the new life relationship as children of God, sons of such a Father? Since redemption and the gift of the Spirit, more can be added now to what the Lord uttered then.

But He reminds us of what we easily forget. If others are a trial to us, are not we a trial to them? Are we not, unless walking according to the light, as dull to see our own faults as we are sharp to notice, and even imagine, wrongs in our brethren? How pungently the Lord puts the case that we may loathe ourselves! "And why lookest thou on the mote in the eye of thy brother, but observest not the beam in thine eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote from thine eye, and, behold, the beam is in thine eye?" The Shepherd and Bishop of our souls thus holily strips us of the mask which failure in self-judgment puts on. For if before God we discern not our own grievous shortcomings and sins, we do not know our brethren with anything like the same certainty and clearness. Love therefore and the fear of God call us each to deem others better than ourselves, judging ourselves for what we do know instead of others for what we know not and ought not to think. "Hypocrite," says the Lord with severe reproof, "pull out first the beam out of thine eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Yet it is well to beware of the too common misuse of our Lord's warning. How often pious persons thereby deprecate any censure of their own position and any care against false doctrine, or evil associations, or responsibility for such discipline as scripture requires! But this is to fail in godliness; which assuredly covers not only personal conduct, but also public walk as members of Christ. The Corinthians were careless in this way and others, which grace has turned to the profit, not only of them, but of "all that in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both theirs and ours." The apostle allows no excuse for carelessness congregationally any more than individually. There is no call to exercise discipline on the evildoers of the world; but Christians have the obligation of dealing with offenders in God's assembly. Paul, though absent, could not but judge that the wicked person should be excluded. It was due to Christ and His sacrifice. God must be vindicated Whose is the assembly. The saints were bound to clear themselves in the matter, taking up the offender's sin as their own; yet even here his ultimate good was sought, "that the spirit might he saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." "Do not ye judge those that are within? But those without God judgeth. Put away the wicked [man] from among yourselves" (1 Cor. 5: 3-13). Here we are commanded to judge.

The selfsame principle expressly applies to sins far less gross. Our thoughts and reasonings are to be discarded on the one hand; and on the other God's authority to be recognised and conclusive. Scripture too is plain that, important as is right judgment of moral evil, the truth is yet more momentous; and this both because to slight and oppose it offends against the Giver, and it ruins those who thus err, whilst they have a fair appearance, instead of shocking men like immorality or unrighteousness.

Express injunction is also laid down, when the evil is of a more general and public character, as in 2 Tim. 2. "Howbeit the firm foundation of God standeth, having this seal, The Lord knoweth those that are his; and, Let everyone that nameth the Lord's name depart from unrighteousness. Now in a great house are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some for honour and some for dishonour. If one therefore purge himself out from these, he shall be a vessel for honour, sanctified, serviceable to the Master, prepared for every good work." There is thus no licence to join in what God disapproves and demands us to judge. Conscience, a purged conscience, is exercised, and the heart all the more free to love fervently according to God,

But how is it with you, dear reader? If you are of the world and only bear the outward badge of Christianity, take the place of truth for your soul in God's sight. Jesus is the all-sufficient Saviour of sinners, and He, the Lord of all, is rich and near to all that call upon Him. For whosoever shall call on the Lord's name shall be saved. Righteousness and salvation are the portion assured by God to each that believes and confesses Him. If you received Christ, say not that you cannot tell who are His. How then can you love God's children, as Christ charged you to do? Even the unconverted know in a general way who are His, and who are not; how much more does every sober believer? He owns that, till born anew and brought to God by Christ's work, he was as evil as anyone; and, without pretending to judge the heart, he accepts those who confess the Lord and follow Him, as he himself does. Such is the judgment of true charity, not the indifference of unbelief which is of Satan.

The verse that follows itself shows whom we ought to judge. For we are to prove all things, holding fast the right. "Dogs" and "Swine" we are bound to discern and disown. "Give not the holy thing to the dogs, nor cast your pearls before the swine lest they trample them with their feet, and turn and rend you." Nabal's family is not extinct, sons of Belial with whom a disciple cannot speak with impunity. Shamelessness and filth plainly tell what they are, and the folly of treating them as sheep of God's pasture. No doubt the grace of God can save such: but in all this discourse is not a word about redemption or saving sinners. All throughout consists of the characters which suit God, and must really be for His Kingdom. This is its design: and it is worthy of Christ, as the gospel is where this was the question.

3 Confidence

Confidence in our Father's giving.

Matt. 7: 7-12.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 164-165. Gospel No. 12-3.)

Our Lord here encourages His disciples to count on the goodness of their Father for every want consistent with His will.

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask of him for a loaf, will give him a stone; and if he ask for a fish, will give him a serpent? If therefore ye, being wicked, know to give good gifts to your children, how much rather shall your Father that is in the heavens give good things to those that ask him? Therefore all things whatsoever ye desire that men should do to you, thus do ye also to them; for this is the law and the prophets" (Matt. 7: 7-12).

It is not a sinner needing life and forgiveness of his sins, but saints directed to appeal to God and assured of their Father's answer of love, whatever their wants be. The Lord had already taught it them to pray in Matt. 6 as with alms and fasting, parts of saintly righteousness and due to His name and glory. Here He enforces it as the way in which all they need from above is to be given them. Hence perseverance and earnestness are incumbent. Asking will ensure receiving, yea to every one that asks; seeking will not be fruitless but shall find; and to the still more importunate the door will be opened, which is but shut to exercise faith.

For there may be a matter of importance for the applicant to learn before the request can be granted, as with the Syro-phenician woman, so earnest in supplicating the Lord to have pity on her, whose daughter was grievously possessed by a demon. Yet at first the Lord answered her not a word. She pleaded like a lost sheep of Israel's house; whereas she was a Greek, and had no right of promise with the Messiah; indeed she was a Canaanite, and thus under the curse. But when she drops His title as Son of David, and gathered from His answer to the disciples wherein her mistake lay, she did Him homage, saying, Lord, help me. On this He speaks out, It is not good to take the bread of the children, and cast it to the whelps. This did help her soul, for it led her to the secret of sovereign grace on which she at once threw herself, saying, Yea, Lord; for even the whelps eat of the crumbs which fall from the table of their masters. Then Jesus answering said to her, O woman, great is thy faith ; be it done to thee as thou wilt. The door opened to her knock. She was deepened and cleared in her faith, as her daughter was healed from that hour.

The Lord also encourages His disciples through the affection which is implanted in a parent's heart. If their Father makes His sun rise on evil and good, and sends rain on just and unjust, how does He feel toward His sons? His love surely goes out to them in every request that is for their good, and withholds only what their foolishness asked that must do them harm. Hence He says, Or what man of you, whom his son shall ask for a loaf, will he give him a stone? and if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? Who would not repudiate such mockery of a son's hunger? Thence He draws the conclusive words for their hearts, If ye then, being wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father that is in the heavens give good things to those that ask Him?

The last verse goes into that which becomes the disciple with men, and lays down the simple but evidently sound principle, to do to others as we would have others do to us; and this too on no ground of human rights or natural benevolence, but of consistency with God's revealed will. "All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, thus also do ye to them; for this is the law and the prophets."

Now let me ask you, dear reader, if you have not by faith the Son of God as your Saviour, are you not conscious that these words are altogether beyond you? What is your state then now, and what must the end be? I call on you in the Lord's name that you perish not in your sins. The same Lord, who thus cheers His disciples and bids them ask freely, warns you that he who disbelieves (who is unsubject to) the Son, shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides upon him. Go to God as you are, a poor sinner, in the Saviour's name, and own your ruin and His grace, that you way be saved, and know it to your exceeding and everlasting joy; and then serve Him as your Lord, awaiting Him from heaven, for He is coming.

4 The Narrow Gate

Matt. 7: 13, 14.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 180-181. Gospel No. 12-4.)

The Lord here gives a warning of great practical value. Public opinion weighs much with the natural mind. It maybe and often is right in material things: there men judge fairly well, and are awake to their interests. For the spirit of man that is in him knows the things of man. But it is not so in the things of God, where the carnal mind does not fail to display its inveterate enmity against Him to man's certain ruin if it sway. Therefore is it elsewhere written, There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none that understandeth, none that seeketh after God. All turned aside, together they become unprofitable, there is none doing good, no, not one (Rom. 3: 10-12).

Hence the Lord says here, "Enter ye through the narrow gate; because wide [is] the gate, and broad the way that leadeth off unto destruction, and many are they that enter through it. Because narrow [is] the gate, and straitened the way that leadeth off unto life, and few are they that find it" (Matt. 7: 13, 14).

Reader, how is it with you? Have you entered through the narrow gate of conversion to God? Have you repented toward God and believed on our Lord Jesus Christ? Baptism is the divine and admirable sign of salvation; yet it never gave life, but rather represented remission of sins and death to sin for such as had life : if they had not life in Christ, its true meaning, as far as they were concerned, was their guilty and wretched inconsistency, to their utter condemnation far worse than if they had not been baptised to that excellent Name. Deceive not your own soul; he not deceived by others. The great apostle warned that in the last days grievous times should come, and evil men and impostors wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But this trust in an ordinance is one of the oldest of errors, and revived of late with fresh audacity and large success, though the same apostle expressly denounced its vanity and danger in early days (1 Cor. 10: 1-11). For "our fathers," said he, "were all baptised unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and did all eat the same spiritual meat, and did all drink the same spiritual drink . . . Howbeit with most of them God was not well pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness . . . . Now all these things happened to them as types, and were written for our admonition on whom the ends of the ages are come."

O unbeliever, will it assuage the horrors of everlasting fire that you followed the multitude in despising the word of the Lord and neglecting His great salvation? You cannot deny that what He says here is very plain; your conscience must own that it is true. It is of no avail to talk about the fate of Tibet sealed up against the light of the gospel, or to enquire what is to become of the heathen millions in darkest Africa, or in haughtier India and China, or anywhere else. You at any rate have the Bible, and may outwardly profess the Lord's name. You have often heard and perhaps read these words of Him who will surely judge living and dead; and the time hastens for it. When you stand and are manifested before Him, will you not be speechless, like him who might be christened but had no wedding garment? The numberless crowds of the lost will verify His words, but yield not a drop of water to cool your tongue in the torments of that day without an end, or even when you die impenitent now before it come. Masses and classes alike perish in their unbelief of Him and His word.

In fact it will only add unspeakably to your bitter self-reproach that the Lord gave you so distinct a signal of danger for time and eternity. You refused the narrow gate, because it admitted neither self-will, nor fleshly lust. You loved the wide gate and the broad way, because you set your heart on what you called liberty, seeking and doing what you liked in defiance of God's will. You stifled the conviction of your moral folly and incredulous madness by the abundance of your company high and low. The narrow gate was repulsive to you, because it compelled you to stoop to God, which your pride and your passions alike resented. You had in entering through it to meet God singly, and to face Him alone about your sins. Had you been in earnest, you would have seen that He is our Saviour God, who desires that all men should be saved and come to acknowledgement of truth. And this is solely in Christ Who is the one Mediator of God and men, and gave Himself a ransom for all.

Therefore are you without excuse. And you are lost and must be condemned for ever, above all your sins for this crowning sin that you reject Christ Who died for you, losing the ransom so precious to God and efficacious for man. O bethink yourself: believe the words of Him Who cannot lie, and in love uttered this warning that you might hear and live. For both gates are clearly set before you, and both ways, one unto life and the other unto perdition. Many are they that enter through the wide gate and tread the broad way. O beware; for I too was once your fellow-sinner, as infatuated as any other. But the Shepherd's voice reached my ear, my soul. May it pierce yours, that you may turn off from the broad way, as from a serpent, yea the old Serpent the Devil, and enter the narrow gate of Christ, the straitened way that leads off unto life. Few are they that find it. May you know this happiness now and evermore in the Saviour.

5 Fruits

Matt. 7: 15-20.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 196-198. Gospel No. 12-5.)

The disciple is here cautioned. It is not only against trusting himself, that he may be dependent on his Father, and earnest in prayer that looks for an answer of grace. He has to pass through a scene haunted by the subtle emissaries of the unseen enemy; and the greater their pretension, the more are they to be shunned. The Lord would not have His own deceived and led astray.

"But beware of false prophets, which come unto you in sheep's clothing but within are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall them recognise. Do they gather from thorns a grape bunch or from thistles figs? So every good tree produceth good fruits, but the worthless tree produceth bad fruits. A good tree cannot produce bad fruits, nor a worthless tree produce good fruits. Every tree that produceth not good fruit is cub down and cast into the fire. Therefore at least by their fruits ye shall recognise them well

Every reader of the O.T. may learn the destructive part by the false prophets who followed like a dark shadow the holy men whom the Holy Spirit inspired, and took up popular cries to oppose the warnings of God as evil became more rampant There is no less danger now, as Peter particularly insists under the gospel; not to say that there is so much the more when good men pretend not to inspiration and are no longer invested with miraculous vouchers, but press only the word in the Spirit. And so it will be again for the godly remnant in the last days when, the heavenly ones being caught up, it becomes a question of that land and people. But the Lord's warning is of living value now also, as we hear in the worst and deceptive form (1 John 2: 18-23; 1 John 4: 1-6; 2 John 7-11). What believer does not know of the boldest antagonism to the truth? What Christian has not tasted bitter grief in seeing saints of God deluded by the sheerest clap-trap? Yea, even conniving, for alleged peace, unity, or testimony, at the denial of Christ's Person?

They who love Christ do well to beware of false prophets, who are such as come unto them in the garb of sheep, but within are ravening wolves. They may cultivate sanctimoniousness and pretend to devotion, but are under the dominion of a mightier foe than themselves, and filled with the keenest zeal to deprive the Christian of a true Christ, of life eternal possessed, of present standing as God's righteousness in Christ, of association with Him in and for heavenly glory. Are not such truly ravening wolves? What remains, if the disciple lose all the treasure distinctive of Christianity?

"By their fruits ye shall recognise them." Do they exalt Him who humbled Himself? Do they confess His incomprehensible being, God and man in one Person? Do they proclaim His grace and truth? Do they follow Christ in absolute subjection to scripture? Do they own it, as the invaluable standard, and the sure communication, of God's mind by His Spirit? Is the believer established? Is the sinner won and delivered? Or are minds filled with ideas which but inflate the spirit, inspire self-complacency, and end in death? For these are practical effects which test what men teach, and which are legible enough to simple souls little versed in scriptural truth, and still less in human subtleties. And thus the Lord safeguards the sheep in various ways.

There is another class of false prophets who more openly contradict the Lord, count scripture obsolete, or deny that it was ever more than Hebrew sages moralising or romancing according to their genius. Hence they dare to say that the wide gate is all right, and the broad way safe; that the few are only sour, proud, and narrow, and that the many cannot but be welcome to the universal Father, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, too good to be severe to His erring children. Here again for all who receive scripture as the expression of divine revelation and authority there is no lack of evidence for any one to recognise these false prophets from their fruits. For their love of the world, or indulgence of the flesh, is as plain as their apology for sin, slight of the Saviour, and ignorance of the true God.

Good fruits are produced by neither the religious misbeliever or the profane unbeliever. How could it be? Do people gather a bunch of grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? Those who utter false oracles are trees which the Father never planted. It is the worthless tree producing bad fruits: whereas every good tree produces good fruits. Christ is the true vine; and they only who abide in Him are branches that bear good fruit.

O then, sinner, renounce yourself, and heed none who point to another than Christ. Were He not set forth openly, and did He not welcome you in perfect grace, your lot would be dismal indeed. But He Himself declares, "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto myself" (John 12: 32). On earth He, the Messiah, was not sent save to the lost sheep of Israel, though he and she who by grace discerned a higher glory were blessed according to their faith. But lifted up on the cross He is seen as the Son of man come to seek and save the lost, whoever and whatever they might be. He is the attractive centre to draw all, however dark or distant, who own Him as Saviour and themselves as guilty and rained sinners. For on the cross He through death annulled him that has the might of death; on the cross He bore the judgment of sin and effected propitiation; on the cross His blood was shed that brings the defiled one perfectly cleansed nigh to God. O sinner, no longer hold out against a work thus provided and commended to you just as you are. Christ is the true God, and eternal life; and it is written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name.

Made a true and living branch of the Vine, you will bear the good fruits of that only good tree. Be humbled, but not in despair, if through allowance of flesh you bear unworthily. For you have still the flesh in you, but no excuse to let it out. For if you are Christ's, you died to sin, not to sins merely, but to that source of lust and will, the flesh; and such is the virtue of His death to law too, that even if a Jew you ware made dead to that old husband and free to belong to Another, Who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit to God. The Holy Spirit directs your eye and heart to Christ; and He, as He produces nothing but good fruit, never fails him that looks to Himself. He is the way, the only way of life and holiness; and if you live by faith, it is now yours to say, "not I, but Christ that liveth in me." Then and then only, can you produce good fruits; as surely as "every tree that produceth not good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire."

Be not deceived then. Look to Christ believingly; and all will be well with your soul now, and evermore. Therefore at least by their fruits ye shall know those that uphold the ways of the Lord, and those that pervert.

6 Bare Profession

Matt. 7: 21-23.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 213-214. Gospel No. 12-6.)

The Lord here delivers a most salutary warning, to which the new things of the kingdom gave occasion. For while the truth which came through Him is as precious as it is characteristic, it of necessity left the door open for mental activity and spurious profession in ways which could not under the law be addressed to Israel. "Now we know that, whatsoever things the law saith, it speaketh to those in (or, under) the law." The truth, Christ, on His coming into the world which knew Him not, casts His light upon every man, and places all that have it under deep and direct responsibility. But it is also capable of being abused widely and variously by a false pretension more or less willing, yet ever inexcusable.

This the Lord meets in these verses with emphatic clearness and solemnity.

"Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but he that doeth the will of my Father that is in the heavens. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out demons, and by thy name do many works of power? And then will I avow to them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work lawlessness" (Matt. 7: 21-23).

The sense of entering into the kingdom of the heavens here is fixed to its glorious estate, not only by "in that day" in the following verse, but by the Lord's application of it in Matt. 8: 11, where its citizens sit in it with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. It is the more important to note; because His rejection (which soon began to appear) brought in its "mysteries" as in Matt. 13, during which He sits on high upon the Father's throne, and the kingdom applies to the anomalous state, as in the field or world wherein He sowed wheat and the devil darnel to ruin as a whole. This is the present mixture of Christendom while the Lord is absent above, during which any one can say "Lord" in vain, and wheat and darnel grow together till the harvest time, and the glory come by judgment.

The essential thing is doing the will of His Father which Christ was revealing. As He said in John 5: 24, where life eternal was in question, "Verily, verily, I say to you, He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath life eternal." These are the persons who, having done the good things as possessed of life now, rise for the resurrection of life (ver. 28). Equally peremptory is the Lord's word here. No profession without corresponding course of life can avail; nothing less or other than doing His heavenly Father's will. And who so competent to reveal as the Son, who left (as He tells us in John 16: 12, 13) many things, beyond hearing then, for the Holy Spirit to announce when He came?

It is clear that, as in the entire discourse, not a word is said about the new birth, still less redemption. The Lord is not here preaching to sinners how they were to be saved; He is teaching His disciples how to walk before the Father that is in the heavens. How does He view that vague and multitudinous profession, which. is a burlesque of Christianity, though now so popular, on the one hand through histrionic ceremonies and gaudy shows and religious fables, and on the other through appeals to the intellect and to the imagination by oratory or. reasoning. There may be seeming devoutness and profuse earnestness; but without living faith in Christ, neither is God known nor is self judged. The Lord insists on true obedience.

O my fellow-sinner, how can you obey a far fuller standard than the law, as long "you are dead in your offences and sins? Are you not by nature children of wrath (Eph. 2)? For we are, saved (nobody else), as the apostle adds, by grace through faith. A rite is wholly unavailing. And faith is God's gift; it is not of works, as rash men pretend: else man could and would boast. Faithful is, the word, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners (1 Tim. 1: 15). Oh then repent and believe the gospel.

How overwhelming is the Lord's warning! "Many shall say to Me in that day (and it is at hand), Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by Thy name cast out demons, and by Thy name do many works of power? And I will say (not even you once knew Me, but) "I never knew you." Compare Heb. 6: 4-8. No gift of power is a sign of life eternal, not even the edifying gift of prophesying. A man might be an apostle of Christ, but not a child of God. "Ye must be born anew," begotten by the word of truth; which Judas never was. Outwardly near, he was really far off, not only a stranger in heart but an enemy. And so we read here of crowds not like Judas, deceived as well as deceivers, "Then will I avow to them, I never knew you."

So indeed it is and must be, where men enjoy the greatest outward privileges, and remain without faith working through love. But it is faith, not founded on evidence, nor on tradition, nor dependent on a dying priest or a dead ordinance or a self-asserting church, but given of God's grace that you may become God's son and Christ's bondman, though just as surely a member of His body. Thus only can you walk in obedience of the Father's word and will, till Christ comes or you depart to be with Him, waiting with Him as well as for Him till then.

And those who do not so believe, whatever their claims now, whatever their pretension to order, office, power or authority, must assuredly hear in that day the just and irrevocable sentence, "Depart from Me, ye that work lawlessness." May grace work and win now, giving an ear to hear the voice of Jesus to the saving of the soul, and delivering from the delusion that christening quickens souls, or exempts them from the condition of being lost and the need of being born anew.

7 Christ and the Law

Matt. 5: 18-20.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 229-230. Gospel No. 12-7.)

We have already seen how certainly and clearly laid down is Christ's position in ver. 17. He maintained the authority of the Old Testament. "Think ye not that I came to destroy the law and the prophets; I came not to destroy but to fulfil." He came to make good God's mind therein. This He confirms in ver. 18. "For verily I say to you, Till the heaven and the earth pass, one iota or one point shall in no wise pass from the law till all things come to pass. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of the heavens; but whosoever shall do and teach [them], he shall be called great in the kingdom of the heavens. For I say to you that, except your righteousness surpass [that] of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of the heavens" (18-20).

That the Lord obeyed the law is beyond doubt. This is not the meaning of fulfilling. He gave the full scope of the law and the prophets; and He did yet more, for He revealed God in Himself both by words and ways, and disclosed those secrets of the kingdom which were absolutely hidden of old. For His rejection and departure to heaven would and did give it a quite new form; and beyond this the great mystery as to Christ and as to the church had to be made known, involving things still higher and deeper. But nothing in the new could weaken the authority of God in the old. "Till the heaven and the earth pass, one iota or one point shall in no wise pass from the law till all things come to pass."

Christ should be glorified in heaven, and the Holy Spirit sent down to baptise the believing Jews and Greeks into one body, the body of Christ, the temple destroyed, the city trodden down by Gentiles, and the Jews scattered over the earth for their Bin against Messiah. But even these woes on the chosen race fulfilled the law and the prophets, and in a special way Christ's word; yet more remains, and darkness still, before the law and the prophets are fulfilled in the salvation of Israel coming to and out of Zion. Then shall the earth yield her increase, and God shall bless to the full His long unblest people, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him. Oh haste the day! Assuredly Christ came not to make void but to fulfil.

But the Lord is here addressing His disciples who were still under the law. He is not yet even predicting His death on the cross and the redemption through His blood to which grace turned it in the justifying righteousness of God by faith to be revealed in the gospel. Indeed, as we have often noticed and might through the entire Sermon on the Mount, not one word says He here of this work of sovereign love. He first sets out the characteristics that are proper to the kingdom in verses 3-12; then position in 13, 14; and now the relation, like His own in their measure, to the revelation God had given to His ancient people, however unbelieving and unworthy as a whole. He does not foretell what their rejection of Himself must entail on the Jewish nation, or what God would then do for them or others who believe.

Hence in ver. 19 He still speaks to them as the godly remnant that heard His voice and clung to Him, born of God, but under law, and on this side of the cross and its blessed results to faith. Obedience first and last is insisted on. Here He begins with the law; but even in this chapter He goes on to what He is saying to them, which the ancients never heard. He brings in rich additions in Matt. 6 as declaring the Father's name from the close of Matt. 5, guards them from inward and outward snares in Matt. 7, and ends the discourse there with hearing and doing His words as the rock of wisdom and safety.

As undoing the word justly sunk one to be "least" in the kingdom, faithfulness to it raised to a great place therein. Evidently therefore the righteousness of such as entered must exceed and excel that of the Pharisee (ver. 20) who honoured tradition, the word of man, to the necessary disparagement of God's word.

It was the perfection of giving His disciples their food in due season. Many prophets and kings, some even inspired, desired to see the things which the disciples saw, and saw them. not; and to hear the things which they were hearing, and heard them not. And greater things were at hand, even that most wondrous of all wonders, God's work in the cross and the resurrection and the heavenly glory of His Son. But if heaven and earth shall pass, as they are, and not the least tittle of the law and the prophets, how far above these to God's glory and man's blessing rise the words of the Lord Jesus!

And these are words of His which deeply concern my reader, who is not a disciple of His, but a slave of sin and Satan. If you are indeed His disciple, let me rejoice with you in the grace God has shown you. If you are not, but only a guilty and wretched sinner, I beseech you to hear His words meant for you to heed before God that you may live for ever. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are, heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Doubt Him not: He is able, He is willing. "I came to call, not righteous men, but sinners:" why despair, or turn away? Even His enemies cried, "This man receiveth sinners." What does He Himself say, even when His hearers sought to kill Him, and when He sought those who had not a pulse of life toward God? "Verily, verily I say to you, He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath life eternal, and cometh not into judgment [out of which no unbeliever can emerge, nor yet believer if he entered], but passed out of death into life."

For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him may not perish, but have life eternal. What love in God Who hates the sins and pities the sinner! What infinite love, when you think, first of His Son, then of yourself! But O my fellow-sinner, what a doom must be yours according to His word if you disbelieve the Son, are unsubject to Him, and neglect so great salvation!

8 Anger

Matt. 5: 21, 22.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 244-246. Gospel No. 12-8.)

The Scribes and Pharisees were especially ritualist and external. This was letter, not spirit. Our Lord not only condemns a righteousness of mere outward acts, but insists on inward reality as indispensable for the kingdom of the heavens. He does not explain at this time how the requisite practical righteousness is possible and actually made good in sinful men. He had already let Nicodemus know of the necessity for a Jew no less than a Greek to be born anew, as well as to have redemption by His cross. Here to His disciples He expounds the absolute need of realising the varied spiritual qualities brought before them in order to enter the kingdom. As the Pharisees fatally narrowed the scope of scripture, the Lord gave its fulness as none but He could. The first of these references is to the law of murder. But the Lord goes immeasurably farther for the kingdom.

"Ye have heard that it was said to those of old, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be subject to the judgment. But I say to you, that everyone that is [rightly] angry with his brother shall be subject to the judgment; whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be subject to the council; and whosoever shall say, Fool, shall be subject to the hell of fire" (Matt. 5: 21, 22). The law and the prophets He had vindicated. All must come to pass. Yet the law made nothing perfect. He speaks Who is above the law and gave fulness to all on His own authority.

Thus is the commandment made exceeding broad and deep. The axe is laid to the root of the evil tree. All violent feelings are judged as in God's sight, and every evil word of malice and contempt shown to be of sinful and dangerous consequence. As He said later in the same Gospel (Matt. 12: 37), "By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." Here He warns, not so much of every light word, but of wrath, hatred, and contempt. The Judge of all the earth, Himself despised by man and abhorred by the nation, as was soon proved, could not fail to discern aright.

The danger He denounced is the burning sense of self, of the old man set on fire of hell. Circumstances might hinder its expression; but it stays in the heart it ruled, and makes itself at length felt in its malignity. He that formed the heart knows it, as He detects a feeling so contrary to His own nature, not only unbecoming in man, but wholly inconsistent with the peacemakers, the pure in heart, the merciful, as well as the poor in Spirit, the mourning, the meek, and those hungering and thirsting after righteousness, the blessed ones that suit the kingdom of the heavens. How too could it agree with being persecuted for righteousness' sake? how with being reproached, and having all manner of evil said and done against one falsely for Christ's sake, yet, rejoicing and being exceeding glad to be thus defamed and ill-used for His name?

But we know that very recently (Mark 3: 1-6) the Holy and the True looked round with anger in the synagogue on those who watched with murderous hate, if He would heal a poor sufferer on the Sabbath. Instead of shrinking from the issue, He bade the man rise up into the midst. They (the high and the broad) were silent; but the fire of their anger burned to destroy Him, after He also bade the man stretch out his palsied hand, restored on the instant His holy anger was distressed at the hardening of their hearts who, in the vain confidence of tradition (ever spurious), were thus maddened against the active and blessed goodness of God as a reality among men here below.

Again, John the baptist said to the Sadducees coming to his baptism, Viper brood, who forewarned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce therefore fruit worthy of repentance; and think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham for father. These were scathing words; but if anger dictated a word, it was unselfish and holy. It was indignation at men who sought a religious form to cover their unbelief and wickedness. And He, whose sandal-thong John counted himself unworthy to untie, pronounced woe after woe on these Scribes and Pharisees, albeit standing highest in Jewish estimation. Blind guides He called them, fools too and hypocrites and serpents; how should they escape the judgment of hell? Was not the blessed Lord fully justified in His words, overwhelming as they were to the highest degree? It was not enmity to tell an evil-doer the truth, that he might repent. Flesh hates fidelity.

If it be objected that so the Lord was entitled righteously to denounce, but no one else may, what are we to learn from one of like passions with ourselves? He on just occasion could say in the Spirit, to an erring saint at Corinth with questions about the resurrection, Fool! as he said before, Wake up righteously, and sin not; for some are ignorant of God: I speak to your shame. So in the next chapter he declares that if anyone love not the Lord, let him be Anathema Maran-atha (accursed at the Lord's coming), 1 Cor. 15, 16. The same apostle tells the saints (Eph. 4: 26), Be angry and sin not. If one truly follow the Lord and the apostle, anger then is a duty, not a sin; yet one surely has to watch and pray withal.

The source, motive, and aim decide. If of God and for Him by the Spirit, anger has His sanction; if for self, it is evil that exposes to judgment: and so the Lord denounces on its various degrees expressed in a form familiar to Jews.

O my fellow-sinner, whose words have been habitually sinful, violent and ungodly, how can you, as you are, enter the kingdom? And if you cannot, what must be your end without end? The Judge tells you plainly. But He is now the Saviour, the only perfect Saviour. Flee, flee for refuge, for pardon, and a new nature, to Him Who alone can give all you need. The resource of God's grace is Christ. And if we believe on Him, His love constrains us to live, not to self, but to Him Who for our sakes died and rose again. Then only do we cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

9 Reconciliation

Brotherly Reconciliation.

Matt. 5: 23-26.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 261-262. Gospel No. 12-9.)

The Lord was not content, with authority peculiarly and emphatically His own, to lay down the hateful evil of anger in heart and word, even if not in violent deed. He proceeds to carry out the revealed mind of God for the kingdom by requiring reconciliation if any had stumbled one's brother. Throughout, disciples are in view, not mankind in general. Sin in disciples is exceeding sinful: good is peremptory (surely not evil) for the kingdom of the heavens.

"If therefore thou be offering thy gift at the altar, and there remember that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Make friends (or, be of good-will) with thine adversary quickly, whilst thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the official, and thou be cast into prison. Verily 1 say to thee, Thou shalt in no wise come out thence till thou have paid the last farthing" (Matt. 5: 23-26).

It is no less evident that Jewish disciples as yet under the law are those addressed. This is as plain in vers. 20, 21 as in those we are now considering. In fact it is the rule in this Gospel as a whole and in the others; and it must be so, till in the death of Christ the middle wall of partition was broken down, and thus the way was opened to reconcile both Jew and Gentile that believed in one body to God, the enmity being slain. The discourse of our Lord anticipates no such unity, nor even the call of the Gentiles, in any one clause. But it is a profound mistake that this indisputable fact takes away the profit of a single word from the Christian, though we stand now in a position of grace which could not be then. There is the richest instruction morally for every one who honours Him who spake as never man spake; a spiritual estimate of unequalled depth for those who know redemption and have the indwelling Spirit to enter in far more fully than those who heard His words of divine truth at the time He uttered them.

Thus the Lord enjoins the disciple who was bringing his gift to the altar, if he remembered that his brother had anything against him, to stop short of his devoted purpose as to God Himself, and be reconciled to his brother, before returning to offer his gift. What tenderness of conscience was looked for, brotherly affection, lowliness of mind, readiness to own wrong, and desire to win an offended brother! It was the very reverse of anger, contempt, or hatred, which He had just treated, as His servant in measure re-echoed at a much later day (1 John 3: 11-15). And that reverse was the Jews' case. For absorbed in bringing their offering to the altar, they were blind to their wrong against Him who deigned to be their brother, with far more than brother's love, born for adversity as they knew not. But they refused to be reconciled, and persisted in their offering, however offensive to God. It was presumptuous sin, and high-handed self-will under cloak of religion.

What follows points to a still more solemn consideration. Who that weighs scripture can doubt that the Lord in vers. 25, 26 refers to the position in which the Jew then stood with God? This was a far deeper consideration than any other brother aggrieved: their Lord became their brother. The awful truth is that He who loved Israel and would die for them, Jehovah-Messiah, was made their adversary by their perverse disobedience and blind unbelief; and His presence, which had been their salvation and best blessing if received, must bring on the inevitable crisis by their utter rejection and hatred of Him. The Lord at this point avails Himself of the occasion in His infinite grace to urge their agreeing, or making friends, with their adversary quickly, whilst in the way with him. How His heart yearned over them, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings! But they would not. Their deadliest aversion was to their loving Messiah.

Hence the case was just about to come before the Judge, and the Judge would deliver to the official the convicted one, and he must be cast into prison till the last farthing be paid. It is no question here of eternal judgment, but of divine government morally on the earth; but all is plainly true of His people found guilty and consigned to suffer long. In that prison still lies the guilty debtor, till his heart turns to the One he despised. Then the word shall go forth, Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye to the heart of Jerusalem, and cry to her, that her time of sorrow (or, suffering) is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of Jehovah's hand double for all her sins (Isa. 40: 1, 2). Who is a God like unto Thee, that forgiveth iniquity and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? (Micah 7: 18.) Is not this the true unforced bearing of our Lord's words? One may apply it, to Christian use or unchristian warning. But it is an evil to twist scripture or to complain of those who bow to its full force. Such ignorance has led men into the fable of purgatory.

But let me appeal to you, my reader, who may excuse yourself because you do not profess to be a disciple. How will this avail when you stand before the great white throne? By your own plea to escape responsibility you incur certain and everlasting perdition. You know that your works are evil, and that dying as you live, you are utterly unfit to be in heaven with the Holy One of God. He whom you refuse as Saviour now will then be your Judge. You turn away from the Lord, you neglect so great salvation; your name is not in the book of life ; your works are selfish, vain, proud, wilful; addicted to lustful passion, rebellious against God, you serve Satan, and therefore must your portion be with the enemy of God and of His Son, as you have been here and are now.

O be warned in time. For the end of all things is at hand, even if you live; and your life at best is but a vapour. You know not what a day may bring forth. God was in Christ reconciling, not only embittered, or self-righteous Jews, but a world to Himself, not imputing their offences to them. But all was vain for either: they hated both the Son and the Father. A great king, a mighty conqueror, would have been to their taste. How would that have blotted out their sins, or given them a nature to serve God on earth and enjoy Him in heaven? In divine wisdom and grace their hatred was allowed to culminate in His cross; and thereby sin was judged, themselves who believe cleansed from their iniquities, and made God's righteousness in Christ. O harden not yourself for hell-fire. God as it were beseeching by us, we pray for Christ, on His behalf who died for you: he reconciled to God. The work is done, according to His will, to save you for over. Repent and believe the gospel. What could be done to compare with that which God has done?

10 Impurity

Matt. 5: 27-30.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 276-277. Gospel No. 12-10.)

Throughout it is not mere acts the Lord demands, but state; the spiritual condition suitable for the kingdom of the heavens. As in the verses immediately preceding the Lord insists on a spirit of lowly grace, going immeasurably beyond Thou shalt not kill, so now on a purity as far beyond the non-commission of adultery.

It is plain also that here, as everywhere in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, it is not the grace which saves the lost sinner who repents and believes the gospel. The state of soul that befits entrance into the kingdom of the heavens exclusively occupies the Lord. He is teaching the disciples what suited the Father's name which He made known to them. All that He laid down therefore manifestly presupposes that one is born of God, as the essential requisite for His kingdom, not acts merely if they could be good, but renewal of heart. Christ Himself was the blessed pattern of perfection.

"Ye heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit, adultery; but I say unto you that every one that looketh at a woman to lust after her committed adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right eye stumbleth (or, ensnareth) thee, pluck out and cast it from thee; for it profiteth thee that one of thy members perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand stumbleth thee, cut off and cast it from thee; for it profiteth thee, that one of thy members perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell."

Violence and corruption are the sad characteristics of man's fallen estate. We see them marked in the antediluvian world, at least as the general signs of a ruined state, whatever the specific evil which aroused divine indignation and unsparing judgment. Throughout man's history as traced in the Bible, and particularly in the favoured circle of Israel under the law, they are ever before us. Christ came, and grace and truth through Him, and redemption through His blood, everlasting redemption, to say nothing now of heavenly counsels made good in His person and place, and communications to the Christian and to the church. But man is essentially unchanged, and even avails himself of grace to become the worse. "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set to do evil." "But when thy judgments are in the earth," says the prophet, "the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness," Showing favour to the wicked, who believe not, emboldens them to persevere. And as the Jew was no exception who dealt wrongfully in the land of uprightness and would not behold the majesty of Jehovah, so will the Gentile reject the gospel to his perdition, and be cut off irretrievably. The time also hastens.

But as of old, so now are the faithful men, of whom the world is not worthy, who lived and suffered as seeing Him who is invisible. And the Lord did not lower the standard but raised it, clearing it of letter and of all accretions or diminutions. He has the godly remnant in view, still Jewish as He spoke, who not only entered the kingdom, but had higher relations intimated as His rejection set in, till His session at God's right hand and mission of the Spirit gave all necessary to reveal and make good in the saints what had been ever hidden heretofore.

As violence then was judged and excluded in any shape for the disciples, so was impurity. The avoidance of the extreme act might satisfy a Pharisee or Scribe; but the Lord could not dispense with anything short of truth in the inward parts. To look at a woman lustfully was to commit adultery with her already in his heart; and it is not the outside only that God regards but the heart above all. It is only a new nature that delights in holiness; and he who has it by grace answers to the will of God his Father; and abhors himself if he slip even into a wrong look, as unworthy of his calling and hateful to Him who loves him.

But the Lord follows up His stringent condemnation by the call to deal promptly and unreservedly with anything that acted as an incentive. Therefore He specifies that which is part of ourselves, and when. rightly used of the greatest value. Not even the right eye, or the right foot, can be allowed in presence of His displeasure which the saint fears, because he is a believer and God's child; as the Lord said elsewhere, "Be not afraid of those that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will tell you whom ye shall fear. Fear him who, after he hath killed the body, hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say to you, Fear him." It is not the highest motive, but it is an imperative and most solemn and urgent appeal.

Therefore says He now, "And if thy right eye stumbleth thee, pluck out and cast it from thee; for it profiteth thee that one of thy members perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand stumbleth thee, cut, off and cast it from thee; for it profiteth thee, that one of thy members perish, and not thy whole body be cast into hell." The right eye and the right hand present forcibly the mortifying of our members that are on the earth, to hinder sin against God. At, all cost must the believer deny self; as we find elsewhere he must hate father, mother, wife, children, brethren, sisters, yea and his own life also, or he cannot be Christ's disciple.

O my fellow-sinner, you know that this is wholly beyond you. You do not, will not, make any such sacrifices. Nothing but Christ, the new life, can so feel and act; and you have only your depraved life of sin and self. Are you then to despair? Yes, despair of yourself. You are truly lost, as the Lord says. But He came to seek and to save the lost. Tell God of your guilt and ruin, but plead the name of Jesus whom He has sent. He is a present and everlasting Saviour. Doubt not, but believe what God declares of His Son. Life in Him answers to the appeal of Jesus, when you rest on His redemption; and the Holy Spirit will strengthen you accordingly.

11 Purity in Divorce

Matt. 5: 31, 32.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 294-296. Gospel No. 12-11.)

In connection with the light of heaven on the lusts of the heart, the Lord adds His word on the permission of divorce in Deut. 24. It is here the woman protected against hard-hearted man. Positive sin in violation of the marriage tie alone calls for divorce. Men abused the licence beyond measure, as if the permission were a precept; and any vexation sufficed. But Jehovah hates putting away, as the last prophet testified to the Jews in their evil day.

In Matt. 19 the question distinctly proposed to Him by the Pharisees, Is it lawful to put away one's wife for every cause? And He answered and said, Have ye not read that He that made from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be united to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh? So that they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God joined together, let not man put asunder. They say to Him, Why then did Moses command to give a bill of divorce and to put away? He saith to them, Moses for your hardness of heart allowed you to put away your wives; but from the beginning it hath not been thus. But I say to you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, not for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery, and he that marrieth one put away committeth adultery. His disciples say to Him, If the case of man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. And He said to them, All cannot receive this word, but those to whom it hath been given.

Thus was the mind of God made clear. The indulgence of lust is incompatible with entering the kingdom of the heavens. The law forbade the act of adultery; the Lord condemns even the looking licentiously as adultery committed already in the heart. He insisted therefore on the most unsparing decision with all that gave occasion. Was it not better to pluck out the right eye or cut off the right hand, rather than the whole body be cast into hell? Here (as in all the chapters of the first Gospel before Matthew 13 where He begins as the Sower), it is not seeking sinners in sovereign grace, but saints, as He enjoins on the twelve in chap. 10. "Into whatsoever city or village ye enter, inquire who in it is worthy" (ver. 11). So the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5) describes what spiritual characters suit the kingdom, as the end (Matt. 7) declares that none shall enter but he that does the will of His Father that is in the heavens. Not even prophesying or miraculous powers, were it casting out demons through the Lord's name, could be a passport to the workers of lawlessness. Practical obedience of His words alone should stand. The rock here is spiritual reality. His word was incomparably more withering to self-righteousness than the law of Moses.

There is power of God given exceptionally to be above marriage, and live only to Christ here below. But, to far the most, marriage is God's order for man on earth. And the monkish rule with high pretension leads into horrible evasion, hypocrisy, and corruption even contrary to nature and abominable. God's mind is clear from the first; adultery alone justifies divorce.

Hence the necessity would be felt urgently and absolutely of receiving a new nature and an everlasting redemption in the Saviour. No interpretation of our Lord's words here or elsewhere is more radically false than that He puts believers under the law as their rule of life. He is really condemning unbelievers and hypocrites far more stringently than the law did, and those sayings of the elders which took advantage of a legal permission for carnal indulgence and unfairness to a wife who through any cause became less attractive to her selfish husband. Such souls were inadmissible to the kingdom. Only the godly remnant are here contemplated, who abhor corruption as they do violence. The presence of Christ, not of the law given by Moses, was bile suited moment for defining the character and conduct proper to the new thing He would set up. He was the standard of what pleased God, and must mark those who are His. "The law made nothing perfect" was a hard lesson for Jews; it seems quite as hard for those who inherit the traditions of fallen Christendom, and not less for Protestants than Papists,

To be content with being nobody in the world, and despised by its religion, is impossible to human nature; to be mourners as Christ was, feeling for God's will and majesty where lawlessness pervades; to be meek now, waiting for the glorious inheritance in God's time, instead of clamorous for our rights; to hunger and thirst after (not ease or wealth, or power or honour, but) righteousness, cannot be without partaking of a divine nature. Harder still was the actively gracious spirit of mercifulness, purity in heart, and peace-making according to God, with the persecutions which such righteousness entails, and especially such maintenance of Christ's name as effaces ours.

Our Lord accordingly singles out of the Decalogue the two great prohibitions of murder on the one hand and of adultery on the other. Assuredly He came not to make void the law or the prophets, but to give their fulness. He not only went farther than either, but declared that a righteousness surpassing that of the Scribes and Pharisees was indispensable for entering the kingdom of the heavens. He most pointedly sets His word with divine authority, so as to contrast what He laid down far beyond the claims of the law. In the case before us, as looking lustfully convicts of adultery before God, so whosoever put away his wife, save for cause of fornication, made her commit adultery, as well as him who married her. Thus He established a moral basis, not for a nation of mixed character, but fit for God's family and kingdom, which judged the heart's evil and allowed no concession to hard-heartedness. And what can be plainer than on this later occasion (Matt. 19) His going up to the beginning, long before the law, to God's instituted order and word in Gen. 2? There again His own word is full and final authority, for the Messiah was the Jehovah God of Israel. Whatever had been allowed by Moses, He is Mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises. It is God speaking in Him who is Son: But I say to you."

Now, I appeal to your conscience, my reader. Can you face the light of God, which our Lord is, on these evils of man's fallen nature? Are you not utterly convicted by every saying of His, who is the Judge of living and dead? And if such be the truth, O spread it out, and yourself as verily guilty before God. Presume no more to stand on your own foundation. You are lost: own it truly and humbly and in earnest. The Lord Jesus is not Judge only; He is the real and the only and the present Saviour of the lost. But you must be in the truth of your guilt in God's sight, if He is to act toward you in the truth of His salvation. That is repentance toward God; this is faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

There is for faith the blood of Jesus that cleanses from all, from every, sin. There is also life in Him, the Son, for every believer in Him. The one is as indispensable as the other. That life is the spring of the new nature which produces every good fruit and detests every evil work, word, and feeling; and now that one rests on His work of redemption, the Holy Ghost is given as divine power to strengthen the new man and mortify the old. It is true, that dependence on Christ, abiding in Him, is needed all the way through, and His words to abide in one, and prayer suitably and with confidence in divine love. But this is just practical Christianity so far; and we are sanctified by the Spirit, not to independence which is sin, but to obedience, the same blessed filial obedience as Christ's, our blessed Lord.

12 Swear not at all

Matt. 5: 33-37.

(B.T. Vol. N4, p. 308-309. Gospel No. 12-12.)

Here again the teaching of our Lord far transcends what was said of old. His presence brought in the light of God, and it was addressed to a new and divine nature in those who believe. It dealt with the root of every question, not merely with the fruit or overt acts.

"Again ye heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not swear falsely, but shalt render to the Lord thine oaths. But I say to you, Swear not at all; neither by (in) the heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is his feet's footstool; nor by (toward) Jerusalem, for it is the great King's city. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your word be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; but what exceedeth these is of evil (or, the evil one)."

Thus the Lord goes far beyond perjury or breaking a vow. He prohibits swearing altogether in the intercourse of daily life. Our word therein is to be, Yea, yea, or Nay, nay. That which is more than these has no sanction from God, and is therefore of evil, or the evil one, the enemy of God and man. All such asseveration as the Lord illustrates from the facts of Jewish habit. arose from the constant experience of men in deceiving or evading. They therefore resorted to such means of insuring the truth. But these efforts defeated themselves; for we know from a reliable Jewish contemporary of the N.T. inspired writers that oaths by earth, heaven, sun, stars, and the entire universe, were not counted binding. Only those obliged the conscience which were by God's name direct and express; nay others might be transgressed. As the Lord supposed in those He addresses poverty of spirit and purity of heart, He proscribed absolutely all such swearing as offensive to God and incompatible with the place of His sons.

Nor is it only Jews then, but professing Christians now, that show themselves as indifferent to the Lord's authority as if He had never thus solemnly uttered His mind. Among Protestants there is some little care to avoid profanity by adopting light and foolish exclamations, or by repeating heathen terms derived from their Greek or Latin reading, forgetting that if the idols are nothing, the demons behind them are real and evil. Romanists are much less scrupulous. It is sad to think how perverts go farther in excuse for their blasphemous phrases than those born and bred in their vain superstitions.

Take the following proof from the late Cardinal Newman's "Lectures on certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Submitting to the Catholic Church": "Listen to their conversation; listen to the conversation of any multitude, or any private party; what strange oaths mingle with it! God's heart, and God's eyes, and God's wounds, and God's blood: you cry out, 'How profane!' Doubtless; but do you not see that the special profaneness above Protestant oaths lies, not in the words but simply in the speaker, and is the necessary result of that insight into the invisible world which you have not? You use the vague words, 'Providence,' or 'the Deity,' or 'good luck,' or 'nature'; where we, whether now or of old, realise the Creator in His living works, instruments, and personal manifestations, and speak of the 'Sacred Heart,' or 'the Mother of Mercies,' or 'our Lady of Walsingham,' or 'St. George for Merry England,' or 'loving St. Francis,' or 'dear St. Philip.' Your people would be as varied and fertile in their adjurations and invocations as a Catholic populace, if they believed as we" (Ninth Lecture, p. 232).

It is grace alone which delivers from Popery and even Protestantism, and makes it a divine joy to be a Christian, neither more nor less. Irreverence of every sort, worldly or superstitious, becomes intolerably evil in one's eyes; and it is the first of duties for the believer to hear these words of Christ and reduce them to practice. But is it not an awful instance of Satan's blinding power, that while none but the vilest of Protestants would think of excusing his own ungodly badinage, a grave clergyman in his new born (or at least early open) apology for the shameless fooling of Papists should plead so barefacedly, not only for such ebullitions in word, but for turning the Last Judgment into a play of fireworks, and argue for it that "they are making one continuous and intense act of faith" (p. 237)

But we must carefully remember, that our Lord in no way forbids an oath before the magistrate or judge. This is not of evil; but of good, being of divine authority. For men swear by a greater, and the oath is a term to all dispute as making matters sure. To refuse it is to deny God's authority in any who represent Him in earthly things, and hence called by His name and translated "judges," as in Ex. 21: 6, Ex. 22: 8, 9, 28. See also Ps. 82: 1, 6. The principle is asserted in Lev. 5: 1, to which the Lord, far from setting aside on the mount, bowed when adjured by the high priest (Matt. 26: 63, 64), though silent before.

In like manner James 5: 12 with marked earnestness forbids swearing either by heaven or by earth. These were not judicial adjuration, which does not fall under people's swearing. It was rather being sworn in God's name. Nor did our Lord any more than His servant prohibit such appeals to God as in Rom. 1: 9, 1 Cor. 15: 31, 2 Cor. 1: 23, Gal. 1: 20, or the like. The scruple of Friends or Separatists has no foundation in scripture.

But how and where do you stand, my reader? Have you owned yourself a lost sinner, and the Lord Jesus the only, the willing, and the perfect Saviour? Believe in Him, and thou shalt be saved. So said Paul and Silas to the Philippian jailer, suddenly arrested, and not to him only, but also to his house. And the same night he was baptised, and all his straightway. Why not you too? The same Lord is open to you. May you exult as he did, having believed with all his house in God, the God of all grace.

STEM Publishing: C. H. Mackintosh: Glad Tidings

Glad Tidings

C. H. Mackintosh.

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. John 3: 16.

There are some passages in Holy Scripture which seem to contain in a line or two, an entire volume of most precious truth. The verse which we have just penned is one of such. It is part of our Lords memorable discourse with Nicodemus, and it embodies, in a condensed form, a very full statement of Gospel truth — a statement which may well be termed "Glad Tidings"

It should ever be born in mind, both by preachers, and those to whom they preach, that one grand object of the gospel is to bring God and the sinner together in such a way as to secure the sinners eternal salvation. It reveals a Saviour God to a lost man. In other words it presents God to the sinner in the very character that the sinner needs. A Saviour is precisely what suits the lost, just as a lifeboat suits a drowning man, or a physician a sick man, or bread a hungry man. They are fitted the one for the other, and when God as a Saviour, and man as a lost sinner, meet together, the whole question is settled for ever. The sinner is saved, because God is a Saviour. He is saved according to the perfection which belongs to God, in every character He wears, in every office He fills, in every relationship He sustains. To raise a question as to the full and everlasting salvation of a believing soul, is to deny that God is a Saviour. So it is in reference to justification. God has revealed Himself as a Justifier, and hence the believer is justified according to the perfection which attaches to God in that character. If a single flaw could be detected in the title of the very weakest believer, it would be a dishonour to God as a Justifier. Grant me but this, that God is my Justifier, and I argue, in the face of every opposer and every accuser, that I am, and must be, perfectly justified.

And, on the same principle, grant me but this, that God has revealed Himself as a Saviour, and I argue, with unclouded confidence and holy boldness, that I am, and must be, perfectly saved. It does not rest upon aught in me, but simply and entirely upon God's revelation of Himself. I know He is perfect in everything; and, therefore, perfect as my Saviour. Hence, I am perfectly saved, inasmuch as the glory of God is involved in my salvation. "There is no God else beside Me: a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside Me." What then? "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else." (Isa. 45: 21-22) One believing look from a lost sinner to a just God and a Saviour, secures eternal salvation. "Look!" How simple! It is not "Work” — "Do" — "Pray" — "Feel" — no; it is simply "Look." And what then? Salvation — everlasting life. It must be so, because God is a Saviour; and the precious little word "look" fully implies all this, inasmuch as it expresses the fact that the salvation which I want is found in the One to whom I look. It is all there, ready for me, and one look secures it — secures it forever — secures it for me. It is not a thing of to-day or to-morrow; it is an eternal reality. The bulwarks of salvation behind which the believer retreats have been erected by God Himself — the Saviour-God, on the sure foundation of Christ's atoning work; and no power of earth or hell can ever shake them. "Wherefore also it is contained in the Scripture, Behold, I lay in Zion a chief Corner-stone, elect, precious; and he that believeth on Him shall not be confounded." (Isa. 28: 16; 1 Peter 2: 6)

But let us now turn directly to the profound and comprehensive passage which forms the special subject of this paper. In it, most assuredly, we listen to the voice of a Saviour-God — the voice of Him who came down from Heaven to reveal God in such a way as He had never been revealed before. It is a marvellously blessed fact that God has been fully revealed in this world — revealed, so that we — the writer and the reader of these lines — may know Him, in all the reality of what He is — know Him, each for himself, with the utmost possible certainty, and have to do with Him, in all the blessed intimacy of personal communion.

Think of this! Think, we beseech you, of this amazing privilege. You may know God for yourself, as your Saviour, your Father, your own very God. You may have to do with Him; you may lean upon Him, cling to Him, walk with Him, live and move and have your being in His own most blessed presence, in the bright sunshine of His loving countenance, under His own immediate eye.

This is life and peace. It is far more than mere theology or systematic divinity. These things have their value, but, be it remembered, a man may be a profound theologian, an able divine, and yet live and die without God and perish eternally. Solemn, awful, overwhelming thought! A man may go down to hell, into the blackness and darkness of an eternal night, with all the dogmas of theology at his fingers' ends. A man may sit in the professor's chair, stand in the pulpit and at the desk; he may be looked up to as a great teacher and an eloquent preacher: hundreds may sit at his feet and learn, thousands may hang on his lips and be enraptured, and, after all, he himself may descend into the pit, and spend a dismal, miserable eternity in company with the most profane and immoral.

Not so, however, with one who knows God as He is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. Such a one has gotten life eternal. "This," says Christ, "is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." (John 17: 3) It is not life eternal to know theology or divinity. A man may sit down to the study of these, as he would to study law or medicine, astronomy or geology, and all the while know nothing of God, and therefore be without divine life, and perish in the end.

So also as to mere religiousness. A man may be the greatest devotee in the world. He may most diligently discharge all the offices, and sedulously attend upon all the ordinances of systematic religion; he may fast and pray; hear sermons and say prayers; be most devout and exemplary; and all the while know nothing of God in Christ; yea, he may live and die without God, and sink into hell forever. Look at Nicodemus. Where could you find a better sample of religious human nature than in him? A man of the Pharisees, a ruler of the Jews, a master in Israel; one, moreover, who seemed to discern in the miracles of our Lord the clear proofs of His divine mission; and yet the word to him was, "Ye must be born again." We have no need, surely, to go farther than this to prove that a man may be not only religious, but actually a guide and a teacher of others, and yet not have divine life in his soul.

But it is not so with one who knows God in Christ. Such a one has life and an object. He has God Himself for his priceless portion. This is divine. It lies at the very foundation of personal Christianity and true religion. It is above and beyond everything. It is not, we repeat, mere theology, divinity, or religiousness; it is God Himself, known, trusted, and enjoyed. It is a grand, unmistakable reality. It is the soul of theology, the groundwork of divinity, the life of true religion. There is nothing in all this world like it. It is something which must be felt in order to be known. It is acquaintance with God, confidence in Him, and enjoyment of Him.

Now, it may be that the reader is disposed to ask, "How can I possess this priceless treasure? How can I know God for myself, in this living, saving, powerful manner? If it be true that without this personal knowledge of God I must perish eternally, then how am I to obtain it? What am I to do, what am I to be, in order to know God?" The answer is, God has revealed Himself. If He had not, we may say with decision that nothing that we could do, nothing that we could be, nothing in us or of us, could possibly make us acquainted with God. If God had not manifested Himself, we should have remained forever in ignorance of Him and perished in our ignorance. But, seeing that He has come forth from the thick darkness and showed Himself, we may know Him according to the truth of His own revelation, and find, in that knowledge, everlasting life, and a spring of blessedness at which our ransomed souls shall drink throughout the golden ages of eternity.

We know of nothing which so clearly and forcibly proves man's utter incompetency to do aught towards procuring life, as the fact that the possession of that life is based upon the knowledge of God: and this knowledge of God must rest upon the revelation of God. In a word, to know God is life, to be ignorant of Him is death.

But where is He to be known? This is, in very deed, a grave question. Many a one has had to cry out, with Job, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him." Where is God to be found? Am I to look for Him in creation? Doubtless, His hand is visible there; but ah! that will not do for me. A Creator-God will not suit a lost sinner. The hand of power will not avail for a poor, guilty wretch like me. I want a heart of Love. Yes, I want a heart that can love me in all my guilt and misery. Where can I find this? Shall I look into the wide domain of providence — the widely extended sphere of God's government? Has God revealed Himself there in such a way as to meet me, a poor lost one? Will providence and government avail for one who knows himself to be a hell-deserving sinner? Clearly not. If I look at these things, I may see what will perplex and confound me. I am short-sighted and ignorant, and wholly unable to explain the ins and outs, the bearings and issues, the why and the wherefore, of a single event in my own life, or in the history of this world. Am I able to explain all about the loss of The London? Can I account for the fact that a most valuable life is suddenly cut short, and an apparently useless one prolonged? There is a husband and the father of a large family; he seems perfectly indispensable to his domestic circle and yet, all in a moment, he is cut down, and they are left in sorrow and destitution; while, on the other hand, yonder lies a poor bed-ridden creature, who has outlived all her relations, and is dependent on the parish, or on individual benevolence. She has lain there for years, a burden to some, no use to any. Can I account for this? Am I competent to interpret the voice of Providence in this deeply mysterious dispensation? Certainly not. I have nothing in or of myself wherewith to thread my way through the mazes of the labyrinth of what is called providence. I cannot find a Saviour-God there.

Well, then, shall I turn to the law — to the Mosaic economy — the Levitical ceremonial? Shall I find what I want there? Will a Lawgiver, on the top of a fiery mount, wrapped in clouds and thick darkness, sending forth thunders and lightnings, or hidden behind a veil — will such a One avail for me? Alas! I cannot meet Him — I cannot answer His demands nor fulfil the conditions. I am told to love Him with all my heart, with all my mind, and with all my strength; but I do not know Him. I am blind and cannot see. I am alienated from the life of God, an enemy by wicked works. Sin has blinded my mind, blunted my conscience, and hardened my heart. The devil has completely perverted my moral being, and led me into a state of positive rebellion against God. I want to be renewed in the very source of my being ere I can do what the law demands. How can I be thus renewed? Only by the knowledge of God. But God is not revealed in the law. Nay, He is hidden — hidden behind an impenetrable cloud, an unrent veil. Hence I cannot know Him there. I am compelled to retire from that fiery mount, and from that unrent veil, and from the whole economy of which these were the characteristic features, the prominent objects, still crying out, "Oh! that I knew where I might find Him." In a word, then, neither in creation, nor in providence, nor in the law, is God revealed as "a just God and a Saviour." I see a God of power in creation: a God of wisdom in providence; a God of justice in the law; a God of love only in the face of Jesus Christ. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." (2 Cor. 5: 19)

To this stupendous fact we call the reader's earnest attention; that is, if he be one who does not yet know the Lord. It is of the very last possible importance that he be clear as to this. Without it there can be nothing right. To know God is the first step. It is not merely knowing some things about God. It is not unrenewed nature turning religious, trying to do better, endeavouring to keep the law. No; it is none of these things. It is God, known in the face of Jesus Christ. "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." This is the deep and blessed secret of the whole matter. The reader, so far as his natural condition is concerned, is in a state of darkness. There is not so much as a single ray of spiritual light. He is, spiritually and morally, just what creation was physically before that sublime and commanding utterance fell from the lips of the Almighty Creator, "Let there be light." All is dark and chaotic, for the "god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." (2 Cor. 4: 4-6)

Here are two things; namely, the god of this world blinding the mind, and seeking to hinder the inshining of the precious, life-giving beams of the light of God's glory; and, on the other hand, God, in His marvellous grace, shining in the heart, to give the light of the knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Thus all hinges upon the grand reality of the knowledge of God. Is there light? It is because God is known. Is there darkness? It is because God is not known. No doubt there are various measures in the experience and exhibition of this light: but there is light, because there is the knowledge of God. So also there may be various forms of darkness; some more hideous than others; but there is darkness because God is not known. The knowledge of God is light and life. Ignorance of God is darkness and death. A man may enrich himself with all the treasures of science and literature; but if he does not know God, he is in the darkness of primeval night. But, on the other hand, a man may be profoundly ignorant of all human learning; but if he knows God, he walks in broad day-light.

In the passage of Scripture which is engaging our attention, namely, John 3: 16, we have a very remarkable illustration of the character of the entire Gospel of John, and especially the opening chapters. It is impossible to meditate upon it without seizing this interesting fact. In it we are introduced to God Himself, in that wondrous aspect of His character and nature, as loving the world and giving His Son. In it, too, we find, not only the "world" as a whole, but the individual sinner, under that most satisfactory title of "whosoever." Thus God and the sinner are together — God, loving and giving; and the sinner, believing and having. It is not God judging and exacting; but God loving and giving. The former was law; the latter, grace; that was Judaism; this, Christianity. In the one, we see God demanding obedience in order to have life; in the other, we see God giving life as the only basis of obedience. In the one, we see man struggling for life, but never obtaining it; in the other, we see man receiving life as a free gift, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Such is the contrast between the two systems — a contrast which cannot be too deeply pondered. "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." (John 1: 17)

But let us mark the way in which this is unfolded in our text. "God so loved the world." Here we have the wide aspect of the love of God. It is not confined to any particular nation, tribe, caste, or family. It embraces the whole world. God is love; and, being so, it is not a question of the fitness or worthiness of the object of His love. It is what He is. He is love, and He cannot deny Himself. It is the very energy and activity of His nature. The heart may have many a question, many an exercise as to its state and condition before God, and very right it should have them. The Spirit Himself may produce such exercises and raise such questions; but, after all, the grand truth shines forth in all its lustre, "God is love." Whatever we are, whatever the world is, that is what God is; and we know that the truth as to God forms the deep and rich substratum which underlies the whole system of Christianity. The soul may pass through deep and sore conflict, under the sense of its own wretchedness; there may be many doubts say, and fears; many dark and heavy clouds; weeks, months, or years may be spent under the law, in one's inward self-consciousness, and that, moreover, long after the mere intellect has yielded its assent to the principles and doctrines of evangelical truth. But, after all, we must be brought into direct personal contact with God Himself — with what He is — with His nature and character, as He has revealed Himself in the gospel. We have to acquaint ourselves with Him, and He is love.

Observe, it does not say merely that God is loving, but that He is love. It is not only that love is an attribute of His character, but it is the very activity of His nature. We do not read that God is justice, or holiness; He is just and He is holy; but it would not express the full and blessed truth to say that God is loving; He is much more, He is love itself. Hence, when the sinner — "whosoever" he be, it matters not — is brought to see his own total and absolute ruin, his hopeless wretchedness, his guilt and misery, the utter vanity and worthlessness of all within and around him, (and there is nothing in the whole world that can satisfy his heart, and nothing in his heart that can satisfy God, or satisfy even his own conscience) when these things are opened in any measure to his view, then is he met by this grand substantial truth that "God is love," and that He so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son.

Here is life and rest for the soul. Here is salvation, full, free, and everlasting, for the poor, needy, guilty, lost one; — salvation resting not upon anything in man or of man, upon aught that he is or can be, aught that he has done or can do, but simply upon what God is and has done. God loves and gives, and the sinner believes and has. This is far beyond creation, government, or law. In creation, God spake and it was done. He called worlds into existence by the word of His mouth. But we hear nothing, throughout the entire record of creation, of God loving and giving.

So as to government, we see God ruling in unsearchable wisdom, amid the armies of Heaven, and among the children of men: but we cannot comprehend Him. We can only say as to this subject, that:

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never failing skill,

He treasures up His bright designs,

And works His sovereign will.

Finally, as to the law, it is, from beginning to end, a perfect system of command and prohibition — a system perfect in its action as testing man, and making manifest his entire alienation from God. "The law worketh wrath." And again, "By the law is the knowledge of sin." But what could such a system do in a world of sinners? Could it give life? Impossible. Why? Because man could not fulfil its holy requirements. "If there had been a law given which could have given life, then verily, righteousness should have been by the law." But no; the law was a ministration of death and condemnation. (See 2 Cor. 3) The only effect of the law, to anyone who is under it, is the pressure of death upon the soul, and of guilt and condemnation upon the conscience. It cannot possibly be otherwise with an honest soul under the law.

What, then, is needed? Simply this, the knowledge of the love of God, and of the precious gift which that love has bestowed. This is the eternal groundwork of all. Love, and the gift of love. For, be it observed and ever remembered, that God's love could never have reached us save through the medium of that gift. God is holy, and we are sinful. How could we come near Him? How could we dwell in His holy presence? How could sin and holiness ever abide in company? Impossible. Justice demands the condemnation of sin; and if love will save the sinner, it must do so at no less a cost than the gift of the only-begotten Son. Darius loved Daniel, and laboured hard to save him from the lions' den; but his love was powerless because of the unbending law of the Medes and Persians. He spent the night in sorrow and fasting. He could weep at the mouth of the den; but he could not save his friend. His love was not mighty to save. If he had offered himself to the lions instead of his friend, it would have been morally glorious; but he did not. His love told itself forth in unavailing tears and lamentations. The law of the Persian kingdom was more powerful than the love of the Persian king. The law, in its stern majesty, triumphed over an impotent love which had nothing but fruitless tears to bestow upon its object.

But the love of God is not like this — eternal and universal praise to His name! His love is mighty to save. It reigns through righteousness. How is this? Because "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son." The law had declared in words of awful solemnity. "The soul that sinneth it shall die." Was this law less stern, less majestic, less stringent, than the law of the Medes and Persians? Surely not. How then, was it to be disposed of? It was to be magnified and made honourable, vindicated and established. Not one jot or tittle of the law could ever be set aside. How, then, was the difficulty to be solved? Three things had to be done: the law had to be magnified; sin condemned; the sinner saved. How could these grand results be reached? We have the answer in two bold and vivid lines from one of our own poets:

"On Jesus' cross this record's graved,

Let sin be damned, and sinners saved.

Precious record! May many an anxious sinner read and believe it! Such was the amazing love of God, that He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all. His love cost Him nothing less than the Son of His bosom. When it was a question of creating worlds, it cost Him but the word of His mouth: but when it was a question of loving a world of sinners, it cost His only-begotten Son. The love of God is a holy love, a righteous love, a love acting in harmony with all the attributes of His nature, and the claims of His throne. "Grace reigns, through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Christ Jesus our Lord." The soul can never be set at liberty till this truth be fully laid hold of. There may be certain vague hopes in the mercy of God, and a measure of confidence in the atoning work of Jesus, all true and real so far as it goes; but true liberty of heart cannot possibly be enjoyed until it is seen and understood that God has glorified Himself in the manner of His love toward us. Conscience could never be tranquillised, nor Satan silenced, if sin had not been perfectly judged and put away. But "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son." What depth and power in the little word "so"!

It may here be needful to meet a difficulty which often occurs to anxious souls, in reference to the question of appropriation. Thousands have been harassed and perplexed by this question, at some stage or other of their spiritual history; and it is not improbable that many who shall read these pages may be glad of a few words on the subject. Many may feel disposed to ask, "How am I to know that this love, and the gift of love, are intended for me? What warrant have I for believing that 'everlasting life' is for me? I know the plan of salvation; I believe in the all-sufficiency of the atonement of Christ for the forgiveness and justification of all who truly believe. I am convinced of the truth of all that the Bible declares. I believe we are all sinners, and moreover, that we can do nothing to save ourselves — that we need to be washed in the blood of Jesus, and to be taught and led by the Holy Ghost, ere we can please God here, and dwell with Him hereafter. All this I fully believe, and yet I have no assurance that I am saved, and I want to know on what authority I am to believe that my sins are forgiven and that I have everlasting life."

If the foregoing be, in any measure, the language of the reader — if it be, at all, the expression of his difficulty, we would, in the first place, call his attention to two words which occur in our precious text (John 3:16), namely, "world" and "whosoever." It seems utterly impossible for anyone to refuse the application of these two words. For what, let us ask, is the meaning of the term "world"? What does it embrace? or, rather, what does it not embrace? When our Lord declares that "God so loved the world," on what ground can the reader exclude himself from the range, scope, and application of this divine love? On no other ground whatever, unless he can show that he alone belongs not to the world, but to some other sphere of being. If it were declared that "the world" is hopelessly condemned, could anyone making a part of that world avoid the application of the sentence! Could he exclude himself from it? Impossible. How then can he — why should he — exclude himself, when it is a question of God's free love, and of salvation by Christ Jesus?

But, further, we would ask, What is the meaning, what is the force of the familiar word, "whosoever"? Assuredly it means "anybody", and if anybody, why not the reader? It is infinitely better, infinitely surer, and more satisfactory to find the word "whosoever" in the gospel than to find my own name there, inasmuch as there may be a thousand persons in the world of the same name; but "whosoever" applies to me as distinctly as though I were the only sinner on the face of the earth.

Thus, then, the very words of the gospel message — the very terms used to set forth the glad tidings, are such as leave no possible ground for a difficulty as to their application. If we listen to our Lord in the days of His flesh, we hear such words as these: "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him might not perish, but have everlasting life." Again, if we listen to Him after His resurrection, we hear these words, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." (Mark 16) And lastly, if we listen to the voice of the Holy Ghost sent from a risen, ascended, and glorified Lord, we hear such words as these: "The same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. For whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." (Rom. 10: 12-13)

In all the above-cited passages we have two terms used, one general, the other particular, and both together so presenting the message of salvation as to leave no room whatever for anyone to refuse its application. If "all the world" is the scope, and "every creature" is the object of the precious gospel of Christ, then, on what ground can anyone exclude himself? Where is there authority for any sinner out of hell to say that the glad tidings of salvation are not for him? There is none. Salvation is as free as the air we breathe — free as the dewdrops that refresh the earth — free as the sunbeams that shine upon our pathway; and if any attempt to limit its application, they are neither in harmony with the mind of Christ, nor in sympathy with the heart of God.

But it may be that some of our readers would, at this stage of the subject, feel disposed to ask us, "How do you dispose of the question of election?" We reply, "Very simply, by leaving it where God has placed it, namely, as a landmark in the inheritance of the spiritual Israel, and not as a stumbling-block in the pathway of the anxious inquirer." This we believe to be the true way of dealing with the deeply important doctrine of election. The more we ponder the subject, the more thoroughly are we convinced that it is a mistake on the part of the evangelist or preacher of the gospel to qualify his message, hamper his subject, or perplex his hearers, by the doctrine of election or predestination. He has to do with lost sinners in the discharge of his blessed ministry. He meets men where they are, on the broad ground of our common ruin, our common guilt, our common condemnation. He meets them with a message of full, free, present, personal, and eternal salvation — a message which comes fresh, fervent, and glowing from the very bosom of God. His ministry is, as the Holy Ghost declares in 2 Cor. 5, "a ministry of reconciliation," the glorious characteristics of which are these, "God in Christ" . . . "reconciling the world unto Himself" . . . "not imputing their trespasses"; and the marvellous foundation of which is, that God has made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Does this trench, in the smallest degree, upon the blessed and clearly established truth of election? By no means. It leaves it, in all its integrity and in its full value, as a grand fundamental truth of Holy Scripture exactly where God has placed it; not as a preliminary question to be settled ere the sinner comes to Jesus, but as a most precious consolation and encouragement to him when he has come. This makes all the difference. If the sinner be called upon to settle beforehand the question of his election, how is he to set about it? Whither is he to turn for a solution? Where shall he find a divine warrant for believing that he is one of the elect? Can he find a single line of Scripture on which to base his faith as to his election? He cannot. He can find scores of passages declaring him to be lost, guilty and undone — scores of passages to assure him of his total inability to do aught in the matter of his own salvation — hundreds of passages unfolding the free love of God, the value and efficacy of the atonement of Christ, and assuring him of a hearty welcome to come Just as he is, and make God's blessed salvation his own. But if it be needed for him to settle the prior question of his predestination and election, then is his case hopeless, and he must, in so far as he is in earnest, be plunged in black despair.

And is it not thus with thousands at this moment through the misapplication of the doctrine of election? We fully believe it is, and hence our anxiety to help our readers by setting the matter in what we judge to be the true light before their minds. We believe it to be of the utmost importance for the anxious inquirer to know that the standpoint from which he is called to view the cross of Christ is not the standpoint of election, but of conscious ruin. The grace of God meets him as a lost, dead, guilty sinner; not as an elect one. This is an unspeakable mercy, inasmuch as he knows he is the former, but cannot know that he is the latter until the gospel has come to him in power. "Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God." How did he know it? "Because our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance." (1 Thess. 1: 4-5) Paul preached to the Thessalonians as lost sinners; and when the gospel had laid hold of them as lost, he could write to them as elect.

This puts election in its right place. If the reader will turn for a moment to Acts 17, he will there see how Paul discharged his business as an evangelist amongst the Thessalonians: "Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the Jews. And Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus whom I preach unto you is Christ." So, also, in that passage at the opening of 1 Cor. 15: "Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures." (ver. 1-4)

From this passage, and many others which might be quoted, we learn that the apostle preached not merely a doctrine, but a person. He did not preach election. He taught it to saints, but never preached it to sinners. This should be the evangelist's model at all times. We never once find the apostles preaching election. They preached Christ — they unfolded the goodness of God — His loving-kindness — His tender mercy — His pardoning love — His gracious readiness to receive all who come in their true character and condition as lost sinners. Such was their mode of preaching, or, rather, such was the mode of the Holy Ghost in them; and such, too, was the mode of the blessed Master Himself. "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink." "Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out." (Matt. 11; John 6-7)

Here are no stumbling-blocks in the way of anxious inquirers — no preliminary questions to be settled — no conditions to be fulfilled — no theological difficulties to be solved. No, the sinner is met on his own ground — met as he is — met just now. There is rest for the weary, drink for the thirsty, life for the dead, pardon for the guilty, salvation for the lost. Do these free invitations touch the doctrine of election? Assuredly not. And what is more, the doctrine of election does not touch them. In other words, a full and free gospel leaves perfectly untouched the grand and all-important truth of election; and the truth of election, in its proper place, leaves the gospel of the grace of God on its own broad and blessed base, and in all its divine length, breadth, and fullness. The gospel meets us as lost, and saves us; and then, when we know ourselves as saved, the precious doctrine of election comes in to establish us in the fact that we can never be lost. It never was the purpose of God that poor anxious souls should be harassed with theological questions or points of doctrine. No; blessed forever be His name, it is His gracious desire that the healing balm of His pardoning love, and the cleansing efficacy of the atoning blood of Jesus, should be applied to the spiritual wounds of every sin-sick soul. And as to the doctrines of predestination and election, He has unfolded them in His Word to comfort His saints, not to perplex poor sinners. They shine like precious gems on the page of inspiration, but they were never intended to lie as stumbling-blocks in the way of earnest seekers after life and peace. They are deposited in the hand of the teacher to be unfolded in the bosom of the family of God; but they are not intended for the evangelist, whose blessed mission is to the highways and hedges of a lost world. They are designed to feed and comfort the children, not to scare and stumble the sinner. We would say, and that with real earnestness, to all evangelists, Do not hamper your preaching with theological questions of any sort or description. Preach Christ. Unfold the deep and everlasting love of a Saviour-God. Seek to bring the guilty, conscience-smitten sinner into the very presence of a pardoning God. Thunder, if you please, if so led, at the conscience — thunder loud at sin — thunder forth the dread realities of the great white throne, the lake of fire, and everlasting torment; but see that you aim at bringing the guilt-stricken conscience to rest in the atoning virtues of the blood of Christ. Then you can hand over the fruits of your ministry to the divinely qualified, to be instructed in the deeper mysteries of the faith of Christ. You may rest assured that the faithful discharge of your duty as an evangelist will never lead you to trespass on the domain of sound theology.

And to the anxious inquirer we would say with equal earnestness, Let nothing stand in your way in coming this moment to Jesus. Let theology speak as it may, you are to listen to the voice of Jesus, who says, "Come unto Me." Be assured there is no hindrance, no difficulty, no hitch, no question, no condition. You are a lost sinner, and Jesus is a full Saviour. Put your trust in Him, and you are saved forever. Believe in Him, and you will know your place amongst the "elect of God" who are "predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son." Bring your sins to Jesus and He will pardon them, cancel them by His blood, and clothe you in a spotless robe of divine righteousness. May God's Spirit lead you now to cast yourself simply and entirely upon that precious, all-sufficient Saviour!

We will now notice, very briefly, three distinct evils resulting from a wrong application of the doctrine of election, namely:

1. The discouragement of really earnest souls, who ought to be helped on in every possible way. If such persons are repulsed by the question of election, the result must be disastrous in the extreme. If they are told that the glad tidings of salvation are only for the elect — that Christ died only for such, and hence only such can be saved — that unless they are elect they have no right to apply to themselves the benefits of the death of Christ: if, in short, they are turned from Jesus to theology — from the heart of a loving, pardoning God to the cold and withering dogmas of systematic divinity, it is impossible to say where they may end; they may take refuge either in superstition on the one hand, or in infidelity on the other. They may end in high church, broad church, or no church at all. What they really want is Christ, the living, loving, precious, all-sufficient Christ of God. He is the true food for anxious souls.

2. But, in the second place, careless souls are rendered more careless still by a false application of the doctrine of election. Such persons, when pressed as to their state and prospects, will fold their arms and say, "You know I cannot believe unless God give me the power. If I am one of the elect, I must be saved; if not, I cannot. I can do nothing, but must wait God's time." All this false and flimsy reasoning should be exposed and demolished. It will not stand for a moment in the light of the judgement-seat of Christ. Each one will learn there that election furnished no excuse whatever, inasmuch as it never was set up by God as a barrier to the sinner's salvation. The word is "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." The very same form of speech and style of language which removes the stumbling-block from the feet of the anxious inquirer snatches the plea from the lips of the careless rejecter. No one is shut out. All are invited. There is neither barrier on the one hand, nor a plea on the other. All are made welcome; and all are responsible. Hence, if any one presumes to excuse himself for refusing God's salvation, which is as clear as a sunbeam, by urging God's decrees, which are entirely hidden, he will find himself fatally mistaken.

3. And now, in the third and last place, we have frequently seen with real sorrow of heart the earnest, loving, large-hearted evangelist damped and crippled by a false application of the truth of election. This should be most carefully avoided. We hold that it is not the business of the evangelist to preach election. If he is rightly instructed, he will hold it; but if he is rightly directed, he will not preach it.

In a word, then, the precious doctrine of election is not to be a stumbling-block to the anxious — a plea for the careless — a damper to the fervent evangelist. May God's Spirit give us to feel the adjusting power of truth!

Having thus briefly endeavoured to clear away any difficulty arising from the misuse of the precious doctrine of election, and to show the reader, "whosoever" he be, that there is no hindrance whatever to his full and hearty acceptance of God's free gift, even the gift of His only-begotten Son, it now only remains for us to consider the result, in every case, of this acceptance, as set forth in the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Here, then, we have the result in the case of every one who believes in Jesus. He shall never perish, but possesses everlasting life. But who can attempt to unfold all that is included in this word "perish"? What mortal tongue can set forth the horrors of the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched"? We believe, assuredly, that none but the One who used the Word, in speaking to Nicodemus, can fully expound it to anyone; but we feel called upon to bear our decided and unequivocal testimony as to what He has taught on the solemn truth of eternal punishment. We have occasionally referred to this subject, but we believe it demands a formal notice; and inasmuch as the word "perish" occurs in the passage which has been occupying our thoughts, we cannot do better than call the reader's attention to it.

It is a serious and melancholy fact that the enemy of souls and of the truth of God is leading thousands, both in Europe and America, to call in question the momentous fact of the everlasting punishment of the wicked. This he does on various grounds, and by various arguments, adapted to the habits of thought and moral condition and intellectual standpoint of individuals. Some he seeks to persuade that God is too kind to send anyone to a place of torment. It is contrary to His benevolent mind and His beneficent nature to inflict pain on any of His creatures.

Now, to all who stand, or affect to stand, upon this ground of argument, we would suggest the important inquiry, "What is to be done with the sins of those who die impenitent and unbelieving?" Whatever there may be in the idea that God is too kind to send sinners to hell, it is certain that He is too holy to let sin into Heaven. He is "of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look on iniquity." (Hab. 1: 13) God and evil cannot dwell together. This is plain. How, then, is the case to be met? If God cannot let sin into Heaven, what is to be done with the sinner who dies in his sins? He must perish! But what does this mean? Does it mean annihilation — that is, the utter extinction or blotting out of the very existence of body and soul? Nay, this cannot be. Many would like this, no doubt. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," would, alas, suit many thousands of the sons and daughters of pleasure who think only of the present moment, and who roll sin as a sweet morsel under their tongue. There are millions on the surface of the globe who are bartering their eternal happiness for a few hours of guilty pleasure, and the crafty foe of mankind seeks to persuade such that there is no such place as hell, no such thing as the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; and in order to obtain a footing for this fatal suggestion, he bases it upon the plausible and imposing notions of the kindness of God.

Do not believe the arch-deceiver. Remember, God is holy. He cannot let sin into His presence. If you die in your sins you must perish, and this word "perish" involves, according to the clear testimony of Holy Scripture, eternal misery and torment in hell. Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith, in His solemn description of the judgement of the nations: "Then shall the King say also to them on His left hand, Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." (Matt. 25:41) And while you harken to these awfully solemn accents, remember that the word translated "everlasting" occurs seventy times in the New Testament, and is applied as follows: "Everlasting fire" — "eternal life" — "everlasting punishment" — "eternal damnation" — "everlasting habitations" — "the everlasting God" — "eternal weight of glory" — "everlasting destruction" — "everlasting consolation" — "eternal glory" — "eternal salvation" — "eternal judgement" — "eternal redemption" — "the eternal Spirit" — "eternal inheritance" — "everlasting kingdom" — "eternal fire."

Now, we ask any candid, thoughtful person, upon what principle can a word be said to mean eternal when applied to the Holy Ghost or to God, and only temporary when applied to hell-fire or the punishment of the wicked? If it means eternal in the one case, why not also in the other? We have just glanced at a Greek concordance, and we should like to ask, Would it be right to mark off some half-dozen passages in which the word "everlasting" occurs, and write opposite to each these words: "Everlasting here only means for a time"? The very thought is monstrous. It would be a daring and blasphemous insult offered to the volume of inspiration. No, be assured of it, you cannot touch the word "everlasting" in one case without touching it also in all the seventy cases in which it occurs. It is a dangerous thing to tamper with the Word of the living God. It is infinitely better to bow down under its holy authority. It is worse than useless to seek to avoid the plain meaning and solemn force of that word "perish" as applied to the immortal soul of man. It involves, beyond all question, the awful, the ineffably awful reality of burning forever in the flames of hell. This is what Scripture means by "perishing." The votary of pleasure, or the lover of money, may seek to forget this. They may seek to drown all thought of it in the glass or in the busy mart. The sentimentalist may rave about the divine benevolence; the sceptic may reason about the possibility of eternal fire; but we are intensely anxious that the reader should rise from this paper with the firm and deeply wrought conclusion and hearty belief that the punishment of all who die in their sins will be eternal in hell as surely as the blessedness of all who die in the faith of Christ will be eternal in the heavens. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost would most assuredly have used a different word, when speaking of the former, from that which He applies to the latter. This, we conceive, is beyond all question.

But there is another objection urged against the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is frequently said, "How can we suppose that God would inflict eternal punishment as a penalty for a few short years of sin?" We reply, It is beginning at the wrong end to argue in this way. It is not a question of time as viewed from man's standpoint, but of the gravity of sin itself as looked at from God's standpoint. And how is this question to be solved? Only by looking at the Cross. If you want to know what sin is in God's sight, you must look at what it cost Him to put it away. It is by the standard of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and by that alone, that you can rightly measure sin. Men may compare their few years with God's eternity; they may compare their short span of life with that boundless eternity that stretches beyond; they may seek to put a few years of sin into one scale, and an eternity of woe and torment into the other, and thus attempt to reach a just conclusion: but it will never do to argue thus. The question is, Did it require an infinite atonement to put away sin? If so, the punishment of sin must be eternal. If nothing short of an infinite sacrifice could deliver from the consequences of sin, those consequences must be eternal.

In a word, then, we must look at sin from God's point of view, and measure it by His standard, else we shall never have a just sense of what it is or what it deserves. It is the height of folly for men to attempt to lay down a rule as to the amount or duration of the punishment due to sin. God alone can settle this. And, after all, what was it that produced all the misery and wretchedness, the sickness and sorrow, the death and desolation, of well-nigh six thousand years? Just one act of disobedience — the eating of a forbidden fruit. Can man explain this? Can human reason explain how one act produced such an overwhelming amount of misery? It cannot. Well, then, if it cannot do this, how can it be trusted when it attempts to decide the question as to what is due to sin? Woe be to all those who commit themselves to its guidance on this most momentous point!

Ah, reader, you must see that God alone can estimate sin and its just deserts, and He alone can tell us all about it. And has He not done so? Yes, verily, He has measured sin in the cross of His Son; and there, too, He has set forth in the most impressive manner what it deserves. What, think you, must that be that caused the bitter cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" If God forsook His only-begotten Son when He was made sin, must He not also forsake all who are found in their sins? But how can they ever get rid of them? We believe the conclusion is unavoidable. We consider that the infinite nature of the atonement proves unanswerably the doctrine of eternal punishment. That peerless and precious sacrifice is at once the foundation of our eternal life and of our deliverance from eternal death. It delivers from eternal wrath and introduces to eternal glory. It saves from the endless misery of hell and procures for us the endless bliss of Heaven. Thus, whatever side of the Cross we look at, or from whatever side we view it, we see eternity stamped upon it. If we view it from the gloomy depths of hell or from the sunny heights of Heaven, we see it to be the same infinite, eternal, divine reality. It is by the Cross we must measure both the blessedness of Heaven and the misery of hell. Those who put their trust in that blessed One who died on the cross obtain everlasting life and felicity. Those who reject Him must sink into endless perdition.

We do not by any means pretend to handle this question theologically, or to adduce all the arguments that might be advanced in defence of the doctrine of eternal punishment; but there is one further consideration which we must suggest to the reader as tending to lead him to a sound conclusion and that is the immortality of the soul. "God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." The fall of man in nowise touched the question of the soul's immortality. If, therefore, the soul is immortal, annihilation is impossible. The soul must live forever. Overwhelming thought! Forever! Forever! Forever! The whole moral being sinks under the awful magnitude of the thought. It surpasses all conception and baffles all mental calculation. Human arithmetic can only deal with the finite. It has no figures by which to represent a never-ending eternity. But the writer and the reader must live throughout eternity either in that bright and blessed world above or in that terrible place where hope can never come.

May God's Spirit impress our hearts more and more with the solemnity of eternity, and of immortal souls going down into hell. We are deplorably deficient in feeling as to these weighty realities. We are daily thrown in contact with people, we buy and sell and carry on intercourse in various ways with those who must live forever, and yet how rarely do we seek occasion to press upon them the awfulness of eternity and the appalling condition of all who die without a personal interest in the blood of Christ!

Let us ask God to make us more earnest, more solemn, more faithful, more zealous in pleading with souls, in warning others to flee from the wrath to come. We want to live more in the light of eternity, and then we shall be better able to deal with others.

It only remains for us now to ponder the last clause of the fruitful passage of Scripture which has been under consideration. (John 3: 16) It sets forth the positive result, in every case, of simple faith in the Son of God. It declares, in the simplest and clearest way, the fact that every one who believes in the Lord Jesus Christ is a possessor of everlasting life. It is not merely that his sins are blotted out; that is blessedly true. Nor is it merely that he is saved from the consequences of his guilt, which is equally true. But there is more. The believer in Jesus has a new life, and that life is in the Son of God. He is placed upon a new footing altogether. He is no longer looked at in the old Adam condition, but in a risen Christ.

This is an immense truth, and one of deepest possible moment. We earnestly pray the reader's calm and prayerful attention while we seek, in some feeble way, to present to him what we believe to be wrapped up in the last clause of John 3: 16.

There is in the minds of many a very imperfect sense of what we get by faith in Christ. Some seem to view the atoning work of Christ merely as a remedial measure for the sins of our old nature — the payment of debts contracted in our old condition. That it is all this we need not say; blessed be God for the precious truth. But it is much more. It is not merely that the sins are atoned for, but the nature which committed them is condemned and set aside by the cross of Christ, and is to be "reckoned" dead by the believer. It is not merely that the debts contracted in the old condition are cancelled, but the old condition itself is completely ignored by God, and is to be so accounted by the believer.

This great truth is doctrinally unfolded in 2 Cor. 5, where we read, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." (ver. 17) The apostle does not say, "If any man be in Christ he is pardoned — his sins are forgiven — his debts paid." All this is divinely true; but the statement just quoted goes very much farther. It declares that a man in Christ is a new creation altogether. It is not the old nature pardoned, but completely set aside, with all its belongings, and a new creation introduced in which there is not a single shred of the old. "All things are become new; and all things are of God."

Now this gives immense relief to the heart. Indeed, we question if any soul can enter into the full liberty of the gospel of Christ until he lay hold, in some measure, of the truth of the "new creation." There may be a looking to Christ for pardon, a vague hope of getting to Heaven at the last, a measure of reliance on the goodness and mercy of God — there may be all this, and yet no just sense of the meaning of "everlasting life," no happy consciousness of being "a new creation" — no understanding of the grand fact that the old Adam nature is entirely set aside, the old condition in which we stood done away in God's sight.

But it is more than probable that some of our readers may be at a loss to know what is meant by such terms as "the old Adam nature" — "the old condition" — "the flesh" — "the old man," and such like. These expressions may fall strangely on the ears of those for whom we specially write; and we certainly wish to avoid shooting over the heads of our readers. As God is our witness, there is one thing we earnestly desire, one object which we would ever keep before our minds, and that is the instruction and edification of our readers; and therefore we would rather run the risk of being tedious than make use of phrases which convey no clear or intelligible idea to the mind. Such terms as "the old man" — "the flesh," and the like, are used in Scripture in manifold places: for example, in Rom. 6 we read, "Our old man is crucified with Him Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin." (ver. 6)

Now what does the apostle mean by the "old man"? We believe he means man as in that Adam nature which we inherited from our first parents. And what does he mean by "the body of sin"? We believe he means the whole system or condition in which we stood in our unregenerate, unrenewed, unconverted state. The old Adam, then, is declared to be crucified — the old condition of sin is said to be destroyed (annulled) — by the death of Christ. Hence the soul that believes on the Lord Jesus Christ is privileged to know that he — his sinful, guilty self — is looked upon by God as dead and set aside completely. He has no more existence as such before God. He is dead and buried.

Observe, it is not merely that our sins are forgiven, our debts paid, our guilt atoned for; but the man in the nature that committed the sins, contracted the debts, and incurred the guilt, is put forever out of God's sight. It is not God's way to forgive us our sins and yet leave us in the same relations in which we committed them. No; He has, in His marvellous grace and vast plan, condemned and abolished forever, for the believer, the old Adam relationship, with all its belongings, so that it is no longer recognized by Him. We are declared, by the voice of holy Scripture to be "crucified" — "dead" — "buried" — "risen" with Christ. God tells us we are so, and we are to "reckon" ourselves to be so. It is a matter of faith, and not of feeling. If I look at myself from my standpoint, or judge by my feelings, I shall never, can never understand this truth. And why? Because I feel myself to be just the same sinful creature as ever. I feel that there is sin in me; that in my flesh there dwelleth no good thing; that my old nature is in nowise changed or improved; that it has the same evil tendencies as ever, and, if not mortified and kept down by the gracious energy of the Holy Spirit, it will break out in its true character.

And it is just here, we doubt not, that so many sincere souls are perplexed and troubled. They are looking at themselves, and reasoning upon what they see and feel, instead of resting in the truth of God, and reckoning themselves to be what God tells them they are. They find it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile what they feel in themselves with what they read in the Word of God — to make their inward self-consciousness harmonise with God's revelation. But we must remember that faith takes God at His Word. It ever thinks with Him on all points. It believes what He says because He says it. Hence, if God tells me that my old man is crucified, that He no longer sees me as in the old Adam state, but in a risen Christ, I am to believe, like a little child, what He tells me, and walk in the faith of it from day to day. If I look in at myself for evidences of the truth of what God says, it is not faith at all. Abraham "considered not his own body, now dead, when he was about an hundred years old; neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb; he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strong in faith, giving glory to God." (Rom. 4: 19-20)

This is the great principle which underlies the whole Christian system. "Abraham believed God," not something about God, but God Himself. This is faith. It is taking God's thoughts in place of our own. It is, in short allowing God to think for us.

Now, when we apply this to the subject before us, it makes it most simple. He that believeth in the Son of God hath everlasting life. Mark, it is not he that believeth something about the Son of God. No, it is he that believeth in Himself. It is a question of simple faith in the person of Christ; and everyone that has this faith is the actual possessor of everlasting life. This is the direct and positive statement of our Lord in the Gospels. It is repeated over and over again. Nor is this all. Not only does the believer thus possess eternal life, but by the further light which the Epistles throw upon this grand question he may see that his old self — that which he was in nature — that which the apostle designates "the old man" — is accounted by God dead and buried. This may be difficult to understand; but the reader must remember he must believe not because he understands, but because it is written in God's Word. It is not said, "Abraham understood God." No; but he "believed God." It is when the heart believes that light is poured in upon the understanding. If I wait till I understand in order to believe, I am leaning to my own understanding, instead of committing myself in childlike faith to God's Word.

Reader, ponder this! You may say you cannot understand how your sinful self can be looked upon as dead and gone while you feel its workings, its heavings, its tossings, its tendencies, continually within you. We reply, or rather God's eternal Word declares, that if your heart believes in Jesus, then is all this true for you, namely, you have eternal life; you are justified from all things; you are a new creation; old things are passed away; all things are become new; and all things are of God. In a word, you are "in Christ," and "as He is, so are you in this world." (1 John 4: 17)

And is not this a great deal more than the mere pardoning of your sins, the cancelling of your debts, or the salvation of your soul from hell? Assuredly it is. And suppose we were to ask you on what authority you believe in the forgiveness of your sins. Is it because you feel, realize, or understand? Nay; but because it is written, "To Him give all the prophets witness, that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins." (Acts 10: 43) "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John 1: 7) Well, then, upon precisely the same authority you are to believe that your old man has been crucified, that you are not in the flesh, not in the old creation, not in the old Adam relation; but that, on the contrary, you are viewed by God as actually in a risen and glorified Christ — that He looks upon you as He looks upon Christ.

True it is — alas, how true! — the flesh is in you, and you are still here, as to the fact of your condition, in this old world, which is under judgement. But then, hear what your Lord saith, when speaking about you to His Father: "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." And again, "As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world."

Hence, therefore, if you will just bow to God's Word, if you will reason not about what you see in yourself, and feel in yourself, and think of yourself, but simply believe what God says, you will enter into the blessed peace and holy liberty flowing from the fact that you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit; not in the old creation, but in the new; not under law, but under grace; not of the world, but of God. You have passed clean off the old platform which you occupied as a child of nature and a member of the first Adam, and you have taken your place on a new platform altogether as a child of God and a member of Christ.

All this is vividly prefigured by the deluge and the ark, in the days of Noah. (See Gen. 6 - 8.) "And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth." Here, then, was, in type, the end of the old creation. All was to pass under the waters of judgement. What then? "Make thee an ark of gopher wood." Here we have set forth a figure of the new thing. That ark, floating peacefully over the dark abyss of waters, was a type of Christ, and the believer in Him. The old world, together with man, was buried beneath the waves of judgement, and the only object that remained was the ark — the vessel of mercy and salvation, riding in safety and triumph over the billows. Thus it is now, in truth and reality. There is nothing before the eye of God but a risen, victorious and glorified Christ, and His people linked with Him. The end of all flesh has come before God. It is not a question of some very gross forms of "flesh" or of nature, of that merely which is "vile and refuse." No; it is "the end of all." Such is the solemn, sweeping verdict; and then — what? A risen Christ. Nothing else. All in Him are seen by God as He is seen. All out of Him are under judgement. It all hinges upon this one question. "Am I in or out of Christ?" What a question!

Are you in Christ? Do you believe in His name? Have you given Him the confidence of your heart? If so, you have "eternal life" — you are "a new creature" — "old things are passed away." God does not see a single shred of the old thing remaining for you. "All things are become new, and all things are of God." You may say you do not feel that old things are all passed away. We reply, God says they are, and it is your happy privilege to believe what He says, and "reckon" yourself to be what He declares you are. God speaks according to that which is true of you in Christ. He does not see you in the flesh, but in Christ. There is absolutely nothing before the eye of God but Christ: and the very weakest believer is viewed as part of Christ, just as your hand is a part of your body. You have no existence before God apart from Christ — no life — no righteousness — no holiness — no wisdom — no power. Apart from Him, you have nothing, and can be nothing. In Him you have all and are all; you are thoroughly identified with Christ. Marvellous fact! Profound mystery! Most glorious truth! It is not a question of attainment or of progress. It is the settled and absolute standing of the feeblest member of the Church of God. True, there are various measures of intelligence, experience, and devotedness; but there is only one life, one standing, one position before God, and that is Christ. There is no such thing as a higher or lower Christian life. Christ is the believer's life, and you cannot speak of a higher or a lower Christ. We can understand the higher stages of Christian life; but there is no spiritual intelligence in speaking of a higher Christian life.

This is a grand truth, and we earnestly pray that God the Spirit may open it fully to the mind of the reader. We feel assured that a clearer understanding thereof would chase away a thousand mists, answer a thousand questions, and solve a thousand difficulties. It would not only have the effect of giving settled peace to the soul, but also of determining the believer's position in the most distinct way. If Christ is my life — if I am in Him and identified with Him, then not only do I share in His acceptance with God, but also in His rejection by this present world. The two things go together. They form the two sides of the one grand question. If I am in Christ and as Christ before God, then I am in Christ and as Christ before the world: and it will never do to accept the result of this union before God and refuse the result of it as regards the world. If we have the one, we must have the other likewise.

All this is fully unfolded in John 17. There we read on the one hand, "The glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me." (ver. 22-23) And, on the other hand, we read, "I have given them Thy Word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of this world, even as I am not of the world." (ver. 14) This is as plain and positive as anything can be. And be it remembered that, in this wondrous Scripture, our Lord is not speaking merely of the apostles, but, as He says, of "them also who shall believe on Me through their word," that is, of all believers. Hence it follows that all who believe in Jesus are one with Him as accepted above, and one with Him as rejected below. The two things are inseparable. The Head and the members share in one common acceptance in Heaven, and in one common rejection upon earth. Oh that all the Lord's people entered more into the truth and reality of this! Would that we all knew a little more of the meaning of fellowship with a Heaven-accepted, earth-rejected Christ!

STEM Publishing: C. H. Mackintosh: Conversion: What is it?

Conversion: What is it?

C. H. Mackintosh.

"Ye must be born again." — John 3:7

Part  1 — The need of conversion

Part  2 — What this conversion is not

Part  3 — What this conversion is

Part  4 — The nature of conversion

Part  5 — Brought to God

Part  6 — Find all resources in God

Part  7 — Serve the living and true God

Part  8 — To wait for the Son of God from the heavens

Part 1

1 Thessalonians 1 presents a very striking and beautiful picture of what we may truly call genuine conversion. We propose to study the picture in company with the reader. If we are not much mistaken, we shall find the study at once interesting and profitable. It will furnish an answer, distinct and clear, to the question which stands at the head of this article, namely, What is conversion?

Nor is this by any means a small matter. It is well, in days like these, to have a divine answer to such a question. We hear a good deal now-a-days about cases of conversion; and we would heartily bless God for every soul truly converted to Him.

We need hardly say we believe in the absolute, the indispensable, the universal necessity of divine conversion. Let a man be what he may; be he Jew or Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, Protestant or Roman Catholic; in short, whatever be his nationality, his ecclesiastical position, or his theological creed, he must be converted else he is on the broad and direct road to an everlasting hell.

There is no one born a Christian, in the true sense of that word. Neither can anyone be educated into Christianity. It is a fatal mistake, a deadly delusion, a deceit of the arch-enemy of souls, for anyone to think that he can be a Christian either by birth or education, or that he can be made a Christian by water baptism, or by any religious ceremony whatsoever. A man becomes a Christian only by being divinely converted. We would earnestly press on the attention of all whom it may concern, the urgent and absolute necessity in every case of true conversion to God.

This cannot be overlooked. It is the height of folly for anyone to attempt to ignore or to make light of it. For an immortal being — one who has a boundless eternity stretching away before him — to neglect the solemn question of his conversion, is the wildest fatuity of which anyone can possibly be guilty. In comparison with this most weighty subject, all other things dwindle into utter insignificance. The various objects that engage the thoughts and absorb the energies of men and women in the busy scene around us, are but as the small dust of the balance in comparison with this one grand, momentous question of the soul's conversion to God. All the speculations of commercial life, all the schemes of money-making, the absorbing question of profitable investment, all the pursuits of the pleasure hunter — the theatre, the concert, the ball-room, the billiard-room, the card-table, the dice-box, the race-course, the hunting-ground, the drinking saloon — all the numberless and nameless things that the poor unsatisfied heart longs after, and grasps at — all are but as the vapour of the morning, the foam on the water, the smoke from the chimney-top, the withered leaf of autumn — all vanish away, and leave an aching void behind. The heart remains unsatisfied, the soul unsaved, because unconverted.

And what then? Tremendous question! What remains at the end of all this scene of commercial excitement, political strife and ambition, money-making and pleasure hunting? Why, then the man has to face death! "It is appointed unto men once to die." There is no getting over this. There is no discharge in this war. All the wealth of the universe could not purchase one moment's respite at the hand of the ruthless foe. All the medical skill which earth affords, all the fond solicitude of affectionate relatives and friends, all their tears, all their sighs, all their entreaties cannot stave off the dreaded moment, or cause the king of terrors to sheathe his terrible sword. Death cannot be disposed of by any art of man. The moment must come when the link is to be snapped which connects the heart with all the fair and fascinating scenes of human life. Fondly loved friends, charming pursuits, coveted objects, all must be given up. A thousand worlds could not avert the stroke. Death must be looked at straight in the face. It is an awful mystery — a tremendous fact — a stern reality. It stands full in front of every unconverted man, woman, and child beneath the canopy of Heaven; and it is merely a question of time — hours, days, months, or years — when the boundary line must be crossed which separates time, with all its empty, vain, shadowy pursuits, from eternity with all its stupendous realities.

And what then? Let Scripture answer. Nothing else can. Men would fain reply according to their own vain notions. They would have us believe that after death comes annihilation. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Empty conceit! Vain delusion! Foolish dream of the human imagination blinded by the god of this world! How could an immortal soul be annihilated? Man, in the garden or Eden, became the possessor of a never-dying spirit. "The Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul" — not a dying soul. The soul must live forever. Converted or unconverted, it has eternity before it. Oh, the overpowering weight of this consideration to every thoughtful spirit! No human mind can grasp its immensity. It is beyond our comprehension, but not beyond our belief.

Let us harken to the voice of God. What does Scripture teach? One line of holy Scripture is quite sufficient to sweep away ten thousand arguments and theories of the human mind. Does death annihilate? Nay! "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement."

Mark these words, "After this the judgement." And this applies only to those who die in their sins, only to unbelievers. For the Christian, judgement is passed forever, as Scripture teaches in manifold places. It is important to note this, because men tell us that, inasmuch as there is eternal life only in Christ, therefore all who are out of Christ shall be annihilated.

Not so says the Word of God. There is judgement after death. And what will be the issue of the judgement? Again Scripture speaks in language as clear as it is solemn. "And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and Hades delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works.... This is the second death" — the lake of fire. "And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." (Rev. 20)

All this is as plain as words can make it. There is not the slightest ground for demur or difficulty. For all whose names are in the book of life there is no judgement at all. Those whose names are not in that book shall be judged according to their works. And what then? Annihilation? Nay; but "the lake of fire;" and that forever and forever.

How overwhelming is the thought of this! An unconverted person, whoever and whatever he is, has death, judgement, and the lake of fire before him, and every throb of his pulse brings him nearer and nearer to those awful realities. It is not more sure that the sun shall rise, at a certain moment, to-morrow morning, than that the reader must, ere long, pass into eternity; and if his name is not in the book of life — if he is not converted — if he is not in Christ, he will assuredly be judged according to his works, and the certain issue of that judgement will be the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, and that through the endless ages of a dark and gloomy eternity. Oh! the terrible monotony of hell.

The reader may perhaps marvel at our dwelling at such length on this dreadful theme. He may feel disposed to ask, "Will this convert people?" If it does not convert them, it may lead them to see their need of conversion. It may lead them to see their imminent danger. It may induce them to flee from the wrath to come. Why did the blessed apostle reason with Felix on the subject of "judgement to come"? Surely that he might persuade him to turn from his evil ways and live. Why did our blessed Lord Himself so constantly press upon His hearers the solemn reality of eternity? Why did He so often speak of the deathless worm and the unquenchable fire? Surely it was for the purpose of rousing them to a sense of their danger, that they might flee for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before them.

Are we wiser than He? Are we more tender? Have we found out some better mode of converting people? Are we to be afraid of pressing upon our readers the same solemn theme which our Lord so pressed upon the men of His time? Are we to shrink from offending polite ears by the plain declaration that all who die unconverted must inevitably stand before the great white throne, and pass into the lake of fire? God forbid! It must not be. We solemnly call upon the unconverted reader to give his undivided attention to the all-important question of his soul's salvation. Let nothing induce him to neglect it. Let neither cares, pleasures, nor duties so occupy him as to hide from his view the magnitude and deep seriousness of this matter. "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

Oh! reader, if thou art unsaved, unconverted, let us earnestly entreat thee to ponder these things, and rouse thee to a sense of thy need of being savingly converted to God. This is the only way of entering His kingdom. So our Lord Christ distinctly tells us; and we trust you know this at least, that not one jot or tittle of His holy sayings can ever pass away. Heaven and earth shall pass away; but His Word can never pass away. All the power of earth and hell, men and devils, cannot make void the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. Either of two things for thee —  conversion here, or eternal damnation hereafter.

Thus it stands, if we are to be guided by the Word of God; and, in view of this, is it possible for us to be too earnest, too vehement, too importunate in urging upon every unconverted soul with whom we may come in contact, either with voice or pen, the indispensable necessity, this very moment, of fleeing from the wrath to come, fleeing to that blessed Saviour who died on the cross for our salvation; who stands with open arms to receive all who come; and who declares in His own sweet and precious grace, "Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out"?

Part 2

In our previous paper, we have sought to set forth the absolute need, in every case, of conversion. Scripture establishes this point in such a way as to leave no possible ground of doubt for anyone who bows to its holy authority. "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Matt. 18: 3)

This applies, in all its moral force and deep solemnity, to every son and daughter of fallen Adam. There is not so much as a solitary exception, throughout the thousand millions that people this globe. Without conversion, there is — there can be — no entrance into the kingdom of God. Every unconverted soul is outside the kingdom of God. It matters not, in the smallest degree, who I am, or what I am; if I am unconverted, I am in "the kingdom of darkness," under the power of Satan, in my sins, and on the way to hell.

I may be a person of blameless morals; of spotless reputation; a high professor of religion; a worker in the vineyard; a Sunday-school teacher; an office-bearer in some branch of the professing church; an ordained minister; a deacon, elder, pastor or bishop; a most charitable individual; a munificent donor to religious and benevolent institutions; looked up to, sought after, and reverenced by all because of my personal worth and moral influence. I may be all this and more; I may be, and I may have, all that it is possible for a human being to be or to have, and yet be unconverted, and hence outside the kingdom of God, and in the kingdom of Satan, in my guilt, and on the broad road that leads straight down to the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.

Such is the plain and obvious meaning and force of our Lord's words in Matt. 18: 3. There is no possibility of evading it. The words are as clear as a sunbeam. We cannot get over them. They bear down, with what we may truly call tremendous solemnity, upon every unconverted soul on the face of the earth. "Except ye be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." This applies, with equal force, to the degraded drunkard that rolls along the street, worse than a beast, and to the unconverted Good Templar or teetotaler who prides himself on his sobriety, and is perpetually boasting of the number of days, weeks, months, or years during which he has refrained from all intoxicating drink. They are both alike outside the kingdom of God; both in their sins; both on the way to eternal destruction.

True it is that the one has been converted from drunkenness to sobriety — a very great blessing indeed, in a moral and social point of view — but conversion from drunkenness to a temperance society is not conversion to God; it is not turning from darkness to light, it is not entering the kingdom of God's dear Son. There is just this difference between the two, that the teetotaler may be building upon his temperance, pluming himself upon his morality, and thus deceiving himself into the vain notion that he is all right, whereas, in reality, he is not. The drunkard is palpably and unmistakably wrong. Everybody knows that no drunkard can inherit the kingdom of God; but neither can an unconverted teetotaler. Both are outside. Conversion to God is absolutely indispensable for the one as well as the other; and the same may be said of all classes, all grades, all shades, all castes and conditions of men under the sun. There is no difference as to this great question. It holds good as to all alike, be their outward character or social status what it may — "Except ye be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven."

How important, then — yea, how momentous the question for each one, "Am I converted?" It is not possible for human language to set forth the magnitude and solemnity of this inquiry. For any one to think of going on, from day to day, and year to year, without a clear and thorough settlement of this most weighty question, can only be regarded as the most egregious folly of which a human being can be guilty. If a man were to leave his earthly affairs in an uncertain, unsettled condition, he would lay himself open to the charge of the grossest and most culpable neglect and carelessness. But what are the most urgent and weighty temporal affairs when compared with the salvation of the soul? All the concerns of time are but as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor, when compared with the interests of the immortal soul — the grand realities of eternity.

Hence it is, in the very highest degree, irrational for any one to rest for a single hour without a clear and settled assurance that he is truly converted to God. A converted soul has crossed the boundary line that separates the saved from the unsaved — the children of light from the children of darkness — the Church of God from this present evil world. The converted soul has death and judgement behind him, and glory before. He can be as sure of Heaven as though he were already there; indeed as a man in Christ he belongs there already. He has a title without a blot, and a prospect without a cloud. He knows Christ as his Saviour and Lord; God as his Father and Friend; the Holy Ghost as his blessed Comforter, Guide, and Teacher; Heaven as his bright and happy home. Oh! the unspeakable blessedness of being converted. Who can utter it? "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us [believers] by His Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God." (1 Cor. 2: 9-10)

And now let us inquire what this conversion is, whereof we speak. Well, indeed, will it be for us to be divinely instructed as to this. An error here will prove disastrous in proportion to the interests at stake.

Many are the mistaken notions in reference to conversion. Indeed we might conclude, from the very fact of the vast importance of the subject, that the great enemy of our souls and of the Christ of God would seek, in every possible way, to plunge us into error respecting it. If he cannot succeed in keeping people in utter carelessness as to the subject of conversion, he will endeavour to blind their eyes as to its true nature. If, for example, a person has been roused, by some means or other, to a sense of the utter vanity and unsatisfactoriness of worldly amusements, and the urgent necessity of a change of life, the arch-deceiver will seek to persuade such an one to become religious, to busy himself with ordinances, rites and ceremonies, to give up balls and parties, theatres and concerts, drinking, gambling, hunting and horse-racing; in a word, to give up all sorts of gaiety and amusement, and engage in what is called a religious life, to be diligent in attending the public ordinances of religion, to read the Bible, say prayers, and give alms, to contribute to the support of the great religious and benevolent institutions of the country.

Now, this is not conversion. A person may do all this, and yet be wholly unconverted. A religious devotee whose whole life is spent in vigils, fastings, prayers, self-mortifications and alms deeds, may be as thoroughly unconverted, as far from the kingdom of God as the thoughtless pleasure hunter, whose whole life is spent in the pursuit of objects as worthless as the withered leaf or the faded flower. The two characters, no doubt, differ widely — as widely perhaps, as any two could differ. But they are both unconverted, both outside the blessed circle of God's salvation, both in their sins. True, the one is engaged in "wicked works and the other in "dead works;" they are both out of Christ; they are unsaved; they are on the way to hopeless, endless misery. The one, just as surely as the other, if not savingly converted, will find his portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.

Again, conversion is not a turning from one religious system to another. A man may turn from Judaism, Paganism, Mahometanism, or Popery, to Protestantism, and yet be wholly unconverted. No doubt, looked at from a social, moral, or intellectual standpoint, it is much better to be a Protestant than a Mahometan; but as regards our present thesis, they are both on one common platform, both unconverted. Of one, just as truly as the other, it can be said, unless he is converted, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Conversion is not joining a religious system, be that system ever so pure, ever so sound, ever so orthodox. A man may be a member of the most respectable religious body in Christendom, and yet be an unconverted, unsaved man, on his way to eternal perdition.

So also as to the theological creeds. A man may subscribe to any of the great standards of religious belief, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Westminister Confession, John Wesley's sermons, Fox and Barclay, or any other creed, and yet be wholly unconverted, dead in trespasses and sins, and on his way to that place where a single ray of hope can never break in upon the awful gloom of eternity.

Of what use, we may lawfully inquire, is a religious system or a theological creed to a man who has not a single spark of divine life? Systems and creeds cannot quicken, cannot save, cannot give eternal life. A man may work on in religious machinery like a horse in a mill, going round and round, from one year's end to another, leaving off just where he began, in a dreary monotony of dead works. What is it all worth? what does it all come to? where does it all end? Death! Yes; and what then? Ah! that is the question. Would to God the weight and seriousness of this question were more fully realized! But further, Christianity itself, in all its full-orbed light, may be embraced as a system of religious belief. A person may be intellectually delighted — almost entranced with the glorious doctrines of grace, a full, free gospel, salvation without works, justification by faith; in short, all that goes to make up our glorious New Testament Christianity. A person may profess to believe and delight in this; he may even become a powerful writer in defence of Christian doctrine, an earnest eloquent preacher of the gospel. All this may be true, and yet the man be wholly unconverted, dead in trespasses and sins, hardened, deceived and destroyed by his very familiarity with the precious truths of the gospel-truths that have never gone beyond the region of his understanding — never reached his conscience, never touched his heart, never converted his soul.

This is about the most appalling case of all. Nothing can be more awful, more terrible, than the case of a man professing to believe and delight in, yea, actually preaching the gospel of God, and teaching all the grand characteristic truths of Christianity, and yet wholly unconverted, unsaved, and on his way to an eternity of ineffable misery — misery which must needs be intensified to the very highest degree, by the remembrance of the fact that he once professed to believe, and actually undertook to preach the most glorious tidings that ever fell on mortal ears.

O! reader, whoever thou art, do, we entreat of thee, give thy fixed attention to these things. Rest not, for one hour, until thou art assured of thy genuine, unmistakable conversion to God.

Part 3

Having thus far seen the absolute necessity, in every case, of conversion, and having, in some measure, sought to point out what conversion is not, we have now to inquire what it is. And here we must keep close to the veritable teaching of holy Scripture. We can accept nothing less, nothing different.

It is greatly to be feared that very much of what passes, now-a-days, for conversion is not conversion at all. Many so-called cases of conversion are published and talked of, which cannot stand the test of the Word of God. Many profess to be converted, and are accredited as such, who prove to be merely stony-ground hearers. There is no depth of spiritual work in the heart, no real action of the truth of God on the conscience, no thorough breaking with the world. It may be the feelings are wrought upon by human influence, and certain evangelical sentiments take possession of the mind; but self is not judged; there is a clinging to earth and nature; a lack of that deep-toned earnestness and genuine reality which so remarkably characterise the conversions recorded in the New Testament, and for which we may always look where the work of conversion is divine.

We do not here attempt to account for all these superficial cases; we merely refer to them in order that all who are engaged in the blessed work of evangelization may be led to consider the matter in the light of holy Scripture, and to see how far their own mode of working may call for holy correction. It may be there is too much of the merely human element in our work. We do not leave the Spirit of God to act. We are deficient in faith, in the power and efficacy of the simple work of Christ itself. There may be too much effort to work on the feelings, too much of the emotional and the sensational. Perhaps, too, in our desire to reach results — a desire which may be right enough in itself — we are too ready to accredit and announce, as cases of conversion, many which, alas! are merely ephemeral.

All this demands our serious attention. It is of the very last possible importance that we allow the Spirit of God to work and to display — as He most assuredly will — the fruit of His work. All that He does is well done, and it will speak for itself in due time. There is no necessity for us to blaze around our cases of conversion. All that is divinely real will shine out to the praise of Him to whom all praise is due; and then the workman will have his own deep and holy joy. He will see the results of his work, and think of them in adoring homage and worship at his Masters feet — the only safe and happy place to think of them.

Will this lessen our earnestness? The very reverse; it will intensify our earnestness immensely. We shall be more earnest in pleading with God in secret, and in pleading with our fellows in public.

We shall feel more deeply the divine seriousness of the work, and our own utter insufficiency. We shall ever cherish the wholesome conviction that the work must be of God from first to last. This will keep us in our right place, that of self-emptied dependence upon God, who is the Doer of all the works that are done upon the earth. We shall be more on our faces before the mercy-seat, both in the closet and in the assembly, in reference to the glorious work of conversion; and then, when the golden sheaves and mellow clusters appear, when genuine cases of conversion turn up — cases which speak for themselves, and carry their own credentials with them to all who are capable of judging — then verily shall our hearts be filled with praise to the God of all grace who has magnified the name of His Son Jesus Christ in the salvation of precious souls.

How much better is this than to have our poor hearts puffed up with pride and self-complacency by reckoning up our cases of conversion! How much better, safer and happier to be bowed in worship before the throne, than to have our names heralded to the ends of the earth as great preachers and wonderful evangelists! No comparison, in the judgement of a truly spiritual person. The dignity, reality, and seriousness of the work will be realized; the happiness, the moral security, and the real usefulness of the workman will be promoted; and the glory of God secured and maintained.

Let us see how all this is illustrated in 1 Thessalonians 1. "Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the assembly of the Thessalonians in God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ: grace be unto you, and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers: remembering without ceasing your work of faith and labour of love, and patience of hope" — the grand elements of true Christianity — "in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father; knowing, brethren beloved of God, your election." How did he know it? By the clear and unquestionable evidence afforded in their practical life — the only way in which the election of any one can be known. "For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake."

The blessed apostle was, in his daily life, the exponent of the gospel which he preached. He lived the gospel. He did not demand or exact aught of them. He was not burdensome to them. He preached unto them the precious gospel of God freely; and in order that he might do so, he wrought with labour and travail, night and day. He was as a loving, tender nurse, going in and out among them. There were with him no high-sounding words about himself, or his office, or his authority, or his gifts, or his preaching, or his wonderful doings in other places. He was the loving, lowly, unpretending, earnest, devoted workman, whose work spoke for itself, and whose whole life, his spirit, style, deportment, and habits, were in lovely harmony with his preaching.

How needful for all workmen to ponder these things! We may depend upon it that very much of the shallowness of our work is the fruit of the shallowness of the workman. Where is the power? Where is the demonstration of the Spirit? Where is the "much assurance"? Is there not a terrible lack of these things in our preaching? There may be a vast amount of fluent talking; a great deal of so-called cleverness; and much that may tickle the ear, act on the imagination, awaken a temporary interest, and minister to mere curiosity. But oh! where is the holy unction, the living earnestness, the profound seriousness? And then the living exponent in the daily life and habits — where is this? May the Lord revive His work in the hearts of His workmen, and then we may look for more of the results of the work.

Do we mean to teach that the work of conversion depends upon the workman? Far away be the monstrous notion! The work depends wholly and absolutely on the power of the Holy Ghost, as the very chapter now lying open before us proves beyond all question. It must ever hold good, in every department and every stage of the work, that it is "not by might nor by power; but by My Spirit, saith the Lord."

But what kind of instrument does the Spirit ordinarily use? Is not this a weighty question for us workmen? What sort of vessels are "meet for the Master's use"? Empty vessels — clean vessels. Are we such? Are we emptied of ourselves? Are we cured of our deplorable self-occupation? Are we "clean"? Have we clean hands? Are our associations, our ways, our circumstances, clean? If not, how can the Master use us in His holy service? May we all have grace to weigh these questions in the divine presence! May the Lord stir us all up, and make us more and more vessels such as He can use for His glory!

We shall now proceed with our quotation. The whole passage is full of power. The character of the workman on the one hand, and of the work on the other, demands our most serious attention.

"And ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost: so that ye were ensamples [or models] to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia. For from you sounded out the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to Godward is spread abroad; so that we need not to speak anything, for they themselves show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you."

This was real work. It carried its own credentials with it. There was nothing vague or unsatisfactory about it — no occasion for any reserve in forming or expressing a judgement respecting it. It was clear, distinct, and unmistakable. It bore the stamp of the Master's hand, and carried conviction to every mind capable of weighing the evidence. The work of conversion was wrought, and the fruits of conversion followed in delightful profusion. The testimony went forth far and wide, so that the workman had no need to speak about his work. There was no occasion for him to reckon up and publish the number of conversions at Thessalonica. All was divinely real. It was a thorough work of God's Spirit as to which there could be no possible mistake, and about which it was superfluous to speak.

The apostle had simply preached the Word in the power of the Holy Ghost, in much assurance. There was nothing vague, nothing doubtful about his testimony. He preached as one who fully believed and thoroughly entered into what he was preaching about. It was not the mere fluent utterance of certain known and acknowledged truths — not the cut and dry statement of certain barren dogmas. No; it was the living outpouring of the glorious gospel of God, coming from a heart that felt profoundly every utterance, and falling upon hearts prepared by God's Spirit for its reception.

Such was the work at Thessalonica — a blessed divine work — all real, the genuine fruit of God's Spirit. It was no mere religious excitement, nothing sensational, no high pressure, no attempt to "get up a revival." All was beautifully calm. The workman, as we are told in Acts 17, "came to Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the Jews; and as his manner was, he went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with them out of the Scriptures" — Precious, powerful reasoning! would to God we had more of it in our midst! — "opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead, and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ."

How simple! Preaching Jesus out of the Scriptures! Yes, here lay the grand secret of Paul's preaching. He preached a living Person, in living power, on the authority of a living Word, and this preaching was received in living faith, and brought forth living fruit, in the lives of the converts. This is the preaching that God has ordained and uses. It is not sermonising, not religious talk, but the preaching of Christ by the Holy Ghost speaking through men who are themselves under the power of what they are preaching. God grant us more of this!

Part 4

The last two verses of our chapter (1 Thess. 1) demand our very special attention. They furnish a remarkable statement of the real nature of conversion. They show, very distinctly, the depth, clearness, fullness, and reality of the work of God's Spirit in those Thessalonian converts. There was no mistaking it. It carried its own credentials with it. It was no uncertain work. It did not call for any careful examination ere it could be accredited. It was a manifest, unmistakable work of God, the fruits of which were apparent to all. "They themselves show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivered us from the wrath to come." (vers. 9-10)

Here, then, we have a divine definition of conversion — brief, but comprehensive. It is a turning from and a turning to. They turned from idols. There was a complete break with the past, a turning of the back, once and forever, on their former life and habits; a thorough surrender of all those objects that had ruled their hearts and commanded their energies.

Those dear Thessalonians were led to judge, in the light of divine truth, their whole previous course, and not only to judge it, but to abandon it unreservedly. It was no half-and-half work. There was nothing vague or equivocal about it. It was a marked epoch in their history — a grand turning-point in their moral and practical career. It was not a mere change of opinion, or the reception of a new set of principles, a certain alteration in their intellectual views. It was far more than any or all of these things. It was the solemn discovery that their whole past career had been one great, dark, monstrous lie. It was the real heart conviction of this. Divine light had broken in upon their souls, and in the power of that light they judged themselves and the entire of their previous history. There was an out-and-out surrender of that world which had hitherto ruled their hearts' affections; not a shred of it was to be spared.

And what, we may ask, produced this marvellous change? Simply the Word of God brought home to their souls in the mighty power of the Holy Ghost. We have referred to the inspired account of the apostle's visit to Thessalonica. We are told that "he reasoned with them out of the Scriptures." He sought to bring their souls into direct contact with the living and eternal Word of God. There was no effort to act on their feelings and imagination. All this the blessed workman judged to be utterly valueless. He had no confidence whatever in it. His confidence was in the Word and Spirit of God. He assured the Thessalonians of this very thing in the most touching manner, in 1 Thess. 2: "For this cause," he says, "thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe."

This is what we may call a vital and cardinal point. The Word of God, and that alone, in the mighty hand of the Holy Ghost, produced these grand results in the case of the Thessalonians, which filled the heart of the beloved apostle with unfeigned thanksgiving to God. He rejoiced that they were not linked on to him, but to the living God Himself, by means of His Word. This is an imperishable link. It is as enduring as the Word which forms it. The word of man is as perishable as himself; but the Word of the Lord endureth forever. The apostle, as a true workman, understood and felt all this, and hence his holy jealousy, in all his ministry, lest the souls to whom he preached should, in any way, lean upon him instead of on the One whose messenger and minister he was.

Hear what he says to the Corinthians: "And I, brethren, when I came unto you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, saving Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power; that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." (1 Cor. 2: 1-5)

Here we have true ministry — "the testimony of God," and "the demonstration of the Spirit" — the Word and the Holy Ghost. Nothing else is of any value. All mere human influence, human power, and the results produced by human wisdom or energy, are perfectly worthless — yea, positively mischievous. The workman is puffed up by the apparent results of his work paraded and talked of, and the poor souls that are acted upon by this false influence are deceived, and led into an utterly false position and false profession. In a word, the whole thing is disastrous in the extreme.

Not so when the Word of God, in its mighty moral power, and the energy of the Holy Ghost, are brought to bear on the heart and conscience. Then it is we see divine results, as in the case of the Thessalonians. Then indeed it is made apparent, beyond all question, who is the workman. It is not Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, but God Himself, whose work accredits itself, and shall stand forever; all homage to His holy name! The apostle had no need to reckon up and publish the results of his work at Thessalonica, or rather God's work by his means. It spoke for itself. It was genuine. It bore, with unmistakable distinctness, the stamp of God upon it, and this was quite enough for Paul; and it is quite enough for every true-hearted, self-emptied workman. Paul preached the Word, and that Word was brought home, in the quickening energy of the Holy Ghost, to the hearts of the Thessalonians. It fell into good ground, took root, and brought fruit in abundance.

And let us mark the fruit. "Ye turned from idols." Here we have, in one word, the whole life of every unconverted man, woman, or child on the face of the earth. It is all wrapped up and presented to our view in the one expression, "idols." It is not by any means necessary to bow down to a stock or a stone in order to be an idolater. Whatever commands the heart is an idol; the yielding of the heart to that thing is idolatry, and the one who so yields it is an idolater. Such is the plain, solemn truth in this matter, however unpalatable it may be to the proud human heart. Take that one great, crying, universal sin of "covetousness." What does the inspired apostle call it? He calls it "idolatry." How many hearts are commanded by money! How many worshipers bow down before the idol of gold! What is covetousness? Either a desire to get more, or the love of what we have. We have both forms in the New Testament. The Greek has a word to represent both. But whether it be the desire to grasp, or the desire to hoard, in either case it is idolatry.

And yet the two things may be very unlike in their outward development. The former, that is, the desire to get more, may often be found in connection with a readiness to spend; the latter, on the contrary, is generally linked with an intense spirit of hoarding. There, for example, is a man of great business capacity — a thorough commercial genius — in whose hand everything seems to prosper. He has a real zest for business, an unquenchable thirst for making money. His one object is to get more, to add thousand to thousand, to strengthen his commercial foundation, and enlarge his sphere. He lives, thrives, and revels in the atmosphere of commerce.

He started on his career with a few pence in his pocket, and he has risen to the proud position of a merchant prince. He is not a miser. He is as ready to scatter as to obtain. He fares sumptuously, entertains with a splendid hospitality, gives munificently to manifold public objects. He is looked up to and respected by all classes of society.

But he loves to get more. He is a covetous man — an idolater. True, he despises the poor miser who spends his nights over his money-bags, "holding strange communion with his gold"; delighting his heart and feasting his eyes with the very sight of the fascinating dust, refusing himself and his family the common necessaries of life; going about in rags and wretchedness, rather than spend a penny of the precious hoard; who loves money, not for what it can get or give, but simply for its own sake; who loves to accumulate, not that he may spend, but that he may hoard; whose one ruling desire is to die worth so much wretched dust — strange, contemptible desire!

Now these two are apparently very different, but they meet in one point; they stand on one common platform; they are both covetous, and they are both idolaters. [The two Greek words to which we have alluded in the text: are, (pleonexia — the desire to get more), and (philarguria — the love of money). Now it is the former that occurs in Col. 3: 5 — "Covetousness, which is idolatry"; and there it stands in the terrible category with some of the very vilest sins that stain the pages of human history.] This may sound harsh and severe, but it is the truth of God, and we must bow down before its holy authority. True it is that nothing is apparently more difficult to bring home to the conscience than the sin of covetousness — that very sin which the Holy Ghost declares to be idolatry. Thousands might see it in the case of the poor degraded miser, who nevertheless would be shocked by its application to a merchant prince.

It is one thing to see it in others, and quite another to judge it in ourselves. The fact is, that nothing but the light of the Word of God shining in upon the soul, and penetrating every chamber of our moral being, can enable us to detect the hateful sin of covetousness. The pursuit of gain — the desire to have more — the spirit of commerce — the ability to make money — the desire to get on — all this is so "highly esteemed amongst men," that very few, comparatively, are prepared to see that it is positively "an abomination in the sight of God." The natural heart is formed by the thoughts of men. It loves, adores and worships the objects that it finds in this world; and each heart has its own idol. One worships gold, another worships pleasure, another worships power. Every unconverted man is an idolater; and even converted men are not beyond the reach of idolatrous influences, as is evident from the warning note raised by the venerable apostle, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." (1 John 5: 21)

Reader, will you permit us to put a plain, pointed question to you, ere we proceed further? Are you converted? Do you profess to be so? Do you take the ground of being a Christian? If so, have you turned from idols? Have you really broken with the world, and with your former self? Has the living Word of God entered your heart, and led you to judge the whole of your past life, whether it has been a life of gayety and thoughtless folly, a life of busy money-making, a life of abominable vice and wickedness, or a life of mere religious routine — Christless, faithless, worthless religion?

Say, how is it? Be thoroughly in earnest. Be assured there is an urgent demand for out-and-out earnestness in this matter. We cannot hide from you the fact that we are painfully conscious of the sad lack of thorough decision amongst us. We have not, with sufficient emphasis or distinctness, "turned from idols." Old habits are retained; former lusts and objects rule the heart. The temper, style, spirit and deportment do not bespeak conversion. We are sadly too like our former selves — too like the openly and confessedly worldly people around us.

All this is really terrible. We fear it is a sad hindrance to the progress of the gospel and the salvation of souls. The testimony falls powerless on the ears of those to whom we speak, because we do not seem as though we ourselves really believe what we are talking about. The apostle could not say to us, as he said to his dear Thessalonian converts, "From you sounded out the word of the Lord . . . so that we need not to speak anything." There is a want of depth, power and markedness in our conversion. The change is not sufficiently apparent. Even where there is a work, there is a tameness, feebleness and vagueness about it truly deplorable and discouraging.

Part 5

We are now called to consider what we may term the positive side of the great subject of conversion. We have seen that it is a turning from idols — a turning from all those objects which ruled our hearts and engaged our affections — the vanities and follies, the lusts and pleasures which made up the whole of our existence in the days of our darkness and blindness. It is, as we read in Acts 26: 18, a turning from darkness, and from the power of Satan; and, as we read in Gal. 1: 4, a turning from this present evil world.

But conversion is much more than all this. It would, in one sense, be but a poor thing if it were merely a turning "from sin, the world, and Satan." No doubt it is a signal mercy to be delivered, once and forever, from all the wretchedness and moral degradation of our former life; from the terrible thraldom of the god and prince of this world; from all the hollowness and vanity of a world that lieth in the arms of the wicked one; and from the love and practice of sin — the vile affections which once held sway over us. We cannot be too thankful for all that is included in this side of the question.

But, we repeat, there is very much more than this. The heart may feel disposed to inquire, "What have we gotten in lieu of all we have given up? Is Christianity merely a system of negations? If we have broken with the world and self — if we have given up our former pleasures and amusements — if, in short, we have turned our back upon what goes to make up life in this world, what have we instead?"

1 Thessalonians 1: 9 furnishes, in one word, the answer to all these inquiries — an answer full, clear, distinct, and comprehensive. it is — "Ye turned to God."

Precious answer! Yes, unspeakably precious to all who know aught of its meaning. What have I got instead of my former "idols"? God! Instead of this world's vain and sinful pleasures? God! Instead of its riches, honours, and distinctions? God! Oh, blessed, glorious, perfect Substitute! What had the prodigal instead of the rags of the far country? The best robe in the father's house! Instead of the swine's husks? The fatted calf of the father's providing! Instead of the degrading servitude of the far country? The father's welcome, his bosom, and his table!

Reader, is not this a blessed exchange? Have we not, in the familiar, but ever charming history of the prodigal a most touching and impressive illustration of true conversion in both its sides? May we not well exclaim, as we gaze on the inimitable picture, "What a conversion! What a turning from and turning to!" Who can utter it? What human tongue can adequately set forth the feelings of the returned wanderer when pressed to the father's bosom and bathed in the light and love of the father's house? The rags, the husks, the swine, the slavery, the cold selfishness, the destitution, the famine, the misery, the moral degradation — all gone, and gone forever; and instead thereof the ineffable delight of that bright and happy home, and, above all, the exquisite feeling that all that festive joy which surrounded him was wakened up by the very fact of his return — that it made the father glad to get him back!

But we shall, perhaps, be told that this is but a figure. Yes; but a figure of what? Of a precious, a divine reality; a figure of what takes place in every instance of true conversion, if only it be looked at from a heavenly standpoint. It is not a mere surrender of the world, with its thousand and one vanities and follies. It is this, no doubt; but it is very much more. It is being brought to God, brought home, brought to the Father's bosom, brought into the family; made — not in the language of a barren formulary, but in the power of the Spirit, and by the mighty action of the Word — a child of God, a member of Christ, and an heir of the kingdom.

This, and nothing less, is conversion. Let the reader see that he thoroughly understands it. Let him not be satisfied with anything short of this grand reality — this turning from darkness to light, from the power of Satan, and from the worship of idols, to God. The Christian is, in one sense, as really brought to God now as if he were actually in Heaven. This may seem strong, but it is blessedly true. Hear what the apostle Peter says as to this point: "Christ hath once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to" — what? Heaven when we die? Nay; but "to bring us to God" now. So, also, in Rom. 5 we read, "For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life! And not only so, but we also joy in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation. "

This is an immense principle. It is not within the compass of human language to set forth all that is involved in being "turned," or "brought to God." Our adorable Lord Jesus Christ brings all who believe in His name into God's presence, in all His own perfect acceptability. They come in all the credit, and virtue, and value of the blood of Jesus, and in all the fragrance of His most excellent name. He brings us into the very same position with Himself. He links us with Himself, and shares with us all He has, and all He is, save His Deity, which is incommunicable. We are perfectly identified with Him.

"Yet a little while, and the world seeth Me no more; but ye see Me; because I live, ye shall live also." Again, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." "These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." "Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you."

So, also, in that marvellous prayer in John 17, we read, "I have given unto them the words which Thou gavest Me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from Thee, and they have believed that Thou didst send Me. I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for them which Thou hast given Me; for they are Thine. And all Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine, and I am glorified in them." "I have given them Thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." "As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world."

"And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me. Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory which Thou hast given Me; for thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee, and these have known that Thou hast sent Me. And I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it; that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them."

Now it is utterly impossible to conceive anything higher or more blessed than this. To be so thoroughly identified with the Son of God, to be so wholly one with Him as to share in the very same love wherewith He is loved by the Father, to partake of His peace, His joy, His glory — all this involves the very highest possible measure and character of blessing with which any creature could be endowed. To be saved from the everlasting horrors of the pit of hell; to be pardoned, washed, and justified; to be reinstated in all that Adam lost; to be let into Heaven on any ground or in any character whatsoever, would be marvellous mercy, goodness, and loving-kindness; but to be brought to God in all the love and favour of His own beloved Son, to be intimately associated with Him in all His position before God — His acceptability now — His glory by and by — this, truly, is something which only the heart of God could think of, and only His mighty power accomplish.

Well, all this is involved in the conversion whereof we speak. Such is the magnificent grace of God, such the love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins, enemies in our minds by wicked works, serving divers lusts and pleasures, worshipping idols, the blind, degraded slaves of sin and Satan, children of wrath, and going straight to hell.

And the best of it all is, that it both glorifies the name and gratifies the heart of God to bring us into this place of inconceivable blessedness, love, and glory. It would not satisfy the love of His heart to give us any lower place than that of His own Son. Well might the inspired apostle exclaim, in view of all this stupendous grace, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ; according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love; having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace." (Eph. 1)

What depth of love, what fullness of blessing, have we here! It is the purpose of God to glorify Himself, throughout the countless ages of eternity, in His dealings with us. He will display, in view of all created intelligences, the riches of His grace, in His kindness toward us, by Christ Jesus. Our forgiveness, our justification, our perfect deliverance, our acceptance — all the blessings bestowed upon us in Christ — are for the display of the divine glory throughout the vast universe forever. It would not meet the claims of God's glory, or answer the affections of His heart, to have us in any other position but that of His own well-beloved and only begotten Son.

All this is marvellous. It seems too good to be true. But it is worthy of God, and it is His good pleasure so to act toward us. This is enough for us. It may be, and most assuredly is, too good for us to get, but it is not too good for God to give. He acts toward us according to the love of His heart, and on the ground of the worthiness of Christ. The prodigal might ask to be made as one of the hired servants, but this could not be. It would not be according to the Father's heart to have him in the house as a servant. It must be as a son or not at all. If it were a question of desert, we do not deserve the place of a servant any more than that of a son. But, blessed be God, it is not according to our deserts at all, but according to the boundless love of His heart, and to the glory of His holy name.

This, then, is conversion. Thus we are brought to God. Nothing short of this. We are not merely turned from our idols, whatever they were, but we are actually brought into the very presence of God, to find our delight in Him, to joy in Him, to walk with Him, to find all our springs in Him, to draw upon His exhaustless resources, to find in Him a perfect answer to all our necessities, so that our souls are satisfied, and that for ever.

Do we want to go back to the idols? Never! Have we any hankering after our former objects? Not if our hearts are realising our place and portion in Christ. Had the prodigal any longings after the husks and the swine when folded in the father's bosom, clothed in the father's house, and seated at the father's table? We do not, and cannot, believe it. We cannot imagine his heaving a single sigh after the far country when once he found himself within the hallowed circle of that bright and blissful home of love.

We speak according to the divine standard. Alas! many profess to be converted, and seem to go on for a season; but ere long they begin to grow cold, and get weary and dissatisfied. The work was not real. They were not really brought to God. Idols may have been given up for a time, but God Himself was never reached. They never found in Him a satisfying portion for their hearts — never knew the real meaning of communion with Him — never tasted heart-satisfaction, heart-rest, in Christ. Hence, in process of time, the poor heart began to long once more for the world, and back they went, and plunged into its follies and vanities with greater avidity than ever.

Such cases are very sad, very disappointing. They bring great reproach on the cause of Christ, and are used as a plea for the enemy, and as a stumbling-block for anxious inquirers. But they leave the question of divine conversion just where it was. The soul that is truly converted is one who has not merely been turned from this present evil world, and all its promises and pretensions, but who has been led by the precious ministry of the Holy Ghost to find in the living God, and in His Son Jesus Christ, all he can possibly want for time and eternity. Such an one has divinely done with the world. He has broken with it forever. He has had his eyes opened to see, through and through, the whole thing. He has judged it in the light of the presence of God. He has measured it by the standard of the cross of Christ. He has weighed it in the balances of the sanctuary, and turned his back upon it forever, to find an absorbing and a commanding object in the Person of that blessed One who was nailed to the accursed tree, in order to deliver him, not only from everlasting burnings, but also from this present evil world.

Part 6

The more we dwell on 1 Thess. 1: 9, the more we are struck with its marvellous depth, fullness, and power. It seems like sinking a shaft into an inexhaustible mine. We have dwelt a little on that very fruitful and suggestive clause, "Turned to God from idols." How much is wrapped up in it! Do we really understand the force and fullness of it? It is a wonderful thing for the soul to be brought to God — to know Him now as our resource in all our weakness and need — the spring of all our joys — our strength and shield — our Guide and Counselor — our all in all — to be absolutely and completely shut up to Him, wholly dependent upon Him.

Reader, do you know the deep blessedness of all this in your own soul? If you are a child of God, a truly converted soul, then it is your happy privilege to know it, and you ought not to be satisfied without it. If we are "turned to God," what is it for but to find in Him all we can possibly want for time and eternity? Nothing can ever satisfy the human soul but God Himself. It is not within the compass of earth to meet the cravings of the heart. If we had the wealth of the universe, and all that wealth could procure, the heart would still want more; there would still be an aching void which nothing under the sun could fill.

Look at the history of Solomon. Hear him recording his own experience. "I, the preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem; and I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven; this sore travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

"For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. I said in my heart, Go to, now, I will prove thee with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure; and behold, this also is vanity. I said of laughter, it is mad, and of mirth, what doeth it? I sought in my heart to give myself to wine, yet acquainting my heart with wisdom, and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life. I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kind of fruits, I made me pools of water, to water there with the wood that bringeth forth trees. I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also, I had great possessions of great and small cattle, above all that were in Jerusalem before me. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces; I gat me men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments and that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem; also, my wisdom remained with me. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them; I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour; and this was my portion of all my labour. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun." (Ecc. 1 — 2)

Such is the withering commentary upon all earth's resources as given by the pen of one who had all that earth could give — of one who was allowed to drain to the very dregs every cup of human and earthly pleasure. And what was it all? "Vanity and vexation of spirit." "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." The poor human heart can never be satisfied with the resources of earth. Creature streams can never quench the thirst of the immortal soul. Material things cannot possibly make us truly happy, even if they were permanent. "All is vanity and vexation of spirit."

The truth of this must be proved by every human heart. Sooner or later all must find it out. Men may turn a deaf ear to it now; they may refuse to listen to the Spirit's warning voice; they may vainly imagine that this poor world can yield them substantial comfort and happiness; they may eagerly grasp at its riches, its honours, its distinctions, its pleasures, its material comforts; but they will find out their mistake. And oh, how dreadful to find it out too late! How terrible to open one's eyes in hell, like the rich man in the parable! What human language can set forth the horrors of a soul shut out forever from the presence of God, and consigned to outer darkness, to the place of weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth? It is overwhelming to think of it. What will it be to realize it? What will it be to find oneself in the tormenting flames of hell, at the other side of that impassable gulf where a single ray of hope can never break through the deep gloom of eternity?

Oh that men would think of all this in time! that they might flee from the wrath to come, and lay hold on the blessed hope set before them in the gospel; that they might "turn to God." But alas! the god of this world blinds their minds, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine into them. He engrosses them with present things — business, money-making, pleasures, cares, lusts, anything and everything but the one thing, in comparison with which all earthly things are but as the small dust of the balance.

But we have digressed from our special theme, to which we must return.

We are particularly anxious to press upon the Christian reader the immense importance of seeking to find all his resources in the living God. We have only for a moment turned aside from this point, in order to sound a warning note in the ear of any unconverted, careless one who may happen to take up this paper. We earnestly entreat the latter to turn to God. We entreat the former to seek a deeper acquaintance with the One to whom, by grace, he has turned. We have the two things before us in penning these papers on the great subject of "conversion." We can truly say, we long to see precious souls converted to God, and we long to see converted souls happy in God.

We are increasingly convinced of the practical importance of Christians proving in their daily life that they have found thorough rest of heart in God. It has immense weight with worldly people. It is a grand point gained when we are able, through grace, to tell the world that we are independent of it; and the only way to do this is to live in the abiding sense of what we have in God. This would impart a moral elevation to our entire course and character. It would deliver us completely from that strong tendency to lean on human props and to betake ourselves to creature streams which we have all more or less to lament, and which assuredly issue in disappointment to us and dishonour to God.

How prone we are on all occasions to look to our fellow-men for sympathy, succour and counsel instead of looking directly and exclusively to God! This is a serious mistake. It is in principle to forsake the Fountain of living waters, and hew out for ourselves broken cisterns which can hold no water. What can we expect? What must be the issue? Barrenness and desolation. Our God, in very faithfulness to us, will cause our fellow-man to fail us, in order that we may learn the folly of leaning upon an arm of flesh.

Hear what the prophet says on this great practical question: "Thus saith the Lord, Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land, and not inhabited."

But mark the contrast. "Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green, and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." (Jer. 17)

Oh! reader, it is a grand reality to lean on the arm of the living God — to find in Him our relief and our resource at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. He never fails a trusting heart. He will never disappoint us. He may see fit to keep us waiting for an answer to our call, but the time we spend in waiting is well spent, and when the answer comes our hearts are filled with praise, and we are able to say, "Oh, how great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee, which Thou hast wrought for them that trust in Thee before the sons of men." (Ps. 31: 19)

It is a great thing to be able to trust God before the sons of men, to confess His sufficiency for our every exigency. But it must be a reality, and not mere profession. It is no use to talk of leaning on God while at the same time we are, in one way or another, looking to some poor mortal to help us. This is a sad delusion. But, alas! how often we fall under its power! We adopt the language of dependence upon God, but in reality we are looking to man, and letting him know our wants. We deceive ourselves and dishonour God and the end is disappointment and confusion of face.

Reader, let us look closely and honestly at this matter. Let us see to it that we understand the meaning of those precious words, "Turned to God." They contain the very essence of true happiness and true holiness. When the heart is really turned to God it has found the true, the divine secret of peace, rest and full satisfaction; it finds its all in God, and has no occasion whatever to turn to the creature. Am I in any perplexity? I can look to God for guidance. He has promised to guide me with His eye. What perfect guidance! Can man do better for me? Surely not. God sees the end from the beginning. He knows all the bearings, all the belongings, all the roots and issues of my case. He is an infallible guide. His wisdom is unerring, and, moreover, He loves me perfectly. Where could I find a better guide?

Am I in want? I can go to God about it. He is the Possessor of heaven and earth. The treasures of the universe are at His disposal. He can help me if He sees it to be good for me; and if not, the pressure will be much better for me than the relief. "My God shall supply all your need, according to His riches in glory, by Christ Jesus." Is not this enough? Why look to a creature stream? Why turn from such a God and go with our wants to a human being? It is in reality giving up, so far, the ground of faith, the life of simple dependence on God. It is actually dishonouring our Father.

If I apply to my fellow for help, it is tantamount to saying that God has failed me. It is really betraying my loving Father who has taken me up, body, soul, and spirit, to do for me for time and eternity. He has pledged Himself to provide for all my wants, be they ever so many, ever so great, ever so varied. "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not, with Him, also freely give us all things?"

But we sometimes hear people say that, the Lord has told them, or laid upon their hearts, to apply to some human resource. This is very questionable indeed. It is not at all likely that our God would ever lead us to forsake the fountain of living waters, and betake ourselves to some broken cistern. His Word is, "Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me."

True, God uses the creature to meet our need; but this is a totally different matter. The blessed apostle could say, "God who comforteth those that are cast down comforted us by the coming of Titus." Paul was looking to God for comfort, and God sent Titus to comfort him. Had Paul been looking to Titus, he would have been disappointed.

Thus it is in every case. Our immediate and exclusive reference must be to God in all our need. "We have turned to God from idols," and hence in every exigency He is our sure resource. We can go to Him for counsel, for succour, for guidance, for sympathy, for all. "My soul, wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from Him. He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my defence; I shall not be moved."

Will this most blessed habit of looking only to God lead us to undervalue the channels through which His precious grace flows to us? The very reverse. How could I undervalue one who comes to me directly from God, as His manifest instrument, to meet my need? Impossible. But I value him as a channel, instead of applying to him as a source. This makes all the difference. We must never forget that true conversion means our being brought to God; and most surely, if we are brought to God, it is in order that we should find in Him a perfect covering for our eyes, a perfect object for the heart, a perfect resource in all our exigencies, from first to last. A truly converted soul is one who is turned from all creature confidences, human hopes, and earthly expectations, to find all he wants in the living and true God, and that forever.

Part 7

We are now called to consider a deeply practical point in our subject. It is contained in the clause, "To serve the living and true God." This is full of interest to every truly converted soul, every true Christian. We are called "to serve." Our whole life, from the moment of our conversion to the close of our earthly career, should be characterised by a spirit of true, earnest, intelligent service. This is our high privilege, not to say our hallowed duty. It matters not what our sphere of action may be, what our line of life, or what our calling; when we are converted, we have just got one thing to do, namely, to serve God. If there be anything in our calling which is contrary to the revealed will of God — contrary to the direct teaching of His Word — then we must at once abandon it, cost what it may. The very first step of an obedient servant is to step out of a false position.

Suppose for example the owner of a public house is converted to God. What is he to do? Can he go on with such a business? Can he abide in such a calling with God? Can he continue in the sale of that which entails ruin, misery, degradation, death and perdition on thousands and hundreds of thousands? Can he possibly serve the living and true God in the bar of a public house?

We cannot believe it. We may be deemed harsh, severe and narrow, in writing thus. We cannot help that. We must write what we believe to be the truth. We are persuaded that the very first act of a converted public house keeper should be to shut up his shop, and turn his back, with stern decision on such a Godless and horrible calling. To talk of serving God in such an occupation, is, in our judgement, a miserable delusion.

No doubt the same may be said about many other callings, and the reader may be disposed to ask, "What is a Christian supposed to do? How can he get on?" Our answer is simply this; We are called to serve God, and everything must be tried by this standard. The Christian has to ask himself this one question, "Can I fulfil the duties of this situation to the glory of God?" If not, he must abandon it. If we cannot connect the name of God with our calling in life, then, assuredly, if we want to walk with God, if we aim at serving Him, if it be our one desire to be found well-pleasing in His sight, then we must give up that calling and look to Him to open some path for us in which we can walk to His praise.

This He will do, blessed be His name. He never fails a trusting soul. All we have to do is to cleave to Him with purpose of heart, and He will make the way plain before us. It may seem difficult at first. The path may appear narrow, rough, lonely; but our simple business is to stand for God, and not to continue for one hour in connection with anything contrary to His revealed will. A tender conscience, a single eye, a devoted heart, will settle many a question, solve many a difficulty, remove many a barrier. Indeed, the very instincts of the divine nature, if only they be allowed to act, will guide in many a perplexity. "The light of the body is the eye; therefore, when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light."

When the purpose of the heart is true to Christ, true to His name and cause, true to the service of God, the Holy Spirit opens up the precious treasures of divine revelation to the soul, and pours a flood of living light upon the understanding, so that we see the path of service as clear as a sunbeam before us, and we have only got to tread it with a firm step.

But we must never, for one moment, lose sight of the grand fact that we are converted to the service of God. The outcome of the life which we possess must ever take the form of service to the living and true God. In our unconverted days we worshipped idols, and served divers lusts and pleasures; now, on the contrary, we worship God in the Spirit, and we are called to serve Him with all our ransomed powers. We have turned to God, to find in Him our perfect rest and satisfaction. There is not a single thing in the entire range of a creature's necessities, for time and eternity, that we cannot find in our own most gracious God and Father. He has treasured up in Christ, the Son of His love, all that can satisfy the desires of the new life in us. It is our privilege to have Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith, and to be so rooted and grounded in love as to be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Thus filled, satisfied, and strengthened, we are called to dedicate ourselves, spirit, soul, and body, to the service of Christ; to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. We should have nothing else to do in this world. Whatever cannot be done as service to Christ ought not to be done at all. This simplifies the matter amazingly. It is our sweet privilege to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, and to the glory of God. We sometimes hear people speak of "a secular calling," as contrasted with what is "sacred." We question the correctness of such a distinction. Paul made tents and planted churches, but in both he served the Lord Christ.

All that a Christian does ought to be sacred, because it is done as service to God. If this were borne in mind, it would enable us to connect the very simplest duties of daily life with the Lord Himself, and to bring Him into them in such a way as to impart a holy dignity and interest to all that we have to do, from morning till night. In this way, instead of finding the duties of our calling a hindrance to our communion with God, we should actually make them an occasion of waiting on Him for wisdom and grace to discharge them aright, so that His holy name might be glorified in the most minute details of practical life.

The fact is that the service of God is a much simpler matter than some of us imagine. It does not consist in doing some wonderful things beyond the bounds of our divinely appointed sphere of action. Take the case of a domestic servant. How can she serve the living and true God? She cannot go about visiting and talking. Her sphere of action lies in the shade and retirement of her master's house. Were she to run about from house to house, she would be actually neglecting her proper work, her divinely appointed business. Harken to the following sound and wholesome words: "Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again: not purloining, but showing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things." (Titus 2: 9-10)

Here we see that the servant, by obedience, humility, and honesty can adorn the doctrine of God just as effectually, according to her measure, as an evangelist ranging the world over in the discharge of his high and holy commission.

Again, we read, "Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good-will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men; knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free." (Eph. 6)

How lovely is all this! What a fine field of service is opened up for us here! How beautiful this "fear and trembling"! Where do we see it nowadays? Where is the holy subjection to authority? Where the singleness of eye? Where the willing-hearted service? Alas! we see headiness and high-mindedness, self-will, self-pleasing, and self-interest. How must all these things dishonour the Lord, and grieve His Holy Spirit! How needful that our souls should be roused to a sense of what becomes us as those who are called to serve the living and true God! Is it not a signal mercy to every true Christian to know that he can serve and glorify God in the most commonplace domestic duties? If it were not so, what would become of ninety-nine out of every hundred Christians?

We have taken up the case of an ordinary domestic servant in order to illustrate that special line of practical truth now under our consideration. Is it not most blessed for us to know that our God graciously condescends to connect His name and His glory with the very humblest duties that can devolve upon us in our ordinary domestic life? It is this which imparts dignity, interest and freshness to every little act, from morning till night. "Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men." Here lies the precious secret of the whole matter. It is not working for wages, but serving the Lord Christ, and looking to Him to receive the reward of the inheritance.

Oh that all this were more fully realized and illustrated amongst us! What moral elevation it would give to the entire Christian life! What a triumphant answer it would furnish to the infidel! What a withering rebuke to all his sneers and cavils! Better by far than ten thousand learned arguments. There is no argument so forcible as an earnest, devoted, holy, happy, self-sacrificing Christian life, and this life can be displayed by one whose sphere of action is bounded by the four walls of a kitchen.

{It is remarkable that both in Eph. 6 and Col. 3 the address to servants is far more elaborate than to any of the other classes. In Titus 2 servants are specially singled out. There is no address to husbands, none to masters, none to children. We do not attempt to account for this, but we cannot help noticing it as a very interesting fact; and most assuredly it teaches us what a very important place is assigned in Christianity to one who, in those early days of the Church's history, occupied the place of a slave. The Holy Ghost took special pains to instruct such an one as to how he was to carry himself in his most trying sphere of work. The poor slave might think himself shut out from the service of God. So far from this, he is sweetly taught that by simply doing his duty as in the sight of God he could adorn the doctrine of God his Saviour, and bring glory to the name of Jesus. Nothing can exceed the grace that shines in this.}

And not only does the practical life of a true Christian afford the very best possible answer to the sceptic and the infidel, but it also meets in a most satisfactory manner the objections of those who talk about works, and insist upon putting Christians under the law, in order to teach them how to live. When people challenge us as to our not preaching up works, we simply ask them, "For what should we preach works?" The unconverted man cannot do any works, save "wicked works," or "dead works." "They that are in the flesh" — unconverted people — "cannot please God." Of what possible use can it be to preach works to such? It can only cast dust in their eyes, blind their minds, deceive their hearts, and send them down to hell with a lie in their right hand.

There must be a genuine conversion to God. This is a divine work from first to last. And what has the converted man got to do? He certainly has not to work for life, because he has it, even life eternal, as God's free gift, through Jesus Christ our Lord. He has not to work for salvation, because he is saved already — "saved in the Lord with an everlasting salvation." What, then, is he called to do? "To serve the living and true God." How? When? Where? In everything; at all times, and in all places. The converted man has nothing else to do but to serve God. If he does anything else, he is positively untrue, unfaithful to that blessed Lord and Master who, ere ever He called him to serve, endowed him with the life, and the grace, and the power, whereby alone the service can be rendered.

Yes, the Christian is called to serve. Let us never forget this. He is privileged to "present his body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is his reasonable [his intelligent] service." This settles the whole question. It removes all difficulties; it silences all objections; it puts everything in its right place. It is not a question of what I am doing, but how I do it — not where I am, but how I conduct myself. Christianity as displayed in the New Testament is the outcome of the life of Christ in the believer; it is Christ reproduced in the Christian's daily life, by the power of the Holy Ghost. Everything the Christian touches, everything he does, everything he says, his whole practical life, from Lord's day morning till Saturday night, should bear the impress and breathe the spirit of that great practical clause on which we have been dwelling — "serving the living and true God." May it be so more and more! May all the Lord's beloved people, everywhere, be really stirred up to seek more earnest, out-and-out, whole-hearted devotedness to Christ and His precious service!

Part 8

The last words of our chapter — 1 Thess. 1 — now claim our attention. They furnish a very striking and forcible proof of the clearness, fullness, depth and comprehensiveness of the apostle's testimony at Thessalonica, and also of the brightness and reality of the work in the young converts in that place. It was not only that they turned from idols to God, to serve the living and true God. This, through grace, they did; and that, too, with uncommon power, freshness, and fervour.

But there was something more; and we may assert, with all possible confidence, that there would have been a grand defect in the conversion and in the Christianity of those beloved disciples if that had been lacking. They were converted "to wait for the Son of God from the heavens."

Let the reader give to this very weighty fact his most devout attention. The bright and blessed hope of the Lord's coming formed an integral part of the gospel which Paul preached, and of the Christianity of those who were converted by his ministry. That blessed servant preached a full gospel. He not only declared that the Son of God had come into the world to accomplish the great work of redemption, and lay the everlasting foundation of the divine glory and counsels, but that He had gone back to the heavens, and taken His seat as the victorious, exalted and glorified Man, at the right hand of the throne of God; and that He is coming again; first, to receive His people to Himself, and conduct them into the very innermost circle of His Father's house — the place prepared for them: and then to come forth with them, to execute judgement upon His enemies — gather out of His kingdom all that offend, and all that do iniquity, and set up His glorious dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.

All this was included in the precious gospel which Paul preached, and which the Thessalonian converts received. We find an indirect but very interesting intimation of this in a passage in Acts 17, where the inspired writer records what the infidel Jews thought and said about the apostle's preaching. "But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to bring them out to the people. And when they found them not, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; whom Jason hath received; and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus."

Such were the ideas which these poor, ignorant, prejudiced unbelievers gathered from the preaching of the Lord's beloved servants; and we can see in them the elements of great and solemn truths — the complete upturning of the present system of things, and the establishment of the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. "I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more, until He come whose right it is; and I will give it Him." (Ezek. 21: 27)

But not only did the Lord's coming and kingdom occupy a prominent place in the preaching of the apostle, it also shines brilliantly forth in all his teaching. Not only were the Thessalonians converted to this blessed hope, they were built up, established, and led on in it. They were taught to live in the brightness of it every hour of the day. It was not a dry, barren dogma, to be received and held as part of a powerless, worthless creed; it was a living reality, a mighty moral power in the soul — a precious, purifying, sanctifying, elevating hope, detaching the heart completely from present things, and causing it to look out, moment by moment — yes, we repeat it with emphasis, moment by moment — for the return of our beloved Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who loved us, and gave Himself for us.

It is interesting to notice that in the two Epistles to the Thessalonians there is far more allusion to the Lord's coming than in all the other Epistles put together. This is all the more remarkable inasmuch as they were the very earliest of Paul's Epistles, and they were written to an assembly very young in the faith.

If the reader will just glance rapidly through these two most precious writings, he will find the hope of the Lord's return introduced in every one of the eight chapters, and in connection with all sorts of subjects. For example, in 1 Thess. 1 we have it presented as the grand object to be ever kept before the Christian's heart, let his position or his relationship be what it may — the brilliant light shining at the end of his long pilgrimage through this dark and toilsome world. "Ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and to wait for" — what? The time of their death? No such thing, no allusion to such a thing. Death, for the believer, is abolished, and is never presented as the object of his hope. For what, then, were the Thessalonian disciples taught to wait? "For God's Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead."

And then mark the beauteous addition! "Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come." This is the Person for whom we are waiting; our precious Saviour; our great Deliverer; the One who undertook our desperate case; who took, on our behalf, the cup of wrath from the hand of infinite Justice and exhausted it forever; who cleared the prospect of every cloud, so that we can gaze upward into Heaven, and onward into eternity, and see nothing but the brightness and blessedness of His own love and glory, as our happy home throughout the everlasting ages.

Oh, how blessed to be looking out, morning, noon, eventide, and midnight, for the coming of our gracious Deliverer! What a holy reality to be ever waiting for the return of our own loving and beloved Saviour and Lord! How separating and elevating, as we arise each morning to start on our daily course of duty — whatever that duty may be, whether the scrubbing of a floor or the preaching of the gospel — to cherish the bright and blessed hope that, ere the shades of evening gather round us, we may be summoned to ascend in the folds of the cloud of glory to meet our coming Lord!

Is this the dream of a wild fanatic or a visionary enthusiast? Nay, it is an imperishable truth, resting on the very same foundation that sustains the entire fabric of our most glorious Christianity. Is it true that the Son of God has trod this earth of ours in the person of Jesus of Nazareth? Is it true that He lived and laboured here, amid the sins and sorrows of poor, fallen humanity? Is it true that He sighed, and wept, and groaned, under the sense of the widespread desolation which sin had wrought in this world?

Is it true that He went to the cross, and there offered Himself without spot to God, in order to vindicate the Divine Majesty; to answer all the claims of the throne of God; to destroy all the works of the devil; to make a public show of all the powers of hell; to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself; to bear the sins of all those who, from the beginning to the end of time, should, through grace, believe in His name?

Is it true that He lay for three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, and on the first day of the week rose triumphant from the grave, as the Head of the new creation, and ascended into the heavens, after He had been seen by at least five hundred witnesses?

Is it true that fifty days after His resurrection He sent down the Holy Ghost, in order to fill and fit His apostles to be His witnesses to the ends of the earth? Is it true that from the day of Pentecost to this very hour He has been acting on His people's behalf as an Advocate with the Father, a great High Priest with God; interceding for us in all our failures, sins, and shortcomings, and sympathising with us in all our infirmities and in all our sorrows; and presenting continually our sacrifices of prayer and praise, in all the fragrance of His own glorious Person?

Are all these things true? Yes, thank God, they are all divinely true, all set forth in the pages of the New Testament, with most marvellous fullness, clearness, depth, and power; all rest on the solid foundation of Holy Scripture — a foundation which not all the powers of earth and hell, men and devils, can ever touch.

Well, then, the blessed hope of the Lord's coming rests on precisely the same authority. It is not more true that our Lord Jesus Christ lay as a babe in a manger of Bethlehem, that He grew up to man's estate, that He went about doing good, that he was nailed to the cross and laid in the tomb, that He is now seated on the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, than that He will come again to receive His people to Himself. He may come tonight. No one can tell when He will come, but at any moment He may come. The only thing that detains Him is His long-suffering, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. For eighteen long centuries has He waited in lingering love, mercy, and compassion; and during all that time salvation has been ready to be revealed, and God has been ready to judge; but He has waited, and He still waits, in long-suffering grace and patience.

But He will come, and we should ever live in the hope of His coming. Thus the apostle taught his beloved Thessalonians to live. Thus he lived himself. The blessed hope was intimately bound up with all the habits and feelings of his daily life. Was it a question of reaping the fruit of his labours? Hear what he says: "For what is our hope, or joy, or crown or rejoicing? Are not even ye, in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, at His coming?" He would see them all then and there. No enemy will be allowed to hinder that meeting.

"We would have come unto you, even I Paul, once and again, but Satan hindered us." Very wonderful! Very mysterious! Yet so it was. Satan hindered an angel of God in the discharge of his business in the days of Daniel; and he hindered an apostle of Christ in the accomplishment of his loving desire to see his brethren at Thessalonica. But, thanks be to God, he will not be able to hinder the joyful meeting of Christ and His saints for which we wait. What a moment that will be! What precious reunions! What sweet recognitions! What affectionate greetings of dear old friends! But, far above all, Himself! His smile! His welcome! His soul-stirring "Well done!"

What a precious, soul-sustaining hope! Need we wonder at the prominent place it occupied in the thoughts and the teachings of the blessed apostle? He recurs to it on all occasions, and in connection with every subject. Is it a question of progress in the divine life and practical godliness? Thus he puts it: "And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all, even as we do toward you; to the end He may establish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints."

Let the reader specially mark the last clause of this touching and beautiful quotation. "With all His saints." What admirable wisdom shines here! The apostle was about to touch directly upon an error into which the Thessalonian believers had fallen in reference to their departed friends. They feared that those who had fallen asleep would not participate in the joy of the Lord's coming. This error is completely demolished by that brief sentence, "with all His saints." Not one will be absent from that joyous meeting, that festive scene. Blessed assurance! Triumphant answer to all who would have us believe that none will share the joy of our Lord's coming save those who see this, that, and the other! "With all his saints," spite of their ignorance and their errors, their wanderings and their stumblings, their shortcomings and their failures. Our blessed Saviour, the everlasting Lover of our souls, will not shut any of us out at that blissful moment.

Is all this matchless grace to make us careless? God Forbid! Nay, it is the abiding sense of it which alone can keep us alive to our holy responsibility to judge everything in us and in our ways which is contrary to the mind of Christ. And not only so, but the hope of our Lord's return, if it be kept bright and fresh in the heart, must purify, sanctify and elevate our entire character and course as nothing else can. "Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure."

It is morally impossible for any one to live in the hope of seeing his Lord at any moment and yet have his heart set upon worldly things — upon money-making, self-indulgence, pleasure, vanity, folly. Let us not deceive ourselves. If we are daily looking out for the Son of God from Heaven, we must sit loose to the things of time and sense.

We may hold the doctrine of the Lord's coming as a mere dogma in the intellect; we may have the entire range of prophetic truth mapped out before our mind's eye, without its producing the smallest effect upon the heart, the character, or the practical life. But it is another thing altogether to have the whole moral being, the entire practical career, governed by the bright and blessed hope of seeing the One who loveth us and hath washed us from our sins in His own most precious blood.

Would there were more of this amongst us! It is to be feared that many of us have lost the freshness and power of our true and proper hope. The truth of the Lord's coming has become so familiar as a mere doctrine that we can flippantly speak of it, and discuss various points in connection with it, and argue with people about it, and all the while our ways, our deportment, our spirit and temper give the lie to what we profess to hold.

But we shall not pursue this sad and humbling side of the subject. May the Lord look upon us, and graciously heal, restore and lift up our souls! May He revive in the hearts of all His beloved people the proper Christian hope — the hope of seeing the bright and Morning Star. May the utterance of the whole heart and the utterance of the whole life be, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus!"

Here we must close this paper. We had hoped to turn through the two Epistles to the Thessalonians in company with our readers, in order to prove and illustrate the statement that the hope of the Lord's return was bound up in the heart of the apostle, with all the scenes, circumstances, and associations of Christian life. But we must allow the reader to do this for himself. Sufficient, we trust, has been said to show that true conversion, according to apostolic teaching, cannot stop short of the blessed hope of the Lord's coming.

A truly converted person is one who has turned from idols — has broken with the world — broken with his former self — turned to God, to find in Him all he can possibly want for time and eternity, to serve Him, and Him only — and, finally, "to wait for the Son of God from heaven." Such we conceive to be the true and proper answer to the question, "What is conversion?"

Reader, art thou converted? If not, what then? If thou art, does thy life declare it?

STEM Publishing: C. H. Mackintosh: Decision for Christ.

Decision for Christ.

C. H. Mackintosh.

In approaching the subject of "Decision for Christ," there are two or three obstacles which lie in our way — two or three difficulties which hang around the question, which we would fain remove, if possible, in order that the reader may be able to view the matter on its own proper ground, and in its own proper bearings.

In the first place, we encounter a serious difficulty in the fact that very few of us, comparatively, are in a condition of soul to appreciate the subject, or to suffer a word of exhortation thereon. We are, for the most part, so occupied with the question of our soul's salvation — so taken up with matters affecting ourselves, our peace, our liberty, our comfort, our deliverance from the wrath to come, our interest in Christ, that we have but little heart for ought that purely concerns Christ Himself — His Name — His Person — His cause — His glory.

There are, we may say, two things which lie at the foundation of all true decision for Christ, namely, a conscience purged by the blood of Jesus, and a heart that bows with reverent submission to the authority of His word, in all things. Now we do not mean to dwell upon these things in this paper; first, because we are anxious to get, at once, to our immediate theme; and, secondly, because we have so often dwelt on the subject of establishing the conscience in the peace of the gospel, and in setting before the heart the paramount claims of the word of God. We merely refer to them here for the purpose of reminding the reader that they are absolutely essential materials in forming the basis of decision for Christ. If my conscience is ill at ease, if I am in doubt as to my salvation, if I am filled with "anxious thought" as to whether I am a child of God or not, decision for Christ is out of the question. I must know that Christ died for me, before I can, intelligently and happily, live for Him.

So also, if there be any reserve in the heart as to my entire subjection to the authority of Christ as my Lord and Master; if I am keeping some chamber of my heart, be it ever so remote, ever so small, closed against the light of His word, it must, of necessity, hinder my whole-hearted decision for Him in this world. In a word, I must know that Christ is mine and I am His, ere my course down here can be one of unswerving, uncompromising decision for Him. If the reader hesitates as to this, if he is still in doubt and darkness, let him pause, and turn directly to the cross of the Son of God, and hearken to what the Holy Spirit declares as to all those who simply put their trust therein. Let him drink into his inmost soul these words, "Be it known unto you, therefore, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins; and by him, all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses." Yes, reader, these are the glad tidings for you. "All from all," by faith in a crucified and risen Lord.

But we see another difficulty in the way of our subject. We greatly fear, that while we speak of decision for Christ, some of our readers may suppose that we are contending for some notion or set of notions of our own; that we are pressing some peculiar views or principles to which we vainly and foolishly venture to apply the imposing title of "Decision for Christ." All this we do most solemnly disclaim. The words which stand at the head of this paper are the simple expression of our thesis. We do not contend for mere attachment to sect, party, or denomination, for adherence to the doctrines or commandments of men. We write in the immediate presence of Him who searcheth the hearts and trieth the reins of the children of men, and we distinctly avow that our one object is to urge upon the Christian reader the necessity of decision for Christ. We would not, if we know ourselves, pen a single line to swell the ranks of a party, or draw over adherents to any particular doctrinal creed, or any special form of church polity. We are impressed with the conviction that where Christ has His right place in the heart, all will be right; and that, where He has not, there will be nothing right. And, further, we believe that nothing but plain decision for Christ can effectually preserve the soul from the fatal influences that are at work around us in the professing Church. Mere orthodoxy cannot preserve us. Attachment to religious forms will not avail in the present fearful struggle. It is, we feel persuaded, a simple question of Christ as our life, and Christ as our object. May the Spirit of God now enable us to ponder aright the subject of "Decision for Christ!"

It is well to bear in mind that there are certain great truths — certain immutable principles — which underlie all the dispensations of God from age to age, and which remain untouched by all the failure, the folly, and the sin of man. It is on these great moral truths, these foundation principles, that faith lays hold, and in them finds its strength and its sustenance. Dispensations change and pass away — men prove unfaithful in their varied positions of stewardship and responsibility; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. It never changes, never fails. "For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven." And, again, "Thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name." Nothing can touch the eternal truth of God, and, therefore, what we want, at all times, is to give that truth its proper place in our hearts; to let it act on our conscience, form our character, and shape our way. "Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee." "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord." This is true security. Here lies the real secret of decision for Christ. What God has spoken must govern us in the most absolute manner, ere our path can be said to be one of plain decision. There may be tenacious adherence to our own notions, obstinate attachment to the prejudices of the age, a blind devotion to certain doctrines and practices resting on a traditional foundation, certain opinions which we have received to hold without ever enquiring as to whether or not there be any authority whatever for such opinions in holy scripture. There may be all this, and much more, and yet not one atom of genuine decision for Christ.

Now we feel we cannot do better than furnish our readers with an example or two drawn from the page of inspired history, which will do more to illustrate and enforce our theme than aught that we could possibly advance. And first, then, let us turn to the book of Esther, and there contemplate, for a few moments, the instructive history of

"MORDECAI THE JEW."

This very remarkable man lived at a time in which the Jewish economy had failed through the unfaithfulness and disobedience of the Jewish people. The Gentile was in power. The relationship between Jehovah and Israel could no longer be publicly acknowledged. The faithful Jew had but to hang his harp on the willows, and sigh over the faded light of other days. The chosen seed were in exile; the city and temple where their fathers worshipped were in ruins, and the vessels of the Lord's house were in a strange land. Such was the outward condition of things in the day in which Mordecai's lot was cast. But, in addition to this, there was a man, very near the throne, occupying only the second place in the empire, sitting beside the very fountain-head of authority, possessing princely wealth, and wielding almost boundless influence. To this great man, strange to say, the poor exiled Jew sternly refuses to bow. Nothing will induce him to yield a single mark of respect to the second man in the kingdom. He will save the life of Ahasuerus; but he will not bow to Haman.

Reader, why was this? Was this blind obstinacy or bold decision — which? In order to determine this we must enquire as to the real root or principle of Mordecai's acting. If, indeed, there was no authority for his conduct in the law of God, then must we at once pronounce it to have been blind obstinacy, foolish pride, or, it may be, envy of a man in power. But if, on the other hand, there be within the covers of the five inspired books of Moses, a plain authority for Mordecai's deportment in this matter, then must we, without hesitation, pronounce his conduct to have been the rare and exquisite fruit of attachment to the law of his God, and uncompromising decision for Him and His holy authority.

This makes all the difference. If it be merely a matter of private opinion — a question concerning which each one may lawfully adopt his own view — then, verily, might such a line of conduct be justly termed the most narrow-minded bigotry. We hear a great deal, now-a-days, about narrow-mindedness on the one hand, and large-heartedness on the other. But, as a Roman orator, over two thousand years ago, exclaimed in the senate-house of Rome, "Conscript Fathers, long since, indeed, we have lost the true names of things;" so may we, in the bosom of the professing Church, at the close of the nineteenth century, repeat, with far greater force, "Long since we have lost the true names of things." For what do men now call bigotry and narrow-mindedness? A faithful clinging to, and carrying out of, "Thus saith the Lord." And what do they designate large-heartedness? A readiness to sacrifice truth on the altar of politeness and civility.

Reader, be thou fully assured that thus it is at this solemn moment. We do not want to be sour or cynical, morose or gloomy. But we must speak the truth, if we are to speak at all. We desire that the tongue may be hushed in silence, and the pen may drop from the hand, if we could basely cushion the plain bold, unvarnished truth, through fear of scattering my readers, or to avoid the sneer of the infidel. We cannot shut our eyes to the solemn fact that God's truth is being trampled in the dust; that the Name of Jesus is despised and rejected. We have only to pass from city to city, and from town to town, of highly-favoured England, and read upon the walls the melancholy proofs of the truth of our assertions. Truth is flung aside, in cold contempt. The Name of Jesus is little set by. On the other hand, man is exalted, his reason deified, his will indulged. Where must all this end? "In the blackness of darkness for ever."

How refreshing, in the face of all this, to ponder the history of Mordecai the Jew! It is very plain that he knew little and cared less about the thoughts of men on the question of narrow-mindedness. He obeyed the word of the Lord, and this we must be allowed to call real breadth of mind — true largeness of heart. For what, after all, is a narrow mind? A narrow mind we hold to be a mind which refuses to open itself to admit the truth of God. And what, on the contrary, is a large and liberal heart? A heart expanded by the truth and grace of God. Let us not be scared away from the path of plain decision, by the scornful epithets which men have bestowed upon that path. It is a path of peace and purity, a path where the light of an approving conscience is enjoyed, and upon which the beams of divine favour ever pour themselves in undimmed lustre.

But why did Mordecai refuse to bow to Haman? Was there any great principle at stake? Was it merely a whim of his own? Had he a "Thus saith the Lord" for his warrant in refusing a single nod of the head to the proud Amalekite? Yes. Let us turn to the seventeenth chapter of the book of Exodus, and there we read, "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. And Moses built an altar and called the name of it Jehovah-nissi; for he said, Because the Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation."

[It is deeply interesting to note that neither the Jews' best Friend, nor their worst enemy is once formally named in the Book of Esther; but faith could recognize both the one and the other.]

Here, then, was Mordecai's authority for not bowing to Haman the Agagite. A faithful Jew could not do reverence to one with whom Jehovah was at war. The heart might plead a thousand excuses and urge a thousand reasons. It might seek an easy path for itself on the plea that the Jewish system was in ruins, and the Amalekite in power, and that therefore it was worse than useless, yea, it was positively absurd, to maintain such lofty ground when the glory of Israel was gone, and the Amalekite was in the place of authority. "Of what use," it might be argued, "can it be to hold up the standard when all is gone to pieces? You are only making your degradation more remarkable by the pertinacious refusal to bow your head. Would it not be better to give just one nod? That will settle the matter. Haman will be satisfied, and you and your people will be safe. Do not be obstinate. Show a tendency to be courteous. Do not stand up, in that dogged way, for a thing so manifestly non-essential. Besides, you should remember that the command in Exodus 17 was only to be rehearsed in the ears of Joshua, and only had its true application in his bright and palmy days. It was never meant for the ears of an exile, never intended to apply in the days of Israel's desolation."

All this, and much beside, might have been urged on Mordecai; but, ah! the answer was simple: "God hath spoken. This is enough for Me. True, we are a scattered people; but the word of the Lord is not scattered. He has not reversed His word about Amalek, nor entered into a treaty of peace with him. Jehovah and Amalek are still at war, and Amalek stands before me in the person of this haughty Agagite. How can I bow to one with whom Jehovah is at war? How can I do homage to a man whom the faithful Samuel would hew in pieces before the Lord?" "Well, then," it might be further urged upon this devoted Jew, "you will all be destroyed. You must either bow or perish." The answer is still most simple: "I have nothing to do with consequences. They are in the hand of God. Obedience is my path, the results are with Him. It is better to die with a good conscience than live with a bad one. It is better to go to heaven with an uncondemning heart, than remain upon earth with a heart that would make me a coward. God has spoken. I can do no otherwise. May the Lord help me! Amen."

Oh! how well we can understand the mode in which this faithful Jew would be assaulted by the enemy. Nothing but the grace of God can ever enable any one to maintain a deportment of unflinching decision, at a moment in which everything within and around is against us. True it is, we know that it is better to suffer anything than deny our Lord, or fly in the face of His commandments; but yet how little are some of us prepared to endure a single sneer, a single scornful look, a single contemptuous expression, for Christ's sake. And, perhaps, there are few things harder, for some of us at least, to bear than to be reproached on the ground of narrow-mindedness and bigotry. We naturally like to be thought large-hearted and liberal. We like to be accounted men of enlightened mind, sound judgement, and comprehensive grasp. But we must remember that we have no right to be liberal at our Master's expense. We have simply to obey.

Thus it was with Mordecai. He stood like a rock and allowed the whole tide of difficulty and opposition to roll over him. He would not bow to the Amalekite, let the consequence be what it might. Obedience was his path. The results were with God. And look at the result! In one moment, the tide was turned. The proud Amalekite fell from his lofty eminence, and the exiled Jew was lifted from his sackcloth and ashes and placed next the throne. Haman exchanged his wealth and dignities for a gallows; Mordecai exchanged his sackcloth for a royal robe.

Now it may not always happen that the reward of simple obedience will be as speedy and as signal as in Mordecai's case. And, moreover, we may say that we are not Mordecais, nor are we placed in his position. But the principle holds good whoever and wherever we are. There is not one of us, however obscure or insignificant, that has not a sphere within which our influence is felt for good or for evil. And, besides, independent altogether of our circumstances and the apparent results of our conduct, we are called upon to obey implicitly the word of the Lord — to have His word hidden in our hearts — to refuse, with unswerving decision, to do or to say aught that the word of the living God condemns. "How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" This should be the language, whether it be the question of a child tempted to steal a lump of sugar, or the most momentous step in evil that one can be tempted to take. The strength and moral security of Mordecai's position lay in this fact, that he had the word of God for his authority. Had it not been so, his conduct would have been senseless in the extreme. To have refused the usual expression of respect to one in high authority, without some weighty reason, could only be regarded as the most unmeaning obstinacy. But the moment you introduce a "Thus saith the Lord," the matter is entirely changed. The word of the Lord endureth for ever. The divine testimonies do not fade away or change with the times and seasons. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but one jot or one tittle of what our God hath spoken shall never pass away. Hence, what had been rehearsed in the ears of Joshua, as he rested in triumph under the banner of Jehovah, was designed to govern the conduct of Mordecai, though clothed in sackcloth as an exile, in the city of Shushan. Ages and generations had passed away; the days of the Judges and the days of the Kings had run their course; but the commandment of the Lord with respect to Amalek had lost — could lose — none of its force. "The Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war with Amalek;" not merely in the days of Joshua, nor in the days of the Judges, nor in the days of the Kings, but "from generation to generation." Such was the record — the imperishable and immutable record of God, and such was the plain, solid and unquestionable foundation of Mordecai's conduct.

And here let us say a few words as to the immense importance of entire submission to the word of God. We live in a day which is plainly marked by strong self-will. Man's reason, man's will, and man's interest are working together, with appalling success to ignore the authority of holy scripture. So long as the statements of the word of God chime in with man's reason, so long as they do not run counter to His will, and are not subversive of his interests, so long he will tolerate them, or it may be he will quote them with a measure of respect, or, at least, with self-complacency; but the moment it becomes a question of Scripture versus reason, will, or interest, the former is either silently ignored or contemptuously rejected. This is a very marked and solemn feature of the days that are now passing over our heads. It behoves Christians to be aware of it, and to be on their watchtower. We fear that very few comparatively are truly alive to the real state of the moral atmosphere which enwraps the religious world. We do not refer here so much to the bold attacks of infidel writers. To these we have alluded elsewhere. What we have now before us is rather the cool indifference, on the part of professing Christians, as to scripture; the little power which pure truth wields over the conscience; the way in which the edge of scripture is blunted or turned aside. You quote passage after passage from the inspired Volume, but it seems like the pattering of rain upon the window; the reason is at work, the will is dominant, interest is at stake, human opinions bear sway, God's truth is practically, if not in so many words, set aside.

All this is deeply solemn. We know of few things more dangerous than intellectual familiarity with the letter of Scripture where the spirit of it does not govern the conscience, form the character, and shape the way. We want to tremble at the word of God, to bow down, in reverential submission, to its holy authority, in all things. A single line of scripture ought to be sufficient for our souls, on any point, even though, in carrying it out, we should have to move athwart the opinions of the highest and best of men. May the Lord raise up many faithful and true-hearted witnesses in these last days — men like the faithful Mordecai, who would rather ascend a gallows than bow to an Amalekite.

For the further illustration of our theme, we shall ask the reader to turn to the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel. There is a special charm and interest in the history of these living examples presented to us in the Holy Scriptures. They tell us how the truth of God was acted upon, in other days, by men of like passions with ourselves; they prove to us that in every age there have been men who so prized the truth, so reverenced the word of the living God, that they would rather face death, in its most appalling forms, than depart one hair's breadth from the narrow line laid down by the authoritative voice of their Lord and Master. It is healthful to be brought in contact with such men — healthful at all times, but peculiarly so in days like the present, when there is so much laxity and easy-going profession — so much of mere theory — when every one is allowed to go his own way, and hold his own opinion, provided always that he does not interfere with the opinions of his neighbour — when the commandments of God seem to have so little weight, so little power over the heart and conscience. Tradition will get a hearing; public opinion will be respected; anything and everything, in short, but the plain and positive statements of the word of God, will get a place in the thoughts and opinions of men. At such a time, it is we repeat, at once healthful and edifying to muse over the history of men like Mordecai the Jew, and Daniel the prophet, and scores of others, in whose estimation a single line of holy scripture rose far above all the thoughts of men, the decrees of governors, and the statutes of kings, and who declared plainly that they had nothing whatever to do with consequences where the word of the Lord was concerned. Absolute submission to the divine command is that which alone becomes the creature.

It is not, be it observed and well remembered, that any man or any number of men have any right to demand subjection to their decisions or decrees; this would be most strongly deprecated. No man has any right to enforce his opinions upon his fellow. This is plain enough, and we have to bless God for the inestimable privilege of civil and religious liberty, as enjoyed under the government of England. But what we urge upon our readers, just now, is plain decision for Christ, and implicit subjection to His authority, irrespective of everything, and regardless of consequences. This is what we do most earnestly desire for ourselves and for all the people of God, in these last days. We long for that condition of soul, that attitude of heart, that quality of conscience, which shall lead us to bow down in implicit subjection to the commandments of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. No doubt there are difficulties, stumbling blocks, and hostile influences to be encountered. It may be said, for instance, that "It is very difficult for one, now-a-days, to know what is really true and right. There are so many opinions and so many ways, and good men differ so in judgement about the simplest and plainest matters, and yet they all profess to own the Bible as the only standard of appeal; and, moreover, they all declare that their one desire is to do what is right, and to serve the Lord, in their day and generation. How, then, is one to know what is true or what is false, seeing that you will find the very best of men ranged on opposite sides of the same question?"

The answer to all this is very simple. "If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light." But most assuredly my eye is not single if I am looking at men, and reasoning on what I see in them. A single eye rests simply on the Lord and His word. Men differ, no doubt — they have differed, and they ever will differ; but I am to hearken to the voice of my Lord and do His will. His word is to be my light and my authority, the girdle of my loins in action, the strength of my heart in service, my only warrant for moving hither and thither, the stable foundation of all my ways. If I were to attempt to shape my way according to the thoughts of men, where should I be? How uncertain and unsatisfactory would my course be! Thank God, He has made it all plain — so plain that the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein; and all I want is a single eye, a subject will, a teachable spirit, to be led aright. If I really want to be guided aright, my God will surely guide me; but if I am looking to men, if I am governed by mixed motives, if I am seeking my own ends and interests, if I am seeking to please my fellows, then, undoubtedly, my body shall be full of darkness, heavy clouds shall settle down upon my pathway, and uncertainty mark all my goings.

Christian reader, think of these things. Think deeply upon them. Depend upon it, they have a just claim upon your attention. Do you earnestly desire to follow your Lord? Do you really aim at something beyond mere empty profession, cold orthodoxy, or mechanical religiousness? Do you sigh for reality, depth, energy, fervour, and whole heartedness? Then make Christ your one object, His word your rule, His glory your aim. Oh! that thus it may be with the writer and the reader of these lines. Alas! alas! how we have failed in these things, God only knows. But, blessed be His Name, there is full forgiveness with Him, and He giveth more grace, so that we can count upon Him to restore our souls, to revive His work in our hearts, and grant us a closer walk with Him than we have ever known before. May the blessed Spirit be pleased to use for the furtherance of these ends our meditation on the interesting narrative of

"DANIEL THE PROPHET."

"It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom an hundred and twenty princes, which should be over the whole kingdom; and over these, three presidents, of whom Daniel was first; that the princes might give accounts unto them and the king should have no damage. Then this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes, because an excellent spirit was in him; and the king thought to set him over the whole realm. Then the presidents and princes sought to find occasion against Daniel concerning the kingdom; but they could find none occasion or fault; forasmuch as he was faithful, neither was there any error or fault found in him." (Dan. 6: 1-4)

What a testimony! How truly refreshing to the heart! "No error or fault!" Even his most bitter enemies could not put their finger upon a single blemish in his character, or a flaw in his practical career. Truly this was a rare and admirable character — a bright witness for the God of Israel, even in the dark days of the Babylonish captivity — an unanswerable proof of the fact that no matter where we are situated, or how we are circumstanced, no matter how unfavourable our position, or how dark the day in which our lot is cast, it is our happy privilege so to carry ourselves, in all the details of daily life, as to give no occasion to the enemy to speak reproachfully.

How sad when it is otherwise! How humiliating when those who make a high profession are found constantly breaking down in the most commonplace affairs of domestic and commercial life! There are few things which more tend to discourage the heart than to hear — as, alas! one so often does — that Christians, so-called, are the most unsatisfactory persons to have any dealings with — that they are bad masters, or bad servants, or bad tradesmen — that they do not attend to their business, that they charge higher prices and give worse value than those who make no profession at all. It is most deplorable when any just ground is afforded for such statements.

No doubt worldly people are only too ready to find occasion against those who profess the Name of Jesus; and, further, we have to remember that there are two sides to every question, and that, very frequently, a broad margin must be left for exaggeration, high colouring, and false impressions. But still, it is the Christian's plain duty so to walk in every position and relationship of life, as that "no error or fault" may be found in him. We should not make any excuses for ourselves. The duties of our situation, whatever it may happen to be, should be scrupulously performed. A careless manner, a slovenly habit, an unprincipled mode of acting, on the part of a Christian, is a serious damage to the cause of Christ, and a dishonour to His holy name. And, on the other hand, diligence, earnestness, punctuality, and fidelity, bring glory to that Name. And this should ever be the Christian's object. He should not aim at his own interest, his own reputation, or his own progress, in seeking to carry himself aright in his family and in his calling in life. True, it will promote his interest, establish his reputation, and further his progress, to be upright and diligent in all his ways; but none of these things should ever be his motive. He is to be ever and only governed by the one thing, namely, to please and honour his Lord and Master. The standard which the Holy Ghost has set before us, as to all these things, is furnished in the words of the epistle to the Philippians: "That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world." We should not be satisfied with anything less than this. "They could find none occasion nor fault, forasmuch as he was faithful, neither was there any error or fault found in him." Noble testimony! Would that it were more called forth, in this our day, by the deportment, the habits, the temper, and ways of all those who profess and call themselves Christians.

But there was one point in which Daniel's enemies felt they could lay hold of him. "Then said these men, We shall not find any occasion against this Daniel, except we find it against him concerning the law of his God." Here was a something in the which occasion might be found to ruin this beloved and honoured servant of God. It appears that Daniel had been in the habit of praying three times a day, with his window open toward Jerusalem. This fact was well known, and was speedily laid hold of, and turned to account. "Then these presidents and princes assembled together to the king, and said thus unto him, king Darius, live for ever. All the presidents of the kingdom, the governors, and the princes, the counsellors, and the captains, have consulted together to establish a royal statute, and to make a firm decree, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any god or man for thirty days, save of thee, O king, he shall be cast into the den of lions. Now, O king, establish the decree, and sign the writing, that it be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. Wherefore king Darius signed the writing and the decree."

Here, then, was a deep plot, a subtle snare, laid for the blameless and harmless Daniel. How would he act in the face of all this? Would he not feel it right to lower the standard? Well, if the standard were something of his own, he might surely lower it, and perhaps he ought. But if it were something divine — if his conduct were based upon the truth of God, then clearly it was his place to hold it up as high as ever, regardless of statutes, decrees, and writings established, signed, and countersigned. The whole question hinged upon this. Just as in the case of Mordecai the Jew, the question hinged upon the one point of whether he had any divine warrant for refusing to bow to Haman; so, in the case of Daniel the prophet, the question was, had he any divine authority for praying toward Jerusalem. It certainly seemed strange and odd. Many might have felt disposed to say to him, "Why persist in this practice? What need is there for opening your window and praying toward Jerusalem, in such a public manner? Can you not wait until night has drawn her sable curtain around you, and your closet door has shut you in, and then pour out your heart to your God? This would be prudent, judicious, and expedient. And, surely, your God does not exact this of you. He does not regard time, place, or attitude. All times and places are alike to Him. Are you wise — are you right, in persisting in such a line of action, under such circumstances? It was all well enough before this decree was signed, when you could pray when and as you thought right; but now it does seem like the most culpable fatuity and blind obstinacy to persevere; it is as though you really courted martyrdom."

All this, and much more we may easily conceive, might be suggested to the mind of the faithful Jew; but still the grand question remained, "What saith the scripture?" Was there any divine reason for Daniel's praying toward Jerusalem? Assuredly there was! In the first place, Jehovah had said to Solomon, in reference to the temple at Jerusalem, "Mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually." Jerusalem was God's centre. It was, it is, and ever shall be. True, it was in ruins — the temple was in ruins; but God's word was not in ruins, and here is faith's simple but solid warrant. King Solomon had said, at the dedication of the temple, hundreds of years before Daniel's time, "If thy people sin against thee, (for there is no man that sinneth not,) and thou be angry with them, and deliver them over before their enemies, and they carry them away captive unto a land far off or near. Yet if they bethink themselves in the land whither they are carried captive, and turn and pray unto thee, in the land of their captivity, saying, We have sinned, we have done amiss, and have dealt wickedly; if they return to thee with all their heart and with all their soul in the land of their captivity, whither they have carried them captive, and pray toward their land, which thou gavest unto their fathers, and toward the city which thou hast chosen, and toward the house which I have built for thy name: then hear thou from the heavens, even from thy dwelling-place, their prayer and their supplications, and maintain their cause, and forgive thy people which have sinned against thee." (2 Chr. 6: 36-39)

Now this was precisely what Daniel was doing — this was the ground he took. He was a captive exile, but his heart was at Jerusalem, and his eyes followed his heart. If he could not sing the songs of Zion, he could at least breathe his prayers toward Zion's hill. If his harp was on the willows at Babylon, his fond affections turned toward the city of God, now a heap of ruins, but ere long to be an eternal excellency, the joy of the whole earth. It mattered not to him that a decree had been signed by earth's greatest monarch, forbidding him to pray toward the city of his fathers and to his fathers' God. It mattered not to him that the lions' den was yawning to receive him, and the lions' jaws ready to devour him. Like his brother Mordecai, he had nothing to do with consequences. Mordecai would rather mount the gallows than bow to Haman, and Daniel would rather descend to the lions' den than cease to pray to Jehovah. These, surely, were the worthies — the spiritual giants of other days. They were men of the right stamp — real, downright, thorough-going men — men whose hearts and consciences were governed absolutely by the word of God. The world may dub them bigots and fools; but, oh! how the heart does long for such bigots and fools, in these days of false liberality and wisdom!

It might have been said to Mordecai and Daniel that they were contending for mere trifles — for things wholly indifferent and non-essential. This is an argument often used; but, ah! it has no weight with an honest and a devoted heart. Indeed there is nothing more contemptible, in the judgement of every true lover of Jesus, than the principle that regulates the standard as to essentials and non-essentials. For, what is it? Simply this, "All that concerns my salvation is essential; all that merely affects the glory of Christ is nonessential." How terrible is this! Reader, dost thou not utterly abhor it? What! shall we accept salvation as the fruit of our Lord's death, and deem aught that concerns Him non-essential? God forbid. Yea; rather let us entirely reverse the matter, and regard all that concerns the honour and glory of the Name of Jesus, the truth of His word, and the integrity of His cause, as vital, essential, and fundamental; and all that merely concerns ourselves as non-essential and indifferent. May God grant us this mind! May nothing be deemed trivial by us which has for its foundation the word of the living God!

Thus it was with those devoted men whose history we have been glancing at. Mordecai would not bow his head, and Daniel would not close his window. Blessed men! The Lord be praised for such, and for the inspired record of their actings. Mordecai would rather surrender life than diverge from the truth of God, and Daniel would rather do the same than turn away from God's centre. Jehovah had said that He would have war with Amalek from generation to generation, and therefore Mordecai would not bow. Jehovah had said of Jerusalem, "Mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually;" therefore Daniel would not cease to pray toward that blessed centre. The word of the Lord endureth for ever, and faith takes its stand on that imperishable foundation. There is an eternal freshness about every word that has come forth from the Lord. His truth holds good throughout all generations; its bloom can never be brushed away, its light can never fade, its edge can never be blunted. All praise be to His holy name!

But let us look, for a moment, at the result of Daniel's faithfulness. The king was plunged into the deepest grief when he discovered his mistake. "He was sore displeased with himself." So well he might. He had fallen into a snare; but Daniel was in good keeping. It was all right with him. "The name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous runneth into it, and is safe." It matters not whether it be a lion's den at Babylon or a prison at Philippi, faith and a good conscience can make a man happy in either. We question if Daniel ever spent a happier night on this earth, than the night which he spent in the lions' den. He was there for God, and God was there with him. He was there with an approving conscience and an uncondemning heart. He could look up from the very bottom of that den straight into heaven, yea, that den was heaven upon earth to his happy spirit. Who would not rather be Daniel in the den than Darius in the palace? The one, happy in God, the other "sore displeased with himself." Darius would have every one pray to him; Daniel would pray to none but God. Darius was bound by his own rash decree; Daniel was bound only by the word of the living God. What a contrast!

And then see in the end what signal honour was put upon Daniel. He stood publicly identified with the one living and true God. "O Daniel," cried the king, "servant of the living God." Truly he had earned this title for himself. He was, unquestionably, a devoted and decided servant of God. He had seen his three brethren cast into a furnace because they would worship only the true God, and he had been cast into the lions' den because he would pray only to Him; but the Lord had appeared for them and him, and given them a glorious triumph. He had allowed them to realize that precious promise made of old to their fathers, that they should be the head and their enemies the tail; that they should be above and their enemies below. Nothing could be more marked — nothing could more forcibly illustrate the value which God puts upon plain decision and true-hearted devotedness, no matter where, when, or by whom exhibited.

Oh! for an earnest heart in this day of lukewarmness! O Lord, revive thy work!

STEM Publishing: J. G. Bellett: Different Conversions.

Different Conversions.

J. G. Bellett.

It is sweet to inspect the way in which the light of God approaches and enters the soul. Sometimes it is gentle, sometimes it is full of force and rapidity; sometimes it intimates a work more fully on the heart; and sometimes a work more on the conscience or understanding. But it is always God's work, that we know, though the material operated upon may be various, and the mode of operation various.

Look at Acts 8: 9, 10. The Eunuch was evidently in the hand of God ere Philip met him – he was under the drawings of the Father (John 6: 44). And that his heart was deeply engaged is evident, because he forgot the common order, as I may say, of the world, when he bid Philip come up to him in his chariot. He waited for no introduction. The stranger was no stranger, since he referred to that subject which at that moment was everything to his heart. He was another Zaccheus, who forgot his place in society, and pressed through the crowd after Jesus.

Look at Saul. He was full of religious zeal – the zeal of an inquisitor. Look at Cornelius. He was full of religious devotion – gentle, benevolent, disposed (instead of persecuting others) to judge that all others were better than himself.

Here were different materials, and the mode of operation on them was different. The work was carried on in Saul's soul with characteristic force – that in Cornelius's with like gentleness and grace. But both of them equally needed Jesus. There was no life in either or for either, but through Jesus.

So the jailer and Lydia in Acts 16, Lydia was something of a female Cornelius. She was devout, and gentle, and gracious, and the Lord, by a very gentle operation, opened her heart. The jailer was a kind of Saul, at least in his apprenticeship; he was beginning to practise his hand in that work of persecution with which Saul had been long familiar. But as far as he had gone, he had learnt his art well, and the operation on him, like that on Saul of Tarsus, was in characteristic force. An earthquake accompanied the unlocking of the bars of his strong and iron heart, as "the still small voice" had done the business with Lydia's.

But again; neither the gentle Lydia nor the fiery jailer could do without Jesus. Till Lydia knew Jesus, Paul could teach her; but he did not worship with her, though she was a devout woman. (See vv. 13, 16).

May the souls of sinners be precious in our sight! and these witnesses of the grace of God, and of the power of the Spirit, be acceptable to our hearts.

STEM Publishing: Norman Anderson: "The Gospel of God"

"The Gospel of God"

Romans 1: 1 to 5: 2.

N. Anderson.

The Roman epistle is the epistle for the teaching of the gospel. It is the gospel of God. How wonderful it is that God has been pleased to speak to man in the way of glad tidings, for that is what gospel means. These glad tidings have a focal point. Coming as they do from the heart of God they focus our attention upon a real living Person. This immediately distinguishes the gospel from everything which makes a bid for the ears of men. It is "concerning His Son." The Son is quickly identified for us, being "Jesus Christ." As the Son of God is the theme of the gospel we may expect some unfolding of the love of God, and we later read that "God commendeth His love towards us." Who more able to make known the heart of God than the Son who has ever subsisted in the sweetness and love of eternal relationship?

"Jesus" is His personal name. Given to Him in His incarnation, bringing before us thoughts of His lowliness and humility; at the same time bespeaking His glory and grace, for JESUS means Jehovah the Saviour.

"Christ" is an official title. He is God's anointed Man. As such He shall give effect to the will of God by so establishing His righteousness that blessing might freely flow to those who deserve only eternal judgment. The gospel then concerns  "His Son Jesus Christ our Lord."

I wonder if we are all united in owning His as "our Lord"? Is He your Lord? Is He my Lord? Thank God, through grace I do truly say He is my Lord. Later in the epistle (Romans 10: 9) a well known verse — would to God its truth and power were as familiar as the words — "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God has raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved."

Yes, saved, by the grace of God! The Saviour in His incarnation came of David's royal line. This made Him available to all that are of Israel, thus the note is sounded forth — "to the Jew first."

Then the declaration has been made that He is Son of God. We are not all of Israel but we are all, because of sin, under the power of death, hence the Son of God is available for all, and the declaration is to the effect that He is — "Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from (of) the dead."

How unlike the first man! Christ's life and ways were all marked by holiness as the first man had been marked by sin. Death is the king of terrors and defeats us all. The Son of God has again and again demonstrated His death-conquering power. For instance at the tomb of Lazarus — "Come forth, and he that was dead came forth."

We learn in Romans that death came in by sin, and we are now introduced to Him who is able to deliver from death because He has dealt with the sin question.

The gospel then concerns this One who has made known the love of God and has brought life in where death had reigned.

The gospel which thus presents Him brings before us the fact that man has been on trial for long centuries and has been proved guilty, helpless, hopeless, sinful wreck, absolutely incapable of extricating himself from the position in which sin had enslaved him, incapable too, of expiating his guilt. The law has come in and can only accuse and condemn, and no flesh is justified by the deeds of the law. This is the crowning conclusion of Romans 1 and 2 with the first half of Romans 3. Man is indicted before God, and the whole world is brought in guilty! Well, if we cannot deal with our guilt what is to be done? We can do nothing! The sooner we accept this the better for us. If anything needs to be done the only One who can do it is the One against whom we have sinned.

Thank God, there is in the gospel the revelation of righteousness of God. He has established His right to bless and justify those who, by sinning, had established their right to be forever damned. And He has done it on a righteous basis, and that the finished work of Christ on the cross. God has manifested His righteousness apart from the law and it is not by works but "by the faith of Jesus Christ," and it is "unto all" — this is the scope of the gospel. All have a common need for "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Truly "There is no difference." All are guilty before God. How large-hearted He is, His righteousness is "unto all." To the Jew who thought he was religiously near, and to the Gentile who was "afar off," whether he knew it or cared about it or not. But His righteousness is only "upon all them that believe."

This is the application of it. Only those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ are in the benefit of the gospel. How blessed then is the fact that God has revealed His righteousness in the gospel. He has a right to judge us; what we have done by sinning against Him affords Him the right to banish us for ever. But wonder of wonders, He has established His right to bless us by what Christ has done. What we never could have done for ourselves in an eternity of endeavour God has done for us through that one act of sacrifice at the cross. The application of this through the gospel is to "him which believeth in Jesus." If then we have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as our own personal Saviour we stand before God in righteousness; we are justified and have been cleared from every charge of sinning that could be levelled against us — indeed God Himself could not charge us for He has cleared us! In Romans 3 we learn on what ground God has done this. Let it be emphasised that we have not merited it, for "all have sinned."

This then is said of those who have believed the gospel, "Being justified freely" nothing to pay. Had we been asked to pay we should have been lost for ever. We read in the parable of the two debtors in Luke 7, "and when they had nothing to pay, He frankly forgave them both." It is all the free-giving of God — "by His grace."

But there was a price to be paid, however much beyond men. Jesus has paid it all — yes, "all to Him I owe." The matter of our guilt has been thoroughly dealt with, God has not closed His eyes to it, His grace which reaches out to justify the guilty does so on a stable, incontrovertible foundation, the righteous basis of Christ's finished work. So it is "through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God has set forth to be a propitiation (or, a Mercy Seat) through faith in His blood."

In the tabernacle in the wilderness the Mercy Seat was the throne of God. There His claims were met by the blood of sacrifice which was sprinkled upon and before the Mercy Seat. There was the righteous meeting place between God and the mediator of the Old Covenant, Moses. Christ, the Mercy Seat, is the meeting place now for God and the sinner. God has set Him forth in this way, "through faith in His blood."

His life has been given in sacrifice that the claims of God may be fully met and that men might be enabled to meet Him in righteousness. On this ground is God's righteousness in forgiving guilty sinners declared. "To declare His righteousness: for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God: to declare, I say, at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the Justifier of him which believeth in Jesus."

This teaches that every sin forgiven in Old Testament times was so, prospectively, in anticipation of the finished work of Christ; and  "at this time" refers to this present time since Christ was crucified. Those who now trust the Saviour are justified — made right with and by God who is righteous — right in everything He does. Christ's precious blood has opened a righteous way back to God for guilty sinners. Let us thank God for such amazing grace to the guilty and take our place with all who believe the gospel of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

NOV/DEC 1973

As we travel through this wonderful epistle we learn from Romans 4 that two examples are adduced by the Spirit of God to demonstrate the truth of justification by faith. Abraham, the father of all who believe, came to God in faith, and "his faith was counted for righteousness."

As to David, the second example, he was the fountain head of the kingdom; as Abraham was the fountain head of promise. David describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness without works. This, of course, is the great theme of this chapter — being made righteous before God without works, on the principle of faith alone. David said, "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." Abraham illustrates the blessing of "him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly."

He and David, both pillars in the history of God's earthly people, emphasise the blessedness of those who come to God pleading no merit of their own. We conclude then that a man is justified by faith without works at all, without law works or any other works. This is a divinely formed conclusion, taught in the Word of God, and exemplified by none less than these two figureheads in God's ways with Israel. God who puts righteousness to the account of the believer in Jesus will never put sin to his account. Again let it be most strenuously affirmed that man can of himself do nothing towards this blessing, all is of the sovereign mercy of God. Again in Romans 4, when Abraham had realised his incapability of implementing the promise of God he found strength in faith, giving glory to God, being fully persuaded that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. Abraham accepted that when he could do nothing God would do everything, and that is just what he proved. Notice, God is able. We are utterly unable — God is completely able. This is where faith rests. There is this difference between Abraham and ourselves — he believed what God would do; we believe what God has done, for "we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification."

In the death of Jesus our sins have all been dealt with. He has borne them sacrificially, even as the apostle Peter elsewhere says, "Who His own self bore our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2: 24).

Let us then thank God, as we take account of our Lord Jesus Christ who went in death on our behalf at Calvary and is now out of death in resurrection, and gladly acknowledge that as Christ is absolutely clear from everything with which He had charged Himself in dying, so all who believe the gospel are as clear from every charge of guilt as He is, now risen from among the dead.

The blessed result of His death, the conclusion of the matter, for faith, is detailed in Romans 5.

"Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." We may now look back over our guilty past and say, "we have peace with God." As to present standing we say, by Him, "we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand." As to the future, "we rejoice in hope of the glory of God."

How blessed is the confidence that we shall eventually be at home where all is suitable to the God who will bring us there. How marvellously He has wrought that we should delight to be there, and that He should delight to have us there. Thus as to the past — peace with God; as to the present — we stand in grace; as to the future — we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Praise be to God for having so acted towards us in gospel blessing. He has done so righteously, He has acted in perfect consistency with all that He is, for — "The work that Thine own Son has wrought, has brought us back in peace and free."

From this point in Romans 5, we progress in the knowledge of Himself. Verses 3 to 5 give us, in a sense, experience in circumstances of trial and contrariety — in other words, wilderness experience. What marks a wilderness is barrenness, no sustenance. In the spiritual counterpart of this the believer learns that there is no support for him in the world through which he passes. Yet, in the good of verses 1 and 2, he says, "and not only so, but we glory in tribulations also."

This obviously cuts across the natural course of things — "glory in tribulations"? Yes, because we know that tribulation is used to form us as we go through it in communion with God. The moral quality of "patience" (endurance) is acquired in the face of trial. We are morally strengthened to stand against the storm just as the tree bending to the wind strikes its roots deeper. This endurance works experience, for we are brought to the conscious knowledge of the faithfulness and support of God. We learn to distrust ourselves, for we are just as incapable of sustaining ourselves in the path of faith as we were of justifying ourselves. So we learn God when things are seemingly against us. Blessed experience that gives us to trust Him unreservedly!

And experience works Hope. This makes the light of the coming glory shine more brightly before us, cheering us on our heavenly way, detaching us more distinctly from the world and conforming us more to God's world. While being helped through the circumstances of this godless world we keep the goal in view, looking forward to those circumstances of glory which shall be ours with our blessed Lord where He is. Praise God, there is an end to the tribulation and the testing, but may we learn the lessons that God would teach us in it. There certainly is spiritual and moral gain for us now, for as we read later in the epistle, "we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose."

"And hope maketh not ashamed" — it is certain of realisation. While we hope, "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." While hope looks to the future we now have that which is a pledge of all that God has given and promised. The Spirit, by His poser, gives us the consciousness of the love of God. We are enabled now to know and enjoy that which shall be our eternal portion. This is language applicable to all who form the Christian company — "the Holy Ghost which is given to us."

May we then go in for the knowledge of God, the enjoyment of the love of God as expressed in the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." The cross is the lesson book of the love of God! Verses 7 and 8 definitely contrast the love of God with the love of man to man, "but God commendeth His love toward us."

For sinners — the unworthy, the undeserving — indeed those deserving only of eternal wrath, for such Christ died! Let us ever remember that the full expression of the love of God was in Christ's death. Blessed as our enjoyment of God's love is, our enjoyment, ebbing and flowing as it is, is not the measure of the love of God. The Scripture ever directs us to look out from ourselves to that which perfectly displayed the love of God — the death of Christ.

So while we were neither righteous nor good, while we were yet sinners, God gave Christ to die for us and we can now most surely say, "much more then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him." He gave his life for those who by sin had forfeited their right to live and this being so judgment will never touch those who believe. Then, too, "if, when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by (in the power of) His life." That is to say, present, day to day, practical salvation through every pressure and trial of the way, is assured to us because Christ lives in the power of an endless life at the right hand of God. He administers to us all that we need to lead us triumphantly through this life of responsibility and experience. We shall be saved, all the way by Him. This is a touch on the priestly service of our Lord Jesus Christ in His ministry of succour, sympathy, and salvation toward His own until they join Him where there is no care nor testing.

We come now to the last verse of this first section of the Epistle to the Romans — "And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement (the reconciliation)." As reconciled to God all distance is gone, no hatred remaining, all enmity has been slain in the cross of Christ, we are brought near to God:

"So near, so very near to God,

We could not nearer be;

For in the Person of the Son,

We are as near as He."

How wonderful these results of the gracious operation of God! We find our joy in God — the God against whom we had sinned, whose judgment we had justly incurred, the God who spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, the God who has blessed us for ever, the God who will surely set us in glory with Christ, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — we joy in Him. Our hearts rise to Him giving Him His worthy praise. We worship Him in the power of the Spirit of God whom He has given to us. This is the peak of the epistle, for God has blessed men who once were at a distance from Him and they, now brought near, praise, worship and adore!

Let us praise Him again and again for His grace in which He has abounded toward us in "the gospel of God concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord."

STEM Publishing : Edward Dennett : Fundamental Truths of Salvation

Fundamental Truths of Salvation

Edward Dennett

Preface

The following pages are designed to meet the need of those who have been awakened and quickened by the Spirit of God; and therefore the writer has sought to explain "the way of salvation" as simply and as clearly as possible. On this account he has not been anxious to avoid repetition, if in this way he could succeed in simplifying his subject. But he has not been satisfied alone with directing the soul to "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world"; but, as the table of contents will show, has added instruction upon some of the fundamental teachings of the Scriptures — such elementary instruction as is needful for babes in Christ. It may occur to some that other subjects might have been included. The writer also thought so; but upon further consideration was led to judge otherwise, especially as there are numbers of books already in existence which deal with more advanced truth.

His desire is, that those who read these pages may compare every statement made with the Scriptures; and that while reading they may be enabled by the Spirit of God to "receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save their souls" (James 1: 21); and it is his prayer, that the Lord may condescend to use them for His own glory, for without His blessing it will have been written, and will be read, in vain.

E. Dennett, Blackheath, December, 1875.

Contents

Chapter 1  Soul-Anxiety

Chapter 2  Man's State Before God

Chapter 3  The Blood of Christ

Chapter 4  Ye Must be Born Again

Chapter 5  Peace With God

Chapter 6  "What Must I do to be Saved?"

Chapter 7  Difficulties

Chapter 8  Deliverance

Chapter 9  The Indwelling Spirit

Chapter 10  Standing and Responsibility

Chapter 11  The Coming of the Lord

Chapter 12  The Judgment

Chapter 1  Soul-Anxiety

WE desire in these pages to meet the need of those who have been awakened out of the torpor of spiritual death, and whose chief concern is to know how to obtain peace with God. Their state may be best described as one of soul-anxiety. There are always numbers in this condition, and especially now, when the gospel of the grace of God is so widely preached on every hand. It is not only those who are so wrought upon as to be compelled to cry, "What must we do to be saved?" but there are many others also who, under an outwardly calm and placid demeanour, hide severe distress of soul. The depth and intensity of feeling will vary in different people and under different circumstances. With some it will be anxiety, and nothing more; with others there will be a real distress of mind and heart; while in other cases there will be positive anguish of soul. But whatever the depth of the feeling — be it more or less — if there be any conviction of alienation from or guilt before God; if there be any sorrow for sin, together with even but the faintest desire for pardon and reconciliation with God; if, in other words, there be any bowing before God in the place of self-judgment, there is that real spiritual anxiety of which we speak; for such a state of mind can only be produced by the Spirit of God.

The instrumentality employed to bring about this state of soul is, in one form or another, the word of God. This may not be always apparent; for sometimes a hymn, sometimes a simple question from another, sometimes the recollection of a prayer, sometimes the appeal of a preacher of the gospel, may be used as the arrow of conviction; but in all these cases it is really the word of God, embodied in these several forms, which the Holy Spirit wields to awaken the careless soul. His own word is, as far as we know, the only weapon which God uses for this end; for He is pleased "by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe" (1 Cor. 1: 21); and hence the apostle says, "We preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1: 23, 24).

Several illustrations of this may be collected from the Acts of the Apostles. On the day of Pentecost we find Peter presenting, in preaching, Christ crucified, risen, and exalted, and charging his hearers with the sin of rejecting and crucifying Him whom God had raised from the dead. "Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Now when they heard, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, men [and] brethren, what shall we do?" (Acts 2: 36, 37). The apostle Paul was humbled at the feet of the Saviour in a special and extraordinary way; but it was also by the presentation of Christ, though in revelation, and not in the preaching of the word. Take the case also of Felix. We are told that when the apostle reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled; and though the effect in this instance seems to have been but transient, it yet shows us the power of the word of God over the soul. The Philippian jailer might seem at first sight to be an exception to the rule; but there can be little doubt that the supernatural occurrences of that eventful night, when Paul and Silas were in his charge and custody, were but the occasion of his soul-distress — the means of fastening upon his heart and conscience the gospel message which he must have previously heard. It is often so now. Sudden sickness or danger, bringing an immediate prospect of death, will frequently give effect, under the power of the Spirit, to the previously unheeded and neglected messages and warnings of the gospel; and, filling the souls of men with guilty fears, with apprehensions of God's wrath against them, will constrain them to cry aloud for mercy.

Wherever therefore we see soul-anxiety — that soul-anxiety of which we have spoken — we may be sure that it has been wrought by the Holy Spirit through the word of God. And it is to those that are the subjects of this anxiety that we desire to speak. Beloved reader, are you in this condition of concern for salvation? Have you been convicted of sin, and is it the desire of your soul to know the way of peace with God? If such is your state, beware of turning a deaf ear to the voice of the Spirit of God, of trifling with, or seeking to hush or to drown the convictions which He has wrought. Beware also, we entreat you, of delay. God is striving in grace with you. For you, therefore, it is especially true, that "now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation" (2 Cor. 6: 2). Beware, too, of healing the wounds of your soul with other remedies than those of the gospel, lest you be led to cry "Peace" when there is no peace. Your case is full of hope. For He who has awakened your desires after salvation sends this message to you, "Be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5: 20); and His own word says, that "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). Let me then beseech you, as before God, to read, both carefully and prayerfully, the ensuing pages, that you may learn the way of salvation as revealed in the Scriptures. And may God Himself teach you, and guide you into peace, through believing in Christ!

Chapter 2  Man's State Before God

THE very first thing that anxious souls need to learn is their place and condition before God; i.e., to understand in what light they are regarded by God Himself. For as long as they continue deceived and ignorant of their own condition, so long will they be unwilling to be saved by God's grace. Hence, until they apprehend and receive His testimony about themselves, they will not receive His testimony about His Son. For the gospel is for sinners, and therefore can only be proclaimed to sinners. I would press this point very earnestly upon all who are the subjects of soul anxiety; for many are kept for months, and even years, in doubt and distress, because they search their own hearts, instead of God's word, to ascertain their real condition, and because therefore they never take the place before God which He assigns to them. "The heart is deceitful above all things" (Jer. 17: 9); but God's word is truth (John 17: 17); and hence it is to it alone that we must appeal.

What then is God's testimony concerning you — concerning all men? Be prepared for the worst. It is, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5: 12). Again, "There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one," etc. (Rom. 3: 10-19). Once more, "There is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (vv. 22, 23). "The Scripture hath concluded all under sin" (Gal. 3: 22). Such is the testimony of the Scriptures, according to which all men are sinners before God. Do you accept it as true of yourself?

I do not ask if you assent to it in a general way; for many will do this who will yet seek, by comparison with others, either to excuse themselves or to draw conclusions to their own advantage. The point is this, God places all men on the same footing before Him; He declares that all are sinners; that there is no question with Him of degrees of sinfulness or of guilt, but that there is no difference; that all, whatever their station, character, or repute, are sinners, sinners without excuse, without a single ground of hope in themselves, inasmuch as all lie under the same condemnation; for death has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned; for the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6: 23). Again I ask you, Do you accept this testimony of God as true of yourself? Do you bow in self-judgment before God, acknowledging that you are a sinner under His just judgment against sin?

If you do not, then I entreat you to pause and consider the hopelessness of your case; for the Lord Jesus Himself said, "I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matt. 9: 13). There is therefore no Christ, no Saviour, except for sinners; and hence, as long as you hesitate or refuse to take the lost sinner's place, you are out, side the pale of God's grace and mercy in the gospel. But if you do accept the testimony of the Scriptures as. to your state, we can then tell of One who "bare our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2: 24); "who was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities" (Isa. 53: 5); of One "whom God hath set forth a propitiation through faith in His blood" (Rom. 3: 25); of Him, indeed, who has taken the sinner's place, borne the sinner's judgment, that whosoever believeth on Him might not perish, but have everlasting life (2 Cor. 5: 21; John 3: 26).

But the whole truth has not yet been told. It is not only that you are sinners, but the Scriptures teach also that all who are unsaved are "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2: 1). The Lord Jesus thus says that the believer "is passed from death unto life" (John 5: 24), showing plainly that the previous condition of the believer was death, spiritual death. The sinner therefore is both under the condemnation of sin, and is dead in sins. It is not meant of course that he has no life at all; for it is very palpable that he has physical life. But what is asserted is, that through sin the sinner is separated from God, cut off from the source of life (for God is the Fountain of life), and consequently that the sinner is in a state of spiritual death, having no life, and no power of life towards God. The whole dealings of God with men, from Israel downwards, do but prove the truth of His word; and hence I have to ask you again, Do you accept this further testimony concerning yourself?

Beloved reader, you will never know the hopelessness of your condition until you subscribe also to this verdict. Men say, "While there is life there is hope." How often have such words sustained the hearts of those who have been watching by the bedside of a sick relative. Hoping against hope, they refused to believe that the end was near, and not until the last beat of the pulse, together with the last breath, would they believe that they stood in the presence of death. So also is it oftentimes with sinners; yea, even with awakened and anxious souls. They may not doubt that they are sinners, and sinners under judgment; but they cannot believe that their case is hopeless, that they have no power of life within themselves, no power of recovery, restoration, and hence they will not take the place of being utterly undone, lost, "dead in trespasses and sins." Ah! thereby they effectually shut themselves out from blessing, and turn back, it may be, to years of weary wanderings and conflicts because they believed their own hearts (and he that trusteth his own heart is a fool — Prov. 28: 26) rather than God. But we should resolutely close our eyes against everything but the testimony of the Scriptures; for it is not what I think, feel, or believe, but what God declares, that determines my condition in His sight. He is the sole Judge; and hence, if He tells the sinner that he is dead in trespasses and sins, it is incumbent upon the sinner to acknowledge that God is true though every man be a liar (Rom. 3: 4).

Do you then now believe that having no life you have no hope? If not, accept God's verdict at once; for as soon as you take the sinner's place, owning the truth of God's word about you, confessing that you are under the just judgment of sin, so soon are you in the place of blessing; the place in which God, in all His infinite grace, can meet you; the place in which you can claim the sinner's Saviour. Bow therefore before God at once, and receive the unspeakable gift of His love — His own Son, as your Saviour, Redeemer, and Lord.

Chapter 3  The Blood of Christ

SUPPOSING now that those of whom we speak — 'anxious ones' — have bowed to the judgment of God upon their condition, their immediate concern will be to know by what means they can obtain the pardon of their sins. The blood of Christ is the only way by which the guilt of sin can be removed. "Without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. 9: 22). Herein lies the necessity for the death of Christ; the need, in fact, for the whole work of redemption. And hence it is of the first importance that this truth should be rightly understood.

We have already pointed out that death has "passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5: 12). Adam first incurred the penalty through his disobedience to God. He had been warned not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. 2: 16, 17). Adam disregarded the divine command, and fell under the awful sentence of death — the penalty which God had annexed to disobedience. Thus "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5: 12). There is therefore no difference; all alike are sinners; and hence every child of Adam's race is subject to the penalty of sin, which is death. Yea, death already reigns (see Rom. 5: 13-21) over the whole human family: every individual member of it (saving those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ) being under the righteous judgment of death, because of sin. "But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5: 8). He "so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). Being rich in mercy, He sent His own Son to die, "the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3: 18). Just as when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, God provided a lamb to be offered up in his stead, that Isaac might be rescued and live (Gen. 22), so God has provided a Lamb to be offered up in the sinner's room and stead" — the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29). This is the secret and meaning, in this aspect, of the death of Christ. He died as the sinner's substitute, bore the sinner's judgment, expiated the sinner's guilt.

The marvelous efficacy of the blood of Christ, as meeting the sinner's need, flows from the character of His person and the nature of His death. His blood is the symbol of His death, of His life poured out; for the life is in the blood (see Lev. 17: 10-14), and hence His blood cleanses from sin, because of the value of His death before God in the sinner's place and behalf. God has condescended to teach us this by type and illustration, as well as by direct statement. Look at the Israelites in the land of Egypt on the passover night. God was about to execute judgment upon the land of Egypt; and when once He began to deal in righteousness, Israel was as much amenable to the penalty of sin as the Egyptians. How then spare the former when the latter were to be judged? "I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord. And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt" (Ex. 12: 12, 13; also vv. 21-23). The only ground (mark it well) of difference on this night between Israel and Egypt was THE BLOOD. It was not what Israel was in comparison with the Egyptians, but it was the blood that stayed the destroyer's hand — the blood on the outside of their houses; for the Lord had said, When I see the blood, I will pass over you. The blood of the lamb — for the lamb had been slain — cleansed them typically from guilt, so that God could righteously spare Israel while He righteously destroyed Egypt. The same lesson is taught by the great day of atonement, of which we have the record in Leviticus 16. For Aaron was directed to sprinkle the blood of the bullock, and of the goat of the sin-offerings, both upon the mercy-seat and before the mercy-seat, where God dwelt between the cherubim; "for on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord" (Lev. 16: 30). All these things were but shadows of the efficacy of the blood of Christ. Thus we read: "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Cor. 5: 7); and again, "Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" (Heb. 9: 12-14). Accordingly we are taught, that "the blood of Jesus Christ His (God's) Son cleanseth us from all sin" (1 John 1: 7).

We may, then, now point out distinctly the teaching of Scripture as to the blood of Christ in relation to sin.

1. It is the only means of cleansing from guilt. This is the divinely appointed and the divinely given way. It is therefore exclusive of all other methods. "Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God" (Jer. 2: 22). "If I wash myself with snow-water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me" (Job 9: 30, 31). It is only the blood of Christ which can make the sinner whiter than snow.

2. It is the blood in and by itself alone which possesses this efficacy. There cannot be any addition to it. It is not the blood and something else. Add to it in any way, whether by feelings, prayers, penitence (all of which have their proper place), and you mar its cleansing power.

3. God has provided the blood. It is He who has delivered up His Son to death. This provision for the sinner's need is one therefore entirely of God's grace, and consequently a provision outside of the sinner altogether. God in His infinite mercy, and because He so loved the world, provided the Lamb for the sacrifice; and now the precious blood of that Lamb avails for every one who believes (John 3: 16). There is no limit whatever in its application, excepting in the sinner's unbelief. It is provided for all, and everyone may be the subject of its blessed cleansing power through faith.

Beloved reader, you have confessed your need of cleansing, and God has provided that which alone can meet your need. Do you ask, But how am I to obtain the application of the blood to myself? Solely and entirely by the obedience of faith. Let us go back to the Passover night (Ex. 12). It was not enough that the lamb was slain, and that the blood was in the basin; but the Israelite was directed to sprinkle the blood for himself upon the lintel and the two side-posts of his door. With the bunch of hyssop in his hand, the sign of his humiliation before the righteous judgment of God, he sprinkled the blood, thereby confessing his own desert of death, and his faith in the blood as the means to avert the stroke of the destroyer, of sheltering him from the wrath of the Righteous Judge. So now. The Lamb has been provided, and slain; His blood has been shed. But the fact of His blood-shedding does not secure your safety. The question is, Are you under the shelter of the blood? Do you again ask, How can this be? By bowing in humiliation, like the Israelite, before the judgment which God has pronounced against sin; that is, by taking the place of a sinner, and by looking to the blood of Christ to secure you from the righteous doom and meed of sin. The moment you do this, the blood of Christ is upon you in all its value, between you and judgment, sheltering you completely and for ever from the consequences of sin; for the blood has met and satisfied all the claims that a holy God had against you. For God hath set forth Christ a propitiation through faith in His blood (Rom. 3: 25). There is therefore absolutely nothing for you to do; not even have you to gather the hyssop and sprinkle the blood. You have simply to believe the word of God, to look in faith to the blood already shed, as the only means of protection from death and judgment, and God instantly sees you as covered with all its efficacy and value — cleansed from guilt, and whiter than snow. Delay not, then, to seek the protection of the precious blood of Christ. At midnight the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt; and as suddenly and unexpectedly will judgment overtake the rejecter of Christ, for when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, and they shall not escape (1 Thess. 5: 3). To-day, then, hear the entreating voice of the love of God, which bids you to flee from the wrath to come, and to "behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29).

Chapter 4  Ye Must be Born Again

When Nicodemus went to our Lord for instruction, he was met instantly by the solemn word, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3: 3). It behoves therefore every anxious soul to consider this searching divine word; because we at once learn, that whatever the anxiety of soul — earnest desires, profession of faith — if there has not been wrought this great change, the "new birth," there is no life in the soul, and consequently no salvation.

Who was it then to whom the Lord addressed these words? We only learn half the truth when we answer, Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; for, in fact, this tells us nothing beyond his name and official rank, and these things have no weight before God, and no significance for the seeking soul. It is in the connection of the third chapter with the second that we shall find the real answer to our question. We read, "Now when He [Jesus] was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast-day, many believed in His name, when they saw the miracles which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man; for He knew what was in man. But" (as it should be read) "there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews," etc. (John 2: 23-25; John 3: 1, etc.). There was thus a number of Jews who believed on Jesus when they saw His miracles, and Nicodemus was one of that number. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them because He knew what was in man; because, in fact, their faith was nothing more than a natural conviction, wrought by the evidence of the miracles, of the truth of the claims of Jesus. There was no bowing of heart before God in all this; there was nothing more than a natural or intellectual belief in the name of Christ. When therefore Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, no doubt in quest of something more, and expressed this belief, "Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him," Jesus answered him at once by stating the necessity of being born again. It was as if He had said, "You may believe in me as a divine teacher, and yet be lost. You must be born again before you can enter into the kingdom of God."

We thus get a most solemn warning, as well as a needed caution. The warning is, "Beware of being satisfied with a profession of belief in Christ." The caution is, "Never forget that everything is useless if you have not been born again. You may be most earnest, most religious, a model of activity, in high repute for sanctity of life, or for works of usefulness, and yet be a lost soul; for unless you are born again, you cannot even see the kingdom of God."

Why then must a man be born again? The answer to this question brings us to a most important part of our subject. We have already shown that all men are sinners; but it is not only that they are sinners, but they have an evil, corrupt, depraved nature; and this incurably corrupt nature is the tree which produces all the evil fruits of sin. The acts of sin reveal the character of the nature; and this nature is totally unfit for God's presence. This is the purport of our Lord's words in this chapter, "That which is born of flesh is flesh" (v. 6). All therefore that we are as natural men, as children of Adam, is flesh; and in this flesh there dwelleth no good thing (Rom. 7: 18).

"Are we to understand that all men, without exception, are thus totally corrupt, hopelessly evil?"

"Yes. Such is the verdict of God upon human nature. 'That which is born of flesh is flesh.'"

"But is it possible, for example, that all the noble deeds recorded in history, or all the kind, generous, and beneficent actions which we meet with in daily life, are all these done by those who have a totally depraved nature? Surely there must be a difference — degrees in our natural condition; for how is it possible to class such actions with open and flagrant sins?"

It matters not what may be the outward character of the actions of men, whether such as will elicit the applause or draw down *tim* condemnation of their fellows; for as long as they proceed from men who have not been born again, they are nothing but evil in the sight of God, "for a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes" (Luke 6: 43, 44). The word of God is most explicit on this question. "The carnal mind" (the mind of the flesh) "is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8: 7, 8). It is thus, as Luther said, not a question of doing, but of being; not a question of the character of actions, but a question of nature, and this nature God declares to be flesh, and the flesh is nothing but evil in His sight, and consequently "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption" (1 Cor. 15: 50).

Herein therefore lies the necessity of being born again; "That which is born of the flesh is flesh. . . . Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again" (John 3: 6, 7). This necessity is universal in its application. It concerns every one born into this world, the dutiful, obedient child as much as the prodigal son; the active, zealous philanthropist as much as the convict in his cell. For the flesh is flesh, and cannot enter the kingdom of God. There must therefore be a new nature and a new life; for if there be not these, whatever a man's moral repute, he will be for ever outside of the kingdom of God.

How then must a man be born again? This, in substance, was the question of Nicodemus. "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" (John 3: 4). This question rigidly construed means undoubtedly, How is it possible for a man to be born again? But our Lord, in His answer, does not notice it in this form, but points out the way in which a man is born again. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God (v. 5).

(1) Water. Much difficulty has been occasioned by special attempts to wrest the meaning of this symbol. Ritualists of many shades have persistently endeavoured to support their false teaching of baptismal regeneration from this passage. But if we confine ourselves to the Scriptures, we shall find that the difficulty will disappear. Now it is very evident that Nicodemus should have understood what our Lord meant; and if he did not, that he was expected to understand. For when he replied, "How can these things be? Jesus answered and said, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?" (John 3: 9, 10). And if we turn to one of the prophets (with whose writings Nicodemus, as one of Israel's teachers, should have been well acquainted), we shall find a distinct foreshadowing of this teaching of our Lord. Speaking of the future restoration of Israel, the prophet says, "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them" (Ezek. 36: 25-27). Here we have the same conjunction of the water and the Spirit, and a radical change following upon its application; for nothing less than this can be implied by "a new heart." Not only so, but the water in this passage is used in the most familiar of all senses to the Israelites, in connection with cleansing.

With this passage then before us, what, we ask, is the import of the water? Turn to Psalm 119, and we get this question: "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word." We read also in the New Testament of "the washing of water by the word" (Eph. 5: 26); again, "Now ye are clean through" (or because of) "the word which I have spoken unto you" (John 15: 3; read also John 13: 5-11). The water therefore is a well-known symbol for the word of God. Hence we find the Word constantly associated in other passages with the new birth. "Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth" (James 1: 18) "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the Word which by the gospel is preached unto you" (1 Peter 1: 23-25). The apostle Paul makes an allusion to the same thing when he says to the Corinthians, "In Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel" (1 Cor. 4: 15). The Word of God, preached in the gospel, is the *tint* means of the new birth which our Lord here sets forth under the type of water.

(2) And [of] the Spirit. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth" (John 6: 63). "The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3: 6). The Spirit acting in and through the word of God quickens dead souls, and they are born again. The Word cannot do this in and by itself nor does the Spirit of God act alone, but He wields the Word as the instrument, so that by it He may bring souls out of death into life, producing in them both a new nature and a new life. Many illustrations of this might be collected from the Scriptures. Take the most prominent of all — that afforded by the day of Pentecost. The crucifiers of the Lord Jesus were gathered round about Peter and the other apostles. Peter proclaimed the word of God to them, and said, "Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ" (Acts 2: 36). At the beginning of the chapter we read of the descent of the Holy Spirit; and it is said of the apostles that "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." Peter was therefore speaking in the power of the Spirit, and that same Spirit clothed the word of God with mighty power, and the effect was that a multitude were born again, the change wrought upon them being indicated by the fact that "they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men [and] brethren, what shall we do?" (v. 37). So it is now when men are born again. It is always through the Word, by the Spirit of God. There is no other way.

(3) We may, however, with our Lord's own teaching before us, define more exactly. In the ninth verse Nicodemus asks, "How can these things be?" Our Lord first of all rebukes, though with all tenderness, both his ignorance (v. 10) and his unbelief (vv. 11, 12), and then proceeds to vouchsafe a full reply to the question he had put. It falls into three parts, and together they reveal the whole mystery which was perplexing the mind of Nicodemus.

(a) The Person of the Son of man. This is the foundation of all in that word of God — the gospel — by which, through the Spirit of God, souls are born again. "No man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, [even] the Son of man which is in heaven" (v. 13). We have here the great mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God. He was in heaven, but He "came down from heaven," was born of a woman, and became the Son of man on earth, who yet while He spake to Nicodemus could say of Himself, "Who is in heaven." It is the God-man — true man, and true God, who is here revealed in the Person of the Son of man. And it is this wondrous dignity of the Person of Christ which gives such infinite efficacy to His work; and hence the necessity of guarding with such jealous care the true doctrine of the Person of our Lord, of repudiating, refusing all teachings which seek to degrade either His human or divine natures. For whatever militates against the Person of Christ, militates against the cross, against His atoning sacrifice. The Person of Christ lies at the foundation of, gives its blessed character to, the gospel of the grace of God. "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to [give] the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. 4: 6).

(b) The Work of Christ. In this we have the second of the divine "musts." "Ye," said our Lord, "must be born again"; and now He says, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so MUST THE SON OF MAN BE LIFTED UP: that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 14, 15). But why must the Son of man be lifted up — crucified? It was a moral necessity; for without the shedding of blood there is no remission (Heb. 9: 22); because, as taking the sinner's place, He must be "wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities" (Isa. 53: 5); because, inasmuch as we were under the judgment and condemnation of sin, He must die in our stead; for He "bare our sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2: 24). It was, in a word, as the sinner's substitute that He must be "lifted up." The object of His being lifted up is, "that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (v. 15). He thus becomes the source of life, yea, in resurrection He is the life of every believer (Col. 3: 3, 4); for it is in being born again that this life is communicated through the power of the quickening Spirit. But He is the life of those who believe, because of the character of His death, because He was the sinner's substitute on the cross; for it was in death that He expiated, made atonement for our sins, and thereby removed every barrier out of the way between a God of grace and lost sinners. Hence He could say, "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live" (John 11: 25). It is thus life out of death, life in a crucified and risen Saviour, because "through death He destroyed him that had the power of death" (Heb. 2: 14); for if the corn of wheat had not fallen into the ground and died, it must have remained alone; but having died, it brings forth much fruit. (John 12: 24).

(c) Faith is the connecting-link between the sinner and Christ, just as the touch was the connecting-link between those who were healed and Christ in the days of His sojourn here. Hence it is, "Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (vv. 15, 16). This will be at once understood by looking at the comparison which the Lord Himself has made. He compares His own "lifting up" to the serpent lifted up by Moses in the wilderness (Num. 21: 6-9). They were serpents that bit the people of Israel and caused their death; it was a serpent to which they were directed to look and live. It is sin that has caused our death. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin," etc. (Rom. 5: 12). It is to One who was made sin for us (2 Cor. 5: 21) on whom we are commanded to believe in order to live.

This, then, is the present point of importance — the comparison between the looking and believing. We read — "And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived" (Num. 21: 9). Notice, first of all, that it was the bitten Israelite who looked; and secondly, that he looked in the obedience of faith — believing the word of God. Just so is it with Christ lifted up. Whosoever takes the place of a sinner, acknowledging that he is "bitten," hopelessly lost by sin, if he look away in the obedience of faith to Christ, will not perish, but have eternal life. We thus, as in the case of the passover night, see that there is absolutely nothing whatever for the sinner to do; he has simply to believe the record that God has given of His Son, that God has dealt with sin in the death of Christ, and that therefore He proclaims life to every one that believeth. So soon then as the sinner has faith in the Lord Jesus Christ he is born again, he has everlasting life (Gal. 3: 26).

This is the method of the new birth. The gospel is preached — the word of God — which tells to a guilty race that "God so loved the world, that He gave (delivered up to death) His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). The Spirit clothes this message of God's grace with power. It enters the hearts of sinners; they believe, they are quickened, they are born again, they have everlasting life (John 3: 16).

Dear reader, Have you been born again? You surely, with this testing word before you, can have no difficulty in answering the question. If you are, your whole soul will go out in thanksgivings to God for the gift of His only begotten Son. If you are not, let me again warn you that it matters not what you are besides — you may be a good son or daughter, a loving husband or wife, a kind father or mother, and yet, not being born again, you are outside the kingdom of God, hopelessly undone and lost. Will you be satisfied in this condition? What had been the consequence if the bitten Israelites had refused to look at the serpent of brass, saying, "We may perhaps recover"? They would have died in their anguish and their sin. And so if you refuse to look to Christ, to believe in Him, there is no other remedy; and, instead of having eternal life, you will for ever perish. But if you bow to this divine necessity of being born again, acknowledging your true condition before God, and look to Christ in simple faith, you will immediately pass from death unto life.

Chapter 5  Peace With God

"Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5: 1). This is the conclusion at which the apostle arrives, after stating the grounds on which God is able to meet the sinner in grace, and to justify every one that believeth in Jesus. The principle involved is so important, and so necessary to be understood, that we propose to state it at length, so that anxious ones may see how carefully God has laid the foundation of peace outside of themselves altogether; that, in a word, they may perceive that the Rock on which it is grounded is Christ alone, and what He has done.

1. Justification is by faith; i.e., on the principle of faith in contrast with the principle of works. Much confusion of mind would be spared if this were remembered; and it is on this contrast that the apostle's whole argument is based. Thus, after depicting the state both of Gentiles and Jews, after proving that both are convicted as sinners, he says, "By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in His [God's] sight" (Rom. 3: 20). Again, "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law" (v. 28); and then, after citing the example of Abraham's justification — "Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness" — he tells us, "To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Rom. 4: 3-5). We have therefore the most complete contrast between the law and the gospel. The law had said, "The man that doeth them shall live in them" (Gal. 3: 12); but the gospel proclaims that God is the "justifier of every one that believeth in Jesus" (Rom. 3: 26). It is no more therefore a question of works — of doing on man's part; for God has shown man's complete and utter failure in every position in which he has been placed. The Gentile without law, and the Jew under law, are brought in as sinners; and thus every mouth is stopped, and the whole world is become guilty before God (Rom. 3: 19). From this very fact, man is entirely precluded from doing anything either to recover himself, or to save himself. He is already under condemnation, lost, and hence works or doings of any kind are utterly without avail. If therefore he is now to be saved, it must be on the principle of faith; "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2: 8). He neither has, nor can he obtain by his utmost efforts, any righteousness before God; and accordingly he is shut up to God's righteousness, which is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith (Rom. 1: 17).

It is of the first importance to apprehend this point; for it is just here that so many souls, like the Jews of old, fail. Thus, in the tenth chapter, we read that "they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth" (Rom. 10: 3, 4). Until therefore souls understand that they cannot "establish their own righteousness," that "their righteousnesses are as filthy rags" before God (Isaiah 64: 6), they will never accept the truth, that they can only be justified on the principle of faith, that if they are saved, it must be by God in His grace towards them in Christ Jesus. But once understood, the gain is immense; for the eye will be immediately taken from self, and directed to Him who is the only Saviour: they will cease from their own doings, and be made willing to submit, on the principle of faith, to the righteousness of God.

2. We may inquire now, What is the object proposed to faith in order to justification? This is very clearly defined in Romans 4. The apostle, we have seen, describes that Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness; and, furthermore, he details the circumstances and character of his faith, carefully pointing out that it was prior to circumcision, and that the law had nothing to do with the promise which he received (vv. 9-16); and then he says, "Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him; but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification" (vv. 23-25). The object proposed to Abraham's faith was God Himself, in His promise that "he should be the heir of the world" (v. 13); and he "against hope, believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb: he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what He had promised, He was able also to perform. And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness" (vv. 18-22).

The object of his faith was thus a God of promise; but the object proposed to our faith is a God of accomplishment; for righteousness will be imputed to us "if we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead" (v. 24). God therefore is presented to the sinner in the gospel as One who has intervened in grace, provided redemption in Christ, and as testifying that Christ has been delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification; as therefore a God of salvation, One who requires now nothing from the sinner but faith in Himself — requiring nothing because He has sent His only begotten Son, who took the whole of our responsibilities upon Himself, met in His death every claim which a holy God had against us, settled forever the question of sin, and so glorified God that He is now able, on the foundation of that finished work of redemption, righteously to receive and justify every one that believeth. God has thus in grace, and out of the love of His own heart, provided everything for the sinner — the precious blood of Christ for his cleansing from guilt, a divine righteousness in which he can stand in His own presence — in fact, everything needed to bring the sinner out of his place of distance, guilt, and death, home unto Himself. In the gospel of His grace, He is therefore presented as a Giver, and not as a Receiver, and as the object of faith in His testimony concerning what He has wrought for us in and by His Son.

In the third chapter the blood of Christ is presented as the object of faith: "Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth [to be] a propitiation through faith in His blood" (Rom. 3: 24, 25). The connection here is different. Man — all the world — has been proved to be guilty before God (v. 19). The question therefore is how to meet the claims of God as a Judge; and the answer is found in the blood of Christ, provided by the grace of God, so that the most guilty can come and be justified before Him through faith in the blood of Christ (vv. 24-26). But in the passage just considered God comes forth, as already said, as a God of salvation, satisfied with the work of Christ, He having made atonement for sin by His death, and thus presents Himself as the God of grace in redemption, and therefore as the object of the sinner's faith. And how blessedly simple it is! for what does God require from sinners? Only that they should believe in Him, that they should believe His testimony concerning what has been accomplished on their behalf by the death of His Son; at the same time offering to them, in confirmation of His testimony, the fact of the resurrection of Jesus our Lord from the dead. It is as if He said to us, "If you want a proof that Christ was delivered for your offenses, that He has expiated them by His death, and that all my claims against you have been completely satisfied, behold it in His resurrection. I have raised Him from the dead, set Him down at my right hand in the glory, to convince all that He has finished the work of atonement, and that I have accepted it."

3. Every one who believes in Him is justified. "Being justified by faith"; i.e., we are by faith accounted righteous before God, righteous in Christ; for God "made Him [to be] sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. 5: 21). This is much more than cleansing from guilt, or pardon of sins, because we have in justification a positive righteousness which fits us for the presence of God. The blood of Christ, as we have seen, is the meritorious cause of this, it being on our behalf of such infinite value, having so glorified God in expiating our sins, that He righteously — in righteousness to His Son — receives, pardons, justifies, and brings us into the very place where Christ Himself is. Hence, as the apostle says elsewhere, "But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness," etc. (1 Cor. 1: 30). For so completely are we identified with Christ before God, that His place is our place, His acceptance our acceptance; for we are in Him; and accordingly the apostle John can write, "As He is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4: 17).

This will suffice to show the complete character of our justification; and it may aid doubting souls to remember that it is God Himself who justifies the believer. For if He justifies us, if He is so completely satisfied with what has been done for us as to clear us from every charge, and set us down in Christ before Himself, who can condemn us? (Rom. 8: 33, 34). Who can incriminate us? nay, who can lower by one jot or tittle the perfectness of our acceptance? God has spoken; He has declared that we are "justified by faith," and His word abideth for ever.

4. Peace is the portion of the justified. "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." The words, "we have peace," do not of necessity mean that we enjoy it; for there are doubtless many justified ones before God who know but little of this peace. The meaning is that peace belongs to us, that it is made between our souls and God, that every question between Him and us is so perfectly settled, that He has nothing against us, that peace therefore is our portion.

But if it is made, and it belongs to us; what hinders so many souls from entering into its possession? Simply unbelief; they look within to their own state, instead of without to what God has done for them. We can only enjoy this peace as knowing it to be ours; and we can only know it to be ours by believing God's word. But if we believe, and are justified, we have peace, whatever our feelings or experience; and hence we should rest in the enjoyment of it in simple confidence in the word of God. It is of the first importance to know that it is ours; for souls are tossed hither and thither by doubts and fears, because they hesitate to believe in the fullness of the grace of God. They are therefore weak and helpless, the easy prey of the tempter; whereas if they but quietly rested on this sure word of God that they "have peace," that He has made it through the work of Christ, and made it for them, they would be able to sing amid the storm, to present a fearless front in the face of all difficulties, to be undisturbed by the most insidious suggestions of Satan, knowing that as the peace rests upon the cross of Christ, it is both sure and steadfast, inalienable and immutable, a foundation on which they might "build and rest secure" for ever. For the peace of the justified is the result of accomplished redemption, founded on the cross, and proved by the resurrection of Christ.

It may encourage some to a stronger confidence if we remind them that God is just, as well as the justifier of every one that believes in Jesus (Rom. 3: 26); i.e., that He is just to the claims which the work of Christ, or rather Christ in His work, has established upon Him. It is therefore what Christ has gained for us; and hence He is our peace (Eph. 2: 14). It should indeed be never forgotten that this peace is not apart from, but in and through Christ; or, consequently, that it is a righteous peace, a peace which God righteously bestows upon and secures to us through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Chapter 6  "What Must I do to be Saved?"

Having pointed out God's provision for the need of souls, we may now consider the subject from man's point of view. No sooner indeed is he convicted of sin than the question springs up within his heart in one form or another, "What must I do?" It was so on the day of Pentecost, when the Jews were pricked in their heart by the power of the Holy Spirit under the preaching of Peter. "Men and brethren," they said, "what shall we do?" The jailor asked Paul and Silas, "What must I do to be saved" (Acts 16: 30). Twice our Lord Himself was asked, "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" (Mark 10: 17; and Luke 10: 25). The question addressed to our Lord by Paul, or rather Saul — "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" (Acts. 9: 6) — is different, and need not therefore be considered.

The peculiarity of these questions is that the "I" occupies a prominent place, or rather perhaps the thought of doing. It is, What must I do? a sure sign that the questioners have not yet learnt what God is, or their true place before Him.

It is on this very account the more important to answer the question, because it marks in many souls a distinct stage of their history. There are very few indeed who have not asked the same question at some period of their soul-anxiety. We propose therefore to examine some of the examples which we have cited, that we may ascertain the answer given to it in the word of God.

1. We take first the case of the young man (Mark 10: 17; Matt. 19: 16; Luke 18: 18). We read that when Jesus "was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to Him, and asked Him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? [there is] none good but one, [that is,] God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honor thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto Him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth" (Matthew tells us that the young man added, "What lack I yet?"). "Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions" (Mark 10: 17-22). This case is the more remarkable and instructive from the fact that this young man was so blameless and unexceptionable in conduct and character. He was both sincere and upright, one who could say, what Paul said of himself, that touching the righteousness which was in the law, he was blameless (Phil. 3: 6); for he replied to our Lord's enumeration of the commandments, "All these have I observed from my youth," and added, "What lack I yet?" (See Matt. 19: 20).

Is not this a picture of many in our own day, young people and others, whose whole lives, morally, as we speak, in their outward expression leave nothing to be desired? Gentle, amiable, and loving; observant, and tenderly observant of their duties as sons or daughters, upright and honourable in all the relationships of life, and diligent also in attendance upon what are termed religious duties, they win the approbation of their whole circle, both of relatives and friends. And what lack they yet? The Lord's answer to this young man is the answer to our question. What then is its import? First, that man can bring nothing to God, and therefore can DO NOTHING to inherit eternal life. Like Paul, he must learn that his righteousness is as filthy rags, to count the things which were a gain to him as a natural man loss for Christ, that nothing that he is, or has done, is of any merit before God; nay, that his best things must be regarded as worthless and unclean. Secondly, that he must be willing to suffer the loss of all things — self, his own righteousness, and the world — for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus. Hence our Lord told the young man to sell all that he had, and give to the poor; and then to "come, take up the cross, and follow me."

Such is the first answer to the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" You must take the place of having nothing, and being nothing — self, the world, yea, and every thing being nothing — at the feet of Jesus. And let not the solemn warning of this whole incident be forgotten, that moral attainments, and the advantages of position, etc., are to be classed among the greatest hindrances to coming to Christ, because they so often cover up and conceal the soul's real condition before God.

2. The case of the lawyer (Luke 10). This is in many respects totally different from that just considered; for the lawyer comes tempting Christ, and thus occupying a much lower moral place. Accordingly our Lord connects with it much deeper lessons of man's true condition. "A certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said unto him, What is written in the law? How readest thou? And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And He said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live. But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?" etc. Then follows the parable of the "good Samaritan" (Luke 10: 25-37). Here the Lord takes the lawyer, who was tempting Him, on his own ground; viz. that of the law; and He thus accepts his statement of the requirements of the law, adding the words connected with its promulgation, "This do, and thou shalt live" ("which if a man do, he shall live in them" Lev. 18: 5). But he used the law, according to its divine intention, as a standard of God's requirements from men in the flesh, and so brought in the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3: 20). For His words, "Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live" (v. 28), convicted the tempting lawyer of sin; for we read, "He, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?" The Lord had searched him with that word which "is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart" (Heb. 4: 12) but instead of bowing to it he desired to escape from its application, if not to insinuate the impossible character of the divine requirements. He sought to justify himself, as if a man could be just with God, by alleging that, since he could not carry out the divine command, he could not be expected to do any thing. But the Lord had brought into his mind the knowledge of sin, and then, to teach also the lesson as to who was his neighbour, described the man who fell among thieves, and how he was succoured by a Samaritan.

What then are the special lessons taught by this answer to the question, What must I do to inherit eternal life? It is not only that man can do nothing, but that he is also convicted as a sinner before God; and hence we have man's condition as a sinner pictured out in the parable. It is thus described: "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded [him], and departed, leaving [him] half dead" (v. 30). The very place in which the traveller is assailed is significant. He was on his way from Jerusalem, the city of God, to Jericho, the city of curse (Joshua 6: 26) — a striking picture of the sinner's journey to destruction. He falls among thieves, who strip, wound, and depart, leaving him half dead; and so he lies helpless and hopeless, at the point of death.

Who does not see in this sketch man's condition as a sinner? And what folly it were for one in that condition to ask, What shall I do to inherit eternal life? The question rather is, What can be done to save him? And this is what our Lord would teach the lawyer — the folly of a sinner asking what he can do, and that if he is saved, it must be by the grace and by the doing of another. This latter truth is brought out in the Samaritan. But first a priest and a Levite pass by, and leave the wretched man to his fate, showing the helplessness of law to save the soul. Then the Samaritan comes upon the scene, "And when he saw him, he had compassion [on him], and went to [him], and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee" (vv. 33-35). Who then is the Samaritan? Surely none but Christ — Christ, in the compassion of His love, seeking and saving the lost. For He is moved with pity by the wretchedness of the poor, helpless man, binds up his wounds, carries him to a place of safety, cares, undertakes, and provides for him until He returns. We learn therefore from the whole scene —

(1) that man is a sinner;

(2) that as a sinner he is both helpless and lost;

(3) that therefore he can do nothing; and

(4) that if he is to be saved, it can only be through Christ, and what He has done.

3. This will prepare us for the case of the jailor (Acts 16). We take this rather than that of the Jews on the day of Pentecost, because the question is put by him in its most distinct form. Paul and Silas, at the instigation of an excited crowd, had been put into prison at Philippi; and at midnight, we read, the apostles prayed, and sang praises to God: and "suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed" (Acts 16: 25-26). The keeper of the prison was terrified, and in the excitement of the moment, thinking that the prisoners had escaped, would have killed himself, but for the interposition of Paul. "Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house" (vv. 27-31).

Why do Paul and Silas treat him otherwise than our Lord dealt with the two cases already considered? The answer in each case meets the moral condition of the questioner. But Paul and Silas are able to direct the jailor instantly to Christ, because he came in the moral condition set forth by the dying man in the parable. And hence if any of my readers are putting this same question, they cannot be answered until they take the same place. This truth has already been insisted on in the second chapter; but we again emphasize it here. For until the lesson is learnt the way of salvation cannot be known. Are you then, beloved readers, recognizing, not only that you can bring nothing to God, that even the things that might be a gain to you amongst men are worthless before Him, but also that you are sinners, and as such lost and undone; that therefore you can do nothing towards your salvation, and that if you are saved, it must be by the work and grace of another? If you are, we can then unfold to you the blessed truth, contained in the words, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved" (v. 31).

To be saved therefore, to have eternal life, you must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. It is thus a question not of doing, but of believing. For it is now, not what the sinner can do, but what Christ has done, for "He took what I had earned; I get the fruit of what He has done." Therefore it is, and ever must be, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." There is no other way; and hence salvation is always connected with faith. Take a few instances: "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace" (Luke 7: 50); "Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole" (Luke 17: 19); "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life" (John 3: 36); "He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation (judgment); but is passed from death unto life" (John 5: 24); "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life" (John 6: 47); "To Him give all the prophets witness, that through His name whosoever believeth in Him shall receive remission of sins" (Acts 10: 43); "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5: 1, etc. etc.).

Do you then, beloved reader, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? We have pointed out the place the sinner must first take; that he must accept God's testimony concerning himself — that he is both helpless, guilty, and lost. If you accept God's word as to yourself and your condition, we then point you to the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world; for He who declares to us what we are by nature and practice in His sight, has provided redemption for us in Christ: He "so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). Look away therefore from yourself to Christ, accept God's testimony also concerning Him, and even while you look you shall pass from death unto life. "The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Rom. 10: 8-10).

Chapter 7  Difficulties

No sooner is the soul awakened, convinced of sin, and directed to Christ, than difficulties will often appear on every side, threatening deprivation for ever of the blessing now so earnestly desired. Magnified by the unbelief which is native to our hearts, and pressed continually upon the soul by the activity of Satan, they seem insuperable; and it may therefore be helpful, if the most prevalent forms which they assume are indicated and explained. At the same time it should never be forgotten that the only effectual solver of difficulties is the Lord Himself; and that they will soon cease to harass the mind, if carried and spread out in simple faith before the throne of grace.

1. "My sins have been too many and too grievous." How often are words like these uttered by the self-judged penitent when he is told of the freeness of God's grace in Christ Jesus. "Yes," he will say, "Christ is able to save, and God no doubt waits to be gracious. But I am very guilty. I have sinned against light and knowledge; others may come and be saved; but for me there is no hope." Two or three remarks will show the real nature of this feeling. In the first place, it really expresses a doubt concerning the efficacy of the precious blood of Christ; for if it cannot cleanse you, it cannot cleanse from all sin. Moreover, it distrusts the sincerity of God in the invitations which He sends to sinners through the gospel of His grace. For He says, "Whosoever believeth in Christ shall not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16); "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Rev. 22: 17); and if you say that you are not included in these "whosoevers," what is it but to doubt the truth of God? Again, our Lord Himself says, "I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matt. 9: 13). This is not some, but ALL sinners. Hence, to be a sinner, is to have a title to come to Christ; and thus the more sure you are of your sinfulness, the more certain you ought to be that there is nothing in your case to shut you out from the mercy of God.

It is worthy of question whether the root of such a feeling is not self-righteousness, for it really means that you are too unworthy. As another has said, "If when God speaks I refuse to believe on the ground of something in myself, I make Him a liar (1 John 5: 10). When God declares His love, and I refuse to believe because I do not deem myself a sufficiently worthy object, I . . . exhibit the inherent pride of my heart . . . God's love flows forth spontaneously. It is not drawn forth by my deserts, but by my misery. Nor is it a question as to the place which I deserve, but which Christ deserves. Christ took the sinner's place on the cross, that the sinner might take His place in the glory. Christ got what the sinner deserved, that the sinner might get what Christ deserves. Thus self is totally set aside."

Besides, it may be added, our Lord has met by anticipation your objection, by receiving while on earth some of the vilest and most degraded. The woman who was "a sinner" (Luke 7: 37-39), and the thief on the cross (Luke 23: 40-43) are everlasting monuments of His willingness to receive the guiltiest. Meet therefore all such thoughts by the plain examples and statements of God's word; and never harbour, even for a moment, any suggestion which tends to obscure the Saviour's willingness to receive, or His ability to save, any and all who come in penitence to His feet.

2. "I do not feel my sins enough." This is quite true; for it is a complaint that even believers have to make, and will make to the end of their days upon earth. It is sure therefore to be the case with every anxious one; and it is on account of his sinfulness that he does not feel more deeply. But this only argues his greater and more urgent need of Christ. For his want of feeling is but the evidence of his alienation from God, and consequently of his need of reconciliation through the blood of Christ. It cannot then be, that to feel deeply is a qualification for coming to Christ, for that would mean that we must first cleanse ourselves from some part of our sinfulness. No; the gospel makes no conditions with men about feelings; it demands no preparation of heart, but proclaims a present salvation to every one that believeth.

"But must I not first repent?" Let me then ask, What is meant by repentance? It is simply taking the place of self-judgment, the place of a sinner before God, taking God's view about my sins. The confusion arises from the misconception that it signifies "the feeling sorry for, and the determination to forsake, sin"; and hence many probe themselves to discover whether they are in this state of mind. But the only thing you have to consider is, Do I know that I am a sinner? and, Do I accept God's judgment of myself as a sinner? If you do, there is nothing on God's part between you and the sinner's Saviour. For the only message of the gospel is, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house (Acts 16: 31).

3. "I cannot be sure that Christ died for me; that I am personally included in the invitations of the gospel." And why not? For when God speaks in His word so repeatedly, and says, "WHOSOEVER believeth" shall be saved (John 3: 15, 16, 36; Acts 10: 43, etc.), is it not as evident that you are included as if your name were written there? As an evangelist recently put it, if you saw written over a gate, Whosoever will may enter, you would understand at once that you had a title to entrance; and you would regard it as downright folly if a companion were to argue with you on the subject, contending that the notice was not distinct. When then we read in the Scriptures, "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely," (Rev. 22: 17), it is nothing but rank unbelief to express the doubt whether we are included in the invitation. In a recently published memoir there is an example of the kind. The subject of it, when first awakened, had this difficulty; and, though Scripture after Scripture was pressed upon him, remained immovable. But going home, he spent a great part of the night alone with God. At last he took a piece of paper, and wrote, "As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ezekiel 33: 11); then he added, "I am one of the wicked"; and further, "Therefore the Lord God has no pleasure in my death," and was thus led to believe that he was within the range of the divine mercy.

Every sinner is entitled to adopt the same plan. Let any one therefore who is troubled with the doubt named take, for example, John 3: 16, and write it out with self-application, and he will find that it is as clear as noonday that God includes him in the term "whosoever." There is no limit indeed to God's grace in the gospel, except in the unbelief of sinful hearts.

4. "It may be that I am not one of the elect." Now this is the most useless of all doubts, except indeed for the purposes of Satan. For secret things belong unto God, and no amount of speculation or reasoning can discover them. And let it be remembered that the sinner has nothing whatever to do with God's purposes. Election has to do with saints, and saints alone. The difficulty, if sincerely felt, should therefore be met by the simple question, Am I a sinner? For if that can be plainly answered, it has already been abundantly shown that the invitations of the gospel are addressed to you, and that to be a sinner is the only qualification for coming to Christ.

5. "I cannot believe." Let us examine this difficulty. What then is it that you cannot believe? Cannot you believe that you are a sinner? God testifies this to you in His word; and if you want any confirmation of His truth, the experience of a single day will surely be sufficient. No; you do not doubt that you are a sinner. Can you not then believe God's testimony concerning His Son? What is that testimony? It is that "He was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification (Rom. 4: 25); that "He hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3: 18); that God "made Him [to be] sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Do you believe this? You will say, "Of course I do." Then see what this involves. You believe on the one hand that you are a sinner, and on the other that Christ has died for sinners; and yet you say "you cannot believe." Let me then put another question. Do you believe that God is satisfied with and has accepted that which Christ has done for sinners by His death? Before you attempt to answer this question, remember two things; first, that the resurrection of Christ, and His glorification at the right hand of the Majesty on high, is the proof that God is satisfied — that He has abundantly accepted the atonement made on the cross; and secondly, that the proclamation of the gospel is a proof also of it, for the gospel is a consequence of the finished work of Christ, and its acceptance by God. It is on the foundation of the cross that the message is sent forth, "Be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5: 20). Do you then believe that God is satisfied? You cannot doubt it. What remains? That you also should be satisfied. This and nothing more.

"Cannot believe," therefore, often means unwillingness to believe, the refusal to bow before God's judgment upon yourself as a sinner; for when you have truly taken the place of a sinner, you must of necessity welcome the offers of salvation as glad tidings of great joy. Suppose now a family in a state of starvation at the point of death, and provision is carried to their doors, and freely offered to them, what would you think if they were to reply, "We cannot believe it is for us"? Of a like character is the objection of the sinner under condemnation to the invitations of the gospel, "I cannot believe." For remember it is God who speaks, and is it possible for unbelief to go so far as to doubt whether He is worthy of credit? If a friend were to come to you with some announcement, and you were to reply, "I cannot believe you," he would regard it, if spoken in seriousness, as an insult. Much more, then, should you hesitate to doubt the truth and veracity of God.

6. "I cannot feel that I am saved." This is often said by those who think and avow that they believe in Christ, but who yet have no peace. How then is the knowledge of salvation to be obtained? Many expect some sudden accession of joy, or some inward experience to certify them of it. A young believer once came to the writer, and said, "I know I am saved now, because I feel so happy." But when he replied, "Suppose you feel unhappy tomorrow, will you come and say, "I know I am not saved now, because I feel so miserable"? she at once saw that she was building a wrong foundation. How then can it be known? By faith — faith in the word of God. For when God testifies that "whosoever believeth in Christ should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16), I am entitled, if I believe, to say that I am saved, resting my confidence on this word; and peace comes as the result of my belief of God's testimony.

Such is the divine order. First, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; secondly, knowledge of salvation, or assurance, as it is sometimes termed, from belief in the word of God; and lastly, peace as the consequence of knowing that I am saved. Take a simple illustration. If I owe a debt of one hundred pounds, and have not wherewith to meet it, I shall be under constant concern and anxiety. If however a friend comes and says, "Be under no concern for the debt. I have discharged it," my anxiety will instantly cease, if I believe his word, not otherwise. So is it with our knowledge of salvation. If I believe in Christ Jesus, I shall know that all God's claims against me have been satisfied, and consequently I shall have peace, if I believe His word, and in no other way. It is most important to apprehend this point; for many, making "assurance" to depend on feeling, are continually in a state of disquiet and unrest. But when we see that the foundation of our confidence lies in the immutable truth of God, we shall never doubt our salvation, whatever the chequered character of our inward experiences. The fact indeed is too often lost sight of (as pointed out in another chapter), that the ground of our peace is entirely outside of ourselves, in the work of Christ for us; and hence the eye is turned inward, instead of outward to His cross, His precious blood. "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through out Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5: 1).

It will be observed that we have spoken only of the ground of assurance. Having peace, there will be, indeed should be, happy experiences; for God sends His Spirit to dwell in the hearts of saved ones, and He bears witness with their spirits that they are the children of God. But happy experiences must follow upon, and cannot precede, the knowledge that we are saved.

7. "Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost." As very many anxious souls are perplexed with the fear that they have been guilty of this sin, and that they are consequently shut out from the offers of mercy in the gospel, it may be well to explain its true character. The words in which our Lord describes it are these: "All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come" (Matt. 12: 31, 32; see also Mark 3: 28-30).

The sin then spoken of is "blasphemy," or "speaking against" the Holy Ghost, and the precise force of these terms may be gathered from an examination of the context. The Saviour had just performed a miracle. We read, "Then was brought unto Him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and He healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw" (Matt. 12: 22). The people were deeply impressed with this display of divine power and mercy, and saw in it an evidence of His Messiahship; for they said, "Is not this the Son of David?" But the enemies of Christ — the Pharisees — made it an occasion for the exhibition of their enmity, and with the miracle before their eyes — indeed, confessing it — ascribed the power which they had seen exerted to the devil. They said, "This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils." Hence it is that we find in the gospel of Mark the reason given for the Saviour's warning concerning "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost": "Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit." The sin therefore spoken of is the wilful ascription to Satan of the power wrought by the Holy Ghost, and therefore blaspheming the Holy Ghost by maligning His operations as devilish. To prevent all possibility of mistake, the argument may be displayed at length.

1. The power in which Jesus laboured, wrought miracles, performed His mission, was that of the Holy Spirit (Luke 4: 1-18; Isaiah 61: 1, 2; John 3: 34; John 14: 10, etc.).

2. It was, therefore, by the power of the Spirit of God that He expelled the devil from the blind and dumb man.

3. The Pharisees acknowledged the miracle; they had seen it done, and could not deny it.

4. They had therefore before them a clear proof of the Saviour's mission; for, if done, it substantiated His claim to be the Messiah.

5. They ignored the evidence, and sought to discredit Jesus by charging Him with being the agent of the devil.

6. They thus wilfully not only sinned against, but "blasphemed," the Holy Ghost.

Thus, as another has said, "What the Lord denounces is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. Keeping that distinctly in view would save many souls a great deal of needless trouble. How many have groaned in terror through fear of being guilty of sin against the Holy Ghost! That phrase admits of vague notions and general reasonings about its nature. But our Lord spoke definitely of blasphemous, unforgivable sin against Him. All sin, I presume, is sin against the Holy Ghost, who has taken His place in Christendom, and consequently gives all sin this character. Thus, lying in the church is not mere falsehood toward man, but unto God, because of the great truth that the Holy Ghost is there. Here, on the contrary, the Lord speaks of unforgivable sin (not that vague sense of evil which troubled souls dread as "sin against the Holy Ghost," but blasphemy against Him). What, is this evil never to be forgiven? It is attributing the power that wrought in Jesus to the devil. How many troubled souls would be instantly relieved if they laid hold of that simple truth! It would dissipate what really is a delusion of the devil, who strives hard to plunge them into anxiety, and drive them into despair, if possible. The truth is, that as any sin of a Christian may be said to be sin against the Holy Ghost, what is especially the sin against the Holy Ghost, if there be anything which is so, is that which directly hinders the free action of the Holy Ghost in the work of God, or in His church. Such might be said to be the sin, if you speak of it with precision. But what our Lord referred to was neither a sin nor the sin, but blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. It was that which the Jewish nation was then rapidly falling into, and for which they were neither forgiven then, nor will ever be forgiven. There will be a new stock, so to speak; another generation will be raised up, who will receive the Christ whom their fathers blasphemed; but as far as that generation was concerned, they were guilty of this sin, and could not be forgiven. They began it in the lifetime of Jesus; they consummated it when the Holy Ghost was sent down and despised. They still carried it on persistently; and it is always the case when men enter upon a bad course, unless sovereign grace deliver. The more God brings out of love, grace, truth, wisdom, the more determinedly and blindly they rush on to their own perdition. So it was with Israel. So it ever is with man left to himself, and despising the grace of God. "He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness." It is the final stage of rebellion against God.

It may then be confidently affirmed, that no one under convictions of sin, no one who desires reconciliation to God through the blood of Christ, can have committed "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost." Nay, these very convictions of sin, and desires after peace with God, are the effects of His own work in the soul; the sure proof that this "blasphemy" has not been committed.

8. The "sin unto death." This is popularly confounded with that just considered. But an examination of the Scripture in which it is mentioned will show that it is a totally distinct thing. It is thus described: "If any man see his brother sin a sin [which is] not unto death, he shall ask, and He shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it" (1 John 5: 16). Here the question is concerning the sin of a believer. If any man see his brother, etc.; and since it is a believer who is spoken of, there can be no reference to eternal death, In fact, the death spoken of is bodily. Thus Ananias and Sapphira committed a sin "unto death" (Acts 5). Their sin was of such a character that God interposed and removed them from off the scene, in merciful chastisement upon themselves, and in solemn warning to others. But though they sinned "unto death," this did not affect their standing, if they were real believers. Their death was the result of the interposition of God in governmental discipline in the church on earth. Allusion is made to other cases of a similar character in 1 Corinthians. The apostle, writing concerning the abuses of the Lord's Supper, says, "He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation" (judgment, as in margin) "to himself; not discerning the Lord's body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (1 Cor. 11: 29, 30). That is, as the result of God's intervention in discipline, many had died.

It will be seen from the above explanation that no one can tell beforehand what constitutes the "sin unto death," because it is judged only by the Lord. Indeed, it does not follow that the same act would constitute the same sin in different circumstances; for there is little doubt that there have been many Ananiases and Sapphiras since their day. But we need not pursue the subject, as we have shown that the sin is that of a believer, and that it is connected with bodily, and not eternal, death, and hence that anxious ones cannot have been guilty of it before God.

9. The case supposed in Heb. 6: 3-6 is often a real difficulty. But a careful examination of the passage, though we cannot here go into it minutely, will show that it can have no application to those who are anxious and who desire peace with God. For the case is that of "those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." Let it be first of all distinctly noted, that this cannot refer to the falling away of any who have been really converted. For nothing is more plainly taught in the Scriptures than that it is impossible for a child of God to perish. (See John 10: 27-29; Rom. 8: 28-39; 1 Cor. 1: 8, 9; Eph. 1: 13, 14; Phil. 1: 6, 7, etc., etc.). It must be borne in mind indeed that the epistle was addressed to Hebrew Christians; and the case put is that of those who had been brought out of Judaism, and convinced of the truth of Christianity, thus far enlightened by the power of the Holy Ghost, but not converted, born again. They were brought into the blessings indicated, but were still without life; and it is concerning these we are told, that if they should fall away it would be impossible to renew them again unto repentance, etc. And why? Because they would be deliberately and wilfully going back to what they knew to be no longer according to God; re-associating themselves with the nation that crucified the Son of God, and thus, by endorsing with their eyes open the act of the nation, crucifying for themselves the Son of God, and putting Him to an open shame (v. 6).

The case supposed therefore is that of wilful apostates. But no doubt it is intended as a solemn warning, though not for anxious souls. The warning will have its application to many who are associated with believers in various ways, to professors, and such professors as have been the subjects of much enlightenment without being born again, so that they, knowing the divine character of redemption, are persuaded that the only way of salvation is through a crucified and risen Saviour, and may even be outwardly zealous for Christ. It is for such that this warning is intended; for if they turn their backs upon what they know to be true, deny Him whom they know to be the Christ of God, become wilful apostates, their case is hopeless. It is to this class alone that this passage applies; and it therefore cannot include those who, convicted of sin by the Spirit of God, desire above all things to know that Christ is their Saviour and Lord. In a word, no one who desires to be saved, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, can be of that class and character.

There are doubtless many other difficulties in special cases, but those dealt with are the most common. Our aim should be to bring everything to the word of God in a prayerful spirit; for "unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness" (Psalm 112: 4), and "the entrance of thy words giveth light" (Psalm 119: 130).

Chapter 8  Deliverance

Many who have been awakened, quickened, and who may even be under the sure protection of the blood of Christ, are yet without a clear knowledge of salvation. They have sometimes a "good hope" that they are saved, but then sin breaks out within them in such overwhelming power, that, thereby made to know the utter corruption of their sinful hearts, they are plunged back into uncertainty and distress. They are thus deprived of the fullness of the blessing which belongs to all who believe in Christ, owing to ignorance (oftentimes through bad teaching) of the two natures, and of the provision which God has made in Christ for indwelling sin, as well as for sins. In other words, they have never learned that complete deliverance is to be found in Christ, both from the guilt of sin and from our sinful nature, so that the believer can say, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus . . . For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death" (Rom. 8: 1-2).

The truth on this subject is specially unfolded in the epistle to the Romans, from chapter 5 to the end of chapter 8. This section has been described by another as follows:

Hitherto the great truth of the remission [forgiveness] of the believer's sins has been fully set forth, closing with the blessed privileges which belong to the justified man, but still in that connection, the expiatory efficacy of the blood of Jesus, and this displayed in His resurrection. Precious as it all is, it is not everything the believer wants. He may be miserable in the discovery of what he finds within himself; and if he knows not the truth that applies to his difficulties on this score, he is in danger of yielding to hardness on one side, or of bearing a burdened spirit of bondage on the other. How many saints have never learned the extent of their deliverance, and go mourning from day to day under efforts which they would be the first to confess unavailing against their inward corruption! How many settle down callously balancing their faith in the forgiveness of their sins by the blood of Christ as a set-off against a plague which they suppose must needs be, and, of course, with no more power over it than those who are honestly, but in vain, struggling to get better. Neither the one nor the other understands the value to them of the sentence already executed on the old man in the cross, nor their own new place before God in Christ risen from the dead. This it is the Spirit's object to unfold in what follows.

The sentences italicized in the above extract find a striking confirmation in chapter 7, where we have a quickened man, one who has been born again, not knowing his deliverance from law, struggling and groaning under the burden of his indwelling sin, so much so that he cries, "I am carnal, sold under sin" (v. 14); and again, "I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" (vv. 22-24). This is precisely the condition of many who are termed anxious souls. It is the felt contrariety of their state to all that they had longed for and hoped which leads them to doubt whether they are saved.

How then has God met this need of the soul? There can be only one answer to this question: it is in the death of Jesus Christ. For not only did He, as we have seen, bear our sins in His own body on the tree, but He was also made sin for us (2 Cor. 5: 21); yea, "God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom. 8: 3).

The application of this truth is expounded in Romans 6. Having shown in the previous chapter that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord" (vv. 20-21), the apostle proceeds, "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also [in the likeness] of [His] resurrection: knowing this, that our old man is crucified with [Him], that the body of sin might be destroyed (annulled), that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed" (justified, in margin) "from sin" (Rom. 6: 1-7).

If now we give attention to the words which we have emphasized by italics, we shall understand the whole subject.

1. We are here taught that we have part in Christ's death: we "were baptized into (or unto) His death"; "our old man is crucified with Him" (vv. 3-6). This is on the principle of substitution, a principle which finds a striking illustration in the following familiar incident. During the days of Napoleon I, a young man was drawn as a soldier, but having some means, he purchased a substitute, who went in his stead to fight the battles of his country. The substitute was soon killed, and not long after a decree for another conscription was issued. It so happened that the same young man was drawn for the second time, but he pleaded that he was a dead man. When asked what he meant by such a plea, he answered that, since his substitute had been killed, he himself ought to be regarded as dead. The case, from its singularity, was carried before the courts of law, and, after examination and trial, it was ruled that the young man was dead before the law of conscription, on the ground of the death of his substitute. So with us, if we are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. We can plead that we have died in the person of our Substitute, that in Him the whole judgment and condemnation due to our sin and sins have been borne and exhausted.

2. We are consequently "dead to sin" (v. 2); and being dead, we are "freed (justified) from sin" (v. 7). That is, our Adam nature — the seat of indwelling sin — our old man, has been judicially judged by God in the death of Christ; so that the penalty has already been paid, our doom so completely met, that before God we are regarded as judicially dead, and being dead we are justified from sin — cleared from all charge on account of it, completely delivered from it, through our death in the death of Christ.

The practical consequences of this truth are given in the succeeding verses. "Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him: knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him. For in that He died, He died unto sin once: but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in" (not through) "Christ Jesus our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof," etc. (vv. 8-12). We are thus reminded, by implication at least, that we have part not only in the death of Christ, but also in Him as risen. "For if we be dead with Him, we believe that we shall also live with Him" (v. 8); and this is confirmed and enforced by the fact, that "in that He died, He died unto sin once: but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God" (v. 10).

Then follow the practical exhortations.

a. We are to reckon ourselves dead to sin. The very terms of the exhortation indicate the truth; for if we were actually dead, we could not be told to reckon ourselves so. What we are then to do is to take God's estimate of ourselves. Having judged us, as to our Adam nature, in the cross of Christ, He holds us as having met our judgment, and consequently to be dead in His sight. This is His judicial estimate of every believer as to the old man; and this judicial estimate is to be the estimate of our faith. What God declares we are to believe, and to believe spite of all appearances or experiences to the contrary; and since He holds us to have been crucified with Christ, we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin. This will explain many otherwise difficult expressions in the Scriptures. "I am" (or have been) "crucified with Christ" (Gal. 2: 20). "If ye be dead" (or have died) "with Christ," etc. (Col. 2: 20); these, and all such, setting forth the truth here considered, that God regards all believers as having died with Christ, and therefore as having in Him borne the condemnation of sin. And this truth is to be our vantage-ground in the presence of temptation. We should remember in the presence of all solicitations to sin, that our old man has been crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin (Rom. 6: 6).

Thus our place before God determines our responsibility; and hence if I yield to sin, I contradict in fact that I have died with Christ; for sin argues, evidences one alive in the flesh and acting in the flesh. On the other hand, taking God's estimate of myself to be true for faith, I cannot let sin reign in my mortal body, that I should obey it in the lust thereof. I reckon myself to be dead to sin, and therefore delivered from it by the death of Christ; and thus my peace is undisturbed because I know that the flesh which I still have in me, and which, if not kept in the place of death, would break out at any moment in unbridled lusts, has already been judged, and condemned on the cross.

b. But we are also to reckon ourselves as alive unto God in Christ Jesus our Lord. This, as before said, implies our resurrection with Christ — although this truth is not here formally stated — because it is only as being in the risen Christ that we can be alive unto God. In the Colossians we find this aspect fully developed, the apostle making the fact of our being risen with Christ the ground of a practical appeal: "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead" (or have died), "and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3: 1-3). It is not only therefore that we have been crucified with Christ, but in Christ we passed through death; for "God hath raised us up together" with Christ. (Eph. 2: 6). This was typified by the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea. In type "the Red Sea is evidently the death and resurrection of Jesus, and of His people in Him; God acting in it, in order to bring them into death to sin, and to deliverance from it, by death, where He had brought them in Christ, and consequently beyond the possibility of being reached by the enemy. We are made partakers of it already through faith. Sheltered from the judgment of God by the blood, we are delivered, by His power which acts for us, from the power of Satan, the prince of this world. The blood keeping us from the judgment of God was the beginning. The power which has made us alive, through Christ, has made us free from the whole power of Satan, who followed us, and from all his attacks and accusations. We have done with Egypt and the world."

Two things have to be carefully noted. It is in Christ that we are alive unto God; and secondly, our being so is to be a matter of faith: we are to reckon ourselves so. We are alive in Christ really and actually; but this is not the thought here presented. We are also in this respect to take God's estimate, spite of all the contradictions to it within and without. Since God regards me as dead to sin, and alive unto Him in Christ Jesus, I am to reckon myself so; His estimate being the foundation of my faith and confidence, as well as the measure of my responsibility.

We are thus before God brought through the death and resurrection of Christ out of our old state and standing altogether, into a place and sphere where the flesh has no entrance — a deliverance so complete that not only is it said, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus," but also, "Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be the Spirit of God dwell in you" (Rom. 8: 1, 9). Such is our perfect standing before God in Christ as risen from the dead.

3. We shall now be in a position to understand the concluding exhortation of the passage cited; viz., "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof" (Rom. 6: 12, etc.). We have here the contrast between our standing before God in Christ Jesus and our practical condition. He holds us, as we have seen, as dead to sin; but this exhortation supposes the presence of sin in the believer. Now it is in the understanding of this contrast, and its practical consequences and responsibilities, that the solution is found of the difficulties which are so often encountered at the outset of the Christian life, and which indeed in many cases keep believers in bondage for years, if not throughout the whole of their lives. It behooves us to be the more careful that our statements, in summing up the teachings upon this subject, are according to the word of God.

(a) Indwelling sin will always be present in the believer. Though he has a complete deliverance before God, the flesh in him remains unchanged; so that he will ever have to say, "In my flesh dwelleth no good thing." He must therefore never expect any amendment in the character of the flesh. What it was before his conversion it will be after, until he departs to be with Christ, either at His coming or through death (Rom. 7: 18; Rom. 8: 1-13; Gal. 3: 16-26).

(b) The presence of indwelling sin does not affect our perfect standing, our complete acceptance, before God in Christ Jesus; for God regards us as dead to sin. This is His judicial estimate of us, and consequently He looks upon the sin in us as already judged in the death of Christ. Thus sin in the flesh has been condemned (Rom. 8: 3). Its motions therefore within me, if I do not yield to them, cannot for one minute obscure even my enjoyment of the love of God; for I reckon the flesh in me as judged, according to His own estimate. It is thus not only that my standing is unalterable, but also my peace, my communion, is undisturbed.

(c) My responsibility is measured by God's estimate. If He regards me as dead to sin, I have to do the same; and therefore I must not allow sin to reign in my mortal body, that I should obey it in the lusts thereof. For if I were to allow sin to reign, I should practically contradict God's estimate of me as dead to it. I have thus to keep myself in the place of death, to mortify my members which are upon the earth (Col. 3: 5), because I am dead with Christ. Here then is the whole secret. I cannot rid myself of the foe. But God has judged it, and I have simply to act according to that judgment; to keep it in that place of death where He has already put it. Hence we are not told to expel sin, to root it out, to cast it away from us, as moralists, and even divines [clergy], ignorant of the Scriptures, sometimes exhort us to do; but we are told not to let it reign; i.e., it must be kept under, in the place and under the sentence of death which has been passed upon it.

"Ah!" you exclaim, "here is my difficulty. How am I, a poor feeble creature, to do this thing?" It is thus that unbelief ever speaks. Look at David in the presence of Goliath. Does he feel the impossibility of coping with such a powerful adversary? Nothing of the kind. His one conviction was that "the battle was the Lord's"; that Goliath was the Lord's enemy, and hence that the Lord would that day deliver him into his hand (1 Sam. 17: 45-47). He thus measured his foe by the strength of the Lord; and by that measurement Goliath dwindled down before him into a puny dwarf, yea, into utter impotence and nothingness. So should it be with us. Granted that indwelling sin is strong and active, yet He who tells us to reckon ourselves to be dead to it, has supplied the power to enable us to comply with the exhortation. He has given us the indwelling Spirit, and if we "through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live" (Rom. 8: 13); if "we walk in the Spirit, we shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh" (Gal. 5: 16). The Spirit of God is therefore our strength in this warfare, the all sufficient power given to enable us to keep sin from reigning in our mortal body.

The completeness of our deliverance is thus not even touched by the presence of indwelling sin. God has judged it in the death of Christ; we are brought clean out from under its power through the resurrection of Christ; and we have the power, in the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts, to keep it where God has put it, under judgment and death. Blessed be His name! We can therefore, like Israel, stand upon the resurrection side of our Red Sea, and sing, "The Lord is my strength and song, and He is become my salvation" (Ex. 15: 2).

Chapter 9  The Indwelling Spirit

Ye are all the sons (uioi) of God by faith in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3: 26). "And because ye are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father" (Gal. 4: 6). This is the divine order. We are born of the Spirit through faith in Christ Jesus, and thus are made sons; then God sends forth the Spirit as the Spirit of sonship to dwell in our hearts. The indwelling of the Spirit is therefore, it will be observed, not coincident with, but consequent upon, becoming sons.

This divine order is shadowed forth in God's dealings with Israel. On the passover night, while still in Egypt, Israel was completely sheltered by the blood; but it is not until they had crossed the Red Sea that we read either of salvation, or of God's "holy habitation"; and we know that, as a matter of fact, God did not dwell in the midst of His people until they were brought out from Egypt, through the Red Sea, into the wilderness. So now. A soul may be quickened, born again, be under the protection of the blood of Christ, but he must be indwelt by the Spirit of God before he can cry, "Abba, Father" (Gal. 4: 6). Accordingly, we do not find in the epistle to the Romans any distinct mention of the Holy Spirit, as dwelling in the believer, until we come to the eighth chapter. As long as the believer does not know his deliverance from sin and from the law, we search in vain for any teaching on this subject; but no sooner do we get the complete answer to the question raised, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" than we are told, "Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you" (Rom. 8: 9).

The truth then is that every saved soul has the indwelling Spirit; and doubtless when the gospel was first proclaimed — proclaimed as it was in all its fullness, simplicity, and power — those who received it by the grace of God were brought at once out of darkness into light, and immediately received the seal of their redemption in the gift of the Holy Ghost. But now in the confusion that reigns around, when the gospel has been so largely corrupted by human admixtures, that the fullness of the grace of God in Christ Jesus is seldom preached, there are numbers who, though quickened, are still groping in the twilight, groaning in the house of their bondage, and consequently have not yet received that Spirit of adoption whereby alone believers can cry, Abba, Father. For "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Rom. 8: 16); and hence if we do not know that we are children of God, and cannot cry in filial confidence, Abba, Father, it is because we have not the Holy Ghost dwelling in us.

Our object now is to unfold what the Scriptures teach concerning this subject. As we have seen, the Spirit of God takes up His abode in us, consequent upon our becoming sons. And this it is which distinguishes a Christian from the saints under the old dispensation. Jewish believers were quickened, born again, but they knew nothing of God's Spirit as dwelling in them; "for the Holy Ghost was not yet, because that Jesus was not yet glorified" (John 7: 39). He wrought by His power; for it was He who quickened the Jewish saints, as well as Christians; He also strengthened them for walk and service; but His coming down from heaven as a person to dwell in believers, and in the Church, was consequent upon the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. This difference is marked in one aspect very plainly by a prayer of the psalmist: "Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me" (Psalm 51: 11); but the apostle Paul, writing to the Ephesians says, "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4: 30). Working by His influences in the heart of the psalmist, it was possible for him to lose that blessed power; but believers now, though they may grieve, are sealed by the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. Just as the presence of the Holy Ghost upon the earth, in the house of God, characterizes Christianity, so His dwelling in God's children distinguishes them from the believers of all past dispensations. For it is the Holy Spirit that unites us to Christ, makes us members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones (1 Cor. 12: 13; Eph. 5: 30); and this union, this place as members of His body, was not possible until Christ had been glorified, and had taken the place of Head in heaven.

There are several prominent aspects of the indwelling Spirit which we desire briefly to notice.

1. As a witness. The presence of the Holy Spirit on earth is the witness of accomplished redemption. For before our Lord departed, He promised to send "another Comforter" (John 14: 16, 17, 25, 26; John 15: 26, 27; John 16: 7-14); and He distinctly told His disciples that "He would send the promise of His Father upon them," and that they were to "tarry in Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high" (Luke 24: 49). The descent therefore of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost was the infallible sign of the completion of redemption or rather the proof that God had accepted and was resting satisfied in the finished work of Christ. For "it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth" (1 John 5: 6).

But here we speak rather of the Spirit as dwelling in God's children, and as such, as we have seen, He "bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Rom. 8: 15, 16; Gal. 4: 6, 7). In this aspect, He is the witness of accomplished redemption to the individual soul — as will be seen when treating the next point — and hence every child of God ought to know by this sure testimony that he is saved. But it may be asked, How is this witness borne to our sonship? The very fact of His presence within us testifies to it; but by His presence He forms within us affections suited to our relationship, begets in us desires after the enjoyment of the Father's love, enables us in the holy intimacies of our filial place and position to cry, Abba, Father, verifies to our souls the word on which we have trusted as revealing to us the relationship and the blessings which belong to us as God's children, and thus bears very distinct witness with our spirit. No! it is not an audible testimony, and it is discerned and apprehended by our spirit alone; but it is none the less, nay, it is all the more, real on this account, because indeed it is a living secret between ourselves and God. The strength and distinctness of His testimony, it ought not to be forgotten, will depend upon conditions. "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." In other words, just as being led by the Spirit of God is an evidence of our being the sons of God, so it is, when we are led walking in simple, loving obedience and dependence, that our spirit will discern most clearly His testimony to our sonship. But if we are so walking as to grieve Him, we shall listen in vain for His testimony, for we shall have grieved Him into silence. God will not therefore permit any of His children to walk carelessly, resting the certainty of their salvation on the ground of their being children; but He reminds us that if we are His we shall be led of the Spirit, and that He will bear witness with our spirit, and teach us to cry, Abba, Father.

2. As a Seal. This truth is set before us in several passages. "Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God; who hath also sealed us" (2 Cor. 1: 21, 22). Again, "In whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise" (Eph. 1: 13); and in the same epistle we are exhorted to "grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4: 30). The Holy Spirit given to dwell in believers is Himself the seal; i.e., God thereby marks them out, takes possession of them as His own, and declares them by the Spirit being within them to be His property. If one may use the illustration, just as the broad- arrow declares the thing on which it is marked to belong to the Queen, so the Spirit of God sets us apart, marks us out as belonging to God. But the figure is that of a seal. Now the seal not only indicated ownership by the impress upon it, but it was put also for protection. Hence believers are said to be sealed until the day of redemption. They are secured by the seal until the Lord shall return to receive them unto Himself. And hence only believers are sealed; and they are not sealed until they are the Lord's, until they are brought out of the house of their bondage (as before seen), through the death and resurrection of Christ, until they not only are safe, but are also saved.

3. As an Earnest. Two of the passages already cited speak of the Spirit as the earnest. "Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts" (2 Cor. 1: 22); "In whom after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of His glory" (Eph. 1: 13, 14). It is the latter passage which defines most exactly the character of the earnest. The Holy Spirit as now given is regarded as "the earnest of our inheritance"; that is, He is the first-fruits of that which we shall inherit in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. As indeed when a sale is effected of a property, a portion of the purchase-money is paid down as earnest-money for the completion of the bargain, so God graciously gives us the indwelling Spirit as the earnest of our inheritance, thereby assuring us that we shall possess all that He has promised, and binding Himself (if we may so speak) to accomplish His own faithful word; for the earnest-money is both a promise and a pledge. But the Holy Spirit is even more, because, as we have seen, He is also the seal, thereby securing us for the inheritance, as well as certifying us that God will put us into possession of it to the praise of His glory.

4. It would lead us far beyond the scope of these pages to enter fully upon the offices of the indwelling Spirit. We can therefore only briefly indicate that He alone is our power for worship (John 4: 23, 24; Phil. 3: 3); for prayer (Rom. 8: 26, 27; Eph. 6: 18; Jude 20); for walk (Rom. 8: 14; Gal. 5: 16-26); for service (1 Cor. 2: 4; 1 Thess. 1: 5, etc.); for the apprehension of truth (1 Cor. 2: 9-16; John 16: 13; 1 John 2: 20-27); for growth (Eph. 3: 16-19), etc. Indeed, as the Spirit characterizes our existence before God — for we are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in us (Rom. 8: 2) — He only is the source of power for all the activities of our spiritual life, whether those activities have God or man for their object. Blessed fact! for it is only when we know our own weakness and nothingness that we can learn the lesson of dependence; and when we are dependent, the Spirit of God is free to act within us according to His will.

A caution is often given, and much needed both by anxious souls and young believers, not to confound the Spirit's work in us with Christ's work for us. Thus another has said, "We are constantly prone to look at something in ourselves as necessary to form the ground of peace. We are apt to regard the work of the Spirit in us, rather than the work of Christ for us, as the foundation of our peace. This is a mistake . . . The Holy Ghost did not make peace; but Christ did. The Holy Ghost is not said to be our peace; but Christ is. God did not send 'preaching peace' by the Holy Ghost, but 'by Jesus Christ.' (Compare Acts 10: 36; Eph. 2: 14, 17; Col. 1: 20). The Holy Ghost reveals Christ; He makes us know, enjoy, and feed upon Christ. He bears witness to Christ, takes of the things of Christ, and shows them unto us. He is the power of communion, the seal, the witness, the earnest, the unction. In short, His operations are essential. Without Him we can neither see, hear, know, feel, experience, enjoy, nor exhibit aught of Christ. This is plain, and is understood and admitted by every true and rightly-instructed Christian. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the work of the Spirit is not the ground of peace, though He enables us to enjoy the peace. He is not our title, though He reveals our title, and enables us to enjoy it." No; the foundation or ground of peace is Christ — Christ in His finished work which He accomplished on the cross. For whoever believes "on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification," is justified; and "being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 4: 24, 25; Rom. 5: 1). The foundation of peace then, it should ever be remembered, is outside of ourselves; and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as pointed out, is consequent upon our becoming the sons of God.

But we cannot be too sensible to the fact that, if believers, we have the Spirit of God dwelling in us; nor too solicitous not to grieve Him by unholy actings in the flesh. (See Eph. 4: 29-32). Hence too the solemn interrogation of the apostle, "What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost [which is] in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body" (1 Cor. 6: 19, 20); and the exhortations, "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh"; "If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit" (Gal. 5: 16-25).

Chapter 10  Standing and Responsibility

No exposition of the salvation which is connected with faith in Christ would be complete, without some explanation of the perfect place of blessing into which we are thereby brought. There is little doubt indeed that many quickened souls are also kept in the bondage of doubt and anxiety through their ignorance of what Christ has really accomplished on their behalf; and it is perfectly certain that they can have no adequate apprehension of their responsibility without a knowledge of their position in Christ Jesus.

Every one understands that forgiveness of sins is the immediate portion of the believer in Christ. But great as is this blessing, it is but a small part of the provisions of grace. "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5: 1). The very next verse speaks of two additional blessings: "access by faith into this grace in which we stand," i.e., into the full favour of God in Christ; and "rejoicing in hope of the glory of God," i.e., the full fruition and consummation of our present blessings. But these gifts of God's grace through Christ belong to us here, as justified men; and in the same way we can turn to other passages which speak of perfect and everlasting reconciliation. (See Col. 1: 21, 22). But there is something beyond all this; as indeed we partly saw when treating of "deliverance."

What then is our standing, position, or place before God? It is in Christ where He is. Let us explain. We have seen (Chapter 8) that every believer is regarded by God as having died with Christ; that the apostle could write to the Colossians, "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3: 3); and the context (v. 1) of the same passage speaks further of our "being risen with Christ." Turning to another epistle we get even more. "But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 2: 4-6). These expressions refer to something already accomplished, and we learn from them that, though we are still actually in the body on the earth, we are before God seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus; that the work of Christ on our behalf is so efficacious and wonderful, so God-glorifying, that God even now can righteously accord us a position in Christ in the heavenly places. For Christ "has not only borne our sins, and died to sin, and closed the whole history of the old man in death, for those who believe, they having been crucified with Him; but He has glorified God in this work (John 13: 31, 32; John 17: 4, 5), and so obtained a place for man in the glory of God, and a place of present positive acceptance, according to the nature and favour of God whom He has glorified; and that is our place before God. It is not only that the old man and his sins are all put out of God's sight, but we are in Christ before God." Every believer therefore has been crucified with Christ, raised up with Him, and is now seated in Him in the heavenlies. He is thus taken altogether out of his old standing — his Adam standing; for "he is not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if so be the Spirit of God dwell in him (Rom. 8: 9); and his new standing is in Christ, and thus of necessity in Christ where He is. Hence too the measure of his acceptance is the acceptance of Christ; "for as He is so are we in this world" (1 John 4: 17).

This is often very difficult for the young believer to understand. Be it therefore very distinctly noted that it is no question whatever of attainment or experience, that it belongs to every believer; and the difficulty will vanish if the eye be taken off from self and directed to Christ. If we look within, consider our weaknesses, failures, imperfections, sins, well might we be perplexed to understand how such imperfect ones, as we are practically, could have such a perfect and inalienable place before God. But when we look at Christ, at His precious blood, at what He was to God on the cross, and what He accomplished there, we instantly confess that He is worthy of the place He fills. Here is the whole secret. It is in His worthiness we stand. All that we were, as to the old nature, is gone from before God: Christ only remains, and we in Him. Our place, standing, is thus God's response to the worthiness, the merits, of His own Son. He can therefore righteously shelter us by the blood, bring us out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, across the Jordan, and set us down in Christ in the heavenlies.

And just because our standing is in Christ, it is unalterable and immutable. Knowing this, the completeness of our redemption, because of our union with that blessed One who is risen from among the dead, we have abiding confidence and peace. We may change, fluctuate in feeling and attainment, but Christ can never change; He is "the same yesterday, and today, and for ever" (Heb. 13: 8). And hence, since our standing is in Him, we dwell for ever in the light and presence of God; for our home is before Him, though we may sometimes forget it; and where should we dwell but in our home? The more fully therefore we understand our true place and standing in Christ, the more familiar shall we be with the presence and glory of God.

But such a wondrous place or standing has its responsibilities; and it is to these we would now turn. As we have seen, we are in Christ before God; and, marvelous fact, Christ is in us down here (see John 15: 4; Gal. 2: 20; Eph. 3: 17; Col. 1: 27, etc.), and this defines and measures our responsibilities; for if God has given us a place in Christ where He is, it is that we may exhibit Christ where we are. A few illustrations of this may be collected from the Scriptures. "He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked" (1 John 2: 6). Taking this in its most general form, we may ask, And how did the Lord Jesus walk? Ever as the heavenly One upon the earth. As when speaking to Nicodemus, He could say, "The Son of man which is in heaven" (John 3: 13), so was it during the whole of His earthly sojourn; for the life He lived was a heavenly life — as One who had come forth from the Father, revealing Him, and unfolding the perfectness of heaven upon earth. He could thus say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14: 9); for morally He was the perfect presentation of the Father. So ought we to walk — as belonging not to earth, but to heaven, and unfolding the ways of heaven upon earth — as samples of the heavenly character; for we are dead with Christ. We have not only died in Him to sin, but we have also died with Him from out of this scene in which we move, and have been raised together with Him. Our citizenship, or commonwealth, is in heaven (Phil. 3: 20), and in accordance with this character must be our lives. This responsibility is summed up, in its double aspect, by the apostle Paul when he says, "Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh" (2 Cor. 4: 10, 11). Thus it is death on the one side, and life on the other: death as to all that we were in the flesh; life as to all that we are in Christ, or rather, Christ Himself as our life — manifested even in our mortal flesh. Hence the obligation to mortify our members which are upon the earth (Col. 3: 5) — an obligation which distinctly flows from the fact that our standing is in Christ risen. The apostle shows that he had apprehended the responsibility when He says, "To me to live is Christ" (Phil. 1: 21); and just in proportion as we approximate to the ability to say the same thing will be our understanding of our true place in Christ.

Another form of our responsibility is found in the passage, "Be ye therefore followers (imitators) of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour" (Eph. 5: 1, 2). The same thing is enforced by the apostle John. Herein we have known love, because He has laid down His life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren (1 John 3: 16). We have also an example, in one particular direction, given in John 13. After the Lord Jesus had washed the feet of His disciples, "and had taken His garments, and was set down again, He said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, [your] Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you" (John 13: 12-15). The love of Christ therefore to us, even in yielding Himself up to death on our behalf, is proposed to us as our example. If He laid down His life for us, we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren, love's uttermost expression, and this — no degree short of this — is our responsibility.

But mark the language of the first of the passages which we have cited; and see how carefully the Spirit of God has defined the character of the love which should also flow out from us, and thereby guarded it from degenerating into human kindness and amiability. It is, "As Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." While therefore we are under responsibility to love our brethren to the uttermost, God, and not they, is to be the object before our souls. It must be expressed as to Him; and can therefore only be expressed in the pathways of obedience. "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep His commandments" (1 John 5: 2). Accordingly, our Lord's sacrifice of Himself is characterized as "obedience unto death" (Phil. 2: 8); and He Himself thus speaks of it: "I have power to lay it" (His life) "down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father" (John 10: 18). Thus Christ must be before our souls — Christ in motive as well as act, in treading in His path of love, in seeking to love one another, even as He hath loved us (John 15: 12).

The apostle Peter gives us another aspect of our responsibility in the presentation of Christ in walk, an aspect towards enemies or persecutors. "If, when ye do well, and suffer [for it], ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth: who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously: who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed" (1 Peter 2: 20-24). It is thus Christ, in whatever way we look; for since He is our life, our responsibility is to live Christ. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2: 20).

It may tend to simplify the whole subject, and aid in its apprehension, if we refer briefly to two other passages which treat of it in another form. Eph. 4: 20-32, and Col. 3 contain a number of practical exhortations which are all based upon our standing in Christ. We take the latter to indicate their general character. The first part of the chapter (Col. 3) deals with our death and resurrection with Christ, on which we have already touched. Following upon this we have practical directions. Then the apostle lays the foundation of all. "Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new [man], which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him: where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond [nor] free: but Christ is all, and in all. Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness," etc. (Col. 3: 9-12). Without entering upon a detailed exposition of the passage, it will be observed that the ground of the exhortations lies in the Colossian believers having "put off the old man," and having "put on the new." But when did they put off the old man? It was in the death of Christ that our old man (Adam) was crucified (Rom. 6: 6). And when did they put on the new man? In the resurrection of Christ (Col. 2: 11-13; 3: 1-5). And herein lies the whole of our responsibility. For if I, through grace, have put off the old man, my responsibility is, to live no longer according to the old man, but to mortify my members which are upon the earth; and if I have put on the new man, I am under the obligation to walk accordingly, for we have been brought, through the death and resurrection of Christ, out of the old state and standing in which Adam was all and in all, into the new, where Christ is all and in all. If therefore Christ in glory is the measure of my standing, He also is the measure of my responsibility, and these two things are always connected in the word of God, as they should also ever be connected in our own souls. "If any man be in Christ, a new creature" (2 Cor. 5: 17), i.e., he is brought into that new creation of which Christ is the beginning and the Head; and hence every believer is responsible to walk in accordance with the character of the place into which he is brought.

Chapter 11  The Coming of the Lord

One object of hope is placed before the believer in the Scriptures as soon as he has been brought out of darkness into God's marvelous light, and that is the coming or return of the Lord Jesus. This is the case in almost every book of the New Testament; and this fact makes it the more surprising that the hope of the Lord's return has been lost sight of by almost the whole professing Church. Let us examine the Scriptures on this point.

In the first place, we shall find that our Lord Himself was continually pressing this truth upon the attention of His disciples. In the gospel of Matthew it is found again and again, and the "parable of the virgins" embodies it in its most striking form (Matt. 25). In Mark we get the exhortation, "Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the Master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning," etc. (Mark 13: 35-37). In Luke we read, "Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately" (Luke 12: 35, 36). In John we have those blessed and familiar words: "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if [it were] not [so], I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, [there] ye may be also" (John 14: 1-3).

These are only samples of the way in which the Lord presented His return to His disciples; and we now pass on to the subsequent books of the New Testament, because it is after the resurrection and ascension of Christ that the Holy Spirit reveals this truth as the distinctive hope of the believer. Indeed, no sooner had the Lord been taken from His disciples up into heaven than this message was sent to them: "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven" (Acts 1: 10, 11). Passing still onward to the epistles which were addressed to churches or to saints, we shall find the same thing. The first epistle to the Thessalonians was the earliest in point of time of these; and in this, describing their conversion, the apostle says: "They themselves show of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for His Son from heaven" (1 Thess. 1: 9, 10; see also 1 Thess. 2: 19, 20; 1 Thess. 3: 13; 1 Thess. 4: 13-18, etc.). The second epistle to the same church treats of the same subject, correcting some mistakes into which the saints were in danger of falling through false teaching. (See 2 Thess. 2: 1-6). In Colossians we have the same distinct note — "When Christ, [who is] our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory" (Col. 3: 4), showing here indeed that the saints will have been caught up to meet the Lord before His appearing. In Philippians also we have, "Our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ" (Phil. 3: 20). So in Titus, "Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ" (Titus 2: 13).

Taking now the last book of the Bible, what do we find? The same thing both at the commencement and at the close. Of all the seven churches Philadelphia seems most in accord with the Lord's mind; and it is to it that He says, "Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown" (Rev. 3: 11). And our Lord thus closes His communications to His people, and the whole canon of inspired truth: "He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly" (Rev. 22: 20), sufficient evidence surely of the place He would have His coming to occupy in our minds.

And not only is it the fact that our attitude should ever be that of waiting for the Lord Jesus, but we are also taught that there is nothing of necessity, as far as is revealed, between the present and that coming, no intervening events to occupy us or to turn aside our gaze; but that at any moment, even while this page is being written or read, the Lord may "descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God," to raise His sleeping saints, and to change the living ones, that both alike may be caught up "in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air" (1 Thess. 4: 15-18). Thus the apostle, in the constant expectation of this event, says, "We which are alive and remain shall be caught up," etc. (1 Thess. 4: 17); and again, "We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed" (1 Cor. 15: 51). Accordingly, it is the evil servant who is spoken of as saying in his heart, "My lord delayeth his coming" (Matt. 24: 48); and Peter also tells us that there will be scoffers in the last days, "walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of His coming?" (2 Peter 3: 3, 4).

Waiting, looking for, expecting the coming of the Lord should thus characterize every believer. For, as we have continually seen in these pages, we are a heavenly people, and hence our hope is also heavenly; and we wait for the Lord Jesus, because He Himself has told us to do so. And, moreover, He has been pleased to reveal to us that then will be the consummation of our redemption. It is then that we shall be like Him (1 John 3: 2); that we shall be like Him bodily as well as morally (Phil. 3: 21). For if we shall have died as to the body ere He returns, He will raise us from among the dead, in resurrection bodies like His own; if we are still on the earth, we shall "be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we" (i.e., the living) "shall be changed" (1 Cor. 15: 51, 52). Then, too, not only shall we enter upon our association with Him in the glory, but we shall also "ever be with the Lord" (1 Thess. 4: 17).

The effect of this hope upon the soul should be most blessed. We may adduce a few instances of the practical power which it is intended to exercise. Beyond all, the constant expectation of Christ constitutes a searching test of our spiritual condition. This is one of the main points in the parable of the virgins (Matt. 25: 1-13). All the virgins are professors; but the fatal distinction is, that while five are wise, five are foolish. All alike had lamps, and all alike professed to go forth to meet the Bridegroom. Outwardly therefore there was no difference; and as far as can be discovered from the parable the essential difference between them was not detected until the cry was raised, "Behold the Bridegroom!" Then it is, in the prospect of His approach, and in order to be ready to meet Him, that they are aroused from their slumbers, and that they begin to trim their lamps; but no sooner was the light applied to the wicks of their lamps than five discover their lack of oil. Until now they had thought that all was well. They were professors, and walked, outwardly at least, as the Lord's people; but now, in the near prospect of meeting the Lord, they are made to know that they had no oil, that they had not been born again, that they had no indwelling Spirit to bear witness with their spirits that they were God's children, that they were professors and nothing else, and therefore that as such they could not meet the Bridegroom. Hence their endeavours to get the oil: but no, their efforts are vain; it is too late, for the Bridegroom and those that were ready have gone in to the marriage: "and the door was shut" (Matt. 25: 10). Undaunted still, they press onwards and reach the door, and standing there, they raise the pleading cry, "Lord, Lord, open to us. But He answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not" (Matt. 25: 11, 12). And the solemn lesson which the Lord Himself draws is this, "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour" (Matt. 25: 13); for what happened to the foolish virgins in the parable may happen to any of us, if we take only the lamp of profession, and have no oil; i.e., if we are Christians only in name, never having been born again, and received the Spirit of adoption.

But not only does the expectation of Christ reveal the true state of professors, but it also discovers the condition of the wise virgins. These equally with the foolish had slumbered and slept, and it is the cry, "Behold the Bridegroom" which also awakens them, and constrains them to trim their lamps that they might go forth and meet Him; and it is only thus that being ready they went in with Him to the marriage (Matt. 25: 10). Indeed, when believers are constantly expecting their Lord, it is impossible for them to sleep. In spirit they are already in His presence, and their own state and associations are instantly revealed. And it would seem from the parable that there are four things which constitute readiness to meet the Lord: First, the one essential thing, oil; secondly, the lamp trimmed and burning; thirdly, separation, for they were to go out to meet the Bridegroom; and lastly, watchfulness, for their failure was in having slumbered and slept. And it is when the Lord is momentarily expected that believers will seek to have these characteristics of preparedness for His presence.

It should be also an incentive to fidelity in service. Thus in the parable of the ten pounds, the charge which accompanied their delivery to the ten servants was, "Occupy till I come" (Luke 19: 12-27). Concerning the evil servant, already mentioned, it is said, "The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites," etc. (Matt. 24: 50, 51). Thus the coming of Christ is a double motive to fidelity; it holds out encouragement to the faithful, and it affords a warning to the careless servant. The former will say with joyful anticipation, "My Lord is at hand, and therefore I must seek to be diligent ere He comes"; while the latter, if he reflect at all, will surely think, "What will my Lord say if He find me, at His coming, both careless and unfaithful?" The more fully therefore we live in the power of the expectation of Christ, the more shall we feel the need of serving as in His sight, knowing that He will reckon with us on His return.

The prospect of the coming of Christ exerts also a separating power upon heart and life. The apostle John says, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in Him (i.e., in Christ) purifieth himself, even as He is pure" (1 John 2: 2, 3). Nothing indeed will detach us from all that is unsuited to His presence like the constant expectation of Christ. Knowing that He may return at any moment, and living with this expectation, it will be our desire to be separated from all, whether in heart, manner, habit, life, and walk, on which He could not smile. Yea, it will lead us to judge everything within and without ourselves by the light of His presence as being in spirit already with Him, and thus having Him in glory continually before our souls, to "purify ourselves even as He is pure."

These are only some of the practical effects of the living expectation of the coming of Christ. If the Scriptures are examined further on the subject, it will be found that the coming of Christ is always associated with the heart and life of the believer. But enough has been said to indicate the practical character of the doctrine. A grievous wrong is therefore done to the young believer when he is kept in ignorance of this most blessed truth. For if the cross of Christ is the foundation, the coming of Christ is the completion of his salvation, for it is then, as we have seen, that in body also he will be like his Lord. And not only so, but he is also deprived of that hope which, applied by the Holy Spirit, not only sustains him in discouragement, comforts him in trouble, consoles him in bereavement, nerves him for conflict, stimulates his zeal, and calls forth his affections, but also works mightily for his practical sanctification. It is no wonder therefore that Satan should seek to obscure it from the minds of believers; but it is a wonder that so many should fall into his snare, inasmuch as our blessed Lord has for ever associated it with the touching memorials of His own death. For every time "we eat the bread, and drink the cup, we do show the Lord's death TILL HE COME" (1 Cor. 11: 26).

Chapter 12  The Judgment

Much confusion exists in the minds both of believers and unbelievers as to the judgment. The general idea is that at the end of the world there will be a judgment-day, when all alike, whether saved or unsaved, will stand before God, and receive according to their works. Hence it is often contended that we cannot know whether we are saved before that time. We therefore propose to examine this subject by the light of the Scriptures.

1. It is very certain that believers will never be judged — will never stand before the judgment-seat on account of sin. Our Lord teaches this doctrine most distinctly. He says, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5: 24). Now this word "condemnation" should be translated judgment, and is so translated in verses 22, 27, and 29; and we have therefore a distinct assertion that believers will not come into judgment. Indeed, this is only a simple consequence of having eternal life; for if the question of our state before God were left unsettled, how could we be possessors of everlasting life? And yet we are taught that we have this now: "He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath" (not shall have) "everlasting life." (See also John 3: 36; 6: 47; 1 John 5: 13, etc.).

This truth was shadowed forth in the distinction which God made between Israel and Egypt on the Passover night, when He smote the first-born. Israel, as we have seen, was completely sheltered from the power of the destroying angel, by the blood of the Lamb. In like manner every believer is secured from judgment as to guilt, by the blood of Christ; for Christ has borne the judgment for him in His death on the cross, so that he can say, "He bare my sins in His own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2: 24).

"Yes," you may perhaps reply, "my past sins." "No," we answer, "your sins; all your sins if you are a believer. For not one of them had been committed when the Saviour died; and so He took the burden of all of them, entered into and exhausted the judgment due to all of them, so that the whole of your guilt might for ever be swept away. Blessed truth!"

"If thou hast my discharge procured,

And freely in my place endured

The whole of wrath divine,

Payment He will not twice demand,

First at my bleeding surety's hand,

And then again at mine."

Thus it is that we have not only died, but have also been raised together with Christ (Eph. 2; Col. 3), and therefore have been brought through the judgment, in the death of Christ, so that we stand on the other, the resurrection side, where in perfect confidence we can cry, "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth?" (Rom. 8: 33, 34).

2. Though believers will never be judged on account of sin, all must appear before the judgment-seat of Christ. Thus the apostle writes: "We are confident [I say] and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord. Wherefore we labour (or, it is our earnest desire), that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of Him (or, acceptable to Him). For we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things [done] in [his] body, according to that he hath done, whether [it be] good or bad" (2 Cor. 5: 8-10). No statement could be plainer to the effect that all, "we all," and therefore believers, must also appear before the judgment-seat of Christ. We ask them these two questions: first, When will this be for believers? and secondly, For what purpose will they be there?

(a) When will believers appear before the judgment-seat of Christ? It has been seen in the previous chapter that the hope of the believer is the coming of Christ; and that at His coming the dead in Christ will be raised, that those who are living will be changed, and that both will be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thess. 4: 16-18). This applies to believers alone, and is "the resurrection of life" of which our Lord speaks in the gospel of John. If we cite the whole passage the reference will be better understood. He says, "The hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation" (judgment, kriseos) (John 5: 28, 29). In verse 24, He proclaims everlasting life to every one that heareth His word, and believeth on Him that sent Him; and declares that all such shall not come into judgment, but are passed from death unto life. He then proceeds, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live." He grounds this assurance upon the fact that "as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself; and hath given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of man" (John 5: 25-27). Then comes our passage, "Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming," etc. (v. 28).

The two things here contrasted are life and judgment, in connection with Christ as the source of one, and the depositary of the other. As the Son of God He communicates life; as the Son of man He is invested with the authority to execute judgment. Accordingly He offers life in the hour that now is; and will execute judgment in the hour that is coming. The hour that "now is" has lasted therefore from the time when these words were spoken, and will last until the close of the present dispensation. Thus the dead in verse 25 are the spiritually dead; and hence we have the words "they that hear shall live"; for it is only they that hear the voice of the Son of God in the gospel who pass from death unto life. But in the coming hour (John 5: 28) we are told that all that are in the graves shall come forth; "the hour" in this case, as in verse 25, marking a period or dispensation, and therefore in no way indicating a simultaneous resurrection. On the other hand, as we know from other Scriptures (1 Cor. 15: 23; 1 Thess. 4: 15-18; Rev. 20: 4-6, etc.), the resurrection of life will take place at the Lord's return, while the resurrection of judgment will not be until the close of the millennium, being the closing event of earthly dispensations preparatory to the eternal state. What we get then from this passage is, that the resurrection of life of those who have heard the word of the Son of God, and believed on Him that sent Him, and have received everlasting life, is an entirely distinct thing from the resurrection of judgment; that believers have no part in the resurrection of judgment, and hence that they will not appear before the judgment-seat together with the wicked. There is also the other solemn instruction which we note and leave, as outside our present purpose, that all men must honour the Son of God, if not now by bowing before Him in self-judgment to receive everlasting life, then by-and-by when He executes judgment as the Son of man upon every one according to their works. Now He acts in grace; then in righteous judgment.

Having then seen that believers have no part in the resurrection of judgment, we have still to enquire, When will they appear before the judgment-seat of Christ? The answer is clear from many passages that it is on His return, and therefore consequent upon the first resurrection. This is the distinct teaching of the parables in Matthew 25: 14, etc.; Luke 19: 11, etc. In the former, we have the words, "After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them" (Matt. 25: 19); in the latter, the charge on departure is, "Occupy till I come" (Luke 19: 13). In all the exhortations, too, addressed to the disciples, under responsibility as servants, the coming of Christ is the goal to which they are directed to look; so also in the epistles (as, for example, 1 Cor. 1: 7, 8; 1 Thess. 1: 9, 10; 1 Thess. 3: 12, 13; 2 Thess. 1; 1 Timothy 6: 13-16; Titus 2: 11-14, etc.).

(b) We may, then, now answer our second question — For what purpose will believers appear before the judgment-seat of Christ? We have seen that it is not to be judged for sin; for the possession of everlasting life exempts them from this, and the judgment, due both to their sins and sinful condition, has already been borne by their Surety in His death. It is "that every one may receive the things [done] in [his] body"; and thus for the believer it is a judgment of his works or service. This truth cannot be too earnestly pressed upon our hearts and consciences; for it will stimulate us both to fidelity and zeal to remember that we must "be manifested" (as the word is) before the judgment-seat of Christ. Let it be remembered, however, that before we are thus judged we are already raised, and made like unto our Lord (Phil. 3: 20, 21; 1 John 3: 2), body as well as spiritually; and hence that we shall have full fellowship with Him in His judgment upon our works. Still it is a very solemn consideration, that in regard to those things which we now excuse or allow to pass unjudged, we shall then take part with Christ in condemning as unworthy of Him whom we professed to serve; as traces of Egypt [a type of the world] which ought to have been judged and rolled away; as actings of the flesh which God in His infinite mercy and grace had put into the place of death, and which He has given us power to keep there through the indwelling Spirit. Hence the blessing of constant and faithful self-judgment, as even now in spirit manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ. May we be enabled to do this, and may "the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. 5: 23).

3. The final judgment of the wicked will take place at the end of the millennium. Earth has been, and will yet be, the scene of many a judgment of the living; and so also "when the Son of man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all nations," etc. (Matt. 25: 31, etc.). This judgment scene is often confounded with that which takes place before the great white throne; but it is entirely distinct. It is, as the word declares, the judgment of the nations, living nations at the coming of the Son of man in glory; a judgment therefore preparatory to His sway from the river unto the ends of the earth. The final judgment, that of the dead, is found in the Revelation, and is thus described: "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God" (it should be, before the throne)"; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is [the book] of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell (rather, hades) delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire" (Rev. 20: 11-15).

This is the "resurrection of judgment" of which our Lord speaks in the gospel of John; and will include therefore all the unsaved, and the unsaved alone. True that the book of life is there; but there is no indication of any saints to be judged. The book of life is opened to show that the names of those to be judged were not there; and thus they are condemned on both negative and positive grounds. Their names were not written in the book of life, and their works declared them amenable to righteous judgment, and they thus fall hopelessly under the everlasting sentence of the lake of fire, which is the second death, a sentence from which there is no appeal and no escape.

Are any of my readers still unsaved? Let me beseech you to ponder upon this solemn scene. He who sits upon that great white throne as the Judge is the Blessed One who, now seated in the glory at the right hand of God, is proclaimed to you as a Saviour. Concerning Him the divine decree has gone forth, "That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of [things] in heaven, and [things] in earth, and [things] under the earth" (i.e., celestial, terrestrial, and infernal beings); "and [that] every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2: 10, 11). None therefore can escape; but the question which affects you, and will affect you eternally, is whether you will bow the knee to Him now while it is the accepted time, and the day of salvation, or whether you will be constrained to bow before Him as your Judge on the throne. Bow before Him now, in self-judgment, taking the place of a sinner, and looking to Him as the Saviour, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world, and you will not come into judgment, but will, while you look, pass from death unto life. Refusing Him as a Saviour, despising the grace of God which promises everlasting life to every one that believeth on Him, you will have to bow before and under the rod of His judgment, and at the same time to confess that He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Awful alternative! Oh that even the contemplation of it may be used of the Lord to bring you, even as you read, as a lost sinner to His feet, so that finding Him as your Saviour, you may be amongst that happy number who are waiting for His return, and who will never stand before the great white throne.

E. Dennett.

STEM Publishing: G. V. Wigram: A Gospel Address.

A Gospel Address.

2 Cor. 4, 5.

G. V. Wigram.

Christian Friend, vol. 8, 1881, p. 197.

I have read these chapters together because they present the gospel in the way in which Paul learnt all the leading points of it. There was a certain man very remarkable for his self-righteousness — Saul of Tarsus. He thought he could put forth his power mightily to vindicate God's cause against One whom he thought an impostor — Jesus of Nazareth; and when he saw the light of the glory shine down on Stephen, it had no effect on him whatever; it only stirred his heart up to go to the high priest to get letters to Damascus. All the hard thoughts he had about Christ had a response in the heart of Christ. He looked down and saw that man with those clothes laid at his feet; and He said, "That is the man I will take up; and I will put him into Stephen's place, whether he likes it or not" The Lord called him as he went down to Damascus "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" Saul's answer was, "Who art thou, Lord?" "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest." What gentleness of the Lord Jesus! The next word is, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" The Lord put that man for the first time into the place of an enquirer about the person of the Lord Jesus. He says, "The first time I ever asked the question, 'Who art thou?' was when I saw the divine glory shining down, and heard the voice of Him who I thought was an impostor calling me by name; what could I do but give up all to Him?" He gives up all his thoughts, and says, "I know Him, and I am at His disposal." Peter, James, and John did not know the Lord Jesus in this way till He was risen from the dead. Both Peter and Paul had to learn what was the main object for which Christ came into the world; and they got the light of it after He rose from the dead. The revelation of Christ as being gone into heaven had to be made known to Peter. Now, how many of you can say, I know Him? Do you know Him? After what sort of fashion? with any sort of intimacy? When I was nineteen, if friends talked to me about Christ, I knew nothing; but when the Lord came and introduced Himself to me I thought that a person was close to me, and that everything I had done was out in the light; but instead of coming to condemn me, there was nothing but love in Him. I could have told you who Jesus Christ was, and who Caesar was; but as to knowing Himself, I was utterly ignorant. But as He made His passages of love into my heart, out came the confession of what I was. I have had forty-seven years' apprenticeship under Christ; and of all the things on which my heart dwells as to eternity, I say, "I have got One who is gone there before me."

God says, "Let there be light." (v. 6.) The One who spoke light out of darkness could speak light into darkness, as He does into the heart of the poor sinner. I want to call attention to what Paul had to learn. Peter learnt it too, that it was not what men did to Christ in crucifying Him that contained the full meaning of His death, but there was a "determinate counsel of God." He let men run their whole course, because He could not be a just God, and the Justifier of him that believeth, without the blood of Christ. They had God in the world, and they would not have Him there, and now the blood is in heaven. They say, We will not have that either. It is the world, not the earth, spoken of here — the world, the system man has set up to make himself happy without God. God comes into the scene, and man says, "I will not have you." "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." He did not come raking up their transgressions. God saw that reconciliation was what was wanted. He saw that unless He could take that enmity out of my heart, we could never come together. And now Paul says, "He has committed unto us the word of this reconciliation." The unconverted say, "I cannot admit that I need reconciling to God, or else I should be lost." "Oh," says the Christian, "that is just where I get my rest!" Even a child very soon displays will. What does God say? "Very unlike my Son; I cannot get on with it." Does He turn away? No; He says you want reconciling. "You are in a path of 'I will' and 'I won't:' it leads to hell. My Son went through the world, and only said 'I will' twice, and that when it was My will." Does God deal with will in man? Yes; He sent out the apostles and others with this word, "Be ye reconciled to God."

Let me say a word about the need of this reconciliation, because I knew so much about it for nineteen years. When I learnt I was going down a sloping path to hell, I set myself to work out righteousness, and worked myself nearly to death, having no idea of doing things by halves. And what did I see all this come to? God says, "I must do the work." What! that no one but God was to have the credit of salvation? That I was to come as a poor sinner? Why that will let me down so very low! It just proved that I wanted reconciling. I was saying, up to that time, "I don't like Thy way." Perhaps some of you are saying to God, "I don't like Thy way; I must do something." God says, "I did it eighteen hundred years ago. My Son died. I shall not do the work again. If you come into My presence, saying, I am going to do everything for myself, I say, I do not know you." Are you going to displace every thing in heaven? Are you going to undo the work of Christ, and bring in a new way? That work has stood before God for more than eighteen hundred years, and are you, an upstart creature, going to say, No; that work must be set aside, and a way must be made for me, to let me figure out and show what I am?

In the last verse we get the basis of it all. If we pause on verse 21, we shall find how different God's thoughts are from man's thoughts. "For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Very well put by the apostle in a few words, because we cannot say, Who can this be? for we know there was only One who "knew no sin." It might be placed over the Lord Jesus in heaven, "This Man hath done nothing amiss;" but more than that, "He knew no sin." "Holy, harmless, undefiled," etc. God made Him to be sin; now what does man think about that? I heard it said, "I don't think there is any justice about that;" but man, when he undertakes to judge God, is in the dark. It would never have been just or righteousness if He had been made sin contrary to His will. I just remark, that in all these infidel reasonings men take things for granted that are not true. Had not God a right to do as He liked? Had not He a right to sit in heaven from all eternity? Yes. Had not He a right to leave that place, and take His place on the cross? Man must keep his own place, or else he comes into judgment. Who can say to God, Thou must not be here? All that it brings out is, that when the gospel is presented to man, he says, "I do not like God, or His ways." It shows another thing, that the wisdom of God was such that He knew how to take the absolute ruin of man, and make that the means of the greatest glory to Himself. Look at man in the garden; he turned his back upon God, and followed Satan. How did He remedy it? Could man? No; God says, "I will step in there, and turn that very ruin to My own praise." How did He do it? His Son comes down to drink that cup of wrath for sinners; the Son of God was made sin. He is the only Person yet who has ever tasted the wrath of God against sin, and I am bold to say He was the only One who could taste it fully. Take a man who goes to "his own place:" he knows what it is to be separated from God; but how can a finite being learn what is infinite? But when the Son of God came into the world He took the cup of wrath. Who will measure what He went through? the thought of God hiding His face from Him? Many a believer has tried to measure sin, and he says, "No, I cannot; I find the measure in the cross which I cannot measure." He was forsaken of God; that is the sort of God who sent Peter and Paul with this message to poor sinners. "I have made Him, who knew no sin, to be sin for you."

Then you get the other thought brought out in the latter part of the verse, "That we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." God hid His face from His Son, just as the Jews and Gentiles were mocking Him; but He did not mean it to end there. Ire says, "Now come to My right hand, and let Me show the world what I think of You; and every one who comes to Me in Thy name shall receive a hearty welcome." It is as simple as possible. Suppose I had been into a foreign land, and saved the life of some man out of a river. I return, and I want a favour of some of you who are akin to him; I come to you; you say, "I do not know you." I reply, "Have you heard from your son lately?" You tell me all that has passed, and I say, "I am the man who saved him." "Oh," you say, "what will I not give you! Come and sit down, and make my home your home:" Just so with God and Christ; if you come in your own name He does not know you, if you come in His name you get a hearty welcome. The thing is as clear as possible, and you have firm ground to go upon if you come in His name.

What is the connection between this and human righteousness? Human righteousness is, I do this and that, and when I have done, God forms the judgment of it. God's righteousness is God saying, "I have done something, and I want some one to recognize it, and to come in His name." That is heart-work when we come to know a loving Saviour; faith-work when we come to think of what God has done. Then there is conscience-work; you cannot look into my conscience, or I into yours. We see a beautiful conscience-work in the apostle. He says we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; not the great white throne — that is at the end of the thousand years. Those who appear there will never appear at the other judgmentseat. Here it is like a man who has been away from home; he comes back and settles up his accounts in a loving way: good servants like their masters to keep short reckonings. When Christ gathers all His people together there, it is a question of how He shall place them in the kingdom. If I speak of appearing in a place, I mean I shall be manifest. Paul says, My doctrine is manifest, and we must all be manifested. People do not like that: what, all come out there? I will tell you why they do not like it, they have not been manifested to themselves yet; but you cannot escape it if you mean to be in the glory. But stop; what are you afraid of? Who are you going to meet there? The Lord Jesus Christ. No mistake about His having known you as a sinner, and as a failing saint He does not expect you to be just like Himself. He expects a poor sinner saved by grace Will it be a very painful thing to be there? He will say, as He did to Peter, "I had not a bit of faith in you, but you had a bit of faith in Me, and that is what brought you here." Will it be painful if He says, You owe it all to Me; do not go and say, that you did it yourself. Are you afraid to appear before Him there? What does God think about me? what do saints of God think about me? what do I think about myself? If I have not weighed myself up in God's presence, no wonder I am not at ease at the thought of being at the judgment-seat. Is your thought about yourself anything but the blood of Christ as to acceptance? I would rather come cleansed by that blood than in my own righteousness even if it were possible.

What do I think of all that blessed favour into which I am brought? Christ is gone into heaven, and I am to go in there. It is what I think of Christ, not what I think of myself; it clears out every thought of myself. Where are poor sinners who do not know they want cleansing by blood? Lost! lost! lost! No matter who you are — either a poor sinner with a Saviour, or a poor sinful man cleaving to his sinfulness. Paul says, I do not come to teach you human righteousness, but Jesus Christ who is revealed to you and me. The eye of that Lord looks down on us now. When He was on earth He looked down on a little company like this; He knew Nicodemus at the first glance, and He knew the woman of Samaria at the first glance. As He looks down on us, does He see one who knows His blood, His finished work, or one who cares nothing about Him? I am connected with One who is the centre of all God's purposes; I know that all that is true of a believer, and a great deal more. It is wonderful, God's way of setting aside all that is of the flesh, and making a way that lets naughty sinners down in self-abhorrence, and makes them say, "My trust is in the Lord." Who else should ruined sinners trust in? Everything in connection with sin about me makes me loathe myself, and cling to Him and say, Christ for me. G. V. W.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

Publisher: Loizeaux Brothers, Inc., Neptune, N.J.

1. A Coal from the Altar

2. In the Pharisee's House

3. At the Well

4. A Brand from the Burning

5. Rahab

6. The Demoniac

7. The Gospel in the Genealogy

8. The Healing of the Issue

9. The Famine of Samaria, and How it was Relieved

10. The Lost Sheep

11. The Lost Piece of Silver

12. The Lost Son

13. Not Lost and Not Saved — (the Elder Son)

14. The Perseverance of the Saints

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

Publisher: Loizeaux Brothers, Inc., Neptune, N.J.

A Coal from the Altar.

A Gospel Address.

Isaiah 6.

The lesson of this chapter, as we in our day may read it, is very full in its evangelic teaching. Its two broad features are these, that, let man but take his true place before God, he shall surely find God's mercy for him; and then, also, that this mercy is, and must be, also righteousness. As the apostle puts it concerning the gospel: "It is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." And then, why? "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed." In God's good news to fallen man is His righteousness revealed.

The prophet, though he be that — God's man toward the people, — in the presence of God must fall as low as any other. A Manasseh or a thief on the cross could do no more than utter that cry, "Woe is me, for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." And that is all the man of God can say. Like the Psalmist, "Enter not into judgment with Thy servant, O Lord! for in thy sight shall no man living be justified."

It is the first essential thing for blessing to be brought just to this point, to the utter giving up of all pretension to anything before God, — to the acceptance of His sentence of utter condemnation upon all the world, — all the world guilty before God. When we have reached that point we do not look round with self-complacency upon our neighbors, to reflect upon how much guiltier they are than we. That word "LOST," if we know what it means, swallows up all other distinctions. It refuses to know any distinction. "Undone!" "Lost!" The sinner of the city and Isaiah the prophet absolutely upon the same level as to that!

Have you come down to that dead level, reader? Death is, you know, the abolisher of all distinctions. Men are dead, — all dead, — dead in trespasses and sins alike. Oh the hopelessness of that condition! Can you educate or improve death? Can human power do aught with death? No; God alone can quicken. You must have "life." You must be born again. No works can come of you but "dead works," nothing that has not the odor of corruption in it, until you are born again, born of God, born of His word, which liveth and abideth forever: and THIS is the word, which by the gospel is preached unto you." (1 Peter 1: 25.)

Where and as you are then, — utterly powerless and helpless, — doing nothing, being nothing, promising nothing, you must receive the sweet and gladdening message of God's good news. You can be nothing, do nothing, till you have received it; for you are born again by it, and only so. You do not even begin to live to God until it does its work upon you.

And now, mark. No sooner is there the acknowledgment, "Woe is me, for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips," than the mercy of God supplies the remedy. "Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar; and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged."

How blessed, how worthy of God! No long laborious process of cure is here! No conditions are imposed, no work of self-help is enjoined. The provision of grace is simple, immediate, and immediately effectual, then and there. On the sinner's part is solely the confession of ruin which sin has wrought. The declaration of iniquity taken away and of sin purged meets it at once on God's part. It is preached to the "undone" one. God's word gives him the assurance of what is done for him. He is not left to examine himself and to search out by his own feelings what is the mind of God toward him. He has to believe only, and be at peace.

And so it ever is. Everywhere the gospel proclaims for all, because all are sinners, the good news of a salvation provided just for sinners. The call is to "repent, and believe the gospel," — that is, to take the place of sinners, and just drink in the mercy provided for sinners. To "repent" is to give up the pretence and effort at self-justification. To "believe the gospel" is just to believe in the justification which God has provided.

"Being justified freely by His grace." "Freely," — what does that mean? "Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely." What is taking it freely? Surely, just believing that it is mine, unconditionally mine, because I want it. That I am to assure myself that it is mine if I "will," without any further question. This is the only "appropriation" Scripture knows of. The prophet confesses himself "undone." He is a needy, anxious, convicted one. He is thereupon assured that his iniquity is taken away, his sin is purged. That is what he is called on to appropriate. Not something that is not his own, but something that is freely his, just upon the ground of his being a poor, lost one, needing it.

Many, if I could ask, Do you need a salvation such as this? would have no difficulty at all in giving answer that they did. And further, if I asked them, would they have just such a salvation, if they could, would think it folly to ask such a question. With them the question is of God's will, not of theirs. In Scripture the question is of man's will, not of God's. "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, AND YE would not." "Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean." "I will; be thou clean." Who would have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth." Thus, if we will, there is no difficulty. For lost ones God has provided salvation, through the work of Jesus. If we are that, and would have that salvation, it is ours. It is not for us to question, but to believe our blessedness.

But what a strange mode of purging unclean lips! "A live coal" from the altar. A coal red-hot with the fire which has just been consuming the victim. Yes, "our God is a consuming fire.'' What a picture of that indignation and wrath against sin, which is a necessity in the nature of a holy God! And though he pity, yea, love the sinner, that cannot change His holiness. Set me in presence, then, of this righteous and holy God, how can He show me favor? How can the righteousness of God clear or justify me? It seems as impossible as that a "live coal" should purge instead of blasting human lips.

But look again. It is a coal from off the altar: a live coal still, for God's wrath against sin never can die out, God's righteousness never can be aught but what it ever has been. But this live coal from the altar of sacrifice is nevertheless changed in its character so far: it does not blast, but purges. And, looking not at the type but at the antitype, the righteousness of God in the cross of Jesus Christ does not condemn but justifies the sinner. That cross surely is the altar of sacrifice where the live coal has done its work. It is where the righteousness of God has been declared as nowhere else; but where it is declared, perfect as ever, living and active in its antagonism to sin; and yet not against the sinner, but on his side. So that if I, confessing the sins which prove me one of those for whom He died, take my place thus before Himself, I find Him faithful and just to forgive me my sins, and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness.

God has title to tell out His love, — title to show it me, — has earned this title at such cost to Himself that I cannot but believe He must love much, and love much to tell it out, and make souls happy in it. The gospel sent out everywhere is His witness that it is so. I cannot honor Him more than by giving credit to it.

Will you, beloved reader, if yet you have not? Will you let in this tale of joy which is seeking admittance to your heart at this moment? Is it too good to be believed? Too good for a tale from God Himself? Does it give Him more glory than He deserves? Only take your place with the prophet in this chapter. God's testimony to the work of Christ is this: That it avails for you; for you, poor undone one, so glad to have this salvation if you only might, for you it avails. "Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged." Believe it and rejoice.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

In the Pharisee's House

A Gospel Address

Luke 7: 36-50.

When we first wake up to realize that we have not got any real solid peace as to the future, — I do not say hope, for I suppose everybody has something which he likes to call hope, if it is not very solid, — but when we wake up to find no solid ground for the future, we are still, if awake, yet in the darkness. We wake up ignorant how to secure what we are so anxious to secure; and therefore it is that we commonly miss, for a time at any rate, what we are seeking after, because we seek it in a wrong direction. We are very apt to impute it to God, and think God is dealing hardly with us, and that God is not willing to give it to us. We have got to wait upon God we think, until He is ready; whereas God is all the time waiting upon us. We have not to wait at all for God; but we are moving in one direction, and the thing we want to find is in another. Therefore the Gospel has to set this right; putting aside the thoughts and feelings of our own hearts to give us God's thoughts instead. What is meant by repentance? Every one naturally — not merely moralists, but the most ungodly, when he is aroused, thinks it means putting himself right, and thus takes a wrong direction — seeks exactly in an opposite way for the thing, he wants to find. Scripture has to come in and correct our thoughts, to turn us right round upon our path; and then the end we thought we had to go so far to reach is nigh at hand.

We find our Lord here with a Pharisee. These Pharisees were not all hypocrites, though we know there were many hypocrites among them, and the "leaven of the Pharisees" was indeed hypocrisy. It is inseparable, more or less, from such a position as they were taking, however many who meant to be honest might be taking it. Law-keepers for righteousness cannot afford to be quite honest. It would spoil their stock in trade if they looked too narrowly at what their hands are manufacturing for God. It *is inseparable from their business that they cannot afford to keep a scrupulous conscience; and here they bring in the thought of God's mercy, and hope that God will take their shoddy for good cloth.

The Pharisees, in fact, included almost all the religious people of the day; and they are types of a large mass of the religious people of any day. We can find plenty of them all about us in Christendom now. A class of people who cannot speak of having attained salvation or got peace with God; but whose religious life is a busy industry to provide themselves the wedding garment they must have to appear in before God.

They are not irreligious, and not at rest. They are sinners in general, but not sinners in particular; not perhaps good enough for heaven, and not quite bad enough for hell; and so, if they do not believe in purgatory, puzzled where to place themselves; but certainly not with publicans and such like. Thus One who sits down with publicans they do not understand. The gospel He comes to announce passes right over their heads and never touches them; or if it touches, it only gives offense.

John the Baptist had come in a totally different way, and in a way more striking, naturally. He had come as a man separating himself from all alike, and altogether. Preaching in the wilderness of Judea, never seen in their cities, never taking part in their religious ceremonies, although of a priestly family, with his strange unfashionable garment of camel's hair, and his food of locusts and wild honey, he stood off from men, calling a whole nation to repentance and to flee from coming wrath.

He did not suit the Pharisees either. The "way of righteousness" was not more to their taste than the way of grace. Opposite as he was in so many respects to the Lord, there was one point in which their testimony perfectly coincided. Neither made any difference in favor of religious people. If the Lord received all, welcomed all, the Baptist stood off from all, condemned all. Neither took account of their meritorious striving for goodness. If they went after John they must go with the common crowd of sinners: if one invited the Lord into his house, a sinner would follow Him in even there, as if His presence were sufficient title.

So they believed in neither. When called to mourning they would not weep, and when piped to they would not dance. God's righteousness was too severe; God's grace was too free and bountiful. Bent upon justifying themselves before God, His righteousness condemned them as sinners, and as sinners His grace too alone would justify them. In either way Pharisaism could not exist. Both proclaimed them in a wrong path, — a path in which each step of apparent progress carried them but farther away from the end they sought. All their effort was to establish a difference between themselves and others, while neither righteousness nor grace would make a difference at all.

The strange thing is that we who try in vain to justify ourselves are called instead to justify God. For ourselves "it is God that justifieth," and God alone. But we justify Him when we take our places according to His estimate of what we are, who has pronounced upon us with a plainness which we cannot (except wilfully) mistake, and an absoluteness which allows of no contention. "The Publicans justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John." They were all baptized in Jordan, the river of death, "confessing their sins," — the sins of which death was the just due; and thus they proclaimed God's righteousness against themselves. That was repentance; and there it was that God could proclaim their righteousness whose testimony was that they had none.

The Pharisee here helps to illustrate these points. He asks the Lord into his house; and the Lord goes. You never find anybody seeking for Him whom He refuses or turns away. If He will not refuse to sit down with Publicans and sinners, he will not refuse a Pharisee's invitation either. And so let me say to anybody here: if there be a heart to welcome Him, fear not that He will not come because your measure of sin is not the due measure of it. The offer of the gospel is world-wide, and God knows perfectly how many and various are the states of soul addressed by it; but they are sinful states, all, with all their variety; and a Saviour of sinners is a Saviour for all. Quite true, that if He comes into Simon's house Simon's heart will not escape the testing of His presence, and it will be soon seen if the reception is real. If it is, His word will be submitted to, in proportion as He Himself is known, and has authority with the soul.

Thus all turns really upon what Christ is to us. Faith in Christ Himself — and that means a welcome given to Him is the beginning of everything to us. Christ is light. To welcome Him is to get the light into our souls. We cannot be in His company without finding out what we are, and learning the only terms upon which we can be with Him; but those terms are surely submitted to, when we so learn them. All really turns upon this, what Christ Himself is to us.

And this is what we find here. Only that the one who welcomed Him in the Pharisee's house was not the Pharisee. Alas, no; the only one found to appreciate the Son of God from heaven was one marked out comparatively as a sinner. "A woman in the city, that was a sinner, when she heard that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind him weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment."

What a wonderful attraction there was in Him for sinners! We may be sure that a Pharisee's house would be just the place of all places she would naturally have kept away from. But if He is there, the place changes its character directly.

His presence even in a Pharisee's house could give boldness to the sinner to be there too.

What a wonderful thing is grace, beloved friends! How it changes all our thoughts, all our relationships with regard to God, as we realize it! Where is the man who, after a long life of service to God, could say, as the fruit of that, "I go to God without any fear"? It is just that very class who call it presumption for them to say that. And it is quite true, it is presumption for anybody on that ground. Who but must tremble to draw near to God? But here is a poor sinner who does not tremble. Here is a sinner who gets boldness, by the very fact of His being there, to come in after Him, uninvited, even into a Pharisee's house! And, moreover, He has not said even a word to her yet, that we know of. She has just discerned what is in Him for such as she is, and lays hold upon Him in her faith without a question.

No syllable, as far as we know, had He ever yet addressed to her. Either she had seen Him, and heard for herself the gracious words that were so constant on His lips, — seen, perhaps, the deeds of love by which the words were evermore confirmed, — or perhaps she had only heard of Him through others. Words repeated, it may be, by unbelieving lips, or the story of what had been to the teller but a gaping wonder, may have sunk into her soul to be the seed there of eternal blessing. Any way, faith in her knew and apprehended Him; and in Him found its need met, found what made Him hers, and made her His eternally.

And there she is now in the Pharisee's house, heedless of everything else in His presence. She feels no other eyes upon her. The presence of others neither daunts nor restrains her. There she is with her tears, not all of sorrow, — to wash His feet; her hair (her woman's glory) abased was it abased? — to wipe them; her box of precious ointment to anoint them with. All was (how much!) too little for Him. All her wealth could rise no higher than His feet; but He who had come so far to win man's heart to God, valued and acknowledged the gift of love, owned and justified the giver. "She loved much," from His own lips here, is the first word of this kind that meets us in the gospels.

But the Pharisee does not understand it. "He spake within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him; for she is a sinner." The Lord shows him that He is a prophet by reading his unspoken thought. "And Jesus, answering, said unto him, Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee. And he saith, Master, say on. There was a certain creditor which had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty."

There was a difference in the amount of the debts: there was no difference in this respect, that they were both debtors. So says the apostle: "There is no difference, for all have sinned," — not all equally, he does not say that, but all have sinned. Who has not? Who is not God's debtor? Then mark what a personal interest this gives us in our Lord's next words. Simon, or one of us, might owe his fifty pence only; another his five hundred. But if the first made that difference his plea, what would it show but hardness?

"And when they had nothing to pay," — there is another point in which there is no difference, and yet the greatest possible difference, if you look at it in another way. As to ability to pay, there is no difference at all. Not alone His holiness could not allow us to compound, but we on our part could not. All we can do is to draw drafts upon the future, — a bank where we have no credit, and where not one of our drafts is honored. We can promise: that indeed is easy; but which of our performances ever did anything else but increase the debt? And if it did not, for which of them, even as a single item, could we presume we had made God our creditor?

If we will take God's word for it, simple enough it is, not only that "there is none righteous," but "there is none that doeth good." In this sense, therefore, clearly, we have got nothing to pay: still, that is not quite yet the sense of the Lord's words. If it were, since all of us have nothing to pay, all would be forgiven, whereas forgiveness is the portion of some, not all, and there is a point at which people have to arrive before they are forgiven.

This is, in fact, the point of which our Lord speaks. It is when the having nothing wherewith to pay becomes a truth in our consciousness, — when we reach the fact of our utter bankruptcy, — when we give up the effort to compound with God, and are obliged to take our places before Him as mere beggars, — sinners quite undone, — that mercy becomes actually ours. "If we confess our sins" — that and nothing more — "He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

This, then, is a word meant for any soul in the consciousness of its ruin to take as applying to itself. If the first part consciously applies to you, beloved friends, the second part does. If it be true of you that you have nothing to pay God with, it is assuredly true that He frankly forgives you. Take the sweet assurance to your heart. Keep it, as you have perfect title. Fear not because it is so much beyond your thought. God's thoughts are not as our thoughts; nor is that unbelieving proverb that a thing is "too good to be true" applicable at all where He is in question. The really best thing of Him is ever the truest.

"The Son of man is come to seek and save that which is lost." Hear it, ye lost ones. Let it fill up your hearts with joy and adoration. "When they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both." The amount of the debt made no difference in this respect. The Pharisee and the sinner of the city might alike here be met. There was no difference as to the way or the certainty of forgiveness. The difference that this would make would naturally be of another kind. "Tell me, therefore," says the Lord to Simon, "which of them will love him most?" "I suppose," says Simon, forced into honesty by the appeal, "I suppose, he to whom he forgave most." "Thou hast rightly judged," replies the Lord.

The natural conscience thus judges, and judges rightly, that the greater the debt forgiven, the more the heart of the debtor would be turned in grateful love toward Him who had forgiven him.

Love, then, here and the Lord teaches us in the application that He is illustrating how lave to God is produced in the soul — love is based upon the knowledge of forgiveness. Grace is thus the spring of holiness in us. The gospel not only sets the soul free from fear of wrath and condemnation, but in setting it free, binds it to God forever. "O Lord," says the psalmist, "truly I am Thy servant: I am Thy servant, and the son of Thine handmaid: Thou hast loosed my bonds." This is the principle. And the apostle says, And not only so," — not only is salvation sure, — "but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation."

Thus the gospel provides for holiness by the freeness of its forgiveness, and (mark it well) by the certainty also of the forgiveness which it proclaims. If the love is founded, as it is clearly taught here, upon the sense of what one has received, then it is absolutely necessary to this that forgiveness should be a certainty, far removed from doubt and question. And this is ever what Scripture supposes as to the Christian. It supposes that he has definite certainty as to that which alone gives him his place, and forms his character as a Christian; and the first thing, of course, is forgiveness.

You may turn round on me, perhaps, and say, "I have not had the Lord's voice speaking to me, as the woman in this story had." But that is your mistake, not mine, beloved friends. In the first place, as to the woman here, when the Lord pronounced her a forgiven one upon this evidence that she loved much, He had not yet spoken to her. It is a thing which seems to give such remarkable beauty and simplicity to her faith that it had no direct word to herself to go upon. She had seen His acts and ways of love with others, and she had laid hold upon the grace in it for her own need. His lips only confirm it to her, — vindicate that simplicity of faith in her, and show it was no mistake. But the love the Lord speaks of, the love that was manifesting itself in her actions there, was a love based upon the sense of a forgiveness which she already enjoyed, and which was working its blessed work upon her.

And then again, if the Lord spoke to her, He speaks here, beloved friends, no less to us. "When they had nothing to pay, He frankly forgave them both," is a word as definite as can be for any soul who is consciously in that condition. To all beggared and bankrupt souls, consciously that, the good news is here proclaimed of a forgiveness for them as clear, as free, as definite, as heart can desire. If your soul only says to Him, "Lord, I have nothing to pay," then you shall know the grace of a giving God. Without presumption, without pretension to be anything, without having to look into yourself to find anything, except sin and misery, you may, nay, you are called upon to appropriate to yourself a forgiveness which God has pronounced yours. The Gospel does not expect to find ready-made saints: it makes them. It is preached not to saints, but to sinners, and the first thing is to receive it as such, — God's good news, declaring the character of God, bringing His love into your souls to produce love again to Him. All commandment-keeping comes as the result of this: If ye love me, keep my commandments." "Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering." All such things are fruits of the Gospel; and therefore the Gospel is first of all to be received, in order to them.

The Lord Himself, not judging here in a direct divine way, but by the evidences, pronounces as to this woman's forgiveness from the tokens of her love, contrasting it with the coldness of the Pharisee's reception: "And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thy house, thou gavest me no water for my feet; but she has washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss; but this woman, since the time that I came in, has not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint; but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore, I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little."

Mark how gently the Lord deals there with Simon's conscience. He will not say Simon does not love at all. Himself there his guest, he will give him all possible credit for the invitation. He will leave it to his own soul if he loved so much even as "a little." But the woman, with her sins "many," as He says they are, she shall have from His own mouth the assurance of how little ashamed of her He is, or of the grace in which she has had such just confidence. "And He said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven." Let them cavil as they may, He will confirm it. "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace."

And may some who listen to me now, with an equal simplicity, lay hold upon a love whose unexhausted treasury is as full today as ever for all demands upon it. May you, too, beloved friends, believing, go on your way rejoicing in a peace made for you by the blood of the Cross, and proclaimed to you by its Maker.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

At the Well.

A Gospel Address.

John 4.

The Lord had not one stereotyped answer, beloved friends, for those He met. He met souls; He answered souls — not questions even, but souls. And you will find, if you take this chapter for instance, and compare it with the chapter preceding, how differently the Lord answers two cases which were indeed different themselves, but the difference between which would have caused, one might naturally think, precisely opposite answers to those the Lord gave. You find in the third chapter Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, a teacher, a man of respectability, and of religion, one who came to the Lord with a serious inquiry, as a teacher come from God. He owns the divine power which was working through Him; and, while he comes timidly — comes by night — yet by that very act shows himself aware how much he is risking by the coming, how much he is endangering his reputation with the people by coming to the Nazarene. And yet he comes, reverently to own that He is a teacher come from God, and to put himself, teacher as he was, in confessed ignorance, at His feet to be taught.

Now you would think the Lord would have opened at once all His heart to such a man. His first words, you would think, would be, words of amplest assurance and unbounded encouragement. Nay; the very first words the Lord has to say are, "You must be born again."

That is not the gospel, beloved friends. Do not ever mistake "you must be born again," for the gospel. It is a very great mistake to suppose the gospel to be any, "you must be." No such thing — you may be assured if it is a "you must be," that it is not the gospel. If a man must be born again, what is he going to do to be born? What does his whole past life count for? Just nothing. What is he going to do for the future? He has got to begin all over again; but how? He has got not merely to live, but to be born. What can a man do in the matter? He has nothing to do with his natural birth. What can he do as to spiritual birth? He can do nothing.

It is just a shut door in a man's face, and that is what the Lord intends. But why does He shut the door in Nicodemus' face? I will tell you why. Nicodemus was a man of the Pharisees; one of the teachers of the people who were leading the people all wrong; he was a man who, with all his sincerity, all his honesty, all his desire to be taught — actually did not know, in spite of such Scripture as the Lord referred him to, what was needed to enter into the kingdom at all. He was one of a class which the Lord represents as being able to stand up before God and say honestly enough, in a sense, but self-deceived, "God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican; I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess." Well, was it not true? Why, yes, the Lord never says one word about its not being true — it was all true. Why should he not say it? He does not claim perfection, nor that what he had done was done without God's help. He thanks God for it. "God, I thank Thee, I am not as other men." He was not only a moral man but a religious man. He was painstaking and self-denying, for he gave tithes of all he possessed, and fasted twice a week.

Was not that a most respectable man? earnest, moral, religious. Yet what do you find? The door shut in his face more fully and more decidedly than in that of Nicodemus. "The publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner." And he went down to his house justified. He found the door opened; the other man found the door shut. Do you understand and appreciate the difference, beloved friend?

Now here in Nicodemus is just a man of this class, and what he wanted was just what the Lord gave him; for the Lord never made a mistake. Self-righteousness must come to a break down. "You have not begun to live," is what the Lord says to Nicodemus: "you must be born again."

What is one to do? Oh! beloved friends, the very hardest thing for a man is to learn that he can do nothing. But just there is he cast right over upon God.

Now mark, dear friends, I find that truth of the new birth pressed by our Lord, how many times, do you think? Once! On whom did He press it? On a Pharisee 1 For what? Just to bring him into a state in which he could receive the gospel. With all his respectability, and with all his morality, and with all his religion too, he must be born again!

But now, what if you turn to the next chapter? You find a person of an opposite character — entirely opposite — a woman alone, but alone for other reasons evidently than Nicodemus. He by night to save his respectability; the woman alone by day — in the midst of the hot day of the East — because people won't have to do with her.

The one is the respectable man, and he does not want to lose his respectability; the other is one with whom if people were found, they would lose their's.

She comes alone, but not to meet Him. She is not looking for Him. She does not know what she is really coming there for. She comes with her water-pot; — and how often has she done that before. She comes with her eyes, so to speak, fixed upon her water-pot. You would say she is a dead, hard creature. What her life was, we know. How is it the Lord treats her in a precisely opposite way to that in which He treats Nicodemus? How is it that while He shuts the door in the face of the Pharisee, He opens it wide in the face of the sinner? For that very reason. Because she is a sinner — for, for sinners Christ died. To sinners God can show mercy. With sinners there is just this one thing: they have not got righteousness to be stripped from them; they have not got reputation to lose; they have not got barriers of this kind to receiving the gospel. What the Lord says explains it all. He says, "the Publicans and harlots go into the kingdom before you" (Pharisees). They go in as a class, why? Just because Christ has died for sinners. God's love is seeking sinners.

A world-wide invitation goes out in consequence of this. Does it shut out anybody? Nobody; but they may be self-excluded. If you had seen over the door-way here to night: "This place is for sinners," would you all have liked to have come in? It is all very well to say, "we are all sinners." But, again, if you had seen over the door-way, "This room is where sinners assemble," would you have liked to come in? That is just the trouble with the gospel. The invitation includes all — Christ died for all. He does not want anybody to be lost. If He came for the righteous He could not have given the invitation to everybody. He can now — a world-wide invitation and oh! beloved friends, man has got to come down to this before God can raise him up; for God's principle is that "he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." We have got to learn our nothingness; we have to take a truthful position before God. He cannot save a man with a lie upon his lips. He can't lift up a man when he is lifting himself up. He will show grace, mercy, love — take up the chief of sinners to show it — but alas! men will shut out themselves by substituting their own terms for God's.

Now Nicodemus wanted to come in on his own terms, but the woman, she, as a sinner, is already where God in Christ can meet her need.

He says, "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith unto thee, 'Give me to drink,' thou would'st have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water." Oh! beloved friends, that is the first sweet, blessed assurance to every soul that is on that ground tonight. "If you know the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, 'give me to drink' thou would'st ask of Him and He would give thee living water." It is quite sure; there is no possibility of denial — He would give you, if you would only take the place of a receiver, making Him a giver; instead of taking the place of a giver, and making Him but a receiver. She does not understand what the living water is. She has the well before her; and she asks, "Art thou greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank thereof himself?" There is just a little wonder and reasoning in her heart. "Who is this man, with His strange conduct?" — a little thought, — "How strange of a Jew to step over the requirements of the law, and come this way with His strange thoughts and new talk about 'God's gift,' that God wants man to receive!" May not that be a new thing for some of our hearts tonight, to learn that God is indeed more ready to give than you are to receive — to learn, beloved friends, that God has got love in His heart for you when there is no thought or care in your heart for Him? Yet it is true; for the lost sheep does not seek the shepherd, but the shepherd the sheep. He goeth after that which is lost until He finds; and then the joy of heaven is but His joy reflected, where all is in fullest sympathy with Him.

And so there is a way in which we can give the Lord to drink. We can satisfy the love that seeks, by just letting it have its way with us, as it desires.

Her heart is touched, her interest is roused; and more — God is before her soul; the light shines for her by which she is to see herself , — because it is only in the presence of God we learn ourselves. Then He goes further; and now mark, beloved friends — she asks Him for water; she says, "Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw." Still she does not know what she is talking about. "That I thirst not" shows that; and the Lord says quietly, in His own blessed, wonderful way, "Go call thy husband, and come hither." He knows all about the secrets of her heart, knows all about what has brought her there a solitary outcast, knew all about it when He spoke of that gift of God to her, and how freely He would give, if she would only take the place of receiving, and ask of Him. And He shows her that He does — but in such quiet words, just touching the tender spot, and no more, like the physician; as if saying, Is there not something there? — not naming it, but suggesting it to her, as if asking, Will you not confide in Me?

When that, alas, meets with no response, He goes a little further, and shows that He knows about it all , but then in simple words, with no judgment, no upbraiding: He "upbraideth not." Conscience might upbraid, and rightly. His care is that, in the presence of God and of His love, she might have what would give her truest judgment of herself and at the same time lead her out of herself for healing and deliverance. So unlike our treatment of a sin-sick soul is His! We judge people readily enough, and it is easy; but it brings no deliverance. They will neither take it nor thank us for it. Their judgment it must be, not ours; and they need other help than this to make it theirs. He first of all takes hold of her for God; so that, when the secret of her life comes out, it is the simplest and most natural thing to come to Him as to a friend about it. It is evident He is no enemy. He is not telling it to her as one who is against her. He is against the sin, to be sure, but not against her. Nor, if He is to be believed, is God either. Knowing her life, He has shown Himself for her already. He has invited her, on the part of God, to take a gift that He would surely give. Will she not understand better now those words about that water when she has found that He knows all, and has to own Him as a prophet? She has to own that. "Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet." She does not run away. She has asked something, she does not know quite what — some great, mysterious gift; and He has assured her she shall get it. She is attracted, held fast to listen to His love, with a dawning sense that He and it are more and other than at first they seemed. He has just shown her a burden that has to be removed, sin that has to be met, if any blessing is to be for her from God; and she turns to Him with a question by no means idle for her, nor an escape from the tale her conscience told — a question as to how to approach God. "Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship."

Doubtless questions about forms of worship are often the escape of souls from what is becoming too grave. But this was not the condition of this soul before us now. She had had her life bared to her, had owned Him as a prophet, and worship was to her what to so many it still is — a homage meant to propitiate an offended God. Jacob's way of winning his brother is still a much approved and fashionable way when the question and the Person are of much more importance. "I will appease him with the present that goeth before," he says; "and afterward I will see his face; peradventure he will accept me." And with these as with Jacob, acceptance is still a "peradventure." If your religion is of that sort, how can you know when you have done enough? Suppose it should not be just what you estimate it to be in God's sight. Oh, would you hang eternity upon a — peradventure?

Don't take that way! beloved friends. The very uncertainty may show you that you have not got God's way of peace. For "peace" He speaks of. The Lord answers her question in a way that shows He does not deem it a light one or out of the way. The time was coming when worship would not be a matter of going to Jerusalem, or any place at all. Worship, He tells her, has to be in spirit and in truth, in the knowledge of the person worshiped, You must know God. You cannot worship an unknown God really, because worship is a thing of the heart; it is not posture or ceremonial, but the heart poured out in adoration. You must see something in Him to worship. You cannot worship an unknown God. But still, beloved friends, many, alas, worship God in that way, and think He ought really to be pleased with it. After all, they don't know what it is to worship. What is God's name? Do you say "Father"? And if you do, is it mere orthodoxy, or as knowing Him in that relationship? "Worship the Father," He says. Beloved friends, do you go and say "Father" in spirit and in truth? Do you not see that, for this, the question of acceptance must be settled first? Do you feel at home with God? or are you still outside, like that father's son who served his father so many years, and yet music and dancing in his father's house were a strange thing? Beloved friends, are you also doing, doing? then, I ask, "Have you got peace with God?" and you have to say, "Well, I do not know what that means." — "What! have you been serving Him so long, and yet not known Him? "

You must worship the Father. "Ye worship ye know not what," saith the Lord. "We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews." Do you hear that, beloved friends? God is known, the Father is known, by salvation. Do you not see, that unless God is known as a Saviour-God, He is not known at all? How do you know Him? As a judge before whom you are going to appear, and then it will turn out whether you are accepted or rejected. That is not salvation. Salvation is His work, not your work. People do not save themselves, they are saved; God is the Saviour, not man. Our blessed God has provided salvation: "Christ is able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him." And the sweetness of that is not merely that salvation is provided — full and real deliverance for man, as there assuredly is — but that salvation is to give you a Father, a real God for your hearts, and in Him a Father to give you ability to worship in spirit and in truth.

Like the prodigal of the Lord's familiar story, turned back to his father's house by famine, for the bread the very hired servants got to the full, when you, in the very midst of your anxiety — at the best, if received, thinking to be a hired servant — find the Father's heart close to yours, and the Father with His arms about your neck, kissing you, (you a sinner, far off yet and in your sins,) God meeting you where you are, because you could not meet Him where He is — you find God for you in the day of grace, God in Christ a Saviour. God, known and enjoyed, is what will make the "spring of living water" rise up in your souls. That is what will satisfy, and abundantly satisfy. You will carry the refreshment with you. Do you want to know where to find it? That meeting-place between God and the sinner — do you want to know where that is, beloved friends? The cross is that meeting-place between God and man. God and man there come together: man in his wretchedness and ruin; man far off from God; for why had Christ to go into the place of curse, if man was not there? Why, beloved friends, should the blessed Son of God take that awful place, forsaken of God Himself, if, after all, although sinners, we were of that respectable sort, if not quite good enough to go to heaven, yet not quite bad enough to go to hell? The cross — can you look at it and say, "Christ died for me?" "He died for all," you say. I answer: If He died for all,' if He took that place for all, what must their place be? Are you going to make distinctions amongst sinners, who needed such a death as that to bring them to God? Are you going to plead some little difference between yourself and others when, after all, Barabbas' cross was the place for you and them? Sinners, with no title but their sins, no reason that God should meet them but that He delights in love and in mercy — if you are able to take that place that the Lord of glory took, you also may surely say, "He died for me."

Or are you going to take some credit still for something or other in you? Ah, it is not an enemy that is telling you of your sins, but divine love that has come down to you, by the sacrifice it had to make for you, telling you what you are. You are just the sinner who needed such a death as that, and for whom He died. And, beloved friends, that is God's meeting-place for you. If you thus look at the cross tonight, you will see surely how God meets you with a ready-made salvation. "It is a faithful saying, and worthy to be received of all men, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." If you could add, with the apostle, "of whom I am chief," you would have chief title. Are you sinners? That is all God wants. Take simply, honestly, that place before God; but add nothing to it. Do not say, "respectable sinners," for Christ did not die for such. If you are not quite bad enough for the cross, then you are not such as Christ died for. If you are a sinner simply, take this mercy home tonight. God, in Christ, is appealing to your hearts to receive this love — God is appealing to your hearts as to whether He does not mean well by you when He offers this salvation. And why should you distrust Him? He is keeping back judgment from the world to show you mercy. The Father is seeking. That is what Christ tells the woman: "The Father seeketh such to worship Him." It is not they who seek the Father, but God is seeking men. Beloved friends, will you receive it? Will you give Him credit for it? The Father seeketh such to worship Him.

"I know that Messiah cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things."

"I that speak to thee am he," is His ready answer.

And she is met. That seals to her this grace. The cross was not yet; but there was already for her the long-expected one — Messiah, Christ; and He it was beside her by the well, ministering to her, in the full knowledge of her sin, the grace that alone could meet it. This is, for her, God's meeting-place. Christ is in her soul; the living water henceforth will spring up for her satisfaction forever.

Christ is what you want, dear friends. Are you offended when you open the Gospels and find Him in company with sinners? Do you sympathize with the Pharisees when they make this report of Him, that he receiveth sinners? Or will you allow Him to receive these few faraway ones, enshrined and canonized in Scripture, but not the low and ordinary sinners of the present day?

Most welcome news, sweeter than water to those parched with desert thirst! A man that receives sinners, casting out none that come — invites all men to Himself, because all are sinners. "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." Whatever your experience, whatever your feelings, or your life. What can a sinner have but bad feelings and bad experiences? What is a sinner but a person of bad life?

He had spoken to her by that well, knowing all about her, and He was the Christ — was there, the living proof of what God was. All was there for her; for her who had asked for what she knew not, and got according to His knowledge and His grace.

And now she runs away to tell the men in the city, — the people who knew her well, — that she had found a man who had told her all things that ever she did. You see at once what has fastened itself upon her. If you know the blessed relief of having had all out before God you will understand it. Has he told it to you in that way, beloved friends? So that having no more reserve with Him, you need have no more now with any other? Can you say, with her, "He told me all things that ever I did. He and I have been together, all my sins out, and nothing but love to me a sinner."

One thing more. If your heart is full, so is His. If He has given you, how wonderful to know that you have given Him I When the disciples come from the city to which they had gone to buy meat, what do they find? Find Him with his meat and drink already. The shepherd has found His sheep and He does not want the meat to eat. Joy will not let us eat, any more than sorrow, when it reaches a certain height. Such joy is His. Joy to meet one poor sinner by a well, and bring her to rest and to God. And still He is the same — yesterday, today and forever the same Jesus.

Only you must be with Him, remember, upon His own terms. You are to be the sinner, He the Saviour. You with your sins and He with His grace. You the receiver, and He the giver. You must be with Him after that fashion, beloved friends, that you may drink in the infinite grace that is in Him, and find not merely salvation, but a God whom your whole soul can bow down before; one with whom you can be at home indeed; one whom you can trust when you can trust nobody whatever besides, and, least of all, yourself.

Beloved friends, that is what God is — God in Christ. Do you want Him tonight? Is there thirst in your soul? Do you want a Christ like that?

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

A Brand From the Burning.

A Gospel Address.

Zechariah 3: 1-4.

The words that I have read, beloved friends, apply properly to the receiving back again of the Jews in the last days, when the Lord puts away their iniquity.

Joshua the high priest is the representative of Israel, and he represents them both in their iniquity, which God puts away, and in the blessed place into which he is brought afterward. But then God's reception of any sinner, or of any company of sinners, is on precisely the same pattern as that of any other. God has one way of saving, and only one; and therefore we may rightly take, without the least straining, the account that we have of God's justification of His ancient people, the Jews, yet to take place in the last days, to represent the justification of any sinner now.

The doctrine fundamental to the gospel is that there is no difference between man and man , — not no difference as to the amount of sins that anybody may have committed, or the aggravation of them; for, truly, the day of judgment will bring out a difference, and put everybody exactly in his place according to his works, that is, those who are not saved by the gospel. It is true, then, that there are various degrees of sin, and God will judge with perfect equity as to all; but that is no question of salvation. As to that, everybody is precisely upon the same footing: "There is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." It does not say, "all have sinned so many times;" but it says, "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."

What was showing forth all through the Old Testament times was, that, according to the principle of works no one could ever be admitted into His presence, — no one could see God and live. That is what the apostle refers to: "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." God dwelt in the midst of Israel in visible glory. He dwelt in the tabernacle, or in the temple; but, beloved friends, He dwelt there, as you know, in a place that was carefully shut up from men, — out of which men were carefully excluded. Nobody could see His face and live. That was the great truth signified by the veil of the temple. The way into the holiest, the apostle says, "the way into the holiest" — the figure of heaven — "was not yet made manifest." Nobody could go in and see God.

As long as ever the law lasted, that was maintained. If you take Moses on the mount, when the law was given the second time, in Exodus 33, 34, you find that he asks to see God's glory. And God says, "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me and live"; but He says, "there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock: and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand, while I pass by: and it shall come to pass when my glory is passed by, that I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen."

How much, beloved friends, would you know of a man if you only saw his back parts? What they saw then was God with His back to them, and His face turned away.

That was in the first great day of Israel's glory, so to speak. Now look at another. When the temple was just reared up, and God came to take possession of it, the glory fills the building. What does it do then? Drives all the priests out. And Solomon says, ” The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness." (1 Kings 8: 12.) If He dwells in the thick darkness, what can you know about Him? If you, dear friends, are thinking of living for God in order to get into His presence, that is God's word for you. All the time the law lasted you saw His back and not His face. He dwelt in the thick darkness. Is there any one of you who depends upon anything of the sort for acceptance, that has ever seen God's face? Is there any one of you that dare say he can stand before Him on this ground? No one can! Because if it depends upon any work of your hands, be it the smallest thing you can imagine, still God is God, and we may work so as to satisfy ourselves very well, but it is another question as to satisfying God. And if I have to satisfy God, beloved friends, I cannot take it for granted that what I do will satisfy Him. I must have His judgment about it, therefore. But this we cannot have till the day of judgment; so we must go on until the day of judgment, and see how it turns out. Alas, and in the mean time you must go on in that awful uncertainty, drifting on, not knowing whither you are going.

I say if there is the smallest thing you have to do to be accepted with God, it will not do for you to say you have done it right. Are you infallible? Has not God said about your heart, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" And, if you cannot know your own heart, how can you trust its judgment? How can you tell it is not deceiving you?

The fact is, nobody has peace with God on that ground, and yet there is such a thing as peace. If I go to the New Testament, I find that "being justified by faith, we have peace with God": and again, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Beloved friends, He means what He says. Is anxiety rest? Is doubt rest? Is not knowing where you will be in eternity rest? Is it peace to say "I do not think anybody can know whether he is saved"? There may be indifference and carelessness in all that, but not rest or peace. But there is such a thing as peace, and knowing. "These things I have written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life." People say, But that is presumption. Is it presumption to know what the apostle wrote that we might know? Is it presumption to take God's word and believe it? The fact is, if you have got eternity before you, how can you rest for a moment while the question where you are to be is unsettled? No, you cannot: it is impossible.

If we cannot meet God upon the throne and in judgment, — if we cannot by all that we can do get into His presence, — what are we to do? Beloved, He has rent the veil and come out to us. He has come out Himself when we could not go in. And, Christ's blessed work being accomplished, He has opened heaven itself to us. Opened the way of access, by the blood which has been shed for us; and His free and gracious invitation now from the heights of glory into which He has gone is still "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Now look at what we have here, in this third of Zechariah. It is a sinner in his sins in the presence of God. Now, beloved friends, is not that the very thing you would be afraid to be? What do you think it must be for a sinner in his sins to be in the presence of God? When a soul is awakened, is not the first effort, the natural effort, to turn over a new leaf, forsake one's sins, and so get into the presence of God without them? You never can. Whenever you meet God for the first time, you will find yourself in your sins in His presence. Nobody ever met Him in any other way.

God picked out the best man on the earth, and that was Job. The Lord said, "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man." There was not one like him, and God says it; but when Job finds himself in the presence of God what does he say? "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." The prophet Isaiah found himself in the presence of God, and probably he might have been the best man in Israel in his day; and he saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphim; each had six wings; with twain he covered his face, with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts," &c. And what does Isaiah say? "Then said I, woe is me, for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts."

You are not in bad company when you are in company with Job and Isaiah; but what they found when they got into the presence of God was that they were undone sinners. Beloved friends, God alone can remove your sins, and you must be with Him to have them removed; and if you get into the presence of God in the day of His grace you will find Him for you. If you get into His presence in the day of judgment you will find Him against you. In the day of judgment He will be a just judge; in the day of grace He is a just Saviour. To be in His presence as a sinner now is SALVATION.

Job found it so: it was the end of his difficulty. "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes," lifted him right out of where he was, and gave him more than he had before. That confession of Isaiah, "Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips," brought the live coal in the seraph's hand to cleanse his lips: "Lo, this has touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." And here, again, we get a sinner with his sins, with a stopped mouth in the presence of God, and it is only to find God for him and not against him.

God is for us: that is the wonderful reality which the gospel gives. "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ." Why? "Because it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." How is this? "Because therein" — in the gospel, the good news to sinners — "is the righteousness of God revealed." God's righteousness is revealed, not in shutting sinners out of His presence, but in GOOD NEWS, — what God Himself can call "good news," — divinely suited to comfort the heart. If you receive them tonight, you will go away with your hearts as glad as they can be.

God is light. He is love: but He is light. "That which doth make manifest is light." When is a man in the presence of God? When he is revealed to himself, so that he knows his own condition; and, beloved friends, the one thing that he knows as his condition always, when he first gets into the presence of God, is that he is clothed in filthy garments. He is a sinner in his sins, and nothing else.

It is a very easy thing, of course, for people to say "we are all sinners." If that is being in the presence of God, why we are all in the presence of God, for everybody will own he is a sinner. And that Pharisee, when the woman of the city came into his house, I suppose he would have owned that, yet he says, "This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for SHE is a sinner." Beloved friends, do you know what it is to distinguish yourselves from other sinners, and put the difference to your own credit? No man in the presence of God can feel like that. When a man is in the presence of God he is a real sinner, — , a brand for the burning, if even plucked out. That is what the angel of the Lord says of Joshua: "Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" A brand plucked out of the fire is a thing put into the fire, to be burned. You may change your mind and take it out of the fire, but that is where it was, and it was sentenced to be burned. There is none righteous, says the law itself, — the very law that people appeal to. They say, Did not God give us the law? Well, what says the law? "There is none righteous: no, not one." This is God's judicial sentence. And what is that said for? It is said, beloved friends, "that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God."

Did you ever take your place, with your mouth stopped, guilty before God? Do you not see that is being in His presence? If you are in the presence of God you are only there with your mouth stopped. Not a word about other sinners. Not a word about difference between sinners. Not a word about degrees of sins. And let me say, too, not a word about good resolutions, or anything to the credit side against your sins! A man comes to me and says, "Well, yes, I did so and so; but — "Now, I say "You are going to make excuses." If you say "I have done so and so," — it is all right. If you add "but," it won't do. You are going to balance your sins with your good resolutions, — going to ask God to look at what you are going to be, instead of what you are. That is not being in the presence of God. Every one who is before God is there GUILTY.

God has given that verdict that every mouth may be stopped. Then, beloved friends, you are not under probation. The trial is over; the sentence has been pronounced; and all your talking is only trying in vain to get God to give you a new trial.

He has pronounced definitely and positively against the whole world. Beloved friends, have you accepted His sentence? That is your only hope. No plea, — no telling God you will do something. If you get into the presence of God, it will be to say "I abhor myself." You do not abhor a man who is going to turn! round and be respectable. When you get a man with whom you can do nothing, — an abandoned creature, — you give him up. That is the sort of man you abhor. When I abhor myself, I give myself up. I say it is no good trying to make anything of myself. Sentence is passed upon me; and if God does not show mercy, all is over; no looking forward to a day of judgment to be told how it will turn out then. Judgment has come. Judgment has been pronounced. Everybody has not yet got the exact measure of what he will get: that is true; but judgment is pronounced, and all the world is pronounced guilty before God.

"Clothed with filthy garments." Did you ever notice there a remarkable contrast? When it is a question of men's righteousness, you will find the prophets saying "all our righteousnesses" — (that is not our sins, — our righteousnesses are not our sins, — our righteousnesses are our efforts to do something, — our righteousnesses are our best performances) — "all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." Not garments; they are not garments at all, — rags, "filthy rags." But when it is a question of our sins, God says, "clothed in filthy garments." They are not filthy rags, they are filthy garments, — he is covered with them. His filthy garments are his iniquity. Our righteousness does not cover us, but our sins do. From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot there is no soundness, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores." This is man's condition before God. If, now, as God's word speaks to you, you learn what you are, and take your place in that way as a lost sinner, — a sinner covered with sins, — you now know what repentance is. "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Not "I abhor my sins." A good many do that: it is "abhor myself." Have you ever said "I am undone"? That is what Isaiah said. He did not say "I am going to be undone, if I do not turn over a new leaf." Did you ever say "I AM undone"? Did you ever know what it was to be "lost"?

The Lord Jesus Christ came to save that which was "lost." He speaks of Himself as going after the "lost." There is not a soul among these lost ones that is not found, — that the arms of everlasting mercy do not finally inclose. "He goes after that which is lost, until he finds it." The "sinner that repenteth" is the sheep that is lost."

There is not a word from the sinner in our chapter; not a word from Joshua here. He does not do or say a thing. There he is, a sinner in his sins, wholly dependent upon the mercy and love of God, — upon that and nothing else, — a sinner in his sins, in the presence of God.

What will God do with a sinner in his sins? What can God do with a man clothed in filthy garments? Beloved friends, what will He do with you, if you are there?

Mark, — oh, mark it well — you have to stand before God in that very fashion, if you have not yet done so. You may defer it; you may put it off; you may refuse to think about it now; you may refuse to take God's sentence home; you may say "Oh, well, I shall have plenty of company, if I am lost. There will be a good many more lost with me." That will not help you when you stand before God. You will find yourself an individual soul, — alone, and not in company, — or, I might say, only in company with Him whose eye will read you through and through and expose you to yourself, naked and deformed, and in your own proper condition. There will be no talking about your company then. There will be no thought about your neighbor. You will be a solitary sinner before God, with only His eye upon you. If you stand before Him thus now, you will find there is mercy for you.. If you stand before Him then, you will find it everlasting destruction. This is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. Now! — now, dear friends. And how long is that "now"? Every pulse-beat, every tick of the clock, is a "now." You don't know how many of them are left you. Friends, there is salvation for you to take hold of as instantaneously as that, because God knows what your need is. There is a rope out for souls that are drowning, that they may clutch on the instant. That is what you want. It is all very well for men who don't know what eternity is to talk about having time. If I had a salvation to offer you that required a week to work out, I could not insure you a week. Blessed be God, I have got a salvation now for you.

A sinner in his sins in the presence of God! What, will God do? Can you trust Him for that? Do you think there is any good thing in God's heart toward you? Do you connect Him with a doctor and a dying bed? — or with the thunder-storm?

Is there any good in God's heart toward man? Do you believe it? Do you believe it, beloved friends? We are in a land in which the mass of people profess to believe it. God gave His Son, but they won't believe in Him. If they believed in God they would not think of Him always as a Judge, and in connection with a storm or a pestilence.

Did God give His Son to punish man? Did Christ die to reveal God as a judge? Why was it, then? Is there any good in God's heart toward man? Beloved friends, when you come to this, that there is none in your heart toward Him, then you will be ready to admit that there is some in His heart for you. These two things go together.

Now the sinner has not a word to say for himself. "And the Lord said unto Satan, the Lord rebuke thee, O Satan, even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" May I not do as I like? says the Lord. And the sinner being silenced, the adversary is silenced too. If the sinner has nothing to say, the adversary, too, has nothing to say. If you want to stop the adversary's mouth, dear friends, stop your own mouth, and let God answer for you.

Well, now, it is as simple as possible. "Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel; and he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him." That is the way sin is taken away, — just one word from God, "Take away the filthy garments from him." Beloved friends, is there anybody that would like to hear a voice like that tonight? God has written it there, that every soul that likes may hear it. Did God write that for that sinner's sake? Has He written the blessed words with which He met sinners of old, for their sakes? No but for ours. He is the selfsame God today. He never changes. He never has any exceptions. Never! He is the same God everywhere, in every case the same, thoroughly trustworthy, never changing. And if you are in His presence now, in your sins, He says, "Take away his filthy garments from him." Do you believe that? Well, He gives you His word. If you do not believe that, He will give you His oath. "He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." He is faithful, faithful, faithful. Do you know what "faithful" is? True to a pledged word. Faithfulness is in fulfilling a pledge. Somebody has a claim upon me in some way. I am faithful to my word, faithful to what I have promised. "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Do you claim that faithfulness of God? If you bring nothing but sins to Him, you can claim it.

There is a confessed sinner in the presence of God. God is faithful and just to forgive him his sins. Has not God pledged Himself? Would He be faithful if He did not keep His word? You ask, perhaps, How can He forgive us our sins after that fashion? Beloved friends, because Christ died for sinners.

People argue, indeed, Christ died for sinners, and therefore you must do all you can to be a Christian, and so to be saved. You take yourselves out of God's loving hands of mercy, which are longing to take hold of you: that is all. You make Him act in righteousness against you instead of in righteousness for you. God does not save in that way. God does not justify people as Christians, church members, and all that. He "justifies the ungodly," — the people who do NOT work for it. To him that worketh not," — "worketh not," do you understand? That is God's word, not mine, "To him that WORKETH NOT, but believeth on Him that justifieth the UNGODLY, his faith is counted for righteousness."

Do you think God means what He says? Do you think God does what He says? God "justifies the ungodly." Do you believe that? "Oh, yes," people say, "we believe that." Well, what are you going to do? "Going to do the best we can." Is not that it? — the best we can! Have we to do the best we can to be ungodly? If God justifies the ungodly, must not you be the sort of person that God justifies? Must you do some good to be ungodly? Ah, if you look at yourselves aright, you will find you are ungodly enough already, — ungodly enough to be justified. If you believe that, what do you do? Nothing! — because you believe. If you want to do something, you do not believe He justifies the ungodly. If you do believe He justifies the ungodly, you do nothing. Christ died for sinners, nobody else. He did not die for good sinners, or for the better class of sinners. He found one man who was the very chief of sinners, and He could not leave him unsaved. He took up that man, the chief of sinners as he was. He could not let him go. Because, if He let the chief of sinners go unsaved, people might have said, there is a limit to the power of the blood of Christ. There was one man, at any rate, that the blood of Christ was not sufficient to save. So God took up the chief of sinners and made an apostle of him. He wanted him to speak in men's ears and hearts: "There! that is the sort of sinners I am saving. Those are the sort of sins that the blood of Christ washes off." Come, now, and put in your claim as a sinner to the precious blood of Christ, and you will get remission of sins. God will say, as to you, Take away his filthy garments from him.

But note: He does not simply turn to others to say that. He turns to the sinner himself. He wants the sinner to know it. He does not wait until he gets to glory to say it to him. He says, "I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee." He says "iniquity" here in the plainest terms He can. He does not say "filthy rags." He speaks it right out. He wants the sinner to know it.

Is there anybody here who can say, Oh that I could hear such a word tonight! If you are in company with *Joshua now, those words will apply to you as well as him. Christ's death can cover you; God's mercy is for you. Still He says, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Are you such? Perhaps, with doubt and perplexity, and all that sort of thing. Well, will you come? No right or wrong way of coming, if to Him. But, will you come? "I will give you rest." "I WILL give you rest." No uncertainty about it; not "perhaps," not "probably," I will give you rest, but I WILL give you rest. No doubt or uncertainty about Christ; He is the "yea and amen." "I will give you rest." He has made Himself responsible about it. Will you put that responsibility upon Him tonight? You cannot help answering as to whether you will come or not. You have answered it already to Him. You may reverse your decision; but you have either said "I do," or "I do not, want it." It is as simple as can be, beloved friends. Nobody can come right, in one way; nobody can come wrong, in another. That is, you know, a sinner cannot come in a right state, with right thoughts and feelings. He comes a sinner; but he comes right if he comes to Christ; for whosoever comes to Him He will in no wise cast out. Christ says, "Come unto me;" but He does not say in any particular way. Oh, beloved friends, if your hearts answer to Him now, He says, "I will give you rest." Just take your place with Joshua; confess your sins — nothing else; and He is faithful and just to forgive you your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

But He does not merely cleanse you from your sins. "I will clothe thee with change of raiment." What does He do? He puts a robe of righteousness upon you. How is that? He puts Christ on you. Christ has not only died for men, He has gone up into the presence of God for men, and the very highest seat in glory is occupied by that One who was upon the cross for sinners. God has taken the Man who filled the cross to fill the throne of glory; God has taken Him up there in His presence, beloved friends; and there He is, a Man, a man forever. He has not merely gone back God, as He came: He has gone back Man, and to be a man forever. There is a Man in the presence of God, in the nearest place to God He can be; a Man who has got a place for man, who never needed to get a place for Himself. He has worked for a place for man, and He has got it; and Christ is made of God unto us "wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption." Christ is our righteousness — the change of raiment for the filthy garments of iniquity; and Christ is righteousness to everyone who believes on Him.

Beloved friends, the soul that believes in Christ is as Christ is before God. What Christ is, he is: as righteous, unchangeably righteous; "righteous as He is righteous." We are accepted in the Beloved, before God as He is, with all His perfection; with all that God sees in Him for us, and the value of His work is ours with God.

That is the "change of raiment." One moment a sinner in your sins before God, and another moment clothed with Christ before Him, as Christ is before His eyes. And mark, God does all that. He does not say to the sinner, take off your filthy garments and put on these. He says to those who stand by, "Take away the filthy garments from him." He does not say put on these new garments. He says, "I will clothe you with change of raiment." God does all.

Now what does He say to you? He is faithful and just to forgive you your sins, and to make over Christ to you as your acceptance before Him. Is not God's righteousness on your side now? What do you say? "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." Why,? "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed." For God must not only be a good God, a loving God, but a righteous God, and His righteousness is revealed. Where? In the cross. And is that against sinners? No! God's righteousness is revealed in the cross; and that is not against sinners, but for sinners. The cross is death; the cross is judgment. The cross, beloved friends, is not the fruit of good works, or anything of that sort: it is the fruit of sin, although the sinless One took it. And if you want a title to the cross, your sins are the title. Take your sins; put them down in the presence of God; and God is faithful and just to forgive you your sins. Aye, and to give you the whole value of the work of Christ as you prove yourself thus to be one of those for whom Christ died. He will put you in absolute perfection before God, the absolute and unchangeable perfection of Christ forever and ever.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

Rahab.

A Gospel Address.

Joshua 2 and 6.

We have here, beloved friends, a beautiful picture of a sinner saved by grace. Jericho is a type of the world. We know that the things that happened to Israel, as the apostle tells us, "happened unto them for types, and are written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the world have come." (1 Cor. 10: 11.) Jericho is a type of the world under doom from God — doom which is continually threatened by His word, which comes only after a day of grace, and a long announcement of judgment. On the one hand God makes and uses this announcement of judgment to alarm souls and wake them up to fly for safety to the hope set before them; on the other hand, because it goes on for a long time, men harden themselves against it, to worse destruction.

Jericho is a striking type of the world under the curse, as we see here, devoted by God to utter destruction (as we know the world is), seated, however fair its surroundings, by the "river of death," Jordan, very near to the Salt Sea, the sea of judgment, into which it flows. The word Jericho means "Sweet Savor," in striking contrast with what it was to God. The whole land really stank before God. And this city of Jericho was branded with His special curse.

But this name (which they, of course, themselves had given it) only shows how differently men estimate the world from the way God estimates it. How highly esteemed among men is that which is an abomination in the sight of God. Our natural thoughts are totally opposed to God's thoughts.

Most surely, if we look around upon the world about us, we shall find everywhere the tokens of God's goodness. His mercy makes the "sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends His rain on the just and on the unjust." That is quite true. And if people call the world fair and beautiful, we can allow fully that the evidences of His goodness, who created it, are not effaced even by the fall, and that assuredly His mercy lingers over it. But if we look at it in its moral character, what is it? "All that is of the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the Father." There is not a good that has not been abused to evil, not a pleasant note which has not been perverted into discord.

There are, of course, plenty of natural resources — things which show us that God had given man a goodly portion naturally. This we believe: and people are finding out these resources, and getting the mastery of them more and more: all that is permitted to man but there is nothing for God, or for one who sees with God, to rejoice in all that. Do you think there is joy in heaven when people invent railways or telegraphs? Can you possibly suppose that anything of the kind can give joy really up there? You know it does not hinder the display of the greatest wickedness. You know that, on the contrary, people are turning this into ruinous self-confidence — are arguing that, having done so much, they can do more. They have mastered so many difficulties, they will master their whole condition, if you only give them time.

Yet they die! None the less rapidly does the river of death flow down to the lake of judgment. Nothing that men have done or can do has contributed in one iota to remove the stamp of God's wrath, or the sin, which is, alas! everywhere and if His judgment tarries, it is not hindered by the marvelous development of human intellect, but by His long-suffering, and because that long-suffering is for salvation.

"Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the time of harvest," and that was the time when judgment was, in the Israelitish army, advancing toward the city. The time of judgment was the time of harvest, the very time the citizens were going out to reap their fields, and bring in the products of their labor. Has not that got a voice? Does it not speak? Man thinks God is waiting for His harvest. In one sense He is. Waiting, on the one hand, in mercy, until the last limit of it has been reached; on the other, waiting until sin, too, has reached its full maturity. And then? Why, as they of Jericho never treasured up the produce of their fields, but the swift executioners of God's wrath were the reapers, so, when the world's harvest comes, God, and not man, will put in the sickle.

Alas, because sentence against an evil work is not speedily executed, therefore the heart of the sons of men is thoroughly set in them to do evil. How long a respite Jericho had! Four hundred years before this, the iniquity of the Amorites had already approached the full. (Gen. 15: 16.) Forty years ago God had cleft the waters of the Red Sea, and brought His people through. Their journey through the wilderness, also, was one constant, miraculous display of Divine power. They had only a little while before seen the destruction of those kings of the Amorites, Sihon and Og. They might have known, their hearts were witness, who it was that was really coming with those Israelites. It was not their own power which was so terrible, that was plain; but there was One coming with them who had power to dry up seas, and make mountains fall down at His presence.

What was all this but a warning of judgment, which would be gladly stopped by man's repentance? And so it ever is; so it is now. Why give such wide and public assurance that He is going to execute judgment, but for them to take the sentence home to themselves, and so to prevent the need of actual execution? He speaks it aloud; He utters it in men's ears, in order that they may turn to Him. Never a soul turned to Him with a sense of coming judgment that did not find from Him mercy — the freest and the fullest possible. We find a striking instance of this in the case of Rahab here. She certainly had a history with nothing to recommend her in it. Certainly, in all Jericho, there was none who might seem to have less claim to mercy than she: a sinner amongst sinners she plainly was. Yet the one thing distinguishing her from the rest was, that while, with the rest, that delay of judgment only hardened their hearts, she kept it in her heart, and sought escape from it.

There is nothing in that to make anything of her indeed — nothing morally great or meritorious in the desire to have salvation; but yet very great indeed was the result. Just as with the prodigal son, away in a far-off land, there was nothing particularly to recommend him in the fact that, starving and destitute, his hunger forced him to think of the bread in his father's house. Yet in result it set his feet upon the way back to his father. It is nothing to recommend us when, by need and famine, we are forced to turn to God. No! Yet, blessed be His name! we do not need recommendation. That is what we have here. One soul hears in the voice of judgment an invitation, so to speak, to escape from judgment; and that one soul is saved by faith. The visit of the spies to the city was made the occasion, in God's hands, of her getting the thing she was seeking. She was part and parcel of the city, shut up in it, with judgment approaching, and except those spies had found their way into the city, there was, humanly speaking, no way of escape for her. God sought and found her there. He never fails to hear the first breathing of a soul after Him. Rahab might have thought herself outside of all interest to the God of Israel — that He scarce would even hear her prayer — yet He had. We make a great mistake if we think the first sighings of a soul in distress are not heard. He himself is in them; and He cannot fail to respond to the cry which He has aroused. So here, Rahab, who had nothing else to distinguish her, pronounces judgment upon herself beforehand, and escapes in the mercy of the One coming near to judge. The two spies come to her house, and are the means, so to speak, of dividing between the living and the dead. Theirs was a message of judgment rather than of mercy — they were sent to search out the land; but nevertheless, they are made the means of distinguishing between the city and those appointed to salvation out of it.

Instead of the king and citizens of Jericho availing themselves of any hope of escape from the judgment so near, they only conspired against the men who came. All their thought was to rid themselves of them, and to stop the voice which might have been raised, as in Rahab's case, in their behalf. And, beloved friends, how many are doing this very thing How many rise up against the message of judgment, as if to stop that would be to stop the judgment itself! The judgment comes none the less surely, if it comes silently and unannounced. Yet how many stifle the voice of conscience, and then suppose that judgment is canceled too! But that is plainly as false as can be. Conscience is not the arbiter in any wise. Conscience can be bribed, and falsified, and hardened, almost to any extent. It is God's word alone that gives true witness, whether to His wrath or to His grace. Jericho might be walled up to heaven, and with store sufficient to defy starvation, and her citizens might frame strong arguments from these. But if Israel had no battering rams for the siege, it availed nothing when at God's word these walls fell to the ground. And whatever our hearts may say, though we may be as comfortable as possible in unbelief, it does not make the wheels of judgment linger for a moment. Do we not already see it taking effect on every side? Is not the world as a condemned cell, and each tick of the clock the summons of souls to meet their God? Why must we die? It is God's original sentence because of sin. Ought we not to hear that voice? Does it not appeal to us solemnly on every side, in the stilled and silent voices of our nearest and dearest? People may call it natural but we do not feel that it is natural. Our hearts bear contrary witness to such words. We feel that if God break the staff of our lives, it is to prostrate us at His feet with whom mercy yet rejoices against judgment, — who can make judgment itself the handmaid of mercy.

A free gospel can be published freely in a world like this to everybody, without exception, and without mistake, because we can be sure that without exception all are sinners. Rahab had no such gospel indeed, but faith in her, with an instinct that belongs to it, laid hold upon God for mercy. The spies — enemies of her people, nature said — were for her identified with the God she sought. She shelters them at her own risk, sends them forth in peace, and commits to them the matter of her deliverance from the doom approaching. She finds them ready to pledge themselves in her behalf, and to give her a token in assurance of mercy. "Our life for yours," they say to her, "we will be blameless of this thine oath which thou hast made us to swear. Behold, when we come into the land, thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by; and thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy father's household, home unto thee. And it shall be that whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will be guiltless; and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood shall be upon our head, if any hand be upon him."

How sweet this assured and abundant mercy! How precious to find these Israelitish messengers able at once to give the needed assurance, without hesitation or peradventure at all! Such is God throughout all dispensations, that those who know Him can always answer for His gracious response to the cry of need. Faith has indeed in her to be in exercise all through; and so it is with all of us. But if she can trust the token they have given her if she has confidence in those who have given it to her — then she is not only safe, she is at rest also; although judgment is still before her, and ever approaching nearer, she can meet it (as far as she herself is concerned) in unruffled peace. Is it not more than a faint type of those Thessalonians of long afterward, who turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, even Jesus, who delivered them from the coming wrath?

Let us look at this token closer — this line of scarlet thread, under the security of which, not Rahab only, but her whole house, abide. Some of us know at once, and know well, what it refers to, and have no doubt at all that here we have one of those allusions, always recurring, to what was always in the mind of God from the beginning — to what the ages were hastening on to as their foreordained completion — to what divides in two all human history, as it divides the human race itself — the blood, the precious blood of Christ. The more you look, however, the more certain and significant does the type appear.

That scarlet line was the sign of a life given up, however lowly a one — a lowliness which has itself significance. It was the product of death although but a worm it might be, and was, that died. Death none the less provided the token of salvation for Rahab, as for us the death of Another has furnished us with the certain pledge of ours.

Nothing but death would do, and that not a natural death, as men speak, but a death surely most of all unnatural — a violent death, at man's hand deliberate murder, but Godward a sacrificial death, in which the innocent paid the debt of the guilty, the just died in behalf of the unjust. This is that which saves us, and alone saves us.

But we can trace this further, and find in the very fact of the death of a worm, a parallel with the death of the Lord of glory which should make us bow our heads in adoring worship. Who speaks really in the 22d Psalm Who knows not, as we cite its opening words word, that find their echo and application in the New Testament alone?

"My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Why art Thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, and Thou hearest not and in the night season, and am not silent!

"But Thou art holy, O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

"Our fathers trusted in Thee they trusted, and Thou didst deliver them. They cried unto Thee, and were delivered; they trusted in Thee, and were not confounded. But lam am a worm, and no man "

Who is this holy Sufferer? Who is it that justifies God in the midst of (as far as himself was considered) inexplicable abandonment? Who is it that is the one solitary exception to all God's ways with the righteous? — righteous above all, and yet forsaken, as no righteous person ever was beside?

Yes, it is the Lord, the Life-giver, the Saviour! It is the Highest in the place of the lowest! Lower than man — a worm — but oh, for what, but that the token of salvation might be ours? — the pledge of a mercy which puts those who take shelter under it in absolute and assured security, and gives, with Rahab, "boldness in the day of judgment" itself!

Christ had to take that awful place of a worm and no man; not treated as other men, but apart from all that was natural in God's holy ways of government. For when were the righteous forsaken? Never! They had gone through death, but they had gone through it with God, with the Lord as their Shepherd, fearing no evil, His rod and His staff their comfort. But when the Lord went through it, over whom death had no title at all, it was a totally different thing. That cloud of darkness that hung over the cross was but a symbol of deeper darkness which pressed upon the soul of Him who made atonement for our sins there. It was not that, as a very beautiful hymn says, but here misinterpreting, "The darkness sought His woes to hide" here it was rather our darkness, the due of our sins, which fell upon Him who bore them for us, and blotted out the sun at midday: the terrible shadow of our curse borne, and needed to be borne, by Him who was made a curse for us.

But Rahab has more than the scarlet thread. indeed, of what use would this be to her, if she had not her pledged and living witnesses in the camp of Israel? After all, her hope must be in the living, not the dead. Death alone would not do as her security, if she had not the living as witness in her behalf. And so it is again with us. Not only Christ has died — He who died liveth! Risen and gone up on high, His life is the pledge of our life: "Because I live," says He to His disciples, "ye shall live also." "If when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life."

It is a living Saviour who thus makes good to us the value of His death. It is One who has not only pledged His life for us, as the spies did theirs for Rahab, but has laid it actually down, and whose resurrection is the assurance of His work being accepted for us. It is His voice still which speaks from heaven — the old invitation, the old assurances which He gave on earth, but now with a love no more straitened in its expression. It is not only of forgiveness He can now speak, but of justification — of acquittal; for we are "justified by His blood," and His blood has been shed. "Through this Man is," therefore, "preached unto you the forgiveness of sins; and by Him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses." (Acts 13: 38, 39.)

Wonderful it is for sinners such as we are to be forgiven — more wonderful, a great deal, for sinners to be justified. As forgiven, God's mercy reaches out its hand to us; but as justified, His righteousness shields and covers us. God, with all that He is, is for us. Himself is our "hiding-place." What arrow of the enemy can pierce through such a defence?

He who has been in death as the due of our sins has been raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father. The brightness in the face of Him who represents us to God is the assurance of how complete has been the putting away of cloud and distance between us who believe and God. The two spies back in the camp of Israel were Rahab's security: how secure are we, who have our pledge in the risen Saviour at the right hand of God!

When judgment should fall upon the devoted city of Jericho, then would appear how safely the scarlet line could protect Rahab's house of refuge. The crash of Jericho's walls would only be to her the announcement of deliverance, complete and final. The time of the world's judgment will be fog us the time when we, too, shall be displayed in the full completeness of our salvation.

But let me guard against a possible mistake here. We must not imagine that we have to wait for the day of judgment in order to realize salvation for ourselves. Rahab had indeed to wait for it; but in applying the figure here, we must remember that faith anticipates and substantiates to us things not seen as yet, and that, for faith, the cross of Christ is already the judgment of the world. So the Lord expressly says: "Now is the judgment of this world; and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me." Rahab's deliverance then more closely represents to us how the world's judgment is passed through and escaped. The cross is both the judgment of the world and our salvation.

Faith can see judgment passed over already, and realize already deliverance out of a present evil world, To it we belong no more — no more of the world than Christ is of the world.

Just as it was in the night of the Passover, when the blood of the Lamb was put upon the door-post, and Israel, in order to their first step out of Egypt, had to learn the shelter of the blood, to see the judgment upon Egypt come and roll over, and to know it passed and gone, and themselves saved.

Christ's death for us is what Scripture teaches us to reckon as our death, and by that death with Him to know ourselves free from condemnation; — dead to sin, to law, and to the world. We look back on judgment, and not forward to it. We have heard the blessed words of Him by whom alone God will at last judge the world, saying, "He that heareth My words, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment" (so the words really read), "but is passed from death unto life." (John 5: 24.)

Thus furnished, we start upon our journey. God's perfect love casts out fear for him that is perfect in the lesson He would teach us. For "herein is love made perfect with us, that we should have boldness in the day of judgment, because as He is, so are we in this world." (1 John 4: 17, margin.) As He is, — Christ, who is now with God, so are we. And when He comes to judge the world, we shall be, not shut up with Rahab within the walls of the doomed place, but rather, like the liberated spies, in the army of the Avenger. "Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world? "

But let us return for a short time to Rahab's house within the walls. How beautiful that request of hers for all her house! How sweet the grace that invites now all within the City of Destruction to take refuge where the scarlet line protects equally all who take refuge there. In the house or outside it, that was the only question. The different conditions, experiences, feelings, aye, or degrees of guilt or of goodness, found among those assembled there had naught to do with their safety. Salvation was the common lot and portion of all of them. They were saved by that scarlet line in the window, and not by anything in themselves at all. Every one is welcome, invited, besought to take shelter under the precious blood of Christ. It is not a question of our thoughts, or our feelings, or our experiences; no, it is not any question even of faith, except just so far as this: that it be faith sufficient to carry us there where the only effectual shelter is to be found. No way to God is there but by Christ; no faith, save faith in Him, will avail at all. And. thus God preaches to us in this wonderful way, in these records of the past, what He is just now telling us so plainly in the gospel. These types are so precious because in them the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are so plainly one. Thus He would press upon us what He is, and invite our hearts to confidence in Him.

And oh, if we reject the loving mercy which has cost Him so dear — the loving mercy which He delights to show — what will it be for us when, unsheltered and unsaved, we have to meet God in wrath and judgment? The scarlet line was no safeguard for the city at large; the cross of Christ, whatever the dreams of dreamers, is none for the world. There was one place of refuge only, where an insignificant scarlet thread was proclaimed, in a woman's story, a safer trust than the city walls. The very house was itself upon the wall; who could have supposed that a line of scarlet thread would hold up the house when the wall fell?

And the cross is foolishness as great to men. Why should faith in it have so much virtue? Yet the foolishness of God is wiser than men.

How will it be with you? I want you to realize, beloved friends, while we are speaking here so quietly, yet that judgment is surely, silently coming nearer on the wings of each passing moment. Up to the very time when it took its course in Jericho, the people held out defiantly. They quaked, no doubt, when they heard of the Jordan passage but after that, what took place would only reassure them. Seven days of mere marching round a wall, and blowing trumpets! Did it not look like consciousness of utter impotence in face of these walls, of which they had long ago spoken so hopelessly? Yet at the word of the Lord those walls fell flat, and judgment came upon all but those saved by the sheltering token of the scarlet line.

Will you accept that foolishness of God which is wiser than men? or will you take your refuge in human wisdom, to prove its folly? The Lord grant that you may realize that salvation which is offered to you tonight freely! It has cost God an infinite deal it will cost you nothing, because you could not possibly contribute to its purchase. Will you, beloved friends, tonight accept it? God only knows when the end will be — when the last trump will be sounded — when the last word, so to speak, of reconciliation will be uttered — when the Master of the house will rise up and shut to the door. Then, with doom in view, it will be vain to say, "Lord, Lord, open to us!" Your lips will utter that cry when too late.

How solemn to think that it may be so with some now here! The Lord grant in His grace that that story of old may speak to your souls tonight, and that you may find shelter under that precious blood of Christ, of which Rahab's scarlet thread is only the type and pattern.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Demoniac.

Mark 5: 1-20.

"That which doth make manifest is light." The presence of Jesus in the world made manifest its true condition. The various forms of human wretchedness which met His eye and were ministered to by His hand, were not, in general, unwonted or exceptional forms. Each had its place, and each gave some distinctive feature to the picture of our poor fallen humanity as it lies around us at this very hour. And therein lies for us much of the blessedness of watching our Lord's ways amid a scene like this, where sins and sorrows like our own meet not mere exposure but relief from Him, in whom, as God manifest, "light" and "love" are one.

The story before us may be pleaded, however, as an exception, in some measure, to this. Without delaying to reason as to it, I desire to point out how, when we look somewhat deeper than the surface, we shall find still what has direct reference and application to ourselves, to the condition of the world — of man at large. But here, as commonly enough, that which is external and bodily is made the type of spiritual and internal things.

"And when He was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling among the tombs, and no man could bind him — no, not with chains: because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder, and the fetters broken in pieces neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones."

How terrible a picture of the power of Satan over man! How still more terrible to find under this bodily possession the type of a spiritual power exercised far and wide over those in whom, as "children of disobedience," the "god of this world" works! There are some features strongly enough marked here to identify this working, wherever found.

1. He "had his dwelling among the tombs." The place of death and corruption is Satan's familiar haunt. He delights in the ruin his hands have wrought. But how manifestly his triumph over man is seen, when he can inspire his infatuated victim with his own tastes, and make him a willing captive in the scene of his own degradation. But you think, perchance, reader, "this does not apply to me, however." Of that you must judge for yourself, of course. Certain I am, for my part, that this earth we tread is far less the home of the living than of the dead. Its buried generations lie thickly strewn around us. Death is the seal and stamp of God upon a scene which sin has blighted. And from man to the worm of the dust, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop upon the wall, the creature is made subject to vanity. All die. "Sin has reigned unto death."

And thus we are not, when our eyes are opened, "dwellers," but sojourners. "The world passeth away." It is so plain a fact that it would not be thought necessary for any to be reminded of it, even for a moment. As the Psalmist says, man "seeth that wise men die, likewise the fool and the brutish person perish, and leave their wealth to others." Yet what does he add as to those who see this? "Their inward thought is that their houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling-places to all generations; they call the lands after their own names. Nevertheless, man being in honor abideth not; he is like the beasts that perish. This their way is their folly; yet their posterity approve their sayings." (Ps. 49: 10-13.) Thus man takes possession of what he cannot keep. In his heart he is a "dweller," where even for sight and sense he is a sojourner only; and although God has come in with the proffer of eternal life, and opened heaven to the outcasts of earth, alas, little attraction is there for men in general. They are still characteristically dwellers among the tombs, and their wisdom approves itself not as that which "descendeth from above," but as what is "earthly, sensual, devilish." (James 3: 15.) "Devilish"! — for what evidence of being under Satan's power could there be more, than when dying men cling to a dying world in spite of very sight and sense, of reason and self-interest alike? when they would sooner have their toilsome, careworn life, grey hairs and furrowed brows, and disappointments and bereavements all together, than the heaven they so often say they hope for, but, I fear me, only as the one alternative with hell? Have you your "dwelling among the tombs," reader? not loving them, of course, but your heart knowing no better portion than a home in the valley of the shadow of death — in a world which passeth away, and the lust thereof? If so, how little are you different from this poor demoniac of Gadara, save that the devil that had possession of his body, has (alas) possession of your soul?

2. But look now at the second characteristic. "And no man could bind him; no, not with chains; because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces, neither could any man tame him." Just such, once more, are men. Not this man or that man, but men in general. For what are laws, all laws, human or divine, but chains and fetters cast round men? — chains that they often break; but without them, who would trust another? Take the most plausible advocate of the goodness of human nature; watch him. in his dealings with others, and you will soon find what real confidence he has in the goodness which he vaunts. How many of his neighbors will he trust with twenty dollars without good security? and how many of his neighbors would trust him? But take away the restraint of law, and who would trust himself unarmed upon the public road? You will perhaps say, it is of the exceptionally bad we should have cause to be afraid; but all experience proves you would soon scarce know whom to trust. And Scripture confirms this with its simple, broad, decisive statements: "As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man." Who has not "lusts?" With opportunity to gratify lust, and fear of punishment removed, how long would men desist to gratify those lusts? "As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God; they are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable, there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace have they not known; there is no fear of God before their eyes." "Now we know that whatsoever things the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law, that EVERY mouth may be stopped, and ALL THE WORLD become guilty before God." How vain, then, to plead exception for any! But —

3. "Neither could any man tame him." What do the efforts of men in this respect amount to? Alas, how do they proclaim their utter disbelief of all attempts of this kind, who assert that if you preach to man on God's part, and from His love alone, the free gift of a complete, a present, and an eternal salvation, then you open the floodgates of immorality at once. And though this is only the blindness of unbelief, how can they more tell out their inmost thought that man can never be tamed — no, not by all the love that God can show man, but that he must be bound with fetters and chains, with the restraint of fear of the day of judgment, because he never can be converted to the pure love of God and good?

4. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones." What a spectacle of utter misery! And even so, men are moral suicides. What more common than the expression, "He was an enemy to nobody except himself"? And though that is not true of any, for none can injure himself without injuring others, still it is ever true, that of all enemies, a man's worst one is himself. Indeed, without our own help, no enemy could injure us. Our fleshly lusts, our self-righteousness, our unbelief, with the thousand other evil growths that intertwine themselves with these, are our most real and deadly foes. And whether "in the mountains" of spiritual pride and self-sufficiency, or "in the tombs," the abodes of more palpable corruption, "crying, and cutting himself with stones" is still man's most constant occupation. It is a terrible picture, but a most true and lifelike one. Every "child of disobedience" is one in whom "the prince of the power of the air" thus "worketh."

But we are now to look at the demoniac's deliverance. "But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshiped him." That it was not the devil brought him to the feet of Jesus we may be quite sure and we may get in this more than a hint of how the devil's power is exercised over those in whom he works. It is not the direct might and mastery of a superior being. Mere force this way would not be suffered. But even if "the god of this world blinds the mind, lest the light of the glorious gospel* of Christ shines in," it is only the minds of "those that believe not," and who thus by the rejection of God's grace and love shut themselves up under Satan's power. It is not that the Word is not witness to itself. It is not that the light shining is not evidence for all. No: the condemnation is that "light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light." Not that they were ignorant that the light was there but they loved and chose darkness. Will was at work, and the heart rejecting. Thus man yields himself up to the devil, and then and thus his blinding power is exercised, until the deluded soul finds perhaps a hundred good reasons for rejecting what he never wanted to receive. How little conscious we are of how the understanding is controlled by the will, and how men may end by becoming "honest infidels" to the truth, who yet never became so in an honest way.

{*Rather, "the gospel of the glory of Christ."}

With Jesus in the scene, the power of Satan is broken. "When he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshiped him." Reader, have you ever done so? Of course, I do not mean, do you go to church on Sunday, or "say your prayers." But I mean, have you ever in your heart of hearts owned and bowed to the One whom man has rejected, and whom God has put at His right hand in glory? Your salvation lies in this, for "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." The way out of Satan's power is in the truthful acknowledging of Him who was manifested that "He might destroy the works of the devil." Put yourself under His authority and power, and He will manifest it on your behalf and for your deliverance. "Come unto me," says He, "all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I WILL give you rest."

But in a strange way does the poor victim approach the Lord: "And cried, saying, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not." Here is the devil and the man's voice mingled, and in such a way you cannot distinguish them. And with how many to whom the Lord has been saying, as we learn He had been here, "Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit," is this the case? For how many come, beseeching Him, the Deliverer, "not to torment them!" With an awakened conscience, and the meaning of the cross not seen, how natural the thought that the holy and the just God must be against them! And how much positive influence of Satan, too, is there in this, when He has so distinctly declared His grace, and justified it by a work done for sinners, and for sinners only! Oh that every one did fully understand that it is Satan's work to impute enmity to the good and gracious God, who gave His Son for us, as if He needed to be "reconciled," or have His heart changed toward us, whereas it is we, not He, that need the reconciliation. Reader, the "just God" and the "Saviour" are One. The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel — in good news to men. God has got title to show out His love to us by the cross; and sin is no hindrance to the blessing of those that come to Him, for Christ died for sinners.

"And He asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion, for we are many. And he besought Him much that He would not send them away out of the country." Then follows a solemn word. "Now there was there, nigh unto the mountains, a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought Him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave."

The solemn thing is that men (though not all men) are called "swine" in Scripture. "Give not that which is holy unto dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again, and rend you." Again, "It is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire." Thus the "swine" are those who, possessed of their own sensual lusts, value not the precious things of God, though presented to them. Such may have had "the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 2: 20), though never so as to change the nature, but only skin deep, washing off the pollutions of the world without, but not reaching to the corruption of the heart within (cp. ch. 1: 14), leaving the swine still swine, and, of course, finally to go back to wallowing in the mire once more. How many such there are, in the heat of so-called "revivals," whether true or false, converted, as they thought, to God, but who in result are found only to have known enough of "religion," to make light of it altogether. In many cases, too, false teaching gives its help to persuade them that it was real conversion they had, though it was not able to keep them out of the world six months, nay, one month, or a week. Thus they can the more thoroughly despise it, knowing the poor, worthless thing it was to them. But how solemn this backsliding when we see in it, as Peter speaks, the manifestation of the swine's nature, and contemplate their "latter end, worse with them than the beginning." And what more appalling than even the hint, if you will call it no more, that is given by this narrative, that they may be as he out of whom the devil went, but only to return with seven others more wicked than himself, to enter in and dwell there! "And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out and entered into the swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and were choked in the sea."

Reader, if you be a rejector of God's precious truth, beware! Is it impossible that He whom thou rejectest may leave thee to manifest the awful reality of Satan's power, driven, for the warning of others, headlong to destruction?

Yet let me say, if the voice of Jesus lingers in your ears — if you are not yet deaf to it utterly — still it says, "Come," and you may come; and still, whosoever cometh, He will in no wise cast out.

"And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that was done. And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind." What a contrast in every feature to the man he was! the shame of nakedness removed; the restless wandering changed to peace; the untamed maniac, a terror to all around, now in the quiet possession of himself; the company of Satan changed for the sweet companionship of the Son of God. Oh, to have in our soul the deep reality of all these blessings! Reader, in their fullest meaning, they are the portion, every one of them, of him who has come to Jesus. If you have done so, come and count over the jewels in thy casket if thou hast not come, still the Lord keeps all this for thee; if thou covet it, it may be thine.

"Sitting."

For He giveth rest. Himself has done all, finished all — proclaimed it "finished." The grace of God brings salvation, consequently, to all men. (Titus 2: 11.) You have not to work for it, but to take it. If you have come, He has received you. You may say, I have not rest; but you have title to it and His word must be your assurance, not your feelings, that He has received you. He casts out NONE, not you then. Take His word for it, and you will rest.

"Clothed."

"Behold," says the angel of the Lord to Joshua (Zech. 3: 4), "I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment." It is God's own hand furnishes this clothing, and clothes with it, too. "The best robe" comes to us from the Father's hand and love. "He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness." "All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;" but Christ "is of God made unto us righteousness." (Isa. 61: 10; Isa. 64: 6; 1 Cor. 1: 30.)

To those who believe, then, Christ is made over. God appropriates Him to them, that the shame of their nakedness may not appear. They are "in Christ" before God, and His beauty and glory are seen upon them. Not only is there "no condemnation," but they are "accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1: 6), and "as He is, so are they even in this world." (1 John 4: 17.)

One more blessedness of this cleansed and delivered man of Gadara: he was —

"In his right mind."

For, reader, however "their posterity approve their sayings," the "way" of the men of this world, wise in their generation as they may be, is "folly," and none but he who has Christ has really "wisdom." If you think not so yet, a few steps more upon the road you are taking, and you will be convinced of it. The opened eye of faith alone sees things as they are. God's estimate of the world will stand. The things "seen" are but "temporal;" the things "unseen" are yet "eternal." "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment." Happy and wise alone is he who can say with the apostle, "I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord." "He that drinketh of the water that I shall give him," says the Lord himself, "shall never thirst."

"And they were afraid . . . and they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts." Were these in their right mind, alas? Do you know that many who are in like manner respectful to the Lord, are only yet praying Him to leave them to the devil? Do you know that multitudes of so-called Christian worshipers, are only respectfully bowing Him out of their houses and hearts? Do you know that for multitudes (to change the figure), Christ is but a dressed-up image to be worshiped in the churches, and left there till the next occasion? not the living One, not the gracious Master and Lord, not the Friend that sticketh closer than a brother, not the companion of the heart and life? And do you know, that in such cases the only true prayer they ever make Him is, "Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways?" How different with the really delivered soul: "And when He was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed Him that He might be with Him." And this desire is of Himself, and shall be fully satisfied. We shall be "ever with the Lord." Before that day comes there is a brief but blessed interval of service given: "Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee. And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all men did marvel."

May such be the testimony rendered to the Lord Jesus, dear reader, by you and me!

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Gospel in the Genealogy.

Matthew 1: 1-6.

"And Judas begat Pharez and Zara of Thamar; . . . and Salmon begat Booz of Rahab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias."

The introduction of four women's names, and of four only, into the genealogy of our Lord as given by Matthew, has furnished material for inquiry to many students of the inspired word. That there was a special purpose in it no one who had any right claim to be such could ever doubt. Moreover, a slight glance only at the names so chosen to a place in connection with the human descent of the Lord of Glory would show something of the significance of their being found there. They are precisely such names as a chronicler, left to mere human wisdom in the matter, and especially a Jew, however right thinking, would have kept out of sight; and especially so as there was no apparent necessity for bringing them forward. They were not needed at all as establishing the connection of our Lord with David or with Abraham. No other names of women are thus introduced — neither Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, nor any other , while yet there was perhaps not another who might not seem to have better title to be remembered. These women were of all others, though in different ways, just the blots apparently upon the genealogy. And then, so far from any attempt at concealment of what was discreditable in connection with them, circumstances which needed not (one might have thought) to be referred to, are brought in, as if to draw our attention to what otherwise might have been less noticed. Thus Zara's twin-birth with Pharez, though himself not in the line of the genealogy, is mentioned as if to recall the circumstances of that sin which brought them into being; while Bathsheba, instead of being mentioned by name, is associated, as it were, with all the horror of the crimes which her name alone one would think sufficient to bring to mind — "her that had been the wife of Urias."

But there is something very beautiful as well as characteristic in this fearlessness of one who, here as in other places — in a mere record of names, as it might seem, as well as in the most solemn passages of our Lord's life spake as he was moved by the Holy Ghost. If there be a blot upon the life of one of His people, the God of truth will never hesitate to bring it out, though it might seem to be furnishing an occasion to those who seek occasion against the truth; and if there be a dark spot that presumptuous man would dare to lay a finger on, on but one of the links (each divinely constituted) of the chain of ancestry of the Man Christ Jesus, the Spirit of God puts His finger upon it first, to invite our attention to it as something worthy of being noted, and calculated only, in the mind of faith, to beget reverential thoughts and lowly admiration of a wisdom that never fails, and that is most itself when it confounds all other.

Now to a faith that (as is characteristic of it) "believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly," the introduction of the names of Tamar and of Bathsheba into the inspired record of the Lord's human ancestry, is pregnant with suggestions fitted to awaken the liveliest emotion. Each of these women of dishonored names and shameful memories had title, then, in a peculiar way, to appropriate those words which recorded Israel's most real boast: "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given." The human feeling — for there is that in it whatever there may be more — which has given an "immaculate conception" to the mother of our Lord, would have at least provided for the unblemished character of the line of His natural descent; and that feeling would have said, Let Him have connection with the purest and noblest only that can be found; and thus it is that human thought has been shown folly in the wisdom of One who, from the beginning, took the "seed of the woman" — first as she had been in the transgression — to bruise the serpent's head, and heal those that are oppressed of the devil. Fixed, in divine wisdom, in that part of our Saviour's genealogy which no Jew could dispute — for none could dispute that the Christ was to come of David — these names (all perhaps Gentile, and some undoubtedly so) stood there to vindicate the Gentiles' part in the "child born." And just so in the face of pretension to human righteousness they stood to vindicate the claims of sinners to Him whose "body was prepared Him" that He might die for sinners.

Thus far, then, the meaning of these names in the connection in which we find them is plain enough, and their place in the genealogy not only needs no vindication, but is another note of harmony in that song of praise which His word, as well as all other of His works, is perpetually singing — seed to sow music in the hearts of the sorrowful, in the assurance of how the sighing of the prisoners has come up before the Lord.

But what if we are able to go further and to show that not only is this so but that each of the four names here given furnishes its own peculiar feature to what, taken as a whole, is really a full and blessed declaration of the story of grace and of salvation — each in its order adding what the former had left out, till the whole is told? Would it not be worthy of God to speak so — to make not only types and parables, but the very names of a genealogy repeat a story He is never weary of telling, however slow man may be to hear?

Let us take up, then, the history of these four names, so far as it connects them with this inspired genealogy, and try to read the lesson which is given us by their connection with it.

The history of Tamar you will find in Genesis 38. It is one of those dark chapters of human depravity which the Word lays open with its accustomed plainness and outspokenness. Infidels would speak of it as a blot upon the book that contains it, and few perhaps care to read it, least of all aloud. And yet it is a story that will one day again find utterance before the most magnificent assembly that the earth or the heavens ever saw or shall see. And how many such like stories shall come out then — mine, reader, and yours, not perhaps, after all, so far removed from Tamar's — and the pure eternal day will not withdraw its beams, and the night not cover it up with its darkness.

What must be told then, may well bear to be told now. The light that shines upon evil deeds is all undefiled by them. If Tamar's history were a mere thing of the past and had no voice for succeeding generations, no doubt it had been vain to bring it up; but now let us rather thank Him for doing it, who has given us a page of human history so dark that we have to shudder; so filthy that we have to blush at it. Reader, I ask again, is there no page of your life, that, if it were written by the faithful hand of God, you would have to blush at in like manner?

Now, in all this history of Tamar's, the thing that strikes me in this connection is, that there is no redeeming feature about it. If I take the record attached to the other names which have place with hers in this genealogy, I may find perhaps in each case something that breaks the darkness a little. But I find nothing similar recorded about Tamar. She comes before me in this picture as a sinner and nothing else. The wife successively of two men, each cut off for his wickedness by divine judgment, she dares yet in her own person, by crime equal to theirs, provoke divine judgment. But the wonder above all this is, that it is this very sin that brings her name into the Lord's genealogy — for this sin it was that made her the mother of Pharez, one of the direct line in Christ's ancestry.

Is there no voice in this? And is it the voice of the God of judgment, or is it the voice of the God of grace, the God and Father, indeed, of our Lord Jesus Christ? True, if I look alone at the Old-Testament record, it may call up before me, as it has called up, the time of account and manifestation but the moment I turn to the New Testament and find Tamar first of women's names in the genealogy of the Lord — Tamar, brought in by her sin into that connection — I find what fixes my mind upon a scene of judgment, indeed, and that of the most solemn sort, but where the Holy One of God stands for the unholy, where Barabbas's cross — place of the chief of sinners — bears the burden of One who alone bare all our burdens, and "with whose stripes we are healed."

Oh, blessed lesson, and worthy of God to give! Tamar's sin her connection with the Lord of life and glory? and O beloved, look! was not our sin our connection? Did not He die for sinners? Was it not when we confessed our sins, and, with our mouths stopped, took our places before God, ungodly and without strength, that we found out the wondrous fact that for the ungodly and without strength Christ had died; and that because we were sinners, and Christ had died for such, He was "faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness"?

Thus Tamar's name, first in this genealogy, is first also in the simple gospel truth that it reveals; and the fact that Tamar is a sinner, of whom I can read nothing but her sin, and whose sin gives her connection in a peculiar way with the Christ who came for sinners, is light and joy and gladness in my soul.

But we must turn to Rahab.

And here again we are not in very creditable company. Rahab is a Canaanite, one of a cursed race, and Rahab is a harlot, sinner among sinners. We seem destined to move in this track. The one thing recorded to her advantage is her faith. That it had fruit too, none can question. She is one whom the apostle James takes up, to ask us, "Was not Rahab, the harlot, justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and sent them out another way"? But even here, you will observe, the thing he appeals to is not what would, in men's eyes, make a saint of her. There was no brilliance of devotedness, no wonderful self-sacrifice, no great goodness, as one might say. Even in the very thing in which she shows her faith she tells a lie; as if to isolate faith from any kind of merit whatever, and to give us expressly the picture of one that "worketh not," but whose only hope is in a God who "justifieth the ungodly." (Rom. 4: 5.)

And who can doubt it was Rahab's faith that brought her into the genealogy, as sin had brought Tamar? Without faith, she had died with those shut up in Jericho, a cursed woman of a cursed race. Faith removed that curse from her faith brought her in among the people of God, if it did not attract to her the heart of Salmon, so as in the most direct way to account for those words being in the genealogy, "Salmon begat Booz of Rachab."

Thus the second of these women's names teaches us a lesson as sweet and as needful as the former. "To him that worketh not, but believeth" is what we instinctively think of when we think of Rahab, — faith that, while it has that which demonstrates its reality, leaves one still to be justified as ungodly, nay, believes on One who only does so justify, — faith which looks not at itself, therefore, and pleads not its own performances, but brings the soul to accept the place of ungodliness only, because for the ungodly only there is justification.

This is very sweet and very wonderful. It is wonderful to find how in the mere introduction of a name into a catalogue, the God of grace can speak out the thoughts of His own heart. And it is very sweet to see how constantly before Him is the thought of our need and of His mercy, and how He would by the very wonder, as it were, surprise men's slow, cold hearts into the belief of it.

And now we have got to Ruth: "Booz begat Obed of Ruth."

But what shall we say of Ruth? Here at first sight our text might seem to fail us, and we might seem to have parted company with sinners. Why, you might say, the Spirit of God Himself takes a whole book to tell us about Ruth. And true, indeed though it be that she was a Gentile, as Rahab and as Tamar, you might repeat of her what the Lord Himself says of another Gentile: "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." With no sword of judgment hanging over her head as over Rahab's, with no tie to connect her with Israel but the memory of a dead husband who had himself abandoned it, with the memory of famine in that land which had forced her husband out, and with the company only of an aged woman, with whom bitter providences, as she deems them, have changed the name of Naomi into Mara, Ruth comes into the land and to the God of Israel, in whose fields she is content to be a gleaner. No, do not think, reader, that I would disparage the worth, or blot the fair fame of Ruth the Moabitess. That she was a Gentile only adds to it the more honor, in that among the godless grew her godliness, and that she was faithful where Israel's own children had set her the example of unfaithfulness.

But is there nothing in this very fact that, in company with the names of sinners among sinners, we find one who shines, as it were, saint among saints? What does it mean, this putting down of Ruth in company with such names as Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba? Is it not a truth of the same kind as when the Word tells us of one who "gave much alms" and "prayed to God alway," that he was to send to Joppa for a man who should tell him words whereby he should be saved? Or as when Zaccheus, standing forth and saying to the Lord, "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor," meets the significant and gentle word — you can scarcely call it reproof — "This day is SALVATION come to this house, for as much as he also is a son of Abraham for the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was LOST."

So that without the smallest word of detraction from Ruth's goodness, but rather allowing in its very fullest all that can be claimed for it, we may fairly draw a lesson from the company in which we find her name, which is itself full of instruction and of beauty and Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, side by side in the genealogy, give us but the announcement of Isaiah's vision, which the Baptist's mission went to fulfill: "Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God." Yes, God's salvation as much needed, and in the same way, by one as another — as much of grace to one as to another, to Ruth the Moabitess, as to Rahab or Tamar.

But we have not yet got at that which gives fullest significance to this name in the genealogy. Against this Ruth, with all her loveliness and with all her goodness, there was lying a ban which did not lie in the same way against the others. She was a Moabitess, and against these there had been leveled an express statute of the law. "An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord, even unto their tenth generation they shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord forever." (Deut. 23: 3.) Thus Ruth lay under the interdict of the law. It is striking that it was to this devoted, to this lovely woman that the law applied, — not to Rahab nor even to Tamar; God having thus proclaimed in an unmistakable way the law's character; not bringing it in to condemn the sinner and the harlot, (where men's minds would have done so,) but introducing it as that which would have excluded a Ruth, even with her piety. Emphatically was it thus taught that it was man as man that was shut out from God; — not in his sins merely, but in his righteousness; and that if we stand on that ground all "our righteousnesses are as filthy rags."

But the law does not keep Ruth out. Moabitess as she is, she does enter into the congregation of the Lord. The law is set aside in her behalf, and instead of her descendants being excluded to the tenth generation, her child of the third generation sits upon Israel's throne, and hears the promise which confirms that throne to his heirs for succeeding generations.

Thus another principle comes out in bright relief. If God takes up the sinner and the harlot on the principle of faith, law is set aside by the very fact. "The law is not of faith." "The righteousness of God without the law is manifested," "even the righteousness of God by faith of Jesus Christ unto all, and upon all them that believe." This is what Ruth is witness to. The Moabitess comes into the congregation of the Lord, spite of the law expressly leveled against her to keep her out; and in this we find but another utterance of this self-same story of grace which, in so many languages, our God so joys to tell.

One name alone remains; one truth has yet to be uttered. God takes up sinners, then, by faith, and law is set aside. "Faith is reckoned for righteousness." Not as if faith were righteousness, or its equivalent — that would be quite another thing: but God, who had been looking (to speak humanly) for righteousness by law, had ceased to do so. The law had returned Him answer, "there is none righteous; no, not one." Thenceforth the principle was changed. "Faith" was "reckoned for righteousness:" faith that did not pretend to righteousness at all, for it was in One who "justifieth the ungodly."

But if God receives sinners, to what does He receive them? Is it a complete salvation they obtain, or are there conditions still to be met before the final goal is reached, and there is complete security? On what, in short, does the ultimate salvation of the believer rest? This is a question which evidently needs answering before the soul can be completely satisfied and at peace. It is one thing to be now in the favor of God, and it is another thing to know that I can never lose it. And the more I look at myself, if it depend upon myself, the more I must be in dread of losing it.

Moreover, there are those who will allow of a free present salvation, who will not allow of one that gives security absolutely for the future. With them the sinner may be saved without works; but the saint may not. The legalism shut out at one entrance gains admittance at another, and the result in either case is the same. Self-sufficiency is built up; self-distrust taught to despair; the work of Christ is practically displaced from its office of satisfying the soul, and the grace of God effectually denied.

The Scripture speaks as decidedly on this point as on any other. On justification by the blood of Christ it builds the most confident assurance as to the future. It tells us that inasmuch as "when we were yet sinners Christ died for us, MUCH MORE then, being now justified by His blood, WE SHALL BE SAVED from wrath through Him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." (Rom. 5: 8-10.)

And when I turn to this last name of the four, and find "her that had been the wife of Urias" taking her place with Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth in the genealogy of the Lord, it seems as if the text just quoted were repeated in my ears. For, the moment I think of Bathsheba, a greater name than hers, linked strangely with hers in the crime which it recalls, comes in to efface her almost from my mind. David, it is I think of — David, child of God, Israel's sweet psalmist! in whose breathings the souls of saints in every age have poured out their aspirations after "the living God," — David fallen, and fallen so low that we cannot marvel if his name be side by side with Tamar's. David, man after God's heart! Oh, how many of the Lord's enemies hast thou made to blaspheme! how many of the Lord's people hast thou made to mourn for thee! Was that thy witness to what God's heart approved? Was that thy soul's panting after Him? What! murder a man in the midst of faithful service to thee zealously rendered, that thou mightest hide thine own adultery? Was that the man who, when flying from the face of his enemy, and when Providence had put that enemy within his power, cut off but his skirt, and his heart smote him for it? Ah! sadder than thy heart could be for Saul, we take up thine own lament over thee, "How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished."

And surely, O Lord our God, in Thy presence shall no flesh glory! If David could not, could we? Alas! if I know myself, what can I do but put my mouth in the dust, and be dumb forever before the Lord! "All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass." And "let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." The voice that comes to me from David's sin is infinitely more than David's condemnation. It is my own. Can I pretend to be better? Can I take my hand from his blood-stained one? Ah, no! I accept with him my own condemnation; and not as a sinner merely, but as a saint. From first to last, from beginning to end, the voice of David's fall brings to me the assurance that the justification of the ungodly must be my justification still. It is like that voice of God, strange, and contradictory in its utterance, men may call it, which, having pronounced man's sentence before the flood, and destroyed every living thing because "every imagination of the thought of man's heart was only evil continually," after the flood declares, "I will not again curse the ground for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living as I have done."

Blessed be His name! He does not trust His salvation to my hand. My "life" depends but upon the life of Him who has taken His place in heaven, after He had by Himself purged my sins; as much "for me" there in the glory as for me" upon the cross. He is the accepted One; I but "in Him." Because He lives, I shall live also.

If David could have taken his salvation out of God's hand, he surely would have done it in the case before us. That he could not I read in this woman's name, partner in his sin, recorded in the genealogy. Once again, as in Tamar's case before, I find sin connecting with the Saviour of sinners. It was not that God did not mark, and in a special way, His abhorrence of the evil. It was only grace, really, to do that. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," and no wonder, therefore, if adultery and murder sprung up again and again in David's path. No marvel that the sword never departs from his house, and that his wives are dishonored in the face of the sun. But in the midst of all this growth of thorn and thistle, sure fruit and consequence of sin, one floweret springs up from this cursed ground, type and witness that, where sin had abounded, grace over-abounds. From this David and this Bathsheba, whom sin has united together, a child springs whose name stand next in the line of the ancestry of the Lord; and who receives, as if to confirm this, a special name "Jedidiah," "beloved of the Lord."

And is it an imagination or is it more, that there is something in the name — the other name of this child born — which harmonizes with all this? I will not say; but if Solomon, "peaceful," be a strange name in so near connection with so sad a history, it is not an unsuited one to follow in this genealogical list — not an unsuited one to be in company with Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, or Bathsheba. And it is a blessed one with which to end the history of four names, which when God utters them can be made to speak of what He must love well to utter, or He would scarcely take such strange occasion to remind us of it.

And if to any there seems after all in this, something that seems too much like a mere wonder to be God's utterance, I would beseech such an one to remember how once a burning bush was made just such a wonder to attract a passer-by, and how when he turned aside to see, a voice out of that bush proclaimed that God was really there. Even so may it not be strange that He should attract now by a kind of wonder, to listen to a story which He loves to tell; and for those who turn aside to see, may the same voice, now as then, be heard.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Healing of the Issue.

"And much people followed Him, and thronged Him. And a certain woman which had an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, when she heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched His garment; for she said, If I may touch but His clothes I shall be whole. And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague." Mark 5: 24-29.

That we should find in the miracles of healing which the Lord wrought upon the body, the types and patterns of spiritual healing, cannot be thought strange. This healing of the soul was certainly the great thing in His mind always. That of the body was a display of Divine power soon to pass away. The records remain not only as the witness of that power manifested in goodness among men, and manifesting the glory of the Son of God. According to His own words with regard to the healing of the palsied man, it was that they "might know that the Son of Man had power on earth to forgive sin," that He bade him arise, take up his bed, and go unto his house. The bodily healing, which they could see, was to be the assurance of the reality of the spiritual healing which they could not see.

This, of course, was not saying that the one was actually a type or figure of the other, but it prepares us at least to find without much wonder the lesser miracle speak of the greater. Nor must we be surprised that no such interpretation of what is here is given us. The perfection of the picture is that it speaks to the eye for itself without the need of any. Even so has the healing of the bloody issue spoken ever since the day of its record here by one "moved by the Holy Ghost."

The expectation of a miracle had brought for a moment a crowd around the Lord. A ruler of the synagogue had besought Him for his daughter, lying at the point of death. And Jesus went with him; and much people followed Him and thronged Him." It was for the most part an idle crowd, just such as would be shouting at no distant time, "Away with Him! away with Him! crucify Him!" There is no hint of anything better as to them. Their thronging and pressing upon Him was no good sign, but the reverse. If they "followed Him," it was outside interest, not love or reverence for Him. No "virtue" went out of Him whom they pressed on, for their need, if need they had. They had no real dealing or intercourse with Him at all.

It is very like what is going on at the present day, when, in these professedly Christian times, a crowd is pressing in the self-same way around the Lord. There is much apparent "following." If we look closer, how much through outside influences, how little from real heart for Christ Himself. How few can speak of "virtue" which has come out of Him for them; of eternal life which they have gotten through Him; of justification from all things by His blood.

Amid all this, however, a need that nothing else can meet brings the soul to Christ, and the touch of faith finds virtue in Him as of old. "A certain woman which had an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse" — how many who read this, perhaps, will say, That is my picture. How many remedies have I tried for my condition, and I am as far from peace as ever, and more hopeless than ever now of finding it." But let us look at what is here more closely.

"An issue of blood twelve years." A slow, steady, unchecked draining of the life away. A thing not in all its dread significance perceived at once, but surely making itself felt as time goes on, paling the brightness of all the eye looks on and stealing away all vigor of enjoyment, until the pall and shadow of death lies everywhere, and life is labor, and all under the sun is vanity. Know it as we may, or not, this is everywhere a disease we suffer from. Little, if at all, understood in the flush and fervor of youth, when the world is yet untried, its reality gradually, but too soon, steals in upon us. "The world passeth away." There is a doom upon it. Its freshness fades. Its blossoms wither. He that drinketh of this water thirsts again, and it becomes more and more impossible to find even temporary satisfaction from it.

This is the effect of the "issue of blood." It is what sin has wrought. It is the mark of Cain, "a fugitive and a vagabond upon the earth." Everything is fleeting, naught abiding. Death is the palpable mark upon sin. And oh, when the eye is opened, what a world! Could there be aught but death for it? Could it go on, such as it is, forever, under the eye of a holy and good God?

But it is my sin that brings the want and weariness and dissatisfaction everywhere into my own soul. It is that I am away from God. For if able to look up out of the midst of it all to One enthroned above it, infinitely good as infinitely great, and with Divine power working out unfailingly the counsels of Divine love, weariness and unrest would be gone, and acquaintance with Him would give peace, deep and unbroken.

But, alas! when I think of Him; conscience has its tale to tell against me, and cast me off from confidence in Him. My indifference, my enmity to Himself, become in my thoughts the argument (judging Him by myself) that He must be careless of or hostile towards me. Sin is upon me, alas, condemning me before Him, and sin is in me, accusing Him to my heart; and yet it is with Him I have to do. Here, then, is my issue of blood, draining out of my soul its all of life and joy and satisfaction.

"An issue of blood twelve years!" But that was not all with this poor woman. She had suffered many things of many physicians." The effort to get relief had thrown her into the hands of those who could accomplish nothing for her, but only added to her affliction. How sure a thing it is, if we have felt anything of soul-sickness, that we shall be prone to try any and every invention of man, rather than the Lord's own simple and effectual way of healing. And the equally sure result is, if we are under Divine teaching, that we find suffering instead of healing. God's gospel is the "gospel of peace;" all other gospels fall short of this. Indeed these others are all one at bottom; they bear the marks of one mind from which they all come, for if it is not God's truth we follow, it is the devil's lie.

Thus all men's religious inventions will be found to base themselves upon and suit themselves to the natural thought as to God. They suppose Him against men, and needing to have His heart turned to favor them; and for this purpose some work of man's own needed, to make (as they put it) their peace with Him. Herein is torture enough for a divinely awakened soul. For what is he to do, who has never yet done even his bare duty? How is he to make up for the past, who is for ever adding to his sin? Or if God's mercy will put away the past, still what about this present constant falling short? Will God excuse him again in this? If so, in how much, for this mercy must surely have a limit? "Keep the commandments?" This in the whole he cannot. But "do the best he can;" this too, he finds, he has not. Will God, — can He, accept less than even this? Where then draw the line, and upon which side of the line, — accepted or rejected, — does he stand?

Thus all is suffering here, for to such questions there is no answer. Under this system of treatment, if we are in earnest, like the woman in this story, we are "nothing bettered, but rather grow worse." The end is total bankruptcy, and that every way: "she had spent all that she had.

"None but Jesus

Can do helpless sinners good."

In such a condition there is one advantage, and that a great one: the "many physicians" disappear. For one simply "lost" they have no remedy, — can hold out no further hope. But one physician, and but one method of cure, remains.

What strange faith comes into the soul at the end of so many trials! "When she had heard of Jesus, she came in the press behind, and touched his garment; for she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole." What gave her such strange assurance? Just her need. He suited her so well. His grace in its freeness commended itself so to her. He was no vendor of patent medicines, made no profit of the help He brought her. This wondrous prodigality of blessing flowing out of Him for every need was the broad seal of heaven to His corn- mission. It spoke in her heart with all the sweetness of Divine authority, and she gave herself up to the joy it brought, without a doubt.

This is the kinship — so simple, and yet so much misapprehended — between "repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." For repentance is indeed that which introduces us to the blessed reality of what He is. We "repent," and we "believe the gospel." Not as if repentance were a legal condition, or legality at all, but, on the contrary, the break-down of it. To "abhor ourselves" with Job is not self-righteousness; it is self-emptiness, the conviction of helplessness and evil, to which only the freeness and fullness of the gospel suit. It is not the doing of something for God, but the conviction of inability to do, which shuts us up to simple receiving of the "gift of righteousness." Then how simple indeed faith is, and how suited and sufficient a Saviour Christ becomes!

The faith of the woman with the bloody issue found its answer from the Lord. Faith always does, for all it counts upon Him for. "And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague."

Notice how the Lord's healing distinguished itself from all others. It was no lengthy process. He did not put this woman under a course of treatment, as some interpreters of His dealings with the soul would make Him in that case do. No, it was immediate healing. "Straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up." How blessed is this! How sure that as to soul-salvation the Lord's way is precisely similar. "Thy sins be forgiven thee" were His first words to the palsied man. "Thy faith hath saved thee," to many another. Nowhere did He put those who came to Him through a probationary course to get their sins forgiven and to find peace with God. And now we are assured in the gospel of a peace made, — a "peace preached," or proclaimed as made. "He is our peace." Faith welcomes this, and enters into it at once.

First faith, then feeling; "she felt in her body." "Ah," says some one who reads this, "that's what I am waiting for. I want to feel that I am healed." But observe, dear reader, she did not wait to feel. She said, "If I may but touch, I shall be healed." She touched, with the assurance that the touch brought healing with it. How much more should you come to Him now with the assurance that you are received, when He says, "Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." Come to Him, saying, "I know Thou receivest me," and you will find feeling the result of faith; but if you wait for feeling to tell you you are received, you are dishonoring Him by discrediting His word; and how can you expect happy feelings while you are doing so?

Here all is in its place. Her feelings were the honor put upon her faith. She had hold of the blessing, never doubting it was hers, although she had no other assurance but the grace which was flowing out around. We have, on the other hand, the distinct positive word of the Lord that whoever comes to Him is received.

"Immediately the fountain of her blood was dried up." And what a wondrous healing is that with us, when the "salvation of God" makes us to know the "God of salvation." Not against us, as we thought, but having righteous title to show Himself for us through the Cross of Jesus; our "issue of blood" healed by the shedding of the blood of our spotless Substitute. No work of our own sufficing; but no work of our own needed. And all revealed in such unclouded light, that not to have simple certainty of it is unbelief, and sin. How the heart is brought back to God by this wondrous manifestation of what He is, and is to us! He who has given Jesus for us is the One in whose hand all things are. To know this is quietness and assurance of heart.

One word more. In the case of this woman, the Lord claims from her the public acknowledgment of what she had got from Him. She would have stolen the cure and got off unperceived. But no! she must own Him now, that He too may own her before them all. "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague." Let me urge this upon all healed ones, the claim which the Lord makes on them for open confession of Him. It is everything for happiness as Christians to be confessors of Christ, to be open, decided followers of His. It will cost us something before a world which rejects Him still, but it is a small cost, for an infinite gain; for the principle is always true, "Them that honor Me will I honor." The Lord give us boldness, beloved brethren, and devotedness to Him who has bought us with His precious blood, that we might be a people formed for Himself, to show forth all His praise.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Famine in Samaria, and How it was Relieved.

A Gospel Address.

2 Kings 6: 24 – 2 Kings 7.

We read here of a famine in Samaria, the capital city of a country most highly favored, most deeply guilty in her abuse of the patience and goodness of a long-suffering God. And now the judgment that must needs overtake iniquity was falling upon her. The enemy was besieging her in her gates, and already we see her in most extreme distress: they besieged it till an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of doves' dung for five pieces of silver." In this awful strait, the words of Moses' prophetic denunciation were fulfilled, and that took place which Jeremiah records in his moan of anguish over a still greater calamity, "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children." The king rends his clothes in agony at the terrible disclosure, and the people see sackcloth within upon his flesh; but in the depth of his despair, his heart, really unhumbled, breaks out against God in the person of His prophet: "God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day." He repents indeed of this rashness, and hastes after his messenger to save the prophet's life, but it is only to break out once more in impatience against God: "Behold, this evil is of the Lord; why should I wait for the Lord any longer?"

Strange it seems to our natural thoughts that just here should come the announcement of blessing: And Elisha said, 'Hear ye the word of the Lord: thus saith the Lord, Tomorrow, about this time, shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria.'"

"God's ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts." No but because as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts. We look at the wickedness of man exhibited here, and we ask "What possible reason could there be here for the coming blessing?" And we can only answer "None, surely; absolutely none." Whatever misery there might be to draw out His pity, goodness there was none to plead on man's behalf and it was at the very time when the evil which had provoked His judgment was laid fully bare that it pleased God to bring in His mercy. Is there here, then, any exception to His ways? Or is there not here rather a principle of His ways? With an unchangeable God there is no exception. Let us look, then, and see if we can find the principle.

Of God's pity and love we may be sure, — a love that delights ever to come in and show itself, — that must be hindered by some necessity of His holiness if it do not show itself in behalf of His needy creatures, whose need should have been but the occasion of their learning more the heart of their Creator. And though sin has brought a dark cloud over all this, God has made this but the background upon which all the brighter the character of His love may be read. His Son has been the messenger and witness of a love that would clasp all in its embrace.

God is showing grace. He has title to show it, apart from any ground in man whatever. It is grace, the essential opposite of works, — of any works at all as a condition: for "if it be of grace, it is no more of works, otherwise grace is no more grace; and if it be of works, it is no more of grace, otherwise work is no more work." It is impossible, then, to mingle these two principles: if you attempt it, the one destroys the other. So, also, of necessity the law is not of faith." "Not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified." On the other hand, the gospel-principle is "They that hear shall live." Law requires: grace gives. The obedience of the law is giving to God: the obedience of faith is receiving from God. "As many as are of the works of the law are under the curse"; but "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us . . .; that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith."

But what, then, can hinder the reception of grace? Nothing, surely, but the rejection of it. And is it possible that there should be the rejection of grace? Can God's free gift woo us in vain to its reception? Alas, there is a condition here, — to man the most galling: to receive grace, he must give up self-righteousness. He must humble himself to receive what he has never earned; he must be content as a sinner to find the Saviour. And here fatal pride prevails to the ruin of how many souls! It is what makes the Lord insist so strongly upon the necessity of repentance, for repentance is just this bringing down of creature-pride to receive, as needing it, God's salvation. The "ninety and nine just persons" of whom He speaks in the parable "need no repentance": the figure of a repentant sinner is a "sheep that was lost." Such lost ones the tender grace of Christ goes after "till He finds." Confessedly lost sinners now, they are finally never lost. On the other hand, even His lips must say, "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

Now, if we come back to Samaria, and God's bestowal of His blessing there, we can easily see how God's announcement comes in most suited order just where it does. The king stands here, as ever in Israel, as the representative of the equally guilty people. And this king, the wicked descendant of as wicked ancestors, awakened to his danger, although not his sin, had put on the garb of repentance, — Job's sackcloth without Job's self-abhorrence. He talks piously of the Lord: "If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee?" And all this not as hypocrisy, — the sackcloth is not outside for the people to see, but "within, upon his flesh." He is seeking to establish a claim upon God by that which is the sign that he has no claim. And how many, not in the least hypocrites, are doing that! They will turn their repentance itself into a kind of righteousness, when the very meaning of repentance is that we have none. And God waits, and defers the blessing which it is in His heart to give, because if He gave it, He would be putting His sanction upon what is quite untrue. The king's sackcloth was, in this way, the very hindrance to blessing. To have given it before this was stripped off would have been to have obscured His precious grace, and to have turned into wages His free gift. He delays, therefore, the blessing; lets the ungodliness of the king's heart come out; and then, when all pretension upon man's part is entirely excluded, brings in His grace as grace, without a stain upon its glory, to be a witness of the principles of His gospel to us today.

Blessed be His name! Every soul that has a true sense of sin will thank Him for it adoringly. Is there not some soul that listens to me now who will now accept for the first time this free and priceless grace, — not now a temporal but an eternal salvation? "Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat! Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price! "

But God has much more to speak of in this precious history, and still more will emphasize for us the riches of His grace. We have now to mark the way the blessing actually comes. For this purpose God takes up "four leprous men," outcasts even among the wretched inhabitants of the city, just as God took up once the chief of sinners, Saul of Tarsus, to preach the fullest, sweetest story of grace that has ever been published to the world. If the shadow of death had fallen on all the city, how must it have pressed upon these forlorn men! And it is out of their despair their hope arises. Who else would have found hope in going out to the camp of the Syrians? But for them death compassed them around; and they said unto one another Why sit we here until we die? If we say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there; and if we sit still here, we die also. Now therefore come, and let us fall into the host of the Syrians: if they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.' "

It was the very place and power of death for that besieged city, and out of it was to come that which would save alive Samaria's starving multitude. Out of the eater was to come meat; out of the strong, sweetness. And so for us also that riddle of Samson's must be fulfilled. For ourselves, our natural portion is death and judgment; and which of us has any ability to meet these? Death is the stamp of a ruined world; and if God enter into judgment with us, no flesh living shall be justified. Here is the stronghold of the enemy against us; and thus through fear of death men are all their lifetime subject to bondage. At a distance from it, although we know full well what awaits us, we may, with the incredible stolidity which belongs to man, think little perhaps about it. In Samaria for some time doubtless the dance and the song went on. Nay, even as the certain doom drew near, it may be there were those who only held more frantically to the revels that for the moment could still divert them from what they dared not contemplate.

A mighty work God had been doing for Samaria, but these we maybe sure knew nothing of it. It pleased God to communicate the secret of what He had done to these four leprous men: "And they rose up in the twilight to go unto the camp of the Syrians; and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man there. For the Lord had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host; and they said one to another, 'Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians to come upon us.' Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their tents, and their horses, and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled for their life." God had worked alone, and no one with Him, needing no help, and for those wholly unable to give it. And thus for faith Christ has "abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel." "He has spoiled principalities and powers"; "has led captivity captive, and given gifts unto men." Alone He has done it. "Whither I go," He says to Peter, "thou canst not follow me now." But the work accomplished, we are welcome to share the fruits of His victory. They are as free to us as the camp of the Syrians to those four leprous men. Absolutely free it was: They went into one tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver and gold and raiment, and went and hid it; and came again, and entered into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid it." How sudden the change from the death that stared them in the face to this abundance! How surpassingly wonderful to him who finds himself reaping the spoil of death, the fruit of Christ's victory! It is all ours without reserve, nothing kept back, "silver and gold and raiment," — things which have very plain significance in the word of God. Let us try and spell them out, and see what our riches are, although after all their value may no man tell.

It is not enough for God to deliver, — He must enrich also those whom He delivers. The deliverance, too, is, in the way of its accomplishment, infinite riches to us; and of this first the silver speaks. The atonement-money was silver, the witness to redemption, which for us is not with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ." Redemption is the testimony of what is in the heart of God toward us. If we needed the ransom, God has not thought even such a price too great. What infinite blessedness to find ourselves of this value to One to whom all worlds belong: "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." Prodigals, beggars, bankrupts, as we are, the whole of the universe does not equal the price that has been paid for us. We can tell our riches, then, in this, when what we have cost Him is the measure of the love which invites and welcomes us the "love of Christ that passeth knowledge"!

And then the "gold": gold is divine glory, the outshining of what He is who is light, and now in the light. The darkness in which for the moment He was hidden who for us went into it is for faith past, and already the true light shines. Our inheritance is in the light. We know God, — are already worshipers in the holiest of all, — can worship in spirit and in truth, — for we know whom we worship.

What wealth is ours in this glory which streams out upon us, — in which we live, — which brightens all our path, glorifying even now all the clouds which hang over it, — which illuminates even such as we are to reflect it: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give out the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." It is thus we know Him, — in righteousness, in truth, in unfailing, everlasting love; and then the light of an eternal day has risen upon us, and a wealth beyond that of unnumbered worlds is in our hands.

"And raiment": for then, too, is the shame of our nakedness removed. We are clothed with that which not only completely covers us in the sight of God, but with the best robe even in the Father's house, for we are clothed with Christ Himself we stand in Him, accepted in the Beloved, seen in the value of that priceless work-which has maintained, in fully tried perfection, the character of God in the very place in which He suffered for the sins of men. We thus in Christ before God are made, not only the display of His grace, but of His righteousness also, — "made the righteousness of God in Him."

How sudden the change, I say again, for these poor lepers, from famine and destitution to this abundance verily theirs to lay hold of as they list! God had wrought alone for them, and they had but to enjoy the fruits; and that place of death had changed for them its character wholly, — it was the place of life, and peace, and marvelous riches. But it is only, after all, the feeble picture, however blessed, of what God has done for us. Beloved, is it, through God's grace, indeed our own? And if so, how far are we realizing our infinite possessions?

But a thought strikes them in the midst of their happiness; and while, after all, it is in them a selfish one, we shall do well to heed the lesson of it: "Then they said one to another, 'We do not well; this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace: if we tarry till the morning light, some evil will come upon us: now therefore come, that we may tell it to the king's household.'"

If we have been able thus far to follow the interpretation of this, should it be needful to make the application here? Surely the need around should sufficiently appeal to those who by grace are partakers of an infinite treasure, which in sharing with others we only realize ourselves the more! Think of needing to be stirred up as to this! And yet we do need; and because of our lack in this respect, does not evil come upon us too under the holy government of God? If "he that withholdeth corn the people shall curse him," what is the responsibility of those who hold back from perishing souls the "word of life," — the good word that can make glad the saddest heart, — yea, make the tongue of the dumb to sing for joy?

Back, then, they go to the city, and tell the well-nigh incredible story, none the less true. I pass over the reception of it, — the wisdom of the king which counts it but deceit, — the need of the people which forces to test if it be not true. God invites this experimental test, beloved friends. Christianity is a religion of experiment; and if only there be lowliness and need on the part of the seeker, he shall not be turned away.

But I pass on to just one final word, which we must not miss; for the Spirit of God emphasizes, by minute repetition of the sin which brought it down, the judgment of God upon the scorner of His precious grace. More solemn than any words which I could use are the words of the inspired historian to one who died in the very midst of the abundance which the prophet had predicted: "So a measure of fine flour was sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, according to the word of the Lord. And the king appointed the lord on whose hand he leaned to have charge of the gate; and the people trod upon him in the gate, and he died, as the man of God had said who spake when the king came down to him. And it came to pass as the man of God had spoken to the king, saying, Two measures of barley for a shekel, and a measure of fine flour for a shekel, shall be tomorrow about this time in the gate of Samaria.' And that lord answered the man of God, 'Now, behold, if the Lord should make windows in heaven, might this thing be?' And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but shalt not eat thereof.' And so it fell out unto him; for the people trod upon him in the gate, and he died."

Thank God for the blessed word which says "He that liveth and believeth on Me shall never die."

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Lost Sheep

Luke 15: 1-7.

Not only are the mines of Scripture yet little worked, there is a wealth of precious things yet upon the surface which we have never made our own, for all the centuries we have had the fields in our possession. What are we more familiar with than the parables of this chapter? They are the constant theme of the evangelist; they are among the most prized treasures of faith everywhere. They are sung in hall and in street, lisped by childhood and studied by youth, and often link for the dying the most precious memories of the past with the joys into which they are entering. And yet, even among so-called evangelical Christians, how often do we find contradictory conceptions of these very parables! If we ask, Who are the "ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance"? who are the two "sons" of the last parable? how is it that the father says to the elder son, "All that I have is thine"? we shall find very different answers given by different persons of at least the average intelligence in spiritual things.

It is no purpose of mine to take up these differences, but rather to look at the parables themselves for what the Lord in His grace may grant us out of them for edification and blessing; only making the diversity of view the argument for closer examination of their meaning and design. One thing is sure: however often we may have come to these divine springs, we shall find still that there is fresh and living water. Blessed are they only that hunger and thirst: they shall ever be filled.

The occasion of the three parables was a common one and they are so manifestly linked together in subject, all the more clearly because of their individual differences, that scarcely a question can be raised on that score. In each case, what has been lost is found; in each, the joy — the basis, and the crowning joy — is, blessed be God, in the one who finds what he has lost. The threefold story of the love that seeks and finds suggests (what a further view confirms abundantly) that here it is the heart of the whole Godhead that is told out to us. Father, Son, and Spirit are all occupied with man. Around him revolves an interest that makes all things its witnesses, and servants for its blessed purposes.

The occasion is this, that there "were drawing near unto Him all the publicans and sinners for to hear Him." And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them."

Our common version says, "Then drew near," but the words do not speak of what merely happened at a certain time, but of what was habitually taking place. We see that everywhere through the gospels, from the day at least in which He called Levi from the receipt of custom, and Levi made Him a feast in his own house, "publicans and sinners" flocked around the Lord. They had gone out largely to John's baptism before that, when through the gate of repentance they were invited to come to find remission of their sins. Now, when grace sought them more openly, it was to be expected that they, beyond others, would welcome it. And they did. "Verily I say unto you," were Christ's words to the Pharisees, "that the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not, but the publicans and the harlots believed him; and ye, when ye saw it, did not even repent yourselves afterward, that ye might believe him." (Matt. 21: 31, 32.)

The Pharisees resented the grace that welcomed such; for this grace makes its own demand, and, with the inflexibility of law itself, will abate nothing. "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish," is harshness indeed to "just persons who have no need of repentance;" and this is how the parable itself describes those to whom, as murmurers against His ways, He is replying. Surely it is evident that if in the last parable alone this murmuring is, distinctly found in the person of the elder son, the first no less pictures the two parties to whom alike they were uttered.

People look around to find a class who have no need of repentance, and some who cannot find them on earth apply our Lord's words to the angels! A common hymn we sing speaks of the same class as —

"The ninety and nine that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold,"

but of this the parable says nothing. The mistake is in making a reality out of what is but the image in a mirror which the Lord puts before His audience that they may recognize themselves. And from this He necessarily pictures them according to their own estimate of themselves, — an estimate which He uses at the same time for the purpose of conviction on the one side, of encouragement on the other. Had he pictured them other than their own thought, the arrow would have missed its mark. How could they fail to apply aright these righteous men whom He exhibited to them in contrast with this wandering sheep, — "lost," or self-destroyed? How could they interpret wrongly this "elder son" serving his father in the field, indignantly pleading against the free reception of his unworthy brother his own ill-requited years of toil? Yet after all, in what seems to admit their fullest claim, they find themselves convicted and exposed, their argument refuted, and their heartlessness and distance from God laid bare.

Yet withal God Himself is at the same time so wondrously revealed, that when the scene closes with that direct appeal upon the father's part — "Then came his father out and entreated him," — you listen involuntarily for the sudden sob which shall tell of another heart, no less a prodigal's, broken down into confession and return.

The scribes taught much in parables. The Lord will have them listen to parables in turn. We feel, in the style in which He addressses Himself to them here, that the reason is not that which He gives upon another occasion to His disciples: "Therefore speak I unto them in parables, because they seeing see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand." No doubt, here as elsewhere, the parable would, like the seed of which He was speaking in the former case, test the receptive character of the ground upon which it fell. Yet the pleading in them cannot be mistaken either. Did He not, as just now said, Himself picture the Father as entreating even the Pharisee? Could He do less, or hide from them in words hard to be interpreted, that very entreaty?

The gentlest, most persuasive, winning form of speech is undoubtedly the parable. There is the attractiveness of the story itself, as the lips here could tell it, taking possession of one before even its meaning might become plain, and then detaining the soul to listen to that meaning. There is the hold upon the memory which we all realize, by virtue of which it might, like incorruptible seed, lodge in the frozen ground until a more genial time should give it leave to expand and root itself. With how many has it not been so since! and how great a harvest may we not be sure will yet be seen to have sprung from this sowing! Sow it in some hearts afresh even now, blest Sower, Son of Man, for Thy love's sake!

"What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?

"And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders rejoicing.

"And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbors, saying unto them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.

"I say unto you that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance."

They have assailed Him for His love, and the Lord first of all, therefore, answers for Himself. He will afterward, though in a more covert way, show how the Spirit, and then openly how the Father, is of one mind with Him. Are they not too? He asks. If it were only a sheep that was in question, there would be no doubt. Alas, that doubt could only come in where men were concerned! Would they indeed value a man lower than a sheep? But these were His: put them upon that low level, who should forbid His interest in them?

He does not compare Himself to the shepherd here. He might act as that, but He was much more than that — even the Owner of the sheep. We see that he makes the loftiest claim here. They are His, even these poor publicans and sinners. He who made and fashioned them is He who is in pursuit of them. Will they question His right?

It is a first principle for faith that God is the seeker; that there is heart in Him, — goodness in Him. We are not bid to batter at closed doors. We have not to soften Him to pity, or turn Him toward us. We feel our hardness toward Him, and we think Him hard. We listen to our consciences that accuse us, and we think we hear His voice in them, who yet "upbraideth not." What a revelation of God is this, when Christ, down here among men, becomes His true and only representative!

Conscience is not the voice of God to us. It is the voice of self-conviction, of the moral nature within us, pronouncing upon ourselves, and which makes us rightly anticipate a judgment to come. But even here, while it is the eye to see, there is no less required the light to see. In the twilight darkness in which so many are shrouded, what is unreal is oftentimes confounded with the real. If a poor Romanist omits his worship of the Virgin, conscience may smite him for it. If he gets his absolution from the priest, he feels relieved and happy. Of many, Scripture says, "Even their mind and conscience is defiled." (Titus 1: 15.) It may have its fools' paradise or its fabled purgatory. As the light comes in, reality succeeds to the unreal, and in the day that comes there will be nothing hid.

But conscience can never take the place of revelation. God only can tell me what He is, or what Christ did for me, or how my soul can be at peace with Him. For all this, I must listen to the Word alone. It alone can bring in the true eternal light in which conscience and heart alike can find their rest and satisfaction forever.

God reveals Himself then as Seeker. It is He whose the sheep are who is come after them. In this character He is for the lost, the wandered, though it be, as with these publicans, that worst wandering, heart and mind astray, and astray hopelessly, without power of self-recovery. A bottomless word, this "lost"! Not even the Pharisees would have uttered it of these publicans for they believed in an inherent power in man by which, though by painful effort and perseverance, the crooked might be straightened yet. Were there not legal sacrifices and prescribed restitutions, ablutions, and purifications?

Divine love saw lost ones, — saw in its full extent the misery which it alone was adequate to relieve, and that misery, so hopeless otherwise, brought it down on their behalf. The Creator becomes the Saviour. He "goeth after that which is lost until He find it." With the divine power and wisdom in pursuit, there is no uncertainty here as to success. Help is laid upon One who is mighty, with whom to fail would be indeed irretrievable disaster, convulsing heaven and earth in universal ruin. But there is no fear: the cause of the helpless is become the cause of the Almighty, to the praise of the glory of His grace."

Pharisees, publicans, and sinners alike knew who were these lost ones, thus made the objects of God's special interest. No one of them needed to inquire, as so many today are found inquiring, "Is this for me?" It was a definite gospel addressing itself without any possibility of question to those whose hearts claimed so great salvation, and whose consciences put them in this strangely privileged class. They had but to take the divine estimate of them to find themselves enrolled among the heirs of salvation. And here, marvelous to say, communion with God begins for the poor sinner who thus is at one with God as to his condition and his need.

Light has shone in upon the soul, and though it be but upon ruin, yet here also, as in the six days' work, God sees the light that it is good. It is the proof of a work begun which shall end only in the rest of God when at last all is good. The soul is in His presence whose presence yet shall be fullness of joy to it. We are new-born, as born naturally, with a cry.

"Until He find it." He has made the responsibility of that His own. Blest news for the consciously helpless, — the work is His. The effect of this sweet assurance, where it takes hold, is that Christ is revealed in it. The lost are found: the everlasting arms are realized to be about them. Not more surely are they disclosed to themselves than He is disclosed to them. This is rest begun. He has given it.

"He goeth after that which is lost until He find it." Then these lost are found. Infinite power and love are on the track and cannot fail. It is plain, then, that the Lord is speaking, not of all men as in a lost condition (for all men are not found), but for the ear and heart of these who were flocking now around Him. His words are no mere generalities, powerless to minister to the need of souls, but divine seed finding its own place, and rooting itself in the furrows of the plowed-up ground, where the work of the Spirit gives it entrance.

It is a blessed thing to be able to give a free and general offer of salvation, — to say, "Christ died for all: come to Him, and He will give you rest." Yet there are those who need even a closer individualization. There are those who lie wounded by the road-side, needing, not merely the call of the gospel, but the grasp of the strong, tender hands, and the binding up of the gaping wounds. There are those to whom, if they cannot appropriate Him, Christ would appropriate Himself, — those who dare not thrust out leprous hands to Him because of their pollution, and who can only be liberated and brought out of their isolation by that direct touch of His, in which a new, undreamed-of life for them begins.

"He goeth after that which is lost." How much do those quiet words involve!

"But none of the ransomed ever knew

How deep were the waters crossed;

Nor how dark was the night which the Lord passed through,

Ere He found His sheep which was lost."

The cross was the only place in which He could overtake these wanderers. It is only as we realize what the cross is, that we find the arms of this mighty love thrown round us. Here indeed He has come where we are. Here is the place in which, without rebuke, we can claim Him, — our place, the place of our doom, — our substitute and sin-bearer He who takes it. The awful cloud which has shadowed His glory has destroyed forever the distance between us. The crucified One is ours; for the death and judgment He has borne are ours. These are our due, — our penalty; and we have them in the cross borne, and borne away from us. He has found the lost; and immediately we are freed and upborne by the might of this redemption and by the living power of the Redeemer: "He layeth it upon His shoulders rejoicing."

How blessed is this! What can be the force of such words, but to assure us of the complete triumph of divine love in the poor sinner's salvation! There is to be no trusting him to himself again; no possible forfeiture of all the toil and pains of divine love in his behalf. The joy is His who brings back His own. The loss now would be indeed His loss. The failure clearly, as represented here, would be His. Failure, then, there cannot be. Put all the weakness, folly, waywardness of the now recovered one in the strongest way, and prove them by the most conclusive of arguments, what does all this do but furnish the most satisfactory reason why the sheet should be where it is, upon the shoulders of the shepherd, and not upon its own feet?

This, then, is salvation in the Lord's thought of it in this parable. It is salvation "to the uttermost" (Heb. 7: 25), — complete, eternal (chap. 5: 9) salvation. This alone suits the case; alone gives peace to the conscience, alone gives rest to the heart. And it is here assured to every one who, looking to the Saviour, finds himself in this company of lost ones, after whom is His special quest. And how beautifully, in this freest of gospels, is repentance thus insisted on as inseparable from saving faith! "And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and his neighbors, saying unto them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.' I say unto you that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance."

Here the moral is plainly reached, and the application is easy. Who is the sinner that repenteth? Beyond all possible doubt, the sheep which was lost. Who are the just persons that need no repentance? As plainly, those who have never been thus consciously and hopelessly astray. It is to the consciousness of those before Him the Lord appeals; and upon this depends the force of that appeal. These publicans and sinners who as such flocked to hear the message of grace, were those in whom was repentance; and so the gospel, with all its real freedom selects (so to speak) its recipients. The ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance have, on this very account, no need of and no taste for grace. No less certainly than the needle follows the magnet do these convicted sinners follow and cleave to Christ.

There are many teachers, — there are many and conflicting teachings, — there were at that time, there have been ever; yet we are not left to this confusion and uncertainty. Nor are the simplest and most ignorant left to be the dupes of those subtler than themselves. No, there is a rule of God's moral government which forbids such a result. For, let a man but face his own convictions, — let him only admit the sin which his conscience, if not hardened, witnesses against him, and realize the helplessness which soon discovers itself to those in earnest to be delivered, — there is but one voice that can be authoritative for him any more. The jangle of contending voices is hushed; scribes, doctors of the law, names, and parties, and schools of thought become utterly insignificant. Faith hears only Him who says, with calmness and assurance, "Come unto ME, and I will give you rest."

It is the Lord; and He who invites to rest, Himself rests in the rest He gives. It is that for which He has labored. "Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel . . . the Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty: He will save; He will rejoice over thee with joy; He will rest in His love; He will joy over thee with singing." (Zeph. 3: 17.)

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Lost Piece of Silver.

Luke 15: 8-10.

The second parable of this chapter, brief as it is, is undoubtedly the most difficult of the three, and that not merely because of its brevity. The thought of the woman, and that of the house, seem to introduce elements which if intelligible from a Christian are all the less so from a Jewish stand-point. Yet we may not omit them as of no importance. Scripture is nowhere less than perfect, and to impute what is our own ignorance to defect in it is irreverent folly. Let us see, then, what light may be gained by patient examination of the parable in dependence upon Him who alone can teach effectually.

It is certain that in all the three the joy of recovery is set before us, — the joy, blessed to hear of, in the presence of the angels — divine joy in the fullest sense. In the first parable, it is that of the Shepherd — of Christ Himself; in the last, it is the Father's joy who receives, — yet not only receives, for the son is yet "a long way off" when He sees and has compassion, and runs, and falls upon his neck, and kisses him. The second parable must give us, then, one would say, the joy of the Spirit, and thus the whole heart of God be manifested to us.

The central figure here — that of a woman — at first sight may present a difficulty. A woman might well be a picture of the Church of God, — of the saints of God, — and such we have elsewhere in the Word. But then these thoughts are after all not so far asunder. The Spirit of God works through the Word; the Word is carried by the saints; thus indirectly He may be represented in what is directly their picture. And how else, indeed, one may ask, could He be more fitly? While most graciously thus redeemed sinners are not only themselves joyed over, but taken in to share the joy of heaven also over the salvation of others.

Thus the "woman" seems intelligible, and the figure of wisdom in the book of Proverbs may remind us that after all it is not altogether foreign to the Old Testament Scriptures. Here, as we might expect in the gospels, the object of her search is more helpless, more absolutely dependent upon the love that goes out after it; and this does not in the least affect the suitability of the story here. Rather is it all in divine harmony.

So is it in keeping that we hear now of a lamp lighted for the search, — the figure, of course, of the Word of God as lighted amid the darkness of the world. Yet the Spirit of God must light it up if it is to manifest where the lost soul is, — often in corners dark and secret enough, and sadly covered with dust and smut of sin, so that you would not recognize it at all as having the value that it has for God. A lost piece of silver speaks of this value; a lost soul may easily overbalance the whole world gained. The atonement-money in Israel was paid in silver; and atonement it is that exhibits the true value of a soul gained for God — regained, for He all through is the owner of it. "Behold, all souls are Mine," He says. Ah, what diligent search would we not make if we thought of the stamp of the royal mint upon the lowest and most degraded among men, and saw the value of souls with God in the price paid for them — saw the sheen of silver glitter

in the lamplight out of the dust of some neglected corner!

We must sweep the house! But the dust will fly, and this sweeping is not a pleasant occupation. To make a stir about sin is unpleasant enough, no doubt, but the broom turns, if it be a little roughly sometimes, the king's money out of its hiding-place.

The house must be swept. It is the place of natural ties and relationships — those links by which God would bring us together and make us objects of interest to one another. It is within this circle that we shall find most profit in sweeping — most readily come across the precious coins for God's treasury. Many are ready to do street-sweeping, and testify abroad for Christ, who have no heart for it in the familiar circles in which after all are the nearest and most recompensing fields of labor. The witness of the home, of the place of business, of the familiar and accustomed life, is the most fruitful — the God-ordained first place at least of labor, which if we occupy, we may be promoted, but not else. Ah, if we would sweep the house! — nothing so marks the work of the Holy Ghost as this, in which the good work will be measured, however, not by the amount of dust that is raised, but by the pieces of silver that we find. For if he that winneth souls is wise," he that is wise, too, shall win them. This close and homely work God blesses: the house is cleansed by it; but more, that which has been lost is found. Oh, be sure, this woman at her housework may read us a true gospel-lesson, and every woman at her housework may thus have the joy of the evangelist, and the labor of love that fails not; for love's labor is never lost.

What characterizes the day is so much official evangelism, with so little simple natural testimony according to the apostolic order — "I believed, and therefore have I spoken:" the necessary outflow of full hearts, of those that have been in Christ's company, and cannot forbear to say to those around what it costs no education, no special gift, to say, — "Come, see a Man which told me all things that ever I did; is not this the Christ?" A great and effectual preacher was that poor Samaritan woman! What had made her so? What she says herself, the company of Christ. Christ had been speaking to her. It is this that looses the tongue and gives it eloquence indeed.

Is it not striking that when the Lord would give us here the share which His people can have in the joy of heaven, that He gives us, not a crier in the market-place, but this quiet and unseen toiler in the house. "It is only an illustration," some will say. Well, it is an illustration out of which the thoughtful and the humble will get help and courage, and thank Him for it. Let the crier cry too in the market-place, and thank God for that! But if it were a choice between the two (which it is not), better would it be to have the necessary testimony of faith — "I believed, and therefore I have spoken," — in every private Christian than the more public testimony even. Could we have this aright, how would the Old Testament scripture be fulfilled, "The Lord gave the Word: great was the company of those that published it" as the words imply, the "women that published it." (Ps. 68: 11.) This woman-preaching would indeed be effectual work.

The joy is here as in the other parables: "And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbors together, saying, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I had lost.' Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth."

And the joy of the Holy Ghost, will He not make it felt in the hearts of His people? "Friends" He must have with whom to share it. It is diffusive, multiplying itself as it travels from heart to heart, as a fire increases with fresh fuel. Such shall be the joy of eternity, — the joy of one the joy of all, the pervasive joy of love, than which there is nothing sweeter, nothing purer, nothing higher. It is indeed the joy of God Himself, for "God is love."

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Lost Son

Luke 15: 11-24.

The third parable of this chapter, while it reveals no less than the former ones the heart of God, reveals on the other hand, more than these, the heart of man, and that whether as receiving or rejecting the grace that seeks him. It is in this respect the fitting close of the appeal to conscience. Publican and Pharisee are both shown fully to themselves in the holy light which yet invites and welcomes all who will receive it.

Whatever applications may be made to Jew and Gentile, it should be plain that these are but applications, however legitimate, and that the Lord is not addressing Himself to a class. outside His present audience, but to the practical need of those before Him. The same consideration decisively forbids the thought of any direct reference to the restoration of a child of God gone astray from Him, an interpretation which makes of the elder son who had not wandered the pattern saint! Strange it is indeed that any who know what the grace of God does in the soul of its recipient should ever entertain so strange a notion. It is one of the fruits of reading Scripture apart from its context, as if it were a mosaic of disconnected fragments: a thing, alas! still done by so many, to the injury of their souls. We hope to look at the elder son at another time, but the foundation of this strange view meets us at the outset.

The two who are in evident contrast throughout here are both called "sons." And so in the first parable are the ninety and nine, as well as the object of the Shepherd's quest called "sheep." But we know the Jewish fold held other flocks than those of Christ in it. When He enters it, He calleth His own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. (John 10: 3.) The fact, then, of all being called sheep need perplex no one.

The title of "son" may indeed seem to involve more than this, because Judaism taught no "Abba, Father," and it is one of the characteristics of Christianity that we receive in it "the adoption of sons." While this is true, it is by no means the whole truth. Israel too had an "adoption" (Rom. 9: 3); and it is with reference to their position in contrast with the Gentiles that the Lord said to the Syro-phenician woman, "It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs." In the parable, the Lord spoke to the Jews after His solemn entry into Jerusalem; He again speaks of both Pharisees and publicans, joining "harlots" with the latter as sons, precisely as here, — "A certain man had two sons." (Matt. 21: 28.) Thus, while the proper truth of relationship to God could only be known and enjoyed in Christianity, it is certain that Israel had also, as the only one of the families of the earth "known" to Him, a place upon which they valued themselves, and it was just that generation among whom the Lord stood, who did above all claim this. "We be not born of fornication" was their indignant reply to Him upon another occasion, "we have one Father, even God." (John 8: 41.) And though He urges upon them the want of real correspondence in their character, yet there was basis sufficient for His utterance here, while the want of correspondence comes out in the end too as fully. "I am a Father to Israel" had long since been declared.

The character of the younger son soon becomes manifest. "Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me" is itself significant. He is not content that his father should keep his portion, but will have it to enjoy, himself, in independence of the hand from which it comes. You do not wonder to learn that in a little while he would be freer still, and that the far country is for him an escape from his father's eye, as the independent portion had been from his hand.

It need hardly be said that this is the way in which men treat God. That which comes from Him, the Author of all the good in it for which they seem to have so keen a relish, such entire appreciation, they yet cannot enjoy in submission to Him or in His presence. God is their mar-all — the destruction of all their comfort. How many "inventions" have they to forget Him! for the "far-off country" is itself but one of these. God is not far of from any one of us." Oh, what a desolation would these very children of disobedience find it, if indeed they could banish God from His own world!

It is no wonder that in this far-off country the prodigal should waste his substance with riotous living. It is only the sign that where he is is beginning to tell on him the touch of coming famine is already on him. The little good in any thing apart from God felt by one still not in the secret of it makes him hunt after it the more; and if there be only a pound of sugar in a ton of sap, the sap will go very quickly in finding the sugar. This is what the man is doing, — going in the company of the "many who say, 'Who will show us any good?'" and who have not learned to say, "Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us."

So the wheels run fast down-hill. Soon he is at the bottom. He has spent all, and then there arises a mighty famine in the land. It is not only that his own resources are at an end, but the whole land of his choice is stripped and empty. This is fulfilled with us when we have not merely lost what was our own, but have come to find that in all the world there is nothing from which to supply ourselves. It is not an experience — perhaps an exceptional experience — of our own, but the cry of want is every where. How can we even beg from beggars? Such is the world when the eye is opened really as to it, — when the ear has come to interpret its multitudinous sounds. Every where are leanness and poverty. Every where is the note of the passing bell. "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof."

Then he goes and joins himself to a citizen of that far-off land, — one who belongs to it as, according to this story, even the prodigal did not. For men have come into this condition, but are not looked upon as hopelessly involved in it. There is elsewhere a Father's heart that travels after them: there is the step of One who goeth after that which is lost. But the citizen of that far-off land has no ties, — not even (one may say) broken ties elsewhere. Such a citizen the devil assuredly is, and the troop he is feeding and fattening for destruction speak plainly for him: "he sent him into his fields to feed swine."

These swine, alas! are men, not all men, not even all natural men. They are those before whom the Lord forbids to cast the pearls of holy things, for they will trample them under their feet, and turn upon and rend you. They are the scoffers and scorners, the impious opposers of all that is of God. These are the company the devil entertains and feeds, — though with "husks," — and indeed it must be owned he has no better provisions. These "husks," whatever they may be naturally, are surely spiritually just what would be food to profanity and impiety. The world's famine does not diminish Satan's resources in this respect, — nay, they are in some sense increased by it. All the misery of man, the fruit of his sin, the mark of divine judgment upon it, but also the warning voice of God by which He would emphasize His first question to the fallen, "Adam, where art thou?" — all this is what profanity would cast up against God. God, not man, it says, is the sinner; and man, not God, will be justified in judgment!

But the swine are swine evidently, rooting in the mire, men in their swinish grovelings and lusts that drive them; and those that feed them cannot after all fill their belly with that which the swine eat. For those who cannot always look down and willingly ignore what is above them, even though storms sweep through it as well as sunshine floats through it, cannot be satisfied with what, in leveling them with the beasts, degrades them below them. The beasts may be — are satisfied. They look not at death, and have no instincts which lead them beyond it: they may be satisfied "to lie in cold obstruction and to rot;" man never really. And it is more than questionable if, with all his powers of self-deception, he can ever quite believe it is his portion.

"And no man gave him." What is there like a land of famine for drying up all the sweet charities and affections that are yet left in men? Take the awful picture that Jeremiah gives, where "the hands of pitiful women have sodden their own offspring," as a sample of what this can do. And the estimate of men as beasts, the giving up of God and of the future life, does it tend to produce the pity of men for men? Have hospitals and asylums and refuges, and all the kindly ministrations of life, grown out of infidelity, or faith? Every one knows. The charity of the infidel seldom consists in more than freeing men from the restraints of conscience and the fear of God.

But here the prodigal "comes to himself." His abject misery stares him in the face. "Adam, where art thou?" is heard in his inmost soul; and if there be uncertainty as to all other things, here at least there is none. He is perishing with hunger. Not that he knows himself rightly yet, still less that he knows his father; but he is destitute, and there is bread in his father's house: he will arise and go to his father; he will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants."

This is another point of which even the infidel may assure himself, that while he is starving, the people of God have real satisfaction and enjoyment. There need be no doubt about that. If it be a delusion that they enjoy, yet they enjoy it: if it be a falsehood that satisfies them, yet they are satisfied. And then it is surely strange that truth must needs make miserable, when a lie can satisfy! Nay, that Christ spake truth in this at least, that He said He would to those who came to Him give rest: and He gives it. Bolder in such a promise than any other ever dared to be, He yet fulfills His promise. While philosophy destroys philosophy, and schools of thought chase one another like shadows over the dial-plate of history, Christ's sweet assuring word never fails in fulfillment. Explain it as you may, you cannot deny it. Between His people and the world there is in this as clear a distinction as existed in Egypt when the three days' darkness rested on the land, "but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings."

So the prodigal turns at last toward the light. There is bread in his father's house. He will return. Yet he makes a great mistake. He says, "How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare!" And there is not even one hired servant in his father's house! God may "hire" a man of the world to do His will, just as He gave Egypt into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar as the "hire" for His judgment which he had executed upon Tyre. But in His house He has but children at His table: as it was said of the passover-feast, the type of it, "A foreigner and a hired servant shall not eat thereof." (Ex. 12: 45.)

He too — far off as he surely is yet — would come for his hire. He knows nothing as yet of the father's heart going out after him. He wrongs him with the very plea with which he intends to come, though it is indeed true that he is unworthy to be called his son. But this confession, in what different circumstances in fact does he make it!

"And he arose, and came to his father." Here is the great decisive point. Whatever may be the motives that influence him, — however little any thing yet may be right with him, — still he comes! And so the Lord presses upon every troubled weary soul to "come." However many the exercises of soul through which we pass, nothing profits till we come to Him. However little right anything may be with us beside, nothing can hinder our reception if we come. Him that cometh unto Him He will in no wise cast out.

So helpless we may be that we can come but in a look — "Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." Not "Look at Me" merely: men may look at Christ, and look long, and look with a certain kind of belief also, and look admiringly, and find no salvation in all this but when Christ is the need — the absolute need, and the death-stricken soul pours itself out at the eyes to find the Saviour, though clouds and darkness may seem round about Him, yet shall it pierce through all This is "coming." It is the might of weakness laying hold upon almighty strength. It is the constraint of need upon All-sufficiency. It is the power of misery over divine compassion. It is more than this: it is the Father's heart revealed.

For, "when he was yet a long way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." How it speaks of the way in which the father's heart had retained his image that he could recognize him in the distance, returning in such a different manner from that in which he had set out. Watching for him too, as it would seem and when he saw him, forgetting all but that this was his son returned, in the impetuosity of irresistible affection, as if he might escape him yet, and he must secure him and hold him fast, running, and, in a love too great for words, falling upon his neck and making himself over to him in that passionate kiss! It is GOD of whom this is the picture! What a surprise for this poor prodigal! What an overwhelming joy for those who are met thus, caught in the arms of unchanging, everlasting love, — held fast to the bosom of God, to be His forever!

Not a question! not a condition! a word of it would have spoiled all. Holiness must be produced in us, not enforced, not bargained for. Tell this father upon his son's neck, if you can, that he is indifferent whether his son is to be his son or not. He who has come out in Christ to meet us, Friend of publicans and sinners, calls us to repentance by calling us to Himself: is there another way? "We joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the reconciliation." Is not this "joy in God" the sign of a heart brought back? of the far country, with all its ways, left forever behind?

Christ is the kiss of God: who that has received it has not been transformed by it? Who that, with the apostle John, has laid his head and his heart to rest upon His bosom, but with him will say, "He that sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him" John 3: 6)? That glorious vision — "the glory of that light" — blinded another apostle , not for three days only, but forever, to all other glory. "The life which I live in the flesh," he says, "I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." (Gal. 2: 20.)

Not until upon his father's bosom is the newly recovered one able to get out his meditated confession. Then in what a different spirit would it be made! The shameful "make me as one of thy hired servants" drops entirely out, while the sense of unworthiness deepens into true penitence. "The goodness of God" it is that "leadeth to repentance." The prompt reception, the sweet decisive assurance of the gospel, the "perfect love" that "casteth out fear," — these are the sanctifying power of Christianity, its irresistible appeal to heart and conscience. Let no one dread the grace which alone liberates from the dominion of sin! If we have not known its power, it must be that we have not known itself. If we have found it feeble, it is only because we have feebly realized it. There is nothing beside it worthy to be trusted, — nothing that can be substituted for it, nothing that can supplement it or make it efficacious. The soul that cannot be purged by grace can only be subdued by the flames of hell!

The son may rightly confess his unworthiness, but the father cannot repent of his love: "But the father said to his servants, 'Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet." He must be put into condition for the house he is coming into; but more, he must have the best robe in the house. And this, we know, is Christ. Christ must cover us from head to foot. Christ must cover us back and front. There must be no possible way of viewing us apart from Him. He it is who appears in the presence of God for us. Our Substitute upon the cross is our Representative in heaven. We are in Him, — "accepted in the Beloved." There can be no question at all that this is the best robe in heaven. No angel can say, Christ is my righteousness: the feeblest of the saved can say nothing else! It is Christ or self, and therefore Christ or damnation.

Oh, to realize the joy of this utter displacement of self by Christ! To accept it unreservedly is what will put us practically where the apostle was, and the things that were gain to us we count loss for Christ. Our possession in Him will become His possession of us, and there will be no separate interests whatever. How God has insured that our acceptance of our position shall set us right as to condition — make us His as He is ours! Here again too, how holy is God's grace! We are sanctified by that which justifies us; and the faith which puts us among the justified ones is the principle of all fruitfulness as well. The faith that has not works is thus dead: that is, it is no real faith at all.

Work is thus ennobled, and this I think you see in the "ring." The hand is thus provided for, and brought into corresponding honor with all the rest. What an honor to have a hand to serve Christ with! So the ring weds it to Him forever. We are no longer to serve ourselves. We are no longer to feed swine with husks. We are "made free from sin, and become servants to God; we have our fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life."

The person clothed, the hand consecrated, the feet are next provided for. The shoes are to enable us for the roughness of the way: and the apostle bids us have our feet shod with the "preparation of the gospel of peace." (Eph. 6: 15.) For the peace of the gospel is to apply itself to all the circumstances of the way. Our Father is the Lord of heaven and earth. Our Saviour sits upon the Father's throne. What enduring peace is thus provided for us! And as the shoe would arm against the defilement of the way, so it would be a guard against the dust and defilement of it. Can anything better prevent us getting under the power of circumstances (and so necessarily being defiled by them) than the quiet assurance that our God and Father holds them in His hand? To be ruffled and disturbed by them is to be thrown off our balance. We try our own methods of righting things, and our methods become less scrupulous as unbelief prevails with us: "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." It is clear independency, — our will, not God's

Thus is the prodigal furnished! Again I say, how holy in its tender thoughtfulness is all this care! Blessed, blessed be God, grace is our sufficiency, that is, Himself is. He is fully ours: we too — at least in the desire of our hearts — are fully His. And now the joy of eternity begins for us — communion in the Father's love. He is in heaven, we are on earth: in heaven the joy is; but we too are made sharers of it. Do we not share in what is here before us, "and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and be merry: for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and is found"?

It is the Father's joy, and over us; but Christ is the expression of it, and the One who furnishes the materials of it. The well-known figure of God's patient and fruitful Worker is before us, and the necessity, even for Him, of death, that we might live. God has wrought these things into our daily lives that we may continually have before us what is ever before Himself. And we are called to make Christ our own — to appropriate Him in faith in this intimate way, that as we abide in Him, He may abide in us. How He would assure us of our welcome to Him! How He would tell us that we are never to be parted! The life so ministered to, so sustained, is already within us the eternal life.

And the Father's joy fills the house, making all there to share it and to echo it. No impassive God is ours. The Author of this gushing spring of human feeling no less feels. We are in this also His offspring. "This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." So the music and the dance begin, and shall never end.

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

Not Lost and Not Saved.

The Elder Son.

Luke 15: 25-32.

Every one of the class that were now following the Lord would realize in the prodigal his picture, and thus would find the invitation of grace superscribed with his name. Publicans and sinners would have the mirror plainly before them, and the truth in the description was absolute truth, the condition of all men, if they could but realize it. With the other class who murmured against this grace, their lack of realization made it necessary to deal differently. They needed, above all, the mirror; and to be that, it must reflect the truth: but there would be a great difference in this respect, that the truth it conveyed would be no longer absolute, but only relative truth. Christ's words must exhibit them to themselves in such a way as they could recognize themselves; not, therefore, simply as God saw them, but according to their own thoughts about themselves; and yet with that in it which — appealing to their conscious experience would bring them into the reality of what they were before God.

This is the whole difficulty as to the elder son in the last of our Lord's three parables here; and it is a difficulty which has already faced us in the first of them. The ninety and nine sheep which went not astray, — the ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance, — have no real representatives among men: yet they vividly portrayed those scribes and Pharisees who were not lost, and needed no Saviour. The light is let in there where it is said that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over them.

In this last parable, the inner workings of the heart are much more exposed, and consequently these features of the first one are found in more development. But the whole is so plain that certainly the Pharisees here would make no mistake about the application. They, at least, would not think of Jews and Gentiles being in question, or of the recovery of a backslider: they would not think of the Lord meaning the whole lesson for others than themselves!

But there is nothing that is not clear if only we are at the right point of view. Thus that it is the elder son that represents the Pharisees has point in this way. Certainly they would not have accepted the position of the younger. To the elder belonged the birthright, with its double portion, in every way of value in the eyes of a Jew. On the other hand, in the book of Genesis, nothing is more distinct than the way the first-born all through loses the birthright. "That which is first is natural" merely, rings through the book. And even so it is here.

When the younger son is restored to his father's house, the elder son is in the field. It is characteristic of him that he is a worker, and a hard worker. All that is due is credited to the busy religion of the Pharisee. But his secret soon comes out: when he hears music and dancing in his father's house, he does not know what to make of it. It is not that he has heard yet of the return of his brother. It is not that he is simply a stranger to grace. But the sounds in themselves are unaccustomed ones: he called a servant, and asked what these things meant." He is the picture of that joyless, cheerless service which finds nothing in God. No pleasures are known as at His right hand forevermore. The soul cannot say, "In Thy presence is fullness of joy." There is work of a certain kind perhaps in plenty, but it is work in the field simply — afar off. Such work is no test of piety; it is only the "work of faith and the labor of love" which are so. And where faith and love are, the soul works amid music, and is never outside the Father's presence. As His grace can be no surprise, so the merry heart sings with melody to the Lord, — "music and dancing" cannot surprise it. Joy is the atmosphere in which we are called to live, — the strength for labor, the secret of holiness. It can lodge in our hearts with sorrow, and abide all the changes of the way. The apostle says, "He that sinneth hath not seen [Christ], neither known Him." May we not say, "He that rejoiceth not, cannot have seen Christ"?

These Pharisees had Him before their eyes, yet saw Him not, — looked into His face, and knew Him not. Theirs was work in the field, while the Father's house was dull and pleasureless. Thus to have it opened after this sort to publicans and sinners could not but anger them — could not but rouse an unwelcome voice in them — a voice they could not but hear, while they would not listen to it. The truth commends itself to men's consciences, when their hearts reject it, hardened through a pride which will not brook humiliation. Did the grace which showed itself so readily to other men refuse them? Nay, the gospel expressly comes out to all, — to every creature — in the same tender tones, addressing itself to all. This elder brother had no door closed in his face. He was angry, and would not go in." Nor was there any thing of indifference toward him, but the contrary: "then came his father out and entreated him."

It will not be found at last that the Father's heart has failed toward any of His creatures. How solemn is His protestation, — "As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye." No: men must tear themselves out of the arms which are ready to inclose them. God is not estranged from us, — needs no reconciliation, although men's creeds may impute it to Him. We pray in Christ's stead, Be ye reconciled to God." (2 Cor. 5: 20.) Man indeed needs his heart changed. Listen to the elder son, and you will find the grudge which is in the heart of many religionists: "But he said unto his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandments; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this thy son is come, who hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou has killed for him the fatted calf.' "

Thus it is plain, men may be busy for God, with all along a grudge in the heart against God. Their blank and cheerless lives, spite of all that they can do, witness against them; but they would fling the accusation against God. Their hearts are not with Him. They have "friends" to whom they turn to find what with Him they cannot. They take outwardly His yoke, but they do not find it easy: there is no fulfillment of that — "Ye shall find rest to your souls."

Who is in fault? How vain to think that God is! How impossible to find aught but perfection in the Holy One! Do that, and indeed you will stop all the harps of heaven, darken its blessed light, and bring in disaster and ruin everywhere. There is no fear: He will be justified in His sayings, and overcome when He is judged. But it is an old contention, and a frequent one: "Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me that thou mayest be righteous?" Ah, we must do that, or submit to that judgment of God ourselves; for it is recorded as to us, "There is none righteous, — no, not one," and "what things soever the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God."

To take this place is repentance, and then we are Pharisees no longer. We need grace, and thus we come to understand it. We understand it, and so appreciate it. We find it in God, and thus turn to Him. How sweet is then His voice! and how the spring of joy begins to bubble up within the soul Repentance and faith are never separate, and the tear of penitence is the dew of the Spirit, that already sparkles in the morning brightness — fuller of joy itself than all the pleasures of sin can make one for a moment!

Of this the elder son knows nothing. His heart is shut up in self-righteousness, and there is nothing that can harden a heart more. Self-righteousness claims its due, and sees nothing but its due in all the blessing God can shower upon it. The more it gets, the more it values itself upon it. The getting so much is proof positive of so much merit. Poverty and misfortune (as the world calls it) are equal proofs of demerit, except indeed when they come upon itself, and then they are unrighteousness in God. So the heart is, as the Scripture expresses it, "shut up in its own fat," insensible, even to the grossest stupidity, or living but to murmur out its folly and its shame.

But the father's words seem to many to refute this account of the elder son. How could he say to such an one as this, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine"? Does God speak to the self-righteous and unsaved after this manner? Could it be said of them that they are ever with God, or that all that He has is theirs? If so, would it not seem as if after all they had the better portion?

We have only to look, however, at the facts of the parable to find a convincing answer to all this. Let us take these two things separately, and inquire what is the real truth as to each.

First, "Thou art ever with me." This must of course express a fact, but what is the fact? That the elder son was with the father, had lived a decorous life, and not wandered as the younger had, is plain upon the surface; and it is not strange that the father should express his approbation of that. The open sins of publican and harlot certainly are not, in God's eyes, better, or as good, as the moral and well-ordered life of the respectable religionist. So the woman in Simon's house the Lord evidently puts down as owing the five hundred pence, rather than the fifty; and of her He says, "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven." It would not magnify God's grace to say that because they were minor sinners it flowed forth so freely to "publicans and harlots," nor is there ever any such reason given. He does not set a premium upon vice — God forbid! — but all natural laws, and all His government among men operate against it. Even the infidel, as to Scripture, allows in nature a "power that makes for righteousness" — meaning by that too just what the Pharisee would mean. Thus the father's, "Son, thou art ever with me," has its basis of truth.

To make out the complete meaning, however, we must certainly supplement it with something else than this. That there was inward nearness to the father upon the son's part is impossible to believe: he had never rewarded his toil with even a kid for festivity with his friends! And in truth the Father makes no provision for merriment elsewhere, and would have no "friends" recognized outside His household.

There was no real nearness to the father, then, in this elder son, and we cannot supplement thus the thought of his outward nearness. What remains for us? Surely as to the younger, so to the elder, it was the father's heart that spoke; and from his side, "Thou art ever near me," tells of One who is not distant from His creatures, in whose heart they dwell near indeed. Yes, He is not far from every one of us; and of this He would persuade the Pharisee no less than the prodigal. "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

But "all that I have is thine"? That is plainly an earthly portion, not a heavenly. If we look at the beginning of the parable, we find that the father had divided between his two sons his living. The younger had spent his portion, wasted it with harlots, — plainly the earthly things, which God does entirely divide to His offspring by creation. To the elder, there still belonged his: he had not squandered it, and it was all that was left. Heavenly grace, when it bestows the best robe, does not thereby give back the lost health, the wasted substance, the natural things which may be gone forever. These things belong still to the prudent and careful liver, such as the elder son was. The meaning here should be very plain, and God would thus appeal to those who, receiving daily from His hand, are yet content to live in practical distance from Him. "The goodness of God leadeth to repentance."

But He keeps to His grace: "It was meet that we should make merry and be glad; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found."

STEM Publishing : Frederick W Grant : God's Evangel.

God's Evangel.

Being gospel papers by F. W. Grant.

The Perseverance of the Saints

The question as to what is commonly called "the perseverance of the saints," includes in it another and a most serious one. That question is as to the footing upon which the believer, justified by faith, stands before God. Thus it is a point of the greatest moment to ascertain what the Scripture truth is. It is not too much to say, that the nature and character of the peace which as Christians we enjoy, and of our life and walk as such, are all materially affected by the view we entertain with regard to the truth before us.

I would at once then put the question, What is the nature of the salvation we have received, and what the footing upon which we now stand as believers before God?

1. Clearly, we stand as such, before God "in Christ," "accepted in the Beloved." (Eph. 1: 6.) Christ in glory, risen from the dead, having finished in our behalf the work of atonement, stands as our representative in the presence of God. So fully, that what He has passed through for us we are accredited with. Thus we are said to be "dead," "buried," "quickened," and "raised up" with Him; and even "seated together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." (Rom. 6: 8; Eph. 2: 5, 6.) His being in heaven for us is thus as if we had actually gone in there and taken possession already of our final home; and there we are, presented to the eye and heart of God as identified with Him who, "when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high."

Our former state and condition as sinners has thus found its judgment in the cross. "Our old man was crucified with Christ:" — not should, or shall be, but "was;" not was crucified in me, but "with Him." (Rom. 6.) Thus, for God and for faith, the old standing has passed away. "We are not in the flesh "(Rom. 8: 9); "not of the world, even as Christ is not of the world." (John 17: 14.) To sum up all in a word, the apostle's words as to the Christian's place are, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." (2 Cor. 5: 17.)

I know that all these things are read, or sought to be read, in the light of experience, and referred to an inward work in the soul instead of to our place in Christ, and what belongs to it. Yet Scripture says distinctly in this last case, as in others, "if any man be in Christ," and then uses expressions which would certainly not be true of "any man in Christ," (mark) if applied to the inward work. "All things new," who indeed can pretend to, that knows anything of himself? Thus these blessed texts taken from their true application are made instruments of self-torture for souls seeking honestly but blindly to find in themselves evidences that they are accepted of God. While, with the eye on Christ, and the knowledge that we are in Him, and therefore, "as He is, so are we" (1 John 4: 17), they become the sweetest, fullest assurances of where divine love has placed us, and what we are to God as in His Son. Is there any "old thing" in Him? If I am thus accepted of God, are not the "old things passed away"? are not "all things become new"? Yes, indeed, wholly. I can take it in the simplest way, and believe it to the fullest extent, and find it unutterable joy, and only that.

Well, this is how we are accepted. We have travelled through death in Christ, and come up out of it. We have taken possession, in Him, already of our place above. We are accepted of Him where no whit of the "old things" is found. Look at this, beloved reader, and then answer me, oh answer me — is this security? Will Christ fail to satisfy God? Will God, who has accepted Him for me, repent, and again turn to what I am? Alas for me if He does! Alas for me and for you; and that, not at our worst, but at our best!

But no; that is impossible; for with Christ — in Christ's death — we have died. He that is dead is justified from sin." (Rom. 6: 7, margin.) Our life, our history, ended with the cross in complete and utter judgment. We live before God in Christ alone. His own words are now, "Because I live, ye shall live also." (John 14: 19.)

2. And thus have we "peace;" and upon such ground as this is "peace" in the proper sense alone possible. I need scarcely waste words in proving that it is peace that God is preaching by Jesus Christ (Acts 10: 36); and that, "being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Rom. 10: 1.) Not only the full assurance of faith" (Heb. 10: 2 2), but "the full assurance of hope" also is what God designs for us. (Heb. 6: 11.) This is peace as to the past, the present, and the future; and this is alone true peace. However blessed my portion in the present, if there is danger that I lose it, who shall say I ought not to be afraid? It is no comfort to say to me, It all depends upon yourself," when "myself" is just what I have learned most of all to be afraid of. Ought I to have "perfect peace" in looking onward to the future, if it is to consist in assurance that I shall never backslide and depart, though many have! If I read, "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee," I can understand that, if I may trust Him for the future too. If I may say, in confidence that I have committed my soul into His hands, "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed unto Him against that day" (2 Tim. 1: 12), then indeed all is well. If He will not keep it, except I do my part (little or much), then how can it be peace?

To trust Him fully, if He be all in it, is surely well, and what I ought to do; but, on the other hand, I ought to distrust myself. "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest, he fall." But if I am not to think I stand, and yet my salvation depends upon my standing, ought I to be at rest?

3. But, blessed be God, it is not so. Perfected as a Saviour through the suffering of the cross, Christ is become the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey Him." (Heb. 5: 9.) What is "eternal" salvation? and when do I receive it? Well, Paul says to us, that God "HATH saved us." (2 Tim. 1: 9.) Is not that, then, "eternal salvation"? If I have obeyed Him — for the gospel calls for obedience, most surely (Rom. 10: 16) — if I have obeyed His call of grace, and come to Him, is He not the author of eternal salvation to me just then? or must I wait till there is no more danger before I can speak of being saved for ever?

4. But redemption, too, is eternal. "He hath entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. (Heb. 9: 12.) Well, are we redeemed? Yes, assuredly, "we HAVE redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace. (Eph. 1: 7.) Is that, then, for ever"? Alas I through how many of the plainest testimonies of Scripture the legality and unbelief of the human heart will work their way. Yet there it lies, the only true and perfect rest for the conscience, as we are witness to ourselves; there it lies before us, preaching peace without presumption, because "peace through Jesus Christ." Will He rebuke me, think you, because I cast this burden with all other burdens on Himself? May I not cast this care for the future too upon Him? Will He not justify my trust? Will He not care also for this?

5. But my "life," too, is "eternal." I already have "everlasting life." How He has compassed me about with these eternities, as if to build me up an infinite rampart against doubt! For thus saith the Lord Himself, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent me, HATH everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life." (John 5: 24.)

Beloved reader, these are the Lord's own words. Solemnly uttered and affirmed as truth, they link the present and the future of the believer indissolubly together. He says, the one who has eternal life (in the present) shall not (in the future) come into condemnation. Do you believe that? There is no "guarding" of that statement, such as men suggest; no "if" nor "but" to mar the blessed peace that that assurance gives. Are you going to put it in? Are you going to bring some other Scripture to qualify or modify the simple meaning of this? It is in vain; for "Scripture cannot be broken," and He who gave it cannot so deny Himself. The whole idea of balancing one passage with another, as if, taken simply as they stand, they were opposed to one another, is false, and a fatal denial of the truth of God. What simple soul could lay hold of the truth in a statement which had to be balanced with an unknown number of other statements, before the precise meaning could be settled? The divine Lover of men's souls could not speak so to them. He could not use words which, taken simply and literally as they stand, would deceive. No, He could not do this. And thus, if I get what really He has said, I may be sure He has said nothing else to contradict or empty it of meaning. I may rest my soul upon it safely. I may build on it as on a rock.

I know few sadder signs of the little authority the word of God has in the present day, than this deplorable habit of ranging Scripture against Scripture. On one side a text is produced; instead of reverent inquiry as to what it means, a text in opposition to it, as men deem, is produced. James' "justification by works" is put in the one scale; Paul's "justification by faith" in the other. Arminian texts are balanced with Calvinistic. Alas! God's word is gone as an authority, and common sense and human reason become supreme judges as to the side on which the scale of truth inclines.

How unlike our Lord's "Verily, verily!" What a relief to come back to that out of the fog of human uncertainty! "He spake as One that had authority, and not as the scribes." Do you fear to trust Him, beloved reader, apart from all His commentators? Certainly, then, what He says of the believer is, that he has everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but — here is the confirmation of it — is passed from death unto life. His future condition is settled by his present one; for already he has "EVERLASTING life." He is alive to God for ever.

6. The Lord repeats this in another well-known passage: "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any one pluck them out of my hand." (John 10: 27, 28.)

Now, if anything could add strength to the former statement, it would be precisely what we find here. For it is not only now, "I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish;" but if people suggest, "It is only if they hear Christ's word," "it is only while they follow Him," this is met by the assertion, My sheep do hear my voice;" they do follow me." You may say, if you will, "not always," "not continually;" but our Lord says nothing one way or other about that. He takes for granted, so to speak, that they do hear and follow. You have no right to suppose anything else. It is not said that they hear always, or follow without any straying; still on the whole they hear and follow, and He gives them eternal life, and they never perish, nor shall any pluck them out of His hand. If you say (with some) they may pluck themselves out, then they would perish; but, He says, they never shall.

7. One more text on this side of the question, and as to this point more decisive perhaps for many. The apostle John, with the case of certain apostates before him, tells us in words that apply to very many since: ' They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us." (1 John 2: 19.)

The decisiveness of this passage in connection with those just quoted, is in its taking up so simply and decidedly just the point which many think to be uncovered by the others. It asserts without any qualification the exact doctrine of the "perseverance of the saints:" — "if they had been of us, they would have continued with us;" their going out made it manifest that they were not of us.*

{*The force of the original is, "that none were of us," which the whole passage proves to be the only possible sense. "All are not" is a Greek idiom for "none are," as in Matt. 24: 22: "no flesh should be saved," which is literally, "all flesh should not be saved;" or in Luke 1: 37: "with God everything shall not be impossible," i.e. "nothing shall be impossible."}

Surely than this nothing can be plainer or more complete. With this, then, we may end the direct proofs of the doctrine. We have found the foundation of it to be a standing in Christ before God, which cannot change because He cannot. We have found that as sinners we had our death and judgment in the cross of Christ, and are now in Him, the old things passed away entirely. We have found that God has saved us, and that salvation is eternal; that we have also "eternal redemption" and "everlasting life;" that the Lord's own assertion as to His own is, that they shall not come into condemnation, nor ever perish; that His sheep do hear His voice, and follow Him; and that the apostle tells us that real Christians will "continue" such.

I beseech, again, my reader's earnest attention to the point, that thus, too, alone is perfect peace with God possible — peace as to the past, the present, and the future "full assurance of hope" without presumption.

The way is now open to look at the passages, which are supposed to teach the possibility of salvation being lost.

A large number — I might say, the largest number by far — of the texts which seem to imply the possibility of the soul being lost that has once believed unto salvation, belong to a class of which 1 Cor. 9: 27 furnishes the most striking example. It is thus the passage most frequently of all upon the lips of objectors. They ask commonly, the moment you speak of being safe for ever, Was not Paul himself afraid of being a castaway?" But the text says nothing about any fear he had. It does say this, "I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway."

It would be poor work to seek in anywise to blunt or evade the force of such Scriptures. They have their use most surely in the divine wisdom which inspired them. But just precisely because they have, we must enquire the more carefully what exactly they do mean. The word of God will bear the strictest and most thorough examination. Precise accuracy will only be shunned by those who either on the one hand have little faith in the perfect inspiration of every word of it, or else fear to face honestly the full light of truth.

Now it is remarkable, upon looking at such passages as that before us, that they none of them put things in the way which would be simplest and easiest to put them, supposing eternal life or salvation were things that might be lost. They do not say, "lest, after I have been saved, I myself should be a castaway," or "lest, after being born again," or "lest, after having had eternal life, I myself should be a castaway." Such passages are not to be found anywhere in Scripture, and surely that is to be marked. How easy for divine wisdom to have settled the whole question for any honest believer by a single sentence of that sort! But there is nothing of the kind. The supposition in the text is, that one who had "preached to others" might himself "be a castaway." But who doubts that? And who doubts, or ought to doubt, that, as there is a way of holiness, which leads to everlasting life, on the one hand, so there is on the other a way of sin, of unholiness, of license to the lusts of the flesh, which if a man takes, will lead him to eternal death?

If we were to question this, we should have to deny some of the plainest passages of Scripture. Taker Cor. 6: 9, 10, for example: what can be plainer? "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived," and this, mark, is addressed to professing Christians, "neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers," and so on, "shall inherit the kingdom of God."

This is most plain and most weighty. It makes it quite plain that the gospel is not intended to be an allowance of sin, but salvation from it. Where really received, it brings a man out of the things it finds him in, and sets him in the way of holiness. As the apostle goes on here: "And such were some of you; but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified," etc. And again, as in Titus 2: 11, 12, "the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared, . . . teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world." The grace which saves makes holy.

This is not limiting the freeness of the gospel, nor diminishing its fulness. It is only the maintaining its real character and power. It is not that we are brought under legal conditions. It is not that we are told, that we shall be saved if we walk aright; but that God has saved us, that we may walk right. In the words of Eph. 2: 10, "we," believers, "are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained (or, as in the margin, prepared) that we should walk in them."

Thus God has linked together in the simplest and most decisive way, without in the least weakening or modifying the previous assurance of His grace in the gospel, "good works" with salvation. But in this way, that those created anew in Christ are at the same time created unto them. If then the loudest profession of faith in Christ be associated with an ungodly walk, Scripture teaches me how to form my judgment of that profession. It tells me, that "as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." (Rom. 8: 14.) It teaches me that I am not to dishonor the precious gospel of grace by allowing that it has taken effect in the salvation of a soul, where it has not at the same time changed the heart and life.

Now this is precisely one important use of such passages as that we are considering. He who saw, even while these epistles were being written, the evil at work — and who foresaw the immense mass of false profession which has since come in — has left these words, and such as these, on record, to test the reality of it all, and that He might not be dishonored by the ungodly lives of mere professors being taken as what His gospel might, if not produce, at least permit. "Faith, if it have not works, is dead, being alone" (James 2: 17); so does the word of God fully teach. We must not put down others, nor must we expect to be put down by others, as true believers, truly saved ones, except as the power of that grace which saves is seen in its purifying influence upon the walk and life.

Thus there is a way which leads to life, and a way of death. No matter what your creed, "to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." (Rom. 6: 16.)

This is the key to the language of the apostle in 1 Cor. 9: 27. Addressing, as he does, "all that call on the name of Jesus Christ our Lord," whether at Corinth or elsewhere (ch. 1: 2), he tells them for himself that he was one who was upon this way of life. He kept under his body, and brought it into subjection, not tolerating its lusts, nor walking in fleshly indulgence, in order not to be a "castaway" i.e. one rejected or reprobate. He had no fear of being such. He took the way which led him heavenward joyfully and confidently, "not uncertainly." He knew the grace which had called him with a holy calling would not fail to carry him through. He knew that God had saved him already, and given him, not the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (2 Tim. 1: 7-9.) And he yielded himself up intelligently and joyfully, to be led along the way of holiness unto the end, everlasting life." If any, professing faith in Christ, were doing otherwise, he meant to warn them by his example what faith did for the soul who had it; because only "as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God."

This in nowise implies that those who are sons of God may cease to be so by refusing to be led of the Spirit. That is mere human argument, and of the poorest kind; for not only do plain Scriptures, as we have seen, forbid the supposition, but it is in real opposition to the passage itself; for (it tells us) the sons of God are those who are led. And there is nothing said in the whole context to show that continuance is at all in question. Those who are sons are simply marked out from those that are not.

It is quite true, too, that true children of God may, alas! be dull and careless, and poor followers of such a leader. They may fall and get bemired with the slough of sin. I dare not say what a believer might not do, if not cleaving closely to his Guide and Strength. What David did, what Peter did, are solemn warnings for all time. Still one easily discerns that these were things the result of sloth and self-confidence, fallen into, not sought out, and from which He who had them in His care recovered them. Characteristically, even of a David or a Peter, surely we could say, they were led of the Spirit of God, and manifested to be His sons. At a particular moment, they might not manifest what they were. But it is only of what is characteristic this text in Romans speaks. It is the determining for us where the line is to be drawn between those born of God in reality and those only assuming to be so; a rule we may not in many instances be able to apply, but which has none the less immense value, because it frees the gospel (as I have already said) from that charge of giving license to sin, which men are always ready and eager to bring against it.

How many would object to us in that way, their own supposition (which they have no title to make) of believers falling into open sin, and going on, and dying in it; and then turn round on us with the question, Would such an one be saved? To all that the one sufficient answer is, "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." You have no right therefore to make the supposition; the latter part of what you suppose would (for me) make entirely untrustworthy the claim to be a believer.

These passages, then, are guards against the "turning the grace of God into lasciviousness," a thing which Jude notices as done in his day (v. 4), and which certainly there is no less danger of in the present. On the other hand, legality is never a real guard of holiness, but the destruction of it. "The strength of sin is the law;" and to put the fear of falling away before a soul, in order to keep him right, is only to pervert the whole character of his life and service. Just so far as he takes up the motive we present to him, he becomes really one living to himself, in a religious way no doubt; but none the less really, and none the less offensively to God. The love of Christ, it is assumed, will not keep me straight, except a large measure of self-love works along with it! What a dishonor to Him, and what a lowering of the whole character of God's work in the soul of a saint! Except I am in danger of eternal damnation, I shall be sure to go wrong. But the Lord says, "If ye love Me, keep my commandments" and the apostle, "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not love" ("charity" in the common version), "it profiteth me nothing" Cor. 13: 3); the apostle John again, "There is no fear in love." (1 John 4: 18.) How does all this agree with the advocacy of a principle essentially and necessarily a principle of fear? for if there is danger of being lost, I ought certainly to be afraid of it.

There are some other texts, nearly akin to the standard passage in Corinthians, which we may now take up. I believe we shall find, if we have got hold of what has now been before us, that we have already the key to the understanding of these also. In Col. 1: 22, 23, for example: "To present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight: if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel" or again, in Heb. 3: 6: "Whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end;" and verse 14: "For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end." Addressing a number of professed Christians, these "ifs" had their right and necessary place. Men were giving up faith in Christ, as this epistle to the Hebrews conclusively shows. The warning was perfectly in place. Nor could men be saved while giving up this faith; drawing back from Christ would be drawing back unto perdition. Yet this same apostle could in the selfsame epistle put those who had believed unto salvation in a different class altogether from those who could so apostatize: "We are not of them who draw back unto perdition" — not simply, "who have drawn back," which there could be no need to say, but "who draw back;" we are not the sort of people who do that — "but of them that believe to the saving of the soul;" that is the class to which we belong, and it is a different one to the other.

Most clearly, then, the apostle did not mean that such believers, positively saved ones, could draw back unto perdition. It was needful, on the other hand, to warn professors about it for two reasons at least. First, because the giving up of Christ put outside the possibility of salvation altogether, for none else could save. Secondly, because it was and is important, that men should not rest in a faith they had, or thought they had, in times past, which was not true for the present moment. Faith that I had faith once is not faith in Christ, and may be a dream of my own. Just so, the vain argument that "I was converted once, and therefore" — which is vain because it is a mere belief in what my heart may have deceived me. If I am trusting my conversion or my faith, the result may prove I had neither. If I trust Christ, He cannot deceive, and so I am safe. "Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him." (Ps. 2: 12.)

There was need to guard a point like that, to prevent men putting "I trusted" for "I trust." "I trusted," is my own thought of what I did. "I trust," makes Christ indeed the object of that trust. Therefore it was needful to say your confidence must be a thing held fast, if you are to be presented blameless in His sight at last.

Belief there might have been, of a certain sort, in Christ, without its being to salvation. Such faith, never having been of divine workmanship, had a natural tendency to wear out and come to nothing. We see many instances in every one of the (so-called) "revival" movements. Nor are they a proof necessarily of anything wrong in the preaching which produces them. The Lord gives us in Matthew 13 plain assurance that where the true seed of the gospel is sown, and He the Sower of it, such things will occur. There will be cases such as his who "heareth the word, and anon (immediately) with joy receiveth it; yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the Word, by-and-by he is offended." Such a man believes: he is not insincere, not a hypocrite; simply, the Word, like seed in stony ground, has no root in him; his heart, never ploughed up by conviction of sin, remains in unchanged hardness. The joy in him was too "immediate;" there was no finding out of self, no taking the place of lost, that Christ might save. He believed a doctrine; never came to Jesus. He had joy, not peace. There was no change in the man himself, and no root. Mark, it was not what had root that withered, but because it had no root it withered away. It would not have withered had it had root.

Scripture then, which teaches that there is such a thing as "believing for a while," teaches too its character. And while we see the need of the admonition as to the necessity of continuance in the faith, we see also abundantly that those who believe to the saving of the soul belong at all times to a different class from those who draw back unto perdition.

There are yet some passages, however, which require special notice. Thus undoubtedly Heb. 6: 4-8 furnishes us with the example of hopeless apostacy; and the previous condition of these apostates is described in terms which appear to many altogether too strong to apply to unconverted professors merely. They "were once enlightened," had "tasted of the heavenly gift," and been "made partakers of the Holy Ghost," had "tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come." It is just this which makes their case so hopeless, that all the goodness of God, as displayed in Christianity, has been, so to speak, spent in vain upon them. Or rather, it has been as rain from heaven nurturing only thorns and briers in the unfruitful soil. Yet, the apostle adds, as to those in whom he had seen fruit (v. 10), "beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things which accompany salvation, though we thus speak." (v. 9.) Thus, again he carefully guards himself from being misunderstood to mean that those whose faith had works, and had thus proved itself a living faith, could so fall away.

This alone, for really simple souls, might suffice as to the whole passage. It surely ought to be enough to hear the apostle say that, although he is speaking thus, he is persuaded better things of those who have shown "work and labor of love toward His name." Yet it is well to enquire, in its place, from what the men before us here apostatize. But observe again, then, there is no mention of their having been born again, or converted, or justified, or saved, or having had forgiveness of sins, or eternal life. Of none who are declared to be in that condition is there ever any doubt of their security, or any hint that after all they might be lost. On the contrary, the thought is carefully guarded against, as we have seen.

But as to these —

They were "enlightened." And the true light lighteth every man which cometh into the world" (John 1: 9); but that this is not necessarily saving knowledge is plain. There may be conviction where there is no conversion, as every day shows. Yet how perilous to turn from the light which has thus borne witness to our souls!

They had "tasted of the heavenly gift," and "of the good word of God." But so had he who received seed upon the stony ground; he "immediately with joy received it." We see that too, often. The word is welcomed; it is not understood. Only he who received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the Word, and understandeth it." (Matt. 13: 23.) It is possible thus to have a false peace patched up, and to find joy in a gospel, which after all has never been apprehended by the soul, and has never brought forth fruit in it at all.

Besides this, they "were made partakers of the Holy Ghost," and had tasted of "the powers of the world to come." This last expression refers to miraculous powers,* and the "world to come" is literally the "coming age." Here, as elsewhere, it refers to the millennium, when the signs and wonders which signalized the early days of Christianity will be repeated. The prophet Joel 2: 28, 29 witnesses of this; and his prophecy the apostle Peter could take up at Pentecost, and apply to what God did by His Spirit at that time. Yet the prophesy itself, however much it might take in Pentecost, goes on to the restoration of Israel in the last days. Miracles could therefore fitly be called "powers of the coming age." But we have the Lord's assurance that men might thus be "partakers of the Holy Ghost" — prophesy and do miracles (which could be done only through the Holy Ghost) — and yet after all He might say to them, "I never knew you." (Matt. 7: 22, 23.) It is clear therefore that in this sense they might be "partakers of the Holy Ghost" and yet be lost. The Spirit crying "Abba, Father," in us is another thing. Those who are thus "sealed by that Holy Spirit of promise" are "sealed unto the day of redemption." (Eph. 1: 13; 4: 3o.) In this case therefore there is no possibility of being lost.

{* The word (dunameis) in the plural is only used either for "miracles" (as chap. 2: 4, for instance), or for angelic orders, "principalities and powers," or once in the expression (Matt. 24: 29; Mark 13: 25; Luke 21: 26): "the powers of the heavens shall be shaken."}

We see, then, that what we are assured by the constant tenor of the word of God, and by the very context of the passage itself, must have been the condition of those who are spoken of as drawing back unto perdition, is confirmed by the very terms by which they are described. For none of these imply that they were either born again or justified. They had now openly given up Christ, and by going back to the ranks of those who had crucified Him, "crucified to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." It is open apostacy that is in question, going back to the Judaism out of which they had come, and what hope could there be for such?

The "wilful sin" of chap. 10: 26 is plainly of the same nature. People were forsaking the Christian assembly (v. 25), taking the place of "adversaries" to Christ (v. 27), treading under foot the Son of God, counting the blood of the covenant by which they had been "sanctified" (or set apart as Christians) an unholy thing. They might say perhaps, "Well, after all, we have God's own appointed sacrifices still." But the apostle answers, that upon that ground "there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins," nothing that has virtue to cleanse a sinner; but, on the contrary, "a certain fearful looking-for of judgment and of fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries."

There may be those who read this who may be otherwise troubled at these verses, and I cannot refrain from adding a word for such. Many do not see that the hopelessness of the state of those described consists in this, that they have given up the only ground upon which salvation is possible. It is not mere failure, getting into the world or into sin, that these verses speak of. It is the wilful rejection of Christ as Saviour. They crucify Him afresh, trample Him under foot, count the blood of the covenant an unholy thing. In a word, it is not any mere ordinary backsliding, as I have said, but apostacy from Christianity itself, and that is hopeless.

Beside this, there is another thing. The "impossibility" spoken of in Heb. 6 is impossibility to renew them again unto repentance. There was no impossibility in their being saved, if they did repent. The word remains ever true for all, while this day of gospel grace lasts" Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." If any one will, therefore, he may. No sin is unpardonable to such, or can shut him out from the salvation that is in Christ Jesus.

But I pass on to the consideration of another example of apostasy which is given in 2 Peter 2: 20, 22: For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire."

Now here again there is said to have been "the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" in those who, without doubt, "draw back unto perdition." And not only so, but this knowledge had had effect upon them, for it had drawn them out of the pollutions of the world." Yet it does not require any very close attention to the apostle's words, to discern here also how little he conceived these apostates to have ever been true Christians. Why had it passed into a proverb that the dog would return to his vomit again, and the washed sow to her wallowing in the mire? What did such a proverb mean, but that a washed sow remained all the while a sow, and that, inasmuch as the washing had not changed her nature, she would go back as a matter of course to her old habits? It was simple enough to know she would. And so one who had in the same way been merely washed from the pollutions of the world — from defilements from without — but whose nature was never changed, might be expected to fulfil that proverb.

But now mark the difference, as pointed out in this same epistle, where there was true faith. Speaking of those to whom that knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord was indeed eternal life, he describes them as "having escaped," not the pollutions merely, but "the corruption that is in the world through lust." (Chap. 1: 4.) Here the need of the soul had indeed been divinely met. It is not in this case external pollution merely, but the "lust," the internal corruption of the heart, that is dealt with. Christ is known as the rest and satisfaction of the soul. The heart is changed with a new nature, new desires, new affections have come in and there is no proverb, that if a sow be turned into a sheep it will go back into the mire.

Thus, then, we have looked at the most prominent of the texts, which might seem to imply the possibility of the soul being finally lost that has once believed unto salvation. It is not likely that other passages will present much difficulty, if the truth as to these is once distinctly seen. There is but one other text which I would briefly, in closing, remark upon; first, because it furnishes the very expression, "falling from grace," which is the technical one with many for their whole doctrine; and secondly, because there is not a passage which more distinctly marks the deeply important principle which is in question. The words in full are these:

"Christ is become of none effect unto you, whosoever of you are justed by the LAW; YE are fallen from grace." (Gal. 5: 4.)

The mere quotation of the passage ought to be enough, one would think, to expose the common misapplication of it. It is he who goes back from the grace of the Gospel to justify himself by the deeds of the law — it is this man, the legalist, and not the one fallen into immorality, or gone back into the world, who is "fallen from grace." And the meaning is not that even to such God ceases to be gracious, but that the man has left that ground himself,

Now it is just the principle contained in this that is so important. What is it to be "justified by the law"? Does he who maintains that "man must do his part and God will do His" approach or not that ground of being justified by the law? Law works are not bad works. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God" is its first and great commandment and the second is like unto it Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Thus the law is holy; and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Yet "as many as are of the works of the law" — standing upon that ground before God — "are under the curse." Where then are they who suppose that their love to God or man, their maintenance of good works, will have something at least to do with their final salvation? Doubtless with many the language of their heart is beyond that of their creed. And there we must leave it.

Let us close with the confident assurance of the apostle's words — the words of the Holy Ghost by him:

"God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. MUCH MORE THEN, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, MUCH MORE, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." (Rom. 5: 8–10.)

Christian reader, is that your assurance?

F. W. Grant.

STEM Publishing : William J Hocking : Salvation Possessed and Known

Salvation Possessed and Known

Notes of an address by W. J. Hocking on Acts 10: 42-43.

Published by F. E. Race, 1915.

“And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (Acts. 10: 42, 43).

These words form the conclusion of the address of Peter to Cornelius the centurion, and to those assembled in his house. They were the special words in the Apostle's discourse which seem to have been for the centurion's personal benefit, though others show the blessing that ensued. They particularly suited his case. They brought him deliverance and enjoyment and peace in the Holy Ghost.

I want you to look this evening at the words as those addressed to a man who was seeking to know from God that which would settle, once and for ever, the great question of his own personal responsibility to his God. Cornelius was not a godless man. He was not a heathen man, in the sense of being a worshipper of false gods. He was a man who recognised that there was one God over all, and that He was the God of the Jews, and that God he most earnestly desired to know. We are told of him, in the commencement of this chapter, that he prayed to God alway, and gave alms to the people of God.

This is a striking witness to the character of the man. Cornelius was a Roman soldier, an officer, a man used to command, accustomed to enforce the strict military discipline which characterised the Roman army; but, in spite of the stern habits of his military life, he was a man who had been touched in his heart and conscience. He had seen and felt the follies and abominations of idol worship. He had been stationed in Palestine, the favoured land of Jehovah, where prophets had testified of God and His worship. He had been serving in that same land so recently trodden, as it had been, by the feet of the Son of God. And will it be too great a stretch of our imagination to suppose that he learned from that other fellow-soldier of his, that centurion of Capernaum, who loved the nation of the Jews, and had himself come to the lowly Prophet of Nazareth, and besought Him, with faith, such faith in his heart as had never before been known in Israel, that he might receive the words that would heal his sick one — would Cornelius have learned something of Jesus of Nazareth from him? And may he not also have heard some report from that other centurion whose duty it was to attend the crucifixion of the Lord of Glory, and see that all was done according to the law of that mighty Gentile empire which was holding God's people in a grip of iron at that time? This man was a personal witness of the extraordinary events of that day. He saw a meek and patient Sufferer, lifted up between two malefactors, and yet so different from them. He was indeed always so different from all men, but with what distinction did the Holy Son of man stand apart from those two robbers. This centurion was a witness to the supernatural darkness that covered the land at noonday. He heard, too, that bitter cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why bast thou forsaken me?” and the officer was smitten in his conscience, and confessed at the close that Jesus was a righteous man — the Son of God.

Cornelius must have heard something of these things. What he believed brought him on his knees to the living and true God. It caused him to love that people whom it was his business to govern in accordance with the exacting laws of his Emperor. For the centurion felt that the Jews were God's people, and he cared for their poor in a conspicuous manner; and yet the man was not at rest inwardly. There was that which was good and beneficent about him. There was that which showed that he had a care for holy things, and for holy persons, and yet the man kept on praying, being in need of something to satisfy the conscience within him, which told him that he had sinned against God, and that he could not escape the judgment of sin; and he craved to know how sins, his sins, the sins of a Gentile, might be forgiven. He knew God's word, and that he himself was not a lost sheep of the house of Israel, to whom the Messiah came. He might well have said: 'What part have I with the house of Israel? The Messiah is for them, but, alas! not for me.'

Yet Cornelius desired the blessing of God's forgiveness; he was a sinful man, but he prayed always, and he was heard.

Beloved friends, there are many persons in this country, no doubt there are some in this hall tonight, who have a sense that they, too, have sinned against the holy God. They feel that the past, with all its sins, is not quite extinct, but that it will be brought forth again to their condemnation, and they do not as yet see how that past will be dealt with otherwise than to their extreme ruin. They feel that they have sinned against God, and they cannot rest because they believe they must answer for sins in their bodies in the day which is to come. They love to hear of Jesus. They love to hear of the Christ of God. They confess that there is no other Saviour among men save Jesus of Nazareth, and yet they are not confident that He is their own Saviour; they do not know that their sins are forgiven. They resort to religious ceremonies — and yet they find no rest; the conscience within them will not be quiet. It accuses them again and again of their guilt before God.

Beloved friends, I honour a man who, in this matter, refuses to acquiesce in an authority not duly accredited. How can we rest the eternal destiny of our own souls upon our own feelings, or upon mere fancy? Shall we go to a mortal, failing man like ourselves, and rest upon his word for it? No; in our responsibility to God, we want the word of God as a valid ground of assurance.

There are, perhaps, many here seeking rest and finding none. There is a memory before me of a sight that I witnessed many years ago, which I shall never forget. I was in a well-known “place of worship,” one of the most famous in our great Metropolis, and I was inadvertently the witness of an early morning service. But what still lives before me is the figure of a man who was one of the communicants. He was a tall man, evidently in a state of physical weakness; but there was more than bodily infirmity: there was mental pain, there was a storm of sorrow and anguish depicted on the man's face as he left his pew with others and fell upon his knees. He received the bread and the wine. He then rose and went back to his place; and, dear friends, I shall never forget the look of unrest, of unhappiness and of intense agony of spirit written upon his face as he returned to his pew, threw himself upon the bench with his hands spread out, and his head bent upon his arms. He had evidently come there that morning to find in the ceremony something that would satisfy his heart. He had been through it, and, at the close, there was the sense that it was all of no use. The ceremony did not give him a solid basis on which to rest his soul.

The man was, no doubt, true, sincere and right in motive, but there was no need for his vain search after peace. The blessed Jesus was ready to speak the word of peace to him, only he was looking manward, to the outward ceremonial, to something that he could see and hear. All the while the gracious Saviour was saying to him, “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The Saviour gives rest by His word, and it is only when you have His word coming to you personally that you can afford to dismiss the great question of your guilt, once and for ever, as a settled matter.

What was it that the blessed Master said to the woman who sought forgiveness of sins? “Thy sins are forgiven thee.” “Thy!” The same forgiveness was for everyone who was in Capernaum to find, if they sought it. The sinful woman sought it. And to her the Lord said, “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.”

Beloved friends, there is no other way of settling the great question. There is no other way of obtaining peace of soul, save by coming to the Lord Jesus Christ, and hearing His word to you.

Now, how was this man, Cornelius, to get such a word from Jesus? Jesus was gone. He had been here. He had left memories behind Him, sweet memories of His ministry, throughout Judea and Galilee. The savour of the Presence that had been was not lost. What could Cornelius do but pray to God? And his prayer rose up as a memorial to God, a sweet sacrifice, as it were, to Him. He was one anxious and desiring to know for himself the fulness of the salvation of God, through our Lord Jesus Christ; and the man who seeks such knowledge shall not be disappointed. The Lord Himself was no longer in Palestine; but His ambassadors were. As He was sent into the world, so He sent His emissaries — the apostles into the world to represent Him (John 17: 18).

Accordingly, God sent His word to this man who was a Gentile, a Gentile soldier, one of the conquerors of God's ancient people. He sent the apostle Peter to speak the word to him that should clear his soul in its anxiety, and settle every doubt. Now, we know that Cornelius understood very definitely that Peter was coming to speak to him, that Peter was God's messenger to him, that he was directed to deliver God's word to him. Peter would be only the channel. The much-desired word was coming through him, and it would not be the word of a mere man. When the centurion met Peter, and had gathered together his friends, he said: “Now therefore are we all here present before God, to hear all things that are commanded thee of God.”

Dear friends, in the great question of the sin of a man's soul there are two persons concerned — the man himself and God. It is one of the cardinal truths of the gospel that in His grace the Saviour God comes down to meet this individual need. It is a device of Satan to adulterate and corrupt the gospel, and to introduce some medium between God and the sinner. No, beloved friends, there is but one Mediator between God and man; the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost. He sought the individual where he was, and now God is sending His word through the Scriptures to the individual.

There may be a word in my text tonight for some hearer personally. You may have a similar difficulty to Cornelius upon your heart. You know you have sinned, and want your sins forgiven, and you are asking, How am I to know that they are forgiven? On what ground? I do not know any possible trustworthy ground but God's holy word, and, having this, you need not fear all the powers of Satan. There is no power in this world, or under this world, which can destroy the imperishable word of God. The Lord said: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away.”

Here is the Bible. Here is God's word, but, beloved friends, you must receive it for yourself. You must be able to open this word and say 'I know that, if there is no other person in the wide world, God is speaking to me.' It is comforting to that extent to know that God is speaking to others, and a person may well be rejoicing in this fact, but it is a different matter if I feel He may leave me out of the blessing, and while other persons have their sins forgiven, I am not included in the company. What a loss for me! The case of the new blessing which others had recently received must have been known to Cornelius, for Caesarea was not so far from Jerusalem, and the news spread rapidly of the people who were receiving the gospel. They had come into the town in the fulness of their joy, and spoken of the joys of their salvation. The sight of their ecstasy led Cornelius to, pray, 'Oh, that I knew my sins were forgiven! Oh, that I might have the remission of my sins!' And God sent Peter to speak to him this particular point of anxiety.

We have not much time to look into details of the apostolic visit, but will pass on to the particular moment when the word met Cornelius. Peter is referring, in the two verses I have read, to the Lord Jesus Christ, and he speaks first of all of Him risen from the dead, and ordained of God to be Judge of quick and dead. What is the special relation of this fact to the anxious man? What did this mean to the soul of Cornelius? Jesus ordained to be the Judge of quick and dead! Have you ever thought seriously of this, beloved friends? It is admittedly a commonly received truth. We know that Jesus Christ is the One who is coming to judge the quick and the dead, but have you ever considered what the prediction involves? The One who was once on this earth, stretched out upon the cross, in the place of shame (so far as this world's judgment is concerned), is He who not only rose from the dead, but into whose hand is placed the responsibility of the eternal judgment of men and women, whether they be alive or dead.

Friends, in the interests of eternal justice there is before us the great work of examining the lives of men and women, and adjudicating upon their words and deeds, and administrating due punishment, and the Person into whose hands this work is committed is that Holy Man who suffered on Calvary's cross. Is it not wonderful to contemplate that He will sit on His throne, and that the nations of the earth shall be gathered before Him, and that out of His mouth shall proceed the sentence of judgment? It is so. The Man whom the world despises is the One into whose hands is committed all judgment. Man regenerate or unregenerate has never paid adequate regard to the Lord Jesus Christ. There is many a person who is losing his way in the things that pertain to spiritual life, because he is seeking joy and rest apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. No man can neglect the veneration of Christ without serious loss. And the gospel of the grace of God is the one that exalts Jesus, and puts Him in the highest heavenly glory — a present Saviour, a coming judge. Would you not, then, like to be on the side of that Judge? Would you not like to have Him for you? If He is for you, oh! how good and blessed! If He assures you now concerning the forgiveness of your sins, oh! how safe must you be in the day of wrath which is to come!

There are persons — possibly Cornelius was one of them — who have that great day of judgment ever before their minds. They think of that time so awful, when all the world will be assembled before the throne, and will be there to be judged. They dread lest they shall then hear the word, “Depart from me”; and they say, 'I can never rest until that day is past.'

I am considering the case of those who are really in earnest, and seeking the salvation of their souls, and who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, but are fearful of what is to come. But, beloved friends, think that it is Jesus who will be there, and that He speaks to you now! What does He say to you now? Does He not say unto you, “I give unto my sheep eternal life, and they shall never perish”? Does He not say unto you, “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life”? If the Judge Himself says to you, 'You shall not come into judgment!' you have this word for your reliance. If there is anyone who can speak to you about the time of judgment, surely it is the One who is ordained to judge the quick and the dead. And He says that the believer shall never come into judgment. Is this sufficient? Is this a word for you? Can you suppose for a moment that the robber on the cross, to whom the Lord said, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” — can you believe that this one shall yet be brought before the Lord as the Judge of quick and dead, to be judged, to decide whether heaven or hell shall be his eternal lot, he having been in the paradise of God now for some two thousand years? He had the Lord's word to him; and He said, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” It was to comfort and assure him in the last hours of his agony. And he passed in peace of heart into the presence of his Lord and Saviour.

And so we just come back to this concise test. Have you received the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving unto you assurance for the future, as well as the forgiveness of your past sins?

But it was not only the fact that Jesus was ordained to be the Judge that Peter advanced. The Apostle unfolded a further truth which Cornelius needed to know. He went on to says “To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.” Jesus, risen from the dead, is Lord of all, not merely of the Jews. He is the Lord of all men and all things, for all things are put under His feet; and this too was meant to enlighten the centurion. Jesus, walking through this world, was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel; but, risen from the dead, there are for the Saviour no national limits. There is no Gentile or Jew beyond the grave. There are here geographical distinctions that mark men off from one another, but beyond the grave there are none, and that is where the Lord of glory is. The risen Christ spoke through Peter as the One who had come out from among the dead; and His grace was flowing out to all men, as the prophets of old had given witness, that whosoever believeth in Him should receive remission of sins.

Cornelius found himself within the scope of this message. That is where I come in. 'That is exactly the word that addresses me.' Such clearly was his belief.

The force of this word of God is such that wherever a man is, whatever a man is, should he believe, he will receive remission of his sins. It is not a question of his bowing to some ceremony. A man is not required to be circumcised, to keep the law of Moses and thus be saved; such is not the truth of God in the gospel. The truth of God is that, whatever a sinner may be, let him come to the Saviour as a sinner, and let him receive the remission of sins.

Then and there the word of the gospel entered Cornelius' heart, and he appropriated that word to himself. He said, 'It is for me,' and there were others with him, his household, his servants, all desirous to know the truth of God, and they found the same truth of God offered to them. “Whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.”

Beloved friends, I do earnestly beseech of you to consider upon what ground you are resting this night in this matter. Is it upon the word of God spoken directly to yourself? Have you at some point in your past history come to this position — that if God did not speak to you, if He did not clear away the doubts from your heart, no one else could, and then God in His word did come to you? Some particular text, some particular truth has flashed like a light from heaven to your soul, and you have known that God is for you. This knowledge God gives through His word. “We know” is the sincere language of faith. The man who believes the word of God is the man who knows it.

There are persons who affirm that it is presumption on man's part to say that his sins are forgiven. How can he know? Such knowledge would be impossible if God had not spoken. I do not think that we, who rejoice in God's word, rejoice sufficiently in this fact, that God has spoken to us in this Book. Amid all the uncertainties of this time and the great national struggle, causing men to wonder what lies beyond, oh! how we ought to thank God for that which never fails, His blessed, holy word! Here it is, as it was spoken of old. We have it now, in all its perfection, unchanged and unchangeable. It is for you and for me, but each heart must take hold of it.

I know that there are men who are proud of this book, that is, the book that is printed. They say there is no other book like it in the world. This is true. They say that it has made national history; but, beloved friends, there is another question, a deeper question than this, which it solves. Here am I, a responsible person, and where God has put me I have failed most miserably. I have despised God's precepts, and what is going to be the result of it? Is there not a word there for me, the erring and disobedient? It is very easy to speak of a Bible which is being sent forth to help and bless nations, and to bring men out of barbarism and into civilisation. But, a man may say, 'How about the sins of which I am guilty? God knows that I have despised His Son, and there are many sins I have committed, and I am responsible for them.'

Now this book speaks to the individual as the apostle Peter spoke to Cornelius. The word was for him, and, when received by him, the clouds dispersed, the doubts disappeared, and the man, gladdened by the sunshine of God's word, was a saved man in the full sense of the Scriptural term. To be saved, beloved friends, is not only to have the benefits procured by our Lord Jesus Christ, but to know that we have passed from death into life, and that whatever may come upon us, whatever may betide us in the future, all is well.

Have you observed the sequel to this preaching? The Spirit of God fell upon every person who was there, every man, every woman was sealed by the Holy Spirit. God thereby marked them out as His own, and they were subsequently baptised, and received into the company of God's people. This was not the admission of Gentile believers into the place of God's ancient people here upon earth. On the contrary, it was a new thing; Jews and Gentiles are now one — equally believing in Him, equally accepted by Him, equally rejoicing in His name, and equally possessed of His great salvation.

Oh, beloved friends, ask you whether you know for yourself the salvation of God. In order to do so you have to come, personally, individually, with your sins, to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not sufficient, however, to come to Him. It is necessary that you should continue in the attitude of expectation and entreaty until you meet God, and learn the truth about yourself on the authority of God's holy word. Do not trust a man like yourself. Do not trust a fellow mortal. Do not let anyone deceive you. Lay hold of God's word for yourself. A man, wittingly or unwittingly, may lead you astray. You can only trust One; that One is the Lord Jesus Christ. He speaks through this holy Book to you, and He who died for your sins, He who suffered for you on the tree, He is the One who says to you, “Thy sins are forgiven.”

Let me say just one further word before parting. Some may have this difficulty which I will specify. And it is a difficulty which the more earnest Christian is not unlikely to have. There are many who start with a fervent determination that henceforward they will please Him at all costs, live for Him, shine for Him, be His good soldiers in this world. They seek to find from the Scripture what they must do, and everything seems joyous and happy and bright, and they can hardly believe the truth about themselves, they are so full of joy, and they are full of desire that everybody may be like them, just resting and trusting on the Lord Jesus Christ; and then something untoward happens. One day there is a disaster. From their mouths something comes which is so unexpectedly evil. They say, 'Surely, I cannot be a true disciple of Christ, or I should not have said or done this.' However, they try again, and find that a similar thing occurs before long, and they become very sorrowful and downcast, after vainly struggling again and again, and they have to confess themselves more prone to fall than they could have conceived. They know that they have done wrong. They say, 'Well, it is worse for me now than when I knew nothing of Christ. I know there is no love like His; He died for me, and, knowing that He died for me, I still go contrary to His will, and I do really what I do not want to do. I cannot seem to help myself.' And then they think they are lost after all, and are plunged into a gulf of darkness and despair. They felt when they came to the Lord, that their sins, and all the past, were obliterated, but now, after receiving the forgiveness of sins, they have gone wrong. What about that terrible disaster in their Christian pilgrimage? How about these sins? Satan says, 'Your sins are now very different from what they were once, for you now know His love and yet you have sinned against Him.' Satan says, 'There is no hope for you. The salvation is for the sinner who does not know God's will.'

Beloved friends, such a state is true of thousands. They are clear as daylight as to the sins they committed before their conversion, but stumbled because of present failure. But, remember, there is one Person who will deal with all your sins. This is the One who died for your sins. You will have to come to Him and confess your sins to Him. You will have to own, with shame, that, having known His love, you have despised it. And you will find that His love and forgiveness will come to you sweeter than ever. You will find that another word of His will come to you, and say that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” “The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanseth us from all sin.”

Dear friends, the remission of sins is the Divine act which covers everything. 'Oh, but,' you say, 'my sin is after my conversion.' That is true, but when the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, God knew, not only what you would commit up to the time of your conversion, but He also knew what you would be after your conversion. It is a sad thing that you should be so weak and wilful, and that after knowing His love, and tasting something of the sweetness of His salvation, such a grievous failure should be true of you; but there is the grave fact, which God knew before He sent out the sweet invitation of His love to you.

Therefore, beloved friends, if you are on the way to God, to that bright place above, and if your face is towards Him who died upon the cross, who is now there, the Lord Jesus Christ will receive you and forgive you in spite of all your failure, if you will but come to Him and believe in Him. The truth is just this. “Whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.” It does not mean that we just believe on the Lord Jesus Christ one day in our history. There was a day when we first looked to the Lord Jesus Christ, a day of days in our history; but His gospel that we believe is to put away all doubts, once and for ever. The terms are “Whosoever believeth,” that is, yesterday, today, and throughout life. You have to continue to believe. You have to look in faith, and not to take your eyes away from Him, who is the Source of strength to those who conquer, and of forgiveness to those who fail.

I just leave this passage with you. “Whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.” Is that word for you personally? Take it home to yourself, and in the light of God's holy presence, do you know, and are you certain, positive, within your own soul, that God therein speaks to you? It is no use looking at the matter from any other than a personal standpoint in order to get peace for your heart. You can rejoice over the conversion of other people, but first of all it must be realised in your own soul, and then, standing on redemption ground for yourself, you can rejoice with a deeper joy in the blessing, as it goes out to others. May God bless His word. W. J. H.

STEM Publishing : C Knapp : We believe and are sure

"We believe and are sure."

C. Knapp.

Simple Testimony 1917, p. 8.

"Seeing is believing" is a saying as trite as it is untrue.

The following occurrence proves how utterly deceived one may be while trusting to what he believes to be the sight of his eyes.

In one of the departments of the University of Kansas some time ago the lecturer stood on a platform addressing a body of some hundred students. Suddenly the front door opened and the janitor of the building came rushing to the front, shouting angrily at the professor, who leaped from the rostrum and met his opponent in the middle of the room. There was a quick interchange of hot words, a struggle ensued which ended with the janitor drawing a revolver. A shot rang out and the two men were with difficulty separated.

When the case was tried all the witnesses swore that it was the janitor who fired the shot, some even testifying that they saw the smoke issuing from the weapon after its discharge.

Will it surprise the reader to be told that it was not the janitor who fired the shot but a man stationed outside the building at an open window? The whole affair was prearranged, an experiment in psychology to test the value of direct evidence before the law students of the University.

And there are many who, in the realm of the spiritual, demand visible demonstration before believing. They ask for what they call tangible proofs; they will receive nothing "on trust," and refuse to believe anything that cannot be discerned by the senses—sight, hearing or touch —their deified trinity, the only god in whom they trust. And in doing this they consider themselves exceedingly astute, and look down with affected pity, and even scorn, on those who have not seen, yet have believed. "Yes," they answer, when it is demanded of them that they have faith in God, "when we see we will believe"; and wise in their own conceits they maintain the ground that they will believe nothing except that which can be demonstrated to the senses.

This they think is rational and safe ground. But is it? Is their attitude toward revealed truth really rational? In view of the above-cited incident, No. Our senses may deceive us, our reasonings are oftentimes faulty; and our deductions are frequently false as our premises are erroneous.

Law students are not, as a rule, easily gulled, nor are they more prone than others to jump at conclusions. Yet in the demonstration arranged for them by their professor they were every one of them deceived; and trusting to the sight of their eyes were ready to declare under oath to be fact that which they afterwards learned to be false.

Yet in view of this (and such mistakes are being made constantly) men, and especially young men, say when spoken to of the verities of Scripture, "Give us proofs, produce for us some direct evidence; we are perfectly willing to believe, but we want to see, hear, touch, taste or handle something to which we may attach our faith." Stupendous folly, when it is every day being demonstrated to us that our natural senses are the very things that we cannot trust. Some are colour-blind, and to the sight of such red appears white, and green looks blue. Some have an impaired taste and to them every bitter thing is sweet, and the sweet bitter. To some the finest music is but discordant noise, while to others (as the heathen chief who heard a famous band play in London some years ago) the big drum is the acme of pleasurable sound. I have known of persons to whom the odour of kerosene oil seemed most delightful perfume! So much for the impaired and perverted senses of fallen man and any real dependence that may be placed upon them.

Except ye see . . . ye will not believe," was the scathing denunciation of the divine Master, "the Author and Finisher of faith," to the unbelieving generation of His day.

Those hundred or more University students saw, or thought they saw, and were deceived and put to shame like gullible children at the trial of the case staged so cleverly for their undoing, as credible witnesses who were sure because they saw.

How then can you know the certainty of those things in which from a child, perhaps, you have been instructed: the great doctrines of the Bible, such as God's existence, the creation, man's fall, the personality of Satan, redemption from sin by Jesus Christ, eternal life for man, the soul's immortality, heaven, hell and other equally important truths? Yes, that is the question. How can you know? by what means may you be sure?

That you cannot implicitly trust your senses is evident. You may have insisted that to believe a thing it must be demonstrated; and it has been demonstrated, by test as fair and full as could be desired, that not one but one hundred clear-headed young men, who were themselves preparing to sift, examine and weigh testimony, could be ludicrously deceived by appearances.

How, then, we repeat, can we know the things of the Bible to be true? Can we know? or shall we take the banal ground of the agnostic and say, We cannot know, no one can tell, it is impossible to be sure? We Christians know; we "know we have passed from death unto life"; "we know we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens"; "I know that my Redeemer liveth," the believer can say (1 John 3: 14; 2 Cor. 5: 1; Job 19: 25). All this and much more we know; and we know it beyond the shadow of a doubt. But how? Well, how was it known by the students finally that it was not the janitor who fired the shot but a man posted for the purpose at a near-by window? It was by credible verbal testimony, the statement of trustworthy men, the word, the assurances of men who they knew would not, in this matter at least, deceive them.

And we believe, not because of visions, revelations, or feelings, nor because by a process of reasoning we have arrived at the conclusion that we may rationally believe, but because God, who cannot lie, has spoken! He has declared these things to be so, and not to believe them would be to make Him a liar, — the extremity of human guilt.

Our faith rests on adequate testimony, the Word of the living God, unchangeable and eternal. And to this the doubter must come if ever he is to arrive at a satisfactory state of mind and heart in reference to the stupendous realities of eternity.

There are evidences, on every hand, many and varied and of the very best; evidences both direct and indirect. The world is full of them, and they may be seen every day; museums of antiquity contain them; evidences of the Bible's veracity are writ large on Egyptian and Assyrian monuments and temples; the ruins of buried cities and the tombs of forgotten kings abound with them, even mummies bearing mute testimony to what the "scripture of truth" declares; and the spade of the excavator brings to light fresh witnesses every year. The natural sciences, astronomy, geology, physiology, anatomy, including even that most exact of all sciences, mathematics, all bear united and harmonious witness to the truth of Scripture, written with "the finger of God."

And in the realm of the moral we have evidence multiplied; at home thousands of men and women reclaimed by the Gospel from lives of degradation, crime and shame; we see saints suffering from incurable diseases, lying helpless year after year on beds of pain, yet rejoicing in hope and patient in tribulation; martyrs die triumphant firm in their confession, preferring torture to deliverance purchased by a denial of their faith; while in the mission-field not only do we see the power and truth of the Gospel manifested in the regeneration of individual savages, but whole districts, islands and archipelagos transformed as if by magic through the influences of the circulation and reception of that book called the Bible.

But all this, though wholly adequate as direct testimony to the truth of Christianity, is not presented for your faith. We have a more sure basis for our belief: God, His word, His testimony, as revealed in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. He speaks, and therefore we believe. It is impossible to be deceived here. It is not necessary to laboriously gather, sift and weigh testimony, or examine witnesses. By the Word of God we know.

"I know whom I have believed and am persuaded," wrote one who ranked with the foremost thinkers of his day: Paul of "much learning" and deepest intellect, yet not faithless, but believing because he had the testimony of Him whose Word is "forever settled in heaven," where shams, deceits and illusions cannot abide, for all there is light and truth and verity.

Yes, "we know." "We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding" (1 John 5: 20). He is "the truth," as well as "the way" and "the life," and believing in Him we shall never be confounded or put to shame (Rom. 10: 11). C. K.

STEM Publishing : William J Lowe : Prove the Bible

“You must prove the Bible true before I accept it.”

W. J. Lowe.

For some 50 years I have never ceased to be astonished at the utter futility of human laws, and parliaments, their inadequacies and mistakes, never-ending tinkering, adding, changing; which all proves the truth of the Bible dictum — “It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”, Jeremiah 10: 23. Usually, most “M.Ps” are lawyers; yet they cannot make laws that are free of “loopholes”, or are just and wise enough to be permanent, a finality. They are unable to grasp and rectify all points of a problem; and above all, have no foresight as to future needs. Yet, the people who urge so strongly that you “vote” for this mass of confusion and contradiction, are the first ones to scoff at a Book that records laws that once pronounced never needed changing, that by foresight covered future changed conditions; that justly governed a nation for 1500 years without tinkering, failure, jails, police or parliaments, elections or lawyers.

Surely, such a law, without parallel in human history, laid down complete at the beginning and never changed, could not be of human authorship; it and the Book that records it, must be God-inspired. The utter inadequacies and foolishnesses of the most enlightened legislatures of today, by contrast, proves the Divine origin of the perfect Law of Moses. Man had no part whatever or vote in this Law; it was dictated direct by God, see Exodus 20 and on through Leviticus; and Moses just “wrote it in a book… for future generations to obey” Deuteronomy 31: 24; 1 Chronicles 16: 15. No king, parliament or people ever altered one word of this Law. The mere fact that while Israel obeyed this Law for centuries they were happy, prosperous, free and enlightened, while trouble, punishment, dispersion, followed disobedience — proves this Law the only perfect law, and necessarily it and the Book it is written in must be God-inspired.

Human laws merely punish, brutalise, perpetuate offenders; they make no reparations. A man cheats people out of their life-savings; he is jailed, the victims get nothing back. But by God’s law — a thief was not only punished, but compelled to work for wages to pay back the theft to his victims, Exodus 22: 1-4; Leviticus 6: 4. He was not jailed and kept at the expense of the taxpayers, nor did his victims suffer and starve.

Divorce was only allowed for a physical cause of impediment, Deuteronomy 24: 1-4. Adultery between otherwise married couples brought death, Deuteronomy 22: 22-24; misconduct before marriage brought stoning to death, vs. 13-21. Rape brought either death or compulsory marriage, vs. 25-29. Causing wilful injury to any person brought identical retribution, “an eye for an eye” by public legal infliction, Leviticus 24: 10-20. “Juvenile delinquency”, laziness, disobedience to parents, were punished by death, Deuteronomy 21: 18-21. No usury, interest on loans to the poor, was permitted, Leviticus 25: 35-37. Murder brought death, no reprieve, Leviticus 24: 21.

Property always remained in the family, no man could buy up and accumulate a large estate, Leviticus 25: 13-36; Isaiah 5-8; 1 Kings 21-3. Care for the poor, Deuteronomy 24: 19-21 & 15: 7-11; consideration for others, Leviticus 19: 13-14, 32-36; love for neighbour, Leviticus 19: 18; were enforced by law. All through human history, against every race, the challenge has gone forth unanswered — “What nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgements so righteous, as this law?” Deuteronomy 4: 5-10. Who but an all-wise, all-time foreseeing, all righteous Creator-God could give and record such laws?

STEM Publishing : H H Snell : Streams of Refreshing from the Fountain of Life

Streams of Refreshing from the Fountain of Life.

H. H. Snell.

"Jesus said, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink." John 7: 37.

London: A. S. Rouse, ninth edition, 1897.

Preface

This little volume is about JESUS the Son of God, and sets forth God's way of saving sinners. It is hoped that the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ will be found the most prominent object in it, and that it is calculated not only to arrest the careless and thoughtless, but to confirm and comfort weak and troubled saints.

In the blood of Jesus God speaks peace and love to every sinner that believes; and that same precious blood enables the believer to draw near and keep near to God. The blood of Christ, being the true ground of peace and source of confidence in God, gives rest of conscience in God's presence, where Jesus now is, and fills the heart with praise.

Many believers, however, are in great bondage. They truly look to Christ for salvation, and have eternal life, though they are scarcely sensible of it. Like Lazarus, when he left the tomb, they really have life, but are unable to walk in liberty, to minister for the Lord, or happily confess His name, because of the grave-clothes which envelop them. They struggle; but they are fettered, and need to be loosed. Some vainly try to get liberty by looking into their own hearts, or are expecting to receive it from some man, instead of looking only to Christ, and believing His Word. It is of the utmost importance that the believer should learn from God's truth his security and standing in Christ; that he is already a child of God, on the other side of death, in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus; not yet with, but in, Christ Jesus. This being realized, the natural inquiry must be, What is my hope? We reply, The Lord's coming. We do not hope to have everlasting life; for he that believeth hath everlasting life. (John 5: 24.) We do not hope for forgiveness of sins; this also we have now: "In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins." (Eph. 1: 7.) We do not hope for righteousness; this too we have now; for "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth." (Rom. 10: 4.) What, then, do we look for? The inspired reply is, "We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body." (Phil. 3: 20, 21.)

Such are the precious truths of God's Word to which the reader's attention is called in this little volume. It is sent forth, with much conscious infirmity, in dependence on the God of all grace, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Fear Not

"And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death." — Rev. 1: 17, 18.

Every one of us must have to do with the Lord Jesus. Each person will yet come before Him. Nothing can possibly hinder this. The joyful expectation of the Christian is, that he will see his Saviour's face and be like Him. Those who are not born again — unbelievers — will assuredly see Jesus too, but not with joy: as a wicked man once said, "I shall see Him, but not now; I shall behold Him, but not nigh." Many persons now turn away from the Saviour's name; they like to banish His blessed gospel from their thoughts; but then, "at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow, in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." This is God's decree, and it must be accomplished. "The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations." There is, therefore, no possibility of escape from having to do with Jesus; and I doubt not that those who will go away into everlasting punishment will send up a cry continually from the pit of torment, that Jesus Christ is Lord. This is very solemn, and makes the gospel a matter of such individual application and importance. The Scripture says, "every knee," "every tongue," "every one of us shall give account of himself in the day of judgment!" "Behold, He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Him!" plainly showing that men must have to do personally with the Lord Jesus. Now He graciously pardons and saves; then He will righteously condemn, and punish with everlasting destruction. What folly, then, it is to neglect His great salvation!

In these verses of the Revelation we find that John saw the Lord Jesus, and he says, "When I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead." So dazzling and refulgent is the glorified Saviour, that even His most intimate and beloved servants, while in the body, cannot catch a glimpse of Him without being overpowered by the brightness of His glory. Perhaps there never was a man on earth who knew such deep intimacy with Jesus as John. We find him with the Lord in the days of His flesh on every remarkable occasion. At the Supper he was the only one of the disciples that leaned on His bosom; and in an anxious moment he only could turn to his loving Master and say, "Lord, who is it?" And further, when Jesus was betrayed and apprehended, and all others forsook Him, John followed Him into the High Priest's palace, and stood by Him to the last, even at the cross. John, then, must have known very deep intimacy with the Lord, and his writings show how richly the love of God was shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost.

John was also faithful after the Saviour left the world. He was transported to the isle of Patmos for his godly life and testimony. It is important to notice that he was banished, not so much for the doctrines he held, as for what he said and did; for in this chapter he tells us that he "was in the isle that is called Patmos for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ." Most persons around us now have no objection to the outward forms of religion, and will allow you to hold what doctrines you please, provided you keep them to yourself; but the unrenewed mind still kicks against faithful testimony in life and word to the infinite and glorious perfections of the person, work, offices, fitness, and fulness of the Lord Jesus Christ. If Christians now bore distinctly "the testimony of Jesus Christ," we may be sure that it would still be offensive to many; for the offence of the cross has not ceased.

While John was honouring his earth-rejected Master in desolate Patmos, his Master marvellously honoured him. His persecuted and banished apostle was chosen, not only to convey the Revelation to the churches, but to have such blessed views of the future as no one was ever privileged before. This is very sweet to contemplate. Accordingly, we are told that he was "in the Spirit on the Lord's day." By his being "in the Spirit," we are to understand that he was not musing or meditating according to the thoughts of the natural mind, but that he was under the guidance, control, and operations of the Holy Spirit; the thoughts of his mind, and the affections of his heart, were according to the workings of the Holy Spirit, the Testifier and Glorifier of Christ. Every believer has the Spirit; but we are not always "in the Spirit." In this state of mind the beloved apostle suddenly heard behind him a trumpet-like sound so very loud, that he tells us "it was a great voice, as of a trumpet." The voice said, "I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book," etc. This was a remarkable sound, which so aroused the dear apostle, that he turned to see the voice that spoke with him; but no sooner had he looked behind him, than a marvellous vision of Christ and the Churches, resplendent with unheard of glory and beauty, met his astonished eye. He saw the churches symbolized by seven golden candlesticks — costly, pure, precious, heavenly, fitted to bear light; and in the midst of the candlesticks he saw the Lord; but, astounding as the great voice must have been, and beautiful as the appearance of the seven candlesticks must have been, it was neither the one nor the other that so overpowered the apostle, as the sight of Christ Himself — "When I saw HIM, I fell at His feet as dead." Oh, my reader, it is not being taken up with the Church, or sounds, or sights of any kind, apart from Christ, that really humbles us; but when by faith we feel near the risen Saviour, it is this that withers up fleshly pretensions, that exposes the filthiness of creature-righteousness, makes us feel in an atmosphere that breathes holy solemnity into the soul, and gives deep reality of feeling to the heart and conscience. It was when Job was brought to say, "Now mine eye seeth thee," that he abhorred himself, and repented in dust and ashes. When Isaiah saw the glory of the Lord, he exclaimed, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." The beloved Daniel tells us, "When I saw this great vision, there remained no strength in me; for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength." The prophet Habakkuk also says, "When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice; rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself." Ah! my reader, be assured that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. In His holy presence our depravity and weakness are made manifest; there we learn that we are really fallen creatures, corrupt, and very unlike Him who is of purer eyes than to behold evil. Here we find that God's balance is infinitely holy, His weights perfectly just, and that, weighed by Him, we are "found wanting." Oh, that you, dear reader, might be led to consider, not what you are as compared with your neighbours, but what you are before God, and how you will meet the Lord Jesus at His coming!

I say, it was a sight of the Lord Jesus that brought John down "at His feet as dead." Though he had full assurance that he was born again, that he was a son of God, that all his sins were purged, that he was in-dwelt by the Spirit, and therefore, as to his eternal state, he had nothing to fear; yet the glory of the ascended Lord was more than he could bear while in this body. In a momentary glimpse, John seemed to eye the adorable Lord from head to foot. He tells us, that He was "like unto the Son of man," and yet He declared Himself to be "the First and the Last." And in this brief account we find His Person — God and Man — beautifully expressed. Who can be "the First and the Last," but the eternal Godhead? and who is "like unto the Son of man," but He who was in "the likeness of sinful flesh," and "was found in fashion as a man"? We may gather from His being "in the midst of the seven candlesticks," that He is in Spirit with the Churches, though personally absent. "His eyes," which once wept tears of sympathy and pity, now, "as a flame of fire," show us that nothing escapes His observation; He therefore says to every assembly, "I know thy works." "The sharp two-edged sword," and "His voice as the sound of many waters," may teach us that He judges and reproves; while the "garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle," may remind us that He is not now mocked with a purple robe, nor is His sacred bosom now exposed to the rude centurion's spear; but that He is girded for the service of judging the assemblies.

We may learn, perhaps, from "His head and His hairs white like wool, as white as snow," that He is the I AM, perfect in purity and spotlessness. The "seven stars in His right hand" may teach us that He is the source, the upholder, and sovereign controller of all ministry in His Church, and that it all flows from the hand that was pierced on Calvary's cross; while "His feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace," may teach us that though He was crucified through weakness, when His feet were nailed to the tree, yet that now all judgment is committed unto Him, He will tread "the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God," and that "He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet." And what can "His countenance as the sun shineth in his strength" set before us, but that He who once condescended to be spit upon and smitten for us, whose visage was "marred more than any man," is now the exalted Head of the Church, Head too of all principality and power, and in the full enjoyment of the glory which He had with the Father before the world was?

"The head that once was crown'd with thorns

Is crown'd with glory now;

Heaven's royal diadem adorns

The mighty victor's brow."

What a glorious sight of the Lord had John! and though it so affected him as to bring him "as dead" at His feet, nevertheless he afterwards found that the feet of Jesus was the place of honour and blessing; and this is not the only instance in the New Testament. When the Lord Jesus appeared to Saul, and arrested him in his persecuting zeal by a glorious manifestation of Himself, it at once brought him prostrate on the earth. He says, "Suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me; and I fell unto the ground." But though blinded with the glorious light, humbled at the feet of Jesus, and crying out to Him whom he had so blasphemed, and whose members he had so persecuted, "What shall I do, Lord?" nevertheless, he found the feet of Jesus the place of rich and abundant blessing even for the chief of sinners. The Lord said unto him, "Arise, and go into Damascus; and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee to do." Oh, that the Spirit of God might now show sinners that the feet of Jesus is the place of blessing!

Peter is another witness of the same thing. He was fishing with his companions in the lake of Gennesaret. For many an hour he had been casting his net in vain. At last Jesus entered the ship; and when He had finished preaching, He prayed Peter to launch out into the deep, and let down the net for another draught. Peter appears to have thought it would be of little use, because he had toiled all night without success; however, as he had been requested to do so, he did it, when the multitude of fishes was so great that the net brake. This circumstance seems to have led Peter into the understanding that the person who had thus commanded him to let down the net was the Lord; and, humbled under a sense of His amazing condescension and power, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" Observe, that Peter fell down as a sinful man; he felt so vile, and so unfit for the Lord's company, that he could only bow down before Him as a sinner. But how did Jesus reply? Did He say, You are such a sinner, you shall depart from me? No. You have sinned so much that I cannot receive you? No. If you will promise to do better for the future, I will pardon the past? Oh, no! but Peter found by happy experience, in thus casting himself at Jesus' feet as a poor guilty sinner, just as he was, that there was grace in the heart of Jesus to abound over all his sin. Jesus said unto him, "Fear not!" as much as to say, I welcome, pardon, cleanse, and save you; and more than this, you shall be honoured in my service; "from henceforth thou shalt catch men." Oh, what grace there is for self-abased sinners at the Saviour's feet!

"The moment a sinner believes,

And trusts in the crucified Lord,

His pardon at once he receives,

Salvation in full through His blood."

Let us look at another instance. A woman who was notorious for her sinful ways heard that Jesus had visited the city, and was sitting at meat in the house of Simon the Pharisee. She felt the burden of her sins; her conscience was oppressed with guilt; her heart was sad. She needed a Saviour, and He was near at hand. But will He save such a sinner? Can He welcome such a notoriously evil person? Will He who is so holy deign to listen to such a vile creature? Such might have been the reasonings of her distressed heart. Nevertheless, necessity compelled her to go to Jesus. She stood at His feet behind Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with ointment. Here we find another troubled soul, a conscience-stricken sinner, at the feet of Jesus. And what did the Lord say to her? Did He give her one upbraiding look? Did one reproachful word escape His lips? Oh, no; for He came "not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." "He came to seek and to save that which was lost." "He came into the world to save sinners." Jesus therefore said unto her, "Thy faith hath saved thee." Oh, how blessedly do the Saviour and sinner meet together! How welcome are such to the gracious heart of Jesus! How happy for the sinner to be thus received! There is nothing here between the guilty sinner and the gracious Saviour; no ordinances, no ceremonial observances, no official interferences; but simply the guilty penitent confessing, and the Son of God forgiving. And the same who had said to another, "Thy sins be forgiven thee," now openly declared, "Thy faith," not thine ointment, thy tears, nor thy kiss, acceptable fruits though they were, but "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace."

Now let us look again at John. "When I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead." The beloved apostle, being thus at his Master's feet, was now in a position to learn still deeper lessons of the Saviour's love. John says, "He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not!" What a blessed manifestation of the compassionate heart of Jesus! How tender, how gentle, was the touch! That same right hand that had gotten eternal victory over His servant's enemies was now again put forth on his behalf that hand which had been once willingly pierced for his sins was again stretched out for his recovery, at the same time comforting His fainting servant with "Fear not;" as much as to say, John, you have nothing to fear, no ground for discomfort, no warrant for uneasy apprehensions; for my right hand is for you, and not against you. If He who has all power in heaven and in earth, the Creator of the ends of the earth, the Redeemer, and Judge of all, says, "Fear not," what ground can there be for disquietude?

But, more than this, the Master will give His fainting servant yet more intelligent reasons for not fearing, because of His person, finished work, and exaltation.

1. His Person. "I am the First and the Last." We have already referred to this. It may be well to add, that true peace must always be connected with right views of the person of Christ, because it is the dignity and glory of His person that give efficacy to His work. Take away His manhood, and we have no Substitute — no Redeemer; take away His Godhead, and we have no atoning virtue in the blood. The blessedness is, that both God and man are found in Him. Thus He was fitted for the stupendous work of eternal redemption. He was the Days-man, that brought in all the blessing man needed, and answered all that God righteously demanded. This is another reason why John should "Fear not."

2. His Finished Work. "I am He that liveth, and was dead." As much as to say, John, I have died for you. I have borne all your sins, and removed all your transgressions from you. I have been into death instead of you, so that you shall never see death. I am alive again; therefore all your debt is cancelled, all just claims upon you as a sinner have been answered by me; and I am alive again; therefore you must live for ever. "Fear not."

3. His Exaltation. "Behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death." Unless every one of our sins had been purged, God could not have raised Christ from the dead. His resurrection, therefore, is God's public testimony that sin has been condemned, and for ever put away; and the risen Lord being exalted to the right hand of God, crowned with glory and honour, appointed a Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec, invested with all power, and having all judgment committed to Him, are abundant proofs of the acceptance and security of all believers. And as to death and the grave, Who holds the keys? Did not Jesus say to His servant at His feet, "I have the keys of hell and of death"? What a comforting truth this is to the child of God! How impossible that one can sleep in death, or be laid in the grave, till Jesus unlocks the gates; and we may be assured He will open the gates for His loved ones at the best time, and it shall be neither too soon nor too late — neither shall the way be too easy nor too painful. How wonderfully does the heart of Jesus provide comfort for His fainting servant at His feet! How very sweetly He took away his fears! Oh, Christian reader! if you are almost ready to faint, behold your risen and exalted Saviour! Think of His person; consider His finished work upon the cross; behold Him triumphing over all your enemies in resurrection; contemplate Him justly exalted in heaven to the highest pinnacle of glory as your life, ever living to make intercession for you, and see Him securely holding the keys of hell and of death. Precious, glorious facts!

"The Saviour lives no more to die;

He lives our Head enthroned on high;

He lives triumphant o'er the grave;

He lives eternally to save!

He lives to still His people's fears;

He lives to wipe away their tears;

He lives their mansions to prepare;

He lives to bring them safely there."

Dear reader! sooner or later you must have to do with the Lord Jesus! Will it be as a Saviour, or as a Judge? Will He say to you, Come, ye blessed? or, Depart, ye cursed? Will you bow your knee to Him with joy in heaven; or with weeping in hell? Now He says, "Whosoever will, let Him take the water of life freely." Then He will say, "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me: for that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord." (Prov. 1: 24-29.)

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation

The Gospel of Our Salvation

Ephesians 1: 13.

H. F. Witherby.

Second edition, A. Holness.

— Preface (this file)

Chapter 1. — Forgiveness

Chapter 2. — Peace

Chapter 3. — Redeemed from Judgment

Chapter 4. — Brought to God

Chapter 5. — The Eternal Efficacy of the Blood of Christ

Chapter 6. — The Fruit of the Tree

Chapter 7. — The Root of the Tree

Chapter 8. — Dead in sins; Alive in Christ

Chapter 9. — Upon counting Self to be what God says it is

Chapter 10. — Deliverance from Self

Chapter 11. — Delivered from the Law

Chapter 12. — “Therefore now no condemnation”

Chapter 13. — The Resurrection and the Life

Chapter 14. — The New Creation

Chapter 15. — The good news of the glory of Christ

Chapter 16. — The power of the new life

Chapter 17. — Blameless before God

Chapter 18. — God, our God

Chapter 19. — God, our Father

Chapter 20. — “Always confident”

Preface.

It has been thought advisable to carefully revise this book before issuing a new edition.

If our reader should be led by the perusal of these pages to a more prayerful and careful searching of the Holy Scriptures, one great object of the writer will be realized. Our every thought about God, or about ourselves in relation to Him, should be brought to the test of the written Word; we each one must stand before God, and the character of our everlasting future will depend upon our present obedience to the truth. We cannot too strenuously urge upon our reader to search the Scriptures, and yet, while so doing, to look to God for the guidance of His Spirit, so that both heart and conscience may be searched through and through by the Word.

An attempt has been made in these pages to indicate some of the different stages by which God leads His people to a more distinct knowledge of Himself. Many can recall the time when the great hope of their souls was to know the forgiveness of sins; and — before God had made good to them His way of delivering His people from thraldom to self — their anguish, during this struggle after peace with God, and that strife within, which almost threatened to end in despair.

It may be, also, that the knowledge of forgiveness, peace, and deliverance, having been given by God, the heart turns with joy to the memories of those hours when God first unfolded to the soul the fact of the glory of the risen Christ; spread before faith's eye the bright and heavenly things which are the Christian's in Christ; and filled the affections with the invigorating yet patience-giving hope of the Lord's coming again.

Further still, the fact of the Holy Spirit indwelling God's children, and the knowledge of the Father's love, may be amongst the holy things which the reader has been given by God to rejoice in, and to prize.

Our souls grow as we know more of God, and these pages are once more issued with the earnest desire that God, by His Spirit, may use them to help seekers after the truth, to a clearer knowledge of the Christian's privileges, and to a more earnest searching into the exhaustless treasury of His Word.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 1

The Gospel of Our Salvation

1. Forgiveness.

Our first need, as sinners, is forgiveness; and there is forgiveness with God, of which His word thus speaks: “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.” (Rom. 4: 7, 8.) This blessedness is a present possession, “We have the forgiveness of sins” in Christ (Eph. 1: 7); and the portion is that of the simplest, as well as that of the most advanced believer, for we read — “I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you.” (1 John 2: 12.)

Forgiveness is the act of God towards the sinner.

We must not mix in our minds our tears, prayers, repentance, or any inward work with God's act of forgiveness. Suppose a man, having no means whatever, owes twenty pounds. His creditor pities him, and forgives him the debt. The forgiveness is not a long process worked within the mind of the debtor, but the act of the creditor: “I forgive you,” he says, and the forgiveness is accomplished. The debt no doubt made the debtor feel miserable; but when the creditor forgave the twenty pounds, the debt was gone, every farthing of it, not because of what the debtor felt, but because of what the creditor did.

Forgiveness is an act of pure grace upon the part of God.

We are entirely without resources; we are sold under sin, and we have no strength to do any single good thing whereby we can merit favour from God. On the contrary, every day and hour of our lives we add to the debt of sin. Yet whatever the debt of our sins may be, there is with God abounding grace to forgive it. Our Lord tells us of “two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty, and when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both;” at the same time showing us that the sinner, who has the greatest sense of sin, has the greatest sense of the grace which forgives sin.

Forgiveness being the act of God, and His own pure grace to sinners, we inquire —

What is the hindrance to the sinner receiving the knowledge of forgiveness of sins

Pride of heart, which refuses to believe his real state, his utter sinfulness and helplessness, is the great hindrance. Pride sends man to the treadmill of his own doings; and there Satan drives the helpless worker to despair, as the taskmasters lashed the Israelites of old, crying to them, when they could not make bricks without straw, “Ye be idle! ye be idle!” Brick-making did not bring the Israelites out of the house of bondage, neither will works bring a sinner out of his sins. Grace brought Israel into liberty, and grace frees the soul. Seeking to obtain forgiveness by our doings is spiritual slavery. God will not be in debt to any man. Listen to what He says: “To him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” (Rom. 4: 4, 5.)

Works and grace cannot be mixed.

One drop of the poison of man's works let fall into a vessel full of God's grace, deprives grace of its character. God will not allow that man shall spoil His gracious act of forgiveness by any mixture of works, for “If by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace.” (Rom. 11: 6.)

The ground upon which God forgives sin.

Self must be set aside and God brought in, if we would know His forgiveness. God consulted Himself and glorified His throne. God magnified His own character of righteousness regarding sin by the death of Christ. The blood which Jesus shed is of sufficient value to discharge the debt of every sinner; and God in grace forgives sins upon the ground of what the Lord has done. The blood of Jesus is available for all; and God's grace is like an exhaustless deposit placed at the bank, so that all, who are poor and needy, may obtain “the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace.” (Eph. 1: 7.) God's righteousness has been magnified about the very sins which burden the sinner's conscience, so that He declares “at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the Justifier of him who believeth in Jesus.” (Rom. 3: 26.)

The following homely illustration of debt being forgiven was used of God to give the subject of the story assurance as to the forgiveness of her sins. May our reader have equally simple faith!

At a village shop the old woman, into whose debt her customers ran, would carefully mark upon the back of her shop door how much each one owed her. There, in white chalk, as well as upon her memory, was written the name of each purchaser with the exact amount owing beneath it. Name and debt were riveted together in the old woman's mind, and could be only separated by due and full payment of all that was owing.

Amongst the old woman's customers was one, whose conscience sorely troubled her on account of the debt of her sins, and who dreaded the opening of the books when small and great shall stand before the great white throne, and be judged according to their works. Our friend knew that her sins could never be erased from God's book by her own doings, and that unless they were blotted out she must be everlastingly lost.

“Why do you mourn thus over your sins?” said one to her; “why do you not believe what God says respecting those who really desire forgiveness? Has He not told such that the debt is paid? You never trouble about the chalk marks upon the shop door after the money is put down. Can you not likewise rest in what the blood of Christ has done in paying the debt of sin, and satisfying the demand of divine righteousness?

“I will go to the shop and see what she has against your name, and will pay the due; she will then rub out the chalk marks, so that when you next go there, she will tell you that not a mark stands against your name, and you will thankfully believe her. Yet in this work you will have no part, save the satisfaction that flows from believing your debt is paid.

“And thus, dear friend, it is with the terrible debt of your sins over which you mourn, and for which you own you have nothing to pay. Justice is satisfied, for the blood of God's Son has been shed for the sins of His people, and not one sin is left against their names. Jesus has paid the price of them all in His own blood. Indeed, Justice has, as it were, by that precious blood, wiped out all the debt of their sins; and we, who believe God, can and do rejoice in freedom from the debt of sin; and more, it is God's own joy to tell us that our names are no longer connected with our sins, but that our names are written in the Lamb's book of life.”

God graciously owned the illustration from her every-day life, and our friend believed, and henceforth rejoiced in God.

The sins of God's people are not only forgiven — they are also forgotten.

An earthly sovereign once said when granting a pardon, “I forgive, but I cannot forget.” If God acted thus, we could never be happy in His presence, but He says: “Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” (Heb. 8: 12.) Thus we can dwell in liberty in His presence, and rejoice in His grace.

The sins which God forgives, are ALL sins.

Some seem to think that a line is drawn at conversion, and that all sins up to that day are blotted out, but they are not at rest when thinking of what sin they may possibly yet commit. “I am safe up to this moment,” said one to us. “But what of tomorrow?” we inquired. “Ah, of that I cannot tell,” was the reply. Self, not God, was his confidence.

God does not say He forgives past, present, or future sins, but SINS. “Through this Man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: and by Him all that believe are justified from all things.” (Acts 13: 38, 39.) The two “alls” in this verse take in every believer, and everything, all who believe are justified from all things. Whether it be strong faith or weak faith is not the question; but, do we believe? And, if we do believe, the question is not great sins or small sins, but all sins; nay God, in His grace, has spoken of things — not gross sins merely, but every kind of thing which we have done, or shall do, so that our consciences may be at rest, and our hearts rejoice before Him.

The perfect work of Christ embraces all sins. Could it do less? It is terrible unbelief to weigh out our sins against Christ's blood in the scales of our imagination. In the balances of the sanctuary we find that our sins, however heavy, are nothing at all in view of the preciousness of Christ's blood. The grievous hindrance to our rejoicing in God's forgiveness is unbelief in what Christ has done, and in God's grace which forgives all sins.

God knew every one of our sins when He “laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53: 6), and Jesus endured the weight of them all when “His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” (1 Peter 2: 24.)

Where then are your sins, believer? They are not upon you, for God laid them upon Jesus, They are not upon Jesus, for He has borne them and is in glory; where then are your sins? They are gone. Rest in the work of Christ, believe and rejoice. Your sins are forgiven you for His Name's sake; you have the forgiveness of sins through Christ; you are one of God's blessed people. “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.”

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 2

The Gospel of Our Salvation

2. Peace.

There are many believers who, while having life in Christ, have not simple faith in His work upon the cross, and in Himself in the glory. We meet with these souls daily, for there are thousands of them, and the more in earnest the more melancholy they are — the more zealous, the more sad.

It is to such that this chapter is addressed. Yes! beloved reader, peace is that which you long for; peace is that which now and again you seem to see through the mists and clouds of unbelief — but solid peace you have not. And each fresh struggle after the longed-for peace ends in deeper dejection, as feelings, tears, and resolves, rise up against you in condemnation, adding heavier weights to your already over-burdened spirit. Nor is the Tempter still; his insinuations, his suggestions, are your sorrowful companions in the dark valley of your grief. But, beloved, burdened soul, there is peace — peace now and for ever — peace for you!

Peace with God, as forgiveness, is the proper portion of all believers. Many are looking within their hearts for peace; but the true ground of peace must be looked for in God's word. Peace with God is a very different thing from a peaceful state of soul; the former is the result of Christ's work in atonement; the latter of a work in the believer. The basis of the one is outside self, and is the work accomplished by Christ; the other is the effect of a work within the believer wrought by the Holy Spirit. The first great fact for us to lay hold of is, that —

Peace has been Made.

This God Himself tells us in His word; and can any news be more welcome to the distressed and anxious heart?

What had to be done in order that peace could be made?

This is our first question. God Himself had to be satisfied. His wrath against sin had to be met. His righteousness had to be magnified. His heart had to find its rest. How could poor worms of the earth have peace with God, until God could say that the offending thing was put out of the way? So long as one single sin remained without a propitiatory, and one act of unrighteousness remained with the claims of justice against it unmet, so long there could not be peace. It is vain to ask our consciences whether they are at peace until we know that upon God's side it is peace.

What is the burden that bows down your head, and bears so heavily upon your troubled heart? It is your sense of your sins, your sense of your own unworthiness, or perhaps it may be the conscious want of a due sense of sin! But the cup which the Lord drank was not filled with our sense of sin, but with God's wrath and indignation against sin. Therefore as we think of peace with God, let our hearts fully heed, that God Himself has been magnified; that His righteousness and holiness have been glorified by the work of His Son. And the measure of God's righteousness is nothing less than Himself — the standard of His holiness, Himself.

How was God's righteousness satisfied?

None but an infinitely holy Being could meet the infinite holiness of God — infinite perfection alone could satisfy the requirements of the infinite justice of God. Christ alone could magnify God in regard to sin. The countless offerings by the law never afforded God's heart rest regarding sin: “Sacrifice and offering and burnt offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein.” (Heb. 10: 8.) Therefore God prepared a body for His Son, wherein He might suffer for sin, and the Holy One said, “Lo I come to do Thy will, O God.” Having finished the work which His Father gave Him to do, having drunk the bitter cup to the dregs, and having gone back to the glory on the right hand of the Majesty on high, nothing more remains to be done, and through Him the “Gospel of Peace” is preached to sinners.

And as there was only one Person capable of satisfying the righteousness of God regarding sin, so there was only one way whereby that one Person could accomplish this end. Jesus did not make peace by becoming the Babe of Bethlehem, by His tears, by His mighty works of love, by His holy life — no, the work could be alone accomplished by His death, for “without shedding of blood is no remission.” (Heb. 9: 22.)

Until Divine Justice was at rest about our sins there could not be peace. Our sins had to be taken out of the way. Jesus took our place and suffered in our stead. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him.” (Isa. 53: 5.) And we have nothing whatever to do in this mighty work of making peace; our happy portion is to believe, and to praise God for what His Son has done for us.

But not only were our sins borne, our evil nature also was judged and condemned at the cross of Christ. “He hath made Him sin for us, Who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” It was God who made our iniquities to meet upon the Substitute; it was God who made His Son, when upon the cross, sin for us — that is, what we are by nature. And for this great end, that we, who are sin by nature, might become, in Christ risen from the dead, the righteousness of God! Sins not only taken away, and our sinful nature condemned, but a new and divinely righteous standing ours in the sight of God!

God, in His own righteousness and holiness, has been magnified by what the Lord did for us, and what He was for us upon the cross. The Divine Son has finished the work which His Father gave Him to do! Righteousness and Love speak in their respective tongues of His precious blood; both proclaim, “Peace made through the blood of His cross.” (Col. 1: 20.) When He bore our sins, when He was wounded for our transgressions, when He satisfied every claim of Righteousness and met every wish of Love, when He bled and died upon the accursed tree — peace was made.

How do we know that God's righteousness is satisfied?

How do we know that all our sins are borne, and that Christ's work meets the uttermost requirements of infinite Justice? Because He who was our Sin-bearer on the cross, and who died for our sins, has been raised from the dead by God. The righteousness of God demanded that “Christ,” who “died for our sins” ( 1 Cor. 15: 3), and, who had magnified God about the sins for which He died, should be raised from the dead. He was crucified through weakness; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter; He was taken by wicked hands and slain, but He was raised by the glory of the Father. Our offences are linked with the cross of Christ; our justification is linked with the resurrection of Christ. The justice of God demanded satisfaction in full for our offences, and meted out to Him, when in our place, all that which we deserve, so that Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” But when the Lord had completed the work God raised Him from the dead, and seated Him upon the throne in heaven. And now God proclaims to us, “Peace by Jesus Christ!”

Let us place these words of the Lord together:

“Why hast Thou forsaken Me?” “It is finished!” “Peace unto you.”

How exquisitely do they unfold to us the gospel! He was forsaken because He took our place; but the wrath has been borne, the work is completed, He Himself has finished it; therefore in the fulness of that work He says, “Peace unto you.”

Yes! Our Lord risen from the grave, brought with His own lips the glad tidings of peace to His sorrowing disciples.

As Victor from the fight He stood in their midst, and proclaimed the result of His anguish; the fruit of His sufferings and death —

Peace.

The billows had rolled over Him; the storm had exhausted itself upon Him; the sword had found its sheath in His bosom, when, risen out of the grave, He announced “Peace” — peace established in resurrection-power — peace, eternally secure. And having proclaimed peace, Jesus showed the Divine evidence or it: “His hands and His side.” (John 20: 20.)

Upon Himself He bade His disciples look. We behold Jesus risen from the dead, and see in His once wounded hands, and feet, and side, the evidence that our sins have been borne, and that the justice of God has raised the Sin-bearer from the dead. There is none other evidence of peace having been made, like the Person of Him who made it.

It is the wonder-working love of God in the gift of His Son, the miracle of grace in Jesus. shedding His blood upon Calvary for wicked man, that overwhelms the natural hatred of our hearts to God. The love of sin stood between our hearts and God, and by wicked works we were enemies to Him; but God's love to us in our sins, and the blood of Jesus shed for our sins, draw out our hearts in love to God. Having made peace by the blood of His cross God hath reconciled us to Himself by the death of His Son. The enmity of our hearts is subdued, and in the righteousness of God we learn His love. God is light — God is love.

Thus, before we were born, long centuries ago, peace was made. The Eternal God, according to His own Majesty and Being, devised the plan. In the depths of His wisdom He settled the mighty way of peace, and His own Son came down to this earth to make it good. And faith now says of the once crucified but risen Saviour, “He is our peace.” (Eph. 2: 14.)

How is peace obtained?

“Have you made your peace with God my good woman?” said a kindly-intentioned visitor to an old friend of ours. Now although our old friend was dying, yet she knew perfectly well what she was saying, when she replied “No; that I have not, sir.”

“Then see to it at once, and make your peace with God before you die, I entreat you,” replied the visitor, with solemn earnestness.

After a few moments' silence, the aged believer fixed her eyes upon him, and said, slowly, “It was all done eighteen hundred years ago. 'He hath made peace through the blood of His cross.'”

It is a fearful thing to attempt to make our peace with God! a dreadful delusion for a dying hour. “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 5: 1.)

The stone over which so many stumble is their feelings. But our experiences do not affect God's fact. Whether the believer is in a peaceful state of soul, or harassed and disturbed, the fact that peace is made remains unchanged. The sun has risen, and though clouds blot out his beams from sight, and a chilly atmosphere takes the place of his genial glow, yet the fact that the sun shines, remains unchanged. What the believer has to do is, by faith, to forsake the valley of distrust over which the clouds hang, and to climb the mountains above the clouds.

Some little time ago a friend of ours, when speaking to a christian, asked her if she knew the blessing of having settled peace with God. She replied, “He sometimes hides His face from me.”

“Why does He do so?” our friend inquired.

“Because of my sinfulness,” answered the doubting believer, adding — “Oh! sir, my heart is such a wicked one, and I often have sinful thoughts and feelings which make Him hide His face from me.”

“But,” asked our friend, “Is God not satisfied with what Jesus was and is for you? Can He then hide His face from you? No it is you, who; by looking within yourself, and, pulling the blind down, shut Him out. You must keep the blind up. If the sun is pouring forth all its golden beauty, and you are keeping the blind up, it will show forth all its power to you; but if you draw the blind down you hinder its rays from entering your room. And if you become occupied with self, and are taken up with your own feelings and thoughts, instead of with Christ, you are in darkness, for you thereby shut out the light of His presence.”

The thought of “keeping the blind up” helped the poor doubter much; and she received the truth of the perfect satisfaction which God has in Christ, and peace coming to us through Christ in glory. “Keep the blind up,” reader, look not within the dark chamber of your heart, but outside of yourself to Christ.

Again, many doubts are bred in the bosom, because there is not faith in a risen Saviour. Too many linger over the cross as if Jesus were still there. As if He were still a dying and not a living Redeemer. Upon the cross the work was done; by the blood there shed the peace was made; but a living Jesus, a risen Jesus, is the object of faith, and His words to you, as He shows you His hands and His side, are — “Be not faithless, but believing.”

“I am ever looking to Jesus upon the cross,” said one. Another gently replied, He is not there.” No, He is not upon the cross; He is upon the throne. He has made the peace, and now He is our peace.

Reader, do you believe on God who raised up Jesus from the dead? Then you are justified. And when did this justifying occur? Upon your believing! There and then God justified you. God did this; and what then shall you say? Oh! in the words of scripture; these great and sweet words — “Therefore,” because God has justified me, I have “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 3

The Gospel of Our Salvation

3. Redeemed from Judgment.

Redemption is directly taught in God's word, for the first time, in the story of the Passover. God would have the bondsmen of Egypt His freedmen. Rest had been promised them, the tidings of the pleasant land had been brought them, but not one step towards liberty could the bondsmen take until they were redeemed by the blood of the paschal lamb.

Love wafted the gentle tidings of the good land to the fainting slaves, but the stern fact remained unmoved — they were in a land under judgment. Justice had drawn its sword, it exacted its claims against them, and from justice they could not escape.

But the judgment which fell upon Egypt was forestalled for Israel; the blood outside their houses forbad the Destroyer entering within. The crimson stain upon lintel and door-posts uttered its voice, and the angel passed over.

There was no escape save by blood. Mercy retired from the land, chased away by the Destroyer. Wherever the blood was not, there fell the sword. Whatever house bore not the evidence of having already been under the sentence of judgment, which had not appropriated the blood to its own door, lay under the wrath. Honour, titles, personal worth were no shield; the sword clave through them all and smote the firstborn dead. “From the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat upon his throne, unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon,” all perished. The very customs of Egypt augmented the horrors of that night, for at death's entry the living fled from their houses — all hurrying hither and thither, till every street and village in the land echoed with their terror. “There was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where there was not one dead.”

When the great day of His wrath has come, who shall be able to stand? Who? The great, the mighty, the noble of the earth? Who? The well-disposed, the upright, the moral? They, and they only, who are redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”

“Show me proof that I am saved. Oh! for evidence that I am amongst God's people!”

“The blood shall be to you for a token.” There is none other granted. Look not for a sign within your breast, see it in the blood of Christ; look not at your feelings, but at His sufferings; not at your joy, but His pain. It would not have been faith but disobedience in Israel to have spent their night in inquiring and looking if the blood marks were upon their house-doors. “None of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning,” God had said. And they sat within and waited for the daybreak. Are they, whose doors are shut, and who assemble in fear and trembling around their paschal lamb, less safe than their neighbours who calmly wait for liberty's coming morn as they keep the feast? Is the first-born of the pale, dejected mother less secure than hers whose strong faith in Jehovah already accepts God's freedom? Nay, it is the blood without the door, not the feelings of them within the house, wherein the safety lies. Faith obeyed God, took the blood and sprinkled it, and in the redeeming blood was the security.

“But give me evidence that God is satisfied respecting my sins.”

Heed His words: “When I see the blood I will pass over you.” His sword of justice has been plunged into the adorable Substitute. His justice asks for no second judgment, no double dying for sin. The very sword which slew the lamb, now shelters those for whom the blood was shed.

We once bent over a poor dying man and said, “Friend, you are leaving this world. You will very soon appear before God. How is it about your soul? Where are your sins?” He was too weak to lift a finger, but looked up calmly and whispered, “My sins are under the blood.”

The poor man had received the truth in the love of it. He had believed what God says respecting the blood of His Son. He rested in this — that God looks upon the sacrifice of His Son, and not upon the sins of those who put their trust in Him.

There is a fine illustration of redeeming love in the 25th chapter of Leviticus.

The case is brought forward of an Israelite, who sinks down lower and lower into poverty, until at length he sells himself to a stranger, and becomes a bondsman; for, according to the ancient law, there was a necessity that debts should be paid, and if the debtor had no means wherewith to pay them, then he himself was sold. The law of God did not allow the principle that because a man is unable to pay his debts therefore he may go free. Neither does the gospel permit excuse upon the ground of inability. There is no bankruptcy court in divine justice where a man's sins can be arranged for God will never receive as an excuse, “I was led astray; I was unfortunate, and so became ruined.” The law of God is firm to the letter, and His justice cannot yield to the petition of human weakness. But while the law was stern, there was room left for the entrance of redeeming love; though the debtor's debts have to be paid to the uttermost farthing, yet grace has provided for his redemption; “After that he is sold he may be redeemed again; one of his brethren may redeem him either his uncle, or his uncle's son, may redeem him, or any that is nigh of kin unto him of his family may redeem him; or if he be able he may redeem himself.” (Lev. 25: 48, 49.) The law maintained its rights, while grace asserted hers.

As for our redeeming ourselves, that is utterly out of the question. Every sin must be atoned for, and we are by nature sold under sin and we are the servants of sin. We have no power whatever to reduce the number of our daily sins, much less to lay up a store of good deeds to procure us liberty from past sins,

Our redemption must come from another, and from One who is not like ourselves, the servant of sin. Our Redeemer has need to be rich, and rich in the perfection of His person as well as in the love of His heart — rich in God's sight, and in love towards men. In order to be our Redeemer, the Lord became our kinsman, and having become a man, in the free love of His heart He bought us from our bondage. He paid for us with the price of His own precious blood. We are not our own; we are bought with a price.

The redeeming love of Jesus cannot be other than the constant theme of our hearts. Like the poor slave whom the rich stranger ransomed, and then, to her astonishment, set at liberty, we are constrained to cry, “He redeemed me, he redeemed me.” She became the willing servant of her redeemer. It was not strange to her to devote her life to her compassionate deliverer; and surely, like her, we would treasure our Redeemer's infinite grace and devote ourselves to His service crying, “He redeemed me”

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 4

The Gospel of Our Salvation

4. Brought to God.

God's ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. The compassion of man rejoices over the freed slave. It is a solace to him to think of the 'street' children of our great cities taken out of their degradation, rescued from their friendless lives, and nurtured in a home. Who would take the starving, evil-taught child out of his vile misery, and bring him into his own family to dwell amongst the children there? No, a moral barrier between man and man seems to say, thus far shalt thou come and no further. Christ died not only to cleanse us and to bring us out of our degradation and our sin, but to bring us to God — not as the starving child — not in the corruption of sin — not in the rags of our former alien state. No, by grace we are bought out of our old state, and far more than this we are brought into a new one.

The prodigal's reception:

The prodigal returning from the far country approached his father's house with the thought that there he should find bread, and a place amongst the servants. Such were not however his father's thoughts, for there was a feast prepared for the son, and a place for him at his father's table. The young man left his home with that portion of the goods which fell to him. He came back penniless, ragged, and starving. And to find the best robe and all things new and suited to his father's thoughts about him. We do not read that when in his father's presence the son said a word about the servant's place, which he had mentally assigned to himself: the love of his father prohibited the rising of such thoughts in his mind. The father's heart and the father's welcome henceforth occupied his soul. And we are so perfectly fitted for God by the work of His Son, that His presence is our dwelling-place.

How Israel was brought to God:

The mercy of God towards Israel did not cease when He saw the blood upon their door-posts, and passed over them. It did not cease in saving them from judgment, but He brought them up out of the land of Egypt, and from the house of bondage. And well did they realize this, for upon the wilderness shore of the Red Sea they lifted up their voices in mighty chorus, singing, “Thou in Thy mercy hast led forth the people which Thou hast redeemed; Thou hast guided them in Thy strength unto Thy holy habitation.” (Ex. 15: 13.)

They were no longer in Egypt or of Egypt, but clean out of it; and, by faith, they saw themselves guided by Jehovah's strength unto His holy habitation.

How often do we hear a newly-converted soul speak of himself as if he were delivered from judgment in order to find his way to heaven. But though we are not yet brought to heaven, we are already brought to God.

A moral change is effected in the soul when being “brought to God” is known.

There is wonderful repose for the soul in the fact that we are “brought to God.” When this is realized a new view of spiritual things opens before us. Doubtless, Israel, upon the standpoint of the rocks of the Canaan side of the Red Sea, viewed God's good news to them very differently from when waiting with their loins girt within their houses in Egypt, eating the passover. They sang upon the other side of the Red Sea (we read of no song in Egypt), and right glorious is that song; so glorious that God has recorded in His book none other song of praise from human lips before it. There are numerous songs given after this redemption triumph, sweet and tender, victorious and exulting; some sung by men upon earth, and some by men in heaven; time songs and eternity songs, but not one before this grand utterance of perfect redemption. And what is true regarding the book is true regarding our lives. There is no real praise to God from the heart of man antecedent to the praise for perfect redemption.

Israel had groaned and cried upon the Egypt side of the sea. They thought that God had brought them to the borders of their land of toil to make for them a vast grave at the sea; but the grave they feared was for their enemies; for themselves it was the gateway of liberty. “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord” They stood still. They saw His salvation. “The waters were a wall unto them, on their right hand and on their left.” They “walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea.” Within those waters Pharaoh's chariot and host were cast — his chosen captains drowned. “The depths covered them — they sank into the bottom as a stone.”

Satan may pursue — he may make to tremble — as did Pharaoh up to the Red Sea; but as at the sea Pharaoh's power was for ever broken, so at the resurrection of Christ the power of Satan finds its eternal end. God's people are saved, and great is God's salvation. The Lord is risen. He has passed through death for us, though death shall overwhelm the foe. The force of the enemy ceases at the grave of Christ. Resurrection ground he can not reach. The blood of the Lamb of God is our redemption: the resurrection of Christ is our liberty. The virtue of both is ours; and, in Him who died and rose again, we are reconciled to God. “All things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 5: 18.) His grave is our gateway of freedom. The powers of darkness cannot pursue the saint beyond the borders of the grave of Jesus. We were redeemed when in the world; but now we are brought out of its judgment; we are brought to God in Christ.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 5

The Gospel of Our Salvation

5. The Eternal Efficacy of the Blood of Christ.

The value of the work effected by our Lord once upon the cross is everlasting. No addition can be made to it, for it is complete; no repetition can be made of it, for it is finished; no interruption of its efficacy can occur, for its value is abiding; what Christ has done upon Calvary once, has been done for ever. We gather from the Epistle to the Hebrews four facts concerning the glorious fulness of Christ's work: —

SINS ARE GONE.

THE MAJESTY OF GOD IS MAGNIFIED.

CHRIST ABIDES IN GOD'S PRESENCE FOR US.

THE QUESTION OF SIN IS NOT TO BE REOPENED.

1. Sins are FOR EVER gone, because Christ ONCE shed His blood.

“Such an high priest became us . . . who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this He did once, when He offered up Himself.” (Heb. 7: 26, 27.) Under the law, there was a daily need for sacrifice, and a daily offering of the same sacrifices. The priest of Israel offered up the daily sacrifice (Lev. 8), the blood of which availed for the day upon which it was shed. It neither covered past sins, nor future sins. Fresh sins called for fresh blood. There was no abiding value in the blood shed. God required constant sacrifices, and the sins of the people required constant offerings. Daily sins had to be met by the sacrifice of the day; but the conscience of the comer to God was never at rest, he was ever remembering sins, and ever coming to God for his sins to be put away. There was divine design in this; He who gave the law declared, “the law made nothing perfect.” (Heb. 7: 19.)

How different the sacrifice of Jesus! The sinless Offerer offered Himself once and for ever. “He needeth not daily . . . to offer up sacrifice” (Heb. 7: 27), are the words of the Holy Ghost, for He met the need “once,” when He offered up His own peerless body upon Calvary. Once and for ever is the divine record of the sacrifice of the cross; once offered — never repeated. Faith allows no darkening thought of twice or thrice doing the same thing; no presumptuous daring that there can possibly be of any sort whatever the shadow of a repetition of this sacrifice. And the result of His work, so far as our need as sinners is concerned, is this, never repairing to Calvary for a second putting away of our sins, but constant and daily praising of God for the one offering of His Son, the efficacy of whose blood lasts for ever and ever; a continual remembrance, not of sins, but of His offering, which more than eighteen hundred years ago met our need as sinners.

Glorious as is this view of the work of our Lord meeting our need as sinners, yet there is a second view of the fulness of His work magnifying the throne of God, and meeting its requirements, to which we do well to turn our earnest gaze.

2. The majesty of the nature and character of God are FOR EVER magnified, because Christ has entered into the Holy place by His blood ONCE.

“By His own blood He entered in once into the Holy place, having obtained eternal redemption.” (Heb. 9: 12.) The Holy place, typically, is that within the veil of the tabernacle, where God dwelt, and where His throne was; the Holiest, actually, is the very presence of God. The cherubim, figurative of God's government, overshadowed the Mercy Seat upon the Ark, wherein were the tables of the law setting out His righteous requirements from man. They were represented as looking upon the Mercy Seat, whereon the blood was sprinkled. The blood of the sacrifice was the execution of the claims of divine justice, and the cherubim were so designed that their faces looked upon the blood. The blood which was carried into the Holiest was that of the yearly sacrifice of the great day of atonement, and made for the whole nation; and the blood thus carried into the Holiest had a peculiar typical value, for it was that of the sacrifice termed the Lord's lot; and was, therefore, in a special way the Lord's portion in the sacrifice. It was the sacrifice which should make atonement for the Holy place respecting the sins of the people, and the efficacy of which should enable the Holy God, morally speaking, to dwell amongst a naturally sinful people. The blood of this sacrifice was sprinkled not upon an erring people to satisfy their consciences, but upon His throne — His Mercy-seat, to satisfy His righteousness about their sins.

Here is an insight given us into the claims of the divine nature — a subject of the deepest value to us as God's creatures. We turn from the deep need of our consciences to that which is deep beyond comparison — the requirements of God Himself. Let us suppose an ordinary throne or seat of justice in our own land, upon which the judge is seated. However mercifully-minded he may be, yet so long as he occupies the throne of justice, the judge must of necessity uphold its honour and dignity. If the judge were to make light of the laws of his country, and set the prisoners free, he would dishonour the throne of justice. Should even the judge's chief friend be proved a criminal, he would be bound either to vacate his judgeship or to condemn the guilty man. When we speak of the throne of God, His holiness and His justice are present to our minds. God cannot deny Himself. He hates sin. Sin is the defiance of His holiness, therefore He cannot pass it by. But the blood of Christ has rendered full satisfaction to the holiness of God respecting sin, and the requirements of His throne of justice are perfectly met. If, then, His throne, if His righteousness, and the holiness of His being, are satisfied respecting human guilt, how surely may our consciences rest where God rests! If God, in His holiness, finds no fault in those who trust in the blood of Jesus, surely the voice of their consciences maybe still.

Now, the Lord has obtained eternal redemption — not merely redemption, for in that there might be a slipping back into servitude, Israel might return to slavery, the freed bondsman might again fall into debt and bonds — but having obtained eternal redemption the Lord entered into the Holiest by His own blood. He went into the presence of the Majesty on High as priest, having poured out His sacrificial blood upon the cross, and He went in there in the virtue of the atoning blood.

As years rolled round, the sacrifices of the great day of atonement were annually repeated, and the veil ever remained hiding the Mercy-seat and the throne of God; “The Holy Ghost thus signifying, that the way into the Holiest of all was not yet made manifest.” (Heb. 9: 8.) For until there should be a sacrifice capable of magnifying divine majesty, there could be no liberty of access for man to God Himself. But when the Lord shed His blood, the veil of the temple was rent in the midst in twain from top to bottom.

The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, had magnified the nature of God about sin, and thereupon God unveiled the Holiest. The way into His presence was made manifest.

God has now revealed His righteousness to us in the gospel, and has shown us the death of Christ satisfying His righteousness, and hence the very throne of God's justice becomes the security of our salvation.

It is our great privilege to see by faith God in His righteousness, with Jesus in His presence for us, and not a veil before the Holiest. The high priests of old went yearly into Jehovah's presence about sin; took the blood there, which spoke for the year's sins, and then retired from God's presence only to return again another year, once more to raise the question of atonement, for the blood of their sacrifices could not avail to meet the majesty of His throne. Our eyes witness the glorious contrast — “For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.” (Heb. 9: 24.) “He entered once into the Holiest.” We see Himself having gone into the presence of God upon our behalf — the accepted Offerer at the right hand of the Majesty on High. What peace there is in thus beholding Jesus! His work upon the cross has told us all our sins are gone. His entering into the Holiest by His own blood has told us that “by the blood of Jesus” we have “boldness to enter the Holiest,” whither He has gone.

3. Christ having effected the work ONCE, by which sin will be put away, abides CONTINUALLY in God's presence for us.

“Once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.” (Heb. 9: 26.) It is a glorious fact that not only are our sins gone, and the nature of God is magnified, but that Christ having put away our sins, He, and not our sins, is continually before God. Instead of looking upon our sins God looks upon Him who put our sins away. The high priests of old could not remain within the veil. They were the representatives of the people, and the blood which they brought in with them could not avail to sustain them within the Holiest. Our High Priest, bearing our names upon His Person, abides within the Holiest of All — in heaven itself, in the presence of God, for us. The blood which He shed once having put away our sins from God's presence, nothing now remains to be done. But He who did the work for His people abides upon their behalf in the Divine presence. He is always there for us.

The high priests of old stood before the Mercy-seat and sprinkled there the blood which was to atone for sins, and departed. Our High Priest sits on the right hand of God for us in continuance. Within the tabernacle of old there was no seat provided, for there was no rest obtained by its sacrifices. God has said to His Son, “Sit Thou upon My right hand,” for He has finished the work which His Father gave Him to do, and now He rests from that work. Once God in His justice forsook Him upon the cross, now God in His justice has established Him as man upon the throne.

What a scene of rest in the presence of God does this view of Christ unfold to us — His toil ended — His work completed — the sins for which He died atoned for the people for whom He died, at liberty to enter into the Holiest where He is — He Himself seated upon the throne, their Representative! Ponder these three facts, christian reader. Your need as a sinner met; the majesty of God's throne magnified about your sins by the death of His Son; God's risen Son seated upon His throne, and God looking upon Him instead of upon your sins — and gladly own that, therefore, there can be

4. No re-opening of the question of sin, since Christ has settled it ONCE and FOR EVER.

When the Lord came to the earth it was to take up and settle, once for all, the awful question of sin. He is coming a second time: “As it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment; so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation.” (Heb. 9: 27, 28.) He is coming again, but not to suffer a second time; not to go into the question of sin a second time, but “without sin — apart from sin — unto salvation.” He is coming to bring His own into the fulness of salvation, to save them from the circumstances, the sorrow, the death of this scene, even as He has already saved them from judgment.

The high priest of Israel entered within the veil on the great day of atonement, and the anxious gaze of the people fixed itself upon the door of the tabernacle. If he came not out, if he died in the presence of God, their hopes were utterly blasted; the blood was not accepted; their sins remained upon them. But the folds of the drapery of the tabernacle doors move; the eyes of ten thousands gladden; the anxious hour of suspense is over. Their high priest appears; Jehovah has accepted the blood. Because he lives they live also.

No anxious expectation “Is He accepted?” fills our hearts. Our expectations are bound up in this great word Salvation. We look for Him to come again, not as high priests of old came out from the Holiest, to take blood again into God's presence, but to take us ourselves into the Father's house in the fulness of resurrection and joy; “for unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin (i.e., apart from the settled question of sin), unto salvation.”

Some, indeed, look for Him with deeper love and more longing desire than others; but all for whom He died look for Him, and unto all such will He appear before long unto salvation. Then, christian reader, we shall know more deeply, and speak together more admiringly of the value of the precious blood of Christ.

“Unto him who loves us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion, for ever and ever, amen.” Rev. 1: 5, 6.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 6

The Gospel of Our Salvation

6. The Fruit of the Tree.

No right estimate can be formed of what sin is in God's sight, until the gospel itself be known: hence our chapters upon God's grace towards us, precede this and the following chapter upon the fruit and root of the tree, human nature.

True, the Holy Spirit makes us to feel our need of Christ before showing to us who Christ is, and what He has done for us, yet as a matter of fact, we learn more about what we are, after having the knowledge of Christ, than during our anxiety to be assured of salvation; and the farther advanced we are in the knowledge of grace the more fit are we to read self in the light of divine holiness.

In the grand gospel epistle — that to the Romans — God first shows what man is by the evidence of his acts, and next by the setting out of what he is by nature. Romans 1, verses 1-15, are the introduction to what maybe called the divine gospel sermon, the text of which

THE GOSPEL OF GOD

is found in verses 16-18. This sermon has, so far as it relates to fallen man, two great parts — one discovering what the fruit of the tree is; the other, what the tree itself is. And God in His abounding grace first reveals His remedy for the corrupt fruit, and next His provision for the state of the root. In other words, the gospel of God first meets the guilt of man; next, the nature of man.

Looking at and judging the tree by its fruits, God from verse 19 of chapter 1 to verse 20 of chapter 3 — divides the world into three parts, and surveys man in each. The field of the world is mapped out into three portions, and the crops borne by each are judged by God.

We have — first, the uncultivated portion (Rom. 1: 19-32); second, the portion tended by the hand of philosophy (Rom. 2: 1-11) third, that favoured part which was ploughed by the law and watered by the prophets. (Rom. 2: 12 — 3: 20.)

Before the cross of Christ a large part of the world was allowed to grow on without any restraint. A section of it, however, had human hands to tend it; it was sown with philosophy and reason. But a part of the world had been under the direct care of God, whose watchful energy over His nation we well know. When Christ died the period of human cultivation ended, and in our epistle the fruits are brought in and examined.

Man's estimate of the field!

Let us inquire what was man's idea of the fruits of the field. The philosopher, walled around with reason and human wisdom, gloried in his powers of mind, but, while judging the vile weeds and evil growth in the barbarians around him, he acted as vilely as they. The Jew — the religious man, who had been fenced in by Jehovah — boasted in the fence, boasted in the possession of the letter of the law, and of having the oracles of God committed to his custody, yet brought forth fruits as worthless as the rest. Then, as now, man was very well satisfied with himself.

But what was God's estimate of the field?

Of the wild part, we read “As they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” — “they are without excuse.” (Rom. 1: 28, 20.) Of that which man's philosophy had cultivated, God says, Thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?” (Rom. 2: 3.) Of the religious, the Jewish part, the record is, “They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” (Rom. 3: 12.) And the condition of the whole world is summed up with these solemn and terrible words

“GUILTY BEFORE GOD,” (Rom. 3: 19.)

Wherever God looked at man's works He found them utterly bad — the fruits of the tree were hopelessly evil.

Jew or Gentile, philosopher or simple, none were righteous, none understood, none sought after God. Man's throat was an open sepulchre; his tongue the instrument of deceit; under his lips was poison; his mouth was filled with cursing and bitterness; his feet were swift to shed blood; his ways were destruction and misery; the way of peace he knew not and no fear of God was before his eyes.

Such is God's photograph of man!

Yes, in such terrible language the God of Light and Truth photographs His guilty creature man. This was the end of the choicest religious and mental cultivation. This was the fruit borne after four thousand years of testing. Reader, do you believe God? Do you bow to this view of yourself as a human being? Do you practically confess that eighteen hundred years ago God declared man to be utterly evil?

Faith refuses to excuse self, owning before God, man's hopeless guilt, and learns, by grace, the way of peace. Unbelief, on the contrary, attempts to improve self, persists in seeking to cultivate the tree, and then proceeds wilfully and deliberately upon the way of destruction.

No difference existing:

The grace of God meets us just as and where we are, and meets all men alike, whether Jew or Gentile, philosopher or simple. The whole race of man is guilty before God; “there is no difference; for all have sinned” (Rom. 3: 22, 23): the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ is “unto all; and upon all them that believe; for there is no difference.” All are alike in the ruin — all are alike the objects of the remedy.

The righteous record of God concerning man: “GUILTY BEFORE GOD.” (Rom. 3:19.)

The declaration of God respecting man's powerlessness in his lost state: “BY THE DEEDS OF THE LAW THERE SHALL NO FLESH BE JUSTIFIED IN HIS SIGHT.”(Rom. 3: 20.)

The righteous remedy of God for man: THE BLOOD OF HIS SON. (Rom. 3:25.)

The declaration of God respecting His grace for man in his lost state: “JUSTIFIED FREELY BY HIS GRACE THROUGH THE REDEMPTION THAT IS IN CHRIST JESUS.” (Rom. 3: 24.)

Thus righteousness condemns, and on the ground of righteousness God justifies.

Righteousness is the ground whereon grace is built.

God forgives in righteousness; God justifies in righteousness; God's gospel reveals His righteousness.

Our guilt calls for righteous judgment; the blood of God's Son is the righteous answer for our guilt. When Jesus took the sinner's place upon the cross, God in righteousness hid His face from Him. When the Lord had finished the work, God in righteousness raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in glory. And now God holds forth to the eye of faith His own Son a propitiation through faith in His blood to declare His righteousness . . . that He might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. (Rom. 3: 25, 26.)

Upon whom is the righteousness of God?

Mark well, if judged according to divine righteousness, the most moral, the most religious of men, will be levelled down to hell along with the vilest, “for there is no difference” — degrees of distance from God are not to be brought into the question. Since, then, none can merit divine favour, grace flows freely to all. The satisfaction rendered by Christ to divine righteousness is perfect. God Himself is the source of His gospel, His Son the essence of it, the cross the channel for it to reach us. The righteousness of God is “unto all,” it is towards all men; but it is also as circumscribed as the number of those hearts which delight in it, for it is only “upon all them that believe.” Man in himself is thus completely set aside as a fruit-bearer, treated as helpless and utterly bad, but God, in Christ, has wrought out a righteousness for man, and “whosoever” believes receives the blessing. “It is of faith that it might be by grace.” The blood of Jesus has perfectly answered to the righteous God for the sins of all who believe. By that blood, God in His grace counts such as believe to be righteous. God justifies such through the blood of His Son.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 7

The Gospel of Our Salvation

7. The Root of the Tree.

We now turn to the second section of the subject of the early part of the Epistle to the Romans, namely, man's nature.

A man's conscience tells him that he does wrong, and is an inward voice speaking to him of right and wrong. Even the heathen have this candle within them, the glimmering light of which shines with varied clearness in every human breast. But conscience is not the standard of what is right and wrong. Now while conscience within discriminates between good and evil, and detects our works, conscience never discovers to man what his nature is. This the light of the word of God reveals. We learn what we are, what our nature is, in the invariable light of God's own truth.

If a man could possibly know what he is, in himself, in God's sight, without the knowledge of God's grace, his end would be utter despair, for “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1: 5); while man by nature is “of the night and darkness.” (1 Thess. 5: 5.) God cannot change; “I am the Lord: I change not.” (Mal. 3: 6.) Man cannot change his nature; “can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jer. 13: 23.)

The gospel of God does not propose to develop man's nature, to reform it, or to cultivate it; on the contrary, God regards it as a worthless thing. The gardener does not cultivate the crab tree, but grafts a sweet apple upon it, and with his knife cuts down the stem of the old tree. God does not allow the old nature any place in His presence, but brings in Christ, the life, instead.

The result of cultivating our old nature is sorrow. Yet we find sometimes even aged believers attempting to bring a clean thing out of an unclean, endeavouring, after a long life of religious disappointment, to bring themselves into a fit state for God's presence, and, perhaps, looking to Christ, as to a means, for effecting their desires.

A little while ago, an inexperienced hand had trained a rose tree over a porch. The leaves of the tree were green, and the growth was strong, but not a flower was there. “Why is this?” inquired the master of a skilled gardener. The answer was given by an act, not by words, for, taking out his pruning knife, the gardener in one moment levelled the rampant growth to the ground. “What have you done?” cried the master. “Don't you see, sir,” was the reply, “your man has been cultivating the wrong shoot!” and, at the same time, the gardener pointed out the grafted rose, which had barely struggled two inches above the ground, and which the wild shoot had completely overwhelmed. In a few months, the graft, set free from the encumbering growth of the wrong shoot, sent out in vigorous life its beautiful branches, and covered the porch with its luxuriance; and there it lives, a parable of heavenly things.

Not all the cultivation or training in the world could have made that wrong shoot become a beautiful and flowering tree, neither will the efforts of a whole life succeed in making our “old man” like Christ, or fruitful towards God. God has condemned our nature in the cross of Christ: He has judicially cut it down; and no fruit fit for God shall grow upon it for ever. The practical word, then, to those christians who are seeking to produce out of self, fruit acceptable to God is, Do not cultivate the wrong shoot.

Alas! that so many boast of what man is in himself, and so few believe what God declares the nature of man to be. Some suppose that they see in the flickering light of conscience sparks of life left in man at the fall; some imagine that in the senses, whereby man has the power of enjoying the externals of religion, lies the germ of life; others argue that it is to be found in reason. God declares that not only are the fruits of the tree corrupt, but that the tree itself is evil.

The latter part of the 5th chapter of Romans treats of our nature, and from it we take five divine proofs of man's condition opposite to which we place five views of divine grace abounding towards man in his lost condition, “for where sin abounded grace did much more abound.” (Rom. 5: 20.)

RUIN.

1. (Rom. 5: 12.) Sin, and death by sin, brought into the world: By one man — Adam.

2. (Rom. 5: 15.) Many being dead: or having died: Through the offence of one man — Adam.

SINFULNESS.

3. (Rom. 5: 18.) The old judicial standing before God — to condemnation: By the one offence of Adam.

4. (Rom. 5: 19.) Many made sinners: By one man's — Adam's' disobedience.

DEATH.

5. (Rom. 5: 21) The reign of sin unto death: Brought in through one man — Adam.

GRACE.

1A. (end of Rom. 5: 15.) The grace of God brought to men: By one Man — Christ.

2A. (Rom. 5: 15.) The free gift by grace abounding unto many: By one Man — Jesus Christ.

RIGHTEOUSNESS.

3A. (Rom. 5: 18.) The new judicial standing before God — justification of life: By the one righteousness of Christ.

4A. (Rom. 5: 19.) Many made righteous: By one Man's — Christ's — obedience.

LIFE.

5A. (Rom. 5: 21) The reign of grace unto eternal life: Brought in through one Man — Christ Jesus.

We arrange these five views of God's grace in the three divisions of Grace, Righteousness, and Life, opposite to man's Ruin, Sinfulness, and Death.

First, then, there is the RUIN. The ruin of God's work when He made man upright.

1. Sin is brought into the world:

“By one man sin entered into the world.” Innocence existed in one man — Adam. God made Adam free from evil; without the knowledge of sin. This was the starting point of man's existence upon earth — a life in its moral characteristics totally distinct from our present life. But Adam preferring disobedience to obedience, and exercising his will, his nature became evil, and thereupon the character of the fountain of human life became changed. Innocence disappeared from the earth, and sin entered the world. This is the origin of our sinful nature which we received through our parents, and with which we were born. We trace the river from this present day to the past generation — we follow it back further and further till we reach its source — and we find that every age has produced a nature which is sinful.

The nature of man is, moreover, actively evil, and the activities of our nature are our own individual responsibilities. If a wicked father beget a wicked son, the wickedness of the son is his own wickedness and his own responsibility, and not that of his parent. The law of the land would not excuse a thief because his father and grandfather had been thieves before him, and neither does the divine law excuse us individually because of the sinful nature of the parent of our race.

Had any man been born innocent, and retained his innocency, from him a fresh stream of life should have flowed; but, “all have sinned.” This is the plain fact. It is unalterable. Neither does God Himself elect to change it; but in contrast to the dark reality of sin's entrance into the world there is GRACE.

1a. The grace of God is brought to men.

One man — Adam — by wilful transgression of God's command introduced sin and death into the world; by one Man — Jesus Christ — willingly, and in obedience to God's word, doing God's will, grace came to man.

Man failed in his state of innocence, and brought ruin upon the whole human race, thereupon God promised One by Whom man should be blessed, and Jesus, dying for sinners in the activity of divine love, brought grace to the ruined race, and brought it by accomplishing redemption. God's justifying grace flows to man from Christ, who died for the ungodly.

God does not repair the ruin, or rebuild what man has overthrown, but God brings grace to man in the ruin, and grace meets us just as we are, and just where we are. The grace of God brought to man in his present state by the one Man, Jesus Christ, is as distinct a reality as the ruin and the sin brought into the world in its first state by the one man — Adam. Sin entered the scene of innocence. Grace has entered the scene of ruin.

Not only has sin been brought into the world, but death also by sin, and thus

2. To man, as the offspring of Adam, is attached the penalty of death.

Through the offence of one many be dead,” or have died. (Rom. 5: 15.) As a king, upon surrendering to the enemy, involves his kingdom by his act, and as, in his fall, his kingdom also falls, so the race of man suffers the penalty of its head — the many, the multitude of mankind has fallen with Adam under death's power.

“The wages of sin is death,” which solemn sentence Adam and myriads of men have proved in their own bodies. Death is the wages of sin, not the debt of nature. God did not make man in order to die, but by sin man forfeited his life, and now hath “death passed upon all men for all that have sinned,” and he who dies in his sins will be eternally banished from the presence of the holy God.

Thus, we have by Adam's act, innocence gone, continuous life upon this earth lost, and man sinning a few short years in a scene of suffering, and then leaving this earth altogether. No power in man to recover what is lost, no strength to lift himself out of his natural condition — Paradise behind, death before, and after death judgment.

Now, what is God's answer to this desolation? God looked from heaven upon man, and sent from heaven by the Person of His own Son the free gift. Nothing but a gift could avail for helpless man. Man had ruined himself and forfeited his life, and could not give God any single thing whatever. But, thanks be to God, in His love,

2a. The free gift by grace, by one Man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.

Divine grace, with its free gift, may, if God choose, enter the dark scene for purposes of blessing. And grace has entered. Christ has died; righteousness is accomplished. We fix our eyes upon the Christ of God. By Him comes to us, just as we are, the free gift in grace. There is, moreover, wondrous greatness in the way which this grace comes to us. It abounds to many! There are riches in God's grace which cannot be limited or exhausted. “Much more,” says the scripture, when viewing the extent of the ruin, “much more the grace of God and the gift by grace . . . hath abounded unto many.” And there are multitudes upon earth and myriads in heaven who have proved the aboundings of God's grace.

Now, how is this gift to be had? It is to be had upon only one principle. There are none other terms. It is to be had for nothing. It is to be received. The “free gift” is not to be won by works, or merited by anything which we can do or feel. It is sent to us by God through His Son, and faith rejoices to receive from God, and, those who do receive the free gift, are not occupied with what they have lost, but with what they have obtained.

Thus God does not recover man again to his primal innocence, or restore him to His presence by infusing a spirituality into him in his present sinful condition, but God bestows upon all who believe, by the one Man, Jesus Christ, a new thing — His free gift.

God's grace, then, is the contrast to man's ruin; and God in His grace does not amend man's ruined condition, but bestows a free gift upon man, and brings him into a new condition. The RIGHTEOUSNESS which God brings in is in contrast with the natural sinfulness of man. We must abide for ever in our natural condition if we are not justified according to the righteousness which subsists by the death of Christ. For man, being a sinner, occupies a judicial position before God, and

3. Man's judicial standing before God is that of being under judgment, and this results in condemnation.

“By the offence of one . . . upon all men to condemnation.” (Rom. 5: 18.) By one false step, Adam fell from the heights of innocence, where God had placed him. We all received our life outside paradise, away from God. There is no ladder to reach the heights whence we fell, and even if we could regain those elevations we should carry ourselves with us. If we could get back to paradise, we should be ourselves still. If the paradise which Adam knew yet existed, and we could return there, we should enter it fallen creatures. As for entering heavenly glory, fallen as we are, it is out of the question; neither do any, save God's own people, so much as desire to enter the glory of God at all. In our natural standing the judgment of God is upon us, and that must result in condemnation: neither does God allow, that for man, as upon this standing, there is any cure whatever; on the contrary, God deals with us as those who occupy a position which results in condemnation, while in His grace, He brings in a

3a. New standing, which is that of justification of life.

This standing is beyond condemnation, and condemnation must be passed through in order that it may be reached in righteousness. And we have been judicially put aside in the cross of Christ, where God “condemned sin in the flesh.” The cross of the Son of God was God's declaration of man's condition. The cross was not a bettering of man's condition. The cross, in the Person of the Substitute, was the execution of the divine sentence against man as condemned. The black flag flying upon the walls of a prison is not a witness that there is still a period for the culprit's probation, neither is it a token of the culprit's reformation, but it is the voice of the law of the land declaring that the state of the prisoner is so utterly bad that death is his portion.

Now, how does God, in grace, bring us out of this terrible condition? How does God deal, in blessing, with the question of man's standing according to His own righteousness? He bestows upon man His free gift of righteousness — that is justification. Under judgment, as we are by nature, and guilty of many offences as we are personally, God sets us in a standing of judicial righteousness before Himself. By virtue of the death of Christ, God maintains His justice, and by grace justifies such as believe on Jesus. Ours is blessing upon the ground of righteousness.

Further, having condemned sin in the flesh by the cross of Christ, God introduces, those who believe, into a condition of life beyond condemnation. And this is termed justification of life. An accomplished righteousness has been effected by Christ's death. Those who believe are justified by God. But they are not only justified persons, they are brought into a new condition of life before God. They were alive in their sins, Christ by His death answered for them in righteousness, and now God has set them “in Christ,” who is alive from the dead.

The term “justification of life” is abstract, and not a little difficult to understand. When God speaks of our justification in relation to our sins, He tells us that we are justified by the blood of Christ. (Rom. 5: 9.) When God speaks of our justification in relation to our standing before Him, He presents to us ourselves linked in life with Christ alive from the dead.

Every claim which divine righteousness had against us was answered by the cross, and being justified by God, we are freed from every claim according to the measure of His righteousness. Thus the believer's position before God is judicially according to God's own standard of righteousness, and he himself is “in Christ,” who dies no more.

Clearly, then, this state is not that of innocence regained, or of the fallen condition improved. There is no mingling of the two rivers. Each is absolutely distinct from the other. The one uprises from Adam, fallen from innocency and subject to death, the other flows from Christ, who has passed through death, and Who lives to die no more. Innocence was held upon the tenure of a frail man's obedience and was lost. Now the fallen condition of man has been judged by God, and set aside for ever. Justification of life is the believer's present standing, and it is his, because Christ, who was condemned in his stead, lives to die no more.

Let us note how God contrasts our old standing with the new into which His grace brings such as believe.

The judgment was of one to CONDEMNATION. By one offence unto all men to CONDEMNATION.

The act of favour of many offences unto JUSTIFICATION. By one righteousness unto all men to JUSTIFICATION or LIFE.

Not only is man's standing in fault, but his nature also is contrary to God.

4. We are by nature sinners:

By one man's disobedience mankind came to be sinners. Adam overstepped the boundary of obedience. He hearkened not to the direct command, and we, as his children, have his nature, and are sinners. It is as when a man is sold into slavery, not only has he become a slave, but the children he begets are also bondsmen, and grow up into slavery, with the thoughts and feelings natural to the slave. In spite of himself, he sins. He commits the crimes he resolved to shun. Whatever man may do he cannot change his nature. The brand, sinner, is upon his brow, as the spots are upon the leopard's skin. He can no more forsake being a sinner than a fish could become a bird, neither has he in him the instinct after divine liberty. An entire change must occur, a radical change the root is in fault, and cannot be transplanted into God's presence to blossom there. Now what God does is not to help man to become righteous in himself by works, nor to assist man to repair the old garment of unrighteousness by adding thereto a little of the new cloth of righteousness, but what God does is to bring in

4a. The new standing by grace — those who believe are constituted righteous:

“By the obedience of One shall many be made righteous.” The Lord was the obedient Man upon earth. From His cradle onwards His path was that of unwavering faithfulness. His ear was ever open to His Father's bidding; even from heaven itself we read of Him, “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God.” Such was He. And as the one disobedient act of Adam made us sinners, so by the one obedience of the perfect Man — Jesus, in becoming “obedient to death, even the death of the cross,” God has made many righteous. The Lord's death, and His enduring divine judgment, results in those, who believe, being constituted righteous before God; “He hath made Him sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor. 5: 21.) Thus the slave is not educated or clothed, but he ceases to be a slave. His old condition is gone; he is, in Christ, in a new state. In this — which is his entirely because of what Christ has done — God regards the believer with perfect satisfaction.

First, then, as we have seen, God brings in His grace to meet man in his ruin; next, God brings in righteousness for man in his sinfulness; now, we have the third thing, eternal life brought in for dying man. For nearly six thousand years upon this earth has been

5. The reign of sin unto death:

And death obtained its throne, and sin its rule over the world by Adam's one act. His disobedience was the key which opened the door to their entrance into the world. Sin reigns still, its kingdom is as wide as the world, and its end is death. But God has an answer even to this. He does not reform the old ruler, or alter the kingdom, but God brings in that which is altogether new, and that which is so noble, that the heart of the believer rejoices; God brings in

5a. The reign of grace through righteousness unto eternal life.

Grace, upon the ground of righteousness, brings in for the offspring of Adam, sinful and subject to death, new life, eternal life.

Grace reigns upon the principle of righteousness, through what God has done by the cross and resurrection of His Son. Righteousness has throned grace and given it its sceptre and sway. The very being of God is now glorified by the satisfaction made by Christ for sin, and consequently, without, in any degree, setting aside the eternal claims of His throne of justice, God's heart of love can go out in grace to the vilest of sinners and the most resolute of His foes. Whenever we speak of the grace of God to ruined man, we must remember that His grace is seen in the blood, the death, the empty grave of Jesus, in other words, the righteousness; and whenever we bring in the righteousness, there we have grace reigning unto eternal life.

Eternal life is God's answer to the graves and the death which surround us. Adam, the disobedient man, brought death into the world; Christ, the obedient Man, brought in eternal life. Through Him, and from Him, we obtain it, and in Him we have it. And this life is of such perfection that none who have it sigh for the innocence and the condition of things before the fall which Adam lost. It is greater than that which is lost, even as the Son of God, in His adorable Person, is above and beyond comparison with the head of our fallen race.

Once more let us trace these actings of God's grace to man. His gift in grace, His free gift of righteousness, His gift of eternal life, and each of those ours, who believe, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Man, alas, too frequently ignores his own ruin by seeking to raise himself to God, and thus despises the gift brought to him in grace; and by trying to work out a righteousness acceptable to God, he practically denies his own sinfulness, and so despises the free gift of righteousness brought to him in grace; and by saying he hopes to obtain eternal life in the future, he blinds his eyes to the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, which is now, today, but never tomorrow, set before the sinner.

The glory of God, in these His gifts, shines in the words “Jesus Christ our Lord.”

“The gift in grace is by one Man, Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 5: 15.)

“The free gift of righteousness . . . by One, Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 5: 17.)

And “grace reigns through righteousness unto Eternal life by Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 5: 21) May it, therefore, be ours to accept not only what God has said respecting the tree — human nature — that tree the root of which is ruin; the stem, sinfulness; the fruit, death; but also to accept God's thoughts of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, by Whom the priceless gifts of His grace are brought to us. Let us seek for nothing from the old tree of self, but let us make everything of the new tree. For Christ is our life, and through Him righteousness and free grace are ours.

God's way of meeting man's condition as that of a sinner departed from Him, and whose nature is actively evil, is this: —

CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST. (Gal. 2: 20; Rom. 6: 6.)

DEAD WITH CHRIST. (Rom. 6: 8; Col. 2: 12.)

BURIED WITH CHRIST. (Rom. 6: 4; Col. 2: 12.)

And God introduces those who believe into a new state — He sets them in Christ” alive from the dead to die no more.

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The Gospel of Our Salvation

8. Dead in sins alive in Christ.

We may liken the way in which the truth of God respecting man's condition is presented in the epistle to the Romans, to tracing a river upwards in order to find its source, while in the epistle to the Ephesians, the course of the river is followed from the fountain-head. In the first case we are given to see our sinfulness by our actions, and then are shown that the spring of our actions is the sin of our nature; in the other we begin with the fact of what our nature is. In one case man is seen in the activities of his sins; in the other he is looked upon as dead in sins. Yes,

DEAD IN TRESPASSES AND SINS

is God's record of man. Of all, the unalterable record stands, “All are dead.” (2 Cor. 5: 14.) To all it is said, “Ye must be born again.” (John 3: 7.)

God declares the fact. He alone is judge of what man is by nature. We can only bow to His word and believe; but nothing is harder, even in common life, than for a man to believe he is what he is. The miser loves his niggard ways, and his pleasure consists in hoarding; the proud man loves his haughtiness, for to him pride is nobility; the creature of gaiety delights in the butterflyism which the thoughtful pity, and the diligent despise. A generous man, however, can discern the miser, and a gracious man see through the proud one. From His infinite standard of holiness the eternal God regards man just as he is, weighs his very being, and declares of man that his spiritual state is a “dead” state.

And faith thus speaks: “We thus judge, that if One died for all, then were all dead (or have all died): and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again,” (2 Cor. 5: 14, 15.) He died, and by His death (which demonstrates man's moral state as well as meets it) those who believe on Him “live.” Of those who live, Christ is the head. And thus it is that Adam is “the figure of Him which was to come,” for as Adam is the head of the fallen human race, so Christ is the head of those who live in the power of the new and resurrection-life which He has communicated to them.

Thus, then, is man's spiritual state of death and the new life which is ours in Christ set forth; “But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ.” (Eph. 2: 4, 5.)

The Gentile — the “ye” of the epistle to the Ephesians — “walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” (Eph. 2: 2.)

The Jew — the “we” — “all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” (Eph. 2: 3.)

Godless Gentiles and religious Jews were by nature alike, “dead in sins,” yet were alike loved by God in His great love, and such as believed had new life imparted to them by the power of the Holy Ghost when in that condition. (Eph. 2: 4, 5, 6.)

The life that comes through Christ is in no sense the polluted stream of Adam-life purified. It is entirely new. Christ is its fountain-head; from His Person its river flows to dead sinners. Christ is “the life,” and “He that hath the Son hath life.” (1 John 5: 12.)

Yes, new life is imparted to dead sinners — the new life flowing from the risen One, Christ! So wonderful is this grace, and so slow are our hearts to realize it, that the Holy Spirit puts into the apostle's lips the petition for us: “That ye may know . . . what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1)

This then is the divine record of man — DEAD IN TRESPASSES AND SINS.

And God's new state for man lies here — QUICKENED WITH CHRIST. (Eph. 2: 5; Col. 2: 13.) RISEN WITH CHRIST. (Col. 3: 1)

There cannot exist a single pulsation of the divine life within the soul till the life be there. God took us up in our nature state and gave us new life out of the aboundings of His own heart of love. He exercised the prerogative of His own nature, and by His own power communicated the new life to us when we were dead towards Him.

“By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. 2: 8, 9.)

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 9

The Gospel of Our Salvation

9. Upon counting self to be what God says it is.

In the roots of a tree lies its strength — of which its fruit is the result. Pluck off all the fruit, yet another crop will grow, and of the same nature as before; but cut off the roots, and the tree withers away and dies. Our actions are the outcome of our nature — the fruit, not the root, of our being. Self, “I,” is the source of what we do. Bitter waters flow from a bitter spring, bad actions from a bad nature. A fountain does not send forth both sweet and bitter water; a tree does not bring forth good and corrupt fruit. Our nature, ruined and alienated from God, is incapable of pleasing Him, and, because it is our nature, cannot be altered. God forgives our sins, but He has condemned our nature. The blood shed upon Calvary cleanses us from all sin, but the death of Christ does not change our nature — it is God's judgment of it, and, in His sight, its judicial end. It frequently happens that the believer, after being assured of the forgiveness of his sins, is distressed and burdened, because he finds that in himself he is only evil. Resolutions to become different result in disappointment, and all the efforts put forth to be holy tend to the practical discovery that, “in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” This experience is for future blessing, and since the gospel of God shows more than the forgiveness of sins, the Holy Spirit will not allow His people to rest short of its full blessing.

We say God does not forgive or improve the nature which bears the fruit of sin, neither does the blood of Christ cleanse it, nor the Holy Ghost sanctify it, and thus it is clear that our pathway to blessing and deliverance lies in believing God's word upon the matter. We should

Take God's side against ourselves:

And since God has shown that the very spring of our being is corrupt in His sight, and that He has passed sentence upon it, and condemned it by the cross of His Son, when “He was made sin for us,” what we have to do is, to bow to the divine fact, and to deal with ourselves accordingly.

It was when we believed God's word about the blood of Jesus and our sins, that we obtained peace respecting our sins before God; and when we believe what God says concerning the death of Christ in connection with our nature, we have peace with God about ourselves. God declares that our old nature is condemned in His sight, and we hate to treat it as such. No one would seek to educate or to nourish a corpse, neither should the believer endeavour to reform or improve; to pander to or to flatter self. We should not preach sobriety to the dead body of a drunkard, or humility to that of a proud person, neither should we eulogize the lifeless frame of the most amiable or wise. The dead body is a grievous thing which must of necessity be put out of sight. God has, in His grace, enabled us to treat ourselves, children of fallen Adam, as dead, and thus to take His side, by faith, respecting self, that self which He condemned eighteen hundred years ago when His Son died upon the cross; for He has declared that

“Our old man is crucified with Christ.” (Rom. 6: 6.)

It is comparatively simple to believe what Christ did for us: “Christ died for our sins,” He paid our debt of sins for us, He bore the punishment we deserved; but more, we have a part with Christ through His cross. Our “old man,” our fallen nature, “sin in the flesh,” the tree which bears the fruit, “is crucified with Christ.” God so regarded us when Christ was made sin for us, that in His mind, we were judicially associated with Christ when He was crucified. A prisoner might obtain a substitute to take his place, and to die for him; and then the law would accept the death of the substitute as the death of the prisoner, so that in a sense it might be said the prisoner died with the substitute. In the mind of God we have been crucified with Christ; and now God looks upon us in Christ, Who dies no more — in Christ, who is risen out of death and from among the dead. Therefore we have to believe God's word about our “old man,” and to count it to be crucified with Christ. Power enters the soul wherever faith opens the door.

The love of sin in a man, and the rule of sin over him are broken when death comes. How can a dead man long for the evil he once followed, or how can sin be longer his ruler? And

“We have died (or are dead) unto sin.” (Rom. 6: 2.)

It is not said that as progress is made in holiness we shall die unto sin, because the dying unto sin relates solely to our having been crucified with Christ. The glorious doctrines of deliverance taught in the latter portion of the Romans were in danger of being turned by a licentious spirit into an occasion for fleshly liberty. The answer to such a spirit is — “How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?” The sinner alive to sin, but dead to God, might practice sinning at his list; not so he, who was alive to God, but dead to sin by the cross of Christ. We have to believe this great first truth of the 6th of Romans, which is really the starting-point of practical victory over self.

And this first principle the Apostle illustrates by the first practice in christianity. He reminds us that we took up the profession of Christ by baptism — “Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized to Jesus Christ were

“Baptized to His DEATH.” (Rom. 6: 3.)

Our starting-point as christians is Christ's death. We begin christianity with a crucified Christ. We were not baptized to His incarnation, which was the beginning of the holy life of Jesus upon earth; but to His death — the end of our sinful life in judgment. We were not baptized to become followers of Messiah, as were those baptized by John and the Lord's disciples before the cross, but to become followers of the risen Lord, who died that we might live.

Goodness or badness ends at death, and in Christ's death faith sees the end of man, as man, before God, and by baptism, owns that the only way of becoming Christ's is by Christ's death, for

“We have been buried with Him by baptism unto death.” (Rom. 6: 4.)

“With Him!” Here is an association with Christ; with Him “unto death.” In burial, the body is put out of sight; it is hidden to be seen no more. And God has done this for our “old man” which was crucified with Christ. God has hidden it from His view. The body is placed beneath the water in baptism, symbolizing the hiding in the grave of Christ of what we are in self and by nature. No place of any kind is thus allowed for self — our old Adam — but in the death of Christ, hence

“We have been planted together in the likeness of His death.” (Rom. 6: 5.)

There has been a like place for us, and for the dead body of our crucified Lord and Saviour. Faith should and does love to accept the place for self which Christ took in grace for us. We are identified with Christ in His death. Nothing teaches us our badness like the death of Christ for us, and when we fully realize what the need was, that He should die for us, it is not difficult to bow to the fact that our place is the place He took for us, and that we have been planted together in death. Our power is in Christ risen from the dead; but a risen Christ cannot be known until we apprehend the meaning of a dead Christ, neither can we know, morally, our power in Him risen until we have accepted our place with Him dead.

The christian has two natures; his own fallen nature, and the divinely given nature. He is like those creatures whose early existence is beneath the water in the mud of a river, which, after a while, receive a new force, that draws them up to the surface of the stream. This enables them to shake off their old coil and rise into the air beautiful and bright-winged, to delight in the sunshine and atmosphere above the water. Henceforth the air is their home, and their former element would be to them destruction. But with the christian, alas, there is always the tendency to return to the mud of the stream. It is only as we bear in our minds Christ's death, His going down beneath the deep waters of judgment in order to bring us up into resurrection-life and blessing, that we have the practical enjoyment of the place which is ours in Christ.

Christ having passed through judgment and beyond death, and being our life, we are not only told to believe these truths, but to count the facts of His death and of His resurrection as realities in our selves.

“Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6: 11.)

Faith counts things that are not as though they were. If our “old man,” our fallen nature, were actually gone, we should not have to reckon ourselves to be dead, for the old nature would not exist; but because Christ died unto sin once, and liveth unto God for ever, we are to count ourselves to be what Christ was and is for us. We are not told that there is no sin in us, nor that the flesh is not in us, nor that “our old man” is taken out of us, but we are told that we are in Christ, and are bidden live as those that are alive unto God in Him.

Our “old man” is crucified with Him, for a practical end —

(1) “That the body of sin might be destroyed,” or annulled.

That it might have its power taken away. That self should not be the asserting force within us, which it is its nature to be. The power and force of self are annulled, the Spirit applying to our hearts what the cross of Christ for us and what our being crucified with Christ is.

(2) “That henceforth we should not serve sin.”

The mastership of sin is frustrated by death. Sin ruled over us when we were alive in the energy of our fallen wills. But who rules dead men? We obtained our discharge from the old ruler by death. He that is dead is freed, or discharged, from sin. He is out of the dominion of his former master. We are not said to be free from sin, as if the longing after sin, and the tendency to sin, were not in us; but we are said to be freed from the dominion of sin, and, consequently, it is our shame to practise sin to commit it. There is no license left for the christian to say “I cannot help practising evil ways, I am so weak and sin is so strong in me that I cannot help it.” God has given us a place of liberty.

Hence, because we are freed from the rule of sin, it is said —

(1) “Let not sin, therefore, reign in your mortal body.” (Rom. 6: 12.)

(2) “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin.” (Rom. 6: 13.)

(3) “Sin shall not have dominion over you.” (Rom. 6: 14.)

This, then, was the form of doctrine delivered to the believers in Rome, and which they obeyed from the heart, as the Apostle thanked God. (Rom. 6: 17.) The doctrine related to deliverance from self by the death of Christ, and His resurrection power; and faith therein, mingled with obedience, gave them liberty from the mastership of sin. “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey.” (Rom. 6: 16.) Let us “then yield ourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead” (Rom. 6: 13); let us surrender ourselves to Him as those whom He has given eternal life in Christ.

The practical issues of the past and the present service in daily life are summarized in the following table: —

THE PAST SERVICE.

Ye were the servants of sin. (Rom. 6: 17.) Ye yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity. (Rom. 6: 19.) When ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. (Rom. 6: 20.)

The fruit of the past service: Shame and the end, death. (Rom. 6: 21.) The wages of sin is death. (Rom. 6: 23.)

THE PRESENT SERVICE.

Ye are the servants of righteousness. (Rom. 6: 18.) Now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness. (Rom. 6: 19.) Now being made free from sin, ye became servants to God. (Rom. 6: 22.)

The fruit of the present service: Holiness, and the end, everlasting life. (Rom. 6: 23.) The gift of God is eternal life. (Rom. 6: 23.)

And in the following table of truths of doctrine and practice, from the 6th of Romans, the fact of Christ's death and resurrection, and the practical issues therefrom to our faith and obedience, are set out: —

DEATH.

“We have died, or are dead, unto sin.” (Rom. 6: 2.)

“We were baptized unto His death.” (Rom. 6: 3.)

“We were buried with Him by baptism unto death.” (Rom. 6: 4.)

“We have been planted together in the likeness of His death.” (Rom. 6: 5.)

“Our old man is crucified with Him.” (Rom. 6: 6.)

“He that is dead (or has died) is freed from sin.” (Rom. 6: 7).

“Dead with Christ.” (Rom. 6: 8.)

The above statements of the divine word, it must be remembered, are not put forth as attainment, but given as facts. Therefore what we have to do is simply to believe God's word about ourselves, and our part with Christ in His death for us.

RESURRECTION.

“If we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.” (Rom. 6: 8.)

“Knowing that Christ, being raised from the dead,

Dieth no more;

Death hath dominion over Him no more.

He died unto sin once: He liveth unto God.” (Rom. 6: 9, 10.)

Here again both our living with Christ and our being “alive from the dead” (Rom. 6: 13) are determined by Christ's resurrection for us. It is the common privilege of all who believe.

PRACTICAL RESULTS.

“Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom. 6: 11)

This is not standing or place, but is distinctly the obedience of faith respecting the great facts of Christ's death and resurrection. Here then we may and we do fail. But our failure does not affect God's facts. Our failure to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God through. Christ (and instead thereof our trying to improve and curb self, and evolve a life out of self) cannot touch the accomplished results of Christ's death and resurrection, and what that death and resurrection have effected for all believers. Yet, failure to believe and obey this form of doctrine does result in dishonour to God, and in sin having the rule over us.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 10

The Gospel of Our Salvation

10. Deliverance from self.

There is a remarkable scripture upon the subject of our last chapter, which concisely gives us the essence of the important truth of the 6th of Romans. It is this: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2: 20.) Three truths stand before us in this passage:

(1.) The end of “I;”

(2.) The new life;

(3.) The power of practical christianity.

The end of “I”

To such as have had no struggle to be free from self, our passage will, we fear, be mystical, and the statements of God respecting human nature, opposed to their common sense. It is only they who have longed for deliverance, that prize God's way of freedom.

It is our nature to do certain things; we commit sin because our nature is sinful, and it is he who has tried, as in God's presence, to be holy, and has learned how impossible it is to keep evil out of his heart, who knows practically something of the meaning of “I.” He knows what self is by experience of himself.

But there is a truer way of learning what “I” means than by experience of self, and that is by looking to Christ upon the cross, hanging there in our place, suffering there what we merit — there as our substitute. For if Jesus took our place, we deserve what Jesus suffered in our stead. Consider how God forsook Him when He was made sin for us. Consider that Jesus Himself justified God as the Holy One, when forsaken upon our account, saying: “Thou art holy,” and consider also what the wrath-bearing of Christ was, what the cross was, and thus enter into the deep dark meaning of “I,” which caused the Lord His woe; yes,

Christ verily took our place.

Many accept in a general way the truth of Christ being their substitute, without being fully and believingly clear that they were really, in God's sight, with Christ in the place He took. During one of the late wars a man, who was called to serve in the army, obtained a substitute. At the close of the battle, when the list of the killed and wounded was made public, amongst them was recorded the name of him who had obtained the substitute. The substitute had died upon the field, and the man for whom he died was counted amongst the dead. After a while, soldiers being scarce, the man was called upon to serve again, but he pleaded to this effect, “I am dead; my name is written amongst the dead; and indeed I have died in the person of my substitute: therefore I cannot serve.” His plea was received; be was accepted as free. Let us take this story as an illustration of the words, “I am crucified with Christ.” Mark, not merely “I am crucified,” for that might be read as a victory over self by self-strength, and might be understood as spiritual attainment, but “I am crucified with Christ,” which is a fact of grace, and accordingly belongs to every believer. God has not only taken our sins and laid them upon the Sin-bearer, but He has crucified our “old man” with Christ, therefore in His sight the “I” of the believer is dead. Let us take God simply at His word, remembering that the highest faith is that which most resembles childhood's simplicity, and by faith count ourselves to be the dead thing which the Divine fact of a crucified Christ discovers us to be.

The new life:

“Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Here also is a fact, the blessings of which, belong to all Christians. New life is no attainment; “this is the record, that God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son; he that hath the Son hath life.” (1 John 5: 11, 12.) If it were an attainment it were no gift; and the gift is bestowed upon those who have no merit whatever, but who are crucified with Christ. Thus God presents us with self dead in His sight, and Christ living in us.

Now, what is that which, in a divine way, lives within the person of the believer? For we read — “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.” Does this new life — this God-given life — enter into our old, fallen nature? Does “I” reappear with Christ helping it? Is this new life, fallen nature christianized modernized? Ah! how carefully does the gospel bar out self! Were it not so, “I” would reappear dressed in new garments, and would stand erect, as vigorous and more reliant than before; for what kind of “I” is more difficult to convince of its utter death-state in the sight of God than religious “I”? What, then, is this new life?  “I live, yet not I;” not the “I,” my fallen nature, my own self, which was and is crucified with Christ, “but Christ liveth in me” — Christ, who has left the sins of His people behind Him for ever — Christ, who was dead but is alive again, lives in the believer.

Christ and “I” stand here in contrast. The holy desires, the spiritual upspringings, the risings Godward, the peace and gladness in the divine presence, all that which expresses itself as divine life in the believer, is Christ in me, not “I.”

Moreover it is as true of a believer, that Christ liveth in him, as it is true that his own nature is a dead thing in the sight of God. He is not to look to himself or in himself for resources, but to “yield himself to God as one alive from the dead.”

We again beg our reader to bear in mind that what we have thus far spoken of is not attainment. Self is judicially gone in the cross of Christ, and when we believe, Christ lives within us. This is the portion — whether enjoyed or not enjoyed — of all God's people. A man may have a fortune left him, yet because he does not know of the fact, he may describe himself as penniless. Thousands of God's people with all the wealth of the gospel theirs, are mourning and doubting whether after all they are christians, and so will they mourn, until they believe God. We now come to attainment, to

The power of practical christianity

“And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” This emphatically is attainment, and appeals to such as, by grace, believe the facts already put forth. It may be missed, or not lived out. For there are certain blessings by grace the common portion of all Christians, whilst there are others relating to our walk, which it is our responsibility not to miss. The Apostle speaks of himself as a person, as an individual believer, and tells us that he was, day by day, hour by hour, living by faith. He was not living by experiences, or by feelings, or by keeping the law, but upon another principle altogether. To live practically by faith was the sum and substance of Paul's daily life below. His faith was a carrying out of the divine principle of self being dead, and Christ being the believer's life. The life in the flesh might last one month or a series of years, but short or long there was to him only one way of living, viz., by faith.

And not only was his life that of faith, but it was the faith of the Son of God, the risen Christ, He who had borne his sins, but who had gone to glory. Paul's faith connected his soul with Christ, where Christ is, and this affected every detail of his life below. His life in its character obtained its energy from the Christ who is the source of the life, and the affections of the Apostle were fixed upon His life, and Christ Himself was the object that Paul had before him while upon the earth.

In such a daily life self is practically out of sight, as by the death of Christ self is judicially out of God's sight, and Christ alone is seen as He who lives in His people. The christian can indeed say our “life is hid with Christ in God,” and his practical walk ought to express the absent Christ to the world. The world cannot see the source of the Christian's life, nor the object for whom the christian lives, but the world should be able to see “Christ in you.”

None, save such as are fully delivered according to the measure of the first two points of our passage, can tread the path of liberty this third sets forth. This life of daily faith of the Son of God cannot be practically known by those who question the blessings brought to them by Christ's death and resurrection. A believer endeavouring to draw sweet waters from the bitter fountain of self, or seeking to wash the Ethiopian white, is not upon the ground of reckoning himself to be dead, and has not faith in the declaration of God, “Ye are dead.” He sets Christ aside as his only strength by his self efforts. Self must be counted what God says it is, “dead,” must be left alone if the practical life of faith of the Son of God would be known. Power for living the life of faith flows from

Faith in the Person of the living Christ.

Thus, while the principle of the believer's daily walk is faith, our passage says it is “the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” First, faith which attaches itself directly to the Son of God in His risen glory — faith which dwells in spirit with Jesus, now out of the world, and at the Father's right hand; but next, faith which, while connecting itself with the risen and exalted Jesus, remembers His past love and past sufferings, “Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” It is the faith of one whose heart is tender towards his own blessed Substitute. We recall the touching story of him, who, travelling through the United States shortly after the terrible civil war there, came to a newly made grave, by the side of which a man was weeping. Moved by the sorrower's distress, the traveller turned and expressed his sympathy, and at length enquired, “Friend, let me ask to whose memory have you raised this grave?”

“Sir,” the man replied, the tears coursing down his cheeks, “I was called to the war: he took my place — he died for me.”

Shortly afterwards this short simple inscription was placed over the grave —

“To the Man who died for me.”

Our lives should be monuments of gratitude to “Him who liveth and was dead;” the memory of the cross should ever be fresh within our breasts. For never does genuine practical faith, by any means, omit or forget the love of Jesus in dying for His people; nay, the more Christ in glory is personally and experimentally known, the more does the soul love to repeat, the Son of God “loved me and gave Himself for me.”

This passage, christian reader, is a noble confession of faith. “I,” self, absolutely gone from the sight of God — “crucified with Christ.” Life, mine, which naught can defile or harm, for it is “no longer I, but Christ, who liveth in me.”

And, lastly, practical behaviour, based upon love to the Lord, conformable to the truths of the great facts of His cross and resurrection.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 11

The Gospel of Our Salvation

11. Delivered from the law.

“The conflict of the 7th chapter of Romans seems to come in very strangely after the peace and the deliverance of the 5th and 6th chapters, and to make a strange introduction to the triumph of the eighth,” observed a young believer. “It is a parenthesis,” we answered, “and in full accordance with the general plan of the epistle, which, after developing the fulness of grace, takes up the law and those who are under it. In the early chapters this is seen when our sins are treated of; and in the latter the same plan is found when God's governmental dealings with Israel are in question; and, in the portion before us, we have it once more, but from an experimental point of view.”

As a matter of fact, numbers of christians do find themselves in this 7th of Romans parenthesis; and some remain there a very long time; while a few go so far as to say, that the condition therein described is that which gives the truest evidence of divine life existing in the soul.

The 7th of Romans describes a believer without deliverance of soul. “I,” “me,” continually recur in the experimental part of the chapter, and only at its close does the note of victory ring out: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

No doubt, if the believer be really established upon the ground of the 6th chapter — “Dead to sin,” “buried with Christ,” “crucified with Him,” “freed from sin,” he is delivered from the conflict and consequent experiences of the seventh. But many christians are practically “under the law,” and like the Galatian believers have to be asked, “Are ye so foolish, having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” (Gal. 3: 3.) Though Christ was once joyfully accepted as their all, and they rejoiced in Him, yet they are now occupied with self; “Where is then the blessedness you spake of?” (Gal. 4: 15.)

The reason of the loss of the blessedness is, they have gone back to the standing of being alive in the flesh before God; they have forsaken the ground of “the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free,” and have become debtors to the law! Indeed, with many believers, it might be almost thought that Christ was but the introduction to Moses. That His death procured the payment of sin's debt, so that the debt being paid, the believer might be in a position to keep the law, and that, accordingly, the law, and not Christ, might be the christian's rule of life.

The flesh, “I,” is not reckoned to be dead. True, it is looked upon as being weak and wilful, but still, as capable of being made into a better thing under the hand of the law. We do not say that such a believer looks to his own efforts for his justification, or as his ground of hope for getting to heaven, but we do say that he does look to his obedience to the law to fit him, in some way, for God's presence, and to make him different and more holy. Thus it is forgotten, that not only are we justified by faith, but that the daily life of the soul must be that of faith, for “the just shall live by faith.” For the believer needs hourly supplies of Christ's power, which Christ does not grant, so long as, by going back to Moses, the christian practically affirms, that within himself there is something which can be worked upon. Now, “the law is not of faith; but the man that doeth them shall live in them,” and for the believer to act as if he had strength of his own, is practically to deny the grace of God (Gal. 3: 12), that he is “buried with Christ,” “crucified with Christ,” and that in Christ and Him alone, he lives to God.

The believer, in the case we have touched upon, notwithstanding that he once knew the blessedness of forgiveness, has so sunk down into the quicksands of self-effort that his constant cry is, “Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?”

Other believers are to be found in the experiences of the 7th of Romans, because they have never been taught the fulness of God's good news to man. The life of those who believe upon the Lord Jesus has, by the Holy Spirit's action, a yearning after holiness, and where the written word of God, which gives the way of holiness, is not understood, christians go to Moses, instead of to Christ, for sanctification. Having begun in the spirit, they hope to be made perfect by the flesh.

It is no light thing to be delivered from the law. God gave the law to man to obey, but man has broken it, and cannot obey it. And God has now given Christ by whose death man may be freed from the condemning law. For if we are not delivered from the law by grace, we shall be doomed to bear the eternal consequences of having broken it, as it is written; “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.” (Gal. 3: 10.) Men speak of the presumption of faith which believes God, and thanks Him for forgiveness and peace through Christ; but what shall we say of the presumption of unbelief, which brings to God the fruits of the evil soil of our hearts! Such presumption is like that of Cain, who “brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.” (Gen. 4: 3.) That ground, which the Lord had cursed for the sake of Adam's sin. (Gen. 3: 7.) Let us remember, that to Cain's offering the Lord had not respect; and that, however religious a man may be, it is of no avail unless his religion be according to God. Alas, how many professing Christians in our day, in “going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.” (Rom. 10: 3.)

Let us look into the 7th of Romans, with the figure of a sick man — his pain, his symptoms, his disease, his physician, and his deliverance, before us.

The pain:

Now pain is not disease, but if there be an ache anywhere in our body, it is because some part of the frame is injured or unhealthy. It is not everyone who groans with the pain of the experience of the 7th of Romans; there are many believers who have not yet felt the pangs it describes, and such believers will hardly enter into the description of them; for in this spiritual exercise we must have gone through the suffering detailed, if we would enter into the case of such as suffer from it. Thus we find, that some who have not for themselves passed through deep and emptying experiences concerning self, by bidding the afflicted soul “You can and you must believe,” really throw the hearer back upon self effort and legality. Such teaching does not lead to Christ as the Saviour and the Strength of His people. Again, there are some who bid their hearers believe that to live a life of doubts and fears, groans and bondage, moans and misery, is the only thing which is christianity! The reason of this is evident. Such teachers have no notion of a healthy christianity and of deliverance themselves, and, therefore, can see signs of life only in pain and sorrow. No doubt we can tell that a man is not dead by hearing his cries, but such evidence of vitality betokens disease or wounds, and it would be a slander upon God and His good news to man, should we accept as genuine christianity such tokens of life. The evangelist should be like the doctor, who not only knows what disease is by having made the human frame his study, and what remedy to apply by having read about medicine and tested its effects; but, who has also suffered himself, and has partaken of the remedy he prescribes.

Any one suffering the soul sickness of the 7th of Romans cannot but cry out; for it is such an awful soul-pain that it is impossible to be still. The spiritual whereabouts of the sufferer is at once detected by his sorrowful lament, “Oh, wretched man that I am!”

The symptoms

Are thus expressed — “That which I do I allow not: for what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that do I.” “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that do I” (Rom. 7: 15, 19). Ten times over in these two short verses does the sufferer cry out “I.” It requires no argument to prove to a man, who exclaims, “I” suffer, what self is. It is not merely that he laments bad things which he has done, but the misery of what his heart is; that he has no power over himself whatever; that within him there is a power which is against him; and that, “self,” “I,” is that power. He hates the things he does; what he wishes to do he cannot do. Does our reader know those symptoms in his own soul? Has he ever known them? If this be his present grief, he is not delivered. If he never has thus felt, he does not appreciate what deliverance is.

The disease itself.

We discover disease by symptoms. Pain makes the patient miserable; but it is to the disease itself the doctor addresses his attention. He does not attack the pain, he wars against the disease. And though it is not every doctor who will tell his patient his real condition, if he be hopelessly ill, yet God is love, and loves His people too well to allow them to remain in ignorance of their real state. His word speaks the truth clearly enough; the pain, which causes the groans, “Oh, wretched man that I am;” the symptoms, which cry of self continually — what I do, what I do not do, what I love, what I hate — are all from this incurable constitutional disease — “IN ME, THAT IS IN MY FLESH, DWELLETH NO GOOD THING.” The Apostle said, “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” He had practically learned it. It would be impossible to know this fact, and yet to be trying to be better, as it would be impossible to know it and still to be looking to self for power. The Apostle gives us an experience; and no man gives an experience till he has passed out of the state he describes. A drowning man could not write about what he felt; he would struggle to be saved; but when saved he could calmly tell us what drowning feels like. It is a mistake to suppose that the groans of the 7th and the liberty of the 8th chapters of Romans are at one and the same time the experience of any believer. He who knows the liberty of the 8th chapter has assuredly come out of the bondage of the 7th; and we as surely know when he is out of the thrall by his triumphant cry, “I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord,” as we know when he is in it by his lament, “Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?”

The root of the pain, which to the soul, having life in Christ, produces the distressing symptoms, is the utter helplessness and badness of self — incurable self. Yet who has not striven and struggled to bring a good thing out of himself? Who has not resolved and been miserable over his broken resolutions? Who has not laboured in vain, and yet laboured again? Be sure of this, nature, self, “I,” is not to be remedied.

The physician.

A physician is spoken of in the chapter; “I speak to them that know the Law,” The Law then is the physician. Now there are two ways of knowing a physician. We may know his carriage, and bow to him; this is knowing him by sight; and in this way many know the Ten Commandments; they know them by seeing them written up in church, or by having learnt them as a bible lesson. But we may also know the physician by having been under his treatment — know him by having tasted his drugs and having felt his knife; and this is experimental knowledge. Thousands sing and say the Commandments and are never “wretched;” but the experimental knowledge produces a cry.

Does our reader know the law by being under it? Has he ever honestly tried to keep the law and not sin, to do what the law bids him? And did the law make our reader better? What saith the scripture? Simply this, the law makes a man feel worse than ever; “I had not known sin, but by the law.” (Rom. 7: 7.) It does not cure self at all; and it was never intended by God that it should do so.

The question is likely to arise, If this be so, if the effects produced are these, “Is the law sin?” (v. 7.) God forbid. The law is spiritual; it is of God, and from God. The point is that we are sin. The tool is good, but the wood is rotten. The best of workmen, with the finest of instruments, could not carve a flower out of a crumbling piece of wood. The medicine is good,but there is no strength within the patient to enable him to benefit by it. God tried man under the law, just as a workman might try what kind of thing the wood he would fashion was like; but since the cross of Christ God has not had man under probation. The law said, “Do this yourself and live.” The gospel says, “Believe in Christ and live.” The law demanded righteousness of man; the gospel brings salvation to man.

A man's moral feelings before knowing the spiritual nature of the law.

Are now described: “Without the law sin was dead — I was alive without the law once.” Immediately, however, he applied the law to his own case, took its medicine, as it were, his eyes were opened, and he became sensible to his condition; “But when the commandment came sin revived and I died.” It stirred up the evil of his heart. Not that it made his heart worse, but it made him feel his badness. The law said, “Thou shalt not covet;” thou shalt not have an acquiring or a grasping desire; and no sooner did the commandment go forth not to wish for a special thing, than it roused up the bad nature to long for that which was forbidden. Like a child who, when told not to look into the basket, immediately desires to do it, so poor, weak, and sinful human nature, when told by the law of God not to covet, immediately falls a longing. It is not that the commandment makes the child naughty, but the fact of the prohibition proves what the child is. The motions of sin are thus rendered active by the law. Sin exists; the nature is there; but the desires of sin are brought into action by the law bidding them be silent. And this sense of what self is, wrings from the broken heart of the believer the cry, “Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?”

The deliverance.

But is it just to blame the physician because the patient has a bad constitution? Shall we say, as some, the law has nothing to do with us, because it cannot cure us? No, the law is “holy and just, and good;” there is no fault in the law. “The commandment was to life.” The fault lies in self, not in the physician and his treatment.

The law cannot give life. “If there had been a law given, which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” (Gal. 3: 21); this is not its province. It demands righteousness. Neither can it keep alive, for where are they to whom it was said, “Do this, and thou shalt live? '' Are not their graves with us?

But if the law does not give life, nor keep alive, does it not deliver? Nay, nor was it ever intended to do so. Whence, then, is deliverance? How does the patient in a hospital, having a painful and incurable disease, escape the doctor's treatment and his own pains? There is only one way of freedom for him. So long as he remains in the hospital, he will be miserable; so long as he is what he is he will suffer. He will not leave the hospital, for he is too ill, and he cannot get free from himself. How, then, shall he become free? By death! There is no other way of escape for him. He cannot be cured, because he is incurable, and the more medicine he takes the more it proves his state.

Death is the only deliverance.

So says the scripture of him at whose spiritual pains and symptoms we have glanced: “Ye are become dead to the law by the body of Christ;” “Dead to that wherein ye were held;” (see margin.) The law remains in its dignity, but poor, wretched “I” is delivered by being crucified with Christ, and by escaping from the law by the death of Christ. And when faith reckons self to be dead, and life to be alone in Christ, the deliverance is experienced.

We quote at length the fourth verse of this chapter —

“My brethren, ye are become dead to the law by the body of Christ.

That ye should be married to another,

Even to Him who is raised from the dead,

That we should bring forth fruit unto God —”

For herein lies the germ of the whole question. We are not by nature dead to the law (see 1 Tim. 1: 8-10), but grace has come in, and a new thing has occurred — “We are become dead.” This marks an era in the soul's history; and the manner in which this was accomplished is by the body of Christ the dead body of Christ upon the cross, which is the judicial end of self, and the freedom of self from the law. We died with Christ, and thus are dead to that wherein we were held. A prisoner is sentenced to die, but he dies before his sentence is executed, and thus escapes the law which would have put him to death. Surely none would say that he was a better man for dying. And because of our utter badness Christ died for us, and thus, by His death, we escape from under the law which demanded goodness and obedience from us in vain. This is God's grace for His believing people. But if a man will not have Christ, and lives on in his own righteousness, as he terms it, and dies without Christ, then he will have to bear in his own person throughout eternity the awful penalty of having broken God's law and rejected God's Son.

We have also the new place, which Christ has acquired by resurrection; it is not as upon our old ground — as alive in our old state, that we are married to another, but as beyond the jurisdiction of the law, as alive unto God, that the union occurs with Him, who is raised from the dead.

It is in this position and thus connected with Christ that we bring forth fruit unto God — spiritual fruit, in which God has pleasure. When a man is under the law he is always trying in his own strength to be obedient — he is trying to make the weeds of his garden become beautiful flowers; but when he knows his connection with Christ risen from the dead, he serves in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. We are not under law, we are under grace; not under the rod of the schoolmaster, but under the guidance of the Spirit. Old things are passed away, all things are become new, and all things are of God.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 12

The Gospel of Our Salvation

12. “Therefore now no condemnation.”

The first few verses of the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans are the summing up of the truths opened out in the three preceding chapters of that epistle, and the result of these truths is stated in these glorious words —

“THERE IS, THEREFORE, NOW NO CONDEMNATION TO THEM WHICH ARE IN CHRIST JESUS.” (Rom. 8: 1.)

Two reasons are given for this statement: the first, based upon the doctrine of the 6th chapter; the second, upon that of the 7th. God has His “therefore” for the security of His people, and it is their privilege to be aware of it, and to see that their “therefores” are God's.

Reason 1. “For the law of the spirit of life, which is in Christ Jesus, has made me free from the law of sin and death.”

What is the law of sin and death? We speak of laws in nature by which, for example, the sun shines and the summer goes, and in virtue of which laws the natural world continues in its course. And, as there is a governing law in nature, so there is, spiritually speaking, one over man, and that is “the law of sin and death.” God did not make man subject to this; He made him innocent of sin, and not under the necessity of death; but since the fall, the law of sin and death rules over man.

Man is helpless to vary the law under which he finds himself. Just as the fish, which, at the approach of danger, fly above the waves, man may make efforts to be free from sin, but his very efforts only demonstrate his inability to deliver himself. The short flights of the fish do not change them into birds, or deliver them from the law of their existence, and they soon drop again into their native element; and man cannot elevate himself out of himself. Nor does he, by efforts to rise above himself, escape from the law under which he is born.

Condemnation is attached to this governing principle of sin and death. Man gravitates to destruction, as the apple falls to the earth. Man does not rise to glory, as the flame ascends upwards. It is not in man's being to direct his course to God and to heaven; alas, it is his nature to get as far away from God as possible, and to tread the broad road.

The extent of this terrible law of sin and death is as wide as the circle where the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus is not found. Everywhere outside of Christ, man is under its power, and wherever he may be, in heathendom, Christendom, circles moral and religious, or in those debased and profane, it matters not.

Let us suppose ourselves in winter time in the arctic regions. No sun is visible, and night continues for many months. The only way to escape from the long, long night, would be to quit the arctic regions, and to travel southwards, where the law of daily sunrise and sunset holds sway. To light a candle in the arctic night would not change the character of the long darkness, and man's search after light amounts, at the very highest, to nothing more than illuminating his night; no efforts of his produce the sunlight, or bring him out of nature's darkness into the marvellous light of God.

But we are made free from the law of sin and death. God has by His Spirit communicated a new life to us. The spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus has met us in our helpless and condemned state, and, being in Christ, who is risen, we are lifted up out of our former condition. The christian lives in another element from that which was natural to him, and his life exists in Christ Jesus alone.

We may use in illustration of the law of the life which is in Christ freeing the believer from condemnation, that creature typical of resurrection — the butterfly. And who, not knowing its marvellous history, could believe that the slow, creeping caterpillar, becomes the swift and gloriously-winged butterfly? It grovelled and fed amongst the leaves till the time for freedom from its first state arrived. Then it died to its first state, and thus entered upon its chrysalis condition. Death terminated its former existence and its first history, and out of death it rose a creature of beauty to live a new life, to feed upon different food, and to flutter through the sunshine.

Yet far more wonderful is the moral change, the change in habit of life, bent of thought, energy of mind yes, the whole existence of him whom God has truly converted. The evidence is unmistakable, and commands even the respect of those who are not in Christ Jesus. Such an instance is now before us. A man, whose whole life of some forty years had been spent in the pursuit of every kind of evil that could possibly engage him, was turned to God suddenly under the preaching of Christ. His townsmen confess to the unmistakable reality of his new life, his old companions bow before it, and his home testifies to it. Nature's miracle of new life, from the caterpillar to the butterfly, is not to be compared with this miracle of God's grace, which has changed a ringleader in iniquity to a pattern of piety and gentleness.

The christian has died with Christ to his former state, and out of Christ's death, in the power of His resurrection, he has the new life, and thereby is freed from the old governing law of sin and death. The Spirit of life, which exists alone in Christ, has wrought the believer's deliverance. He does not belong to the old judged state, and being in Christ, “there is, therefore, now no condemnation.”

Reason 2. “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”

The law given to man by Moses was rendered ineffective for producing righteousness in man, by reason of the incapacity of man's moral being for obedience to its behests. It was weak through the flesh. The best of laws will not make men good. “The flesh,” like an intractable and hopelessly dull scholar, yielded no result to the commands of the “Schoolmaster.” And this went on up to the time of, or until, Christ. (Gal. 3: 24.) Then God, who gave the law, sent His Son into the world in the likeness of sinful flesh, not to perfect the work of the law, not to add to its instruction or to continue its efforts to produce good out of man, but to die in the stead of the intractable and unteachable scholar — man. God sent His Son into the world for the question of sin. The law had relation to sin. It forbade sin. Christ came and took up and determined the question. It was by forsaking Him who was His own Son upon the cross that God condemned sin in the flesh, and this God did to deliver us, so that, being in Christ Jesus, and having a new life, and a new force in Him, the righteous demands of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 13

The Gospel of Our Salvation

13. The Resurrection and the Life.

Our endeavour hitherto has been chiefly to show God's grace to man in his ruin, to lead the heart to God's forgiveness, and to establish it in God's peace, to take away every hope in self, and to fix faith upon Christ alone. We have hardly touched upon our possessions in Christ; but let us not think that christianity consists merely in forgiveness of sins and deliverance from self: for, as the pot of oil met the widow's need, so does grace meet us. First, that pot of oil gave her enough to pay all her debts, and thus saved her children from bondage; next, it gave her a lifelong sufficiency. And God delivers us from the terrible burden under which we groaned, so that we may live the life of faith of a now risen Christ, and thus rejoice in His fulness.

Let us now endeavour to point out some of our wealth, or, rather, to point to the treasury where the wealth is stored. The power of practical christianity lies in what we have. The religious man without Christ is constantly trying to obtain something out of himself to give to God; the sceptic is ever telling us that he has done with religion; but the christian lives in the enjoyment of the blessings wherewith he is blessed  — he possesses. The gospel comes to the weary and needy heart with positive good. It brings blessings to man, it fills the soul with satisfaction, it removes want by pouring in exceeding riches. The satisfied sheep lies down when she wants nothing more. The abundance which is ours occasions our rest; “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”

The gospel of our salvation first answers every need which the Spirit of God, by showing us our real condition, awakens within us; next it satisfies all the longings which God Himself, by His Spirit, creates in our souls. Brought, as we are, into a new relationship with our God, we know Him in a new way; we know Christ in a new way. All things are become new to us, and we are made new to enjoy the new things.

Of our blessings, Christ's resurrection is the foundation. Resurrection,which each seed sown in the earth and rising up in new life, and which each waking spring teaches, is the very essence of the gospel of God. Our dull hearts too often travel no further than the benefits of Christ's death; we reach the cross and there sit down. Sometimes the sluggish spirit, having found forgiveness by the blood of Jesus, returns to earthly things, resting in forgiveness, not rising above the circumstances around us in the vigour of resurrection-life. The believer is, indeed, a forgiven man, but he is also delivered from the power of Satan, and the world, and death, and himself, in the resurrection of Christ. The blood of the sacrifice has cleansed away his guilt, but he is not only cleansed, he is risen with Christ. He lives already in the life of the eternal spring.

Resurrection is the guarantee of our blessings for “if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” (1 Cor. 15: 17) If Christ be not raised, the christian's hope in God is utterly vain. But by Christ's resurrection we are established in a standing of absolute liberty before God — a standing upon the other side of death, the bright side, where Christ is. He is the “Resurrection and the Life;” first the resurrection, then the life. He first overcomes death, and then gives life to them for whom He died. After having borne the judgment and death due to their sins, He imparts, to man dead in sins, eternal life in the power of His resurrection. Death precedes judgment, “After death the judgment,” and from death the sinner cannot escape. The Lord has destroyed the power of death, and has taken us out of our state of death in trespasses and sins, and has given us a life which is beyond death and free from judgment.

We are, alas, so occupied with this world and its vanity that we are dull to discover and slow to receive the fulness of our resurrection blessings! Besides which, many of God's people are, in spirit, trembling upon the Egyptian side of the Red Sea, they are not, in faith, upon resurrection ground. Israel was safe in Egypt when under the shelter of the blood of the slain lamb, but Israel, though equally safe, was in despair when hedged up between the pursuing enemy and the Red Sea. Then came the third, day the day typical of resurrection and Israel proved God's power in opening a way for them through the waters. When standing upon the opposite side of the Red Sea, they knew God's salvation. And, though we are safe the moment we trust Him Who shed His blood for us, yet we know not God's salvation until we lay hold, by faith, of God's power in raising Him from the dead, and in bringing us through His death and by His resurrection into perfect deliverance.

Should there be a reader of this page, still wanting the full assurance of the knowledge of his acceptance before God, let him turn his eye of faith to Christ in the glory of God. The Sin Bearer upon the cross, is the Crown Wearer upon the throne; the Forsaken of God upon Calvary is now glorified by God in heaven. Our sins, which nailed Him to the tree, our judgment, which brought Him to death, are gone in His sufferings. Our very selves, like fruitless trees, are cut down and hidden in His grave. His cross and His crown are linked together. There is no separation between haying been crucified with Christ and being glorified with Christ. The new life which is ours in our risen Christ should assert itself in our daily walk and ways; it should, like the freshness of spring, hide the death and efface the very memory of the winter of our unconverted days.

From among the numerous blessings which God declares we have by virtue of Christ's resurrection, we will make mention of the following: —

1. We are justified because the Lord is risen.

He was “raised again for our justification.” (Rom. 4: 25.) God judicially “made Him to be sin for us,” but having “died unto sin once,” (Rom. 6: 10), having finished the work given Him to do, the Lord could not be holden of death. The righteous God could not allow that He should be held a captive in the grave, and, therefore, “He was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father.” (Rom. 6: 4.) And those, who believe on the Lord, those for whom He died and rose again, are regarded, judicially, as occupying the same freedom with Christ from the judgment of sin. God has “justified them from all things.” (Acts 13: 39.) Who then shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect (Rom. 8: 33) since our judicial standing established by God is perfect?

And more: As the life which we receive through Adam is sinful, and the sentence against man as possessor of it is, “Thou shalt surely die,” so we have in Christ, life which is holy, and the possessors of this life are justified persons, connected with Him, who lives to die no more. God imparts to those who believe, the new life in the condition of resurrection, for Christ has passed through death and judgment on man's account.

Before the fall, man's was innocent life.

After the fall, man's was sinful life.

In Christ, those who believe, have a holy life.

2. Our security is based upon, the power of Christ's resurrection.

Here we have an immovable foundation for faith, a divine security. Its measure is nothing less than “the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead.” (Eph. 1: 19, 20.) God put out His divine energy to raise His Son from the grave, and the same character of power is used by Him to give resurrection-life to us “even when we were dead in sins.” And now the secure place which Christ has in resurrection is that which His people occupy spiritually before God and the life of Christ on high is theirs, though they are still in mortal bodies. An illustration amongst others of Christ and His people having one and the same resurrection place before God, is to be found in the ancient ordinance of Jehovah for Israel. When the harvest was ripe, Israel waved before Jehovah a sheaf as first-fruits, and having presented to Him the sample of that which was about to be ingathered, they reaped their fields, and garnered their grain. The sheaf was part of the harvest. The same quickening power which raised from the bare grain the ears of corn in the wave-sheaf, raised also the ears of corn in all the other sheaves of the harvest. Christ is the first-fruits. He has presented Himself to God, the first-born from among the dead. He is our life, and what He is before God that also, as associated with Him, His people are. We are “risen with Christ.” (Col. 3: 1.)

3. We are united to Christ, not in incarnation, but to Him risen.

“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” (John 12: 24.) The Lord being risen out of the grave, has brought “much fruit,” even His people to God. There was no union of man with Christ till after Christ died for man. Had He gone back to glory without dying, He had ever continued in the solitary holiness of His humanity. We should have remained sinful, for our fallen humanity could not be joined to His sinless humanity. But His death for us has separated our sins from us, and us from the judgment due to them; it has separated us from our old standing as guilty before God, and from all the consequences due to that standing. There is no union with Him save in the new life and by the Spirit.

From the earliest times, God foreshadowed the truths of death, resurrection, and life. When Jehovah set the first man in the earthly paradise, and there was no help meet for him in the creation over which he was the head, “the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam,” and, while he slept, took from him that out of which woman was formed; so that, seeing her, Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” (Gen. 2: 21-23.) The Lord passed through the deep sleep of death, in order to bring us into life. Life for us arises out of His death. We are risen with Him. “We are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.” (Eph. 5: 30.) We are united to Him, and “This is a great mystery.” (Eph. 5: 32.)

Thus we are justified by God in the risen Christ; secured by God in the risen Christ; and united to the risen Christ. In the presence of these three blessings, there is one scripture to which we do well to take heed.

“If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above . . . set your affection (or mind) on things above.” (Col. 3: 1, 2.)

By these words, God challenges His people to earnest and diligent search after heavenly blessings, and bids them give their minds to these things. A man who seeks after a definite object in life, who makes that one thing his business, is sure [likely] to succeed. Such diligence should characterize the christian in devoting his soul to the things above, where Christ is. “Seek those things,” implies no weak or languid action, but eager and intense purpose. If the mind be set upon the things, the whole life will be formed by the things on which the mind is set.

The Colossian believers, to whom the exhortation was originally addressed, were in danger of sinking down into an earthly religiousness. They were upon the brink of the morass of Judaized-Heathenized-Christianity into which so many are now plunged. “Worshipping of angels,” being “subject to ordinances,” such as “Touch not, Taste not, Handle not,” threatened to engulf them. These things have now become so vast a system that the minds of thousands are enveloped in them, and by these things the essence of the christian faith — a risen Christ — is blotted out from the spiritual perceptions of the greater part of Christendom. But, in the same truths, which were given by God to save the Colossians from the threatened loss of christianity, lies its recovery to the soul. Christ is the same today as He was in the days of His apostles; christianity has not changed, and the way back to its blessings will be found by those who “seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God;” who set their minds on things above, and not on things on the earth, and who ever remember “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.”

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 14

The Gospel of Our Salvation

14. The New Creation.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Gen. 1: 1) But when the beginning began God has not told us. We may be certain that some event took place after the beginning, whereby “the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” for “God is not the author of confusion.” (1 Cor. 14: 33.)

The Creator, having brought light and order into the earth, declared of His finished work that “it was good,” and He placed man in it as head over the work of His hands. And now, to man, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handy work, Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (Ps. 19: 1-4.)

The voice of the written Word.

But God has a creation more wonderful than that of things to human eyes now visible, a creation which expresses the glory of His being and character, and this the heavens above and the fulness of the earth upon which we tread can never do. The voice of created things declares to all lands and languages His eternal power and divinity (Rom. 1: 20), but the voice of His word makes manifest “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4: 6.) Alas! man is deaf to these voices. The highly educated and intellectual heathen, as well as the debased and ignorant, alike worship images of things God put under man's feet they fall down before fishes, reptiles, and animals. Thus has sin degraded man to cause him to “serve the creature rather than the Creator,” and thus, despite the evidence of the heavens above, the foolish heart of the heathen is darkened even to the folly of idols (Rom 1: 22, 23); while, more grievous still, in Christendom, notwithstanding the witness of the scriptures to the moral perfections of God, “the god of this world hath blinded the eyes of them which believe not” to the knowledge of God's character, and into the rejection of Him and His sacrifice, whereby alone God can be truly known by man.

The creation of the world illustrative of the new.

Using the creation of the world as an illustration, the scriptures declare that “God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Our hearts in their darkness of mere mental understanding are like the earth when it was without form and void. The order and the beauty of the creature enjoying God's rule of love are not present. Instead, there exists the rule of sin, hatred of God, the darkness of evil ways and thoughts — a moral chaos. “God made man upright.” Such was man's beginning. Then came in the ruin; now, by grace, the new creation. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” (2 Cor. 5: 17.)

The very first act of God in the new creation is what we read of as His first act in the beginning: God brings in light. “Let there be light” is His command. The “Spirit of God,” who “moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1: 2), brings home the word of God to conscience and to heart; the light shines in, and, as “God divided the light from the darkness,” so also He works within our hearts, dividing between the good and the evil.

The entrance of light.

In every-day life, when light upon any subject enters the mind, thenceforth, so far as the given subject is concerned, all is changed — a new power, a new perception, and a new outlook has arisen within us. The eyes of our mind are opened. Now the heavenly light, divinely given, has shined into our hearts to give us a special knowledge, even that of God's own glory. We do not mean His creator-glory, which the heavens declare, and which human science can at least in measure unfold and explain, but a far more excellent glory, even that of His own being and character. This knowledge is not shown by the firmament, or uttered by the day and the night, but is written in another book, and explained by a different language. “In the face of Jesus Christ” we read it — and not merely in His face when He was upon earth, but where He is, in heaven. “In the Son of His love” is this knowledge made known to man. We must see Jesus where He now is, if we would understand His life and His death upon earth. That life of grace and truth, that death of love and holiness, viewed in connection with the character of God, are a mystery until the fact of Christ's present glory is apprehended. His present glory is the divine answer to His past shame; Himself upon the throne, the First-born from among the dead, the Head of the new creation, the answer to His taking the place and responsibility of sinners, dead in trespasses and sins.

The purpose of God respecting His people unfolds before our souls as “We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour.” (Heb. 2: 9.) It was with astonished gaze that His apostles beheld Him leave the appointed mountain, blessing them as He ascended to heaven, the cloud receiving Him out of their sight. (Acts 1: 9.) Having beheld Him thus, they failed not to preach His resurrection; the full meaning and blessing of which, as bearing upon His people, the Epistles declare to us. By them we know that in due season all who believe in Him, all who accept, by faith, His death and shame as their life and glory, shall be rendered in body, soul, and spirit like him, the Head of the new creation of God. We know also, though our bodies be still mortal, and though sin be in us, and though the circumstances of the world and the rule of its god be against us, yet that we have Christ's life communicated to us in the power of His resurrection. We are a new creation, the “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (2 Cor. 5: 17.) This divinely-given knowledge is, by the Spirit's strength, divine power within the soul.

The bounds of infidelity.

Infidelity the popular christianized infidelity of our day — that boasts of humanity, and denies the fall, shrinks into a contemptible nothingness before the greatness of the fact of a risen Man. The restless sea of human speculation storms on still, but, as in previous centuries, so now, to be baffled and broken against that impassable barrier — death. Thus far, oh, wisdom of man, shalt thou go and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed! The weakness of God is stronger than man. The good news of a crucified One risen from the dead is the power of God unto salvation. The foolishness of the preaching of the crucified Man, is God's way of saving them who believe. Out of His death has arisen our life, in the power of His resurrection we live. The christian's life is in Christ, who is risen from among the dead, and the christian knows, by the energy of the Spirit of God within him, the things pertaining to life and incorruptibility which are brought to light through the gospel. God's good news to us brings new life — everlasting life by means of the death of His Son — and incorruptibility, a new creation in the power of the resurrection of His Son. Thus, though the career of human greatness ends with the touch of death's finger, and though death bounds human knowledge, it is not death to the believer, but “to depart and to be with Christ.” We know that our inheritance is with the risen Christ, and that, should we die, it is only to wait with Him awhile until the resurrection morning breaks, and the bodies of all who believe awake for glory.

Then will the new creation, of which Christ's own are now a part, be seen in its perfection. Life in a risen Christ is our present portion; incorruptibility and likeness to Him risen, our future portion. In Christ, the First-born from among the dead, we possess the new life, and wait for the full glory of the new creation.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 15

The Gospel of Our Salvation

15. The good news of the glory of Christ.

“If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (2 Cor. 4: 3, 4.) Reader, ponder these words — “the gospel of the glory of Christ,” for it should not be read the glorious gospel of Christ.” Glorious, indeed, is the good news of Christ, but the Spirit of God, in the text before us, addresses our minds rather to the subject than the quality of the good news.

There is divine good news for man in the fact that the once-crucified Christ is a man in glory.

The light of His glory on earth.

When our Lord was upon earth He “was the light of the world.” Every act and deed of His, grace or truth, gentleness or reproof, was the shining out of the Divine character. He was both “the image of God” and “the light of the world.” Suppose we take a torch into a cavern; its light reveals the character and contents of the cave, makes manifest that which, before the entrance of the torch, was hidden in darkness. Such was the Lord's shining way through this world; it detected everything. But man “loved darkness rather than light,” and understood not His perfections. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1: 5.) “The world 'at large' knew Him not;” the circle of His ancient people “received Him not.” (v. 10, 11.) The darkness did not mingle with the light; the light did not modify the darkness. By Jesus the Light, the image of the invisible God, is the character of God expressed to man. By knowing the Son we know the Father. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” (John 1: 18.) Man learns God in the person of His Son. Therefore, to reject the Son, is to reject the Father who sent Him. Receiving the Son, God gives us the privilege of becoming His children. (John 1: 12, 13.) From the Person of Christ the glory of God shines out. We understand the cross, we know pardon and peace, we perceive the character of the throne of God in its holiness and justice, and we know, too, that God is love.

The effulgence and rays of His character reached man through the Son. Even as the light emanates from and surrounds the sun, so Christ is the brightness of God's glory (Heb. 1: 3), and as we see not the sun itself, but its effulgence, we see not God save through Him who expresses to us who and what God is.

A glorified Christ in heaven.

At length the darkness sought to put out the light and drive it from the world. And with what result? The Light is no longer beaming from this earth; Jesus is in heaven; He is in the glory of God as a Man. There, the Man, Christ Jesus, bears upon His Person the marks of man's rejection, while the fact of His presence there attests God's estimate of His work upon earth. The light of His words and works led man, in his darkness, to crucify Him; the light of His Person, now on high, expresses to man the brightness of God's glory and His grace to the chief of sinners.

The Lord revealed Himself to Saul as Jesus of Nazareth, glorified at God's right hand in heaven, and with Him, as He is, every man must have to do. The christian knows not Christ after the flesh, but in resurrection-glory. Christ is not the Man of sufferings upon earth; He is not the dying One upon the cross; He is not the slain One in the sepulchre where, eighteen hundred years ago, the shining angels said to the women, “He is not here, He is risen.” No, He is the Risen Man, the Ascended Man, the One whom the chosen few beheld ascend from Olivet. And whither went He? To heaven! But to what part of heaven? The Son of God, the brightness of God's glory, the express image of His Person, “when He had, by Himself, purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” It was from that glory He announced Himself to Saul, “I am Jesus of Nazareth,” the self-same Jesus, who had walked in humiliation and in rejection upon this earth. And this is a message distinct from everything previously given by God to man.

The gospel of His glory.

Prophets had predicted His coming, and the yet future day of His glory upon earth, when, under His sceptre, righteousness should be established and peace should reign. The angelic hosts had praised God, and proclaimed peace on earth and good pleasure concerning man when He was born the Babe in Bethlehem. He Himself, when here, had preached eternal life to all that believe on Him; and His apostles, after His resurrection, had published forgiveness of sins through faith in His Name. But the special good news of the Man rejected and despised on earth, linking His own with Himself in heaven, was reserved to be made known to man, until His own lips announced that gospel from the glory above.

Man's difficulty.

Human eye could gaze upon the lowly Babe of Bethlehem, could look upon the Man of Sorrows, and, even now, man can allow his imagination to paint an ideal — chisel a careworn countenance — carve a crucifix; but His ascension-glory is beyond the perception and grasp of mere humanity. His enemies fell to the ground as dead in the presence of the light of it. The radiance of which was brighter than that of the noonday eastern sun. They “saw, indeed, the light, and were afraid,” and Saul was blinded by “the glory of that light,” the moral perfection of which, however, by the power of the Holy Ghost, shined into his heart “to give the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Satan's effort to hide Christ from man.

The enemy, “the god of this world,” gained a seeming victory at the cross. His power of darkness allied with man's will cast out of the world the only One who could tell man who and what God is. And now the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ, is hidden from the chief part of the earth — darkness is upon the face of humanity. By far the greater portion of the world is heathen or Mahomedan, and only in a very small part of that which is Christendom is the word of God so much as read, and within those narrowing limits but very few believe. Save within the hearts of God's hidden people, there exists upon the earth the most vague idea of God. The fact of a risen and glorified Jesus does not enter into the calculation of the popularized christianity of our day. Thus has “The god of this world blinded the minds of them that believe not.”

But the strongholds of Satan become weakness in the presence of Jesus, once crucified, now glorified. Where He has gone Satan's power cannot follow, and when a man believes Christ, and apprehends where He is, he triumphs in the victory of his Lord. Thenceforth to him infidelity and superstition are the creatures of that darkness which the god of this world rules, and by which he sways the minds of those who do not believe. The christian's faith is beyond the darkness, fixed on Him who is in glory, and from whom glory shines.

The glory of Christ, good news.

By the gospel we have not only the tidings of forgiveness of sins, peace with God, and new life in Christ, but we have also the message of glory for ourselves. The ministry of the law, engraven in stones, which Moses brought with him from the mount, was accompanied with surroundings of glory. The face of Moses shone as he came down from Sinai with the tables of the law in his hands and the reflection of God's glory upon his countenance. Then Moses put a veil upon his face, to hide the glory from a trembling people under the law; for Israel could not read the meaning of the reflections of glory upon Moses' face, because the tables of the law were in his hands. It is impossible to receive grace from a law-giver, and until grace be known by man, the glory of God is terrible to him. It is only as believers in Christ crucified that we can know Christ glorified. The holiest is opened to faith's vision through the rent veil of His flesh. His grace in dying for us has made His glory our joy.

There is no veil before the face of the ascended Jesus. It is all love, grace, glory. Not a cloud upon His face, not a shadow of doubt should remain in the hearts of His own. We know that He would not be the glorified Man on high had He not been the crucified Man below. We see Him, but not holding the tables of the law in His hands, and bidding us “do this and live;” we see Him with hands once pierced for our sins, and the glory of God shining from His face, telling us that all is done, that our sins are gone, and that God is magnified. We know that He who was forsaken for us is the new measure of our acceptance — “We are accepted in the Beloved.” Thus is the glory of Christ good news to His people.

The glory of Christ gives His people the christian hope.

God had a great purpose in making man. He made him in His own image, and set him over the works of His hands. The image is now sorely marred by sin, man is grievously unlike God. But God has not departed from His purpose, and what sin has spoiled upon earth, grace will establish in glory. What has been permitted to fail in the first creation, will be built up in perfection in the new. In due time God's people will be made like to the glorified Christ on high. As they have borne sin's stamp and sin's suffering here, so shall they bear His image, who has died for sin, and risen out of death and sorrow there. “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” (1 Cor. 15: 49.)

How this end will be effected.

Resurrection is the mighty power of God. The lesson which we learn yearly, in the bare grain becoming the fruitful ear of corn, will be fulfilled in the bodies of God's people by the Lord Himself. “Our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body” (or, body of humiliation), “that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.” (Phil. 3: 20, 21.)

When will this be elected?

The day, the hour, we know not. But when the Lord comes, His own will rise, and those of His who are living will be changed. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” (1 Cor. 15: 51, 52.) And this is the highest christian hope. The hope of the redemption of our bodies on that day of glory (Rom. 8: 21); the hope of being conformed to Christ's image and likeness, of being in body, soul, and spirit pure like Himself.

Practical results.

This hope is a purifying hope. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.” (1 John 2: 2, 3.)

Holiness produced.

Moreover, the occupation of the heart with Christ where He is, produces holiness within the christian. “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Cor. 3: 18.) We see an unveiled face of the glorified Christ in the presence of God. Faith sees it, and present holiness follows, for we are changed. The change is progressive, it is “from glory to glory;” there is no standing still — “not as though I had already attained, or either were already perfect.” The light of a glorified Christ poured into the soul by God the Spirit produces holiness, even as the fruit is surely, though imperceptibly, ripened by the sun's rays. As it grows, it is changed to sweetness by the light. There is no effort in this work, but a great result. “Beholding . . . . we are changed.” We hinder holiness by looking to the earth, to self, to one another. There is but little holiness where Christ is not all.

Energy given.

Acquaintance with Christ in the glory is the great energizing principle of the christian faith. Christ in glory beamed like the light of a beacon before His servant, Paul. It guided and drew him on in his troublous course on earth. It led him with unwearied force to “press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 3: 14.) He saw before him the brightness of a glorified Jesus, and he longed to be like Him on high. The prize of resurrection-blessings glistened before his soul. He panted for the day when he should be exactly like Christ, and in the power of that prospect he counted what he once so dearly prized, as dung, and was ready, even should it be by the means of martyrdom, to be with Christ, whose image he would shortly bear. Reader! the force of his example appeals to us, while his tears, as he tells of those “who mind earthly things,” warn us; for we are either running in the race as was Paul, or we are turning to the world — there is no neutral ground.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 16

The Gospel of Our Salvation

16. The power of the new life.

They, who are in Christ Jesus, have a new power within them. Not only new life in Christ and a new standing before God, but a new force within — even the Spirit of God Himself. The law is no longer their ruler, but by the Spirit they are enabled to fulfil the law's requirements, and to live to God.

Let us first observe how God, when teaching us of His Spirit, divides mankind into two vast families. In both of these we cannot be — in one or other we all are. There is no intermediate place, since birth determines entrance into each of them. First is that which is natural; into this family we all entered when we were born into the world; afterwards is that which is spiritual; into this family we were brought by grace, when we were born again.

The two vast families.

Flesh

ORIGIN. — “That which is born of the flesh.” (John 3: 6.)

NATURE. — “Is flesh.” (John 3: 6.) “After the flesh.” (Rom. 8: 5.)

STANDING. — “In the flesh.” (Rom. 8: 9.)

INCLINATION.— “Mind the things of the flesh.” (Rom. 8: 5.)

RESULT. — “Death.” (Rom. 8: 6.)

Spirit

ORIGIN. — “That which is born of the Spirit.” (John 3: 6.)

NATURE. — “Is Spirit.” (John 3: 6.) “After the Spirit.” (Rom. 8: 5.)

STANDING. — “In the Spirit.” (Rom. 8: 9.)

INCLINATION. — “the things of the Spirit.” (Rom. 8: 5.)

RESULT. — “Life and peace.” (Rom. 8: 6.)

Further, let us take heed to what God says respecting the powerlessness of the flesh to do His will, a word of warning not to be passed by in our day of religious boastfulness. A word equally applicable to the sinner in his fallen nature, or to the saint as to his fallen nature —

(1.) “The fleshly mind is enmity against God;

(2.) For it is not subject to the law of God;

(3.) Neither indeed can be.

So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” (Rom. 8: 7, 8.)

When a man believes on Christ, he has everlasting life, and is

BORN OF THE SPIRIT.

This is his birthday in divine things. Thus he enters the family of God's people. And as he receives life by the Spirit, so is the Spirit the power for living out practically the life he has in Christ and from Christ. Towards this end “The flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6: 63), for the flesh contains in itself no vigour for godly living; no strength for serving God, or for enjoying God; on the contrary, it is opposed to God; and in the believer “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” (Gal. 5: 17.)

The children of God are born of God; they receive not divine life by nature's parentage, by their own free will, or by the will of others. (John 1: 13.) That which is born of God sinneth not (1 John 3: 9), it is holy and of God. But as the believer has still a sinful nature, he may sin (1 John 1: 10), for though he has the holy life in Christ, sin is still in him (1 John 1: 8); however, he should not sin (1 John 2: 1), and the Holy Spirit, by leading to obedience to God's word, restrains the activities of the sinful nature, and keeps the believer from sinning. The believer is a complex being. Two energies are within him, that of the Spirit of God, and that of his old nature.

Not only is the believer born of the Spirit, he is also

INDWELT BY THE SPIRIT.

For in every believer, who believes the gospel of salvation, the Holy Spirit dwells. The work of the Lord Jesus in redemption is finished. He has by His own blood bought His people for Himself. But the day of glory, when the full results of His redemption shall be seen, and His people shall be glorified, has not yet dawned, and unto this day of redemption the Holy Spirit seals the believer. He Himself dwelling within the believer is the seal of the perfect work for the believer, which the Lord has accomplished.

The Holy Spirit does not seal us in our unbelief, in our doubts and fears, nor in the uncleanness of our unforgiven state; but He seals us when made clean by the blood of Christ, and when believing the gospel of our salvation.

Upon our believing God, who gave His Son to be delivered for our offences, and to be raised again for our justification, God justified us, and being justified we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 4: 25, Rom. 5: 1) — peace regarding the righteousness of God in dealing with sin, and with our sins — peace with God as the great Judge, for He, the Just One, justified us. Thereupon the Holy Spirit took up His dwelling within our hearts, and shed abroad in our hearts the love of God. (Rom. 5: 5.)

The Spirit of God, by dwelling within the believer, seals the person in whom His own work is effected. Sealing implies completion. Suppose a man make a deed of gift, by which he bestows certain wealth upon the object of his goodness, the document is sealed by the giver. He puts his seal to the completed deed, and thenceforward he cannot alter it. After the Holy Spirit has removed from the believer every hope of salvation in self, and opened his soul to receive Christ as his all — the result of which, as we have just observed, is peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ — He seals him, by dwelling within him. So we read, “after that ye believed ye were sealed.” (Eph. 1: 13.)

There is a distinct work of God in leading the soul on, step by step — an establishing work, whereby doubts and fears are removed, self-confidence is taken away, and Christ becomes the peace of the soul, and upon this the Holy Spirit takes up His abode within.

God gives us to rest before Him in the sense of what we are in Christ. He settles us upon the immoveable foundation. He then seals by His Spirit those in whom He has wrought. He first establishes the soul in Christ. He next seals the established believer. In olden times the blood of the sacrifice was placed upon the leper who was about to be cleansed, and after the blood the anointing oil (see Lev. 14: 28, 29); and now we read, “He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God; who hath also sealed us.” (2 Cor. 1: 21, 22.)

Thus the Spirit of God takes up His abode within the believer — “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?” (1 Cor. 5: 19), and thus are fulfilled the Lord's own words to His disciples respecting the Holy Ghost, “He shall be in you.” (John 14: 16.) And this being accomplished, The Holy Spirit never leaves His dwelling-place.

Our Lord said of the Spirit, “He shall abide with you forever.” (John 14: 16.) True it is, that David prayed, “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.” (Ps. 51: 2.) But we are not now speaking of the manifestations of the Spirit to the believer, but of the Spirit personally dwelling within him. The Spirit was not personally sent from the Father and given to dwell within the believer until the Lord Jesus rose from the dead. “The Spirit was not yet given, for that Jesus was not yet glorified.” (John 7: 39.) In the resurrection and ascension of Christ we find the divine reason why we, in this day of grace, have the Spirit dwelling within our hearts. Our privileges are based upon the finished work of Christ, and are consequent upon our Lord's glory.

The Spirit of God, then, does not forsake the believer, whose body He has deigned to make His temple. But if the believer allow the flesh to act, then the Spirit of God is grieved. He is a Person within the believer, who is a grieved person. He witnesseth not with our spirits: instead of gracious communications we experience rebuffs. A father does not leave the house because his child is wilful and disobedient, but until his child be sorry, his grieved heart finds it impossible to express its affections to the child. He becomes the reprover of his child. His true love to his child can act in no other way, and the child, instead of beholding the smile, sees grief written upon his father's countenance. And thus it is, too often, that the children of God instead of enjoying the manifestations of the Spirit of God within, are, because of their evil and disobedient ways, subject to the reproofs which the Spirit addresses to them. Therefore we are enjoined, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.” (Eph. 4: 30.)

The Holy Spirit of God, who dwells within His people, takes up His abode in their hearts as the

SPIRIT OF SONSHIP.

“Ye are all the sons (lit.) of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3: 26), “and because ye are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” (Gal. 4: 6.) He is not within us as the Spirit of bondage, not as a Spirit leading us to fear, but to liberty. He does not lead us to place ourselves under legal terror. We do not go back from the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free to be entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Gal. 5: 1) at the bidding of the Holy Spirit. We are not by the Spirit led to doubt our Father's love, or to question whether we are His children. We are not led by the Spirit to dread lest, after all, we shall fail of His home in glory. “Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear.” (Rom. 8: 15.) “Thou art no more a servant, but a son.” (Gal. 4: 7.)

Those who are born of God are the children of God, and the indwelling Spirit leads them to know the love of God, and to call Him Father. “Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” (Rom. 8: 15.) Not Father in the sense of His being the Creator, but as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are connected in our sonship with “The Son of God's love” in heaven; we are sons in the power of the ascension of the Lord Jesus,

The love wherewith the Father loves His Son, is the nature of the love wherewith He loves us. And the Spirit brings our hearts into the enjoyment of this love. True, our enjoyment of the love is feeble, but in some small degree it is the privilege of all to delight in it. Such is the nearness into which the adoption into the family of God brings us.

Moreover, this relationship is an individual blessing — a private blessing to each of God's people, though possessed by all the family. And we know the blessing experimentally. We know it, first, because God has revealed it in His word; but we know it, secondly, because God has made the fact good within our hearts. “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.” (Rom. 8: 16.) There is a mutual witness of love within the hearts of earthly parent and child, but there is a closer witness within our hearts to God, for the same Spirit who is with the Father is also within our hearts, and He makes God our Father to our hearts what our Father's heart is for us.

The Spirit of God within us, by whom we are enabled to rejoice in our nearness to God, is the Spirit of holiness. His title is emphatically the Holy Spirit. The love is holy. It produces no levity when thinking of God, no tinge of irreverence. Boldness, indeed, the love gives, but boldness in us suitable to God. He is in His action within us a

SANCTIFYING SPIRIT.

It is by His energy within us that we detect the evil of our hearts, and learn to judge ourselves as dead, and as living to God alone by and in Christ. “If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” (Rom. 8: 10.)

By Him we have the power practically to mortify within ourselves the very passions in which we once indulged. No force of our own can accomplish this end. Self cannot put self to death; nature cannot mortify nature. “If by the Spirit ye do mortify — put to death — the deeds of the body, ye shall live.” (Rom. 8: 13.) Self-indulgence is sin; God's Spirit gives us power over self, and, instead of indulging self, by Him we put to death the motions after the things in which we once delighted.

He it is who obtains the victory within us over the strength of the flesh in us, for He strives “Against the flesh . . . . so that ye cannot (or, may not) do the things that ye would.” (Gal. 5: 17.) The works of the flesh, and the fruit of the Spirit, are placed in contrast (read Gal. 5: 19-23), and we are either bringing forth our evil works, or the Spirit within us is producing fruit. The garden of the soul is bringing forth in the energy of its own evil soil the rampant weeds which are the growth of the flesh, or, sowing to the Spirit, we are bringing forth from the new life the fruit of the Spirit. Such is the daily outcome of our lives. Either the weeds, or the fruit, are being constantly produced by us. But “They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections (or passions) and lusts.” (Gal. 5: 24.)

The Spirit of God leads His people into a practical resemblance to Christ. He is within them as a

FORMATIVE SPIRIT.

And thus every believer in whom He dwells becomes, at least, in some small degree like Christ. The Holy Spirit leads the believer into heart occupation with Christ. He is the power by whom we behold Christ where He is in glory, and recall Him where He was on earth, and thus are changed into His image, and though there may be only very slight resemblance, yet there is some resemblance to Christ in all the members of God's family. So that it is said, “Hereby know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit.”

The Spirit of God also in indwelling the hearts of His people succours them in their difficulties and trials: He is

OUR COMFORTER (John 14: 16); HELPER AND INTERCESSOR. (Rom. 8: 26, 27.)

The Lord Jesus was the Comforter of His own while He was personally with them upon earth; now, in the absence of Jesus, the Spirit of God has come and has taken up His gracious work for the weak and tried children of God. As Comforter, the Holy Spirit abides with the believer for ever. Unseen and unknown by the world, He dwells in and with His people, and ministers to them Christ and the Father's love. The Lord, in order to make good to us the blessings He came from heaven to bestow, had to die and leave this world, but the Holy Spirit has come to us, being sent from heaven by the ascended Man, Christ Jesus. He has united us to Christ, and the blessings being all ours in Christ, it is His gracious ministry to comfort our hearts, by filling us with the realization of the blessings, and the love of the Blesser. The joy which fills the breast of the believer is due to the presence of the Spirit, who is the well of water within him springing up unto everlasting life.

We are weak and ignorant, and He who dwells within us has been graciously pleased to become the Helper of our infirmities. By reason of our weakness we cannot grasp the things of God firmly, and the Holy Spirit is a power within the new man to lay hold of these things for us, so that we may receive the fulness of their blessings. Weakness is essential to God's people. Power belongs to God. And the Almighty Spirit of God is our Helper in our weakness and infirmity, so that thus our very weakness becomes by grace the occasion of constant and priceless blessing to our souls. Our danger lies in self-sufficiency.

The Spirit is our Intercessor. “We know not what we should pray for as we ought.” We may have only the true desire, being ignorant of the right way, and then it is that He who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, and hears His groanings which cannot be uttered. It is a far deeper thing to have the right desire than to have the right words. Speaking practically, it is the smaller thing to have intelligence respecting the Father's will; the great thing is to have true desires to do that will. There are children of God living in known transgression of their Father's will, whose consciences are becoming seared as with a hot iron, and whose souls are losing their sensitiveness while on the other hand there are the children of the Father with but small intelligence, whose consciences are tender, and whose souls are true. It is the latter who enjoy the manifestation of the love by the Spirit. The solemn question to be answered, in the presence of the great Searcher of hearts, concerns our practical state, and where this is as God would have it be, then follows the availing intercession of the indwelling Spirit. “He makes intercession for the saints according to God,” in entire uniformity with the character and will of God. How much uttered prayer is after all no prayer at all! How vain is eloquence, in the view of these groanings which cannot be expressed! And how frequently we pray out the wishes of our own wills, so that numbers of our requests are, after all, not according to God, and therefore, not made in the Spirit, nor helped by His intercession.

Let the sincere soul take courage. Let us be assured that the abundance of God's grace has not yet been fully realized by us. There is more to be practically received. Is our joy yet full? And if our hearts be full at this moment, there is a divine power which enlarges the heart to receive more. There is no limit to the blessing which the Spirit of God will manifest to us, only let us sow not to the flesh, but to the Spirit.

Distressed as the most downhearted may be, he has an Abiding Comforter weak as the weakest may be, he has an Almighty Helper; ignorant as the most simple may be, he has an All-wise Intercessor.

The indwelling Spirit is further

OUR POWER FOR KNOWING GOD, and

OUR POWER FOR TESTIMONY FOR GOD.

The natural man knows not the things of God. (2 Cor. 2: 14.) Science cannot search them out. They are spiritually discerned. A blind man knows not in himself what are the beautiful colours of the flower — he has no sense of sight to perceive this loveliness of God's handiwork. Our power for discerning divine things lies in our having the Spirit of God within us, who is as eyes to our souls. The wisdom of God is foolishness to the natural man. “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.” (1 Cor. 2: 9, 10.) The simplest believer upon earth, having within him the Spirit of God, knows more of God's things than the wisest of men not having the Spirit; just as the unlettered man, blessed with sight, knows better, practically, what colour is, than all the scientific blind men in the world put together. The natural man may sit in judgment upon God's Word and God's character, but to the christian, his pride resembles that of a council of deaf men giving their opinion upon harmony. And thus it is that “the oppositions of science, falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6: 20), leave the simple believer, who possesses heart knowledge of Christ, unmoved and immoveable he having within him a power for apprehending God.

The believer can truly say, “we have known and believed the love.” (1 John 4: 16.) The unbeliever knows neither the Son nor the Father who sent him: nor the love. “And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.”( John 17: 3.) Let us then inquire whether; this blessed knowledge be ours. We live in a day that boasts of knowledge, but heart knowledge of God will alone stay us in time, and avail us for eternity. Jesus spoke of His knowledge of His Father in the face of religious pretension, such knowledge was His constant joy in His lonely and misunderstood path below, and, by grace, those in whom the Spirit of the Son dwells have, in degree, the same knowledge.

The power of testimony for God is also that of His Spirit. God's servants are simply receptacles for His power; the treasure of the knowledge of God is stored in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. (2 Cor. 4: 7.) And it is while we practically recognise this fact that power issues from us. It is a truth that calls for earnest prayer, in order to be in any degree lived out. To own the truth theoretically, is not acting upon it. We may acknowledge that it is not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit, and yet lean upon fleshly props, or betake ourselves to worldly energies and carnal means, and thus deter the Spirit of God from using us as vessels for God's glory.

So soon as self begins to assert itself, the Spirit is grieved. The Apostle said his speech was “in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor. 2: 4), and that he spoke “not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth.” (v. 13.) And again, “Our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost.” (1 Thess. 1: 5.) In a day of much independence of God we do well to search our hearts, and to inquire whether we really believe, what we say we believe, respecting the Holy Spirit as our power for testimony for God, and also to test the means adopted, and to gauge the principles guiding us in our service of God.

We will only touch upon one more blessing which is ours by the indwelling Spirit. The Holy Spirit is in us the

EARNEST OF OUR FUTURE BLISS.

What we have hitherto seen respecting the Spirit of God, relates to our present portion by Him; but there is the vast future — eternity is before us. Having the Spirit, we can look right into eternity, and the more we look, the more calm and glorious does it appear. The Spirit Himself is the earnest of our inheritance” (Eph. 1: 14), and, as the Earnest, is present in our hearts. (2 Cor. 1: 22.) The blessings which we now possess, and which are ours practically to enjoy through Him, did we but fully enter into them, would evidence to us what the great future will be; and the believer, in whose heart the Spirit is, does receive the sample of the gladness of future bliss. There are moments in his life when the Spirit, being ungrieved and unhindered, gives him such tastes of what is yet to come, that he rejoices with joy unspeakable and full of glory. God has promised us glory, and our faith trusts God's righteousness in keeping to His word, in hope of the fulfilment of which we wait for the coming day; “We through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.” (Gal. 5: 5.) And thus it is that “we are saved by hope” (Rom. 8: 24); for the anticipation of the glory is a mighty and practical energizing power, amid the disheartening and trying incidents of the way. The believer is as a man who goes bravely on his journey, not occupied with the trials by the way, being stayed by the power of the hope of home's joys and welcome. The believer fears not lest he shall not reach his home, for to him, by grace, all is certain nor does he doubt the fact of his welcome at the end of his journey. But still, notwithstanding his assurance, he is not yet at home, and hence he hopes to be there, “for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” (Rom. 8: 24.)

This hope effects within him a sympathy with God's mind in relation to the sorrows of creation. There is a longing in the groaning creation which the coming day will satisfy. There is a groaning, too, for that day, within the heart of him who has received the Earnest of the coming glory. The creature, in the captivity of its present sorrow, stretches out its neck, as it were, looking for the deliverance which shall be its portion in the day of the liberty of the glory of the children of God.” (Rom. 8: 21)

The believer longs to be free from his vessel of sin and death, to be quit of its weight, and delivered from its weakness, and he waits for “the redemption of his body.” (v. 23.) The blood of Jesus has redeemed his soul, but the body of the believer, in common with the rest of this groaning creation, is under the power of weakness and sickness, and is still in the scene where Satan rules. His heart has found its home, but his body is still on earth, and a body of humiliation. But he will be changed. How soon he knows not. He looks forward to be clothed upon with his house which is from heaven, then he shall be fashioned like his glorious Lord, and, holy and without blame before God, his endless portion shall be the liberty of the glory of the children of God, liberty to be enjoyed in company with the companions and friends of his path below, and in the presence of Jesus, the eternal brightness of glory.

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 17

The Gospel of Our Salvation

17. Blameless before God.

“Then Jacob fled from his father's tent with a fearful spirit and condemning conscience, he came to a desert place, where night overtook him. His only possession was his staff, and laying his head upon a stony pillow, the solitary wanderer fell asleep. Then God showed him His mercy — opened His heavens above Jacob, and discovered to him a ladder set up from the earth, the top of which reached to heaven. Upon this shining way the angels of God ascended and descended, and “behold the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of

Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee, and in thy seed, shall all the families of earth be blessed.” Having promised, God declared that He would perform. He assured Jacob that He would be with him, and keep him, and not leave him until all the word of His grace had been fulfilled.

Thus was Jacob blessed with the promise of earthly blessings in earthly places, and all was secured to him in the Seed — Christ.

Let us turn to a ladder of blessings, another shining way even more excellent than that which Jacob saw, and upon which the angelic company communicated between earth and heaven. We, like Jacob, are by nature ready to perish. We are wandering across the desert world possessed, in self, of not one single good thing. Darkness surrounds us. Sleep wraps us in insensibility; but God is rich in mercy. Of His own great love He loves us, even as we are, dead in our sins. He opens His home above to us, and shines upon us in His own love. He “hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ.” All is God's own doing, all His sovereign grace, and He Himself secures every blessing to us irrevocably in Christ.

The ladder Jacob saw was set up upon earth and reached to heaven; the shining way of spiritual blessings, which God presents to the christian's eye in the opening verses of the first chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians, is let down from heaven, and reaches us, just as we are, on earth. Its stay is the very heart of God, and from the heart of God it descends to us, and by it we reach to the heart of God.

CHOSEN in Him before the world's foundation.

HOLY — BLAMELESS — “Holy and without blame before Him in love.”

ADOPTED — “Predestinated unto the adoption of children by Christ Jesus to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the GLORY OF His GRACE.”

ACCEPTED — “Accepted in the Beloved.”

REDEEMED — “In Whom we have redemption through His blood.”

FORGIVEN — “Forgiveness of sins according to the RICHES OF HIS GRACE.”

The reader will not fail to note that it is the riches of God's grace which meet him in his helplessness and in his sins. Those stores of grace, which the need of millions cannot exhaust, that wealth of grace, which countless crimes and sins innumerable have not diminished; for God is “rich in mercy,” and the treasury wherein the riches of His grace are stored is none other than His own heart, and according to His own heart He abounds in grace towards the sinner.

Forgiveness is our first blessing. The heavenward step upon which we first set foot is “forgiveness of sins.” We cannot know one of all the blessings wherewith we are blessed in the heavenly places in Christ until we, by grace, believe and know that God has forgiven us all our sins by virtue of what Christ has done for us.

Redeemed, brought to God, is the next step. Redemption in Christ, through the blood of Christ. Here we discover a sensible nearness to God such as even the knowledge of His pardoning grace does not afford. The forgiven sinner is purchased for God. He is taken out of the prison and brought into liberty; and it is in Christ, where Christ is, that he has the redemption. The redemption is connected with the Person of the Redeemer. It is not simply that a price, even that of His precious blood, has been paid for us, but in the Lord Himself “we have the redemption.”

Accepted — “Accepted in the Beloved.” Mark these wonderful words, and behold how we have mounted upwards! All that the beloved One of God is to God as the Accepted One on high, so is the humblest believer in Him. Christ is personally accepted, and as such He is the object of God's delight — we, too, being in Him, are accepted even as Christ. Christ is the measure of our acceptance before God. We are graced in the Beloved, robed in His beauty, adorned with His perfections.

Forgiven all trespasses — brought to God in Christ — accepted in the beloved One of God — these are indeed blessings whereby we ascend in the power of God's grace towards us to God Himself, the Blesser. God's purpose of grace is to bring His people into perfect nearness to Himself. His will is to have His own before Him, not simply as forgiven sinners, but as dear children. And the fulfilment of this, His purpose, God will display in eternity to the glory of His grace. While all the blessing of the 15th of Luke is without doubt ours now, we may find in the father kissing the prodigal, despite his rags and misery, the riches of grace; and in the father seating the son at his table, the glory of grace. Before his father, at rest in his father's love, the prodigal was the expression of the father's heart to all within the house, a heart which not only forgave him his sins, but brought him into the honours of his house. Here in our sins we prove the riches, there in His presence we shall ourselves be the joyful expression of the glory of His grace. Here, in our need, we receive privately the riches of pardoning mercy, the pardon of our own particular evil, but in the coming day myriads of God's creatures shall behold the glory of God's grace to sinful men in the blessings wherewith we are blessed in Christ.

Adopted into God's family is the common lot of all God's people. God has destined that His people should be His children. Angels are His servants. Sinners saved by grace, forgiven, redeemed, accepted, are nearest to His heart. And thus it is given to us, before it is manifested what we shall be, to rest in the love of God in the affectionate intelligence of His dear children; “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God!” We are already made partakers of the divine nature and have the spirit of adoption given to us whereby we cry Abba! Father!

With the present blessing of adoption and with the prospect of God having us before Him to the glory of His grace, we find that we have yet again mounted up on our shining way. But let us enquire, “Are we at liberty as we thus think of God? Are there any fears left?” God is holy; we are by nature still sinful. God is light; we are, though believers, often sinning. What a word then is this which next meets us: —

Blameless! — “Without blame before Him.” In His presence. Under His eye, in whose sight the very heavens are not clean. Before Him, who charges even the angels with folly. And what is man the sinful worm, man? But “blameless” is God's own word. No fault before God is what He declares respecting His children. Such is the result of God's great salvation for us.

Holy! is also His word. The nature holy, the actions blameless. The fountain pure, the waters undefiled. Such is the purpose of God respecting His own.

In love we are to be before Him thus. Not as if He would excuse, or extenuate, or pass over our weakness and wilfulness in love. No, but in love, as in the repose of His own nature, for He is love. God is love, and in the joy of that love we are to be before Him. God is light, and in the holiness of that light, and in the liberty of it, we are to be before Him. Holy as to our inmost being, for God is holy; blameless as to our behaviour, no folly left for God to find fault with. Verily conformed to the image of His Son, and thus perfect liberty before Him, our everlasting joy.

It is for this, christian reader, that we are

Chosen, and chosen not in self, not because of what we are, but in Christ, for it is His work and His worth which God regards with ineffable delight, and it is in Him alone that all these blessings are ours. “Now He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing (the glory) is God” (2 Cor. 5: 5); but the present reality, “Ye are of God,” and, “Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4: 4), is in no wise short of the future glory. Let us weigh them together and enquire whether one is more rich in blessing than the other — whether the present blessing or the secured blessing is the greater. The secured blessing is but the display of the present. All is ours now in Christ. We are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.

If there be not complete rest in God there is something lacking in our hearts. If we cannot lay hold of “Holy and without blame before Him,” the weakness arises from lack of the sense of sin within our breasts. A deep sense, a thorough sense of what sin is, will be the best practical interpreter of our being blameless before God. If we have indeed learned what sin is at the cross, we shall not dread God's holiness, for we shall then be shut up to the love which gave His Son to be made sin for us and to suffer in our stead. God's perfect love casts out fear from its presence. Our sinful nature has been condemned; what is there left to us? The nature of God Himself, Light and Love! Our sins are pardoned; what then is left to us? The holy liberty of children in the presence of Him who gave His Son to be the propitiation for our sins! Well may we say, “What hath God wrought?”

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 18

The Gospel of Our Salvation

18. God, our God.

God, who is light — God, who hates iniquity, — God and who cannot look upon sin — God, who knows our inmost being and all our ways, is our God. We find rest of heart, even though our hearts condemn us, in the knowledge, that the Great Searcher of hearts is our God. For He with whom we have to do is love.

More than 1800 years have rolled by since the wonderful message, “I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God” (John 20: 17), was sent by the risen Lord Himself to His disciples and, from that day, the portion of all God's people has been to know God in all the fulness of His love. Still, as a matter of experience, it is frequently the case that the heart of the christian is more at home when occupied with Jesus than in approaching God. Perhaps, there exists in his mind a remnant of that sorrowful misapprehension of God, which portrays Him as an angry Being, with whom His Son intercedes upon behalf of men in order to reconcile Him to them; or it may be that, through not being established in the gospel of our salvation, the infinite holiness of God causes him to tremble. Now God is the source of all our blessing; He is the Author of His gospel, and it is in the confidence of what God is, according to the revelation which He has given of Himself, that our souls find rest.

There is in the fourth chapter of the first Epistle of John a jewelled chain of God's love, which we do well to wear about our hearts.

GOD is love. (1 John 4: 8.)

GOD'S love manifested in sending His Son to give us life. (1 John 4: 9.)

GOD'S love in sending His Son a propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4: 10.)

GOD'S love to us our motive for loving one another. (1 John 4: 11)

GOD'S love in giving us of His Spirit. (1 John 4: 13.)

GOD'S love our testimony to the world. (1 John 4: 14.)

GOD'S love in dwelling in His people. (1 John 4: 15.)

GOD'S love giving us boldness in the day of judgment. (1 John 4: 17.)

GOD'S love casting out our fear. (1 John 4: 8.)

GOD'S love to us drawing us to love God. (1 John 4: 19.)

“God is love.” This is an eternal truth. The centre of all blessing, the spring of all joy. Before the world was or the angels were called into being, from everlasting to everlasting, God is love. Had man never been created, the fact of God being love had been the same. The human mind could never have conceived the thought; human nature could not have originated the truth, that God is love. Had God not made known the wonderful reality to us, to this hour man must have been in utter ignorance of the blessed fact. The wisdom of the world possesses not in its treasury these heaven-sent words “God is love.” In its wealth they are not to be found.

The joy of God's creatures originates from, and depends upon, the nature of God. The heart of God is the sun from which all our happiness radiates. The love of God is not like a lake locked within the heights of an inaccessible mountain, but it flows down from heaven to the poor and thirsty upon this earth. And it is our joy to know that God is love, because

God's love has been manifested to us.

“In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” (v. 9.) Without the new life it had been impossible for us to respond to God's love. The sweetest strains of music, the most exquisite display of beauty, the most delicate odours of perfume, excite no desires, awake no pleasure within a corpse. And by nature we are spiritually dead towards God; insensible to Him. But with God's gift of life we have obtained a capacity for the enjoyment of Himself, and our hearts can now enter into His love.

In His own love God sent His Son to give us this life. For the gracious activity of love to man issues from God Himself. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3: 16.) God's own love is the reservoir; His Son the communicator of the love to us. Through the Son the love flows towards us, and from Him we receive Eternal Life.

But not only has God in love to us sent His Son to be our life, He has removed from us everything that is contrary to Himself, and that hinders us from dwelling in His presence;

God's love has found a propitiation for our sins.

“God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (John 1: 5), therefore He could not have us in His presence in our sinfulness, neither could uncleansed sinners abide before God in His righteousness. It is a necessity for God's holiness, as well as for our liberty in that holiness, that if we should be before God it must be according to His thoughts and His perfections. Having the life capable of enjoying God given to us, we need perfect cleansing from the sins which, as possessors of a fallen nature, we commit. The holy life without the cleansing would not give us peace before God. To possess a life capable of enjoying God, without the removing of the evil acts and evil propensities of a fallen nature, would be an eternity of distress. And for want of faith in what God has done in providing the propitiation for their sins, many of God's own people are in sorrow of heart before Him. They have received the Son, by grace — and “he that hath the Son hath life” — but they have not believed God's testimony about the blood of Jesus, and they know not that they are cleansed. Cleansing such as God requires could be effected in only one way. There could be only one propitiation suitable to God. Only One Person, by only one way could render satisfaction for our guilt. Jesus's blood is the propitiation, and by Him we are brought into perfect righteousness before God. The propitiation of God's providing has given all, who accredit God, perfect peace, and thus the love of God has established them in confidence before Him, and thus has God's love brought His people into His presence suitably with Himself.

In God is this love. God did not look for it within our hearts. He loved us in our enmity towards Him, and when sinning against Him, and, in the full knowledge of what we are, He sent His Son, the propitiation for our sins. It is our comfort and our strength to search into God's heart for the love, while it is only a hopeless effort to look within our own hearts, when without peace, for love to God. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4: 10)

The manner of God's love to us is our motive for loving one another.

God loved us when there was nothing in us to love, and when there was no response in our hearts to His heart. And the manifested love of God to us should bear its fruit in our behaviour towards our fellow believers; “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” (v. 11.) “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” (John 1: 18.) The name of Father was manifested to man by Him who dwelt in His Father's bosom; who abode in the love of His Father's heart. And again we read, “No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.” (1 John 4: 12.) For the children of God, when loving in a divine way, have God dwelling in them. And thus, God's love toward His children is perfected in them. They become the expressions of it. Filled with it, the heart overflows. The love of God enriches the heart so that there is ability to give out love to others. There is no stint in God's love, but marvellous meagreness in man's love. But as God dwells in us, the naturally selfish heart of man becomes a fountain of kindness towards others, and that of a divine character.

Thus has God brought His people into moral union with Himself. We are partakers of the divine nature. But the greatness of God's love has blessings yet to bestow —

God's love has given us of His Spirit.

We cannot enter into God's thoughts or delight in Himself of our own might. Man's finite power, addressed to discover the knowledge of God, merely drives him upon the rocks of infidelity. “What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” But God has not left His people in the dark about Himself. He has given us of His own Spirit; we have received “the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things which are freely given us of God.” (1 Cor. 2: 11, 12.)

In His love to us, God would have us know the things of His own heart, and the things which He has bestowed upon us. Giving us of His own Spirit, God has brought us into the apprehension of Himself, and enabled us to hold communion with Himself respecting Himself. Not only to take delight in what He has done for us, but to delight in Himself because of what He is. When the Spirit of God is unhindered in His gracious action within us, our hearts then dwell in God. God becomes the home for our affections, and, in His wonderful grace, He pleases to make our hearts His dwelling-place. “Hereby do we know that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit.” (1 John 4: 13.)

Eternal life, the Propitiation, and His own Spirit, are the gifts of God's love to us. Hence it is that

God's love to us is the strength of our testimony to the world.

His love to us is the energy of our feet in carrying abroad the gospel of our salvation. “We have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son, the Saviour of the world.” (v. 14.) The believer has seen and experienced the love of which he himself is the willing witness. He can say even more than that God loved the world. He knows as His Father the God who spared not His Son, therefore he testifies that the Father sent His own Son to be the Saviour! In fellowship with the Father and the Son the believer is enabled to tell of that love, which eternity itself shall have never fully told. And when the heart is practically enjoying the love of God the natural result is testimony to the world. Just as when the empty pitcher has remained a while beneath the flowing spring it begins to overflow itself. The passive vessel becomes an active bestower of bounty. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” Whether it be a golden or an earthen vessel which contains the water, the thirsty ask not; neither gift nor eloquence is necessary; but whoever he may be, that has a heart filled with the love of God, becomes a welcome testimony of divine love to the perishing world.

It is a rule with God's gifts that the greatest of christian blessings are the common property of all the family. Of these blessings none can be higher than

God's love in indwelling His people.

Yet this great blessing the simplest of saints shares with the apostle John, even as in a family the new-born babe as well as the eldest son are alike the objects and the sharers of their father's love. John said, “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us,” adding, “He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Abiding in that love is abiding in God, and then God abides in His people. The apostle spoke from a heart richly stored with the love which is of God. But some might say, God dwelling in us and we in God belongs only to a very few. Not so; for such is the grace of God, that “whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwells in him, and he in God.” Thus does this gracious word “whosoever,” which has eased the troubled souls of thousands, emboldened multitudes to come to God, and encouraged countless hosts of lost sinners to claim gospel mercies for themselves, embrace every believer and lift him up into those privileges of nearness to God which the greatest of the apostles enjoyed. God dwells in that one however simple, however humble — whose heart believes on His Son, and whose lips confess Him.

God's love in giving us boldness in the day of judgment.

God is our God. He has associated our hearts with Himself, and Himself with our purified affections. And He with whom this hallowed fellowship exists is Light: There is no fellowship with Him and darkness. We could not enjoy communion with Him while the sense of unpardoned sin rested upon our consciences. But the blood of Jesus has cleansed us once and for ever: it never loses its cleansing power. “If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” But there are sins frequently committed, for our conduct is not always becoming those who are in the light. For these God has made provision; “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1: 9), so that cleansed by Himself we may again have intercourse with Him. The family circle affords an illustration of the moral effect of this truth. The father loves his children, and has the joy of their affections, and they have the joy of his. But suppose a child guilty of disobedience. Thereupon the child's heart is uneasy, and the evil act, like a cloud, rises up between its heart and the father's. Then the father asks why the wonted smile is missing, why the little feet are slow to run to meet him. He perceives the reason. Evil has barred the child's joy in him, and also hinders his expression of love to the child. Then the child owns what it has done, confesses its ways, and is forgiven. Whereupon there is in it the sense of cleansing, and so once more the streams of love mingle. God, who searches us, knows our evil and declension of heart towards Himself, and He, by His Spirit, makes us to own our sins before Him. Also the Lord Himself is occupied for us to bring us into God's presence, and to produce the sensitiveness to evil, which God's holiness requires, and thus arises the confession of evil done, without which the heart would become deadened to God; and the result of the confession is our blessing.

If, then, these things be so while we traverse this earth, how shall we enter the presence of His unclouded light in eternity? “We must all appear (be made manifest) before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5: 10), and then everything which we have done will be brought into the light. To the unsaved, this day will be awful beyond thought, but to the saved it will be unutterable blessing. We shall stand there in glorified bodies and in unsullied righteousness. He who will be Judge upon the throne, is Jesus, the lover of our souls, Who was crucified for us upon the cross. He before Whom we shall each be manifested, has already been manifested to put away our sins. That day of light and bringing into the light,will possess no terrors to the believer. Does the child tremble when in its father's arms and bosomed in his love he owns his ways and confesses his guilt? And in that day the perfect triumph of Divine love will be witnessed in God's people. “Herein is love with us (see margin) made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment.” (1 John 4: 17.) God's love with us! His love, that is not only for us, but with us now, shall, in the day of judgment, be seen in its full perfections, and the weak and failing, and, alas, often sinning, children of God shall have boldness before the throne.

God would remove from us all questionings. He would have His people in perfect rest before Him, therefore He links with the display of judgment our present standing before Himself in Christ, “for as He is, so are we in this world.” (v. 17.) As Christ is in resurrection, so are we, though in this world of sin and death. Yes, as He is in glory; as He is, accepted on high in the favour of God; as He is, the enthroned One, even so are we in the world at this moment, weak, helpless, sinning, though we be.

“God's love casts out fear.”

God's love itself, so deep, so wonderful, and His love in taking us up, poor atoms as we are in His great universe, and filling us with Himself, leaves no room for ought else in our hearts but love. As His great love enters, fears flee away. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.” (v. 8.) Small and insignificant as is man in the mighty creation of God, so wonderfully made is he, that none but the infinite God can satisfy His longings, and none but the perfect love of God can cast out his fears.

God's love to us has knit our hearts in love to Him.

God is ours who believe on His Son; ours, because He is love, and loves to love us. Let us, then, bind this chain of His love about our hearts, and wear it continually. Here is its clasp, “We love Him, because He first loved us.” (v. 19.)

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 19

The Gospel of Our Salvation

19. God, our Father.

In the 22nd psalm, which so deeply expresses the atoning sufferings of the Lord, and which shows the blessings consequent upon those sufferings, the adorable Substitute says, “Thou hast heard Me from the horns of the unicorns” — the horns of the altar to which the sacrifice was bound. From the depths of the cross His prayer was heard. The deliverance of His beloved people from the power of the enemy was accomplished. His griefs, His pangs, His blood, have wrought redemption. All has been taken out of the way that was against us. The wrath of God against sin has been poured out upon Him. By Him the bitter cup has been drained. The sword of divine justice has been sheathed in His bosom. And now, risen from the dead, Jesus announces the Name of His God and Father to His people, and leads their praises.

The Name of Father.

God revealed Himself to Abraham as the Almighty God. To Israel He made Himself known as Jehovah. “I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by My name Jehovah was I not known to them.” (Ex. 6: 3.) To the christian God makes Himself known as the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

When God gives Himself a name in connection with His people, He associates His people with Himself according to the special relationships the name involves. The Name of Father, with the blessings and relationship it implies, is one of the great pillars of the christian faith. The words of Jesus lead us to the knowledge of the Name He declared. Jesus, that Eternal life, is the expression and the evidence of who the Father is. The Lawgiver did not proclaim the Father, neither did the prophets; but the Incarnate Son explained the Father, so that He said, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” (John 14: 9.)

And here let us observe that the name Universal Father, which is so common in some circles, is utterly at variance with scripture. Apart from the Son, God is not our Father, and unless we are connected with the Son we are not connected with the Father. Rationalism denies the Eternal Son, and rejects the holy truth of His atonement, and disbelieves Him, risen and glorified in heaven. It was the disciple, who chiefly shows us the Father's love, that uttered these solemn words, “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?” (1 John 2: 22.) And that which denies the Son has not the name of the Father of the Son in its “Universal Father.” To speak of God's goodness and grace apart from the Son, is to falsify God's character; “He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.” (v. 22.) There is no knowledge of the Father's Name save as there is knowledge of the Person of the Son; “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.” (v. 23.)

Our Lord often declared His Father's Name, but His disciples understood not its fulness, neither could they do so, until the foretold hour had arrived, when, in resurrection, in a peculiar way, He communicated that Name to them and to us. The chosen messenger for this service was the one whose heart was true to His Person. “Touch Me not,” He said to Mary; Handle Me not; as it were, Detain Me not on earth. For thenceforth Jesus was to be known in a new way by His disciples. Not simply as the Messiah in connection with promises of blessing to men upon earth, but as the Risen One ascended to His Father, and in connection with heavenly things. Accordingly we read, “Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more. Therefore, if any man be in Christ He is a new creature (or there is a new creation): old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (2 Cor. 5: 16, 17.) It was then, in a peculiar way, that the risen Jesus declared His Father's Name when he said, “Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God. ( John 20: 17.) Having accomplished redemption, having borne the wrath due to their sins, and being the First-born from among the dead, He linked His people with Himself in the blessings of the Name; and associated them with Himself to learn the Name and the love which He knew so well.

He had separated Himself from the earth, He had gone through death and the grave for their sakes, and was about to go back to glory, and now in the power of His resurrection He could bring His own into heavenly blessings in company with Himself. “He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare Thy Name unto My brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto Thee,” (Heb. 2: 11, 12; see also Psalm 22) It is as the One who is victorious over sin and death and Satan, that He is not ashamed to call us His brethren — “Go to My brethren.” Let us not call Him our elder Brother, as if, because He was born a babe into this earth, He were our brother, for not only is such language irreverent, but it results from ignorance of His grace in dying for us, and in His separating us to Himself in resurrection. It is as the risen One that He is the First-born of all whom He has redeemed. As the Incarnate Jesus we could have had no part with Him, even as He said, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” Our link is with Christ, where Christ is; not with Christ before atonement, but after an accomplished redemption.

Israel received special blessings from God according to the Name by which He was pleased to reveal Himself to their fathers, and we receive the blessings peculiar to christianity from God as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the thanksgiving which heralds the unfolding of the deep things in the epistle to the Ephesians is to “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” (Eph. 1: 3.) Also the two prayers of that epistle — pleading in the one case for spiritual understanding of these blessings, and in the other for heart knowledge of the love which blesses — are addressed, the one to the God (Eph. 1: 16-23), and the other to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Eph. 3: 14-21.)

We receive the power practically to enter into the blessings of the Father's Name by the Spirit of God, Who, by indwelling our hearts, forms within us the spiritual affections of children, and He it is who enables us to draw near in love and in liberty to our Father, and to rejoice in His Name of tender relationship — the Name of God which removes all fear, and which satisfies every desire.

Knowledge of the Father is the common portion of all the family.

The apostle John divides believers into three classes, fathers, young men, and babes, and of the last he says, “babes . . . ye have known the Father.” (1 John 2: 3.) This knowledge should be the joy of all; it is a privilege common to the weakest and the youngest in the family. In natural things — long before a babe can speak, years before it can understand the fulness of its father's love, the babe knows the father himself. This knowledge is the instinct of nature, the father's arms, the father's bosom, the father's voice and smile are the joy of the babe. And so the Father's presence is the joy of those, who are sons of God, by faith which is in Christ Jesus. To know the Father is the throbbing of divine life.

Ignorance may hinder this joy. Unless we know that God is our Father how can we enjoy the relationship? There may be within us yearnings after the enjoyment, when we hear of other believers who are happy in their Father's love, while our hearts lament their deficiency. A lost child might be recovered from the destitution of the streets, and be brought into a family circle, without knowing a father's love, and as it saw the children of the house gather round their father, and enjoy his pleasure, and he theirs, the child would look on and long, that it, too, was not only the object of compassion, but that it had itself a father. But let us suppose this child to discover that his benefactor, who rescued him from starvation and ruin, is also his father, and that he himself, the child longing for a father's love, is the lost one found! Immediately joy springs up within his breast, and the latent feelings of the child gush out. And is it not so, that many of God's children regard God rather as a Benefactor than as a Father? But because we are children, the Spirit of God has put within us the feelings of children, and nothing save our Father's love can satisfy those feelings. And God is our Father, and we are His children, which blessed assurance opens the fountains of our affections to flow towards Himself with whom the love originates. We that were dead are alive again we that were lost are found.

The Father seeks the worship of His children. The Jews had their divinely planned temple, with its divinely given ritual, and they worshipped Jehovah. The Samaritans had their mountain and their traditions, and they worshipped they knew not what. But the days for sacred localities are gone by. The darkness is passed, the true light now shineth. “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth.” (John 4: 24.) And such worshippers the Father seeks. His love is such that He seeks hearts true in love to Himself. He seeks for affection formed by His Spirit in His children,which shall respond to His love in the way in which He has pleasure. Now we, with the woman of Samaria, can easily discuss religious questions. How readily her heart argued, even before the Lord of all, upon such subjects as sacred mountains, cities, and wells. But when the conscience was touched by His divine power, her religious pride gave way to a broken spirit, and she owned herself a sinner and Himself the Christ. Alas! there are many hearts too occupied with tradition's sacred things to dwell upon these words of Jesus, “The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in Spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship Him.” (John 4: 23.) God's children are indwelt by His Spirit, and the Father seeks the intelligent and spiritual worship of His children. It is in this that He has pleasure. And what is worship, but the heart filled with the Spirit, overflowing with the love which the Father has generated within His children?

The Father's love.

This will be the ceaseless spring of our eternal joys. The Father's love was the Lord's constant theme. The record of His words to His people is chiefly given by the disciple whom Jesus loved, who declares those depths of love in words so short and simple, that the simplest may understand them. It was leaning upon the Master's bosom that John learned the love, which Jesus uttered from the bosom of the Father. The Father's love ever filled the Lord with joy, and into this joy the Lord would lead His people. As we read, “And I will declare it (Thy name), that the love wherewith Thou lovest Me may be in them and I in them.” ( John 17: 26.) It is this joy that the Lord would have fulfilled in us. He would have His people enter into the love of His Father to them, which love is measured and characterized by the Father's love to the Son. “Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me.” (v. 23.)

The Father's love is the great preservative from the world, its influences and entanglements. When that love satisfies the longings of the heart there is no room left for the world. All that is around us is not of the Father, but is of the world; and so long as the love of the world is within the heart, the power of the Father's love is displaced. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” John 2: 16.)

There is no witness so powerful to the world as moral oneness with the Father in the hearts and minds of His children. In a day of doubt and distrust, these are the evidences of christianity to be coveted. Unity of desire, fellowship with the Father and the Son, and the practical results of this secret power, are the all-convicting testimony to the world that the Father sent His Son into it. “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their word; that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.” ( John 17: 20, 21.)

We will now touch upon our Father's love as connected with the circumstances of earth.

Our Father's care.

We shall not require our daily bread in heaven, nor need deliverance from temptation there. But, while upon earth, it is the happy privilege of each child to know that he is verily under the loving care of his Father in heaven. Heavenly Father is a name which implies our being upon earth. How often did the Lord teach that our heavenly Father knows all our need! It is in such assurance of earthly parents that little children rest, for if aware that their father knows what they want, they are satisfied. Their simple hearts are content in the wisdom, the resources, and the love of their father. They do not question; they do not plan; and the fact that our heavenly Father knows that we need the things of life, should quiet our hearts before Him. It would be a strange and an unnatural spectacle to see a child endeavouring to right those things which the father's hand was itself arranging. Our Father in heaven has planned out our path. He has numbered the very hairs of our head. Not one single incident, of however trifling a character, can occur to us without His knowledge. Many would be the anxious hours spared if the child's heart simply accepted and acquiesced in his Father's care — many the disappointments and sorrowful results avoided, if the child of God had waited for his Father's time to act on his behalf. He who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, has, in His wisdom and love, appointed for His children their due of food and raiment, their bodily strength and mental power. “Seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind. . . . Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.” (Luke 12: 29, 30)

Our Father's government.

“We have had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?” (Heb. 12: 9.) God oftentimes by the trials of life brings His children to the subject mind. The world is the school for the children of God. Life, the time for experiencing many strange dealings, the reason of which eternity will disclose. Trials are portioned out by perfect wisdom, and their ultimate object we know, though their present pain may be a mystery. Our Father's chastenings are for “our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness.” (v. 10.) God does not always explain the reason of His governmental dealings with us, but He has fully unfolded His heart to us, and thus it is our privilege to walk by faith.

He who has been educated in the school of affliction, is readily distinguished by a brokenness of spirit, a humbleness of mind, and withal a trust in God. “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.” (v. 11.) The exercised spirit, and the peaceable fruits, betoken the good and perfect work of God within the soul.

As we conclude this chapter, let us remember that the day is near when the care of our heavenly Father for His weak and needy children, and the government of His hand for His, too often, ignorant and wilful children, will not be called for. Life's lesson will soon have been learned. The school time will be over. The circumstances of the scene wherein we are suffered to want, and wherein we are humbled and proved,will be exchanged for the peace and joy of the Father's house. Then no good thing shall be lacking, and none shall lack the grace to enjoy the good. Then we shall know the Father's love in its fulness, and shall continually enjoy His presence, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and then, in a deeper way than we have ever learned upon earth, shall we apprehend these wonderful words of Jesus “Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me.”

STEM Publishing : H Forbes Witherby : The Gospel of Our Salvation : Chapter 20

The Gospel of Our Salvation

20. “Always confident”

We close these chapters upon the Gospel of our Salvation with the inspired words, “Therefore, we are always confident;” and may this language be the heart utterance of each of our readers.

“Confident!” Yes, christian; yet not the confidence of ignorance, which leaves this life for eternity with a leap in the dark, which sleeps in false peace while the house burns below; nor that of self-trust, which boasts of security as the ship settles down to her watery grave. But the confidence of those whose eyes are open to eternal realities, who have looked upon sin and their own sins; have beheld the righteousness of God; have seen, by faith, into heaven and into hell; and who, in view of all, trust not in self, but calmly, peacefully, rest in God.

Such as believe not the gospel may have unstable reasons for their confidence; but we are those “who worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.” (Phil. 3: 3.)

Neither is the word “confident” only, but “always confident.” Some of God's people have confidence for an hour and then they lose it; theirs is like the ray of sunshine which pierces the cloud and is gone; they are like the changeful ocean, now calm and again disturbed — one day the reflection of the heavens upon its bosom, the next the agitation of its own troubled waters; this is not being “always confident.”

Christian confidence, we say, is built upon a solid base, a rock, which shall never be moved, and because of this we have the therefore of the apostle. God Himself was the foundation for his trust. “He that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit. Therefore, we are always confident.” (2 Cor. 5: 5, 6.) The rock upon which these men of old trusted was God; and since God was their rock they could look into their hearts and thence up to the throne of glory, where Christ sits at God's right hand; they could look upon themselves as servants; they could look upon the trials of their daily lives; the martyr's end; death; the coming of their Lord and ours yea, more: they could look upon the judgment-seat of Christ; and, in view of all, they could declare heartily, joyfully, “We are always confident.”

Confidence when looking within the heart as in the sight of God.

“God hath shined in our hearts.” (4: 6.) Once these hearts were a moral chaos, once they were dark and dead; no light, no love, moved there, and enmity towards God strode across the gloom; sin and evil passions, the activities of moral corruption, teemed within. “We all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath.” (Eph. 2: 3.) But God shined in; God said “Let there be light, and there was light.” There was a new creation, and it was entirely of God. The Creator brought into these hearts, by His sovereign grace,what was not born there; by His own light He showed what sin was, what self was, and proved by His love the excellence of His light. Yes! all believers can say, “God hath shined in our hearts.” We have had our guilt, our sinful being, discovered to us by the power of the Divine Spirit, and by no less a brilliancy than that which radiates from the Person of the Son of God enthroned in heaven. Yet more, we have had the heart of God, and His glory in the Person of His Son revealed to us. And further, our hearts have been rejoiced in the light of Life. God knows these hearts; every pulsation of our moral being is bare to His vision; He, and He alone, is acquainted with the density of the darkness which once filled them, and with our folly in seeking to cast the darkness out of our hearts. For we, in vain efforts to change our nature, were like men endeavouring to carry the darkness out of a shuttered room. And the overwhelming evidence of God being for us, lies here — God shined in. And the darkness fled before His light.

Where, then, is room for doubt — we will not say despair since God hath Himself wrought this selfsame thing? The marvel is, His grace; the wonder is, His love. “Therefore, we are always confident.”

Confidence in looking up into heaven.

From the darkest spot upon earth these men of old turned their gaze to the brightest place in heaven: from within their own hearts they looked to Christ on the throne in the glory. The eye of faith followed the sunbeam that shone into the dark heart to its glorious source. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” “We see Jesus who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor.” Yes! we see the once crucified Man throned in glory, and rejoice, for

“The light which shows our sinfulness

Shines from His face who bore our guilt.”

Those wounds of Jesus in glory tell the glad tidings of debt paid, judgment borne, self disposed of. Head of the New Creation, Firstborn from among the dead; He lives in glory, the Saviour of all who put their trust in Him — the Proof of their security — the Sample of their perfect salvation. And because He who died upon the cross in our stead lives in glory, and because God has made known the glorified One above to us, and shown us, in Him, our present security and what will be the result of our faith, the end of our expectations — even likeness to Christ above — “therefore,” as we look up into heaven, “we are always confident.”

Confidence in the presence of the righteousness of God.

Gladly would the godless welcome a gospel of no righteousness. Centuries ago the fool said in the desires of his heart, “No God.” For the fear of God troubles the sinner, and gives him weary hours; unless, indeed, his conscience has become seared as with a hot iron, and has become thickened with indifference, so as to be callous to the fear of judgment to come. But the righteousness of God is the very foundation of the gospel of God. God has built His palaces of love upon the rock of His righteousness, and the believer treads those courts in the liberty of the knowledge that his sins have been removed according to the righteousness of God, and that the cross of Christ, which his sins occasioned, has established the claims of the righteousness of God.

The righteousness of God once against us is now for us. It demands for all who are in Christ the blessings which Christ has secured for His own. The righteousness of God has raised up Christ from among the dead, and given Him glory, and “As He is, so are we in this world.” (1 John 4: 17.) Such is our acceptance before God. “Therefore, we are always confident.”

Confidence occasioned by our very weakness.

We are but vessels, and earthen vessels,weak, and easily broken; but from felt weakness never arises lack of confidence in God when in His presence. God has chosen common and fragile vessels wherein to store His glory. In them He places the unutterable treasure of His own light; and He has put the light in, that it may shine forth! And its shining forth from heart and life expresses to the world, in some small way, the reality of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Would that the earthen vessels contained this light in greater brilliancy! Current infidelity out of its own mouth and life testifies to the impotency of the human mind to understand the scriptures. Without the Spirit of God the Word of God remains in man's hand a sealed book; but God has put His Spirit within His people that power may issue from them for His glory upon earth. He does not change the character of the earthen vessel for this end. Did He work in such a way, the vessel might be more valued than its contents. The excellency of the power is of God, not of us.

The weakness of the vessel continues. Circumstances are not changed by conversion. There are christians who expect to become golden vessels upon being born again; but although the treasure is richer than gold, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” While maintaining the place of vessels, God effects a shining forth of Christ that evidences the divine treasure within, and since God Himself has wrought us for this end, “Therefore we are always confident.”

Confidence in the trials of life.

Sorrow and pain are the inheritance of the children of men. Trials have to be borne, afflictions are appointed; and while the christian has trials which are common to the human race, he has others also of a different character. He has within him the Spirit of God, and thus has eyes to see sin and sorrow in some way as God beholds it. He has the mind of Christ, and, therefore, has intelligence to know the heart of his Lord, and His desires for His people, and ability to comprehend, at least in measure, the departure of men from Christ. And more, he is called to suffer for Christ in a world which is now, and ever was, against Christ. But shall suffering hush his triumphant song? Listen to these words, from those who suffered, as christians in our day seldom do: “Troubled on every side — yet not distressed; perplexed — but not in despair; persecuted — but not forsaken; cast down — but not destroyed.” Nay, these trials produced a sweet savour from their lives. These men were like the herb which, when beaten small, emits its fragrance, or like the grass which, torn by the bush harrow, fills the spring air with grateful sweetness. As they carried about in their bodies the dying of Jesus, the life of Jesus, His beauty and His grace, were made manifest in their mortal bodies.

When in heaven, in glorified bodies, there will be the fragrance of Christ issuing from His people, but while on earth, in weak, mortal bodies, there should likewise be the manifestation of the life of Jesus in us. It will be found true that those whose hearts know most of Christ glorified, will, in their lives, practically express most of Christ crucified. The knowledge of a glorified Christ is the sail of the vessel which catches the heavenly breezes, and hastens it to glory; the bearing about in the body of the dying of Jesus is the stability of the soul holding it aright in waves and storms. The heart filled with the Person of the glorified One, is filled with an object which calls out the vigour and energy of divine life, urging on the steps to heaven and Himself; the heart filled with the death of Christ — by which the world is crucified to the heart, and the heart to the world, and by which self is crucified with Christ — is filled with an intense and Christ-like spirit leading the steps to follow the path which the Lord trod when here on earth. It is a practical word, bearing about in the body the dying the dying on the cross — of the Lord Jesus, that the life — the character — also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal bodies.

Daily growing by sorrow and affliction, becoming continually more like to the Master, exhibiting the life of Jesus in daily things, and suffering and being persecuted, the God-given word again is heard from their lips, “Therefore we are always confident.”

Confidence in view of the martyr's end.

Even this caused no distrust. Hourly conflicts, trials, perplexities, learning of the defection of some hearts from Christ, and of difficulties amongst others of God's people, were the portion of these noble men, and beyond loomed the martyr's end, “We which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus sake.” But their triumphant cry of faith falters not. The very end would but introduce into His presence who died for them. “Therefore we are always confident.”

Confidence in the presence of death.

Let us look calmly at death; it may soon touch us. How shall we greet the “King of Terrors?” as the world designates that which God, speaking to His people, describes as Sleep! With these words, “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens?” “We know!” What assurance is here; and, again, the confidence is built upon God. The shifting tent will be exchanged for the building of God. True, God formed our bodies from the dust, and to Him we owe our existence upon this earth, but sin has spoiled the fair beauty of these our tabernacles. Decay has smitten them. Death will take them down. And what then! Laid in the dust, they will be found no more. But a permanent building will arise, a house awaits each ransomed spirit, a house eternal in the heavens. God has a resurrection body in the future, and a home in glory waiting for His people.

And God has wrought this Himself. Yet more, should death come, should we be absent from the body and present with the Lord, Jesus Himself will, in a special way, be with us in the hour of death. For as the weakness of the child calls for the special solicitude of its mother, so the weakness of His people in their hour of death does, in a marked way, call out the tenderness of the Lord for them. It may happen, that when the feet of a saint are brought to the brim of Jordan, like its waters, his heart feels cold. He may know forgiveness, and be assured of glory, but still lack the joy of going home. We call to mind such an instance. The pilgrim in question, who had known for years the blessings of christian life, and had no doubts concerning her salvation, when death drew nigh said, “It seems so dark and friendless.” Then it was that these words, “I will be with thee,” changed the gloom to brightness, and the loneliness to joy. “I am not alone now,” she said, “Jesus is with me. His Person, as well as His work, is now filling my soul.” And so she passed over that river, the strength of the waters of which, His death exhausted for His people 1800 [now 2000!] years ago.

The apostle, in his deep intimacy with the Person of the Lord Jesus, could say, “we are confident and willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord.” And we, too, as we consider for what God has wrought us, may exclaim, “Therefore we are always confident.”

Confidence in view of the coming of the Lord.

The Lord is near. His coming is more sure than death, for “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” How shall we meet Him? These men of faith desired not death; “Not that we would be unclothed.” Their prospect was the first resurrection, and the Lord's coming when they should be “Clothed upon.” Then would mortality be swallowed up of life. For as the sun-rising not only dispels but by its beams swallows up the darkness, so shall our Lord at His coming not only chase away our fears and sorrows but all that which pertains to weakness, to sin, to bodily and spiritual infirmity in us shall be eternally gone.

As we ponder His coming, the break of the resurrection morn, the song of gladness at the awaking light, the purity and the peace of that hastening sunrise, yea, beholding Him Himself as He is, who is the sun, shall we not declare that as God has wrought us for that day, “Therefore we are always confident.”

Confidence in the presence of the judgment-seat of Christ.

Let us look beyond death, beyond the coming of the Lord and resurrection glory, beyond that hour when His people shall be transformed to His image, and so enter the home above. Let us look on to the judgment seat of Christ. There deeds will be made manifest; there the creature will be brought face to face with spotless light. “We must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according as he hath done, whether it be good or bad.” But perfect love casts out fear; the judgment-seat can be viewed in peace.

Should the believer lay his body down before the Lord comes, his spirit will wing its way to the Lord; “Absent from the body present with the Lord.” And when the Lord comes, the body will be raised from the dead a glorious body; the corruptible will have put on incorruption, and then the ransomed spirit will be re-united to its glorified body. But should the believer be present upon this earth when the Lord comes, the Lord will change the believer's mortal body, and give him a glorious body; and so shall this mortal put on immortality. And thus, whether raised or changed, all shall in glorified bodies meet the Lord at His coming. Therefore, it will be in already glorified bodies, in bodies made like to Christ's, that we shall “appear before the judgment-seat of Christ.” This judgment-seat must not be confounded with the great white throne, of which we read in Rev. 20: 11-15; the judgment which will take place at the end of this world's history, and after the earth itself has fled away. For on that judgment day those of the dead will be raised, who were not raised or changed at the coming of the Lord; “The rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. Blessed and holy is he who hath part in the first resurrection.” We may then look on even to the judgment-seat of Christ, and say, with holy boldness, “Therefore we are always confident.”

The practical results.

There is a strange temerity in unbelief, a presumption which dares to assert that a man is likely to be the holier for want of confidence in God, and that fear of not being saved at the last, is a wholesome check upon evil longings; or that assurance leads to loose behaviour. Allowing, for a moment, the false assertion that purity of life and distrust of God's word go together, we are met with a pure life actuated by motives in which God has no pleasure. For, from such seeds as slavish fear of Him, no fruits acceptable to His love can possibly be produced.

Divinely-given confidence is the ground for holy walking before God; this confidence is produced by the knowledge of God, and knowledge of God leads out the heart to Him who first loved us. It is this confidence which draws forth these words of the apostle, “Therefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of (or acceptable to) Him” (ver. 9). If, by grace, we can trace our way from those days when we dreaded the wrath to come, up to the hour when God gave us peace in believing, we can surely say that we are more anxious now than then, to please God. We can say that the removal of our fears, and the entrance of faith into our souls, by the Spirit's grace, has given rise to a standard of Christian life, and to motives for seeking to walk before God, and for desires after consecration to Himself, which previously were unknown to us; and indeed it cannot be otherwise. Faith works by love, and if faith does not work, then it is not real but dead faith. Not faith divinely given, but merely intellectually received. We have received from God life, and this life is energized by God the Spirit, who dwells within us, Christwards, Godwards.

The exceeding grace of Jesus, in giving Himself for them, and in laying hold of them for Himself, had so won the soul of the apostle, and the souls of those who were associated with him, that their one object was to be acceptable to their Lord; they looked on to the day of His tribunal, and laboured so that on that day they might hear His voice, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” There was not one thought that they might be disowned of Christ; but His love had energized their lives to labour to please Him.

Some look on to the coming day of His judgment-seat with thoughts of then gaining rewards. True, not so much as the cup of cold water given in His Name will be then forgotten, for it is not in the heart of Christ to forget the least thing, however simple, done by the humblest of His disciples out of love to His name, and even if the service be not rendered, He remembers the honest desire to serve and please Him. Love rewards, but working for reward and working for love are entirely distinct. The labourer in the vineyard, who wrought for his penny, gained his penny, but he did not obtain the smile of his master. It is the christian's happy privilege to work for love. It will be the joy of the Master to remember every service.

There are no stringent rules for service laid down in the New Testament, but there are numbers of entreaties and appeals for our entire devotion. It is a mistake for a christian to trammel himself by rules for living, unknown in the word of his Master; and, we may add, usually contrary to the spirit of his Master's word. We do not bind ourselves by rule to please our firmest friends, for love has already bound us. Our Lord says, “If ye love Me keep My commandments.” The spirit of love governs the whole of a man's walk and life in a way which the legal spirit, demanding for duty's sake so much time and so much service, is utterly unable to effect.

In the mystery of grace, the God of love gave His Son, and His Son, Himself, for us. In the presence of this unspeakable kindness, happy is he whose heart is for Him, who walks with God, and loving the Lord, keeps His commandments, and who, when before His judgment seat, shall, like Enoch, have this testimony — “HE PLEASED GOD.”

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible

The Story of our English Bible

Its Preservation - Its Compilation - Its Inspiration - Its Translation

Walter Scott.

The Story of the English Bible

Lecture 1. The Scriptures are Divine and the Text Divinely Preserved.

Lecture 2. The Perfection of and Verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures.

Lecture 3. The Books and Canon of the Old Testament.

Lecture 4. The Books of the Old Testament..

Lecture 5. The Books and Canon of the New Testament.

Lecture 6. History of the Various English Versions of the Bible.

Lecture 7. Specimens of Translations and Peculiar Renderings.

Lecture 8. The Bible: Its Divisions, Chapters, Verses, Titles, and Subscriptions.

Prefatory Note to Third Impression

We are exceedingly thankful to the Lord that a large edition of our "Story" has been disposed of, and that two further impressions have been called for. We regard this continued interest in the Holy Scriptures as a hopeful sign. The history of the Bible, which is briefly told in those pages, is one of thrilling interest, and we are right glad to know from many that the book has proved a real help.

We will be I thankful if friends at home and abroad would kindly do their utmost in making the "Story of our English Bible" known to Christians, and to Christian workers in every sphere of labour.

Once again, we commend the book to the God of all grace, in the fervent hope that He may grant a largely increased circulation.

Your Servant for Christ's sake, Walter Scott.

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 1. The Scriptures are Divine and the Text Divinely Preserved.

1. The Scriptures are Divine and the Text Divinely Preserved.

It is now more than half a century since we began reading the Holy Scriptures with spiritually-opened eyes, and we avow our deep and growing conviction that these imperishable, because Divine, records of eternal truths and realities are indelibly impressed with the character of God, and hence of unquestioned authority over the soul.

We can readily understand an unbeliever questioning the truthfulness of the Divine oracles, because thus only can the authority of God, so troublesome to a guilty conscience, be set aside. We may also remark that the religious infidelity of the day is characterised by impeaching the veracity of everything divinely revealed, and ends by believing nothing. But what we so earnestly desire for every Christian reader of the Scriptures is, if possible, a deepening moral certainty that these writings, from the first word in Genesis to the "Amen" closing the Revelation, are fully and verbally inspired of God. We refer, of course, to the original Scriptures.

The Scriptures are Either Divine or Human.

To say that the Scriptures are supernatural in character because of the grand subjects they unfold, because of the practical duties they inculcate, because of the Divine Saviour and magnificent salvation they disclose, is but a feeble, and at best a partial statement of a weighty and profound truth. But if only supernatural, do they reflect angelic intelligence? Were they written by the pen of the archangel? Nay; the Holy Scriptures are either human or Divine in their source and character. Just face the difficulty. Could man have forged these sixty-six separate books? Could man have delineated, in every detail, the life of the Holy One? Why, the objector must have been absolutely perfect ere he could have sketched such a divinely perfect life.

Would it not be a miracle to suppose a succession of about forty to fifty impostors, of different nationalities, living at different times, and some residing 1400 miles apart, totally unacquainted with each other — so that many never exchanged word or letter — and this course of systematic deception continued during the long period of nigh 1600 years? — for, mark it well, Divine authority is claimed for each book, and the same themes as ruin and redemption, but with ever-increasing fulness of disclosure, run through the entire Divine volume. It would just be as easy for man to create and sustain worlds as to have written the Bible. Is it not so? But the Bible is Divine.

"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God" is a comprehensive statement, embracing all then penned, as also those then unwritten. Nor must the reader for an instant suppose that the Holy Spirit influenced the minds of the writers merely, leaving thereby the Divine truths of revelation to be communicated in words of man's choice. The Scriptures, not the thoughts or truths of Scripture, are inspired. Scripture means writing, and writings are composed of words and letters; hence these are inspired. But we are not left to reason it out, however logically this may be done. Let this Divine oracle suffice for all who have ears to hear — "Which things also we speak . . . in the words . . . which the Holy Ghost teacheth" (1 Cor. 2: 13).

Has the reader ever seriously reflected upon the admirably-chosen words in which the Holy Ghost has clothed the doctrines, truths, and facts of Divine revelation? Has the inimitable perfection of the Word of God, so stamped its character upon his soul that he rises from every fresh reading and study of these precious records, with ever-increasing delight and deepening conviction that they are in deed and in truth the very revelation of God, of Christ, of eternity to man?

Preservation of the Old Testament Scriptures.

The Old Testament oracles were committed to Jewish keeping (Rom. 3: 2), and more faithful guardians, even to the least letter of their sacred books, there could not be. We cannot but own the providential care and rich mercy of God in the singular preservation of the text, uncorrupted, of the Old Testament — preserved through sixty centuries of unexampled trial and oppression, of striking and eventful vicissitudes, of persistent and determined efforts to destroy it — making up a story which reads more like romance than reality. The Pharisees, morally blind, as undoubtedly they were, yet scrupulously observant of the least of their traditional observances, were never guilty of tampering with the sacred text; nor were the rival sect of the Sadducees, who held the Pentateuch only, to be of Divine authority, ever charged with corrupting the text of Moses. We possess the books of the Old Testament in our noble English version substantially as they left the hands of the inspired penman.

Where are the records of antiquity? Where are the Hebrew and the Greek books prior to the times of Christ? Where are the classical MSS. of the ancients? All have perished and are forgotten, save the names of some which have been rescued from oblivion, and fragments, not original, of others. The oldest and only trustworthy documents of the past ages are those of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.

Professor Gaussen on the Preservation of the Text of the Old Testament.

The following weighty extracts, from the French of Professor Gaussen, present some admirable and scholarly statements on the preservation of the sacred text: —

"The Lord has miraculously watched over His word. Facts demonstrate this. In the first place, by constituting the Jews its depositaries, and afterwards the Christians, His providence thus charged itself with watching that the oracles of God should be faithfully transmitted to us. This has been done; and to attain this result, various causes were brought into operation, of which we shall have to speak hereafter. Recent researches of science have placed this fact in the light of day. Herculean labours have been undertaken to collect all the readings, or variations, which could be supplied, either by the diligent examination of the manuscripts of the sacred writings, preserved in the various libraries of Europe, the study of the most ancient versions, or the investigation of the innumerable quotations made from the sacred books throughout the writings of the Fathers of the Church; and this immense labour has furnished a result admirable in its insignificance, imposing by its nullity.

"All this labour has established so convincingly the astonishing preservation of the text, copied, nevertheless, so many thousand times (in Hebrew during thirty-three centuries, and in Greek during 1800 years), that the hopes of the enemies of religion, in this channel, have been overwhelmed: they have ceased to hope for anything from the critical researches which they were at first so vehement in recommending, because they expected discoveries which have not been made. A learned rationalist himself acknowledges that the different readings of the Hebrew manuscripts scarcely afford enough interest to repay the labour bestowed upon them. But these very miscalculations, and the absence of these discoveries, have been a precious discovery for the Church of God. This was what she expected; but she has to rejoice in owing it to the labours of her adversaries 'In truth,' says a scholar of our times, 'if we set aside those admirable negative conclusions at which they have arrived, the obvious result obtained by the lives of so many men consumed in these mighty researches appears to be nothing; and it may be said that to arrive at it they have foolishly squandered time, talent, and science.'

"But, as we have said, this result is immense by its nothingness, and all-powerful by its insignificance. When it is remembered that the Bible has been copied during thirty centuries, as no book of man ever was, or ever will be; that it was borne with Israel in all their vicissitudes and captivities; that it was transported for seventy years to Babylon; that from the days of the Philistines to those of the Seleucidae it has been so often persecuted, forgotten, interdicted, and burnt; when it is remembered that from the time of Jesus it had to endure the first three centuries of imperial persecutions, in which those convicted of having it in their possession were sentenced to be torn by wild beasts; after which came the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, in which were everywhere multiplied false books, legends, and decretals; the tenth century, in which so few men knew how to read, even among princes; the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth, in which the use of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue was punished by death. In the remembrance of all this, it will be well understood how necessary it was that God should always keep His powerful arm uplifted, in order that, on the one hand, the Jewish Church should give us, in full integrity, that word which records their rebellion, predicts their ruin, and testifies of Jesus; and of the other, that the Christian Churches (the most powerful of which, and especially the Roman sect, prohibited the people from reading the sacred books, and set aside the word of God for traditions) should, notwithstanding, transmit to us, in all their purity, those writings which condemn all their traditions.

"Now, although all the libraries which possess ancient copies of the sacred books have been summoned as witnesses; although the commentaries of the Fathers of every country have been examined; although the Arabic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, Ethiopic, and other versions have been compared; although all the manuscripts of all countries, and of every age, from the third to the sixteenth century, have been examined a thousand times by innumerable critics, who sought with ardour, as the reward and glory of their sleepless toil, for some new reading; and although the learned, not content with the libraries of the West, have visited those of Russia, and extended their researches to the convents of Mount Athos, of Asiatic Turkey, and of Egypt, in quest of new records of the sacred text: — yet has nothing been discovered, not even a single reading, which can cast doubt upon any of the passages hitherto received as authentic. All the variations, with scarcely one exception, leave untouched the essential meaning of each sentence, and relate merely to points of secondary importance, such as the insertion or omission of an article or conjunction, the position of an adjective before or after its substantive, and the accuracy, more or less important, of grammatical construction.

"It is well known that among the Jews it was the profession of the Masorites, or doctors of tradition, to transcribe the Scriptures. We know to what extent these indefatigable scholars carried their respect for the letter; and when we read the rules under which their labours were carried on, we understand the use that the providence of God (who had 'confided his oracles to the Jews') made of their reverence, severe exactitude, and even of their superstition. They reckoned the number of verses, words, and letters in each book. They tell us, for instance, that the letter A occurs forty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-seven times in the Bible; the letter B thirty-eight thousand two hundred and eighteen times; and so on to the end. They were scrupulous of changing the position even of a letter, though evidently misplaced, but limited themselves to noting it in the margin, supposing some mystery was involved. They tell us which is the middle letter of the Pentateuch, as well as of each of the books of which it is composed. They never allowed themselves to correct their manuscript; and if any mistake escaped them, they rejected the papyrus or the skin which they had blemished, and recommenced upon a fresh one; for they were equally interdicted from even correcting one of their errors, and from retaining for their sacred volume a single parchment or skin in which an erasure had been made. . .

"These facts, we repeat it, together with the astonishing preservation of the Hebrew text (1200 years more ancient than that of the Septuagint), plainly tell us how the intervention of the mighty hand of God was needed in the destinies of this sacred book.

On the Preservation of the Text of the New Testament,

"So far the Old Testament; but think not that the Providence which watched over this holy book, and confided it to the Jews (Rom. 3: 1, 2), has less protected the oracles of the New Testament, which were committed by God to His new people. To these He has not left less reason for gratitude and confidence.

"Such, then, has been the astonishing preservation of the Greek manuscripts which have handed down the New Testament to us, that — after the sacred text has been copied and re-copied so many thousand times in Europe, Asia, or in Africa, in convents, colleges, palaces, or in presbyteries, and this almost without interruption, during the long course of 1500 years — notwithstanding during the last three centuries (and especially during the lapse of the last 130 years) so many noble characters and ingenious minds, and so many learned lives have been devoted to labours hitherto unheard of in extent, admirable for their sagacity, and scrupulous as those of the Masorites — after the collation of all the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, which were buried in the private, monastic, or national libraries of the East and West — after comparing them not only with all the ancient Latin, Armenian, Sahidic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Sclavonic, Persic, Coptic, Syriac, and Gothic versions of the Scriptures, but also with all the ancient Fathers of the Church, who have quoted them in their innumerable writings, in Greek or in Latin — after so much research, what have they been able to find? . . .

"It is calculated that, in the seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine verses of the New Testament, there scarcely exist ten or twelve in which corrections introduced by the new texts of Griesbach and Scholz, at the close of their laborious investigations, have any weight. These, moreover, do not, for the most part, extend beyond the difference of a single word, and sometimes even of a single letter.

"Thus, then, all the efforts of the adversaries of inspiration to shake our faith in this channel have in the end only had the effect of strengthening it. They have compelled the Church to follow them in their investigations, and very soon afterwards to precede them; and what has been the result Why, that the text is found more pure than the most pious ventured to hope; and that the opponents of inspiration, and those of orthodox doctrines (at least in Germany), have been compelled to come to the same conclusion. After the labours of Erasmus, Stephens, and Mill, they had hoped to have derived, from among the numerous manuscripts of our libraries, readings more favourable to Socinian doctrines than those which they could gather from Beza and the Elzevirs. Several, indeed, anticipated that the differences would be so great, and such uncertainty would result, that (to use their own terms) all exclusive, positive, evangelical belief would be thereby overthrown. But it has not been thus. It is now a suit terminated; the plaintiffs are cast at their own appeal; the inquest having been held by modern criticism, all the judges — even the bench of Rationalists — have unanimously pronounced that it is a lost cause, and that the objectors must go to some other quarter for arguments and grievances.

"When this question of the integrity of the original text presented itself for the first time — upwards of 120 years ago — to the learned and estimable Bengel, he was dismayed at it, and his upright and pious mind became deeply exercised. Then commenced on his part that work of sacred criticism which gave a new direction to this science in Germany. The English had preceded the Germans; but the latter soon outstripped them. At length, in 1721, after long and laborious research, Bengel, who had become satisfied and happy, thus wrote to one of his disciples:— Eat the Scripture bread in simplicity, just as you have it; and do not be disturbed if here and there you find a grain of sand which the mill-stone may have suffered to pass. You may hereby avoid all the doubts which, for a season, so horribly tormented me. If the Holy Scriptures, which have been so often copied, and have so often passed through the erring hands of fallible men, were absolutely without variations, this would be so great a miracle that faith in them would be no longer faith. I am astonished, on the contrary, that from all these transcriptions there has not resulted a greater number of different readings.' . . .

"How can we avoid recognising here the powerful intervention of God in this unanimous agreement of all the religious societies of the East and of the West Everywhere the same Scriptures. What a distance separates in their worship Christians from Jews! and, notwithstanding, enter our schools, examine our Hebrew Testaments, then go into their synagogues, ask of their Rabbins their sacred rolls, you will there find the same books, without the difference of a letter! What a distance separates the reformed Christians from the sectaries of Rome! Yet you will find in our respective schools the same Greek Testament, without the difference of an iota. Again, what a distance separates the Latin Church from the Greek Church, which also calls itself the catholic, but orthodox apostolic, daughter of Antioch, condemning the Romans as rebel and schismatic sons! and yet ask of one and the other their sacred texts, neither will you find any difference here. There are no variations to make two schools; they will bring forward the same manuscripts; priests and popes, Munich and Moscow, will give you the same testimony. We were then to have amongst us — Greeks, Romanists, and Protestants — the same sacred book of the New Testament, without the difference of a single iota.

"We come, then, once more to the conclusion, that not only was Scripture inspired at the time when God caused it to be written, but that this word, which was inspired eighteen centuries ago, is now in our possession; and that, moreover, holding the sacred text in one hand, and all the readings which science has collected from hundreds of manuscripts in the other, we can exclaim with gratitude, I now hold in my hands the eternal word of my God!"

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 2 The Perfection of and Verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures.

2. The Perfection of and Verbal Inspiration of the Scriptures.

The Bible does not contain the word of God, but is the Word of God. The Old Testament is the record of God's actions in government; the New Testament unfolds God's ways in grace. In the Old we have revelations from God; but in the New we have God Himself revealed. In the Old we have the veil unrent — that is, God in light and man in darkness morally apart; in the New the veil is rent — that is, God is revealed, and man brought nigh to God. In the former revelation the Almighty God sustained the hopes and became the strength of the patriarchs in their path of strangership. Jehovah was the chosen title which guaranteed to Israel the fulfilment of prophetic promise and glory; but the higher designation of Father brings us into an intimacy and communion with God utterly unknown by saints, patriarchs, or prophets of old.

Counsels to Readers of the Scriptures.

In order to learn well and according to God, remember that the Holy Ghost, and not intellect or learning, is the only efficient teacher of the Church and of individuals; further, that our English Bible, being in very deed The Word of God, "is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Tim. 3: 15-17); and lastly, that the perverted mind of man the pride of the natural man — constitute our greatest hindrance in understanding the Holy Scriptures. Supreme faith in what is written by inspiration of God — namely, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments — combined with the simplicity of children, are absolutely needful to every student of the Word of God.

What a moment in the soul's history when one is consciously maintained in the Lord's presence! What is man when there! Ah! it is in the presence of Christ, where Mary sat and learned, and will sit and learn for ever, that we are preserved from mistakes and are taught according to God.

Should a difficulty (and who has not?) present itself, do not hazard an opinion or give "your thought," but in patience wait in prayer and communion with God, and He will meet your difficulty. If you are asked a question on any Biblical subject which you cannot answer, be frank and own your ignorance, saying, "I do not know." Be willing to learn from any child of God, whether a bed-ridden saint or an able teacher. Do not be fault-finding or captious; do not quarrel with unscriptural expressions on the part of others, but be you accurate in the extreme in your statements and quotations from Scripture. Do not be an Ishmaelite (Gen. 16: 12) among the people of God, for "the servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle unto all, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves" (2 Tim. 2: 24, 25).

Do not bring "Church truths" before the unestablished in the grace of God, nor teach "prophecy" to persons not glorying in the cross of Christ. Seek to get souls right with God, and especially beware of mere sentiment, putting experience in place of Christ, shunning as evil and as destructive of practical Christian life occupation with condition of soul, which is not Christ and His Word. Firmly maintain, as of equal moment, Gospel and Church testimony; do not sacrifice either, for both sinners and saints are around us.

When persons ask you for "evidences," say to them that they will find these evidences in reading the Bible and prayer to God. Do not argue with sceptical persons, for he that cometh to God must believe that "He is" (Heb. 11: 6); it is lost time, moreover, and will probably prove hurtful to your soul.

Give yourself to a systematic study of God's Word; avoid, as a general thing, desultory reading. Study the Bible as a whole. Seek to understand the general bearing of each book, the Holy Spirit's thought in its composition. Remember that God has subordinated the numerous and interesting details of Scripture to one general purpose, which is to manifest the glory of Christ. Have this purpose constantly before you, and the details, "so difficult to remember," will fix themselves on your memory. Do not make Scripture of "private interpretation" — that is, do not divorce any subject or detail from the whole. Do not say that facts in the realm of nature confirm the Word of God or establish its truth, nor that scientific facts throw light upon Scripture. The Scriptures never borrow light from man, nor do they need his confirmation; nor does text throw light upon text, as if a single word or letter penned by Him who is light could possibly be dark. One text may throw light into your darkened mind upon another, but the darkness is always in man, never in the Scriptures.) "Harmonies" and "evidences" should be rejected by all who have supreme faith in what God has written. We reject all efforts to show that various accounts and different genealogies may be reconciled. Variety, and not sameness, characterise the works and words of God, and hence we look for differences, not of course contradictions. Never allow the breath of suspicion to cross the soul that the facts culled from every department of the kingdom of nature can contradict the least or seemingly obscure statement in the Word of God.

Perfection of the Scriptures.

The Creator of the countless orbs of heaven — God, who created the stones, made the Bible. Why fear? We boldly challenge the science of the nineteenth century to produce one fact at variance with a single statement throughout the entire range of Holy Scripture. On the contrary, we could show, from the earliest of all records, human or Divine — Genesis and Job — that the statements in these books as to the earth and heaven are in fullest accord with the certain deductions of science, and have again and again corrected the scientist in his own special department, and those statements were penned ages before ever astronomy or geology or other science had an intelligent votary. We are not surprised at the perfection of Scripture; we expect absolute perfection in every page and every line, for God is its Author.

Its range of subjects — as, heaven, hell, sin, death, time, eternity, law, government, redemption, love, grace, Divine and human relationships, God, Christ, man, angels, creation — cover the whole field of human inquiry. Its authors — from forty to fifty — are drawn from all classes of society, as kings, prime ministers, priests, prophets, herdsmen, physicians, tentmakers, fishermen, tax collectors. Amongst the various places where its separate portions were composed were the deserts of Arabia, Egypt, Jerusalem, Rome, the court of the Gentiles at Babylon, the river Chebar in Mesopotamia, the dungeons of the Caesars, the rocky isle of Patmos, in places and countries 1400 miles apart, and at intervals of time during the slow progress of nigh 1600 years. The Hebrew for the Jews, the Syriac for the Gentiles, and Greek for the world at large, were the chosen languages selected by God wherein to express His will and word to man.

The Scriptures Imperishable.

The world passeth away, its glory withereth; man is but a fading leaf; but "the word of the Lord endureth for ever." Not one "jot or tittle" — the smallest particle of a letter — penned by inspiration of God will pass away. The Bible, because it is the Word of God, is imperishable. What a rock amidst the shoreless sea of human uncertainty and conflicting opinions! The pagan persecutions of the first Christian centuries; the papal fires of the Middle Ages, in which cart-loads of the Scriptures were cast; nor the gross ignorance which prevailed prior to the Reformation.; centuries, too, in which an interdict was laid upon reading the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue; nor the yet more wicked attempts in our own times of so-called Christian men who are labouring with unwonted zeal and earnestness in the sad and hopeless task of undermining the authority and Divine character of the Scriptures — these, and the ten thousand attempts of ancient, medieval, and modern times, have covered the enemies of Divine revelation with everlasting confusion, while our dear old English Bible is invulnerable as ever. Do we say, it is a faultless version? Nay; but its mistakes and blemishes only display the blundering hand of man, while leaving untouched the peerless perfection and matchless beauty of the sacred Scriptures.

Testimony of the Fathers.

Jerome, the most learned of the early Latin or Greek Fathers, styled the whole collection of sixty-six sacred books The Divine Library. Chrysostom, the most eloquent of the Fathers, spoke of them. as The Divine Books. Polycarp, who lived at a still earlier date, having been personally instructed by the Apostle John, spoke of the Bible as The Sacred Scriptures, as also the Oracles of the Lord. Clement of Rome, whom Paul styles his "fellow-labourer" (Phil. 4: 3), termed the Scriptures The true sayings of the Holy Spirit. Irenaus, of the second century, makes about 1200 citations or references from the New Testament; Tertullian, also of the second century, refers to or quotes from the New Testament about 2500 times; Clement of Alexandria, another of the second-century Fathers, cites from or refers to the New Testament 800 times; and Polycarp, already referred to, in a brief epistle addressed to the Philippians, quotes from the New Testament about 50 times. Thus the Scriptures, and not misty tradition nor the varying decisions of councils, were the source of all authority. Their verbal inspiration was the ground from which their absolute and Divine authority became the settlement of every question, and from which there could be no appeal, for their testimony is the voice of God.

We reject the mysticism of the Fathers; we are strongly opposed to their fanciful modes of interpretation, and are convinced that the "spiritualizing" of Origen has been pernicious and hurtful in the extreme. We meet with the fruits of that system in most of our English Bibles, where the headings of the chapters in Isaiah — chapters which distinctly and exclusively apply to Israel — are applied to the Church; that is, in those headings which are destitute of Divine authority the blessings of Israel are applied to the Church, while the judgments are literally used of Israel. But, on the other hand, the constant appeal to Scripture, the numerous citations from the inspired word, in the writings of the Christian Fathers, are worthy of all mention and deserving of the highest commendation.

The Lord, the Jews, and the Written Word.

We rather fear that the thrice-repeated formula of the Master, "It is written" (Luke 4), is getting out of date and out of mind, and argument instead of Scripture is getting fashionable. The extreme reverence of the Lord, as also of the Jews, for the written word demands our rapt attention. With what care, with what minuteness of detail the Lord again and again quoted Old Testament oracles; how, too, in midst of an agony which only God could fathom, He remembered that there was one Scripture lying unfulfilled (Ps. 69: 21). He could not die and so lay the foundation of God's counsels in grace till that one statement, penned a thousand years before, was fulfilled to the very letter (John 19: 28). When He rose from the dead He did not give to His own another written Bible, but "beginning at Moses" — for Christ, in His sacrificial and prophetic glories, lay hid beneath the abstract typical system elaborated there "and all the prophets" — the remaining thirty-four books of the Old Testament in which His regal and messianic glories are the burden of song and prediction — "He expounded unto them in ALL THE SCRIPTURES the things concerning Himself" (Luke 24: 27).

Has the reader ever reflected upon the extreme care, the almost superstitious reverence with which the Jews regarded the inspired Word of God Ask any of the ancient Jewish doctors how many words or even letters occur in any of the thirty-nine sacred books of the Old Testament — nay, ask even how many times each letter of the alphabet occurs in the whole collection of sacred books, and you would get an immediate answer. So scrupulous were they in transcribing their sacred books that if a mistake was observed the copy was rejected and the work commenced afresh. The perpetuity of the written word is divinely assured us (1 Peter 1: 23-25), as also its stability (Ps. 119: 89), and its all-sufficiency (2 Tim. 3: 15-17), through all times and under all circumstances.

The paramount importance of the written word, even over and above the successive revelations of the name of the Lord, is also distinctly declared in the words, "Thou hast exalted Thy word above all Thy name."

The Bible the Word of God.

There yet remains one point to which we would briefly advert. Some hesitate to term the Bible "The Word of God," on the plea that it is merely a translation. But it is well known that the original Hebrew MSS. — immediately proceeding from the pen of Moses, Isaiah, and other inspired writers — were not in existence during the time of our Lord's sojourn on earth, and further, that the earliest of all translations, the Septuagint or Greek version of the Old Testament Oracles, was then in general use in Palestine; in fact, was the only translation commonly used till the beginning of the fourth century, and was universally regarded in early Christian times as having been translated from the Hebrew under special Divine influence. Origen was but partially acquainted with the Hebrew language. Jerome, however, who was a competent Hebrew scholar — the first of the Fathers who was so — discarded the Septuagint as authority, and studied and expounded the Old Testament from the original in which it was written — the Hebrew.

Now the important fact we bring before our readers is this: That the Lord, the Apostles, and early Christian writers reverently turned over the pages of this venerable translation, reading, citing, and referring to it as the Word of God. Many quotations found in the New Testament are from this Greek translation; others, of course, are from the Hebrew. Now, is there any difference in principle between an English and Greek translation? The question is a simple one. Have we got the very words of God whether expressed in Greek, English, or French? We have. Why, it was this very Greek copy of the Old Testament with which Timothy was acquainted from childhood, and yet the Holy Spirit through Paul terms it "The Holy Scriptures," declaring their full inspiration, besides coupling them with those then unwritten, "All Scripture given by inspiration of God (2 Tim. 3: 15, 16).

Copies of the Septuagint rapidly multiplied through the diligence of scribes, as now the completed Bible by the aid of printing; then it was the Word of God although in Greek; now it is the Word of God although in English. Translations and multiplied copies, whether written or printed, do not in the least affect the question of inspiration, nor the Divine character and title of the Bible as being in very deed The Word of God.

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 3 The Books and Canon of the Old Testament.

3. The Books and Canon of the Old Testament.

Titles of the Bible.

In the ecclesiastical writings of the four first Christian centuries we have the Bible frequently referred to as "The Scriptures," or "the Sacred Scriptures"; another common enough title by Jewish and Christian writers was, "The Books."

From about the beginning of the fifth century the whole of the sacred writings as in our English version was spoken of as The Bible, from the Greek word biblos, meaning book; previously they were spoken of as "The Books." The pre-eminent dignity of the Word of God as the book of books is thus signified in the title, "The Bible." But there was yet wanting a word to denote its Divine character, hence "The Holy Bible," which is the chosen title of the Sacred Scriptures throughout the known world; in England the title has been in general use for about 600 years. Under the pontificate of Julius II. — the military and profligate head of the Romish Church — the title "The Holy Bible" first received papal sanction.

It is interesting to trace also how the terms Old and New Testament arose. The expression, "the old testament," applied in 2 Cor. 3: 14 to the law, led gradually to the extension of the expression so as to include the whole of the Jewish Scriptures — 39 books in all; while "the New Testament" (Matt. 26: 28) would as naturally embrace the 27 books of the later revelation. "The Oracles of God" (Rom. 3: 2); "The Holy Scriptures," or, "The Sacred Letters" (2 Tim. 3: 15); and "The Word of God," are scriptural and beautifully expressive titles of the Bible as a whole. The first intimates its authoritative character; the second is the expression of its Divine origin; while the third refers to its object — which is God's revelation of Himself to the race — His voice to the soul of man.

St. Jerome, who flourished during the latter half of the fourth century, beautifully styled the whole collection of sixty-six sacred books, "The Divine Library."

St. Jerome and the Vulgate.

A few particulars about St. Jerome, one of the most distinguished and learned Fathers of the Latin Church, may not be uninteresting. He was born, about A.D. 340, on the borders of the ancient country of Pannonia, one of the provinces subject to the Roman sway. Jerome's father was named Eusebius, not the celebrated ecclesiastical historian of that name. Eusebius, being a Christian and in affluent circumstances, provided his son with a liberal secular and theological education. Jerome was early sent to Rome, where he studied for several years under various masters, the most noted of whom was Donatus, perhaps the most accomplished grammarian of his age. Jerome seems to have been brought to the Lord when a young man, probably when prosecuting his studies in Rome. He soon gave himself up almost wholly to the study of the sacred Scriptures, and produced a number of commentaries on separate books of the Bible, besides numerous other works. Books in those days were exceedingly expensive. It is said that Jerome ruined himself by purchasing the works of Origen. Having gone to Palestine to make himself personally acquainted with the localities mentioned in Holy Writ, he resolved to become master of the Hebrew language, so as not to be dependent upon translations in the study of the earlier oracles of God — the Old Testament. In a few years he acquired an intimate knowledge of the language, which he soon turned to good account

From the second century till the days of Jerome, the Bible in use in Western Christendom was a translation from the ecclesiastical tongue — the Greek. The Septuagint, or Greek version of the Old Testament, executed about three centuries before Christ, was in common use even in Palestine in the days of our Lord and of His apostles. From the fact of this old and venerable document being frequently cited by the Lord and writers of the New Testament, it would have been regarded almost as a sacrilegious act to have questioned its exactness; besides which, Hebrew was only known comparatively to the few. The Greek New Testament and the Greek version of the Old, formed the basis of all Latin and other versions of the Bible till the days of Jerome, who was the first Christian scholar who attempted a translation direct from the original tongues. This valuable work, styled the Vulgate, was bitterly opposed at the time, and it was only after a lapse of 200 years that it was accorded general favour. Jerome's version was commonly spoken of as "The New Translation," to distinguish it from the Septuagint, the Old Translation. Pope Gregory — the best of the Roman Pontiffs — officially sanctioned the Vulgate of Jerome, who was certainly one of the most pious, and probably the most learned, of the Latin Fathers.

Chrysostom, the Distinguished Greek Bishop.

We may also add a few particulars of another of the Fathers and an ardent lover of the Scriptures. We refer to John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople. This Greek Father was for many years contemporary with the learned Jerome of the Latin Church. John was surnamed Chrysostom, meaning the golden-mouthed, because of his matchless eloquence. He was not only an indefatigable preacher — daily attracting thousands by his burning words — but he was a most fearless one, regardless alike of the frown or smile of the Emperor Arcadius or his godless consort, Eudoxia. The bishop, in the course of his familiar discourses styled "Homilies" — of which there are about a thousand extant — spoke of the Bible as "The Divine Books." Chrysostom was much beloved by the people of Constantinople, but hated by many of the clergy, and ladies and nobles of the court, whose ways and lives he unsparingly condemned. He died after much suffering, repeating his favourite words, "Glory be to God for all events."

It is somewhat singular that both these distinguished Fathers (Jerome and John) voluntarily secluded themselves for several years, the former in the deserts of Syria, and the latter in a mountain cave near Antioch. The study of the "Divine Library" and of the Hebrew language were the objects of the former; while the latter made such good use of the "Divine Books" that he committed them entirely to memory. Both Fathers were truly eminent men; both loved the Lord Jesus, and both were renowned for their devotion to the Word of God. If Jerome was the more learned, Chrysostom was the more eloquent of the two.

Times, Persons, and Places where the Scriptures were Written.

The 66 sacred books comprising the Bible were written at different times, by various persons, and in distant places.

We entertain but faint hope of convincing the sceptic or silencing the caviller, but we submit the following statement of facts as demonstrating that the Bible is, indeed, the voice of God to man; that He has imprinted on it Divine unity; that God only could have secured such remarkable agreement, such precision of statement, such oneness of mind and plan as are revealed in the Scriptures. Here are sixty-six books, the work of from forty to fifty writers, and their composition occupying a period of about 1600 years, written in the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and in courts, deserts, and dungeons; under circumstances, too, of gladness, sorrow, poverty, pain, and pressure.

Of the writers we number the most illustrious monarchs of Israel, as David and Solomon; two distinguished prime ministers at the court of the Gentiles. Mordecai and Daniel; a cup-bearer — a highly honourable position — in personal attendance on the Persian monarch, as Nehemiah; the adopted Hebrew, Moses, brought up amidst the splendours of the Egyptian court and educated in the wisdom and learning of that truly remarkable people; the learned and pious scribe, Ezra, whose name and deeds are engraven on the memories of the past and present Jewish people; a farm servant Amos, whose charming simplicity (Amos 7: 14-17) accords so fitly with his humble occupation; the prophet and judge, Samuel; many prophets, grand as Isaiah, touching as Jeremiah, vigorous as Ezekiel, powerfully descriptive as Joel; illiterate Galilean fishermen (Acts 4: 13); a despised and degraded tax collector in the employment of the Romans, Matthew; the tentmaker of mighty intellect, Paul; the highly educated Gentile physician, Luke; the loving John, the energetic Jude, the fervent Peter, and the practical James.

Of the writings, the first was the Pentateuch, completed fifteen centuries before Christ — that is, 700 years before Rome was founded, and about 1000 years before the work of Herodotus, the first authentic history, was published — centuries, too, before the prince of Greek poets, Homer, flourished, or Hesiod, more ancient still, sang his verses. The Pentateuch and the book of Job are by far the oldest writings in existence. The historical and chronological boasted records of China and Egypt are unworthy of a moment's serious consideration. The former gives the age of the world as some hundreds of thousands of years, while the Chaldean records, equally unreliable as those of China and Egypt, carry back the age of the world to nearly half a million of years. It has been shown that even were the annals of the Hindoos — which exceed in absurdity those of China and Egypt — reliable, the arbitrary mode of computation (months of fifteen days, and years of sixty days), would reduce the chronologies of these peoples to a near agreement with the Biblical chronology. The first recorded date in Scripture is found in that highly important chronological chapter — Genesis 5: 3. Neither science nor Scripture determines the antiquity of this globe. All Scripture dates refer to human history.

There is neither book nor monument to which you can refer within several centuries of the time when Moses wrote the first portion of the Bible. Then, after a quarter of a century, Joshua, the second inspired penman, wrote the book to which his name is attached. Then comes another interval, a lengthy and sorrowful one, of more than 300 years, covering the times of the Judges, and well termed "the dark ages" of Israelitish history, when Samuel, the third inspired writer, brought up the Jewish annals to the times of David — the sweet Psalmist of Israel — his co-adjutors in the work being the prophets Gad and Nathan (1 Chron. 29: 29). Another interval of 300 years, and we listen entranced to the grand and glowing strains of Isaiah — the prince of Hebrew prophets; perhaps the most magnificent piece of writing ever penned is the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah, and of course divinely inspired like every other line and word of Scripture. Yet another period of nigh 300 years, during which the voices of the prophets were lifted up in the land of Immanuel, or amongst the captives in Babylon and Mesopotamia — when their tears bedewed the sacred soil, and their sufferings and exercises are written on high, and Malachi closed the inspired records of the Old Testament; the editor of the whole being Ezra. A long and dreary blank of 460 years, unwritten in the pages of God's most holy Word — save in a few prophetic passages (Dan. 8, 10, 11) — brings us to a few years at most after the death of Jesus, when Matthew wrote of Christ — His messianic rights, glories, and sufferings. Within thirty years after, the whole of the New Testament was completed, save the Revelation, which was written about A.D. 96. Thus the whole Bible was finished and in the hands of the Christian, and in the keeping of the Church, or rather of God, ere the first Christian century closed.

Of the places where the various parts of the Bible were written, Babylon, the capital of the Chaldean monarchy; Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Israel; Rome, the capital of the fourth Universal Empire; and Ephesus, the capital of Asia Minor, may be instanced. Take Jerusalem as a centre, and you have Daniel the calm and measured historian, and Peter the warm-hearted and fervent apostle, both writing in Babylon, 660 miles distant, and Paul penning his prison epistles in the imperial city of Rome, 1450 miles distant. The greater number of the sacred books were of course written in Palestine — regarded by the ancients as occupying the central situation in the known world (Ezek. 5: 5).

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 4 The Books of the Old Testament.

4. The Books of the Old Testament.

There are thirty-nine books in the Old Testament, but the ancient Jewish writers reduced the number to twenty-two so that the sacred books might correspond in number to the twenty-two sacred letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Testimony of Josephus.

Josephus, of Jewish historic fame, an unbeliever in Christ, born in Palestine about the time of Paul's conversion, and thoroughly conversant with Hebrew literature, probably more so than any man then living, thus writes: — "We have only two-and-twenty books which are justly believed to be of Divine authority, of which five are the books of Moses. From the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, the son of Xerxes, King of Persia, the prophets who were the successors of Moses have written in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the regulation of human life."

This arithmetical feat was accomplished by regarding the Pentateuch* as five separate books as in the Septuagint and in our English Bibles. The "thirteen books" written by the prophets were, (1) Joshua, (2) Judges with Ruth, (3) Samuel, (4) Kings, (5) Chronicles, (6) Isaiah, (7) Jeremiah with Lamentations, (8) Ezekiel, (9) Daniel, (10) The twelve minor prophets from Hosea to Malachi, (11) Job, (12) Ezra and Nehemiah, (13) Esther. The four remaining books are the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song. It may appear singular to some that the twelve minor prophets should be so grouped, but in most, if not all ancient catalogues, they are regarded as one book, as also in all quotations from them. The reason of this, we suppose, was to facilitate an easy reference to these prophetic books. The modern Jews make up the Old Testament into twenty-four books.

{* Pentateuch is from the Greek words pente, five, and teuchos, book; thus the "five books" of Moses.}

The Pentateuch.

The first five books of Scripture were originally written in one scroll, according to Hebrew custom, and are still so used in Jewish reading in their synagogues. The distribution of the Pentateuch into separate books can be traced up to the days of Ezra, about 450 B.C. Their English titles, which are of Greek origin, are very inexact as descriptive of their character and contents. The Hebrew titles of the books are taken from the opening word or sentence of each, but are not regarded by the Jews as descriptive of their character. Thus the Hebrew Pentateuch, although not arranged in books, has yet fifty-four pretty lengthy sections, and six hundred and sixty-nine very short ones; while the English version has its five books — very ancient, and one hundred and eighty-seven chapters — the latter only dating from the thirteenth century.

It is an interesting circumstance that the Samaritans — the religious rivals of the Jews (John 4) — possessed a copy of the Pentateuch written in the ancient Phoenician or Hebrew characters, hence not a translation, which they regarded with peculiar veneration, and from which the woman of Samarian race gathered that Messias was to come (John 4: 25). There are said to be several complete copies of the Samaritan Pentateuch now in Europe, and one is believed to date from the 8th century — the era of Mohammed. The Pentateuch, as a whole, was from earliest times familiarly spoken of by the Jews as "the law," or "the law of Moses." The Lord, and writers of the New Testament, frequently refer to and cite from the Pentateuch as a whole, as also its several books. The writings of Moses are held to be of equal authority with the words of the Lord Himself (Luke 16: 31).

{In the book form, inserted here is a facsimile of a section of the Codex Alexandrinus (A). This MS., quoted as Codex A, was the first important text available for the use of scholars. Written in Greek, in uncial letters, it is of fifth century origin. It was presented to King Charles I in 1628, and is now in the British Museum, London. The portion reproduced here is from Luke's Gospel 12: 54 — 13: 4. On the next page is reproduced a section  of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels. Translated from the Latin Vulgate Text, and written near Bath in Wessex (S.W. England) about A.D.1000. Portion shown is John 1: 1-13.}

When the Pentateuch was completed Moses directed it to be placed in the side of the Ark (Deut. 31: 24, 26). Was this the identical copy of the law found by Hilkiah the high priest seven hundred and fifty years afterwards, amongst the rubbish in the Temple (2 Kings 22: 8); or was it a copy transcribed from the original by one of the early kings (Deut. 17: 18)? We believe it was the very copy of the law or Pentateuch written by the hand of Moses (2 Chron. 34: 14). That Moses was the writer of these five inspired records is evident from the testimony of the books themselves (Deut. 31: 9, 24), by Joshua (Joshua 1: 7), by Samuel (1 Sam. 12: 6-8), by David (1 Kings 2: 3), by Solomon (1 Kings 8: 53, 56), by Jehovah (2 Kings 21: 8), by Josiah (2 Kings 23: 2, 3, 25) by Jehoiada (2 Chron. 23: 16-18), by Hezekiah (2 Chron. 30: 16), by Ezra (Ezra 7: 6), by Nehemiah (Neh. 13: 1), by Daniel (Dan. 9: 11-13), by Malachi (Mal. 4: 4), by Christ (John 5: 45-47), by Peter (Acts 3: 22-26), by Stephen (Acts 7), by Paul (1 Cor. 9: 9), by all the Jewish writers, ancient and modern, and by the Jewish nation in all ages, by apostates as Mahomet and Julian, by heathen writers as Longinus and Tacitus. Yet in the face of this overwhelming testimony, Divine, Christian, Jewish, and Heathen, men will be found bold enough and bad enough to impugn the authority of the Pentateuch, and deny, too, its Mosaic authorship!

The magnificent conclusion to the blessing of the Tribes (Deut. 33: 26-29) forms a perfectly beautiful and fitting close to the pen of inspiration by the hand of Moses. The first eight verses of the concluding chapter of Deuteronomy were probably written by Joshua, and the last four verses by an utterly unknown hand, perhaps by Ezra, the editor and compiler of the Old Testament. This last chapter of the Pentateuch (Deut. 34) is, however, as fully inspired as the first chapter (Gen. 1), and we may again remark that the question of authorship in no wise touches the fact of inspiration: "all Scripture is given by inspiration of God."

The next group of sacred writings is from Joshua to Esther, twelve books in our Bibles, but reckoned by the Jews as six.

Joshua (the Lord's Salvation) comprises a period of from twenty-five to thirty years; the first twenty-two chapters cover a period of about eight years. It has been gathered by some from the frequent use of the third person that not Joshua, but a contemporary and eye-witness was the writer of the book. But it must be remembered that it was not an unfrequent occurrence on the part of an inspired writer, both to speak and write in the third person (see Ezra 7). Jewish tradition ascribes the authorship of the whole to Joshua save the last five verses which were evidently written after the death of the "Saviour" of Israel, as the name Joshua imports. Jesus, son of Sirach, the writer of Ecclesiasticus about 250 B.C., calls Joshua the successor of Moses in prophecies. Probably one of the elders who out-lived Joshua added these supplementary verses, as also the record of certain transactions which occurred some time after the death of Joshua (Joshua 15: 16-19 comp. with Judges 1: 12-15; Joshua 19: 47 with Judges 18).

Judges. According to generally accepted Jewish tradition, Samuel was the writer of this book. The remark, "In those days there was no king in Israel," four times repeated (Judges 17: 6; Judges 18: 1; Judges 19: 1; Judges 21: 25) would show that the book was written after the establishment of Monarchy in Israel, but before the capture of Jerusalem and destruction of the Jebusites by David (for this compare Judges 1: 21, with 2 Sam. 5: 6-9). The administration of the thirteen Judges from Othniel to Samson embraced a period of about three hundred years The last five chapters form an important appendix which must be placed historically at a very early period of the book. The reference to Phinehas (Judges 20: 28) would prove this. This supplementary part discloses the moral condition of the people — one of lawlessness, anarchy, and idolatry.

Ruth, beauty. From the allusion to a then old custom in Israel "concerning redeeming and concerning changing" (Ruth 4:7), and the historical account of David's genealogy (Ruth 4: 17-22), we gather that the book was written certainly not earlier than the accession of David to the throne of Israel. Probably Samuel was the writer. The counsels of God as to the millennial blessing of the Jew and of the land are disclosed in this typical book of history. Ruth is the connecting link between the times of the Judges and the establishment of royalty in Israel.

Books of Samuel

1 Samuel This book covers a period of about one hundred years, from the birth of Samuel to the death of Saul. The first twenty-four chapters only were written by the prophet (compare 1 Chron. 29: 29 with 1 Sam. 25: 1); the remaining chapters, with the whole of the second book, were probably written by the prophets Gad and Nathan. This is also according to ancient Jewish tradition preserved in the Talmud. Samuel was the first of the regular prophetic order (Acts 3: 21).

The main subjects of the book show the connection between God's great ordinances of priesthood, prophecy, and royalty, and the utter failure of man in maintaining them as means of blessing. The priest met failure under the law; the prophet recalled the people to their obedience to the law; while the king was set to firmly maintain and vindicate the authority of the law.

2 Samuel. Here we have unfolded the history and reign of David for about forty years. First we have his reign over Judah at Hebron for seven and a half years, then his glorious reign over all Israel in Jerusalem for the remainder of the probationary period, forty years. These books in the ancient Hebrew formed but one. In the Septuagint and Vulgate and in the subtitle of our English Bibles, they are spoken of as 1st and 2nd Books of Kings.

Books of Kings.

1 Kings details the public history of the kingdom, but more especially that of Israel after the disruption of the united kingdom. The glory of Solomon's reign for forty years, and its sorrowful decline, form an instructive page of Jewish history.

2 Kings historically traces the kingdom from the conclusion of the Elijah ministry till the subversion of the kingdom of Judah and destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans in the year 588 B.C. It also records the downfall of the kingdom of Israel or of the ten tribes, and the deportation of the king, princes, and people to Assyria, which took place 130 years previous to the Chaldean attack upon Jerusalem. The decline, idolatry and ruin of both kingdoms are the subjects of the book. The previous book covers a period of about 126 years; this about 300 years.

These books form but one in the Hebrew canon. In the Septuagint, Vulgate, and titles of our English Bibles they are spoken of as the third and fourth books of Kings; consequently, these kingdom records are a continuation of the history contained in the books of Samuel. The Jews assign the authorship to Jeremiah, giving as reason that the last chapter of that prophet covers the same ground as the concluding section of 2nd Kings (2 Kings 24: 18-25). We consider it much more probable that Ezra was the inspired historian of these kingdom histories, which were written during the captivity, and probably in the reign of Evil-Merodach, king of Babylon (2 Kings 25: 27).

Books of Chronicles.

In 1 Chronicles the inspired historian — probably Ezra — portrays David not as the man (1 Sam.), nor as the king (2 Sam.), but especially in those circumstances where he stands out pre-eminently as the type of the Lord in the early period of the millennium; hence the grave faults of David, as his adultery, etc., are omitted. Grace and glory shine throughout, and David is everywhere, and made everything of.

2 Chronicles contains the history of David's house, prominently noticing after Solomon, the reigns of the godly and pious Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah. Here, too, the sins of Solomon are entirely omitted. The sovereign grace of God is impressed on these Chronicle records with an indelible pen.

These books constitute but one book in the Hebrew; called by the Jews "words or acts of the days," i.e. journals or diaries, rendered chronicon by Jerome and with us chronicles from the Latin Vulgate. The title by the Septuagint Paraleipomenon, "things omitted," is a most objectionable one. The special design of these books is manifestly of God and as worthy of its Divine Author as any other portion of Holy Writ. The close of the Babylon captivity is indicated more than once, and moreover is regarded as a past historical fact (1 Chron. 6: l5). The closing verses (2 Chron. 36: 22, 23) constitute the opening words of the book of Ezra, in which the history contained in the Chronicles is continued. Ezra therefore may safely be regarded as the writer and compiler of the Chronicles, and the time at or during the restoration to Palestine. In the Hebrew canon these books stand last in order. The books of Chronicles cover the same ground and time as the books of Kings, while having a special character of their own. The first nine chapters contain divine genealogical records from Adam, and which enabled the returned remnants from the Captivity to verify their various Jewish claims.

Ezra (help) covers a period of about eighty years, and records the doings, the work and the worship of the Judah remnants who returned to Jerusalem from the Chaldean exile. The distinguished ecclesiastical historian and ready scribe whose name is attached to this book has ever been highly venerated amongst the Jews, and is generally regarded as the inspired editor and compiler of the Old Testament. When, where, and by whom this book was written are questions easily answered — after the return from the Babylon captivity, in Palestine, and by Ezra. The change from the first to the third person, as in chaps. 7, 10, in nowise affects the authorship; John the Apostle habitually does so in his Gospel. Similar instances might be adduced from Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, and elsewhere. Yet Professor Smith (in his Lectures on the Old Testament in the Jewish Church, page 321) says, "One asks for proof that any Hebrew ever wrote of himself in the third person." Is human learning to be trusted in the things of God? What is man in presence of these Divine and imperishable records? The books of Ezra and Nehemiah anciently formed but one work; they are still spoken of by Roman Catholic writers as the 1st and 2nd books of Esdras. There are two portions of this book written in the Syriac or Aramean language — that spoken in Babylon and Assyria — viz. , Ezra 4: 8 to 6: 18; and Ezra 7: 12-26.

Nehemiah (whom the Lord comforts). The administration of Nehemiah, "the Tirshatha" (Persian title, meaning governor) over Judea lasted about thirty-six years. The rebuilding of the city and generally the civil condition of the returned Jewish remnants are the main subjects of this the last historical book of the Old Testament, written about 420 B.C. The Temple and the ecclesiastical state of things are characteristic of Ezra. The one book is thus the counterpart of the other. Work and worship are marked features of Ezra, while work and conflict are as distinctly characteristic of Nehemiah.

The commission granted to Nehemiah anent the rebuilding of the city and reconstruction of the civil polity according to Moses, recorded in Nehemiah 2, marks the commencement of the seventy weeks or 490 years of Daniel's celebrated prophecy (Dan. 9: 25). The book was written by Nehemiah (Neh. 1: 1), after his return from the court of Persia (Neh. 13: 6) in Greek and Latin Bibles it is called the "second book of Ezra"

Review of the Sacred Books from Genesis to Nehemiah.

Now, dear Christian reader, having got to the historical close of the Old Testament, in which we have the sum of all history as connected with the Jews and as bearing upon the glory of Christ, let us briefly review the steps of this wonderful journey. As creatures, we necessarily commence with the enquiry — What about creation? Who created? What, too, are the salient features of the early ages of the world? We get a full and Divine answer in the book of Genesis. What next commands our attention? All nature is disturbed; there is agony in the depths and in the heights. Here hearts are broken, tears are shed, and a seething mass of human misery and sin calls aloud for redemption from Satan's grasp and slavery; yea, and from God's judgment, too, righteously pressing upon the ruined sinner. God in holiness and righteousness provides redemption in the person and by the work of His beloved Son — the grand theme of Exodus.

Now, by sacrifice and priest, we enter the sanctuary of God most holy and blessed presence — and worship Him who has thus fitted us to bow before Him; there you have Leviticus. Next comes the wilderness, with its testings, trials, and services, where, too, the faithless hearts of the redeemed are exposed amidst the circumstances of life; where man is broken, humbled and proved, but where, in presence of sorrow and daily need, the heart of God is told out; these are the lessons of the wilderness book — Numbers. God created worlds, and so displayed His power (Genesis). He gave His Son to die, and so expressed His love (Exodus). He has counted the hairs of our heads, thus manifesting His infinite care (Numbers).

Then comes the practical ground of blessing for the saint. Let no one say, "It is enough; I am dead, and risen with Christ, seated in the heavenlies in Him." Your path through this world, your ways, conduct and practical enjoyment of your heavenly place are dependent upon and are to be regulated by the written word of God, as the book of Deuteronomy most clearly shows. Then comes conflict with wicked spirits (not with doubts or fears) in heavenly places — the principalities and powers who, under Satan, unceasingly labour to spoil the Christian's enjoyment of heaven and heavenly things; of this Joshua is the typical witness. Now we pass on to enquire: Has the Church maintained her heavenly standing, testimony, and hope? Has her walk on earth answered to her heavenly calling? The dark clouds of unbelief have covered Israel's sky. Judges is proof of this, as also figuring the yet darker close of the Church's earthly sojourn (2 Timothy).

But God, ever mindful of His people, has laid the roots of time and eternal blessing, for Israel and the Church, in the Son of His love. Christ, the Christ of God, our well-known and loved One, is the mighty Redeemer, the Elimelech [Boaz?] in whom is lodged the sure and unfailing counsels of God, whatever the failure on man's part, and this is unfolded in the book of Ruth. Now, God's three great ordinances of blessing for man, for Israel, but according to their responsibility, are next developed. Priesthood in Eli; prophecy in Samuel, and kingly power in Saul, each in turn breaks down; for what is man but a broken cistern, a leaking vessel? such are the subjects and truths of 1 Samuel. But all is stable and enduring in Christ, and so the typical David (beloved), Jehovah's elect, maintains the glory of God, and secures blessing, combining the regal, prophetic, and priestly glories, characteristic of the Messiah and millennial times — 2 Samuel.

Next follows the peaceful and glorious reign of Solomon (peaceable), foreshadowing the blessed reign of Christ with His heavenly saints, and their dwelling with Him in their Father's house (John 14: 2); for here the Temple is seen as typical of heavenly scenes and persons, without "a veil" and without "an altar." Neither distance to God, nor approach to God, as signified by the veil and altar, can apply to a people already brought to God, and whose place is prepared for them in the Father's house. These and other lessons are typically taught us in 1 Kings. Then the kingdom history of Israel is pursued down to the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities — a history fraught with instruction and of deepening interest to the saint on whom the ends of the world or ages are come — 2 Kings. If we have had the public history of the kingdom in the previous books, we hare now the inner history — God's grace and sovereign call — blessedly presented in these genealogical records of Jehovah's earthly elect people, and the earthly side of the millennium, in connection with Solomon; all this is prefigured in 1 Chronicles. God will have an earthly people, with whom He will put Himself in relationship in millennial glory and blessing, as the throne and temple of Solomon here bear witness. The Chronicles account of the Temple, with its "veil" and "altar," respect an earthly people, who will need the altar of approach. In fine, we have Solomon's throne and temple, in their aspect toward Israel and man, as the main theme of 2 Chronicles.

But the fine gold becomes dim, and the flower fades, and all flesh is grass, and so the kingdom glory is exchanged for captivity in Babylon. Again, however, God works, and a remnant, chastened and broken in spirit, return "together as one man to Jerusalem." The "altar" and the "word" — worship and obedience — then characterised the returned people of Judah. Do they morally mark off the present saints of God from the professing mass around? Of this and other themes and subjects we are instructed in Ezra. This is fitly followed by the hearty service and freewill offerings of the remnant, who are then left in their land under Gentile protection — left to wait in patience for the coming in of the Messiah, in whom their hopes were placed. Thus we are brought to the fitting conclusion — the last historical book of the Old Testament being Nehemiah.

Esther (star) comprises a period of about twenty years. We utterly reject the thought advanced by some, that this book is a mere compilation from the Persian records — a page of eastern romance — on the ground that the name of God does not once occur in it. There is a Divine reason for such an important omission. It will be remembered that only a small portion of the nation availed themselves of the edict of Cyrus, granting permission to the Jews to return to the land. The mass of the people were indifferent to Jehovah and His interests, and did not choose to avail themselves of the offer. Yet God watched over them, but secretly, because of their state, thus withholding the very mention of His name.

The scenes of this book come in historically between chaps. 6 and 7 of the book of Ezra. We believe on internal evidence that the book was written by "Mordecai the Jew," and in the metropolis of the Persian Empire. But we would again observe that the questions of When, Where, and by Whom the books of Scripture were written are altogether irrespective of their inspiration and Divine character. The origin of the Jewish feast of Purim or of lots has its historical origin stated here — a feast yet observed and from time immemorial by the Jews. The Persian monarch Ahasuerus is the renowned Xerxes, whose history is so familiar to most readers of ancient history.

Job (treated with hatred). This is a book or poem in dramatic form upon the moral government of God, and consists of seventeen speeches, with an introduction in which Jehovah, Satan, and Job mainly figure (Job 1-3), and a weighty and instructive appendix, in which Jehovah and His broken-hearted servant alone appear (Job 38-41). The book is without dates, and hence not characteristically dispensational, nor is it at all prophetic. Volumes have been written to prove (as if that were possible) the non-existence of the patriarch, and that the book is merely a page of Arabian romance. Ezekiel among the prophets (Ezek. 14: 14, 20), and James among the apostles (James 5: 11), guarantee the life, trials, and death of Job, while Paul authenticates the Divine character of the book by citing from it, introducing the quotation with the usual formula "it is written" (1 Cor. 3: 19, with Job 5: 13).

{Here, in the book, is a portrait of John Wycliffe with the following notes: Born Spresswell, Yorkshire, about the year 1324 Died Lutterworth, Leicestershire, 31st Dec., 1384.

To John Wycliffe, entitled "The Morning Star of the Reformation," belongs the honour of giving to the English-speaking peoples a complete translation of the Sacred Scriptures in the Vernacular tongue, after fifteen years severe labour, and to him we owe more than to any one person, our English language, our English Bible, and our Reformed religion. In reply to the reproaches of his opponents, he gives this solemn assurance: "Let God be my witness, that before everything I have God's glory in my eye, and the good of the Church which springs out of reverence of Holy Scripture, and following the law of Christ."

On the reverse of the page is a facsimile of a section of Wycliffe's Bible with the following notes. John Wycliffe's translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English was made about 1380. Alternative renderings of different passages are underlined. The MS. one of the earliest in existence, is now in the British Museum. The portion illustrated above is Mark 15: 33-41.}

The scenes of this book belong in point of antiquity to the patriarchal age this we gather from the following considerations: — Job must have been nigh a century old, if not more, when the Lord opened the controversy with Satan respecting His servant. The patriarch then had seven grown-up sons, for they had houses of their own, and three daughters, while after his trial he lived a hundred and forty years (chaps. 1, 42). Does not this long age conclusively point to a time, certainly not later, if not earlier than, the days of Abram? This is further confirmed by a reference to the earliest form of idolatry, that of the heavenly bodies (Job 31: 26, 27), the only kind mentioned in the book, and further by the frequency of the patriarchal title "the Almighty" occurring oftener than in any other book of Scripture. Job, too, like his contemporaries prior to the days of Moses, is seen in household priestly action (Job 1: 5). According to many — Jews and Christians — Moses was the writer of the book; if so, it was probably written forty years at least before the Pentateuch, the former in the land of Midian (Ex. 1), and the latter subsequently on the plains of Moab (Deut. 31: 22, 26).

The five books from Job to the Canticles constitute the third divisional title of the Old Testament, "the Psalms" (Luke 24: 44); so termed because they record the exercises, feelings, sorrows, and emotions of the heart of man.

The Book of Psalms. This inspired collection of sacred songs, and of compositions of various character, has evidently the impress of God upon their arrangement. He selected them, gave them their present shape and form, gave one hundred and sixteen of them those untranslated headings or titles which are rarely read and still less understood. He gave to the whole collection its title, "The Book of Psalms" (Luke 20: 42), and caused them to be numbered, too, for more easy reference, as "the Second Psalm" (Acts 13: 33). The Psalms are inspired, and their arrangement is Divine. "Selah," that word of so frequent occurrence — about seventy times — signifies to pause or consider. Uniform tradition — Jewish and Christian — ascribes the compilation of the Psalms to Ezra on his return to Palestine after the Babylon-captivity. Human arrangement would have set the Psalms in chronological or historical order; but God has classified them in a manner befitting His glory. Whoever were the authors — and they are numerous (David, of course, principally) — the composition of the whole extended through a period of about a thousand years, commencing with Moses (Psalm 90) and ending with the return from Babylon (Psalm 137).

The Jews — ancient and modern — not only regarded the Psalms as divided into five books, ending respectively with Nos. 41, 72, 89, 106, 150, as a Divine arrangement, but also considered each book to correspond with the separate books of the Pentateuch, having the same distinguishing characteristics. We will in as few words as possible trace the parallelism.

The first book of Psalms (Nos. 1-41) stands in the same relation to the whole collection that Genesis does to the Bible, both books being introductory and in both are unfolded the counsels of God as to this earth. The second book (Nos. 42-72) brings in God as Redeemer, as in the former He is revealed as Creator; hence the future blessing and redemption of the people on the ground of sovereign grace alone — all being utter ruin on man's side — is the lesson as distinctly graven here, as it is in Exodus the second book of the Pentateuch. In the third book (Nos. 73-89) we have God made known as Sanctifier, and the whole nation set apart for God — the root idea in Sanctification. The "Sanctuary" and the "House" characterise these 17 psalms throughout as they do Leviticus, the third book of Moses. The fourth book (Nos. 90-106) commences with what has been termed "the funeral psalm of the wilderness" — No. 90. Here too we have the patriarchal title "God Almighty," faith's resource in wilderness circumstances, and "Most High" the millennial title so as to sustain the hopes of the pilgrim and journeying host. The frailty and mortality of man and of Israel are solemnly chanted in the opening of this series of 17 psalms, But we have also the righteous ground unfolded in the death of the Messiah, and the glory and eternity of His being (No 102), on which God will yet set His people in Canaan blessing, after the truths of death and resurrection have been practically learnt. And are not these the very truths and characteristics of the fourth book of Scripture — Numbers? There we behold the generation of Israel dying in the wilderness, there too we see the cross (Num. 21) man's only hope and refuge! there also we witness the testing of man. But why amplify, with the teachings of both books before our very eyes! The fifth book (Nos. 107-150) is a book of review, a book in which the moral element largely prevails. Here God in His character, ways, and works is unfolded in strains — sublime and rapturous. Is the correspondence to Deuteronomy difficult to perceive? Have you ever compared the song (Deut. 32) and blessing of Moses (Deut. 33) with the closing five Psalms? We consider therefore that the Jews had a Divine thought in holding that parallelism existed between the separate books of the Pentateuch with the separate books of the Psalms.

It will be observed that the first, second, and third books of the psalms end with the words, "Amen, and Amen"; while the fourth and fifth close with a "Hallelujah," or "Praise ye the Lord." The expressive note attached to the second book or 72nd Psalm, "The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended," was probably the work of the inspired compiler. What more could be desired Immanuel's land is filled with glory and the praise of the once despised Nazarene, the Man of sorrows, engages the heart and tongue of the millennial earth, for "daily shall He be praised." The last five psalms each begin with a "Hallelujah," and also close with it, while the last of the five is a "Hallelujah psalm" throughout.

The Great Hallelujah or Passover Hymn of the Jews consisted of that group from Nos. 113 to 118 inclusive. The first three were sung while the sacrificial lambs were being slain: the latter three were sung on the conclusion of the feast. Probably this second part, or Psalms 116-18, formed the hymn sung by the Lord and His apostles at the close of the celebration of the last Passover (Mark 14: 26).

That interesting series of 15 psalms (Nos, 120-134) entitled Songs of Degrees, are supposed to have been sung by the males of Israel on the occasion of their journeys to Jerusalem to observe their three national and compulsory feasts (Deut. 16: 16). These "songs of ascents" (not "degrees") imply Jerusalem's historical and moral elevation; see Ex.34: 24; 1 Kings 12: 27, 28.

Jewish and Christian Divisions of the Book of Psalms.

Book 1 contains Psalms 1-41, ending with "Amen."

We have here the godly part of Judah — "the excellent of the earth," with whom Christ identified Himself in the historic past (Matt. 3), as He will by His Spirit in the future. To this remnant Jehovah reveals His counsels, and makes them the depository of His thoughts, hence the frequency of the covenant name Jehovah — about 270 times.

Book 2 contains Psalms 42-72, ending with "Amen."

Here the God-fearing Jews are prophetically viewed as suffering under the Beast or civil power of Rome (Rev. 12, 13; Dan. 7), but outside Jerusalem, which is governmentally given up to the Gentiles who wreak their vengeance on the ungodly Jews for the last half of Daniel's week, or three years and a half, hence the prominence given to the creatorial title God — about 200 times.

Book 3 contains Psalms 73-89, ending with "Amen."

Israel as a whole (not Judah only), has her history divinely sketched from her rise in Egypt as a nation till her Millennial glory — Jerusalem being fully owned. Before the nation's yet future acceptance (Ps. 73-83) God is the leading title throughout; after the nation's acceptance (Ps. 84-89) Jehovah is the much more frequent name.

Book 4 contains Psalms 90-106, ending with "Praise ye the Lord."

Here Christ is regarded as "the hope of Israel," and for His return they sigh and wait. The successive announcements of His coming for their deliverance and the overthrow of their enemies are celebrated in triumphant strains. As this involves the national restoration to the Divine favour, the covenant or relationship title is the one used — Jehovah — about 107 times.

Book 5 contains Psalms 107-150, ending with "Praise ye the Lord."

God's character, His ways, and works are here grandly celebrated in songs unrivalled for sublimity and poetic sweetness and fervour. Jehovah occurs about 260 times. The last psalm is one triumphant "Hallelujah" or "Praise ye the Lord." This division is neither prophetic nor historical as the others, but is distinctly moral in character.

In the first Psalm, the two parts of the nation are distinguished — the godly (verses 1-3), the ungodly (verses 4-6). In the second Psalm, the counsels of Jehovah respecting Christ as man and Messiah are declared. Thus these two Psalms are introductory to the whole collection, revealing the chief actors in the closing days.

The Book of Proverbs. The whole of these proverbs were spoken by Solomon, save those contained in the two last chapters. We may regard these wise principles and maxims as part of the three thousand uttered by the illustrious monarch of Israel (1 Kings 4: 32), and as the fruit of that wisdom he asked from the Lord at the commencement of his reign (1 Kings 3: 12); his name is introduced at the beginning of each of the three divisions of the book (see chapters 1, 10, 25), and which are here selected and arranged by inspiration of God. The compiler was probably one of the prophets living in the days of Hezekiah, if, indeed, that monarch himself did not do so; we know at least that his servants copied out a number of these proverbs (Prov. 25: 1). We know nothing of Agur (Prov. 30: 1), nor of King Lemuel (Prov. 31: 1); their names alone have been handed down to posterity.

Ecclesiastes (the preacher). The opening words of the book are conclusive as to its authorship, "The words of the Preacher, the son of David, King in Jerusalem." The boundary of Solomon's horizon is the sun, beneath it all is pronounced "Vanity." Read the book, and you will say that it was evidently written by Solomon at the close of his reign, in the evening of his life; probably too in Jerusalem, at least in Palestine.

One class of critics boldly tell us that the book was not written by Solomon, but that some unknown author assumed the name, and personified the character, of Israel's wisest and richest monarch, because they have discovered that the style is not that of Solomon's, nor the circumstances in the book in accordance with his reign. "Knowledge puffeth up;" and so these wise men in their own conceit regard with a sneer and with supreme contempt the fact that God has settled the question of the authorship of the book (Eccles. 1: 1), and further that it always held its present place in all Hebrew Bibles, and formed part of the Sacred Scriptures in the days of Christ and writers of the New Testament. We suppose, moreover, that the Jewish mind is quite as capable as any modern critic in estimating the value of differences in style and diction — of Hebrew writers especially; yet the Jews ancient and modern fail to see a difficulty in assigning the authorship to Solomon. As to style, the Holy Ghost has none of His own. He is free to use the style and character of any human vessel He sees fit. But enough, God has spoken (chap. 1: 1), and we would reverently bow and implicitly believe.

The Song of Solomon. Solomon was not only a Preacher (Ecclesiastes) and a Moralist (Proverbs), but a Song-composer (Canticles), Of the 1005 Songs (1 Kings 4: 32) written by Solomon, all have perished save this one which is styled by way of pre-eminence "The Song of Songs," unless we include in the number of 1005 the two Psalms 72 and 127 attributed to Solomon. The book was written in Palestine, probably Jerusalem, by Solomon in the early period of his reign, about 1014 B.C. Its typical application is to the Jew of the future; its moral bearing is all-important for the Christian now. This divine poem is in the form of a dialogue between Solomon, his spouse, and her companions. No doubt Solomon's marriage with the lovely Egyptian princess formed the historical ground on which is based the moral and prophetic teachings of the book. Some arrange it in seven portions, answering to the seven days of the Jewish marriage feast.

All Jews and Jewish writers in ancient times regarded the book as a sacred one, and it has always formed part of the Hebrew canon unquestioned till modern times. It also received the seal of the risen Lord as contributing its quota of testimony to Himself — His sufferings and glories (Luke 24: 44).

The Prophets.

Prophecy and God's government of the earth, having Palestine as the land, Jerusalem, then Babylon, and again Jerusalem as city and centre, Judah or Israel as the people, and the glory of Christ as the object, form the ground-work and basis of the prophetic revelations contained in the books from Isaiah to Malachi. The Prophets are divided into "four greater" and "twelve minor prophets," Lamentations being included in the prophecies of Jeremiah. These books are so divided and termed because of the extent of their writings. Prophetic utterances and prophetic signs were generally communicated by "vision" (Isa. 6) or "word of the Lord" (Jer. 2: 1).

{"The Hebrew word for a prophet is Nabi, which comes from a word signifying to boil up, and hence to pour forth words as under Divine inspiration." — Dr. Kitto.}

Isaiah (salvation of the Lord). This is the grandest, sublimest, and most comprehensive of the prophetical books; and because of its fulness of subjects and wide sweep of the prophetic future, occupying itself with the whole scene of God's purposes respecting Israel and the nations, is first in order in all Hebrew and English Bibles. If Isaiah lived to the close of Hezekiah's reign, then he must have worn the prophetic mantle for a period of at least sixty years, dating his introduction to the prophetic office from the last year of Uzziah's reign (Isa. 6). Being a Judah-prophet, and standing in high repute in the royal court, these magnificent prophecies were mainly uttered in Jerusalem Jewish tradition asserts that the aged prophet, then about ninety years old, was "sawn asunder" during the reign of Manasseh, and that to protract his sufferings a wooden instrument was used for the cruel purpose. Many suppose that Heb. 11: 37, "sawn asunder," refers to the barbarous martyrdom of our prophet. Isaiah too being their favourite prophet must have a royal parentage; so they tell us that Amoz the father of the prophet was a brother of king Amaziah. These traditions are not supported by a particle of evidence. We do not say they are false, neither can we affirm their truth.

This great prophecy is divided into two main portions, the first occupying Isa. 1 — 35, the second part consists of chaps. 40 to the end; the historical four chapters which divide the two great portions of the book are needful, as supplying the main subjects of the prophetic future. Now in this latter portion (Isa. 40 — 66) the prophetic intimations respecting Babylon and other nations are remarkably full, and have been fulfilled to the letter. Even Cyrus, the deliverer of the Jews from their Chaldean exile and the destroyer of Babylon, was prophetically appointed for the work, and surnamed about one hundred and fifty years before he was born (Isa. 44 and 45).

Here then our modern critics are on the horns of a dilemma. If this latter part of the prophecy be really the work of the "Evangelical Prophet," or of the "Fifth Evangelist," as some have termed Isaiah, then the authority of Holy Scripture is supreme, for God alone can reveal the future. But then this portion of Isaiah is an integral part of the book. How then can it be got rid of? Well, it is said that the last twenty-seven chapters were written after the events, and by Ezra, who is thus made the author of a stupidly arranged imposition. Can our denunciations of such unfounded suppositions be too scathing or severe?

When our Lord went into the synagogue at Nazareth, there was handed to him "the book of the prophet Esaias" (Luke 4: 17-21). Ah! did the Lord of heaven and earth not know what our modern infidel scholars have found out, that only the first thirty-nine chapters in general constituted the book of Isaiah. He read a portion of Isa. 61, that is, one of the so-called spurious chapters, and when finished, He said "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." Was Christ reading, applying to the consciences of His hearers, and fulfilling what falsely professed to be written by Isaiah? But the theory is baseless, and absolutely false, for Paul, too, cites from the "great unnamed" author. The one to whom this absurd title is applied by certain German and English divines, was Isaiah to Paul (Rom. 10: 20; Isa. 66) and Isaiah and Scripture to the Lord (Luke 4). Why these persistent efforts to set aside the historical Moses and the prophetic Isaiah? Just this, dear reader, that you may doubt everything and believe nothing. The full verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is the ground of all authority. Hold fast, then, the written word of God.

Jeremiah (exalted or established of the Lord). This is the second of the "greater prophets" — so called because of the largeness and extent of their written prophecies — the other two being Ezekiel and Daniel. Jeremiah was of priestly descent, his father being Hilkiah, one of the priests residing in the Levitical town of Anathoth, four miles north-east of Jerusalem. The name Hilkiah was a common enough one among the Jews, so we cannot say that the high priest of that name who found the copy of the law in the Temple was the father of our prophet.

Jeremiah was ordained a prophet to the nations before his birth, and was early called to the office (Jer. 1: 5-7), which he occupied for the long period of forty-two years — about one hundred and thirty years after the call of Isaiah. Jeremiah uttered his predictions in and about the metropolis of Judea; then, on the capture of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans, among the people spared by the clemency of the Chaldean conqueror, and who, after the murder of Gedaliah, the governor of Judea, and in spite of the faithful remonstrances of the prophet, went down into Egypt (Jer. 43, 44), and nearly all perished there.

These prophecies, in our English Bibles, as also in the Hebrew, are arranged (by whom we cannot tell, probably by Ezra) without regard to chronological order. But whoever was the editor of Jeremiah's weeping prophecies, for almost "every letter is written with a tear, and every word is the sound of a broken heart" — especially so of the Lamentations — must have been divinely directed; for the moral order, and connection of the various prophecies to each other are evidently of God. In the Septuagint they are arranged chronologically. The last verse of the fifty-first chapter ends with "Thus far are the words of Jeremiah." The last chapter of the book is not written by Jeremiah, but is an historical appendix substantially the same as 2 Kings 24: 18-20, 25; and equally given by inspiration of God, and needful in its place. The predictions of the prophet respecting Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, were fulfilled to the letter, as this historical appendix, probably written by Ezra, conclusively prove. It is only in this book, so far as we know, that the duration of the Chaldean kingdom is given, as also the duration of Judah's captivity in Babylon (Jer. 25: 9-14; Jer. 29: 10). Daniel was a devout student of these very prophecies, especially of those portions just referred to (Dan. 9: 2). We may observe that Jer. 10: 11 contains a message to the heathen written in their own language — the Aramean or Syriac.

The Lamentations. It is self-evident that this book is from the pen of Jeremiah. The Septuagint has the following passage: — "And it came to pass after that Israel was taken captive, and Jerusalem was laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented this lamentation over Jerusalem." These strains of anguish uttered over the success of the Chaldean attack upon Jerusalem, and the consequent desolation of city and people, are most touchingly expressed. The death of the godly Josiah (2 Chron. 35: 24, 25) was the immediate occasion of these strains of unrivalled pathos, as the last hope of Israel died in the death of the godly monarch.

The book originally constituted one work with the prophecies of Jeremiah. The structure of the book is worth noticing. The first, second, and fourth chapters each contain twenty-two verses, and are, in the original, arranged alphabetically according to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The third chapter of sixty-six verses is also alphabetic in structure, only there are three verses to each letter. The fifth chapter consists of twenty-two verses, but is not similarly arranged. Several of the Psalms, as the 119th, etc., are constructed in like manner, proof of God's tender compassion for the feeble minds and failing memories of His poor people.

Ezekiel (may God support or strengthen). Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel were contemporary prophets; the two former were priests, while the latter was of the seed royal of Judah. Jeremiah prophesied amongst the poor of the people who were spared and left in the land through the mercy of the Chaldean conqueror, and afterwards in Egypt, whither the miserable remnant of the nation fled after the murder of Gedaliah the Babylonian governor of Judea. Ezekiel lifted up his voice, and by sign and word warned the exiled portion of Judah in the land of Mesopotamia, as also to considerable numbers of the ten tribes transported thither at an earlier period. Daniel interpreted the visions and dreams of the heathen monarch in Babylon itself, and there, too, were communicated to him those visions and prophecies which most of all concern the European and other Gentiles in relation to the Jews — past, present, and future.

The subversion of the kingdom of Judah and the deportation of her king, princes, priests, and people were effected by the Chaldeans on three separate occasions. In the year 599 B.C. Jehoiachin, second last king of Judah, after a brief reign of but three months, was taken captive along with the principal people of the land, including Ezekiel (2 Kings 24). Seven years previously Jehoiakim, with Daniel and other members of the royal family, had been removed to the proud and haughty court of the Gentile in Babylon. The third captivity (2 Kings 25) eleven years after the second, and eighteen years after the first, completed the ruin of Judah. Our prophet was located on the banks of the river Chebar, 400 miles from Babylon.

The most distinguished of the Judah exiles flocked again and again to the prophet's dwelling at Tel Abib (Ezek. 8: 1; Ezek. 16: 1; Ezek. 21: 1; Ezek. 33), and there the burning and eloquent lips of the exiled seer and priest uttered the word of the Lord. The prophecies contained in the book were proclaimed during a period of twenty-two years (Ezek. 1: 2), although the prophet's forced exile lasted twenty-seven years (Ezek. 29: 17). Christ, Daniel, and Ezekiel are the only persons termed "Son of Man" in the Scriptures, the latter nearly one hundred times.

We do not agree with those who consider this book a difficult one to understand; in our judgment it is the reverse. The first twenty-four chapters contain chronologically-arranged prophecies bearing upon the Chaldean invasion of Judea and capture and sack of Jerusalem, 588 B.C. Then you have the destruction of those nations who participated in the attack or rejoiced in the ruin of Judah (Ezek. 25 — 32). Lastly, Israel herself and her future great enemy Gog, or the northern power (Russia), are judged, while particulars of the millennial temple and throne, and details of an interesting kind, occupy the closing chapters of the book (Ezek. 33 — 48). We know nothing certain of the death of the prophet; probably he died or was martyred in Egypt.

Daniel (God my judge). This prophet was taken to Babylon nearly twenty years before the final Chaldean attack upon Jerusalem and sack of the city; and, as he survived the captivity, which was seventy years, even to the third year of the reign of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire (Dan. 10: 1), he must have been taken captive when very young, and hence could not have shared the national guilt to any considerable extent; but this very consideration gives weight and solemnity to his confession of national sin (Dan. 9). From the setting aside of Jerusalem and substitution of Babylon as the centre of Divine government on the earth, we date "the times of the Gentiles," that is, until the Jew is again taken up in sovereign grace, the government of the earth has been handed over to the Gentiles. This government, exercised through the four successive Gentile monarchies, is the great subject of the book; that government, as also the combined history and prophecy respecting Jew and Gentile, will close at the introduction of the millennial kingdom of Christ.

It is an interesting circumstance that that portion of the book from Daniel 2: 4 till the close of Daniel 7 is in the Syriac or Aramean language, that being the tongue spoken by the Babylonians and the Assyrians — the two powers employed in the captivity of all Israel. In that portion we have divinely sketched the rise, progress and doom of Gentile power. Thus not Hebrew, but Syriac is the selected tongue, so that the Gentiles could read for themselves, and were thus left without excuse as to the exercise of the governmental power divinely entrusted to them.

Style of the Prophets, and Classification of the Twelve Minor Books.

The style and character of the four greater prophets present striking contrasts. Isaiah is grand, Jeremiah is tearful, Ezekiel is energetic, Daniel is calm. When the Spirit of God selects any instrument to accomplish His work, the individuality of the chosen vessel is in fullest accord with the Spirit's inspiration. The "several ability" of those to whom "talents" are entrusted is ever recognised (Matt. 25: 15).

By Jewish arrangement the twelve minor prophets were grouped in one volume. Thus in the enumeration of the sacred books by Josephus and others, and in all ancient catalogues, they are classed together, and cited from, as one book. The Hebrew arrangement of the first six minor prophets differs from the Septuagint. The order in which they stand in our English Bibles follows the Hebrew, which is the moral order. In the Septuagint they are represented thus — Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, which is not strictly chronological.

We would classify those twelve books under three divisions. 1st. Those which relate to the overthrow of the kingdom of Israel by Assyria, and of Judah by Babylon. 2nd. Those which unfold the judgment of the Gentiles. 3rd. Those which relate to the people restored from the Babylon captivity. Under No. 1 we place the books of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, six books in all. Under No. 2 we have the three books of Obadiah, Jonah, and Nahum; while under No. 3 we place Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, which along with Ezra and Nehemiah are termed "the Books of the Restoration."

We may here add that the sixteen prophetical books from Isaiah to Malachi (Lamentations included in Jeremiah) are, in our English Bibles, arranged in the main in chronological order; the first four are strictly chronological, although preceded by some of the lesser prophets. But what is of more value to us, and manifests moreover the hand of God, is the moral arrangement of these writings. The last historical book of the Old Testament is Nehemiah, while the last prophetic book is Malachi. Thus from Genesis to Nehemiah you have sixteen books, the sum of Old Testament history; while from Isaiah to Malachi you have sixteen books, the sum of Old Testament prophecy.

Hosea (deliverance). From the first verse of the book we gather that Hosea must have prophesied for a period of about sixty years. We cannot with certainty say whether the prophet resided in Samaria or Judea; probably the former, as Israel or the kingdom of the ten tribes is more especially the burden of these prophecies. But while Judah and Israel for judgment, as also for millennial blessing, are directly regarded in this book, it is to be observed that the Gentiles are entirely passed over both for judgment and blessing, save perhaps in Hosea 1: 10, which study and compare with Rom. 9: 24-26.

Joel (the Lord is at hand). In this book we have no historical data or chronological notes whatever to guide us as to the place or time when the prophecy was uttered. But judging from the internal character of the book, and also from the fact that the closing words of our prophet (Joel 3: 16) are the opening words of Amos (Amos 1: 2), we gather that Joel uttered "the word of the Lord" in Judea, perhaps Jerusalem, and further, as preceding Amos, must have been one of the earliest of the Judah prophets, probably about 800 B.C. The then present circumstances of Judah, the harvests utterly destroyed, the sacrifices withheld from the house of the Lord, while famine and desolation wrapped the land and all classes of the people in mourning owing to the dreadful ravages of countless swarms of locusts and other insects, form the text on which Joel enlarges and announces "the day of the Lord."

Judah and Jerusalem — people and city — are specially remembered for millennial blessing (Joel 3: 1, 20). "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh" (Joel 2: 28) is a blessed intimation that grace will overstep the narrow limits of Judaism in the happy years at hand. The descriptive powers of our prophet (see Joel 2) are unequalled by anything found in Scripture or elsewhere.

Amos (bearer). This prophet was a Jew residing in Tekoa, a small town six miles south-east of Bethlehem, and followed the very humble occupation of a herdsman and gatherer of sycamore fruit (Amos 7). From thence he was called to utter "the word of the Lord" in Israel, especially in Bethel, the southern seat of idolatry in the kingdom of the ten tribes (1 Kings 13). The charming simplicity of the prophet's account of himself and of his peasant life, his striking images and metaphors drawn from nature and the animal creation, with which he was familiarly acquainted, are beautiful and very striking. The native eloquence of the shepherd of Tekoa characterises the book throughout.

Judgment upon the Gentiles in external relationship to Israel — as Damascus, Syria, Tyrus, and the Moabite nations bordering upon the land of Israel — is the burden of the first eighteen verses of the book. Then the prophet denounces the wickedness and hypocrisy of Israel, even under the splendid reign of Jeroboam II., and predicts her captivity to Assyria, and that of Judah to Babylon, announced in language and symbols both striking and original. The last five verses of the prophecy are beautiful, and we are not surprised at their frequent quotation by prophetic students in describing millennial blessedness. Amos was contemporary with Hosea (Hosea 1: 1), and probably followed Jonah. The latter may have lived in the early part of Jeroboam's reign, and Amos in the latter part.

Obadiah (servant of the Lord). This is the shortest of the prophetical books; and unless we regard Obadiah as an historian, writing after the capture and sack of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans, 588 B.C. (actively assisted by the Edomites who exulted in Judah's overthrow), we must place him among the early prophets and discard the date of the accomplished chronologist Usher, viz., 587 B.C. The burden of this book is the doom of Edom, a people proverbial for their pride, wisdom, power; and whose rage against the people of Jehovah's choice found vent at the Chaldean destruction of Jerusalem. Alas! the Babylonians needed not the encouraging cry of the Edomite in wreaking their vengeance upon the poor Jew: "Rase it, rase it even to the foundation thereof" (Ps. 137: 7).

The land of Edom is about a hundred miles in length, lying between the Dead Sea and the eastern arm of the Red Sea, and strong in its natural strength and rocky position, and is prophetically destined to be the scene of one of the most appalling judgments noted in the Divine records (Isa. 63: 1-6). Here the character, doings, and thoroughness of the overwhelming desolation yet awaiting Edom by the hand of conquering Judah are calmly and sternly announced. The prophecy was probably uttered in Judea. and at a very early period of Jewish regal history.

Jonah (dove). It was probably because of the Gentile mission to which Jonah was separated, and which he so disliked, that the ecclesiastical leaders of Judah conveniently forgot that a prophet had arisen out of Galilee (John 7: 52). Jonah was born in Gath-hepher, in the northern part of Palestine, and was probably a contemporary of Elisha, or at least immediately succeeded him. This piece of information we glean from 2 Kings 14: 25-27, where we are told that the enlargement of Israel's sea coasts wrested from the Syrians was according to a previous prediction by Jonah. This consideration, as also the internal character and contents of the book itself, warrant us in assigning a very early date indeed to this prophecy of judgment upon proud and haughty Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian kingdom and the mistress of the earth. It is perhaps the earliest prophetical book we have.

The personal history of the prophet occupies the larger portion of the book, while the remainder affords a highly instructive narrative of the Lord's governmental ways with nations as exemplified in the threatened judgment at Nineveh, its repentance, and the suspension of the stroke for a lengthened period. The book was probably written about 826 B.C., and either in Palestine or near Nineveh. Some Jewish writers absurdly suppose Jonah to have been the son of the widow of Sarepta.

Micah (who is like unto the Lord?). This prophet was contemporary with Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos: see the first verse of each of the books of these prophets. Micah is termed "the Morasthite" from Moresheth-Gath, a small town in southern Judea, not far from Jerusalem. There is not in this book such a range of subjects or comprehensiveness of treatment as in Isaiah, yet Micah in some respects resembles his great contemporary. Both specially regard Israel's political foe and external enemy in the future Jewish crisis, namely, "the Assyrian" or "king of the north;" and both predict millennial blessedness in the same eloquent terms (Isa. 2: 2-4; Micah 4: 1-3).

Jeremiah was not afraid that his credit as a prophet would suffer by referring expressly to Micah (Jer. 26: 18) as did Daniel in a latter day to Jeremiah (Dan. 9: 2), and Amos to Joel (Amos 1. 2). There are few original characters in the world, and we above all others should beware of the spirit of independency, for God has set us in "one body" and constituted us members one of another, and thus mutually dependent; let us not hesitate, therefore, to own frankly indebtedness to each other.

In the prophecies contained in this book, Jerusalem the religious, and Samaria the proud, capitals of Judea and Israel, have special judgment meted out to them; these predictions have been fulfilled to the very letter. Zion was to be "ploughed as a field" (Micah 3: 12), and Samaria made "as a heap of the field" (Micah 1: 6). The former prediction was verified by Turnus Rufus, who in obedience to imperial orders passed the Roman plough over Zion after its destruction in the year 70 A.D.; while the latter prediction, in its accomplishment, has been witnessed to by Dr. Keith, M'Cheyne, and others, who beheld the stones of Samaria gathered in heaps.

Here Jehovah is seen coming out of His place, the temple; and so the storm of Divine wrath sweeps through the land of Immanuel, then the land of Assyria, and finally spends itself upon the near and distant heathen. But glory will break for Israel and the nations in those coming days so grandly foretold by Isaiah, weepingly yearned for by Jeremiah, and energetically predicted by Ezekiel. Palestine (probably the southern kingdom — Judea) would be the scene where, and 750 B.C. about the date when, these prophecies were uttered.

Nahum (consolation). The prophets Jonah and Nahum were Galileans, and both had Nineveh as the burden of their testimony. In the former, however, the character and doings of the prophet form an integral part of the book, while in the latter the character of God is unfolded in language unrivalled for its sublimity.

The short, abrupt, bold and elegant sentences in describing Nineveh, her lengthened siege of two years and the manner of her capture, make the book a very interesting one indeed. We need not the pen of the historian to trace for us the particulars connected with the destruction of that ancient city which with its rival Babylon is doomed to perpetual desolation. A more graphic account of the pride, cruelty, and idolatry of Nineveh, of its size and its resources, and finally of the mode of its capture by the combined forces of the Medes and Babylonians, with the surprise of its king and nobles, cannot be produced, and positively makes the reader independent of the human historian. Nineveh was to be destroyed by fire and water. The travellers Botta, and Layard, in their interesting discoveries in the palaces and ruins of the city, found considerable quantities of charcoal and half-burnt wood. Here we have God's account of things, surely preferable infinitely to man's judgment and his generally faulty record of things and persons.

Nahum prophesied in Palestine, and nearly a century and a half after Jonah his predecessor, in testimony to and of Nineveh.

Habakkuk (an embrace). We have nothing in Scripture as to the personal history or parentage of this prophet, but plenty of tradition as to both, which is not of much value. It has been remarked that Jeremiah's great prophecy has been divided into two parts — the destruction of Jerusalem forming the break between the two — which we might term the moral and prophetic, and further, that Habakkuk takes up the moral side of the book of Jeremiah, as Zephaniah does the prophetic side.

We have neither note of time nor exact historical data as to when or where this prophecy was uttered and written. We should judge, however, from Habakkuk 1: 5, 6, which intimate the Chaldean invasion of Judea, that the vision of Habakkuk (Hab. 1 and 2) and his sublime and fervent prayer (Hab. 3) considerably preceded the rise of the Chaldeans, and that the southern kingdom of Palestine, probably Jerusalem, was the scene of the "vision" and "prayer." If Nahum announces the judgment of the proud Assyrian who destroyed the kingdom of Israel, Habakkuk on the other hand predicts the utter ruin of the Chaldeans, who in their day of power destroyed the kingdom of Judah. The distinctly moral character of the book, and the prophet's identification with the people in their confession of sin, and then in their turning to Jehovah and hoping in His mercy, are truths of priceless value to every true servant of God whose desire is to serve Him, His saints, and church.

It will be observed that the word "Selah," meaning to pause or consider, occurs three times in the third chapter, as also about seventy times in the book of Psalms. This chapter also contains other points of resemblance to the Psalms. The character of the Chaldean power (Hab. 1) and the five woes pronounced upon it (Hab. 2) are foretold with an exactness, force of language, and striking imagery peculiar to our prophet. We heartily endorse the enconium of another who says "it were difficult to find words to set forth adequately the exalted claim and peculiar merits of this high minstrel of grief and joy, of desolateness and hope, of scorn and tenderness."

Zephaniah (whom the Lord protects). The pedigree of this prophet is carefully given for four generations, as also the period of his prophecy — the reign of the godly Josiah, the last pious king of Judah (Zeph. 1: 1). Both Zephaniah and Habakkuk were contemporary with Jeremiah. The time and place of these predictions are thus easily ascertainable. It was in the land of Judea, and about 630 B.C., or a few years later when Zephaniah uttered his "Thus saith the Lord" — the usual formula of the prophets.

The references to preceding prophecies by Isaiah, Amos, and Joel, are numerous in so short a prophecy. The harmony and entire agreement in the prophetic books of the Old Testament are well worth consideration, as evidencing that one Divine mind and purpose characterise all Scripture. The great themes of all the prophets are iniquity, judgment, and glory, and Zephaniah finely descants on these subjects. In the main the burden of his prophecy is the "great day of the Lord," the day of Jehovah's anger — an expression common to all the prophets, and signifying the future period of judgment. It is, therefore, pre-eminently a book of judgment, but glory triumphs in the end. The judgments predicted by this prophet are not only general and universal in their range and extent, but are also minute and particular — none escape. Thy land and people, O Immanuel, will yet be the objects of Thy joy, and the rest of Thy love!

Haggai (festive). The three last books of the Old Testament have a peculiar character impressed upon them. They contain predictions of judgment, but are also exceedingly rich in their anticipations of that happy future awaiting Israel and the earth. They were uttered in presence of the remnants returned to Judea from the Babylonian captivity, and in view of their then moral condition. Man's utter failure and inability to respond to God's presentation of grace or claim of law, with Jehovah's tender and yearning love over His guilty people, are truths graven in these books, or "Prophets of the Restoration," as they are termed by some of our American Bible students.

Haggai and Zechariah greatly encouraged the people to resume the building of the Temple, which had been interrupted for about fourteen years (Ezra 5: 1) by a decree from Artaxerxes, the Persian monarch, forbidding the work (Ezra 4). The energetic and faithful remonstrances of our prophet and of his able coadjutor Zechariah, had the desired effect, and the people recommenced the work before Darius reversed the decree of his predecessor and confirmed the commandment of Cyrus. What about the unchanging laws and unalterable decrees (Dan. 6: 15) of the Persian realm in presence of God and of His power? When God is working with His people, and they are in fellowship with Him, what is man? Ah! we have omnipotent strength and infinite love to count upon — the strength for our weakness and the love for our need. The living God is Himself the resource of His people.

The book contains four messages, termed in each case, "the word of the Lord" delivered in Jerusalem in the second year of Darius Hystaspes, 522 B.C., and within a period of about three months.

Zechariah (whom the Lord remembered). This prophet commenced his prophetic service two months later than his contemporary and colleague Haggai (compare Zech. 1: 1 with Haggai 1: 1). The latter is simply termed "Haggai the prophet," whereas the father and grandfather of our prophet are expressly named. We gather from a comparison of the first verse with Neh. 12: 4, and Ezra 5: 1, that Zechariah was of priestly descent, as were Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Ezra, and perhaps Habakkuk. We would direct special attention to the minute accuracy of the dates in the books of Zechariah and Haggai. They conclusively mark God's recognition of the sovereign power granted to the Gentiles, and under which His people were placed till the government of the world shall be once again exercised through the Jew, and from Jerusalem, the city of the Great King.

The prophecies contained in this book are mainly respecting Judah as a people, and Jerusalem as a city in their judgment, as also in their blessed future, but in special relation to the Gentiles. The eight visions seen in one night (chaps 1-6) from the Persian power, under Cyrus (the rider among the myrtle trees, but figuring Christ, Zech. 1: 8) till the temple and throne are set up in Jerusalem in millennial glory, present the great facts connected with Israel and her relation to the imperial powers. In the rest of the book numerous details of a deeply interesting kind, bearing upon the millennial future, are given; moral truths, prophecies of and about the Messiah, and physical facts accompanying the Lord's descent to Mount Olivet for Jewish deliverance, make up a record of undying interest to prophetic students (Zech. 14).

Malachi. Significantly, the name Malachi means "My Messenger" (Mal. 3: 1). He prophesied about a hundred years after Haggai and Zechariah. What now remains for God to do in view of Israel's moral condition, since His claims are treated with proud contempt, His service a weariness, and His worship a lifeless form? If Jehovah's last pleadings of love fall upon the cold insensible ears and hearts of these returned remnants, save upon a few (a remnant out of the remnant who originally returned from the captivity, Mal. 3: 16-18), what can God now do to His degenerate vine but send "His messenger" before He comes personally in judgment. We have the coming of Jesus in grace referred to (Mal. 3: 1), and His coming in judgment (Mal. 4: 5). The opening words of our prophet are quoted by Paul (Rom. 9: 13), while the closing utterances are cited by Jesus (Matt. 17: 11, 12). We close these remarks upon the Old Testament in the earnest hope that the reader will lay deeply to heart the solemn lessons and truths graven on these last books of the former revelation.

The Apocrypha.

The Hebrew Bible or Old Testament was completed with Malachi. Then about 284 B.C. the Septuagint or Greek translation of the Sacred Hebrew Books was begun, and finished about 130 years before Christ. But long after the Old Testament was complete in Hebrew, certain books were written by Jews in Alexandria and elsewhere — dates and names of authors being uncertain — which were bound up with the Septuagint. These books are termed The Apocrypha. They are useful as connecting links of history between the Testaments, but are utterly destitute of Divine authority, nor do the books themselves claim to be inspired. The difference between the Apocrypha and the Hebrew Bible as to character, style, and subjects are patent even to a child.

The Apocrypha was first received as canonical by the Council of Trent, 1545, and is highly regarded by Roman Catholics throughout the world.

The following statements are important to remember:

1. No portion of the Apocrypha was written in Hebrew, but all in Greek, although by Jews, and never formed part of the Hebrew canon.

2. It was written more than a century after the completion of the Old Testament.

3. It was never regarded by the Jews or their writers as possessing the slightest claim to inspiration.

4. Neither the Lord nor Apostles ever cited from, or referred to, the Apocrypha.

The Holy Bible. — Old Testament Summary.

{Given in the book as a table. The book name, meaning, character, by whom written or compiled, and where and when written are given.}

Giving the name and meaning, character of the book, by whom written or compiled, where and when written.

Genesis, origin, Gen. 1: 1.

Seed-plot of all Biblical subjects, principles, and relationships.

Moses, see John 5: 46; John 7: 22.

On the Plains of Moab, about 1452 B.C.

Exodus, departure.

Redemption; and the revelation of grace in the construction of the Tabernacle and its holy vessels.

Moses, see Luke 20: 37 ; Rom. 9: 15-17.

On the Plains of Moab, about 1452 B.C.

Leviticus, from the priestly tribe Levi.

God in the midst of the redeemed, and instructing in the truths of sacrifice and worship.

Moses, see Rom. 10: 5; Matt. 8: 4.

On the Plains of Moab, about 1452 B.C.

Numbers, from the numberings of Israel.

God numbering His redeemed, and their service and testings in the wilderness.

Moses, see John 3: 14; Luke 2: 22-24.

On the Plains of Moab, about 1452 B.C.

Deuteronomy, the law repeated.

God gathering the people, without the intervention of priest and levite, around Himself.

Their blessing in the land on the ground of obedience.

Moses, see Deut. 31; Acts 3: 22.

On the Plains of Moab, about 1452 B.C.

Joshua, salvation of the Lord.

The accomplishment of Divine counsel (Ex. 3: 8; Ex. 6: 6-8).

Canaan the scene of blessing becomes thereby the place of conflict.

Joshua 24: 26; Acts 7: 45.

Canaan, about 1427 B.C.

Judges, Israel's deliverers and judges.

The covenant people forgetful of Jehovah; their sins and His signal deliverances.

Samuel, Jewish tradition.

Canaan, about 1100 B.C.

Ruth, beauty.

A typical outline of God's purposes respecting Israel.

Samuel, Jewish tradition.

Canaan, about 1100 B.C.

1 Samuel, asked of the Lord, 1 Sam. 1: 20.

Israel's rejection of Jehovah as king; man's choice of a king, and its sorrowful consequences.

Samuel, Gad, and Nathan, 1 Chron. 29: 29.

Canaan, about 1100 B.C.

2 Samuel, asked of the Lord, 1 Sam. 1: 20.

The kingdom established in David according to Divine purpose.

Gad and Nathan, 1 Chron. 29: 29.

Canaan, about 1100 B.C.

1 Kings, 2 Kings, from Israel's Kingdom history.

The public history of the kingdom, especially of the kings of Israel, of whom there were 19. Typical also of the heavenly part of Christ's millennial kingdom.

Ezra, According to Jewish Writers.

Babylon,about588 B.C. Materials from whence these inspired books are compiled commenced

with the death of David and closed with the destruction of Jerusalem, 558 B.C.

1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, chronological accounts.

The public history of the kingdom, noting especially the sovereigns of Judah, of whom there were 20. Typical also of the earthly part of Christ's millennial kingdom.

Ezra, According to Jewish Writers.

Palestine, after the restoration, about 536 B.C., See 1 Chron. 6: 15; also 2 Chron. 26: 21-23.

Ezra, help.

Ecclesiastical history of the Judah-remnants returned from the Babylon captivity to Jerusalem.

Ezra, chap. 7: 6.

Palestine, after the restoration, about 457 B.C.

Nehemiah, whom Jehovah comforts

Civil history of the Jews on their return from Babylon.

Nehemiah, chap. 1: 1

Palestine, after the restoration, about 434 B.C.

Esther, Star

God's care, providentially exercised, towards His people, who elected to remain in Persia instead of returning under the edict of Cyrus.

Mordecai, chap. 9: 20-32

Persia, about 509 B.C.

Job, persecuted

A book upon the moral government of God. Job pious, and the sum nearly of human righteousness, tested in the Divine presence, and found wanting.

Moses (?)

Land of Midian (Ex. 2: 15), about 1552 B.C. (?)

Book of Psalms, i.e., of Sacred Songs

The prophetic future of Israel, and their latter-day circumstances morally considered. The Messiah's identification with the remnant (Jewish).

Many writers, David chiefly; Ezra, the compiler,

Palestine chiefly. The first chronologically, is the 90th, the last, the 137th (?). The composition of the whole extended through a period of 1,000 years. Ezra, the compiler, on his return from the Babylon captivity about 457 B.C.

The Proverbs, i.e., wise maxims,1 Kings 4: 32.

The path of Divine wisdom for earthly relationships and circumstances.

Spoken by Solomon except chaps. 30, 31; compiler (?)

Palestine; probably collected and compiled in the days of Hezekiah (Prov. 25: 1) about 726 B.C.

Ecclesiastes, the preacher, chap. 1: 1, 2.

The world; its wealth, wisdom, pleasures, and boundless resources, all pronounced vanity. The object neither large nor precious enough for the heart.

Solomon, chap. 1: 1.

Palestine, about 975 B.C.

Song of Solomon, see chap. 1: 1, with 1 Kings 4: 32.

The moral subjects treated of are love and communion. The Beloved, i.e., Christ, God's object for the heart whether of Jew or Gentile.

Solomon, chap. 1: 1.

Palestine, about 1014 B.C.

Isaiah, salvation of the Lord.

The grandest of the Hebrew prophets, and containing a full prophetic outline of Israel's future.

Isaiah, chap. 1: 1; John 12: 38-41.

Palestine, about 698 B.C.

Jeremiah, established of the Lord.

Moral appeals addressed to the conscience of Judah, with history and prophetic future of the nation.

Jeremiah, chap. 1: 1-4; Matt. 2: 17-18.

Palestine or Egypt, about 587 B.C.

Lamentations, strains of anguish.

Zion's desolation by the Chaldeans, expressed in touching strains of anguish.

Jeremiah, 2 Chron. 35: 25.

Palestine, about 588 B.C. (?)

Ezekiel, God my strength.

Chaldean destruction of Jerusalem prophetically and symbolically announced, and Israel's prophetic future in her land.

Ezekiel, chap. 1: 1-3; Rom 2: 24.

Banks of the Chebar, Mesopotamia, about 557 B.C.

Daniel, God my judge.

The rise, course, and doom of the four universal empires, and especially of the third and fourth in connection with the latter day circumstances of Israel.

Daniel, chap. 12: 4; Matt. 24: 15.

Babylon (at the court), about 534 B.C.

Hosea, deliverance.

In these appeals, warnings, and prophetic utterances, Israel only is embraced.

Hosea, chap. 1: 1-2 Rom. 9: 25.

Palestine, about 725 B.C.

Joel, whose God is Jehovah.

The day of the Lord in judgment upon Judah and the Gentiles, and the subsequent blessing of "all flesh".

Joel, chap. 1: 1; Acts 2: 16.

Palestine, about 800 B.C.

Amos, a bearer.

Judgment announced upon those nations in external relationship to Israel, also the judgment of Israel and its future blessing.

Amos, chap. 1. 1; Acts 15: 16-17.

Palestine, about 787 B.C.

Obadiah, servant of the Lord.

The burden of Edom, whose rage and pride against Israel knew no bounds; see Ps. 137: 7.

Obadiah, 1.

Palestine, about 587?

Jonah, a dove.

The instructive history of this Jewish prophet and God's governmental dealings with nations are here finely blended.

Jonah, chap. 1: 1; Matt. 12: 39-41.

Palestine or nigh Nineveh, about 826 B.C.

Micah, who is Jehovah?

God judging Israel and all the earth from His temple, but sovereign mercy yet in store for Israel, chap. 7: 20.

Micah, chap. 1: 1; Matt. 2: 5-6.

Palestine, about 750 B.C.

Nahum, consolatory.

God's character in judgment while revealing the doom of Nineveh, destroyed about 625 B.C.

Nahum, chap. 1: 1; Rom. 10: 15.

Palestine probably, about 713 B.C.

Habakkuk, an embrace.

The prophet identifying himself in heart and interest with the condition and circumstances of the people before God.

Habakkuk, chap. 1: 1; Acts 13: 41.

Palestine, about 626 B.C.

Zephaniah, protected of the Lord.

Thorough and unsparing judgment upon Israel and the Gentiles lying near Palestine; glory gilding the future.

Zephaniah, chap. 1: 1.

Palestine, about 630 B.C.

Haggai,  festive.

The indifference of the returned remnants to Jehovah and His house, with the future glory of the Lord and of His coming kingdom.

Haggai, chap. 1: 1.

Palestine, about 520 B.C.

Zechariah, remembered of the Lord.

Here the royalty of Christ and His connection with the Jews, especially in the future as the Deliverer of His people from their sins and Gentile enemies, are in question.

Zechariah, chap. 1: 1; Matt. 21: 4-5.

Palestine, about 520 B.C.

Malachi, the Lord's messenger, ch. 3: 1.

Jehovah's closing message to and pleading with Israel, or rather Judah, returned from the captivity to Palestine.

Malachi, chap. 1: 1; Matt. 11: 10.

Palestine, about 420 B.C.

Note. — Absolute certainty in all cases cannot be relied on.

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 5 The Books and Canon of the New Testament.

5. The Books and Canon of the New Testament.

The composition of the Books of the Bible was begun by Moses on the plains of Moab in the 15th century B.C.; the subjects of which they treat were completed by Paul during his Roman imprisonment in the latter half of the first Christian century (Col. 1: 25); while John, the last of the Apostolic band, had those wondrous visions and sights vouchsafed to him in the rocky isle of Patmos, and the whole, known to us as "The Revelation," committed to writing by the close of the century.

The First and Last Books of the Bible.

If the first book of the Bible unfolds to us the sources of good and evil, the origin of all things, the germ of every truth, the foundation of every divine and human relationship; the last book shows us the final and eternal results, the triumph of good over evil; the issues, whether in glory or of judgment, of the human race, — there we behold the pride of man humbled and flesh wither under the hand of God; there too the meek and lowly ones of earth who identified themselves through grace with Christ and His cross, are exalted; the impress of eternity, the touch of God's hand rests on every person and every subject treated of in the 66th book of Holy Scripture — The Revelation.

The Apostles Paul and Peter.

It was during the reign of Nero, the ravening "lion" (2 Tim. 4: 17), that the Apostles Paul and Peter were martyred; the former by beheading, the latter by crucifixion, and, at his own request, with his head down as unworthy to die like his Master. We see no reason to doubt the traditions concerning these beloved Apostles; certain it is that both had special revelations of their near end, although not, perhaps, of the manner of their death. It may be well to remark in passing, that both Apostles firmly insisted on the saints rendering obedience and honour to Nero the Emperor — one of the worst and most cruel of men who ever sat on the throne of the Caesars; not the character of the ruler, but the office he fills, is that which demands the respect and reverence of the saints of God. (Rom. 13: 1-7; 1 Peter 2: 17.)

From the Emperor Nero to Domitian.

We dare not defile the minds of our readers nor blot our pages with a recital of the cruelties practised by Nero during a reign of thirteen years. Suffice it to say that their record is written on high by a pen that faithfully chronicles the deeds and thoughts of men. After the ignominious death of the tyrant, three Emperors in succession assumed the purple and swayed the earthly destinies of mankind, considerably within a period of two years, followed by the prosperous reigns of Vespasian and of his son Titus — the latter being termed by the Romans the "delight of mankind." It was during the reign of these Emperors that the siege of Jerusalem took place — a siege unexampled in the annals of history. The Gentiles destroyed Jerusalem so completely, that the Roman plough passed over the city (Micah 3: 12), and death or slavery were the appointed portion of her people. (Deut. 28: 49-57.) But again the star of Jacob will rise, and the sons of her destroyers build up her walls, and pour their treasures and wealth into the city of the Saviour's love and choice (Isa. 60).

Next, we have the reign of Domitian, who had been nominated to the throne of his brother Titus. What a period! We question if the blackest page of history can furnish one equal to it. For about 15 years from A.D. 81 the Roman world lay bleeding at the feet of the despot. The wickedness of this man, who spared neither age, sex, nor rank in the gratification of his avarice and cruelty, is without a parallel. The sufferings of the Christians under the second legal persecution during this dismal reign were truly awful, and the torments to which they were subjected barbarous in the extreme. Domitian not only trod closely in the steps of Nero, but even exceeded that insane tyrant and hater of mankind in glutting himself with the blood and agonies of his subjects and of the saints of God.

The Apostle John and Patmos.

It is traditionally reported that the beloved Apostle John and the then only survivor of "The Twelve," was brought before the Emperor, and after a brief examination, ordered to be cast into a cauldron of flaming oil, but after a few hours came out unhurt. Tertullian, who flourished in the third century, asserts the truth of it, and, it has been asked, which, if any, of the early writers denies it? It is certain, however, that John was doomed to perpetual banishment in the rocky isle of Patmos. In that dreary convict establishment of about 25 miles in circumference, washed by the waves of the Aegean Sea, the worst of criminals were sent to drag out a weary existence by labouring in the mines which then existed in the island. We may be sure that the stern Roman Emperor would allow the prisoner of the Lord no exemption from the hard toil and vicious society of Patmos. There is a Greek monastery in the island, and the lazy monks profess to point out the very cave where John was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, where the visions and sights narrated in the Apocalypse were seen, and where the prophecy was written. On the accession of Nerva, the edicts of Domitian were cancelled, the banished Christians recalled, and their confiscated property restored. John, on the general authority of antiquity, returned from the inhospitable isle of Patmos to Ephesus, the flourishing capital of Asia, and there peacefully ended his days at the advanced age of 100, full of love and labour for his beloved Master.

The Apostle John and the Canon.

We are not aware that John left any authoritative declaration of what writings were canonical. If each of the 66 books of the Bible do not carry with them their own evidence to the soul and conscience of men, then no external proof will convince. It is an important circumstance that John survived the completed revelation of God by several years. He was there to distinguish, on his Apostolic authority immediately derived from the Lord Jesus Christ, the inspired from the uninspired books then in circulation amongst the Churches. He could be appealed to if necessary on any point involving the Divine authority of any book of Holy Scripture.

John's personal knowledge of the Lord, and his familiar acquaintance with the writings of his fellow Apostles and others, and, we might add, his jealous regard for the glory of his Master, His person and work, fitted the Apostle above all others for the task of handing over to the Church a full Bible. We have positive evidence that no writings subsequent to those of John have ever been admitted into the canon of the New Testament.

Canon of the New Testament.

It is true that numerous Christian books were in circulation, even in the days of Luke, the writer of the third Gospel and of "The Acts" (Luke 1: 1), some of them attributed to the Apostles and their companions, but they were not regarded as inspired, however highly esteemed otherwise. So numerous are the quotations from the New Testament in the writings of the fathers of the first seven centuries, that the whole of the New Testament might from thence be recovered, if needs be. We frankly admit, however, that certain Epistles, as Hebrews, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation were not at first universally received as canonical, owing to the difficulty of communication existing in these early times. It was no easy matter then for Churches or individuals at a distance to hold mutual intercourse, and it must be borne in mind that Epistles were addressed to persons or assemblies in some instances 1000 miles apart; besides which the transcribing of accurate copies of the originals required time and care. These facts remembered, we are thankful for the extreme caution with which the canon of the New Testament was finally accepted.

When the 27 books of the New Testament were first collected, or the principle on which they were arranged, is of little consequence. It is just as evident on moral grounds that "The Revelation" forms a fitting conclusion to the New Testament, as that "Malachi" closes the canon of the Old; and this form of evidence is of far more value than any other, inasmuch as it searches the conscience and carries inward conviction to the soul. If, therefore, the last of the Hebrew prophets leaves Israel under the last pleadings of Jehovah's love till the advent of the Messiah in grace, so the last of the Apostles leaves the Church under the warning voice of the Spirit of God till the advent of Christ in glory. Malachi and Matthew bridge a period of four centuries and a half, the Spirit uniting them in one common testimony, "for the Scripture cannot be broken;" compare Mal. 3: 1, Mal. 4: 5, with Matt. 17: 11-13. Again, Moses the lawgiver and John the Apostle stretch hands over the gulf of sixteen centuries, "for the Scripture cannot be broken;" compare Gen. 1 with Rev. 21. The Holy Bible may be likened to a noble bridge of 66 arches — only undermine one and the whole system of Revelation goes. Reader, hold fast the inspired Scriptures of our God.

The New Testament: Materials of Original Documents, Manuscripts, etc.

"New Testament" is an expression defining the believer's new position before God since the work of the Cross and the rending of the veil. It is one no doubt borrowed from Matt. 26: 28; and we suppose that 2 Cor. 3: 14 would give title and character to the previous revelation — "Old Testament." The New Testament was completed during the latter half of the first century. The original documents which came from the pen of inspiration were generally either of parchment or of the brittle papyrus plant.

Had the inspired autographs been preserved, we believe men would have worshipped them. Israel paid divine honours to the brazen serpent (2 Kings 18: 4), and would have worshipped the body of Moses and reverenced his sepulchre had he died in their midst and his tomb been known (Deut. 34: 5, 6; Jude 9). Paul seems to have used parchment generally, if not exclusively, in the writing of his epistles (2 Tim. 4: 13), which was very enduring, being prepared from the skins of sheep, antelopes, etc. The manufacture of these skins for preservation of documents of value was perfected in Pergamos. The name of the city gave its name to the article. John wrote on the papyrus, (2 John 12), which grew plentifully on the banks of the Nile and anciently by the Jordan, from which our word paper is derived.

A few specimens of this Egyptian paper have been found in tombs, but not many, as the material was difficult to preserve, being so brittle. A still more ancient material was linen, which has been found wrapped round their mummies and covered all over with hieroglyphics and writing. The earliest Christian documents we possess date from the fourth century; no classical MSS. are nearly so old. We doubt if any Hebrew MSS. exist of earlier date than the tenth century. The Jews were wont to buy very old, defaced, or mutilated MSS. of value. The Sinaitic MS., discovered by Professor Tischendorff, the eminent Biblical critic, is supposed to date from about the accession of Constantine to the imperial throne, and is regarded as an immediate transcript from those destroyed during the previous reign. Perhaps the original MSS. were destroyed during the baptism of blood under Diocletian — the last and hottest of the pagan persecutions. The first recorded instance of burning any portion of the Word of God will be found noted in Jer. 36: 20-32. Jehoiakim in his person and posterity paid a fearful penalty for the impious deed. The reader, however, may rest assured and rejoice in the moral certainty which God has granted him, that he in very deed possesses the Word of God. Although a period of about 280 years from the apostolic age to the earliest copies of these writings now extant exist, yet the gulf is easily abridged. Other and adequate helps are available for our Biblical critics, whose labours in restoring the sacred text to nigh the state in which it left the hands of the inspired penman is truly a cause for unfeigned thankfulness to God.

The New Testament and Epistles of Paul.

The New Testament contains 27 books, the work of eight inspired writers, and all written within a period of fifty years. All close in our version, although not in the Greek copies, with the Spirit's "Amen" except the epistles of James and Third John. Some of these inspired penman were illiterate men, as Peter and John (Acts 4: 13); others scholarly, as Luke and Paul. These books are not arranged chronologically, save, perhaps, the Gospels and Acts.

The Epistles of Paul, of which there are fourteen, form a distinct group by themselves, and which we might denominate "The Faith" — the first in moral order being "the Romans," while the last in chronological and moral sequence is "2 Timothy." The first written of these fourteen Epistles is that addressed to the Thessalonians. The authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews has been long a disputed point. It has been variously ascribed to Peter, Apollos, and Paul. From internal evidence we gather that the great Gentile apostle was the writer (Heb. 13: 23); while from 2 Peter 3: 15, we are certain that Paul was the author. Further, from the circumstance that the writer develops the glory of Him who is "the Apostle and High Priest" of the Christian confession, he was led of the Spirit to withhold the mention of his own name. The Hebrews was placed last of the fourteen Pauline Epistles, as the collector of the sacred books or editor of the New Testament had, it is supposed, doubts as to its authorship. Its inspiration, however, is irrespective altogether of the special penman employed. The first word in each of these inspired Epistles is "Paul," save in the fourteenth.

Divisions of the New Testament.

The whole of the 27 books might be advantageously classified thus: — first, the Gospels; second, the Acts; third, the Epistles; fourth, the Revelation.

In the first part is laid the ground work of Christianity in the person and work of the Saviour. Levi or Matthew, a sub-Roman collector of the taxes leviable upon the fisheries and merchandise of Capernaum, an odious employment in Jewish estimation, unfolds the Messianic glories of Christ according to Old Testament prediction, and reveals Him in death as God's sin-offering for Jew and Gentile. John Mark, for some time the minister or servant of Paul, and of Barnabas his near relative, and probably Peter's child in the faith (1 Peter 5: 13), touchingly records the service of the Lord — noting the hand, the eye, the heart, the look, and the exquisite grace of the perfect workman. It is His death, as the trespass offering, which Mark, under the guiding of the Spirit, presents. The scholarly and accomplished Gentile, the "beloved physician" — Luke — had the delightful task of unfolding the perfection of the manhood of Jesus, of tracing the path of the bruised, dependent, suffering Son of Man from the Jewish circumstances preceding His birth in the manger or stall for cattle, till the heaven of heavens receives Him. In this gospel also Jesus takes the place of both the "flour" (Lev. 2) and "communion offerings (Lev. 3). John, the special friend of Peter and the bosom companion of the Lord, unfolds those divine and wondrous truths respecting the person and glory of the Lord from eternity and onward. The divine dignities and glories of the Son, if all written down, would constitute a library too vast for the world to contain (John 21: 25). We commenced with the sin-offering, and here end with the burnt-offering.

In the second part or division of the New Testament we name the Acts — the only historical work of the 27 — written by physician Luke to his friend and Christian enquirer, Theophilus, probably a Roman governor over one of the Asiatic provinces of the Empire. We think it highly probable that Theophilus gave up his official position in the Roman service after the perusal of the gospel by his friend Luke. The official "most excellent" (Luke 1: 3) is omitted in Acts 1: 1. The Acts historically traces the progress of Christianity amongst the Jews by Peter (Acts 1—12), and the Gentiles by Paul (Acts 13—28). The missionary zeal and long-continued labours of the Gentile apostle for about thirty years, his evangelistic tours, his last great journey from Jerusalem to Rome, the historical circumstances under which the Epistles were penned, the rise and progress of the numerous churches planted by the Apostles and others, make up a book of interest unequalled in the annals of missionary enterprise.

"Under the third division of the New Testament are embraced the fourteen Epistles by Paul, two by Peter, three by John, one by James, and one by Jude — in all, 21. Christianity or the righteousness of God is the theme of the Romans; the church and ministry, of the Corinthians; grace as opposed to law, of the Galatians; the heavenly places for blessing, for power, and for conflict, while heaven's light is thrown upon every earthly relationship in which the Christian is placed, are the main subjects of Ephesians; the personal and relative glories of Christ are unfolded in Colossians; the coming of the Lord for the dead and living saints is treated of in the Thessalonians; the house of God in order and disorder in those to Timothy; Christian walk and order in the world in that to Titus; a purely domestic matter is courteously treated in Christian correspondence in Philemon; the present heavenly position of Christ as Sacrifice, Priest, Minister, and Forerunner, within the veil — we inside as worshippers, outside as His witnesses — are treated of in the Hebrews; the path of practical godliness will be found traced in James; the government of God in time and on to eternity, in the epistles of the Jewish Apostle, Peter; life, love, and light are the themes in John; and an energetic and solemn warning in apostate times in Jude.

The fourth and concluding part of the New Testament is the prophetic book of the Revelation. It was written by John during his imprisonment in the lonely and inhospitable Grecian island of Patmos. Judgment is the great subject of the book. The roar of heaven's artillery, the crash of falling kingdoms, the wail of impenitent sinners; heaven, earth, hell, eternity, time, God, Christ, angels, Satan, and men, are some of the scenes, actors, and places so vividly and awfully portrayed in this the 66th book of Holy Scripture. The time is at hand, and the effect of every vision.

The Holy Bible — The Books of the New Testament.

Name and Meaning, Character of the Book, by Whom Written or Compiled, Where and When Written.

Matthew, gift of the Lord

This Gospel is the Spirit's record of the Divine, human, and legal rights and titles of Christ to the throne of Israel. Salvation to the Jew first, and then to the Gentile is here the order.

Matthew (see Mark 2: 14), or Levi, of Jewish origin.

Palestine, A. D. 38

Mark, polite

This Gospel is the Spirit's record of the service and acts of Jesus, Son of God, to needy Israel. Hence, viewed as the servant of Jehovah's grace, there is no genealogy of our Lord given.

John, surnamed Mark, cousin to Barnabas, Col. 4: 10.

Rome, A. D. 64

Luke, luminous

This Gospel is the record of the ways in suffering, grace, and dependence of Jesus, Son of Man; not the legal genealogy as in Matthew, but the human one is found here.

Luke, a Gentile and scholarly physician, Col. 4: 14 .

Rome, A.D. 64

(Note. Neither Mark nor Luke were Apostles nor eye-witnesses of much, at least, of what they relate; Mark is especially circumstantial and minute. Luke moralizes upon the facts; both were companions of Paul.)

John, grace, or gift of the Lord

This Gospel is the Spirit's record of the Divine glories of the Son. The matchless simplicity, yet profound depths herein unfolded are truly God-like.

John, companion of Peter: for authorship, see 21: 20-24.

Ephesus, A. D. 69

Acts, from the character of the book

This, the only historical book of the New Testament, supplements the Gospel history and serves as an introduction to the study of the Epistles.

Luke, "the beloved physician" and companion of Paul.

Rome, A.D. 64, (supplementing the third Gospel).

Romans, from "Rome," strength

A Divine, comprehensive, and orderly exposure of Jewish and Gentile corruption and unfolding of Christianity — of the Grace and Gospel of God.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Corinth, A.D. 58 (first in moral order of the Epistles)

1 Corinthians, from "Corinth,"** satisfied

The ordering of the house of God, so as to maintain practical holiness, and the regulation of gift and ministry so as to secure godly order and edification in the assembly

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Ephesus, A.D. 57

2 Corinthians, from "Corinth,"** satisfied

The afflicted Apostle, cheered by the partial recovery of the Corinthians from their state of decline, and filled with the consolations of Christ, pours out his heart to his children in the faith.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Macedonia, A.D. 57 (a few months after the former.)

(**Corinth, noted for wickedness and philosophy; only exceeded by Rome in the former and by Athens in the latter.)

Galatians, from "Galatia," white or milky

The true grace of God and justification on the principle of faith, established for the saint in opposition to law, legalism, and flesh.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Corinth, A.D. 57 — Both time and place uncertain.

Ephesians, from "Ephesus," desire

The individual, then corporate, blessedness of the saints as united to Christ the glorified Man, seated too in heavenly places before God — in Christ and as Christ.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Rome, A.D. 62.***

Philippians, from "Philippi," lover of horses

Christian walk and experience, which is the manifestation of Christ Himself, amidst wilderness trials and circumstances.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Rome, A. D. 62.***

Colossians, from Colosse," correction

The richest and fullest unfolding in Scripture of the glories and perfections of the Church's Head, as also of the application of His work in peace and reconciliation.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Rome, A. D. 62.***

(***These were written with that to Philemon about the same time — during the Roman imprisonment.)

1 Thessalonians, "Thessalonica," from name of daughter of Philip of Macedon.

The "blessed," or happy hope — the immediate return of Christ for His saints whether asleep, or alive on the earth, is the main subject.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Corinth, A.D. 52. (First written of the Pauline Epistles.)

2 Thessalonians, after a memorable victory obtained over the Thessalians. Ancient name was Therma.

The translation of the saints, the subsequent rise of Antichrist, etc., then the return of Christ in glory, and kindred subjects, are developed in this Epistle.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Corinth, A.D. 53.

1 Timothy, honoured of God

Godly behaviour in the Church, which is God's house, and is here viewed in its normal character, is the main point insisted upon.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Macedonia, A.D. 67 (?) — Date uncertain.

2 Timothy, honoured of God

The ruin of the Church as God's witness to the world is here depicted, and the individual pathway of the saint traced by the pen of inspiration.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Rome, A.D. 68. (Last written of Paul's Epistles.)

Titus, honourable

The conduct becoming the faith of God's elect, not in the Church as in 1 Tim., but in the world, is the great point pressed by the Spirit.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Ephesus, A.D. 67 (?) — Date uncertain.

Philemon, affectionate, or kind

A courteous and delicately-expressed inspired communication, touching a personal and domestic matter.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Rome, A.D. 62. (Eph., Col., Phil., written at same time.)

Hebrews, from "Eber," the other side. Gen. 11: 17.

An elaborate and comprehensive disclosure of Christianity in its effects, its priesthood, worship, and sacrifice, which are shown to be heavenly and permanent, in contrast to Judaism.

Paul the Gentile Apostle.*

Italy, A.D. 63. (For authorship see chap. 13: 23, and 2 Peter 3: 15, 16.)

(*Paul was a Jew, of the sect of the Pharisees, of the honoured tribe of Benjamin, a free-born citizen of Tarsus of Cilicia, educated in Jerusalem, under Gamaliel, converted in A.D. 36, and sixteen years afterwards commenced writing these inspired communications bearing his name, as also that to the Hebrews; was martyred by beheading at Rome, A.D. 68, under Nero, perhaps the cruelest of the Caesars. Thus died Paul, after 32 years' life of service and suffering, unexampled by all then or since. His record is on high.)

James, supplanter

The scattered tribes of Israel, not the Church, are here exhorted to a life of good works as evidence of their faith in God, hence the use of Gen. 22 in chap. 2: 21.

James, "the Lord's brother," "the Just," son of Alphaeus.

Jerusalem, A.D. 61. (The first of the four Hebrew Epistles)

1 Peter, a stone or piece of rock; see Matt. 16: 18; 1 Peter 2: 4-8.

Addressed to Christian Jews, in which their call to heaven, and walk on earth are the distinguishing subjects.

Peter, whose conversion is recorded in Luke 5; Chief of "the twelve," Matt. 10: 2; Mark 3: 16; Luke 6: 14; martyred by crucifixion in Rome, A.D. 68 (?)

Babylon. A.D. 64. See chap. 5: 13, where the word church should be omitted; "She at Babylon." probably Peter's wife.

2 Peter, (See as above.)

Addressed to the same persons as the first (chap. 3: 1.) In the first Epistle the saints are encouraged and comforted; here they are warned and the judgment of the world announced.

Unknown, A.D. 65. Compares chap. 1: 14 with John 21: 18, 19.

1 John, (See under the Gospel.)

Eternal life in the believer in manifestation and communion; its moral characteristics, and all pretensions to it tested and judged.

John, the son of Zebedee, and brother of James, who was martyred by Herod Agrippa, A.D. 42-44. (Acts 12: 2.) John outlived all his apostolic brethren, and is believed to have fallen asleep at Ephesus, about A.D. 98-100.

Ephesus (?), A.D. 69 (?)*

2 John,

The glory of Christ to be unflinchingly maintained; neither sex, woman, position, lady, nor age, children, are freed from the responsibility.

Ephesus (?), A.D. 69 (?)*

3 John,

The stern rejection of evil is the point of the second Epistle; the hearty reception and encouragement of all that is good, the main point of the third.

Ephesus (?), A.D. 69 (?)*

(*These Epistles contain no information when or where they were written. Tradition is the only ground of our answer to these really unimportant questions.)

Jude, praise the Lord

Jude and 2 Peter are much alike, but they differ in this essential respect, that the former develops the apostacy of Christendom in the last days, the latter the sin of the last days.

Jude, or Judas, Lebbaeus, surnamed Thaddeus.

Unknown, A.D. 66 (?) (Compare with 2 Peter.)

Revelation, rolling back of a veil

The Lord's judgment upon the professing Church, Israel, and the world prophetically announced, with the final results to all, whether in glory or judgment.

John, the youngest, and probably the most beloved of the apostles.

Patmos, A.D. 96. This lonely isle, of about 20 to 25 miles in circumference, was a convict establishment.

Note. We may remark that By whom, Where, and When the various books of Scripture were penned, are questions irrespective of their inspiration. The Divine character of the Bible remains untouched, although, in some instances, cannot answer these questions with any degree of certainty. God, by His Spirit wrote the Bible.

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 6 History of the Various English Versions of the Bible.

6. History of the Various English Versions of the Bible.

Christianity Introduced into Great Britain and Ireland.

Christ and Him crucified was preached in Great Britain as early as the first century, especially during the reigns of Nero and Domitian, A.D. 54-68, 81-96, and probably by the immediate companions of the Apostle Paul, while numerous translations of portions of the Scriptures from the Vulgate or Latin Bible of the Western Church were made and circulated during the second century.

It is an interesting circumstance that Bran, a British king, was at Rome as a hostage for the good behaviour of his country, during the imprisonment of Paul in the imperial city. He was probably converted by the Apostle, as on his return to Britain he was accompanied by certain Christian teachers, among whom was Aristobulus (Rom. 16: 10). Bran preached Christ in Wales. Succat, a Scotch boy born on the banks of the Clyde, in the picturesque village of Kilpatrick, about A.D. 372, was carried off to the then savage island of Ireland by pirates, and converted there when about 16 years old. On his return to his family he longed to revisit the land of his captivity, and so Succat, better known as St. Patrick, carried the pure gospel to the Emerald Isle. The ancient religion of the country was that of the Druids, whose practices and, mysteries were never committed to writing, but were handed down through successive generations by the priests of the system after, it is said, a twenty years' training. Slowly, but surely, however, Druidism and other Pagan superstitions disappeared before the rising sun of Christianity.

The sixth century was a happy and prosperous one, so far as Great Britain was concerned. The famous Columba, a native prince of Ireland (we owe much instrumentally to the Irish), laboured in the north amongst the native Caledonians, while Gildas, the earliest of British historians, a man too of fervent piety and of considerable talent, laboured in the south amongst the ancient Welsh.

The Work of Bible Translation and Value of Books.

Such, too, was the desire to read the Scriptures, not then translated into the vernacular tongue, that many of the natives learned Latin, that they might read for themselves the wonderful works and words of God then only accessible in the Vulgate.

But while portions of the Scriptures, especially the Psalms and the Gospels, were frequently translated, as by the venerable Bede, King Alfred, and others, a complete copy of the Bible was a rare acquisition, and procurable only by the rich. In the reign of Edward I. of England, about 1272, the price of a complete Bible was from £30 to £37, and occupied a careful scribe in his scriptorium about ten months, while the day's wage of a working man only averaged 1.5 pence. When it is borne in mind that it only cost £25 to build two arches of London Bridge in 1240, while the price of a complete Latin Bible was considerably more, it will readily be allowed that only the rich and scholarly had access to the Word of God.

So expensive were books in England at one time that King Alfred gave a large and valuable estate for a book on Cosmography in the year 872. A countess of Anjou, in the 15th century, paid for one book 200 sheep, five quarters of wheat, and the same quantity of rye and millet; and in early times the loan of a book was considered to be an affair of such importance that in 1299 the Bishop of Winchester, on borrowing a Bible from a convent in that city, was obliged to give a bond for its restoration, drawn up in the most solemn manner; and Louis XI., in 1471, was compelled to deposit a large quantity of plate, and to get some of bis nobles to join with him in a bond, under a high penalty, to restore it, before he could procure the loan of a book which he borrowed from the faculty of medicine at Paris.

(Here is inserted in the book a picture of William Tyndale, born about 1484, probably in Gloucestershire, martyred at Filford, near Antwerp, 6th Oct., 1536. In the year 1526 William Tyndale gave to the English-speaking people the first complete printed New Testament. He who can measure what the New Testament has been to the English-speaking peoples, can measure what they owe to William Tyndale. He may well be called "the Apostle of England." On the reverse are facsimiles of Exodus 3: 1-8 fromTyndale's Pentateuch printed in 1530 and a page - 2 Cor. 10: 1-11 -  from Tyndale's New Testament printed in 1534. More than half of our New Testament, even in its latest form, stands as it came from Tyndale's pen. The style, the simplicity, the character and the spirit of the translation are what he made them in his devotion to his labour, and in his dependence on God. Tyndale's version was made from the original Greek, its predecessors having been made only from the Latin.)

Libraries, too, were very rare in these old times. Probably the first private collection of books in this country, or perhaps Europe, belonged to Richard de Bury, Chancellor of England, 1341: he gave fifty pounds weight of silver for 30 or 40 volumes to the Abbot of St. Albans. The first public library was founded at Athens by Hipparchus, 526 B.C. Books in general sold from £10 to £40 in 1400. But the Bible is God's priceless boon to man; it contains a message of grace to every creature under heaven; it records the old, old story of undying love to perishing sinners, and so, exactly 500 years ago, the first complete English Bible was produced by John Wycliffe.

The Ignorance of the Middle Ages.

God was preparing instruments and persons for the emancipation of the thousands — yea, millions — who were wrapped in thick folds of ignorance and darkness. That we may have some idea of the gross ignorance which universally prevailed among all classes during the Middle Ages, it may be enough to state the following facts: — It was an exceedingly rare thing to find a layman, however distinguished, who could sign his name; the usual practice was to affix the sign of the cross. Even in the legal profession, the charters and other documents which were written in Latin were oftentimes unintelligible, and led, consequently, to much dispute. Contracts were more frequently drawn up verbally, in presence of witnesses, as many notaries could not write. The clergy were not much, if any, better. Many of the bishops were not a bit ashamed to own that they had never read the Scriptures; while, as a rule, the inferior clergy mumbled over their prayers and services in a language they did not understand.

It has been asserted that in Rome itself, during part of the tenth century, it would have been difficult to have found a person who could read, or even know the letters. Truly the ages were dark when thousands of the clergy, who alone had access to books, could not write, nor translate their Latin prayers into the vernacular, and regarded the Hebrew and Greek languages as new ones and to be carefully avoided, as they produced all the heresies then existing! when libraries, public or private, were almost utterly unknown; and when emperors and kings could neither read nor write, and learning was regarded as an intolerable heresy. Another consideration which contributed to the prevailing and gross ignorance of the times was the scarcity and value of parchment, and, we might add, the dissolute character of the monks, for although each monastery had its scriptorium, the work of transcribing was so tedious and the monks so lazy that oftentimes it was never used. Learning was wholly confined, shut up, we may say, in these monasteries, where all MSS. of sacred and secular literature were copied and preserved.

Both monks and nuns wrought in these writing cells, and sometimes produced really beautiful work, especially in the 8th and 9th centuries. As many as twelve solitary writers in separate apartments might be employed in a large monastery or convent.

The Inventions of Paper and Printing.

Paper made from rags was the invention of the 13th century. It is true that paper from cotton was manufactured, perhaps, as early as the 11th century, but the material was not found to answer so well as parchment, and hence not frequently employed, at least, for copying valuable MSS. Paper was invented and used in China 170 years B.C. In the 14th century, however, the paper produced was generally used and found to suit admirably, so much so that the rapid multiplication of copies created a new branch of trade. Learning began to revive, and the study of the original languages was taught in the universities.

But yet another instrument was needed for the great work at hand. Of this we are fully convinced, that the Reformation owes more to the printing-press — the wonderful invention of the 15th century — than even to the personal labours of the Reformers (Evangelists we would prefer to term them) at home and abroad.

Now, is it not a remarkable circumstance that the first printed book was the Bible? Ah! it was its glorious doctrines, its imperishable truths, its undying records of love and grace which were to emancipate from the thraldom of Popery, deliver from the more awful grasp of Satan, and set thousands in the joy and liberty of the Gospel. The Bible is now [~1900?] to be had, printed and published in 150 languages, and in nearly 200 versions. It is computed that there are about 40,000,000 of Bibles at present in circulation. Yet there are still about 700,000,000 souls without the Word of God

The first printed book was the Bible, and was executed in Mentz, Germany, in 1450. it is sometimes called the "Mazarin Bible," because a copy was found last century in the library of the cardinal of that name in Paris. It is also termed "Guttenberg's Bible," because he, with two others whom he took into his confidence, printed it. It is a disputed point with some whether Guttenberg was the inventor of the art of printing in Europe. It was certainly known and practised in China centuries before. This Latin Bible is also known and spoken of as "The forty-two line Bible," because each column contains 42 lines. It was beautifully printed, all things considered. A vellum copy of this interesting Bible was sold for £500 about 56 years ago. Printing was introduced into England by William Caxton in 1474, and into Scotland by Walter Chapman in 1508.

The First English Bible.

To John Wycliffe, entitled "The morning star of the Reformation," belongs the honour of giving to the English-speaking populations a complete translation of the Sacred Scriptures in the vernacular tongue. The pious and worthy king, "Alfred the Great," is said to have translated the Bible into the Anglo-Saxon, but this is gravely questioned. It is certain, however, that he translated most, if not all the Psalms, and some other portions besides. It was a common enough custom to write an English translation between the lines of a Latin Bible for those who could not read the Vulgate. This practice specially prevailed before the times of Wycliffe. But, as yet, the people were practically debarred from the enjoyment of their inalienable inheritance — the Sacred Scriptures. God, however, was thinking of England and preparing His instruments in the great and noble work of Bible translation.

John Wycliffe was born about 1324, and was an accomplished Latin scholar; but, according to some, ignorant of the original tongues — Hebrew and Greek. His translation, a close rendering from the Vulgate, was completed in 1380, after nearly 15 years' severe labour, about 70 years before the invention of printing. It has never, we believe, been wholly printed, although his New Testament has been more than once. There are several copies of Wycliffe's Bible in the principal libraries — one in the British Museum is believed to have been written by Wycliffe himself; about 300 of his sermons in manuscript are also extant.

In his controversies with the Romish hierarchy, and sweeping exposure of the morals and doctrines of that most corrupt of all systems, Wycliffe earnestly and constantly appealed to the Word of God — the sole source of all authority. The Popish monks were baffled, and so they pronounced judgment upon the Bible which was being rapidly disseminated throughout the land. "Master John Wycliffe," said they, "by translating the Gospel into English hath rendered it, more acceptable and more intelligent to laymen and to women than it hath hitherto been to learned and intelligent clerks. The Gospel pearl is everywhere cast out and trodden under foot of swine. It is heresy to speak of holy Scriptures in English. Let the people learn to believe in the Church rather than the Gospel."

Wycliffe was feared and cordially hated by the Pope and the entire college of cardinals for his unsparing attacks upon their whole system — root and branch; while, on the other hand, he was almost idolized by the common people, to whom he regularly preached the pure Gospel in their own tongue and with power and eloquence. The Papal party sought again and again his life, but he was protected from their malice by the powerful intervention of the court and several of the nobles, as the Duke of Lancaster and Lord Percy, both in high position in the government.

Dear old Wycliffe, we revere thy memory. Thy name and deeds are graven in tablets that will never perish. They burned his bones 44 years after his death and then cast them into the Swift, near which the old champion of the faith and defender of the Bible lived and laboured. An attempt was made by the Civil power to suppress the circulation of this first of English Bibles. A bill was brought into the House of Lords, having for its object the suppression of the Bible amongst the people, in the year 1390, just ten years after its publication, but the bill was rejected through the powerful advocacy of the Duke of Lancaster and other noble peers, who boldly defended Bible translation and its reading in the vulgar tongue. Another ten years and this time the enemy seemed to triumph, but the skilfully laid plans of Satan always contain the elements of certain defeat; and, although the Bible was forbidden to be translated, and imprisonment and death made the penalty for possessing a copy of the Word of God, the rising tide of cruel persecution only increased the number and strengthened the faith of the followers of the Lamb of God.

Where today are the maligned saints of God? In Paradise, at rest from their labours and sufferings. What about the Bible for which they suffered? Sold to the English-speaking populations of the earth for a few pence instead of from £30 to £40. Where are the enemies of the Lord, and the persecutors of the Saints and Church? Where?

Wycliffe lived four years after the completion of his great life-work, but not till he had the joy of knowing that his Bible and portions of it were circulated throughout all England.

Tyndale's Translation

William Tyndale, who gave to the English people in their own tongue the first printed Testament, was born in the year 1484, a year after the birth of Luther, and 100 years after Wycliffe's death. In the University of Oxford, his great delight was to study the Greek Testament of the learned Erasmus, which was published at Basle in 1516 and of which there are several copies extant. He soon equalled, if not outstripped, his teachers in Greek and Latin, and on his removal to Cambridge was joined by the godly Thomas Bilney and the pious and learned John Frith — both afterwards martyred for Christ and the truth's sake. When tutor and chaplain in the house of Sir John Walsh, he had frequent altercations with the ignorant priests, who were excessively annoyed at Tyndale's constant appeal to the Greek Scriptures. Many of them did not even know the alphabet of the language. The illustrious subject of our sketch not only exposed the ignorance of these men, but plainly told them that he would "cause the boy who driveth the plow to know more of the Scriptures" than his ecclesiastical guides, by translating and printing them into the vernacular tongue — the sure death-blow to Papal assumption.

Tyndale, in order that he might devote himself to his great life-work, the translation and printing of the Bible, sought the needed quietness and leisure in the house of Humphrey Monmouth, a rich London merchant, who allowed Tyndale ten pounds a year — a considerable sum in those days. For this offence Monmouth was shortly afterwards committed to the Tower, but after a short detention was liberated. On his trial, he gave the following account of Tyndale's daily life; "He conducted himself as a good priest: he studied most part of the day and night at his book: he would eat not sodden meat by good will, nor drink but small single beer. I never saw him wear linen about him in the space he was with me."

Tyndale, however, after six months, had to leave the house of his friend and patron and betake himself to Germany, where he hoped to prosecute his work unmolested; this was in 1523. From Hamburg he went on to Wittenberg, where it is said he met Luther, and was immensely helped by his intercourse with the great Reformer. The zeal, piety, and devotion to the Word of God so eminently characteristic of the German champion of the Word of God, were as distinctly impressed on the illustrious Englishman. Tyndale, however, seems to have regarded Luther as in some respects a master in Bible translation, as he used the Reformer's German translation, and copied even the order in which the books appeared, first the New Testament, then the earlier books, as the Pentateuch, Jonah, etc. It may here be remarked as an interesting circumstance that the very copy of the Hebrew Bible dated 1494, and from which Luther made his German translation is deposited in the royal library at Berlin.

The English New Testament is said to have been finished in Wittenberg, but printed in Worms; and then, through the agency of a merchant named Packington, the stock was sold for a good price to the Bishop of London for the express purpose on his part of being burned. Previous to the completion of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, being first printed, were sent over to England to the care of Tyndale's constant friend, Monmouth, which brought that worthy man into some trouble with the authorities.

With the money thus obtained from the Bishop, aided by Monmouth's yearly donation of £10, Tyndale set about preparing a new edition of the Testament. The first entire English New Testament ever printed and published appeared in the year 1526, but nearly all were burned at St. Paul's Cross; and it was made an offence punishable by fine, imprisonment, and even death were a copy found in anyone's possession. The year following 500 were secretly disposed of in England and Scotland, being the fourth edition within a year. Tonstall (the kindly-disposed bishop, who, to inflict as little pain as possible, bought the Testaments) was astonished to find that, in spite of the most rigorous search, the Books still found their way into England. On inquiry, he found that the clever Dutch printers reprinted the Testament, expecting that they would also be bought. Eight years after (1534) a new and more perfect edition of Tyndale's New Testament appeared, in the introduction to which the translator says: "I have weeded out of it many faults which the lack of help at the beginning and oversight did sow therein."

We next find our ardent Bible translator, whom no difficulties could overcome, at Antwerp, assisted by his friend and son in the faith, John Frith, diligently translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew. But the bishops and clergy thirsted for his blood, and the priests Gabriel, Donne, and Phillips were employed to betray him, with, it is said, the connivance of Henry VIII. We are satisfied, however, that the authorities of England were mainly responsible for Tyndale's cruel death, as the priests named were well rewarded for the impious deed. Efforts were made in England, and abroad by the English merchants in Antwerp, by whom Tyndale was greatly beloved, and elsewhere to save him. The martyr was first confined in the castle of Filford, about 20 miles from Antwerp. He was taken from prison on Friday, October 6th, 1536, fastened to the stake, strangled, and his body burned to ashes. The fervent prayer of the martyred Tyndale, when bound to the stake, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes," was about to be answered shortly. The way and means manifested God's sovereign disposal of events and persons; for it is the resource and stay of faith at all times and under all circumstances "that the Lord reigneth." The memory of William Tyndale will be held in everlasting remembrance.

Coverdale's Translation.

Miles Coverdale, born in Yorkshire, an Augustine monk, and subsequently Bishop of Exeter, was the next indefatigable labourer in the work of Bible translation. The first complete English Bible, as also the first issued by royal authority, was published October 4th, 1535, by Miles Coverdale, just a year before the martyrdom of his friend Tyndale, whom he had also assisted in his work.

It was of this Bible that the king said: "Let it go abroad among my people," and ordered besides that a copy should be chained to a pillar, or fastened in the choir of every parish church in the land. He also for a time encouraged its sale among all classes of his subjects, although afterwards capriciously forbidding it to the lower classes, allowing its use and possession only as a special privilege to the higher ranks. Still, during the latter 20 years of Henry's reign, no fewer than 31 editions of the Bible or New Testament, besides numerous parts of Scripture, were issued.

From all we can gather, we quite endorse the opinion of another, that "Coverdale had neither the creative power nor Biblical learning of Tyndale." His was a translation made from the German and Latin, and it has been questioned whether Coverdale was not entirely ignorant of Hebrew and Greek, as it is evident that the originals were not consulted in the preparation of the work. The German and Latin translations — not by any means correct — were the sources from whence the Old Testament was prepared, while Tyndale's New Testament was largely appropriated without acknowledgment.

This Bible is believed to have been printed abroad, but where, is a keenly-contested point. Two years before its publication, Convocation had urged "that Holy Scripture should be translated into the vulgar tongue," but not satisfied with the accuracy of this version, they petitioned the king, Henry VIII., for a new translation, or at least a thorough revision of this one. Coverdale dedicated his work to "the dearest, just wife, and most virtuous Princess, Queen Anne." We believe Coverdale to have been a good man, but his religious character does not stand so high in our esteem as that of Tyndale and some others.

Henry presented the Bible to the bishops, and ordered it to be placed in the churches, although the privilege was but short-lived, and the translator was subsequently promoted to the See of Exeter. In the second edition of the work, which had been petitioned for by Convocation as already remarked, the dedication was transferred from Queen Anne to Queen Jane, so as to please Henry in his new love amour. Subjection to the powers that be is a plain Christian duty (Rom. 13: 1), but a witness for Christ is not a trimmer not a man who adapts his testimony to the worldly policy of the day, as we fear dear Miles Coverdale did to some extent. We believe that Henry's zeal for the Holy Scriptures, and his order to have them placed in every church and read to the people, was the Lord's answer to the prayer of the dying Tyndale, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."

During the brief reign of but seven years of Henry's son by Jane Seymour, the English Bible rapidly passed through eleven editions, besides six of the New Testament. Edward VI. was, perhaps, one of the most godly kings that ever sat on the throne of England. He had an intense love for the Word of God, and had it carried reverently in the procession on his coronation-day.

In Queen Mary's reign Coverdale was deprived of his bishopric and imprisoned, but was released and allowed to go abroad on the intercession of the King of Denmark. On the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England he returned, but did not resume his ecclesiastical office, and died at a good old age. The name and memory of Miles Coverdale will never be forgotten, as the man who gave to the English-speaking people the first complete printed Bible in their own tongue.

(Here, in the book, is inserted a facsimile of a section of the Great Bible, so-called because of its size, its pages being 9 by 15 inches. A revision of the Tyndale-Matthew Bible, undertaken by Miles Coverdale, at the request and expense of Cromwell. It was the first Bible that was authorised to be read in the churches. Printed in 1539. The portion reproduced is 2 Kings 20: 1-7. On the reverse is reproduced Rev. 6: 1-4 from the Authorised Version. Undertaken under the personal direction of King James I., and issued in A.D. 1611, this version was the work of three double committees of revisers, who were occupied nearly three years on its preparation. While not a faultless version, it is unrivalled for its simplicity, for its force and vigour of language, as a compendium of literary excellencies, and as a faithful translation of the very words of the Holy Spirit.)

Matthew's Bible.

The next Bible translator was a man of fervent piety, of deep learning, of singular eloquence. we refer to John Rogers, born about 1500, near Birmingham, and educated at Cambridge, and the first martyr in the reign of Queen Mary.

Henry VIII. was no friend of Luther's; for the book he wrote against the German Reformer and his writings procured for him from the Pope the high-sounding title "Defender of the Faith." Though he was neither Protestant nor Papist, for he committed to the flames both alike, yet on various occasions he favoured the work of Bible circulation, besides which there was a growing and deepening conviction in England that the Scriptures must be translated and circulated in the vulgar tongue. It was at an opportune moment, therefore, when "Matthew's Bible" appeared. This second complete English Bible can scarcely be called an original translation, although a very decided improvement upon Coverdale's version, which was never regarded as a highly satisfactory work.

The King's printers, Grafton and Whitchurch, engaged John Rogers to revise Coverdale's Bible. Probably they could not have commissioned a more scholarly and pious person for the task. Besides Rogers' special fitness for such a work, he had enjoyed the personal friendship of Tyndale and rendered considerable help to that able Bible translator. Rogers adapted Tyndale's New Testament after carefully comparing it with the original and also with the German. As to the Old Testament he again followed what Tyndale had previously translated, from Genesis to the end of 2 Chronicles, the rest, being Coverdale's own, was carefully revised. The work, with prefaces, notes, and numerous wood-cuts, was dedicated to Henry by the so-called Thomas Matthew, hence the term "Matthew's Bible." It was printed at Hamburg, and published in the year 1537.

We cannot but regard John Rogers as guilty of deception in thus assuming the name of Thomas Matthew. It will be observed that the new Bible was a combination of the labours of Tyndale and Coverdale, but carefully revised throughout. Cromwell, Cranmer, and others in power thought so much of this Bible, that in conjunction with the King's printers they sought to make it the only authorised version. It will be seen from the following letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Cromwell, Earl of Essex, then high in power, that this edition of the Scriptures was highly regarded. Of the first edition only 1500 copies were printed, and sold at a sum equivalent to about £7 of modern money per copy. This Bible was reprinted several times, but in the later editions the annotations and notes were deleted, as they were considered objectionable and faulty by many.

"My Special Good Lord,

After most hearty commendations unto your Lordship, these shall be to signify unto the same, that you shall receive by the bringer thereof a Bible, both of a new translation and of a new print, dedicated unto the King's Majesty, as farther appeareth by a pistle unto his Grace in the beginning of the book, which, in mine opinion, is very well done; and, therefore, I pray your Lordship to read the same. And as for the translation, so far as I have read thereof, I like it better than any other translations heretofore made; yet not doubting that there may, and will be found some fault therein, — as, you know, no man ever did, or can do so well but it may, from time to time, be amended. And forasmuch as the Book is dedicated unto the King's Grace, and also great pains and labour taken in setting forth the same, I pray you, my Lord, to exhibit the Book unto the King's Highness, and obtain of his Grace, if you can, a license that the same may be sold and READ of EVERY person, without danger of any act, proclamation, or ordinance heretofore granted to the contrary, until such time that we, the bishops, shall set forth a better translation, which I think will not be till a day after doomsday. And if you continue to take such pains for the setting forth of God's Word as you do, although in the mean season you suffer some snubs, and many slanders, lies, and reproaches for the same, yet one day He will requite altogether. And the same Word, as St. John saith, which shall judge every man at the last day, must needs show favour to them that now do favour it. Thus, my Lord, right heartily fare you well.

Your assured ever,

T. CANTUARIEN.

At Forde, the 4th day of Aug., 1537."

Soon after the accession of Mary to the throne, John Rogers was summoned by the Lords of the Council to remain in his house as a seditious preacher, then he was committed to Newgate, and on the 4th of February, 1555, was cruelly burned, but the Word of God for which John Rogers lived, which he so dearly loved, and for which he died — liveth and abideth for ever. Its pages are precious, its truths are imperishable. Blessed Scriptures of our God! we prize them for their priceless value, and will continue to hold in loving memory those men who devoted their lives to their translation and circulation, and who sealed their holy, eternal truths with martyrdom.

Taverner's Bible.

This Bible was simply a revision of the "Matthew's Bible" with its notes, but without the woodcuts. In the margin the reviser added numerous notes and references of his own, besides titling the chapters. The work was done at the request of the King's printers and published in 1539. Taverner in his preface suggested that a complete and perfect revision of the Holy Scriptures should be undertaken by a number of competent scholars, the work of private translation not being regarded with favour by the then ecclesiastical authorities. There was a folio and 4to edition of this Bible published. The smaller size was also issued in parts for the convenience of many who could not purchase an entire Bible. The New Testament was also issued separately, and a year after was again printed and published in 12mo size.

Richard Taverner was born near Norfolk, in 1505, was licensed as a preacher, but studied law and was made High Sheriff of Oxford. He died on the 14th of July, 1577. Taverner was one of Cardinal Wolsey's favourites; then, on the fall of that prelate, he came under the favourable notice of Cromwell, Earl of Essex. We can only hope that the burning words and truths of Holy Scripture became the seed of eternal life in the soul of Taverner. He is a man of whom little is known.

The Great Bible.

This new edition of the Sacred Scriptures was printed in large folio, its pages 15 inches in length and more than 9 inches in breadth, and hence from its size was generally spoken of as "The Great Bible." It was printed in Paris by Regnault, under the editorship of the indefatigable Miles Coverdale; the expense being borne in part, if not in whole, by Cromwell, Earl of Essex. "The Great Bible" is simply a revision of the Tyndale-Matthew Bible, and is in no respects an original translation. It is true that the editor was assisted by several learned Bishops, but the times were not safe enough for their names to appear. The translations and revisions made were from the Latin, and principally affected the Old Testament. In the 53rd chapter of Isaiah about 40 alterations occur — a chapter of exceeding evangelical interest, and one yet capable of godly and learned translation from the Hebrew.

The King of France, Francis I., granted permission to have the Bible printed in Paris, but the ecclesiastical authorities were on the alert, and the Inquisition set itself in determined hostility to the publication and circulation of the Word of God. What does Popery fear so much as the entrance of that word which giveth light? The machinery of the Inquisition was more powerful than that of the king. The Bibles were seized and most of them burned; some, however, were saved and completed in London, by Rychard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, the king's printers, in 1539.

In the following year, April, 1540, appeared the "Cranmer Bible," which was simply the "Great Bible" partly revised. Its title is derived from the circumstance that the Archbishop of that name wrote a lengthy prologue to it, and otherwise lent his powerful aid in procuring for it royal sanction.

The Psalter used in the service of the Church of England is verbally printed from this very old and first fully authorised edition of the Holy Scriptures. The price of this Bible was 10s. unbound, and 12s. bound, per copy. The Vicar General, then Cromwell, Earl of Essex, who played such a conspicuous part in the reign of Henry VIII., and who did much to promote the circulation of the Scriptures, issued a peremptory order that in every parish church a Bible should be placed under a penalty of 20 shillings or thereby. Bishop Bonner also, to his honour be it said, directed that six copies of the Bible were to be placed in St. Paul's Church, at his own expense. Every person in the land who could read had thus access to the Word of God, and even those unable to avail themselves of the privilege, through want of education, could have it read at least every Sunday.

We regard, therefore, the year 1540 as a memorable one in considering the history of our English Bible. It was then that, for the first time in this country, the civil and ecclesiastical powers combined in one great effort to make the Bible accessible to the common people. There were various royal and ecclesiastical proclamations issued at this time, having for their special object the unhindered circulation of the Word of God, and its public and private reading by all.

In 1542 the Popish Bishops got an order suppressing the circulation of the Bible and its place in the churches; but on the accession of Edward VI. the order was revoked, and the Bible stored as before; but again it was forbidden to be read or circulated by Popish Queen Mary, till the first year of the reign of Elizabeth, who did so much, politically and individually, to further the cause of the Reformation at home and abroad. We wish we could number Queen Elizabeth, of illustrious name and memory, amongst the saints of God. From the first publication of the "Great Bible," 1539 till 1568 (30 years), numerous editions were issued, and it became the only authorised version in use, save during the brief and bloody reign of Mary of about five years.

The Geneva Bible.

During the bloody reign of Queen Mary, whose distinct and pronounced Romanism cost many a saint of God life, liberty, and goods, a number of godly and learned men fled to the continent, and in Geneva found a home and welcome, 1555.

Amongst the number of refugees were Whittingham, whose wife was Calvin's sister; Cover-dale, the indefatigable Bible translator; John Knox, who "never feared the face of man," and many others. The Bible was their first thought, and so a new translation was at once commenced. In 1557 the New Testament was completed with annotations, italics, and distinguished by verses — the parent, in this, of all succeeding Bibles. Three years after the publication of the New Testament, the complete Bible appeared, 1560 (the second year of Queen Elizabeth's reign), and soon became exceedingly popular — rapidly passing through, it is said, more than 100 editions. Thus two Bibles were then in circulation — the Bishops' Bible and the Geneva edition. King James could not tolerate this latter version; yet it was printed and circulated frequently for more than 30 years after the publication of the authorised version of 1611.

The Geneva Bible was the first complete translation into English from the originals throughout. It was addressed to "the brethren of England, Scotland, and Ireland," and first published in 4to size; it was afterwards sent out, however, in various sizes. There were two Bibles at this time in general use in England. The Geneva Bible was the more popular of the two, and was generally read in the household and in private study of the Word by the people. The Cranmer or Bishops' Bible was the one, however, which obtained most favour amongst the clergy and was read in the churches.

The Bishops' Bible.

The "Great Bible," which had been suppressed during the reign of Mary, became once more the authorised Bible under Elizabeth. As already observed, it was in no wise an original translation — the first English Bible entitled to be regarded as an original work being the Geneva edition; but its annotations were, in numerous instances, regarded as unscriptural, some of which were pronounced by King James to be positively seditious in their character.

It was felt by many, however, that the "Cranmer," or "Great Bible," needed careful revision, hence eight years after the first publication of the "Geneva Bible," appeared the Bishops' Bible, or revised edition of the "Cranmer" version; this was in 1568. It was again subjected to a still more careful revision, and the result appeared in an improved edition four years afterwards — 1572. It was certainly an improvement upon any previous edition of the "Great Bible," but from its learned character, and lack of that purity and vigour of language, which has so justly made the present authorised version so distinguished, even in a literary point of view, it never possessed a popular character.

Archbishop Parker, of Canterbury, was the master mind in the preparation of this new edition of the Holy Scriptures, assisted by about 15 scholarly men. He distributed the "Cranmer Bible" into parts, assigning portions to various learned bishops, the whole being subject to his own personal supervision. The large number of the revisers being from the Episcopal bench gave name and character to this Bible. It was printed in large size, and beautifully executed. It was adorned with numerous cuts; its notes were brief, and, like the "Geneva Bible," was divided into verses. It was used in the Churches for about 40 years. Various revised editions of the "Bishops' Bible" were published. Soon after the appearance of the Authorised Version of 1611, the "Bishops' Bible" — the last edition of which was published about five years before its noble successor — fell into general disuse; it was accorded, in the opinion of many, well-merited universal neglect.

Rheims New Testament and Douay Bible.

The Roman Catholic Church being baffled in numerous and determined efforts to stop the circulation of the Word of God in the common language of the people, resolved to execute a version of their own. Accordingly, William Allyn (afterward created a cardinal), Gregory Martyn, and Richard Bristow translated and printed at Rheims, in 1582, the New Testament "out of the authentical Latin;" the notes were by Thomas Worthington. Nearly 30 years afterwards, in 1609, the whole Bible was completed and printed at "Doway, by Laurence Killam, at the sign of the holie Lamb." This has been pronounced by the learned as a most objectionable version, while its notes have evidently been prepared in the interests of the Papacy, pure and simple. Mary is said to be "full of grace" (Luke 1: 28). Jacob is said to have "adored the top of his rod" (Heb. 11: 21); see also 1 Cor. 10: 16; Heb. 13: 16; 1 Peter 3: 19; Eph. 5: 32.

We gladly transcribe the following passage of interest: "The Rheims, in an important class of religious terms, unmistakably influenced and benefited the Authorised Version, and has carried over to it many of the peculiarities of Wycliffe. To this is due the extraordinary fact that while there is hardly a seeming parallelism, and not a solitary demonstrable one anywhere between Wycliffe and Tyndale, the parallelisms are many between Wycliffe and the Authorised Version. This is another of the points of interest and beauty in that remarkable version, which, in its aggregations, stands almost unique as a miracle of Providence and history — the symbol of England itself, whose greatness has so largely sprung from appropriating what others have produced, and actualizing what others have dreamed."

The Authorised Version of King James.

We have had Wycliffe's unprinted Bible, the first ever given to the English people, in 1380; nearly a century and a half afterwards appeared the first printed English New Testament by the godly and learned Tyndale, this was in 1526; shortly before the cruel martyrdom of Tyndale, Coverdale presented to his countrymen the first complete printed English Bible, in 1535; two years afterwards, dear John Rogers gave us his revised edition of Coverdale's Bible, familiarly known as "Matthew's Bible," 1537; another two years or so, and the "Great or Cranmer Bible" was published, which was simply a careful revision of what had gone before, 1540; twenty years of stirring events and Geneva becomes the birth-place of the first complete English Bible translated throughout from the original tongues, 1560; another period of about eight years, and in 1568 appeared what we would term "The Ecclesiastical Bible," known as the "Bishops' Bible," a simple revision of the Cranmer edition; soon after this the Romish Church began to think of England and of the clamant demand of her people for the Word of God in her native tongue, and so gave the New Testament in 1582 — the link between Wycliffe's Bible and King James' translation; then appeared the Douay Bible under high ecclesiastical sanction, possessing certain marked excellencies, but, on the whole, exceedingly faulty, 1609; two years after the complete Roman Catholic Bible was published, the noble and renowned work known as "the Authorised Version." — the result of seven years' diligent labour appeared, and thus crowned the work of Bible translation and printing, 1611.

We have already referred to the two versions of the Scriptures in public use during the prosperous reign of Elizabeth, and at the commencement of King James' — namely, the "Bishops' Bible," used at Court and in the Churches, and the. "Geneva Bible," in more common use in the households of the people. Neither gave universal satisfaction, and it was felt by all parties that sooner or later an entirely new version must be prepared. It was brought about in a simple way, as most great undertakings are. There was a conference held at Hampton Court, on January 16, 1604. Certain Church differences and questions were discussed in which the King took great interest. In the course of the proceedings, the Puritan, Dr. Reynold, proposed a new version of the Bible. The King, to please the Puritans, and attach them more firmly to his throne and constitution, and also because of his strongly expressed dislike to the two translations then in use, consented. The King's cordial approval silenced the opposition of the conformist party. The superintending hand of God was apparent even in the preliminary arrangements.

The measures adopted to secure a new version of the Holy Scriptures were of the most complete and satisfactory kind, and the result has been an edition of the Word of God unrivalled for its simplicity, for its force and vigour of language, a compendium of literary excellencies, and, what is still better, a faithful and accurate translation of the very words of the Holy Ghost. It is not a faultless version, far from it. Whatever critical helps we use in our private study of the Word of God, we ever and again turn to the authorised version for communion with God.

The New Testament of 1881 is a disappointment to many. It certainly corrects many of the blemishes and blunders of the edition of 1611, but, in the judgment of many, neither the scholarship nor piety and marked reverence for the Word of God, which distinguished the revisers and translators of the former work, are found in the latter one, and no doubt it will simply come to be regarded in course of time as a mere critical help in the study of the sacred volume.

The late revisers were in a much better position to construct an accurate Greek text than were those nominated by King James. Valuable MSS. and other sources of information have of late years been at the disposal of our Biblical critics, which have been largely taken advantage of by pious and learned men. The three oldest and most valuable of our Biblical MSS. were unknown to the translators of King James' time. The "Codex A," now in the British Museum, was presented to Charles I. in 1628, about 24 years after the Authorised Version was begun, and 17 years after it was finished. The "Codex B," now in the Vatican at Rome — perhaps the oldest MS. in existence — was only collated early this century, and published in 1858. The jealousy of the Papacy has hitherto practically debarred scholars from access to, and careful collation of, this valuable and venerable document. The "Codex Sinaiticus," discovered in 1859 by Professor Tischendorff, and now deposited in St. Petersburg. The first is supposed to date from the 5th century; the two latter from the 4th century. On the whole, therefore, the high expectations formed by many have not been realised, expectations based upon the rich and accumulated stores which the revision company of 1881 might have used, and which the revision company of 1611, not exceeding half their number, had nothing like in quantity or value.

King James named 54 pious and scholarly persons — and who were empowered to communicate with "all our principal learned men within this our kingdom," so that the scholarship of the country was consecrated to the noblest work which could engage the heart, the mind, and the pen of man — the production of our admirable English Bible. Seven of the number, through death and other causes, were unable to serve, so that the list was reduced to 47.

It may be interesting to know how and to whom the work was distributed. There were six committees chosen, two of which sat at Westminster, two at Cambridge, two at Oxford. The whole were presided over by Bishop Andrewes, who, besides possessing an intimate knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, Chaldee, and Syriac, was familiar with 16 other languages. As each set or committee of translators finished the particular part assigned to them, it was then subjected to the criticism of the other five sets in order; so that each part of the Bible came before the whole body of the translators. When the 47 finished their work it was then carefully reviewed by a final committee. Dr. Myles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester, wrote the preface.

It will be readily perceived from the instructions given to the translators that our English Bible is not a direct translation from the original tongues throughout, but might be more fitly spoken of as a combined revision and translation, the Bishops' Bible being used as the basis of the whole work. Although printed by his Majesty's special command, and appointed to be read in churches, it was not forced upon the acceptance of church and people by the civil power. On the whole, the wise measures adopted, and the number and character of the translators engaged in the work inspired general confidence, while the translation itself — so accurate, so artless, yet withal so vigorous in style and diction — commanded universal love and respect, and has continued to do so, for now nigh 300 years, The "Bishops' Bible" and "Geneva Version" soon went out of date and fashion.

It may interest the reader to have a copy of the instructions and rules issued by the King for the guidance of the translators, as also a list of their names and ecclesiastical positions, with the separate portions of Holy Scripture assigned to each committee for revision: —

1. The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the "Bishops' Bible," to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit.

2. The names of the prophets and the holy writers, with the other names in the text, to be retained, as near we may be, accordingly as they are vulgarly used.

3. The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, as the word church, not to be translated congregation.

4. When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most eminent fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place and the analogies of faith.

5. The division of chapters to be altered either not at all or as little as may be, if necessity so require.

6. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.

7. Such quotations of places to be marginally set down as shall serve for the fit reference of one Scripture to another.

8. Every particular man of each company to take the same chapter or chapters; and, having translated or amended them severally by himself where he thinks good, all to meet together to confirm what they have done and agree for their part what shall stand.

9. As any one company hath despatched any one book in this manner, they shall send it to the rest, to be considered of seriously and judiciously; for his Majesty is very careful in this point.

10. If any company, upon the review of the book so sent, shall doubt or differ upon any places, to send there word thereof, to note the places, and therewithal to send their reasons; to which if they consent not, the difference to be compounded at the general meeting, which is to be of the chief persons of each company, at the end of the work.

11. When any place of special obscurity is doubted of, letters to be directed by authority to send to any learned in the land for his judgment in such a place.

12. Letters to be sent from every bishop to the rest of his clergy, admonishing them of this translation in hand, and to move and charge as many as, being skilful in the tongues, have taken pains in that kind, to send their particular observations to the company, either at Westminster, Cambridge, or Oxford according as it was directed before in the King's letter to the archbishop.

13. The directors in each company to be the Deans of Westminster and Chester, for Westminster, and the King's professors in Hebrew and Greek in the two universities.

14. These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible: Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Matthew's [Rogers's], Whitchurch's [Cranmer's], Geneva."

15. By a later rule "three or four of the most ancient and grave divines, in either of the universities, not employed in translating, to be assigned to be overseers of the translation, for the better observation of the fourth rule."

Names and Official Standing of the Translators.

Westminster Committee.

Genesis to the end of the Second Book of Kings.

Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, President.

Overall, Bishop of Norwich.

Saravia, Prebendary of Westminster.

Clerke, one of the six Preachers.

Layfield, Rector of St. Clement Danes.

Teigh, Archdeacon of Middlesex.

Burleigh.

Kinge, Bishop of London.

Thomson.

Bedwell, Vicar of Tottenham.

Cambridge Committee.

First of Chronicles to the end of Ecclesiastes.

Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew, President.

Richardson, Master of Trinity.

Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel.

Dillingham, Rector of Dean, Beds.

Harrison, Vice-Master of Trinity.

Andrewes, Master of Jesus College.

Spaldinge, Fellow of St. John's.

Byng, Archdeacon of Norwich.

Oxford Committee.

From Isaiah to the end of the Old Testament.

Hardinge, Regius Professor of Hebrew, and President of Magdalen, President.

Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi.

Holland, Rector of Exeter College, and Regius Professor of Divinity.

Kilby, Rector of Lincoln College.

Smith, Bishop of Gloucester [writer of Preface].

Brett, Fellow of Chelsea College.

Fareclowe, Provost of Chelsea College.

Cambridge Committee.

The Apocrypha.

Duport, Master of Jesus, and Prebendary of Ely, President.

Braithwaite, Master of Gonville and Caius.

Radcliffe, Fellow of Trinity.

Ward, Master of Sidney Sussex.

Downes, Regius Professor of Greek.

Bois, Prebendary of Ely.

Ward, Prebendary of Chichester.

Oxford Committee.

The four Gospels, the Acts, and the Revelation.

Ravis, Bishop of London, President.

Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Montague, Bishop of Winchester.

Thompson, Dean of Windsor.

Savile (Sir Henry), Warden of Merton.

Perin, Regius Professor of Greek.

Ravens Harmer Regius Professor of Greek formerly, and now Warden of Winchester,

Westminster Committee.

The Epistles.

Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, President.

Hutchinson.

Spencer, Fellow of Corp. Ch. Camb.

Fenton, Prebendary of St. Paul's.

Rabbett.

Sanderson, Archdeacon of Rochester.

Dakin, Gresham Professor of Divinity.

The Revised New Testament of 1881.

The movement for a revision of the authorised version of the Holy Scriptures commenced on May 6, 1870, in the Convocation of Canterbury. An influential committee was at once formed, consisting mainly of distinguished scholars and divines within the pale of the Established Church, but with power to consult or add to their number eminent Biblical scholars of all denominations. Many of its members were truly eminent for godliness and of distinguished ability, but it may be gravely questioned whether the constitution of the Committee as a whole may be compared with that nominated by King James, for piety and extreme reverence for the Word of God.

Soon after the formation of the English Committee another was organized in America for the same purpose and in conjunction with the English one; so that the Revised New Testament is the result of the joint-labour of both Committees. The English revisers met regularly in the Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster; the American Committee in the Bible House, New York. The English Committee was divided into two companies, one devoting itself to the revision of the Old Testament (not yet finished), while the other attached itself to the New. The American Committee was similarly arranged.

Both Committees were in constant and confidential correspondence, so that as far as possible there might be mutual agreement in the result of their combined labours. It was a wise determination not to solicit the aid of the civil power or imprint its authority on the title page. It will thus stand or fall upon its own merits. It presents the result of ten years' research and labour. Whether we have in the revised New Testament an ample reward for the time and scholarship expended is questioned by many competent persons, but probably a little while will show. The Old Testament is not yet finished, and its publication is awaited with interest and anxiety by many Bible readers.

Both the English and American Committee adopted the following principles for their guidance:—

1. To introduce as few alterations as possible into the text of the Authorised Version consistently with faithfulness.

2. To limit, as far as possible, the expression of such alterations to the language of the Authorised or earlier Versions.

3. Each company to go twice over the portion to be revised — once provisionally, the second time finally.

4. That the text to be adopted be that for which the evidence is decidedly preponderating; and that when the text so adopted differs from that from which the Authorised Version was made, the alteration be indicated in the margin.

5. To make or retain no change in the text, on the second final revision by each company, except two-thirds of those present approve of the same; but on the first revision to decide by simple majorities.

6. In every case of proposed alteration that may have given rise to discussion, to defer the voting thereon till the next meeting, whensoever the same shall be required by one-third of those present at the meeting.

7. To revise the headings of chapters, pages, paragraphs, italics, and punctuation.

8. To refer, on the part of each company, when considered desirable, to divines, scholars, and literary men, whether at home or abroad, for their opinions.

The following is a list of the English and American Revisers*: —

(* See "Biblical Revision: its Necessity and Purpose.")

1. — English Revision Committee.

(1) Old Testament Company.

The Rt. Rev. E. H. Browne, D.D. (Chairman), Farnham. The Right Rev. Lord Arthur C. Hervey, D.D., Wells. The Right Rev. Alfred Ollivant, D.D., Llandaff. The Very Rev. Robert Payne Smith, D.D., Canterbury. The Ven. Benjamin Harrison, M.A., Canterbury. The Rev. Wm. Lindsay Alexander, D.D., Edinburgh. Robert L. Bensly, Esq., Cambridge. The Rev. John Birrell, St. Andrews. Frank Chance, Esq., M.D., Sydenham, London. Thomas Chenery, Esq., Reform Club, London, S.W. The Rev. T. K. Cheyne, Balliol College, Oxford. The Rev. A. B. Davidson, D.D., Edinburgh. The Rev. George Douglas, D.D., Glasgow. S. R. Driver, Esq., Tutor of New College, Oxford. The Rev. C. J. Elliott, Winkfield Vicarage, Windsor. The Rev. Frederick Field, D.D., Heigham, Norwich. The Rev. J. D. Geden, Wesleyan College, Manchester. The Rev. C. D. Ginsburg, LL.D., Wokingham, Berks. The Rev. Frederick William Gotch, D.D., Bristol. The Rev. William Kay, D.D., Chelmsford. The Rev. Stanley Leathes, B .D. , King's College, London. The Rev. John Rawson Lumby, B.D., Cambridge. The Very Rev. J. J. S. Perowne, D.D., Peterborough. The Rev. A. H. Sayce, Queen's College, Oxford. The Rev. William Robertson Smith, Aberdeen. William Wright, Professor of Arabic, Cambridge. William Aldis Wright, Esq. (Secretary), Cambridge.

O. T. Company, 27.

Note. — The English Old Testament Company lost, by death, the Right Rev. Dr. Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, d. 27th July, 1875; the Ven. Henry John Rose, Archdeacon of Bedford, d. 31st January, 1873; the Rev. William Selwyn, D.D., Canon of Ely, d. 24th April, 1875; the Rev. Dr. Patrick Fairbairn, Principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow, d. 6th August, 1874; Professors M Gill, d. 16th March, 1871; Weir, 27th July, 1876; and Davies, 19th July, 1875; and by resignation, the Right Rev. Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln; the Rev. John Jebb, Canon of Hereford; and the Rev. Edward Hayes Plumptre, D.D., Professor of N. T. Exegesis, King's College, London (resigned 17th March, 1874).

(2) New Testament Company.

The Rt. Rev. C. J. Ellicott, D. D. (Chairman), Gloucester. The Right Rev. George Moberly, D.C.L., Salisbury. The Right Rev. Joseph B. Lightfoot, D.D., Durham. The Very Rev. Edward H. Bickersteth, D.D., Lichfield, The Very Rev. Arthur P. Stanley, D.D., Westminster. The Very Rev. Robert Scott, D.D., Rochester. The Very Rev. Joseph W. Blakesley, B.D., Lincoln. The Most Rev. Richard C. Trench, D.D., Dublin. The Right Rev. C. Wordsworth, D.C.L., St. Andrews. The Rev. Joseph Angus, D.D., London. The Rev. David Brown, D.D., Aberdeen. The Rev. Fenton J. Anthony Hort, P.D., Cambridge. The Rev. William Gibson Humphry, London. The Rev. Benjamin Hall Kennedy, D.D., Cambridge. The Ven. William Lee, D.D., Dublin. The Rev. William Milligan, D.D., Aberdeen. The Rev. William F. Moulton, D.D., Cambridge. The Rev. Samuel Newth, D.D., Hampstead, London. The Ven. Edwin Palmer, D.D., Christ Church, Oxford. The Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D., St. Andrews. The Rev. F. Henry Ambrose Scrivener, LL.D., London. The Rev. George Vance Smith, D.D., Carmarthen. The Rev. Charles John Vaughan, D.D., London. The Rev. Brooke Foss Westcott, D.D., Cambridge. The Rev. J. Troutbeck (Secretary), Westminster.

N.T. Company, 25.

Active Members in both Companies, 52,

Note. — The English New Testament Company lost, by death, the Right Rev. Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, d. 1873; the Very Rev. Dr. Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury. d. 1871; the Rev. Dr. John Eadie, Professor of Biblical Literature in the United Presbyterian Church, Glasgow, d. 1876; and Mr. Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, LL.D (who was prevented by ill health from taking any part in the work), d. 1875; and, by resignation, the Rev. Dr. Charles Merivale, Dean of Ely.

(The Rev. F. C. Cook, Canon of Exeter, the Rev, Dr. E. B. Pusey, who were asked to join the O.T. Company, and the Rev. Dr. J. H. Newman, who was asked to join the N.T. Company, declined to serve.)

2. — American Revision Committee.

General Officers of the Committee.

Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., President. George E. Day, D.D., Secretary.

(1) Old Testament Company.

Prof. W. H. Green, D.D., LL.D. (Chairman), Princeton, N.J. Prof. G. E. Day, D.D. (Secretary), New Haven, Conn. Professor Charles A. Aitken, D.D., Princeton, N.J. The Rev. T. W. Chambers, D.D., New York, Professor Thomas J. Conant, D.D., Brooklyn, N.Y. Professor John De Witt, D.D., New Brunswick, N.J. Professor G. Emlen Hare, D.D., LL.D., Philadelphia.. Professor Chas. P. Krauth, D.D., LL.D., Philadelphia. Professor Charles M. Mead, D.D., Andover, Mass. Professor Howard Osgood, D.D., Rochester, N.Y. Professor Joseph Packard, D.D., Alexandria, Va. Professor Calvin E. Stowe, D.D., Hartford, Conn. Professor James Strong, S.T.D., Madison, N.J. Professor C. V. A. Van Dyck, D.D. , M.D., Beirut, Syria. (Advisory Member on questions of Arabic).

O. T. Company, 14.

Note. — The American Old Testament Company lost, by death, Tayler Lewis, LL.D., Professor Emeritus of Greek and Hebrew, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., d. 1877.

(2) New Testament Company.

Ex-President T. D. Woolsey, D.D., LL.D. (Chairman), New Haven, Conn.

Prof. J. Henry Thayer, D.D. (Secretary), Andover, Mass, Professor Ezra Abbot, D.D., LL.D., Cambridge, Mass. The Rev. J. K. Burr, D. D., Trenton, New Jersey. President Thomas Chase, LL.D., Haverford College, Pa. Chancellor Howard Crosby, D.D., LL.D., New York. Professor Timothy Dwight, D.D., New Haven, Conn. Professor A. O. Kendrick, D.D. , LL.D., Rochester, N.Y. The Right Rev. Alfred Lee, D.D., Bishop of Delaware. Professor Matthew B. Riddle, D.D., Hartford, Conn. Professor Philip Schaff, D.D., LL.D., New York. Professor Charles Short, LL.D., Columbia College, N.Y. The Rev. E. A. Washburn, D.D., Calvary Church, N.Y.

N. T. Company, 13. In both Companies, 27.

Note. — The American New Testament Company lost, by death, James Hadley, LL.D., Professor of Greek, Yale College, Conn. (who attended the first session), d. 1872; Professor Henry Boynton Smith, D.D., LL.D. Union Theological Seminary, New York (who attended one session, and resigned, from ill health), d. 1877; Professor Horatio B. Racket, D.D., LL.D., Theological Seminary, Rochester, N. Y., d. 1876; and Professor Charles Hodge, D.D., LL.D., Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J. (who never attended the meetings, but corresponded with the committee), d. 1878; and by resignation, Rev. G. R. Crooks, D.D., New York, and Rev. W. F. Warren, D.D., Boston (who accepted the original appointment, but found it impossible to attend).

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 7 Specimens of Translations and Peculiar Renderings.

7. Specimens of Translations and Peculiar Renderings.

Here is a specimen of the language in which the Scriptures were read in the eighth and ninth centuries, during the time of the venerable Bede, King Alfred, St. Cuthbert, and probably for a considerable time after the Norman Conquest of England. It is from John's Gospel, and is scarcely readable in the 19th century. By comparing the specimens of early English, the gradual growth of the language into its present form may be more easily traced: —

"On fruman waes Word and thaet Word waes mid Gode, and Gode waes thaet Word. Thaet waes on fruman mid Gode. Ealle thing waren geworhte thurh hyne; and nan thing waes geworht buttan him. Thaet waes lif the on him geworht waes, and thaet lif waes manna leoht. And thaet leoht lyht on thystrum; and thystro thaet ne genamon. Man waes fram Gode asend, thaes nama waes Johannes. Thaes com to gewitnesse, thaet he gewitnesse cythde be tham Leohte, thaet ealle men thurh hyne gelyfdon. Nees he Leoht, ac thaet he gewitnesse forth-baere be tham Leohte. Soth Leoht waes, thaet onlyht aelcne cumendne man on thysne mid-dan-eard. He waes on middan-earde, and middan-eard waes geworht thurh hine, and middan-eard hine ne gecneow."

The English of Wycliffe, 14th century, is more easily read than that just given we transcribe a passage from Luke's Gospel in the Wycliffe translation:

"In the dayes of Eroude Kyng of Judee ther was a prest Zacarye by name: of the sort of Abia, and his wyfe was of the doughtris of Aaron: and hir name was Elizabeth: An bothe weren juste bifore God: goynge in alle the maundementis and justifyingis of the Lord withouten playnt. And thei hadden no child for Elizabeth was bareyn and bothe weren of greet age in her dayes. And it befel that whenne Zacarye schould do the office of presthod in the ordir of his course to fore God. Aftir the custom of the presthod he went forth by lot and entride into the temple to encensen.

"And al the multitude of the puple was without forth and preyede in the our of encensying. And an aungel of the Lord apperide to him and stood on the right half of the auter of encense. And Zacharye seynge was afrayed and drede fel upon him. And the aungel sayde to him, Zacarye drede thou not: for thy preier is herd and Elizabeth thi wife schal bere to thee a sone and his name schal be clepid Jon.

"And joye and gladyng schal be to thee and manye schulen have joye in his natyvyte."

Here is another specimen of early English, from a MS. Bible, about 1350 — thirty years before the publication of Wycliffe's translation

Early English MS. Bible [about A.D. 1350]

John 1: 13, 14. (The book has a facsimile of these verses.)

In most, if not all versions of the Holy Scriptures issued before the Great Bible, 1539, will be found the following peculiar rendering of Psalm 91: 5: —

"So that thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for any bugges by night, nor for the arrowe that flyeth by daye."

In all the Bibles published before the present authorised version (1611), except the Genevan and Douay Bibles, the word "balm" (Jer. 8: 22) is rendered "treacle." Thus Matthew's Bible, 1537, reads:—

"Is not the Lorde in Syon? Is not the kynge in her? Wherefore then haue they grened me (shall the Lorde saye) with theyr yinages and folyshe strange fashyons? The harueste is gone, the sommer hath an ende, and we are not helped. I am sore vexed, because of ye hurte of my people. I am heuye and abashed, for there is no more tryacle at Galaad, and there is no physycyen that can heal the hurte of my people." In the exceptions named we read — "Is there noe rosin in Galaad."

In the Puritan or Geneva editions of the Holy Scriptures the word "aprons" (Gen. 3: 7) is rendered "breeches." In Wycliffe's Bible the passage reads thus:—

"And whan yei knewen yat ya were naked, ya sewiden ye levis of a fige tre, and madin breechis."

Richard Rolle, a Yorkshire hermit, in the fourteenth century, before the publication of the Wycliffe Bible, translated the Psalms. Here is a specimen of his work from Scotland's favourite one, the 23rd: —

"Our lord gouerneth me and nothyng to me shall want stede of pasture thar he me sette. In the water of the hetyng forth he me brougte: my soule he turnyde.

"He ladde me on the stretis of rygtwisnesse: for his name.

"For win gif I hadde goo in myddil of the shadewe of deeth: I shal not dreede yueles, for thou art with me.

"Thi geerde and thi staf thei have coumfortid me. Thou hast greythed in my sygt a bord: agens hem that angryn me.

"Thou fattede myn heued in oyle: aud my chalys drunkyenyng what is cleer.

"And thi mercy shall folowe me: in alle the dayes of my lyf.

"And that I wone in the hous of oure lord in the lengthe of dayes."

In one of the reprints of Matthew's Bible, of 1549, August 17th, twelve years after the publication of the first edition, there is a number of curious woodcuts in the Revelation, each picture being explained by two lines. The cuts were common enough in those days, but the explanatory doggerel is not so familiar to English readers: —

1st Figure.

By the Stars in hys hand we may wel se

What maner of men our preachers should be.

2nd Figure.

In the middest of his church God sytteth in majestie,

To whom al hys faythfull geue honoure, and glorye.

3rd Figure.

Pale hypocrytes, enemies to Goddes Gospel,

Bring death in their doctrine, and dryue us to hell,

4th Figure.

The sainctes that we prayed to, lo, where they lye,

And they that were our spokes men herke low they crye.

6th Figure.

The Lord hath his numbre, whom he doeth preserue

Their soulles shall not perishe, though theyr bodies sterue.

7th Figure.

The prayers of godly men that do lyue here,

And they that before God so pleasant appere.

8th Figure.

Oute of the darke pytte came locustes fell,

To vexe them that lyueth not after the Gospel.

9th Figure.

The doctrine and laws of these beastes cruel

Drawe the thyrde part of men unto hell.

10th Figure.

Goddes worde is swete in the mouth of the faythfull,

But bitter in the bealy, to the fleet it is painful.

11th Figure.

The Popes parte is cast out and geuen to the swords

When the Churche is measured wyth Goddes word.

12th Figure.

Goddes chosen Churche trauayleth here alwaye,

And bringeth forth Christe both nyght and day.

13th Figure.

The open enemye is most ougly in syghte,

But the wolfe in the Lambes skyne doeth al the spight.

14th Figure.

The electe of God onely can singe the songe

That soundeth on the herte, and not on the tonge.

15th Figure.

At the tyme appointed by Goddes secret wyll,

The Sykle shal cut downe boeth good and yll.

16th Figure.

The seuen trompettes and the seuen scales,

Declare the same thinges that the seuen vialles.

17th Figure.

The Princes of the earth euerye one

Have with this whore wrought fornicacyon.

18th Figure.

The Romyshe marchauntes, the Priestes of Ba.

Do wepe, houle, and crye, at Babylon's fall.

19th Figure.

All flesh is kylled with the ij edged sworde,

Which after the spirit is called Goddes worde.

20th Figure.

For euer lyeth Sathan bounde in chayne,

Though in his membres he be louse agayne.

21st Figure.

A beautyfull cytye, most semelye to se

Are the faythfull followers of Goddes verytye.

In Coverdale's Bible, 1535, there are many peculiar renderings, thus: —

Gen. viij. and 11, "She bare the olive leaf in her nebb."

Judges 10: 53, "Cast a piece of milstone upon Abimelech's head, and brake his brain pan."

1 Kings 20: 34, "And shot the King of Israel between the maw and the lungs."

1 S. Timothy vj. and 4, "But wasteth his brain about questions and strivings of words."

In some of the early versions the untranslated Hebrew words in the text of our present Bibles are wisely and correctly translated. It is true that in numerous instances the translation is given in the margin, but the English reader of the Scriptures naturally asks, Is then the margin correct? and if so, why is it not in the text? The well of "Beer-lahai roi" (Gen. 16: 14) is rendered in the old versions the well of him that "liveth and seeth me." Again, "El-Elohe-Israel" (Gen. 33: 20) "El" it is well known, is the expression of God in His might, hence the old Bibles read, "The mighty God of Israel." "It is manna" (Ex. 16: 15) has no meaning to a reader unacquainted with Hebrew, but as translated in the earliest versions "What is this?" the passage is simple enough.

In the following pages we give specimens of the same portions of Holy Scripture (New Testament) from the four editions of 1380, 1537, 1560, 1582. The comparison is simple yet withal instructive. It will be observed that the verses are not numbered in the two earliest editions. The first English Bible distinguished by numbers was the Genevan of 1560. We also give a few illustrations from the Old Testament, confining ourselves to the book of Genesis, the book of Psalms, and the prophet Daniel.

John Wycliffe's, 1380.

Matthew. chap. 2.

A therefore whanne Jhesus was borun in Bethleem of Juda, in the daies of kyng Eroude. Lo astronomyenes camen fro the eest to Jerusalem.

And thou Bethleem the lond of Juda are not the leste among the princis of Juda, for of thee a duyk schal go out that schal governe my puple of Israel.

B Thanne Eroude clepide prively the astronomyenes.

C Than Eroude seynge that he was disseyved of astronomyenes was ful wrooth, and he sent and slowgh alle the children that weren in Bethleem.

Effesies. chap. 6.

C For why stryvyng is not to us aghens fleisch and blood, but aghens the princis and potestatis, aghens governouris of the world of these derknessis, aghens spiritual thingis of wickidnesse in hevenli thingis.

Grace withalle men that loven oure Lord Jesus Crist in uncorupcioun Amen. That is so be it

1. Tymo. chap. 4.

A Ghyvynge tent to spiritis of errour and to techingis of develis.

Nyle thou litil charge the grace which is in thee, that is ghovun to thee by prophecie with puttyng on of the hondis of presthood.

John Rogers', 1537.

The Gospel of St. Matthew. chap. 2.

A When Jesus was borne at Bethleem in Jeurye in the tyme of Herode the kynge. Beholde ther came wyse men from the Eest to Jerusalem.

And thou Bethleem in the lande of Jeurye, art not the leest concernynge the prynces of Juda. For out of the shal come the captayne, that shall govern my people Israel.

B Then Herod previly called the wisemen.

C Then Herod perceavynge that he was mocked of the wysemen was excedinge wroth and sent forth and slue all the chyldren that were in Bethleem.

The Epystle of S. Paule to the Ephesy. chap. 6.

C For we wrestle not agaynste fleshe and bloude: but agaynste rule, agaynste power, and agaynste worldly rulers of the darknes of thys worlde, agaynste spiritual wickednes, for heavenlye thynges.

Grace be wyth all them which love our Lord Jesus Christ in puernes. Amen.

The Fyrste Epistle of Saynte Paul unto Tymothe. chap. 4.

A And shall gyve hede unto spirites of erroure, and devilishe doctryne.

D Despise not the gyfte that is in the, which was given the thorow prophesy, and with laying on of the handes of an elder.

Geneva, 1560.

The holy gospel of Jesus Christ, according to St. Matthew. chap. 2.

1 When Jesus then was borne at Bethlehem in Judea in the dayes of Herode the king, beholde there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem.

6 And thou Bethlehem in the lande of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come the governour that shall feede my people Israel.

7 Then Herode privily called the wisemen.

10 Then Herode, seeing that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slewe all the male children that were in Bethlehem.

The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians. chap. 3.

12 For wee wrestle not against fleshe and blood, but against principalites, against powers, and against the worldly governours, the princes of the darknesse of this world, against spirituall wickednesses which are in the high places.

24 Grace be with all them which love our Lord Jesus Christ, to their immortalitie. Amen.

The First Epistle of Paul to Timotheus. chap. 4.

1. And shall give heed unto spirits of errour and doctrines of devils.

14. Despise not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by prophecie with the laying on of the hands of the companie of the eldership.

Rheims, 1582.

The Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ, according to St. Matthew. chap. 2.

1 When Jesus therefore was borne in Bethlehem of Juda in the daies of Herod the king, beholde there came sages from the east to Hierusalem.

6 And thou Bethlehem the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come foorth the captaine that shall rule my people Israel.

7 Then Herode secretly calling the sages.

16 Then Herode perceiving that he was deluded by the sages, was exceeding angry: and sending murdered all the men children that were in Bethlehem.

The Epistle of S. Paul to the Ephesians. chap. 6.

12 For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood: but against princes potestates, against the rectors of the world of this darkenes, against the spirituals of wickednes in the celestials.

24 Grace with all that love our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruption.

The First Epistle of St. Paul to Timothee. chap. 4.

1 Attending to spirites of errour, and doctrines of devils.

14 Neglect not the grace that is in thee: which is given thee by prophecie, with the imposition of the hands of priesthod.

John Wycliffe's, 1380.

Hebrewis. chap. 1.

A At the laste in these daies he hath spoke to us bi the sone whome he hath ordeynen eir of alle thingis and bi whom he made the worldis which also whanne he is the brightnesse of glorie, and figure of his substaunce, and berith alle thingis bi word of his vertue, he maketh purgacion of synnes and sittith on the right half of the majestee in hevenes.

1. Petir. chap. 1.

A Petir apostle of Jesus Crist to the chosun men, to the comelingis of scateryng abrood of Ponte, of Galathie, of Capadocie, of Asie. and of Bythynie, by the bifore knowing of God the Fadir in halewing of spirit, bi obedience and sprenging of the blood of Jesus Crist, grace and pees be multiplied to you.

1. Jon.  chap. 5.

C He that hath the Sone of God hath also lyf, he that hath not the Sone of God hath not lyf.

D And we witen that the Sone of God cam in fleische and gaf to us witte, that we knowe verrei God, and be in the verrei Sone of hym. This is verrei God, and everlastynge lyf. My litle Sones kepe ye you fro mawmetis.

John Rogers', 1537.

The Epystle of Sayncte Paule unto the Hebreus. chap. 1.

A But in these laste dayes he hath spoken unto us by hys son whom he hath made heyre of all thynges: by whom also he made the worlde. Whych sonne beynge the bryghtnes of hys glory, and verye image of his substaunce, bearing up al things with the worde of hys power, hath in hys owne person pourged oure sinnes, and is set on the ryght hand of the majestye on hygh.

The Fyrste Epistle of Saynt Peter the Apostle.

chap. 1.

A Peter an apostle of Jesu Christ to them that dwel here and there as straungers thorowout al Pontus, Galacia, Capadocia, Asia and Bithinia, electe, by the foreknowledge of God the Father, thorowe the santyfying of the spyrit, unto obedience of spryncklyng of the bloude of Jesu Christe. Grace be wyth you and peace be multiplied.

The Fyrst Epystle of Sayncte John. chap. 5.

C He that hath the Sonne hath lyfe.

D We knowe that the Sonne of God is come, and hath geven us a mynd to know hymn whiche is true: and we are in hymn that is true thorowe his Sonne Jesus Christ. This same is very God and eternall lyfe. Babes, kepe yourselves from images. Amen.

Geneva, 1560.

The Epistle to the Hebrews. chap. 1.

2 In these last dayes he hath spoken unto us by his Sonne, whome he hath made heir of all things, by whom also he made the worldes,

3 Who being the brightnes of the glory, and the engraved forme of his person, in bearing up all things by his mighty word, hath by himselfe purged our sinnes, and sitteth at the right hand of the majestie in the highest places.

The First Epistle Generall of Peter. chap. 1.

1 Peter an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers that dwell here and there throughout Pontus, Galatia, Capadocia, Asia, and Bythnia,

2 Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father unto sanctification of the spirit, through obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. Grace and peace be multiplied unto you.

The First Epistle Generall of John. chap. 5.

12 Hee that hath that Sonne, hath that life: and hee that hath not that Sonne of God, hath not that life.

20 But we know that that Sonne of God is come, and hath given us a minde to know him, which is true: and we are in him that is true, that is, in his Sonne JESUS CHRIST: this same is very GOD and eternall life.

21 Babes, keepe yourselves from idoles. Amen.

Rheims, 1582.

The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrewes  chap. 1.

2 Last of al in these daies hath spoken to us in his sonne, whom he hath appointed heire of al, by whom he made also the worldes, Who being the brightnesse of his glorie, and the figure of his substance, and carying al things by the word of his power, making purgation of sinnes, sitteth on the right hand of the Majestie in the high places.

The First Epistle of St Peter the Apostle. chap. 1.

1 Peter an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the electe strangers of the dispersion of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynla.

2 According to the prescience of God the Father, into santification of the spirit, unto the obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. Grace to you and peace be multiplied.

The First Epistle of St. John the Apostle. chap. 5.

12 He that hath the Sonne hath life. He that hath not the Sonne of God hath not life.

20 And we know that the Sonne of God commeth: and he hath given us understanding, that we may know the true God, and may be in his true Sonne. This is the true God, and life everlasting. My little children keepe yourselves from idols. Amen.

John Rogers' Translation, 1537.

The First Boke of Moses, called Genesis. chap. 3.

B And the eyes of bothe them were opened that they understode how that they were naked. Than, they sowed fygge-leves togedder and made them apurns.

C I wyll put hatred betwene the and the woman and betwene thy seed and hyr seed.

And that seed shall tread the on thy heed, and thou shalt treade it on the hele.

The Psalmes of David. Psalms 68.

A Oh synge unto God, synge prayses unto his name: magnyfye hym that rydeth above the heavens (whose name is the Lorde) and rejoyse before hym.

The Boke of the Prophesye of Daniel. chap. 9.

G Understande thys then and marcke it well: that from the tyme it shall be concluded, to go and repayre Jerusalem agayne unto Christ (or the anoynted) prynce: there shall be seven wekes. Then shall the stretes and walles be buylded agayne LXII wekes but with hard troublous tyme. After these LXII weeks, shall Christ be slayne, and they shall have no pleasure in hym. Then shall there come a people wyth the Prince, and destroye the citie, and the sanctuary: and hys ende shall come as the water floud. But the desolacyon shall contiynue tyll the ende of the battell.

Bishops' Bible, 1572 and 1575.

The First Booke of Moses, called in Hebrewe

of the First Worde of the Booke, Bereschith,

and in Greeke Genesis. chap. 3.

6 Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knewe that they were naked, and they sewed figge leaves togeather and made themselves apernes.

15 I wyl also put enmitie betweene thee and the woman, betweene thy seede and her seede: and it shall treade downe thy head, and thou shalt treade upon his heele.

The Psalmes of David. Psalm 68.

4 O sing unto God, and sing prayses unto his name: magnifie him that rideth upon the heavens, as it were upon an horse, prayse him in his name, yea, and rejoyce before him.

The Book of the Prophete Daniel. chap. 9.

25 Know therefore, and understand that from the goying foorthe of the commandemente, to bring agayne the (people,) and to builde Hierusalem unto Messiah the prince, there shall be seaven weekes, and threescore and two weekes, and the streets shal be built agayne, and the wall, (even) in the straitenesse of tyme.

26 After these threescore and two weekes, shall Messiah be slayne, and not for hymselfe: and the people of the prince that shall come, shall destroy the citie and the sanctuarie, and the end thereof shall be with a flodde, and unto the end of the battayle, it shall be destroyed by desolations.

Geneva edition, 1579.

The First Boke of Moses, called Genesis. chap. 3.

7 Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches.

15 I will also put enimitie between thee and the woman, and betweene thy seed and her seed, He shall breake thine head, and thou shalt bruise his heele.

The Psalmes of David. Psalm 68.

4 Sing unto God, and sing praises unto his name: exalt him that rideth upon the heavens, in his name, JAH, and rejoice before him.

Daniel. chap. 9.

25 Know therefore and understand that from the going foorth of the commandement to bring againe the people, and to build Jerusalem, unto Messiah the prince, shall be seven weekes, and threescore and two weekes, and the streets shall bee built againe, and the wall even in a troubleous time.

26 And after threescore and two weekes, shall Messiah be slaine, and shall have nothing, and the people of the prince that shall come, shall destroy the citie and the sanctuary, and the end thereof shall be with a flood; and unto the end of the battell it shall be destroyed by desolations.

King James', or Present Translation.

The First Book of Moses, called Genesis. chap. 3.

7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The Book of Psalms. Psalm 68.

4 Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH, and rejoice before him.

The Book of Daniel. chap. 9.

25 Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem, unto the Messiah the prince, shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary: and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.

STEM Publishing : Walter Scott : The Story of our English Bible : 8 The Bible: Its Divisions, Titles, and Subscriptions.

8. The Bible: Its Divisions, Chapters, Verses, Titles, and Subscriptions.

Divisions.

The Bible might be conveniently divided into six main parts; the Old Testament into three, and the New Testament into three. The Old Testament Scriptures are familiarly spoken of as "Moses and the Prophets" (Luke 16: 29; Matt. 11: 13); but a fuller division of the 39 sacred books of the former revelation will be found contained in Luke 24: 44 — "The law of Moses, the prophets, the psalms." The first comprises the books from Genesis to Deuteronomy; the second embraces the historical books from Joshua to Esther, and the more direct prophetic section from Isaiah to Malachi; the third, the remaining five books from Job to Song of Solomon.

The New Testament naturally divides into three parts. First, the four Gospels as laying the foundation of Christianity in the revelation of the person and work of the Lord. Second, the Acts, in which are detailed the historical annals of Christianity for about 34 years — marvellous record of primitive missionary enterprise. In the former section the Lord is witnessed as acting on earth, and the Holy Ghost from heaven; while in the latter the Lord is regarded as the object of faith as present at God's right hand, and the Holy Ghost present on earth the efficient power of all Church and Gospel testimony. Third, the Epistles embrace the whole circle of Christian truth and doctrine, and the regulation of Christian life and service.

Chapters.

The necessity of dividing the sacred books into chapters or sections was early recognised. To read right through a whole book without a single break was too great a strain upon the memory; hence, in the third century, earlier attempts were set aside, and a system adopted by Ammonius, a learned Christian of Alexandria. But the Ammonian sections, as they are termed, were but partially applied, being confined to the four Gospels, or the Gospel by four, so called by Eusebius; nor was it at all a complete or satisfactory system. He divided Matthew into 355 sections; Mark into 234; Luke into 342; and John into 231. This was the fullest attempt yet made to present the contents of the Gospels in parallel order. Eusebius in the fourth century, the father of ecclesiastical history, in his Harmony of the Four Gospels, greatly improved upon the system of Ammonius. Adopting his "sections," he also added ten canons to the parallel sections of Ammonius. The improved system of paragraphing the Gospels, so as to assist in comparing the parallel portions, is very fully given in Wordsworth's Greek Testament, besides other particulars, and are spoken of as "The Eusebian Canons." Ere the century closed an unknown hand divided into sections the Epistles of Paul.

Next century, about 458, Euthalius, an Alexandrian deacon, some say bishop, prepared an edition of Paul's Epistles in which he adopted the divisions introduced 60 years previously, and which he ascribed to "one of the wisest and most Christ-loving of our fathers," In 490 A.D. he broke up the Acts and general Epistles into readable and convenient sections, now known as "The Euthalian Sections." He further improved the text by arranging as many words in a line as would complete the sense. Probably this was the earliest, and certainly the most successful, attempt yet made to simplify the reading of unpunctuated MSS. He also introduced those summaries of the contents of the chapters in our English New Testament, and which really disfigure them. The summaries were altered by Dr. Blayney in 1769.

The introduction of points or stops, so as to mark the sense, is assigned to the era of Jerome. In the beginning of the fourth century, and through the progress of several centuries, the system of punctuation was gradually improved, as was also the style of writing. The earliest MSS., and up to about the 10th century, are termed Uncials (Latin, inch), so called from the size of the letters, and which were all capitals. Afterwards the cursive or small running hand was employed, as the word cursive, from the Latin, denotes. Hence Biblical and other MSS. are spoken of as "uncials" or "cursives" according to the style of writing which they present; an important factor too in helping to determine the probable age of a MS.

But the division of the sacred books into chapters as in our English and all other Western Bibles is comparatively a modern one, and the introduction of verses still more so.

In the 13th century, and about the year 1244 or 1248, there lived a Dominican named Hugo de Sancto Caro, a very clever, learned, and ingenious man and who was made a Cardinal, the first of his order who was advanced to such a dignity. Cardinal Hugo conceived the happy idea of preparing a concordance to the Scriptures — the Vulgate or Latin Bible. We may just say in passing, as an interesting circumstance to Bible readers, that this was the first concordance of the kind ever produced, and the Latin Bible the first ever printed. It ought to be borne in mind that Latin and other copies of the Bible were only marked according to the divisions already referred to, and some in fact had no divisions at all, hence in order to facilitate an easy reference of the concordance to the Bible, he divided the latter into chapters, and these again into smaller sections of equal length, marked on the margin of the MS. by the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Hugo's chapters were in course transferred to the Hebrew and Greek originals and to all English and other Bibles. The earliest editions of the Scriptures in the vernacular, as Wycliffe's and Tyndale's, were sectioned off according to the Cardinal's chapters at the top and letters on the margin of the page (see specimen pages).

Verses.

The history of our modern verses is on this wise. A celebrated Jewish Rabbi, Mordecai Nathan, about 1430 was engaged in frequent disputes with the Christians, and as they could readily find any word or passage in the Bible by the help of Hugo's concordance — the former being sectioned off into chapters, and smaller divisions noted by letters — it occurred to the Rabbi to prepare a similar work for Jewish use to the Hebrew Scriptures. He completed his task in seven years — from 1438-1445 — about the era of the invention of printing.

But Nathan, while adopting Hugo's chapters, rejected his smaller divisions, and instead of letters, substituted Hebrew numeral figures, placing them at every fifth verse on the margin.

But the Rabbi, while availing himself of the Cardinal's labours in the division of the sacred books into chapters, improved in the arrangement of the smaller sections. Hugo, we have already remarked, divided his chapters into seven equal portions where they were long, and the shorter ones into a fewer number of parts, noting them on the margin by letters. But Nathan substituted Hebrew numeral figures, not letters, placing them in the margin at a distance equal to every fifth verse. Hebrew Bibles have both chapters and verses marked in the margin, and the text broken into sections for their synagogue lessons.

The plan of the Rabbi was still further improved by a member of the Hebrew persuasion. Athias, an Amsterdam Jew and printer, produced two editions of the Hebrew Bible, the first in 1661 and the second in 1667. Athias introduced numeral letters in those places omitted by Nathan. All the Latin, Greek, English, and other Bibles now in use throughout the known world, save in a very few exceptions, have the chapters of Hugo and the verses of Athias.

But we have not yet accounted for the verses in our New Testament. This was the work of Robert Stephens, a celebrated French printer, and a man of considerable scholastic attainments. Stephens in preparing a fourth edition of his Greek Testament — published in 1551 — found that the chapters of Hugo were too long for easy reference, and so subdivided them to assist him in compiling a concordance for his Testament, afterward printed by his son Henry. Stephens divided the chapters of the New Testament into verses while travelling from Paris to Lyons, and from him they have been copied into all English and other editions of the sacred Scriptures. Can any one reasonably suppose that a man on horseback, or even resting in the inconvenient inns in these days, was competent, under such circumstances, to break up the text of Scripture into 7959 verses? How much better were the Bible sectioned off into paragraphs, according to the evident sense of the Spirit in the respective portions. Yet the present arrangement is not without its merits. Our English Bibles thus have Hugo's chapters throughout, the Jew's arrangement of verses for the Old Testament, and Stephens' verses for the New Testament. The first of English Bibles thus chaptered and versed is the Bishop's Bible, that immediately preceding our authorised version.

Titles.

The titles or inscriptions prefixed to the sacred books are of great antiquity. The authors of them are unknown. "The Book of Psalms" is a divine title (Acts 1: 20). The names of the separate books of the Pentateuch come to us from the titles found in the LXX.; the Hebrew titles are from the opening word or sentence in the various books. "Chronicles" from the Vulgate of Jerome. The word "general" is not found in any of the so-called Catholic Epistles of earliest date, nor is the name of "Paul" introduced in the earliest MSS. of the "Hebrews." The more ancient the MSS. of the New Testament, the more brief and simple are the titles. Not only are the titles prefixed to the books of the Bible (with perhaps an exception or so) destitute of Divine authority, but they present considerable diversity in the form in which they occur in the MSS. — notably so those of the New Testament, but in substance they are much the same.

Subscriptions.

It will be observed that these subscriptions are only attached to the Pauline Epistles, and are utterly destitute of Divine authority. They are of more recent date than the titles, being introduced by Euthalius of Alexandria, already referred to. Euthalius, about 458, edited an edition of Paul's 14 Epistles, and appended those subscriptions found in our English New Testament. It would have been better had the good presbyter left the Epistles to tell their own story where written, as some of the postscripts are positively incorrect, being contradicted by the very text of the Epistles to which they are attached. Horne in his Introduction, after citing various instances in which they contradict history and chronology, says: — "The author of these subscriptions, it is evident, was either grossly ignorant, or grossly inattentive."

No divisions whatever of the inspired text are of God; they are all human in their origin. Certainly the best way of reading Scripture is to read it as originally penned without any external divisions whatever. Where time allows, read a book right through, or pause where the Spirit has clearly indicated a break.

May God's presence be the place; the Holy Ghost, the teacher; and the book, the inspired Scriptures of the Old and New Testament — where, by whom, and from which our souls are taught for time and for eternity.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Missionary Life in Uganda

From Scottish Moors To African Swamps.

A Story of Missionary Life in Uganda.

By C.J.L.

London: G. Morrish, 20 Paternoster Square, E.C.

Contents.

Chapter 1. A Missionary Exhibition

Chapter 2. A Scotch Laddie

Chapter 3. A Mother's Influence

Chapter 4. A Boy's Request

Chapter 5. First Thoughts of Africa

Chapter 6. School Life and Business Training

Chapter 7. A Long Journey

Chapter 8. Fever and Famine

Chapter 9. On the March

Chapter 10. Fresh Trials

Chapter 11. Uganda at Last

Chapter 12. Dark Days

Chapter 13. Unfriendly Arabs

Chapter 14. Letters from Home

Chapter 15. Market-Day in Uganda

Chapter 16. A Royal Funeral

Chapter 17. Boat-Builders

Chapter 18. The New King

Chapter 19. Testing Times

Chapter 20. A Noble Army of Martyrs

Chapter 21. Great Changes

Chapter 22. Friends from Afar

Chapter 23. Called Higher

Chapter 1.

A Missionary Exhibition.

Not very long ago what was called "A Missionary Exhibition" was held in one of the largest buildings in London; for the three weeks during which it remained open it was visited every weekday by numbers of people. Grown-up people were there in crowds, but there was also a fair

sprinkling of boys and girls, who took an intelligent interest in what they saw, and really wanted to learn all they could about the dark places of the earth. They will not, I think, soon forget the delightful stories, told by more than one missionary, of the people among whom he or she (for more than one lady missionary told us about Chinese women or Indian schoolgirls) had been seeking to make known the sweet story of salvation through the precious blood of Christ.

"What was to be seen?" I am afraid that if I were to try to write down the names of all the articles exhibited you would not think the first chapter of "From Scottish Moors to African Swamps" an interesting one, and might not even care to read the second; so I will only name two or three.

In the "Indian Court" some very beautiful shawls were shewn, made by native workmen. A loom, so simple and almost clumsy that it was not easy to believe that stuffs so varied in design and rich in colour could have been woven upon it, was also shewn. Carved work in ivory, and chains and necklets of Indian gold met the eye at every turn, but from all the forms of beauty and blaze of colour many turned sadly away to look at the idols, of which quite a number were on view. Some were large, others small � all were ugly, and some almost shapeless; and yet these senseless idols are feared by millions of men, women and children, many of whom obey the same laws as ourselves.

In another court, bright with Chinese fans, lanterns and umbrellas, a medical missionary, at home on furlough, was telling how sick people are often treated in China. They cannot have a good time, and often have to suffer a great deal of needless pain. A native doctor has no need to learn much about different kinds of illnesses, their cause and cure; he will not be required to "walk the hospitals." His stock-in-trade usually consists of one or two books, some packets of herbs, a bundle of charms and a few large, dirty needles. Chinese doctors are, as a rule, very fond of using these needles, but as they take no trouble to keep them clean, their use often not only causes severe pain, but leaves worse trouble than the doctor at first attempted to cure.

A poor woman who was quite blind had, the doctor said, been brought to the Mission Hospital where he had worked, and to which he hoped very soon to return. She had been suffering from bad headaches, causing great pain in her eyes. She was taken by her friends to a native doctor, who said he must prick her eyes to let the pain out. He did so, in such a way that her sight was destroyed, and for the rest of her life she was hopelessly blind.

When a sick person goes to a Chinese doctor, who usually wears a long, loose coat (something like a dressing gown, made of green or plum-coloured silk), very large spectacles, and has his finger nails sometimes from two to three inches in length, carefully protected by small coverings of bamboo, the doctor opens a box about two feet in length, mumbles a charm over it, and after in a very solemn manner opening it, tells the patient to take one from a number of small bamboo canes, on each of which a number is given, and the sick man pays his fee, and goes away quite satisfied with the care bestowed upon him.

A peep at the "Far North" would be interesting, but we must not linger among the snow huts in which the Esquimaux live and sleep. They take long journeys in sledges drawn by reindeer or dogs and have very clever ways of catching seals and fish. The brave little band of missionaries who live and work in these cold countries often have to endure great hardships and as mail steamers only visit some of the ports once a year, we may be sure that their opportunities of getting home-letters and new books are few and far between.

But I have not told you anything about the African exhibits, and we shall find them of more than common interest. Day after day groups, varying from ten to twelve and fifty to sixty, gathered round a printing-press. Was there anything remarkable about it? I think not. It was old-fashioned, a trifle clumsy, and had few, if any, of the improvements that of late years have done so much to perfect the art of printing and yet the hearts of christian men and women were deeply moved as they read on a card the simple but touching story of how on that very press, in far-off Uganda, in the very heart of heathen Africa, the first scripture portions ever seen in that dark land had been printed.

"Who took the press there?" Alexander Mackay, who will long be remembered as the pioneer missionary of Uganda. The story of his useful and unselfish life is a deeply interesting one, and if in thought we follow step by step the way in which he was fitted for his life-work among African swamps, we shall, I hope, learn some lessons of patience, courage and simple trust in God.

His life-story, written by his sister, lies before me as I write, and from it we learn that on a dull, cheerless day in the autumn of the year 1849 there was rejoicing in a Scottish home over the arrival of a baby boy. The father, a godly, well-informed man, who preached every Lord's day in the neighbouring church, or "kirk," as he would have called it, and when not visiting among his poor or sick neighbours spent much time in his study, decided that the little stranger should be named Alexander.

The father looked with a strange blending of pride and tenderness on his firstborn, and when his eyes turned from the face of the unconscious infant, they rested upon a picture that always hung just above his writing-table. It was that of a man somewhat past middle life, whose strongly marked and almost rugged features told their own tale alike of suffering and resolution. It was that of John Knox, the Scottish reformer, whose fearless preaching had kept a purer faith than that of Rome alive in many of his countrymen and women.

"God bless the wee laddie," said the father, "and grant that he may grow up to love and serve his Maker as John Knox did, who never feared to preach the faith of his fathers before priests, and did not quail before the sceptre of a queen."

"If he be like his mother he'll have a gentler spirit and a softer heart than that good man had, though I doubt not that he was raised up by God to meet the need of the times he lived in, sir," was the reply of Annie McWilliam, the old housekeeper who had lived for many years in the family, and like most upper servants in those days stood on very friendly terms with her employers.

Chapter 2.

A Scotch Laddie.

Alexander Mackay did not walk out of the pages of a story-book to enter upon his life work in Uganda. He was a real boy, fond of fun, ramble and adventure; but also gifted with rare powers of observation and a quiet thoughtfulness beyond his years.

Surrounded from infancy by the influences of a godly home, he was early taught the way of salvation. Naturally warm-hearted and affectionate, the "wee laddie" soon became a general favourite, not only in his home circle, but with the simple country folk who lived near his Highland home, and who, even not more than forty or fifty years ago, clung to their old habits and ways of life in a manner we may not find it easy to understand. They would often walk from five to six miles to attend the preaching, and the same distance to return to their scattered homes. Neither rain, snow nor storm kept them away, and to make their homeward way seem shorter than it really was, they used to form little companies, telling each other all they could remember of what they had heard, while the children were encouraged, not only to answer, but to ask questions.

Many of the women wore no bonnets, only high-crowned white caps, the wives and daughters of farmers being known by their closely-fitting bonnets, made of cardboard covered with black silk. When one was worn out, it was replaced by another of exactly the same pattern. Each carried her Bible, neatly tied up in a large, white pocket-handkerchief, with a sprig of some sweet-scented plant, while the other hand held the family umbrella, usually a green cotton one, for however bright the morning, a "Scotch mist" or drizzling rain might come on at any time.

Perhaps, next to his parents, there was no one the boy loved better than his kind and faithful nurse, Annie McWilliam, or, as she was more often called in the house and parish, "old Annie." Age had bent her form and silvered her hair, but she was true and godly, and loved her young charge dearly. One among the stories told of Mackay's childhood is that as on an ironing day he watched Annie deftly smoothing snowy linen and dainty lace, he suddenly exclaimed, "Annie, you like to look nice! Why don't you smooth the creases out of your neck, and iron the wrinkles out of your brow?" Annie stopped in her work for a moment, but her only answer was, "If 'tis fine on the morrow, we'll gang to Blackfells farm for a day or two."

"Oh, that will be delightful" the boy replied, clapping his hands; "but tell me, Annie, what made you look so sad just now? "

"It's because you didna ken me when I was young."

"I'm glad I didna, for then you would not have been old Annie, and you could not have told me half the things I want to know," was the boy's answer.

The following morning was all that could be wished, so after an early dinner the two set out for the farm, fully six miles away. Both were good walkers, and long before sunset had received a warm welcome from the farmer and his wife, who were old friends of Annie's, having known her in her young days. Their long walk had sharpened their appetites, and they were quite ready to do justice to the home-made bread and butter and new-laid eggs with plenty of fresh milk set before them (tea-drinking having in those days hardly found its way into Highland homes). After sundown, as the evenings were chilly, the party drew round the cheerful fire, built of pine logs, that blazed and crackled merrily; the wide chimney was open to the sky, while from the rafters near hams and flitches of bacon were in process of curing. The farmer and his sons went out to attend to the cattle, and the women plied their knitting needles.

Annie and her friend talked over old, times, and told stories of the Covenanters, of their sufferings for their faith, and of the hardships and dangers they so often had to face. Forbidden by unjust and cruel laws to worship God according to their own consciences, enlightened as many of them had been by the teaching of the Bible, they had found comfort and help in secret gatherings, often after nightfall, and always in lonely, out-of-the-way places, often in woods or caves. But even this was not allowed them, and if, as was sometimes the case, the time and place of these secret assemblies became known to their ever watchful enemies, a party of Claverhouse's soldiers would be sent to surprise them, and any who were unable to escape were hurried away to prison; some were sentenced to death for no other crime than reading their Bibles and meeting for prayer and praise with others who thought and felt as they did; while others dragged out long and weary years of imprisonment.

To such stories the boy would listen with great attention, and when overcome by the excitement and fatigue of the day he could no longer keep his eyes open and was sent to bed, the two friends talked to each other of the look that had made that bright young face so grave and thoughtful, and said, "May the good Lord bless and keep Sandy (his household name), for surely some great work lies before the wee laddie."

And they were right, but before he could enter upon it, many and varied lessons had to be learned, not only from school-books, but in the battlefield of life. Alexander Mackay did not attend a day school till he was fourteen; up to that age he was taught by his father, who took great pains with his education. Gaelic was at the time of which I am writing largely spoken by the simple country people among whom Mackay's boyhood was spent, but from his early childhood he spoke English with ease and correctness, and his father took care that he should be well grounded in Latin and mathematics.

Many outdoor lessons, remembered in later years, were learnt as father and son made collections of flowers, ferns and mosses, or watched the ways of birds and insects. But perhaps his mother, a woman of gentle spirit and deep piety, had no small part in moulding the character of her boy.

Christian missions had a large place in her thoughts and prayers, and she would often tell her son stories of perils from robbers, floods and wild beasts, that had been so bravely faced by African explorers and missionaries. Sunday evenings Mrs. Mackay usually spent with her children, her husband having gone to preach at some distance. Bible verses committed to memory during the week were repeated, and if the lesson had been well learned the reward was a missionary story.

Chapter 3.

A Mother's Influence.

Alexander Mackay was a merry-hearted, fun-loving boy. Few things gave him greater pleasure than a long ramble across the moorlands, sometimes stopping to watch the flight of a flock of grouse or wild ducks the noise of his approach had startled from their hiding-place among the heather; at others he would stop to gather some rare fern, to be carefully dried and pressed on his return home. From his father he had learnt to observe, so found never-failing interest in studying the ways of birds and insects. Being a good walker, he was often his chosen companion in the visits that from time to time he paid to people who attended his preaching, but who lived in outlying, often faraway places.

During those walks many a never-to-be-forgotten lesson on natural history or botany was given and received, for Mr. Mackay had read and studied much, and his son was early taught to trace the goodness and wisdom of God told out in His care even for the smallest and weakest things He has created. Often father and son would repeat together, "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." (Rev. 4: 11.) Or, after an interval of silence, they would sing such words as

"The Lord my pasture shall prepare,

And feed me with a Shepherd's care;

My noonday walks He shall attend,

And all my midnight hours defend."

And their voices would awaken many an answering echo in the surrounding hills�

hills the boy dearly loved to climb. We almost wonder if, as he scaled their rugged heights, he ever thought of himself as one day to cross African swamps, or as climbing mountains to which the heights on which he then stood were mere molehills in comparison.

We do not know, so we will not venture to guess, what his day-dreams were; but we are sure of one thing, that Alexander Mackay was being even then shaped and moulded by God to fit the niche he was one day to occupy.

His early training was just what he needed to fit him for his lifework as a pioneer missionary in Uganda.

But you must not think that he was allowed to run wild, or that he was an idle, careless boy. Naturally thoughtful and fond of study, his lessons were almost without exception well and thoroughly learnt. Several hours each day were spent in his father's study, where sometimes he read aloud, at others committed to memory large portions from books selected by his father. As he grew older he sometimes helped by copying MS., answering letters, and other things. In all such work great neatness and accuracy was required of him.

To his mother, whom he loved with all the devotion of which a deep, strong nature is capable, he doubtless owed much of the missionary spirit that in after years led him to leave his loved home circle and his native land, to help carry the gospel to one of the darkest of the dark places of the earth, Uganda, which at that time was wholly heathen.

Mrs. Mackay was descended from an old Huguenot family, and would often tell her children how, after the "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," they were obliged either to escape from France, or attend the mass. They chose the former and after many hardships and dangers reached the coast, and finally settled in Scotland. Their property, and much of their worldly goods, had been left in France, but like the Hebrew believers to whom Paul wrote, they were enabled to "take joyfully the spoiling of their goods," for in Scotland they were free to read their Bibles in broad daylight, and worship God according to the teachings of that blessed book.

These stories made a life-long impression upon the boy, but Sunday evenings in the old manse were rich in holy, happy memories to all the younger members of the Mackay household, for when the verses of scripture learned during the week had been correctly repeated, mother was always ready either to read aloud from some interesting book, or to have what her children loved to call "a missionary talk."

Let us take a peep at the little group one Lord's-day evening. It is a winter's night, rain and sleet beat against the closed window-shutters, and the wind moans and howls outside. Inside all is warmth and brightness. The mother and children are seated round a cheerful fire; lessons are over, and Alexander claps his hands and cries joyfully, "Now, mother, we are all ready for a story, please!"

"Do you remember the one I told you last week? "

"Oh yes, mother, it was about Henry Martyn, and his work in India, and I can say the verse of the missionary poem you taught us."

"Light on the Hindoo shed!

For the maddening idol-train;

The flame of the suttee is dire and red,

And the fakir moans with pain;

And the dying faint on their cheerless bed,

By the Ganges laved in vain."

"And what Indian custom is referred to by the word 'suttee'?"

"That of burning a widow alive with the dead body of her husband. You told us, too, that when more than seventy years ago a great part of India came under British rule, laws were made to punish those who attempted it. There was only too good reason to fear that in out-of-the-way places, or where there were few if any British officers, it was still carried on, though not so openly as before. But, mother, will you tell us to-night a story from the very beginning; when did you first begin to think about missions?"

"I was quite a little girl, not more than eleven or twelve years old, when I heard there was to be a missionary address in the church I attended with my parents. I did not expect there would be anything said that I should find very interesting, but I knew the gentleman who was going to speak. He was a friend of my father's and often came to our house; he loved children, so I felt I must listen to every word he said. I had even heard that he had a great wish to go to the heathen, but had been prevented.

"I shall never forget that night. The church was very full; we went early to get a front seat, as my father's hearing was not good. Two short verses of scripture were read, 'Jesus said, If ye love me, keep my commandments,' and 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,' and as the address went on, I felt as I had never felt before. Child though I was, I felt sure that I loved my Saviour, and so much was said about the honour and happiness of being a missionary, and seeking to bring souls to Christ, that I longed to be old enough to go and teach little black children about Jesus. At the close, prayer was offered that some among his hearers might be constrained by the love of Christ to go; and that others, who perhaps could not go, might by prayer and gifts help to send others.

"That night I could not sleep. I got up very early, dressed, put on my sunbonnet, and went out into the garden. It was a lovely June morning, roses were everywhere. I went into a quiet spot, and kneeling down, asked God to let me help the missionaries. If I could not go, even a little girl could, I knew, pray; and perhaps when I was older He would shew me some other way in which I could help.

"From that day to this my love for, and interest in, missions has never died down."

Chapter 4.

A Boy's Request.

"Would you like me to go as a missionary to Africa, mother?"

"If God prepares you for it, my boy, but not unless. You may be a true missionary, and yet stay at home; you must first come to Him, and if He has need of you in Africa, He will call you in a way you will not mistake. Should the message, 'Depart, for I will send thee far hence,' ever come to you, take care that you do not disobey it. Remember what Jonah got for his pains."

It was in the "quiet hour" Mrs. Mackay and her children loved so well that the boy listened to his mother's words; the impression they made upon him was deep enough to influence his whole after-life.

Every now and then business of importance rendered it necessary for Mr. Mackay to leave his Highland home and visit Edinburgh. In the spring of 1859, when Alexander had not passed his tenth birthday, father and son were on their way to the railway station, where Mr. Mackay was to take the train for the great city; he was driving, his son accompanying him in order to take home the trap kindly lent by a neighbouring farmer. They had gone more than half way when Mr. Mackay broke a silence which had lasted some minutes by saying, "Sandy, what book would you like me to bring you from Edinburgh?"

This was the opportunity the boy had been longing for, he could not afford to lose it, though he was by no means sure that his request would be granted. "I think, father, if it would not cost too much, I should very much like to have a printing press." Mr. Mackay dropped the reins for a moment, then said in a voice of mingled surprise and displeasure, "A printing press! Whatever can you want with a printing press? What you have to do is to become a good scholar; be that, and then if you ever write anything worth reading, any one will print it for you. Why, only last week when I called upon Mr. Smith at Keig I found one of his sons lying on the study floor, poring over a great Hebrew Bible, and you talk of wasting your time over a printing press!"

"But, father, do you really think it would be wasting time? I have often heard you say that skill takes up no room in the pocket or travelling bag, and some day I may find it very useful to know how to print."

"My dear boy, do you not know that the desire of my heart for you is to see you one day become a preacher of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ?"

"Yes, father, but Martin Luther said that printing was the latest and greatest gift by which God enables His servants to advance the tidings of the gospel."

The railway whistle was heard, Mr. Mackay's train was due, and with a hasty good-bye at the station, father and son parted. Alexander watched till his father was out of sight, then drove carefully home.

As the train bore Mr. Mackay along, he thought over his son's request. "A printing press! What could have put such a thing into the boy's head? I expect it is the part printing played in furthering the work of the Reformation. I know he has been reading D'Aubign� lately. He does not play like other boys, but devours every book he can get hold of; yet every now and then he seems hankering after some kind of manual work. When he has a free hour, if he is not in the study with a book, I find he goes down to the carpenter's shop, handling all kinds of tools, and now and then lending a helping hand. I think the best thing will be to send him to school. In the meantime, I must look for a book that will make him forget the printing press."

A few days later Mr. Mackay entered the well-known publishing firm of Messrs. Blackwood. New books in every variety of style and binding there certainly were in plenty, and yet he could not find exactly what he wanted. He was a well-known visitor and always welcome, and was soon engaged in friendly chat with the head of the firm. Before they parted, he spoke of his son's desire for a printing press, to which Mr. Blackwood laughingly replied, "He wants a printing press, does he! Well, my dear sir, there is no need to worry yourself about it. Let him have one. We cannot all be on the same lines. I believe that boy means to strike out a course of his own. Give him a free hand, and he will come out all right in the end. You get the press, and it will give us pleasure to make him a present of the type. But tell him, that even if he prints your books, we do not give leave to publish them."

So the printing press was bought, and in due time, with a large and varied collection of types, packed and sent off. No words can tell the delight with which it was received by its young owner. For some weeks every spare moment was devoted to making himself thoroughly acquainted with every part of his new possession. At first he found considerable difficulty in getting good, clear impressions, but he kept on trying, and in time was able to produce really creditable work.

How little any one thought that one day, in the very heart of "Darkest Africa," upon that press the first portions of scripture that were to bring light, peace and joy to many of the sons and daughters of Uganda were to be printed. We can only say that in that quiet Scottish home God in His love and wisdom was preparing the future workman for his work.

Chapter 5.

First Thoughts of Africa.

Up to sixty or seventy years ago very little seems to have been known about Central Africa. I remember, when quite a little girl, having read in an old geography book that the greater part of that vast continent, lying nearest to the equator, was supposed to be only a sandy desert, with here and there pools of water, round which a few native huts, in shape very much like beehives, were clustered. In some very old maps of Africa a great river has been traced, but as no one appeared to be quite sure of it being there at all, it was often left out altogether.

Several explorers had tried to trace the river Nile to its source, and about the time that Alexander Mackay was making his first attempts at printing, a great deal of attention and interest had been aroused by hearing of wonderful discoveries. Yes, the old maps were, after all, right. The Congo, a mighty river, was really there, also lakes. Uganda was not a barren waste, but a well-watered and well-peopled country. Every new discovery formed a fresh subject of conversation in the boy's home, and few things gave him greater pleasure than to trace the journeys of Livingstone and Stanley on the map that when no longer required in his father's study, he carried off in triumph to his own room.

"Father," said Alexander one day, "there is one thing that puzzles me very often. I know that till quite recent times, when any skilled work such as building bridges, piers or lighthouses had to be done, we had to send across the Channel for engineers and they had to bring their own workmen with them. Have we had to send for missionaries too? Livingstone and Moffat were, I know, Scotchmen, but I see that quite a number of the missionaries in Africa are Germans."

"Well, my boy," was his father's reply, "you see the field is so large, and so many stations needed to be filled, that it was difficult to find a sufficient number of really suitable men at home who were willing to be despised, unknown missionaries, and a large missionary institution at Basle, in Switzerland, responded nobly to the call for the foreign field."

"But, father, why did you say 'despised missionaries'? I have always thought it was a great honour to be a missionary."

"So it is, to those who are constrained by the love of Christ to carry the glad tidings to heathen lands; but any who have not that constraint had better stay at home."

Soon after this conversation, the boy confided to his father his great desire to become an engineer. Mr. Mackay, who had long noticed his son's growing love for mechanics, was not surprised, though his own hopes and plans for the future of the boy had been quite different. He heard him patiently, and explained kindly that to place him as a pupil with a good firm in Glasgow or Edinburgh would cost a large sum of money, much more than he could afford. He advised him to go on with his studies, and when old enough, try to win a good scholarship that would carry him through the University, and in wearing college cap and gown he would, he told him, forget all about saws and hammers.

In the spring of 1860, when "Sandy" (as he was still called in the home circle) was just entering his eleventh year, he seemed to lose his robust health and high spirits. His lessons were, as a rule, well and faithfully learnt; but it was easy to see that his heart was no longer in them. He did not complain, but grew thin and pale; he lost his appetite, and his parents grew anxious.

He was seen by a doctor, who owned he could not tell what ailed the laddie. His father took him to Edinburgh to consult a physician, who gave as his opinion he was not really ill, but had grown beyond his strength, and advised change of air and a long holiday. Acting at once upon the advice of the doctor, his father took him for a tour in the Highlands. In later years he often recalled the happy, restful time he enjoyed during those weeks, specially when a friend lent him a strong Shetland pony and he was able to take long rides over the moors, and get delightful glimpses of lake and mountain scenery.

Three months of free, out-of-door life did him good in more ways than one, and he returned to his home greatly improved in health; but though he did his utmost to please his father by attention to his studies, his old love of books seemed almost a thing of the past. He was still gentle and thoughtful, and very kind to the younger members of the family, but he never seemed more happy than when engaged in some kind of manual labour. It was "Sandy" who shovelled and swept the snow that often lay in deep drifts blocking the way, and almost preventing visits to or from neighbours. He would clear and weed the garden paths; and sowing and reaping time always found him ready and willing to lend a helping hand. Small repairs, requiring the use of carpenter's tools, soon began to be looked upon by the family as his work, and he rather enjoyed, than otherwise, taking a turn at wood-chopping.

And so the years, happy, busy years, passed on till the boy was fourteen, and his parents felt it was high time he should be sent to school. Much prayer about it was made by both; for kind and amiable as he naturally was, they were not sure that he had really decided for Christ, and they feared that his affectionate, confiding disposition might, in the wider world of schoolboy life, expose him to temptations he would be unable to resist.

He had never had a boy companion, and looked forward with great delight to a promised visit, during the holidays, from a youth of about his own age, the son of an old friend of his father's who, like himself, was about to enter the Grammar School at Aberdeen. On the appointed day, John Hector, who in after years went as a missionary to Calcutta, arrived at the manse, and the two lads soon found that they had much in common, and, as the parents of both had hoped, a warm friendship grew up between them. They were left pretty much to themselves, and took long and delightful rambles, sometimes visiting a neighbouring loch or waterfall, at others fishing or bathing in some mountain stream.

Chapter 6.

School Life and Business Training.

School Life was the turning of a fresh page in the lesson book of men and things to Alexander Mackay, but he took to it kindly. His home training had formed habits of thoroughness and industry; and even before his conversion "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Eccles. 9:. 10) seems to have been the motto of his life. He did not lose his love of machinery, and took a lively interest in all the buildings in course of erection in the neighbourhood. He still studied well, and if ever he felt himself tempted to be idle or careless, the thought of how disappointed and grieved his loved ones at home, most of all his mother, would he if he failed in his examinations, or his report proved anything but satisfactory, spurred him on to renewed diligence.

He was a day pupil at the grammar school, and during his first half-year formed one of the family circle in the house of an old friend of his father's. For several reasons, however, it was thought best that lodgings should be found for him, and to satisfy herself that he was comfortably placed his mother undertook a journey to Aberdeen.

For some months Mrs. Mackay had been far from well, and her doctor advised her not to go till the weather was warmer. But to think of herself, her own health or comfort, when others were to be helped or served, would have been unlike her gentle, unselfish disposition. So she went, and the memory of the ten days mother and son spent in the great city was one that, to the close of his life, Mackay loved to recall. It was holiday time, so that he was her companion in her walks and visits to places of interest. How little he thought, when he saw her off at the railway station, that the end of her journey was so very near.

A chill, taken on her homeward journey, proved too much for a frame already weakened, and three weeks later the boy received a hasty summons home as his mother was dangerously ill. He remained with her a week, and, as she appeared much better, returned to school; but she had not strength to rally, and a few weeks later calmly fell asleep in Christ. Her death was his first great sorrow, and as he stood by her grave, he felt as if he never could be a light-hearted, fun-loving boy again.

He was not with his mother when her home-call came, but her dying charge, "Tell Sandy not only to read, but to search his Bible, and to meet me in heaven" (faithfully repeated to him by a relative), was never forgotten, and proved a turning-point in his life. Religious knowledge, godly training, were not all, he saw clearly enough. He must have to do with Christ as a trusted, personal Saviour. He took his place before God as a lost sinner, and that he was "on the Lord's side" was well known among his friends and schoolfellows from that time.

He still had a great wish to become an engineer, a wish that for some years his father did not feel free to encourage.

Writing to a friend in 1866, he said: "I cannot see my way for the future, but I feel certain that the Lord will make it plain in His own time. I believe that God gives each of us some talent that we are bound to turn to the best possible account, therefore I must go on with engineering. You say it is impossible, as my father cannot afford to give me the help I should require. But if I cannot overcome a greater obstacle than that of my father not being a rich man, I shall never make a good engineer; therefore I must go on with engineering; for He who gave me the desire will in some way grant it. This I feel sure of."

And in ways that perhaps he did not expect the way was made plain. In 1867 the family removed to Edinburgh. The six years that followed were very busy ones. Time was, he felt, very precious, and hardly a moment was wasted. Two of these years were spent as a student in a training college for teachers. Afterwards, he took a course of study in engineering and other subjects at the University, and that he might get a practical knowledge of the different kinds of work he might one day find himself required to do or to superintend, he worked for a time in the well-known firm of Messrs. Miller and Herbert.

During the greater part of the time, in addition to his other work, he taught for three hours, almost daily, either in public or private schools, and in this way earned money enough to pay his class fees and personal expenses. One of his most valued friends was Dr. Horatius Bonar, the author of the well-known hymns,

"I heard the voice of Jesus say,"

and,

"I was a wandering sheep."

The close, personal friendship and counsel of this ripe and matured Christian were an unspeakable help and comfort to the younger, and deepened his desire really and truly to serve his Lord and Master.

School and college life lay behind him, and as he was just entering his twenty-fifth year Alexander Mackay took passage on board the s.s. "North Star" for Hamburg. He had a twofold object in going. Having already made some progress in the German language, he wished to perfect himself in it; and some things connected with the profession he had chosen could, he felt sure, be more thoroughly learnt in Germany than in London or Edinburgh. It was soon after the Franco-German war, and trade was very dull. However, he soon obtained employment in a large firm. It was just the kind of work he liked, and he put his whole might into it, but he sorely missed his christian friends.

Many among his workmates were openly freethinkers, and by hard questions, and clever, though unsound arguments, did their utmost to shake his faith. "Indeed," he wrote to his sister, "if it were not for daily Bible-reading, and that every time I open the word of God I get a fresh ray of light, I think I should give way altogether."

"The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy," and before many weeks had passed he had found in Dr. and Mrs. Baur just the friends he so greatly needed. They did not speak much English, and his German was at that time far from being fluent; but they loved the same precious Saviour, and had much in common. "Come and see us whenever you like; you will always find a welcome," said the doctor, as with a warm hand-shake he bade Mackay good-bye at the close of almost his first visit.

Always frank and open, he spoke out his desire not only to visit but to live with his newly-found friends, adding that, surrounded as he was, not only at his work, but in his lodgings, by infidels, he longed for a quiet, christian home. So he was received into their family. Dr. and Mrs. Baur soon learned to love him almost as if he had been their own son, and found him a useful and trusted helper in the home mission work in which they were actively engaged.

Chapter 7.

A Long Journey

The employers of Alexander Mackay soon found that, in addition to more than common talent, he was industrious and persevering, and several very important pieces of work were left almost entirely in his hands. Still he did not allow his weekday duties to occupy his whole time and

thoughts. Remembering that he was not his own, but had been bought with a price, "the precious blood of Christ," he really and truly desired to serve his Lord and Master. His Lord's days and evenings were either spent in Bible study, happy, helpful intercourse with christian friends, or visits to the sick and poor.

One bitterly cold night in the winter of 1875 he finished reading a book in which he had grown deeply interested, "How I found Livingstone." It was at that time quite a new book, written by the well-known African explorer, Henry Stanley, who tells in its pages how he and his men, in their search for the pioneer missionary, Dr. Livingstone (who had not for a very long time been heard of by his friends in Scotland or England), had crossed rivers, climbed mountains, and for days and even weeks together forced their way through forests where the trees grew so closely together that though the sun was shining brightly overhead they had sometimes, even at noonday, almost to grope their way.

As he read, all his old interest in and love for Africa seemed to revive. He lingered for a few moments over its last page, then closed the book. As he laid it down, his eye fell upon a packet of books and papers sent from his home in Scotland. Hardly knowing why, he took one up and read with delight, not unmixed with surprise, an appeal for christian men who wished to devote their lives to the Lord's work to go as missionaries to Uganda, in the very heart of Africa; its then king, Mtesa, being, it was said, quite willing to receive and welcome them. It was already past midnight, but Mackay felt he could not sleep until the first step had been taken, and a letter offering himself for Uganda was at once written.

Some correspondence followed, after which he paid a short visit to London. Early in the New Year he received a letter telling him that he had been accepted, and asking him to get ready for a voyage to Zanzibar as soon as possible.

Just at that time he was more than usually busy with work for the firm by which he was employed. He had invented a machine in which a great number of different parts had not only to be made, but fitted together, and he did not feel free to leave until the whole was in proper working order. However, he replied that he hoped to be ready to sail about the last week in March. But a great domestic sorrow, the sudden death of a younger brother, a bright, noble boy to whom he was greatly attached, prevented his going so soon. He did not sail till towards the end of April.

How glad he must have been when fairly out at sea! The three or four weeks before his departure had been such busy ones, that the friends who bade him good-bye at Southampton thought he looked very worn and weary. What a number of packing-cases he had seen labelled "Zanzibar" and lowered into the hold of the ship!

The contents of these cases were very varied. All kinds of tools, several machines, presents for Mtesa and other native sultans and chiefs through whose dominions the missionary party would have to pass before reaching Uganda, and bales of cloth and bags of beads, the two latter to be used as money in the purchase of food and other things that might be required, coins being quite unknown in that part of Africa to which they were going. A medicine chest and some books had not been forgotten.

On the voyage to Zanzibar the party met a merchant who had known the missionary, Dr. Livingstone. He had done business with him and been impressed by his fair dealing and kindness. He did not speak very good English, but when asked what he thought of the doctor, replied: "Livingstone very good man, yes, very good man; Livingstone the best man I ever have seen; good for rich man, good for poor man, good for every man."

For the first time in his life Mackay had an opportunity of seeing something of the horrors of the slave-trade. A British man-of-war and several gunboats did good work against the dhows. During one week no less than one hundred and fifty poor slaves who had been stolen from their homes and sold to Portuguese or Arab traders were set free and helped to return to their villages. "The boats and men are," he wrote home, "all too few for the work required. It is like catching a few of the stolen horses after the stable door has been left open."

To tell of all the difficulties, dangers and disappointments of the journey from the coast to Uganda would make the story far too long. Day by day, and hour by hour, "ye have need of patience" seemed to be saying itself over and over again. But the lesson was by no means easy to learn.

A good deal of time had to be wasted in getting the different parts of their boat, "The Daisy," out of the Custom House. Part of a valuable engine had been lost and was never heard of again. There was difficulty, too, in getting porters to carry the boat and other heavy baggage up country. The friends at the French mission station gave him all the help they could, but so many broken articles had to be repaired, and so much blacksmith's and carpenter's work had to be done before the party was ready to start, that sometimes it seemed as if they would never start for Uganda.

Black men, however heavily loaded, always sing at their work. One day Mackay got a number of natives to carry the boat (ten men to each piece) for some distance, and as they tugged and pulled and groaned under heavy burdens, they chanted, "White man give plenty pence!" They thought themselves well paid when each man received the value of twopence for a couple of hours hard work!

A page from his note-book will give some idea of how busy his days were. "Got up at daylight. Coffee, oranges and quinine at 6 a.m. Weighing goods, packing them into bales of 60 lb. each, till 7. At 7 sound the drum and take out my men for drill; 8 o'clock till 10, busy packing. Hard work at any number of things till lunch, then at work till dark. Numbers of visits from natives of different tribes, all good at looking-on, but have no desire to help. After dark, dinner, then at work again. So far it has been hard times for most of us, physically and mentally."

"The Daisy" had been built in three sections for transport by land to Lake Nyanza, but as they were found much too heavy to be carried any great distance, Mackay set to work to take out screws and rivets, so as to divide it into small pieces which could be carried by two men. This, of course, took some days of hard and seemingly fruitless work, but after delays and much trouble in getting porters, they were at last ready to start.

Tools, books, machinery, valuable instruments and many other things were to be carried by native porters, of whom, after considerable trouble and many delays, Mackay succeeded in engaging about two hundred.

His home letters and journals shew that he felt it was no easy task he had undertaken. He wrote, "Suddenly to have stepped into the place of father to so large a family of children, who are every day crying out, 'Poss-ho!' which may be translated, 'Give us our daily bread' is by no means an easy task. All their little disputes and complaints I have to settle. My interpreter is very poor in English, so he often misunderstands, and makes fresh trouble by doing so. Still we get on wonderfully well, and it often comes to my mind, If two hundred men on march can give such endless trouble, what an anxious time Moses must have had all through the long years of the wilderness journey!"

It is a great comfort and help to remember that hour by hour we can commit our way to the Lord and He will give all needed wisdom and grace for guiding.

Over-strain, alike of mind and body, brought on frequent attacks of fever, and at times Mackay was so weakened as to be quite unable to walk, and needed to be helped to mount his donkey. Still, there was very little sickness among his men, for which he was very thankful.

Chapter 8.

Fever and Famine.

As days and weeks went on, the work of the pioneer missionaries to Uganda seemed to grow more, instead of less, trying and difficult. "The Daisy," stores, and many other things, all had to be carried for hundreds of miles on the shoulders of men, and he found himself obliged to take the command of a caravan of more than two hundred. Very often the road lay through marshes, where they were forced to wade knee-deep through stagnant water, quite unfit for drinking, and even when boiled and filtered still dirty and ill-smelling. Repeated attacks of swamp-fever left him so weak that some days he was too ill to travel at all, and more than once he thought himself dying. But his work in Africa was not done, and through the mercy of God he recovered.

Small-pox broke out among his men, and though he used all the means in his power to prevent its spread, several of his native porters died. Writing to his sister, he said, "It would have shocked an English doctor to have seen my donkey-boy, almost covered from head to foot with small-pox sores, wading for a couple of days through the swamps with very little clothing on; but here he is to-day, quite well, and with hardly a mark upon him."

Most of his provisions were either lost or stolen, and sometimes the whole party knew what it was to be short of food. It was no uncommon thing for a porter to throw down his load and run away, and when they came near a native town, or even a cluster of mud huts, the chief, or headman, never failed to expect and demand large presents in the way of cloth, salt and beads.

Soon after passing Mtamburu, Mackay was seized with such a severe attack of fever that in his already weak state he could scarcely bear even to be carried in a hammock. His companions decided that he must return to the coast, but he was with difficulty persuaded to do so. Mackay at last consented, and set off eastwards, carried by two strong men, and eight others with his tent, clothes and other things on their shoulders. With this small party a rapid journey to the coast was made, and there a sea voyage in the mission steamer "Highland Lassie," did his health good.

When he was again fit for work be set about collecting another caravan for the relief of his companions on the Nyanza, intending to go with it in order to join the party he had accompanied in the autumn. Porters were more difficult to obtain than when the previous caravan had started, so he made a tour of three hundred miles northward and back along the coast to collect men. Often he and the few men who were still with him had to wade for hours across swamps where they were waist-deep in mud and water, sleeping in the open air or in cow-sheds, and living on roots, berries, or anything they could get.

Before setting out again for Uganda, Mackay received instructions to try, if possible, to construct a road, the first ever made in Central Africa, and though a severe attack of fever forced him to be idle for six weeks he was soon at work collecting men and tools. The Sultan of Zanzibar seemed much pleased at the proposal, and gave Mackay a fine horse to ride on.

By May day the work was fairly begun, and to his great delight he was able to engage as his personal servant and interpreter Susi, an old servant of Dr. Livingstone's, one of the faithful few who helped to carry his body to the coast, and afterwards went with his remains to England. He could speak several native languages, and proved a real help and comfort to the lonely missionary.

The slave-trade was still a cause of great trouble and anxiety to Mackay. He writes "How many poor slaves are being nightly driven to the coast no man can tell. A well-beaten track leads from here to the sea, and every time I cross it, I shudder to think of the unhappy men, of the helpless women and children who, after being stolen from their homes, are being driven along it to be crowded into the hold of slave-dhows.

A British man-of-war, for the suppression of the trade, was stationed off the coast; but its boats and men were too few for the work that needed to be done. The Sultan could, he said, do nothing to prevent the slave trade, and Mackay soon found that the native interpreters, who were engaged to help the British sailors, were often bribed by the slave traders to allow their dhows to pass unnoticed, or to say that the women on board those captured were the wives or household servants of the owners.

Still he kept bravely on, and his home letters were bright and cheerful. Here is one. "I am well again, thank God, and camp life has set my spirits up. My horse, my dog, my goat, my oxen and donkey, with my household of nearly seventy men and a few women, are enough to feed, and quite enough to look after at one time. It is now dark and all is quiet, my men are going to rest. I have given them their food, and they know I shall take a good day's work out of them to-morrow. The insects are hard at it again; midges, flies and mosquitoes above, and ants and other creeping things below. A cup does duty for my inkstand, with a little powder mixed with water for ink; but eight or nine o'clock is bed-time when one is on the march or in camp, and I must turn in, so good night."

Day by day the work went on; miles of forest and jungle had to be cut through, trees felled, and river banks sloped down. Herds of elephants roamed through the jungle, and tracks of the lion and panther were often seen. Camp-fires had often to be kept burning all night, but the party were preserved from the attacks of wild beasts, and in rather less than twelve months two hundred and thirty miles of road were completed.

The business of road-making over, Mackay was once more free to set out for his beloved Uganda, though it was still six hundred miles away. He was advised to travel by bullock-cart, and to his great delight found a young Englishman, an earnest Christian, and by trade a carpenter, had been sent out to help him. His new companion proved of great use in improving or repairing the native carts, and as his strength had not, like Mackay's, been wasted by frequent attacks of fever, he was able to manage the wilder oxen.

At last they started. Six large carts loaded, eighty oxen, sixty men, half of whom were drivers, the rest porters, five donkeys, a flock of sheep and goats, with six dogs, made up the party.

But every day the carts upset, sometimes two or three times; and in some places the jungle was so thick that it was found that twenty oxen yoked to one cart were hardly able to draw it.

Chapter 9.

On the March.

I almost seem to hear some of my young friends saying our last chapter was not a very bright one, and it made them feel quite sad to read of the difficulties and dangers Alexander Mackay and his friends had to face in their attempt to carry the gospel to the then darkest part of "Dark Africa."

Well, dear ones, if I only told you of the bright and pleasant things, and left out all the trials of faith and lessons of patience that had to be learnt by the way, I should expect you to say my story was not a true one, and then you would not care for it.

Frequent attacks of fever thinned their numbers, and the few who survived were weak and often suffered greatly. Crossing rivers was often no easy matter, and in a letter written to friends in the homeland, Mackay tells of one that must have needed not only all the nerve and courage he possessed, but much real confidence in God.

He wrote: "I have just arrived at the Rukigura river. It is at present in flood, a mighty, rushing river, neck-deep. How I am to cross it I cannot tell. By putting up ropes and pulleys, much in the same way as for the life-saving apparatus in shipwreck is done, I think I could manage to get the men and most of the stores over, but eighty oxen, the carts, and several donkeys will, I am afraid, prove slow and troublesome work. Still, I must make the attempt, or stay where I am till the flood is past, and I cannot tell how long that may be, as we are having thunder-storms with heavy rains day after day. A few of my men have run away, taking cloth and other things with them; those still with me are, I think, on the whole, fairly faithful. They are all sad cowards, and when any danger arises take to their heels, leaving their master to get out of it the best way he can.

"Just now a scorpion (one of a kind much feared by the natives, as its bite is almost always fatal) crawled over me as I sat writing. It would make you shudder to see half the horrors of this kind one meets every day. Snakes glide about in the soft, slimy mud through which we have, often knee-deep, to wade. Several kinds of flies draw blood with every bite, and they can bite too! Last night I was quietly sleeping when the growl of a hyaena just at my ear made me start up, seize my rifle, and fire; but Bobby, my dog, was before me, and set up such a lively bark that the hyena was off before I had time to present it with a bullet."

Heavy rains had made deep ruts. Large felled trees and bushes often lay right across the road, and the rough, uneven path was so wet and slippery that one or other of the carts seemed almost always in trouble. Sometimes the pole ox would fall and upset the cart. It must have been trying to find, as was often the case, that everything breakable was broken, and nearly everything that could be spoiled was so. But Mackay was not a man given to crying over "spilled milk"; so the cart was reloaded, and making the best of what could not be helped, they were soon again on the march.

About this time an accident rendered him lame, and for more than a week he was unable to walk. While helping to get one of the carts out of a rut, a bush caught his foot and he fell, the wheel going twice over his leg. Two of his men put their loads into a cart and carried him in a light hammock; but as cart after cart upset, they did not make very good progress, and weary and almost fainting from pain and loss of blood, the day's march ended, and they reached a village. The chief, hearing of his arrival, brought six or seven sick people to be treated, and one little boy he wished to be cured of spinal disease.

Weak and worn out as he was, the sad news that reached him while still some distance from Uganda, must have added greatly to his sorrow and anxiety. There had been fighting in a district through which they still had to pass, and two white men and about fifty natives had been killed. He did not need to ask who the white men were. Too well he knew that two of his missionary friends, with whom he had sailed from England, Messrs. Smith and O'Neill, were the only Englishmen within many miles; and he felt their loss deeply.

Soon after he wrote "There were eight of us sent out; two soon found they could not stand the climate and had to return broken down in health, four have gone home, only two are now left. Poor Africa! But the work of God will proceed, even if we break down."

The next stage of the journey lay through a plain thirty-six miles in length. He was only taking a few of his men, carrying small loads he was unwilling to leave behind, and as he knew robbers were often to be met with he ordered them to keep close to each other.

Towards evening of the first day, one of them fell a few yards behind, when a party of robbers sprang from their hiding-place, and striking the hapless man a heavy blow with a club, seized his load and disappeared. To attempt to follow them would, he felt, be worse than useless; but the con- tents of the stolen load could ill be spared. All the food supplies on which he depended for several days were gone, also his candles and matches. Perhaps the loss that tried him most was that of two ounces of quinine, a medicine he had found very useful in keeping off attacks of fever.

The robbers were hardly out of sight when a caravan drove up. The leader was an Arab trader, who was crossing the plain in a very comfortable way. He had a nice large tent, with Persian carpets, cooking utensils, sweets, coffee, plenty of rice, and many other things. He behaved in a most friendly manner to Mackay, and gave him a good dinner of rice and curried fowl, and before saying good-bye made him a valuable present, a packet of candles and a box of matches!

He had no quinine, so the next day Mackay sent back one of his men a distance of thirty miles with a note, begging that the precious powder might be sent to him with as little delay as possible.

Chapter 10.

Fresh Trials.

Writing to his sister in June 1878, Mackay says, "What a forlorn hope our mission to Uganda seems to be! I am almost the only one still living of the missionary band who sailed from Southampton little more than two years ago. Very few could endure the hardships we went through in the early months of this year. The loss of so many valued friends and fellow-labourers is a great grief to me. But God's ways are not our ways. I am now in some thirty miles of desert, and am going (D.V.) to the island of Ukerewe, to see the king who so lately murdered Lieutenant Smith and O'Neill. I have just had a bad turn of sun fever, but am quite well now."

Elephants, hippos, giraffes and zebras were frequently seen in the desert. After an evening march Mackay and his porters arrived just before nightfall at a deserted village. They were all very tired, but having found water, lighted a fire, cooked some potatoes and nuts, and lay down to sleep. Mosquitoes, however, were very troublesome, and about ten o'clock an alarm was raised. Loud reports as of guns were heard, and flames seen in the direction from which the sounds came only increased the alarm.

The men made up their minds to be off at once. They left their pots, gourds and half-cooked food all lying about, and packing his clothes and other belongings in less time than they had ever required before, by their very terror forced their leader into getting up, though he was at first very unwilling to do so. There was no moon, and the night was dark and cloudy. On they went, tripping, slipping and stumbling at almost every step, till, after a two hours' march, they reached another village, where the people were friendly.

Their next day's march brought them to a third village, where the cattle lived and slept in the same huts as their owners. The men wore no clothes at all, and little girls and young women only a small apron made of beads.

His socks were all worn out, and Mackay suffered greatly from blistered and often bleeding feet, when marching across sandy deserts or through brushwood. A few days later he caught the first glimpse of the lake, and enjoyed the refreshing breeze that cooled his sunburnt cheeks. On the shore of the lake lay the mission boat, "The Daisy," overgrown with grass, and very much the worse for its long rest. The machinery, too, was in a very bad state, and many valuable tools lying about were either broken or so injured by rust as to be useless.

Soon after he had a message from the king, who seemed to be greatly in fear of the white man, and said he had no quarrel with the murdered missionaries, and that the slave-traders were the only persons to blame for their death.

One or two extracts from his notebook at this time are interesting. "I have," he wrote, "sorted and assorted machinery, nails, screws, etc., till quite done up, and much has still to be done. To-morrow is the Lord's day, and I cannot tell you how gladly I shall welcome its rest. May I have grace to use it aright."

The morrow brought him an early visit from a neighbouring chief, who wanted to know why he and his followers rested on that day. Mackay told him the story of the six days of creation, and how God rested on the seventh day. The chief listened well, and seemed to understand what he was told, but the scripture lesson was a good deal disturbed by the cattle, who took to fighting while it was being given. Mackay wrote, "It does seem as if Satan is doing his utmost to prevent even a little gospel light entering this dark land."

The natives advised Mackay not to trust Lkonge, the king, as they were sure he intended to poison him. They told him that after the murder of the missionaries, Smith and O'Neill, he had persuaded their men to lay down their guns, saying that he was their friend, and wished only for peace. They believed him, sat quietly down, and began to cook their food while they were so engaged, Lkonge's men fell upon them, and many were killed.

Mackay felt his position to be one of danger, but it was a cheer to remember that the God whom he served was able to shut the mouth of the lion, and that it was not for his own pleasure or profit, but in the service of his Lord and Master. So leaving himself and the whole matter in His hands, he went quietly on, alone, for his men were so overcome with fear, that they begged to be allowed to go to their villages.

King Lkonge, who was at that time little more than twenty years of age, seemed more anxious than before that Mackay should believe his account of the murder of the white men. But when, as a proof of his friendship, Mackay asked for the book in which Lieutenant Smith had been seen writing only a few hours before his death, as he wished to send it to his friends in England, he was told it was lost, and could not be found. He was also told that guns and other things that had belonged to him had been carried away by his people, and he did not know where they were.

Mackay replied, "Lkonge says he is a great king, A great king need only tell his people to bring back the articles, and they will soon be here."

The king said he would look for them. He then asked a great many questions about England, and expressed surprise on hearing that the subjects of Queen Victoria greatly outnumbered his own. Several days, however, passed, but neither the book nor other lost property were forthcoming. Mackay felt that to wait longer would be a mere waste of valuable time, so after presenting the king with a red blanket and a dressing-gown, they wished each other a friendly good-bye, and Mackay returned to where he had left "The Daisy," and at once began putting her under repair. The natives gave him a warm welcome, and came in crowds to watch the progress of the work. All were good as lookers-on, but had no idea of giving any real help, and as all the heavy part of the work had to be done by his own hands under the rays of a burning sun, a sharp attack of fever again laid him up for some days.

Chapter 11.

Uganda At Last.

After many days of very hard work the mission boat, "The Daisy," was repaired, and with a glad and praise-filled heart Mackay, in company with a missionary friend, set sail for Uganda.

For the first four days everything went smoothly, but on the fifth a terrible storm arose. Heavy seas broke over the little vessel, and the blacks, who formed the crew, were so overcome with fear as to be worse than useless. "The Daisy" was fast filling with water, and there was nothing for it but to let her drift on to a barren and somewhat rocky coast. The natives were friendly, brought food, and built a hut to shelter the white men and some of their goods; but the work of repairing the boat had to be done almost all over again, and as the weather continued wet, with frequent storms of rain and thunder, only slow progress was made.

After a delay of eight weeks they were afloat again, and after a rough and trying voyage, on November 1st, 1878, they came in sight of Ntebe, the port of Uganda. The natives saw them and manned a canoe, beat drums and appeared very pleased to see him. Five days later they reached Rubaga, the capital. King Mtesa was, they were told, too ill to see them, but sent his salaams (greetings), and two very fat goats as a present.

On the 8th Mackay wrote, "This has been an eventful day. Word came this morning that the king was somewhat better, and wished to see us. We (that is, Wilson and I) set off at once, carrying our presents, as everybody seemed too excited to be of any use. Messenger after messenger came running and shouting like so many madmen to hurry us on, but we did not mean to give way, so kept up a steady step. After a long walk we reached the palace, when the gates were opened, and the guard presented arms. We were ushered through long rows of soldiers and attendants to an inner room. At the end of a large hall we found the king, seated upon a mat. He wore a long white robe, something like a dressing-gown, and a black coat, richly embroidered with gold thread. He bowed politely, and stools were brought for us to sit upon. Several gaily-dressed attendants were seated on the ground, and an old woman, at a little distance behind the king, seemed greatly interested in watching us.

"For quite ten minutes we just looked at each other in silence, as it would not have been polite for us to speak first. Then a little talk began. We presented our gifts, one being a large musical box, which we set playing 'The Heavens are Telling.' He seemed pleased, but after a time said he was too ill to sit longer, and we might retire. The whole court rose when we left, and followed us for some distance, small boys being, as usual, well to the front. In the evening the king sent a present of cattle, tobacco, coffee and honey."

Any of our readers who are fond of history will perhaps remember that in Saxon times the smith was considered a very important person, and treated with great respect. Next to him ranked the worker in metal, closely followed by the physician. In the royal court of Wales the smith was allowed to sit with the king and queen in the great hall; at least, so we are told by Dr. Samuel Smiles in a chapter of his interesting book, "Industrial Biography," in a chapter all about "Iron Workers and Tool Makers."

From his great skill in all kinds of metal-work, Mackay soon became almost as important as the Saxon smith had been. All kinds of broken articles were brought to him for repair, and the natives were never tired of watching him at his work, and admiring the brightness of the polish he put upon much of it. Native workmen could, it is true, make hoes and hatchets, and a few could even manufacture knife blades, but the art of tempering metals was unknown, and when one day he rolled some logs up an inclined plane, he was followed by a wondering crowd, who shouted, "Mackay is the great spirit; yes, he is truly the great spirit."

King Mtesa was very intelligent and quick to understand anything that was properly explained to him. Mackay told him about railways, and steam-boats, and delighted his majesty by describing the wonders of the telegraph and telephone. One day he said, "King Mtesa, my forefathers made the wind their slave, then they put water in the chain, they next enslaved steam, and now the terrible lightning is the white man's slave, and a capital one it is too."

On another occasion he gave a magic-lantern lecture before the king and his court on "The Human Body," pointing out the wickedness of selling a boy with a body made by God with such wondrous skill and care to an Arab slave-trader for a piece of soap! The king paid great attention and said, "From this day no slave shall be sold out of my country." Mackay was delighted, and told him it was the best law he had ever made.

Busy as Mackay always was, he did not forget that his real object in going to Uganda at all was not so much to make roads, or teach useful arts to the natives, as to carry the glad tidings of salvation through the finished work of Christ to those who had never heard the gospel. In all the haste and bustle of preparation for his journey the printing press that had been the delight of his boyhood had not been forgotten, and he was soon at work translating and printing some short scripture portions.

About this time almost every page of his notebook has some such entry as, "House, or rather hut, full of boys, who come for a reading-lesson, and take a great interest in watching me at my work." "A chief, who brought a canoe, spent last night with me. I gave him one of the white blankets off my bed, and we had a long conversation. I tried to tell him as clearly as I could the way of salvation; he asked many questions, and shewed a good deal of interest. The longer I live among these people, the more I learn to admire, and even to love them."

Every Lord's day Mackay, by royal invitation, went to the palace, when a short gospel service, to which many came, was held. For a time the king shewed great interest. On one occasion he was so deeply impressed that he said to his people, "Isa [Jesus], was there ever any like Him?" Mackay rejoiced, and hoped the day was not far distant when Uganda would be ruled by a truly christian king.

But this state of things did not last long. More missionaries were on their way to Uganda. Some of them thinking that to sail for some distance up the Nile, and then across Egypt, would be a quicker and easier way of reaching that country, chose that road. This displeased the king greatly. For some time he had not been on friendly terms with the government of Egypt, and his suspicions were aroused. In vain Mackay assured him that the missionaries were not sent by Queen Victoria or General Gordon; that they did not come to spy out the country, and would not be followed by soldiers who would bring many large guns. The king was frightened and angry, and the outlook was certainly not a bright one.

Chapter 12.

Dark Days.

A Few mornings later, as Mackay and a missionary friend were at breakfast, a messenger arrived breathless with haste. The king had called for them! They must go at once. On arriving at the palace, they found his majesty excited and angry. Two white men (Frenchmen) had, he had been told by an Arab trader, landed at the port. Who were they? and what was their object in coming? were questions he wished to have answered at once.

The strangers were Roman Catholic priests, and Mackay explained to the king that though they believed in the one true God, and also in the Lord Jesus, they thought more of the Virgin Mary than of the Lord Himself; and prayed not only to God, but to people who had been dead for hundreds of years. They also taught that the Pope was to be obeyed rather than their own king.

The king listened, but it was easy to see that he did not understand. He looked bewildered, and said, "Who am I to believe? How can I tell which is right?" The slave-dealers, who disliked Mackay, because he had on more than one occasion exposed their wickedness and done all in his power to put a stop to their trade, lost no opportunity of trying to persuade the king that while pretending to be his friend the white man was really his enemy, and would, sooner or later, bring ships and soldiers and take possession of his country.

The Lord's day that followed must have been a time of more than usual trial. The preaching service could not be held, as the king gave a grand reception to the newly-arrived, who made him large and valuable presents, while the beating of drums, firing of guns, and shouting of an excited crowd of onlookers, made it impossible to get a moment's quiet. The priests shewed a most unfriendly spirit, and Mackay felt that if they were allowed to remain it might be well for him and his missionary brethren to leave the country, as their preaching was put a stop to, their usefulness hindered, and their lives in danger. The king was ill again, and they were told that should he die, the chiefs intended to kill every foreigner in the country.

Still, in spite of difficulties and discouragements, they held on bravely. Going to the palace one Lord's day morning, Mackay asked the king if he should bring his Bible and read to him. The king said, "Yes, bring the book." He also asked many questions about the future state and the resurrection of the body. He did not, he said, wish either English, Scotch or French teachers to leave his country.

For a short time after this visit things went on more quietly. The preaching services were again held, and the printing-press was at work, for as the number of those who wished to be taught to read was increasing, scripture portions and reading-sheets were badly wanted.

The next serious trouble was with an old woman who said she was a witch and could cure the king of his illness. She saw him very often, and though his health did not improve, Mackay was grieved and disappointed on finding that to please her he had returned to many of his old heathen ways.

"How I wish I had learned to sew before coming here!" Mackay wrote one day in his journal. His clothes were all but worn out, and to dress himself with any degree of respectability was not easy. "I had a day at tailoring yesterday," he wrote. "A coat of checked tweed which one of the Nile party hung up in his hut at night on his way here, was partly eaten, and partly built into the wall before morning by the white ants; he made me a present of the coat, and I have patched and darned till the result is quite a tidy garment. But my needlework will not bear a very close inspection."

The mission stores were very low indeed. Hardly any barter cloth was left, so as Mackay and his friends were no longer able to buy food, but were obliged to live almost entirely on what the king chose to send, it was decided that he should again go to the coast to bring up supplies. Taking a few of his boys, he set out with as little delay as possible, but the journey was neither an easy nor a pleasant one. At every village, however small, they were stopped by its chief, who expected tribute or presents of cowries (a small shell, used as money in many parts of Africa), cloth, knives, or beads.

At one village be was obliged to wait for many days, as its chief was not content with such things as Mackay was able to give him. But his waiting time was not wasted. He spent much of it in teaching his boys; they in return told him many things he had not known before about the people, their customs, and belief in witchcraft.

At almost every stopping-place he was surrounded by crowds of women and small boys, who came out to indulge in a long stare at "the white man." Sometimes he would take out his musical-box, with which they were always delighted. In almost every case their favourite tune was "God save the Queen."

Often, when after a long day's march they stopped at some village, his rest was broken by the bitter wail of some mother whose son had been stolen and sold to the Arab slave-traders. Kid- napping boys who, when employed as shepherds or goatherds, were often too far away from their own village for their cries to be heard, was, he found, quite a common practice. There were always plenty of traders ready and willing to buy them; in some places hardly a boy was left. How he longed to do something to suppress, even if he could not stop their wicked trade!

But at last the object of his long and wearisome journey was gained, he got the needed stores, found porters, and started on his return journey.

When still at some distance from Uganda, his three faithful boys narrowly escaped a violent death. While they were sleeping in a hut behind the one in which Mackay (who was again down with fever) lay, some natives with whom they had quarrelled during the day rushed in upon them, firing their guns as they entered. The lads fled for their lives and Mackay, though feeling very ill, forced himself to get up, and after some trouble persuaded the leader of the party to sit down and talk to him. Other natives came up, all fully armed. The boys remained in hiding until far into the night, when after a long and exhausting debate, Mackay was able to induce the whole party to fire off their guns and go quietly to their homes.

Chapter 13.

Unfriendly Arabs.

New Year's Day, 1881, found Mackay and his brother missionary passing through a time of more than usual trial.

Mackay often thought of the home of his boyhood. The hills there were now covered with snow, almost dazzling in its whiteness. Under the hospitable roof of his father, friends and relations from whom he had been long parted were meeting; the fire burnt brightly, and everything spoke of comfort.

How different all was in Uganda! The drought which had set in some weeks before still lasted. The cloth, beads and other things brought for barter were all gone. The chiefs, though they found Mackay plenty of work, were unable to pay for what they required; some were so poor that they had been obliged to send away their many wives, who had gone to their country homes, and were living as best they could upon the roots they dug up. From early morning till late at night the tired missionary might have been seen busy at his bench, yet times were so bad that he was sometimes obliged to beg food, and often suffered keenly from hunger. He had to keep a sharp look out over the brass taps and other fittings of his engine, or they would have been stolen and worn as ornaments.

It was weary, up-hill work, and they often said to themselves, or each other,

"Now, the sowing and the weeping,

Working hard, and waiting long,"

and if they had not with God-given faith and courage looked on to an

"Afterward, the glorious reaping,

Harvest-home, and grateful song,"

they would have given up, and taken the first opportunity of leaving a field so unpromising as Uganda. But they did not give up; though often "faint," they were "still pursuing."

They went quietly on, teaching a few boys who came to them and using their spare time, when they had any, in translating the Gospel by Matthew into the language of Uganda. Mackay wrote: "In studying the gospels, word by word, I see in them more beauty than I ever saw before, and I pray that the Holy Spirit may bless them greatly, not only to my own soul, but to the faithful native boy who is my helper."

Letters from home, always so welcome to those abroad, and eagerly looked for, were due, and ought to arrive not later than the middle of January, also books, clothes and goods for barter. But instead of these, a bitter disappointment had to be faced. The stores had to be brought from the coast by Arab traders. The traders arrived, but upon being closely questioned, confessed that they had left the letters and goods with which they had been trusted at Kagei, a place at a great distance, from which they were not likely to arrive for many days, perhaps not at all. The king, though of uncertain temper, had learned not only to like, but to respect Mackay; he evidently did not wish him to leave the country, for sometimes he would listen with seeming interest to the gospel message.

The Arab slave-traders, who had never been friendly with Mackay, were now his bitter enemies. It would not be easy to decide which they hated with the more deadly hatred, the man who had dared to expose their wickedness, or the faith he taught. They lost no opportunity of trying to poison the mind of the king and his chiefs against him and his teaching, and tried in every possible way to hinder his work.

Long and trying interviews with the king took up much of Mackay's time during the next few months. Would the king allow any of his subjects who wished to become Christians to do so was a question to which it seemed impossible to get an answer. At one time the king would say, "There are many witches in Uganda [mostly old women] who have great power, and if I consent, they would kill any one who turned away from the gods of the country." To this Mackay would reply, "Mtesa says he is a great king, and if he gives liberty to his subjects to become Christians, the witches will not dare to injure them."

"I give liberty," said the king, "to all my subjects to learn to read. You may teach reading to any who wish to be taught."

"But learning to read does not make any one a Christian," urged the missionary. "The liberty for which we ask is for any who in their hearts believe in the true God, and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to confess their faith by baptism."

"If I consent," said the king on another occasion, "can I have an English princess, a daughter of Queen Victoria, for my wife?" Mackay smiled, but prudence suggested the answer, that as he was not an English princess, he was unable to say.

Frequent attacks of fever, quickly following each other, sometimes as many as three in a single week, weakened Mackay greatly. He wrote in his notebook, January 6th, 1881: "At midday, the usual hour, a bad turn of fever came on, in just the old way: cold shivers, pain all over the body, most severe in the head, and sickness. Got into bed, but a hundred blankets, even if I had had them, would have been of no use. A fire lighted close to my bed, on the floor, gave no warmth in the first stage of the attack. The coldness was followed by a burning fever; a few cups of hot tea bring on perspiration, and after a night of broken sleep and frightful dreams, leaves one the next morning weak, sick, and fit for nothing."

The Arab traders were a never-ending source of trouble and annoyance to him. Though there was not a word of truth in the stories they told the king about his past life, and his reasons for coming to Uganda, at times the king seemed inclined to listen to and believe them. The king really disliked, and knew he could not trust the traders, but as they brought him presents of guns and gunpowder, he did not wish to offend them.

Mackay next asked for permission to leave the country and return to England, but this the king was unwilling to give. He at first refused, and afterwards made excuses to delay his departure.

Chapter 14.

Letters from Home.

For a time at least, day after day seemed to bring some fresh trouble to our missionary friends. The much-dreaded plague broke out in the palace, and several of the king's wives died within a few hours. The king and his chiefs left with all possible haste for the hills, and Mackay and his friend, Mr. Pearson, had to endure many hardships and privations. They were often hungry and in want of proper clothing.

Under date March 13th, 1881, Mackay wrote in his notebook: "The hours of daylight are very precious, as we have only one candle left, and we do not know when we may get more. Fat and oil are not to be had, hence every hour of daylight must be filled up with useful work; so after dark we must just sit in the dark, as we have had to do at intervals many times before. I miss a nightlight for reading or writing a little. There is so much to be done, that I always grudge the hours of daylight for these purposes, but now I must do without my evenings. How I thank my dear father for the pains he took to store my mind with useful knowledge. When I cannot read or write, I often enjoy a quiet hour spent in recalling much that I learnt when quite a boy."

Food, too, was scarce and dear; sometimes for days, or even weeks, they were unable to get anything except a few plantains, and to buy these they had to part with all the clothes they could possibly spare.

March 14th "I had been busy all the forenoon translating, and had just got to work printing our first book of texts. I had my composing-stick in my hand, and was just in the middle of the verse, God so loved the world, that he gave...' when I heard a shout outside. It was our boys, who had set it up to welcome the man we had sent down to the coast for letters two months before. Down went my work, and on went my sun hat and white canvas coat, and I was out in a moment, just starving for home news and letters. Pearson was letter sorter. He had fifteen letters, but I had forty. I just hugged them with delight, and asked for the books and papers my dear ones at home never failed to send me. But none had come, so we began to read our letters. We read while daylight lasted, and as the moon was full and the sky clear, we were able to read by moonlight for some hours longer. Then we lighted our one remaining candle, and finished our piles. We were too happy and excited for sleep, so talked to a late hour.

"We have nothing to go by here as to when we may expect letters. After about three months, we begin to think that in another three months we may get home letters, but we often have to wait much longer. When we send off our letters, please don't think all that is needed is that they should be stamped and posted. First we have to consider which of our men we can best spare. Perhaps those we fix upon refuse to go, and we have to try others, till a party of four is made up. Each man asks for a gun, powder and caps; also calico to wear, and calico to buy food with. If he has any small debts, we are expected to pay them. We have also to settle with the owners of some canoes about to cross the lake for the passage of our letter-carriers. We are glad when their backs are turned, as we have been writing late the night before, and the packet has to be made up, sealed, sewn into a piece of strong calico or bark-cloth, with a string for hanging round the neck of the carrier."

The king, who for some time had been suffering from several diseases, was again seriously ill. His mother (the Queen Dowager), who had her own court at some distance, paid him a visit. She was a heathen, and had always been unfriendly to the missionaries; but on this visit her object was to attempt to cure the king of his sickness. All the donkeys were, she said, to be killed, or sent out of the country before the king could recover.

The mission house, or hut, was three miles away from the royal palace, and as the long walk was trying in the great heat, Mackay had for some time been the owner of a donkey, not so much for his own use as that of a fellow-worker. The king did not order it to be given up, but sent two of his pages to "borrow" it. The donkey was never seen again.

Still many pupils, both chiefs and slaves, came to Mackay, all anxious to be taught to read, and amid all his troubles he was often cheered and encouraged. Sometimes they were only allowed to visit him for a short time, and were ordered off to some other part of the country. But as they had all, or nearly all, very good memories, and learned to read quickly, it seldom took more than two months to teach one of the younger boys to read fluently. Their teacher was not discouraged, for he felt sure that they would carry the good news they had heard, also some sheets of texts, into places where he could not go himself.

In one of his home letters Mackay described himself as "engineer, builder, printer, physician, surgeon and general artificer to Mtesa, King of Uganda, and overlord of Unyoro."

The summer proved a more than usually hot one, and the plague spread rapidly. Many died, and though Mackay felt it would be unwise, as he did not really understand the disease, to attempt to do much for those who were really down with it, he spent a good deal of time in trying to make the king understand how much might be done to prevent the terrible disease from spreading.

The king gave a patient hearing, and said something ought to be done. But though numbers of women and slaves were set to work to sweep and clear the roads, the huts remained as dirty and ill-smelling as they had been before.

A young elephant was captured in the forest, and of course presented to the king, who handed it over to the care of the missionaries, with a request that they would teach it to obey, carry loads, and do other useful things like the tame elephants of which he had beard in India. The time and trouble this would involve was by far too great an addition to their regular work, beside, they could not afford to feed the hungry animal. So Mackay sent it back with a message that if the king would build a suitable house, send two men to attend to it, and send daily food enough for the elephant and its keepers, he was quite willing to look after it. This, he knew, the king would not be likely to do, and no more was heard of the elephant.

Chapter 15.

Market-Day in Uganda.

From early morning till night Mackay was hard at work. For many weeks all the time he could possibly spare was spent in building a house, "fit," as he said, "for an Englishman to live in."

Perhaps the weekly rest of the Lord's day had never been more welcome to him than at this time. Under date January 8th, 1882, he wrote, "Had a pleasant afternoon with my young men, studying two of the psalms. How glad I am when Sunday comes round, bringing as it does a few hours rest and quiet, and giving me a little time to get food for my own soul, never more needed than in this dark and heathen land."

The house was finished at last. The people�rich and poor, high and low�came in crowds to see, admire and wonder. Indeed, on some days Mackay had so many visitors that for hours together he was able to do little except answer, or try to answer, their questions. Windows! and doors with locks and hinges! a double story, and a staircase with a handrail! and if last, not least, an oven in which Mackay and his friends could bake their own bread! Such wonderful things had never before been seen in Uganda!

But the greatest wonder of all was a cart, built by his own hands, and painted red and blue; it was drawn by a couple of bullocks he had broken in and trained to pull.

Such a thing as a market had never been heard of in Uganda. But one day when the king asked how it was that many other countries were so much richer than his own, he was told that one way by which not only men but nations became rich, was by trade.

They had markets, in which they bought and sold. He thought it would be a very good thing to have a market, and ordered that a piece of ground close to the palace should be cleared and enclosed at once, though almost his next words shewed that he really did not know much about buying and selling, by making a law that any one offering articles for sale in any place but the market should be chopped in pieces!

Busy as Mackay had been, he had never lost sight of his real object in going to Uganda, which was to help carry the glad tidings of the gospel to its dark, ignorant people. In weakness and weariness he and his fellow workers had sown the "good seed," and the God in whom they trusted gave the increase.

In the spring of 1882 he was greatly cheered by the baptism of the first native converts, five young men who had, there was good reason to believe, received a saving knowledge of Christ. Several among his older pupils had also asked for baptism, but it was judged best for them to wait. All the pupils were, however, invited to be present, and all greatly enjoyed a treat of beef, plantains and other good things that had been provided for them.

Mackay wrote to friends in the homeland, "Our daily prayer for these dear lads, all of whom have reached the years of manhood, is that they may be kept faithful, and that the Lord may give them much grace. They may be called to suffer for Christ's sake, but each may be 'a light shining in a dark place,' and may, we hope, be the means of leading others to the Saviour."

In reply to a letter urging him to leave Africa for a time, and take a year's rest at home, he wrote, "I cannot forsake my work till God gives me some plain proof that the time for me to do so has really come. Our mission party is much too small for the varied kinds of work going on, and I have no right to leave while I have strength to stay."

On one occasion he put the bullocks into his cart and drove to market, a distance of three miles from the mission station, as he wanted to buy a load of plantains; but when he reached the market no one was there. The king, on hearing of his arrival, ordered his wives to go at once and sell plantains, bidding them also take a good look at the cart, as, though he would not go out himself, he wished very much to know what it was like.

Mackay gave an amusing account of his return journey. In the first place the people wondered how he got his oxen yoked. Did he tie them by their tails? "Off we went," he wrote, "down the steep hill, with the crowd after us. When I clapped on the brake, they all yelled with delight; at every yell the oxen went faster, and the crowd grew thicker; on they ran, some before, and some behind, till at last I had a procession of not less than a thousand. But oh, the noise they made! It was no easy task to drive. We however reached home without any mishap."

Chapter 16.

A Royal Funeral.

We know something of the many ways in which Mackay had made himself useful to the king and people of Uganda, but a new kind of service, neither expected nor wished for, was forced upon him. Early in the spring of 1882 Namasole, the Queen Dowager, died, and in great haste the king sent for Mackay. He wished to know how the kings and queens of England had been buried. Mtesa wished equal, or, if possible, greater honour to be paid to the memory of his mother, who died as she had lived, a heathen. He pressed Mackay to act as undertaker.

Printing, teaching, translating and other work made his life a very busy one but he did not wish to offend the king, so he consented.

The court presented a strange scene, All the chiefs and nobles were dressed in rags, and as each pretended to be crying, but was really yelling at the top of his voice, it could have been no easy matter to hear his own voice, or find out what the king really wanted.

Court mourning in Uganda lasts thirty days. No letters could be sent away, as no boat was allowed to start. No native must carry a load, and no work of any kind could be done till the royal lady was buried. Mackay, however, was toiling from morning till late at night, for everything had been left to and depended upon him. The king said the funeral was to outdo in every way, both in cost and grandeur, that of any former king or queen, and a tax of two thousand native or bark-cloths was at once laid upon his subjects.

Coffins for the dead were things unknown in Uganda, but on hearing that at the funeral of an English king or queen three coffins, two of wood and one of lead, would be required, the king said it was "good," and asked Mackay if he could make three coffins. Little knowing the task he was undertaking, he said if Mtesa would give him wood, metal and men to help he would try. The king said he had no lead, but would give him copper and bronze trays and bowls, of which he had a great number. These were sent to Mackay, who at once turned the school-house he was building into a workshop, and all the smiths who could be mustered were set to work to hammer them into flat plates. Like most of Mackay's native helpers, they were of little real use, as, though they had no objection to looking on, it was almost impossible to get them to work for any length of time, and, of course, the funeral could not take place till the coffins were ready.

Unforeseen difficulties now arose. The grave, Mackay was told, would be a deep pit, so the coffins must be made very, very large. Mackay told the king that he should require much more wood than had been supplied, so men were sent into the forest to cut down trees; but the planks they brought were so crooked and uneven as to be of little real use. A large tree had been chopped up to make two boards!

He next asked for logs. These, he was told, could not be had. But as he said he must have them, or the work could not go on, the men said they would try. The next evening about two hundred shouting and yelling men appeared, some pulling, others pushing, a thick slice of a tree, dragging it along the rough ground by the climbing stems which still clung about it.

Mackay laughed, and told them he could carry it alone. They looked their wonder, and it was easy to see they only half believed his words, but when he lifted the body of the cart off the wheels, and strapping the log to its axle with leather ropes, with one hand pushed it along, the crowd grew thicker, their yells louder. They danced, clapped their hands, and cried out, "Mackay is truly the lubare!" (the favourite idol of Uganda).

To write the story of all the trouble and worry Mackay had in performing the task of undertaker to the dead queen would make my chapter far too long. Every day, and sometimes several times during the day, pages were sent from the palace to report the progress of the work. With one or two exceptions the native workmen ran away, and Mackay was left almost single-handed to complete the work. From early morning till far into the night, and sometimes all night, saw and hammer were in his hands.

The Arab traders, who had all along disliked and tried to injure him, shewed the same unfriendly spirit. They told the king Mackay was wasting his time, and keeping back the wood that had been sent for the coffins to build his own house. For once, however, the king refused to believe their reports, and remained friendly.

At last all was ready, and the day of the burial fixed. The pit was of great depth; thousands of bark-cloths were neatly spread along the bottom, or fastened on to its sides. Into it the coffins were, with great labour, one by one lowered, the space being then filled up with more cloth, many hundred yards of English calico being added. Mackay said afterwards he did not think there could have been so much cloth in the country, and when he and his brother missionary tried to put into writing the actual value of the cloth, beads and other things put into the grave, they found it came to little short of fifteen thousand pounds in English money.

How sad it is to think of all this reckless waste at the burial of one who had turned a deaf ear to the gospel message; who died trusting to idols, and hoping the bundles of charms put into her coffin would secure her happiness after death!

The day after the funeral every man, woman and child had their heads shaved, and laid aside the rags they had worn during the court mourning. Mackay was, we may be sure, glad of a little time to rest his aching limbs and toil-hardened hands. One native workman, the head blacksmith, had stood by him. This man soon after became an inquirer, confessed his faith in Christ, asked for baptism, and proved a bright Christian and a faithful friend to the missionaries.

Chapter 17.

Boat-Builders.

After the royal funeral, things in Uganda went on much as they had done before the thirty days of enforced idleness always required when the court went into mourning. Mackay, who had been again (after an interval of two years) suffering from attacks of fever, sorely needed rest. Friends in the homeland pressed his return, if only for twelve months; but though it must have cost him a great deal to refuse, there was, he felt, so much to be done, and so few to do it, that he decided, if possible, to hold out for another year or two.

The Roman Catholic priests left the country, taking with them about fifty small boys they had purchased and were teaching to say Latin prayers and make the sign of the cross. Shortly after their departure another missionary, Mr. Ashe, arrived at Uganda. This was a great cheer to Mackay who, during the six years they worked together, found in him not only a devoted fellow-labourer, but a true friend and brother.

Early in the year 1883 a letter was received at the mission station from Urima, a district at the south end of the lake. It was a letter of only three words, "We have arrived," and Mackay was left to guess who the "we" were. About a month later he heard that stores and other things he had been for some time expecting had been sent on by an Arab dhow and were lying at the port. With the help of a young chief he got porters to carry the loads, and before sunrise the next morning set off with a donkey and four men, himself walking most of the way, in the hope of shaking off a threatened attack of fever.

On reaching the port they were sorry to find that all the calicoes, barter cloths and other things had suffered severely from the wet, but it was too late in the day to do much in the way of opening the bales and drying the goods. A young Arab gave the tired missionary part of his supper of rice and gravy, and cleared out half his tent for him to sleep in. The chief, who was quite an old friend, sent as a present a sheep and some sugar-canes. About midnight a fearful storm of thunder and rain came on, and Mackay, who was lying on the ground with the donkey's saddle for his pillow, soon found that the thin calico tent was no protection from the fury of the storm; and as it was on the open beach, no shelter was to be had. His blankets were dripping, and the floor flooded; he got to the top of a bale, and sat there, half asleep, till the morning.

The rain lasted all day. The next night he got a hut, if such it could he called, for it was a cow-shed. The swarms of fleas and mosquitoes made sleep almost impossible. Next day the work of looking over and drying the goods began. Many bottles of medicine were broken, and the oil-cans leaked badly. This was a great loss, as night in the tropics comes on quickly, and it meant often being obliged to sit through the long hours of darkness without a light. After repacking the bales, he engaged more porters, but just as they were about to start, rain came on, and they all ran away.

Many delays followed, but at last he reached a place nine miles from the mission station. The people came in crowds to see and hear "the wisdom of the white man," as he told them of the one true God, and tried to shew them that the charms in which they trusted had been of no use to keep away the plague, from which many had died. He advised them to clean their houses and roads.

A week later Mackay wrote, "Many visitors to-day. One man had been a witch-doctor and fortune-teller. His master, a sub-chief, had taken very kindly to learning, and wished to have all his people, women as well as men, taught to read, but by the king's orders was suddenly sent away to a great distance. But he had not forgotten us, for the old man brought as a present from his master � a fine fat bullock. The old man said that since hearing his master taught about the one true God, he had thrown his charms into the swamp, and no longer believed in witchcraft.

"Another old man came in who said he had heard of the fame of our wonderful house at the other end of the lake, and had travelled many miles to see it for himself. We had some interesting conversation, and before leaving his faith in charms was somewhat shaken, as he owned they could not keep sickness and death away. He promised to come again to hear more, and said he would bring a friend. We hope they will come, and that the Holy Spirit may so open their eyes that they will not only throw away their idols, but believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as their own trusted Saviour."

Boat-building was the next large piece of work Mackay had to undertake. A boat for the use of the mission had been sent out in numbered sections, but when he reached the place where they had been left, he saw the task that lay before him would not be an easy one. The covering that had been put over the sections to protect them from sun and rain had been stolen. Bolts, iron plates, nails and screws were all missing, and the planks had been so warped by the sun that many of them were quite useless.

He was in a district ruled over by a king who had never seen a white man, and was not at all sure that he would be allowed to stay long enough to build a boat. The king accepted a present of cloth and other things, but refused to see Mackay, saying he was afraid of the white man, though he wished to be friends with him. He was afraid to let him stay in his village (ten miles away), and he must only stay for a month, as no rain would fall as long as the white man was near, and the crops would be spoiled. The people came in crowds to see the strange white man, and he was able to tell them that it is only God who can give or withhold the rain.

After a great deal of very hard work, the "Eleanor," as the boat was called, was built, painted and launched. It was not roomy or comfortable; a Scotch herring-boat would, he said, have been far better, but such as it was, he was thankful for it.

Chapter 18.

The New King.

The year 1884 was one long to be remembered in the history of missionary work in Uganda. During its early months Mackay made several journeys to the south side of the lake Nyanza.

On one occasion, as he had been unable to get bread, plantains, or other food supplies on board before starting, the missionary and his crew were very hungry, so they made up their minds to try, if possible, to land upon the large island of Sesse, where he hoped to find friendly natives who would be willing to sell food. But in this he was disappointed, for they no sooner caught sight of the boat than they ran down in crowds to the beach, uttering frightful yells, throwing stones, and shaking their spears and war-clubs in a very threatening manner.

Mackay stood up in the boat, and holding up cloth, beads, and a string of cowries, did his best to explain that he had not come to rob, but to buy of them, but could not get a hearing. It was as much as he and his men could do to keep the boat out of the range of the stones, which at times came flying in showers. Still, in the goodness of God, no one was hurt. He then asked if, as they refused to let him land, they would put out a canoe and bring food for sale, but even this they could not be persuaded to do. It was trying to be obliged to go away hungry, but he wrote in his journal: "These poor people have been so badly treated, and so often robbed and even murdered by Arab traders, that I was not surprised that they were afraid to allow strangers to land. Had we persisted in landing, it is quite likely they would have all run away, and I should have been no nearer buying food than before."

For several years King Mtesa had been in failing health, and day by day he grew weaker. To the end of his life he continued in a half-hearted way friendly to the missionaries, but gave them no ground for hope that he had really accepted Christ. His illness was kept a great secret, and he had been dead for some days before the news got abroad. The death of a sovereign in Uganda had always been a signal for plunder and bloodshed, and there were grave reasons to fear that for some time neither life nor property would be safe.

Mackay was away at the coast when a messenger arrived with the tidings, at the same time telling him that four of his men whom he had sent to the port for stores had been robbed, and forced to run for their lives. Houses and gardens were being robbed, and the mission house was to be burnt or pulled down. Nearly all his men were away, but he felt that he ought to return at once.

After many hours hard work the boat was launched and safely anchored near the shore. On the return journey the boat narrowly escaped being swamped during a violent gale, but by the good hand of God no lives were lost.

The morning after his return to the mission premises, Mackay received a message from the chiefs, who had sent a party of a hundred armed men to escort him to the palace. They could not settle the question of who was to fill the throne left vacant by the death of the king till after his funeral, and Mackay was required with all possible haste to make the coffins. The palace presented a strange scene. Thousands of women were weeping, or pretending to weep, and uttering mournful cries; while the men were yelling and roaring in a way that in one of his home letters he described as "simply frightful."

They wanted three coffins, but after a good deal of talking, said they would be content with two. Mackay went back to the mission house for tools and some zinc cases to be hammered into plates, collected as many native helpers as he could, and set to work with a will. By dawn the next morning the coffins were finished and the funeral took place.

The king had many sons, and the new king was to be chosen from among them by the chiefs. Their choice fell upon Mwanga, a youth of about seventeen, who bore a strong likeness to his father. His mother became at once a very important person, and the queen-sister, or maiden-queen, was at once chosen from among the princesses.

The missionaries were pleased that Mwanga had been the prince chosen to succeed his father. They knew him well, as he had often visited them and received instruction. On one occasion he had been asked how, if ever he became king, he would treat his old friends the missionaries? His reply was, "I shall like you very much, and shew you every favour." But he was no sooner raised to the throne than he forgot his promise and behaved very badly.

On their first visit to the court after his accession he refused to see them, and when, after long waiting, they obtained an interview, his manner was rude and insulting in the extreme. He received their presents of cloth, beads, and a large umbrella, but was very haughty.

It was not long before he shewed himself in his true colours as a bitter enemy of the gospel. Several of the chiefs, seeing the temper of the king, made the most of their opportunity to still further poison the mind of Mwanga against the missionaries, though still making a shew of being friendly to them. Persecution broke out; a plot to entrap Mackay and the native Christians, the firstfruits of his work in Uganda, was laid.

It was again a needs-be that Mackay should take a journey to the south side of the lake. Permission to go was given him by the king, also by a chief through whose district they would have to pass. He started with a fellow missionary and two of his christian lads. As they were about to enter a dense forest they were met by a party of armed men, who drove them back, and after tying the hands of the boys, carried them of as prisoners. The missionaries never saw them again.

Chapter 19.

Testing Times.

Unable to learn what had become of the two christian boys who had been so roughly taken from them, they went to a chief who, only a few days before, had made a great profession of being their friend, and begged to know the fate of the boys. They could not get a hearing, and were treated with great rudeness and violence. King Mwanga had, they were told, given orders that all the Christians in Uganda were to be burnt.

With almost breaking hearts the missionaries left, and making all possible haste to the mission premises, told their pupils of the state of things and urged them to fly and hide themselves in the woods, but had great difficulty in persuading them to do so.

Later in the day they heard that the mission boys had, with another young man, also a Christian, been burnt to death. The young martyrs had, they were told, boldly confessed their faith in Christ. Some said that after the fire was lighted they sang in their own language a hymn beginning with, "Daily, daily sing His praises."

Mackay wrote, "Our hearts are well-nigh breaking! Our Christians are all driven away, and we are lonely and deserted, sick and sad."

Under date February 8th he wrote, "Ashe and I have been all this week busy printing. It is quite likely we may be driven away, and if so, we cannot do better than leave as many scripture portions and gospel books as possible. These will be treasured by the Christians, and so the work of God may go on, even if our voices are no longer heard."

King Mwanga sent for the missionaries, and pretended that the boys had been burnt without his knowledge or consent. Mackay did not believe this, and spoke very plainly and faithfully to the king, though knowing that he risked his own life by doing so. He told the king that the boys had not been guilty of any crime, and to burn them because they loved the Lord Jesus and read their Bibles was to commit a great sin against God.

Amid all the gloom and sorrow the Lord did not leave His servants without encouragement. Night after night numbers, mostly young men and boys, came to the mission house, and said they wished to confess Christ by baptism. They knew the danger, but were, they said, willing to face it, and many were baptised. Some even found courage to visit the missionaries during the daytime, though such were always advised not to do so, as the mission premises were closely watched, and any native found there might be burnt!

News of the wreck of the mission boat, "The Eleanor," now reached Mackay, but without permission from the king or the head chief, he could not go to the lake to see for himself the extent of the damage she had suffered. To obtain this was difficult and trying in the extreme; much valuable time was wasted, as the chief to whom he first applied sent him to the king, and the king back again to the chief. And when, after many delays, the order was given, and Mackay started with a party carrying ropes, boathooks, axes and other things he expected to find useful in the work of repair, he had not gone far before he was met by a party of armed men, who said they had orders not to allow him to reach the port. There was nothing for it but to turn back, and again taking with him a present, seek an interview with the king. The present was accepted, a fresh permission given, and he again set out to reach the lake.

"The Eleanor" lay on her side, almost covered with water, but after a great deal of very hard work was raised, and drawn up high and dry on the beach, the water baled out, and the boat found very little the worse for her supposed wreck.

There were many points on which the king and his chiefs could not agree, and more than once it looked as if a rebellion was about to break out. The missionaries gave themselves to prayer, feeling almost sure that if the chiefs got the upper hand they had nothing to expect but martyrdom. For once the weak king acted with firmness, he deposed the rebel chiefs, and several who were friendly to the mission were put in their places. "By this act," Mackay wrote, "the king has saved himself and us. God be thanked!"

Mackay's skill as boat-builder, carpenter, printer and in other ways again gained him a measure of favour. The king sent for him, said he was much pleased with a shelf he had put up for his clock, and expressed a wish to be again on friendly terms. The chiefs said, "The white men are men of truth, they do not, like the Arab traders, mix ashes with the salt to make it look more."

Mackay told the king that by being ahead of his subjects in reading and knowledge, he would set them a good example. Mwanga said he had often wished to learn to read, but had always been opposed by his chiefs. Mackay told him he was king, and could be powerful when he liked.

For a little while things went on more quietly. Mackay had many opportunities of speaking very plainly to the king, and told him that the blessing of God could not rest upon his country as long as robbery and murder were allowed. He also urged him to make a law putting a stop to the slave trade. Much might, he saw, be done to prevent the spread of plague and small-pox, from which great numbers were dying, if the people could only be induced to keep their persons and houses clean, and not allow rubbish to stand in rotten, ill-smelling heaps before their doors.

Chapter 20.

A Noble Army of Martyrs.

"Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;

When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me."

The well-known lines I have just quoted must often have been the language of the sorely-tried missionaries in Uganda, for every day King Mwanga seemed to become more cruel and blood-thirsty than before. It was very seldom that a week passed without some of his unfortunate subjects being cruelly put to death. In August, 1885, the king took a trip on the lake, and ordered Mackay to accompany him. The very first day twenty poor natives whom they met were killed. Mackay writes in his diary: "This wicked work must stop. I hope to try by God's help to shew the evil of such murder, and if it continue I must enter my protest and return to the capital."

Not long after a fresh trouble caused deep sorrow to Mackay and his friend, Mr. Ashe. One day they heard that white men with a caravan were entering Uganda by a road that the king called his "back door," and the next the sad news reached them that the whole party, who proved to be Bishop Hannington and his followers, had been murdered by the express orders of the king, who knew that they had brought large quantities of beads, barter cloth, and other things which fell into his hands, and which he had brought to the palace by night, as he did not wish the news of this fresh crime to get abroad.

The missionaries spent much of their time in translating and printing portions of scripture, feeling sure that if they were obliged to leave the country, or, as it often seemed likely, called upon to lay down their lives for Christ's sake, God would still watch over and bless His own written word.

Many of the native Christians had been killed. Some were burnt, others killed by the sword. They witnessed a good confession, and boldly owned their faith in Christ, and the head executioner told the king that he had never killed such brave people. "They died," he said, "calling upon God."

It was well known that any native found on the mission premises, which were often closely watched, would at once be arrested, and perhaps put to a cruel death; yet many, mostly young men and lads, found courage to visit them, some in broad daylight, though by far the larger number came by night. All received scripture portions, and many were baptised.

Sometimes the missionaries thought that the time for them to leave the country had really come, but without royal permission it would, they knew, be impossible for them to do so. Mackay had made himself far too useful as builder, doctor, worker in metals, carpenter and undertaker, to be readily spared. Though more than once he was told by the king that he intended to kill all the white men in the country, permission to leave was refused. "A great king like me," said Mwanga, "must always have a man of skill to work for him; I will not let you go away, not even if they send seventy letters for you!"

Still, week by week the christian company grew larger, and on July 25th 1888, the missionaries' journal shewed that two hundred and thirty-seven persons had been baptised. Several christian couples had also been married. On that date, under cover of darkness, fifty converts ventured from their hiding-places, and met at the mission house, where, at midnight, they united in remembering the Lord's death.

The king called for his fortune-tellers, and ordered them to find out by the use of charms and devil worship if it would be safe for him to kill Mackay. Mr. Ashe had at last been allowed to leave for England, and Mackay was alone.

Some of the friendly chiefs disapproved strongly. "No, you must not kill Mackay," they said, "he is your friend; he buried the old queen-mother, he buried Mtesa, he is a man of great wisdom." The king was angry, and said he would go with armed men and fight and kill Mackay, but the God in whom the lonely missionary trusted kept the wicked king from carrying out his threat.

The Arab traders, who had never forgiven Mackay for exposing their evil deeds and trying to put a stop to the slave trade, made many false charges against him, telling the king that white men would take his country and crown from him. The witch doctors were then ordered to bewitch Mackay and all the Christians in the country; but, as he wrote, "if they are content to stop at this, no harm will be done."

Meanwhile things were not going well with the king. First he had sore eyes, for which, of course unjustly, he blamed Mackay; then his palace was burnt down, and all his goods lost. His gunpowder kegs, which he kept in a straw hut where a fire was constantly burning, blew up, and great damage was done. Many were killed by the explosion, and others wounded. His Majesty then took refuge with his head chief, but he had only been there a few days when the house was set on fire by lightning, and the powder exploded.

The king was now in a terrible fright, and said he was bewitched, and must kill Mackay. Food supplies often ran short, and anxiety, hard work, want of sleep, and frequent attacks of fever told greatly upon Mackay's health. One day, to his great surprise, the queen-mother sent him a present of a fine fat cow, without begging for any gift in return.

Chapter 21.

Great Changes.

After many delays, and a great deal of trouble and annoyance, Mackay got the king and his

chiefs to consent to his leaving Uganda for a time; perhaps a year or longer. But it was not to visit the scenes of his boyhood, though he stood sadly in need of a real holiday. Constant work, hardship and privation, with frequent attacks of fever, had done much to injure his health; he was often weak and suffering. The Roman Catholic priests who had returned to Uganda would, he knew, rejoice at his going, as it would allow them to have things much in their own hands; but this, he felt sure, would not be God's way of blessing for the country and its people. So he gave up all thought of a visit to the homeland, determined to go only to the south side of the lake, there to see how far it was possible to carry the glad tidings of a Saviour's love to the tribes living in villages along the coast, to whom the gospel had never been preached. He also intended to wait for and welcome fresh missionaries, who were, he had heard, on their way from England.

The journey took many days, and while on the road Mackay wrote to his sister: "Every half-mile or so along the coast we come upon a tiny hamlet of from twenty to thirty round huts, surrounded by a rough fence of cocoa logs, with, of course, a kraal for cattle in the centre. These villages are of great interest from a missionary point of view, they are just so many fields, I will not say 'white to harvest,' but where a great deal of ploughing and sowing needs to be done, and there may have to be long and patient waiting for the reaping time, but come it will. One great difficulty is that hardly two of these villages speak the same language, and as we cannot stop long enough at each to learn more than a few words, we are unable to do much in the way of giving them the gospel."

The printing-press had not been left in Uganda, and Mackay was soon hard at work printing scripture portions and reading sheets, which he hoped to send to Uganda. House building also took up a good deal of his time, for the expected missionaries might arrive any day, and he wanted to be able to give them at least the shelter of a roof.

They came at last, a party of six, one of their number being Mackay's old friend and fellow-labourer, Mr. Ashe. It was a great pleasure to the lonely missionary to welcome his brethren, and they had many happy seasons of prayer and fellowship together. Within a fortnight after their arrival two of the party received their home-call. They had appeared in perfect health, but could not rally from their first attack of fever.

One day Mackay received a letter from Mwanga, the king of Uganda, asking him to send, with as little delay as possible, the new missionary who had come with Mr. Ashe from England. Mr. Walker went, Mr. Gordon having already gone to supply Mackay's place as far as possible. The king, on Mr. Walker's arrival, gave him quite a grand reception, and seemed to wish him to think that though as a sovereign he had great power, his desire was to be on good terms with the missionaries.

Mr. Ashe, whose health again broke down, was obliged to return to England, so again Mackay was alone. But, as he said, he had not time to be lonely, so much needed to be done. Crowds of natives came to look and wonder at the wisdom of the white man, and all who could read received some portion of scripture.

A tribal war was going on, and as a large number of boxes, bales and packages belonging to the great African traveller, Stanley, had been sent on to his care, it took much thought and time to find safe places in which to hide them all until the trouble was over.

Great changes were taking place in Uganda. The cruelty and greed of the king had long caused a great deal of discontent, and at last the chiefs took up arms against him, made justly angry by finding that he had intended to ship his body guard to a desert island, and there leave them to die of starvation. The king fled in haste and fear to the lake, followed by a number of his women. Only one canoe was to be had, so most of the women had to be left behind, but he reached an Arab station on the south coast of Speke Gulf.

From there he wrote to Mackay, begging him to come quickly, and take him away from the Arabs, who were robbing him. In the true spirit of Christ-like compassion and love Mackay felt sorry for Mwanga, and more than once sent him barter goods with which to buy food and clothing. After many troubles the exiled king was able to return to Uganda, and at last to his capital and palace.

But how had Messrs. Gordon and Walker been faring in Uganda? It was months since Mackay had heard of them, and he often felt anxious and longed for some letter or message from his absent friends. One morning the mission boat, "The Eleanor," came in sight, and to his surprise and delight the missionaries were on board. They were thin, pale, sick and almost without clothing, for, as Mr. Walker said, they had just been bundled on board, but without their bundles.

They had a strange, sad story to tell. For a week they had been imprisoned in a wretched hut, where they were kept almost without food, with only a blanket each, and had to lie among filth too horrible to write about. More than once they had expected to be dragged out and cruelly put to death; but the good hand of God was over them, and their lives were spared.

When they were pushed on board "The Eleanor" they had very few clothes, no food or bedding was given them, and they had no protection from sun or rain. They would have been well-nigh starved had it not been for the French priests who were on board the same boat, who, being a little better off than themselves, kindly shared with them what food they had. Mr. Walker had only saved two books, one being his Testament, but these were taken from him and thrown into the lake.

Many Christians who had escaped from Uganda found their way to the mission station, and though the Africans are not naturally fond of work, Mackay did his utmost to shew them that the blessing of God cannot rest on idleness, and some became his willing helpers.

Chapter 22.

Friends from Afar.

Something unusual must have happened, or was going to happen, for though it was hardly daybreak, every one at the little mission station where Mackay had so patiently awaited the arrival of the great African traveller, Henry Stanley, was astir, and every one was busy. A fine goat had been killed and roasted, fresh bread baked, and everything, indoors and out, put in readiness for the guests who might arrive at any time.

Again and again watchers were sent to a hill at no great distance, from which a good view could be had, and when at last the news came that though still at some distance, the long line was really in sight, Mackay put on a white linen suit, and sun hat, and went off to welcome Stanley, his friends and followers. They were a large party, consisting of Mr. Stanley, Emin Pasha, with his daughter, and about half a dozen other gentlemen, while their following of soldiers, baggage-carriers, drivers and others, numbered nearly eight hundred.

For many days they had forced their way along, sometimes wading knee-deep through swamps, sometimes through forests where the trees grew so closely together that it was dark even at noon-day. Food supplies had often run short, and they were all very tired. So for nearly three weeks they rested. To the missionary, who for months together had worked single-handed in the midst of heathen darkness and superstition, the society of Mr. Stanley and his friends was a great pleasure. They had much in common, for the man who had found Livingstone had learnt to love and value his Bible.

"How was he led into the light?" some of my readers may ask. I will tell you in as nearly as I can remember his own words. "I was down with fever," he wrote, "and lay in my tent very sick and lonely. I badly wanted something to read, but most of my baggage had been left on the road, and all that could be found was an old English newspaper and a Bible. I tried the newspaper first, but soon grew tired of it; then I took up the Bible. I read it that day as I had never done before; and alone, in the heart of that African forest, I remembered my Creator, and as I read the New Testament peace came to my soul."

Stanley strongly urged Mackay to leave his work for a time, perhaps a year or so, and return with him to England. He had been so long at his post, had suffered so much from fever, and was looking so ill and worn, that he really ought to have a rest. All this was true, friends in the homeland were writing by every mail pressing his return. But he could not be persuaded to go. The long, dark night of cruelty and persecution in Uganda was, he believed, nearly over; the gospel was winning its way, there were many inquirers; and until some one came out to take his place and carry on his work, he was not at liberty to go.

And so the parting came. Good-byes were said, and Mackay, who had walked for some distance with the caravan, returned to his mission station. Stanley soon after arrived in England and found himself a popular and much-talked-of man. He was received by royalty; honours were heaped upon him. Perhaps Mackay little thought how very soon higher honours and richer rewards were to be his: the home-call and the Master's words, "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

Busy days followed. A great deal had to be done to get the mission boat, "The Eleanor," into good working order, for though new boilers and other parts had been sent from England in numbered sections, it had been impossible to get them together before. They had suffered greatly from rust, and some parts were so bent and damaged as to be quite useless; nails and screws had been lost or stolen.

All through the winter of 1889 and the first weeks of 1890 Mackay was toiling from early morning till sunset at his forge, or turning-lathe. His evenings were, with the help of two or three native converts, spent in translating or printing portions of scripture; at noon, while his workmen were at dinner, he had a reading class for boys. "To be always at work was," he said, "the only way to keep well in Africa."

Nearly all the chiefs or headmen in Uganda were professing Christians, and there was good reason to believe that many were really "children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." They wanted preaching-places and schools opened all over the country, and Mackay wrote to friends at home, asking if there were no godly, devoted young men who were willing to go out as missionaries to Africa, love the people, live among them, for Christ's sake "endure hardness," and so have the joy of leading precious souls to the Saviour.

"In Germany, and some other countries of Europe," he wrote, "every man is trained for military service, and expected to be a soldier; and are not all Christians Christ's soldiers? And where can soldiers be more needed than out here, where the fight is so fierce and the soldiers so few?

At last the gospel appeared to be taking root in Uganda, and on every hand there were cheering tokens that the long time of weeping was about to be followed by a morning of joy, and though Alexander Mackay was very tired, still his home letters were brightly written, and often all aglow with faith and courage. One of his great desires was for the construction of African railways. Good railways would, he felt sure, not only help missionaries who were obliged to take long journeys to reach the places where they were most needed, but also do much toward putting a stop to the slave trade.

Chapter 23.

Called Higher.

"But one morning early in February, 1890," so wrote his sister, "the clang of the iron hammer was hushed; the glare of the furnace had faded, the last blast of the great bellows had been blown, and all was still and silent." Where was Mackay? Only the day before he had been busy in the workshop. In the evening he had helped his fellow-missionary, Mr. Deekes, whose health had completely broken down, to pack and make arrangements for his return to England. He had, he said, a cold, but it was only a cold, which be thought he had taken through getting over-heated, and then working knee-deep in water to finish some needed repairs on "The Eleanor." But the next day he was down with fever, and on the following day he was delirious. It was no common attack, and the worst was feared. His boys, who loved him dearly, were quiet and tearful. They moved about with silent foot-steps and sad faces, and whispered to each other, "Will he die?"

They did what they could for him, but it would have taken a journey of hundreds of miles before a doctor or nurse could reach him. He was only ill four days, and then the home-call was given, and he passed peacefully away. For him all was well: no more toil, no more pain, no more sorrow, but the presence of the Lord he had loved and served so faithfully.

During his short illness he did not appear to suffer much pain, but was delirious nearly the whole time. He often spoke of Mr. Stanley, who he seemed to think was still his guest, and asked again and again if he and his party were being made comfortable. All his remarks during the four days he was ill were made in English. In his delirium more than once he threatened to leave the house and sleep in the forest.

His brother missionary, Mr. Deekes, wrote to his friends in Scotland: "I had a coffin made from planks he himself had cut for the boat, and at 2 p.m. we buried him by the side of one who had already fallen on the mission-field. I tried to read some passages of scripture, and offer a few words of prayer, but quite broke down through grief and weakness. Our boys, with a number of native Christians, stood round the grave and sang, with tears rolling down their cheeks, 'All hail the power of Jesus' name,' in Luganda, and we returned to the house. Never shall I forget that day and many others that followed it. God, and He only, knows how I miss my friend. Those were sad days. I dismissed the porters who had been sent to carry my loads to the coast, and prayed that God would give me strength to hold the post till others could arrive to carry on the work; and so far my prayer has been answered, for my health is much better, and more missionaries are, I hear, on their way to Uganda, and may arrive in about three weeks."

We may say of Alexander Mackay, that

"He laboured awhile 'mid burning sands,

When the scorching sun was high;

He grasped the plough with a fevered hand,

Ere he laid him down to die;

But another, and yet another,

Has filled the deserted field,

Nor vainly the seed they scattered,

Where a brother's care had tilled."

We may not understand why one so fitted for and devoted to the work of carrying the glad tidings of the gospel to the tribes, living in what, not many years ago, was the darkest part of dark Africa should have been so early called from the service of earth to the rest of heaven; but we are sure, quite sure, that God knows best. He makes no mistakes, but doeth all things well.

The work of God in Uganda went on. Long and patiently Mackay and his fellow-labourers had toiled, sowing the good seed; many were the hearts in which it took root, and with the blessing of the Lord brought forth much fruit. The work of translating the Gospel by John, on which he had been engaged the night before his fatal illness came on, was completed by a fellow-missionary, and many of the portions of scripture he had printed found their way into far-away places, and were the means of leading many souls to Christ.

To-day there are schools and preaching-places in almost every town and village in Uganda. Whole tribes have thrown away their idols, and said they wanted to love and serve the true God. Nearly all the children in Uganda go to Sunday-school and sing the same hymns (translated into Luganda) to the same tunes we have at home.

Abler pens than mine have told the story of Alexander Mackay, but if through reading it one dear boy or girl is led to see the beauty of an unselfish, useful life, it will not have been rewritten in vain. Remember he was only a schoolboy when he yielded his heart and life to the Saviour. We may not all be called to do some great work, but every life is full of opportunities; we can all do something to help or comfort others. Little things, if done from love to Christ, are precious in His sight, and may have results we never thought of or expected. "Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right."

STEM Publishing : For the Young : The Boyhood of Well-known Christian Men.

The Boyhood of Well-known Christian Men.

by G. W.

London Gospel Tract Depot, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C.

Contents

William Farel

Philip Melancthon

George Whitefield

Adoniram Judson

William Wilberforce

The Earl of Shaftesbury

Present Lessons

A Fearless Preacher in Reformation Times.

William Farel.

The early days of William Farel were spent in a mountain village bearing the family name, near the town of Gap, in Dauphiny. That beautiful and fertile province in the South-east of France, is situated by the Italian frontier, and overlooked by the majestic Alps, with their snowy summits

and interesting scenery. His father was a nobleman, living in the honour of his earthly position, so that the old family mansion was greatly superior to the humble homes of the villagers near. William was born in the year 1489 � one long to be remembered by the poor suffering Waldenses as that of fierce persecution, which had also characterised the previous year. Cruel scenes of bloodshed, therefore, were enacted not far from the beautiful home of the Farels, but being staunch papists, they sympathised with the oppressors, and the cry of the oppressed troubled them not. Ah, little could bigoted man foresee, that that helpless babe coming at a time when papal rage was triumphant, would, in the vigour of manhood, break its yoke from many a neck, and unmask its evils, with an unsparing hand!

William's lot was cast in a religious home. That means one, in which a constant and careful observation was given, to those works of the flesh, which were considered good and acceptable to God. Instead of accepting His terms, and His free gift, the natural heart of man labours, in its ignorance, to do that which is impossible. The Holy Ghost has written to us regarding this error, in Romans 8: 8: "They that are in the flesh cannot please God."

William Farel's youth was spent in the blindness of unbelief and superstition, and though he early learned to read, he knew nothing in those days, of the only Book in the world which is of infinite worth. Instead of learning that there is only One who can hear and answer prayer in the name of Jesus, the credulous boy was taught to pray to angels and saints, while his mind was filled with foolish fables, and supposed miracles. It was truly the blind leading the blind, and the plastic mind of the child was the soil in which the enemy sowed these false traditions, by means of deluded parents.

Farel was wont to relate some of the follies of those early days, as in after life he remembered, with regret, the sins of his youth. He acted ignorantly and in unbelief, no doubt, but he afterwards learned that his darkened state did not excuse the deeds of darkness flowing from it. God in His mercy has made provision for sins of ignorance, and the believer can say that "the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin." Many a soul, even in the present day, seeks to cover its guilt by the simple words, "I did not know;" but the word of God plainly shews that we are responsible to know what He has revealed.

In John 7: 17, we read, "If any one desire to practise his will, he shall know concerning the doctrine." (New Trans.) Human will and ignorance are generally closely allied, and the former is simply pleasing one's self, which conscience and the scriptures make plain to the soul, can never be pleasing to God.

After the light of the written word had shone in on Farel's soul in later days, he wrote and spoke of his youth in no measured language, as he grieved intensely over the guilt which he felt had been his.

When only seven years of age, he went with his parents to see a piece of wood, which the priests affirmed to he part of the cross on which the Lord Jesus was crucified. It was ornamented with copper, which was said to have been part of the basin used by the Son of God to wash the disciples' feet.

I do not tell you all that was thus falsely affirmed of that so-called holy cross, for it would only fill the mind with the repetition of folly and wickedness. The child, young as he was, felt greatly disturbed in his mind, but the parents questioned not the truth of all that they saw, and the wonderful tales poured into their ears. They did not dare to allow even a thought that anything could be untrue or unholy in the ways of priest or people, whatever the outward appearance might indicate. Many things therefore combined to make religion an unsolved problem to that young thinking soul.

William possessed a reflecting mind, but was not the less behind his brothers, nor other boys, in the adventurous pursuits of his mountain home. In common with those who live amid such wild scenery, he delighted in the difficulties, and feared not the dangers of the Alpine height, or rocky gorge. He entered into all with boyhood's keen enjoyment, both using and invigorating his health thereby. So adventurous and full of spirit was he, that his father thought a soldier's life would be the most suitable one to give scope to the energy of his character.

William, however, soon manifested desires after a totally different life to that proposed by his father. He wished for earthly fame and greatness, and thought that to be a man of learning and an author, would best accomplish this ambitious purpose. Thus we see how all the natural thoughts of the human heart revolve around one's self, as the only object to please in life, while in reality God has given this brief span, that we may learn therein how to live to His glory. It was not in the days of his boyhood that Farel learned this, but his desires towards education were overruled by God, to bring him within reach of the glad tidings of salvation.

The father by no means approved of the son's desire to study, yet he yielded to his wishes, and was willing to let him have a tutor, to give him lessons in Latin. But no such teaching was to be found near Farel's home, and he searched in vain for some man of sufficient Latin education. He was horrified to find, not only ignorance where he expected learning, but also sinfulness, where he thought to see holiness. He saw how hollow were all the vain pretensions of the priests and monks, and how little faith they themselves seemed to have, in the routine of their religious lives.

God thus used this educational disappointment to shew that earnest youth the utter vanity of a form of godliness, which denies the power thereof. "Not of works, lest any man should boast." In God's purposes too, the inability to find a tutor was the means used to lead him to the place where he would be taught of God, and learn, for the first time, the way of salvation, as all of grace.

William's next attempt to reach his mental goal, was to request his father to send him to Paris University. The capital was a long way off, and travelling not so rapid as in our day. The separation, therefore, seemed greater then than now, so that the parents' consent was only reluctantly obtained. On receiving this permission, however, the son eagerly set out to meet the accomplishment of his cherished hopes and desires, and he reached them eventually, far beyond his expectations. He was twenty years of age when he thus exchanged the parental roof for a student's life in Paris. We can now look at him only for a little longer, and leave William Farel as of age � a boy no longer. In Paris, Latin lessons were easily obtained, while Hebrew and Greek were also within reach. He was therefore able to gratify to the full his great desire for study. This extended to the reading of the scriptures, which shook the idolatrous foundations on which his religion had hitherto rested. As a soul groping in darkness, he had long desired to meet with a man devoted to his creed. This was attained in Paris, when he met with Faber. They became fast friends, and God converted both Farel and Faber, and used them mutually to each other's blessing.

The former had reached the years of manhood, before he knew these two facts � what sin deserves, and what the heart of God has given. Till he learned these, his life-work had not begun, which was to dispel error by the manifestation of divine truth. True, it was not always done gently and quietly, for a good deal was accomplished by force, both by voice and hand, but much courage and faithfulness were displayed, with no small amount of success.

The century in which Farel lived was a very remarkable one, because of the revival of great and precious truths, which had been long hidden from sight.

An extraordinary impetus was also given to learning, by the labours of men who were life-long students, and able teachers. We can scarcely understand the difficulties which lay in the learner's path in those days, for things were not made so easy and pleasant as they are now. The invention of printing took place about the middle of the sixteenth century, and greatly facilitated the spread of truth and literature.

William Farel shared in these blessings, and, by the grace of God, was wisely directed to see the all-absorbing importance of God's revelation to man. We cannot pursue his life further, however, but leave with the young reader the different steps from childhood, boyhood, and youth, which led to the way of peace, in manhood's riper years. As we see divine love thus following the child, the boy, the lad, till union with Christ was consummated, we may well exclaim with Paul, "O, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable his judgments, and his ways past finding out!"

A Light-Bearer in Moral Darkness.

Philip Melancthon.

Piety and learning, gentleness and youth, are qualities which immediately suggest themselves to the mind, at the mention of this honoured and well-known name. It may be that association with the more stern and aggressive Luther, has brought into relief the retiring disposition of Melancthon, and that the striking contrast between the two men made their respective characters more distinct. Be that as it may, each had his own peculiar place, doing a needed work in times of great moral darkness, while as warm, devoted friends, they encouraged one another in difficulty or danger.

The great movement in which those two friends figured, is familiar to our ears as "The Reformation." Though men were used in it, and nations were even politically affected by it, the active power which was really at work, was "the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God." The world, the flesh, and the devil, had all gained such power over the church, that the full and free salvation of God was put aside for a way in which man could boast. The reading of the scriptures was neglected, and preference given to human teaching, so that Luther and his associates did no ordinary thing when they studied and taught the revelation of God's mind to man.

Forgiveness of sins through the blood of Jesus, was the truth of God written to ruined man, hundreds of years before. In Acts 13: 38, we read: "Through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins; and by him, all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses." The veil of unbelief had hidden this from the eyes of needy sinners, and now, the Holy Ghost not only bestowed spiritual sight to see that which was revealed, but gave courage to proclaim a divine message in the face of the most violent opposition on every side.

Such were the days in which Melancthon's lot was cast, and a share in this wonderful work was, in the wisdom of God, accorded to him. The days of his childhood were spent in a religious atmosphere, where good works and prayers held a prominent place. If these were the results of faith in the heart, they must have been profitable, but if not, however devout his parents may have been, all would be vain.

When only ten years of age, Philip was called to his father's death-bed, to hear his last words and counsel. It is recorded that the dying parent said, "I can foresee that the world is about to be shaken by terrible tempests. Great events are about to happen. May God guide and direct thee!" With the light of subsequent events thrown upon them, these tones seemed forcibly prophetic. The father died two days after, but even before the end, the boy was hurried away that he might not have the sorrow of this death-scene in his home. The sad event made a change of residence necessary for Philip and his brother George, and they then found a home with their grandfather, who gave them equal advantages with his own son.

Under the care of a wise and able tutor, encouraging results were obtained, for God had bestowed on the youth extraordinary mental capabilities, which rapidly developed. With the faculty of gaining knowledge, he possessed the power of a retentive memory, so that he not only learned easily, but remembered and profited by his studies.

Philip's surname was "Schwarzerd," which means in German, "black earth." "Melancthon" has the same meaning in Greek, and this is the name by which he was known through youth and manhood. The change was made by the learned professor Reuchlin, and soon became generally adopted.

Two traits in the lad's character were very attractive to those who knew him, and won for Philip many friends. He was of a gentle nature, and was particularly unassuming in the possession of more knowledge than was usual at his age. His grandfather being a Mayor, received visits, from time to time, from men of note, intellect, and learning.

The boys had the mental advantages of such society, but when this relative died, they were obliged to go elsewhere, to pursue their studies at school.

Their home-life was then spent under the roof of a lady who was sister to the well-known Reuchlin, and there they frequently met with him. The latter was greatly drawn to Philip, and gave him two valuable gifts, one of which was priceless above all else on earth. These presents were a copy of the Scriptures, and a Greek grammar. How much the recipient valued and studied both, his after life makes strikingly manifest!

Eager in the search after knowledge, Melancthon next passed on to the university of Heidelberg, and thence to Tubingen, which was also a seat of learning. He was everywhere recognized as an unusually clever and studious youth. His strict adherence to the word of God was much observed, but not so applauded as his education. So attached was he to his Bible, that he considered it no trouble to carry the precious book in his hand, even when its presence excited suspicion. Bibles were much more bulky then, than now, so that this youthful student in the sixteenth century, sets us a worthy example, in having the scriptures always at hand.

A prayer-book would not have been remarked in the hands of the youth, nor would it have so engaged the attention of others. But being larger, and receiving a greater share of attention, than any empty form of man's arrangement could command, its happy possessor was misjudged and blamed, for they said he was studying a class-book during religious ceremonies. Thus the soul who dares to prefer the simplicity of the word of God to the interpretation put upon it by man, must suffer for its courage and zeal. Satan and his emissaries are ever on the watch, to bring in false witnesses against the upright.

It must have been a beautiful sight in those benighted days of gospel truth, to see this clever young man ever preferring as his choicest company, that holy blessed Book. To be characterised by its presence was an honour, but to be recognised as one who sought to live out the spirit of it day by day was infinitely more. "The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." (2 Cor. 3: 6.) So far as Melancthon had learned the scriptures in power, he held fast that which he knew. He also firmly rejected what human teaching he saw to be opposed to the simplicity of the word. Thus was he led on to learn, to believe, to obey, and to teach.

At fourteen years of age, Melancthon had taken his degree of bachelor, and two or three years after he was doctor of philosophy, and began to give lessons. His teaching was greatly prized, and even at eighteen he produced written works, which were used and valued for years, in German universities. By Reuchlin's recommendation, a most honourable position in Wittenberg university presented itself, and at twenty-one, the youthful savant began his labours there. Little was expected from Melancthon at first, for his boyish appearance did not betoken such intellectual powers as they had expected.

But these learned professors soon found themselves greatly mistaken in the opinion thus prematurely formed. When the unostentatious youth began his public speech a few days after his arrival, he astonished all who heard by the talents which they saw he possessed, and the cultivation of them which application to study had produced. Even Luther wrote, "Let us beware of despising his age and person, for he is worthy of all honour," and he again mentioned him at this early stage as one "who incites all, of whatever station, to the study of Greek."

We shall not further pursue this remarkable life, as it passed onwards in the current of the wonderful events then taking place. Boyhood was over, and the work of the man entered upon, when, hand in hand with Luther, he sought to use these wonderful talents for God. We do not know much about Melancthon's inner thoughts, but we see the outcome of them in the use which he made of the knowledge he possessed, and the cultivation of the mind which God had given him.

Love for the scriptures is one of the most direct indications of spiritual life, and this was a most prominent feature in that remarkable man, even from boyhood. It does not appear to have been natural courage which enabled the gentle Melancthon to identify himself so fully with the written word, in an age when by many, it was neither known nor valued. But a holy boldness seems to have been manifest, and the power of God sustained him, as he witnessed to the purity and power, of the Book which was his precious and constant companion. How this developed in manhood into defence of the truth, and the high and holy privilege of circulating it, was fully apparent in subsequent events of his life. Luther had need of help in the translation of the Scriptures which he had warmly at heart, and Melancthon's aid was most valuable to him and greatly prized.

We must not confound the natural amiability of character in the latter, with the fruit of the Spirit in him as a child of God, however pleasant to nature the former may have been. Scripture shews that gentleness and meekness ought to be manifest in the believer, as the result of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Hence that which was the outcome of divine power within him, could only bear the impress of the Spirit of God. Nothing short of this is of any value in God's sight, for He has said: "The flesh profiteth nothing." All therefore, that was profitable in this honoured man, came from God, all that was only human nature, was powerless to act for Him. The Holy Ghost used the unerring word by Philip Melancthon, making his life and lips to testify to its divine and abiding simplicity, and of him we may say, that he lived, "holding forth the word of life."

An Earnest Soul-Winner.

George Whitefield.

The early days of this remarkable man were spent amid the uninteresting surroundings of a house called "The Bell Inn," in Gloucester. He was the youngest of seven children, and had only one sister. He lost his father when only two years of age, but the business was continued under his mother's care. She was anxious to give George a good education, and for this, the free Grammar School of his native town afforded every opportunity.

Being quick to learn, the boy made rapid progress, so it was with no small reluctance that he was compelled to relinquish his studies at the age of fifteen, and, in obedience to his mother, seek to assist her at home. Think of the altered life for a lad who loved books! � to turn from mental culture in school-life, not only to domestic work, but to sell beer, and wait upon the people who drank it.

Poor boy! he felt the contrast keenly, and was wont to steal away into any retired place he could find, to enjoy the companionship of some favourite work. Dramatic reading suited his tastes at that time, for he knew not God, nor understood the evil of his own heart. He had not been more than a year thus occupied, when his mother transferred the care of the inn to her eldest son, but poor George obtained no change of employment thereby. His aversion to the work was heightened by the presence of his sister-in-law, instead of his mother, and the boy continued unhappy. He had no alternative, however, for a time, but God's eye was watching him, till the moment arrived for deliverance from such uncongenial surroundings. Another brother who lived in Bristol, asked George to spend a little time with him there, and the invitation was gladly accepted. Some preaching to which he listened, while in that city, impressed him greatly, but the only immediate effect visible upon him, was that he began to write sermons, and thought of becoming a clergyman. His studies thus took a religious turn, but he did not know Christ yet, so he could only endeavour "to make a fair shew in the flesh."

Returning to his mother's house in Gloucester, he there met with a young man who had been at school with him, but who was at that time studying at Oxford. He was occupied in waiting upon other students, and for this work received a sufficient equivalent to enable him to meet the expenses of his own education with them. When George heard that in this position of servitor, he might maintain himself while pursuing a course of study, as his old school-mate was doing, he began to think about applying for such a post. His mother agreed, and preparatory to the university training, George went again to the old familiar school, to spend his time over Latin and Greek, till he could be received at Oxford.

His mother aided in the project, and at eighteen years of age, the desired opening was obtained through her efforts, and her next care was how to provide a suitable outfit, and travelling expenses.

Sufficient for these needs was lent by a friend, and bright with hope, young Whitfield diligently began his studies at the university. He soon repaid all the expectations which were centred in him, by applying himself, with great energy of purpose, to his books.

Charles and John Wesley were then studying at Oxford, and had gathered around them some religious companions, who were wont to meet together for mutual help and encouragement. Whitfield soon heard of this little company, and longed much to get acquainted with the two brothers, who were thus seeking to influence others for good. After he had been in Oxford about a year, a circumstance occurred, which brought him into contact with these young men, in a very simple way. Becoming interested in the sad case of a poor woman who had endeavoured to commit suicide, he wished much to help her morally, but knew not how to set to work. He thought of Charles Wesley as the most suitable person to advise, and therefore sent to enquire, if he would see her. The messenger was directed not to give Whitefield's name, but did so, and the result was an invitation from Wesley, to breakfast with him next morning.

Whitefield gladly responded, for he was secretly longing for spiritual help, and this, he thought, he might obtain from these earnest men. They were kind to him, lending books which were helpful at the time, but, like a true-hearted soul, Whitefield did not stop to measure himself by his friends, for he pressed on, till he knew more than they. He planted his feet on a divine foundation, when that truth laid hold of his soul in power: "Ye must be born again." He was not ashamed to write to his relations, telling of the necessity of the new birth, nor feared to press the same on others.

Though greatly opposed by many, George Whitefield made his soul's salvation his one care, and unmoved by man's disapproval, gave himself to such work as he thought would please God. The "sick or in prison," received his attention, so did the poor and needy, in other quiet ways. He had some reproach to bear on account of his zeal, because being poor, and in earnest, he was disliked, and spoken against, by those who were rich, and lived in ease. More over he endeavoured to bear all that came upon him as for Christ's sake, remembering that He will abundantly make up for all that His disciples may give up for Him.

In spite of George Whitfield's devotion, however, he was not yet at rest, for he had not learned a full salvation, in God's simple, perfect way, but was really labouring to reach it. He made known his state of unrest to his respected friend, Charles Wesley, for, finding out the evil of his own heart to be incurable, according to the scriptures, he longed for deliverance from its power. Had he turned direct to God, he would have been encouraged, but by reading the books they lent to him, he only got further astray, and grew disheartened in his search for light. Endeavouring to follow the rules given in these, the poor seeking soul only got deeper and deeper into the mud of human imagination, of which man is so foolishly vain.

Whitefield's days were, at this stage, spent in prostration of body, and a forced humiliation, in the futile hope of reaching God's free gift in this way. He had not yet learned "That no flesh should glory in his presence;" for his constant cry was for a better heart. God's answer to the suppliant shewed him how ineffectual all his efforts must be to remedy that which God had condemned and judged in the death of His beloved Son.

Whitefield sought to conquer his will according to the instructions given in the books he read, and thus hoped to obtain salvation. Alas, that unbelief should so deprive many an earnest soul of that divine deliverance which is the practical consequence of knowing that the believer has died with Christ! Not only that Christ has suffered for sins, but that, in his death, everything belonging to the flesh has gone from God's sight, in the perfect oblivion of the grave. The soul which knows this truth practically, no longer vainly seeks to master or keep in check the will, but refuses to own it at all.

Another of these false religious rules was, to remain in the seclusion of his room, till he could come up to a certain standard which was set before his mind. Rigidly following out every regulation laid down in his books, the poor misguided soul was only plunged deeper into darkness and distress, by the deceitfulness of his natural heart. Many painful efforts were made, such as fasting, praying out in the cold at night, preserving an unusual silence, and similar religious follies, but all was in vain. His beloved friends, Charles and John Wesley, sought to dissuade him from such foolish doings, but he heeded them not, and thought it right to give up their hitherto valued company.

At last, the hand of God was gently laid upon him, and this divine chastening sufficed to draw the weak and ignorant sufferer to a knowledge of God's love in Christ. For weeks and months, he thus learned in the school of God, and then his soul emerged from the mists of earth, into the brightness of a new and divine position, for George Whitefield had, at length, obtained peace in believing.

When convalescent, the young man went to his own home, and there gave himself to the study of the word of God. Then he began to feed upon Christ, and his soul learned the liberty which results from the ungrieved action of the Holy Spirit. All seemed new, and he owned now that a few weeks' study of the Scriptures, taught him more than all the writings of man he had ever perused. Whitefield found out too, what it was to have God's thoughts instead of his own, thus tasting the sweetness of communion.

But we must now take our leave of the boy George, for at this stage, he had reached the years of manhood, and the restless strivings of his youth gave place to active faith, in riper years. Ere long, he awoke the British Isles by the earnestness of his gospel preaching and burning love for souls. The power of God was with him, and in days when open-air gatherings for the gospel were rarely to be seen, Whitefield's zeal brought thousands to listen, and many to be blessed. Multitudes of souls dead in sin were reached, and numbers of sleeping Christians woke up, to find that God expects reality.

Thus George Whitefield became an honoured servant of the living God � a man in earnest, having one purpose in life, and he nobly fulfilled his aim. Willing to be anything that he might win souls for Christ, he was an out-and-out man in his onward course, and the seal of God's approval of his faithfulness was given in the awakening of thousands to a sense of their need. Wherever he turned his steps with God's glad tidings, in England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales, multitudes flocked to listen, and hung with marked attention on his wonderful message from God. Across the wide Atlantic too, he carried the glad news, bringing blessing to souls, not only in America, but on board the vessel that carried him thither.

Beautiful indeed is the picture presented to our minds by the record of his voyage, and the manifest tokens of the power of God, in a man who burned with love for precious souls! When he set sail from England, he found himself in the company of unbelieving ones, godless, indifferent, and hardened, to whom his only opportunity of testimony was a turn of the head, and a look towards some sinner more bold than the rest. He had not even a quiet spot where he could be alone with God, and preaching, or even reading with those on board, seemed, to the natural eye, well-nigh impossible.

"According to your faith be it unto you," is a divine principle for blessing between the needy soul and a giving God. Whitefield expected blessing, and the Lord gave it, first a retired place for prayer, then a way to the hearts of many, and eventually opportunities in which to minister to the sick, and the frequent preaching of the gospel, till the blessing of the Lord had spread over the ship. Looking back on this voyage, he thus wrote in after years: "A consciousness that I had in view the glory of God, and the good of souls, from time to time, afforded me unspeakable satisfaction."

This is only one example, among many, of the way in which Whitefield began on barren soil, labouring with God, in patient perseverance, till the blessing came down in rich abundance through the Word. At Bristol, his open-air preaching to twenty thousand colliers, moved hearts there, and melted to tears multitudes unaccustomed to weep and mourn over sin. In other large cities and towns, he attracted immense crowds, always to pour forth the burden of his heart, which was the need of lost and ruined souls "Ye must be born again."

Whitefield was greatly ridiculed because of the constant reiteration of this all-important truth, and if he knew popularity, he also experienced persecution.

Attempts were even made to take his life, but he could afterwards rejoice that curiosity to see the preacher on whose life murderous hands had been laid, only brought an increase of numbers to hear the gospel. Thus lived and laboured a devoted man, till in the fifty-sixth year of his age, he entered into rest on the 30th September, 1770. Though long in a condition of weakness, even the last day spent on earth found him sounding forth the glad tidings of salvation, from lips so soon to be sealed in death.

"They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever."

A Gospel Preacher to Heathen Hearers.

Adoniram Judson.

Enlightened America gave Adoniram Judson birth, benighted Burmah witnessed his life-long labours, and the boundless ocean received his dust, when the spirit returned to God who gave it. Sixty-one years of precious time lay between that cradle in the West, and the lonely grave in Eastern seas, making up a life full of talents, and pursued with rare devotion, during half its course. The simplicity of infancy, the expanding intellect of boyhood, even to the self-will of youth, were each, in turn, divinely overruled in the preparation of heart, which is from the Lord. Then when the light of God shone in upon his soul, and love divine was made known to his heart, the vigour of manhood was yielded up to God, and Christ, not self, became the object of life.

Young Judson's father was a man who commanded the respect of those who knew him well, and therefore exercised his own peculiar influence over the early life of this promising child. He expected a wonderful future for his boy, so much as to predict for him, at the age of ten, a distinguished career, in the few brief words, said in affection, "You will one day be a great man." This prediction came true in later years, but his life-work needed the preparatory training which he received in boyhood, that the clay might be formed in the hands of the Potter, and the vessel made meet for the Master's use.

Adoniram began to learn his letters when only between two and three years of age, and being easily taught, he made rapid progress, and was early encouraged to read the Scriptures. Even at four, the child showed an innate desire to impart to others what he had already learned, often gathering around him a little group of children, in his play, and talking to them in a fashion that was meant for preaching.

Study frequently superseded play with Adoniram, for while other boys were in the enjoyment of needed recreation, he might have been seen in some distant nook, enjoying his valued pastime in the productions of a favourite author. His father's library did much to form his mental tastes, and he made the most of his access to its treasures, in the cultivation of his mind when at home.

Young Judson's earliest thoughts regarding his soul's salvation, seem to have arisen during a very serious illness which brought him to the verge of the grave. The boy feared to enter eternity unsaved, and because of this, his sins rose before him in alarming magnitude. Anxiety lessened after the crisis was over, and then earthly aspirations seemed to smother, for a time, his desires for something real and morally profitable.

At times the beautiful life of a humble follower of the Lord Jesus, would open out before him; and he wondered in himself if that were not the truest greatness. As he pondered the fact, that "the time is short," he could not deny the inward suggestion, that at last, it would be more satisfactory to have pleased God rather than men. In the multiplicity of his thoughts he found out a most important truth, in the discovery that, at heart, he really did not wish to be converted. The Spirit of God was thus revealing to this inquiring soul, its own state � the first need of the sinner. "The carnal mind is enmity against God." (Rom. 8: 7.)

At the age of sixteen, young Judson went to college, and there devoted himself thoroughly to study, carrying off the palm, though in the list with the most clever competitors. When the president of the college wrote of this to the father of the successful student, he entered more into particulars than the youth had done, while he also commended him very highly, and touchingly expressed a wish for his conversion to God.

Alas! how busy and eager the enemy of souls was to beguile that favoured youth, round whom so many hopes were gathered! One college friend became his constant companion; for, being clever, bright, and witty, he had soon gained young Judson's affections. A dangerous companion he proved to be, for he was one of those subtle reasoners who refuse to believe what they cannot explain in the word of God. Such cavilings seem plausible to the human mind, for the natural man does not know his own condition of moral blindness. Only the Holy Ghost, who wrote the scriptures, can explain them, and He has written, "No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation."

Judson's friend did not deny the existence of God, but he did not own a revelation from Him, and was thus a daring and avowed deist. The former was therefore soon and easily entangled in the meshes of human reasoning and unbelief � professing to doubt that which he did not understand. Filled with ambitious thought as to the profession they should choose, these young men spent their time in folly, "having no hope, and without God in the world."

In the mercy of God, a parting time came, and the two met no more on earth, for a brief period of time irrevocably decided eternity for each. The deist died shortly after, leaving no trace which could give hope to his startled friend, of any submission to Christ, without which there could be no salvation. But God had bright and happy days for young Judson, who was shortly after brought to see himself a sinner, and after many a struggle, yielded to Christ, under the constraining power of the Spirit of God.

Before this, the most important event in his history, took place, he passed through varied circumstances, which served to teach him his own folly and need, as well as the longsuffering of God. Wishing to see a little of life, Judson set out on a tour through a part of his native land, with that object in view. In New York, he found his way one night to the theatre, and the next he had joined the theatrical company, imagining that seeing their life would be a help to his literary pursuits.

For eight days, Judson indulged this exercise of his will and desires, before any marked disturbance of his mind took place. But longer he could not stay, for thoughts of his parents' grief stole over him and touched his heart, while doubtless, their prayers were also moving his conscience by the Holy Ghost. In short, he became really anxious about his soul, but still endeavoured to hush its cravings after something holier and more satisfying than the empty frivolities which surrounded him.

As the young man thought of his danger, he tried to make himself believe that he was not afraid, and that it was necessary he should thus see life. But conscience triumphed, and instead of continuing his pursuit of the drama, he bent his steps to the home of a relation, intending to travel still farther. There again, God met him, and spoke to him through an earnest preacher who was staying in the house at the time. Occupied with divine things himself, he spoke out of the abundance of his own heart, and the young man was irresistibly drawn towards him. Not only was Judson's heart attracted, but the conscience was also reached, and his guilty state before God, alarmed him. The arrow of conviction lodged within, for the Spirit had wounded that He might heal, though the smitten one did not fully realise his condition of great need and imminent peril.

Judson was endeavouring to continue his intended tour, when he heard of the death of his deist friend, and then utterly wretched, he turned his steps homewards instead. In short, the Holy Ghost had implanted life in his soul, and he saw what his natural state was as a lost sinner, but he did not know what it is to have peace with God, for he had not trusted Christ as his Saviour. At last, he saw that the precious blood had been shed, which cleanseth from all sin, and believing, he got peace.

This was the turning-point in his life. The question now was, How could he best spend his life for God? Ambition was put aside; earthly greatness had no claims. One thing alone impelled him, and that was the constraining love of Christ. The overflow of this was the desire to serve. Ecclesiastical positions of eminence, and brilliant prospects opened out before him, but Judson quietly put everything of the kind aside, for the loneliness, the sorrow and the sufferings of a missionary's life, in heathen Burmah. He preferred thus to labour in telling dark souls of a living Saviour's love, rather than enjoy the ease and luxury of an American home.

From the time that the desire thus to serve took possession of his soul, till the closing hours of a useful and devoted life, love for the Master going out towards the perishing, filled his heart with an all-absorbing power. Oh, what a reproof to lives of pampered ease, was that of the devoted and honoured Judson! How one sees the power of one Object in the path, characterising the servant, as he pressed on in obedience, according to his light.

My reader may not feel called to any prominent service, either in this or heathen lands, but the future is greatly determined by the present. If God has given you desires after Himself, look to Him for power to carry them out. Let not one fall to the ground through moral laziness and apathy. You will get what you aim at, for, if your mark is Christ, the Spirit of God, who forms your desires, will surely work them out into the reality and practice of daily life. Desires lack not, for God never fails, but the moral power to deny self, is frequently the point where we come short.

"If any man serve me, let him follow me, and where I am, there shall also my servant be; if any man serve me, him will my Father honour."

The Slave's Friend,

William Wilberforce.

William Wilberforce was the only son of a prosperous merchant in Hull, and was born on the 24th of August, 1759. His circumstances were, therefore, easy and comfortable, and so far as this life was concerned, he possessed a name which had long been influential and respected in Yorkshire.

He was a delicate child, and small for his years, but his mental powers amply compensated for lack of physical strength. That which characterised the man was early manifest in the boy, namely, the mind rising superior to outward influences instead of being overcome by them.

With much vigour and intellect, Wilberforce possessed keen affections, and a heart readily occupied in the welfare of others. He was remarkably thoughtful in his ways for a child, and this beautiful trait in his childhood is worth remarking, as strikingly indicative of the character afterwards developed. A friend who was often a visitor at his home, was greatly struck with this exceeding thoughtfulness, and wrote as follows: "I shall never forget how he would steal into my sick-room, taking off his shoes, lest he should disturb me, and, with an anxious face, looking through my curtains to learn if I was better."

At the age of seven years, Wilberforce was sent to the grammar school in his native town, and gave great satisfaction to his masters during two years of study there. He had the comfort and privilege of home in the evenings, and the valuable training of a good schoolmaster and his assistant by day � advantages not to be lightly prized in the life of any child, rich or poor. Death soon entered the former, however, and the associations of the school were broken up in consequence, but in after-life, the master and pupil had opportunities of shewing, by an increasing friendship, their continued appreciation of each other.

In consequence of the death of his father in 1768, William was placed under the care of an uncle, and this necessitated a change of residence. His home was then, for a time, in the house of the latter at Wimbledon, where he was again sent to school. There however, he was a boarder, and thus lost the influence of home-life, for which there were no advantages obtained at school which could compensate for the loss. Two years were thus spent, happily broken at intervals by the holidays enjoyed at his uncle's, a visit now and then to a relative in Nottingham, and also to his own home in Hull.

A marked influence was exercised over the boy in that Wimbledon household, for there christian principles were instilled, which, in their vitality, were new to the fatherless child. His mother was not then converted, and could not therefore appreciate the training given by her brother-in-law and his wife, who were thus occupied with the soul's eternal welfare.

Before William had reached his twelfth birthday, he had already given evidence of much interest in divine things. The years which unhappily followed this seed-time, so smothered the thoughts and feelings of these hopeful days, that he seemed scarcely able afterwards to say, whether eternal life began then or not. His own words ran thus: "Under these influences my mind was interested by religious subjects. How far these impressions were genuine I can scarcely determine, but at least, I may venture to say that I was sincere. There are letters of mine, written at that period, still in existence, which accord much with my present sentiments."

If the boy was happy at Wimbledon, however, the mother in Hull was ill at ease about him. Strange to say, she was greatly alarmed regarding her son's state, and feared intensely that he would become a methodist, if longer left with his uncle and aunt. She therefore removed her son from their home and influence, and, sad to relate, sought to divert the mind of her child from spiritual things to worldly.

It was with feelings of the keenest regret that the youth left the pious influence of the home circle which for four years he had increasingly enjoyed, even though it was to return to the parental roof, to have his mother's care and his sister's company. He afterwards spoke of being almost broken-hearted at the separation, for he had no taste for the worldliness which he received in exchange, and in heart he was with the methodists still. Affection was sorely tried, but what he did not then understand, he could afterwards see was God's overruling hand, to serve a purpose in his life.

Regarding this matter, Wilberforce afterwards wrote: "If I had stayed with my uncle, I should probably have been a bigoted, despised methodist; yet to come to what I am, through so many years of folly as those which elapsed between my last year at school and 1785, is wonderful. Oh the depths of the counsels of God! What cause have I for gratitude and humiliation."

Wilberforce was twelve years old, when he returned with his mother to Hull, and even at that tender age, he was led into the folly and excitement of a purely worldly life, and encouraged to pursue its course, till early impressions seemed gone. His references to this in later years, is full of profit and warning; "This mode of life was at first distressing to me, but by degrees I acquired a relish for it, and became as thoughtless as the rest."

He was very musical, and excelled in singing, making his company strikingly attractive in a world which needs to be amused. In course of time, he found out how such natural gifts became ensnaring to his soul by their very attractive qualities, for they made him an object of admiration, and fostered the desire for it. Love of pleasure rapidly took possession of the youth, and lessened any inclination for the steady application which his studies required. His compositions cost him less labour than his schoolfellows needed to give to theirs, but instead of improving the extra time thus gained, the hours were only idly frittered away. He not only produced his exercise more speedily, but also in a far superior style, to any of his class-mates.

That abhorrence of the slave trade which led Wilberforce onward till he was the means of emancipating thousands of slaves, was manifested in action, even at the early age of fourteen years. The following story was related by a gentleman in illustration of this, recalling the days when they were at school together, and is thus recorded in his biography: "He boarded in the master's house, where the boys were kept within bounds. I lived in the village. One day he gave me a letter to put into the post office, addressed to the editor of the York paper, which, he told me, was in condemnation of the odious traffic in human flesh."

Wilberforce entered Cambridge University at the age of seventeen, with scholastic attainments of no mean order even then, in spite of the time he had wasted in the indulgence of his love of pleasure in the world. Alas! college life only brought fresh and powerful temptations to the attractive youth, and for a time, he yielded to society which was depraved and debasing. But the transition from folly to vice, was not gradual enough to ensnare him fully, for he loathed the sins that were so daringly committed, and his first year saw an end to this unholy intercourse.

For two years more, the worldling pursued his self-pleasing course, but then it was in company which did not so roughly shock his sense of right and wrong. He was courted and flattered because of his talents and his wealth, while his generous hospitality, and affectionate disposition, also gathered many around him. Some true friends he met, whose intimacy survived to later years, but the majority of his companions only exercised a pernicious influence over him, judging from the statements he made when he knew himself better.

Wilberforce did not require to push on for the same reason as poor students must do, for time had no money value for him. Even when he wished to study, his companions would remind him of his ample means, and tell him that he need not apply himself so vigorously. Thus he was led on farther and farther in his blindness, fully illustrating the words of Scripture: "Evil communications corrupt good manners." His rooms were frequented by a set of gay and pleasure-loving young men, and his liberal means enabled him to spend freely towards their entertainment. As is usually the case in such circumstances, the centre of the circle was the man who could best minister to their worldly desires, as they did to his vanity.

Though this condition of things was very sad indeed, yet the young man was mercifully dealt with, in being preserved from the excesses in which his companions delighted. Although, as he said in after years, "he could not look back without unfeigned remorse," yet, he never seems to have plunged into the grosser and outward forms of vice. This looks as if the conscience which was early brought into exercise by the piety of his uncle's household, had never entirely lost its sense of the heinousness of sin, in some of its aspects at least.

The same compassionate interest which Wilberforce had shewn when a lad of fourteen in the condition of the poor suffering slave, was again manifest when about twenty-one. In those boarding-school days it was the African negro which had occupied his thoughts; seven years later it was the slave population of the West Indies. A friend of his was about to sail for Antigua, and to him he therefore addressed himself, asking if he would obtain some information on the subject when he should reach his destination. In requesting this, the hope was also expressed that some day he might "redress the wrongs of those wretched and degraded beings."

On leaving college, Wilberforce repaired to his own home, carrying in his heart the decision formed at Cambridge, of refusing his father's business which was open to him, and to enter public life instead. He therefore set himself to obtain a seat in parliament as member for his native town. In this he succeeded, and it was in that position that he came forth to prominence, on behalf of the poor down-trodden slave, though it was only gradually that the subject pressed itself upon his notice.

The impelling power to action came at last from a woman's heart to this champion of the oppressed, whose sympathies were ready to take definite shape in pleading with power for them. This instrument was Lady Middleton, who had heard from friends once resident in the West Indies, of the terrible cruelties connected with the slave trade. Britain's guilt and responsibility pressed upon her, causing her to ask her husband whether he could do anything to bring the national iniquity before parliament. He said he could not plead, but when some one suggested Mr. Wilberforce as having the gift of eloquence which he lacked, Sir Charles Middleton met his wife's wish in the matter, and wrote to him.

This letter called forth the existing sympathies of its recipient, and he henceforth laboured incessantly to bring the British people to a knowledge and sense of the awful character of the sin which was being countenanced by a nation called christian. After rousing public feeling by the facts brought to light, Wilberforce nobly succeeded in pleading the cause of the oppressed to such a powerful extent, that one difficult step after another was gained, till finally his efforts were crowned with success.

It was impossible to set free, in any general way, the multitude of slaves belonging to British subjects, or stop the trade between one country and another, without having a distinct act of parliament; but this could only be obtained by the influence of public opinion. Wilberforce knew this, and laboured, in much bodily weakness, but with great mental energy, to obtain the necessary decision. He was evidently moved, in his desires for the relief of suffering humanity, by the fact that he wished to live to some good purpose in the world, and believed that to influence the British people and government to abolish slavery, was the way given to him whereby to serve God. Little by little, he was led on, till the grand and needed end was accomplished, bringing about that state of things in Her Majesty's dominions, which enables us to say that a slave cannot breathe on English ground, because the moment he touches British soil, he is free.

Wilberforce had many friends with him in his public efforts, but the desire to accomplish the work went upwards to God, and he owned Him and His might, both before and after. "There will be a day of retribution" he pleaded, "wherein we shall have to give account of all the talents, faculties, and opportunities which have been entrusted to us. Let it not then appear, that our superior power has been employed to oppress our fellow-creatures, and our superior light to darken the creation of our God."

We cannot follow the course of events which led on to the desired consummation, because it would involve subjects beyond our present scope. Suffice it to say that Wilberforce succeeded in his gigantic undertaking, after the persistent and persevering labours of nineteen years. Patiently and vigorously did he pursue his aim during those many eventful days, in which his persuasive eloquence, coupled with a feeling heart and ready sympathies, won for him the final accomplishment of his desires under God.

The abolition of slavery became the law of England on March 23rd, 1807. The following touching remarks proceeded from the pen of Wilberforce immediately before the successful issue. "Never surely had I more cause for gratitude than now, when carrying the great object of my life, to which a gracious Providence directed my thoughts twenty-six or twenty-seven years ago, and led my endeavours in 1787 or 1788. O Lord, let me praise Thee with my whole heart: for never surely was there anyone so deeply indebted as myself; which way soever I look, I am crowded with blessings. Oh may my gratitude be in some degree proportionate!"

Shortly before his death in 1833, he breathed the same pious spirit in the words, "I thank God that I should have lived to see the day when England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery!"

Who can adequately imagine the joy of that emancipation that followed, when thousands of men, women and children, long held in slavery's cruel chains, emerged into the unwonted freedom of a life of liberty! Ah, how dear a treasure is this on earth, and yet, infinitely greater is deliverance from Satan's terrible bondage, and the liberty which the glad tidings of God's grace gives to the sin-bound creature! But alas, the deceitful heart of man knows not the fetters of the enemy nor appreciates the liberty which God alone can give!

My reader, are you in slavery? Will you be made free? The Lord Jesus said on earth, (and His words are for every unconverted soul still), "If the Son therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

A Friend to the Friendless.

The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury.

The name of Lord Shaftesbury has long been held in honour and esteem by many a man, woman, and child who has lived in England during the nineteenth century. It is linked in our minds with a long and useful life, spent in the alleviation of misery in varied forms, from the vigour of his youth and manhood, till the feebleness of fourscore years and more. As a nobleman, and in parliament, he first came forth to public life in England, in occupation with the affairs of the country which had given him birth. Soon, however, the pressure of other and higher claims upon him, gained the mastery of his soul as a Christian, and then a position of prominence before the world, became the result.

Lord Shaftesbury was deeply interested in the needs of the poor and the friendless, and warmly advocated their cause in public, with untiring zeal. Much of the work with which he was associated, was done on a large scale and widely known, so that his name is familiar abroad as well as at home. The rarity, too, of one from the circle of aristocratic life, finding his joy in seeking to lessen the misery of his fellow-creatures was probably the means of bringing the willing worker to the front, at the call of others who regarded the eminence of his title and name.

Before noticing the early days of this well-known nobleman, we may profitably look, for a little, at the expressed habits of his spiritual life. His own statements give a beautiful and instructive key which opens up to view the place he trod on earth. Lord Shaftesbury was a man of prayer, habitually looking to God in dependence before acting, and turning to Him with thanksgiving afterwards. His first speech in parliament, was delivered, after asking most earnestly for aid and courage, and when it was over, the applause of his friends was not allowed to interfere with a speedy return to his own room, there to give thanks to God his Father. "Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name;" was thus a principle very early made manifest in his career. His own words on the subject ran thus: "Prayer to begin, prayer to accompany, and prayer to close any undertaking for His service, is the secret of all prospering in our ways."

Let us go back to the opening years of this useful life, and, see the subject of our chapter as Lord Ashley, for he reached the ripe years of manhood, before succeeding to his father's title and position. His childhood was not by any means bright, but he learned to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ then, and early experienced the peace which flows from faith in God. Therefore, out of the saddest of his days, the greatest blessedness sprang, which far more than outweighed the sorrows of the child, and the absence of natural joys in his youth.

"Oh the joy for ever flowing,

From God's thoughts of His own Son!

Oh, the peace of simply knowing,

On the cross that all was done!"

The surroundings of Lord Ashley's infancy were of the most worldly character, for his parents were occupied with the things of time, and could not train the child for God. The Lord had fitted another in the household to do this needed work, however, and the lack in the family only brought the child more constantly under the power of a godly influence in the nursery. This was a faithful old servant who had been Lady Shaftesbury's maid before her marriage, and continued to serve her mistress after that event, in her new home. She eventually accepted the responsible position of nurse, and in this capacity, was used of God, to sow the good seed of the word in young Ashley's heart, though she did not live to see the manifold results. The noble work of moulding an infant mind in wisdom's ways, was thus committed to a woman's trust, who was walking in the fear of the Lord herself.

A strong attachment bound those two hearts together, the elder nearly done with time, the younger only entering into life. The pious nurse became the confidante of all the little sorrows of childhood's day, while the precious soul for which she was responsible, was carefully taught in the ways of the Lord. The child eagerly drank the water of life, and greatly prized the dear faithful woman who brought it within his reach, by the word of God. The glad tidings, of salvation gave joy to their hearts, because they not only heard, but also believed. "Let him that is athirst come and whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."

Well and wisely, did that pious woman do her work, and she may have been able to rejoice that her labour was not in vain, in the Lord. The child was only a few years under her care, yet before he had reached the age of seven, she had nobly used the golden opportunities in her cherished charge, to do a work which none could ever undo. In many little ways, the fruit, even then, must have been seen, and the loving confidence of the gentle child amply repaid the nurse's love. As time sped on, the good seed of the word became more manifest in the fruit of the Spirit, whether in the devotion of Lord Ashley in youth, or in the pious activity of his manhood as Lord Shaftesbury, on to the mellow maturity of a ripe old age.

That a valuable lesson is here for the godly mother, governess, or nurse! � a soul committed to a woman's care, a service done to a living Saviour, the blessing added that maketh rich, and multitudes are blessed in consequence. "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good."

At the tender age of seven years, the quiet of the nursery in the parental home was exchanged for many an unhappy day in school routine, under a stranger's roof and charge. Taken thus from his best and earliest friend, brought into contact with rough and older boys whose wicked ways he loathed, this young nobleman experienced sorrows in these first days at school, of which children in humbler life know little.

Unhappy at home, the child had always had the comfort of his nursery friend to turn to, but now, away in a cold and chilly moral atmosphere, he was truly friendless, because there were none to meet the full need of his heart in companionship. While these days of misery passed slowly on, the first overwhelming sorrow of his life came upon him, in the death of his beloved nurse. The painful certainty that he would never see her again on earth, added greatly to the discomfort of those bitter school-days.

�All things work together for good to them that love God." These words of holy writ were abundantly verified in Lord Ashley's youth, as well as in the case of many a precious soul on this wide earth. This bereavement was for true soul-blessing, from the heart and hand of One who makes no mistakes. If with his dear old friend he had learned of God by the scriptures she loved, how much more need was there to read them himself, now that he stood alone in his soul's great need! So the boy in his loneliness sought the comfort of the Book she had valued, and the Father who had taken her in love, drew the youthful believer the more to unburden his heart to Him in prayer. Thus early began, through death, the habits of his youth, manhood and old age � the word for counsel, the throne of grace for help in time of need.

The trials of school life became considerably less when young Ashley was removed to Harrow, at the age of twelve, to continue his studies under much more pleasant circumstances, and in a happier home than before. Those years of trouble, between seven and twelve, taught the youthful believer to walk alone in faith. While he greatly missed the brightness which at his age it was natural for him to expect, his soul learned many a deeper lesson such as more cheerful surroundings might never have brought within his reach. The Lord, in His perfect wisdom, was winning the confidence of a young and tender heart, which shrank from a cold unfeeling world, and could confide in none on earth, at the time. The holy habit of referring everything to God, was thus begun in youth, and became the joy and delight of a lifetime.

The first distinct bent of the boy's mind towards the voluntary occupations of future years, seems to have been consciously felt, during these school days. A very common circumstance, that of an obscure man being carried to the grave, was the apparently insignificant event which the venerable Lord Shaftesbury spoke of, seventy years afterwards, in the following terms: "God called me to the work, and gave me strength to do it; and I can see now the very spot, and I could almost tell the hour of the day, at which the thought first entered into my mind, when a boy of thirteen or fourteen years of age, at Harrow School."

It was a painful sight to the eye, and equally unpleasant to the ear, which thus met the thoughtful boy in his lonely walk that day, and so far determined the whole course of his life as a man. No special interest in the dead, nor sympathy with the living, animated the youth, but the helplessness of the dust to be consigned to the earth, and the sin of the men who bore it, deeply stirred Lord Ashley's soul, as he looked on in horror. The cold clay within that rude coffin was carried by men so intoxicated as to reel and totter in their steps, while they dropped their lifeless load, and poured forth from their lips language only in keeping with their vile and depraved condition.

Five debased drunkards formed that funeral; none to grieve, none to pity, none to speak of death, eternity and God, in that pitiable group, only a dead body carried by men living in the flesh but wholly dead in trespasses and sins. This revolting scene which attracted the schoolboy's attention on Harrow Hill, and touched his heart with that genuine pity which only God can give, constituted him the only true mourner as he watched the progress of the miserable company. "Can this be permitted," he exclaimed, "simply because the man was poor and friendless?" There and then the desire was formed within the boy, to take his stand beside the needy and the helpless, though years passed over his head before it took shape in practice, when the instrument had been made ready for use by the hand of the divine Master.

On leaving Harrow, Lord Ashley was placed under the care of a clergyman for two years, when study was greatly neglected, but a fresh start was given, when he proceeded to Oxford at the age of eighteen. His mind then seems to have expanded to a considerable degree, so that its cultivation was more rapid and steady than before. There, in his student life, the energy and perseverance became manifest which so marked his long career of usefulness to the close. At twenty-one, he gained a first class in classics, and four years afterwards, he took his place in parliament.

On the threshold of his life-work we must leave the young Lord Ashley as one who was, ere long, to be known among rich and poor, high and low, possessing a heart which felt for others' woes, and constantly labouring to assuage the sorrows of many. Above all, the seventh earl of Shaftesbury was known by the holy honoured name of Christian, in its truest sense; that is, not only one who took the name of Christ upon him, but one who belonged to Christ, and was seeking to occupy, "till he come."

Nature had many charms for Lord. Shaftesbury, for he greatly enjoyed its varied beauties, with a mind simple and appreciative. He saw in creation the hand of the Creator, and loved the workmanship because he loved the living God, and knew him by the tender name of Father. Thoughts were suggested about the coming One, by the blue sky or the clouds of heaven, and a lonely walk afforded occasion for "a silent prayer in solitude and contemplation."

Like every one who seeks to serve "Jesus only," this devoted man knew what it was to practise self-denial. He was of a sensitive nature, and loved retirement, yet he went forth in public in the face of much that touched him keenly, that he might serve rather than rest. He loved the quiet of home, and the society of friends, and valued time for mental enjoyment. Instead of yielding to these tastes, however, Lord Shaftesbury sought to soothe the sorrowful, relieve the needy, encourage the weak, raise the fallen, and befriend the friendless. So to the front he went, with much moral courage, seeking to deny himself that he might benefit his less-favoured fellow-men.

We have seen how large a place prayer had in the varied events of the life whose early impressions we have been recording, though only to a small extent, for there is much in a dependent spirit, that is hidden from the eye of man. It is fostered by feeding upon the word, and he who speaks much to God, cannot fail to delight in what He has written.

Of this matter, Lord Shaftesbury expressed himself in the following words: "The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible!" "Amid all the conflicts of the nations coming upon the earth, that Book shall be our life, our light, our security, our pillar of cloud by day, our pillar of fire by night, our guide through all our perils; and none but those who have the Bible in their hearts, will be able to meet the great conflict, and stand in their lot, at the end of the days."

Present Lessons from Past Labours.

Of all the millions of men who have trodden the earth, our minds have been occupied in the preceding pages with only six, and of these, the most insignificant part of their lives has claimed our attention. The child or the boy may pass unnoticed, but when the full development of manhood is reached, it is then the mark of the mind is best seen, for good, or for evil. If boyhood, however, is less prominent, it is a period of life of the greatest importance, for the principles and habits acquired then often follow one through many, many years.

We have seen these six men living for the benefit of others less favoured than they. The whole course of each life was coloured with the object which was so dear to the heart, and everything was looked at in its relation to the one desire which governed the person. This mental purpose was cherished and pursued, from very small beginnings to the final triumph, and a grand and visible success.

Most people would enjoy the achievement of a long cherished desire, but fewer have the moral courage to follow the first faint wish from its occurrence in the mind, to a successful accomplishment in action. One must be content to be led on little by little, through good report and through bad report, by the rough ways where self is denied, or the difficult steps which incur reproach.

William Farel waged war with error, but he did it at the risk of his reputation, and even life itself. Philip Melancthon held the scriptures in such unwonted prominence, that he incurred blame in his student days, and was misjudged even when only carrying a copy. George Whitefield feared not to be accounted mad, if only he could awaken souls to a sense of their danger, and lead them to Christ. Naturally, young Judson seemed fitted to shine in America, but to preach to the heathen, he was willing to hide himself in Burmah, away from the surrounding civilization and enlightenment of his youth. Wilberforce laboured, in the face of much opposition, to influence individuals, till he succeeded in touching the whole British nation with a sense of what was due to God, and the slave as His creature. And lastly, Lord Shaftesbury had to undergo the bitter but necessary training of friendlessness in youth, before as a man he went forth to befriend his fellow-creatures in their helplessness and misery.

Perhaps the young reader of these pages has felt the desire awakened in the soul to live to some good and noble purpose in life. If the opening years of those valuable lives have set before you lessons which are profitable and worthy of attainment, then remember those true and familiar words � "There is no royal road to learning."

Many valuable old maxims were brought before me in the days of my childhood, when my brain was only developing, as that of my young readers may also be, at the present time. These have formed substantial principles in after life, for which I have frequently been thankful, and am still. I was often reminded of the fact, that "a man is known by the company he keeps, and by the books he reads." This is simply because the mind which controls the movements of the body, instinctively associates itself with that which suits it, whether in living individuals or inanimate books. Tastes and desires are also strengthened or acquired, in the time thus spent, and the mind so engaged.

Boys have generally more time for reading than girls, for the needle occupies the gentle fingers during many moments which the boy can freely spend on his much-loved book. It may be well that it is so, for some girls have a taste for reading of a less solid character than suits the mind of the future man. It is a well-known fact, that what is called light reading tends to unfit one for practical duties, whereas books which give more exercise to the mind than a mere record of frivolities, form thoughts and ways of greater activity and energy.

We are careful as to the kind of nourishment taken into the body, why should we be less particular as to mental food? Scripture says, "Take heed what you hear;" "Take heed therefore how ye hear." Both thoughts teach us the importance of keeping out all one can, that would not be profitable to the soul, which is reached through the body. The formation of the mind depends much on the outward influences brought to bear upon it under God. He can overrule all, and speak to the heart at any period of life, but His own perfect word commands, "Train up a child in the way he should go."

Two well-known rivers, on whose waters I have sailed, rise before me in memory, when I think of how mentally the youthful life is moulded by surroundings of good or evil. The Rhine and the Rhone first see the light of day in the same beautiful country, and only a short distance apart. Like the youthful mind, they begin small, and very little would turn their course in any given way. A stone, a rock, a bank, suffices to give a certain turn or bend to a river, which will shape the direction it takes, till its existence on earth is over. So with your mind, dear young reader! formed, moulded, bent as it is in any particular direction according to the influences brought to bear upon it, how needful then it is that you should shun that which is evil, and choose only what is good!

The destiny of the Rhone is the beautiful Mediterranean, therefore turning south, it runs with short and rapid flow through the magnificent country that lies between those sparkling waters and its source. The surroundings are those of a sunny clime, and charming scenery, with a southern warmth ever increasing in the river's onward course. I spent twelve hours one autumn day sailing down to Avignon, and nature seemed most fair and lovely on each side of its broad waters, and as far as the eye could reach. In the hand of God the Creator, the Rhone is useful to man, His creature, but I leave my reader to gather lessons from its course when contrasted with that of its early neighbour in Switzerland.

The Rhine, like the Rhone, soon leaves the land of its birth, but while the latter speeds on through sunny France, the former is slowly passing through German territory, and becomes both widely known, and greatly praised. Increasing in width, usefulness, and beauty, it pursues a steady northward course, where the German nation boasts of its greatness, and profits by its presence. On, on, on to the sea, never ceasing, never idling, but in the hands of the Creator a comfort, a blessing, a profit to many, the beautiful river makes haste to begone! Lingering not by vine-clad heights, or scenes of human greatness, it leaves alike the busy town, the prosperous village, the stately castle, to seek the cold grey sea in the north, where its waters mingle with the ocean, and finally encircle the earth.

"The ear of the wise seeketh knowledge." So wrote the wise man in his book of Proverbs, as inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Following out this thought, you and I, dear reader, may gather a few lessons from the far-famed Rhine, that will help us in life's journey to live for others' good. Infinitely more than a creature of earth, the believer may shine for Christ in the new creation, where "all things are of God."

Begin at the cross, my unsaved reader! that as a needy sinner you may be saved by a loving Saviour, who "died for all" there. Then, as a child of God, by faith in Christ Jesus, let the Holy Ghost lead and guide you, bending your steps on earth as suits his perfect wisdom, and you will leave behind you traces of moral beauty, marvellous because divine. A well-ordered mind should produce a well-spent life, hearing such useful results as will call forth praise from many a heart to God.

Then, beyond the banks of your God-given life, beyond the inhabitants of the places where you have lived, the glorious infinitude of the future lies before you, in all its great and wonderful reality. There in divine perfection and bliss, your spirit, soul, and body, will be for ever occupied with one centre of glory and adoration � God's Son as your Saviour! His Christ as your Lord! His Lamb as your Redeemer!

To stimulate the believing youth to holy deeds of love, as he passes on to eternity, the record of these young lives has been written, but for the unsaved boy who remains so, I can only sorrowfully add, that no deeds worth remembering, either great or small, can be done by the soul that continues to be a great sinner, and despises in his neglect, a seeking Saviour!

"In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be." � Eccles. 11: 3.

"Life is brief � a span, a shadow,

Vapour vanishing from sight;

Time is short � each moment bearing

Mortals, in its rapid flight.

"Precious soul of God's creation

What to thee are time and life?

Are they spent for Jesus only?

Or with self and folly rife?

"Endless, boundless is the future �

Full with bliss or woe to thee;

See the end of all thy labour �

After time, eternity!"

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Stories of East London

Stories of East London

or,

(Peeps into Busy Places).

by C.J.L.

London Gospel Tract Depot, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C.

Contents.

Chapter 1. Jute Hands

Chapter 2. Blind Maria

Chapter 3. Among The Match Girls

Chapter 4. Match Box Makers

Chapter 5. Fancy Boxes

Chapter 6. Toy Makers

Chapter 7. Working In The Dark

Chapter 8. Working Girls

Chapter 9. Brush Makers And Braille Makers

Chapter 10. Among The Hop Pickers

Chapter 11. Surgical Bandage Makers

Chapter 12. A Rock-Bound Coast

Chapter 1.

Jute Hands.

Who is willing to join me in a ramble to-day? We have taken some pleasant ones together. Many a bright autumn morning has found us on the sands or by the shore, hunting among sea-weeds and pebbles for crabs or starfish, learning a little more than we might have known before of the wisdom and power of God in His care for such weak tiny things as sea snails or hermit crabs.

But our walks on this occasion will not take us within sight or sound of the sea; we are not going to the fields to gather flowers or to the woods to return with baskets well filled with nuts.

Ah! I see you are beginning to wonder where I am going to take you. To pay some visits, and get a few peeps at the working girls of East London.

Edith looks up with a smile and says, "It will be delightful," for she has read of little children who work at match box making, and would very much like to see some of them.

Match box making is only one of many occupations in which we shall find the girls we are going to see employed, and though I am glad to be able to tell you that the amount of child-labour in East London is not nearly so large as it was before the law of England required that every child in Great Britain should receive some education, still we shall find much that will, I hope, prove interesting.

Where shall we begin?

Suppose we visit a jute factory, and take a peep at "the hands," as the working girls are called, who spend so much of their week-day lives within its walls.

But perhaps before we ring the bell I had better tell you where all the jute comes from.

It does not grow in England, so has to be sent over from some other country. Much of it comes from Russia and the cold countries north of the Baltic.

Frank says, "It is an import."

He is quite right, and I should have used the word myself, only I was afraid some of my very little friends might not know its meaning.

Many shiploads of jute come into the Port of London every year. If we were to visit the Docks we should see it lying about in large bales.

It is a vegetable fibre, not unlike flax or hemp. It is largely used in making ropes, coarse sacks, and for other purposes. Some of the very same jute, too, spun and dyed, re-enters the market under another name. It is the ice wool some of our girls are so fond of working into shawls, caps and other pretty and useful birthday or New Year presents.

But the jute as we see it in the Docks is what is called in its raw state and must pass through many hands, as it needs to be cleaned, combed, sorted, etc., before it will be ready for use.

Let us go into the factory. What a busy scene it is! Great numbers of girls are at work picking or combing the jute. They seem very poor, but most of them are clean, and we are glad to notice the rooms are airy and well lighted in which their work has to be done.

Many of the young work-people attend Sunday school or Bible class, so they have heard the sweet story of a Saviour's love, and there is reason to hope that a few at least have not only heard but believed the gospel message, and are seeking in their daily walk and ways to please and honour the Lord Jesus.

One who knows the jute girls better than I do, has often told me how for quite a long time any attempt to bring them under the sound of the gospel seemed such very discouraging, almost hopeless work, that several who had tried, gave it up, saying, "It is of no use." For, though perhaps it would be going too far to say that even at the time of which I write there were not one or two christian girls in the jute factory, taking them as a class they were perhaps the wildest and roughest of all the working girls of East London: hardly one went to Sunday school, and when any were invited to attend they would refuse, saying, We don't like to sit with girls who wear better clothes than ourselves."

But "God, who is rich in mercy," had thoughts of peace and blessing even for these poor neglected girls: He wanted them to hear of His love to sinners, and the story of how a Bible class for them grew from a very small beginning will, I feel sure, be read with interest by all our young friends.

Chapter 2.

Blind Maria.

Oh, how I wish I could get just a few of those poor jute girls to come to my house sometimes! I would, with the blessing of the Lord, teach them to read their Bibles, and tell them of the love of God in the gift of His Son. But I have asked them ever so many times and they will not come.

Thoughts something like these you have just been reading were passing through the mind of an earnest worker for Christ as one Sunday afternoon he passed the jute factory on his way to school, where, as he knew, the girls of his Bible class would be waiting for him.

He might not like me to tell you his real name, so we will call him Mr. Marks. That he had very often tried to make friends with the jute girls was quite true; but perhaps it was because they were so little used to kind words they seemed afraid to trust him.

Sometimes they would run away laughing loudly, in a way that seemed to say, "Oh, you don't want us, we are only jute hands;" or, what was even more trying, now and then one would say, "Yes; I should like to learn to read," and would promise to go to his house for the first lesson on the very next evening, a promise that had never been kept.

But Mr. Marks had done more, he had taken his desire to help and teach the jute girls to God in prayer, asking Him to shew him a way by which they could be reached. And though I think he hardly knew himself how it came about, on that very afternoon he closed his Bible five minutes before the time for lessons was up and began telling his girls of his great wish to form an evening class among the workers in the jute mill. He asked any who had begun to pray for themselves to pray for the talked-of class, and said he should be glad of any help they could give.

Among the girls who had listened to him was one who was quite blind, Maria as she was called by all who knew her.

She went home that day with one great desire filling her heart, a longing to please and help her much-loved teacher. It did not seem as if a blind girl could do much, but Maria was going to try.

She knew one of the jute girls, whose mother had often worked for her mother, and in some way she contrived to get to her house at a time when she knew Rose would be likely to be at home.

"Please, Rose, I have come to ask you if you would do something very kind for me. Will you take me to school next Sunday?" Maria said, and gaining courage as she went on, continued, "I do love going, and sometimes my brother has to go out on Sunday for the gentleman he works for, and then I have to stay at home, for you know I can't go alone, only when somebody takes me."

The last appeal was too much for Rose. While she did not care about going herself, she felt as if she could not refuse to take a little trouble to give so much pleasure to her sightless friend, and though I think she began to make some excuse about not having any clothes fit to go in, you may be sure Maria did not leave till Rose had promised to call for her the next Sunday.

She kept her promise most faithfully, and I shall leave you to judge for yourselves of Maria's delight as she said to her teacher, "Please, sir, Rose works at the jute mill."

After school Rose found herself staying behind with Maria and Mr. Marks, talking to the latter as if he were an old friend.

"Yes," she said; if he did not mind beginning a class with only two girls, she would be willing to attend, and she could, she thought, promise that the girl who worked next to her in the mill would join it too, for they were great friends and always loved to do the same things and go to the same places.

And so the class was begun, and though for some weeks Rose and her friend were the only ones who came, it soon grew into quite a large one, and before the winter came on, a christian lady, on hearing that many of these poor girls had never been taught to sew, offered to teach any who would meet her after work hours in a bright, pleasant room, how to cut out as well as how to make and mend their clothes.

After a few months it was encouraging to see how much more tidy many of the girls began to look; their manners, too, were less rude and noisy.

But, better still, a few were beginning to ask, each one for herself, "What must I do to be saved?" And we know one only answer to that question could meet the need of any soul who, led by the Holy Spirit, really longs to know Christ as a Saviour � "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." (Acts 16: 30.)

Chapter 3.

Among the Match Girls.

A visit to a match factory, would, I think, surprise most of us greatly. We should say on leaving that we had never even guessed that half so much work needed to be done before the logs of wood, sent by shiploads from abroad, and brought to the factory on waggons so heavily laden that a whole team of horses is often needed to draw them, can be sent out again as matches, neatly packed into the small boxes we all see, and perhaps use, so often.

It would be interesting to go through all the sheds and rooms in which the different parts of the work are done, and to listen while the manager tells us the names and uses of the different machines, many of them working by steam, needed for splitting, sawing, and in other ways getting the wood ready for the use to which it is to be put. We should notice with pleasure that the rooms in which the girls work are airy and well lighted.

But as an account of such a visit would perhaps not be quite the kind of story suited for this little volume, I am going to propose, by way of a change, that instead of watching the girls busy at their work we meet them as they are leaving and ask one or two of those we know to tell us a little about their employment.

Shall we suppose ourselves in East London, just outside the gates of Bryant and May's, one of (if not the largest) the East End factories?

The handsome clock on the outside of the building is on the point of striking six, and as the last stroke dies away the gates will open and the work-people, to the number of several hundred, come out. Here they are, and for a few minutes Fairfield Road will be a very busy scene.

The girls we are waiting for are not among the first comers, so we shall have time to look a little at their companions.

Taking them as a whole they are a rather rough class of girls; many of them say that they like working in the factory better than to go to service. Nearly all wear clean white aprons, and we cannot help noticing that almost every girl has a large feather (blue, white, green, or red) in her hat.

Here are two, neater in dress and quieter in manner than most who have passed us � Carrie and Emma.

They greet us with a pleasant "good evening," and we soon find they love to hear and speak of the Lord Jesus as the Saviour they have begun to trust. They say there are some decided Christians among the workgirls, and we know that each one, if true to Christ, will be a "light shining for Him," for we, who "have tasted that the Lord is gracious," need to be often reminded that we are to be here for Christ.

But Carrie says she cannot quite understand what it means. Only the Holy Spirit can really teach any of us how very real and blessed it is to be for Christ here now; but perhaps some words that helped me may help Carrie too.

I am not sure that I remember them exactly, but their meaning is, that if we are Christians we belong to Christ, and so everything we do is to be done in a way that will suit and please Him.

Our bodies, too, are the Lord's, and so we are to use them in His service, just as a slave would use his time and strength in doing the very kind of work his owner wanted.

Carrie and Emma are sisters, and their mother, who is a widow, is very often ill, and does not seem quite willing that her daughters should leave home, so they go on working at the factory, and their earnings are a great help in keeping the little home together.

Emma says, "We had rather a rough time with the other girls when we were first converted; but it did us good, for it made us feel we needed to pray very often that we might be kept from doing or saying anything that would grieve the Lord. But when they saw we did not mind being laughed at or called names, many of them left it off and began to be kind to us, and one or two have gone with us to the Bible class or to hear the gospel preached."

Are the match boxes made in the factory?

"Oh, no; they are the work of our outdoor hands, who make them at their own homes and bring them in ready to be filled."

In our next chapter we may perhaps take a peep at "Match Box Makers," and learn a few of the secrets of one-room life.

Chapter 4.

Match Box Makers.

The poor children who are employed in making match boxes we have all heard of, or read about, but perhaps few of us have really seen them at work.

I have many times, and I am going to tell my young readers a little about their work and the places in which it is done.

What is Nellie saying? She thinks our story, as it is all true, ought to begin by telling you where the match box makers live.

Match box making is carried on in many parts of East London � Shoreditch, Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Hackney Wick, and several others.

We cannot visit them all at once, we know, but a short journey by train will take us to Old Ford, and a walk of only a few minutes from the railway station will bring us into a road where quite a number of match box makers live.

It is quite early in the afternoon, but as it is holiday time the Board schools we pass on our way are closed, and we know we shall be likely to find the children at their work.

The houses, though not large, are often let to two or three families; in many cases the rent of one room is all that the people, most of whom are very poor, can afford to pay, and the boxes are made in the room in which father and three or four children live, eat and sleep; sometimes it is done in a small kitchen or washhouse.

Our knock at one of the doors is answered by a bright-looking little girl about ten years of age. "Yes," she says, they are quite busy; work has been very slack, but mother got an order this morning for six gross of boxes, they will be wanted tomorrow, so they must all work away."

We follow her, and find her mother and four other children sitting round a low table. Each worker has a pile of very thin strips of wood, a tin of paste and a packet of printed labels.

How quickly their fingers move! In less time than it takes to write about it the flat strips of wood are one at a time folded into boxes, pasted, labelled and thrown on to the heap of those already finished.

Talking need not stop working, and the mother, who seems glad to have a visitor, says, "There is not much doing in the trade now, so many of the cheap matches being made in Sweden and Germany."

She used to help her mother to make boxes when quite a little girl herself, not more than six or seven years old, often working from six in the morning till eight or nine o'clock at night, and was always kept away from school in busy times.

Children, she tells us, do not work such long hours now, they get more play and all attend school, but hers are always willing to "help mother" when she has any work.

Can they earn much? we ask. She shakes her head, saying, "Not a great deal, as the price paid for the work is very low, and though the wood and labels are supplied when the work is given out, they have to find their own paste and keep a good fire for drying, as wet work would not be passed by the overlooker."

Would the children like to hear a true story while they work?

It is pleasant to see how their eyes brighten, and we know by the look on their faces they are all going to listen,

"Not very long ago a young girl, who had begun to trust the Lord Jesus as her own precious Saviour, left her home in the country and went to a place of service in London. It was a large household where many servants were kept.

"Mary, as I am going to call her, was the kitchen-maid, an under-servant, the youngest and in a way the lowest of them all. She saw it would not be her place to talk much to people so much older than herself, but she prayed that the Lord would give her grace to live for Him, and I am going to tell you how her prayer was answered.

"Her master was obliged to leave his town house, and was away for many weeks.

"On his return he told his servants that he was so pleased with the way in which they had served him during his absence, he was going to give them what he thought would be a great treat, every one was to have a free ticket for the theatre. All but Mary had got their tickets; when her name was called she went up to her master, saying in a shy way, 'Thank you all the same, sir; but if you please, sir, I don't want to go.'

"'Don't want to go! what a strange girl you are, you must tell me why not.'

"'Because, if you please, sir, the Lord Jesus loves me and I love Him, and I know He will not be there.'"

Chapter 5.

Fancy Boxes.

Please do not think, dear young readers, that because in our last chapter we took a peep at "one-room life," and saw just a few of the children whose work is done very often after school-hours in their own homes, that match boxes are the only kind wanted, or in making of which we shall find large numbers of girls employed.

We have all seen the pretty fancy boxes so largely used by drapers, grocers and confectioners; and although it is quite true that a few of the large firms have the boxes in which their sweets and chocolates are to be packed made on the premises, so many kinds of boxes are wanted that it would surprise some of us to hear how many gross can (in busy times) be sent out in a single week from some of the warehouses in Hoxton or Bethnal Green.

Very few of the fancy box hands work at their own homes.

Some of the warehouses employ from fifty to sixty girls, while by others the work is given out to persons who will promise to get a large quantity done, and who engage and pay a few girls to help them.

Shall we look into one of the smaller workrooms and see what the girls are doing?

Piles of cardboard, reams of coloured paper, and cans or tins of paste are on the tables, while at one end of the room two girls are pasting bright scraps or pictures on boxes that are soon, we are told, to be filled with cracker bon-bons.

Their fingers move very quickly, and they seem to work in a willing, cheerful way. Nearly all are doing what is called piecework, and are paid for just as many boxes as they make; their earnings are not more than five or six shillings weekly, though a few earn more. A great deal of time is often lost by having to wait for work.

We know several of the girls, one or two are old scholars, and as the forewoman does not object, we soon find ourselves talking, not about boxes and how they are made, but about a gospel meeting some of us attended not very long ago, and a sweet, true story we heard from the evangelist who spoke to us in his Master's name.

"A story," Maggie and George are saying, and Nellie asks if I would mind telling it over again. Well, dear, I am quite free to do so, for it interested me so greatly that I told Mr. M. I should like all the boys and girls I know to read or hear it too, and he was kind enough to say I might have it for my new volume.

"Caught up, caught up." The words seemed to be saying themselves over and over again to George F. as he went home from a meeting where an address on the coming of the Lord had been given.

The son of christian parents, from a child he had known "the holy scriptures," but till that night had never really felt his own need of salvation. As he drew near his house he noticed how dark it looked. He had been used to find a bright fire and lamp, supper and a loving welcome had always been ready for him, but on that night all these were wanting.

"I hope the Lord has not come yet," he said, as he entered the house, "Father and mother, and all who belong to Christ would be caught up to meet the Lord in the air, but I should be left for judgment." He sat down and fell asleep. How long he slept he could not tell, but when he awoke the house was still dark and silent.

He could bear it no longer. Lighting a candle he went to his father's room, it was empty; the Bible George had so often seen him reading lay open on the dressing table, but neither his father nor mother were in the room.

"If the Lord has really come I am sure Mr. M. has gone too," was the boy's next thought. It was not far to his house and George felt he must go and see.

He was soon there, and creeping along the garden path saw to his great delight, as the blinds had not been quite closed, the well-known form of his friend, who, though it was very late, was still busy writing.

"The Lord has not come, I have another opportunity, I may be saved tonight," George said with a great sigh of relief. That very night he owned to God that he was a lost sinner, and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as his own precious Saviour.

Three evenings later he went to Mr. M.'s with such a bright, happy face, that his friend almost guessed the good news he had to tell before he had time to say, "I came on Tuesday night to see if you had been caught up to meet the Lord in the air, but if He comes to-night I know He will take me too, for I do trust Him now, and I am saved through His precious blood."

Caught up to glory, or left for judgment. It must be one or the other when the Lord comes. Which will be your portion?

Chapter 6.

Toy Makers.

If we want to see the toy makers really "at home," we shall have to say good-bye to the working-girls of East London and pay a visit to one of the quaint old towns of Germany.

We should find numbers of children, some of them not more than five or six years of age, very busy making toys, not to play with, but to sell, for quite a number of the toys we see in the windows of the toy-shops are made by the children of Holland and Germany, who do not seem to think it at all hard to have to begin early to help their parents by working.

But we cannot take such a long journey to-day, and yet I shall, I think, be able to shew you a few of the child toy makers, for a great many Germans live in the East of London, and some of them work at their old trade in the land of their adoption.

Who will go with me to a poor but quiet street in Shoreditch?

Lizzie and Florence are quite ready for a walk, but before we reach the house we are going to Lizzie has noticed that though the houses are small, many of the windows are large and flat, and wants to know why they are all of one shape?

Ah Lizzie, the windows you are looking at always interest me greatly, for the very old houses in which we still see them were built many years ago; in them French silk weavers set up their looms and worked at their own trade, weaving rich silks and soft velvets, costing I should be afraid to say how many shillings a yard.

Nearly all these weavers, or their fathers, had made a noble choice to suffer for Christ's sake rather than deny His name, to leave their pleasant homes and pretty gardens in France rather than give up their Bibles.

But what is Florrie saying? That she has heard of these weavers, who were sometimes called Huguenots, but thought they lived at Spitalfields.

Florrie is right, by far the largest number really settled there; but we are only a short walk from Spitalfields, and so many of the houses in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green are built with the windows Lizzie noticed, and which are, I believe, called "side lights," and we may be sure that many of them lived and worked in this neighbourhood.

But if we talk any more about the weavers we shall not have time for our visit to the doll makers.

How busy they all are � father, mother and four children. What are they making? Wooden dolls.

Can they get enough work to keep them employed all the year round?

"Oh, no," the father, who speaks English very well, says. There is not much doing in the doll line, for it is really cheaper to get toys from Germany than to have them made in England; but now and then, when they are wanted in a hurry, he gets an order for a few dozen, and then the whole family work till they are ready to be sent to the warehouse.

He is cutting out dolls from pieces of wood, while the eldest son rounds off all the arms on a small turning lathe.

When ready they are passed on to a girl, who fastens arms and legs on to the bodies. The mother paints the faces. Two younger children are busy "helping mother," and we think of the old proverb "Many hands make light work."

It is cheering to find that this industrious family have a Bible in their own language, a Bible that is greatly valued and often read. The father sometimes tells his children stories of Germany, "the Fatherland," as he loves to call it. One they like very much begins something like this:

"Through an old town in Germany,

Four hundred years ago,

A little boy, barefooted,

Went singing through the snow."

And goes on to tell how Martin Luther, of whom we have all heard and read so much, was, when a boy, so poor that while attending school and working hard at his lessons, was often obliged to go, with a few other schoolboys as needy as himself, into the streets and sing, hoping to receive a little food or a few small coins.

But God was leading him on step by step to the great work of his life.

A time came when, after having long felt the burden of sin and tried in many ways to save himself, he was at last enabled to turn away from his own doings and trust only in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. Then, but not till then, he was free to tell others of the Saviour who had sought and found him.

Perhaps another time I may tell you how graciously the Lord helped him to place numbers of gospel books and tracts in the hands of thousands of German readers.

Chapter 7.

Working in the Dark.

Lily is saying, "What a strange title!" while Harold, who is fond of guessing, says he expects that instead of having our usual talk about working girls I am going to ask you to visit some home where no ray of sunlight ever enters, and where all would be in darkness if the lamps of the miners did not shine brightly and throw a few gleams of light into its long winding passages.

Ah Harold, you have guessed wrongly this time, for our walk to-day will not take us out of London. We have been invited to pay an afternoon visit to a school for the blind and watch the pupils busy at their work.

Before entering the classroom we are shewn quite a number of articles made in the institution: brushes of various kinds: baskets, some very large and strong, others so light and pretty that we cannot help being surprised at the skill and taste displayed, as we remember with perhaps a shade of sadness that they were made in the dark.

Here is a pile of mats; one or two of the older boys have had a few lessons in wood-turning, and the spoons, bowls and other things they have made shew good progress.

Now we are asked to look at knitted stockings, socks, comb-bags and shawls; some of the latter are very fine and the patterns and work are really beautiful.

A white shawl, knitted in Shetland wool by the pupils of a blind school in the North of England, was one among the many presents received by the Princess May on her marriage.

We should like to see how brushes are made, so we follow our guide into one of the workrooms. Quite a number of girls and women are at work, each sitting before a small vice firmly screwed on to a long wooden table, and for a few minutes we watch, without speaking, what is going on.

How quickly many of them take just the right number of bristles from the heap placed near each worker, fix them for a moment in the vice, and in less time than it takes to tell it, draw and fasten them into their proper places.

Hair-brushes are being made to-day, and the part of the work we are watching is called brush-drawing. Putting backs on the brushes is men's work, also finishing.

We are told of some who learnt brush-drawing when at school who carry it on at their own homes, and so are able to earn, if not quite a living, still what they find a great help.

"Are the girls taught basket making?"

"No, not now, only boys and men; for some years we taught the girls, too, and found they learnt just as quickly; but as the canes used in making baskets have to be kept wet or they would break instead of bending, and so many of our girls took bad colds from working in damp clothes, it was thought best to employ them in other work."

We have only time for one more visit, so we go to the schoolroom, where a party of blind children are busy in the Kindergarten class, stick-weaving, paper-folding, bead-threading, and even making clay models of fruit, walnuts, etc., and several other occupations are shewn, and the teacher, who is herself blind, seems really pleased by our interest in the children and their work.

But we should feel quite disappointed if we had nothing to remember about our visit but having seen a number of useful things made by the blind.

All the pupils are taught to read, and though we may not find one who has a whole Bible, it is a cheer to notice with what real pleasure most of the young people answer our questions by saying that they have one or two gospels or a few of the epistles in raised or dotted type which they read by passing their fingers lightly over the letters or dots.

Several say they have friends who write "Braille," and sometimes they get a real letter.

One has a daily text-book with verses of scripture and hymns for a month. But she says she has learnt every word in it, and though it has been a great comfort, she shall be so glad when the friend who sent it has time to dot her another.

She had a New Year's card with such a lovely text "But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me." (Psa. 40: 17.)

But we must say "good-bye" to our new friend, so we leave, commending her and all her sightless companions to the love and care of that great, good Shepherd, who gave His life for the sheep.

"And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight." (Isa. 42: 16.)

Chapter 8.

Working Girls.

Shall we, dear young friends, take a peep today into City workrooms, and see how some of the girls we meet so often in a Bible class are occupied?

Our first visit shall be to a large factory, where about three hundred girls are employed, though, of course, they do not all work in one room.

They are capmakers, and, as we enter, the click of quite a number of sewing machines makes the scene rather a noisy one.

All work quietly as long as the forewoman is present, but she has just got a message that she is wanted elsewhere, and as soon as she leaves the room there is a good deal of loud talking and laughing. It is almost leaving-off time, so we shall not have long to wait for Jessie.

Here she comes, looking a little tired, and there is a cloud on her face.

We think of the time, not many months ago, when, as we believe, the Holy Spirit led Jessie to decide for Christ.

The Bible class was just over when Jessie's teacher, who felt sure that for some time she had been anxious and unhappy, felt she could not let her go without a few whispered words as to her personal need of salvation.

She felt and owned her need, and it was not long before she was enabled to rejoice in knowing that she was saved through the work and by the precious blood of Christ.

And now came the question, how could she serve and please the One who had loved and given Himself for her � the Lord Jesus?

She must, she knew, go on with her daily work; but she longed to do the old work in a new way, as one should who belonged to the Lord, and though, like most who are only just converted, I do not think she knew or thought much about the new power that could alone enable her to do this, the Spirit of God, for a time Jessie was very bright and happy.

Why, then, was she looking so sad?

Her story was soon told. "When I was first brought to the Lord," she said, "I thought I should never be tempted to do wrong any more, and that even if the girls I work with were rude or unkind to me, I should not mind it at all, but would go on praying for them; but I do not find it easy work, and sometimes I almost wonder if I have ever been converted."

You will wonder, Jessie dear, as long as your eye rests on yourself. Peace is in looking to another Person altogether, "Looking unto Jesus."

One of the lessons we all have as children of God to learn is, that we were not only a great deal worse than we thought ourselves, but that there is no good thing (apart from Christ) in us at all.

But it is a great comfort to remember that God knew just what we were before He took us up in grace. He allows us to find out how bad we are that we may turn away from ourselves and trust simply in Christ, glad, so glad, to be set free by His death to enjoy His love in the new place where He now is.

"All thy sins were laid upon Him,

Jesus bore them on the tree;

God who knew them laid them on Him,

And believing thou art free."

And as Jessie looked away from herself to her Saviour the clouds passed from her face, the trouble died out of her voice and she was again enabled to rejoice in the Lord, who had loved her and washed her from her sins in His own blood.

I know that this book will be read by quite a number of boys and girls who can say of the Lord Jesus, "He is my own precious Saviour," and perhaps one of those who may get it given them is just a little "discouraged because of the way" and is saying sadly, "Jessie's trouble is my trouble."

Is it, dear young believer? Then let Jessie's Saviour be your Deliverer too. Let Christ set you free.

I have seen sometimes when a shop has been shut up, a bill pasted on the shutters or in the window saying it would be re-opened under new management. Let the Lord who bought you take the management of your life. Let Him do for you by His power, the power of the Holy Spirit, just what you cannot do for yourself.

But I must not forget that we have other workrooms to visit, and in closing this chapter will give you a sweet little text, "We love him, because he first loved us." (1 John 4: 19.)

Chapter 9.

Brush Makers and Braille Writers.

Have you, my dear girls, ever tried to work in the dark?

I do not mean just running upstairs after the evening closed in and before the lamps were lighted, but doing real work such as sewing or knitting.

Nellie answers with a merry laugh that when she was quite a little girl she used very often to shut her eyes and try to go on with her sewing, but she found it almost impossible to work neatly and so soon gave it up; and Percy, who is fond of reading about mines and mining, reminds us that a great deal of work must be done in darkness before we can enjoy the warmth and light of a coal fire.

No ray of sunshine ever finds its way into the long winding passages and galleries of a mine.

Each miner, however, carries a small lamp covered with a network of very fine wire, and the light from these lamps shines out so brightly that there is always light enough to work by.

Percy is quite right, but as a visit to a mine would take us quite away from East London, and Mabel and Ruth would like to see a few more of our working girls, they shall go with me to pay an afternoon visit to two of my blind friends who live together, and though it would be too much to say "earn a living," are yet able to add a little to their small income by working each with her own hands, one as a brushmaker, the other as a Braille copyist.

There is no need to tell them who their visitors are, for the present is far from being our first visit, and they are quick to learn and remember voices.

"What a nice light room yours is," some one is saying.

One of the blind girls, Annie, as we will call her, answers with a pleased smile, "We thought of that in coming here, for though we cannot see the light for ourselves we know a room that is always dark cannot be a healthy one, and we enjoy pure fresh air."

Mabel is looking at the knitted window curtains, which are really very pretty, and seems quite surprised at being told they are the work of Annie's blind friend, Ellen.

Ellen is a brushmaker by trade, but not having had many orders lately has been able to do a great deal of knitting, and shews us a shawl made of wool so fine that it looks almost like lace.

We have seen blind brushmakers busy at their work, so after watching Ellen for a little while we ask what Annie is doing.

"Copying Braille," she says, and hands us a sheet of paper covered with rows of dots hardly larger than the pricks of a pin.

Ruth says she cannot make out even one letter of the alphabet, and finds it rather difficult to believe that dots mean not only letters but very often words.

Annie replies in such a bright pleasant way, "Ah, you would find it easy if you had learnt the system," and holding out her hand for the pricked sheet begins to read aloud:

"Now have I seen Thee and found Thee,

For Thou hast found Thy sheep

I fled, but Thy love would follow �

I strayed, but Thy love would keep."

Do Annie and Ellen know anything of the joy of having been sought and found by the Lord Jesus, the Shepherd who gave His life for the sheep? This is a true story, and I am very glad that I can say "Yes" in answer to your question.

So our blind friends have "light in their dwelling" � the light of a risen Saviour's love. Like the blind man of whom we read in the Gospel of John, Annie and Ellen can say each for herself, "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." (John 9: 25.)

Annie tells us that Ellen and she were converted when quite young before leaving school, and were happy in knowing that their sins were forgiven for the sake of the Saviour who had loved and given Himself for them, and so for some years they went on content to know that they were saved through the precious blood of Christ, but going on with many things that they see now were not suited to the Lord.

But a time came when the Holy Spirit led them on, and they saw from the word of God that the Lord Jesus Christ has present thoughts and desires for His dear people.

His heart wants to have gathered to His name where He is owned as Lord, and the Holy Spirit ungrieved and unhindered is free to lead in worship, and so in obedience to His word our blind friends are found with those who while they wait for their Lord's return shew forth His death in the breaking of bread. (See 1 Cor. 11: 26.)

Chapter 10.

Among the Hop-Pickers.

Alice is saying that I promised to tell you stories of East London, and she is sure hops would not grow in the small gardens that we who live in London or even a little way out of it see so often.

Alice is quite right, and I agree with her in thinking that a chat about hops and hop-pickers does look a little like running away from my promise; yet so many girls whose homes are in East London are found every year in the hop gardens of Kent and Surrey, that it seems only fair to give them a place among our working girls.

Many of my readers will have been away for a pleasant two or three weeks in the country or by the sea during the summer months, and will, 1 think, like to know something of the way in which hundreds of poor children enjoy a holiday that is not "all play."

If we could pay a visit quite early in the summer to one of the crowded streets in Limehouse or Bethnal Green, or join the children in the playground of a Board school, we should most likely hear a good deal of talking about hops, and find that by the end of August whole families � fathers, mothers and children � would be quite ready and very glad to join the hop-pickers, and so get into the country for a few weeks.

Nearly all the railway companies run cheap trains from London to the hopping districts, and some of us who have been on the platform of a city station just before one of these trains started will not easily forget many things we noticed.

Taking the pickers as a whole they are cheerful and good-tempered, and though Carrie wonders why so many babies and children too young to pick are of the party, those of us who have visited the hop gardens know that even these tiny ones will give very little trouble; those who are old enough to run about are sure to have a good time on the soft grass, while a cosy nesting-place quite close to mother's bin will be found for the babies.

Most of us have seen hops grow, and will hardly need to be reminded that the plant is a climbing stem, and if not tied to a pole would be spoiled by trailing on the ground.

When the hops are ready to be gathered, these poles are pulled up by men, who in

doing so break or cut the stalk of the plant.

They are carried to the bins, where the picking is done by women and children, who are paid, not for the number of hours they work, but for the quantity of hops they pick, and we may be sure that the work, that looks at first very much like play, becomes tiring when it has to be gone on with all day in the hot sun, or when the clothes of the pickers are wet and uncomfortable through being soaked with rain by the heavy showers we get sometimes even in the hot days of August and September.

But I want very much to tell you a little about the way in which the gospel is carried into the hop gardens, for we must not forget that the soul has needs deeper and more enduring than those of the body, and for many years past some who love to tell

". . . . the old, old story

Of Jesus and His love "

have felt that the opportunity afforded by having so many people together is for gospel work a golden one and far too good to be lost.

Meetings for preaching are held nearly every evening, and a good deal of quiet but very happy work for the Master may be done during the day by going from bin to bin, giving gospel books or text cards or saying a few earnest words about salvation to the workers.

Now and then, too, the heart of the faithful servant is gladdened by finding one who can say of the Lord Jesus, "He is my own precious Saviour."

Then there is sure to be one or two gospel meetings for the children, and one only needs to look at their bright faces and listen to their hymn-singing to know they greatly enjoy their own meeting.

A friend, who was speaking to some young people not very long ago, taught his hearers four lines of poetry. I do not know who they were composed by, but I thought them so good that I do not think I can close our talk about hops and hop-pickers better than by copying them.

"'Tis not for what I give Him,

It is when I believe Him

I feel His love and hear Him

Bid me be happy near Him."

Chapter 11.

Surgical Bandage Makers.

Is it to visit some hospital we are going today? and are we to pass from bed to bed seeking to cheer the sufferers by a few whispered words about the love of God in the gift of His Son, see some sad sights, and listen to still sadder stories?

No; we have been invited to take a peep into another workroom, and we accept the invitation with real pleasure, for two of our own girls are among the workers, and Lizzie and Mary would feel almost neglected if we passed them by without a smile or word of encouragement.

The room in which the young people work, though smaller than some we have visited, has two large windows, and one side is almost taken up by a cupboard with glass doors.

What a stock of bandages, lint, splints, and other things of which we do not know even the names or uses are on its shelves.

The forewoman, who has a pleasant face and a kind manner, explains by telling us that many of the oddly-shaped belts, etc., we are looking at will be returned in a few days to a maker of surgical instruments, who sends them to their firm to be lined, etc., a part of the work that requires not only great care and neatness but skilled fingers, as the slightest roughness or crease would give pain to the wearer and so render what was intended to be a help and comfort worse than useless.

We wonder where all the bandages, chest protectors, etc., will be wanted or used, and are told that some of them are intended for the children's ward in one of the London hospitals.

We remember a visit paid not so very long ago to a hospital in which all the patients were children, some of them dear little babies of not more than a few months old, and wish we could take all our young friends for an afternoon visit to one of its pretty wards.

Some of the tiny patients were asleep in dainty swing cots, vases of fresh, bright flowers were on the table, and a canary in a gilded cage sang his sweetest song at one of the open windows.

Ah! but we saw many things besides birds and flowers during that visit. There were little children with pale, pain-worn faces; children who would never walk again or join in the merry games of their playmates.

One small boy, who was run over nearly a year ago and so badly hurt that the doctors were obliged to cut off both his legs, gets about the ward quite quickly on his crutches and we notice a fair-haired little girl who looks very pale and ill.

Her name is Jessie, and the nurse tells us that a fall when she was quite a baby caused such severe injury to the spine that Jessie has never walked and is always obliged to lie quite still in her white cot. She is a gentle, patient child and very fond of singing hymns, and there is reason to hope that her young heart has been touched and won by a Saviour's love.

We are shewn more bandages and told they are going to be sent to far-off India, where a missionary, who is also a doctor, will be very glad of them for use in a small hospital he has opened, where any of the natives who are ill can go and have advice and medicine without having to pay for it.

The hospital is open all the year round, and day after day its small waiting-room is crowded by dark-faced people who speak a strange language.

Many of them worship idols, and come to the mission hospital, glad to get a little medicine for their sick bodies and with little thought of their never-dying souls.

But before the doctor sees one of his patients the doors are closed, and for a few moments every one is very quiet, for they are listening to Bible words as some one reads one of the Lord's parables or miracles of healing, and then they hear � some, perhaps, for the first time � of the one true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and of His love in sending His only Son to die upon the cross for sinners.

But this wonderful story, so wonderful because it is all true, would be only half told if Mr. S. did not go on to speak of the Lord Jesus as a risen, living Saviour and of the new place where He now is.

Mabel says, in almost a whisper, "He is in heaven."

Yes; and if we turn for a moment to one of the letters written by Peter, we shall read: "who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God." (1 Peter 3: 22.)

Chapter 12.

A Rock-Bound Coast.

My dear girls, please do not think because we have visited quite a number of workrooms during the year that nothing is left to be seen or learnt about the working girls of East London.

Lillie and Florence are, we fear, feeling just a little hurt on finding that our walks have not taken us so far Citywards as Fleet Street, for there we should have found them each busy at her work: Lillie among the bookbinders, Florence as an envelope-folder in one of our large city firms.

We know both girls well, we have met them so often in a Bible class, and it would really have been pleasant to watch their bright faces and busy fingers for a little while.

But if we cannot stop to visit City workrooms, it will be pleasant, and I hope profitable, to spend half an hour in the inspection of the "South London Workshops for the Blind."

Stockrooms and a shop in which articles made by blind workmen and workwomen are exposed for sale occupy by far the greater part of the ground floor. But when the manager says "Would you like to see our basket and matmakers busy at their trades?" in such a bright, pleasant way that we feel sure he will not mind the trouble of shewing us over the building, we are glad to avail ourselves of his kind invitation, and follow our guide.

The basket-makers are very busy, several fresh orders having been received by the morning's post, and as we watch how quickly and deftly the willow-canes, after having been first steeped in water to soften them, are handled and woven into baskets differing greatly in shape and size, it seems difficult to believe, and still more so to realise, that all the workmen are blind. But baskets are far from being the only things made in this department, though it is called the "basket-shop." Cane and bamboo chairs, bed and leg-rests (the latter to be used in the surgical wards of one of our London hospitals) and many useful things are the work of their skilled fingers. And when we remember how many difficulties had to be faced, and often the temptation to say "I'll give it up; I cannot work in the dark" must have come to these blind workmen, one cannot but feel ashamed of so often giving way to fits of depression and not always trying to do our very best.

But our guide has more to shew and more to tell. The mat-makers are busy people, too. Though their work is not so varied as that of the basket-shop, their mats are so strong and well made that they will stand hard wear and often last for many years. The brush-shop also presents a busy scene. It would take up far too much space were I even to attempt to give the names of all the different kinds of brushes required for use in yard or stable, to say nothing of household and toilet use. The smaller and finer kinds are generally made by girls and women; each works upon a board in which a number of very fine holes have been drilled, through which the bristles are drawn or passed; this part of the work is called brush-drawing. When ready the brushes are taken to another department, in which the backs are shaped and fastened by male workers.

But I must not stop to introduce you to blind shorthand typists, teachers of music, pianoforte tuners, carpenters, picture-frame makers, and other workers who have found ways and means of making themselves useful.

As we say good-bye to our sightless friends our hearts thrill with the longing that each dear, blind worker may learn what it means to "walk in the light" in the simple, happy consciousness of being "children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." For such the darkness in which their outer lives must be spent cannot last long. Soon, it may be very soon, the shadows and gloom of earth will give place to the cloudless light and joy of being for ever with the One they have through grace learnt to love and trust.

This may be my last opportunity of having a quiet talk by way of pen and ink, and I want very much to tell you another true story of a young girl who in her far-away home in one of the Shetland Isles was allowed to do a work that will last when everything we can see with our eyes, or touch with our hands, has been worn out and forgotten, for it was work for God, and when any who belong to Christ work from the sweet constraint of love to Him, it is really of no consequence how small or feeble the work may be, it is sure to last.

Some of our friends who have been to the Shetlands tell us it would be difficult to find a more delightful place in which to spend a long summer holiday.

Live seals may often be seen basking in the sunshine or sporting among the rocks, and the silence is broken by the shrill cry of many a sea bird, almost if not quite unknown on our southern coasts.

The simple islanders, too, will not be easy to forget by those who have spent even a short time among them. The only way in which people who live in the different islands can get at each other is by boat, and some of the smaller islands can only be reached by such narrow openings among the rocks that visitors can only approach them in fine, calm weather.

On one of these islands lives a fisherman � I am not sure that he would like me to tell you his real name, so I will call him Donald.

Donald was a very busy man, but at the time our story begins he was not a happy one.

Light from heaven had shined into his heart, and in that light he had seen himself to be a lost sinner, and the thought that one day (he did not know how soon) he must leave his fishing, and then, ah, then! his soul � that soul that must, he knew, live for ever � would go into eternity, made him very unhappy.

But the light came from God, a God who loves to bless, and as it grew clearer he saw that there was salvation for him as the free gift of God (Rom. 6: 23), so in simple faith Donald took the gift and thanked the Giver, and a strange new joy, the joy of forgiveness, filled his soul.

But for a long time he treated this joy in much the same way in which a miser hoards and hides his gold, he kept it to himself, he did not tell his friends or neighbours of the Saviour who had sought and found him.

He only talked of these things to his little daughter Agnes, and she, too, loved and trusted the same precious Saviour, and so you may be sure that father and daughter were great friends.

But the One who had saved Donald and Agnes wanted to have a witness for Himself in that lonely sea-girt isle.

Other fishermen and their families lived near Donald's cottage and the Lord Jesus loved and longed to bless and save them too. He wanted them to hear through Donald's simple words of His great love.

Donald, however, was not quite ready to be His messenger. He had to learn in the school of sorrow that the Lord who is mighty to save is also able to comfort.

Agnes was taken ill, and before many days her almost broken-hearted father saw that his dearly-loved little girl was dying. But even on her sick bed there was a work for Agnes that perhaps no one but herself could have done.

The Lord had given Agnes a deep, faithful love for souls, and she longed that not only the fisher children she used to play with, but their fathers and mothers should know the One who had saved her. So she asked her father if he would promise her "one thing," that when she had gone to be with the Lord he would get the neighbours together and, preach Christ to them.

He said, "It is of no use for me to promise, I cannot preach."

Such a troubled look came over the face of the dying girl, and for a moment she seemed disappointed. But only for a moment, for she asked, "But, dear father, if you cannot preach to the grown-up people, we have no Sunday school here, won't you tell the children about the Lord Jesus?"

Donald said, "I'll try," in a voice almost choked with sobs. And he has kept his promise, too.

He began very soon after dear Agnes fell asleep by holding a meeting for children in his cottage, but very soon fathers and mothers began to attend, and now Lord's day after Lord's day Donald is telling "the old, old story" of Jesus and His love to nearly all the people who live in his island home.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Martyr Tales and Sketches

Martyr Tales and Sketches

for the Young.

By G. W.

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C.

Contents

The First Martyr � Stephen

Vivia Perpetua at Carthage

Youthful Witnesses � Cyril, Denisa, Marcus and Marcellanius

Rome and Popery

Spain and the Inquisition

Maria De Bohorques at Seville

John Rogers at Smithfield

William Hunter at Brentwood

Chapter 1.

The First Martyr � Stephen.

It is indeed a happy task to bring before the youthful mind that which is bright and pleasant, as well as profitable.

Many things, however, we may learn with profit, which are neither bright to the eye, nor pleasant to the ear. Besides, there are subjects presenting beauties to our mental sight, which far exceed any seen by the eyes of the body. It is with the desire that the young mind of my reader may be occupied with that which is morally lovely, that I relate these Martyr Tales.

The scenes are far too harrowing in many cases for us to be able to follow them fully, nor need any unnecessary details be given. Yet, it will not do to turn from sorrowful sights, because they distress us, if, in looking on, we are learning needed lessons. Therefore, if under the blessing of God, the stories of these dear suffering ones lead your hearts to value the many privileges which you enjoy, they will not be lost. Should one note of praise from thankful lips, for the great goodness of our God, be the result, these tales will not have been told in vain.

It is good for us in this land of liberty, to look back on less favoured times, that we may learn our responsibilities in the present. It is well, also, to remember that if we are called upon to suffer, others have endured a vast deal more. In the sunny lands of the far south, brave spirits have yielded up their all for Christ. Under a scorching eastern sun many a faithful one has died the martyr's death. In the cold north, too, warm hearts have been found, who counted not their lives dear, when truth was at stake. Yes, and in the countries of the west, in our own favoured Europe, men, women, and children, have bled for the peerless name of Jesus.

In that day when our precious Lord makes up His jewels, not one so dearly bought by Him can possibly be missing. From the north, the south, the east, and the west, He will gather His own to sit with Him in the glory of His kingdom.

Will you, dear reader, visit with me a city in the East, while in thought we gaze upon a scene once enacted there? Outside its gates and walls an angry and excited crowd were seen, furiously stoning to death a helpless man. The men thus occupied were not the low, rough fellows of the city, but those who took the place of servants of God! It was the learned and religious men of the land who were there, and all shewing feelings of hatred and excitement. Even those who ought to have been the leaders of the people in peace and justice were only present to give vent to their rage.

The object of their wrath and malice was, however, much more to be envied than they, for he was really gaining a victory. From the cruel hands of his countrymen many a stone had been fiercely hurled, for his plain and fearless words had stirred up their hate and enmity in rage and fury. But while it was easy for them to destroy the body, they could not touch the soul.

Wounded, suffering, and dying, Stephen received no mercy from his enemies, while those cruel missiles did too well their deadly work; yet the falling stones touched not that brave man's inner life, though they had given the death-blow to his mortal body. That gentle voice, which had so often spoken for the One he loved more than any on earth, was then heard speaking to his Lord and Saviour in confidence. Listen to those wonderful words, as, with meekness and joy, they fall from his dying lips: � "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit"! And can we not most truly say that the cry was heard above, in the sympathising ear of the now exalted, but once rejected Christ of God?

But that dying cry was not his only prayer. His last thoughts on earth were for his enemies � those very men who in their hatred and envy, had put him to death! Forgetting his pains and wounds and suffering, that dying man, with voice which all could hear, gave utterance to the fervent prayer � "Lord! lay not this sin to their charge"! Stephen was full of gentleness and love towards his cruel persecutors, while with firmness of purpose, he owned Jesus of Nazareth to be his Lord on high.

After thus committing himself into the Lord's eternal keeping, and asking forgiveness for his foes, Stephen slept the sleep of death, and his spirit went to be for ever with the Lord.

Thus died a holy, God-fearing man � stoned to death by those of his own nation who were considered to be religious! And why had he thus to die, and be cast out from the earth? Because he had spoken boldly the truth of God. Fearing not the face of man, he had dared to tell the members of that Jewish Council that they had murdered their long-looked for Messiah.

Let us return for a brief space to look at the circumstances which led to the death of this the first martyr for the name of Jesus. Stephen was a Jew, and had been brought up in the Jewish religion. The nation was looking for the Deliverer who had been promised by God long before � the Messiah, or the Sent One � who would free them from oppression, and rule in glory and power. There were many prophecies in the Old Testament which spoke of the great things to be done by Him, and the victories of His reign. These were treasured and valued words, yet, strange to say, many other scriptures which were equally distinct, were blindly passed over. While the former spoke of a victorious King, the latter told of "a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." The truth that the Royal Messenger was first to take a lowly position, and pass through death before ruling in power, was not understood, and, therefore, not believed.

Unlike the mass of the nation, Stephen believed that Jesus of Nazareth whom the Jews had lately slain, was the Son of God, the Messiah, long promised to His people. Indeed, we may look upon the first martyr as a man to whom Christ was everything, for he was known as "a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost." No one can possibly be in that condition without a great change having taken place, for it is the Spirit of God who occupies the heart with Christ. In our natural state, that is, with the nature which we have on being born into the world, we can do nothing to please God. Nor do we love Him in any sense, for our deceitful hearts are full of enmity.

When we turn from our own ways and doings to trust in the finished work of the only perfect Man who ever lived, we are said to be converted. It is a wonderful change when the sinner looks to God, confessing his sins, and owns Jesus Christ as his Saviour. Such a change Stephen must have known, and consequently the Spirit of God dwelt in him. Much power also marked his course from this time, so that he did great wonders and miracles.

Stephen was one of the seven disciples who were chosen to take charge of the distribution of money to those who were in need in the church. This duty was undertaken in order that the apostles might be more free for preaching and teaching the word. In addition to this, he was fearless in speaking the truth of God, so that those who opposed him "were not able to resist the wisdom and spirit by which he spake."

The rage of his opponents could not vent itself on him as a guilty man, and so they invented things to say against him and thus brought a godly man to trial before the Council, by false accusation. Stephen stood before his judges, and the untruthful witnesses did their best to stir up the leading religious Jews against him � a faithful man, who had done them no wrong.

Most remarkable must that face have appeared to them as it rivetted the gaze of each one! Never could such a wonderful scene be forgotten by any who saw it that day! With a beaming face, and the love of God in his heart, that noble witness to a crucified Christ poured forth his faithful, telling words. The very look on his face was heavenly, as even his enemies did not fail to see. To them it was "as it had been the face of an angel."

When the high priest put the question, "Are these things so?" Stephen answered by giving a powerful address. Going over the history of the nation, from the beginning, when God had called Abraham and led him forth, he spoke of Israel's ways and God's doings. He reminded them of Jehovah's faithfulness, of their own frequent failures as a nation, and their unbelief as the people of God. The climax was reached when this bold and courageous witness came to speak of the Son of God � the despised Jesus of Nazareth � whom they had cast out and murdered.

Then the rage of these outwardly religious men broke forth in all its fury, and in their hate they gnashed their teeth against the godly, truth-speaking Stephen.

Nothing daunted, however, that brave man fearlessly stood a witness for God, but only to increase the violence of their enmity. Full of the Holy Ghost, he turned his eyes to heaven, and there a sight, unseen before by mortal man, met his upward gaze.

Stephen saw "the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God." He told the Council of those opened heavens, and the Son of man in the place of honour and power, but his words only the farther increased the fury of his enemies.

Desiring to hear no more, they raised their voices, stopped their ears, rushed upon the defenceless Stephen, and cast him out of Jerusalem. Then, as we have already noticed, they speedily sent home to the presence of Christ, this first martyr to the name of Jesus.

How like his holy Master was this witness! Hated because he did what was right, and said that which was true, cast out because of his faithfulness, and praying for his very murderers, he committed himself into divine keeping, "saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." What an entrance into the presence of God must his have been � the first redeemed one who had sealed his testimony with his blood!

Have you, my dear young reader, learned to confess the name of the meek and lowly Jesus, whom men despise? If so, you will be sustained, as Stephen was, when called to pass through suffering. For you, too, glory lies beyond this passing life, and for you the Christ of God lives at the Father's right hand.

But, dear reader, if unsaved, unconcerned, unconverted, how will you meet God? Will you run the risk, by continued delay, of finding yourself in the presence of Jesus as a Judge? Mercy's voice is calling to you to come "To-day." The risen Jesus bids you come as you are. Come now. To-morrow may be for ever too late.

Chapter 2.

Vivia Perpetua at Carthage � A Wife and Mother Torn by Wild Beasts.

Vivia Perpetua was a lady of high rank, whose heart had been won, and whose faith was upheld by Jesus Christ the Lord. She was a wife and mother, yet, with her child, she was torn from her home by cruel men, and cast into prison for the name of Christ. Her sorrowing relatives did all they could to obtain her release, but in vain. Liberty could only be procured on one condition, and that was that she would declare herself no longer a Christian. But she refused to deny the name of Him who had given His life's blood for her, so that her release was impossible.

The visits of her aged father from time to time, tried and tested both her faith and affection. For, in the agony of his grief, he besought her with tears, to deny the truth for which she was imprisoned. The sight of his sorrow was most depressing to his affectionate daughter, and, much as she loved him, it was a relief when he did not come.

Amongst the four other Christians who shared the same dungeon with Vivia Perpetua was a woman who had been a slave. How unlike had been the lives of those two women � one brought up in the midst of luxury, the other accustomed to hard work and toil. Now through their faith in the Lord Jesus, they had much in common, for they were enduring pain and suffering for the name of Christ.

At the time when these five were imprisoned, they were known to be receiving instruction in the truths of Christianity with a view to their being baptised. And the prison happily did not hinder that desire from being carried out. They had the intense joy and privilege of putting on the name of Christ by baptism, in their miserable yet happy cell.

This great pleasure was speedily succeeded by a change of outward circumstances for the worse. These dear suffering ones were afterwards removed to another dungeon, into which no light entered. That cruel mode of punishment was most trying to these five prisoners, for the want of fresh air was added to the misery of darkness.

How little do we know what utter darkness means, who have the bright sun by day and the moon and stars by night, and have our rooms cheerfully lighted up within! During the hours of rest darkness is an aid to sleep, but our waking eyes naturally prefer the sunlight. Terrible indeed must it be to wake up in the morning and see no sun to pass the long hours of day and still no ray of light, each day and night repeating the same dark and dreary tale! No wonder that total darkness makes one sad and ill and had not some relief been speedily given to these captives, death would soon have ended their imprisonment.

A person interested in those sufferers contrived through bribing one of the guards, to obtain for them the privilege of getting out of their narrow cell for a short time daily. Though not out of the prison, yet a purer air and the precious boon of daylight were much valued, and thankfully received.

What a sorrowful sight could then be seen, as their pale faces and wasted frames showed the dire effects of the gloomy dungeon! Each looking upon the other must have been painfully conscious of the decline of health during those days of darkness. But they were also able to speak words of cheer and comfort to the heart, and see the eye light up with joy and brightness � a joy and brightness that sprang not from the earth, and which the dungeon's gloom failed to touch or to mar.

In the light of day, Vivia Perpetua could now look upon her helpless babe, and profit thereby in mingled joy and sadness. The dear infant child was the companion of its mother's outward misery, yet was it happy in the mother's love. Child-like, it understood not its surroundings, so that its spirit was unaffected by them. As for the mother, she was happy and cheerful in spite of all her painful circumstances.

These days, however, came suddenly to a severe and testing end. In the midst of their prison meal they were one day unexpectedly startled by the presence of a company of soldiers. These men had come to take them to the place of trial before their judges. There, questions were asked of them which only gave to all an opportunity of declaring their belief in Christ Jesus their Saviour.

At the moment when the lady Perpetua was being examined, a very sorrowful and trying scene took place. The aged father once more appeared, and appealed to his daughter on the ground of her natural affection. "Have pity on your babe," he implored. The judge also made an appeal for both father and babe. "Spare the grey hairs of your father, spare your infant, and offer sacrifices to the Emperor." Heart-broken though the daughter must have felt, yet she faltered not. When the judge finished his appeal with the question "Are you a Christian?" it only drew from the lady the decisive reply, "I am a Christian."

To add to the anguish already rending her heart, she was called upon to bear still more from her persecutors. Her poor old father was torn from her side, and ordered to be beaten because of his daughter's steadfast faith and confession! Very keenly did Vivia Perpetua feel her parent's sorrowful position in being thus shamefully treated for her sake; yet true and firm the woman's heart was kept, for neither as a loving daughter, nor a youthful tender mother, was her brave spirit allowed to yield. No, like Paul, she was able to count everything but loss that she might win Christ.

The sentence pronounced upon Vivia Perpetua and her four companions brought a trying prospect before them. It was one very common in those days of heathen power, but none the less shocking and painful to those persons who were thus called upon to die. They were condemned to be torn by wild beasts who had been kept without food for some days to make them more fierce and hungry. Only think of these wild ravenous creatures being let loose on weak and helpless women, by the wish and will of human beings! Yet with such a death before them, it is said that they "went back with cheerfulness to the prison."

The choice had been given these five faithful ones of avoiding that sentence of death by yielding to worship idols. But no, life was too dear for them at such a price, since it meant disobedience to the word of God. The prospect of the end was sweeter far to souls who knew and loved the Saviour for His own matchless worth. The meek and quiet behaviour of these five condemned prisoners spoke of the divine life which God had given. None might touch or take from them that precious treasure. The Lord while on earth had said, "I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my hand."

In the lowly example of the suffering Jesus they found a perfect pattern, and they sought to follow in His steps. The men who had charge of them were moved with compassion when they saw their gentle ways, and granted them favours which they were not ordered to give. They willingly permitted friends to visit them during their last days on earth. This was a great boon, giving opportunity for farewell words of love and affection to the dear ones from whom they were parted.

At last the solemn day dawned, when Vivia Perpetua and her four companions were led forth to die. Once more a determined effort was made to get these Christians to deny their Saviour. They were requested to bow down to idols, and thus own themselves heathen worshippers. But not even immediate exposure to the fury of those wild beasts sufficed to make them yield. These faithful ones preferred the cruel death that was before them, rather than to save their souls by dishonouring the name of their Lord.

We shall not follow that heart-rending scene through all its horrors, for they are too awful to relate. When death did at last release these captive ones from earth, it was only joyfully to usher them into the presence of their Lord.

Such was one of many displays of man's hate to God in the early centuries of the church's history. Raised seats overlooked the open space where the animals and victims were placed. And strange to say, many a human eye gazed upon those cruel sights, and took pleasure in the martyr's sufferings and death.

But other eyes than those of men, looked down upon the inhuman spectacle. God, who "with-draweth not his eyes from the righteous," watched over those patient, persecuted saints, and turned the eye of faith upward to Him. With what tender pity did the Father's heart feel for them! And how must the blessed Lord, for whose name they had endured such sufferings, have looked down upon them in loving sympathy! Angels, too, gazed upon the sorrowful sight, and it was theirs to minister to those whom man despised.

What a scene to call forth our mingled feelings, as in thought we retrace the long centuries of the past! Under the promptings of Satan, man was following out the desires of his own evil heart. On the other hand, dear saints of God were patiently enduring, not only shame and scorn, but actual bodily pain. God sustained them, and the Spirit comforted till death snapped the tie that bound them to earth, and set them free for ever. Then had the blessed Lord the unspeakable joy of having His own with Himself in peace and love without alloy.

One cannot help pitying the aged and affectionate father in the helplessness of his grief. Oh, if he had only known the Christ of God, who was the object of his daughter's heart, how different would all have been! He would then have been able to understand that his beloved daughter possessed a hidden imperishable treasure, of more value than even life itself. His own heart too, would have been comforted by the presence of a sympathising Saviour and he could then have looked forward to a reunion in glory. But he knew not the secret strength which was her stay, nor the living Person who upheld her and therefore could only see sorrow and gloom. The old grey-haired gentleman was completely bowed down with the agony of his grief. Little wonder was it indeed, for the affectionate father only saw his loved one about to die. The gloom of death seemed to him to separate them for ever. One can only hope that in his sorrow he may have turned the eye to the Saviour, who has said, "Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out."

Chapter 3.

Youthful Witnesses � Cyril, Denisa, Marcus and Marcellanius.

Many hundred years ago, a little boy of the name of Cyril, was called upon to lay down his life for Christ. His father was a heathen, and hated Christianity, yet his youthful son did not hide from him, or from any, the fact that he believed in the Lord Jesus. Unhindered by the fear of man, Cyril was known as one who prayed to God, and neither punishment nor aught else could make him desist.

Enraged at this conduct, the cruel father sent him from his home, sternly declaring that he would no longer regard him as his son. This young believer was then taken before a judge, who endeavoured to reason him out of his faith. He told Cyril that he ought to obey parental authority, and that if he would do so he might return to his home, and all the past would be forgiven.

The noble-hearted boy knew that he was called to obey One higher than his father, and the latter only "in the Lord." Since his parent was not allowing him to own the Lordship of Christ, he chose "to obey God rather than men," like the apostles of old. Cyril told his judge that he must ever be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ, adding, "I am not sorry because I am turned out of the house, for I have a better mansion and I am not afraid to die, because then I shall have a better house."

Still hoping to make the boy yield, the judge endeavoured to frighten him into submission. He therefore commanded him to be fettered and taken from his presence, as if about to be put to death. But yield he would not, in spite of all that the judge could say or do, and even the flames before his eyes did not alarm him. Truly God alone gave the needed strength to that youthful witness, and stayed his heart upon Himself. "I am going to a better home," said he, "and greater pleasures; make haste and kill me, that I may enjoy them."

Some wept as they looked upon that young and courageous boy on the brink of the grave, while full of health and vigour. To these, Cyril said, "Oh, you know not what a city I am going to live in, or what a hope I have!" His longing was soon realised, for the precious young life was quickly taken, and that happy spirit freed to enter into the presence of the Lord. There, with the blessed One whom he had loved and trusted on earth, dear Cyril entered into rest, in the spring-time of his youthful days.

My dear young reader, would you thus willingly die for Christ, if life were offered on such persuasive terms? You could only do so by having the heart first "set on brighter things above." Jesus Christ, the Son of God, must be known as your Saviour, ere you could say in confidence that your home is with Him. Yet the grace that was given to Cyril, is also free for you.

Death may overtake you, therefore why remain undecided any longer? Choose while young the way of life that leads to pleasures which are at God's right hand for evermore. Jesus saith, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me."

Many a grey-headed old man would give all he possesses to have the opportunity of giving to God the best of his days. Yes, and strong able men in the prime of life, have frequent regrets that they turned not to God in their youth. Oh, it is a privilege far beyond what you my youthful reader can at present understand, to be the Lord's while you are young! "Turn ye, turn ye . . . . for why will ye die?"

I should like also to tell my young readers of a young girl, who like Cyril, suffered in those early days of Christianity. Her name was Denisa, and her age sixteen, when she comes before our notice in history. The circumstance which made known her faith was a sudden exclamation from her lips as she gazed upon a suffering Christian. The latter was a man who had been commanded to sacrifice to idols, and at first firmly refused, but being put upon the rack the pain at last became more than he could bear. In such an hour of weakness he denied the faith for the sake of life!

No sooner had this denial fallen from his lips, than the intensity of his suffering so rapidly increased, that he died immediately! Denisa had been looking on this scene, and was greatly appalled at the sudden and solemn occurrence. On the impulse of the moment, she exclaimed with great feeling, "O, unhappy wretch! why would you buy a moment's ease at the expense of a miserable eternity?"

Optimus, the pro-consul of Asia, under whose direction the torture had been going on, overheard her words, and quickly asked, "Are you a Christian?" Denisa replied by boldly confessing Christ, as she owned with courage that blessed name.

Immediately the hatred of the pagan was aroused by the mention of the holy One whom he despised and hated. He commanded the young girl to offer sacrifice to the idols, but all he could say was unavailing. Denisa stood firm, and bow to other than the one God, she neither would nor could. Optimus, in great wrath, then delivered her into the hands of two brutal men she was placed wholly in their power, and her position was terrible in the extreme.

God interposed, however, on behalf of His suffering witness, and those wretched men became powerless to do her harm. At the dead hour of night they were startled by a sight which alarmed them greatly. So much were they overcome by the effects of that vision of the night, that they even cried to her for mercy. Throwing themselves at the feet of the helpless girl, they entreated her to pray for them, fearing that they were about to suffer at the hands of God for the evil done to this Christian.

That midnight scene makes one think of the words of Eliphaz the Temanite in the book of Job. "In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake." The heart which knows God in Christ need never be afraid, for nothing can overtake that soul for hurt. David, the psalmist, says, by the Spirit of God, "The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them."

If the words of Eliphaz might have been uttered by these wicked men, those of David were true in Denisa's case, for God protected her in youth and helplessness. One would have thought that Optimus would have feared to lay hands on her again. But daring as ever in his wickedness, that cruel man soon gave orders for her execution, and rudely brought that precious life to an early and untimely end. Denisa was beheaded, but, like many others, only to leave a scene of sorrow for a home of eternal bliss.

A christian lady many hundreds of years since Cyril and Denisa ended their brief young lives, has written:

At thy right hand there are pleasures,

There are pleasures for evermore;

In the depth of thy glory are treasures �

A measureless, countless store."

And surely could they speak to us from their happy abode on high, their words would only confirm the truth of the word of God expressed in this beautiful verse.

Not only is there infinite and eternal bliss at God's right hand, but there is a risen glorified Man there, who waits in patience to have His own in that bright scene with Him. It is to Him the eye of faith is directed, and with Him the waiting believer desires to be. Ah, if we long to see His face, how must He also be looking forward to the moment when He will come from that radiant place for us, His blood-bought people! We rest in the faithfulness of His parting words, "I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."

"What will it be to dwell above,

And with the Lord of glory reign,

Since the blest knowledge of his love

So brightens all this dreary plain?

No heart can think, no tongue can tell

What joy 'twill be with Christ to dwell."

At the time when these young Christians' lives were rudely snatched from them, the trial of their faith was different from that which was given to others in after centuries. Yet, in each case, through nearly nineteen hundred years, the true test has been the name of Christ. Circumstances only changed as time rolled on, and the persecuting power was not a heathen one. In those early days the demand was � worship idols or die. In later times it was a contest between a true and a false Christianity.

Different modes of punishment were adopted in those early days, which usually corresponded with the habits and ways of the people. Cruelty in varied forms was ever exercised, and men grew ingenious in their plans when devising the most painful kinds of torture. But though the times grew darker and increasingly dangerous, yet the few believers in Jesus scattered here and there were kept faithful amid much temptation. As it was said in the days of the Judges, when Israel's history was indeed a dark one, so may we say of the true-hearted in those early centuries: "The word of God was precious in those days."

After shewing the faith of this little boy and girl, I want now to tell my reader about two brothers, as an instance of faithful witnesses whose words and conduct brought blessing to others. Marcus and Marcellanius were young Romans of noble family who lived towards the end of the third century. (Cyril and Denisa confessed Christ and died. Marcus and Marcellanius believed in Jesus and were permitted to live a little longer.) These two boys were under the charge of tutors while receiving their education. The guardians to whom they were thus committed were Christians, while the parents of the children were heathens. As such they would, in all probability, have brought up their boys, had they been more directly under their care.

The fact therefore of these brothers being brought up under christian influence caused them to be closely watched. Their conduct evidently proved them to be Christians, and they were accordingly arrested. They were first cruelly put to torture, and then condemned to die. Their friends pleaded for the sentence to be delayed for one month, and that request was granted. During that period, parents as well as relatives, used every effort to make them abandon the christian faith, but all without avail.

God kept these two dear boys faithful amid all these temptations, and then largely rewarded their faith and firmness. The consequence was that the whole family nominally left Paganism, but whether every one turned to Christ I cannot tell. When the father was examined about the faith of his sons and if he had succeeded in getting them to turn again to worship idols, he startled the judge by telling him, that on the contrary, he was himself a Christian. Proceeding then to tell the prefect (who was questioning him) of the truths he held, he so fully convinced him of the reality of Christianity, that the latter turned from idols to serve the living God. Thus the testimony of these christian brothers was blessed to not a few in the course of a very short time.

Chapter 4.

Rome and Popery.

What memories of persons, events, buildings, secular and sacred, are called up before the mind when we utter the name of Rome! How they crowd before the mental vision, and call forth varied feelings of admiration, pity, enthusiasm, or indifference! Rome on her seven hills, ruling the earth, calling herself "the eternal city," and claiming to her name the admiration of all � proud, imperious, powerful in the past! But Rome of to-day tells of departed greatness, of empty state, of power lost, and the vain show of a nominal greatness is all that remains. Such is that proud city in our time, a city which once made herself supreme in the church and the world.

If the greatness of Rome is a thing of the past, there still remain the relics of what it has been. The place itself is therefore a spot of absorbing interest to many a one in our own day, as well as in times gone by. In writing of it at the present moment, my object is not to tell of what the city has been, nor what it now is, but to explain a little the different terms in common use concerning Rome. That my young reader may clearly understand, it becomes necessary to touch on this well-known name.

The "Church of Rome" is a familiar expression, which as commonly used, does not refer to a building. Nor does it refer to the church of which God speaks in His word. The Romish church is a religious system in which the people who belong to it, are ruled over by a man who lives in Rome. I should like to tell you by-the-way, that at the present time the city itself possesses more than three hundred religious edifices of various kinds.

Some of them are considered places of great attraction, and are remarkable for their historic interest. As buildings, their value, beauty, and grandeur, have gained a world-wide fame. St. Peter's, whose dome rises high above the city, was 120 years in building, and is the largest in the world. Rome of to-day has still much in common with the past: its grand old hills, its flowing Tiber, the sunny sky of Italy and the verdant lands of a southern clime. The vine and the olive, the orange-tree and the citron, still flourish around as in days of yore. But the size of the city is only one-third of what it once was.

The church founded by the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, did not long retain the simple character of its early days. At first the fact was very fully owned that the people of God were separated to Himself. This implied practical separation from everything that was not according to God. But as time went on, errors crept in; little by little hearts got away from the Lord, and were thus exposed to the temptations of Satan.

When the church and the world came to be on friendly terms, the name and place of a Christian were less despised. Hence many took the name and followed the outward thing, who in their inmost souls knew not God. Such had no scruples as to what they did, but considered that they might do that which pleased either themselves or others. With no life in their souls, they were but empty professors, understanding not that God alone was to be satisfied. And thus meaningless forms and ceremonies took the place of that which the Lord had enjoined.

There was one class of men who took upon them to approach God on behalf of their fellow creatures. Assuming to be better than their fellows, they called themselves by the name of priests. A little attention to the word of God would have saved them from taking such an unwarranted place. For the Holy Ghost in the Scriptures distinctly speaks of all believers as an "holy priesthood." "Praise to God continually" is the only sacrifice which is asked from those who have trusted in Christ. He offered one sacrifice for sins. But these self-made priests said that there must be a daily repetition, in which the bread used to remember the Lord's death would actually become His body again. That empty ceremony, so contrary to the teaching of the word of God, is called "The Mass;" and it is actually being performed daily at the present time.

In addition to the ordinary priests, one man from their midst, considering himself still better than they, took a yet higher place. That priest said that Christ had appointed him here on the earth instead of Himself, now that He had gone to heaven. The man in that position received the name of "Pope," which is a word meaning "father." Such a place was never given to mortal man, for none could represent a holy God. That title is expressly forbidden by the Lord in Matthew 23: 9. When Christ, the Head of the Church, went on high, the Holy Ghost was sent to be here on His behalf. So neither the first pope, nor any who succeeded him, could have any scriptural authority for taking such a position.

Of "the heavenly gift" Peter thus spake to the Jews when the Spirit came down. ". . . . Jesus hath God raised up . . . . therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear." (Acts 2: 32, 33.) The Lord also had said while on the earth, "The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things." (John 14: 26.)

Having therefore a divine Person dwelling in the church of God, the believer ought to submit to His rule, and to those whom He appoints. Hence the assumption of a class of men to be priests, and one man to be pope, are distinct errors which gradually crept into the church hundreds of years ago. No wonder then, that godly souls have been found in all ages who have refused to own such men as part of the Church of God, willing rather to submit to death than bow to them.

The word pope was originally given to every bishop, but principally to the bishop of Alexandria. In time, however, it came to be a title belonging only to the bishops of Rome. The latter city then took an important place, as being the abode of him who styled himself "Head of the church" and "Vicar of God." When, therefore, a man and a city were in such prominence in the church, it became known among men as "the church of Rome."

Obedience to the pope had taken the place of obedience to Christ. Hence, though it is christian in name, the term popery more truly stamps its character. In the Epistle to the Ephesians we read "The church is subject unto Christ." But the professing church had submitted to the pope, and dared not call in question anything which that dignitary said or did. Still, even when things had reached this corrupt stage, not a few true believers were to be found therein. Though a mass of people had come in who were Christians only in name, yet God had still the wheat where the tares abounded.

With an empty religion and no Christ, with dead works and no faith, we need not wonder that the scriptures were set aside and tradition accepted. The pope ruled instead of Christ, and the followers of the former had corrupted Christianity into popery.

The secret of all this failure lay in the lack of separation from the world and the neglect of the word of God. In proportion as Christians were true and faithful to their heavenly calling, so was the church a witness for Christ. But when the ways of the world were brought in, the name of the Lord was dishonoured. The results of fidelity in the few who remained stedfast were simply suffering and persecution in some form or other. It is the old hatred of men and Satan to the Person of the Lord Jesus, because, as the holy One, His presence condemns all sin. Listen to the parting words spoken to the disciples whom He loved while He walked this earth: "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." (John 15: 18, 19.) But who and what is the world? one may ask. Let John the apostle give the short but divinely inspired answer. "All that is in the world . . . . is not of the Father, but is of the world." Scripture does not, in these verses, speak of the earth on which we live as the world. Nor does it refer to the number of human beings composing it, as we often use the term. But it is applied to everything which is only of man, and not of God in any sense. Speaking of Him who delivers us from "this present evil world," Paul says that "Our Lord Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins . . . . according to the will of God our Father." (Gal. 1: 4.)

When the Spirit of Christ was lacking, men began to interpret scripture according to their own ideas. As these were false and their hearts corrupt, all went wrong. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God . . . neither can he know them." The popish authorities then began to compel all to do as they did or die. Thus they imagined that they would uproot every thing and person opposed to them. Ah, their poor deluded souls little dreamt that the life was eternal that they were endeavouring to touch! Vain was the attempt in their self-will and ignorance. They were fighting against God and could not overcome.

Those who dared to differ from the Romish church were called "heretics." The fact of their faith in Christ and resistance to popery was styled "heresy." Heresy and heretics are words which have often been wrongfully applied. In Paul's able speech at Caesarea before Felix the governor, he used the word, saying, "After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers." The papists apply the term "heretic" to all who are not of their creed. There are other Christians also who dare to speak thus of those who differ from them, yet cling to the word of God. Let us remember that heresy is one of the works of the flesh, as mentioned in the Epistle to the Galatians, and that it is the same word as sect or schism.

Even supposing, however, that every one who differed from the Romish church was a heretic, scripture gives no authority for putting such to death. No, nor yet putting bodily suffering of any kind upon them. A schismatic or heretic may be looked upon as one who breaks from the path of walking in truth. The word of God counsels the saints to admonish such a one. If he remain hardened after this has been once or twice done, then he is to be rejected. (Titus 3: 10.) Thus men, instead of acting in the blindness of a zeal without knowledge, would have done better to have listened to the voice of God, and not to that which is always wrong, the "evil heart of unbelief."

"The atoning work is done;

The Victim's blood is shed;

And Jesus now is gone

His people's cause to plead:

He stands in heaven their great High Priest,

And bears their names upon his breast."

Chapter 5.

Spain and the Inquisition.

I have no doubt that many of my readers would like to see the beautiful sunny shores of Spain. The very name makes one think of flowers, fruits and sunshine, blue skies and balmy air. The lovely waters of the Mediterranean on one side, and the bold free Atlantic on the other, give to the peninsula a very attractive coast-line. The country itself has an interesting variety of hill and dale, river and plain; hence the climate also differs much, according to the height or exposure of a place.

Oak and chestnut trees clothe the hills in the north, and the valleys produce rich and abundant harvests. That part is therefore in a measure like our temperate isles, only there may be greater fertility and richness. Towards the south the climate partakes of a semi-tropical character, and therefore life and vegetation are both abundant. What child does not connect oranges, grapes, and raisins with the glowing southern shores of Spain? The middle of the country is not so pleasant. The scorching heat of a burning sun at one time, and the cold of a piercing wind at another, are extremes which some find very trying.

From the beginning of the christian era till within a few hundred years ago, Spain was very different from what it is now. To-day, the mass of the people are very ignorant; formerly, it was a land noted for its learning. At present its possessions are few, at one time they were far and wide. That "the sun never sets on her dominions," is said of our own beloved land now, it might also have been said of Spain some centuries ago. God's glad tidings were also preached, but for a time refused, and now consciences are fettered, and the people kept in ignorance of the word of God. In the days when such hindering influences began other evils crept in, and Spain's bright days of learning, power and freedom were over.

It was necessary in a former chapter to explain the words pope, priests, popery, and heresy. Another name, well-known only a few hundred years ago, comes under our notice now. I refer to the wicked Court of the Inquisition established by the Church of Rome, and with which Spain was very intimately connected. The object of the Court was the punishment and destruction of "heretics," and many faithful children of God were tortured and put to death by its means. This Court was composed of a number of men who made a show of justice, but from the moment that a person suspected as a heretic came before it, persecution and revenge � not justice � marked its course.

In many a popish town those dark and gloomy prisons rose to view, striking terror when the thought of being within came before the mind. Their iron bars, the strong and cheerless walls, their size and gloom, all told a tale of unrelenting power and cruelty. Having once entered, the victim would there remain, or only pass outward to the flames as the end and aim of all. There were many cells, some of which were below the level of the streets; and some were even cut in the rocks, and were very cold and damp. The light of day never reached them, nor could any groan be heard above. Neither the passer-by nor the cruel persecutor need be disturbed, for the loudest cry could reach no pitying ear.

Force was the ruling power there, while violence was displayed in its direst forms, for the working of this awful Inquisition was fully in keeping with its dark and gloomy cells. Deeds of darkness of various kinds took place within its walls; but the vilest thing was the fact, that all was done in the name of Christianity and zeal for the church! The Court which was held there consisted of three men in prominent positions in the land. All were, of course, keen advocates of Romanism, and filled with deadly hatred to all who differed from them in their religious opinions. Especially was their enmity directed against the word of God, for that would have given light to a people whom they desired to keep in ignorance.

Over two thousand years before, David the King of Israel, wrote as he sang one of his sweet psalms to Jehovah: "The entrance of thy words giveth light, it giveth understanding unto the simple." In all ages, the sons of men who have turned from their own ways to serve the living God, have found these words true; and, consequently, they have cherished the precious life-giving word of God.

As the scriptures were read, so individuals made progress in the truth of God; taught by the Holy Spirit, they followed the Christ of whom these testified; thus their lives became known and their enemies began to watch for opportunities of reporting them. It is a person's works which make manifest that which he is in heart; so the scriptures tell us, "Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit." (Matt. 7: 16, 17.)

Let us follow a little the usual mode of procedure when a victim was obtained for the Inquisition. We take an imaginary case to shew its character as carried out in many. A young girl in a certain town is observed to be reading the Bible; she has even been heard to sing a hymn. The empty forms of the religion in which she has been brought up have lost all charm for her. The mass she no longer attends, and she has ceased to make the sign of the cross. Her ways are quiet and her behaviour gentle, being more dutiful to her parents than before. All that she is in herself, however, will not make amends for this marked fact, that the Romish church obtains no honour from her now. The pope, the priests, the people, all demand this homage, or the fearful alternative � her life.

Some bigoted Romanist observes the change, and reports her to head-quarters; that is, he tells a priest or some official in authority who is a papist. The person who carries the tidings of what he sees is a "spy," and obtains an expected reward for the tale he tells. Alas, it usually brought death to the unsuspecting victim!

Not only were spies employed to give information, but other mean men were employed to fetch the victim, and these messengers of the Inquisition were called "familiars." The latter took care that it should not be easily known who or what they were. A long dark cloak was worn, the hood of which covered the head and face. The only parts of the body exposed were the two eyes and hands.

The time considered most suitable to set out on their errands of cruelty was night, as the person would then be more easily found. In day-light the knowledge that the "familiars" were on their way, might however give time to escape. Not so at night, for then the surprise was perfect. In the sweetness of sleep the victim would be suddenly roused, and sternly ordered to follow those wretched messengers.

And whither go they with that gentle maiden in the dark hours of night? On to the cruel gloom of the Inquisition; and soon they have led their unresisting charge before their superiors. In them the same cruel spirit is brutally manifest, and no mercy can be expected there. These so-called judges then go through a pretence of an examination. Perfectly needless indeed it is, because their one intention is to punish the victim now in their grasp. Justice was a meaningless name, but it suited their purpose thus to speak of their proceedings.

In the dark shadows of a dimly lighted room sit the judges. Before them stands a cross of wood, and on the table lies a paper containing the accusation. Whether true or not it matters little to them; all they want is something on which to condemn. Hence the most dreadful untruths were frequently written against one who was no criminal, and guilty of any offence. As it was with Daniel, so the only true occasion these enemies could often find, was "concerning the law of his God."

The accused, being charged with the things written, was not allowed to say much. But generally the answer given was a brave and noble confession of faith in Christ. Frequently a fearlessness of death was expressed, and oft-times it was esteemed a privilege to die. Coaxing, threatening, entreaty � everything was tried to get the accused to say that Rome was right. In other words, the arrested person was asked to give up believing in Christ, and to set aside the word of God, for both were implied in the denial of that which was felt to be true. To go back to the Church of Rome was the one thing demanded.

Sometimes terror drove the victim to give up Christ for the pope's authority. This was called "recanting," that is withdrawing a former opinion. It is also spoken of as "abjuration," when the recanting is by oath. Many stood firm, refusing to deny their Lord. Where Christianity had only been an outward thing, it was natural and easy to recant to avoid suffering. But where through fear a child of God did so, it was generally followed by deep repentance, and the sin confessed before others.

When persuasion failed, the next step was to shew the arrested person the instruments of torture soon to be felt. For if first attempts availed not to produce recantation, fresh efforts were put forth when the prisoner was on the rack. The latter produced the most dreadful sufferings, every joint in the body being dislocated. The instruments of torture are too awful to dwell upon, so I shall simply mention another. Besides the rack, a second mode of causing agony was before the victim's gaze. A pulley raised the person from the floor, after heavy iron weights had been attached to the feet. The cord was then let go, and the helpless one suddenly dropped to the ground, grazing his back on spiked rollers as he descended. Such are specimens of the cruel tortures of the Inquisition.

Everything that wicked hearts could suggest and brains devise to inflict suffering, was to be found in those dreadful rooms. After the savage persecutors had retained their prisoners long enough to suit their fiendish purposes, they led them forth to die. Most were rendered unable to walk, crippled for ever by what they had undergone. The cold, damp dungeon had been a relief; and death was looked forward to as ending their terrible sufferings. No wonder then, that they left their gloomy cells frequently with joy as well as peace upon the heart and countenance; for a speedy release to the presence of the Lord lay in prospect for them.

The greatest efforts were made to extract from the prisoners, such information as would lead to the arrest of others. In great bodily pain, this was sometimes obtained, but most very nobly maintained silence on the point. Great courage and patience were shewn by very many, which must have spoken loudly to hard and stony hearts; and they sought not to avenge themselves, but � "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord."

Chapter 6.

Maria De Bohorques Martyred at Seville.

Maria De Bohorques was a Spanish maiden, only one year younger than the mother of whom a former chapter tells. This young lady lived some hundreds of years later than the noble Vivia Perpetua. Both, however, were alike in the fact, that their earthly position was good, and also that they preferred death rather than to deny their Lord. The home of each was in the sunny south, but the blue waters of the Mediterranean rolled between. The lady Vivia Perpetua lived and suffered in Carthage, while Seville was the scene of the martyrdom of Maria de Bohorques.

All that wealth and rank could procure lay before this Spanish daughter, for her youth was passed with every luxury surrounding her. None of these things held her heart, however, for she possessed a better and more enduring treasure, which far outweighed them all. Maria de Bohorques knew Jesus as her Saviour, and was happy in the sense of His everlasting love. In the sixteenth century in which she lived, there was more gospel light in that priest-ridden country than at the present time. There were many homes in Spain where the word of God was read, believed, and valued in those days.

The gentleman who acted as tutor to the young Maria, was one of the most learned men of that day. His name was Dr. Gil. He was a Christian, and the Bible was to him no sealed book. His youthful pupil had with him the great advantage of studying the scriptures in the original language. God gave His own blessing in the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ the Lord. He, and He only, can bring home with power to the heart, the written and the living Word.

Like many more, this young lady learned alone with God that His salvation is full and free, and that it is to "whosoever will," that the water of life is freely offered. You, my reader, do not live in those trying days when it was considered a crime to be seen reading the Bible. Yet, it may be, that you know not Christ, and are as dark in mind as any popish child. Oh, it will indeed be a solemn thing for you, if you "neglect so great salvation" � you who have the Bible in your native tongue, and whose privilege it is to hear the joyful sound of God's glad tidings. Come, oh come, "while it is called to-day," and trust the loving Saviour in glory, who once died for sin, but is now alive for evermore.

In the days when Maria de Bohorques was drawn to Jesus, every Christian was closely watched. As soon as they were known to be such, many eyes were upon them; yes, and many a heart thirsted for their blood. Spies were never lacking to make known the victim, and the awful horrors of the Inquisition speedily became a reality to the persons arrested. The Inquisitors of Seville were not less severe in their dealings than those of other Spanish towns, and the mode of suddenly claiming a victim was as Satanic as elsewhere.

The dear, gentle Maria knew the outside of the gloomy prison, and had heard not a little, doubtless, of the proceedings of that well-known Court. And full well she knew the possibility of her feet having to pass within those gates, to suffer for Christ when her faith should become known. Therefore, alone on her knees, she ofttimes cried to God for strength to meet the arrival of that dread hour. When the moment did come, her prayer was answered, and meekly she met the prospect before her. Suddenly, the high-born maiden was snatched from the comforts of her luxurious home, and led within those dismal Inquisition walls. There she was taken to a secret room, to be questioned as to faith in Christ or allegiance to Rome.

Human friend or helper she had none, when, in the defencelessness of her youth and sex, Maria de Bohorques stood before those heartless judges. The room was quite in keeping with the dark deeds enacted there, for all was shade and gloom. Enveloped in shadow, and scarcely recognisable, sat those men who professed to try the suspected one. But it was a poor trial where justice was unknown, for the sentence was sure and certain, whatever the accused might say. Like cruel hawks, those keen-sighted men were only eager and ready to pounce upon their prey. All kinds of inducements were held out, to make a timid one deny the faith, but promises made with this object were usually broken, and death was certain to be the result.

At first, persuasion was tried in Maria's case, and smooth words were spoken. The judges declared that their desire was to restore her soul, which, they said, had wandered from God and the church. These statements did not succeed however in entrapping the courageous girl, but only drew from her lips an open confession of her faith. Her would-be judges then became very angry, and threatened to make her yield. But neither had this method any effect, for the cry of her heart was going up to God, and He strengthened her to be faithful. The instruments of torture were shewn, and Maria was made to understand that her body should soon feel their power. Yet even the sight of those awful horrors failed to make her courage give way. She refused to call herself a papist, or acknowledge, in any way, the Church of Rome.

The next step was an effort to get Maria to mention any others who were of the same faith. To this they at first received no reply, for their victim would not give the slightest information. But, alas, for human nature! the reply was at last obtained. When put upon the rack she owned, in her agony, that her sister had conversed with her about her faith. This was told in a moment of bodily weakness, and most bitterly repented of, for it brought to torture and to death her own beloved sister, and this was no small grief. Yet who could wonder at the dear suffering girl if, to stop her agony, her firmness gave way for a moment, and the fatal intelligence was given?

The joints were starting from their sockets, and her body felt as if being torn limb from limb. And men, inhuman, hard-hearted men � whose bodies could feel like her own � turned the awful instrument, and gloated over her sufferings like wild beasts! How comforting to know, that that once suffering child of God is now for ever with the Lord, having entered into rest! The body waits the resurrection-morn, and the spirit has returned to God who gave it. Departing to be with Christ, which is far better than earth's brightest scenes, the noble, true-hearted Maria de Bohorques left behind for ever the sorrows of the way.

Maria was taken from the rack to a cold damp cell, where, at least, rest and quiet were to be had. Even the discomforts of that dreary place were welcome, after the horrors of the rack, and the ceaseless voices of her tormentors. There in calmness she awaited the expected end, while she encouraged herself in the Lord her God.

Once more an empty form of trial was gone through, and then sentence was passed upon the already crippled victim. Maria de Bohorques was condemned to be burnt at the stake, with other believers who, like herself, preferred to die rather than deny the Lord. One would have thought that the helpless condition of the dear young sufferer would have drawn pity from the hearts of the men who judged her. Alas, they were too hardened by such sights, and too greedy of their prey, to be melted by any such feeling. Unable to walk, from the effects of the rack, Maria had the additional pain of being borne by those who only hated her and sought her destruction. No love was there to brighten her earthly path as it neared the end, yet the love of God shone in her heart, and gave her a joy beyond that of earth.

The quiet of the cell into which she was carried was soon broken in upon by visits from various priests. Her rank and position made them eager to win her back to the Romish Church, if at all possible. Every plan they could think of was tried, to persuade the courageous girl to recant, but all were alike useless. She must have been wearied with their foolish arguments, yet patience was given her to endure. Wisdom, too, was not wanting to return the fitted answers, while a firmness, which God alone could have given, kept Maria de Bohorques stedfast and true.

Gentle firmness marked the ways and words of that Spanish lady, and true nobility of character shone out in those closing days of her youthful life. But God was the Giver of all, for the natural heart could never have produced such gentleness, wisdom, or patience. The same beautiful spirit towards all, was shewn to the end of that brief life. The Great Square of Seville was chosen as the public place whence this young believer was to depart to be with Christ. Even her last evening on earth was disturbed by the crafty priests again visiting her in her place of imprisonment, hoping to see her yield at the last through fear of death. But death had no sting for that courageous heart. The popish hopes of restoring to the Church of Rome that gifted daughter of a noble Spanish family, were therefore dashed to the ground. And well that it was so since life could only be obtained by denying Him who had shed His blood for her.

Once again that youthful witness was carried from her miserable cell, but now borne forth to die for the Lord she loved. She was not only peaceful, but a surprising cheerfulness was distinctly manifest. Being happy herself, that dear one was free in heart to encourage and cheer her fellow-sufferers. Other women were amongst the number, and she spent life's last moments seeking to strengthen their faith in God. Maria shewed neither fear nor timidity, but a holy boldness marked her rejoicing end.

When bound to the stake, she asked her fellow-martyrs to join her in singing a psalm. That was more than her wicked enemies would allow. It made the dying ones too much like victors (as they truly were), when they could praise God in face of death. So they gagged the mouth of Maria de Bohorques, that she might cease to lead others to praise the living God. That was an indignity not usually put upon women, so Maria was distinguished by this additional suffering for the name of the Lord.

Before the pile of wood was lighted, the gag was removed, the sentence again read, and a last appeal made for the martyrs to abjure their faith. The same calmness continued unbroken as Maria distinctly uttered the words, "I neither can nor will recant." At a later moment, with the lighted torch before her eyes, she was again entreated to own the Church of Rome. She replied with a repetition of her faith, and continued speaking till the moment when, in their wrath, they strangled her, and thus added to their own guilt and condemnation. On the 24th of September, 1559, Maria de Bohorques was "absent from the body, present with the Lord," and the lighted fagots soon consumed her body to dust which now awaits the resurrection-morn.

Chapter 7.

John Rogers � A Husband and Father Burnt at Smithfield.

In these days of liberty in our cherished England, it is difficult to realise the bondage of the past. That there was a time when it was considered a crime to read the word of God, seems hard for us to understand. A great deal depends upon the sovereign, and we owe much, under God, to the peaceful reign of our honoured Queen. There have been monarchs on the throne of England who would neither read the Bible themselves nor allow their subjects to do so. In their self-will and ignorance, they quite overlooked the fact, that a man's conscience is not a thing which a sovereign can order, as he would a servant. He may command his subjects outwardly to accept the religion preferred by royalty; but a man can never be made to believe that which he doubts, even at the command of a monarch.

Such a vain attempt did Mary, Queen of England, make, in seeking to compel her people to follow popery. For there beat honest hearts on English soil, who would not forswear their conscience to suit a monarch's folly. Consequently such faithful ones were made to suffer, and many to die, to please the blood-thirsty queen. Her reign was so full of bloodshed that her name is handed down in history with that word which ever reminds us of her ungodly deeds.

The young King Edward VI., who preceded her, had honoured the Bible and given perfect liberty in his kingdom regarding the sacred book. Nay more, he encouraged the study of it, by having a large copy placed where any one might read. This plan for bringing the scriptures within reach of the people had been adopted by his father, Henry VIII., sixteen years before, though not from any personal love for the word, as was the case with the young king. It was usual to fasten it by a chain, to a stand or desk in the churches.

It was only within the means of a few to possess Bibles in those days. One copy cost many pounds, and was too large and bulky to be carried about like the present pocket Bibles. In addition to these difficulties, there were few who could read, so that not many could directly profit. It was therefore no uncommon sight to see a number of people around one person, a little more learned than themselves, who read to them the words of life. It must have been a very interesting scene when the eye lighted upon such an earnest group. I am sure my young reader would have been delighted to look upon those earnest faces, and to listen to a style of reading which would be difficult for us to understand now. Jeremiah the prophet could say to God, "Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart," and so doubtless could many a soul say in the days of King Edward VI.

That brief reign of six years and a half brought these happy peaceful days to an end. For the accession of Mary after his death brought a bigoted Roman Catholic to the English throne, and liberty for the conscience was unknown in England while she lived. The result was that able, learned, and God-fearing men, in common with all, were expected to bow to her wishes in religious matters, whether it suited them or not. That the queen should be obeyed was right and lawful, they very well knew, but that she should rule their consciences was a thing to which they could not agree. The reason was simple � the word of God and the queen's wishes were not alike, and consequently obedience to the monarch meant disobedience to God. Therefore sorrow and trouble became their earthly lot, yet withal, many grew brighter in soul as the days of persecution increased in fury.

When command and threat alike had failed to cause a faithful man to deny the truth of God, nothing but death remained for him. Consequently, many a noble-hearted believer in Jesus was speedily sent from earth to heaven by the fires which popery kindled in the reign of Queen Mary. A brief examination settled the point of guilt. The suspected person was brought before his judges to answer them on one particular point. A word was sufficient, and on it, hung the doom of the person suspected. The whole thing hinged on whether one error of Rome was believed or denied. That was the false and foolish Romish doctrine, that the bread, used to remind us of the body of Christ, actually became His body of flesh after being blessed by the priest. When these faithful ones denied that error, only the stake and the fire remained for them on earth.

The first to suffer was John Rogers, a faithful and much-loved preacher of the gospel. During a residence on the Continent, he had met with such pious and learned men as William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale. These, and other Englishmen, were exiles from their country because of their faithfulness, and were occupied in the translation of the scriptures.

The society of such Bible-loving men was good for John Rogers, and he too gained an intimate knowledge of the word of God. During Edward's reign, Rogers returned to this country to preach the gospel. He continued to do so after Mary had ascended the throne of England, but it was only for a brief space. A notable sermon which he preached at St. Paul's Cross in London, brought upon him the displeasure of the queen. He had openly warned the people against the popish errors so soon, alas! to be forced on them, and bade them stand true to sacred writ. When put upon trial and ordered to make his defence, he did it so ably, and with such power, that he was allowed to go free. Regardless, however, of punishment or danger, he continued to preach the truth of God.

Once again the brave John Rogers was called before a council of bishops, because he would not give up Christ for popery. The queen had commanded that nothing but her corrupt religion should have any liberty in her realms. It was disobedience to this unrighteous law, that brought that persevering servant of God again into notice. He was ordered to be kept shut up in his own house, as within the walls of a prison. But that kind of imprisonment, trying as it was to him, was not severe enough to please his enemies. Bonner, bishop of London, a man notable for his cruelty and wicked zeal, arranged to have John Rogers taken from his home to a common prison. Within the walls of Newgate therefore, that christian man was forced to pass his days among the worst criminals of the land.

Still, all that indignity and shame were only leading on to more and more. A day arrived when he was awakened from sleep with the startling news that he was to be committed to the flames. Only one request he had to make, and that was harshly denied. It was, that he might see his beloved wife before being taken to the stake, but even the melancholy satisfaction of a sad farewell to those he loved, was too much for his cruel persecutors to grant.

Before leaving the jail, the sheriff, as the representative of the law, called to ask Rogers to recant. The answer of the latter was clear and decided: "That which I have preached, I will seal with my blood."

"Thou art a heretic," the sheriff said.

"That shall be known at the day of judgment," answered Rogers.

"Well, I will never pray for thee," said the sheriff.

"But I will pray for you," was the Christ-like reply, called forth from lips so soon to be silent in death.

The victim was led to Smithfield with a heart so sustained by God, that he comforted himself by repeating a psalm as he passed along. Many who looked on praised God for the grace given to that beloved man, so cheerfully going to death. His wife, carrying her babe, and accompanied by their ten children, met him as he went onwards. Oh, how she and they must have longed for a parting word! But, alas, it only the further pleased the persecutors, thus to tear a good man from his wife, his family, and every earthly tie. Whatever he felt, he looked perfectly calm, and did not allow natural affection to hinder his dying testimony.

"The fires of Smithfield" bear to us even now an awful meaning, for we know that many a precious one was there committed to their mercy. But oh, to those who lived in those days, what a scene of dread and suffering would the very words present! Those who were faithful to God and His word, must often have trembled when the possibility of such a death came before their minds. Yet, when the moment arrived, the weakest believer found that an unchanging God was on his side. The calm peace, and even cheerfulness and joy, manifest in such circumstances, shewed that the source of all was not of earth. The apostle Paul wrote, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" and, quoting David's words, he adds, "For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter." Those early martyrs knew something of that condition, and yet they could have said with Paul, "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us."

Let us look for a little at the scene around John Rogers at the stake in Smithfield. Mary, the Queen of England, was about to send him from her presence, but God was going to receive his soul on high. That was a place of which she knew nothing. Noblemen, officials in authority, private persons who were rigid Romanists, besides men who loved the man about to die, were assembled to see the end. As usual, an endeavour was made to make him deny his faith in Christ, and own the Romish Church. A pardon was brought and offered, if he would only recant. But no, not even a pardon tempted him; he desired only to be kept faithful. The patience manifested by this worthy man was most remarkable, and his stedfast spirit was upheld to the end.

When the fire had been lighted, and even had begun to do its work, the flames seemed to possess no terror for him. He was seen to put his hands amid the flames, as if washing them in the coldest water. Then, lifting them towards heaven, he remained in that position, till they were burnt in the fire as it rose. Speedily that fire at Smithfield did its work, and nought remained but smouldering ashes. The body of John Rogers, the faithful servant of God and preacher of the gospel, was reduced to dust, and his enemies were satisfied. But every atom in these ashes is precious in God's sight, as part of a body purchased by the blood of Christ.

And thus was a happy believer set free from the pain and sorrows of earth, to pass into the paradise of God. Fire was but the gate of entrance � the flame only snapped asunder the last link with earth. Our hearts go back with pity when we think of what those martyrs endured, yet let it also be with hearty thanks-giving. For, surely, we may truly thank God that He kept them "stedfast, unmoveable," as only divine power could. It is easy for us to say it now, but may we not also thank the Lord that men have been honoured to die for Him? Even face to face with death, many a martyr felt it a holy, happy privilege thus to shew to the world that Christ was dearer than life.

Chapter 8.

William Hunter � A Young Man Led to the Stake at Brentwood.

William Hunter was a young man whose home was at Brentwood, Essex. He was employed in London as a weaver, but while his daily life was passed in the busy city, his father's house in the country was dear to him, and there he spent many a quiet time. William loved and could read the Bible, though he did not possess a copy. He was therefore in the habit of repairing to the chained treasure within those well-known walls in his native village. There, in the quiet stillness of the place, he delighted to read and study the precious book. God had given to this young man a desire for the "sincere milk of the word," and truly he grew thereby in the divine life.

One day, William was observed by a papist to be thus engaged, and taunted with attempting to explain the sacred volume. The boy answered gently and respectfully, that he did not do so but, he said, "I read it for my comfort." A conversation followed, in which William spoke modestly of his belief in the scriptures, but the papist spy only answered with hate and scorn. The latter then left the building, that he might bring a priest to see this "heretic." That official spoke in the same threatening strain, and plainly shewed that fatal results would follow.

The young man immediately returned to say good-bye to his parents, and left for London without delay. William considered that the only hope of safety lay in flight, for the attitude of those two enemies had been too plain to be mistaken. To leave his parental home and become a fugitive for the truth's sake seemed the only course open to him.

Popery was too thirsty for the blood of the saints to be thus baffled. The father was sent for, and demanded to give up his son. "What, sir," he asked the priest, "would you have me seek my son that he may be burned?" Yet with these words of parental affection on his lips, the old man was forced to set out at once in search of his son. He hoped that he might not find him, but suddenly and unexpectedly he found himself face to face with his beloved boy. William had seen his father in the distance, and made haste to meet him. When he heard on what errand his parent had been sent, he immediately desired to return, that he might save him any further trouble. It was a difficult position for the father, but he gave in to the wishes of his son, and the two returned to Brentwood the same evening.

During the darkness of that night, the papist messengers came for their victim. In their cruel hands, there remained little else but suffering for William Hunter. He was, however, kept cheerful in his spirit, and thus the name of the Lord was honoured. He passed twenty-four hours in the stocks, and then with day-dawn, his persecutors began their efforts to make him recant. By the grace of God given in that hour of need, every effort was unavailing. The next step was to send William at once to the Bishop of London. The latter, in his turn, tried every possible way of making the young believer deny the truth, but equally without success.

The bishop's mode of seeking to overcome the youth was very cunning, and had William not had divine wisdom given to him, he would have yielded. That unprincipled man endeavoured to get his captive to believe that anything which he might say would be in confidence. But that young witness was not to be beguiled into saying aught to such a man, other than a repetition of his faith in Christ, and in the teaching of the word of God. Therefore, by all his wiles and worldly inducements, Bishop Bonner failed to make William Hunter recant. This being the case, poor William was again sent to the stocks, there to remain for forty-eight hours. A crust of bread and a cup of water were put by his side, but were left untouched at the end of that time.

When the bishop came to see this young victim in the stocks, and saw that he had eaten nothing, he ordered him to be taken out and breakfast given to him. After the meal, the crafty Bonner once more summoned William before him. Again he demanded whether he would recant, and again he met with a firm refusal. Bonner then taunted him with denying the faith in which he was baptised. "I was baptised in the faith of the Holy Trinity," said William, "which I will not go from, God assisting me by His grace."

The bishop further asked how old he was. On making the reply that he was nineteen years of age, he said, "Well, you will be burned ere you be twenty years old, if you will not yield yourself better than you have done yet."

"God strengthen me in this trouble!" was the brief but earnest reply of William Hunter, and thus closed his interview with the Bishop of London.

That wicked, cruel man had not done, however, with his young prisoner. He kept him in captivity for nine months, and during that period, he called him five times before him. The money spent daily on William's food at that time, was the small coin of one halfpenny. So, while the bishop was living in comfort and luxury, he was keeping a young man, in the bloom of youth, starving and suffering within those prison doors. The instructions given by the bishop when the imprisonment began were, that the jailer should "put as many irons upon him as he could possibly bear." There, within those gloomy prison walls, that bright young spirit was kept till the final sentence was given. Still, however, William Hunter clung to the word, and trusted God through Christ.

Once when the bishop sent for the young man, in the hope that prison life had made him willing to yield, he offered what was a considerable sum in those days, if he would only abjure his faith. Then he proposed to make him steward of his own house, but neither temptation could move the stedfast youth. "My lord," he answered, "if you cannot persuade my conscience by scripture, I cannot find it in my heart to turn from God for the love of the world; for I count all worldly things but loss, in comparison with the love of Christ."

Seeing that nothing succeeded, the angry bishop then gave orders that the courageous witness should be burnt at the stake.

A month afterwards William Hunter went again to his beloved Brentwood, knowing full well that he entered the little town only to die. As the place was too small to possess a prison, he was taken to an inn, and a guard set to watch him. There he was visited by his broken-hearted mother, for the constables had been unable to resist the sight of her grief and affection. It was a very great comfort to that sorrowing mother to witness the calm firmness and courage of her imprisoned boy. Her heart and thoughts were turned to God, and found relief in praising Him for the faith given to her son.

William comforted his mother with these touching words: "For the little pain which I shall suffer, Christ has procured for me a crown of joy; are you not glad of that, mother?" There together, for the last time, they knelt in prayer, when the mother commended her son to God, and asked for needed grace in the dying hour.

When the day dawned on which William was to die, he was led forth with a poor empty show of law. Needless, indeed, it was to guard him by constables, for he was submissive enough, and turned not from the death appointed. A sheriff, and the men calling themselves justices, had little need of expending their energies on that happy, radiant martyr, yet they formed part of the procession to the stake. Priests, too, were there, in their endeavours to carry out an ignorant zeal, but better had it been for them to have been less active. To add to the number of that imposing company leading a young man to death, were those miserable men who were to carry out the final sentence. What a mockery! what infatuated zeal was this in the garb of religion! Ah! for every deed of darkness God has yet to reckon with them, unless any afterwards turned to the blood that "cleanseth from all sin."

On the way from the prison to the stake his father met the procession, and in bitterness of soul poured forth his heart's deep affection. But while his tears fell fast, his farewell words were full of hope as his wife's had been. "God be with thee, son William!" The quiet and loving response was, "God be with you, father! be of good cheer; I trust we shall meet again, where we shall rejoice together."

As he passed that which had been his home, he could only give a passing glance of love on his weeping sisters. To the companions of his youth and childhood he expressed an affectionate farewell, and indeed, to all whom he knew there. Many a tear of sympathy flowed for William Hunter, that day, from eyes that were not wont to weep. When the place of death was reached, he was bound to the stake by a chain, and fagots of wood were heaped around, for all had been carefully prepared. Then the victim having been secured, the fire was speedily applied to complete the Satanic work.

Once more William was asked to deny his faith, and pardon was promised if he would. "No," he answered firmly, "I will not recant, God willing." He then turned to the people, and asked prayer for him in the moment of need. One cruel, blasphemous man, whose position was nominally that of a justice, scornfully replied, "I will no more pray for thee than I would for a dog." With touching meekness, the young believer gave the gentle answer, "I pray God this may not be laid to your charge at the last day."

Expressions of sympathy broke forth from some of the bystanders, when the final scene began. The lighted fagots burned readily, for a malicious care had been taken that they should be dry for the occasion. William held in his hand a copy of the Psalms, which he was able to throw to his brother who stood near. The latter on receiving that dying gift, cried, "William, think of the sufferings of Christ, and be not afraid!"

"I am not afraid," was the prompt reply, and then the inspired prayer broke from his dying lips, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!"

Soon the crackling flames rose high, and consumed that body which was so precious in the sight of God. And thus died William Hunter, in the middle of the sixteenth century, in our own beloved England. In the morning of his days he trusted in Jesus, and he early entered into rest. An old elm-tree near the spot, serves to shew the place where his spirit passed from earth to heaven. The happy confidence in God which marked his brief course and early end, may teach both old and young; and "faithful unto death," might indeed be written over the spot where he now rests.

Persecution is not confined to time or place, and history records its dire deeds again and again. These few chapters travel far and wide, both as to locality and date � from the glowing East, to our grey cold Isles in the West, and down the long vista of sixteen hundred years of time.

We have noticed the martyrdom of Stephen as given in holy writ, in the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. The place was outside the city of Jerusalem, and the time shortly after the beginning of the christian era. Next we followed the Lady Vivia Perpetua, from the home of her married life in Africa, to prison and to death with four christian companions. It was heathen hate which took their lives, early in the third century, on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Cyril, the child who suffered in the province of Cappadocia; Denisa, the girl martyred at the age of sixteen; Marcus and Marcellanius, the twin brothers, were each and all examples of very young Christians in the early centuries of the church's history.

Those followers of Christ were hated and despised because they refused to worship idols, and found their delight in the true God; therefore the rage of the heathen vented itself on them, and pagan rulers sent the Christians from the earth as often as they could. But the days changed when persecution came, not so much from the Jew, nor yet from the Gentile, but from that which was called the church of God.

The corruption of that which was so fair and beautiful in its beginning, led on to many wicked methods of obtaining submission to the Church of Rome.

Maria de Bohorques was a victim to the latter, and the spot whence she passed from earth was the Great Square of Seville. Over fifteen hundred and fifty years had run their course from the church's beginning till then.

Following the flow of time, popery in England came before us, the fires of Smithfield were lighted, and persecution raged fierce and keen. The good and brave John Rogers headed a long list of suffering witnesses, following each other in rapid succession. His death, and that of the youthful William Hunter, took place on English soil, in the middle of the sixteenth century.

We thus see the grace of God shining out in every relationship of life, in various paths on earth; the wife and mother, the husband and father, the young man and maiden, even to the little child, proving the reality of those divine words, "As thy days, thy strength." The unchanging God who stood by them to strengthen in their hour of need, will never, no never, forsake His own beloved people, thus divinely taught to trust in Him.

We may not be called upon to die for Christ, but let us be able to say from the heart, like Paul, "For me to live, Christ, and to die, gain!"

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Mayken Karlzon's Diary

Mayken Karlzon's Diary.

A Story of the Inquisition in Spain and Holland.

By C.J.L.

London: Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C., 1921.

Contents

Chapter 1. Stories of Sunny Spain

Chapter 2. The Gathering of the Storm

Chapter 3. The Field-Preaching

Chapter 4. Julianillo Heramdez, Muleteer and Martyr

Chapter 5. Images and Image-Makers

Chapter 6. One Stormy Night

Chapter 7. How They Kept the Faith in Holland

Chapter 8. "William the Silent"

Chapter 9. Dark Clouds with Silver Linings

Chapter 10. Faithful Witnesses

Chapter 11. A Strange Story

Chapter 12. Birds of Passage

Chapter 13. "The Noble Army of Martyrs"

Chapter 14. "Stormy Wind Fulfilling His Word"

Chapter 15. The Siege of Leyden

Chapter 16. The Defence of Leyden

Chapter 17. The Relief of Leyden

Chapter 18. "Joy-Bells Ringing"

Chapter 19. Henry of Navarre

Chapter 20. The Nun of Jourre

Chapter 21. Among the Heather

Chapter 22. More About the Huguenots

Chapter 23. The Edict of Nantes

Chapter 24. A Great Sorrow

Preface.

The days which are portrayed in the following pages were stirring and eventful ones. Though Germany was, as we know, the birthplace and early home of the Reformation, gleams of gospel light were seen here and there amid the darkness that had for hundreds of years hung over nearly the whole of Europe; and in Spain, some whose hearts had been prepared to receive the Glad Tidings came boldly out as witnesses for their Lord. San Roman was the first, though far from being the last, of the "noble army" of Spanish martyrs.

The Siege of Leyden is far more than an interesting page of history. It is a record of the goodness and faithfulness of God.

The days in which you and I, dear young friends, are living are not less solemn and eventful. The effort of the enemy on every hand is to take away our Bibles, not by threats of imprisonment, or death, but by trying to shake our faith in the Bible as The Word of God.

May the simple record of what has been suffered for the truth's sake in Spain and Holland be an encouragement to us all to prize our Bibles more than we have ever done, knowing that "ALL Scripture is Given by Inspiration of God."

C. J. L.

Chapter 1.

Stories of Sunny Spain.

May 1st, 1565. This is my birthday, and I am twelve years old today. I think it is very pleasant to have a birthday. I am quite rich in presents. Darling mother has given me a beautiful new hood and a hymn-book, and Truyken, the faithful old housekeeper, who has lived so many years in our family that she was my father's nurse when he was only two years old, bought me a work-bag with my name, Mayken Karlzon, embroidered upon it in crimson wool, a most useful present; for, as she says, I am getting too old to care for toys, and it was very kind of her to take so much trouble to give me pleasure. But I think the present I like the very best of all is the one I received from my dear father. It is a large, thick volume, bound in brown leather, and in gilt letters on its cover are the words, "Manuscript Book." It is not like any book I have ever seen before, for it must be written before it can be read, though I suppose this is true of all books; but the strange thing that makes it seem so different from other books is, that I am to write it; father says so, and as I always try to do as he wishes me, of course I shall try.

When I asked father, "What shall I write?" he answered, "True stories, Mayken; but they must be ALL-TRUE. Let every one be a page of history. Some will belong to the past, some to the present, for Holland may yet count her martyrs by scores, perhaps by hundreds, for King Philip of Spain cares little that his subjects in the Netherlands are loyal, peace-loving and industrious, as long as they refuse the authority of the Pope and desire liberty to read the word of God for themselves."

So I must begin at once. I think that next to the Bible stories, which I never tire of listening to, the stories that interest me most are those mother tells me in the quiet hour on Sunday evenings before the lamps are lighted. Some of these stories are sad ones, for when she tells me about the Spanish martyrs, who laid down their lives rather than deny their Lord, her voice is very low and sad, and more than once I have seen by the firelight that tears were in her eyes; I felt ready to cry too, but she kissed away a tear that was just ready to fall, and said, "Do not weep, Mayken, but rather rejoice, as they rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for the Lord they loved; their sufferings were quickly over, but their reward is eternal." "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more . . . for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." (Rev. 7: 16, 17.)

All mother's stories are so interesting that I hardly know which to choose, but perhaps her own account of something that happened when she was a very little girl ought to come first.

I think her home must have been a very happy one; she was not, like myself, an only child, but had brothers and sisters, who loved her and used to play with her. Her father, who would have been my grand-papa, died when she was too young to remember much about him, and after his death her mother took her children to live in the house of her mother, who was, like herself, a widow. Their home was in Valladolid, a beautiful Spanish town. But dearly as she loved her mother and her home, some very happy weeks were spent every year in the cottage of her old nurse, Annetta, who had married a vine-dresser named Ambrose, and lived a little way in the country. When there, she was allowed to run about the garden, feed the chickens, help or hinder Ambrose as he trimmed his vines, and do many other things that were a never-failing delight to the town-bred child.

One morning, soon after sunrise, she was roused from sleep by Annetta's voice saying, "Awake, little lady, it is the 'fete,' and my darling will see wonderful sights to-day. She shall have her best dress on, for the princes and nobles will be there, and bishops, and priests, and grand ladies with their court dresses all ablaze with jewels, and there will be music, and the choir boys in their white robes will sing. Ah, it will be a beautiful show."

Every one in the little household was soon ready, and my mother, after being dressed by Annetta with more than usual care, garlanded with white roses, and adorned with some golden ornaments that had belonged to Annetta's great-grandmother, was seated upon a donkey, which was carefully led by Ambrose.

The Grand Square was crowded with people, all dressed in holiday attire; but getting out of the throng as quickly as possible, they went to the house of Annetta's sister, whose windows looked out upon the square.

No market of fruit and vegetables was held in the square that day. In the centre a platform had been raised, on which stood a tall, green cross; twelve large wax tapers were burning round it, though their light looked pale and dim in the glory of the sunshine that flooded the whole scene. The cross was guarded by monks, who wore long, black robes, while a guard of soldiers stood around.

After they had waited a little time, the procession came in sight. First walked the choir boys, then a large silver cross was carried, followed by a great number of monks and priests; then came the mayor and great men of the city, followed by the nobles on their beautiful horses. But just behind the cross walked several men wearing such strange dresses that at first my mother thought it was to amuse the people they formed part of the show. But they looked grave, and it was easy to see that they did not enjoy it, for almost every one pointed at them, and so she began to wonder what it all could mean. Some carried crosses and were dressed in black; but others wore long, loose coats painted all over with red tongues of flame, the points turning downward. But she soon forgot to look at the gay ladies, or the fine horses of the nobles, one man had so fixed her attention, and indeed every one seemed to be looking at him, and all around her she heard whispers, such as, "Look at him, he is still obstinate. He will not confess to a priest, or even kiss the holy relics. He must truly be a wicked man. The priest says it is sin even to pray for him."

But my mother thought he did not look like a wicked man. He wore the same ugly dress as the others, with this difference, that on his yellow robe the flames pointed upward, as real flames always do. His head was covered by a high pasteboard cap written all over with black letters. He was not an old man, she felt sure of that, and yet he walked with a slow and tottering step. A number of monks, called "Black Friars," kept talking to him in loud, angry voices, as if they wished to force him to do or say something. At first he tried to answer them, but they would not listen to what he said, so he was silent, but every now and then he looked upward with such a peaceful, happy look, and his lips moved as if in prayer.

After a little while San Roman, for that was his name, was placed upon a platform, just opposite to the cross, and one of the friars went into a wooden pulpit, covered with crimson cloth, and it sounded just as if he were scolding San Roman. When that was over, the whole company knelt down and repeated in Latin the Roman creed. I said the whole company, but there was one man who remained standing, and that was San Roman. This seemed to make the monks more angry than before. Two went up to him and, taking hold of him quite roughly, tried to make him kneel down, while a third held a crucifix close to his face which he wanted him to kiss. But though San Roman looked ill and was very pale, he would not kneel or kiss the crucifix. Then an angry murmur rose from the crowd, and she heard some one say, "He must have an evil spirit since even the rack failed to bring him to his senses." What could it all mean? If San Roman had been a very bad man would his face have been so full of peace and even joy? There was beautiful music, but she did not listen to it, for her eyes and her thoughts were fixed upon San Roman. What would happen to him? The soldiers made a passage through the crowd, and after all the men who were so strangely dressed had knelt at the feet of a tall, dark man, who they told her was the General of the Inquisition, San Roman stood alone.

Then the friars tried again to make him do as they wished, but he still refused so they led him down the steps and placed him upon an ass, for he was too weak to walk, and the people cried, "Away with him, he is not fit to live." Two friars led the ass away and the people saw it and its rider no more, but the look of peace was still upon his pale face.

But mother is calling "Mayken, little daughter, where are you?" so my story must for to-day be an unfinished one.

Chapter 2.

The Gathering of the Storm.

May 15th, 1565. Can it be only a fortnight since I wrote even a page of my MS. book? Only a fortnight, it seems longer; perhaps because so much has happened; we are living in such strange times, when so much, not only of the history of our own Holland, but of the progress of the reformed faith in France, Germany and England is being written, that I feel sometimes as if I never could be a happy, thoughtless child again.

I left the story of San Roman unfinished, for mother was calling me, and I entered our family sitting-room, which I always think a very pleasant place, with its high-backed chairs covered with crimson damask, and the large, open fire-place, from which, when I was a tiny child, mother gave me such sweet, simple Bible lessons � for the pictures are nearly all of scripture scenes � that I seemed to know David slaying the lion and the bear, or Ruth gleaning in the fields of Boaz, almost as well as I know Paul Brock, the cripple son of Hans Brock, the weaver, who was my earliest, and I was going to write, my dearest playmate; but then as I never had any other I can hardly tell.

Father, mother and my aunt Ursel were all seated round the wood fire, for though the day was fine, the air was chilly, and as my mother, who is far from being strong, seems to miss the bright skies and glorious sunshine of her early home among the vineyards and orange groves of Spain, we have fires in the sitting-room, I think, longer than most of our neighbours.

Aunt Ursel and I are great friends; she is always very kind to her little niece. Her presents were a large pot of choice tulips, just unfolding their bright red and yellow blossoms, and a large cream cheese of her own making, as her contribution to the birthday feast. When I had kissed and thanked her, she said, "I have brought news to-day, Mayken; there is to be a field-preaching to-morrow, and it is decided that you shall accompany us, as we think that you are old enough now to share our privileges, even if you share our dangers."

I did not understand what danger there could be in going anywhere when my father, Herr Mark Karlzon, who is just as brave as he is kind, was to be of the party.

When I was not more than five or six years old, Truyken taught me to knit, and I often wonder now at the patience with which she used to pick up my dropped stitches; but as, with all her kindness, she was very firm and would never allow me to begin a fresh piece of work till the one already in hand was completed, I had better finish the story of San Roman, who was, mother says, the first martyr of the Reformation in Spain, before I write about the field-preaching.

When I asked mother where they took him, and if she ever saw him again, she said there was not much more to tell. Placed upon an ass, because the tortures he had suffered during his imprisonment had rendered him unable to walk, surrounded by the Black Friars, and closely followed by a guard of the Pope's soldiers, he was taken to the place of burning. All this she was afterwards told by Annetta; the friars with their hard faces and ugly black cowls kept pressing him to recant, and promising that his life should be spared if he would only say he believed that by saying five Latin words over a piece of bread, a priest could change it into the real body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, who, the Bible says, "is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God." (1 Peter 3: 22.) But he stood firm, and again refused to kiss a crucifix, which is an image of Christ on the cross, and he would not confess to a priest. As the crowd made way for him to pass many mocked at the yellow robe he wore, and called him hard, bitter names, but he did not seem to hear them; some who were near enough to see his face said that it was full of peace, and even joy, a smile played round his lips, and his eyes had a far-away look in them, as if he saw the light of the home he was so soon to enter. Indeed, some one told Annetta that San Roman looked more like a man going to his bridal than to a martyr's death. And yet the priests had said it was a sin even to pray for him!

They bound him to the stake, but as soon as the faggots were lighted his head sank upon his breast. The monks thought this was a sign that he was penitent and had him drawn out, but with a faint smile he said, "Did you envy me my happiness?" and they thrust him in again. He was not left to suffer long, for almost before the flames reached his body, he was suffocated by the smoke. And so for him there was no longer the mocking crowd, or the damp, dark dungeon.

But I must return to the field-preaching, and as the preaching was to be held in a wood at some distance from the town, we had to start early. Truyken did not at all approve of our going, which she said was like tempting providence by flying in the face of the king; and even if nothing worse came of it, we all should, she knew, catch our deaths of cold through sitting so long on the grass; she even wanted, as a protection from possible danger, to tie round my neck her most precious earthly possession, a relic which she believes to have been the tooth of some saint, enclosed in a small silver case, hardly larger than a sixpence; it had been highly prized by her mother and grandmother, and was looked upon as a kind of charm to keep sickness and trouble of all kinds at a distance; but as her grandmother was drowned, and her mother died of a fever, I cannot see that the relic did much good to any one.

Truyken said, when a slight shower of rain fell the day before that appointed for the preaching, that all through the night the clouds would pour down torrents, and the flooded state of the roads would prevent our reaching the place of meeting. But contrary to her expectations, the morning was fine and almost cloudless, with a light breeze and plenty of bright sunshine. We were ready to start in good time. My pony, Jock, neighed with pleasure as I stroked his mane and fed him with some bread I had saved from my own early breakfast. I rode by father's side; it has been my place ever since I was a child of not more than five years old, when he lifted me on to the back of a white donkey he had bought for me at the cattle fair, and taught me how to hold the reins. Mother and aunt Ursel followed on their mules.

When we were well out of the town I asked father what the danger Truyken had spoken of could possibly be, "for," I added, "she is never so afraid of our taking cold when we go for a pleasure party and lunch in the woods."

He looked grave as he answered: "Faithful old Truyken, though she still counts her beads, and says her prayers in Latin, a language of which she does not understand a single word; she is a good woman, loyal and true to those she serves, and she loves my Mayken almost as if she were her own child. Yes, little daughter, there is danger, and you in some measure by being with us to-day are a sharer in it; it is only fair that you should understand something of the risk to which we are all exposed. Still," he added, and his smile as he spoke, though grave, was very sweet and tender, "nothing can happen to one of the children of God except what He allows who maketh even 'the wrath of man' to praise Him.

"The King of Spain is at present Master of the Netherlands, through his sister, the Duchess Margaret, assisted by Counts Egmont and Horn, and is a stern, unyielding Roman Catholic. His will is that all his subjects should be Roman Catholics too. He has been heard to say that he would rather reign over a desert than over a nation of heretics. When one of his own nobles, who had been condemned to death for no ether crime than that of having a Bible in his house, ventured, on his way to the stake, to appeal to his majesty, the reply was, 'I would carry a faggot to the burning of my own son if he were such a wretch as thou.'

"But King Philip has not been alone in the work of rooting out heresy,' his most zealous and trusted helpers are the officers and soldiers of the Inquisition. Although only established in 1536 by Pope Paul III., acting on the advice of one of his cardinals, who succeeded him as Pope, it has worked with such right goodwill for what it calls the 'stamping out of heresy,' that numbers in every part of the king's dominions have been thrown into prison, or put to death by its orders.

But many, even in our own city of Antwerp, not fearing the wrath of the king, are hungering for the word of God, and though all the king's subjects are commanded to attend mass, there are many who, while they see the storm gathering, will, I believe, have faith and courage to obey God rather than man.

"But we are no longer alone, and it is not safe even to speak of these things in public. If you, my little Mayken, should ever see your father and mother led away to prison, do not attempt to follow us, but trust in God, and return as quickly as possible to Truyken; I know of no one who would risk more to protect my child."

Then father rode on to speak to some of our neighbours, who were, like ourselves, going to the preaching; and I followed him but slowly, for I felt as if a great weight was upon me. Father and mother taken to prison! Oh, it would be dreadful, and not even to be allowed to be with them. Of course, I would obey father, but I shall pray that if it be the will of God I may be spared this sorrow.

Chapter 3.

The Field-Preaching.

May 25th, 1565. The day of the first field-preaching I was allowed to attend is one I am not likely to forget, but perhaps I had better write down a few of the things that impressed me most while they are fresh in my memory.

After father, who was riding a little in advance of our party talking in low, earnest tones to our burgomaster, Von der Werf, who is, like himself, a cloth merchant of Leyden, had told me of King Philip's orders that all his subjects should attend mass, I seemed to understand what the danger Truyken had feared for us was in a way I had not done before. I felt as if I had suddenly come to a place where some great battle was being fought.

It is a real battle, too, between the law of the king and the will of God. I am sure it cannot be right to pray to pictures and images, and I remember now, that although Truyken is allowed to have her own way in most things in our household (more of it, Aunt Christiana says, than is good for her), there was just one thing in which both my parents stood firmly; and much as Truyken wished it, she was not allowed to teach me a single Latin "Paternoster," or "Ave Maria," so the first words of prayer I ever lisped were learnt from the lips of my own dear mother.

God, who is just as great as He is good, will, I feel sure, take care of those who really wish to please and obey Him. But perhaps He will not do it just in the way we should expect, or think best. He did not send His angels to take San Roman out of the hands of those who were leading him to a martyr's death, and yet I know He could have done so if He had pleased. But then, as father said the other day, when he and mother were reading a letter telling them of fresh sufferings inflicted upon their brethren and sisters in the faith in Spain and France, it was because the Lord had far better things in store for them than liberty, or even life upon a sin-stained earth could have been, that they were allowed to suffer and even to die for the Lord they loved. So "I will trust, and not be afraid."

We were quite early at the place where the preaching was to be held, so that I had time to look round before the service began, and I hardly know whether I was most surprised or delighted to see my old friend and playfellow, Paul Brock, lying upon his little bed, which had been carefully lifted into his father's cart; and though the long ride must have made the lame boy very tired, there was a flush of pleasure upon his pale face.

He greeted me warmly, saying, "Oh! Mayken, this is lovely. I was wondering if heaven itself could be much more beautiful. It seems like being in another world, just to hear the wild birds singing, and to see the flowers growing, making the grass look like a beautiful carpet; but the best of all will be that we are to hear in our own tongue the word of God read and explained.

"I begged very hard before father would consent to bring me; he said that as these field-preachings are forbidden by the king, and those who are found attending them run the risk of fines and imprisonment, he did not care to expose his cripple boy to danger. But I pleaded that being a cripple did not shut me out from being one of Christ's soldiers, and all real soldiers expect to go to war; that even if today our company should be routed by the Pope's soldiers, it would only be a common danger, and I should share it with those I loved best on earth."

I hardly knew how to reply to my little friend; but as I saw his eyes rested with a gaze of wistful longing on some large white daisies growing near the hedge, I ran and gathered them for him. Soon after mother called me, and bade me sit beside her, so I did not get another opportunity to speak to Paul that day.

The people now began to arrive in great numbers. Every one looked grave, and took their places in silence, while an outer circle of men, many of whom wore swords, and among whom was my father, burgomaster Herr Von der Werf, and several of our neighbours, seemed to be keeping a kind of guard over the whole party. Armed men stood like sentinels at the end of every woodland path leading to the open space where the company, which now numbered several thousands, had assembled. I noticed, too, that the horses and mules were not turned loose to graze as is usual when we go into the country, but fastened in such a way that at a moment's notice their riders could be in the saddle. The women and children were for safety seated in the middle, near the preacher, the men stood or sat in groups beyond, or took turns in relieving those who formed the outer circle.

Sellers of portions of scripture, hymnbooks, and some Martin Luther's writings translated into Dutch, moved silently about offering their books for sale. They had no need to press for customers, for every one seemed eager to buy, and yet all these books are forbidden by the Pope. To possess even one was in the eyes of the Inquisition a crime worthy of death.

The preachers for the day were Francis Junnis and Peregrune de la Grange. Both belonged to noble French families, and had already suffered much for their attachment to the reformed faith. A great silence fell upon that vast congregation as Pastor Junnis mounted a wooden stand or reading desk that had been prepared in order that he might be better seen and heard by the people, and began to read in a clear, distinct voice one of the psalms.

He had not read more than two or three verses, when the cry, "The soldiers are upon us," was raised. The women drew closer together, but did not speak or scream, while the men mounted their horses and grasped their arms. But the alarm was a false one, and in a few minutes all was quiet again, and the preacher went on as calmly as if nothing had happened.

The singing made me feel as if I must cry. It was so solemn, and yet so beautiful. It seemed as if one heart and one voice was telling out a great need, and asking a great help from God.

The last note of the hymn died away, and for a moment the only sounds heard were the murmur of the brook, or the restless pawing of some horse; then one voice was speaking, and though at first its tones were low, it grew louder as the speaker prayed not only for the great company before him, but for brethren and sisters in the faith who, he knew only too well, were even on that bright spring day pining their lives away in dark, gloomy prisons; some might, perhaps at that very moment, be undergoing the torture of the rack, or even being led to the stake.

A portion of scripture read by another pastor followed the prayer, and then the sermon began. The preacher did not try to hide the danger we all stood in. He even said that some who heard his voice might be called upon to lay down their lives for Christ's sake. But it was, he also said, far better to suffer for their Lord than to deny Him, and he told us of four martyrs who only a week before had been burnt at Lisle, by order of the Inquisition.

One, who was only a youth, had to suffer what must have been a sharper trial even than flames. As he and his three companions were being led to the stake, his aged father pressed through the crowd, and falling upon his son's neck, sobbed out: "My dear child, are you going to die thus?" The young man answered in a calm and cheerful voice, "It is a small matter, my father, for now I am hasting to live for ever." But as the poor old man still wept, and clung to his son, the youth's firmness gave way, and he wept too; then turning to the priests who were urging him to recant, he said, "Oh! ye priests and friars, if we could have been prevailed upon to go to your mass, we had not been here now. But Christ Jesus has not instituted any such sacrifice." The soldiers forced the father away, and the four martyrs were led to the place of burning. As the fire was lighted, they sang with one voice, "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?" and again, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." And then � absent from the body, they were present with the Lord.

The preacher went on to tell us how God does not promise to keep His children from trouble, but to give them strength according to their day. His word does not say, "You shall not go to prison," but "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." He may allow some to die as martyrs, but His word is, "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life."

But the preacher's voice rose as he went on, and his faithful words of warning were followed by what seemed almost like a ringing trumpet call. He urged his listeners to prize their Bibles as their greatest treasure, and bade them be willing, if needs be, to suffer the loss of all things rather than give them up. He said too, that he believed that as surely as God raised up Moses to deliver His people Israel from the bondage and brick-kilns of Egypt, so surely would He in His own time and way raise up one who would deliver poor, down-trodden Holland from the yoke of Spain.

As we rode homewards after the preaching, my father and Herr Von der Werf were talking very earnestly together, and though I could not understand all they said, I made out enough to he sure that they and many others are thinking of the Prince of Orange as the one by whom God will yet save our country. They say he is a good man, and strongly attached to the reformed faith. His soldiers love and trust him greatly, though he is a man of so few words that he is known through the ranks as "William the Silent."

Chapter 4.

Julianillo Heramdez, Muleteer and Martyr.

July 1st, 1565. Sunday evening, when we are alone and mother feels strong enough to sing hymns with me, or tell me stories of her own girlhood in sunny Spain, is always a pleasant, restful time; but the last two have been, I think, more than usually happy. Father left home quite early in the afternoon to carry food and a few needed comforts to one of our brethren in the faith, who succeeded only last week in escaping from France (where a good deal of persecution is going on) with his wife and one of their three children, a girl about two years of age.

Father says that though M. D'Ampter is a man of great learning and piety the disguise in which he passed the frontier was that of a bricklayer's labourer; he carried a bag of tools and was supposed to be looking for work. His wife, who is related to some of the best families in Provence, was dressed like a peasant woman going to market. The risk of travelling together would have been too great, but by taking different roads, husband and wife under cover of darkness reached the port in safety, and getting on board the same vessel were soon out to sea.

We have been able to sit out-of-doors a good deal lately. An old rustic seat under the shade of the linden trees is a spot where some of my happiest hours have been spent. We were sitting there, mother and I, only a few evenings ago; I was not sure she really intended telling me a story, for she seemed at first as if her thoughts were far away, and she hardly cared to talk much. But after a little while she roused herself, and said, very softly, "I hardly know what it is, Mayken, it may be the glow of the setting sun, or the scent of the limes, but I seem almost as if I was again in my old home at Valladolid, and I can recall the faces, and fancy I hear the voices of some early friends who went years ago to join the noble army of martyrs.'" I nestled closer to her, and begged for a story.

There was a secret in our family, Mayken, a secret which, although quite a number of persons were allowed to share it, was long and faithfully kept. My grandmother's house at Valladolid was for some years the meeting-place of the Reformed Church in that city. Great care and secrecy had to be used, so as to escape, as long as possible, the notice of the terrible Inquisition. Those who were of our little company always came singly, and by different roads, the same care being taken when the hour of departure arrived, and yet the danger was braved again and again, and persons of all ranks found their way to these secret meetings. As we children grew up and were thought old enough to be trusted, we were, one by one, taken into confidence, and always looked upon it as a great treat to be allowed to be present. We usually paid great attention when the word of God was being read or explained; it was all so new and fresh to us, to hear in our own Spanish the wonderful story of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Sometimes a pastor was present and preached, while at others, one of the company would read part of some book or tract written by Martin Luther, the German monk who had dared to make such a bold stand against the sale of indulgences, and had made the Pope so angry by telling people that it is only God who can forgive sins.

I often wondered how it was that so many new books reached our house, and when I asked my mother, she replied, 'Little Julian, the dwarf muleteer, is again on his way across the mountains, and we pray that by the good hand of God he may reach us in safety. His service is one of no common danger, and we count him worthy of all honour. But wait, and you will know.'

"It was, I think, during our very next meeting that Liza, a faithful old servant, came in a somewhat hurried manner to tell my mother that little Julian had just arrived from Granada, bringing a pack much larger than usual, which he said contained jewels of such value that he would not allow even her to open it, but bade her tell her mistress of his arrival, as he could trust them to no hands but hers.

"No one appeared to mind the interruption, and my mother left the room, returning a few minutes later, followed by the smallest man I had ever seen, who seemed to stagger under the weight of a pack larger than himself. He was a peasant, I saw that at a glance from his dress and bearing; but high-born Spanish nobles went forward to relieve him of his load, while others grasped his hand, called him 'brother,' and told him how they had been praying for his safe return.

"For a moment the little man seemed confused, but quickly recovered himself, and said, simply and humbly, You make too much of my poor services. It is true that there are dangers and hardships in my work, but it has its bright spots as well. Judge of my joy not long ago, in calling with my wares at a convent, where I had heard that the prior wished for a Spanish New Testament, to find not one only, but six monks all eager to receive the truth. But my faith is far from strong, more than once I have hidden in some hole or cave among the hills, and the soldiers of the Inquisition, who were sent out to arrest all heretics, and burn all forbidden books, have been so near that I could not help overhearing their conversation; on one occasion they galloped over the hole in which I lay trembling, and thinking every moment that I should be discovered, and either killed on the spot or dragged away as their prisoner, it did not seem easy to trust quietly in God. Do not speak of my faith, for it is poor and weak, and I pray daily that when the hour of trial comes it may not fail me altogether. It is the goodness of God, who still takes care of me, and often gives me the joy of knowing that He hides me under the shadow of His wing.'

"By the time that Julianillo had done speaking, willing hands had unstrapped his pack, and its contents lay in disorder on the floor. Very carefully his pieces of silk and rolls of velvet were lifted, and when a slight rustling sound betrayed the presence of a few sheets of paper, great was the joy of the finder. There was more than one Spanish New Testament, though for greater safety the precious volume had been unstitched and a few concealed in each roll. There were also Spanish translations of some of Luther's writings, which were greatly valued, and some portions of which I afterwards heard read and explained.

"The meeting closed with prayer, and then little Julian, as he was often called, was asked to give some account of his journey, and the openings he had found for circulating the scriptures.

"I cannot remember all he said, but I know we all listened with interest and attention. The journey across the mountains had been one of more than usual danger and difficulty, owing partly to the bad state of the roads, the larger stock of books he carried, and partly to the fact that parties of soldiers, having received fresh orders to seize all forbidden books, and arrest all suspected persons, were scouring the country in every direction.

"And yet on more than one occasion, when some slippery place in the passes had proved too much even for his sure-footed, patient mules, and he had been compelled to struggle onward, bearing part of their burden, a kindly soldier had helped him, and for some distance carried the very books he was commanded to seize.

"On reaching the next town, as he passed through its main street with his usual cry, 'Come, buy my silks, come, buy my laces, come, gentle ladies, buy,' he was stopped by a stranger, who bade him go to a convent at a short distance from the town, as he had heard that its prior was in want of some rich Genoa velvet for church furniture. At first he did not feel sure that he ought to go. It might be only a plan to get him into the power of the priests.; every convent had its dungeons, and he might never again be allowed to breathe the pure mountain air he loved so well, or to bask in the golden sunlight; or it might be that God had opened a door, and he ought to enter. He would trust, and not be afraid, and so he went.

"A somewhat sullen-looking porter unbarred the gate and bade a lay brother take him to the apartments of the prior, who, as soon as they were alone, locked the door and asked Julian if his packs did not contain copies of the scriptures and the forbidden writings of Martin Luther. ' I,' said the prior, have heard of you and your work, and for many days one whom I can trust has been on the watch for your coming. I do not want your velvets, though I shall buy, to prevent your real errand being suspected, but I and several of my monks have been reading the Testament, and we cannot find anything is written about prayers to the Virgin Mary, or the worship of relics and pictures, and we want to know more.'

"'Great was his joy and mine,' said Julian, 'when he received a copy of Luther's Notes on the Epistle to the Galatians.' 'But,' he added, 'the porter must not suspect your real errand. I would gladly retain you as my guest, and talk far into the night of the truth I have learned of late to love, but you must go to supper with him, it will disarm suspicion.'

"Brave little Julianillo; he was allowed to make several more journeys, each time bringing a fresh supply of books, and then � his name was added to the list of those who had joyfully laid down their lives for Christ's sake. When led to the stake, he spoke bright words of faith and courage to his fellow-martyrs, and continued to bear a bright testimony for his Lord and Master until silenced by the gag."

Chapter 5.

Images and Image-Makers.

September 17th, 1565. I cannot understand why the Bible should be a forbidden book, or why people who wish to read it for themselves should be punished with fines, imprisonment, or even burnt at the stake, as San Roman was only twenty-two years ago.

When I asked father, he answered with his sad but very sweet smile, "Your question, little Mayken, is one that wiser heads than yours or mine have ached over in trying to answer." Now my father is very wise, at least, I think so, so if he cannot tell I do not expect it would be of much use to ask any one else, only I really do want to know, for I do not see why God should have such a wonderful book written if it was not intended to be read.

But there are houses in Holland, even in our own city of Antwerp, in which the forbidden book is safely hidden, and ours is one of them. I am glad there is a secret book in our family, just as there was in mother's when she was a little girl, though our secret, like hers, is shared by quite a number of people. I knew the precious volume was hidden, and only brought out after the lamps were lighted, and the window shutters closed and fastened with a stout wooden bar, but it was a long time before I discovered its hiding-place.

I think it is quite two years ago, I had been playing in mother's room, when my ball rolled behind a large oaken press; I tried to reach it, and in doing so suppose I must have touched a spring, for a sliding panel flew back, and much to my surprise I saw a small, dark cupboard; I could not see into its depths, but when I put my hand in a little way, I touched a book. I was pleased, yet half afraid that mother might not like what I had done; so I went at once and told her just how it all happened, but she only smiled and said, "We always intended that some day our little daughter should share our secret, but now she has found it out for herself and we are not afraid to trust her."

And after that the book was oftener brought out and read, and sometimes neighbours would come in, and say that they too were longing to hear the beautiful Bible words; but as they could not afford to buy even a copy of the New Testament for themselves, they would ask father to read to them. So, though still hidden, our treasure was shared with many.

I love to listen when father reads, even though I cannot always understand it all, but then dear mother is willing to go over the chapter again with me, and explain what I find difficult. We had such a lovely time together last Sunday evening. I must try to write down as much of what mother told me as I can remember. Father had been reading the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which gives an account of how, when Paul preached at Ephesus, a silversmith named Demetrius made a great uproar by calling his fellow-workmen together, and telling them that their craft was in danger, and their goddess Diana would be despised. So they were very angry, and all cried together, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians."

I asked mother to tell me about Diana, as I thought her name was something like one of Truyken's favourite saints, about whom she sometimes tells me wonderful stories: But mother said that the old Greeks and Romans, who did not know the true God, had a great number of false gods and goddesses, one of whom was Diana. Her temple was very beautiful, much more beautiful than the church Truyken attends, and I think that must be a lovely place, for she has told me so often about its grand pictures, and statues of marble as white as snow. But the temple of Diana was called one of the wonders of the world. And amid all that was pleasing to the eye, the supposed image of Diana was nothing but an ugly, shapeless, black stone, which the priests told the people had fallen from Jupiter.

The "craft" of the silversmiths was the way in which they got their living, by making small silver images and altars, which they sold to the people who came in crowds to worship at the temple.

And then mother told me the story of another silversmith who laid down his life rather than deny his Lord. The martyr-death of San Roman had not at all the effect the priest and officers of the Inquisition expected or intended it should have. It seemed more like a match applied to a ready-laid fire for many who had learnt from him to love the truth, but had been afraid to let it be known even by their dearest friends, seemed to grow stronger, and braver, and were often found at the secret meeting for Bible-reading and prayer held in the house of her grandmother. Among these was the silversmith, Juan Garcia. His chief trade at that time lay in making images of the Virgin Mary, silver candlesticks, vases for holy water (so-called) and such things, and as he was a workman of no common skill, he often received orders from rich noblemen, and was sometimes employed in helping to decorate the churches. But by some means he had heard or read from Luther's translation of the Bible the words, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." (Ex. 20: 4, 5.)

Do what he would, the words seemed to follow him. The work on which he was engaged sometimes fell unheeded from his hands, while he tried to find an answer to the question, If the Jews, who were God's earthly people, were so plainly told not to make or worship images, could it be right for Christians to do so?

He prayed for light, and as the days went by he saw more clearly that his work was a dishonour to God, and by going on with it he was helping others to dishonour the God of the Bible. But great difficulties were in the way of his giving it up. His skill had brought him into notice, and he often received orders from persons of rank who were not only able, but willing, to pay large sums of money for images to adorn their private chapels, or as presents to convents and churches.

He knew no other trade by which to earn a living for himself and his family, and, worse still, to refuse such orders would be to own that he was no longer at heart a Romanist, and this once suspected, he might at any moment be arrested and thrown into prison, or even sentenced to death as an obstinate heretic.

He dared not even tell his wife anything of the anxious time he was passing through; she could not, he felt, understand his feelings, for she was a devout Roman Catholic, completely under the influence of the priests, whom she thought it right to obey in all things. One thing puzzled her a good deal. Juan frequently went out in the evening, and was absent for hours, but did not tell her where he went.

She noticed also his want of interest in his work of making images, and that he was no longer in any hurry to complete his orders. She told both to the priests, who perhaps before had their suspicions aroused; and they told her that by following her husband the next time that he left home, finding out where he went, and who were his companions, she would render a great service to the church, and so make herself pleasing to God.

She had not long to wait for her opportunity. The secret character of the meetings prevented their being held at any stated time, and Juan Garcia was always willing to be the bearer of the day and hour of the next gathering to his brethren and sisters in the faith.

The shop was closed, and with a kindly word of farewell to his wife, Juan went out. Hastily putting on her hood and mantle, his wife followed, taking care, however, to keep well within the shadows cast by the high stone houses; she dogged his footsteps through the principal street of Valladolid, taking special note of the houses which for a few moments he entered, the last being the one used as a place of gathering for the Protestant Christians of the neighbourhood.

Her husband's secret had become hers at last, base and unworthy as the way was in which it had been obtained, and she lost no time in reporting it to the priests. No further evidence was asked or needed. Juan and many of his friends were arrested and thrown into prison. The officers of the Inquisition usually visited the houses of those suspected of heresy as near midnight as possible, and before the sun rose the one against whom the charge was brought was a prisoner in the dark, damp dungeons of the inquisition.

Little more can be told of Juan Garcia, but it is believed that he witnessed a good confession, and died in prison, but whether from the effects of torture, or from the poisoned air of his cell was never fully known. A pension for life was allowed to his widow, "as a reward for the great service she had done the church," so the priests said; but I think she behaved very badly, and I am sure she could not have been very happy when she remembered how cruel and cowardly her conduct had been.

About the time of Juan's arrest the Christians meeting, like those of Valladolid, in the house of a rich widow of Seville passed through a time of great danger. Maria Gomaz, a widow, who had for some time been one of them, suddenly became insane, and had to be placed for care in the house of a doctor. She seemed to take a violent dislike to those she had before loved, and finding some means of escape from the house of the doctor, went at once to the Inquisitor-General, and gave him the names of about three hundred persons who attended the secret meetings. But the good hand of God was over the poor, frightened sheep. The doctor was a secret friend of the Protestants, and was able to persuade the Inquisitors that the lady was out of her mind, and no weight should be attached to her statements. So nothing came of it, but a warning was given to the doctor to take greater care of his patient.

Chapter 6.

One Stormy Night.

December 10th, 1565. We had an unlooked-for pleasure last evening: Dr. Louis Jean, who, like many other French Protestants, sought refuge in Holland from a terrible persecution then going on under the Duke of Alva, joined our party. My little friend Paul Brock and his father were also present. It was a very happy evening, for the doctor told us such an interesting story of the flight for life and liberty of an English lady and gentleman, that I will try to write it down; for if the duke, who is said to be a stern and hard-hearted man, brings his army to Holland, as many think he will, and we too are obliged to leave home and friends, it will encourage us to be reminded of how really God cares for and helps those who trust in Him.

One wild, stormy night, early in the year 1555, a man and woman carrying a young child might have been seen walking with slow and weary steps along the road leading to Wesel, a German town on the banks of the Rhine. The travellers were drenched with rain, and almost covered with mud, for they had already walked upwards of five miles, and at every few steps the lady seemed ready to faint from fatigue for in spite of her draggled and forlorn condition she was one who, until a few weeks before the story begins, would never have thought of going, except in a carriage, outside her own grounds. Still they kept bravely on, feeling sure of finding food and shelter as soon as they reached the town. But though they presented themselves at the doors of more than one inn, the landlords, fearing that they might get into trouble by receiving guests who, it was easy to see, were gentlefolk, and were travelling without luggage, servants or carriage, refused to take them in; while to make matters still worse, they could not speak a word of German, and could not find any one who understood either English, French, Italian or Latin, in any of which languages Richard Bertie, for that was the name of the gentleman, was able to converse.

The rain began to fall in torrents, and the wind howled in wild and angry gusts. He must find shelter for his wife and child. Seeing a large stone porch at the entrance to one of the churches, he left them there, while he went to try to buy a little food. But the shops were closed, and though there were lights in many of the houses, no one seemed willing to open their door to a stranger whose language they did not understand. He was on the point of giving up in despair, when two schoolboys passed, one reciting a portion of Latin grammar (perhaps his morrow's lesson) to his companion. Mr. Bertie spoke to them in that language, and to his great delight found that he was understood. There were, he knew, several earnest Christians, who had fled from other countries to escape persecution, living in or near Wesel. The boys were quite willing, for a small reward, to guide him to the house of one of these, and returning as quickly as possible to the church porch where he had left his wife and child, they set out again, this time in better spirits. The house they were most anxious to find was that of the pastor of the Reformed Church, whose name was Perusel, but the boys, not knowing where he lived, offered to take them to a house where he was, they said, well known.

It was by no chance, but the guiding hand of God, that Perusel was, on that very night, a visitor in the house to which they were taken; and though at first he did not know who the wet and weary wanderers were, his surprise was very great when he recognised in the lady one whom, in the days when he lived in England, he had known as Lady Catherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, the dear friend of Queen Catherine Parr, and the martyred Bishop Latimer.

We may form some idea of how welcome rest, warmth and food were to the tired travellers. Better still it must have seemed to them to be with friends who understood that it was for the name and sake of the Saviour they loved that they were on that stormy night homeless wanderers.

They had fled from England for the truth's sake and also to escape from the revenge of Bishop Gardiner, a man who, though he stood high in favour of Queen Mary, never forgave a real or fancied injury, and whom the Duchess had, when quite a girl, offended by some thoughtless speech, and so made him her bitter enemy.

Her mother had been one of the Spanish ladies who came to England with Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. This lady was greatly attached to the unfortunate queen and named her little daughter after her royal mistress. Her two brothers died early, so that Catherine became, when little more than a child, a wealthy heiress. The death of her brothers was quickly followed by that of her father, and she became the ward of the king, who appointed the Duke of Suffolk as her guardian, on the understanding that she was to be married to his son. Catherine was then ten years of age, and the next five years of her life were happy ones, for she found a true friend in his gentle wife, the princess Mary, sister to Henry VIII., who had her educated with her own daughters, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor Brandon (Lady Frances was in after years the mother of Lady Jane Grey); but this amiable lady died in 1533, and the young duke, who was to have been Catherine's husband, died the next year.

The duke saw that the only way to keep Catherine's large fortune was to marry her himself, and so the girl of fifteen was married to a man of fifty. The duke, however, proved a kind and indulgent husband, but lived mostly at court. For some years Catherine's cup of happiness seemed full. She had youth, wealth, rank (in those days there were only two dukes in the United Kingdom, and she was the wife of one of them), she was clever and accomplished, and her merry temper and pleasant manners made her a general favourite. Her husband loved and trusted her, and she had two sons, boys of rare promise and beauty.

But God, who had thoughts of peace and blessing for Catherine, was about to lead her, in His own way, to seek and value "eternal things." We do not know who was used to open her eyes, or to lead her out of the darkness of popery into the light of Bible truth, but it may have been the aged Bishop Latimer, for whom, she had almost the affection of a daughter. Suffolk died in 1545, and Catherine, a rich widow, became again the ward of the king, who, as he did not insist upon her marrying one of his favourites, but allowed her to live quietly at her own beautiful castle of Grimsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, we may suppose really wished to be kind to her. For the few years that followed she devoted herself to the education of her sons, while her tenants and servants found in her a kind mistress and a true friend.

King Henry died in 1547, and his son, Edward VI., came to the throne. Those who had been taught by the Holy Spirit to love and value the word of God, rejoiced on hearing that it was the wish of the young king that a copy of the Bible should be placed in every church throughout his kingdom. The duchess was well known as one who had taken a stand for the truth she prized far above her earthly riches. She sent her elder son, who was then about thirteen years old, to Court, under the care of a learned and pious man, as a companion to the king, and her younger to St. John's College, Cambridge.

But soon that loving mother was called to drink of the cup of sorrow, for during an outbreak of what was then known as the "sweating sickness," both her sons died within a few hours of each other.

Early in the reign of Queen Mary, the duchess gave her great offence by marrying Richard Bertie, a christian gentleman, who for some years had been her faithful friend and adviser. Bishop Gardiner thought the opportunity of getting her into trouble much too good to be lost, and both her husband and herself were in such real danger that they were obliged to fly from England. They could not, however, escape together, and the poor lady had more than one narrow escape from the officers sent by Gardiner to take her as the queen's prisoner to London. At last, to the great joy of both, they met, but new trials awaited them. On the way to Wesel they were waylaid by robbers, who took from them nearly all they possessed. They must have been very glad to rest for a little while at Wesel, where they found christian friends and received much kindness, but it was not for long, for being warned by a friend that Gardiner had discovered the place of their retreat, and issued orders for their arrest, they fled into Poland where for a time they endured great hardships, sometimes being without food or fire. But God, in whom they trusted, did not forsake them, and brighter days were in store for Catherine, her husband and children, for Queen Mary died in November, 1558, and in July of the following year the exiles felt it would be safe to return to England. They were kindly received by Elizabeth, and the property of the duchess restored to her; her son born abroad was made an English subject, so that on the death of his mother he might inherit her estates; and, better still, the son of parents who had suffered for the sake of Christ grew up a man who loved and feared God, and enjoyed the confidence of the queen.

Chapter 7.

How They Kept the Faith in Holland.

May 1st, 1566. It is just a year since I began to write down some of the things I most wanted to remember, and now so much is happening in Holland and even in our own city of Antwerp, that I am not sure that I shall have room for any more of dear mother's stories of sunny Spain.

I am sure the home of her girlhood must have been a happy one, for when she tells me of the old garden in which she and her sisters used to play, her voice is always low and tender, and once or twice I have seen tears in her eyes; and yet she was glad to quit the land of her birth. She has often told me how, on the night of her escape, with father leading her mule, in the silence and darkness of night, they crossed the frontier, leaving Spain by a narrow and dangerous mountain-pass, neither daring to speak even a whispered word to the other. For a band of the Pope's soldiers, who had been sent to guard that very pass, were so near that they could hear their voices, but as they were playing cards, and were too much absorbed in their game to notice the almost noiseless tread of the mule, by the good hand of God my father and mother got through safely.

I am thirteen now, so I understand better than I did a year ago why my father looks so grave at times, and why the voices of many of our friends often sound so full of trouble. The outlook is certainly not a bright one. King Philip is more determined than ever to burn all the heretics in his dominions, though the people he calls heretics are only those who wish to read the Bible and obey its teachings.

We hear, too, that some of his subjects have grown restless and impatient, and think of taking up arms against the king, but our good burgomaster Van der Werf, my father, and a few others are doing all they can to persuade them to trust in God and wait patiently; so I hope and pray that they may see that such advice is wise and good, and be content to follow it.

All the time father can spare from his business correspondence, which takes up the greater part of each working day, has been devoted lately to writing letters of cheer or sympathy to friends far and near who are suffering, or may at any moment be called upon to suffer, for the truth, or seeing people who come to him for advice or help, so that he is very seldom able to take me for a walk; but yesterday was a public holiday, owing to the opening of a new bridge across the Scheldt, and I went with him to see the procession. It was a pretty sight. Our burgomaster and counsellors looked quite grand in their robes of office. The city guilds carried large, gaily-painted banners, as well as symbols of their various trades or industries.

Colours were flying from the windows and roofs of many of the houses, a band of musicians played lively national airs, friends and neighbours were greeting each other, and yet I could not help noticing that almost every face wore a troubled or anxious look. I felt I must ask father to tell me why there should be so much sadness, and I had not long to wait for an opportunity, for as we were returning home by the quay we saw some fine ships in full sailing making for our harbour.

Father stood silently gazing at them for a few moments, then, turning to me, said sadly, "Those ships are sailing the wrong way, Mayken."

"The wrong way, father!" I exclaimed in surprise, "What can you mean?"

"They are laden with Flemish silks and woollen cloths, the work of Dutch weavers, who sought refuge in England from the persecution that has been going on ever since the Inquisition came to Holland.

"Ten years ago they would have sailed from Dutch sea-ports, many of them from Antwerp, so bringing trade and wealth to our shores; now they sail from English ports; and I believe the blessing of the Lord will rest upon the country that gave them a welcome and a home. The towns of Sandwich and Norwich, where so many of our countrymen have settled, are, I hear from frequent letters, prosperous and peaceful. Our brethren have not only been encouraged to set up their looms, but some are employed in teaching English workmen the art of our woollen manufacture. Many of my best workmen have already left me, others are, I know, more or less secretly, preparing to follow. I cannot forbid their doing so, I would not if I could, and yet their leaving will render me unable to fulfil my contracts; and the factory, in which only a few years ago so many weavers were earning good wages, will have to be closed from want of hands to work its looms."

"Is the Bible a forbidden book in England? I asked half timidly, for I felt at that moment as if a great tide of hope and joy that I could not put into words was sweeping over me.

"No, Makyen," he replied. "Our brethren not only read it in broad daylight, 'none daring to make them afraid,' but are allowed to meet together to worship God in the way in which they believe the Bible teaches; they also openly instruct their children in the scriptures and the doctrines of the reformed faith. While the laws that have been framed to prevent any of the inhabitants of the Netherlands from leaving the country are very severe, punishing with fines and imprisonment any who are found attempting to leave the country, the captains of ships and masters of sailing vessels being also forbidden to allow them to take passage, it is a cause of constant surprise and rejoicing that so many of our brethren and sisters in the faith have been thus far preserved and watched over. God has prospered them, and more than once they have sent money to be distributed among families that have been plunged into poverty and distress by the husband and father having been found guilty of possessing a New Testament, or of teaching his children other than Latin prayers, and been thrown into one of King Philip's prisons."

"Why then, father, cannot we escape to England?" I found courage to say. "You and I and mother, and Paul and his father, and Truyken, good, faithful Truyken! We could not leave her behind, for though she calls herself a Catholic, and says what was good enough for her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother is good enough for her, I am sure she loves God, and one day when mother was speaking to her of the Saviour's sufferings, I saw tears running down her face, and after, as she went about her work, I heard her say, as if talking to herself, 'For me, for me! Oh, if it was really for me, how wonderful! But it is almost too good to be true.' Besides, it would almost break her heart if we were to leave her. Oh, do please take Truyken."

Father drew me a little way from the quay, and after looking round to be sure that we were alone, said: "Your question, Mayken, is one that I have often asked myself, and even talked over with your mother. Why do not I with those near and dear to me seek, as so many of my countrymen have done, for some way of escape from the despotic rule of the King of Spain? For many weeks and even months I was uncertain what I ought to do; I took my difficulty to God in prayer, asking for light and guidance. At last, I believe I saw clearly that while there seemed some good reasons for going, by remaining I should be doing the will of God.

"You know that your Aunt Ursel and myself visit the prisons whenever we are allowed to do so. Among those undergoing punishment for various offences are several who have been arrested on suspicion of leaning toward the reformed faith, or on the charge of having absented themselves from the mass; but as no orders have been received concerning them they are still awaiting trial. At any moment they may be removed to the dungeons of the Inquisition, or even led forth to die as martyrs; but while they remain in the common prison, we are able now and then to visit them, speak words of encouragement, and do what we can, by supplying them with food and clothing, to make their situation a little more comfortable. And what a joy it will be if one day the Lord should say of such little service, 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' (Matt. 25: 40.)

"Then, too, if I quit my post, the factory must close at once, and some of my workmen, who for family reasons cannot leave the country, would be plunged into the deepest distress. Peter von Roph has not only a sick wife, but is the sole support of his aged and almost blind mother. Trade is so bad, not only in Antwerp, but all over Holland, that it would, I am afraid, be difficult for them to find employment elsewhere. So for their sakes I am willing to remain, and if needs be 'endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.' (2 Tim. 2: 3.)

"I will give you just one more reason why I should remain where I am. I, with many others, believe that God is about to raise up a leader who will deliver the Netherlands from the yoke of Spain. It may, and perhaps will, be William, Prince of Orange. Many who would have stood by him in the coming struggle for truth and freedom have already left the country, and he must not find, when he comes, that all have gone. No, my Mayken, we will 'be still,' and quietly trust in God."

Chapter 8.

"William the Silent."

January 1st, 1567. New Year's Day again, and though I think we are all trying to look cheerful and give each other good wishes, it is easy to see that no one is really happy, or at rest; the very air seems full of trouble. Trade is almost at a standstill. Father says he cannot fulfil the large orders he has received for woollen goods, as nearly all his best workmen have left the country.

Only this morning, when Truyken went as usual to the baker's, she found the shutters had not been taken down; it was still early, so thinking he might have overslept himself, she knocked loudly, but got no answer.

After some time a neighbour looked out of the window of a house on the opposite side of the street, and said, "You may knock till you are tired, for the house is empty, the whole family sailed last night for England." We knew them to be of our faith, and father prayed very earnestly that the good hand of God might be over them, keeping and guarding them from all the dangers of the way. Mother says we must bake our own bread. Well, I think I shall rather like that. I only hope the miller will not go to England just now.

So many things have happened in our city of Antwerp lately, that I hardly know how or where to begin telling the story of the sorrowful times in which we are living.

It was a wild, stormy afternoon late in October, when we noticed that quite suddenly our quiet street was filled with crowds of people, all going in one direction. Father went to the door, and after exchanging a few words with a neighbour, came in and began to put on his cloak and hat. "What is the matter, Mark?" my mother asked; "is there a fire?" "There will be one to-morrow, dear wife," he said, as he kissed her tenderly; "that is, if the deed of darkness is not done before the morning, for King Philip advises that instead of being publicly burnt at the stake, heretics should be drowned or strangled secretly in their prisons; but our brother Christopher Fabricius, who has been for some months in prison, is to die a martyr's death to-morrow, and our brethren are on their way to the prison in the hope of being able to encourage him by singing psalms and repeating passages of scripture. If he is not gagged they may even hear his voice through the barred windows of his cell."

"But must you go, Mark?" mother pleaded. "See, there are so many; your voice will not be missed; cannot you stay with us?"

For a moment father stood as if not quite sure whether he should go or stay, then said very gently, "There will not be one too many, Constanza, and would you wish the Saviour to say to me, 'in prison, and ye came not unto me'?"

Mother understood him and said no more, but I saw tears were in her eyes. That evening seemed a very long one. People were still passing our house, many of them carrying lanterns, for the night was dark and starless. We did not talk much, but I am sure we both prayed that God would bless and keep my dear father. Then the bible was brought from its hiding-place and mother read me such a beautiful story of how, long ago, God sent an angel to deliver the apostle Peter from prison (Acts 12), and mother said that even if God saw it best to allow Fabricius to be burnt at the stake, to be with Christ in heaven would be better than even to walk a free man through the streets of Antwerp. So we were comforted for him, but when our usual time for saying "Good- night" came, mother said she could not possibly go to bed, but would sit up and wait for father.

So I begged that I might share her watch, and though I believe that after a time I fell asleep, my head resting on her knee, I hope I was of some little use, as mother said afterwards she would have felt more lonely if I had not been with her.

I think it must have been morning when father came back. He looked pale and tired, but said that though there were great crowds outside the prison, all were quiet and orderly, and there was no disturbance, and no fresh arrests were made. The burning was, he told us, to take place the next morning, and many who lived at a distance had not attempted to go to their homes, while fresh crowds kept pouring in. Father also told us that many believe that the friends of the reformed faith are strong enough in Antwerp to take Fabricius out of the hands of the soldiers, but he does not think the attempt would be a wise one, and he is sure the martyr himself does not wish it.

Father could not stay with us long, though mother and I tried our utmost to coax him to take rest and food; he ate a few mouthfuls, just to please us, and then was off again. On his return, some hours later, he told us that even before daybreak crowds gathered in the market-place. The peasant-women, who always came early, bringing eggs, butter, fruit and many other things, were turned back with their loads, as there was to be no market that day. A space had been cleared in the middle of the square, to which some men were silently carrying faggots, while a few mounted soldiers were on guard. The silence was almost painful. No one spoke, but all faces were turned towards the street leading to the prison. Soon the soldiers came and formed a passage for the monks who walked with the prisoner.

As they passed near father, Fabricius said in a calm, clear voice, "My brethren, let none of you attempt to release me; but suffer God to accomplish His work in me." A deeper hush came over the crowd, and for a few moments all was still; then with one heart and voice they sang the psalm,

"Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord."

As the place of burning was reached, the voice of the martyr was again heard as he begged the people not to forget the truth he had taught them. Many voices spoke words of cheer, and one bolder than the rest cried out loudly, "Fight manfully, my brother, be thou faithful unto death." The priests were very angry and ordered the officer in command of the troops to arrest the speaker, but the crowd opened right and left and made a way for him to pass, and he was soon lost to sight. When the stake was reached, the martyr knelt down and would have prayed aloud, but the monks would not allow him to do so, and he was at once chained to the stake. Again the crowd tried to sing a psalm, but the soldiers tried to silence them with blows, which were returned with a shower of stones. A fight followed, during which some of his friends made a rush at the stake with such effect that monks and soldiers fled in confusion. Friends were round the martyr, but it was too late, a soldier as he fled had struck him on the head with an axe and the blow was fatal.

We were all greatly pleased to hear that the Prince of Orange was expected, and would, it was hoped, soon be in Antwerp. It was even said that the Duchess Margaret had written begging him to come and help her, as she found the people of the Netherlands growing more discontented and unruly every day. A great many of the nobles of Holland and Flanders have banded together to try if they cannot get King Philip and the duchess to respect what they call the charters, which, if I understand it rightly, means that promises made by the king to his Dutch subjects have not been kept. They went to see the duchess, shewed her great respect, and presented a petition. She seemed troubled, but would not make any promises and said she must write to her brother, the King of Spain. As they were leaving, one of her advisers was heard to say to her, "Why should your Royal Highness be afraid of them? they are only gueux,'" a Flemish word meaning beggars. So they have adopted the word as the name of their party. Many of them wear a grey cloak and doublet of coarse cloth, and carry a beggar's bowl and wallet.

But I must not forget an event so important, that for many days before it took place people seemed to think or speak of little else, namely, the coming to Antwerp of William, Prince of Orange. Father says the nation seemed to feel a thrill of new hope and courage at the very mention of his name.

When it was known that he was really on his way and would arrive within a few hours, thousands of people lined the streets. The magistrates and merchants of our city, among them being my father, rode a few miles into the country to meet him and give him a fitting welcome. A pistol was to be fired as soon as he came in sight; the report was no sooner heard than such a welcome rang out. Everybody was so glad, so very glad, that the man to whom they looked as the deliverer of Holland was really among them, that they could not help trying to make him feel how much he was wanted.

But amid all the good wishes and cheering that greeted him, the Prince did not seem flattered, indeed, many thought he was not even pleased. Those who were nearest to him said that his face wore an anxious, troubled look, and that he was more grave and silent than usual. It had been proposed that the ringing of bells, lighting of bonfires, and great public rejoicings should close the day of the Prince's arrival; but when the people saw how ill and worn he looked, and that he wished for quietness, they shewed their love for him and respect for his wishes by going quietly to their homes.

He began work that evening, and now he has been here for some weeks. Father, who is with him a great deal, says that he works almost night and day. So many people have to be seen, and every one, whether high or low, rich or poor, is sure of a patient hearing, and of justice, while far into the night he sits at his desk; such piles of papers have to be gone through, letters and petitions read and answered.

Amid all the hopefulness the outlook is not very much brighter; for though the Prince has been able to induce the duchess to allow the reformed preachers and those who wish to hear them the use of one church a little way out of the city, King Philip has issued fresh edicts, forbidding any of his subjects to leave the country. Captains of ships must not take them as passengers, no one is to give or sell them food, and any person giving information of any attempt to leave the country will be rewarded with half the property of the accused persons.

Chapter 9.

Dark Clouds with Silver Linings.

December 31st, 1567. It seems a long time since I wrote anything in my MS. book. A great many things have happened since I last turned its pages, but some days were so dark and sorrowful that I had no heart to write at all; and yet, hardly an hour ago, as dear mother and I sat alone enjoying the cheerful blaze of the wood fire, just before Truyken brought in the candles, and talked over the story of the year that is just closing, we felt, as well as said, that God had been very good to us, "a stronghold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him." (Nahum 1: 7.)

It is a great trial to us to have my much-loved father away from home, as he has been for nearly six months, but how much better it is for him, and for us too, that he should be free and able to help the Prince of Orange, than if he had been wearing his life out in one of King Philip's dungeons; for he has been in prison, but by the good hand of the Lord was able to escape before being tried and sentenced.

It is nearly a year, I think, since two very grand marriages took place at Brussels, one being that of the young and brave Baron Montigny, the other that of Prince Alexander of Parma, son of the Duchess Margaret. Great public rejoicings were ordered, and not to be outdone by other towns the citizens of Antwerp voted quite a large sum of money to be spent on shows, fireworks, bonfires and street illuminations. The streets were gay with many-coloured flags and banners, and the shopkeepers made a grand display of life-sized figures of the bridegrooms and their brides.

I went with Truyken to see the fireworks; they were really very pretty, but I could not help noticing how little groups of people, just "twos and threes," got together and conversed in low, earnest tones. One of these groups, consisting of three middle-aged men, was so near me that I could not help hearing part of their conversation.

"We are all under sentence of death, and it may be carried out at any moment," were the words that first attracted my attention. I wondered what the speaker could mean; soon after I heard him say, "For once King Philip seems likely to keep his word, for if his last edict is carried out, it seems likely that he will soon rule over a desert. Heresy is at all costs to be rooted out, and Holland may yet count her martyrs by hundreds."

"We must not talk of these things in the public street," quietly said another, and the group broke up. I did not care to look at the fireworks any longer, and begged Truyken to take me home.

As we turned to leave the market-square, I had a strange, almost uncomfortable feeling that we were being followed, and on looking round I saw a tall, grave-looking man who kept very near us. I thought it was the one who had said we were all under sentence of death, but I could not be sure, as I had not seen his face, for it was dark, and his features were almost concealed by the broad-brimmed Flemish bonnet he wore. He kept near us for some time, but without speaking, till Truyken, seeing an old friend in the crowd, stopped to speak to her. The stranger touched me lightly on the arm, and said in a whisper, but in such a kind, gentle manner that I was not afraid, "Do not fear me, my child; but tell your father to be careful; his name has been sent to the officers of the Inquisition as one strongly suspected of holding and teaching what is called heresy. Tell him the message was given you by Herr von Delph. But you must say this to your father when you are alone with him. Good-night, and may God bless and keep you and yours." And without another word he was gone.

Truyken was again by my side, and asked what the stranger had been saying. But I only answered, "I think he knows my father very well, for he gave me a message for him," but I did not tell her what it was. We were a little late in reaching home, and found father, mother, my aunts Christiana and Ursel, and one or two other friends assembled in the family sitting-room, about to begin the evening meal. How I longed to get father all to myself just for one minute, that I might tell him of the warning I had received; but he was about to ask a blessing, so I must wait until the meal was ended.

A few minutes later we heard a knock, and Truyken, looking pale and anxious, came in to say that two strange gentlemen, who said their business was of great importance, desired speech with her master. I thought of the warning I had received hardly an hour before, and grew sick and faint with fear; but father went out of the room in his usual quiet way. Truyken was on the alert, and told us that after a few minutes' conversation (she could not catch all that was said, but thought his help was asked for some man who was said to be dying) my father took his cloak and hat from a peg in the hall, and went with them out into the darkness. Truyken watched them, as far as she could see, but after going a short distance they turned into a passage, and she saw them no more.

Our meal that evening was a very silent one; the hours passed slowly, and when the hands of the great Dutch clock in the hall pointed to half-past ten and father had not returned, mother, who had tried for our sakes to appear calm and cheerful, could hide her anxiety no longer, but sank sobbing into a chair. Aunt Ursel did not try to check her sobs, but said very gently, "Let us pray." In a moment we were on our knees, and I feel sure we all felt less alone, and less afraid after we had taken our trouble to God in prayer. Truyken stood just outside the door, but quite near enough to hear every word, and I heard her join a very hearty Amen to ours for the safety of her master.

Soon after my aunts took their leave, promising to come or send very early the next morning. As soon as I was alone with mother, I told her of my strange meeting with Herr von Delph, and of the message I had been unable to deliver. I felt as if I had in some way been the cause of the trouble through not having given my dear father warning on the moment of my return. But mother understood it all, and soothed me so tenderly, though she said her worst fears were confirmed.

Herr von Delph is, she told me afterwards, a Flemish noble who, though he has not openly joined the reformed party, has in more ways than one proved himself a true friend. Mother would not go to bed, for she had not lost hope that father might yet return, and she should not like him not to find her watching and waiting for him; besides, if he came, he would, she added, be cold and hungry, and a cheerful fire and hot soup would be very welcome.

I begged to be allowed to sit up with her, but she would not hear of it, and at last, feeling quite worn out, I sobbed myself to sleep. Truyken, if she had gone to bed at all, must have risen very early, for long before daylight she was at mother's side with a tempting little breakfast, which she had great difficulty in coaxing her to eat. Poor Truyken! Her eyes were so red and swollen that I felt sure she must have cried a great deal; she was kindness itself, though more than once she said she always thought these new-fashioned ways would bring trouble on the house of Karlzon.

During the day many friends came with words of sympathy and offers of help, but we had no tidings of my father; in this way six long, weary weeks passed; mother seemed to grow paler and thinner every day. My aunt Ursel spent a good deal of time with us; she still visited the prison and made garments for the poor, but she moved and spoke in such a sad, weary way, that it almost made me cry even to look at her. But brighter days were drawing nearer than any of us really believed.

I often helped Truyken by going on errands, and one morning I was crossing the market square when I saw Herr von Delph coming in an opposite direction. My first thought was to run to him, tell him of our trouble, and beg him to get some tidings of my father, but he waved me back and walked quickly onwards.

A few moments later a poor, ragged boy dropped a crumpled paper at my feet, but he, too, hurried past me. I felt strongly impelled to pick up the almost dirty paper, and it was well that I did so, for it was a note addressed to my mother. I made all possible haste home, and we read it together. It was very brief, but as we read we were almost beside ourselves with joy.

"To Constanza Karlzon,

"Leave the side door unlatched and watch to-night, but without a light. You may see your husband between 10 and 12 p.m.

"Herr Von Delph."

Oh! how we watched and waited � mother and I, Aunt Ursel and Truyken, none of us daring to speak a word. A few minutes before midnight we heard a slight sound, then the latch was lifted, and we knew it was father who stood amongst us. Mother drew him into the sitting room, where a fire was burning, and for a little while they were alone together; then the door opened, and we all went in. Father looked ill and worn, and his clothes were torn and his hands bleeding; but he was free, and we were all very happy.

He told us in a few words how the men who came to our house led him into a dark passage; there he was gagged and after being told that he was their prisoner, was taken, not to the common prison, but to a strongly built house at some distance from the town, his place of confinement being an upper room, the window of which was guarded with iron bars. Here he saw no one but the man who appeared to be his jailor. A small quantity of bread and water was placed before him each day. One day, much to his surprise, he found an iron file concealed in the bread, with a note bidding him use it to remove the bars from his windows; the next day a rope of sufficient length to reach the ground was also somehow conveyed to his room.

Herr von Delph had not spared gold in bribing the jailor to give him these things, and had planned everything for his escape. But he could not stay with us, and we knew it would not be safe for him to do so. His friend was waiting for him with a boat; so after a prayer that was a thanksgiving, and a hasty, though tender farewell, he was gone.

Chapter 10.

Faithful Witnesses.

October 17th, 1568. "There is sorrow on the sea; it cannot be quiet." (Jer. 49: 23.) For many days past the Bible words I have just written have seemed to be saying themselves over to me. Sometimes like an anthem, set to grand but mournful music; at others I seem to hear them as the autumn wind sighs through the branches of some almost leafless tree; and yet I have never seen the sea, and mother says that the waveless, sometimes almost stagnant water of our dykes can give me but a very faint idea of what the sea is like.

But at one of the few field preachings we were able to attend I heard it said that God in His word uses the waves of the sea as a picture or figure of nations, or people; and I am sure this must be true of Holland, for there is sorrow everywhere, and no one seems happy or at rest.

But I must not forget or be unthankful for the bright gleams that God in His mercy sometimes sends to lighten the gloom that hangs over the Netherlands. We have seen my father again, though only for a very short time, and more than once he has been able to write to mother; and it is such a joy to know that he is well and able to help the Prince of Orange, who is very kind to him, and has shewn in more ways than one that he looks upon him as a faithful friend.

Our meeting was a very happy one. Father felt it would be unsafe to come to the house, but a messenger from the friend who had given me warning on the night of his arrest, told mother that a lonely marsh at some distance from the town was the appointed place of meeting. So under cover of darkness mother and I set out, guided and attended by Truyken, who would not be persuaded to remain at home when it was possible that she might get sight or speech of her much-loved master.

We had some time to wait, but father came at last, and told us how, on the night of his escape, his friend, Count Herr von Delph, waited for him in a boat, moored at some distance from our house. He was taken to a castle belonging to the count, where for ten weeks, seeing no one but two old and trusted servants, he had remained, treated as the guest of the friend to whom under God he owed his liberty, perhaps his life. But the time had come when it was judged safe for him to leave, and though he must not be seen in Antwerp, two courses lay before him: the count would either use his influence, and his gold, to procure him a passage to England, where, though we could not accompany him, he hoped later to find means of sending us; or he might join the Prince of Orange in Flanders, where he was greatly in need of faithful friends and trusty helpers. Drawing mother to him, he said very gently, "Constanza, you shall decide; which path shall I take?"

Mother was silent for a few moments, and I think I understood something of what she felt, indeed she told me afterwards how the vision of a home in free, peaceful England, where we could all be together, rose before her. On the other hand, she saw for him the hardships and dangers of a soldier's life. But she knew how loyal he was to the prince, and how he loved his country, and how a still higher and purer motive would guide him in his course, his desire to do the will of God so forcing back the tears that were ready to fall, she answered, "Dear Mark, you have given me my choice, but I cannot, dare not decide for you. Do what you believe to be God's way for you. I know it will be best for each and all of us."

We knelt together on the thick rank grass with which the moor was covered, and father prayed, oh! so earnestly, for his loved ones and himself. Then loving words of farewell, in which Truyken was not forgotten, were spoken, and that night father was on his way to join the prince in Flanders.

There have not been any public burnings in Antwerp just lately, but the prisons are said to be full, and we often hear from other parts of Holland of the faith and courage given to those who were called to suffer, or even to die for the Saviour they loved. We can never forget the brave old soldier martyred at Mons, who said, as they bound him to the stake, "I have risked my life often for the emperor, and shall I shrink from offering it now to my Saviour?"

A father, mother and four sons suffered together at Lisle. When the officers of the Inquisition arrested the elder members of the family, two sons, quite young boys, were absent; but on hearing what had happened, they gave themselves up. "Will you also go to the New Jerusalem?" asked the father. "We will go," the boys replied. And they have gone.

One young wife in another place was remanded for a time after all she had loved best on earth had died at the stake. "Ah, my lords," she said, "I have languished long enough in prison. Why do you keep me any longer? I feel strong enough, God be praised! to follow my father, husband and brother." And before many days had passed she too had joined the "noble army of martyrs."

Many hundreds of people, most of whom belong to the better class, have joined the ranks of the "gueux." One bright, spring day great crowds assembled in the most perfect order in the market-square to await the result of an interview the Duchess Margaret had consented to grant to several noblemen who, headed by Louis of Nassau, brother to the Prince of Orange, again presented a petition begging the King of Spain to allow religious liberty to his loyal and faithful subjects of the Netherlands. The duchess seemed even more troubled than before, and tears rolled down her cheeks; but they were tears of passion and wounded pride, and nothing has as yet been gained. Only we see the beggar's dress everywhere; young nobles who not many months ago would not have appeared in public without embroidered cloaks and velvet bonnets, now wear suits of coarse grey cloth, but in many cases the beggar's bowls and wallets they carry are inlaid in silver, with the names or crests of their owners.

We hear that the prince is not pleased with the way in which many of them are acting, and has expressed a fear that they will do more to hinder than to help the cause of truth and freedom. He is still working almost night and day. Truyken, who always speaks her mind pretty plainly, thinks that they are playing beggars, much in the same way in which children sometimes play being soldiers, and that their dainty little bowls will soon be thrown away when there is really nothing to put in them. Truyken, though "no scholar," is, as mother sometimes says, "a woman of quick understanding," and often seems to see a long way before her.

The prince had no easy time of it. He seemed to be wanted by every one at once, and his presence and advice were asked for in so many places that he must often have found it difficult to decide where he was most needed. He had been appointed to act as deputy-governor of Holland and Zealand, and though the terror of the Inquisition still hung like a dark cloud over the whole country, much had been done to bring about a happier state of things, and in some places those of the reformed faith were even allowed, though under certain restrictions, to hold services, conducted by their own pastors. If we could have stayed in Antwerp father thinks the outbreak, that will make the 15th of August a day to be long and sorrowfully remembered, would never have taken place; but just a week before he had left for Brussels, having received an urgent message from the duchess that she needed his help to protect her from the nobles, who were getting so angry that no notice had been taken of their petitions, that she was afraid they would take up arms against her.

A great festival was to be held in honour of the Virgin Mary, but there were many in the town and neighbourhood who saw that it was wrong to worship pictures and images. These were, for the most part, orderly and peace-loving people, who would have been content to shew their disapproval by not joining the procession; but the gueux and their leaders seemed ready for any wild and lawless undertaking; they were quickly joined by others who, though they cared nothing at all for the gospel, were impatient under the despotic rule of King Philip and the duchess.

On that day a grand procession always took place. A very large image of the Virgin Mary, dressed in costly robes, glittering with gold and jewels, was carried round the city, accompanied by bands of music, and attended by priests and choir boys, who chanted a litany composed in honour of "The Queen of heaven."

And what was the idol? Just a lifeless image, a helpless, dressed-up, wooden figure, that could have had little, if any, likeness to the lowly and gentle Mary of Nazareth, whose own words, "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour" (Luke 1: 46, 47), God has had written in the Bible for us.

We heard that there was to be a rising of the people, but only half believed the report. The procession was followed by a crowd of wild boys and men who were, it was easy to see, ready for any mischief. Truyken, though she did not join the procession, placed herself at the door, kneeling and crossing as the image passed. At that moment one of the boys threw a handful of mud, aimed not at Truyken, but at the image; some of it fell, however, upon her snow-white apron, and this double insult made her very angry; she ran after the boy and boxed his ears soundly.

Mother was very thankful, and so was I, that the riot did not begin at our doors. The procession got fairly well through the city streets, and the image was replaced in the church, though idle crowds still lingered round the doors. Some of the wisest of our neighbours tried to persuade the people to go quietly to their homes, but they were too noisy and excited to listen to reason, and as the counsellors could not agree upon what was best to be done, they did nothing to prevent the riot, that we had only too good grounds to fear would follow.

Chapter 11.

A Strange Story.

December 1st, 1568. It was a white world I looked out upon from my bedroom window this morning. For some weeks past we have had wild, wintry weather with frequent showers of snow; but last night there was a heavy fall, and when the sun shone brightly, as it did for a little while after breakfast, I thought I had seldom seen anything more beautiful than the almost unbroken lines of white-roofed houses; while the icicles that hung from the rigging of the ships in the harbour, or from the branches of leafless trees, glittered and sparkled in the sunshine till I thought the diamonds I once saw worn by the duchess on some state occasion were not so bright and beautiful.

But about noon the weather changed again. Heavy clouds covered the sky, while showers of sleet made the day anything but a pleasant one. And now, as I have finished my task of needlework, Truyken is busy in the store-room, and mother and Aunt Ursel have gone to carry some nourishing food to a sick neighbour, I will try to fill a few pages of my MS. book with the strange, sad story of what happened in Antwerp two days after the procession, in honour of the Virgin Mary, I have already named.

We hoped that when the wild, disorderly crowd had tired themselves out with hooting and shouting they would disperse, and go quietly to their homes. But all through the night groups hung about the door and windows of the cathedral. No one seemed to know what was going to happen, but they were ready for any mischief. The day of the procession had been a public holiday, and on the following no one seemed ready for work. Several friends, who feared an outbreak, tried to induce them to go away, but were only able to succeed with a few of the better disposed. On the morning of the third day a crowd had collected; an old woman who used to sit on the marble steps leading to the porch, selling tapers, medals and small pictures of the so-called saints who had shrines or chapels within the great building, had her basket snatched from her and her stock-in-trade scattered on the ground. Soon after the mob entered the beautiful old church, and the work of destruction began.

A fight took place between a young sailor, a devout Romanist, and a man in a ragged, black cloak, who had mounted one of the pulpits and was saying rude, mocking things about the begging friars and their ways; both fell, rolling together down the pulpit steps, and the crowd grew every minute more excited and angry. Images were torn from their places and dashed against the walls, or thrown upon the marble pavement. The great image of Mary was dragged round the church with ropes, and then broken into a thousand pieces. No women were present but a few of the lowest class, who, with yells and coarse jests urged the men and boys to finish the work they had begun. And yet, strange though it may seem, no lives were lost; even the old taper-woman was protected from injury. The gold and jewels were not stolen, but thrown into dark corners, or left among the broken fragments, as if they were things of no value.

We did not think it would be wise or safe to go out of doors while the tumult lasted, but a day or two after Truyken came in from the market crying bitterly. I had not seen her in tears since the night of my dear father's arrest, and putting my arms coaxingly round her neck, I begged her to tell me the cause of her trouble. For some minutes she seemed unable to speak; at last she said, with great sobs almost choking her voice, "The saints! the blessed saints! they are torn to pieces."

For a moment I felt quite puzzled, for I did not know of what had been taking place in the church, so I said, "Not the saints in heaven, dear Truyken; they are safe." "Oh, yes!" she answered, still weeping, "Thank God! the mob cannot touch them." "Is it the saints in Holland?" I asked eagerly, "Has King Philip given fresh power to the Inquisition? Are there to be more burnings or drownings in Antwerp?" " If so, I have heard nothing of them," was her reply, "It is the saints in the cathedral I mean; they are all broken to shivers, heads, arms and legs strewn about in every direction; and the beautiful robes of the Virgin Mary all embroidered with gold, and sparkling with gems, are torn to shreds. Oh, that I should have lived to see this! Poor Truyken! She threw herself into a chair, covered her face with her hands, while large tears dropped through her fingers and fell thick and fast upon her spotless apron.

I was deeply touched by the sight of her sorrow. At last I said, "I am sorry, very sorry, that so much mischief has been done, but the images are only wood or marble. They could not feel the blows that were showered upon them." But still Truyken refused to be comforted.

From the cathedral the mob went to the other city churches, where the same work of destruction was carried on. Mother says that the story of the seven days and nights during which "The Antwerp Fury" lasted will always be a blotted, tear-stained page of our country's history. The duchess was very angry, and it needed all the influence of her friends and advisers to prevent her from flying in hot haste from her palace at Brussels.

I hardly know whether the Romanists, or we of the reformed faith, were most troubled about this outbreak. The Romanists were angry because their images had been destroyed, we were deeply grieved, for all the blame of it was laid at our doors, and we feared what might follow.

For a little while all seemed quiet, and we began to indulge some faint hope that the storm might blow over. But only a few months passed, and on a bright morning toward the end of May, the old cruel edicts of persecution, revised and re-written, were once more exhibited on the doors of public buildings, or posted at the corners of the principal streets; and as we read, it seemed as if for us all the brightness had faded out of the glorious spring day, for we were reminded that all grown persons who had attended a field-preaching might, if the charge was proved against them, be hurried off to prison, or even sent to the gallows; little children were to be beaten with rods, while all who had sung Protestant hymns at the burial of a relation, or bought any of the forbidden books, or said a word against a priest, were under sentence of death; all their property would be claimed by the Inquisition, half of it being given as a reward to the person or persons who had informed against them.

For a little while we were afraid to speak, almost to breathe; for there was not a single member of the little company in Antwerp who wished to worship God according to the teaching of His word against whom it would not have been easy to prove one or more of the offences named in the edict. But the king, we heard shortly afterwards, considered the edict far too mild and merciful, and, acting upon the advice of the cardinals, had ordered the Duke of Alva to enter the Netherlands, with as large a force as he could collect, and crush out heresy. No one was to be spared. Fire and sword were to do their worst, and truly, as Herr von Delph had said, the whole nation lay under sentence of death.

We had not had a letter from father for more than a month, and were getting anxious for his safety, when one night, just after supper, we were startled by a loud knocking at the front door. As Truyken opened it, we saw our unlooked-for, and certainly unwelcome visitors were the chief constable of Antwerp, followed by a party of the servants of the Inquisition under the command of one or two petty officers. The constable handed a paper to Truyken, telling her in a gruff, harsh voice to give it to her mistress, and not keep honest people waiting in the cold. It was an order giving them liberty to search the house for forbidden books, as such were known to be in the possession of Mark and Constanza Karlzon.

Mother turned pale, and I felt as if my heart stood still with fear, for there was hardly a drawer or cupboard in our house that did not contain some book or letter, the possession of which would be treated as a crime worthy of death. She moved a few steps forward, but would have fallen if Truyken had not caught her, and placed her in a chair. "Stay where you are," she whispered, "I will go, I understand these people better than you do." And she led the party from room to room, opening cupboards, and shewing them the springs of secret drawers, with a politeness and seeming readiness that puzzled us greatly.

But to their surprise and disappointment they found nothing. The papers in father's desk were contracts with regard to goods sent out from his factory, or receipts for monies paid to the wool-merchant. They were baffled, and some spoke of leaving the house, when the constable cried out, "Halt! I am too old at my work to lose the scent so easily. I came to find forbidden books, and I believe they are to be found. We may yet find a secret cupboard in the large bedroom." We trembled, for we knew that our most precious, as well as dangerous books, were hidden in the recess I had discovered in my play so long ago; and we were not sure that even Truyken, dear, faithful Truyken, knew their exact hiding-place. But she still led the way, and even drew aside the bed-hangings, saying, as she did so, "The Karlzons, as everybody knows, come of as good a stock as any in the Low Countries; and every old family has its treasure cupboard. But we have no need to fear to open ours to you. The constables of Antwerp are no thieves, but keepers of the public peace."

So saying, she pointed to the secret panel; it flew open at a blow from a heavy staff one of the men carried, and the search began. What did they find? A little plate, some old-fashioned gold and silver ornaments, dresses, and high neck ruffles that had been worn by my father's grandmother sixty years before; but no books, till in the very far corner of an old press, the quick ear of one caught the rustle of paper and he dragged it out. Yes, there was a book, the leaves were yellow with age, and when he brought it to the light, which Truyken still held, it proved to be an illuminated Roman Catholic mass book. Throwing it upon the floor with a gesture of contempt, he turned and left the house, followed by his men, while Truyken made a great show of picking up the book, wiping the dust from its covers, and saying, in a very loud voice, that when she was young good books were not trodden under foot.

What became of our books? We do not know till this day, for Truyken still keeps her secret, and as her courage and faithfulness have under God saved our lives, mother does not feel that we have any right to force it from her; so we can only think that in some way she had received warning of the intended visit and buried or destroyed all that would have led to our arrest on the previous night.

Chapter 12.

Birds of Passage.

May 1st, 1569. It is not really so very long ago since we left our dear old home at Antwerp; and yet so much has happened, and we have been often such weary wanderers, that when I try to recall the peaceful, happy days of my childhood, it all seems like a dream, and I find it hard to believe that we were not always the "birds of passage" we have been during the last six or eight months.

The last entry I made in my MS. book was an account of the fruitless visit paid by order of the Inquisition to our house in search of forbidden books. The officers were very angry, and though many friends said that Antwerp was no longer a safe home for us, and advised our leaving with all possible speed, my father was still with the Prince of Orange, and mother would not act without knowing his wishes.

Hardly a week had passed when a trusty messenger brought a letter in his well-known handwriting. He was well, and though the Prince's army was small, and he, with others, often had to endure great hardships, he was hopeful that Holland would yet be free. His fears were for us. We must leave Antwerp at once. No one was safe. The Duke of Alva with his army had already entered the Low Countries, and terrible cruelties marked their progress. He shewed no mercy either to Romanists or Protestants, for the chief friends and advisers of the Duchess Margaret, the Counts Egmont and Horn, had been arrested by his orders at Brussels; and Count Egmont was, as every one knew, a zealous Catholic. Father wished us to go to Friesland, partly because he had a little property there, and partly because it would, he thought, be easy to escape from there into Germany, where so many in the faith had already taken refuge.

Aunt Ursel decided to go with us; her brother would, she said, never forgive her if she refused to share our fortunes; besides, she loved us, and were we not one in faith, and so one in danger? Mother said at first that it would be better not to take Truyken. After so many years of faithful, loyal service to the Karlzon family, it would not be fair or kind even to wish her to share the privations we might be called upon to meet, for we should be very poor; for though father had been one of the richest merchants of our city, the closing of the factory had meant the loss of nearly all our worldly goods, and trade was so bad everywhere in Holland, the small income from other sources we had hoped still to call our own did not come regularly.

Truyken had saved a little money, had relations in the country, and it would, mother thought, be much better for her to spend her few remaining years in quiet and comfort.

We all felt the parting would be a very hard one, but to our great surprise, when mother first proposed it to her, she did not object, as we expected she would. She listened quietly, and went out of the room wiping her eyes, but there was a smile playing about the corners of her mouth I did not quite understand. However, with her usual good sense and promptness, she set about packing the few things we felt we must take, and they were very few, for nearly everything of value had to be left. Perhaps it was as well that the boat was to sail in three days, for we were all too busy to have any time for regrets.

All was ready, and as the boat would sail in an hour, we must go on board at once. But where was Truyken? We dreaded saying "Good-bye," but it must be done. She was nowhere to be found. What had become of her? she had prepared our last meal, and even packed some food to be eaten during the journey; but no one had seen her since she left the room laden with packages.

We dared not linger, and though I could not forget my dear old nurse, the bustle and excitement of going on board for a time put other thoughts out of my mind. When night came, we three, mother, aunt Ursel and I, wrapped ourselves up in our cloaks, and lay down upon deck, the air of the tiny cabin was so close and stifling. We did not talk much, for the day had been a sad and trying one. At last from very weariness we fell asleep. What was our surprise to be awakened by a familiar voice saying, "We land here, but you must drink some hot coffee first." The voice was Truyken's. We started up and rubbed our eyes. Were we really awake, or still dreaming? It was no dream, and in another moment I was in her arms. "Truyken, Truyken," said my mother, with a half- choked sob, "How did you come here?" "The same way that you did," replied Truyken coolly "by the boat, only I was on board an hour before you were. Did you think Truyken was such a fair-weather friend that she would let you go out into a cold, hard world without her, and you as ignorant of its ways as three babes?" So we kissed our faithful friend and said no more. What more could we say? But ever since we have been glad, so very glad, that Truyken cast in her lot with us. Her hands never seem to grow weary of serving us, while her strong common-sense and ready wit have helped us over many an unforeseen difficulty.

We landed at a quaint little wharf, and when Truyken had collected our belongings, which she had taken care were not more than we could carry, our long, wearisome overland journey began. Everywhere the news of Alva's approach had struck terror into the peaceful inhabitants of towns and villages, and it was said that one hundred thousand houses were deserted. The gueux had broken up, and the few who remained were for the most part leading lawless, reckless lives. Some lived in the forests, and were known as the "wild gueux," others formed a small fleet of boats, and called themselves "sea beggars." Strange, and often sad stories were told of them and their doings, but we remember with thankfulness how, under God, we owed a very narrow escape to a party of gueux.

We were met by a band of Spanish troopers, and hope seemed to die within us, for in their eagerness to root out heresy, Alva's soldiers held no code of honour, but attacked the unarmed and helpless, while neither women nor children were spared. Flight was impossible, and they were within a few yards of us, when we heard the old cry, "Vivent les gueux," and a mounted party dashed out from the forest. A fight followed, in which several troopers were killed, and the rest fled in confusion. The gueux followed them a little way, but soon returned to us, and in the leader of the band we found an old friend. We slept that night under their guard, and in the morning continued our journey on horses belonging to the troopers, which had been captured by the gueux.

We found that for a time at least we could not reach the old house, half a mansion, half a castle (for the Karlzons were descended from a family of Flemish nobles), as the place was already occupied by Alva's troops, so gladly fell in with Truyken's proposal that we should all go to her uncle's farm on the north-eastern bank of the Zuider-Zee. "Uncle Jacob is," she said, "a good man, and a true Christian, though he is neither Catholic or Lutheran; he calls himself a Baptist. I think you Protestants are a quarrelsome family, but when trouble comes you do hang together, and that's not a bad thing in any family."

It was night when we reached our destination. We were cold, tired and hungry, when a light in a long, low building seemed almost to promise us a welcome. Its friendly gleam seemed to give us fresh strength and courage, and we were soon there. "What can they be doing in the great barn?" said Truyken, "harvest was over quite a month ago." But we were not left to wonder long. Under cover of the darkness a few Christians had left their scattered homes, and were holding a meeting for prayer. As we stood outside, not wishing to disturb them, we heard the voice of old Jacob Anderzon lead in simple, but heartfelt thanksgiving for the mercy that had once more allowed a few poor, scattered sheep of the Saviour's flock to come together. Then the barn door opened, and though the little company seemed at first startled by the sight of strangers, a few words from Truyken explained all. We were led to the house, where Jacob, and his German wife Freda, seemed to vie with each other as to which could shew the greatest kindness to their unlooked-for guests.

Rest and food were very welcome; we were all too tired that night to talk or even to think much, but as we sat at breakfast the next morning, Truyken said, "Uncle Jacob, when I saw you last, three years ago, you were a hale, strong man. You have not yet reached three-score years, how is it that you are so lame and bent like a man of eighty?" Uncle Jacob, as we all soon learned to call him, smiled a somewhat sad smile, and answered gently, "Our Lord and Saviour has allowed me, in some little way, to have fellowship with Him in suffering since you were here, Truyken."

He would have changed the subject, but Freda added, "Ask the priests, who bent and crippled his strong, straight limbs upon the rack. A great persecution arose in this part of the country against the Baptists, and Jacob was thrown into prison, and tortured on the rack because he would not betray his friends, or give the names of those with whom we had met to worship God."

Jacob interposed, "But, dear wife, remember how much we have to be thankful for. It is very few who fall into the hands of the priests who come out until God sees fit to set the spirit free from the poor, maimed body. It always seems to me as if God must have sent His angel and delivered me out of their hands."

After family prayers, our kind hosts proposed taking us over the farm. Freda had all the pride of a true German housewife in her poultry-yard and well-filled cheese presses, and as mother was able to pay a small sum for our board, it was settled then and there that we should remain at the farm till we could safely continue our journey.

I can never forget the happy months we spent at the farm. I enjoyed the free, country life fully, and after a few days, Freda let me help her feed the poultry, and taught me how to milk Whitestar, a remarkably gentle and good-tempered cow. Mother said, though there were no vine-clad hills, she seemed almost to be living over again the days of her own childhood, and her visits to Annetta's farm.

Chapter 13.

"The Noble Army of Martyrs."

March 11th, 1570. It must be nearly a year since I wrote even a page in my MS. book. The months we spent at the farm seemed often marked by the change of seasons, or the rotation of crops, rather than by great and stirring events; and we heard so little of what was going on in the great world outside the dykes, that sometimes it seemed hard to believe that we had ever lived in the constant stir and bustle of a busy sea-port town.

It was very seldom that father was able to write to us, or, I should have said, to get an opportunity of sending his letters; and when they were delayed longer than usual, mother, though she was just as kind and ready to help others as she had always been, would move about the house and farm with such a sad look on her face, and such a tone of wistful patience in her voice, that it made me feel almost ready to cry every time I looked at her, or heard her speak. If father could only have paid us a visit now and then, our days at the farm would have been very happy ones. We had only intended to stay a few weeks, but weeks grew into months, and still we were the guests of Uncle Jacob and his wife.

Truyken, with her willing hands and strong common sense, proved a great help to Freda in all kinds of house and farm work, while mother and aunt Ursel were always willing to undertake any light duties; and I, well, I fed the chickens, dusted the rooms, and, later on, taught the little ones; for, by twos and threes, six orphan children were received into our small household. Two of these, Max, a curly-headed, blue-eyed boy of seven, and Whilma, a quiet, gentle little girl of six, were the children of parents who had chosen death at the stake rather than a denial of their Lord and Saviour. The four others were all of one family, whose father had been killed by a band of the Duke of Alva's soldiers while vainly attempting to defend his home and family, the mother dying shortly afterwards of grief and privation.

We were a very happy household; "Uncle Jacob," as we all loved to call the dear old man, said it made him feel quite young again to have so many children round him. On summer evenings, when the work of the day was done (for there were no drones in our hive, and even the youngest were taught in some way to be of use to others), we used to gather in the large, old-fashioned. porch, while Jacob read from his well-worn Bible � a costly possession, valued first for its own sake, and also as the parting gift of a noble exile, a brother in the faith, who for many weeks had found rest and a safe asylum in Jacob's humble dwelling; when he closed the book our voices would mingle in a hymn of praise, or we knelt in prayer, while Uncle Jacob committed his household and himself to the care of the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps.

I noticed that at first Truyken used either to busy herself about some household task, or, with her knitting in her hand, seat herself at some distance from the group; but little by little she drew nearer, so that at last she could not help hearing all; and then a change came over her, her knitting dropped unheeded by her side, as, with a look of fixed attention, she would seem to drink in the sweet Bible stories, just as the thirsty ground drinks in the rain.

In the winter our gatherings were in the farmhouse kitchen; and after the children were in bed Uncle Jacob would read to us, very often the letters of the martyrs. Some of these touched me so deeply that I begged him to let me copy one or two. There was one from Jeronymus Sergersin to his wife that we never seemed to tire of hearing. They were imprisoned together at Antwerp, though not in the same cell, in 1551; but they did not die together. Many of their letters were preserved and treasured as very precious things among the little groups of believers scattered here and there in the Low Countries; and many tears have, I believe, fallen over those true and tender words, traced by fingers made stiff and trembling by the torture of the rack. I will copy a few lines mother and I liked so much.

"Great peace, gladness, joy and comfort," he wrote, "a firm faith and good confidence with an ardent love to God, I wish to my most beloved wife, Lysken . . . . I pray the Lord very earnestly for you, that He will comfort you, and remove what is too heavy for you. I know well, my beloved, that you are greatly distressed on my account; but put away all sorrow and look to Jesus. Think only what a faithful God we serve. Know that I received your letter by my mother, which I read with tears. I thank you that you so truly comfort me, and rejoice in hearing that you are so well contented.

"I cannot sufficiently thank the Lord for all the strength He gives me in this trial. He is such a faithful Leader, He gives His servants such courage, and so strengthens them that they do not fear. Let us guard this treasure, for we have it in earthen vessels; but it is much too precious to be hidden. One (in this prison) calls to the other, and pours out his treasure, so that it may be seen. We are so happy, everlasting praise to the Lord! We call upon Him, we sing together, and find great joy in comforting and strengthening each other. I also have seen from afar the promised land, and hope soon to enter the beautiful city; there is no night there.

"May the almighty God so strengthen you with His blessed word that you may abide faithful to the end! Then shall our despised bodies be glorified, and fashioned after the likeness of His glory. Then shall our weeping be turned into laughter, and our sorrow into joy. Yes, my Lysken, God shall yet wipe away all tears from our eyes. Then there must first be weeping. Let us be content, nay, even joyful in sufferings here, for we shall soon be clothed in white robes. Oh, what a glorious company we shall form when united with the great company of the redeemed of all ages!"

Jeronymus was burnt at the stake on the 2nd September, 1551. To the last he witnessed a good confession, and died rejoicing that he was counted worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ. Lysken was kept in prison for some months longer. Her faith was firm and bright to the end. The last time she was seen she was standing at the window of her cell singing a hymn. When at last the day of her martyrdom was fixed, some of her friends, hearing of it, arranged to meet in good time outside the prison, in the hope of being able to speak cheering words to her on her way to the stake. But they were too late; between three and four o'clock in the morning she had been taken to the river and drowned. But a few who were astir, even at that early hour, saw the deed of darkness, and said Lysken walked firmly to the river's brink, and her last words were, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." We will not sorrow for our friends, for they are beyond the reach of sorrow, sin or death, "with Christ, which is far better."

One beautiful story we often begged Uncle Jacob to tell was that of a martyr who died not only for his faith, but for his kindness in saving the life of the officer who had been sent to arrest him. It happened only two winters ago. As Dick Williamzon was fleeing for his life across one of the frozen dykes, closely followed by his pursuers, the ice cracked under his feet, and a black, yawning gulf behind him lay between him and those who were in full chase. For a moment he was safe, and he knew it; but looking back he saw the foremost of his pursuers struggling and in danger of drowning in deep water; Dick stooped over the edge of the ice, and at the risk of falling in himself, saved the drowning man, who, grateful to his deliverer, begged that he might be allowed to go free; but the officer in command would not consent; he said they had come out to arrest Williamzon, and arrest him they must; and so he was bound, taken to prison, and a few weeks later burnt alive.

We got to know quite a number of the christian friends of Uncle Jacob and Aunt Freda. At first we, or perhaps it was only myself, were half afraid of them, they were so grave in their manners and conversation; but as I got to know them better, I found much to admire, and even to love. They were so godly in their lives, so simple in their habits, though sometimes I could not help thinking they were somewhat narrow and one-sided in their judgments; but mother said that that may be partly owing to the hardness with which they have been treated. Many have suffered fines and imprisonments, and some, like Uncle Jacob, even the terrible torture of the rack, just because they would not deny their faith, or betray their friends. There has been so little sunshine in their lives, that they could hardly help living in a kind of twilight. Yet they were most kind and self-denying, and when they heard of any cases of special need among their brethren, they would forget their own poverty and send help to any in prison, or to the widows and orphans of the martyrs.

I hardly know who watched with the greatest interest during the weeks of early spring for the return of the storks, I, or the children. For several years a pair of very large birds had, on their yearly return from their winter home in Africa, built their nest in an old cart wheel that had been fixed upon the roof of the farm on purpose to encourage their visits. Though their nest was somewhat clumsy, and not so neatly built as those of smaller birds, it was so pretty to watch them feeding their young and teaching them to fly. Aunt Ursel told me of a pair of storks who had built their nest upon the roof of a wooden house that caught fire. They could easily have saved themselves by flight, but they had a pair of young ones, more than half grown, but unable to fly. Each parent bird gently lifted a young one from the nest, and tried to fly off with it; but the young birds were too heavy. Then they stood still for a little while, as if considering what was best to be done; then they tried to carry one between them, but were only able to fly a few yards; the roof was by that time in flames, but returning to the nest, they laid the baby birds down again, and themselves perished in the flames rather than desert their offspring. Numbers of people in the street below saw and admired, but were unable to help the brave birds.

Chapter 14.

"Stormy Wind Fulfilling His Word."

February 4th, 1572. It seems almost like a dream, and yet I know it is all true, and we are really in the old moated house in which my father spent some happy years of his boyhood; every room from the ivy-covered turret down to the servants' hall, every nook in the delightfully old-fashioned garden, has its story, and Aunt Ursel knows them all, and never seems to tire of telling them to me and the orphans.

For we are all here, Uncle Jacob and Aunt Freda (as we all call her now). We are very happy, and if father could only be with us, his presence would banish that sad, anxious look I notice so often on dear mother's face, and then I should not have anything left to wish for; but she never complains, and tries to encourage us to be thankful that God not only allows him to take part in the struggle that will, we hope, when it is ended, give religious liberty to thousands of Christians in the Low Countries, but that we have been so wonderfully cared for and kept unharmed in the midst of so many dangers. And so we have; for though our peaceful retreat at the farm was swept away by a flood, and everything Uncle Jacob possessed carried away by rising waters, we were not, like many of our neighbours, left homeless and destitute.

It was a strange, never-to-be-forgotten experience. We had been having quite a long spell of wild, wintry weather; for some days the waters of the Zuider-Zee had been slowly but steadily rising, and by the end of October it was thought well to collect the cattle from the low-lying pasture lands, and bring them for safety into the outbuildings on the farm. But still we had no thought of danger, though we knew that the field upon which the farm stood lay many feet below the level of the sea. On the 1st of November heavy masses of dark clouds drifted across the sky, and the autumn wind moaned and whistled with a strange, threatening sound. Uncle Jacob and Truyken brought the cattle from the sheds into two of the lower rooms, and we all were together in the topmost story. No one felt like going to bed, though one or two of the youngest of the orphans slept amid all the raging of the storm without.

Uncle Jacob took his well-worn Bible and read such a beautiful psalm; part of it was, I remember, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea: though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah." (Psa. 46: 1-3.) As I listened I found myself wondering if David had ever listened as we were then listening to the sullen roar of waters, that were every moment rising higher and higher.

With the first grey streak of dawn the crash came. For a few moments we heard nothing but the rush of waters, then the house shook to its foundations, and we knew that the dykes had given way, and the country for miles round was under water; as daylight advanced we saw the roofs of a few scattered homesteads looking like islands in the midst of a great sea. It was a moment of real peril; we thought that our last hour had come. The children, roused from sleep, clung to us, crying piteously; but we all grew strangely calm and still, as dear old Jacob Anderzon said, "Let us pray." We all knelt, and in very simple words he told God as his heavenly Father of our great danger, and asked Him to do that which would be most for His own glory. I do not know how long we waited after that prayer; to me it seemed a very long time, but mother says she does not think it was more than half an hour. At last we heard the splash of oars; the farm servants had, with great difficulty, and at the risk of their lives, got out the boats, and one by one we made our way through a skylight on to the roof, and were taken off in two boats.

For some hours we tossed about on that wild waste of waters, hardly knowing what to hope for, or what lay before us, for the flood was still rising, and one by one the roofs that had looked so much like little islands were lost to sight. We were chilled to the bone by the bitter wind, and drenched with spray; we had not been able to carry either food or water away with us, the children cried with cold and hunger, and hope seemed almost to have died out of all our hearts, when we saw a ship in full sail coming towards us, though still too far off to decide if she would prove a friend or a foe. If she proved to be a Spanish cutter, it would be better, we all felt, to die where we were than to allow ourselves to be taken prisoners. We strained our eyes in trying to see what colours she carried at her mast-head; but in vain.

At last one of the men who was helping to row cried out, "I have seen that trim little brig before; she is 'The Water Witch.' Her captain and crew are 'Beggars of the Sea,' they will take us on board, we shall yet be saved!" And so we were! We were all taken on board, food and hot drinks given to us, and on finding where we wished to go, the captain changed his plans, sailing round the north coast of Holland to take us to the old home of the Karlzons. Uncle Jacob and his wife are to make their home with us, and we are all very happy about it; for, as mother says, we can never repay the kindness we received from them, or forget how freely when we were homeless wanderers they opened their home and their hearts to us; and now that their little farm and all their worldly goods have been swept away by the flood, we are so glad that though we have only a little, we can share it with those who have lost their all.

No word of murmur or complaint is ever heard from Uncle Jacob. Once, when I heard Truyken ask him if it did not sometimes seem hard, that after so many years of toil everything should have been swept away, he only bowed his head and said, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." (Job 1: 21.)

The orphans are all with us, and though it is not always easy to provide food for such a large and hungry family, "the blessing of the Lord" seems to make a little go a long way. We have a cow, and as Truyken and Aunt Freda are clever at all kinds of dairy work we have no lack of milk, cheese and butter; we grow our own vegetables, and Uncle Jacob is busy about all manner of occupations in the house and garden, for the old place has been neglected and allowed to get very much out of repair. We often fear he is working far beyond his strength, as we cannot help noticing how feeble he has grown during the last few months; his sight, too, seems to be failing; he can seldom see now to read his long-loved Bible, but many psalms and chapters are stored in his memory, and one or other of us is always ready and glad to read to him.

The other day I was reading to him the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel by John; he listened with a look of deep peace on his face; when I had finished he said, "I often think I am almost at my journey's end. Day by day as the lights of earth grow paler, the light of 'the many mansions' grows brighter, and my homeward way cannot be a dark one. I have learnt to love you, Mayken, almost as dearly as if you had been my own child; but if, before the return of your father, my home-call should come, I am content; for I shall leave you in better care and in safer keeping than his or mine, in that of the Saviour-God, who has led me by the right way, who was near me in prison, who will never fail me, nor forsake me."

Father's letters are still few and far between, but they are so bright and cheerful that their coming always seems to bring a ray of sunshine, no matter how dull or dark the day on which they arrive. He says very little about the hardships of the campaign; the long, weary marches, the cold and hunger often suffered by the prince's troops, for money is very scarce with them, and many who had made high-sounding promises of help failed in the time of their greatest need. Father has been employed by the prince on several missions in the hope of raising money to pay his soldiers, one being to England, where so many of our brethren in the faith have already found peaceful and prosperous homes. But they had scarcely reached the English coast when they were forbidden to land and driven away by order of Queen Elizabeth, though we cannot believe that at heart she is really unfriendly to the Protestant cause, but acted under pressure in consequence of some treaty she had made, or intends to make, with Philip of Spain.

Some victories have, however, been gained, and more than one town in the Netherlands has opened its gates and given a right hearty welcome to the prince and his troops. He has pawned or sold all his own plate and jewels, and never seems afraid to face toil and danger if the cause of freedom is to be served by his doing so. Father writes, that amid all the stormy scenes of camp life the prince still finds or makes time to read his Bible; and his quiet but firm faith in God has been a great help and encouragement to himself and many others.

I sometimes find myself wondering how all this will end. But I am, I think, learning one thing to say from my very heart, "What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee." When I see what care God takes that there should be seeds and berries for the birds, and sunshine and dewdrops for the flowers, I feel sure He will not forget His children.

Yesterday was quite an eventful day in our little household. In spite of all the mending and patching that has been done the children's clothes wear out so quickly, that to keep them from being in rags has needed a good deal of time and thought. Mother said one day, "How I wish your Aunt Christiana could see the poor little things! She has a kind heart, and her linen chests are well filled." So it was arranged that mother and Aunt Ursel should visit her in her home at Leyden, which, though not so large or grand as the one she and her husband had been obliged to leave in great haste at Antwerp because my uncle, John von Brock, was known to be one of the friends and supporters of the Prince of Orange, was still very comfortable and nicely furnished.

They returned the next day, bringing Aunt Christiana with them. The sight of the children seemed to touch her deeply, and as their clear young voices joined in their evening hymn, I saw a tear steal quietly down her cheek. When they were in bed, and we sat talking, she said suddenly, addressing my mother, "Constanza, if you would trust me with that blue-eyed boy who sang so sweetly, I should like to take him to bring up as my own child. Since my darling Henrich died, my heart has often seemed empty and hungry for affection, and it will do us good to hear the patter of a child's feet, or the ring of its laugh about the house."

We were all so pleased and thankful, as we knew not only that it would be a good and happy home for our little Max, but that as both my uncle and aunt were true Christians, he would be wisely and lovingly trained. When told in the morning that he was going to leave us, he cried so long and bitterly that we all felt it would be cruel to force him away.

For a few moments we were all silent, hardly knowing what to say or do then Bertha, a gentle child of six, nestled close up to her side, and slipping her hand into hers, whispered, "I should like to go with you, but please will you take Bertrand, too?"

Aunt Christiana did not say "No" to the little pleader, and when on the next day she set out for Leyden with her two little charges, we all thought she looked happier than she had done since the death of her only child.

Chapter 15.

The Siege of Leyden.

May 29th, 1574. It must be quite two years since I wrote even a page in my MS. book. I might not find it easy to explain why I have neglected it so long. So much has taken place in Holland lately that it cannot have been that I had nothing worth writing about, but that I had no heart to write it, for it is always sad and weary work to tell the story of disaster and defeat. When we waved our good-byes to Aunt Christiana and the orphans, whom she has since loved and cared for almost as if they had been her own children, we were bright and hopeful, telling ourselves and each other of the good times that were, we said and believed, not far off. So many towns in the Low Countries had opened their gates to the prince, so many hailed him as the long-looked-for deliverer of Holland, that it seems hard, very hard, to believe that such bright visions were to end only in failure and disappointment; not that we have quite lost hope, for the prince still lives, and we are still told to "have faith in God."

The army of the Prince of Orange! Where is it? His best and bravest generals have fallen on the field of battle, and the army, scattered and discontented because the prince was unable to pay them longer, have, with the exception of a faithful few, broken up and returned to their homes. We are in Leyden, with no prospect of being able to leave it while the siege lasts. This is the second time this year that the city has been besieged; in the spring it was relieved by Count Louis, but he has fallen. The prince, we hear, worn out with sorrow and anxiety, is dangerously ill, and unable to rise from his bed, so he cannot at present come and help us. The Duke of Alva and his army are outside our walls, and for the last four days the roar of their cannon has hardly ceased; they have, it is true, proposed conditions of peace, but Alva and his soldiers are too well known for our citizens to trust high-sounding promises. Wherever a town or city has surrendered they have broken faith with the too trustful inhabitants, and cruelly put them to the sword; and we all feel that we would rather die within the walls of our besieged city than fall into the hands of the Spaniards.

Just before our coming to Leyden father was able to pay us one short, hurried visit, but he was the bearer of such terrible news that our delight at seeing him once more was strangely mingled with sorrow. He looked so ill and worn that for a moment even mother hardly knew him; but when he said, "Constanza, Mayken," we knew his voice, just as full of tenderness as it used to be in the old, happy days at Antwerp, and we were more than content.

He told us of the defeat of the prince's army, and of the sickness of its brave leader; many prayers are, we know, being offered for his recovery, if such be the will of God, and we cannot but hope that he may still be spared to us. Father's visit has confirmed our worst fears for our friends in France. We had, it is true, heard rumours of a great slaughter of Huguenots, as the Protestants of France are often called, having taken place on the 24th August, 1572, but hoped things were not quite so bad as had been represented; we had yet to learn the double dealing and unfair means by which it had been brought about. The story of "Black Bartholomew" will, I think, always be one of the saddest and darkest pages in the history of France. I cannot write much about all that happened on that dreadful night. Father would not tell us all, but as I recall what I heard, my very blood seems to turn cold.

The leader of the Huguenots was the young and gallant Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry the Fourth of France. He was a brave soldier, and his high sense of honour had given him a warm place in the affections of the Protestant party, who hoped much from the fact that he had warmly espoused their cause. Next in command was Admiral Coligny, a man whose sterling worth had greatly endeared him to the soldiers. Both were greatly disliked by Catherine de Medici, the Queen-Mother, though she made a great profession of friendship, and did all in her power to induce them to attend court; failing in this, she tried another plan, and arranged a marriage between her daughter and Henry of Navarre. The King, Charles the Ninth, at her bidding wrote a flattering letter to Henry, offering him the hand of his sister Margaret, and soon after the betrothal, the marriage took place amid great rejoicings. Paris seemed ablaze with fireworks, bonfires and shows. A great number of Protestant gentlemen had been invited to be present at the ceremony, and many came.

A letter was also written to the Prince of Orange, promising that an army should be sent to help him to defeat the Spaniards. But all the time the Queen-Mother was working secretly for the murder of the Protestants. Four days after the marriage Coligny went to the palace, and in company with another Huguenot gentleman played a game of tennis against the King and the Duke of Guise.

The king chatted with the admiral in a very friendly way, told him how pleased he should be to place him at the head of the army that would, he hoped, in a few days be in readiness to march into Holland to the help of his friend and ally, William of Orange, against Philip of Spain. How little Coligny thought, as he left the Louvre that day, that he was being closely followed by an assassin who had been hired by the king and his mother to shoot him. The shot, however, only wounded him in the hand and arm, and though in great pain, and faint from loss of blood, he was able to reach his hotel, where he was visited by the king, who pretended to be angry that his old friend should have been so badly treated, and promised to punish the man who had fired at him if he could be found. He was well known to the king, who, instead of punishing, gave him a reward of two thousand crowns and a badge of honour.

While Coligny lay suffering and helpless from his wounds, the Queen-Mother was busy calling together her friends and advisers. She held a secret council, and when all was in readiness for the wicked deed she had planned went to the apartments of her son, and with a great show of concern for his safety said she had discovered a plot, by which Coligny and a number of Huguenots had bound themselves to kill him, and assured him that all the Protestants must be swept from the land, as they were enemies alike to his person and his throne.

The king believed her every word, and cried out in a passion of rage and fear, "Kill all! Let no one escape to reproach me with the deed." Two hours after midnight the dreadful work began, and before it was over five thousand Protestants were murdered in one day in Paris, and a hundred thousand throughout the country. The admiral was one of the first victims. A party of ruffians, led by the Duke of Guise, went to his hotel, and bursting open the outer door fired upon his followers in the courtyard. Roused from an uneasy sleep by the noise of the shots, the admiral fled for safety to an upper room, but there he was followed, and stabbed while leaning against the wall. His body was thrown out of the window into the court-yard and treated with every mark of disrespect.

But the noise of cannon and the sound of battering rams will not let me forget that the Spaniards are outside our walls, and though the citizens have no thought of surrender, it may go hard with us, for already it is feared that our food supplies will not hold out for more than a few weeks, and it is being proposed that every family should bring whatever stores of provisions they may have into one of the public buildings, where a small quantity will be given out daily to each man, woman and child in the city. Come what may, we dare not, must not open our gates to the Duke of Alva and his savage soldiery. The terrible lessons we have learnt from the fate of towns that have done so seem to have been burnt into our very hearts.

Zutphen and Naarden, where are they? Ah! what tales of sorrow those smoking ruins, that were all the soldiers left to mark the spots where busy and prosperous towns had stood, could tell. Beguiled by offers of pardon, they threw open their gates, received the soldiers willingly into their houses, and gave them in the way of food and drink of the best they had. How were they repaid? Every man, woman and child, even little babies were put to the sword. May God in His mercy save us from such a terrible fate. We can hardly hope to hear from father while the city is blockaded, but in some mysterious way our burgomaster received good news yesterday, news that seems to have given us fresh hope and courage. The prince appears to be on the road to recovery, and intends, as soon as possible, to come to our help.

Chapter 16.

The Defence of Leyden.

December 31st, 1574. The story of Leyden, its terrible siege and brave defence, will, mother says, form a never-to-be-forgotten page of history, and yet I do not think that I shall find it easy to write down even a few of the things that happened during the dark, anxious days the siege lasted, days that grew into weeks, and even months, while we watched and waited for the relief that seemed so long in coming.

When I wrote last the siege had lasted four days, and even then some fear was expressed that provisions would run short. During the two months that followed the repulse of the Spanish army by our brave troops, under the command of Count Louis, brother to the Prince of Orange, they had withdrawn themselves, and we, too, blindly hoped they would trouble us no more; but the brave count has fallen on the battlefield. At least we know that he is dead; whether he lies among the heaps of slain, or was drowned in attempting to cross the river, or perished in the burning into which, with horrible cruelty, Alva's soldiers drove the conquered, no one seems to know, but we believe that, whichever way it was, he met death like a true Christian and the brave soldier he was.

We were not so well supplied with stores of food as we should have been. Perhaps our relief at the absence of the Spanish was so great that we would not believe they were likely to come again. So we spoke hopefully, and tried to believe that, after their repulse under the command of Count Louis of Nassau, the Spaniards would raise the siege. But the Duke of Alva was a man of iron will; he had received royal commands to stamp out heresy, and if it was not done, it should not, he determined, be any fault of his. So with a larger army he again attacked our city, and cannon roared, and large, heavy guns poured out a constant volley of shot and shell. Our walls are, however, as strong as they were on the first day of the siege, and we hope, will remain in good condition for weeks to come; but the Spaniards have not been idle, and a circle of well guarded forts have grown up with what seems to us wonderful rapidity. Several times the principal citizens have been summoned by the burgomaster, and councils lasting several hours have been held, all, we were rejoiced to hear, being of one mind.

They will not listen to Alva's proposed conditions of peace, or enter into any treaty, knowing only too well that it would be made only to be broken, and that if our gates are once opened to the foe, fire and sword will follow, leaving only smoking ruins to tell their own sad story. There is just one gleam of hope in the knowledge that the soldiers are divided among themselves; it is nearly two years since they received any regular wages, and though when a victory is gained they are encouraged to plunder and spoil to their hearts' content, they are, we hear, getting restless and discontented, and have more than once broken out into open mutiny.

Early in June famine seemed almost to stare us in the face. The councillors were buying up all the food the town contains. Large stores of grain, meat and other foods are being carried to the public buildings, and daily rations given out: half a pound of meat with the same quantity of bread for each man, and less for women and children.

Small as the daily portion was, we noticed that Uncle Jacob ate only a very small part of his. Day after day he would insist upon sharing it with one or other of the orphans, and when we saw with tear-filled eyes how very thin he was, and tried to coax him into being just to himself, even if he could not so often indulge his love of giving, his gentle voice would answer, "Do not be anxious for me. My journey is almost ended. The children need the food more than I do; they may have many years of life before them; God is very good to me; I am not allowed to suffer from the keen gnawings of hunger. My strength is, I know, failing; before Leyden opens her gates to her long-looked-for deliverer, the Prince of Orange, I shall be safe home, 'where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.'" And so it was, for only a few days before the horrors of actual famine were upon us, with tender good-byes to us all, and the name of Jesus upon his lips, our dear old friend fell asleep. We felt his loss keenly, but for him all was, we knew, well. Like Stephen of old, "devout men carried him to his burial," and while the noise of war raged around our walls, we laid him in a quiet grave with words of faith and hope, and returned to our home sorrowing, but yet rejoicing.

Food supplies failed, day by day the allowance grew smaller, and then ceased altogether. Truyken and Freda did their very utmost to keep the hunger wolf from our door, and displayed great skill and patience in trying to make wholesome and even tempting food of all manner of unsavory scraps. Sometimes the children and I would go out in search of food, but long lines of trees from which every leaf had been plucked told us that we were too late � others on the same errand had been before us; grass too was very scarce, our baskets were not half filled, when we turned our steps towards the churchyard, where a few nettles still grew among the graves. How eagerly we gathered them, how proudly we carried them home, yet not without some attempts to conceal our treasure, lest any one, perhaps more keenly pressed by hunger than ourselves, should rob us of our prize.

Aunt Ursel proved herself a born nurse. Sometimes in the hospital, where her gentle touch and kind but firm manner did so much to relieve the wounded; sometimes on the ramparts, where, even though bullets were falling around her, she would carry water to the soldiers, or kneel to dress and bandage some gaping wound, never moving, till her work was done. There was so much to be done at home that I could not be spared very often, but now and then I was free to go with her to the hospital, so glad of any small service I could render. I read to the sick and wounded, now and then I wrote their letters to loved ones in village homes, or took messages to and from the hospital. We all began to feel the pressure of hunger. The few horses that had not died of hunger were killed, and for a few days we rejoiced in having a small allowance of horse-flesh served out to each person; but that did not last long, and the starving people ate cats, dogs and rats. To add to the horrors of siege and famine, plague broke out in our midst, and it was said that nearly twenty thousand people died. We grew almost used to the sight of the dying and the dead.

One afternoon as Aunt Ursel and I were leaving the hospital, passing down one of the poorest streets in the town, our attention was arrested by the crying of an infant, such a low, piteous wail; we felt as if we could not go on without trying to find out, if we could not do something soothe and comfort it. We knocked several times, but getting no reply we opened the door and went in. Never can I forget the sight; an infant of not more than a few months old lay upon the low but clean bed, tightly clasped in the arms of its dead mother. We thought at first she had died from the plague, but found afterwards that it was really from hunger. The infant, though very thin, appeared healthy; so having obtained permission of the proper authorities, we took it home till such time as it should be claimed by its relations, if it had any. But none came, and for more than six, months baby Matilde, as we call her, has been the pet of the entire household.

Twice or three times during the siege the prince was able, by the use of carrier pigeons, to send us letters, in one of which he asked if we could hold out for three months longer, by the end of which time he was almost sure of being able to come to our relief. "Three months!" what a long, weary time it seemed to look forward to, for we had only provisions enough to last four days. There was not much actual fighting all the time the siege lasted. Shots were fired at the walls, but the officers in command of the Spanish troops knew that we were very short of food, and as they thought it would be easy to starve us into surrender, made no attempt to force the gates.

General Francesco de Valdez, to whom the Duke of Alva, had entrusted the taking of Leyden, seemed at last to grow tired of waiting, and sent a flattering message to the citizens, in which he said that he quite admired the gallant way in which they had held the city, but begged them, in the name of King Philip, not to continue to suffer all the discomfort of having an army quartered just outside the walls. Would it not be better, he said, to open our gates, and accept a free pardon for having so long rebelled against the authority of our lawful sovereign, King Philip of Spain. A meeting of the principal citizens to consider his proposals was held. The answer they sent was short and to the point. Mother was able to get a copy of it: "The fowler plays sweet music on his pipe while he spreads his net for the birds."

Then they began to taunt us with being rat and cat eaters. The answer they got was, "While a dog barks or a cat mews within our walls, be sure we will not open our gates; and when the last is eaten, rather than surrender, every man will eat his own left arm, keeping the right hand still to hold his sword."

And so the weeks went on, weeks that seemed like months, or even years, and the prince did not come. We knew that he had been very ill, the army he had collected at such cost had broken up; still he had not given up the hope, of being able to come to our relief, and begged us to hold out a little longer.

Strange news reached us at last, though we hardly knew at first whether to be glad or sorry. The prince had collected another army, small, but brave; but as the Spaniards had four men to every one of his, and were in possession of sixty-two forts, all well garrisoned and supplied with large stores of arms and ammunition, the prince and his best generals were of one mind, namely, that it would be useless even to attempt to reach us by land; one hope and one only remained, to relieve us by water. But as Leyden lies fifteen miles from the sea this way of getting at us seemed at first sight almost, if not quite, impossible. It was certainly a remarkable idea, but the Prince of Orange is a remarkable man, and he believed that it was God who had given him the thought, and he trusted in Him for the needed wisdom and strength to enable him to carry it out. The country for miles round lay lower than the sea, and had really been won from it at great labour and expense by building dykes. Why not let the sea have the land once more, and give the prince and his followers a chance of coming to our help?

The Government gave him leave to cut through the dykes, saying it was better to ruin the country than to lose it; so the prince set to work to form "The Beggars of the Sea" into a fleet sufficient to man two hundred flat-bottomed boats, many of which were well laden with provisions, and then the work of cutting away the dykes began.

But all this took time, the Spanish army was still outside our walls, and we were starving. How slowly the days seemed to pass! How truly we felt that if God did not deliver us, no one, not even the prince, could.

Chapter 17.

The Relief of Leyden.

January 1st, 1575. On August 12th the burgomaster and citizens of Leyden received a letter from the Prince of Orange telling them how much pleasure the courageous way in which they had defended the town had given him, and begging them to hold out till he, with his fleet of flat-bottomed boats, could reach them. Their reply was, that there was only food enough in the town to last four days. When that was gone, nothing seemed before them but starvation.

The same evening another letter was brought in by one of those brave runners who all through the siege now and then, almost it seemed as if by a miracle, contrived to escape the fire of the Spaniards, in which the prince told us that the dykes were cut through, and the water was slowly but he hoped steadily spreading over the land. The news seemed almost too good to be true, but William of Orange had never given us occasion to doubt his word, and for a little while we were almost beside ourselves with rejoicing. Flags waved from the roofs of public buildings, and many of the private houses were decorated, as if in readiness to welcome the long-looked-for deliverer. Bands of music processioned the streets. How the Spaniards must have wondered what it all meant!

But the longed-for relief did not reach us till October 3rd, and the weeks that lay between were very dreary and sad ones. When I try to remember how we lived through them I find I cannot; their story seems like some troubled dream. Many, very many died from hunger, and the plague carried off still greater numbers. Two of our little family of orphans died, not exactly from hunger, thank God; but our blue-eyed Freda and her little brother Casper had always been delicate children, and could not endure privation so well as the stronger ones. We loved and missed them, but we could not sorrow, for we knew they had both early learned to love the precious Saviour, and it was sweet and restful to think of them as safe with Him, whose kingdom is of such. We were all starving, and there were two less to suffer.

But why did not the prince come? Most afternoons I went to the hospital with Aunt Ursel, and after having done what little we could (and it seemed so little when we had no food to give the poor famine-stricken patients) we went to the watch-tower in the centre of the city, said to have been an old Roman fortress, and from its guard-room we were able to see for miles over the country. Yes, the dykes had been pierced, thousands of acres of land were ruined; but only a few inches of water covered them, the Spanish army was still outside our walls, and the prince, who had risked and suffered so much to help us, was still fourteen miles off, and there seemed but little prospect of his being able to reach us.

Hope and courage seemed once more to die down in our hearts. The citizens sent an urgent appeal to the Government, asking if nothing could be done to help them? Had Leyden been forgotten in the hour of her utmost need? The reply, which will, I believe, be written in "The History of the Dutch Republic," was, "Rather will we see our whole land and all our possessions perish in the waves than forsake thee, Leyden. We know full well, moreover, that with Leyden all Holland must perish."

The electors would have helped us if they could, but the Spanish army had a complete circle of forts round the city, and though other cities gave large stores of food for our relief, there seemed no way by which these gifts could reach us. All this time very little fighting went on. The soldiers who remained in the city were so enfeebled by hunger and disease that there was not the shadow of a hope that they would be able to force a passage through Alva's well-fed, well-disciplined troops; and the generals in command of his army seemed so sure that hunger would compel us to open our gates, they seemed content to wait. From time to time conditions of peace were proposed, and offers of pardon made, if we would surrender. But we could not forget the terrible lessons we had learnt from the way in which they had broken faith with all who had trusted their fair promises; and though some in our midst talked more or less openly of surrender, and even went so far as to say that even if the prince had intended to come to us, he must have seen how impossible such an undertaking was, and given it up as hopeless, most of us still felt we would much rather die from hunger than fall into the hands of the Spaniards.

Some said the water would never rise to a sufficient height to float a fleet of boats; but mother and Aunt Ursel and I believed it would, for we remembered how of old God made a passage through the Red Sea for the children of Israel, and was it not as easy for Him to cause the sea to cover the dry land?

All through "The Sea Beggars" did valuable work, not only in cutting through the dykes, sometimes under heavy fire, but in driving off the Spaniards, who tried in every way to hinder their progress. Sometimes the water rose high enough to allow the boats to make some progress, but a sudden change of wind drove them back again to the sea, and more than once the boats were stranded in a few inches of water.

Admiral Boisot, who was in command of the prince's fleet, was very hopeful that in a few days at most he would be able to reach Leyden, but again for more than a week the boats lay in shallow water, unable to proceed. For some days we had noticed how rapidly Truyken's strength seemed to be failing. Sunken eyes and hollow cheeks were far too common to attract much notice, but one morning we found her unable to rise, and almost too feeble to speak; but when we tried to coax her with a morsel of food a neighbour had given us, she opened her eyes, and whispered faintly, "Let me die, for now I can no longer serve you; the trees are leafless, and there is not a single nettle left in the churchyard. I could not, dare not let you even guess where or how I obtained the untempting food I have cooked for you during the last few days; I am one more to feed, I can only be a drag upon you, it is better for you I should be gone. You will not forget how I have loved you all; but you need not grieve for me, I have trusted my soul to your Saviour, and I know whom I have believed; He will not cast me out." I noticed that she was not wearing her silver relic-box; she must have read my question in my face, for she said, "Oh! Mayken, when you were quite a tiny child, I intended to leave my relic to you as the most precious possession I had, but it went weeks ago, I sold it for two handfuls of bran. But I do not want it, I do not value it now."

We tried to soothe our faithful old friend, and moistened her parched lips with a little wine; for, strange to say, our wine held out long after every morsel of food was gone. At last mother said, "Mayken and I will go to the burgomaster's house. He may have received news of the prince, or even have a little food to give us." We begged Truyken to lie still till our return, but she only moaned, and did not answer us.

We went; a corpse lay just outside his door; but we were so used to sights of horror that we hardly noticed it. He was not at home, but we were told that there had been a tumult among the people, and he had gone to the market-square to try what could be done to restrain the few who, having lost heart and hope, talked of taking forcible possession of the keys of the city and opening the gates to the Spaniards. The corpse, we learned afterwards, had been placed outside his door on purpose to reproach him with being the cause of the misery. We followed him. He was standing upon a raised platform, from which public notices were read.

One glance at his face told its own story. He was painfully thin, he had not suffered less from hunger than any of the famished crowd around him, but there was a look of deep peace upon his brow, and a light in his eyes that all the misery could not quench. At first all we heard was a confused murmur of sounds, it seemed as if every one was speaking, and no one listening. But waving his broad burgomaster's hat, Adrian von der Werf commanded silence; then a hush fell upon the crowd, and though his voice was thin with hunger, its tones were clear and firm.

"What would you, my friends?" he said, "Why do you murmur that we do not break our vows, and surrender our city to the Spaniards, a fate more horrible than the agony she now endures? I tell you I have made a vow to hold the city, and I pray God to give me strength to keep it. I can die but once, whether by your hands, the enemy's or by the hand of God. My own life is indifferent to me, but not so that of the city entrusted to my care. I know we must soon starve if not relieved, but starvation is better than the dishonoured death, which is our only choice. Here is my sword, plunge it into my body, and divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender while I remain alive."

His brave words seemed to put new courage into the hearts of all who heard them, and with voices broken by sobs the crowd promised, by God's help, to be faithful to him and to the city. When all had dispersed, mother and I told our sad story. Tears were in his eyes as he listened, then he said, "There will be meat to-morrow. The two cows that have so far been kept alive to supply the infants with milk are to be killed this evening. Come to my house, I can give you a few drops of milk. It is the last you will get, but it may revive your faithful servant; to-morrow I will see you have your share of meat." We hurried home with a small jug holding barely half a pint of milk, but the room where we had left Truyken was empty. We called and searched for her everywhere, but she was nowhere to be found, and to add to our trouble and surprise Aunt Freda was gone also.

The next time we went to the watchtower we found a crowd there before us, and in the distance, perhaps not more than five miles away, we could plainly see the flash of powder and hear the sullen roar of guns. "They are gaining ground," said the onlookers, "they will soon be here, but fighting is going on; they are having to force their passage."

On the 28th September a carrier pigeon brought a letter to the burgomaster from the admiral, saying that the fleet was making every effort to reach Leyden, and he hoped in a day or two at the most to be his guest. The burgomaster ordered the church bells to pour out a joyous peal, but there were no flags or bands this time. On the following day the water was again sinking, and the fleet, though in sight, unable to reach us.

On October 1st a carrier pigeon brought in another letter from the admiral. Nothing now remained between the famishing city and food but one Spanish fort, only two hundred and fifty yards from our gates. All through the night a strong north-east wind was blowing, piling up the water in the remaining dykes, and reminding us of the gale that had swept away Jacob Anderzon's farm; then it changed suddenly to the south-west, and blew the piled-up waters over the land. God had surely fought for us. All through the night we saw lights gliding backwards and forwards upon the waters, and with a terrible crash part of the city wall fell. Early in the morning the prince's fleet sailed under the very cannon of the fort, but not a shot was fired; and then we learnt the truth, the enemy had taken fright and fled in hopeless terror and confusion, and soon the flag of Holland was waving on its ramparts. The ships sailed under the walls of the city and the sailors seemed unable to wait until they could land, but threw food from the ships to the starving people on the land. In a short time the stores of food were carried to the public buildings, and in perfect order distributed among the citizens. Oh, how we thanked God for bread! We who had said grace over a dish of nettles, and often been unable to find even such poor food!

Chapter 18.

"Joy-Bells" Ringing.

January 15th, 1575. Food for the famishing! Loaves of pure, wholesome bread � and only an hour before we had been thankful if a few crumbs fell to our share. It is really true, though at first, from very gladness, we could hardly believe that the Spanish soldiers had either been killed or fled in terror and confusion. Leyden was delivered, and though many were too weak from hunger to say more than "Thank God" a praise-song seemed to be making music in every heart.

Aunt Ursel was recovering, though very slowly, from an attack of famine fever.

All through the long, weary months during which the siege lasted she had worked far beyond her strength in the hospitals and upon the ramparts, and many, I believe, have thanked God not only for her skilful nursing, but for "words fitly spoken" with regard to their eternal interests.

But amid all the joy mother and I were restless and unsatisfied. Though we went from group to group of the Zetland sailors who had manned the prince's fleet, and often stopped to ask questions, father had not come to us, and we could hear no tidings of him. We knew that his first thought and care would be of and for us, but how and where should we find each other? The streets were thronged with happy, excited people, and for a few moments we stood still, uncertain which way to go.

"Let us ask God to guide us, Mayken," mother whispered softly, and I am sure that an earnest if a voiceless prayer went up from the hearts of both. Then like a flash came the thought that father would seek us in the house where we had last met and parted. It was only a heap of blackened ruins, having shared the fate of many of its neighbours: a shell falling upon its roof had set it on fire, and only the walls were standing; but he could not know that, so we made the best of our way thither.

But father was there before us, and I will not attempt to describe the joy of that meeting. At first mother seemed almost overcome by the glad surprise, and we thought she had fainted, but father's arms supported her. I ran to a spring for water, and she soon opened her eyes and smiled, then lay her head upon his shoulder with a look of such deep content that I seem to see it even as I write. When we had taken a little food, and it had been impressed upon us that though there was food in abundance, we had all suffered so much from hunger, that those who did not for the first few days eat very sparingly were likely to be very ill, and might even die, we formed a procession, headed by our burgomaster and the admiral, and went to church to give thanks to almighty God for His great goodness in sending relief just when it was so sorely needed.

As we walked homewards, in passing down a poor street we heard something, we hardly knew what, but it sounded like a low moan, and seemed to come from what appeared to be the lower room of an empty house. We wondered afterwards that we had heard it at all, for the bells of all the churches in the town were pouring out such joyous peals. We stood still and listened. Mother said, "O Mark, let us go in! Perhaps in the general rejoicing some poor sick one has been forgotten, and I cannot bear to think when God has been so good to us, and we are so happy, that one whom we could help is alone, suffering and perhaps even dying from hunger."

We went in. The room was quite dark, and the moans had ceased, but when father said in his kind, cheery voice, "Is any one sick here? we are friends, so do not be afraid," we heard a faint cry, and in a moment the truth flashed upon us. Father struck a light, and we saw it was Truyken, our good, faithful Truyken. She was very weak, but joy seemed to give her strength, and she said feebly, "Now my prayers are answered. Oh! how much I have longed to see you all once more. I have nothing more to live for now, you must let me lie."

We were overjoyed, and said we must take her home, but at first she refused, saying, "No, let me die; I know you would all give me your last morsel, but I could not take what my mistress and Mayken need more than I do." We told her the days of famine were past, and no one needed to be hungry; then father, seeing she was too weak to talk, left us to watch her, while he went to find a conveyance. We took her home, and did all we could for her, but it was many days before it seemed possible she could recover; but slowly she began to recover, and after some weeks of careful nursing was able to tell us a little of what had happened during the time she had been away from us. Of her own sufferings and privations she said very little; how she had existed at all seemed little short of a miracle; Aunt Freda had been one of the first victims of the famine fever, but her death had been peaceful, and even happy.

The day after the relief the Prince of Orange himself entered Leyden, and if the citizens were too weak to cheer loudly, the welcome they gave him was not less loving and loyal. He appeared deeply touched by the sight of the long-continued suffering that met him everywhere; but he told us how pleased he was with the way in which we chose rather to suffer than surrender, and offered Leyden her choice, either to be always exempt from paying certain taxes, or to be made the seat of a University. It did not take the councillors and citizens long to decide upon the latter, and already the buildings are in progress, and it is expected that students will arrive from all parts of Holland, and perhaps from Germany and Bohemia.

The first day that Truyken was able to sit up in an easy chair, propped up by pillows, we all took our evening meal in her room, and father told us his intention of going to Antwerp for a few days, as he had some business there. Truyken listened with great attention, beckoned mother to her side and said, "Tell master to go to the old house, and dig underneath the seat where you and Mayken sat so often on summer evenings, the one beneath the linden trees I mean, and about a foot, or it may be a foot and a half deep he will find a tin box, and in that box safe and sound the books and papers the officers of the Inquisition had such a hunt for; it was almost more than I could do to keep from laughing, when leaving the house as they did by the side-door, they passed through the garden, and as nearly as possible walked over the very books they were under orders to seize. What a lot of trouble they took, and all to no purpose. How they did hunt! 'Upstairs and downstairs, and in my lady's chamber.' But those who hide know where to find." And Truyken laughed her old merry laugh, and looked and spoke more like the Truyken of former days than she had done for many months past.

"But, Truyken, how could you have known of their intended visit?" mother asked. For some moments Truyken did not reply; I thought she had not heard, or had failed to understand the question, and was about to repeat it, when, rousing herself, she said, "Is there not something in the Bible about casting bread on the waters, and finding it again after many days?" Without waiting for an answer, she continued, "Do you remember the widow Kusel, and how one winter when her children were all down with fever, you would not let me go, but day after day you went yourself to carry soup and other things you thought good for them; and how, when her little Carl died, you tried to comfort the poor mother. The family were, as you knew, Roman Catholics, but help was needed, and you did not hesitate to give it.

"Well, to make a long story short, the widow was grateful, and in a way none of us looked for found an opportunity of returning your kindness. After some years Andre, her eldest son, was taken into the service of the Inquisition, where his uncle was also employed. He did not like the work, but as you know times were bad and the pay helped to support the family. Andre heard the order given to search your house, though he was not one of the party told off for that purpose; in some way he contrived to let his mother know, and she at once made up her mind, at all risks, to give a friendly warning. But she dared not go to the house, as if seen it might have excited suspicion; she knew at about what hour I usually went to market, so she watched and waited for me; she could not speak plainly, but in broken sentences and mysterious hints, as we chatted with a market-woman over the price of cheese and butter, she made herself understood.

"But there was no time to be lost, as that very night the search was to be made. I prayed, as I think I had never prayed before, that God would help me, and shew me just where to hide the books. Before I reached home my plans were all made. The Frau Von Brock had not been well for some days, and you and Mayken were, as I knew, going to see her; so far, all was well; before you had left the house an hour I had collected the books and papers, but I dared not begin to dig till after dark. I do not remember a day in my life that seemed to pass so slowly as that afternoon, my fear being that the officers would arrive before I could complete my task. The shadows fell at last; I was afraid even to let the sound of digging be heard; but with the help of a stout piece of wood and my hands I was able to complete my task only a few minutes before your return. The search-party was in the house an hour later."

"And did not the freshly-turned earth excite any suspicion?" mother asked. "Was no notice taken of it?" "Night," said Truyken, "is the time they usually choose for their deeds of darkness, for I know full well that very few of them would bear the light; but the linden trees had shed their leaves, and I took care to strew the ground pretty thickly with them."

"But the secret spring and the sliding panel in the best bedroom?" mother said, with a tremble in her voice that told me tears were not very far away. Truyken smiled as she answered, "Dear heart, Truyken knew every hole and corner in that old house long before you ever set foot inside it. More than once the Karlzons have hidden money and other valuables just where you hid your Bible and the writings of Master Martin Luther, about whom I never believed half the wicked things that were said."

"Dear, good, faithful friend," said my father, who had entered the room while Truyken was speaking, "how can we thank you as we would? But the risk to yourself was very great. Had the officers arrived only an hour earlier, and found you in the very act of trying to hide forbidden books, you would have been made their prisoner, and I do not know but that the Inquisitors might have considered it a crime worthy of being punished with death."

"Do you suppose I did not know as much?" Truyken said very quietly, "But I remembered that I had heard you read in your Bible that Christ laid down His life for His enemies, for the very people who hated Him, and wished Him to be crucified, you said it was; I only risked mine, and it was for those I loved better than my life, so small thanks to me for doing just what I chose to do.

"Well, I am glad there is no Inquisition in Holland now; it seemed to hang like a dark cloud over the land, and I believe the Roman Catholics were as heartily tired of it as the Protestants were."

We all share Truyken's gladness, for Philip of Spain is no longer ruler of the Low Countries, and with the withdrawal of the Spanish army, the terrible Inquisition went too, and a praise-song is in every heart.

Chapter 19.

Henry of Navarre.

June 1st, 1575. Several matters of business detained my dear father in Antwerp longer than he or we expected; but he came at last, bringing the recovered books which, thanks to Truyken's care in packing, have suffered very little from damp or mildew. I cannot find words to express our joy at having once more a whole Bible, larger and in better condition than the one dear old Jacob Anderzon loved and studied so well, and many of the writings of Master Martin Luther. And we may now read them openly, and in broad daylight, for Holland is free. The power of the terrible Inquisition is broken, and the haughty Philip of Spain is no longer master of the Netherlands. All that we suffered during the siege of Leyden seems but little when we think of the great joy that is now ours. No one is compelled to attend mass, and great numbers, who had not openly declared themselves on the side of the reformed faith, have given up doing so, and attend service in the Protestant churches; while hardly a week passes without some pastor, who had been obliged to fly from the country to escape arrest, being welcomed back by his old friends.

Father did not return alone, and though mother was in the secret, I did not even guess at the delightful surprise he was going to give me. He brought with him my old friend and playmate, Paul von Brook, still lame, but a tall, blue-eyed youth of eighteen. He is to be one of the first students in the University, the walls of which are rising, and our home will be his; for he has lost both parents. Soon after we left Antwerp, his father was arrested on the charge of heresy, and died in prison only a few hours before the time on which his trial before the court of the Inquisition was to have taken place. His widow, who had never been strong, drooped and died, the neighbours said from grief, in less than three months after the death of her husband. Paul was quite alone in the world, but his youth and friendlessness touched the heart of a merchant, who was, though at the time secretly, a friend to the reformed faith, and he gave Paul some light employment in his counting-house, and though more than once he himself stood in danger of arrest for having dared to give shelter to the son of a heretic, he would send Paul into the country for a few weeks, and when the storm had blown over, Paul was again at his old desk in the office.

He is more ardently attached to the reformed faith than ever, and is delighted at the prospect of being able to study under the professors who are expected to hold classes and give lectures in the University, as his great desire is to become a pastor; though sometimes I think he would have chosen the work of a colporteur, his lameness would render it almost impossible for him to take the long journeys over moors and mountains that fall to the lot of these brave and faithful men.

I must not forget to write down something else over which we all rejoice greatly. Father will remain with us in Leyden, as the prince has appointed him steward to the new University; and we are already looking forward to the time when, as we hope, in the long evenings, little knots of students will assemble in our house to read and study the word of God.

During the long and dangerous illness of the prince, father was sent as the bearer of important despatches into France, where he remained for some weeks in the suite of Prince Henry of Navarre, and learnt so much about the boyhood of the brave young nobleman, that Paul and I feel almost as if we ourselves knew and loved him. He is at present the leader of the Protestant party in France; and it is not unlikely that one day he will occupy the throne. Great things are hoped from him; but father fears that some at least of his friends will be bitterly disappointed. The young prince is a brave soldier, and has much in his natural disposition to win affection and command respect; but his desire to please, and to be on the best of terms with every one, may lead him into slippery places.

He was the third son of Antoine and Jeanne de Bourbon; the two baby princes who had preceded him had both died before reaching the age of two years; the firstborn had been given into the care of a middle-aged lady of good family, whose one great fear appears to have been that her little charge should "catch cold." Large fires were kept burning by night and day in the royal nurseries; the windows were seldom if ever opened; and even on a bright summer's day it was not thought safe to take the baby into the fresh air; so the little prince grew paler and weaker, till at last he drooped and died, like some sickly hothouse plant.

The second son might have fared better, but was killed through the carelessness of a nurse, who let him fall down a steep flight of stairs. Their grandfather, King Henry of Bearn and Navarre, was disappointed, as he began to fear there would be no male heir to his throne, so he got his daughter Jeanne, who had been married to a prince of the house of Bourbon, to promise that if she had a third son, she would allow him to have the child brought up as he thought best. So when in 1553 the infant Prince Henry was born, his grandfather claimed him when only a few hours old, and lifting him in his arms rubbed the baby's lips with a clove of garlic; then gave him a drop of wine from a golden cup, saying as he did so, "There, thou shalt be a true Bearnais." This, father says, was an old custom common in France, and supposed to make the little prince strong and healthy.

The nurse chosen for him was not a high-born lady, but a sturdy peasant woman, who was ordered by his grandfather to take him to her own home among the mountains, and bring him up as simply as she would had he been her own child. And so the little Henry of Navarre grew from a delicate baby into a bonny, healthy boy. "He had," says an old writer, "few toys, and no flattery, but his childhood was a very happy one; he was allowed to run about all day among the mountains, bareheaded and barefooted, his friends and playfellows were the peasant children around, and he shared all the fun and frolic of the village boys."

When Henry was little more than two years old, his grandfather died, and his father, under the title of King Antoine, succeeded in right of his wife to the throne of Navarre. At that time a great struggle was going on between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, who were gaining both in numbers and influence. King Antoine was looked up to as a leader among the Huguenots, as the French Protestants are called. His wife, a lady of great ability and noble character, seemed for a time uncertain which were in the right. But if she did not grasp the truth quickly, when once received, she held it firmly, and after a time became one of the most ardent and devoted friends of the Reformation. But as the wife went forward, the husband went backward; his old Roman Catholic friends were very anxious to have him on their side, and spared neither bribes nor flattery. In the end they succeeded only too well; he first grew lukewarm, then openly went over to the Roman Catholics; he tried in every way to induce his wife, the Queen of Navarre, to go to mass with him, and when she refused tried by threats and even blows to force her to do so; but she stood firmly; for with her it was a question of loyalty to Christ.

As Henry grew older his mother was able sometimes to have him with her, and the affection between mother and son was very strong. The boy was devoted to his mother, and she not only took great pains with his education, but lost no opportunity of teaching him the truths she had learned to love.

On one occasion the boy was present when his father was trying by force to compel his wife to attend mass; he sprang to his mother's side, and tried to defend her from the cruelty of her husband. King Antoine was very angry, and commanded Henry's tutor to give him a sound whip- ping; but it did not shake the boy's loyalty to his mother. It was a sad day for both when Henry's father decided he should be sent to France, to be educated with his cousins, the Dukes of Guise. They parted with tears, and Henry promised his mother he would never forget what she had taught him, and that he would refuse to attend mass, a promise which the poor boy must have found very hard to keep; he loved his mother dearly and wished to do what would please her, but with him it was his mother's God, his mother's faith, not his own.

It was a gay, pleasure-loving court in which the young prince found himself. Every day he saw and heard things of which he knew his mother would disapprove. The young king of France, Charles IXth, was a youth of thirteen,* and his mother, the haughty and cruel Catherine de Medici, had things very much her own way. Like every one else she took a fancy to the bright, fearless little prince, of whom even his cousins found it hard to be jealous, he was so kind and generous, so ready to please and be pleased.

{* French sovereigns were considered to be of age at thirteen.}

King Antoine died in 1562, and his mother paid a visit to the French court, in the hope that her boy would be allowed to return to her and grow up under her care. But she was coldly received, and Catherine flatly refused to give the boy up, and so she had to return alone.

Soon after the Court paid a visit to Bayonne on the borders of Spain. Balls, shows and amusements of all kinds were provided, but a great deal of plotting was going on. The Queen Mother, as Catherine was called, held long interviews with the Duke of Alva. No statesmen or counsellors were present, but Henry, then a boy of eleven, was allowed to run in and out as he pleased; no one thought he would listen or understand, but he did both, for his quick ear had caught the word "Huguenots," and he knew they were his mother's people. He heard the duke say, "We must kill the heretics; kill them all. No one who has ever held that religion ought to be left alive."

These talks were the foreshadowings of the terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew's, which a few years later filled all Europe with such horror. The bright, quick-witted young prince understood enough to know that his mother and her chosen friends were in danger, for were they not all Huguenots? Going to one of the Protestant gentlemen about the court, the boy told him what he had heard; a letter of warning written in cypher was sent to the Queen of Navarre, and though the courage and presence of mind of her little son did not prevent the murder of thousands of French Protestants, there is no room for doubt that it was delayed by the Protestant leaders having been put on their guard.

Chapter 20.

The Nun of Jourre

September 17th 1575. Father only returned home a fortnight ago, after an absence of nearly three months. He has been again in close, almost daily attendance on the Prince of Orange; he

received a summons to join the prince at Heidelberg in Germany, where, for more than a year, Charlotte de Bourbon, the lady who is now Princess of Orange, has been the loved and honoured guest of more than one Protestant family. The letter father received was in the prince's own handwriting. It was, he said, only right that one who had so bravely shared with him the hardships and dangers of the battlefield should share his joy in being the accepted suitor of one who had, he believed, been trained by God in the school of sorrow, and so fitted to adorn the high position to which He has now called her. They were married on the 10th June.

The life-story of the lady William of Orange has made his wife, but who, not so very long ago, was Nun and even Abbess of Jourre, is indeed a strange and eventful one; I will write down as much of it as I can remember.

Charlotte de Bourbon was the second daughter of the Duke of Montpensier, and so nearly related to the reigning house of France. Her mother, whose eyes had been opened to see the errors of popery, was warmly attached to the reformed faith. Her father, a proud and stern man, was a Romanist; during the wars in which France was so often engaged his property had become reduced, and, as he said, he could only afford to give one of his daughters a marriage portion suitable to his rank. His choice fell upon the elder, and he determined that Charlotte should spend her life within the walls of the nunnery of Jourre, a small town in Normandy.

Charlotte had at that time no desire to become a nun, and shed many tears when informed of her father's decision; but the sorrow of her pious and gentle mother was far deeper, as it sprang from the knowledge that her much-loved child would, besides being taught many things contrary to the word of God, be surrounded by the superstitions from which she herself had been delivered. By every means in her power she tried to induce her husband to change his mind, but in vain; the only favour she could obtain was a promise that Charlotte should be allowed to remain under her care till she was thirteen years of age.

This was, she felt, her God-given opportunity, and she set herself in faith and prayer to make the best possible use of it. Spending several hours each day alone with her daughter in her private apartments, she instructed her in the truths of salvation, taking great care to store her mind and memory with passages from the word of God. Charlotte promised to try and remember all that her mother had taught her, and they often wept and prayed together. The days passed all too quickly, and the time came when Charlotte must enter the convent; her father announced his intention of himself taking her to Jourre.

The parting between mother and daughter was a very sad one; with tear-filled eyes the lady of the castle watched the departure of her beloved child. Would she ever see her again on earth? Perhaps not, for as she was well known to be a Protestant, she might be forbidden to cross the threshold of the convent, and even if allowed to enter its reception room, she could not hope to see her daughter more than once, or at the most twice a year, and could only speak to her through an iron grating, and in the presence of others; while Charlotte, she knew, would not be permitted to write or receive any letters except such as were approved by the Superior.

I do not know very much about convent life, but mother says it is a strange, gloomy system for which there is no authority in the word of God, though she believes that in many cases monks and nuns have taken the vows with a real desire to serve God. Master Martin Luther was at one time himself a monk, but finding as he did in the library of that old convent a copy of a Latin Bible, light from God shone into his soul, and he went forth in more ways than one a free man, free to speak of the One who had saved him, and to give not only the people of Germany, but father believes through them many other lands, Bibles in the language of the common people.

Nuns spend a great deal of their time repeating Latin prayers. They make a vow or solemn promise always and in all, things to obey one of their number who is chosen to rule over each house, and is called the abbess, or Lady Superior. They also take what is called "the vow of poverty," that is, that though the order to which they belong may be very rich, no nun can have anything, not even a thimble or a book of her very own, all belongs to the order.

But I am forgetting Charlotte de Bourbon and her story. Soon after entering the nunnery she became a novice, or one who intends, or is intended to become a nun. Then came the day of her profession, a day, there is little doubt, spent by her mother in tears and prayers. Her long, beautiful hair was cut off, and she was dressed, according to the rule of the order, in a loose gown of coarse serge, tied round her waist by a cord. She was required to walk barefoot, and with downcast eyes, through the stone-paved halls and passages of the convent, and had to submit to many hard and trying things.

At first she really wished and tried to remember the teachings of her pious mother, but she was very young, and every means was used to lead her to forget that salvation by faith in Christ is the free gift of God; she was told that her own sufferings were pleasing to God and were merits by which she might hope to enter heaven. At last she fell into the snare, and was one of the most zealous of the sisterhood. She fasted very often, slept at night on the stone floor of her cell, and spent many hours kneeling either before a crucifix or image of Christ upon the cross, or a picture of the Virgin Mary. She was much looked up to by the other nuns, and after some years was chosen to fill the position of Lady Abbess. Her mother had fallen asleep in Christ, and for a time her teachings seemed to have been almost, if not quite, forgotten. She really wished to set a good example to the nuns under her charge, and the nunnery of Jourre became famous throughout France.

But a mother's prayers were remembered by God, and He was about to answer them in His own time and way. No one seemed to know exactly how light came into that convent, but it came through Protestant books; they were read by the abbess, and also some of her nuns; and as she read the memory of all she had heard from her mother seemed to revive in her memory. Again she seemed to hear that loved voice pleading with God for the salvation of the child so soon to be parted from her. She saw clearly that her own so-called good works could not earn or buy salvation. She must receive it, as her mother had done, as the free gift of God. Very simply she accepted Christ as her Saviour and peace filled her soul. The life she was living as Abbess of Jourre became distasteful to her. She was not really free to worship God according to the teaching of His word, and she was, she felt, leading others in a path of error. Was there no way of escape? She prayed and waited, and in a way she did not expect God opened the doors of the convent that had become to her little better than a prison-house.

In the year 1572 the noise of war raged round that quiet convent. While many of the nuns sought the protection of their favourite saints, Charlotte de Bourbon prayed to the living God. The soldiers came nearer and nearer, calling upon the nuns to open the gates; this, however, they were afraid to do, so they were broken open, and the nuns fled in terror, spending the night in the woods. But Charlotte was free, and she resolved that all the powers of Rome should not again imprison her within convent walls. There would, she knew, be many dangers in an attempt to quit France, but she was willing to brave them all for liberty to worship God in the way she saw to be right; and the God in whom she trusted not only guided her steps, but in a remarkable way raised up friends to assist her in her flight.

Dressed as a peasant woman going to market, she fled through part of France, often walking during the hours of darkness, and hiding in the woods till after sunset; more than once she narrowly escaped being taken prisoner by a party of soldiers, who had been sent out to search for her, and before reaching the frontier she was obliged to change her disguise; but after many dangers, tired and footsore, she reached Heidelberg in Germany, where she found christian friends, who gave her a cordial welcome, and were able to protect her from the Romish priests, who were very angry that a daughter of the noble house of Bourbon, who had herself been the Lady Abbess of Jourre, should cast in her lot with the despised Protestants.

Disguises were now no longer necessary; Charlotte de Bourbon openly united with the little company of Christians who, like herself, had found a temporary asylum in the old German town, and used every opportunity of becoming better instructed in the word of God. Humble and gentle, she soon endeared herself to many; the Prince of Orange, hearing her story, became greatly interested; personal acquaintance only strengthened the high opinion he had formed of her, and he made her an offer of marriage, which she accepted; and we are all so glad that after so many stormy and sorrowful years, spent as they have been in the cause of truth and freedom, he should have a prospect of domestic happiness, for father believed that his choice had fallen upon one in every way worthy of him, and we trust that her example, both as a Christian and a wife, will be a real help to the women of the Netherlands, but perhaps most of all an encouragement to mothers wherever her story is read or told.

[I should like to add a few lines to Mayken's story, as it will, I believe, not be without interest to know that the present sovereign of Great Britain, King George V., traces his descent in a direct line from Charlotte de Bourbon, Princess of Orange. Her daughter Louisa was the wife of the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, Frederick IV., and grandmother to Sophia, Duchess of Brunswick, who was the mother of George I. of England, whose great grandson, the Duke of Kent, was the grandfather of his late Majesty King Edward VII.]

Chapter 21.

Among the Heather.

January 6th, 1580. The MS. book father gave me on my twelfth birthday was filled long ago. Its brown leather covers are faded and stained with the waves that so often threatened to swamp our little boat on the never-to-be-forgotten night when dear old Jacob Anderzon's farm was swept away by the terrible flood that followed the bursting of the dykes; more than one ink-blot disfigures its pages, but he says I am not to destroy it, as the account I have given of the siege of Leyden is really a page of the history of the "Dutch Republic," so he wishes me not to destroy it and as on New Year's morning I found a new and much larger MS. volume upon my dressing-table, I think I will begin at once to write down some of the events of the last five years, for though many changes have taken place, we, as a family, have proved again and again that "the Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him." (Nahum 1: 7.)

The Prince of Orange has proved himself worthy of the affection and confidence of the people over whom for the last five years he has ruled so well and wisely. Father, who knows him in both his public and private life, always speaks of him as a man whose one great desire appears to be to do the will of God. He cares little for worldly honours, and though he never wishes to give offence, is not easily turned from a purpose when once formed by the praise or blame of others. His marriage with Charlotte de Bourbon proved a very happy one, but his life is still a strange and stormy one; several attempts to shoot or stab him have been made, the last being nearly successful, when a ball fired at him by a would-be assassin entered his cheek, coming out in the lower jaw, and carrying away two teeth in its passage. For many weeks he lay between life and death, nursed with unwearied tenderness and devotion by his wife, who could hardly be persuaded to leave his side to take the rest she so greatly needed.

In answer, as we believe, to a nation's prayers, his life was spared, and he began, though at first very slowly, to recover; but in the midst of our rejoicings came an afterclap of sorrow; we were shocked and grieved at hearing that his faithful wife, worn out with anxiety and watching, had taken a fever, from which she was too weak to rally, and before her husband was able to resume his public duties, she calmly fell asleep in Jesus. The sorrow of the prince was very deep and lasting, but it was, he said, "the will of God," and he must not, dared not, repine.

Now I must record some of the Lord's gracious dealings with my loved home circle. Mother, my patient, gentle mother is far from strong. We think the long strain of the siege of Leyden, and the privations from which we all suffered, told greatly upon her health, for she has never seemed quite the same since; she never complains, and will not own to not being well; only last week we all noticed how pale and thin she was looking, and father pressed her to see a doctor, but she said with her old smile, "O Mark, why should I give the doctor needless trouble when there are so many sick people for him to look after? I am not ill, only tired."

I am so glad that my being still at home relieves her of nearly all the burden of household cares. She is, if possible, more unselfish than ever; and though sometimes when I look at her pale face and think how empty our home would be without her, a dull pain seems to go through my heart, I am learning, I trust, to cast even this care upon the "Burden Bearer." Truyken is still with us; she is feeling the weight of years, and is not so active as she was, even a few years ago. With all the strength of her warm, loving nature, she has turned away from Rome and its teachings; for "how," she asks, "can a tree be good whose fruit was the terrible Inquisition?" Nearly three years ago she united with the little company of Christians here; she has lost much of her old sharpness of manner, and it is encouraging to watch her growth in grace.

Father is still engaged acting for the prince as steward or secretary of the University. The number of students who attended its opening session was greater than we had even dared to hope. They came from all parts of the Netherlands, Bohemia and Germany. Several of the professors, and nearly half of the students, are openly attached to the reformed faith; and for such our house has all along been a gathering place, many happy hours having been spent in Bible study. How wonderful it seems to us to be allowed to read our Bibles openly, and even in broad daylight! we who so long read them with closed shutters, and kept them in strange hiding-places. But I must not forget my old playfellow, Paul von Brock. He decided to study medicine, for, as he said, few doors were closed to a doctor. His services would be needed alike in the castle and the cottage, and in each, he believed, God would give him opportunity of witnessing for Christ.

He worked hard, and during a four years' course of study won several college honours, and nearly two years ago sailed for Scotland, where, he said, God would give him an open door, not only in the practice of his profession, but in making known the glad tidings of the gospel among the students who thronged the Scottish capital. The seed-sowing must, we all knew, be a very quiet work, for there is no religious liberty in Scotland, and the Inquisition has a good deal of power; still, as he believed God was directing him there, we dared not urge him to stay with us.

It seems almost too good to be true, but only a few months ago I paid a visit to the land of the heather � such a happy visit! I was away from home nearly six weeks, accompanied and attended by Truyken, as it was not thought safe for me to travel alone. We were the guests of a Bohemian merchant, Herr von Velt, and his sister, the Frau Dorotha Richer. They have been such true and faithful friends to Paul, and it came about in a somewhat remarkable way.

Herr von Velt has been for some years a widower, with one little girl, Elspeth, a sweet little maiden of eight, who won my heart completely. Soon after his arrival in Edinburgh Paul was called in to attend the child, who was ill with a mild form of fever. She was very restless and appeared excited. As Paul took her hand in his to feel her pulse, she said, fixing her large, bright eyes on his face, "You will not tell me to say my prayers to the Virgin Mary, will you? Liza does, but I tell her No, I will only say them to the good Jesus, He loves the little children.'"

"The poor child is wandering; the fever was very high this morning," said her aunt, looking somewhat anxiously at the doctor. "Would to God we were all in our right minds, as this dear child now is," replied Paul. The merchant, who had been listening unobserved, now came forward, and grasping Paul's hand warmly, said, "If I mistake not, we are brothers in the faith." From that moment they were firm friends. Persecution had driven him from Bohemia; business had detained him in Scotland, and though it was dangerous to meet openly, many a little knot of Christians often met for reading and prayer after nightfall at his house, arriving and leaving singly to avoid notice. At these little gatherings Paul, with one or two of the students who were, he believed, interested in the truth, was often able to be present.

Herr von Velt had much to tell us of the sufferings of the Christians in Bohemia. I had often heard the names of John Huss, and Jerome of Prague, and though I knew that they led its noble army of martyrs, he told me their stories at far greater length than I had ever heard them, repeating the remarkable words John Huss is said to have uttered at the stake. "You may burn the goose (the name Huss means goose in the language of Bohemia), but within a hundred years God will raise up a swan you will not be able to burn."

It must have been a vision of things to come such as God sometimes grants to the dying, for though Master Martin Luther has many enemies, he still goes on with his work of preaching, writing and translating, work in which he is not alone, for God has given him a band of helpers who in Holland, England and Germany are busy translating not only the scriptures, but the writings of the Reformers, into the language of the people of these countries.

One of Paul's patients was a poor widow woman, Anne Kerr. He found her in a very poor cottage, little better than a hut, and seeing she was very ill, and hardly likely to recover, asked her if she was afraid to meet God? Almost to his surprise she replied "No," and went on to tell him that she was trusting in the precious blood of Christ. Four years ago she had heard one of God's faithful servants preach at the Market Cross; gladly she had drunk in the truth that salvation was by faith alone, and longed to know more.

But the next thing she heard was that the preacher was thrown into prison, and soon after that he had been tried by the Inquisition and sentenced to be burnt alive on the charge of heresy. She could not get near enough to hear his dying words, but she saw his calm and even cheerful bearing, and went to her poor home feeling sure that by his words God had wrought a work in her soul. She had not had courage openly to break with Rome, but when asked by the priest why she did not attend mass, replied that, being very poor, she helped to support her family by acting as a sick-nurse among her neighbours, and not knowing when her services might be called for, seldom left her cottage. When on her sick-bed, it was a source of bitter grief to her that she had not told the whole truth, and so been more faithful to Christ.

Chapter 22.

More About the Huguenots.

October 17th, 1580. Mother sometimes says we have not many bright days in Holland; that our skies are often dull and overcast for days together, and cold winds from the north bring winter early. I think she misses the glorious sunshine and the scent-laden breezes of her girlhood's home in Spain. But to me it seems as if the sun was always shining; we are so happy, not only in our family circle, but in seeing everywhere tokens of the loving-kindness of the Lord. The University is making itself a felt power for good throughout the land; the number of students who have openly confessed Christ is larger this year than it has ever been and several who have finished their studies and returned to their homes as doctors, lawyers, or pastors of Reformed Churches, are doing splendid work for the Master they love and serve. Paul writes often; his letters are always bright and cheerful, and while he does not try to hide that he is often exposed to danger from the spies and servants of the Inquisition, he rejoices in his wonderful God-given opportunities of making the glad tidings known, and thinks there are quite a little band of students (perhaps six or eight in number) who, when the test comes, as it may any day, will not be afraid to witness boldly for Christ.

Letters from our brethren and sisters in the faith who left their country and homes during the dark days when the terrible Inquisition was in power, tell of prosperity, both spiritual and temporal. Sandwich, where so many of our most skilled weavers and cloth workers have set up their looms, begins, they write, to have a very homelike look, and might easily be mistaken for a Dutch or Flemish town. Quite a colony of French silk-weavers have been encouraged by Queen Elizabeth to settle in Spitalfields, while many more are living and working at Canterbury, and are even allowed to hold their services in one part of the great cathedral, where, father says, an archbishop, Thomas a Becket, was murdered in the year 1170.

But while we are rejoicing, we must not, would not forget those who are still suffering. The French Protestants, or Huguenots as they are often called, are passing through dark and troublous times. They have little or no liberty to worship God according to the simple teaching of His word, while fresh edicts make it more and more difficult to get their living in France, and yet they are forbidden to leave the country; any found attempting to do so are to be punished, not only by fines and loss of property, but by being thrown into prison, or sent to the galleys, where, chained to thieves and murderers, they will be forced to work, some for many years, others till death sets them free.

Protestants are not allowed to hold any public office; they cannot be doctors, lawyers, or professors in the colleges; while Protestant teachers in public and private schools are to be imprisoned if they attempt to teach the children anything but reading, writing and arithmetic. Even carpenters, shoemakers and vine-dressers are to be refused employment unless they conform. Bribes, too, are freely used, but from all we hear, those who accept them are such as have never had any real love for God and His word.

Henry of Navarre will, it is thought, soon come to the throne as Henry the Fourth of France. But even those who love him best know that for a long time his professed attachment to the faith of the Bible has been wavering, and it now seems almost certain that, sooner or later, he will go over to the Roman Catholics. He is a brave soldier, and his natural disposition is kind and generous; but if he was a Protestant only to please his mother, it does not seem unlikely that he may turn Roman Catholic to please his wife's relations. Father says it will not do to act upon the faith of others, we must each have to do with God for ourselves, and I believe he is right.

Fathers and mothers in France are having a sad, anxious time; for if children, even little boys and girls of only seven years old, can be induced to enter a Roman Catholic church, or to say they wish to be Roman Catholics, the priests and nuns have power to take them away from their parents and send them to a convent school, where their parents are forced to pay for their board and education; while in some parts of France quite a number of children have been stolen from their homes, some never being heard of again, while others were discovered shut up in convents.

And yet in spite of all these cruel and unjust laws great numbers have succeeded in leaving the country. The story of some of these escapes seems really wonderful. One can only say they must have been hidden by God Himself from those who sought their hurt. Few of these stories have, I think, interested me more deeply than that of a Huguenot family who, though in comfortable circumstances, finding that there was no hope of being allowed to live quiet, peaceable lives in their own loved country, determined to leave all rather than give up their faith. They were able to conceal some money and several articles of value in quilted silk petticoats, made by the mother and her daughters; these they sent to England. They knew escape would be impossible if they remained together, so the two elder sons were the first to leave the country, and reached England in safety; there remained both parents, one daughter, a girl of sixteen, and two little boys, aged four and six years.

Some hasty preparations for their flight were made, but at the last moment the father was betrayed and taken to prison. His wife and daughter visited him in prison, when he begged them with tears to get away as quickly as possible, adding that he still hoped one day to be able to join them on English soil. That night his wife, wearing a disguise, and attended by a faithful man-servant, set out for the nearest port, which she reached in safety; there she arranged with the master of a sailing-vessel for passages for her three children and herself; the servant then went back to fetch them, while she remained hidden in the house of a friend till they could join her.

On his return the daughter dressed herself as a peasant girl going to market; her next care was to put her little brothers each into a large basket or pannier slung across the back of a donkey; after covering them up carefully with fruit and vegetables she put some poultry in a basket on the top.

The little boys had been told that whatever happened they must not speak or cry, as if they were discovered they could never hope to see either father or mother again. The servant, in the dress of a country farmer, rode on horseback a little in advance of the others. It had been arranged that he should not take any more notice of his young mistress than if she had been a perfect stranger, but he took good care not to lose sight of his charge.

They generally travelled by night, hiding in the woods during the day, but as they made only slow progress, when they got near the end of their journey they began to be afraid that the captain of the vessel would not be willing to wait longer for them, so were obliged to hurry on during the day. They were met by a party of soldiers, who stopped the donkey and asked the girl what she had in the panniers. Before she had time to reply one of them thrust his sword into the basket in which the youngest child lay concealed, but not hearing a sound, thought all was right and turning his horse's head galloped off, followed by the whole troop.

As soon as they were out of sight, with trembling hands and a quickly-beating heart the brave girl threw off the covering, half expecting to find only the dead body of her brother, but he held up his arms to her; they were covered with blood. He had received a deep sword-cut in one of them. His sister bound it up and soothed and petted him as well as circumstances would allow. That night they were with their mother. Soon after they were on board the ship in which their passages had been taken. How glad and thankful they must have been when, with all her sails set to catch the breeze, the ship was well out at sea. They reached England safely, where friends gave them a loving welcome. It is some years since this happened, but the father has not been able to join them; all they can learn about him is that he is still a prisoner.

But though many French Protestants did succeed in leaving the country, finding homes in England, Holland and Germany, great numbers failed in their attempt to reach one of the ports. Two young ladies of noble family, who, though they had grown up surrounded by all the comforts and many of the luxuries of life, decided that it was better to forsake all than to deny Christ, disguised as boys, set out in company with three Protestant gentlemen, hoping to reach the coast. Their way lay under dripping trees, along rough and broken roads, and through thick forests; still they kept bravely on for some days, but being at last so pressed by hunger that they were obliged to enter a town in the hope of being able to buy a little food, they were all arrested and taken to prison; the prison was crowded, but on finding among their fellow-prisoners several Huguenots, they wept for joy. On making their secret known to the gaoler, he removed the young ladies to a separate cell; but all that we have been able to learn about them is, that after being tried before the judges they were sent to a convent.

Chapter 23.

The Edict of Nantes.

May 1st, 1599. My birthday once more, and as my MS. book lies open before me my thoughts go back to the one father gave me when I was twelve years old, and I seem almost to see the cosy little room in our old home at Antwerp in which its first pages were written. It was quite at the top of the house, but I liked it all the better for that, as from its window, draped like the bed with curtains of snowy whiteness, the special care and pride of our good, faithful Truyken, I had a view of the river, and from quite a tiny child I loved to watch the ships, and soon learnt to know to what country they belonged by the flags that floated so proudly from their mastheads. Many changes have taken place since then; but to-day with a praise-filled heart I can say, "The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him." (Nahum 1: 7.)

Charles IX. of France, though he could have been little but a tool in the hands of his mother at the time of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, only outlived it by about two years. Sleeping or waking, its terrible memories seemed to haunt him; he grew pale, haggard and miserable. Attacked by a painful and incurable disease, he was attended by a Huguenot doctor and nurse; he would often wake from an uneasy sleep, exclaiming that he heard dreadful cries, and would insist upon his attendants going out to see that his subjects were not rising against him. When on their return he was assured that all was quiet, he cried out: "Oh, why was I so led astray? What shall I do? What will be the end of all this? I am utterly lost! I see it now it is too late!" He died, calling upon God for forgiveness, but without one gleam of hope or comfort.

The vacant throne was filled by the king's brother, the Duke of Anjou, who took the title of Henry III. He disliked all state business, grew angry if he was asked to attend to the affairs of his kingdom, and spent most of his time playing with an ivory cup and ball, or teaching his pet dogs to perform tricks; but as he thought himself a good Catholic, he would now and then ride at the head of a procession in honour of some so-called saint. When he appeared in public it must have required all the politeness for which the French as a nation are noted to prevent his subjects from laughing at his ridiculous appearance: his face was painted red and white, his hair powdered, and he usually wore a black satin bodice trimmed with costly white lace.

Like all his family, he hated the Huguenots, and ordered fresh edicts of persecution to be issued against them; but the King of Navarre raised an army and came to their help; about the same time the Catholics, who knew that Henry of Navarre was the next heir to the throne, and were resolved that they would not have a Protestant ruler, banded themselves together to form what they called "The Holy Catholic League," but as they were very much disliked and tried to injure all Huguenots, we think the word "holy" is quite out of place.

Several battles were fought between the soldiers of Henry of Navarre and those of the League, the latter being under the command of the Duke of Guise, who was very popular among the Romanists. The weak and foolish king sometimes took sides with one party, sometimes with the other, the result being, as he might have foreseen, that he was trusted by neither.

After one of these battles the king invited the Duke of Guise to visit him. Father says that a royal invitation is a royal command, so of course he went; he had no sooner entered the palace than the gates were barred behind him; the duke entered one of the state rooms and stood by the fire, waiting till he was sent for by the king. At last the summons came, and as he drew back the hangings which covered the door to answer it, he was met by forty-five men with daggers, who stabbed him; he fell covered with wounds. On hearing that he was dead, the king entered the room and spurned the lifeless body with his foot, in just the same way in which the duke had treated that of the murdered Admiral Coligny. Hearing of this brought the Lord's words, "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Matt. 7: 1), vividly to my mind.

About eight months after the death of the duke, Henry III. was prevailed upon to lead his soldiers to the field. One day a monk entered the camp and, on telling the guard that he was the bearer of such important news that he must have a private interview with the king, was conducted to the royal tent. He handed the king a letter, and while he was quietly reading it, stabbed him with a knife. Hearing his cries, the guard rushed in, but too late to save the king's life. The monk met death calmly, and was afterwards placed on the list of Romish saints by the Pope, who said that by killing the king he had rendered a great service, not only to the Catholic church, but to the world.

Though Henry of Navarre was the rightful heir to the throne, he was not allowed to take peaceable possession of it. The League bitterly opposed him, and two great battles were fought, in both of which Henry's troops were victorious, the most brilliant being that of Ivry.

Just before it took place Henry of Navarre bound a snow-white plume in his helmet, and addressing his soldiers said, "Comrades, if our standard-bearer falls, do not lose sight of my white plume; you may find it in the thickest of the fight, but it shall lead you in the path of honour, and I hope of victory also." The troops replied with a ringing cheer, and fought with more than usual bravery. The ranks of the League were broken and fled in confusion. Henry shewed a noble and generous spirit towards his conquered foes, and soon after was publicly crowned under the title of Henry IV. of France.

He was no sooner firmly seated on the throne than what many had long expected took place. On Sunday, July 25th, 1593, in the church of St. Denis, he made a public profession of the Roman Catholic faith. Before doing so he was heard to say, "I shall make a somersault on Sunday, but my kingdom is worth a mass." If he expected by so doing to gain the goodwill of the Catholic party, he must have been disappointed on finding that he had as many enemies among them as before.

But I must not forget one act of his reign for which we are all deeply thankful, the passing of a wise and just law known as "The Edict of Nantes," by which protection and a large measure of liberty is granted to his Protestant subjects. They are now free to worship God according to the simple teaching of His word. Many public offices are now open to them, and their children are to be admitted to schools and colleges; any one wishing to employ them as workmen or servants is quite free to do so; and we hope that brighter days are in store for those who have already suffered so much for Christ's sake and the gospel's.

The edict only became law on February 25th, 1599, and though we hear that in many towns and villages where the Catholic influence is strong the priests and councillors are doing all they can to prevent its being carried out, many workmen, mostly silk-weavers and vine-dressers who had left their homes during the dark days of which I have previously written, have returned already. Trade is in a more flourishing state than it has been for many years past, and hardly a week passes without some pastor of a little company of Christians being welcomed home by the friends who love him and have long mourned his absence.

Henry shews a real care for the well-being of his subjects. He is a wise and able ruler. He has often been heard to say, "I will so manage the affairs of my kingdom that the poorest peasant may have meat every week-day, and a fowl to put in the pot on Sunday." More than one attempt has been made upon his life by the Jesuits, who cannot forgive him for the bold stand he once took as the friend and helper of the sorely oppressed Protestants; but so far he has escaped, and as it is long since France has known so much of peace and prosperity, we hope he may long be spared, and pray, "God save King Henry of France and Navarre."

Chapter 24.

A Great Sorrow.

December 31st, 1599. My MS. book has been neglected for many months past; not from the want of something to write about, but just because I had no heart to write. Throughout the Netherlands the days, or at least most of them, have been dark and gloomy. As the news, which seemed so terrible that at first we almost refused to believe the report, that William, Prince of Orange, had fallen by the hand of an assassin, spread from town to town, from village to village, rich and poor, high and low, wept as children might weep who had lost a wise and loving father. We did not even try to comfort each other, for what with surprise and sorrow we had no comfort to give.

Five previous attempts on his life had been made; once, as I have already recorded, he had lain for weeks hovering between life and death. He had through the good hand of God escaped so many dangers, and had never seemed to be more greatly needed than at the moment of his death, that we never thought such a sad ending to the story of his brave and useful life would one day have to be written.

Father often said of him that he had never known a man whose life appeared to be more governed by one desire, "to do the will of God," and though we cannot understand why God allowed his enemies to triumph, we bow to the stroke, and own how little of God's purposes we really comprehend; but we are sure, quite sure, that He is wise and good and loving, for "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him." (Ps. 103: 13.) Perhaps some day, in the clear light of eternity, many things that perplex us now will be made plain; till then, we will "trust and not be afraid."

But I must try to recall how it all happened. About two years after the death of his dearly-loved wife, Charlotte de Bourbon, the prince married Louisa, the widowed daughter of the French Admiral Coligny. She, too, had known sorrow. "Black Bartholomew," as it is often called now, must have been a day of sad and painful memories to her, as both her father, and her first husband were among those killed. She, too, proved herself an affectionate and devoted wife, and their union, though not of long duration, appears to have been a happy one.

Well and wisely as William ruled over the Netherlands, he had many bitter enemies among the Roman Catholics, who never forgave him for the bold stand he had taken for truth and liberty. He was by no means ignorant of their feelings towards him, but leaving himself in the hands of God quietly went on with his many public duties. Those who sought his life, at last accomplished by cunning and deception what they had failed to do by force.

A young man, whose name I do not care to record, for it does not deserve to be remembered, obtained several interviews with the prince; he professed to be the son of a martyr, always carried a large hymn book under his arm, and talked loudly of his zeal for the reformed faith; but he was really an agent of the priests, from whom he had received instructions to take the life of William of Orange, and made himself as far as possible acquainted with the home life and habits of the prince. He knew there was no small degree of risk in the attempt, but the priests had not only given him absolution, or, in other words, a full and free pardon for the crime he intended to commit, but had assured him that by killing William he would render a great service not only to the Roman Catholics but to the world. If he could escape, a rich reward was promised him, but if not, his family would receive a pension, and a patent of nobility.

The opportunity came at last for which the assassin had for some time waited. On that day the prince dined with his family, and appeared more than usually cheerful. As he rose to leave the table his wife called his attention to a dark figure muffled in a cloak, who stood in a recess near. The prince replied, "Oh, it is only some one who has a petition to present," and began to ascend the stairs leading to his private apartments. He had only taken two steps when the assassin followed and stabbed him.

He fell, mortally wounded, and expired shortly afterwards. The assassin was not suffered to escape.

There is not a single blank page or even a spare line in my MS. book, and there is no need that I should begin another. The children of bygone years are the men and women of today; a new generation is growing up round me, and I can only hope and pray that the story of the dark days in which all the power of the inquisition was used to oppress and crush the followers of Christ (many in both Spain and Holland who, though weak in themselves, had learnt the blessed secret of simple faith in a risen living Saviour were "out of weakness made strong," and cheerfully, often joyfully, laid down their lives rather than deny their Lord) will help the boys and girls who read it to value their Bibles more than they have ever done.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Wycliffe's Work for England

Wycliffe's Work for England

L. Laurenson

Contents

1 The Most Interesting Book in the World

2 Rome: Mediaeval and Modern

3 Conversion and Conflict

4 Wycliffe and the National Opposition

5 Wycliffe and the Bishops

6 The "Poor Priests".

7 More about the "Poor Priests"

8 Rome attempts to extinguish the light

9 The Wonder of the Book

10 The Oldest Book in the World

11 The Early Christian Centuries

12 The Rise of the Papacy

13 Christianity in Early Britain

14 The First English Bible

Chapter 1

The Most Interesting Book in the World

What is the most interesting book in all the world? Perhaps different people would give different answers to this question. Boys might think of books describing the lives and actions of great men in history: the battles they fought, the brave deeds they did, and the wonderful things they accomplished. And girls might think of the life-story of some noble woman, less prominent on the world's stage but equally brave, and perhaps more useful and helpful to those with whom she came in contact.

But while such books are both interesting and helpful, yet there is ONE BOOK that far surpasses all others, not only as a book of history and narrative, but in every other way. That book is THE BIBLE.

In it are found stories of the very earliest times. The first of all stories and the most wonderful of all stories is found in the first Chapter of Genesis. There we read how God, in six days, prepared this world to be the habitation of men, providing for their use, with gracious care, every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food. Then, when our first parents had sinned and brought ruin and death into the fair scene, God in wonderful grace gave them the promise of a SAVIOUR.

Moreover, we know from the Bible that God will again prepare a new Heaven and a NEW EARTH wherein righteousness will dwell and into which sin cannot enter. Between the accounts of these two most wonderful events we find other stories of great and good men, brave and strong men, wise and noble men; of gentle and loving women, faithful and true women, kind and useful women.

All these stories of men and women who have lived for God are recorded for our example, for only those who are really good can ever be truly great.

But that which makes the Bible the book of supreme interest is that in it we find the wonderful STORY OF LOVE — the story of the Life and Death, the Resurrection, and Ascension to Heaven of our Lord Jesus Christ. All who know the Saviour love the Bible, for everything in it, in some way or other, speaks of Him. The Bible thus becomes to them a very precious possession. H. M. Stanley, the great explorer, when he set out to find Livingstone, took with him one hundred books to read while on his journey. As the difficulties of the march increased, and the loads of the carriers had to be lightened, everything not strictly necessary had to be thrown away. One by one the books followed, until ninety-nine out of the hundred had been left in the swamps of Central Africa, and only ONE remained. Which book do you think that was? It was the Bible. Stanley had selected the hundred most interesting books, but he found that the most interesting of all the hundred was the Word of God.

In our days Bibles are so common and so easily procured that we are apt to think that they have always been so. And while we are deeply thankful for an open Bible in our Protestant land, yet we do well to remember that England has not always been a Protestant country, and the following pages are an endeavour to trace how the Scriptures came to us, and what a noble Englishman did and suffered in order that we might be able to read the Scriptures in our own language.

We shall have much to say in the following pages about the "Church of Rome"; therefore it will be well to remember that the Papacy was only a sect which broke off from the early Church, and introduced a great many unscriptural doctrines and practices in total contradiction to the teaching of the Lord Jesus and His Apostles.

The early centuries of the Christian dispensation were ages of marked intellectual ability. The great names that are mentioned in history confirm this. Tertullian in the second century wrote his famous Apology. Origen manifested his zeal and learning by editing the celebrated Hexapla edition of the Holy Scriptures. Jerome translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and the New Testament from the Greek originals into the Latin, then the language of the West. John, called Chrysostom, or the "golden mouthed," was the greatest preacher of his time. Augustine was the greatest teacher. Many others might be mentioned who were not only familiar with the Scriptures but did everything they could to make their contents known to others.

But when the bishop of Rome adopted the blasphemous title of Vicar of Christ and became a temporal sovereign, all this was changed. Rome's motto then became, "We do not want learned men, we want submissive subjects," and of course the more ignorant the subjects were, the more submissive they became.

Private confession to the priests of Rome has been called the foundation stone of popery, and this "stone" was laid as early as the fifth century by Leo I. With audacious blasphemy, priests of Rome, sinful men themselves, and ofttimes both ignorant and wicked, were supposed to be able to "forgive sins." Succeeding popes followed this policy because it increased their revenues, and these men, though living always in luxury, and ofttimes in idleness and vice, were ever on the outlook for fresh fields over which to extend both their temporal and spiritual sovereignty.

Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and all the multifarious hierarchy of popedom were appointed by the Pope on condition that he was well paid for doing so. These men were under his power, and, even among the sovereigns of the nations, few were found that dared to disobey him.

Every effort was made to keep the people in ignorance and darkness, and at the same time everything that Rome supplied had to be bought with money. One has well said, "Not an article was there in her creed, not a ceremony in her worship, not a department in her government that did not tend to advance her power and increase her gains. Her dogmas, rites, and orders were so many pretexts for extorting money. Images, purgatory, relics, indulgences, pilgrimages, jubilees, canonisations, miracles, and masses were but taxes under another name, so many drains for conveying the substance of the nations to Rome."

A "pall for an archbishop" cost from £1,000 to £10,000, and every new "saint" that was canonised cost the country of his birth 10,000 crowns. "Truly," says another, "Rome takes your gold and gives you nothing in return but words."

In short, nothing could be got from Rome without money, and nearly everything for it

These years are known in history as the "Dark Ages," and one reason among others for this prevailing darkness was the fact that the settled policy of Rome was then, and is yet, to keep the Bible from the people.

And we can well understand why she did so, for in the Scriptures there is the light of Truth which exposes and condemns all the false pretences of the Apostate Church. The people had been taught that there was a series of priests, popes, and "saints" between them and God. From the Bible they would learn that there is One Mediator — the Man Christ Jesus. Rome taught that pardon was to be purchased by paying her priests to say "masses." The Scriptures declare that "we have redemption THROUGH HIS BLOOD, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace" (Eph. 1: 7), and that "BY HIM all that believe are justified from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses" (Acts 13: 39).

Rome may well fear an open Bible. The power of the priest is at an end when we learn the pardoning love of a Saviour God through virtue of the finished work of Christ at Calvary. For about nine hundred years from the time that the monk Augustine, in 597, landed with his forty followers, England was more or less under the power of the Pope. Augustine thought that "faith and holiness were less essential to the Church than authority and power, and that its work was not so much to save souls as to collect all the human race under the authority of Rome." This man's character has been summed up as a mixture of ambition, superstition, and zeal. As soon as he got a footing for himself and his attendant monks he began his work of aggression against the British Christians, and he and his successors did not rest until the papal supremacy was established all over the land.

And this is just the attitude of Rome to-day. Her age-long motto is "Semper eadem" (ever the same), and she is working harder to-day than ever before to recapture England. Monasteries and nunneries are more numerous in our land to-day than they were before the Reformation. Priests and Jesuits enter in ever-increasing numbers, and each and all are doing their utmost to overthrow the good work of the Reformation. Romanists are active and awake; Protestants are in many cases half-hearted and asleep.

Chapter 2

"Rome": Medieval and Modern

Carry your mind back for just over six hundred years. It is the year 1324, and at that time was born a man who in the good providence of God did much to deliver England from the thraldom into which she had fallen, both socially and religiously. That man was John Wycliffe. And the England of the fourteenth century was a very different country from what it is to-day. The population numbered only about three millions, and fully one-third of these were slaves or serfs (villeins), who cultivated the ground for the lords of the manor, and were bought and sold with the land whenever it changed owners.

Edward II. was reigning, but his feeble career was drawing to a close. During his reign the nation had lost much of the power and prestige it had acquired under his warlike father. He had applied to the Pope for at the Pope's "shop" you could purchase anything — for "a box of ointment to make him brave" before he set out to conquer Scotland. But in spite of, or because of his "box of ointment," his Scottish wars ended disastrously. He lost both his battles and his courage, and perhaps his "box" as well, and fled back to England to save his life. Then his struggles with the barons further added to his unpopularity. We read of misery and sickness caused by poor harvests. "The dead bodies of the peasants were found by the roadsides. The dead in cities were buried in trenches; the gaols were full of thieves; people were driven to eat the flesh of dogs and horses and even of children."

Amidst all this misery we get a glimpse of some wise men who could make good laws. It was enacted that "less grain be made into beer and more into bread." Our land would be all the better were this ancient policy in force to-day.

But as usual, while the common people suffered so sorely the upper classes were living in luxury, and most of all the monks and friars who were "at no period so splendid in their equipages and households." Again, we read of a "dole" of bread being given out at a rich man's funeral in London, and so great was the need of the starving poor that over fifty people, old and young, were crushed to death in their efforts to secure a portion.

London had already become the headquarters of all the colours of the begging friars. Whatever the good intentions of their founders may have been, corruption and decay soon set in among their followers. They rapidly fell into the besetting sin of everything connected with Rome, and began to "add house to house and field to field."

The Dominicans reached England about 1220 and settled in Holborn. Though vowed to poverty, they soon were able to put up a convent, the most splendid in London. The Franciscans followed a few years later and settled at Cornhill. Within twenty years their brotherhood numbered eighty friars, and a church and convent was built by them far surpassing in splendour those of their rivals.

Following hard upon the Franciscans came the Carmelites in 1240, and still another of the begging orders — the Austin friars — arrived in 1253. Like a cloud of locusts they covered the land, licking up every green thing, so that it was reckoned that in the time of Wycliffe nearly one-third of the nation's wealth belonged to the Church of Rome. These men were directly responsible to the Pope, and were known as the regular clergy in distinction to the parish priests, who were the secular clergy and were under the rule of the bishops.

It is interesting to hear Wycliffe's opinion of these "holy beggars" in his own times, when they had further increased both their wealth and their begging effrontery. From the initials of their names he formed a word which we should call an acrostic — "CAIM." The Carmelites supplied the first letter, the Austins, the Jacobins (or Dominicans), and the Minorites (or Franciscans) completed the fanciful idea. This word he connected with Cain who slew his brother, and he found many analogies wherewith to make vigorous and trenchant exposures of their hypocrisy, greed, and evil deeds. Their so-called poverty, he says, is nothing but a lie, for it is based on the lust for wealth and robbery, and is really an inspiration of the devil.

He shows us also how their practice of entering the parishes of the secular clergy and persuading the people to "confess" to them, led to a fearful increase of licentiousness and sin. "For thus did they whisper to one another, 'Let us follow our pleasures: some friar whom we never saw before and may never see again may come this way. When we have had our will we can confess to him without trouble.'"

Is the system of Rome any better to-day? The poor deluded votary goes to "Confession" and thinks he can procure forgiveness from a "priest," then being "absolved" he is free to go on again in his course of evil.

We can thus see how this unscriptural system sears the conscience, belittles sin, and blinds the mind to the holiness of God who has appointed a day in which HE WILL JUDGE the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance unto all men in that He hath raised Him from the dead.

Thank God, the Lord Jesus Christ to-day is a SAVIOUR, and this is the Day of Salvation. The day is fast approaching when He will take the place of a Judge and then the Day of Salvation will be over.

Chapter 3.

Conversion and Conflict

Let us now return to the early days of Wycliffe, and see how he was prepared for his great work of reformer before the Reformation.

As we have seen, he was born in a Yorkshire village in 1324, where his family had been lords of the manor since the Conquest. No records of his childhood or youth have come down to us; so we cannot tell how his boyhood days were spent, but, as youth is the formative period of life, we may conclude from what we know of his later years that he made the best of whatever opportunities he had.

Character is built up step by step. Single actions repeated, form habits, and habits form character. At an early age his parents sent him to Oxford. In those days boys of fifteen years of age were entered as students, so it is likely that Wycliffe began his career at Oxford about the year 1340.

His habits of diligence and application served him well at the University, for even his enemies bear witness to his proficiency and abilities. One of his bitterest opponents says, "He came to be reckoned inferior to none of his time in philosophy, and incomparable in the performance of school exercises, a man of profound wit, and very strong and powerful in disputation, and who was by the common sort of divines esteemed little less than a god." In later years, after he had taken his degree of doctor of divinity, he came to be known as the "Evangelical Doctor," and he required all his "profound wit," learning, and ability to meet the assaults of his enemies. Doubtless, in the providence of God, he was being prepared in those early years for the service he would be called upon to perform in later life.

So the early years of his scholastic life passed on, and while he was still a young man an event happened — the most important event in the life of any man — Wycliffe was converted to God. About this time Europe was visited by the dreadful pestilence known in history as the "Black Death." Such an awful scourge may well have brought all thinking men to face seriously the issues of life, death, and eternity. Many were led to true repentance towards God. Many others became callously indifferent to all the sorrow and suffering around, or saw in it only the means of enriching themselves at the expense of others. Crossing from Asia to Constantinople, then to Italy, its ravages swept away half of the population. The filthy condition of European cities in those days provided a fruitful soil for contagion, and all suffered alike. It has been estimated that in Europe 25,000,000 human beings perished, though this number is no doubt greatly exaggerated. London had a comparatively small population, but 100,000 of its citizens died. Huge pits were dug to hold the bodies. Rivers were "consecrated" by the priests for the same purpose. Everywhere death stared men in the face. Even ships at sea were attacked, and when all their crews had died, drifted aimlessly until stranded on some shore to spread still further the infection.

In the midst of this convulsion of society the young and learned Oxford student was driven to study the Scriptures, and, like Luther later, in them he found the words of eternal life. At this time he wrote his Commentary on the Apocalypse. With other pious men of his time, he seemed to think that the dreadful woes overspreading the earth, coupled with the moral and spiritual corruption of the Church, pointed to the time of tribulation spoken of in the Apocalypse.

Now we know that this was not so, but Wycliffe used the circumstance as a call to the unconverted, and from this time we can trace his closer application to its study. When in later years he became a professor or lecturer to Oxford students he insisted on the authority of the Scriptures.

It has been said that pagan Greece or Rome never had so many "Gods" and "Goddesses" as had the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. Wycliffe had learned much when he boldly announced that "Whosoever entreats a 'saint' should direct his prayer to Christ as God, not to the saint but to Christ. Nor does the celebration or festival of a saint avail anything, except so far as it may tend to the magnifying of Christ. Hence not a few think that it would be well for the Church if all festivals of that nature were abolished. For the Scriptures assure us that Christ is the mediator between God and man. Hence many are of opinion that when prayer was directed only to Him for spiritual help the Church was more flourishing than it is now, when many new intercessors have been found out and introduced."

Words like these were something new to men of that time, but they were also true, and truth was not wanted by the priestly authorities. When warned of his danger Wycliffe replied: "I have learned from experience the truth of what you say. The chief cause beyond doubt of the existing state of things is our want of faith in Holy Scripture. We do not sincerely believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or we should abide by the authority of His word . . . which is of greater weight than any other. . . . It is His pleasure that the books of the Old and New Law (Old and New Testaments) should be both read and studied, and that men should not be taken up with other books, which, true as they may be, and containing even Scripture truth, are not to be confided in without caution and limitation. If we follow this rule the Scriptures will be held in becoming reverence. The papal Bulls will be superseded as they ought to be."

These were bold words to speak in 1372 and were enough if reported to Pope Gregory XI. at Avignon to cause the poor man to gnash his teeth.

That Wycliffe recognised what they might entail we learn from another sermon: "For the believer," says he, "in maintaining the law of Christ should be prepared as His soldier to endure all things at the hands of the satraps of this world; declaring boldly to pope and cardinals, to bishops and prelates how unjustly, according to the teaching of the Gospel, they serve God in their offices; subjecting those committed to their care to great injury and peril, such as must bring on them a speedy destruction one way or another. All this applies indeed to temporal lords, but not in so great a degree as to the clergy, for as the abomination begins with a perverted clergy, so the consolation begins with a converted clergy. Hence we Christians need not visit pagans to convert them by enduring martyrdom on their behalf, we have only to declare with constancy the law of God before Caesarian prelates, and straightway the flower of martyrdom will be at hand."

Loving the book with all the depth of his powerful nature and finding in it truth to meet the conscience and satisfy the heart, he determined to translate it into the common language of the people, so that all might hear the word and understand the message.

But this, he felt, would be a matter of time, and while it was important to translate the Scriptures, his busy mind formed another plan for spreading the truth until his great work of Bible translation could be accomplished.

This plan was no less than to send out men whom we should now call home missionaries, who, travelling from town to town and village to village, would preach to the people in simple language the Gospel of God's free Salvation through the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

These men came to be known as Wycliffe's "Poor Priests," and we shall learn more about them in a later chapter.

Chapter 4.

Wycliffe and the National Opposition

So far we have been tracing the history of our Reformer in his work and teaching at Oxford. But events happened about this time which brought him forward in a more public capacity as a champion of national freedom against the usurpation of Rome in the State. Other men had done so before Wycliffe, but he did not stop here; he saw that the Pope's usurped control over the consciences of men was a worse thing than control over their bodies and goods, and so he set himself to oppose both.

To trace the course of these events we must turn back in history for over one hundred years to the time of King John, who, as we all know, had yielded up England and Ireland "to St Peter, St Paul, and Pope Innocent III." John abjectly laid his crown at the feet of the haughty Pandulf, the Pope's legate, who is said to have kicked it and rolled it in the dust of the muddy floor as a worthless bauble. However, he very condescendingly allowed the humbled John to resume it on condition that he would pay the Pope £666. 13s. 4d. per annum and also become his vassal.

This payment had been very irregularly made, and since the majority of Edward III. it had been entirely discontinued. Suddenly Pope Urban V. in 1365 sent in a claim not only for the annual amount, but also for all the accumulated arrears. The papal Court has been famous at all times for its love of money, but at this time the Pope could not help himself. It was the period of the "Babylonish Captivity," when the papal Court had been transferred from Rome to Avignon, and was therefore under the power of France. Charles the Wise of France hoping to humble Edward the Warrior of England had forced the Pope's hand. This situation gave Wycliffe his opportunity and produced events the benefits of which we are reaping to-day.

But Edward III. was no weakling, as was King John. The man who had humbled France at Crecy and Poitiers, and who at that very moment was titular monarch of one-third of its soil was little likely to yield to the insolent demands of Urban, who was but a tool in the hands of Edward's enemy. So Edward wisely said "No," and summoned his Parliament to support him.

The Commons complained that the Church drew five times more money from the nation than did the King's exchequer. Moreover, they were not afraid to criticise the morals of "His holiness," and these were certainly open to criticism, for at this time the Papacy had probably reached its lowest stage of corruption, degradation, and debauchery. At Avignon benefices in every part of Europe were openly put up for sale and handed over to the highest bidder. The purchaser in turn squeezed out of his parish not only enough to repay his outlay, but sufficient to allow him to imitate the luxury of his superiors. So the Commons of even Roman Catholic England might well complain of the simony and corruption of Avignon.

All these evils were coming to a head when it pleased God to raise up His servant Wycliffe to oppose them. At this time he was a King's Chaplain, and his principles influenced both King and Parliament. The prelates were in an unfortunate position. They had either to become traitors to the Pope or traitors to the King. If they disobeyed the Pope they risked their spiritual dignities. If they disobeyed the King they risked their worldly possessions. They were wise in their generation, and submitted to the power nearest at hand.

"With the other dukes, earls, barons, and great men" they answered that neither King John nor anybody else could give away his kingdom and his people without their consent.

But though the prelates had betrayed the interests of their master the Pope, the friars were not so disposed to yield. They declared that, according to the Canon Law, the King, having defied the Pope, ought to be deposed. Then the question arose, what did the Canon Law say, and the Oxford professor was at once appealed to.

But Wycliffe neatly turned the tables on the friars by declaring that the point was not what saith the Canon Law? but WHAT SAITH THE SCRIPTURES? It was language new to the men of that age. "Canon Law," said he, "is of no power when it is opposed to the Word of God."

But God had more important work for Wycliffe than worldly politics. His lectures to his students were those of one "having authority." Other masters taught from the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which Sentences, as their name implies, were a collection of aphorisms compiled from the works of Augustine and other of the early "Fathers" on various points of Christian doctrine. But Wycliffe went direct to his Latin Bible and showed his hearers that in the Word of God there was not only the way of life, but the rule of life, and that both flatly contradicted the doctrines of Rome.

It was about this time no doubt that he began to gather around him many of those friends who became light bearers all over England in later years, and who helped to spread the truth and light God was graciously revealing to the people.

How thankful we should be that, although wicked men, led on by Satan, have often attempted to suppress both truth and light, they have never quite succeeded. Such attempts were made later in the time of Henry VIII. who "broke with the Pope" only to set himself in the Pope's place and measure out, if that were possible, equal cruelties against the saints of God. Again, the Queen who has earned the unenviable title of "Bloody Mary," became an abject slave of the Papacy, and by its instructions condemned to the awful death of fire three hundred of the best men and women in. England. The haughty prelates of the Church of England, at the Restoration, thought themselves vastly in advance of papal Rome, yet they continued the old persecuting spirit and brought in oppression, both sustained and severe, against the Puritans, who were the most godly people in the nation at that time. On Black Bartholomew's day (24th August 1662) over two thousand ministers were ejected from their parishes for refusing to accept the Act of Uniformity, and were "left without house or bread, their people unable to help them and not daring to do so even where they could." Mr Jeremy White compiled a list of 6o,000 persons who between the Restoration in 1660 and the Revolution in 1688 had suffered on account of their religion, 5,000 of whom died in prison. In Scotland during the same period some 28,000 lost their lives under the persecuting monarchs, Charles II. and James II.

The same principles are at work to-day, for Rome never changes. In our country she cannot appear in her true colours just yet, but she has been steadily working ever since the Reformation to undo that great work. The way to defeat the works of darkness is to spread truth and light. Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel or under a bed and not to be set on a candlestick? It is the duty and privilege of all who have the light to "let their light shine."

From exposing the wicked practices of Rome Wycliffe was led on to denounce her evil doctrines, and while the first offence might be ignored, the second must be dealt with and punished without mercy.

We shall see in our next chapter what means Rome adopted to do so and how far she succeeded.

Chapter 5.

Wycliffe and the Bishops

We noticed in a previous chapter that our Reformer was now devoting himself more and more to the study of Scripture, and it was by this means that he was able to deal those resounding blows to the Papacy, the echoes of which reached to Rome itself. So the Pope issued a Bull enjoining the English clergy to crush "this formidable heresy," for such the plain teaching of Scripture was called. The priests needed little incentive.

Courtney, the Bishop of London, "a proud and fierce man," energetic in all he undertook, and "possessed in full the violent manner and overbearing temper of a great noble," roused up the meek old Archbishop Sudbury to persecute the Reformer. "By the report of persons truly worthy of credit," says the papal missive, "it hath become known to us that John Wycliffe, Professor of Divinity, or more properly, a Master of Error, hath proceeded to a degree of madness so detestable as not to fear to assert . . and teach propositions, the most false and erroneous, contrary to the faith, and tending to weaken and subvert the whole Church." As every reader may see, Wycliffe is here falsely accused of doing what the popes for nearly one thousand years had been really doing. They were the men who had laboured to teach and enforce by fire and fagot "propositions, the most false and erroneous," and utterly subversive of the truth of the New Testament.

But with the true spirit of popery the epistle goes on to say, that "means be taken with the said John Wycliffe to commit him to prison and retain him in sure custody."

Sudbury seems to have been a quiet, peaceable old man, more interested in collecting his revenues than in caring for the good of his people, as the people remembered against him in the day of his extremity. His own friends accused him of allowing the "evils" of Wycliffism to go on till it was too late to arrest them. "Too late the bishops roused up their father the arch-bishop, as one from a deep sleep . . . or rather as a hireling drunk with the poison of avarice, to recall the wandering sheep from feeding on the food of perdition, to give him to the keeper of the sheep for cure, or, if need be, for the knife." The last three words express papal policy in short and forcible language.

The "proud and fierce" Courtney cited the "wandering sheep" to appear before "the hireling drunk with the poison of avarice." Poor Sudbury! We could wish that his friends had given him a better character to hand down to posterity, for next time we see him he is deserving of all respect.

Four short years afterwards he had to take refuge in the Tower of London in hopes to escape from the rebels during the Peasants' Revolt. With the mob raging round the doors he calmly celebrated the Lord's Supper, preparing both himself and his fellow-prisoner — the Treasurer Hales — for death. Then, when the ruffian crowd burst in, the brave old man quietly accompanied them across the moat to Tower Hill, there meekly laid down his grey head upon the block, and so finished his course for good or evil.

Meantime Courtney took charge of the proceedings against Wycliffe. He had been cited and he did not fail to appear. "His right hand is raised, clutching his tall white staff. His clothing consists of a dark simple robe, belted about the waist, and dropping in folds to the feet; while above that grey and flowing beard you see a set of features which speak throughout of nobleness, and which a man might do well to travel far even to look upon."

With Wycliffe came his serving man carrying his books, and especially THE BOOK, for he knew that the strongest weapon in the battle of truth was the Sword of the Spirit. But with Wycliffe came two powerful friends. The one was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and the other was Lord Percy, Earl Marshal of England.

An immense crowd thronged the approaches to St Paul's Cathedral. Insults were offered to the old man by some of the ruffian mob, and loud hootings by the partisans of the priests filled the building when he appeared. Courtney ordered that the prisoner should stand to hear his indictment read. Percy ordered him to sit. "You have much to reply to and need a soft seat," said he to Wycliffe. Courtney insisted. The Duke lost his temper and abused the priest, "muttering in his beard that he would drag the bishop out of the church by the hair of his head." Others of the mob now broke in, and a wild melee took place between the citizens and the soldier guards of the noblemen. The assembly broke up in confusion "before nine o'clock," Wycliffe being the most unmoved person in it. What he thought or said we do not know. But next year a new set of papal Bulls arrived from Rome. Three were addressed to the priests, one to the King, and another to the University of Oxford.

It is interesting to look over the shoulders of the writer and see what Gregory XI. thinks of the man about whom he has taken the trouble to write five letters. He is both "surprised and indignant" that the heads of the University, "notwithstanding all the privileges granted to them by the See of Rome, had, through sloth and negligence, allowed tares to spring up among their wheat." Then he seems to have quite forgotten that the Lord Jesus said in the same Scripture from which he quoted (Matt. 13), "Let both grow together till the harvest," for he goes on to root up the tares by "seizing the person of the said John Wycliffe and delivering him a prisoner to the Archbishop." Sudbury, as we have seen, was a man who was willing to have peace at any price, Courtney was a man of a different stamp, but both had to obey the Pope's behests, and Wycliffe was cited to appear before the bishops at Lambeth. This time no powerful earthly friends appeared on his side. His patron, King Edward III., had just died. His previous protector, John of Gaunt, wrote to him beseeching him not to "ruin a fine political career by an insane love of the truth." Whether the opposite course would ensure a "fine political career" we cannot say, but evidently John of Gaunt thought so. Here the two men part company and Wycliffe had to face his enemies alone, and yet not alone for God was with him and gave him grace to witness a good confession.

But the priests had again overreached themselves. No brief from the Pope could have authority in England without the King's consent, and this had not been obtained. In the midst of their proceedings the royal messenger, Sir Henry Clifford, arrived from the Queen Mother to forbid the court. The citizens of London had also veered round from their attitude of the previous year. They were ever jealous of their privileges and would allow no interference with what they considered their rights, and, though papists, they were ready to cry "no popery" when it suited them. So the bishops, as the old writer scornfully says, "became as reeds shaken with the wind. Their words were softer than oil. They made public shipwreck of their dignity. You would have thought that their horns were gone."

Thus a second time Wycliffe was preserved from his enemies to continue his work for God. He produced a paper setting forth his faith in the Word of God, and again protesting against the errors of the Church. In the first place," said he, "I am resolved with my whole heart, by the grace of God, to live as a sincere Christian, and, while my life shall last, to profess and defend the truth of Christ as far as I have power." Sometime shortly after this Wycliffe fell suddenly and dangerously ill. He was now an old man and had lived a life of incessant labour coupled with harassing and persistent persecution which had told seriously upon a constitution never very strong. The priests, and especially the friars, whose vices he had so scathingly exposed, were delighted. They hoped now to get rid of their life-long enemy. But greater far would be their victory if they could induce him to recant. So a deputation was formed. It consisted of a representative from each of the four begging orders of friars and some of the aldermen of Oxford. They proceeded to his lodging and were admitted into his chamber. We can imagine how hypocritically they condoled with him on his illness, and then exhorted him, as a dying man, to do all in his power to atone for the injuries that their society had experienced at his hands.

The old man listened in silence, and then ordered his attendant to raise him up in the bed. Looking sternly at his visitors and gathering up his strength he cried, "I shall not die, but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the friars." They left the room disappointed and in confusion, and the Reformer recovered, as he had prophesied, to go on with his work.

It was at this time that the great papal schism occurred (1378) — an event which greatly helped to free men's minds from the foolish belief that creatures so utterly wicked and fallible could ever be "infallible popes."

Gregory XI., the last of the "Babylonish" popes, returned from Avignon to Rome in 1377. Next year he died and Urban VI. was elected; the first time a pope had been elected at Rome for seventy-five years. Urban was a man of mean birth, so "harsh and offensive in his manners" that thirteen of his cardinals forsook him and elected another "infallible pope," who styled himself Clement VII. The northern nations, including England, supported Urban. The southern countries, including France, Spain, Naples, also Scotland, supported Clement. Immediately Urban issued Bulls of excommunication against his rival, calling him a heretic, a liar, and anti-pope, and every other evil thing he could remember. Clement replied with like vituperation, and who was in the right or who was in the wrong no man knoweth till this day. This dual popery continued for nearly forty years, and all that time "two popish heads were inside one popish crown" and little love lost between them. Then in 1407 all the cardinals of the opposing camps got tired of the game at which the two popes had been playing, and, assembling a Council at Pisa, they deposed both and elected another, whom they called Alexander V. But as both the old popes refused to be deposed and there was now a new one elected, the only result of the celebrated Council of Pisa was that there were now three popish heads inside one popish crown, and no love lost among them at all. Alexander died, and John XXIII., who had been a pirate, reigned in his stead. We shall notice only one event in the five years of his history he condemned all the writings of Wycliffe to be publicly burned on the steps of St Peter's. The popes hated each other well: they hated the truth more.

One pope was bad: two popes were worse: three popes were unendurable. At the Council of Constance (1414-15) all three were deposed: John because of his "evil deeds," and the other two because they refused to attend. So, John of the many numbers stole out of the city "on a sorry nag" and fled. But he was caught and put in prison where, it is hoped, he had time to repent of his "evil deeds."

This digression comes into our story only to show the effects all these events had on Wycliffe. Up till the time of the papal schism he had recognised the Pope and tried hard to reform him. Now with the monstrous spectacle of "two heads" to the Church, and both "infallible," he saw that reformation was impossible. Henceforth he banished both of them from his scheme, and lost no opportunity of exposing the unscriptural, worldly, and wicked character of the whole papal system in spite of its pretensions to sanctity.

He continued to preach at Oxford, and we find him getting access to many pulpits even in London. He wrote tracts, both in Latin for the learned and in English for the common people; but the heaviest blow he inflicted upon the Romish Church was his attack upon and denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. This blasphemous doctrine (of which we can use no milder word) was a terrible engine in the hands of Rome, and it was round this doctrine that the battle of the Reformation raged. If this point was gained, the power of the priest over the conscience was gone and he became weak as any other man. So all the armies of the Prince of Darkness were marshalled to defend the citadel. Alas! that in the Church of England to-day so many of her so-called "priests" are going back to the darkness and delusions of Rome, to deliver them from which many of our forefathers suffered imprisonment, torture, and death.

A few more years pass. It is 1381, and the "proud and fierce man" Courtney is now Archbishop. He had marched to the archiepiscopal throne over the dead body of Sudbury, murdered, as we have seen, during the Peasants' Revolt. With the proud title of "Primate of all England" he would see if he could not do what he had failed to do as Bishop of London. Assembling a Convocation at Oxford, Wycliffe was again summoned to appear.

The indictment was read and he rose to reply. As of old, he repelled their charges and challenged them to convince him of error before they condemned him. "Ye are the heretics," he cried, "who teach your foolish traditions instead of the truth of Scripture. Why do ye propagate such errors? Why? Because, like the priests of Baal, ye want to vend your masses. With whom think ye that ye are contending? With a frail old man on the brink of the grave? No, with truth, which is stronger than you and will overcome you."

His judges were astounded at his bold words which they knew to be true. They had no legal power to detain him, so he left the court unmolested. Though now an old man, "on the brink of the grave" as he said, yet the greatest of all his works was yet to be done. We shall see later what that work was and how he accomplished it.

Chapter 6.

The "Poor Priests".

We have already seen that Wycliffe's progress as a Reformer began with his attacks upon the wicked practices of the priests of Rome. From the Pope downward he unsparingly exposed the hypocrisy of men who professed to be followers of the meek and lowly Jesus, and yet lived in pride, luxury, and sin. But by and by he came to see that not only were the deeds wrong, but that many of her doctrines were wrong also. And as he had now learned, in everything, to refer to the Word of God as the sole authority, he saw the importance not only of denying what was false but of affirming what was true.

To do so, he was led to turn to that great plan first practised by the Lord Himself on the green hillsides of Galilee, and enjoined by Him upon His disciples in all ages. Wycliffe's plan was to PREACH THE WORD. But how could one man, and that man advanced in years, hope to reach many with the sound of the Gospel? If he could not do it single-handed he could induce others to help. Sometime, then, between the years 1375 and 1380, that band of men were gathered together who were known as Wycliffe's "Poor Priests." Rome, too, had her preachers, and they were found mostly among the friars. But they were by no means poor priests. They invaded the parishes of the secular clergy, who hated them just as bitterly as both combined hated the Reformer. Under their wide flowing robes they carried large bags into which they put the gold, silver, or provisions they succeeded in begging from hall or hut wherever they went. They well deserved the name of Mendicants, for their principal business was filling their wallets. Their "preaching" consisted in telling stupid, foolish, and fabulous stories of the "lives of the saints," too silly to repeat in our pages, or legends from the Siege of Troy. Afterwards, they spent their time in the alehouses or at the gaming-table.

When they came into a town they proclaimed to all that they had power from the Pope to pardon all sin. Relics of wonderful virtue were produced from among their other treasures capable of performing all kinds of cures, either upon man or beast. These relics usually consisted of old sheep's bones or other similar rubbish. But though easily procured and easily carried, they were parted with for one commodity only — money, and still more money. And one of the curious things about them was that if you purchased your old bone for silver your crops increased only twofold, but if you gave the rascal friar gold for his old bone, then, in some way which neither he nor we can explain, your crops increased fourfold. So the wily friar defrauded the poor people, enriched his greedy order, and offended a holy God.

In all this we see but a baptized paganism, much worse than even that of heathen Rome. In the "good old days of Rome" the priest believed what he preached. Here we find men who knew that they were deceiving the simple people, yet deliberately continuing to do so in order that they themselves might amass wealth by robbing the poor.

Wycliffe's "Poor Priests" seem to have been friends like-minded with himself who had gathered round him while he was at Oxford. We get a glimpse of them as "men travelling barefoot." Their clothing usually consisted of a "long russet gown reaching down to the heels, without pockets." The last two words remind us of our Lord's instructions to the seventy disciples sent out to preach the Gospel (Luke 10), "Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves. Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by the way. And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house." This seems to have been the model on which the Wycliffe preachers were formed, and it might truly be said that they went forth as "lambs among wolves."

The bishops had recourse to their usual weapon persecution, and had a law passed for any King's officer to arrest the preachers and commit them to prison. The parish priests and friars, though they agreed on little else, agreed on this and acted as policemen. When the humble evangelist began to preach, they set off for assistance. But the Gospel was a sweet sound in the ears of the people, and they at least had a welcome for the preacher, so that ofttimes when the King's officer appeared to arrest him, a "body of stout men stood forth, surrounded their preacher, and bore him off in safety."

When persecuted in one place the devoted missionaries fled to another, and, whether seated in castle hall or beside cottage hearth, whether preaching to the crowd at the cross-way or to the merchant in the busy mart, they spoke of full and free salvation by grace alone, not of works lest any man should boast.

It was hardly to be expected that seeing all the corruptions both of life and doctrine which Rome had introduced they would abstain from attacking her errors. And here indeed there was scope and matter for all their fiery indignation. There was the hypocrisy of the friars, who pretended to be poor men, but who were bent only on enriching their order. There was the worldliness of the higher clergy, who were more interested in State preferment than in performing their spiritual duties. There was the pollution and degradation of the papal Court itself, which instead of setting a standard of righteousness was at that time sunk in the lowest depth of infamy.

Then it became their duty to warn the ignorant people that payment of money to a priest or friar could not put away sin; and that the worship of images was no part of Christianity, but only a pagan practice introduced by Rome. How very true this charge was can easily be verified. Rome taught then, and teaches now, that without baptism there can be no salvation. She thus makes the way of salvation baptism instead of the Lord Jesus, who alone could say, "I AM THE WAY." So far is this false doctrine pressed that even infants are included, in express denial of the beautiful words, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 19: 14).

Rome's fond deceit is "justification by works," but the Scriptures say, "BY HIM all that BELIEVE ARE JUSTIFIED from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses" (Acts 13: 39). The heathen nations of old were required by their priests to do works of penance and self-mortification, even cutting their flesh with knives like the priests of Baal, whom we read about in 1 Kings 18: 28. So Rome teaches that God is not satisfied without tortures of the body and penances without number. But this is a denial of the value of the FINISHED WORK of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the PRECIOUS BLOOD that alone cleanses from ALL sin.

Again, we read that just as there is One God, so there is "ONE MEDIATOR between God and men, the man CHRIST JESUS" (1 Tim. 2: 5); but Rome puts the Virgin Mary in a higher place than the Lord Himself. A well-known Romanist tells his readers that the sinner who ventures to come directly to Christ may come with dread and apprehension of His wrath, but that if he comes through Mary, the wrath of "her Son" will be at once appeased.

In the days of Jeremiah (Jer. 44: 19) the paganism of the heathen nations had invaded Judea, and women were seen offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven. The same Scripture gives us the origin of Rome's blasphemous "Mass." The "cakes" that were offered to the "Queen of Heaven" were small, round, thin wafers, the pattern of which we have with us to-day in Rome's "wafer god."

The doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the dead comes from the same heathen source. Neither the one nor the other is found in the Bible, but both go hand in hand with Rome, for they are two of her best money-making devices. For no prayers are of any value except the priests' prayers, but "no pay no prayer," so that unless the priest be well paid, purgatory holds the victim.

It is difficult to write calmly about this atrocious system of deliberately making merchandise of the tenderest feelings of the human heart sorrowing over departed loved ones. Priests of paganism in Egypt or in Greece, priests of the Jews, or priests of papal Rome have all alike been adepts at "devouring widows' houses."

Again, the idol worship of Rome might well arouse the indignation of men who had learned the truth of Scripture for themselves. A Romish procession, bearing a figure either of the Virgin Mary or some other saint, might well remind us of what Isaiah says: "They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith; and he maketh it a god; they fall down, yea, they worship. They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry him, and set him in his place, and he standeth; from his place he shall not remove."

Pagan idolatry in principle has been deliberately annexed by Rome.

Now, all these things were the recognised order of things in papal England in the fourteenth century, and we have to thank God that we are in some measure delivered from it, and think ourselves too wise to go back to it; yet Rome to-day is making an insidious, determined, and untiring effort to reintroduce the same conditions into this Protestant land.

Alas for men's poor man-made religion in contrast to the glorious Gospel of the blessed God concerning His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. His finished work on Calvary settles every question of sin, both to the glory of God and the blessing of men, and He is to-day the Only Saviour of Sinners. From the glory He is saying to-day, "Come unto ME and I will give you rest."

Chapter 7.

More about the "Poor Priests"

It is interesting to trace further what the men of that day, whether friends or enemies, thought of Wycliffe's "Poor Priests," and we will begin with our old acquaintance, the proud, fierce man," Courtney.

He had reached the lofty position of Archbishop, as we have seen, over the headless body of the murdered Sudbury. One of his first efforts to extinguish the new movement was to call a council at the Convent of the Blackfriars in London, which then stood where the offices of The Times newspaper stand to-day. So these great men assembled — eight bishops, twenty doctors, fifteen friars, and four monks — and their object was to put down the new opinions and prosecute all who were suspected of holding them, especially John Wycliffe. Here Wycliffe's doctrines were examined and, of course, condemned by all present. But an event happened on the very day of the council meeting which completely destroyed the effect of the council's decision. "About two o'clock that afternoon, while the Churchmen were sitting round the table at their pious work, a terrible earthquake took place which struck all with panic except the zealous Archbishop."

These things were not looked upon as accidents in those days, and the friends of Wycliffe loudly proclaimed that "their Master had been condemned by the bishops, but that the bishops had been condemned by God."

Courtney was not content with mere councils, however. King Richard II. was no statesman like his grandfather Edward III., and he foolishly allowed Rome more power than was good for either his kingdom, his people, or himself. Courtney saw his opportunity and had an Act passed, in spite of the opposition of the Commons, to make persecution legal.

But Englishmen as a nation are not a bloodthirsty race. Torturing, maiming, and burning to ashes living men and women were strange sights to them, and sights at which the native character revolted.

This policy of fiendish cruelty had its origin at Rome. For the century and a half it existed in our country, during which its tracks were marked by bigotry and blood, the councils, both of the Church and of the nation, were swayed by the agents of Rome. When the last popish King and humble servant of the Pope stole out of his palace and fled secretly, with no man pursuing him, then men began to breathe freely. They awoke, as it were, from a hideous nightmare and determined that as far as in them lay, they would take steps to prevent such chains ever again being riveted either on their own necks or on the necks of their children.

We may well be thankful for the liberty we enjoy to-day, and we should ever be thankful to the brave men and women who won that liberty for us. Many of them loved the Lord Jesus more than they loved their own lives. May we be as true to the truth we know as they were!

So Courtney's Act read that: "Sentence being duly pronounced, the Magistrate shall take into hand the persons so offending and any of their supporters and cause them openly to be burned in the sight of all the people, to the intent that this kind of punishment may be a terror unto others, that the like wicked doctrine . . . be no more maintained within this realm."

Courtney had triumphed for the moment, but his triumph was short-lived. The Commons returned to the matter next session. "Whatever was done," say they, "was done without our consent. Let it now be annulled, for it is not our intention to be tried for heresy or to bind over ourselves or our descendants to the priests more than our ancestors have been in the past."

There is a ring of sturdy independence about this deliverance which later Parliaments might have copied with profit. So the Commons rescinded Courtney's Act, and not till 1401, in the reign of Henry IV., was the infamous "burning statute" passed. History will ever record it as a disgrace on the reign of a king whose father was a friend to the great Reformer.

But Henry IV. had arrived at the throne by the defeat and murder of the rightful King and the help of the priests. To maintain his usurpation he had to bind himself to "support the Church." The priests were overjoyed. They seemed like bloodthirsty animals let loose, and for the next hundred years and more they literally revelled in the blood of the saints of God.

We may here look forward to an incident which illustrates the above remarks, and which shows both the savage cruelty of men calling themselves priests and the bigoted folly of a man calling himself a king. The event to which we refer took place in 1413. Henry V. was reigning. Sir John Oldcastle, who had been the King's companion before he came to the throne, and one too who had fought bravely in the King's service, had become obnoxious to the priests because he had embraced the reformed doctrines. The "fierce and cruel man" Courtney had died in 1396 and gone to his own place, and the "crafty Arundel" was now Archbishop. He had been banished as a traitor by Richard II., but made himself useful as a tool of the Duke of Lancaster who effected the revolution of 1399. The priest having helped the King, the King's son will oblige the priest. Sir John was arrested and lodged in the Tower. His good confession is worth recording, but first the King in person will try to induce him to abjure his faith.

To the King he said, "I am, as I have always been, most willing to obey your majesty, as the minister of God appointed to bear the sword of justice for the punishment of evildoers, and the protection of them that do well. . . . But as to the Pope and the spiritual dominion which he claims, I owe him no service that I know of, nor will I pay him any, for as sure as God's Word is true, to me it is fully evident that he is the great Antichrist and son of perdition."

Before the priests his words were of no uncertain sound. He declared in plain language his denial of Transubstantiation, the idolatry of image worship, and the folly of pilgrimages. Then turning to the people, he cried, "Look, good people, for the breaking of God's law these men never cursed me, but for the sake of their own law and tradition most cruelly do they use both me and other men."

Such opinions Rome could only meet in one way. When reason failed, force might succeed. He was condemned, but escaped from the Tower. Four years afterwards he was recaptured and the original sentence carried out. He was hanged (as a traitor) over a slow fire, in order that he might at the same time be burned as a heretic. Truly the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

Chapter 8.

Rome Attempts to Extinguish the Light

We saw in a previous chapter that the Commons had repealed Courtney's persecuting edict, but with the deceit to which Rome often descends, the bishops concealed and denied the fact. There were no Parliamentary Reports in those days, and no daily newspapers: few would have been able to read them even had they existed. So Courtney determined to use his present authority to purge Oxford if he could.

This brings before us some glimpses of others of Wycliffe's friends and followers at Oxford who became his helpers in the work of the Gospel. Dr Nicholas Hereford had learned much from his master at Oxford, and was so ardently convinced of the truths of Scripture which Wycliffe had opened up to him that he thought all men would believe the truth of the Gospel as soon as it was put before them. His faith took in even the Pope himself, and he promptly set off to Rome to show him a better way.

Alas, he did not know the Pope. Urban VI. was no better, and he could hardly be much worse than some of his predecessors. He promptly thrust into a Roman dungeon for life the man who should dare to question Rome's best money-making conceit of Transubstantiation. And life with Hereford, if left to the Pope's tender mercies would have been short indeed. But the city that was governed by the "Successor of St Peter" and the "Vicar of Christ," as the "Holy Father" loved to call himself, was possibly the worst governed city upon the face of the earth. The miserable inhabitants, goaded ofttimes to fury, made periodical risings against their "Holy Father," stormed his castles and emptied his prisons. Such a rising took place after Hereford had been two years in captivity, and he having escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler, wended his way back to England, a sadder and a wiser man. But he could not now go back to his lecture room at Oxford, so he joined Aston and some others of the brethren in the west.

We are grieved to find that this man, who in his early zeal aimed at converting the Pope himself, after preaching the Reformed doctrines for some years, "made his peace with the Church and rose to high preferment." Do these last four words convey the reason of his falling away from the truth? Only grace can keep anyone. Let us not judge him. The paths of these early confessors were spread with thorns, and to all is not given the courage to resist unto blood striving against sin.

John Aston, Master of Arts, was another of those who were brought up before Courtney as "one who troubled Israel," and one who had "cost the Bishop of Lincoln many a sleepless night." Now if the good bishop had been as anxious to put the truth before the people as he was to keep it from them he would have had our sympathy, but this was far from being the case. Dr Aston is described by his enemies as "a man of great scholarship and of ardent zeal and earnest effort," but his efforts in preaching the Gospel to the People were not at all to the liking of his enemies. They said he was "like a bee, always on the wing," or "like a hound, ever ready to start up from his repose and bark." And the bishops did not like Aston's "bark," There was a menacing ring in it that spelled the downfall of their power and pride. There was an echo to it that made the walls of their princely palaces to shake.

The question against him was again the old fable of Transubstantiation. This was the key-stone of their arch on which all their power over men's consciences was built. Were this knocked down, many other things would follow. So Aston was called upon to answer to certain questions in relation to this doctrine, and he replied that his faith on this subject was the faith of the Church, meaning the true faith of the true Church. Then, speaking no longer to his judges, but to the great congregation of people who had crowded in to watch the proceedings, he declared what the true faith of the true Church was, until he was hastily called to order, and "commanded to speak in Latin that the people might not understand him."

In the end his opinions were condemned, as we should expect, but as yet the bishops had no power to arrest his person, so "this long lean man" went forth again to travel on foot from one part of England to another preaching with the zeal of an apostle," and "like a bee ever on the wing." Like a bee, also, he carried a sweet message of truth and grace to many a heart tired of the penances, pilgrimages, and works of merit, which could give neither peace to the conscience nor rest to the heart. It was a new and a joyful sound to hear of ONE who could say, "Come unto ME and I will give you REST."

And there were many who received and rejoiced in the new-found truths. Beginning at Lutterworth, which was Wycliffe's parish, as a centre, we find the new doctrines extending north through Leicester, Loughborough, and Nottingham; going west there were many of Wycliffe's followers found in Coventry; in Worcester — where the poor bishop had "so many sleepless nights," and in Hereford. Further south the light spread to Gloucester, Berkshire, Wiltshire, and in the extreme south Sussex also came under its influence. Even in the Archbishop's own town of Canterbury were found many who had passed out of the darkness of Rome into the light of the Gospel.

Nor must we overlook the life and work of Dr John Purvey, who was one of Wycliffe's closest friends, and who rendered valuable help with Bible translation as we shall see later.

Possibly Purvey was one of the most able and learned men among the early Reformers, and when Wycliffe and his friends were finally expelled from Oxford, Purvey resided at Lutterworth and helped in the publication — if not even in the writing--of the many books and tracts issued during the closing years of Wycliffe's life. The efforts of the latter during these closing years must have been incessant and untiring. Over ninety tracts and pamphlets were issued in Latin for the learned, and some sixty five in English for the common people. Some were written as instruction for his "poor priests," some dealing with the way of Salvation; many, as we should expect, attacking the manifold errors both of the Pope and of the papacy.

After Wycliffe's death Purvey joined some others of the company of "poor priests" in the west, and continued the work of Evangelisation. The little community were residing in an old disused chapel, where there still remained a wooden image of "St Catherine" standing in a corner. Finding themselves short of fuel one cold evening, they pulled down the image and promptly split it up for firewood. When knowledge of this "terrible act of sacrilege" came abroad it caused a great sensation, as we might have expected. But it also led people to think. Why should they worship stocks and stones as pagans do? Were they not, in name at least, Christians? So the fire lighted by the broken fragments of St Catherine helped to shed additional light, both on the errors of Rome and into the minds of the people.

We meet with Purvey again nearly twenty years later. There is another fire before him this time, more fierce than that kindled by St Catherine. At this time, 1401, the "crafty Arundel" had succeeded in getting the Act, "de Haeritico Comburendo," placed on the Statute Book, and William Sawtre, the first of England's modern martyrs, was wrapt to glory in a chariot of flame. He had dared to say to the priests, "I will worship Christ who died on the Cross, but I will not worship the Cross on which Christ died."

Three days after Sawtre had gained the martyr's crown, we listen sadly to Dr John Purvey reading a recantation, at St Paul's Cross, of all he had said and done. And so the old man passes into the shadows.

As far as we can trace he was the last of the Oxford scholars that had originally gathered round the Reformer, but they had done their work. The seeds of truth they had sown bore fruit in the next generation. The banner of truth had been raised, and though many standard-bearers fell on the field of conflict, others were found to grasp what soon became indeed a bloodstained banner and bear it on to victory. The death fires which were first lighted in 1401 continued to burn till 1558, and never more fiercely than during the last six years of that period. Men and women, even boys and girls, sealed their testimony with their blood. To read the Scriptures or even to possess a Bible was considered a crime only to be expiated at the dreadful stake. Tortures, conceivable only by men inspired by the devil himself, were inflicted on delicate women until their poor bodies were so maimed and broken that they had to be carried to the death fire and chained erect to the post. Men had their feet burned to the bone, and were then put in the stocks the night before they were to die, in order to add to their sufferings. All these things were done by the priests of Rome, and all these things were suffered by the martyrs of Jesus. We, to day, have our liberties as the result.

Chapter 9.

The Wonder of the Book

It is a day in summer in the year A.D. 33. A large crowd of excited people are gathered together in an Eastern city. They have come from many parts of the world and speak many languages. Some have travelled from Parthia, Media, and Elam in the north; others from the far east of Mesopotamia; many from the west of Asia; and some from the distant south of Egypt and Cyrene.

But the remarkable thing about their meeting to-day is that they are listening to men otherwise uneducated, who yet are able to speak to their audience, to each man "in his own tongue wherein he was born." Then the subject of which they speak is of the deepest importance, for they are declaring to the assembled multitudes the "wonderful works of God."

We all recognise this as a story found in Acts 2, and we repeat it here because it was to this most interesting chapter that Wycliffe trenchantly appealed when he began to assert the rights of the common people to have the Word of God in their own tongue.

"Those who call it heresy to speak of the Holy Scriptures in English must be prepared," says he, "to condemn the Holy Ghost who gave it in tongues to the Apostles of Christ to speak the Word of God in all languages that were ordained of God under heaven."

Then, growing bolder, he challenged the priests as being the real heretics. "Those heretics are not to be heard," he says, "who fancy that secular men ought not to know the law of God . . . for Scripture is the faith of the Church, and the more it is known the better. Therefore, as secular men ought to know the faith, so it is to be taught them in whatever language is best known to them."

These words carry us back to the words of a greater man than even John Wycliffe — even the words of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, Paul. When writing his inspired Epistle to the Colossians, he said, "When this epistle is read among you, cause it to be read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and that ye also read the epistle from Laodicea."

In the days of the Apostle there were no recognised orders of "clergy" and "laity." The scriptural simplicity of the early faith was held by all. They recognised, according to the Lord's own teaching, that all were brethren in Christ, and they "called no man father," much less "Holy father," a title applied only to God Himself.

In Wycliffe's opinion there were still the "clergy" and the "laity," but he had made a great advance on the teaching and practice of Rome when he boldly advocated that the "laity" ought to have the liberty to read the Bible in their own language.

We may gather something of the determined opposition he had to encounter from the bishops when we see what they said about his work when completed.

One says, "This Master John Wycliffe has translated the Gospel which Christ gave to the clergy and doctors of the Church to be by them communicated to the weaker sort and the laity according to their need, and has thus made it more accessible to the laity and to women who are able to read than it was before to the well educated and intelligent clergy."

Another says, "He has completed his malice by devising a translation of the Scriptures into the mother tongue."

In the year 1408, when the priests had more political power, they issued a very stringent order, drawn up by the persecuting Archbishop, the "crafty Arundel," that "no unauthorised person should hereafter translate any portion of holy Scripture into English or any other language by way of book or tract, and that no such book or tract should be read, either in whole or in part, publicly or privately, that was composed lately in the time of John Wycliffe or since, under the penalty of the Greater Excommunication, until such translation shall be approved by the bishop of the diocese." But the bishops were more anxious to burn the Bible than to approve it, and in very many cases they burned the possessors of the Bible with the book hung round their necks.

But before we look at Wycliffe's translation, let us turn back and trace shortly how this wonderful Book of God came to men, and also notice some things about it which make it so different from all other books that it has become known now as THE Book.

In 2 Peter 1: 21 we read that "prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." God, the Holy Spirit, was the Author of the Scriptures. He used "holy men of God" to write what He inspired. Therefore the Word of God is perfect. It could not, as the Word of God, be otherwise. When men say that the Bible is only a textbook of morals and not a textbook of science, thereby inferring that its science is not "up to date," they involve themselves in a glaring contradiction, for the Spirit of God, who is the "Spirit of Truth" (John 14: 17), could not surely inspire men to write what was not true. Much of the so-called science of fifty years ago flatly contradicted the Bible. Much of the science of fifty years ago has been proved to be wrong. Much of the so-called "assured conclusions" of modern science rest on nothing more solid than a basis of unproved theories which future scientists may discard and disown. If the so-called science of to-day contradicts the Bible, so much the worse for the science. The Bible is the Judge. We may confidently rely upon this: as men approach nearer to the truth in their study of the works of God, so in proportion will they draw nearer to the Bible, the Words of God; and both are PERFECT. True science can never contradict Scripture.

Not only is God the Holy Spirit the Author of the Holy Scriptures, but God the Son is the great Subject of this wonderful revelation from Heaven.

He was the promised Seed spoken of in Genesis 3: 15 who would bruise the serpent's head. He was the One of whom Adam or Abraham, Isaac or Joseph, David or Solomon were but types. He was the One to whom the paschal lamb in Egypt and every sacrifice in Israel's temple pointed. Psalm and prophecy, and parable, all spoke of Hint. Kings and conquerors were only dim shadows of the One who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Judges of Israel and saviours of the people were but faint shadows of the One whose name was called JESUS, for "He shall save His people from their sins."

Then, when He is born into this world as the Babe in Bethlehem's manger, all Heaven is interested in the wonderful event, and a multitude of the heavenly hosts chant the words which mean so much to every one of us: —

"Glory to God in the highest,

And on earth peace,

Goodwill towards men."

Four separate accounts are given to us in the four Gospels of His life on earth.

MATTHEW speaks of Him as the King of Israel and the One who will yet sway the sceptre of the universe of God in righteousness, power, and glory. To Him every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

MARK tells of Him as the One who in grace became the Prophet of God and the Servant of Men. The Psalmist had said, "Grace is poured into Thy lips: therefore God hath blessed Thee for ever" (Psalm 45: 2); and in Luke 4: 22 we read that all the people wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth. And well they might, for "He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God" (John 3: 24), and "never man spake like this Man" (John 7: 46).

LUKE, the beloved physician, tells of One who was a more skilled physician still — the wonderful Man of God's counsels who came into the world

To preach the Gospel to the poor.

To heal the broken-hearted.

To preach deliverance to the captives.

And recovering of sight to the blind.

To set at liberty them that are bruised.

To preach the acceptable year of the Lord . . . (Luke 4: 18, 19).

And that "acceptable year" of grace, first announced in the synagogue of Nazareth, is still being proclaimed: blessing is still flowing forth to sinners, and the Lord Jesus Christ, now at God's right hand, is still saying, "Come unto Me and I will give you rest."

When we come to JOHN'S Gospel we learn that the Man Christ Jesus, who became the Servant of God and men, though He was the King of Israel, is no less a Person than the One of whom Isaiah's glowing page foretold: "Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end" (Isa. 9: 6, 7).

The ACTS OF THE APOSTLES and the twenty-one EPISTLES continue the theme and tell us from every varying standpoint what Christ is to God and what Christ is for His people.

In the BOOK OF REVELATION we are carried on to a time when time shall be no longer; when the mystery of God shall be finished and the Lord Jesus will rise up to purge the earth, deliver His people, and introduce the reign of righteousness and world-wide blessing.

Then this Book of God speaks to the conscience. It deals with men as sinners. It brings them, as it were, into the presence of a holy God and convinces them that by nature they are unfit to be there. But it also tells of the Way of Salvation, and points to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.

Another thing, among many, that makes the Bible different from all other books is the prophecies of Scripture. If we confine ourselves to one theme alone — that of the promised Messiah — we find that 4,000 years before He was born it was prophesied that He would come. Micah foretold the place where He would be born (Micah 5: 2). Daniel told of the time when He would appear, and named the very day when He would present Himself to the nation as their King, and also indicated how the nation would reject Him (Dan. 9: 26). Isaiah portrays the remarkable way in which He would enter into this world (Isa. 7: 14); then that He would be despised and rejected, and finally that His death would be the great propitiatory offering for the sin of the world.

All these things are spoken with exactness of detail, and all have come to pass exactly as foretold, proving conclusively that the writers spake by the Word of the Lord, who alone knows the end from the beginning.

Chapter 10.

The Oldest Book in the World

We have seen in a previous chapter that the Bible is the best book in the world: it is also the oldest. No other book can compare with it in this respect. Herodotus, who is known as the "father of history," dates back only to 480 B.C., shortly before the closing book in our Old Testament was written. The ancient poets Homer and Hesiod are supposed to have flourished — for no one really knows — about the time of Hezekiah, King of Judah. But 75o years before that time Moses had written the five books which we know as the Pentateuch. So that the Bible presents to us the oldest authentic records of the history of the human race. Egyptian history cannot be traced farther back than 270o B.C. The Chinese records go nearly as far. Babylonish history begins about 2450 B.C. Greek history dates from the Trojan War — if that war ever was fought — I200 B.C. Rome was busy founding its capital about 758 B.C., and Persian history begins 200 years later still. But Bible history carries us back for 4,000 years before the Cross, and gives us in the words of Inspiration the history of the very beginning of our present ordered earth and all that it is necessary for us to know about the story of man's creation to inhabit it.

The oldest vestiges of human construction are the Pyramids of Egypt, and the oldest of these is supposed to have been built shortly after the Flood. A French engineer has estimated that there are materials in this vast erection to build a wall one foot thick and ten feet high right round France, or about 1,800 miles.

For 2,500 years or thereby the world had no Bible — no written word of revelation from God. But it is remarkable that this long space of time was bridged by the lives of but three men. Methuselah, the oldest man that ever lived, is one of the links that connect with Adam on the one side and on the other with Noah, who passed through the Flood and lived for 300 years after it.

Adam lived for 965 years, and during that time he would be able to teach his descendants all the wonderful revelations which God had made to him both before and after sin came into the world. Generation after generation would hear from his lips the story of Eden, the fail, the promised Deliverer, and the way of approach to God.

If we turn back to 1 Chronicles 1, the opening three verses give us one of the wonderful sentences of Inspiration. It is a sentence containing ten proper names and not a single verb. The names are these: Adam, Sheth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, Henoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah. Dr Kitto has pointed out that these ten names literally translated in order form the following most remarkable sentence in English: Man, Appointed [or Replaced], Miserable, Lamenting, The God of Glory, Shall descend, To instruct, His death sends, To the afflicted, Consolation. Thus the very names of the antediluvian patriarchs would be a standing testimony to the world. Methuselah's name in particular was a warning message to the sinners of old. The prophet Enoch, whose own name marked him out as one able "to instruct," named his son in words prophetic of coming judgment that would "descend" after his death. The very year in which Methuselah died, the Flood came. One cannot help noting that after the name of the oldest man this world ever saw, God wrote "and he died."

How interesting it would be for us now if any person was alive who had come over with William the Conqueror. Such a person would be able to tell us, for example, about the various dynasties who had ruled in England — the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Yorkists, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Hanoverians. We should also be able to provide much interesting information about the laws and customs during the various periods of his life, and to hear such an account from his lips would be as interesting as to read it from a book. So during Adam's long life many people of the ancient world would learn from him all that God had been pleased to make known of Himself at that time.

Methuselah, the grandfather of Noah, lived with Adam for over 240 years and nearly boo with his grandson Noah. To Noah he would doubtless communicate all that he him- self had learned from his ancestors. Shem, the son of Noah, lived after the Flood for 500 years until the days of Abraham, who was called out from his country and kindred to become the father of the faithful and the repository of all the promises of grace to the nation of Israel.

Five hundred years later we come to Moses, the man of God, and the first of the illustrious men who were chosen by God to write for us the "Scripture of Truth."

And so the good work went on; the various revelations extending over a period of some 1,600 years, until the Apostle John, in Patmos, wrote the last book in our New Testament, "The Revelation of Jesus Christ," telling us about the solemn events that will usher in the closing days of men in responsibility upon the earth and of the time when "time shall be no longer."

Kings and nobles, priests and prophets, physicians and fishermen, tentmakers and tax collectors are found among the writers (over forty in all, and all inspired by God Himself, so that "the law of the Lord is perfect").

We may well pause here and ask, How has this wonderful Book been received, and how have these sacred writings been treated by the men to whom they have been sent? And in trying to answer this question we shall see that the Bible, not unlike the Person of the Lord Himself when on earth, sharply divided men into two classes — those who loved the Book and those who hated it.

In Deut. 31: 24-26 we read, "And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished, That Moses commanded the Levites, which bare the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying, Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against thee." And, again (ver. 10), "And Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, When all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men, and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law."

It is very clear from these words that God intended everybody to hear and understand His Word. Even the children are not left out, so that when Rome says that the Bible is for the priests only, she is flatly contradicting the words of God Himself.

But let us follow the history of the Book. Placed in the side of the ark, as we have seen, it entered the land with the nation and was with them in all the wars of Canaan. It abode with the ark in Shiloh for 400 years, went with it on that strange pilgrimage when the ark was taken by the Philistines, and with the ark returned again to Kirjath-jearim, whence David removed it on his "new cart." Three years afterwards, when David had learned his lesson, the ark was brought into the tent prepared for it in the City of David.

We know from 2 Chron. 6: 11 that the same autograph copy which Moses wrote was still in the ark in the palmy days of King Solomon, when he finished the first temple and put the ark in the holy of holies. And it is just possible that it is the same roll we hear of 400 years later in the darker days of Josiah. This pious King was one of those who loved the Book, for, after it had been found among the rubbish in the neglected temple, we read that, just as Moses commanded, he gathered the people together and "read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord." It is always good to read the Bible. God honours in His providence both men and nations who honour His Word. The history of our own country abundantly proves this. Compare England's greatness under Cromwell with its abject condition under Charles II. Queen Victoria rightly called the Word of God "the secret of England's greatness." Only comparatively few years have passed since the good Queen died, but we may well ask, Does the Bible hold the same place in the nation to-day as it did then?

But succeeding Kings of Judah were not all so pious as the good King Josiah. We have a sharp contrast in the actions of his son Jehoiakim. Let us pay a visit, unasked, to this King's palace. We find him in his "winterhouse" with a fire burning before him. Another portion of God's Word is being read in his presence, but taking the roll out of the hands of the reader, "he cut it with the penknife and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed" (Jer. 36: 26). He was the first person we know of who ever dared to destroy any portion of God's written Word, and short and sharp came his judgment. "God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Pagan Rome and papal Rome have only too well followed this wicked King's example, but the Word of God is indestructible; it liveth and abideth for ever.

Soon Judah was carried captive to Babylon, but during the long years of captivity God watched over His Word, and provided men to preserve it. It was copied and re-copied with the most meticulous care. Jewish scribes knew the Scriptures so well that they could tell how many words were in each book. They reckoned up even the number of individual letters, so that they knew, for instance, that the letter Aleph occurred 42,377 times, the letter Beth 38,218 times, and so on, right through all the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

So God used this scrupulous care in order that His Word might be faithfully preserved through all time.

The seventy years of the Babylonish Captivity came to an end at last. The pride of Babylon was humbled before the might of Persia. King Cyrus, who had been mentioned by name by the prophet Isaiah 176 years before he was born, issued a proclamation enjoining the Jews to go up to Jerusalem and rebuild the house of the Lord. We learn from the book of Ezra that "forty-two thousand three hundred and three score" (Ezra 2: 34) led by Zerubbabel formed the first company of returning exiles that reached Jerusalem to set about the task of restoring the fortunes of their overthrown country.

The first thing they did was to set up the altar and offer burnt offerings upon it. They thus declared their faith in the words, "God is our refuge and our strength"; and then, when the second modest temple was founded, very touching it is indeed to be present, in fancy, at the ceremony of laying the foundation stone. Old and grey-headed men are here who can remember Solomon's temple with all its magnificent architecture and golden furniture, and the present building which they are so painfully rearing up in the midst of their poverty and distress seems to them so insignificant that they weep as they think of what once was and of what now is.

On the other hand, the young men who had been born in exile, when they saw the work so far advanced, shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people. Twenty years afterwards this second temple was completed, and later, when the energetic Governor, Nehemiah, arrived at Jerusalem, the city wall was built and prosperity began again to smile upon the long-desolate land.

But what concerns us most in our present inquiry is the work that Ezra the scribe did when he came. He was the Religious Reformer of the day, just as Nehemiah, who came after him, was the Righteous Ruler.

Passing over many of his drastic reforms, both among the priests and the people, let us hasten down to Watergate Street, on the east side of the temple, for Ezra is to hold a great open-air reading meeting there to-day. A great pulpit of wood "made for the purpose" has been erected here, and the "ready scribe in the law of Moses" climbs up into it, with six men on his right hand and seven at his left, and opens the BOOK in the sight of all the people. From the time that it was light until midday the reading went on, "and all the, people were attentive unto the book of the law" (Neh. 8).

We note with pleasure the attention of the people to the words of the Book, for dark days are coming soon both for it and them. They had returned to a land not yet recovered from the desolation of the great overthrow. Jerusalem, the "holy city" towards which their hearts had yearned with such intense longing during the weary years of the captivity, was a mass of ruins. Their old enemies the Philistines were pressing in from the west. The Edomites — foes of a thousand year feuds — had pushed north as far as Hebron, the ancient capital. Moab and Ammon, on the east, are again contracting alliances with the Arabians to the further hindrance of the work of restoration.

We cannot linger longer to hear Ezra, however much we should like to do so, for we have still a long way to travel before we come to the times of John Wycliffe. But one other thing it is interesting to notice before we pass on, and that is that Ezra is believed to have compiled and arranged all the books of our Old Testament as we have them to-day (including, we believe, even Malachi), so that those who came after him had a complete copy of "The Law," "The Psalms," and "The Prophets," according to the three great divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Leaving the Jews to meet and conquer their many foes as best they may, we must take a glance at the blank leaf between our Old Testament and the New.

It was a period of stirring times for the land of Israel. Systematic and diabolical persecution, such as perhaps no other nation could have survived, occupied part of this period. Remarkable victories, gained by a few patriotic men over multiplied enemies, followed. Finally, corruption and decay set in, until all that was good and noble disappeared; and we open our New Testament to find Herod, an Idumean usurper, reigning in the Lord's land: the "sceptre has departed from Judah."

But to return. It is the year 277 B.C. Alexander the Great has met and overthrown the might of Persia more than fifty years before, only to be himself overthrown soon after by his own passions. But in the great city of Alexandria, which he built to keep his memory green, and colonised with many races, there is now a population of 100,000 Jews. We pause here to take a glimpse at some seventy learned Rabbis engaged upon the first complete translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into another tongue. This translation into Greek is known as the Septuagint Version, and was the Bible read in the time of our Lord and the Apostles. Many of the quotations from the Old Testament found in the New are from this version; hence the slight textual differences which sometimes appear. There are 275 Old Testament passages quoted in the New Testament, and about forty are from the Septuagint. The Apostle Paul quotes from the earlier Scriptures about one hundred and twenty times.

Another step of about one hundred years and we find that the domination of Babylon, of Persia, and of Greece is a thing of the past, and Palestine finds itself in the power of a more bitter foe than any of these had been. Antiochus Epiphanes (the Illustrious), or some would call him Epimanes (the Madman), is ruler of Syria, and Judea lies at his mercy. He has determined that he will destroy the race of the Jews and banish the name of the God of Israel from the earth. To do so, Antiochus saw that he must first get rid of the "Law of Moses." Perhaps never, either before or since, has the BOOK passed through such an extreme crisis. Copies of it, laboriously written by hand, could be but few. Those who possessed them were weak and their enemies were strong, but God was over all.

We read that "Antiochus went up to Jerusalem with a great multitude and proudly entered into the sanctuary, and took away the golden altar, and the candlestick of light, and all the vessels thereof . . . and there was great mourning in Israel. And he commanded the holy place to be profaned . . . and he set up the abominable idol before the altar of God, and cut in pieces and burned with fire the books of the Law of God. And every one with whom the books of the Testament of the Lord was found, and whosoever observed the Law of the Lord, they put to death according to the Edict of the King . . . and there was great wrath upon the people."

Just let us take a glance at one of the dreadful things which were frequently taking place in Jerusalem under the rule of this wicked King. We shall not linger, neither shall we return, for the sight is too appalling to witness. If we were to linger, many such dreadful spectacles of suffering should we encounter.

A mother and seven sons are led, bound, before the King, accused of "faithfulness to the law of God." One by one they are scourged, the woman being no exception. Then they are commanded to eat swine's flesh and sacrifice to idols. When all refuse to obey, the eldest son is first brought forward to the torture. A sharp knife is drawn round his head, cutting in to the bone, and skin and hair are torn from the living scalp. Again he is ordered to sacrifice in order to save his life. Still refusing, his tongue is cut out, part of his hands and feet are chopped off, and, while still alive, he is cast into a red-hot brazen cauldron to be slowly roasted to death.

One by one the heroic little band of witnesses passes through the same dreadful ordeal till only the youngest is left. Then the King promises with an oath that he will make him a rich and happy man if he will only disobey the law and sacrifice to idols. But he, refusing, as the others did, "the King rages against him more cruelly than all the rest." Last of all the woman dies also. "And others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection." And Antiochus, what of him?

"The murderer and blasphemer, being grievously struck, died a miserable death, being eaten up of worms, in a strange country" (2 Macc. 9).

A dark day this indeed for the ancient people of God, but man's extremity is God's opportunity, and the very wickedness of the King brought to the front a hero and a man.

Judas Maccabees, the chief of five brethren, was used by God to punish many of the proud oppressors of the land, recover possession of the temple, and restore the worship of Jehovah. The Feast of the Dedication, instituted by Judas in 165 B.C., which we read of in John 10, was intended to keep in remembrance this great national event. The feast began on the twenty-fifth of the month Chesleu (our December). The nations around them were celebrating the heathen Festival of the Sun. The Jews were joining in praise to Jehovah, the only true God.

Just 196 years afterwards we read, "And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And JESUS walked in the temple in Solomon's porch" ( John 10: 22, 23). This brings us to the central point of all the revelation of the ways of God in grace. In the Old Testament we read what men ought to be. In the New we find out what God is, and what God is to men. Two sentences in the first Epistle of John convey to us in the fewest possible words the two grandest truths of Scripture "God is light" and "God is love" (Chaps. 1: 5 and 4: 8, 16). This love has so wrought for His own that every stain of sin that light could detect love has found means to put away. "Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

In our next chapter we shall follow the fortunes of the Book during the early Christian centuries.

Chapter 11.

The Early Christian Centuries

In this and the following chapters we must trace the Book for a period of some 1,300 years, or from the time that the New Testament was completed until the time comes that we can look into Wycliffe's study at Lutterworth and see him busily translating his Vulgate copy into the then spoken language of England.

And just as we found in our rapid survey of the history of the Old Testament Scriptures that at various times enemies had striven to destroy them, so we shall find the same thing repeated with the New Testament in an even more determined and bitterly hostile way.

We know that all the twenty-seven books of our New Testament were written before the close of the first century. When and by whom were these various books of the New Testament completed and arranged in one volume as we now have them? Of all the various opinions that have been expressed, it seems most probable that the beloved disciple John was used by God not only to write the closing words of inspiration, but also to collect together those already written. Whether this be so or no, we know from many testimonies that by the middle of the second century all the books of the New Testament were known and read in the Christian assemblies. The Apostle's life was lengthened out for about one hundred years, and during that time he had seen the Church in its pristine freshness and unity, as described in Acts 2, and seen also the corruption, declension, and decay which set in when, even at Ephesus, believers "left their first love."

The letters to the "seven churches" in Rev. 2 and 3 describe the departure from the truth of "all in Asia," and also supply the needed correction, not only for them, but for believers in all time, "till He come." If we divide the 1,300 years before us into two periods we shall better understand the methods of opposition given to the Book.

The first period would last from Apostolic days down to the time of Constantine the Great. These were the years of the great Pagan persecutions.

Church historians have usually divided these into ten, reasoning that the prophetic word in Rev. 2: 10, "ye shall have tribulation ten days," foretells in a mystic way the long period of sufferings under the savage rulers of heathen Rome.

Different authorities give different dates for these persecutions, but the most common reckoning is as follows:

1 Under Nero, A.D. 64.

2 Under Domitian, A.D. 95.

3 Under Trajan, A.D. 107.

4 Under Hadrian, A.D. 125.

5 Under Marcus Aurelius, A.D. 165.

6 Under Septimus Severus, A.D. 202.

7 Under Maximinus, A.D. 235.

8 Under Decius, A.D. 249.

9 Under Valerian, A.D. 257.

10 Under Diocletian, A.D. 303.

But indeed the whole period of Early Christianity was one of persecution in some part of the Empire. The dates given above only indicate times of special outbreaks of the latent hatred shown to the followers of the Lord Jesus.

We find the beginning of this opposition in the Book of Acts. A few short weeks, or months at the most, after the Lord ascended to Heaven, we read of Stephen, the first martyr, being stoned to death. Saul, the persecutor, being, as he says himself, "exceedingly mad" against the believers, was making so close a search for them that he was entering into every house and committing men and women to prison and to death.

Ten years afterwards, Herod the King took up the work so dear to the hearts of the Jewish priests and "slew James the brother of John with the sword; and, when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take Peter also" (Acts 12: 3). But Peter's work was not finished, and Herod's chains were but cobwebs when they resisted God's purposes.

Space permits but a passing glance here and there as we hasten forwards.

Saul the persecutor was changed into Paul the Apostle, and by his ceaseless labours, ardent zeal, and tireless activity the Gospel had been preached in every quarter of the Roman Empire before his death, somewhere about the year A.D. 66.

At this time Rome was ruled by possibly the most wicked man this world has ever seen. Nero had murdered his brother, his sister, his two wives, and his mother. His hands were red with the blood of assassination and murder. His morals were such as we may not describe. To his many misdeeds he added the burning of Rome, and then laid the blame on the Christians.

And so began the first pagan persecution.

Now the Book and its followers are no longer confronted only by the Jewish priests in Palestine and elsewhere. They are face to face with the formidable power of the Roman Empire. So far, the imperial laws had been in their favour, impartially protecting those who were freemen from mob violence, as we see in Acts 18: 12. But if there is "another King, one Jesus," Rome will take steps to protect herself by dooming to death all who confess His name. For to confess the name of Jesus was to be in the eyes of the authorities an enemy to Caesar. If they refused to worship Nero they were counted atheists. If the Alexandrian corn ships were delayed by contrary winds, the Christians were to blame. If it did not rain, or if it rained too much, it was they who had offended the gods. "If the Tiber overflowed its banks," says Tertullian, "or if the Nile did not, the cry was raised, 'The Christians to the lions.'" In addition to all this, the trade interests of the image makers, and all the craftsmen connected with the idol temples, were in danger if Christianity prevailed. Truly, it was no small undertaking to turn the ancient pagan Roman Empire "upside down," but Christianity did it. Not by force of arms was this accomplished, but by the power of the gospel of peace, and by the efforts of men and women who loved the Lord more than they loved their own lives. When the persecutors had done their worst, friends lovingly gathered the mangled bodies or scattered bones from the blood-stained sands of the arena, and conveyed them to those wonderful places of interment known as the Catacombs, which became, during the early days of Christianity, both the meeting places and the burying ground of the believers at Rome. It has been estimated that over three millions of graves exist in its vast galleries, whose intricate network of passages is believed to extend some 587 miles — a distance equal to the entire length of Italy.

We cannot trace in detail all the records of those early years. If we did, we should see exposed on the one hand the hatred of the human heart to the name of Jesus, and on the other we should be amazed at the numbers of men and women who fearlessly suffered and overcame all the cruelty that barbarous and savage persecutors could inflict. But if we look below the surface we shall see that the chief actor was Satan himself. After all, he has but two methods of opposition to the things of God. The one is violence. The other is corruption.

For the first 300 years he tried the first method, and stirred up his servants to exterminate the Book of God and the followers of Jesus. But the blood of the martyrs has ever been the Seed of the Church, and like Israel of old, the more they were afflicted the more they multiplied and grew.

So the 300 years of pagan persecution drag their leaden feet along the track of history. But we notice that the Christians are winning. All the tower of the Empire, backed by all the will of the rulers and supported by every effort of the governors in every province is unable to stamp out either the Book or the followers of the Book. On the other hand, the numbers of the believers are increasing so fast that Tertullian (A.D. 200) can challenge the oppressors by telling them, "We are but of yesterday and we have filled everything that is yours: cities, islands, castles, factories. . . . We have left you nothing but your temples."

Many standard-bearers fell in the battle front. If we may rely on history, all the Apostles but John died violent deaths. Ignatius, one of John's disciples, was brought from Antioch to Rome to be thrown to the lions to make a Roman holiday in the year A.D. 107. Justin Martyr, with six companions, was beheaded in A.D. 163. Polycarp, with eleven fellow-sufferers, was burned alive at Smyrna in A.D. 167.

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, A.D. 161-180, has been much admired as a philosopher, but evidently he had not wisdom enough to see that, when he unjustly condemned to death men like Justin Martyr and Polycarp, he was destroying the noblest and most loyal of his subjects. In spite of his "philosophy," or because of it, he was one of the most cruel oppressors of the Early Church. Every year of his long reign was defiled with innocent blood. The Church at Lyons in France produced many faithful witnesses.

The old writer says, Then were we all much alarmed because of the uncertain event of confession, not that we dreaded the torments with which we were threatened, but because we looked forward unto the end and feared the danger of apostacy."

Attalus, Maturus, and Sanctus sustained "tortures which exceed the power of description." Blandina, a female slave girl, shared in their sufferings and triumphs. After a whole day of tortures too terrible to narrate, she could only be compelled to say, "I am a Christian and there is no evil done among us." She was scourged, seated in a red-hot iron chair, then, still alive, thrown to the beasts, and so she won the crown of life.

Under Septimus Severus (A.D. 193-211) the stern edict was issued against the Christians, "It is not lawful for you to live," and the military despot who had marched to the throne over the murdered bodies of his nearest friends was not likely to allow such a law to remain a dead letter.

From Lyons we must cross over to Carthage and listen to the touching words of the young and noble Perpetua, who with many others suffered at this time. "After a few days we were cast into prison. I was terrified, for I had never before been in such darkness. O miserable day! — from the heat of the crowded prisoners and the insults of the soldiers. But I was wrung with solicitude for my infant."

Later on in these affecting memoirs we read: "And the prison became to me like a palace, and I was happier there than anywhere else." "When the day of trial came," she proceeds, "we were placed at the bar, and my father came with my child, and said in a beseeching tone, 'Have compassion on your infant,' and the procurator said, 'Spare the grey hairs of your parent; spare your infant; offer sacrifice for the Emperor.' And I answered, I will not sacrifice.'

"'Art thou a Christian?' said he.

"I answered, 'I am a Christian.'"

Hung up in a net, she was exposed to wild beasts to amuse the populace, and, when gored and torn, a gladiator was sent to put her to death. He added to her sufferings by clumsily wounding her in the side, and she herself finally guided the sword to her throat, thereby setting her free from further suffering.

But it is in the closing years of the third century and the opening of the next that we see the most determined efforts put forth that ever were made to extinguish Christianity.

At this time the Roman world was divided under four Emperors — Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, and Galerius. We must take a glimpse at these before passing on. Two men are sitting alone in secret serious conference in the palace of Nicomedia. One of them is the old Emperor Diocletian, the other is his son-in-law Galerius. The younger is urging his proposals with vehemence. The elder is listening with apparent reluctance to what might well be, even to him, a revolting proposal. Galerius is insisting that the whole Christian community should be put outside of the laws, and that all who will not worship the Roman gods shall be burned alive.

The winter of A.D. 302 was spent in frequent conferences. The prudent Diocletian proposing milder measures, Galerius urging on his scheme of fire and blood, until the old man finally gave away and allowed the storm to break.

"It was in the ninth year of Diocletian, in the month Xanticus, which one would call April, according to the Romans, about the time when the Paschal festival of our Saviour took place, that suddenly the Edicts were published — everywhere to raze the churches to the ground — to destroy the Sacred Scripture in the flames — to strip those that were in honour of their dignities — and to deprive freedmen of their liberty if any persisted in the Christian profession."

The first Edict ordered the Sacred Books to be everywhere destroyed and the churches to be demolished. By a second Edict all bishops and ministers of churches were cast into prison. Shortly afterwards a more fearful act came into force. Magistrates were empowered to compel by torture all their prisoners to renounce Christianity and worship idols. New and hitherto unheard of torments were to be invented for this purpose. It was thought that if the shepherds yielded their flocks would follow.

The next step was to extend this order so that it included every follower of Jesus, without distinction of rank, age, or sex. Multitudes were immediately imprisoned in every place, and the dungeons "formerly filled with criminals and murderers were now filled with bishops and presbyters, and deacons, readers and exorcists, so that there was no room left for the real criminals."

This dreadful persecution extended to nearly every city and town of the Roman world. Even far away Britain had its confessors and martyrs. In Gaul alone, where ruled Constantius Chlorus (father of Constantine the Great), was there any respite.

It is a pleasure to contrast the life of this man with his three compeers. Many Christians were found in his own household, and when the first Edict was issued he ordered all who would not retract to quit his service. Then, contrary to all expectations, he dismissed the apostates and reinstated all who had held true to their faith, remarking that men who were faithful to God would be true to their Prince. "Neither did he demolish the churches, nor devise any other mischief against us, but protected pious persons under him from harm. At length he enjoyed a most happy and blessed death, being the only one of the four Emperors] who at his death did peaceably and gloriously leave the government to his own son."

Constantius Chlorus died at York in A.D. 306. It would be impossible to arrive at any estimate of the numbers who perished during the ten years that this persecution lasted. In one province alone 150,000 are said to have been put to death. Some villages entirely Christian were surrounded by soldiers and totally consumed by fire. In some cities the executions reached one hundred daily. Magistrates vied with each other in inventing new and excruciating forms of torture; but all to no purpose: the Christians would rather give up their lives than give up the Book of God.

Wearied at last with murder, the authorities authorised a more "humane" policy. Maiming was resorted to: many had their right hands cut off, and yet others one of their legs. But we must complete this sad story in the words of the old historian and eyewitness, who says: "To mention each name would be a long and tedious work, not to say impossible."

The enemy had launched his master stroke and failed. God, who overrules all things, now laid His hand on the savage monster of cruelty, who so far had appeared to have all things his own way. "Galerius was smitten of God," Eusebius says, and some of his physicians, because they could not give him relief, were "slain without mercy."

"Then, struggling with so many miseries, he began to have compunction for the crimes he had committed against the pious . . . First of all he confessed his sin to the supreme God . . . then ordered that without delay they should stop the persecutions and hasten to rebuild the churches . . . and offer up prayers for the Emperor's safety."

The Christians might well hail this new Edict like a trump of liberty. It struck the fetters from those in the dungeons. It released the captives from the mines. Those still hiding in the dismal Catacombs were able once again to appear in the light of day, but above all, it was no longer death to be found reading the Book.

But God is not mocked. Galerius died. Died as only few men in this world have died. It had to be said of him, as of Herod of old (Acts 12: 23), "He was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost." History records the same fate of Antiochus Epiphanes, Herod the Great, Philip II. of Spain, and Lauderdale of the killing times in Scotland — all opposers of God and oppressors of His people.

Meantime Constantine was marching from far distant Britain. Slowly but surely his iron legions were closing in on the heart of the Empire. From Milan he issued the great decree of universal toleration. "We give," said he, "to the Christians, and to all, the free choice to follow whatever mode of worship they wish." Maxentius (son of Maximian), now ruler of Italy, was defeated at Turin, then again at Verona, and finally at the battle of Milvian Bridge near Rome, A.D. 312. Fleeing from the stricken field, the last of the oppressors, endeavouring to force his way across the crowded bridge, fell into the river and was smothered in Tiber mud. Next day Constantine entered Rome and became sole Emperor of the West. His brother-in-law, Licinius, was ruler of the East. With the supremacy of these two men, though both were pagans, pagan persecution ceased. Satan had endeavoured in vain to burn the Book. We shall see in our next chapter how he tried to banish it, and we shall see that he failed in this also.

Chapter 12.

The Rise of the Papacy

We have reached a period in history when we might expect that the fortunes of the Book and the followers of the Book would enter upon a time of peace and prosperity. The reign of Constantine certainly forms a remarkable era in the history of the world. In matters both political and social there was a great advance on what had gone before. But the same cannot be said of that which concerns the Church. We have now reached the time spoken of by the Lord Jesus in Matt. 13: 32, when the "grain of mustard seed" had become "a tree," with the "birds of the air" lodging in its branches. Evil men, who before had "crept in unawares," now found that the professing Church was the best place for earthly preferment. The company of believers at Rome soon ceased to be known as "the Church in Rome," and became "the Church of Rome." Two little words, but how great the difference in meaning. The Christian religion was legalised, and became a State-aided institution, as paganism had been before it.

This period saw also a marked distinction among the Christians themselves. In Apostolic days all believers were looked upon as God's Kleros (clergy or lot, 1 Peter v. 2). Now sharp and very distinctive lines were drawn between the "clergy" and the "laity" (the people). Next the "clergy" began to be divided among themselves into ranks of greater or lesser precedence. Deacons considered themselves greater than readers; presbyters considered themselves greater than deacons; bishops assumed authority over presbyters, and soon there was a strife among bishops themselves as to "who should he the greatest." This unscriptural supremacy was sought for, assumed, and finally asserted by the Bishop of Rome. The finished product was the "popes," and everything that bishops should not be they have been. All alike would seem to have forgotten the divine word, "One is your Master even Christ and all ye are brethren" (Matt. 23: 8). Instead of seeking in love to serve one another, they soon began to "beat" and abuse their fellow-servants and "eat and drink with the drunken" (Matt. 24: 49). Not only so, but so great became their pride and assumption that they impiously declared that all who would not bow to the rule of Rome were on the sure road to hell. Outside of the Roman Church there is no Salvation. And such folly and impiety is still taught among the sect of the Roman Catholics to-day. It is folly, because the Apostles were "outside of the Roman Church." It is impiety, because it transfers the way of Salvation from the Lord Jesus, the alone Saviour of Sinners, to a perverted sect calling itself Christian, but which has both in its history and doctrines manifested everything that is unchristian and of the world.

At this period, too, the bones and relics of the martyrs became articles of great importance and high mercantile value. Not only so, but in a most remarkable way the supply was always equal to the demand. Peter's chains multiplied as fast as credulity could purchase, and blacksmiths have been making chains for Peter ever since. Even Joseph's "latest breath" received in Nicodemus's glove could be had for a consideration.

In all this we see that the Prince of Darkness was beginning to build up a new system of opposition to the truth out of the debris of his former cruelties. From pagan persecution came papal superstition. Thus the Church gave up entirely the truth of the "heavenly calling" and adopted all the principles of the world. Even the cruelties she had suffered in the early days she, in turn, inflicted in the Middle Ages on all who truly witnessed for Christ.

Constantine now began to fashion the Church after the pattern of the State. The "priests" were made princes of the Church. (Alas! the Church had forgotten that all believers are priests.) They wore splendid robes similar to the Emperor's. Now, also, we read of them sitting upon "Episcopal thrones" and wearing "mitres." Half-pagan and half-Jewish millinery also began to play some part, for we get a glimpse of "sacred gowns" and other trumpery ill-suited for men who were "not of the world." The bishopric became an office of dignity and influence, and, in the natural course of things, only palaces could be suitable accommodation for such magnificence. These followed next.

Thus the men who had been the mark for Satan's keenest shafts now found themselves patronised by the Emperor and fawned upon by the world. The Church had given up its heavenly calling. We have difficulty in recognising these men as followers of the meek and lowly Jesus, who had to say when on earth, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head" (Matt. 8: 20). In the first century the Church turned the world upside down; now the world had turned the Church upside down.

From this time the Church rapidly fell away from Apostolic teaching and practice, and the results were manifest to all when the Christians began to quarrel among themselves. From quarrelling they came to fighting, and as usual the victors persecuted the vanquished.

Constantine called himself the bishop of the bishops, and in order to settle their differences summoned the first Great Council to meet at Nicea. It is said that a "golden altar" was erected in the centre of the hall, and the Book, which for 30o years had been the object of the world's fiercest enmity, placed upon it. Constantine also ordered fifty copies to be specially bound and sent to the principal Christian assemblies. Three hundred and eighteen bishops met on this occasion, and men who, a few short years before, had lived in danger of their lives found themselves now treated as guests and friends of the Emperor. Many of these men bore in their bodies the marks of the sufferings they had endured. Some were twisted out of human shape, their bones had been broken by torture and badly set afterwards. Some could not sit erect, the muscles of their sides and shoulders all drawn together after having been seared with hot irons. Others walked lame, with legs and sinews torn and burnt. When they were all invited to the splendid banquet given them by Constantine, they must have gone greatly wondering.

One result of this Council was that Christendom, for the first time in its history, found itself in the possession of a Creed. But however Scriptural this may be, we are better with the words of the Book itself than with any definitions therefrom made by men.

Another thing we must notice here before we leave. The Emperor had been besieged with petitions from all the discordant parties accusing each other. Before the debate began he called for a brazier and, declaring he would not read one of them, cast them all into the fire, adding, "It is the command of Christ that he who would be forgiven must first forgive his brother."

The years that lie before us are rapidly shading down to the Dark Ages. Dark deeds took place in the Emperor's own family, which finally led Constantine to transfer the seat of Empire to his new city on the Bosphorus, which, through the munificence of the Emperor, soon became greater and more populous than Rome itself.

The departure of the Emperor saw the arrival of the "pope." The bishops of Rome from this time began to seek a place of power and influence both in things spiritual and in things temporal. When the break-up of the Western Empire took place about one hundred years later, they aspired to become earthly princes and rule over this world, forgetting alike both the words and the spirit of Him who said, "My Kingdom is not of this world."

But amid all these dark clouds there were in many places silver linings; and instead of dwelling longer on the evils that everywhere abounded, we shall look at a young man who lived in Constantinople somewhere between the years A.D. 335 and 345. He was a Goth from the region of the Danube who had come to Rome as a hostage, and while there he had been converted. He conceived the purpose of preaching the Gospel among his heathen countrymen, and to this end very wisely decided to begin by giving them a translation of the Book. But as their native language had not yet been reduced to writing, he had to form an alphabet as well as make a translation of the Scriptures. Both of these things he accomplished with great success, and a MS. of this version, written in silver letters on purple vellum, is preserved at Upsala in Sweden.

Ulphilus is known as the "Apostle of the Goths." He laboured among them with much success for nearly forty years.

Another devoted servant was Severinus, the "Apostle of Noricum." He travelled through the district barefooted, "fasting and praying, and calling upon men to repent."

Prisoners of war in those days met a hard fate. If not massacred on the field of battle, they were condemned to the harshest form of slavery. Severinus interceded with King Flethus and the barbarian chiefs in their favour, collected money, redeemed many, and sent them to their homes — enriched himself by their gratitude and blessings.

When the old man lay dying he sent for the King and Queen. Gisa, the Queen, was a wicked woman, who had been harsh to the captives and severe in the terms of their redemption. Stretching out his hand to her, he said, "Which lovest thou best, O Queen, thy husband, or gold and silver?"

"I love my husband better than all treasure," she replied.

"Beware, then," said the dying man, "of oppressing the innocent, lest their oppressions bring your destruction. Abstain from evil deeds and adorn your life with good works."

When his royal visitors had departed, he asked his attendants to sing Psalm 150. He feebly joined with them in the closing verse, and with the words on his lips, "Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord," he passed home to his reward.

We may pass over in a few words the reputed "conversion" of Clovis, King of the Franks, in A.D. 496. The Bishop of Rheims was a different type of man from the Apostle of Noricum. What he looked for was change of profession; change of life and nature might, or might not, follow. That they did not is shown by the complaint of his neighbour, the King of Burgundy, who said of Clovis, "A cruel and covetous mind is not the symptom of a sincere conversion; let him show his faith by his works." Already a "Cathedral Church" had been erected at Rheims. We read of "costly tapestries," "sweet strains of music," "wafted perfumes," and "numberless candles."

When the barbarian King, about to be baptized, entered the large building, he asked in an awestruck whisper, "Is this the kingdom of heaven?" We are inclined to question the truth of the bishop's reply when he answered, "No, but it is the way to it." Rome was too anxious to number a king among her vassals to make the gate either strait or narrow. Clovis was baptized and became "The Eldest Son of the Church." His warlike Franks, nothing loth, changed their religion to please their master.

We notice this here only to show that Roman missionary methods now aimed only at conversion en bloc. When a king or chief was "converted" by these methods, his followers had to obey or be put to the sword. This, we know, was far from the Apostolic method, but the Christianity of the sixth century was very different from the Christianity of the first. In many cases it was merely paganism with new titles. The methods of the Book were no longer followed. We may notice here that so far it had not been forbidden, it had only been forgotten. The neglect of the Book, however, was the secret of all the errors, both in doctrine and in practice, we have been noticing.

But God has ever had in this world a testimony to His Name and His truth. This we must now seek for outside the Roman Church. Or shall we say Rome was careful to try to extinguish that testimony in fire and blood as soon as she discovered it.

We now take a long step forward in history, and find ourselves in the year 1172 or thereby. Much has taken place in the interval, and Rome now has become, in type at least, "that great city which ruleth over the kings of the earth." Not only the King of the Franks, but all the Kings of Europe, Russia alone excepted, have bowed their necks to her yoke. She is now at the height of her power and pride and glory outwardly. Morally she is at the lowest depth of vice and degradation and infamy.

We are in the sunny south of France, and when things can be no darker, God is about to kindle a light that all the power and cruelty of the Pope will not be able to completely extinguish.

A rich merchant of Lyons has been truly converted, and by the study of Scripture he has conceived the desire to bring back the Church to the teaching and practice of the days of the Apostles.

His first thought, like that of every true Evangelist, was that the people should read the Book for themselves. At that time the only version of the Bible in Western Europe was Jerome's Latin Vulgate, but Latin was now a dead language, and even the priests, who by this time were alone expected to possess it, were ignorant of the truths it contained. So Peter Waldo succeeded in making a translation into what was called the "Romaunt" tongue. He then gave his money and goods to the poor, and not only began to preach the Gospel himself, but collected round him other helpers like-minded to assist. Just as those who helped our English Reformers were called "Wycliffe's Poor Priests," so Waldo's assistants came to he known as the "Poor Men of Lyons."

Soon Waldo's Testament spread widely through the Waldensian valleys, but as copies had to be written out by hand, and were thus expensive to produce, the young people were taught to commit large portions to memory so as to be able to repeat them in their assemblies when there was no Bible present. Many could repeat complete Gospels without an error. We wonder if even one out of the many readers of this book could do so!

These men hoped to reform the Church, and reform was long overdue. Pride and luxury marked the higher clergy; ignorance and sensuality characterised the lower. But reform was the last thing in the mind of the Pope. He sent instead a company of friars to find out the state of affairs, and take note of who should be burned when opportunity came.

Now for the first time we come across this dread word — Inquisition. It speaks of torture and tears, of suffering and blood. Inside its dark chambers of hellish cruelty we get glimpses of men wholly given over to the devil, and left free to work out their diabolical delights on the sensitive bodies of men and women by inflicting the most acute and protracted forms of suffering that Satan himself could inspire.

But the result of the Inquisition made by Dominic and his fellow-friars was that a "holy war" was preached against the Waldenses. Rewards, both temporal and spiritual, were offered to the ruffian crowd to induce them to join the Pope's army. They were told that the men, women, and children they were called upon to slay were "accursed of God and the Church" — that to shed their blood was to wash away their own sins. The Pope pledged his word that at the moment of death the angels would be in attendance to carry them to Paradise. And for all this they had only to serve a campaign of forty days. Truly the Pope made Paradise cheap. Such were the blasphemous teachings and the bloodthirsty instructions of that which professed to be the Church of Jesus Christ. But enough — here we see Romanism undisguised, Satan's agent and counterfeit of true Christianity.

At last the ruffian army marched. The three divisions were led, one by the Arch- bishop of Bordeaux, one by the Abbot of Citeaux, and the third by the Bishop of Puy. And these Churchmen were more keen for blood than even their rascal followers. The city of Beziers was their first objective. Inside its walls many had fled for refuge. The gates were forced and the city was taken. The Abbot, instead of showing mercy as we might have expected, urged on the work of death. "Kill all," he cried, "the Lord will find out His own." Seven thousand of the women and children fled to the churches. Seven thousand dead corpses lay there at night. Fired in various places, the once flourishing city became a vast funeral pile. Not one house was left standing, not one human soul left alive. Sixty thousand human beings had perished. Mohammed himself never perpetrated deeds such as these. He offered "death or the Koran." Rome's cry was "death" without option.

There is a day coming when the Archbishop, the Abbot, and the Bishop will stand before the Judge of all the Earth, and when "He makes inquisition for blood," the blood of Beziers will not be forgotten.

And so the work of extermination began, and continued in the various Alpine valleys for nearly five hundred years.

We have selected one example out of many, and that not one of the worst. The record of the sufferings and tortures inflicted on the Waldensian Christians was of such a nature that the details may not be printed in the English language. And these things were done with the full approbation of the Romish Church. The leaders were honoured, the rank and file were rewarded. And these deeds have the approval of the Roman Church to-day, for Rome never changes. What she has done in the past she would do again did opportunity offer and her policy require it. Whatever Rome may profess, we do well to remember what Rome is.

But Peter Waldo in translating the New Testament had done a work mighty in its results. The thirteenth century saw but the faint shimmering of the dawn. The fourteenth was destined, in the good providence of God, to see the Book translated into the language of a people that would ultimately carry its message of life and peace, pure and unadulterated, to the utmost ends of the earth.

In the fourteenth century, as we have already seen, was born John Wycliffe. In the fourteenth century, for the first time in their history, the people of England had the Book of God in their own language.

Chapter 13.

Christianity in Early Britain

Romanism in England was not indigenous. It was, if we may say so, an imported religion. Many, if not all, of its dogmas were foreign to the native mind. Compulsion is the first thing Rome has to offer, and it is the last thing to which a Briton is willing to submit. Our country, though apparently under the sway of the Pope from the seventh to the sixteenth century, yet produced many men who refused his supremacy and spurned his teaching.

The true light had reached Britain long before Augustine and his forty monks landed in A.D. 597.

Let us go back to the beginning of the two thousand years of our island's authenticated history. We have no reason to be ashamed of the men who then inhabited Britain and became the foundation strata of a strong and virile race.

The earliest Roman invader, with his "twelve thousand warriors," was so roughly handled that he had to hie him to his ships before the first wild winds of winter and flee to safer quarters. Learning wisdom by experience, Caesar next year appeared with "thirty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry, conveyed in eight hundred transports." The size of his new armament was a tribute to the courage of the islanders he was striving in vain to subdue.

The danger was great, but, as ever in our island history, with the hour came the man. Looking back over the years, Cassivellaunus is to us now but a name. Emerging out of the darkness on the one side, we see him striking his many bold blows at the haughty Roman, and then he disappears into the darkness again. We know little of the social life of the period, and less of the religious, save that Druidism, with its Egyptian lore, its stern doctrines, its gloomy rites, and its blood-stained altars, held sway over the minds of men. So far, the glorious Gospel of Peace was unknown.

Another hundred years, and again we see through the mists of time another hero letting loose the British lion against the Roman eagles. But Caractacus's nine years' struggle ends in disaster, and we sadly watch the fettered chief, "with his weeping wife and children," transported as captives to Rome. Step by step the natives are forced back. The last refuge of the Druids in Anglesey is invaded, and the heathen worship is extinguished in fire and blood. The "sacrifice to devils" (1 Cor. 10: 20) is coming to an end. The knowledge of the True God will soon find entrance, and to men who have lived in darkness and the shadow of death, the light of life is about to arise. But that, though soon to be, was not just yet. Another startling figure now emerges. Stung to hatred and madness by insult and suffering, the "British Warrior Queen" once again arouses the spirits of this fighting race. Fear and terror marched before: carnage and death accompanied her, and 70,000 Romans lay dead in and around London as the result of that stern campaign. But with a pertinacity worthy of a better cause, Suetonius again gathers his scattered legions, and after the next clash of arms, Boadicea, at the close of a lost battle, perishes by her own hand. And so passes another leader worthy to be remembered — noble men and women all.

But we come now to what interests us more than warfare or battles. We catch glimpses, for the first time, of some of those noble Britons who proudly refused to bow to imperial Rome, and see them now bowing in faith and worship at the name of the Lord Jesus. What missionary company first found their way to our shores? Did they bring the Book? Neither question can be answered, but it is almost certain that Roman Christians would follow Roman conquest. Indeed, many soldiers in the imperial armies were believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Another thing we know is that books at this time were comparatively cheap. Bookselling in the first century was a flourishing trade, and Rome then was to literary men what Athens had been before, or what London or Edinburgh is to-day. Publishers employed a staff of girls to copy out, in neat characters, the works of their clients, and so expeditiously was this done that a book of over 200 verses could be sold for about one penny. In later years, as the power of the Empire declined, learning was neglected, and ultimately found a home in the monasteries, where pious men, fleeing — mistakenly perhaps — from the evils of the world, spent their time in copying the Scriptures. Much evil sprang from the monastic system of the Early Church. This is one of the good things: let us not overlook it. It has been estimated that at the close of the second century there would be three millions of Christians and some 60,000 copies of the Scriptures. We may well conclude, then, that the early Christians in Britain were possessed of many copies of the Gospels in the original language, for Greek was still the literary language of the day.

After the coming of the Romans, the next important event in our island history was their departure. Paganism in the Empire came to an end, as we have seen, early in the fourth century. Thus British Christians were free to carry the Gospel to the Picts and Scots in the North, which we know they did. And well it was so, for here the light continued to shine when it had been almost extinguished in the South.

Ninian, who built the first church in Scotland, was born about 360. He laboured in Strathclyde. Then we read of one "Calpurnius, a deacon of the church at Bonavern," near Glasgow. To him was born about 372 a son named Succat. His mother's name was Conchessa, and she must have been a very superior woman, to judge by her son's career. When only sixteen years of age, young Succat, while playing on the shore, was captured by pirates, carried to Ireland and sold as a slave. Here the lessons of his Christian home came back to his mind and led him to faith in Christ. Succat was converted. Some years afterwards he escaped and rejoined his family. But the desire now filled his heart to return to Ireland and preach the Gospel. He did so, and his labours were greatly blessed. From Scotland Ireland first received the Gospel. Two hundred years later Scotland was to receive in return a missionary who did much, not only for Scotland, but for other parts of Europe as well. Columba reached Iona in 563.

But before we notice the labours of Columba, we must look at other and less welcome visitors who landed in the South in 449. The departure of the Romans left the nation to struggle unaided against their ancient foes, the Picts of the North and the Scots from Ireland. In an evil moment for his race, Vortigern, the British King, sought help from the Saxon rovers, Hengist and Horsa. With them landed at Ebbsfleet another conqueror, with flaxen hair and blue eyes, and never a shield or spear. But the fair Rowena soon had the British ruler at her feet. The heathen bride was married to the Christian King, who from love for a fair face plunged his kingdom into misery. This much of good we may trace in her tragic story: that through all his troubled life she was true to her husband. And whether her friends or his friends were losers in the many fights, hers was ever the sorrow, for she had relations in both camps. At last she perished with him in the flames that destroyed the fortress in which they had taken refuge after his last lost battle. Poor Rowena! Did she continue to cling to the worship of her father's war gods, or did she open her heart to the sweet influence of the love of Christ? Who shall say. Anyway, in that little Welsh fortress, firmly facing the greedy flames thirsting for her life, beside the husband of her youth, Rowena bravely met her doom.

And so the wild welter of war went on for some sixty years, until nearly every vestige of Christianity had been swept from the land. For it was against Christianity that the rage of the heathen Saxons most fiercely burned. They destroyed the churches, or turned them into idol temples. They slew the clergy. Above all, they burned the Scriptures wherever found, for as of old the Book was the object of men's fiercest hate. The powers of darkness were putting forth another effort to retain the land under the sway of the Prince of Darkness. It reminds us of the tenth persecution, only acted upon a smaller field, but with even more effective results.

But just as Diocletian failed, so failed the present reaction in Britain. By many and various agents God continues to work out His purposes of grace, and these go ever forward until the day comes when angelic hosts will chant the song of final victory. "The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever (Rev. 11: 15).

Chapter 14.

The First English Bible

We shall not trouble to trace how the many companies of Saxon invaders quarrelled and fiercely fought among themselves, shaping out the various kingdoms of the Saxon Heptarchy. Let us look rather for the brave men who were willing to risk everything in the endeavour to relight the lamp of truth in eastern Britain.

As we have seen, Columba formed a Christian community at Iona in 563. From this centre Evangelists went forth all over the north of Europe. Burgundy, France, and Switzerland were reached by these earnest men. The islands of Orkney, Shetland, and Faroe were not neglected, and we read that even Iceland was visited, though we may well doubt if their frail boats could possibly navigate such dangerous waters.

Kentigern was labouring meantime in Cumberland. Had he received more support from the Iona brethren, England might have been saved from the Romish invasion. Columba died in 597: in 597 Augustine landed in Kent. Here begins the Italian mission: it is going on still.

But much of the apparent success of the sixth century has to be greatly discounted if we are to arrive at a true estimate of its real worth, as we shall see later.

Kent was chosen for a landing-place because here reigned the Christian Queen Bertha, with her pagan husband Ethelbert.

Royal ladies fill a large place in life, and just as Rowena, unintentionally perhaps, had brought evil, so Bertha brought good. In the first place she induced the King to receive the missionaries kindly. Next year he professed to be converted, and 10,000 of his people followed. If we are to believe Augustine's report, all were baptized in one day. We hear nothing, alas! of the vital essentials of repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. The 3,000 converted on the Day of Pentecost were pricked in their heart and said, "What shall we do?"

Augustine then "converted" the temples by washing them with "holy water," and instead of heathen idols he substituted popish idols, with relics of the saints. Soon, alas! the savage worshippers of Odin saw little difference between the old religion and the new.

We read of one, King Redwald, who had been baptized, but who had "an altar to Christ, and another on which he immolated victims to the devil."

Pope Gregory was overjoyed at the success of the mission. He made Augustine an Archbishop, and wrote to him: "All the bishops of Britain we comit to your charge, that the unlearned may be instructed, the weak be strengthened, and the perverse be corrected by your authority."

But the British churches refused the authority of the monk, and very rightly said: "We will have no master but Christ." Conferences were arranged at which the proud Archbishop, "seated upon his throne," tried to bring them to subjection without success. Losing patience, it seems, in face of their devotedness, he threatened that if they would not receive the papal agents as friends they would find them to be enemies.

Augustine died. Ethelbert died. The good Queen Bertha died. Eanbald succeeded to the throne. Soon the priests quarrelled with the new King. Then the King went back to his heathen rites, "and a great portion of his subjects changed their religion with him." The "success" of the Romish mission had been more apparent than real. It is one thing to profess a religion it is quite another to see ourselves as lost sinners needing a Saviour. In the kingdom of Essex the same events took place, and the priests had to flee. Then King Eanbald "became a Christian again." Let us hope that this time it was more than mere profession. Anyway, he hurled down his heathen idols and pagan altars; he forbade sacrifices to Odin, and invited the priests from Essex to take refuge in his kingdom. Very right, too, were the scruples he urged when the young King Edwine of Northumbria sent to demand his sister in marriage "It is wrong," said he, "for a Christian maiden to become the wife of a pagan husband; of one who would neither share with her in the holy sacrament nor kneel down with her to worship the same holy God."

The Scriptures say, "Be not unequally yoked together," and this erstwhile pagan King had learned the lesson yet to be learned by many today who profess to call Jesus, Lord.

King Edwine, however, solemnly promised to give every freedom, both to his young bride and to all the Christians who might come with her. So, like her mother before, the royal lady set forth to sojourn among strangers. Like her mother, also, her influence was for good in the end.

Queen Edilburga listened to the preaching of the Bishop Paulinus who had accompanied her, and her gentle spirit was strengthened by the truth of the Gospel. To Edwine the stormy halls of Odin were, as yet, more congenial than the grace and peace of Christ. When his little daughter was born he "gave solemn thanks to Odin," but he also allowed her to "be baptized as a Christian."

We see in King Edwine a true-hearted man in dark days seeking after light. He next called a conference of his ealdormen and pagan priests to discuss the new religion. We must pause a moment here and listen to their interesting conversation. Coifu, the chief priest, spoke first, and spoke well.

"Not one of your whole Court, O King," said he, "has been more attentive to the worship of your gods than I myself, although many have received richer benefits and prospered more than I have done. Now, if these gods had been of any real use, would they not have assisted me? And in the new preaching, I freely confess, I seem to find the truth I sought, for it promises us the gifts of life, salvation, and eternal bliss."

Coifu sits down, and no one seems able to refute his able argument. We look into the dark faces of the priests of Odin and the stern countenances of the Saxon warriors gathered round their King to see who will rise next. An aged councillor, with a faraway look in his eyes, makes answer: "The soul of man, O King, is like a sparrow which, in a dark and dreary night, passes for a moment through the door of your hall. Entering, it is surrounded by light and warmth and is safe from the wintry storm. But after a short spell of brightness and quiet, it flies out through another door into the dark from whence it came. Such, O King, is the life of man: for a moment it is visible, but what was before or what comes after we know not. If this new religion can tell us anything about these mysteries, by all means let us follow it."

After this they went to Godmundham (the house of gods), destroyed the idols, and levelled the buildings with the ground.

We trust Paulinus was able to teach them clearly about the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel, and we are sure that both he and his fellow-labourers were faithful to the truth they knew, or else they could never have made the good impression they did among the fierce idol worshippers of Saxon England. Edwine used his powerful influence to support the missionary efforts in various directions, and extend his own power as well, for it seems he had ambitious dreams. His rule reached to the sea on the west, and extended north as far as Edwinsburgh, where "he built for himself a great castle on the rock," and there it is until this day. So he went on and prospered.

But Edwine's greatness came to a sad end. The fierce pagan King Penda of Mercia, "a man who could no more live without fighting than he could without food," came against him with a great army, and Edwine was slain. On that dark battlefield he laid him down to sleep the sleep no dreams disturb, and men began again to think that the "new religion," which taught peace and goodwill, was not good enough for kings.

And so nearly all the land became pagan as before. The gentle Edilburga, with her children, fled to Kent, and Paulinus fled with her. Her brother received her kindly and sorrowfully, and she afterwards retired to a convent. Such was the ending to a lifetime of dramatic events. As a little girl, forty years before, she had no doubt learned the Gospel at her mother's knee. Then she had seen the strange procession of monks that visited her father's Court. She had looked with childish awe and wonder on the figure of the Redeemer exhibited on the missionaries' banners. She had seen her father throw down his blood-stained altars at the call of the true faith, and had witnessed the same experience in her husband's history.

But all the good work had not come to an end. We read much in the Book of Acts about the influence of devout women, and we find many similar cases in Saxon history. Edwine's little girl, who had been "baptized as a Christian," grew up to be the wife of another Christian King of Northumbria, and Queen Eanflaed, like her mother and grand-mother before her, used her influence in a right way.

But meantime one King after another stepped on to Edwine's vacant throne. We seem to see mere phantoms lifting a crown on to their brows, only to be hurled down in a moment, and they themselves passing to an untimely grave. But what we are most interested in is the sad fact that during these civil commotions it seemed as if a wet sponge had been drawn across the face of the land and had wiped Christianity entirely out of Northumbria. "It was a time that was hateful to all good men."

But when heathenism seemed about to close in once more, a young heir to the throne appeared in the person of Oswald, the "Saint King," who had been an exile in Iona. Oswald set himself to recover his people to the faith of the Gospel. The Latin missionaries had fled from the land when Edwine was slain. Oswald, therefore, turned to Iona, and from Iona came the man who has been called the "Apostle of England," St Aidan. For the eight years of Oswald's reign these two men, with their fellow-helpers, worked nobly together. No sanction from Rome was asked for. They had learned the Gospel of Christ, and in His Name they went forth to proclaim it. The King often acted as interpreter to the missionary until Aidan acquired the language.

Aidan's headquarters were at Lindisfarne, a short distance from Bamborough, the royal residence. Here a school was established, and young men trained for the mission field.

But the heathen King Penda was again on the march, and after eight short years all Oswald's good work had to be laid down. But the javelin that transfixed him on his last fatal field did not overthrow the work so well done during his life.

Oswy, his younger brother, came to the throne, and once again the old heathen King appeared. Oswy retreated as far north as the Firth of Forth, and offered large gifts. But Penda declared that he came to make an end of Oswy and not to take tribute. In the battle which followed, the last champion of the heathen gods fell on the field, and with the death of Penda the most powerful opponent of Christianity passed from the scene. Never again did the land revert to the heathenism introduced by the Anglo-Saxons.

Two other events we must notice about this time, and then we shall cease to follow the fortunes of the followers of the Book and come back to the Book itself.

The first of these events introduces us to another devout woman of the period. The Abbess Hilda was of the royal house of Edwine, who was her grand-uncle. She had been baptized when a girl of thirteen, and was one of the educated women of the time who gave themselves and their possessions to the cause of the Gospel. With the help of Aidan she had founded a monastery and school at Whitby, and from it many missionaries went forth not only through Northumbria but as far south as Essex. Here lived Caedmon, who has been called the father of English poetry. His verse had this recommendation, that it put the words of Scripture in simple language before the people. Here is a sample.

CAEDMON'S POEM

"Go thou, with utmost haste, Abraham, journeying set thy steps, and with thee lead thine own child. Thou shalt Isaac to me sacrifice, thy son, thyself as an offering, after thou mountest the steep downs (the ring of the high land which I from hence will show thee) up with thine own feet: there thou shalt prepare a pile, a bale-fire for thy child, and thyself sacrifice thy son, with the sword's edge, and then with swart flame burn the beloved's body, and offer it to me as a gift."

Soon the controversy between the Romish mission and the Evangelicals became acute. It was no longer merely the time of keeping Easter or the shape of the tonsure that was at issue. What Rome demanded now was subjection to the fiction of the "Supremacy of Peter," or in other words, to the authority of the Pope, apostolic succession, and the adoption of all her other rites and ceremonies.

So King Oswy summoned the famous "Synod of Whitby" in 664 to settle their differences. Colman of Lindisfarne, successor to Aidan, with Hilda and others, supported the cause of the Gospel. They held that every Christian ought to be a preacher according to his ability. The Romish doctors declared that Peter was the "prince of the Apostles," that all authority must come from him, and that to him all must submit. We have met this word — submit — before. It is Rome's only argument. Now King Oswy had married the "little girl who had been baptized as a Christian," and, unfortunately, Queen Eanflaed was in the Roman interest. She persuaded her husband to submit. He submitted and declared himself on the side of the Pope. Colman and the others refused. Leaving their all in Lindisfarne they went back to Scotland, and the "Romans" took possession.

We may sum up in a few words the results of the last hundred years by saying that Scottish missionaries Christianised England. Augustine and his followers Romanised it.

We come now to the second event we purposed to notice, and that is the birth of Baeda, or the Venerable Bede, as he came to be called later in life. And this brings us back to the Book, for Bede was the first who endeavoured to translate a portion of Scripture into the native tongue. He had spent his life in the monastery of Jarrow, and was one of the most accomplished men of the age. Six hundred scholars attended his lectures, and his last days were occupied in translating the Gospel of John. Some say he died when he had reached the ninth verse of chapter six, others that he completed the book; then, with the words "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost" on his lips, passed to his rest. Anyhow, we know that he was the first Englishman who really set himself to this good work.

Let us now, in a single step, pass to the year 848, when Alfred the Great was born. In him we again find a man fitted for the great work that lay before him. Just as the heathen Anglo-Saxons in the fifth century swept away nearly every vestige of Christianity, so the Danish Invasion seemed to threaten a like result in the ninth. It was the last effort of the Prince of Darkness to heathenise England and it failed. Everywhere the Scriptures were destroyed. Great monasteries, such as Croyland and Peterborough, with all their books, treasures, and manuscripts, were given to the flames, while hundreds of priests were massacred in cold blood. But Alfred contended unflinchingly and successfully with all his foes. He not only delivered his kingdom from foreign invasion, but he set himself to rule his subjects in the fear of God. Not content with having learned men among the clergy, he endeavoured to teach the people also to read, and many of the nobles, encouraged by his example, were to be seen conning their alphabet. He founded schools, both for English and Latin, and books of various kinds were translated into the language of the people. But valuable as all these things were, we may well conclude that his greatest work was the translation of some parts of the Bible. He is said to have died while engaged on an English version of the Psalms.

Let us now pass on to the year 1324. Many things have taken place in that long interval. One of these things has been the steadily rising power of the popes, who were seeking to bring all the nations of Europe under their sway, and drain the wealth of the people into the coffers of the Church. Another has been the Norman Conquest, and with it has come a race of Kings who offered unvarying opposition to papal encroachments. When Gregory VII. wrote to Norman William to "do him fealty" for the realm of England, the King replied, "Fealty I have never willed to do to thee, neither do I will to do it now." It required a strong man to speak thus to the greatest of the popes, but William was strong. The people of England, too, were beginning to resent the frequent visits of Roman tax-gatherers. One such was told, "If you stay three days longer, you and your company shall be cut to pieces." A papal legate was hunted out of Oxford amid cries of "Usurer" and "Simoniac." "Where is the gaper for money who enriches foreigners with our spoils?"

And so legate Otho "is fain to put off his official robes and escape in the night as best he may." An anti-Roman spirit was rising in the nation, and even bishops of the Church, such as Robert Grosseteste, were among the leaders. When two friars came from Rome to demand from him 6,000 merks, he refused to accede to their extortionate demands. In the end the Pope excommunicated the bishop, and the bishop excommunicated the Pope. Then the bishop appealed from the tribunal of the Pope to the tribunal of Christ. "After which he troubled himself no more about the matter, but died quietly in his bed."

Such a man was no unworthy forerunner to John Wycliffe, who may well be called the "Morning Star of the Reformation." Seventy years after Grosseteste died, Wycliffe was born. To him belongs the honour of producing the first complete translation of the Bible into our language. To Rome belongs the shame of ordering — after that noble work was issued — that "all who read the Scriptures in their mother tongue shall forfeit lands, cattle, life, and goods from their heirs forever." Rome's vengeance stayed not even at death. She dared to prejudge the cause of her victims and consign their souls to Satan.

And now we reach the time when we can look into the quiet little study at Lutterworth and see Wycliffe and his helpers busy in penning the Words of Life in language understandable by the people. Busy and willing must have been the many hands at work, for it requires sixty hours even to read through the Bible. How many it would take to write it we do not know. Earnest and faithful, too, must have been these helpers, for Rome was determined the people should not read the Book, and soon was coming that dreadful statute condemning men and women to the flames for daring to read the Word of God. But the good work went on. Neither the labour of production nor the cost of purchase hindered it. Latin had been a dead language in Europe since the break up of the. Empire, but all MSS. of the Scriptures had been copied in that language ever since Jerome's Latin Vulgate had been issued nearly eight centuries before. Now, clothed in the language of the people, it came home to the hearts of the people. Men were so eager for the Words of Life that they risked their lives to procure them. Soon it could be said that every third person in England was a Lollard.

Here is a sample of Wycliffe's translation. Can you read it?

"Yan whan He was borne in bethleem of Jude, in ye dais of Herod kinge: Se ye maistres come from ye est to jerusalem, and saiden, Where is he yat is born ye kinge of Jues, For whi we sen his sterre in ye est and we come to adore him: And Herod ye kinge whan he herd yis is greteliche troubled, and al ierlm wiy hi. And he gadred alle princes of prestes and maisters of ye folk, and asked of hem where yt crist was borne: And hy saide to him In bethleem of Jude: For so is it writen yom ye prophete. And you bethleem lond of jude you nart nouzt lest in ye princes of Jude: For of ye schal corn out aduk yat gouerney mi puple of isrl."

The Pope summoned Wycliffe to Rome to answer for his errors, but Wycliffe replied by "giving the Pope some good advice."

With the completion of his English Bible, Wycliffe's work was done. He was stricken down with paralysis on the last Lord's Day of 1384, and on 31st December passed home to his reward.

Let us take another short step, this time of forty years only, and again we are back at Lutterworth. Is it a public holiday, or have all these churchmen come out to do honour to the memory of Wycliffe? Archbishop Chichele is here, dressed up in all the gaudy show of Romish pomp, with many other priests and bishops as well. And all are marching to the grave of Wycliffe, but, alas! it is not to do honour to the Reformer. They have come to burn his bones. And yet may it not be that Rome, in basely desecrating the grave of the dead, has done him more honour than she intended. She was unable to reply to him when in life. She now shows her fear of his work by revenging herself on his body when dead. Many of the inhabitants of the village would be able to remember the good old man who had counselled them, and preached to them, and pointed them to the One Way of Salvation. Now they are silent but not indifferent witnesses to the ceremony of to-day. A bonfire is lighted near the bridge, the grave forced open, and with childish spite the bones are flung into the fire, burned to ashes, and the ashes cast into the river. The spectators that day received a lesson as to what Rome is.

But Wycliffe had done a work Romish intolerance, spite of its utmost efforts, has never since been able to undo. She hates, and also fears, an Open Bible. He was a sage counsellor who said to the priests later, when Tyndale's printed Testament appeared, "We must get rid of printing, or printing will get rid of us." So far Rome has not "got rid of printing," but in every place where the Bible is read and believed men are "getting rid of Rome." And to-day there are more Bibles than ever before. It has been estimated, from the records of the three great Bible Societies, that over six hundred millions of Bibles have been produced since the art of printing was discovered. The Bible has been translated into over eight hundred different languages, and in embossed printing it can be read even by the blind. To all it brings the true light; to all it offers life and salvation through the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ alone.

We may well say with the Psalmist, "The entrance of thy word giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple."

THANK GOD FOR THE BIBLE, THE BEST BOOK OF ALL.

In the preparation of this book the following works have been consulted, and the help received is herewith gratefully acknowledged by the Author.

GREEN: "A Short History of the English People."

TREVELYAN: "England in the Age of Wycliffe."

PENNINGTON: "John Wyclif: His Life, Times, and Teaching."

HOOK: "Ecclesiastical Biography." 6 Vols.

NEAL: "History of the Puritans."

SHORT: "History of the Church of England."

RANKE: "History of the Popes." 3 Vols.

VAUGHAN: "John de Wycliffe, D.D."

ROBERTSON: "The Roman Catholic Church in Italy."

HISLOP: "Two Babylons."

M'KILLIAM "A Chronicle of the Popes."

SYDNEY: "Modern Rome in Modern England."

O'DONNOGHUE: "The Peculiar Doctrines of the Church of Rome."

EUSEBIUS: "Ecclesiastical History." Cruse's Trans.

MILMAN: "History of Christianity." 4 Vols.

WITHROW: "The Catacombs at Rome."

MUSTON: "Israel of the Alps." Hazlit Trans.

By the same author

"Four Points about a Wonderful Book,"

"The Inspiration of the Book,"

"The Vital Importance of the Book,"

"Britain's Open Bible,"

"A Bright Sunset,"

"Those 37000 Children,"

"The Story of Rebekah,"

"The Story of Ruth,"

"The Story of Christianity in Britain."

"Messiah the Prince."

"My Class for Jesus."

"The Great Prophetic Outline." An Exposition of Matthew 24, 25.

"The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

"The Man Who Did His Best."

The Captain's Heroism."

"How Young Hislop Died for the Truth."

"Maggie's Resting Place."

"John Wycliffe's Great Work."

"Bonfires of Bibles."

"The Boy Martyr of Brentwood."

"Mason's Mistake."

"Suddenly."

"Forgiven."

"Trying to be a Christian."

The Sailor's Devotion."

"The Sailor's Folly."

"Outline of the Book of Exodus."

"What Saith the Scriptures?" (A Reply to Dr Black.)

"Seven Wonderful Gifts."

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Christianity in Britain

Outlines of the Story of Christianity in Britain.

L. Laurenson. (Editor of "Loving Words.")

Second Edition

Edinburgh: J.K. Souter & Co., 2&3, Bristo Place.

Contents.

Chapter 1. The Faith in Early Days,

The Druids � Persecutions of the Early Church by Nero, Domitian, Trajan, and Dioclesian � The Culdees in Scotland � Toleration of Constantius Chlorus in France � Accession of Constantine to the Purple � The Church and the World � State Religion � The Picts and Scots � Birth of Succath � Becomes a Missionary to Ireland � His Death � Labours of Ninian in Cumbria,

Chapter 2. Pioneer Missionaries.

Persecution by Pagan Rome � Julian the Apostate � His Attempt to rebuild Jerusalem � Roman Legions withdrawn from Britain � Persecutions by the Anglo-Saxons � Increase of Paganism in Britain � Kentigern preaches near Glasgow � Retires to Wales � Invited back by Ryderech � Columba Arrives in Iona � Preaches among the Northern Picts � Missionaries from Iona � Their Journeys, Hardships, and Teaching � Usurpation of Popery � The Monk Augustine Arrives in Kent � Interview with King Ethelbert � Persecution by Papal Rome � Rise of the Moslems � Their Conquests � Inroad into Europe � Defeated at Tours � Development of Popery,

Chapter 3. The First English Bible.

Birth of John Wycliffe � His Conversion � Edward III. and Urban V. � Wycliffe Preaches at Oxford � Papal Bull for His Arrest � Summoned before Courtney � Before the Bishops at Lambeth Palace � The "Poor Priests" � Early Bible Translators � the First English Bible � Wycliffe Expelled from Oxford � Retires to Lutterworth � His Death � Persecution of his followers � Heretics to be Burned � Martyrdom of Sawtre, Badby, and Thorpe � Martyrdom of Lord Cobham � The Bohemian Reformers � Martyrdom of Huss and Jerome,

Chapter 4. Scotland's Confessors and Martyrs.

Patrick Hamilton Preaches in Scotland � Power of the Priests � Beaton Invites Hamilton to St. Andrews � His Arrest, Condemnation, and Death � Arrival of Tyndale's New Testament � Futile Opposition of the Priests � George Wishart in Dundee � Times of Revival � Wishart's Care for the Sick and Dying � Attempt to Assassinate him � Preaches at Edinburgh, Inveresk, and Haddington � Arrested at Ormiston � Burned at St. Andrews � Murder of Beaton �

Martyrdom of Walter Mill,

Chapter 5. John Knox and His Times.

Knox in the Castle of St. Andrews � Siege of the Castle by the Regent and the French � Knox sent to the Galleys � Miseries Endured by Galley Slaves � Knox and the Image of the Virgin � Liberation of Knox in 1549 � Visits Cranmer � Preaches in Berwick � Death of King Edward VI. � Accession of Mary Tudor � Dark Days for England � Mary of Guise Regent of Scotland � Favours the Protestant Party � Her Craft and Dissimulation � Knox cited to appear at Edinburgh � Finds no Accusers � Preaches to the People � The Archbishop's Warning � Civil War � Death of the Regent � Arrival of Queen Mary from France � The Mass Again � Knox's Doctrine � Interview with the Queen � Massacre of Vassy � Mirth of Mary � Rebuke of Knox � Catherine de Medici and Philip of Spain � Popish Plots � Trial and Acquittal of Knox � The Queen's Marriage � Murder of Rizzio � Carberry Hill � Imprisonment of the Queen � Murray Regent � Death of Murray � Massacre of Bartholomew � Illness of Knox � His Death � Tribute to his Character by the Regent Morton and by Pope Pius IX.,

Chapter 6. Tyndale's New Testament.

Persecution of the Lollards � Death of Claydon, Taylor, and White � Wars of the Roses � Birth of Tyndale � Training of Priests at Oxford � Erasmus' Greek Testament � Tyndale's Conversion � Thomas Bilney � Tyndale at Sudbury Hall � Disputes with the Priests � Preaches in the Villages � Decides to Translate the New Testament into English � Forced to leave Sudbury Hall � Tyndale in London � Humphrey Monmouth � John Fryth � Tyndale begins his Work � Luther's Books in England � Henry VIII. writes against Luther � The Pope confers on Henry "Defender of the Faith" � Henry Persecutes the Christians in Lincolnshire � Tyndale flees to the Continent � His New Testament printed at Worms � Introduced into England � Welcomed by the People � Burned by the Clergy � Martyrdom of Bilney and Fryth � Tyndale seized and Imprisoned � His Trial, Condemnation, and Martyrdom,

Chapter 1.

The Faith In Early Days.

The first authentic records we have of ancient Britain come to us from Commentaries of Julius Caesar. This ambitious conqueror, not content with his successes over the fierce and warlike tribes on the continent of Europe, sought to add a new province to the Roman Empire in the neighbouring island of "Britannia."

When Caesar landed in Britain he found that the only religion of our forefathers � if religion it could be called � was that taught by the Druid Priests, who had much influence over the people. The places where they practised their superstitious rites were usually enclosures of vast unhewn stones arranged in a circle, situated in the centre of dark forests where human victims bled under the sacrificial knife of the priest. Some fragments of these enclosures may still be seen on Salisbury Plain, and at Stennis in Orkney. So cruel and bloody were their rites, that even the merciless Roman conquerors speak of them with horror.

Soon Caesar had to withdraw his legions to take part in the great struggle with Pompey, which convulsed the Roman world; and nearly a hundred years passed away before the Imperial power again succeeded in establishing a footing in our island. It was only after many battles and much hard fighting that some of the tribes were subdued, and even then they were ready to break out into insurrection at the first opportunity.

Following their usual custom, the Roman generals sent some of the principal men as hostages to Rome for the good behaviour of the rest of the nation, and we read of a Welsh chieftain, named Brian, who was in Rome during the time the Apostle Paul was in the Imperial City.

We know from Scripture that there were many Christians in Rome at that time, and it is very possible that in his enforced sojourn in a strange land, the heart of this chief might be turned from his idol gods to know and love the true God.

We hear of this same Brian some time afterwards preaching Christ in his own country, and of the conversion of a native prince named Lucius. But whoever the servant was that braved the dangers of this primitive missionary journey to the ultima thule of the Roman empire, we know that there were many little companies of believers in Britain as early as the second century.

The tidings of Christ crucified had spread more quickly over the country than the arms of the Roman Emperors, and many followers of Christ were found beyond the walls of Adrian, where the ancient and mystical Druid worship, with its cruel and bloody ceremonies, was rapidly giving place to the knowledge of the Prince of Peace. But in every age "they that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution," and these early saints were to be no exception. The Roman Emperors, tolerant to nearly all other religions, made special efforts to rid the world of Christianity. In the first century Nero put many Christians to death under circumstances of the greatest cruelty and insult.

At the close of the century, under Domitian, we find that persecution had extended to Spain. The humane Nerva, who succeeded to the purple in 96, issued a pardon for those who had never been guilty, and Christians enjoyed a short respite till the beginning of the second century when the warlike Trajan meditated the extinction of the name. With such edicts in force we can hardly expect that the British Christians would escape, but when the relentless and prolonged persecution under Diocletian commenced, no part of the Empire was unvisited. The most ingenious and fiendish devices were used to torture as well as to slay all who refused to sacrifice to the gods. At no time previously had so determined and systematic an attempt been made to root out Christianity, and so complete was supposed to be the destruction of believers in Christ that coins were struck and inscriptions set up to declare that "the Christian superstitions had been rooted out, and the worship of the gods restored by Diocletian."

Some idea of the rapid increase of the Christian faith and also of the awful barbarity of pagan Rome may be gathered from the fact that during these persecutions over 750,000 Christians in one province alone perished by various kinds of cruel deaths. In Britain many Christians in the South fled from the cruelty of civilised Rome to the uncivilised and unconquered part of the island, and among the rude tribes then inhabiting Scotland they lived and taught the faith of Jesus. The lives of virtue and holiness led by these pious men, who came to be known as Culdees, led many of the pagans to forsake their sacred oaks and bloodstained altars to become disciples of the gospel.

In France where the mild Constantius Chlorus ruled, the followers of Jesus found some respite. Several Christians were found among his own household, and when the persecuting edict arrived, to test them, he ordered all who would not retract to quit his service. But the result was contrary to all expectation. He retained all who held fast to their faith, and dismissed the apostates, remarking that men who were unfaithful to God would also be so to their Prince. Constantius Chlorus dying at York in 3o6, Constantine, his son, succeeded him, and in the war that ensued was finally successful in putting down all his enemies, and became sole Emperor both of the East and West.

The Empire, which had previously been divided among two Emperors and two Caesars, was now firmly united in one hand. Constantine was prudent enough to see that in Rome at least, paganism was getting obsolete, and that by patronising Christianity he would forward his own political designs. The result of this we shall soon see. Outwardly it seemed a great thing that the Emperor should favour the Christians, but the Christians forgot that "the friendship of this world is enmity with God," and leaving the simple teaching of the Word of God, which says, "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant," (see Matt. 23: 11), individuals sought after place and power, exalting themselves to bear rule over their brethren.

One has said, "There was no plainer proof how completely the Church had fallen through forgetfulness of the Lord's name than when it accepted the Emperor's terms and the patronage of the world. The Church had been called out to be the standing witness of these two things � first, of the world's ruin; and secondly, of God's love. But when we see the Church shaking hands with the world all is gone, and the Church slips down into the mind of the age."

Constantine next proceeded to arrange the affairs of the Church after the pattern of the State, nominating the bishops of Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople, Patriarchs with revenues to support their new dignities. Sumptuous buildings were erected as Churches after the pattern of Solomon's temple. Honours and emoluments were heaped upon the pastors. Henceforth, pride and ambition in the hearts of the bishops led them to occupy themselves with the world, anxious to procure advancement, forgetting the Divine command, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." The doctrine of real conversion was also being lost sight of, while the mere external rite of baptism was taking the place of the inward work of the Holy Spirit.

We have digressed for a moment to tell of this sad degeneracy in the East

and in Italy, that the position of the Church of Rome may be better understood when she appears at a later period in our story. But as yet the Christians in Britain enjoyed little benefit from this State leniency. Their rulers when not employed in settling civil dissensions, were called upon to repel the fierce inroads of the savage tribes on their borders.

The Picts from the Highlands of Scotland, and the Scots from Ireland, devastated the more settled part of the country wherever they came, putting the inhabitants to the sword or carrying them away into slavery. One of the captives thus enslaved was at a future day, to become a useful missionary, and so interesting is the story that we give it in detail.

On the wooded banks of the Clyde, not far from where the City of Glasgow now stands, there was born in the year 377 � or as some say 387 � a little boy named Succath. His father Calpurnius was a farmer, and also a deacon of the Church at Bonavern, where his farm was, and seems to have been a simple-hearted, pious, Christian man.

As the little boy grew up, his father, and especially his mother Conchessa, diligently taught him the truths of Christianity, and sought to instil into his mind the knowledge of the true faith, warning him to beware of the idolatrous rites which prevailed in many places around them; Scotland, at this time, like Athens of old, being almost "wholly given to idolatry." Succath, like many other little boys, often paid little heed to the earnest teachings of his parents, and liked better to be the leader in the fun and mischief of his companions, than listen to the story of the Saviour's love. The time was coming, however, when he was to remember and profit by these lessons. In due season the good seed so prayerfully sown would spring up and bear fruit an hundredfold. How important to learn the truths of Scripture while young! Timothy was commended because from a child he had known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make wise unto salvation. "The entrance of Thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."

One day when Succath was about sixteen years of age, he and his two sisters were playing near the shore, when an Irish pirate chieftain, named O' Neale, made a descent on the coast near Bonavern, and carried them off, along with a number of others, to be sold for slaves. You can imagine how sad his kind parents would be to lose all their children in one day, but these were common occurrences in those lawless times.

Succath was carried to Ireland, sold to the chief of a pagan clan, and like the prodigal of old, he was sent into the fields to feed swine. It was now in his solitude and sorrow that the lessons his pious mother Conchessa had taught him came back to his mind, and as he thought thereon he wept.

"I was sixteen years old," he says, "and knew not the true God, but in that strange land the Lord opened mine eyes, and although late I called my sins to mind and was converted to the Lord my God, who regarded my low estate, had pity on my youth and ignorance, and consoled me as a father consoles his children. During the night in the forests and on mountains where I kept my flocks, the rain and snow and frost which I endured led me to seek after God."

After six years' captivity Succath succeeded in effecting his escape and rejoining his parents in France whither they had removed after the loss of their children. But his mind was often occupied with the cruel and bloody rites he had witnessed with abhorrence among the pagan Irish, and he now felt the desire to go back to Ireland and tell them the story of the love of Jesus which he had learned whilst a captive in their midst. His parents and friends tried to dissuade him, but with his heart full of the grace of Christ, he tore himself away. As he says, "It was not done in mine own strength; it was God who overcame all."

Soon afterwards he set out for Ireland, and among his other possessions he carried a big drum. A strange thing for a missionary to have, you will think; but with his big drum he collected the people of a district into the fields and preached to them Jesus. Among his converts was a chieftain named Benignus who became a faithful helper and a powerful protector to his teacher. In a large barn belonging to this chief, meetings were held every day, to which the people came in crowds, and at which many were converted. The gospel story of the love of God was indeed good news to those poor people, whose only idea of religion was to propitiate their gods, whom they believed to be as fierce, cruel, and vindictive as they were themselves, and to whom human sacrifices were often offered up in the endeavour to appease their wrath or procure their favour. Truly "the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty."

Succath � or as he was afterwards called, Patrick, and to whose name, like that of other servants of Christ, many foolish and superstitious stories have been attached � travelled over a great part of Ireland, and many little companies were brought to the knowledge of the true faith. After labouring for thirty years he died near Downpatrick, and we shall see in another chapter how Ireland repaid her debt by sending missionaries to Scotland when the light of truth in that country had waxed dim indeed.

About the time that Patrick was labouring in Ireland another devoted missionary named Ninian was evangelising among the Picts and the lowland tribes in Scotland. Ninian was a Briton of noble birth, who had been educated in Rome, and returning to his native land gave up the ease and luxury of his position and went forth to preach the Gospel. His labours appear to have begun in Cumbria � then a large province embracing Cumberland, in England, and several shires in the south of Scotland � and to have extended as far north as the Grampian Hills.

At Whithorn, in Galloway, he built a little church of "wood and earth," believed to have been the first building of the kind in Scotland. Making this his head-quarters, he made missionary tours through his extensive "parish," preaching the Gospel to the inhabitants whereever he came. He died in Wigtownshire about 430.

We know little of either the successes or failures of these ancient missionaries. Great difficulties they must have had to encounter and much opposition to overcome, but He who was for them was greater than he who was against them, and, their labours done, they have passed hence to their reward.

Chapter 2.

Pioneer Missionaries.

When the Romans came to Britain faithful servants of Jesus Christ were to be found in many of the legions, but with the Roman power came also the state religion of ancient Rome, which was paganism. A stately temple to Diana was erected on the spot where St. Paul's Cathedral now stands, another to Apollo on the site now occupied by Westminster Abbey. We hear little of Christianity during this period, save that the followers of Jesus were often confronted with the choice � "Christ or Diana?" and that many loved not their lives unto death, we learn from Bede, who tells us that "about this time suffered Aron and Julius, citizens of Chester, and many more of both sexes in several places, who after enduring sundry torments, and having their limbs torn after an unheard-of manner, sent their souls to the joys of the heavenly city."

After Constantine's profession of Christianity legalised persecution ceased for a time. Under Julian the Apostate, pagan Rome put forth its last efforts to attain that supremacy it had previously enjoyed.

Julian set himself to uproot Christianity and reform paganism. He attempted the impossible task of destroying Christian principles, and yet maintaining Christian practice. So great was his hatred of the Christian religion that he tried to make the words which the Lord Jesus uttered concerning Jerusalem false, "And Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." Julian determined to rebuild it. He had three objects to live for: the restoration of idolatry the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the conquest of Persia. After a short reign of one year and eight months he lay dying on the sands of Persia with all his schemes unaccomplished. As his life ebbed away through the wound inflicted by a Persian lance, he filled his hand with the blood and casting it into the air, exclaimed, "O GALILEAN, THOU HAST CONQUERED." The temple is still unbuilt; the cause of God still survives. Julian died a solemn illustration of Isa. 45: 9, "Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker."

The Roman power was now on the decline. In 420 the last of the legions were withdrawn from Britain to defend the more central parts of the Empire frequently assailed by the barbarous hordes ever on its borders. The inhabitants under the Roman rule had become weak and servile, and thus easily fell a prey to the next invaders, the "Franks" and "Saxons," who, with their pirate galleys, made frequent descents on the sea coasts, and even carried their inroads far inland.

In 446 an appeal, called "The Groans of the Britons," was sent to the "Great Patrician" Aetius, desiring "ayde and comforte from the daungier of strange enemies," but Aetius needed all his legionaries to conquer the fierce Attila and his savage Huns, and could give them no assistance. Vortigern, one of the British kings, made an alliance with the Angles and Saxons to assist him against the inroads of the Picts and Scots; but instead of allies the Anglo-Saxons soon became masters, and their successors tempted other bodies of German invaders to follow. These newcomers were more barbarous than Imperial Rome. They drove out the inhabitants wherever they came, compelling them either to become their slaves, or else retire to more remote parts of the country. Pagans themselves, they treated everything pertaining to Christ or Christianity with special ferocity. Preachers and people were slain with indiscriminate cruelty, and churches were razed to the ground.

These savage wars gave little opportunity for the early British Church to extend its influence over these fierce marauders, even if the conquerors had not treated with contempt everything belonging to the conquered. Thus we find that during the fifth century the Christians in the south were gradually driven back into the mountains of Wales and the wild moors of Northumberland, and, although isolated Christian families could be found here and there, paganism again overspread the land, and idol temples arose to the heathen gods in many places, where previously the true God had been known and worshipped. Our names for the days of the week still preserve a remembrance of these idol gods. Sunday is from the sun, Monday from the moon, Tuesday from their hero-god Tuisco, Wednesday from Wodin or Odin, the god of war, Thursday from their chief god Thor, the thunderer, and so on.

For many years after the withdrawal of the Romans little is known of the religious history of Britain.

Civil wars among the various petty chiefs were the principle events. Christianity existed, but ofttimes it was swept back by the tide of paganism, as in some predatory excursion the "priests" of one tribe were murdered by the soldiers of another, who, ascribing their victory to their idol gods, reared again their fallen altars and deserted shrines. Afterwards, when peace had been restored, some Christian missionary would be found brave and zealous enough to rear again the banner of the cross, and go forth with his life in his hand preaching the gospel. Thus the contest went on, but the light was slowly penetrating the darkness; the truth was the stronger, and would triumph in the end.

One of the missionaries who went forth as a light-bearer in these dark days was called Kentigern. He was born about 514 in Culross, and the scene of his first labours was at Cathures (now Glasgow). But on the accession of a new king to the throne of Cumbria, Kentigern had to flee for his life, and take refuge in Wales. When the Christian king Ryderech ascended the throne, Kentigern was invited to return, and the old writer goes on to tell us that he abode in "a town called Glesgu, now called Glasgu, where he united himself to a family of servants of God who lived after the fashion of the primitive Church in holy discipline and Divine service."

While Kentigern was labouring in the south, another missionary, named Columba, in Ireland, was preparing to visit the western shores of Scotland. Several fellow-Christians, imbued with his zeal, volunteered to accompany him, and setting sail in their currach of osiers and skins, they reached the island of Iona in 565. Here they erected their humble settlement of wattles, and from thence set forth to evangelise the rude Picts in their vicinity. Columba's efforts were directed towards the northern Picts, beyond the Grampians, where, as far as we know, the Gospel had not as yet penetrated. The brethren led lives of the greatest simplicity, and Columba, like Jacob of old, is said to have slept on the bare ground, with a stone for his pillow. A man of remarkable activity, he sought to use every moment for the glory of God. He read, wrote, and taught; he preached, prayed and visited from house to house, and from tribe to tribe, and soon fruits of his service began to appear. The king of the Picts was converted and many of his people. A school was established in Iona, where the Word of God was studied, and through the living Word many were born from above. The young men of Caledonia were taught that "the Holy Scriptures are the only rule of faith." "Throw aside all merit of works," said he, "and look for salvation to the grace of God alone. Beware of a religion which consists of outward observances: it is better to keep your heart pure before God than to abstain from meats. One alone is your head, Jesus Christ."

Soon the true instinct of a living Church arose. The young men who had learned the gospel in the school of Iona desired to spread the knowledge of Jesus Christ in other lands. Kneeling in the chapel of Iona, they were set apart by the laying on of the hands of the brethren, and they went forth with their blessings and their prayers: Often in cruel persecutions, often in jeopardy of their lives, these devoted missionaries travelled through the Low Countries, Gaul, Switzerland and Germany, preaching the Word of God to the barbarous and unsettled tribes who at that time inhabited those countries. Nor were they afraid of the wild Atlantic billows, but crossed over in their frail boats to the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and even found their way to Iceland, ever seeking to preach the Gospel in regions beyond. Often "in perils by the heathen, in perils by the wilderness, in weariness, and painfulness," only the love of Christ constraining them could have carried them on, only the power of Christ could have sustained them. They sought not for worldly place and power, for advancement and riches, but were content with little of this world's goods, if only they might induce their hearers to "turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from Heaven."

Hardships and adventures were everyday occurrences in the lives of these men. Often their way lay over bleak and rugged mountains, or through dark and pathless forests abounding with wild beasts, and sometimes with men still more fierce and wild. Often they were in danger of suffering and death from the hands of the very men to whom they came with the word of life. At times they were exposed to the fury of the white-robed Druid priest whose pagan rites and worship they condemned or again, driven with scorn from the doors of the proud chieftain, they turned aside to the humble hut of the serf, and there told out in simple language to their rustic audience the old, old story of the love of Jesus.

We cannot but admire the zeal and earnestness of these early pioneers of mission enterprise. Their teaching was derived direct from the Scriptures, and they went forth with the Gospel, because they believed the Gospel to be "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth."

But we have come to a period when another system was to usurp their place, and enter into their labours � when popery like a dark cloud was about to overshadow the land with its baneful influence, and eclipse for a time the light of truth.

In the fifth century Pope Leo I. had already laid what has been called the foundation stone of the papal supremacy, by introducing private confession to the priests, who were empowered to grant absolution, or impose penances at will, thus blasphemously taking the place of the one Mediator, Christ Jesus, who alone has power on earth to forgive sins.

Men were taught to hand over their consciences to the keeping of the priests. The priests, in their eagerness to multiply converts, lost the true idea of conversion, and, instead of looking for the fruits of righteousness which the Holy Spirit alone can produce, they were willing to accept a mere nominal assent to doctrines and ceremonies of man's making. Thus men had a name to live but were dead, and the whole became merely a worldly organisation, destitute alike of both life and practice.

Succeeding occupants of the papal chair continued this worldly policy, because by it their revenues were increased, and, though living in luxury and sensuality, they were ever on the outlook for some new field over which they might extend their dominions, and arrogate to themselves both the spiritual and temporal sovereignty whenever they came.

In 590 Gregory I. was elected to the pontifical chair, and at once decided on his long intended mission to Britain. Some time previously he had seen some youths exposed for sale in the slave market at Rome, and being pleased with their handsome appearance, he made inquiries and learned that they were Anglo-Saxon prisoners of war whose country was still pagan. Henceforth Gregory's desire was to bring Britain under the power of the Church of Rome. In 596 a monk named Augustine, attended with forty others, set forth on this mission and landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent.

Augustine is said to have possessed even to a greater degree than Gregory himself "a mixture of ambition and devotedness, superstition and piety, cunning and zeal. He thought that faith and holiness were less essential to the Church than authority and power, and that its prerogative was not so much to save souls as to collect all the human race under the authority of Rome." Even Gregory himself took notice of his spiritual pride and exhorted him to humility.

England at this time was divided into the Saxon Heptarchy, or Seven Kingdoms, and, having landed in the Kingdom of Kent, the monks desired an interview with King Ethelbert, whose wife, Bertha, seems to have been a real Christian. The King decided to receive them in the open air, and took his stand under a large oak tree, while the monks, to make as much show as possible, approached, bearing a huge crucifix at the head of the procession. The King was sufficiently impressed to allow them the use of an ancient British chapel near Canterbury, and not long afterwards was converted � to the Church of Rome at least � by the eloquent appeals of Augustine. This event greatly helped on the work among his people, and ten thousand pagans were baptised in the Swale in one day. But alas what shall we say of such conversions? There was little "repentance towards God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ." Little of that real work of the Spirit in which, on the day of Pentecost, three thousand were pricked in their hearts, and said, "What shall we do?" The aim of Rome has ever been to make nominal converts to the aggrandisement of the Papal See, and such continues to the present day to be the false and unscriptural practice of Romish missionaries in heathen lands. See to it, my reader, that you are not only a nominal Christian but a real Christian; forgiven, saved, justified, and on your way to heaven � made fit by the blood of Christ, and made sure by the Word of God.

Augustine "converted" the heathen temples by washing the walls with "holy water," erecting "altars," and substituting "holy relics" for the images of the heathen gods.

His next object was to win over the original British Churches, and, to this end, he appointed a conference and demanded them to submit to the government of Rome.

The British Christians were firm in their refusal. "We desire to love all men," meekly replied Dionoth, a faithful teacher from Bangor, "and what we do for you we will do for him whom you call the Pope, but he is not entitled to call himself father of fathers; we know no master but Christ."

Augustine summoned another conference in 601, and again demanded the British Churches to submit to Rome, but Dionoth again resisted with firmness and success, and was supported by Dagam, one of the Scotch representatives from Iona, who refused even to eat bread with the Romans. But the pretensions of Rome were gaining ground. Much of the truth which had been so faithfully taught from Iona was already lost sight of, and the minds of the British Christians finally became unsettled as to whether they were right in their opposition. They visited a pious Christian teacher who led a solitary life, and asked him if they should continue to resist Augustine or follow him.

"If he is a man of God, follow him."

"And how shall we know that?" they replied.

"If he is meek and humble of heart, he bears Christ's yoke; but, if he is violent and proud, he is not of God."

"What sign shall we have of his humility?"

"If he rises from his seat to receive you when you enter the room."

They departed for the Council, and entered the hall, but the Romish Archbishop, desirous of showing his superiority, proudly kept his seat. Again the British protested against the papal supremacy � "We will have no master but Christ." Augustine was incensed. "If you will not receive brethren who bring you peace, you shall receive enemies who bring you war," he said. He comes out here in his true character. Argument had failed: now for the sword. The first thing that British Christians receive, either from Pagan Rome or Papal Rome is alike persecution.

Augustine died in 604, but the spirit of persecution survived, and the influence of the priests over even pagan kings was always used against the British. Twelve hundred were murdered near Bangor in one day, in a place where they were gathered together for prayer, by Edelfrid, one of the Anglo-Saxon kings and soon the light of primitive Christianity was almost extinguished in Britain. Only in Iona the Christians still continued to hold fast the truth, and missionaries went forth through the various Saxon kingdoms in England preaching the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In Northumberland at this time reigned King Oswy, an ambitious and unprincipled man, who determined to add to his territories at the expense of his neighbours. He first treacherously murdered his relative, Oswin, King of Deira, and also usurped the throne of Mercia after King Peada had been slain in a conspiracy got up by his wife, Oswy's daughter, and thus succeeded by craft and cruelty in uniting nearly all England into one kingdom. He now called a conference, and, professing to be won over by the priests, exclaimed, "Peter is the doorkeeper, I will obey him." Such was the character of the man who became Rome's convert and handed over the liberties of England to the Pope.

The priests knew what to make of their victory, and soon all England was under the domination of the Papal See. The Pope wrote to Oswy and sent him, not copies of the Holy Scriptures, alas! but "relics of the saints," and for nearly seven hundred years England, which had refused the light, was given over to darkness, and made to groan under the spiritual despotism of a false Church which made merchandise of the bodies and souls of men.

In the East, also, the minds of men were groping in darkness. Mohammed, born in 570, was at this time propagating his dark delusion by fire and sword.

Neither the legions of Rome nor the trained warriors of Persia could withstand the fierce onslaughts of the Moslem hordes, who rushed eagerly to the fight, fondly believing that those who fell in battle went straight to Paradise. Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Persia, and Northern Africa were rapidly overrun. By the Straits of Gibraltar they entered Spain, which was subdued after desperate fighting, in which its king was slain.

Crossing the Pyrenean mountains they invaded France, but were met near Tours in 752 by Charles Martel at the head of the armies of Europe, and defeated after a battle which lasted six days.

It is impossible to enumerate the havoc and slaughter perpetrated by these fanatical warriors. The countries along the shores of Northern Africa contained an immense number of Christian congregations, with many bishops and pastors. These were almost entirely swept away. In the twelve years after the death of Mohammed it is estimated that his successors conquered 36,000 towns and villages; destroyed 4,000 Christian Churches, putting to death all who opposed them or refused to become Mohammedans, and so successfully has this "mission" been carried on since, that there are now about two hundred and six millions of our fellow-men who are followers of the doctrine of that false prophet. But Europe was saved from the ravages of the Moslems only to become the prey of popery, which rapidly developed its anti-Christian principles and practices during the dark ages. How true it is that "men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil."

Let us see to it that we value the privileges we enjoy. Living in a professing Christian land and having an open Bible telling us of the love of God to lost sinners in sending His only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him; surely if we neglect so great salvation we will indeed be without excuse.

Chapter 3.

The First English Bible.

At the close of the seventh century, those British Christians, who had offered so determined an opposition to Rome, were won over, one by one, until, even in the original settlement of Iona, they agreed to recognize the papal supremacy.

Henceforth, instead of the humble preachers of Iona who went forth taking nothing from any man, but preaching the simple gospel of Jesus Christ, Rome brought in her rites and ceremonies, relics and superstitions.. Every effort was used to enslave men's minds and keep them in ignorance, while at the same time everything Rome supplied had to be bought with money. A writer on the subject has said, "Not an article was there in her creed, not a ceremony in her worship, not a department in her government that did not tend to advance her power and increase her gain. Her dogmas, rites, and orders were so many pretexts for exacting money. Images, purgatory, relics, pilgrimages, indulgences, jubilees, canonisations, miracles, and masses were but taxes under another name, . . . so many drains for conveying the substance of the nations to Rome."

And another says, "Rome takes your gold and gives you nothing more solid in return than words." How different to all this is "the gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord." Without money and without price, He invites sinners to come and take of the water of life freely. How thankful we should be that we have an open Bible that tells us of the free grace of God.

But the tyranny of Rome was wearing to a close. Though she knew it not, the time was coming when God would raise up a man to give to Britain that best of all gifts � a Bible in her own language. That man was John Wycliffe, born in 1324 in the North Riding district of Yorkshire. He became a student of Merton College, Oxford, and was converted to God when about twenty-four years of age. He had found the way of life in the Holy Scriptures, and determined to show it to others. In 1365 he was elected warden of Canterbury College, and continued to preach the doctrine of free grace with much power.

Let us now digress for a moment to trace shortly the following events which brought Wycliffe forward as the determined opposer of the Pope in his demands on the State, and led him to take up higher ground and oppose Rome's usurped control over the conscience.

In 1213 King John had yielded up "England and Ireland to St. Peter, St. Paul, and Pope Innocent III." He had laid his crown at the feet of Pandulf, the Pope's legate, who is said to have kicked and rolled it in the dust as a worthless bauble, and consented to allow John to resume it on the annual payment of 1,000 marks (�666 13s. 4d.) to Rome and to become the Pope's vassal. This payment had been very irregularly made when in the time of Edward III., after a period of thirty-five years, in which it had never been mentioned, Pope Urban V. summoned Edward to recognize him as King of England and renew the annual tribute. But King Edward III. was no weakling like King John. The conqueror of Crecy was little likely to yield to this insolent demand, and summoned his Parliament to support him. The Parliament agreed with the king and enlightened by the lucid and scriptural arguments of Wycliffe, declared against the Pope. The partisans of Rome were infuriated, and declared that by the canon law of the Church the king ought to be deprived of his fief. "The canon law," said Wycliffe, "has no force when it is opposed to the Word of God."

But God had more important work for Wycliffe than mere worldly politics, and, having been presented by the king with the living of Lutterworth, he set about preaching the gospel in his parish with his usual activity. At Oxford he lectured to the students as one "having authority;" for while others taught from the sentences of Peter Lombard, or the mystical philosophy of Duns Scotos, he opened up the Scriptures and showed that they were indeed spirit and life. He accused the clergy of having banished the Holy Scriptures, and demanded that the authority of the Word of God should be re-established over the conscience.

These things were not looked upon by his enemies with indifference, and he who would dare to attack the papacy in such high-handed fashion must be dealt with. In 1377 the Pope issued a Bull, enjoining the English clergy to crush this formidable heresy � for such the teaching of the Scriptures was called � and take immediate steps to silence the author of it "by arresting the said John Wycliffe and shutting him up in prison." The clergy needed little incentive. Courtney, bishop of London, had begun the prosecution before the Bull arrived, and cited Wycliffe to appear and answer for his teaching. An immense crowd thronged the approaches to St. Paul's Cathedral as Wycliffe appeared to attend the convocation. Hands were raised to do violence to the venerable old man, and loud hootings from the partisans of the priests re-echoed through the building. With Wycliffe, however, came John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Lord Percy, Earl Marshal of England. Having two such powerful friends, Courtney could do little but show his hatred by railing at the bold preacher, and the assembly broke up in confusion.

Next year the Bull arrived, and Wycliffe was cited to appear before the bishops at Lambeth Palace. This time no John of Gaunt appeared to protect him, and his patron King Edward was dead. The human arm was withdrawn that his faith and hope might be in God. The sitting was scarcely opened when Sir Lewis Clifford entered with a dispatch from the queen-mother to forbid the court, "as the Pope's brief could have no authority in the realm of England without the consent of the king." Thus a second time he was preserved from his enemies to continue his work for God. Before retiring he handed in a protest, setting forth the teaching of Scripture as opposed to the errors of Rome, and, "In the first place," said he, "I am resolved with my whole heart, by the grace of God, to live as a sincere Christian, and, while my life shall last, to profess and defend the truth of Christ as far as I have power." Shortly afterwards, Wycliffe, while still continuing his teaching at Oxford, fell suddenly and dangerously ill. He was now an old man, and his incessant labours, with the persistent and harassing persecutions he was called upon to bear, had told upon a constitution never very strong. The monks, whose vices and ignorance he had so scathingly exposed, were delighted. They would now get rid of their enemy, but greater would be their victory if they could get him to recant. A deputation of four waited upon him and urged him to retract all he had said against them. But Wycliffe had been too much convinced of the truth of what he taught in health to retract it in sickness. Raising himself on his couch, he replied in an emphatic voice, "I shall not die but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the friars." They left the room in confusion, and Wycliffe recovered to continue his work. Not content with his own efforts, he sent forth the most earnest of his disciples to preach the gospel all over the land and "seek to convert souls to Jesus Christ." The missionaries Rome sent forth were the begging friars, who strolled over the country filling their wallets, and, in place of preaching the Word of Life, told stupid and foolish legends about the lives of the "saints," or amused the people by stories of Sinon and the wooden horse, from the Trojan War; afterwards wasting their time in the alehouses or at the gaming tables.

Wycliffe's "poor priests," as they were called, went forth barefoot, staff in hand, taking nothing of any man but sufficient for their daily bread, and visiting the sick, the aged, the poor, and the blind. They became favourites among the people, who gladly listened to them and drank in the good news so long hid, but which, like old wells reopened, gave forth abundant refreshment to all who would come and drink. The clergy had recourse to their usual weapon � persecution, and got a law passed commanding every king's officer to arrest the preachers and commit them and their followers to prison. The monks watched their opportunity, and when the humble evangelist began to preach they set off for assistance, but when the officers appeared, led on by the priests, a body of stout men stood forth, surrounded their preacher, protected him from the violence of the clergy, and carried him off in safety. Thus, day by day, the work went on, and the light was penetrating into every part of the country. When persecuted in one place the devoted missionaries fled to another, and, whether seated by the cottage hearth or preaching to the crowds at the crossways, to the few as to the many, they spoke of full and free salvation by grace alone, not of works, lest any man should boast.

It has ever been the policy of Rome to withhold the Bible from the people. The teaching of the Church of Rome is at utter variance with the teaching of Scripture, and when the light of the truth contained in the Word of God shines out, all the fabric of superstition, built upon a foundation of ignorance, falls to pieces. Accordingly the priests forbade all laymen under pain of death to read the Scriptures, and told the people to "learn to believe in the Church rather than in the Gospel."

John Wycliffe, both in his controversies with the priests, and in his preaching to the people, ever appealed to the Holy Scriptures as the sole source of authority.

The ignorant and dissolute priests and monks both hated and feared him, while by the common people he was loved and honoured because he taught them in their own tongue the pure Gospel of the grace of God.

Not content with publicly preaching the Word, he determined to give the people a translation of the Bible in their own language, and this great work he completed about the year 1380. Previous attempts at Bible translation had been made, but with only partial success. King Alfred, with the help of learned men, began a translation, but dying soon after, the work was stopped. Bede, in the eighth century, had translated the Gospel of John, and is said to have expired as he finished the last verse. But these copies, even if any now existed, were only fragmentary and out of reach of the common people.

In his quiet retreat at Lutterworth, after nearly fifteen years' labour, he succeeded in finishing his translation from the Latin Vulgate into the English tongue. There are still several copies of Wycliffe's Bible in the principal libraries, and one in the British Museum is believed to have been written by Wycliffe himself. Here is a specimen of the language in which the Scriptures were read in the fourteenth century; it is a passage from Luke's Gospel in Wycliffe's translation �

"In the days of Eroude Kyng of Judee ther was a prest Zacarye by name: of the sort of Abia, and his wyfe was of the doughtris of Aaron; and hir name was Elizabeth; an bothe weren juste bifore God: goynge in alle the maundementis and justifyingis of the Lord withouten playnt."

Here is another curious specimen from the time of King Alfred �

"On fruman waes Word, and thaet Word mid Gode, and Gode waes thaet Word. Thaet waes on fruman mid Gode. Elle thing waeron geworht thurh hyne; and nanthing waes geworht buttan him. Thaet waes lif the on him geworht waes, and thaet lif waes manna leoht. And thaet leoth lyht on thystrum; and thystro thaet ne gena-mon."

Wycliffe's translation was completed, but there was then no printing presses and no great publishing houses; however, there was a real desire for the Word of God, and soon many expert hands were engaged in multiplying copies, which were eagerly bought up by the people. They had been taught that there was a graduated series of monks, priests, popes, and "saints," between them and God, but by the Scriptures they learned that there is only "one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus." Rome taught that redemption was to be purchased by paying the priests for masses. The Scriptures declare, "We have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace." That "by Him all that believe are justified from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses."

Thus the glorious light of God's Word chased away the errors and darkness of Rome, as the morning mists disappear before the rising sun.

The people rejoiced. The clergy mourned. Their gains were in danger. Who would buy worthless masses when they had an open Bible? But they did not long remain inactive; Wycliffe had attacked transubstantiation, which, ever since it had been invented by the monk Radbertus in the ninth century, had been a powerful engine in the hands of the clergy over the people; accordingly he was suspended from teaching at Oxford and expelled from the University, but he appealed to the Parliament, and meantime he retired to his parish of Lutterworth, from which the priests could not as yet expel him, because it was the gift of the king.

Here he spent a few quiet months until Parliament re-opened in November, when, instead of coming forward to defend himself from the priests, he came forward to attack in the face of the whole nation "the corruption, tyranny, and errors of heirarchy." Parliament repealed the persecuting edict, and thus once again God shielded and preserved His servant against the hatred and malice of his enemies.

Wat Tyler's insurrectionary followers had seized and beheaded Sudbury, the Primate, and Courtney, now Archbishop of Canterbury and "Primate of all England," would see if in that capacity he could not accomplish the destruction of the man he considered his enemy. Assembling a convocation at Oxford, he summoned Wycliffe once more to appear. Would he come? He came. It was to be his last appearance before either kings or councils � his last public testimony for the truth of Christ. The indictment was read and he rose to reply. As of old, he refuted their charges, challenging them to convince him of error before they condemned his teaching. And growing bolder, his words glowing with eloquence and energy, he turned the accusation against themselves. "Ye are the heretics who teach your foolish traditions instead of the truth of Scripture. Why do you propagate such errors? Why because like the priests of Baal, ye want to vend your masses. With whom think ye are ye contending? with an old man on the brink of the grave? No, with truth; truth which is stronger than you, and will overcome you." His enemies were astounded at his bold words, every one of which they knew to be true. He turned to leave the court, and no one attempted to hinder him. They allowed him to pass through their midst and go back to his beloved parish of Lutterworth.

Here he spent the few remaining days of his life in teaching and preaching Jesus Christ. His enemies intended to bring him to the stake, but God, who overruleth all things, frustrated their intentions. On the last Sunday of December, in the year 1384, he was stricken down with paralysis in the midst of his beloved people. They carried him sorrowfully to his home, and tended him night and day, for they loved him as a father. Here he lingered till the last day of the month, and as the year was dying, he entered into rest.

After his death a petition was got up by those who opposed his work, and presented to the Pope (which, however, he refused) to have his body taken out of the grave and buried in a dunghill � so deep was the hatred of his enemies; and forty years afterwards his bones were actually dug up, burned to ashes, and cast into the river. The priests also excommunicated all who bought his books or tracts, and it was at a terrible risk they could be read.

Many men who were found by the priests with a copy of Wycliffe's Bible were burned to ashes at the stake with the book hung round their necks. Men, and women too, were executed for teaching their children in their mother-tongue the Ten Commandments or the Lord's Prayer. Children were forced to light the death fires around their parents; and the possessors of the Bible were hunted down and slain like wild beasts.

Old John Fox says, and we may well say the same, "Certes the zeal of these Christians seems much superior to this of our day, and to see their faithfulness may well shame our careless times."

Over a hundred years elapse before we come to another version of the Bible in the English tongue, and any copies made during that period were laboriously written out by hand.

Yet, notwithstanding, copies increased and though the price was about forty pounds a volume, and labourers' wages a penny a day, yet men denied themselves other things and bought them. Those who were not able to buy them, and had the opportunity, learned whole epistles off by heart, and recited them to the little gatherings who met in fear and trembling, and yet thirsting for the life-giving Word.

The Bible was to them a precious Book. Do we value it as we ought?

Wycliffe died, but the fruit of his great life-work remained. His followers took up the work where he laid it down, and assiduously sought to spread not only the truth of the Scriptures but copies of the Book itself whereever they found opportunity. They traversed the country preaching the Gospel, and many of the nobility, as well as the common people, gladly embraced the truth. Where the preacher could not enter, the Word of God often found a place, and Wycliffe's Testament was seen both in the castles of the nobles and the halls of the gentry. Soon men began to see the difference between the teaching of Rome and the teaching of Scripture, and in proportion as minds were enlightened by the Word of God, so were they set free from the bondage of darkness which had hitherto enthralled them. But the persecuting Arundel was now Primate, and he, seeing the growth of the new opinions, posted off to Ireland, where King Richard II. then was, and entreated him to return and take measures to suppress the Lollards, as Wycliffe's followers now came to be called. Easily persuaded either to one side or the other, the weak king gave Arundel liberty to commence the persecution, and shortly afterwards set out to return to England, but before Richard set foot on his native shores another had arrived there before him who would contend with him both for place and power.

Henry of Lancaster, son of the famous Duke of Lancaster mentioned in a former paragraph, had been banished by Richard, but suddenly sailed from the Continent, landed in Yorkshire, and deposed Richard, who was imprisoned and starved to death in Pontefract Castle. The crafty and cunning Arundel, who had been wise enough to desert the losing side in time, now came forward (1399) and crowned the usurper as Henry IV. with the "Vial of oil which fell down from the Virgin Mary." The son of Wycliffe's protector was now king, but he had arrived at the throne by the murder of the rightful king and the help of the priests, and to maintain his usurpation he had to bind himself to "protect the Church." To protect the Church meant, in these days, to persecute every humble follower of Jesus who dared to differ from Rome, and Henry was not long in making good his promise to the priests.

In his reign was passed the act ordering every heretic to be burned alive � a stain alike on his memory and the Statute Book. The priests, who can only be likened to blood-thirsty animals, were overjoyed. Hitherto their power was limited by the will of the king, now their persecution was legalised, and they hastened to satiate their cruelty on those who set at nought their traditions.

"I will worship Christ who died on the cross," said William Sawtre, "but not the cross on which Christ died." He was condemned to the fire by the primate, and handed over to the secular power, with the hypocritical request to treat him with mercy. A stake was planted at Smithfield, and he was burned alive in 1401 � another martyr for the truth in England. John Badby was burned for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. William Thorpe was murdered in prison for refusing to worship images. Thus Rome has clearly shown how both in doctrine and practice she is at utter variance with the teaching of Jesus Christ.

The prisons in the bishops' houses were full to overflowing. Not only were they used as places of confinement, but they became dens of torture: fetters and the rack, thumb-screws and the "boot" were brought into requisition with fiendish ingenuity, and men "were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection and others had trial of cruel mockings and scourging, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment." Very touching is the testimony of one who carved on the walls of his dungeon, "Jesus amor meus" � Jesus is my love. These words are said to be still seen on the walls of the Lollard's tower in Lambeth Palace.

Not only did the priests vent their rage on the humble and lowly, but they proceeded against Lord Cobham, and succeeded in inducing the king to allow him to be brought to trial. Accordingly he was seized and imprisoned in the Tower. Brought before Arundel in 1413 he witnessed a good confession for Jesus Christ.

"We must believe what the Church of Rome teaches, whether Christ says so or not," said the primate.

"I am ready to believe all that God desires, but what is contrary to Scripture I can never believe," said Sir John. But he was before judges who knew no mercy, and he was sentenced to death and sent back to the Tower to prepare for the fire. "It is well," said he, "though you condemn my body, through the mercy of the eternal God you cannot harm my soul."

He escaped from the Tower at this time, but four years afterwards he was retaken and drawn on a hurdle through the streets of London to the place of suffering. With diabolical cruelty he was suspended in chains over the fire and slowly burned to death. Yet the Lord stood by His servant and enabled him to endure this awful torture with constancy and firmness unto the end.

Space forbids any attempt to chronicle even the names of those, who, during this period, were called upon to seal their testimony with their blood, and though the hearts of many failed them before the fiery trial, yet the knowledge of the truth had been widely diffused by means of Wycliffe's New Testament, and the good seed thus sown brought forth fruit at a future day. We are accustomed to look upon Luther as the man whom God raised up to hold forth the lamp of truth in the middle ages, but over a hundred years before, the glorious truth of Salvation by grace was known in England; and Bohemia at the same period had its martyrs for Jesus Christ.

On the Continent at this time was seen the curious spectacle of three "infallible" popes, each striving to assert his supremacy at the expense of the other; as old John Fox says, "There were not three crowns on one pope's head, but three heads in one popish crown." The Council of Constance (1414) had been called to deal with these three rival "infallible" popes which Christendom had found to be very fallible indeed; these three they deposed and elected another "infallible" whom they styled Pope Martin V. Thereupon they cited before them John Huss, who has been called the apostle of Bohemia, and though he came with a safe conduct from the Emperor "to go and return without let or hindrance," yet the Emperor, won over by the priests, broke his most sacred promise and allowed Huss to be arrested and imprisoned. He was commanded to abjure his opinions and submit to the Church. "I would rather," said he, "that a millstone was hanged about my neck, and I was cast into the sea, than offend one of those little ones to whom I have preached the Gospel by abjuring it." He was condemned to the fire, and one of the prelates said, We devote thy soul to the devil." "And I," said Huss, "do commend my soul to Thy hands, O Lord Jesus, for Thou hast redeemed me." Two years afterwards Jerome of Prague suffered and triumphed on the same spot; but Bohemia, through the teaching of these two men had been emancipated from the thraldom of Rome, and a few years afterwards the great majority of the nation embraced the faith for which these noble martyrs died. A day of retribution came when the Government threw off its vassalage, and arraying its armies in the field under the leadership of the famous John Ziska and the no less famed Procopius, repulsed, again and again, with tremendous slaughter, the numerous and well appointed armies Rome brought into the field to exterminate alike the truth and the nation.

Procopius was a theologian as well as a warrior. "Can you show," said he to the priests, "that the order of friars was instituted by either the prophets of the Old Testament, or the apostles of the New? If, not, by whom were they instituted?" To this the priests did not reply. Their argument was force. But better by far, would it have been, had the Bohemians, instead of resorting to the sword, endeavoured to spread the knowledge of the truth so fully taught by Huss and Jerome. "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds."

Chapter 4.

Scotland's Confessors And Martyrs.

In a previous chapter we have seen how Columba had visited Scotland in the sixth century and founded a settlement in Iona, from which the light of truth for some time shone out amidst the surrounding darkness. However, as Columba's successors began to lose the clear views of truth which he had taught, the light grew dim, and soon Romish superstition took the place of the Gospel of Christ.

The heathen Norsemen too, often harassed the settlement. In 795 they plundered and burned it; in 875 it was again attacked and sixty-eight persons murdered. King David I., in the twelfth century, in his zeal for the "Church," finally drove out the settlers and planted a colony of French monks instead; and now truly was Scotland at the feet of Rome. But no country owned the sway of the Pope for a shorter period. Its brave and warlike inhabitants, who had so often hurled back the Southern chivalry, could ill brook the domination of a foreign priest, and the country, as a whole, could never be said to be very devoted to Rome. Even in the time of King Robert the Bruce we find Pope John XXII. complaining that "the land had never been thoroughly purged from heresy." These "heretics" were, no doubt, some who had remained faithful to the teaching of the early evangelists, and amidst all the corruptions of that profligate age were endeavouring to keep themselves unspotted from the world. By and by Wycliffe's Testament found its way northwards, and we read of one, Murdoch of Hardhill, who had a copy which he kept concealed in a vault, and read to his family at midnight. Another, named Gordon, also had a copy, and used to read portions to a little company gathered in a lonely wood near his house. How dark and unhappy these times must have been! The people were in utter ignorance of the Word of God. Only a manuscript copy of the Testament was to be found here and there, and those who possessed it had to hide it with the greatest secrecy, as it meant death to be found reading the Scriptures in the common tongue.

And Scotland, too, had its confessors and martyrs for Jesus Christ. In 1406 James Riscby, who had learned the truth from John Wycliffe, was committed to the flames at Perth. In 1420 we find Scotland possessed a Heretical Inquisitor in the person of the Abbot of Scone. In 1431 Paul Crawer was burned at St. Andrews. His tormentors forced a ball of brass into his mouth to prevent him addressing the people gathered round the stake. But all the efforts of the Prince of Darkness could not keep out the light which by the grace of God was rising over the nations.

Nearly a hundred years pass away, and we stand by the stake of one of Scotland's greatest sons � Patrick Hamilton, who was burned in 1528.

Born of a noble family in 1504, Hamilton received his education at St. Andrews, and afterwards proceeded to the Continent. Seeking after light, the learned disputations of the Doctors of the Sorbonne did not satisfy him, and he went on to the College of Marburg, which had been newly founded by the Landgrave Philip of Hesse. Here he met Francis Lambert, the friend of Zwingle, who said of him, "I have scarcely ever met a man who expressed himself with so much spirituality and truth on the word of the Lord." Soon his one object was to return to his native land and preach the gospel of full and free salvation. But Scotland had never been more under the power of the priests than at the present moment. The rash King James IV., with all his principal nobility, had fallen on the dark and bloody field of Flodden, and the profligate Bishop Beaton grasped the power of Government during the feeble minority of James V. Nevertheless, Hamilton, who had fully counted the cost, returned home to his family near Linlithgow. He was first used in being the means of the conversion of several in his own home. He also visited in the houses of the gentry, where he was known and respected, and sought to win souls for Christ. He preached in the fields, and in the highways and by-ways spoke to individuals, ever seeking to sow the good seed of the Word of God.

Beaton grew alarmed. If this continued, the priests were undone; but Hamilton was of the blood royal, and the Archbishop had to act with caution. His first object was to get the young king out of the way for the time. This he accomplished by inducing him to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Duthac, in Ross-shire, there to pray for his soul's health. Afterwards, cloaking his dark designs under a plea of Church reformation, he invited Hamilton to visit him at St. Andrews. Here, after a few weeks of freedom, he was arrested in his lodgings at the dead of night, and conveyed through the silent streets to the dungeons of the Bishop's Castle. A few days afterwards he appeared before Beaton, who was attended by a numerous body of the principal bishops and abbots of Scotland. Prior Campbell, having read the indictment, burst out into a torrent of invective. "Heretic," said he, "thou sayest it is lawful for all men to read the New Testament." "Heretic, thou sayest it is lost labour to call on the Virgin Mary as a mediator." "Heretic, thou sayest it is vain to say masses for the release of souls from purgatory;" and much more in the same strain. Beaton pronounced sentence of death, and every voice on the tribunal said, "Away with him to the fire." At noon he was chained to the stake, the faggots heaped round, and a bag of gunpowder placed at his feet. The powder exploded, wounding the martyr in the face, but the wood was green and would not burn. Another supply was got with like result; his limbs were scorched, but the fire did not reach his body. Six hours has the martyr stood on the pile of suffering, but now the end has come, the glory is near. One standing by said, "If thou still holdest true to thy doctrine, give us a sign." The iron band round his waist was red hot, his whole body was burning in the fire, but raising his hand he held it in the flame till the fingers dropped into the fire. His last words were, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," and so he entered into the joy of his Lord. Surely great grace was given to him in his great need, for it is said that no impatient word escaped his lips, as through such protracted sufferings he patiently waited for the end.

But the death of Patrick Hamilton did more for the cause of truth than his life could have done, as one said, "The reik (smoke) of Hamilton infected every one it blew upon." Numbers came forward to fill the ranks of those who had fallen. The priests were furious, but despite their utmost vigilance there was now that to contend with which defied all their efforts. Copies of Tyndale's New Testament, printed at Worms in 1526, were being brought into Scotland, concealed in packages of goods and even bags of flour, till they could be distributed over the country. A mandate was issued that "The Scriptures, or any book that contained a quotation from them, were not to be read by the people," yet the people bought them and read them, and believed unto everlasting life.

The priests resorted to their favourite plan of burning all whom they could lay hands on. Straiton and Gourlay were burned at Greenside, Edinburgh. Russel and Kennedy were burned at Glasgow. Forrest, with four other confessors, were burned on the Castle Hill. Of Forrest, we read that he was in the habit of beginning at six o'clock in the morning to read the Scriptures, and that he committed to memory three chapters every day, which he repeated to his servant at night.

But the murder of individuals was too slow a process for the cruel and vindictive David Beaton, who was now at the head of the Roman heirarchy. He meditated a Scotch Bartholomew, and compiled a list of over a hundred Protestants to be assassinated at one time. This list contained the names of Lord Hamilton, the first peer in Scotland, and many of the nobility who had been led to see the errors of Rome. But James V. dying of grief after the battle of Solway Moss, this list was found on his person, and the nobles, aghast at the diabolical plot thus revealed, elected the man the priest intended to slay, as Regent of the kingdom during the minority of the infant Queen, Mary Stuart. Thus God, who maketh even the wrath of man to praise Him, overruled the evil designs of the priests for the good of His people, and though the Cardinal forged a will appointing himself Regent, yet the nation knew the profligate priest too well either to believe him or entrust him with a power he would have wielded for his own selfish ends.

Next year, 1543, by Act of Parliament, it became lawful for every subject in the realm to read the Bible in his mother tongue, and then might be seen "the Bible lying upon every gentleman's table, the New Testament openly borne about in men's hands, and thereby did the knowledge of God wondrously increase."

The same year George Wishart returned from the Continent, and now God had given to Scotland an open Bible and a faithful preacher.

Wishart was born in 1512. For some years he was connected with an academy in Montrose, and is said to have been the first who taught Greek in Scotland. While here he became suspected of heresy, and not yet fully established in the truth he retired to the Continent to escape the coming storm.

In Switzerland he met Bullinger and others of the Swiss Evangelists, and became strongly imbued with the earnest evangelistic spirit which marked these pious men.

Returning to Scotland, as we have said, at the close of 1543, he found that the Regent Arran's zeal for the truth had been short lived. Self-interest and worldly policy had led him for a time to favour those who were contending for the faith, but his heart was in the world, and he shaped his conduct accordingly. Let us look for a moment into the Franciscan Convent at Stirling, and there humbly kneeling before a shaven priest we shall see the man who swayed the sovereign power of Scotland. He is solemnly recanting his opinions, and receiving "absolution" for departing from the "true Church." And now the weak tool is ready for the work of the scheming prelate. A marriage had been proposed between the young queen Mary and the heir of Henry VIII., but the priests saw an end to their power if an alliance was formed with protestant England, and the crafty and strong-willed Beaton having got the Regent into his power, the treaty with England was abandoned, and one with popish France put in its stead. Bluff King Henry was indignant at the breach of faith, and one day an English fleet sailed up the Forth and cast anchor in Leith Roads. There was no one to oppose them, and Hereford's soldiers disembarked next morning, pillaged Leith, and fired Edinburgh, which they left burning for three days, returning to their own country after putting to death every man, woman and child they met with.

We can easily understand something of the opposition that George Wishart was likely to meet with at a time when the priests held so much political power, as he began, in spite of their edict forbidding "discussion on the doctrines of Scriptures," to expound the Epistle to the Romans to the large audiences who everywhere hung upon his words. He was the greatest orator Scotland had listened to for centuries. In Dundee crowds were drawn together wherever he preached. With convincing eloquence he showed that "all had sinned and come short of the glory of God." Then he spoke of the "one man" by whom sin entered, and passed on to the "One Man" by whom came the "free gift," showing that justification was not to be obtained by works or penance, but "being justified by faith we have peace with God."

This good work was suddenly interrupted by the Regent and the Cardinal, who with a train of siege artillery, sought to capture both the town and the preacher; but the citizens retiring took their preacher with them till the danger was over, when they quietly returned, and the meetings went on for some months as before. But Beaton was on the alert, and got a summons delivered to him in the Queen's name, "to depart and trouble the town no more with his presence."

Wishart deemed it wise to obey, and, persecuted in one city, he went to another. Every Church door was now closed to the faithful evangelist, but like his Master of old, on the hillsides and in the fields he preached the word of life to the listening thousands who surrounded him.

It was a time of real revival wrought by the Holy Spirit of God. Profligate sinners were seen with tears of repentance rolling down their faces, and change of life gave evidence to the reality of their conversion. Men were led to see not, only the errors of Rome � that could be understood by mere intellect � but their own state as sinners before a Holy God, and their need of a Divine Substitute in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This could only be wrought by the Spirit, who alone can convince of sin and produce true repentance by taking the eye away from self, to rest on Christ, "Who bore our sins in His own body on the tree," "Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for Our justification."

The plague broke out in Dundee a short time after Wishart left, and he hastened back to minister to the sick and the dying. "They need comfort," said he, "and perchance the hand of God will make them magnify and reverence that Word which before, for fear of men, they set at light part." By his advice and help, food and medicine were distributed among the sick. Mounted on the top of the battlements at the "East port" he preached from the text, "He sent His Word and healed them" � a fitting text for such an audience. Outside were the plague-stricken from the Lazar houses that stood near the gate. Inside were the terrified citizens haunted by the fear that they too might be the next victims.

The Cardinal took care to keep away from Dundee while the plague was raging, but hearing Wishart had returned he hired a priest to assassinate him. The would-be murderer waited at the foot of the stairs with a naked dagger concealed under his cloak till the preacher should descend. Something in the man's manner betrayed him, and Wishart going up to him said, "Friend, what would you?" at the same time taking hold of his right arm and revealing the concealed knife. The crowd rushed in and would have torn him to pieces, but Wishart shielded him from their fury and allowed him to escape.

Among the sick he was unsparing in his labours for the benefit both of soul and body. He carried food to those who were still able to partake of it, and ministered the comfort of the Gospel to those who were dying. He sometimes referred to an incident that happened to him when abroad which stirred him up to more devoted charity. Meeting a Jew one day while sailing on the Rhine, he laboured to convince him that Jesus was the Messiah. "I can never believe," said the Jew, "that you Christians are the followers of the Messiah, because ye abrogate the holy law which was given to our fathers. Ye see the poor perishing among you, yet ye are not moved to pity. Secondly, it is forbidden by the law of God to make any imagery of things in Heaven or things on earth, yet your chambers are full of idols. A piece of bread baken upon the ashes ye adore and worship, and say it is your God."

Wishart never forgot these true censures which became a lesson, not only to himself but to others.

Leaving Dundee at the close of 1545, Wishart passed on to Edinburgh, preaching in the different towns and villages till he came to East Lothian. He had already experienced the Cardinal's hatred, and he had a presentiment that his work was almost accomplished � that his end was near. A few weeks before he was arrested, he preached at Inveresk. Gentle, winning, and persuasive as his usual manner was, yet he could be stern and unsparing when he came to attack the vices of Rome, and in this address he gave a scathing, vehement denunciation of the practices of the false and idolatrous church. At the same time he told the people of "the shortness of the time he had to travail among them, and of his death which now approached nearer than any one there would believe."

The last time he preached was at Haddington, and before he left the town he took an affectionate farewell of all his friends. The man they loved was going from them, and their hearts were sad because he had told them that they should see his face no more. John Knox, whom we shall meet again, earnestly desired to accompany him, but he, fully persuaded that martyrdom awaited him, would not consent, saying "Go back to your duties; one is enough for a sacrifice." Accompanied by a few friends he set out on foot for the house of John Cockburn of Ormiston. When supper was over he gave a short address, seeking to encourage the few friends still around him, and closed by singing the 51st Psalm in old Scotch metre �

Have mercy on me now, good Lord,

After Thy great mercy �

and dismissing the company with the parting words, "Now, may God grant quiet rest," he went off to bed. But there was to be no more rest on earth for this devoted servant. The few days left are to be spent in captivity and suffering; the martyr crown is to be won, and then, "faithful unto death," he shall receive the "crown of life." A band of men from the Cardinal, led by Earl Bothwell, had been searching for him; at midnight they surrounded the house and took the evangelist prisoner. He was instantly carried off to St. Andrews and thrown into prison. Wishart was well assured of the fate which lay before him, but he "knew Whom he believed," and his mind was in perfect peace.

On February 28th, he was brought out to a mock trial before the Cardinal, and condemned to the flames, to be burned to death on the following day.

Early next morning the preparations began. The stake was erected before the Bishop's palace. Chains, fire and faggots were prepared for the martyr. Cushions and drapery lined the palace windows, that Beaton and his friends might luxuriously repose thereon while they feasted their eyes on the sufferer's dying agonies. The guns of the castle were loaded and turned on the scaffold to prevent any chance of rescue. Wishart's friends received permission to see him for the last time. They found him in the dungeon, full of triumphant grace. "Consider and behold my visage," said he, "ye shall not see me change my colour. The grim fire I fear not, for I know surely that I shall sup with my Saviour this night."

At noon he was led forth surrounded by soldiers. His hands had been tied behind his back like a common criminal; a chain was round his waist and a rope round his neck. At the stake he fell upon his knees, and said, "Oh, Thou Saviour of the world, have mercy upon me; Father in Heaven, I commend my spirit into Thy hands." Then he prayed for his accusers and enemies, also for his brethren in the faith, when, the fire being lighted, he was quickly surrounded by the flames, and his body burned to ashes.

The murder of Wishart was not sanctioned by the Estates. Many of the nobles cared little for the cause of Christ, but a great deal for worldly power, and they could ill abide the proud priest usurping the highest prerogative in the state without their consent. A conspiracy was formed against him; three short months pass, and sixteen daring men succeed in surprising him in his strong castle, on which he had spent vast sums, and which he believed to be impregnable. Roused by the noise, the wretched man is met on the stairs, and James Melville exhorts him to repent of his wicked life, as he "passes his short sword once and again through his bosom."

A few short years and the magnificent buildings on which the murdered prelate had spent so much labour, that he might be safe to plot and carry out his wicked deeds, but in which he met his just doom, are swept away, and all that remains are a few heaps of ruins. Truly, even "the dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nought."

The priests filled up the vacant see by the nomination of Hamilton, brother to the Regent, and immediately proceeded to besiege the castle in which many of the Reformed party had taken refuge. After holding out for sixteen months it was taken by the assistance of a French fleet; and among the prisoners shipped off to the galleys was John Knox, destined to be the leader in the final emancipation of Scotland from the yoke of Rome. Once again it seemed as if the priests had triumphed, and they prepared as usual to celebrate their victory in fresh persecution of the humble followers of Jesus. Walter Mill, an old man, of eighty-two years, was arrested and brought before Hamilton. At his trial he had to be assisted into court, but his faith was strong and his voice gave no uncertain sound. "I will not recant," said he, "for I am corn, and not chaff, and will not be blown away with the wind." He was condemned. A rope was wanted to bind the old man to the stake, but not a merchant in St. Andrews would sell one for the purpose, so greatly was the action of the Archbishop detested. As he stood by the stake he said, "I trust I shall be the last to suffer death in Scotland for this cause," and his words have proved true. He died on the 28th August, 1558. During the night the people raised a great heap of stones on the ashes of the martyr, and, though the priests removed them day after day, yet this "heap of witness" duly rose again in the morning.

Chapter 5.

John Knox and His Times.

The faithful preaching and martyr death of George Wishart had not been in vain. The Gospel of the grace of God, so zealously proclaimed by that devoted evangelist, had produced a real and lasting revival among the common people, which was to have deep and far-reaching results. This had its effect in opening the way for more widespread instruction in divine truth; and those who were desirous of being thus taught, had soon the privilege of such teaching, for God, who of old sent Peter to Cornelius, was preparing the man He was about to use to further the cause of Christ in Scotland, at a time when wickedness seemed to come in like a flood. That man was John Knox. He had taken refuge, as we have seen, in the castle of St. Andrews, to be safe from the plots of Archbishop Hamilton, who had put a price upon his head, and when the castle fell before the combined efforts of the Regent's army and the French fleet, Knox, in direct violation of the terms of capitulation, had been shipped off to the galleys.

We can have little idea of all the suffering and misery entailed upon the wretched men who were sent to this worse than penal servitude, but the following description by a writer on the subject will enable us to realize something of what Knox endured during the space of nearly two years before he was released. "The galleys were long craft, rowed by forty or fifty oars a-piece. Able-bodied vagrants, convicts, and the worst off-scourings of France were swept into these floating prisons. The long, low undecked waist of the ship was packed full of rowers, five or six of them chained to each oar. The labour of rowing was terrible. From the great length of the oars, the rowers had to rise to their feet at every stroke. They wrought stripped to the loins, and along the centre of the galley ran a gangway, on which the 'forcers' walked up and down with a long whip in hand which they mercilessly applied to the naked backs of the rowers, whenever they thought that any oar did not keep touch with the rest. In the hold there was a low dark room, entered by a scuttle about two feet square. This was the hospital; it was so low that the deck above was only three feet from the sick men's faces as they lay on the bare boards. The stench was so horrible in this dismal hole that slaves stricken with disease often chose to keep at their oar till they dropped and died rather than enter it."

Such was the place, and such were the masters under whom Knox acquired part of his education, but in the midst of it all we see his unflinching faith and trust in God, calmly waiting for the time when He would deliver him and send him forth into His service. Here he learned meekness in the endurance of wrong, self-control, patience, and also that resolute resistance to everything evil which comes out time after time in his after-life. He would tolerate no shams, neither in men nor things; what he insisted on was reality. One day a gorgeously painted lady, a figure of the Virgin Mary, was brought aboard to be kissed, but when presented to Knox, he gently said, "Trouble me not, such an idol is accursed, and I will not touch it." "Thou shalt handle it," said the officer, and violently thrust it into his face. Knox, seeing no other alternative, promptly used the opportunity and cast it into the sea, saying, "Let our lady save herself; she is light enough let her swim."

The galley in which Knox was confined returned to Scotland in 1548 accompanied by the French fleet sent to repair the damages wrought by Protector Somerset, at the Battle of Pinkie. Anchored off the Fife coast, a fellow-prisoner pointed out to him the steeple of St. Andrews, and asked him if he knew the place. Knox was worn down by fever and thought to be dying, but raising himself, he said, "Yea, I know it well, for I see the place where God first opened my mouth for His glory, and I am fully persuaded that I shall not depart this life till my tongue shall again glorify His holy name in the same place."

Knox was liberated in 1549, and went to England. Here he and others were employed by Cranmer, then in power, to go into the various districts where the Romish clergy were most opposed to the Reformation and preach the Gospel. Knox was appointed to Berwick. This work he entered into with much zeal and fervour, with a deep sense of the love of Christ to lost sinners, and of the grace of God in providing salvation without money and without price. He was not content with the district allotted to him, but travelled round the surrounding country as far as Newcastle, "in season and out of season preaching the Word."

In December 1553 we find him in London. King Edward had died in July. Lady Jane Grey, after a reign of ten days had passed from the throne to the prison; from the prison to the block, and Mary Tudor is queen. Night is settling down upon England to be lighted only by lurid gleams from the stakes of the confessors and martyrs of Jesus Christ. Protestants were allowed till the 20th of December to "change their opinions," after that it was to be "turn or burn." Knox knowing that the time was short, preached on. "I have no time to answer your letter," he wrote to a friend, "for I must preach every day as long as this poor, weak body will allow." At last at the urgent entreaties of his friends he returned from London and arrived at Dieppe in January 1554. The same year Mary of Guise was appointed Regent of Scotland; at heart a bigoted papist, yet she had won the affections of the protestant party of befriending them from the severity of Arran after his apostacy, and it was by this means she had succeeded in procuring his resignation.

Now that she was in power, she courted their influence by promising to support them against the clergy. Thus the policy of the Regent gave liberty to Christians to meet in private for the preaching of the Word and exhortation, though at heart she cared for none of these things. The bitter persecution in England under Queen Mary led many to flee into Scotland where they became a help to their brethren by their zeal for the truth and their desire to further the Gospel among the common people. But the favour of the Queen Regent had a very different effect on the Lords of the Congregation (as the nobles who favoured the Reformation came to be called); they sought to please her by going to mass, and attending the outward services of the papists. This conduct brought out a strongly-worded warning from Knox. "Arme yourselves," said he, "to stand with Christ in this shorte batell; for avoyding ydolatrie your substance salbe spoillit; but for obeying ydolatrie heavenlie ryches shalbe lost; for avoyding of ydolatrie ye may fall into the handis of earthly tirantis, but obeyeris, manteaneris, and consentaris to ydolatrie sall not eschaip the hands of the liveing God. Hes not the maist part of the sanctis of God from the beginning entered into rest be torment and troubillis. Did God comforte theme and sail He despyse us, gif in fichting aganis iniquitie we follow thair footstepis? He will not."

But when the Regent found her power firmly established, she threw off the mask and gave them a rude awakening by summoning four of the protestant preachers to appear at Stirling and answer to a charge of heresy and rebellion.

The nobles remonstrated, and reminded Mary of her promises. She replied like a true Jesuit, that "princes are not to be expected to keep their promises unless it suits their own convenience," and that she would "drive every preacher from Scotland, though they preached as soundly as St. Paul." Nevertheless, at this time she yielded, departed from the diet, and forbade the preachers to appear; but when the day arrived she ordered the summons to be called, and the prescribed to be outlawed for not appearing.

At this time Knox returned from the continent and arrived in Scotland in 1555. He was invited to Ayrshire, and preached every day wherever he found an open door. But the Roman clergy hearing of his arrival, cited him to appear before them in the Blackfriar's Church at Edinburgh. Knox feared God too much to fear man, and set out to be present at the diet; but the priests were afraid to bring the matter to an issue.

Knox arrived, but found that his enemies had departed, and, finding no accusers, he quietly went up into the pulpit and preached the gospel to the multitude who were gathered together to see how the matter would end. For the following ten days in succession, he preached to large audiences from the same place. Next year we find him back in Geneva. In 1558 he finally returned to Scotland. The clergy immediately proclaimed him an outlaw and a rebel, and put a price upon his head, but the nobles protected him from their violence, and arranged a meeting at St. Andrews. Knox preached in the villages along the Fife coast by the way, and arrived in St. Andrews on the 9th of June. The Archbishop, hearing of the gathering of the nobles, dashed after them with two hundred horse; but, finding them stronger than he expected, fled again for his life, leaving a message for Knox "that if he dared to preach from his pulpit, a dozen bullets should light upon his nose." The nobles were intimidated, but Knox said, "As for the fear of danger that may come to me, let no man be anxious, for my life is in the hands of Him whose glory I seek. I desire the hand or weapon of no man to defend me; I only crave audience." Next Sunday he preached without interruption, and continued to do so for some days longer. In July we find him in Edinburgh, and, when the army of the nobles had to retire to Stirling before the combined forces of the Queen Regent and the French auxiliaries, we find him with them, telling them in blunt, plain language that they had failed because they had forsaken the Lord and put their confidence in man. "When we were few in number we called upon God, but since our strength has increased there has been nothing heard but 'This lord will bring us so many hundred spears,' and ' If this earl be on our side, no man in that district will trouble.' Let us unfeignedly return unto the Lord, for it is the Eternal Truth of the Eternal God for which we contend, and it shall finally prevail, though it be resisted for a season." Next year help arrived from England. The French troops in Leith were forced to sue for terms of peace. A treaty was signed in Edinburgh whereby the foreign soldiers were withdrawn, and the Queen Regent, wearied out and heartsick of the struggle, died in Edinburgh Castle on the 10th of June. Feeling the end to be near, she sent for Lord James Stuart and told him she was sorry for Scotland and for her own share in Scotland's sufferings, and asked forgiveness of all whom she had wronged. Lord James advised her to see the preacher Willocks. She did so, and listened to him with much attention, but afterwards sent for a popish priest and died a "good Catholic." Her bigotry was supreme, � a determined opposer of Christ; an oppressor and persecutor of His people, and a hater of His Word. She became the patron of a party whose members were unscrupulously wicked, whose actions were relentlessly cruel, whose system of fraud and falsehood were a disgrace to intelligent humanity. She lived to see her power broken, her hopes blasted, and her schemes defeated, and died in darkness and despair. Verily "the way of the wicked He turneth upside down." The man of God is called upon to stand for the truth, not only in the face of open opposition and persecution, but more so when Satan appears as an angel of light, when evil is called good, and when the love of many is waxing cold. Then, indeed, is the faithful servant called upon to show that he is not ignorant of the doings of the enemy of souls, that, living by faith, he is ready to fight the good fight of faith, and witness a good confession for Christ Jesus. Under the regency of Mary of Guise, Knox had been persecuted, banished, outlawed, a price set upon his head, and assassins hired to slay him. Under the government of Mary Stuart, he had the grief of seeing many who walked uprightly in time of persecution turning aside in time of peace, to make servile courtiers, for worldly advancement, to a vain and dissembling woman. He, himself, by turns was threatened and fawned upon, publicly accused and privately slandered, but nevertheless the great Reformer went steadfastly on, doing the work put into his hands, and ever seeking to advance the cause of Christ in Scotland.

Mary Stuart arrived in Scotland on the 19th of August 1561. She had been brought up in France � the most polluted court in Europe; a place where every vice was cultivated, where every virtue was ridiculed, and for the brief period of eighteen months she had been partner of the throne. Her uncles, the Duke of Guise and Cardinal of Lorraine, had engaged her to devote herself heart and hand to the extirpation of the "new opinions" with fire and sword, if need be; and with this purpose she came to Scotland. She refused to condescend to examine the subject of difference between papist and protestant. She scorned to hear the preachers, and so wilfully did she shut her eyes to the truth that she would not even allow them to lay before her in writing the ground of their faith. But the protestant party was now in power, and she had to conceal her real designs until a time came more favourable for their execution.

Nevertheless, the people were captivated by the charms of their young queen, and the first night she slept in Holyrood she was awakened by a serenade under her windows � not very successful as music, and all the more distasteful to Mary because the people were singing psalms. Next Sunday she ordered mass to be said in her chapel, upon which Knox said "he was more afraid of one mass than of ten thousand armed enemies." There was just cause for fear. In the Netherlands, multitudes had been put to death under Charles V. and his more wicked son Philip II. In France, the followers of Jesus were being persecuted by the Guises. In Spain, the martyr piles still continued to blaze, and in the sister kingdom of England they had newly gone out with the death of Mary Tudor. Knowing the knowledge of the truth to be the only safeguard from error, Knox continued to preach with increased energy twice every Sunday and three times during the week in the great building of St. Giles, which was crowded by interested listeners. From some of his writings which have come down to us, we learn that in his preaching he gave forth no uncertain sound. Heaven and Hell, salvation and judgment, justification by faith, or condemnation through unbelief, were to him solemn realities. Death by sin, and life by Christ alone, were the cardinal points of his doctrine. No mere set of opinions, whether protestant or otherwise, were sufficient. There must be regeneration through the work of the Spirit, producing new life in the soul, and from this new life Knox looked for new conduct � the "fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God." Knox had settled in Edinburgh in 1560, and the house he inhabited may still be seen in the High Street. Over the west front is the inscription, "Lufe God above al and your nichbour as yourself." A stair leads up from the street to the audience hall, in which is a window, called the "preaching window," because from it Knox was in the habit of addressing the people assembled in the street below. Underneath this window are the words, "DEUS THEOS, GOD."

Mary having set her mind upon subduing Knox and bending him to her will, summoned him to the palace. In one of their many interviews, after a long conference, she charged him with teaching the people a different religion from that allowed by their princes. He replied that true religion derived its origin from the eternal God, and that if subjects were bound to frame their religion according to the will of their rulers, the Hebrews would have been of the same religion as Pharaoh.

The papists feared that Knox's appeals would shake the Queen's constancy; the protestants hoped she would be won over to attend the preaching at least, but Knox thought differently. He says, "Her whole proceedings declare that the Cardinal's lessons are so deeply printed in her heart that the substance and the quality are like to perish together."

The news of the massacre of Vassy, which took place in France at this time, brought much joy to the papists. One Sunday morning the Duke of Guise had surrounded their meeting house, where about 1200 Huguenots � as the French Christians were called � were gathered together, and the troops bursting open the doors, with cries of "Kill, kill," the work of butchery began. When it was over the soldiers gathered together the Bibles and hymn books and burned them. About eighty persons � men, women, and children � were slain, and several hundreds wounded. When tidings of this exploit of her uncle reached Scotland, Mary gave a grand ball in the palace, and this unseenly mirth called forth the stern rebuke of Knox, who said that "princes were more exercised in dancing and music than in hearing or reading the Word of God; and that they delighted more in fiddlers and flatterers than in the company of wise men, capable of giving them wholesome counsel." As to dancing, he said it was "a gesture more becoming to mad, than to sober men, and that those who danced for joy at the misfortunes of God's people would soon have their mirth converted into mourning." Next day he was summoned to the palace, ushered into the royal chamber where the Queen sat with her ladies and counsellors, and accused of having spoken irreverently of Her Majesty. Knox bluntly told her that if she refused to hear the preacher herself, she must depend on the false reports of flatterers, but that for her benefit he would repeat the substance of what he had said. Thereupon she was compelled for once to listen to a sermon, though much against her will. Mary could find nothing faulty in his discourse, and was reluctantly compelled to let the bold preacher go free.

We next find Knox in the West, visiting with untiring energy the different Churches, and seeking to confirm the Christians in the faith of Christ.

In 1566 France and Spain concluded a peace with the object of "rooting out the new heresy." Just as Herod and Pilate were made friends together over the condemnation of the Lord Jesus, so Catharine de Medici � one of the most wicked women that ever lived � patched up a peace with the cruel, vindictive, and bigoted Philip of Spain, who was responsible for the unjust murder of nearly 100,000 of his subjects � the followers of Christ � in the Netherlands. The object of this agreement was that they might use their joint powers against the Protestants, and exterminate every man, woman, and child who refused to worship the Roman idol. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, six years afterwards, was the outcome of this atrocious compact, when a beginning was made in Paris with the slaughter of Admiral Coligny and the principal leaders, who had been decoyed to the city by fair words and false promises of security, made, only to be broken. The work of death proceeded through the provinces till over 50,000 of the best citizens of France had been destroyed; their only crime being that they dared to differ from the teaching of Rome and sought to worship God in sincerity and truth.

Influenced by her uncles, the Guises, Mary readily became a partner to the scheme. The intentions of the papists were to reduce Scotland to obedience to the pope; next, to depose Elizabeth and seat Mary on the throne of England instead. The dagger of the assassin and the art of the poisoner were considered legitimate weapons, and the pope promised "pardon for all his sins," to the man who would succeed in assassinating Elizabeth. But all those deep-laid plots came to nought, and the misguided Scottish Queen, in place of sitting upon an English throne, laid her head upon an English block, and her better qualities were lost sight of in the vices which she allowed to govern her life and conduct.

Meanwhile, she temporised. Smiles, caresses, and hypocritical promises were the weapons she used, until the majority of the nobles should be won over. With these weapons Mary was an adept. She made a show of favouring the Reformed party till the plot was ripe for the stake and the faggot, and her arts were largely successful. Many zealous professors grew cold to the cause of Christ in proportion as they courted Mary's favour, and the more they reverted from Christ, the more they grew in the queen's good graces. But there was one man who would neither be won by flattery nor silenced by threats. That man was Knox, and Mary having already measured herself against him, and found that neither her tears nor her frowns had the slightest effect upon his massive sense of righteousness, and that to win her smile or escape her anger, he would not deviate one hair-breadth from the straight line of what he considered duty, she determined to bring him to the block. Events which took place shortly afterwards placed her enemy in her power. In 1563 she had taken a journey to Stirling, and while the queen was away, mass was openly celebrated at Holyrood, and some of the turbulent spirits among the protestants, offended at these proceedings, burst into the chapel and asked the priest how he dared to be so malapert in the queen's absence. Mary, when she heard of this, was indignant, and ordered two of the protestants to be brought to trial. Fearing this was only a beginning to measures still more hostile, some of the nobles induced Knox to write to the principal gentlemen interested in the case, to be present at the trial. Knox did so, and one of the circular letters came into the hands of the queen. This she laid before the Privy Council, who, to her great delight, pronounced it treasonable. Knox himself was now brought to trial, and great was the anxiety on the part of the people as to the result. The queen took her place at the head of the counsel with much dignity, but seeing Knox standing uncovered at the foot of the table, she forgot herself and burst into loud and unbecoming laughter. "That man," she said, "has made me weep, and shed never a tear himself; now I will see if I can make him weep." But Knox, however, was made of sterner stuff. The proceedings began, and Knox was asked if he was sorry for what he had done. He replied that before he could be sorry he must first be taught his offence. "You shall not escape me," said the queen; "is it not treason to accuse a prince of cruelty?" "Is it lawful, madam, for me to answer for myself, or shall I be condemned unheard?" "Say what you can, for I think you will have enough to do," said the queen exultingly. "I desire then," said Knox, "of your grace and of this honourable audience, whether you do not know that the obstinate papists are deadly enemies of all such as profess the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that they most earnestly desire the extermination of them, and of the true doctrine taught in this realm." The queen was silent; her conscience told her that the words of the fearless confessor were true, but the lords answered with one voice, God forbid that ever the lives of the faithful stood in the power of the papists, for sad experience has taught us what cruelty lies in their hearts." Knox proceeded and told the queen that the papists who had her ear were dangerous counsellors, and such her mother had found them to be before her. "But," said he, "cast up the acts of your parliament; I have offended nothing against them, but I affirm that those who have inflamed your grace against the protestants are the children of the devil, and therefore must obey the desire of their father, who was a liar and a manslayer from the beginning." This plainness of speech the queen and counsel were not in the habit of hearing. They liked not this rugged man's rugged way of calling things by rugged names, and the chancellor interrupting, informed him that he was not in the pulpit. "I am in the place where conscience demands me to speak the truth, and therefore the truth I speak impugn it whoso list," was his reply. After some further discussion he was told he might return home. "I thank God and the queen's majesty," said he, and withdrew. The votes were then taken as to his conduct, and he was pronounced Not Guilty by a large majority. Secretary Maitland was enraged, for he had assured the queen of his condemnation, and Mary was mortified and displeased at his acquittal, and "That nicht," says Knox, "was nyther dancing nor fiddeling in the court, for madam was disappointed of her purpose, quhilk was to have Johne Knox to her will by vote of her nobility."

Two years afterwards, the queen was married to Darnley. The Earl of Murray and many of the principal nobility objected to a man who could be "either papist or protestant as it suited him," and Mary, finding that nothing would bring them over to her party, dismissed them from her presence with taunts and reproaches. At the age of twenty-three, on a mid-summer day in 1565, she was married; and from that moment the steps of the misguided queen led rapidly downwards through a series of follies and crimes, each of which brought greater troubles in its train than those it was intended to cure. After six months of married life she found that "she hated Darnley as much as before she had loved him." He, in turn, became jealous of the Vatican agent, Rizzio, and one Saturday night a dark tragedy took place in Holyrood. Rizzio was slain in the queen's apartments. He who had plotted the death of thousands meets with a bloody death himself.

Henceforth Mary lived only for revenge. Outwardly she masked her hatred until everything was ready for another tragedy, and then, one Sunday night in February 1567, we find her seated by the bedside of her sick husband, promising that "all should be forgotten and forgiven," and that they should live together � as in the happy days of old. About midnight she left him to "attend a ball in the palace." When she arrived at Holyrood, Bothwell left on his dark mission, and next morning the dead body of the king was found in the garden. Three months afterwards she was married to the murderer of her lawful husband. Another month, and at Carberry Hill the guilty pair met the nation in open rebellion against such high-handed wickedness. Bothwell escaped, but Mary was made prisoner and confined in Lochleven Castle. Truly "the way of trangressors is hard."

The Earl of Murray, called "the Good Regent," was now elected to govern for the young king, and by his prudence and ability the country was again reduced to quietness. When Mary escaped from captivity, she met the Regent's forces at Langside, and being once more defeated was forced to flee. This time she took refuge in England, where after a lingering imprisonment of nineteen years she was finally brought to the block.

Mary Stuart had often been warned by the faithful, if stern Knox, of the danger of her course. She lived in a day when the truths of Scripture were faithfully preached by many of her protestant subjects, but she slighted the warnings, scorned the preachers, refused to read the Scriptures for herself, lived only for pleasure, and circumstances alone hindered her from being a bitter persecutor of God's people. The Regent Murray was an earnest, God-fearing man who sought to do that which was true and right in the high position he had been called to fill; and Knox now seeing the popish idolatry, as bethought, rooted out, and Christianity the professed religion of the nation, felt that his work was done. He was now an old man, and his life of incessant labour had told heavily on a constitution never very strong. But the papists soon found means to murder the Regent at Linlithgow, and this awakened Knox from his dreams of ease. The body was brought to Edinburgh, and Knox preached the funeral sermon from the text, "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord." Three thousand persons sat before him dissolved in tears as he described the Regent's virtues and bewailed his loss. Knox's grief at this event brought on a stroke of palsy, and his enemies hoped he would preach no more, but he recovered, and during the civil wars which followed between the king's party and the queen's party, he continued to preach in St. Giles as often as his strength would permit. Obnoxious to both parties by his fearless denunciation of evil, his life was often in danger, and one evening a musket ball was fired through the window at which he was in the habit of sitting. It happened that he was in a different part of the room at the time and so escaped the assassin's bullet.

After a short visit to St. Andrews we find him back in Edinburgh in 1572. Here he learned with deep distress of the murder of many of his acquaintances and friends in France during the massacre of Bartholomew. But his grief speedily gave way to indignation, and he caused himself to be conveyed to the pulpit, where he summoned up his strength to thunder forth, like some Hebrew prophet of old, the vengeance of Heaven against �that cruel murderer, the King of France." The French Ambassador, Le Croc, resented Knox's plain speech, and requested the Regent Morton to silence him. But Morton, believing that Knox had spoken only the truth, refused to interfere. Thereupon Le Croc, in much umbrage, took his departure. When tidings of the massacre reached Rome it was received in a different manner. The Pope ordered a day of solemn thanksgiving and proclaimed a year of jubilee.

On the 9th of November he preached for the last time, and afterwards, "leaning upon his staff, he crept down the street to his house," from which he never came out again alive. A few days afterwards, feeling the end to be near, he sent for some of his elders and deacons, and the words with which he addressed them give us the keynote to the man's character � the object of his life. "The day now approaches," said he, "when I shall be released from my great labours, and shall be with Christ. And now God is my witness, whom I have served in spirit, in the gospel of His Son, that I have taught nothing but the true and solid doctrine of the gospel of the Son of God."

On Monday, November 24th, he fell asleep. His body was buried in the Old Greyfriar's Churchyard, and the Regent Morton, standing at the head of the open grave, said, "There lies he who never feared the face of man." By the side of Morton's wreath, we place another of modern manufacture. Pope Pius IX. in 1877, bewailing the loss of Scotland, says, "That savage apostate Knox, perverted Scotland by the protestant heresy, and won it over to a sect which repudiates all hierarchy, and admits only simple presbyters all equal among each other." A small plate of metal, with the initials "J.K.," let into the pavement of Parliament Square, now marks the last resting place of John Knox.

Chapter 6.

Tyndale's New Testament.

Wycliffe's life and teaching, but more especially his translation of the Bible into the English language had been the means of making the Gospel known to many, but as we have seen in a previous chapter, a Bible written out by hand was a very expensive book. Few people were able to purchase even a portion of it, and fewer still, the whole book. The priests also devoted themselves to seize and destroy every copy they could find, so that in a short time there was a danger of the Bible becoming as unknown to the people as if a translation had never been made.

But Wycliffe's work had not been in vain. Like the sower he had gone forth with the good seed which is the Word of God, and though some had fallen on the wayside hearts of the adherents of Rome, and some on the thorny ground of intellectual and political life, yet much of it had taken root in the hearts of the common people who "heard him gladly." One hundred years afterwards, when Tyndale's New Testament appeared, we see, in the eagerness with which it was welcomed, a proof of the lasting character of the work of that faithful old contender for the truth � John Wycliffe.

But during that period persecution raged with unabated violence against suspected Lollards. Parliament enacted, among other acts already in force, that all "judges, justices, and magistrates shall take oath to make inquisition for Lollards, and that they shall issue warrants for their apprehension and delivery to the ecclesiastical judges, that they may be acquit or convict by the laws of holy church." All found with English books, or suspected of "Wycliffe's learning," were apprehended. The priests could pardon any sin but the sin of heresy. That must be purged by fire. Soon the new act brought forth fresh victims to the insatiable cruelty of the false church. Among the many who were counted worthy to suffer for His name, we read of John Claydon who was found in possession of a book called the Lanthorn of Light. Light the priests could not tolerate. It exposed their dark deeds. In 1415 they burned both John and his book. William Taylor, a priest, who had learned better knowledge than Rome could teach him, was burned in 1422. Another priest, named William White, was converted, and went about the country preaching the truths he had learned from Wycliffe's writings. He was arrested and tried at Canterbury, but his courage failed when he saw before him the fiery death, and he confessed and abjured his heresy. However, instead of peace, his recantation only brought him remorse [sorrow and] because of his failure, and we are not surprised, to find the ex-priest in a short time preaching Jesus Christ with more zeal and diligence than before. Arrested and brought before the Bishop of Norwich he was condemned, and this time went joyfully to the fire. Even amidst the flames he exhorted the people, and told them to remain steadfast in the doctrine he had taught them, but as he continued to speak, a servant of the bishops smote him a cruel blow on the mouth, and forced him to remain silent; thus he meekly yielded up his spirit.

By and by the fierce and bloody Wars of the Roses began, and those in high places got other work to do than persecuting Lollards. During a period of the war when the White Rose of York was in the ascendency, a Lancastrian family under the assumed name of Hutchins, came to reside near Berkley Castle, in Gloucestershire. When the Lancastrian party was in power they resumed their original name, and a son born to them in 1484 was named William Tyndale. The accession of Henry VII. to the throne of England in 1485 put an end to the thirty years of civil war which had wasted the kingdom, and men had time to think of other things than mere brute fighting. Accordingly when young Tyndale grew up he was sent at an early age to the University of Oxford. How men were trained for priests in these days Tyndale himself records. He says, "In the Universities they have ordained that no man shall look at the Scriptures until they be trained in heathen learning eight or nine years, and armed with false principles with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scriptures. And when he taketh his first degree he is sworn that he shall hold none opinions condemned by the Church." Tyndale found nothing to satisfy him in all this "perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth," but his time was not entirely spent in this vain pursuit. Here he became acquainted with the Greek and Latin New Testament, published by Erasmus, at Basle, in 1516. Erasmus had for some time been professor of Greek at Oxford, and had published a book called the Praise of Folly, exposing the evils of the monastic orders; but, timid as he was learned, he had retired to the Continent dismayed at the storm he had raised. Tyndale's acquaintance with the New Testament marked the turning-point in his career. In it he found that which could meet his conscience and satisfy his heart. It was the means of his conversion; through the living Word he was born again. Having learned the truth himself, he began to lecture in public on the book which had been means of his own salvation, that others too might know the Saviour of whom it spoke. But Oxford would have none of that, so he retired to Cambridge. Here he met Thomas Bilney, soon to become a fervent preacher of the Gospel and a martyr for Jesus Christ. For years Bilney had been seeking salvation, and as he knew of no other way he regularly went to the priests � but how shall the blind lead the blind? His confessor prescribed fasts, vigils, masses, and indulgences which cost poor Bilney a great deal of money but gave him no rest. His purse got empty and his conscience knew no peace. At last he began to doubt whether it was not for their own interests that the priests denounced the Greek Testament as the "source of all heresy." Romish doctrines were losing their hold on Bilney; he went to the house where the Testaments were secretly sold, bought one, and with fear and trembling shut himself up in his room to read � "This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." Bilney thought over the words he had read, and as he meditated, the Holy Spirit opened his eyes to the only way of salvation. "Jesus saves. Jesus Christ saves sinners. Jesus saves me," exclaimed Bilney. Now he saw that his fasts and vigils were "destroying instead of saving him," and born from above by the power of the Spirit of God, Bilney had turned from the study of law to study the New Testament and learn of Jesus.

In 1521 we find Tyndale back in Gloucestershire. He had completed his studies, and was now engaged as tutor to the sons of Sir John Walsh, at Sodbury Hall. Perhaps in few other places could he have been brought into more direct contact with the evil practices of Rome, than in this retired spot which was much frequented by priests and friars. For fifty years four Italian bishops placed in succession over the diocese had surrendered it "to the pope, to the monks, and to immorality." A resident collector from Rome had power from the pope to pardon the sins of murder and theft on condition that the criminal shared half his profits with the pontifical commissioner. Rome cared not how she got money, provided only she got it. We narrate these details only to show how debased and darkened the minds of men may become when unenlightened by the Word of God; and when the light shines in what fierce opposition is raised in the human heart, because its evils deeds are exposed. "This is the condemnation that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God."

Sir John Walsh was a man of considerable importance, kept a hospitable table, and the priests and idle monks, ever fond of good cheer, took full advantage of his generosity. The church dignitaries cared little for their duties, but a great deal for their revenues, and they soon saw that if Master Tyndale's "opinions" were received, the illegitimate gains would be gone. The learned doctors and lordly abbots warmly disputed with him as to his presumption in daring to differ from "Holy Church," but Tyndale, with his Greek Testament ever by his side, had a way of testing their arguments by what was written in "The Book," so as to leave him master of the field. "That is the Book that makes heretics," said they. "The source of all heresy is pride," replied Tyndale. Not content with merely exposing that which was false, he busied himself in making known that which was true, and devoted himself to preaching the Gospel in the villages near by. Extending his journeys as he had opportunity, he visited Bristol and preached to large audiences which gathered to hear him on the college green.

His teaching had its effect too on his patron Sir John, and the priests and monks soon began to find that their welcome at the manor house was not so hearty as heretofore. This they ascribed to Tyndale's influence, and having been defeated in the argument they resorted to force. The Chancellor of the diocese cited him to appear and answer to certain charges which had been made against him. Tyndale went, and knowing what was before him, "prayed heartily to God to strengthen him to stand fast in the truth of His Word." We get a glimpse of the judicial procedure of these days from what he tells us of this court. "When I came before the Chancellor," he says, "he threatened me grievously and reviled me, and rated me as though I had been a dog; and laid to my charge things whereof there could be none accuser brought forth, as their manner is." To this invective Tyndale made a calm reply which only exasperated the Chancellor all the more, but as they could not produce one witness to substantiate their charges, he escaped out of their hands and returned home to Sodbury. The priests next tried to "convert" Tyndale, and engaged a learned schoolman to visit him and convince him of his errors.

We know little of what took place at this interesting interview, except that the evangelist's Testament was more than a match for all the churchman's logic, and when he saw that the Word of God only exposed the evil of his own doctrine, he exclaimed, "We had better be without God's laws than the pope's." Tyndale, shocked at such irreverence, warmly replied, "I defy the pope and all his laws, and if God spares my life I will cause the boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scriptures than all the priests in England." He had decided on his great work, the translation of the Bible into the language of the people, and devoted all his spare time to this one object. But when the priests got knowledge of his design, their opposition, smouldering before, broke out into so fierce a flame that he was forced to leave Sodbury. "You cannot save me from the priests," he said to Sir John, "and I should be sorry to bring you into trouble; permit me to leave you." Taking with him his papers and his precious Testament, he bade good-bye for ever to the place where two years of his life had been pleasantly and profitably spent, and became an exile and a wanderer, that he might give to England the Bible � the knowledge of the Word of God. Tyndale went to London. He vainly hoped that the learned Bishop Tunstal would accord him patronage and encourage him in his design, but he had yet to learn not to put his faith in princes. Tunstal received him coldly and listened to his plans, but told him that his house was full, and dismissed him. "Alas" said he, "I have been deceived: there is nothing to be looked for from the bishops: Christ was smitten on the cheek before the bishop: Paul was buffeted before a bishop, and a bishop has turned me away; but I hunger for the Word of God, and I will translate it whether they say so or no: God will not suffer me to perish." Repulsed by the Bishop, he found a home with a Christian merchant named Humphrey Monmouth, who received him into his house and provided him with the opportunity of prosecuting his labours. Here he met John Fryth, whom he speaks of as "his dear son in the faith," and who at a future day, was to die a martyr for the truth of Jesus. Meantime he rendered valuable assistance to the translator, and daily the two shut themselves up in a small room in Monmouth's house to render the Greek Testament into English. They were making rapid progress, and Tyndale hoped soon to see his sheets printed, when events took place which showed him that there was "no room, not only in the bishop's palace to translate the New Testament, but that there was no place to do it in all England."

Two years before Tyndale arrived in London, Luther's books were beginning to be introduced into England, and in such numbers too that the clergy took alarm, and condemned every copy they could lay hands upon to be seized and burned. Aleander, the papal nuncio in Germany, had prohibited the printers from publishing any of Luther's works in the Empire. "Very well," said the printers, "we shall send them to England then." And to England they came. The Theses of 1517, the Explanation of the Lord's Prayer, the Epistle to the Galatians, the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, and others were translated into English, imported by the enterprising merchants, who found it a profitable, if a risky trade, and circulated through the country by an elaborate system of colporteurage. The clergy did everything in their power to stop the growing evil. Even King Henry himself entered the lists, and wrote a book against "that arch-heretic and child of the devil, Martin Luther, who had ventured to resist the authority of the Pope. Writing to Louis of Bavaria, he exhorts him to "seize and exterminate this Luther, and unless he repents, to deliver him and his books to the flames." A copy of the King's book, beautifully bound, was sent to Rome, and the Pope, to show his gratitude to the messenger who brought it, gave him his toe to kiss. To Henry too something must be given, and a bull was issued bestowing upon him the sounding title of Defender of the Faith." Henry was in raptures. A sumptuous entertainment was given. The heralds proclaimed the King's new title, and Wolsey said mass. The Court jester, entering in the midst of these proceedings, asked the cause of his joy. "The Pope has just named me Defender of the Faith," said the King. "Ho! ho good Harry," replied the fool, "let you and me defend one another, but let faith alone to defend itself." The "fool" was the wisest man in the company. Henry, to show his zeal, immediately began to persecute all who differed from Rome � to destroy the faith instead of defending it. In Lincolnshire was found a small community of Christians who were wont to meet together on Sundays and at other times, as they had opportunity, to read a portion of the Gospels, or spend the time in prayer and exhortation. Books were few, and those who possessed a copy of the Gospels or one of the Epistles would secretly lend them to their friends that they might commit portions to memory, and in turn pass them on to others. One, John Scrivener, a faithful colporteur, was entrusted with this task, and carefully conveyed the precious volumes to those who thirsted for the life-giving word. Here was a field for Henry. Officers suddenly appeared in the district, and many arrests were made. Some recanted: some were tied to a post in the market-place, while the executioner branded them on the cheek with a red-hot iron. Others were considered worthy of death, and among them the colporteur Scrivener. When the pile was ready his weeping children were dragged forward, the torch forced into their unwilling hands, and they were compelled to light the faggots of their own father's death pile. The priests also made inquisition in London for all who should possess Luther's books and tracts, and Tyndale thereupon fearing that the stake might put an end to his life before his translation was completed, determined to leave London and retire to the Continent.

The generous Monmouth gave him ten pounds, equal to nearly fifty pounds in our day. Other friends of the gospel made up a like sum, and taking his unfinished sheets and his Greek Testament he went on board a vessel and sailed to Hamburg in 1524. He knew what fierce opposition his work would raise, but he was determined that England should have the New Testament in spite of the Clergy. "The priests," he said, "when they had slain Christ set poleaxes to keep Him in His sepulchre, that He should not rise again: even so have our priests buried the Testament of God, and all their study is to keep it down that it rise not again."

From Hamburg Tyndale proceeded to Wittenberg where he spent some time in the society of Luther and Melancthon. Afterwards he went to Cologne where he hoped to get his translation printed. Taking lodgings in an obscure part of the town to avoid observation, he placed his manuscripts in the hands of the printer, Peter Quental, and soon had the joy of seeing the first sheets of the first printed English New Testament. But his joy was of short duration. Dean Cochloeus found out his secret and procured an order from the Senate forbidding the printer to continue the work, but Tyndale learning of this interruption succeeded in procuring the printed sheets, and hastily leaving Cologne proceeded up the Rhine to Worms. When Cochloeus and the officers arrived at the printing house they found that the "apostate had taken the abominable papers and escaped." The dean took care to apprise Henry VIII. and warn him of the danger England was exposed to. "The New Testament in English is about to be sent to your people," said he. "Give orders at every seaport to prevent the introduction of this most baneful merchandise." Such was the way the priests of Rome spoke about the Word of God. The Scriptures must not be read by the people. This was the dogma of the false church then, and she is the same to-day. Generations have succeeded each other, yet in each there has been manifested that implacable, untiring opposition to God which was began by Satan in the Garden of Eden, and in every age since he had found men willing to be his instruments for evil in the world. Civilisation and so-called progress have not in the least modified the policy of Rome to the Word of God. Writing to his bishops and clergy in 1824, some time after the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Pope Leo XII. says "Ye are not ignorant that a society commonly called a Bible Society, is audaciously spreading through the earth: and that . . . it endeavours with all its might, and by every means, to translate, or rather corrupt the Holy Scriptures into the vulgar tongues of all nations . . . . We exhort you to remove your flocks with care and earnestness from this fatal pasture."

In 1870 Pope Pius IX. after the loss of his temporal power, was forced to be the unwilling witness of the "audacious" Bible Society, upon which his predecessor had poured his unqualified condemnation; but his power was now limited, and he could only express his hatred to the Word of God by warning all "good catholics" to beware of the "pernicious literature" issued therefrom.

In 1890 a Christian lady in Edinburgh offered to give a Bible to an Italian who lay in the Calton Jail, charged with murder, but the Roman Catholic Canon who visited the jail would not allow him to accept it. Many more particular instances might be cited, but these three are enough to prove our point. The opposition to the truth in the nineteenth century is not one whit less than it was in the sixteenth.

After a voyage of four or five days, Tyndale arrived in Worms. Four years previously, Luther, in the same town, had stood before the Emperor and the Diet, and single-handed had said, "I cannot recant; here stand I; I can do no other; God help me." God had indeed helped him, and delivered him from those who sought his life, and God was watching over and protecting His servant Tyndale, from all his enemies until his work was done. At Worms he found a printer in Peter Schoeffer who was interested in his work, and soon six thousand copies � three thousand in octavo, and three thousand in quarto � of the New Testament were on the way to England. Notwithstanding the warning of Dean Cochloeus, the opposition of King Henry, and the hatred of the priests, the books arrived and were distributed all over the country. Then the partisans of Rome took counsel together and issued an edict with the concurrence of the king that "all these books, containing most pernicious poison, were to be burned."

The Bishop of London enjoined all in his diocese who possessed English Testaments to deliver them up under pain of excommunication, and Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, did likewise. But as Testaments did not come in fast enough to make fires with, they tried a new plan. Large sums of money were expended in buying up all the copies they could lay hands on, and on one occasion nearly a thousand Testaments were burned at St. Paul's Cross. Such was the way the Word of God was treated by the men who called themselves the spiritual guides of the people. Only one complete octavo copy of the first edition of Tyndale's Testament is now known to exist; it is treasured in the Baptist College of Bristol. A fragment of the quarto edition, printed at Cologne, is also to be seen in the British Museum.

But the bishops had over-reached themselves; the money, that had been spent in buying up the books, only provided the translator with means for printing another and more carefully revised edition. The Dutch printers also, finding it a profitable undertaking issued several editions on their own account, all of which were successfully shipped to England and Scotland, and eagerly bought up by the people.

In 1534, Tyndale issued a new and revised edition, correcting the various errors which had crept into the text through the ignorance or carelessness of the foreign printers, and this is substantially the same translation as we now possess in our Authorised Version. To this edition was appended a number of expository marginal glosses or comments; but in some of these he made more direct application to the abuses of the times, as in 1 Thess. 4: 11, "That ye study to be quiet and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands," he says, "A good lesson for monks and idle friars."

But Tyndale's work was done. Eight years before, he had written, "In burning the New Testament they did none other thing than that I looked for: no more shall they do if they burn me also, if it be God's will it shall be so." His enemies, who had long been endeavouring to get him into their power, were now about to be successful. Under the sanguinary Henry VIII. his friends Bilney and Fryth had been cruelly martyred in London. Others, also, had suffered death for being found in possession of a New Testament. But still the books came pouring in. The priests were unable to cope with the evil. The printing press defied them all. So it was decided to bring the translator to the stake, and thus, as they thought, strike at the root of the evil. Needless for us to enter into all the details of the pretended friendship which masked the treachery and cunning employed for this end. Needless to add that Romanism, injustice, and fraud always go together. Suffice it to say, that under the guise of friendship and goodwill, he was decoyed from the house of his friend Poynitz, with whom he was residing in Antwerp, and so skilfully was the treacherous design carried out, that before his friends knew of his arrest, he was securely lodged in the gloomy dungeons of the Castle of Vilvorde.

The laws of Charles V. against "heretics" in the Low Countries were very concise. "Men were to be beheaded, women buried alive, and the relapsed burned." Before a Romish tribunal, with such a code of laws to enforce, there was little hope for so illustrious a prisoner as Tyndale. And besides the Emperor's edict, Pierre Dufief, the Procureur-General, was specially anxious to get a conviction against his prisoners, because he got a share of their confiscated goods. One who had good reason to know him describes him as a man "whose cruelty was equal to his wickedness." But there was to be some respite. For sixteen months he lingered out a dreary captivity, and during that time we learn that "the power of his doctrine and the sincerity of his life were such that his keeper, the keeper's daughter, and others of his household were converted." Like the Phillippian jailor of old, we can imagine Tyndale's keeper alone with his prisoner asking that all-important question, "What must I do to be saved;" and then his eyes opened to the truth of justification, through the sufferings, death, and resurrection of Another � rejoicing in full and free salvation.

Winter was coming on, and Tyndale, sitting alone in darkness and cold, wrote to the Governor of the Castle, "I entreat your Lordship, and that by the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here during the winter, you will request the Procureur to be kind enough to send me, from my goods which he has in his possession, a warmer cap, for I suffer extremely from cold in the head . . . a warmer coat also, for that which I have is very thin; also a "piece of cloth to patch my leggings; my overcoat too is worn out. I wish also his permission to have a candle in the evenings, for it is wearisome to sit alone in the dark. But above all I entreat and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the Procureur that he may kindly permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Grammar, and Hebrew Dictionary, that I may spend my time with that study; and in return may you obtain your dearest wish, provided always it be consistent with the salvation of your soul."

Our sympathies go out to this devoted servant of Christ, in loneliness, darkness, and cold, yet anxious to spend every moment to advance the glory of God. He had previously translated and published the five books of Moses, with the book of Jonah, and now in his prison he set himself with a brave heart to finish the translation of the whole of the Old Testament Scriptures, and had proceeded as far as the end of the Books of Chronicles when his trial came on. His manuscripts are then said to have been secretly sent to his friend John Rogers, in Antwerp, who finished the books of the Old Testament, and printed a complete edition of the Scriptures, known as "Matthew's Bible."

Tyndale's trial took place in 1537. His chief accuser was a Dr. Tapper, a determined enemy of Tyndale, and for his share in this judicial murder he was rewarded with the sum of about fifty pounds, and afterwards appointed by the Pope, Chief Inquisitor in the Low Countries. But what will his reward be when "He maketh inquisition for blood, who remembereth them, and forgetteth not the cry of the afflicted? "

Among a number of similar charges, Tyndale was accused of having maintained,

That faith alone justifies.

That to believe in the forgiveness of sins, and embrace the mercy of God offered in the Gospel, is sufficient for salvation.

That he denied the existence of purgatory.

That men should neither pray to the Virgin nor the Saints.

Every one of his assertions traversed the traditions of Rome, and for the man who dared to differ there was no toleration. "Confess your errors or die," were the terms of Rome. But Tyndale was little likely to confess. His life had been spent in the cause of Truth, which he loved far better than life itself, and he looked forward to his martyrdom with a calm and steadfast trust in God, knowing it to be the door through which he would pass from earth's troubles to Heaven's rest, and be henceforth at home in "the Father's House."

On Friday, 6th of October, 1536, he was bound to the stake. A rope was passed round his neck, he was first strangled, and then his body burned to ashes. "Lord, open the King of England's eyes," were his last words, and he passed home to his reward.

It is no part of our purpose to enter into the details of the domestic history of the Court of Henry VIII., or of the causes which led to the political breach with Rome. Suffice it to say that two years after Tyndale's death the man who had been the most bigoted and abject worshipper of the pope to further his own ends, had become the most determined opposer of the pope and his claims, still to further his own ends; and the Bible which Tyndale had devoted his life to give to the people of England, and which the servants of the devil had so earnestly endeavoured to keep from them, was placed by Act of Parliament, and by will of the king, in every Parish Church, and "raised upon a desk so that all might come and read." England was now nominally a protestant country.

Immediately the prohibition was withdrawn, several editions of the Bible were printed in England, and now, all over the wide world, wherever the English tongue is spoken, may be found the result of Tyndale's life-work, that inestimable treasure, that Holy Bible.

But there are still "dark places" in the earth, and many of our fellowmen have never even heard of the Bible. Let us then be stimulated, by what these faithful martyrs of the sixteenth century did and suffered, to do more ourselves to spread the knowledge of the Grace of God as revealed in the Scriptures. And there are still "dark places" and dark hearts in our own land, for Protestantism is not necessarily Christianity. A man may be a protestant without being a Christian. To protest against evil is merely negative. It is not enough to "abhor that which is evil," we must also "cleave to that which is good."

Christianity does not consist in a series of rites and ceremonies, however Scriptural, but in a real love for the Lord Jesus Christ. Where the Bible is known and loved, there is Christianity, for the Bible makes known the love of God revealed in the death of His Son.

But how is the Bible treated in this protestant country of ours to-day? It is instructive to notice the character of the opposition of the sixteenth century as compared with that of the nineteenth. Then the opponents of the Bible burned the Book, knowing it to be the Word of God, and determined at all costs to keep it from the people. Now the opposition to the truth has assumed a more subtle form. The doctrines of the Bible are ignored. The foundation truths of the Atonement, the necessity of the New Birth, and Justification by faith alone, are lost sight of, or disbelieved altogether; while reformation and morality are preached, instead of regeneration and faith. The Romish dogma of "human merit," against which the Christians of the sixteenth century so strenuously fought, has been resurrected in protestant England in the form of a gospel of "doing your best" as a means to merit God's favour, forgetting that "all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (Isa. 64: 6). We are told by those who profess to be spiritual guides that the facts of creation as related in the Bible are only poetic fancies; that the books of Moses are only a myth: that many of the prophetic books were not written till after their fulfilment. Thus Satan, working behind the vain imaginations of men's minds, is seeking to undermine the authority of the inspired Word of the living God. "But we are not ignorant of his devices." All these things have been foretold by the Spirit, and to the child of God they only indicate that we are living in the "last days," when "men will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from truth, and shall be turned to fables." Amidst all this confusion, Christians are called upon to be blameless and harmless, the sons of God without rebuke in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, and to shine as lights in the world, holding forth the Word of Life.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : History of the Church

A Concise History of the Church;

From the Apostolic Era to the Establishment of the Reformation.

By Alfred E. Knight.

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, & 114, Camberwell Road, S.E.

"Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it." — Eph. v. 22.

"He is the head of the body, the church." — Col. i. 18.

Contents.

Preface.

Chapter 1.

The First Century of the Christian Era.

Introductory Remarks Death of Stephen — Persecution under Nero — Account by Tacitus — Martyrdom of James — Of Peter — Of Paul — Testimony of Clement — Persecution under Domitian — Grandsons of Jude — Martyrdom of the Apostle John — Of Timothy — Reflections on the Persecution Heresies and Dissensions — Gnosticism

Chapter 2.

The Second Century of the Christian Era.

Nerva — Persecution under Trajan — His Letter to Pliny — Pliny's Letter to Trajan — Martyrdom of Ignatius — Persecution continued under Hadrian Antoninus Pius — Spread of the Gospel — Persecution under Marcus Aurelius — Martyrdom of Polycarp Of Justin Martyr — Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne — Practices of the Church in the Second Century

Chapter 3.

The Fifth and Sixth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.

A.D. 200-238.

Persecution under Severus — Appeal of Tertullian — Martyrdom of Perpetua — Irenus — His Letter to Florinus — His Martyrdom — Martyrdoms of Leonidas and others — Persecution under Maximus — Cause of the Persecution — Reflections

Chapter 4.

The Seventh and Eighth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.

A.D. 238-274.

Symptoms of the Church's Decline — Failure in Testimony — The Novatian Heresy — Persecution under Decius — Fabianus, Origen, and Cyprian — Effects of the Persecution Instances of noble Confession — Gallus — Persecution under Valerian — Cause — Account of Cyprian — His Martyrdom — Martyrdom of Cyril — Of Laurentius — Death of Valerian

Chapter 5.

The Ninth and Tenth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.

A.D. 274-306.

Persecution under Aurelian — Declension in the Church — Paul of Samosata — Brevity of the Persecution — Com mencement of the Tenth General Persecution — Decreasing zeal among Christians, and spread of Judaism Failure among the Bishops Disputes between Bishops and Presbyters — Activity of Galerius in promoting a Persecution — The Four Edicts Reception of the first — Violence of the Persecution — Mildness of Constantius — Martyrs of Egypt Romanus Testimonies of Martyrs — Julietta — Miserable ends of the chief Persecutors of the Christians — Close of the Smyrna Period — Accession of Constantine the Great

Chapter 6.

The Fourth Century of the Christian Era.

A.D. 306-375.

Account of Constantine the Great — His Vision and its results — Altered aspect of Christianity Munificence of Constantine Union of Church and State — Oecumenical Councils — The Arian Heresy and the Council of Nicea — The Arians opposed by Athanasius — Their Devices to Overthrow him — Banishment of Athanasius — Uneasiness of his Successor — Triumph and Death of Arius Death of Constantine the Great Constantine, Constans, and Constantius — Religious Wars — Athanasius a second and third time in Exile — Julian the Apostate — His impious attempts to Re-build the Temple — Martyrdom of Basil — Death of Julian Description of his person by Gregory of Nazianzus — Jovian — Valentinian and Valens — Valens converted to Arianism — Death of Athanasius — His Doctrine of the Trinity

Chapter 7.

Development of the Pergamos State.

A.D. 375-500.

Gratian Emperor — He divides the Empire with Theodosius — Tumult at Thessalonica and Crime of Theodosius — The Faithfulness of Ambrose — Repentance of Theodosius — His Treatment of the Arians — Manicheism — Pelagius and his Doctrine — Augustine, of Hippo — Account of Augustine His zeal against the Manicheans and Pelagius — Against the Donatists — Account of the Circumcellions — Augustine's Death — Arcadius and Honorius Emperors — Decline of the Empire Invasion of the Goths — Of the Visigoths — Of the Huns — Of the Vandals — The Western Empire Broken up — Treatment of the Christians by the Barbarians — State of the Church — Nestorius — Dawn of Monachism — St. Antony — Spread of Monachism — How Monasteries became subject to the Roman See — Origin of Nunneries — St. Simeon Stylites — Pillar-men

Chapter 8.

The Dawn of the Thyatira Period.

A.D. 500-600.

Thyatira Period commences — Edict of Milan — Growing Pretensions of the Romish Church — Justinian Emperor — Gregory the Great — His Character — Account of his Life — He desires the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons — Augustine's Missionary Journey to England — Account of the Introduction of Christianity into England — Into Ireland — Into Scotland — Success of Augustine's Mission — Murder of the Monks of Bangor — Columbanus and St. Gall — Continued Declension of the Church — Innovations — Purgatory — Ritualistic Practices — Protest of Vigilantius

Chapter 9.

The Nestorians and Paulicians; with Some Account of the Rise and Spread of Mahometanism.

A.D. 600-700.

Decay of Learning — Dissolute Lives of the Clergy — Of the Monks — Growth of the Papacy — Phocas and Gregory — Establishments of the Spiritual Supremacy of the Popes — Pope St. Martin — Temporal Claims of Rome — Her encouragement of Mission Work, and Cause — St. Kilian — Willibrord — Winifred — The Nestorian Missionaries — The Paulicians — Their Origin — Martyrdom of their Leader — Increase in their numbers — Mahomet — Sketch of his Life — Origin of the Koran — Outline of its Doctrines — Rapid spread of Mahometanism

Chapter 10.

Romish Idolatry and the Growth of the Papal Power.

A.D. 700-800.

Missionary Labours of St. Winifred — Impostures of the Druids — Winifred Destroys the Sacred Oak — Character of his Devotion — Testimony of Alcuin — Alarming Growth of Idolatry and Superstition — Gregory's Letter to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles Leo the Iconoclast His Edicts against Image-worship — Effects of the Edicts — Rebellion in Italy — Menacing Language of Pope Gregory II. — His Blasphemy Death of Leo — Crusade against Image-worship continues — Empress Irene favours Image-worship — Proceedings at the Second Council of Nice — Idolatry established as the Law of the Christian Church Incursions of the Lombards — The Pope appeals to Pepin — Pepin's Obligations to the Roman See — He responds to the Appeal — Donation of Pepin, and foundation of the Temporal Power of the Popes — Renewed Incursions of Lombards Blasphemous Appeal of Stephen II. Barbarians driven back — Charlemagne — His Triumphant Entry into Rome — He confirms the Donation of Pepin and increases it — Council of Frankfort — Alcuin — Paulinus — Progressive Wickedness of the Popes — Of the Bishops and Priests — Question of the Clerical Tonsure — Testimony of Baronius

Chapter 11.

The Darkest Period of the Dark Ages.

A.D. 800-1000.

Chain of Witnesses Unbroken — Lewis the Meek — Oppositions to his Reforms — He is Deposed and Re-instated — Death — Introduction of the Gospel into Denmark and Sweden — Ansgarius and Aubert — Russia, Poland, and Hungary receive the Truth — The Gospel in Great Britain — King Alfred — Specimen of his Translation of the Gospels — Labours of Clement in Scotland — Of Duns Scotus — Erigena in Ireland — Arnulph, Bishop of Orleans — Claude of Turin — His Controversial Writings — His Piety — Influence of Claude — Persecution of his Followers — Awful State of the Professing Church — Scandalous Lives of the Popes — Lying Wonders — The Decretals of Isidore — The Rosary and Crown of the Virgin Mary — Mass of the Archangel Michael — Transubstantiation — Expected End of the World — Preaching of Bernhard of Thuringia — The Year of Terror — Close of the 10th Century

Chapter 12.

From the Year of Terror to the Death of Hildebrand.

A.D. 1000-1100.

Church-building Mania — Revival of Learning — Pope Sylvester II. — Increasing Temporal Power of the Church — Missionary Labours in Eastern and Western Europe — Instances of Personal Piety — Margaret of Scotland — Berengar — The Paulicians — Hildebrand — Sketch of his Early Life — His Influence at the Vatican — Elected Pope as Gregory VII. — His Great Scheme — His Reforms — Effect of his Reform — His Quarrel with Henry IV. — Henry Excommunicated — Henry Deserted by his Subjects — His Penitential Visit to Gregory — His Pitiless Reception by the Pope — His Resentment — He raises an Army and proceeds to Rome — Gregory Deposed — The City taken by Henry and retaken by Robert Guiscard — Rome Sacked and Burnt — Death of Gregory — Reflections

Chapter 13.

The First Crusade.

A.D. 1094-1100.

New expedient of Rome to Promote her temporal Interests — The Crusades — Urban II. and Peter the Hermit preach the first Crusade — Exploits and Defeats of Peter's Army — The first Crusade — Difficulties by the way — Preliminary Engagements — Dissipation of the Army — Capture of Antioch by the Crusaders — Kerboga comes to the Relief of the Mahometans — The Crusaders saved by Superstition — They continue their March — First sight of Jerusalem — Extremities of the Army — The Army again Saved by Superstition — Capture of Jerusalem — Terrible Slaughter of the Mahometans — Godfrey de Bouillon created Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre — Return of the Army

Chapter 14.

The Church in the Twelfth Century; with an Account of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades.

A.D. 1100-1200.

Missionary Labours of the 12th Century — In Pomerania — The Isle of Ruegen and Sclavonia — Changed Character of Testimony — Peter de Bruys — His Martyrdom — Henry — His Zeal and Self-denial — Character of his Preaching — His Martyrdom — Martyrs of Cologne — Testimony by Evervinus and Bernard of Clairvaux — Increase of Seceders from Rome — The Cathari, Piphles, Tisserands, and Publicans — Martyrdom of a Little Girl — Peter Waldo — His Labours in the Gospel — The Gospels Translated into the vulgar tongue by his directions — Waldo excommunicated — His Death — "The Poor Men of Lyons" — Their Dispersion — They are kindly received by the Vaudois Christians — Bernard of Clairvaux — Abelard — His Learning — His Public Disputation with Bernard at Sens — His Death Arnold of Brescia — Character of his Preaching — He is Banished from Rome — Is Persecuted by Bernard His Martyrdom — Thomas a Becket — His Early Life — Is made Chancellor of England — His Deceitful Policy with Henry II. His Magnificence — He is created Archbishop of Canterbury — Immorality and Oppressions of the Clergy — Becket Protects them — The Constitutions of Clarendon — Becket's Prevarications — He Escapes to the Continent — Excommunicates his Enemies — His Death and its Results — The Second Crusade preached by Bernard of Clairvaux — Miserable Failure of the Crusade — The Third and Fourth Crusades — Richard I. of England — Reflections — The Knights of Jerusalem — The Knights Templars and the Teutonic Knights

Chapter 15.

The Church in the Thirteenth Century; with an Account of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Crusades.

A.D. 1209-1300.

Missionary Labours of the 13th Century — The Nestorian Missionaries — Condition of the Professing Church — Testimony of Roger Bacon — Thomas Aquinas and the "Summa Theologiae" — Innocent III. — His arrogant Conduct towards the King of France and King John of England — John's disgraceful Servility — The Barons of England disregard the Pope's Threats — Transubstantiation Institution of the Jubilee — The Fifth Crusade — A Crusade of Children — The Sixth Crusade — The Seventh and Eighth Crusades — Results of the Crusades

Chapter 16.

The Home Crusades, and the Establishment of the Inquisition.

A.D. 1200- 1300.

The Home Crusades — The Waldensians — The Albigenses — Commencement of the Home Crusades by command of Innocent III. — Raymond of Toulouse — Peter of Castelnau — His Murder — Raymond Excommunicated — Character of the Home Crusades — Simon de Montfort — Dominic, the Spaniard — Almaric — His Blasphemy at the Capture of Beziers — A New Crusade — Villainous Treatment of Raymond by the Pope — The Pope's Duplicity — Brutal Conduct of the Papal Legate — Progress of the War — Barbarous Treatment of the Albigenses — Capture of La Minerbe — Capture of Brau — Capture of Foix — Blasphemy of the Priests on that occasion — Wholesale Massacre of the Garrison of Foix — Capture of Toulouse — Fouquet — Rome grows Jealous of De Montfort — Prohibits the further Preaching of the Crusades — Fouquet driven from Toulouse and the Albigenses again in Possession of the City — Lying Prophecies of the Papal Legate — Death of De Montfort — Renewal of the Home Crusades — Toulouse Re-captured by the Crusaders — Reflections — The Inquisition — Its Mode of Procedure — The Consistory — The Torture-room — The Auto da Fe — Exhortation to return to the bosom of the Church.

Chapter 17.

Fresh Instances of Papal Assumption, and Their Influence upon the Reformation.

A.D. 1300-1400.

Continued Opposition to Rome — Gregory IX. — His Quarrels with Frederick of Germany — His Measures to Subdue him — Failure of those Measures — Death of Gregory — The Struggle continues Death of Frederick — Numerous instances of Resistance to the Temporal Pretensions of Rome — Boniface VIII. — His Collision with Philip of France — The Blindness of his Ambition — William of Nogaret and Colonna — The Pope's Life Threatened — His Dignified Conduct — His Miserable end — Wickedness and Assumption of succeeding Popes — Dawn of the Reformation

Chapter 18.

The Dawn of the Reformation.

A.D. 1324-1450.

Wickliffe — His College Life — His Attacks on the Mendicant Orders — Rome Alarmed — Popularity of Wickliffe — His Trial at St. Paul's — The Great Schism — Wickliffe's Second Trial — Timidity of his Judges — His Translation of the Bible, and Death — The Lollards — Burning for Heresy becomes a Statute Law in England — Martyrdom of William Sautree — Of John Badby — Arrest of Lord Cobham — His Trial, Escape, and Martyrdom — Continuance of the Lollard Persecution

Chapter 19.

The Reformers Before the Reformation.

A.D. 1400-1500.

Reformation in Bohemia — The Sister of the King of Bohemia — Her Piety — Jerome of Prague visits England, and becomes acquainted with the Reformed Doctrines — Two Wickliffites from England visit Prague — John Huss — His Character and Appearance — His Zeal as a Reformer — Evil Consequences of Over-zeal — The Council of Constance — Huss Summoned before the Council — Violation of his Safe-conduct — Brutal Treatment of Huss — Disgraceful Conduct of his Judges at his Trial — John of Chlum — Condemnation, Testimony, and Martyrdom of Huss — Jerome of Prague — His Trial and Martyrdom — The Bohemian War — Zisca — Cardinal Julian — Testimony of Popish Writers to the Bravery of the Bohemians — Divisions among the Bohemian Seceders — Calixtines and Taborites — United Brethren — Persecution of the Moravians — Bible Translated into the Bohemian Language — Savonarola — Character of his Preaching — His Imprisonment and Martyrdom — John of Wesalia — His Labours and Death — John Wessel — His great Learning and Piety — His Contempt for Ecclesiastical Honours — His Death — The Period of the Reformation Commences

Chapter 20.

Martin Luther and the German Reformation.

A.D. 1483-1522.

The Flagellants — Indulgences — Self-confidence of Rome at the beginning of the 16th Century — Martin Luther — His Early Life Ursula Cotta — Luther at Erfurt — Alexis — Luther Awakened. — He becomes a Monk — Conversations with Staupitz — Agony of Soul — Luther's Conversion — His Visit to Rome — Instances of the Profanity of the Roman Priests — Hutten's Picture of Rome in the 16th Century — Tetzel — His Sermon — Luther in the Confessional — He Preaches against Indulgences — Luther's Theses — Tetzel's Theses — Luther Excommunicated — He Burns the Pope's Bull — Great stir throughout Christendom — The Diet of Worms — Luther's Journey to Worms — His First Appearance before the Diet — His Remarkable Prayer — His Second Appearance before the Diet — Attempt to Violate his Safe-conduct — Honourable Action of the German Emperor — Plots against Luther — His Removal to Wartburg Castle

Chapter 21.

Ulric Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation.

A.D. 1484-1522.

Reformation in Switzerland — Ulric Zwingli — His Early Life — Elected Pastor at Glaris — Removes to Eisleben — Accepts a Call to Zurich — Character of his Preaching — Zwingli smitten by the Plague — Increased Zeal on his Recovery — First important Triumph of the Swiss Reformation — Zwingli Rejects the Overtures of the Pope — Rapid Spread of the Reformation in Zurich — In Berne — In Basle — Oecolampadius

Chapter 22.

Luther's Zeal in the Reformation.

A.D. 1521-1529.

Serious Checks upon the Reform Work in Germany — Melanchthon — Carlstadt — His Fanaticism — The Wittemberg Iconoclasts — Luther leaves Wartburg — Quiets the Disturbances at Wittemberg — Finishes his Translation of the Bible — Its Effect — Spread of the Reformation — The Peasants' War Its — Disastrous Consequences — The Anabaptists — Luther opposes them — The Diet at Spiers — The Second Diet at Spiers — Beginning of the Sardis Period

Chapter 23.

The Sardis Period Commences.

A.D. 1529-1530.

Introductory Remarks on the Sardis Period — Planting of the First Reformed Churches — Dissensions — Diet of Augsburg — Confession of Augsburg — Opening Triumphs of the Protestants — Difficulties in the way of Reading the Confession — The Confession Read — Its Effect on the People — Testimony of Seckendorf — Of the Bishop of Augsburg — Of Dr. Eck, and of Luther

Chapter 24.

Development of the Sardis State.

A.D. 1529-1558.

Luther's position a dangerous one — The Weak side of his character — The Conference of Marburg — Luther's views on the Eucharist compared with those of Rome and Zwingli — Commencement of the Sacramentarian Controversy — Luther's unguarded Language — Proceedings at the Conference of Marburg — Hoc est corpus meum — A "Formula of Concord" — Reflections on the same by Dean Waddington — Death of Zwingli — Death of Oecolampadius — Grief of Luther — Account of his closing days — His Domestic Life — His last moments and Death at Eisleben — His Funeral — The Council of Trent — Condition of affairs in Germany at his Death — Epitome of events to the Death of the German Emperor

Chapter 25.

The Reformation in France and French Switzerland.

A.D. 1520-1592.

The Reformation in French Switzerland — Farel — James Lefevre — Farel Labours at Basle, Montbeliard, Aigle, Vallengin, St. Blaise, and Neuchatel — The Mass abolished at Geneva — Calvin settles there — Condition of the City — Calvin driven from the City — His Return — His Death — Account of Calvin by Beza — The Reformation in France — Briconnet — Work at Meaux — Alarm of the Monks — They complain to the Sorbonne — Briconnet returns to Popery — Lefevre, Farel, etc. driven from Meaux — Silent Progress of the Reformation — Leclerc — His Arrest and Punishment — Leclerc as Image-breaker — His Martyrdom — Martyrdom of Chatelain — Zeal of Berquin — Erasmus counsels him to desist from Preaching — His Martyrdom — Increase of Persecution — The 'Year of the Placards' — Terrible Results — Persecution of the Vaudois Christians — Death of the French King Henry II. and Catherine de' Medici — The Bed of Justice — Planting of the first Reformed Churches in France — Arrest of Du Bourg — Death of Henry II. and Accession of Francis II. — Martyrdom of Du Bourg — Political Aspects of the French Reformation — The Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine — Marriage of Margaret of Valois with the King of Navarre — Admiral Coligny — Massacre of St. Bartholomew — John Hennuyer, Bishop of Lisieux — Massacre in the Provinces — Statistics — Papal Rejoicings — Te Deum in St. Mark's Church — "Piety has armed Justice" — Instances of Retribution — The Reformation Established

Chapter 26.

The Reformation in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

The Reformation in Italy — Its rapid spread — Aonio Peleario — His Imprisonment and Martyrdom — John Craig — Dr. Thomas Wilson — Dr. Reynolds — His Martyrdom — Activity of the Inquisition — The Reformation in Spain — Spanish Refugees in England — Juan and Alfonso de Valdes — The Reformation in the Netherlands — Margaret of Parma — Awful Persecution under the Duke of Alva — Martyrdom of Walter Kapell — Of Robert Ogier and family — Sweeping character of the Persecution — Its effects — Rising of the Protestants in the Netherlands — Proclamation of Independence — The Reformation in Sweden — Gustavus Vasa, the right man in the right place — Olaus and Laurentius Petri — The Reformation in Denmark — Christian II. — John Taussen — Frederick I. — Conference of Odense — Banishment of Taussen — Diet of Copenhagen and Establishment of the Reformation

Chapter 27.

The Reformation under Henry VIII.

A.D. 1510-1531.

Character of the Reformation under Henry VIII. — Persecution under Richard Fitzjames, Bishop of London — Martyrdom of John Brown — Persecution under Longland, Bishop of Lincoln — Martyrdoms of John Scrivener and William Tilsworth — William Tyndal — His Life at Gloucester — Ill-success of his Application to Tonstall, Bishop of London — He is entertained by Humphrey Monmouth — Danger of his position — His desire to Translate the Scriptures — He retires to the Continent — Settles at Antwerp — Completes his Translation of the New Testament — Its Reception in England — At work upon the Old Testament — Arrest and Martyrdom — Hugh Latimer — His early life — He is sent to the University — His Zeal against the Reformation — Bilney desires and prays for Latimer's Conversion — His Prayer Answered — Latimer as a Reformer — His attacks upon Romanism — The Papists attempt to silence him — Robert Barnes, a friend in need — Latimer preaches his Sermons on the Card — Their Effect — The King favours Latimer — He is Excommunicated and Imprisoned — What Latimer had to say about his Examination in the Bishop of London's Court

Chapter 28.

Helps and Hindrances to the English Reformation.

A.D. 1529-1547.

Thomas Cranmer — The cause of his rapid advancement — The extent of his Influence in connection with the Reformation — Gardiner at work — Martyrdoms of Fryth, Hewett, Bilney, and others — The Six Articles — Persecution on account of the Articles — Account of Anne Askew — Her Piety — She is thrown into Prison — Her Examinations before the Lord Mayor, and the King's Council at Greenwich — She is Tortured — Her great constancy — Her Martyrdom at Smithfield with Nicholas Belenian, John Lascelles, and John Adams — Unhappy state of the Country — Bishop Hooper's sad description of it — Thomas Becon's reflections — Edward ascends the Throne

Chapter 29.

The Reformation under Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth.

A.D. 1547-1558.

Piety of Edward VI. — The Duke of Somerset, Protector — Somerset's Reform Measures — Incompetent Bishops — The Reformed Doctrines in the Universities — Fall of the Protector — The New Government — Death of the King — Accession of Mary — Her Hatred for Cranmer — Her Promise of Toleration — Romanism Restored and its Consequences — Examination and Martyrdom of John Rogers — Of Sanders, Hooper, Taylor, and Farrar — "Our Lady's Matins" — "The Psalter of our Lady" — Martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer — Cranmer Recants — His Sorrow, Restoration, Confession, and Martyrdom — Statistics of the Persecution during Mary's reign — Death of Mary, November 17th, 1558 — Death of Cardinal Pole — Accession of Elizabeth — Characters of Mary and Elizabeth — Establishment of the English Reformation

Chapter 30.

The Reformation in Scotland and Ireland.

A.D. 1494-1558.

Condition of Scotland at the close of the 15th Century — Patrick Hamilton pays a Visit to the Continent — Is Decoyed to St. Andrews on his Return — Is Arrested and Burned — Specimen of the Doctrines which he Taught — Tyndal's New Testament in Scotland — Archbishop Beaton — Cardinal Beaton — His Cruelties — His Campaign in Angus and Mearns — George Wishart —

A Priest named Wigton hired to assassinate him — Wishart Saves the Life of his would-be Murderer — He visits East Lothian, and meets John Knox — Is Arrested by Treachery — His Martyrdom at St. Andrews — Death of Cardinal Beaton — Knox in the French Galley — He Visits England — Offered the Bishopric of Rochester — Retires to Geneva and becomes acquainted with Calvin — Returns to his Native Land — Again retires to the Continent — Martyrdom of Walter Mill — Knox again returns to Scotland — Unsettled state of the Country — The activity of the Papists increase — Progress and Establishment of the Reformation — Reformation in Ireland —George Brown, Archbishop of Dublin — Dr. Coles and his Commission — Establishment of the Reformation — Concluding Remarks

"The Church's one foundation,

Is Jesus Christ her Lord;

She is His new creation,

By water and the word:

From heaven He came and sought her,

To be His holy Bride;

With His own blood He bought her,

And for her life He died.

"Though with a scornful wonder,

Men see her sore opprest;

By schisms rent asunder,

By heresies distrest;

Yet saints their watch are keeping,

Their cry goes up, 'How long?'

And soon the night of weeping

Shall be the morn of song.

"'Mid toil and tribulation,

And tumult of her war,

She waits the consummation

Of peace for evermore;

Till with the vision glorious

Her longing eyes are blest,

And the great Church victorious,

Shall be the Church at rest."

Preface.

The Author's chief desire in giving to the Public this short History, has been to meet what he believes to be a real want among general readers; not to make a student's book, for we have already many able works of this kind, but a popular handbook, such as might be read with profit by those who have no time or inclination for a more exhaustive study. In short, he has endeavoured to gather together, in a single volume, all that is interesting and essential, and to so write his history that the mind of the reader may not be wearied even while the dullest facts are passing before it. These are high aims, and only those who have attempted a similar task can understand the difficulties by which the Author has been surrounded.

An outline knowledge of Church History is not only useful to the class of readers referred to, but necessary to all who would tread firmly in the present day, when rationalism on the one hand, and superstition on the other, are luring the unwary into by-paths of worldliness and unrest. In the open page of history we may see the infidelity of the one, and the idolatry of the other; and, admonished by the miserable consequences of each, may be prepared against their insidious approaches in the future. We have not yet seen the end of mystic Babylon, or the beast that carries her.

The Author has been sparing of quotations, save from such writers as were contemporaneous with the events described; but he has not scrupled to avail himself of the thoughts of others, when they have commended themselves to his judgment, because of their peculiar fitness and importance. He would cover this liberty by the reflection, that truth is the property of all seekers.

The authors to whom he is chiefly indebted, and whose works he has had in constant reference, are: — Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and St. Augustine, among old writers; Waddington, James White, Haweis, Timpson, Barth, and Andrew Miller, for complete epitomes; Cave, Milman, Milner, and Edward Burton, for histories of the early church; and for the period of the Middle Ages, Fleury, Hallam, Monastier, Dr. Gilly, Dr. Muston (Hazlitt's translation), Keightley, and Jane Willyams; as well as the author of a valuable little work, "The Church in the Middle Ages." For the period of the Reformation, Fox, the Martyrologist, Burnet, Robertson, McCrie, Scott, D'Aubigne, Ludwig Hausser, Ranke, Green, etc.; and the works of the English reformers published by the Parker Society. Southey (for his "Book of the Church"), and the French historians Sismondi and Michela, have also been frequently consulted, together with the authors of sundry biographies, outline histories, etc., whose names it is needless to enumerate.

From this it will be seen that the Author makes no pretensions to originality, in the strict sense of the word, although he would claim for his book that it is more than a mere compilation. It is, in fact, the result of the earnest labour of several months; and while he has gone much to other books, it has been with the purpose of reference and not of plunder. Others have laboured, and he has entered into their labours.

In conclusion, he would commend these fruits of his labour to the blessing of God, without which they can only prove a failure but, crowned with this, they may succeed beyond his hopes, and in spite of every defect.

October, 1888.

Chapter 1.

The First Century of the Christian Era.

The history of the church of God in all ages is a history of divine grace in the midst of human failure. This has often been said, and any one who examines that history with ordinary attention must be convinced that it is so. We know from the epistles that even in the apostles' time failure had set in, and that envy, wrath, strife, backbiting and tumult, with numerous other evils, had crushed the love in the hearts of many true believers. They had left their first works, and their first love; and not a few who had begun in the Spirit were vainly seeking to be made perfect in the flesh. But this was far from all. Not only were there true Christians living irregularly, and speaking perverse things in order to draw away disciples, but men who were no Christians at all, who had neither part nor lot in the matter, were creeping in unawares and sowing discord among the brethren. This, indeed, was the state of things alluded to in the opening verses of the second chapter of the Revelation, and embraces that period of the christian era which has been fitly described as the Ephesian stage of the church's history.

But a time of persecution from without was coming upon the church, which the Lord in grace permitted, that those who were approved (the faithful, though feeble ones among them) might be made manifest. This persecution commenced in the reign and at the instigation of the pagan emperor Nero, and was the first of ten general persecutions, which continued, with but few interruptions, for nearly three centuries.

The question has been often asked, Why does God allow the people on whom He has set His love to suffer in this way? and the answer is simple. It is because He loves them. There may be, there are, other reasons, but this is the chief. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and if the heart wander chastening is necessary. The wise man tells us, "By sorrow the heart is made better," and experience teaches us the truth of this. How readily will evil attach itself to the best of us! but in the furnace of affliction the dross is separated from the purer metal, and consumed. Moreover, when we endure chastening, God deals with us as with sons; and every trial which visits us, were we but patient under it, would be fruitful in blessing to our souls. True, the experience of passing through the trial is not pleasant; it would be no trial if it were; but a morning of joy succeeds the night of sorrow, and in the quiet after-time we say with David, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted."

But God sometimes allows the persecuting wickedness of man to rise to a head, in order to expose him and to shew what is in his heart; and it is therefore no matter for surprise that Christians, who know not this fact, begin to question in their minds, complaining that the path is so rough, and the hand of the oppressor so heavy upon him. Yet we are not left in this scene to complain of difficulties, or to shrink and turn back because of the wrath of man. We have a Master to serve, and a foe to resist; and it is only when we are strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might, that the service can be rendered, or the resistance effectually made. How nobly this has been done in former days, these pages are intended to illustrate; but it must ever be borne in mind, if we would rightly understand God's dealings with His people, that christian warfare is unlike all other warfare, and that part of its resistance is to suffer. Our weapons, too, are not carnal, but spiritual; for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places (Eph. vi.). A Christian using carnal weapons is an anomaly, a contradiction, and cannot know what manner of spirit he is of. He can never have traced, with true spiritual intelligence, the wondrous pathway of his Lord, or have understood the meaning of those words, "My kingdom is not of this world, else would my servants fight." The church militant is the church suffering, and directly carnal weapons are taken up she has really ceased to fight.

We have the prototype of the true warrior in the brave and holy Stephen. He was the first christian martyr; and what a victory did he gain for the cause, when he died praying for his murderers! David, centuries before, had said, "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked;" but Stephen, who belonged to another order of things, prayed, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." This was true christian warfare.

The first wave of general persecution which broke over the church, shewed itself in the year 64, when Nero had ruled the Roman empire, with tolerable humanity, for about nine years. The murder of his own mother, and his brutal indifference after the perpetration of that unnatural crime, shewed but too plainly his native disposition, and prepared the people for what they might expect at his hands. Alas! their gloomiest apprehensions were more than realised.

One night during the month of July, in the year above named, the inhabitants of Rome were roused from their sleep by the cry of "Fire!" The direful word arose simultaneously from several quarters of the city, and in a few hours the great capital was wrapped in flames. The spacious circus, which lay between the Palatine and Aventine hills, and which was capable of holding at least 150,000 persons, was soon a burning mass; together with most of the public buildings, monuments, and private villas. The conflagration lasted nine days; and Nero, by whose orders the disgraceful act had been committed, watched the scene from the tower of Maecenas, where he expressed his delight with the beauty of the flames, and, dressed as an actor, sang to his lyre of the burning of ancient Troy!

The severe odium which was cast upon him in consequence of this act, aroused his shame and fear; and in the activity of an uneasy conscience, he presently discovered a way of escape. The rapid growth of Christianity had already raised against it many enemies — many persons in Rome were interested in its suppression — so what could be more opportune and at the same time more simple than to lay the onus of guilt upon the unoffending Christians? Tacitus, a pagan historian and no favourer of Christianity, thus speaks of Nero's conduct: Neither his exertions, nor his largesses to the people, nor his offerings to the gods, did away the infamous imputation under which Nero lay, of having ordered the city to be set on fire. To put an end, therefore, to this report, he laid the guilt, and inflicted the most cruel punishments, upon a set of people . . . . called by the vulgar, Christians." He then continues, "The founder of that name was Christ, who suffered death in the reign of Tiberius, under his procurator Pontius Pilate. This pernicious superstition, thus checked for awhile, broke out again, and spread not only over Judea, where the evil began, but through Rome also, whither everything bad upon the earth finds its way and is practised. Some who confessed their sect, were first seized; and afterwards, by their information, a vast multitude were apprehended, who were convicted, not so much of the crime of burning Rome as of hatred to mankind." It is almost needless to explain, that the Christians entertained no hatred for mankind, but rather for the horrible idolatry which prevailed throughout the empire; and for this reason only were they regarded as the enemies of the race.

How many suffered on this occasion is not known, but certainly a great number, and all the tortures which an ingenious and cruel mind could devise were practised upon them to gratify the emperor's ghastly and unnatural pleasure. "Some were disguised in the skins of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs; some were crucified; and others were wrapped in pitched shirts, and set on fire when the day closed, that they might serve as light to illuminate the night. Nero lent his own gardens for these executions, and exhibited at the same time a mock Circensian entertainment; being a spectator of the whole in the dress of a charioteer; sometimes mingling with the crowd on foot, and sometimes viewing the spectacle from his car."

Hegesippus,* a writer of the second century, makes some interesting references to the apostle James who finished his course during this period, and gives a detailed account of his martyrdom which may be fitly inserted here. He tells us the apostle was called Oblias — signifying justice and protection on account of his great piety and his devotion to the people; and he also refers to his ascetic habits, which doubtless went a good way to enhance his reputation. He drank neither wine nor fermented liquors, and abstained from animal food. A razor never came upon his head, he never anointed with oil, and never used a bath. He alone was allowed to enter the sanctuary. He never wore woollen, but linen garments. He was in the habit of entering the temple alone, and was often found upon his bended knees, and interceding for the forgiveness of the people; so that his knees became as hard as a camel's, in consequence of his habitual supplication and kneeling before God."

{*Quoted by Eusebius, bk. ii. chap. 23.}

The account of his martyrdom as given by the same writer, is not less interesting. A dispute had arisen between the believing and unbelieving Jews concerning the Messiahship of Jesus, and the question was referred to the apostle. "The scribes and pharisees," says Hegesippus, placed James on a wing of the temple, and cried out to him, 'O thou just man, whom we ought all to believe, since the people are led astray after Jesus that was crucified, declare to us what is the door to Jesus that was crucified.' And he answered with a loud voice, 'Why do ye ask me respecting Jesus the Son of man? He is now sitting in the heavens, on the right hand of great power, and is about to come on the clouds of heaven.' And as many were confirmed, and gloried in the testimony of James, and said, Hosanna to the Son of David, these same priests and Pharisees said to one another, 'We have done badly in affording such testimony to Jesus, but let us go up and cast him down, that they may dread to believe in him.' And they cried out, 'Oh, oh, Justus himself is deceived,' and they fulfilled that which is written in Isaiah, Let us take away the just, because he is offensive to us; wherefore they shall eat the fruit of their doings' (Isa. 3). Going up therefore they cast down the just man, saying to one another, 'Let us stone James the Just.' And they began to stone him as he did not immediately die when cast to the ground but turning round, he knelt down saying, 'I entreat thee, O Lord God and Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' Thus they were stoning him, when one of the priests, of the sons of Rechad, a son of the Rechabites, spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet, cried out saying, 'Cease, what are you doing? Justus is praying for you.' And one of them, a fuller, beat out the brains of Justus with the club that he used to beat out clothes. Thus he suffered martyrdom, and they buried him on the spot, where his tombstone is still remaining, by the temple."

The death of James can scarcely be ascribed to the persecuting edicts of Nero, however, it was an unpremeditated act for which the Jewish nation was alone responsible. Yet that does not clear the emperor of the guilt of shedding an apostle's blood; for it is generally allowed that both Peter and Paul suffered during the persecution which he had authorised. The following reference to these devoted servants of Christ, by Clement, a fellow-labourer with the latter (see Phil. iv. 3) is replete with interest.* "Let us take," says he, the examples of our age. Through zeal and envy, the most faithful and righteous pillars of the church have been persecuted even to the most grievous deaths.. Let us set before our eyes the holy apostles. Peter, by unjust envy, underwent not one or two, but many sufferings; till at last, being martyred, he went to the place of glory that was due to him. For the same cause did Paul in like manner receive the reward of his patience.. Seven times he was in bonds; he was whipped, he was stoned, he preached both in the east andin the west, leaving behind him the glorious report of his faith; and so, having taught the whole world righteousness, and for that end travelled even unto the utmost bounds of the west, he at last suffered martyrdom by the command of the governors, and departed out of the world, and went unto his holy place, being become a most eminent pattern of patience unto all ages." It is said that the mode of Peter's execution was crucifixion, and that he was fastened to the cross with his head downwards; choosing that position because he felt his unworthiness to suffer in the same position as his Master. Paul, who suffered on the same day and at the same place (Rome) was spared so painful and lingering a death. He was beheaded.

{*We must bear in mind that the writings of this good man, as of all christian writers since the apostle's time, are not the word of God. We may treasure and value them. and it is meet in some cases that we should; but scripture. stands alone, and to place any other book beside or even near it is folly and presumption. The church of Rome has done this, to its everlasting ruin.}

"To these holy apostles," says Clement, "were joined a very great number of others, who, having through envy undergone, in like manner, many pains and torments, have left a glorious example to us. For this, not only men, but women have been persecuted; and having suffered very grievous and cruel punishments, have finished the course of their faith with firmness."

A prey to remorse and fear, the wretched Nero died by his own hand in the year 68; and after this the church had rest for nearly thirty years. During that period, however, Domitian (who might have disputed the palm with Nero by reason of his intolerance and cruelty) ascended the throne; and when he had reigned fourteen years, the second general persecution broke out.

A rumour having reached his ears that one of David's line was living in Judea, of whom it had been said, He shall rule all nations with a rod of iron," the emperor caused inquiry to be made, and two grandsons of Jude, the Lord's brother, were seized and brought before him. When, however, he looked upon their hands, hardened and rough with labour, and found that they were poor people, who waited for a heavenly and not an earthly kingdom, he dismissed them with contempt. We are told that they were bold and faithful in witnessing for the truth before him, and that when they returned to their native village they were received with affection and honour by the brethren.

With reference to this persecution, little is known; though that little is undoubtedly interesting. Among the numerous martyrs who suffered were John, the beloved disciple, and Timothy, whom. Paul had written to with such affectionate solicitude. The former is said to have been cast, by the tyrant's command, into a cauldron of boiling oil, but a miracle was wrought in his behalf, and he came out unscathed. Unable to hurt the body, the emperor banished him to Patmos, where he was forced to labour in the mines. Here he wrote the book of the Revelation; and would doubtless have ended his course, but for the unexpected death of the emperor; who was assassinated by the comptroller of his own household on the eighteenth of September, A.D. 96. Being now set at liberty, the apostle returned to Ephesus, where he wrote his gospel history, and the three epistles which bear his name. Love, as ever, seems to have been the ruling motive of his life here; and when he died, at the advanced age of one hundred years, he left as an enduring legacy this simple charge, "Little children, love one another." A simple word, and uttered many years ago, but which of us has learnt it even now?

Timothy stood manfully for the truth in the same city till the year 97, when he was killed by the rabble at an idolatrous festival. The people, armed with sticks, and with masked faces, were on their way to their temples to sacrifice to the gods, when they were met by this servant of the Lord. The love of his heart went out towards them, and, reminded perhaps of the example of the apostle Paul, who had faced the idolaters of Athens in a similar way not many years before, he declared unto them the living and true God. But they set at nought his counsel, and grew angry at his reproof, and falling upon him with their clubs, beat him so mercilessly that he expired in a few days.

And now, looking back for a moment upon the history of these primitive persecutions, there is surely much to encourage and stir the heart. In the face of such afflictions one cannot but admire the fortitude of the saints, and be thankful to God for that grace, by which they were enabled, with uncomplaining patience, to endure so much. Neither cross, nor sword, nor wild beasts, nor torture could prevail against the faithful followers of Jesus. Who could separate them from His love? Could tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay! In all these things they were more than conquerors through Him that loved them. Had He not told them to expect as much? Had He not said to His disciples while he was yet with them, "In this world ye shall have tribulation?" and did not the bright hope of coming glory, which He had held out to them, more than compensate for the sufferings of the "little while"? When a few more years had rolled away, persecutors and persecuted would alike have left the scene, and have passed into eternity: and then — how great the change! For the former, the blackness of darkness for ever; for the latter, that "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." What a contrast!

In bringing this chapter to a close, we may remark how impossible it will be — considering the limited space at our disposal to enumerate all the heresies and dissensions which have torn and distracted the church of God from earliest times; and we purpose, therefore, only to glance at those which have a special interest, either because of their peculiar subtilty, or the widespread nature of their influence. Gnosticism was one of these, and perhaps it was the earliest heresy of any wide or general growth after the apostles' day. It was an amalgamation of errors which had their source in the Jewish cabala, a mysterious science among the Rabbins, in the philosophy of Plato, and in oriental mysticism. A Jewish teacher of philosophy at Alexandria, named Cerinthus, introduced part of the gospel into this heterogeneous mass of "science falsely so called," and under its new form many true believers were ensnared, and a great deal of bitterness and dissension was engendered.

But this error has long since had its day, with countless others that followed after; and the word of God, which alone contained the imperishable doctrines of the church, had already foretold that evil men and seducers should wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. (2 Tim. iii. 13.) The apostle Paul had already exhorted his "son Timothy" to "shun profane and vain babblings" which would only "increase unto more ungodliness" (2 Tim. ii. 16); and had referred, in language indited by the Holy Ghost, to the "perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of truth." Tim. vi. 5.) "But thou, O man of God," he cried, "flee these things; and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness. Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses." (1 Tim. ii. 12.) The beloved apostle had already fought the good fight, and finished his course, and had kept the faith, and in the happy consciousness of what was before him, had uttered words which were to be the encouragement of the church of God in future ages. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing." (2 Tim. iv. 7, 8.)

Chapter 2.

The Second Century of the Christian Era.

Domitian had not been dead more than eighteen months when the church, which had enjoyed immunity from persecution during the brief reign of his successor, Cocceius Nerva, was again called upon to suffer. Nerva, a man of mild and generous disposition, had treated the Christians well; and with praiseworthy humanity had recalled all who had been banished under the persecution of Domitian; but after a reign of sixteen months he had been seized with a fever, from which he never recovered. Trajan succeeded him, and for awhile left the Christians unmolested, but having been induced to look upon them with suspicion, he determined to renew the persecution, and, if possible, to exterminate by decisive and severe measures, the new religion. In his haughty view Christianity was an offence an insult to human nature, and its teaching (as was indeed the case) entirely opposed to the philosophy of his times; a philosophy which exalted men into gods, and made the humility and gentleness which marked the former, effeminate and contemptible. But Trajan had neither the cruelty nor malignity of Nero and Domitian; and one may notice a wavering and indecision in his conduct on this occasion, which contrasts significantly with that inflexibility of purpose which usually marked his actions. That he had no pleasure in the torture or execution of his subjects we may learn by his letter to Pliny, the governor of Bithynia and Pontus, in which he says distinctly, "These people must not sought after;" and again, "if any one renounce Christianity, and evidence his sincerity by supplicating our gods, however suspected he may be of the past, let him on his repentance obtain pardon." In short, it was the religion, and not the professors of it, which Trajan hated.

Full of interest is that letter of Pliny to the emperor, which brought the reply from which the above has been extracted. In one place the governor writes, "The whole of the crime or error of the Christians lay in this they were accustomed on a certain day to meet before daylight, and to sing among themselves a hymn to Christ, as a god; and to bind themselves by an oath not to commit any wickedness; not to be guilty of theft or robbery, or adultery; never to falsify their word, nor to deny a pledge committed to them when called upon to return it. When these things were performed, it was their custom to separate, and then to come together to a harmless meal, of which they partook in common without any disorder; but this last practice they have ceased to attend to, since the publication of my edict, by which, according to your commands, I prohibited assemblies. After this account I judged it the more necessary to examine, and that by torture, two females, who were said to be deaconesses, but I have discovered nothing except a bad and excessive superstition." So much for Pliny. A stranger to the grace of God, it is not surprising that he saw in the religion of the despised and lowly Jesus, only a bad and excessive superstition. It is no matter for wonder that the polite and learned governor, whose importance filled the world, should write with careless disdain of a people whose views were so unlike his own. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."

Ignatius, who is said to have been acquainted with the apostles Peter and Paul, and to have been ordained bishop of Antioch by the apostle John, was martyred during this period. The zeal with which he courted martyrdom has exposed him to the censures of some historians, and not without sufficient reason. It is related that when Trajan visited Antioch, he boldly sought admission to the emperor's presence, and having explained at some length the leading doctrines of the christian religion, and represented the harmless character of its professors, entreated that justice might be done. The emperor, however, treated his appeal with contempt; and after censuring him for what he was pleased to call his incurable superstition, commanded that he should be taken to Rome, and thrown to the wild beasts.

On his way through Syria, Ignatius wrote several letters to the churches, exhorting them to faithfulness and patience, and earnestly warning them against the errors that were being taught. In one of these epistles he writes, "From Syria to Rome. I am contending with wild beasts by land and sea, by night and day, being tied to ten leopards, the number of the military band, who, even when treated with kindness, only behave with greater ferocity. But in the midst of these iniquities I am learning. . . . . Nothing, whether of things visible or invisible, excites my ambition, so long as I can gain Christ. Whether fire, or the cross, the assault of wild beasts, the tearing asunder of my bones, the breaking of my limbs, the bruising of my whole body, let the tortures of the devil all assail me, if I do but gain Christ Jesus."

On his arrival at Rome, he was brought into the arena, and in the presence of a crowded theatre calmly awaited his death. When the keeper of the lions came to loose them from their cages, the people grew wild with brutal joy, and clapped and shouted; but the aged martyr stood firm. I am as Christ's threshed wheat," he said, "which the teeth of wild beasts must grind before it become bread." Into the details of the few following moments we need not enter. The awful spectacle was soon over, and before the people had reached their homes, Ignatius had won the crown he coveted, and was at home with the Lord.

In the year 117 Trajan died, and was succeeded by Hadrian, who continued the persecutions and it was not till the year 138, when Antoninus Pius ascended the throne, that the pressure was in any measure removed. With his mild and gentle reign a period of calm commenced, which lasted nearly thirty years; and for a time the word of the Lord had free course and was glorified. True, there were isolated cases of oppression, but the general persecution had subsided; and the gospel quickly spread through every quarter of the Roman dominions. Westward to the extremities of Gaul, and eastward to Armenia and Assyria the glorious message was conveyed; and thousands who had been vainly seeking rest of heart in the mythologies of Rome and Egypt, drank in the words of life, and declared themselves the willing followers of Christ.

The accession of Marcus Aurelius, however, was the signal for another reaction; and in the second year of his reign the clouds again began to gather.

Troubles of various kinds, which followed upon each other with startling rapidity, and which seemed at one time to disturb the foundations of the empire, afforded a ready pretext for the renewal of the persecution; and presently the long-cherished hatred for the Christians began once more to be expressed in words. The old cry, so fearfully familiar to the ears of many, was revived, and passed like the breath of a pestilence through the eastern empire; "The Christians to the lions! The Christians to the lions!" Thus the fourth general persecution commenced.

The full force of the coming storm was felt in Asia Minor, from whence the new edicts were issued; and the name of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, stands brightly out on the martyr scroll of this period. Unlike Ignatius, who exposed himself unnecessarily to the blinded will of the populace, Polycarp refused not to listen to the warnings and entreaties of his friends; and when he found himself the marked man in Smyrna, retired to a neighbouring village, and there resumed his labours. On being pursued thither, he retired to another village, exhorting the people as he went; and in this itinerant way his life was spent, till his place of hiding was discovered. Then the aged bishop (warned, as it is said, in a dream that he must glorify God by a martyr's death) resigned himself peacefully to the will of God, and gave his body into the hands of the officers who were charged with his arrest. Before he left the house he ordered food to be placed before these men; and then, in seeming anticipation of what awaited him, arose, and commended himself to God. It is recorded that the fervency of his prayer so affected the officers that they repented they had ever been the instruments of his capture. He was then seated upon an ass, and brought back to Smyrna, where a vast concourse of people had gathered to celebrate the feast of unleavened bread.

In consideration for his age and learning, Nicites, a man of considerable influence, and his son Herod, the irenarch of the city, went forth to meet him; and taking him into their chariot, urged him to consult his safety by ascribing divine honours to Caesar, and consenting to sacrifice. This he refused to do, and was thereupon thrust from the chariot with such violence that he sprained his thigh in falling. But the aged servant of God went patiently forward, unruffled by the rudeness of the irenarch, and unmoved by the shouts of the multitude, who buffeted him from side to side in their anger: and so the stadium was reached.

This was the place of exhibition for sacred games and shows; and we are told that, as he entered the arena, a voice, as though from heaven, exclaimed, "Be strong, Polycarp, and contend manfully." Be that as it may, a power that was not human sustained the man of God, and when the proconsul, touched by his venerable appearance, entreated him to swear by the genius of Caesar, and to say, "Away with the godless!" the aged martyr, pointing to the crowded benches, repeated sorrowfully, "Away with the godless!'' "Swear," said the merciful governor, "and I will dismiss you. Revile Christ." But Polycarp meekly answered, "Eighty and six years have I served him, and he never did me wrong: how can I now blaspheme my King and Saviour?" "Swear by the genius of Caesar," said the governor, still inclining to mercy. Polycarp replied, If you think that I should swear by the genius of Caesar, as you say, pretending not to know who I am, hear my free confession. I am a Christian. But if you wish to learn what the doctrine of Christianity is, grant me a day and listen to me." "Persuade the people," said the proconsul, noting with some uneasiness the impatient clamour of the multitude; but Polycarp refused. He had been taught to shew honour to the higher powers, and to be subject to them, because they were ordained of God, but to the people, especially in their present turbulent state, he would offer no defence. "I have wild beasts at hand," said the governor, "and will cast you to them unless you change your mind." "Call them," said Polycarp quietly. The aged pilgrim rejoiced at the prospect of speedy deliverance from a godless and persecuting world; and the calm fearlessness which he displayed exasperated the proconsul, who thereupon threatened him with burning. Polycarp answered, "You threaten fire that burns for a moment, and is soon extinguished, but you know nothing of the judgment to come, and the fire of eternal punishment reserved for the wicked." The governor's patience was exhausted, and a herald was sent to proclaim in the middle of the stadium, "Polycarp is a Christian." This proclamation, according to custom, was repeated three times, and the rage of the populace was at its height. They saw in the aged prisoner a man who had set at nought their gods and emptied their temples by his teaching; and the cry became general, "Polycarp to the lions!"

But the hour for the exhibition of the chase was over, and the asiarch who had control of the public shows, refused to give the people their desire. If they were still bent on his destruction they must find some other way; so the cry was quickly taken up, that Polycarp should be burnt. The wood and straw were near at hand, and the victim, relieved of his robes, was hurried to the stake. They would have nailed him to it, but he requested that he might be simply bound, and his request was granted. Having then commended his soul to God, he gave the signal to the executioner, and the pile was lighted. But the wonders of the day were not yet over. From some unaccountable cause the flames refused to touch his body, and the people, baffled and wondering, looked curiously at each other. Anger, however, overcame their superstition, and a demand was made that the executioner should dispatch his victim with the sword. This was done. The fatal blow was immediately struck, and in that moment of unconscious pain, the faithful martyr yielded up his spirit, and passed for ever beyond the reach of his tormentors.

Many others, not inferior in faith and fortitude to Polycarp, though not all so distinguished for their abilities, suffered during this persecution, and it would have been interesting to speak of some of these had space permitted. It would have been interesting to tell of Germanicus, a young Christian whose constancy and courage witnessed so brightly to the reality of his faith, even in the solemn hour of death, that many were converted; or of Justin of Neapolis, who, having investigated all the philosophic systems of his time, and taken a high place among professors of learning, found it his joy and gain to become a follower of the meek and lowly Jesus; to tell how he afterwards sealed the testimony which he had borne, with his blood; and gained for himself a name far nobler than that of Justin the Philosopher, the name of Justin Martyr; a name by which he is known in the churches to this day, and by which he will yet be known in a future day, when the martyrs' crowns are awarded.

At Lyons and Vienne, also, the faith of believers was sorely tried, for the enemy of souls was very active. Every species of torture that human ingenuity could devise, was inflicted upon the Christians of these parts; but their numbers only increased; and every effort to exterminate the new religion, became but the means of its wider and more speedy diffusion. Here Blandina, a female slave of tender and delicate frame, after enduring with exemplary patience the most exquisite tortures, during the infliction of which the persecutors themselves became weary, gained the martyr's crown, and died, giving glory to God. Here Sanctus, a deacon in the church, and Maturus a new convert to Christianity, suffered nobly for the truth; with Attalus of Pergamus, and Pothinus, bishop of Lyons, and many more.

And thus, like precious metal which is passed through the furnace of the refiner, the church of God was passed through the furnace of affliction, and much of the rubbish attaching to it was separated and consumed; while the sparks from the furnace, carried hither and thither by the winds of persecution, kindled in the breasts of many a desire to solve this strange matter; to understand the nature of this new metal, which could sustain the fiery test so well.

Up to this time the church seems to have retained that simplicity of conduct and worship, of which we get some beautiful examples in the Acts of the Apostles and elsewhere. Justin Martyr has given us an account of its practices in his day, which cannot fail to be interesting. "We meet on the Lord's day," he says, "for worship, in towns and villages; read as much of the prophets and the memoirs of the apostles as time permits: the reading finished, the president or bishop, in a speech or sermon, exhorts the faithful to follow these excellent examples; then all rise and pour forth united prayer. Then bread, wine, and water are brought forth, the president utters prayers and thanksgiving according to his ability, and all the people say 'Amen.' Distribution is then made of the things blessed to each one present, and to those absent is sent by the deacons. Those who are prosperous and willing, give what they choose, each according to his own pleasure; and what is collected is deposited with the president, and he carefully relieves the orphans and widows, and those who, from sickness and other causes, are needy, and also those in prison, and the strangers who are residing with us, and in short, all those who are in need of help."

Beautiful simplicity of life and worship! Surely this is an instance of that steady continuance "in the apostle's doctrine and in breaking of bread and in prayers" which is commended in the Acts, and which forms a distinguishing mark of primitive Christianity. But where is that simplicity now?

Chapter 3.

The Fifth and Sixth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.

A.D. 200-238.

The extraordinary fortitude which we have seen in Polycarp, Ignatius, and others was not peculiar to those men. The power of endurance was not merely displayed in the Christian of long experience, or the man of natural strength and courage; it was seen in the timid and delicate; in women as well as men; in the child of tender years, as well as in the man of hardy age. The strength by which they conquered was not their own, but God's; by whose power, and whose alone, they were kept through faith. (1 Peter i. 5.) There were some, it is true, who sought to face the enemy in their own strength, and such was Quintus a Phrygian, who went about persuading others to invite persecution, but who, in the first moment of actual danger, drew back and denied his Master. Of the reality of his zeal we need not doubt, but he acted without faith. He trusted in his own strength, instead of looking to another; and remembered not that God had said, "My strength is made perfect in weakness." He dropped the shield of faith, whereby he might have quenched the fiery darts of the wicked, and adopted the shield of self-confidence, which, as might be expected, was pierced by the first arrow of the enemy.

Not so Perpetua, the martyr of Carthage, who suffered during the persecution of which we are to speak, and whose name will ever find a foremost place in the annals of martyrology.

It was in the beginning of the third century, and the Emperor Severus occupied the throne of the Caesars. An African by birth, he was a man of great sagacity and learning, but was loathed for his perfidy and cruelty. The persecution which commenced in his reign was unsurpassed for barbarity by any that had gone before, and certainly was not exceeded by any that came after. At one time he appears to have been not unfavourably disposed to the Christians; and it is even said that he ascribed his recovery from a severe illness to the prayers of a Christian named Proculus. But his moderation did not last, and in the year 202 the persecution broke out in Africa with unwonted violence. Neither the eloquent appeals of Tertullian to the humanity of the people, nor the solemn warnings which he addressed to the prefect of Africa, availed to stem the flood of popular fury which now rolled in upon the Christians. One after another they were haled to torture and execution, till the words of the great apologist were verily fulfilled, "Your cruelty will be our glory. Thousands of both sexes, and of every rank will crowd to martyrdom, exhaust your fires, and weary your swords. Carthage will be decimated; the principal persons in the city, even perhaps your own most intimate friends and kindred, must be sacrificed. Vainly will you war against God!"

The noble army of martyrs did indeed get many reinforcements from the far-famed capital of Roman Africa; and Vivia Perpetua, a catechumen or new convert to the faith, was one of these.

She was a married woman, of good family and education, and though only twenty-two years of age, the mother of one child, then an infant at the breast. Her father was a Pagan, and loved her dearly; and when she was apprehended and thrown into prison, he sought by every means to win her back to Paganism. On one occasion when he had been unusually earnest in his endeavours, she pointed to a pitcher that stood near them, and said, "My father, you see that vessel; can you call it by any other name than what it is?" He told her "No," "Neither can I," said Perpetua, "call myself by any other name than that of Christian." At this her father turned upon her angrily and beat her, and departed; and for several days she saw him no more.

During his absence she was baptised, together with four other youthful converts, one of them her brother; and with that the hand of persecution began to press more heavily upon her, for she was cast with her companions into the common dungeon. Here all light was excluded, and she was almost suffocated by reason of the heat and overcrowding. "O miserable day!" she writes, "from the dreadful heat of the prisoners crowded together, and the insults of the soldiers. But I was wrung with solicitude for my infant. Two of our deacons, however, by the payment of money obtained our removal for some hours in the day to a more open part of the prison. Each of the captives then pursued his usual occupation; but I sat and suckled my infant, who was wasting away on my account. And for many days I suffered this anxiety, and accustomed my child to remain in the prison with me; and I immediately recovered my strength, and was relieved from my toil and trouble for my infant; and the prison became to me like a palace; and I was happier there than I should have been anywhere else."

After a few days there was a rumour that the prisoners were to be heard, and her father, wasted with anxiety, came from the city with increased desire to save her. His manner of approaching her was changed, and threats and violence gave place to supplication and entreaty. He begged her to take pity on his grey hairs, and to think of the honour of his name; to remember all his former kindness, and how he had loved her the best of all his children. He urged her to look in pity upon her mother and brothers, and upon her dear babe who could not live without her. "Do not destroy us all!" he cried. And then he flung himself at her feet, weeping bitterly, and kissed her hands in his fondness, and clinging like a suppliant to her dress, said he would no longer call her daughter, but "mistress," because she was the mistress of all their fates. But Perpetua, mightily sustained by God, endured the agony of the moment with unshaken fortitude, only saying, "In this trial, what God wills, will take place. Know that we are not in our own power, but in that of God."

In due time the hour of her trial came round, and she was placed at the bar with the other prisoners. When it came to her turn to be examined, the poor old man, her father, appeared with the child, and holding it before her eyes, again implored her to have compassion. Alive to the occasion, Hilarianus, the procurator, ceased his stern interrogations, and said in his softest manner, "Spare the grey hairs of your parent; spare your infant; offer sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor." But she answered, "I will not sacrifice." He then demanded, "Art thou a Christian?" and she answered, "I am a Christian." Upon this her father broke into loud and frantic cries, insomuch that the procurator ordered him to be thrust down, and beaten with rods: all which she endured with calmness and fortitude. Sentence of death was then passed upon her, and she was taken back to prison with the rest.

Once again, when the day of the games approached, the old man visited her, and with wilder entreaties begged her to pity him in his affliction, and to consent to sacrifice; but though her grief was very great she faltered not in her steadfastness, and would not deny the faith. These, indeed, were the hardest trials she had to encounter, but they were over at last, and her end was very near.

On the day of execution she was brought forth with her own brother, and a female martyr, by name Felicitas, and the two women were tied in nets and thrown to an enraged cow. But the injuries which Perpetua sustained were not fatal, and the people, glutted though not satiated with the sight of blood, called upon the executioner to administer the death-stroke. Rousing as from a pleasant dream, Perpetua drew her torn robe more closely about her person, and gathered up her fallen hair; and when she had addressed a few faint words of encouragement to her brother, she guided the gladiator's sword to a vital part, and so expired. Brave Perpetua! the heart beats quick as we read thy wondrous history: but we shall yet, through God's grace, see thee crowned and happy in thy Master's presence.

In the same year (A.D. 202) died Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, a sincere lover of souls, and a zealous defender of the truth. He withstood the then bishop of Rome,* a man of great arrogance and little piety, in whom the foul spirit of the Papacy was, alas! but too manifest, and wrote him a synodical epistle in the name of the Gallic churches. The following extract from another letter which Irenaeus addressed to one Florinus, a schismatic of Rome, will doubtless be read with interest. "I saw thee," he says, "when I was yet a boy in the lower Asia with Polycarp, moving in great splendour at court, and endeavouring by all means to gain his esteem. I remember the events of those times much better than those of more recent occurrence. As the studies of our youth, growing with our minds, unite with them so firmly that I can tell also the very place where the blessed Polycarp was accustomed to sit and discourse; and also his entrances, his walks, his manner of life, the form of his body, his conversations with the people, and his familiar intercourse with John, as he was accustomed to tell, as also his familiarity with those that had seen the Lord. How also he used to relate their discourses, and what things he had heard from them concerning the Lord. Also concerning his miracles, his doctrine, all these were told by Polycarp, in consistency with the holy scriptures, as he had received them from the eyewitnesses of the doctrine of salvation."

{*By name Victor. Yet this man afterwards died a martyr's death rather than purchase his liberty by a denial of the faith.}

Irenaeus had many conflicts with the false teachers of his time, who, alas! were increasing but too rapidly; and his zeal presently drew upon him the resentment of the emperor. He was led out to the summit of a hill in company with some other Christians, and on refusing the usual test, to sacrifice to idols, was beheaded.

So also, at Alexandria, died Leonidas, a man of rank and learning, and the father of Origen of whom we shall have more to say hereafter. Likewise two Christians by name Serenus, with Heraclides, Heron and Plutarch, the latter a pupil of Origen. We might swell the list with many more, but space forbids; and there is a blessed satisfaction in the thought, that a day is coming when we shall not only know their names, but see them crowned, and doubtless hold sweet communion together.

The sixth general persecution commenced with the accession of Maximin, a Thracian, A.D. 235, and lasted three years. The immediate cause of the persecution was peculiar. Maximin entertained a savage hatred towards his predecessor, Alexander, and in order to shew his malice, reversed as much as possible the policy of Alexander's reign. That humane and excellent ruler had dealt kindly with the Christians, and hence the burly Thracian could do no other than treat them with corresponding severity. His first edict commanded that only the chief men of the churches should be slain, but the cruelty of his nature was stimulated by this sanguinary act, and the edict was quickly followed by another of a more sweeping character. During his reign the Christians were haled away to execution without trial, and often were buried in heaps like dogs. The magistrates could offer them no protection from the savagery of the mob, or the tyranny of individual oppressors; and thus their property became the general booty, and their lives the sport of every passing whim of the populace. But men and women were still found everywhere, who were faithful to the cause; and the more the emperor sent abroad his edicts, the brighter shone the lights which he was vainly endeavouring to put out.

Two hundred years had now rolled away since the death of Christ; two hundred years of odium and suffering for His beloved church, but still its numbers were increasing. Again and again the powers of hell had been loosed against it, but all to no effect. "This was an anvil which had worn out many a hammer," and when the Thracian savage ascended the imperial throne he found that he had the same difficulties to overcome, the same mysterious power to subdue, which had baffled the wiliest and most indefatigable of his predecessors. In truth, the church throve in persecution, and the seeds of the gospel, scattered over an ever widening area, and watered by the blood of martyrs, bore fruit a hundredfold, though the efforts to tread them down were terrible and relentless. The power of man in all its varied forms had been arrayed against the unresisting community, but neither imperial edicts, nor angry mobs, nor discontented augurs, nor gibing philosophers could check its steady growth, much less accomplish its destruction. Fixed on its Rock foundation it stood there — the work of God and the wonder of men; with that eternal promise its strong confidence, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

Chapter 4.

The Seventh and Eighth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.

A.D. 238-274.

In contemplating the decline of the Roman empire, there is much to remind one of the contemporary history of the church of God. Rome had now passed the zenith of its glory; and alas! so far as its testimony down here was concerned, the church had done the same. The fanatic and impious projects of Elagabalus to fuse and recast into one great system the religions of the world, of which he himself was to be the sun and centre, tended not a little to disturb the foundations of the empire; and the pitiful and unworthy efforts of misguided Christians to reconcile the faulty philosophies and speculative mysticism of unregenerate men with the sublime truths of Christianity, though they could not disturb the foundations, yet produced incalculable mischief in the church, and led to many schisms.

The mild reign of Alexander Severus had been the occasion of more injury to the christian cause, than all the persecutions put together. In his time the church, through failing zeal, had begun to grow weary of its place of holy separation from the world; and christian bishops, elated by their growing power and importance, had accepted places at court and begun to amass considerable wealth. Temples for the more ostentatious display of the new religion had already appeared in different parts of the empire, and the words of the Holy Ghost that "The most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands," seemed in danger of being forgotten. The beautiful simplicity of the early church was rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and the meddling hand of man had already effected many ruinous changes in the management of its, affairs. Paul, as a wise master-builder, had laid the foundation, but others had been building rubbish upon it; and now the gold, silver, and precious stones of vital Christianity were getting sadly mixed with the wood, hay, and stubble of a lifeless profession. (1 Cor. iii.)

It was then that Christians began coquetting with the philosophies of Greece and Rome, and found stimulants for their declining faith in the daring mysticism of Egypt and Arabia; and it is therefore no matter for surprise that, when a fresh persecution broke out, many true believers lost heart, and expressed uneasy thoughts that God was dealing with them for their sins.

Swayed by this fear, and forgetting the sufficiency that was to be found in Christ, some of them denied the faith, or were guilty of dissimulation, and thus evaded further persecution. Yet they became marked men by their more faithful brethren, and when they applied, as many of them did, for re-admission to church-fellowship, a warm controversy arose, and great differences of opinion prevailed. Some were for re-admitting the erring brother on the confession of his fault; others wanted more rigid discipline, and urged that re-admission should not be immediately granted; while some again, and these not a few, declared that the act was inexpiable, and refused to receive the backslider on any terms. The severer opinion was called the heresy of Novatian, after its author; and where its promoters were successful in gaining the ascendancy, the most painful results ensued: insomuch that many a true child of God, unable to obtain restoration to fellowship, was swallowed up with overmuch sorrow, and died of remorse.

Decius was now upon the throne, and the implacability with which he persecuted the Christians gives him an unenviable place beside the great prototype of imperial cruelty, Nero. He observed with jealousy the growing power, and determined to check it. He saw the churches crowded with proselytes, while the heathen temples were deserted; and this, in his judgment, was an insult to the national religion which could not be passed over. He therefore sent abroad his edicts, and revived once more the smouldering fires of persecution.

Fabianus, bishop of Rome, was the first object of his resentment, and such was the virulence of the persecution, that upon his decease none had courage to come forward and undertake the sacred office. Origen in the east and Cyprian in the west did much, by their example and teaching, to strengthen the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees; but they only had the oversight of limited districts, and other bishops and pastors were not so faithful. The latter, who was bishop of Carthage, thus refers to the persecution, "Our gracious Lord has so ordered it, that all which has occurred seems more like a trial than a persecution. Forgetting what believers did in the times of the apostles, and what they should always be doing, Christians laboured with insatiable desire to increase their earthly possessions. Many of the bishops, who, by precept and example, should have guided others, neglected their divine calling to engage in the management of worldly concerns." No wonder then, if the shepherds grew lax and worldly, that the sheep grew timid, and shrunk from the brutal attacks which the emperor so freely encouraged.

Edict after edict was issued by the emperor, appointing certain days for the Christians to appear before the magistrates, when those who refused to renounce their religion were thrust into prison, and subjected to the most excruciating tortures in order to enforce compliance. Some submitted at once, others persevered up to a point and then gave way, and others, of whom the laborious Origen was one, were faithful to the end. Many fled into voluntary banishment, where they continued to hold their meetings in woods and caves of the earth, feeling safer and happier in the company of wild beasts than in the society of their more brutal fellow men. Yet this did not always ensure safety; and we read of seven Roman soldiers who were starved to death in the cave in which they had taken refuge, the emperor having ordered the entrance to be closed.

Yet all were not so weak, and the intrepidity of some, while under examination, forms a striking contrast to that timidity of which we have spoken. "I am astonished," said one who had been commanded to sacrifice to Venus, that you should ask me to worship an infamous woman whose debaucheries even your own historians record, and whose life consisted of such actions as your own laws would punish." The rebuke was just, but truth in that form is seldom palatable, and the speaker being condemned for his boldness, was broken on the wheel and beheaded. "I did it not, it was you that did it," was the exclamation of a woman who had been made to offer incense by one who held her hand; and for this she was condemned to exile. Another, a prisoner at Rome, wrote to Cyprian, "What more glorious and blessed lot can by God's grace fall to man than, amidst tortures and the fear of death itself, to confess God the Lord — than, with lacerated bodies and a spirit departing but yet free, to confess Christ the Son of God — than to become fellow-sufferers with Christ in the name of Christ? If we have not shed our blood, we are ready to shed it. Pray then, beloved Cyprian, that the Lord would daily confirm and strengthen each one of us, more and more, with the power of His might; and that He, as the best of leaders, would finally conduct His soldiers, whom He has disciplined and proved in the dangerous camp, to the field of battle which is before us, armed with those divine weapons which never can be conquered."

The Lord, indeed, had not forgotten His beloved people, and the period of their affliction had been graciously determined by Him. Perhaps He saw their weakness and shortened the time. It would even appear so, for after a short reign of two years and six months, Decius was killed in battle with the Goths; and the seventh general persecution of the empire came to a close.

Gallus, who succeeded Decius, only reigned two years; and after Gallus came Valerian who commenced a fresh persecution. At first, he was favourably disposed to the Christians, and is said to have examined (with the most hopeful results) the influence of Christianity on the public morals: but his fondness for Oriental magic exposed his mind to the insidious teachings of an Egyptian magician, named Macrionus, who was an active and bitter opponent of the truth; and to his designing influence we may attribute the eighth general persecution of the empire.

On the first rumours of the persecution, Cyprian became a marked man. A glance at his previous history will not be out of place here. He was born in the year 200, of noble family, and received an education suited to his station. In later years he publicly taught rhetoric with great success at Carthage, where he lived in princely style. It is said he dressed gorgeously, and maintained a stately retinue, and that whenever he went abroad he was besieged by a crowd of clients and followers. Converted from Paganism at the age of forty-five, he immediately sold his estate and gave the chief part of the produce to the poor. He now made wonderful progress in the truth, and after three years, during which he applied himself closely to the scriptures, was made bishop of Carthage. In the reign of Decius an order was issued for his arrest, but Cyprian withdrew to some secure retreat till the storm was over, where he spent his leisure in writing consolatory epistles to the suffering Christians. It was not fear, however, which led him to take this step, as his conduct on a later occasion sufficiently proved. He was back again at Carthage at the commencement of Valerian's reign, when a plague broke out in that city; and was enabled to render valuable assistance to the sufferers. He exhorted the Christians to forget their injuries and to manifest the graces of the gospel by ministering not only to their own brethren, but to their plague-stricken enemies. The appeal was heartily responded to, and the Christians went about their new work with cheerful alacrity.

When the persecution under Valerian broke out, Cyprian did not again withdraw. He was thereupon arrested by order of the pro-consul and banished; but only to be recalled on the appointment of a new pro-consul. This, however, was merely that he might undergo a further trial; and heedless of the earnest entreaties of his brethren, who urged him to conceal himself till the persecution was over, he allowed himself to be retaken. The day following his apprehension the trial came on, and under a strong guard, the former senator of Carthage was conveyed to the pro-consul's palace. It was a remarkable sight, and the whole city had turned out to witness it. The examination was short, and the words on both sides few and decisive. "Art thou Thascius Cyprian, the bishop of so many impious men?" "I am." "The most sacred emperor commands thee to sacrifice." "I do not sacrifice." "Consider well," said the proconsul. "Execute your orders, the case admits of no consideration," answered Cyprian. The pro-consul then delivered his sentence, concluding with the words, "Thou must expiate thy crime with thy blood." Cyprian exclaimed, "God be thanked!" And in this contented frame of mind he was shortly afterwards removed to a neighbouring field and beheaded.

Even children were not exempt from this persecution, and many, through grace, witnessed a good confession. Cyril of Alexandria, a lad of tender years, was one of these; the reality of whose faith was such that neither threats nor blows were able to shake it, nor even the prospect of a slow and painful death. Children of his own age harassed him with their petty taunts and provocations, and his father even drove him from home because he would not renounce his faith or acknowledge the emperor as God. His behaviour in the presence of the Roman magistrate was equally interesting and conscientious. "Child," said the merciful pagan, I am ready to pardon you, and to let your father take you home again, and you may by-and-by inherit his property, if you will only be wise and concerned for your own interest." The child steadily refused. "I am willing to suffer," he said, "and God will take me up. I am not troubled at being turned out of doors, I shall have a better home. I am not afraid to die; it will only send me to a better life."

As the ruler could not persuade him to retract, he told the officers to take him to the stake and shew him the straw and faggots; hoping that that would intimidate him; but the child withstood the test and betrayed no symptoms of terror. The good Shepherd kept very near His tried lamb, and allowed no fear to enter his heart: and the people could only weep and marvel. When he was taken back to the ruler, and the ruler asked him, "Are you ready now to change your mind?" he answered bravely, "Your fire and sword cannot hurt me; I am going to a better home: burn me quickly, that I may get to it the sooner:" and seeing many of the people in tears he said, "you ought to be glad; and so you would be if you knew of the city to which I am going." After this he was brought again to the stake, and bound there; and the sticks and straw were piled around his tender limbs, and lighted. But the child's sufferings were soon over, and before the smoke of the fire had rolled away, he had passed beyond the reach of pain and trial and had entered the "better home" he talked about.

Laurentius, a deacon of the church at Rome, was another martyr of this persecution. Being called upon to render an account to the emperor of the church treasures, he gathered together a number of the aged and helpless poor, and presented them to the magistrate, saying, "These are the treasures of the church." Provoked and disappointed, the magistrate consigned him to the torturers, by whom he was first beaten with iron rods, then had his limbs dislocated, and afterwards was stretched upon a gridiron and slowly roasted.

Valerian, however, was taken prisoner by Sapor, king of the Persians, when he had administered the affairs of the empire about four years, and this put an end to the persecution. The church rested then for nearly fifteen years; by which time the restless hatred of man for the gospel, again found public expression, and the ninth general persecution broke out.

Chapter 5.

The Ninth and Tenth General Persecutions of the Roman Pagan Empire.

A.D. 274 - 306.

The persecution which began and ended in the reign of Aurelian lasted only a few months; for the sanguinary edicts which he issued had scarcely reached the limits of his dominion, when he was removed by the hand of the assassin. The storm indeed gathered rapidly, and the horizon for awhile looked dark. and ominous, but after a few premonitory thunderings the clouds rolled by without discharging, and the Christians were enabled to breathe again in a freer air.

But if there is little to say about the persecution, the records of the church during this period are fraught with painful interest. It was during the reign of Aurelian that Christians first invited the arbitration of a civil power in the affairs of the church; and this, moreover, in an important matter of discipline. In the apostles' day they had sought the aid of magistrates in the settlement of private questions, and Paul had rebuked them sternly for it (1 Cor. vi.); but what would he now have said, when the civil power was appealed to, to decide upon a question which affected, in a most solemn manner, the foundation truths of the christian religion?

Paul of Samosata, a vain and impious pagan, who by some unaccountable means had obtained the title and position of bishop of Antioch, propagated an abominable heresy respecting the Person of the Lord. His teaching presently excited the attention of Christians throughout the eastern portion of the empire, and a council was convened to inquire into it. Pastors and bishops thronged to Antioch from all parts, and after a patient investigation they decided by almost unanimous consent to put away the wicked person from amongst them. Happy had it been for the church if the matter had ended here, but it did not. Paul refused to bow to the authority of the church, and the council appealed to the emperor to ratify their decision. The emperor, with considerable shrewdness of natural wisdom, referred the question to the bishops of Italy and Rome; and as they confirmed the judgment of their brethren, nothing remained but for the haughty bishop to retire in silence, under the ignominy of a double censure.

It was not till after this affair that Aurelian changed his attitude towards the Christians; and the cause of his altered policy has not been ascertained with certainty. Eusebius, in a vague manner, ascribes the change to the influence of "certain advisers;" but who they were, and how they succeeded in winning the emperor to their side he does not explain. "But whilst (Aurelian) was already on the point, and so to say, on the very act of subscribing the decrees, the divine vengeance overtook him . . . . illustriously proving to all, that there can be no privilege granted the rulers of the world against the churches of Christ, unless by the sovereign hand of God; the decree of heaven permitting it to be done for our correction and amendment, and in those times and seasons that He may approve." (Euseb. bk. vii. ch. 30.)

After a rest of some twenty-eight years the puny hand of man was again stretched forth in persecution, and the imperial head of Rome made one last and frenzied effort to exterminate the hated religion. Historically, this was the decisive and closing conflict between Paganism and Christianity. It lasted ten years, and was, without doubt, the most desolating of all the persecutions.

The undisturbed security of the church since the death of Aurelian had produced an enervating effect upon the Christians, and their condition had justly roused a feeling of shame in the hearts of many, not unmixed with a fear that the Lord's displeasure was hanging over them. Owing to its unfaithfulness the church had been steadily decreasing in spiritual power, but increasing in pride and worldly ambition; and the primitive simplicity of its worship had been almost obscured by the distracting and fleshly ritual of Judaism.

Nor was this all. Many were using their gifts for display instead of for edification; and those whose privilege it had been to feed the flock of God, were neglecting their sacred charge, and busied in the accumulation of riches. The bishops whose true office was to minister to the people, and labour in person among the sick and poor, had become a great sacerdotal order, acting as "lords over God's heritage," and employing officers under them. They were no longer "given to hospitality," which Paul has said was the necessary qualification of a bishop, but received a salary, and thus became dependent on the earnings of others.* Not a century later a pagan prefect of Rome was heard to say, "Make me bishop of Rome and I also will be a Christian." Indeed, it was out of this system of spiritual tyranny and ambition that the distinction between clergy and laity arose; from whence, in turn, proceeded those frightful abuses of the Middle Ages, which were afterwards condemned in part (though for political reasons) by the arrogant and daring Hildebrand on his elevation to the papal chair.

{*Had these bishops of the church adopted no higher standard than the early Fathers, they ought to have known better than to act thus. Had not Origen said, that "he who is called to the office of a bishop, is called not to command but serve the church; and that he ought to perform this service with such modesty and humility as to make himself both useful to him who performs and to him who receives it; for the government of the Christians ought to be entirely different from that of infidels, which is full of severity, insolence, and vanity"?}

Furthermore, the internal peace of the assemblies was continually disturbed by feuds. Disputes were constantly arising between the bishops and presbyters, because of the haughty pretensions of the former, who claimed a pre-eminence in the church which the latter would in no wise concede. In the early days of Christianity the titles had been considered synonymous; and it was not until towards the close of the second century that the custom had obtained, to rank one above the other. The controversy was long and bitter; and whilst the shepherds were thus striving among themselves, the sheep were starving, and evil wolves were creeping in among them not sparing the flock.

In the midst of this sorrowful condition of things the persecution under Diocletian began. The savage and wanton tyrant had already occupied the throne for nineteen years, and during that period had associated three others with him in the government; Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine the Great.

Galerius, who hated the Christians, was the emperor's son-in-law, and exercised a fatal influence over him. He persuaded him that Christianity was opposed to the best interests of the people, and that the way to revive the former glories of the empire was to strike at the roots of the obnoxious religion and to destroy it utterly. The better to attain his end he procured the assistance of the heathen priests and teachers of philosophy, who by their word and influence (though, indeed, it wanted no such earnest pressure) quickly converted the emperor to their views.

Four edicts in all were issued; the first requiring the destruction of all the churches and of the sacred writings — the latter, a new feature, and doubtless suggested by the philosophers; the second, that those belonging to the clerical order should be apprehended and imprisoned; the third, that none should be liberated unless they consented to sacrifice; and the fourth, that Christians of every condition, in all quarters of the empire, should either sacrifice and return to the worship of the gods, or die.

The first edict had no sooner appeared in Nicomedia (the new capital of the empire) than it was torn down by an indignant Christian. He left in its place the contemptuous inscription, "Such are the victories of the emperors over the Goths and Sarmatians;" an act of zeal for which he had to pay dearly, though he bore the tortures inflicted upon him with christian fortitude. He was roasted alive over a slow fire. A conflagration breaking out in the emperor's palace shortly after, the Christians were charged with the act, and the violence of the persecution increased. Within fourteen days the palace was again in flames,*' and the wrath of Diocletian, who was now thoroughly alarmed, grew hot and terrible. "The officers of the household, the inmates of the palace, were exposed to the most cruel tortures, by the order, it is said, in the presence of Diocletian . . . . Prisca and Valeria (the emperor's wife and daughter) were constrained to pollute themselves with sacrifice; the powerful eunuchs, Dorothius and Gorgonius and Andrias suffered death; Anthinus, the bishop of Nicomedia was beheaded. Many were executed, many burnt alive, many laid bound with stones round their necks, in boats, rowed into the midst of the lake, and thrown into the water."

{*It is pretty generally believed that Galerius was the incendiary in both cases.

East and west from Nicomedia the persecution waxed hot and furious, and Gaul alone of all the Roman provinces escaped the fiery storm. Here resided Constantius, the only ruler who sheltered the Christians; the rest were active, remorseless, implacable. But Diocletian at last grew weary of the awful work, and in the following year resigned the reins of the empire. His colleague, Maximian, immediately followed his example; but Galerius reigned on, sole master of the East, till his nephew, a monster like himself, obtained the jurisdiction over Syria and Egypt under the title of Maximin II.

It would be impossible to speak of more than a few of the martyrs whose names are associated with this persecution, for the ranks must have been swelled by thousands during those ten miserable years; indeed, the Christians of Egypt suffered by multitudes, sometimes as many as sixty or eighty in a day, Romanus, a deacon of Antioch, when threatened with torture exclaimed, "Thy sentence, O emperor, I joyfully embrace; I refuse not to be sacrificed for my brethren, and that by as cruel a means as thou canst invent." When the executioner hesitated in his awful work because his victim was of noble parentage, Romanus said, "Not the blood of my progenitors, but christian profession makes me noble;" and when he had received many wounds in his face he exclaimed, "I thank thee, O captain, that thou hast opened unto me many mouths with which I may preach my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." Another, when under examination was asked, "Why do you keep the scriptures forbidden by the emperor?" and returned this answer, "Because I am a Christian: life eternal is in them: he that gives them up loses life eternal."

A maiden of thirteen, the daughter of a nobleman of Emerita, praised God in the midst of the torture, saying, "Behold, O Lord, I will not forget Thee: what a pleasant thing it is for those, O Christ, that remember Thy triumphs and attain to these high dignities!" Another, as the flames were wrapping round her, exclaimed, "Grow weary, my sisters, of your lives led in darkness, and be in love with Christ — my God, my Redeemer, my comforter, who is the true light of the world. May the Spirit of God persuade you that there is a world to come in which the worshippers of idols and devils shall be tormented perpetually, and the servants of the most high God shall be eternally crowned." This was the faithful testimony of a lady of wealth, by name Julietta.

Contrast with such triumphant scenes the miserable ends of the great persecutors of Christianity. Nero, Diocletian and Maximian committed suicide. Domitian, Commodus, Maximin and Aurelian were assassinated, Hadrian died in agony, crying out, "How miserable it is to seek death and not to find it!" Decius, cut off from retreat during an ambuscade, perished miserably, and his flesh became the prey of vultures and wild beasts. Valerian, after being taken prisoner by Sapor, king of Persia, was used as a stool by that monarch to assist him in mounting his horse; and after seven years of this and other insult, his eyes were put out and he was flayed alive. The body of Maximin II. was slowly consumed by an internal fire: and, last of all, Galerius, that prince of persecutors, was smitten with a loathsome disease which kept him in continual torment a whole year. Physicians were consulted in vain, and like his prototypes Antiochus Epiphanes and Herod he was eaten of worms!

But the Smyrna period of the church's history had reached its close. That mystic intimation of the Church's Head, "Ye shall have tribulation ten days," had been fulfilled; and the ten persecutions of the Roman pagan empire had passed into history. The tenth had lasted ten years, but even that had had its day.; and the Pergamos period, when the lion became the serpent, and adversaries from without gave place to seducers from within — this solemn epoch in the church's history had begun.

Meanwhile Constantius had died at York, and Constantine his son — the Constantine the Great of history — had ascended the throne.

Chapter 6.

The Fourth Century of the Christian Era.

A.D. 306-375.

As the accession of Constantine the Great marks a new era in the church's history, it would be well to take a hurried glance at the public career of the man himself. He was born in Britain, and his mother is said to have been a British princess. On the death of his father, who was beloved for his justice and moderation, the Roman legions stationed at York saluted him as Cesar, and invested him with the imperial purple. Much as Galerius resented this nomination, he was not prepared to risk a civil war by opposing it; he therefore ratified the title which the army had conferred upon their general, and assigned him the fourth rank among the rulers of the empire. During the six following years Constantine administered the prefecture of Gaul with marked ability, and at the close of that period — Maximin and Galerius having been meanwhile removed by death — the whole Roman empire was placed within his grasp. There now remained but one competitor for the throne, Maxentius, a stedfast assertor of paganism; and when Constantine had obtained an accurate knowledge of his resources, he marched against him with a large army.

The question whether Constantine was really a Christian has ever been a vexed point with ecclesiastical writers, and many and very different motives have been advanced as accounting for his adoption of the Christian religion.* But if converted at all, we may safely affirm that it was not till after his march against Maxentius, during which he is said to have witnessed a strange phenomenon in the heavens, and to have been favoured with a remarkable vision; up to that time he was still undecided between paganism and Christianity.

{*For his own sake we would hope that Constantine was a Christian, but for the honour of Christianity we would hope otherwise. History describes him as a pitiless and jealous ruler, the murderer of his father-in-law, his brothers-in-law, his sister, wife, son and nephew! (Sismondi's Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. i. p. 78.)}

The particulars of these (supposed) occurrences are thus given. The emperor, at the head of his Gallic legions, was on his way to Rome; where Maxentius had proclaimed himself emperor and was ruling in undisturbed authority. Suddenly, about three o'clock in the afternoon, there appeared in the clear heavens a glittering cross, inscribed with the words, "In hoc signo vinces" (In this sign overcome). Unable to account for the phenomenon which, according to some accounts, was seen by the whole army — Constantine retired to his tent, restless and dejected. When night came on, his troubled mind found temporary relief in sleep; and as he slept, he dreamed. He dreamed that One stood beside him, that One none other than the divine Author of Christianity — and instructed him to make a banner in the form of a cross, which was to be borne before the army in place of the Roman standard. By this means victory would be assured, and his claims to the imperial throne would be established. "At day dawn," writes the church historian Socrates, a century later, "Constantine called together the priests of Christ, and questioned them on the subject of the christian faith. Then having put forward the sacred books of the scripture, they explained the things that relate to Christ; and the sovereign, astonished at the prophecies on the subject of the Saviour, commanded ingenious men to fabricate, to the figure of the cross, set with gold and precious stones, a standard, what is called among the Romans, Labarum," this being the device which had been made known to him in his dream. The result surpassed his expectations. The sight of the banner animated his soldiers, and inspired them with that reckless courage which usually accompanies a superstitious zeal. The armies met — a bloody engagement ensued — and Constantine was victorious. Maxentius was drowned in the Tiber while attempting his escape.

Reflecting upon these events we are constrained to say, that the peaceful character of Christianity forbids a belief in the supernatural origin of the phenomenon and dream. The former may have been the hallucination of an excited brain; the latter, a vivid dream, but nothing more. Still, Constantine seems to have had faith in God, the faith perhaps of a Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar, and God honoured it.

Strange times had now fallen upon the people of God. "From the depths of the catacombs uprose the adoration of the martyrs. On those sites where the gods of Olympus had been worshipped — on the very columns that had supported their temples, were shrines erected to the memory of those who had rejected their divinity, and died for refusing to yield them worship. The religion of Christ, coming forth from the desert and the dungeon, took possession of the world. We sometimes feel astonished that precisely a secular building of the heathen, the basilica, should have been converted to the purposes of christian worship: but in this fact there is a remarkable significance, the apsis of the basilica contained an Augusteum, the assembled statues of such emperors as had received divine worship. They were replaced by the images of Christ and his apostles, as they are seen in many basilicas to the present day. The rulers of the world, themselves considered as deities, gave place to the Son of God arrayed in the nature of man. The local deities passed away, and were seen no more. In every highway, on the steep summits of the hills, in the deep ravines and remote valleys, on the roofs of houses, and in the mosaic of the floors was seen the cross: the victory was complete and decisive. As, on the coins of Constantine, the labarum, with the monogram of Christ, is seen to rise above the conquered dragon, so did the worship and name of Jesus exalt itself over the vanquished gods of heathenism."* An entirely new order of things had, in fact, arisen, and the Roman emperor had become the moving power in the church.

Some of the first acts of Constantine's reign were in keeping with his twofold position. He made munificent grants to many of the churches; handed over the heathen temples with their ample revenues to the Christians; and even exercised the authority of the law in the propagation of the christian religion. To the administration of state and civil affairs was added the control and management of the church; and the strange sight might now be witnessed of a Roman emperor presiding at its councils, and taking part in its debates. Nor was this intrusion resented by Christians generally; they looked upon it as an auspicious and happy omen; and instead of rebuking the emperor for his meddling, they welcomed him as the bishop of bishops. Like Israel of old when they chose a king, the people of God had embraced the protection of a semi-heathen state; and Christianity had suffered its greatest possible degradation in the patronage of a worldly potentate.

{*Ranke's History of the Popes, vol. i. p. 6.}

The pernicious effect of this first union of church and state was presently felt. Controversies arose, and the emperor was called upon by the contending parties to act as arbitrator. His judgment was no sooner given than it was scornfully set aside by the party whose plea had been disallowed. The same thing was again and again repeated, till the emperor became indignant, and resorted to violent measures in order to enforce his domination. Thus was demonstrated, at the very outset, the uselessness and mischief of that patronage to which the Christians had so willingly but blindly submitted.

Hitherto the councils of the church had been composed of the bishops and presbyters of a province; but during the reign of Constantine general assemblies were convened, the calling together and dismissal of which were left entirely to the emperor. These were called oecumenical or general councils, and their object was the discussion of the more important questions of the church. The first of such assemblies was held at Nicea in Bithynia, for the examination of one Arius, who had been teaching that our Lord had been created by God like all other beings, liable to sin and error, and that consequently he was not co-eternal with the Father. This is what Constantine, on being informed of the heresy, had called a trifle: the council, with but few dissentients, pronounced it a horrible blasphemy. The bishops so felt the indignity put upon the blessed Lord, that they stopped their ears whilst Arius was engaged in explaining his doctrines, and declared that he who held such doctrines was worthy only of anathema. As a check upon the growth of the heresy the famous confession of faith known as the Nicene Creed was drawn up, in which the scriptural doctrine of the Lord's divinity was clearly and fully enunciated. Arius and his followers at the same time received sentence of banishment, and the possession and circulation of his writings was constituted a capital offence.

The subsequent conduct of the emperor shewed that his ruling on this occasion was the result of no deep or settled conviction. At the solicitation of his sister Constantia, whose sympathies were strong with the Arian party, he recalled the great heresiarch from banishment, and revoked the interdiction which had been placed upon his writings. Arius was then fully restored to the emperor's favour, and treated with every mark of distinction at court.

But his triumph was not unmingled. He was now to find a powerful and indefatigable opponent in the person of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, an adversary who had already discomfited him not a little during the sittings of the council at Nicea; and who, though only a deacon at the time, had taken a prominent part in the discussion, and ever since had continued a staunch defender of the truth and an active exponent of the wicked devices of the Arians.

An imperial mandate from Constantine to restore the excommunicated heretics to the fellowship of the church, was now received with deliberate and steady disregard by the bishop; who would submit to no authority which sought to set aside the Godhead of his Lord and Saviour. His enemies were resolved to carry out their purpose, however; and what they could not gain by fair means, they determined to accomplish by foul. A charge of the most horrible kind was prepared against the bishop, and he was accused of causing the death of a Miletian bishop, named Arsinius; whose hand, they said, he had used for purposes of enchantment. He was accordingly cited before a council at Caesarea, to answer to the twofold charge of magic and murder; but Athanasius refused to appear, because the tribunal was composed of enemies. Another council was then convened at Tyre, and at this the bishop attended. The hand (which held, as we may say, the convicting evidence) was produced in court; but, alas for his accusers! the murdered bishop was produced also, alive and unmutilated.

Yet this farcical exposure did not inflict that silence on his adversaries which shame should have dictated, and they hastened to prepare a new accusation. They affirmed that Athanasius had threatened to check the exportation of corn from Alexandria to Constantinople, an act which would have brought famine to that city; rightly judging that the bare imputation of such misconduct, would surely rouse the jealousy and resentment of the emperor, whose deepest interests were centred there. Their plans succeeded. On this petty charge — for the truth of it was never proved — the sentence of banishment was obtained, and Athanasius was sent to Treves, on the Rhine, where he remained two years and four months.

But the banishment of the faithful bishop did not secure those results for which the Arian party had been contending. The Christians of Alexandria had been instructed too well in the truths of the scriptures, and held them too dearly, to sell them now their teacher was gone. They would agree to no compromise, and even when Arius subscribed an orthodox faith, their new bishop, an aged servant of God named Alexander, questioned his sincerity and refused to accept his retractation. Upon this Constantine again interfered, and sending for the bishop, insisted that Arius should be received into communion on the following day. This was felt by many to be a crisis in the affairs of the church, and the Christians of Alexandria anxiously awaited the issue. Alexander felt his weakness, and a host of uneasy thoughts oppressed his mind: he entered the church, and spread his case before the Lord. Prayer was his last resource, but it was not a vain or barren one.

The Arians were already loud in their exultations, and while the bishop was on his knees at the altar, they bore their leader in triumph through the streets. Suddenly the ovation ceased. Arius had entered a private house, none seeming to know exactly why. The people waited and wondered, but they waited in vain; the man for whose return they looked had retired from public gaze — never to appear again. The fate of Judas had overtaken him, and the great heresiarch was dead. Athanasius afterwards observed that the death of Arius was a sufficient refutation of his heresy.

Constantine did not long survive this event. He died A.D. 337, in the thirty-first year of his reign, and at the age of sixty-four. His general legislation, says a modern writer, "bears evidence of the silent underworkings of christian principles; and the effect of these humane laws would be felt far beyond the immediate circle of the christian community. He enacted laws for the better observance of Sunday; against the sale of infants for slaves; and also against child-stealing for the purpose of selling them; with many other laws both of a social and moral character. . . . But the one grand, all-influential event of his eventful reign, was the casting down of the idols and the lifting up of Christ." Second to this in importance, from a christian standpoint, was the conversion of the Ethiopians and Iberians, who are said to have received the Gospel during the same period.

The empire was now divided amongst the three sons of Constantine the Great, Constantine securing Gaul, Spain and Britain; Constantius, the Asiatic provinces; and Constans, Italy and Africa. Constantine favoured the Catholic or orthodox party and recalled Athanasius, but was killed in the year 340 while invading Italy. Constans, who took possession of his dominions, also espoused the catholic cause and befriended Athanasius; but Constantius and all his court, declared themselves for the Arians. A religious war between the brothers now commenced, which, like the generality of religious wars, was characterised by cruelty and injustice on both sides, and reflected strangely on the presumably peaceful nature of the christian religion.

In the meantime Athanasius was again degraded, through the exertions of Constantius and the Arian bishops; and a man of violent character, Gregory of Cappadocia, was forcibly installed in his place. Scenes of further disorder and violence resulted from this iniquitous proceeding, and the attendance of the military was required in order to maintain the intruding bishop in his position. Councils in perplexing number were afterwards convened, and five different creeds were drawn up in as many years, but apparently with little result. In all of these the orthodoxy of Athanasius was again and again confirmed; but no justice was done to the aged bishop till the death of Gregory. He was then once more recalled and reinstated in his office, to the joy of all who loved the truth and held fast the form of sound doctrine.

Constans, who had proved himself from the first a true friend to Athanasius, died in the year 350; and the Arians, protected by the patronage of Constantius, renewed their machinations. Being now, for a third time, driven from his post, Athanasius retired into voluntary exile; and found a refuge for some time in the deserts of Egypt, where he prepared himself by meditation and prayer for further conflict. Meanwhile, those who held his doctrines were persecuted with rigour by the Arian ascendancy; so that the saying went abroad, that the days of Nero and Diocletian had returned.

Constantius died in the year 361, and was succeeded by Julian, who recalled the bishops who had been banished by Constantius; but evidently through no sympathy with their doctrines, for he soon after lapsed into heathenism, and so distinguished himself by his efforts to restore idolatry that he gained for himself the name of Julian the Apostate. He affirmed that the judgments of God on the Jews as foretold in the gospels and elsewhere were a fable, and made an impious attempt to prove this assertion by sending an expedition to Palestine to rebuild the temple. But his plans were frustrated in a miraculous manner. Balls of fire, it is said, issued from the ground with a dreadful noise, and drove the workmen in terror from the spot. The work was therefore abandoned, and the impious designs of Julian were brought to nought.

During the reign of this emperor, a Christian named Basil made himself notorious by his fearless denunciations of Arianism and idolatry. The Arian bishop of Constantinople commanded him to desist from preaching, but Basil preached on in spite of the command. He urged that he held his commission from the Lord and not from man. The bishop then denounced him as a disturber of the public peace; but the emperor (for whose ears the charge was intended) was preparing at the time for an expedition to Persia, and no attention was paid to the accusation. Later on, however, the zeal of this devoted man against Paganism drew upon him the indignation of the heathen, and he was brought before Saturninus, governor of Ancyra, who sent him to the rack. His constancy and patience under the torture excited the wonder of all who saw him, and the emperor was presently acquainted with the facts. His interest was not less excited than the wonder of his subjects, and he gave command for the prisoner to be brought into his presence. The occasion was gladly welcomed by Basil, and, zealous for the emperor's good, he proclaimed the gospel in his presence, and warned him of the danger he incurred, by his despisal of the Son of God. The rebuke, so faithfully administered, was unhappily without effect: Julian received it contemptuously, and shewed the depth of his hatred for the christian religion by his treatment of its minister. He commanded that Basil should be taken back to his dungeon, and his flesh torn from his bones day by day, till his body was completely mangled. The inhuman sentence was carried out, and the brave martyr expired under the torture, on the 28th of June, A.D. 362.

Julian did not long survive him. In the same month (almost on the same day of the month*) of the following year, he was mortally wounded in a skirmish with the Asiatics: and as he lay, weak and helpless, on the ground, was seen to stretch his hand towards heaven, and uttered these words, "Galilean, thou hast conquered!" He then expired.

{*26th of June.}

Julian wrote some books against the Christians which were much applauded by Libanius, but they have fortunately been lost. Not that there was much to fear in them, however, for they seemed to have been characterised more by sophistry than sound reasoning, and were calculated only to deceive those who were willing to be deceived. Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the fathers contemporary with Julian, thus describes the man himself: "It seemed to me that no good was portended by a neck seldom steady, the frequent shrugging of shoulders, an eye scowling and always in motion, together with a phrenzied aspect; a gait irregular and tottering, a nose breathing only contempt and insult, with ridiculous contortions of countenance expressive of the same thing; immoderate and very loud laughter, nods as it were of assent, and drawings back of the head as if in denial, without any visible cause; speech with hesitancy and interrupted by his breathing; disorderly and senseless questions, with answers of a corresponding character, all jumbled together without the least consistency or method." Not a flattering picture this, but the public actions of the emperor accord with it in almost every particular.

Jovian, who succeeded him, was perhaps the first really Christian ruler of the Roman empire; but his reign was short. He desired Athanasius, who had returned to Alexandria on the death of Julian, to act as his instructor and adviser; and he was soon so settled in the truth that neither pagan priest nor Arian heretic had any influence with him. But toleration was extended to all, and though the emperor adhered to the truth, those who opposed it were always to be seen about his person. Indeed, if Socrates can be trusted, who quotes for his authority Themistius, the philosopher, the followers of the great heresiarch were governed by expediency rather than conscience, and regulated their opinions by the opinions of the reigning power. To quote Themistius, "Experience has made it evident that such persons worship the purple and not the deity; and resemble the changeful Euripus,* which sometimes rolls its waves in one direction, and at others the very opposite way." After a happy reign of only eight months Jovian died by suffocation, February 17th, A.D. 364.

{*The Straits of Negropont.}

His successors, Valentinian and Valens, promised well to follow in their father's steps; but the latter was presently won over to Arianism by his wife, and submitted to baptism from an Arian bishop. He then renewed the attacks on Athanasius and his followers, and the aged bishop, after remaining concealed some four months in his father's sepulchre, again fled from Alexandria. Popular opinion, however, would not suffer him to languish in exile, and he was almost immediately recalled. His long and agitated career came to a peaceful close not long after, in the year 373; his death being looked upon as a public calamity by all who watched with solicitude the interests of their divine Master.

The doctrine of the Trinity, as held by Athanasius, may be thus given in his own words: "The Father cannot be the Son, nor the Son the Father; and the Holy Ghost is never called by the name of the Son, but is called the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. The holy Trinity is but one divine nature, and one God, with which nothing created can be joined. This is sufficient for the faithful; human knowledge goes no farther; the cherubims veil the rest with their wings." And it was in contending for these grand truths that the venerable bishop was thrice driven into exile, and branded as a heretic by the false priests of Arius.

Chapter 7.

Development of the Pergamos State.

A.D. 375-500.

In the year 375 Gratian succeeded Valentinian, as emperor in the West; and was only sixteen years of age when he came to the throne. He was a true child of God, and in spite of his youth, was distinguished by an earnestness and piety which would have done credit to much older heads. One of the first acts of his reign was to write a letter to Ambrose, bishop of Milan, in which he requested the bishop to visit him. "Come," he writes, "that you may teach the doctrines of salvation to one who truly believes; not that we may study for contention, but that the revelation of God may dwell more intimately in my heart." His reign was generally popular, and it is doubtful whether the charges of indolence and luxury, brought against him by some historians, have any foundation save in the malice of his enemies.

After the death of his uncle, the emperor Valens (a fierce Arian and implacable persecutor of the catholic party), Gratian became sole ruler of the empire; but feeling unequal to the pressure and anxiety attending this additional responsibility he determined to invest with the imperial purple, Theodosius, a Spaniard of honourable birth. He was the son of Theodosius, a general who had rendered good service in Britain during the reign of Valentinian, by quelling the incursions of the Picts and Scots; and Gratian had every confidence in his energy and ability. Nor was the emperor much at fault in his choice, for Theodosius was a man of decided piety and great parts, and his reign of nearly sixteen years was marked by a display of wisdom and moderation which well befitted a christian ruler. But, like David of old, his character was not without its blemishes, and the records of his life contain some dark and even bloody pages. The following facts must speak for themselves.

There had been a tumult at Thessalonica, owing to the imprisonment of a favourite charioteer, and during the tumult the Roman general Botheric and several officers lost their lives. Theodosius, roused to indignation by this outrage, determined to avenge it; and accordingly issued secret instructions for an indiscriminate slaughter of the inhabitants. Under the pretence that an exhibition of public games was to take place, a vast crowd was collected in the circus of the city, and a fearful scene of slaughter ensued, in which fifteen thousand of the people lost their lives. Ambrose, who had received a promise from the emperor that the offence should be overlooked, was filled with anguish and astonishment when the news reached him, and, retiring to a neighbouring desert, wrote a stern letter of remonstrance to the emperor. The bishop was a man of mild and loving disposition, to whom the poorest of his flock might always find access; but he could be firm when occasion demanded, and he felt that an occasion had come. Whatever might be his private feelings towards the emperor, nothing should be permitted to stand in the way of his duty to God. In His presence all mere sentiment and human distinctions must disappear. The claims of His glory were in question, and they must be vindicated at whatever cost. Ambrose felt his position keenly; yet his grief was not more real than the grief of Theodosius. The emperor's conscience was thoroughly aroused, and his heart found a double burden in the bishop's rebuke and his own blood-guiltiness. To repair to the church was naturally his first thought, but Ambrose heard of his intention and hastened back to Milan to intercept him. The two men encountered each other at the porch, and a remarkable scene was witnessed. As the emperor moved forward to enter the church, the bishop caught his robe, and solemnly adjured him to withdraw. The emperor expostulated, but Ambrose was resolute. Private expressions of grief were unavailing, the calamity was a public one, and the bishop would have nothing but a public confession. In vain the emperor pleaded — Ambrose was firm. An analogous case in David's history afforded no justification for his offence: if he had imitated David in his crime, he should also imitate him in his repentance. "Emperor," said the unyielding bishop, "you know not, it appears to me, the enormity of the murder perpetrated by you; nor, after the cessation of your rage, has reason come to know the crime committed. Verily it does not behove you, decoyed by the splendour of the purple, to be ignorant of the feebleness of the body covered by it. Emperor, you rule over creatures of like nature with yourself, and moreover fellow slaves: for God is the one Master, and Sovereign of all without exception. Now, how shall you receive in such polluted hands the supremely holy body of the Lord? and how, having shed so much blood unjustly, shall you approach the honoured blood to that mouth? Away with you then, and attempt not to swell former transgression by subsequent misdeeds."

Theodosius accepted the rebuke and withdrew. Eight months elapsed, and during that time he shut himself away in the privacy of his palace, where he devoted himself to humiliation and prayer. Meanwhile the Christmas season came round, and on Christmas day he again presented himself at the porch. "I weep," said he, "that the temple of God and consequently heaven, is shut from me which is open to slaves and beggars." But the bishop required proofs of the sincerity of his repentance. "What change of mind," said he, "have you exhibited after so great a transgression? and with what kind of medicines have you healed your wounds?" The emperor answered, "For you is the duty to point out the medicines, but mine is to receive your prescriptions." "Then commit it to writing, as law," said Ambrose, "that they who sub-ministrate the imperial commands, put off for thirty days the punishment of those that have been condemned to death, so that time in the interim may soften the imperial wrath, and that there be space given for mercy and well-regulated change of mind." Theodosius yielded, and commanded that such an order-at-law should be immediately written out. Ambrose now made way for the emperor and he entered the church. Immediately divesting himself of his imperial robes, Theodosius fell on his face, and prayed aloud in the words of Psalm cxix., "My soul cleaveth unto the dust, quicken thou me according to thy word." The scene was heart-rending, and the people, uniting in the emperor's prayer, mingled their tears with his.

Reflecting upon this remarkable occurrence we can fully endorse the following opinion, for which we are indebted to a modern writer "Stripped of the superstition and formalities peculiar to the times, we have a case before us of the most genuine and salutary discipline.... The behaviour of Theodosius was not the result of weakness or pusillanimity; but of a true fear of God; a real feeling of his guilt; a tender conscience; an acknowledgment of the claims of God, to whom all worldly greatness is subject."

We may reasonably expect that a man who could act thus would be a stern disciplinarian when he detected error or crime in others. This he was; and an instance of his severity may be found in the zeal with which he persecuted the Arians, whose numbers increased alarmingly during his reign. This zeal was still further inflamed by the indirect rebuke of an aged bishop, who had offended him by some trivial act of disrespect to one of his sons. "If you are angry," said the bishop, "because a slight has been put upon your son, even so will the heavenly Father be angry with those who refuse to His Son the honours which they pay to Himself." The emperor was struck by this remark, and resolved that henceforth he would use the power which God had given him in the suppression of Arianism and the banishment of all who embraced its evil doctrines. The resolution made, he was not slow in carrying it out. An imperial mandate was issued, and the Arians were driven into banishment. Large numbers of them took refuge among the Goths and Vandals and other barbarous hordes of northern Prussia; where they were in some cases kindly received: so that by this misguided act the evil doctrines were diffused more widely than ever.

But there were other heresies besides that of Arius which the faithful had to do battle with; and some of them of older date. Such for example, was that grotesque confusion of truth and error, of light and darkness, which has come down to us under the name of Manicheism. Its founder was a Persian magician named Mani, who became notorious towards the close of the third century. For some time he professed Christianity, but afterwards gave out that he was the Paraclete, and asserted that he had been favoured with a revelation from God. His Ertang, or marvellous book, was a wild and foolish medley of various philosophies and creeds, in which, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Orientalism found a conspicuous place. It is strange that such an impostor should have found followers; hut the heart of man is open to anything but the gospel, and before a century had passed away the Manicheans had become a numerous and powerful sect. The end of their leader was terrible and admonitory: he was flayed alive by order of the Persian king.

But a heresy of a more subtle and dangerous character than this of Mani was shortly to he spread abroad; a heresy which might rank beside that of Arius, so deadly and pernicious was it. Towards the close of the fourth century a monk named Pelagius arose, who denied the total corruption of the race through the first man's transgression, and taught that we are born in innocence. "The sin of Adam," he said, "hurt himself alone, and not mankind." Logically followed out, this doctrine disallowed the necessity of divine grace, and raised man's conscience and the law to a level with the gospel: indeed, according to Pelagius, a man could be "saved by law as well as by the gospel; and the fall of man and his need of a new birth were dismissed as pious imaginations." The virtues of philosophers and patriarchs were the fruits of their own intrinsic excellence, and proved "how great was the goodness of nature."

But God, who sees the end from the beginning, had already prepared Himself a man to go forth against this new enemy. This man was Augustine, bishop of Hippo, one of the brightest lights that ever dawned upon the church.

He sprang from a noble family, and was born at Thegaste, a little village in Numidia, A.D. 354. His father was a pagan, but his mother was a woman of much piety, whose faithful and loving counsel Augustine was never weary of recalling in after life. Ambrose knew her well, and once said to her, "Be of good courage, a child of so many prayers and tears can never be lost." Augustine received a good education, and quickly came to the front as the first pupil in the school of rhetoric; but even in youth he was noted for his depraved ways. By his own account he would deceive "his tutor, masters, and parents with innumerable lies," and was so enslaved by greediness that he would "commit thefts from his parents' cellar and table." His very conscience was stifled. "I was grown deaf," he says in his Confessions, "by the clankings of the chain of my mortality, the punishment of the pride of my soul; and I strayed further from Thee, and Thou lettest me alone, and I was tossed about, and wasted and dissipated; and I boiled over in my fornications, and Thou heldest Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy!" The father of Augustine died while he was yet young; but not before Monica's prayers for her husband had been answered, and he had found peace for his soul in Monica's Saviour. Thus encouraged, the pious woman went on praying for her son; feeling confident that her faith would be rewarded, though the answer might seem to linger. From his nineteenth to his twenty-eighth year, Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric; and, removing to Carthage during that period, he immediately took his place as the foremost rhetorician of that city. Yet his evil ways continued; and he acknowledges that the "hunt after the emptiness of popular praise, down even to theatrical applauses, and poetic prizes, and strifes for grassy garlands, and follies of shows," was the ruling passion of his life there. Nor was this all. To his thirst for popularity was added "a seduced and seducing lust," which kept him in bonds of wretchedness many years. A copy of Cicero's "Hortensius"came into his hands about this time, and gave him some serious thoughts about himself; but human philosophy proved inadequate for his deeper needs, and the book did him no permanent good. After this it was his misfortune to fall in with some books of Manichean philosophy, which drew him still further from the truth; and it was not till A.D. 384, when he visited Milan, that he was able to disengage himself from the wildering meshes of that network of lies. Here, under the advice of Ambrose, he began to study the scriptures for himself, and with the happiest results. He was thoroughly aroused; and saw for the first time his moral deformity in the mirror of divine truth. He was amazed at his wickedness, and became from that time an earnest, though hopeless seeker after God. Hearing on one occasion of the conversion of some Roman nobles, he exclaimed, "These people take the kingdom of heaven by force, while we with our learning are wallowing in sin." But hope dawned at last, and after a wholesome though painful discipline of some months, he was converted through the instrumentality of Ambrose. His mother — her last earthly wish gratified died the following year; exclaiming, in the language of the aged Simeon, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."

After his conversion, Augustine remained three years in retirement, during which time he studied the scriptures with profit. On his re-appearance in public he was ordained presbyter, and became a celebrated preacher at Hippo Regius, where he was elected bishop some years later. Throughout the remainder of his life he continued a faithful minister of the truth, and specially distinguished himself by the ability and vigour with which he exposed the doctrines of Mani and Pelagius. It is asserted by many that the zeal of Augustine against Pelagius, led him into the opposite extreme of Fatalism, and perhaps the charge is just. Yet the saying of Jeremy Taylor, that "when Pelagius had puddled the stream, Augustine was so angry, that he stamped and disturbed it more," is more witty than truthful. The free grace of God was ever his favourite theme, for, like Paul, he had learnt from what he had been delivered, and could glory in the apostle's words, "By grace we are saved through faith, and that not of ourselves; it is the gift of God."

The schism of the Donatists also engaged the attention, and excited the opposition, of this devoted man, and drew from him the sternest denunciations. The Donatists took their name from their leader Donatus, who was a schismatic of the most extreme kind, though sound in doctrine and of unimpeachable morality. So far back as the year 311, he had opposed the election of one Caecilian to the bishopric of Carthage, on the plea that a bishop named Felix, who had taken a prominent part in the consecration, was a Traditor; that is, a person who had delivered up copies of the sacred books during the persecution under Diocletian: but other motives seem to have been at the root of the matter. The clergy and people of Carthage had elected their bishop, and proceeded to his consecration without consulting the bishops of Numidia, a contiguous and subordinate province, and the troubles which followed were really due to the jealousies of the latter, and nothing else.

At first the opposing parties had been content to carry their differences to the emperor (Constantine); but when the synods of inquiry which he had instituted at Rome and Arles had decided in favour of Caecilian and his party, and Constantine himself had placed his seal to their decision, the Donatists (who had been the first to invite his interference) had revolted against his authority, and compelled him to more rigorous measures.

At this point they had been joined by a number of lawless men, of no faith or religion, who became the soldiers of their party, and quickly made themselves notorious by their excesses. These were the Circumcellions.* Armed with clubs and other weapons they overran the surrounding country, and spread terror and desolation in all directions. They expelled the catholic people, violated the women, murdered the children, threw the sacramental elements to the dogs, burnt the altars, melted down the chalices, and committed other lawless acts too numerous for mention. As a necessary consequence the Donatist faction lost prestige from that time forward.

{*The word means "around the cottages." The name was given them by the orthodox, because of their habit of going from cottage to cottage, enforcing their demands.}

But long before Augustine took up his pen in defence of the truth, the armies of Constans had purged the country of these dangerous outlaws; and when the bishop began to write, it was against the old schism of the Donatists and not the excesses of the Circumcellions. His zeal was not thrown away. So vigorously did he expose 'this dangerous and seditious spirit,' — alike in his writings, his public discourses, and his private conversation, that he all but ruined the Donatist cause in Africa, and destroyed the sympathy which their sufferings had awakened in other parts of Christendom. The faithful bishop died at Hippo, in the year 430, just as the Vandals were besieging the place.

Meanwhile Arcadius and Honorius had succeeded their father, Theodosius, on the throne, and Rome's darkest days had set in. The empire, indeed, had long been on the decline; and was seen to be approaching its dissolution even when Theodosius was raised to a share in the government. During his reign the eastern and western empires had been re-united for the last time; and no sooner had his death become known than hordes of barbarians poured in from all parts. The Goths were the first to make an incursion; and having succeeded in their attempt to pass the Danube, nation after nation followed their example, till the mighty deluge of human life had swept through Europe, and even cast its waves upon the coast of Africa. In the year 400, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, invaded Italy, and was no sooner repulsed than a new host of barbarians, under their leader Radagaisus, crowded in from the shores of the Baltic. They overran Germany and Gaul, and penetrated even to Spain; but eventually were hemmed in by the Roman army among the Apennines, where vast multitudes were taken prisoners and thousands perished by exposure. But Rome, sunk in sloth and luxury, had neither energy nor strength to follow up her advantage. Three times in the reign of Honorius, who had taken up his residence at Ravenna, was the ancient city at the mercy of the barbarians. On the first occasion, (A.D. 408,) Alaric, king of the Goths, led his troops in triumph to the very gates of the city, when the citizens purchased his withdrawal by the sacrifice of their wealth; on the second occasion, (A.D. 451,) Attila, king of the Huns, called Godegisel or God's scourge, having laid waste the country as he went along, was only persuaded to leave the city after infinite difficulty: and on the third occasion, (A.D. 455,) Genseric, king of the Vandals, brought his army up to the walls, when they swarmed over the city like locusts, leaving only ruin and desolation in their wake. Such was the awful end of ancient Rome and so did God sweep away her corruptions, and visit upon her the blood of His martyred people.

In A.D. 476, the western empire was finally broken up; and Odoacer, king of the Heruli, assumed the title of king of Italy. He reigned fourteen years, and then resigned his kingdom to Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, a man of wisdom and prudence, in whose reign the country settled down after its long struggle, and began to enjoy once more the comforts of peace.

For many years before the fall of Rome, there had been a goodly number from among her enemies who had embraced Christianity; but as it was in most cases that spurious form of it which the Arians had disseminated after their expulsion by Theodosius, we need not wonder that the orthodox Christians were much persecuted when the barbarians became masters of the empire. Yet it is worthy of note that during the three invasions of Italy, from A.D. 408 to 455, when the soldiers of Alaric, Attila, and Genseric, were going hither and thither pillaging the country, the costly churches of the Christians were scarcely touched; and deference was everywhere paid to the bishops. Indeed, the retreat of Attila from the walls of Rome was owing in no small measure to the promptness of Leo I., bishop of Rome, who confronted him in his camp and so wrought upon him by his remonstrances, that the fiery Hun wheeled about with his army, and left the city by precipitate marches.

But though the Lord had thus delivered His people from many dangers, Christians had been preparing troubles for themselves by their own follies. The lives of the clergy (with some bright exceptions) had become notoriously bad; and in Rome the condition of the church was so abandoned that the bishopric became, at one time, an object of competition; and two candidates, Laurentius and Symmachus, in their scramble for the office, did not scruple to bring the gravest criminal charges against each other. The daring effrontery of the clergy is strikingly illustrated by the fact, that Martin, bishop of Tours (in many respects a faithful and devoted Christian), suffered himself to be waited upon at table by the wife of the Emperor Maximus, dressed in the habit of a servant!*

{*There is another story of this bishop to the same point. He was dining with the emperor on a similar occasion, when the latter handed him his goblet, requesting him to drink first. Martin ostentatiously complied; but before returning the goblet to the emperor, he passed it to his own chaplain, remarking that princes and potentates were below the dignity of priests and bishops.}

An ambition for distinction in the church was also consuming the energies of many less gifted Christians, and to meet this a host of new functionaries had been introduced; so that we begin to hear of sub-deacons, readers, attendants, acolyths, exorcists, and doorkeepers. But beyond all this, the worship of images and invocation of saints had become common; and the persecution of one Nestorius for objecting to the term "Mother of God" as applied to the Virgin Mary, told, but too plainly, whither the church was drifting.

It was out of this confusion and manifest declension on all sides that Monachism arose. Antony, a native of Coma, in Upper Egypt, has the doubtful honour of being the first monk. Hermits had existed before him, but he was the first to adopt the life of the cloister, and to retire absolutely from the world. It is said that he was led to this step when quite a youth, by hearing those words of the Saviour, "Sell all thou hast and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." He shortly after disposed of his property, and retired to a tomb, in which he remained immured ten years. Here he became famous for his piety and asceticism, and many from all classes resorted to him. Afterwards he retired to a ruined castle near the Red Sea, where he remained other twenty years. An early historian informs us, that "his sustenance was bread only, and salt but his drink was water; and his meal-time the setting sun. Yet he oftentimes staid fasting two days and more. But he kept ever watchful (following the Saviour's words, 'What I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch'), whole nights as one might say, and was intent upon prayer until day. But if haply he even tasted of sleep, he slept a little instant upon a mat, but generally on the ground, making the same bare ground his pillow; moreover he was particularly gentle, and most humane, and discreet, and courageous; agreeable to those that met and talked with him, and inoffensive to those with whom he disputed." There is little doubt that Antony was a true Christian, and when the persecution under Maximus broke out he proved his devotion to the Lord by coming from his retirement and sharing in the dangers of his brethren: but the storm had no sooner subsided than he disappeared, and found a new seclusion in the cave of some lofty mountain. His last appearance was in the year 352, when the spread of Arianism once more called him from his retirement. He was then a hundred years old, and the rumour of his re-appearance attracted thousands to Alexandria. His influence was immense, Arianism received a severe check, and many conversions resulted from his visit to the city. He died in the year 356, at the advanced age of one hundred and five years.

Monachism spread with the reputation of St. Antony, and before the close of the century all the waste places of the christian world were dotted over with monasteries. Pachomius drew together a little colony of monks on the island of Tabenne, where they were distinguished from the rest by their linen tunics and black frocks: Ammon drew together another and larger colony in the hilly desert of Nitria; Macarius another, in the vast solitude of Scetis. Hilarion established several colonies in Syria; Sabas, the celebrated monastery of Mar Seba, in Palestine; and Basil, of Cappadocia, introduced the ascetic profession into Asia Minor. The contentious Jerome, while secretary to the bishop of Rome, established several monasteries in the western empire, and St. Martin, abbot-bishop of Tours, furthered his labours by founding similar retreats in Gaul.

Until the close of the fifth century, all these widely-scattered institutions were under the control of the bishops; and the monks, in spite of their great reputation and growing wealth, were only recognised as laymen by the churches. Leo I. expressly forbade them to engage in any priestly offices, or to become the religious instructors of the people; although, on the other hand, the monasteries were looked upon as schools and nurseries for the ministry. This apparent inconsistency may be accounted for by the fact, that monks who had been ordained, "immediately quitted the cloister and engaged in the duties of the secular clergy." At the close of the fifth century, however, they appealed to the Pope of Rome, and requested permission to place themselves under his protection, a request which he was ready enough to grant, being well acquainted with their wealth and influence. Thus it was that monasteries, abbeys, priories and nunneries became subject to the See of Rome.

The establishment of convents of nuns during the fourth century was owing greatly to the activity of the monk Pachomius, of whom we have already spoken; and before his death there were no fewer than 27,000 such recluses in Egypt alone.

But even the rigid mortifications and ascetic habits of a monastic life were not sufficient in all cases; and the absurd lengths to which some deluded victims of Satan were encouraged to go, almost exceeds belief. Thus Simeon, a monk of Syria, passing from one step of fanaticism to another, erected a pillar six cubits high (each cubit being eighteen inches), and dwelt on it four years. On a second of twelve cubits high (eighteen feet) he lived three years; on a third of twenty-two cubits (thirty-three feet), ten years; and on a fourth of forty cubits, or sixty feet high, which the people built for him, he spent the last twenty years of his life.

And even this insanity had imitators, for after Simeon's death, a sect of men arose, who made similar erections for themselves, and gloried in the name of "Pillar-men."

Chapter 8.

The Dawn of the Thyatira Period.

A.D. 500-600.

With the sixth century begins the Thyatira period of the church's history; in other words, the popery of the dark ages. It carries us on to the time of the Reformation, although, of course, Romanism itself goes on to the end. It is a time of growing darkness around, but of growing devotedness among real saints — on the whole, an intensely solemn epoch in the history of Christendom. In glancing for a moment at the beginning of this new period, it is necessary that we retrace our steps.

In the year 313, the first edict in favour of Christianity was published. Constantine had entered into a secret alliance with Licinius, to accomplish the overthrow of the usurper Maximus; and he used the occasion to induce Licinius to revoke the persecuting edicts of Diocletian, and to unite with him in framing a new edict in favour of Christianity. Licinius consented, and when the two emperors met at Milan, they drew up the famous Edict of Milan, sometimes called the Magna Charta of Christendom. It was a proclamation of universal toleration, and contained, among other things, the following important sentences: "We have thus granted the Christians a free and absolute liberty of exercising their religion. And not only is this liberty absolutely granted to them, but all others who wish for it have also the privilege allowed them of following their own religious profession." "Also, that as to any of the places of worship where the Christians were accustomed formerly to convene, if they shall have been purchased by any person, either from our exchequer, or from any one else, they shall restore the same to the said Christians without fee or demand of the price paid for them, and without impediment or evasion." The church welcomed with extravagant joy this sudden turn in her affairs, and, in the blindness of excessive gratitude, withdrew the confidence which belonged to her Head in heaven, and nestled comfortably down under the wing of the Roman eagle. Yet there could never be a complete amalgamation of the two parties. One or the other must assume the pre-eminence, and for awhile the church was content to take the lower place. The gold had but just emerged from the furnace, and could afford to remain awhile amongst the ashes, whatever might be the future that awaited it.

With the death of Constantine, however, the strife for supremacy commenced; and the bishops of Rome, as a preliminary step, boldly put forth their claims to universal government in the church, as the successors of St. Peter. It seems, indeed, to have been a growing belief among Christians, that St. Peter was the founder of the Roman see; and when Leo I. asserted, that "the apostle was called Petra, the rock, by which he is constituted the foundation," and admonished the brethren "to acknowledge that he is the primate of all bishops, and that Christ, who denieth His gifts to none, yet giveth unto none except through him," he found thousands who were ready to receive the statement, and to listen submissively to the admonition.

These pretensions would certainly have surprised the early bishops of Rome, for the idea of supremacy and apostolic succession never entered their heads. Indeed, it is a significant fact that, though their names are known in history, the order in which they succeeded each other is not known, and their histories — if ever they were written — have been lost in the mist of ages. True they had a certain pre-eminence, but this was only because of the political importance of the city; and the same pre-eminence was given to the bishops of Antioch and Alexandria. Indeed, these three cities were respectively the capitals of the European, the Asiatic, and the African divisions of the empire, and it was for this sufficient reason that their bishops took precedence of the rest. Nearly a century and a half later, Gregory the Great (the pope whose history we are about to consider) acknowledged an equality of rank in the three bishops; a fact which shews how far the roots of the papacy were removed from the primitive sources of Christianity. In the course of an epistle to the bishop of Alexandria he says, "And thus, though the apostles may be many, yet the see of the chief of the apostles (which belongs to me though it is in three places) prevailed in authority solely by virtue of his (Peter's) chiefship. For it is he which exalted the see (Rome) on which he condescended to take his rest and finish the present life. It is he who adorned the see (Alexandria), to which he sent the evangelist, his disciple. It is he who established the see (Antioch) in which he sat for seven years, though he was to leave it." In another letter to the same bishop, who had addressed him as "Universal Pope," he says, "I pray your most sweet holiness to address me no more with the proud appellation of 'Universal Pope,' since that which is given to another beyond what reason requires is subtracted from yourself. If you style me 'Universal Pope,' you deny that you are at all that which you own me to be universally. Away with words which puff up vanity and wound charity." These quotations, however carry us somewhat in advance of our subject, which is rather to prove the progress of the apostasy, than the feeble efforts of pious popes to avert it.

The sixth century was extremely favourable to the growth of the papal power, for, with the exception of Justinian, the emperors had neither the ability nor energy, even if they had the inclination, to oppose its pretensions. As for Justinian, though he loved to dabble in ecclesiastical affairs, his attention was concentrated in the East, and he found enough to occupy his mind in the endless and stormy controversies of his bishops. He was orthodox to the last degree, and tried by every means to suppress heresy; often neglecting the affairs of state to prosecute this hopeless end. By his command the schools of philosophy, which had flourished for centuries at Athens, were closed, and Pagans were everywhere prohibited from holding public offices: yet the wisdom of the prohibition is more than doubtful, as it led to the greatest hypocrisy, and many adopted the christian profession for purposes of worldly advancement. Moreover, this act of the emperor, combined with the discouragement given to profane learning at a later period by Gregory the Great, led to that decay of learning which produced such lamentable results in the Dark Ages.

Gregory was the only pope of any note during this century; and his character may be taken as typical of most of the pious prelates of his time. It presents a strange mixture of meekness and assumption; of simple piety and extravagant superstition; of self-denial and priestly-ambition; of mildness and intolerance; of personal purity and ecclesiastical corruptness. Looked at as Gregory the man, there is much — very much — to inspire respect and affection; looked at as Gregory the pope, he is the haughty, intolerant, deluded ecclesiastic which every occupier of the papal chair must be.

Yet it is gratifying to add, that Gregory's elevation to the see of Rome was not a distinction of his own seeking. The position was forced upon him by the clamorous desire of the people, who loved and respected him for his fervent piety and self-denying attentions to the poor. His previous history conclusively shews, that he shrank from worldly recognition and applause.

On the death of his father, who was a senator of Rome and the grandson of pope Felix, he succeeded to an ample fortune. But Gregory was not the man to settle down in selfish ease and enjoyment. He received his riches as the steward of God, and six monasteries presently arose in Sicily as the witnesses of his faithful stewardship. He also devoted his own mansion at Rome to similar purposes, and from that moment entered upon the monastic life himself. From the lowest order of monks, whose most menial duties he considered not beneath his dignity, he gradually rose to the position of abbot in his own monastery; where he spent his time in prayerful study of the scriptures and the most self-denying exercises. It must have been about this time that that pleasing incident occurred, the circumstances of which are so familiar to English readers. We refer to Gregory's visit to the slave market, when his attention was arrested by the beautiful faces of two English boys, who were offered there for sale. Being informed from whence the children came, and that the inhabitants of our island were all heathen, he exclaimed, "Alas! that the prince of darkness should possess forms of such loveliness! That such beauty of countenance should want that better beauty of soul!" and when he heard that they were called Angles, he added, "call them angels rather, for they have angelic faces, and it is a thousand pities that they are not partakers of the glory that shall be revealed before the angels of God." He then inquired, "to what province do they belong," and being told Deira, "Surely," said he, they must be rescued de ira" — from the wrath of God "and called to the mercy of Christ." The missionary zeal of Gregory was roused by this trifling incident, and he obtained the pope's permission to proceed to England: but he was not three days on his journey before he was summoned to return. The affection of the people had proved stronger than their self-denial, and they had 'risen in pious mutiny' to demand his recall.

After this Gregory was not permitted to return to his monastery, and when the pope Pelagius died, in the year 590, he was elected, though much against his wish, to fill the vacant chair. Yet in the multiplicity of cares attending his new office, Gregory did not forget the claims of England; and one of the first acts of his pontificate was to equip a band of missionary monks, under Augustine, and despatch them thither. They landed at Thanet a few months later, but found on their arrival that the gospel had been already planted in the country, and that many of the people were converted. The queen of Ethelbert (a daughter of Clotaire I., king of France) was one of these; and owing to her powerful influence the monks were kindly received, and a great gospel work began.

When and under what circumstances the gospel was first introduced to the country is not certainly known; but it is probable that even in the apostles' day the light had penetrated; and there are reasons for believing that the "Claudia," of Paul's second epistle to Timothy, was the daughter of a British king. Be that as it may, it is beyond question, that the gospel had been preached in all the British Islands long before Augustine and his monks arrived. The following facts will prove this.

As regards England — in addition to the testimony of christian writers of the second century that there were professors of Christianity in every country known to the Romans — we have the information, that several bishops from England were present at the general council of the fourth century; though the withdrawal of the Roman troops about this time almost neutralised their former influence and importance. Indeed, as is well known, the departure of these forces opened the north of England to the Picts and Scots, who invaded the country year after year, spreading desolation in all directions. It was then, too, that the British chiefs, perplexed and harassed by the repeated incursions of these invincible freebooters, appealed to the Saxons for assistance. The Saxons responded to the call, but having fulfilled the purpose for which they had been invited, displayed no willingness to return. On the contrary, they invited reinforcements from the North, who poured in upon the Island in overwhelming numbers; so that the Britons began to find, that in escaping from one danger they had fallen into a worse. These Saxon and Angle invaders were Pagans, merciless and cruel in warfare, and their hatred to Christianity was evidenced by the zeal with which they sought to exterminate it. Some Christians, however, contrived to escape with their lives, and took refuge among the mountains and rocky fastnesses of Wales and Cornwall, where they were permitted to remain without much molestation till the arrival of Augustine with his monks.

Ireland and Scotland were likewise favoured with the gospel long before the preaching of Gregory's mission; the former by the labours of Patrick, a Scotchman, who had been captured by pirates and sold as a slave in the sister country; the latter by the labours of an Irishman named Columba, some century and a half later. Thus the apostle of Ireland was a Scotchman, and the apostle of Scotland was an Irishman. Both these missionaries seem to have been exceptionally pious and enlightened men, a fact which is the more noteworthy when we consider the times in which they lived. We can only briefly refer to them in these pages.

St. Patrick was converted during the six years of his captivity, through calling to remembrance some passage from the Scriptures, which he had learnt at his mother's knee, in his home on the Clyde. He thus alludes to the event: "I was sixteen years old, and knew not the true God; but in that strange land the Lord opened my unbelieving eyes, and, although late, I called my sins to mind, and was converted with my whole heart to the Lord my God, who regarded my low estate, had pity on my youth and ignorance, and consoled me as a father consoles his children." St. Patrick's real name was Succat, but when he started on his missionary journey to Ireland it was changed to Patrick, to signify his patrician descent: in addition to this he was ordained bishop of the Irish before setting out, by his uncle, the famous Martin of Tours. His labours in the gospel were amazing, and Ireland presently became the most enlightened country of Western Christendom; nor did she acknowledge the supremacy of Rome till the middle of the twelfth century.*

{*Scotland was also independent of the Roman see till about this time.}

Columba, who left the island with a band of twelve monks in the year 565, reached the Hebrides and landed at Mull, a barren rock to the south of the basaltic caverns of Staffa. The island of Iona was adopted as their home, and from thence, a few years later, the gospel penetrated to the mainland. For centuries after, the humble monastery of Iona was the most famous for learning and piety among all the monasteries of the western world. South of the Grampians, Palladius and Niman appear to have laboured with success; the former was sent by pope Celestine, in the year 431, to the Christians of Scotland — some say, to refute the errors of Pelagius. Of Niman little or nothing is now known.*

{*The monks of Scotland were called Culdees, and three explanations are given for the origin of the name. 1. That it is an abbreviation of Cultores Dei, worshippers of God. 2. That it is derived from the Gaelic expression Celi-de, servants of God. 3. That it is derived from the Gaelic Cuil or Ceal, a sheltered place or retreat.}

Judging by the number of converts, the mission of Gregory was a success; for it is said that no fewer than ten thousand heathens were baptised on Christmas Day of the year 597. More missionaries followed as the result of this success, and with them a host of Romish toys and ornaments; including the pallium which was to invest Augustine as Archbishop of Canterbury. The haughty spirit of the monk-missionary was fearlessly displayed on his elevation to this new dignity; and when a conference of British and Roman clergy was held by the river Severn a few weeks later, he boldly required of the former an acknowledgment of the universal supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, and conformity to the ritual of the Latin church. But the British clergy, who traced their reception of Christianity from the east and not from Rome, steadily refused the demand. Augustine argued, but he argued in vain. The people were firm, though peaceable; and their quiet demeanour irritated the monk. At last he wrathfully exclaimed, If you will not receive brethren who bring you peace, you shall receive enemies who bring you war. If you will not unite with us in shewing the Saxons the way of life, you shall receive from them the stroke of death." The prediction had its fulfilment shortly after his death; when 1250 monks of Bangor were slaughtered in cold blood by the army of Edelfrid. Some say that Augustine connived at the bloody deed, and was actually preparing for it during the closing days of his life; but the affair is shrouded in mystery, and we will gladly hope otherwise.

This rapid glance at the missionary labours of the past three centuries would not be complete without the mention of two other famous evangelists, Columbanus and St. Gall. They sailed together from Ireland, about the year 590, with a colony of monks, and landed in Gaul. Refusing the invitation of Gontran, king of Burgundy, to settle in his dominions, they obtained permission to encamp among the barren mountains of the Vosges, where for many months they were content to subsist on the coarsest food — the berries, barks of trees, and wild honey which the forest afforded — and to live in logwood cabins and mud huts. But their work was owned of God, and through their instrumentality the gospel spread through Lorraine, Switzerland, and Northern Italy: while many souls were converted, and monasteries sprung up in all directions. St. Gall is now honoured as the apostle of Switzerland.

Yet, say what we will of the missionary zeal of this period, things were growing darker on all sides, and the corrupting power of Rome was alarmingly on the increase. The simplicity of Christian worship was continually suffering by fresh innovations, and more than one new doctrine of a questionable character had crept into the church. It was in the time of Gregory that the abominable notion of purgatory was first mooted. He himself spoke of "purification by a fiery probation as a settled fact;" little thinking that this heathenish figment would be made the ground, in future years, for the sale of indulgences. Yet his thoughts on the subject were only vague: almost as vague indeed, as the speculations of Augustine, who was the first to suggest the doctrine of a middle state. Even to this day there is much uncertainty on the subject with Romish writers; and the visions of purgatory, with which monks and priests have been favoured from time to time, are strangely contradictory. Perhaps the most popular idea is that supplied by Drithelm, who pretends to have made a journey to purgatory on purpose to collect information. He was accompanied by an angelic guide, who conducted him, by way of the rising sun, to a huge valley enclosed on the one side by great furnaces, and on the other by hills of snow and ice. The valley was tenanted by human souls, which a strong wind buffeted from side to side in angry sport; now driving them into the roasting furnaces, and now on to the freezing hills. Here the miserable captives were to remain till the last day, when they would be translated to heaven, unless by means of alms or masses they were released beforehand. It was not however till the superstitious Middle Ages that, these absurd stories were circulated among the credulous.

Most of the religion that was now abroad appealed more to the carnal senses than the spiritual perceptions of men; and in some cases it might have been even described (using the apostle's words) as 'worldly, sensual and devilish.' Those who wished to indulge their love of pleasure under the cloak of religion, could find abundant opportunity on the feast days of the Latin church, which were arranged after the manner of the Lupercalia and other heathen festivals; while the superstitious mind could find every encouragement for its fatal credulity among the wonder-working bones of the saints, or the glittering crucifixes and consecrated candles which adorned the altars. The simplicity of christian worship was buried under the pomp of ritual; and those who went to adore the Lord came away, confessing they had only been dazzled by the priests; indeed, it became a complaint with some, that the celebration of divine service in the churches, was more burdensome than even the Jewish ceremonial could have been. When a presbyter named Vigilantius, a native of Commence, in Aquitaine, had had the boldness to protest against these innovations, though at a much earlier period, he had incurred the hot displeasure of Jerome, and had been glad to purchase peace by lapsing into silence.

It was, indeed, a sorry day for the poor church; for Jezebel was carrying on her seductions, and none seemed able or willing to withstand her.

Chapter 9.

The Nestorians and Paulicians; with Some Account of the Rise and Spread of Mahometanism.

A.D. 600-700.

The darkness which was gathering over Christendom grew darker as the years rolled on, and towards the beginning of the seventh century the ignorance of the clergy and the superstition of the people had become amazing. The decree of Gregory the Great, discouraging the pursuit and acquisition of profane knowledge, had produced this deplorable result, the extent of which may be imagined by the fact, that many of the clergy were unable to write their own names. The Greek language was almost forgotten; even the Bible was but little read; and the bishops, unable to compose their own discourses, made up for their lack of learning by shameless filchings from the homilies of the fathers. Yet even this was not an unmixed evil; for their lives, in most instances, were so dissolute and bad, that a sermon of their own (granting the ability to write one) must have been either a piece of insincere verbiage, or an impeachment of the moral law and a denial of the gospel. Almost the only literature circulated among the people consisted in the wildest legends of the martyrs (such as would often raise a smile were the subjects trifled with less solemn), and fictitious lives of the saints. Yet these were read with avidity, and people could be found everywhere who were superstitious and ignorant enough to believe them. The pride and avarice of the clergy, which had hitherto been peculiar to their order, had now found its way into the monasteries those institutions which really owed their existence to the efforts of pious men to escape from these very evils and it is no exaggeration to say, that many of these places were literally honeycombed with vice. There were frequent squabbles, too, between the monks and clergy, owing to the encroachments of the latter upon the wide and fertile districts belonging to the monasteries. These districts were unquestionably the property of the monks; it was their industry which had changed them from barren wildernesses into fruitful plantations; and how the clergy contrived to support a claim it is difficult to imagine. The disputes, however, were never settled, for the priests were as insatiable in their avarice as Ahab, and the monks shewed no disposition to suffer joyfully the spoiling of their goods.

Yet this deplorable declension on all sides is not surprising, when we consider the examples of the popes, whose arrogance and impiety seemed daily to increase. Their ambition was unbounded and insatiable, and no means were too base to attain their ends. During the first half of the seventh century, they obtained a great accession of power by means of the usurper Phocas, who had murdered the emperor Maurice and established himself on the throne. For several years prior to this, a strife for supremacy had been raging between the rival bishops of Rome and Constantinople, and Phocas to conciliate the Italians, who of course supported their own bishop, declared in favour of the former. Thus the title of "Universal Bishop" became theirs by imperial authority; and the foundation, upon which all their after pretensions were built, was firmly laid. This had taken place in the previous century, during the pontificate of the first Gregory and the one great blot upon his character in unquestionably this, that he sanctioned the murderous act of Phocas, and openly rejoiced in the tidings of his success.

Her ecclesiastical supremacy thus established, the future popes of Rome began to turn their attention to the temporal advancement of the Papal see and political intriguing began to be a familiar element in the councils of the Vatican. At present the pope of Rome, though Universal Bishop and therefore supreme dictator in the church, was still in subjection to the civil power, and his movements were necessarily much hampered by the arbitrary will of the emperors. He was liable, in common with the meanest citizen, to be arraigned before the civil courts of Rome an event which actually took place in the year 653, when Pope St. Martin was not only brought up before a tribunal of justice, but imprisoned for his offence, and afterwards doomed to perpetual exile.

Those who advocated the temporal claims of Rome were not wanting in arguments, and in later years, when the object of the Papacy was in measure attained, Pope Adrian's reasoning took somewhat this form. If the pope is Christ's vicar on earth, then whatever comes under the dominion of Christ comes under the dominion of the pope: but Christ's kingdom extends over all, therefore the whole world is under the jurisdiction of the pope. It would be interesting to know what Adrian would have made of those words of the divine Founder of Christianity, "My kingdom is not of this world."

However, the occasion for asserting the jurisdiction of Rome in this way was not yet ripe, and she well knew that her first business must be the extension, and, at the same time, the consolidation of her spiritual empire. But this could only be accomplished by the missionary labours of her sons, and hence every facility was offered to evangelising monks and others in the prosecution of their arduous labours. It was of little consequence to Rome whether the gospel was being preached or perverted, whether souls were being born again for eternity or were being led blindfold into hell: all she looked for was converts to her cause, who would acknowledge her supremacy, and yield unquestioning obedience to her wishes. At a later period, when her temporal power also would he established, and the gospel, perhaps, would prove an awkward element in her system, she might take steps to purge it out — but not now. Missionaries, so long as they advocated her claims, might preach anything else they pleased; all she wanted was proselytes for the extension of her spiritual power. Hence it is no matter for surprise that the gospel seed was widely sown in some places even during this period of growing darkness, or that Rome herself sanctioned the labours of her missionary sons.

St. Kilian, a Scotchman, was one of these. He settled at Wurzburg, in the year 685, and carried on his labours under much encouragement. His preaching was widely blessed among the eastern Franks, and the Duke of Thuringia, Gozbert by name, was one of the first to submit to the ordinance of baptism at his hands. But a martyr's death awaited him. He was sacrificed, together with all his monks, to the treachery of Geilana, the sister-in-law of Gozbert, who had been living with the duke as his paramour. The duke had undertaken to dissolve the guilty connection, but during his absence from home the jealous woman ordered the missionary band to be arrested, and having shut them up in a stable, they were beheaded in her presence.

Willibrord, a Northumbrian, was another of those who went out to the heathen under the auspices of Rome. He left England in the year 690, with a band of twelve, and made Friesland the scene of his mission labours. There is a story told of the king of the Frieslanders, Radbod by name, which may have a passing though painful interest for some readers. He had been prevailed upon, after much opposition, to receive baptism; but before going down into the water, he put this question to Willibrord, "What think you, teacher, of my forefathers? Do you suppose the greater number of them to be in paradise, or in the nether world?" On receiving the hesitating answer, "I fear that most of them are in the nether world," he turned abruptly from the water, saying, "Then I think it better that I should go where the greater number of them reside." In the year 696 Willibrord forwarded a report of his successes to Rome, and was consecrated archbishop of Utrecht as a reward for his services.

Of Winifred, the apostle of Germany (canonised under the title of St. Boniface), we must speak in another chapter, as he belongs more strictly to the eighth century, in the history of which he plays an important part.

Yet though St. Kilian, Willibrord and Winifred were the chief preachers sent out by Rome during the seventh century, the missionary records of that period are far from complete with the mention of these men. It is a remarkable fact, that the gospel was preached in its greatest purity by men outside the pale of the Romish church; by men who were stigmatised and anathematised as heretics by the successive occupants of the papal chair. Such were the Nestorians and Paulicians, to whom we now turn with a feeling of pleasure and relief; although the little we know of them is principally derived from their enemies.

In the year 636, the Nestorians* penetrated as far as China, and preached the gospel with great success. An interesting marble monument, sixty feet long and five feet broad, containing a record of their labours, was discovered near Singapore by some Jesuits, in the seventeenth century. The characters inscribed upon it are partly in Syriac and partly in Chinese, and are arranged in twenty-eight parallel columns, each of sixty-two words. In addition to the names of some Nestorian missionaries, the monument contains an account of the introduction of Christianity into the country, and a confession of faith, such as few Christians could object to. The Nestorians laboured on in China till towards the close of the eighth century; when the government grew jealous of their influence, and it is presumed that they were either exterminated or expelled the territory. Others of their missionaries worked their way as far as Persia, Syria, and the Malabar coast, but they do not appear to have penetrated far into the interior of India.

{*The followers of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, mentioned in chapter 7, who maintained the co-existence, but not the union, of the two natures in the person of Christ. It was Nestorius who objected to the term "Mother of God," as applied to the Virgin Mary.}

The origin of the body of Christians called Paulicians is remarkable, and leads us to the first mention of the Mahometans, the founder of whose religion began to formulate his extraordinary doctrines in this century. A certain deacon having been taken prisoner by the Mahometans, contrived to make his escape, and was hospitably received by one Constantine, a Gnostic or Manichean (it is uncertain which) of Samosata. On taking leave of his kind host, the deacon presented him with a manuscript, containing the four Gospels and fourteen epistles of St. Paul; a prayerful perusal of which soon dispelled from his mind whatever Gnostic or Manichean views he might have held, and gave him an earnest desire to see the church restored to that state of simplicity which distinguished it in the apostle's day. Inflamed by this desire, he went abroad preaching the gospel and inveighing against the corrupt and superstitious practices of Rome. He soon drew together a band of devoted followers, the chief of whom he named after the disciples mentioned in Paul's epistles, Timotheus, Titus, Tychicus, and so on. He took for his own name, Sylvanus, and when writing to the Christians of Cibossa, in Armenia, styles them Macedonians a beautiful and harmless allegory surely, but which kindled the jealousy of the catholic party, and was made the excuse for a persecuting edict against them. Constantine and several of his followers were taken prisoners, and the officer charged with the execution of the decree, commanded the latter to stone their pastor to death. But they dropped the stones which had been given them for that purpose: and only one of their number was found base enough to obey the order. This was a youth named Justus, an adopted son of Constantine, who threw his stone with such fatal precision that the martyr fell dead on the spot. The officer, Simeon, was afterwards converted, and actually became the successor of Sylvanus under the name of Titus; thus reminding one of Saul of Tarsus, who was present at the stoning of Stephen, and afterwards preached the truth for which that blessed martyr died. After this event the doctrines which Constantine had been instrumental in reviving spread rapidly, and by the commencement of the next century the Paulicians numbered several thousands. Some of them are believed to have taken refuge in the secluded valleys of the Pays de Vaud; where, shut off by the Alps from the oppression and false worship and superstitions of Rome, they became a bright and happy community; and formed the nucleus of a church from which arose in after years the Waldenses of martyr fame.

What a contrast between this little body of simple worshippers, and that great system of idolatry and corruption which had its centre in Papal Rome! How was the gold become dim! how was the most fine gold changed! (Lam. iv. 1.) But an ordination of judgment had gone out against the guilty church; and a mighty scourge was preparing, with which God was shortly to afflict the millions of Christendom, and to display before the nations His righteous anger.

In the year 612, Mahomet, the false prophet of Arabia, appeared upon the stage of the world's history. He was born in Mecca, a city of Arabia, in the year 569 of the Christian era, and belonged to the noble family of Koreish. Owing to the death of his father when Mahomet was quite a child, the responsibility of his training devolved upon his uncle, Abu Taleb, a merchant of Mecca, with whom he went on various expeditions to Damascus and other parts. During the evening halts of the caravan, Mahomet would listen with rapt attention to the wonder-tales of his companions, who delighted to recount those marvellous legends which had been preserved by the people through years of solitary travel, among silent and deserted valleys: and thus his mind, at an early period, became stored with a host of legendary fancies, which he afterwards turned to practical account in the composition of the Koran. He was of a contemplative turn of mind, and as he grew older began to view, with scornful interest, the conflicting varieties of sects by which he was surrounded, and the prevalence of idolatry and polytheism. A desire now possessed him to found a new sect, which should be distinguished by an absence of idolatry, and which should acknowledge only the one supreme God.

Full of this thought Mahomet retired to a cave near Mecca, where he had for his companions a Persian Jew, well versed in the history and laws of his persuasion, and two professing Christians; and here he commenced the compilation of that incoherent medley of truth and fable, called the Koran or 'Book.' Issuing from his retirement a few months later, he announced his new work to the world, and circulated a report among his friends that he had received it by instalments from the angel Gabriel. At forty years of age he publicly stood forth as the apostle of God, and began to teach the new doctrines; but followers gathered slowly, and he was much persecuted for a time by his kinsmen and brethren. By the end of three years, however, his following had considerably increased; and this turn in the tide of his affairs encouraged him to change his peaceful tactics, and to introduce the sword. But the moment was not ripe for the change, and he was compelled to flee from Mecca in order to save his life. The Mahometan era dates from this event, which is called the Hegira, or Flight. The story is, that being surrounded in his house, he blinded his Koreishite pursuers by scattering a handful of dust in their midst, meanwhile escaping in the confusion. The faithful still point to a passage in the Koran — "We have thrown blindness upon them that they shall not see," — in support of this fable; but it is safer to adopt the opinion of a modern writer,* who says, The most probable account is that he clambered over the wall in the rear of the house by the help of a servant, who bent his back for him to step upon it." Yet from that time the religion spread rapidly, and when Mahomet returned to Mecca some ten years later he was attended by 150,000 followers; and entered the city with regal pomp and magnificence. Having made himself virtually master of Arabia, he retired to Medina, and died A.D. 632, at the age of sixty-three.

{*Washington Irving, in his Life of Mahomet.'}

The fundamental doctrine of Mahometanism is embodied in the well-known dogma of its author, "There is no God but God, and Mahomet is his prophet." "We follow," says the Koran, "the religion of Abraham, the orthodox, who was no idolater. We believe in God, and that which hath been sent down to us, and unto Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob, and the tribes." The worship of saints, and the use of paintings and images, were declared to be idolatrous, and are expressly forbidden in the Koran; while fastings, prayers, pilgrimages, frequent washings, and almsgiving are insisted upon. The following is the Mussalmans' creed, as taught in their schools at the present day. "I believe in the books which have been delivered from heaven and the prophets. In this manner was the Koran given to Mahomet, the Pentateuch to Moses, the Psalter to David, and the Gospel to Jesus. I believe in the prophets, and the miracles they have performed. Adam was the first prophet, and Mahomet was the last. I believe that for the space of fifty thousand years the righteous shall repose under the shade of the terrestrial paradise, and the wicked shall be exposed naked to the burning rays of the sun. I believe in the bridge Sirat, which passes over the bottomless pit of hell. It is as fine as a hair, and as sharp as a sabre. All must pass over it, and the wicked shall be thrown off. I believe in the water-pools of paradise. Each of the prophets has in paradise a basin for his own use; the water is whiter than milk, and sweeter than honey. On the ridges of the pools are vessels to drink out of, and they are bordered with stars. I believe in heaven and in hell. The inhabitants of the former know no want, and the houris* who attend them are never afflicted with sickness. The floor of paradise is musk, the stones are silver, and the cement gold. The damned are, on the contrary, tormented with fire, and by voracious and poisonous animals."

{*A houri, among the Mahometans, is a nymph of Paradise.}

All this pitiful nonsense had, perhaps, been better passed over in silence; but the crying sin of the great impostor remains to be spoken of. Mahomet denied the divinity of Christ. Whatever else he had to say of Him can be of little moment to the Christian — Mahomet's deepest, blackest crime was this he denied the divinity of Christ. By this he has wrecked the eternal hopes of millions of the human race; and for this he will be judged hereafter.

One of his last acts was to place his banner in the hands of a youthful general, named Osama, a son of Zeid, who had been one of the prophet's most devoted adherents; charging him to fight valiantly, till all who denied the unity of God had been swept from the earth. How far this charge was carried out may be gathered from the fact, that by the close of the seventh century his disciples had obtained military possession of Persia, Syria, the greater part of central and western Asia, of Egypt, the northern coast of Africa, and Spain. Their further history, in so far as it affects the history of Christianity, belongs to future chapters; though before we return to them, we must cast our eyes in a different quarter, and trace the onward course of another giant evil.

Chapter 10.

Romish Idolatry and the Growth of the Papal Power.

A.D. 700-800.

While the Saracens or Arabs were carrying their conquests through Asia and northern Africa, and planting the standard of Mahomet where the cross had hitherto been seen, the servants of the gospel and of Rome were not idle in the west. St. Winifred, an Englishman of noble birth, belonging to the Benedictine order of monks, a superstitious but christian man, laboured indefatigably in Hesse and Thuringia, and was afterwards consecrated bishop Boniface (or Bonifacius, a doer of good) by the pope. The barbarians of Thuringia had hitherto worshipped the Germanic gods, Thor, Wodin, Friga, Seator, Tuisco and others, besides those which were peculiar to their immediate province. They expressed the greatest faith in their religion, and their priests (who resembled the Druids in our own country) were treated

with every reverence. These ministers of idolatry laid claim to all kinds of miraculous power, and inspired the awe of the people by the skilfulness of their impostures. An instance of this may be seen in the construction of the god Pusterich, a hollow brazen image three feet in height, which, after being plugged at the mouth, was secretly filled with water; a fire was then kindled beneath it, and the water, expanding as it boiled, drove out the plugs, and spurted a scalding shower over the awe-stricken worshippers.

With dauntless courage Winifred went about amongst the people, exposing the impostures of the priests and the hollowness of their religion; nor did he scruple to lay his axe at the roots of the sacred oak in which the supreme deity was supposed to dwell, although the priests vehemently protested, and the deluded multitude expected he would be struck dead for his impiety. When the giant tree had fallen to the earth, and Winifred quietly proceeded to saw it into planks for building purposes, the minds of many were convinced, and in an incredibly short space of time the whole of Thuringia and Hesse had become professedly christian.

Yet the light of the gospel in these parts was sadly clouded by the errors and superstitions of popery; and it is but too probable that the zeal of Boniface was more the result of devotion to Rome than of devotion to Christ. The churches that were built by his sanction and direction were more noticeable for their images than their evangelists and teachers; and the sign of the cross was more familiar to the eye, than the preaching of the cross to the ear. The relics of the saints were more freely distributed than copies of the Scriptures; and it would not be going too far to affirm that, in many instances, the so-called converts from heathenism had only changed the form of their idolatry. Doubtless there were cases of true conversion, but it is certain that many of the professing Christians were Christians only by compulsion; and Alcuin, the Saxon historian, tells us that "the ancient Saxons, and all the Frieslanders, being urged to it by King Charles (Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne), who plied some of them with rewards and others with threats, were converted to the christian faith."

But the idolatry of which we have been speaking, was not peculiar to Hesse and Thuringia. It had increased to an alarming extent throughout Christendom, where the wildest excesses of superstition were indulged in. Lighted candles were placed before the images in many of the churches; they were kissed by the people; they were worshipped on bended knee. The priests burned incense to them, and encouraged the popular delusion that they could work miracles. Indeed, so far did this mania possess some, that they dressed the female figures in robes and made them stand godmothers to their children. During the pontificate of the first Gregory, Serenus, a bishop of Marseilles, had had the courage to prohibit these abominable practices, and had destroyed a number of images, but Gregory had only reproved him for his faithfulness. "We have been apprised," he wrote, "that animated by an inconsiderate zeal, you have broken in pieces the images of the saints, on the plea that they ought not to be adored. In truth, we should have entirely approved of your conduct, had you forbidden their being adored, but we blame you for having broken them in pieces For it is one thing to adore a painting, and another to learn by its history the proper object of adoration." In this insidious way had the leaven been allowed to work, and we may be sure that the nice distinctions drawn by Gregory in this letter, would not long be observed by his less scrupulous successors: while, on the other hand, the countenance which he had given to the detestable practice would be loudly insisted upon, and the extent of it much exaggerated.

In the year 726, Leo III., emperor of the East, alarmed by the progress of the Mahometans — whose avowed object was to exterminate idolatry and assert the unity of God — began in his own interest a spirited crusade against image-worship: and the zeal which he displayed in this novel work, presently earned for him the name of Iconoclastes, or image-breaker.

The reception of his first edict shewed how totally the people were opposed to his work of reformation, and civil war was the result. On the appearance of a second and more sweeping edict, an officer who had been commissioned bv Leo to destroy a noted statue of the Saviour, called the Antiphonetes, or Surety, was surrounded by a crowd of women, who begged him to spare the image. The officer, however, mounted the ladder, and was proceeding in the work of destruction, when he was dragged from his elevation and torn in pieces. Nothing daunted by this event, Leo promptly punished the authors of the crime; and, sending more officers to the spot, the image was taken down and demolished.

The rebellion which followed was speedily suppressed in the eastern empire, by the expeditious but bloody measures of the emperor, who authorised a persecution, but the Italians were not so easily subdued. They looked upon the act with horror and indignation; and when orders were issued to put the same edict in force in their country, they rose in a body, and declared that their oath of allegiance to the emperor was no longer binding. Thus was brought about the final separation between the Latin and Greek churches. The papal power had long been waiting for it; and Gregory II. saw his opportunity, and took every advantage of the popular excitement. His reply to the edict, which is full of menace and blasphemy, abounds with the most absurd statements, and shews an ignorance of the scriptures which would bring disgrace upon a child. By a strange confusion of names, he confounds the godless Uzziah with the godly Hezekiah, observing that "the impious Uzziah sacrilegiously removed the brazen serpent, which Moses had set up, and broke it in pieces!"* His letter, however, is interesting, as shewing the seditious and defiant spirit in which the bishop of Rome could meet his imperial master, as well as the consciousness of growing political power which swelled the breast of the haughty ecclesiastic. "During ten pure and fortunate years," thus the epistle begins, "we have tasted the annual comforts of your royal letters, subscribed in purple ink with your own hand, the sacred pledges of your attachment to the orthodox creed of your fathers. How deplorable is the change! How tremendous the scandal! You now accuse the catholics of idolatry; and by the accusation, you betray your own impiety and ignorance. To this ignorance we are compelled to adopt the grossness of our style and arguments: the first elements of holy letters are sufficient for your confusion; and were you to enter a grammar school, and avow yourself the enemy of our worship, the simple and pious children would cast their tablets at your head.... You demand a council: — revoke your edicts; cease to destroy images; a council will not be needed. You assault us, O tyrant, with a carnal and military band; unarmed and naked, we can only implore the Christ, the Prince of the heavenly host, that He will send unto you a devil, for the destruction of your body and the salvation of your soul." Alluding then to the successful efforts of Boniface, the apostle of Germany, who had brought the barbarous hordes of that country within the pale of Rome, he says: "Incapable as you are of defending your Roman subjects, the maritime situation of the city may perhaps expose it to your depredations; but we have only to retire to the first fortress of the Lombards, and then you may as well pursue the winds. Are you ignorant that the popes are the bonds of union, the mediators of peace between the east and west? The eyes of the nations are fixed on our humility; and they revere as a god upon earth, the apostle St. Peter, whose image you threaten to destroy .... The remote and interior kingdom of the west present their homage to Christ and His vicegerent; and we now prepare to visit one of their most powerful monarchs, who desires to receive from our hands the sacrament of baptism. The barbarians have submitted to the yoke of the gospel, while you alone are deaf to the voice of the Shepherd. These pious barbarians are kindled into rage; they thirst to avenge the persecutions of the east. Abandon your rash and fatal enterprise; reflect, tremble and repent. If you persist, we are innocent of the blood that will be spilt in the contest; may it fall on your head." The pope then ventures the lying assertion, that the emperor's conduct in abolishing image-worship is "in direct contradiction to the unanimous testimony of the fathers and doctors of the church, and, in particular, repugnant to the authority of the six general councils;" an assertion which has drawn from a Roman Catholic historian this remark: "In none of the general councils does a word about images or image-worship occur, and the statement as to the unanimous testimony of the fathers is equally at fault."

{*A century later, Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, who knew his Bible better than Gregory II., adduced very different arguments from the king's act. "If Hezekiah," says he, "a godly and religious king, brake the brazen serpent, made by God's express command, because the mistaken multitude began to worship it as an idol for which his piety was very much commended; much more religiously may and ought the images of the saints (they themselves approving it) be broken and ground to powder; which were never set up by God's command, but are absolutely human inventions."}

The charge of absurdity which we have brought against this letter is fully borne out by the pope's further statement, that no sooner had the disciples cast their eyes on Christ "than they hastened to make portraits of Him, and carried them about, exhibiting them to the whole world, that, at the sight of them, men might be converted from the worship of Satan to the service of Christ:" and furthermore, that "pictures and images had been taken of James, the Lord's brother, of Stephen, and all other saints of note. And so having done, he dispersed them over every part of the earth, to the manifest increase of the gospel cause."

Gregory died soon after, but he was succeeded by another Gregory; a man of equal zeal and wickedness, who summoned a council of bishops, at which the arrogant pretensions of his predecessor were confirmed. Ninety-three bishops and all the clergy of the city were present on this occasion and signed a decree, that, "If any person should hereafter, in contempt of the ancient and faithful customs of all Christians, and of the apostolic church in particular, stand forth as a destroyer, defamer, or blasphemer of the sacred images of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, and of His mother, the immaculate ever-Virgin Mary, of the blessed apostles, and all other saints, he be excluded from the body and blood of the Lord, and from the communion of the universal church."

Roused by the insolence of this pope, Leo fitted out a fleet, and dispatched it to the coast of Italy, but it was disabled during a storm in the Adriatic and had to put back to port. Both pope and emperor died soon after in the year 741, and it might have been expected that the matter would now rest. But no. The iconoclastic views of Leo, as well as his crown, descended to his son,* and the crusade against image-worship was continued with unabated vigour during his long reign of thirty-four years. The emperor** who succeeded him in the year 775 was also guided by the same principles and policy, but his reign was of short duration, and, in the year 780, the reins of empire fell into the hands of his wife, the empress Irene, who held them in the name of their son*** a child of ten. This was the signal for a change of policy; and the empress uniting with the pope, immediately took measures for the restoration of image-worship; a step which was warmly welcomed both by priests and people. A council was summoned at Nice (the seventh and last general council according to the Greek church), and it was resolved, that "with the venerable and life-giving cross shall be set up the venerable and holy images. . . . . The images, that is to say, of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ; of the immaculate mother of God; of the honoured angels; of all saints and holy men — these images shall be treated as holy memorials, worshipped, kissed, only without that peculiar adoration which is reserved for the Invisible, Incomprehensible God. All who shall violate this, as is asserted, immemorial tradition of the church, and endeavour, forcibly or by craft, to remove any image, if ecclesiastics, are to be deposed and excommunicated; if monks or laymen, to be excommunicated." A curse was afterwards pronounced on all who refused obedience to this blasphemous decree, and the assembled clergy exclaimed with one voice, "Anathema on all who call images idols! Anathema on all who communicate with them who do not worship images. Everlasting glory to the orthodox Romans, to John of Damascus! to Gregory of Rome everlasting glory! Everlasting glory to all the preachers of truth!" "This seventh and last council," says Dean Waddington, "established idolatry as the law of the christian church: and thus was completed the structure of oriental orthodoxy. It rose from the most solid and substantial foundation; it advanced, by the labours of a busy and unwise generation, through the mid-air and mist of metaphysics, and terminated in a still blinder age, in clear and manifest superstition."

{*Constantine Copronymus (Constantine v.).

{** Leo iv.: who was murdered by his wife, the empress Irene.

***Constantine vi.: afterwards murdered by his mother, the empress Irene.}

But the activity of the Iconoclasts was not the only matter which agitated the Romish church during this century. There were enemies of another kind, and nearer the walls of Rome, which caused her much annoyance and anxiety; although these very circumstances became, in due time, the means whereby her worldly and ambitious projects — the cherished dreams of many years — were effectually carried out. These enemies were the Lombards, who had taken advantage of the late troubles to seize on the exarchate of Ravenna, and were now threatening Rome itself.

In this dilemma the pope appealed to Pepin, king of the Franks, a man who was under no slight obligations to the Papal see. He had formerly held the office of mayor of the palace to Childeric III., surnamed the Stupid, the last monarch of the Merovingian line, and had virtually ruled the kingdom in his stead. Finding, however, that the responsibilities of government, without the compensating title of king were thankless and wearisome, and yet afraid to usurp the throne without the sanction of a higher authority, he had appealed to the pope. Zachary then occupied the papal chair, and the onerous and delicate task of negociating between the two parties, had devolved upon Boniface, who was then staying at the Frankish court. He was anxious to serve the powerful Pepin, and not less anxious to serve the pope, whose temporal interests, he well knew, would be greatly advanced were he to sanction the guilty act. Zachary, therefore previously apprised by Boniface of what would be expected from him — had been waited upon in due course by ambassadors from Pepin's court, who had proposed to him the following inquiry "Whether the divine law did not permit a valiant and warlike people to dethrone a pusillanimous and indolent monarch, who was incapable of discharging any of the functions of royalty, and to substitute in his place one more worthy of rule, and who had already rendered most important services to the state?" To this naively worded inquiry, Zachary (unwilling to commit himself too readily) had returned the following ambiguous yet sufficient answer, "He who lawfully possesses the royal power may also lawfully assume the royal title." This was all that Pepin had waited for, and his course was clear. Childeric was shut up in a monastery, and the usurper having been anointed king by Boniface, was crowned with great honour at Soissons, in the year 752.

This had proved a stroke of true diplomacy on the part of the pope; for now that Rome was being threatened by the barbarians, under Astolph, king of the Lombards, his successor Stephen II. had a powerful ally to fall back upon in the person of the Frankish monarch. His first appeal for assistance was promptly responded to by Pepin, who marched his army across the Alps, defeated the Lombards, and handed over to the pope the exarchate which he had recovered from their grasp. This belonged in right to the throne of Constantinople, but Pepin declared that he "had not gone to battle for the sake of any man, but for the sake of St. Peter alone, and to obtain the forgiveness of his sins."

The donation thus made formed the nucleus of the temporal dominions of the pope, and was the foundation of the temporal power.

Yet it soon became evident that the donation of Pepin needed confirmation; for he had scarcely returned to France when the barbarians again poured in upon the territory, and wrested it from its new owners. Flushed with success, and meeting with little or no opposition they again approached the city, exulting and confident. Meanwhile, two pleading letters, which the pope had hurriedly addressed to Pepin, had been disregarded, and matters began to look alarming. What was to be done? Resting all his hopes on a final effort, Stephen wrote a third letter, and worded it as from the apostle Peter himself. We transcribe it for the reader without comment; the letter must speak for itself.

"I, Peter the apostle, protest, admonish and conjure you, the most christian kings, Pepin, Charles and Carloman, with all the hierarchy, bishops, abbots, priests and all monks; all judges, dukes, counts, and the whole people of the Franks. The mother of God likewise adjures you, and admonishes and commands you, she as well as the thrones and dominions, and all the host of heaven, to save the beloved city of Rome from the detested Lombards. If ye hearken, I, Peter the apostle, promise you my protection in this life and in the next, will prepare you for the most glorious mansions in heaven, and will bestow on you the everlasting joys of paradise. Make common cause with my people of Rome, and I will grant whatever ye may pray for. I conjure you not to yield up this city to be lacerated and tormented by the Lombards, lest your own souls be lacerated and tormented in hell, with the devil and his pestilential angels. Of all nations under heaven the Franks are highest in the esteem of St. Peter; to me you owe all your victories. Obey, and obey speedily; and by my suffrage, our Lord Jesus Christ will give you in this life length of days, security, victory; in the life to come, will multiply His blessings upon you, among His saints and angels."

This letter may recall to some another letter — the epistle to the Thessalonians wherein the apostle speaks of a falling away, and a man of sin to be revealed, the son of perdition, "who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he as God, sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God"! (2 Thess. ii. 3, 4.)

Responding to this third letter, Pepin set out with his army, and speedily succeeded in driving the barbarians back to their own country. He died soon after, in the year 768, and Charlemagne, his son, succeeded him. The Lombards now began a third invasion of the papal territory; and the pope, finding his throne again in danger, sent out another appeal to the Frankish court. Charlemagne willingly responded, and on Easter Eve he entered Rome with his army. Here a grand reception was accorded him. The streets were thronged with applauding multitudes the clergy were there with crosses and banners; the children of the schools went before him with palm and olive branches. As he approached the church of St. Peter, hymns of welcome broke upon his ear, and dismounting from his horse, he finished the journey on foot. On being introduced into the presence of the pope, he slowly mounted the papal throne, kissing each step as he proceeded. After that he kissed the pope also, and the ceremony of the reception was over, During his stay in the city, he confirmed the donation of Pepin, and increased it; the further grant embracing the dukedoms of Spoleto and Benevento, Venetia, Istria, and other territory to the north of Italy, together with the island of Corsica. Charlemagne remained in Rome through the Easter festivities, and then rejoined his army. It is almost needless to add, that success attended his arms wherever he went, and that it was not long before he had hopelessly crippled the forces of the barbarians, and placed the papal throne beyond the fear of their incursions. At the close of the campaign he proclaimed himself king of Italy, and returned to his dominions with great honour.

We have spoken of Charlemagne's submission to the church of Rome, but it was not a blind submission. He could exercise an independent judgment at times even in ecclesiastical affairs, and on some occasions shewed himself more protestant than catholic in his opinions. This may be seen in his opposition to the second general council of Nice, which had decided in favour of image-worship; although he was doubtless not a little influenced by the godly counsels of Alcuin, a deacon of York, to whom he had sent a copy of the decree.

It is not clear what were the steps taken by the English church in this matter, but it is probable that Alcuin was their mouthpiece at the council of Frankfort; which was convened for the discussion of this important question, in the year 794. At the recommendation of Charlemagne, who had called together the council, special deference was paid to the judgment of the English deacon, "as one erudite in ecclesiastical matters;" and certainly he did not abuse the honour conferred upon him. Their decision, which was doubtless drawn up by Alcuin, was entirely against image-worship, and their reasons were emphatically stated and most convincing. Neither man nor angel was in the least to be adored, and "the insolent use of images"was declared to be "not only without scripture, but also directly contrary to the writings of the Old and New Testament." This emphatic declaration, with its reference to the word of God, might well have fallen from the lips of Alcuin, for he was a man who studied his Bible with a fearless heart, and looked to it as his only canon and rule of life.

"The reading of holy scripture," he somewhere says, "is the knowledge of everlasting blessedness. In the holy Scriptures man may contemplate himself as in some mirror, what sort of person he is. The reading of holy Scripture cleanseth the reader's soul; it bringeth into his mind the fear of hell-torments, and it raiseth his heart to the joys above. The man who desires to be ever with God, should often pray to Him and study His holy word. For when we pray, we speak to God, and when we read the holy books, God speaks to us. It is a twofold joy which the reading of the holy books bringeth to the readers; it so instructs their understanding as to render them sharper; and it also leads them from the world's vanities to the love of God; as the body is fed with fleshly meats, so the higher man, the soul, is fed with divine conferences, as the Psalmist says, 'How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth!'"

Another ecclesiastic who distinguished himself at the council of Frankfort was Paulinus, bishop of Aquileia. He boldly denied the value of any intercession or mediation apart from that of Christ, and wrote thus: "The Son of God, Almighty, one Almighty Lord, because He redeemed us with the price of His blood, is justly called the true Redeemer by the confession of all who are redeemed." "The Advocate is He, who, being also the Redeemer exhibits to God the Father, the human nature in the unity of the Person of God and man. John intercedes not, but declares that the Mediator is the propitiation for our sins." The testimonies of such men as these afford the bright evidences of remaining life in that wilderness of error and superstition in which the church was found at this time; but, alas! how few and far between such testimonies are.

The clergy, for the most part, were living in a state of spiritual lethargy and vicious indulgence, the bishops not excepted; indeed it was in the supreme bishop, the pope of Rome, that iniquity found a head. From the fourth century onwards the successors to the chair of St. Peter, had offered in their own persons increasing evidence of the church's decline; and their lives, even as recorded by their own historians, shew in lurid light, the downward steps towards the great apostasy. In the year 358, pope Liberius was proved guilty of prevarication and heresy by Hilary, bishop of Poictiers, and eight years later, Damasus, another pope, incurred the charge of murder by forcing his way to the papal chair over the dead bodies of 160 of his opponents. In 385, pope Siricius imposed celibacy on the priests, and established by a decree this wretched dogma; which became one of the chief causes of the immorality of the Middle Ages. Later still, the pontificate of Zosimus became notorious because of his great pride and assumption; and it is thus reflected upon by the bishops of Africa in the course of a letter to his successor Boniface:"We hope that since it has pleased God to raise you to the throne of the Roman church, we shall no longer feel the effects of that worldly pride and arrogance which ought never to be found in the church of Christ." The election of Boniface himself was the occasion of such disorder, that the civil power had to step in to keep the peace; and his after conduct is a sufficient proof that the letter of the pious bishops was soon forgotten or entirely disregarded. Thrice in the space of half a century did the chair of St. Peter become the subject of double elections, in the third of which votes were freely offered for sale; bribery was practised on both sides, estates were mortgaged to defray expenses, and even the vessels of the church were pawned to obtain money. Later still, a pope, named Silverius, who had purchased the dignity from king Theodatus, was dethroned by the famous general Belisarius on the charge of treasonable correspondence with the barbarians, and Vigilius, archdeacon to a former pope, purchased the office from Belisarius for two hundred pounds of gold. This man afterwards became involved in troubles with the emperor and the Eastern church; and after the most pitiable vacillation, was frightened into a confession of error, in which he acknowledged that his past differences of opinion were the suggestions of the devil.

But to enumerate a fiftieth part of the irregularities and enormities proceeding from the papal throne would be impossible. We might fill pages, with descriptions of men who were thrust into the chair without election; of deacons who were elevated to that dignity above the heads of pious presbyters: of a pope who was distinguished for his avarice, and for his zeal in grinding the faces of the poor; of a layman, who aspired to the high office and was made deacon, priest, and bishop in a few hours, to enable him to gratify his ambition, though he was afterwards thrust from his place by a Lombard monk, who, in his turn, was speedily supplanted by a stronger rival.

The bishops in many cases were no better than the popes, and instead of being overseers of the flock of God, were noted for their avarice, which often led them into the wildest excesses of cruelty and extortion. The priests, too, were woefully guilty in this respect, and Gregory the Great accuses them of seizing the propety for others, and of ridiculing those who walked humbly and chastely. "All things which were predicted," says he, "are taking place. The king of pride is at hand; and, what is unlawful to utter, an army of priests is prepared for him." Even where any religious zeal did exist among them, it was usually wasted in a worthless cause; and idle questions of tweedledum and tweedledee were frequently agitated, till the controversial spirit was roused to an angry pitch. Thus the question of the clerical tonsure was long a sore point in some quarters; and the Celtic and Italian missionaries were especially divided upon it. The one party, following the churches of the East, shaved the fore part of their heads in the form of a crescent; the other, the Italian, shaved the crown in circular fashion. The latter party eventually won the day; and at the beginning of the eighth century the monks of Iona consented to receive the Latin tonsure, and by this surrender, made themselves the voluntary slaves of Rome.

Gloomy indeed was the state of things which we have been describing, but it was to grow yet more gloomy; and we have but reached the outskirts of the Dark Ages. "Behold," writes the Cardinal Baronius, "the nine hundredth year of the Redeemer begins, in which a new age commences, which by reason of its asperity and barrenness of good has been called the iron age; by the deformity of its exuberant evil, the leaden age; and by the poverty of writers, the dark age." "With what filth was it her fate to be besprinkled who was without spot or wrinkle; with what stench to be infected, with what impurities to be defiled, and by these things to be blackened with perpetual infamy."

Chapter 11.

The Darkest Period of the Dark Ages.

A.D. 800-1000.

It is cheering to the heart, depressed by the contemplation of the church during the period which we have been considering, to be able to record that, in spite of increasing darkness on all hands, the gospel was not entirely hid. It is an irrefragable principle, which may be traced throughout all the dispensations of God, that He never leaves Himself without a witness. We see it in Noah and his family preserved from the flood; we see it in the 7000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal; we see it in the solitary four who refused to touch the king's meat or worship the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar; and, blessed be God, we see it even in these degenerate times when the professing church was steeped in vice, and 'honeycombed and gangrened with falsehood.'

In the West, where the darkness was deepest (though not in the vicinity of Rome), a true work for Christ was going on, owing not a little to the christian zeal of Charlemagne's successor, his son Louis the Meek. Lewis was a true Christian; but too gentle for his soldiers, and too pious for his priests: and the reforms which he contemplated were opposed both by the military and ecclesiastical powers. His position, for manifold reasons, was not a happy one. All attempts to purify the court were frustrated by the evil examples and rebellious conduct of his sons: the soldiers, who subsisted by plunder and violence, liked not the checks which he put upon their thieving and lecherous habits: the bishops, proud of their swords and spurs, resented his action in depriving them of these warlike appendages: while the personal piety of the good king made him the common butt of all classes. When his sons, Pepin, Louis, and Lothaire, rose in open rebellion against him, a pope (Gregory IV.) was not lacking to countenance the wicked and unfilial act; and the clergy, whose true office would have been to counsel and console him, united with the rest in the effort to dethrone him. False charges of the gravest nature were lodged against him, and having been summoned to appear before an assembly at Compiegne, he was there subjected to the most painful insults and humiliation. A paper containing the list of his pretended crimes was placed in his hands, and some sort of a confession having been extorted from him, he was made to do penance in the following manner: A coarse mat was placed before the altar, on which he was commanded to kneel, and divest himself in turn of his bald-rick, sword, and royal vestments, assuming in their place the sackcloth covering of a penitent. A form of psalm-singing and laying on of priestly hands was then gone through in order to give an odour of sanctity to the crime, and the degraded monarch was conducted to the cell in which it had been ordained that he should end his days. But the nobles and people, disgusted with this act of priestly assumption, demanded his restoration; and the popular clamour at length became so loud, that the king was removed from the cloister, and re-instated on the throne. In the year 840 death put an end to his gentle but unhappy reign; and the jaded spirit of the pious king found rest in a country more peaceful than that which it had been his misfortune to rule over.

Yet the christian efforts of Louis, though barren of good results in his own kingdom, bore fruit in other parts; and the introduction of the gospel into Denmark and Sweden, which was brought about in the following manner, was undoubtedly due to him. In a dispute for the throne of Denmark, between Heriold, the rightful king, and Godfrid, the former had to take refuge at the court of Louis, and where the kindliness of his reception encouraged him to solicit the help of his royal host. But Louis would only consent to this on condition that Heriold embraced Christianity, and agreed to allow the preaching of the gospel in his dominions. The king consented to this, and was accordingly baptised at Mentz, together with his queen and many of the court, in the year 826. On his return to Denmark he took with him two missionary monks, Ansgarius and Aubert, the latter of whom died within a few months of his arrival, but not before he had seen some results from his preaching. Ansgarius laboured on for awhile, and then crossed to Sweden, where the word was much blessed and many were converted. He was afterwards made archbishop of Hamburg and all the North by Gregory IV., and entered into his rest, full of honours, in the year 865. The sphere of his labours embraced the territories of the Danes, the Cimbrians and the Swedes; but we are sorry to add, that the work which he commenced, already hampered by much that was superstitious and unscriptural, was almost buried beneath the rubbish of Romanism during the next century.

The gospel was also carried, with more or less success, to the Russians, Poles, and Hungarians; owing in no small degree to the conversions of their respective princes, which seem in some cases to have been real, and accompanied with a saving faith. It is very interesting to notice the various means which were used of God, in opening the territories of the barbarians to the gospel message: sometimes it was by the instrumentality of a zealous monk — as Ansgarius or Aubert; sometimes by the union of a heathen prince with a christian princess as Vladimir, prince of the Russians, with Anna, the sister of the Greek Emperor; sometimes by a plague or famine — the means which were instrumental in opening up the way to Bulgaria.

Great Britain also, being so far removed from Rome, had few hindrances to the preaching of the gospel, though the pure light was much clouded by monkishness and superstition. The story of king Alfred's glorious reign is too well-known to be repeated here. The piety of this truly christian king was as conspicuous as his prowess, and amid the cares of state, and anxieties caused by the incursions of the Danes, his pen was not idle in a better cause. In addition to the composition of some poems of a moral and religious character, he translated the gospels into the Saxon tongue, and this may be justly spoken of as his great work. The subjoined passage from his translation may not be unacceptable, as it forms an interesting example of the language spoken in this country during the period in question. The reader will recognise it as the Lord's prayer. "Faeder ure thu the earth on heafenum, si thin nama gehalgod, to become thin rice, gewurthe thin willa on earthen swa swa on heafenum, urne ge dgwanlican hlaf syle us to doeg; and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgivath urum gyltendum, and ne geladde thu us on consenung ac alyse us of yfle (si it swa)."

In Scotland the people were much indebted, through the goodness of God, to the faithful ministry of a monk named Clement, who preached a gospel remarkable for its clearness and purity; but his faithfulness drew down upon him the enmity of Boniface, the archbishop of the German churches; and at his instigation Clement was summoned or enticed to Rome, where he suddenly disappeared.

Ireland boasts the honour of giving birth to Duns Scotus Erigena, a christian philosopher of this period, who is regarded by Hallam* as one of the two remarkable men of the Dark Ages. He says, however, that the extracts from his writings which he has met with contain "unintelligible rhapsodies of mysticism;" though whether he would include in this condemnation the following extract, we are not in a position to say. It is quoted by D'Aubigne and runs thus: O Lord Jesus, I ask no happiness of Thee, but to understand, unmixed with deceitful theories, the word that Thou hast inspired by Thy Holy Spirit! Shew Thyself to those who seek for Thee alone." If this is mysticism, would that there were more of it, even in the church to-day!

{*Literature of Europe in the 15th and 16th Centuries." (Chap. i. 11.)}

Arnulph, bishop of Orleans, seems to have been a man of some piety, but very little is known of him. One of his discourses throws a ghastly light on the condition of Rome in his day. "O deplorable Rome!"he exclaims, "who, in the days of our forefathers, didst produce so many burning and shining lights, thou hast brought forth in our times only dismal darkness, worthy of the detestation of posterity!" Of the pope he says, "what think you, reverend fathers, of this man, placed on a lofty throne, shining in purple and gold? Whom do you account him? If destitute of love, and puffed up with the pride of knowledge only, he is antichrist, sitting in the temple of God."

But, perhaps, the most remarkable man of this period is Claude, the bishop or metropolitan of Turin; who was advanced to that dignity ('the burden of a bishopric' he called it) by Louis the Meek, about the year 816. He has been described as "the protestant of the ninth century," and deserves the title. He differed from the church of Rome on many points, and there is no mincing matters in the way he speaks his mind. On his elevation to the bishopric he says that he "found all the churches at Turin stuffed full of vile and accursed images," and forthwith began to destroy "what all were sottishly worshipping. Therefore it was that all opened their mouths to revile me; and forsooth, had not the Lord helped me, they would have swallowed me up quick." He speaks in scathing language of the adoration of the cross, which God commanded men to bear and not to worship, and complains that some, who would bear it neither corporeally nor spiritually, were bent on worshipping it. "If," argued the bishop, "we ought to adore the cross because Christ was fastened to it why not adore mangers and old clouts, because He was laid in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes? Why not adore fishing boats and asses, because he slept in the one and rode on the other?" But this was answering the fool according to his folly, and the bishop continues, "all these things are ridiculous; rather to be lamented than set forth in writing: but we are forced to set them down." Those who had departed from the truth had fallen in love with vanity, and he follows them with an earnest cry of warning. "Why do you crucify again the Son of God, and expose Him to open shame; and by this means make souls by troops to become the companions of devils, estranging them from their Creator by the horrible sacrilege of your images and likenesses, and precipitating them into everlasting damnation?" Going from this to the subject of pilgrimages to Rome, which many were teaching was equivalent to repentance, he shrewdly inquires how they could keep so many poor souls to serve them in the monasteries instead of sending them to Rome to get forgiveness of their sins. What had they to say against that sentence, "Whosoever shall lay a stone of stumbling before any of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hung about his neck, and be cast into the bottom of the sea?" He then proceeds to explain, that these pilgrimages to Rome were utterly worthless, and shewed a spiritual destitution on the part of those who undertook them, which could only belong to the very ignorant. Some also were putting their confidence in the merits or the intercession of saints, but it only shewed that they were walking in darkness, for if the saints on whom they called were as holy and righteous as Noah, Daniel, or Job, there would still be no hope or deliverance from such a quarter. Even the pope was but a fallible man, and in spite of his title of apostolic lord, was only apostolic in so far as he shewed himself the keeper and guardian of the apostle's doctrine. The mere fact of his being seated in the apostle's chair proved nothing: the scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses' chair.

But it must not be inferred from this that Claude was merely a controversialist. He was naturally more inclined to learn than to teach or correct others, and his writings breathe a true spirit of humility and christian love. Witness his beautiful description of truth, which we extract from his address to a friend, inserted at the close of one of his commentaries: "For this beauty of the eternal truth and wisdom (God grant I may always have a constant will to enjoy her, for the love of whom we have also undertaken this work) doth not exclude those that come unto her, because of the great number of hearers she hath; she grows not old by length of time; she minds not high places; she does not suffer herself to be overtaken by night; she does not shut up herself in shadows, and doth not expose herself to our bodily senses; she is near unto all those that turn themselves to her from all parts of the world; and who love her indeed; she is eternal to all; she is not limited by any places, she is everywhere; she advertises abroad, she instructs within, she changes and converts those who behold her; she does not suffer herself to be violated by any person; no man can judge of her, nobody can judge well without her."

The influence of Claude, however, was only felt over a very limited area; and, in the midst of so much darkness, it is hardly to be expected that his followers would become numerous. Yet they were sufficiently numerous to attract the attention and to draw down upon their heads the anathemas of the pope. He incited the lay princes against them; and so we find that they were hunted from the open country and compelled to take refuge among the neighbouring mountains, where they were shut off from papal influences, and there throve as they had never done.

Happy condition this for the little remnant, when all around was so dark and spiritless! Happy to be thus shut in with God among the mountains, whose snowy peaks were always pointing heavenwards, at a time when the plains were so swaddled up in earthly mists and vapours! These were the Christians of Piedmont, another accession to the Vaudois church, to which we have already made a passing reference: we shall meet with them again later on.

But how dark was all around! It was a darkness that might be felt: but who was there to feel it? The condition was natural to most of them; and they loved it more than the light, because their deeds were evil. How evil we may learn by contemporary records and the decisions of their own councils.

At the council of Pavia, in the year 850, it was necessary to enjoin sobriety on the bishops, and to prohibit them from keeping "hounds and hawks for hunting, and having gaudy dresses for vain show." At two separate councils the complaint was raised, that "the inferior clergy kept women in their houses, to the great scandal of the ministry;" and it was said of the presbyters that they "turn bailiffs, frequent taverns, practise usury . . . . and do not blush to indulge in revelry and drunkenness." Lacrius, a Carthusian, speaks of the period as "the worst of times;" lamenting that charity had grown cold, iniquity abounded, and "truth was rendered scarce by the sons of men." Waltrun, bishop of Naumburg, after giving a graphic and deplorable picture both of the internal and external condition of the Romish church, civil war at that moment raging between the pope and the emperor, quotes the prophet Hosea to this effect, "There is no truth and there is no pity, and there is no knowledge of God upon the earth. Cursing and lying and murder and theft and adultery have inundated it, and blood toucheth blood." Hervey, archbishop of Rheims, another contemporary, laments that every one is given up to his passions, the human and divine laws are alike despised, and that the plunder of ecclesiastical possessions is universal. "The bishops," he says, "are bishops only in name; neglecting preaching, falling into sin, abandoning God, and binding heavy burdens on the people which they will not touch with the ends of their fingers." Another, himself a bishop, affirms that "one could scarce find a man fit to be ordained a bishop, or a bishop fit to ordain others." Of the popes (passing over the story of pope Joan, a woman who is said to have occupied the papal chair for two years) it is sufficient to say: that one (Stephen VII.) was strangled, his death occasioning the remark that, "he had entered the fold like a thief, and it was fit that he should die by the halter;" that another (Sergius III.) — we have it on the testimony of a cardinal — was "the slave of every vice and the most wicked of men;" that another (John X.) was raised to the throne by the interest of the prostitute Theodora, and was afterwards murdered through the influence of the woman's daughter; and lastly, that a youth of eighteen, having forced his way to the papal chair, and taken the title of John XII. "turned the Lateran into a brothel, carried on amours with various women; was given to hunting; put out the eyes of his godfather; drank to the health of the devil; swore by the heathen gods while playing dice," and was killed in a midnight brawl in the year 964.

Another feature of the period was the lying wonders of various kinds, which were exhibited in many of the churches. Thus we hear of a feather from the wing of the angel Gabriel;' a piece of Noah's ark; the 'chemise of the blessed Virgin;' some of the coals that roasted St. Laurence; a little soot from the furnace of the three young men; the mark of the breath of Joseph on a glove that belonged to Nicodemus; and the parings of St. Antony's toes.* The period is also remarkable for the perpetration of a monstrous fraud; which, while it increased the power of Rome, added to the growing darkness. A collection of forged decretals was issued, called the "Decretals of Isidore," which purported to be the decrees of the Roman bishops on important ecclesiastical questions from Clemens downwards. "In this collection the contemporaries of Tacitus and Quintilian, are made to speak the barbarous Latin of the ninth century. The customs and institutions of the Franks are gravely attributed to the Romans at the time of the emperors. Popes are therein made to quote the Bible in the words of the Latin translation written by St. Jerome, who lived one, two or three centuries after them; and Victor, the bishop of Rome in the year 192, is found writing to Theophilus, who was archbishop of Alexandria in 385." For a long time these decretals were generally believed in, and did not a little mischief in the church, in spite of the clumsiness of the forgeries and the many internal proofs of their spuriousness. The pope, of course, adopted them, and did not scruple to assure the hesitating bishops of France that they had lain for years in the Roman archives. So true is it that a lying spirit is in the mouth of popery.

{*Eleven of the convents in England exhibited girdles belonging to the Virgin one exhibited the ear of Malchus! another, the one-winged image of an angel which had flown to England with the spear-head that pierced our Saviour while the teeth of St. Apollonia (said to be an infallible cure for the tooth-ache) were so numerous that they weighed more than a ton!}

But the credulity of the people was imposed upon in other ways by the clergy; and to this period belongs the institution of the rosary and crown of the Virgin Mary. The rosary (from rosarium, a bed of roses) consists of a string of beads on which the possessor counts the prayers which he repeats. Fifteen repetitions of the Lord's Prayer and a hundred and fifty salutations of the blessed Virgin complete the rosary; and the crown consists, as a rule, of seven repetitions of the same prayer and seventy salutations. Moreover, an absurd belief that the archangel Michael celebrated mass in the court of heaven every Monday, was very general; and the clergy were not slow to profit by the ignorance of the people, who crowded the churches dedicated to St. Michael, in order to obtain his intercession.

Another of the inventions of the period was the doctrine of transubstantiation. It originated with a monk, named Paschasius Radbert; but it was not placed among the settled doctrines of Rome till nearly three centuries later. Paschasius asserted that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are actually converted into the body and blood of Christ, and built his novel doctrine on a strictly literal interpretation of the Lord's words, "Take eat, this is my body," and similar scriptures. Yet to take the words in that sense is a manifest absurdity, and involves one in a labyrinth of absurdities. A recent writer has forcibly remarked: Christ could say, "'This is my body which is broken,' when it was not broken at all, and while He held the bread in His own hand alive; 'This is the Lord's passover,' when God was no longer passing over at all; 'I am the true vine,' and so of a thousand others. It enters into all language. I say of a picture: 'That is my mother.' Nobody is misled by it, but those who choose to be misled 'We are buried with Christ by baptism unto death,' yet we are not buried and we do not die; that is certain. Hence we find in scripture, in a general way, the use of language as to the Lord's Supper."* In Rome, however, there are, and ever were, many who choose to be misled, and it is therefore simple to understand that the dogma of transubstantiation was presently received as a leading and essential doctrine.

{*Lady Jane Grey, in her cross-examination by Fecknam, reasoned in much the same way, When Fecknam put the question: "Doth not Christ speak these words? Doth He not say it is His body?"the lovely martyr replied: "I grant He doth, and so He saith, 'I am the vine,' 'I am the door;' but He is never the more the door nor the vine," etc.

But we must hasten on. It might be asked, Could it be possible that things would grow darker and more dismal that the minds of men choked by the weeds of sloth, and blinded by the web of superstition, would sink to even lower depths of morbidness and misery? Alas! it was but too possible. As the thousandth year of the church's history drew near, terror was added to superstition; and a panic, such as has doubtless never been known before or since, seized upon the people. Had not the Lord said, that after the thousand years Satan should be loosed out of his prison, and should go out to deceive the nations in the four quarters of the earth?* Surely then the end of the world was at hand!

{*Revelation xx.}

Taking this for his text a hermit of Thuringia, named Bernhard, had gone forth in the year 960, preaching the coming doom. There was a show of reason in the doctrine, and the superstitious of every rank were wrought upon by the delusion. Monks and hermits took up the cry, and long before the year commenced it had rung its dreadful knell through all Europe. People crowded to Palestine, leaving lands and houses behind them, or bequeathing them, by way of expiation for their sins, to churches and monasteries; nobles sold their estates, and even princes and bishops joined the pilgrim train, and prepared themselves for the appearing of the Lamb on Mount Zion. An eclipse of the sun and other phenomena in the heavens contributed to the general terror and misery, and thousands fled from the cities to take refuge in the dens and caves of the earth. Truly there were ghastly reasons for the act; for it was expected that a convulsion of nature would usher in the awful moment, and many felt it would be better to be destroyed by the falling mountains than by the wrath of Him that sitteth upon the throne. The awful premonitions that were to usher in the day of judgment, seemed actually to be fulfilled; there were "signs in the sun and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which (were) coming upon the earth." (Luke xxi. 25-26.) That year the houses of rich and poor were left unrepaired, the lands untilled, the vineyards uncultivated. No harvests were gathered in because no seed had been sown; no new churches or monasteries were erected, because in a few months there would be no human beings to frequent them.

At length the final day of the terrible year began. When night closed in, few were in a condition to seek their beds: the vestibules and porches of the churches were thronged with anxious, fearful watchers. It was a sleepless night for all Europe. But day dawned. The sun rose in the heavens as of yore, and shone down upon an unconsumed though famine-stricken world; there were no portentous signs in the skies above — no tremors in the earth below — all things continued as they were. A sigh of relief arose from all hearts. The deluded multitudes returned to their several homes, and resumed their accustomed avocations. The Year of Terror had passed away, and the eleventh century of the church's history had begun.

Chapter 12.

From the Year of Terror to the Death of Hildebrand.

A.D. 1000-1100.

The re-action which succeeded the Year of Terror produced a church building mania, which instantly infected all classes of people. The immense wealth which the terrorising preaching of the monks had extorted from the people was in many cases devoted to this end; and it is questionable whether the churches of this period have ever been surpassed for size or architectural beauty.

Relieved from the horrors of the dreadful nightmare which marked the closing days of the last century, a slight revival of learning was also perceptible; and the efforts of Sylvester II., a pope who had studied in the schools of Arabia, then the great emporium of learning, did much in this direction. Yet, when he published a treatise on geometry, his favourite science, the curves and angles so scared the superstitious monks that they accused him of dabbling in the forbidden sciences, and avoided him as a necromancer. Had his zeal in the cause of religion been as real as it was in the cause of science, Christendom might have been purified from many of its pollutions, but it was not; and at the close of his pontificate darkness still brooded over the unhappy church. The great increase of importance which everywhere attached to the ecclesiastical power for which also the munificence of the nobles during the Year of Terror accounted not a little may be inferred from the fact, that "baronial and even ducal rights were held in Germany by the bishops and abbots of the empire, not within their own possessions only, but even beyond them;" and that "ecclesiastical estates were no longer described as situated in certain counties, but these counties were described as situated in the bishoprics." Progress in mission work among the heathen seems to have been almost at a stand; though the work in Russia, Sweden, and Denmark was continued, and Poland, Prussia, and Hungary were partially opened to the gospel. Some praise, however, must be accorded to the Nestorian Christians, who carried the gospel to Tartary and Mongolia, and were specially successful in the provinces of Turkestan, Cosgar, Genda and Tangut. Doubtless the lack of blessing among the Western missionaries may be traced to the lack of vital godliness, and the host of errors by which the gospel had been overlaid. Turning over the records of this century we look in vain for lingering traces gospel taught in its purity, or of an assembly of believers gathered on truly scriptural grounds. Even instances of personal piety are rare; and when we have recorded the names of Queen Margaret of Scotland and Berengar, we have almost exhausted the list of notable Christians, whose learning was accompanied by any striking proofs of godliness. Even the Christianity of Margaret was of an intensely Romish cast, and one turns from the perusal of her history with strangely mingled feelings. It is with more of pity than pleasure that we think of the wearying monotony of her religious life; nor can we close our eyes to the fact, that there was much ostentation in her acts of benevolence, and much parade in her humility. Still she was a true Christian, and in those dark days one has to be thankful for even a feeble glimmer of light. Berengar is deserving of mention as having revived the controversy respecting the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. He was archdeacon of Angers, and zealously taught that the bread and wine were simply the emblems of the Lord's death; not being converted into the body and blood of Christ as stated. For this he was cited to appear at Rome, and, under threats of torture and death, was induced to sign a recantation; but after much sorrow of heart for his unfaithfulness he returned to his former opinions, and came to a peaceful end in the year 1088.

But the palm for christian devotedness must be bestowed on believers outside the pale of Rome. During this century the Paulicians worked their way through Western Europe to France, where they were subjected to much persecution by the catholic party; but their labours were owned of God. Eventually, to be rid of them, they were accused of the Manichean heresy, and burnt at the stake. There is much evil spoken of these evidently devoted men, but as it is chiefly recorded by their enemies, specimens of whose honesty and veracity have already been laid before the reader, we shall do well to take it in a directly opposite sense, or to discard it altogether. It is thought by some, that the seed of the Vaudois church was planted by Paulician missionaries.

But Rome, at this time, had a more important work than to busy herself with the obstinacy of a few harmless heretics: the woman, Jezebel, had not yet been invested with the full authority to which she aspired, a spiritual universal monarchy, and the sovereigns of Europe were still independent of her sway. Her darling ambition to raise herself to the high dignity of autocratrice of all the world, though long indulged in secret, was now to be openly announced, and the pontificate of Hildebrand was the fitting occasion for the framing and partial accomplishment of this daring scheme. This was the pope of whom the poet says:

"There was a carpenter of Tuscany,

"Whose son, from a cowled monk, made himself pontiff"*

{*R.H. Horne's Gregory VII.}

He was born at Soana, a city of Etruscan origin, situated in the low marsh lands of La Maremma. His father is said to have been a carpenter (as the lines above quoted indicate), but descended from a noble family, and enjoyed the patronage, if not the friendship of the Counts of Tusculum.

The youthful Hildebrand was educated, contrary to his wishes, at the monastery of Calvello, near his native city, and afterwards at the monastery of St. Mark, on the Aventine Mount; where his application and love of learning attracted the notice of his uncle, the abbot of the monastery. He attached himself at an early age to the Benedictine order of monks; and in his sixteenth year, dissatisfied with the laxity of St. Mark's, was draughted to the famous monastery of Clugny, where greater austerity of discipline was observed. Here, moreover, there were greater facilities for the acquisition of that secular knowledge, always so necessary a factor in the machinations of the church of Rome. Even at this early period of his history, he seems to have given evidence of considerable penetration of intellect and much calculating prudence, allied with a craftiness and ambition, which were to make him the spiritual despot of his age.

It would appear that Hildebrand had obtained considerable influence at the Vatican before his twenty-fifth year; for we find him busily intriguing with Benedict IX., a dethroned pope of Rome, and arranging with him for a transfer of his claim to one Gratian, for 1500 pounds of gold. But he does not seem to have visited Rome in person till the election of Bruno, bishop of Toul, to the papal see, by the nomination of Henry III. of Germany. The bishop was staying at Clugny at the time of his election, and Hildebrand having gained possession of his ear persuaded him that the nomination of the pontiff by a worldly potentate was a disgrace to the church. There should be no subjection, he argued, of the ecclesiastical to the secular power; and advised him to make his journey to Rome in the garb of a pilgrim, refusing the dignity till it had been conferred upon him by the will of the people and the act of the cardinals. Bruno discerned the wisdom and foresight of this counsel, and proposed that Hildebrand should accompany him on his journey; a proposition in which the monk readily acquiesced. This scheme succeeded beyond expectation, and the people received the pilgrim-candidate for the papal throne with acclamation. Hildebrand was loaded with honours, made sub-deacon of St. Paul's, cardinal, abbot, and canon of the holy Roman church, and custodian of the altar of St. Peter.

The influence which this single act had acquired for him was incalculable. He now became the moving spirit in the Lateran palace, administering the affairs of the papacy, and virtually ruling the pope himself. Indeed, his Holiness was a mere puppet in his hands, as was proved when he presently procured his deposition by means of bribery and intrigue. After that, Hildebrand remained for twenty years behind the scenes, deposing and electing popes, almost at his pleasure. His friend Damianus once sent him some Latin verses in which he satirically remarked, "I worship the pope ceremoniously, but I adore thee submissively. Thou makest this man lord; he makes thee God:" and the lines truly indicated the remarkable influence of the cardinal. While the popes were content with present ease and enjoyment, Hildebrand, who cared for none of these things, was busy with his schemes. He "fomented or originated quarrel, usurpation, and conquest everywhere;" unsettling all, "that in the re-settlement his schemes might have a place." That he made no secret of his strength is evident from his treatment of Alexander II., a pope who gave offence to him by offering to suspend the exercise of his functions till he had been duly appointed by the temporal power. Hildebrand mounted the papal throne, and with clenched fist, struck the pontiff in the face, in the presence of a conclave of cardinals, ambassadors, and others. On another occasion, at a full council of bishops, he accused the whole assembly of being disciples of Simon Magus, and deposed one who dared to contravene the charge.

All this time his ambitious schemes were ripening slowly, though not more slowly than surely; and step by step, with a caution that was half the secret of his power, he mounted the glittering ladder. At last (it was the month of March in the year 1073) he reached the summit, and was unanimously elected pope by the council of cardinals. He took the title of Gregory VIII.

But even this was only a means to an end. The course which Hildebrand had been pursuing during the past twenty years was not to end here; this was not the supreme object for which he had been striving. His schemes were wider, and, in a certain sense, less selfish; and nothing less than the institution of a permanent hierarchy, with unbounded authority over all peoples and kingdoms on the face of the earth, would satisfy his ambition. Yes; he would organise a vast ecclesiastical state, which should preside over the destinies of men — a mighty theocracy or spiritual oligarchy, with power to instruct the people in its infallible dogmas, to over-ride their consciences and to enforce their obedience; a state whose ruler should be supreme over all the rulers of the earth, creating and deposing kings at his pleasure interdicting whole provinces and kingdoms, and none daring to oppose — the vicegerent of God upon earth, in whom could exist no error, from whom could be no appeal!

But before these ambitious schemes could be realised, some important reforms were necessary. The sale of ecclesiastical benefices — or the sin of Simony — must be instantly suppressed. That it prevailed throughout Christendom was no hidden thing, and we have already given proofs of its prevalence at Rome. There were many Simon Maguses abroad, who thought that the gift of God might be purchased with money. But there was something even more hateful to Gregory's mind than simony, and that was the marriage of the clergy. He could see that, as long as that was permitted, all his efforts would be futile. Marriage was the one connecting link between the priests and the people, and until this was broken there could be no true unity as he desired it. The clergy must be an entirely and separate body, bound by no ties of kindred, having but one object the maintenance and glory of the church. They must recognise no sonship save sonship to the church — no fatherhood save that of spiritual parentage: all interests and ambitions, all feelings and desires, apart from this were traitorous and unworthy. These were Gregory's views, and his dictates were framed accordingly.

His mandate with regard to the latter of these two grievances produced the most appalling results. "It dissolved the most honourable marriages, rent asunder what God had joined together, scattered husbands, wives and children, and gave rise to the most lamentable contentions, and spread everywhere the direst calamities; wives especially were driven to despair, and exposed to the bitterest grief and shame." But the more vehement the opposition, the more loud the anathemas against any delay in the plenary execution of the pontiff's commands. The disobedient were delivered over to the civil magistrates, to be persecuted, deprived of their properties, and subjected to indignities and sufferings of various kinds. Part of one of his letters says on this point: "He whom flesh and blood moveth to doubt or delay is carnal; he is condemned already; he hath no share in the work of the Lord; he is a rotten branch, a dumb dog, a cankered limb, a faithless servant, a time-server, and a hypocrite."

Another of Gregory's decrees was directed against lay investitures, and this involved him in a quarrel with Henry IV. of Germany. The inauguration of bishops and abbots by ring and crosier, had been the custom with kings and emperors long before the time of Charlemagne; and Henry was in no mood to surrender the time-honoured privilege at the command of a Romish priest. His refusal incensed the pope, and led him to connive at Henry's destruction.

Nor was this their only cause of difference. When the dictates of Gregory respecting the sin of simony, had been communicated to Henry, though the emperor had received the papal legate graciously, and had spoken approvingly of the proposed reforms, he had taken no steps in the matter; and this had further incensed the pope. He wanted deeds, not words; the carrying out of his decrees, not the evasive compliments of the emperor; and he became more particular in his demands. He required that a council should be convened in Germany, and that the many charges of simony which had been brought against Henry's bishops, should be immediately investigated: but to this the emperor would not consent; and was, of course, supported in his refusal by the bishops, many of whom were doubtless guilty. But Gregory was not to be thwarted in his purposes, or discomfited by opposition. Unable to gain his end one way, he resorted to another; and having summoned a council at Rome, the charges were gone into there. As a result, several of Henry's favourites, some of them the highest ecclesiastics in the land, were deposed; and, as though to add insult to injury, the emperor himself received a peremptory summons to appear at Rome, to answer to similar charges; while a threat of excommunication was held out against him if he refused to attend. He did refuse; and indignant at the wanton insult which had thus been offered to his person, called a council of his own bishops and deposed the pope.

The gauntlet had been thrown down, and Gregory at once retaliated by issuing the threatened bull. In a full assembly of bishops, numbering 110, he pronounced the excommunication of the emperor; and declared at the same time, his kingdom forfeited, and his subjects absolved from their oaths of fealty. The language of Gregory on this occasion was sufficiently blasphemous, "Now, therefore, brethren," he cried, "it behoves us to draw the sword of vengeance; now must we smite the foe of God and of His church; now shall his bruised head, which lifts itself in its haughtiness against the foundations of the faith, and of all the churches, fall to the earth, there according to the sentence pronounced against his pride, to go upon his belly, and eat the dust. Fear not, little flock, saith the Lord, for it is the will of your Father to grant you the kingdom. Long enough have ye borne with him; often enough have ye admonished him: let his seared conscience be made to feel!"

Gregory knew the disordered state of the German empire, and had chosen his time well. The superstitious fears of the people were roused by the papal ban, copies of which were extensively circulated; and the cupidity of the Saxon nobles was excited, by the licence which it gave them to throw off their allegiance to the emperor; and thus the threats which the bull contained were rapidly effective. Some from terror, some from personal feelings against the emperor, and some from hope of reward, were led to take up arms against their prince; till Henry found himself absolutely deserted by his own subjects. And as he lost ground, the influence and authority of the pope increased. "Great swelling words of most awful import were his weapons. The 'name of God; the peace of God; the commands of God; the salvation of God; the keys of the blessed Peter; closing the gates of heaven; opening the gates of hell; eternal perdition;' were words which struck terror into every human mind, and the manacles with which he bound his slaves," It was an unequal contest, for the pope had all the power on his side, and Henry was almost alone. He was a high-minded prince, and the greatest monarch of Europe, but resistance against such odds as this was hopeless: crushed at last, he determined to obey the pope's summons and set out for Italy. Yes, he would beg the pope's forgiveness, confess his sins, and get the ban removed. Perhaps a message from the pope to one of the rebel lords encouraged him to take this step. "Deal gently with Henry," were Gregory's words, "and extend to him that charity which covereth a multitude of sins." Henry had an opportunity of experiencing the pope's charity later on.

It was the depth of winter when he set out. He was accompanied by his wife and child, and a few attendants; and their path lay across mountains which were capped with snow, and overlaid by sheets of ice. After a dangerous and fatiguing journey of several weeks the party arrived before the castle of Canossa, in Apulia, where Gregory was staying with the Countess Matilda. The pope had been advised of his approach, and as the penitential emperor came in sight of the fortress the outer gates were opened to him. The second entrance was also thrown open, but when he would have essayed to enter the castle itself, he found that the innermost gates were barred against him. He waited; but he waited in vain. A cold January frost had set in, and he began to grow faint with fatigue and hunger; but night found him still standing in the court of the castle, unable to gain admittance. Henry was experiencing the 'charity' of the pope. The following morning, when he again presented himself for admittance, this treatment was renewed: the pope was inexorable, and the mercy which the degraded emperor craved was not to be had. For three dreary days was he thus kept waiting in the cold; till all save the iron-hearted pope were melted to tears. At last the combined entreaties of the Abbot of Clugny and the Countess Matilda, whose hearts had been deeply moved by the passionate appeals of the afflicted emperor, were successful; and Gregory, with an ill-grace, consented to admit him to his presence.

But he had gone too far. The high-minded prince had been too deeply insulted ever to forgive or forget the injuries which he had sustained at his hand, and though, while he continued in the power of the pope, he had to submit to much degradation and further insult, it only made the recoil greater when he was at last set free. Revenge was all he could think about; and no sooner was the outward act of reconciliation over, and the ban removed, than he formed a scheme for the invasion of Italy. Many sympathisers had meanwhile gathered round him, so that he found no difficulty in raising an army; and when all was in readiness he placed himself at its head and set out for Rome. A prophecy which the pope had impiously uttered, that Henry would be dead or deposed within a year, presently shewed that he was a lying prophet as well as a lying priest, for at the end of three years the emperor was alive and well, and — what was more to the pope's mortification in possession of the papal city. He deposed Gregory, who had meanwhile shut himself away in the fastness of St. Angelo, and placed the pope elect, Guibert, archbishop of Ravenna, on the papal throne as Clement III. But the approach of Robert Guiscard, a Norman warrior, with a large army, compelled the emperor to withdraw, and Gregory now obtained his release. An awful doom, however, awaited the ancient city. The soldiers, whom Gregory had invited, were for the most part infidel Saracens, and scarcely had Robert received the pontifical blessing, than he let loose this half barbarian army upon the city. For three days Rome was given over to pillage and confusion, until such time as the soldiers were utterly fatigued by their rioting and stupefied with drink. Then the defenceless inhabitants of the city could repress their indignation no longer, and rushing out upon the lawless freebooters, they fell upon them with the energy of desperation. Guiscard, finding that the tide had turned against him, gave orders to fire the houses, and this inhuman act again turned the scale in his favour. The inhabitants forgot their enemies in their eagerness to save their wives and children from the flames, and while they were thus engaged, they were massacred in hundreds by the ruthless Saracens.

In the midst of this conflict and confusion Gregory retired from the city, and hastened to Salerno; where, as if untaught by the terrible scenes which he had just witnessed, and of which he had been the author, he proceeded to thunder out fresh anathemas against Henry. But an arresting hand was soon to be placed upon him, whose grasp he could not evade; a hand which no pope had ever been able to resist — the hand of death. The solemn ordination had gone out against him, and on the 25th of May, in the year 1085, he was called into the presence of God. A great storm was raging at the time, and he died miserably, with these words upon his lips, "I have loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."

And this, reader, is the man who is lauded to the skies by the partisans of Rome, and whose name has been inscribed upon her catalogue of saints! Alas! of what avail are all these barren and posthumous honours, if his name is not found written in the Book of Life? What are the empty adulations of men, if the great churchman is now wailing with the damned in hell?

Chapter 13.

The First Crusade.

A.D. 1094-1100.

The papacy gained little by Gregory's struggle with the emperor; and before the century was out, the reigning pope found it expedient to resort to a new device in order to promote the temporal interests of the papacy. From time to time complaints had been brought from the Holy Land, of insults and outrages which had been suffered by pilgrims to the holy sepulchre; and Urban II., who then occupied the chair of St. Peter, formed the idea of promoting a great religious war. He saw that if he could engage all Europe in this fever scheme, and drain the various countries of their best soldiers, he would be able to push his temporal pretensions in a way that no preceding pope had done, since the turbulent barons and powerful princes would be out of the way, and there would be none to oppose him. He therefore lent a willing ear to the complaints of one of the chief fomentors in this novel agitation, a hermit of Amiens, named Peter; and gave him every encouragement in preaching a crusade. This remarkable man had visited Jerusalem in the year 1093, and viewed with indignation the manner in which his fellow-pilgrims were treated by the Seljuk Turks, who were in possession of the city, and while there, had made a solemn vow to rouse the nations of Europe against the infidels — a vow which he now proceeded to perform. Mounted upon a mule, and clad in a long robe, tightened at the waist by a hempen girdle, he passed from town to town, calling upon the people to arm in defence of the holy sepulchre. His wandering rhapsodies and impassioned appeals aroused by turns the awe and indignation of his hearers, and quickly produced the results for which he aspired. "Why," he cried, "should the unbelievers be allowed any longer to retain the custody of such christian territories as the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane? Why should the unbaptised followers of Mahomet, the children of perdition, pollute with hostile feet the sacred ground which had been the witness of so many miracles, and still furnished so many relics which manifested superhuman power? Bones of martyrs, garments of saints, nails of the cross, thorns of the crown, were all lying ready to be gathered up by the faithful priesthood who would lead the expedition. Let the floors of Zion be purified with the blood of slaughtered infidels." Such was the character of the monk's preaching; and when he had succeeded in working the people to a pitch of frenzy, and they were in readiness to receive whatever orders were imposed upon them, Urban himself came forward to add his approving word. His speech was delivered in the market-place, and was frequently interrupted by cries of "God wills it — God wills it!" for he was careful to appeal to the passions of the people, and did not neglect to offer absolution for the blackest sins to all who joined the holy army. As the result of these appeals an immense rabble, numbering 60,000 men, set off for Palestine in the spring of the year 1096, with Peter at their head. They seem to have been chiefly of the peasant class; and so ignorant, that they are said to have inquired at every town as they passed along, "Is this Jerusalem?" little thinking that they were destined never to reach the holy city. After numberless reverses they reached Constantinople, and crossed the Bosphorus; but, having proceeded as far as the Turkish capital, they were met by an army under Solyman, the Sultan of Iconium, and miserably defeated. Out of the 60,000 who set out, only a third returned to tell the tale.

The year following another army was raised, and 600,000 crusaders, of all ranks and conditions, began their march, attended by numerous women, "jugglers, servants, and workmen of all kinds." This immense army separated into four parties for the sake of sustenance, and proceeded by different roads to Constantinople. Here they re-united and pursued their onward course together, thousands perishing on the journey by reason of the great heat and the scarcity of water. Other difficulties had to be encountered in the loss of all the horses, as well as in the jealousies and frequent quarrels of the soldiers: but in spite of these hindrances, the army dragged on its course, and slowly-advanced towards Antioch. A few engagements took place before this city was reached; notably, the battle of Dorylium, in which the crusaders were victorious, and the siege of Edessa, which resulted in the capture of that city, after no very great resistance from the Mahometans; Antioch, however, was not so easily reduced. The fruitfulness of the luxurious country round the city proved as dangerous to the cause of the crusaders as the scorching and sterile plains of Phrygia had proved some months before; and the besiegers no sooner found themselves on the fertile banks of the Orontes, and among the groves of Daphne, than they abandoned themselves to the wildest excesses. The approach of winter found them quite unprepared; their camp was flooded; their tents were wrecked by the wind; and the horrors of another famine became inevitable. In the extremities of their hunger they devoured the dead bodies of their enemies; and so managed to sustain life, till the treachery of one of the besieged placed them in sudden and unexpected possession of the place. Under cover of the night, and at a moment when a fierce storm was raging, the crusaders scaled the rugged walls, and with their stirring battle cry,"God wills it!" entered the city.

But the possession of Antioch by the crusaders, did not long remain undisputed. The former garrison was not entirely subdued, and their warlike spirit revived when the fact became known that an army of 200,000 Turks, under Kerboga, Prince of Mosul, was marching to their relief. As the prospects of the Mahometans grew brighter, the prospects of the crusaders grew more hopeless; and once more they were threatened with destruction. But superstition came to their aid, and the sudden discovery of the spear which pierced the Saviour's side, the burial place of which had been revealed to a crafty monk named Bartholomaeus, produced a wonderful reaction in the hearts of the crusaders. We may remark that it was the monk who found the spear. He had been told in his dream that it was lying under the great altar of the church of St. Peter; and it was not till others had searched to a depth of twelve feet, that he volunteered his aid. The hour of his search was well chosen — the dusk of evening; the garment in which he made his descent was doubtless as well chosen a capacious cloak. There was room for many spear-heads beneath it. Bartholomaeus was successful; and a lance-head was brought up from the hole, and exhibited in triumph to the desponding army. The effect was electrical. With the animating cry,"Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered!" the gates of the city were flung open, and the army rushed out upon the unsuspecting foes. Victory was assured; and the Saracens were driven from the field like chaff before the wind. The result was decisive, and the immense spoils of the enemy fell into the hands of the crusaders. with every demonstration of joy they returned to the city; and having proclaimed one of their leaders, by name Bohemond, prince of Antioch, they gave themselves up to ten months of luxury and idleness; evidently quite unadmonished by their severe experiences in the past.

It was May of the following year before the army again moved on, and as they approached Jerusalem their fanaticism exceeded all bounds. Tyre and Sidon, Caesarea and Lydda, Emmaus and Bethlehem, were all passed in turn; and at last a height was reached from which the Holy City could be plainly seen, stretching out like a map before them. Then it was their excitement reached its height, and a great cry burst forth, "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! God wills it! God wills it!" and the crusaders fell prostrate upon their faces, and embraced the consecrated ground.

But much was yet to be done. Jerusalem was theirs in anticipation, but not in fact. An offer from the Saracen Governor to admit the crusaders in the character of pilgrims was indignantly rejected; the Christians would come to no terms — would agree to no compromise. Their mission was to deliver the Holy City from the tyranny and oppression of unbelievers, and nothing short of this would give them rest. The siege lasted forty days, and during that time the besiegers were again reduced to the greatest extremities. A scorching sun, which made their thirst the more intolerable, had dried up all the water in the brook Kedron; their cisterns had been poisoned or destroyed by the enemy: and in the despair produced by these untoward circumstances, they prepared for the final assault.

But superstition was once more ready to their aid. Strange rumours got afloat that their brave leader, Godfrey de Bouillon, had been favoured with a vision, and was prosecuting the siege under angelic directions. He had seen a bright form in heavenly armour, hovering over Mount Olivet, and waving his drawn sword in signal for this last attack. That was enough. The old cry,"God wills it!" was caught up by 40,000 desperate warriors, and ere long the whole army was swarming up the steep walls which surrounded Jerusalem. The struggle was long and bloody, but victory declared for the besiegers, and Godfrey himself was the first to gain a firm and undisputed footing on the walls. A moment later, and he had leapt into the devoted city, followed by thousands of his soldiers, who poured down upon the enemy with the restless fury of an avalanche. The carnage that followed was indescribable. Neither age nor sex was spared, and the butchery of 70,000 Mahometans was considered creditable christian work by the crusaders. For three days the city was deluged with blood, and credible historians relate that in the temple and Solomon's porch the crimson tide was up to the saddle-girths of the horses. But the lull came; and on the eighth day after the attack, the victorious leaders assembled, and offered the kingdom of Jerusalem to Godfrey de Bouillon. He was unquestionably the hero of the day, but with a modesty equal to his heroism he declined the royal dignity, and accepted the humbler title of Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre. A further victory at Askelon, not long after, secured the position of the crusaders; and now that the wrongs of their pilgrim brethren had been avenged, they felt that their mission was done, and many of them prepared to return to their native lands.

The Mahometans had held the city since the conquest of Omar in the year 637, a period of 462 years: the exact date of its recapture was the 15th of July, A.D. 1099. The day was a Friday; and it was just three o'clock in the afternoon when Godfrey stood victorious on the walls of the city. Is it merely a coincidence that this was the day and hour of our Saviour's passion?

Chapter 14.

The Church in the Twelfth Century; with an Account of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades.

A.D. 1100-1200.

The records of the century to which we are now brought, are singularly cheerless; with but few gleams of light to relieve the prevailing gloom. True there were some attempts of a missionary character in the still pagan parts of Europe, but the results were only partial and uncertain. Otho, bishop of Bamberg, carried the gospel into Pomerania; that country having been conquered by the Duke of Poland; and when the people found that his objects were peaceable, and that he came to offer them salvation and not to plunder or oppress them, they listened to his words, and many were baptised. The islanders of Ruegen also, who had received Christianity in the previous century, but had relapsed into image-worship, and were even offering human sacrifices to the image of St. Vitus, a martyr, were reclaimed in some measure through the ministry of Absolom, archdeacon of Lunden. But it would seem that carnal weapons were employed more freely in the work than the sword of the Spirit, and we may, therefore, reasonably doubt the sincerity of many of the conversions. Lastly, with the mention of Vicelin, bishop of Oldenberg, who seems to have done some sterling gospel work among the Slavonian nations, the brief record of the missionary labours of this period closes.

But the century is notable for the existence of testimony of another kind — testimony which seemed a preparation for something that was future, rather than a repetition of the peculiar testimony of the past. The need of the heathen had produced the latter testimony, but the need of the church itself was producing the former. The one was the proclamation of the gospel to the poor and ignorant; the other was a protest against the corruptions of a wealthy hierarchy, which professed to be all-knowing. The professing church had now become thoroughly corrupt, and it is therefore not surprising that some bold speakers should have arisen to declaim against it.

One of the first of these was Peter de Bruys, a native of the South of France, and described as a man of dauntless spirit. He was originally a presbyter; but the pointed and personal tone of his preaching having roused the animosity of the clergy, he became an itinerant and a fugitive to escape persecution. The points on which he differed from the then professing church, were many and important; and he did not fail to make them widely known. He protested against the innovations of Rome; against infant baptism; against the erection of costly churches; against the worship of crucifixes; against the doctrine of transubstantiation; against the celebration of the mass; and against the efficacy of alms and prayers for the dead. The fervour of his eloquence gained him many hearers, and not a few followers; but his mission seems to have been one of destruction rather than of reformation; insomuch that Dupin, an historian of the seventeenth century, relates that "In Provence there was nothing to be seen but Christians re-baptised, churches profaned, altars pulled down, and crosses burnt." After labouring amid much persecution, for upwards of twenty years he was burned alive at St. Gilles, in the year 1130.

The influence of his teaching, however, could not be destroyed; and his work was carried on by an Italian named Henry, who, by his extraordinary zeal, and convincing eloquence, carried all before him. He went about the country barefoot, even in winter; and his clothing was scanty and of the poorest kind. The cottages of the peasants were his frequent resting places; but, like his divine Master, he often had not where to lay his head. Many a weary hour was spent under porticos, or on the dark hillsides, exposed to the pelting rain and the piercing night winds: but his courage was not daunted by suffering, and the threats of his adversaries caused him no alarm. Like Peter de Bruys, he taught that it was a fallacy to build costly churches, since the church of Christ consisted not in a mass of coherent stones, but in the unity of the congregated faithful; like him, he taught that the cross of the Lord was not to be honoured and adored: that transubstantiation was a doctrine of hell; that prayers for the dead were vain and useless; and that the baptising of infants was attended with no saving results.

A "heretic"so daring could not be permitted to roam at large, and Henry was at length seized and imprisoned at Rheims. He was afterwards removed to Toulouse, where he was put to death by order of Alberic, the papal legate, A.D. 1147.

Several other, so-called, heretics — doubtless followers of Henry and Peter de Bruys — suffered martyrdom at Cologne in the same year; and Evervinus, Praepositus of Steinfeld, near that city, gives an account of their martyrdom in the course of a letter to Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux. After speaking of their firmness and resolution while under examination, he continues, "And (what is more wonderful) they entered to the stake, and bare the torment of the fire, not only with patience, but with joy and gladness. In this case, O holy father, were I present with you, I should be glad to have your answer how these members of the devil could with such courage and constancy persist in their heresy, as is scarcely to be found in the most religious in the faith of Christ." It would indeed be interesting to know how the worthy abbot of Clairvaux, or any other holy father, would explain the secret of this courage and constancy. The abbot made an attempt to do so by ascribing it to the power of the devil, "which," said he, "is so great not only over the bodies, but even over the hearts of men:" but modern fairness will rate the abbot's opinion at its proper value. This same Bernard, who could approve of the zeal which persecuted these faithful Christians even to the death, could also say of them, "If you interrogate them respecting their faith, nothing can be more christian: if you inquire into their conversation, nothing can be more irreprehensible; and, what they say, they affirm by their deeds. As for what regards life and manners, they attack no one, they circumvent no one, they defraud no one. Their faces are pale with fasting: they eat not the bread of idleness; but they labour with their own hands for the support of life." Such is the blinding power of popery, even over the mind of one who was undoubtedly a true child of God.

It is a matter for rejoicing, however, that in spite of persecution, the number of these seceders from Rome increased. The abbot above referred to, describes them as "the multitude of heretics;" and another writer, Eckbert, affirms, that "they increased to multitudes in all countries;" while William of Newbury testifies, that "they seemed to be multiplied beyond the sand of the sea." Eckbert further informs us, that the "heretics" went by different names according to the countries in which they were found. In Germany they were called Cathari, in Flanders, Piphles, and in France, Tisserands, from the art of weaving which was their common occupation. In England they were called Publicans. It is related that during a persecution at Cologne in the year 1163, when four men and a little girl, belonging to the Tisserands, were delivered over to the secular power to be burned, the people, taking pity on the child, held her back in the hope that she would recant. But the child, watching her opportunity, suddenly broke from their control, and cast herself into the flames.

But, perhaps, the brightest light of this century was Peter Waldo,* the pious merchant of Lyons. Roused to serious thought by the sudden death of a friend, he became an attentive reader of the scriptures; and having distributed his property among the poor, devoted the remainder of his life to acts of piety. A fuller acquaintance with the Scriptures taught him the corruptness of the dominant religious system, and led him in time to renounce it entirely as anti-christian. Meanwhile he became anxious for the deliverance of others from the state of darkness in which he had so lately been, and adopting an itinerant life, he went forth to preach through the world the unsearchable riches of Christ. One of his adversaries, Stephanus de Borbonne, informs us that having applied himself to the study of the fathers, and given his utmost attention to the reading of the Bible, he became so familiar with them that they were "engraven in his memory," and he determined to seek after that evangelical perfection which had distinguished the apostles. Stephanus further informs us how that, having sold all his goods in contempt of the world,* and distributed the money he had gained to the poor, the pious merchant went about, "preaching the gospel, and the things he had committed to memory, in the streets and public places." Amongst his other sins, as recorded by this useful exponent of the practices of the heretics, we learn that he collected men and women of all trades (even the meanest) around him, and having confirmed them in the knowledge of the gospel sent them into the surrounding countries to preach. But the steps which Waldo took for the translation of the gospels into the vulgar tongue will ever be considered his great work. Without this he could never have sent out his disciples as he did, freighted with the words of life; for they were ignorant and illiterate, and the Scriptures were only to be obtained in the Latin tongue. His faithfulness, however, was not long to go unchallenged; and the tidings of his last great act, at once awoke the thunders of the Vatican. So long as Waldo contented himself with the lesser task of reforming the lives of the clergy, he was tolerably secure from molestation; but when he drew from its sheath that dreaded weapon, the word of God, and placed it in the hands of the common people, he at once declared himself the enemy of Rome. To place an open Bible in the possession of the laity, was nothing less than to disturb the very foundations of the Papacy; for the word of God was Rome's greatest adversary. The action of the pope was therefore prompt and decisive; and a ban of excommunication was issued against the honest merchant. Yet in spite of Alexander's bull, Waldo remained in Lyons three years longer, busily employed in preaching, and circulating the Scriptures; by which time, finding former measures ineffectual, the pope extended his threats to all who held communications with the heretic. Then, for his friends' sake, Waldo quitted the town; and during the remaining four years of his life, was a wanderer on the face of the earth; although, in the providence of God, he never fell a victim to the persecuting vigilance of Rome. He died a natural death in the year 1179.

{*Variously called Waldus, Valdo, Valdus, Valdius, Valdensis, etc. etc.

**Stephanus de Borbonne adds, "and dared to usurp the office of the apostles."}

The dispersion of his followers ("the Poor Men of Lyons") after his death, contributed greatly to the spread of the gospel; and numbers of them wended their way to the Cottian Alps, among which the Vaudois valleys are situated. Here, to their joy, they found a growing colony of Christians, professing views in many respects similar to their own, and affording by their life and conversation, a most pleasing example both of christian fellowship and domestic felicity. By these simple believers they were received with open arms, and even permitted to attach themselves to the colony; and in this way they became partners in its fortunes, and, ere long, partakers in its sufferings. There we must leave them for the present, while we take a glance at others of a professedly orthodox persuasion, and within the pale of the Romish church, whose names have any prominence in the ecclesiastical records of the century.

Of these we may name four — Bernard of Clairvaux, Abelard, Arnold of Brescia, and Thomas a Becket; though they were not all so orthodox as the more staunch adherents of Rome might have wished. Bernard of Clairvaux we have already mentioned, and in no favourable terms; but in spite of his zeal against the followers of Henry and Peter de Bruys, he seems to have been a man of some godliness, and lashed fearlessly at the abuses and sins of the clergy. The luxurious living of the bishops; their drunkenness and gluttony; their gorgeous equipages; their costly cups and dishes; their gilded spurs — all fall beneath the censure of his pen: nor does he scruple to speak of the priests as servants of Antichrist; and of the abbots as lords of castles, rather than fathers of monasteries, as princes of provinces rather than directors of souls. His influence, indeed, was enormous, and, perhaps, second to none.

Abelard was a Frenchman, and is noticeable as being the first public teacher of theology who was not an ordained priest. The romantic side of his history, upon which we do not propose to touch, must be familiar to most readers: yet is there much in it to move our sympathy, as well as to excite an admiration for the man, though poets have had more good things to say of him than theologians. As the learned scholastic, however, we may consider him, and in that character he takes the palm of all his contemporaries. People came from immense distances to hear him lecture; crossing seas and mountains, and submitting to almost any inconvenience to obtain that privilege. But human reason had far too wide a field in his preaching, and led him sadly astray, even with regard to some of the fundamentals of Christianity. At last his great popularity aroused the animosity of Rome, and Bernard was tempted from his cloister to oppose him. The occasion was remarkable, and when the disputants met at Sens, in France, the scene in the council-chamber was worthy [of] the occasion. The king was there, attended by his court; bishops, also, and other ecclesiastics; abbots and learned doctors. But if the occasion which brought them together was remarkable, the circumstances of the debate were yet more so. Bernard having stated that he was not there to accuse Abelard, since his own writings would testify against him, the reading of the incriminated passages commenced. The recital was still proceeding when Abelard abruptly rose to his feet, and turning to his judges said, "I refuse to hear more, or to answer any questions: I appeal to Rome." All were taken by astonishment, and Bernard asked him, did he fear for his person, assuring him at the same time that he was perfectly safe, and would have a patient hearing. Abelard simply replied, "I have appealed to the court of Rome;" and left the assembly. The great schoolman afterwards retired to the monastery of Clugny, where he was kindly received by the abbot; and having taken the cowl, died there in the year 1142.

Arnold of Brescia is said to have been a disciple of Abelard, hut evidently was not tainted with the errors of that brilliant but unhappy man. Though he never seems to have thrown off his allegiance to the pope, he openly defied his power; and in the destructive and revolutionary character of his preaching he reminds one of his contemporary, Peter de Bruys. Using for his text the Saviour's words, "My kingdom is not of this world," he commenced a series of attacks on the lives of the clergy, in the very hotbed of their iniquity, Rome. "If poverty was of Christ," was his cry, "if poverty was of his apostles, if the only real living likenesses of the apostles and of Christ were the fasting, toiling, barely clad monks, with their cheeks sunk with the famine, their eyes on the ground, how far from the apostles, how far from Christ, were those princely bishops, those lordly abbots, with their furred mantles of scarlet and purple, who ride forth on their curveting palfreys, with their golden bits, their silver spurs, and holding their heads like kings." Stung by his reproaches, the hierarchy of Rome clamoured for his removal, and accordingly he was banished by the Lateran council in the year 1139. But he was back again in the year 1154, and recommenced his powerful and passionate declamations; till the people became riotous, and, on several occasions embroiled themselves with the priests. In one of these scuffles a cardinal was wounded, and Adrian placed the city under an interdict, refusing to remove the inhibition till Arnold was expelled the city. The threats had the desired effect, and, for awhile, the movements of the reformer seem to have been restless and unsettled. Hunted from place to place, he at length found an asylum at Zurich, where he was received with kindness by the diocesan bishop. Bernard, however, would not let him rest. He had watched his movements with angry impatience, and now urged the pope to take further action with regard to him. Yet no extreme measures were resorted to till the pontificate of Adrian IV. (an Englishman, whose real name was Nicholas Breakspere) into whose hands the bold preacher was committed by the emperor Barbarossa. The pope, fearing lest the mob should attempt a rescue, hurriedly condemned him at a secret council; and before day-break Arnold had ceased to breathe, and his ashes were lying with the ooze and slime in the bed of the Tiber.

We come now to Thomas a Becket. Of the birth and parentage of this extraordinary man nothing is known, though some affirm that he was the son of a London merchant. He commenced his studies at Oxford, and finished them at Bologna; after which he entered the service of the church, and rose by rapid gradations to the dignity of archdeacon of Canterbury.

At this time, the reigning king, Henry II., was but twenty-five years of age, but he had already begun to manifest a spirit of independence, and promised, like his father, to prove no slight check upon the papal power in this country; and this had aroused some grave misgivings in the mind of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury. It made him anxious to place near the king's person a man of energy and ability, devoted to the church, who would be able to check such opposition, and, in case of need, to override the king's will. Such a man he saw in Becket; and when the chancellorship of the kingdom fell vacant, he recommended the archdeacon as a fitting man for the post. His recommendation was favourably received, and Beckett soon became a favourite with the king. He ingratiated himself in every way with his sovereign, entering into all his schemes, and even (for this was part of his deep-seated policy) siding with him in his efforts to check the encroachments of the papal power in England. He was noted at this time for his worldliness, and the princely style in which he lived. At the chase, the banquet and the tournament, his presence was always in request; and whenever he went abroad, he was conspicuous above his fellow nobles for the magnificence of his apparel, and the splendour of his retinue, which usually consisted of some six to seven hundred knights. Henry seemed always happiest in the company of his favourite; and so long as it suited Becket's purpose the friendship was reciprocal; but no sooner had the unsuspecting monarch raised him to the archbishopric of Canterbury (made vacant by the death of Theobald) than he completely changed his tactics, and shewed himself in his true colours as the inflexible vassal of Rome. His demands at once became arrogant and pressing: and soon enough the king was bitterly regretting that he had placed such honour on his favourite.

For some time past the clergy of England had been seeking to obtain for themselves immunity from the civil law; and, indeed, to all intents and purposes, they had gained their object; as facts abundantly illustrate. Between the years 1154 and 1163 no less than one hundred murders and numberless debaucheries had been committed by men of the priestly order, and not one of the criminals had been called upon to answer for his crime. This alone is conclusive. Becket now espoused their cause, and offered to Murder and Incest the shelter of his archiepiscopal robes. His practical co-operation was seen anon, when he took under his protection a priest, who had been guilty of seduction, and afterwards had murdered the father of the unhappy victim of his lust. The king demanded that the criminal should be given up, but his demand was disregarded: the haughty prelate replied that his degradation was a sufficient punishment, and to this answer he resolutely adhered.

To remedy these abuses, as well as to define more clearly his prerogative, the king called together his barons, and consulted with them as to what should be done; and as they shared their sovereign's views, and recognised the necessity of adopting resolute measures for the protection of his subjects from the aggressions of the clergy, they proceeded to draw up the famous code of laws known as the Constitutions of Clarendon. Therein it was decided, among other things, that, "If any controversy shall arise between clerks and laymen, concerning advowsons or benefices, it shall be heard and decided in the king's court (and not at Rome): that churches belonging to the fee of our lord the king, cannot be appropriated without his grant: that, archbishops, bishops, or parsons, etc., may not leave the kingdom without the consent of the king: that no person who is the king's tenant in capite, nor any of his officers, shall be excommunicated, or their lands placed under an interdict, until the king hath been applied to for justice: that no appeal can be made beyond the court of the archbishop without the consent of the king, that is, no appeal to the pope at Rome and that if a suit shall arise between a clerk or clergyman, and a laic, it shall be decided by twelve lawful men in the presence of the king's chief justice."

Becket reluctantly subscribed his name to these Constitutions, but immediately violated his bond by appealing to Rome; and then, under promise of the pope's indulgence, refused to recognise them at all. True, he had set his name to the new laws, but he declared that he had not engaged to confirm them by affixing his seal; and by this miserable subterfuge he evaded the consequences of his act.

The church and the crown had now entered the lists against each other; and it was evident that the conflict between king and priest, which Hildebrand had begun a century before, was presently to be re-enacted on English soil. Becket's first act shewed how well he understood the spirit of the age. He delivered up the seals of his office: dismissed his numerous retinue; exchanged his costly robes for a hair-cloth shirt and a monk's frock; and gave himself up to all the austerities of a monastic life. His pretended sanctity was his weapon; and the sympathies of a superstitious people were speedily enlisted in his behalf. Henry, however, though rendered uneasy by the conduct of his archbishop, was not to be so easily subdued: and after some vain attempts to bring the refractory priest to submission, he issued orders to proceed against him as a traitor. Becket had meanwhile requested permission to leave the kingdom; but knowing the temper of Henry and fearing for his life, he no sooner obtained information of the king's intentions than he consulted his safety by flight. He "left Northampton privily in the night, and eluding pursuit by a circuitous course," effected his escape to the Continent. Here he was received with marks of honour and affection by the French king; and, with the advice of the pope, retired to the abbey of Pontigny, where he assumed the habit of a Cistercian monk, and restlessly awaited the issue of events.

He was now declared a traitor by proclamation, and his relatives and friends were banished from the kingdom: but Becket angrily retaliated by excommunicating all his opponents. The ceremony of excommunication took place at the church of Vizelay, and the occasion seems to have been made exceptionally awful and imposing. Amid the tolling of bells and the mournful intoning of attendant priests, the impious form was read: and some score or more of persons, whose only crime was obedience to their sovereign's commands, were consigned by the anathema of the archbishop, to a life of unmitigated sufferings on earth, and the quenchless flames of hell hereafter. The crosses on the altar were then inverted; the torches were extinguished; the bells ceased tolling; priests and people retired slowly from the ghostly edifice; and the church was left in silence, solitude, and darkness.

The strife between Henry and Becket lasted seven weary years, and would doubtless have continued much longer, had not the combined intercessions of Louis VII. and the pope procured his restoration. When he returned to his country, he shewed himself as haughty and unyielding as when he left it: though into the history of his subsequent quarrels with the king, and his offensive conduct towards him, we cannot enter. The record might be interesting, but falls not within the limits of our history. His pride and insolence, however, at length became unbearable; and the incautious remark of one of Henry's bishops that, "there would be no peace for him or his kingdom while Becket was alive," kindled into flame his smouldering resentment, and forced from him the well-known exclamation, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four knights, who heard these words, hastened to Canterbury; and having failed in extorting from the haughty prelate a promise of allegiance to their sovereign, murdered him at the altar of the cathedral.

The death of Becket was an unfortunate release for Henry; and the people, groaning under the Norman yoke, made good use of it for the ventilation of their grievances. Nearly all the nobles of the land were Normans, and even most of the abbots and bishops had the hated blood in their veins; but Becket was an Englishman. "To honour à-Becket was to protest against the conquest; and when the crowning glory came, and the crimes of Henry against themselves attained their full consummation in the murder of the prelate at the altar the patriot in his resistance to oppression — the enthusiasm of the country knew no bounds. The penitential pilgrimage which the proudest of the Plantagenets made to the tomb of his victim, was but small compensation for so enormous a wickedness, and for ages the name of à-Becket was a household word at the hearths of the English peasantry, as their great representative and deliverer — only completing the care he took of their temporal interests while on earth, by the superintendence he bestowed on their spiritual benefit now that he was a saint in heaven."

Our references to the twelfth century would be incomplete did we omit to speak of the crusades. The year 1147 is memorable as the year of the second of these "Holy Wars" against the Mahometans. For several years past the power of the crusaders in Syria and Palestine had been growing weaker and weaker, and the soldiers of the cross had settled down to a life of luxury and idleness temptations so peculiar to the countries of the East. The Mahometans, taking advantage of their condition had collected their forces, and after harassing the Christians and considerably weakening their forces by numberless petty wars, had succeeded in recapturing Edessa, and were now centring their attention on Antioch. The crusaders, conscious of their own helplessness, grew seriously alarmed, and sent imploring messages to Rome for help; and this was the origin of the Second Crusade. Pope Eugene III. responded to the appeal, and wisely entrusted the preaching of the crusade to Bernard of Clairvaux. Apart from the great eloquence of the learned abbot, there was a moral weight attaching to all he said, which was sure to bring success to any cause he advocated; and the confidence which the pope had reposed in him was not disappointed. The king of France and the emperor of Germany both responded to the call; and when 900,000 men had rallied round the banner of the cross, this great army, dividing into two companies, set out for Palestine. But misfortune dogged their steps, and the crusade was a miserable and humiliating failure. Only a small portion of the French king's army reached the Holy Land, and the leaders of this remnant could effect nothing owing to the dissensions and jealousies among the soldiers. In the year 1149, the shattered remains of the army returned to Europe, nearly a million having perished in the enterprise.

The third and fourth crusades also belong to this century, and were scarcely more successful. Richard I. of England, who headed the latter, gained some brilliant victories, but not without tremendous loss of life; and his exploits only ended in a truce with Saladin, the Saracen emir; after which Richard returned to England. It is said that 120,000 Christians perished during the siege of Acre; at which the king was present; and if we add to this number the 180,000 Mahometans who perished on the same occasion, we get a total of 300,000 warriors, the price of one solitary engagement; in which nothing was gained but a little empty honour and renown! And who was responsible for all this waste of human life? We can only answer, The head of papal Rome, the pope himself. "It was perfectly evident that by these long expeditions to Palestine, the blood of Europe must be drained, its strength exhausted, and its treasure wasted. There was no thought of seeking to convert the unbelieving to the faith of Christ — the true mission of Christianity — but of weakening the power of the temporal monarchs, that the pontiffs might reign over them. The papacy is essentially infidel.... 'Preach the gospel to every creature,' is the Saviour's commission to all who own Him as Saviour and Lord. No, says the pope, slaughter the unbelievers without mercy. This is the work which God requires at your hands. Let the tares be torn up by the roots, and cast into the fire that they may be burned up."

The three orders of military monks, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights Templars, and the Teutonic Knights, may be considered as offshoots of the crusades; but their character is more political than religious, and we dismiss them with the mention. The Knights Templars grew to be the most powerful, and receptions into their order were conducted with the greatest mystery. In later years, when they had settled on the island of Malta, and their wealth had increased, a jealous feeling was roused against them, and the most frightful stories were circulated with regard to their secret rites and strange ceremonies. Eventually their pride, and cold, unsympathetic attitude to all classes proved their downfall, and in the year 1314 the order was abolished by command of the pope.

Chapter 15.

The Church in the Thirteenth Century; with an Account of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Crusades.

A.D. 1200-1300.

The thirteenth century, though in many respects a period of great importance, has little to shew in the way of missionary achievements.

The Nestorians continued to gain converts in Tartary, India, Persia and China; and the Danes made some feeble attempts of a similar kind in the last-named country. In Spain also, some efforts were made to Christianise the Arab population of the country, but without success. Pope Clement IV. thereupon advised their expulsion from the kingdom; and his advice having been listened to, much cruelty and bloodshed resulted. An attempt was also made to carry the gospel into the pagan parts of Prussia on the point of the sword, and Conrad, Duke of Massora, engaged the Teutonic knights in this barbarous enterprise. Such compulsory measures were at first resented by the inhabitants, but force of arms at length compelled them to submission, and they reluctantly bowed their necks to the papal yoke. Encouraged by this success the knights afterwards extended their mission to Lithuania; where, by robbery, murder, and incendiarism, they speedily reduced the people to a similar state of servitude, and forced them to be baptised.

These acts of injustice and oppression, committed within the bounds of Christendom, need not occasion much surprise, when we consider the condition of the professing church at this period. Ecclesiastics of every grade, from the Pope downwards, were engaged in a scramble for wealth and power, and the schoolmen and other theologians were exhausting their learning and eloquence in idle controversies, and profitless speculations on questions beyond the ken of finite minds. "Never," says Roger Bacon, the most learned Englishman of the age, "never was there so great an appearance of wisdom, and so great ardour in study, in so many faculties and so many countries, as during the last forty years — for doctors are scattered in every city, in every castle, in every borough, and yet never was so great ignorance and misapprehension. The mass of students doze like asses over bad translations of Aristotle, and waste together the time, labour, and expense they lay out upon them. Appearances are all which engross their attention, and they care not what it is they know, but only to appear very learned before the senseless multitude."

The "multitude" were, indeed, as ignorant as they could be, and almost entirely destitute of spirituality. Despising learning, they were thus at the mercy of the priests, who saw the value of it, and sought in every way to limit the boundaries of their knowledge. It was the policy of the clergy to encroach as much as possible upon the civil courts of law; so that in time almost every case of perjury, blasphemy, usury, bigamy, incest, fornication, etc. etc., was tried in the ecclesiastical courts. Yet they craftily managed that the enforcement of their decisions, and the execution of their sentences should be left to the temporal power; thus absolving themselves, as they thought, from the responsibilities incurred by any miscarriage of justice. There is no doubt, indeed, that Europe in the thirteenth century was ruled by the priests, who had both wealth and learning to support them. The monasteries had become palaces, in which the lordly abbots could give their sumptuous entertainments, and carry on their guilty amours, protected by the strong arm of Rome. The bishops were princes, who, in many instances, owned the lands over which they had been appointed spiritual overseers. The friars had their substantial dwellings in the suburbs of every important town, and wandered daily through the streets, in their sombre frocks, to receive the reverent salutations of the people. The cottages of the poor, and the castles of the rich, were always open to their visits; and whether welcome or unwelcome, a reception must be accorded them. Hermits and other recluses still wandered moodily among the tombs and mountain paths, and by their ascetic severities did much to strengthen the hands of the pope. Many a true Christian, disgusted with the licentious conduct of the priests, would doubtless have left the fold, had it not been for these hermits, who, by their supposed sanctity, overawed the superstitious, and disarmed the objections of the discontented. We can imagine what that power must have been, which could compel a man, for some venial offence, extorted from him at the confessional, to fast, or to go about with bare feet, or to leave off wearing linen, or to go on pilgrimages, or even, where the removal of the offender was thought desirable, to take the cowl and enter a monastery! Yet this was the power invested in the priests; and we may be sure they were not slow to use it, where there was anything to be gained by so doing.

But if the priests ruled the people, the pope ruled the priests. All were subject to him; and the more so, as, during this century, the dogma of the pope's infallibility was brought prominently to the front. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, assuming the truth of the writings of one Gratian, a Benedictine of the previous century, added thereto a mass of spurious and traditional matter which was still floating about, and from this patchwork of error and superstition evolved the dangerous doctrine, that "Christ is fully and completely with every pope in sacrament and authority." His work, the "Summa Theologiae," contains various other canon or ecclesiastical laws, and is still a theological text book of the Romish church.

Of the popes of this century, Innocent III., who rose to that dignity in the year 1198, was perhaps the greatest; certainly he was unexcelled for his wickedness. His real name was Lothario de' Conti; he was named Innocent by his cardinals in testimony to his blameless life!

One of the first acts of Innocent on his elevation to the papal chair, was to ruin the domestic happiness of the French king. Philip Augustus, attracted by the fame of the Danish princess Isamburga's beauty, had given his hand to that lady, and a marriage had been hastily concluded between them. But the monarch had not known his own mind, and from the first had shewn an unaccountable aversion to his young queen. Refusing to live with her as his wife he shut himself up in a convent and transferred his attentions to the young and beautiful Agnes, daughter of the duke of Meran; a lady for whom his love was deep and real, and to whom he was shortly afterwards united. The pope, however, espoused the cause of the repudiated princess, and threatened to place the whole kingdom under an interdict unless the king put away the duke's daughter, and received the princess Isamburga with conjugal affection. This was no light or empty threat, and the consequences of such an interdict would have fallen heavily on the unoffending subjects of the French king. To suspend the public exercise of religion was a terrible matter in their eyes, for almost all their worship was through the priests, and, speaking generally, they had no resource in private prayer.

But Philip refused to give way. He pleaded that his divorce from the Danish princess was a lawful one, and had been ratified by a former pope (Celestine III.): moreover, he had been legally married to the lady Agnes, who had already borne him two children. The pope, however, would allow of no exonerating plea; and when Philip continued obstinate, he gave the necessary authority to his legate, then at Dijon, to proclaim the interdict. At midnight, amid the tolling of bells, the execrable ceremony took place. The consecrated bread was burned, the images were draped in black, and the relics replaced in the tombs. Then the clergy came forth from the church in solemn procession, headed by the cardinal in his mourning stole of violet; and when he had pronounced the ban, the priests extinguished their torches; the church doors were locked; and all religious services, and all prayers, were indefinitely suspended. Only the sacraments of baptism, confession, and extreme unction were now permitted by the church; and meanwhile the people went about unshaven, the use of meats was prohibited, and the dead, without place of sepulture, were left to the dogs which infested the cities, and to the wandering birds of prey.

It was in vain for Philip to protest against these extreme proceedings; the pope was inexorable, and his mandate must be obeyed. Agnes must be put away, and Isamburga reinstated in her rights; until this was done, the interdict could not be removed. But Philip's affections were centred in his beautiful wife, and he could not bring himself to submit to the harsh demand. Agnes herself had no ambition for queenly honours, but the thought of separation from her husband was more than she could bear: she only wanted to remain, what pope and parliament alike had made her, his lawful wife. Driven to madness by his wife's grief, and his own impotence to assuage it, the king at last exclaimed, "I will turn Mahometan! Happy Saladin, he has no pope above him." But to all this the pitiless demand was repeated, Obey the pope, dismiss Agnes, receive back lsamburga."

At last the king consented. Innocent had gained the day, and now removed the interdict. The churches were again thrown open to the people, the images were undraped, the relics were again exhibited, and the sacraments were administered as before. The princess Isamburga returned to the French court, and was outwardly acknowledged as Philip's queen, but his aversion to her was only deepened by all that had occurred, and he still refused to live with her as his wife. The lovely and loving Agnes, torn from her husband, died soon after of a broken heart.

But France was not the only country which experienced the horrors of an interdict during the pontificate of Innocent III. John of England, by his undignified menaces to the pope in the year 1207, brought a similar visitation on our own country. The circumstances will be familiar to all readers, and we need not dwell upon them. Even the interdict, however, had no effect upon John, and when he was excommunicated in the following year, he treated the pope's bull with contempt. The bull was followed, in the year 1211, by an act of deposition, and John was declared to have forfeited the crown. His subjects meanwhile were absolved from their oath of allegiance, and liberty was given them to transfer their allegiance "to a person worthier to fill the vacant throne."

Lastly, Philip Augustus of France was invited to take up arms against the contumacious king, and the territories of the English crown were promised as an appendage to his own kingdom. This final measure brought the craven-hearted John to his knees, and his former haughtiness and independence suddenly gave place to a meanness and servility which is almost without parallel in history.

At the house of the Templars, near Dover, the degrading ceremony took place. On bended knees, the king of England laid his crown at the feet of Pandulph, the papal legate; "resigned England and Ireland into the hands of the pope, swore homage to him as his liege lord, and took an oath of fealty to his successors." The following is a copy of the king's oath: "I, John, by the grace of God, king of England and lord of Ireland, in order to expiate my sins, from my own free will, and the advice of my barons, give to the church of Rome, to pope Innocent and his successors the kingdom of England, and all other prerogatives of my crown. I will hereafter hold them as the pope's vassal. I will be faithful to God, to the church of Rome, to the pope, my master, and his successors legitimately elected. I promise to pay him a thousand marks yearly; to wit, seven hundred for the kingdom of England and three hundred for the kingdom of Ireland." Such were the shameful and humiliating terms dictated by the simulated shepherd of Christ's flock, and submitted to by an English king! Philip Augustus, who had meanwhile gone to enormous expense in raising an army, was now coolly informed that he must desist from hostilities, and that any attempt "to annoy the king of England would be highly offensive to the holy see."

But the triumph of the pope was changed to wrathful alarm, when, two years later, the barons of England, headed by archbishop Langton, met at Runnymede, and forced the tyrannical John to renew and ratify the charter of their liberties, which had been granted to them by Henry I. "What!' exclaimed Innocent, "do the barons of England transfer to others the patrimony of the church of Rome? By St. Peter we cannot leave such a crime unpunished." But the barons were made of other metal than their sovereign; and when the pope annulled the great charter, and threatened those who defended it, they received his communication in contemptuous silence.

The pontificate of Innocent acquires a further importance from the fact, that it was he who established by decree the fatal dogma of transubstantiation; thus settling, as he fondly deemed, a question which had long been fermenting in the minds of many. At the fourth Lateran Council (A.D. 1215), it was canonically affirmed that when the officiating priest utters the words of consecration, the sacramental elements of bread and wine are converted into the substance of the body and blood of Christ.* Divine honours were now decreed to them, and the consecrated elements became the objects of worship and adoration. Costly caskets, exquisitely chased, were made for their reception: and thus, according to this doctrine of hell, the living God was confined in a casket, and might be carried about from place to place!

{*The same body which was born of the Virgin. It was reserved for pope Pius IV., in the year 1563, to decree that "the body and blood of Christ, together with His soul and divinity, are truly and really and substantially in the Eucharist, and that there is a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into His body, and of the whole substance of the wine into His blood, which conversion the Catholic church calls transubstantiation." It is worth noting that this dreadful doctrine finds no place whatever in the writings of the Fathers, on which the Romish church professes to build so largely.}

But the activity of the papacy was shewn in yet another way during this century. The decay of the crusading spirit, which had filled the coffers of the church, while it impoverished the whole of Europe, made it necessary for the pope to look about him for a fresh source of revenue; and the suggestion of an ingenious catholic, that the place of pilgrimage for Christians should be transferred from Jerusalem to that city, most happily met the case. Streams of wealth now flowed in to the treasuries of the Vatican, and when, at the close of the century, pope Boniface VIII. instituted what is called the Jubilee, the success was complete. Every hundred years was to be the grand occasion for a general pilgrimage to Rome; and so fruitful did this institution prove, that the task of waiting one hundred years for the next influx of wealth proved too great a tax on the patience of the popes, and the interval was changed to fifty years. Eventually even this term was found too lengthy, and twenty-five years became, in due time, the prescribed and settled period. Of the pope who instituted the Jubilee we shall have more to say hereafter.

We have already intimated that the crusading spirit was on the decline, but history has to record the banding, on different occasions, of no less than five other armies in that hopeless cause. The first of these, which forms the Fifth Crusade, was proclaimed by Innocent III., and met with but a feeble response. A few French nobles, aided by the Venetian Republic, succeeded in mustering a small army; and having sailed to Constantinople, took the city by storm. They re-instated Isaac Angelus on the throne, as emperor of the Greeks, and were preparing to return, when the newly appointed emperor was murdered, and the city was suddenly thrown into a state of tumult and insurrection. After order was again restored, the crusaders elected a new emperor, Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and then returned home. Their victory, so far as it went, was complete; and during fifty-seven succeeding years the Greek empire was ruled by this Frankish dynasty.

Between this crusade and the sixth, the feverish spirit of the times produced one of mere children. Ninety thousand boys, varying from ten to twelve years of age, placed themselves under the leadership of a shepherd lad, named Stephen, who professed to be acting by divine guidance, and marched forth, singing as they went. They carried banners and crosses in their hands, and cried as they went along, "O Lord, help us to recover Thy true and holy cross!" Without weapons, they thought to overcome the infidels by their prayers and innocence; and it is deplorable to think that no one came forward to restrain these poor children, or even to warn them from their foolish enterprise. How many reached the coast is not recorded, but thousands must have perished by hunger and fatigue, and many were doubtless sold into slavery. None, of course, reached the Holy Land.

The Sixth Crusade was proclaimed by Honorius III., and the warriors were chiefly Germans and Italians. They marched into Egypt, and captured Damietta; but not before 70,000 of the inhabitants had perished in the siege. It was a shocking waste of human life, as the sequel proved, for the city was recaptured by the Saracens in the course of the next few years.

The Seventh and Eighth Crusades may be said to have resulted from a vow, made by Louis IX. of France, on a sick bed. He saw in his recovery, the expression of the will of heaven that he should deliver the holy sepulchre from the power of the infidel, and neither returning health, nor long delays could dissipate the conviction. The first expedition was undertaken in the year 1249, and resulted in the recapture of Damietta, but in the following year the king and nearly his whole army were taken prisoners. After four years his liberty was purchased for a large sum, and a truce was concluded with the Saracens for ten years. Having made a few pilgrimages to the sacred places, he then returned to France.

But his vow was not forgotten, and sixteen years later he engaged upon his second crusade. With a worn-out body, but a spirit as vigorous and hopeful as ever, he set out with his army on the 14th of March, A.D. 1270. Before a year had passed, the miserable remnant of that army was on its way back to Europe, having left the king behind in Palestine. His vow unfulfilled, his hopes unrealised, he had been carried off by the pestilence, during the month of August, leaving the conquest of the Holy Land as distant an achievement as ever.

Thus terminated the Eighth Crusade, the last for many years which any pope proclaimed, and, with one or two exceptions, the last in which any sovereign of Europe took part. Kings and emperors had seen the evils which these "Holy Wars" engendered, and the popes had grown too busy with crusades of another kind, and nearer home, to waste their thoughts on such visionary enterprises.

Yet the popes had been the chief gainers by the crusades, and the increase to their temporal power was considerable during those 180 years of strife and bloodshed. Indeed, the clergy generally had not failed to profit by the occasion; and whilst the nobility of Europe were throwing away their lives in Palestine, bishops and abbots had been encroaching upon their estates, and filling the coffers of the church with plundered treasure.

Chapter 16.

The Home Crusades, and the Establishment of the Inquisition.

A.D. 1200-1300.

The crusades of "another kind," to which we made allusion at the close of the preceding chapter, were those undertaken against the Waldensian Christians, by command of Innocent III. At the time of his accession, the work of Peter de Bruys, of Henry, and of Peter Waldo had borne wonderful fruit, insomuch that their followers might be found in almost every country of Europe. In Germany and Italy men and women of all classes had embraced the revived doctrines, from the noble to the peasant, from the mitred abbot to the cowled monk; while in Lombardy they existed in such numbers that one of them declared he could travel from Cologne to Milan, and be hospitably received every night on the road by members of the fraternity." They were to be found in England and Austria, in Bohemia and Bulgaria, and even among the hardy Slavonians as far as the Oural mountains. But nowhere were they to be found in greater numbers than in the fruitful plains of Southern France, and the fertile valleys of Piedmont; and it was against these two favoured spots of God's earth that the edicts of extermination were most directed. Shut in by their native mountains, the Christians of the valleys escaped for nearly two more centuries the horrors of a general persecution, but the Christians of the plains, the Albigenses as they were called, were marked out for instant execution.

Innocent opened the persecution by calling upon Raymond VI., Count of Toulouse, and other princes of Southern France, to adopt immediate measures for the suppression of the heretics; but his appeal did not meet with that hearty response which he had calculated upon. Raymond and his brother nobles could not bring themselves to agree to the merciless demand. Many of them had relatives among the proscribed heretics, and to drive them from their homes, or to slaughter them in cold blood, was more than could be expected from even the most dutiful son of Rome. Besides, what harm had these persecuted Albigenses done? They had always shewn themselves to be peaceable, law-abiding, and contented subjects; and, owing to their industry, the province of Languedoc had become the wealthiest in the kingdom. Their feudal lords, therefore, who owed so much to their labours could scarcely be expected to respond to a barbarous edict, which commanded their wanton destruction.

The presence of the pope's legate, Peter of Castelnau, at the court of Raymond only made matters worse. He was an insolent monk of the Cistercian order, and endeavoured to carry things with a high hand in the presence of the count; and when the pope, by repeated threats of temporal chastisements and eternal flames, did at length prevail upon the count to sign an edict of extermination, the officious legate was so zealous in pressing for its execution that he overreached himself, and produced results which effected his own ruin, as well as prevented the carrying out of the edict. Raymond was irritated beyond endurance by his arrogant behaviour; and, unfortunately, gave expression to some ill-advised and hasty threats, which were overheard by one of his attendants. On the following day this man picked a quarrel with the legate, and, after some angry words on both sides, drew his poignard, and inflicted a fatal wound.

The news of this event was joyfully received at Rome, as it gave the pope a plausible excuse for excommunicating Raymond, and for appealing to the king of France and his nobles for assistance. "Up, soldiers of Christ! up, most Christian king," was the language of this shepherd of the Lord's people, this vicar of Christ. "Hear the cry of blood; aid us in wreaking vengeance on these malefactors. Up, ye nobles, knights of France; the rich and sunny lands of the South will be the reward of your valour!"

It is easy to see the great moral difference between the crusade which Innocent was now proclaiming, and those which had been proclaimed by other popes in the past. In the former there was some show of righteousness; and the crusaders, with small hope of earthly reward, were called to a life of hardship and self-denial. The nobler part of man's nature was then appealed to, and the deliverance of the holy sepulchre from the hands of the infidel was the one engrossing, all-sufficient motive for the soldiers of the cross hut now, how different!

Where was the covetous man? There was another kind of mission for him; Rome had a gospel to preach to him to which the world as yet were strangers. Did he covet the waving cornfields and the gadding vines of fruitful Languedoc? then on to battle with the heretics, for "the rich and sunny lands" would soon be his. Where was the ambitious man? Rome had her gospel, too, for him. Did he long to stand a conqueror on yonder lofty battlements, and live the lord while others cringed before them? — then forth to the war, for yonder castle of the heretic count would soon be his. Where was the man that loved cruelty — the man of blood? Rome had much good news for him. Dominic, the Spaniard, would soon be busy with his Inquisition, and there would be plenty of work for cruel and bloody monsters then. And the voluptuous man — where was he? Let him come on to the battle he need not think himself forgotten. Were there not women, dark eyed and beautiful, in yonder smiling villages? With husbands, do you say? Yes — but what of that? And there are bright eyed girls, too ah! you drop your eyes — you need not look ashamed — they are all yours indulge your lust upon them as you will — you have joined the Holy Crusade — your sins are forgiven you — and never ending bliss is yours.

It was the year of grace 1209 when 300,000 soldiers, all decorated with the holy cross, and under the supreme command of Simon de Montfort, were on their way to Languedoc. The trumpet call of Innocent had been but too clearly heard and understood, and this immense army of eager adventurers, with its archbishops, bishops, and mitred abbots, had been collected in the space of a few days.

At the head of the forces was seen Dominic, with the symbol of Christianity in his hand, and the hatred of the devil in his heart; and over his long white robe was thrown a black mantle — dismal emblem of coming woe. By his side rode Almaric, the papal legate; his sunken eyes twinkling with a horrid joy, as he looked from time to time in the direction of the fruitful plains of Languedoc, and then round upon the army in his rear.

Ere long the work had commenced, and the soldiers were busily engaged, burning, plundering, slaying in all directions: though the conflict did not properly commence, till the army arrived before Beziers. The garrison here was under the command of Raymond-Roger, nephew to Raymond of Toulouse, and this was one of his strongest cities. The bishop of the place, acting by the orders of Almaric, advised the people to surrender, but catholics and heretics alike refused. Almaric muttered a fearful threat against the whole city, and the attack commenced. The odds were overwhelming, and presently the gates yielded to the battering-ram of the besiegers. But a difficulty arose. There were catholics within the walls, and how were they to be distinguished? This was no difficulty to Alrnaric. Kill them all," he cried; "kill man, woman, and child — the Lord knoweth them that are His!" Yes, Almaric, the Lord will yet shew thee who were His, when the throne is set in heaven, and He sits there making requisition for blood.

From twenty to one hundred thousand persons, according to various reports, are said to have been massacred on this occasion — the whole of the inhabitants of the city. Other cities followed. But the withdrawal of several leading nobles at a later period with their retainers, necessitated an appeal for more soldiers; and Dominic and his monks were soon busily employed preaching a new crusade. A forty days' campaign, said they, will atone for the blackest crime, and purge the heart of the blackest stain. To be a soldier in the holy army covered a multitude of sins. The appeal was again successful, and in the beginning of the following year De Montfort was ready with a fresh army.

To speak of all the pope's treatment of Raymond of Toulouse, does not come within the province of this history. His sin of being the ruler of so many heretical subjects, seems to have been inexpiable. It was not enough to express his sorrow and to clear himself of the murder of the Cistercian monk; Raymond must give a proof of his sincerity by surrendering seven of his strongest castles; he must do public penance for his offences, with a halter suspended round his neck while his back was being scourged; and then he must join the ranks of the crusaders, and bear arms against his own subjects, even against his own kith and kin; and after that, his holiness the pope might perchance shew his great leniency by giving him the kiss of peace.

This was precisely what transpired; but when the poor count was congratulating himself that all his danger and humiliation was at last over, there came a letter from the pope to his eminence the legate, in this strain: "We counsel you with the Apostle Paul, to employ guile with regard to this count; for in this case it ought to be called prudence. We must attack, separately, those who are separated from unity. Leave for a time this Count of Toulouse, employing towards him a course of dissimulation, that the other heretics may be the more easily defeated, and that afterwards we may crush him when he shall be left alone." So Raymond had not been forgiven after all? By no means. The charges of heresy and murder had not yet been cleared to the pope's satisfaction; at least, so he was presently informed by the pope's legate. This was too much for the poor count; and he burst into tears. The sight might have melted a heart of stone: but the hearts of Jezebel's children are made of adamant, and the papal legate ironically observed, "Surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him." With that the ban of excommunication was pronounced against him afresh.

Raymond now began to see that the tragedy of Naboth the Jezreelite was in danger of being acted over again on his own territory. He represented Naboth, the pope was Jezebel, De Montfort, Ahab, and the vineyard was the vine-clad plains of Languedoc. The war now changed its character; and Raymond, supported by the Count of Foix and other nobles, began to take desperate measures for his protection. His people, who were much attached to him, flew to arms on the first summons, and De Montfort found that he had now to grapple with a foe made desperate by persecution and maddened by the sense of accumulated wrongs. His own cruel nature was stimulated by this unexpected opposition, and the most unheard of barbarities were committed by his sanction. Men and children were mutilated and tortured, women were ravished, crops and vineyards were destroyed, villages were burned, and towns and cities were given over to pillage and the sword. On the occasion of the capture of La Minerbe, about 140 persons, of both sexes, among whom were the wife, sister, and daughter of the governor of the place, were burnt alive on one enormous pile. We are told they went to death willingly, and sang hymns to God in the flames, nor ceased their praises till they were suffocated by the smoke. At the capitulation of the castle of Brau, De Montfort put out the eyes and cut off the noses of one hundred of its brave defenders, leaving one of them one eye, that he might guide the rest to Cabrieres, to terrify the garrison there. At another place, an old man was fastened to a bench, and suffered unheard of agonies by means of a horned beetle, which was confined to his body by a small inverted vessel, and there left to gnaw its way to his vitals. Pagan Rome, with all its lingering tortures, could not offer an instance of such refinement of cruelty as this, committed by these "holy pilgrims," as the pope had gratefully christened them. At the capture of Foix, when the city was given over to the horrors of a sack, and the inhabitants of every age and both sexes were alike massacred, the voices of the bishops and legates were heard above the shrieks of women and the curses of their murderers, repeating the solemn chant, "Come, Holy Ghost." On this occasion, eighty nobles were to be hanged on one gibbet, by order of De Montfort, but the ghastly machine had not been well planted in the earth, and it broke down with its first victim. To save time, the rest were handed over to the soldiers, who cut them to pieces amid the approving cheers of the monks. The lady Geralda, of whom it had been said, "no poor man ever left her door without being fed," was also one of the prisoners. She was thrown into a pit, and dispatched with huge stones. Raymond was a catholic, but when he saw the treatment to which his faithful people were being subjected, he is said to have observed, "I know that I shall lose my lands on account of these good people; but I am ready not only to be driven from my domain, but to lay down my life for their sakes."

After many vicissitudes the city of Toulouse, the most important stronghold of the persecuted count fell into the hands of the crusaders; and the inhabitants were treated with the usual barbarities by the "pilgrims." The papist bishop, Fouquet, a man with the blood of ten thousand of his flock already on his conscience, took possession of the ancestral palace of his lawful lord, and forced the poor count into an ignoble obscurity. Simon de Montfort was meanwhile invested by the king of France with the count-ships of Beziers, Carcassonne, and Toulouse; and might be seen daily riding through the streets, while the people applauded, and the clergy cried exultingly, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!"

But Rome, ever jealous even of her best supporters, began to look with furtive glances on the ambitious and powerful De Montfort. Perhaps there was some excuse for this, as he was no sooner established in his new territories than he commenced to quarrel with the pope's legate. The latter, as archbishop of Narbonne, laid claim to the temporal sovereignty of that province; but De Montfort, who had taken the title of Duke of Narbonne, refused to recognise the claim, and on the continued persistence of the archbishop, branded him as a heretic, and proceeded to seize upon the city by force. The pope thereupon issued an edict prohibiting the further preaching of the crusades, and granted permission to Raymond and his heirs, "to recover their lands and lordships from all who held them unjustly."

The son of the fallen count gained courage by this new edict, and succeeded in raising an army for the recovery of his father's dominions. He marched upon Toulouse, and was received there with enthusiasm by the oppressed and downtrodden citizens, whilst the perfidious Fouquet was driven ignominiously from the city. After many fruitless endeavours to recapture the place, De Montfort succeeded in raising a fresh army of 100,000 men, and, confident of success, bore down upon the city in the spring of the year 1218. The assault was conducted with great energy, but he was again repulsed; and this fresh defeat threw him into a state of gloom, from which he was with difficulty roused by the pope's legate. "Fear nothing, my lord," said the lying prophet, "make another vigorous attack. Let us by any means recover the city and destroy the inhabitants; and those of our men who are slain in the fight, I will assure you shall immediately pass into paradise." This was a pleasant assurance, but the remark of an officer who overheard it, was, perhaps, nearer the truth. "Monsieur Cardinal," said he, "you talk with great assurance; and if the earl believes you, he will, as before, pay dearly for his confidence."

While the earl was engaged hearing high mass, he was suddenly informed that the enemy had made a sally from the walls; and so soon as the mass was ended, he sprang into his saddle, and hastened to the scene of conflict. But he had scarcely reached the spot, when his horse, a fiery animal, received a painful wound, and starting off at full gallop, bore him right under the ramparts of the city. Archers placed aloft were not slow to perceive their opportunity, and one of their arrows, piercing the greaves of his harness, entered his thigh. A moment later, and a huge fragment of rock, flung by a woman's hand, struck him on the head, and he fell lifeless to the ground.

Within five years from this event, almost all the chief actors in these terrible persecutions had passed from the scene. Innocent was dead and had been succeeded by Honorius III., a man of smaller mind but equal cruelty, who continued the persecutions. De Montfort had been succeeded by his son, and crossed his sword with the younger Raymond, whose own father had also died. The king of France, Philip Augustus, had made way, by his death, for his son Louis, who had entered heartily into the struggle, but on the side of Rome. The perfidious Fouquet, however, was still alive, and when, in the year 1228, Toulouse again fell into the hands of the crusaders, it was mainly owing to his wicked and remorseless counsels. The crusaders had almost given up the siege in despair, when he suggested that they might starve the besieged into a surrender, by burning the cornfields and vineyards, and turning the surrounding country into a desert. The suggestion was immediately adopted, and the promised results ensued. After holding out for three months longer, the inhabitants opened their gates to the besiegers, and submitted to the most humiliating terms. Raymond was treated much as his father had been treated before him, though instead of being compelled to deliver up seven of his castles to the pope, he was compelled to surrender seven of his provinces to the French king. In this way Rome really defeated her own ends, by increasing the power of a monarch who might at any moment prove a troublesome and formidable foe.

In reflecting upon the calamities of Languedoc, a recent writer has said: "To every thoughtful mind, to every man of faith, especially to those who study history from a scriptural point of view, the wars in Languedoc are most suggestive. They are the first of the kind on record. It was reserved for Innocent III. to inaugurate this new character of warfare. There had been many instances of individuals being sacrificed to the prejudice of the priesthood, such as Arnold of Brescia: but this was the first experiment on a great scale, which the church made to retain her supremacy by force of arms. It was not, observe, the army of the church going forth in holy zeal against the pagan, the Mahometan, the denier of Christ, but the professing church itself in arms against the true followers of Christ— against those who acknowledged His deity, and the authority of the word of God And what then, it may be asked, was the crime of the Albigenses? The head and front of their offence was simply this — they denied the supremacy of the pope, the authority of the priesthood, and the seven sacraments as taught by the church of Rome; and, in her eyes, greater criminals there could not be on the face of the whole earth: therefore utter extermination was the one unchangeable decree." It remains for us to state that, during the first fifty years of this century, not less than a million of Albigenses are believed to have lost their lives.

At the beginning of these wars, the Inquisition, that most awful of earthly tribunals, was opened, through the influence of Dominic, in a castle near Narbonne. This was its first appearance, but before many months, similar provisionary tribunals had been opened in all the chief towns and districts of Languedoc. At first its work was done secretly, but in the year 1229, its extreme usefulness in the detection of heretics was publicly acknowledged, and the council of Toulouse made it a permanent institution. It was now commanded that lay inquisitors should be appointed in every parish for the detection of heretics; with full power to enter and search all houses and buildings, and to subject the suspected to whatever examination was thought necessary.

It is difficult to realise all the frightful consequences which the exercise of such a power involved. We do not attempt to go into it; but as truth about the ways of Rome is important, we will endeavour to give the reader, in a few words, some idea of the doings of this awful tribunal. Let him picture to himself a man, the father of a numerous family, who is being watched by the spies of the Inquisition. He has just returned from his day's toil, and his children are playing about his chair. His cheerful and devoted wife is spreading the evening meal, and humming over a simple air which she has learnt from the wandering troubadours. A knock is heard; and the wife turns towards her husband with a look of startled inquiry. Even the children pause in their play, and gaze into their father's face half wondering. His wife goes to the door, and opens it with shaking hand. Three or four men now enter the house unbidden — one of them a Dominican friar. In a few moments they are gone again, but during those few moments a change has taken place in the home circle. The woman is wringing her hands, the children are sobbing piteously around her — and her husband is no longer near to comfort them. It is his absence they are all lamenting, for he has just left the house with the friar, a trembling and unwilling prisoner. When the door has closed upon them, and their footseps have died away in the streets, you ask the woman whither they are taking him, but she cannot tell you; you ask her as to the nature of his crime, but she can throw no light upon your question. The man himself is as dark on this point as his wife; but he is hurried away, and after being robbed of his money, is thrust into a foul dungeon, where he is confined in irons for several days. The gaoler (himself a most useful tool of the Inquisition), having meanwhile insinuated himself with the prisoner, recommends him to "petition for an audit," and the advice is adopted. He is accordingly summoned before the consistory, and the inquiry is put, "What is your request?" The prisoner replies that all he desires is a hearing; and thereupon he is told, "Your hearing is this — confess the truth, conceal nothing, and rely on our mercy."

But he has nothing to confess. He is not conscious of having committed any offence against the pope, or against his most holy religion; but, on the contrary, has always been a good catholic. Yet this very declaration of his innocence is a crime; for the Holy Inquisition cannot err, and the mere fact of his appearing before the court is a proof of his guilt. He is forthwith taken to the torture-room, a dismal chamber lighted by two candles, the walls of which have been padded in order to stifle the groans of the tortured. He is then stripped by command of the presiding inquisitor, and stretched upon the rack. A surgeon is ready to bathe his temples when necessary, and to set the dislocated bones, as well as to advise as to the amount of pain which the patient is capable of sustaining. The rack is then applied, and every word which the prisoner utters while under this torture is scrupulously noted down in a book. At a fitting time it will be used as evidence against him.

Two months later, having somewhat recovered from the shock which his system has sustained, he is brought forth again, and a new species of torture is applied. He is stripped as before, and his naked feet having been smeared with lard, are placed against a brasier of live coals. The torture is exquisite; and the prisoner having lost his reason for awhile in consequence of the extreme pain, is again remanded to his cell.

Other two months elapse, and then he is brought forth once more, to endure a third and final application of the torture. We need not describe it; it is more excruciating, if possible, than the two former, and he is carried back to his dungeon insensible, and almost dead.

His wife presently gets tidings of him for the first time. An Auto da Fe* is shortly to be held in the public square of the town, and her husband's name is on the list of those who are to suffer. It has been decided by the officers of the Holy Inquisition, that he is an incorrigible heretic, and he is therefore to be burned alive.

{*"The words mean "act of faith."}

The day at length arrives: it is the Lord's day. The stakes are planted in the earth, the green furze and dry faggots are piled in heaps beside them, and all is ready. The approach of the procession is announced by a blare of trumpets, and the tumultuous shouts of the assembled multitude. The priests lead the way, carrying crosses; and after them come the heretics, guarded by a file of soldiers. They are dressed in long tunics, on which are painted the flames of hell, with demons fanning them to keep them brisk — a fantastic allusion to the future torments of the heretics. The ceremony of exhorting them to return to the bosom of the church being over, they are chained to the stake and the several piles are lighted. The fierce roar of the multitude almost drowns the voices of the martyrs, but now and again you may catch some note of praise — the one bright feature in the awful tragedy — and thus may learn that He in whose name they suffer, does not forsake His people in their hour of need, but gives them the comfort of His presence even amid the flames.

This is a faithul picture of the Inquisition — Reader, what do you think of it?

Chapter 17.

Fresh Instances of Papal Assumption, and Their Influence upon the Reformation.

A.D. 1300-1400.

In spite of the great authority which Rome had acquired for herself, by means of the Inquisition, and other much older institutions, there were not wanting indications during this century of a steady opposition to her pretensions, which neither fire nor sword could subdue.

When Gregory IX., an old man eighty-one years of age, mounted the pontifical throne in the year 1227, he fancied he was going to wield the sceptre of another Hildebrand, but he was soon to be miserably undeceived. The first important effort of the pontiff was to promote a revival of the crusades against the Mahometans; but his letters to the courts of Europe at first met with no response. The aged canonist then appealed to Frederick of Germany; and the emperor, though busied in some political complications, religiously agreed to raise the necessary forces, and to proceed with them to Palestine.

The army was raised, and Frederick set out; but being overtaken by the plague, the troops were dispersed, and, for a time, the expedition was abandoned. The mortification of the pope, on hearing of this failure and delay, was great. His eyes had been covetously fixed, for a long while past, on the emperor's dominions, and he had hoped by creating disaffection among Frederick's subjects, to encroach upon his territory during his absence, and thus to make some important additions to the papal states: but the return of the emperor had disturbed his calculations, if it had not utterly dissipated his pleasant dreams. He refused to believe in the reality of Frederick's illness treated it as an empty pretence, and excommunicated him.

But the consequences of these severe measures were not what he expected. Instead of being daunted by the unjustifiable harshness of the pope, Frederick wrote a vigorous and indignant reply; and set about composing several letters and papers in his own defence. Writing to Henry III. of England he said, "The Roman Church so burns with avarice that, as the ecclesiastical revenues do not content it, it is not ashamed to despoil sovereign princes and make them tributary. You have a very touching example in your father, King John: you have that also of the Count of Toulouse, and so many other princes whose kingdoms it holds under interdict until it has reduced them to similar servitude. I speak not of the simonies, the unheard of exactions, which it exercises over the clergy, the manifest or cloaked usuries with which it inflicts the whole world. In the meantime these insatiable leeches use honeyed discourses, saying that the court of Rome is the church, our mother and nurse, while it is our stepmother and the source of every evil. It is known by its fruits. It sends on every side legates with power to punish, to suspend, to excommunicate; not to diffuse the word of God, but to amass money and reap that which they have not sown." To the pope himself he wrote, "Your predecessors have never ceased to encroach upon the rights of kings and princes; they have disposed of their lands and territories, and distributed them among the minions and favourites of their court; they have dared to absolve subjects from their oaths of allegiance; they have even introduced confusion into the administration of justice, by binding and loosing, and persisting, without regard to the laws of the land. Religion was the pretext for all those trespasses upon the civil government; but the real motive was a desire to subjugate governors and subjects alike to an intolerable tyranny — to extort money, and, so long as that was to be got, to care little if the whole structure of society were shaken to its foundations."

But in spite of this bold and forcible language, Frederick was a true son of the church; and in obedience to the wishes of the pontiff, though without "obtaining any repeal of the anathema, under which he lay" (which, indeed, was renewed before he set out), he resumed his preparations for an expedition to Palestine. In the spring of the following year he set sail. For this he was excommunicated afresh; and thus for a third time the vials of Gregory's wrath were poured out upon him.

All who were observing with any thoughtfulness the movements of the pope, began now to see through his shallow artifices, and to discover the hollowness of his zeal for the deliverance of the Holy Land. His personal dignity stood far before the honour that was due to the name and birthplace of Christ; and hence he no sooner got tidings of Frederick's arrival, than he sent instructions by his minorite friars to the patriarch of Jerusalem and the military orders, that no assistance should be given to the emperor, hoping that by that means he would be overpowered by the enemy, and either perish on the field of battle or find a prison in one of the dungeons of the Saracens. He even connived at a plot for the surprise of Frederick as he was going to bathe in the Jordan; but the Templars, to whom the execution of the plot had been entrusted, failed in their attempt; and thus the malevolent old man was again disappointed.

But he had not done scheming. Unable to strike at the emperor in his own person, he raised a large army, and having pronounced a fourth ban of excommunication against him, and absolved his subjects from their allegiance, he invaded his dominions. Frederick immediately concluded a hasty but honourable treaty with the Saracens, and hurried back with all speed to Europe. The news of his return spread dismay through the invading army, and in a little while the pope was forced to undergo the discomfiture of another and more signal disappointment. He soothed his fretted spirit, however, by launching a fresh ban of excommunication at the emperor; the crime in this instance being the abandonment of the crusades. This was the fifth occasion on which the pope had anathematized the emperor in the course of a few years; and it is amusing to reflect what must have been the perplexity of Frederick, did he take any serious heed to these anathemas. He had been "excommunicated for not taking the cross; excommunicated for not setting out to the Holy Land; excommunicated for setting out; excommunicated in the Holy Land," and lastly, "excommunicated for returning, after having made an advantageous peace with the Mahometans."

But Frederick was wise enough to treat the fiery bans with unconcern, and only smiled at the pontiff's anger. A sort of hollow truce was afterwards concluded between them, but it did not last; for Gregory was unable to let his rival rest. The contentious old man dragged on his miserable existence a few more years, and then died at the age of ninety-nine from exhaustion brought on by a fit of anger.

The struggle between the temporal power and the papacy for we must look upon it as more than a mere struggle between man and man — was continued with varying zeal by succeeding popes; nor did the death of Frederick, in the year 1250, put an end to the strife. The news of his decease, however, was received with undisguised satisfaction at Rome, and the then pope, Innocent IV., grew eloquent in his joy. "Let the heavens rejoice," he cried, "and let the earth be in festivity; for the thunder and the tempest with which a powerful God has so long threatened you, are changed by the death of this man into refreshing breezes and fertilizing dews." But it was not until the pontificate of Boniface VIII. that thoughtful minds began to discern in these continual efforts of Rome to push her temporal pretensions, symptoms of a slow but unmistakeable decline of her supremacy.

In all parts of Europe princes were rising up in defence of their temporal rights, and declining to hold their kingdoms as fiefs of the papal see. Even in England, spite of the cowardly example of John, a monarch was found bold and powerful enough to resist the demands of the pope; so that when Boniface put forth an impudent claim to the kingdom of Scotland, it was quietly repudiated by Edward I. A similar claim to the crown of Hungary was warmly opposed by the nobles of that country, who set up a prince of their own choosing; though the pope solemnly declared that the "first christian king of Hungary offered and gave that kingdom to the Roman Church." That Boniface had in no way abated the extravagant pretensions of previous popes may be gathered from his epistle to his legate in Hungary, on the occasion above mentioned; it commenced as follows: "The Roman pontiff, established by God over kings and their kingdoms, sovereign chief of the hierarchy in the church militant, and holding the first rank above all mortals, sitteth in tranquility in the throne of judgment, and scattereth away all evil with his eyes." Such foolish bombast may have pleased the pride of Boniface; but he little thought how soon the hollowness of it would be exposed, how soon the glory in which he boasted would be taken from him.

At the time of which we write the throne of France was occupied by Philip the Handsome; one of the most unprincipled of men, and as obstinate as he was unprincipled. Having already made himself sufficiently odious to his subjects by plundering the nobles, oppressing the common people, and maltreating the Jews, he proceeded to levy contributions on the clergy, and thus awoke at once the thunders of the Vatican. Philip, however, was in no wise daunted by the threats of excommunication with which he was now assailed, and retaliated by forbidding the transmission of money, jewels and other articles to the court of Rome; a proceeding which deprived the pope of his revenues from France. Thus the hostilities commenced. The subsequent action of the French king in imprisoning the bishop of Pamiers, on a charge of sedition, still further aggravated the quarrel; and in the year 1302 the pope issued an insulting Bull, in which he proudly affirmed that God had set him "over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant, in his name and by his doctrine." The manifesto continues, "Let no one persuade you that you have no superior, or that you are not subject to the chief of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He that holds that opinion is senseless; and he that obstinately maintains it is an infidel, separate from the flock of the good Shepherd."

Philip, however, would not be humbled. He was more surprised at the audacity of the pope than troubled by his threats; and one of his first acts after receiving the bull was to have it publicly burned at Paris, amid the blare of trumpets. Moreover, these daring proceedings met with the full approval of the French parliament; and the clergy, filled with apprehension at the threatening condition of affairs, strongly urged the pope to adopt a milder course. But Boniface was obstinate and unbending, and pride had blinded his eyes to the grave importance of the contest. To think of coming to terms with his adversary was beneath the dignity of a pope; he therefore summoned a council of cardinals, and proceeded to draw up another bull. In this decretal he went to some pains to define his authority; but as, in his mind, that authority was simply unlimited, there is no occasion to examine in detail the various clauses of it. Having asserted his pretensions to universal supremacy, he concluded with these words, "Wherefore we declare, define, and pronounce, that it is absolutely essential to the salvation of every human being, that he be subject to the Roman pontiff."

Along with this bull appeared another, excommunicating all who should either "prevent or impede those who might desire to present themselves before the Roman see." This was evidently directed against the French king, who had issued orders forbidding the attendance of the clergy at Rome, a step which had been highly displeasing to the pontiff. Philip received these new communications with remarkable urbanity, indeed, the moderation of his reply gave rise to no little astonishment. He expressed his willingness to check the abuses with which he had been charged, and, in fact, promised to do all in his power to promote a reconciliation with the Roman church. This was a golden opportunity for Boniface, but he missed it. Unconscious of the crisis through which the papacy was passing, he professed himself dissatisfied with Philip's answer, and in that act, closed for ever the possibilities of an agreement between them.

It now remained for Philip to choose a shorter method with the pope; and he found a willing helpmate in William of Nogaret, the French chancellor. For a bribe of 10,000 florins, this man bought over the services of a Roman noble, named Colonna, who had access to the pope's presence, and attended by 300 armed horsemen they hastened to Anagni, where the bewildered old man had taken up his abode.

The cardinals had gathered round him, his attendants were standing at a distance eyeing him furtively, when a clatter of horses' hoofs was heard, followed by the tumultuous shout, "Death to the pope! Long live the king of France!" In a moment cardinals and attendants had disappeared, and the pope was left alone. More distressed by the desertion of his friends than the dangers that awaited him, the unhappy old man gave way to the first feelings of his nature, and burst into tears. But the weakness was quickly conquered, and to sustain the dignity of his office became his all-engrossing thought. "Since I am betrayed," he cried, "as Jesus Christ was betrayed, I will at least die like a pope." Investing himself with his official robes, he placed the tiara upon his head, and taking in his hands the keys and cross, mounted the pontifical chair. Colonna and Nogaret were the first to enter his apartment; but the dignified presence of the old man disarmed their courage, and they stood still. Meanwhile the others spread through the apartments in search of plunder; and while they were thus busied, the people of Anagni recovered from their panic, and hastened to the rescue of their pope. The attempt was successful, and those of the king's party who were not killed in the sally, escaped from the palace with all the booty they could carry.

But though the pope was saved for that time, his days were numbered. He was now eighty-six years of age, and the shock which his system had sustained had partially unhinged his mind. He shut himself in his room and refused to eat: and continued in this condition for three whole days. Then he seemed unable to bear the solitude, and hastened to Rome, feverish and excited, and thirsting for revenge. He presented himself in the market-place in disordered attire, his white hair dishevelled and hanging about his face, and addressed the crowd. "Good people," he said, "you have seen how our enemies have spoiled me of my goods. Behold me as poor as Job. I tell you truly I have nothing to eat or drink. If there is any good woman who will charitably bestow on me a little bread and wine, or even a little water, I will give her God's blessing and mine." Then he hid himself away in his room again; and feeling that his end was near, dismissed his attendants. None must see him die — God was the alone witness. When his domestics next saw him, the foam was oozing from his mouth; his white hair was dabbled in blood; the staff which his hand had but lately grasped was dented by his teeth — Boniface was dead.

To enter upon the history of the popes who succeeded him, or even to enumerate their acts of wickedness and assumption, would be a long and dreary task, and we shall not attempt it. We might fill pages with descriptions of their quarrels with the cardinals, their cruelties, their extortions, their insolence to princes, their hypocrisies: we might shew how one was a miser, another a perjurer, another a murderer, another an adulterer, and so exhaust the reader with the narrative of their crimes, but we have already written enough on this subject. It must now be sufficiently clear to all that a reformation of some kind was a necessity, as society could not much longer hold together as it was. This was the fact; and we shall presently see that a reformation did take place, though a work so tremendous was not to be accomplished in a moment. The dark night of the Middle Ages was indeed to give place to day; but there must be the gradual coming on of dawn first, during which the light would be but partially seen, and the beams would have to struggle through reluctant vapours: and there must be the morning star to herald the approach of the day's great ruler, and to cheer the anxious watcher with its ray.

So it happened. And when the confusion was greatest, and the darkness deepest, day began to dawn; and John Wickliffe, the Morning Star of the Reformation, appeared above the spiritual horizon.

Chapter 18.

The Dawn of the Reformation.

A.D. 1324-1450.

It is believed that Wickliffe was born in the neighbourhood of Richmond in Yorkshire, about the year 1324. The poverty of his parents, who seemed to have belonged to the peasant class, did not hinder him, at a proper age, from entering the University of Oxford; where he neglected no opportunity of obtaining knowledge, and soon won golden opinions from his tutor, the pious and learned Thomas Bradwardine. As a student of Merton College,* he acquired not only a perfect knowledge of the civil, the canon, and the municipal law, but of the ruin of man's nature as taught in scripture, of the worthlessness of human merit in the matter of salvation, and of the freeness of divine grace, by which a man could be justified apart from the works of the law. He is said to have studied the works of Grostete, by the advice of his tutor, and derived therefrom the idea that the pope is Antichrist.

{*Some very recent writers give Balliol College, and state that the John Wyklif of Merton College was another person, who was nominated to the vicarage of Mayfield in the year 1361. This is probably correct, for in that year Wickliffe, the reformer, was master of Balliol, and the Bursar's Rolls, of Queen's College, prove his residence there.}

His attacks upon the mendicant orders, who enticed away the students of the university to their monasteries, first brought him into notice at Oxford; and he wrote some spirited papers on the subject, entitled "Against able beggary," "Against idle beggary," and on "The poverty of Christ." He was now a professor at the University, but this did not cripple him in his service to the Lord; and on Sundays he laid aside the professor's gown, and preached the simple gospel to the people in their own language.

The fame of his preaching soon spread Rome-wards, and the Mendicants, whose influence was being steadily undermined by his teaching, were not slow to acquaint the pope with their grievances. This they managed in a most effectual way, by extracting from Wickliffe's writings nineteen articles of a questionable character, which they forwarded with their letters; and as most of these articles combated, in very plain language, the temporal pretensions of the pope, the result may be anticipated. Nine of the obnoxious extracts were quickly condemned as heresies, and the rest were declared erroneous; and bulls were at once dispatched to England, commanding that the daring heresiarch should be brought to trial for his opinions. This was the beginning of the conflict: but Rome, as usual, had over-reached herself.

In attacking the reformer she had not attacked a man without friends, for Wickliffe was a favourite with all classes. The common people liked him, because he took an interest in their state, and explained the scriptures to them in a language they could understand; the nobles favoured him, because he supported them in their resistance to the clergy; and at Oxford he was not less beloved for his piety than he was venerated for his learning.

In the month of February, and in the year 1377, the Convocation commenced its sittings in St. Paul's Cathedral; and thither Wickliffe proceeded, attended by his friends, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Lord Percy, Marshal of England. They feared that Wicklife would not be heard with impartiality if he went alone, perhaps would be made the victim of foul play; and when the trial commenced, the conduct of Courtenay,* bishop of London, shewed that there was some ground for their fears.

{*A son of the Earl of Devon.}

The press of people inside the cathedral was very great, and the marshal had to use his authority in order to make a way to the presence of the judges. This greatly incensed the bishop, and a stormy scene ensued. "If I had known, my lord," said he, "that you claimed to be master in this church, I would have taken measures to prevent your entrance." The Duke of Lancaster, who at this time was regent of the kingdom for the young king Richard II., approved of the marshal's act, and observed that it was "necessary to maintain order in spite of the bishops." Courtenay with difficulty concealed his vexation, but when the marshal presently demanded a chair for Wickliffe, he angrily exclaimed, "He must not sit down; criminals stand before their judges." High words again ensued on both sides, Wickliffe alone remaining silent: the people meanwhile caught the spirit of their leaders, and began to express their own opinions in acts of open violence. To prolong the sitting under such circumstances was impossible; the court was therefore dismissed, and the reformer withdrew from the cathedral under the powerful escort of the Duke of Lancaster.

For a time he was allowed to rest, and Rome became engaged in a more alarming controversy nearer home, which demanded all her attention. The cause of this controversy was the election of a rival pope at Findi, in Naples. The Roman pontiff, Urban VI., had so disgusted his cardinals by his coarseness and severity, that they had found it expedient to transfer their allegiance to another, and had invested with the dignity Robert, Count of Geneva. This man, after being duly elected at Findi, had taken up his residence at Avignon, in France, under the title of Clement VII.; and here he was acknowledged as pope by Scotland, Spain, France, Sicily, and Cyprus. The rest of Europe still looked up to Urban as the legitimate successor of St. Peter.

As might be expected, this remarkable schism still further inflamed the zeal of Wickliffe against the papacy, and gave him new motives for attacking it. "Trust we in the help of Christ," he exclaimed, "for He hath begun already to help us graciously, in that He hath cloven the head of Antichrist, and made the two parts fight against each other." He had already declared, "The pope is Antichrist, the proud worldly priest of Rome, and the most cursed of clippers and purse-carvers;" and now he did not scruple to affirm that a fit moment had arrived for "extinguishing the evil entirely." But in this he was anticipating the future by nearly two centuries; and on being cited a second time to appear before his accusers, he found that many of his friends had deserted him on account of his extreme views, and among them the powerful Duke of Lancaster. But God had not deserted him; and the falling off of his earthly friends gave him but little concern. Perhaps, in his former trial he had unwittingly been "making flesh his arm;" but it was not so now, and he went to the council unattended. Yet many of the people, thinking he would surely be devoured in such a den of lions, made their way into the chapel, intending to rescue him should there be any symptoms of treachery.

The prelates had gone to the council with confident and proud looks, fully expecting an easy victory; but, observing these popular manifestations they became uneasy; and when, at the commencement of the proceedings they received a message from the young king's mother forbidding them to proceed to "any definite sentence respecting the doctrine and conduct of Wickliffe," their discomfiture was complete. Walsingham, the papal advocate on that occasion, thus refers to the event: "The bishops who had professed themselves determined to do their duty in spite of threats and promises, and even at the hazard of their lives, were as reeds shaken by the wind, and became so intimidated during the examination of the apostate that their speeches were as soft as oil, to the public loss of their dignity, and the damage of the whole church. And when Clifford pompously delivered his message, they were so overcome with fear, that you would have thought them to be as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth are no reproofs."

Thus, through God's mercy, Wickliffe again escaped from the toils of his persecutors, and was enabled, shortly after, to engage upon his great work, the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. He had long ago expressed a wish that his countrymen might "rede in Englysche the gospel of Crist's lyf;" and there was now every probability that his wish would be gratified. Probability gave place to certainty before many months had passed away, and, as the work drew near its close, the brave reformer began to feel that his mission on earth was almost done. The year 1383 saw his task completed; and although the bishops tried hard to get the version suppressed by Act of Parliament, their efforts failed; and it was soon widely circulated throughout the kingdom. But Wickliffe did not live to see the opposition of the bishops. On the 31st of December, 1384, after an agitated career of sixty years, he entered into his eternal rest: and though his enemies had hoped, and his friends, had expected, that he would perish by the hand of man, God had ordained otherwise, and he died peacefully in his bed at Lutterworth. Yet though the agents of Rome were thus cheated of their expected prey, his body was afterwards exhumed and burnt, and the ashes thrown into a neighbouring brook. "The brook," says Fuller, "did convey his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over."

At the time of Wickliffe's death his followers had become very numerous, and might be found among all classes of the community. At Oxford they seem to have been in the majority, and when the chancellor of the university, Dr. Rigge, was commanded to silence all who favoured the reformer, he replied that he "durst not do it for fear of death." All who publicly adopted Wickliffe's views were called Lollards, but it is certain that Christians of that name existed in considerable numbers, even before Wickliffe appeared upon the scene. The origin of the name is uncertain, but some have traced it to the German word lollen, to sing; the question however is of small importance. Their doctrines and opinions were in every way similar to those of the reformer, and they seem to have been as indefatigable in disseminating them. Like Wickliffe, they taught that "the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only source of true religion, that there is nothing in the gospel to shew that Christ established the mass; that the substances of bread and wine remain after consecration; that those who enter monasteries only render themselves so much the more incapable of observing God's commands; and that penance, confession, and extreme unction are not needful, and have little foundation in scripture."

To think that Rome could allow such incorrigible heretics to exist unmolested, would be to suppose her capable of tolerance and mercy; qualities which she had never exhibited, and which she is doubtless incapable of possessing. This was not her way; and though the Lollards were not immediately visited with her anger, it was only because she lacked the means to make it sufficiently effective. The accession of Henry IV., however, afforded the opportunity for which she waited. The priests and friars had been busily engaged meanwhile, circulating lying reports of the revolutionary practices of the Lollards, and had so successfully worked upon the fears of the nation, that when, in the year 1400, the new king issued a royal edict for the burning of the heretics, Parliament was ready to sanction it. The decree ordained that, "on a high place, in public, before the face of the people, the incorrigible heretic is to be burnt alive;" and by this decree, burning for heresy became a statute law in England.

To speak of all the martyrdoms which belong to this persecution would be to write a martyrology, and that would be travelling far beyond our limitations. William Sautree has the honour of being the first victim under the new law. After him came John Badby, an artisan of Worcester, whose martyrdom was witnessed by the young Prince of Wales — afterwards Henry V. It is recorded of this martyr, that when the pile had been lighted he was heard to cry for mercy, and Henry ordered him to be extricated from the flames. On being brought before him the prince asked, "Will you forsake heresy, and conform to the faith of holy mother church? If you will, you shall have a yearly maintenance out of the king's treasury." But John Badby had been appealing to the mercy of God and not of man; and his steadfastness remained unshaken by this new test. He was accordingly consigned a second time to the flames.

The Lollards continuing to increase, archbishop Arundel called together a synod in the year 1413, in order to arrange further measures for their suppression; and among those marked out for condemnation was Sir John Oldcastle, by marriage Lord Cobham, who had long been a diligent student of Wickliffe's works. He was described as "a principal favourer, receiver, and maintainer of the people called Lollards," and among the crimes that were laid against him were those of "setting up preachers whom the bishops had not licensed; and of holding and teaching opinions of the sacraments, images, pilgrimages, etc., repugnant to the determinations of the church of Rome." Of course he was looked upon as a dangerous heretic one who was not safe to roam at large; and as soon as arrangements could be conveniently made, he was arrested by the king's command, and committed to the Tower.

On being brought before the Consistory, in the chapter house of St. Paul's, archbishop Arundel tried to win him back to "holy mother church" by many blandishments and fair speeches; but the knight was not to be moved from his convictions by the soft words of the prelate. The archbishop then changed his manner, and said sternly, "Sir John, beware what you do. For if you answer not clearly to these things (especially at the time appointed you only for that purpose) the law of the holy church is, That compelled once by a judge, we may openly proclaim you a heretic." "Do as ye think best," returned Sir John, stoutly, "for I am at a point!" As the archbishop could get no retractation from him on that day, he was remanded to the Tower till the following Monday, when a large assembly was present to witness his condemnation. We do not say trial, as that would suppose the impartiality of the judges who came to the council with the sentence written. The examination on this occasion was held at the Dominican Convent, in the ward of Ludgate, and in place of the two or three bishops who had attended at the former examination, there was an imposing concourse of canonists and friars, prelates and doctors, with the archbishop at their head.

Arundel opened the proceedings by making a conditional offer of absolution and mercy to the prisoner, which he promptly declined. "Nay, forsooth," were his words, "for I never yet trespassed against you." The stout old soldier then fell upon his knees in the sight of all, and exclaimed with tears, "I shrive me here unto Thee, my eternal, living God, that in my youth I offended Thee, O Lord, most grievously in pride, wrath and gluttony, in covetousness and lechery! Many men have I hurt in mine anger, and done many other horrible sins! Good Lord, I ask Thy mercy!" With that he rose to his feet, and addressed the spectators in a loud voice. "Lo! good people," said he, "for the breaking of God's law and His commandments they never yet cursed me. But for their own laws and traditions, most cruelly do they handle both me and other men. And, therefore, both they and their laws, by the promise of God, shall utterly be destroyed."

To attempt to subdue the spirit of the bold speaker was clearly a vain task; and the subsequent speeches of the knight, far from offering any hopes of retractation, were full of the most indignant denunciations of the whole system of popery. "Ye are no part of Christ's holy church," he exclaimed, addressing the whole body of ecclesiastics, "as your open deeds do show: but ye are very Antichrists, openly set against His holy law and will. The laws ye have made are nothing to His glory, but only for your vain glory and abominable covetousness." The prior of the Carmelites attempted to take him to task for his language, and said, "Rash judgment and right judgment are all one with you. So swift judges always are the learned scholars of Wickliffe." But the knight answered readily, "It is well sophistered of you, forsooth! Preposterous are your judgments evermore. And as for that virtuous man Wickliffe, I shall say here, both before God and man, that before I knew that despised doctrine of his, I never abstained from sin. But since I learned therein to fear my Lord God, it hath otherwise, I trust, been with me. So much grace could I never find in all your glorious instructions!" The prior was weak enough to attempt another sally, and satirically observed, that it had not been well in his own case, had he possessed no grace to amend his life, till he heard the devil preach. The knight retorted by reminding the Carmelite that the Pharisees, of old, ascribed the miracles of Christ to Beelzebub and His doctrines to the devil. Then, turning to his judges, he demanded by what authority they were thus sitting in judgment on a Christian man. "No ground have ye in all the scriptures," said he, "so lordly to take it upon you, but in Annas and Caiaphas, which sat thus upon Christ, and upon His apostles after His ascension." Hereupon a lawyer remarked that Christ judged Judas; but Sir John corrected him by saying that "Judas judged himself." "Indeed," he continued, "Christ said, 'Woe unto him' for that covetous act of his, as He doth yet unto many of you; for since that venom was shed into the church, ye never followed Christ." When asked by the archbishop what he meant by that venom, he replied, "Your possessions and lordships; for then cried an angel in the air, as your own chronicles mention, 'Woe! woe! woe! this day is venom shed in the church of God!' Since that time, one pope hath put down another, one hath poisoned another, one hath cursed another, and one hath slain another, and done much more mischief, as all the chronicles tell. Let all men consider well this, that Christ was meek and merciful; the pope is proud and a tyrant; Christ was poor and forgave; the pope is rich, and a malicious manslayer, as his daily acts do prove him. Rome is the very nest of Antichrist, and out of that nest cometh all his disciples, of whom prelates, priests and monks are the body, and these piled friars are the tail!"

In this way the examination proceeded, the prisoner having apparently changed places with his judges, till the archbishop thought proper to close the discussion by reading the form of condemnation. In this the knight was described as a "most pernicious and detestable heretic," worthy only of death, and a sentence in accordance with these views was forthwith pronounced upon him. In addition to this he was excommunicated and accursed, and a prohibition was read forbidding any one to supply the atrocious malefactor with food or shelter, or to offer him any kind of assistance whatsoever. This being settled to the satisfaction of the court, the knight firmly declared his determination to stand to his convictions to the last, and expressed his willingness to suffer in so good a cause: then, turning to the people, he exclaimed, "Good Christian people, for God's love be well aware of these men, for they will else beguile you, and lead you blindling into hell with themselves. For Christ saith plainly unto you, 'If one blind man leadeth another, they are like both to fall into the ditch!'" After that he fell upon his knees, and offered up this prayer, "Lord God eternal! I beseech Thee of Thy great mercy's sake, to forgive my pursuers, if it be Thy blessed will!" He was then remanded a second time to the Tower.

Of his escape from prison, and his four years of hiding in Wales, we cannot here speak, nor of the trumped-up charge of conspiracy against the Lollards, of which he was pointed out as the leader. His martyrdom was only postponed by his escape, and when, in the year 1418, he again fell into the hands of his enemies, the sentence was carried out with unexampled cruelties. He was taken through London to St. Giles's with his hands pinioned, and then, after being suspended in chains, was roasted over a slow fire.

From this time forth, for nearly a century, the flames of persecution were kept burning in England, and the search for heretics was conducted with the usual rigour: but God had decreed that the work of His servants should go on, and who could stay His hand? The wretched creatures of Rome might thin the little band of Christians, by their fires, and tortures, and imprisonments (and tribulation was the expected portion of the faithful disciple), but they could not destroy the work which God had begun. His word — that incorruptible seed which liveth and abideth for ever — was in the hands of the people, and so long as this power was among them, the arm of Rome was impotent, and souls would be born again for glory.

Chapter 19.

The Reformers Before the Reformation.

A.D. 1400-1500.

Whilst the Lollards were being persecuted in England, a revival work was springing up in another part of Europe, to which we would now draw the reader's attention. This was in Bohemia; and the chief leader in the movement was the martyr-reformer, John Huss.

There is little doubt that the writings of Wickliffe kindled the first sparks of this revival; and the circumstances which led to it, on which, however, we can only linger for a moment, are thus given. The queen of Richard II. of England was a Bohemian princess, the sister of Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia. She was a woman of piety, and a student of the Scriptures; facts which may be learnt from the persecuting archbishop Arundel, who affirms that, "although she was a stranger, yet she constantly studied the four gospels in English, with the expositions of the doctors; and in the study of these, and the perusal of godly books, she was more diligent than the prelates themselves, although their office and calling required it." On the death of her husband she returned to Bohemia, taking with her the reformer's works.

After this, a learned Bohemian of Prague, named Jerome, visited England, and became acquainted with several of the Lollards, whose teachings he imbibed. He afterwards returned to his own city, and taught the new doctrines with earnestness and success.

At a still later period (A.D. 1404), two Englishmen of Canterbury visited Prague, and uttered antipapal sentiments. "They took up their abode in the suburbs of the Bohemian capital, in the house of one Luke Welensky, and, by his consent, painted on the walls of their room two pictures; one, the history of Christ's passion, the other, the pomp of the papal court. The meaning of the pictorial antithesis was plain enough: people ran to see the rude drawings, and Huss (at that time a preacher at the Bethlehem chapel, and withal dean of the Philosophical faculty) referred to them in his sermons."

From an early period Huss had shewn his sympathy with the Wickliffe movement. He was a man of profound learning, a clear thinker, and a skilful dialectician: in appearance the student rather than the priest, his figure being tall and spare, his cheeks pale, and his eyes grey and thoughtful. In manner he was dignified and grave; in morals austere and irreproachable. Like Wickliffe he always preached to the people in their native tongue, and like him was stern and emphatic in his exposure of prevailing abuses; but being a favourite at court, he was not at first molested. He cherished and revered the memory of the English reformer; and in his chapel of Bethlehem was frequently heard to pray that his soul might be with Wickliffe's after its departure.

The great schism in papal Christendom was still the topic of discussion when Huss was the preacher at Bethlehem Chapel and the popular rector of the University; and it was not likely he would let it pass without some words of censure. Yet his zeal on this subject did him but little harm, as the prohibitory decrees which were issued against him were disregarded by those who should have seen them carried out. It was circumstances of another kind, which made him a heretic in the sight of Rome, and one of too deep a dye for hope or pardon.

In the year 1411 the pope of Rome, John XXIII., a man of dissolute life and military habits, proclaimed a crusade against Ladislaus, King of Naples, and offered the usual indulgences to all who joined the papal army. Huss was justly indignant that the cross of Christ should be degraded to such unchristian ends, and preached against the crusade. The people, inflamed by his eloquence, refused to listen to the papal missionaries, and interrupted their harangues by angry exclamations. This was a treatment to which they had not been accustomed, and to which they were not likely to submit in silence. To strike at the leader of the movement, however, would have been too perilous and precipitate a measure, nor would it have been wise, in the then agitated state of the people, to have taken public steps for their own protection. They therefore procured the secret arrest of three of the ringleaders, who, having been thrown into prison by order of the Senate, were hurriedly and privately executed. But the blood of the murdered men was seen oozing through the prison grating, and their fate was thus made known to their friends. This was the signal for a general rising, and the people rushed in a body to the town-house, which they took by storm. Breaking open the prison, they possessed themselves of the headless trunks of the victims, and bore them to a place of sepulture with martyr honours. Huss, meanwhile foreseeing the consequences to himself of this rash and lawless act, wisely withdrew from the city, and continued his preaching in places where he was more safe. A summons from the pope to answer for his conduct before the tribunal of the Vatican was disregarded, and for this was he excommunicated; but he went on preaching just the same, and the numbers of his converts and sympathisers increased daily.

Meanwhile, a council of prelates and others had been convened at Constance, an imperial city on the German side of the Alps, with the twofold purpose of healing the great schism, and of suppressing the heresies of Wickliffe; and in due course Huss received a summons to appear before it. We might fill several pages with accounts of the secret abominations and outspoken blasphemies of the members of this council, but the details are too revolting: we shall only refer to them because of their connection with John Huss, and their perfidious treatment of that truly noble man.

When the Bohemian reformer had received his citation to appear at Constance, he did not hesitate to obey. He had declined to appear at Rome because he knew the faithlessness of the pope; but with the assembly at Constance the case was different. The prelates, in his idea, were the august representatives of that true church to which he belonged, and he knew that one of the purposes for which the council had been convened was identical with that which was often nearest his own heart when preaching. Yet though he had some confidence in placing himself in its power, he felt that a safe-conduct from the German emperor* might be a useful protection, and he procured one. To those unacquainted with the nature of a safe-conduct we may remark, that it was a passport granted by some person in authority, empowering the holder to go to and from a certain place without molestation. The wording of the Emperor Sigismund's safe-conduct was as follows: "You shall let John Huss pass, stop, stay, and return freely without any hindrance whatever:" and with this in his possession the reformer started on his journey.

{*Sigismund.}

And now mark the perfidy of Rome. No sooner had the reformer put his foot in Constance than he was seized and thrown into prison on a charge of heresy. That he held a safe-conduct from the emperor was well known to the council; but this was a difficulty easily removed, and they passed a decree that no faith should be kept with heretics. The people were amazed when they heard of the reformer's arrest, and their indignant clamours reached the emperor from Bohemia. He had not yet arrived in Constance, and at first seemed disposed to side with the people in condemning the treachery of the council — he even talked of breaking open the prison in which the reformer was confined: but when he reached the city, the specious arguments of the priests overcame his sounder judgment, and he suffered them to do their will with the prisoner.

The dungeon in which Huss had been confined was damp and fetid, and his food was stinted and unwholesome: by this treatment they thought to reduce his strength, and make him pliant in their hands. Their efforts were so far successful that the reformer became dangerously ill.

Early in June (A.D. 1415), and before he was thoroughly recovered, his public trial commenced; but though he was still so weak, he was forbidden to employ counsel, because, said his enemies, a heretic could not be defended. There were two charges preferred against him; the first, that of imbibing the doctrines of Wickliffe; the second, that of being "infected with the leprosy of the Vaudois." When called upon for his answer to the first charge he appealed to the authority of scripture, but his voice was immediately drowned in a tumult of scorn and derision. To attempt a defence under such circumstances was impossible; and when the next question was put he remained silent. Yet even this was made to militate against him, and his silence was received as a tacit acknowledgment of his guilt. When he again spoke his voice was again lost in the general uproar. At last the excitement became so great that it was found impossible to proceed with the trial; and the assembly was adjourned.

On the second day the emperor appeared in person to preserve order; and on this occasion there seems to have been a greater show of decency, though the prelates failed to preserve their composure to the end. When, during the course of examination, Huss admitted that he had said that "Wickliffe was a true believer, that his soul was now in heaven, and that he could not wish his own soul more safe than Wickliffe's," the holy fathers expressed their merriment in a burst of laughter. On the third day the trial was concluded, and Huss was remanded to prison pending the delivery of his sentence.

Throughout the trial there seems to have been one friend who clung to him, and that with an energy which belongs only to a very deep affection: this friend was a Bohemian knight, John of Chlum. He was with him on each occasion in court, and he attended him throughout his painful and tedious imprisonment; though not without considerable risk to his own person. "My dear master," he said when the third day of the trial was over, "I am unlettered, and consequently unfit to counsel one so enlightened as you. Nevertheless, if you are secretly conscious of any of those errors which have been publicly imputed to you, I do entreat you not to feel any shame in retracting it; but if on the contrary, you are convinced of your innocence, I am so far from advising you to say anything against your conscience, that I rather exhort you to endure every form of torture than to renounce anything which you hold to be true." Huss was deeply moved by the earnest and loving counsel of his friend, and told him with tears that God knew how willingly he would retract on oath any statement which he had made contrary to the holy scriptures. A month elapsed, and during that time the faithful knight seems to have been constantly with him proving himself a faithful disciple and true friend to the last. "Oh, what a comfort to me," said Huss, "to see that this nobleman did not disdain to stretch out his arm to a poor heretic in irons, whom all the world, as it were, had forsaken."

On the 6th of July 1415, he stood before the council for the last time; and received his sentence. The sitting was held in the cathedral, and Huss was detained in the porch while mass was celebrated, as a heretic could not be permitted in the church during the ceremony. The bishop of Lodi preached the sermon, and chose for his text, "That the body of sin might be destroyed." His remarks were a fierce tirade against the heresies of Huss, who, he said, was "as bad as Arius and worse than Sabellius." The articles of accusation were then read, and sentence was pronounced. During the reading of the articles, Huss made several attempts to speak, but was prevented: and when he afterwards offered up a prayer for his enemies, and asked that God would forgive their injustice, his words were treated with derision. The martyr, strong in his integrity, then lifted up his hands and exclaimed, "Behold, most gracious Saviour, how the council condemns as an error what Thou hast prescribed and practised, when, overborne by enemies, Thou committedst Thy cause to God Thy Father, leaving us this example, that when we are oppressed we may have recourse to the judgment of God." The fervour of his eloquence had compelled attention, and during his few following remarks his enemies preserved an uneasy silence. Sigismund alone seemed undisturbed, but his discomfiture was only delayed. Suddenly lifting his eyes from the assembled prelates, Huss fixed them steadily on the emperor. "I came to this council," said he, in a firm, clear voice, "under the public faith of the emperor." Then a deep blush was seen to pass over the emperor's face: and Huss had finished speaking.

He was now stripped of his priestly garments, and his head crowned with a paper mitre, on which were painted three devils. The sacramental cup, which had been meanwhile placed in his hands, was then taken from him with these words, "Accursed Judas, who, having forsaken the counsel of peace, art entered into that of the Jews, we take this holy cup from thee in which is the blood of Jesus Christ." "Nay," said Huss in a loud voice, "I trust, in the mercy of God, I shall drink of it this day in His kingdom." The bishops retorted, "We devote thy soul to the infernal demons." "And I," said Huss, "commit my spirit into Thy hands, O Lord Jesus Christ; unto Thee, I commend my soul which Thou hast redeemed."

Having been thus degraded from the priestly office, he was handed over to the emperor, as representing the secular power. "It is thy glorious office," said the bishop of Lodi, "to destroy heresies and schisms, especially this obstinate heretic;" and the emperor proceeded to his "glorious office" without delay. The place of martyrdom was not far distant, and thither Huss was immediately taken, under the escort of the elector Palatine and eight hundred horse. As he walked along his face shone with joy, and the people who lined the way were astonished at his pious ejaculations. "What this man has done," they said, "we know not; but we hear him offering up most excellent prayers to God." On arriving at the place of execution he was not allowed to address the people, but his prayer as he was being chained to the stake could not escape their ears. "Lord Jesus," he exclaimed, "I humbly suffer this cruel death for Thy sake, and I pray Thee to forgive all my enemies." At the last moment an attempt was made to induce him to sign a recantation, but in vain. "What I have written and taught," he said, "was in order to rescue souls from the power of the devil, and to deliver them from the tyranny of sin; and I do gladly seal what I have written and taught with my blood." The elector, who had exerted this last endeavour, now rode away from the spot, and the pile was lighted. But the martyr's sufferings were speedily terminated; and while he was yet calling upon God, his head sank upon his breast, and he was suffocated in a rising cloud of smoke. Thus John Huss, having witnessed the good confession, obtained the martyr's crown, and departed "to be with Christ, which is far better."

His friend and fellow-labourer, Jerome of Prague, followed him in a little while. He was a man of greater learning, but not of greater endurance. Indeed, the tortures to which he was subjected during a barbarous imprisonment of nearly a year, so crushed his spirit that he was induced to sign a recantation. But the victory of his enemies did not last, and the Lord having graciously restored his soul, he quickly recanted his recantation. It is worthy of notice, that in spite of all the sufferings through which he passed at this time, his memory remained clear, and his intellect unimpaired, so that at his final trial (though he had been without books and paper, in a loathsome dungeon, for upwards of 340 days) his references to authorities, and frequent quotations were always prompt and correct; and his eloquence was such as to excite the admiration even of his enemies. "It was amazing," wrote the pope's secretary Poggius, "to hear with what force of expression, fluency of language, and excellent reasoning, he answered his adversaries; nor was I less struck with the gracefulness of his manner, the dignity of his action, and the firmness and constancy of his whole behaviour. It grieved me to think so great a man was labouring under so atrocious an accusation. Whether this accusation be just or not, God knows: I make no inquiry into the merits of the case; I submit to those who know more of it than I do."

It was in the May of the year 1416 that Jerome was brought up for his final audience. He did not forget to reproach his adversaries with the fact, that he had been confined for over eleven months in prison, where he had been cramped with irons, poisoned with dirt and stench, and pinched with the want of necessaries. "And during this time," said he, "ye gave my enemies at all times a favourable hearing, but refused to hear me for a single hour." He then referred with shame to his retractation; and his sorrowful confession was in itself a testimony. "I confess and tremble when I think of it," he said, "that through fear of punishment by fire, I basely consented, against my conscience, to condemn the doctrine of Wickliffe and Huss. This sinful retractation I now fully retract, and am resolved to maintain the tenets of these men to death, believing them to be the true and pure doctrines of the gospel, even as their lives were blameless and holy."

The Assembly behaved no better to their new victim than they had behaved to Huss; and their conduct is described by one of their own number as "unruly and indecent." Yet Jerome never lost his presence of mind, or suffered himself to be discomfited by their clamour and ridicule. He reminded them that his case was not an isolated one; that others, worthier than he, had been borne down by false witnesses and unjustly condemned. Joseph and Isaiah, Daniel and John the Baptist, yea, even his Divine Master, had been arraigned before councils, and suffered wrongfully at the hands of wicked men. "Ye have determined to condemn me unjustly," he cried, "but after my death I shall leave a sting in your consciences, and a worm that will never die. I appeal to the Sovereign Judge of all the earth, in whose presence ye must appear to answer me."

Language like this was more than sufficient to procure his speedy condemnation; but death had lost all terror for him now. When the trying moment drew near, his willingness to suffer was shewn by his cheerful countenance; and he went to the place of his martyrdom singing hymns of joy. In this he was like his friend and forerunner; and the simile did not escape the notice of a Roman Catholic historian (Aeneas Sylvius) who afterwards became pope.* "They went to the stake," says this writer, "as to a banquet: not a word fell from them which discovered the least timidity; they sung hymns in the flames, to the last gasp, without ceasing."

{*As Pius II.}

It is worthy of notice that John XXIII., the pope who summoned the council which condemned these noble martyrs, was afterwards deposed for his wickedness by the same council. This was the one worthy act they preformed, although, indeed, little credit is due to them, as the step was taken from interested motives.

The martyrdom of Huss and Jerome, by which they hoped to purge Europe of the heresies of Wickliffe, not only left upon their consciences the awful reproach of a double murder, but, looked at from the side of Rome's interests, was a fatal mistake. Instead of crushing by that means what they were pleased to call a seductive and scandalous heresy, they inflamed the minds of the Bohemian people, and produced a civil war. Even before the death of Jerome, several noblemen and other eminent persons in Bohemia had sent an indignant protest to the Council of Constance, in which they accused them of unrighteousness and cruelty, and expressed their determination to sacrifice their lives for the defence of the gospel of Christ, and of His faithful preachers. Their letter, however, had been contemptuously burnt by the assembled prelates; and the indifference of these holy fathers had been afterwards more insultingly shewn by the ruthless murder of their second victim. Their subsequent edicts of persecution did not help to soothe the popular mind, and when, in the year 1419, a Hussite minister was seized, and burnt, under circumstances of great cruelty,* the exasperated people flew to arms; and, headed by the king's chamberlain, a one-eyed nobleman named Zisca, carried all before them.

{*His hands were bored through with a sword, and the holes were then threaded with a piece of rope, by which he was confined to the stake at which he suffered.}

A large and well-trained army was brought against them by the emperor Sigismund, but it was scattered like chaff before the threshing-flails of the Bohemian peasants, who, in truth, had scarcely any other weapons with which to fight their battles. The pope's legate, Cardinal Julian, was present at several of these encounters, and was amazed when he saw the flower of the emperor's army — princes renowned for their bravery, and veterans of European fame — retreating in disorder before the uncouth weapons of a handful of peasants — nay — sometimes even flying when no man pursued, possessed by some unaccountable panic. On one of these occasions he burst into tears, and exclaimed, "Alas! it is not the enemy, but our sins which put us to flight!" Several popish writers have confessed their inability to account for the wonderful success of these Christian warriors, and one of them affirms, that the "Bohemians proved themselves a brave people; for though the emperor Sigismund led nearly half Europe in arms against them, he was not able to reduce them." Melanchthon, a reformer of the next century, ascribed their victories to miraculous agency, and believed that the angels of God accompanied them on their expeditions, and discomfited their enemies.

On the death of Zisca in the year 1424, efforts were made to bring the war to a conclusion, and the Bohemians were invited to lay their ultimatum before a convocation at Basle. But the Hussites were not all so favourable to the proposed treaty; and as there had already been some grave differences of opinion among them, they separated into two parties. The one, demanding only that the cup should be restored to the laity, was easily cajoled into returning to the bosom of the church; and the pope promised to yield to the dissentients the point insisted upon: though, as soon as it was safe to do so, he violated his pledge. These were called the Calixtines, from the Greek kalyx, a cup. The other party, holding the doctrines of Huss in their entirety, refused to sign the compact, and were now exposed to persecution from their old friends in addition to that of Rome. They were known by the appellation of "Taborites," because they met for worship on a certain hill, which they called Mount Tabor. Meanwhile, an increased acquaintance with the word of God had taught the Taborites that their appeal to carnal weapons was contrary to the expressed mind and will of God; and when the persecution was revived, instead of returning to their threshing-flails and hoes, they appealed to no other weapon than "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God."

At length the severity of their sufferings excited the pity of the archbishop of Prague, who had formerly been a prominent Calixtine; and by his influence they were removed to the lordship of Lititz, on the confines of Moravia and Silesia; where for a time they were free from persecution, and were enabled to found a colony. Some of their brethren from the Calixtines now rejoined them, together with several citizens of Prague and not a few of the nobility: and to commemorate the re-union they took the name of Unitas Fratrum or the "United Brethren." This was in the year 1451.

Scarcely, however, had they been settled in their new quarters a twelvemonth, when they were again harassed by the merciless agents of Rome. A baseless charge of sedition was made the ground of this new persecution, and all the patience and all the faith of the Moravian Brethren was now called into practice. The cruelty of the inquisitors was worthy of their office; and hundreds of the guiltless and unresisting Moravians were seized by their orders and thrust into prison. Some were starved to death, others were racked, others mutilated, others burnt at the stake; while those who managed to escape, were forced to take up their abode in caverns and forests, where their food was the game they procured by hunting, and the wild berries which the bushes afforded. When they left their hidings they went in single file, each treading in the steps of the other, and the last carrying a branch with which to obliterate the marks of their feet; and thus they secured themselves against detection. When night came on they kindled their fires, which they dared not do in the day-time lest the rising smoke should betray them, and by the flickering glare of these midnight fires they held their pious meetings, and read their Bibles together. In the year 1470 they completed a translation of the Bible in the Bohemian language; and as printing from metal blocks had now come into general use on the Continent, through the efforts of the celebrated John Guttenberg, it was not long before the translation had gone through several editions. Thus one thing was helping on another, and, in spite of the efforts of Rome to mar and hinder, the way was being prepared for the approaching Reformation.

Of the three remaining links, which connect the chain of testimony with the period above referred to, we cannot speak at any length. The first of these was Jerome Savonarola, a Dominican monk, and the son of a physician at Ferrara. In early life he believed himself to be the subject of heavenly visions; by which he was led to enter the convent of Bologna, where his fastings and mortifications attracted the notice of his superiors. He was afterwards removed to St. Mark's convent at Florence; and here he rose to the dignity of prior; in which capacity he endeavoured to restore, as nearly as possible, the primitive simplicity of the monastic life. But it was his fame as a preacher of reform outside his convent, which made him a marked man at Rome his unsparing denunciations of the pope; his attacks on the vices of the clergy; his passionate laments over the spiritual deadness of the times. "The church," he said, "had once her golden priests and wooden chalices; but now the chalices are gold and the priests wooden; for the outward splendour of religion has been hurtful to spirituality." The pope tried to silence the great preacher by the offer of a cardinal's hat, but a cardinal's hat had no attractions for Savonarola. He received the offer with indignation, and declared that the only red hat which he coveted was one that should be dyed with the blood of martyrdom.

At length he was seized and thrown into prison. Here he improved his time by reflection and prayer, and wrote a spiritual meditation on Psalm xxxi., in which he described the inward wrestlings of the converted man. After being cruelly tortured by order of the Inquisition, the order for his condemnation was signed by the same pope who would have made him a cardinal, and he was burnt at the stake in the year 1499.

The second of the three connecting links was John of Wesalia, a famous doctor of divinity of Erfurt. This devoted man was much harassed in his old age by the popish inquisitors, who confined his weak limbs in iron fetters, and subjected him to many indignities. He taught that salvation was by grace alone, that pilgrimages, fasts, extreme unction, etc., were of no profit to the soul, and that the word of God is the only authority, in all matters of faith. Some of his opinions he was at length induced to withdraw; but the retractation had no effect in curbing the resentment of his enemies, and after languishing in prison a few months longer, he was mercifully released by death (A.D. 1479).

The third link was John Wesselus or Wessel, a friend of John of Wesalia, and sometimes mistaken for his friend. He was born at Groningen in Holland, about the year 1419, and obtained a European celebrity. Though he was unquestionably the greatest theologian of his age, he was never ordained, and hence was never associated with any ecclesiastical body. It was not an uncommon practice in his day to adopt the clerical character in order to evade persecution; and this explains a remark he once made, that "he was not afraid of the gallows and therefore had no need of the tonsure." When his friend Rovere, general of the Franciscans, was raised to the papal throne, the newly-elected pope asked him, was there any request he would like to make of him. "Yes," said Wessel, "I beg you to give me out of the Vatican library a Greek and Hebrew Bible." "You shall have those," was the reply, "but, foolish man, why do you not ask for a bishopric or something of that sort?" "For the best of reasons," said Wessel, "because I do not want such things."

Such was the spirit of the man who was to carry on the line of testimony — that "silver line of grace" as another has called it — which we have traced from the era of the apostles, and to connect it with the line of testimony which runs through the period of the Reformation. He does not seem to have been much persecuted in his life-time, although the whole tenor of his teaching was opposed to the ways and maxims of Rome. Luther, in the next century, expressed his surprise that the writings of Wessel should be so little known, adding that "the reason might be that he lived without blood and contention," for that was the only point of difference between them. He spoke of him as "a man of admirable genius and uncommonly large mind," who was evidently taught of God, and "did not receive his doctrines from men." "If I had read his works before," said Luther, "my enemies might have supposed that I learnt everything from Wesselus, such a perfect coincidence there is in our opinions. . . . . It is now impossible for me to doubt whether I am right in the points which I have inculcated, when I see so entire an agreement in sentiment, and almost the same words used by this eminent person, who lived in a different age, in a distant country, and in circumstances very unlike my own."

Wesselus died full of honours in his seventieth year, acknowledging with his latest breath the intense satisfaction of his soul in the fact, that "all he knew was Jesus Christ and Him crucified."

This was in the year 1489. Luther was then a lad six years of age. Thus the line of testimony was connected with the period of the great Reformation, and the chain of witnesses, thus far, had been preserved without a break.

Chapter 20.

Martin Luther and the German Reformation..

A.D. 1483-1522.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the doctrine of justification by faith had been almost lost sight of in the church; and this was the one great fact which made the Reformation a necessity. No sooner had the power of this truth been weakened in the souls of the faithful, than a doctrine of salvation by works had been introduced, and penances and outward mortifications had been substituted for that repentance toward God and inward sanctification which are the signs of true conversion. These works of penance, which began as early as the time of Tertullian were multiplied as years rolled on; until at length the superstition of the people could carry them no farther, and the darkness of the Middle Ages gave birth to the Flagellants.

These were a sect of fanatics which arose in the thirteenth century, and spread over a large part of Europe. They went about the streets in a half-naked condition, and flogged each other twice a day with scourges. The severity of their chastisements (which were supposed to atone not only for their own sins, but also for the sins of others) though at first exciting persecution, presently aroused the sympathies of the people, who began to turn away from the licentious priests, and to carry their sins and sorrows to the groaning flagellants. How to retain the influence of their usurped dominion was now the question with the priests, and "therefore," says D'Aubigne, "they invented the novel system of exchange, distinguished by the name of indulgences." For the payment of twenty, ten, or three sous, according to the rank and condition of the applicant, the benefit of a fast of seven weeks was granted, with proportionate amounts for longer terms: and so the disgraceful traffic began.

The pope was not slow to perceive the advantages that might be derived from so lucrative a system of exchange; and in due time Clement VII. advanced the startling dogma, that a belief in indulgences was a necessary article of faith. He asserted that one drop of Christ's blood had been sufficient to reconcile man to God; the rest was shed to ensure a sinking fund for the treasury of the church. Moreover, there was a balance of good works to the account of the saints, works which "they had finished over and above what was requisite for their own salvation," and these also became a marketable commodity. Nor were the indulgences of Rome confined to the living: they were carried beyond the grave, and the wailing souls in purgatory were supposed to be delivered by their means.

Then there were the indulgences belonging to the year of Jubilee, of which we have spoken in an earlier chapter,* indulgences which were granted to all who made pilgrimages to Rome during the specified time. According to the bull of Boniface VIII., this Jubilee was to be celebrated once every hundred years; but the success of the first celebration had so excited the avarice of the popes that they had changed the interval to fifty years. This also, however, was found a weary while to wait, and an interval of thirty-three years was decided upon. But even thirty-three years was a long period the third of a century — and, before long, the figure was definitely fixed at twenty-five. Once every twenty-five years then, the plenary indulgence was granted; and at the same time the conditions of the indulgence were also modified, to suit the circumstances of all classes. A journey to Rome was declared no longer necessary, and the benefits might be procured of the intending pilgrim's own priest in his native town or village.

{*See Chapter 15.}

The sale of indulgences was of necessity a great encouragement to sin; and indeed, the more ignorant of the people could see nothing in the doctrine but a positive permission to do evil; while the priests, who profited so much the more by this distorted view of their doctrine, were in no haste to set the people right.

By by whom were these indulgences granted? It is interesting to note this. Who were the approved instruments in this strange work? Who were these valuers of sin — these disposers of indulgences? Surely men of approved morality and keen spiritual perception — alas! the delusion. We will sketch for the reader a picture which might be often seen during the period of which we write; and the answer will be found there.

Yonder is the market-place of a medival town, A man is crossing the open space on his way to the cathedral; and as he passes yonder group, the voices of the speakers sink lower, and they smile significantly at each other. The man seems half ashamed and returns their respectful salutations with an embarrassed air. Presently his form is lost among the gothic arches of the cathedral and the voices of the speakers grow loud again. Their conversation is drawing to a close, and one of them repeats with a laugh a familiar proverb, often quoted in those days, "Ah well, the priest will do what the devil would be ashamed to think of." But who is the man whose retreating figure we have watched as far as the cathedral porch? He is the most notorious debauchee of the town; a daring blasphemer and a reckless gambler; his concubines and children are supported out of the revenues of the church. But why this reverence towards him? Is he nothing more than we describe? Oh yes; he is a priest of Rome, and a notorious trafficker in indulgences.

This picture is not overdrawn, nor was the evil which it describes peculiar only to an isolated few; it was as widespread as the doctrines of Rome, by which, indeed, the corruption had been bred. Robert Bellarmine, a learned controversialist of this century, and withal, a Romish cardinal, acknowledges as much when he says, "For some years before the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies were published, there was not any severity in ecclesiastical judicatories, any discipline with regard to morals, any knowledge of sacred literature, any reverence for divine things; there was scarcely any religion remaining."

Such then was the condition of the church at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Corrupt in doctrine — corrupt in practice — it was impossible that things should continue much longer as they were.

Nevertheless, Rome was boastful and self-confident, for she had few open enemies to trouble her. The Hussites had either been scattered by persecution, or gathered back into the fold of the church; and the testimony of the Vaudois Christians had been almost suppressed. But there was still a feeling of disaffection in the hearts of men of all classes, which the smoke of Rome's burnings could not stifle, or its deceitful promises allay. Kings and nobles, citizens and peasants, theologians and men of letters, politicians and soldiers, all had their ground of complaint, and were morally prepared for the work of the Reformation. Europe had roused from the long nightmare of the Middle Ages, and was now peering, though with dreamy eyes, through the haze of a lingering superstition in quest of light. An important change a re-action nay, a revolution was inevitable; and a leader only was wanted. Men's minds were ripe for such a revolution, and all that was needed was a master-mind — a mind to sustain the burden of the strife — to lead, to counsel, to control.

God had seen the want, and gave to the church and Europe, Martin Luther.

Leaders for individual sections and parties were not wanting, but Luther was to be the leader of leaders. Princes and nobles, long disgusted with the encroachments of successive popes on their dominions, found a true-hearted though timid representative in the elector Frederick of Hanover: politicians and men of letters, bound by the restraint of the canon laws, found a mouth-piece for their grievances in the person of Ulrich von Hutten: but all classes and conditions of men, from kings downwards, found the charter of their liberties in the life work of the great Augustine, Martin Luther.

The reformer was born of humble parents, at Eisleben, in the province of Mansfeld, on November the l0th, 1483. "I am a peasant's son," we find him saying in after life, "my father, grandfather, and all my forefathers were simple peasants." It was from his parents that he inherited that sturdy simplicity, and frank, joyous temperament which is peculiar to the Thuringian peasant. His home education was strait and strict, and the treatment he received at school was harsh in the extreme: yet all this was necessary to prepare the future reformer for his great and perilous work.

When fourteen years of age he was sent to the Franciscan school at Magdeburg, where his youthful sufferings were much increased. He tells us he was half starved, and frequently went singing through the adjacent towns and villages in order to get bread. "Do not despise the boys who go singing through the streets, begging a little bread for the love of God," was his pathetic appeal many years later; "I also have done the same." He was afterwards removed to Eisenach, where he had relatives, but they afforded him little or no relief. He still had to wander, hungry and miserable, through the pitiless streets, singing hymns, and to say 'panem propter Deum' at the doors of strangers, thankful even for the crumbs which were sometimes thrown to him. But relief came at last. What relatives had denied him, strangers supplied: and one evening, having begged at many doors without success, he came to one from which he was not repulsed. Christians will always remember with affection and gratitude the name of Ursula Cotta; for she it was who opened her house to the hungry lad, and gave him not only the food he needed, but a home and a mother's love. Luther had an opportunity later on of requiting her kindness, when he received her son into his own house at Wittenberg.

At the age of eighteen his father removed him to the University of Erfurt, to study law; and here his mind received a serious bent, by the sudden death of his fellow-collegian and intimate friend, Alexis. This occurred during a short vacation, while they were out walking together. Passing through the Thueringenwald, they were overtaken by a great storm, and a flash of lightning stretched the light-hearted Alexis a corpse at Luther's feet. Falling upon his knees on the impulse of the moment, Luther vowed that if God would spare him, he would henceforth consecrate his life to His service.

From that hour he became a changed person. It was long before his inclination for study returned to him, and day after day he might be seen wandering moodily about the library and hall of the university, like one unable to find rest. At length a Latin Bible fell into his hands, and, having a thorough knowledge of the language, he began to read it. This was the first time he had looked into the sacred volume, and his surprise was great. Here were depths of wisdom which he had never expected to find, precious pearls of truth which none of the missals or breviaries could shew; and he bent over his new treasure with tremulous in fatuation. As he read on he became more and more persuaded of the divine authority of the sacred volume, and a deep conviction of his own sinfulness was borne in upon him. As yet a sense of mystery surrounded the inspired words, and he was like a blind man groping his way in the broad sunlight. He felt that the darkness was in himself; and not in what he read; and the more the external light was perceived, the more was the inward darkness realised. Perplexed and trembling, he closed the volume, and remained in meditation for some minutes. Then, one after another, the long catalogue of his sins rose up before his mind, and filled him with a vague alarm. He had never seriously thought upon his sins till now, he had never seen them in so foul a light. Such a black catalogue as that had surely shut the gates of heaven against him for ever; there could not possibly be hope for one so vile as he. Then Luther suddenly remembered his vow, and he rose to his feet with a new purpose before his heart. Yes there was one hope yet remaining he would quit the university and become a monk.

When we next look at him it is in the monastery of the Augustines, at Erfurt; and how changed is everything now! When we left him he was the great law student, a Master of Arts, and the idol of the university; now he is a monk, and the lowest in the grade of monks. The one who before had delivered lectures and engaged in learned discussions, has become the menial of his order, and must cleanse the cells, and wind the clock, and sweep out the chapel of the monastery! Yet Luther submitted to his task, and performed all the painful drudgeries which belonged to his new position without complaint; while the conflict of mind through which he was passing made him almost forget the degradation. Often, when the deep needs of his soul were pressing upon him, he would steal away from his work to the monastery chapel, where the chained Bible was kept, and there would seek that spiritual food for which he was hungering. At present this was his only opportunity for studying the word of God.

Eventually, however, new facilities were afforded him, and he was appointed to the vacant chair of theology and philosophy at Wittenberg. The appointment was made by Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustine order of Saxony, who acted under the advice of Frederick the Wise, elector of Hanover. The elector had heard of Luther's proficiency in the scriptures, and his great scholarly attainments, and had grown interested in the neglected monk. Luther was now, in a certain sense, master of his own time, and could devote long hours to the study of the Bible. The seclusion of his cell was very convenient for that purpose, and he applied himself to the study with unusual zeal. He began to make extraordinary efforts to reform his life, and by prayers and mortifications to atone for the past; and many were the vows he offered up to abstain from sin: but his efforts never gave him satisfaction, and his vows were always broken. "It is in vain," said Luther sadly to Staupitz, "that I make many promises to God; the sin is always the strongest." Staupitz reasoned gently with him, and told him of the love that was in the heart of God, who was not angry with him, as Luther thought: but the monk was still unsatisfied. "How dare I believe in the favour of God," he said, "if so be that there is not in me a real and thorough conversion? I must needs change to be accepted by Him."

His agony became deeper than ever, and his efforts to propitiate the divine Justice were continued with untiring zeal. "I was indeed a pious monk," we find him writing in after years, "and followed the rules of my order more strictly than I can express. If ever monk could obtain heaven by his monkish works, I should certainly have been entitled to it. Of this, all the friars who have known me can testify. If I had continued much longer, I should have carried my mortifications even to death, by watchings, prayers, readings and other labours." The monk had yet to learn the meaning of those words, "by grace ye are saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of god: not of works lest any man should boast."

Further conversation with Staupitz brought a measure of hope, and at times a thrill of inexplicable joy would pass through him, and his heart would gain confidence to say, "This is Jesus Christ, yes, it is Jesus Christ Himself, who consoles me thus admirably with His mild and saving words." But the memory of his sins would return upon him, and his distracted soul would shrink in horror at the thought of the judgment with which they must be visited. "Oh my sins! my sins! my sins!" he exclaimed one day, in the presence of the vicar-general; and when Staupitz pointed him to the Fountain opened up for sin and uncleanness, the words seemed like a sealed mystery to the poor monk.

At last his health broke down by reason of his repeated watchings and mortifications, and he was brought to the very door of death. And now the dread of approaching dissolution was added to his other fears, and the anticipation of the coming judgment plunged him in deeper depths than before. What if he should die unsaved? What if he should be buried in his sins? As yet he had no satisfying assurances of the divine mercy; those sins had not yet been put away, and he feared to go down to his grave with their burden still upon him.

While in this condition, he was visited in his cell one day, by an old monk, who spoke some words of consolation to the despairing invalid. Luther was won by the kindness of his words, and, little expecting what the act would bring about, opened his heart to him. The aged father was unable to follow him through all the mazes of his doubts, but repeated in his ear a sentence from the Apostles' Creed; which had often given rest and comfort to himself, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins." This was the message of God to Luther's soul, and he caught at the words with all the energy which his need awakened. "believe," he quickly repeated to himself, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins." Hearing him repeat the words the monk reminded him that the belief must be a personal and not a general belief; that it was not sufficient to believe merely in the forgiveness of David's sins or of Peter's sins, but that there must be the appropriating faith which says, "my sins." All this was heaven's music in the ear of the trembling listener; and when the worthy old man added, "Hear what St. Bernard says, The testimony which the Holy Spirit produces in your heart is this, Thy sins are forgiven thee," the light broke in upon the troubled heart, and Luther thanked God that those words were true of him.

But though truly converted to God, Luther was still a slave of Rome; and it was not till he paid a visit to the papal city, that he began to detect her corruptions, and to be shaken in his allegiance towards her. A visit of this kind became necessary in an official capacity, in consequence of a dispute which had arisen between the vicar-general and seven of the convents; and in due course Luther set out upon his journey. When he got within sight of Rome he threw himself on the ground, and exclaimed with pious enthusiasm, "Holy Rome, I pay you homage." He looked upon it as the labour-field of St. Peter and St. Paul; and was not yet familiar with the proverb of its citizens, "If there be a hell, Rome is built over it: it is an abyss out of which every sin issues forth."

But when he got within the city his eyes were opened. Then he began to realise what a sink of corruption the metropolis of catholicism really was, and for a time he was stunned. Wherever he went the evil was the same, and among the inhabitants of the city, none were more loud in their blasphemies, or more conspicuous for their infidelity than the priests themselves. He attended mass at one of the churches, and heard seven masses read at the neighbouring altar while he was reading one. A priest would even have hurried him in the same manner."Quick, quick," he said, "and send our Lady back her Son!" — making an impious illusion to the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Then he heard stories from the monks' own lips which filled him with horror and bewilderment. They related, amid shouts of laughter, how that when repeating mass, instead of pronouncing the sacramental words over the bread and wine, which were supposed to transform them into the body and blood of Christ, they frequently repeated the words, "Panis es et panis manebis, vinum es et vinum manebis" — "bread thou art and bread shalt thou remain, wine thou art and wine shalt thou remain."

These are only instances of the shocking profanity which Luther met with during his brief sojourn at Rome; we might mention many more. His friend, Ulrich von Hutten, has left a speaking picture of the city during this period of its history, which we cannot withhold. "There are three things," says this writer, "which a traveller commonly brings away from Rome, a guilty conscience, a disordered stomach, and an empty purse. There are three things which are not believed in at Rome, the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and hell. There are three things which are traded in at Rome: The grace of Christ, ecclesiastical dignities, and women." With these appalling facts before his soul, Luther left the city and turned his steps once more towards his native land.

On his return he was made a doctor of divinity; and began to attract great attention by his sermons in the Augustine church at Wittenberg, where immense crowds flocked to hear him. His fluency of thought, his eloquence, his wonderful memory, and above all, the evident intensity of his convictions, captivated all who heard him; and Dr. Martin Luther became the topic of conversation in no small or unenlightened circle. But what brought him into general notice more than anything else, was his dispute with John Tetzel, the Dominican and mountebank monk of Leipsic. Tetzel had come, peddling his indulgences, to the very place where Luther was fulfilling his duties as confessor to the good people of Wittenberg. A collision was inevitable.

Mounting the pulpit, near which was placed a large red cross, surmounted by the papal arms, Tetzel began his discourse. His speech was loud and animated, and his descriptions of purgatory were marked by a hideous picturesqueness, which fascinated his hearers, while it roused in them the liveliest solicitude after their departed friends. He touched upon the immense advantages of his commodity even to themselves; for there was no sin which they had committed, which an indulgence could not wipe away. Nay, not only were these indulgences efficacious with regard to past sins, but sins of the future, sins which his hearers had a desire to commit, might be covered by his letters of absolution,"I would not exchange my privilege," said the loquacious monk, "for those of St. Peter in heaven, because I have saved more souls by my indulgences than the apostle by his discourses."

These remarks were listened to with rapt attention, but his appeals for the departed produced the more stirring and profitable results."Priest, noble, merchant, wife, youth, maiden," he cried, "listen to your parents and other friends who are dead, and who cry to you from the bottom of the deep abyss 'We are suffer ing a horrible martyrdom! A small pittance by way of alms will deliver us; you are able to give it, and yet you do not wish to do so!' at the very moment when the piece of money tinkles at the bottom of the chest, the soul takes its departure from purgatory, and directs its free flight towards heaven.... Deaf and heedless man! with twelve drachms you can release your father from purgatory, and yet you are so ungrateful as not to purchase his deliverance! I shall be justified in the day of judgment; but as for you, you shall be punished so much the more severely for having neglected so great salvation."*

{*Several rate-tables of indulgences were drawn up, in one of which the price of a general letter of absolution was thus apportioned. To princes and bishops, twenty-five ducats; to abbots, counts, and barons, ten ducats; to other classes of the nobility and rectors, six ducats; to the poor and middle-classes from one to half-a-ducat, according to the purchaser's means. Another table valued sacrilege and perjury at nine ducats; murder at eight; adultery at six; and magic at two.}

The discourse concluded, the faithful hurried up the aisles to the counter where the deputy indulgence-monger was seated, and made their purchases. Most of them, doubtless, were well satisfied with their bargains: and when they went to the confessional next day it was with no thought of turning from their sins. Did not they hold in their possession a document signed by brother John Tetzel, in the name of Peter, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,* which re-established them in the innocence and purity in which they were at the hour of their baptism, as well as declared their immunity from the consequences of future sins, right up to the day of their decease? But father-confessor Martin Luther had nothing to do with brother Tetzel and his documents. It was his duty to tell the people that the holy God was a hater of sin; that perdition and not paradise was the destined abode of the wicked, and that unless there was true repentance towards God, they would be for ever lost."If you do not turn away from your sins," he said,"you shall all likewise perish." It was in vain for Tetzel to storm, and the people to object to these sweeping declarations; Luther was firm."Take heed to yourselves," was their pastor's warning word,"and do not listen to the clamours made by these vendors of indulgences. You have better things to mind than the purchase of such licences as they sell to you at the most villainous prices." In the pulpit he was not less emphatic. In plain words he counselled the people to discontinue the iniquitous traffic."I have already said, and now repeat it, my advice is, that no person should purchase these letters.... And should some individuals assert that I am a heretic (for the truths which I preach are very hurtful to the interests of their strong box) I am little affected by their abuse. Such persons are affected with sickly and cloudy brains, men who have never felt the spirit of the Bible, who have never studied the doctrine of Christianity, never understood their own teachers, and who are rotting, enveloped in the torn rags of their vain opinions May God grant unto them and us a right judgment! . . . . Amen."

{*The concluding words of one form of absolution ran thus:"In the name of Peter, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Brother John Tetzel, commissioner, has signed this letter with his own hand."}

This sermon left his hearers in astonishment. It became the subject of general discussion at Wittenberg; and before the sensation which it caused had passed away, the famous Theses appeared. None of Luther's friends, even the most intimate, knew that he had written them; and the good people of Wittenberg were electrified one morning, to see them posted on the church doors. The deceitful nature of the horrid traffic was therein plainly exposed; and men presently began to feel that a voice had spoken, such as had not been heard in Europe for many a day. A copy of the Theses fell into Tetzel's hands, and the mountebank Dominican became frantic with rage. He even had recourse to oaths. To write some theses of his own, and then to burn those of his antagonist was merely to prepare additional gall for his own cup; for the students of Wittenberg gathered round their professor, and replied by burning eight hundred copies of Tetzel's brochure.

Meanwhile the Theses passed from hand to hand, and the news of Luther's bold act spread rapidly. The pope heard of it in due course, and summoned the indomitable monk to Rome: but through the counsel of the elector of Hanover — Luther's true friend from first to last — the summons was evaded. The elector remembered the fate of John Huss, and was naturally suspicious of Leo's intentions.

Luther was now declared a heretic, and the pope forthwith issued a bull fulminating anathemas against him. But during all this commotion the doctor had been steadily advancing in the truth, and when the form of excommunication reached him, he had so far shaken off the fetters of Rome, as to make his next great stand as a reformer. God's time for the announcement having come, Luther publicly declared that the pope was Antichrist! Beyond doubt this was a bold declaration, but it was followed by an act equally bold. In the public square, surrounded by the professors and students of the university and several members of the municipality, Luther burned the pope's bull!

Rome heard of it in due time, and waking to a confused sense of her danger, declared that the monk should die. Charles V., a youthful prince of great promise, was now upon the throne of Germany. He was a Roman Catholic, but by no means unconditionally submissive to the authority of the church. Notwithstanding, the nuncio Aleander, then the papal legate to Germany, induced him to take some steps with regard to Luther. Rome had now exhausted her weapons, and unless the temporal power could be won over to her side, all would be lost. A Diet that was to be held at Worms to welcome the young emperor to the throne and to arrange the details of the election contract, must be made the opportunity for speaking the decisive word, and crushing the troublesome heretic. This was the general thought, and the pope endorsed it, and expressed a desire that Aleander should be present at the Diet, in order to demand the carrying out of his bull.

It was a moment for action. The danger was spreading, and the sovereign pontiff of Christendom had begun to realise the strength and courage of his adversary. The mind of Europe was awake, and there was no possibility of rocking it to sleep again, unless the audacious monk was silenced. To withdraw from the struggle was simply useless, for the voice from Wittenberg had already rolled its thunders through Europe, and all were eagerly waiting for the next word. The exclusive service of three printing presses had not been able to supply his writings quickly enough to the people; the lecture hall of the university and the church of the Augustines, had failed to contain the crowds which flocked to hear him. Princes and peasants, poets and statesmen, learned professors and theological students, were alike aroused; and the anxious attention of every class and of every nation was directed towards him. A solitary monk of Wittenberg had sounded the trump of defiance, and all Europe was waiting with breathless interest the issues of the coming struggle.

For Luther it was a time of peril, but his confidence in God was strong. He determined to go to Worms, and there answer to the charges which had been brought against him, be the dangers what they might: and when his purpose was known, he again found a true friend in the elector of Hanover. This christian prince obtained for him safe-conducts from the emperor and all the German princes through whose states he would have to travel; and thus protected, Luther was ready to set out. But his friends were fearful and apprehensive, and the well-known tenet of the Romish church that "no faith should be kept with heretics," was urged by them to induce him to abandon the journey. Huss, said they, had gone to Constance with a safe-conduct not a century before, and who did not know the result? But Luther's confidence was in something more than his safe-conducts, and the appeals of his friends were disregarded. "If Jesus Christ do but aid me," he said, "I am determined never to fly from the field, nor desert the word of God."

On his way to Worms his coach was frequently surrounded, and many an earnest prayer and warning word fell on his ear. "Ah," said one, "there are at Worms so many cardinals and bishops, and they will burn you as they burnt John Huss." Luther answered, "Though they kindle a fire which shall reach from Worms to Wittenberg, and blaze as high as heaven, I will walk through it in the name of the Lord; I will appear before them, I will enter the mouth of this Behemoth, I will break his teeth, and I will confess the Lord Christ." Arrived at Frankfort he wrote to his friend Spalatin, who was then staying at Worms, to prepare him lodgings, and his letter contains the following characteristic passage: "I hear that Charles has published an edict with a view to terrify me. But Christ lives, and we shall enter Worms, though all the gates of hell or all the powers of darkness oppose us." Spalatin, troubled in mind, still endeavoured to dissuade Luther from entering the city, and sent an envoy with the warning message, "Do not enter Worms;" but Luther, strong in God, sent back answer, "Tell your master that though there were as many devils in Worms, as there are tiles upon the house-tops, I would go!"

His entrance into that city, on the 16th of April 1521, was like a public ovation; and many a pious word of encouragement, and many a blessing fell upon his ear as he was borne along the streets to his lodgings. On the day following, the marshal of the empire appeared, to conduct him to the Diet; and as the monk pressed his way through the throng of people to the council chamber, he was greeted with friendly words of encouragement by several of the knights and nobles there present. One old veteran, General George of Freundsberg, pressed up to him and said,"Pluck up thy spirit, little monk; some of us here have seen warm work in our time; but neither I nor any knight in this company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thy cause is just, and thou hast confidence therein, advance in the name of God, and fear nothing." "Yes, in the name of God," said Luther, taking up his words, "in the name of God — forward!"

Upon entering the council-room, the reformer was at first somewhat disconcerted by the unusual sight which met his gaze. Immediately before him, robed in purple and ermine, sat Charles V., king of Spain and emperor of Germany; and beside the throne sat his brother, the arch-duke Ferdinand. At suitable distances from these were ranged, six electors of the empire, twenty-four dukes, eight margraves, thirty archbishops, bishops or prelates, seven ambassadors, besides deputies, princes, counts, sovereign barons and others. Such a spectacle might well have troubled the spirit of the lonely monk, whose days, for the most part, had been spent in the seclusion of the peasant's cottage, or the monastery cell: but One was standing by his side who was more than sufficient for these things, One who had said to Ezekiel of old, Be not afraid of them, neither be afraid of their words, though briars and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions; be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks." In that One was Luther's trust.

The business of the day was opened by the Chancellor of Treves, a friend of Aleander. In the midst of an impressive silence, he rose in his place, and addressed himself to Luther in the following questions: "In the first place, do you acknowledge that these books" — pointing to a pile of Luther's works on the table before him — "are composed by you? Secondly, are you willing to retract from these books and their contents, or do you persist in the opinions which you have advanced?" After a few words had passed between Luther and his counsel, he gave an affirmative answer to the first question, but requested time to consider his answer to the second. His request was acceded to, and it was arranged that he should have till the following day to think over it.

The interval, save for the few moments that were devoted to his friends, was spent by Luther in earnest wrestlings with God; and it was during this anxious period that he offered up the following prayer, without doubt one of the most precious documents of the Reformation: —

"Almighty and everlasting God, how terrible is the world before me; behold it openeth its mouth to swallow me up, and I have so little trust in. Thee. . . . How weak is the flesh, and Satan how strong. If it be in what the world counts powerful I must put my trust, I am undone. . . . . The steeple has fallen down, and judgment is pronounced O God! O God! . . . . O my God! . . . help me against all the wisdom of this world! Do this; Thou must do it — Thou alone — for it is not my work, but Thine. I have nothing to do here; I have nothing to contend for with these great ones of the earth. For me, truly I would wish but happy and peaceful days. But the cause is Thine . . . . and it is just and eternal! O Lord, help me, Faithful God, unchangeable God! I put no confidence in man. That were vain. All that comes from man changes: all that comes from man fails. O God! O God! Dost Thou not hear? . . . . Thou hidest Thyself! Thou hast chosen me for this work I know . . . . Ah! well, then do Thou work, O God! . . . . Be Thou at my right hand, for the sake of Thy well-beloved Son Jesus Christ, who is my defence, my shield, and my buckler."

There was a pause; the listener at his door thought he had done speaking, but presently his voice broke forth again. "Lord where dost Thou dwell? O my God! Where art Thou? . . . . Come! come! I am ready. . . . . I am ready to yield up my life for Thy truth . . . . patient as a lamb; for the cause is just, and it is Thine own . . . . I will not detach myself from Thee, neither now, nor throughout eternity . . . . And although the world should be filled with demons, although my body, which is still the work of Thy hands, should be made to bite the dust, and to be extended on the ground, cut in pieces . . . . and reduced to ashes . . . . my soul is Thine. . . . Yes, Thy word is my assurance of it . . . . my soul belongs to Thee, it shall eternally dwell with Thee . . . . Amen Help me, O God! . . . . Amen!"

In the power of the Spirit which dictated this marvellous utterance, Luther went forth to stand a second time before the tribunal of man. Can we wonder at the result? No longer timorous and shrinking; when the question was again put to him by the chancellor he spoke with ease and eloquence; and his reply drew forth admiring exclamations from his friends and confounded his enemies. His denunciations of the whole system of popery were scathing and unanswerable. The following may serve as an example: "Is it not evident," he exclaimed, "that the human laws and doctrines of the pope perplex, torment, and martyrize the consciences of the faithful, whilst the crying and perpetual extortions of Rome swallow up the property and the riches of Christendom, and more particularly of this very illustrious nation? . . . . Were I to revoke all that I have written on this subject, what should I do but fortify this fearful tyranny, and open wide, for so much and so gross impiety, a door of yet larger dimensions. Overflowing, then, with more fury than ever, we should see them, these proud men, to increase, to rise in their passions, and to storm continually the more. And not only would the yoke which now presses on the Christian people be rendered more irksome on account of my retractation, but it would become, so to speak, more legitimate, because it would receive, by means of this very retractation, the confirmation of your serene Majesty, and of all the States of the holy empire. Great God! I would thus be converted into a vile cloak, destined to conceal and encourage every description of malice and tyranny!"

Luther closed his address with a vigorous word of warning to the emperor Charles, and a solemn appeal to him for that protection which the malice of his enemies rendered necessary. Being pressed for a more explicit answer to the chancellor's question, he promptly replied: "Since your most serene Majesty and you exalted powers require from me a simple answer, clear and precise, I will give it you, and this it is — I cannot submit my faith, neither to the pope nor to councils, because it is clear as the day, that they have often fallen into error, and even into the most palpable contradictions with themselves. If, therefore, I am not convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by manifest reason, if I am not persuaded by the very passages which I have quoted, and if thus my captive conscience be not delivered from the word of God, I neither can nor will retract, for it is not safe for a Christian to speak against his conscience." "Then," says D'Aubigne, "looking round on that assembly, in the midst of which he stood upright, and which held in its hand the power of death, he said 'Here I take my stand. I cannot do otherwise — God help me! Amen.'"

The fears of Luther's friends that Rome would act treacherously in the matter of his safe-conducts, were now shewn to be well founded; and had the emperor Charles been another Sigismund, all would have been over with the reformer. But the treacherous efforts of the papists to procure the violation of his safe-conduct were lost upon Charles, and each new suggestion of their treachery was met with the unflinching answer, "Though good faith were banished from the whole earth, it should still find a refuge in the courts of kings." The emperor, notwithstanding, consented to an edict of banishment; but this so little satisfied the rapacious demands of Rome, that they fell back upon their last and most desperate resource — assassination. Plans were laid to murder the reformer on his return to Saxony; but his good friend, the Elector, got timely warning of the plot, and was able to frustrate it. As Luther was returning home, he was suddenly surrounded by a party of horse, with masked faces, who after dismissing his attendants, conveyed him at dead of night to the ancient castle of Wartburg, near Eisenach, and there left him.

This was the Elector's ruse for getting Luther to a place of safety; and during the interval of rest afforded by his incarceration in Wartburg castle, and in calm defiance of imperial decrees and papal bulls, the reformer produced some of his most powerful controversial works, and commenced his favourite — perhaps his greatest work, the translation of the Bible.

Chapter 21.

Ulric Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation.

A.D. 1484-1522.

Leaving Luther at Wartburg, we will turn our eyes, and note what God had been doing for His people, though by other instruments, in another part of His earth.

It is peculiarly worthy of remark that simultaneously with the dawn of the Reformation in Germany, the papal throne was still further shaken by a great religious upheaval in Switzerland; and the instrument which God had chosen for the accomplishment of this work was Ulric Zwingli,* a priest of Rome. If Luther was only a miner's son, the Swiss Reformer could scarcely boast a higher parentage, for his father was a shepherd, who tended his flocks at Wildhaus, in the valley of Tockenburg.

{*Sometimes written in its Latinised form Zwinglius.}

But for the fact that his father intended him for the church, Zwingli might have died a "village Hampden," and his name have never come down to us. But all was wisely ordered of God, who had a peculiar and important work for the shepherd's son to do, and the discipline of his young life was regulated accordingly. Before he was ten years of age he was sent to his uncle, the dean of Wiesen, for instruction, and there gave such proof of his abilities, that his relative undertook the further responsibilities of his education, and sent him to study successively at Basle, Berne, Vienna, and then again at Basle. On his return to this city he was happy in being placed under the tuition of the celebrated Thomas Wittembach, a man who saw clearly the errors of Rome, and, at the same time, was no stranger to the important doctrine of justification by faith. The professor did not conceal either his knowledge or his opinions from his pupil; and it was here that Zwingli learnt for the first time, and not without a feeling of astonishment, that "the death of Christ was the only ransom for his soul."

Leaving Basle at the conclusion of his theological course, though not before he had taken the degree of Master of Arts, he was chosen pastor of the community of Glaris, where he remained ten years. Whilst there, a deeper study of the scriptures, and an attentive examination of the doctrines and practices of the early church, as contained in the writings of the fathers, convinced him still further of the corrupt state of the professing thing, and he began to express his views on church matters with considerable plainness.

The year 1516 found him at Einsidlen, in the canton of Schweitz, the reformer having received an invitation from the governor of the Benedictine monastery, to the pastorate of the church of "Our Lady of the Hermitage," then, as now, a hotbed of Romish idolatry and superstition. What Luther saw at Rome, Zwingli saw at Einsidlen; and his ardour in the work of Reformation was stimulated by the deplorable discoveries which he made. His labours at the Hermitage were greatly blessed, and Geroldseck the administrator, and several of the monks were converted.

After three years' faithful ministry at Einsidlen, the provost and canons of the cathedral church at Zurich, invited him to become their pastor and preacher, and the invitation was accepted. Some, mistrustful of the reformed doctrines, objected to his appointment, but his reputation was so great, and his manner so engaging, that the majority were in his favour, and he was duly elected. Zurich now became a central sphere of his labours; and it was here he made the acquaintance of Oswald Myconius, who afterwards wrote his life.

Whenever he preached at the cathedral thousands flocked to hear him; his message was new to his hearers, and he delivered it in a language that all could understand. The earnestness and novelty of his style are said to have produced impressions which were indescribable; and the full and clear gospel which he preached had everlasting results with many, while it called forth expressions of astonishment from all who heard him. His faith in the converting power of the word, apart altogether from man's efforts to explain it, was great. He refused to restrict himself to the passages allotted to the different festivals of the year, which needlessly limited the people's knowledge of the sacred volume, and declared his intention of going completely through the gospel of St. Matthew, chapter by chapter, without human commentary. "In the pulpit," says Myconius, "he spared no one. Neither pope, prelates, emperor, kings, dukes, princes, lords, nor even the confederates themselves. Never had they heard a man speak with such authority. All the strength and all the delight of his heart was in God; and accordingly he exhorted all the city of Zurich to trust solely in Him." "This way of preaching is an innovation," cried some, "one innovation will lead to another; and where shall we stop" "It is not a new manner," was Zwingli's mild and courteous answer, "it is the old custom. Call to mind the homilies of Chrysostom on St. Matthew, and of Augustine on St. John." By quiet answers such as these he often disarmed his adversaries, or even won them over to his side. In this respect he presents a striking contrast to the rude and stormy Luther.

When Zwingli had been settled about a year in Zurich the plague visited Switzerland, and the reformer was infected by the pest. He prayed earnestly for his recovery, and his prayer was answered, and the mercy of God in sparing him became an incentive to deeper devotion. His preaching was with increased power, a season of Pentecostal blessing ensued, hundreds were converted, and the priests became wrathful and anxious. Zwingli challenged them on more than one occasion to a public disputation, but they were afraid of the challenge, and at last, to silence the reformer, appealed to the State. This appeal was their ruin, for the State ruled that "since Master Ulric Zwingli had publicly and repeatedly challenged the adversaries of his doctrine to confute them by scriptural arguments, and since, notwithstanding, no one had undertaken to do so, he should continue to announce and preach the word of God, just as heretofore. Likewise, that all ministers of religion, whether resident in the city or country, should abstain from teaching any tenet which they could not prove from scripture: that they should refrain, too, from making charges of heresy and other scandalous allegations, on pain of severe punishment." Thus was Rome taken in her own toils, and again defeated; while the decree became a powerful impulse to the Reformation.

Meanwhile, the pope (Hadrian VI.), who had been thundering his anathemas in Saxony, received alarming news of the movement in Switzerland; and fearing the effects of a second reformation, tried a new device with Zwingli. Knowing that the Swiss reformer was a man of more polish and refinement than his German brother, he sent him a flattering letter, assuring him of his "special favour" and calling him his "beloved son:" nor was the honeyed epistle unaccompanied by more substantial proofs of his regard. When Myconius inquired of the bearer of the papal brief what the pope had commissioned him to offer Zwingli, he received this reply, "Everything, except the chair of St. Peter." But Zwingli was not a stranger to the wiles of Rome, and preferred the liberty wherewith Christ had made him free, to the bondage of superstition, and a cardinal's hat.

After this event the Reformation rapidly gained ground, and the reformer received repeated encouragements in the work, and the most gratifying proofs that God was with him. In January 1524, a decree was passed for the demolition of images: on the 11th of April 1525, the mass was abolished, and it was agreed that henceforward, by the will of God, the Eucharist should be celebrated according to the institution of Christ, and the apostolic practice. Later still, the news arrived of the conversion of the nuns belonging to the wealthy convent of Koenigsfeldt, where the writings of Zwingli had penetrated; and the reformer's heart was made glad by the receipt of a letter which had been addressed to him by one of these converts. This was a terrible blow for Rome. The effect of a clear gospel upon the nuns was to shew them the uselessness of a life of celibacy and isolation, and they petitioned government for permission to leave the convent. The council, misinterpreting their motive and alarmed at their request, promised that the discipline of the convent should be relaxed, and their allowance increased. "It is not the liberty of the flesh that we require," was their answer, "it is the liberty of the Spirit." Their petition was eventually granted, for the council itself became enlightened; and not only were the nuns of Koenigsfeldt liberated, but the gates of all the convents in the Canton were thrown open, and the offer of freedom was extended to all.

At Berne the power of the truth was shewn in another, and not less interesting way. The magistrates, rejoicing in the good work, released several of their prisoners, and granted free pardons to two unhappy men who were awaiting execution. "A great cry," writes Bullinger, a disciple of Zwingli, "resounded far and wide. In one day Rome had fallen throughout the country, without treachery, violence, or seduction, by the strength of truth alone." The happy citizens, roused by the power of the truth, expressed the feeling of their hearts in the most generous sentiments. "If a king or emperor," said they, "in alliance with us, were to enter our city, would we not remit offences, and shew favour to the poor? And now the King of kings, the Prince of peace, the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, has visited us, and brings with Him the pardon of our sins, who only deserve eternal banishment from His presence. And can we better celebrate His advent to our city than by forgiving those who have trespassed against us?"

At Basle, one of the most powerful cantons of Switzerland, the doctrines of the Reformation, spread with inconceivable rapidity, and produced the most gratifying results. The zealous burghers swept the country of its images, and when the meek and pious Oecolampadius (the Melanchthon of the Swiss Reformation) had fulfilled a faithful ministry of six years in the canton, the reformed worship was adopted by all the churches, and firmly established by a decree of the senate.

The heart glows in describing this glorious work of God, and we are loth to pause in the prosecution of so grateful a task: but space is limited. We will now return to Germany, and Martin Luther.

Chapter 22.

Luther's Zeal in the Reformation.

A.D. 1521-1529.

While Luther was busy with his translation in the solitudes of Wartburg castle, there was no person fully capable of carrying on his work in Germany; and the thought of this — for he was kept well informed of what was taking place outside the castle — made him anxious and fretful, and at length led him to return to Wittenberg. Melanchthon was almost his equal in scholarly attainments, and doubtless was not less steady in his devotion to the cause, but he was too mild and peaceful for the rough work which Luther had begun, and seemed scarcely fitted to bear the rule in such turbulent times. Then there was Andrew Carlstadt, a doctor of Wittenberg, well versed in the scriptures, but unsound in much of his theology, and far too fanatical to be depended upon as a leader. His actions were so little tempered by prudence, that when a body of men arose in Zwickau, with the avowed object of summarily abolishing everything not expressly enjoined in the Bible, he applauded the act, and placed himself at their head. Saints, crucifixes, masses, priestly vestments, confession, the host, fasts, ceremonies, church decorations all were to be immediately swept away by the besom of destruction; and the whole of Christendom was to be revolutionised in a moment, by the combined influences of the gospel and the sword.

Luther heard of the commotion in due course, and wrote to the rioters from Wartburg, telling them that he could not approve of their work, and would not stand by them in it. "It has been undertaken," said he, "in a harum-scarum fashion, with great rashness and violence. . . . Believe me, I know the devil well enough; it is he alone that has set about it to bring disgrace on the word." His admonitions were vain, however: the measures which he proposed were too mild and moderate for the Wittenberg iconoclasts, and they went on with their innovations.

The disturbance increasing, Luther closed his eyes to his own danger, and emerging from his concealment, set out for Wittenberg. It was in vain for the elector to expatiate on the peril of this step, or to point out to him the enemy he had in Duke George, through whose territory he would have to pass. "One thing I can say for myself," wrote Luther, "if things at Leipsic were as they are at Wittenberg, I would still go there, even if it rained Duke Georges for nine days, and every one of them were nine times as fierce as he. Therefore be it written to your elector highness, though your elector highness knows it very well, that I go to Wittenberg under much higher protection than that of the elector."

On arriving at Wittenberg in the month of March, 1522, Luther commenced a course of sermons (eight in all) on the fanatics of Zwickau, in which he handled the different subjects with uncommon tact. These sermons are treasures in themselves, and were admirably adapted to the occasion which called them forth. In his vigorous and pointed style he shewed the deplorable ends to which such excess of zeal would surely lead the people; told them that they lacked charity, without which their faith was little worth; that they knew better how to talk about the doctrines preached to them than to put them into practice; and that they were without patience, and far too ready to assert their own rights. "In this life," said he, "every one must not do what he has a right to do, but must forego his rights and consider what is useful and advantageous to his brother. Do not make a 'must be' out of a 'may be' as you have now been doing, that you may not have to answer for those whom you have misled by your uncharitable liberty." The effect of these sermons was all that could be desired. The agitation ceased, and calm and tranquility succeeded. The students returned peaceably to their studies, the people to their homes: and the Elector could not but acknowledge that Luther had done wisely in leaving Wartburg.

He now resumed his translation of the Bible, and was greatly assisted in his arduous task by the critical revisions of Melanchthon. Before many months the New Testament was ready, and in September, 1522, it was given to the world. It was received by his countrymen with enthusiasm, and a second edition was called for within two months: ten years later no less than fifty-three editions had been issued in Germany alone! Then the Old Testament was added. The German people had now a complete Bible in their own language, and this fact did more to the consolidation and spread of the reformed doctrines, than all Luther's other writings put together. The Reformation was now put on its right basis, namely the word of God. Hitherto Luther had spoken — now God Himself was to speak to the hearts and consciences of men. His word was now accessible to all, and papal Rome had received a shock from which she would never thoroughly recover. Not many years later, a council of Roman Catholic bishops addressed a memorial to the pope on this very question. "The best suggestion," said they that we can offer to your holiness is, that every effort should be made to prevent the reading of the gospel in the vulgar tongue . . . . The New Testament is the book which has proved the occasion of more disturbances than all others, and these disturbances have well-nigh ruined our church. Indeed, if any one gives sedulous attention to the scriptures, then to what he commonly meets with in our churches, he finds that there is a wide difference between the one and the other; that the doctrine of the reformer is totally distinct from our own, and is in many respects, diametrically opposed to it." Thus is Rome judged out of her own mouth; and the power of the word acknowledged by those who practically deny its authority.

Meanwhile the Reformation continued to gain ground, and the interest which Luther's first great act had awakened did not diminish as time went on. People everywhere heard the word with gladness, often weeping for joy at the good news. At Zwickau and Annaberg eager crowds surrounded the pulpits of the reformers, and listened by the day together; and on the occasion of Luther's first address at Leipsic, the vast multitude fell upon their knees and blessed God for the word which His servant had been privileged to speak. Pamphlets and sermons of the reformer's were carried from town to town by vehicles of all kinds; pedlars and hucksters conveyed them to the remotest villages; and vessels took them from port to port and introduced them to all countries where men were civilised enough to receive them. Three years after the commencement of the Reformation, a traveller purchased some of Luther's works at Jerusalem.

Rome, we may be sure, was not idle through all this, and hurled abroad her anathemas in futile anger. "Heresy! Heresy!" was everywhere her cry; while excommunications were multiplied and royal edicts issued forth in ever-increasing number. Preachers were arrested tortured burned; but it was of no avail. Better to stand upon the ocean beach, and bid the rolling waves advance no farther, than try to stem this swelling torrent. The Bible was in the hands of the people, and resistance was useless. Simple women sat at their spinning-wheels with their Bibles on their laps, and confounded the monks who came to reason with them. A new order of things had arisen, and the power which produced it was not of man. It was a power which had hitherto seemed weakness in the eyes of Rome, but which she was now to find was a power which she could not crush, and one which was mighty to the pulling down of strongholds.

The Reformation was still in its infancy when it received a terrible check by the outbreak of the Peasants' War. Its leader was a fanatic named Thomas Munzer, a man who had taken a prominent part in the rising at Wittenberg, during Luther's seclusion at Wartburg castle. He afterwards settled at Muhlhausen, and set about his great work (for so he called it) of overthrowing the "heathen kingdom" by which he meant the temporal — and the extermination of the godless.

The oppressed peasants heard him gladly, and flew to arms. Luther at first met them with the word of God and sober reason, saying, that "people's minds must be allowed to crack themselves against one another;" but when they broke into open insurrection, he wrote severely against them, and called them "the rapacious and murderous peasants." The provinces of Upper Germany were now plunged in anarchy and confusion. The mob, stimulated by a temporary success, and frantic with the remembrance of past injustice and oppression, rushed hither and thither, burning and wrecking palaces, churches and convents; till at length they were brought to bay at Frankenhausen by the Landgrave of Hesse, and utterly routed. Their wild and rebellious act had done them no good, and when they returned to their homes, they found that they had only added to the burden of their woes. To condemn indiscriminately all who had the remotest connection with the movement, was now the policy of the papal party; and hence all the evils of the Peasants' War were unjustly attributed to the influence of Luther's work. The Reformation suffered not a little by reason of this ill-founded charge.

Nor did the troubles of the reformers end with the suppression of the Peasants' War; for the restless spirit of the times found fresh expression in the absurd and revolutionary doctrines of the Anabaptists.* The leaders in the new movement, laying claim to divine inspiration, asserted that they were the true reformers, and spoke lightly of the work of Luther. Among other fallacies they taught that the kingdom of Christ was at hand; that the Christian was subject to no human laws; and that, as it was their privilege to have all things in common, they were not called upon to pay tithes and tribute. Luther was much distressed by the spread of this sect, and spoke of it in his usual forcible manner. "Satan rages," he wrote; "the new sectarians called Anabaptists increase in number, and display great external appearances of strictness of life, as also great boldness in death, whether they suffer by fire or by water." The sect continued to increase, in spite of persecution, till the capture and execution of their principal leaders, after which little is heard of them.

{*So called because they held the doctrine, that baptism should be by immersion, and that those baptized in infancy should be baptized again.}

About this time, the three most powerful princes of Europe, Henry VIII., Charles V., and Francis I., the sovereigns of England, Germany, and France respectively, united, in association with the pope, for the suppression of the disturbers of the catholic religion, and the avenging of the outrages which had been offered to the holy See. To this end a Diet was held at Spires in the year 1526, at which the emperor's brother, Ferdinand, presided; and an imperial message, urging that the edict of Worms against Luther should be promptly carried out, was read to the assembled princes. But it did not produce those results which the friends of the papacy had fondly counted upon; and instead of delivering up the reformer to the tender mercies of Rome, the council submitted to the emperor the following resolution: "That they would use their utmost exertions to advance the glory of God, and to maintain a doctrine in conformity with His word, rendering thanks to Him for having revived in their time the true doctrine of justification by faith, which had long been buried under a mass of superstition; and that they would not permit the extinction of the truth, which God had so lately revealed to them."

Confident, in spite of defeat, the emperor, three years later, assembled a second Diet in the same city. His tone was angry and despotic; but the nobles who favoured the Reformation were calm and resolute. It was a time when such qualities were gravely needed. Their unyieldingness had not been anticipated, and the presence of such a spirit amongst them was a new element in the German Diet: hitherto the emperor had been credited with absolute power. But a crisis in the history of the Reformation had been reached, and that for which the nobles contended had no place in human politics. This the emperor did not understand.

Ferdinand again presided at the Diet, and feeling that a crisis was at hand, he resorted to desperate measures. Under cover of that authority of which he was the representative, he imperiously demanded the submission of the German princes to the edict of Worms. His conduct was characterised more by boldness than wisdom, and it only aggravated the party feeling which was already at work. Eventually, to bring the matter to an issue, a decree was drawn up embodying the emperor's demands, and this was subscribed to by the catholic nobles. The moment which had now arrived was an anxious one for Luther and the Reformation; but the reforming party in the Diet were equal to the occasion. Undaunted by the imperiousness of Ferdinand, and unmoved by the menaces of the spiritual nobles, they now united in a body, and on the following day recorded their protest against the decision of the assembly. This was the beginning of Protestantism, and the Sardis Period of Church History.

Chapter 23.

The Sardis Period Commences.

A.D. 1529-1530.

In reflecting upon the important period to which we have now arrived, we have to be cautious that we do not mix the work of the Reformation with the cold formalism which grew up along with it.

For no sooner had the emancipating power of the reformed doctrines been fairly tested than those who had embraced them, forgetting the sufficiency of their Head in heaven, and dreading the future assaults of Rome, placed themselves under the protection of the civil magistrates. Satisfied with their security, they presently settled down to the enjoyment of their new privileges, and ere long had sunk into a deplorable state of spiritual inertia and deadness. "I know thy works," are the Spirit's words to the church at Sardis, "that thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God. Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast and repent." (Rev. iii. 1-3.)

All historians are agreed that the second Diet of Spires marks the commencement of Protestantism, but all, perhaps, would not go the lengths of the opinion here quoted, which nevertheless is well worthy our consideration. "At the Reformation," says W. Kelly, "in escaping from popery, Christians fell into the error of putting church power into the hands of the civil magistrate, or else made the church itself a depository of that power; whereas Christ, by the Holy Ghost, should still maintain the Lordship. . . . Protestantism was always wrong, ecclesiastically, from the very beginning, because it looked up to the civil ruler as the one in whose hand ecclesiastical authority was vested; so that if the church had been (under popery) the ruler of the world, the world now became (in Protestantism) the ruler of the church."The statement is at first startling, but we are persuaded that prayerful reflection will lead every unbiassed mind to a similar conclusion.

The German Reformation did not commence with the lower classes, as was the case in Switzerland. The princes took the lead, by supporting the cause and adopting the opinions of the reformers; and when the necessity of an ecclesiastical constitution for the churches began to be seriously felt by the Lutherans, instead of going simply to the word to be instructed, they adopted for their model a system of laws and principles completed by the Landgrave of Hesse. Thus the reformed churches, from their very beginning, were purely human and political in their constitution.

The good Elector of Hanover, Frederick the Wise, died in the year 1525, and his successor, John, a stout Lutheran, pushed on vigorously with the work of reform. As a means of checking the authority of the pope, he assumed the entire jurisdiction in religious matters, displacing incompetent men, and filling their places with pious and approved Lutherans. Other princes followed suit, their systems of church government being merely human organisations; and thus the first Lutheran and reformed churches were planted.

Not without dissension however. Precipitate measures on matters of importance always excite opposition. Hitherto, the moderation of the Elector Frederick had kept the catholic and Lutheran parties tolerably united, but the vigorous and extreme measures of his successor alarmed the catholic princes; and they formed an alliance among themselves to check the progress of the reformed doctrines in their respective territories. The breach became irreparable. A great part of Saxony, the ancient Frisian district, and the eastern colonies of Germany were now Protestant; while Austria, Bavaria, and South German bishoprics adhered to the old religion. At one time civil war seemed inevitable. But the details of these disputes belong more to political than ecclesiastical history, and we need not speak of them at any length.

As for the emperor, he had long been weighing over in his mind the expediency of assembling a Diet for the purpose of ascertaining for himself, from the lips of the Protestant princes, their reasons for separating from the ancient church. The pope, with the proceedings of the Diets of Worms and Spires still in his recollection, objected to such a course, and advised more summary measures. "Large congregations," said he, "serve only to introduce popular opinions. It is not with the decrees of councils, but with the edge of the sword, that we should decide controversies." Charles promised to reflect upon this counsel, but after halting for some time between the two opinions, decided in favour of his own, and summoned a Diet at Augsburg.*

{*The emperor shrank from shedding blood. When the aged Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach was commanded to conform to the old religion, he threw himself on his knees before the emperor and exclaimed, "I would sooner lose my head than God's word." The emperor, deeply moved, replied,"Dear prince, no heads off."}

No sooner were the emperor's reasons for the convocation of the Diet known than the Protestants prepared, for submission to the Diet, a formula of confession. It was drawn up by Luther and Melanchthon, and contained a clear enunciation of the chief doctrines of the reformers, the materials being furnished for the most part by Luther; while the work of revision was left to the milder pen of Melanchthon. "I am born." said Luther, "to be a rough controversialist; I clear the ground, pull up the weeds, fill up ditches, and smooth the roads. But to build, to plant, to sow, to water, to adorn the country, belongs, by the grace of God, to Philip Melanchthon." The document, drawn up by these great men, was the celebrated "Confession of Augsburg."

On the 15th of June, 1530, the emperor entered Augsburg with an imposing retinue. The protestant princes, dismounting from their horses, went forward to meet him; and Charles, with a graciousness equal to their loyalty, also dismounted, and extended his hand cordially to each in turn. Meanwhile, the papal legate, Cardinal Campeggio, had remained immovable on his mule (with which animal, indeed, there seemed to be some affinity), but finding that he had made a mistake, he sought to remedy matters by pronouncing a benediction on the assembled princes. As he raised his hands for this purpose, the emperor and his train fell on their knees, but the protestant princes remained standing. This emergency had not been provided for, and the emulations of the papal party were somewhat hindered by the incident.

Later on, mass was to be celebrated in the chapel of Augsburg to solemnise the opening of the Diet, and the Protestants gained another victory by refusing to attend. But the wily legate would not be beaten. The Elector of Saxony, in his office as Grand-Marshal of the empire, was bound to go before the emperor on such occasions, bearing the sword; and the cardinal suggested that Charles should order him "to perform his duty at the mass of the Holy Ghost, which was to open the sittings." The Elector agreed to attend, but gave the emperor to understand that it was only in discharge of a civil office. The legate was doomed to experience a second disappointment. At the elevation of the Host, when the congregation fell upon their knees in worship, the Elector remained standing.

The Diet was opened on the 10th of June, and the emperor presided in person. It was thought that the question of religion would take precedence of all other matters, but little was achieved on the first day; and the reading of"The Apology" another name for the Confession was fixed for the 24th. It was the cherished hope of the Catholics that the Protestants would have no public opportunity of stating their case, and when the 24th arrived, they did all in their power — by dragging on the other business of the day — to delay the reading of the Confession, till it was too late. It was surprising how much time the cardinal required to present his credentials, and to deliver the pope's message — how solicitous, too, was the emperor for details of the ravages of the Turks in. Austria, and of the capture of Rhodes. The precious moments were thus frittered away, till it was almost time to close the sitting. Then the objection was raised — surely a very plausible one! — that it had grown too late for the reading of "The Apology." "Deliver your Confession to the appointed officers," said Charles, "and rest assured that it shall be duly considered and answered."

But here some opposition arose. It had never occurred to Charles that his rule did not extend over the consciences of his subjects, or that he was exceeding his prerogative by his evasions and deceit. The answer which he received was one for which he had not been prepared. "Our honour is at stake," said the princes, "our souls are endangered; we are publicly accused, and we ought publicly to answer." What was to be done? The princes were respectful, but they were firm and unyielding also. "To-morrow," said the emperor, "I will hear your summary not in this hall, but in the chapel of the Palatine Palace."

The following day the protestant chiefs appeared before the emperor a memorable day in the history of Christianity. There were two copies of the Confession produced in court, one in Latin and one in German. Charles desired that the Latin copy should be read, but the Elector reminded him that they were in Germany, not Rome, and should therefore be permitted to speak in German. His plea was admitted, and the Chancellor Bayer, rising in his place, read the Confession in a slow, distinct voice, which was heard a considerable distance off. The reading occupied about two hours, and Pontanus, a prominent reformer, then handed both copies of the Confession to the emperor's secretary, with these words: "With the grace of God, who will defend His own cause, this Confession will triumph over the gates of hell."

The effect produced upon the people by the public reading of the Apology was encouraging beyond measure. The extreme moderation of the Protestants was a wonder-theme to many; and, says Seckendorf, "many eminently wise and prudent persons pronounced a favourable judgment of what they heard, and declared that they would not have missed hearing it for a great sum." "All that the Lutherans have said is true," observed the bishop of Augsburg, "we cannot deny it:" and testimonies of this kind were numerous. The Duke of Bavaria inquired of Doctor Eck, the foremost champion of Rome in Germany, "Well, doctor, you have given me a very different idea of this doctrine and of this affair; but, after all, can you refute by sound reasons the Confession made by the Elector and his friends?" "No," replied Eck, "by the writings of the apostles we cannot; but by the writings of the fathers and the canons of councils we can." "I understand then," returned the duke reproachfully, "that the Lutherans have their doctrine out of scripture, and we have our doctrine without scripture."

The reformer himself wrote, "I thrill with joy that my life is cast in an epoch in which Christ is publicly exalted by such illustrious confessors, and in so glorious an assembly. Our adversaries thought they had succeeded to admiration, when the preachers were silenced by imperial prohibition; but they do not perceive that more is done by our public confession, than perhaps ten preachers could have accomplished. Truly Christ is not silent in the Diet. The word of God is not bound. No; if it is prohibited in the pulpits, it shall be heard in the palaces of kings."

Chapter 24.

Development of the Sardis State.

A.D. 1529-1558.

Luther's position as leader of the Reformation was one of extreme danger to himself. By the multitude he was looked upon as little less than a pope, and it cannot be denied that on some occasions his actions gave a warrant for the name. He sustained his position by a rough dogmatism, and seems to have entertained a fear of lowering himself in the estimation of mankind by any avowal of error. When arguments failed he would maintain his position by sophistry and clamour; and, on one occasion at least, even sacrificed the interests of the gospel to party claims and the maintenance of his authority.

This may seem a hard word, but it is abundantly supported by facts, and history must be candid. The proceedings at the conference at Marburg are a sufficient proof of this. This conference was brought about by Philip, the landgrave of Hesse, and had for its object the settlement of the great sacramentarian controversy, which had long been raging between the German and Swiss reformers.

Luther had never been able to shake himself entirely free from the trammels of popery; and the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was a dogma which he held to the last. True, he exchanged the word transubstantiation for that of consubstantiation, and sought to modify the hurtful and blasphemous doctrine; but his modification was a poor shift, and the error was not removed. Rome held — one's pen is slow to write it — that "the hands of the priest are raised to an eminence granted to none of the angels, of creating God, the Creator of all things, and of offering Him up for the salvation of the whole world." In other words, that the bread and wine were actually converted into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist; a doctrine which they made the corner-stone of their fabric of errors, condemning as infidels all who rejected it. Luther held the more absurd, and quite as erroneous notion, that the elements after consecration remained just what they were before it — true bread and wine, "but that there was also with the bread and wine the material substance of Christ's human body." "As soon as the words of consecration are pronounced over the bread, the body is there, however wicked be the priest who pronounces them!" These are the reformer's own words.

Now Zwingli, and the body of the Swiss reformers recoiled in horror from both these doctrines. They had revived the teaching of scripture as to these precious memorials; and had widely distributed their views, though in a private way, among the learned of Europe. Luther's friend, Dr. Carlstadt, was one of the first to reject the Lutheran notion, and to embrace the revived doctrine; but dissatisfied with Zwingli's mild and silent measures for disseminating the truth, he published in the year 1525, a spirited pamphlet against the doctrines of his former chief; and thus the controversy began.*

{*Carlstadt's teaching with regard to the institution of the Lord's Supper was not identical with that of Zwingli. He held that when Christ said, "This is my body," He pointed to His real body and not to the bread.}

Luther's reply, which appeared in the same year, was characterised by much arrogance and bitterness, and he did not hesitate to attribute the godly efforts of Zwingli to Satan. This was throwing down the gauntlet indeed; and Zwingli had no alternative but to enter the lists against him. Yet throughout the controversy, which lasted upwards of four years, the language of the Swiss reformer was moderate in the extreme. Fully convinced of the righteousness of his cause, he bore the angry clamour of his opponents without resenting it, and pierced the mailed armour of their stubbornness with many a shaft of truth. The result was what might have been expected. Many of the more thoughtful Lutherans, observing with sorrow how their leader resisted all peaceful investigation of the question, began to lose confidence in his guidance, and went over to the side of the Swiss. This disturbed Luther the more, and in the vehemence of his resentment he seemed to labour for words. The followers of Zwingli became his "Absaloms, sacrament conjurors, in comparison with whose madness the papists are mild opponents — the Satanic instruments of my temptation." Meanwhile, the papists watched with undisguised satisfaction the progress of the controversy; and the remark of Erasmus, that the Lutherans are eagerly returning to the bosom of the church," became a proverb in everybody's mouth.

The conference, which was largely attended, but in which only Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, and Oecolampadius took part, was not very fruitful in good. Luther went to it with his mind made up, and protested at the beginning that he should always differ from his opponents regarding the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. Taking up a piece of chalk he wrote in large letters on the velvet cover of the table, "Hoc est corpus meum" (This is my body). "These are Christ's words," said he, "and from this rock no adversary shall dislodge me." Harping upon the same words, he added a few moments later, "Let them shew me that a body is not a body. I reject reason, common sense, carnal arguments, and mathematical proofs. God is above mathematics. We have the word of God — we must adore and perform it."

As the discussion proceeded, the close reasoning of Zwingli told with great effect, but Luther remained obstinate and inflexible. The arguments of the Swiss, drawn from the scriptures and other sources, evidently troubled his spirit; but he had gone too far — it was too late to recede. At length Zwingli introduced an argument, which Oecolampadius had started in the morning, as to the meaning of the term "the flesh profiteth nothing." Luther now observed, "When Christ says the flesh profiteth nothing, He speaks not of His own flesh, but of ours."

Zwingli "The soul is fed with the Spirit, and not with the flesh."

Luther "It is with the mouth that we eat the body; the soul does not eat it; we eat it spiritually with the soul."

Zwingli "Christ's body is therefore a corporal nourishment, and not a spiritual."

Luther "You are captious."

Zwingli "Not so; but you utter contradictory things."

Luther "If God should present me wild apples, I should eat them spiritually. In the Eucharist, the mouth receives the body of Christ, and the soul believes His words."

Luther was now talking nonsense, and Zwingli wisely proceeded to take up another line of argument, establishing his own views rather than combating his opponent's. But Luther would own no defeat. "This is my body," was his untiring cry, and he made it his sure refuge in every difficulty. "The devil shall not drive me from that," he said; "to seek to understand it is to fall away from the faith."

Later in the day Oecolampadius, quoting 2 Corinthians v. 16 said, "We know not Jesus Christ after the flesh."

Luther "After the flesh means in the passage, after our carnal affections."

Zwingli "Then answer me this, Doctor Luther. Christ ascended into heaven; and if He is in heaven as regards His body, how can He be in the bread? The word of God teaches us that He was in all things made like unto His brethren. He therefore cannot be at the same instant on every one of the thousand altars at which the Eucharist is being celebrated."

Luther "Were I desirous of reasoning thus, I would undertake to prove that Jesus Christ had a wife; that He had black eyes, and lived in our good country of Germany. I care little about mathematics,"

Zwingli: "There is no question of mathematics here, but of St. Paul, who wrote to the Philippians that Christ took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men."

Finding himself driven into a corner, Luther again took refuge in his four words. "Most dear Sirs," he exclaimed, "since my Lord Jesus says, Hoc est corpus meum, I believe that His body is really there."

For a moment even the patience of Zwingli seemed to give way. Approaching Luther in a nervous manner, and striking the table with his hand, he said, "You maintain then, doctor, that Christ's body is locally in the Eucharist; for you say, 'Christ's body is there — there — there.' There is an adverb of place. Christ's body is then of such a nature as to exist in a place. If it is in a place, it is in heaven, whence it follows that it is not in the bread."

The argument, however, was thrown away.

"I repeat," said Luther warmly, "that I have nothing to do with mathematical proofs. As soon as the words of consecration are pronounced over the bread, the body is there, however wicked be the priest who pronounces them."

In the presence of such obduracy (for we cannot use a milder word) it is surprising that the reformers came to any amicable arrangements among themselves; especially when, at the close of the discussion, Luther refused to give his hand to his Swiss brethren. We do not recall the scene. We are glad that the scope of this history does not admit of its inclusion. It is sufficient to say that the efforts of the Landgrave of Hesse to effect a reconciliation were at last, in measure, successful. A "Formula of Concord," consisting of fourteen articles, was drawn up by Luther, which was subscribed to by both parties on the 4th of October, 1529. The Swiss reformers nobly yielded to Luther whenever they could do so without violating their own consciences; but their very yielding made their victory more complete.

Commenting upon the conduct of the great Reformer at the conference at Marburg, Dean Waddington says, "Upon the whole, he lost both influence and reputation by that controversy. By his imperious tone, and elaborate sophistry, he weakened the affections and respect of a large body of intelligent admirers. Many now began to entertain a less exalted opinion of his talents, as well as of his candour. Instead of the self-devotion and magnanimity which had thrown such a lustre over his earlier struggles, a vainglorious arrogance seemed to be master of his spirit; and but for the indulgence of this ignoble passion, the mantle, which might have wrapped Germany and Switzerland in one continuous fold was rent asunder. He was no longer the genius of the Reformation. Descending from this magnificent position, whence he had given light to the whole evangelical community, he was now become little more than the head of a party, then, indeed, the more conspicuous and powerful section of the reformers, but destined in after times to undergo reverses and defections, which have conferred the appellation of Lutheran on an inconsiderable proportion of the Protestant world."

Little did the German reformer think, when he refused the hand of his Swiss brother in the castle of Marburg, that within a year the opportunity for taking it would have gone by for ever. Yet so it was. Zwingli died on the battle-field, having accompanied the Protestant army in his capacity as chaplain. We do not attempt to justify the conduct of the Swiss Protestants in taking arms against their enemies; though they were only contending for their rights. Scripture teaches that "the servant of the Lord must not strive," and we may be sure that no good was ever done by the employment of carnal weapons in the spiritual conflicts of the church. At the battle of Cappel, in which Zwingli lost his life, twenty-five christian ministers were left dead upon the field! The great reformer was struck down at the very commencement of the action, while he was stooping over a dying man to breathe some word of comfort in his ear. The wound was not immediately fatal; and as he lay exhausted on the ground, he was heard to say: "Alas, what a calamity is this! Well, they have indeed killed the body, but they cannot touch the soul." For long hours he lay stretched upon the field, and when night had far advanced, a party of papists, with lighted torches, who were engaged in rifling the dead, came upon his body. He still breathed, but they did not recognise his face. One of the party asked him would he have a confessor, but the reformer shook his head. "If you cannot speak," said they, "invoke the mother of God, and the other saints for their intercession." The reformer again shook his head, and kept his eyes steadily fixed on heaven. "Die, then, obstinate heretic," said the officer of the party, and as he spoke he struck Zwingli on the throat with his sword. Later on they held a mock council on the lifeless body, and having condemned it for treason and heresy, the head was struck off, the body quartered, and the mutilated remains reduced to ashes.

The grief of Oecolampadius was great on hearing of the death of his friend, and he did not long survive him. The following year he was removed by the plague; and thus, within the space of a few months, the two chief agents in the Swiss Reformation were called away. Luther's resentment could not follow them to the grave, and writing to Henry Bullinger, he said, "Their death has filled me with such intense sorrow that I was near dying myself."

But Luther's time was not yet. The Lord had other work for His beloved servant; and for fifteen other years did the doctor of Wittenberg pursue his labours, furthering the work which it had been his privilege to begin, by his fervent prayers, his wise counsels, his generous sympathies, his burning eloquence, and his ready pen. His last days were spent in tranquility and peace; and his domestic life was not the least of his many joys. He was blessed with a true wife, his solace and helpmeet in many a trial and difficulty, and his children were the pride of his heart. An anecdote has come down to us which sheds a pleasant light on Luther in the home circle. A friend entering his room somewhat suddenly on one occasion, found his little boy sitting astride his leg, and laughing immoderately as his father tossed him up and down. Luther refrained from rising, and said apologetically, "My little boy is riding to Rome with a message from his father to the pope, and I could not interrupt his journey." How beautiful is all this, when we think of it as coming from the man who had shaken thrones and set the world thinking!

The death of his little daughter Magdalene supplies us with another, though sadder glimpse of his home life. He was constantly beside her in her last illness, and their hearts were knit together by the tenderest chords of love. "Magdalene, my dear little daughter," he once said to her, "you would be glad to stay with your father here, or you would be glad to go to your Father in heaven?" "Yes, dearest father, as God pleases," said the child. And when the wrench did come, he did not murmur. "Dear Kate," he said to his wife, "think where she is. It is well with her; but flesh will have its way. The spirit lives and is willing. Children do not dispute; they believe what is said to them. With children everything is simple; they die without pain and fear, as if they fell asleep."

Presently his own turn came. A dispute between the Counts of Mansfeld, in which he had been asked to arbitrate, necessitated his appearance at his native town. "I was born and baptised at Eisleben," said Luther to a friend who accompanied him, "what if I should remain and die here!" So it came to pass. Towards evening he complained of an oppression in the chest, and though relieved for a time by hot fomentations, it returned at a later hour. At nine o'clock he lay down on a couch, and slept till ten. On waking he retired to his room, and after bidding good night to those around him, added, "Pray for the cause of God." His pains continuing to increase he left his bed between one and two in the morning, and removed into his study without assistance. He knew his end was approaching, and frequently repeated the words, "O my God! into Thy hands I commend my spirit." Meanwhile his condition had been made known beyond the house, and there were now standing around his couch, his three sons, several of his friends, the Count and Countess Albert, and two physicians. At length he fell into a perspiration, and their hopes began to brighten: but he said, "It is a cold sweat, the forerunner of death: I shall yield up my spirit." He then broke into prayer, and concluded by thrice repeating the words, "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit: Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord God of truth!" Presently Justus Jonas inquired of him, "Beloved father, dost thou confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, our Saviour and Redeemer?" and Luther made reply, audibly and distinctly, "I do." These were his last words, and between two and three o'clock in the morning, he passed away.

The body was removed to Wittenberg on the 22nd of February; and the vast multitudes which assembled on the following day to witness the procession, were addressed by Pomeranus. Melanchthon afterwards delivered a funeral oration. But it has been remarked, as creditable to both orators, "that their feelings were more conspicuous than their powers of oratory, and that their pious attempts to console the sorrows of others were little more than a hearty demonstration of their own."

Charles had long been waiting for the death of Luther. He had many times lamented that he had suffered him to leave Worms, after his confession before the Diet. He had even said, "Though I spared him solely on the ground of the safe-conduct I had sent him, I confess, nevertheless, that I did wrong in this, because I was not bound to keep my promise to that heretic . . . but in consequence of my not having taken away his life, heresy continued to make progress; whereas his death, I am persuaded, would have stifled it in its birth."

It had been the wish of the emperor, ever since the Diet of Augsburg, that the pope should summon a general council, in order to inquire into the abuses of the ancient church, and thus make a way for the return of the dissentients to the allegiance of the pope. By this means he hoped to destroy the work of Luther, and restore peace and unity to the empire. But one thing and another had come in to thwart his wishes, and the successive popes to whom he had appealed, had all seemed curiously diffident in the matter. The threats which he had held out to the Protestants at the close of the Diet had only put them more on the alert, and they had immediately entered into a league for their mutual defence. This league they had been endeavouring to strengthen ever since, and thus, in spite of the warnings of Luther, the Protestants had become a thoroughly political body. This, in few words, represents the condition of affairs in Germany up to the period which we have now reached.

The death of Luther gave new hopes to the catholic party: the emperor found that a fitting opportunity for the gratification of his wish had come, and the long talked of council might be summoned with impunity. Into the proceedings of this council, which was held at Trent, a city in the Tyrol, we cannot enter. The Protestants refused to acknowledge it, and the emperor made their refusal a pretext for declaring war against them. The history of this war; of the capture of the elector; of the surrender of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse; of the shameful indignities heaped upon them by the emperor; of the persecution of the Protestants; of the temporary revival of popery; of the appointment of Maurice, Duke of Saxony, to the command of the forces; of the consummate duplicity of the duke; his secret league with the Protestant princes; his sudden declaration of war against the emperor; his march upon Innspruck and the miserable retreat of the emperor from that city — all this, together with the Peace of Passau, the concession of absolute freedom to the Protestant faith, the abdication of the emperor in favour of his brother Ferdinand, his retirement to a monastery, and, finally, his death — belong not to the compass of this outline, but to histories of greater bulk and more pretension. We must also leave to other historians the account of the further progress of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, and the efforts of Rome to hinder it. Our references must now cease. We have seen it firmly established in those countries; and while noting its mighty influence for good, have not omitted to notice also the failures which were incidental to it. God permitted these, in order to check vain-gloryings, and to hide pride from man.

We will conclude our remarks on this important and interesting period, by taking a rapid glance at the progress of the Reformation in other countries.

Chapter 25.

The Reformation in France and French Switzerland.

A.D. 1520-1592.

The establishment of the Reformation in France and French Switzerland, in its relation to the German and German-Swiss Reformation, must be looked upon as a somewhat late work. Its record is a record of blood, beginning with the martyrdom of the eloquent but imprudent John Leclerc, and ending with the massacre of the Huguenots, in which about 70,000 of the reformed faith were slaughtered in a few days.

William Farel, a native of Dauphiny, may be regarded as the apostle of the Reformation in French Switzerland. He learnt the reformed doctrines from a pious and learned doctor of Etaples, named James Lefevre, and first taught them in Paris, where he enjoyed the friendship and patronage of the bishop of Meaux, William Briconnet, who himself taught the new doctrines.

Persecution, however, at length became so violent that he was obliged to take refuge in Switzerland, where he made the acquaintance of Oecolampadius, Bucer, and other reformers. At Basle, Montbeliard, Aigle, Vallengin, St. Blaise, and Neuchatel, all in French Switzerland, he laboured with varying success; and such was the power of his preaching in the last-named place that the people declared they would live and die in the Protestant faith, and refused to rest satisfied till the Reformation was legally established in the Canton. At Geneva, which he visited twice, his work was difficult and perilous, and many attempts were made both by monks and priests to murder him. Several times he was stoned and beaten; twice he narrowly escaped a death by drowning in the Rhone; and once he was mercifully preserved from a more painful death by poison. But the blessing of the Lord was upon his labours, and ere long the Mass was officially suspended by a decree of the Council of Two Hundred, and an edict appeared ordaining that, "the services of God were thenceforward to be performed according to the statutes of the gospel; and that all acts of papal idolatry were to cease altogether." Coins were struck in commemoration of the event, and the citizens chose for themselves this new motto, "After darkness, light." The same happy results attended the labours of the stout-hearted reformer at Lausanne, though his first visit to the place was unsuccessful. The important matter was settled at a public disputation which lasted eight days, and ended in a signal triumph for the Protestants.

While at Geneva in the year 1536, Farel made the acquaintance of Calvin, then a young man in his twenty-eighth year. He had already made himself famous by the publication of his "Christian Institutes," and Farel felt that if he could persuade his young friend to remain in Geneva, to overlook the work, he would be doing much to help on the interests of the Reformation. He proposed the matter to him, but Calvin shrank from taking up the burden of such an undertaking, and refused. He pleaded that he was not mentally prepared for the task, that his education was as yet unfinished, and that, for the present at least, he could only render assistance by his pen. But Farel felt that he had the mind of God in asking him to remain, and met his shrinking refusal with the authoritative reply, "I declare to you on the part of God, that if you refuse to labour here along with us in the Lord's work, His curse will be upon you; since under the pretence of your studies, it is yourself that you are seeking, rather than Him."

The words had the desired effect upon the young theologian. Calvin abandoned his intention of proceeding to Strasbourg to continue his studies, and settled at Geneva. He was at once appointed a professor of theology, and commenced an arduous ministry of twenty-eight years, as pastor of one of the most prominent churches of the city: and from this place his influence presently extended to all the countries of Europe. "His relation to the ancient church," says Ludwig Hausser, "was peculiar. He was more bitterly opposed to it than any one else. Passionate and cutting things had indeed been said of Rome, but nothing so crushing had been urged against the Curia in the whole range of polemics as the attempt to prove that the church of Rome, in its origin and growth, was utterly opposed to the true church of Christ. Never had the hierarchical principle of the mediaeval Romish church been the subject of a fiercer attack than by Calvin's unimpassioned and cool-blooded assertion, that it was utterly opposed to the original idea of the constitution of the church, and he was therefore regarded by Rome as a more dangerous and implacable enemy than Luther."

But the people of Geneva could not at once fall in with the measures of reform which Calvin introduced. The whole city was sunk in vice and popery, and its "nine hundred priests" governed the consciences of the people. They did not like the restrictions which he put upon their singing, and dancing, and other worldly amusements; nor could they tolerate his stern rebukes of those less open sins to which they were no strangers: and when at last he prohibited them from coming to the altar, and sent them back with the rebuke, "You are not worthy to partake of the Lord's body; you are just what you were before; your sentiments, your morals, and your conduct are unchanged" when his faithfulness had brought him to this point, the people rose in a body and drove him from the city.

But in a little while they wished him back again. The city became filled with disorder, owing to the angry factions of the papists, the libertines, and the Anabaptists; and his presence was much needed. The very people who had driven him away began to clamour loudly for his return. "Let us recall the man," said they, "who wished to renovate our faith, our morals, and our liberties." And so, in the year 1540, it was resolved by the Council of Two Hundred, "in order that the honour and glory of God may be promoted, to seek all possible means to have Master Calvin back as preacher."

Calvin was loth at first to return, and declared that there was no place under heaven which he more dreaded than Geneva, yet added that he would decline nothing that might be for the welfare of that church. At last, in response to his official invitations and the earnest appeals of his friends, and feeling that he was guided by the will of God, he accepted the recall. To Farel he wrote, "Since I remember that I am not my own, nor at my own disposal, I give myself up, tied, bound, as a sacrifice to God." The welcome which he received atoned in some measure for his past ill-treatment, and from henceforth he was little hindered in his labours for the good of the people.

History does not favour us by drawing back the curtain which hides the inner and domestic life of Calvin from our view, and so the contemplation of his life is not so fraught with interest as that of Luther. He died on May I7th, 1564, literally worn out by the excessive mental fatigue which he had gone through. Farel, who was a feeble old man in his seventy-fifth year, when the news of the great reformer's illness reached him, wrote to say he must come and see him, but Calvin thoughtfully begged him to spare himself that fatigue. His brief letter was full of affection. "Farewell, my best and most faithful brother," he wrote, "and since it is God's pleasure that you should survive me in this world, live in the constant remembrance of our union, which, in so far as it was useful to the church of God, will still bear for us abiding fruit in heaven. Do not expose yourself to fatigue for my sake. I respire with difficulty, and continually expect my breath to fail me; but it is enough for me that I live and die in Christ, who to His people in life and death is gain. Once more, farewell to thee, and to all the brethren, thy colleagues." Calvin lingered on some three weeks after writing this letter, and spent the greater portion of that time in prayer. He died repeating the apostle's words, "The sufferings of this present life are not worthy to be compared with the glory to be —" here he stopped, for at that moment the glory dawned upon his view.

In the narrative by Beza, a fellow reformer, we get this reference to Calvin: "He lived fifty-four years, ten months, and seventeen days; half of which time he spent in the sacred ministry. His stature was of a middle size, his complexion dark and pale, his eyes brilliant even unto death, expressing the acuteness of his understanding. He lived nearly without sleep. His power of memory was almost incredible; and his judgment so sound, that his decisions often seemed oracular. In his words he was sparing, and he despised an artificial eloquence; yet was he an accomplished writer, and, by the accuracy of his mind, and his practice in dictating to an amanuensis, he attained to speak little differently from what he would have written. . . . Having given with good faith the history of his life and of his death, after sixteen years' observation of him, I feel myself warranted to declare, that in him was proposed to all men an illustrious example of the life and death of the Christian, so that it will be found as difficult to emulate as it is easy to calumniate him."

So much for Calvin and the Reformation in French Switzerland: we may now turn our attention to France, and watch the progress and difficulties of the work there. We have already alluded to the work of Farel and Lefevre in Paris, and of the encouragement which they received from Briconnet, the bishop of Meaux; but it was in the diocese of Briçonnet that the reformed doctrines were first publicly proclaimed.

Meaux at that time was a busy little city filled with wool-carders, fullers, and cloth-workers, and these simple people listened with deep interest to the new doctrines of their bishop, many being converted. The work grew, and the monks and begging friars who infested the neighbourhood became alarmed. "What new heresy is this?" they cried; "our authority is being questioned, our means of livelihood are being cut off — we must take instant measures to suppress these strange doctrines." They accordingly proceeded to Paris and laid their complaints before the Sorbonne and the Parliament, averring that "the city of Meaux, and all the neighbourhood, was infected with heresy, and its polluted waters flowed from the episcopal palace."

At that time the kingdom was administered, in the absence of its rightful monarch Francis I., by his mother, a bigoted catholic; and the reforming party knew that they could expect no kindness at her hands. Nor was the conduct of their bishop, when he was presently summoned before the Parliament, at all likely to encourage and sustain them; for he displayed the greatest timidity during his examination, and eventually yielded to the terms of the Sorbonne. The worship of the virgin and the saints was now resumed throughout his diocese; a prohibition was placed on the sale and possession of Luther's works; and Lefevre, Farel and the other reformers were forbidden to preach in the pulpits of Meaux, or even to remain in the neighbourhood.

This was not a hopeful beginning. The foremost reformer at Meaux had given up the work through fear, and the rest had been driven from the field. What was to be done? Was the work to be abandoned, and the cause of God to suffer irretrievably because of the wrath of man? No. For a while the work went on in secret, and though the public means of grace were denied, private study of the word and prayer were not neglected. Then a prominent member of their party, a wool-comber, named John Leclerc, drew up a proclamation, in which he spoke in no measured terms of the pope, and asserted that the kingdom of Antichrist was about to be destroyed by the breath of the Lord. This proclamation he posted on one of the doors of the cathedral, where all might read it; and waited the result.

As might be expected the monks and priests were filled with rage and confusion; and Leclerc was arrested on suspicion. When brought up for trial he made no attempt to conceal his act, and after a trial of a few days was condemned to be whipped through the city, and to have his forehead branded with a hot iron. While the latter part of his sentence was being carried out, a woman pressed through the crowd, her face pale with grief and emotion, and cried out, "Jesus Christ, and His marks for ever!" It was Leclerc's mother.

The wool-comber scarcely suffered his wounds to heal, before he was at work again: but the scene of his labours was changed. Having been banished from Meaux we next hear of him at Metz, and in the character of an image-breaker. Seated one day before the images in the Chapel of the Virgin, an edifice of great celebrity near that city, those words came into his mind, "Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works; but thou shalt overthrow them, and quite break down their images" (Ex. xxiii. 24), and receiving this as a divine injunction, he immediately arose, and demolished the images with which the chapel was crowded. This done, he quietly re-entered the city.

The agitation produced among the catholics by this act was indescribable, and the branded heretic was immediately arrested. As in the case of his previous trial, he readily confessed his crime — gloried in it in fact and exhorted the people to renounce idolatry, and return to the worship of the one true God. Sentence of death having been passed upon him, he was hurried to the scene of his martyrdom. Here a frightful death awaited him, though he was wonderfully sustained to the last. First, his right hand, which did the mischief, was cut off; then his flesh was torn with red-hot pincers; then his chest was cruelly burned. But while this torture was going on he recited, in a clear unwavering voice, the Psalmist's words, "Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they smell not; they have hands, but they handle not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither speak they through their throats. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them. O Israel, trust thou in the Lord; he is their help and their shield." Then his body was consumed over a slow fire; and thus the first martyr of the French Reformation entered heaven.

In due time came the martyrdom of a converted priest, named Chatelain, whose patient testimony at the stake, convinced many of the truth of the cause in which he died, and filled them with a desire to know more of that gospel in which he had found so great a solace. Then came the pious and very learned Louis Berquin, a peer of France, who Beza said would have made a second Luther if he had found in Francis a second Frederick of Hanover. Thrice was he imprisoned for preaching the reformed doctrines to the people, and thrice was he delivered from his prison through the instrumentality of the king's sister, the eminently pious Margaret, afterwards Queen of Navarre. Meanwhile his friends, timorous and lukewarm by reason of the dangers by which they were surrounded, urged him to desist from preaching, and to tempt no longer the malice of his enemies; but Berquin could see no reason to fly the field, and fearlessly went on with the work."Leave these hornets alone," wrote his timid friend Erasmus, "above all, do not mix me up in these things; my burden is already heavy enough." "You know Beza and his familiars," he wrote again, "a thousand-headed hydra is shooting out its venom on all sides. The name of your enemies is Legion. Were your cause better than that of Jesus Christ, they will not let you go until they have brought you to a cruel end. Do not trust in the protection of the king. But in any case do not commit me with the faculty of Theology." But while Erasmus and his other timid friends called loudly for Berquin to stop, the voice of God in his own soul and through the pages of His word, bade him go on; and Berquin went on, and France has need to bless God for it.

In the month of April, 1529, he was arrested for the fourth time, and brought before the Sorbonne. After a hurried and mock trial he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and to have his tongue bored through with a hot iron, but Berquin appealed against the decision of the council, and the judges feared to insist upon their sentence in the face of his appeal. Then they decided that he should be strangled and burnt, and this sentence was carried out. On the 22nd of April, 1529, he was taken in a cart to the Place de Grève, under an escort of six hundred soldiers, and met his death with great firmness.

Martyrdoms now grew frequent, but they were the beacon fires of the Reformation, inviting the people everywhere to rise in defence of the truth; and for every life thus taken, twenty champions arose to fill the gap. But the opposition was very great, and the number of the reformers in comparison with the enemies of the Reformation was a mere cipher. At length an expedient was hit upon, which it was hoped would accelerate the work; and an elaborate protest was prepared,* in which the abuses of Rome were exposed in vivid colours. Copies of this protest were circulated throughout France, and it was privately arranged that it should be published simultaneously in every town, upon a night that should be named. The 18th (some say, the 24th) of October, 1534, was the date fixed upon; and the eventful work of that one night has given to the whole year the name of the "Year of the Placards."

{*The author of the protest is not known: some think that Farel had the chief hand in it.}

The night at length arrived — an anxious one for the Lutherans, and the daring task of posting the placards was accomplished quietly, and without disturbance. In Paris, copies were affixed to the wall of the university, and all the public buildings, and the doors of the cathedral were covered with them. Even the parliament house, and the door of the king's sleeping apartment were not excepted; though it is probable that an enemy was responsible for the presence of the placard there. Morning came; and the effects of the discovery throughout the kingdom cannot be described. The excitement was unparalleled: a wrathful cry of "Death to the heretics!" arose throughout the land and a storm of terrible persecution began. The king grew pale with agitation when he saw the placard, and wrathfully exclaimed, "Let all be seized, and let Lutheranism be totally exterminated."

Numerous arrests were at once made, and the executions followed one another with terrible rapidity. Bartholomew Milon, a cripple, was the first martyr. He had to be lifted out of the cart on the day of his execution, as he could not walk; but the judges had taken no pity on his affliction, and he was burnt to death over a slow fire. Others followed. On the 21st of January, 1535, a "peace offering" procession, to atone for the indignities which had been offered to the ancient church, "marched through the most public streets of Paris in gloomy majesty," and the solemnities of the day were closed by the martyrdom of six Lutherans. The king was present, and made a violent speech against the new doctrines. "If my arm were infected with this pestilence," he said, I would cut it off. If one of my children were so wretched as to favour this new reform, and to wish to make a profession of it, I would sacrifice him myself to the justice of God, and to my own justice." Notable zeal this; but how the language of the wretched king began to change, when the hour of his own departure drew near! What would he have given then to have washed the guilt of so much blood from his conscience, and to have relieved his soul of the consequences which he knew were hanging over him!

And what a history of crime and blood his reign presents to us! — of so many crimes, and so much blood! It was he who consented to the persecution of the Vaudois Christians, who inhabited the fruitful country of Merindole and Cabrieres. They held doctrines similar to the doctrines of the French reformers; and this was their only crime. "They are irreproachable in morals," said a catholic writer of that day, "laborious, sober, benevolent, and of unshaken loyalty." Yet an edict of persecution was published against them, and upwards of twenty-two towns and villages were plundered and burned, and the inhabitants murdered under circumstances of shocking barbarity. And Francis was in measure responsible for this. What a burden for his distracted soul as the hour of his dissolution drew near! It is then we hear him moaning, as the terrors of an accusing conscience take form before his eyes, "I am not to blame — my orders were exceeded." Courtier-prelates might have lulled that conscience to sleep while the king was in the vigour of life; but of what avail were their words when the hand of death was upon him, and eternity stared him in the face?

In the year 1547 Francis died, and was succeeded by his second son Henry, whose elder brother had been poisoned by the wicked Catherine de' Medici, the new king's wife. During his reign of twelve years the persecution was continued with increasing violence, and the priests did not lose any opportunity of prejudicing the king's mind with regard to the Reformation. They described it as seditious and revolutionary, and declared that the Huguenots* — for this was the new name by which the French Lutherans were known — were plotting against him, and that their doctrines were subversive of all ecclesiastical and regal power. The king took alarm at these representations, but it was not till towards the close of his reign, (when the Reformation had taken such a hold of the people that a sixth of the population were Huguenots), that he resorted to the extreme measure of summoning a parliament with a view to their suppression. This memorable sitting is known in history as the "Bed of Justice."

{*So named from one Hugues, a Genevese Calvinist.}

Meanwhile, thanks to the untiring labours of Calvin, the ecclesiastical foundations of the Reformation had been laid, and churches had been formed on his model in Paris, Poictiers, Angers, Bourges and elsewhere; so that when the king convoked his parliament in the year 1559, there were over a thousand such congregations in existence in France.

The only important incident which occurred during the deliberations of the parliament, seems to have been the arrest of one of its senators, John Du Bourg, whose bold speech in favour of the Huguenots, excited the king's anger, and led him to exclaim that he would watch Du Bourg's martyrdom with his own eyes. This, indeed, was his serious intention, but the Lord had willed otherwise, and fourteen days after the senator's arrest, Henry was killed in a tilting match with Count Montgomery, the captain of the guards. Strange to say, this was the very man who had effected the arrest of Du Bourg.

The accession of Francis II. brought no brighter prospects for the Huguenots; and after their bold champion, Du Bourg, had been immured for six months in the frightful dungeon of the Bastille, during which he had been denied the common necessaries of life, and had suffered grievous tortures by means of an iron cage, he was burnt alive.

The new king was a mere boy when he ascended the throne, and his weak body and still weaker mind rendered him eminently unfit to rule. It was during his reign that the work of Reformation in France assumed a political complexion, and the wars of religion began. French Protestantism could now number among its adherents several of the highest nobles in the land, men like Coligny and Sully, and the Huguenots had become a body which could no longer be despised. There were two parties then in the State in violent opposition; the one, with Catherine de' Medici at its head, representing the old nobility of France — the Bourbons, Montmorencys, etc.; the other, headed by the brothers Francis and Charles Guise, representing an entirely new faction, which had grown out of the intrigues of these men. Francis Guise, in rank a duke, had control of the army, and aspired to the throne; Charles held the rank of a cardinal, and had control of the finances and foreign affairs. How to check the power of the two brothers, who virtually ruled the kingdom between them, became a problem with Catherine's party, and they sought to solve it by drawing to their side the Huguenot opposition. Many members of the discontented aristocracy even adopted Calvinistic sentiments for purely political motives; and when one of these nobles, La Renaudie by name, who held a grudge against the Guises for the murder of his brother, had been detected in a plot against their lives, the Huguenots were implicated in the conspiracy. But the death of Francis II., in the year 1560, effected the overthrow of the Guise party, and Catherine de' Medici having undertaken, in her own interests, the guardianship of the new king, Charles IX., then in his tenth year, the reins of government were practically transferred to her hands. Though possessed of no strong religious convictions, she was a catholic in name, and hated Protestantism be cause of its supposed democratic tendencies: yet, in order to consolidate her power, and to destroy more effectually the power of the Guises, she professed toleration, and released the Huguenots who had been imprisoned during the reign of Francis II. At the same time she avoided mortally offending the Guises, and permitted them, and all their adherents, to remain in their offices and posts of honour.

But no sooner was her position firmly established than she proceeded to mature her plans for the extermination of heresy and the ruin of the Huguenots. Her schemes were as deeply laid as her heart was cruel and wicked, and aided by the counsels of Pope Pius V., and Philip II. of Spain, her plot was ripe for execution in the autumn of the year 1572. That plot had for its object the wholesale massacre of the French Protestants.

At the head of the Huguenots was the illustrious Admiral Coligny, an old man, alike venerated for his piety and renowned for his bravery. It had been necessary that his confidence should be gained, or, at least, that he should be thrown off his guard, before a scheme so vast as that which Catherine and her accomplices had formed, could be carried out: and this had been effected in the following manner. Charles IX., then in his 22nd year. had been instigated by his mother, to profess "an earnest desire for the establishment of a lasting peace" between the two religious factions, and to that end a marriage had been proposed between his own sister, Margaret of Valois, a Roman Catholic, and the protestant king of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. At first there had been some opposition to this, from the mother of Henry, the spiritual and accomplished Jeanne d'Albret, but she had been secretly removed by poison at an early stage of the proceedings; and the marriage had been duly arranged. Coligny guileless and open-hearted himself, could suspect no treachery in others, and made no attempts to sift the hidden sources of the king's action, or to question his motives. Nothing disturbed his own peace, and he began to look forward with joyful hope to the approaching union.

The marriage was fixed for the 18th of August, 1572, and nobles from all parts of the kingdom; — Protestants as well as Catholics — were invited to the ceremony. Almost all responded to the invitation, and by the 18th, Paris was crowded with the chiefs of the two religious parties. The marriage was duly solemnised, and for some days the French metropolis was given up to feasting and gaiety; the Protestants mingling with the Catholics without suspicion. But this was all a part of the great scheme, and by it the Huguenots were lulled to sleep. St. Bartholomew's eve was drawing near, but still the festivities continued and still the same amicable relationships were preserved among all classes. True, at times there was something in the looks and gestures of certain of the Romanists, which those who perceived it could scarcely understand: yet the feeling of wonder passed away, and the fatal sense of security remained. Now and then a Protestant would come upon a whispering group of papists, lurking in some dark corner of a street, and a feeling of uneasiness would steal over him — but why? Were they not his frends? — Alas! Alas!

Charles became deeply agitated as the fatal hour drew near. His face grew deathly pale; his frame shook; a fearful feeling of remorse oppressed his heart. In his irresolution he would have countermanded his orders, but for the persuasions of his mother. He did dispatch a message to the Duke of Guise urging him not to act in haste; but the message came too late. Catherine had anticipated him, by commanding that the tragedy should commence an hour before the stated time; and while the messenger was yet on his way the signal bell rang out. Immediately it was answered from every steeple in Paris, and the massacre began. A voice was heard at the door of Coligny's sleeping apartment, "My lord, God calls us to His presence!" He had been wakened by the clanging of the bells, and was at that moment engaged in prayer. The aged nobleman rose to his feet, and turning towards his attendants, said, "I have been long prepared to die; as for you, save yourselves if you can; you cannot save my life." The Duke of Guise was waiting in the street without, while the assassins did their work, and presently his voice was heard, calling to his servant, "Behem, hast thou done it?" The ominous answer immediately came back, "It is done, my lord." "But we must see it to believe it;" said the Duke, "throw him out of the window." Behem took up the still breathing form, and did with it as he was commanded. As the body fell on to the pavement below, the Duke spurned it with his foot, saying, "I know him, it is he: courage, comrades; we have begun well — now for the rest."

In all the streets was now heard the firing of musketry, mingled with the brutal curses of the papists, and the groans of the dying. The Huguenots, taken by surprise, could offer no resistance; and when morning dawned their corpses were seen lying in heaps on every hand. The streets ran with blood, and the Seine was purpled with the dark stream. Morning brought no cessation in the awful work, and by that time Charles had recovered from his indecision, and came out on a balcony, with his mother, to feast his eyes on the scene of slaughter. He even joined in the work himself, and, seizing upon an arquebuse, fired upon the Huguenots who were seeking to escape by swimming across the river. For four days the massacre continued, and then the murderers left off through sheer weariness. By that time some five hundred of the Protestant nobility and gentry had been slaughtered, and from five to ten thousand Huguenots of lesser station.

Nor did the carnage end there. It extended to the provinces, and orders were dispatched to the various governors and magistrates to exterminate the heretics without mercy. Some yielded a ready obedience, but not all. To his eternal honour be it told, one catholic bishop, John Hennuyer, bishop of Lisieux, refused to incur the guilt of so foul an act, and when the royal messenger presented him with the order, he said, "No, no, sir; I oppose, and will always oppose the execution of such an order. I am the pastor of Lisieux, and these people whom you command me to slaughter are my flock. Although they have at present strayed, having quitted the pasture which Jesus Christ, the sovereign Shepherd, has confided to my care, they may still come back. I do not see in the gospel that the shepherd can permit the blood of his sheep to be shed; on the contrary, I find there, that he is bound to give his blood and his life for them." Noble testimony! It is with joy that we record it here, though differing so widely from the brave John Hennuyer as regards the doctrines which he taught. The governor of Bayonne was another who refused to obey the murderous command. "The king has many brave soldiers in his garrison," he said, "but not a single executioner."

During six weeks the massacre in the provinces continued, and the number of victims is variously estimated at fifty, seventy, and one hundred thousand. The latter number, if we take into account those who afterwards perished from hunger and grief, is probably the most correct. The grave-diggers of the cemetery of the Innocents, at Paris, interred over a thousand bodies which had been cast up the Seine alone, a fact to which the account-books of that city bear witness to this day; and in Meaux, where the French Reformation may be said to have begun, the number of victims was so great that the labour of killing them with the sword was too slow, and they were dispatched with iron hammers.

Rome was loud in her joy when the first news of the massacre reached her. The messenger who brought it was rewarded with a thousand crowns by the Cardinal of Lorraine; artillery was fired; and when night came on, the city was gay with its illuminations. A solemn Te Deum was celebrated in St. Mark's Church, and thanks were offered to God for so signal a blessing conferred on the Roman See; while at Paris a medal was struck with this inscription, Pietas armavit justitiam, "Piety has armed Justice." "If ever the depths and wiles of Satan were seen in human wickedness," says Andrew Miller, "it is here. The premeditation, the solemn oaths of the king — which drew the Calvinists to Paris the royal marriage, and the dagger put into the hands of the mob by the chiefs of the State, at a time of universal peace, represent a plot which has no parallel in history. And then, from the pope downwards, the Catholic community lifting up their hands to heaven, and thanking God for the glorious triumph!"

But a solemn retribution awaited the authors of this terrible crime. All but one came to violent ends. Charles died, some two years after, in dreadful agonies of soul and body; and was heard to exclaim, not long before his death, "What blood — what murder! How evil are the counsels that I have followed! Oh my God, pardon and pity me! I know not where I am, so grievous is my agony and perplexity. What will be the end of it? What will become of me? I am lost for ever." The Duke of Guise was assassinated; his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, died raving mad; and the wretched Catherine de' Medici, though she lived to an unhonoured old age, was imprisoned by her favourite son, and her name became synonymous throughout the world with perfidy and cruelty.

And the "heresy" of the Huguenots was not exterminated, though one hundred thousand of their number fell. He who had planted the incorruptible seed of the gospel in their hearts, could quickly plant it in the hearts of one hundred thousand more: and so it came to pass. A long series of petty wars between the Huguenots and the Catholics, distinguished the reign of Charles's successor, Henry III.; and when he was assassinated in the year 1589, a Protestant prince, Henry of Navarre, succeeded him on the throne.

Chapter 26.

The Reformation in Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

There is a special interest attaching to the history of the Reformation in Italy, as being the centre and hot-bed of Roman Catholicism. The Italians, as a body, had long looked upon the papacy with feelings akin to contempt; for they had been constant witnesses of the uncloaked wickedness of their metropolis, and could not but see that in the Vatican that wickedness found a centre. They had long been wearied with the licentiousness and greed, the ambition and deceit for which their chief city was notorious, and many an earnest heart was sighing for a change, long before the work of reformation actually began. Hence, no sooner had the fame of Luther's collision with Tetzel reached Italy than there was an eager demand for his writings. A few months later we find his printer, at Basle, writing to him in these terms: "Blasius Salmonius, a bookseller at Leipsic, presented me, at the last Frankfort fair, with certain treatises composed by you, which being approved of by learned men, I immediately put to press, and sent six hundred copies to France and Spain. My friends assure me that they are sold at Paris, and read and approved of, even by the Sorbonists. Calvus, a bookseller of Pavia, himself a scholar, and addicted to the Muses, has carried a great part of the impression into Italy. . . . In spite of the terror of pontifical bulls, and the activity of those who watched over their execution, the writings of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Bucer, continued to be circulated and read with avidity and delight in various parts of Italy. Some of them were translated into the Italian language, and, to elude the vigilance of the inquisitors, were published under fictitious names." This thirst for the literature of the reformers was encouraging, to say the least; and it proceeded from no idle curiosity. "Purchase Bullinger's work, De Origine Erroris," said a monk to Zanchius, "and if you have no money to buy it, pluck out your right eye, and read the purchased book with your left."

For upwards of twenty years this good work was allowed to go on, with little opposition; but in the year 1542, its weakening effect upon the papacy began to be more clearly realised at Rome; and the pope is found writing: "It is with sincere regret we hear, from good authority, that many of our clergy, both secular and regular, in several provinces of Italy, have become so infected with the Lutheran heresy, that they corrupt the minds of the people, even by public preaching, to the no small scandal of all faithful Christians." The Inquisition was now put in force against the Protestants, and the prisons were quickly crowded with victims.

Aonio Paleario, author of a little book entitled, "The Benefit of Christ's Death," was one of the most notable pioneers of the Italian Reformation, but his career of usefulness was cut short by martyrdom. "In my opinion," said he, "no Christian ought to think of dying in his bed, in these times. To be accused, imprisoned, scourged, hung up, sewed up in a sack, and thrown to wild beasts is not enough. Let them roast me at the fire, if only the truth can be better brought to light by such a death." When questioned by his accusers as to the first means of salvation which had been given to man, he answered,"Christ." "And the second?" said they. "Christ." "And the third?" "Christ." Paleario was imprisoned in the dungeon of the Inquisition for three years, and was then burned alive.

Several Englishmen, at that time resident in Italy, suffered severely at the hands of the Inquisition; among whom were John Craig, a Scotch reformer, who afterwards assisted in drawing up the National Covenant; Dr. Thomas Wilson, who became secretary to Queen Elizabeth, and Dr. Thomas Reynolds, Craig and Wilson escaped from their prison at Rome, during a tumult, in which the doors were broken open; but Reynolds was not so fortunate. He was severely tortured by order of the inquisitors, and at last expired under the torture. Another Englishman was burned to death, in the same city, in the year 1595.

In every corner of Italy the inquisitors were now at work, and the country swarmed with spies. These were, for the most part in the pay of the Vatican, and their business was to gain the confidence of private persons suspected of heresy, in order to facilitate the arrests. They were found among all classes of the people, from the highest to the lowest, and by means of their shameless perfidy and deceit the prisons were quickly filled with victims. Some of these were condemned to penance, others were sent to the galleys, others were shockingly tortured and mutilated, others were cramped with heavy irons and starved in damp unwholesome dungeons; and others were burned alive. Many fled for refuge to other countries, where they were in most cases kindly received, and not a few found a home and a welcome on our own shores. Some idea of the extent of the work in Italy may be gathered from the fact, that during a search that was made for heretical books, upwards of forty thousand copies of Paleario's little work "The Benefit of Christ's Death," were discovered.

Of the Reformation in Spain we cannot, unfortunately, offer so hopeful an account, for the persecutions which followed the introduction of the reformed doctrines into that country, drove thousands into exile; and those who remained, remained only for the stake, the torture-room, or the galleys. But Protestant England could still find room for her exiled brethren, and, as bishop Jewell touchingly wrote,"The Queen, of her gracious pity, granted them harbour." It would appear that the number of the Spanish exiles was between three and four thousand, for the bishop adds, "But what was the number of such who came unto us? Three or four thousand. Thanks be to God; this realm is able to receive them if the number were greater." The chief agents in the Spanish Reformation were two brothers, Juan and Alfonso de Valdes.

From Spain we are naturally led to the Low Countries, or Netherlands, as they formed part of the dominions of the Spanish King. Here, in spite of persecution, the revived doctrines spread with rapidity; and the martyrdom of three monks, of the order of Augustine, who had been convicted of reading Luther's works, awoke a spirit of inquiry in the minds of the people, which no threats or tortures could subdue. Erasmus says that, "the city of Brussels where they were executed, had been perfectly free from heresy till this event: but many of the inhabitants immediately after began to favour Lutheranism."

In the year 1566 a deputation waited upon the king, with a petition of toleration signed by one hundred thousand Protestants; but instead of yielding to their appeal, he directed the Governess of the Netherlands, his half-sister Margaret of Parma, to raise an army of 3000 horse, and 10,000 foot soldiers, for the enforcement of his decrees. But armies and royal decrees were of little moment, when God had decided that the work should go on. The Protestants daily increased in number, in spite of the efforts of armed forces to thin and scatter them; and the cold-hearted bigoted Philip found that he must resort to more desperate measures than he had yet employed, if he would exterminate the hated religion. Dissatisfied with the clemency of Margaret, he now vested his authority in the person of the Duke of Alva; who shortly after arrived in the country with an army of 15,000 Spaniards and Italians; and a series of atrocities, almost without parallel in the annals of persecution, commenced.

The Inquisition was at once put to work; and before long its victims could be numbered by thousands. Most of the Protestant churches and meeting houses were destroyed, and the beams were made into gallows on which to hang the Lutherans. The cities were depopulated — for the people fled from them as from a plague — and the commerce of the country was at a standstill. Merchants, manufacturers, artisans, men of all classes, hastened out of the country, and considered themselves fortunate in being able to escape with their lives. For those who remained it was almost certain death.

"About the same time, 1561, Walter Kapell, a man of property and benevolence, and greatly beloved of the poor people, was burned at the stake for heretical opinions. A most touching scene occurred after Titelmann's officers had bound him to the stake: a poor idiot, who had been often fed by his kindness, called out, 'Ye are bloody murderers; that man has done no wrong, but has given me bread to eat.' With these words he cast himself headlong into the flames to perish with his beloved benefactor, and was with difficulty rescued by the officers. A day or two afterwards he visited the scene of the execution, where the half-burned skeleton of Walter Kapell still remained; the poor idiot laid it upon his shoulders, and carried it to the place where the magistrates were sitting in session. Forcing his way into their presence, he laid his burden at their feet, crying, 'There, murderers! ye have eaten his flesh, now eat his bones.'"

One, Robert Ogier, of Ryssel in Flanders, suffered martyrdom in the following year, in company with his eldest son. The latter, who was quite a youth, exclaimed in the flames, "O God, eternal Father, accept the sacrifice of our lives in the name of Thy beloved Son." A monk who was standing by retorted angrily, "Thou liest, scoundrel! God is not your father ye are the devil's children." A moment or two later the boy exclaimed, "Look, my father, all heaven is opening, and I see an hundred thousand angels rejoicing over us! Let us be glad, for we are dying for the truth." "Thou liest — thou liest!" shrieked the priest, "all hell is opening, and ye see ten thousand devils thrusting you into eternal fire." Robert Ogier's wife and remaining son suffered in a similar way a few days later, and the family was thus reunited in heaven.

The very worst times for the Netherlands had now set in. "The executions by fire, water, and sword, and the confiscation of property, were recklessly continued. The victims numbered many thousands. The number of emigrants increased in the same proportion, and the product of confiscation reached by degrees the sum of thirty million dollars. The ancient privileges of the country were already annihilated; the population was fearfully diminished; agricultural prosperity was threatened with ruin; commerce was at an end; the harbours were empty; the shops and warehouses lying waste; numbers of industrious hands were idle; the great businesses were at a standstill; the wealthy trading cities were impoverished; in short, everything that had contributed to commercial and industrial prosperity began to decay."

But Alva cared for none of these things. The reckless slave of a cruel master, no thoughts of political economy ever troubled his mind; this fearful retrogression was nothing to him. Nay, in so far as the wanton sacrifice of human life was concerned, he had no thought of pausing yet — his thirst for blood was not yet satiated! The slaughter of a few thousand Protestants was not enough to satisfy the rapacious cruelty of such a man; the scythe must take a wider sweep in short, the whole nation of heretics must come beneath the murderer's arm! In the year 1568, when the "Council of Blood" held its second sitting, it was decreed that all the inhabitants of the Netherlands should suffer death as heretics; and from this universal doom none were excepted, save a few persons specially named. "This," says Motley, "is probably the most concise death-warrant that was ever framed. Three millions of people — men, women, and children — were sentenced to the scaffold in three lines."

The effects of this ghastly edict were frightful. Many of the people went mad; and others, who contrived to escape to the West-woods of Flanders, were driven wild by solitude and despair. In the towns and villages the tolling of the death-bell might be heard at all hours; and verily, had a plague visited the country, the condition of things could not have been more terrible. Every house was a house of mourning, and the charred and mangled corpses of the victims of the awful decree were exposed by hundreds on the door-posts and fences.

Then, at last, the people found that they could endure the oppression no longer; and, rising with the energy of despair, they came forth from their desolated homes, and their places of hiding in the woods, and found a common rallying-point around the banner of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange. Into the details of the Civil War that followed we cannot enter; and the reader will doubtless be familiar with the facts. The Protestant army, at first unsuccessful, was aided by Elizabeth of England, the French king, and the German Protestants; and in the year 1580 the people were enabled to throw off the Spanish yoke, and assert their independence. Thus a new Protestant State was constituted in Europe; and the Netherlands were known henceforth as The Seven United Provinces.*

{*The original name, however, still survives.}

In Sweden the Reformation was established, after some opposition, by the renowned Gustavus Vasa, who was assisted by the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri. In spite of the hindrance of the spiritual lords, headed by the archbishop of Upsal, the truth prevailed; and the king had soon so powerful a party to support him, that he was able to compel the restoration of the various estates and castles which those prelates had obtained from his subjects by improper means. A check was also put upon the power of the bishops: the distribution of the revenues of the church was taken out of their hands, and they were forbidden to take any further part in the affairs of the State. Gustavus Vasa was evidently the right man in the right place, and it is pleasant to be able to add, that the work which he began was accomplished with the greatest rapidity, and without tumult or bloodshed.

In Denmark, a king — Christian II. — was again at the head of the Reformation, and, though the opposition of the ecclesiastical party was at first a serious clog upon his movements, and the bishops even succeeded in procuring his deposition, he continued the good work while in exile, and employed his secretary to translate the New Testament into the Danish language.

The Danes were much indebted to the ministry of the intrepid John Taussen, a monk of Antvorscov, who, having been imprisoned for preaching justification by faith, continued to expound the doctrine from his prison window. The new king, Frederick I., hearing of the dauntless monk, sent an order for his release; and shortly afterwards appointed him one of his own chaplains.

At the conference of Odense, held in 1527, the king openly declared himself for the Reformation; and, in spite of much opposition from the bishops, decreed that henceforth the Protestants should enjoy the same immunities as the Catholics. On the death of Frederick, the bishops made another desperate effort to restore popery, and succeeded in procuring the banishment of Taussen; but their triumph did not last. The new king was as favourable to the Reformation as his predecessor; and, in the year 1536, a Diet was held at Copenhagen, and the Protestant religion was finally established. The bishops, convicted of intriguing and other treasonable practices, were deprived of their offices and emoluments; and the last, lingering traces of popery were effaced from the land.

Chapter 27.

The Reformation under Henry VIII.

A.D. 1510-1531.

The work of the Reformation in England, in so far as the State was concerned, did not begin, strictly speaking, till the latter half of the sixteenth century. As Ludwig Hausser justly observes, "What was attempted by Henry VIII. was not in anywise a reformation, but a wanton experiment of autocratic absolutism." He shook off the allegiance of the pope in the year 1514; suppressed the mendicant orders in the year following; and followed up this act by plundering the monasteries, the revenues of which he appropriated to his own use. The motive power with Henry in this specious kind of reformation was anger, arising from the pope's refusal to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Arragon. A reformation thus begun could scarcely be expected to stand.

Yet a real work of God was going on, a work indeed which had never ceased since the days of Wickliffe, and every year new light was coming into the country from the Continent. Of this we will now speak more particularly.

In the very year of the king's accession, the popish bishop of London, Richard Fitzjames, began a persecution in his diocese, a fact which shews that the truth was already making itself felt in some quarters; and between the years 1510 and 1527 some forty Christians of both sexes suffered in various ways for their faith. The charges against them were various, and, for the most part, extremely petty. One would not reverence the crucifix, or acknowledge that the pope had power to give pardons; another spoke against pilgrimages and praying to saints; a third denied the carnal and corporal presence of the Lord's body and blood in the sacrament of the altar. Others were found guilty of reading certain forbidden books, as, for example, the Four Gospels, Wickliffe's Wicket, the Ten Commandments of Almighty God, and sundry of the Epistles; and others were convicted of the supreme sin of speaking against the pope's holiness, and against his blessed martyr Thomas à Becket.

One of the martyrs of this period was John Brown, the nature of whose offence is thus given. Seated upon a Gravesend barge one day, he fell into conversation with a certain priest, who, becoming heated in their talk, delivered himself in this fashion: "Dost thou know who I am? thou sittest too near me, thou sittest on my clothes." "No, sir," said John Brown; "I know not who you are." "I tell thee I am a priest." "What, sir, are you a parson, or vicar, or a lady's chaplain?" "No," quoth the priest, "I am a soul-priest; I sing for a soul." "Do you so, sir?" said Master Brown, "that is well done: I pray you, sir, where find you the soul when you go to mass?" "I cannot tell thee," said the priest. "I pray you, sir," said Master Brown, "where do you leave it when the mass is done?" The priest returned the same answer. "Then," said Brown, "you can neither tell me where you find it when you go to mass, nor where you leave it when the mass is done, how can you then save the soul?" "Go thy ways," quoth the priest, "thou art a heretic, and I will be even with thee." Three days after, the bold speaker was arrested in his own home, and brought fast-bound to Canterbury. During his confinement here, efforts were made to induce him to recant; and to this end his feet were horribly tortured over a fire, until the bones were laid bare. But John Brown was not to be moved; and when the priests found that he was firm in his confession, they sent him to the stake.

In the neighbourhood of Lincoln, also, there was not a little persecution, and the bishop of the diocese, protected by a letter from the king, instituted a rigorous search for heretics, with whom he dealt with characteristic cruelty when they were brought before him. Those who were found guilty of a first offence, and abjured their opinions, were, for the most part, incarcerated in the monasteries, where they were retained for life; but relapsed heretics were handed over to the secular arm, to be burnt alive. In the case of John Scrivener, his own children were compelled to light the faggots at his burning; and in like manner, the daughter of William Tilsworth was made to fire the wood at her father's martyrdom.

But while Wolsey's creature, bishop Longland, was busy in his diocese of Lincoln, other Englishmen, with objects of a nobler and purer kind, were not less busy in other parts. In the year 1520, William Tyndal left the university of Cambridge, and commenced his eventful career.

We hear of him first at Gloucester, where he was tutor in the family of a knight named Welsh, in whose mansion he frequently reasoned and disputed with the abbots, deans, archdeacons, and other beneficed men who met around his patron's board. Being thus engaged on one occasion, he was informed by his opponent, who had lost his temper in the heat of controversy, that "It were better to be without God's laws than the pope's." Tyndal, swelling with indignation, exclaimed, "I defy the pope and all his laws!" and to this he added, "that if God spared his life, ere many years he would cause a boy that drives a plough to know more of the scriptures than he did." On the whole the Cambridge scholar does not seem to have been at all popular in the Gloucestershire knight's household; indeed, his place was much preferred to his company, and the priests of those parts discovered him to be an heretic in sophistry, an heretic in logic, and an heretic in divinity."

Proceeding afterwards to London, he waited upon the then bishop, Cuthbert Tonstall, and endeavoured to obtain a place in his household, but his efforts were unsuccessful. To nestle down under the sheltering wing of patronage was not to be the lot of Master Tyndal. He was to be a servant of the Lord in perilous times, and for that it was necessary that he should pass through a severer school than was to be found in any bishop's household. For awhile, however, he was comfortably lodged in the house of one Humphrey Monmouth, a worthy citizen of London, who had a sincere respect for his guest, and was himself interested not a little in the new teaching. But as the opinions of Tyndal became known (and he was not one to hide his light under a bushel) the dangers of his situation increased, and his friends advised him to retire to the Continent.

Besides, a new work was now occupying his attention — the translation of the Bible — and for this he needed all the quiet that could possibly be had. London was not likely to afford him much of that. The call for such a work he had often insisted on, but he also felt the need of it for his own soul. "I hunger for the word of God," he said, "and will translate it, whatever they may say or do. God will never suffer me to perish. He never made a mouth but he made food for it, nor a body but He made raiment also." With such a hunger oppressing him, no wonder that Tyndal thought lightly of his bodily needs, and, content with his meagre fare of boiled meat and small beer, refused the delicacies of Humphrey Monmouth's table.

But persecution was waxing hot, and while those around him were being condemned merely for reading portions of the word of God, it was not likely that he would long escape who was translating the whole Bible. "Alas," he sighed, "is there no place where I can translate the Bible? It is not the bishop's house alone that is closed against me, but all England." The complaint was but too just, and within a few days of quitting Humphrey Monmouth's sheltering roof, Tyndal was on his way to Germany.*

{*Humphrey Monmouth was afterwards imprisoned in the Tower for sheltering the reformer, and only escaped the forfeiture of his goods and other heavy penalties, by some dexterous excuses and a degrading abjuration.}

On arriving in that country he called upon several of the reformers, and then passed into Saxony, where he had a conference with Luther; and having continued in those parts a certain season he proceeded to the Netherlands, and finally took up his abode in Antwerp. Others have traced his progress first to Hamburg, and thence to Cologne, to which city he was followed by his busy enemy Cochlaeus, who is said to have made the printers drunk, in order to get from them the secret of his work. Finding himself in danger here, he moved on to Worms, and there completed the first portion of his work, the translation of the New Testament. In the spring of 1526, copies of the translation had reached England, and were being circulated far and wide. The Romish priests in England were now in somewhat evil case, and began to ask each other what was to be done. The foundations of the Papacy were being sapped, and the whole fabric seemed in danger of a collapse. To condemn the book was easy enough, and this was presently done, but to purge the country of the new doctrines which it so clearly taught, and to prevent the influx of further copies, was quite another matter. It was useless for Henry to storm, and for Tonstall to preach it down; the Book had got a hold of people's hearts and consciences, as well as of their minds, and neither the king's clamour nor the bishop's sermons could destroy its influence. Copies of the translation were publicly burnt at Oxford, Cambridge, and London; and in some instances not only the books, but the readers of them were committed to the flames: yet the work went on just the same, for God was in it.

Meanwhile, Tyndal was busy upon the Old Testament, and by the year 1528 had finished the Pentateuch; but while on his way to Hamburg to get it printed he suffered shipwreck, and the MS. was lost. He continued his journey directly he was able, however, and on reaching Hamburg recommenced his arduous task, being now assisted by his brother reformer, Miles Coverdale, whose own translation of the scriptures was published a few years later.

But a period was soon to be put to the labours of the brave reformer, and a martyr's crown had been decreed to him. While at Antwerp, and lodging in the house of an Englishman named Pointz, he was betrayed into the hands of the papists by one who had shared his confidence, and after languishing in prison eighteen months (during which time he was instrumental in the conversion of the gaoler, and others of the gaoler's household) he was condemned to the stake. It was his lot to be strangled before being burned; and the sentence was carried out in the town of Vilvorden A.D. 1536. His last words, uttered with a loud voice, were a prayer for his benighted country — "Lord! open the eyes of the King of England."

But Tyndal was not the only Englishman of exceptional learning and ability, who laboured for the public good during these troublous times. What he was doing in a silent way as a translator of the scriptures, Dr. Latimer of Cambridge was doing in a more public manner by his sermons. Indeed the two men, taken together, may be said to represent the Luther of the English Reformation.

Hugh Latimer was the son of a farmer, and was born at Thurcaston, in the county of Leicester, in the year 1491. His remarkable precocity, added to a sharp and ready wit, induced his father to send him to the University, and he was received at Cambridge in the same year that Luther entered the Augustine convent. Some four years later, his mind received a serious bent, and the gay and witty student became an intensely devoted and superstitious disciple of the Romish Church. About the same time he was made a fellow of Clare Hall, and applied himself to the study of the classics with considerable diligence. Later on, he began the study of divinity, and wasted many precious hours poring over the works of Duns Scotus, Aquinas, and other learned doctors of the Middle Ages; whose Summa Theologiae, Commentaries on Aristotle, and such like metaphysical abstractions, he was wise enough to put aside in after years as useless and lumbersome. He had meanwhile taken his Master's degree, and was now, to use his own words, "as obstinate a papist as any in England." His zeal against the new doctrines which were being publicly taught in one of the Halls by Master Stafford, expressed itself in witty sarcasms and biting orations, and so delighted the clergy that they conferred upon him the dignity of cross-bearer to the University. In truth, as the fame of his preaching continued to spread, the prelates and friars began to rub their hands, and to stimulate one another with the thought that, even Luther had found his match at last.

But they were giving expression to their thoughts too soon. In the University with Master Latimer was one of quite another way of thinking, a scholar, named Thomas Bilney, who watched with not less interest, though with motives altogether different, the movements of the witty and zealous preacher. "Ah!" sighed Bilney, "if I could only win this eloquent priest to our side, that would indeed be a triumph for the cause! If I could only lead him to the Saviour's feet, a revival of true religion would certainly follow!" This was a consummation devoutly to be wished, but how was it to be brought about? Humanly speaking, the task was impossible; but Bilney was a man of faith, and he felt that this was a time when faith should be in exercise.

One day Master Latimer, in his character of priestly confessor, was waited upon in his room by a penitent upon whom he gazed in no little astonishment. It was Master Bilney."What is this?" thought the priest, "Bilney here! The heretic confessing to the catholic — this is strange. But maybe my Latin sermon against Melanchthon has convinced him of his error, and he has come to seek restoration to the communion of the Church!" While he was thus reasoning, Bilney began to pour into the confessor's ears the artless story of his own conversion to God; and the words, applied by the Holy Ghost, went home to the heart and conscience of the unsuspecting priest. Then and there he surrendered himself to God; and, abandoning from that time the specious divinity of the schools, he became not only an earnest student of the true divinity, but a teacher of the reformed doctrines. In the words of Foxe, "He was not satisfied with his own conversion only, but, like a true disciple of the blessed Samaritan, pitied the misery of others, and therefore became both a public preacher, and also a private instructor to the rest of his brethren within the University, for the space of three years, spending his time partly in the Latin tongue among the learned, and partly amongst the simple people in the English language."

But his plain preaching and ruthless exposures of the Romish fallacies were not likely to be relished by the proud doctors of the University, or the self-righteous priests and friars; and ere long their wrath began to shew itself in covert threats and passionate invectives. Yet Latimer was not the man to be cowed by threats or disconcerted by clamour, and he went on preaching with all boldness. His caustic wit, lively sallies, and, above all, the deep earnestness of his manner, overcame all opposition, while his heart was continually cheered by the most signal proofs of the divine blessing. Long after he had left the University, there was a saying current in those parts:

"When Master Stafford read,

And Master Latimer preached,

Then was Cambridge blessed."

After awhile, the ordinary of Cambridge (the Bishop of Ely) tried softer measures with the intrepid preacher, but with no greater success. He complimented him on his wonderful gifts, declared himself ready to kiss his feet, and then advised him, as a sure way to put down heresy, to preach against Luther. Latimer, who had too much common sense to be deceived by such evident flattery, returned, "If Luther preaches the word of God, I cannot oppose him. But if he teaches the contrary, I am ready to attack him." "Well, well, Master Latimer," said the bishop, "I perceive that you smell somewhat of the pan. One day or another you will repent of that merchandise."

Abuses, threats, and honeyed speeches having failed, the bishop now turned from words to deeds, and closed the pulpits of the University against the preacher. But Latimer had not long to wait before another door was opened to him, and Robert Barnes, the prior of the Augustinian friars at Cambridge, whose heart the Lord had touched, invited him to preach in the church belonging to that order. Later still, he was cited to appear before Wolsey, to answer to a charge of heresy; but the hand of an overruling Providence was again seen, and the event only turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel. Contrary to all expectations, Latimer was acquitted; and the inhibition of the bishop of Ely was overruled.

About the Christmas of 1529 he delivered his famous Sermons on the Card, which roused much discussion, and were used to the enlightening of many souls. "I promise you," he said, in the course of his second sermon on this subject, "if you build a hundred churches, give as much as you can make to gilding of saints, and honouring of the church; and if thou go as many pilgrimages as thy body can well suffer, and offer as great candles as oaks; if thou leave the works of mercy and the commandments undone, these works shall nothing avail thee." Referring to the Magdalene in the Pharisee's house, and the Lord's reply to Simon's bickerings, he said, "So this proud Pharisee had an answer to delay his pride: and think you not but that there be amongst us a great number of these proud Pharisees, which think themselves worthy to bid Christ to dinner; which will perk, and presume to sit by Christ in the church, and have a disdain for this poor woman Magdalene, their poor neighbour, with a high, disdainous, and solemn countenance? And being always desirous of climbing highest in the church, reckoning themselves more worthy to sit there than another, I fear me poor Magdalene under the board, and in the belfrey, hath more forgiven of Christ than they have; for it is like that those Pharisees do less know themselves and their offences, whereby they less love God, and so they be less forgiven."

The controversy which these sermons revived was stopped by a letter from the king's almoner, in which the contending parties were bound over to silence until the king's pleasure should be known. But the king's pleasure was that Latimer should go on preaching. He had been meanwhile informed that the eloquent gospeller had favoured his cause in the question of the divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and that was a sure way to the royal favour. In the following year, we find him preaching before the court at Windsor, when the king was so pleased with his earnest, fearless eloquence, that he made him his chaplain. In the year 1531 a further mark of the royal favour was conferred upon him, and he was presented to the rectory of West Kington, in Wiltshire.

But the papists would not let him rest, and on being summoned before the bishop of London on a further charge of heresy, he was excommunicated, and thrown into prison. He makes some allusion to his examination before the bishop, in a sermon preached at Stamford in the year 1550, from which we may gather some curious facts concerning the honesty of his judges. "I was once," he says, "in examination before five or six bishops, where I had much vexation: every week I came thrice to examinations, and many snares and traps were laid to entangle me. Now God knoweth that I was ignorant of the laws, but that God gave me answer and wisdom what I should speak; it was God indeed, for else I had never escaped them. At the last I was brought forth to be examined into a chamber hung with arras, where I was wont to be examined: but now at this time the chamber was somewhat altered. For whereas before there was wont ever to be a fire in the chimney, now the fire was taken away, and an arras hanged over the chimney, and the table stood near the chimney's end. There was amongst the bishops that examined me one with whom I had been very familiar, and took him for my great friend, an aged man, and he sat next the end of the table. Then, amongst all other questions, he put forth one, a very subtle and crafty one, such, indeed, as I could not think so great danger in. And when I should have made answer, 'I pray you, Master Latimer,' said one, 'speak out; I am very thick of hearing, and here be many that sit far off.' I marvelled at this, that I was bidden speak out, and began to suspect, and gave an ear to the chimney, and there I heard a pen writing in the chimney behind the cloth. They had appointed one there to write all mine answers; for they made sure that I should not start from them: there was no starting from them. God was my good Lord, and gave me answer, I could never else have escaped it."

So much for the rector of West Kington and his experience in the bishop of London's court. We will now leave him in his prison, while we take up with other matters.

Chapter 28.

Helps and Hindrances to the English Reformation.

A.D. 1529-1547.

In the year 1529, Wolsey having fallen into disgrace with Henry over the matter of the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, a way was made for Thomas Cranmer to the royal favour. Cranmer was a man of learning and godliness, but timid and vacillating — facts which even the most friendly of his contemporaries have allowed. "We desire nothing more for him," wrote bishop Hooper, "than a firm and manly spirit . . . . he is too fearful about what will happen to him." Though superior to Latimer in point of learning, he was behind him in loyalty to Christ; and it was a long time before he had resolution to extricate himself from the meshes of popery.

The cause of his rapid advancement was briefly this. In the course of conversation with Dr. Foxe, the king's almoner, he expressed an opinion that the best way to settle the vexed question of the divorce, was to try it out by the authority of the word of God; and this being repeated to Henry, he was highly pleased thereat, and sent for Dr. Cranmer. "Marry," said he, "I will surely speak with him, for I perceive that this man hath the sow by the right ear." So Cranmer being sent for, the king had conference with him upon the matter, and desired him to place his views in writing; which Cranmer did. After reading his book, the king demanded whether Cranmer would abide by what he had written before the bishop of Rome. "That will I do, by God's grace, if your majesty do but send me there," was the doctor's answer. "Marry," said the king, "I will send you to him in a sure embassage." The ability and tact which Cranmer displayed in the discharge of this difficult office delighted the king, and shortly after his return to England, he was promoted to the See of Canterbury.

It might have been expected that the progress of the Reformation would have been greatly accelerated by this event, but it was not. The facilities which Cranmer had for helping on the work, do not seem to have been at all commensurate with his high position; and the persecuting bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, had more influence with the king in all matters which affected the interests of the church, than the new primate. But it was evident that Cranmer was in love with many of the reformed doctrines; and we find him using his authority for the release of Latimer, whom he restored to his rectory. This, at least, was a seasonable act.

The burning and torture of heretics, however, went on as before; and two months after Cranmer's promotion, John Fryth,* an intimate friend of Tyndal, suffered at the stake, together with a tailor's apprentice, named Hewett, who had denied the corporal presence in the sacrament. It must not be supposed, however, that Cranmer was in any way a party to these brutal transactions; they were entirely due to the savage bigotry of Winchester, a man for whom the archbishop had a decided antipathy.

{*Note the miserable hypocrisy of his judges on this occasion. When his examination was concluded, they delivered him over to the secular authorities, "most earnestly requiring them, in the bowels of our Lord Jesus, that the execution and punishment worthily to be done on him, may be so moderate that the rigour thereof be not extreme, nor yet the gentleness too much mitigated:" in other words, that he might be roasted to death with all gentleness and moderation!}

There were numerous other victims to Gardiner's zeal, but we cannot refer to them individually: their records are in heaven, and none of them will be forgotten by God. The learned and gentle-hearted Bilney had already suffered, as also a monk of Edmundsbury, named Richard Byfield, who had been converted from Romanism through the preaching of Robert Barnes. But darker times were drawing near, and Gardiner had only begun his episcopal labours!

In the year 1540 appeared the famous Six Articles, which gave a new stimulus to the persecution. The ostensible cause of this wicked Act was to promote the unity of Henry's subjects on matters of religion, but in reality it was a subtle artifice on the part of the bishop of Winchester, to place the Protestants in opposition to the law; hence the breach was only widened. In these articles the blasphemous doctrine of transubstantiation was again insisted upon; the celibacy of the priests was commanded as a law of God; private masses were to be continued and admitted in the church; and auricular confession was declared to be expedient and necessary.

Of the multitude of persons who were persecuted on account of the Six Articles we cannot here speak particularly. The charges, in many cases, were paltry and ridiculous, recalling those of the Fitzjames persecution, twelve or thirteen years before. One was presented for denying his wife the use of beads in saying her prayers; another, for eating fish on a Friday before Lent; a third, for burying his wife without a dirge. An apprentice, named John Smith, was charged with saying, "that he would rather hear the crying of dogs than priests singing matins or evensong;" a citizen, named William Clinch, with speaking disrespectfully of the bishop of Winchester. Some were presented for walking in the time of consecrating mass with their caps on; some for turning their heads away; some for sitting at their doors when sermons were in the church; and some for despising our Lady and not praying to saints.

But of all those dealt with by the law, for nonconformity to the Six Articles, none, perhaps, is so deserving of notice as the martyr of God, Anne Kyme — better known as Anne Askew. She was the second daughter of Sir William Askew, of Kelsey in Lincolnshire, and the wife of one Kyme, a bigoted papist. It was not till after she had been some time married that the Lord opened her eyes, and shewed her by the light of His word the errors of popery: but, once enlightened, she shewed her sense of the favour conferred upon her, by the stedfastness and courage with which she proceeded to stand to her convictions.

The first persecution which she had to endure was from her own husband, whose hatred for the gospel at length so overcame all natural affection, that he drove her from his house. She now became attached to the court of queen Catherine Parr, who was herself a devoted Christian; and here her beauty, piety, and learning, attracted the notice, and afterwards aroused the hatred of Gardiner and his party. A watch was put upon her movements; but nothing whatever could be found on which to ground an accusation. Her manner of life was apparently without reproach. Strype informs us that, "A great papist of Wickham College, called Wadloe, a cursitor of the chancery, hot in his religion, and thinking not well of her life, got himself lodged at the next house to her. For what purpose need not be opened. But the conclusion was, that instead of speaking evil of her, he gave her praise to Sir Leonil Throgmorton, for the devoutest and godliest woman that ever he knew. For, said he, 'at midnight she beginneth to pray, and ceaseth not for many hours after, when I, and others are at sleep or at work.'"

But in the year 1545, a charge of heresy, grounded on the Six Articles, was brought against her, and she was thrown into prison. Her first examination before the inquisitors, of which she has left an interesting account, took place in the month of March of the same year, and occupied three sittings. First she was brought before the Quest (the inquisitors appointed to enforce the Six Articles) at Saddlers' hall; then before the Lord Mayor in his own court; and then before the bishop of London in the bishop's chamber. When asked if she did not believe that the sacrament over the altar was the very body of Christ, she said she would not "assoil * that vain question;" and when they tried to entrap her by asking how she understood Acts vii. 48 and xvii. 24, 25, she replied that she would not throw pearls before swine, for acorns were good enough." The Lord Mayor, thinking that he, also, would take a turn with her, approached her thus: —

{*Absolve that is, answer.}

"Thou foolish woman, sayest thou that the priests cannot make the body of Christ?"

Anne Askew. "I say so, my lord; for I have read that God made man; but that man can make God I never yet read, nor ever shall read it, as I suppose."

Lord Mayor. "No! thou foolish woman, after the words of consecration, is it not the Lord's body?"

Anne Askew. "No; it is but consecrated bread, or sacramental bread."

Lord Mayor. "What if a mouse eat it after the consecration? What shall become of the mouse? What sayest thou, foolish woman?"

Anne Askew. "What shall become of her? What think you, my lord?"

Lord Mayor. "I say that mouse is damned."

Anne Askew. "Alack, poor mouse!"

The lords by this time had had quite enough of the Lord Mayor's divinity, and, "perceiving," says Strype, "that some could not keep in their laughter, they proceeded to the butchery and slaughter they intended before they came thither."

Her first examination over, she was removed to her cell in Newgate, where she remained for nearly a year. Her next examination was before the king's council at Greenwich, where she received her meed of scorn and insult from the bishop of Winchester and his creatures, and was again sent back to Newgate. "After that," writes the martyr herself, "they willed me to have a priest, and then I smiled. Then they asked me if it were not good. I said I would confess my faults unto God, for I was sure that He would hear me with favour, and so we were condemned without a quest."

A day or two later she was removed to the Tower, where efforts were made by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley to induce her to implicate others of the court who were suspected of sharing her opinions; and because she would not do this, the wretched monster ordered her to be placed upon the rack. "And because I lay still," says the poor, patient sufferer, "and did not cry, my Lord Chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead.... But my Lord God, I thank His everlasting goodness, gave me grace to persevere, and will do, I hope, to the very end." After that, she was conveyed to a house, and laid on a couch, "with as weary and painful bones as ever had patient Job;" and while so lying, the Chancellor sent her word that if she would leave her opinions she would be well-cared for; but if not, she should be sent back to Newgate, and so be burned. But she sent him word again that she would rather die than break her faith; and in that answer her fate was sealed. Her own account of these proceedings concludes with these pathetic words: "The Lord open the eyes of their blind hearts, that the truth may take place. Farewell, dear friend, and pray, pray, pray."

Some time in the same year, the exact date not being given, the tragedy of Anne Askew was completed, and she was taken from her prison to be burned. Being too weak to walk, she was carried to Smithfield in a chair; and when brought to the stake was unable even to stand upon her feet. They therefore fastened her round the middle with a chain. An offer of the king's pardon was then held out to her if she would recant; but she answered that she had not come thither to deny her Lord and Master. A light was then placed to the faggots, and, the wood taking fire instantly, her sufferings were quickly terminated, and her spirit ascended to heaven in a chariot of flame. Three others suffered with her, whose names and callings are thus given: Nicholas Belenian, a priest; John Lascelles, a gentleman of the king's household; and John Adams, a tailor.

Unhappy times! Well might the cry go up, "How long, O Lord, how long?" and well might the anxious thought arise in many hearts, will the poor afflicted church in England never see a brighter day? Alas! that day seemed far distant, for darkness was still covering the land, and gross darkness the people. "Accept, my dear master," wrote bishop Hooper to Henry Bullinger, in the same year, "accept in few words the news from England. As far as true religion is concerned, idolatry is nowhere in greater vigour. Our king has destroyed the pope, but not popery; he has expelled all the monks and nuns, and pulled down their monasteries; he has caused all their possessions to be transferred into his exchequer; and yet they are bound, even the frail female sex, by the king's command, to perpetual chastity. England has at this time at least ten thousand nuns, not one of whom is allowed to marry. The impious Mass, the most shameful celibacy of the clergy, the invocation of saints, auricular confession, superstitious abstinence from meats, and purgatory, were never before held by the people in greater esteem than at the present time."* Tyndal, Bilney, Fryth, Barnes and others had delivered their testimony, and were gone. That testimony had been rejected, and the mouths of the witnesses had been stopped. "How were they entreated?" asks the devout Thomas Becon, Cranmer's secretary, "How were their painful labours regarded? They themselves were condemned and brent [That is, burnt.] as heretics, and their books condemned and brent as heretical. O most unworthy act! 'The time shall come,' saith Christ, 'that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God high good service.' Whether anything since that time hath chanced unto this realm worthy the name of a plague, let the godly-wise judge. If God hath deferred His punishment, or forgiven us these our wicked deeds, as I trust He hath, let us not therefore be proud and high-minded, but most humbly thank Him for His tender mercies, and beware of the like ungodly enterprises hereafter."**

{*Zurich Letters, 1st series, Parker Society.

**Becon's Works. The Flower of Godly Prayers, p. 11. Parker Society.}

Needful admonition! But, alas! it was only to be listened to for a moment, and then forgotten. A godly Josiah, in the person of Edward VI., was now to ascend the throne, but a Mary had yet to follow.

Chapter 29.

The Reformation under Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth..

A.D. 1547-1558.

Edward was now upon the throne. Though only nine years of age at the time of his accession, his life had already borne evidence of much true piety; and he was looked upon as a prince of great promise by all who favoured the protestant religion. He had, indeed, "the noble ambition to make his country the vanguard of the Reformation, and to offer a refuge to the fugitive professors of the new creed in his free island." Owing to his extreme youth, his uncle, the Duke of Somerset, a man of protestant principles, was appointed protector of the kingdom; and the news of his appointment revived the hopes and quickened the flagging energies of the Christians in England. A protestant king, and a protestant protector what more could the friends of the English Reformation desire than this?

The first use that Somerset made of his authority was towards abolishing the obnoxious Six Articles — that "six-headed hydra," as Fox quaintly calls it, which had already devoured so many men. When these had been taken away, he directed his attention to other needed reforms: the sacrifice of the Mass was forbidden; all prohibitions which had been placed upon the reading of the scriptures were withdrawn, and such persons as had been expelled the country in Henry's reign on account of their religion were granted full permission to return. Many of the bishops, too, were ejected from their Sees, in order to make way for more competent men; a change that was greatly needed, owing to the indolence and pride of too many of Henry's prelates. As for Bonner, the persecuting bishop of London, he was not only deprived of his bishopric, but, being found guilty of contempt and misdemeanour, was cast into prison. This was also the lot of the bishops of Winchester and Durham, Gardiner and Tonstall.

In the universities the influence of the protector's government was also felt; and while Oxford was profiting by the wise and godly instructions of Peter Martyr (an Italian reformer who had been invited over by the University), Cambridge was privileged in the possession of two such men as Martin Bucer and Paul Phagius, also foreigners.

Furthermore, commissioners were appointed by the King's council to visit all the dioceses throughout the country, for the purpose of redressing abuses, and of reporting upon the state of each bishopric. These were divided into parties, each party being provided with two preachers, who explained the doctrines of the Reformation to the people, and preached the gospel to them in a language they could readily understand.

In the midst of these salutary changes and reforms, a cloud appeared above the spiritual horizon, and alarming rumours began to be circulated relative to the young king's health. To increase the uneasiness of the Protestants, the protector himself (who, if we except Cranmer, was the moving spirit during this period of the Reformation), was overthrown by the political faction of the Duke of Northumberland, and sent to the scaffold. The Seymours, however, upon whom the responsibilities of government now devolved, were equally in favour of the Reformation, and the protestant bishops received every encouragement from the State in the prosecution of their arduous labours. Yet the cloud still hovered about the throne: the evil rumours about the king's health were still kept afloat; and the protestants daily grew more anxious. Before the new government had been in power a twelvemonth, these rumours were more than verified; and a new epoch in the history of the English Reformation had been reached. Edward had passed away, and Mary had ascended the throne of England.

The outlook at this point was far from pleasant. Mary was a bigoted catholic; and that was not a very promising fact for the protestants: moreover, she was a daughter of Catherine of Aragon, of whose divorce from Henry, Cranmer had approved, and that was no very cheering thought for the ecclesiastical head of Protestantism in this country. Mary had no kindly feelings towards the doctrines which Cranmer had been so assiduously promulgating during the reign of her brother and still less had she any kindly feelings towards the primate himself, whom, indeed, she looked upon as her arch-enemy. During the young king's reign she had requested permission to hear Mass in her own house, but Edward had refused; and now, on Cranmer's devoted head, the consequences of this refusal were to fall. True, he had counselled the king to grant the request, but Mary either ignored this fact, or was ignorant of it; and nothing would now appease her indignation but Cranmer's blood. As a queen, she hated him because of his reforming measures; as a catholic, because of the restraints of a religious kind which he was supposed to have put upon her in the previous reign; and, above all, as a woman, because of his decision in the great divorce question, by which she had been pronounced illegitimate.

For the first few months of her reign, however, the queen dissembled her true feelings; and in order to establish her position on the throne, promised toleration. The Protestants were not to be molested either in the profession or practice of their religion, nor was any compulsion to be used in matters of faith: the catholic was to refrain from the offensive term "heretic" when speaking of a Protestant, and the Protestant was to eschew the use of the word "papist" when speaking of his catholic neighbours. But Cardinal Pole was at the queen's elbow, and Gardiner and Bonner were waiting by to drop their poison into the queen's ear, and it was scarcely possible under such circumstances that this state of neutrality should continue.

The people, too, had not yet sufficiently understood the benefits which a thorough Reformation would bring to them; for the partial work in Henry's reign had been deprived of the popular sympathy by the king's changeful and autocratic measures, and the work in Edward's reign had had no time to take root. Hence when parliament assembled, one of its first and principal acts was to abolish the religious innovations which Cranmer and Somerset had been foremost in introducing, and to restore public worship on the old basis. As an immediate consequence thousands of married clergymen were driven from their offices, and, with their wives and children, were reduced to beggary.

The persecutions were not long in following. John Rogers, prebend of St. Paul's, was the first martyr. He was imprisoned for a time in his own house, but afterwards in Newgate, where he had to herd with common criminals — murderers, thieves, and the like until his trial came on. The conduct of his judges at his first examination was unseemly and turbulent, indeed, the judges at Huss's trial could scarcely have behaved worse. Their remarks were characterised by coarseness and levity; and more than once they gave way to fits of laughter; while the lord Chancellor, bishop Gardiner, did not consider it beneath his dignity to indulge in flouts and jeers. After three examinations in the chancellor's court, where he bore himself with great modesty and patience, Rogers was declared contumacious, and handed over to the secular power to be burnt. Before leaving the court he turned towards the Chancellor, and begged leave to make a last request. On being told to name the request, he said:

"That my poor wife, being a stranger, may come and speak with me as long as I live, for she hath ten children that are hers and mine, and I would somewhat counsel her, what were best for her to do."

The Chancellor refused. "She is not thy wife," he added.

"Yes, my lord," said Rogers, "and has been these eighteen years."

"Should I grant her to be thy wife?" asked the bishop.

"Choose you," answered Rogers; "whether you will or not, she shall be so, nevertheless."

"She shall not come at thee," said Gardiner emphatically.

"Then I have tried out all your charity," returned the martyr; "you make yourself highly displeased with the matrimony of priests, but you maintain open concubinage."

Gardiner was confounded, and could say nothing: and with this they separated.

A few days later, Rogers was taken to bishop Bonner to be degraded, and a similar incident occurred. Rogers craved that he might speak a few words to his wife before he was burned: but the request was denied! "Then," said he, "you declare what your charity is." The faithful martyr was burned at Smithfield, and met his death with christian fortitude.

The martyrdoms now grew frequent, and Gardiner and Bonner had soon as much work of this kind as they could do. Sanders, Hooper, Taylor, Farrar, all suffered in turn, with others of less note in man's eyes, though not less precious in the sight of God. A youth, named William Hunter, was one of these. Bonner offered to make him a free man and to present him with forty pounds, if he would abjure his opinions; nay, he even promised him a stewardship in his own household if he would agree to these conditions, but Hunter refused.

"I thank you for your great offers," said the youth, "notwithstanding, my lord, if you cannot persuade my conscience by scripture, I cannot find in my heart to turn from God for the love of the world, for I count all worldly things but loss and dung, in respect of the love of Christ." Hunter was burned at Smithfield, and was not behind the other martyrs in faith and constancy.

In 1555 appeared a popish primer, called "Our Lady's Matins," which was introduced into the schools, in the hope that by implanting the doctrines of Rome in the mind at an early age, they might take root more deeply, and thus impede effectually the growth of the new doctrines. A glance through the book is sufficient to shew the foolishness and blasphemy of its contents. The first lesson commences:

"Holy Mary; mother most pure of virgins all;

Mother and daughter of the King celestial,

So comfort us in our desolation,

That by thy prayers and special mediation,

We enjoy the reward of thy heavenly reign."

In another lesson Thomas a Becket is thus alluded to:

"By the blood of Thomas, which he for Thee did spend,

Make us, Christ, to climb, whither Thomas did ascend."

In other lessons prayers are offered up in the name of John the Baptist, the apostles, St. Lawrence, and Mary Magdalene; while the reference to St. Nicholas runs thus: "O God, which hast glorified blessed Nicholas, Thy holy bishop, with innumerable miracles, grant, we beseech thee, that by his merits and prayers we may be delivered from the fire of hell!" What refinement of wickedness thus to poison the minds of children, by teaching as the truth of God these blasphemous versicles and prayers!

Adult catholics were permitted to read, "The Psalter of our Lady," compiled by the "seraphical doctor St. Bonaventura," bishop of Albano and cardinal of Rome. This Psalter was nothing more than a parody on the Psalms of David from which the name of the Lord had been eliminated, and the name of the Virgin printed in its place. Thus in the seventh Psalm we read "O my Lady, in thee will I put my trust; deliver me from mine enemies, O Lady:" in the forty-fifth, "My heart is inditing a good matter, O Lady," etc. The fifty-first commences: "Have mercy upon me, O Lady, which art called the Mother of Mercy, and in the bowels of thy great compassion cleanse me from mine iniquities." The hundred and tenth psalm is even more dreadful: "The Lord said unto our Lady, 'Sit here, my Mother, on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool'!"

Seeing that blasphemy so daring was countenanced and encouraged by the Romish priests in England, the reader will scarcely be surprised to hear of any other wickedness from the same quarter. The burning or persecution of a few hundred Protestants for holding contrary views is only a natural result. In the same year that the popish primer was published, the venerable Latimer suffered martyrdom, being then in his sixty-fourth year. Truly, of him it could be said, that he had fought a good fight and had kept the faith, for none had been more true to his convictions, or more fearless in stating them, than he had been. His fellow-martyr, Ridley, was a younger man, but he had already become celebrated as one of the ablest champions of the Reformation; and, perhaps, in learning and solidity of judgment he was superior to Latimer. These two faithful servants of Christ were chained together, at the same stake; and as the fire burned around them, encouraged each other in the Lord. Ridley suffered the most, as the faggots which were used for his fire were green; and he had every need of the encouragement of his brother-martyr. "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley," said Latimer, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." For some time after Latimer had ceased to speak, Ridley was heard crying in his agony, "I cannot burn — Let the fire come unto me — I cannot burn!" But at last the flames reached some gunpowder which had been fastened about his neck, and he was mercifully delivered from his sufferings.

Then came Cranmer's turn, but not with the attendant glories of the other martyrdoms. Though a Christian, and, in the end, a martyr, he was timid and unstable almost to the last; and in a moment of strong temptation, his courage deserted him, and he fell. He was an old man, and, in the ordinary course of nature, could scarcely have lived more than a few years, yet he seemed to cling to life. It was when his examination was over and sentence had been pronounced, that he began to waver; and at this point, being borne down by the flattering persuasions of his enemies and the fears of torture in the flames, he put forth his hand to sign a recantation. This recantation, says Foxe, "was no sooner written, than the doctors and prelates without delay carried it to be printed, and sent abroad in all men's hands. The queen, having now got a time to revenge her old grief, received his recantation very gladly; but of her purpose to put him to death she would not relent."

The state of the poor archbishop at this point may be imagined. His shameful and utter denial of the faith had destroyed his peace of mind, and at the same time had brought no mitigation of his sentence. He was indeed most miserable. But Cranmer was still an object of God's love, and there was restoring grace to be had. He was one of Christ's sheep, and though he had wandered, he was still a member of the flock, loved with a love that even failure could not dim. Presently the gracious motions of the Spirit began once more to be felt in his heart, leading him to confess the failure to God; and with that his peace of mind returned to him, and a strength that was not his own took possession of his soul. The desire for life passed away; and he began to wait with resignation and chastened joy, the moment when God should call him to Himself.

On the 21st of March 1556 he was brought from prison to St. Mary's Church, Oxford, in order to be present at his funeral sermon, which was to be preached by Dr. Cole, a zealous papist. The church was densely crowded, as it was expected that the archbishop would be called upon to read his recantation, and the moment was one of solemn interest. The papists were there to witness the triumph of their religion; the protestants, to assure their sad hearts of the truth of the disastrous news about their archbishop. As Dr. Cole proceeded with his sermon Cranmer was seen frequently to shed tears, and once or twice he turned and lifted his hands to heaven as if in prayer. Many of the people were also melted to tears, and expressed the liveliest pity and commiseration.

The sermon finished, the congregation was about to disperse, when Dr. Cole requested all present to wait a little longer. "Brethren," he said, "lest any man should doubt of this man's earnest conversion and repentance, you shall hear him speak before you; and therefore I pray you, Master Cranmer, that you will now perform what you promised not long ago; namely, that you would openly express the true and undoubted profession of your faith, that you may take away all suspicion from men, and that all men may understand you are a catholic indeed."

"I will do it, and that with a good will," said the archbishop, uncovering his head as he spoke; and then, after waiting a moment or two, he rose to his feet, and began to address the people. The first part of his discourse, which was broken by a most pathetic prayer, was a solemn word upon the vanity of human life, and the deceitfulness of riches: the confession was left for the close. As the address proceeded papists and protestants grew still and attentive, and no interruptions were offered. At last the confession was reached, and an intense, hushed feeling of excitement seemed to fall upon the assembled multitude. "And now," said Cranmer, "I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my conscience, more than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now here I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be, and that is, all such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation; wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished for it: for when I come to the fire it shall be first burned.

"And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.

"And as for the sacrament, I believe, as I have taught in my book against the bishop of Winchester, which book teacheth so true a doctrine of the sacrament, that it will stand at the last day before the judgment of God, when the papistical doctrine shall be ashamed to shew her face."

A scene of indescribable confusion ensued. The Protestants wept tears of thankfulness and joy, and the papists could only gnash their teeth. As for Dr. Cole, he had heard quite enough of the confession, and when the archbishop presently began to develop his remarks on the papacy and the sacrament, he exclaimed, "Stop the heretic's mouth and take him away." Grace had triumphed, and the discomfiture of the catholics was complete.

On being brought to the place of his martyrdom, Cranmer divested himself of his outer garments, and suffered himself to be bound to the stake by an iron chain. The pile was then lighted, and, as the fire burst forth around him, he thrust his right hand into the flames (the hand which had signed the recantation) and was heard to say repeatedly, "This unworthy right hand — this unworthy right hand." Then he repeated several times the cry of Stephen, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit;" and so expired.

Two hundred and twenty-eight persons* in all, were sacrificed on the altar of their faith in this country during Mary's reign, five of whom were bishops, twenty-one clergymen, eight gentlemen, eighty-four tradesmen, a hundred husbandmen, labourers and servants, fifty-four women, and four children. In addition to these were many who suffered in other ways, by torture and imprisonment: and the reformer, Miles Coverdale, who retired to the Continent during the persecution, informs us that, "Some were thrown into dungeons, ugsome holes, dark, loathsome, and stinking corners. Others lay in fetters and chains, and loaded with so many irons they could scarcely stir. Some were tied in the stocks with their heels upwards, others had their legs in the stocks, and their necks chained to the wall with iron bands, having neither stone nor stool to sit upon to ease their wearied bodies. Some stood in Skevington's gyves, which were most painful engines of iron, with their bodies bent double; others were whipped and scourged, beaten with rods and buffetted with fists. Some had their hands burned with a candle, and others were miserably famished and starved."

{*Some have swelled the number to 400.}

Mary died on the 17th of November, 1558, within a few moments of her cousin and chief adviser, Cardinal Pole, and her sister Elizabeth succeeded her on the throne. No two women could have borne less resemblance to each other; and few, perhaps, have been so completely misunderstood. Protestants have talked much of Elizabeth, and have never wearied of branding with contumely the memory of Mary; so that the expressions, "Good Queen Bess" and "Bloody Mary" have become proverbial amongst us. But say what we will, Mary was the nobler woman of the two. Whatever charges of blood-guiltiness she may have incurred, she acted with a conscience — and this is more than can be said of her sister. True, she was cruel, but her very cruelty was the result of strong religious convictions. She persecuted the Protestants, but only because she thought she was doing God service. With Saul of Tarsus she might have said, "I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." Elizabeth, however, had no such thoughts. History has shewn her to us as a woman without a heart: and as for her character what was it? She was void of modesty and reserve; cold and calculating in all her dealings, and full of dissimulation. Self-confidence was the secret of her courage, and her intellectual attainments were marred by excessive vanity. She could be everything to everybody as occasion required; and her heart was in nothing. Though she mixed in all the pleasures of a gay court, and was luxurious in matters of dress, her purpose seemed merely to dazzle those who came to court her favour; for her manner of life in private was simple and frugal in the extreme. Cool, dispassionate, and stoical hating none, and loving none she was, as we have said, a queen without a heart, and almost without a conscience.

And yet, it cannot be denied that her accession to the throne of England was the signal for the restoration of Protestantism; and though, by reason of her vanity, she was dangerously partial to much of the ritual of the Romish Church, and consented to the persecution of the Puritans, the Reformation was undoubtedly established in England during her reign, and upon a firmer and broader basis than it had ever been.

Chapter 30.

The Reformation in Scotland and Ireland.

A.D. 1494-1558.

The Reformation in Scotland began somewhat early, but not before there was a need for it. The wealth of the ecclesiastical orders had become enormous; and their greed and licentiousness were equalled only by their wealth. The lives of the people were rendered burdensome by the exactions of the priests, who, not content with making their demands upon the living, even besieged the beds of the dying, and there pursued their extortions with impunity. The kingdom swarmed with monks of every order, Carmelites, Carthusians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jacobins with nuns of St. Clare, of St. Austin, and of St. Scholasticus; while indolent friars, white, black, and grey, wandered through the country, leaving traces of their debaucheries wherever they set foot. The Scotch, with their shrewdness, industry, and love of plain living, were necessarily in a favourable condition to be roused by these enormities, and this will account for the early growth of the Reformation in this country.

So far back as the year 1494 there was a movement in the right direction, and the Lollards, who were found in the country in some numbers, began to state their views on the subject of image-worship, the Mass, and the licentious lives of the prelates with considerable freedom. This of course soon awoke a persecution, and thirty persons of both sexes, who held the doctrines of Wickliffe, were arrested and brought up for examination, the king himself presiding at their trial. James, however, was so much amused by the humour and tact with which one of their number, Adam Reid, of Barskimming, answered the questions of his examiners, that he merely dismissed them with an admonition: nor were there any further prosecutions for heresy during his reign.

For the next thirty years nothing very memorable occurred in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland, but at the end of that period the attention of the prelates was drawn towards a youth of royal lineage, a kinsman of James V., who had been speaking in bold and severe terms of the worldliness and immorality of the priestly order. This interesting youth was Patrick Hamilton, whose name now heads the roll of Scotland's martyrs, and whose memory will always be revered by the friends of the Reformation. His interest having been awakened by what he had heard of the reform work in other countries, he determined to visit the chief centres of the Reformation, and to that end, set out for the Continent in the year 1526. He visited Luther and Melanchthon, and received a hearty welcome from both, profiting much by their godly and wise counsels. Afterwards he proceeded to the university of Marburg, and placed himself under the tuition of the celebrated Benedictine, Francis Lambert; but the desire to communicate to his countrymen the truths which he had been drinking in at the feet of the great reformers, tended to shorten his stay, and he returned to his native land in the year 1528.

The rumour of his return overjoyed the people, and filled the minds of the priests with the gloomiest apprehensions. He was beloved by the one party for the very reasons that he was hated by the other. His noble birth, his learning, his youthful appearance, and above all his earnest piety, while it won the people, repelled the priests, and set them plotting his destruction. Having decoyed him to St. Andrews, under the pretence of holding a free conference, they employed a prior of the Black Friars to draw from him, in private, a statement of his views; and when this had been done, he was arrested. The next day he was brought before a full council of prelates and doctors, and having been convicted of "maintaining and propagating heretical opinions," was hurriedly condemned to the stake. And this was the sequel to a Romish free conference!

When the brave youth was brought to the scene of his martyrdom, he divested himself of his cloak, and handed it to a faithful servant who stood by, saying, "This stuff will not help me in the fire, and will profit thee. After this you can receive from me no more good, but the example of my death, which, I pray you, keep in mind. For albeit it be bitter to the flesh, and fearful in man's judgment, yet it is the entrance into eternal life, which none shall possess that denies Christ Jesus before this wicked generation." When the treacherous prior, whose pretended sympathy had led the noble martyr to open his heart to him, drew near the stake, and exhorted him to recant, Hamilton reproved him for his deceit, and reminded him of the judgment-seat of Christ, to which he now appealed, and before which they would both assuredly have to stand hereafter. His last words were, "How long, O Lord, shall darkness cover this realm? How long wilt Thou suffer this tyranny of man? Lord Jesus receive my spirit!"

Perchance the reader would like to learn somewhat further concerning those heretical doctrines for which Patrick Hamilton was condemned. Here, then, is a fragment from his "Treatise on the Law and the Gospel," a work which was much circulated after his death. "The law sheweth us our sin; the gospel sheweth us a remedy for it. The law sheweth us our condemnation; the gospel sheweth us our redemption. The law is the word of wrath; the gospel is the word of grace. The law is the word of despair; the gospel is the word of comfort. The law is the word of unrest; the gospel is the word of peace. The law saith, Pay thy debt; the gospel saith, Christ hath paid it. The law saith, Thou art a sinner, despair, and thou shalt be damned; the gospel saith, Thy sins are forgiven thee, be of good comfort, thou shalt be saved. The law saith, The Father of heaven is angry with thee; the gospel saith, Christ has pacified Him with His blood. The law saith, Where is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction? The gospel saith, Christ is thy righteousness, thy goodness, and satisfaction. The law saith, Thou art bound and obliged to me, to the devil, and to hell; the gospel saith, Christ has delivered thee from them all." If this be heresy, would that there were more of it in the church and in the world to-day!

The death of Patrick Hamilton was a triumph for the Reformation, for it set people thinking, and led numbers, who might otherwise have remained in darkness, to renounce popery. Even many of the Friars began preaching the reformed doctrines; and when matters presently assumed a more serious aspect, and the Archbishop of St. Andrews, James Beaton, thought it advisable to threaten the burning of a few more of the heretics, some one was heard to remark, "My lord, let him be burned in a hollow; for the reek (smoke) of Patrick Hamilton's fire hath infected as many as it blew upon."

By degrees several works of the continental reformers found their way to Scotland, and not a few copies of Tyndal's translation of the New Testament, "one copy of which usually supplied several families. At the dead hour of night, while others were asleep, they assembled in one house. The sacred volume was brought from its concealment, and while one read, the rest listened with mute attention. In this way the knowledge of the scriptures was diffused, at a period when it does not appear that there were many public preachers of the truth in Scotland."

Owing to the persecuting zeal of Archbishop Beaton, there were several martyrdoms between the years 1534 and 1539; but it was not till after the death of the Archbishop, that the animosity of the clerical party was seen at its worst. He was succeeded in office by his nephew, the Cardinal Beaton of evil fame, and his cruelty and bigotry soon gained for him a high place among the champions of papal Rome. No measures were too bloody, no schemes too diabolical for this man; he hesitated at nothing that offered any prospect of the overthrow of the Scotch Reformation. In the year 1543 five men and a woman were brought before him, charged with holding the reformed doctrines. The woman, who was wife to one of the men, had but recently been delivered of a child, and the only evidence against her was that she had refused to supplicate the Virgin during the pangs of travail. Yet the Cardinal condemned her to death with the rest, and then refused her pathetic appeal to die with her husband. To consummate the tragedy he was hanged before her eyes. Her unweaned babe was then torn from her bosom, and the poor woman was hurried by her executioners to a pool of water, where she was drowned.

The Cardinal then proceeded on his circuit, leaving the bloody traces of his progress throughout Angus and Mearns; in which latter district he was to stain his soul with the blood of a more distinguished victim. This was George Wishart, brother to the laird of Pitterow in Mearns, a man of eminently Christlike character. He is described as gentle, patient, and full of affection; and yet a man of fearless speech and unconquerable zeal. His preaching was with power, and so wrought upon his hearers, that they are said to have wept at his appeals, and trembled while he warned them of the wrath to come. The fame of his preaching soon reached the ears of the Cardinal, who, afraid at first to proceed in the usual public manner with his intended victim, hired a priest named Wigton to assassinate him. As Wishart was descending a flight of steps, his mild but searching eyes fell on the face of the priest, and, suspecting his design, he was able to grasp his hand and gain possession of the dagger before the blow was struck. The movement was unexpected, and the priest, filled with fear and remorse, threw himself at the reformer's feet and acknowledged his guilt. Meanwhile, the people crowded round with indignant exclamations, and were on the point of rushing upon the assassin, when Wishart, perceiving the man's danger, placed his arms around him, and said, "Whosoever troubles him, troubles me; for he has hurt me in nothing," and so saved his life.

This incident occurred in Dundee: afterwards Wishart went to Leith, and from thence to East Lothian, where he remained some time, preaching in the different towns and villages. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of John Knox, the future reformer of Scotland, who was then living as tutor in the family of the Douglas's of Longniddry. Knox at once publicly associated himself with the cause, and became sword-bearer to Wishart that is to say, stood at the head of the armed retainers, who guarded the person of the popular evangelist while he was travelling or preaching. Knox little thought how soon his new friend would be taken from him: but it was while Wishart was still in East Lothian that Cardinal Beaton, who watched his progress with the eyes of a fox, and the pertinacity of a blood-hound, at length by treachery got possession of his person. He was shortly afterwards arraigned before a council of prelates, and condemned to the flames.

The death of Wishart was like his life — Christlike and beautiful. The scene of his martyrdom was just outside the castle-gates of St. Andrews, a spot which had been chosen by the Cardinal himself, as he wished to feast his eyes on the dying agonies of the faithful evangelist. All things being in readiness, Wishart was brought to the place of execution, where he fell upon his knees, and prayed aloud, "O Thou Saviour of the world, have mercy on me! Father of heaven, I commend my spirit into Thy holy hands." This he repeated three times, and then, rising to his feet, addressed the people, exhorting them, in the most affecting manner, to give heed to the word of God. Even the stern executioner was overcome by this appeal, and falling at his feet, expressed his sorrow for the painful task that was committed to him. and requested to be forgiven. Wishart bade him draw near, and then kissed him on the cheek, saying, "Lo, here is a token that I forgive thee; my heart, do thine office." The peal of a trumpet presently announced that the moment of execution had arrived, and a light was placed to the faggots. With that the captain, who had charge of the execution, rode forward to the pile, and exhorted Wishart to be of good cheer; to which the martyr replied "This fire torments my body, but no way abates my spirit." Then, observing the Cardinal at one of the windows of the fore-tower of the castle, which overlooked the scene of torture, he exclaimed: "He who in such state from that high place feedeth his eyes with my torments, within few days shall be hanged out at the same window, to be seen with as much ignominy as he now leaneth there in his pride." He then expired.

These words proved to be prophetic; and within three months from the death of the brave evangelist, the Cardinal was surprised in his castle by a party of indignant nobles and gentlemen, one of whom, James Melville, stabbed him twice with his sword. The wretched man expired without any signs of repentance, exclaiming with his last breath, "I am a priest I am a priest! fie fie all is gone!" His dead body was then suspended from the same window at which he had watched the martyrdom of George Wishart.

Now that Wishart was gone, the eyes of the Scotch Protestants turned instinctively to Knox: but before the influence of the Reformer could be widely felt in the country, he was taken prisoner by the papists, and imprisoned in a French galley, where he suffered many hardships and indignities. On one occasion a beautifully painted figure of the Virgin was brought to him, and he was bidden to give it the kiss of adoration, but refused, declaring that all images were accursed. An attempt was then made to compel him to kiss it, by forcing the image to his lips; but Knox snatched it from the officer's hand and threw it into the water, saying, "Let our Lady now save herself; she is light enough, let her learn to swim." He was never afterwards troubled in this way.

The Reformer laboured for some time at the galleys, and then was liberated on the application of the English ambassadors, when he crossed to England, and resided nearly five years in this country. An offer of the bishopric of Rochester, which was made to him during this period, was declined, because he disapproved of the English liturgy, but he accepted the post of an itinerant evangelist, and his labours were greatly blessed in the northern counties. On the outbreak of the Marian persecution he retired to Geneva, where he made the acquaintance of Calvin; and a warm friendship sprang up between the two Reformers. Calvin was his senior by many years; indeed, had almost finished his course when Knox was beginning to preach; and his influence upon the mind of the Scotch preacher was great and lasting.

In the year 1555 Knox returned to his native land, and was gratified to find that the work had grown during his absence. Several of the nobility had embraced the reformed doctrines, among whom were Lord Lorne, Lord Erskine, Lord James Stewart, the Earl of Marischall, the Earl of Glencairn, John Erskine of Dun, and William Maitland of Lithington; and these nobles rallied round him, and much encouraged him by their private friendships, as well as by their public witness for the truth. After labouring during the winter of 1555-6 in Kyle, Cunningham, Angus-shire, and elsewhere, the continued and increasing animosity of the clergy, who were zealously plotting his destruction, rendered it expedient for him to withdraw from the country, and in June or July of the latter year, he retired a second time to Geneva, where he remained till the January of 1559.

During his absence the fires of persecution were kept burning, and an aged priest, named Walter Mill, who had embraced the reformed doctrines, was one of the victims of the papal malice. As no one could be found heartless enough to execute the sentence upon this martyr, the Archbishop of St. Andrews commanded one of his own domestics to perform the task, and the brutal sentence was carried out on the 28th of April, 1558. The venerable old man was faithful to the last, and delivered this testimony from amid the flames: "As for me, I am fourscore and two years old, and cannot live long by course of nature; but a hundred better shall rise out of the ashes of my bones. I trust in God, I shall be the last that shall suffer death in Scotland for this cause."

On May 2nd, 1559, Knox again returned to Scotland, brought back by the earnest solicitations of his friends. His presence was needed, as the people were in a ferment, and the country was threatened with civil war. Not that the preaching of the great reformer was at all likely to soothe the popular mind: indeed, it would seem that Knox both approved of the agitation, and advocated the destruction of the monasteries, since it was from him they learnt the party-cry, "Pull down the nests, and the rooks will flee away."

And yet, in spite of appearances, the reformer was no friend to lawlessness or disaffection. Writing from Dieppe at an earlier period to the Protestant lords of Scotland, he refers to rumours which had reached his ears, that 'contradiction and rebellion' were made to the authority by some in Scotland. "In which point," he adds, "my conscience will not suffer me to keep back from you my counsel, yea, my judgment and commandment, which I communicate with you in God's fear, and by the assurance of his truth; which is, that none of you that seek to promote the glory of Christ, do suddenly disobey, or displease the established authority in things lawful; neither yet, that ye assist or fortify such as, for their own particular cause and worldly promotion, would trouble the same." He who would write thus does not deserve the name, which some have endeavoured to fix upon him, of "lawless and seditious priest."

The activity of the papists increased with the news of the reformer's return, for they felt that a decisive moment was at hand, and that it would need all their scheming and ingenuity to secure a victory over so powerful a leader. The infamous Queen-regent, Mary of Guise, bent on the destruction of the Protestants, had directed all her attention to Perth, where the tumult was at its height; and, confident in her resources, could think of no defeat. It was a moment of peril for the Scotch Reformation. On the other hand, the presence of Knox revived the flagging energies of the Protestants, and his fiery eloquence did much to swell their ranks. They were also aided by troops and money from England, sent by order of Elizabeth, who sided with them partly from religious, but chiefly from political motives; for the Pope had declared her illegitimate, and had named Mary of Scotland to supplant her on the throne. The struggle lasted for about a year, but without any serious loss on either side, and victory then declared for the Protestants. Meanwhile the queen-dowager had been removed by death, and the nation — prepared by the preaching of Knox — was both in a condition and position to welcome the establishment of the Reformation. In the month of August, 1560, the parliament subscribed to a confession of faith drawn up by the reformer; "abolished the papal jurisdiction; prohibited, under certain penalties, the celebration of mass; and rescinded all the laws formerly made in support of the Roman Catholic Church, and against the reformed faith."

Even dark, popish Ireland was not unvisited by the light during the period which we have been considering; and in the reign of Henry VIII. a Protestant clergyman, named George Brown, who had formerly been an Augustine monk, was made Archbishop of Dublin, and received instructions from the King to suppress the Roman hierarchy in the Island. The efforts of the Archbishop to carry out the royal command were received with much opposition, and his life was frequently endangered by the malicious plottings of the Catholics; but in the year 1536, the Irish parliament assembled at Dublin, and agreed to the reception of the reformed doctrines.

The work, however, does not seem to have made much progress, and it excited so little anxiety among the papists during Mary's reign, that no measures were taken to suppress it, until shortly before her death. A commission was then drawn up, and intrusted to a Dr. Coles, who set out for Dublin the following day. Stopping at Chester on his journey, the innkeeper's wife heard him boast to the mayor of the town, that he had that in his valise "which would lash the heretics of Ireland," referring, of course, to his commission. The woman happened to be a Protestant, and moreover, had a brother in Dublin who had embraced the reformed doctrines, so, watching her opportunity, she quietly removed the commission from the bag, and left in its place a pack of cards, with the knave of clubs uppermost. When he got to Ireland, and opened his bag in the presence of the Council, which had assembled to listen to the commission, his proud vauntings gave place to astonishment and shame. But a Romish priest who was by, made light of the loss, and recommended the doctor to send to England for a fresh commission, adding, "and meanwhile let us shuffle the cards." The new decree was obtained, but before it reached the Irish metropolis, the queen was dead.

The reign of Elizabeth saw the policy of her sister's reign reversed, and shortly after her accession Protestantism became, by proclamation, the national religion.

*****

We have now completed the task which we proposed to ourselves in setting out, having written, according to our ability, a short history of the Christian Church, from the Apostolic Era to the Establishment of the Reformation: we must therefore leave it with the reader to discover, in the subsequent history of the Church, those developments which answer to the prophetic descriptions of the churches in Philadelphia and Laodicea. But we may add that, if our interpretations with regard to those which we have treated of (namely, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, and Sardis) be correct, the period of the Church's history must be very near its close. This thought is shared by many, and is supported by other scriptures than those which we have touched upon. Already there has been a mystic awakening throughout Christendom, and the hope of the Lord's return has been revived in many hearts. The cry has gone forth, "Behold the Bridegroom cometh!" and who will say that this awakening is not of God? The question only follows, What should be the attitude of soul of every child of God at such a moment? The question is a solemn one, and can only be answered by those who have been duly affected by its solemnity.

The End.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Persecution and Profession

Persecution and Profession:

Being Sketches of Early Church History to the Close of the Fifth Century.

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square.

Contents.

Part 1. Persecution.

Chapter 1.

Persecution: Why Christians were persecuted. Why called "Atheists." — Rome full of temples and altars. — Christianity aggressive. — The burning of Rome, charged on the Christians. — Persecution by Nero. — Testimony of Tacitus. — The Twelve Apostles

Chapter 2.

Insurrection of the Jews: Often revolted under the Romans. — The Jews at Caesarea. — Florus attacks Jerusalem. — Treachery of the Jews. — Massacre of the Jews at Caesarea. — Cestius attacks Jerusalem. — Great victory of the Jews over the Romans. — Prophecies relating to the

destruction of Jerusalem. — Fearful sights and great signs. — The cry of Jesus, son of Ananus. — Josephus. — Ruler — Prophet — With the Romans. — Destruction of Jerusalem. — The Jews divided into factions. — The siege led by Titus. — Determined resistance of the Jews. — Mode of attack by the Romans. — Severe famine in the city. — A woman eats her child. — The city taken. — Titus desires to save the temple. — It is burnt. — The city destroyed. — Great slaughter and numerous prisoners. — Prophecy fulfilled.

Chapter 3.

Further Persecutions. — The Romans attribute all calamities to the Christians. — Letter of Pliny to the Emperor Trajan. — Trajan's reply. — Ignatius. — Justin Martyr. — Polycarp. — Blandina. — Perpetua.

Chapter 4.

The Apostolic Fathers: Clement. — Polycarp. — Barnabas. — Ignatius. — Hermas. — None to be trusted as scripture.

Chapter 5.

Attacks on Christianity. — Celsus. — Porphyry. — The Oracle of Delphi. — Hierocles. — The Apologies. — Justin Martyr. — Minucius Felix. — Athenagoras. — Tertullian

Chapter 6.

The Catacombs. — How formed. — The testimony of the tablets. — A visitor's description.

Chapter 7.

Miracles and Signs. — Their existence in the early church. — Exorcists.

Chapter 8.

Offices in the Early Church. — Elders, Presbyters, and Bishops. — Undue exaltation of the bishops.

Chapter 9.

Customs in the Church. — Reception into the Church. — Catechumens. — Fidelis. — Audientes — Baptism. — Forms of Worship. — Meetings on Sunday. — The Lord's Supper. — Taken weekly. — Singing. — Collection for the poor. — Bread and wine sent to the sick. — Water mixed with the wine. — Abuses creeping in. — Love Feasts. — Superstitions in the Church. — The sign of the cross. — Clergy and laity. — The Lord's Supper and Absolution. — Letter of Dionysius. — Celibacy of the Clergy. — Hippolytus and Callistus.

Chapter 10.

Early Heresies. — What is heresy? — Gnosticism. — Arianism. — The Novatians. — The Lapsi.

Chapter 11.

Cyprian and the Assumptions of Rome. — How were the "lapsi" to be treated? — Rome struggles for supremacy.

Chapter 12.

The Later Persecutions. — Persecution of Decius. — The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. — Origen. — Valerian and Diocletian. — Galerius. — The oracles consulted. — The ten persecutions. — The address to the church at Smyrna.

Part 2. Profession.

Chapter 1.

Conversion of Constantine. — His vision. — Was he really a Christian?

Chapter 2.

The Council of Nice. — The Nicene creed. — The Arians condemned. Easter — How calculated — How kept

Chapter 3.

Athanasius and His Times. — The Arians in power. — Athanasius persecuted. — Death of Constantine. — Athanasius banished.

Chapter 4.

Ambrose: made a bishop suddenly. — Valens emperor in the East. — Eighty ministers burnt in a ship. — The Second General Council. — Ambrose rashly opposes Valentinian II. — Revolt at Thessalonica. — Massacre of the inhabitants. — Penance demanded of the emperor.

Chapter 5.

Chrysostom and His Times. — He finds being an advocate and a Christian inconsistent. — Chrysostom an ascetic. — His trick on his friend Basil. — His narrow escape. — He cannot crucify the flesh. — Made a presbyter and preaches. — The revolt at Antioch. — Made bishop of Constantinople by Eutropius. — Not liked by the clergy. — Popular with the bishops. — He aids Eudoxia in carrying relics to her new chapel. — Protects Eutropius when condemned to death. — He ventures to the Gothic camp. — The Tall Brethren. — Plots against Chrysostom. — He is deposed and banished. — The fright by an earthquake restores him. — Eudoxia's image condemned by Chrysostom. — Again he is deposed and banished. — His great usefulness in his long banishment, — Removed to a more severe climate. — His death.

Chapter 6. The Donatist Schism. — Their doctrine of separation from evil, good. — Their practice bad. — The Circumcelliones. — Augustine. — His works.

Chapter 7.

Pelagianism. — Pelagius condemned. — His doctrine. — Semi-Pelagianism

Chapter 8.

Monasticism. — St. Anthony. — Simon Stylites. — The Essenes. — Egyptians. — What led to Monasticism. — The Scriptures preserved and copied by Monks.

Chapter 9.

Christianity in Britain. — The Druids. — Their human sacrifices. — Christianity in England early. — Was Claudia a British Christian? — St. Patrick and Ireland. — Scotland.

Chapter 10.

Councils in the Church. — The General Councils: The first at Nice. — The second at Constantinople. — The third at Ephesus. — Eutyches condemned. — The Robbers' Meeting. — The fourth at Chalcedon. — The Nicene creed confirmed. — What Scripture for Councils. — What authority over Christians.

Chapter 11.

The Western Church. — Leo the Great, bishop of Rome. — Saves the city of Rome. — Defends the faith. — Manichaeism. — The Priscillianists. — Leo anxious for universal supremacy. — His conflict with Hilary of Arles. — His death.

Chapter 12.

Close of the Fifth Century. — Conflicts with the Arians. — The Monophysites. — The Henoticon. — The bishops of Rome and Constantinople excommunicate each other. — The professing church rent into parties. — The address to the church at Pergamos

Chapter 13.

The Bible for the Church — Translated into many languages.

Chapter 14.

Conclusion. — Review of the whole period.

Chapter 1.

Persecution.

To the lions! "Sacrifice, or to the lions!" were words often used in the courts of law in the early days of Christianity. Persons were not allowed to be Christians, and if such were discovered they were brought before the magistrate, and if they refused to sacrifice to the heathen gods, they were put to death.

For the amusement of the Romans, a number of lions were kept, to which criminals were cast. These amusements took place in a public building, in which there were thousands of spectators who delighted in such cruel practices, as well as in men fighting with men, or men with beasts. To these lions the persons who confessed themselves to be Christians, or who refused to sacrifice to the gods, were often cast.

We need not search far to find out the cause of the hatred to the Christians, though we might have expected better things of the Romans; for though they worshipped false gods, they were enlightened and were very lenient towards those they conquered.

Doubtless the real cause was, that Satan was stirring up the evil heart of man in opposition to Christ, and to those who were His. Our Lord told His disciples while He was with them, that they should be hated of all men for His sake. (Matt. x. 22.) But Satan often makes those who do his work think they are doing right, and so in the case we are considering, the people had their reasons for persecuting the Christians.

It was an understood thing that Rome had its own gods, and no others were to be allowed there. Cicero had said, that 'no man might have for himself particular gods of his own: no man should worship by himself any new or foreign gods, unless recognised by the public laws.' And scripture itself tells us how the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ was looked upon by the pagans. The learned men of Athens said of Paul, "He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods." (Acts xvii. 18.)

Another reason was that as the government provided temples, and priests, and sacrifices, for any one to speak against these was looked upon as speaking against the state. They did not distinguish between speaking against the gods made of wood and stone, and speaking against the government of the land who set up the gods.

Another reason was that there were a great many who obtained their living from the temples and the sacrifices, and when Christians became numerous in any place, these persons began to suffer, and then they raised an outcry against the Christians. This was so at Ephesus, as recorded in the Acts, when one called his fellow tradesmen together, and said, "Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth." Paul had been saying that they were no gods which were made with hands. Therefore, these tradesmen urged, "not only this, our craft is in danger to be set at naught, but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised," etc. (Acts xix. 25-27.)

There was one circumstance which may at first sight appear to be strange, namely, that the Jews were allowed by the Romans to go on unhindered, but Christians were not. This is, however, accounted for by the Jews being looked upon as a separate nation, and so were allowed to worship their own God. Celsus, a Greek philosopher of the second century, said: "The Jews are a nation by themselves, and they observe the sacred institutions of their country — whatever they may be — and in so doing, act like other men. It is right for every people to reverence their ancient laws; but to desert them is a crime." And the Romans thought that one reason why they were victorious over so many nations was, that they paid respect to the gods of every nation; whereas the Christians were not a nation of themselves, but were being taken out of all nations, and, as we know, some were Romans, and it could not be understood how a Roman could need any other gods than those he had.

Another reason was that the Jews had their temples, their priests, and their sacrifices; whereas the Christians had none of these, and so they were often termed "Atheists"* — those who had no god of any sort — none to be seen — and who were neither Jews nor pagans. The Christians met privately, and horrible tales were circulated as to the secret practices by them at their private meetings, charges which were of course quite false.

{* From the Greek atheos; a, negative, theos, god: without god. This term is now applied to those who deny the existence of a Supreme Being.}

Another thing that roused the hatred of the Romans was that some of the Christians were reluctant to become soldiers. Celsus thus speaks of this: "Does not the emperor punish you justly? for should all do like you, there would be none to defend him; the rudest barbarians would make themselves masters of the world, and every trace, as well of your own religion itself, as of true wisdom, would be obliterated from the human race; for believe not that your Supreme God would come down from heaven and fight for us." There were, however, at different times, as we shall see, Christians in the armies of the emperors.

Rome, in the full blaze of its glory, had seven hundred temples, and altars much more numerous. On festival days, when honour was paid to any of the gods, long and imposing processions were formed. Old and venerable men, young men in full vigour of life, maidens dressed in white, and children, marched through the city to one of the temples, where sacrifices were offered to the god whom they intended to honour; incense was thrown upon the sacred fires, and filled the air with sweet perfumes.

How poor and contemptible to the eyes of such as enjoyed this outward show must have been the simple meetings of the Christians, who met to break bread in remembrance of their Lord! For this purpose they doubtless at first met "at home," a few here and a few there, as they had done at Jerusalem, according to Acts ii. 46.

Besides this, the religious festivals of the Romans were always more or less associated with amusements, either in the theatre or in some of their many places of entertainment. Christians no longer enjoyed such amusements: they alike shunned the national places of amusement as they did the national temples. Such people could not be understood. They had no temple, no priests, and, as the Romans thought, no god; and joined no amusements with their religion. They were first pitied, then treated with contempt, and lastly with hatred.

Another thing that doubtless drew forth the enmity of the people against the Christians, was the aggressive character of Christianity. When any one is converted to the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ, he naturally desires that others shall share in the blessing. It has always been so, and we may be sure that the Roman converts were always pleading with their relatives and friends that they were not really gods which the people worshipped; for they now knew the only one true God and His Son Jesus Christ. Their gods could not save them.

As we see in Acts xix., there were persecutions of the Christians by the people — the mob — altogether independent of any laws being passed against the Christians. The first persecution by law was in the time of the emperor Nero; he, who, as many believe, has been introduced to us as the "lion" by Paul. (2 Tim. iv. 17.) For the reasons we have given, the motives for a general persecution were all in readiness, the people needing only a word of command. That command came in a way no one expected.

On a dark November night, in the year A.D. 64, the Romans awoke from their slumbers to find that their city was in flames.

Apparently it had been set on fire in several places, and nothing could stay the devouring flames. Day followed day, and night followed night, but still the city burned. For a whole week the fire continued, until out of fourteen departments only four remained untouched. Many public buildings, much valuable property, and many works of art were destroyed.

The streets of the city were narrow, with winding lanes in all directions. This much impeded the escape of the people. Some tarried behind to save a feeble relative or some valuable article, and then found their escape impossible; the fire was on all sides of them, and they perished in the flames. Thus numbers lost their lives, and others, who would have escaped, found the way blocked up by the old and feeble.

The fire was at length stayed by pulling down some houses, thus making a gap which the flames could not pass.

Nero was not at Rome when the fire occurred, but he hastened thither when the flames approached his palace. He is said to have looked on the burning city from a high tower, singing to his lyre that part of the poem of Homer which describes the burning of Troy.

It is reported by some historians that the emperor himself had ordered the city to be set on fire; some suppose it was done in order that he might enjoy a sight so well described by his favourite poet; others believed that he did it in order to improve the city, and make room for a grand palace for himself.

Rightly or wrongly, suspicion fell upon the emperor — his known crimes had rendered him odious. He had caused the death of his mother, his brother, and his wife. The fire caused such a general outburst of indignation from the people, that the emperor offered to rebuild the city at his own expense, though he robbed even the temples to raise the funds; and then, to remove the stain of such a crime from himself, he declared that the city had been set on fire by the Christians!

As we have seen, the people had their reasons for disliking the Christians, and now Nero ordered a general massacre. Some were crucified, and some were sewn up in the skins of beasts, and were then torn to pieces by dogs. Others, after being smeared over with wax and other inflammable substances, were fastened to stakes, and placed in the emperor's gardens, that on being set on fire they might serve as torches.

The more generous even of the pagans pitied the martyrs. Tacitus, the historian of the age, while he had not one good word for the Christians, remarked, that people could but pity those who were thus put to death, not for the public good, but to serve the purpose of a cruel tyrant like Nero.

This same historian says, "Nero falsely accused and punished most grievously certain people, hated for their wickedness, which the common sort called Christians. The author of that name was Christ, who in the reign of Tiberius, was put to death under Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea. And their dangerous superstition, suppressed for a time, burst forth again, not only through Judea, where it first began, but in this city also . . . . an infinite number were convicted, not so much for setting the town on fire, as for the hatred of all men against them. Thus Christians became a sect everywhere spoken against, and wickedness was attributed to them because they could not be understood."

We have no records to shew how the martyrs, under the persecution of Nero, bore their sufferings. Our Lord had forewarned His disciples that in the world they should have tribulation, and He bade them rejoice when they suffered for His sake. (Matt. v. 12.) Doubtless the martyrs felt the presence of the Lord, and were enabled to look beyond their sufferings to the glory that awaited them. Our lot is cast in peaceful times. We should be thankful that we are allowed to worship the true God without hindrance; but Satan uses this peace in another way, namely, to cause many to think they are Christians, when they are not really resting all their hopes on the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus Christ. Many of the churches and chapels are now thronged; but if soldiers waited at the doors to drag the worshippers to prison, would so many be there? Have the reader and the writer found such value in the name of Christ that, God helping us, we should hold to Him, and leave the consequences with our Father and our God?

The Twelve Apostles.

The early fathers record the death of some of the apostles which took place about this time. Without touching the more than doubtful point whether Peter founded the Church of Rome, it appears to be beyond question that he suffered martyrdom in that city during the persecutions by Nero. Clement of Rome speaks of the martyrdom. Ambrose relates that Peter was exhorted to flee from the city, to which he yielded; but on his reaching the gates, he met our Lord. "Lord, where goest thou?" he asked. "I go to Rome," was the reply, "once more to be crucified." Peter at once understood this as a reproof to himself, and he returned. This may have been in a vision, or, what is more probable, a tradition only.

Our Lord had said to him: "When thou shalt be old thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God." (John xxi. 18, 19.) It is agreed by all that he was crucified, and some add that he was crucified head downward at his own request, that he might not die like his Lord.

As to Paul, the Acts of the Apostles closes with the apostle's having dwelt two whole years in his own hired house. There can be little doubt but that he was liberated, and took another missionary journey. When he wrote the Second Epistle to Timothy, he was again at Rome, and not apparently so comfortable a prisoner as when described in the end of the Acts; for he speaks of his chain, and says, "I suffer trouble as an evildoer, even unto bonds." To be a Christian had then been declared to be a crime, and Paul would fall under the condemnation. But he was sustained by his God. He wrote: "I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day." (2 Tim. iv. 6-8.) He, as a Roman citizen, was beheaded. The date is not known, but it is put down at A.D. 66 or 68.

Of James, the Lord's brother, Hegesippus (middle of second century) relates that he was highly esteemed at Jerusalem, and the scribes and Pharisees came to him and said, "We pray thee stop the people, for they have gone astray after Jesus, as though He were the Christ. We pray thee to persuade all that come to the passover concerning Jesus." So they set him at the gable of the temple, that all might hear him and calling to him, said, "O just one, to whom we ought to give heed, seeing that the people are going astray after Jesus who was crucified, tell us what is the door to Jesus." He answered, with a loud voice, "Why ask ye me about Jesus the Son of man? He sits in heaven on the right hand of great power, and will come on the clouds of heaven." Many were convinced, and gave glory on the testimony of James, crying out "Hosanna to the Son of David." This enraged the rulers, and he was thrown down and stoned, while he, like his Lord, prayed for his enemies.

Josephus also states that James was stoned, but says it was under the charge of breaking the laws. Both accounts may be true; his testimony being the cause of his death, and this accusation the plea to justify the act. There is no date by which to fix the year. It must have been before the siege of Jerusalem.

We copy the following from Hippolytus, as to where the twelve apostles laboured, and where they died. He himself died about A.D. 230, so that he may have conversed with some of the apostolic fathers who knew the apostles themselves.

Peter preached the gospel in Pontus and Galatia, and Cappadocia and Bethania, and Italy and Asia, and was afterwards crucified by Nero in Rome.

Andrew preached to the Scythians and Thracians, and was crucified, suspended on an olive tree, at Patrae [a town] of Achaia; and there too he was buried.

John, again, in Asia, was banished by Domitian, the emperor, to the isle of Patmos, in which also he wrote his Gospel, and saw the apocalyptic vision; and in Trajan's time he fell asleep at Ephesus, where his remains were sought for, but could not be found.

James, his brother, when preaching in Judea, was cut off with the sword by Herod the Tetrarch, and was buried there.

Philip preached in Phrygia, and was crucified in Hierapolis, with his head downwards, in the time of Domitian, and was buried there.

Bartholomew, [preached] to the Indians, to whom also he gave the Gospel according to Matthew, was crucified with his head downward, and was buried in Allanum (or Albanum), of the great Armenia.

Matthew wrote the Gospel in the Hebrew tongue, and published it at Jerusalem, and fell asleep at Hierees, of Parthia.

Thomas preached to the Parthians, Medes, Persians, Hyrcanians, Bactrians, and Margians [or, Magi], and was thrust through in the four members of his body with a pine spear, at Calamene [or, Caramene], the city of India, and was buried there.

James, the Son of Alphaeus, when preaching in Jerusalem, was stoned to death by the Jews, and was buried there beside the temple.

Judas, who is also Lebbaeus, preached to the people of Edessa, and to all Mesopotamia, and fell asleep at Berytus, and was buried there.

Simon the Zealot, the son of Clopas, who is also [called] Judas, became bishop of Jerusalem after James the Just, and fell asleep and was buried there, at the age of 120 years.

Matthias, who was one of the seventy, and numbered with the eleven apostles, preached in Jerusalem, and fell asleep and was buried there.

Paul entered into the apostleship a year after the ascension of Christ, and beginning at Jerusalem, he advanced as far as Illyricum, and Italy, and Spain, preaching the gospel for five-and-thirty years. And in the time of Nero he was beheaded at Rome, and was buried there.

Chapter 2.

Insurrection of the Jews.

Although the insurrection of the Jews which led to the destruction of Jerusalem is not strictly connected with the church, one cannot pass it by in silence. Jerusalem was the chief city of the land chosen by God for His beloved people, and, as we know from scripture, there were many Christians there. We shall see what became of them.

The Lord Jesus had plainly foretold the destruction of Jerusalem: "There shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles." (Luke xxi. 23, 24.) We have to tell you how this was brought about.

Palestine had been for many years subject to the Romans — it was so when our Lord was there — but the Jews were too proud to submit willingly to their masters. From time to time there had been insurrections; one occasion is alluded to when the Jews relate to our Lord how Pilate had mingled the blood of the people with the sacrifices. (Luke xiii. 1.) What led to the final revolt and destruction not only of Jerusalem, but of other great cities, was the following: —

There were a number of Jews living at Caesarea who had erected a synagogue, but the ground on which it stood belonged to a Greek. The Jews wished to purchase the ground, and offered a large price for it; but the Greek refused to sell it, and to annoy them he erected various buildings on the spot, which scarcely left the Jews room to get to their place of worship. The Greeks in other ways annoyed the Jews until a disturbance and a fight were the result.

Gessius Florus was procurator* of the district, so the Jews appealed to him, sending him at the same time a present of eight talents. He accepted the money and promised to interfere, but did nothing. On the breaking out of the above disturbance some of the Jews seized the books of the synagogue and left the city, while others of the highest rank proceeded to Florus to seek redress. He treated them with great disdain and cast them into prison.

{*The Roman governor of a province.}

Florus seemed determined to drive the people to a revolt, that he might seize their property as well as cover his own misdeeds. He made a demand on Jerusalem for seventeen talents, under the plea that the emperor needed the money.

The news of the imprisonment of the chief men of Caesarea had already reached Jerusalem, and this demand upon the city for money was received with derision, and the name of Florus was everywhere held in contempt and open ridicule.

Florus hastened to punish the city for these insults. The people at once submitted, and received both him and his soldiers readily. But, as we have seen, Florus wanted them to revolt, and he sent his soldiers to plunder the city and to put to death those who opposed his troops. Many who offered no resistance were wantonly put to death. More troops entered the city, and an effort was made by Florus to plunder the treasury of the temple. The people sought to prevent this, and attacked the soldiers with stones from the roofs and windows of the houses. Florus gave up the attempt, being satisfied for the time to retire with the riches he had already collected.

Agrippa,* at this juncture, visited Jerusalem, and exhorted the inhabitants to submit to the Romans; but on his mentioning the name of Florus, such an uproar was raised that he had to leave the city or he would have fallen a victim to their fury.

{*This was Agrippa II., a descendant of Herod, named in Acts xxv. 13. He ruled over portions of the kingdom, and was called "king." (Chap. xxvi. 7.)}

The rulers of the people appealed to the governor who was over Florus;* but a war party arose in the city, who, under Judas a Galilean, declared openly that it was wrong to own any king but God, and opposed the payment of any more tribute to Rome. They forgot how they had disowned God, how they had put His Son to death, and had declared at His trial, "We have no king but Caesar!" When they spoke to the Lord about paying tribute to Caesar, He asked them for a piece of money, and inquired, Whose was the image and inscription on it. They said, Casar's. Our Lord replied, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." They were now acting in direct opposition to this, declaring that they would not render to Caesar the things that were his. God had left His people to their own folly that they might be punished.

{*It was now Cestius Gallus, governor of Syria, etc.}

When Florus departed from Jerusalem he left a guard of Roman soldiers to keep possession. These were now attacked by the war party, and after much resistance they agreed to surrender, on condition that they should be allowed to walk out of Jerusalem, leaving their arms and everything behind. This was solemnly promised to them. The Romans came forth from their stronghold, and made a pile of their swords and articles of war, but they were no sooner defenceless than Eleazar* and his followers fell upon them and put all to death except one who called for mercy.

{*Eleazar was the son of Ananias the high priest, and was now the chief of the war party.}

This act of treachery was, as it is said, sealing the revolt in blood — a treachery that left no hope of peace, and filled the peaceable inhabitants with fear and evil-forebodings.

On that very day the Greeks of Caesarea rose against the Jews, and put to death every Jew in that city except a few who escaped. Josephus reckoned the number slain to amount to 20,000.

The whole country was now in arms; the Jews against any who were not Jews, and all who were not Jews were oppressing them. Then, as now, many of the Jews were rich, and they were plotted against and put to death for the sake of their riches. On the other hand, where the Jews were strong enough, they attacked their neighbours and pillaged their houses.

The Romans proceeded to put down the revolt, and Cestius Gallus marched into Palestine with his army. Zebulon, Joppa, and other places were quickly subdued; the Jewish inhabitants being put to death and the cities laid in ruins.

Cestius at length marched to Jerusalem, and Agrippa again tried to persuade the inhabitants to lay down their arms and submit to the Romans, but his messengers were attacked with sticks and stones. God had declared that the city was to be destroyed, and nothing could now save it, Many in the city would have been glad to come to terms of peace, but the war party would not hear of such a thing.

The Roman soldiers commenced the attack, and soon took a portion of the city; but inside they found another wall. This they proceeded to destroy; but, through want of resolution, Cestius called his men off, and apparently began to leave the city. This emboldened the Jews, who rushed out and put many of the Romans to death. Cestius still retreated, until they came to the narrow pass of Beth-horon. Here the Jews swarmed down the steep inclines and hurled stones on the heads of the retreating army. The way became blocked up, and the Romans, who were in the habit of fighting in ranks, seemed almost helpless, and thousands of them were slain. Cestius himself had to fly to save his life. The Romans abandoned their engines of war, and also took to flight. The Jews pursued them as far as Antipatris, when, finding they could not overtake more, they returned to secure the spoil, and to pillage the dead. They entered Jerusalem with hymns of triumph, having suffered but little, while the Romans lost 5,300 foot, and 380 horse. The Romans had not suffered such a defeat for many a year, and this one was the more disgraceful being at the hands of undisciplined people who were in a great measure without arms.

It could not be expected that Rome would let such a defeat go unavenged. Nero was still emperor: he called upon the most skilful of Rome's commanders — Vespasian — to quell the revolt and to punish the Jews generally. Vespasian, assisted by his son Titus, entered with spirit into the enterprise. Sixty thousand troops were placed under his command, with which to subdue Palestine.

The Jews in the meantime had not been idle. Walls were built and fortified, arms manufactured and provisions stored. They were, however, still divided: many greatly desired to submit to the Romans, while others were as determined to fight to the last.

Before relating the final struggle, we must call attention again to the prophecy of Christ relating to this war. "Great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven." (Luke xxi. 11.) Mark the words, "fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven." Josephus, the historian, relates that a star or a comet with a long tail in the form of a sword hung over the city for a whole year. Another sign was that on one occasion chariots and troops of soldiers were seen among the clouds, hurrying to and fro. On another occasion, a great light shone around the altar for about half an hour and then died out. The gate of the inner court of the temple, made of brass, and of such immense weight that it took twenty men to shut it, opened of itself. This was interpreted to mean that the temple was no longer to be protected from the enemy. These events may seem to be fables, but the historian declares that they were witnessed by many, and these signs are confirmed by Tacitus.

But the cause of perhaps still greater alarm was a man named Jesus, the son of Ananus, who commenced to traverse the streets of Jerusalem, crying, "A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, and a voice against this whole people. Woe, woe to Jerusalem." Certain of the people seized and beat him; but he still cried, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem." At length he was carried before the Roman governor, who asked him who he was, where he came from, and why he uttered such words; but he gave no other answer than "Woe, woe to Jerusalem." He was fearfully scourged, but uttered no cry but his cry of woe. At length he was dismissed as a madman. This fearful cry he began before the revolt, when all were at peace, and he continued it during a space of four years. When the war raged, he still wended his way, fearless of danger, uttering his woeful cry. All at once he varied it with "Woe, woe to myself:" a stone struck him and he fell down dead.

Thus had this unhappy people ample time to be warned and, had they heeded the voice of their Messiah, to have been saved. To His disciples our Lord gave another word of warning, "Let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that are in the countries enter therein." (Luke xxi. 21.) In obedience to this command the Christians quitted Jerusalem and took up their abode at Pella, and thus escaped the doom about to fall on this guilty people.

Pella was a town on the east of the Jordan in the district of Decapolis. Here, no doubt, Agrippa was able to protect them as peaceable inhabitants. We have no record of the number of the fugitives. Our Lord left the temple, saying, "Your house is left unto you desolate;" and now the Christians departed from the doomed city, leaving nothing really but the outward shell of the once divinely ordered ritual of the one true God, and the dire judgment of the One they despised hovering over their heads.*

{*Under Hadrian (A.D. 136), the Christians were allowed to return to the city built upon the ruins of Jerusalem, then called Aelia Capitolina. Christians and pagans only were allowed there — no Jew dare shew his face on pain of death. Its ancient name was restored by Constantine the Great. At the council of Nice, Macarius signed the canons as Bishop of Jerusalem.}

Josephus.

Josephus, the well-known historian, was involved in the war with the Romans. He was a Jew, and a descendant of a priestly family. His father's name was Matthias, and he was called Joseph, but is better known as Josephus, After studying the law, and becoming acquainted with the various sects, he joined the Pharisees.

At first his desire was to induce his countrymen to submit to the Romans; but failing in this, and the war party growing in strength, he joined in the war. He was appointed to command the Jews in Galilee. After various escapes from the jealousy of others who were also in authority, Josephus effected an entrance into the city of Jotapata, and took the command. This city was considered of great importance, and therefore Vespasian came in person to order the siege. It was in a lofty position, and to be approached only on one side. On the other side it was surrounded with thick forests, thought to be impregnable. But the Romans with their axes soon cleared a way through the forest so as to approach the walls, and with their battering rams and scaling ladders the place was eventually taken, though the Jews fought with bravery.

Josephus had taken refuge in a dry well, from the bottom of which he was enabled to reach a cavern and remain unseen from those above. Here he found about forty of the citizens who had taken refuge there, and who had provided themselves with food for several days. In the meantime the soldiers were searching for him, anxious to find either dead or alive one who had made such a gallant defence against them.

On the third day a woman, having left the cavern, was captured, and she revealed the secret that Josephus was safe in concealment. Vespasian sent some of the Romans to offer Josephus his life if he would surrender. After some parleying, Josephus was desirous of giving himself up; but his companions, not so sure of their own lives, called him traitor and coward, and even threatened to kill him. Josephus tried to persuade them to risk saving their lives, and detailed to them the sin of self-murder. It was all of no use; they would not hear of surrender. He then persuaded them that if they must die, it would be better to kill one another than to commit suicide. To this they agreed, concluding that Josephus would surely share the same fate as themselves. Lots were drawn, and, somehow or other, one and another fell by the swords of their companions, until only Josephus and another remained. Josephus persuaded him to accept the offer of the Romans, and both came out of the cavern alive.

Josephus asked for an interview with Vespasian, and he then put on the air and manner of a prophet, and declared to Vespasian that he and his son Titus would, each in due time, be made emperors of Rome. "Send me not to Nero," said Josephus, "bind me and keep me in chains, as thine own prisoner; for soon thou wilt be the sovereign lord of earth and sea, and of the whole human race." He appealed to some of the citizens if he had not foretold that the downfall of Jotapata would be in forty-seven days, and they declared that he had done so. Josephus was still kept in chains, but was well taken care of and received various presents.

Thus this man, after many narrow escapes, was now with the Romans. He grew in favour, and remained with them during the siege of Jerusalem; and afterwards lived to write his famous History of the Jews. Vespasian and Titus both became emperors, and this brought Josephus into favour with them, because his predictions came true.

Destruction of Jerusalem.

From Jotapata Vespasian and Titus proceeded to destroy other cities, putting all the inhabitants to the sword or selling them as slaves. But we will relate only the destruction of Jerusalem.

Palestine had had many robbers, such as would now be called banditti. As the country was being laid waste by the Romans, these took shelter in Jerusalem, and at length formed a strong party and were called Zealots. They murdered some of the citizens, until at length these arose to defend themselves against the Zealots. The Zealots then took shelter in the temple, and secretly invited the Idumeans to come to their relief, declaring that the inhabitants wanted to give Jerusalem up to the Romans. The Idumeans had been incorporated with the Jews, and like the Arabs, were ever ready to rush to war where-ever there was a need for it. They armed at once and appeared before Jerusalem. But the city authorities refused them admittance and tried to reason with them to induce them to return. Night came on, leaving the Idumeans encamped outside the walls. In the night a dreadful storm of rain and wind with thunder and lightning took place. The Zealots, finding the guards had neglected their posts to escape the storm, stole out of the temple, and with saws cut through the iron bars of the gates and admitted the Idumeans. That night, the whole of the guard who watched the temple were put to death. In the morning 8,500 dead bodies were counted.

The city was now at the mercy of the Zealots, and they, assisted by the Idumeans, killed whom they pleased. Not fewer than 12,000 of the noblest blood in Jerusalem perished in this way. Surely the city was given up by God to the direst calamities! The Roman army was approaching the city, and Jerusalem, instead of making preparations to defend itself, was thus being destroyed by its own children!

The Idumeans however at length awoke to the wickedness of the Zealots. They had been called to prevent Jerusalem from being given up to the Romans; but they found that the report was raised merely to serve the purpose of the Zealots to murder and to rob. They determined to leave the city.

The Zealots however continued their evil work. This state of things became known to the Romans, and the general was advised to make his attack upon them while thus divided. But he judged that if he approached it would make them all unite to oppose him. He thought it better to let them "like wild beasts" devour one another.

John of Gischala was head of the Zealots. Simon, the son of Gioras, was another desperado; he entered Jerusalem and became head of another party. Eleazar, the first to advise the revolt, was leader of a third party. These were all in deadly hatred one against another. Had the Romans delayed their visit to the city, it must surely have perished by its own people.

In the year A.D. 69 Vespasian was made Emperor, and the command now devolving on Titus his son, the siege began in earnest, in April, 70.

Each of the three parties had his fortified position, from which the advancing army of the Romans could be seen. Eleazar's place was the summit of the temple; John's, the porticoes of the outer courts; and Simon's, the heights of Zion. They now began to feel that they had one common enemy against whom they ought to fight, and they agreed on a general attack on the Romans. Simon had 10,000 men and 5000 Idumeans (who had either remained or returned to the city); John had 6000, and Eleazar 2400.

The Romans were busy with their entrenchments, when the Jews sallied forth and took them by surprise; they put many to death and others to flight, and Titus himself had a narrow escape. The Romans however rallied, and the battle lasted all day, with many killed on both sides.

Titus went on with his works, levelling the approach to the city. When this was accomplished, he resolved to attack the wall at the part called Bezetha, where the wall was the lowest, and the houses not high enough to protect the wall.

The Romans had engines for throwing heavy stones as well as arrows. Of the soldiers some were slingers of stones, and others archers; firearms were not yet invented. To knock down the walls they had battering-rams. These were made of a huge beam of timber, armed at one end with a large piece of iron in the shape of a ram's head. This was pulled away and then thrown back with great force against the wall. At times sacks, stuffed full, were lowered from the walls to break the force of the blows; but these were pulled down with hooks by the Romans.

Titus set three of these rams at work against the wall. The Jews mounted the walls and hurled down stones upon those who worked the machines; but Titus had towers made on his embankment from which his archers and slingers swept all from the walls. The rams were kept at work night and day until the walls began to totter. They were seventeen and a half feet thick, and of immense strength, composed of blocks of stone thirty-five feet long. Still the incessant strokes of the ram began to loosen the stones.

The Jews resorted to other means. Suddenly, through an unperceived gate they sallied forth with firebrands and attempted to set the engines on fire; but Titus rushed down with his horse soldiers and drove back the Jews into the city. One was taken prisoner, whom Titus crucified before the walls.

At length a breach was made and the Romans entered. But they found no enemy; the whole place was deserted. But this was only a portion of the city. Jerusalem was divided into three distinct parts, each with its wall: so that when one part was taken, the Jews all retired to the second. Here the siege had to begin again.

The battering rams had to be brought up to the second wall, and then worked night and day until a breach was made in it. In a few days this was accomplished, and then the Jews retired to the third part of the city. Titus did not destroy the houses in the second part, still hoping that the Jews would surrender.

Leaving the houses standing led to a sad disaster. When his troops had entered this part of the city, the Jews attacked them fiercely, and as they knew every turn of the narrow streets, they were able to run round and appear where they were least expected, and attack the Romans on all sides. Titus came to the rescue, and by placing archers at the openings to all the streets, he was enabled to bring off many of his men alive, and means were taken to prevent the repetition of such attacks.

Titus, seeing the magnificence of the temple and the palace, was desirous of sparing the city, and again he tried to induce the people to surrender. Josephus was now employed to reason with the Jews; but he was assailed with scoffs, and darts were hurled at him.

The whole of the inhabitants were now cooped up in one-third of the city, and famine, which had been for some time staring them in the face, became severe. Persons sold their possessions for a little food, and many died of hunger. At length the war party, who had taken care to keep provisions for themselves, began to be in want, and they went about the city, seizing every particle of food they could find. If they thought any were concealing food, they would torture them to compel them to confess its whereabouts.

All natural affection deserted the people generally. Relatives would snatch the food from one another — children from parents, and parents from children; wives from husbands and husbands from wives. On one occasion, those who searched for food, sword in hand, smelt the fumes of cooked flesh. They entered the house and demanded the food. A woman brought it, but the courage of the robbers failed them when they found that a mother had cooked her own child, and had eaten a part of it. She shrieked out, "Eat, for I have eaten: be not more delicate than a mother; or, if ye are too religious to touch such food, I have eaten half already, leave me the rest!" They left her in horror.

How true is scripture! It had been foretold that a delicate and tender woman should eat her own children. (Deut. xxviii. 56, 57.) It had taken place at the siege of Samaria (2 Kings vi. 29), and it had now taken place at Jerusalem. Alas, it is hard to fight against God!

By night many would come forth and search about outside the walls for anything they could manage to eat; they would have doubtless left the city entirely but for their wives and children who were starving as well as themselves. Titus laid soldiers in wait for these, and where they offered any resistance they were seized, tortured, and crucified within sight of the walls, in hopes that this would strike terror into the rest and cause them to capitulate; but instead of this, the war party would drag to the walls any who wished to give themselves up to the Romans, and shew them what they called Roman mercy. As many as five hundred of these poor wretches were caught and crucified in one day. Still the famine increased and more left the city in search of food, and these were caught and crucified until space as well as wood was needed for the crosses.

Titus had now come to the third wall, at a corner of which stood the tower of Antonia which defended the temple. He raised four embankments in different places, and on these were ranged his instruments of warfare. All was ready for a vigorous, and as they hoped final, attack on the walls. The soldiers only waited for the word of command to commence. But suddenly, like an earthquake, the ground moved, then fell in, carrying with it all the embankments and the engines. The Jews had undermined the places where the embankments had been made, then setting fire to the supports, the whole gave way, and all the preparations were in a moment destroyed. The Jews now rushed out in immense numbers with firebrands to burn all they could; and they attacked the Romans so fiercely that these began to waver. Titus, who was absent, returned in time to rally his men, and drive the Jews back into the city; but they left the Romans much dispirited.

Titus called a council to decide what should be done. 1. Should they rush into the city at once? 2. Should they make new engines and go on with the siege? 3. Should they build a wall entirely round the city, and starve the Jews into submission? They concluded on the latter. A wall of nearly four miles was formed, with thirteen towers. By the whole army working it was done in three days.

No sooner was this done than the Romans set to work to make new engines. A portion of the wall soon fell because of being undermined to destroy the engines of the Romans, but when the Romans rushed in they found that a new wall had been made within. But being new this was weak and the tower of Antonia was soon taken. An effort was now made to save the temple. The Jews were asked to depart from it, and it was promised that the Roman soldiers should not defile it. But the leaders had already put to death the priest, and had drunk the wine and food devoted to the temple; and they cared nothing for the building. Josephus appealed to the Jews, and Titus appealed to them: all, except the Jews, were desirous of saving the temple. Titus said, "I call on your gods — I call on my whole army — I call on the Jews who are with me — I call on yourselves, to witness that I do not force you to this crime." It was all of no use; we know, from scripture, that this could not be — its destruction was foretold.

The cloisters of the temple were next attacked and burnt; still the Romans decided to spare the temple itself. August 10th had arrived, the very day on which the temple had previously been destroyed by the king of Babylon. Titus had taken up his quarters in the tower of Antonia, and had retired to rest, resolving to make a general attack on the next day, when a wild cry was raised! a soldier rushed into his chamber crying out that the temple was on fire. After Titus had retired some of the soldiers had attacked the Jews in the cloisters, and one of them seizing a burning brand had been able, by mounting on another's shoulders, to reach a small window. Into this he had thrown the firebrand, and the temple was soon in flames.

Titus hastened to the spot; he shouted to his soldiers to stop the flames, but they either did not or would not hear. Everything was noise and disorder. Many Jews had taken shelter in the temple. These were slain till the blood ran in streams in the building. Titus stood amazed at the magnificence of the interior. The gold reflected the flames and added an awful grandeur to the scene. The holy place was not yet in flames, and Titus made an effort to save it. But it was of no use, he was disobeyed, but God was obeyed. This, too, was destroyed.

Yet one portion remained, in which about 6,000 of the inhabitants had taken refuge, deluded by a false prophet who had said that if they repaired to the temple, God would interfere to save them; whereas Christ, the true prophet, had said that it should be destroyed. This also was burnt, and all perished.

The Roman army entered the temple, and amid the ruins offered sacrifices to their gods, and saluted Titus.

Still the third part of the city remained and three very strong towers; engines were brought to bear, but it was not till the seventh of September — nearly a month after the burning of the temple — that the city was taken. John and Simon, the two leaders living, fled to underground passages in hopes of saving their lives, and the rest, dispirited and starving, offered but little resistance. The soldiers slew all they met with, until they grew weary of the work. After that, only the infirm were killed, and the rest saved. The whole of the city was destroyed except three strong towers which were left as monuments of the siege.

The people that were left were sorted like cattle. The noted insurgents were put to death; the tallest were reserved to form a part of the triumph of Titus when he entered Rome; many were sent to work in the mines; some were sent into the provinces, and were compelled to fight as gladiators, or with wild beasts to amuse the people. It was estimated that in the siege there had been killed no fewer than 1,100,000, and 97,000 had been taken prisoners. The large numbers are accounted for by many having taken refuge in the city because of the desolation taken in the provinces, and because many came to the feast, and could not return.

Thus perished the favoured city of Jerusalem — God's city — but because of the sins of the people, given over to destruction. Christ wept over the city, knowing all that was coming upon it, and knowing how different it would have been had they but listened to their true Messiah.

But with the doom pronounced by our Lord there was one word of hope: it was to be trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. Then will God again take up His favoured people and they shall rebuild the holy city, and blessing and prosperity shall again visit the holy land.

"Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah . . . . I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. . . . . Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that the city shall be built to the Lord . . . . shall be holy unto the Lord it shall not be plucked up, nor thrown down, any more for ever." (Jer. xxii. 31-40.)

A prophecy clearly never yet fulfilled, but one which will be brought about as surely as God is true.

Chapter 3.

Further Persecutions.

One of the leading features of the early history of the church is, as we have seen, persecution. It commenced under Nero. After him, as emperor succeeded emperor, some were mild in their treatment of the Christians and others were the reverse. A good deal, too, depended upon the proconsuls* and the magistrates. Some of these avoided persecution, as far as they could with safety to themselves, while others went as far as their power extended in rooting out the hated disciples of Christ.

{*Those who acted for the consuls; they ruled over provinces.}

Even Gibbon, the historian, shews how unjust the heathen were in accusing the Christians of any and everything that might happen, "If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the season had been interrupted, the superstitious pagans were convinced that the crimes and the impiety of the Christians, who were spared by the excessive lenity of the government, had at length provoked the divine justice."

Still the number of Christians rapidly increased. Our Lord had said He would build His church, against which the gates of hell should not prevail (Matt. xvi. 18); and though Satan had stirred up his servants to fight against that church, it still grew in numbers and spread itself far and wide. As has been often said, "The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church;" and, if a few were put to death, many seemed to spring out of their ashes.

Letters written at the time of an event are always valuable evidence; persons looking back after a long course of years are apt to view things differently from what they really were. Now there is an interesting letter written by the younger Pliny, proconsul of Pontus and Bithynia, to the emperor Trajan, and the emperor's reply, which will throw light upon these persecutions.

"The following is the method I have pursued," wrote Pliny, "with regard to such as have been brought before me as Christians. I have asked them whether they were really Christians. On their confessing that they were I have questioned them a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; and on their persevering in the confession, I have commanded them to be led forth, not doubting but that inflexible obstinacy ought to be punished. Nothing can compel those who are really Christians to adore thy image with incense, or to call on the gods, or to curse Christ. This is the sum of their error. They are accustomed to assemble on a stated day before light; to sing a hymn to Christ among themselves by turns; and to bind themselves by an oath to commit no wickedness — neither fraud, nor robbery, nor adultery — and they never violate faith. These things having been done, it is their custom to depart, and assemble again to take meat, but promiscuously and without offence. Many persons of all ages, of all orders, and of either sex even, are placed in peril; for the contagion of this superstition has invaded not only the towns, but even the villages and fields. It is sufficiently evident, indeed, that our temples are almost deserted, that our sacred rites have been for a long time interrupted, and that there is rarely to be found a purchaser of the victims."

To this the emperor Trajan replied, "You have done perfectly right, my dear Pliny, in your proceedings against the Christians who have been brought before you; it being impossible to establish any regular or general form in affairs of this kind. No search should be made after them, but if they are accused and convicted, they must be punished. Should the accused, however, deny that he is a Christian, and prove that he is not by invoking the gods, then let him be pardoned, whatever may have been his former profession." No anonymous accusation was to be received. It would not be right.

These letters are important in many particulars. Notice, in the first place, that Pliny says that refusing to adore the image of the emperor (which image was set up to be worshipped), and to call on the heathen gods, and to refuse to curse Christ, is the sum of their error. No evil is laid to their charge — nothing but refusing to perform acts of idolatry, and to curse the One to whom they looked for salvation. This coming from a heathen, is a strong testimony in favour of Christians of that day.

Next notice that he speaks of their meetings for singing, and to "take meat." This no doubt referred to their taking the Lord's supper, with which were perhaps connected their love-feasts, that were often taken before the Lord's supper, as was the case at Corinth. (1 Cor. xi.) At this time nothing but simplicity and sincerity marked the meetings of the Christians. They were privately accused of wickedness, and many were tortured to induce them to reveal what they did at their private meetings; but after all that could be drawn from them, Pliny is obliged to confess to the simplicity of their meetings.

In the answer of it is plainly stated that to be a Christian was a crime which must be punished. It is also clear that it had been the custom to let persons anonymously accuse the Christians. This was no longer to be allowed, because such a thing would be a disgrace, even to a pagan Roman.

We proceed to give a few instances of those who suffered under various emperors.

Ignatius.

We will first mention Ignatius, of Antioch. He lived in the reign of Trajan, whose letter we have just given. The emperor was passing through Antioch on his way to the Parthian war, in A.D. 106. Ignatius feared for the Christians at Antioch, and thought to save them by appearing personally before the emperor.

The emperor demanded, "Art thou he who, like a bad demon, goeth about violating my commands, and leading men to perdition?"

"Let no one," said Ignatius, "call Theophorus* a bad demon" . . . .

{*Or, "one who carried God."}

"And pray who is Theophorus?"

"He who has Christ in his breast."

"And thinkest thou not, that the gods who fight for us against our enemies, reside in us?"

"You err in calling the demons of the nations gods; for there is only one God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is; and one Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, whose kingdom is my portion."

"His kingdom, do you mean, who was crucified under Pilate?"

"His who crucified my sin with its author, and has put all the sin and malice of Satan under the feet of those who carry Him in their hearts."

"Dost thou then carry Him who was crucified within thee?"

"I do: for it is written, 'I dwell in them, and walk in them.'"

The emperor cut the matter short by proclaiming: "Since Ignatius confesses that he carries within himself Him that was crucified, we command that he be carried, bound by soldiers, to great Rome, there to be torn by wild beasts, for the entertainment of the people."

He was at once bound and sent on his way to Rome. Staying at Smyrna, he had an interview with Polycarp, bishop of that city. Ignatius also wrote letters to various churches, copies of which are still preserved. In writing to Rome, he begged them not to interfere to stay his execution. "Suffer me," said the aged man, "to become the food of bears and lions: it will afford a very short passage to heaven."

As he approached Rome, a crowd of persons were seen coming from the city. They were Christians, who flocked to meet the aged man. Notwithstanding his letter, they begged of him to let them endeavour to save him; but he steadily refused. The soldiers allowed Ignatius a short time for prayer with his fellow Christians, and to give them a short exhortation. Then he was forthwith led to the amphitheatre. There wild and hungry animals were ready, and the aged man was soon devoured by them; a few fragments of his bones being all that his friends could find of his remains.

Many others shared the same fate as Ignatius in the reign of Trajan. Adrian succeeded Trajan as emperor (A.D. 117), and continued the persecutions until an Apology for the Christians was presented to the emperor by Quadratus a pious and learned man. This was followed by others, which induced the emperor to order the discontinuance of the persecution. We will consider the Apologies presently.

Adrian was succeeded by Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138), who procured for the Christians still greater liberty. He sent the following sensible message to his magistrates. "I am convinced that it is for the gods themselves to take care that men of this kind should not escape; for it is much more fitting that they should punish those who refuse to worship them, than that you should...."

Justin Martyr.

Marcus Aurelius succeeded Antoninus (A.D. 161). Marcus was accounted a philosopher, but he was a persecutor of the Christians. Among those who suffered under him was the well-known Justin Martyr.

Justin was a native of Samaria. He had been early led to study philosophy; but after trying one system and another he found himself dissatisfied with all. Nothing could satisfy the cravings of his active mind. He longed for something above and beyond anything he knew or felt.

In this state he wandered about, lost in meditation, till one day as he strolled along the sea shore, he was arrested by the venerable appearance of an old man. They entered into conversation, and Justin told the old man what he felt and his desire of finding out God. His companion told him of the uselessness of all that the philosophers could teach, and recommended him to study the Hebrew scriptures and the doctrines of Christianity, and to pray for light; for they could be understood only by the help of God and of His Son Jesus Christ. They parted, and never met again. But Justin had new work before him. He read and studied and found what he wanted. He was converted to Christianity, and became a champion for the truths he had learned. He argued with the philosophers, and confuted those in error among the Christians; he also wrote two "Apologies" to the emperors. At length he was seized, and carried before Rusticus the prefect.* He was still dressed as a philosopher, and the prefect asked him what he had studied.

{* From prefectus, one placed over others — a magistrate, or ruler.}

"I have, endeavoured," said Justin, "to learn every sort of knowledge, and have at last embraced the doctrine of Christianity, rejected though it be by those who are in blindness and error."

"What, wretch! you follow that doctrine?"

"Yes, and with joy, because I know it to be true."

"Sacrifice, then, and obey, or I will order you to be tormented without mercy."

"Our only desire is to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ. ..."

He, with others, was ordered to be scourged, and then beheaded.

The Christians, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, were persecuted not so much by direct orders of the emperor, as by the cruel industry of the provincial rulers: in some places they carried this to such extremes that he sharply rebuked them, pointing out how much more zealous the Christians were in serving their God, than the heathen were in devotion to theirs, and willingly died for their faith. He prohibited all search for Christians, and enacted penalties against the informers. But he left the laws unrepealed.

Polycarp.

Polycarp had known the apostle John, and is said to have been appointed by him over the Church of Smyrna. He might have been set apart as "elder," for we know that the apostles had authority to appoint such in the churches. (Titus i. 5.)

Irenaeus, writing of Polycarp, says, "I have yet present in my mind the gravity of his demeanour, the majesty of his countenance, the purity of his life, and the holiness of the exhortations with which he fed his flock. I almost think that I can still hear him relating how he had conversed with St. John and many others who had seen Jesus Christ, and repeating the words he had received from their lips, and the accounts they had given him of the Saviour's miracles and doctrines; while his zeal for the purity of the faith was such that, when any error was advocated in his presence, he was wont to close his ears and to retire, exclaiming, "Merciful Lord, for what times hast thou reserved me?"

On persecution breaking out, Polycarp was induced to retire to a small country house, a short distance from Smyrna; but one of his attendants being put to the torture told where Polycarp was. When the soldiers arrived to arrest him he had retired to bed; but he at once arose, and ordered provisions to be provided for the officers. Then he asked for an hour for prayer, but which extended to two. He was now placed on an ass, on account of his age, and conveyed to the city. He was met by a magistrate who knew him, and was invited by him into his carriage. Here Polycarp was exhorted to acknowledge the gods, but on his steadily refusing, he was pushed out of the carriage, and was hurt by the fall.

When before the proconsul, he was pitied on account of his great age, and was exhorted to give way. "Swear, and I will release you: curse Christ."

"Eighty and six years," replied Polycarp, "have I served Him and He has never injured me. How can I blaspheme Him to whom I owe my salvation?"

The proconsul, finding he could not shake the resolution of the accused, declared that Polycarp acknowledged himself to be a Christian.

The multitude thereupon called for his death, naming at first the wild beasts, but as it was not the season for the public games, they cried out for him to be burnt. To this the proconsul consented.

The multitude, among whom were many Jews, says the historian, hastened to collect the fuel and stake and pile were soon prepared. As they were about to nail him to the stake, he assured them that it was unnecessary. He who enabled him to endure the fire would enable him to stand firm. He spent his remaining moments in prayer. On his saying "Amen," the pile was ignited, and the flames rose rapidly but, strange to say, the flames formed a sort of curve around him, his body having the appearance of shining gold and silver, while a sweet smell as of perfume filled the air. This being witnessed by the heathen, they called for him to be killed. He was put to death by the sword, and his blood running in streams put out the fire and left his body unburnt. But lest any superstitious use should be made of his body it was consumed: only a few charred bones remained. Though the above account sounds strange to our ears, it is thus given in the Epistle from the church of Smyrna, by those who witnessed his death — an epistle which is generally considered to be genuine.*

{* It is given by Eusebius, and is entitled "The Church of God at Smyrna to that of Philomelius and to all parts of the holy universal church."}

The persecution continued under the reign of the emperor Marcus until the following circumstance stayed his hand.

The emperor was engaged in war with a people called Quadi, belonging to a portion of Germany, when he found his army placed in a position of great peril, and suffering at the same time from extreme thirst. Many Christians in one of the legions fell on their knees and cried to God for relief. Soon after, a storm of hail and rain beat in the faces of the enemy, and also supplied the fainting army with a means of quenching their thirst. Victory was on the side of the Romans. The Christians believed it was in answer to their prayers, while the heathen thought it was their gods who had favoured them. The emperor however at that time slackened the persecution, though it was renewed afterwards.*

{* Tertullian attributes the leniency of the emperor to the marked answer to the prayer of the Christians. But this is disputed by others, for there were pictures representing the emperor in the attitude of prayer to the gods, and soldiers catching the rain in their helmets. A medal also represents Jupiter launching his thunderbolts against the barbarians. There seems therefore to be evidence that some such event actually took place, and Eusebius says the above account is given by several writers worthy of credit.}

Blandina.

Christianity had spread everywhere under the control of the Romans, and about this time persecution broke out in Lyons and Vienna. Here the heathen were determined enemies of the Christians, treating them with great cruelty and dragging them before the magistrates. A notable instance of fortitude was Blandina, a female slave. She was tortured from morning to night, to make her confess to the evil practices of which Christians were accused. But no cry could they wring from the noble sufferer but "I am a Christian, and no evil is done amongst us." Those who tormented her were obliged to confess their astonishment at her fortitude. She was eventually put into a net and thrown to a wild bull, and thus received martyrdom.

Perpetua.

Severus was made emperor A.D. 193. He is said to have been not unfavourable to the Christians, but was unable to repress the anger of the people. Certain it is that persecution reigned. At Carthage in A.D. 204, four were seized and cast into prison, among them was a lady named Vivia Perpetua. She wrote an account of her own sufferings. To add to her trials, her father, who fondly loved her, came again and again to her prison and entreated her to save herself by calling on the gods, but through the power of God she remained firm. Perpetua had an infant at her breast, which was a source of comfort to her in prison; but nothing touched the hearts of her persecutors.

At length she was brought before the judge. Her father appeared in court to make another effort to save her. Even the judge was moved at the scene. "Spare the old age of your father, and the helplessness of your infant," said he; "sacrifice for the prosperity of the emperor."

"I will do nothing of that kind," she said.

"Are you a Christian?"

"I am."

Her father was almost beside himself. He tried to drag her away, until the judge ordered him out of court. She was condemned.

The night before she and her companions suffered they had a love feast in the prison, at which some other Christians were allowed to be present. On the following day they were led to the amphitheatre. The men were attacked by bears and a leopard. Perpetua and Felicitas (a christian slave) were placed in nets and exposed to a wild cow. By this they were attacked and wounded, but not killed. The spectators called for their death, and this was effected by the swords of the gladiators.

These are but examples of the many who suffered during the reign of Severus. After his death, during the reigns of several emperors, for twenty-four years the Christians had comparative peace. But before looking at the last of the persecutions, we must refer to some other matters of interest.

Chapter 4.

The Apostolic Fathers.

Great respect has constantly been shewn to the so-called fathers of the church, and to their writings, especially to the apostolic fathers. Naturally we might think that those who had the privilege of intercourse with the apostles would themselves be well instructed in the truth. But we doubt not that God allowed that there should be a deep, dark line of distinction between writings that were inspired and those that were not. And this we find to be the case, so that no one should be mistaken as to which is scripture and which is not. This difference is gathered from internal evidence, too plain to be mistaken; for indeed, external evidence might otherwise have led us astray, seeing that in the ancient Greek manuscripts some of these writings were placed along with the inspired books, and were in early days read in the meetings of Christians.*

{*There is no complete manuscript of the New Testament in uncial characters (the most ancient) that does not contain some of these writings. Thus the Codex Sinaiticus contains the Epistle of Barnabas, and part of the Shepherd of Hermas. The Codex Alexandrinus has the First Epistle of Clement and a portion of the Second Epistle. Codex Claromontanus contains the Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocalypse of Peter.}

Clement. Eusebius says Clement was "the friend of St. Paul," and wrote two Epistles to the Corinthians. They are therein warned of their disorders and strife, and earnest appeals are made to their heart and conscience. Yet the fabulous stories introduced mark them at once as uninspired, and the fanciful use made of the Old Testament makes them very untrustworthy. For instance, he gives the story of the phoenix, which was supposed to build its nest of frankincense and other spices, in which it enters and dies; but as it dies, a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. It takes up the nest, and flies to the city of Heliopolis, and places it on the altar of the sun, just five hundred years after the birth of the former bird. This is related with all seriousness as a fact, and is called a wonderful figure of the resurrection! As to quoting the Old Testament, when speaking of bishops and deacons he adds: "For thus saith the scripture in a certain place, 'I will appoint their bishops [or, overseers] in righteousness, and their deacons [or, servants] in faith.'" This is from Isaiah lx. 17, but altered by Clement. In the Septuagint it reads, "I will give thy rulers in peace, and thy overseers in righteousness;" and refers to Jerusalem, and not to the church. These are in the First Epistle.

The Second Epistle of Clement is not now believed to have been written by him.

Polycarp. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp. He says that "Polycarp was instructed by the apostles, and was brought into contact with many who had seen Christ." He is called the bishop of Smyrna. We have already given an account of his martyrdom. He wrote an Epistle to the Philippians, which is mostly exhortations, and abounds with quotations from the Apostolic Epistles; but in one place he quotes the Apocrypha: "When you can do good, defer it not, because 'alms deliver from death.'" (Tobit.) This stamps it at once as uninspired: alms do not deliver from death.

Barnabas. There is an Epistle bearing the name of Barnabas. Clement of Alexandria, who died about A.D. 213, is the first to say it is the same Barnabas that was a companion of Paul. Eusebius calls it "spurious," though it was read in the churches. One MS. entitles it "Epistle of Barnabas the apostle." There is no other Barnabas spoken of in the early writings, and yet from the contents it is not believed to be by the companion of Paul. It is not known to whom it was addressed. Some of its interpretations of scripture are foolish in the extreme, and several times it professes to give quotations from scripture which are nowhere to be found in the word of God.

Ignatius. There are, bearing his name, Epistles — 1, to the Ephesians; 2, to the Magnesians; 3, to the Trallians; 4, to the Romans; 5, to the Philadelphians; 6, to the Smyrnaeans; and 7, an Epistle to Polycarp. Of all these there are longer and shorter copies; and of those to the Ephesians, to the Romans, and to Polycarp, Syriac copies have been discovered, differing from both the long and the short. The whole shews how shamefully the writings have been tampered with, so that no one knows really what Ignatius wrote. Some consider the short epistles in the Syriac copies as most likely to be genuine. We have elsewhere quoted these Epistles on the subject of the place and power to be given to the bishop. Besides the above, there are several others (one to the Virgin Mary) undoubtedly spurious.

Hermas is said to be the Hermas mentioned by Paul in the Epistle to the Romans (but this is really very doubtful), and said to have written a treatise called the "Shepherd of Hermas." It was so highly esteemed by many that it was judged to be inspired. Irenaeus quotes it as scripture; Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen as "divine," and it was read in the churches. It is a sort of allegory, and has often been compared with Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." But some of it is really foolish, and some scarcely decent.*

{*Besides the above, there are a number of apocryphal writings: about a score of different "Gospels," a dozen "Acts," several "Epistles," and four or five "Revelations." — Our Father's Will, p. 157.}

Thus we see, get as near as we can to the inspired writers, there is not a single thing that can be trusted. Though this is indeed sad, yet it is well that we are thrown entirely upon that which is the word of God. This can be trusted, and it is complete, and thank God is entirely sufficient for all we can need. How unwise then to confide in the fathers, or to think that because they were near to the time of the apostles they may be trusted in the interpretation of scripture. It is not so; for if we leave scripture, we at once enter upon that which is dubious if not darkness itself.

Chapter 5.

Attacks on Christianity and the Apologies.

We have already looked at various things that may have operated on the minds of the pagans, as reasons why the Christians should be persecuted, and why Christianity should be stamped out as far as man could do it.

But besides the dislike to Christianity which existed in those who gave the supremacy to the laws of the state, and besides the hatred indulged in by the mass of the people, surrounded with all the show of their pagan worship, which contributed to their lusts, if it did not satisfy their consciences — there was quite a distinct class of opposers, namely, the philosophers.

There had been many systems of philosophy, each supposed to be something in advance of its forerunners. We see from the short account given in Acts xvii., the curiosity of the philosophers at Athens as to the new religion Paul preached. "What will this babbler say?" they exclaimed: "he seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection." Nevertheless, they would give him a hearing in their own court. But when he had spoken to them of the true God, and had called upon them to repent; for there was a judgment day appointed, when the Man whom God had raised from the dead should judge the world in righteousness — some mocked at the very idea of a resurrection, and others said they would hear him again another time.

This is not really to be wondered at, for God Himself had declared that Christ crucified was to the Greeks — the wise men of the earth — foolishness: something altogether contrary to their notions of what a religion suitable to a reasoning man ought to be. But it is interesting to see the form which the opposition towards the great plan of salvation by God through the Lord Jesus Christ took with some of these wise men in the early days of the church.

Let us look first at CELSUS.* He objected to Christians because they made so little of human reason. He said they were ever repeating, "Do not examine, only believe: thy faith will make thee blessed." This is a false way of speaking of Christianity. It fears no examination; but since God has spoken we are expected to believe, and receive His word because He has spoken, not because it falls in with our ideas of right and wrong, which, as we know, are often very faulty.

{* Of this Celsus nothing is known, except that he wrote a book against Christianity, called "A True Discourse," about A.D. 177, which Origen answered.}

Again, he said, in all other religions, that one is invited who is "free from all stains, who is conscious of no wickedness, who has lived a good and upright life:" whereas in Christianity, the call was to "Whosoever is a sinner, whoever is foolish, unlettered, in a word, whoever is wretched — him will the kingdom of heaven receive." Yes, blessed be God, whosoever will is invited to partake of the water of life freely. Poor Celsus knew nothing of the fall of man, and that there was indeed not "a sinless man" upon the earth to be invited.

He seemed to see that a real moral change was needed in man, but he had no idea of the transforming power of Christianity. Thus he said, "It is manifest to every one, that it lies within no one's power to produce, even by punishment to say nothing of mercy, an entire change in a person to whom sin has become a second nature, for to effect a complete change of nature is the most difficult of things; but the sinless are the safer companions of life." No, it cannot be produced by man; he must be born again: there must be a new creation ere man can be raised out of his fallen condition. But this, and much more, is found in the remedy God has graciously provided, had men but eyes to see it.

Unhappily the philosopher had one objection that was too true: it was the division of the saints into sects. "In the outset," he says, "when the Christians were few in number, they may perhaps have agreed among themselves, but as their numbers increased they separated into parties, mutually attacking and refuting each other, and retaining nothing in common but their name, if indeed they did that." If this could be truly said by an opponent in the second century, alas, how it has increased in this our day!

Thus much for Celsus. We have only picked out what was decently consistent in a poor fallen man using his reason. Alas for him, his philosophy did not stop here, but extended to scoffs and opposition to Christ, His Person, and His work, raking up all that was offensive from scoffing Jews and blaspheming enemies.

Another of the philosophers who wrote against Christianity was Porphyry.* In one work he took great pains to collect all the apparent discrepancies in scripture, especially the differences in the Gospels. Christians had often put allegorical interpretations on parts of the Old Testament, to shew that the Old agreed with the New. This seemed to give Porphyry a handle, to say how different the two must be in order to need such fanciful interpretations. This is a point well worthy of attention, for many a Christian has unwisely placed a weapon in the hands of opponents by giving a false interpretation to scripture.

{* A Greek philosopher who, when very young, was under the instruction of Origen, and, as some say, professed Christianity, but apostatised because of ill-treatment by the Christians. He became a violent opponent. Born A.D. 233.}

Another curious work of Porphyry was the judging of Christians by the replies given by the heathen oracles, which were supposed to be direct answers from their gods. Perhaps the reader will be interested in a short account of these oracles.

The Oracle of Delphi.

The oracle at Delphi was one of the most renowned. A smoke, doubtless accompanied by a gas, issued from the ground. It is reported that this was discovered by some shepherds in the neighbourhood, who found that if a sheep wandered too near to the spot, it fell into convulsions. Well, in some way this came to be regarded as a means by which the gods might be communicated with. A temple was erected over the spot, with attendant priests or prophets, and a woman, through whom the god was supposed to communicate his mind. A seat on three legs was set over the place where the smoke arose, and the Pytha, as the woman was called, sat on this seat, and when she was more or less overcome by the fumes, gave her answer to the question asked. She prepared herself by fasting three days, and bathing herself in a particular well. She burnt laurel leaves and flour of barley on the altar. Those who consulted the oracle had also to offer up an animal to Apollo.

Such was the faith placed in the above and other oracles, that the heathen would never enter on any important undertaking without consulting the oracles. We can hardly wonder then that when a new religion was being pressed upon them they should consult their gods in this way.

There were many other oracles besides the one at Delphi, and other ways of ascertaining the will of their gods, such as examining the entrails of the animals slain in sacrifice.* From the passage in Acts xvi. 16, it would also appear that persons were similarly employed, apart from any temple or sacrifice. And it is remarkable that the female slave mentioned in this passage bears the same name, or very nearly, as the prophetess at Delphi — Pithon or Pitha. (See margin.)

{* We shall see an instance of this further on.}

Many of the answers given were very vague, leaving the person who asked the question quite in the dark as to whether the advice of the god was favourable or not. But other answers were quite plain, and led to important results, altogether apart from their being prophecies in any sense of the word. Various theories have been raised as to from whom the answers really came.

We can come to no other conclusion than that the prophetess spoke either as simply dictated by her own sense, or by judging of the wishes of the questioner; or by the direct agency of Satan himself. In the case recorded in the Acts, there can be no question that the damsel was possessed by a demon; and when he was cast out, all her powers of soothsaying came to nothing, as her owners soon saw. And again, the apostle Paul declares that the things the Gentiles offered they sacrificed to demons, and not to God. So there can be little doubt but that the oracles, where there was anything more than the cunning craftiness of man, were under the immediate control of Satan.

Still the, poor heathen thought he was consulting his god — we believe he was consulting Satan; but let us see a few of the replies given touching Christianity. It was not an unfrequent occurrence that a wife was converted to Christianity before the husband, and in one case a husband consulted the oracle as to what god he should propitiate in order to get his wife to abandon her religion. The answer is recorded to be, "that he might sooner write on the flowing stream, or fly on the empty air, than change the mind of his wife after she had once become impure and godless;" adding a most irreverent expression, that he was to let her alone to lament her God who had died, profanely alluding to the death of Christ.

Another question was, whether the judges who condemned Christ did right or wrong. The answer was they did right in condemning Him as a revolter against Judaism: "for the Jews acknowledged God at least more than the Christians." This was a common thought with the heathen, because the Christians believed in Christ, whom they accounted to be only a man.

At another time the question was, why Christ had suffered death, when the reply was, "To be subject to the weaker sufferings is always the lot of the body, but the soul of the pious rises to the fields of heaven." An answer that might at first sight seem to be not unfavourable; but in reality it is so, because it refers His death to mere human suffering common to man, in direct opposition to His death being sacrificial.

Hierocles* was another who wrote against the Christians, in a book entitled "Words to the Christians from a lover of truth." But it is simply an attack on Christianity, repeating much that had been said by Celsus and Porphyry. He especially attacked the miracles of Christ, and declared that they were no proofs that He was God; for one named Apollonius had also done works of the same sort, and the Greeks did not consider him to be a god on that account, but only a man particularly beloved by the gods. And many such assertions are based on tradition.

{*A Roman proconsul in the time of Diocletian, born about 275. He is said to have urged the Emperor to persecute the Christians.}

Such then were some of the early attacks upon Christianity by heathen philosophers. In modern times the very same objections have been urged, not indeed by philosophers, but by sceptics and infidels. Thank God, Christianity stands upon such a basis that none of these efforts of poor fallen man can in any way affect it, though they may (alas!) stumble and injure those who prefer to listen to man rather than to God.

Let us now see how the Christians defended Christianity.

The Apologies.

During the persecutions of the church by the pagans, several addresses were written to the emperor and the Roman people in defence of Christianity. These have been called "Apologies," not of course in the sense of excuses for Christianity, but to let the pagans know somewhat of Christianity, and to defend the Christians against the false accusations constantly raised against them. Apology originally meant a defence.

The three principal charges against the Christians were: —

1. That they were atheists, because they had no gods made by man, and because they would pay no respect to the gods the pagans worshipped.

2. That they ate their own children.

3. That at their private meetings gross immoralities were practised.

It is easy to see, as we have seen, that the Romans with the multitude of gods they could behold, could not understand how the Christians could worship an unseen God. The other two were pure calumnies and had simply to be denied.

In these Apologies, the first thing that strikes one is their length, which makes one wonder whether the emperors ever read them. Perhaps the earliest handed down to us is that of —

Justin Martyr. His first Apology, in an English translation, occupies more than sixty pages of print. He is supposed to have had before him three subjects, namely: —

That christian doctrines are true, and are to be received, not on account of their resemblance to the sentiments of poets or philosophers, but on their own account. He quotes many passages of scripture to shew the purity of the christian doctrines.

That Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God and our Teacher. He quotes many of the prophecies respecting our Lord, and shews how they were truly fulfilled.

That before the incarnation of Christ the demons, having some knowledge of what He would accomplish, enabled the heathen poets and priests in some points to anticipate, though in a distorted form, the facts of the incarnation. This is the most curious part of the Apology. He says that the pagan poets spoke of the sons of Jupiter, and that certain of them ascended to, and descended from, heaven. And after our Lord had appeared, Satan enabled others to do wonderful things, that they might be on a level with Christ. Thus Justin speaks of one Simon, who did such wonderful things at Rome, before the senate and people, that they accounted him to be a god, and honoured him as such. We shall have occasion to quote from this Apology on the forms of worship, etc.

This Apology was addressed to Antoninus Pius. We know not what effect it had on the emperor. He did not persecute the Christians himself, but in parts of Asia the persecution continued; and he himself wrote thus to the Common Council of Asia concerning the persecution: "I am clearly of opinion, that the gods will take care to discover such persons as those to whom you refer. For it much more concerns them to punish those who refuse to worship them, than you, if they be able. But you harass and vex the Christians, and accuse them of Atheism and other crimes, which you can by no means prove. To them it appears to be an advantage to die for their religion, and they gain their point, while they throw away their lives rather than comply with your injunctions. As to the earthquakes, which have happened in times past or more recently, is it not proper to remind you of your own despondency when they happen; and to desire you to compare your spirit with theirs, and observe how serenely they confide in God?"

No one was to be molested unless he attempted "something against the Roman government." If any person accused another merely as a Christian, the accuser was to be punished, and the Christian to be acquitted. Thus God, in His providence, caused a heathen emperor to defend the Christians. It is strange that such a man should not have embraced Christianity when he could say, that the gods would defend themselves if they were able.

Minucius Felix also wrote an Apology, but in the shape of a dialogue between a heathen and a Christian, while another sits as judge. This writer had been a Roman orator, and his work is described as eloquent and elegant. An extract or two will give an idea of how he handled the subject of Atheism. He admitted that the Christians did despise the gods: "The mice," said he, "the swallows, and the bats, gnaw, insult, and sit on your gods, and unless you drive them away they build their nests in their mouths: the spiders weave their webs over their faces. You first make them, then clean, wipe, and protect them, that you may fear and worship them. Should we view all your rites, there are many things which justly deserved to be laughed at; others call for pity and compassion."

On the other hand, the God of the Christians is thus spoken of: "When you lift up your eyes to heaven, and survey the works of creation around you, what is so clear and undeniable as that there is a God, supremely excellent in understanding, who inspires, moves, supports and governs all nature? Consider the vast expanse of heaven and the rapidity of its motion either when studded by the stars by night or enlightened with the sun by day: contemplate the almighty hand which poises them in their orbs and balances them in their movements." He then speaks of the sun and the moon, the light and the darkness, and the beautiful order of the seasons; the sea also with its ebb and flow, the fountains and rivers running into the ocean. Then of the animal world, each creature suited to its sphere, and lastly of the beautiful structure of man — all proclaim a divine Author, and that Author is the God of the Christians.

Athenagoras had been a heathen philosopher and purposed to write against the Christians, and that he might the better carry out his purpose he began to examine the books of the Christians — the scriptures. In doing this, God opened his eyes, and instead of attacking the Christians, he defended them in an Apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius. He makes ample reference to the heathen philosophers and poets. "Why should you be offended at our very name?" said he: "the bare name does not deserve your hatred: it is wickedness alone that deserves punishment. If we are convicted of any crime, less or more, let us be punished, but not merely for the name of a Christian; for no Christian can be a bad man unless he acts contrary to his profession."

In another part, contrasting the conduct of the Christians with that of the heathen, he says: "Among us you will find uneducated persons, and artisans, and old women, who, if they are unable in words to prove the benefit of their doctrine, yet by their deeds they exhibit the benefit arising from their persuasion of its truth: they do not rehearse speeches, but exhibit good works; when struck they do not strike again; when robbed, they do not go to law; they give to those that ask of them, and love their neighbours as themselves."

Tertullian also wrote an Apology about A.D. 198. He ends it with "Do your worst, and rack your inventions for tortures for Christians. It is all to no purpose; you do but attract the notice of the world, and make it fall the more in love with our religion. The more you mow us down, the thicker we spring up. The christian blood you spill is like the seed you sow: it springs from the earth again and fructifies the more. That which you reproach in us as stubbornness, has been the most instructive mistress in proselyting the world; for who has not been struck with the sight of what you call stubbornness, and from thence were prompted to look into the reality and ground of it? And who ever looked well into our religion that did not embrace it? and who ever embraced it that was not ready to die for it? For this reason it is that we thank you for condemning us, because there is such a happy variance and disagreement between the divine and human judgment, that when you condemn us upon earth, God absolves us in heaven."

Tertullian was presbyter of a church in Carthage, and wrote several other works. One against Marcion the heretic is quite a volume, with a constant reference to scripture. Some of his other writings are, however, unimportant.

By means of these Apologies the emperors had the truths of Christianity more or less plainly put before them, and this makes it the more manifest that the work of persecution was of Satan, as indeed our Lord had foretold when speaking of this phase of the church's history: "The devil shall cast some of you into prison," etc. (Rev. ii. 10.) But, blessed be His name, the faithful should have a "crown of life."

Chapter 6.

The Catacombs.

In considering the early history of the church, we must not omit to mention the catacombs. These were formed at various places, but those at Rome were the most extensive. The name is supposed to have been derived from two Greek words kata, kumbos, a hollow or recess,

In the neighbourhood of Rome there are entrances to a number of long passages underground. These extend for many miles in various directions. It was generally believed that these passages were originally formed by the removal of stone and sand for the building of the city of Rome.

A good deal of the stone was called tufa litoide, sufficiently hard for building purposes. Large blocks of this were easily cut out by the miners, and as they proceeded they formed the miles of passages which exist in the catacombs.

There was also a species of rough sand, called pozzolana pura, which made a very enduring cement, when crushed and mixed in water with pounded shells or lime. This was also valuable for building purposes.

As the miners worked gradually downwards they would, by an inclined plane, get below the passage they had already formed, and then by turning to right or left (guided perhaps by the seams of stone or sand they were seeking for) they would work their way underneath the first passage they had made. In places they would again descend until a third passage was formed.

This, for a long time, was thought to be the origin of the catacombs; but modern researches seem to shew that, while in a few places old quarries were used for burial places, the principal part of the catacombs was the sole work of the Christians themselves. This seems evident by the different formation of the galleries, and by most of them being cut in a third description of material, tufa granolare, unfit for building purposes; though, on the other hand, it is difficult to see how such an immense amount of material could have been disposed of if not used in building. Some of these galleries made by the Christians were near those made by the miners, and this was often of great use to the Christians. They blocked up the entrance to their own, and made a way into those of the miners, so that they could enter without arousing suspicion; and the entrances being at various distances from the city, persons, by appearing to journey into the country, could take food to those who had taken shelter therein.

In some places the Christians cut away the walls of the passages, and made a crypt or vault. Here underground they could hold their meetings for worship unmolested.

The principal use made of the catacombs was for the burial of the dead. A hole was dug in the wall, and the body placed therein, as on a shelf; slabs of stone covered the entrance, while a tablet told who was buried there.

In later times, long after persecution had ceased, the catacombs seem to have been forgotten. The Christians no longer needed to hide themselves, nor to bury their dead there. Some of the entrances got blocked up by the earth falling, and all interest in them died out. Thus for some six hundred years the catacombs remained undisturbed and indeed unknown.

But in the year 1578, considerable excitement was caused by the discovery of the catacombs, and they began to be explored, and interest was taken in everything found in them. The tablets on the tombs were cut from the walls and brought to light. Some of them were secured by private persons, but a great number were preserved, and are exhibited to this day in a long gallery in the Vatican at Rome.

It is very strange that the Roman Catholics do not see that these early memorials, though silent, are a strong witness against themselves. In those simple memorials there is no mention of prayers for the dead, and no mention of the Virgin Mary. But instead of this there is a constant mention of Christ, and of Him alone as Saviour or Patron. Those who are buried are said to "sleep in Christ," "they rest in peace," "in peace and in Christ," etc.

A monogram very commonly found on the tablets taken from the catacombs, is meant to point out the name of Christ. It is formed of the first two letters of the name in Greek, CHRISTOS. The above symbol was supposed to have been first used by Constantine about A.D. 312; but as it is often found on the tablets from the catacombs, it is doubtful whether it did not exist long before, and he simply adopted it.

Many other symbols and monograms were found on the tablets. Perhaps one of the most curious is the symbol of a fish. It is thus explained. In Greek the word would be ICTHUS, and this word is supposed to represent (by containing the initials of) Jesus Christos Theou Hios Soter: Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour. It was thought that such a symbol would never be understood by their persecutors. Believers could use it while they lived as a symbol that they were Christians, and have it engraved on their tombs when they died.

The dates, when there are any, are determined by the names of the consuls of Rome:* thus an inscription runs thus, "Aurelia, our sweetest daughter, who departed from the world, Severus and Quintinus being consuls. She lived fifteen years and four months." This would mark the date to be A.D. 235. The dates fixed by this means for these Christian burials, extend from A.D. 98 to A.D. 400, though there may have been some earlier than A.D. 98, for numbers of tombs bear no dates. During these years there would be buried in the catacombs many thousands of Christians.

{* Two consuls were appointed in Rome yearly. A record of them was carefully preserved; so that by naming the consuls of the year in which any event took place, the year can always be ascertained.}

The catacombs, though robbed of their tablets, have excited the curiosity of modern travellers. One gives the following description: "These entrances are mostly low and dark: beyond them you see one or more long, low, dark aisles, the great length of which is concealed in the obscurity which envelops every object at the distance of a few paces from the torches and lanterns which you and your guides may carry. Nothing can well be more solemn than this subterranean gloom, and the effect produced by the objects brought to light as you advance. The yawning tombs on either side of you, and before and behind you — skulls, skeletons, crosses! Nothing is here but speaks of persecution or death. The entire length of few of these aisles is known for, as a measure of precaution, many have been closed by stone walls while others are so blocked up by rubbish and fallen blocks of pozzolana, that the boldest explorer is compelled to halt. At irregular distances, and usually on both sides of the main aisles, narrow passages branch off, leading to other crypts. Mostly these passages strike off at right angles, but they seldom run far in a right line, while many of them become very tortuous. Many of these passages are now wholly blocked up, while others are so encumbered with rubbish that in order to get through them, the explorer must crawl on his hands and knees. The difficulty of finding one's way in such a labyrinth, without a guide, may be easily comprehended. . . . In most of the catacombs there are crypts, galleries, or passages underneath those which you first enter . . an involuntary descent is sometimes obtained by careless travellers through holes which have been made by the falling in of the tufo flooring. . . . The awful silence of these deep cavities more than ever adds horror to the darkness There is nothing down here that has life — not so much as a fly, or the minutest insect is to be found. If there exist any objects at all, they are mournful mementos of man's mortality — skulls, bones, broken epitaphs, or graves closed up with slabs, bearing the symbols of death and of martyrdom, or empty and open, and, as it were, yawning for fresh tenants."*

{* Macfarlane.}

Thus the catacombs form an interesting chapter of early Christianity places where they could bury their dead without any of the heathen ceremonies, and to which they could fly for temporary safety when violent persecution broke out. Many prayers must have ascended to heaven from those dark passages, and much precious dust lies buried there, waiting for that glad morn when the voice of the archangel and the trump of God shall call the sleeping saints to rise, and, with those who shall be alive at that time, to meet their Lord, and be with Him and like Him for ever!

Chapter 7.

Miracles and Signs.

Our Lord said to His apostles after His resurrection, in sending them forth to preach the gospel, "These signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." (Mark xvi. 17, 18.) It is an interesting question as to how long these signs were continued in the church, or were they confined to the apostles and their immediate successors

If we give credit to some historians, miracles have always been found in the church, from the apostles downwards, and have been wrought in various ways: at first, by the direct agency of the living saints; but afterwards by means of their bones and relics; by the consecrated bread of the Eucharist; and even by pictures and images! One is tempted to turn away from all such records with disdain. Our Lord did not promise that such wonders should be wrought by means of dead men's bones, much less by images and pictures; besides which we cannot shut our eyes to the exposure, in modern times, of the tricks by which many a professed miracle was wrought, and this too in that which professes to be the church of God.

The question remains, are there any reliable records of miracles and signs in the early church? Perhaps that which is most prominent is the casting out of demons. But even here we must be on our guard, because it came to be believed that every one, child or adult, belonged to the devil, if not actually possessed, so that before they were baptised they were exorcised. But let us see what the early writers say on the subject.

Justin Martyr says the name of "Jesus" was powerful for the destruction of the demons. He thus appealed to the Romans: "Now you can learn this from what is under your own observation. For numberless demoniacs throughout the whole world, and in your city, many of our christian men exorcising them in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, have healed and do heal, rendering helpless and driving the possessing devils out of the men, though they could not be cured by all the other exorcists, and those who used incantations and drugs."*

{* Second Apology, vi.}

Now this plainly speaks of driving out demons, and the Roman Senate is asked to judge of the reality of the profession by facts occurring all around. There seems here no room to doubt that such things were actually being done; and it does not say by bishops or presbyters, but by "many christian men."

Irenaeus gives us a much fuller list of what was being done in his day: "Some do certainly and truly drive out devils, so that those who have thus been cleansed from evil spirits frequently both believe and join themselves to the church. Others have foreknowledge of things to come: they see visions, and utter prophetic expressions. Others still heal the sick by laying their hands upon them, and they are made whole. Yea, moreover, as I have said, the dead even have been raised up, and remained among us for many years. . . . As she [the church] has received freely from God, freely also does she minister. Nor does she perform any thing by means of angelic invocations, or by incantations, or by any other wicked curious acts; but, directing her prayers to the Lord who made all things, in a pure, sincere, and straightforward spirit, and calling upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, she has been accustomed to work miracles for the advantage of mankind, and not to lead them into error."*

{* Against Heresies, ii. 32, 4.}

Here again the words are plain, and the works of power are wrought by a direct appeal to the Lord Himself. It will also be seen how exactly the curing of the sick agrees with the means above named in the passage from Mark, namely, by the laying on of hands.

Tertullian also appeals to known facts concerning the cure of some: The clerk of one of the advocates, "who was liable to be thrown upon the ground by an evil spirit, was set free from his affliction; as was the relative of another, and the little boy of a third. And how many men of rank, to say nothing of common people, have been delivered from devils, and healed of diseases!"*

{*To Scapula, 4.}

Again, in his Apology (23), he appeals to the emperor thus: "Place some assuredly possessed person before your tribunals; a follower of Christ shall command that spirit to speak, who shall as surely confess himself to be a demon as elsewhere he will falsely call himself a god."

We can hardly suppose that this writer would thus appeal publicly to cases known to those frequenting the courts, and even ask for some case to be brought before the tribunal, that the question might be publicly tested, if such things did not exist.

It is further to be noticed that these writers do not speak of such things being done by any one or more privileged persons, but apparently by Christians generally; and this the better agrees with the quotation from Mark, that the signs should "follow them that believe."

As we might suppose, Satan was busy in both opposing and counterfeiting the working of miracles. Thus he had agents to oppose the truth, such as the "sorcerer" we read of in Acts xiii., who sought to turn away the proconsul from the faith. So, later on in the early church, he had those who were supposed to be able to work miracles, and who used their influence to lead men astray. Simon Magus and others professed to work wonders, and one writer tells of a woman who professed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. She fell into ecstasies and pretended to prophesy, and did wonderful things. But it is related that a Christian exorcised her, and then it was shewn that she was an agent of Satan.

Later on in the church there were those called "exorcists." The Apostolic Constitutions* say (viii. 26) such need not be ordained: "for he who has received the gift of healing is declared by revelation from God, the grace which is in him being manifest to all. But if there be the occasion, let him be ordained a bishop, or a presbyter, or a deacon." And the first council of Constantinople (A.D. 336) shews that exorcism was nominally practised where there was no question of persons being possessed: thus speaking of heretics, it says they must be received as non-Christians, and goes on to say, "the first day we make them Christians; the second, catechumens; then the third, we exorcise them, after breathing thrice upon the face and ears, and so we catechise them, and cause them to stay in the church and hear the scriptures; and then we baptise them."

{*The date of this work is much disputed, varying from the third to the sixth century; it is in nowise apostolic.}

Thus we see that "exorcism" came to have quite a different application — as if to keep up the name after the power of casting out demons was gone. And it is evident that the working of miracles did not continue long in the church; indeed, later on, it is claimed only for some specially holy man — mostly a recluse — and from this it descended in still later times, as we have seen, to the bones and other relics of the saints, and even to pictures and images! Thus, alas, everything committed to man fails because of his unfaithfulness; but instead of owning his failure, he will do his best to keep up the name without the power; and this even after the necessity for the gifts named has passed away.

Chapter 8.

Offices in the Early Church.

As we shall be compelled to use various ecclesiastical titles, it will be well to see how far they have been obtained from scripture.

The term "bishop" occurs constantly in all histories of the church, simply because some were so called, and there is no other word that can well be substituted. The same title also occurs in the authorised version of the New Testament. We want to see how far they agree.

In the scriptures it is plain that the "bishops" and "elders" were one and the same. Paul had left Titus to appoint elders (presbyters), in every city, if any were blameless, etc.; for a bishop must be blameless, etc. (Titus i. 5-7.) He was one who took the oversight of an assembly, or there were more than one appointed — elders — some for ruling, and some for ministering in the word. (1 Tim. v. 17.) But there is no thought in scripture of these having any authority over districts.

Neither do we find such in the early church. As one has said: "Let none confound the bishops of this primitive and golden period of the church with those of whom we read in following ages. For though they were both designated by the same name, yet they differed extremely in many respects. A bishop during the first and second centuries was a person who had the care of one christian assembly, which, at that time, was, generally speaking, small enough to be contained in a private house."* It was not till much later that bishops had control over districts, with inferior clergy under them, and at length also with others superior to them.

{* Mosheim.}

In the first epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, we find the title "elder" or "presbyter" and "bishop" used indiscriminately. Others of the early fathers prove that these terms were used of the same person.

As we have seen, there were elders (in the plural) appointed in a city, and some were gifted to rule, and others to minister in the word. We can easily understand that one of the two, or more may have taken a prominent place and become a sort of "president," to use an expression given by Justin Martyr,* and then that one to be called 'bishop' in distinction from the presbyters and deacons, that we read of in the epistles of Ignatius.

{*proestos is the word used: it does not occur in the New Testament.}

Still in the epistles bearing the name of Ignatius, the bishop seemed to be over the church in a city, though even there an undue reverence is claimed for the several officers. Thus he says: "It is evident we ought to look upon the bishop as the Lord Himself." (Ep. to the Ephesians vi.)

"Let all reverence the deacons as Jesus Christ; and the bishop as the Father; and the presbyters as the sanhedrim of God and college of the apostles. Without these there is no church." (Ep. to the Trallians, iii.)

"All of you follow the bishop, as Jesus Christ the Father; and the presbytery as the apostles; honour the deacon as the commandment of God . . . let that eucharist be considered valid which is celebrated by the bishop, or by him whom he has permitted. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptise or to celebrate a love feast." (Ep. to the Smyrneans, viii.)

Now though these extracts may not have been written by Ignatius (for it is a much disputed point, and in the Syriac copy of the Epistle to the Ephesians the above passage does not occur: of the other epistles, though there are shorter and longer versions, no Syriac copy has yet been discovered) they shew what was creeping into the church when these epistles were put forth by some one — somewhat later than Ignatius (died A.D. l07). But even in the Syriac copy, which is believed to be by Ignatius, these words occur: "Look to the bishop, that God also may look upon you. I will be instead of the souls of those who are subject to the bishop, and the presbyters, and the deacons: with them may I have a portion in the presence of God."

The next step would be that as Christianity extended to the districts around a city, if any dispute arose, appeal would be made to the presbytery of the city, when, if one of these had assumed a separate place of bishop, he would be brought into prominence, and by degrees would obtain influence over a district. Then later on there were several bishops in a province, and when any important matters arose a synod of the bishops would be called, and one would preside. The bishop of the chief city or district generally presided, and he was eventually called Metropolitan. This again was followed by the appointment of archbishops or patriarchs.

In this early stage of the church "Apostolic Succession" was not known. It is true that Paul empowered Titus to ordain elders in every city, but there is not a word that this authority for ordination was afterwards to be continued, and without authority there could not be the same appointment. Men might be gifted for the various branches of work — as is the case to this day; but gift is not office. How was the office to be obtained? This indeed led to many disputes: Were the bishops properly ordained? Then, when heresies arose, were consecrations by heretics valid? Later on, the emperors appointed whom they pleased to be bishops. At length a great system of hierarchy was established, but which had not one single feature of resemblance to anything found in the New Testament.

On the other hand, there is not one word in scripture to warrant the church in choosing its own ministers; indeed, among some, at least, of the dissenting bodies, the thought of its being scriptural is quite given up, and they argue that because all human societies choose their own officers, it is right for the church to do the same. But this, alas, reduces the church of God to a mere club. Would that Christians were content to meet in the name of the Lord Jesus, according to Matthew xviii. 20, and there let all whom God has gifted use their gifts, without any choice of the people or any human appointment.

God indeed knew how soon evil would be associated with His church, and He caused His servant Paul, when predicting the apostasy after his decease, to commend the saints "to God and to the word of his grace." He said, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, "obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls" (Heb. xiii. 17), but there is no instruction as to how the authority was to be handed down in the future. And so the appeal must be to the word for if even an angel from heaven preached any other gospel he was to be accursed. And it was well even in the early church, when evil doctrines were propagated, and often by those called bishops, for the saints to know that they were not bound to obey man merely because of any office he might be supposed to hold, but to obey God as revealed in His word; though surely then, as now, they were called upon to submit to any who watched for their souls, with a desire for their spiritual welfare.

In contrast to this, let Ammianus Marcellinus speak of the bishops of Rome in the fourth century: "It was no wonder to see those who were ambitious of human greatness, contending with so much heat and animosity for that dignity, because when they had obtained it, they were sure to be enriched by the offerings of the matrons; of appearing abroad in great splendour; of being admired for their costly coaches, sumptuous in their feasts, outdoing sovereign princes in the expenses of their tables." It was this worldly glory that led Praetextatus, a heathen, to declare, "Make me bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian too!" Alas! how sadly had those fallen who should have been examples to the flock! How unlike the Lord Jesus, who had not where to lay His head, and who made Himself of no reputation!

Chapter 9.

Customs in the Church.

We must now look at a few things of interest that will throw light upon the practices and internal condition of the church. The things here described were introduced gradually, and were not the same in all parts at the same time, some preserving a measure of primitive purity much longer than others.

Reception into the Church.

It is surprising how little we read of conversions in the early church. Of "regeneration" we do read, but it is almost invariably connected with baptism. There seems to have been a settled conviction that "born of water," in John 3, refers to baptism, instead of its being connected with "the word:" as "of his own will begat he us with the word of truth" (James 1: 18); while another passage — "washing of water by the word" — clearly connects "water" and "the word." In opposition to this, persons were said to be regenerated, or born again, in their baptism.

Another thing we miss is the record of persons believing — a truth so clearly brought out in the scriptures. Take for instance, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth:" and so in many other passages.

Instead of this, there was what appears to have been a being educated into Christianity. We have little insight as to how the gospel was really preached; in the sermons of Chrysostom it was sadly mixed up with what would now be called ritualism — a trusting to the efficacy of the sacraments.

For any applying for fellowship there was a long process of education before they were received: so different from when Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, and "they that gladly received his word were baptised; and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls."

The person applying was at first received as a Catechumen, if his outward conduct was commendable; that is, he became a pupil — one to be taught by catechising. Here he might be kept for a year, or even two or three years; and if, in the meantime, he fell into idolatry, he must begin again, or the time be further prolonged. He was called a Christian all this time, but not a fidelis, one of the Faithful. This distinction was kept up, so that even on tombs it was not enough to say the one buried was a Christian, "fidelis" must be added, if such were the case.

Another curious custom was that the Catechumens were not allowed to hear the Lord"s prayer nor the creed; but when a portion of the service was completed, a deacon would tell them to leave. This is the more remarkable, seeing that the Lord's prayer forms a part of scripture, and should have been, but for the scarcity of the manuscript copies, in the hands of every one, as now happily is the case.

Another class of persons — or another name for the Catechumens — was Audientes, those who were allowed to listen (hence the name). In the East it would appear that this name especially referred to the fallen seeking restoration, though in other places it may simply have been another name for the Catechumens: both classes were allowed to hear the scriptures read, and the sermons, but not to join in the worship. All were told to leave, except the Faithful.

In certain places further divisions existed, and some were allowed to kneel (called Genuflectentes) and pray before their full reception. When ready for baptism they were called Competentes.

The instruction included the whole of sacred history, from the creation downwards, and after this the gospel narratives. Then instructions in the subjects of God, of Christ, of the Holy Ghost, of the judgment to come, of the body, soul, etc.

At length the time approached for their reception, and for forty days special preparation was made for baptism by prayer and fasting. Instruction was given in the creed, the nature of the sacraments, and discipline in the church; and special inquiries were now made as to their walk. A few days before baptism, they were taught the Lord"s prayer and the creed. In some places, they were now allowed to lay aside their heathen names and take christian ones.

The time for baptism was between Easter and Pentecost of each year; and it was administered by the bishop or presbyter. Midnight was the appointed hour, and torches were burned to give the necessary light; curtains were hung from the pillars to separate the sexes. Each candidate faced the west, and, as he stretched forth his hand, said, "I renounce thee, Satan, and all thy works, and all thy pomps, and all thy service." Then turning to the east, he repeated the belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He was then rubbed from head to foot with oil, and on approaching the pool was questioned by the bishop, and on his confession was immersed (by some thrice, by some once): he was again anointed with oil, and then, dressed in white, received the kiss of peace, and a little honey and milk. Now for the first time he repeated the Lord's prayer. He was now a Fidelis, and ready for the Lord's supper.*

{* See Cyril of Jerusalem, and Chrysostom; both were of the fourth century.}

Surely one cannot but see in this how the simplicity of the gospel had been elaborated and spoiled. Compare, for example, all this with the conversion of the Philippian jailor in Acts xvi. "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" he asked. "And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." That same night, the jailor and all his house were baptised. Not entirely ignorant, for we read, "They spake unto him the word of the Lord." But an hour was enough when the Lord had wrought upon the soul. True, an apostle was there, and was doubtless able to discern that the work was real; whereas now a little time may be needed, to discover if the seed has fallen into good ground according to the parable of the sower. But not a word of being a Catechumen for a year or more, and no room for the thought of being educated into a Christian. And how simple the baptism! At midnight, it is true, but in a prison or the jailor's house. Doubtless on his confession of faith, but no renouncing of the devil, nor repetition of a creed learnt by heart, ready for the occasion. God acts upon a soul: he believes and is baptised, and his house. Alas, how the presentation of the gospel, the mode of reception, and all else failed and was corrupted in the hands of man

Forms of Worship.

There is but little information given by the early writers as to how their meetings were conducted. Justin Martyr gives some interesting particulars. He says, "On the day called Sunday all who live in cities or in the country gather to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine with water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying, Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well-to-do, and willing, give what each thinks fit and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows, and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word he takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is a day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ, our Saviour, on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things."

Of the Lord's supper he also says, "This food is called among us the eucharist, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins, and unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayers of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the apostles in the memoirs composed by them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that Jesus took bread, and, when He had given thanks, said, 'This do ye in remembrance of me: this is my body;' and that after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, He said, 'This is my blood,' and gave it to them alone."*

{* First Apology, lxvi., lxvii.}

It is pleasing to see that in the days of Justin (second century), the Lord's supper was partaken of weekly, the same as is implied in Acts xx. 7, when "upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them." We also see that the scriptures were always read to the saints. This was the more needed in those days, when the books were only in manuscript and very scarce, and could only be heard in this way. Indeed, we find copies of the Gospels prepared specially for public reading, called Lectionaries, with slight alterations, so that, for instance, a portion might commence with the words, "Jesus said," instead of "He said;" and which alterations have been preserved in a few places in the Authorised Version.*

{*See Matthew viii. 5 as an instance, where the best manuscripts read "he" for "Jesus."}

It may be thought remarkable that nothing is said here of the saints singing, while we read that our Lord at the institution of the supper "sang a hymn," and singing is spoken of as a part of public worship in 1 Corinthians xiv. 15. See also Ephesians v. 19; Colossians iii. 16; James v. 13. But this being an address to the emperor, may not be a full statement of all that took place at these Lord's day meetings; but, in another part of the same Apology, he speaks of God "whom we praise to the utmost of our power by the exercise of prayer and thanksgiving for all things .... and with gratitude to Him to offer thanks by invocations and hymns."

We find that they had exhortation and instruction at their meetings, as Paul also "preached" to the saints in Acts xx. 7. There was special need of this in the early church, when there were no books of christian instruction, though needed indeed at all times. The bishop was to be "apt to teach" (1 Tim. iii. 2; 2 Tim. ii. 24); "teachers" were among those set in the church (1 Cor. xii. 28). "He that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort." (Chap. xiv. 3.)

We also find that a collection for the poor was made at these meetings, but it says that the money was given to the "president," and that he succoured the orphans and widows — a work generally thought more suited to those called deacons; for in the Acts such were appointed that the apostles might not have to serve tables. (Acts vi. 2.)

Another custom we find introduced here was to send the bread and wine to those who were absent. Scripture says nothing of this, and it may be questioned whether it did not lose its assembly character by being carried forth. In 1 Corinthians xi., we read they were "come together in the church . . . . come together into one place." And because of the disorders in the assembly at Corinth, some were sick. Surely it would not be according to God's order to carry the bread and wine to these on whom He had laid His hand in discipline. And it might be discipline that kept others from the Lord's supper.

Some will, no doubt, wonder why water was mixed with the wine. Of this also nothing is said in scripture. It certainly became a practice thus early in the church, but from what source it is not known. Some have endeavoured to prove that water was mingled with wine at the paschal suppers of the Jews, and hence it was the same as the Lord used at the institution of the supper. But this cannot be proved. The reason given by some of the early writers why it was used in the church, is that it alludes to the blood and water that ran from the side of our Lord when pierced with the spear. It is still the custom in some churches, but has no warrant from scripture.

The above passage, referring to the bread and wine being the flesh and blood of our Lord, is not at all clear in its meaning, and indeed it has been claimed alike by Protestants and Catholics as having very opposite meanings. It would however appear, that the words of our Lord were taken in their literal sense at an early date in the church. Thus Cyril of Jerusalem (died about A.D. 386), speaking of the Lord's supper, says, "Then, after hallowing ourselves by the spiritual hymns [sanctus, etc.] we beseech the merciful God to send forth His Holy Spirit upon the elements displayed on the table, to make the bread the body of Christ and the wine the blood of Christ. For most certainly, whatever the Holy Spirit may have touched, that is hallowed and transformed (petabebletai). Then, after that the spiritual sacrifice, the unbloody service, is completed, over that sacrifice of propitiation we beseech God for the common peace of the churches," etc. He then goes on to speak of the intercession of the saints and martyrs, whom God would doubtless hear: thus calling the Lord's supper a sacrifice, and laying early the foundation for some of the gross perversions in the Church of Rome. It will easily be seen why the Romish Church so constantly appeals to the Fathers as its authority, instead of to scripture.

Love Feasts.

The "feasts of charity" we read of in Jude 12 were continued in the early church. It is not clear whether they were associated with the Lord's supper or not. In the account we have given from Justin Martyr respecting the Lord's supper, he does not name the Love Feast. Tertullian mentions the Feast, without naming the Lord's supper. He says, "Our souls ascend in prayer to God before we sit down to meat. We eat only what suffices nature, and drink no more than is strictly becoming chaste and regular persons. We sup as servants that know we must wake in the night to the service of our Master, and discourse as those who are in the hearing of God. When supper is ended, every one is invited forth to sing praises to God; and by this you may judge of the manner of drinking at a christian feast. As we begin, so we conclude, with prayer, and depart with the same tenor of temperance and modesty as we came; as men who have not so properly been drinking as imbibing religion." The same writer does not always speak thus of their Love Feasts, for abuses crept in, as indeed may be alluded to in 2 Peter 2: 13, and the feasts were forbidden by some.

Superstitions in the Church.

There can be no doubt that superstitions began at an early period. Thus Prayers for the Dead are supposed to have been in use in Tertullian's time. In speaking against second marriages, he says the first wife has been "already received into the Lord's presence; for whose spirit you make request; for whom you render annual oblations." He elsewhere speaks of commemoration and intercession for the dead. So also does Cyprian. Cyril of Jerusalem explains, that at the prayers and intercessions of the martyrs, etc., God would receive our supplications; and also that the greatest benefit would accrue to their souls for whom the living supplicated. Again we need not wonder that the Fathers should be quoted in support of false doctrines and practices. It is the most that can be done where scripture is silent.

The Sign of the Cross. — This was introduced quite early. Justin Martyr says, "The sign of the cross is on our brow and on our heart. It is on our brow that we may always confess Christ, on our hearts that we may always love Him, on our arm that we may always work for Him." Tertullian says, "In all our travels and movements, in all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupieth us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross."* He also recommends the sign of the cross being immediately resorted to, as protection from the bite of a scorpion! So the sign of the cross was made on the forehead, on entering and leaving the meetings.

{* De Corona, iii.}

Clergy and Laity. — The division of Christians into clergy and laity took place quite early in the Church.* The term "clergy" is from the Greek kleros, and is found in 1 Peter v. 3, where all Christians are included in God's "heritage." The use of the word, however, soon wandered from this, to mean the bishops, presbyters, and deacons, to distinguish these from the laity (from laos, the people). The bishops and presbyters were also called "priests," but here again in scripture, the term applies to all Christians, as in Revelation i., which clearly teaches the priesthood of all Christians. "In holy orders" is another term applied to the clergy, as if they were more holy than other Christians.

{* Clement, in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, writes: "His own peculiar services are assigned to the High Priest, and their own proper place is prescribed to the Priests, and their own special ministrations devolve on the Levites. The Layman is bound by the laws that pertain to laymen." (Chap. xl.)}

The Lord's Supper and Absolution. — The idea crept in early, that the eucharist conveyed grace and safety in some way. Those who fell during the persecutions were in some places kept for years before they were restored, but in very few instances was the eucharist refused to them when they came to die. The following letter by Dionysius of Alexandria (A.D. 247-265), as given by Eusebius, will shew in what light this was regarded: —

"There was a certain Serapion, an aged believer, who had passed his long life irreproachably; but, as he had sacrificed during the persecution, though he frequently begged, no one would listen to him. He was taken sick, and continued three days in succession, speechless and senseless. On the fourth day, recovering a little, he called his grandchild to him and said, 'O son, how long do you detain me? I beseech you hasten, and quickly absolve me. Call one of the presbyters to me.' Saying this, he again became speechless. The boy ran to the presbyter. But it was night, and the presbyter was sick. As I had, however, before issued an injunction, that those at the point of death, if they desired it, and especially if they had entreated for it before, should receive absolution, that they might depart from life in comfortable hope, I gave the boy a small portion of the eucharist, telling him to dip it in water, and to drop it into the mouth of the old man. The boy returned with the morsel. When he came near, before he entered, Serapion, having again recovered himself, said, 'Thou hast come, my son, but the presbyter could not come. But do thou quickly perform what thou art commanded, and dismiss me.' The boy moistened it, and at the same time dropped it into the old man's mouth. And he, having swallowed a little, immediately expired, Was he not, then, evidently preserved, and did he not continue living until he was absolved; and his sins being wiped away, he could be acknowledged as a believer for the many good acts he had done?"

What a strange mixture we get here! Discipline, when rightly exercised by the assembly, is recognised in heaven (Matt. xviii. 18; 2 Cor. ii. 7), but forgiveness is altogether apart from receiving the eucharist, though of course the eucharist would be given when the person was restored. But here the morsel of bread is said to restore, and to wipe away the old man's sins! and then it is strangely added, that he could be counted a believer for the many good works he had done! Alas, the darkness that was overshadowing the church at this early date!

The Celibacy of the Clergy. — It was taught by some, quite early in the church, that it was much holier for men and women to remain unmarried. This led to asceticism and dwelling alone, and then it was demanded, from time to time, that the clergy should not marry after their appointment, and never take a second wife; and by some, that they should separate from their wives if married before election. This was strongly opposed by others, and it was only by degrees that the celibacy of the clergy was demanded. We may illustrate this by an account of Hippolytus and Callistus.

The emperor Commodus (died 192) had a favourite mistress, named Marcia, who was supposed to be a professing Christian: she was styled by Hippolytus a "God-fearing woman." She had great influence over that profligate tyrant. Victor was at that time bishop of Rome. One, named Carpophorus, kept a sort of bank in which the Christians put their savings, and a slave, a professed Christian, Callistus, had the management of the same. But Callistus made away with the money and fled. His master pursued him, and when Callistus saw him, he threw himself into the sea, but was rescued by the sailors and given up to his master, who brought him back, and kept him in prison, until some interceded and he was liberated. But he was neither grateful nor penitent, and one day he created such a disturbance in a Jewish synagogue that he was seized and carried before the prefect. His master claimed him, but he was publicly scourged and sent to the mines in Sardinia.

Some time afterwards Marcia, wishing to extend her influence for the benefit of the Christians, asked Victor for a list of those who had been banished to Sardinia, and then used her influence with Commodus to have them recalled. The name of Callistus was not included; he was too well known to be trusted. The list was given to an honourable eunuch, who proceeded to Sardinia to fetch back the convicts. Callistus was vexed to find his name omitted, but by great persuasion he induced the eunuch to claim him also, and the governor submitted, upon the eunuch promising to bear all blame. On arriving at Rome, the bishop was greatly annoyed at seeing the reprobate Callistus among the prisoners, and he was banished to Antium.

For a time Callistus was lost sight of, but was next heard of as assistant to Zephyrinus, who came to Rome and succeeded Victor as bishop: Hippolytus describes Zephyrinus as an ignorant person, greedy of gain, and who left much to his more sharp-witted deacon, Callistus, who managed, in helping his bishop, to ingratiate himself with many persons of influence, so that at the death of Zephyrinus he was actually chosen bishop. Hippolytus charges him with heresy, and with great presumption, for he professed to be able to forgive sins, and he also ruled that if a bishop sinned, even if it were a sin unto death, he could not be deposed. One would think this was specially framed to shield himself.

But it is remarkable that one of the principal things Hippolytus brings against Callistus is that he was very careless about discipline, and ordained as bishops, presbyters, and deacons, those who had been twice and even thrice married! "Even a man," says Hippolytus, "who had married while in orders was subject to no kind of penalty, as if he had not sinned," And then listen to the reply of Callistus: he asks, "Did not the Lord say, Let the tares grow with the wheat?" and "Were there not unclean beasts in the ark?" and such there must always be in the church!

Now while this, with the grave sins charged on Callistus, gives a fearful picture of the low state of the church at this time in Rome, it shews what a dreadful sin it was accounted for a bishop to marry: and yet this forbidding to marry was only an ordinance of man, and one in direct conflict with the word of God, where the bishop is spoken of as having a wife, and ruling his children well. (1 Tim. iii. 2-4.)

It is a disputed question as to where Hippolytus was settled. He is often styled bishop in Pontus, but by others is represented as being at Rome, and by some he is supposed to have been anti-bishop of Rome at the same time as Callistus. The latter is the one named in the lists of the bishops of Rome; though Hippolytus is often called bishop of Rome and martyr.

Hippolytus wrote many works, and several commentaries, of which latter only fragments remain. A larger work, "The Refutation of all Heresies," is also attributed to him. The above account of Callistus is taken from this.

Chapter 10.

Early Heresies.

One of the most important things in the early history of the church, is the evil doctrines that were manifested in its midst. These were usually called Heresies. Irenaeus and Hippolytus name about thirty different heresies from the days of the apostles to their times.

It is important to understand what heresy is, because we are informed by the word of God that in the latter day things will get worse and worse, and professing Christians will bring in "doctrines of demons" (1 Tim. iv. 1); while the apostle John said that in his day Christians were to try the spirits, for many false prophets had already gone forth into the world (1 John iv. 1); and in another place he says, "even now are there many antichrists."

We generally understand by a "heretic" one who holds false doctrine, and by "heresy" that which is held contrary to the truth according to scripture. And no doubt this is correct. We read in 2 Peter ii. 1, of those who bring in destructive heresies; yet the word in the original has another meaning, which it is important for us to look at. This other meaning is "sects," apparently irrespective of false doctrines. (See Acts v. 17; xv. 5; xxvi. 5.)

At first sight there may appear no connection between a person's belonging to a "sect," and his holding "false doctrines;" but it is not difficult to see how the two are associated together. The root of the word is "to choose," and this equally applies to the "sect" and to the "heresy." If I take scripture simply, without wishing to add to it or take from it, I have no choice. It is God's book to me, and I have nothing to do either to choose or refuse. It is not a question of choosing that book or another, or one part of that book in preference to another. I gratefully accept it all. In doing this, and submitting to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, there can be no heresy. Men commonly say, "I must choose my own religion." But this supposes that God has not spoken; that He has not given a revelation, and a form of doctrine. Paul thanked God that the Roman saints had obeyed from the heart the "form of doctrine which was delivered" to them. There is no thought in scripture of Christians choosing their own doctrine. "Choosing" is that which leads to heresy.

So of the sects. One said, "I am of Paul," another, "I am of Apollos," etc. Here again was choice, instead of receiving all whom God had gifted. Christians boast of liberty to choose their own gifted men; but this is a liberty condemned of God. We should receive and value all.

Thus we see that both heresies and sects spring from men — and possibly from Christians — exercising their choice where God would have them have none.

There were many heresies in the earlier church, to recount which would be tedious and unprofitable. But a few of them demand our attention.

Gnosticism.

The first of these mixed philosophy with Christianity, and denied the manhood of Christ. They denied that Christ really became a man and died. With this was a great deal of philosophy so called. We will give a specimen of this, that our readers may judge how unprofitable it was. They taught that "from the self-existent Father was born a high Intelligence called Understanding; from Understanding proceeded the Word (Greek, Logos); from the Word, Prudence; from Prudence, Wisdom and Power; from Wisdom and Power, Powers, Principalities,* and Angels, whom they call superior angels, by whom the first heaven was made; from these proceeded other angels and other heavens. . . . . The self-existent and ineffable Father sent his first-begotten, Understanding (Greek, Nous.), who also is said to be Christ, for the salvation of such as believe in him, and to deliver them from the tyranny of the makers of the world; and that he appeared on earth as man and wrought miracles. But he did not suffer." One of these heretics says that Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross of our Lord, was crucified in his stead. They agree that our Lord was not really a man, but only appeared as one, and that He did not suffer on the cross.

{*These Intelligences were called Aeons.}

It is easy for any intelligent Christian to prove from scripture that all this is false. Besides the error of saying an angel created the earth, and that Jehovah was not the God of the Jews, it was fatal to salvation to deny that the Lord Jesus was really a man and that He died for our salvation.

This error was very early in the professing church, and it is believed that the apostle John referred to it, when he said that he was an antichrist who denied that Christ had come in the flesh, or was really a man. (1 John iv. 2, 3.)

The folly also of attempting to attach philosophy to Christianity is condemned in scripture (Col. ii. 8), and the theory, given above, of Wisdom and Power being born of Prudence, etc., is a species of philosophy so called. Its folly and wickedness are surely plain to all Christians.

Those who held these views were called Gnostics,* and Simon Magus, named in the Acts, is supposed to have been the first who held and taught them, though not exactly as given above, for each of the teachers tried to improve on the theory. It is recorded that this Simon was a learned man, and that he endeavoured to unite the Magian philosophy with Christianity. He came to Rome in the reign of Claudius, and was held in high repute. A good deal more that is said about him is now held to be unworthy of credit.

{* From the Greek Gnosis, knowledge.}

It is difficult to say how far this same form of evil doctrine exists at the present time; for Satan is constantly varying his attempts to delude mankind and draw them from the religion of Jesus Christ.

The belief of the Swedenborgians may be named as approaching in some things to Gnosticism, in so far as it speaks of the humanity of our Lord as divine humanity, and denies that His death was in our stead. But there are many others who also deny this last point, and who attempt to exalt man into being his own saviour by morality and virtue, altogether denying the truth so plainly taught in scripture of the fall of man, and the need of the death of Christ for redemption.

Marcion, in the second century, was another Gnostic heretic, but differed perhaps from all others. He taught that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of the New, nor the Messiah of the Old the same as the Christ of the New; and other foolish and hurtful things. Tertullian answered him, pointing out many passages in the Old Testament quoted in the New. It is recorded that in his latter days, he repented of the schism he had caused, and sought to be restored. He was told that he must seek to restore those he had led astray; but he died soon afterwards.

Arianism.

The other great heresy in the early church was denying that our Lord was God as well as man. The name Arianism came from Arius, who was a strong defender of the error, although it is generally believed that the same, or similar, doctrines, were held before his time.

Arius was presbyter of the church at Alexandria, and here he came into collision first with Alexander and then with Athanasius, bishops of Alexandria, and kept the church in a state of contention for many years.

The controversy was supposed to have given rise to what is called "The Athanasian Creed." Its origin is not now known, though it seems to bear internal evidence of having been written to meet the Arian and Sabellian* heresies.

{*The Sabellians (from one named Sabellius) denied that there are three Persons in the Godhead; but held that there were three Phases under which the one divine essence reveals itself.}

The creed says, "The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, and yet there are not three Gods: but one God." It further says that after the incarnation of the Lord Jesus He was "perfect God, and perfect man."

Now we cannot understand that which is so far above us, the nature of God — that which is infinite; but it is necessary to see that scripture clearly speaks of the Father as God, and the Son as God, and the Holy Ghost as God; and yet, as the creed says, there are not three Gods, but one God. So it is necessary to see that the Lord Jesus was truly a man, born of the Virgin Mary; that He lived a man upon the earth, was then nailed to a cross of wood, and died — died to redeem His people. Being man, He could die; His being God as well as man gave infinite value to His death for the redemption of an innumerable multitude. Our Lord Himself said that no man knew the Son but the Father (Matt. xi. 27), and therefore we cannot expect to understand the mystery of the union of God and man in one Person. Many who have attempted it have fallen into error; some have denied the Godhead and others the manhood of our Lord. It is our wisdom to believe every statement of scripture, though we cannot understand that which is infinite, nor the Person of our Lord, as He Himself said. We shall see, later on, to what evil the Arian heresy led in the church.

A doctrine, similar to that held by the Arians, has come down to our own day under the name of Unitarianism.

Unitarians profess to believe in one God, but deny that there are three Persons in the Godhead. Consequently they hold that Christ was only a man, that He died as a martyr, but that there is no atonement in His death. Indeed, they believe that no atonement was needed, for they hold that man has not fallen from his original condition, and, on repentance, will be forgiven. They also deny eternal punishment.

Our readers will see how wrong it is to consider as Christians any who hold such soul-destroying doctrines.

The Novatians.

These are generally classed among the sects. It is difficult at this distance of time to get a clear idea of those to whom this name was given. About A.D. 250, Novatian, a presbyter of a church at Rome, broke away from the general body of Christians, holding that no one who lapsed into idolatry, during the reign of an emperor who enforced paganism, should again be received into communion, counting them to be apostates, such as are described in Hebrews vi. 1-6. Some of the emperors, as we have seen, were much more severe than others, and under some it was possible for a man to hide his religion and serve the state; but when persecution arose he must give up the one or the other, and it was found that some could be pagan and Christian by turns, according to the aspect of affairs. There can be no doubt that some of these were not Christians and ought to have been denied communion. It is impossible now to tell whether Novatian did not press this too far, and allow no room for repentance.

After the persecution of Decius (A.D. 249-251) there were many cases for restoration. They were in general called "Lapsi," apostates, but they were classified thus: 1. "Sacrificati," those who had actually sacrificed to the gods, or the images of the emperor. 2. "Thurificati," those who had strewn incense on the heathen altars. 3. "Libellatici," those who, by money or favour, had obtained certificates from the magistrates as if they had obeyed the emperor. 4. "Traditores," those who delivered up the sacred books or church property. On the other hand, there were many who had suffered tortures, imprisonments, mutilations, working in the mines, etc. These, when they were restored to their homes, being extolled by their brethren, were apt to be proud of their faithfulness, and stood out in strong contrast with those who had fallen. Were the lapsed to be treated as though they had been faithful, or their apostasy to be thought little of? Novatian held that no one on earth had power to restore such.

At Rome matters were brought to an open rupture at the election of a bishop. Cornelius, a presbyter, was nominated but Novatian strongly opposed his election because he would admit those who had fallen. But his election was carried, and, a synod being called, Novatian was condemned. On this, seeing no remedy for the increase of corruptions in the professing body, he withdrew with many others, and was also elected bishop by some who held with him. They were the first class of Christians called Cathari (Puritans), but whether the name was adopted by themselves is not now known.

The Novatians continued as a separate body for some centuries. They abstained from much of the contention that arose in the church in after years, and were able to render help to others when they were persecuted. They contended that one of the essential marks of the true church was purity and separation from evil and they would admit none except these were re-baptised and those who lapsed into idolatry were never re-admitted, though they opposed them in no other way, and did not feel called upon to decide as to their true repentance. A charge afterwards brought against the Novatians was that they did not pay due reverence to the martyrs, nor value their relics. May not these Puritans have been such that many a true saint could unite with, and find in them a community of Christians separate from the growing evils, though they may have been too rigid in their discipline? Their enemies can bring little against them except their separation. In the council of A.D. 383 they subscribed the Nicean creed and were counted orthodox.

Chapter 11.

Cyprian and the Assumptions of Rome.

In resuming our history, we will take a glance at the way Rome was attempting to gain the ascendancy in the church.

Cyprian was a wealthy teacher of rhetoric at Carthage before his conversion. He was baptised A.D. 245 or 246, and at once distributed a portion of his fortune, and devoted himself to the study of the scriptures and the fathers.

This was during what has been called the Long Peace, there being no persecution for the period of about thirty years, and during that time the African church had fallen to a low ebb spiritually, though outwardly it was prosperous. Its bishops are described as engaged in agriculture, trade, and even usury. Some were too ignorant to instruct the people or to distinguish between the orthodox and the heretics.

In A.D. 248 the bishop of Carthage died, and Cyprian was chosen to succeed him, but chiefly by the poor of the flock; others strongly opposed him, and maintained their opposition, even after his consecration. In the year 250, the emperor Decius began a persecution, principally against the bishops. It was thought that if the bishops could be got rid of, the people would easily be gained. Cyprian fled, defending this course as best he could, but this was taken as an occasion of opposing him. He returned in 251, but then, as we have seen, the question of the lapsi was being hotly discussed. Some at Carthage agreed with Novatian and chose another bishop others agreed with those who received all, and elected still another; Cyprian took a middle course, not refusing the restoration of all, nor admitting any without due repentance (or penance, as it was then called).

Though there was now a complete schism at Carthage, Cyprian held his ground, became the recognised bishop, and was looked up to by others. He came into collision with Rome under the following circumstances: —

About A.D. 252, two Spanish bishops, Basilides and Martial, were deposed by a synod as "libellatici." Basilides made public confession and was restored to communion, but as a private Christian only. The year following he went to Rome, and appealed to the bishop to interfere on their behalf. Stephen had succeeded Cornelius, and he, on his own authority, ordered the Spanish synod to restore the two deposed bishops; but in the meantime, for some reason, the case had been referred to Cyprian and an African synod. These met and confirmed the judgment of their Spanish brethren. On hearing the decision of the bishop of Rome, Cyprian treated it with contempt and, repudiated the thought that the bishop of Rome could set aside a district synod.

We see here an instance of the growing assumption of the bishops of Rome. Various things served to give them a prominent place among the bishops, principally because Rome was the seat of the civil government. Its bishop was delighted to be thus appealed to as to one who had authority over other bishops and even local synods. We shall see that this was a battle that had to be fought many times before there was anything like a victory for Rome.

The bishop of Rome had of course much higher claims for supremacy than what proceeded from the relations of the city to the state. Zephyrinus (about A.D. 202) had asserted that he sat in the chair of St. Peter, referring to the words of our Lord, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church;" but Tertullian contended the point with the bishop.

The bishop of Rome, from time to time, did not hesitate to style himself "chief Pontiff," and "bishop of bishops," and used other such-like terms.

Another occurrence in the time of Cyprian also brought out the assumptions of Rome. The question had been raised as to whether the baptism by heretics should be considered valid or not? Stephen of Rome and many others held that those thus baptised should not be re-baptised; a simple laying on of hands was sufficient. On the contrary, many in Asia held that no grace could flow through such polluted sources; the applicants must be re-baptised. Cyprian agreed in this judgment.

The bishop of Rome, assuming an undue authority, took upon himself to excommunicate the bishops of Asia! A synod was at once called at Carthage. It is said to have consisted of eighty-seven bishops. The questions to be considered were: 1, the validity of baptism by heretics; 2, the conduct of Rome.

Cyprian exhorted all to speak their judgment freely. The decisions arrived at were against the bishop of Rome's assumption, and against his dictum as to re-baptism. Stephen was very angry, and called Cyprian "false Christ," "false apostle," "deceitful labourer," etc. Cyprian asserted that it was the duty of every Christian to resort immediately to the gospel and the apostolic traditions [teachings] as the only fountain of christian truth.

It was not only the African bishops who contended against the assumptions of Rome. Firmilian of Cappadocia wrote: "The people of Rome do not uniformly hold the things handed down to them from the beginning, yet vainly pretend to apostolic authority."

It is therefore clear that the claim of the bishop of Rome to supremacy over all other bishops was not admitted in the early church, and it was only tolerated much later, after repeated resistance. At this date the term Papacy did not exist: many bishops were styled Papa, (Pope) or father; and in their controversies even Cyprian is thus designated by the bishop of Rome himself.

Cyprian's course was not lengthy. In A.D. 257, Valerian began his persecution, and Cyprian was cited before the proconsul; on his refusing to offer sacrifice to the gods, he was banished to Curubis, a lonely spot on the seashore, but only a day's journey from Carthage. Here he remained eleven months in communication with his flock. A new proconsul recalled him, but on a more severe edict being issued, he was again arrested and condemned to death by the sword. He exclaimed, "By the grace of God." Thus he became a martyr. He was much beloved by his people, and highly esteemed in the church.

Chapter 12.

The Later Persecutions.

Decius became emperor A.D. 249, and ordered a severe and systematic persecution of the Christians. Some of the early christian writers regarded the persecution as needed, because of the low spiritual condition of the church, though that condition is curiously described. Thus christian men are described as "effeminate and self-indulgent, trimming their beards, and dyeing their hair; the women as painting their faces and colouring their eyebrows. The clergy were self-seeking and ambitious."

The heathen looked upon them as a secret society which they could not understand, and as one dangerous to the prosperity of the state. Efforts must be made to root it out. The magistrates were ordered throughout the empire, under heavy penalties, to carry out the persecution. At first great pressure was to be used to induce the Christians to return to the religion of the state. Those who yielded were to be no further molested.

History records that the offices were thronged with candidates who were willing to obey the edict. Some sacrificed, some sprinkled incense on the altars, and some bought, by money or favours, certificates that they had satisfied the law without doing any of the above. We have already seen what trouble these caused in reference to their restoration after the persecution had ceased.

Many however refused to comply. Naturally the bishops were especially sought for. Some escaped and hid themselves, but this was not easy, as the persecution was general. Some were imprisoned and otherwise punished; some put to death. Fabian, bishop of Rome, Babylas of Antioch, and Alexander of Jerusalem, were among the martyrs. There was scarcely a province of the empire where the persecutions were not severely felt.

Origen was tortured on the rack, but survived. A lad, Dioscorus, only fifteen, stood firm, but was spared by the prefect because of his youth.*

{* The books of martyrs give the oft repeated story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in connection with this persecution. These, confessing their faith, were walled up in a cave, and left to die. They fell asleep, and the place was long famous as a place of sanctity. In the reign of Theodosius (A.D. 447, some two hundred years after) the cave was opened, and the sleepers awoke; and walking about, were surprised to see such numerous changes — churches occupying the places where heathen temples once stood, etc. They did not, however, survive long; for they again fell asleep to awake no more. Thus fables are often found along with the facts concerning the early saints and martyrs.}

Happily this persecution did not last long. The emperor was called away to meet the Goths, and he and his son were slain (A.D. 251).

Doubtless the persecution had a good effect, notwithstanding all that was so painful; for it dissociated many, who for various reasons had been associated with the Christians without being such in reality. Where there was true faith it could bear the trial, and come out from the furnace of affliction all the brighter, or seal it with their blood.

Origen.

Having named this theologian, we add a few particulars concerning him. He was born about A.D. 185, of christian parents. In A.D. 202, his father was put into prison and afterwards put to death. The confiscation of his property left his son dependent on others. A rich christian lady took him into her house, and enabled him to go on with his studies. When about eighteen he engaged in catechetical instruction. About this time he made himself a eunuch, being led thereto by reading Matthew xix. 12.

Paying a visit to Palestine and Caesarea, he began to give discourses in the church, but was forbidden by Demetrius of Alexandria, and he resumed his catechetical instruction. About A.D. 218, he was invited to Antioch to give christian instruction to Mammaea, the mother of the emperor Alexander Severus. About A.D. 230, he went to Greece, by way of Palestine, where he was ordained presbyter. This again roused Demetrius, who caused him, at two synods, to be forbidden to act as presbyter, perhaps because he was a eunuch, though Jerome says it was through jealousy of his talents. He went on with his teaching (some renowned in the church placing themselves under him) and his writing, employing several to copy his works, and he was looked up to by many for counsel. As we have seen, he suffered torture under Decius, but died a natural death about A.D. 254.

He was a compiler of the renowned book known as Origen's Hexapla, a work that must have involved immense labour. It gave the Old Testament in Hebrew, the same in Greek characters, the translations of Aquila, of Symmachus, of the LXX, of Theodotion, with three other versions. It occupied nearly fifty volumes, but unhappily all is lost, except the extracts that had been made from it. He was also the author of several commentaries on parts of scripture; but he mixed philosophy with his Christianity and was not sound in the faith. There were repeated controversies as to his teaching, but some of it was so speculative that Athanasius and Arius both claimed him as on their side. He denied eternal punishment, holding the eventual restoration of all, even the devil! Thus we see the danger of attempting to join philosophy with Christianity, and not keeping simply to the teaching of the word of God.

Valerian and Diocletian.

Valerian was made emperor A.D. 253, and at first was favourable to the Christians, but began a persecution in the year 257. The first edict forbad their holding any meetings; those who did not obey were by another edict sent to work in the mines; a third ordered all bishops, presbyters, and deacons, to be put to death.

Under these persecutions, Stephen (bishop of Rome), and Cyprian of Carthage were martyrs. Sixtus II. succeeded Stephen at Rome, but suffered martyrdom the year following. His faithful disciple, Laurentius, deacon of the church at Rome, was also arrested. It had been reported that the church had amassed great treasures and these were demanded of the deacon. Under the supposition that they would be given up, he was released he then collected a number of the poor of the church, "paupers and cripples," and presenting them to the prefect, said, "These are our treasures." The prefect felt insulted, and ordered Laurentius to be put to death by a slow fire. This cruel sentence was carried out, to the horror of his fellow Christians.

The persecution continuing, no one was chosen to succeed Sixtus II. as bishop of Rome until A.D. 259, when Dionysius was chosen.

The emperor Valerian had been defeated and taken prisoner he was succeeded by Gallienus, who at once stayed the persecution.

In A.D. 284, Diocletian was chosen emperor, and did not at first molest the Christians. In the year 292, he appointed Constantius Chlorus and Galerius co-emperors. In A.D. 303 a violent persecution commenced. Various things led to it. The mother of Galerius was in the habit of giving frequent sacrificial banquets, and was annoyed by the christian officers refusing to take part in them. Others refused to serve the state because of the idolatrous rites required of them. This seemed to rouse Galerius: what was to be come of the state if so many turned Christians?

The pagan priests were not long in working upon the fears and prejudices of the emperors. Diocletian was fond of consulting the oracles and signs. He sacrificed, and then the priests searched the entrails of the victims for omens, good or bad. But they now declared that there were no omens. Again and again victims were killed, but the same result — "no omens." At last they declared it was because of profane persons being present. These profane persons were the Christians who accompanied the emperor as attendants, and who satisfied their consciences by making the form of the cross upon themselves. This declaration of the priests roused the anger of the emperor: he ordered all his officers to sacrifice or be scourged, and dismissed from his service if they refused. He ordered all the chiefs of the army to act in a similar way towards all Christians in their companies. Galerius and his mother urged on Diocletian but he was not so ready to extend the persecution: he would first consult the gods.

A messenger was sent to consult the oracle of the Milesian Apollo at Branchidae. We need not wonder that the answer was that the self-styled "just ones" on the earth made it impossible for the oracles to speak the truth. The priests explained that this referred to the Christians. The answer was not only given by the priestess, who usually gave the replies, but it was said to be given by the god himself. This decided Diocletian to extend the persecution, but he wished bloodshed to be spared as far as possible. Galerius was not so scrupulous, and would have burnt those who refused to sacrifice.

The edicts issued were: 1. All churches were to be destroyed. 2. All copies of the scriptures and sacred books were to be given up and burnt. 3. All who held any official position were to lose their dignities and civil rights, unless they sacrificed. 4. All men not officials were, on refusal, to be reduced to the condition of slaves.

These edicts were obeyed, except in Gaul and Britain, where Constantius Chlorus reigned. He was content with destroying the buildings. In all other places the edicts were carried out with more or less severity. The prefects did not stop at confiscation, imprisonment, and tortures, but put many to death. The bishops, deacons, and readers, were especially sought for and tortured to reveal and give up their sacred books. A fire broke out in the palace of Diocletian, and suspicion fell upon the Christians, and this further enraged him; still he wished the lives of the Christians to be spared as far as could be.

At the end of the same year, Diocletian was laid by, unwell, and Galerius sought to become sole emperor, and complications ensued but the persecutions continued. Galerius increased in power, and issued more severe edicts against the Christians, and death was now the common penalty for disobedience.

At the end of A.D. 310, Galerius was seized with a painful malady, and died in May, 311, being gradually eaten by worms. When he saw that death was inevitable, he issued a hypocritical edict, staying the persecution, and asking the prayers of the Christians!

In the west, persecutions had also been severe. It is estimated that 16,000 persons suffered death in one month, but this may include the whole empire. Marcellinus was bishop of Rome (A.D. 296). It is recorded that he saved his life by placing incense on the altar, but afterwards repented and suffered martyrdom in A.D. 304. As the persecution continued, no successor was appointed for more than two years.

In A.D. 306, Maxentius became emperor of that part of the empire, and protected the Christians thus persecution ceased at Rome much earlier than in the east.

In A.D. 307, Marcellus was chosen bishop, and no sooner was the persecution over than again occurred the vexed question as to the lapsi, of whom there were many during the late severe persecution. Marcellus demanded "penitence" for all such, and his stern discipline roused such violent opposition, that riots and even bloodshed were the result. The emperor, to quiet the tumult, banished the bishop from the city.

One named Eusebius succeeded, A.D. 309 or 310, who also enforced penitential discipline before restoration of the fallen, and the tumults were renewed. These were so violent that again the emperor ordered the banishment of the bishop. He died the year of his banishment. Melchiades succeeded, A.D. 311 till 314.

During this time, Constantine the Great became sole emperor, and then followed that great change in the whole professing church which we shall now have to consider.

But before leaving the period of persecution, it may be well to notice that in the address to the church of Smyrna, which speaks of persecution, occur the words: "Behold the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried and ye shall have tribulation ten days." (Rev. ii. 10.) Many have thought that this points to ten persecutions, and have named especially the following: —

1 Under Nero, about A.D. 64.

2 Under Domitian about A.D. 95.

3 Under Trajan about A.D. 106.

4 Under Adrian about A.D. 118.

5 Under Severus about A.D. 199.

6 Under Maximinus about A.D. 235.

7 Under Decius about A.D. 250.

8 Under Valerian about A.D. 257.

9 Under Aurelian about A.D. 272.

10 Under Diocletian about A.D. 303.

On the other hand, it has been contended by some historians that anything worthy the name of a general persecution was comparatively rare and far between; nothing of note between Nero and Decius, and nothing between Decius and Diocletian. As we have seen, there were Christians in the army under the emperor Marcus, where one would think they could not be hid. While the laws condemning the Christians remained unrepealed, a great deal depended on the proconsuls as to how far those laws were enforced, as well as how far the Christians made themselves obnoxious to "the powers that be."

Without doubt, the address to the church of Smyrna, interpreted prophetically, applies to the period we have been surveying, whether we are able or not to interpret all its details. Persecution marks it throughout. Our Lord therein is spoken of as "the first and the last, which was dead and is alive." They should be like their Lord: though put to death they should live again. "Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison that ye may be tried .... be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life."

There were many during the first three centuries of the church who suffered spoliation, torture, and death, for the name of Christ. What consolation for such to know that their persecutors could only kill the body; their Lord was dead, and is alive again, and His promise to all such as were overcomers was that they should not be hurt of the second death: instead of that, He Himself would give them a crown of life.

Part 2. Profession.

Chapter 1.

Conversion of Constantine.

A.D. 312.

One of the most remarkable things connected with the history of the church is the conversion of the emperor Constantine, called the Great.

This forms a landmark also by which to trace out other events. Up to this time the Roman emperors had been pagans, and persecution was that which characterised the first three hundred years of the church's history, though with many and long exceptions.

Now all was changed, the emperor professed to be converted, and not only did persecution cease, but Christianity for the first time became fashionable. Those who wanted to be in favour with the emperor must embrace his religion. This was a turning everything upside down, and was the means of making many professors. It brought great relief to the real Christian, but it commenced on a very large scale what has from that day to this gone on increasing — namely, Profession.

We saw that the period of persecution well agreed with the address to the church in Smyrna, in Revelation ii. 10. The period we are now about to look at will coincide with the address to the church at Pergamos. The church therein is seen dwelling in the world, and yet a witness for Christ. There is also a teaching error for reward, and the allowance of evil doctrine.

But we must relate the conversion of Constantine. The account is very remarkable. When the emperor was assembled with his army against his rival Maxentius, about the time of the sun-setting, he, having risen from offering prayer for the success of his arms, saw in the heavens, towards the west, the figure of the cross, large and luminous, with these words, "By this conquer." It is said that this sign was not seen by himself only, but by the whole of his army.

Further, on retiring that same night, in his sleep he saw Christ, who bore a cross similar to the one he had seen in the heavens, and who bade Constantine have one made like it and use it for a standard in his wars. He summoned the most skilful workmen into his presence, to whom he described exactly the form of the cross, and ordered one to be made inlaid with gold and precious gems.* This was constantly carried as his standard, and to this he attributed his many victories.

{*See chapter 6.}

Historians have been sadly puzzled as to whether this account of the conversion of Constantine is true. Eusebius hands it down to us, and he tells us that he heard it from the lips of the emperor himself, so that there seems to be no room for mistake.

Another serious question arises, Was Constantine really converted? Was it a work of God? or was it all a delusion? It would appear at first sight a very good thing to abolish idolatry over the empire; but on the other hand, it was a very dangerous thing for thousands to profess to be converted to Christianity when they were not Christians.

Certainly Constantine knew nothing of the true liberty of a child of God. He was not baptised till near his death, lest he should commit sin after his baptism. This, no doubt, was based upon the false and dangerous teaching that baptism washed away sins; so the poor man, though an emperor, was kept all the rest of his life as a catechumen, and not admitted into the church, because he feared to be baptised. How different is the religion of Jesus Christ! "The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin."

Though on some occasions Constantine seemed to speak more like a Christian than some of the bishops, and was zealous in religious observances, yet at last he more and more favoured the Arians. This, with the mysterious death of his son Crispus, his nephew Licinius, and his wife Fausta — with the very grave suspicion of all having been put to death by his orders — has thrown a dark cloud over the hopes any would fain have of his being a true Christian.

Constantine, after his conversion, was engaged with various wars until, in A.D. 323, he became sole emperor, and was then more at leisure to attend to the condition of the church, which was in great confusion. Arius had a strong party on his side who denied that Jesus Christ is God; while the faithful Christians maintained — as all true Christians must maintain — that He is God. This was a vital question. If Christ was not God as well as man, there could be no salvation; and therefore the faithful could not let this be called in question.

Constantine, after attempting to make peace privately, determined to call together a general council of the heads of the church. This was called the Council of Nice.

Constantine then went on with his work of changing the pagan worship into that of christian, and ordered the images in the pagan temples to be destroyed except those made of brass, and such others as were judged of superior workmanship: these were saved as works of art, and carried to Constantinople, but, alas, only to be used afterwards in pagan worship again when Julian ascended the throne.

Constantine proceeded to erect churches for christian worship in many places, and Helena his mother erected a church at Jerusalem, where some wood was found which superstition claimed to be the cross of our Lord!

In many districts the converts were counted by hundreds; it was found that to embrace Christianity was a means of obtaining favour at court, and undoubtedly many who changed their religion were nominally Christians only.

Another thing, introduced for the first time, was the union of church and state. As we shall see, the emperor attended the council of Nice, and future emperors had constantly to interfere to attempt to quell disturbances between rival bishops, and settle doctrinal disputes, carried on by turbulent men in place and power — so different from the meek and gentle disciples who marked the early church.

Chapter 2.

The Council of Nice.

A.D. 325.

About three hundred bishops and five hundred presbyters attended this council. They came from Europe, Asia, and Africa. On the day appointed they all assembled, and waited for the emperor. As he entered they all rose from their seats to welcome him. He said in Latin: "In beholding you thus assembled, my beloved, I enjoy this accomplishment of my most earnest supplications..... When indeed my arms, by the favour and help of the Almighty, were rendered victorious, I thought that nothing was then wanting to me but to praise Him for His blessings, and to rejoice with those whom He had enabled me to deliver. On receiving, therefore, the unlooked for intelligence of your dissensions, I immediately judged it necessary to take the matter into consideration, and hoping that I might thereby afford some remedy to the evil, have hastened to call you together..... Hasten then, beloved, as good servants and ministers of our common Lord and Saviour, to remove from among you the causes of the present dissensions, so that, by the laws of peace, you may break asunder the bond of contention by doing which, you will render an acceptable homage to the Almighty, and bestow a most excellent favour on me your fellow-servant."

But the bishops had many complaints to make against each other. Constantine requested them to put their charges into writing, and he appointed a day when he would consider them. But on that day he threw all the letters unopened into the fire, saying that it did not belong to him to decide the differences of christian bishops, and that the hearing of them must be delayed until the day of judgment.

The emperor succeeded in some degree in bringing the council to order and the discussion began, but again and again the emperor had to exhort the council to charity and forbearance. Among the assembly were some clever philosophers, who attempted to puzzle their opponents with subtle arguments; but this was stopped by a venerable old man rising from his seat and saying, "Christ and His apostles did not teach us the art of logic, nor an empty cunningness, but a naked wisdom, to be kept by faith and good works." This had a good effect. The Christian had silenced the philosopher.

Athanasius, then only a deacon, was present to defend the true doctrine of Christ's divinity; Arius himself was present to oppose him. A Creed was drawn up — still known as the Nicene Creed, from the city in which the council was held — declaring the divinity of Christ. Some of the Arians were induced nominally to agree to the creed by altering a word.*

{* They substituted homoiousios for homoousios, that is "similarity" for "sameness."}

But this did not satisfy the orthodox. They proceeded to expel Arius and his followers from the council. Arius and others were sent into exile, and all his books ordered to be burnt — death being the penalty for any who concealed his writings.

The decisions arrived at during this council, called the First General Council, were made known to the professing church in a solemn epistle.

Although the council of Nice seemed to settle everything, its decisions were not obeyed. Many who signed the confessions of faith, but who agreed really with Arius, and his friends — especially Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia — afterwards besought the emperor to recall the exiles. This he did, overruling the council of Nice, and setting the example of treating its decrees with contempt. Alas! the church was now really ruled by the civil power. It dwelt in the world, according to Revelation ii. 13.

Easter.

At the council of Nice was also determined the day on which Easter should commence. Although this would be considered by many a matter of small consequence, it had been hotly contested, and one bishop of Rome attempted to excommunicate whole districts for not observing Easter on the right day!

The word "Easter" occurs once in the Authorised Version (Acts xii. 4), where the word is pascha, which is elsewhere translated "Passover," and is so translated here in the Revised Version. This shews that in the translators' minds Easter and the Passover corresponded. But the Passover is associated with the crucifixion: "Christ our passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Cor. v. 7); and the Passover fell on the 14th day of Nisan, and might occur on any day of the week; whereas Easter is generally accepted to refer to the resurrection, and commences on a Sunday. The former mode of reckoning was mostly adopted in the east, and the latter in the west. At the council of Nice it was settled for the latter.

In general terms, Easter may be said to be the first Sunday following the fourteenth day of the so-called paschal moon, which happens on or first after the vernal equinox. The vernal equinox always falls on March 21, so that Easter may be March 22, but not earlier; or if the fifteenth day of the paschal moon falls on March 21, a full lunar month must pass before another fourteenth day can come, and this may be on a Sunday, and so Easter may be as late as April 25, but not later: it may, of course, fall on any day between these dates.

There is nothing in the New Testament respecting the keeping of Easter. Acts xii. 4 simply refers to the Passover as a suitable time for Herod to deliver up Peter to destruction. Of course the Passover was observed by the Jews, and probably by the Jewish converts. The words sent out from the council were "that all the brethren in the east, who formerly celebrated Easter with the Jews, will henceforth keep it agreeably with the Romans and ourselves, and all who from ancient time have kept Easter as we." The crucifixion was observed on what is called Good Friday by fasting, etc.; the following Sunday commenced Easter as a festival.

Its observance began on the preceding evening by fasting, prayer in the churches, etc. Jerome assigns as a reason for the people being kept till after midnight, that "even as the paschal deliverance of Israel took place at midnight (Ex. xii. 29) it was the expectation of the church, according to apostolic tradition, that Christ would return to accomplish the redemption of His church, and triumph over her enemies at the same hour. That hour being passed, the awe with which the Lord's coming was anticipated being relieved, the Easter feast was celebrated with universal joy." Lactantius also mentions the night being passed in watchfulness for "the coming of our King and God." How strange that the coming of the Lord should be looked forward to in awe instead of being the hope of the Christian!

Lamps and candles were lit everywhere in token of the festival. Gregory Nazianzen speaks of persons of all ranks, even magistrates and ladies of rank, carrying lamps, and setting up tapers both at home and in the churches, thus turning night into day. In later times a huge taper was solemnly blessed as a type of Christ"s rising from the dead to give light to the world! Easter eve was also the chosen time for baptising the converts, and the numbers were often great: "three thousand" awaited baptism when Chrysostom was deposed.

Gregory Nyssen (A.D. 372-394) gives a graphic description of the keeping of the festival: "All labour ceased, all trades were suspended, the husbandman threw down his spade and plough and put on his holiday attire, the very tavern-keepers left their gains. The roads were empty of travellers, the sea of sailors. The mother came to church with the whole band of her children and domestics, her husband and the whole family rejoicing with her. All Christians assembled everywhere as members of one family. The poor man dressed like the rich, and the rich wore his gayest attire; those who had none of their own borrowed of their neighbours; the very children were made to share in the joy of the feast by putting on new clothes."

Alas, that this should have been associated with keeping a christian festival: every word of it would be just as suitable for preparing for a pagan rite. How sad to forget that those who worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth, and all such outward show counts for nothing or, worse than nothing!

The same writer says, "Every kind of sorrow is put to rest to-day, nor is there anyone so overwhelmed with grief as not to find relief from the magnificence of this feast. Now the prisoner is loosed, the debtor is forgiven, the slave is set free, and he who continues a slave derives benefit."

The time was to be spent in "worship, singing paschal hymns, and offering their daily sacrifices."

We thus see how in the early church the festivals were made to draw together and interest the people generally, irrespective altogether as to whether they were believers or unbelievers. And from that day to this, the same period of the year — and even more so the festival of Christmas — have been the scene of holiday-keeping, feasting, and mirth, entirely inappropriate to the solemn scenes they are said to commemorate: in many respects, indeed, a direct insult to the One who should be before the soul.

Chapter 3.

Athanasius and His Times.

Athanasius was born in Alexandria, of christian parents, about A.D. 296. As we have seen, he was present at the Council of Nice and opposed Arius.

In A.D. 326 he became bishop of Alexandria, and from the prominent place he thus held, and from his firm and persistent opposition to Arianism, he has been called the "Father of Orthodoxy." After him has also been named the popular creed handed down to us, which is still in use in the Roman and English churches as "The Athanasian Creed," though it is now generally believed to have been drawn up at a later date; by whom is uncertain. The Greek Church never acknowledged it, and in A.D. 1785 the Episcopal Church of America struck it out of their prayer book.

When Arius was recalled from his banishment Athanasius steadfastly refused to reinstate him; and now he was threatened with punishment; but the death of Arius brought relief.

This respite, however, was short, for the Arians had now grown into a strong party, including several bishops; and the accusations against Athanasius became so loud and so serious — even charging him with murder — that Constantine agreed to his being called before a synod at Tyre.

The day of trial at length arrived. Athanasius was charged with the murder of Arsenius, a bishop of the Meletians, and with cutting off his hand, to be preserved for magical experiments. The trial proceeded, and a shrivelled hand was actually produced in court as being the hand of the murdered man. A shudder ran through the assembly, and even his friends began to fear for the results, while his enemies thought the proof complete and his condemnation certain.

Athanasius stood calm and asked if there were any present who knew personally the supposed victim. Many said they did. And at once a man was led into court: his cloak was thrown on one side and his two hands exhibited to the spectators: it was Arsenius! Athanasius left his enemies to explain how it was that the bishop was still alive, and from whence they procured the other hand. Great efforts had been made to hide this man, but Athanasius had succeeded in finding him, and bringing him to the council.

Of course the accused was acquitted, but, alas! what a picture does this trial present of the state of the church at that time, or rather of those high in power as bishops and clergy. Even that which no honest worldly man would descend to do was planned and carried out by those accredited as guides in the church of God.

Nor did the matter end here. Nothing abashed at their own wickedness, his enemies determined to ruin the man who had thus stood steadfast in maintaining the truth as to the divinity of our Lord. Another charge was now brought against him — a charge of hindering supplies being sent from Egypt to Constantinople. No doubt the emperor was long since disgusted with their theological disputes — now they would lay a civil charge against the bishop, and one which they knew would rouse the emperor to act severely. Athanasius denied the charge; but he was condemned by his enemies, and Constantine banished him to Treves in Gaul.

The last years of the life of Constantine do not stand to his credit. At the council of Nice all seemed to shew well. He entertained the bishops at his table. "The guards," says Eusebius, "kept watch with drawn swords round the vestibule of the palace; the men of God passed through their midst without fear, and entered the inmost parts of the royal dwelling. Some of them reclined by his side, and others were placed on couches on either hand. One might have seemed to picture to oneself an image of Christ's kingdom; the whole thing was more like a dream than a reality." As we have seen, this picture faded away, and the faithful ones then in favour were afterwards banished.

Family quarrels, too, disturbed the peace of the emperor, and led to the death of his wife and other relatives, as we have seen. Many have tried to hide or deny these enormities; others relate how he was filled with remorse and sought absolution in acts of charity and building churches.

He was making preparations for war with the Persians, but did not live long enough to carry it on. A tent was to be fitted up as a chapel. The soldiers, whether pagan or Christian, were taught a daily prayer, and Sunday was ordered to be kept as a holy day. But fearing his end was approaching he was baptised by his favourite bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, (an Arian and an enemy of Athanasius) — and he passed away A.D. 337. Thus Constantine at the last seemed to favour the false doctrine of Arius, and his conduct leaves a doubt as to his Christianity, now only to be revealed at a coming day.

Constantine was succeeded by his three sons, Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. Alexandria fell to the lot of the first of these, who recalled Athanasius and restored him to his diocese, to the great joy of his people. But the death of Constantine II. (A.D. 340) again placed Athanasius in danger, and he fled to Rome. A synod was called by Constans to try and settle the dispute, but those assembled could not agree. This emperor then insisted that Constantius should re-instate Athanasius, which was once more carried into effect.

Constans however was murdered in A.D. 350, and Constantius at once commenced to persecute Athanasius; but a synod could not agree as to his condemnation. A second synod was called, and now the bishops were desired to condemn the good man, and were threatened with deposition if they did not — thus proving in how false a position the church had placed itself by depending on the State, and receiving its directions from man, though he be an emperor. He declared that what he willed was to be regarded as a Canon!

Persecution followed the condemnation of Athanasius, and fell upon several who held to the truth: some were imprisoned, and others banished. Athanasius was ordered to leave the place, but his beloved people would not hear of it, nor allow him to leave. But one night when the bishop was at church with his people, a loud knocking was heard at the doors which terrified the congregation. Athanasius calmed the people and they began to chant Psalm cxxxv.

"Praise ye the Lord: praise ye the name of the Lord:

Praise him, O ye servants of the Lord,

Ye that stand in the house of the Lord,

In the courts of the house of our God,

Praise the Lord; for the Lord is good ...."

But the doors were forced, and a large body of soldiers rushed in, driving away the people with cruel violence. Athanasius at first refused to move, but the people carried him with them and for the time he escaped, and fled to the deserts of Thebais, where he found protection among those whom historians call hermits and monks. He was however pursued and many ran great risks in protecting him, for they shewed great zeal in hiding him, to the peril of their own lives; but he was compelled to depart still further into the deserts, where he gained respect as a holy man. A saint named Anthony bequeathed him his garment, which it is said he wore to the end of his days.

Here he remained for about six years, paying occasional secret visits to Alexandria, but which nearly cost him his life more than once. During this time the Arians reigned supreme in the East.

In A.D. 360 the emperor died and was succeeded by Julian — called the Apostate; for, though educated for the church, he abjured Christianity, and favoured paganism.

As Julian spoke of toleration, Athanasius once more appeared at Alexandria as bishop, the time seeming to be opportune on account of the death of George of Cappadocia, who had been forced into the bishopric during his absence. But he was soon ordered to leave Alexandria by the emperor, who began to use great efforts to root out Christianity. However, his work was soon cut short: he was mortally wounded in a battle with the Persians in A.D. 363. Athanasius once more returned to his people.

Jovian succeeded Julian, but reigned only eight months. Valentinian and Valens succeeded (A.D. 364*), and, except being banished once more from Alexandria for a short time by the intrigues of the Arians, Athanasius was allowed to remain and end his days at that place. He died, May, 373.

{*The Empire was now divided into Eastern and Western. Valens took the Eastern with Constantinople; Valentinian the Western with Rome.

Athanasius was a noble champion for the truth of the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, though when he had power he may not always have used it wisely. Men cannot be forced to hold the truth, and it is useless to make them confess it when they do not hold it. On the other hand, it is to be feared that many cared little about it, changing their views with the change of those in power; while those doctrinally wrong were bold and unscrupulous persecutors of those who held the truth.

All this is a sad and solemn picture of the state of that which was called the church of God in the fourth century. One would have been glad to have known more of private Christians, and whether they were sound in the faith and walking separate from an evil world. But there is no record of them. We would fain hope there were many scattered here and there, true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, who sought, according to the light they had, to walk amid the gathering darkness so as to please Him.

Chapter 4.

Ambrose.

A.D. 374-397.

Though both Athanasius and Arius had passed away, the controversy raged as fiercely as ever. Of course every true Christian must maintain the divinity of Christ; for without His divinity there can be no atonement; and without an atonement there can be no salvation. Of course there may have been many who held these views without knowing their value and power; while, on the other hand, Satan was as determined as ever that such a doctrine must be opposed.

One of the first things that demanded the attention of Valentinian in the West, in respect to the church, was the election of a bishop of Milan. Here both parties — if such they may be called — were most determined to elect one of their own people, and there seemed no hope of their being able to agree, when suddenly some one in the crowd proposed that the magistrate who presided over their meeting should be bishop. This was Ambrose. "Ambrose for bishop" was cried out. But he refused the dignity, until seeing there was no hope of their coming to any other decision he consented. He was baptised, hurried through the intermediate stages, and on the eighth day was consecrated bishop of Milan.

Ambrose was of Roman parents, and had been educated for the bar, and about A.D. 370 had been made consular prefect of Liguria and Aemilia. He was residing at Milan, and presiding over the election of a bishop, or was present to prevent disorder, when, as we have seen, he was thus suddenly elected bishop.

When this was fixed, he proceeded to fulfil its duties. He settled all his possessions (after giving much away) under the care of a brother as a reserve for his sister, that he might be wholly devoted to his ecclesiastical duties.

Valens in the East had been gained over to the Arian party, and became a bitter persecutor of the orthodox. On one occasion, eighty ministers appealed to the emperor and sought to gain an interview with him; but he gave secret orders for them all to be put to death. The officer, fearing an insurrection if they were killed openly, ordered them on board ship for banishment, but gave secret orders to the sailors to fire the ship and leave them to their fate. This was actually done, and they all perished.

Valens was compelled to defend his estates from the Goths, which gave relief to the orthodox. He fell in battle in A.D. 378. Valentinian had died in A.D. 375. Theodosius succeeded, at first with others, and then alone in the East; Valentinian II. in the West.

In A.D. 381 the second General Council met at Constantinople (again in A.D. 382 and 383), which confirmed the decrees of the Council of Nice, and condemned Arianism and several other minor heresies. This brought the orthodox into greater power; but alas, few men can bear to be in power without abusing it. This was strikingly brought out in the otherwise worthy Ambrose. In a remote district the people, led on by a bishop, attacked a Jewish synagogue and a meeting-place belonging to some separatists, and both were destroyed. The emperor ordered the people to rebuild the edifices, or to pay a fine to the holders. But, on hearing this, Ambrose strongly opposed this being done, insisting that toleration of the Jewish religion was a persecution of Christianity! The emperor gave way, and would have let the matter drop; but Ambrose insisted that a solemn promise should be given that the guilty should not be punished, and again the emperor yielded.

We see here how strangely Ambrose mistook his mission. Instead of obeying the powers that be, according to the Epistle to the Romans, he was here opposing them, and that too in a simple matter of justice for injury done, and moreover in a civil matter. The bold bishop had, however, to oppose the emperor in a matter that came more immediately under his mission.

During some public games at Thessalonica the people were offended by the governor thwarting them in some of their wishes, whereupon they rose and murdered the officer and some of his guards. The emperor was so incensed at this, that he ordered the garrison to carry out an indiscriminate massacre of the inhabitants. They were invited into the circus on the pretence of seeing some public game; but on a signal the soldiers rushed in and commenced to kill, irrespective of age or sex. It was estimated that 7000 were thus ruthlessly put to death. The emperor indeed relented of his rash design and sent a messenger to prevent it, but, alas, he did not arrive in time. The emperor was sorry for the issue, but had to bear the reproaches of the clergy. Ambrose was the boldest of them, and told the emperor he could not allow of his taking the Lord's supper. The emperor pleaded the case of David and his sin. Ambrose replied, "You have indeed imitated the king of Israel in the sin of homicide; it remains for you to imitate him in his repentance." The emperor was humbled by the bishop's rebuke and promised to submit to any penance he might impose. Ambrose insisted upon a public penance, and that the emperor should not for the future have any execution carried out for thirty days after the sentence, that there might be time for passion to cool down.

Thus, while in Ambrose we see a bold man who would not be a respecter of persons, we see also how all this was paving the way for the clergy to reach that place of authority over the powers that be which eventually culminated in the arrogance of the Popes of Rome.

An incident in the life of Ambrose shews how necessary baptism was considered to be to salvation. Baptism was often put off till death was supposed to be near, and Valentinian had died unbaptised, and his sisters deeply lamented the fact; but Ambrose assured them that his desire was equal to the act, and that he had been washed in his piety as the martyrs in their blood! One is puzzled to know how anyone can be a martyr until he is a Christian and has been already washed in the precious blood of Christ. It shews how deeply mystical and confused was their knowledge of the truth.

Ambrose died quietly on his bed (A.D. 397), fulfilling his duties until the last.

While these things were transpiring in the West, let us look at another of the great Fathers located in. the East.

Chapter 5.

Chrysostom and His Times.

A.D. 347-407.

Chrysostom's life will give a better insight into the state of the church at the close of the fourth century than any mere description can do.

John Chrysostom was born at Antioch about A.D. 347. His father had died when he was an infant, but his mother was a godly woman who felt that her work was to devote herself to the care and bringing up of this son, and she remained a widow for that purpose.

Chrysostom was educated for the bar, and began to practise as an advocate, in which occupation he was soon renowned for his eloquence. This would speedily have drawn him into the world, but the pious instructions of his mother began to bear fruit, and he was early struck with the contrast between the lives of true Christians and those who bore its name only.

He soon discovered also the difficulties of being both a Christian and an advocate. To accept fees to use his eloquence to bolster up a bad cause and make it appear a good one, seemed to him to be practising a lie — to be taking the devil's wages — to sin indeed against his own soul.

He also had a particular friend named Basil, who had resolved to adopt the monastic life, and though Chrysostom could not at first give up the world and follow his friend, he did so after a time. Melitus, at that time bishop of Antioch, is described as "mild, holy, and orthodox," and he was soon attracted by the gifts of the young man, and seemed to see he would be a shining light in the church. Though Chrysostom's mother was a Christian, he had never been baptised, and after living apart from the world for three years, he was baptised and ordained as a "reader," and thus was employed to read the scriptures in public.

He now proposed to seek some secluded spot with his friend Basil, where they could practise a rigid asceticism. But his pious mother besought him so earnestly with tears not to desert her, that he gave way and went home with her. But he would be a recluse, nevertheless. He ate but little and seldom, and that of the plainest food. He slept on the bare boards, and rose frequently at night to pray. He seldom left the house, and when in company he spoke but little lest he should sin with his tongue.

Diodorus was head of a monastery near Antioch, and he taught Chrysostom to avoid the allegorising interpretation of scripture so common in the early church, and to let scripture speak for itself and mean what it said. This was of great use to Chrysostom in his after life, when he became instructor of others; though, strange to say, he was a party to a gross act of deception soon after, thinking the end justified the means: indeed, he even went so far as to say that Jacob's acts were "not a deceit but an economy."

What he did was this. Some of the bishoprics in Syria became vacant, and those interested in the matter looked about for suitable men to fill the offices, and they fixed upon Chrysostom and his friend Basil. Chrysostom shrank from the responsibility and determined not to accept it; but in order to get Basil to accept the office, he pretended to agree to it, and that they should both accept the proposal and be consecrated together. Whether Basil agreed to this or not is not clear, for we read that Basil was "seized," carried before the bishop, and ordained. But when they attempted to do the same to Chrysostom he was not to be found, for he had concealed himself until all danger was past. A strange way surely of making a man a bishop! and in direct opposition to the scriptural injunction not to lay hands suddenly on any man. (1 Tim. v. 22.) And strange conduct of Chrysostom, supposed to be so conscientious: he only laughed at Basil's remonstrances afterwards and was glad his plot had succeeded!

Chrysostom tells us of a narrow escape he had soon after this, in which he believed he was saved by God's overruling hand. A severe edict had been issued at Antioch against practising magical arts, and anyone possessing a book on the subject was held to be guilty and was in danger of torture if not death. He was one day walking with a friend near the river Orontes, when they saw in the water part of a book and at once fished it out; but to their horror discovered it to be on the magical arts. At that moment, too, they observed a soldier approaching — what could they do with the book? To keep and attempt to hide it would shew they were guilty; to be seen to throw it into the water was equally dangerous. They, however, flung it into the river, and were allowed to pass on unchallenged.

Soon after this he left the city and joined himself to a monk of severe habits, and there spent four years in crucifying the flesh. But, alas, he found that his flesh was stronger than he was — he could not subdue it. He would retire to a more lonely spot and be still more severe with himself. He found a cavern in a lonely place exposed to the cold, and there by scarcity of food and little sleep, if he did not succeed in killing the flesh he nearly succeeded in killing himself. At the end of two years he had to give it all up and return, with a shattered frame, to his home at Antioch. The flesh cannot be killed while life remains, and it is not to be conquered thus: power, given by life in Christ, and being led of the Holy Spirit, is the only way in which the flesh can be conquered (Gal. v. 6): "killed" it cannot be.

Chrysostom was soon at work again: first he was made deacon by Meletius in A.D. 381, and then presbyter by Flavian, bishop of Antioch, in A.D. 386. We see by the case of Chrysostom that being a "deacon" in those days was not simply to look after the poor and dispense the alms; for we find that during the four years he was a "deacon" he had become quite popular by his aptness to teach others, though perhaps privately. When he was ordained presbyter he began to preach, and for ten years his principal occupation was preaching in the church or cathedral; and, strange as it may seem to us, his sermons not only drew together large congregations, but his eloquence drew forth "loud and noisy applause." This did not please him, for he often rebuked it as unseemly for such occasions.

In A.D. 387 Antioch drew upon itself the wrath of the emperor Theodosius. A call for a large sum of money from the city to pay the army was received with general discontent. From grumbling things came to uproar and revolt. The lower classes, and especially those who are to be found in every city who have nothing to lose, proceeded to acts of violence. The public baths were sacked, and then an attack was made on the praetorium.* Here the governor was overpowered and had to escape by a back door. The judgment hall was decorated with portraits of the emperors: here, too, were statues of Theodosius and his deceased wife Flaccilla; but nothing was spared: the pictures were torn to shreds, and the statues smashed to atoms. Further destruction was stopped by the appearance of a body of archers sent by the prefect, and at length order was restored. But now every one was appalled at what had happened: what would the emperor say and do to such a direct insult to himself and his beloved wife? He was remarkable for his outbursts of passion, and all feared he would not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, but destroy the city with a general massacre. Flavian was at that time absent from the city, but disregarding his infirmities, he started at once to see, and attempt to appease the wrath of the emperor. In the meantime imperial commissioners arrived, and began to arrest, torture, and put to death those whom they thought to be the most guilty; but deadly fear fell upon all, and many prepared for flight.

{*The official residence of the praetor or governor of a province.}

Chrysostom at once was stirred into action. His addresses now were specially directed to quelling the fears of the citizens generally, while he turned it to an occasion of loudly calling the unconverted to repentance. If there was cause for so much fear because of the anger of a man — an emperor — what real cause of fear was there as to their being able to meet an angry God!

Flavian was successful in his endeavours to calm the angry emperor, and obtained pardon for the guilty city as a whole, though many had already been put to death.

The labours of Chrysostom were not in vain — many of the pagan citizens were won over to the faith. He speaks of the great labour he had afterwards in establishing those who had turned from idols in consequence of this calamity.

These things occurred in A.D. 387, and for ten years longer Chrysostom spent his time here in preaching, exhorting, etc. Many of his sermons are left on record as commentaries on various parts of the word of God. But he was not to remain here all his life. A great and unexpected change awaited him, and it was brought about in this way.

In A.D. 397, the bishop of Constantinople, Nectarius, died, and many inquiries were made as to who should succeed him. It was a very honourable position at that time, the bishop being the Metropolitan of that district of the church, and sometimes called archbishop. Many were the aspiring candidates who in an unseemly manner pressed their claims.

At this time the weak Arcadius was emperor of the East, and though the bishop was nominally chosen by the clergy, the real choice lay with the emperor, or rather with his prime minister, who now was Eutropius, the chief eunuch. Eutropius had heard Chrysostom preach, and knew of his influence with the people; thereupon, passing by all the importunate candidates, he proposed to the electing bishops "John of Antioch,"* and he was at once accepted. And now came a piece of deception to be played on Chrysostom, such as he had once connived at in the case of his friend Basil. He was privately enticed to a martyrs' chapel outside the city. There he was taken possession of by officers sent for the purpose, and, before any alarm could be given, was conveyed to Pagrae, the first post station on the road to Constantinople. He protested against such treatment, but he was not heeded. He made all sorts of inquiries, but could get no information as to his fate. At Pagrae he was placed in a chariot, and, with a military escort, was driven from stage to stage with all speed until he reached Constantinople — eight hundred miles — a prisoner.

{*John of Antioch was really his name, and he was not called Chrysostom until after his death: it meant "golden-mouthed."}

Chrysostom had seen too much of such ways of making bishops, to know it was any use resisting; he was therefore duly installed. Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, had to perform the consecration, and this he was very unwilling to do; for he had a favourite candidate of his own who would better have suited his purpose. But the prime minister knew of certain charges against Theophilus, and of which he held the proofs: he declared he would use these against him and bring him to trial if he refused. Theophilus gave way, and Chrysostom was consecrated bishop of Constantinople, on February 26th, 398, in the presence of a large company.

It was soon discovered at Constantinople that their new bishop was a very different man from the easy-going Nectarius, who had lived in great magnificence, keeping a good table and giving banquets to the clergy and laity. All this was changed by the ascetic habits of Chrysostom. The costly plate and rich equipage of the palace were sold off, and the money given to benevolent objects, and he ate his frugal meals of common fare in his chamber alone. Until pressed, he shunned the court and the society of the rich; and, when drawn out, he spoke but little; so that he was soon judged to be morose, niggardly, and proud.

On the other hand, he was bishop, and had now to take the oversight of all the clergy in the city, and by many of them he was disliked even more than by those in high station; for he was brought into closer contact with them, and had to set aside several for gross sins, and refuse the Lord's supper to others.

He revived an old custom of services at night for the benefit of those who were unable to attend the services in the day. This also gave great offence to the clergy, who studied their own ease rather than the good of the people.

It is to be feared that the rigid asceticism of Chrysostom led him to rule the clergy with a rough hand as well as a firm one. Strictly sincere himself, he could make no allowance for anything that deviated from the path he laid down; so that his rule appeared to be one of iron rather than of love. Anything but happy fellowship was the result.

With the general public he soon rose into favour because of his sermons. We may hope that some were attracted by the truths he expounded, but certainly many were drawn by his eloquent denunciations of vice and folly, no matter where found. The clergy were no more pleased than the aristocracy by these public orations, to which the people flocked in crowds.

The bishop also pleased the emperor and his clever consort Eudoxia, who was gradually rising into power over both the weak emperor and his favourite prime minister. The empress and the bishop were brought into closer contact by the following circumstance. In a whim of mere religiousness she had founded a martyr's chapel in honour of St. Thomas, on the sea-shore of Drypia, about nine miles from the city; and she was now desirous of carrying thither the bones of some unknown martyrs, treasured up in a Greek Church. Of course the bishop must take a prominent part in such a ceremony. It was effected at night-time with a profuse display of torches. The empress, in her diadem and purple, walking by the side of the bishop and attended by nobles and ladies, followed the chest containing the sacred bones, and behind them the clergy and all communities of the people, male and female, followed, so that the light of the torches was compared to a "river of fire." The morning had dawned before the chapel was reached, and then Chrysostom had to preach his sermon. But, alas instead of telling forth the folly of such ceremonies, his sermon was full of unseemly praises of the empress, and expressions of his joy in taking part on such an occasion. On the next day the emperor paid his devotions at the same place, and another sermon of the bishop told of the piety and humility of the emperor. Such things seem marvellously strange in this day, but it gives a true picture of the state into which the church had fallen in that comparatively early age; and this conduct, too, is that of one universally styled a great and good man. Alas! if such things were done in a green tree, what might be expected in a dry?

Chrysostom had however nobler work. The Goths had attacked the Roman empire, and had probably taken some Christians among the prisoners, by whom Christianity was made known to the barbarians. Certainly, many of the Goths professed Christianity. On persecution arising among their own people, many were allowed to take refuge in some parts of the Roman empire, and many were now found at Constantinople, and these drew forth the sympathies of Chrysostom to care for their souls: these were for the most part Arians. The bishop had certain portions of the scriptures translated into their native tongue, and these were read to them, in one of the churches set apart for the purpose, by a Gothic presbyter, who afterwards addressed them, and Chrysostom himself at times preached to them through an interpreter. He also was the cause of missionaries being sent to the Gothic and Scythian tribes at their homes on the banks of the Danube.

In A.D. 399, Chrysostom had his heart drawn out in another direction. The eunuch Eutropius, first minister in the State, was, as we have seen, the means of the bishop's election. He had hoped that Chrysostom, in return, would have sanctioned his plans and purposes, not always right and good. But he found in the bishop a man of quite a different stamp; instead of helping on the statesman, he denounced all dishonourable transactions from the pulpit, though he did not name to whom his remarks applied.

This would have placed Chrysostom in great danger, had not the haughty eunuch given grave offence to the empress, who was now able to hurl the favourite from his high position. Eutropius had attempted to abolish the right of taking refuge in a church, because some of his victims had thus escaped the punishment he intended for them; but now, no sooner was there an outcry for his own death, than he ran into the church and clung, not to the horns of the altar now, but to the communion table, for safety. Loud demands were made by the soldiers and populace for the victim to be given up to them; but to these the bishop gave a persistent refusal.

Their indignation now turned upon the bishop, and he was marched off to the emperor. Here he so pleaded for the life of Eutropius, though his enemy, that he moved the emperor to agree to perpetual banishment instead of death.

The next day was Sunday. Chrysostom failed not to shew how unstable were all earthly favours and honours, pointing to the fallen statesman, to be seen through the curtains still clinging fast to the table. We hope he pointed also to those glories which Christ could give and which none could take away.

The culprit was saved for the present and exiled to Cyprus, but soon afterwards was put to death.

In the next year (A.D. 400) the Goths, having brought an army near to Constantinople, demanded three of the chief men of the city to be given up to them, and also that one of the churches of the city should be handed over to them for Arian worship. This roused Chrysostom: he braved the danger of going to the enemy's camp, and there used his eloquence before the chief, Gainas, on behalf of the three who, to save the State, had surrendered themselves and to divert him from his purpose as to the church; for he resolved that, cost what it would, no misbeliever should publicly worship in the city. He gained this point also. At length the emperor saw no way of saving the city from pillage and bloodshed but by declaring war against the Goths. The city was roused into activity, and the Goths were conquered.

We thus see how varied were the duties of a bishop in those days, at least, of one who, whatever his failings may have been, had Christianity truly at heart, as far as he himself understood it. But he soon felt himself called upon to oppose one yet more formidable. The empress had got rid of Eutropius, and was free also from the interference of the Gothic chief; the bishop now only stood in her way of ruling her weak husband just as she wished. Her religious zeal had all evaporated, and she was now seeking to ruin the bishop. An occasion soon presented itself.

In the General Council, A.D. 381, the bishop of Constantinople was declared to rank next to the bishop of Rome, the bishops of Alexandria and Antioch following, yet it was not well defined nor well acknowledged how far the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Constantinople extended. Thus, while some of the outlying districts would at one time respect his authority when he was in their favour, they refused it at another when he was against them. The actual collision arose thus. At a synod of bishops, held at Constantinople in A.D. 400, Eusebius of Valentinopolis accused Antoninus (bishop of Ephesus) of selling some bishoprics, of melting down the church plate, etc. An investigation was set on foot, but the accused died before any decision was arrived at. The Ephesian clergy invited Chrysostom to come and endeavour to set matters right. He went at once, and removed six bishops for simony, and proceeded to correct other abuses with his usual sternness. This gained him many enemies among the clergy in that district.

In the meantime his own position was being undermined at Constantinople. He had left Severian, bishop of Gabala, to be his deputy in his absence; but he joined with Chrysostom's enemies to bring about his ruin. The empress was at the head of it, together with a number of ladies in high life, whose arts to make themselves attractive the bishop had ridiculed in his addresses. Two bishops had also arrived at Constantinople: Antiochus, bishop of Ptolemais, and Acacius of Beroea, who also joined in the empress's plot. Chrysostom's archdeacon kept him informed of these growing troubles, and urged again and again the bishop's return; but three months elapsed before he had concluded his business.

When once there, he went into the pulpit and publicly attacked, in unseemly language, both Antiochus and Severian as flatterers and parasites. A short time after, having chosen a text from the history of Elijah, he said: "Gather together to me those base priests that eat at Jezebel's table, that I may say to them, as Elijah of old, 'How long halt ye between two opinions?' . . . . If Jezebel's table be the table of the Lord, eat at it, eat at it till you vomit." Whether Chrysostom meant it or not, the allusion was taken to point to the empress as Jezebel, and it is not easy to see to whom else it could apply. This insult the empress could not overlook, and his doom was sealed.

A quarrel sprang up between Severian and Serapion, the bishop's archdeacon, who charged the former with a blasphemous denial of the divinity of Christ. Chrysostom rashly listened to this, and, without due investigation, deposed Severian and banished him from the city. The populace took up Chrysostom's cause, and Severian was obliged to fly for his life. But he had served the empress, who now, hiding her purposes, pleaded earnestly for the exile, and even placed her infant son on Chrysostom's knees in the church. He could not refuse such an appeal, and absolved Severian, and peace was so far restored.

But it was only a temporary lull before the coming storm. The empress could not forget being compared to Jezebel, and Severian was now a more determined enemy than ever. A leader of the conspiracy was found in Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, who had never forgotten nor forgiven having been compelled to consecrate Chrysostom. A plea for his interference soon presented itself. A number of monks, called because of their stature, "the Tall Brethren," had come to Constantinople and been well received by Chrysostom. They had been persecuted by Theophilus, on the plea of heresy, but it was believed it was really because they knew too much of his evil deeds. They had fled from place to place, and, he still pursuing them, they came to Constantinople to appeal to the emperor and Chrysostom for protection. Theophilus was summoned to appear before a council at Constantinople to answer the charges these monks made against him. He felt obliged to obey the summons, but set his wits to work to make matters turn to the condemnation of Chrysostom rather than of himself.

Theophilus arrived with the curious escort of a number of rough sailors of the port of Alexandria, and with not a few rich presents to gain over to his cause those who could be purchased. He refused all intercourse with Chrysostom, and soon succeeded with several of the clergy and the influential citizens by sumptuous banquets and a distribution of his gifts. And then, instead of his case being submitted to a council, he summoned Chrysostom to a synod to be held at a place called "the Oak," in the suburb of Chalcedon on the other side of the Bosphorus. Thirty-six bishops, nearly all Egyptian and dependent upon Theophilus, the rest being known enemies of Chrysostom, formed the synod. A list of twenty-nine articles formed the charge against Chrysostom, and he was summoned to appear and plead. It had been drawn up by two deacons whom he had been compelled to depose for gross sins.

Many of the charges were frivolous in the extreme, though some were more serious, as to the misappropriation of the church funds. Others touched his private life — his want of hospitality: one, "he had private interviews with women;" "he dined gluttonously by himself as a cyclops* would eat, he had changed his robes on the episcopal throne; and he had eaten a lozenge after the Lord's supper, etc.

{*A fabled giant with one eye.}

A second list was also drawn up, among which was the charge of comparing the empress to Jezebel, and this was made to signify inciting the people to rebellion.

Chrysostom was summoned four times, but refused to appear before such a tribunal composed of his enemies only: he appealed to an impartial council. In the meantime he called together a synod of forty bishops, who protested against the proceedings of the synod at "the Oak." This was disregarded, and on receiving an order from the court to come to a speedy conclusion, those at "the Oak" deposed Chrysostom. They would hardly have done this, had it not been that the empress had now the chief ordering of the empire, and she was his deadly enemy. The synod professed to leave the charge of treason to the State, and hoped that the accused would be condemned to death. The empress, however, knew how the bishop was beloved by the people, and was content to get the decision of the synod ratified and sentence him to banishment for life.

No sooner, however, was the sentence known than the people rose to protect their bishop, and formed a guard round both his residence and the great church. A sign from Chrysostom would have raised an insurrection; but he exhorted the people to patience and resignation to the will of God. "Glory be to God for all things," was his favourite exclamation. On the third day he took occasion to slip out unperceived, and gave himself up to the officers, who, after dark, conducted him to the harbour, and put him on board a vessel bound to Hieron, at the mouth of the Euxine. His enemies were in high glee, and Theophilus proceeded to punish those who had supported the bishop; while his friends and the people flocked to the gates of the palace, demanding a fair trial for their beloved bishop, and a revolt seemed imminent.

But, strange to say, on the following night the city was shaken by an earthquake, and, a shock being felt severely in the bed-chamber of the empress, she was filled with great superstitious fear, and, falling on her knees, entreated the emperor to avert the judgment of heaven by revoking the sentence and recalling the expelled bishop. This was at once done, and messengers were soon despatched by several routes to call back the bishop. His friends, too, were filled with joy, and, seizing on what boats could be had, they went forth with torches to meet and give him a hearty welcome. He came to the gates of the city, and then hesitated to enter until he was acquitted by a general council. But the people, fearing another plot against him, were ready to revolt, when the emperor sent a messenger begging him to enter at once. He obeyed, and was carried by the people through the city, taken at once to the church, placed on his throne, and an address demanded. A council of about sixty bishops declared the proceedings of the synod of "the Oak" null and void, and that Chrysostom was the bishop of Constantinople. On the other hand, Theophilus dared not shew his face in the city, and privately left for his own diocese.

Thus peace was restored, and now the empress and the bishop were again great friends, at least outwardly, praising each other in an unseemly manner. But peace brought about by such means had no real foundation, and was soon again shattered to pieces. Within about two months the collision took place, and was thus brought about. Eudoxia had virtually the ruling of the eastern empire, but she aspired now to higher honours than this. She caused a column of porphyry to be erected near the church of St. Sophia, on which was placed her statue in silver, for the adoration, it is said, of the people. This was a common thing among the heathen emperors, but how could this be with Christians? At any rate, in September, 403, it was dedicated amid tumultuous and licentious proceedings, very like those that had been customary among them when pagans. The noise of this dedication penetrated into the church and disturbed the worshippers. Chrysostom could not endure this pagan proceeding, and at once, with great rashness, denounced in his sermons the whole thing: the authorities and the people were all roughly handled, but especially the empress, whose image was to be adored. He is reported to have said, "Herodias is once more maddening; Herodias is once more dancing; once more Herodias demands the head of John on a charger." Who could be the John but Chrysostom? and who could be the Herodias but Eudoxia?

It is not to be wondered at that this — whether exactly reported or not is not known — should revive all the deep-seated enmity of the empress, and she loudly demanded redress. This was no sooner known than all Chrysostom's old enemies rose as one man to seek his destruction. It so happened that the bishop had been for some time asking the emperor to call a general council. Now this was the very thing. Yes, they would call a council, but not a general one; it would be easy, in spite of the bishop's many friends, to call such a one as would be sure to condemn him.

Theophilus did not personally attend, though he was one of the chief actors in the plot, and he had now a decree ready that would at once condemn the bishop. In the council of Antioch, A.D. 341, the 12th canon condemned any one who had been once deposed, if such appealed to the secular arm for restoration. Chrysostom had not really done this: the secular arm had appealed to him, and he had not resumed his duties until he had been cleared by a council. But it was quite near enough in resemblance when injustice wanted a plea, and on this he was condemned, though no formal resolution is recorded.

The council met at the end of A.D. 403, and was continued to the Easter following. The emperor had abstained from the Lord's supper at Christmas, on the plea that he did not know whether Chrysostom was really bishop, and as Easter approached, when a great festival in the church was held, it was thought desirable to get rid of Chrysostom, so as not to shut out the emperor again from the eucharist. Still the emperor hesitated until Antiochus and his companions stoutly assured him that Chrysostom was no longer bishop. The order for his removal was given, but, on the officer presenting it to the bishop, he replied with firmness that he had received his office from God and would not desert it. The emperor might expel him by force if he pleased; violence would be his excuse before God for leaving his post. He was then ordered to keep himself a prisoner in his house and not enter the cathedral. But the bishop would obey God rather than man, and go he would; he expected 3,000 catechumens to present themselves on this occasion: the guards feared to stop him. The emperor now reproached the bishops for being the means of things coming to this state, when they declared again that Chrysostom was no longer bishop, and they would take the responsibility of his being removed. The emperor was glad of shifting the responsibility on to others, and ordered the arrest of the bishop.

It was on the night before the day that spoke of the resurrection. A vast crowd filled the cathedral. Baptism was being administered to a long file of catechumens, who had removed their outer garments for the occasion. On a sudden the soldiers appeared, and, with drawn swords, took possession of the place. Those near the font were driven away, some wounded, and, as an eye-witness puts it, "the waters of regeneration were stained with blood." Those driven into the streets sought refuge with some of the clergy in the baths of the city, the waters of which were consecrated and the baptisms went on; but only to be again disturbed, and the people driven out by the soldiers — who were mostly rude barbarians from Thrace, and who did their work roughly. The persecutions were continued all Easter week, whenever it was known that any of Chrysostom's clergy were continuing his work. The horrors of that week were long remembered in the city.

In the meantime Chrysostom was a prisoner in his own house, but guarded by his friends outside. Still he was in real danger, his assassination being twice attempted. Thus he remained for two months before the timid emperor could be induced to order his banishment. He may have feared another earthquake. At length the blow was struck, and the order given. Chrysostom bowed to it, and surrendered himself, after a visit to the church with a few friends for prayer. He had to steal away to avoid a tumult. Two bishops refused to leave him, and the three were at once conveyed on board ship and taken by night to the Asiatic shore. They had, however, scarcely left the place, when a fire broke out in the church they had so lately left. The church was consumed, and the fire spread also to some public buildings. It was never ascertained how the fire originated, but suspicion fell on the bishop's friends, and many were put to the torture in order to draw out a confession. Two are named — Tigrius a presbyter, and Eutropius a reader — who expired under their tortures, and others are mentioned who remained maimed or disabled for life; but no confession was gained. This was followed by rigorous persecution of all who refused to bow to the one put into Chrysostom's place.

Appeal was made to the church in the western empire by Chrysostom and the persecuted bishops who held with him, through those who were accounted to be in influential positions, such as Innocent bishop of Rome, Venerius bishop of Milan, and Chromatius bishop of Aquileia. On the other hand, Theophilus sent his charges. The bishop of Rome judged the council who condemned Chrysostom to have been irregular, and he remonstrated sharply with Theophilus and condoled with the exile. He also got Honorius, the Western emperor, to write to his brother Arcadius urging him to call a general council, and the letter was entrusted to some Western bishops. But the empress ruled, aided by the bishops and others, and these messengers were not allowed to approach the emperor, the letters being snatched from them, and they treated with contempt. Injustice ruled supreme.

Chrysostom was sent to a most inclement spot — Cucusus, "a lonely mountain village buried in the depths of a valley of the Tauric range, on the borders of Cilicia and the Lesser Armenia." Remonstrance was vain: go he must. A long journey through a desolate country lay before him, and yet he was to be taken with all speed, regardless of his health or strength, and this in the great heat of midsummer. The villages fixed on for resting-places could give him only the barest fare of hard black bread, very unsuitable for him; this, with unwholesome water, brought on ague-fever. Still, on he must move: the orders were imperative. At length, more dead than alive, he reached Caesarea. The bishop here was no friend of his, though some of the clergy were; so he pretended to sympathise with him, but really avoided him, and would be glad to see him gone. He was really too ill to travel, but a body of fanatical monks attacked the house and demanded that he should be sent away. A lady took him into her country house, but the bishop of Caesarea compelled her to turn him out in the night, under the plea that the banditti were about and he must fly for his life. He had to be led or nearly carried along, and at length reached his destination towards the end of August.

Here he was kindly received, and more than one offered him hospitality. Many of his friends at Constantinople had estates in that neighbourhood, and directed their stewards to send him supplies. He was now nearer Antioch, his former scene of labours, and was visited by some of his old friends. He occupied his time in receiving and writing letters, and his influence was felt far and near; indeed, he seemed to become the principal guiding star of the church both in its western and eastern portions. His counsel was sought from all quarters, and few things of real importance were undertaken without consulting the exiled bishop. If it was the rooting out of heresy, he was the one who directed the course to be taken; if it was destroying the remains of pagan observances, he was the directing power; and if it was extending the operations of the church, he was the one who exhorted to it. While, at the same time, he comforted and exhorted the faithful, and warned and sought to recover those who had gone astray. He also used much of the money sent to him for benevolent purposes and in cases of need around him.

But the spot where he was had great disadvantages. It was subject to inroads of Isaurian robbers, who would rush down upon the peaceful inhabitants to kill and rob. The climate also was severe, especially to such a worn-out frame as that of Chrysostom. He had to remain at home during the winter, with fires always burning, and many blankets on his bed; and, at times, had to keep his bed for weeks together.

In the winter of the year 405, intelligence reached the place that the banditti were coming, and newly the whole town took to flight, Chrysostom, among them, hobbling along as well as he could with a few faithful followers, passing the nights in forests or ravines with but little shelter, until they reached the mountain fort of Arabissus, described more as a prison than a home; there he spent the winter in much distress. In the spring he was glad to get back again to his home at Cucusus, inclement as that was, and again receive his letters and send forth his epistles far and wide. He seemed to have a strong persuasion that he should again be restored to his diocese and to his beloved people, though this was not to be.

The relentless Eudoxia had passed from the scene by death, but had left many enemies of Chrysostom, who were disappointed and amazed to find that banishment had neither killed the old man nor hindered him from making his voice heard so universally in the church. They now obtained an order for his removal to a still more inclement spot — the worst in the whole empire — to the small town of Pityus at the base of the Caucasus on the north-east of the Euxine. Two guards were chosen to convey him thither — men remarkable for their harshness. They were to take him there on foot with all speed, and regardless of his health or of the weather — with a private hint, says bishop Palladius, that if he died on the road they might expect promotion! Towns were to be avoided, all letters to be refused him, and no one was allowed to aid him on the journey.

For three months the weary journey was pursued — his poor body being shrivelled up with the heat of the sun. They had reached Comana, he being more dead than alive; but he was not allowed to rest there — he must go on to a chapel some five or six miles beyond, where they were to spend the night. This chapel was supposed to have been erected over the tomb of the martyr Basiliscus. Chrysostom fell asleep and dreamed that he saw the martyr by his side, who said to him, "Be of good cheer; on the morrow we shall be together." The presbyter in charge of the chapel, it was said, had also seen a vision bidding him "prepare a place for our brother John."

In the morning the old man begged for a halt, but it was denied him: he must go on, but they had not proceeded far when a fever attacked him, and made progress hopeless — they therefore returned to the chapel. Here he was clothed in white baptismal robes, and partook of the Lord's supper. He prayed, ending, with his "Glory be to God for all things, Amen," and fell asleep. It was September 14, 407. He had been bishop ten years, but three and a quarter of these he had spent in exile.

About thirty years afterwards, when Theodosius II. was emperor, the remains of Chrysostom were removed with great ceremony to Constantinople, and interred in the church of the Holy Apostles, the emperor and his sister Pulcheria praying for the pardon of heaven for the persecution by their parents of this holy man.

We have not only the life of Chrysostom, but also his numerous writings, which throw much light upon the state of the church in his days. Montfaucon collected enough to fill thirteen folio volumes.

It will have been seen how subject the church had become to the state. An emperor, or even his chief minister, could make bishops of whom he pleased he could call councils when he pleased, and, by taking care as to who were invited, bring about any decisions he pleased. Many of the clergy had become mere tools in the hands of those in authority, and aided each other in carrying out plans for personal enrichment, as well as in enforcing their wishes by persecution.

Chrysostom, as we have seen, had to remove several of the clergy because of their having purchased their livings, and others for their immoral lives: all shewing the sad low state into which those had fallen who ought to have been examples to the flock. We would fain hope that these were the exceptions and not the rule. Still Chrysostom speaks of the state of many of the clergy as beyond belief, evinced not only by the means used to obtain their dignities, but by their undeniable profligacy and their restless ambition for power.

As to his hearers generally, he is no less severe, laying bare all the follies and sins of the age, while he warned and exhorted those who had made profession of faith.

One great feature in the character of Chrysostom was his love of scripture, doubtless instilled into him by his pious mother. His writings constantly quote it, and he publicly exhorted the flock to read the Bible. Business in all its shapes, and the family in all its cares, were no excuse for neglecting the Bible. "It is a plain book," said he, "the artisan, slave, and widow, may understand it;" the earnest reader would profit by it though he had none to explain it. It was of no value to possess it merely, or hang portions of it round their necks — they needed it in their souls. In those days of manuscripts only, few could afford to purchase even a whole New Testament he exhorted them to buy portions of it, according as they had the means.

Chrysostom preached the holiness and love of God, the divinity of our Lord, the atonement by His death, the personality and work of the Holy Spirit, the walk of faith, and the eternal happiness that awaited the faithful. But it is to be feared that he did not preach the gospel fully and freely, even so far as the forgiveness of sins. It was too much mixed up with philosophy. Thus, how often would he dwell on the exalted merit and angelic perfection of celibacy, almost to the exclusion of perfect Christianity in the married state!

Another thing that damaged his gospel was the exalting the church and its ordinances unduly. Baptism was "the pool of regeneration," and the Lord's supper, "the altar of sacrifice." How could such thoughts agree with pardon through the work of Christ alone? He knew that ordinances did not avail without faith in the atonement, and yet he would often exhort to repentance and faith, and then, as if the work of Christ was not enough, he would exhort the people to partake of the Lord's supper — "as of a mystery, initiation into which would banish evil, curb Satan, and open the portals of heaven."

As to the terms he uses respecting the Lord's supper, and partaking of the body and blood of Christ, he has been claimed by Roman Catholics as teaching transubstantiation, and by Protestants as not teaching it.

The rules and orders of the church were thought much of in his days. Thus, at his trial, while he could calmly deny graver charges, the thought that he had baptised anyone after he himself had eaten, was dreadful and worthy of a curse! When charged with giving the eucharist to some who had not fasted, he exclaimed, "If I have done so, let me be rejected by Christ."' Such things were apparently in his eyes greater sins than moral iniquities. Was not this the setting of the traditions of the church before the plain injunctions of the word of God?

Thus we see how, at that time, the foundations were being laid on which ritualism was afterwards erected; there may have been no thought of its undermining God's foundation of grace and truth; but, as we plainly read in the word of God, there can be no other foundation laid whereby men can be saved, nor must the word of God be added to nor taken from. And there is that solemn word that "we have an altar whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle." (Heb. xiii. 10.) If Christ is not enough, the whole is lost. The ordinances are quite right in their place, but salvation cannot be obtained by them.

Chapter 6.

The Donatist Schism.

Donatism must be distinguished from the heresies in the church, inasmuch as the Donatists held the same doctrines as Christians generally, but deemed it right to separate on account of the corruptions in the church; but whether the corruptions were really their chief reasons for separation, is now a doubtful question.

During the Diocletian persecution (A.D. 303) one thing especially demanded by the pagans was that the sacred books should be given up to be destroyed. Mensurius was bishop of Carthage, and, on his books being demanded, he hid the sacred books, and gave up some heretical books instead. This was deception, and not to be commended; but he said he was disgusted with the professed faithfulness of many would-be martyrs whose conduct did not correspond. Thus it is recorded: "The cells were full of debtors unable to meet their creditors, of fanatics, idlers, who were fed by injudicious devotees;" and he discountenanced in every way such so-called martyrs. Whether he went too far, so as to discredit every honest effort to obey God rather than man, cannot now be ascertained. At any rate, he made a great many enemies in the church, and a paper was afterwards issued denouncing his apparent slight upon the virtues and the sufferings of the martyrs.

Caecilian succeeded Mensurius at Carthage (A.D. 311). He had worked with Mensurius and had the same judgment in these matters, and now things came to an issue. His ordination was called in question, principally because he had been ordained by Felix who was a "traditor."*

{*See chapter 10: section 'The Novatians'.}

Secundus, bishop of Tigisis, was his principal opponent, and this was the more inconsistent, as he himself was a traditor. At a synod held at Cirta (A.D. 305), presided over by Secundus, it is said there was not one who had clean hands. "One had thrown the gospels into the fire; another had offered incense to the gods, and a third had given up his small papers, but kept his codices." A charge of murder being brought against bishop Purpurius, he broke out furiously, saying to Secundus: "Do you wish to frighten me, as you frighten others? Not only have I killed, but I do kill all who thwart me. Take care not to provoke me too much, or I shall have to declare what you did when the curator demanded of you to deliver up the scriptures." Terror filled the whole assembly of bishops, and all received with joy the proposition that, as God had not punished them, they should not punish one another: let each give an account to God, and nothing more be said of their failures!

A sad picture surely of a number of bishops, and yet these were the men who now opposed Caecilian because he had been, as they said, ordained by a traditor, and they proceeded to consecrate another bishop, Majorinus, in his place. This completed the schism, which eventually wrought much mischief and no little bloodshed.

The point insisted on was, that any sacred act done by an excommunicated person was invalid; and a traditor was held to be in the same position as an excommunicate.

The question whether Felix was a traditor was thoroughly investigated afterwards, and he was cleared of the charge; yet the Donatists, as they were afterwards called, would not credit it, nor cease their opposition.

There were two bishops of the name of Donatus: the first was of Casae Nigrae: he agreed with Secundus. The other succeeded Majorinus as bishop of Carthage (A.D. 315), and was called Donatus the Great. He became the vigorous leader of the separatists.

The bishop of Rome was asked to investigate the question at issue in A.D. 313. He, in association with a few others, condemned the Donatists.

An appeal from their decision to Constantine was made in A.D. 314, and again in A.D. 316; but they were again and again condemned, and an edict at the later date took away their churches, and some of them even lost their lives.

The Donatists, under their leader, defended themselves, and anyone who had a grievance against the church or the civil authorities, rallied to their standard. Among these were the Circumcelliones.* These are described by Augustine as "a class of men who followed no useful employment; they held their own lives in fanatical contempt, and thought no death too cruel for those who differed from them; they wandered about from place to place, chiefly in the country districts, and haunted the cottages of the peasants for the purpose of obtaining food." The better class of the Donatists turned away in horror from such murderous associates; but they had been accepted by others. The faction gathered strength daily, and threatened a civil war. Thereupon the emperor revoked his laws against the Donatists, and all were left free to be what they pleased.

{*From cellae, or cottages, of the peasants, and circum, "around" — a nickname because of their going about among the peasants. They called themselves Agonistici, or combatants.}

When Constans succeeded Constantine the Great in Africa, he sought to reclaim the Donatists. But Donatus the Great, and others with him, refused all union with those called orthodox. And the Circumcelliones were again stirred' up to their outrages, but were overcome in an attack by one of Constans' officials. Persecution was now again put in force against the Donatists and carried on with great cruelty.

Julian, when he came to the throne (A.D. 361), recalled the exiles, and again gave liberty, and the Donatists once more rapidly increased.

Gratian reversed the order of things again, and drove the Donatists from their churches.

Thus these separatists were from time to time tolerated, and again persecuted; sometimes were flourishing, and at others brought low.

As to their doctrines it is not easy to obtain a clear account. In general they held the same doctrines as other Christians, as even their opponents confess; nor were their morals in any way inferior — excepting the Circumcelliones, who were not really Donatists, and whose actions were detested by the best of the Donatists. Their great crime was being separatists. They contended that this was needful because of the corruptions in the church generally; they re-baptised those coming to their communion, and re-ordained the ministers, because they could not own anything done by the church which they now judged to be corrupt, and, because of evil men being allowed within, they declared it had ceased to be the true church.

In A.D. 395, Augustine was consecrated bishop of Hippo. Here he found the Donatists very strong, and he at once took up the question warmly. He lamented that there was such division, exclaiming, "What has Christ done to us, that we rend His members asunder? Consider how sad a division reigns in christian households and families. Husband and wife, who, in their married state, know no division, separate themselves at the altar of Christ." An evil, alas! that has increased a hundred-fold in this our day!

Donatus died in exile, and Parmenian succeeded him. Between the latter and Augustine a long controversy followed, and several writings were issued for and against. The Donatists quoted 1 Corinthians v. as their authority for putting evil out of the church. Augustine admitted this in the main, but said it could not be done entirely, as was shewn by the parables, such as that of the Wheat and the Tares. The Donatists replied that this was what would be in the world, and was not to be in the church.

Surely in this the Donatists were right; but, if the historians are to be relied on, it was party spirit that ruled the Donatists and not a real desire for a holy assembly. It is said that they received with open arms those who had been, on account of the laxity of their lives, dealt with in discipline by the orthodox church.

They were also greatly to blame in having connexion with the Circumcelliones, after having once seen their true character; but again, about A.D. 401, they allowed these fanatics to join them, and, once more, they set fire and sword at work to destroy churches and slay those that opposed them. They principally sought out those who had left the Donatist party, and the orthodox clergy. Augustine had a narrow escape.

An effort was made to hold a conference, but the Donatists replied that "the sons of the martyrs, and the brood of traditors can never meet. The emperor was now appealed to, and severe edicts were issued against the Donatists. This caused many to return to those called orthodox, where they were received "with love and forgiveness." On the other hand, it roused the fanatics to still greater excesses, and the city of Hippo and its neighbourhood suffered fearfully.

In A.D. 411, a conference was suggested and now it was accepted by all. There were present 286 Catholics* and 279 Donatists, shewing that the latter were still strong in numbers. It met at Carthage, each choosing seven persons to speak. After a good deal of quarrelling, the Donatists presented their side of the question in writing. They objected to the doctrine that the church must to the end contain both good and bad; they quoted scriptures to prove that the church must be pure and without spot; they objected to the examples quoted by the catholics from the prophets as inapplicable to that day; they dissented from the view that Judas received the Lord's supper, and that that was a proof of allowed evil; and to the interpretation of the parable of the Wheat and Tares as applying to the church; or that Romans i. 18 was to the point.

{*The term "catholic church" was used very early, and afterwards the mass of Christians were termed "Catholics" when it was needful to distinguish them from heretics, Donatists, etc.}

Augustine replied that scripture did not contemplate the church being free from evil: he repeated in substance what he had previously written: "We cannot separate ourselves while in the body from the wicked; but we must use all the greater diligence in heart and will to separate ourselves from their mode of life. It is our duty to recognise this, and not to imperil love by passionate division, or dissever unity by pride. Let us be diligent to hold the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: for he who gathers outside this unity, gathers not with Christ; and he who gathers not with Christ, destroys." In another place he says, "The church grows and cannot perish, even if wicked men are mixed in it with the good; for this mixture does not lose its character."

It will be seen that this raises important issues that have had to be discussed many times since, namely, What is the church? Is that necessarily the church of God that calls itself such? And is it always wrong and schism to separate from that which bears the name of the church of God when it has lost the essential characteristics of that church as put forth in scripture?

As we have said, the Donatists were more consistent in their doctrine, however they may have failed in practice, and however blinded by party spirit, and joining with evildoers to gain their ends. In these things they were surely guilty. As the Spirit of God is a Holy Spirit, the unity of the Spirit we are exhorted to keep, must be in separation from evil.

Another point that was discussed in the above council was whether persecution for differences in the church was right. The Donatists contended that it could not be justified; Augustine — perhaps because of his connection with the church called orthodox — contended that it was at times needful.

Persecution again followed this council, under Honorius the emperor. It has been judged that though the Donatists seem not to be mentioned after Gregory the Great (A.D. 590-604), they continued to exist until Africa was overrun by the Saracens in the seventh century, when they are lost sight of.

Augustine.

A.D. 354-430.

Having mentioned Augustine in his connection with the Donatists, the reader will like to learn a little more of this great champion for the truth, as he was called. His mother, Monica, was a Christian, and prayed earnestly and constantly for his conversion. When young, indeed until near his conversion, he led an irregular life, according to his own "Confessions." For about ten years he was joined to the Manicheans* (whom he afterwards attacked); but their immorality disgusted him, and their shallowness could not satisfy his longing for something better. He went to Milan where, out of curiosity, he heard Ambrose, and there he was converted in his thirty-fourth year (A.D. 386). On the death of his mother, which deeply affected him, he sold his property and became an ascetic; but in A.D. 391, he was called to be a presbyter at Hippo, and in 395 he became bishop. Here he continued about thirty-five years with but few remarkable incidents except his defence of the faith. Shortly before his death, the Vandals overran the North of Africa and assailed Hippo; but Augustine closed his earthly career (A.D. 430), before the city was taken.

{* Professors of a new religion, which we shall read more of farther on.}

The two principal works of Augustine are his "Confessions," which give his own history of his conversion, and his "City of God," an elaborate work which represents the church of God as surviving the decline and fall of the Roman empire. He defended the doctrine of the Trinity, and has been thought to have ended the great controversy against the Arians, although some still held the doctrine and do to this day. He was also the champion of grace against Pelagianism, and what has been called semi-Pelagianism, which we hope to look at presently. And thus he has often been held up to be the defender of the truth, standing, as it were, midway between the apostles and the Reformers.

On the other hand, he was a great champion for the church considered orthodox in his day, and in his works many of the errors of the Church of Rome are either laid down or can be easily drawn therefrom, so that he has also been constantly appealed to by Roman Catholics as well as by Protestants.

Chapter 7.

Pelagianism.

This was one of the many heresies of the church in the fifth century. Pelagius was long thought to have been an Englishman of the name of Morgan, but nothing is really known of his nationality. He was first known at Rome as an ascetic, when he was joined by one Coelestius, and both attempted strictly to carry out all the precepts of Christ, but it is to be feared they strove to do it in their own strength. In A.D. 411 they removed to Carthage, but some suspicion of their orthodoxy had preceded them, and Augustine at once called a synod to examine the questions at issue, and therein Coelestius was condemned for holding that the fall of Adam did not extend to his posterity, and Coelestius was denied communion.

Pelagius went to Palestine, where two synods acquitted him, because, when pressed, he allowed that divine assistance was necessary to enable a man to keep the law of God. But the orthodox were not satisfied, and appeal was made to the bishop of Rome, Zosimus. (A.D. 417-8.) A confession of faith was carefully drawn up by Pelagius and his colleague, and the bishop acquitted them. Letters were now written to North Africa, remonstrating with the clergy for condemning these men. Here another synod was held, and they refused to receive the judgment of Rome.

The real doctrine of Pelagius was a denial of the fall of man — not the fall of Adam — but that man universally shared in the fall of Adam. He held that man has ability to sin, but also, of his own free will, to choose the good and to do it in an acceptable manner. Man has a propensity to sin, but this is not sinful in itself — not sin unless he practises sin. If he obeys, he is helped by divine grace to a more perfect obedience. By believing in Christ his sins will be forgiven. Though the term Pelagianism has long since died out, there are many in the professing church of to-day who hold doctrines quite as erroneous. But to return to our history.

The African bishops prevailed on the emperor to condemn Pelagius, and now Zosimus changed his mind and condemned him also, with severe penalties against all offenders. But the error had taken root, and in Italy eighteen bishops were ejected because they would not renounce the heresy. A general synod of Ephesus afterwards condemned all who held the doctrines of Pelagius. (A.D. 431.)

This gave rise to what has been called semi-Pelagianism, namely, Man universally might be involved in the fall of Adam, but he was not disabled from doing good works, or having a will to do them. As it is at this day, so it was then: we cannot exalt man without in an equal degree lowering the supremacy of grace, and the need of the almighty power of God in conversion.

Man is willing to own that he needs help in order to fully satisfy God, but he does not receive the testimony of the word that he is lost, and needs a Saviour and a new birth before he can begin to do anything that can please God.

Few who deny the utter ruin of mankind see that they in reality undermine the atonement. If man needed help only, God could have given that; but in order to forgive sins, and give man an entirely new standing, Christ must die: "without shedding of blood there is no remission," but the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin. Scripture shews plainly that man must be born again, must be a new creature, as well as that he was lost and needed salvation, and this could only be by the atonement.

Chapter 8.

Monasticism.

St. Anthony is considered to be the father of monks, though one, Paul of Thebais, may have been a little before him as to date. Anthony was born about A.D. 250 at Coma in Upper Egypt. When he was about twenty years of age his parents died, leaving him well provided for. But hearing the scripture read: "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor," he resolved to carry it out. He sold his property except just enough for his own and his sister's wants. Soon after he heard another scripture: "Take no thought for the morrow," and he sold off the remainder of his estate, and, after seeing his sister taken care of, he retired into a lonely spot, and began to live in the most sparing way — eating bread only, and lying on the bare floor. But finding that Satan still tempted him to evil, he removed to a more secluded place, and took shelter in a dilapidated tomb. Here, after much suffering, he thought he had conquered Satan, and was able to live a life of exalted piety. He afterwards removed to the ruins of a castle in a mountain, where he resided for a long period, spending twenty years in his various seclusions.

He became known as the pious hermit, and was solicited to allow others to share in his seclusion. He had some small cells erected, and here he allowed others to reside; but he refused to preside over them, and at times would take long journeys away from the old castle that he might be absolutely alone.

He restricted himself to six ounces of bread per day, moistened with water, and a little salt. When brought very low he would allow a little oil or a few dates; but would fast for whole days to make up for his indulgence. His dress was a sackcloth shirt and a coat of sheepskins, tied with a leathern girdle. He often spent the greater part of the night in prayer and meditation.

Many resorted to the pious hermit for advice or to ask his prayers, and the emperor Constantine wrote to him. His companions expressed their surprise at this. But he replied, "Be not surprised that the emperor writes to us — one man to another; wonder rather that God should have written to us, and that He should have spoken to us by His Son."

St. Anthony knew enough of human nature to foresee that many might take up with a life of seclusion who had not given up the world. He feared that a day would come when such would like to live in stately buildings and fare sumptuously, while their only distinction from others would be in their dress — a prophecy too well fulfilled in later years.

When his end approached, he refused to remain among the other monks, except the two who lived near his cell. He bequeathed one of his sheepskins and his cloak to Athanasius, as a token that he approved of the doctrine of the Trinity; the other sheepskin he gave to bishop Serapion; and his sackcloth he gave to his two companions. He died at the good old age of 105 years.

Others followed a similar course, and became even more renowned. One, called Simon Stylite, carried his privations to such extremes that he was dismissed from a monastery as too severe. He foolishly tied a rope round his body so tightly that it ate its way into the flesh, and could only be removed after three days' exertions by a surgeon, and then left a dangerous wound. He eventually built himself a tower (hence the name Stylite) on which he lived till his death, raising it by degrees from six to thirty-six cubits high. He became exceedingly famous.

This, then, is a slight sketch of the beginning of monasticism in connection with the christian church. As it became a powerful agency in after days, it is well to see whether it originated in the church, or was copied from anything that existed previously.

It was closely associated with asceticism, that system of becoming exercised in bearing privation, and of seeking for greater purity than could be found in the mass of mankind generally. This caused some to separate themselves from the mass of the people, and when there were several at or near the same spot they associated together and became communities. Or, as we have seen, in some places it began with one man, who became famous, around whom others gathered.

It is clear from history that there was a sort of monastic order among the Jews, who were called Essenes.* Both Josephus and Philo speak of these. They sought to attain to great purity and considered there were several stages of purity, such as —

1, the Essene attained to outward purity, signified by baptisms;

2, he abstained from marriage — this was an advance on the first stage;

3, he then sought inward or spiritual poverty, though it is not clear in what this consisted;

4, he sought to be meek and humble, and put away all anger and malice;

5, then he attained to holiness so-called;

6, then he became fit to be a temple of the Holy Spirit;

7, then to do cures and work miracles;

8, to attain to the portion of Elias, the forerunner of the Messiah.

{*It is a very disputed point as to the meaning of this name; some take it to mean the "pious," others "the silent ones."}

These lived together in communities — had all things common — worked with their hands, tilling the ground, etc.; they were very zealous for the law, and liberal to the poor. Josephus speaks of them as existing as early as the time of Jonathan Maccabeus. (died B.C. 144.)

It is also proved that similar societies existed among the ancient Egyptians. There abode in the temples of Serapis bands of men who had left the world, given up their possessions, and who lived upon the bread their relatives brought them. Their object was to attain to greater purity of soul.

It would be interesting to discover how and why such communities sprang up in the christian church, seeing scripture is silent on such a subject. It has been judged that monasticism did not exist during the first two centuries, though there may have been some practising asceticism. St, Anthony was born, as we have seen, in the third century.

Christianity taught man that he was a fallen being, and if he did not grasp God's remedy for this condition, it is easy to see why he attempted to conquer the evil by his own endeavours. Men could but see that there was much evil in the world, and they sought to get away from it. But there was also evil within, and this they could not run away from, for, go where they would, they carried it with them. They, therefore, punished the body by starving it and whipping it; but this did not reach the heart, out of which proceeded the evil that defiled, as our Lord explained to His disciples. (Matt. xv. 18.) Therefore, with all their fancied purity, they were just the same as before in themselves, though, of course, their outward conduct may have been improved. As to any remedy, "the flesh profiteth nothing."

Those also who were Christians made a great mistake, as they might have seen in the Epistle to the Galatians. They had begun with Christ (or they could not have been Christians) and then they sought to be perfected in the flesh.

Two or three things naturally helped on monasticism. One was the persecution in the early church. This often drove the Christians, especially those known as pastors and teachers, into secluded places far distant from the usual abodes of men, where they lived in caves or put up temporary abodes; then when persecution ceased, some preferred to remain in the quiet seclusion they had before sought as a necessity.

Another thing was, that when Christianity became popular it also became more or less corrupt, with much contention for place or power in the church. This caused some pious souls to withdraw from the scenes of confusion to quiet places where they could be at peace, and carry on their studies and their devotions unhinderedly. But such were generally discovered, and news of the "holy man" would rapidly spread. And then, as we have seen, his quietude would be destroyed. Many would flock to him for advice, some to ask his prayers, and his judgment on disputed points. Others pressed him to let them take up their abode with him, and this ended either in his taking refuge in some more inaccessible place or in his becoming the head of a community. This indeed was the origin of many monasteries.

In some places the chief work was copying ancient manuscripts, including the Bible, and, indeed, when the dark ages set in, some of the monasteries were the places where the scriptures were preserved and where copies of them were multiplied.

Protestants sometimes shrink from the thought of any good being done in a monastery, since so much evil was found eventually to be connected with them; but it is well to see that in their origin — however mistaken the idea may have been — they were not corrupt, and they certainly did good work from time to time in the earlier stages of their existence, by thus preserving and multiplying the copies of the word of God.

But how contrary is monasticism to the example of our blessed Lord, who went about doing good! He prayed for His saints, not that they should be taken out of the world — indeed, He sent them into the world (John xvii. 18) — but that they should be kept from the evil. Oh! for grace, while passing along in the world, to keep our garments unspotted from its many and varied corruptions!

Chapter 9.

Christianity in Britain.

Religion in our country was, as far back as we can trace, that of Druidism.

Of the principles of this religion (if such it can be called) very little is known; the Druids were instructed in secret, and nothing was allowed to be put into writing. Britain appears to have had a pre-eminence in the observance of Druidism, for Julius Caesar says that "such of the Gauls as desired to be thoroughly instructed in the principles of their religion, usually took a journey into Britain for the purpose."

The Druids were judges as well as priests, and had great influence over the people; they elected from among themselves one to be Arch-Druid. They taught especially three things: bravery in war; the immortality of the soul; and life after death. These latter principles were carried out so practically that they sometimes left accounts and money lent to be settled for in the new life, and some would even cast themselves into the funereal pile to be the sooner along with the deceased ones they loved. It has been asserted that the Druids were not addicted to idolatry until after the invasion of the Romans: eventually they worshipped the sun and moon; with Jupiter, Mars, etc., as demi-gods.

The Druids had a curious way of enforcing the annual payments due to them. A tradition says that on the last day of October every family was obliged, under heavy ecclesiastical penalties, to let all the fires in their dwellings go out, and then on the first day of November they had to resort to the temple, pay their fees, and get a light from the sacred fire to re-kindle their fires at home. The time was well chosen, as the winter approached when fires were the more needful.

The places of worship were amid a grove of oak-trees, with huge stones in the form of a circle, and horizontal stones placed on the top of two or more of the upright stones. Sometimes a double row of stones was formed. The altar was at times a pile of stones or of turf, and at other times one massive stone.*

{*At Stonehenge, and other places, the remains of Druids' temples are supposed to exist.}

Along with the animals sacrificed, human beings were also offered; several were confined in huge enclosures of wicker-work and all burned together. At other times, a man was killed with a stroke of the sword, and then the way he fell, the contortions of his body, the way his blood flowed, were all watched and certain things were predicted from what was observed or the victim was laid on the stone altar and offered up.

Thus our now highly-favoured country was once the scene of these dreadful cruelties — a system, indeed, too revolting even for the idolatrous Romans. Surely Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning, must have been the author of such a religion.

The invasion of the Romans gave a great check to Druidism. Tiberius banished such systems from the provinces around Rome, and Claudius put an end to them in Gaul at the same time the Druids were attacked in Britain and were compelled to take refuge in Anglesea. "Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain under Nero, cut down the sacred groves of the Druids, destroyed their temples, overthrew their altars, and burned many of the priests." No doubt this was because of their offering human sacrifices, as the Romans themselves were idolaters.

As Rome thus rooted out this ancient horrid system, it was also a means of introducing Christianity into this island at how early a date cannot now be ascertained, though it was, without doubt, during the first century of the christian era.

Some of our readers will, perhaps, be surprised to hear that besides Christianity being thus established very early in Britain, some of the British Christians are even named in the New Testament. Yet this has been asserted. The story is this. A poet named Martial* mentions a lady of the name of Claudia, born of British parents, and who lived at Rome. The apostle Paul also speaks of a Claudia in his second Epistle to Timothy. These two are supposed to have been the same person. What adds to the probability, is that the same poet mentions a Pudens along with Claudia, and this name is also given by Paul: "Eubulus greeteth thee, and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and all the brethren." (2 Tim. iv. 21.)

{* Martial lived A.D. 43-104, and resided thirty-five years at Rome.}

It is supposed that Christianity was first introduced into England about A.D. 64, but as early as B.C. 55-54, Julius Caesar invaded Britain, and may have taken back hostages. Again, in A.D. 40, Aulus Plautius visited Britain, and eleven years later Caractacus was carried to Rome.

Now the date given to the Epistle to the Romans is A.D. 58, which proves that there was a church at Rome at that time, and many years earlier, according to Romans xv. 23; and some of the British hostages may have been converted and added to that assembly before the second Epistle to Timothy was written (A.D. 63, or 68 by others), and thus the Claudia of Paul may have been the British lady named by the poet; this is as much as can be said on the subject.

Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, in the second century, both speak of Christianity being spread over the whole of the Roman empire, and, if so, it would have spread to Britain; and Tertullian, in the same century, speaks of the parts of Britain, inaccessible to the Romans, being subject to Christ. Gildas, called "the father of British history," represents the Sun of Righteousness as shining on these remote islands, ice-bound in paganism, in the earliest ages of the earth and before the conflict of the Romans with Boadicea (A.D. 61).

While therefore there cannot be a doubt that Christianity was introduced into Britain thus early, little is known of its history.

It has been questioned by some whether Britain received Christianity through Rome, because of its opposition to the Church of Rome in later years; and they think it is more probable that our island received the religion of Christ direct from Asia Minor. This may be so, or Britain may have received it from Rome before the Church of Rome became so corrupt and being separated by distance maintained its purity much longer than the metropolis of the world.

As we have seen, a persecution broke out in the reign of Diocletian, and orders to persecute the Christians reached Britain as well as all other parts of the Roman empire. Gildas says of the persecution: "All copies of the scriptures that could be found were burned in the streets, and the chosen pastors of God's flock butchered, together with their innocent sheep, in order that not a vestige of the christian religion, if possible, might remain in any province. What disgraceful flights then took place; what slaughter and death, inflicted by way of punishment in divers shapes; and, on the contrary, what glorious crowns of martyrdom then were won! What raving fury was displayed by the persecutors, and what patience on the part of sorrowing saints, ecclesiastical history informs us; for the whole church was crowding in a body to leave behind them the dark things of this world, and to make the best of their way to the happy mansions of heaven, as to their natural home."

Amphibalus, one of the clergy, fled from his persecutors, and found shelter at Verulam with a pagan named Alban who kindly received him, and was amply repaid by receiving Christianity from the refugee. When Amphibalus could no longer be hid, Alban changed clothes with him, and he escaped; but, on this being discovered, Alban was ordered to offer to the gods or he should share the fate that was intended for the other. He refused, and was first scourged and then beheaded.

On Constantine turning Christian, the church in Britain rapidly recovered from the effects of the persecution; for at the council of Arles in A.D. 314, three British bishops signed the decrees — Eborius of York, Restitutus of London, and Adelphius of Britannia Secunda, as some district was then called. And, without doubt, British bishops took part in later general councils.

Little is known of how the church proceeded in Britain at this time, but they had to share in the troubles arising from the various heresies we have already looked at, especially we read of Pelagianism having been taught in Britain.

When the troubles of the Romans to maintain the empire arose and they had withdrawn their legions from Britain, the land was invaded once and again by the Picts and Scots. This was followed in due time by the fall of Rome, and the British, being unable to repel the Picts and Scots, invited the Saxons and Angles to aid them, who, having defeated these enemies, turned upon the British and drove them into Wales and other parts, A.D. 455.

All these changes must have greatly affected the prosperity of the churches in Britain. The Abbey of Glastonbury had in the meantime come into existence, and St. Patrick, if some accounts are to be trusted, became its abbot, but this is very doubtful.

The origin of this celebrated man is much disputed. When young he fell into the hands of the Picts and Scots, and was twice sold into captivity, but making his escape he returned to Britain. When a captive he became sensible of his lost condition and sought salvation, and was then anxious to make known the gospel to others. He was eventually met by Germanus, who was travelling through the country opposing the Pelagian heresy. Germanus took him to France, and from thence he went to Rome, in the time of Celestine. By him he was sent to Ireland, where he laboured for many years, and established many churches — thus indelibly linking Ireland and St. Patrick together. Many fables are mixed up with his history, and some have supposed that there were two or three of the same name.

Very little is known of the introduction of Christianity into Scotland. It is recorded that Ninian, the son of a British prince of Cumberland, went to Rome, and was there ordained by bishop Siricius in the close of the fourth century, and sent to preach the gospel among the pagan tribes of Caledonia. Ninian established himself at Whitherne in Galloway, and built a church there, remarkable in those days for its architecture, and from thence the gospel radiated to other parts. Many a church and chapel in Scotland was named after St. Ninian, or St. Ringan as he was often called. He died A.D. 432. Palladius, also sent from Rome, came about this date, as the first bishop "to the Scots believing in Christ," but it is thought more probable that he was sent to the Scots of Ireland, which was anciently called Scotia, though he may have visited Scotland also, or sent one of his clergy. But little is known as to what success attended these early labours.

Chapter 10.

Councils in the Church.

In imitation of the notable council of the church mentioned in the Acts, as to whether the Gentiles should be compelled to be circumcised and to keep the law — when the apostles and elders came together to consider the matter, and at which, after much discussion, a godly judgment was arrived at — so much so, indeed, that the apostles could write "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us" — in imitation of this meeting, it became common in the early church, when disputes arose, to call for a council of the church, and it is well to see what weight is attached to these early councils.

There were some called Oecumenical or general councils, while there were others that could have no sort of claim to be called general, and thus became merely synods or gatherings of the bishops of certain districts, more or less large, and could have no claim upon other districts, especially after the Roman empire was divided into eastern and western. Then when heresies began to appear and were held by those in authority in the church, synods were sometimes called by those who maintained the heresy, and others by those who opposed it; and thus many were in every sense unworthy to be called councils of the church.

The councils considered to be "general," during the first five centuries, are: —

1. The council of Nice, convoked by Constantine the Great, on the question of Arianism, A.D. 325. Three hundred and eighty bishops were present.

2. The council of Constantinople, convoked by Theodosius the Great, on the same subject, A.D. 381. A hundred and fifty bishops attended.

These we have already glanced at; we will now look at the third.

3. In A.D. 431, the third general council was held at Ephesus. It was called by the emperors Theodosius the Younger and Valentinian, on account of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, who, in condemning the expression "the mother of God" as applied to Mary, which was then common in the church, had concluded that in our Lord there were two persons as well as two natures. This shews the danger of being wise above what is written touching the deep mystery of the Person of Christ, which it is not possible for any one to fathom; and, as we have seen, all fall into error who will try to grasp and put into words what is infinite and known to God only. Nestorius was condemned, 198 subscribing to his condemnation.

In this council the Nicene creed was again formally confirmed; and with decisions as to the powers of a bishop being confined to his own province, the council closed, and a measure of peace was again restored.

What led to the fourth general council may be thus briefly stated: —

In A.D. 448 a synod was held at Constantinople to settle some disputes between certain bishops, when Eusebius of Dorylaeum unexpectedly brought an accusation against Eutyches which raised a serious discussion.

Eutyches had for seventy years lived a monastic life, and for thirty years had presided over some three hundred monks. He had hitherto been supposed to be orthodox, and the accusation took his friends quite by surprise. Eutyches had strongly opposed Nestorius, but now he was said to be in error himself, and this, too, touching the Person of our Lord.

Two messengers were despatched to Eutyches to ask him to attend the synod. But he said he had vowed not to leave the cloister. He said he held with the Nicene creed, but they discovered that he had his own way of explaining his belief. He believed that Christ, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was very God and very man, but His body was not of like substance with ours. This was no sooner repeated to the synod than Eusebius exclaimed, "This is quite enough to enable us to take action against Eutyches; but let him be summoned a second time."

Again two messengers were sent to him; but he declared that nothing but death should make him leave the monastery: they might do what they pleased, At length Eutyches sent some of his friends to the council, including Abraham, the head of a neighbouring monastery. Abraham assured Flavian, who presided, that Eutyches was unwell. Flavian replied in a friendly manner, saying, "Let him remember that he is not coming among strangers, but among men who would receive him with fatherly and brotherly affection..... surely if he could leave his retirement when the error of Nestorius imperilled the faith, he should do as much when his own orthodoxy is in question!" But he added, "You know the zeal of the accuser of Eutyches. Fire itself seems to him cold in comparison with his burning zeal for religion. God knows I have besought him to desist; but as he persisted, what could I do?"

Eventually Eutyches promised to appear. In the meantime it had been ascertained that he had been sending round a paper asking for signatures, and this Eusebius also urged against him.

At length he appeared at the synod, bringing a letter from the emperor, who had sent a representative to be present. The discussion then took place. Eutyches stated his belief, but he was questioned again and again as to how he defined the Person of Christ. At length he said he believed our Lord, before the union of the Godhead and manhood, had two natures; but after the union only one. He was condemned. The sentence ran, "Eutyches, formerly priest and archimandrite,* hath proved himself affected by the heresy of Valentinus and Apollinaris, and hath refused, in spite of our admonition, to accept the true faith. Therefore we, lamenting his perverseness, have decreed, through our Lord Jesus Christ, blasphemed by him, that he be excluded from all priestly functions, from our communion, and from his primacy in his monastery." It was signed by about thirty bishops and twenty-three archimandrites.

{*Signifying either a "ruler of the fold," or a "chief of the monks." The first is derived from the Greek, the latter from the Syriac.}

Eutyches left the council-chamber muttering that he would appeal to Rome, and this he did, as we shall see. The monks rallied round Eutyches, but Flavian spread abroad the decree and demanded obedience — the whole resulting in a great scandal in the church.

Eutyches was a friend of the chief eunuch at court, Chrysaphius, and eventually the emperor called a council to reconsider the matter.

It met at Ephesus, A.D. 449, but was what would be called a packed synod. The emperor directed Dioscorus, bishop of Alexandria, to bring ten metropolitans and ten other bishops; distinguished for their learning and orthodoxy, but no more. Others were specially invited. Theodoret of Cyrus (Kars) was not to come unless the council called him. Leo was summoned from Rome, who sent three representatives. Altogether there were 128 bishops present. Eutyches made a confession of his faith, and complained of his being condemned by Flavian. Petitions were also presented by the monks of Eutyches that Flavian should be deposed. The council decided in favour of Eutyches, and deposed both Eusebius of Dorylaeum, and Flavian of Constantinople, with a few others. The council is said to have been intimidated by the presence of soldiers and monks. Eusebius and Flavian were both given into custody, and Flavian died from the treatment he received in prison.

It will readily be conceived that things would not be allowed to rest with this decision. The emperor Theodosius II. passed away, and Marcian was elected, and he called another council "to settle some questions respecting the orthodox faith." It was to have met at Nice, but the emperor, fearing a tumult, removed it. It met at Chalcedon in A.D. 451.

4. This is called the fourth general council of the church. The first act was to condemn the late council at Ephesus (now called the "robbers' meeting") which had condemned Eusebius and Flavian. It was declared that Dioscorus, as president of that council and five others deserved to be deposed.

At their third meeting, fresh charges were brought against Dioscorus, some by Eusebius of Dorylaeum, and others by two of the deacons. He was twice summoned, but not appearing, he was deposed.

Efforts were afterwards made to restore Dioscorus, but without success, and the great thing remaining was to state distinctly what was the creed of the church respecting the Person of our Lord. It was discovered that some slight additions had been made to the Nicene creed at Constantinople, so the creeds of both Nice and Constantinople were put forth with synodical letters of Cyril to Nestorius and of Leo to Flavian.* To this was added the statement, that no further explanation was needed, nor was any other creed to be taught under pain of excommunication.

{* Leo's doctrine as to the Person of Christ, is, in short, described as "two natures united without confusion, without change, and without separation, in one and the same Christ."}

This decision was solemnly attested in the presence of the emperor Marcian and the empress Pulcheria, the emperor telling them that he had come, like Constantine, to confirm what had been done, not to display his power. He would punish any who did not obey the decisions of the council.

At the same council, monks were made more dependent upon the bishops. Bishops were not to engage in secular callings, and they were not to leave the churches to which they were attached.

We have gone thus a little into detail as to these councils, in order to get some idea of their true value. As we have seen, it was very easy for an emperor to gather a number of bishops together to carry out his views and favour the party he had most at heart — all to be condemned and set aside by another emperor or by another council.

It is well to see that when the council of the church, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, was held, all the scriptures had not been written. Now that we have the whole, we do not find any instructions for calling councils, and, indeed, a general council would now be impracticable. The apostle Paul, knowing that after his decease, evil persons would be found in the church, introducing "perverse things," commended the elders of Ephesus to God, and to the word of His grace, which is able to build us up, and give us an inheritance among all them that are sanctified. (Acts xx.)

That the councils and synods held in the early ages of the church were in no sense worthy to be compared with the council of the church recorded in the Acts is abundantly proved, though right decisions may have been come to, especially at the earlier ones. Ammianus Marcellinus, the historian, speaks of the disputes of the bishops (which he considered the emperor ought to have crushed by his power), and the highways being covered with groups of bishops, galloping from every side to the assemblies called synods, and while they laboured to bring each other to their opinions, the public establishment of the posts was almost ruined by their hasty and repeated journeys.

Gregory of Nazianzus declared of the councils in his day (A.D. 379-389), "If I must speak the truth this is my resolution, to avoid all councils of the bishops, for I have not seen any good end answered by any synod whatsoever; for their love of contention and their lust of power are too great even for words to express."

So that for the simple Christian all these gatherings of bishops in the early church have neither weight nor authority, except as they agree with scripture. It is quite true that there were raised up by God from time to time noble champions for the truth, who contended manfully for it at some of the councils; but the professing church as a whole was gradually becoming more and more corrupt, and its councils and decisions can in no way be relied on. Happily we do not need such. We have the word of God in our hands, and the Holy Spirit as our teacher; happy are they who have their teaching by these means, and who by grace are led to obey.

Chapter 11.

The Western Church.

We must now glance at the Western Church during the fifth century, and will look a little at the history of Leo I., called the Great, bishop of Rome. The Western church does not appear to have been so distracted with heresies as was the Eastern, though it could not wholly escape the contamination, nor keep aloof from what was going on in the East; indeed, the bishop of Rome was again and again appealed to by those who were condemned, and it is not to be wondered at if Rome did not always side with the right.

Leo became bishop of Rome in peculiar times. The dignity of the imperial name may be said to have died with Theodosius the Great, though others succeeded him, and the barbarous hordes were only waiting their time to make fresh attacks upon the empire. If the succeeding emperors were weak and incompetent, now, at least, a man of energy succeeded to the bishopric in A.D. 440, and had to take part in saving the city of Rome from the barbarians, as well as the church from the heretics. Augustine had passed away (A.D. 430), and Cyril was soon to follow (A.D. 444). Leo has been held up by some as a successful champion for the truth.

In A.D. 452, Attila, after pillaging Lombardy, approached the city of Rome. The emperor Valentinian had shewn his cowardice by fleeing, and there seemed no hope for Rome. Leo, however, with two others undertook the perilous task of going forth to meet the barbarian, to see if they could come to terms. It has been thought that Attila was glad of the opportunity to treat, for his army was being enfeebled, and a force was on its march to oppose him; and besides that he was probably fearful to attack such a "holy" city, for Alaric did not long survive a similar act. At any rate the embassy was successful; Attila retired beyond the Danube; but threatened that he would make Italy suffer more if the princess Honoria, who had offered herself in marriage to the king of the Huns, were not given up to him with her rich dowry.

Again, in A.D. 455, the dreadful Genseric approached the gates of Rome, and there was really no ruler or general to oppose him. Was the city of wealth and luxury to be given up to the fury and lusts of the wild barbarians, without any effort made to stem the torrent? No; Leo again stepped forward and with his clergy went forth to meet the invader. He could not prevent the sack of the city, but he succeeded in getting promises that some restraint should be put upon the acts of the rude conquerors. Leo was thereupon hailed as "saviour of his country."

He was also often called upon to defend the truth. Manichaeism* had found shelter in the church in Africa; but on Genseric capturing Carthage in A.D. 439, many fled for safety to Rome, and there concealed themselves while passing as good Christians: they are described as moving about "with pale faces, in mean apparel, fasting, and making distinctions of meats." Leo, in A.D. 444, had a diligent search made for these heretics, and a large number were found, including some bishops. The aid of the civil authorities was sought, and a combined tribunal formed for their examination. Gross immoralities in their secret meetings were confessed by them, and these the state could deal with, while the bishops condemned their doctrines. Those who remained impenitent were banished from Rome, and an edict of Valentinian, dated June 19, 445, revived the laws against them. Leo warned bishops in other places against the sect.

{* Manichaeism is named after its founder, Mani. It was an attempt to combine Pagan philosophy with Christianity. It held that Christ did not imprison Himself in a human body — it was only an appearance of Him that men saw. This, of course, was destructive of Christianity, and was a system which should never have found a place in the church. Mani was put to death about A.D. 274. Dioclesian, A.D. 296, ordered the leaders to be burnt at the stake, and their followers to be beheaded. Still they flourished. In A.D. 372 Valentinian the elder forbad their meetings, and imposed heavy penalties on the leaders. In the year 381, Theodosius the Great pronounced them infamous, and deprived them of all rights of citizens.}

He was next called upon for advice against the Priscillianists* who were exercising a very damaging influence in Spain, and, under his advice, synods were held in two or three places to condemn them.

{*Named after Priscillian, a man of eloquence and austere manner. He had many followers, including, it is said, "some bishops." The doctrine was similar to Manichaeism. The sect was condemned by a synod at Saragossa, A.D. 380, but this only roused them to greater energy. In A.D. 384, the emperor Maximus caused Priscillian to be executed with some of his followers at Treves — the first instance, it is said, of a heretic being condemned to death by the Christians in solemn form of law.}

As we have seen, Leo was also consulted upon the questions concerning Eutyches. This man had himself appealed to Rome, and agreed to abide by its decision. But Leo did not commit himself to him, and eventually took the side of Flavian. He wrote the famous letter, already alluded to, called the "Tome." It was addressed, in a sense, to all the world, on the solemn subject of the Person of our Lord. It was presented at the synod of Ephesus in A.D. 449, but his legates could not get it adopted.

When Leo heard of the sad way in which that synod had been managed, and its results, his anger was aroused. He declared it no synod at all, but a den of robbers; its acts were null and void; it cut to the root of the christian faith. A synod of the West was sitting at Rome, and Leo, in his own name and in that of the synod, at once wrote letters protesting against the whole proceeding. He wrote to the emperor and to the empress Pulcheria, to Flavian, (and then having heard of his death) to the church at Constantinople, and to many others.

Later on, Valentinian, emperor of the West, was at Rome with his wife and mother; Leo got them also to write letters, begging that a more numerous synod might be held in the East to set matters right. But Theodosius, in his reply, seemed disposed to do nothing more; for he was satisfied with what had taken place.

In the meantime Anatolius had been chosen to succeed Flavian in the chair of Constantinople, and this caused Leo anxiety, for Anatolius had been the representative of Dioscorus at Constantinople: Leo was very anxious to gain influence in the East as well as the West, and here was one appointed without his "sanction." So he wrote to the emperor almost demanding that the orthodoxy of Anatolius should be substantiated. But he learned that Dioscorus had had the audacity to excommunicate him — the bishop of Rome! and that the emperor was against him; so all looked dark. But before Leo's messengers reached Constantinople, Theodosius II. had passed away, and the empress Pulcheria was Leo's friend. Marcian was associated with her, and he also was on Leo's side; so now all was changed. Marcian wrote to Leo, promising that a council should be held, and wished it to be under his influence. In the meantime Anatolius had signed the "Tome," with "all the church of Constantinople, and other bishops" and all the metropolitans. Those who had been banished for agreeing with Flavian were recalled, and Eutyches himself was sent into exile.

Strange to say, Leo now is not anxious for a general council. He has issued his "Tome," and it has been signed everywhere: the thing is settled; what need of a council? If it is held, it must merely express a judgment already arrived at: not judge it afresh. Rome has spoken — was not that enough?

Leo had, however, to give way to the emperor, and the council was held, as we have seen, at Chalcedon, in the year 451. Eutyches was fully condemned, and Dioscorus deposed: this was all well, and delighted Leo. He exclaimed, "The divine mystery of the incarnation has been restored to the age;" "it is the world's second festivity since the advent of the Lord," etc.

But though the above acts of the council gave great pleasure to Leo, one of its acts gave him great offence. The council deemed it right to confirm the status of the bishop of Constantinople as primate of the Eastern church, whereas Leo wished him to be only a subordinate to Rome. When this came on for debate the legates of Rome left the council, declaring they had no instructions. The canon is important as proving that the claims of Rome, which had gradually become bolder and more aggressive, were not at that day conceded. "The fathers," it was said, "gave with reason the primacy to the chair of old Rome, because that was the royal city, and, with the same object in view, the 180 pious bishops gave equal primacy to the chair of new Rome," that is, Constantinople, but still adding, "next after old Rome." The see of Constantinople could appoint the metropolitans of Pontus, Asia, and Thrace, and certain other bishops.

Leo wrote to the emperor complaining of this, and would "confirm" only the acts of the council touching articles of faith: he could not sanction the canon touching the place given to the archbishop of Constantinople. Well, it did not much signify; the archbishop went on exercising his prerogative without such sanction! The bishop of Rome was not yet to be acknowledged as "universal bishop."

To be thus styled was the ambition of Rome, and it was not simply in the East that the bishop claimed it as urgently as was prudent, but also elsewhere — in Gaul, for instance. Hilary was bishop of Arles, and was looked upon as the Metropolitan of Gaul. We find him presiding at the councils of Riez and Orange in A.D. 439 and 442.

Hilary was in advance of many in that day. He had been a monk, and when he was seized and made bishop he continued to live sparingly. He would even till the ground with his own hands, to help to raise money for redeeming captive Christians. Much of his time he spent in prayer and study, and his preaching was with power over his hearers, though he has been described by some as favouring semi-pelagianism.

As metropolitan, Hilary visited the cities of Gaul, and found a bishop (Chelidonius) who had married a widow before he was made bishop; he also had been a magistrate and pronounced death on a culprit. These acts were held by Hilary as sufficient to prevent a man becoming a bishop, according to the canons of the church. Hilary called a synod at Vienne (A.D. 444) and Chelidonius was deposed.

He at once appealed to Rome, and Leo took up his case, being only too glad of an opportunity to assert his authority in Gaul as well as in the East. Hilary crossed the Alps, though it was winter, and appeared at Rome to try and convince Leo that the canons of the church had been respected.

Leo called together a synod, and Hilary, in a conciliatory spirit, consented to be present. He then stated the case, and defended his conduct but Leo actually had him put under guard, proceeded with the case, and declared the marriage with a widow was not proven. He reinstated Chelidonius, and then proceeded to declare that Hilary was no longer to be metropolitan of Gaul, and conferred the honour on the bishop of Vienne.

In the meantime Hilary had escaped and returned to Gaul; but Leo followed up his acts by obtaining from the emperor an edict (A.D. 445) against Hilary, as one who was injuring the peace of the church and rebelling against the majesty of the emperor.

Leo also charged Hilary with taking armed men with him when he traversed Gaul, and with consecrating a new bishop in the room of Projectus before the latter was dead. The whole case between Leo and Hilary has been frequently discussed by historians; but however faulty Hilary may have been (he is said to have taken the soldiers on account of the disturbed state of the country) nothing can justify the language of Leo in saying Hilary wished to cause the death of the sick bishop! The edict of A.D. 445 clearly shews that Leo's aim was "supremacy."

Hilary did not own the pretensions of Rome, but went on discharging his duties till the day of his death (A.D. 449). Leo, later on, styled Hilary a man "of holy memory."

Leo was held to be a great champion for the truth as far as he knew it, and was indefatigable in his appeals to emperors and bishops to stem the current of evil doctrine, we may say, all over the world. While doing this he was also very anxious that any questions he had decided should not be discussed over again as open questions. If councils were held, they must be, he contended, to confirm what had been decided, not to call them in question. This, of course, whenever it was listened to, tended the more to exalt the see of Rome, and paved the way for his being called "universal bishop."

One is anxious to see how far such a champion for truth, as he has been called, presented the gospel to his hearers. A great many of his sermons dwelt upon the Person of Christ, and dilated either upon His being truly God, or on His being really a man. As to the atonement, he had the erroneous thought, that man being a slave of Satan, the atonement was made really to the devil in order to free man from his authority — an idea not uncommon in those days.

Though he speaks of the merits and death of Christ as alone the source of salvation, yet he, strangely to our ears, held that the merits of the saints could work wonders and give aid to the church on earth. He mentions St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. Laurence (but never mentions the Virgin Mary) as helping in this way; but does not make direct appeal to them.

As to the way of salvation, it was sadly enshrouded by such statements as these: "By prayer, the mercy of God is sought; by fasting, the lusts of the flesh are extinguished; by almsgiving, our sins are atoned for [redimentur]." "He who has cleansed himself by almsgiving need not doubt that even after many sins the splendour of the new birth will be restored to him." Alas! that any one could be called the champion of the truth who could put forth such errors as these!

Leo died A.D. 461. Felix III. was the next patriarch of note (483-492). We shall see how he also took a prominent part in the questions which agitated the East, and was the cause of an open rupture between the Eastern and Western divisions of the church.

Chapter 12.

Close of the Fifth Century.

The council of Chalcedon had seemed to settle the doctrine as to the Person of Christ. The bishops had cried out, "We all have the same faith with Leo." But the disputes were in no way ended. Palestine and Egypt were distracted with the question. Theodosius, a fanatical monk, caused great commotion in loudly condemning the late council — not only in words, but by proceeding to denounce bishops and attempting to put others in their places.

In Alexandria things were no better. Though Dioscorus was deposed, a strong party sympathised with him, and opposed Proterius who had been appointed to fill his place. The contests were so severe that the aid of the military had to be called in, to quell the disturbances. This for a time made things worse; Proterius was murdered in the baptistry of his church, his body cut to pieces and then burnt. The emperor was now appealed to for protection.

Marcian begged Leo, the bishop of Rome, to come to the East and attempt to reconcile the parties. But he declined the honour: he pleaded that the decisions of the council, "under the guidance of the Holy Ghost," should strictly be maintained. The emperor was puzzled: what could be done with people who would not listen to a general council? He sought advice from all the metropolitans, and they upheld the council. The emperor determined to use force. Timotheus Aelurus (the Cat) was consecrated by two deposed bishops, and became leader of the faction; he was banished, and Timotheus Salophaciolus was appointed patriarch of Alexandria. He was of a mild disposition, and peace was in some measure restored.

A change of emperor was looked upon as a favourable opportunity to secure the interests of each party. Marcian had passed away, and Leo I. succeeded him, and then Zeno (A.D. 474). In A.D. 475, Basiliscus succeeded in expelling Zeno, and at once the Monophysite* party came into favour. He was the first to publish decisions of emperors on matters of faith, and required all the bishops to subscribe to them. Thus he issued a decree that the Nicene creed, with its confirmatory decrees of the councils of Constantinople and Ephesus, should alone stand; and that the decrees of Chalcedon and the letter of Leo should be condemned and burned wherever found.

{*This term was now used to point out those who held that our Lord had but one nature after His incarnation.}

At Alexandria, Timotheus Aelurus was recalled and re-instated, the mild patriarch quietly retiring to his cloister. In other places tumults were the result, and the decree of the emperor was opposed.

A hermit, called Daniel the Stylite, held to be an oracle in the church in those days, being warned in a vision, descended from his pillar and appeared at Constantinople, and there confirmed the orthodoxy of the council of Chalcedon, it is said, by a number of miracles! Zeno, having gained adherents, was restored as emperor, and this again changed everything. The bishops who had subscribed to the decree of Basiliscus now made the plea that they had signed by compulsion, though they had before subscribed to it as "a divine and apostolic letter."

In A.D. 477, Timotheus Aelurus passed away, and the Monophysite party took advantage of the opportunity and elected a successor. The emperor viewed this as an insurrection and sentenced their bishop to death, but flight saved him. Timotheus Salophaciolus was again installed, with a threat from the emperor, that any one not bowing to this choice should lose his bishopric and be exiled. Timotheus softened the rigour of this decree as well as he could, even to succouring his enemies.

At the death of this bishop, two persons were chosen by the two parties — Peter Mongus by the Monophysites, and John Talaia by those who held with the council of Chalcedon. But the latter, having offended the patriarch of Constantinople, was in ill-favour at court so Peter Mongus seized the opportunity of visiting the capital, and pointed out the strength of the Monophysite party at Alexandria and the sad consequences that would follow any other person being forced on the people. A plan of uniting both the factions and restoring peace in the church was suggested. This was favourably received, and in A.D. 482 a treaty of agreement was drawn up in the name of the emperor, on the basis of the Nicene creed, avoiding disputed terms and names, and even the nature of the dispute. It was named the Henoticon, signifying "deed of concord." It set forth that "Christ was one, not two, since miracles and sufferings were referred to one and the same Person." If all would subscribe to this, they were not to be troubled further as to what their explanations were on the subject.

Peace, however, was not to be restored on such a basis, indeed, the result was to form four parties instead of two, namely the moderate of the two parties (those who yielded to the wish of the emperor), and the zealous of each (those who looked upon any compromise as "inexcusable").

The Roman church, as we have seen, had all along held with the council of Chalcedon. Felix III. was now patriarch there, and being appealed to by John Talaia, he took up the case, being only too glad to be consulted in matters concerning the Eastern church. A synod was called, and the Henoticon was condemned and all who held with it, and messengers were sent off to Constantinople. But the authority of Felix was denied; the messengers threatened, but they were gained over by bribes. Felix, however, was not to be silenced. He proceeded to excommunicate both Peter and Acacius the patriarch, and a messenger was despatched with the document respecting the latter to Constantinople. This was a task of no small peril, but one Tutus, an aged ecclesiastic, undertook the mission. He also yielded to bribery, and the document remained unserved. There was, however, a community called the Sleepless Monks, and one of these slipped into the church and attached the document to the patriarch's robe. Acacius soon discovered the paper, but went on with the service. At the close he proclaimed that the name of Felix, bishop of Rome, be erased from the diptychs* of the church. Thus the bishops of Rome and Constantinople were mutually excommunicated by each other; and a rupture thus took place between the Eastern and Western churches which lasted thirty-five years. The two successors of Acacius sought communion with Felix, but it was denied, unless the names of both Peter and Acacius were erased from the diptychs. This was not complied with, and the rupture continued.

{*The term signifies "two-fold." It was a list of dead and living members.}

In A.D. 491, the emperor Zeno died and Anastasius succeeded. He was for peace and the acceptance of the Henoticon; but was met with violent opposition. The patriarch of Constantinople had only agreed to Anastasius being emperor, on the assurance that he would attempt nothing against the decisions of the council of Chalcedon. Some agreed with the patriarch, while the Monophysite party had many adherents. Rome would acknowledge neither.

Thus was the professing church rent into parties at the close of the fifth century. The church and state had become so united that the emperor and the patriarch were mutually dependent upon each other for place and power. If the patriarch was in power the emperor must yield, or nothing but disorder and anarchy would be the result. If the emperor was powerful, the patriarch must bow his head, or intrigue and opposition would thwart all his plans, if, indeed, he succeeded in standing his ground in any way.

The saddest controversy at the close of the century was respecting the Person of our Lord. As we have said, none ever attempted to reason about and define that blessed Person, without being in great danger of falling into error, either on the one side or the other — for the errors have been respecting the manhood as well as the divinity of Christ. "No man knoweth the Son but the Father" ought to have been a solemn warning against inquisitiveness on so solemn a subject.

It may seem to some as if the discussion had been simply a battle about words and terms; but we doubt not that there was real deadly error lurking behind the mere terms employed. As there were those who long before had denied the divinity of Christ, it was easy for others to hold the same doctrine if it was smothered up by words to which they could give, mentally at least, their own interpretation.

On the other hand, Monophysite doctrine, as put forth by Eutyches, while not denying the manhood of Christ in so many words, held that "the two natures of Christ, after the union, did not remain two natures, but constituted one nature." This was the error most prominent at the close of the century. The Nicene creed was a great guard as to the divinity of Christ, if the natural meaning of the words were honestly received and believed; not that any formal creed is needed where the teaching of scripture is implicitly believed. Scripture is quite plain that our Lord was really a man, He ate and drank, He slept and He suffered. And He was really God: He raised the dead and did miracles which no mere power of man could do; and the voice from heaven proclaimed, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." By Him all things were created, and the angels of heaven are called upon to worship Him. To Him be glory for ever and ever.

We saw in the former part of our brief sketch that the Address to the church of Smyrna agreed with the persecution that characterised that period; let us now look at the next Address — that to Pergamos — and it will be seen how exactly it coincides with what we have looked at under Profession. (Rev. ii. 12-17.) The church dwelt where Satan's seat was — the world. And they had among them those who held the doctrine of Balaam, who taught error for reward; also those who held the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, which Christ hated. We may not know definitely to what this last applies — it is supposed to be Antinomianism — but we have seen how evil doctrine, and the allowance of evil practices ran along with seeking place and power where Satan's seat was. Still in mercy Christ could say, "Thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith" — blessedly true of some; but He could only reveal Himself as "He which hath the sharp sword with two edges." They were called to repent, or He would fight against all evildoers.

The times were peculiarly evil and the temptations to give up were very great; but a very blessed promise is added to the overcomer: Christ will give him "to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." Secret delights awaited such, and we doubt not there were many hidden and unknown, who will share in these blessed promises by entering into the joy of their Lord.

Chapter 13.

The Bible for the Church.

As we have seen, Christianity spread wherever the Roman empire extended — and, indeed, beyond in several directions. But in such an empire there were many different countries, each speaking its own language. And in every place the Bible was wanted in the native tongue. We cannot tell when and by whom the work was carried on, but there is evidence, more or less distinct, that the New Testament at least was translated as the need arose in many countries. Venerable relics remain of those early translations, but, of course, we cannot say that we have even portions of the earliest by many years.

The Syriac. — Hegesippus was bishop in the second century, and the Syriac was claimed as his version. Unhappily the Syrian church was divided into two in the fifth century — and in correspondence we have two Syriac versions: in the main they are the same, but yet different; then there are others drawn from each of them. There are manuscripts bearing the names of: 1, the Peshito (or "simple"); 2, the Curetonian Syriac (named after Dr. Cureton); 3, the Philoxenian Syriac (named after a bishop in eastern Syria); 4, the Jerusalem Syriac; 5, the Karkaphensian Syriac.

The Latin. — Jerome (A.D. 345 (?)—420) found different Latin translations, and set to work to gather a correct text from the whole. It is called the Vulgate. This proves that Latin copies existed long before his time in order to become thus altered. The manuscripts before his time are called, in distinction from his, the Old Latin, or Italic, in allusion to Italy. It is not to be wondered at that the New Testament was soon translated into Latin, because of the early existence of the church at Rome. (Rom. xv. 23.) The Old Latin may date from the second century.

The Egyptian. — It is judged that there were two distinct translations of the New Testament from the Greek into Egyptian — the Memphitic, or Coptic, and the Thebaic. The latter is considered the older, but both may be dated in the second or third century. We have seen how prominent the church became in Egypt at an early date; it is therefore no wonder that the scriptures were thus early translated into the native tongue. Portions of the Old Testament also exist in the Egyptian versions.

The Gothic. — The Goths attacked the Roman empire, and thus came in a sense morally under its influence, and both the Old and New Testaments are believed to have been translated into Gothic by their bishop, about A.D. 348. It is said he omitted to translate the four books of Kings (two of Samuel and two of Kings), lest they should stir up still more those warlike tribes!

The Armenian. — This dates from the fifth century.

The Aethiopic. — the language spoken in Abyssinia; it dates about the sixth century.

Other versions followed later on in the history of the church, including the Georgian, Slavonic, Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, Persic, and the Arabic.

Chrysostom, indeed, says in his time the scriptures had been translated into the language of the Syrian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Persian, the Aethiopic, and "ten thousand other nations."

This happily shews that however much evil was allowed in the professing church, the word of God was so much valued as to cause its translation into many different languages; so that there was always the scripture to be appealed to, which was able to correct all errors and to make men wise unto salvation.

The beautiful style in which many of the ancient copies were written is very remarkable. The letters of some are formed so uniformly that they appear more like printing than writing. Great care and labour must have been bestowed on their production.

Chapter 14.

Conclusion.

We have thus completed our short sketch of the history of the church during the first five hundred years. That which was begun with so much power and blessing was not long committed to the care of man before he began to fail to preserve it in purity. Even the apostle had to speak of perverse men seeking to draw away disciples after themselves, and of others who crept in unawares, bringing in destructive heresies — a state of things that has never entirely disappeared.

Satan, indeed, at first endeavoured to stamp out the name of Christ from the earth, through persecution by the pagans; but in this, as in many other things, he was deceived: the blood of the saints became the seed of the church, as has so often been seen and spoken of. For every saint put to death a number sprang into life. These persecutions had a purifying effect: few who were not real cared to risk all their property and their lives at the will of a pagan emperor: so that, if Christianity was not in full vigour, there was but little of mere profession.

As we have seen, Satan changed his mode of attack, and, from the time of Constantine the Great, he caused Profession to take the place of Persecution, and the aspect of the whole was changed. Not only must those who would stand well with the christian emperor be Christians, but, when the church was broken up into parties, they must be of the same party as the emperor as long as he was in power; and with the change of the emperor must come the change of the people, or persecution might ensue. Thus the emperors became not only the guiding star of the church, but also its ruling power. They made and unmade bishops as they pleased, and that office, which should have been confined to such as God chose and God gifted, was thrust upon any who would serve the purposes of the emperors or of those in places of authority. Happily there were noble exceptions — men who asserted they were God's servants, and were answerable to Him alone.

But even in some of the best of these champions we see seeds of leaven that came into full bearing afterwards in the church, as is clearly shewn by the apostate Church of Rome in later years seeking to prove its doctrines from quotations from these very fathers, though, as we have seen, their language was so uncertain that it is quoted also against such errors.

The councils of the church also were too often made the mere instruments of the powerful either in the church or in the state, without the semblance even of a holy convocation of heavenly men. Here, too, there were exceptions: from the council of Nice proceeded the Nicene creed, and from the council of Constantinople the condemnation of Pelagianism.

As to doctrines, we have seen how the leaven of evil spread everywhere. No sooner was one great heresy put down, or rather silenced, than another sprang up, dividing the church into parties, each zealous for its own views, and often contending, not with the sword of the Spirit — the word of God; but with the weapons wielded by flesh and blood. Happily there were exceptions — those who stood firm for the truth in all its fundamentals, and who fought manfully the fight of faith.

We have also seen how persistently and subtly Satan led men, again and again, to attack the doctrines touching the Person of Christ as set forth in the scriptures. If he could lead men into error touching that sacred subject, all was gained; for error as to this was fatal.

We have also seen the rise of monasticism — begun comparatively in a harmless manner, yet with the mistaken idea of perfecting the flesh — a system that afterwards ripened into one of the most God-dishonouring things conceivable — a disgrace even to common morality, and which should not have been so much as once named in connection with the church of God.

What a sad picture does the whole history present of that which should have been a testimony for the absent Lord. Instead of truth, there was much error; instead of saints loving one another, they were hating each other; instead of unity, there was division everywhere; instead of being of "no reputation," leaders were contending for place and power.

It may be asked, But were there not many in those days, down, indeed, from the days of the apostles, plain honest Christians who lived to the glory of God in all good conscience? We doubt not that there were many such, and trust there were thousands; but, alas history names them not, except a few who suffered martyrdom, and the more prominent of these we have recorded. But God does not leave Himself without a witness, and we doubt not there were many, who, led of the Holy Spirit, kept themselves, at least in a measure, unspotted from the world, and brought forth fruit to the glory of God, maintaining the truth according to the light they had.

How refreshing it is to turn to scripture, and see that, though the spread of evil was foretold, and the prediction has been and is still being fulfilled, yet the Lord Himself "knoweth them that are his," and there is a day coming when our Lord will present to Himself a glorious church "without spot or wrinkle or any such thing." To His name be all the glory.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Church History from A.D. 500 to the Time of the Reformation

Darkness of the Dark Ages:

Being Sketches of Church History from A.D. 500 to the Time of the Reformation.

"I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness." � John XII. 46.

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C.

Contents.

Introduction.

What is meant by the Dark Ages?

Chapter 1.

Union of the Eastern and Western Churches, A.D. 518. � Anastasius emperor. � Not one church, but the union of two churches.

Chapter 2.

Justinian Emperor, A.D. 527-565. � He rules the church. � Upholds the Council of Chalcedon, as to the two natures in Christ. � His wife, Theodora, a Monophysite. � Justinian aims to unite the Monophysite party with the orthodox. � The three Chapters. � Fifth general council held, A.D. 553. � Justinian's schemes useless.

Chapter 3.

Benedict and Monasticism. � Becomes popular, and founds monasteries. � Monasticism useless for a holy life. � The monks multiply the copies of scripture. � The prison. � Forgiveness of sins unknown to the monks.

Chapter 4.

Gregory the Great. � Seeks to set things in order. � Description of a service on Easter Sunday at Rome, very unlike that of the Lord's supper in the New Testament. � Gregory's superstition as to relics. � He flatters the cruel emperor Phocas.

Gregory and England. � Anglo-Saxon slaves at Rome. � Gregory sends Augustine to England. � Ethelbert embraces Christianity, A.D. 597. � Augustine made archbishop of Canterbury. � He is succeeded by Laurentius. � Eadbald succeeds Ethelbert, returns to Paganism, and threatens the bishops. � Laurentius said to be whipped by St. Peter for thinking of leaving England. � Eadbald, convinced by this, embraces Christianity. � Edwin, king of Northumberland, converted by a supposed miracle. � All the divisions of the kingdom embrace Christianity. � The invasion of the Danes. � They destroy many of the monasteries, and put the monks to death. � Dunstan becomes archbishop. The rule of Rome submitted to in England.

Chapter 5.

Mahomet. � His childhood. � His mission refused at first. � Persecutes the Jews who had also opposed him. � Poisoned by a Jewess. � Becomes victorious. � Enters Mecca, and destroys the idols. � Acknowledged all over Arabia. � Died A.D. 632. � His personal character. � His creed. � Denies the divinity of Christ. � The god of Mahometans not the God of the Bible. � The conquests, of Mahomet's successors. � They become a scourge of professing Christians in the East.

Chapter 6.

Break Up of the Roman Empire. � The Roman Empire passes away with the conquest of Constantinople. � Resuscitation in times yet to come. � Nebuchadnezzar's image. � The iron and clay. � The ten kingdoms of old. � A warning to those who advocate the supremacy of the people.

Chapter 7.

France Protects Rome. � Stephen II. pope, A.D. 752. � Threatened by the Lombards, he appeals to the French. � Pepin delivers Rome.

Charlemagne. � Leo III. pope. � He is accused to Charles. � The pope not answerable to any human authority. � Charles crowned emperor of Rome.

Chapter 8.

The Worship of Images. � Miracles ascribed to images. � Leo the Isaurian emperor. � John of Damascus and the reported miracle of the restoration of his hand. � Constantine Copronymus emperor. � He calls a council, which condemns images. � Leo. IV. emperor opposes images, but dies soon. � His wife Irene calls a council to restore the worship of images. � Difference between worship and adoration. � An image was adored by the council. � Charlemagne opposes the worship of images. � The Caroline Books. � Leo V. the Armenian emperor opposes images amid opposition. � Michael the Stammerer, emperor. � He allows images, but not to be worshipped. � Theophilus emperor, also against images. � All countries eventually agree with Rome in the adoration of images.

Chapter 9.

Hildebrand, Gregory VII. � His predecessors. � Henry III., of Germany, invited to rescue the Church from its degradation and pollution. � Hildebrand dreaded. � Energetic in his reforms. � His authority over nations.

The Decretals. � Gross forgeries

Gregory and the Married Clergy. � His decrees against marriage everywhere opposed

Gregory and Henry IV. � Gregory disowned by Henry and by his clergy. � Henry excommunicated and dethroned by Gregory. � Henry humbles himself before the pope, and is absolved. � He regains power, and despises the anathema of the pope. � Enters Rome.

Chapter 10.

The Crusades. � Pilgrims to Jerusalem molested and robbed. � Peter the hermit preaches a crusade. � supported by pope Urban II. � Full forgiveness of sins promised to the Crusaders, and absolution pronounced. � They reach Nicaea, and are conquered. � More regular armies follow, and are victorious. � They lay siege to Antioch. � The holy lance discovered. � Antioch taken. � They reach Jerusalem, and take the city. � The Crusades that follow. � Jerusalem had many masters. � Is yet to be blessed and restored to the Jews.

Chapter 11.

The Inquisition. � First judicial death for heresy. � Rome persecutes any deemed heretics. � The inquisition permanently established. � Its tortures. � Its deceptions to entrap its victims. � The Auto-de-F�.

The Jews and the Moors of Spain. � The Jews treated without mercy � The treaty with the Moors violated. � Cardinal Ximenez's plan of conversion. � The Moors converted or banished

Bartolom� Carranza. � In England. � Made Archbishop of Toledo. � Charges against him. � His arrest. � Released after a long imprisonment.

The Inquisition in India. � The Syrian Christians. � Inquisition at Goa. � Case of M. Dellon. � The English rescue a prisoner.

Spanish America. � The Inquisition established. The Jews persecuted. � Fourteen Protestant Europeans seized. � The circulation of the Bible prohibited. � Spain loses her colonies in Mexico, etc.

The Inquisition Abolished. � Napoleon in Spain. � The Inquisition never established in England.

Chapter 12.

The Waldenses. � Various other names. � Peter Waldo. � Persecution and martyrs. � The decree of pope Lucius III. � Charges against the Waldenses. � Their mode of procedure as hawkers. � Armies raised to annihilate them at Toulouse, etc. � Persecution in Germany. � Echard, a persecutor, converted. � The Waldenses spread over the whole of Europe. � Return of the Waldenses to Piedmont. � At length they are tolerated. � A witness for God during the Dark Ages.

Chapter 13.

England. � William the Conqueror. � Lanfranc reforms the Church. � William not servile to Rome. � William Rufus. � Anselm archbishop. � He retires from England. � Henry I. � Anselm's return. � Oxford and Cambridge Universities. � Henry II. � Martyrs in England. � Thomas a Becket. � Richard. � John surrenders the kingdom to Rome. � Henry III.

Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. � He successfully opposes the pope

Edward III. � He withstands Rome

Bradwardine. � His work against Pelagius

Wiclif. � The first English Reformer

Scotland. � Struggles against Rome

Chapter 14.

Councils of the Church. � From the Fifth to the Twenty-first General Council of the Church.

Chapter 15.

The Claims of Rome. � The assumptions of Rome examined. � Was Peter ever bishop of Rome? � The kingdom of God not built with the keys given to Peter. � Unity, Catholicity, Holiness, and Apostolicity.

Chapter 16.

Conclusion. � Light springing up. � Few records of godly Christians in the Dark Ages. � Christ will have a glorious Church. � Judgment will fall on apostate Christendom. � The path of the Christian.

Introduction.

The Dark Ages have been said to extend from about A.D. 500 to the time of the Reformation, a period of well-nigh one thousand years.

We would first inquire what is meant by these ages being dark? And then, Did the darkness exist during the whole of that long period? Was it all equally dark? and, if not, when and where was it the darkest?

It is not easy to answer these questions. One must be accustomed to the light, at least in some measure, to be able to judge of the darkness. A blind man can have no idea of the extent of the darkness around him; and one accustomed to a gloomy dungeon, would not consider a place as dark which would distress another who usually lived in a well-lighted room; in the same way that one accustomed to a dirty house, does not understand what a cleanly person sees to find fault with.

It is the same as to moral and spiritual darkness. A person must have some acquaintance with the light of scripture in order to discern the darkness around him.

It is most probable also that the darkness of the Middle Ages � which is another name often given to the same period � was not the same at all places at the same time. The invasion of the barbarians, or of the Saracens may have swept away the light-bearers in one district while they remained undisturbed in other places. A wise and godly man in authority was at times the means of diffusing much light around him; but that light, instead of extending elsewhere, only made more manifest the surrounding gloom.

One thing is clear, that the darkness was caused solely and entirely by man. God's word � the great source of light to this dark world � was in existence, and would, by the blessing of God, have enlightened mankind, had they been willing to be enlightened. But those in authority in the church made it a crime to read the Bible. Thus, alas, during the ages under consideration, it was indeed dark, as it had been when our Lord was on earth: "The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." (John i. 5.)

This is really the secret of the whole matter; and may we not say, that as it was then so it is now to a great extent?

In looking at the history of the church during the above period, we shall see in what the darkness consisted, and also that God had, here and there, His light-bearers who spread abroad the light of the gospel of God as far as in them lay.

We get in scripture itself a graphic description of how persons may be deceived on the subject of their own spirituality. One class is described as saying, "I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing;" whereas God's scrutinizing eye saw such to be "wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." (Rev. iii. 17.)

Now we can easily understand that such would wonder what any one could mean by describing them as being in the dark: they had become so thoroughly insensible as to what God calls the light, that they did not discern the darkness, but declared that they had need of nothing,

By the Dark Ages, then, is meant that the state of the professing church had degenerated instead of progressed. There are two ways in which a thing may recede: one, in numbers � quantity; the other, in condition � quality. It is not meant that the numbers of those professing Christianity had decreased; far from it, in places they had wonderfully increased, though in others they had not only decreased, but had been almost destroyed. It is in the reality of the profession that the declension is to be observed.

Not only had profession been adopted where there was merely "a name to live," but the most outrageous and immoral behaviour, together with the most unscrupulous means of obtaining power and riches, was associated with the name of Christ.

Happily there were exceptions. We would fain hope many even of the clergy were such, though unable to stem the torrent of iniquity; and of the people we trust there were thousands who, while mixed up with the professing church, were true to the Lord in private.

As we shall see, the Waldenses were for many long years bright lights amid the surrounding darkness, but, alas! only to be extinguished, as far as those in place and power could do it. How plainly then was the fact evinced that "men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."

Learning also decreased. It seemed as if the mere glimmer of the learned languages and of science was too much for those accustomed to the habit and the love of darkness. Many of the plants then cultivated throve best in the darkest places: the light of God's word killed them outright.

Let us proceed to give some sketches of the period under consideration, and in doing so we shall see whether it is right that the middle ages should be called The Dark Ages.

Chapter 1.

Union of the Eastern and Western Churches, A.D. 518.

In our previous sketches of the history of the church,* we saw that at the close of the fifth century, there was an open rupture between the eastern and western portions of the church. The patriarch of Constantinople and the patriarch of Rome had excommunicated each other as heretics � and this breach had borne much bitter fruit. The West was mostly styled orthodox, because of maintaining the divinity of Christ; and the East was declared to be in error as touching the Person of our Lord.

{*"Persecution and Profession; being Sketches of early Church History to the close of the fifth century."}

Anastasius was emperor in the East. He had opposed the orthodox faith; but in A.D. 517, John of Cappadocia was elected patriarch, though he held orthodox views, and was not molested by Anastasius, who only survived a few months. Justin, the commander of the imperial guards, by a popular confession of faith was supported by the clergy, and was hailed as emperor. Thus Constantinople was now blessed by having emperor, clergy, senate, and many of the people, all professing one faith � that which was considered orthodox.

All now agreed to condemn Nestorius, Eutyches, Severus of Antioch, and all, 'living or dead,' who held communion with them. The canons of the general councils � especially that of Chalcedon, which had been so much disputed � were adopted and canonised afresh.

The next step was to re-instate the names of Macedonius, Euphemius, and Leo the Great of Rome, on the sacred tablets of the church. This is said to have been done by acclamation � so glad were the people in the prospect of peace being restored in the church. The establishment of orthodoxy at the capital was followed by its adoption nearly all over the East.

All this was on one side only. It was the East undoing what had been done there in shielding and supporting the heresy that had made and widened the breach. All were now anxious to know if Rome would be equally willing for reconciliation. The emperor wrote to the patriarch, or pope, as we suppose he must now be called � Hormisdas � in a flattering and reverential tone. John also sent letters, containing his confession of faith, in the terms laid down by Leo the Great. All prayed that Hormisdas would send accredited legates to ratify the union of the two churches.

But Rome stood erect in its dignity. Before anything could be done, the names of Acacius, former patriarch of Constantinople, and Peter Mongus of Alexandria, must be struck out of the list of the faithful, and consigned to oblivion. And then the covenant of peace must be from Rome, not from Constantinople. Legates, bearing the "libellus" or covenant, were despatched to the East, with strict orders to hold no communication with any of the clergy or laity until they had presented the covenant to the emperor, and to request he would give his subscription at once, without any discussion, and make it public that he had done so. As soon as he and the patriarch had signed the covenant, and had erased the hateful names, the legates were at liberty to receive into the orthodox church. "You have renounced heresy," wrote the pontiff; "you have taken upon you the faith of the blessed Peter, knowing that in that faith alone you have salvation: therefore now set your hands to the written covenant herewith sent you for your subscription, that thereby we may be united in one holy communion with each other."

The progress of the legates was a march of triumph. Bishops signed the covenant without waiting for Constantinople. At the metropolis there was no hesitation � no discussion. All were anxious for peace, and everything that Rome required was acceded to, and peace was restored after a rupture of some thirty-five years.

Still the church was not one. Rome was anxious that the East should succumb to the West by subscribing to what Rome had written: this was far from what the East intended; and all that was done was to restore peace between two churches, the East and the West. The patriarch of Constantinople was head of the eastern church, and the pontiff head of the western church. It is important to notice this, because in after times � and in our own times, indeed � the church of Rome (as a mark of being the true church) claims to be the universal church. This is not true of it now, and never was true. The eastern church never acknowledged the pontiff of Rome as the head of the eastern church. As we shall see, Rome strove to claim and to enforce this; but it was always refused. John of Constantinople accepted the title of "oecumenical patriarch" � a title which shewed plainly his independence of Rome.

Neither of them were actuated by the truth of the "one body," as revealed in scripture; nor were they "endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit." It was Rome striving for supremacy everywhere; and the East, without acknowledging that supremacy, desirous of peace between the two churches. As to how far either the one or the other was justified in calling itself the church of God, will appear as we proceed.

Chapter 2.

Justinian Emperor, A.D. 527-565.

Glancing at the reign of Justinian, emperor of the East, will give us somewhat of an insight into the state of religion at that time as far as it can be gathered from histories. Justinian is often called Roman emperor; but the West was so over-run by the barbarians, especially the Goths, that he held little more than nominal sway over the West � at times it was really ruled by the Goths.

It will be seen that by wide-spread profession all were regarded as Christians of some sort, except the Jews and a few who still regarded themselves as pagan philosophers. The emperor ruled in the church as well as in the state, and the clergy greatly influenced the acts of the state.

In A.D. 527, Justinian became emperor. He was a moral man, and took much interest in all ecclesiastical questions. He seemed to think that the regulation of such matters was his especial work, for he left the political and military subjects to the management of others. A work of his in Greek, against the Monophysites,* has been published by cardinal Angelo Mai.

{*Those who held that Christ had but one nature, the human nature being absorbed in the divine.}

He was liberal in his gifts for building churches and hospitals, but he has been charged with raising the funds by extortion, bribery, false accusations, and unjust confiscations, altogether regardless of God's being unable to bless such apparent liberality. He spent an enormous sum of money on the re-building of the church of St. Sophia at Constantinople, which had been burnt down at the time when Chrysostom was banished, and once after. When the emperor viewed the beautiful building at its dedication (A.D. 544) he thanked God for having permitted him to complete so great a work; but then impiously exclaimed, "O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!" Three years after an earthquake shattered the dome of the church; but Justinian rebuilt it with still increased height and splendour.

To this cathedral were attached, by one of its laws, sixty priests, a hundred deacons, forty deaconesses, ninety subdeacons, a hundred and ten readers, five and twenty singers, and a hundred door-keepers. Alas! how the simplicity of the early worship in the church had become destroyed! It could not be otherwise when it was sought to out-do the outward splendour of the times of Solomon.

Up to this date there were still a few teachers of pagan philosophy at Athens, though they were obliged to pay outward respect to the religion of the state. Justinian ordered the schools to be closed. The philosophers fled to Persia, hoping to find patronage from the king, but were disappointed, and returned to their own land. They lived unmolested to their death, but left no successors. Thus ended pagan philosophy in the midst of Christendom. It had survived some five hundred years after the introduction of Christianity. But it is remarkable how similar the pretended intercourse of these philosophers with higher powers was to the pretended miracles and visions that were then professed in the church!

In the year 529 it was enacted that no pagan or heretic should hold any civil or military office. Such persons were also given three months to decide whether they would abjure their errors, or be banished; or if they remained they were to be deprived of all civil and religious privileges. This produced a great mass of pretended 'conversions.' But some would not yield, and with the greatest infatuation preferred suicide. Thus, in Phrygia some Montanists* actually shut themselves up in their meeting-houses, set fire to the buildings, and perished in the flames.

{*The Montanists were a fanatical sect which arose as early as the second century. They professed to be inspired by the Holy Ghost, and were at times thrown into ecstatic trances, especially some of the women.}

Justinian professed to hold with the council of Chalcedon in its principal decision, that there were two natures in Christ; but his wife Theodora* was a zealous Monophysite. Through her influence, Severus, who had been expelled from Antioch, was brought to Constantinople, and Anthimus, an enemy of the council of Chalcedon, was made primate of the eastern church.

{* Theodora had been an actress of doubtful morals, and a law had to be passed before Justinian could legally marry her.}

In the year following (537) the Gothic king compelled Agapetus primate of Rome to visit Constantinople on a political mission, and while there, he put before the emperor the errors of the archbishop, and obtained his deposition on the plea that he had been translated from another see, contrary to the canons. Mennas was then made primate; he called a council, and Anthimus was declared to be a heretic and was excommunicated.

In the meantime Agapetus died at Constantinople, and Vigilius his archdeacon was urged by Theodora to become a candidate for the papacy. The emperor promised his influence and his money if Vigilius would oppose the council of Chalcedon, and communicate with the expelled Anthimus.* But before Vigilius reached Rome, Sylverius, a subdeacon, had been elected.

{*That the emperor should now have apparently turned quite round and opposed the council of Chalcedon, can only be accounted for by the influence of his wife Theodora, and his own desire to bring all to an outward uniformity.}

Justinian had made war against the Goths, and had taken Rome. In the next year Rome was besieged by the Goths. Justinian's general, Belisarius, summoned Sylverius into his presence and charged him with treasonable correspondence with the enemy. This he denied, but written evidence was produced which left no defence. He was stripped of his robes, and sent off by sea. Vigilius was elected, and he paid Belisarius two hundred pounds of gold for his interest!

Here was a most flagrant case of simony, and that too by the pope himself. And his predecessor had been guilty of treason. Such were the men at this age who pretended to hold the sacred office of bishop of Rome, yea, primate of the church universal!

The next act of Justinian was to issue an edict against the doctrines of Origen. Few held with Origen, or cared for his teaching, but the emperor drew up an edict detailing ten heresies drawn from his works. A council was called, and the wishes of the emperor were confirmed. This is a matter now of very little moment, except that it shews how the emperor was the prime mover of that which, if needful, should have been cared for by the church generally.

Justinian still laboured to bring about a union with the Monophysite party and those called orthodox. He determined to write a treatise that should convince the former of their error. While he contemplated this, it was artfully suggested to him that his object would be more easily obtained by condemning certain writings approved at Chalcedon, but which the Monophysites disliked, and which they alleged the orthodox ought also to disavow.

Three articles were especially named to be condemned: 1, The writings and person of Theodore of Mopsuestia; 2, The treatise of Theodoret against Cyril; and 3, a letter written by Ibas, bishop of Edessa, to the Persian bishop Maris. These have been called the "Three Chapters," from the words used in the original;* but may be more rightly termed three articles of the indictment.

{*Tria Kephalaia.}

It has been judged that his wife Theodora was really the instigator of this suggestion. If the emperor fell into the snare, he would really be condemning the council of Chalcedon, without openly appearing to do so; and if he could be brought to issue an edict condemning the three articles, he would, for very shame, be compelled to enforce its reception. Unhappily, Justinian fell into the trap laid for him, and thus kindled a needless flame that burnt long and did much damage.

Between A.D. 543 and 545 the edict was published, and sent forth with the demand that the clergy should sign it. A strange thing, indeed, that an emperor should put forth, on his own authority, an article of faith to which all were required to subscribe. The church had fallen even to this in the sixth century.

To all the orthodox the edict was revolting. It really condemned, as we have seen, the council of Chalcedon, which they considered needful to uphold as a proof of their soundness in the faith.

The four eastern patriarchs were first encountered. Mennas of Constantinople signed reluctantly, and with a promise made to him on oath that if the bishop of Rome did not sign he might withdraw his signature. Ephraim of Antioch, Peter of Jerusalem, and Zoilus of Alexandria, signed, under the threat, imagined if not real, of being deposed if they did not. Most in the East followed the example of the patriarchs, some being gained by threats and others by gifts. Many of them had rich dioceses, and were dependent on the state.

In the West and in Africa there was a good deal of opposition to the edict. It caused a sensation at Rome, and Vigilius was summoned to Constantinople. He had been made pope, principally through the influence of the emperor, but he was surrounded by staunch supporters of the council of Chalcedon. His secretary, Stephen, was at Constantinople, and he had separated from Mennas because of his signing the edict. Dacius, archbishop of Milan, had done the same. All were anxious to see how the pope of Rome would act. He was very reluctant to go to the emperor, but when he could no longer put off his departure he was begged by them at Rome not to sign the edict.

He was under severe threats by Theodora if he did not appear at Constantinople. Indeed, from the first he was under a promise to the empress to carry out her views; and had hitherto played fast and loose, trying to please the empress yet keep in with the orthodox, and be faithful to his convictions, if he really had any. He managed to spend nearly a year on his journey, but arrived at Constantinople in A.D. 547.

He at first refused to sign the condemnation of the Three Chapters. Then he attempted to draw up a compromise, called the Judicatum, namely, to condemn the Three Chapters, but without touching the decisions of the council of Chalcedon. His own clergy compelled him to withdraw his compromise. He asked for a general council.

In A.D. 548 Theodora died, but the emperor had so far committed himself to the line of things he was pursuing, that he would not alter his course. He persecuted those in Africa who refused compliance, and extorted a secret oath from Vigilius to condemn the three articles.

Justinian drew up another edict to the same effect in A.D. 551, calling it a Confession of Faith. Vigilius refused to sign it, though whether it was from conscientious scruples or from fear of the clergy of the West, is not known. Fearing violence, he took shelter in the church of St. Peter. A praetor was sent with a guard to capture him; but he placed himself under the altar and clung to its legs. Regardless of who he was, they attempted to pull him out by his feet, his hair, and even his beard; but he clung so firmly that some part of the altar began to give way, and would have fallen on him had it not been held up by some of the clerks. Very shame caused the officers to desist and let him alone.

He was induced by the promise of a safe-conduct to come forth, but fled again to Chalcedon, and took shelter in the church. At length the emperor, seeing no probability of peace otherwise, consented to call a council, and the pope returned to Constantinople. Vigilius desired it should be held in Sicily or Italy, but the emperor would not consent. After a great deal of contention, the emperor summoned the council to meet at Constantinople. It was called the Fifth General Council.

It met in May, 553. A hundred and sixty-five bishops attended, including all the eastern patriarchs, but only six African bishops. Vigilius did not consider that the western church was at all adequately represented, and he would not attend, though urgently requested to do so by the other patriarchs. Vigilius drew up a paper, with the concurrence of sixteen bishops, endeavouring to make a compromise by condemning the writings which were in question, but without condemning the authors. But the emperor would not receive it. He presented to the council the secret compact he had made with Vigilius, and desired that his name should be erased from the church diptychs (lists of those in communion). The council proceeded without the attendance of the pope.

The council condemned the Three Chapters and pronounced a curse against all who should defend them, or should pretend that they were countenanced by the council of Chalcedon. The persons of Theodoret and Ibas were spared, but Theodore was condemned as well as his writings. The four previous general councils were confirmed; and the edicts of the emperor were approved. As usual, the emperor issued an edict enforcing the decrees of the council.

At the close of the same year, Vigilius, who had now spent some six years at Constantinople, and who did not wish to be a martyr, being condemned by many, and almost a prisoner, wrote a letter of confession to Eutychius, at that time patriarch of Constantinople, confessing that he was wrong. Another letter followed, to the western clergy, to the same import. He was now released by Justinian, and started for Rome, but died on his journey at Syracuse. If he did not believe Justinian to be wrong, why stand out so long? and if he did, why give in at last? His liberty, thus dearly bought, did him no good: God took him from the scene.

We see from this also that the bishop of Rome, or pope, as he is called, was not at that time held in such fear and respect as was afterwards claimed for one who was called the direct successor of the apostle Peter. He was to a great extent the servant of the emperor when the emperor was in power. What a pitiful sight for Christendom to behold a pope cringing beneath an altar, and attempts being made to drag him forcibly away!

Pelagius succeeded Vigilius, but he was unpopular at Rome, and there was in the West great opposition to the Fifth General Council which Pelagius sought to enforce. Persecution followed. Many bishops were banished and imprisoned in convents, and in north Italy some of the bishops broke communion with Rome rather than receive the decrees of the council.

The whole scheme of the emperor was an entire failure. It in no way gained the Monophysite party back to communion with the so-called orthodox church; and in his latter days he is believed to have fallen into the very error he seemed at first so anxious to correct. He died in A.D. 565.

While all this contention was going on in the church between the emperor and the bishops, what was the condition of the mass of Christians who had been led to look up to the bishops? Alas! we know not. We may fain hope that many a one was enabled to maintain the truth in private, unobserved and unmolested by those who were prominent in the disputes. How good to know that the Good Shepherd careth for the sheep, and often leads them beside the still waters, and refreshes their souls notwithstanding all that is passing around them.

Justinian's successor, Justin II. did not trouble himself about ecclesiastical matters: he left the bishops to settle their own disputes.

Chapter 3.

Benedict and Monasticism.

However simply and sincerely monasticism had been commenced, it no sooner became popular than it began to be corrupt. In some places the monks were numerous and rude, and took very prominent parts in the quarrels of the clergy, even to fighting and bloodshed, in their fanatical zeal for any party they upheld.

Justinian had interfered in monasticism as in everything else in the church. He enacted that married people might embrace the monastic life, without the consent of husband or wife; children, without the consent of their parents; slaves, without the consent of their masters, etc.

The monasteries were supposed to be under the control of the bishops, but many were almost if not entirely independent. Sometimes the monks aided the bishop, and sometimes opposed him; being often a powerful body of men.

The revolutions in the West were on the whole favourable to the monks, They were often spared by the conquerors, and many persons resorted to the convents for safety, carrying much of their wealth with them. But this did not contribute to the purity of monasticism.

Benedict (of Nursia, now Norcia) was a reformer. At the age of twelve he was sent with a nurse to Rome for study; but he was soon disgusted with the irregularities of his fellow-students, and at the early age of fourteen, leaving his nurse, he fled from the city, and lived for three years in a cave near Subiaco. No one knew where he was except a monk who had met with him in his flight, and he, taking an interest in the youth, supplied him with food, but only what he could spare from his own allowance. This he took to him occasionally, and lowered it by a string.

At length he was discovered by some shepherds. He sought to instruct these and others who now came to him; and when his fame increased, he was chosen abbot of a monastery in the neighbourhood. But he was a reformer, and the monks did not want to be reformed, so they mixed some poison in his drink to get rid of him. Before drinking he made the sign of the cross, as was then customary, and on his doing this, it is said, the cup flew to pieces! He mildly rebuked the monks, reminding them that he had warned them not to elect him as their abbot, as he saw their ways were so unlike his own.

He returned to his solitude; but his renown only increased the more, and monastery after monastery was erected to carry out his rules, each house holding twelve monks and an abbot. Even some members of the Roman nobility placed their children under his care for education.

But persecution again followed him. A monk named Florentius, out of envy, did all he could to ruin his character by calumny, and to cut him off by poison. Again he retired with a few of his followers � whither he knew not. At length he reached Monte Cassino, where on a lofty spot stood a heathen shrine to Apollo, still receiving some sort of worship from the rustics of the neighbourhood. After many warnings from Satan, as is related, he succeeded in destroying the idol and cutting down the grove, and erected a place for private worship, called an oratory, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist and St. Martin, which became the germ of a most renowned monastery, and from which others arose.

Benedict now set to work to draw up a set of rules for his houses. He avoided extremes, hoping to have the rules the better carried out if they were moderate, being warned by the mistakes of others who had enacted such strict rules that none attempted to follow them, and even made that an excuse for many indulgences.

A few of his rules may be named. The abbot was to be chosen by the monks, and approved of by the bishop. He was to be cheerfully and implicitly obeyed: he stood "in the place of Christ." He must be addressed as Dominus. They were to call each other brother or father, according to age, and great respect was to be paid to the elder brethren.

Candidates were required to come on probation for a year, and to have the rules read over to them three times during that period, and asked if they resolved to keep them. They had to furnish a written vow of stedfastness, amendment, and obedience, and, on full admission, must give up all their property to the community.

Should a married man who had become a monk return to his wife, he could be forcibly dragged back to the monastery; but this does not appear to have been always enforced.

One thing that especially characterised the Benedictine order was occupation. They were to rise at 2 a.m. for early prayer (matins), to attend eight services daily, and to work seven hours. The Psalms were to be read over every week in their services, and time allowed for the study of the scripture, reading Cassian's "Conferences,"* "Lives of the Saints," and other books which they deemed edifying. At meals a book was to be read aloud, while all others preserved silence. In general the monks were to speak but little.

{* Cassian was a celebrated monk who wrote this work: it was respecting the internal scope and spirit of Monasticism. It touched also on grace, faith, etc.; but was considered unsound by Augustine on these points.}

At dinner there were to be two dishes of pulmentaria, that those who could not relish one might be able to eat the other. It is not certain what was included in the word 'pulmentaria:' vegetables and grain certainly, but some suppose eggs, fish, and birds, because the flesh of four-footed beasts only was forbidden. In addition, uncooked fruit or salad might be eaten. A small measure of wine was allowed to each: Benedict would have preferred none, but feared to make the rule too stringent. A pound of bread was the daily portion, subject to the discretion of the abbot to increase it where needed. Flesh was allowed to the sick. The monks were to sleep ten or twelve in a room, each in a separate bed, with their clothes and girdles on. A light was kept burning. No talking was allowed after the last service of the day, called "compline."*

{* From the Latin completa, so called because it completed the services of the day.}

Each "house" had its garden, mill, well, and bakehouse, so that the monks need go abroad but little. When this was necessary, the abbot must give permission, and the messenger, on his return, was forbidden to relate to others his adventures. The occupation of each was chosen by the abbot, and if any one thought himself handy at any particular work, this work he was not to do.

Extra seclusion and bodily chastisement might be used as punishments.

For some twelve years, Benedict remained head of his system of monasticism, and from time to time sent out men to make known his rules to monks who had no regular organisation, and with the object of founding houses where there were none. This was carried on with spirit and perseverance until Benedictine monks were to be found all over Europe, including England.

He did not attribute any merit to keeping the law, and he denied that man had any power to keep it except he had help from heaven. But as to salvation, nothing is recorded. All is swallowed up in "how to become a good monk," though here and there glimpses are apparent of Benedict's having been beyond the standard of others. For instance, he found a hermit passing his life chained to a rock. He rebuked him, saying, "Brother, be bound only by the chain of Christ."

The reader need scarcely be reminded how contrary monasticism is to Christianity. The plea raised for a monastic life, was that by its means greater holiness was attained; but it is manifest that, however earnest the desire to escape from the corruptions of the world, and indeed of the professing church, holiness is not to be obtained that way. All Christians have their old nature remaining in them, and this being carried by the monks into their cells, they may be as much engaged in serving the flesh there as in the world, and thus have as little practical holiness. Whereas the example of Christ was going about doing good. He also sent his disciples into the world (warning them to keep themselves free from its spirit and ways), and prayed that they might be kept from its evil. (John xvii. 15, 18.) The Holy Spirit is given to the Christian that he should not follow the promptings of the flesh; and if he walk in the Spirit he will not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. (Gal. v. 16, 17.) And he that soweth to the Spirit reapeth life everlasting. (Gal. vi. 8.)

The monks did good in multiplying the copies of scripture, and it is surprising that Benedict did not enjoin the careful study of the scriptures instead of reading the "Lives of the Saints" with its follies and fables. Alas! the dark ages were setting in.

Among the various monasteries that existed in the sixth century, we read of one near Mount Sinai in Arabia � a small place called the Prison. In this place the monks who had committed any great crime imprisoned themselves. They spent their time in prayer, with every possible self-denial and debasement. Not one single comfort did they allow themselves. In their prayers they did not consider they could ask for or expect entire forgiveness; but they besought that their punishment might not be to the utmost of their deserts. Voluntary punishments continued with many until their death.

How strange that any who called themselves Christians should hope for forgiveness or an abatement of their punishment because of their austerities, instead of turning their eyes to the word of God � where they could have read that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John i. 9.)

Yet so little knew they of forgiveness of sins through the sacrifice of Christ, that the utmost they hoped for was less punishment than they merited for the sin they had committed. Of the true gospel they appear to have been entirely ignorant. And yet these were some of those deemed to be more holy than the mass of the Christians in those days: another proof of the darkness settling over Christendom.

Chapter 4.

Gregory the Great.

We have looked a little at the East, in the sketch of Justinian; we will now look at one of the renowned bishops of the church in the West. Gregory was born at Rome. At first he entered into civil employment, but when about thirty-five years of age, he abandoned the world, and founded several monasteries. One was in his family mansion at Rome, where he lived as a strict ascetic. In this he persevered, though frequently laid low through illness brought on by his severities. He had been ordained deacon, and, on the death of pope Pelagius, he was chosen to succeed him.

He did all he could to avoid the appointment by hiding himself, and by writing a letter to the emperor, begging him not to give his consent. The letter being intercepted and detained, the consent was given, and he was duly installed. An ancient writer says he shrank from the office, "lest the worldly glory which he had before cast away might creep on him under the colour of ecclesiastical government."

He himself, also, compared the church to an "old and violently shattered ship, admitting the waters on all sides � its timbers rotten, shaken by daily storms, and sounding of wreck." This is not a description by an enemy, but by one who loved his church, and had been zealous to serve it.

Things around the pope were indeed discouraging. Italy was held to belong to the emperor at Constantinople but the Lombards had overrun a great part, and threatened the rest. Those in Italy could only look to the emperor, who did not protect them. The inhabitants were wasting away by wars and famines, and Rome itself suffered from storms and inundations. Things were in such a low state that many predicted that the end of the world must be at hand.

Neither were the affairs in the church any brighter: darkness was setting in. The clergy were few, and did not look well after their scattered flocks. The dreaded Lombards were Arians. Schism still reigned in some places because of the "Three Chapters;" and in others the Donatists and Monophysites caused trouble.

Gregory took the reins in hand at once, and energetically laboured to steer the church through its many dangers. Nearly 850 letters tell of the diligence he used to set matters right wherever he thought his aid was needed. He endeavoured to introduce many improvements into the church, both in its organisation and in its practices. He paid special attention to the singing, introducing the mode of chanting which still bears his name. With a whip in hand (long preserved as a relic) he would threaten the choristers if they disobeyed him.

He had, however, other important duties. Preaching was one that he diligently followed, with what success we know not. The distress at Rome was so great that he used a great part of his revenues in supplying the needs of the people.

Rome being threatened by the Lombards, he came to terms with them, without waiting for the court of Constantinople to sanction what he did. The court ridiculed this, but the people were spared the horrors of war, and were glad of his interference.

Gregory had to lament that he was so much taken up with temporal things. He wrote to a friend, "Weep if you love me, for I have so many temporal affairs to attend to in the situation which I occupy, that I find myself almost separated by this dignity from the love of God."

His zeal was very much exercised in ceremonies; the dresses were multiplied, and everything was to be done in a stated order. History records how a service was conducted by Gregory on Easter Sunday, which shews how the simplicity of worship was marred.

The service began by hymns being chanted as the pope walked through the church. He was attended by the chief deacon, while seven attendants preceded, carrying seven candlesticks and the incense. On reaching the altar, "Glory to the Father" was sung, completing the preliminary hymns. The pope then prayed in silence, then kissed the altar and the Gospels. The choir then chanted the "Kyrie Eleison." He then turned to the congregation and repeated alone the "Glory in the highest," and then blessed them. The collect and the epistle were read. A chorister chanted a hymn. The chief deacon, being blessed by the pope, kissed the Gospels, and then read the gospel appointed for the day. The book was then carried by a subdeacon to the whole congregation for each to kiss. The pope then preached his sermon, and another psalm or anthem concluded this part of the service.

The pope then went round the church with two attendants to receive the offerings of the congregation, which at that time consisted of loaves of bread and flasks of wine. The pope and the chief deacon then washed their hands. Bread and wine were now placed on the altar. The choir sang the "Offertory," while the pope received the offerings of the clergy and his own (presented by the chief deacon). Then he and the whole clergy knelt in silent prayer. The choir sang the "Sanctus," and he read the canon.

Then the chief deacon took the chalice and carried it to the pope, who touched the side of it with the host. A prayer and blessing was then said, and after making the sign of the cross three times on the chalice, the bread (consecrated the day before) was placed into it, and it was carried to the congregation to kiss. The choir chanted "Agnus Dei."

The pope then, turning towards the East, partook of the bread and wine. He then put a morsel of the bread of which he had partaken into the chalice, and poured a small portion of the consecrated wine into a vessel full of unconsecrated. This rendered it all consecrated. The bishops and the priests then partook of the bread from the hands of the pope, the chief deacon giving them the wine. The pope then gave the bread to the congregation in the front seats, while the clergy did the same to the other parts of the congregation. The chief deacon followed with the wine which the people partook of through a golden tube. The choir in the meantime chanted appointed psalms.

The pope again approached the altar and prayed and blessed the people; and the deacon dismissed the people with "Ite, missa est!"

We have given this service nearly in full, that the reader may see to what a set of formalities the Lord's supper had fallen in the sixth century. One has only to compare it with the account, given in the New Testament, of how our Lord instituted that memorial of His death, to see how sadly it was smothered in outward ceremonies. The singing was by the choir, trained for such service; the prayers were by the clergy; the people kissed the Gospels and then the cup, and partook of the bread and wine. Oh that men would remember the words of our Lord, "They that worship God, must worship him in spirit and in truth." "The flesh profiteth nothing."

Notice also that at this date the people partook of the wine, which is now denied them in the church of Rome.

Along with the ceremonies introduced by Gregory into the service of the church, reverence towards relics was also fostered. Thus in one of his letters to the empress, who had asked for some relics of St. Paul and St. Peter, he told her they were to be approached even with the greatest fear. He said his predecessor had been troubled by visions, because he had simply desired to try their virtue. He said the relics themselves were never given, but only pieces of linen or stuff which had been placed near the relic; however he would try and send her some filings from the chain of St. Peter, provided the priest appointed was able to obtain them, for the file would not cut unless there was holiness in those who desired the same! Alas, how false must be the religion that needs to be bolstered up, by such falsehoods!

The church of Rome at that time had its earthly possessions in various places. In all these Gregory had his agents to manage the estates, and many of his letters are to these agents, giving them minute instructions as to how things should be managed, so that there should be no damage to the church, and no infringement on the rights of others. He had the income from these estates carefully divided into four equal parts, and given to the bishop, the clergy, the church and its service, and the poor. This supervision contributed to what Gregory lamented as the many earthly things that drew him away from those more heavenly.

One very grievous trial to Gregory was the fact, that the patriarch of Constantinople was styled "universal bishop." So strong was Gregory in condemning this that he himself would not, at that time, be thus styled. Though what made it so irritating to him was that he contended, that the eastern church was dependent on the church of Rome, and nothing that at all clashed with that claim could be tolerated. He wrote to the patriarch, and then to the emperor, respecting the hated title; but with little or no effect � the title was maintained.

Gregory even appealed to the emperor Phocas � a man who had assumed the purple, after slaying six sons of the emperor Mauricius before his eyes, and then putting the emperor to death: he also enticed the late empress and her three daughters from the asylum of a church, upon promise of liberty, but then put them to death. Gregory wrote to this cruel pretender, and his wife Leontia, in the most flattering terms, rejoicing at their accession, and condemning the late emperor, from whose yoke the church was now blessedly free! He exhorted them to protect the afflicted church of St. Peter. "I do not doubt," said he, "that you will take care to oblige and bind him to you by whom you desire to be loosed from your sins."

Gregory did not long survive this shameful flattery of Phocas. He passed away, after suffering much from gout, on March 12, A.D. 604.

Gregory has been held up as being one of the best of the bishops of Rome. He lived at a time when the darkness was only setting in, and yet in writing to various rulers he exhorted them, among other things, to correct the vices of the clergy, and to aim at the conversion of the heathen. A strange thing this, for the rulers to correct the clergy, instead of the clergy being examples to the rulers; and surely it was also the work of the clergy, rather than the rulers, to preach the gospel to the heathen.

Gregory and England.

Soon after Gregory the Great had been made abbot of the monastery at Rome which he had established, he was one day passing through the market-place when he saw some young Anglo-Saxon slaves exposed for sale. He was so struck with their appearance that he was led to inquire respecting their country. The conversation that ensued is thus related:

"Whence come these captives?"

"From the isle of Britain."

"Are the natives of that island Christians?"

"No; they are pagans."

"It is sad that the author of darkness should possess men with such bright faces; but what is the name of that particular nation?"

"They are called Angli."

"And rightly so, for their angel-like faces: they ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven. In what province of England did they live?"

"In De�ra."

"They must be freed de Dei ir� (from the anger of God). How is the king of the country called?"

"Ella."

"Surely Hallelujah ought to be sung in his kingdom, to the praise of God who created all things."

Gregory, after gaining the consent of the pope, determined to go to England, and seek the conversion of its inhabitants. He started on his mission, but had not proceeded far when the people of Rome, who had been accustomed to consider him as a saint, compelled him to return.

Though thwarted in his purpose for the time, Gregory did not forget England; and when he became pope, he sought means to send some missionaries to our island.

Augustine, the abbot of his monastery, was chosen by Gregory for this mission. He was a man of ardent piety � one on whom Gregory could rely. Several monks were appointed to accompany Augustine, and after being commended to God by prayer, they set out on their journey. They had, however, only proceeded as far as Provence, when they were overwhelmed with the prospect of the difficulties of such a mission; and, after consultation, Augustine returned to Rome to ask permission of the pope to abandon the enterprise.

But Gregory only the more earnestly exhorted Augustine to persevere, and reminded him of the rewards of heaven if he succeeded. He also gave Augustine letters to the king of Burgundy, and to other princes, and to bishops through whose provinces the missionaries would travel.

Augustine and his party took courage, and again started on their mission � being now forty in number � and at length landed safely on the isle of Thanet. Ethelbert was then king of Kent, the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs. He had married Bertha, a christian princess, daughter of Charibert, king of Paris. Messengers were sent to the king, to announce the arrival of men who had brought tidings of the way in which eternal happiness and glory were to be obtained, with peace and blessing from the true God.

Ethelbert went to meet Augustine where he had landed, and preparations were made by the abbot to impress the king with the dignity of his mission. These things appear to have had a contrary effect, and to have roused his suspicions, for he would not meet Augustine except in the open air, lest he should be brought under some magical power, though this may, however, have been suggested by the pagan priests. The reply of the king was that he could not change the religion of himself and his people without due consideration. But, as they had come from a distance, they might remain, and he would protect them. Any of his people that chose might become converts.

Augustine removed to Canterbury, where Ethelbert held his court, and near which Bertha worshipped in a ruined church. Here the chaste lives and seemly behaviour of the missionaries � together with their lofty message, and the miracles they were supposed to have wrought � gradually won the confidence of the people, and many converts were gained. Ethelbert at length embraced Christianity (A.D. 597), and glad messages were despatched to Rome of the success of the mission.

Augustine was made archbishop of Canterbury, and he proceeded to call a synod of the Saxon and British bishops. Christianity had long before been established in England; but during the wars of the Picts and Scots, and of the Saxons, the British Christians had taken shelter in the more secluded places, especially in Wales.

Augustine seeing the desirability of calling all to the synod, decided to hold it on the confines of the West Saxons, so that all might be able to attend.

Few however attended the first meeting, and Augustine proposed that they should all strive for the conversion of the heathen, that they should submit to the pope, and should adopt a uniformity of ceremony with the Roman church, especially in the celebration of Easter.

The reply was that they were ready to obey the church of God, the pope of Rome, and every godly Christian; but other obedience to any one calling himself pope, or father of fathers, they could not yield.

The synod thus failing in the object Augustine had in view, he proposed that they should prove who was right by a miracle. A blind man was introduced, and the British bishops prayed that he might receive his sight; but he remained blind. Augustine then called on God, and the blind man was soon restored, according to the historian Bede!

The British bishops owned that now they ought to bow to Augustine as to the observation of Easter; but the consent of the elders and people was needed before they could promise entire submission.

Before the next meeting, the British resorted to a hermit, who was reputed to be "holy and wise," for advice as to yielding to the requests of Augustine. The conference is thus recorded:

"Are we bound to desert our traditions at the preaching of Augustine?"

"If he be a man of God, follow him."

"But how shall we be able to make trial thereof?"

"The Lord saith, 'Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.' (Matt. xi. 29.) If therefore this Augustine be mild and humble of heart, it is credible that he himself beareth the yoke of Christ, and tendereth the same to be borne of you; but if he is cruel and proud, it appeareth that he is not of God, neither ought ye to heed what he saith."

"But how shall we make discovery hereof?"

"Contrive that he and his may come first into the place of the synod. And if he rise up when you draw near unto him, hear him then obediently, knowing him for a servant of Christ; but if he slighteth you, and vouchsafeth not to rise up unto you (seeing you are more in number), let him be slighted by you."

Armed with these instructions, the British bishops proceeded to the synod. But, alas! Augustine sat in all dignity, and did not rise to greet them. Now they could not be moved to offer submission to one so proud. Augustine then proceeded to threaten them, prophesying that they would be punished by the heathen's swords.

Some while after, Ethelfrid, king of Northumberland, attacked Wales, when an army of monks, some 1200 strong, unarmed, prayed for protection. But Ethelfrid, being told that they were praying against him, ordered their massacre. Only fifty escaped; but this event is placed, by some, subsequent to the death of Augustine.

After this we lose sight of the British Christians for a long time, except that we read, that they who had not withdrawn to secluded places had more or less submitted to the Romish clergy.

Augustine however had prospered. Multitudes of the Anglo-Saxons turned nominal Christians. It is said 10,000 were baptised in one day � baptised as they walked through the river Swale.* He wrought many miracles, according to the Romish historians, some of which are too absurd even to repeat, much less to be believed.

{* Fuller said, "the river Swale, near Richmond in Yorkshire;" but Dr. Heylin said it was a branch of the river Medway, which is divided into East Swale and West Swale and Fuller afterwards agreed with this.}

Gregory had counselled that the heathen temples should not be destroyed, but consecrated for worship, so that the people might be the more easily induced to attend. Festivals also were held at the ancient times, booths erected, animals slain, and the people fed � but consecrated to some saint. Their heathen habits would thus not be so much violated as if all were swept away at once. The new religion, indeed, was to be accommodated to heathen customs! And this was called Christianity!

Augustine was also successful with Sebert, king of Essex, who, with all his kingdom, professed Christianity. After appointing bishops of London and Rochester, he was influential in winning over Redwald, king of East Anglia, who also embraced Christianity. Augustine died about A.D. 605.

Laurentius followed Augustine as Archbishop. He succeeded in bringing the Britons and the Irish to a more precise observance of the Romish ceremonies.

Troubles, however, awaited the church in England. Ethelbert died, and his son Eadbald returned to paganism. Three sons of the king of the East Saxons also returned to paganism. These refused to be baptised, and yet in bravado demanded the Lord's supper, Mellitus, bishop of London, refused them; whereupon he was threatened, but was told that he might depart. He consulted with Justus, bishop of Rochester, and Laurentius; and not wishing to be made martyrs, the two former returned to France, leaving Laurentius only.

Laurentius also resolved to depart; but while passing the last night in church, it is said, he was visited by St. Peter, and rebuked for entertaining the thought of forsaking his flock, and, more than that, the apostle administered so sound a whipping that it left him black and blue!

He went to Eadbald, and threw off his cloak, shewing the marks of his punishment. The king was amazed, and demanded who had dared to chastise so holy a man. The tale was told as above, and this had such an effect on the king that he embraced Christianity. Justus and Mellitus were invited to return. The reader, perhaps, need not be told that it became a ready trick of the monks, when they wanted to prove that they had had a visit from some departed saint, to shew some part of their body still black and blue with the whipping they said they had received from the saint; but this eventually became too common to be believed even by the most devoted Romanist.

Edwin, king of Northumberland, was also converted to Christianity � by a miracle, according to the early historians. Edwin, who had long been a fugitive, took refuge with Redwald king of East Anglia. But his retreat being discovered, Edilfrid, who reigned in Northumberland, demanded his being given up to him. Edwin was exhorted to fly for his life; but he was so tired of fleeing from place to place, that he declared he would not stir though death might await him. He sat in a lonely spot while his fate was being deliberated on. While here, a stranger visited him, and asked what returns he would give if all his wishes were gratified. He declared that he would take that one for his guide who should bring about his restoration to the throne, power, etc. The stranger placed his hand on Edwin's head, and said, "When this sign shall come upon thee, remember this time and the promise thou hast made." And the stranger vanished in a way that led Edwin to believe it was a spirit who had visited him.

Redwald refused to give up his guest. War was the result, but Edilfrid was defeated, and Edwin was placed on the throne � but remained a pagan. He married Ethelberga, daughter of the late Ethelbert. As she was a christian princess, he promised her liberty to make full profession of her religion, and he would embrace the same if he should find on examination it was worthy of adoption. He made promises from time to time, but remained a pagan until one day, Paulinus, a Romish priest who had accompanied Ethelberga, entered his chamber, and placing his hand on his head, asked him if he remembered the time and the promises that had been given to the heavenly visitor. The king fell at his feet, completely conquered. He and thousands of his subjects became Christians. Such is the account given by Bede, and it is now impossible to sort out the true history from that which is mere fable.

In the year 633, Edwin was defeated and slain by Penda, prince of Mercia, and the Northumbrians to a great extent returned to paganism, and Paulinus retired into Kent. Oswald, however, succeeded, and restored Christianity to some extent, by aid of Aidan, a monk from Iona.

Eventually all the divisions of the kingdom embraced Christianity, and Theodore was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England. The attempt, however, to have uniformity everywhere did not succeed. Again the disputes arose as to keeping Easter; and also as to the shaving of the head, called the tonsure. This, indeed, was not uniform in the East and West, and Theodore, who came from the East, had to wait after his appointment four months that his head might be shaved in an orthodox fashion � that of Rome!

A council was called at Whitby by Oswy, king of Northumberland, to settle these disputes. The Romish clergy repeated the worn-out plea that Rome must be right, for the church of Rome had been founded by Peter, and to Peter had been committed the keys of the kingdom. Oswy asked if the giving of the keys to Peter was admitted by the British. They acknowledged that it was true. Then he declared that he must decide for Rome, lest perhaps when he came to the gates of heaven there would be none other there who could admit him!

The British bishops, though silenced, were in no way convinced, and, distressed by the arrogance of the Romish clergy, some resolved to quit the country. Colman and others returned to Ireland.

Iona had long been a seat of learning and of Christianity, from whence missionaries were sent to various parts.

The historian Bede regrets � but which was really an advantage � that these British Christians were ignorant of the decrees of councils, and diligently observed no other works of piety and purity than what they could learn in the prophets, the gospels, and apostolic epistles.

They did not make a gain of godliness, nor set a price upon every act of devotion. Nor did they confine their ministrations to consecrated walls, but, like the apostles, preached and exhorted from village to village, and from house to house.

Those who remained in England gradually conformed to Rome and its doctrines, to the great loss of that simplicity and devotedness taught and practised by the missionaries from Iona.

The church in England became rich, by kings and wealthy persons making over to the church their property, to insure the favour of heaven. Corruption rapidly followed, and monasteries and nunneries became the seats of debauchery. In the council of Cloveshoo, in 747, it was ordered that monasteries should not be turned into places of amusement "for harpers and buffoons." It is recorded that many nobles became abbots, that they might lead easy and jolly lives with companions like themselves.

The invasions of the Danes came at the close of the eighth century, and punished many a dissolute abbot and his monks by death, laying the place of their abode in ruins over them. King Alfred mourned over these desolations.

The renowned Dunstan was born in the year 925, and miracles were not wanting to mark him out as one highly honoured of heaven, according to the historians � miracles, indeed, that cannot now be believed and need not be repeated. He was offered various bishoprics, but declined them, evidently hoping for some higher station; though he said he was visited by St. Peter and St. Paul, and flogged by St. Andrew for rejecting their apostolic society.

He was accused of dishonesty in managing the royal revenues, and had to fly from England, and narrowly escaped his pursuers.

In A.D. 960, on the death of archbishop Odo, Dunstan succeeded. Being supported by king Edgar, he proceeded to carry out his reforms, as he called them. One was that all the clergy should put away their wives, or resign their offices. Some who chose the latter were described as monsters of wickedness! All canons were ordered to become monks.

Miracles, so-called, were resorted to in order to force the clergy to submit to Dunstan. A synod was held at Winchester in the year 977, when the canons who refused to become monks hoped to get the Archbishop to rescind his order. To their astonishment, a crucifix in the wall was heard to exclaim, "Do it not! do it not! you have judged well, and you would do ill to change it." This had but little effect on the canons, who knew too much to be thus deceived, and they would not yield. Dunstan had to resort to harsher measures.

Another synod was held at Calne, and a Scotch bishop named Boernelm was chosen as spokesman for the clergy. Dunstan was pressed by the arguments used, but exclaimed, "I am now growing old, and you endeavour to overcome me. I am more disposed to silence than contention. I confess I am unwilling that you should vanquish me; and to Christ Himself as judge I commit the cause of His church." At these words, the part of the floor on which his opponents stood, gave way and fell, hurting many and killing some, while the other part of the floor stood firm! Who can doubt that this was a diabolical mode of enforcing the will of the archbishop against the desires of the clergy? Dunstan died in A.D. 988.

Here we must leave for the present our sketch of the church in England. Rome had established its dogmas here, with its various corruptions. Penances were imposed on sinners, but the culprit could buy exemptions at a market value: thus a year's fasting could be bought for thirty shillings paid to the church, and sinning became a mere trifle, especially to the rich.

Little is known of the religion in Scotland during this period. The church there is generally believed to have been less under the influence of Rome and to have been purer; but forms and ceremonies made up so much of religion that any deviation from Rome was counted a schism. Margaret, the Anglo-Saxon queen of Malcolm Canmore, was shocked, on going to Scotland, at the differences she saw, and used the influence of her husband to ensure conformity to the ritual of Rome.

Thus was England fast sinking under the thraldom of Rome, with all its high pretensions, and its traditions of men, coupled with its soul-deceiving way of salvation, and the very lowest scale of morality. The dark ages had then set in, but how strange that any Christian should still be entangled in the snares and devices of Rome, now that the dark ages are supposed to have passed!

Chapter 5.

Mahomet.

Before we quit the seventh century we must consider the rise of one who, together with his successors, was allowed to become a scourge in Christendom, especially in the East.

Mahomet was born about August 12th, 570. His father, Abdullah, had died a short time previously. When seven days old, his grandfather made a feast, and on the name of the child being asked, he replied it was Mahomet, the Praised One. The guests were astonished at the name, it not being known in the family, and asked the reason. His grandfather replied, "In the hope that my grandson will be praised by God in heaven, and by God's creatures on earth."

As was usual, the infant was committed to a nurse who took him into the desert. When two years old he was brought to his mother, but his nurse begged that she might keep him longer, as her household had prospered while he was there. But soon after, the child was reported to have had a fit. Its nurse was alarmed and thought the child was possessed of a demon, and, lest any calamity should happen to him, she returned with him to his mother. "No, no," exclaimed his mother; "nothing of the kind. The demon has no power over him: a high destiny awaits him." It is thus remarkable that even from his birth he was regarded as destined for some great work.

When about twelve years of age he was taken by his uncle into Syria, and there, while visiting a christian monastery, a monk is said to have fixed his eyes on the youth, and said to his uncle: Convey your nephew home again, and guard him carefully, especially against the Jews; for if they discover certain signs upon him, which I have found out, they will make some attempt upon his life. Know, further, that a glorious future awaits the son of your brother." If true, this also is remarkable, especially as coming from a christian monk.

At about twenty-five years of age, he tended sheep in the neighbourhood of Mecca. He said in after life, "Verily, there hath no prophet been raised up who did not perform the work of a shepherd."

About this time he attracted the attention of a rich widow, named Khadijah, who employed him as her agent to travel on business into Syria. He managed these transactions so well, that she offered her hand in marriage, though she was fifteen years older than himself. It is reported also that one of her servants declared that he had seen two angels shading Mahomet from the heat of the sun!

There can be little doubt that the visits he paid to Syria had great influence over him. He would there come in contact with numerous Christians, and would most likely hear of the subtle questions that still divided the Syrian portion of the church, as to the Person of our Lord, and would see for himself how far many who professed faith in Christ were practically like or unlike their divine Master.

Mahomet would also have met with many Jews, and an inquiring mind would doubtless have sought from them an explanation of Christ's mission, and why they refused Him as their promised Messiah.

For some years Mahomet had been in the habit of retiring to a cave in Mount Hir�, near Mecca, attended by his family. When he was forty-one years of age, one day his wife missed him, and, on returning, he declared to her that he had had a peculiar dream of an angel visiting him. This had disturbed him, and he had gone out to quiet his mind, when he heard a voice say: "O Mahomet, thou art the apostle of God, and I am Gabriel." He looked up and gazed on the angel until he disappeared.

His wife was his first disciple, then some of his household, and then a few acquaintances, some being men of note. He imposed on his followers that they should believe in one God; in future rewards and punishments; in his being the prophet of God; in practising ablution and offering up prayers, and should promise obedience, He declared that this was not a new religion, but the religion of their ancestor Abraham, restored to its purity.

After three years he had forty adherents, whom he taught privately. He had frequent revelations, he said, from God: these eventually formed the Koran. He determined to make his mission more public, and invited a number of guests; but, except one, they laughed at his pretensions.

He, however, was not silenced, but began now to preach against the gods made of wood and stone. This enraged his countrymen, who would have attacked him but for the protection of his uncle they caused his uncle to attempt to silence him, but Mahomet declared that could they set the sun and moon against him he should not abandon his mission.

Mahomet was urged to prove his mission by miracles, but he appealed to the internal truth of his doctrine, and declared that signs and wonders would lessen the merit of faith and aggravate the sin of unbelief. The only miraculous act he professed � if such it can be called � was a supposed journey by night from Mecca to Jerusalem. Some accounts say it was on an animal, but according to the Koran it may mean simply "in a vision."

Some of his followers being persecuted, they emigrated to Abyssinia, to save their lives. Repeated opposition to the prophet caused his flight in A.D. 622* to Yatreb, the name of which was altered to Medina, the city of the prophet. Some of his disciples had preceded him, and the citizens, among whom the prophet already had some advocates, were ready to receive the outcast. They sallied forth in procession to meet the despised prophet, invested him with the kingly and priestly office, and made his cause their own.

{*It is from this date the Muslims reckon their era.}

This was the beginning of his success, and the revelations he professed to receive sanctioned the use of the sword to put down idolatry. It is to be noted that the Koran is a long succession of revelations, which were made to suit and sanction anything that was thought to be to the interest of the prophet and his mission. For instance, war was prohibited in the sacred month Rajah, during which some of his followers were sent to spy out the enemies of the prophet near Mecca; but a caravan approached, guarded by four men only, and the temptation was too strong to be overcome. It was attacked, and two of the men were killed, and the other two taken prisoners, and the spoils taken to Medina. Mahomet was much disconcerted because of its being done in the sacred month, and in violation of the general truce. A new revelation, however, set it all right. It runs thus: "They will ask thee concerning war in the sacred month: say, To war therein is bad, but to turn aside from the cause of God, and to have no faith in Him, and the sacred temple, and to drive out its people, is worse in the sight of God." (Sur. ii. 214.) After this the booty was appropriated and a ransom accepted for the prisoners.

Various encounters followed without being decisive. At one time the Jews were united with the enemies of Mahomet, and Medina was invested with a large army. But the prophet managed to sow discord among the various chiefs, who one after another left the place, and a truce for ten years was agreed on, but which did not include the Jews, and during that time Mahomet besieged several places inhabited by the Jews, and carried off their property, taking the women and children captives and putting most of the men to death.

At Chaibar, one of the captured places, the prophet nearly lost his life by poison being mixed with his food by a Jewess. He indeed escaped death, but felt the effects of the poison for the rest of his life.

As long, however, as Mecca did not acknowledge the prophet he could not be said to be secure. Its leaders having broken the truce, Mahomet determined to attack the place, and he was now enabled to take with him ten thousand warriors. From some cause the town surrendered after slight resistance, and its inhabitants yielded to the sway of the prophet whom they had previously driven out. He was not revengeful, but forgave his countrymen now converted to his faith. He proceeded at once to destroy their three hundred and sixty idols, and remove every vestige of idolatry. He adorned and consecrated their temple to the worship of God, and betook himself to prayer and devotion, as the pilgrims had formerly done, around the holy shrine, a black stone said to have been originally an altar to the true God.

This victory and another over the hostile fortress of Tayif, left Mahomet supreme ruler, both sacred and earthly, over the whole of Arabia. He then projected trying his strength against the Roman empire as it existed in his day. But his end was approaching, and it was his successors who had more to do with encountering Christianity than the prophet himself.

In the year 632 Mahomet determined to make another devotional pilgrimage to Mecca. After this he addressed his followers: "Listen to my words, and let them sink into your hearts. I leave you a law, to the which if you cleave it will preserve you always from error: a clear and positive law, a book dictated from on high . . . . O my God, have I fulfilled my mission?" A thousand voices answered, "Yes, thou hast fulfilled it." The prophet added, "O my God, hear this testimony."

He returned to his domestic circle, and died after a short illness, on June 8th, 632. A great commotion immediately followed. "How can our apostle be dead?" exclaimed one; "he was to be our witness on the day of judgment." "No," said Omar, one of his chief men; "he is not dead: he is gone to visit his Lord, as Moses aforetime did, when, after an absence of forty days, he re-appeared to his people." But another exclaimed, "Muslims, if ye adore Mahomet, know that Mahomet is dead. If you adore God, God is alive and cannot die. Do you forget that passage in the Koran, 'Mahomet is no more than an apostle: other apostles have already passed away before him;' or that other verse, 'Thou shalt truly die, O Mahomet, and they also shall die'?" This quoting of the Koran quieted the people: it was clearly revealed that the prophet must die. The next question of moment was, who should succeed him? Abu-Bakr was chosen.

As to the personal character of Mahomet it does not stand high; and, as we have seen, he could always get a revelation, pretending that it came from God, to sanction his doings: more than once he sanctioned the assassination of his enemies, this and his having several wives and concubines, was not without shameless unfaithfulness, even to violating his oath.

As to his creed, if it can be said that he had any, it was copied partly from the Old and New Testaments and from various other sources. Of the Lord Jesus he says, "The Messiah Jesus, son of Mary, is only an apostle of God . . . . God is only one God. Far be it from His glory that He should have a son." "Infidels now are they who say, God is the Messiah, son of Mary." "God is one; God the eternal; he begetteth not, neither is He begotten; neither is there any One like Him." He may have learnt this from the Arianism of the professing Christians he had met with.

His followers claim for the Koran that it is the latest revelation of the mind of God, and that it had been penned under the immediate inspiration of God. The quotations above given settle at once and without dispute that it in no way came from God. It may have � as scholars declare it has � some sublime passages; but anything that denies the divinity of Christ, cannot be from God.

Another important question is as to God. It sounds reverent to say, "There is only one God," "God is one," "God the eternal," etc.; but is this God they speak of the only true God revealed to us in the scripture? It is not. God is LIGHT, and the Koran is thorough darkness, and in no way reveals the true God, nor the way that a guilty man can approach and be accepted by God. Again, God is LOVE, and the Koran breathes of hatred and vengeance. God is HOLY, but the Koran sanctions lust and impurity. And besides all this, it joins with the declaration of the oneness of God, that Mahomet is His prophet; and as we have seen, he could not possibly have been a prophet of God.

At first Mahomet advocated toleration, but when he was successful, he enforced his mission by the use of the sword, and that without mercy. His religion was an advance upon heathenism, since it turned the thoughts of man to an unseen God instead of serving idols; but the God he revealed, as we have seen, was not the true God. Mahometanism was a deadly enemy to Christianity, though it was doubtless used by God as a scourge of the Eastern church, then sunk in superstition, worldliness, and impurity.

The conquests of the successors of Mahomet were rapid. Palestine, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, the south of Spain, fell under their sway, and they threatened to stable their horses in St. Peter's at Rome, but their onward march was arrested by Charles Martel at the battle of Tours (732), and Europe was saved. But in the ninth century, Persia, Afghanistan, and a large part of India, were made to embrace Mahometanism. In the fifteenth century they conquered Constantinople, and put an end to the Byzantine or Eastern empire (1453).

The once flourishing church in the Eastern empire was now only tolerated by the victors. How humiliating to think that when the Mahometans had cleansed their own land of idolatry, they were met with images and image worship in that which professed to be pure Christianity! And also how sad to think that they should be witnesses of the shameful, immoral conduct of those who should have been examples to the flock. More than once they rebuked the christian rulers for acts that shocked the moral sense of a Mahometan! What greater proof could we need that these things took place when men loved darkness, and won for the times in which they lived the title of "The Dark Ages"?

Chapter 6.

Break Up of the Roman Empire.

As we have referred to the taking of Constantinople by the Mahometans, we will at once add a few remarks as to the Roman empire. With the conquest of Constantinople, the Roman empire may be said to have passed away. Long before this, certain parts of the old empire had ceased to belong to it: Britain perhaps in A.D. 409, and Rome itself in A.D. 476, when Odoacer became king. The empire in the East continued to exist with many changes in its limits; and in the later period of its existence might be called the Greek empire rather than Roman. At the same time a German empire had grown up in the West.

These points are noted because the church was so intimately connected with the empire, and because of the prophecies that allude to a resuscitation of the Roman empire in times yet to come. To those who have not considered this interesting subject, we might point to the great image of Daniel, in conjunction with other prophecies in the same book. We are there told that Nebuchadnezzar was the head of gold; then followed a kingdom compared to silver; then one of brass; and lastly one of iron and clay. This latter was to be destroyed by a stone "cut out without hands," to be succeeded by a kingdom "which shall never be destroyed," which the God of heaven would set up.

One word as to the "iron and clay:" perhaps no figure could point out more graphically the existence of the two distinct powers: "the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly brittle" (margin) and may point out what has been called the "imperial," and "the people." At one time the emperor kept the people in fear and trembling; at another time the people � especially the army � made and unmade emperors when they pleased. The "barbarian" element also has been compared to the clay attempting to mingle with that which was truly "Roman." The iron and clay did associate, but "they shall not cleave one to the other, even as iron is not mingled with clay." All over the confines of the old Roman earth the struggle still continues between the royal or imperial and the people.

The question naturally arises, Has the stone yet appeared, or is it yet to appear? There can be no doubt that Christ is the stone, and the question resolves itself into this, Did Christ when He was here begin that work of destruction, as well as introduce the kingdom in power, that is to set it aside?

May we not say, He did not. For the Roman empire became larger and saw its most halcyon days after our Lord had quitted the earth. Whereas the prophecy says that the image is to be destroyed before the stone fills the whole earth.

We are therefore driven to the conclusion, that in some way, and under some form, the Roman empire will be again resuscitated, with its ten toes � its ten horns, which are ten kings � in order that it may be crushed by the advent of that stone which is to do so great a work.

Then the inquiry suggests itself, What kingdoms will form the ten toes? It is not difficult, with a map of the Roman empire at its height of prosperity to pick out ten countries which it then embraced, though those countries may now be subdivided into a greater number of kingdoms.

1. Italia. Now Italy, with Piedmont and Switzerland.

2. Illyricum. Turkey in Europe, and Greece.

3. Asia Minor, now under Turkish rule.

4. Syria. Under Turkish rule.

5. Egypt. Nominally under Turkish rule.

6. North Africa, Tunis, and Tripoli.

7. Mauritania. Morocco and Algiers.

8. Hispania. Spain and Portugal.

9. Gallia. France, Belgium, and Holland.

10. Britannia. Britain.

Now, if the truth of the revival of the Roman empire, as gathered from Daniel, be compared with Revelation xiii. and 2 Thessalonians ii., it will be seen that this revival of imperial power will be associated with the Antichrist and be under the influence of Satan (which, indeed, is also pointed out in Daniel vii.), and ends in the dire punishment of both Satan and his willing dupes.

We must not here carry the subject farther, except to point out, that there being one great ruling power of this revived empire in no way clashes with the thought of there being ten kings who will give their support to him, and to Antichrist, led on by Satan.

This solemn subject is commended to the student of scripture. It is a solemn warning to those who form part of Christendom, to whom, because they will not now believe the truth, God will send a strong delusion, so that they will believe a lie, being led away by the signs and lying wonders of Antichrist, wrought by the power of Satan.

A warning also to those who are advocating the supremacy of man, regardless of the claims of God. How often have those who advocate the supremacy of the people, and thus raise the passions of men, been the first to fall under the powers they were the means of arousing. Man cannot get his true place unless God is given His: "the powers that be are ordained of God;" though the powers, indeed, may become corrupt, as well as the people. The stone that is coming will destroy the kingdom of iron and clay; but only to raise up a glorious kingdom, in which shall dwell righteousness and peace.

Chapter 7.

France Protects Rome.

Returning to the history of the Roman church, much may be passed over in silence as not being of particular interest. Stephen II. became pope, A.D. 752. It was not at that time an enviable post, because of the Lombards, who under their active king Astolfo, seized on the lands of the church and threatened Rome. Appeals to Constantinople were useless, for although the emperor claimed Italy as a part of his dominions, he did little or nothing to protect its inhabitants.

Stephen turned to France for protection, and hurried in person to visit Pepin, who then reigned. He was received with all humility, Pepin and his noble attendants prostrating themselves to the earth before the pope.

The request was granted. An army was sent against the Lombards, and Astolfo was compelled to shut himself up in the town of Pavia. But as soon as the French troops were withdrawn, he again with fire and sword laid waste the district around Rome, and threatened the city itself.

Appeal was again urgently made to Pepin. We give the words used that the reader may judge of the shocking way in which the pope applied scripture. "I conjure you," he wrote, "by the Lord our God, by His glorious mother, by all the heavenly virtues, and by St. Peter, who has consecrated you a king, to make the spoiler restore to the church of God what he has taken. You will have, at the day of judgment, to give an account of the manner in which you have defended us. It is you whom God has chosen for this great work by His own eternal prescience for those whom He hath predestinated He hath called, and those whom He hath called He hath justified."

Indeed, the letters of Stephen are shocking � for he does not hesitate to call himself, not the successor of Peter, but Peter himself. Over and over again he calls himself, "I, Peter, apostle, called by Christ." He explains that they are to believe that the apostle invites them, for though he is absent in body, he is spiritually present! They were invited also by "our Lady, the mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary." It was to rescue "the holy church of God, in which ye hope to receive eternal life."

Again a French army routed the Lombards, and then arose the question to whom were the estates to be given. The envoy of the emperor claimed them for him. But Pepin, knowing his own power, granted the conquered territory to Stephen and his successors for ever.

This has been taken as the commencement of the temporal dominion of the church, which was added to from time to time though long before, it had lands under its control and a revenue from the same. This made the pope a temporal prince, and was in direct opposition to the word of our Lord, "My kingdom is not of this world: else would my servants fight." The kingdom of the pope was now, at least in part, of this world, and his servants had from time to time to fight for his earthly possession.

Charlemagne.

This powerful French king was also called in by the successors of Stephen to protect the possessions of the pope. In A.D. 795 Leo III. became pope. He had enemies in Rome, who were offended at his elevation, and watched their opportunity to attack him. Such was the little restraint on the inhabitants of the "holy city," that one day when the pope was in a procession, he was thrown from his horse, and efforts were made to deprive him of his eyes and his tongue. This was not accomplished, but he was dragged into a monastery and again attacked, and left weltering in his blood. But he still retained his sight and his speech. He was able to escape to Charles at Paderborn.

While here, messengers arrived with serious charges against Leo. Charles said he would inquire into them at Rome. When he reached the city, an assembly of archbishops, bishops, etc., was called together to judge of the accusations. But they came to the conclusion, that the successor of St. Peter was not answerable to any human judgment! Leo swore on the Gospels that he was not guilty of the charges.

A memorable incident followed this. On Christmas day � the first day of the ninth century, as it was then reckoned in the West � while Charles knelt at the altar, Leo placed a splendid crown on his head, and the congregation shouted, "Life and victory to Charles, crowned by God emperor of Rome!"

Charles protested against the act, but it is doubted if it were not all pre-arranged and with his consent. This severed Rome from the Greek empire (to which it was nominally attached), and made it a sort of capital of the West.

Charles had many successful wars with the Saxons, but on their chief, Widikind, submitting and being baptised, these wars ceased. Time after time, Charles had induced numbers to be baptised, but no sooner did they feel themselves strong enough to revolt than they again professed the religion of their fathers. Now that peace was proclaimed, it was enacted that death was the penalty against all who refused baptism; against burning the bodies of the dead; against eating flesh in Lent, if done in contempt of Christianity, etc. A tenth of the people's incomes was demanded for the church.

This was making Christians after a new fashion. Alcuin, an Englishman who was settled in France, protested against such conversions. He said the people should be instructed before being baptised; but thousands were forced to become Christians in the above way.

Charles, whose education had been neglected, was anxious for the instruction of his subjects. Amongst those chosen was the above-named Alcuin, who had had a school in England of great repute. On a visit to the continent he met with Charles, who urged him to remain in France and teach. This he was permitted to do, and became teacher to Charles himself, his sons and daughters, and some of his courtiers. He taught theology as well as the sciences.

After being head of this school for fourteen years, he became tired of teaching, and was made abbot of St. Martin at Tours. He took part afterwards in the controversies of the church.

Charles ordered schools to be opened all over his dominions, not forgetting the great need also in this respects of the monks and the clergy. "We have often received," said he, "from different monasteries letters which contained, indeed, many good things, but of which the style was so gross and rude, and so marked with ignorance, that it might reasonably be doubted whether the writers were capable of understanding the holy scriptures."

Charles � or Charlemagne, as he was called after the death of his father � took the lead in all ecclesiastical as well as in temporal matters. He considered it his duty to watch over the spiritual well-being of his people. In spiritual matters he was chief. He considered the pope the highest of bishops, and consulted him, and at times acted on his advice; but when he did, he gave the orders in his own name and not in that of the pope. It was not till later times that all spiritual matters in France were referred to the pope.

Chapter 8.

The Worship of Images.

From early ages, pictures and images had been introduced into churches without, as far as can be gathered, any thought of their being worshipped, But in the dark ages images were not merely treated as works of art, but foolish tales were related respecting them, and believed: some of them had fallen from heaven; others were declared to have been the work of St. Luke the evangelist. Of a picture it was said that Abgarus, king of Edessa, when in correspondence with our Lord, had commissioned a painter to take the portrait of Christ. But the artist was so dazzled by the glory of the countenance that he could not attempt it, whereupon our Saviour Himself impressed His image on a piece of linen and sent it to the king This had been hidden for ages, but was said to have been discovered by a vision. Together with these tales of the origin of the images and pictures, went forth a long list of pretended miracles wrought by them.

It can easily be imagined, that if people, ignorant of the scripture, believed all these things, it would be almost natural that they should pay the highest respect to such images and pictures; and that this respect should gradually merge into veneration and worship. Various things were calculated to encourage this: such as burning lights before them, offering incense in honour of them, adorning them with gems and precious metals. Hands were also placed on them when oaths were taken, and they were even employed as sponsors in baptism! To fall down and reverence them, and then to pray to them naturally followed.

We can well believe that many Christians must and did disagree with all this, and many and severe were the conflicts as to the question of images and their worship. It will be seen that, while the above honours were paid to the images, it was perfectly vain to profess that no worship was intended.

An open rupture took place in the East on this subject, when Leo the Isaurian was emperor (A.D. 718-741). On being freed from his enemies he turned his attention to religion. In the sixth year of his reign he issued an edict, that all Jews and Montanists should be baptised. It is recorded that the Jews submitted, but only mocked at the rite: it was nothing to them. Some of the Montanists, however, full of fanaticism, shut themselves up in their meeting-houses, set them on fire, and perished in the flames, as others had done under Justinian.

The next year (A.D. 724) he issued an edict against images. His motives are not known; he could hardly be influenced by a simple motive to purify the church, because of his general character. The storm it raised was great: parties united together to protect their images. A Saracen army was believed to have been driven off by the influence of the images of the city attacked! Who would dare remove images armed with such power?

A usurper was even selected to supplant the impious emperor; but the usurper was no sooner put down than the emperor issued a decree, that all images should now be destroyed, and the painted walls of the churches should be whitewashed.

He then sought the concurrence of Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople. Germanus reminded the emperor that he had promised to make no innovation in religion. It would appear that in a private interview, Germanus had admitted that images should be abolished; but when pressed, he said to the emperor, "Not in your reign."

"In whose reign, then?" demanded the emperor.

"In that of an emperor named Conon, who will be the forerunner of Antichrist."

"Conon," said the emperor, "is my own baptismal name."

Germanus argued that images were not meant to represent the Trinity, but the Incarnation. That Old Testament prohibitions were no longer in force since Christ appeared in human form, and referred to the reputed Edessan impression of our Lord's countenance, and to the pictures painted by St. Luke. No council had condemned them, and he could make no innovation on the faith. He resigned rather than subscribe the new edict.

The emperor proceeded to carry out his edict. Over the brazen gate of the palace was a noted statue of the Saviour, called the Surety. Many tales were told of this image, and it was much esteemed. A soldier was sent to destroy it; but when, mounted on a ladder, he struck the face with an axe, a number of women who had gathered around, and had intreated him to spare the image, pulled over the ladder and killed the man, and "tore his body to pieces," says an historian. Men now joined the women, and they rushed to the house of the new patriarch, but he took shelter in the palace. The emperor's guards put down the tumult, but not without much bloodshed. Persecution followed, and many were scourged, mutilated, and banished, especially the monks who would not yield to the emperor.

Beyond the dominion of the emperor, some strongly defended images, perhaps none more so than John of Damascus. He wrote against the emperor's edict, and this caused Leo to seek his destruction. He forged a letter in which John offered to deliver up Damascus to the emperor. This was sent to the Caliph of Damascus, who, without staying to hear any defence, cut off John's right hand. This was exposed in the market-place until evening, when John begged that it might be given him, for he suffered great pain while that hung in the air. On receiving his hand he placed it to his arm, and fell down before an image of the Virgin Mary, praying to her to restore it, as he had lost it in the defence of images, and it should be devoted to her service. He then went to sleep, and in the morning the hand was joined to his arm!

Such is the narrative of his historian. Can it be wondered at when such legends were told respecting the images � and believed � that the images should be respected, prayed to, and adored?

This John of Damascus, in defending the use of images, declared that scripture countenanced images by the instructions for making the cherubim! Also by the words of our Lord as to the tribute-money: that which bears Caesar's image is Caesar's, and is to be rendered to him; so that which bears Christ's image is to be rendered to Christ, for it is Christ's. He distinguished between the kind of adoration which should be reserved for God alone, and that which is, for His sake, given to angels, saints, or consecrated things.

He admitted that scripture did not prescribe any veneration for images. Surely this should have been enough for any Christian, especially with the much that is said in scripture against idolatry. And how are poor, simple persons able to distinguish between the kind of worship given to God, and to those images which have been declared able to work miracles?

As Italy was nominally a part of the empire, the edict of Leo was sent thither, but the pope and his clergy would not respect it.

In A.D. 741 Constantine Copronymus succeeded Leo as emperor, and he determined to call a council to settle the question of images. The see of Constantinople was then vacant, and other patriarchs of the East were now under Mahometan rule, so the emperor had to be content with a smaller council of bishops. It met on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus; 338 attended.

The council professed to rest their judgment on the authority of the Fathers, and, relying upon these, they declared all representations made for religious purposes by the art of the painter or sculptor to be presumptuous, pagan, and idolatrous. They, however, declared the lawfulness of invoking the blessed Virgin and the saints.

How strange that so many bishops could meet together on such a subject and not take scripture for their guide! This would have set them right as to invoking the saints, as well as the images. But this was in the dark ages, though, alas! the same thing is done � yea, and images restored in the age that is called enlightened!

Constantine, armed with canons of the council, proceeded to enforce the destruction of images. Most gave way, except the monks, and many of these were cruelly tortured and put to death, and the monasteries turned into barracks. The patriarch gave way to the emperor, but was afterwards treated with the greatest cruelty, and then put to death, on a charge of treason.

In the year 775, while on a military expedition, the emperor was seized with such dreadful pains that he declared that he already felt the pains of hell, and expired. However right the emperor may have been in discountenancing images, there is nothing to justify his cruelty, and nothing to shew that he was really anxious for the purity of the church.

Leo IV. was the next emperor. He was opposed to images, but allowed the banished monks to return. His wife Irene took a contrary course, and privately encouraged the introduction of images. Some were found under her pillow, which roused the emperor: he punished those who had introduced the images, and separated from his wife, though she declared her innocence.

Leo IV. reigned only four and a half years, and his son being only ten years of age, Irene took the reins of government.

Paul, patriarch of Constantinople, suddenly resigned and entered a monastery. When questioned, he declared that his conscience accused him for having opposed the restoration of images. A successor was sought, and he, Tarasius, would only accept the office on condition that a general council should be called to settle the vexed question of images.

This was agreed to, and a council was called to meet at Constantinople. The pope was invited. He appointed two to appear for Rome, and begged the empress to reverse what the former emperor had done in respect to images; but he did not forget to complain that Tarasius had been styled Ecumenical, a title which only belonged to himself.

As the day approached, those who opposed images began to collect, and threatened Tarasius. There were some bishops among them, and some soldiers. Fearing a tumult, Irene told the patriarch to give way, and the Iconoclasts raised shouts of victory. But the empress did not intend to be thwarted. She let things rest a little while, and then disbanded the soldiers and sent them to their homes. Then, in A.D. 787, she called the council together in Nicaea instead of at the capital.

It was an understood thing from the first that the council was not to investigate the question, but simply to restore the images. A great difficulty was how to treat those bishops who had taken part in the last council against images, and of others who had been consecrated by such persons. The monks cried out for rigour against them as the worst of heretics, but the general voice was for leniency.

The way the bishops defended their decision to re-establish images (and they must for very shame say something) sounds curious to our ears. Appeal to scripture was, of course, never thought of. They quoted the Fathers, or more frequently the legends of the miracles wrought by images, to which some of the bishops added marvels from their own experience.

The use made of the Fathers may be judged of by an example. After a passage had been read from Gregory of Nyssa, in which he tells how he had been affected to tears by a picture of the sacrifice of Isaac, a bishop added: "The father had often read the history, but perhaps without ever weeping; yet, as soon as ever he saw a picture he wept."

"If," said another, "so great a doctor was edified and moved even to tears by a picture, how much would it affect lay and unlearned people?"

"If Gregory wept at a painting of Abraham," said another, "what should we do at one of the incarnate Saviour?"

"Should not we too weep," said Tarasius, "if we saw a picture of the crucifixion?" and his words were received with great applause!

Surely this was all solemn trifling: but worse was to follow. The legates of Rome proposed that an image should be brought into the council and receive the adoration of the assembly. This was done the next day! They then proceeded to read the canons of the council of A.D. 754, and one by one they were said to be refuted, in words declared to be dictated by the Holy Ghost!

In conclusion it was decreed that even as the figure on the cross was honoured, so images of the Saviour and blessed Virgin, of angels and of saints, whether painted or mosaic, or any other suitable material, are to be set up for kissing and honourable reverence (proskunesin); but not for real worship (latreian) which belongs to divine nature alone. Incense and lights are to be offered to them, as to the cross, the Gospels, and other holy memorials; "forasmuch as the honour paid to the image passes on to the original, and he who adores an image, adores in it the person of him whom it represents."

This council has been admitted by both the Greeks and the Latins to be the Seventh General Council. It is to be observed that the canon refers only to pictures or flat representations, not images; and to this the Greek church has limited itself to this day.

We thus see how the worship of images was solemnly ordained in a council of the church. It is in vain that we are now told that images are not worshipped. An image was adored in the council itself, and the council itself declared that the veneration paid to an image passed to the person represented. Alas, that scripture should be thus utterly rejected, and men's thoughts set up in place thereof. We also see to how low a standard that which is called worship had fallen in those days. It could be given to a picture of our Lord, or even to one of the saints!

The reader will be interested to learn that the word chosen by the council to designate the sort of worship to be given to images is the word used in Matthew iv. 10: "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." It is also used in John iv., when our Lord was speaking to the woman of Samaria. Also in Revelation xix. 10: "Worship God;" and in other places.

The pope (Adrian) was pleased with the restoration of images, and sent the canons of the council to Charlemagne. But they were ill received in France. The king sent the canons to Alcuin, who was then in England, for his examination. His judgment was against images. Alcuin wrote against them, and four books written by him and others on the subject, were put forth in the name of the king. They are known as "The Caroline Books."

These books boldly called in question the authority of the council, saying it was not universal. They blamed the council for listening to stories of a fabulous character, and refuted in detail all the statements put forth. Still the conclusion went no further than that the worship of images was not to be enforced: images were to be allowed and were not to be broken. A council was now called by Charlemagne, to meet at Frankfort in 794, at which, among other things, the enforced worship of images was condemned; but, as the images were not removed, it is easy to see that the clergy, where so disposed, could encourage their worship.

In the East, however, the question of the restoration of images was not finally settled, notwithstanding that the council of Nice had decided in their favour. Leo V., the Armenian, became emperor in 813, and was opposed to images. He requested the attendance of Nicephorus the patriarch to hear all he had to say in their favour. Nicephorus introduced one, Theodore, an abbot of a famous monastery, who argued that images were not merely for the unlearned, but were necessary for the most advanced Christian; and that a reverence for them was necessary for the right faith in the Incarnation; impiously adding that if images were suppressed "our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain."

Nothing convinced the emperor, and images were again broken, burnt, or covered with dirt. Many who refused to obey were banished. At Christmas, A.D. 814, the emperor went to St. Sophia's church, and all proceeded quietly until a prophecy was read in the lessons for the day from Isaiah xl. against idolatry, when one of the clergy stood forth, and told the emperor that God commanded him, by the prophet's words, to proceed against image-worship.

Nicephorus was displaced and shut up in a monastery; Theodore, who would not be quiet, was cruelly scourged, his wounds being left undressed, and banished. For three years he was confined in an underground dungeon; but his energy seemed to revive, the more he was punished. He wrote or dictated messages to the pope of Rome and others, to oppose the emperor, whom he called a Pharaoh and a Nebuchadnezzar, an enemy of the Saviour and of His Virgin Mother.

Michael "the stammerer," one of the generals, conspired against the emperor; but his plot was discovered, and he was condemned to death. It was the eve of Christmas, 820. He would have been at once executed, but the empress begged the execution might be left until after the festival. The emperor agreed, but told her that her pious scruples might cost her dear. Feeling ill at ease, in the dead of the night the emperor went to see that his enemy was safe. He found Michael and the officer who guarded him, as well as the keeper, all asleep; and he retired again. But there was a slave in the place whom the emperor had not noticed; he recognised the emperor by the purple buskins which he wore, and, on the emperor withdrawing, he awoke the sleepers and told them what he had seen. The officer, knowing that he would be condemned for sleeping, concerted a plan with Michael for immediate action.

On Christmas morning it was usual to begin the earliest service at three o'clock, and one of the gates of the palace was opened at that early hour to admit the clergy and the singers, when some armed conspirators entered also. By mistake they first attacked the chief chaplain, but he, shewing his shaven head, escaped. They then fell upon Leo, and though he defended himself with a large cross from the altar, he was overcome and slain. Before a smith could be obtained to remove the chains of Michael, he was proclaimed emperor, and was crowned the same day!

Theodore, from his dungeon, congratulated the new emperor, and rejoiced that the apostate should thus end his life! He, with others, was recalled, and Theodore had a sort of public triumph.

It is really shocking to see to how low an ebb Christianity had fallen when its loudest advocates could thus rejoice in such a deed of blood as the murder of Leo. But it was then the dark ages!

However, the joy of Theodore was of short duration, for Michael, though allowing images, would have no worship of them. Theodore was again roused to defiance, and was again banished, and died in exile.

Michael wrote to the pope (Paschal) and to Louis the Pious (of France) on the subject of images. This letter shews to what excesses the veneration of images was carried. Besides lights and incense being burned in their honour, hymns and prayers were addressed to them; and in some cases the consecrated bread was placed in the hands of images that it might be received from them!

In the year 829 Theophilus succeeded Michael as emperor, and in every way enforced the orders against images. On his death, 842, all was again changed, and pictures (in the East, rather than statues) were again introduced.

In France the opposition to images on the whole grew weaker, there was an evident desire to be friendly with Rome, and by degrees the doctrines adopted by the Roman church were held by those in France. Thus the question of images was to a certain extent settled. Not, we presume, that all the extreme things mentioned above were enforced; but images were tolerated and reverence paid to them, as may be seen to this day in any Roman Catholic country, if not indeed in our own. The reader will however learn from the above that it was long and strongly opposed in the church; and was only tolerated and enacted during the darkness of the dark ages, though, alas! it survives in times thought to be much more enlightened. It is to be noticed that Rome, at least in respect to images, cannot plead antiquity.

Chapter 9.

Hildebrand, Gregory VII. A.D. 1073-1085.

Perhaps this pope is better known by his real name, Hildebrand. He had been the most influential of the clergy long before he was made pope. Cardinal Hugo Candidus said of him: "He had been for more than a quarter of a century the champion of the Roman church, the restorer of domestic tranquillity, the protector of the poor and the oppressed, and the terror of tyrants."

To shew that such a man was needed, we will glance at a few of his predecessors.

We must not omit to mention pope Joan. It is recorded by Roman historians that a woman was elected pope in the year 855. When young she had a strong affection for a young monk, and, in order to be in his company, she assumed the dress of a man and entered the monastery. On his death, she devoted her mind to study, and being clever, succeeded so well that she was elected pope. She eventually had a child and died. This account was never called in question until the time of the Reformation, when it was repeated by the reformers as against the church of Rome. Certainly the reformers did not invent the story, and why should any Romanist historian do so? It was not deemed worth contradiction until, as we have seen, it was brought as a proof against the holiness of that church.

Several of the popes were elected by open and acknowledged bribery, and some were men of no standing or reputation in the church. Thus John XIX. (1024-1033) was a layman when elected, and was hurried through all the intermediate grades in one day.

His successor, Benedict IX., was elected pope when only ten years of age.* Money overruled all objections.

{* Some say twelve.}

Desiderius, abbot of Monte Cassino, and afterwards pope, declared that "the Italian priesthood, and among them most conspicuously the Roman pontiffs were in the habit of defying all law and all authority . . . . the people sold their suffrages for money to the highest bidder; the priesthood, moved and seduced by avarice and ambition, bought and sold the sacred rights of ordination, and carried on a gainful traffic with the gifts of the Holy Ghost!"

Benedict IX. was so notoriously wicked by acts of "rapine, murder, and every species of felony," that the people of Rome arose and drove him from the city. The office was then sold to Sylvester III. But in three months' time Benedict gained power, and drove away Sylvester, but finding that his own crimes had made him odious to the clergy, he sold the popedom to another who called himself Gregory VI. (A.D. 1044.)

Thus there were three popes at the same time. Gregory found he had made a bad bargain, for Benedict had sold everything he could, and the new pope could scarcely find enough for his support. The roads were beset with robbers, which hindered pilgrims from coming to Rome with their gifts, and scarcely any one was safe in the city itself.

Henry III. of Germany was invited to rescue the church from the dreadful state into which it had fallen. He called a synod in Germany, and addressed the bishops, with a heavy heart: "I speak to you who stand in the place of Christ in that holy church which He hath taken for His bride, and bought with the price of His blood . . . . you have corrupted yourselves by avarice and cupidity; you, whose duty it is to dispense freely the gifts of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, have polluted yourselves by the vile lust of gain. . . . Do we not know of a truth, that all ecclesiastical decrees and orders, from the supreme pontiff himself down to the meanest doorkeeper in the house of the Lord, are already sinking under the load of that damnation which they carry within themselves? Are they not all fattening for the slaughter upon the fruits of this their spiritual felony?" The bishops made no defence, but confessed their sin and asked pardon.

Thus was the church openly rebuked by the emperor, and its leaders could only confess that the charges were too true.

The emperor then proceeded to Italy, and requested Gregory VI. to call a council for the reform of the church. It assembled at Sutri. The first question was that of the three popes. Sylvester was at once deposed, as having no legitimate claim; Benedict had been reckoned as the pope, but as he had twice retired, he was also deposed. Then as to Gregory, who had called the synod, he had bought the office, and the synod resolved that he should depose himself. This he was very loth to do, but was at length constrained to comply.

The emperor then proceeded to Rome, and called for the election of a new pope, a man at least canonically pure. It was soon confessed that there was no such person at Rome; all were polluted by "simony and fornication." The election seemed at a deadlock, when the clergy agreed to delegate all their powers into the hands of the emperor. His election should be theirs. He descended from his throne, and taking Sudger, bishop of Bamberg, by the hand, seated him on the vacant throne amid the hosannas of the people. He took the name of Clement II. (A.D. 1046.) But he lived only a few months.

Several popes followed in rapid succession, until Alexander II. (A.D. 1061) who raised somewhat the papal power. On his death, the people declared Hildebrand to be the right man, and rushed upon him without delay and installed him in the papal chair. The forms of election were hastily gone through, and he chose the title of Gregory VII. (A.D. 1073.)

No sooner was the news of his election spread abroad than the easy-going clergy appealed to the emperor (Henry IV. of Germany) to declare the election void because his sanction had not been obtained. They feared that a man of so much energy as Hildebrand was known to be, would not leave them long at peace where abuses had crept in. They also warned the emperor that, if he suffered such a man to be pope, he himself would surely be made to feel his power.

A message was at once despatched to Rome to protest against the election of Hildebrand. But the newly-elected pope spoke with the greatest humility, declaring that the office had been thrust upon him; he had no personal ambition in the matter, and, indeed, he had delayed his enthronement until he had learned the will of the emperor and his princes.

This so pleased the emperor that he at once sent his affirmation of the election, and the enthronement took place. It was not, however, difficult to see that great and important events must follow this election � events in which the pope and the emperor would be the principal actors.

Gregory confessed that his ambition was to effect a total reformation of the church, of which, indeed, it stood in great need. Simony existed everywhere: the vacant offices of the church were given to favourites or sold to rich applicants, as we have seen, altogether apart from their real fitness for the same. And such men, when elected, cared little for the good of the people over whom they were placed, but sought rather to enrich themselves and their relatives in honours and estates.

The emperor Henry had been badly brought up by his tutors, who had allowed the young man to indulge in folly and sinful pleasures.

The sale of livings had been so shamefully carried on at his court that many a one had good cause to fear when they heard that such a stern disciplinarian as Hildebrand had been chosen pope.

France was ruled by a cruel and greedy tyrant (Philip I.), who was hated and despised by his subjects.

Spain was divided among Saracens and Christians, without any power to repel the aggressions of the pope; while other continental nations were suffering from disorders of various kinds.

All pointed out to Gregory that now, when there was nothing but weakness on every hand, was the time for him to raise the church of Rome to full supremacy, not only over all in the church, but also over kings, and to see that it obtained all it claimed.

One of the first places that engaged Gregory's attention was Spain. Bands of French adventurers had been for some time encouraged by Rome to attack Spain, and whatever places they could seize were to be made over to the church. Now Gregory wrote to the Spanish princes, reminding them that the whole of Spain had been from olden time a part and parcel of the patrimony of St. Peter! And any country that once belonged to the church could never be taken therefrom!

Gregory took no trouble to prove his assertions. He made his demands, and would seek for power to enforce them. Of course all was done in the name and professedly for the welfare of the church of God, though really it was all for the welfare of the church of Rome, based upon what has been called ecclesiastical law. But who made these laws? Well, they were supposed to have been passed at ancient councils, or laid down by former popes. But it is an undeniable fact, that many of these ancient documents are really forgeries, of which we will now say a few words.

The Decretals.

A great deal of the power which the popes claimed as belonging to the church of Rome, was not pretended to be founded on anything in scripture, though they did not neglect the supposed dignity of Peter and of themselves as his successors. Things were asserted and claimed for Rome on the sole authority of the Decretals, or canon law of the church. These are found to be: 1, Answers given by the popes to questions asked 2, Decrees passed by the popes and their cardinals. These, together with the canons of the general councils, formed the canon laws of the church of Rome.

It is easy to see that collections of such laws may have been made from early times, and then have been enlarged from time to time when various questions at issue were considered to be finally settled.

Of course, every collector was anxious to trace back as far as he could the source of each law, and to stamp it with an antiquity that would carry with it its due weight.

Now, in the ninth century, a collection of such laws was made by one known as Pseudo-Isidore (to distinguish him from another Isidore of Spain who also did a similar work) � a collection which professed antiquity for many of its laws, and which covered a wide field of questions touching the authority of the pope, the clergy, and internal ordering of the church, etc.

It was then "the dark ages," and no one thought to question what was put forth with much apparent reverence, and mingled with pious ejaculations. Incidents of persons who lived at various times were interwoven with the laws, which seemed to give a reality to the whole.

To this the popes pointed triumphantly: who could gainsay such antiquity? who could call in question such piety? Men surely would hear, learn, and submit implicitly to such documents.

But, as we have said, the ages were dark, or people would then and there have discovered, at least, glaring errors and mistakes, if they had not ventured to call them falsehoods. There was monstrous ignorance of history, glaring mistakes in chronology, things and people jumbled up together in utter confusion, proving the whole to be unquestionably false. This has since been owned by some honest Roman Catholic writers as well as by Protestant.

What must we think of that church that needed such false decretals to bolster up its supposed authority? The whole was evidently gathered together to uphold the supremacy of the church of Rome, and especially the undisputed authority of the popes personally.

It has been disputed that the middle ages were really dark. Well, what about these false decretals? Could they have been collected by any one but an ignorant man, a man who knew next to nothing of even history and chronology? And then could the popes who used these decretals have been anything but ignorant men to have used such documents bearing falsehood on their very surface? Well, yes, there may be another answer to the question but it is that the one who made the collection, as well as the popes who used it, may have been wicked enough to put forth and use what they knew to be false. Any way, these false decretals prove the ages to have been dark � very dark.

All this is apart from scripture. If people leave the word of God for tradition, the figure used in scripture may well apply to them: it is the blind leading the build, and both fall into the ditch. Happy those who know the sufficiency of the word of God for all that they need, to guide them both in faith and practice. There is nothing "false" there.

But how sad to see intelligent men in the nineteenth century attempting to give the church of Rome that supremacy which it then claimed, and sought to support its claims by that which has been acknowledged by honest Romanists to be shameless forgeries!

Gregory and the Married Clergy.

In the year 1074, Gregory summoned the bishops to a special synod at Rome, and under his influence it was ordained: 1, That priests should not marry; 2, That those who were married should put away their wives, or renounce the priesthood; 3, That for the future no one should be ordained priest who did not promise celibacy.

These things had been enacted before, but, having met with much decided opposition, had been allowed to slumber. Now, however, there was a man of energy on the papal throne, and they were to be enforced everywhere. He threatened with perdition any that should disobey the order. "How," he asks, "shall they obtain pardon for their sins who despise him who openeth and closeth the gates of heaven to whom he pleaseth? Let all such beware how they call down the divine wrath upon their own heads."

Nevertheless there was strong opposition everywhere to the decrees. There were many of the clergy who had wives and children, and they felt they could not violate their pledges to their wives, and, indeed, disobey God, who had said that what God had joined should not be put asunder by man.

In Paris a synod was held on the subject, and it concluded that no obedience should be given to the decree touching the married clergy. Walter, abbot of Pont-Is�re, insisted that the pope, right or wrong, ought to be obeyed; but he was dragged from the hall of meeting, and beaten severely before he could be rescued.

The archbishop of Rouen proceeded to expel the married clergy, but he was assailed with showers of stones, etc., so that he had to fly for his life.

In Normandy it was a recognised thing that the clergy were allowed to marry, and their sons often succeeded to their livings.

In Spain the opposition was also most determined, and as late as the year 1104, pope Paschal II. had to relax the decree in order to avoid a schism.

In England the zealous Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, declined to publish the decree, and later on all that was done was to make it a condition that no more married men should be ordained, nor any allowed to marry after ordination.

In Germany also there was great resistance. The heads of the clergy gave six months for the priests to put away their wives. But all to no purpose, the pope was not obeyed nor the council he had called.

Gregory was all the more urgent, quoting scripture in the most outrageous manner. "To obey is better than sacrifice," he wrote; "see I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms to root out and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build and to plant." "The decrees of the fathers, the authority of the canons, demand prompt, unhesitating obedience He whom flesh and blood moveth to doubt or delay is carnal � he is condemned already; he hath no share in the work of the Lord; he is a rotten branch, a dumb dog, a cankered limb, a faithless servant, a time-server, and a hypocrite."

The archbishop of Mainz, thus urged by the pope, called a synod. The clergy protested, and many left the council in anger, and consulted together. He pressed them to return, promising them he would urge the pope to relax his orders. He then proceeded to press them for some tithes; but he was obliged to hurry away, to avoid their violence. They would not give up their wives nor give their money.

Now all this opposition of the clergy to the decree is important, as shewing that the enforced celibacy of the clergy is comparatively a modern innovation. After the existence of the church for more than a thousand years, there was all this determined resistance to this "forbidding to marry." There always had been persons of ascetic habits who had preferred to remain unmarried; but there had been no direct effort to enforce it on all till about the year 952; again in 1012; and later in the year we have been looking at (1074) when it was opposed everywhere. Where, then, is the antiquity of this doctrine � the antiquity which the Romanists claim for all their doctrines and practices? As we have seen, such a claim is a mere myth that will not bear the least investigation. The practice is without the least particle of authority from the scripture � indeed, it is dead against it; for therein a bishop is to be the husband of one wife. (1 Tim. iii. 2.) Woe be to those who, with such high pretensions to divine authority, trample under foot the word of God which should be their only guide. Their pretensions in this matter are not even ancient.

Gregory and Henry IV.

The emperor Henry governed his country so badly, that a revolution was the consequence. The people appealed to the pope against the emperor, and the emperor appealed to him also against the revolters.

The austerities of the pope had, however, alienated from himself the affections of many of the clergy. In Rome itself, he had compelled the married clergy to separate from their wives, and had compelled them to live together, throwing all their private property into a brotherhood. This had led many to consider him as their enemy.

He had other enemies near Rome. Cenci, the leader of the Tusculan party, after various collisions with the pope, still waited an opportunity to take revenge upon Gregory, On the eve of the Nativity, the pope usually repaired to the church of St. Mary-the-Greater, attended by many clergy and multitudes of the laity. But on the occasion in question, it rained in torrents, and few attended the pope. Cenci, on learning this from one of his spies, determined to carry off the pope. He disposed of his followers, so that there could be no escape, and then entered the church and seized Gregory, who was slightly wounded in the scuffle.

Gregory is said to have remained perfectly composed while Cenci proceeded to "degrade" him, by stripping him of some of his robes; they then set him on a horse behind one of their party, and carried him off to one of their strongholds.

But before daybreak the whole city was in commotion; altars were stripped of their ornaments, and all religious services stopped, out of sympathy for the pope. All the gates were guarded, to prevent the pope being carried off if still in Rome.

This upset all the plans of the conspirators, who had made a mistake in remaining in the city. The prison was soon discovered, and a most determined attack was made on the place. The gates were burned, and battering-rams soon knocked down the outer walls.

In the meantime, some had gained entrance to the pope, had bound up his wounds and warmed him with additional clothing. An accomplice of Cenci threatened the pope with instant death, when a javelin from without laid the man dead at the pope's feet.

Cenci, feeling all hope of resistance was now vain, fell down at the feet of the pope, confessed the great sin he had committed, and begged for pardon. This was granted, but by way of penance he was ordered to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He started at once on his journey.

The pope, being liberated, proceeded to the same church, and there, in his tattered robes, went on with the mass from where he had left off the day before!

But Cenci and other enemies of the pope, found refuge at the emperor's court, and it became evident that the great conflict for power was to be between Henry IV. and Gregory VII.

Henry had been summoned to Rome by the pope; but instead of going, Henry proceeded to summon a synod of the clergy at Worms. It met on January 24th, 1076. It was called for the express purpose of deposing the pope. Cardinal Hugo Candidus was the emperor's spokesman.

The following charges were said to be proved against the pope: �

1. His inordinate ambition and intolerable pride, whereby flames of dissension had been spread in the church.

2. He had enfeebled the authority of the clergy.

3. He had suffered the name of Christ to be altogether eclipsed by his own.

4. He had twice sworn that he would not accept the papacy.

5. His election was irregular.

6. His conduct towards certain noble females had occasioned a scandal in the church, and decrees of the church had been settled in a small senate of women.

7. His slander and abuse of some of the clergy.

Lastly. For all these things they judged him unworthy of obedience as their apostolic head.

The document was signed by two archbishops and twenty-two bishops. Two other bishops objected that any one should be condemned without being heard. They were told they must resign their livings unless they signed. They gave way, and appended their names.

Henry's chancellor in Italy lost no time in publishing the document, and exhorted the people to join their king (for Henry IV. was still nominally king of Italy) in deposing the pope.

Henry also despatched a letter to the pope, proceeding thus: "Henry, by divine ordinance, king, to the false monk Hildebrand. . . . . Such is the merited salutation to one who, like you, hath dealt out confusion rather than peace, a curse instead of a blessing, to the catholic church. . . . . Hath he not, the blessed, the true pope, Peter, said, 'Fear God, honour the king'? But you dishonour us because you do not fear God. . . . . Now, therefore, seeing that you are smitten by the anathema, and by our judgment, and by the unanimous verdict of our bishops condemned and deposed, descend now from the chair you have usurped. . . . I, Henry, by the grace of God, king, with all my bishops, do command you, Hildebrand, to come down � and again I say, Come down."

The way adopted in delivering the king's letter added to the affront. One of the inferior clergy was sent as messenger. He chose the time when the pope sat in the Lateran, surrounded by the assembled clergy. He began, "My lord the king, and the bishops of the empire, do, by my mouth, command you, Hildebrand, without delay, to resign the chair of Peter; for it is unlawful for you to aspire to so lofty a place without the royal consent and investiture." Turning to the clergy, he said, "You, brethren, are hereby commanded that at the coming feast of Pentecost, you present yourselves before the king, to accept a pope at his hands, for this Hildebrand is not pope, neither is he your shepherd, but a wolf in the fold of the Lord."

The lay brethren rushed upon the king's messenger with drawn swords, and would have slain him then and there, had not the pope quickly wrapped his own mantle round him; thus saving the assembly from the charge of slaying the king's herald.

Gregory calmly addressed the assembled clergy, quoting, "It must needs be that offences come, but woe to that man by whom they come." Again, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."

Nevertheless, he proceeded to denounce Henry, and to declare him no longer emperor of Germany, saying, "I do hereby, for the honour and defence of the church, on behalf and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and by thy [the synod's] power and authority, inhibit and drive out Henry the king, son of Henry the emperor, from the crown, rule, and government of the kingdoms of Germany and Italy, and do absolve all christian men from the bond of the oath which they have sworn, or may hereafter swear unto him; and I do forbid all men from this time forward to serve or obey him as king."

We see in the above what a false position Henry took in seeking to usurp power in the church, over which he had no true power; while on the other hand, the pope, instead of obeying "the powers that be," acted directly contrary, and sought to dethrone the king, and impiously absolved those who had taken oath to obey their sovereign. Indeed, he did more, for he exhorted to civil war and bloodshed, quoting the passage, "Cursed be he that withholdeth the sword from blood."

The pope's condemnation was sent with all speed to all parts of Germany. As we have said, Henry IV. ruled his kingdom badly, and his Saxon subjects were often at variance with him. These, with all the king's enemies, gladly hailed the popes letters, and began to plot against the emperor. The clergy too began to waver; some indeed had secretly communicated with the pope, declaring that they had signed the resolutions of Worms by compulsion, and that they really sided with the pope. Others waited to see who would be victors in the great struggle.

Henry tried to make light of the pope's curse, but he began to see that some who had held with him were now lukewarm, and others deserted him altogether.

Through the pope's influence it was agreed to convoke a general convention of the estates of the German empire, to consider the question of the emperor and the pope. It assembled at Trebur, but was greatly under the influence of the pope. His legates were to exhort the convention to choose another king if Henry remained impenitent, that is, if he did not submit to the pope, But the pope's legates were not to hold any intercourse with the heads of the nation then assembled, until they had been purified from their defiled influence with their deposed king.

This being done, the impeachment of the king followed � raking up all that could be brought against him. In the meantime, he had his army and his enemies had theirs; but no result followed by the sword. Negotiations were tried; but the assembled nobles declared that as Henry was cut off from the church by "the sword of the apostolic anathema," they could hold no communion with him; the pope had also released them from their oath of obedience.

Henry's cause got worse and worse. Negotiations were opened, notwithstanding the above declaration, and it was proposed that the estates should wait till a year and a day from the time of the papal anathema, and if the king did not submit by that time, the pope should go to Augsburg, and with the estates, choose another king. In the meantime, Henry was to lay aside all signs of royalty.

Henry now saw that it was no use to resist any longer. He sought by all means, before the fatal day arrived, to meet and submit himself to the pope. On the other hand, his enemies sought to prevent his doing so. Henry sent to Rome, by Archbishop Udo of Treves, letters of submission, and a request that he might meet with the pope. The confederates besought the pope not to grant an interview, but to come himself to Germany and dispose of the king's matter.

The pope assured the confederates that he would come to Germany, and proposed to arrive at Mantua, January 8th, 1077. Henry thought that his only chance of success was to post off to Rome before the pope could cross the Alps. The confederates seized some of the passes, to prevent his egress into Italy; Mont Cenis alone remained open to him. By permission of William, duke of Burgundy, he passed into Savoy. There the duchess, his mother-in-law, demanded a grant of estates as her price for letting him pass. The worst part of his journey yet remained. The passes of the Alps were so blocked with snow and ice, that his progress seemed hopeless, but a path was cut by a number of labourers, to whom he promised large rewards, and he reached the summit; but to descend was even worse. His wife and child were wrapped in cow hides, and slid down by the guides. The men slipped down on their hands and knees; but at length the emperor landed with his small party on the plains of Lombardy.

Here many received him joyfully, but on passing into Italy, the pope's party as loudly denounced him. As soon as the pope heard of Henry's arrival in Italy, he thought it best to make himself secure in the strong castle at Canossa, belonging to his devout friend the countess Mathilda.

The clergy who had held with Henry were as anxious to be absolved as was the king. These had passed the Alps and hastened to Canossa, and there, with bare feet and clothed in sackcloth, they begged the pope's pardon. By way of penance, they were placed in solitary confinement, and fed on but one meal of bread and water in twenty-four hours.

Henry used the influence of others to beg the pope to grant him an interview, and he besought the countess Mathilda to intercede for him.

Henry being in Italy was not the same thing as his being in Germany. He had a powerful party in Lombardy, who might gain ascendancy over the pope's followers, and thus make him a prisoner. Still, after all the pope's protestations to the German confederates, he could not without much seeming hesitation grant an interview. At length, however, he agreed to receive him, providing the king would make full confession of his guilt, express repentance for the insults against the apostolic throne, obey in future the papal mandates, etc.

Henry was determined to agree to everything. On the appointed day he presented himself the castle. He was admitted to the first enclosure, where he was divested of all signs of royalty, clothed in a coarse woollen garment, and made to stand barefoot, fasting from morn till sunset. And thus he was kept for three days, waiting for the pope's permission for his admittance, until all were moved to beseech the pope to have pity on the king. The three days were 25th, 26th and 27th of January, 1077 � only six days before the year and a day had run out!

The conditions of absolution were: �

1. That Henry should submit himself to a general synod consisting of all the ecclesiastical and lay princes of the empire, as to whether, by the laws of the church, he was worthy to be their emperor.

2. That till the trial he should lay aside royalty.

3. That he should collect such taxes and revenues only as were necessary for support of him self and family.

4. That until that time his subjects should be absolved from their oaths.

5. That he should dismiss from his council all counsellors objected to by the pope.

6. That in case of acquittal he should in all things be obedient to the holy see.

7. That if he should fail in any of these things his absolution should become void.

The king solemnly pledged his oath to obey these conditions, and he was absolved.

Then followed a solemn and irreverent scene. The pope said, having been accused by the king, he would prove his innocence. Standing before the altar, with a piece of consecrated bread in his hand, he said, "May the body of the Lord, which I now take and receive in witness thereof, either free me from the guilt of the crimes thus laid to my charge, or, if guilty, strike me with sudden death!"

He swallowed part of the bread, and remained alive! A sensation ran through the company at that, which appeared to them, a certain proof of the pope's innocence.

Henry was now invited to give the same proofs of his innocence. But after consulting with his friends, he said he did not know definitely of what he was accused, and thus in his case such a proceeding would have no meaning.

One cannot but be struck with the dreadful profanity of using the bread of the Lord's supper for such a purpose, and that too by one calling himself the successor of Peter. The forbearance of the man of the world should have put the pope to shame.

One can hardly suppose that the pope really thought that Henry could or would fulfil the above conditions. To be emperor, and yet to lay aside all signs of royalty, was ridiculous. Indeed, the conditions seem to have been purposely drawn up so as to keep Henry in check by the proposed synod, while at the same time it might seem as if the pope were acting in good faith towards the confederates.

In fact, the conditions settled nothing, and the confederates soon complained of the way they had been treated. Though a synod had been spoken of, no time had been named for its assembling. Eventually the estates assembled together and chose another emperor � Rudolf of Swabia.

No sooner did Henry leave the pope than in Lombardy he was assailed with reproaches for humbling himself before the pope in the way he had done. Here he could soon have raised an army, but he hastened back to Germany.

We must not follow him in his struggles with his subjects. Rudolf was slain, and when Henry gained power, he marched into Italy to avenge himself on the pope. Henry had assembled another council, and had again deposed the pope, and had appointed Guibert (or Wibert), archbishop of Ravenna, to be pope as Clement III.

Henry's army reached the gates of Rome; but the pope had allied himself with Robert Guiscard. the Norman conqueror of Apulia and Sicily, and the city being well defended, Henry was unable to take it. He tried again the next year (1082) and the year following, but without success.

A council was called of those in Rome in 1083, to try and settle the questions at issue between the pope and Henry. All were desirous of peace, but the pope would not yield, and things remained as they were.

In the next year Henry was invited to enter Rome by some who were dissatisfied with the pope. Henry acceded to the request, took possession of the Lateran and the principal parts of the city. Gregory fled for refuge into the castle of St. Angelo, and Clement III. was proclaimed pope. He crowned Henry in St. Peter's, who was hailed as king by acclamation.

But Robert Guiscard was approaching with his army, and Henry left the city and retired to Tuscany. Guiscard took his place in the city under the pretence of aiding the pope, but his army pillaged the city, and committed many atrocities. They set the city on fire, and carried away many inhabitants and sold them as slaves.

Gregory, on leaving his castle, called another council, in which, for the fourth time, he excommunicated Henry and Guibert. But Henry had now power enough to care nothing for the pope's anathemas.

Gregory, not feeling himself safe in Rome when Guiscard left, went with him to Salerno, but took hostages from Rome to ensure their future submission. The pope died the next year, 1085.

One of the great things contended for by Gregory was that he, and he alone, had power to invest the clergy with authority, and not only at Rome, but in every other place; whereas Henry would not agree to this. The clergy appointed by Rome were too much under Roman influence to serve the emperor. He would appoint his own clergy. If they were dependent on him, he could count on them to serve him and carry out his purposes.

Alas, that the church of God should have thus become a mere citadel, open to the attacks of, and governed by, a merely worldly man, and made to serve his purposes, right or wrong! or, on the other hand, to be ruled and used by such a crafty man as Gregory VII., who did not scruple to depose the emperor when he would not obey his mandates, in direct opposition, as we have seen, to the exhortation to "obey the powers that be" in worldly matters.

The papal chair was vacant for a year, at the expiration of which Victor III. was elected; then in 1088 Urban II., in whose time the Crusades commenced.

Chapter 10.

The Crusades.

Christians had for a long period been induced to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and visit the holy sepulchre.

There was a sort of merit attached to the accomplishment of this object, though it is now difficult to see in what the merit consisted. Some of the best in the church discouraged pilgrimages, knowing well what evils attended the mixing of so many men and women promiscuously together. Others, however, upheld it, and many hundreds made their way yearly to the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem.

While this place was in the custody of the Caliphs of Bagdad, and of those of Egypt, Christians were allowed to come and go as they pleased, and carry on their devotions unhinderedly. The Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid had even sent keys of the sepulchre as a present to Charlemagne. But when, later on, the Turks had conquered Palestine, things were changed. Christians were molested and insulted in various ways, their riches being a great temptation to the needy Turks.

On their return, from time to time, the whole of Europe was stirred by the recital of the insults the christian pilgrims had received.

How wise it would have been to have stayed away, and to have worshipped God at home. There is not a word in the scriptures about taking pilgrimages to Jerusalem or anywhere else. But it had now become popular, either as a test of devotion to the One who had lain in that sepulchre, or in certain cases as a penance for some fault they had committed.

About A.D. 1064, a rumour arose that the last day was near, and some 7000 pilgrims made the journey to Jerusalem but they were repeatedly attacked, and only about 2000 returned! From this arose such a bitter cry for vengeance on their enemies, the Turks, that the whole of Christendom was roused. Pope Sylvester II., about sixty years before, had preached a crusade, but all held back from taking the sword. Now fresh efforts were made to arouse men to action.

Peter the Hermit eventually felt called upon to make this his mission. He had been a soldier in his youth, but when grown up he deserted his wife and entered a monastery, and afterwards became a hermit. He had visited Jerusalem as a pilgrim, and had had his spirit stirred within him when he witnessed the insults and robbery of the pilgrims. He suggested to the patriarch of Jerusalem to apply to Constantinople for redress, but the empire was too feeble to accomplish anything for them. The Christians of the West must be entreated to give aid by their prayers, if not by their arms.

Peter returned to Rome and visited the pope, relating to him the scenes he had witnessed, and repeated the request of the patriarch. He added that in the holy sepulchre he had seen the Saviour Himself in a vision, who had charged him to arouse the Christians of the West to wrest the Holy Land from the infidels.

Pope Urban II. listened to the recital, and then, without committing himself, bid Peter traverse the country and see what effects his preaching would have.

This was Peter's mission � to rouse Christians everywhere to what was called the Holy War. He went mounted on his mule. He was a strange looking man, was short, lean, and of a dark complexion, with a large head and a piercing eye. His dress was very rough, with a thick cord round his waist, his head uncovered, and his feet bare. His speech was rude but earnest, and crowds of the high and low listened to his tales of woes that haunted the feet of the pilgrims, and the shame that would attach to Christians generally if they let the Holy Land remain in the hands of the infidels. He read letters from the patriarch and others, and even, historians say, professed to have had a letter from heaven itself! At times he would weep, sigh, groan, beat his breast, while he kissed the crucifix he carried.

Such appeals gained many to his cause, so that, indeed, he had to restrain some that would have seized arms and at once have followed him to the Holy Land. Alms and gifts were bestowed on him freely, and many sought his advice in their difficulties. These he entered into, and was the means of reconciling enemies, and of reforming the profligate. But nothing was allowed long to hinder his mission � to arouse Christendom to the Holy War. He returned to Rome, and related to Urban his great success.

At this time there were two popes: Urban II. and Clement III., and it appeared to the former that if he took up the cause of the Holy War it might seat him more firmly in the papal chair, and might be the means of again uniting the eastern and the western churches, which would also be to his advantage. He resolved to patronise the movement, or rather become its head.

A council was summoned at Piacenza in 1095: it was attended by 200 bishops, 4000 clergy, and 30,000 laity. It was held in a plain near the city � no building could hold the people. The holy war was set forth, and agreed to: many bound themselves to go forth to release the Holy Land. A few other things were carried also at this council. Heresies were condemned, and curses pronounced on Clement, called the antipope.

But as Italy did not take up the matter with enthusiasm, Urban resolved to agitate the subject in France. A difficulty presented itself, for Philip, king of France, had been excommunicated by some of the clergy for divorcing his wife Bertha and marrying Bertrada, wife of Fulk, count of Anjou. Philip raised the plea that Bertrada was not the true wife of Fulk, because of being related. Urban had restored the king, on his promising to separate from Bertrada, but Philip had not kept his promise.

A council was called to meet at Clermont in Auvergne, in November, 1095. There were fourteen archbishops, two hundred and twenty-five bishops, and about one hundred abbots, with a number of strangers. The villages were filled with occupants, and some had to resort to sleep in tents.

Canons were passed against simony, pluralities, etc., and then it went a step beyond former councils, namely, that no ecclesiastic should swear allegiance to any temporal lord. The great aim was to make the clergy answerable to the pope only, and not to any king or ruler. Philip was again excommunicated, but this caused little commotion now, for men's minds were all anxiously filled with the subject of the holy war.

At length the day arrived when this was to be brought forward. It was done in the marketplace, where Urban ascended a pulpit, and vast throngs surrounded him. He told of the ancient glories of Palestine, on which the feet of the Saviour and His Virgin Mother had trod. God's interest still in the land was also declared to be proved by the miracle, that the lamps of the holy sepulchre were lit from heaven at the season of the Saviour's passion! A miracle, Urban said, that ought to soften all but hearts of flint.

He detailed the hardships, insults, and injuries inflicted on the pilgrims by the cruel children of the Egyptian handmaid, and he appealed to many standing there who had witnessed these atrocities.

He spoke of the encroachments of the Turks on Christendom, and the great fear there was for Constantinople, the treasury of so many famous relics!

"Cast out the bondwoman and her son," he cried; "let all the faithful arm. Go forth, and God shall be with you. . . . Let the famous nation of the Franks display their valour in a cause where death is the assurance of blessedness. Count it joy to die for Christ where Christ died for you. Think not of kindred or home; you owe to God a higher love; for a christian every place is exile, every place is home and country."

Thus spoke Urban, but he went further and told his hearers how easy was the remedy for sin he now proposed: for all penance should be relaxed in favour of those who should go forth to the holy war! Indeed, he began now for the first time to preach the dreadful soul-deceiving error of Indulgences. Full forgiveness of sins was promised, and this without even penance. A writer of the time saw that a new method for the cleansing of sins had been invented. Shame on any one calling himself a Christian to issue so false a thing as indulgences, and this, too, by one claiming for himself to be Christ's vicar or representative on earth!

It is recorded that thousands gave ready adherence to the cause, some calling out as Urban spoke, "It is the will of God;" and this became their war cry. They attached a cross to their breasts, and were thus called Crusaders. To keep up the solemn farce, a cardinal stepped forth and made a confession of sins in the name of all who were to share in the war, and then the pope pronounced absolution on them. This was all a solemn mockery, for there had been no real confession of sins at all. If those carrying on this deception knew no better, it was really the blind leading the blind into the bottomless pit of destruction.

Raymond, the count of Toulouse, was the most prominent of the crusaders. Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, also declared his intention of joining the army. The festival of the Assumption (August 15th) in the following year was settled as the day the crusaders should set out.

Enthusiasm ran high. Women urged their husbands and their sons to take the cross, and those who refused, unless circumstances prevented, became marked men. Property was sold or mortgaged to raise funds, and workmen sold their tools and utensils; the price of property fell, and the price of horses and arms rose considerably.

Those who took the cross were a motley group, for many in debt took this means of getting release, and even robbers, pirates, and outlaws were said to be among the absolved bearers of the cross. Many had nothing to lose but their lives, and this they would risk in the hope of the spoils they might obtain. Even monks rushed forth to join the army.

Wondrous tales were told of signs of approval from heaven, besides Peter's letter already spoken of, and one monk declared that the cross which he bore on his body had been imprinted there by a miracle. Unfortunately for him, it was afterwards found out that he had been at his wits' end, not knowing how to find the means for his outfit, when he hit upon that pretension, and then he had plenty given him. But, alas, though while among honest men such an act of deception would have ruined a man's character, here it was overlooked, and he was even promoted afterwards to be archbishop of Caesarea!

The movement so rapidly gained adherents that, long before the appointed time, people were eager to set out, and Peter was urged to lead them to the conflict. He could not restrain them, and so crossed the Rhine at Cologne at their head. A knight, named Walter, of Pacy, and his nephew, Walter "the Penniless," were also leaders. These latter went on with the more vigorous of the troops, leaving Peter to follow with the others. Another group was led by a priest named Gottschalk; and another by Count Emicho, a man of known violent and lawless character. Each succeeding company was lower in character than that which had preceded it, the last being quite the refuse of the community, among them being women and mere children, some were without arms, and had no idea of the distance nor of the dangers of the march.

But a new thought struck some of the reckless followers. As they passed through some of the places they were attracted by the wealth of the Jews. Why go so far to attack God's enemies when before their eyes were Jews, than whom no nation is more bitter in enmity to Christ? So they attacked and plundered the Jews, putting some to death. The bishops did what they could to rescue the Jews by permitting a temporary profession of Christianity; but it is recorded that some of the more zealous Jews shut themselves up in their houses, put their children to death, and set fire to their houses, disappointing their enemies by perishing with their property.

No proper provision had been made for feeding these bands, and they were not over-particular in helping themselves by plunder. The later parties had to suffer for the misdeeds of those who had gone before, and the inhabitants of Hungary and Bulgaria were enraged against them. Gottschalk and his party were destroyed in Hungary. Others were turned back on the frontiers, and found their way home as well as they could, to tell a tale of hardship and disappointment.

The elder Walter died at Philippopoli, leaving his nephew and Peter to struggle on with their bands. They eventually reached Constantinople, much reduced in numbers, but yet a formidable army, if such a group can be so called. The emperor Alexius would have been glad of any who could stem the torrent of the Turkish conquests, but he was not a little troubled by such a multitude, whose thefts and disorders disturbed the whole place. Peter somewhat quieted the emperor by his eloquent appeals, and he desired to wait for the later groups; but those with him demanded to be led to the scene of action. The emperor was only too glad to get rid of such a company by carrying them over the Bosphorus.

A battle took place under the walls of Nicaea, then the Turkish capital. Walter the Penniless was killed and most of his followers. An immense pile of their bones was raised as a monument by the Turks. Peter escaped with a few others. These sold their arms to Alexius, and made their way home in any way they could. It has been estimated that not less than half a million of human beings perished in this foolish enterprise.

But meanwhile more regular armies were being enrolled in the various countries of Europe except Spain, which was too much taken up with its internal war with the Saracens. Germany seemed at first to be another exception, for, being opposed to Urban, his preachers had not traversed that country. However, as party after party passed through Germany, though at first laughed at as fanatics, yet in time the Germans also were induced to take the cross, wonderful tales being told them of heaven's approval of the holy war by signs and wonders.

Godfrey of Bouillon, son of Count Eustace of Boulogne, stood forth as leader, together with his brothers Eustace and Baldwin; Hugh of Vermandois, brother of the king of France; the Counts Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Flanders, and Stephen of Blois; and Robert, duke of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror.

Each party was independent of the others, and this constantly led to disasters. They had agreed to take different routes so as not to overburden any one of the countries intervening, but all were to meet at Constantinople. This again raised the fears of the emperor Alexius, and he managed to get each party to cross the Bosphorus into Asia before others arrived. All had crossed, by Whitsuntide, 1097.

As the crusaders approached Nicaea they saw the huge pile of bones that told the tale of their predecessors. This excited them to revenge, and the siege began in earnest. It lasted from May 14th to June 20th, but when the city was captured it was found to have been made over secretly to Alexius, and no longer belonged to the Turks. A fortnight later an important battle was won at Dorylaeum, attributed, by the Christians, to help being sent direct from heaven. The defeated Sultan retired to safer quarters.

The leaders were in no way united, and Baldwin accepted an invitation to assist a christian prince of Edessa. His subjects had revolted against him, and Baldwin went to his aid; but his subjects threw him over the wall of the city, and Baldwin succeeded in gaining the city and became its ruler.

The rest of the crusaders marched on, and laid siege to Antioch. This lasted eight months, during which they suffered fearfully. By the heavy rains their camp was a swamp, and famine at length greatly enfeebled them. They ate the flesh of horses, dogs, and mice; leather and bark, grass and thistles became their food. Disease also cut off many, and their case was becoming hopeless. Some of the knights slipped away, among them Stephen of Blois: he met Alexius, marching with reinforcements. Stephen said the siege was hopeless, and the emperor turned back. Peter the Hermit also deserted, but was fetched back and compelled to remain. Notwithstanding all these distresses, the licentiousness in the camp was disgraceful, especially as the crusaders were professed Christians. Adhemar, the papal legate, compelled them to remove all the women from the camp, to give up gaming, and to seek deliverance by pious devotions.

As the spring advanced, the condition of the crusaders improved. Provisions were obtained, and by means of a deserter the city was captured, but not the fortress. They did not, however, profit by experience, but wasted their provisions; this soon led to yet greater distresses, for a large force of Turks, under Kerboga prince of Mosul, attacked the place, and no provisions could be brought to them. The famine became so severe that they fed on human flesh! The strong men were enfeebled, and all became careless of life.

In the midst of their distress, a priest of Marseilles, Peter Bartholomes, professed to have a revelation from St. Andrew, that the lance which pierced the side of the Saviour was to be found in the church of St. Peter! A search was set on foot, and after a day's work the head of a lance was found. Now despair was changed to enthusiasm, and all who could rushed out, carrying with them the holy lance.

The Turks were divided among themselves, and this unexpected attack caused them to fly from the place, and the crusaders found abundance of spoil; they again ascribed their victory to warriors from heaven, and were once more in good cheer; but the unburied bodies so tainted the air that some were carried off by disease, and among them the legate Adhemar. The fortress was soon after delivered to them.

News was sent to Rome of the capture of Antioch, and the pope was invited to come himself and take possession of the ancient see of St. Peter. In the meantime, Bohemund was elected prince of Antioch, though he proceeded with the others to Jerusalem.

Doubts afterwards arose as to the holy lance, the discovery of which had led to their late victory � was it likely that a revelation should have been made to such a disreputable man as the priest Peter? Besides, the lance was declared to be of Saracen manufacture, and could not be ancient: Peter must be a deceiver! To settle the question he was required to undergo the ordeal of passing between two burning piles. If he came out unhurt he was innocent; if he was burnt, he was guilty. He was much scorched, but his admirers, seeing him come from the fires, took him to be unhurt, and they thronged around him to obtain pieces of his clothes as relics; but he fell, and, in tearing his clothes off his back, they brought away pieces of his flesh, which led to his death a few days after.

The crusaders tarried at Antioch to regain their strength until March of the next year (1099). They had come to that place 300,000 in number, but were now reduced to 40,000, and even a less number than this were fit for service. Before they reached Jerusalem, news was brought them that the Fatimite Arabs had gained a victory over the Turks, and now possessed Jerusalem, and they were willing to let the pilgrims visit the holy sepulchre unmolested, if the crusaders would retire. But the Christians could not let the place be held by any followers of the false prophet. On June 6th the cry was raised, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" They were indeed in sight of their long-looked-for destination. They would have liked to have trodden the earth around the holy city with unshod feet, but feared the enemy.

A hermit of Mount Olivet pointed out to the eager multitude the various places that corresponded to the scenes of the sacred narratives, and the Christians who had been expelled from Jerusalem, poured into their ears thrilling tales of the Turks' cruelty, and of the profanation of the holy places. The zeal of the crowds led them to attack the place at once, but they were repulsed. Later on, a second and a third attempt were also fruitless.

They now began to suffer from hunger and thirst. The brooks were dried up, and the cisterns had been destroyed, or the water poisoned. Water was brought from a long distance and sold at high prices. Their horses and mules had to be led six miles away to find water.

The crusaders were almost in despair, but Godfrey now raised their hopes by declaring that he had seen on Mount Olivet a warrior from heaven, waving his bright shield as a signal for another attack. It was also said that some of their dead companions were seen in front of their army. Another desperate attack was made, and Jerusalem was taken! It is recorded to have been on a Friday at three o'clock � the same day and hour as the Saviour's death! It was July 15th, 1099.

But now these christian warriors disgraced themselves with lust and slaughter: they spared neither man, woman, nor child. If life was promised by some, it was taken by others; seventy thousand Mussulmans were put to death, the blood running, it is recorded, to the horses' knees. The Jews were burnt in their synagogue.

Happily there were exceptions to this disgraceful conduct. Godfrey, dressed as a pilgrim, repaired to the holy sepulchre and thanked God for giving them possession of the holy city: others did not forget their devotions, but again returned to their revenge, and for three days Jerusalem ran with blood.

Godfrey was chosen king of Jerusalem, but he refused to wear a golden crown where the Saviour had been crowned with thorns: he was content to be called Defender and Baron of the holy sepulchre.

About a month later, a large body of Saracens arrived � too late to save Jerusalem, but too formidable to be despised. Godfrey collected his forces, and was again victorious at the battle of Askelon.

As the victory over their enemies seemed now complete, a large body of the crusaders returned to Europe, after first bathing in the river Jordan. They carried with them palm-branches from Jericho, and any relics they could obtain. Peter the hermit had been permitted to see his mission brought to a successful issue. He also returned, and ended his days in a monastery of his own founding at Huy, near Liege.

Godfrey's dominion was at first confined to Jerusalem and Joppa, with the surrounding territory, but was afterwards extended. The French language was established, and useful laws put forth. Godfrey died, August 17, 1100, and was succeeded by his brother, Baldwin of Edessa. Multitudes of pilgrims now visited Jerusalem, excited by the toils and dangers their brethren had passed through.

Internal disputes arose in Jerusalem. The patriarch had been of the Greek church, now one of the Latin church was chosen, and the Greeks were treated as schismatics; nor were the Latins agreed among themselves, the clergy striving for power over each other, and then over the king.

In reviewing the subject of the crusades, it must not be overlooked that in many there may have been a sincere desire to see the holy land wrested from the power of the infidels. Some were sent on pilgrimages to Jerusalem as a penance, and to them, if they must go, it was of importance that they should be able to go and return unmolested. As to any merit being attached to such a pilgrimage, it was merely a superstitious illusion. We have also seen that the pope, Urban, espoused the cause to further his own ends, and to raise himself in power. This it did, not only in giving him influence all over Europe, but by giving him a footing in the East where otherwise his influence would have been called in question.

The worst feature in the whole thing was the absolution uttered over the heads of the crusaders, leaving them to indulge in every sin and wickedness, with the promise of salvation, because they were engaged in that holy war!

God, indeed, may have overruled it, to stay for a time the further conquests of the Mahometans. Constantinople was, for the time, thus saved. Christendom had been punished by that scourge � a time of repentance was now given them: would they learn wisdom by the chastening they had received, or must God again allow still further punishment? We shall see that more indeed was needed.

A short account of the other crusades, and of Jerusalem itself, may be of interest.

II. The second crusade went forth (1147) because Jerusalem was in danger, in consequence of the conquest of Edessa by the Mahometans. Eugene III. was head of the movement, and Bernard of Clairvaux preached the crusade in France and Germany. He prophesied victory: even God Himself, he said, would smite the infidels. Two large armies went forth under Conrad III. of Germany and Lewis VII. of France. But the emperor at Constantinople (Manuel I.) was more afraid of the crusaders than of the Turks, so he made peace secretly with the latter; and chiefly by his treachery, the German army was wasted in the defiles of Asia Minor. The French also suffered severely. They attacked Damascus, but disease and treachery brought it all to an end. Great indignation filled Germany and France. Bernard, to save his credit as a prophet, declared that the sins of the army had prevented victory.

III. In 1187 Jerusalem was taken by Saladin. Gregory VIII. preached another crusade. Frederic Barbarossa of Germany, Philippe Auguste of France, and Richard I. ( Coeur-de-Leon ) of England, led forth their armies. Frederic Barbarossa was drowned in the Kalykadnus: his son Frederic of Suabia took command. They all met at Acre; but the siege was long, and some three hundred thousand perished ere the place was taken. Philippe Auguste returned to France. Richard, after other conflicts, obtained permission for christian pilgrims to visit Jerusalem, and he returned, but was taken prisoner by Duke Leopold of Austria, and sold by him to the emperor, Henry VI., who, to the scandal of the whole christian world, demanded an immense ransom.

IV. This was preached by Innocent III. (1203). It reached Venice, but, unable to pay the heavy sum demanded to transfer the army of twenty thousand, it turned aside to Dalmatia, and won Zara for Venice, and then conquered Constantinople (April 12, 1204), and established a Latin empire under Baldwin of Flanders, one of the leaders of the crusade. They never reached the Holy Land.

The pope was scandalised, and summoned a new army. He was answered by children. Thousands of children, boys and girls, rushed forth to go to the war. They reached Italy, but melted away by hunger, disease, and in the slave-markets.

Other troops were collected by Andrew II. of Hungary and Count William of Holland, but they did not reach the Holy Land. They became a sort of robber band, and went to Egypt where they perished.

V., VI., VII. The failure of the last-named troops was attributed to the emperor Frederic II., who had taken the cross, but refused to go. The pope (Gregory IX.) interfered and compelled him to embark (August 15, 1227), but he soon returned, declaring he was unwell. The pope was much annoyed, and excommunicated him. The next year he embarked again, and was successful. He conquered Palestine, and by a treaty was crowned king of Jerusalem (1229). He returned to Europe, defying the pope and his excommunication.

In 1247 the Turks again overran Palestine and again took Jerusalem.

In the next year, Louis IX. of France reached Cyprus with a large army, and spent the winter there. In 1249 he went to Egypt and conquered Damietta and Mansura; but, on attempting to reach the Holy Land, he suffered severe losses and was compelled to surrender with his army. It cost France most of its wealth to redeem its king and its army in 1254.

Notwithstanding this disaster, Louis would not give up the idea of rescuing the Holy Land from the infidels. He raised another army in 1269, and, followed by the French nobility, he conquered Tunis, but died there, August 24, 1270. His son Philippe III. made peace, and gave up the enterprise. This was the last of the crusades.

Jerusalem has had many masters. In 1799 it was held by the French under Bonaparte; but in 1517 it passed into the hands of the Ottoman Sultan. The pasha of Egypt took possession in 1832. In 1841 it was again restored to the Sultan. It continues thus to this day.

There is a time coming when God will favour Zion, and then again Jerusalem will surely be wrested from the infidels, and put into the possession of � not the Christians, but of God's ancient people the Jews. They are now despised, and have to wail over the desecration of their city but then they shall surely become masters of their own city, though they indeed must be brought through the fire and purified: but, owning Christ as the Messiah, full blessing awaits them, and that in the very city now in the possession of the infidels.

Chapter 11.

The Inquisition.

What is generally called the Inquisition was not the commencement of persecution for what was considered to be heresy. As early as the end of the fourth century, Priscillianus was put to death on this plea. He was condemned first by a council held at Bordeaux, A.D. 384, and then he appealed to the emperor Maximus, who caused his case to be investigated by the prefect. On his report, Maximus ordered him, with six others, who, under torture, had confessed impure practices, to be beheaded. This has been considered to be the first case in the church of persons being judicially put to death for heresy.* A bishop named Ithacius was his principal accuser, and this was at that time considered by Ambrose and others so unbecoming to the office of bishop, that he was excommunicated, and died in exile. So that it is evident that such dealing with heretics did not meet with the approval of some of the best in the church at that time.

{*Priscillianus held a doctrine combining Gnosticism and Unitarianism, with an admixture of astrology.}

The emperor Justinian (A.D. 527-565), in his Code, treats of the Catholic faith, as settled by the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, forbids public disputations upon dogmas, and enacts penalties against heretics, Jews and apostates. Persons were appointed to assist in the prosecution of the guilty, but at that date they were civil officers; and, for a time, cases of heresy were tried in the ordinary courts, and penalties awarded.

As time rolled on, the bishops examined those who were charged with heresy, and if these did not renounce their errors they were handed over to the civil powers for punishment; but the hunting for heretics was not yet general, nor was everything considered to be heresy which deviated from "the Church." As we have seen, the councils were to be the test; but in due course the church became everything.

Pope Alexander III. (A.D. 1159-1181) being driven from Rome by an anti-pope, proceeded to France. King Henry II. of England and Louis VII. of France, held the bridle of the pope as he rode on horseback through the town of Cosne, on the Loire.

There had been a great religious awakening in some parts of France. To crush this, Alexander called a council at Tours, in A.D. 1163. Seventeen cardinals (including Thomas � Becket) and one hundred and twenty-four bishops attended. As its canons may be said to be the first acts of the church of Rome essentially inquisitorial, we will give a part of its decision: �

Because of heresies existing in Toulouse, and elsewhere, "We command the bishops and all the Lord's priests dwelling in those parts, to keep watch, and under peril of anathema, to prohibit that, where followers of that heresy are known, any one in the country shall dare to offer them refuge, or to lend them help. Neither shall there be any dealings with such persons in buying or selling; that, all solace of humanity being utterly lost to them, they may be compelled to forsake the error of their life. And whosoever shall attempt to contravene this order shall be smitten with anathema, as a partaker of their iniquity. But they, if they be taken, shall be thrown into prison by Catholic princes, and be deprived of all their goods." All meetings of heretics were strictly forbidden.

It should be noticed, that not only were those called heretics to be punished, but all their goods were to be forfeited. As we shall see, this became a frightful incentive to greedy priests to bring accusations against the rich, for they themselves shared in the confiscated goods of their victims.

Pope Innocent III. (A.D. 1198-1216) was exceedingly zealous in rooting out any called heretics. He summoned a fourth council of the Lateran in 1215, where new and severe enactments were passed against such as not simply differed from the general councils of the church, but all who differed from the church of Rome, with its errors and superstitions. The bishops were now to be the judges.

In this council it was enacted: "Persons marked with suspicion only, unless they can clear themselves, are to be smitten with the sword of anathema, and shunned by every one. If then they persist for a year in excommunication, they shall be condemned as heretics."

At a council held at Toulouse in 1229, it was ordered that a permanent Inquisition should be established against heretics; but it was not till pope Gregory IX., in 1233, had deprived the bishops of the power of punishing heretics, and entrusted the work to the Dominicans, that it took a permanent form as a separate tribunal. It was called the Holy Inquisition, and its officers Inquisitors of the Faith.

At first it was comparatively simple in its action, and acted as an ordinary court of Justice; but by degrees the Inquisitors extended their powers, and degenerated into tyrants. They not only professed to judge actions and words, but thoughts and intentions. If they wanted to convict an accused person, they would apply torture, and if they could get a confession of even a thought against the church of Rome, it was enough to convict of heresy. And it was always easy to suspect one of heresy, and then to deny that such a one had cleared himself.

Any person was allowed to accuse any of his enemies, and the accused, when he least expected it � at the dead of night sometimes � was aroused by their agents, and dragged off to their prison. Inquiries were useless; the accused would not be told who were his accusers; he must simply reply to the questions asked. Everything was marked by secrecy.

The tortures also were dreadful � too dreadful to be detailed. Joints were dislocated, tender parts of the body scorched, etc., till numbers would confess anything to save themselves such torments.

The property of the condemned being confiscated, was, as we have seen, a great temptation to avaricious men to accuse and convict.

When tortures failed to get the desired confession, other plans were tried. For instance, another person, apparently in great distress, would be put in the same cell; he would profess that he also was an accused person, and he would rate out against the church of Rome and his persecutors, and seek to draw from the accused some response to his suggestions.

Or one would come professedly to console the accused, and to assure him that anything he might confess to him should never be known: indeed, he would use his influence to procure his liberation if he opened his mind to him. Such diabolical snares were only too often successful.

One case is recorded where a mother and two daughters were suspected. One of the daughters was arrested and examined, offered relief if she would confess; but she would confess nothing. The following plan was adopted. The inquisitor ordered her into his presence, and then bid all his attendants to leave the room. When alone, he declared that he had fallen in love with her, and was really anxious to save her. This he repeated day after day with endearing words; but one day he told her that her mother and sister had been arrested, and all was known as to them. If she would confess, he would be able to save them as well as herself. She was thus taken off her guard, and told all. The very next day she was summoned into the presence of others and her confession, thus drawn from her, was used to condemn herself, as well as her mother and sister! Such treachery was not considered any disgrace, but was treated as great cleverness. The end would justify the means.

Those who were condemned to death were often kept waiting for months until more were also ready, that several being burnt to death at one time might strike terror into the hearts of all, and warn them of the danger they ran in differing from the then all-powerful church of Rome.

Auto-de-F�, Act of Faith, was the name given to these executions. They took place on the Sunday, when people were more at leisure to be present. A procession was led forth from the prison, the victims being dressed in coats, on which there were pictures of flames, with figures of dragons and demons, and huge caps on their heads. Those who were only to do penance were dressed differently: a cross told that they were not to be burnt. If any were 'converted' to the Romish faith just before being led out or at the stake, they had the privilege of being strangled before being burnt!

Some of the victims had gags in their mouths, lest they should speak to the people or reveal any secrets. "This I saw done to a prisoner," says Dr. Geddes, in his account of the Inquisition in Portugal, "presently, after he came out of the gates of the Inquisition, upon his having looked up to the sun which he had not seen for several years, and cried out in a rapture, 'How is it possible for people that behold that glorious body to worship any being but Him that created it?'"

When the place of execution was reached, prayers were offered up, and a sermon preached in praise of the Inquisition and in condemnation of all heretics. Those who were not ' converted ' at the stake were told, by the priests, that they were left to the devil who was at their elbow to carry their souls to perdition.

Even at the execution cruelty reigned; for the victims were often slowly burnt to death. This was witnessed also by Dr. Geddes. He says: "The victims were chained to stakes at the height of about four feet from the ground. A quantity of furze that lay round the stakes was set on fire; by a current of wind it was in some cases prevented reaching above the lowest extremities of the body. Some were thus kept in torture for an hour or two, and were actually roasted, not burnt to death." He also adds that such a sight was witnessed by both sexes with marks of joy and satisfaction. This was not because they were cruel naturally, but it was through their zeal for their religion! Can such religion be that of the Lord Jesus?

The Jews and the Moors in Spain.

One of the dark pictures of the Inquisition is the expulsion of the Jews from Granada in Spain. The Moors, while still in possession of this place, were marked out as victims; but it was thought best to commence with the Jews. An order was obtained from the king of Spain � professedly given reluctantly � that all Jews should become Christians or be banished from the country. Both the king and the Inquisitor wanted money, and here was a rich harvest ready for them.

The charge was that the Jews perverted Christians by their superstition, and idle tales were circulated as to the Jews profaning some of the sacred wafers of the Mass.

Four months were given to the Jews to decide what they would do, and to sell their property if they would not become Christians; but it was cunningly added that they must not carry away "gold, silver, money, or other articles prohibited by the laws of the country."

Rabbi Abarbanel, well known to Hebrew scholars, and much respected and formerly employed by the king himself, sought an interview with the king and queen (Ferdinand and Isabella) at the Alhambra. He implored pity on his nation, and offered to lay down as ransom six hundred thousand crowns of gold. Time after time he came and on his knees besought them: "Regard us, O king, use not thy servants so cruelly. Why do thus to thy servants? Rather exact from us our gold and silver, and all that the house of Israel possesses, if we may remain in the country."

It is said that the queen exhorted the king to resist the appeal. Years before she had tried to convert the Jews to Romanism, and now her heart seemed hardened against them.

The king indeed seemed disposed to yield. An offer of so much money was a temptation. He could keep all that would be given in this way, whereas if it came to confiscation, he would only get a share of the spoil.

But the inquisitor, Torquemada, was on the watch. He rushed into the room, and holding up a crucifix, shouted out, "Judas sold the Son of God once for thirty pieces of silver: your highnesses are going to sell Him the second time for thirty thousand. Here He is! Here you have Him! Sell Him if you will!" And then, flinging the crucifix on the table, he left the room in a rage. The Inquisition conquered. Such 'christian' sovereigns could not be unfaithful to the church. The Jews must be expelled.

Torquemada lost no time in carrying out the edict. Preachers were sent over the country offering baptism to the Jews, or, on their refusal, Christians were forbidden to hold any intercourse with them or give them shelter.

An eye-witness thus describes their distress. "Within the term fixed by the edict the Jews sold and disposed of their property for a mere nothing. They went about begging Christians to buy, but found no purchasers. Fine houses and estates were sold for trifles. A house was exchanged for an ass, and a vineyard given for a little cloth or linen. Although forbidden to carry away gold or silver, they secretly took large quantities in their saddles, and in the halters and harness of their loaded beasts They experienced great trouble and suffered indescribable misfortunes on the roads and country they travelled; some falling, others rising; some dying, others coming into the world; some fainting, others attacked with illness; so that there was not a Christian who did not feel for them, and entreat them to be baptised." All their synagogues were left, and these were turned into places for the Mass, without any compensation.

In some respects the treatment of the Moors was more unjust than that of the Jews; for at the surrender of Granada the religion of the Moors was not to be interfered with. It was really the Inquisition which eventually caused the king to break the treaty.

Don Fray Hernando was desirous to see the Moors converted. He was willing to give up a more lucrative office to live among them. His offer was accepted, and he was consecrated archbishop of Granada.

His gentle spirit and spotless life won the Moors. He caused the scriptures to be translated into Arabic for their use, and set to work to learn the language in his old age. The Mahometans heard him willingly, a few at a time being invited to private houses. And all things looked hopeful.

But such ways of spreading the gospel did not please those who surrounded the king and queen. The Moors must be converted at a faster rate, or banished from the country. The remaining king of the Moors must first be got rid of. He had retired to Alpujarra, as agreed, and lived in retirement. One day he was surprised by a visit from his representative, who came with mules laden with eighty thousand ducats. He was coolly told that his estates had been sold for this amount, and he was advised to leave the country with his wealth while he could. Treachery had brought all this about. Overwhelmed with grief, he left Spain.

The inquisitors now worked upon Ferdinand and Isabella to insist on conversion or emigration. This was contrary to the terms of the surrender, but the Romanists declared that it would not be breaking the compact, inasmuch as it would be giving the Moors something better � better for their souls!

The king hesitated, as well he might. He had hoped that the Moors would become Christians; but he had said they were to be instructed and were not to be oppressed on account of their religion. Influence now had to be brought to bear on the king and queen. Francisco Ximenez, archbishop of Toledo, visited the court at Granada and obtained a royal injunction to remain there and promote the great object in view, but was to use forbearance and guard against tumult. He eventually became head of the Inquisition in Spain, but it is not clear as to how far he was connected with that institution at the time he went to Granada.

His first work was to consult with the mild Hernando, and see what had been done. He was shewn the scriptures in the Arabic tongue, ready to be printed, as well as a version of the Missal, etc. Curiously, as it may seem to us, it is said that Ximenez thought that the Moors would despise Christianity if they understood it. Prayers in the known tongue must not be introduced, and he forbad the versions being printed!

He soon shewed how he could make converts. He invited some of their learned men to conferences, presenting them with a creed, and offered them freedom, rewards, and offices if they would accept the first elements of Christianity themselves, and then teach them to others. The plan was successful; in the mosques these learned men were heard advising the people to embrace Christianity. These efforts were quickly responded to, and in a short time Ximenez had three thousand of the Mahometans ready for baptism. He made them walk past him, and he sprinkled them with a bunch of hyssop as they passed!

Those who would not become christian were persecuted, and many were arrested and imprisoned. At length, as one of his agents was leading away a woman to prison, the people were roused, the woman was rescued and the agent killed. Many now flew to arms, and besieged the Alhambra, where Ximenez took refuge, and he would soon have had to surrender. He was now glad of the services of the mild Hernando, who went to the armed men and was well received. They complained that the articles of capitulation had been violated, arrests had been made illegally, and the Koran burnt. By persuasion peace was restored.

Ferdinand and Isabella were alarmed, and justly blamed Ximenez. He hurried to court, and persuaded the king to treat Granada now as a revolting city, and annul all agreements.

In the meantime the Sultan sent an embassy, demanding that his brethren should not be forced into Christianity. The court gave assurance that there was no force used; but added, as Mahometans could not be loyal to a christian king, the people must become Christians, or they would be sent over to Barbary. Every facility was offered them to sell their property, and royal ships were provided for their voyage. As the Sultan was still to be feared, these things were carried out, the Mahometans faring better than the poor Jews, who had no earthly power to protect them.

Great numbers chose to remain in the country, and were baptised; but were Christians only in name; and for years after they were hunted and persecuted by the Inquisition because they were not zealous Romanists.

For instance, a man, seventy-one years old, was arrested upon the accusation of a woman who had lived in his house years before � arrested because neither he nor his children ate pork nor drank wine, and on Saturday nights or Sunday mornings they used to wash their feet! These things were supposed to point out that he was really a Mahometan at heart. He declared that he was baptised when forty-five years of age; before that time he had never eaten pork nor drank wine and had no taste for either. Being a coppersmith by trade, it was needful to wash thoroughly once a week. He was released with a caution, but was arrested again, and made to witness the burning of others.

The Inquisitors continued their persecutions among the Moriscoes, as christian Moors were called, until they were not only converted, as it was called, but dispersed into various parts of the country, no two families being together, so that they should become mixed with the inhabitants, and be entirely under the influence of the Roman religion.

We must not leave this part of the subject without relating that, in after years, the mild Hernando, though he became confessor to the queen, was himself accused by the Inquisition. His principles of moderation were hated, and his influence with the queen feared. Without doubt, he would have been condemned, but that his case was referred to the pope, who in a council absolved him. He had suffered three years of anxiety, and some of his relatives had been arrested. It is said that his name still stands on the Spanish Index of heretics!

Ximenez remained a violent persecutor, and carried on the enormities of the Inquisition with the utmost rigour.

The New Christians, as converted Jews were called, offered to the king six hundred thousand ducats of gold if he would abandon the secret action of the Inquisition, and allow the names of witnesses to be published. But Ximenez at once opposed it, offering also a large sum of money if the king would not yield. Again the Inquisition was victorious.

Ximenez did not forget that many had fled from Spain to avoid the Inquisition, and had taken refuge in the small state of Oran on the coast of Africa, living in a measure of peace and security. He fitted up ships and embarked at the head of fourteen thousand men, to exterminate the heretics, and soon returned victorious What deeds for one who should have cared for and fed the flock of Christ; for he was still archbishop of Toledo. The Inquisition was established at Oran to deal with all fugitives for the future.

Again and again this man outstepped all bounds of moderation, and protests were frequently made to the king that he was usurping the place of the magistrates in civil causes as well as in church matters; and the king was compelled to check the violent priest as well as he could, for he really had but little power over the Inquisition.

At length Ximenez was made cardinal and head of the Inquisition in Spain, and, on the death of Ferdinand, was regent of Castile. He resisted the pope, and strove to revive the Inquisition into its full power; but was checked by Charles I. (Charles V. as emperor of Germany), and ordered to retire to his archbishopric, where, in enmity with the masses and ill at ease with the church, he died, being eighty years of age (November 8th, 1517).

This is the same Cardinal Ximenez who caused the Complutensian Bible to be printed at great cost. It included the Greek Testament � the first printed (but not the first published). This is to his honour, and has caused some to speak of him as the "learned, liberal, munificent Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros."

On the other hand, it has been collated from the records that he added some 50,000 victims to those who suffered by the agency of the Inquisition! He is a remarkable instance of zeal, but not according to knowledge. What good such a man might have done had he known the ways of the Lord more perfectly, and have had the cause of Christ at heart, instead of serving so zealously the corrupt church of Rome.

Bartolom� Carranza.

God allowed some who had been prominent in enforcing the rules of the Inquisition to fall themselves under the same power. It was quite right that they should know by experience that which they had made others feel so forcibly. Bartolom� Carranza is a case in point. He was a learned man, filled a chair of philosophy, and also became doctor of theology, and was made examiner to the Inquisition at Valladolid.

Many a case had he examined and scrutinised; and for his zeal and learning was chosen preacher at many an 'Auto-de-F�.' He preached at the first burning in the city of Valladolid, and saw the patient triumph of a Lutheran over the fear of death, and heard his words, "Do you envy me my happiness?"

In the days of queen Mary of England, Carranza came to England, and laboured incessantly, "convincing heretics and confirming waverers." He assisted also at the condemnation of Cranmer and Martin Bucer. How strange that such an one should himself be suspected of heresy!

He returned to Spain and was chosen archbishop of Toledo, the highest ecclesiastical dignity in Spain. This could but offend those who had hoped to fill that office. It was now called to remembrance that at the Council of Trent, Carranza had insisted that bishops should be compelled to reside in their dioceses. This, too, gave great offence, which was not soon forgotten.

The archbishop published some commentaries on the Apostles' Creed, Lord's Prayer, etc., and these were welcomed by all � except that some at once set to work to discover anything that could be found to condemn the writer. Some thought they could see traces of Lutheranism on the subject of Justification. Inquiries were now diligently made as to all that he had been heard to preach. One had heard him preach before the king in London, where he had spoken of justification by living faith, just as a Lutheran would have preached.

Others had heard him say that the sins of a Christian were as if they had never been, since Christ had made atonement for them all. He had also been heard to exhort the emperor Charles V. when dying to trust to the merits of Christ alone; charges one is glad to hear amid so much darkness.

We thus see incidentally that there was one here and there in the Romish church who knew and taught the way of salvation truly.

These sayings, with a few similar ones, were laid before the heads of the Inquisition, who resolved to proceed against the archbishop. The pope (Paul V.) signed a brief to make him a prisoner. The king was appealed to, and he also assented, but asked that the archbishop's dignity should be respected. Carranza was informed by the king of the suspicions against him, but he seemed to expect nothing more than a severe censure.

It was not considered decent to arrest an archbishop at his palace, so the king requested his sister Juana, who governed Spain in his absence, to invite the archbishop to Valladolid, under the plea of meeting the king there. He was to come as soon as possible, without waiting for his usual cortege, and everything for his public appearance should be provided for him!

The archbishop set out on his journey, stopping at certain places to hold confirmations. Everything was allowed that would lull suspicion.

At Fuente del Sax, a friend called him aside and told him of the rumour that he was about to be arrested. He replied that it was incredible, for the princess herself had invited him. He could call God to witness that he had not fallen into error.

The archbishop had not proceeded far when he found the rumour was only too true: orders had been given for his arrest. If he had attempted to fly now, it would have been taken as a proof of guilt. More than a hundred men had been sworn in to assist if needful so that escape would have been almost impossible.

At Tordelaguna he was allowed to fulfil his duties as archbishop, while those about to arrest him got all things ready. Rodrigo de Castro had taken the message from the princess and had travelled with him, and on Sunday night (August 27th, 1560 or 1561), after supping with the archbishop, had retired on the plea of fatigue. On finding all things were ready, he returned and bade the master of the house where the archbishop lodged to have all the doors unfastened by daybreak.

During the night the governor of the place, and other officials were arrested � none daring to resist the holy office � to prevent any attempt at rescue. They then proceeded to the residence of the archbishop; went upstairs, and knocked at the ante-room where an attendant friar slept. "Who calls?" said the friar. "Open to the holy office," was the reply. The same reply was given at the archbishop's door. "Is Don Diego Ramirez there?" was asked (he was an inquisitor of Toledo). On being told that he was there, the door was at once opened.

Rodrigo entered first and begged the pardon of the archbishop.

Then the Alguacil (arresting officer) said, "Most illustrious senor, I am commanded by the holy office to make you prisoner," and an order was produced from the Inquisitor General.

The archbishop replied that he was subject to the pope and to no other person.

Don Diego stepped forward and produced the brief of the pope. On its being read, the archbishop at once surrendered himself a prisoner. During the next night he was set on a mule and brought to Valladolid.

Here they proceeded to examine him, but he refused to answer. He appealed to the pope. They produced the pope's brief; but that, he said, could not apply to him, for he was not in Spain at the time it was issued. That spoke of "archbishops or other prelates in Spain."

Delay followed delay, and in the meantime the council of Trent (which was sitting at the time) in spite of the protest of the king, appointed a commission to examine the commentaries of the archbishop, and they reported favourably of them. Indeed, it became a question of power � was the court of Rome to rule, or the king and the Inquisition?

At length the pope (now Pius V.) ordered the prisoner to be sent to Rome. The inquisitors could not altogether resist this, but delayed it as long as they could, and actually required security for his re-appearance as their prisoner! He had been a prisoner six years and a quarter before he embarked for Rome, in April, 1567. Some inquisitors sailed with him, to make the most of their case before the pope and his council. But the pope died in 1572, leaving Carranza a prisoner.

Gregory XIII. succeeded, and the case was again gone into, and at length the archbishop was (in April, 1576) set at liberty, after an imprisonment of some sixteen years. He abjured Lutheran articles, and then said Mass as a token of reconciliation with the church; but he was not restored as archbishop; indeed, he was now too old and infirm.

At Rome the Spanish inquisitors were to be seen standing behind the chairs of the cardinals, much mortified at the rebuffs they received; whereas in Spain they had reigned supreme, none daring to question a word they said, or anything that they did.

The story of Carranza gives a vivid picture of how those who abandon the path of truth and justice are at times made to feel the evils they bring to bear on others.

It is recorded that Gregory XIII. placed an inscription over the tomb of Carranza, describing him as a prelate, "illustrious for his birth, his life, his doctrine, his preaching, and his charity." Whereas the Inquisition entered him in the Index of condemnation for his writings: an Index remarkable, inasmuch as it contains the name of Thomas Cranmer, placed there, it is believed, by Carranza himself, who little dreamt that one day his own name would be in the same Index.

In this case we also see a clear proof of the want of unity in the Romish church: one branch of it condemned a man as a heretic, and another branch declared his doctrine to be sound; and at the same time men, clothed with power, were using it in the most shameless way to carry out their own ambitious purposes. Of true Christianity there is not a trace in this persecution.

The Inquisition in India.

A short notice of the Inquisition in Travancore and Malabar must not be omitted, because of the Syrian Christians who were living there, and who claimed to have come from Antioch, and to have had a succession of bishops appointed from thence.

On the Portuguese arriving in the country they were surprised to find upwards of a hundred christian churches; and, as the pope claimed universal supremacy, the Roman catholics said, "These churches belong to the pope;" but the Syrian Christians asked, "Who is the pope? we never heard of him."

They afterwards discovered that the Inquisition had been established at Goa, an island near by, and they could not be allowed to be Christians separated from Rome. A council was called, and one hundred and fifty of the Syrian clergy attended. They were charged with the following. "They had married wives; they owned but two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's supper; they neither invoked saints nor worshipped images, nor believed in purgatory; and they had no other orders or names of dignity in the church than priest and deacon."

Rome could not allow such christian simplicity as this, and all were ordered to abjure these things, or be suspended. Those near the sea coast reluctantly gave way, but refused to pray in Latin, and persisted in retaining their own language and liturgy. The pope gave way as to the language; and their liturgy, after being 'amended,' was allowed. Those in the interior avoided as far as possible giving way to Rome, and maintained at least a measure of their simplicity.

Goa became a centre of Roman catholicism for India: it had its cathedral, numerous churches, and all the machinery connected with that false system. The Inquisition was in full operation, and existed till as late as 1812, when it was abolished by the request of the British government.

A Frenchman � M. Dellon � who was a prisoner of the Inquisition at Goa, having providentially escaped, published an account of the place of confinement, and of his sufferings. He had incurred the displeasure of a black priest and of a man in authority on the coast of Hindostan; and, having rather freely expressed himself on some of the gross superstitions of Romanism, was seized, put into irons, and shipped off to Goa.

It was January 16th, 1674, when he was led, with other prisoners, to the house of the Inquisition. His chains were taken off, and he was led into a room called "the board of the Holy Office." The Grand Inquisitor of the Indies sat at one end of a long table and a notary at the other.

Dellon, hoping to soften his judge, fell on his knees, but was told to rise. He was asked if he knew the reason of his arrest, and was advised to make a full confession as the only way to obtain an early release. Dellon caught at the idea of release, and told his tale, amid tears and protestations, and again fell on his knees. The Inquisitor rang a silver bell, and an attendant led Dellon away into a gallery, where his trunk was searched, and everything taken from him. He was then led to a cell about ten feet square, and left there by himself. In the evening he had his first meal, which he ate heartily, and afterwards fell asleep. In the morning he learnt that he could not have a book, not even a Breviary: there was no form of religion for those in the cells. His hair was cut short, so that "he did not need a comb."

The cells were arranged in galleries, and four warders were in each gallery. Each cell had two doors. The inner one was grated at the bottom, and open at the top, through which the food was passed. The outer door was opened from six in the morning until eleven (at night we suppose). This was needful in that country, unless it was intended to smother them.

The prisoners had three meals a day � a wholesome but spare diet; physicians attended to the sick; but no confessor attended to the dying: all were treated as heretics.

Silence was strictly enforced. If one of the prisoners dared to utter a cry or offered an audible prayer to God, the warder would run to his cell and beat him cruelly, that the others might fear.

Once in two months the Inquisitor, with a secretary and interpreter, would visit each cell, ask if the prisoner wanted anything, was his food supplied regularly, or had he any complaint against the warders; but woe to the prisoner who complained of the warders, for he was quite at their mercy afterwards. Notes were carefully taken of anything that could be used against the prisoners.

The prisoners were told that they could always have an audience by telling one of the warders. Dellon did thus several times, but had to wait fifteen days before it was granted. When in the presence of the Inquisitor, he was made to lay his hand on a Missal and swear to secrecy, and to tell them the truth. He told them all the unguarded expressions that he had used, as far as he could remember. The Inquisitor told him he had done well in accusing himself so willingly; exhorted him in the name of Jesus Christ to complete his accusation fully, that he might experience the goodness and mercy which that tribunal exercised towards those who shewed true repentance and unforced confession. His confession was read over to him, and he signed. Then he was led back to his dungeon.

In about a fortnight he was again examined. He was told to repeat the Paternoster, Hail Mary, the Creed, commandments of God, commandments of the church, and the Salve Regina. He did all this well, and to their satisfaction. He was then exhorted to confess more without delay, and then conducted back to his cell.

Now his heart sickened. What more could he confess when he had confessed all? In despair, he endeavoured to starve himself, but they forced him to take food. He shed tears day and night. At length he bethought himself of prayer, and he prayed earnestly to the blessed Virgin, who he had been taught was the most merciful and the most ready to send help.

At the end of a month he obtained another audience and confessed that he remembered speaking against the Inquisition; but he was told that this was not what they wanted, and he was sent back to his cell.

He was now filled with despair. He feigned sickness, and was bled several times, and each time dragged off the bandages when alone, in the hopes of bleeding to death. But death fled from him. A Franciscan came to confess him; who tried to comfort him, and begged the Inquisitor to let him have a fellow prisoner. A negro, accused of magic, was sent as a companion; but after five months he was removed, when Dellon again fell into dire despair. He was found one day weltering in his blood and insensible. Restoratives were used, and his wounds bound up. On his restoration he was carried into the presence of the Inquisitor, and lying there � for he could not stand � he was reproached and then ordered to be put into irons. On this being tried, he became so furious that they were compelled to remove the fetters.

After this his examinations were different, for he defended his doctrines as a good catholic from quotations from the Council of Trent and from the scriptures; but this only discovered the ignorance of the Inquisitor. That dignitary had never heard of the scripture that Dellon quoted to prove, as he thought, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Nor was he acquainted with a passage in the decrees of the Council of Trent which declares that images are only to be reverenced on account of the persons whom they represent. The Inquisitor called for a Bible and a copy of the Acts of the Council, and was surprised to find that the passages quoted were actually there.

After a time the monotony and silence of the prison were changed; for now Dellon heard every morning the shrieks of persons under torture, and he afterwards saw many of them, both men and women, who had been lamed or distorted by the rack.

On Sunday, January 11, 1676 � he had now been there two years � he was surprised by the warder declining to receive his linen to be washed, as was usual. He also heard the cathedral bell rung for vespers and matins, which was also unusual. He wondered what was about to happen. They brought him his supper, but he refused it; and to his surprise, instead of insisting that he must have it as usual, they took it away.

He had repeatedly been threatened when before the Inquisitor that he should be burnt, and now he feared that the time had come. He gave himself up for lost, but about midnight he fell asleep.

He had not slept long before he was roused by the noise of an attendant and some warders. They brought a lamp, the first that had shone in that cell since he had been there, and some clothes. He was told to dress himself in the clothes, and be ready when wanted. He put on the trousers and vest � black, striped with white and with bare feet walked out when called.

He was one of about two hundred victims who were made to sit on the floor in a long gallery. dismally lighted up by a few lamps. A number of women were also sitting in another gallery. All were filled with the deepest gloom, none knowing what their fate would be.

In a room not far distant Dellon saw another company, differently dressed, among whom were confessors walking.

About four o'clock servants and warders came and offered bread and figs to the victims. Dellon refused to have any; but the man advised him to have some, saying, "Take your bread; and if you cannot eat it now, put it in your pocket; you will certainly be hungry before you come back." Come back! those words thrilled and cheered him somewhat; for he judged now that he was not to be burnt!

A little before sunrise, the great bell of the cathedral began to toll, and the people of the place ran to see the procession and to line the streets. When it became daylight, and Dellon could see his fellow prisoners, he distinguished about a dozen Europeans among them: the rest were natives of India.

As they approached the door their names were read out, and one of the chief inhabitants of the place was called to attend each prisoner as sponsor. "The General of the Portuguese ships in the Indies" placed himself beside Dellon.

The procession wended its way to the church of St. Francis, the sharp flint stones of the roads cutting many a wound in the feet of the pilgrims. Some were now seen to be dressed differently, their garments being covered with painted flames and devils � these were doomed to be burnt.

A sermon was preached by the provincial of the Augustines. Dellon noted only one sentence of the sermon. It compared the Inquisition to Noah's ark, which had received all sorts of beasts wild, but had sent them out tame! Whatever the poor victims had been before their imprisonment, there could be no doubt as to their being tame now!

The sermon over, the names of the prisoners were read over, with their accusations and their punishments. Dellon's indictment was that he had maintained the invalidity of the baptismos flaminis, or desire to be baptised when there was no one to administer the rite. He had said that images ought not to be adored; and he had called an ivory crucifix a piece of ivory. He had spoken contemptuously of the Inquisition; and above all he had an ill intention. His punishment was a confiscation of his property, banishment from India, and five years' service in the galleys in Portugal, with such penance as the Inquisitor might enjoin.

Dellon's sponsor, who would not speak to him before, now embraced him and called him brother.

On this occasion there were but two to be burnt alive, and four dead bodies (strangled before being burnt, is supposed), and some effigies of the dead; all convicted of heresy must be burnt.

Dellon was sent to Lisbon and worked in a gang of convicts; but by the intervention of the French government he was liberated.

We fear Dellon was not a Christian, and was apparently a fair sort of catholic. He would no doubt never have been molested if he had not, at the first, incurred the hatred of those in authority. But alas! what sort of shepherds were they who could treat such a one in this way! And surely such treatment would have the tendency to make men hate a religion that could only carry on its warfare by the dungeon, the torture, and the flames.

His treatment, bad as it was, was really mild in comparison to what others had to endure. If a catholic was served in this way, how would a simple believer have been treated, who could not have repeated the Hail Mary, etc.!

In the case of M. Dellon the French authorities were not so prompt as they might have been; being catholics, they were perhaps loth to interfere with what the heads of their own religion were doing. Not so the English; for in the seventeenth century, when the English had but some factories in India, the following case occurred.

A Capuchin missioner, named Father Euphrem, arrived at Madras on his way to Pegu, and the English requested him to remain at Madras. They promised him entire liberty in respect to the Roman religion, and to preach and minister to the catholics already settled there. He agreed, and formed an establishment which was afterwards protected by the English Company.

In a sermon this father pointed out the great difference between the worship that should be rendered to the Sovereign Creator, and the honour paid to Mary, who is but a creature. Thereupon some Portuguese accused him before the Inquisition at Goa of having preached against the Mother of God!

The Jesuits, who were secretly Inquisitors also, managed very cleverly to seize the preacher and carry him off to Goa, distant from Madras about two hundred leagues, where he was soon imprisoned in one of the cells.

The English, justly shocked at such a proceeding, undertook to release him. One of their vessels dropped anchor off Goa, and eight or ten determined fellows, well armed, presented themselves at the gate of the Inquisition. Two of them kept guard at the gate, and the others, sword in hand, boldly demanded the Inquisitors to give up instantly Father Euphrem, or they would run them through. He was quickly set at liberty, and carried back to Madras.

In 1808, Dr. Buchanan visited Goa, and found the Inquisition was in existence there, and victims still being persecuted. He was not allowed to visit their dungeons, and his presence was evidently not desirable. He shewed the Inquisitor the above account by M. Dellon, and the Inquisitor could not but own its general accuracy.

But how refreshing to find amid the profound gloom of the dark ages that there was at Malabar and its neighbourhood a company of Christians who had never heard of the pope, and who had maintained, at least to a great extent, the purity and simplicity of Christianity.

Spanish America.

In A.D. 1501 pope Alexander VI. made a pecuniary concession to Ferdinand and Isabella, on consideration that it was their desire "to acquire and recover the islands and countries of the Indies" � South America included � "in order that in them, every condemned sect being cut down, the Most High might be worshipped and revered."

This was followed by "Inquisitors of the Indies and islands of the ocean" being appointed. The Christians in America were not simply fugitives from Europe; many of the natives had been compelled by the Spaniards to be baptised. Of course they were Christians in name only, and still held their heathen feasts when able to do so. On the Inquisition interfering, many of these natives withdrew, renounced Christianity, and joined other native tribes.

The Spanish viceroys had to write home and declare that the place was being ruined by the interference of the Inquisition with the natives, and orders were now sent that the Inquisitors were to deal only with Europeans and their descendants.

This was very galling to the zealous Inquisitors, and they appealed to Philip II. of Spain, who had feasted his eyes on the martyrdoms in England and in Spain. In reply, he ordered that the Inquisition should now have more settled stations. One was installed in Panama (June, 1569), another at Lima (January, 1570), and another at Mexico (August, 1570), with substations in other places,

In 1574, the year that the conqueror of Mexico, Hernan Cort�s, died, the first Auto de F� was held at Mexico with all the pomp available. An Englishman and a Frenchman were burned as impenitent Lutherans. Eighty others were at the same time otherwise punished.

Doubtless many who were persecuted in Europe for their faith, cast their eyes to the various colonies as places of refuge; but every precaution was taken by Spain that no such refugees should be found in her colonies. Thus Philip III. ordered: "That no one newly converted to our holy faith, from being Moor or Jew, or his child, shall pass over into our Indies without our express licence." He also ordered, "that no one who has been reconciled, nor the child or grandchild of any one who has publicly worn a sambenito [garment of the condemned], nor the child nor grandchild of a person burnt or condemned as a heretic . . . . shall pass over to the Indies, under penalty of loss of goods . .. . and his person to be placed at our mercy, to be perpetually banished from our Indies; and if he have no property, let them give him one hundred lashes publicly."

Jews were in no way spared by the Inquisition. In a volume published at Mexico, the Inquisitors say they had "celebrated two particular Acts of Faith in the past years, 1646 and 1647, in which, with all attention and good order, were despatched, and went forth to public theatre, seventy-one causes; the greater part of them Jews, observant of the dead and detestable law of Moses!" In 1648 another Act of Faith was held, in which twenty-eight persons were marched to church to be preached to, and then taken back to prison; "and the day following the justice of lashes was executed;" the Inquisitors looking forward to "a more numerous and general Act, for exultation and glory of our holy Catholic faith, punishment and warning of her enemies, edification and instruction of the faithful."

Many painful incidents are recorded. Let one suffice. A Frenchman, Louis Ram�, relates that he saw fourteen protestant European officers taken into custody at Vera Cruz by the Inquisitors. They were solicited to deny their faith. Five who refused were carried to the stake, strangled and burnt. Nine endeavoured to purchase life by renouncing their religion. They were baptised, flattered, and feasted publicly the next day; but on the evening of that same day the perfidious Inquisitors ordered them all to be hanged. Eight died on the scaffold, but the rope broke of the ninth � one, John Morgan � and he escaped. This was declared to be a miracle wrought by God to prove that he was "a good Catholic!"

An extract from a brief of pope Clement XI., dated August, 1709, respecting the word of God, must not be omitted. It was directed to the Inquisitor-general of Spain.

"It has come to the knowledge of our apostleship, that the Holy Bible, translated into an American dialect, has lately been printed in the city of London, according to the depraved doctrine and corrupt sense of Protestants, under whose care and management it is brought to light, for the purpose of being circulated in America. Now if the circulation takes effect, as the heretics desire, it is easy to conjecture what danger will be done to the faithful, to whom the food of holy scripture, sprinkled and infected with much poison, shall be presented under the name of spiritual nourishment. . . . Resolve then that nothing shall be left undone by you that may be necessary to cut short the circulation of depraved books of this kind in America, where not even importation of them should be allowed, lest they be circulated among the faithful."

Thus did Rome seek to exterminate everything that differed from it, and not in Europe only, but in India and South America, doing all it could to hinder the circulation of God's word, which, as we have seen, was too pure a light to be endured by those who loved darkness, yea, even the gross darkness of the dark ages.

God did not allow the above state of things in the South-west to continue. The people longed to be free from the thraldom in which they were held; and though civil and political freedom may have been the chief aim of many, God overruled it to deliver the inhabitants from the power of Rome.

The people clamoured for independence; but the Romish clergy expended the wealth of their churches to keep up the link with old Spain. Ammunition was stored in the houses of priests and bishops, but only to fall into the hands of the inhabitants: and soon the clergy had to fly for their lives; one died, in consequence of his sufferings, in banishment; another had to flee through deep forests and trackless wilds; one lost his reason; another was in prison. Strange reverses for those who had lived in luxury, and had reigned as kings. Mexico rebelled against the viceroy in 1816, and gained its independence in 1821.

Thus did God take from Spain those colonies, from which she, with Rome, sought to keep the holy scriptures, and in which they desired only the supremacy of their false religion, destroying by their prisons and the stake all who would not sanction their pretensions.

The Inquisition Abolished.

To complete our sketch, we add a few words on the abolishing of the Inquisition, though it falls beyond our appointed date.

Napoleon Bonaparte had carried his victories into Spain, and entered Chamartin, a village about a league from Madrid. He established his head-quarters there, and sent his troops to take the capital, and to demand the submission of all public bodies. The Inquisition alone refused. Napoleon wrote on a slip of paper to arrest the Inquisitors, abolish the Inquisition, and sequestrate the revenue. Some escaped, and others were arrested and carried prisoners to Bayonne. Thus was accomplished by the stroke of the pen what some of the best kings of Spain would gladly have done, had they had the power.

Attempts were afterwards made to re-establish the Inquisition, and it was in a measure restored; but it never regained its former power. True members of the Roman catholic church declared it to be inconsistent with the liberties of the people.

The Inquisition was strongest in Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In other places, including England, it was never really established, and as the dark ages passed away before the light of the Reformation, it became extinct everywhere � perhaps lasting the longest in Italy. The date given for the last person burnt by the Inquisition is 1781, though its power was not abolished till 1820.

It has been attempted to shew that among all religions there has been persecution, and in a measure this is true. Protestantism is certainly not free from the charge. But while this is true, it is also certain that in no other religion was there such a system of injustice, tyranny, and secret persecution as existed in the Inquisition, nor anything approaching to it. We have given a few instances of the way in which it was worked, and of some who fell under it. The way in which its victims were tortured � with distinct rules as to how far this was to go for both males and females, often little short of death � is far too dreadful to find a place in our pages. And all this is not what is said of it by its enemies, but what may be gathered from the rules laid down by the various heads of the Inquisition for their subordinates.

If any one still asks for a proof of the existence of "Dark Ages," let the Inquisition be pointed to as one of the darkest blots on that which called itself the church of Christ. Discipline must of course be exercised in the church, and a wicked person must be put out but how contrary is the conduct of the Inquisition, in taking men's lives, to the rebuke of our Lord to His disciples, who asked if they should call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans who would not receive our Lord on His way to Jerusalem: "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." (Luke ix. 56.) How true as to the period we are considering is God's sentence on this spiritual Babylon: "In her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth." Dire will be the fall of that system, and sore the punishment of its leaders.

Chapter 12.

The Waldenses.

Here can be no doubt that God has had in the church at all times some � few or many as the case may have been � who were true witnesses for Christ and His truth, at least according to the light they had. It is true that they cannot always be traced, at least at this distance of time, but this in no way denies their existence.

Another thing to be remarked is, that as the church of Rome became more and more corrupt, the persons condemned by that corrupt church were most probably the true followers of Christ. This was remarkably so with the Waldenses.

In the various histories these bore different names, as we shall see, and it is not possible now to discover the real origin of some of those names. If the term "Waldenses" came from Peter Waldo of Lyons, others holding similar doctrines were in existence long before this, and must have been known by other names.

Another term is "Vaudois," which has been traced by some simply to signify, "valley dwellers," because some holding similar truths inhabited the valleys of the Pyrenees.

"Albigenses" is another name, from the city of Albi, and the district Albigeois, between the Garonne and the Rhone, where there were, at one time, many of the same people.

There is much obscurity as to these devout people before the time of Waldo. It is most probable that those who had doubts as to the church of Rome being the true church, and who held the truths of Christianity, remained in communion with that church, and so in a great measure escaped detection and punishment.

An inquisitor, Reinerius Saccho, who lived only eighty years after Waldo, speaks of men, like to the Waldenses, flourishing some five hundred years before the time of that preacher. This is all the more to be rejoiced at, seeing that it proves that God had His secret faithful ones, long before they became sufficiently prominent to provoke persecution.

Peter Waldo was an opulent merchant of Lyons. The gospel had been faithfully preached there in early days, and some remains of its tidings may have been handed down to the then inhabitants, though, in general, Lyons had sunk along with the mass of Christendom.

What is reported to have raised suspicion in the mind of Waldo was, that about the year 1160 the doctrine of transubstantiation came into prominence (though not established as a formal dogma till the time of Innocent III., 1198-1216), and all men were commanded to receive it. Along with this went the falling down and worshipping the Host. This appeared to Waldo to be a species of idolatry, and he felt called upon to oppose it as a gross corruption, but without any thought of separating from the church of Rome.

It is doubtful whether at this time Peter was a true Christian, though he had light enough to see that the above was an innovation. However, God, in His providence, gave him a severe shock. He sat one evening after supper with a party of friends, in cheerful intercourse, when one of the company suddenly fell to the floor a corpse. Peter was startled with the thought of the uncertainty of life: was he prepared? Under the terrors of an awakened conscience, he sought instruction and comfort from the scriptures. But the Bible was only available in the Latin Vulgate. Either he, or some one for him or with him, must translate it into French; and therein he saw what was God's remedy for a guilty conscience, and he found salvation.

As is usual with all true conversions, Peter could not keep his good news to himself, with souls all around him perishing for the lack of knowledge. He gave up his business and sought to do good by distributing his wealth; but when the poor came to him for alms, he would tell them also of the enduring riches of Christ. He obtained copies of the four gospels in French and distributed them, and then sought to explain their meaning. "His kindness to the poor being diffused," says Matthias Illyrius, "his love of teaching and their love of learning growing stronger and stronger, greater crowds came to him, to whom he expounded the scriptures."

To the honour of Waldo, it is recorded that he was the first to put forth the scriptures in one of the modern tongues, wherein men and women could read for themselves what God had written, and compare and weigh what the church was teaching: a blessing that surely cannot be overestimated.

As Waldo became better acquainted with the scriptures, he could not help seeing � as we think all true disciples, desirous of being taught, must see that there was in the scriptures that which totally condemned much of what the church of Rome was teaching, and there was also much in the scripture that the church never attempted to teach at all. He had therefore two things to do: first, to learn and then make known what scripture taught; and secondly, to hold up for condemnation everything that did not agree with the word of God.

This unequivocally condemned much that the church of Rome taught, and exposed many things that its clergy practised. These things could not long be hid from the authorities of church. The archbishop of Lyons threatened him with excommunication and prosecution, as a heretic, if he did not cease his teaching. Waldo declared boldly that he could not be silent on what concerned the salvation of his fellow-creatures.

It was then attempted to arrest him; but he had so many friends in Lyons, both rich and poor � persons whom he had been the means of leading to the Saviour � that be was hidden by them in the city for the space of three years.

Tidings at length reached the pope, Alexander III., who at once anathematised Waldo, and ordered the archbishop to proceed against him with the utmost severity. The preacher was now compelled to leave the city, but many of those who had benefitted by his preaching left too, and this was the means of further spreading the glad tidings wherever these fugitives went.

Waldo himself went to Dauphiny and, with great success, spread the truths he had learned from the scriptures. But he was again obliged to fly, and he went to Picardy: from thence he went to Germany, and eventually to Bohemia, where he laboured, and then peacefully ended his days in the year 1179: he had laboured faithfully for nearly twenty years.

May we not say that he was a forerunner of the reformers? except that we do not read that he separated from the church of Rome. He was driven out by persecution, if he really was separate. But how simple the process of his career! He read the Bible: he learnt the truth: he saw that the way of salvation was not being taught by the church, so he would teach it: he saw that much that the church put forth was either not mentioned in scripture, or was condemned therein, and he would expose its errors. God had indeed raised him up for this good work, and his labours were abundantly blessed, as we shall see.

Many of those taught by Waldo fled to the valleys of Piedmont, where it was hoped they might find a safe asylum. They carried with them the new translation of the Bible. We shall see how they multiplied, and how bitterly they were persecuted by the church of Rome.

In the meantime, the same blessed truths of God's word spread elsewhere. People had friends and relatives, among whom the glad tidings were carried, as well as among traders visiting Lyons. Persecution followed them wherever they were discovered. The bishops of Mentz and Strasburg were very zealous. Thirty-five citizens of Mentz were burned in one fire at Bingen, and eighteen at Mentz itself. Eighty persons were burned to death at Strasburg. It was a renewal of the martyrdom of the second century; but it was worse, for now it was those who professed to be the church putting to death their fellow Christians! This, too, was only the few drops of rain that fell before the deluge of persecution which fell upon the faithful afterwards. How true is the description in holy writ, we again repeat: "In her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth." (Rev. xviii. 24.)

It is not to be wondered at that, when the above-named disciples were driven from place to place, and found for a time a resting-place in the valleys of Piedmont, they should feel themselves driven out of the church of Rome, and should in no way be anxious to renew the connection. Doubtless, too, further light was vouchsafed them as to the true nature of the contest between truth and error, culminating in the only true conclusion, that the church of Rome could not be the true church, though, of course, there might be true saints in it.

Let us, however, see what their enemies said of them. Pope Lucius III. issued a decree against heretics, A.D. 1181. As usual, several were classed together: it said, "We declare all Catharists, Paterines, and those who call themselves 'the Poor of Lyons;' the Pasagines, Josephists, Arnoldists, to lie under a perpetual anathema." The people we are now considering are here called "the Poor of Lyons:" it was those taught at Lyons by Peter Waldo, or those who held the same doctrines. We might, however, take a glance at the titles of others here condemned.

"Catharists" is from a Greek word katharos, pure, and it is a similar term to our word "Puritan." It is not clear to whom the term applied at this date. It might be hurled against all who spoke against the impurities of the church of Rome, though it is supposed by some that it applied to some heretical sect that existed at that time.

"Paterines." The origin of this word is not known; but it was applied generally to denote any who were separated in spirit or in fact from the church of Rome.

"Pasagines" were a sect of the twelfth century, who held that the Jewish rites, except the sacrifices since the destruction of Jerusalem, were binding on Christians. They were also Arians.

"Josephists" cannot now be traced.

"Arnoldists" were the followers of Arnold of Brescia, a young priest, whose only crime was protesting against the abuses and corruptions of the church, and seeking to reform them. He was hunted from place to place, but, in 1155, the emperor, Frederick I., was seeking the friendship of the pope, and this was promised if Arnold was given up to the pope. The emperor yielded, and the reformer was strangled, his body burnt, and his ashes thrown into the Tiber.

It will be seen that it was very unfair to class all these together in one common condemnation. But it was enough if any were found to question the teaching of Rome: she could bear no rivals, good or bad; and she could bear no scrutiny: all must be silenced. It will be seen, too, that such an edict would condemn all dissentients: if the accused did not belong to any of those well-defined companies, it was enough if he dissented from the church of Rome: that was a crime.

We will, however, look at some of the things specially named in this papal decree. A perpetual anathema rested on all who preached publicly or privately without the authority of the apostolic see.

All who held or taught anything concerning the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, baptism, the remission of sins, matrimony, or any other sacraments of the church, contrary to the teaching of the church of Rome.

All such the church of Rome held to be heretics.

It will be seen that the holy scriptures are not named. The church of Rome was to be supreme and without a rival: all who differed were heretics. The above named items are called "crimes" and must be put down.

We will now look at a more definite charge against the opponents of the church of Rome, and one in which the Waldenses are specially named. It is by Reinerius Saccho. He had been associated with the Waldenses, but had returned to the church of Rome, and been made an Inquisitor and had become their deadly enemy.

He said that the Waldenses deemed themselves to be the true church, and held that the church of Rome was the harlot of Revelation xvii.

They denied that any true miracles were wrought in the church.

They held that no ordinances of the church introduced since the ascension of Christ were of any value, and should not be observed,

They rejected the feasts, fasts, orders, blessings, etc., of the church of Rome.

They spoke against consecrated churches, churchyards, etc., as inventions of covetous priests to augment their gains.

Some of them held that the baptism of infants was of no avail, because they could not believe.

They rejected the sacrament of confirmation, and instead thereof their teachers laid their hands on the disciples.

They did not believe the body and blood of Christ to be in the sacrament, but only blessed bread, which by a figure only is called the body of Christ.

They said that a priest who was a sinner could not bind or loose any one, being bound himself; and that any good or intelligent layman might absolve another and impose penance.

They rejected extreme unction.

They held it to be an unpardonable sin to betray a heretic.

They held there was no purgatory, and that prayers for the dead were of no use. Offerings made for the dead were only for the clergyman.

They derided all the festivals held in honour of the saints, and worked on holy days.

They did not observe Lent or other fasts.

They did not receive the Old Testament.

They taught such as were eligible among them to commit to memory the words of scripture, so that they might teach others.

Not only the men, but the women also taught among them � privately, it is supposed, by what is said elsewhere.

The same writer charges them with practising uncleanness instead of marriage, and in the book he wrote against them, he says: "Of all the sects that have risen up against the church of Rome, the Waldenses have been the most prejudicial and pernicious, inasmuch as their opposition has been of very long continuance."

It is not now possible to tell what is meant by their not receiving the Old Testament. They had most probably only the New Testament in French and could not read the Latin. Their own documents prove that they did not reject the Old Testament. Neither can it be known what is intended by their despising marriage. It may be that Saccho treated their marriage as null in the sight of the church of Rome, there being no Romish priest among them to celebrate it.

There is also abundant testimony, that their only fault in the eyes of the Roman Catholics was that they judged that church to be impure, and its priests not to be followed.

The king of France was again and again informed of the evil doings of the Waldenses, and was requested to persecute them. He sent more than one person into their midst to learn the truths of these reports, but the replies were always in favour of the Waldenses, except as to their judgment of the church of Rome.

Thus Louis XII. (A.D. 1498-1515) sent his confessor and another to gather information on the spot as to the true state of these people. The archbishop of Ambrun pressed these commissioners to condemn the Waldenses, that he might obtain the goods that would be confiscated. But the commissioners were too upright for this, and the confessor declared before a number of his friends, that he wished that he himself was as good a Christian as the worst in the valley he had visited.

Another describes those he visited, thus "Their clothing is of the skins of sheep, they have no linen. Their houses are built of flint stone, having a flat roof covered with mud. They live on milk and venison, being through constant practice excellent marksmen. One thing is very remarkable, that persons externally so savage and rude, should have so much moral culture. They can all read and write. They know French sufficiently for the understanding of the Bible, and the singing of psalms. You can scarcely find a boy among them who cannot give you an intelligent account of the faith which they profess."

Reinerius Saccho, whom we have already quoted, tells us how industrious the Waldenses were in spreading abroad their tenets. Some would go forth as hawkers with trinkets, articles of dress, etc.; and he thus describes how they proceeded. "Sir, will you please to buy any rings, or seals, or trinkets. Madame, will you look at any handkerchiefs, or pieces of needlework for veils? I can afford them cheap." If after a purchase, the salesman were asked if he had anything more, he would reply, "O yes; I have commodities far more valuable than these, and I will make you a present of them if you will protect me from the clergy." If he were encouraged, he would proceed, "The inestimable jewel I spoke of is the word of God, by which He communicates His mind to man, and which inflames their hearts with love to Him. . . . In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee named Nazareth:" and then he would repeat the first chapter of Luke. At other times, different portions of the gospels would be repeated, their minds being well stored with scripture. If he were further encouraged, he would proceed to repeat such passages as "Woe unto you: ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer them that are entering to go in;" "Woe unto you that devour widows' houses," etc.; and then proceed to state that these passages applied to the Roman priests and monks. They kept away the key of knowledge which he was so desirous of communicating. And yet he, and they who, with him, were seeking to live a holy life, were persecuted by the Romish priests.

It is surprising that such an account should have been put forth by a Roman catholic. He was indeed very blind if he did not see, that the very thing he was condemning was to the praise of those he condemned, and was to his own disgrace. It was simply the Romish church that was held up as the standard. No matter how ignorant or profligate its monks or clergy were they were accounted good Christians: and all else, however holy and true, were to be condemned and persecuted.

Yes, persecution was the portion of these people. They had increased wonderfully and were quietly spreading forth the truths of Christianity. Pope Innocent III. (A.D. 1198-1216) had previously taken the persecution in hand. He had despatched preachers throughout Europe to get volunteers for the putting down of heresy, as it was called. "We exhort you," said they, "that you would endeavour to destroy the wicked heresy of the Albigenses, and do this with more rigour than you would towards the Saracens themselves: persecute them with a strong hand; deprive them of their lands and possessions; banish them, and put catholics in their room." To any who would bear arms for forty days, remission of all their sins and paradise were promised!

Toulouse was then one of the chief seats of the Waldenses (they were here called Albigenses), and this was ruled over by Raymond, the sixth count of Toulouse. He was a wise and humane man, and, though exhorted to persecute the Albigenses he refused, seeing they were peaceable and loyal citizens and good Christians, though he regretted they did not hold with the church of Rome as he did himself.

He was excommunicated by the pope for harbouring the heretics; but he could not be moved to commence the persecution.

About this time, Peter de Chatineau, one of the Inquisition, was murdered, and Raymond was accused of having a hand in the matter. This he strongly denied. It was known that this Peter had been pursuing a gentleman who had turned round and put him to death, and then had fled.

The pope, in order to appear reasonable, proposed that they should seek to win the Albigenses, and that the questions at issue should be discussed. The time of meeting, etc., was agreed on. They were to assemble at Montreal near Carcassonne: it was in the year 1206.

Pastor Arnold Hot was the principal of the Albigenses who attended. He undertook to prove:

1. That the Mass and transubstantiation were idolatrous and unscriptural.

2. That the church of Rome was not the spouse of Christ.

3. That its policy was of a pernicious and wicked tendency.

These points were discussed for some days, but were cut short by the cry, The army of the crusaders is at hand. The pope had not waited for the result of the conference: indeed, it seemed only a device to gain time. Though the soldiers were called crusaders, they were now bearing the cross to root out heresy so-called.

Raymond was alarmed at the news of a hundred thousand men approaching to attack him. He would not, however, persecute his own people, but he submitted to the pope, and delivered seven fortified places up to him.

That, however, did not satisfy the pope. Raymond was required to present himself before the gates of St. Agde. Upwards of twenty archbishops and bishops were there to receive his submission. At the gates he was required to swear upon the holy eucharist and the relics of the saints, that he would obey the command of the holy Roman church. One of the sacred vestments was then thrown over his neck, and he was brought into thee church, where he was scourged with a whip. This was so severe that he was unable to go out by the way he entered, but passed, nearly naked as he was, by the lower gate. He was accounted absolved! though the process was repeated at the sepulchre of St. Peter the martyr, at New Castres.

The poor Albigenses were now at the mercy of the army, led on by the papal legate, and the sword was speedily at work in the cities in which they were known to be. The streets ran with blood and many were burnt alive.

All, however, was not lost. Raymond had a nephew named Roger, who, under his uncle, had governed some of the cities. He was now at B�ziers. Raymond was compelled, as one of the conditions of absolution, to lead on the army to the destruction of his own subjects. He continued only a few days with the army, preferring to go himself to Rome and humble himself before the pope.

Roger, earl of B�ziers, saw it was no use attempting to defend the place against such an army. He therefore went out and threw himself at the feet of the papal legate, telling him there were many in the city true to the catholic faith, and hoped he would not slay the innocent with the guilty. He was told that to save the city the Albigenses must renounce their faith and promise to live according to the Romish church.

The inhabitants were called together, and the conditions were pressed on the Albigenses. They would thus not only save themselves but the catholics too. This was a painful position to be in, but they told their fellow-citizens that they could not renounce their faith they must die first. They left it for the catholics and Roger to make the best terms they could for themselves.

Finding the Albigenses could not be moved from their resolution, the catholics sent out their bishop to the papal legate. He intreated that the catholics who had always been true to the Romish church should not be slain with the Albigenses; and even these he hoped might be gained by kindness.

The answer was short and severe: unless all confessed their sins, and returned to the church, all should share alike. The city was ordered to surrender at discretion. This it did, as resistance was useless, and its inhabitants, 23,000 in number, were indiscriminately put to death, and the city itself destroyed by fire. Caesarius informs us that when the army was about to enter the city, they asked how they were to distinguish catholics from Albigenses. Arnold, abbe of Cisteaux, brutally replied, "Kill them all: the Lord knoweth them, that are his." Even the priests were slain in their robes!

Roger, seeing there was no hope of safety, then made his escape to the city of Carcassonne. Many Albigenses were there, and many others came, telling him of the fate of all in B�ziers. Carcassonne was better fortified, and he determined to make what resistance he could. He called together the inhabitants, and told them the horrible end of those at B�ziers, and that it was plain that the whole was a planned system of robbery under the plea of religion. He was a catholic; but see, said he, how those faithful to the Roman church have been treated at B�ziers. This roused their courage, and all prepared for the defence of the city.

In the meantime more men had joined the army � now 300,000 strong. They advanced towards the town, filled up the ditches with fascines, and assailed the first wall; but they were met with such a stout resistance that the ground was covered with the dead bodies of the assailants.

The next day, scaling ladders were used and the outer wall was taken after a stout resistance, and all who were found outside the city proper were put to death. The upper town was yet secure, and though it was assailed again and again, hundreds of the army were slain. Besides this, the immense army began to be in want of provisions, and had to disperse over the country in search of it. With many the forty days had expired for which they were engaged � they had purchased forgiveness of their sins, as they thought, and as had been promised � and would on no conditions remain any longer: thousands left for their homes.

The papal legate became alarmed, and finding the city could not be so easily taken as he supposed, determined to try what negotiations would do. The king of Arragon had joined the army, and he undertook to meet the earl of B�ziers. He asked the earl why he offered resistance to such an army. He was told what had taken place at B�ziers, and how the catholics had been slain, the priests in their robes, etc. The king had his eyes opened to the fact, that it was not merely a religious war as had been pretended, and reasoned with the papal legate as to his proceedings, and advocated a different course.

But the legate was so enraged that he sent the most defiant reply: he was the pope's legate, and all must submit at discretion: the earl, if he surrendered, would be kept in strict custody. Such terms could not be accepted, and all remained as before.

The legate hit upon another plan. He induced one of the officers of the army to try and entice the earl to come out of the city, promising that the officer should be well recompensed on earth besides the rewards he would have in heaven if he succeeded.

The officer succeeded too well. Under the plea of arranging conditions of peace, and the solemn promise that he should be conducted safely back to the city, the earl came out and met the legate.

After some conversation, in which the earl tried to reason with the legate, and plead for the city, he was told the inhabitants could do as they pleased, but that he was a prisoner. He protested against such perfidy. The officer had pledged himself by oaths and execrations to see him back into the city. It was all of no use. He was thrown into prison and died soon afterwards, not without strong suspicions that he had been poisoned.

The people of Carcassonne no sooner learnt the fate of the earl than all hope left them of defending the city, and escape seemed hopeless as the city was entirely surrounded with their enemies. When despair was seizing them, a rumour arose among some of the older citizens that they remembered a report of a subterraneous passage somewhere in the city which led to the castle of Caberet, a distance of about three leagues: but no one knew where the entrance was. Except those who manned the ramparts, they all now made diligent search, and at length it was whispered about, The entrance is found. Preparations for flight were at once set on foot: food for a few days only must suffice, and, except a few things any could carry about them, all must be left. But this was far better than falling into the hands of such merciless murderers. We may be quite sure that many a thanksgiving ascended to God for this prospect of deliverance, and prayer to Him that it might be crowned with success.

"It was a dismal and sorrowful sight," says their historian, "to witness their removal and departure, accompanied with sighs, tears, and lamentations . . . . betaking themselves to the uncertain event of saving themselves by flight: parents leading their children, and the more robust supporting decrepit old persons; and especially to hear the affecting lamentations of the women."

It would have been an instructive lesson to have known whether the Albigenses bore their trials any differently from the catholics. The former had none on earth to lean on, and we trust they found support from their heavenly Father. The catholics had sought to lean on an earthly reed, but alas, that reed had broken and pierced them to the quick. Such is often the fate of those who put their trust in man even in this life, and as to the future, we shudder to think of the fatal delusion.

God prospered their flight: they reached in safety the castle on the following day, and from thence dispersed themselves wherever God opened a door for their admission.

In the morning after the flight, the army were surprised that not a sound was to be heard from the city: some stratagem was suspected, but on mounting the walls the cry was raised, "The Albigenses are fled." The legate ordered that none of the property should be carried off. It was to be carried to the church, and disposed of for the benefit of the "pilgrims," as the army was called.

The army was now placed under the command of Simon, earl of Montfort. He was cruel and rapacious, and no mercy was given to any of the Albigenses that fell in his way. He was made governor of the whole district, but insolently requested that the earl of Toulouse should make over to him all his territories, as conquered by the catholic army. Raymond refused, and appealed to Philip king of France, his chief.

Simon laid siege to the castle of Minerba (or Minerva) in Narbonne, near Spain. Of this place it was said "No mass has been sung in it for thirty years:" a proof of the spread of the truths held by the Waldenses. Raymond, earl of Termes, defended the place, but on account of the scarcity of water was obliged to surrender. He was exhorted to turn catholic, but he steadily refused, and was thrown into a close prison where he soon died. Efforts were then made to convert his wife, sister, and daughter, and other females of rank. But all stood steadfast in the faith, and were together thrown into one large fire.

There were still the inhabitants. These were now preached to, and exhorted to acknowledge the pope and the church of Rome. But the preacher was interrupted with cries of "We will not renounce our religion: you labour to no purpose, for neither life nor death shall induce us to abandon our profession." On this, the earl and the legate committed one hundred and eighty men and women to the flames.

Castle after castle fell before the army until Raymond began to fear for his dominions, and so, collecting some troops, he opposed the army and gained back much of his loss. But again he was defeated, and persecution was resumed with vigour.

A good deal of what followed, for some twenty years, took more the character of civil rather than religious warfare, though the popes of Rome never lost sight of their one great object, to root out entirely all who differed from the church of Rome, no matter by what name they were called; and for this purpose they were not particular by what means they could induce the various authorities to fight for the catholic church.

Thus, to Louis king of France, the pope wrote, "It is the command of God, who says, If thou shalt hear say in any one of thy cities which the Lord thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which ye have not known, thou shalt smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword." Thus shamefully did he pervert the scripture against idolatry to mean the persecution of God's saints.

From 1206 to 1228 the persecution was carried on, with such rigour, that no room was found for those arrested. The archbishops of Aix, Arles, and Narbonne, interceded with those who were pushing on the persecution, and wrote: "It has come to our knowledge that you have apprehended so many of the Waldenses, that it is not only impossible to defray the charges of their subsistence, but also to provide stone and mortar to build prisons for them. We therefore advise you to defer for a while augmenting their number, until the pope be apprised of the great multitudes that have been apprehended, and until he notify what he pleases to have done in this case. Nor is there any reason why you should take offence hereat; for as to those who are altogether impenitent and incorrigible, or concerning whom you may doubt of their relapse or escape, or that, being at large again, they would infect others, you may condemn such without delay."

It has been calculated that as many as a million were put to death in the southern provinces of France, and many fled from the district to other places.

The war that existed between the emperor of Germany (Frederick II.) and the pope (Innocent IV.) gave some breathing-time for the Waldenses, and they rapidly increased.

About the year 1330 a great persecution was set on foot in various parts of Germany by an agent of the Inquisition, named Echard, a Jacobin monk. Vignier, the historian, relates that this man, after inflicting cruelties with great severity and for a length of time upon the Waldenses, was at length induced to examine the causes why these people were separated from the church of Rome. The force of truth was such that it broke down all his prejudices � his own conscience bearing witness that many of the errors and corruptions charged on the church of Rome really existed. Finding that he could not disprove the articles of their faith by the word of God, he confessed that the truth had overcome him, he gave God the glory, and entered into communion with the Waldenses whom he had, like Saul against the Christians, long been engaged in punishing and persecuting unto death.

News of his conversion soon reached some other agents of the Inquisition, and messengers were sent in search of him. He was arrested, conveyed to Heidelberg, and burnt to death. He boldly charged the church of Rome with monstrous and iniquitous proceedings, in putting to death so many innocent persons for no other crime than steadfastly adhering to the cause of Christ, in opposition to the delusions of Antichrist.

Such an instance might well have made the persecutors pause and ask themselves, whether they were really fighting for God or against Him. But no, the persecution raged on furiously by others; and yet the faith increased wonderfully, so that it was said, as an acknowledged fact, that in those days the Waldenses were so numerous that in travelling from Cologne to Milan, the whole extent of Germany, they could lodge every night with persons of their own profession, and that it was a custom among them to affix certain private marks to their signs and gates whereby they made themselves known to one another.

Indeed, the Waldenses had spread over the whole of Europe, carrying the gospel of God and His truth wherever they went � pursued and persecuted everywhere by their relentless enemies, the agents of the church of Rome, until they were rooted out everywhere except in and about Piedmont.

In our short sketches it is impossible to give a complete history of the Waldenses. They took up arms in their own defence, and obtained many victories over small detachments of troops; but whole armies were sent against them, which with fire and sword turned many a fertile "valley into a desert.

This was continued century after century until the Reformation had made good progress; but still these mountaineers were persecuted by the intrigues of the popes and the Inquisition, with the aid sometimes of the kings of France, and at other times by the dukes of Savoy.

Protestant countries protested against such merciless treatment, and from time to time sent money to aid the survivors; but as long as the pope's power continued, the persecution again and again broke out.

Many of the Waldenses, or Vaudois, as they are here called, had fled to Switzerland, and were there scattered over the various cantons, working at anything their hands could find to do to support themselves.

In 1689 most of them resolved to attempt a return to their favourite villages. It appeared a very hazardous enterprise, for some parts of Savoy were held by French troops, and others by those of Piedmont.

Still nothing could daunt their courage nor turn them from their purpose. For two or three months their preparations were quietly and secretly made. They must leave their wives and children behind, and provision was sought for them. Then arms and ammunition were needed for themselves, and money to buy food as they proceeded.

One named Janavel, living at Geneva, was the soul of the movement. He knew the country well through which they would have to pass, and at a meeting held at his house, put forth a plan of the campaign, pointing out which passes needed to be secured, and which avoided, etc. One part of his plan was peculiar, but was found to be very useful, namely, for the Vaudois to seize hostages from some of the principal towns, carry these with them, treating them well, but making their lives depend upon the treatment the Waldenses received from the inhabitants in other places.

The forest of Prangins was the gathering-point. So much preparation, and so many moving about armed, could not but be observed, and in some places they were arrested by the Swiss before they could reach Prangins. Other arrangements were in progress to stop them, but about sunset, from the forest there came forth 1,000 to 1,200 men, who made their way to lake Leman.

Fifteen boats were there ready for them. Their pastor Arnaud made an earnest prayer for divine assistance. The young Lord of Prangins was there out of curiosity, and knelt with the others, but mounted a horse as soon as he could, and rode all night to Geneva, to inform the French of what he had witnessed. A messenger was at once sent off for French troops.

By about two o'clock in the morning all from the forest had crossed the lake, though they expected others to follow. Their first act was again to fall on their knees and earnestly pray for the protection of God, It was August 17th, 1689.

One of their pastors went to a village to seek a guide, when he was seized and carried off. This made them more careful. The small town of Yvoire was summoned to open its gates, or it would be attacked. From thence the lord of the manor and the receiver of taxes were taken as hostages. These, by the good treatment they received, and by the discipline of the troops, were well disposed towards them, and were of great use to the Vaudois.

As they passed along, town after town opened their gates. At St. Joire, the magistrates placed a great cask of wine in the street for their refreshment.

At Cluse the gates were shut, and it appeared as though a passage would not be allowed. The hostages were appealed to, and one of them wrote to a nobleman in the town. He came to the camp, and was detained, while a Vaudois officer went to the town. "Where is your warrant?" was asked. "At the point of our swords," was the reply. They were allowed to pass through, and to buy provisions.

At other places they met with similar treatment � a refusal at first, but then permission.

But they had mountains to pass covered with snow, and they knew there were troops gathering somewhere to oppose them. They had reached the top of the mountain of Tourliers, when they observed some soldiers, and farther on, near Salabertrans, the Vaudois asked a peasant if they would be able to obtain provisions in that place. His reply was, "Go on, go on! they are preparing you a good supper there!"

On reaching the plain, they counted thirty-six bivouac fires, by which they reckoned that there must be an army of over 2,000 men. They proved to be French soldiers, under the command of the Marquis de Larrey.

The Vaudois divided their troops into three companies, and made for the bridge, which was defended by the marquis in person. He was soon wounded, and retired. The fight was desperate, but the Vaudois were victorious. They crossed the bridge, and then destroyed it. The French fled in the greatest disorder. The Vaudois thanked God, and took courage.

On they must go, weary as they were. Some fell down, and went to sleep, but the rear-guard awoke them. Some were missed, and never seen after. They had still to cross the mountain of Sci, when they would reach Pragela, the home of some of their forefathers.

On Sunday morning (August 25th) they reached the top of the mountain, and they fell on their knees, returning thanks to God for having brought them within view of their native place. "O Lord, my God," exclaimed the pastor, "Thou who didst bring back the sons of Jacob from the land of bondage to that of their ancestors. O God of Israel, God of our fathers! be pleased to accomplish and to bless Thy work in us, Thy feeble servants! May the light of the gospel never be extinguished in these mountains, where it has so long shined; and grant that our hands may rekindle and maintain it there. Bless our absent families And to Thee alone, our heavenly Father, with Jesus Thine only Son our Saviour, and the Holy Ghost our Comforter, be honour, praise and glory, now and for ever. Amen."

They had still a mountain to pass, and they received information that an enemy awaited them at the Col Julian. This was found to be true. The soldiers cried out, "Come on, come on, ye devil's barbets! there are more than 3,000 of us, and we hold all the posts." The Vaudois, nothing daunted, climbed up the mountain, and took post after post, the soldiers at last fleeing before them.

They descended the mountain, and then took possession of the villages of L'Aiguille and Sibaoud, and then Bobi. The Catholic priests, who had persecuted them before, now fled away.

On the hill of Sibaoud, they piled their arms and reposed at leisure. It was Sunday, September 1st. The pastor Montoux, having placed an old door on two rocks, mounted it as a pulpit, and preached from Luke xvi. 16: "The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it."

They had been a fortnight on their journey, but had yet more to do. They must possess the valley of Lucerna and that of St. Martin; but were still victorious, though they were surrounded by their enemies, and had to fight many battles. They were at length driven to the mountains for protection, because of the French army.

To provide provision was now a great difficulty, for their enemies destroyed all they could. A mill had been dismantled as far back as 1686, and the stone hidden; but some knew where it was to be found. It was soon unearthed and set up, and what corn they could get was ground and bread made. At Pral and Rodoret a remarkable interposition of God favoured them. The inhabitants having been driven away, the corn had not been reaped in the harvest of 1689, and the snow had covered the standing corn; this was now found in good condition, and was reaped by them from February to April, 1690. Thus God provided them a harvest in the winter.

They would no doubt have been obliged to surrender to the French, but Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, had to choose between France and Austria, who, with England and Spain, were now at war. He decided to join Austria, and this saved the Vaudois. An envoy brought them the news that Piedmont was no longer an ally of France, and that Victor Amadeus II. offered the Vaudois provisions and arms if they would join his army. The country was opened up to them, to go where they pleased. They accepted the offer, and became the soldiers of Amadeus. But after a while Amadeus was defeated, and Savoy was made over to France, and again the Vaudois had to fight for their lives and suffer persecution.

There is no doubt that love for their country was the main inducement that led the Vaudois to fight their way back to their native valleys. Others, who had joined the Vaudois, fell back from time to time, despairing of success; but no hardship could daunt the true Vaudois. We cannot justify their using the sword; for our Lord had declared that His kingdom was not of this world, else His servants would have fought; and He further warned His followers, that those who took the sword should perish by the sword.

Napoleon I., having conquered Italy, granted relief and liberty to the Waldenses; but on his fall, Victor Emmanuel I. issued an edict enforcing the old discipline, but on England and Prussia interceding, more mild treatment followed in 1816. In 1831 when Charles Albert ascended the throne, the Jesuits nearly succeeded in revoking the edict of toleration; but the protests of Prussia and Holland were again crowned with success.

From that time they have remained comparatively unmolested; though it is to be feared that they have sunk, more or less, into the general level of Christendom.

In the history of the Waldenses and those: who had a like faith, we see how God raised up in the dark ages companies of faithful men, who had no thought at first of leaving the church of Rome; they only asked for liberty to worship God in simplicity and truth. But this brought them into collision with the clergy, and persecution drove them out of that corrupt church, of the evils of which, with the light of the scriptures, they could not be ignorant. They may be compared to a body of pioneers who went forth to attack the powers of darkness found associated with the church of Rome � before the more regular army of Reformers were called out, who attacked still more powerfully and more successfully those direful deceivers, and brought to light the supremacy of the word of God, and the one glorious doctrine of justification by faith.

Chapter 13.

England.

A.D. 1066 to the Reformation.

Many changes were introduced into the English church at the conquest of England by William duke of Normandy. Vacant places were filled by Normans. It is said that the Anglo-Saxon clergy were so illiterate as to be scarcely able to stammer out the forms of divine service; and that any one who understood grammar was quite an exception: learning as well as religion had fallen into decay. The Norman clergy, however, made no efforts to learn the Anglo-Saxon language, by which to edify their hearers.

The king appointed an able man as primate. Lanfranc had been a professor of laws in his native city of Pavia, and had afterwards opened a school at Avranches; from thence he removed to the monastery of Bec, in Normandy. He had opposed William's marriage with Matilda as being within the forbidden degrees, and had in consequence been ordered out of the country by the duke. But meeting accidentally, a compromise was made, and Lanfranc was despatched to Rome to get from the pope the removal of an interdict under which William's territories had been laid. Lanfranc succeeded, and William urged him on his return to accept the archbishopric of Canterbury. He would have preferred to return to his monastery, but the pope refused his consent. He then accepted William's offer, though Lanfranc was nearly ninety years old, and travelled to Rome to receive the "pall" of his office.

Lanfranc set to work to reform the church in England: vacancies were filled up, but not always by worthy men. The king had to listen to the powerful barons and give places to their favourites. Many of the English were removed simply because they were not Normans. Thus an effort was made to remove Wulstan, the venerable bishop of Winchester, on the plea that he did not understand the French language; and a synod was called to effect it. He is said to have been an illiterate man, but had led a blameless life. He said to the synod that he knew his own unworthiness, but the king his master had called him to the office, "By the authority of the holy see he laid the burden upon me, and with this staff he commanded me to receive the rank of a bishop." Knowing his unworthiness, he would resign the office, but not to them, but to the one who had called him to it. Then walking to the tomb of Edward the Confessor he laid the crozier on his tomb, and took his place among the monks. He was allowed to retain his office, and, at the death of the king, was the only English bishop who had not been removed.

The marriage of the clergy was a difficult point. A council at Winchester ordained that no canon should have a wife, and for the future no married man should be ordained priest or deacon; the rural clergy were allowed to retain their wives.

William was desirous of maintaining relationship with Rome, but he was resolved to be master in England. He not only appointed the bishops and abbots, but invested them also. Lanfranc begged that he might have the investing of the abbots; but the king declared that he meant "to keep all the staves in his own hands." The bishops were not to obey citations to Rome, nor were they to receive any letters from the pope without shewing them to the king; neither was any one to be excommunicated without the king's licence.

This was displeasing to the pope (Hildebrand), but he was anxious not to break with the king. He sent an envoy to England, asking that the king should swear fealty to the pope, and should pay Peter's pence, as his predecessor had done. The king would not swear fealty to the pope: he would pay some pence as alms, but not as a tribute. The pope replied that the money without obedience was worthless. Threats were held out to William; but he paid no regard to them. The pope then cited certain English and Norman bishops to attend a synod at Rome; but no response was made to this, and the pope had to overlook the disobedience. Again and again Lanfranc was summoned to Rome, to confer on matters touching the English church; but he never went.

All this is important, as shewing that England was not wholly under the yoke of Rome at that time, and could manage its own affairs better without the pope's interference than with it.

William was succeeded by William Rufus, who as long as Lanfranc lived was held in restraint, but when the archbishop died (in 1089) he gave way to profligate living, and made free with the revenues of the church, keeping places vacant that he might spend the money. No successor to Lanfranc was appointed for four years. A severe illness was declared to be a judgment on the king, and he now appointed Anselm as archbishop.

Anselm was born in Piedmont, and had settled at Bec. In 1063 he had been made prior, and in 1078, abbot. Here he became very famous by his writings on theology, grammar, etc., and pupils flocked to him from all quarters: many questions were addressed to him, and his answers were valued as oracles from heaven.

He has been accounted the most learned man in theology since Augustine, and has been described as the setter forth of what is called natural theology.

Anselm strongly opposed his own appointment. He much preferred his quiet monastery and time for study, to having to do with such a king as William. He compared the position to a young untamed bull being yoked to an old and feeble sheep: the poor sheep would be dragged to death.

All opposition, however, was useless: being in England at the time he was carried into the king's sick chamber at Gloucester, the crosier was forced into his hands, and notwithstanding his struggles, he was hurried away into a church and hailed as archbishop of Canterbury.

The king recovered, and was now worse than before, and Anselm soon found his position was not a bed of roses. The king still wanted money, and the archbishop learned that he was expected to send to the king a contribution. He sent �500, in the hope that the king would be favourable to the church. The king would at first have received the money; but some about him declared that it was a paltry sum, and was not nearly as much as should have been sent by one receiving such an office. The archbishop said he could not then send more; but it would not be his last gift. The king, however, refused to receive it, and the archbishop distributed it among the poor.

The king was highly displeased, and refused to restore the estates of the church. He also refused a council to be held to reform the disorders among the clergy and monks. When pressed to fill up some vacancies, William replied, "What is that to you? are not the abbeys mine?" "They are yours," was the reply, "to defend and protect as advocate; but they are not yours to invade and devastate."

After various conflicts, Anselm sent two of the clergy to Rome, to inquire which of the rival popes (Clement III. and Urban II.) had the best claim. They judged Urban should be acknowledged as pope, and Anselm requested permission to go to Rome to receive the "pall" of office. The king refused; but Urban, on being acknowledged the true pope, sent a pall for the archbishop. This again was a cause for dispute. William wanted Anselm to receive it from his hands; but he refused. At length the pope's legate laid it on the altar at Canterbury, and the archbishop took it from thence.

After repeated hindrances, Anselm started for Rome (A.D. 1098), but was searched at Dover lest he was carrying money to the pope. At Rome he was received with great distinction, and was spoken of as "the holy man." Envoys were also sent by the king to Rome, and the pope told these that everything must be restored to the archbishop under pain of excommunication; but, by large presents from the king in private, this was averted!

This convinced Anselm that he could not hope for much from the pope, so he retired to Lyons where he remained a year and a half. There he heard of the death of Urban, in July, 1099, and of that of William in 1100.

While abroad, Anselm finished a treatise on the Incarnation, which is said to have been the basis of much that has been written since. He shews that there must be a satisfaction for sin; and the necessity that this satisfaction should be rendered by One who is perfect God and perfect Man.

Henry I. succeeded in England. He invited Anselm to return to his office, and he filled up the vacancies in the church. But a dispute arose at once about investiture. The king claimed it, and the archbishop claimed it as from the pope. Messengers were sent to the pope � Paschal II. now � but he refused to give way to the king, and encouraged the archbishop to resist.

In 1102 a council of the clergy was held in London, attended also by the nobles. The celibacy of the parochial clergy was now, for the first time, agreed on. This met with great opposition in some places. The canons bear evidence of the low state into which religion, discipline, and even morality had fallen during the reign of William Rufus.

Anselm again went to Rome, and messengers also went from the king, respecting investiture � each claiming it as their right. At length a compromise was agreed on � that the king should forego investiture, but that, for the present, bishops and abbots should be permitted to do homage; while those who had been invested by him should be admitted to communion on such terms as the two envoys of the pope should agree. This was a decided victory for Rome.

In the twelfth century learning revived in England. Perhaps to this period may be assigned the establishing of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, though there had been schools at these places and in London, St. Alban's, and elsewhere, long before. In the reign of Richard I. we find the university of Oxford mentioned as being similar to the university of Paris, and as a sort of rival to that renowned seat of learning.

It is recorded that in 1109 three monks went to Cambridge every day, to teach in a barn hired for their use. One taught grammar in the morning; a second, logic at one o'clock; and the third gave lectures on rhetoric at three. The barn was soon found to be too small for the purpose, and places were sought in different parts of the town. This is the description given of the humble state of learning at what became the university of Cambridge.

England was gradually enslaved by Rome. Henry II. strongly opposed the encroachments of the pope, but had to give way. He joined the the French king in persecuting the Cathari of Toulouse, who are believed to have been true Christians, though styled Arians by Rome.

In the reign of Henry II. also, thirty men and women, Germans, were brought before a council of the clergy at Oxford. Gerard, their teacher, declared they were Christians and believed the doctrines of the apostles. But as they did not hold with purgatory, prayers for the dead, nor the invocation of the saints, they were, by the orders of Henry, branded with a hot iron on the forehead, then whipped through Oxford, had their clothes cut off at their girdles, and turned into the open fields. Under heavy penalties no one was allowed to give them shelter or food. They remained calm, and were heard repeating "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." It being winter time, they all perished.

What a sad picture is this of how England was devoted to the dogmas of Rome. The king and the university were thus united to cast out true Christians from the land!

The conflict between Henry and Thomas � Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, must be but briefly touched upon. From the most magnificent of courtiers, Becket, as archbishop, appeared to be the most devoted saint. He adopted the coarsest clothing, and ate the plainest food; daily he washed the feet of the poor; devotedly he paced the cloisters of his cathedral, and spent hours in prayer.

It having been represented to the king that, during the first eight years of his reign, a hundred murders had been committed by the ecclesiastics, Henry called a council of prelates and barons at Clarendon, 1164.

It was therein settled that "all cases whether civil or criminal, in which a clergyman was concerned, should be tried and determined in the king's court; that appeals should be from the archbishop to the king; and that no cause should be carried further than the archbishop's court (that is, not to Rome) without the king's consent; that no archbishop, bishop, or dignified clergy should depart from the kingdom without the king's leave."

Becket promised to agree to the Constitutions of Clarendon, but at a meeting afterwards refused. The king was exasperated, and the clergy begged the archbishop to give way. He promised, if the meeting was adjourned till the resolutions could be put into proper form, he would agree to them. On this being done, he again refused, and imposed a penance on himself for his weakness in having promised to agree to the Constitutions. Pope Alexander III. released him from his oath.

As is well known, Becket rather than give way, fled to the continent, and remained there nearly six years. On being reconciled to the king, he returned; but had sent on before him excommunications against the archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury. These hastened to lay their complaints before the king, and demanded redress: "We implore it," said they, "both for the sake of royalty and the clergy � for our own repose as well as yours." The king was seized with a fit of fury. "How!" cried he, "a fellow that has eaten my bread � a beggar that first came to my court on a lame horse, dares insult his king and the royal family, and tread upon the whole kingdom, and not one of the cowards I nourish at my table � not one will deliver me from this turbulent priest."

Unhappy words! Four of the king's knights quietly left his presence unobserved, crossed the sea, and murdered the archbishop.

The king was greatly shocked, and fasted for three days. He swore it was not done at his command nor with his knowledge; but as his hasty words may have led to the deed, he afterwards promised to maintain two hundred knights as crusaders for a year; to serve himself for three years against the Saracens or Moors if the pope should require it; to restore the lands and possessions belonging to the friends of the late archbishop; and to allow appeals to be made to the pope; etc. He was then fully absolved.

Becket was accounted a saint; crowds flocked to his tomb to pray, and it was said that many miracles were wrought there. It was declared that "even from his grave he rendered his testimony in behalf of the papacy."

Later on, the king prostrated himself before Becket's tomb, and the bishops, priests, and monks, each bearing a scourge, struck the king's bare shoulders three or five times according to their rank. After this, it is not to be wondered at that Rome became supreme in England.

In the time of Richard, Innocent III. was pope, and he plainly declared that no one was fit to exercise any authority who did not revere and obey the holy see. In a bull he declared that he would not endure the least contempt of himself or of God, whose place he held on earth, but would punish every disobedience without delay, and without respect of persons; and would convince the whole world that he was determined to act as a sovereign. Richard, though the "lion-hearted," had to give way.

His successor, John, had no power over the pope. John having objected to an illegal appointment of an archbishop, Innocent III. laid the kingdom under an interdict. In despair, John proposed to turn Mahometan, but afterwards thought it best to yield to the pope. On May 15, 1213, he laid his crown at the feet of the pope's legate, and made oath that he surrendered the kingdom to Rome.

The indignant barons made John sign the "Magna Charta," but by hired troops he put down the barons, and Rome reigned supreme in England.

In the time of Henry III. the kingdom was still subject to Rome, but a wholesome check was given to Rome by one of the English bishops, now to be named.

Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln.

A few words must be said of bishop Grosseteste, elected A.D. 1235. He was learned above his compeers, and was really zealous to carry out reforms in the church. But he held the mendicant orders in too much favour, and was long deceived by them. At length he found that they needed to be reformed, and he obtained letters to carry this out. But when he set to work to reform them, they appealed to the pope. Innocent IV. was then at Lyons, and Grosseteste travelled there to see him. To his astonishment the case was decided against him. He said, "I relied on your letters and promises, but am entirely disappointed." "What is that to you," was the reply; "you have done your part, and we are disposed to favour them: is your eye evil because I am good?" We trust such profane use of scripture shocked the bishop: he replied in a low tone, "O money, how great is thy power, especially at the court of Rome!" It is a wonder such a scene did not open the eyes of the bishop to the apostasy of Rome.

He returned, but was further shocked by the pope's sending Italians, who knew not a word of English, to fill up vacancies. The pope also insisted that one of his nephews, an Italian youth, should be a canon of Lincoln. Grosseteste, to his honour, positively refused to obey, and wrote an epistle defending himself.

Innocent was indignant. "Who is this old dotard," he exclaimed, "who dares to judge my actions? By Peter and Paul, if I were not restrained by my generosity, I would make him an example and a spectacle to all mankind. Is not the king of England my vassal and my slave? and if I gave the word would he not throw him into prison, and load him with infamy and disgrace?"

The cardinals did all they could to appease the pope. They said that the bishop's epistle was true, and to persecute him would only bring the pope into contempt. He would not listen to their advice, but excommunicated the bishop, and nominated another in his place. As the cardinals had said, the acts of the pope were disregarded, and the bishop remained in the see till his death in 1253.

Innocent desired to take vengeance on the bones of the bishop, but one night, says a monk (Matthew, of Paris), the bishop appeared before him, drew near to the pontiff's bed, and struck him with his crosier, declaring that the Lord would not let him molest him. The pope uttered a cry and lay senseless on his bed. He never had a quiet night after, and when he expired the palace re-echoed with his fearful groans!

Another catholic writer said, "The holy bishop Robert departed this world which he never loved, and which was always to him a place of banishment. He was the open reprover both of my lord the pope and the king, and the censurer of the prelates, the corrector of the monks, the director of the priests, the instructor of the clergy . . . . and lastly he was the scourge of lazy and selfish Romans whom he heartily despised."

Though not clear in all his views of truth, it is to be hoped that he was a true Christian himself, and was able to point out to others the way of salvation. In many respects he was certainly a light shining in this our country during the Dark Ages.

By the above it will be seen, that the pope claimed supremacy over the kings of the earth. He said, "Is not the king of England my vassal and slave?" And in 1191 Celestine III. kicked the crown off the head of the emperor Henry VI. while kneeling, to shew that he could make or unmake an emperor. Alas, for any country to be under such masters! The ages must still have been dark, when such a claim could have been listened to for a moment.

Edward III.

In the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. things continued much as before, concerning the relations of England with Rome. But under Edward III. a decided stand was made against the assumptions of Rome. He refused to make the annual payment to Rome. He also obtained a parliamentary declaration, that king John had no right to reduce the kingdom to a state of vassalage. He, also obtained a statute against the claims of the pope to appoint successors to vacancies, and outlawed those who should dare to appeal to Rome.

One, Richard Fitzralf, was appointed archbishop of Armagh. He was zealous in opposing the pretensions of the mendicant friars, who absolved people for gross sins in defiance of the clergy. The friars appealed to the pope, and he summoned Fitzralf to Rome, where he was condemned, and died in banishment.

Rome was not only in thorough darkness itself, but would not allow any light to appear elsewhere if it could prevent it.

Bradwardine.

Bradwardine was confessor to Edward III. He had studied at Oxford, and had gained the distinction of "the profound." He was chosen for the see of Canterbury, but Edward would not part with him till he was elected on a second vacancy, when he let him go. But he died after a few weeks. He has obtained a place in history principally by a large work he wrote, "Concerning the cause of God against Pelagius." The subject is treated in a most orderly manner � with "mathematical accuracy," says his biographer. The work is still in existence.

Wiclif.

During the reign of Edward III. lived also the pious Wiclif who strongly opposed the assumptions of the pope, translated the Bible into English, and preached the gospel faithfully. A short account of this early reformer has been given elsewhere.*

{*"Lights and Shadows of the Reformation."}

We have thus seen how slavishly servile the kingdom of England became to Rome in the Dark Ages. And we have seen how Edward III. made a dead stand against the pope's assumptions. Wiclif also opposed the doctrines of Rome, and brought to light the word of God and the gospel of God's grace. All this paved the way and prepared the minds of men for the further revelations of truth that were proclaimed at the Reformation. Indeed, the publication of the word of God in the English language was a great means used in opening men's eyes to the evils of Rome, and to the glorious gospel contained in that message to man � a light indeed that destroyed the Dark Ages. If men now refuse the light, we know from God's word that a still greater darkness awaits them; those who will not now receive the truth, whereby they be saved, and who take pleasure in unrighteousness, will then believe a lie. May the Lord grant that every reader of these pages may take warning, receive Christ as his or her Saviour, and be eternally blessed.

Scotland.

In Scotland, the Anglo-Saxon Margaret, after her marriage with Malcolm III. (Canmore) sought to conform the church there to the church of England, which was under the control of Rome.

Monasteries and abbeys were established all over the country, and were endowed by this king, his successors, and by the nobles.

In the time of king Alexander I. (1107-24) Eadmer, a monk at Canterbury, was chosen bishop of St. Andrew's; and a hot dispute arose as to his consecration, the archbishops of Canterbury and York both claimed it as their prerogative to consecrate him. The Scotch king did not wish it to be from either. Eadmer naturally preferred Canterbury, but the king would not yield. "While I live," said he, "I will not permit the bishop of St. Andrew's to be subject to that see." Eadmer would not break with Canterbury, resigned his office, and returned to England. He afterwards wrote to the king, owning he was wrong. The archbishop of Canterbury also wrote demanding that Eadmer should be re-instated. The king listened to neither, but chose another bishop.

In 1178 a more serious dispute arose as to Rome's authority in Scotland. The See of St. Andrew's being again vacant, the chapter chose one "John, surnamed the Scot;" but the king (now William the Lion) chose his own chaplain, Hugh. John appealed to Rome, and pope Alexander III. annulled the appointment of Hugh, and his legate consecrated John. But the king banished John, and installed Hugh in the bishopric. The pope could not suffer this, and after much disputing, king William was excommunicated and the whole of Scotland was laid under an interdict.

At this juncture the pope died (1181), and William hastened to send ambassadors to the new pope Lucius III., who reversed all that his predecessor had done. John was made bishop of Dunkeld, and peace was restored. The next pope (Clement III.) was also favourable to William, and the church of Scotland was adopted as "the daughter of Rome, by special grace," and was to be subject to no other intermediate power.

In 1225 the Scottish clergy obtained permission from pope Honorius IV. to hold councils in Scotland to settle the affairs of the church. This was a great boon to the church of Scotland, and eventually they did not hesitate to pass canons against the edicts of the pope. Thus when the pope demanded that the Scottish clergy should give a tithe to the king of England, in aid of a proposed crusade, they firmly refused.

It was settled that the above council should meet yearly, the bishops in turn presiding, whose business it was to see that its canons were carried into effect. These canons continued in force until the era of the Reformation, though the bishops and clergy were still in full union with Rome, and for the most part were obedient to its edicts.

Chapter 14.

Councils of the Church.

During the Dark Ages there were many councils held in various places: some were called for party purposes, and are unworthy of the name. We will record only those called "General Councils" by the church of Rome.

V. Held at Constantinople in A.D. 553, against the errors of Origen.

VI. Held at Constantinople in 680, against the Monothelites.

VII. Second Nicene Council in 787, against image breakers.

VIII. Constantinople in 870, against the same, and various heresies.

The above have been already looked at in our Sketches.

IX. First Lateran, in 1123, to settle the right of investiture between the pope and Henry V.

X. Second Lateran, in 1139, called to settle the temporal matters of the ecclesiastics, and restore internal peace in the church. 1,000 fathers of the church attended.

XI.. Third Lateran, in 1179, called to consider the decrees of the antipopes. Popes were to be elected by the cardinals alone. A spiritual war was declared against schismatics and heretics, especially the Vaudois.

XII. Fourth Lateran, in 1215, against the Albigenses and any called heretics. A permanent Inquisition to be established against all suspected persons. The crusades. The dogmas of transubstantiation and auricular confession were established.

XIII. Lyons, in 1245. Called by Innocent IV. to depose the emperor Frederick II.

XIV. Lyons, in 1274. The Procession of the Holy Ghost discussed. The temporary union of eastern and western churches. The various orders of mendicants reduced to four.

XV. Vienne in Dauphine, in 1311-12, to suppress the order of the Knights Templars. This was really a civil matter. Philip king of France, finding the knights too powerful, sought by their suppression to gain both power and riches. The council ordered the suppression of the order, not in a way of justice, but by way of expediency, lest the king of France should be offended. As at other councils, reforms in the church were talked of, but deferred.

XVI. Pisa, in 1409. There were now two popes, Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII. The council summoned both to attend, but neither answered. Thirty-eight charges were brought against them, and both were deposed; Alexander V. was elected pope.

XVII. Constance, in 1414-18. Called because there were now three popes. Alexander V. died the year of his election, supposed to have been poisoned, and John XIII. was elected; but the two former popes refused to be deposed � "Was not a pope above a council?" The council deposed John, confirmed the canons of Pisa, and elected Martin V. Wiclif was condemned, and Huss and Jerome sent to the stake.

XVIII. Basil, in 1431-43. Conferences with the Bohemians. Conflict with the pope, Eugenius IV. The power of a council declared to be above that of a pope. Eugenius was deposed, and Felix V. elected in 1439. Eugenius would not submit, and again there were two popes. Felix resigned in 1449. Reformation of the clergy.

XIX. Fifth Lateran, in 1512-17. The "pragmatic sanction" of France (as the edicts of the king were called against the usurpation of the pope in the choice of bishops), suppressed.

XX. Trent, in 1545-63, to condemn the Reformation. At this council was settled what was to be the future doctrine of the church of Rome; and its Catechism is now always appealed to as the standard authority of that church.

XXI. Rome, in 1869-70. Infallibility of the pope declared.

Chapter 15.

The Claims of Rome.

We deem it well, seeing that popery has held such a prominent place in our sketches of church history, and that it not only still exists in this country, but is greatly on the increase, to review, as briefly as possible, what its claims really are, and what those claims are based upon, that the Christian may not only refuse its pretensions, but be able to help any who may be deceived thereby.

We have already seen that it was in the Dark Ages the church of Rome attained its greatest power � it flourished in the darkness, and did all it could to hide the light of God's word, and refuse its circulation.

The popes not only claimed authority over all Christians in every part of the world, but they also maintained that all kings and emperors held their authority from them. We have seen how the popes treated Henry IV. and Henry VI. of Germany, and king John of England.

A step farther, the popes claimed to be owners of all newly-found lands. Alexander VI. granted to the Portuguese a right to certain countries, and to the Spanish other places in the West Indies and the Azores.

Then the popes claimed authority over heaven and hell. By means of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, they professed to open heaven to any; and by their anathemas they doomed people to the punishment of hell. These are pretensions merely, they had not really this power.

Happily a great number of Christians � simply with the Bible in their hands and its truths engrafted within them � are able to shew that if God's word is true, the doctrines and pretensions of Rome must be altogether wrong and false.

As is well known, Rome lays its claims upon the assumptions: 1, That the apostle Peter was once bishop of Rome; 2, That a certain supremacy was given to Peter over the other apostles; 3, That this supremacy was handed down to the bishops of Rome who succeeded Peter, and from them onward to the present day by what is known as apostolic succession. These three things combined are declared to prove the church of Rome to be the true church, and consequently all others to be false.

We turn to scripture to see what light we can gather on these points; and first as to Peter being the bishop of Rome. On the day of Pentecost (say A.D. 29), "strangers of Rome" are named as being present at Jerusalem; and, as many were converted on that occasion, it may be that when these "strangers" returned to Rome, an assembly there may possibly have been the result. In whatever way the work commenced there we know that, when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans, he stated that their faith had been "spoken of throughout the whole world." This would be about A.D. 58.

Thus, during the intervening thirty years the faith had greatly spread in the city so as to have been thus widely known. Rome being the capital of the empire, people would be constantly going and coming, which would largely aid, no doubt, in spreading abroad the faith of the Roman Christians.

Now it seems quite clear that Peter was not at Rome when Paul wrote to the saints there, or he would surely have mentioned his name; neither is there any mention of Peter when Paul arrived at Rome as a prisoner (about A.D. 62); and indeed scripture is quite silent as to Peter ever having been at Rome.

In Acts xii. Peter is at Jerusalem (about A.D. 41); and again in Acts xv. he is also there (about A.D. 50). Then we read of him visiting Antioch (Gal. ii. 11), perhaps soon after the council at Jerusalem. All this is entirely opposed to the idea of his having been the founder of the church at Rome, and having resided there as bishop.

Besides he was emphatically apostle to the circumcision, as Paul was apostle to the Gentiles, which would not at all accord with his being settled over any particular church, especially over a Gentile church.

If we turn to the early writers of the church, all is confusion. Some say that Peter was bishop of Antioch. Others, that he was apostle at Rome and was appointed the first bishop there. Some, that he, in conjunction with Paul, founded the church at Rome. There is, however, nothing in the least certain, and in later times it became easy to assert that Peter had been the first bishop of Rome, especially when it was sought to build an immense fabric upon that assumption.

In reference to the second question, as to whether Peter had any supremacy over the other apostles, the supposition is based upon the notable passage in Matthew xvi. 18, 19: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

From our point of view we need not have entered upon this second question, seeing that there is really nothing to link Peter with the church of Rome; and without this link the supremacy of Peter, if proved, would not give precedence to that church. Nevertheless, it may be well to endeavour to learn what the passage is intended to teach.

At the outset it may be admitted that Peter seems to have had a somewhat prominent place among the disciples, inasmuch as in the Gospels he is often mentioned first of the three, "Peter, James and John," though we cannot see that this gave him any supremacy over them.

In the above passage � as has often been pointed out � the words "this rock" may refer to Christ Himself, and not to Peter � indeed, this is the decided judgment of some who are able to refer to the original Greek. They say that it is proved that it does not refer to Peter by the word used for "rock," though this cannot be easily shewn to an English reader. It would be somewhat like this: "Thou art a stone: on this rock I will build my church."

{* The two words are Petros and Petra. The former is always the name of Peter except in John i. 42, where it is translated "a stone;" "Cephas, which is by interpretation a stone." The latter occurs sixteen times, and is always translated in the Authorised Version, rock.}

If we turn to the fathers we find great difference of judgment as to the passage, and nothing that throws any light upon it.

One thing is clear, that the foundation of the church cannot be a mere man, as Peter was: "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." (1 Cor. iii. 11.) It is true that the saints are said to be built upon the foundation of the apostles and [New Testament] prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone. (Eph. ii. 20.) But here, we see, there is no thought of the apostles being separated from the prophets, much less that any one of the apostles was appointed as the foundation.

Further, as to supremacy, we find that at Jerusalem, James � not Peter � had the chief place. At the council at Jerusalem, after Peter and others had spoken, James said, "My sentence is," etc., though they were able to say, "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us." (Acts xv. 19, 28.)

Again, at Antioch we find that Paul withstood Peter to his face, because he was to be blamed; clearly proving that Peter then held no such place in the church as has been claimed for him by the church of Rome.

But it will be asked, What about the keys? Were not the keys of the kingdom given to Peter? They were; but this can have nothing to do with the building. People do not build with keys. Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, and many were admitted thereby. He also was the means used to bring in Cornelius. He himself said at the council at Jerusalem: "God made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel and believe." (Acts xv. 7.) So that Peter was the instrument by which both Jews and Gentiles were first admitted into the kingdom.

Again, it will be urged that to Peter was given power to bind and loose, and whatsoever he bound or loosed on earth was bound or loosed in heaven. True; but the same power was also given to all the apostles; to them our Lord said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." (John xx. 22, 23.)

This surely refers to discipline, etc., and not to eternal forgiveness. They were not to take the place of God, who alone can forgive sins; but the apostles had power to bind sin upon an individual, as in the case of Ananias and Sapphira.

And further, we learn from the Epistle to the Corinthians that the church has the power � and it is its duty � to put away a wicked person, thus binding sin upon the guilty one. And on his repentance, it has the power to "forgive" such a one (2 Cor. ii. 7-10) and restore to communion. And when this is rightly done, the saints being led therein by the Holy Spirit, it is recognised by God in heaven.

In reference to the third point, very few words will suffice. There is no such thought in scripture as a succession of authority. Paul had the authority to delegate Timothy and Titus to appoint elders in every city; but there is not one word about those elders having authority to appoint others.

The apostle Paul, when speaking of his departure, commended the saints to God and to the word of his grace (Acts xx. 32), without the least hint that there should be any one in authority, to whom they were to bow.

And this was surely good. Apostasy came in very soon after, and evil doctrines were held by those who claimed such supposed authority, and it was well that Christians could cast themselves on God, refer to the written word, and refuse obedience.

The accounts of the pontiffs also shew plainly that their boasted succession from the apostles is a complete fable. At times the chair was vacant for months or even years; at other times there were two or even three men attempting to reign at once � each one cursing the others, and declaring all their ordinations to be worthless and void. Even Roman Catholic historians are not able to say how the succession should be traced, and differ in their attempts to make out a list. For a time the popes were notoriously wicked men, raised to power through the influence of profligate women. Thus their own historian Baronius confesses that there was "nowhere any mention of clergy electing or afterwards consenting, all canons buried in silence, the decrees of pontiffs suffocated, ancient traditions and old customs in electing the sovereign pontiffs proscribed, and sacred rites and ancient customs utterly extinguished."* He further says that the clergy chosen by these popes were such men as themselves. At Rheims, Count Hugo made his son of five years old archbishop, and took the revenues; then, when some got the upper hand, and consecrated another, there was a fight over it, and councils about it, and two archbishops at the same time.

The same historian says, "Not only was Christ asleep in the ship [alluding to the narrative in the gospels], but there were no disciples who should wake Him up: they were all snoring. What presbyters and cardinal deacons can we suppose should be chosen by these monsters, when nothing is so implanted in nature as that each should beget what is like himself? Who can doubt that they consented in all things to those by whom they were chosen."*

{* Baronius, 912, viii., vii. }

Now remember that this is not a history by a Protestant writer, but by one of Rome's own accredited historians, who surely did not portray the facts darker than they really were. Where, then, in all this was there apostolic succession? In such a succession should we not expect to find at least a few of the true features of Christianity and godliness? whereas here there was not one.

Notice, too, that the historian says, like pope like presbyters, like deacons, etc., and there were no disciples to call upon Christ: all were snoring. Surely this is a vivid picture of the Dark Ages. Men have tried to deny the darkness of those ages because there were Bibles in existence here and there; but what effect could they have if locked up, the light being extinguished as far as these wicked men could do it? At a council held at Toulouse in 1229, the laity were forbidden to have the scriptures in the vulgar tongue, except a psalter, or the like; and it was also forbidden to translate the scriptures.

The doings of these popes were not enacted in some obscure corner of the earth, where there were few to see or to regard what was done. It was at Rome, the head and centre of the catholic religion; and though the whole civilised world was looking on, still these things were done with the most audacious and unblushing effrontery.

This claim, then, of apostolic succession � like all other claims of the Roman catholic church � crumbles into atoms as soon as it is fairly examined.

But notwithstanding all this and much more failure in that church, they still declare that it is that church of which it is said "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." But surely our Lord said this of the church He was going to build. We know from other parts of the word that what man builds may end in failure � be burned up like wood, hay, and stubble. (1 Cor. iii. 11-15.) This is in contrast to what our Lord Himself builds, which will of course stand for ever, in spite of all Satan's endeavours to prevent it.

We will further briefly allude to the so-called proofs of the Roman Catholic church being the true church. They are mainly condensed into four, namely, Unity, Catholicity, Holiness, and Apostolicity.

As to unity of faith and practice, it is but a myth. These have been altered again and again to suit circumstances, popes condemning councils, and councils condemning popes; one pontiff again and again undoing what another had done.

As to Catholicity, by which is meant universality � this is also a mere fable. It is not and never was universal. There were always Christians who were separated from it, notably those forming the eastern church, as well as the Waldenses, the Syrian Christians at Malabar, British Christians, etc.

As to Holiness, it surely should be a mark of the true church, but one only blushes to think how barefaced must be the man who can put this forth as a proof that the church of Rome is that true church of God. One has only to read their own best historians (say upon the subject of the celibacy of the clergy) to see that it has been from time to time so scandalous in its unholiness, that many an emperor has had to point it out in unmeasured terms, and call for councils to put a stop to the wickedness.

Apostolicity we have already looked at in connection with their assumption of apostolic succession.

Thus the whole that Rome claims for itself vanishes into the merest pretension, when examined by scripture and credible history. It can only thrive by suppressing the word of God, and by lulling men's consciences by the cry of "The church, the church, believe the church, and that church will secure your salvation." To examine is not faith. You must take it as it is presented to you, though the name it adopts carries a lie on its face � the Roman Holy Catholic Church. As we have seen, it is not holy and it is not catholic. There are more professed Christians on the face of the earth who are not Roman catholics than those belonging to that church. Other parts of our history will also shew that on some points it is fatally heretical.

Chapter 16.

Conclusion.

Such are our sketches of the History of the Church during the Dark Ages. Except the history of the Waldenses, the early British church with the missionaries from Iona, and the Syrian Christians of Malabar, there is little recorded but the history of the eastern church till the Saracens conquered Syria, Egypt, and Constantinople; together with the history of the church of Rome.

Toward the close of the Dark Ages, light was springing up in various places, and there became a large army of reformers and of martyrs before the Reformation had well taken root. In most instances those to whom God had given light did not seek to separate from the church of Rome, however clear they were as to its errors and corruptions. Some indeed � like the English bishop Grosseteste � fondly hoped that the church of Rome would reform itself. In their simplicity they thought that abuses had only to be pointed out and they would be renounced. Being Christians themselves they judged of others by themselves, and had often bitterly to learn that the church of Rome was mainly the fold of the unconverted, who had ends and aims quite foreign to the glory of God and the good of the saints.

It is well to be acquainted with the history of the church of Rome during the Dark Ages; it is highly important we should know its character, because of the increase of Romanism in England, and of that form of Ritualism which is already becoming a dangerous stepping-stone to Romanism. It is surprising that any true Christian can have anything to do with the church of Rome, seeing that its pretensions have been so often refuted, and its wickedness so openly exposed. But a fearful judgment awaits spiritual Babylon, as we read in the Revelation.

It is to be regretted that there are so few records during the Dark Ages of Christians who sought to live godly lives amidst the darkness, besides those we have named. We feel sure there were many such; for God does not leave Himself without a witness. History records them not; that called "the church" was what engaged attention, irrespective of the extent to which it had fallen from its high standing; but God's eye saw every God-fearing soul, and these will have a place in His book of remembrance.

It is comforting to turn to scripture and to know that, notwithstanding all the darkness, God knows those that are His, and there is a day coming when our Lord shall present to Himself "a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing." (Eph. v. 27.) May He hasten it in His own time; but let us all remember the reverse side of God's seal: "Let him that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity."

Nor must we forget the judgments that are to fall on apostate Christendom, whether Papal or Protestant, as found detailed in God's word, when Antichrist will be fully revealed and be received by those who will not bow to the Lord Jesus Christ nor receive His gospel. (See 2 Thess. ii. and Rev. xvi. � xviii.) It is a solemn thing to associate evil in any way with the name of Christ, and many warnings are given in God's word against those who do so.

May our Sketches of the Church be used of God to shew that, amid the Dark Ages, He always had some who were witnesses for their absent Lord, who valued the Holy Scriptures, and were opposed to false doctrine and evil practices wherever found.

Also to shew how fearfully contrary to God persons may be, even living in sin, while at the same time making the highest professions of holiness, and claiming authority in the church. We would also earnestly desire that Christians, being led wholly and solely by the word of God as to what Christianity really is, may separate from evil, and find their place among those that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. (2 Tim. ii. 22.)

STEM Publishing : For the Young : The Reformation.

Lights and Shadows of the Reformation.

"If the son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed."

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square (before 1915).

Contents.

England.

Wiclif

The Translation of the Bible

The Work progresses

Bohemia.

John Huss and Jerome of Prague

Indulgences for Bohemia

Huss and the Council of Constance

Jerome a Martyr

Ziska and the Bohemians

Germany.

Luther and Melanchthon

The New Testament in German

Conflict with Rome continues

Human arrangements in the Church

The Work progresses amid opposition

War against the Reformation

France and Switzerland.

Zwingli, Calvin, Farel, Oecolampadius.

Zwingli, Farel and the Reformation in France

Farel in Switzerland

War in Switzerland

Calvin and France

Calvin in Italy

Geneva

Calvin in Geneva

France and the Massacre of Bartholomew

England.

Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Tyndale.

The King's Divorce

Latimer

Cranmer and the King's Divorce

Translation of the New Testament

Henry VIII. head of the Church

John Lambert

The King's Religion

Edward VI. and the Reformation

Queen Mary: Death of Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer

Queen Elizabeth and the Reformation

The Reformation under James

Charles I. and Cromwell

Scotland.

John Knox

Mary, Queen of Scotland

Knox's last days

Conclusion.

England.

Wiclif.

In the year 1365 the pope (Urban V.) came into collision with England, by arrogantly demanding the annual rental of one thousand marks promised by King John* with the arrears of many years then due. The English failing to pay this, the pope claimed possession of England as his kingdom, and ordered King Edward III. to repair to Rome.

{* King John when excommunicated by the pope, and in danger of an invasion from France in 1213, had said, "I promise to pay him [the pope] one thousand marks yearly, to wit, 700 for the kingdom of England, and 300 for the kingdom of Ireland." The value of a mark was thirteen shillings and four pence.}

No little consternation was caused in England by this demand. The papal party were in high hopes. England had already enacted some statutes denying the right of the pope to appoint foreigners to high offices in the English church; and prohibiting any one from bringing to England, or from receiving and publishing, any bulls or excommunications from the pope: but now the pope was only asking for that which had been promised from England by their own sovereign, how could it be refused?

Wiclif* by this time was about forty years old. He was a Christian. He had passed through soul trouble on account of sin and the judgment of God, and had found peace in studying the scriptures. He resolved to make known the treasure be had found.

{* Wiclif's name is spelt in about twenty different ways. He was born in 1324 at the village of Wicliffe, near Richmond in the county of York, from which village he received his name. Surnames were not yet in common use, and people were often called after the place where they were born, or where their parents owned property. Thus John Wiclif would be originally John de Wycliffe, John of Wycliffe.}

In 1361 he had been chosen warden of Balliol College, and in 1365 warden of Canterbury Hall, at Oxford. In these offices he made known and expounded the scriptures to the students in the week, and on the Sunday he preached in simple language the same truths to the people.

Wiclif heard of this demand of the pope, and he strenuously opposed it. He may have been appealed to by the king, and if so, it would have been his duty to reply; but otherwise how much better it would have been had Wiclif left the matters of the state to those whom God had placed over the nation, and kept to the work God had given him to do for the souls of his hearers.

Parliament was summoned amid great excitement, and proceeded to discuss the question. The friends of the pope were of course in favour of the money being granted; but many could not see what the pope had to do with demands on their country. "England belongs not to the pope," said one; "the pope is but a man, subject to sin; but Christ is the Lord of lords, and this kingdom is held directly and solely of Christ alone." It would have been more to the purpose had they quoted the passage in Romans 13: 1: "The powers that be are ordained of God." God had ordained Edward III. and not Urban V. as King of England. After much discussion the demand was refused.

The friends of the pope declared that by the canon law England belonged to the pope, and the pope could now lay claim to the country. But who had made the canon law? The popes themselves and their councils. What authority then had the canon law? "The canon law has no force," said Wiclif, "when it is opposed to the word of God."

This demand made on England and its refusal brings out one of the reasons why the Reformation was needed. The popes laid claim to authority from God over the kings in Christendom, and when they chose they not only excommunicated a king from the church, but they also declared that he was no longer kind, and all his subjects were justified in refusing obedience to their sovereign.*

{* In 1077 Henry IV., Emperor of Germany, having been deposed by the pope, was made to divest himself of his robes, and, in a coarse woollen garment, stand bare-footed and fasting from morning till sunset for three days, before the pope would even admit him into his presence. In 1213 King John of England delivered his crown to the pope's legate, who kept it five days to shew the pope's authority over the king!}

The pope found it was of no use to try and enforce his demand on the English, yet he was loth to lose both his spiritual and his temporal power over England, so he brought about a conference at Bruges in 1374, to which Wiclif repaired with other commissioners. The chief points before them were the statutes which related to the pope's ecclesiastical powers in England.* The conference ended by a compromise. The king was to repeal the penalties against the agents of the pope; and the pope agreed to confirm the appointments of the king. The people however were displeased. "The clerks sent from Rome," said the House of Commons, "are more dangerous for the kingdom than Jews or Saracens." The pope had asked too much: the people begrudged him anything.

{* The principal of these was called the Law of Praemunire (so called from its commencement, Praemuniri facias, "cause to be forewarned"). The first statute was passed in 1306; another in 1352; another in 1392, which is the one generally referred to under the above title; others to meet abuses were passed from time to time. The pope had not only appointed whom he would to the higher offices in the church, but had nominated persons to fill vacancies long before the vacancies occurred, so as to keep the succession in his own hands.}

But the sojourn of Wiclif abroad was of great use to him. Like Luther's visit to Rome it opened Wiclif's eyes to the wickedness of the papal system, and confirmed him all the more in his judgment against it. On his return he was made Rector of Lutterworth. Here he preached the gospel to the people. "The gospel," said he, "is the only source of religion. The Roman pontiff is a mere cut-purse, and, far from having the right to reprimand the whole world, he may be lawfully reproved by his inferiors and even by laymen."

Such language however could not be allowed. The pope had many friends in England, and many in power. They beheld with alarm the spread of Wiclif's doctrine, and set to work to crush him.

On February 19, 1377, Wiclif was summoned to St. Paul's, London. It awoke great interest, and a large concourse of people flocked into the Cathedral. All were more or less excited, and many were holding animated conversation. But the hum was hushed on the approach of the man for whom all had been looking. But he came not alone. First came Lord Percy, marshal of England, then Wiclif and the Duke of Lancaster, followed by four monks, bachelors of divinity. All eyes are turned on Wiclif, who had been charged with heresy. The church was thronged with friends of the pope, and it was with great difficulty that Lord Percy and those following could make their way to the place where the bishops had assembled. As they pushed their way they encountered the scowls and frowns of the crowd, who would gladly have laid hands on Wiclif had he been alone, but they restrained themselves before his noble protectors.

At length they forced their way to where the ecclesiastics were assembled. Bishop Courtenay presided, who was not a little disconcerted to find that Wiclif was protected by two of the most powerful men in England, and a few angry words passed between them.

Lancaster foolishly whispered to one near him that he should like to pull the bishop out of the church by his hair. Some standing by heard this, and they at once made such an uproar in defence of the bishop that Lancaster and Percy had to defend themselves, and make their escape from the church as best they could. After cautioning Wiclif the meeting broke up, nothing being really done.

Wiclif again went on with his preaching, but the pope concerted measures to have him effectually stopped. For this purpose later in 1377 he was brought before the Archbishop. Men now expected he would be condemned; he was before the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the land, and the King (Richard II.) being but a child could not interfere. But Wiclif had a friend in the Queen mother; and scarcely had the Archbishop commenced proceedings against Wiclif when Sir Louis Clifford entered the chapel and forbade the court to proceed. The bishops were confounded; but felt they had no power to resist, and gave way. Wiclif handed in a protest and retired. The protest said, "I do mind and intend with my whole heart (by the grace of God) to be a true Christian, and as long as breath shall remain in me to profess and defend the law of Christ." If any things he held could be shewn to be wrong by scripture he was ready to revoke and renounce them.

Wiclif was now left to go on with his work. That work increased in value in his own eyes. He greatly desired to have the gospel preached in all the dark places of England. To his disciples he said, "Go and preach, it is the sublimest work; but imitate not the priests whom we see after the sermon sitting in the ale-houses or at the gaming-table or wasting their time in hunting. After your sermon is ended, visit the sick, the aged, the poor, the blind, and the lame, and succour them according to your ability."

Alas, what a picture of the practice of the priests in those days! They too often went from the pulpit to the tavern or the gaming-table! What fruit could be expected from such labours and such labourers?

Wiclif's evangelists scattered themselves abroad. With staff in hand they went forth, living on alms, as was the custom, and preaching the gospel by the wayside, in churchyards, or wherever they could find hearers. Wiclif had taught them that salvation was not in angels or saints, but in Jesus Christ. "An angel," said he, "could have made no propitiation for man; for the nature which has sinned is not that of the angels. The mediator must needs be a man; but every man being indebted to God for everything that he is able to do, this man must needs have infinite merit, and be at the same time God."

The regular clergy were alarmed, and obtained a law to forbid the evangelists; and then from their retreats they would watch for them, and running out fall upon them. But the people often took their part, and forming a strong ring round the preachers would not allow them to be hurt.

Thus by the means of these devoted evangelists the gospel reached many a dark corner of our country, and a yet future day alone will reveal the result of the good seed sown.

Wiclif, besides this work of evangelization, still discharged his duties as professor at Oxford, when in 1379 he was taken dangerously ill, and all thought he would die. The papal party were in joy, but to make their triumph complete they hastened to his bedside to induce him to retract before he died. "You have death on your lips," said they "be touched by your faults, and retract in our presence all that you have said to our injury." Wiclif was calm and serene, and for a time held his peace. The priests were full of hope, and waited, expecting to hear his recantation. They had brought with them four Aldermen, so that their report of it should not be called in question.

Wiclif begged his attendant to raise him up. Then summoning his strength, though he was dreadfully weak, with piercing gaze he said, "I shall not die, but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the friars." Disappointed and confounded they retired from his room. The Reformer began to recover, and lived to accomplish a yet greater work than he had hitherto done.

The Translation of the Bible.

That greater work was to give to the English the Bible in their own tongue. England had been professedly a christian country for years, and yet, except the clergy, and perhaps a few who could read Latin, no one possessed a Bible, or knew anything of its contents except what the priests told them! How grateful we should be to God that our lot is cast in days when everyone can have his Bible, and read it as he pleases! Yet how great our responsibility to know what it teaches, and to obey it!

Wiclif did not understand either Greek or Hebrew, and so he could translate the Bible only from the Latin Vulgate; but this was infinitely better than not having any Bible at all. He had laboured patiently at his work of translating for more than ten years, assisted a little by others; but in 1380, the next year after his dangerous illness, his work was completed — the Bible was published in the English language.

Portions of the scriptures had been translated before — the gospels by one; the Acts and Epistles by another; the Psalms and a portion of the Old Testament by others: but these could never be said to be published. They were kept more as curiosities by their possessors — mostly in the convents — and were not intended for the people.

Wiclif's, on the other hand, was intended for the people; but when we say it was published we mean it was allowed to be copied and sold. As yet printing had not been invented, and there was only the long, tedious, and expensive process of copying by the pen. Still the copyists diligently went to work, and soon portions of the translation were offered for sale.

These portions were gladly bought, as well as were the complete copies. Wiclif's expectations were surpassed by the joy and eagerness with which men purchased the word of God. Many who had never seen this fountain of truth could now for themselves, and in their mother tongue, read the wonders of God's revelation to man. The book was above all price, and one told another of the treasure he had found. Men were now in what has been called the Dark Ages on account of the general darkness both spiritual and intellectual that was over the whole earth; but now a great light — God's light — had pierced that darkness, and shone along the Christian's path. A light too that has through the mercy of God shone on these lands ever since, notwithstanding all the efforts of Satan and all his agents to extinguish or stamp it out.

This publishing of the word of God brought out a second need that existed for the Reformation. It was a part of the policy of Rome to keep the Bible from the people: the Reformation restored it. It was God's gift to man, and man must have it.

Accordingly no sooner was Wiclif's Bible published than he was assailed on all hands by the friends of the pope. "It is heresy, to speak of holy scripture in English," said some; others seemed envious: "Master Wiclif, by translating the gospel into English," said they, "has rendered it more acceptable and more intelligible to laymen and even to women than it hath hitherto been to learned and intelligent clerks." Others affected a pious dread that by all having the gospel it would be trodden under foot as of swine. Others took higher ground, and said, "Since the church has approved of the four gospels, she would have been just as able to reject them and admit others! The church sanctions and condemns what she pleases. . . . Learn to believe in the church rather than the gospel!" This was really the point at issue. The church had not given the scriptures, it was God who gave them: the church of Rome had withheld them. Men ought not to believe in the church but in the gospel — the gospel of God. Wiclif was sure he was right, and cared not for the clamour. "Though the pope and all his clerks," said he, "should disappear from the face of the earth, our faith would not fail, for it is founded on Jesus alone, our Master and our God."

{* "Clerks" is only an old-fashioned name for clergy.}

In some places Wiclif met with encouragement. A copy of the gospels afterwards found its way to the palace, and Anne of Luxemburg, wife of Richard II. began to read them diligently. She also brought them under the notice of Arundel, Archbishop of York, who was struck by a woman and a foreigner reading "such virtuous books," and began to read them himself, and rebuked some of the clergy for neglecting such studies.

In the House of Lords a motion was made to crush the work by seizing all the copies, when the Duke of Lancaster exclaimed, "Are we then the very dregs of humanity, that we cannot possess the law of our religion in our own tongue?"

We give a specimen of Wiclif's New Testament.

In language it came between the pure Anglo-Saxon and our present English; Tyndale's coming between Wiclif's and the Authorized Version.

Anglo-Saxon. (7th Century.)

Swa swa Moyses tha naeddran up-ahof of tham westene, swa gebyrath thaet mannes Sunu beo up-ahafen: thaet nan thaera ne forweorthe the on hyne gelyfth, ac haebbe thaet ece lif. God lufode middan-eard, swa thaet he sealde his ancennedan Sunu, thaet nan ne forweorthe the on hine gelyfth, ac haebbe thaet ece lif. Ne sende God his Sunu on middan-eard, thaet he demde middan-earde; ac thaet middan-eard sy gehaeled thurh hine.

Wiclif, 1380.

As moises arerid a serpent in desert, So it behoueth mannes sone to be reisid, that eche man that beleueth in hym perisch not but haue euerlastynge liif. for God loued so the world, that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif, for God sente not his sone in to the world, that he iuge the world, but that the world be saued bi him.

Tyndale, 1534.

As Moses lifte vp the serpent in the wyldernes, even so must the sonne of man be lifte vp, that none that beleveth in him perisshe: but have eternall lyfe. For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe. For God sent not his sonne into the worlde, to condempne the worlde: but that the worlde through him, might be saved. John 3: 14-17.

Authorized, 1611.

As Moses lifted vp the serpent in the wildernesse euen so must the Sonne of man be lifted vp: that whosoeuer beleeueth in him, should not perish, but haue eternall life. For God so loued the world, that he gaue his only begotten Sonne: that whosoeuer beleeueth in him, should not perish, but haue euerlasting life. For God sent not his Sonne into the world to condemne the world: but that the world through him might be saued.*

{* It has been estimated that in the Authorized Version, out of every forty words, thirty-nine are Anglo-Saxon. Dr. Adams gives the following as approximate dates for the transition of the language of Britain:

From 550 to 1150 Anglian or Anglo-Saxon.

From 1150 to 1250 Semi-Anglian or Semi-Saxon.

From 1250 to 1550 Old English.

From 1550 to 1650 Middle English.

From 1650 Modern English.}

The Work Progresses.

Wiclif proceeded to study the scriptures he had given to the people. The doctrine of the Mass — being said and sung every day — naturally received his attention. "The consecrated wafer," said he, "which we see on the altar, is not Christ, nor any part of Him, but His efficient sign." The church of Rome taught that when the priest consecrated the bread it at once became the actual body of Christ, by a change called transubstantiation. "How canst thou, O priest, who art but a man, make thy Maker?" said Wiclif. "What! the thing that groweth in the fields — that ear which thou pluckest to-day — shall be God to-morrow! . . . . . As you cannot make the works which He made, how shall you make Him who made the works?"

The Duke of Lancaster who had hitherto defended Wiclif, could not support him in his new doctrine. He exhorted, yea, even commanded Wiclif to remain silent; but Wiclif could not agree to smother the light God had given him.

About this time (1381) occurred the well-known insurrection of Wat Tyler, and there were many who were ready enough to ascribe these disorders as the fruit of Wiclif's doctrines. A more unfounded accusation had never been made.

Courtenay was promoted to the See of Canterbury and he hastened to call a synod to condemn Wiclif. They met in May (1382), in the afternoon, and were proceeding to draw up their sentence of condemnation, when a dreadful earthquake shook London and a great part of England, and this so alarmed the bishops that they hesitated to complete their work, looking on this as a rebuke from God. But the Archbishop endeavoured to turn the event into his favour. "Know you not," said he, "that the noxious vapours which catch fire in the bosom of the earth, and give rise to these phenomena which alarm you, lose all their force when they burst forth? Well, in like manner, by rejecting the wicked from the community we shall put an end to the convulsions of the church." The courage of the bishops revived and they condemned Wiclif — quoting some articles against him of which he was not guilty.

The Archbishop pressed the king to enforce their decision. "If we permit this heretic to appeal continually to the passions of the people," said he to the king, "our destruction is inevitable. We must silence these Lollards* — these psalm-singers." The king gave orders to confine in the prisons of the state any who should maintain the condemned propositions.

{* Most probably the term comes from lollen, to sing.}

Wiclif was not frightened, though he saw his friends one by one forsake him. He consoled himself with the thought that the doctrine of the gospel could never perish. Here he might have rested, and have gone on with his work as he could find opportunity; but he thought it right to appeal to the House of Commons. "Since Jesus Christ," said he, "shed His blood to free His church, I demand its freedom, I demand that the poor inhabitants of our towns and villages be not constrained to furnish a worldly priest, often a vicious man and a heretic, with the means of satisfying his ostentation, his gluttony, and his licentiousness — of buying a showy horse, costly saddles, bridles with tinkling bells, rich garments and soft furs, while they see their wives, children, and neighbours dying of hunger." The House of Commons felt their authority had been infringed upon by the king's order being issued without their concurrence. They called for its repeal.

Courtenay was disconcerted; but determined that his victim should not escape. So he hastened to Oxford, and gathering together the heads of the church he summoned Wiclif before him, taking care to open the doors to the students and laymen that the humiliation of the professor should be complete. Wiclif was infirm, and might have pleaded his weakness, but he did not. He obeyed the summons. But it ended in a way they little expected. Fixing his piercing gaze upon Courtenay he read him such a lecture that the archbishop did not soon forget it. He charged the Roman Catholic clergy with being like the priests of Baal, and with selling their Masses in a way that winked at evil to fill their purses. Then exclaiming, "The truth shall prevail," he left the court, none daring to stop him; and "like his divine Master at Nazareth," as D'Aubigné says, "he passed through the midst of them, and no man ventured to stop him." He retired to Lutterworth.

He was not, however, to escape molestation. He was quietly living among his parishioners and his books when he received a papal brief summoning him to Rome. He would doubtless have received this earlier but there were then two rival popes, and they were too busy abusing and cursing one another to think much of such a despised personage as Wiclif. Now while Scotland acknowledged one pope (Clement VII.), England held to the other (Urban VI.), who had plenty of friends in England, and these would not fail to press upon him the damage that was being done to the papal cause by this man's doctrine.

Wiclif believed his increasing infirmities justified him in declining to visit Rome: but he would write to the pope. He first exalted the gospel, and then declared that the pope himself was bound by the gospel. "For the greatness amongst Christ's disciples did not consist in worldly dignity or honours, but in the near and exact following of Christ in His life and manners. . . . . Hereby I do fully gather that no faithful man ought to follow either the pope himself or any of the holy men, but in such points as he has followed the Lord Jesus Christ."

But Urban was too busy with his war with Clement to trouble more about Wiclif, and so the Reformer continued his course unmolested. He was busy among his parishioners and also with his pen. During this time he wrote his Trialogues* between Truth, Falsehood, and Understanding. Let us listen to some of his conclusions.

{* Conversations between three, as dialogues are between two.}

"The scripture is the rule of truth, and should be the rule of the Reformation. We must reject every doctrine and every precept which does not rest on that foundation.

"To believe in the power of man in the work of regeneration is the great heresy of Rome; and from that error has come the ruin of the church.

"Conversion proceeds from the grace of God alone, and the system which ascribes it partly to man and partly to God is worse than Pelagianism.

"Christ is everything in Christianity: whosoever abandons that fountain which is ever ready to impart life, and turns to muddy and stagnant waters, is a madman.

"Faith is the gift of God: it puts aside all merit, and should banish all fear from the mind.

"The one thing needful in the christian life and the Lord's supper is not a vain formalism and superstitious rites, but communion with Christ according to the power of the spiritual life.

"The true church is the assembly of the righteous for whom Christ shed His blood.

"It is possible for the pope to be condemned at the last day because of his sins."

Thus did Wiclif gather truth from the scripture, taught by the Holy Spirit: he had no other teacher. He was highly favoured to live in peace. He expected nothing but martyrdom. "What!" said he, "I should live and be silent. Never! Let the blow fall, I await its coming."

But he was to die in peace. On the 29th of December, 1384, he was in the church at Lutterworth, engaged in the service, when he fell down upon the pavement stricken with paralysis. He was carried to his house and died peacefully on the last day of the year.

Thus passed away one whom God had raised up, and used to do a great work for Him. His greatest work was to give to England the Bible in the English language. Besides this he sent forth many evangelists to preach the gospel. He had learnt (though not clear on many points) a great portion of truth, by which he was enabled to see the errors of the church of Rome, and he had faith to cry against its abominations. Thus began the Reformation in England. He was the first, as well as the greatest, of England's Reformers; and of the Reformation generally, as one has well said, If Luther and Calvin were the fathers of the Reformation, Wiclif was its grandfather, that is, as an instrument in God's hand.

That he manfully opposed the errors of the church of Rome is proved by the list of charges brought against him, amounting to forty-five; and his name became a sort of touchstone by which to condemn others. To be a follower of Wiclif or hold what he held, was an end of all controversy, and stamped the person as a thorough heretic.

It is important too to see that the light given by God to Wiclif never after went out in England. There were always those who held and rejoiced in the light and truth. Every now and again it became visible, and some suffered martyrdom. They were often called Wiclifites, though he did not commence a sect, nor did he leave the church of Rome except in spirit. At other times they were called Lollards. But they all saw the same abuses in the church of Rome, and found relief and salvation in Christ and His gospel. Knighton, the historian, says that such was the success of Wiclif that "more than half of the people of England in a few years became Lollards."

The church of Rome saw such an attack upon itself in the work of Wiclif that in 1415 the Council of Constance ordered the bones of the Reformer to be burnt. This was carried out thirteen years after, in 1428. But the truth he had taught could not be burnt; it had been sown in men's hearts and brought forth fruit to life eternal.

His ashes were cast into a neighbouring brook called the Swift. As a historian says, from the Swift they could be carried to the Avon, from the Avon to the Severn, from the Severn to the ocean, and become an emblem of his doctrine which is dispersed all the world over; as the poet has said:

"Once more the Church is seized with sudden fear,

And at her call is Wiclif disinhumed

Yea, his dry bones to ashes are consumed

And flung into the brook that travels near;

Forthwith, that ancient Voice which streams can hear

Thus speaks (that Voice which walks upon the wind,

Though seldom heard by busy human kind) —

'As thou these ashes, little brook! wilt bear

Into the Avon, Avon to the tide

Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas,

Into main ocean they, this deed accurst

An emblem yields to friends and enemies

How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified

By truth, shall spread throughout the world dispersed.'"

Bohemia.

John Huss and Jerome of Prague.

In Prussia, at a place called Wilsnack, in the province of Brandenburg, there stood a part of a stone altar. About the year 1403 in this altar were found three of the wafers used in the Lord's Supper by the Roman Catholics. Years previously a church had stood on that spot: but the church had been destroyed by a knight, who had suffered a part of the altar to remain.

Well, when these wafers were discovered they were found to be of a red colour. Now as the Roman Catholics say that when the bread, or rather wafers, and the wine are consecrated, they are changed into the very body and blood of our Lord, and that the body and blood are both present in the bread, when these wafers were found and seen to be red, those who found them thought that this was the blood of Christ becoming visible. They thought they saw the wafers stained with the actual blood that flowed in the veins of our Lord when down here upon the earth. They at once raised the report that such was the case. It was said to be a miracle — a real miracle which any one could come and behold with his own eyes. Numbers flocked to the place. It at once became a "holy spot," and reports were soon circulated that marvellous cures were being effected at the broken altar. The fame of it soon spread abroad, and pilgrimages were made to it from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Poland and all parts of Bohemia.

The clergy of the district encouraged this all they could. It brought to them a rich harvest through the pilgrims, and raised them into honour that such a miracle should have been wrought in their midst. A citizen of Prague with a lame hand procured a hand made of silver and hung it up as a votive offering in honour of those bloody wafers, as they were called. But he remained in the place a few days, most probably unknown to the priests, and indeed to test their honesty; but one day he was surprised to hear that one of them had publicly declared that the silver hand was hung there as a memorial that the lame hand of the citizen had been cured by a miracle. The poor man could not allow this, he held forth his lame hand as bad as ever, to the great dishonour and shame of the priest, but to the enlightenment of himself and others.

Still numbers flocked to the bloody wafers; and believed all that the priests told them. At that time Zbynek of Hasenburg was Archbishop of Prague. He was at least an honest man, and desired the abuses of the church should be removed. He had his doubts about these "bloody wafers," and the professed miracles, so he appointed three to investigate the whole matter. John Huss was one of these three. After due examination they reported that the miracles were not real, and the wafers were not bloody. Bread and other substances, exposed to the air and moisture, often have from vegetable or animal products a red appearance.* The Archbishop prohibited any more pilgrimages from his diocese.

{* The microscope had not then been discovered, or it would have at once revealed the true nature of such an appearance.}

This was the first thing that brought Huss into prominence as an enemy of abuses. He was born about 1370 at Hussinetz, a village in Bohemia. in the circle of Prachin, towards the border of Bavaria. He studied at the University of Prague, was made Master of Arts in 1396, and began to lecture in 1398.

John Huss was not satisfied with the prevailing state of religion. Besides being an enemy of abuses and imposture, his soul thirsted for something better than was afforded by the Roman Catholic religion. He saw not only that he needed this better thing for himself, but that the people too were perishing for lack of knowledge.

In Prague, apart from the Roman Catholic churches, a house had been converted into a chapel, named Bethlehem, or House of Bread. It had been set on foot by two good men, in order, as they said, that the word of God might be preached to the people in the Bohemian language. "Christ had given commission to His disciples," said they, "when He appeared to them after His resurrection, to preach the word, so as to preserve constantly in the world the living memory of Himself."

In 1401 Huss was chosen as preacher in Bethlehem, where every Sunday, and on festivals, he preached in the Bohemian language. This was his delight. As he learnt the truth himself he taught it, and, as one has said, he became a curer of souls, principally among the humbler classes, who came to him with their burdened consciences, and who found that the absolution of the priest did not suffice. Huss diligently devoted himself to the study of the word of God as the fountain of all light.

A Bohemian princess, Anne, sister to King Wenceslaus, had married Richard II. King of England. This united the two countries, and English students went to Prague, and Bohemian students came to Oxford. Wiclif's writings thus became well known in Prague. Huss knew them well. "I am attracted by his writings," said he, "in which he expends every effort to conduct all men back to the law of Christ, and especially the clergy, inviting them to let go the pomp and the dominion of the world, and live with the apostles according to the life of Christ."

Huss had a friend and companion in Jerome, known as Jerome of Prague. He was one of the few knights of Bohemia who cared for learning. He was very different in temperament from Huss. Never quiet long together, being full of life and ardour, he was, as people say, here, there, and everywhere — sometimes at Oxford, at other times at Paris, then at Jerusalem, with visits to Hungary, Vienna, and Russia. In 1398 he returned from Oxford, bringing with him copies of several of Wiclif's writings, hitherto unknown at Prague, which stimulated the study of his works. It divided the University of Prague into two camps; some were for the principles of Wiclif, and some opposed them.

This at length attracted the attention of the heads of the University, and in May, 1403, a meeting was called to consider "forty-five propositions ascribed to Wiclif." The votes were taken by nations — Bohemian, Bavarian, Saxon, and Polish) each one vote; but, inasmuch as Bavaria and Saxony were German, and half of Poland, the Germans could always outvote the Bohemians, which gave rise to national jealousy. It was heightened in this case by the propositions of Wiclif being condemned by the German party, while many in Bohemia were in favour of them. Huss, at present, could not give his entire consent to all of Wiclif's propositions, some of them being on abstruse philosophic subjects, so that he was not involved in the vote.

The Archbishop and Huss had hitherto been good friends. Their friendship was soon to be broken. Some of the clergy had been accused of favouring the principles of Wiclif, and the Archbishop had summoned them to answer the charge. One of them, Nicholas of Welenowitz, was thrown into prison, and though afterwards released he was banished from the diocese. Huss took up his cause and boldly wrote to the Archbishop, blaming him for his conduct. "What is this?" said he, "that men stained with innocent blood, men guilty of every crime, shall be found walking abroad almost with impunity; while humble priests who spend all their efforts to destroy sin, who fulfil their duties under your church guidance, in a good temper never follow avarice, but give themselves for nothing to God's service and the proclamation of His word, are cast into dungeons as heretics, and must suffer banishment for preaching the gospel." Such bold language could not fail to make Archbishop Zbynek an enemy of Huss.

Huss was confessor to Queen Sophia, and had thus great influence at court, which brought him many friends. So the Archbishop having done something to eradicate the doctrines of Wiclif let the matter rest. King Wenceslaus hastened on events, though unintentionally. He issued an edict altering the constitution of the University, giving the Bohemians three votes, and only one to the foreigners. This offended the Germans who bound themselves by a solemn oath to leave the University unless the king abandoned his plan. This he refused to do, and many of the professors and students left Prague. Some have put down the number who left as 44,000; the lowest named is 5,000. Only about 2,000 remained. This separation was the means of the founding of the University of Leipsic.

Huss was made Rector of the University of Prague, but in a great measure he felt his hands tied, for he was associated with others who evinced no interest in the truth. He must either do nothing, or clash with them; while, on the other hand, those who had left the University spread abroad everywhere that Huss had imbibed heresy. He was also charged with driving away the students. This was not true, though he had with many others favoured the change.

To make matters worse, the king was brought into collision with the Archbishop and his clergy, they holding with pope Gregory XII. and he with the Council of Pisa, which was called to settle matters in the church, there being another pope (Benedict XIII.) both contending for the mastery. Huss declared in favour of the council, which made him to be still more disliked by the Archbishop.

The faithfulness of Huss brought him also enemies among the higher clergy. While he confined himself to pointing out the failings of the monks they did not interfere, but as soon as he began to attack the abuses among the higher clergy all were in arms against him. They laid a complaint before the king; but the king took the part of Huss. He told them that Huss had not spared the princes and lords, the clergy did not complain then: now it was their turn, and they must make the best of it.

The council of Pisa (1409) set aside both the popes, and elected another — Alexander V.* The Archbishop of Prague saw it best to acknowledge the new pope, who in return issued a Bull against any in Bohemia holding the doctrines of Wiclif. The Bull bore evidence on it that it was the work of the Archbishop, and that it was really aimed at Huss, which gave great offence to those about the king, who were friends of the Reformer. Huss tried to evade the Bull without coming into open collision with the church of Rome. He appealed from the pope ill-informed to the pope better informed. But the Archbishop seemed determined that things should be brought to an issue, so he sent forth an order prohibiting preaching in private chapels. This at once involved Huss and his preaching at Bethlehem Chapel. Huss thought he was protected by the foundation charter of the chapel; at any rate he deemed it right to obey God rather than man, and not to discontinue his preaching.

{* This forms a hard problem for the Roman Catholics. What became of the infallibility of the pope when there were two, condemning and cursing each other? Which was infallible? And if either, how was it that a council was able to set that which was infallible on one side, and elect another? Neither of the deposed popes would submit, so that there were actually three at one and the same time claiming to be pope.}

The Archbishop also ordered all Wiclif's books to be delivered to him within six days for examination. But without examining them he declared his intention to burn them all. A convocation was held at the University which petitioned the king to prevent the burning of the books condemned.

The king sent to the archbishop asking him if he really meant to burn the books. He replied he would do nothing without consent of the king. He only delayed his purpose — he did not abandon it. So on July 16, 1410, under the plea that the king had not forbidden the burning, he caused his palace to be surrounded with a watch, and then burnt about two hundred volumes of the writings of Wiclif and other Reformers. This caused great indignation, and some turned it into ridicule. Songs were made up and sung about the Archbishop, signifying

"The great Archbishop he must learn

His A, B, C,

That what was in the books he burnt

He yet may see."

There is no proof that Huss had any hand in these satirical songs; but the excitement became so strong that the king had to forbid their being sung on pain of death. Huss said, "I call the burning of the books a poor business. Such burning never yet removed a single sin from the hearts of men (if he who condemned them could not prove anything), but has only destroyed many truths, many beautiful and fine thoughts, and multiplied among the people disturbances, enmities, suspicions and murders." Huss adds "murders," for, sad to relate, blood had been shed amid these contentions.

Just at this time (1409-1410) Pope Alexander died, and John XXIII. was chosen as his successor, so that there were still three claiming to be pope. Huss, with others, vainly appealed to the new pope against the Archbishop. The Reformer did not yet see how useless it was to appeal to such a corrupt standard as the pope. This pope — John XXIII. proved to be one of the worst of them, and was eventually set aside by another council of the church. But Huss's aim was to reform the Roman Catholic church, to which he was attached.

Huss could not bow to the order to stop the preaching in Bethlehem Chapel. "Where is there any authority in holy writ," said he, "or where are there any rational grounds forbidding preaching in so public a place, fitted up for that very purpose, in the midst of the great city of Prague? Nothing else can be at the bottom of this but the jealousy of Antichrist." Huss saw and asserted that the divine call to preach the gospel was of more authority than any outward call from man. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty." He went on with his preaching, leaving results with God.

Huss, amid the confusion and strife in the church, had to weigh up everything as in the presence of God, and to come to some resolve, in God's strength, as to his future course: should he obey God as far as he understood His will and stem the torrent, or should he swim along with the stream, avoiding the evil as much as he could as he swam?

Let us hear at what conclusion Huss arrived: "In order that I may not make myself guilty, then, by my silence, forsaking the truth for a piece of bread, or through fear of man, I avow it to be my purpose to defend the truth which God has enabled me to know, and especially the truth of the holy scriptures, even to death; since I know that the truth stands, and is for ever mighty and abides eternally; and with her there is no respect of persons." Noble resolve! Amid such darkness as then overshadowed the church, resolving to abide by the light which must bring him into collision with the darkness and the powers thereof, was true courage.

We have seen that Huss appealed to the pope: Archbishop Zbynek had also hastened to do the same. The pope listened to the Archbishop and appointed Cardinal Otto of Colonna to investigate the case of Huss. The Cardinal confirmed the sentence of the Archbishop; but lest this sentence should not be carried out, he further summoned Huss to appear at Bologna where the pope then was.

Huss hesitated to obey the summons. He declared it would be unsafe for him to travel in Germany, and at the papal court he could expect nothing but condemnation. Queen Sophia took up the cause of her confessor, and the king wrote to the pope and the college of Cardinals in favour of Huss. He begged the pope to put a stop to the whole process, to impose silence on the enemies of Huss, to suppress the dispute concerning the books of Wiclif; since it was evident that no one in his dominions had fallen into error or heresy by those writings. "It is our will too," said he, "that Bethlehem Chapel which, for the glory of God and the saving good of the people, we have endowed with franchises for the preaching of the gospel, should stand, and should be confirmed in its privileges . . . . and that Huss (whom he styles the loyal, devout, and beloved) may be established over this chapel and preach the word of God in peace."

The king also requested that Huss might be excused from coming to Bologna; but that the pope would send some one to investigate the matter in Bohemia. The king's letter was sent by a personal friend of the pope, and Huss also sent three others from the college.

In the meantime Colonna had pronounced excommunication against Huss for not obeying the summons; but the pope was moved by the letter of the king, and took the matter out of the hands of Colonna and appointed a new commissioner. Archbishop Zbynek however was not asleep. He used all his influence to induce the pope to make Huss appear before the papal court. He even sent "horses, vases, and costly rings" to the pope, and other gifts of a costly kind to the cardinals. For some reason the pope took it out of the hands of the commissioner and placed it in the hands of Cardinal Brancus, who let it quietly rest for a year and a half.

At length, however, he arose like a lion, declared Huss, unheard, to be an heresiarch — a chief of heretics — and placed the town of Prague, where Huss resided, under interdict.* Zbynek was overjoyed, and at once issued orders according to the authority he now received. The clergy of Prague proceeded to close their churches.

{* In any town placed under interdict no religious service of any kind was allowed to be held by the papal clergy.}

The king, however, would not allow this. He took up the cause of Huss, and confiscated the property of the clergy who attempted to enforce the interdict. The people too were incensed against the clergy, and some of them had to flee from the place.

This enabled Huss quietly to go on with his work, leaving the king to contest the matter with the Cardinal and the Archbishop. Now all this is very remarkable; because the king cared nothing about the truth, and was really a very bad man, so bad that he was twice imprisoned by his own subjects because of the evil that he caused. And yet here he was contending against the power of Rome and protecting the servants of God! Doubtless God was over-ruling all to protect His own work.

The Archbishop, however, found the king had too much power on his side, especially as there was really only weakness on the side of Rome to back him up on account of the pope himself (John XXIII.) being generally execrated, and too busy with his own troubles to care for Bohemia.

In July, 1411, a committee was appointed, and the king and the Archbishop agreed to abide by its decision. It resulted in the Archbishop removing the ban and interdict, and writing to the pope that no heresies existed in Bohemia; the king on the other hand released such of the clergy as were under arrest, and restored their salaries. Though peace was in some measure restored, the Archbishop was ill-at-ease, and in September, 1411, he left Bohemia and died soon after.

John XXIII., having sent a legate into Bohemia to enlist help against his enemies, the legate caused the new Archbishop Albic to summon Huss before him. He at once asked Huss if he intended to obey the apostolic commands. Certainly, said Huss; he would do so with all his heart. Turning to the Archbishop the Legate said, "Do you see? the master is quite ready to obey the apostolic mandates." But Huss saw that he was not understood. "My lord," said he, "understand me well. I said I am ready with all my heart to fulfil the apostolic mandates; but I call the apostolic mandates the doctrines of the apostles of Christ; and as far as the papal mandates agree with these, so far I will obey them most willingly. But if I see anything in them at variance with these, I shall not obey, even though the stake were staring me in the face." At present Huss escaped: the Legate had other work in hand.

Indulgences for Bohemia.

The Legate was engrossed with raising money for his master. He was armed with a papal Bull in which indulgences — that is, papers professing to forgive the sins of those who held them — were granted to those who helped the pope by enlisting against his enemies; he also granted indulgences for those who would help in money in proportion to their means. Huss opposed these indulgences and it was this that severed him from some of his friends in the University, especially Stephen Paletz, dean of the theological faculty, who now and hereafter became Huss's determined enemy. Huss said to him: "Paletz is my friend; Truth is my friend; and both being my friends, it is my sacred duty to give the first honour to Truth."

As to the indulgences Huss declared that by them "The foolish man of wealth is betrayed into a false hope; the law of God is set at naught; the rude people give themselves up more freely to sin; grievous sins are thought lightly of; and, in general, the people are robbed of their property. Far be it, therefore, from the faithful to have anything to do with indulgences."

Jerome also took up the subject of the papal Bulls, and delivered a glowing discourse against them, which so stirred up the hearts of the students that in the evening they rallied round Jerome, and escorted him home in triumph. The students did not stop here; but they got up a mock procession; the papal Bulls were hung round some of the necks of women who were placed in a chariot, and the procession went through the principal parts of the city. They then collected a pile of faggots and publicly burnt the Bulls. It was intended to be a parody on the burning of Wiclif's books by the Archbishop.

It is certain that Huss had no hand in such an unseemly act, and Jerome long after declared that he did not burn the Bulls. It was proved to have been done by one of the king's favourites.

The king was vexed at the transaction, and gave strict orders that the priests should not be molested in publishing the Bulls. Thus encouraged they went on with their work industriously; but one-day as they were exhorting the people to buy the indulgences, three young men, artisans, called out to one of the preachers, "Thou liest! Master Huss has taught us better than that. We know it is all false." The priests managed to seize these young men and carry them before the senate, who met on the next day, and, in accordance with the edict of the king, condemned them to death. Huss hastened to the senate, and demanded a hearing. Two thousand students accompanied him, and the senate could not refuse. Huss declared that he looked upon the fault of these young men as his own; and he deserved death more than they. The senate promised him that no blood should be shed. Believing they would keep their promise, he left the senate chamber, and the excitement calmed down.

The senate however did not mean to keep its word. A few hours later a body of soldiers were brought, and the three prisoners were hurried away to the place of execution. It soon became known, and many began to run after the procession. Every moment the excitement and the numbers increased and, fearing a tumult, the authorities halted before they came to the accustomed place, and smote off the heads of the three young men. When the executioner had done his work he called out "Let him who does like expect to suffer the same fate," when many called out, "We are all ready to do the like and suffer the same."

Several and especially the Beguines,* stepped forward and dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood and kept them as relics. A woman also offered linen to enshroud the bodies, and one, attached to Huss, with a company of students, conveyed the bodies to Bethlehem Chapel. With hymns and songs they buried their remains amid great solemnities, under the direction of Huss.

{*"Beguine" was a term of reproach given to certain pious women, similar to the term Pietist or Puritan.}

The three were naturally looked upon as martyrs, and Bethlehem Chapel was called by many "The chapel of the three saints." Had not Huss preached the truth? Had not these young men learnt it? Were they not put to death because they stated the truth? If the truth had really reached their hearts they were martyrs. It was indeed a dreadful sin for the priests to pretend to sell for money the forgiveness of sins, call it by the name of indulgence or any name you please.

The death of these young men had been attended by so much excitement that others who were in prison were liberated; while the hands of the true friends of Bethlehem Chapel were strengthened. The truths taught had borne fruit; and they were truths worth dying for.

The news that Huss was condemning the sale of indulgences soon reached the pope, who put the matter into the hands of Cardinal Peter de St. Angelo, charging him to use the severest measures against the heretic.

The Cardinal pronounced the sentence of excommunication against Huss. In twenty days, if he disobeyed the pope, the ban was to be proclaimed in the churches with the ringing of all the bells and the extinguishing of all the tapers! By a second order from the pope, who by this time had perhaps heard of all that had taken place at Prague, they were to seize at once on Huss, and deliver him or condemn and burn him. Bethlehem Chapel was to be destroyed to its foundation.

The senators met together, and resolved to carry the orders of the pope into execution. On October 2 they proceeded to disperse the congregation at Bethlehem and seize Huss. But they were met with such a firm resolution on the part of the congregation that they were compelled to abandon their object. They resolved however that they would destroy the Chapel; but, when this became known, such commotions arose that they were compelled to give this up also. Huss solemnly appealed from the pope to the Lord Jesus Christ. It was advised that for a time Huss should leave Prague. This he agreed to, and retired to some of the strong castles of his friends; one of the first being the castle of Kozi-hradek, belonging to the lords of Austie.

The king now strove to bring about a compromise for the sake of the peace of the kingdom; but it all ended in no real union. The papal party made the pope and all he did the ultimate appeal, while the friends of Huss insisted upon the holy scriptures.

In the meantime Huss was busy studying the word and writing, and especially a work on the church. Huss reverted to the passage, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them." "There then," said he "would be a true particular church. Christ alone is the all-sufficient Head of the church." Then he turned and looked at that which called itself the church, and said, "We may well be amazed to see with what effrontery those who are most devoted to the world, who live most worldly and abominable lives, most distant from the walk with Christ, and who are most unfruitful in performing the counsels and commandments of Christ — with what fearless effrontery such persons assert that they are heads, or eminent members, of the church, which is His bride." Just at that time as we have seen, John XXIII. was pope, claimed to be the head of the church, and yet he was one of the most wicked of men.

Though in retirement Huss was continually writing to his friends; and ever and anon he longed to be preaching again in Bethlehem Chapel. This desire became so strong that in 1413 he braved all dangers and paid short visits to Prague, spent a few hours in communion with his friends, retiring again to privacy as soon as his presence began to be known outside the circle of his friends. To be nearer Prague he came to reside at a castle at Cracowec. There too he began preaching, and numbers flocked together from all quarters to hear him.

Huss and the Council of Constance.

Huss continued at his blessed and happy work of preaching the gospel when he had formal information that a General Council was to be held at Constance, at which he would be required to be present, and his case would be considered. Sigismund, brother of King Wenceslaus, was Emperor, and he requested the King to send Huss to Constance, and promised to give him a safe-conduct, enjoining upon all, in the name of the Emperor, not to molest him. Huss required no driving — he was anxious to defend himself from the charge of heresy, and to give an account of his faith in presence of the representatives of all Western Christendom, and to testify against the corruptions of the church. He wrote to the Emperor, saying, that "under the safe-conduct of your protection I shall, with the permission of the Highest, appear at the next council at Constance."

In the meantime he returned to Prague. Many of his friends were filled with fear as to his safety; but nothing could shake his resolution to appear at Constance. He committed his cause to God. "If my death," said he, "can glorify His name, then may He hasten it, and give me grace to endure with good courage whatever evil may befall me. But if it is better for me that I should return to you, then let us beseech God for this, that I may come back to you from the council without wrong; that is, without detriment to His truth, so that we may from thenceforth be able to come to a purer knowledge of it, to destroy the doctrines of Antichrist, and leave behind us a good example for our brethren."

On the 11th of October, 1414, Huss left Prague, accompanied by two knights, Wenzel of Duba and John of Chlum. Great interest was taken in his journey, and in some places large bodies flocked to see the intrepid man. At all places he was ready to give a reason of the hope that was in him, and make known what he had learned from scripture.

On November 3 he entered Constance, and announced his arrival to the pope. For four weeks he was left to himself; but his personal enemies arriving, Paletz among them, they bestirred themselves to influence others against him.

On November 28 Huss was at his lodging in company with his friend the Knight of Chlum, when visitors were announced, These proved to be the bishops of Augsburg and Trent with two others. They told Huss that he was going to have the hearing he desired, and they had come to fetch him to the pope's palace. Huss protested; it was in the council he desired to be heard. The Knight of Chlum also protested. But they were assured that there was no bad intention. So they went. On the lower floor he was met by the mistress of the house, who took leave of Huss in tears. He gave her his blessing. He was confronted with some of his enemies, who were now rejoiced, and said plainly, "Now we have you, nor shall you escape till you have paid the uttermost farthing." Huss was a prisoner. Indeed soldiers had been placed in the adjacent streets as a provision against any commotion or resistance.

Towards evening, it was intimated to Chlum that he might retire to his lodging: Huss must remain. The knight now saw the trap that had been laid for them, and was filled with indignation. He hastened off to the pope and reproached him with treachery. The pope declared it was not his doing, but that of the Cardinals. This might be true, for he himself, being one of three popes, was at the mercy of the Cardinals. The same night Huss was removed, and after eight days he was confined in a narrow dungeon on the Rhine, which was filled with foul air from a sink.

The Knight of Chlum next hastened to inform the Emperor of how his safe-conduct had been violated. The Emperor expressed indignation, and ordered Huss to be set free, and threatened to break open the prison doors if it was not done. He was not yet come to Constance, but when he came he did nothing. It is doubtful whether the Emperor was sincere in the expression of his intention, but it is recorded that some of the council waited upon him, and begged him not to interfere in matters relating to heresy, as that was their province; and this may have weighed with him. Huss remained a prisoner. The unhealthy position of his cell brought on a dangerous illness. The pope sent to him his own physician: for, as one has said, "it was not desired that be should die a natural death." Through the intercession of his friends he was shifted to a more airy room in the same convent.

After Huss had left Prague for Constance, a movement had taken place to shew that it was right for Christians to take the wine as well as the bread at the Lord's supper. In the church of Rome only the bread is given, because they say, the body and blood of Christ are both present in the bread. They wrote from Prague to ask the judgment of Huss. He referred to the scripture, and there it was plain enough that Christians partook of both; and now, though a prisoner, he did not hesitate to say what he had found. They commenced to give the people the bread and the wine. Afterwards this was one of the charges brought against Huss.

Various propositions were made to Huss as to his case, but nothing was yet really settled, when on March 21, 1415, the council was thrown into confusion by the flight of pope John. He doubtless foresaw that he, with the other popes, would be deposed, and to save this he fled from the place. But with him also went the attendants of Huss, who was now left destitute, yet a prisoner. His friends again pressed on the Emperor for his release, but his enemies prevailed, and he was now imprisoned in the castle of Gottleben, and chained night and day.

At length, through the intercession of the friends of Huss, he was promised a hearing in the council. He was also brought from the castle to a Franciscan convent at Constance; and by a singular retribution the next prisoner in that castle at Gottleben was the man who had been pope John XXIII. (in whose name Huss had been first imprisoned), now deposed, and simply called Balthazar Cossa, who had been caught and was now a prisoner.

A long list of charges was made out against Huss. The first article was read. Huss acknowledged it, and began to defend it from scripture.

But they said, All that was nothing to the point. Again he began, but they interrupted him continually, until he saw it was no use, and was silent. The more just part of the council were ashamed; and it broke up in confusion.

On the 7th of June he appeared again, the Emperor being now present. The second point was that Huss denied Transubstantiation. This he denied. He had his own way of explaining it, but as yet he believed in the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine. Then many other subjects followed with long discussions. At length the Emperor told Huss that he had better submit to the council, and he promised that they would deal with him in a lenient manner, and he should be let off with a slight penance and satisfaction. If not, they would know what to do with him. The Emperor would not undertake to protect his errors; he would sooner prepare the faggots for him with his own hands. On the 8th of June Huss was again brought up, and other charges read to him, to which he answered fully. Then again he was advised by the council and the Emperor to submit to the council, and recant.

After he left, the council settled that if he recanted he was to be a prisoner for life; and efforts were made to get him to recant. A form was drawn up and submitted to him; but he could not sign it. Then various members of the council visited him and begged him to recant and to submit to the council. One said that he ought to do this if even the council was wrong!

The Knight of Chlum begged Huss to confess to any error if he knew of any, but he exhorted him to suffer any punishment sooner than deny the truth. Huss was moved, and replied, weeping, "I call God the Almighty, as I have often done, to witness that from my heart I am ready whenever the council teaches me anything better by testimonies from holy scripture, to change my opinion at once, and to confess publicly under oath, that I was previously in error." This they called obstinately clinging to his errors, so far was it from their thoughts that anything should be proved by scripture only.

Huss was now condemned to death, to the lasting disgrace of the Emperor, who had given him a safe-conduct. He must first be degraded. He was dressed as a priest. His dress was taken piece by piece with a denunciation at each. A chalice was placed in his hand which was then taken from him with the words, "We take from thee, condemned Judas, the cup of salvation." To this he replied, "But I trust in God my Father, the Almighty, and my Lord Jesus Christ, for whose name I bear this, that He will not take from me the cup of His salvation; and I have a firm hope that I shall yet drink of it to-day in His kingdom." A cap, painted over with devils, was then placed on his head, with the words "Arch-heretic." Then they said, "Now we give over thy soul to the devil." "But I," said Huss, raising his eyes to heaven, "commend into Thy hands, Jesus Christ, my soul, by Thee redeemed.

He was led to the place of execution July 6, 1415, and there bound to the stake, and chained to it by the neck. Just before the pile of faggots was lit, the marshal of the Empire rode up and again called upon him to recant. He could not. "The chief aim of my preaching," said he, "was to teach men repentance and the forgiveness of sins according to the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the expositions of the holy Fathers; therefore I am prepared to die with a joyful soul." The faggots were lit, which blazing up soon stifled him, as he called on Jesus Christ, Son of the living God. The ashes of his body were thrown into the Rhine, that nothing might remain to pollute the earth.

Thus died this honoured servant of the Lord. He was not clear on some points, and in doctrine he did not think it possible for any one to know if he was saved, but in fact he seemed to have no doubts about his own salvation. Rome had triumphed in putting him to death, as they thought; but it was he who really had triumphed, and had resisted all their seduction, and had died for the truth.

The result of his teaching exists to this day. Though they burnt the man, they could not uproot the seed he had sown, and it brought forth fruit, notwithstanding all the powers of Rome to uproot it and stamp it out. The reason is, that it was of God, and by God, and for God; and when He works none can hinder.

Jerome a Martyr.

Jerome of Prague, the friend of Huss, was to pass through a similar ordeal. He had been to Constance secretly, but the Emperor refusing him a safe-conduct he returned to Bohemia. But his enemies succeeded in seizing him, and he was brought to Constance in chains. This was in May, 1415. He was thrown into prison, chained fast, and kept there for four months. He was pressed much to recant; and, his imprisonment telling seriously upon his health, he broke down and offered to do so. His recantation was drawn up for him, and on September 23 he read it before the council. He abjured all the heresies with which he was charged, and all the heresies of Wiclif and Huss: agreed with the sentence on both those Reformers, with other particulars. After this he expected his liberty, but he was conducted back to prison, though he was no longer bound in fetters.

His enemies doubted if his recantation was real, and feared that if he was again in Bohemia he would head the Reformers; so he was further questioned by others appointed to do so. Thus months were consumed until Jerome refused to answer any more in private; he demanded to be heard by the council. This was granted in May 1416. He made a very eloquent speech, as to many events at Prague, and then they expected to hear his further recantation, when he declared that there was no one of his sins he more repented of than having said, on the fear of death, that he agreed with the death of that saintly confessor of the truth John Huss. He took back all he had said against Wiclif and Huss, and declared that his judges would have to answer to God if they condemned him wrongfully.

Many were moved by his eloquence, and tried to save him by getting him again to recant. But though they tried hard, he remained firm to the end. On May 30 he was condemned to death.

They led him to where Huss had suffered. He sang a spiritual song as they fastened him to the stake. The wood was being lit behind him, but he called out to the executioner to light it before him; for if he had been afraid he should not have come there. The fire burned, and Jerome repeated with a loud voice, "Into thy hands, O God, I commit my spirit." An eye-witness said, "With cheerful looks he went readily and willingly to his death; he feared neither death, nor the fire and its torture."

Ziska and the Bohemians.

The results in Bohemia of the martyrdom of Huss and Jerome, and the severe edicts that were carried out against their followers, were sad in the extreme. Many of them were tortured and burnt alive. As many as sixteen hundred were thrown alive down the mines. At length, by the leadership of a warrior named John Ziska, forgetful that our Lord had declared that His kingdom was not of this world, else would His disciples have fought, the Hussites, as they were called, armed to defend themselves.

Ziska was attached to the court of the king, and it was noticed that ever after the death of Huss he had never been the same man; but was gloomy and thoughtful. For hours he would wander about with his eyes to the ground, muttering now and then words no one could understand. One day the king asked the cause of his gloomy silence. "They have burnt John Huss," said he, "and we have not yet avenged him." "I cannot help it," said the king; "you must try yourselves what you can do."

The king had not seriously meant this, but Ziska took it earnestly, and called the Hussites to arms. The king, terrified at the thought of a rebellion, ordered the citizens to bring all their arms to the palace at Wischerad, where he then resided. They obeyed, yet not as he expected, for they came fully armed, ready to battle. Ziska said to the king, "Here we are," and asked against what enemy he wished them to march. The king was powerless; and the Hussites marched through the town. Passing the town hall, one carrying a chalice, in token that they gave the people the cup as well as the bread, a stone was thrown from the senate house and struck the bearer of the cup. Ziska's men immediately broke open the doors and threw some of the senators out of the window.

This same year (1419) King Wenceslaus died. The Hussites sent to Queen Sophia and also to the Emperor Sigismund proposing a compromise. The Emperor insulted the messengers, and vowed to settle it in a bloody revenge. This was the man who had violated his safe-conduct to Huss, and they knew they could expect no mercy from him, they therefore prepared for the worst. Ziska called all to arms, even those who could throw a stone; and then they did not wait for the Emperor, but marching through the land they burnt the churches and monasteries, putting many priests to death. One had led astray Ziska's favourite sister, which injury he could never forget.

When the churches were first refused to the followers of Huss, they were led out by their pastors into the open air where they could enjoy freedom of worship. One of these places became a permanent settlement. It was a high hill about sixty miles south of Prague. This hill Ziska, being a skilful warrior, strongly fortified, and it was called Mount Tabor. And the enemy they compared to the Moabites and Amalekites. At length Sigismund and Frederick of Austria arrived with an army of 100,000 men. They marched to Prague and put many to death and then proceeded to attack the mount; but after a long and severe battle the Germans were compelled to flee, leaving their camp in the hands of Ziska. Victory followed victory until the Taborites, as they were called, were the masters of all Bohemia, and even penetrated Austria and Germany.

At another time 150,000 soldiers were sent against Ziska. The Germans were very cruel, and burnt their prisoners, not caring whether they were Reformers or not. On the other hand Ziska and his followers declared that they were the elect of God: all things belonged to them; they might lawfully seize property, and put to death God's enemies. Alas, that any, in the name of God should have adopted such principles!

For thirteen years Ziska carried on the war, and all the resources of the pope and the Emperor were unable to put down or overcome the Bohemians. As Ziska's death approached, he ordered that they should make a drum of his skin, the very sound of which, he said, would make the Philistines flee! Procopius succeeded him and was equally successful.

The success of the Bohemians was very remarkable, so much so that Melanchthon said that an angel of God must have accompanied the army, and smote their enemies. Ziska had lost the sight of one eye in his youth, and he lost the use of the other in a siege as early as 1420, and yet, though totally blind, he was enabled to lead on the army to victory. It could not be called God's war, though God may have brought about His own purposes thereby, and may have used Ziska and his army to shew that the pope and the Emperor were not invincible; but it brought no glory to God, and gained for the Christians neither peace nor real prosperity. It associated them with thousands who had no interest in the truth, and stirred up all the worst passions of man.

In 1431 the council of Basle was held, and endeavours were made to come to terms, but it was not until 1433 that Rome allowed the cup to the people.

This gained many over to the side of Rome,* and many deserted the army of Procopius. In a battle he was slain and many of his people. Sigismund now entered Prague, and sought to restore peace by making promises to the followers of Huss. But as he increased in power he proceeded to deprive them of their churches, and another violent commotion was being raised, when the Emperor died (1437).

{*These were called Calixtines, that is, "Cup-Christians" (from Calix, cup), because one of the principal things they demanded was the wine as well as the bread in the Lord's supper. These became determined enemies of the Reformers.}

In 1436 Rome was further successful by making Rokyzan, a Calixtine, Archbishop of Prague, who soon began to use his endeavours to induce the people to give up the cup. This man is a fearful instance of an apostate. He was so far gained to the truth that he exhorted the true Hussites to meet in private, and he even helped them with the aid of books. "I know that your sentiments are true," said he, "but if I should patronize your cause, I must incur the same infamy and disgrace which you do." Among the faithful was his nephew Gregory, who was so terribly racked, that he fainted away, and they thought him to be dead. The news of this being brought to Rokyzan, he rushed off to the prison, and in remorse exclaimed, "My dear Gregory, I would to God I were where thou art!" Gregory, however, recovered, and was long spared to help on the work; while Rokyzan was obliged to take part in the persecution, and, after repeated exhortations to take his place with the faithful, died in despair.

In 1457 the Hussites took the name of United Brethren, and were by persecution obliged to live in dens and caves. Many fled to Moravia and others to Poland, carrying with them the truths they had learned. In easier times they again became numerous in Bohemia, so that about A.D. 1500 they numbered nearly 200 congregations in Bohemia and the surrounding countries.

In the seventeenth century, when the times were comparatively quiet, the Protestants, or "the Reformed," as they were called in Bohemia, had greatly increased. A numerous sect, called Utraquists, had special privileges from the Emperor, in which the other Reformed churches desired to share. Matthias, King of Bohemia, became Emperor in 1612, and he refused to grant their request. This caused the Utraquists to fear that they too might be next robbed of their privileges, so they united with the Lutherans and Calvinists to oppose the Emperor. Matthias had sent commissioners to Prague to inform the deputies of his majesty's final decision. While they met, an armed body of Utraquists, forgetting their character as professed followers of Christ, entered the council chamber, seized three of the most obnoxious of the commissioners, and threw them out of the window, which was eighty feet from the ground. A large heap of dung saved their lives, and they escaped. This was the commencement of a long and bloody war between the Catholics and Protestants, known in history as the Thirty Years' War. After devastating Germany and surrounding countries, in 1648 the peace of Westphalia established what is called "religious liberty."

We have thus far sketched the Reformation in Bohemia. Huss had stood so high as a Christian, especially in his godly life and his testimony against the evils around, that he became a watchword, to which was attached that of our own Wiclif. To be a follower of Huss, or to hold doctrines similar to those of Huss or Wiclif was at once to stamp such a one as a heretic, and one dangerous to the interests of Rome. The faithfulness of John Huss; his opposition to the sale of indulgences; his preaching the word of God; and his exposing all that was called "holy," which was only evil and wickedness, was the light of the Reformation, the light which God was igniting in various parts of the world, to lead His own to truth and liberty.

Sad it is, that there was also a shadow — a dark shadow — that followed in the Reformed taking the sword, and in the bloodshed and devastation that was carried on in the name of God and of His holy religion; associated too, as it was, in some cases with the sacred emblem of the cup attached to the supper of our Lord.

Amid man's many failures

God carries on His plan,

He gives not up His purpose

Though all should fail in man.

So, spite of human follies,

He darkness puts to flight,

And, though all Hell opposes,

He spreads His truth and light.

Germany.

Luther and Melanchthon.

A Poor man named Conrad Cotta, residing in Germany, told his wife one day that a certain monk was in the town preaching "pardon for sin, without money and without price." "That would just do for us," said his wife Ursula; "let us go to the church and hear him." The church was crowded, but they managed to get in. They heard with astonishment the news of salvation free, through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; so different was it from what the priests usually preached. The sermon over, the preacher gave out a psalm, "God is our refuge," when the truth burst upon them that surely the preacher must be Martin Luther, who had often sung that same psalm at their own fireside.

Conrad and Ursula Cotta had been in better circumstances, and in the town of Eisenach about sixteen years previously they had noticed a lad singing in the street, and crying, "Bread for the love of God." They had opened their house to him, and for several months he had resided under their roof. There they had heard him sing this very hymn, "God is our refuge." It was indeed the same Martin Luther. We can easily imagine the joyful greeting after the service. Luther had repaid the kind Ursula; she received the truth from his lips that day.

Luther's preaching was not confined to the poor. On one occasion he preached at Dresden in the castle of St. James. There were present Duke George of Saxony, cousin of the Elector, and the ladies and gentlemen of his court. At dinner afterwards in the castle Luther's sermon was the subject of conversation — as it was indeed everywhere — for it was such preaching as but few had ever heard in those days. "How did you like the sermon?" said the Duke to Madame de la Sale, lady of the bedchamber to the Duchess. "If I could hear but such another sermon, I should die in peace," she replied. "And I," said the Duke, "would give something not to have heard it; for such sermons are good for nothing, and serve only to encourage men in sin." A month afterwards Madame de la Sale died in peace, trusting in Jesus Christ as her Saviour. The Duke became an enemy of Luther and the Reformation. How truly are those who preach the gospel the savour of life unto life, or death unto death.

Martin Luther was born at Eisleben, a town in Upper Saxony, on November 10, 1483.* In 1501 he went to the University of Erfurt. Here he found a Bible in the library, which became the book from which he learned the truth, and by which he was armed against the enemy. Here he also met with the writings of John Huss.

{*Many interesting details of Luther's life are omitted. They will be found in a companion volume, "Light amid the Darkness, as seen in the Life of Luther."}

"When I studied at Erfurt," said Luther, years afterwards, "I found in the library of the convent a book entitled, 'The Sermons of John Huss.' I was anxious to know the doctrines of that arch-heretic. My astonishment in the reading of them was incredible. What, thought I, could move the council to burn so great a man, so able and judicious an expositor of scripture! But then the name of Huss was held in abomination: if I mentioned him with honour, I imagined the sky would fall, and the sun be darkened; I therefore shut the book with indignation. But I comforted myself with the thought, that perhaps he had written this before he fell into heresy!" Such were the innocent reflections of Luther before he knew what Rome was.

In 1505, in returning from a visit to his parents he was overtaken by a dreadful storm, at which he was so terrified that he vowed he would devote himself to God by becoming a monk, and seek thereby to become holy and fit for heaven, as he imagined.

In the convent, however, he found no relief, and passed through great agony of mind, nearly killing himself in mortifying his body. He eventually found relief through the Vicar-general, Staupitz, who shewed him that such a course of punishing the body was of no use to the soul. Salvation was by forgiveness through the sacrifice of Christ.

He also learned much from the passage of scripture "the just shall live by faith," and was used by God to teach the doctrine that man is not justified by prayers, alms-giving, penances, etc., but by faith — faith in what Christ did on the cross for sinners who were too bad to be saved in any other way. It became a great part of Luther's work to maintain, amid much opposition from Rome, the doctrine of "justification by faith."

Staupitz recommended Luther to the Elector of Saxony, and in 1508 he was invited to Wittenberg and made a professor in the University. About two years after he made a visit to Rome, where he saw such shocking wickedness and profanity mixed up with the profession of religion that astonished and grieved him above measure; but all this was very useful to him afterwards, as it shewed him the true character of the Roman Catholic religion, at least in its practice at Rome itself. In 1512 Luther was made Doctor of Divinity, and became happily employed in teaching the truth as he himself was able to acquire it, both in the University as a professor, and in the pulpit as a preacher, besides making occasional tours to other towns.

Luther was first brought into collision with Rome by the following circumstance. In 1517, to raise money, the pope sent out his agents to sell indulgences, which professed to insure forgiveness of sins to any who purchased them. No matter whether the sins were past or present, for the dead or for the living — all would be forgiven to those who purchased indulgences, signed by the pope.

Tetzel, a Dominican monk, was the one who came with these indulgences near Wittenberg. This shocking traffic filled Luther with horror. He could not bear to see the people deluded by such soul-destroying falsehood. He drew up some propositions called 'Theses,' against indulgences, and nailed them to the church doors. This drew upon him the anger of Tetzel, indeed of Rome itself.

Many, too, of those who were glad of the Theses did not care to follow Luther when a storm was raised against him; and he found himself almost alone, and yet not alone, for God was with him. At times he was very much cast down, and Satan took advantage to harass and distress him. Various sins would come back to his memory, and Satan would tempt him with, "Can you be a child of God, and yet be guilty of that?" On one occasion Luther met him with "Yes, it is true; I have been guilty of these sins against God; but take a sheet of paper and write down these sins, and those which I acknowledge, and add to them ten thousand more, and I will write at the foot of the page 'The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin.'" Satan was vanquished.

Besides the conflict within, there were many and loud threatenings from without. "As for those who threaten me," said he, "I can only answer, The poor man has nothing to fear, for he has nothing to lose. All that is left me is this wretched body, enfeebled by many trials. Let them kill it by violence or fraud, so that it be for the glory of God. By so doing they will shorten the time of my life by a few hours. It is sufficient for me that I have a precious Redeemer, a powerful High Priest, my Lord Jesus Christ. I will praise Him as long as I have breath. If another will not join me in praising Him what is that to me?"

The next year Luther was summoned to appear at Rome within sixty days to answer for his conduct; but by the intercession of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, Luther was allowed to answer in Germany instead of going to Rome. He appeared before the papal legate, Cardinal De Vio, at Augsburg. It was not attempted to prove that indulgences were right, or that Luther was wrong, from scripture. The pope had ordered the indulgences, and Luther must retract. After several interviews De Vio said one day, "Retract, or return no more."

Luther answered in writing; and then his friends advised that he should leave the town, but with great caution lest he should be seized. Before daylight, leaving a letter behind him for the Cardinal, he slipped away unobserved, and so escaped. He afterwards saw a copy of the pope's brief, in which he was to be seized and carried to Rome. He now saw plainly the danger he had run. De Vio was very angry at the escape of Luther and wrote to the Elector of Saxony requesting that Luther might be sent to Rome, or at least banished from the Elector's states. The Elector wrote in reply that it was inconsistent to expect Luther to retract if he had not been proved to be wrong. However the Elector requested Luther to leave Wittenberg for a time. All were filled with sorrow and alarm as Luther prepared to leave Wittenberg, for he was endeared to many. Just as he was ready to leave another message came, saying he need not go. Rome had sent another Legate who hoped all might be settled.

This Legate was Miltitz, who began by flattery. "Do you know," said he, "that you have drawn away all the world from the pope? Even if I had 25,000 men I would not undertake to kidnap and carry you to Rome." He agreed with Luther that both sides were to be silent on the subject; all question of Luther's retractation being postponed for the present.

This year (1518) Melanchthon came to Wittenberg as professor of Greek, and gave Luther instruction in that language. The two professors became staunch friends. "If there be any man," said Melanchthon, "that I love and embrace with my whole heart it is Martin Luther." Their friendship continued till death separated them. They helped each other much. Luther was bold and energetic; Melanchthon mild and timid.* Thus, just as Luther's troubles from without began, God raised up for him a true friend and companion.

{*"To look at Melanchthon," said a Swiss, "one would say he was but a youth, but in understanding, learning, and talent, he is a giant."}

Philip Melanchthon was born the 16th of February, 1497, in the small but pleasant town of Bretten, in Saxony. Philip went to school at Pfortsheim, and lodged in the house of a sister of Reuchlin, the celebrated Greek scholar. It was Reuchlin, who being well pleased with the young scholar, changed his name from Schwarzerde to Melanchthon, both signifying "black earth," the latter being Greek. It was the fashion in those days for the learned to translate their names in this way. After a time the scholar was always called Melanchthon.*

{*His name is often written Melancthon; but this is incorrect. In about sixty autographs not one is spelt Melancthon: 'ch' in the Greek is one letter. He sometimes wrote his name Melanthon.}

The Emperor Maximilian died January 12, 1519, about a month after the arrival of Miltitz. Until another Emperor was elected, the Elector of Saxony had chief control. This caused the pope to seek his favour, and to do this, Luther, for a time, was allowed to escape.

The silence that Luther had promised was soon to be broken, and broken by Rome. Dr. Eck, a German theologian, had challenged to dispute with Carlstadt, one of Luther's colleagues; but it was well known that Eck was really attacking Luther, so Luther said he would go to the discussion. Duke George, who had disliked Luther's sermon, and in whose states Leipsic was, refused at first to let Luther take part in the discussion, but afterwards consented, and they met in discussion several days.

This discussion was in the presence of many professors and students, and was important, as it brought scripture out as an authority above the pope; which was a doctrine so new that it demanded their consideration, and we may fain hope that many were gained to the truth. The next year, when Eck came to the same town with Bulls from the pope against Luther, he was made the song of the students, and was glad to hide himself till he could secretly leave the town.

In 1520, Charles V., so famous in history, was elected Emperor of Germany, at the age of nineteen. Luther wrote to him respecting the Reformation, but received no reply.

In the same year Luther published his Appeal to the German Nobility, in which he plainly pointed out the abuses of the religion of Rome, and the remedy for them in the scriptures. From various quarters he received alarming reports; but on the other hand from many places he received the most cheering news that the seeds of truth were taking root. "How I wish," said he, "that I could send preachers — living books — to those distant places to teach the people the knowledge of divine things." This was brought about by his books being translated into the various European languages, and being widely scattered over many lands.

After the discussion at Leipsic Eck had hastened off to Rome, and now returned with a Bull from the pope excommunicating Luther.

On December 10, Luther fixed a notice on the walls of the University, inviting the people to meet him at the east gate. There, amid a large crowd of spectators, Luther burnt the pope's Bull along with some useless papal books. This was effectually breaking with Rome. He could not now retreat. He must go forward, and, in God's strength, conquer; or fall a victim to Rome and its agents.

The friends of Rome were now very clamorous with both the Emperor and the Elector, to have Luther seized. The Elector replied that Luther's writings had not yet been refuted. It was resolved that Luther should be summoned to the Diet of Worms, and heard in defence of his doctrines.

Many were filled with fear for Luther's safety, and strongly advised him not to go. But he declared he would, even if there were as many devils at Worms as there were tiles on the houses. At all the towns he passed through great crowds assembled to see the man who had dared to burn a pope's Bull; others desired to see the man through whom they had learnt the way of salvation and peace.

He was furnished with a safe-conduct from the Emperor; but he was reminded that this was no security. Did they not burn John Huss, and violate the safe-conduct? Luther did not trust in man, but in the living God.

At Frankfort an aged widow, in high life — Catharine of Holzhausen — said to him, "My father and mother predicted to me that God would one day raise up a man who should oppose the vanities of the pope, and restore the word of God. I hope you are that man; and I wish you the grace and Holy Spirit of God to help you."

Luther arrived safely, amid great excitement. He turned to God: "O God Almighty, God ever lasting! how dreadful is the world! Behold how its mouth opens to swallow me up, and how small is my faith in Thee. . . . If I am to depend on any strength in this world, all is over. . . . Then, my God, help me against all the wisdom of this world. . . The work is not mine but Thine. The cause is Thine — it is righteous and everlasting. O Lord, help me."

Luther appeared before the Diet. It was an august assembly. The Emperor, the princes of the Empire, and the hierarchy of the church were present. What passed may be summed up in few words.

A pile of books were on the table. "Are these books yours?" was asked of Luther.

"Yes, I am the author of these books."

"Are you prepared to retract them?"

"I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the councils, because it is as clear as noonday that they have often fallen into error themselves. If, then, I am not convinced by proof from holy scripture . . . . I neither can, nor will, retract anything. . . . . Here I am I cannot do otherwise — God help me! Amen."

Luther was dismissed from the Diet and from Worms. "I will, then," said the Emperor, "take measures against him and his adherents as open heretics by excommunication, interdict, and every means necessary to their destruction."

Luther left Worms, and made his way to Wittenberg; but on his road he was surrounded by a party of horsemen; who seized him, put him on a horse, and galloped away with him. They were however his friends, who did this for his safety. He was carried to the Wartburg, a strong castle, near Eisenach; there he was made to dress as a knight, and was known as Knight George. The scheme had been carried out so secretly that few of his friends or enemies knew what had become of him. Here Luther devoted himself to the translation of the New Testament into German.

The Emperor Charles had threatened to destroy Luther and his adherents. God found him other work to do. Disturbances broke out in Spain; Soliman invaded Hungary with the Turks; and war broke out between the Emperor and Francis I. of France. These troubles so occupied him that he had no time to think of Luther and his destruction.

Though Luther was a prisoner, the work of reform did not stand still. Gabriel, a preacher at Wittenberg, declared that "Christ instituted the sacrament of the altar in remembrance of His death, and not to make it an object of worship. To bow to it is idolatry. . . . . No person has the right to require a monk to say Mass alone. Let one, two, or three officiate, and all the rest receive the Lord's sacrament under both kinds."

This attacked the doctrines of Rome in several particulars. They used to elevate, or hold up, the host (the bread or wafer) for adoration, that is, worship. Again, they used to have private Masses for money; so that a person could live a wicked life, and yet for money have private Mass, which was supposed to ensure his salvation. And further, the Catholics gave only the bread to the people. All these abuses were now preached against.

But this caused great commotion; so much so that the Elector heard of it, and sent his chancellor to bring them to order, and to cause them to give up these new ideas. He had authority to put the monks on bread and water if necessary.

Melanchthon and other professors in the University went to the convent to use their influence with the monks to the same end. The monks drew up a memorial on the subject which confounded the professors, and at length convinced them that the monks were right according to scripture. They made bold to tell the Elector so, and begged him to put an end to all corruption.

Melanchthon said, "To partake of the Lord's supper is not to do any good work, but merely to make use of a sign which recalls to remembrance the grace bestowed upon us by Christ. . . . As the sight of the cross does not justify, so the Mass cannot justify. As the gazing on a cross is no sacrifice for our own or others' sins, just so the Mass is no sacrifice. There is but one sacrifice — but one satisfaction — Jesus Christ: beside Him there is none other."

Gabriel next attacked the idle and useless lives of the monks, and in one day thirteen monks left the convent. But he did not stop here, but advocated the destruction of the monasteries. "Let not one stone remain upon another," cried he; which was followed by great disorders. The churches were broken open, images carried off and burned.

Others pretended to be prophets, declaring that Christians need not now refer so constantly to scripture: God was speaking to them direct. Others despised learning, and advised the parents of the scholars to take them away from school, because God was now revealing Himself to plain unlettered men.

Luther could remain in his retreat no longer. He saw that the devil was busy trying to spoil the work from inside, because he could not hinder it from outside. This is an old tactic of Satan. If he cannot prevent the work, he will try to spoil it. Luther preached vehemently against the disturbances, and in a great measure peace was restored, at least at Wittenberg.

The New Testament in German.

Luther's next great work was to give the people the New Testament in the German language. With the aid of Melanchthon and others, the translation was finished and put to press. In September, 1522, it was published, and three thousand copies rapidly sold. The price was a florin and a half. By December a second edition was ready; and after that, edition followed edition in rapid succession, not only from the press at Wittenberg, but at Augsburg, Basle, and other places.

Thus did the German people thirst for the word of God. They could now read for themselves at their own firesides God's way of salvation The priests were in alarm, and well they might be; for now their authority could be challenged. And people could now go to the fountain of truth itself, instead of drinking at the muddy streams that had flowed to them through the pollutions of Rome. They could now search for indulgences and penances, purgatory, and a host of other things, and prove them wrong because they could not be found from cover to cover of that blessed book.

Rome did what it could to stop its circulation, and orders were given to seize all the copies that could be found. But the sale could not be stopped. Duke George lamented that though he prohibited its sale in his states, many thousand copies were sold and read. Some Romish divines, finding that its circulation could not be stopped, brought out a New Testament of their own. It was said to be the same as Luther's, but altered here and there.

Conflict with Rome Continues.

Though the excommunication of Luther had not been carried out in Germany, Henry VIII. did what he could in England to carry out the pope's Bull. In May, 1521, Cardinal Wolsey went, in solemn procession, to St. Paul's, and, after a sermon against heresy by Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Luther's books were committed to the flames.

In some parts of Germany not belonging to the Elector of Saxony, Luther's books were also burnt, and in Brussels in 1522 the first martyrs of the Reformation in Germany sealed their faith with their blood. Three young monks had imbibed the truth, and were burnt to death. The example once set, persecution arose in other places, and several were brought to the stake on account of their faith.

In 1525 a rebellion broke out among the peasants, in the Black Forest, near the source of the Danube, and spread rapidly. It was only put down by the sword of the state. It only concerns us to name it because it was declared to be a fruit of the Reformation. But it was not. Luther did all he could to prevent it; and though the name of God was mixed up with the demands of the peasants, it was clearly the work of Satan, in bring dishonour upon the name and religion of Jesus Christ.

In the same year, just before the final defeat of the peasants the aged Elector of Saxony breathed his last.

Also in this year a great commotion was caused by Luther marrying Catharine Bora, who had been a nun. The marriage of priests is forbidden by the church of Rome; but Luther saw that it was right and proper that they should be at liberty to marry, and he determined to put in practice what he taught.

Duke John, brother to Frederick, had succeeded him as Elector of Saxony. Duke George tried to prejudice him against Luther; but he boldly declared that everything, no matter what, must be conformed to God's word. He became a fearless supporter of the Reformation.

The princes who were favourable to the Reformation now formed themselves into a league to defend it. Those who were zealous for Rome did the same to oppose it. Luther and Melanchthon both saw that it was a wrong thing to attempt to defend the truth of God by the sword; but the princes carried out their scheme. We shall see in the sequel how dearly some of them had to repent of it.

The Diet of Spire was opened on June 25, 1526, when all feared that extreme measures would be taken. The Emperor at the Diet of Worms had spoken out his determination, which had ended in a decree. There were now loud calls for carrying out that decree. But, to the surprise of all, the Emperor wrote to the Diet, "Let us suspend the edict of Worms!" The key to this was soon discovered to be that the Emperor was at war with the pope; he did not want another with the princes of Germany — indeed he wanted soldiers from Germany to march against the pope. The Emperor after all had so little respect for the pope as God's Vicar on earth, that he sent his army into Italy. Rome, the "eternal city," as it was called, was taken and given up to pillage and massacre. This "Sack of Rome" is declared to be the worst that the city ever experienced, though carried on by a Catholic Emperor! Thus we see the finger of God in a marvellous manner. The wrath of man that was to fall on the lovers of grace and truth, is turned against the great obstacle to reform, and brings it unto the dust.

Human Arrangements in the Church.

This gave the Reformers a time of rest, but which brought new labours upon them. Luther felt that while in many places there had been a ceasing from the evil in a measure, there had not been a corresponding learning to do well. He saw there was a great lack of pastors and teachers; but instead of turning to the Lord of the harvest, and praying only to Him to supply the lack, he turned to the Elector. "Your highness," said he, in 1526, "in your quality of guardian of youth and of all who know not how to take care of themselves, should compel the inhabitants who desire neither pastors nor schools, to receive these means of grace, as they are compelled to work on the roads, on bridges, and such like services. The papal order being abolished, it is your duty to regulate these things."

We fear we must call this a great mistake of Luther's, and a dark shadow on the Reformation. Doubtless Luther wrote this letter with a good motive, but we fear he did not see what was involved in what he did, in asking the Elector to regulate such things. He also asked him to commission four persons, two of whom were to take charge of doctrine, schools, churches and pastors. In fact it was Making the Elector head of the church. Luther had declared against the pope, that Christ was the Head of the church, and in Ephesians iv. we read that Christ gave pastors, teachers and evangelists, and yet Luther is here asking the Elector to commission men to "take charge" even of doctrine and the pastors. This Elector (John the Constant) may have been a Christian; but if he were he had no authority from scripture to regulate the things in the church of God. Another Elector might be an infidel, and yet if this same order of things existed, this infidel would have to "commission" and "regulate" for the church of God! Besides if it was right for the Elector to be head of the church in Saxony, it was right for Philip to be head of the church in Hesse; and so of other places; and so the church would have a dozen heads, thus far setting aside the one true and only Head of the church — Christ Himself.

It is important for the reader to see how such a state of things came into existence. Previous to this the pope was head of the whole Catholic church; but as the churches broke away from the pope, instead of being satisfied with the one Head, Christ in heaven, they put themselves under the ruling prince; and there became no end of the number of heads. Our Queen is head of the church in England, and this has grown out of the same state of things. But, as we have seen, the ruling prince may be an infidel really, and yet he would be head of the church of God!

Another evil connected with each ruling prince being head of the church was that it split up the church of God into as many parts, each with its own head. And although they were all at first called reformed churches, they soon began to be different in doctrine, in practice, and in general order; and eventually adopted different names, and refused communion one with the other. As far as in them lay, they were separate and distinct churches.

Another mistake was in Luther asking the Elector to compel the people generally to have pastors, and thus make them all believe that they were Christians. Pastors are for the sheep: compel them to have pastors, and they naturally think themselves God's sheep. Luther does not seem to have distinguished between preachers of the gospel of God's grace to the unconverted, and pastors to feed the flock of God. The mass of the people became the flock, over which a pastor was appointed; and thus the distinction between the church and the world was lost.

Luther, Melanchthon, Spalatin and Thuring were the four who were first appointed, and they made the tour of the states, carrying out the plan of Luther. The Latin Liturgy they retained, with some German hymns introduced. This was afterwards altered in many places to a service wholly in German.

The Work Progresses Amid Opposition.

To return to our history. The sack of Rome drew forth such a storm on the head of the Emperor from all the Catholics that he was glad to come to terms with the pope. Now they resolved to crush the heretics.

A second Diet was held at Spire in 1529, presided over by Ferdinand, the Emperor's brother. Ferdinand attempted to carry things with a high hand, and bind the Reformed States not to extend the Reformation. To this they could not agree. He left the Diet, and declared all was over. To this the Reforming princes drew up a protest, and presented it to Ferdinand. From this the Reformers were afterwards called Protestants.

Another dark shadow was hanging over the Reformation, in the disunion existing between the Swiss and the German Reformers. The Landgrave of Hesse determined to try and unite them. For this purpose he arranged a meeting at Marburg. Luther and Melanchthon were on one side, and Zwingli and Oecolampadius on the other. The question at issue was, whether in the Lord's supper the bread and wine were changed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Zwingli said that we feed upon the body and blood of Christ by faith. Luther said though the bread and wine were not changed into the body and blood, yet the actual body and blood of Christ were always present after the priest had consecrated the bread and wine. Luther was mistaken, and yet he would not yield, being very obstinate, and manifesting a bad spirit, which greatly damaged the cause of the Reformation, and brought dishonour upon the name of Christ. He could scarcely be induced to part in a christian spirit with the Swiss Reformers.

Another Diet was held at Augsburg in 1530. Before it took place the Emperor was crowned by the pope. Placing a sword in his hand, the pope said, "Make use of it against the enemies of the faith." Charles replied, "I swear ever to employ all my strength to defend the pontifical dignity, and the church of Rome." Much was now expected from the Emperor.

To prevent unnecessary excitement Luther remained at Coburg — for he was still an excommunicated person — but Melanchthon came to Augsburg. It was thought desirable that a Confession of Faith should be drawn up by the Reformers, to present to the Diet, and Melanchthon was commissioned to draw it up. When finished, the Elector was about to sign it when Melanchthon said, "It is for the theologians and ministers to propose these things." But the Elector replied, "God forbid that you should exclude me. I am resolved to do what is right without troubling myself about my crown. I desire to confess the Lord." The Elector signed and then the other princes.

Melanchthon alone was filled with fear. "My dwelling is in perpetual tears, my consternation is indescribable," wrote he to Luther; who did all he could to encourage him, and spent much time in prayer that God would forward His own cause.

"We teach," said the Confession, "that we cannot be justified before God by our own strength, our merits and our works; but that we are justified by Christ through grace, through the means of faith . . . who by His death has made satisfaction for our sins . . . . We teach, at the same time, that this faith ought to bear good fruits, and that we must do all the good works commanded by God, for the love of God, and not by any means to gain the grace of God."

It then spoke of the Lord's supper in "two kinds," and the marriage of the priests, and then related the many abuses in the church that needed correction.

It ended with, "We have explained the doctrines that we maintain to be essential, in order that it may be understood that we admit of neither dogma nor ceremony which is contrary to the holy scriptures, and to the usage of the universal church."

The reading of this Confession was an important event. There sat the Emperor, surrounded with all the powers of Germany, both civil and ecclesiastical. It was right they should know what this new thing was that was shaking Rome to its foundations. The pope called upon them to crush this "heresy:" it was quite right that they should know of what it consisted; and some afterwards admitted that it had been represented to them as something very different.

Luther was delighted that such an opportunity had been granted for the gospel to be heard by such an assembly. "I thrill with joy," said he, "that my life was cast in an epoch in which Christ is publicly exalted by such illustrious confessors and in so glorious an assembly."

The Emperor determined to have a reply to the Protestant Confession drawn up by Dr. Eck and others. In the meantime desperate efforts were made to bring about a compromise. Melanchthon, ever fearful, was now so wrought upon that he was ready to purchase peace almost at any cost. He said, "We venerate the universal authority of the Roman pontiff, and we are ready to obey him, provided he does not reject us." The disputed points were reduced to two: the Lord's supper in two kinds, and the marriage of the priests. Full of hope Melanchthon sought an interview with the pope's Legate. An important moment this in the Reformation. If they can come to terms, Melanchthon hopes to save all: whereas if they come to terms, it may be to lose all. Scripture says there can be no union between light and darkness; no concord with Christ and Belial; and yet poor Melanchthon is going to try. All is, as it were, in a balance. If Rome agrees, all is lost; for the Reformers, if once again united with that apostate system, would soon be gained over, by fair means or foul, to do as Rome wishes. But the movement is of God, and He is watching over all. Though the advance is made by the fear of the holders of the truth, Rome is too proud to accept the terms. As the Reformation had humbled itself thus far, it should be made to humble itself still more. It should be made to give up the two points. Rome refuses the compromise, and thereby the Reformation is saved.

Luther and others were indignant when they found what Melanchthon had attempted; and he himself was afterwards ashamed of it. However God had overruled all, and saved the vessel from a wreck. All now took courage, and awaited the turn of events.

When the reply to the Confession was ready it was publicly read, and then there were loud cries that the Confession was refuted, and the Reformers must now submit. Campeggio, the pope's Legate, loudly called for "fire and sword to eradicate these venomous plants."

Luther was calm, and filled with faith. "As I was at my window," said he, "I saw the stars, and the sky, and that vast and magnificent firmament in which the Lord has placed them. I could nowhere discover the columns on which the Master has supported the immense vault, and yet the heavens did not fall. . . . . God will choose the manner, the time, and the place suitable for deliverance, and He will not linger."

Still the clouds grew darker, threatening a storm, and that, too, before the Reformers could leave Augsburg. Loud threats were hurled against them, and especially against the Elector of Saxony. To make all sure, on the night of August 6 the imperial soldiers took possession of all the gates of the city, so that none should escape.

But God had ordered otherwise. A few hours before the Emperor seized the gates, Philip, Land-grave of Hesse, had secretly left the city, and when the Emperor thought he had all secure, Philip was miles away from Augsburg. This immediately changed everything. Philip had heard the threats against the Reformers, and the Catholics doubted not that his flight was a declaration of war. Those who had called the loudest for war were now as desirous of peace.

Efforts were again made to conclude a compromise, and Melanchthon, again seized as with blindness, endeavoured to make peace with Rome. But Campeggio declared he would make no concessions. After again threatening the Reformers, the Diet broke up, with nothing settled. The formal decree of the Diet, called the "recess," was drawn up, but in such a way that the Protestants refused to sign it.

The Protestant princes being thus threatened both by the pope and the Emperor, formed themselves into another league, and met from time to time at Smalcalde, at times along with the theologians favourable to the Reformation. The princes agreed to defend one another if attacked. Luther, as we have seen, protested against this at first, but he himself had called upon the Elector to take the control of the church in his states. All this altered the character of the Reformation. It was no longer confined to those who were really Christians, whose weapons were spiritual only, and who could not fight, as Christ had said. (John 18: 36.) But here were whole states, bound by their princes to take up the sword and fight, professedly for Christ and His truth, altogether apart from whether they were Christians or not. This was a dark shadow on the Reformation, and made it partly Christian and partly political.

In 1534 Luther published the Old Testament in German. This was a great work. The German Christians had now the whole revealed will of God in their mother tongue, and could go to the fountain head for themselves. By this portion of the work they could see how many parts of the popish ritual agreed better with the by-gone dispensation of the Jews than with the christian dispensation into which the gospel had brought them.

In 1540 a dark shadow passed over the Reformation by Philip of Hesse desiring to take a second wife, while his first wife was alive and living with him. Sad to relate, Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, with others, signed a paper approving it, but asking it to be done in private. This forms a dark blot on the character of the Reformers, and especially on Luther's, who had been in the forefront and fearlessly stood for the truth when others were ready to give way.

In December 1545 the General Council, so long called for, and which was to settle the question of the Reformation, was opened at Trent; but the pope managed to get the council entirely into his own hands and to do almost entirely as he pleased. It continued with intervals for eighteen years, and its decrees and its catechism, so called, are constantly appealed to as the standard of the Roman Catholic religion.

Luther died February 18, 1546, soon after the council began to meet.

The Council of Trent being so manifestly under the power of the pope, the Reformed princes wrote to the Emperor demanding that the topics so dear to them might be discussed in a free German council. "Do not leave us to be judged," said they, "by an assembly in which it is impossible by its very constitution that justice should be done us."

The Emperor was little disposed to listen to this. He was at peace with France, and had concluded a truce with the Turks, so that he could now devote all his attention to bring the princes into obedience to Rome. He sent off a messenger to the pope requesting his assistance.

War Against the Reformation.

Charles was found to be preparing for war, though he declared that it was only to ensure peace to the empire. Philip of Hesse was on the alert, and exhorted his colleagues to arm themselves. They were loth to believe such a calamity to be true, and slow to credit that the Emperor was playing them false. But the continued movement of troops into Germany aroused them from their dream of security. The Reformed princes prepared for war.

The pope sent, besides money, 12,000 infantry and 500 horse: all was to be religiously devoted to the war "against the heretics."

Let us pause, and look at the conduct of the pope in this matter. For years the Reformers had been asking for a council to reform abuses, and to prove them wrong from scripture if they were so. A council was now being held, in which the pope gave strict orders not to consider abuses. And in order to turn men's minds from this subject whenever it was named his nuncio had orders to bring forward abstruse subjects, like the "freedom of the will," "original sin," which would occupy the council for months. In the meantime he sends his armies into Germany to demand submission, or put them to death! It is easily explained. The light made manifest the evil. They would not give up the evil; they loved it too well, so they resolved that by all means in their power they would put out the light.

The Emperor had the foresight to see that if he crushed the Elector of Saxony, and Philip of Hesse, their allies would not stand out, so he proscribed those two as rebels, and resolved to punish them, and forbid any to join them on pain of death and confiscation of goods.

On the banks of the Danube the Protestant princes awaited the attack of the Emperor. They took the opportunity of addressing him, "You attack by your proceedings," said they, "not only the gospel, but the law and liberty of the empire."

Hostilities soon commenced. Again and again the Protestants had good opportunities of attacking the Emperor, but as often did they let them slip for want of promptitude and decision. It is quite clear God was not fighting for them. They had taken up arms in express contradiction to scripture, and though it was in the name of God, and avowedly for His gospel, it was not His war, nor for His glory.

The Elector being away from his states, they were declared to be confiscated, and were offered to Maurice, Marquis of Misnia and Thuringia, and son-in-law to Philip of Hesse. Maurice was professedly a Protestant, but had not joined the league. He pretended to decline to enter on the states of Saxony; but on being informed that if he did not accept them they would be given to another, he took possession of them, and they were more or less devastated with the horrors of war.* The Elector on hearing of the seizure of his states returned, and attacking Maurice, regained his territory, and he then attacked those of Ferdinand the Emperor's brother.

{* Maurice was a very crafty man, and it is recorded that he had previously agreed with the Emperor that he was to have the Elector's states.}

The Emperor now collected all his forces and marched against the Elector, and in the forest of Lochan, three miles from the Elbe, a general engagement ensued. The Elector's army was small compared with that of the Emperor, and he soon saw it was useless to continue the conflict. The Elector laid down his sword, and was led before Charles. "I am your prisoner, gracious Emperor," said he, "allow me, I pray, a guard worthy of a prince." The Emperor replied, "I am, then, your Emperor? You shall be treated as you deserve."

The Emperor marched to Wittenberg, which being fortified, held out against him. The Elector was now called before the Emperor, and was accused of rebellion, and sentenced to death. The Elector's wife begged her husband to submit to any terms to save his life. Charles relented, upon condition that the Elector gave up the fortified cities and all his states to the disposal of the Emperor, and that the Elector would consent to all that the Council of Trent or the Emperor might determine concerning religion. To avoid being bound to the religion of Rome the Elector had gone to war: he would not accept this condition to save his life. The Emperor further relented. Sentence of death was altered to remaining a prisoner for life, all his estates being confiscated to the Emperor.

The Landgrave of Hesse saw too clearly that it was useless for him to continue the struggle. He also gave himself up to the Emperor. He was fined, his estates seized, and he held a prisoner.

Thus ended the war — a war to resist Rome and to ensure the Reformation in Germany — and thus it signally failed. Luther saw that it was not needed for princes to take the sword to support the cause of God; and our Lord distinctly said that those that took the sword should perish by the sword. Luther had said to the Elector of Saxony, when it was first proposed to form a Protestant league, "We cannot, on our conscience, approve of the proposed alliance. We would rather die ten times than see the gospel cause one drop of blood to be shed. Our part is to be like lambs of the slaughter. The cross of Christ must be borne. Let your highness be without fear. We shall do more by our prayers than our enemies by all their boastings. . . . You cannot defend our faith each one should believe at his own peril and risk."

The princes took up the sword, doubtless from a good motive, thinking thereby to forward the cause of truth, but it is never safe to disobey the word of God. Besides, many were called to take the sword for the sake of the gospel who had not bowed to God and His grace; and there cannot be a greater inconsistency than unconverted men fighting to establish the gospel of God which they themselves disobey!

Though the war was over, the various states of Germany were as far off as ever from being one in matters of religion. The truth, as taught by Luther, and by the word of God in the German language, had taken too deep a root in the hearts of the people to be easily rooted out or given up.

In the meantime the Council of Trent had been holding its sessions, but, as we have seen, avoiding as much as possible the correcting of abuses — abuses which even every conscientious Catholic was compelled to see, to deplore, and wish to see removed. The Emperor began to despair of seeing peace restored by this council of the pope; he therefore resolved on doing what he could to bring about an agreement. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1548 he produced a Confession of Faith, drawn up with a view that all could subscribe to it, until a free general council should definitely settle the matters in dispute. Three theologians had been selected: two Catholics and a Reformer.

This Confession was called the Interim (signifying that it was only a temporary arrangement). A copy was sent to the pope. He was very angry that the Emperor should interfere in matters of religion, and two of the articles were condemned as heretical, namely, those which permitted the Lord's supper to be in "both kinds," and the marriage of the priests. The Emperor cared nothing now for the protest of the pope. The Interim passed the Diet and became a decree for the Empire.

It gave as little satisfaction to the Reformers. It was little more than disguised popery. Neither Calvin nor Bucer would acknowledge it, and the aged ex-Elector of Saxony refused to purchase his release by receiving it. "I cannot," said he, "in my old age abandon the principles for which I early contended; nor, in order to procure freedom during a few declining years, will I betray that good cause on account of which I have suffered so much, and am still willing to suffer." The Emperor was much displeased, and increased the rigour of his imprisonment.

The Interim was everywhere enforced; some of the free cities, which resisted, were seized by the Emperor, the reformed pastors sent to prison, and the people forced by the sword to conform to the imperial orders. Other places gave in a nominal adherence to the Interim to avoid a like calamity; the pastors doing the best they could to explain it away in their teaching.

Maurice called upon Melanchthon, with others, to draw up something that would quiet the consciences of the Protestants while they carried out the Interim. Melanchthon had been famous for compromises, and though he at first disclaimed the Interim he now entered upon this task, which, however, raised a controversy that lasted for years — the question being, How far can a Christian conform to things indifferent?* This is a very subtle question. Circumcision might have been called by some a matter or indifference; but the Spirit of God said to the Galatians (chap. v. 2) "If ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing." He further says, "Whatsoever is not of faith is, sin." (Rom. xiv. 23.) "To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." (James iv. 17.) Here doing things which I know to be wrong, or for which I have no faith, is declared plainly to be sin. But let us see what it was to which Melanchthon asked his fellow-protestants to agree.

{* Melanchthon, and those agreeing with him, were called Adiaphorists, from the Greek word adiaphora, indifferent.}

Besides explaining doctrines so as to try and satisfy all, Melanchthon allowed the pope to be head of the church, but without giving him divine rights. He also allowed the seven popish sacraments (Baptism, the Mass, Confirmation, Penance, Marriage, Holy Orders, Extreme Unction), but did not call them sacraments, or essential to salvation. The Mass he did not call a sacrifice, but represented it as the Lord's supper. He even touched the article of "justification by faith," adding thereto that good works were as essential to salvation, not on the ground of merit, but as an essential part of the christian character.

Thus did Melanchthon, in his timidity, and his desire to satisfy all, undermine the foundation of the christian faith, and laid down the dangerous. and false principle that a Christian might practise that which he knew to be wrong by calling it indifferent. In doing this, he also acquiesced in false doctrines by reserving in his mind a meaning different from what he knew was intended.

This false principle — though, happily, many refused it entirely — was a dark shadow on the Reformation.* By it some were enabled to profess to be Catholics when in reality they were Protestants. In our own day many have subscribed to Articles of Faith on the same principle of reserving in their minds a meaning different from what they know those Articles are intended to convey.**

{* Calvin wrote to Melanchthon (June 18, 1550) on this subject, "Several things which you consider indifferent, are obviously repugnant to the word of God Truly if I have any understanding in divine things, you ought not to have made such large concessions to the papists; partly because you have loosed what the Lord has bound in His word, and partly because you have afforded occasion for bringing insult upon the gospel. . . . Lest you may perhaps have forgotten what I once said to you, I now remind you of it, namely that we consider our ink too precious if we hesitate to bear testimony in writing to those things which so many of the flock are daily sealing with their blood. . . . Although I am fully persuaded that the fear of death never compelled you in the very least to swerve from the right path, yet I am apprehensive that it is just possible that another species of fear may have proved too much for your courage, for I know how much you are horrified at the charge of rude severity."

**For years Melanchthon was hereby involved in controversy, not only with Catholics but with Protestants. He died at Wittenberg in 1560.}

In 1550 pope Paul III. died, and Julius III. succeeded. He conciliated the Emperor, who in return used all his influence and power to force upon the people the doctrines and practices of the church of Rome.

Thus matters remained for some time, when the princes began to discover that the Emperor was intriguing to get his son Philip appointed as king of the Romans though the Electors had chosen the Emperor's brother Ferdinand. It was also manifest that the Emperor was endeavouring to gain extended power into his own hands, but as yet the German princes saw no way of enforcing and maintaining their rights.

Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, secretly formed a design against the Emperor, and carried out his plans so secretly that he was in no way suspected, the Emperor confidently placing in his hands the generalship of the foreign troops, raised by the Emperor to subdue Magdeburg, which still resisted the Interim. When all Maurice's plans were matured, and he had secured the adherence of all the Protestant princes, and entered into a treaty with Henry II. of France, he openly declared his designs which were, 1, to secure the interests of the Protestant faith; 2, to uphold the constitution of Germany against absolute monarchy; 3, to deliver his father-in-law, Philip of Hesse, from prison.

The movements of Maurice were so rapid that he nearly took the Emperor prisoner. He was staying at Inspruck,* the capital of the Tyrol, to be near Trent, but now had to fly in the night, by the aid of torches, over the Alps to Villach in Carinthia, where he arrived in a pitiable plight, though Emperor of Germany.

{* More correctly called Innsbruck, situated at the confluence of the Sill and the Inn.}

On his flight he set the aged ex-Elector of Saxony at liberty; but he, having no confidence in the treacherous Maurice, followed the Emperor.

The Council of Trent broke up in alarm at the success of Maurice, and did not meet again for ten years.

The Emperor, without money or troops, was induced to come to terms with Maurice. The treaty of Passau was signed (1552), which restored peace to the empire, and insured liberty to the Protestants until a Diet should be called to end all further disputes. Philip of Hesse was set at liberty and restored to his states; the ex-Elector of Saxony also took possession of a small part of his former states.

It was a great blessing to the Protestants that they were allowed to hold the doctrine of scripture, and to worship God in the way they believed scripture taught them. But it was a dark shadow that Maurice had brought it about by the sword, handled by intrigue and perfidy, assisted too by the King of France, an open enemy to the Reformation.*

{* Maurice was not permitted long to enjoy the fruits of his success. In the following year he was killed in a battle with Albert, Duke of Brandenburg, at the age of thirty-one.}

In 1555 a Diet was held at Augsburg in which it was agreed that there was to be liberty both to Catholics and Protestants, every prince having the power to decide what should be the religion of his states, without molestation. In the same year the Emperor startled the world by calling around him his nobles in the city of Brussels, and resigned the Imperial crown to his brother Ferdinand, and the remainder of his vast dominions to his son (Philip II.), who had married Mary of England. Charles then retired to a monastery near the town of Placentia in Spain, and died about eighteen months afterwards.

Though Protestantism was thus in a measure established in Germany, there were occasional outbursts and conflicts, until all were involved in the Thirty Years' War in 1618.* At the close of this, peace and liberty were more firmly settled.

{*See the section: 'Ziska and the Bohemians'.}

It was God's work to bring about freedom from the snares and errors of Rome. It was God's book that had shed its light into men's hearts, by the operation of the Spirit of God. They were God's servants who did the work of contending for the faith. They may have made grave mistakes, and they may have joined Christianity to the world. Others, like Uzzah, may have put their hand to the ark who should not have touched it; but above all this, the Reformation was God's work; it restored the truth of God, and gave to all the scriptures, by which they could learn God's will more perfectly, and by His grace follow it.

"An arm of flesh must fail,

In such a strife as this;

He only can prevail

Whose arm immortal is:

'Tis heaven itself the strength must yield,

And weapons fit for such a field.

And heaven supplies them too:

The Lord who never faints,

Is greater than the foe,

And He is with His saints:

Thus arm'd, they venture to the fight;

Thus arm'd, they put their foes to flight.

And, when the conflict's past,

On yonder peaceful shore

They shall repose at last,

And see their foes no more;

The fruits of victory enjoy,

And never more their arms employ."

France and Switzerland.

Zwingli, Calvin, Farel, Oecolampadius.

In the year 1507 there was great commotion at at Berne, a canton in Switzerland. Crowds of people hastened to the convent of the Dominicans to see a young man, bearing five wounds in imitation of our Lord. His arms were extended, and his head lay on one side. At times he would appear to be dying. "He is suffering the cross of Christ," whispered those who stood by. It was said that he got his wounds in this way. One night as he lay in his cell the virgin Mary appeared to him, and coming to his bed-side pierced his hand with a nail, then wrapped around the wound a piece of the linen cloth worn by her Son — our Lord — on His flight into Egypt. Afterwards four other wounds were made upon the body of this young man, he being chosen out for this in great grace. And thus, with the "five wounds," he was visited by the crowds, anxious to see one on whom had fallen such an honour.

Jetzer was the name of this young man, and after a time he had another visit from the virgin Mary as he supposed; but in his visitor he now recognized the voice of his confessor. On expressing this to be his belief the visitor vanished. After a time she came again, and now reproached him for his unbelief. "This time it is the prior," said Jetzer, rushing at him with a knife. "Mary" threw a pewter plate at his head and disappeared.

The scales were now fallen from Jetzer's eyes. He saw how he had been deceived, and felt sure he knew who his visitors were. The Dominicans finding themselves detected tried to poison Jetzer; but he happily discovered this and fled from the place. The deception was soon noised abroad, and the pope appointed persons to investigate the matter. Four persons were found guilty and burnt alive.

Zwingli had studied at Berne, and had attracted the attention of the Dominicans, and they had invited him to lodge at their convent. His father, fearing for his safety, had bidden him leave Berne at once. The above shameful imposture shews the danger Zwingli had run.

Ulric Zwingli was born on January 1, 1484, at Wildhaus, in the canton of St. Gall, in Switzerland. The village stands 3,613 feet above the sea — near to heaven, as one has said, and yet a part of this sin-stained earth. Ulric was first placed with his uncle, the dean of Wesen, for his education, and being found of good ability, he was sent at ten years of age to Basle. Here he outstripped his fellow scholars, and in 1497 he was sent to Berne, where he remained till called away from the danger that threatened him, as we have seen. From Berne he went to Vienna in Austria and studied philosophy. He afterwards went to Basle where he became Master of Arts, and commenced teaching.

His next step was to become pastor of Glaris, and in 1513 he commenced to study Greek in order, as he said, "to draw from the true source the doctrine of Christ." And he afterwards said that we must endeavour to leave philosophy and theology, and "enter into God's thoughts in His own word. I applied myself in earnest prayer to the Lord to give me His light; and though I read nothing but scripture, its sense becomes clearer to me than if I had studied many commentators." This was the man chosen of God to be the most zealous of the Swiss Reformers, and this was his education for the work.

Zwingli twice visited Italy, and strange to say as a soldier. In those days all were expected to take arms when there was a call to war, and Zwingli thus was in arms to fight for the pope. These visits, like the visit of Luther to Rome, were of great use to Zwingli. They gave him a clear insight into the evil practices of the church of Rome, and it grieved him to the heart to see his beloved countrymen given up like cattle to the slaughter, to save that which was so corrupt.

In 1516 Zwingli was called to be priest and preacher at Einsiedeln, in the canton of Schwytz. It had been said that a chant of some unseen heavenly choristers had been heard in the church, and a voice which declared Christ Himself had consecrated the place. This drew to the spot thousands of pilgrims, to whom Zwingli preached the gospel. He told them plainly that God was not there more than anywhere else. There was no merit in their pilgrimages. "Christ, who offered Himself on the cross once for all, is the sacrifice and victim, which satisfies for all eternity for the sins of all believers." This was strange news to the pilgrims. They told one another, "Christ alone saves us, and He saves everywhere." At this news many turned back, and the visitors became fewer. There was in consequence less money coming in, and Zwingli's stipend fell short. But he cared not: he was content to be the poorer if he made others rich.

Oswald Myconius, a friend of Zwingli, was appointed over the school at Zurich, and soon after his arrival, the post of preacher becoming vacant, Myconius at once proposed his friend Zwingli. After a good deal of canvassing for and against, Zwingli was chosen preacher of Zurich, which greatly enlarged his sphere of usefulness. On December 27, 1518, he entered on his duties. He began to expound the Gospel of Matthew, to the great delight of the faithful.

In the next year a monk, named Samson, was going the round of Switzerland, selling indulgences. Zwingli heard of his approach to Zurich, and commenced to preach against the unholy traffic. This and other influences caused the council to resolve not to admit Samson into the town. They therefore sent messengers to the suburbs where Samson had arrived. He said he had a message from the pope. So he was admitted, but was not allowed to open his traffic. He was soon recalled from Switzerland, and a cart drawn by three horses was needed to drag the chests of money he had collected from the poor deluded Swiss.

In August 1519, a dreadful plague broke out at Zurich. Zwingli was at the baths of Pfeffers, but he returned to his post at once, where he was indefatigable in his attentions to the sick. At length he was smitten down by the plague, and all hope was lost of his recovery. But day and night prayers were made by the faithful that he might be spared. God heard their prayers and raised up His servant, with renewed strength and energy to proceed with the work set before him. Besides preaching on Sundays he observed that many persons flocked to Zurich on Fridays to the market, and he resolved to open the church on the market days, and let those simple country people hear the truth and carry it away with them. By this means, and by a colporteur going from village to village with the works of the Reformers, the work rapidly spread in all directions. And everywhere as the light increased, the power and influence of Rome decreased.

This at length attracted attention and in a peculiar manner. It is one of the rules of Rome not to allow meat to be eaten on Fridays nor during Lent, and a citizen of Lucerne being at Zurich was scandalized to find a friend of his eating meat during Lent, and told him of it. His friend retorted that he knew those at Lucerne ate meat on days when it was forbidden. "We purchase our licence from the pope," said the citizen of Lucerne. "And we ours from the butcher," said his friend; "if it be an affair of money, the one surely is as good as the other." It got noised abroad, and the council being appealed to, the practice was forbidden. But the friends of the pope were not satisfied, and wrote to the Bishop of Constance, declaring that Zwingli was the destroyer, not the pastor of Christ's flock.

The bishop appointed three persons to visit Zurich, and investigate the case. They first called a council of the clergy; but in this Zwingli delivered a speech in favour of the gospel, which his accusers did not attempt to gainsay.

The magistrates were appealed to — the smaller council. Here Zwingli was not allowed to be present, and he would have been condemned, but those friendly to the truth appealed to the large council — the Two Hundred.

On the 9th of April, 1522, they met, amid great interest and excitement. The friends of the truth demanded that the pastors should be present to hear the accusations and answer them. The smaller council objected; but it was decided that they should be heard.

The deputy from the bishop said, "Men have appeared amongst us teaching newly-invented doctrines that are equally abominable and seditious . . . . Continue in the church. Out of the church none can be saved. The ceremonies of the church alone can bring unlearned Christians to the knowledge of salvation: and the pastors of the flock have nothing to do but to explain the signification of these ceremonies to the people." He and his coadjutors then wanted to leave the council, but Zwingli begged them to stay. This they refused, until the council itself strongly begged them to remain. At length they consented.

Zwingli rose to reply. The deputy had talked of sedition, "Let him learn that Zurich is more tranquil and more obedient to the laws than any city in Switzerland — a blessing which all good Christians attribute to the gospel. . . . .

"It is not by vain observances that the unlearned multitude can be brought to the knowledge of the truth. There is another and a better way. It is the way that Christ and His apostles have marked out for us — even the gospel itself

"With regard to abstinence, let him who thinks forty days insufficient, fast if he will all the year round, it concerns not me. All that I contend for is that no one should be compelled to fast. . .

"In every nation whosoever believes with all his heart in the Lord Jesus is accepted of God. Here truly is the church, out of which no one can be saved. To explain the gospel, and to obey it — such is the sum of our duty as the ministers of Christ."

The Two Hundred resolved to appeal to the pope and the cardinals to explain the controverted point, and that in the meantime abstinence from flesh should be observed during Lent.

This was really a triumph for the Reformers. Zwingli went on with his work. But his enemies were not baffled, and were constantly plotting to get rid of him. One day he received a letter, begging him not to eat except in his own house, and not to partake of bread except that baked at home — a plot being laid to remove him by poison. On the next day another attempt was made with the dagger, but God preserved His servant.

Again the bishop interfered, and wrote to the chapter at Zurich. Though not named, all knew it was meant for Zwingli. He replied in writing. "What after all is my offence?" asked he: "I have endeavoured to open men's eyes to the peril of their souls; I have laboured to bring them to the knowledge of the only true God and Christ Jesus His Son." He was allowed to go on with his work.

Other preachers were raised up. At Lucerne on a solemn fast-day a large crowd filled the church, expecting to hear some noted preacher. Conrad Schmid, of Kusnacht, entered the pulpit. Attention was immediately riveted, as he began to speak in German instead of the usual Latin. Among other strange things to their ears he said, "God forbid that we should recognize a head so full of sin as the Roman bishop, and thereby reject Jesus Christ. If the bishop of Rome dispenses the bread of the gospel, let us acknowledge him as a pastor, not as our head: and if he does not dispense it, let us in no way whatever recognize him."

In other places there was not room in the churches for those who preached the gospel. This was the case at Appenzell, where Walter Klarer often preached in the meadows or on the mountain sides the glad tidings of salvation.

The scandals that occurred through the celibacy of the clergy occasioned the Reformers to search the word, and there they found that the bishop was to be the husband of one wife. (1 Tim. 3: 2.) Zwingli saw it was right to marry; but because some of his friends were not clear about it, he resolved to be married secretly. He was united to Anna Reinhard, widow of Meyer von Knonau. This was in 1522, some say 1524, but its being kept from the public will easily account for the different dates being named.

In the meantime the enemies of the truth had appealed to the Diet of the nation, and the Diet had forbidden any from preaching "doctrines that disturbed the people." Zwingli could not consent, but in order to work in harmony with his brethren he called a meeting of the preachers favourable to the gospel to meet him at Einsiedeln. The object was to address the heads of the cantons and the bishop on two points. 1, To claim a free preaching of the gospel. 2, To allow the clergy to marry. Happily for both they had ample scripture, which they took care to quote in their appeals. These were printed and widely circulated.

These appeals stirred up the energies of the papal party. Their anger fell first upon Oswald Myconius. He was the head of the school at Lucerne. He was known to be a friend of reform, and for this, or, as they said, because he was a disciple of Luther, he was dismissed from his office. With his sick wife and child, sadly he left Lucerne. The city had refused the light and the truth, and, as if given up to its darkness, it has remained chiefly Roman Catholic to this day. Myconius found shelter at Einsiedeln.

About the end of 1522 Leo Juda, a friend of Zwingli, and a staunch friend of the gospel, came to Zurich as pastor of St. Peter's. One day Leo heard a monk in his preaching say that a man by his own strength could satisfy the righteousness of God. His spirit was stirred, and he begged the hearers to keep their seats while he proved to them the preacher was wrong. This caused great commotion, and a council was called to consider the matter. Zwingli again took the lead, first by issuing some theses, and then in the council, by maintaining the truths of the gospel.

Faber, a German theologian, was present, but declined to hold any discussion with Zwingli. The council decreed that as Zwingli was reproved by no one, he was at liberty to preach the gospel. Again had God kept an open door for His truth.

Rome tried other stratagems. Zwingli was surprised by a visit from the captain of the pope's guard and a legate, bearing a letter in which the pope called Zwingli his well-beloved son. Others, too, gathered round the Reformer and offered him, honour and riches from the church. Through God's grace, Zwingli saw the trap laid for him and evaded it.

The friends of the gospel were tried by the unwise zeal of some who, it may be hoped, had imbibed the truth. Thus, one of the vicars of St. Peter's on seeing many poor people about the doors only half clad, said, in allusion to the costly attire of the images of saints, "I should like to strip those wooden idols and clothe those poor members of Jesus Christ." A few days after, both the saints and their rich clothing were missing. The council sent the Vicar to prison, though he had no hand in their removal.

In October, 1523, another council was held at Zurich — an important one for the Reformation. In this the doctrine of the Mass was discussed. "My brethren in Christ," said Zwingli, "far from us be the thought that there is anything unreal in the body and blood of Christ. Our only aim is to prove that the Mass is not a sacrifice that can be offered to God by one man for his fellow." There was no one to reply, and the point was gained. Zurich became the stronghold of the Reformation, Myconius being called shortly afterwards to take charge of one of the schools. Thus was he again brought near to Zwingli.

A general Diet of Switzerland was now held at Lucerne. The question as to which of the cantons were favourable to Reform was soon raised. Zurich alone was decidedly for the Reformation; Schaffhausen almost; Berne, Basle, Soleure, Glaris, and Appenzell were doubtful; the rest were decidedly against it. Nineteen Articles were passed to the import that no new or Lutheran doctrine was to be allowed in public or private. They bore date January 26, 1524, and were ratified by all the cantons except Zurich, and copies sent to each to be carried out.

The effect of this was first felt by a citizen of Zurich, Hottinger by name. Having been grieved by seeing persons fall down before a crucifix by the roadside, he had gone and dug round it till the crucifix came down with a crash. For this he was expelled from Zurich; but wherever he went he spoke freely of the gospel the Reformers preached at Zurich. "It is," said he, "that Christ has offered Himself up once only for all believers, and by that one sacrifice has purified them and redeemed them from all iniquity; and they prove by holy scripture that the Mass is a mere delusion." Some took notice of his words, and at Coblentz he was seized. They tried to get a conviction against him in two places in vain; but at Lucerne, where the gospel had been driven away, they were more successful. The council at once sentenced him to be beheaded. People wept as they saw him led to execution. "I am going to everlasting happiness," said he. On reaching the scaffold he raised his eyes to heaven, and said, "Oh my Redeemer, into Thy hands I commend my spirit," and his head was struck off.

It being well known that Zurich was the stronghold of the Reformation, deputies were sent to the canton, requesting that they would root out the new religion. "Dismiss Zwingli and his disciples," said they: then they would all unite to correct abuses.

The council met to consider the proposition. All saw that it was a momentous crisis for the Reformation as far as man was concerned. But God had the hearts of all men under His control, and the council of Zurich replied that they could make no concessions in what concerned the word of God. As yet at least in Zurich the gospel was free.

Nor did the council stop there. They had spoken courageously, they proceeded to act in like manner. The relics, collected with so much care, but about which there was so much doubt, should be worshipped no longer. They buried them. They then proceeded to strip all the churches of the images, the ornaments of which were sold for relief of the poor. The paintings were obliterated, and the walls whitewashed. Some of the ornaments were committed to the flames, "to the honour and glory of God," Then the organs were silenced, simplicity and sincerity of worship were sought for.

While these things gave joy to the Reformers, they filled the friends of the pope with indignation and resentment. The pope also was aroused. He addressed a brief on the subject to the Swiss confederation. A Diet was called in July 1524 at Zug, from which a deputation was sent to Zurich, Schaffhausen and Appenzell, stating their determination not to allow the new doctrine. Zurich replied that in matters of faith the word of God must be obeyed. It was not simply the council now. They had previously appealed to the people to know their judgment, and that judgment was emphatically for the gospel. The reply of Zurich greatly incensed the confederation, who threatened to sit no longer with Zurich in the Diet.

Zurich "choosing the gospel" sounds very encouraging, but it must be noticed that the people had been appealed to, and this was irrespective of whether they were Christians or not; so that the movement became partly religious and partly political.

A breach was brought about unexpectedly. Oexlin was pastor of Burg, a village in the vicinity of Stein, upon the Rhine. He was a friend of Zwingli and a preacher of the gospel. One night he was seized and carried off; but calling out, the neighbours were aroused; the alarm gun was fired, and the tocsin sounded. The whole neighbourhood were on foot. They hastened after their pastor but were unable to come up with him before he had crossed the river Thur, and was beyond their rescue.

The alarm had not raised the friends of the pastor only, but those also who cared for nothing but excitement. These broke into a neighbouring convent, burnt the books, and made themselves drunk, which ended by the place being reduced to ashes.

Among those who had pursued their pastor was deputy-bailiff Wirth and his two sons, all devoted to the truth, the sons being priests, and preachers of the gospel. These had had nothing to do with the spoliation of the convent, but being known as Reformers, and as they were out on that eventful night, they were singled out as those who ought to be punished.

A Diet of the whole of the cantons was called, and the surrender of these three men was demanded. Zurich caused them to be arrested, but on examination they were declared to be innocent. Still the Diet demanded them, and on the promise that they should be examined only as to the events of that night, and not as to their faith, they were given up, and carried to Baden. It was August, 1524.

At the examination the father was put to the torture, but declared himself innocent as touching the attack upon the convent. He was then charged with destroying an image of St. Anne. Against his son Adrian there was nothing except that he had married, and had preached like Luther and Zwingli. John had given the holy sacrament to a sick man without candle or bell. They were also tortured, being urged to confess of whom they had learnt the evil doctrine. The bailiff's wife repaired to Baden, and with a babe in her arms, appealed to the judges. Her younger son was given up to her; but her husband and John were condemned to death, together with another bailiff, named Rutiman. Sustained by faith in the Lord, they were beheaded. The gospel was bearing fruit to the glory of God.

This caused deep emotion in Zurich, but so far from hindering the Reformation, it instilled new courage and helped on the work. On August 11, 1525, the pastors of Zurich applied to the great council to abolish the Mass, and re-establish the Lord's supper. This they agreed to. The altars were removed, and tables supplied their places. The people were given both the bread and the wine.

As these things were being done at Zurich, at Berne the gospel was also progressing, but amid great opposition. James Watteville, president over the council, and his son Nicholas, provost in the church, were both favourable to the gospel. The council ordained that the preaching should consist of the gospel, and the doctrine of God as it is found in the books of scripture, and that the preachers should not allude to any doctrine, disputation, or writing coming from Luther or other teachers. This was skilfully worded. While it appeased the Romish party that the doctrines of Luther were not to be preached, it left the Reformers free to preach the same truths drawn from scripture.

At Koenigsfeld, there stood a monastery where all the noble families of Switzerland and Suabia sent their daughters who desired to take the veil. In this convent was the sister of the provost — Margaret Watteville, who had read the scriptures and received the truth, along with others of the inmates. These were convinced that their proper place was in their families, and they made a request to the council that they might leave the convent. The council used its influence to cause them to remain. The discipline was relaxed, and their allowances increased; but this did not satisfy them. "We desire," said they, "not liberty of the flesh, but that of the Spirit. We your poor unoffending prisoners, beseech you to take compassion on us." "Our prisoners," exclaimed the banneret, a staunch defender of the convents; "I have no wish to detain them prisoners." This turned the council in their favour. The doors were thrown open, and all who wished left. Nicholas Watteville, to keep a good conscience, gave up all hopes of promotion and emoluments, and married a nun, Clara May, from another convent. Thus were the strongholds of Rome being broken into in the canton of Berne.

At Basle, too, the Reformation made progress. It was the learned city of Switzerland, and the residence of Erasmus, who, while he spoke plainly and loudly against the abuses of the church, always drew back when any wished him to advance. He thus became really a hindrance to the Reformation and eventually wrote against Luther. But Oecolampadius was a faithful advocate of the Reformation. He had suffered persecution, and was now a "tried" man. He was professor and preacher at Basle.

Zwingli was led, in studying the scriptures, to the belief that the bread and the wine were not changed into the body and blood of Christ in the Lord's supper; neither did he believe with Luther, that though the bread and the wine were not changed, yet they were accompanied by the real body and blood; but he believed that the bread and wine were symbols of the body and blood of Christ: the one represented the other. This is now the view held by most Protestants; but at that time it was a newly recovered truth, that had been hidden for ages. Oecolampadius agreed with Zwingli.

Though Luther and Zwingli did not agree on this point, Zwingli and the other Swiss divines were anxious that this difference should not separate them from the German Reformers. But Luther was very violent about it, and declared to the messenger whom the Swiss sent, "Either the one party or the other — either the Swiss or we must be ministers of Satan."

Thus was the bark of the Reformation weakened from within by its divisions, where unity would have been strength. It was assailed, too, from without by the philosophy of Erasmus and the schools; by the fanaticism of the Anabaptists, who, driven from Germany, spread in Switzerland; and by the "religion" of the church of Rome. If it had not been floated by God Himself it must have foundered; but God was above all, and the frail bark weathered every storm.

A general Diet was called for, May 16, 1526, at Baden, to consider the subject of the "new doctrines." Dr. Eck was invited as the champion for Rome. The way Baden had behaved in the matter of the bailiffs Wirth and Rutiman, and the threats thrown out against Zwingli, rendered it unsafe for him to attend. Oecolampadius had to be the champion of the Reformation. Naturally quiet and retiring, he would have wished for Zwingli, but he felt constrained to be present and speak for the word of God.

Nothing could be more marked than the attitude of Baden. The friends of the papacy — especially Eck and Faber — fared sumptuously and were well received everywhere, while Oecolampadius and his compeers were as a set of beggars, and were scoffed at as freely as the others were commended. The landlord of "The Pike," the inn where Oecolampadius lodged, being curious to know how the Reformer spent his time, often looked in upon him, but always found him reading or praying. "It must be confessed," said he, "that he is a very pious heretic."

The discussion lasted eighteen days. Eck was loud, boastful and confident. Oecolampadius was serene, mild, but weighty. Of him a friend of Rome was heard to say, "O that the tall sallow man were on our side!" No one was allowed to take notes except those appointed by the papal party; but a student, named Jerome Walsch, had an excellent memory. After each discussion, he hastened home and wrote down all he could remember, and a messenger was despatched with it to Zwingli, who sent advice in return.

The discussion over, the theses of Eck were signed by eighty persons, while the protest against them was signed only by Oecolampadius and ten others. The Diet now decreed that as Zwingli, the leader in the pernicious doctrines, had refused to appear, and as the ministers who had come to Baden had hardened themselves against conviction, both the one and the others were in consequence cast out of the bosom of the church!

A strange thing this surely, that a Diet of councillors — with no pretension whatever to have any standing in the church should take upon themselves to excommunicate a body of Christians! It may have satisfied themselves; but certainly in God's sight it went no further than presumptuous words.

Oecolampadius was received back to Basle with great joy. He had done his duty, and God had protected him. Haller, on his return to Berne, was ordered to perform Mass by the smaller council. He appealed to the larger council; and there he solemnly told them that he could not with a clear conscience perform the Mass. He would leave the city if they wished it. They decided, to try and appease Rome, to remove him from being canon, and appoint him preacher. In other places the work spread. The discussion at Baden, instead of crushing the Reformation, as it was hoped it would do, only gave to it fresh life and vigour.

In 1527, Zurich being excluded from the national Diet by the Catholic cantons, called a Diet in its own city, and invited those supposed to be favourable to the gospel. Deputies from Berne, Basle, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, and St. Gall attended. A proposition was made in favour of the preaching of God's word and not the opinions of any man, and independent of any custom of their forefathers, who had not the word as they now had. The deputies promised to report the proposition.

The Catholic cantons were much disconcerted that Berne should be holding with Zurich, and they-called together a council of deputies in Berne itself, and then demanded of that city that it should turn away the preachers of the gospel, and return to the "true" faith.

Berne refused; but soon found, to its dismay, that the Catholic cantons were seeking foreign aid. The report was raised that Ferdinand, brother to Charles V., was about to enter Switzerland with an army to attack Zurich and those who held with that city.

About this same date (1527) there was in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, at Aigle, a schoolmaster known as Ursinus. He was a Frenchman, and had lately come into Switzerland, and sought employment to teach the youth. When his labours were over in the school he would be busy with the Greek and Hebrew scriptures. He next, as opportunity offered, instructed the parents as well as the children. He attacked purgatory, the pope, and the priests, and by degrees he had quite a band of listeners. But one day, to their astonishment, he threw off his disguise and said, "I am William Farel, minister of the word of God." The magistrates and the priests were alarmed to find such a man among them. But we must digress, and tell you who William Farel was, and what he had done to excite alarm in the minds of the magistrates. In doing this we shall get a glance at the commencement of the Reformation in France.

Farel and the Reformation in France.

William Farel was born in 1489 at a place called Farel, "three leagues from the town of Gap, in the direction of Grenoble," in France. His parents, devoted Catholics, used to take him on a pilgrimage to a cross said to be made of the wood of the very cross on which Christ was crucified, and the copper about it was made of the basin in which He washed His disciples' feet! There was a small crucifix attached to the cross, which the priest told them moved violently and threw out sparks when there was a storm: "were it not for this," said the priest, "the whole country would be swept bare." Among such superstition was young Farel reared.

He longed for learning, and, though discouraged by his father, he soon mastered all that was to be known in the vicinity, and set out for Paris. Here he fell in with Lefevre, professor at the University, they were soon good friends. Farel met with a Bible; but he found it differed so much from the church of Rome, that he was puzzled, but he concluded that it was because he did not understand the Bible.

Lefevre had his eyes open to the truth, and to the value of the scriptures, and he began to expound Paul's Epistles to his scholars. In the Sorbonne sounded that great truth of justification by grace. "It is God alone," said Lefevre, "who by His grace justifies unto eternal life." Of the death of Christ he said, "The sinless One is condemned, and he who is guilty goes free." Farel drank in the truth, and soon saw that if this was salvation, the church of Rome was to use his own word — devilish.

Farel having found Christ, said, "Now everything appears to me to wear a different aspect. Scripture is elucidated, prophecy is opened, and the epistles carry wonderful light into my soul. A voice before unknown — the voice of Christ, my Shepherd and my Teacher — speaks to me with power." He gave himself up to study Greek and Hebrew, that he might the better understand the scriptures.

Farel was made Master of Arts, and lectured at the college of Cardinal Lemoine, which ranked nearly equal to the Sorbonne. To him and Lefevre were soon added as believers, Briconnet, bishop of Meaux, and Margaret, sister to the King, Francis I., Berguin, and a gentleman at court.

Beda was syndic of the Sorbonne; he was a noisy persecutor, and he so harassed Lefevre and Farel that they were glad to accept an invitation from Briconnet, and leave Paris. Thus it was that at Meaux were a number of lovers of the truth, and under the protection of the bishop, the gospel was freely proclaimed in the churches.

Lefevre, in his retirement, turned his attention to the translation of the scriptures. In November, 1524 the New Testament was published in French, and the next year the Psalms. Thus from a corner, as it were, issued the light of God upon France. Many read the scriptures with great eagerness.

But the light of the gospel and the darkness of Rome could not both flourish together. A clamour was soon raised that Meaux was the hotbed of heresy, and an appeal was made to the Parliament. Briconnet cleared himself, but gave way so far as to deprive the pious men who were with him of their licences to preach!

Lefevre was next attacked; but the king cared for none of these things; he, however, appointed a commission, by which Lefevre was acquitted. Farel, who stood more alone, was obliged to flee. Berguin soon after was thrown into prison. Thus the Sorbonne had hoped that they had stamped out the light of the gospel. But it had taken roots in the hearts of many at Meaux, and as they could no longer hear the truth at church, they met privately. One, Leclerc, a wool-comber, was a sort of pastor, and visited from house to house; but he was condemned to be whipped and branded as "heretic" with a hot iron on the forehead. Just as this was being done the operator was startled by the prisoner's aged mother exclaiming, "Glory be to Jesus Christ and His witnesses!"

Leclerc went to Metz. There he met with Châtelain, a monk converted to the truth, who was preaching the gospel. There were great hopes of good being done here, when the rashness of Leclerc destroyed all hopes.

A short distance from Metz stood a little chapel, in which were images of the Virgin and of several saints, to which crowds of pilgrims used to go for worship once a year. That festival was just approaching. The next day the place would be full of worshippers. Leclerc steals out of the city, and goes to the chapel. He thinks he has a commission from God to overthrow and break the images, according to Exodus 20: 4; 23: 24. He enters the chapel and the place is soon scattered with the broken images

The morrow comes; the bells ring; the banners are unfurled; the crosses are raised, and the processions gradually make their way to the chapel of the Virgin. When they reach the place, all are amazed. The hymns cease, the banners are lowered; and there comes a universal cry of death to the wretch who has broken the images. Leclerc was seen returning to the city, and was suspected. He did not deny it. He was sentenced to death. His right hand was first cut off, and then his flesh was torn away by hot pincers, and then he was burnt over a slow fire. As long as he could, he related the scripture: "Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands," etc. Thus died the first martyr of the gospel in France. Châtelain was also now accused and burnt alive for heresy.

Farel returned to his native district and preached the gospel. His three brothers with others were converted: but the opposition raised compelled him to fly; and after wandering about, preaching where he could find an open door, in 1524 he quitted France and proceeded to Basle in Switzerland.

Here he met with Oecolampadius, and their hearts were at once knit together in loving brotherhood and friendship; but Farel paid no heed to the half-hearted Erasmus. This touched Erasmus to the quick, who always after spoke of Farel in the most offensive terms. Farel's motto was "God's word is all-sufficient," and he wished to have a public discussion on thirteen propositions, one of which was, "To take from the certainty of the gospel of Christ is to destroy it." Neither the priests, nor the students of the University were allowed to be present. Farel and Oecolampadius maintained the theses, but not one attended to dispute them.

There was a door opened in Montbéliard, and Oecolampadius pressed Farel to accept it. Farel had not been ordained to the ministry, as it was called; but never mind, Oecolampadius himself would ordain him. Farel consented. Neither of them saw as yet that those whom God had gifted and sent to preach needed no other ordination. Oecolampadius said to him, "The more you find yourself inclined to vehemence, the more must you exercise yourself to maintain a gentle bearing: temper your lion heart with the softness of the dove." The gentle Oecolampadius was to the vehement Farel, what Melanchthon was to Luther. Farel went to Montbéliard July, 1524.

Erasmus had not failed to inform his Roman Catholic friends of the whereabouts of Farel, and they soon concerted measures to get rid of the Reformer. But he laboured there for some months and it was Farel himself who raised the storm that compelled him to leave.

One day Farel was walking near the banks of the river when he saw a procession, headed by two priests, bearing the image of St. Anthony, and reciting prayers to that saint. Farel's spirit was stirred within him. What should he do? Hide himself, or speak, or act? He advanced, snatched the image from the priest, and threw it over the bridge into the water, saying, "Poor idolaters, will ye never put away your idols?" The anger of the people was great, but a cry was raised, "The image is sinking," and whether it was because of saving the image, or what, somehow or other Farel escaped for the moment; but he was obliged to fly from the place and again returned to Basle. He had not practised Oecolampadius' advice and tempered the lion with the lamb. He was forbidden to remain at Basle, and retired to Strasburg. In December, 1526, an invitation was sent to him to return to France. An opportunity to return to his native country he had long wished for and long waited for; but as no door had seemed to open he had turned his steps towards Switzerland and the invitation did not reach him till he had reached Aigle, and was at work as a schoolmaster, as we have seen. He resolved to go on with his work and not return to France.

Farel in Switzerland.

This brings us back again to the work in Switzerland. You will remember that Farel at Aigle had one day thrown off his disguise, and told them who he was. He now ascended the pulpit and preached Jesus Christ as the salvation of sinners.

Being attached to Berne* he had obtained a licence from the council to preach. The priests and magistrates stormed and protested, but Farel went on with his work.

{* Aigle having been taken by Berne from Savoy in 1475, was at this time under the protection of that canton. The Pays de Vaud being by constitution a separate canton in 1803, Aigle became a part of the canton de Vaud.}

A new proclamation coming from Berne caused the Catholics to revolt and with the cry of "No more submission to Berne! down with Farel!" they proceeded to attack the preacher. But those favourable to the Reformation gathered round Farel and shewed such a bold front, that for the time danger was averted; but Farel, to avoid excesses, left the place for a few days. On his return he resumed his preaching, but amid much opposition.

Many in the canton of Berne were much opposed to the Reformation, and the great council had tried to please all, but at length they called the priests and ecclesiastics to a conference on the disputed points; yet decided beforehand that all must be decided by the word of God. Dr. Eck and other well-known Catholics were invited. Eck declined to go.

The Catholic cantons sent a protest against the conference; but they were reminded that they had had a similar one at Baden. The Emperor then sent an order for it to be postponed; but it was so far advanced that this could not be.

The question arose as to who was to be the champion of the Reformation. Haller was at Berne; but he was modest and timid. It will be remembered that at Baden Oecolampadius stood the brunt of the battle. He wrote to Haller saying that Zwingli ought now to take his share in the conflict. Haller invited Zwingli, who gladly consented.

This was not without danger. It was known that in the Catholic cantons they might be waylaid. From various parts the ministers assembled at Zurich, and then all proceeded under an escort of three hundred armed men. They had one or two alarms, but all arrived safely.

The disputation opened January 7, 1528. Everything was to be settled by scripture, and no explanation was to be given that did not come from the word of God, explaining obscure texts by such as were clear.

The first thesis was read: "The holy christian church, of which Christ is the sole head, is born of the word of God, abideth in it, and listeneth not to the voice of a stranger."

A monk replied, The word sole is not in scripture: Christ has left a vicar here below."

Haller said, "The vicar that Christ left is the Holy Ghost."

A Romanist said, "See then to what a pass things have come these last ten years. This man calls himself a Lutheran; that, a Zwinglian; a third, a Carlstadtian; a fourth, an Oecolampadist; a fifth, an Anabaptist."

Unfortunately the Reformers had no good answer to this. Haller said that those named did not desire any to bear their names; but he did not deny that it was a fact. How much better it would have been if all had been content with the one scriptural name of Christian.

Various other subjects were discussed, each side doubtless thinking that it had the victory.

On Sunday, Zwingli took a bold step. He went into the pulpit and recited what is called the Apostles' creed. When he had said, "He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead" he paused and said, "These three articles are in contradiction to the Mass." A priest was then below him prepared to celebrate the Mass. He stopped at these words of Zwingli as if bewildered, and stood with his eyes on the Reformer. At length, to the astonishment of the congregation, he took off his priestly garments and threw them on the altar, exclaiming, "Unless the Mass reposes on a more solid foundation I can celebrate it no longer."

Three days after was the feast of St. Vincent, the patron of the city, as they say. It was usually a high day with the Catholics. The council decided that those who wished could hold the service as heretofore. On the previous evening the bells announced the approach of the festival. On the morning the tapers were lit, and the incense prepared; but alas! no priest came to say Mass, and no congregation to hear it! Thus in this quiet way were the bulwarks of Rome being assailed. On the next day, with a foreign priest Mass was said to a few.

The discussion over, the two councils ordered the Mass to be abolished, and everyone might remove any ornaments they had placed in the churches. Twenty-five altars were removed, tables being substituted, and a number of images destroyed.

Zwingli, ere he left, said in the pulpit, "Victory has declared for the truth, but perseverance alone can complete the triumph. . . . Citizens of Berne . . . . do not abandon Jesus Christ." Then, pointing to the broken fragments of the images, not yet removed, said, "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made you free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."

The Romanists were exasperated at the results of the discussion, and determined to molest the Reformers as they returned from Berne. On arriving at Bremgarten, they found the gates closed. They had with them two hundred men at arms. They knew that it would be against Zwingli that any mischief would be attempted, so he was surrounded by troops, and then the commander gave orders to advance. The keepers of the town gave way, and the party passed through an immense crowd, but safely, and at length arrived at Zurich "all well."

Berne next proceeded to make the movement general over the canton as well as over the city. Everywhere the Mass was abolished and the images destroyed. Some of the monasteries were next turned into hospitals, others into places for the poor.

Thus the Reformation in the canton of Berne seemed to be complete; but the work had been too rapid to be real. For a man to be a Catholic today, and a Protestant to-morrow — as many were — without change of heart or real knowledge of the gospel — could not be expected to remain a Protestant when it was to his interest to be a Catholic. So there soon began to be a reaction, especially in the rural districts, far from the city of Berne, and near to the Catholic cantons.

From Interlaken they took up arms, and entered the canton of Berne, declaring that they would march on to Berne, and re-establish the Mass. Berne collected its troops, and the revolt was soon crushed, and Interlaken humbled for invading a neighbouring canton.

The Reformation spread in St. Gall and Glaris; in Appenzell six out of eight parishes embraced the Reform. In the Grisons religious liberty was proclaimed.

At Basle the struggle was long and tedious. Oecolampadius laboured faithfully, but the Roman party was strong. The council was timid, and while it hesitated the people armed and broke into the churches and removed the images. In some places there were heaps of heads, arms, legs and bodies. Erasmus, with his usual sarcasm, said, "I am much surprised that they performed no miracles to save themselves: formerly the saints worked frequent prodigies for much smaller offences." The senate decreed that the Mass and images should be abolished throughout the canton.

Erasmus was in perplexity. While he made game of the images of the saints he was afraid that he should he classed with the Reformers. His fame extended far and near. He must save his good name. He went to Freyburg, in Brisgau.

Farel was the real evangelist of Switzerland. When the gospel was settled and free in one place he would move on to another. Thus he went to Lausanne, but there they had a bishop, and the Reformer had to retire. Then he went to Neuchatel. There the priests, who had long been quarrelling, united like Herod and Pontius Pilate, to crush Farel. He was compelled to leave after sowing the seed. He hoped, however, to return.

Meantime he went with a young man, Anthony Boyve to the Val de Ruz to the town of Vallengin. It was on a festival day, and numbers had flocked into the church. Farel entered the pulpit and began to preach to the people. At the same time the priests were busy with the Mass. Though some listened to Farel for a time, on the elevation of the Host they moved to the altar to receive the wafer, when suddenly Anthony Boyve rushed up, snatched the Host from the priest, and turning towards the people said, "This is not the God whom you should worship, He is above — in heaven in the majesty of the Father; and not, as you believe, in the hands of the priest."

For the moment all were silent with astonishment, and Farel tried to go on with his sermon; but they were both obliged to run for their lives. The people, as soon as they recovered from their bewilderment, rushed after them. Farel hoped to escape by a path which avoided the town; but while they stealthily made their way, a shower of stones told them they were discovered. Soon they were beset with priests, men, and women, who attacked them with clubs and sticks till blood flowed. "Drown them, drown them," cried a voice; which was responded to by their being dragged to the bridge. Just at this time, came up some citizens, who said, "What are you doing? Put them rather in a place of safety, that they may answer for their proceedings." This prevailed, and they were cast into a dungeon of the castle. A cruel end was being prepared for them, when some townsmen of Neuchatel came and claimed them. From Neuchatel, observe, that would not have the gospel, the deliverers of the preachers came!

The act of Boyve cannot be justified; the wide world was open to them, and they could have preached in the open air. Farel was never so near losing his life, and both felt the effects of their rashness for many a day afterwards. But the place where he suffered so sorely was at length gained to the gospel.

Farel returned to Neuchatel and preached in the church; and the people became so excited that they commenced at once to pull down the images: and then to shew their contempt of the doctrine of the Mass they distributed the consecrated wafers among them and ate them. This so exasperated the priests and friends of Rome that a tumult resulted, and both came to blows. The council tried to calm the tempest, but all was in vain. By degrees it died out and all again was quiet. There was inscribed on a pillar of the church, "L'an 1530 le 23 Octobre, fut ôtée et abattue l'Idolâtrie de céans par les Bourgeois."* The matter was finally settled by the vote. A majority of eighteen decided that Neuchatel was for the Reformation. Farel was not to be seen in any of these things, though it was through his preaching that they all came about.

{* "On October 23, 1530, idolatry was overthrown and removed from hence by the citizens."}

Everywhere the altars and images were removed, and the Mass abolished. But an incident will show how little the people understood what they were doing in crying out against idolatry. Two citizens were passing a chapel, when one was reminded that he had put an image of St. John there. He declared he would light his stove with it to-morrow. So as he returned from work he entered the chapel and took away the image, but laid it down outside his door till the morning. In the morning he fetched the image, but it had not been long in the stove when the family were startled by a loud explosion. It must be the anger of the saint, said he. His friend tried to persuade him that it was not so, and at length assured him that in the night he had bored a hole in the image and filled it with gunpowder. But it was all of no use. He was so convinced that the saints were angry at what was being done, that he broke up his establishment and fled from the place.

The Reformation once settled in Neuchatel, Farel looked about for new ground, and began to visit the villages round. One after another fell under the power of his preaching, and the seed was sown in some places where he was obliged to fly for his life.

War in Switzerland.

During the above progress of the gospel the Catholic cantons were not idle. They persecuted by torture and death all that fell into their clutches. And not satisfied with this, feeling that the Reformed cantons were now too numerous and strong for them, they went and threw themselves into the arms of Austria. The Austrians could scarcely believe that the Swiss would sacrifice their country for their religion; but the Swiss assured them they were sincere.

The Reformed cantons sent deputies to those Catholic cantons in the hope of coming to terms; but the deputies were received everywhere with insults and menaces.

But things were brought to an issue sooner than was expected. A Reformed pastor had been waylaid, carried off, and — notwithstanding the protests of the Reformed cantons he was burned alive. This so stirred up the people of Zurich, that they at once flew to arms. The Catholics also did the same. The armies took the field, but again an effort was made to prevent bloodshed. Berne refused to help Zurich, saying that Zurich had begun without them and might finish without them; but Berne joined in a demand that the Catholic cantons should break their alliance with Austria. The treaty was produced. The Reformed cantons wished to read it, but this was forbidden, and in presence of the army it was cut to pieces. It was hoped now that all might be settled; the troops were disbanded and returned home. An edict was passed to revive mutual friendship and concord. But this was more easily said than done. There were still the ill-feeling and religious rancour ready to burst forth on any fresh occasion.

Zwingli unfortunately made rapid strides as a politician. This casts another shadow over the Reformation. Zwingli not only busied himself in the politics of Zurich and Switzerland, but went so far as to advocate the overthrow of the Emperor Charles V., and even plotted for its accomplishment (1530), and above all with France who had so persecuted the Reformers. "My kingdom is not of this world," said our Lord. How was it that the Reformer overlooked this important truth? Politics were so mixed up with religion in Switzerland that it caused Erasmus to say, "They ask us to open our gates, crying aloud, The gospel, the gospel. . . . raise the cloak, and under its mysterious folds you will find — Democracy," the political rights of the people.

The Catholic cantons in the meantime were more and more uneasy at the peace they had agreed to, and secretly longed to break it. They began by persecuting any who favoured the gospel in their own states, and then by calumniating the Reformers. A paper was said to have been found upon an altar which said that the Reformers held that any who committed an abominable offence did not sin so much as he who heard Mass. This of course was false, but it was believed, and being printed was widely circulated.

Zurich advocated that these calumnies should be avenged; but Berne proposed an appeal being made to the Catholic cantons. It ended in a general Diet of all the cantons being called at Baden, in April, 1531. But this Diet ended in nothing, and the confusion and distrust only increased. An attempt was then made to form a confederation of the Reformed cantons, but this failed; at length Berne proposed that they should close their markets against the five Catholic cantons, and not allow them to buy corn, salt, wine, steel, and iron. This was agreed to, and the Reformed cantons took measures accordingly.

In some of the proscribed districts this meant starvation. The Protestant cantons were actually going to try to starve their countrymen in the name of religion. How could the Catholics love such a people or such a religion?

The Catholic cantons ordered provisions from places outside of Switzerland; but the Protestant cantons would not allow them to pass through. France tried to mediate, but it was not listened to. A general council was called in presence of the envoys from France. The Catholic cantons were inflexible, saying, "We will not listen to any proposition before the raising of the blockade." The Reformers said they would not raise it until the gospel was allowed to be freely preached all over Switzerland.

Mediators stepped in, and an agreement was drawn up which it was hoped would meet all obstacles; but the various cantons would not agree to it.

Zwingli found his influence declining in Zurich, and he appeared before the council, asking them, that, as he was blamed for every misfortune and yet his advice was not followed, he might be dismissed.

The council were astonished and grieved, and begged him to remain. After three days he consented, saying, "I will stay with you; and I will labour for the public safety — until death."

Fearful omens were said to be seen. In a village a widow was alone in her house, when blood flowed from the wainscot and from the stones: it fell from a basin, etc. She rushed from the place crying, murder. The neighbours came, and there were surely the marks of blood, and they helped to efface them; but it appeared again the same day. The bailiff of Schenkenberg and the pastor of Dalheim arrived, to see for themselves. They reported it to Berne and Zurich. The records are preserved both in Latin and German.

Again, it is recorded that a terrific meteor was seen in the heavens — like a comet with a fiery tail. Zwingli himself saw this, and predicted his own death and that of many others.

The Catholic cantons assembled at Lucerne, and determined to commence the war. They would enter the bailiwicks and take provisions by force. At once they seized on all the passes, and in secret made their arrangements. Messenger after messenger came to Zurich with the news that war had commenced. But, as if paralysed, they did nothing, hoping the reports were false.

Messengers still arrived with more alarming reports, still they only sent some one to see if the reports were true, but did nothing.

At length, after many and long delays, Zurich awoke to the reality, and began to arm, but there seemed no enthusiasm, no defined plan, no leader. Zwingli, as chaplain of the army, went with them. He felt oppressed. No wonder, when we reflect on what was sought in this war, namely, to prevent their fellow-countrymen having bread, and compelling them to have the gospel.

Cappel was to be the scene of battle. The few that could be got there from Zurich picked out the best place, anxiously awaiting reinforcements. The Catholic cantons — Lucerne, Uri, Schwytz, Unterwalden, and Zug — are in high spirits. They are eight thousand strong, all picked men from the cantons. They hear Mass before they leave Zug, and when in the open plain they bend their knees, 'cross themselves,' and say five 'paters,' as many 'aves,' and the 'credo.'

The Zurichers also bent the knee and invoked God's help. They could only muster twelve hundred men. Zwingli soon reached the army, but was sad and dispirited.

At length they joined battle; at first those from Zurich seemed to be successful, but they were overpowered, and suffered defeat on all sides. Zwingli had armed himself with sword and battle-axe, but he was stooping to console a dying man soon after the battle had commenced, when a stone struck him on the head and closed his lips. He received other blows, and at length a wound from a lance felled him to rise no more. But he was not dead. The battle over, with torches the Catholics searched the dead, and any found still alive were taunted about their religion, and then dispatched. At length Zwingli was met with, but was not recognized. "Do you want a priest to confess yourself?" He could not speak, but shook his head. One turned the face of the dying man towards the fire, and exclaimed, "I think it is Zwingli." Another heard the name, and with his sword despatched the Reformer, saying, "Die, obstinate heretic." Not content with this, the dead body was dismembered, and then burnt.

Thus had fallen that devoted and zealous Reformer Zwingli; but he was one who had signally failed to observe the spiritual nature of the religion of Christ, and had, as we have seen, mingled politics and patriotism with Christianity. Our Lord had distinctly said, "My kingdom is not of this world," and "they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." (Matt. xxvi. 52.)

The Reformers suffered another repulse. The other Protestant cantons sent supplies until twelve thousand men were mustered. On the other hand, there were two thousand Italians sent by the pope. The Reformers were not united, some of the cantons made separate treaties with the Catholics and retired. Zurich, finding itself deserted, was obliged to do the same. It preserved its faith, and that was all. Berne also sought peace; and the others were obliged to do the same.

The Reformation had gained nothing by the war but shame, while in many places the Romish religion was re-established. To add to the sorrow of the Reformers at this time, Oecolampadius was called away. He had been invited to take the place of Zwingli, but had declined; the death of his friend, and the sorrows into which the Reformation was plunged broke his heart, and soon carried him off. Henry Bullinger, who had been obliged to fly from Bremgarten, succeeded Zwingli.

The cantons now settled down; some into the Reformed religion, and some the Catholic. More than once they had their religious wars, and they are to this day some Catholic and some Protestant.

We have not yet done with Switzerland, but we must turn again to France, and introduce you to another of God's servants in the Reformation.

Calvin and France.

Not far from Paris, in the Forest of Livry, lived a hermit. He had met with some of the men of Meaux;* had heard the gospel, and embraced it, and he now spent his time in going from cottage to cottage, telling the people of the good news of salvation — a pardon infinitely more precious than that of priestly absolution. Many knew of the hermit and went to visit him. To all he told the way of salvation.

{* See the section 'Farel and the Reformation in France'.}

News of the hermit reached the Sorbonne, who ordered him to be seized and cast into prison. He had committed the dreadful crime of preaching salvation in Christ only, and for this he must be burnt alive over a slow fire! To make it more effective, the great bell of Notre Dame was tolled to draw the people together. The scholar left his book, and the workman threw down his tools and hastened to the spot. In the centre of a dense crowd stood the hermit. The bell ceased. He was asked the last question. He declared his adherence to the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. As a dreadful heretic, he was doomed to destruction by the priests, the fire was lit, and thus passed away a quiet and devoted evangelist.

One of the students at that time in the college of La Marche was John Calvin. He was born at Noyon in Picardy, on July 10, 1509. His father's name was Gerard, and his mother's maiden name was Jane Lefranq. John was now sixteen years old. Austere in his manner, he kept apart from the mass of scholars, and joined but little in their games. His pale aspect and piercing eye drew from them a measure of respect, which was heightened by the seriousness of his conversation and his rebukes of their sins. Perhaps one thing that contributed to this was that though so young his head was shaven as a priest's. His father had devoted him to the church, and about twelve years of age he had been made chaplain of La Gesine! This was done by his father, we suppose, for the sake of the income, as he and his family were poor. Calvin's progress was so rapid at college that he was removed from the classes and taken singly to the higher branches of study. As he was to be a priest, he went from La Marche to the college of Montaigu.

Here the terrible Beda was principal, who watched over young Calvin. He had no fault to find with the young scholar, who never missed a fast, a Mass, or a procession. Calvin said afterwards, "I was at this time so obstinately given to the superstitions of popery, that it seemed impossible that I should ever be pulled out of the deep mire."

Like Luther, he studied Scotus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas with the philosophy of the last-named he was delighted, but only to be its deadly enemy when he knew its hollowness.

Calvin was visited at college by his cousin Olivetan, who had a measure of light from reading the scriptures and who longed to teach Calvin what he had discovered. Calvin would not listen; but when alone he began to reflect, and asked, Whither was he going. He dreaded the thought of the resurrection. He did not feel the virtue of redemption. In his agony he said, "Where shall I find the light that I need . . . Alas! thy word, which should enlighten thy people like a lamp, has been taken from us."

The professors noticed a change in Calvin, and sought to appease his trouble. "I am a miserable sinner," said Calvin. They admitted it, but said that he could satisfy the justice of God by confessing to a priest, and by blotting out the memory of the sins by good works. Calvin did as he was told, and more; but it was useless: his agony returned, and all his austerities and penances brought him no relief. His cousin had advised him to read the scriptures. He did so, and found Christ, or rather Christ found him. "O Father," said he, "His sacrifice has appeased Thy wrath; His blood has washed away my impurities; His cross has borne my curse; His death has atoned for me. . . . We had devised for ourselves many useless follies . . . . but Thou hast placed Thy word before me like a torch, and Thou hast touched my heart, in order that I should hold in abomination all other merits save that of Jesus."

Still, he clung to the church, he declared he could not separate from the "majesty" of the church. His friends drew his attention to the nature of the church as revealed in scripture, and what the church of Rome was. Calvin searched for himself; and found that the true order had been lost; the keys had been "counterfeited:" Calvin was gained to the Reformation. It was about 1527; Calvin was nineteen.

Calvin's father had, as we have seen, designed him for the church; but it is supposed that hearing of his son's conversion, he had desired him to study the law. Certain it is that in 1527 Calvin left Paris and proceeded to Orleans to become a jurist.

At Orleans Calvin had a return of his depression; but further light chased away his fears. Here he studied Greek, which was of much value to him afterwards. He then went to Bourges, still studying the law. Then Wolmar recommended him to devote himself to the gospel, and this he did privately at people's houses. But at length a wider door opened for him. At a town named Lignières ten leagues from Bourges, he was invited to preach the gospel in the parish church. He consented, and crowds came to hear the young man. This excited the jealousy of the priests, who sought to put him in prison. The death of his father called him from his work.

Calvin, desirous of furthering his studies in Greek, returned to Paris, where he studied not only languages but law and philosophy. Some begged him to give himself up to the gospel, and at length he determined to do so. Berguin had just before died as a martyr, and those who loved the gospel had to meet in secret places. Calvin joined them, and began to expound the word.

Calvin turned his eyes on Meaux, where Briconnet still presided, but who had sadly fallen. Calvin hoped to restore the bishop, but could get no entrance to him. Daniel, a friend of Calvin, wanting to attach him to the church, proposed to ask for him the office of Vicar-general, and wrote, asking if Calvin would accept of it. Calvin, who was not as yet at all clear as to the true character of the church of Rome, was in danger, but he was to be God's servant, and He was watching over him. Calvin refused the offer.

Calvin was next invited to be the chaplain of Margaret, Queen of Navarre. She had made Roussel a bishop; she would also promote Calvin. She appeared to love the truth, but adopted a sort of half-Catholic, half-Protestant policy. Calvin declined the tempting offer.

For a time the gospel seemed to progress in Paris, and the Sorbonne and the enemies of the gospel to be silenced. Calvin endeavoured to take advantage of this. His friend Cop was rector of the college, and a friend of the gospel; Calvin proposed to him that as rector he should declare the gospel boldly in the face of all France. It was customary for the rector to give an inaugural address in Latin on All Saints' day. This would be a fine opportunity. Cop excused himself, by saying he was a physician and not a divine, he declared however that if Calvin would write the address, he would read it. Calvin readily agreed, and the address was written. It was called, "Christian Philosophy."

On All Saints' day, 1533, a crowd of college dignitaries, professors, theologians, and students filled the church of the Mathurins. Cop was known to be favourable to the Queen of Navarre, and all were anxious to hear what sort of an address the rector would give. Calvin had taken care that at least for once they should hear the gospel. The rector read, "Christian philosophy" was "the gift of God to man by Jesus Christ Himself. . . . . "What is the hidden will that is revealed to us here? It is this: The grace of God alone remits sins . . . . The Holy Ghost which sanctifies the heart and gives eternal life is promised to all Christians." The rector asked them to join with him in prayer "to Christ the true and only intercessor with the Father."

Never had they heard such an address, and loud was the outcry against the rector. His enemies, thinking it was useless to apply to the University, applied to parliament, and laid his heretical address before the house. Cop was ordered to appear. He summoned courage, and prepared to do so, but as he was rector he went in his robes, preceded by the under officers, with their maces, etc. But a friend of the gospel saw that if the rector appeared he would be a lost man, and sent a messenger to stop his coming. The messenger caught sight of the archers who were ready to arrest Cop, so he hastened forward in hopes of stopping him. His procession was then in a narrow street, where they could pass only with difficulty. The messenger ran to Cop and whispered to him that if he appeared he would share the fate of Berguin: the officers were ready to arrest him. If he went any further he would be a dead man! Cop hesitated; some friends gathered round him, and urged him to flee. He broke up the procession and hurried off home; and then in a disguise quitted Paris and fled to Basle.

The archers came to arrest him, but he was gone. The parliament, annoyed at his escape, offered a reward of three hundred crowns for him dead or alive.

The enemies of the gospel now turned their thoughts on Calvin. It was really him they had heard in the address, and he was the energetic spreader of the heresy. The parliament, ordered his arrest. Calvin was sitting quietly in his college room when his friends came and said, "Fly! or you are lost." Others came bidding him to fly. They had seen the officers coming to arrest him. They were then at the college gates. Some endeavoured to delay the officers a little, while others made a rope of Calvin's bedclothes, by which he lowered himself out of his window into the street of the Bernardins. The archers entered his room but he was gone. The officer dispatched some of his men in pursuit, while he stayed to gather up what papers and letters he could collect.

Calvin from the Rue des Bernardins went to the suburbs of St. Victor. Here he went to the house of a vine-dresser, a friend of the gospel. They exchanged clothes; and Calvin, in the rustic clothes of a vine-dresser, with a hoe on one shoulder, and a wallet with provisions on the other, took his steps away from Paris, traversing the less frequented roads and avoiding observation.

The letters seized in Calvin's room brought his friends into danger, and it was only by the intercession of the Queen of Navarre that they escaped death.

In 1533-34 Margaret left the court of France, and came to reside at Nerac. Here she threw off her form of royalty and spent her time in visiting the poor, and helping on the gospel. She employed colporteurs to take round, along with their trinkets, the New Testament in French. With her was her chaplain Roussel and the aged Lefevre. Calvin had taken refuge at Angoulème which was not far from Nerac; he desired to see his old friends. and indeed he was fearful of the half-and-half measures of Roussel, who, though he administered the Lord's supper in "two kinds," yet preserved the Mass, though altered. Calvin was now thoroughly convinced that the church of Rome was so corrupt that it ought to be pulled down and another church built. Roussel was alarmed. He was trying to cleanse it, and not to pull it down, nor even to leave it.

Calvin was distressed at those who knew and loved the truth, and who yet would go on with their confessions and the Mass. He returned to Angouleme, and from thence, under a feigned name, he went to Poitiers. Near here he used to assemble in a cave with those who loved the gospel, and he would expound to them the scriptures, and then they partook of the Lord's supper in the "two kinds," without the Mass or elevating the Host. But opposition arose, and he had to leave, much to the regret of the faithful.

Calvin then went to Noyon, his native place, where all this while he had held two livings in the church of Rome, conferred on him when quite young. These he now resigned, and severed his last tie to the church of Rome. His friends thought he could have done much more good by remaining in its fold, but he was quite certain his only course was to leave it entirely.

Calvin returned to Paris (1534). He found things had quieted down, and he hoped there was an open door for the gospel. But he was advised to do nothing except in private; for Paris and the king were not really changed. Many had been gained to the truth, and Calvin found plenty of work in private.

Here, as elsewhere, Satan tried hard to mix poison with the truth. To the horror of Calvin he found some had become "spirituals." There was but one Spirit, said they, the Holy Spirit; and everything they did was done by the Spirit. A man robbed his employer, but his master must not complain, the Spirit invaded every one, and it was the Spirit who used the man! Calvin saw through this awful delusion, and exposed it, but it led away many in France.

Another heresy at that time was by Servetus, who denied the Godhead of Christ. Full of his own opinions this man challenged Calvin to a conference; Calvin accepted the offer, but Servetus did not keep his appointment. Calvin became the defender of the Trinity against this deceiver.

All these things were useful to Calvin. It was not needed to oppose the errors of Rome only, but to adhere closely to the truth. Many saw Rome to be wrong, but, deceived by Satan, they wandered in the mazes of error and wickedness.

Again Calvin had to leave Paris. He retired to Strasburg. After he left, the gospellers, as we call them for want of a better name, sent one of their number, Feret, on a mission to Switzerland, to ask advice of Farel and others, whether they judged it best for those in France to meet as they were now doing — in private — or to act in some bold way openly for the truth's sake. Feret was struck with the difference between Switzerland and France. While they in Paris were afraid to let their faith be known, at Neuchatel and other places the images were destroyed and the gospel preached boldly.

A conference was held, and to print and post up in Paris a placard for the gospel and against Rome was proposed, and assented to. Farel drew up the placard in his usual energetic style, the printers were set to work, and a number were soon ready; some were large for posting up, and some small to give in the streets, etc.

Feret hastened back with the bills. A consultation was held. Some feared the consequences, but others advocated the posting of the bills, trusting in God to use them for the spreading of the truth. Paris was too small; they must spread them all over France. The bills were circulated to the cities and towns privately to friends of the gospel; and all being ready, the night of October 24, 1534, was fixed on for the posting them up. Earnest prayer was made for God's blessing.

The night arrived, and men stole from their houses, and cautiously looking round, posted up a bill; then hastened to another spot and put up another, and so on, each in his own district. Paris was well placarded, as well as the towns and cities "all over France."

The heading was, "Truthful Articles concerning the horrible, great, and unbearable abuses of the popish Mass, invented directly against the holy supper of our Lord, the only mediator and only Saviour Jesus Christ."

It denied that the Mass was a sacrifice thus: "By the great and admirable sacrifice of Jesus Christ all outward and visible sacrifice is abolished. Christ . . . . was once offered for all. By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified."

It then attacked transubstantiation. It denounced it as a doctrine of devils, opposed to all scripture. "I ask those cope-wearers, Where did they find that big word Transubstantiation? St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. John, St. Paul, and the old fathers, never spoke of it. When they made mention of the Lord's supper those holy writers openly and simply called the bread and wine bread and wine. St. Paul does not say, Eat the body of Christ, but, Eat this bread."

On the other hand it said, "The holy supper of Jesus Christ reminds us of the great love with which He loved us, so that He washed us in His blood. It presents to us on the part of the Lord, the body and blood of His Son, in order that we should communicate in the sacrifice of His death and that Jesus should be our everlasting food."

But it called the Catholics "wretches," and spoke of their "infernal theology." It said, "Kindle, yes, kindle your faggots, but let it be to burn and roast yourselves. . . . Why should you kindle them for us? Because we will not believe in your idols, in your new gods, in your new Christs, who let themselves be eaten by vermin, and in you also who are worse than vermin."

Alas! for the gospellers, and for Farel, and for the cause of Christ, that such language should have been put forth in His holy name! Could such language gain any one, while it insulted those so grossly whom it believed to be in error? Allowing for the grossness of the age, nothing can justify such language put forward in the name of Christ.

In the morning one of the bills was carried to the king. He was just then in great hopes of joining Protestant and Catholic into one; but now it was all spoilt. He was exceedingly enraged and ordered a minute search to be made for the aggressors. The parliament took it up, and offered one hundred crowns reward for any information as to who posted the bills. All who concealed them should be burnt.

Morin had the matter in hand to find out those favourable to the gospel. He hit on a plan to secure all. He sent for one who had been used to convene the meetings, and demanded of him where they all lived. He refused to tell. Morin ordered a scaffold to be prepared, and threatened the man he should be burnt. He, in fear of death, turned traitor, and going from door to door the poor wretch pointed out where the gospellers lived. All were seized and carried off to prison.

The trial was a mere form; the fires were lit, and one after another they were burnt alive: many who had nothing to do with posting up the bills were also burnt. One was a poor paralytic who could not walk, and had to be carried. He was a gospeller, and that was quite enough.

Then a solemn procession was formed of all the relics in Paris, and High Mass was sung, and all honour done to the Host, for the supposed insult offered to it by the placards! Thus the bills — intemperate and unwise — brought death to many, while they caused the chains of Rome to be riveted still firmer upon the whole of France.

In the meantime Calvin had travelled to Strasburg, and then to Basle (1534). Here he went to see Erasmus, but Calvin had no sooner stated his judgment on certain things, than Erasmus, like a snail, withdrew into his house, wishing to be seen no more with the Reformer. Here Calvin met with Cop, the ex-rector from Paris, who read Calvin's address, and for which both had to fly. Soon they heard of the placards and the results, which filled them with sorrow, and then one and another fugitive reached Basle, who had managed to escape martyrdom. Calvin was sad that not only were the Reformers put to death, but their characters were traduced, and the faith they held was misunderstood. To step in, as it were, between the victims and their executioners, and tell the latter, and indeed the world, what the former held, caused Calvin to set to work to compose a book, called "Institutes of the Christian Religion." He greatly added to it afterwards. It is still a standard work among many.

With the "Institutes" before the world, Calvin appealed to the King of France; and then, in order to be quiet, he left Basle for Italy (1535).

Calvin in Italy.

At Ferrara was the princess Renee, daughter of Louis XII. of France, wife to Duke Hercules of Este. To her Calvin came in 1535, under disguise, being called Charles d'Espeville. The duchess had a few rays of gospel light when in France, but longed for more. He expounded the scriptures in her room to all whom she pleased to invite. Then she opened her chapel and Calvin preached there. Others favourable to the gospel came to her court.

These things however became known at Rome, and the duke plainly told his wife that she must send the Frenchmen away; and that one would certainly be dragged to punishment if he did not escape — this was Calvin. There was an office of the Inquisition at Ferrara, and Calvin was already on their books. Being forewarned of his danger, he was preparing to depart, when the officers of the Inquisition seized him. As he had powerful friends in that place they sent him of to Bologna for his trial.

God, however, was watching over His servant, but Calvin saw no way of escape. On they journeyed and had traversed more than half the distance when suddenly a body of armed men surrounded Calvin and his escort. They demanded the release of the prisoner: and to the disappointment of the officers of the Inquisition, their prisoner made his escape. With all speed he quitted Italy.

Calvin is next heard of in Aosta. From thence he went to his native place, Noyon. Finding his brother Charles dead, he invited his brother Anthony and his sister Mary to leave a country where they were liable to persecution on account of the gospel. The three leave their native place and start for Basle, calling at Geneva on their way. This was July, 1536.

We must now digress and tell you what was passing at Geneva in 1536, and how it came about.

Geneva.

Geneva had been the scene of many contests. It was claimed by the dukes of Savoy; and presided over by a bishop. In 1524 it threw off the authority of the duke of Savoy; and many were becoming impatient to throw off the authority of the bishop, which yet bound them to Rome.

Farel evangelized many parts of Switzerland. At St. Blaise he escaped very severely beaten. He was placed in a boat, and carried to Morat, where he had to keep his bed for some time. But his incentive was, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel," and as soon as he was able he was preaching again spite of all opposition. At Orbe he laboured for some time, but he longed to carry on the work at Geneva. Situated as Geneva is, it was the rendezvous of many of the gospellers from France, between whom, together with the Genevese favourable to the gospel, and the bishop there were frequent disturbances. Sometimes one gained the upper hand, and sometimes the other.

In 1532 Farel and Saunier entered Geneva. They inquired for Robert Olivetan, and consulted with him as to the best means of gaining over the town to the gospel. Farel had letters from Berne for the principal gospellers of the place, and he collected them together. He found some were more political than religious — anxious to get rid of the bishop, but not anxious to receive Christ. He preached the gospel to them.

These secret meetings got wind, and Farel and Saunier were summoned before the council. They were ordered to quit the town. Farel asked them if they were not allies and co-burgesses with Berne. Well, he had a letter from the lords of Berne. "If you condemn me unheard," said he, "you insult God, and also, as you see, my lords of Berne." This softened the council. They were allowed to remain in the city, but were told not to disturb the public peace.

The clergy of the place called a conference. Farel was in the city — what was to be done? They determined to put him to death, and to this end they would summon him to appear under the plea of giving him a hearing. News of the plot reached the council, and two of the magistrates determined to go with the Reformers as a safeguard. Olivétan accompanied them.

There sat the abbot-vicar, the canons, the bishop's officers, and higher clergy, all in their robes. Farel was the marked man. It was demanded of him why he came there, and by whose authority.

"I am sent by God," said Farel, "and I am come to announce His word." It was told him that it was forbidden by the church for a layman to preach. Farel referred to the word, "Preach the gospel to every creature." He denied that they were the true successors of the apostles, as they did not care for the doctrine of Christ. The clergy became enraged; they stormed, and called him a wicked devil, and declared that he had thrown the whole country into confusion. At length they rose to their feet and hustled him about. The president succeeded in restoring somewhat of order, when Farel addressed them, "My lords, I am not a devil . . . . If I journey to and fro, it is that I may preach Jesus Christ — Jesus Christ crucified, who died for our sins, and rose again for our justification, so that whosoever believeth in Him shall have everlasting life." As to the country being disturbed, he said, "I will answer as Elijah did to Ahab, 'I have not troubled Israel, but thou and thy father's house.' Yes, it is you and yours who trouble the world by your traditions, your human inventions, and your dissolute lives."

The clergy sprang to their feet and rushed at the Reformer, crying, "To the Rhone, to the Rhone! Kill him, kill him!" They spat in his face and covered him with blows; while others were doing the same to his companions. At length, one of the magistrates, unable to prevent this outrage, called out, "I will go and ring the great bell, and convoke the General Council. The assembled people shall decide." He was leaving the room to carry this into effect, when the other magistrate interfered, and order was again restored. The Reformers were asked to leave the room while the council deliberated. In the gallery stood a servant of the Grand-vicar armed with a gun. He had heard the tumult inside, and now with Farel before him he levelled his gun at him, and pulled the trigger but it missed fire. Farel turned to the man and said, "I am not to be shaken by a popgun; your toy does not alarm me." Surely it was the finger of God which saved His servant.

The Reformers were recalled, and Farel with his two companions were ordered to leave the town in six hours or they should be brought to the stake. It was only the council's respect (or rather their fear) for their lords of Berne that they let the Reformers off so easily.

But in the meantime the lower clergy had collected round the door of the house in great numbers, armed with clubs and daggers, vowing vengeance on the head of Farel. The Lord alone could save them from this infuriated mob; He had watched over His servants, and protection was at hand. The syndics, seeing how it would fare with the man who had been recommended to them by the lords of Berne, called out the guard and proceeded to the house. They made the crowd fall back and placing Farel and his companions in their midst they escorted them to their inn, but not without a priest aiming a blow at Farel with a sword, but which was averted by one of the syndics seizing the assassin's arm. In the morning some stout gospellers waited on the Reformer early, but not so early as to prevent the priests being there, and a mob collected — and escorted them to a boat on the lake, amid shouts and yells. They landed at a secluded spot between Morges and Lausanne. For the present Geneva was not gained to the gospel.

But Farel could not give up Geneva. He called a fellow-labourer, Froment, and expressed a wish that he should go and labour to gain that city. Froment was a young man, and had heard how Farel had been treated there, and he drew back in alarm. Farel let the matter rest a little while and then again endeavoured to arouse his fellow-labourer. He reminded him of how he had begun at Aigle as a schoolmaster, and how the work had spread. Froment at length consented, and went to Geneva. He wandered through the town, and no door opened to him. He visited the gospellers Farel had told him of; but they were not "taken" with him. This was a city of importance; they needed a scholar, and not a rustic. They did not in this manifest the Spirit of Christ. Froment returned downcast to his inn, paid his bill, and left Geneva. But he had not gone far when he felt himself arrested. Must he leave? Was he sure he was doing right? He felt constrained to go back. Then he prayed for guidance and felt he should have it.

He heard of a room fit for a school near the Molard, at an inn of the sign of the Croix d' Or. Terms agreed upon, he went to his inn, and wrote out some bills saying that children and adults would be taught to read and write French in a month. Where the scholars were not successful in learning he would ask no pay, adding at the end "many diseases are also cured gratis." The bills were posted and his doors opened.

A number of children came. He gave them lessons, never neglecting to read a portion of scripture, and explain it. He gave also some simple medicines where needed, for ailments of the body. News of the strange schoolmaster soon spread abroad, and the stories he read out of the Bible, and adults would often drop in to hear for themselves. This increased, until all over the city the fame of the strange schoolmaster increased more and more, and the seed sank into the hearts of many. Froment seemed to have confined himself to preaching the truth, without stopping to attack error. Such a change was wrought in some that others often spoke of Froment as an enchanter.

A remarkable conversion cheered the heart of Froment. Claudine Levet, wife of a citizen, was a bigoted Romanist, but was invited by her sister-in-law to go and hear the schoolmaster. She took care to anoint herself and to put on her charms to secure herself against the "enchanter." Claudine sat down in her pride, taking care to let her faith be seen by repeatedly crossing herself and muttering her prayers. Froment had opened his New Testament, and read his portion, and was telling of the love of God to sinful man. Her crossings continued, but presently something arrested her ear, and her prayers ceased, and with her eyes fixed on the schoolmaster, she drank in every word he uttered. A deep struggle seemed to be going on within her, as if to say, Can it possibly be true?

The address over, she kept her seat till all were gone, and then asked the preacher, "Is it true what you say?" He assured her it was. "Is it all proved by the gospel?" It is. "Is not the Mass mentioned in it?" It is not. "Is the book from which you preached a genuine New Testament?" It is. She begged Froment to lend her the book. This he gladly did, and she retired.

In her own room for three days she studied the word — not even coming to her meals. The Spirit of God had sent His shaft into her soul, and there was a dreadful struggle as to giving up Rome and receiving the gospel. But God, who had begun the work, completed her salvation. She saw her sins forgiven through the sacrifice of Christ, and joy filled her soul. She called for Froment and told him the good news. He thanked God, and took courage. His labour had not been in vain.

The conversion of Madame Levet was real. It soon told in her manner of life, and having moved in good society, as it is called, it attracted attention. She was the means of other ladies hearing the gospel and being saved. But the friends of Rome now awoke to the nature of Froment's work. If the gospel was successful, it was to their ruin. Then such an opposition was raised to the schoolmaster that, though he left off his work and took to weaving as a servant for protection, he was soon obliged to leave the city. But the gospel seed had been sown and many had been converted.

These began to meet privately, and hold simple meetings. They had no minister or president except that One who, as D'Aubigne says, was "present in the midst although unseen." One read a portion of scripture, another explained or applied it, and a third prayed. God was with them and they were blessed. Would that they had continued in such simplicity! They desired to partake of the Lord's supper; but instead of being content with the presence of the One in their midst though unseen, they elected one of their number — Guérin — to preside at the supper. They met secretly for this purpose; it was beautifully simple. They came not to hear a sermon; but for the one express purpose to break bread, as in Acts 20: 7. But in this passage we do not read that any one was elected to preside; neither is there any warrant in scripture for such an election; still to meet for the express purpose of breaking bread was simple and scriptural, and God gave His blessing. These meetings becoming known, Guerin was obliged to flee from the town.

Disturbances now broke out at Geneva. The Catholics arming themselves determined to put the Protestants to death; the Protestants armed themselves in defence; but there was little or no bloodshed through the interference of some mediators from Friburg.

Then the bishop returned to Geneva, and took active measures against the Protestants. Some escaped and some were imprisoned on a charge of having caused the death of a Catholic. But the bishop wanted to be ruler of the city, and was not always careful to observe the laws, so that many of the Catholic patriots were not altogether pleased at what the bishop did. They cared not what he did with the Protestants provided he did it lawfully; while he did not care to be in Geneva at all unless he could do pretty much as he liked. The bishop knew he was acting against the laws of Geneva, and was ill at ease.

The Protestants, hearing that the bishop was about to remove his prisoners away from Geneva for greater security, determined to endeavour to make him give them up. A bold leader got together fifty men, to each he gave a staff, to which were attached five matches. When it was dark they lit all their matches, and with a staff in one hand and a sword in the other they marched to the bishop's palace, and then, without ceremony, walked up to his room, and then and there made a formal demand for the release of the prisoners. The bishop was overawed.

Did they mean to kill him with their swords or burn his palace with their matches? He ordered the release of the prisoners. These were not set at liberty, but were transferred to the care of the city authorities, that everything might be done legally. The bishop took alarm, and fled from the city, never to return. It was July, 1533. The prisoners were tried and released.

Froment is now invited to return to Geneva; this he does, but is obliged again to flee in a few months. Then Farel ventures to return and take up the work, and for a full year there is a contest between the Catholics and the Reformers, partly religious and partly political.

In 1535 a determined effort was made to poison the three preachers then in the city — Farel, Viret, and Froment. They all lodged in the same house, and the papists thought it could be done, and the three be got rid of at once. A woman was selected as the agent. She professed to be a convert and was selected to wait on the Reformers — the very thing the papists hoped for. She did not like her task, but the priests told her it would be a meritorious work. One day she made some thick spinach soup, and then slipped in the poison. Farel did not like it, and asked for some household soup. Froment was just about to sip some when a messenger came and announced that his wife and children had arrived; he dropped his spoon and ran off. Viret, still suffering from a sword-cut he had received from a priest, partook of some soup.

The wretched woman's conscience smote her immediately, and she came, and with tears in her eyes, begged Viret to drink some cold water, which she believed was an antidote. Then she ran away from the house, fetched her children and hurriedly getting into a boat left the place. She was fetched back, but escaped, and ran to the house of the canon who had urged her to the deed. She was arrested in his cellar and confessed everything.

Through the mercy of God Viret recovered, but felt the effects of the poison all his life. The wretched woman was beheaded, and the priests who had urged her on were imprisoned.

The Reformers began to have the upper hand in the city, and pressed the council to carry out their wishes; but for peace' sake the council declined. The Reformers determined to act. They fetched Farel and took him to the Madeleine church. As he and a crowd entered, the priest was performing Mass; but the priest ran away and most of the congregation. Farel preached. Farel was forbidden by the council, but he heeded them not and repeated the act in other churches, and then in the cathedral. Farel thought he was justified by the commission to preach the gospel to every creature. But he could have done this outside in "the world," as the passage says, without disturbing the Catholics at their service.

The Reformers next entered the churches and broke the images. In doing this they discovered how various pretended miracles had been wrought. They invited the Catholics to come and see how they had been cheated.

The council in amazement convened the Great Council of the city. Farel made an energetic appeal to the council in favour of Reform. They deliberated calmly and decided that there should be no more image-breaking, so as not to irritate the Catholics; and there should be no more Mass, to satisfy the Reformers. This was a great victory for the Reformers, and "no more Mass" was a deadly wound to the Catholics.

The priests, monks, and nuns left the city in large numbers. Many went to the Duke of Savoy and told him of what was being done in Geneva. He informed the pope, who exhorted the duke to interfere, which he resolved to do. The Emperor Charles V. also took up the case, and he appealed to the Swiss league to help in restoring Geneva to the Duke of Savoy and the bishop. The pope did the same; while, on the other hand, the Genevese, seeing the storm rising against them, appealed to Berne and the other cantons for help. The cantons, including Berne, declined to interfere. Internal disorder also reigned. Many were yet staunch Catholics, and these would be only too glad to help the enemy outside against the Reformers.

The envoy to Berne was sadly disheartened at the refusal of that canton; but he remembered that Farel had preached at Neuchatel and other places, and he hastened to call on some whom he knew to be friends of the gospel and solicit their aid. Jacob Wildermuth entered into it with spirit, and he went about to see what assistance he could muster. The governor of the district forbade any to go and fight against the Duke of Savoy. This drew off a good many — about four hundred were left, some of them were women.

They moved cautiously towards Geneva, and at length reached the Jura. Here they met three young men who said that they had been sent by Geneva to escort them there. Glad to find guides the party proceeded till near to Nyon. Here the guides said it would be unsafe for them to enter the village. If they remained there the guides would fetch provisions which the little band so much needed.

The three guides, however, were spies, who now hastened off to the Catholics and told them where the band was. They could go and easily put them all to death. Wildermuth, while waiting for the provisions, was aroused by a voice, and saw they were being approached by a body of cavalry and infantry. Though tired and hungry they started up and a dreadful battle ensued. The Swiss, being good marksmen, made sad havoc among the nobles who had joined in the "holy war," as it was called. Many priests also who were acting as soldiers were killed. Though far inferior in numbers the Swiss were entirely successful, though enforcement came up to help those of Savoy. The Swiss had lost seven men and one woman.

Some lords of Berne had hastened to try and prevent war. They were too late, but they prevented those from Neuchatel fighting more, in hopes that peace could be concluded. The Duke of Savoy had, however, no intentions of peace: he meant to seize Geneva.

The city became in great straits. A large army was surrounding it, and many within would gladly have betrayed the city if they could; while the famine became severe. The bravest began to lose heart.

In the meantime a messenger from Berne arrived. The Bernese were arming and in a short time help would be at hand. Nägueli, a famous general was taking the lead. When this was known a force from the Duke of Savoy was sent to prevent them reaching Geneva, under the general Medici. His plan was to secure Morges, and with that as a base to stay the progress of Nägueli; but on landing he found the enemy already near at hand, and in a good position on the heights of Morges. To attack them there would be dangerous, he and his men might be all driven into the lake. He had already felt the power of Nägueli, and now his heart failed him; and he withdrew his troops. Nothing now stopped the brave Nägueli. He marched straight to Geneva and the city was saved. The council put on their records these words, "The power of God has confounded the presumption and rash audacity of our enemies." It was in 1536.

The castles near Geneva were then destroyed. They had been the strongholds of the enemy. One thing more yet remained. Bonivard, a nominal Reformer of Geneva, was confined in the castle of Chillon, and also three Genevese who had been seized in treachery. These must be delivered, but how? for the governor of the castle had orders from the Duke of Savoy that if any attempt was made to rescue the prisoners they were to be at once put to death. Nägueli undertook to attempt their rescue. He wrote to the governor threatening him that if he put the prisoners to death he should lose his head. The castle was surrounded, and the cannon opened fire. The governor, seeing all resistance vain, asked for a parley. The garrison, not liking to fall into the hands of the Swiss, managed to slip into their boat in the night and make their escape.

The Swiss entered the castle and soon found the three Genevese; but where was Bonivard? They searched lower, and found instruments of torture; and at last by undoing bolts and bars they come to the rock, and a cry arose, "Here he is! he is alive!" Bonivard fell into the arms of his deliverers. For six years he had been confined in a low dungeon below the lake, dark, except what light came in at one small loophole. There he had walked round a column until he had worn a path in the rock — a path still shewn to the visitors at the castle of Chillon.

Geneva was now restored to the "most holy religion of Christ," to use the words set up in the city at the time. Farel took the lead among the "ministers." Geneva was not converted though it was Protestant, and Farel greatly desired to have the gospel preached in the surrounding neighbourhoods as well as all over the city; but where were the evangelists? He longed for faithful men to enter the doors now opened all around. He sought in vain.

Calvin in Geneva.

In 1536 Farel heard that Calvin was in Geneva. We have seen what brought him there. * Farel had long been praying for help; he believed that God had now sent it. Off he ran to Calvin. He had read his "Institutes." Calvin was the very man they wanted to consolidate the work so well begun.

Calvin tells him that he can only stop one night.

"Why seek elsewhere for what is now offered you? Why refuse to edify the church of Geneva by your faith, zeal, and knowledge?"

Calvin shrank from it, saying at last, "I cannot teach: on the contrary, I have need to learn. There are special labours for which I wish to reserve myself. This city cannot afford me the leisure I require."

"Study, leisure, knowledge! What, must we never practise? I am sinking under my task: pray help me."

{* See the section: 'Geneva'.}

Calvin said he was weak and needed rest.

"Rest! death alone permits the soldiers of Christ to rest from their labours."

Calvin said he was timid. He could not battle with such strong spirits as the men of Geneva.

"Ought the servants of Jesus Christ to be so delicate as to be frightened at warfare?"

Calvin was moved at the thought that he should be a coward; but begged to be let go his way.

Farel reminded him of Jonah and the punishment he received. Still he could not get Calvin's consent, when Farel, as if inspired, put his hand on his head and with a piercing look said, "May God curse your repose! may God curse your studies, if in such a great necessity as ours you withdraw, and refuse to give us help and support."

Calvin broke down, he shook in every limb. He felt as if God had seized him. He must obey. He was won for Geneva.

Calvin, once settled in Geneva, soon took the lead. He had a very difficult task. The whole people were now supposed to be Protestant and nominally Christians, but many were unconverted. Calvin attempted to enforce at least morality on the people; but many rejected even this. They desired to please themselves, and to be only religious as far as it suited them. On this account Calvin with Farel and Courad (a minister from Paris) said they could not give the Lord's supper to some of the people. The council, being appealed to, met, and ordered the three ministers to leave Geneva within two days.

They left, and met in conference at Zurich on church matters, after which Calvin went to Strasburg. Here he published an enlarged edition of his "Institutes." Farel went to Neuchatel.

While at Strasburg, Calvin married Idelette de Bures, widow of a converted Anabaptist. By her he had one son, who died immediately after his birth. Idelette died in 1549.

In 1540 Calvin attended the Diet at Worms, and in the following year one at Ratisbon. In October, 1540, the syndics of Geneva most opposed to the Reformers being removed by death, or other means, Calvin was invited to return. At first he refused, but on September 13, 1541, he returned to the city, and proceeded to set the church in order. Calvin appears to have been the first to introduce a presbyterian form of government into the church. It was, however, more or less under the control of the senate. It was the senate who invited him to return to Geneva, and it was the senate who settled and paid him his salary;* and when he had appeared before the senate and stated the importance of a settled church government, "I requested," wrote he to Farel, "that they would appoint certain of their number who might confer with us on the subject. Six were thereupon appointed. Articles concerning the whole ecclesiastical polity will be drawn up, which we shall thereafter present to the senate."

{* The salary of Calvin was settled at five hundred florins, twelve measures of corn, and two tuns of wine, with a house to live in, and an ell of velvet for clothing.}

One cannot but be struck with the fact how far this was below the principles of even the Roman Catholic church, who would allow no one to interfere in matters concerning the church but ecclesiastics. Of course this was of little practical value when the clergy and even the pope himself were unconverted men, but we are speaking of the principle, and not how far it was carried out; whereas here is Calvin agreeing to submit his church polity to the senate, which was formed simply of the worldly rulers of the city. Calvin attempted to set up his system of Presbytery, for all matters ecclesiastical; but he was again and again brought into collision with the senate. Though the Presbytery was agreed to, some were to be seen, said Calvin, "going about secretly, dealing with each of the senators, exhorting them not to lay at our feet the power which was in their own hands (as they said), not to abdicate the authority which God had entrusted to them." Calvin had to avoid a collision as best he could. "We at length," said he, "possess a Presbyterial court, such as it is, and a form of discipline such as these disjointed times permit." Afterwards, if the Presbytery refused communion to any citizen, he could appeal to the senate, and the senate could order him to be received! At times Calvin refused to do so.

Besides being in this false position, Calvin does not appear to have seen the spirituality of the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ. By baptism all became a part of the church. "Baptism," says Calvin, "is the initiatory sign by which we are admitted to the fellowship of the church, that being engrafted into Christ we may be accounted children of God. . . . We ought to consider that at whatever time we are baptized we are washed and purified for the whole of life."* This made all the people to be Christians, and so all who lived decent moral lives were received at the Lord's table. Calvin insisted that baptism was "to give us an entrance into the church of God;" and the Lord's supper "to keep us in it."

{* It is difficult to see how Calvin made this agree with another part of his doctrine, which taught that while the sacraments were the means of grace offered to all, they really benefited only those who had faith.

Now all this entirely altered the character of Christianity. Instead of its being a calling out of the world a people for Christ (Acts 15: 14), Calvin made the world to be the church! While, to make the people believe that they were Christians when they were not, was full of danger to their souls; though he did tell them, as we have seen, that the sacraments would not benefit them unless mixed with faith. This mixture of the church with the world surely was a dark shadow on the Reformation.

For more than twenty years Calvin laboured incessantly by lecturing, writing tracts and commentaries, with a large correspondence with other Reformers. To add to this there were constant commotions with the Catholics who still remained in the city, and with those who were Reformed in name, but were not Christians. More than once a plague broke out in the city, and in 1545 the wretches who attended the sick, by mixing virus from those who died into an ointment, and by smearing it upon the handles of doors and doorposts greatly increased the plague. It was supposed to have been done to reduce Geneva to such a few souls that it could easily have been overcome and gained over to Popery.

Calvin was troubled, too, with the Libertines of Geneva, who desired a greater amount of freedom of action than the Reformer would allow. To shew the severity of Calvin we give one of the cases. Ameaux was a member of the Two Hundred. He was discontented, and was heard to speak against Calvin and his doctrine. His trial was demanded. At his trial witnesses were called to prove the morality of Calvin's private life. Ameaux was fined sixty dollars. He retracted the charges, and promised future respect to the Reformer.

Calvin was not satisfied with the punishment. He appeared before the council and demanded that the judgment should be set aside. Ameaux was now sentenced to go through the whole city bareheaded, and with a lighted torch in his hand, and then to kneel down and openly proclaim his repentance.

Surely this was very unwise of Calvin and very unlike his gracious Lord and Master. It called forth further opposition, and the cause of the gospel was greatly damaged.

In 1553 Michael Servetus — who denied the divinity of Christ, and who put forth his doctrine in blasphemous language — visited Geneva. He was informed against by Calvin and was thrown into prison as a heretic and a blasphemer. He was tried, sentenced and burnt alive. Much controversy has arisen as to how far Calvin was concerned in the death of Servetus, some contending that his death was chiefly owing to Calvin, and others that Calvin had little or nothing to do with his conviction. But there really seems to be little room for doubt on the subject. Calvin's own words to Farel are, "We have now new business in hand with Servetus. He intended perhaps passing through this city . . . . but after he had been recognized, "thought that he should be detained . . . I hope that sentence of death will at least be passed upon him; but I desire that the severity of the punishment may be mitigated."*. To another he wrote that Servetus "is held in prison by our magistrates and he will be punished ere long, I hope." To Bullinger Calvin wrote, "Our council will on an early day send the opinions of Servetus to your city, to obtain your judgment regarding them. Indeed they cause you this trouble despite our remonstrances; but they have reached such a pitch of folly and madness that they regard with suspicion whatever we say to them. So much so that were I to allege that it is clear at mid-day they would forthwith begin to doubt it." To Sulzer Calvin wrote of Servetus, "He at length, in an evil hour, came to this place, when at my instigation one of the syndics ordered him to be conducted to prison."

{* That is, death by the sword, instead of being burnt alive.}

We have quoted Calvin's own words which clearly set forth his share in the matter. To this we may add a few words of Beza's: "Calvin pleaded the cause of the church against him in the council, in the presence of a great assemblage of the pious." Doubtless a good deal is to be attributed to the age in which this took place, so that none should blame Calvin too severely. It was surely an error, but in this Calvin did not stand alone; Farel, Melanchthon, Bucer and Bullinger all advocated the death of Servetus.

Farel attended the unhappy man to the stake in the hope of getting him to retract his error, but he laboured in vain. Calling for the death of Servetus was another dark shadow on the Reformation. It is appalling to think of a man in error, ever so dreadful, being hurried into eternity.

Calvin became more and more the man of the Reformation. From all parts of Europe, where any question arose, the opinion of Calvin was sought. Refugees and messengers were constantly arriving to seek his help and advice, while his nights were often spent in corresponding with those who sought his council.

In 1558 Calvin was taken seriously ill, and his physicians impressed upon him that he must take rest. In 1563 he was again laid prostrate. In the following year asthma impeded his utterance. On February 6 he preached his last sermon, but attended service afterwards by being carried there.

Like a great general, feeling his time was drawing near, he desired once more to address the senate. They came to him, and then taking a general review of matters he exhorted them to justice and morality. Then he invited the ministers, and exhorted them to faithfulness and peace, asking their pardon for any peevishness they might have experienced from him. To Farel (now in his eightieth year) he wrote (May 11, 1564), "Farewell, my best and most right-hearted brother . . . . I draw my breath with difficulty, and am daily waiting till I altogether cease to breathe. It is enough that to Christ I live and die. To His people He is gain in life and in death." In his prayers he was heard to say, "I was silent, O Lord, because Thou didst it. "Thou, O Lord, bruisest me; but it is enough for me that it is Thy hand." On May 27 he ceased from his labours and was with the Lord.

On September 13, 1565, at Neuchatel Farel, after his many labours and perils, fell asleep in Jesus. Of him it was said, "This man is the very same that he has always been! We never knew him depressed, even when our hearts were failing us for fear. When we were ready to give up everything in despair, he was full of hope, and he cheered us by his christian heroism."

After many and varied jealousies between the Catholic and Protestant cantons, in 1653 the cantons were again in open war with each other. The Protestants were defeated, but peace was made. In 1712, after a desperate battle, a peace was concluded more favourable to the Protestants of Switzerland.

France and the Massacre of Bartholomew.

The Reformation had never been fully embraced by France; yet the light and truth had been received there by many. At one time Beza reckoned more than two thousand churches, and Calvin gave them a Confession of Faith, and a Presbyterian form of government. They were, however, often obliged to meet in secret, especially in Paris. The Cardinal of Lorraine became the principal persecutor.

In 1555 there was a congregation of the faithful in Paris, who used to meet and carry on their devotions in the night. But this becoming known, one night as they were about to break up they noticed that the adjoining streets were filled with a noisy crowd, and fear began to take hold of them that all was not right. They hoped, however, that the darkness of the night would enable them to escape, but judge of their surprise when, as they left the house, they found that lights had been placed in the windows of the surrounding houses, so that each one could be plainly seen as he left the meeting house. Seeing that a trap had been laid for them, some drew their swords and fought their way through the mob and escaped. But many were women, and some aged and infirm. These, after rough handling, were hurried off to prison. Just then the king (Henry II.) was in alliance with the German and Swiss Reformers, who earnestly requested the king to release them. This he did, to the annoyance of the Cardinal of Lorraine.

Henry II. died in 1559, and his successor Francis II. reigned but seventeen months. In 1560 Charles IX. at ten years of age succeeded, under the regency of his mother, the crafty and ambitious Catherine de Medici. In the meantime the Protestants had gained some influential men among whom were Admiral Coligni and his brother Dandelot. The prince of Condé also became a leader among them, though probably as much for political purposes as from religious motives.

In 1561 a conference was held at Poissy. Calvin asked Beza to attend instead of himself, because Beza could "tread lighter" than he could. Calvin spent much time in prayer for God's blessing and protection.

The object was professedly peace and union, and if abuses had been introduced into the church for their removal. The king, the Duke of Orleans, the queen mother, and the king and queen of Navarre were present. On the Catholic side were three Cardinals and a number of bishops, etc. There were twelve Reformed ministers. Beza was spokesman for Reform. He went through the points of faith in which all were agreed; then the disputed points. On speaking of the Lord's supper he said, "The body of Christ is truly given us, but as to place it is as far from the bread as heaven from earth." This caused a tumult. The Catholics insisted that Beza must be quiet or they must leave; but Beza went on, and ended by presenting a Confession of the Reformers' faith.

Then the Catholics replied. But the conference ended in no real union. Some met privately, and drew up a confession, worded so vaguely that both parties could sign it, each putting their own meaning to it.

Still it had this effect that Beza was invited to remain in France. This he did, and went to Paris and preached the gospel there. In 1562 an edict was passed, securing to Protestants the free exercise of religion. It is to be feared that the Protestants did not use this liberty wisely. By loudly proclaiming against the errors of Rome they excited her envy and hatred. Others who suffered severely from the Catholics were provoked to retaliate, and from time to time the Protestants were in open arms to defend themselves against the Catholics.

In 1569 the prince of Condé lost his life in a battle, and Dandelot dying soon afterwards, Coligni became sole leader of the Protestants. Peace was signed 1570.

But deep-laid schemes were planned to entrap the Huguenots. The marriage of Margaret of Valois, the king's sister, with the young king of Navarre had been agreed on. This was arranged to take place in August, 1572, and the dowager queen of Navarre was invited to Paris, together with Admiral Coligni, and the leaders of the Protestants. The dowager queen of Navarre died suddenly — by poison it is fully believed, and Coligni was shot at and wounded as he left the presence of the king. The king feigned great sorrow, but these deeds were soon to be followed by one of the most diabolical actions recorded on the page of history.

On the eve of St. Bartholomew a conference was held with the king, which ended by his saving, "I consent to the massacre of the Huguenots,* but take heed that no one is left alive to reproach me for it." At midnight or soon after (some say two o'clock) it was to commence. Troops were placed in readiness, and as the hour struck, the shrill sound of the tocsin followed. This was the sign for every Huguenot to be hunted up and put to death. Coligni, still suffering from his wound was one of the first to die. Some were surprised in their beds. Others, starting up by the noise, ran into the streets to inquire the cause, but only to meet the assassin's dagger. None were spared. Rich and poor, young and aged, all fell in the merciless massacre. Even the Count de la Rochefoucault, a companion of the king, was slain in the palace of the Louvre. The streets ran with blood, and the river was polluted by its stream. For three days this slaughter continued; search being made for any who had concealed themselves. The king and queen of Navarre were spared only because of their rank.

{*The Protestants in France were commonly called Huguenots. What gave rise to the name is very uncertain. it is most probably from the German word eidgenoss. "sworn or bound by oath."}

Messages were also sent off to the provinces to put the Huguenots everywhere to death, and in many places this was at once effected. It is worthy of record that in some places Catholics refused to carry out the order. The Viscount d'Orthe, governor of Bayonne, sent word that he had "good citizens, and brave soldiers, but not a single assassin." This cost the good man his life.

Sigognes, the governor of Dieppe, summoned Catholics and Protestants, saying to them, "Gentlemen, the order I have received can only regard rebellious and seditious Calvinists, but, thanks be to the Eternal, there are no longer any such in Dieppe." He declared they were all children of the same God, and he exhorted them to live as brothers and cherish only the love of Christ.

The bishop of Lisieux refused to have the order carried out. "Those whom you wish to slaughter," said he, "are my sheep; gone astray it is true, but I will labour to bring them back into the fold. I cannot see in the gospel that the shepherd ought to let the blood of his sheep be shed; on the contrary, I read there that he ought to pour out his own for their sakes."

Still the orders were too faithfully carried out, until thirty thousand victims had been massacred, if we may take the reckoning of a Catholic historian; the number being placed as high as eighty thousand by Protestant writers.

The news of the massacre was received with the greatest sorrow and indignation by foreign Protestants, but it was hailed with joy by the pope, who ordered a jubilee to be celebrated all over Christendom, and he went with his Cardinals in procession to offer thanksgiving to God for the destruction of their enemies!

Though so numerous had been the victims, and notwithstanding the many who also fled the country, there yet remained in France many Protestants. In 1598 the edict of Nantes under Henry IV. gave them a large measure of relief, under which they again greatly increased. In 1610 Henry was assassinated, and his successor, Louis XIII. again began to persecute the Protestants. Louis XIII. was succeeded by his son Louis XIV. in 1643, who was even a worse persecutor than his father. In 1685 the edict of Nantes was repealed, when a dreadful persecution broke out, with every species of torture, cruelty and death. This caused thousands to leave the country. Thus were the Protestants persecuted from time to time until 1787, when a more general and lasting toleration was brought about.

Still in France it is a toleration — the nation claims to be Roman Catholic, and when it is not this it is infidel. It has had the light presented to it; and it has again and again, amid scenes of massacre and bloodshed that should make even the heathen ashamed, refused to receive it. It seems to be a country given up to judicial blindness and death.

"We may grow hard, and not revere

Each old prophetic token,

Too wilful and too proud to hear

What God Himself hath spoken;

Yet shall the Son of man appear,

And strongest hearts shall fail for fear,

And wrath and pride be broken.

But mercy now flows full and free,

Forgiveness still is offered thee."

England.

Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Tyndale.

Nothing is a greater proof that the Reformation was of God than seeing that in England it began during the reign of such a man as Henry VIII.

In 1521 he had written his book against Luther, and England had won its F.D. on its money, by the pope declaring Henry to be "Defender of the Faith." This greatly pleased Henry and bound him still more strongly to the pope.

Since the time of Wiclif there had always been persons who loved the truth, and who saw with more or less distinctness that the pope and his doctrines were wrong. But with Henry thus bound to the pope, and Wolsey himself trying to be a pope, those lovers of the gospel were everywhere searched after and persecuted. Thus England was at that time emphatically a Roman Catholic country: we have to see by what means the Reformation was brought about.

As is well known, Henry VIII. had married his brother's widow Catharine, aunt of the Emperor Charles V. Henry greatly desired a son and successor, but his children had died in infancy except Mary. This perhaps produced the first discontent in the heart of the king, but it was Wolsey who first suggested his divorce. Wolsey, a cardinal and the most powerful man in the state next to the king, was glad of this discontent; for he had been annoyed by Catharine chiding him — him a cardinal — for his dissolute life, and he had been greatly disappointed by Charles not making him a pope; he conceived the thought of avenging himself against both Charles and his aunt by getting the king to divorce his wife.

Wolsey wanted the king's confessor to suggest it to the king; but he said, No: the Cardinal must take the first step. This the Cardinal did, when the king declared that there was no cause for which he could separate from his wife. Wolsey retired, but only to return with the Bishop of Lincoln. They made it appear that they were only anxious for the soul of the king. It was not right for him to have his brother's wife. It was for his salvation they begged him to submit the question to competent judges. Henry consented, and appointed Fox his almoner, Pace dean of St. Paul's, and Wakefield professor of Hebrew at Oxford, to study the Old Testament, to see if it was forbidden for a man to marry his brother's wife. Wakefield wanted to know what the king wished before he gave his judgment. He was told the king wished the truth. Then the king put the matter into the hands of a commission of lawyers.

Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn, which made him all the more anxious to be divorced from the queen. But how to bring about his separation he could not find out. He told Wolsey, who was hunting for a wife for the king, that he should marry Anne Boleyn. Now Anne had been brought up at the French court with Margaret of Valois, and was supposed to be, favourable to the Reformation, besides which her family were enemies of Wolsey, therefore Wolsey was now as anxious that the king should not be divorced as he was in favour of it before. If Anne was queen, Wolsey knew he should soon lose his place and power. Still Wolsey was careful not to let his change of aim be seen, and was soon obliged to further the divorce.

Henry next called upon Wolsey as the pope's legate to pronounce the divorce; but Wolsey reminded the king that Catharine could afterwards appeal to the pope, who might set his decision on one side. They agreed to send messengers to the pope, asking him to divorce the king from his wife. But just then the pope was a prisoner of the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor sent at once to strike a bargain with the pope. He would set him at liberty if he would refuse to divorce the queen of England. The pope promised to come to no decision in the matter without informing the Emperor. Very soon after the messenger from the Emperor had gone, those from Henry arrived. The pope now saw his power. Both were appealing to him. It would the better answer his purpose to do nothing. The English agent had to fly from Rome, or he would have been taken prisoner by the soldiers of the Emperor. The pope promised as soon as he was at liberty to attend to Henry's request.

In December, 1527, another messenger was sent to Rome with instructions to scatter money freely, and to tell the pope that it would be for his own protection to oblige the king. The pope gave the messenger a "commission," which was despatched to England; but which Henry and Wolsey found to be worthless.

Then Fox, chief almoner, and Gardiner, secretary to Wolsey, were despatched to Rome with more urgent requests, and to hint that if the pope refused he might lose not only Henry but England also. They brought another paper equally worthless.

The anger of the king was great. He stormed and raved against the pope, for whom he had done so much. He was a heartless priest who would do nothing to satisfy the king's conscience or to save England.

Henry invited Erasmus to England, but the learned Dutchman excused himself. No one liked to touch the delicate question of the king's divorce.

Wolsey, seeing the temper of the king against Rome wrote more letters, urgently requesting that Campeggio might be sent to England to settle the matter. To Gardiner he said that he must not return to England unless he brought Campeggio with him. News soon came that the pope had sent Campeggio, and had sent a document, signed by himself, to divorce the king and give him permission to marry again. Henry and Anne were now pleased.

Still, the more Henry seemed anxious, the slower was the pope's legate. Indeed Campeggio perfectly well understood the pope. The legate had the brief in his possession, but it was to depend on circumstances whether it was to see light or ever to be used.

Circumstances soon occurred that made the pope more resolute. The Emperor's army was successful, and he was now master of Italy. He at once said to the pope, "We are determined to defend the queen of England against king Henry's injustice." The pope was now entirely in the power of the Emperor and must please him.

Messengers were immediately despatched to Campeggio, with instructions — 1, Not to hurry. 2, Try and reconcile the king and queen. 3, If this does not succeed, induce the queen to take the veil. 4, If all these fail, wait for further instruction. All this meant, as to the divorce, "do nothing."

Still all this was kept secret. The king kept inquiring as to what had become of Campeggio — he had not yet reached France. At last the news came that he had arrived in Paris. Henry wrote to Anne, "Monday next we shall hear of his arrival in Calais, and then I shall obtain what I have so longed for, to God's pleasure, and to both our comforts."

At length Campeggio arrived. He had taken three months to come from Italy to England. Wolsey was anxious that a pope's legate should enter London in style, so he sent mules with rich trappings and mysterious "boxes." But Campeggio, as he was to do nothing, preferred coming in a quiet way, and so sailed privately up the Thames to the palace of the Bishop of Bath. The mules, etc., sent by Wolsey returned to London. Some of the mules taking fright, the boxes, dubbed to be "coffers," got broken. The people rushed forward to see their contents, when they were found to be empty. This was not forgotten as an emblem of popery — fine outside, but full of nothing.

But now Campeggio was here. A fit of gout real or feigned — kept him a prisoner. Wolsey was often by his side; but could get nothing out of the legate, and soon began to suspect that there was a "screw loose" somewhere.

Campeggio, with information from Wolsey, began to see that it was really a serious matter. If the king was not satisfied by the pope, there was real danger that the king would abandon the pope and embrace the Reformation. This must be hindered at all cost.

It was soon quite plain that it was useless for Campeggio to try and reconcile the king and the queen. The king was now determined to make Anne Boleyn his wife, and she had consented. Therefore he must try to induce Catharine to enter a convent. Campeggio and Wolsey visited the queen, and proposed this step, telling her that she might avert the blow that awaited her by this act of her own. Then, seeing that she was about to refuse, he sternly asked her how it was that since the matter had been referred to the pope she had been gayer than usual. The church was distressed; her husband was unsatisfied; and instead of mourning she was giving herself to vanity. "Renounce the world, madam," said he, "enter a nunnery. Our holy father requires this of you."

But the question was this, Was Catharine the legal wife of King Henry? Was it forbidden by scripture? If she entered a convent she was admitting that she was not the king's true wife, and Mary her daughter would be illegitimate. She would never admit this. Then turning to Wolsey she said, "As for you, having failed in attaining the tiara, you have sworn to avenge yourself on my nephew the Emperor. . . . . One victim was not enough for you. Forging abominable suppositions, you desire to plunge his aunt into a fearful abyss. . . . . But my cause is just, and I trust in the Lord's hand." She had spoken with an energy beyond herself. At once she withdrew.

Campeggio now determined to sound the king as to a reconciliation with the queen however much appearances might seem to make it impossible. But no sooner did he propose this to Henry than the king flew into a dreadful passion. "Let the pope only persevere in this way of acting," said the king, "and the apostolic see, covered with perpetual infamy, will be visited with a frightful destruction."

Campeggio saw that he must appease the king, so he shewed him the decretal which pronounced the divorce, and read it to him. This pleased the king, and now he declared that the pope might expect more from him than he could conceive.

Thus we see how, humanly speaking, England's alliance with the pope was in suspense. If the Pope gave the divorce, England would be bound to Rome; but if the divorce was refused, then Rome might go to destruction. At present all was uncertain.

Campeggio, having read the decretal, locked it up, and though both the king and Wolsey begged and prayed to see it again, to read it, and to shew it to Anne, Campeggio as firmly refused.

Wolsey next said privately to Campeggio, "Let us now make the divorce public," when the legate told him that it could not be while the pope was at the mercy of the Emperor. For an excuse, Campeggio wrote to Rome for further instructions, and thus Henry was doomed to further delay.

In the meantime, lest the subjects of the Emperor residing in London should take up arms in favour of Catharine, fifteen thousand were ordered to leave London.

The king, too, to quiet the nation, who were much concerned about the question of the divorce, called together the parliament. He told them that there was no fault to find with the queen; but that his conscience was troubled about having his brother's widow. It would also be for the nation's welfare if he should leave an heir to the throne. "Therefore I require of you all," said the king, "to pray for us that the very truth may be known, for the discharging of our conscience and the saving of our souls." In other ways the king made all to understand that the "very truth" that he wanted must by all means be for the divorce, and not against it.

Campeggio having despatched his messenger to Rome, Wolsey hastened to send one also, with orders to leave no stone unturned to induce the pope to grant the divorce. But no sooner had this messenger seen the pope and got all he could — promises — than messengers from the Emperor arrived, threatening the pope if he agreed to Henry. One was to whisper to the pope that it was known that he was illegitimate, for which he could be turned out of the popedom at any time. The pope declared he would refuse Henry at all cost, and he sent a messenger in all haste to London privately to burn the decretal which Campeggio had.

In the meantime a brief by Julius II. was discovered in London touching the question of marrying a brother's wife, issued at the time of the king's marriage, contradicting another one the same pope had given on the same day. Campeggio declared again that he could not go on without fresh instructions. There must be another journey to Rome.

The king also sent his messengers. They were to inquire 1, Whether this brief of Julius II. was genuine or not. 2, Could the matter be settled by both the king and queen entering convents, the king being afterwards released by the pope? 3, If this should fail, would the pope grant to Henry two wives, as was the case in the Old Testament?

However, while these messengers were hastening to Rome, on January 6, 1529, the pope was taken suddenly ill, and it was thought he would die. All was now changed. Wolsey again thought he might become a pope, and then he would grant Henry the divorce. They counted up the votes. They thought they could reckon on twenty, six more were needed, and these were to be bought at all cost. But this hope was dashed to the ground by the pope's recovery.

At length Henry began to see that he could hope and expect to receive nothing from Rome. He next executed a commission for the case to be tried by the two Cardinals, Campeggio and Wolsey. It was quite true the pope might reverse it afterwards, but this must be risked.

The commission was opened on June 18, with due form by the two Cardinals, certain others sitting with them. "Henry, King of England, come into court," said the usher. "Here I am," said the king. Again, "Catharine, Queen of England, come into court." The queen handed in a paper, in which she protested against the judges, and appealed to the pope. This was overruled. Then she took a place before the king, and falling on her knees, said, with tears in her eyes, "Sir, I beseech you, for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right. . . . I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble, and obedient wife. . . . These twenty years I have been your true wife, and by me you have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world, which yet hath been no default in me. . . . . It is not to be doubted that the marriage between you and me is good and lawful. Who are my judges? Is not one the man who has put sorrow between you and me . . . . a judge whom I refuse and abhor. . . . . I conjure you not to call me before a court so formed. Yet, if you refuse me this favour . . . I shall be silent, I shall repress the emotions of my soul, and remit my just cause to the hand of God." Thus spoke Catharine, and, though called back, she left the court.

Henry, moved by the queen's address, declared that the queen was a true and obedient wife — "as noble in character as in truth."

After many delays the cause proceeded in the absence of the queen. Witnesses were examined, and judgments taken. It turned principally upon three points: Was it forbidden in scripture for a man to marry his brother's widow? And if so, Had the pope power to set aside the law of scripture? To end all disputes Campeggio was pressed to produce the pope's decretal which so long before had been shewn to the king. After various delays July 23 was named to decide the question. The king, impatient, had crept into the gallery to hear the judgment. The attorney-general said, that as everything had been done to satisfy and enlighten the consciences of the judges, attendance was now given to hear the judgment. But the pope had concluded an alliance with the Emperor, the Cardinal could not say Yes to the divorce; for him to say No was to separate England from Rome. He must contrive somehow to say neither.

The court was crowded, all anxious to hear the decision. The next day, the 24th, at Rome the courts did not sit, he must do the same, and adjourn the case to some future day. "The queen," said he, denies the competency of the court: I must therefore make my report to the pope, who is the source of life and power, and wait his sovereign orders."

Henry was incensed, and vowed he would not be played with any longer. Wolsey feared the wrath of the king and of Anne. Many of those about the king were also Wolsey's enemies. One of them when at Rome, had obtained a letter of Wolsey's in which he begged the pope to delay the matter of the divorce, and then oppose it, seeing that the new queen would be favourable to the Reformation. This letter was laid before the king. The doom of Wolsey was sealed, but for the present nothing was said.

Anne, who had returned to court, one day laid a book she had been reading near a window, and one of her ladies, Miss Gainsford, took it up and began to read it. It was Tyndale's "Obedience of a Christian Man." George Zouch was paying his addresses to Miss Gainsford, and in sport took the book from her hands. She hastened to recover it, but just then Anne called her. Zouch retired to his room and began to read. He had never met with such a book. "I feel the Spirit of God," said he, "speaking in my heart as He has spoken in the heart of him who wrote the book." He was won to God and His truth. So fond was he of the book that he used to take it to the king's chapel with him. One day Dr. Sampson saw him with the book, and when the service was over he rudely took the book and carried it to Wolsey.

Zouch and Miss Gainsford were now in a great fright. The book belonged to Anne, and was now in the possession of Wolsey. Anne, on hearing what had befallen the book, went at once to the king and told him all about it. She had not long left his presence when Wolsey arrived to complain to the king of the book, and to accuse Anne if he had opportunity. But the king took the book and at once dismissed Wolsey. He had promised Anne to read the book; he sat down to do so.

The king read strange things, such as "The king is in the room of God in this world. He that resisteth the king, resisteth God."

"Let kings, if they had rather be Christians in deed than so to be called, give themselves altogether to the well-being of their realms."

"Emperors and kings are nothing now-a-days, but even hangmen unto the pope and bishops, to kill whomsoever they condemn.

"The pope, against all the doctrine of Christ, which said, My kingdom is not of this world,' hath usurped the right of the Emperor. Kings must make account of their doings only to God."

The king was pleased. "What excellent reading!" said he; "this is truly a book for all kings to read, and for me particularly." Henry had his eyes opened, but he was not converted as Zouch was.

The pope ended the matter by citing the cause of the king to be tried at Rome — summoning Henry to appear, or to be fined ten thousand ducats. Of course the pope did not expect that he would go, but this was the last part of the pope's way of doing nothing to please the Emperor.

The anger of the king was extreme. "I, the King of England, summoned before an Italian tribunal!" Yes, he would go, but with such an army that would strike terror into all Italy.

Campeggio was dismissed, but his boxes were all searched at Dover to find the decretal, which had however been burnt, and anything else touching the king. Wolsey retired in disgrace. The wrath of Henry could not fall on the pope, it should fall on his cardinal Wolsey.

Latimer.

Hugh Latimer was one of the preachers of the Reformation in England. He had been converted in a singular manner. When he was made Bachelor of Divinity at Cambridge he had to deliver a discourse in Latin, and he chose for his subject, "Philip Melanchthon, and his doctrines." Melanchthon had set scripture above the Fathers and the schoolmen; Latimer attacked such a shocking doctrine, as he judged it to be. He was considered to be the champion of Cambridge against the Reformation.

Among his hearers on that day was Thomas Bilney, who had been already won to the truth and was a preacher of the gospel. He longed for the conversion of Latimer, but how was he to find admittance to the new bachelor? Bilney's leaning, to the truth was known in the University, and already he was despised by Latimer. But, doubtless led on by God, Bilney came to Latimer and asked permission to confess to him. "For the love of God," said he, "be pleased to hear my confession." Latimer naturally thought that his discourse had made an impression upon Bilney, and he yielded to his request.

Bilney on his knees confessed how he had been distressed on account of sin; how he had tried in vain all that the church presented, without relief and then described the peace he felt in believing in Jesus Christ, as the "Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." Now God was his Father. Latimer was arrested, confounded, broken down, born again of the Holy Spirit. He was a new man. When Bilney had ceased he could only stammer out a few words. Bilney approached and they became strong and lasting friends. Such a conversion made quite a commotion in the University, and many now flocked to hear Bilney preach.

Latimer became a preacher of the gospel. He exposed the pretensions of the papacy with great freedom, but found occasion thereby to point men to the Lord Jesus, and His work on the cross, as the basis of all forgiveness.

During one of his sermons the Bishop of Ely came in and heard Latimer, and then forbade his preaching. After this Wolsey sent for Latimer, and requested him to give the substance of the sermon that had offended the bishop. Latimer did so, which so pleased Wolsey (who also found Latimer to be a learned man) that without further inquiry he gave Latimer licence to preach anywhere in England!

Latimer declared for the divorce. This brought him to court, and he preached before the king. In 1830, a council held at Westminster forbade certain books being circulated and read, among which was "The scriptures corrupted," by William Tyndale. This drew from Latimer a long and faithful letter to the king, strongly advocating the free circulation of the scriptures. We shall meet with this faithful man again.

Cranmer and the King's Divorce.

Cranmer was introduced to the king in a curious manner. On the return of the king from Woodstock he stopped at Waltham, full of anxiety as to how his cause was to be decided. He had looked to Rome, and Rome had played him false. Whither should he turn now? was the all-absorbing question.

Fox and Gardiner were supping that night at a gentleman's house, where they met with Cranmer, whom they had known at college. At supper they asked Cranmer's opinion of the divorce question. He told them they were on the wrong track. There was a surer and a shorter way to satisfy the king's conscience than going to Rome. "What is that?" they asked. "The true question is this," said Cranmer "What says the word of God?" "If God has declared a marriage of this nature bad, the pope cannot make it good." "But how shall we know what God has said?" "Consult the Universities," said Cranmer.

The next day the king said to Fox and Gardiner, "Well gentlemen, our holidays are over: what shall we do now? If we still have recourse to Rome God knows when we shall see the end of this matter." They told him what Dr. Cranmer had said. "Where is Dr. Cranmer?" said the king. "This man has the right sow by the ear." Cranmer was fetched in haste.

Cranmer was annoyed to find himself dragged into the question; but there was now no help for it. The king requested Cranmer to lay aside all other occupation, so as to consider the matter and make his report. Then calling Anne's father, he told him to receive Cranmer into his house till he had drawn up his report.

Cranmer drew up his report. He believed the king's marriage with his brother's widow was contrary to scripture, and that the pope had no authority to set scripture aside. "Will you abide by this, that you have here written, before the bishop of Rome?" said the king. "That will I do, by God's grace," replied Cranmer. Henry had not yet done with the pope. The Earl of Wiltshire, and Drs. Cranmer, Stokesley, and Edward Lee, with some others, were sent to the pope, to argue the king's case.* Cranmer soon returned to England but was despatched to Germany by the king.

{* It is said that when the pope met these envoys, he put out his foot for them to kiss it. The Earl of Wiltshire and the others disdained to do it, but the Earls spaniel ran forward and gave the toe a bite, which made the pope hastily withdraw his foot.}

While away, he married his second wife, a niece of Osiander's wife.

The fall of Wolsey was rapid. He had been the most powerful man in the kingdom. Ego et rex meus — "I and my king" was the way he viewed his own position and that of the king. He was impeached for high treason, but Cromwell so well defended him that he was acquitted. Wolsey's hopes revived, but he was again arrested on a second charge: this broke his heart. "Alas master Kingston," said he to the governor of the Tower, "if I had served God as diligently as I have served the king, He would not have given me over in my gray hairs. This is my just reward!" Unquestionably he had served himself before any one else.

He was now on his death-bed; but his hatred to the Reformation was not abated. "Tell the king," said he, "that I conjure him in God's name to destroy this new pernicious sect of Lutherans." God was about to open a door in England for the truth, and one of its worst enemies was now being taken out of the way. He died November, 1530.

In 1532 an Act of Parliament was passed abolishing the payment of annates* or first-fruits to the court of Rome — a memorable statute as breaking a link which bound England to Rome.

{* From annus, a year. The profits of one year of every vacant living was claimed by the pope. The new Act gave them to the king.}

Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in 1532 and Cranmer succeeded him; but in accepting the office he refused to receive the appointment from Rome. He said to Henry, "Neither the pope nor any other foreign prince has authority in this realm." "Can you prove what you have just said?" asked Henry. "Certainly I can," said Cranmer. "Holy scripture and the Fathers support the supreme authority of kings in their kingdoms, and they prove the claims of the pope to be a miserable usurpation."

The lawyers were asked what was to be done, and they suggested that some one else should go to Rome and ask for the appointment. Cranmer did not object to this; but he declared that he would have nothing to do with Rome, and reserved to himself the right of speaking against the pope and attacking his errors.

This was a great step towards the Reformation. Henry however was not so far advanced. He sent to Rome, and the pope, being glad of still having some link with England, gladly gave the appointment. But Cranmer refused to own it, and three times publicly protested against any oath his representative might have taken contrary to his duty. He was bound to the law of God, the rights of the king of England, the government of the church of England, and "the reformation of all things that may seem to be necessary to be reformed therein." Yet, strangely enough, after all his protests, he took the usual oath to St. Peter and to the holy apostolic church of Rome!

The Universities, including some of the foreign ones, declared that the pope had no authority to set aside the law of Leviticus. Cranmer then proceeded to declare the divorce without the pope. "We, Thomas, Archbishop, primate, and legate, having first called upon the name of Christ, and having God altogether before our eyes, do pronounce and declare that the marriage between our sovereign lord, King Henry, and the most serene lady Catharine, widow of his brother, having been contracted contrary to the law of God, is null and void." This was May 23, 1533. On the 28th of the same month, Anne was declared duly married to King Henry: they had been married privately before the divorce was pronounced.

In the meantime a brief was printed and circulated by the pope, addressed to Henry. "We exhort thee, our son, under pain of excommunication, to restore Queen Catharine to the royal honours which are due to her, to cohabit with her, and to cease to associate publicly with Anne . . . . otherwise . . . . we pronounce thee and the said Anne to be ipso facto excommunicated, and command all men to shun and avoid your presence."

Thus Henry obtained the divorce, and Anne was now his wife. In getting this he had been excommunicated by Rome. Henry would renounce the pope. "The pope and his cardinals," said Henry, to the French king, "pretend to have princes, who are free persons, at their beck and commandment. Sire, you and I, and all the princes of Christendom, must unite for the preservation of our rights, liberties, and privileges; we must alienate the greatest part of Christendom from the see of Rome."

Though Henry said this he made another attempt after the divorce to be reconciled with Rome, but the Emperor had the pope in his grasp and he would not allow him to make peace with Henry. Again the King of England was compelled to turn away from Rome against his will. God was over all and He so ordered it.

Henry was enraged, and wrote a book entitled, "On the power of christian kings over their churches, against the tyranny and horrible impiety of the pope." It was all right to throw off the yoke of the pope, but alas for England if the church had no other head and no other Reformation than that of Henry. He was the instrument in God's hand to further the Reformation from a national point of view, and as far as turning away from the pope was concerned; but Henry, in turning from the pope, did not turn to Christ; his shield was not faith, and his weapon was not the word of God. We must now endeavour to see what God was doing by His Spirit and His word to bring about the Reformation.

Translation of the New Testament.

England owes a debt of gratitude to William Tyndale. He had been early impressed with the thought that his work was to give to England the Bible in its mother tongue. He had said to his opposers, "I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the scriptures than the pope." With this before him, he set himself to work in earnest. He had to get his translation printed abroad, anywhere he could — sometimes a part in one city and a part in another; concealing it from being seen. While thus engaged he was often in want; yet with the firm conviction that he was doing the work God would have him do, he persevered, and about 1525 his first edition of the New Testament in English was ready. It had to be smuggled into England, but it was gladly received, and eagerly read. This was rapidly followed by other editions which gradually spread all over England, enlightening men's minds as to what was the truth of God, and also as to what was not of God, though it bore the name of religion.

Cranmer loved God and his truth, and he took the first opportunity to advocate that the Bible, translated by learned and competent men, should be allowed free circulation. Hitherto it had only come from abroad by stealth, and was always liable to be seized. The king granted the request on condition that the clergy of England should never call the pope universal bishop or pope; but only bishop of Rome. Those of the clergy who were devoted to Rome had to resort to mental reservation or lose their places. Many chose the former.

About 1529, Tonstal, bishop of London, finding Tyndale's New Testament in circulation, thought he would stop it effectually by buying up all the copies he could and burning them. So he commissioned Packington, a merchant, to buy all he could lay his hands on. This he did, and the bishop paid for them, and burnt them publicly in Cheapside. Tyndale was glad of the money. He was aware that the edition was imperfect, so he set to work to revise it and printed a new edition with the money supplied by the bishop of London! The next edition being ready, a large supply was sent to England. Constantine, one of Tyndale's friends, was apprehended. The Lord Chancellor asked him who had encouraged them in this work, promising that no harm should come to him if he revealed the secret. He said their best customer had been the bishop of London! Thus was the folly of this man and his hatred to the word of God, the means of giving England a better edition of this precious book.

Henry VIII. Head of the Church.

Cranmer's was a painful position. Few men could have filled his place as he did, and many have greatly blamed him for being where he was. The parliament had declared the king to be "the only supreme head on earth of the church of England," and some gave up their livings and even their life rather than admit it; Cranmer kept his place, and followed out the views of the king, who soon shewed himself to be much more of a Catholic than a Protestant. A good man in a false position, Cranmer was often obliged to bend to circumstances. And it is to be feared that in some of his bendings he stooped to that which was evil.

A dark shadow passed over the Reformation in England — if such we can call it — at its commencement. The parliament had declared that the king was head of the church; conscientious Catholics could not, and would not, acknowledge it. This brought two illustrious persons to the block.

Bishop Fisher had been an old tutor of the king. He was a Catholic, and he would not acknowledge the king as head of the church. For this he must die. The pope had just conferred on him the Cardinal's hat; but Fisher had said, "If the Cardinal's hat were at my feet I would not stoop to pick it up." Henry was the more enraged that the pope should put honour on a man that he was condemning. When informed that his death was resolved upon, he said, "I most humbly thank his majesty that he is pleased to relieve me from all the affairs of this world." On the morning of his execution he took off his hair-shirt and asked for his best clothes. His servant reminded him that it was only for two hours he could wear them. "Exactly so," said the aged bishop, "this is my wedding day, and I ought to dress as if for a holiday."

Fisher took his Testament, and was ready. He opened it, saying, "O Lord, I open it for the last time. Grant that I may find some word of comfort to the end that I may glorify thee in my last hour." Then he read, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." "That will do," said Fisher; "here is learning enough to last me to my life's end." The aged bishop, tottering with age and infirmity, had to be helped. He repeated his text as he went along. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." When on the scaffold he said, "Christians, I give my life for my faith in the holy Catholic church of Christ. I do not fear death. Assist me, however, with your prayers, so that when the axe falls I may remain firm. God save the king and the kingdom." His last words were, "Eternal God, my hope is in thy deliverance." His head fell on the scaffold. We would fain hope he died in the faith of Christ.

The other victim was Sir Thomas More, ex-chancellor of England. He would not acknowledge the king as head of the church. For this crime he must die. On the scaffold he repeated a psalm, "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions." Though More had hated the men who loved the truth of God, and had been the means of the death of some, yet we hope that he saw at last that his only refuge was in Christ and in his grace, and not in the pope, the Virgin Mary and the saints.

The death of these two men caused great commotion in the country and great indignation in Catholic countries. The pope cited the king to Rome. "In case of default," said the pope, "we strike him with the sword of anathema, of malediction, and of eternal damnation. We take away his kingdom from him . . . . we release his subjects from their oath of fidelity." He called upon christian princes to march against him, declaring him and his to be their slaves.

Thus did the pope place himself above the king, and, as far as he could, took his kingdom from him. This clearly brings out what popery really is, and to what it assumes. This act of the pope only widened the breach between Rome and England.

Henry next turned his attention to the monasteries. There were two things that moved him. One was that they were rich, and he thought he could make a better use of the money; the other was that they were the strongholds of the pope. Luther, when he heard of the king's destroying the supremacy of the pope and yet leaving the monasteries intact, said he was leaving the "soul" of popery untouched.

One day Henry dropped in to a monastery at dinner time. He was unknown, so he called himself one of the king's guards. They had a table full of good things. Henry had been hunting, and was hungry, and speaking of a piece of beef he said, "I will stick to this sirloin," and ate heartily. "I would give a hundred pounds," said the prior, "to eat with as much appetite as you; but alas! my weak and qualmish stomach can hardly digest the wing of a chicken." Henry resolved he would bring back the prior's appetite. A few days after some soldiers came and conducted the prior to the Tower, where he was fed on bread and water. After a few weeks of this diet a sirloin of beef was set before the prior, and now indeed he ate of it heartily. The king now entered and claimed his hundred pounds. The prior paid it and went back to the monastery. But Henry never forgot how they fared in the monasteries, where by the bye they had promised poverty.

An examination of all the monasteries was ordered, with a correction of abuses. Some were entirely closed, and the revenues seized. In some places things came to light which shewed how the people of England had been deceived. At Hales, in Gloucestershire, crowds of visitors used to go to see what the priests declared to be some of the blood of Christ in a bottle. The strange thing was that some people could see the blood and others could not. If a rich man came, he at first would not be able to see it. He confessed and made an offering, and if the priests were not satisfied, he still could not see it. "Your sin is not forgiven," said they. There must be more confessions and more offerings, and then the blood could be clearly seen. His sins, they said, were now forgiven. The commissioners examined the bottle and found it transparent on one side and opaque on the other. "When a rich penitent appears," confessed a monk, "we turn the vessel on the thick side; that you know opens his heart and his purse."

At Boxley, in Kent, there was a crucifix which bowed its head and moved its eyes to express approbation or disapprobation when the people brought their offerings to the priests, and in which they were taught devoutly to believe. The examiners found that it was by the means of wires the figure had been made to move. The king had it brought to court and there exhibited. "I do not know," said the king, "whether I ought not to weep rather than laugh on seeing how the poor people of England have been fooled for so many centuries."

But these deceitful tricks were not the worst things the commissioners found. Almost every evil and every abomination that can be named were to be found in these places, said to be devoted to the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ. The commissioners were able to name a few as notable exceptions.

The commissioners allowed any monk under twenty-four years of age, and every nun under twenty-one, to leave the monasteries. Many had been sent there when quite young, and they were glad to escape; and others who were over age entreated with tears in their eyes to be allowed the same privilege.

The suppression of the monasteries in England had its abuses and its mistakes. There were many who wished to share in the spoils. It was one thing to seize them and another thing to make a better use of the money. Much of it was given to the king's favourites, who spent it in many shameful ways. To satisfy the people it was given out that the money would lessen the taxes; soldiers with skilful officers would be paid out of the funds; a better provision would be made for the poor; and that preachers would be paid to preach everywhere the true religion. "But," says Strype the historian, "nothing of this came to pass."

Some fine libraries too were sold for a mere nothing. Doubtless it was a severe blow to the power of Rome, and swept away many abuses; but as to its leading to a better use of the funds is very questionable.

The king, desiring to form an alliance with the German Reformers, sent Barnes to Wittenberg. Melanchthon was at first taken with these advances, and dedicated to Henry a new edition of his "Common Places." Henry was delighted, sent him two hundred crowns, and invited Melanchthon to visit England. But on hearing of the death of More, Melanchthon drew back, and though afterwards desired by the Protestant princes, under no consideration would he visit such a man as Henry. An alliance however was signed, December 25, 1535. Calvin was left out. He had called the dogma, that Henry was the head of the church, "blasphemy."

On January 7, 1536, Queen Catharine died. The German Reformers contended that her marriage with Henry was not such as to allow of a divorce. Now she was removed they felt free to consider afresh an alliance with King Henry. The German Reformers however, said, "The King of England wishes to be pope in the place of the pope, and maintains most of the errors of the old popery, such as monasteries,* indulgences, the Mass, prayers for the dead, and other Romish fables."

{*Some of the larger monasteries were left when the others were suppressed.}

England sent Bishop Fox and Archdeacon Heath to Wittenberg. Luther and Melanchthon met them in conference. But the English divines were so slow in giving up the papal abuses that instead of a conference it became a discussion. "I am disgusted with these disputes," said Luther; "they make me sick." To the Elector he said, "I have done more in four weeks than these Englishmen in twelve years. If they continue reforming in that style, England will never be inside or out," meaning, we suppose, neither inside popery, nor really outside.

The Elector was appealed to, and asked if a few concessions could not be made in their Confession. The Elector applied to Luther, who said, No; but after that he softened down a little, and said that expressions might be softened, but great doctrines must be maintained. The king was required to consent to the Augsburg Confession. This was April, 1536.

The very next month Henry brought Queen Anne to the block, and proved himself altogether unworthy of being considered as a friend of the gospel. The Reformed princes could only recoil with horror from joining with one whose hands were stained with the blood of his wife — a wife, too, well known as a friend of the Reformation, and not guilty of the crimes laid to her charge.

Queen Anne may not have known the saving power of the truth, but she certainly helped on the cause of Christ in encouraging those who preached the gospel, helping necessitous students, shielding others from persecution, etc. We would fain hope, however, that before her death she had bowed to the gospel which she had so often heard.

Cranmer had been very intimate with the queen and counselled her in her good works. His conduct in her condemnation is most deplorable. At the king's bidding he divorced the queen without a shadow of proof of her guilt. The conduct of Cranmer in this is a dark shadow on himself and still darker on the holy religion of the Lord Jesus which he professed.

King Henry, now married to Lady Jane Seymour, turns his attention as head of the church in England to tell the nation what must be their creed. Alas for the church if it had no better head; and for the saints if they had no better creed! We give a few points of the creed.

Baptism. it is "necessary for the attaining of everlasting life." By it those baptized "do also obtain remission of their sins, the grace and favour of God, and be made thereby the very sons and children of God." By it original sin was cancelled, and the recipient received the Holy Ghost.

Penance. "Concerning the sacrament of penance we will . . . that men, which after baptism do fall again into sin, if they do not penance in this life, shall undoubtedly be damned."

Lord's Supper. "As concerning the sacrament of the altar . . . . under the form and figure of bread and wine . . . . is verily, substantially, and really containing and comprehended the very self-same body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which was born of the Virgin Mary."

Justification. "The only mercy and grace of the Father, promised freely unto us for His Son's sake, Jesus Christ, and the merits of His blood and passion, be the only sufficient and worthy causes thereof. And yet that, notwithstanding to the attaining to the same justification, God requireth to be in us not only inward contrition, perfect faith and charity, certain hope and confidence, with all other spiritual graces and motives."

Images. Worship was to be to God only, but it might be done "before the images, whether it be of Christ, of the cross, of our lady [the Virgin Mary], or of any other saint beside."

Saints. "We may pray to our blessed lady, to St. John Baptist, to all and every of the apostles, or any other saint."

Rites. The "sprinkling of holy water," "bearing of candles," "giving of ashes," "bearing of palms," "creeping to the cross," with other things, were "to be used and continued as things good and laudable."

Purgatory. It was declared to be right "to pray for souls departed" and "to give alms to others to pray for them."

A pretty sort of "Reformation" from the errors of Rome this! Why, there is not one of them that a good Catholic could not sign, and not one that a good Protestant could sign! Here again we see the weakness and unfaithfulness of Cranmer. As primate of England he signed this creed; others objected no longer, but signed it too.

In this same year (1536), Coverdale's translation of the Bible was ready for circulation. But unfortunately, as men say, he had dedicated the book to Henry VIII. and his "dearest, just wife, and most virtuous princess, Queen Anne." Now Henry had just put this "just wife" to death, and all saw that the king would never give his consent to this about Anne: so some tried to alter Anne to Jane (for Jane Seymour) others scratched the name out altogether.* Then a new dedication was printed. But the king would not give his consent. The Bible could not be circulated except by stealth.

{* Copies thus altered are still in existence in the British Museum and elsewhere.

Still everywhere the truth of God was quietly making its way by means of the scriptures, the writings of Luther, etc. Truth had to do its work secretly, for there was no one in England who could protect the public preaching of the gospel; the king's creed had to be taught everywhere; still, in quiet, out of the way places, the gospel was preached, and it sank into men's souls and brought forth fruit to everlasting life.

In 1535 Latimer had been made Bishop of Winchester. In 1536 Cromwell chose him to preach before the convocation, when he delivered a very faithful discourse to the assembled bishops, abbots and priors, such a sermon as many of them had certainly never before heard. "Study for the glory and profit of Christ," said he; "seek in your consultations such things as pertain to Christ, and bring forth at the least something that may please Christ. Preach truly the word of God."

The king, though he had given to the nation a very Catholic creed, had in no way satisfied the true Catholics. He had made thousands of enemies by closing the monasteries. The monks who were turned out went about the country crying, "Woe, woe to England," which ended in the rebellion of 1536 to re-establish popery in England. The greatest nobles in the land, though Catholics, sided with the king, and the rebellion came to nothing. The Reformation, if crushed, was not to be crushed in this way. It had more to fear from its professed friends.

In this same eventful year occurred the martyrdom of Tyndale. As we have seen he had given England the New Testament, and he had just finished the translation of the Old when he was betrayed at Antwerp by an Englishman named Phillips, sent from England for the purpose, and cast into prison. His friend Rogers, chaplain to some English merchants at Antwerp, had secured the copy, so that the prisoner was rejoiced to hear that his labours would not be lost. He greatly desired to give to England the whole Bible.

Rogers immediately put the work to press. Great efforts were made in England to save Tyndale. John Poyntz, a gentleman of North Okendon, in Essex, strained every nerve to effect this purpose. With a letter from Cromwell he hastened to Antwerp, but after various toils he had to fly back to England to save his own life. Vaughan wrote to Cromwell, "If you will send me a letter for the privy council I can still save Tyndale from the stake: only make haste: for if you are slack about it it will be too late." But Cromwell could not do this without a word from the king. The king would not give the word and Tyndale was sacrificed. He was the means of the conversion of the gaoler, his daughter, and others. Thus God gave him true seals to his ministry in his imprisonment. At the stake he prayed, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes," and died rejoicing in the Lord. Thus died (October 6, 1536) one of the true ministers of God to the land of England.

In the year 1537 Tyndale's Bible was published, bearing the name of Thomas Matthew — a name assumed by Rogers; and the printer, Richard Grafton, came to London to ask permission to have it circulated. He first applied to Cranmer.

The Archbishop was delighted with the translation, and wrote to Cromwell asking him to present it to the king, and to ask his permission for its circulation — but shrewdly adding, "until such time that we, the bishops, shall put forth a better translation," and then for Cromwell's ear, "which, I think, will not be till a day after doomsday."

Henry looked over the book. The dedication to himself was excellent, and Tyndale's name did not appear. The king gave his consent, though he had but lately forbidden Coverdale's to be sold. Other editions followed, marked, "Set forth with the king's most gracious license."

Now the scriptures could be openly bought and read, a benefit for which the Christians of England had waited so long. Whoever could, bought a copy; and in some places people clubbed together and had one in common. When people had no true servant of Christ to preach to them, they met in twos and threes and read the Bible, and God thereby fed their souls.

This free circulation of the scriptures forms a true and great epoch in the Reformation in this our land.

It does not appear to be certain when Bibles were first ordered to be placed in the churches, but an order was made on May 6, 1541, referring to some previous injunction (probably in May, 1540) which had not been everywhere obeyed, and more stringent orders were now given by the king: "That the curates and parishioners of every town and parish within this his realm of England, not having already Bibles provided within their parish churches, shall on this side the Feast of All Saints next coming, buy and provide Bibles of the largest and greatest volume, and cause the same to be set and fixed in every of the said parish churches, there to be used as is aforesaid" — a penalty being added of forty shillings per month should any fail to obey. The Bibles were for the use of "every of the king's majesty's loving subjects, minding to read therein." They were not to be read with loud voices "in the time of the celebration of the holy Mass" and other services; and the people were not "to presume to take upon them any common disputation, argument, or exposition of the mysteries therein contained."

This as a great boon to the people. The poorest person could now resort to the church and read the Bible free of all expense. It often happened that one person read while others gathered round to listen; for there were many in those days who were unable to read; besides which it made a good use of the book, for while one read aloud, many could listen.

John Lambert.

Soon after followed the case of John Lambert. He was a learned and devout man. Because of his tendency to the Reformation he had been imprisoned as early as 1532, but was liberated on the death of Archbishop Warham.

Now in 1538 Lambert was hearing Dr. Taylor preach in St. Paul's, and hearing what he believed to be contrary to the truth, he spoke to the Doctor after the sermon. The subject was "the real presence," and by degrees it came before the bishop, and when pressed to recant Lambert unwisely appealed to the king.

Gardiner, a crafty man, unfavourable to the gospel, went to the king, and told him about Lambert, saying, that as the king had now many enemies because of his turning from the pope, it would appease the people if he punished heresy. The king, as head of the church, determined to hear the case in person.

Lambert was summoned to the court at Westminster, and the king presided, surrounded by the bishops and lawyers. The king called upon Cranmer to refute Lambert on the subject of the Lord's supper. Lambert held that the body and blood of Christ were represented by the bread and wine, and that the body and blood were present only to faith; Cranmer had to argue for the "real presence;" and then was visible this dark shadow over the Reformation that Cranmer had to argue against, and to sit in judgment upon, a humble believer in the Lord Jesus, guilty of no crime and of no heresy.

After Cranmer and others had argued with the good man, the king demanded, "What sayest thou now after all . . . . the reasons and instructions of these learned men; art thou not yet satisfied? Wilt thou live or die? What sayest thou? Thou hast yet thy free choice." This meant that he must retract or die.

"I commend my soul into the hand of God," said Lambert, "but my body I wholly yield and submit unto your clemency.

"You must die," said the king," for I will not be a patron of heretics." He then called upon Cromwell to read the condemnation.

Cromwell was accounted to be a chief man among the gospellers, and yet he had to read the condemnation of this godly man.

His death was in the most wanton and cruel manner. He was burnt alive; and when his legs were consumed and his hands burning, but no vital part touched, they pushed him about with halberts as far as his chain would allow, while he still called out, "None but Christ! none but Christ!"

Here is a picture of the Reformation in England. A man for no other crime than believing the true doctrine of the Lord's supper is judged — the judgment being quietly acquiesced in by the chief men of the gospellers Cranmer, Taylor, Barnes, and Cromwell, without any effort being made to save the martyr. And then the poor man is put to death in the most cruel manner possible. Can anything be clearer than the fact that it was God who brought about the Reformation in England, without, and indeed in spite of, the king. This is clearly proved by what follows.

The King's Religion.

In 1539 another effort was made to settle by parliament and convocation a set of doctrines. They agreed to the following six:

1. This maintained the "real presence." After the consecration it declared that there remained no substance of the bread and wine.

2. That "both kinds" were not necessary: the blood as well as the flesh was in the bread.

3. Priests must not marry.

4. Vows of chastity, or widowhood, ought to be observed.

5. Private Masses were "meet and necessary."

6. Confession to the priest was "expedient and necessary."

The punishment was death and imprisonment, and inquisitors or commissioners were appointed all over the country to bring the gospellers to trial. This of course much impeded the spread of he truth. People had the Bible, and might read it; but if they did, and found, as they would, that the above doctrines were contrary to scripture, they were compelled to keep their faith to their own bosom or they would be arrested and burnt.

It may well be asked, How could Cranmer agree to these six articles with a good conscience? Latimer, of the bishops, appears to have been the only one that threw up his appointment. He declared, "I will be guided by God's book; and rather than dissent one jot from it, I would be torn by wild horses." He retired to the country, and remained unmolested; but meeting with an accident he came to London for surgical assistance, when he was arrested and sent to the Tower, where he remained till Edward VI. came to the throne.

In the next year (1540) Cromwell was brought to the block through the influence of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and others. On the scaffold he said, he died in the Catholic faith, not doubting of any of the sacraments; perhaps thinking thereby to save himself, but in his prayer he depends altogether upon the death of Christ, repudiates good works, and looks for cleansing alone to the blood of Christ.

Many imprisonments followed the publishing of the Six Articles. Through the entreaty of Cranmer the penalties were after a time made less severe.

The enemies of the gospel now attempted to ruin Cranmer; but the king at once told Cranmer of the plot. The Archbishop was thankful for the protection of the king, but he would not in any way take revenge upon his enemies.

In 1545 persecution again broke out, and the case of Anne Askew is especially worthy of being recorded. This faithful lady was driven from her home by her cruel husband when he discovered that she was a gospeller. She was for some time guarded and cherished by ladies of the court; but her case coming to the ears of the Bishop of London he caused her to be examined.

In various examinations they took great pains to prove her wrong, and this was necessary, for she delighted to say that she believed in the Lord's supper just what the scripture taught, and endeavoured to avoid further explanation. At length she confessed that the "bread is but a remembrance of His death, or a sacrament of thanksgiving for it." She was carried to the Tower, and asked to confess any who held as she did: special persons being named, as Ladies Suffolk, Sussex, Hertford, Denny, and Fitz-Williams. She said, "Then they put me on the rack, because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion; and there they kept me a long time, and because I lay still and did not cry, my Lord Chancellor [Wriothesley] and master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead. Then the lieutenant caused me to be loosed from the rack. Immediately I swooned away, and then they recovered me again. After that I sat two long hours reasoning with my Lord Chancellor upon the bare floor. But my Lord God, I thank His everlasting goodness, gave me grace to persevere, and will do, I hope, to the very end."

She wrote in her prison,

"On Thee my care I cast,

For all their cruel spite;

I set not by their haste,

For Thou art my delight.

Yet, Lord, I Thee desire,

For that they do to me,

Let them not taste the hire

Of their iniquity."

Anne Askew was burnt alive with three men. She had to be carried to the stake because of the injuries received on the rack. When fastened to the stake a pardon was offered to her if she would recant. She said she did not come there to deny her Lord and Master. The flames took hold upon them, and all were consumed.

This was not Catholics putting Protestants to death; but it was those who had thrown off the claims of Rome putting their fellow-christians to death; but all must bow to the will of Henry instead of the will of the pope. Alas! for the Reformation in England! If God work not, there is no hope in man.

Another desperate effort was made to ruin Cranmer; but the king again took his part, and warned him of his danger. Cranmer was indifferent about it. "You fool," said the king, "do you think if you were once in prison, that there would not be abundance of false witnesses to accuse you? But as you do not know how to take care of yourself, I must look to it for you." What an avowal for the head of the English church to make! If it would fare thus with the Archbishop, what would be the fate of poor unprotected Christians?

Henry gave Cranmer, at an interview after midnight, the ring off his finger to use as he thought fit. Cranmer was summoned before the council, and was made to wait outside with the servants. He was seen here by the king's physician, who told the king how his Archbishop was being treated. The king sent a message for him to be admitted immediately.

"You and your chaplains," said the council to Cranmer, "are the authors of all the heresies in the kingdom." He asked to be put face to face with his accusers, but they threatened to send him to the Tower. Cranmer appealed to the king, and shewed them the kings ring. Cranmer was saved, and the council had to hurry off to the king to secure themselves.

In 1546 a proclamation was made forbidding any one to have or read Tyndale's or Coverdale's New Testament, or any not sanctioned by parliament; also all books, either by English writers or by those beyond the seas, unless they were licensed. Thus was shut out, as far as possible, any book containing the truth as drawn from the scriptures.

Things continued in England in this fluctuating state until the death of Henry. More than half a Roman Catholic himself — though claiming to be head of the church — and many of his council entirely papists at heart, they often hindered the work Cranmer, Latimer and others were endeavouring to further. Still the gospel made progress. People had the scripture in their hands, and God blessed its perusal, and saved souls, though many had no opportunity of making it known. Thus God was carrying on the work, without noise or observation, in a manner that nothing could uproot though it was made to hide its head.

Edward VI. and the Reformation.

King Henry died in 1547; and on Edward VI. ascending the throne, Cranmer was able to proceed with the work of reforming abuses.

One of the first things, after repealing the obnoxious laws, was to send visitors to all parts of the kingdom to ascertain what sort of people the clergy were. Gross ignorance was found nearly everywhere; to remedy this, in some measure, a Book of Homilies was composed, one of which was to be read regularly to the people.

The visitors had inspectors to remove the images from the churches. This met with great opposition in some places. Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, met the work of the visitors with such a determined resistance that he was sent to the Tower. Others shared the same fate.

The next step was, that by Act of Parliament the people were regularly to have the bread and wine at the Lord's supper.

Then the Lord's supper was altered as a service. Instead of private confession to the priest before partaking of the supper, a public confession took its place.

Cranmer next turned his attention to writing a Catechism, with scripture proofs, in which he exposed the errors of Romanism.

His next work was to prepare a new Prayer Book. In this he laboured to retain as much as he could in the oldest books, so as to give as little offence as possible. A good part of this remains to this day. In 1548 by Act of Parliament, the Prayer Book was settled as the service-book of church of England. In the same year an Act was passed allowing the marriage of the clergy.

The Prayer Book once settled, it was forced upon the people. No clergyman was to use any other, and all were to use this, under pain of fine and imprisonment — the third offence being punished by imprisonment for life.

The next step of Cranmer was to draw up a Confession. As in Germany this was thought to be desirable in order to let all see what Protestantism was; so the same thing was felt desirable for England. Bucer was now in England, and pressed this on Cranmer. Cranmer now had Coverdale, Hooper, Ridley, Latimer, etc., but it is supposed that the Articles drawn up (forty-two in number) were the work principally of Cranmer and Ridley, though they were sanctioned by all in February, 1552. This formed the basis of the present Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.

Thus far then we see that in England the Mass was abolished; images were removed; Romish abuses were attacked; and a regular "service" was adopted. But as this "service" was for the converted and the unconverted, indeed for the nation at large, irrespective of whether the people were Christians or not, we look in vain for that spiritual tone of worship which none but Christians can enter into and appreciate.

As yet, too, there was no liberty allowed; all were obliged, as we have seen, to use the Prayer Book and agree to the Articles. Any who needed a more scriptural and spiritual mode of worship must assemble for that purpose in private houses, to be seen only by God and themselves.

During the reign of Edward, Joan Bocher, better known as Joan of Kent, was condemned and burnt alive, principally through the influence of Cranmer, because she denied that "Christ took flesh of the Virgin." She said to him, "It was not long ago that you burnt Anne Askew for a piece of bread, and yet came yourself soon after to profess the same doctrine for which you burnt her." It is recorded, to the honour of the young king, that he revolted against signing the death warrant of Bocher, and it was only by the persuasions and importunity of Cranmer that he could be brought to do it. He declared that if he did wrong Cranmer must answer for it at the tribunal of heaven. Her death was a dark shadow on the Reformation, and especially on Cranmer.

Queen Mary: Death of Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer.

In 1553 Edward died, and Queen Mary succeeded. She did all she could to sweep away the Reformation, and bring England again under the power of the pope.

Bonner and Gardiner came into favour, and Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley* were sent to the Tower. From thence they were carried to Oxford to be examined by the doctors. The questions turned principally upon the "real presence" in the Lord's supper, after which they were left in prison.

{*Ridley had been made Bishop of Rochester by Cranmer in 1547, and afterwards Bishop of London. He was a zealous supporter of the Reformation.}

In 1555, after long and tedious examinations on various subjects, Ridley and Latimer were condemned to be burnt.

On October the 10th, the procession was formed. Ridley wore his bishop's gown, and walked between the mayor and an alderman. Latimer, in a poor worn frock, followed. As they passed Cranmer's prison they looked up, hoping to catch a sight of the Archbishop; but he was just then under examination.

They came to the stake. "O heavenly Father," said Ridley, "I give Thee most hearty thanks for that Thou hast called me to be a professor of Thee even unto death. I beseech Thee, Lord God, take mercy upon this realm of England, and deliver the same from all her enemies." A chain bound them to the same stake.

As they kindled the fire, Latimer said, "Be of good comfort, brother Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

Ridley, as he saw the fire blazing up, cried out, "Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." Latimer on the other side responded, "O Father of heaven, receive my spirit." Latimer was soon with the Lord: but too much wood being piled around Ridley, he cried out, "Let the fire come to me, I cannot burn." The wood was removed, and he, too, was consumed.

Cranmer was kept in prison nearly three years, and was then brought to trial and condemned. Then the Oxford divines used all their entreaties to induce him to recant. At length he gave way, and signed a recantation — all they demanded of him.

He did this in the hope of saving his life, but the queen had no such intention. Dr. Cole was told to draw up his funeral sermon.

Cranmer was brought to St. Mary's church to hear the sermon — after which he was to read his recantation. But Cranmer began to see that his life would not be spared, and besides he had been very miserable since he signed the paper.

As he stood on a platform hearing the sermon, tears rolled down his cheeks, and he was evidently enduring a great struggle. The sermon ended, Dr. Cole called on Cranmer to make true confession of his faith. Cranmer called upon the people to pray for him, and falling on his knees he prayed aloud. Then rising he gave those present an exhortation, and at last came to his confession, and after professing faith in the Trinity, the scriptures, etc., he said, "And now I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my conscience . . . . the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth, which I now here renounce and refuse as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be. . . . . And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished for it; for when I come to the fire it shall be first burnt.

"And as for the pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.

"And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester."

His enemies were exasperated. Dr. Cole called out, "Stop the heretic's mouth, and take him away."

Nothing his friends could do could now save Cranmer. He was hurried to the stake, and bound by an iron chain. His beard was long and thick, giving him an appearance of marvellous gravity, which moved the hearts of friends and enemies.

When the fire began to blaze up he could be seen holding out his right hand into the flames, saying, "O this unworthy right hand." The flames now enveloped him, and crying, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," he was consumed.

Thus passed away this true servant of the Lord. Fearful and pliable when threatened with danger, through the mercy of God he was firm at last, and faithful unto death.

As is well known, many were put to death in the reign of Queen Mary — earning for her the title of "Bloody Queen Mary." But God had mercy on England, and cut her life short.

Queen Elizabeth and the Reformation.

In 1558 Mary died, and Queen Elizabeth was proclaimed queen. Again all was changed. The queen was Protestant, and required an oath from the clergy to renounce the pope.

The Homilies, Prayer Book and Catechism are again introduced, and England is once more a Protestant country. The queen is now head of the church. Certain rules are made, even as to the gowns to be worn, and the queen being very resolute no deviation is allowed. It was indeed sad to see the church of England, only just free from a dreadful persecution under Queen Mary, now split up by internal quarrels — and those quarrels in many cases about the colour and shape of a preaching gown! But man likes to use his authority. The queen was now head of the church, and head she would be.

Many felt that though the dress of the clergy was made the war-cry, deeper principles lay at the root of the differences. England professed to be Protestant, but was only half reformed, as they judged, and therefore when the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1562, many declared they could not conform, and this gave rise to the name of "Non-conformists" (though this name was not formally adopted till long afterwards), or as they were called by the queen's party, "Puritans," a term of reproach because they were judged to be over-nice or purer than need be. Many of the clergy threw up their livings, and endeavoured to meet privately. But these meetings were forbidden. Some were imprisoned, and others fled to the continent.

Still this did not heal matters. There was a large and increasing number who could not conform, and these banded themselves in any way they were able. But more stringent measures were taken by parliament. Heavy fines and imprisonment were inflicted on those who absented themselves from the places where "common prayer is said according to the Act of Uniformity."

This made many of the Puritans the more resolute. Nearly all had heretofore gone to the Established church for the Lord's supper; but now they entirely separated, and began to meet in congregations anyhow they could. This gave rise to the name "Congregationalists." Others viewed themselves now as independent of the Established church, and thus arose the name "Independents." Heavy fines and imprisonments followed these actions. The parliament endeavoured to lessen these severities; but the queen was not to be moved. She was head of the church and would have conformity at all cost.

The Reformation under James.

Thus things continued until the death of Queen Elizabeth, in March, 1603. Great hopes were entertained by the Puritans that the accession of James would bring them relief — he being supposed to be a presbyterian. Before he reached England a memorial was presented to him of the hardships to which the Puritans were exposed. It was called the Millenary Petition, because it represented a thousand ministers, though it was signed only by seven hundred and fifty.

The king was now head of the church, and he deemed it sedition for any one to dispute his will as head. The Puritans found no relief. Many fled to the continent, and then began the emigration to New England, where the Puritans sought a new home in which they could worship God without hindrance. In 1620 sailed the May Flower, with the pilgrim fathers (as the Puritans were called) on board. This was followed by thousands of others until, as was calculated, more than twenty thousand had left. Many more would have gone, but the government stopped the emigration.

Charles I. and Cromwell.

Under Charles I. there was no great change, but under the Commonwealth the Puritans found great relief, and divines and others met at Westminster (1643-47) and drew up the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechism, which became the standard of the Scottish Presbyterians.

As liberty arose amid these changes, and those that followed from time to time, a multitude of sects were formed. It became a principle that any number of Christians could form themselves into a church, without endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit (Eph. 4: 3), which must embrace all Christians; or without any care as to the setting up of barriers over which they knew their fellow-Christians could not pass. The unity of the body of Christ was lost sight of and Christians sought only the unity of the few or the many who thought as they did. Thus arose the many sects and denominations we see around us, which have been further increased from that day to the present — forming one of the darkest shadows that arose upon the Reformation; and which yet encloses so many Christians in dense darkness, both as to the claims of the Lord Jesus as Head of His church the oneness of His body — the unity of God's Spirit, to and the liberty for Him to endow with gifts, and use any whom He endows as and when He pleases. It is a startling fact that, all the sects we see around us had their origin at or since the Reformation.

On the other hand the Reformation — brought about by God — gives us liberty from the superstition and soul-destroying errors of the religion of Rome; but into which alas! we now find many called Protestants willingly being led. Will they not take warning from the history of what that corrupt church was and is, and upon the fate of that spiritual Babylon so vividly portrayed in the word of God?

There is a place of safety,

(Not many — only one),

There only have we shelter —

It is in God's dear Son.

But if we from Him wander,

It matters little where,

Outside the place of safety

There's danger everywhere.

Scotland.

John Knox.

About 1540, by means of books and general intercourse with England, many in Scotland were won over to the Reformation; otherwise, as yet, the country was Roman Catholic. In 1542, notwithstanding the strong opposition of the Romish clergy, the Scottish parliament passed an Act, making it lawful for any one to possess and read the holy scriptures. This was the first step towards the Reformation in Scotland.

Preaching was the second step. Among those who preached the gospel none were so renowned as George Wishart. He was driven into banishment for teaching the Greek Testament, but returning to Scotland he went through the land, preaching the gospel. Go where he would, the people were arrested with the power of the truth as it fell from the lips of Wishart.

Among his hearers one day was John Knox, who was so won by the truth, that as soon as he was able he attached himself to Wishart, who was equally pleased with the zeal of his attendant. When Wishart was arrested Knox wished much to accompany him, but Wishart seemed to feel that his time was come for martyrdom, and replied, "Nay, return to your bairns (his pupils) and God bless you: one is sufficient for a sacrifice." Wishart was hanged and then burnt.

Cardinal Beatoun, who had caused Wishart to be seized, was himself murdered in St. Andrew's castle, which place was held by those who had put him to death, and it became a refuge for those oppressed by the Romish clergy. Here John Knox, with others, took refuge.

One day John Rough, the preacher to the garrison, entered the pulpit, and preached a sermon on the election of ministers and the danger those ran who refused the "call." The sermon over, he turned to Knox and said, "Brother . . . . in the name of God and of His Son Jesus Christ, and in the name of all that presently call you by my mouth I charge you that you refuse not this holy vocation . . . . that you take the public office and charge of preaching." Knox was so overcome by this unexpected "call," that he could not speak. He burst into tears, and rushed from the place. Notwithstanding much reluctance he yielded, and became their preacher, and at once struck at the root of popery. It was argued against him that the church condemned such-and-such things. But stay, objected Knox, we must first prove from scripture which is the church. By the word of God the church of Rome is not really a church at all; but the mother of harlots of the Revelation.

In 1547 a French fleet attacked the castle by sea, while an army did so by land. It was obliged to capitulate, and Knox was taken prisoner and carried to France, and put on the galleys. Here he with his fellow prisoners were subject to harsh treatment by the Catholics. They were compelled to hear Mass, and though threatened, because they did not pay adoration to the Host, they refused, and used to cover their heads to see nothing. Knox relates that one day they brought an image of the Virgin and told the prisoners to kiss it. They refused, when the officer said, "You shall," as he forced it to the mouth of one. The prisoner seized the image and threw it into the river, saying, "Lat our Ladie now save hirself; sche is lycht enoughe, lat hir leirne to swyme." With difficulty the image was saved. In about nineteen months, after much suffering Knox obtained his release.

On the release of Knox (in 1549) he came to England. Henry VIII. being now dead, Cranmer had more freedom. Knox was appointed preacher at Berwick. Here he freely preached against the papacy. He was attacked by Tonstal, Bishop of Durham; but this, with Knox's defence only increased his popularity. From Berwick he was removed to Newcastle, and, according to Strype, was made chaplain to Edward in 1551. From Newcastle he was removed to London.

At Berwick Knox met with a family named Bowes, and formed an attachment to Miss Marjory Bowes, whom he afterwards married. The union was opposed by her father, but favoured by Mrs. Bowes, by whom Knox was much beloved, and with whom he kept up a confidential correspondence.

On the accession of Queen Mary, Knox was obliged to fly for his life. He went to Dieppe, from thence to Switzerland, where he remained, with occasional visits to Dieppe. At Geneva he formed a lasting friendship with Calvin, and employed his time in studying Hebrew.

Many refugees from England had settled at Frankfort, and in 1554 they invited Knox to leave Geneva and become their pastor. But here there were constant squabbles about the English Litany and such things, and some at length treacherously accused Knox before the magistrates. The magistrates advised Knox, for the sake of peace, to leave the place. He returned to Geneva.

Knox, having news more favourable to the gospel from Scotland, and having pressing invitations from Mrs. Bowes, determined to visit his native land. In 1555 he visited Berwick and found his wife and her mother well, and that they had not bowed the knee or received the mark of Antichrist, as Knox expressed it.

From Berwick he took a tour through Scotland, preaching wherever a door opened, boldly declaring against the corruptions of Rome. At Dun many were favourable to the Reformation, and numbers sat down to receive the Lord's supper apart from the Mass; and these entered into a bond or covenant to renounce the popish communion, and to promote the preaching of the gospel. This was probably the first of the various covenants entered into by the Scottish Christians, which won for them eventually the name of the Covenanters.

Though Knox had thus travelled and preached in Scotland, he had done it so quietly that his presence was not generally known. But as crowds flocked to the preaching he could not long be hid, and he was summoned to appear before a convention of the clergy at Edinburgh.

This the clergy did without for a moment supposing that he would appear. But Knox came, accompanied by Erskine of Dun, and several other gentlemen. The clergy were bewildered when they heard of his arrival. They could easily have condemned him in his absence; but it was quite another matter now he was present; for there were many in Edinburgh favourable to the Reformation. The clergy made an excuse of some informality, and the convocation was put off.

But Knox was not to be silenced in this way. A large room was found for him in the Bishop of Dunkeld's "lodging," where for ten days he preached twice a day to large numbers. Knox was encouraged, and wrote to his mother-in-law, "Rejose, mother; the tyme of our deliverance approacheth: for as Sathan rageth, sa dois the grace of the Halie Spreit abound, and daylie geveth new testymonyis of the everlasting love of oure merciful Father."

Mary of Guise, the mother of the infant queen (Mary Stuart) from the death of her husband, James V., in 1542, had the reins of affairs very much in her own hands. Though the Earl of Arran had been made regent, the queen dowager and Cardinal Beatoun gradually acquired great power, leaving the Earl with little more than the name of Regent. In 1546 the Cardinal was murdered; the queen dowager then took the first place, and in 1554 she induced the Earl of Arran to resign the regency, upon which she was appointed regent.

Knox was induced to write to the queen regent in favour of the gospel. But it is reported that she scarcely read it, and giving it to the Bishop of Glasgow said, "Please you, my lord, to read a pasquil."*

{*"Pasquil" is a term of contempt. It is taken from a cobbler at Rome, who was fond of satire. The name was given to a mutilated statue on which were stuck squibs and satires.}

While Knox was thus engaged in Scotland, he received an invitation from the English congregation in Geneva to be one of their pastors. Knox accepted the "call," and with his wife, and her mother, who was now a widow, went to Geneva: this was 1556. His visit had been very useful to the Christians in Scotland; but he judged the time had not yet come for a general Reformation in his native land.

After about a year Knox was invited to return to Scotland. But on reaching Dieppe he received letters in a very discouraging strain. He returned to Geneva in 1558. Here he is supposed by some to have assisted in a new translation of the Bible, which was called the Geneva Bible from being printed in that city, though it was often reprinted in Great Britain.

From this blessed work Knox turned aside to politics, and published a book, "The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regimen of Women." This was against queens ruling in the place of kings. It is a lamentable instance of how those gifted to preach the gospel could leave that holy work for the worldly politics which should not have occupied them; for "our conversation [citizenship] is in heaven." (Phil. 3: 20.)

In the meantime the Reformed doctrines and practices were making silent but steady progress in Scotland. This greatly annoyed the papists, and the Archbishop of St. Andrew's determined to try and stop its career. There was an old man, Walter Mill, priest of Lunan, in Angus, who preached the gospel. He had been condemned by Cardinal Beatoun, but had escaped. He was now seized, brought to trial, and condemned. But the Archbishop could find no magistrate to sentence him to death, and had to get one of his own servants to do it. He was burnt alive on August 28, 1558. The martyr said, "As for me, I am fourscore and two years old, and cannot live long by course of nature, but a hundred better shall rise out of the ashes of my bones. I trust in God I shall be the last that suffer death in Scotland for this cause."

This raised the courage of the fearful, and spurred on the resolute. They had agreed to meet in private, but declared that they would meet in public at all cost. The nobles laid a complaint before the queen regent, begging for relief and liberty. She, needing the aid of some of the Reformers, promised protection.

Knox was again invited to Scotland and left Geneva in 1559. He now reaped some of the fruits of meddling with politics. Though Queen Elizabeth reigned in England Knox was not allowed to come to London because of his book against the reign of queens. He sailed for Leith.

Very soon after the return of Knox the queen regent, feeling her hands strengthened, summoned a convention of the nobility at Edinburgh. The primate of Scotland called a council of the clergy at the same time. The Reformers met at Edinburgh and appointed commissioners to lay their petitions before the convention and the council.

The council resolved to refuse that any part of the public service should be in the mother tongue. They ratified all the popish doctrines condemned by the Protestants; strict inquisition was to be made for all who absented themselves from the Mass; all who received the Lord's supper after the Protestant forms were to be excommunicated.

The queen regent and the clergy were now resolved to crush the Reformation — the clergy promising to furnish the necessary funds. Four of the preachers — Methven, Christison, Harlaw, and Willock — were cited for trial to Stirling. They resolved to appear, and gave sureties for their appearance. Knox reached Scotland at this juncture, and resolved, with many others, to appear at the trial (though the queen regent as soon as she heard of the arrival of Knox had declared him an outlaw and a rebel). Fearing lest the attendance of so many at Stirling might cause alarm, they informed the queen regent of their peaceable intentions. She persuaded Erskine of Dun to write to them at Perth (where they stayed in the interval) not to come to Stirling, declaring that she would put a stop to the trial. In violation of this the trial came on, and those cited being absent were outlawed and their sureties fined.

Erskine hastened to Perth with the news of this treachery, which only the more opened the eyes of the Reformers as to their true position. But matters were brought to an issue sooner than expected.

Knox was at Perth when the above news arrived, and on the same day he preached a sermon against the idolatry of the Mass and of image worship. The sermon over, the people had dispersed except a few loiterers, when a priest, more zealous than wise, uncovered a rich altar-piece, decorated with images, and prepared to celebrate the Mass. A boy made some remark when he was struck by the priest. He threw a stone at his assailant, but the stone broke one of the images. This was an incentive for those present, who, taking up the cause of the boy, tore down all the images and ornaments in the church, and smashed them. A crowd had now collected, and finding all the work of demolition done in the church, they rushed off to the Gray and Black Friars; and though the magistrates assembled together, and the preachers themselves interposed, nothing could stay or satisfy the mob till the monasteries were in ruins. Knox declared that neither he nor his friends had any part in this work of destruction. He called the actors "the rascal multitude."

This impetuous act well served the purpose of the queen regent. She had now something that could be called rebellion, and which must be signally punished. She collected an army and sent it to Perth, threatening to lay waste the town with fire and sword. The Reformers quickly informed the regent that they were not rebels, and would obey the government; but fearing the worst they armed themselves for defence.

The queen regent, seeing such preparations for resistance, offered terms of peace, which the Reformers gladly accepted; the queen regent afterwards broke the agreement, which drove from her cause some of the Catholic nobles, who would not be a party to such treachery.

The Reformers deemed it prudent to have copies of their Covenant printed and circulated privately, to see who were desirous of signing it. They then felt that it was not simply themselves but the nation at large were calling for Reform. They therefore again appealed to the queen regent, but as she failed to respond, they resolved in God's strength to push on the work themselves.

St. Andrew's was chosen as the starting-point. Knox had preached there before, and he had a strong feeling that he should preach there again. Quietly he wended his way, others promising to meet him there. The Archbishop sent him word that if he attempted to preach in the Cathedral his soldiers should fire upon him.

The nobles consulted together, and advised Knox under the circumstances to retire; but the Reformer's zeal was aroused: "As for the fear of danger that may come to me," said he, "let no man be solicitous, for my life is in the custody of Him whose glory I seek. I desire the hand nor weapon of no man to defend me; I only crave audience, which, if it be denied here unto me at this time, I must seek where I may have it."

Who could withstand this? Knox preached to a numerous assembly on the day appointed, and on the three following days, without being disturbed. His preaching had such an effect that the authorities of the town declared for the Reformation. The church was stripped of its images and the monasteries were levelled to the ground.

The queen regent hoped to surprise and seize St. Andrew's, but the Protestants at Angus were quickly on the alert, and coming to the assistance of their brethren, the scheme was abandoned.

Other places followed the example set by St. Andrew's. In Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Linlithgow, and other places, the like scenes were witnessed. It is strange that the Reformers did not find a use for the monasteries rather than demolish them; but being considered a part of the idolatrous worship they were swept away.

Knox became preacher at Edinburgh; but on the queen regent coming to the city, he retired as being very obnoxious to the court, and Willock was preacher in his place. The queen regent was desirous of having the Romish worship re-established in the church; but the people met the proposition with such a decided resistance that she was obliged to be content to have it at the chapel royal and the chapel of Holyrood.

Driven from Edinburgh, Knox travelled throughout Scotland preaching against the errors of Rome. His wife now came from Geneva, accompanied by Christopher Goodman a reformed preacher.

Knox now unfortunately entered still deeper into politics, and carried on a correspondence with the court of England, with the view of gaining its assistance. This so exasperated the queen regent and the papal party that a reward was offered for the head of Knox, and many laid wait to seize him.

After this the Reformers met to consult if it would be right to use their influence to set aside the queen regent. Willock and Knox said, Yes, it was lawful for subjects not only to resist tyrannical princes, but to deprive them of authority. This is surely in direct opposition to Romans 13, which exhorts Christians to be subject to the powers that be, and where it is not qualified by "if they are pious and good;" and which injunction was written when Nero was Emperor, emphatically one of the worst of the Roman Emperors. This, with its attendant evil of mustering soldiers to carry out their views, forms a very dark shadow upon the Reformation in Scotland.

That the reader may judge how far the Reformers mixed up politics with their religion we give their act of condemnation of the queen regent. Their charges against the regent were many. First came the religious grievances, but these were slightly touched on. Then there was introducing foreign troops into the kingdom the seizing and fortifying towns; the placing foreigners into offices of power; the debasing the current coin; the subversion of ancient laws; the imposition of new and burdensome taxes the attempt to subdue the kingdom and to oppress its liberties. On these charges the Congregation* maintained that the nobles as counsellors by birth-right to their monarch, had a right to interfere, and therefore in the name of the king and queen [but who would in nowise have agreed with their act] they deprived the queen regent of her office, and ordained that for the future no obedience should be given to her commands.

{* The Congregation was a name adopted by the Reformers in Scotland.}

Knox not only gave the above unscriptural advice, of resisting "the powers that be," but when affairs began to look gloomy he mounted the pulpit and used his eloquence which should have been devoted to the gospel and building up of God's saints — to stirring up the people to renewed energy in opposing the queen regent. This he did at Stirling, after the messenger sent to Berwick to receive the money from England to pay the troops had been robbed of the subsidy, and the soldiers mutinied for want of pay, and Edinburgh had been abandoned, and the leaders had fallen back upon Stirling grievously dispirited. Knox's strong appeals gave new energy, and one William Maitland was despatched to London to solicit aid.

This was granted, and in 1560 a treaty was concluded between Elizabeth and the Reformers, and an army sent into Scotland, and a fleet to the coast. All this was done — mark you — professedly to carry on the cause of Jesus Christ! who had expressly said, "My kingdom is not of this world," else "would my servants fight." (John 18: 36.)

Leith had been fortified by the French troops; while it was being besieged the queen regent died. France and England both sent ambassadors and peace was concluded. The English troops returned. The French army embarked at Leith. The Congregation met at St. Giles's church, Edinburgh, to return thanks for peace, and victory as they termed it.

The Catholics now saw the only means of supporting their waning cause was by more peaceful means than the sword. Some doctors of the Sorbonne had come over from Paris who used their influence to win the people to Rome: but as this work was too slow, the monks hit upon another plan.

Near Musselburgh, to a chapel dedicated to our Lady of Loretto, pilgrims used to flock from time immemorial. The monks now gave out that on a certain day they would put the reality of their religion to the test by the miracle of restoring sight to a young man born blind. On the appointed day great crowds flocked to the place. The young man was led in a procession of monks to a scaffold erected outside the chapel. Many declared him to be the blind man they had often seen begging: some examined him and declared him to be totally blind. The monks then went to prayer, begging for the interference of the Virgin to confirm their religion by this miracle. During their ceremonies The young man opened his eyes. The miracle was complete! He now descended to receive the congratulations of the spectators and their alms.

But it happened that among the crowd had stood a gentleman, named Robert Colville, who being a Protestant, had grave doubts of the supposed miracle, and determined to try and unravel the mystery. Catching his opportunity he slipped some money into the young man's hand, and pressed him to come home with him. When in his lodging at Edinburgh Colville locked the door and drawing his sword, told him that he was convinced he had been aiding the monks in a wicked deception, and now he would know the truth, at the same time undertaking to protect him from the wrath of the papists.

The young man confessed all. From a boy he had been able to turn up the whites of his eyes, and keep them thus so as to appear quite blind. The monks had made him practise this, and then go about as a blind beggar, until they had made the use of it we have seen. The whole story was soon spread over the country, to the great damage of the cause of Rome.

Mary, Queen of Scotland.

Mary, daughter of James V., when an infant, had been espoused to the dauphin of France, and to ensure her education in the Catholic religion, she had been carried to France when only six years of age. In 1558 she was married, and on the death of King Henry II. of France in 1559, her husband became king (Francis II.), and she queen of France. On the death of the queen regent, Mary took up her rights as queen of Scotland, and her husband became by courtesy King of Scotland.

In 1560 the parliament met, and declared for the establishment of the Protestant religion; but on an ambassador being sent to France to obtain the ratification of these acts by the king and queen, this was refused, and the ambassador was insulted by the court. This left all in confusion.

Knox was now settled at Edinburgh, and he, with four others, was commissioned to draw up articles of church government. The result was the Book of Policy, or First Book of Discipline. This was the first step in setting up the church of Scotland. The form of government became Presbyterian, learnt by Knox from Calvin, but modified as the Scottish Reformers thought fit. One may well ask what authority had any to set up a church after their own whim and fancy. Of course it was said to be according to scripture, but how far they wandered from this may be seen in their rule that the Lord's supper was to be administered in towns four times a year, when scripture plainly says that the disciples came together on the first day of the week for the purpose of breaking bread. (Acts 20: 7.)

The first meeting of the general assembly met at Edinburgh on December 20, 1560. There were forty members — six only being preachers. Where had the Reformers found scripture for such an assembly to regulate the affairs of the church?

This same year Knox lost his wife, who had shared many troubles with her husband. She left two children to his care.

But troubles were not yet over for Scotland. Queen Mary of Scotland (being also as we have seen, Queen of France), now prepared an army in France to invade Scotland, and re-establish the Catholic religion; but the attack was frustrated by the death of her husband (Dec. 5, 1560).

Mary, now a widow, being invited, returned to Scotland (August 19, 1561), to take her place as queen. Her situation was most trying — not yet nineteen years of age, a stranger in her own country, and almost without a friend. Soon after her arrival she had a long interview with Knox, but she could make no impression on him; and he could not influence her. The queen finding that asserting her authority could not move Knox, sent for him from time to time, becoming very confiding to gain her own ends.

She also appointed Protestants to all the high offices in the state, which was the means of weaning them more and more from the strict principles of the Reformation which had been laid down. The queen by these means was working out her own ends. Being a thorough papist at heart, she steadily kept in view the restoration of popery in Scotland. To this end she was endeavouring first to weaken her opponents.

Knox, hearing that the queen was contemplating marriage, denounced from the pulpit her marrying a papist. This offended some of the Protestants, and set them against Knox. News of the sermon soon reached the queen, who again sent for Knox. She received him with a stern countenance. "What have you to do with my marriage?" demanded the queen, bursting into tears. Knox made the best excuse he could. Certainly this was not preaching the gospel, nor feeding the flock of God. She ordered him out of her presence, but to await her pleasure.

In the ante-room he found himself amidst the ladies of the court. "O fair ladies," said he, "how plesing war this lyfe of yours, if it sould ever abyde, and then, in the end, that we might pas to hevin with all this gay gear! But fye upon that knave Death, that will come widder we will or not!" For the present Knox was dismissed.

Another event brought the Reformer into trouble. The queen being away from Edinburgh, some of her household revived at the palace certain formalities that had been laid aside rather than offend the Protestants. Some who heard of these things resorted to Holyrood, and burst into the chapel, and asked the priest how he dare be so "malapert." This caused great confusion at the time, and when the queen heard of it she resolved to bring the intruders to trial.

Knox wrote circulars to the chief of the Protestants, inviting them to come to Edinburgh to be present at the trial. One of these circulars was taken to the queen, who resolved to indict Knox for treason. The queen was present at the trial of Knox, and tried hard to get him condemned. "Is it not treason, my lords, to accuse a prince of cruelty?" said the queen. "But wherein can I be accused of this?" asked Knox. "Read this part of your own bill," said the queen. The sentence ran thus: "This fearful summons is directed against them [who had caused a disturbance at Holyrood] to make, no doubt, a preparative on a few, that a door may be opened to execute cruelty upon a greater multitude." "What say you to that?" demanded the queen. Knox asked if the queen did not know that the obstinate papists were deadly enemies to all such as profess the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that they most earnestly desired the extermination of them, and of the true doctrine that was taught within the realm. The nobles acquitted Knox, greatly to the annoyance of the queen. This was in 1563.

In 1564 Knox married Margaret Stewart, daughter of Lord Ochiltree, by whom he had several children.

The country continued in comparative quiet, the Protestants going on with their work amidst more or less opposition, and the queen watching her opportunity to bring back the country to Romanism.

In July, 1565, the queen married Lord Henry Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, who seemed to have no religion, and who could be either papist or Protestant as occasion demanded. He was proclaimed king without the concurrence of the nobles. Some of the Protestant nobles took up arms to secure the Protestant religion, as they said; but political reasons in opposition to Darnley seemed to have been their real aim.

Though Knox kept himself as free as he could from these nobles, he was again brought into collision with the queen by another intemperate sermon. Darnley, to please the Protestants, resolved to go sometimes to St. Giles's church, and on the 19th of August he went in "state." Knox preached and in his sermon spoke of the punishment of "women" ruling over them, and said that God punished Ahab because he did not correct his idolatrous wife Jezebel. This was taken to be aimed at the king and queen, and Knox was forbidden to preach while the court remained at Edinburgh.

The Protestant nobles who had taken up arms had not been successful. They were exiled, and the Protestant party being to this extent weakened the queen began to plot again to bring the kingdom back to popery. Various means were taken to bring this about, and the plot seemed about to succeed when a sudden change was brought about by the assassination of the queen's favourite, Rizzio, who had been principal adviser in the scheme. The queen's other popish counsellors now fled, and the exiled nobles returned.

There can be no doubt but that the murder of Rizzio had been brought about by Darnley's jealousy of the power bestowed on this favourite. It is also clear that he found Protestant nobles to aid him in the scheme. Nothing forms a darker shadow on the Reformation than that Protestant nobles should have turned assassins; but, as we have seen, Protestantism in Scotland was political as well as christian, and national as well as spiritual; so that many were attached to the reformed religion who were not Christians, and we would fain hope that no true Christian had anything to do with that dark deed.

Another tragedy, well known in Scottish history — the murder of Darnley — hastened on events. The queen's affection, which for her husband had sensibly declined, now settled on the Earl of Bothwell. The husband was decoyed into a solitary house in Edinburgh, which in the night was blown up by gunpowder. The queen's want of zeal in prosecuting her husband's murderers and her hasty marriage with Bothwell, left an indelible impression of her guilt on the mind of the nation.

This deed was rapidly followed by the confederation of the nobles to avenge the death of the king. Bothwell fled, and the queen resigned the government; her infant prince was crowned, and the Earl of Moray appointed regent during his minority.

Knox preached the sermon at the coronation of James VI., and it was now hoped that the Reformation was finally settled in Scotland. In December the parliament met and decided that no prince should be king in Scotland unless he took oath to maintain the Protestant religion. Knox was appointed one of the commissioners to draw up articles for church government.

All things were not however finally settled. The queen escaping from her confinement was joined by some of the nobles who had not joined in proclaiming James VI. king, a large sum of money was contributed by the continental Catholic princes, and an opportunity was sought for again placing the queen on the throne. The vigilance of the regent was equal to the occasion, and many disasters were avoided by his promptitude and decision. An opportunity was sought, and he was murdered. His death greatly affected Knox, which was followed by a stroke of apoplexy which greatly affected the Reformer's speech. This was in October, 1570.

The Earl of Lennox was made regent, but he only feebly filled the place of Moray, and the civil war was increased by some who had supported the Reformation now abandoning it. This was notably the case with Kirkaldy, whom Moray had made governor of Edinburgh castle. This man had been imprisoned with Knox, they had shared persecution together, and it now greatly grieved the Reformer to find him desert the cause of Reform. But politics were now so mixed up with religion, that the Protestants were divided among themselves on political grounds. Instead of the war cry being "Protestantism and Catholicity," it became, "Who is for the king and who is for the queen?"

It was soon seen that it was not safe for Knox to remain in Edinburgh. A shot was one evening fired into his room; but not sitting in his usual place he escaped. His friends now advised him to flee, but he steadily refused until they told him that they should take up arms in his defence, and if their blood was shed it would be on his head. He returned to St. Andrew's. But here was the same commotion — some for the king, some for the queen. Here Knox again got into trouble by attacking people in his sermons.

In 1572* there was a cessation of hostilities between the parties of the king and queen, and Knox was invited to return to Edinburgh. He had been gradually failing in health, but resolved to go. Once more he was in the pulpit where he had so electrified the people by his eloquence, but now he was so broken down that not half the people could hear him. James Lawson of Aberdeen was chosen as his colleague.

{* Mary had fled to England in 1568. She was afterwards made prisoner by Elizabeth, and in 1587 was executed.}

Scotland, with every Protestant country was startled by the intelligence of that darkest of all Catholic deeds the massacre of Bartholomew. Knox was carried to the pulpit, and there he summed up his energies to thunder the vengeance of heaven against "that cruel murderer and false traitor, the King of France." It would have been more in the spirit of Christ if he had prayed for the king's conversion.

Knox's Last Days.

The strength of Knox now rapidly gave way. He called around him the "session" of St Giles's, he took a review of his course, then exhorted them to constancy, still begging them to have nothing to do with those who opposed the king. His politics, a part of his religion, clung to him to the end.

A lady visiting him, began to praise his labours, when he rebuked her, and repeated to her what he had said long before, "Lady, lady, the black one has never trampit on your fute" — meaning, we suppose, that she had never been broken down by Satan stamping on her foot.

On his last day he asked his wife to read the fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. "Is not that a comfortable chapter?" said he: "O what sweet and salutary consolation the Lord has afforded me from that chapter!" Soon after he said, "Now for the last time I commend my soul, spirit, and body into Thy hand, O Lord." He then asked for John 17, where he cast his first anchor, as he expressed it. The same night he fell asleep without a struggle. It was November 24, 1572.*

{* Scotland enjoyed comparative peace until James VI. became King of England as James I. in 1603, when a new set of troubles began in resisting, not now the Catholics, but the ritual of the king and his authority in the church.}

Thus passed away one of the boldest of Reformers. His preaching was with great earnestness and eloquence. James Melville, afterwards of Anstruther, said of him, "I had my pen and my little, buike, and tuke away sic things as I could comprehend. In the opening up of his text he was moderat the space of an half-houre; but when he entered to application he made me so grew [thrill] and tremble, that I could not hald a pen to wryt."'

Knox never stopped at half measures. The way the Reformation was first attempted in England disgusted him. Thoroughly convinced that Rome was antichrist, he would give it no quarter.

As we have said, Knox failed by mixing up politics with his religion, in express contradiction to the acts and words of our Lord Jesus.

Knox also failed in forming the church of Scotland according to his own ideas. He arranged the General Assembly to which nothing answered in scripture, with superintendents, and readers, which are never once named in the word of God. Still he was greatly used of God, and was the principal instrument in the Reformation in Scotland.

Conclusion.

In considering the Reformation as a whole, it is desirable to draw from it some useful lessons. We have seen various shadows amid the light. These have not been pointed out for the sake of doing so, but that we might not call darkness light.

The reformers wrought with great zeal, energy, and self-denial, amidst powerful opposition. We esteem them very highly for their works' sake. But they failed,

1, In making religion national instead of individual.

2, In putting sacraments in the place of Christ and faith in Him (Calvin had said, Baptism "engrafted into Christ" and the Lord's supper kept one in the church).

3, In mixing up politics with religion, and taking up the sword to defend the gospel of Jesus Christ.

4, In forming churches each after his own thoughts.

5, In placing kings and electors as the heads of those churches, or in forming General Assemblies, with their attendant machinery.

6, The forming of still smaller churches as liberty arose; any few thinking themselves competent to form a church. Thus man wrought, but failed amid his work.

On the other hand, God brought about by the reformers,

1, Freedom from the control and bondage of Rome.

2, The scriptures were placed in each man's hands in his own tongue.

3, The gospel of His grace was proclaimed in opposition to merit, penance, etc.

4, Justification by faith was taught, in opposition to works, etc.

5, God forgave sins, not the priests.

6, The Roman Catholic church was not the true church.

7, There was salvation outside the church of Rome.

Thus God brought about great blessing. To HIM BE ALL THE PRAISE.

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Life of Luther

Light Amid the Darkness

as Seen in the Life of Luther.

"The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding to the simple."

Psalm 119: 130.

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square.

Contents.

Chapter 1. Luther's Early Life — A.D. 1483-1501.

Magdeburg — "Bread for the love of God" — Why called 'Martin' — Severity of his Parents — Ursula Cotta — Luther's Music

Chapter 2. Luther at College — A.D. 1501-1505.

Erfurt — Luther finds the Bible — Thirst for truth — Bachelor of Arts

Chapter 3. Luther a Teacher — A.D. 1505.

Luther Master of Arts — Death of Alexis — Luther in the Storm — His Vow — Paul and Luther — His parting repast — Takes himself to the cell

Chapter 4. Luther a Monk — A.D. 1505-1508.

His drudgery — Search for Holiness — His anguish — Staupitz — Forgiveness of sins — The Belief — Grace — Luther a Priest

Chapter 5. Luther a Professor — A.D. 1508-1510.

Wittenberg — Luther teaches Philosophy — Bachelor of Divinity — The little Chapel — Luther preaches Salvation

Chapter 6. Luther's Visit to Rome — A.D. 1510.

No fasting at the rich Monastery — Luther's sickness and anguish — Corruption at Rome — Jokes of the Clergy — Pilate's Staircase — "The just shall live by faith"

Chapter 7. Justification by Faith — A.D. 1510-1517.

Luther Doctor of Divinity — Carlstadt — Truth not new, but recovered — Light makes manifest the darkness

Chapter 8. Sale of Indulgences — A.D. 1517.

Tetzel's preaching — Myconius and the "Free" Indulgence — The Shoemaker's Wife — The Saxon Gentleman — The parting feast — Luther's Theses — Tetzel's Theses — Dr. Eck — Luther at Heidelberg

Chapter 9. Luther in Conflict with Rome — A.D. 1518.

How Germany was governed — Luther summoned to Rome — George Spalatin — Luther to be tried in Germany — Philip Melanchthon

Chapter 10. Luther at Augsburg — A.D. 1518.

Cajetan (De Vio) — Discussion — A word of six letters would settle all — Justification by faith ruins Rome — Nothing settled — Luther escapes — God's truth precious

Chapter 11. Luther and Miltitz — A.D. 1518.

Luther must leave Germany — No, he need not go — The matter postponed, not settled — Decretals of the Popes — The Golden Rose — The truth spreads

Chapter 12. Luther and Dr. Eck — A.D. 1519.

Carlstadt — Discussion — Supremacy of the Pope — Huss and Wiclif — Purgatory — Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians — The Lord's Supper.

Chapter 13. Luther and the Roman Bull — A.D. 1520.

Election of Emperor — Charles chosen — Luther on Good Works — His Appeal to the German Nation — Luther writes to the Pope — Zwingli appeals to the Pope — Eck brings the Papal Bull — Margaret of the Low Countries — The Count of Nassau — Luther burns the Pope's Bull — Demand for Luther's death

Chapter 14. The Diet at Worms — A.D. 1521.

Luther excommunicated — Aleandro's Speech — Luther summoned — Threats on the journey — Reception — George Frundsberg — Luther before the Diet — He will not retract — Duke Eric of Brunswick — Luther departs

Chapter 15. Luther at the Wartburg — A.D. 1521, 1522.

Luther carried off — Knight George — Translation of the Bible — Monkery — Temptation by Satan — Luther visits his friends — The Sorbonne

Chapter 16. The Reformation and Its Dangers — A.D. 1522.

The Mass — "Both Kinds" — Carlstadt — Gabriel Didymus — The Prophets — Nicholas Storch — Images broken — Learning despised — Call for Luther

Chapter 17. Luther Returns to Wittenberg — A.D. 1522.

The Swiss Students at the 'Black Bear' — the New Book — Luther preaches on the state of affairs — New Testament in German — King Henry of England — Melanchthon's "Common Places" — King Henry writes against Luther — Henry made Defender of the Faith — Luther replies

Chapter 18. Persecution Breaks Out — A.D. 1522-1525.

Henry Voes, John Esch, and Lambert Thorn — Pope Adrian too "good" — Julio De Medici — Diet of Nuremberg — Campeggio — Gaspard Tauber — Henry Zuphten

Chapter 19. Revolt of the Peasants — A.D. 1525.

The Anabaptists — Count Louis of Helfenstein, his wife and child — John Müller — Munzer caught — The Revolt not a fruit of the Reformation — Death of the Elector Frederick — John, Elector of Saxony

Chapter 20. Luther Marries — A.D. 1525.

The Nuns of Nimptsch — Catharine Bora — Family Scenes — Luther's Poverty

Chapter 21. Diets of Augsburg and Spire — A.D. 1525, 1526.

Threatening — The Emperor and the Pope quarrel

Chapter 22. The Sack of Rome — A.D. 1527.

Rome pillaged by the Catholics — The Pope a Prisoner — Hypocrisy of the Emperor — Judgment

Chapter 23. Peace Disturbed — A.D. 1527, 1528.

Otho of Pack — His Treachery

Chapter 24. Protestantism — 1529.

Diet at Spire — The Protest — Protestants

Chapter 25. Luther And Zwingli — A.D. 1530.

Discussion on the Lord's Supper — OEcolampadius — Bucer — Luther and the Table-cover — The flesh profiteth nothing — They agree to be friends

Chapter 26. The Protestant Confession at Augsburg — A.D. 1530.

Melanchthon and the Confession — Concession — The Duke of Bavaria and Dr. Eck — Reply to the Confession — Threats to the Reformers — The Gates of Augsburg secured — Flight of Philip of Hesse — The cry for War is changed to Peace — Attempts at Agreement — God prevents it — Christ and Belial cannot agree — Diet ends in confusion — The Swiss and German Christians unite

Chapter 27. Attempts at Agreement — A.D. 1530-1536.

Meetings at Smalcalde — Luther's "Admonition to his beloved Germans" — Diet at Ratisbon — Fear of the Turks — A General Council — Death of Clement VII. — Paul III. — Verger — Luther ordains — Envoys from France and England — The Reformation becomes political — The Articles of Smalcalde — Death of Erasmus — Not a Martyr

Chapter 28. Insurrection of the Anabaptists — A.D. 1534, 1535.

Rotman and John of Leyden at Munster — Anabaptists and their visions — John alters the law of Marriage — He is made king of all the earth — His twenty-eight Evangelists — The Famine — John executes his wife — Munster taken — Satan's work

Chapter 29. Darkness Amid the Light — A.D. 1540.

Philip of Hesse wants another wife — He quotes the Old Testament Saints — Appeals to the Reformers — The Reformers fall — Doctrine of Marriage — Philip with his two wives — Grace abounds over sin

Chapter 30. The General Council — A.D. 1540-1545.

What is to decide in the Council? — Diet at Ratisbon — Gropper's book — Truth and Error will not unite — Death of George of Saxony — Henry, a Protestant, succeeds — The Council of Trent entirely a Catholic Council

Chapter 31. Luther's Old Age and Death — A.D.1534-1546.

The complete Bible in German — Its teachings — Luther's Catechisms — Plagues at Wittenberg — Hans Kohlhase, the Robber — Death of Magdalen — Luther at Eisleben — His sickness and death — Luther's character — Faith — Light from the Scripture — In Christ is all I need

Chapter 1.

Luther's Early Life — A.D. 1483-1501.

About the year 1497 might be seen a group of lads going about the city of Magdeburg (a strongly fortified city on the Elbe in lower Saxony), crying, "Bread for the love of God."

They were not rude beggars like those we sometimes see in this country, nor were they those who liked begging better than working. No, these boys were glad to do any odd work they could find, their great aim being to get enough to eat that they might stay at the famous school at Magdeburg, so as to be educated. Their desire, and the earnest desire of their parents, was that they should be able to attend that school, and in order to do this the boys often had to do with very little food, and to lodge in any place where they could find a shelter.

How the children in England and elsewhere ought to value the privilege of being able to attend school without having to beg their bread, or to be subject to such privations!

One day, near to Christmas time, these lads were going through the surrounding villages, chanting some Christmas carols, when a man called out in a gruff voice, "Where are you, boys?" when they were all so terrified that they took to their heels and ran away. But he continued to call them, and at length they ventured to return, and found he wanted to give them some food. They had met with so many rebuffs that the man's gruff voice only awoke their terror.

One of these lads was Martin Luther. He tells us that this was the way in which he had to obtain his education. In after life he said, "Do not despise the boys who try to earn their bread by chanting before your door, 'Bread for the love of God.' I have done the same."

Martin was born November 10, 1483, at Eisleben, a town in upper Saxony. It was about eleven o'clock at night on what was called St. Martin's Eve, which was the reason he was called Martin. His father's name was Hans (which answers to our John) Luder or Luther, and his mother's name before she was married was Lindemann. His parents were pious, and solemnly devoted their son Martin to the Lord as soon as he was born, and we shall see as we trace his history how God accepted him from their hands and greatly used him to spread His truth.

When Martin was only six months old, his parents went to reside at Mansfeld. At this time they were very poor. His father was a woodcutter, and his mother often had to carry the wood on her back to help to support her family. But after a time Martin's father erected some furnaces for iron, and came into more easy circumstances, and was afterwards made one of the council of the town.

This brought the family into good society as it is called, and Martin used to enjoy sitting and listening to those who visited his father. Martin's bright eye at times attracted their attention, and they would ask him questions, from which he never shrank. He made good progress with his studies; at six years old he could read and write well.

Martin's parents loved him, but they were severe in their treatment. "My parents," said he many years after, "treated me cruelly, so that I became very timid; one day for a mere trifle my mother whipped me till the blood came." His master too was very severe. Martin said that on one occasion he flogged him fifteen times in one day. Doubtless Martin's resolute disposition early shewed itself, and this severe discipline would have the tendency to make him more determined, even when wrong. It was a severe school; but it may have been used of God to fit him for his after course in which resoluteness was so much needed to persevere, when nearly every one was against him.

But at the village schools not much was to be learned, so when Martin was fourteen years old his father resolved to send him to a celebrated school at Magdeburg.

In May 1497 two lads with wallets on their backs, and staff in hand, left Eisleben to trudge to Magdeburg. They were sad at leaving their parents, and entering upon an unknown path. One was Martin and the other his friend Reinick, about his own age. When there, as we have seen, they had to beg and sing for the means to live.

Martin stayed at Magdeburg about twelve months, when his parents, hearing of the difficulty their son had to obtain food, sent him to another celebrated school at Eisenach, a well-built town on the river Nesse, where he would be near to some of his relations. His father still found it was as much as he could do to maintain his family at Mansfeld, without paying for the support of Martin at Eisenach.

But Martin's relatives took no notice of him, and here he was as badly off as before. He had, with some of the other students again to sing in the streets for a little bread. But he often received nothing but harsh words, which filled him with gloomy thoughts. Must he give up the studies he loved so dearly? His troubles made him weep. But no, he need not give them up. He was going to be used of God to do a great work for Him, and in an unexpected manner He brought him relief.

One day he had been more than usually unsuccessful, and was about to return to his lodging hungry and faint: but he unconsciously stopped before a house and was lost in painful reflections, when the door was opened and the good woman of the house invited him in, and relieved his immediate wants.

This was Ursula, wife of Conrad Cotta. She had often noticed his pale face had been struck with the sweetness of his voice, and had observed his apparent devotion at the church. Her husband on his return approved of his wife's benevolence, and shortly afterwards they invited Martin to come and live with them altogether.

Now all was changed for Martin. He had no more trouble about his food, and he could now pursue his studies with renewed energy. God had provided a home for him in a family professing Christianity. Happy Martin! He often with gratitude looked back in after life to the happy hours he spent in the family of Conrad and Ursula Cotta.

Martin was never ashamed of his deep poverty. He afterwards considered that this was a part of God's school to make him what he became. Think of this, my youthful readers, and do not repine over your seemingly hard lot, no matter what it may be. If you are where God has placed you, you are in the right place, and all other places would be wrong for you. And God can bless the greatest hardship to your good.

The intercourse of this pious family was blessed to the young man. He became more calm, and his heart enlarged. He was very fond of music, and learned to play the flute and lute, which led in after days to his composing both hymns and tunes for christian worship. It is commonly believed that the favourite tune the Old Hundredth was composed by him, as well as the well-known one called "Luther's."

Chapter 2.

Luther at College — A.D. 1501-1505.

Martin's happy sojourn with the Cotta family must be broken up. He had been at Eisenach four years, and had outstripped all his fellow-students; and now he longed to go to a University for further instruction. His father had confidence in his son's ability, and Martin was sent to the University of Erfurt* in 1501. His father desired him to study the law; but Martin was to be God's servant to do His work. We shall see as we proceed how God brought it about.

{*An ancient fortified town of Saxony situated on the Gera. The Augustinian convent in which Luther used to live was burnt down, with all its relics, his portrait, Bible, etc., in April, 1862.}

The professed Christianity in Germany in those days was the Roman Catholic; and at the University of Erfurt a great deal of time was spent in studying what was called "scholastic philosophy," as set forth by such men as Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, and these things Martin — or as we must now speak of him, Luther had to study, but of which he afterwards declared his utter hatred. He took greater pleasure in the writings of Cicero, Virgil and others.

Luther was not at this time a Christian, but he was a devout young man. He felt his dependence upon God. He used to say, "To pray well was the better half of study."

Now there was a library at Erfurt, and in this young Luther used to spend his spare moments, looking over the various volumes. One day, as he was looking over the books, a certain one attracted his attention, and on opening it he found it to be THE BIBLE. Luther had never seen one before, and he had no idea that the Bible contained more than the various extracts he had heard read in the church. But here was chapter after chapter and book after book he had never seen or heard of.

Only think how different the times were then from what they are now. Here was a young man who had professedly christian parents, and had lived for years in a pious family, and yet had never seen a Bible. Books were then very scarce and very expensive; but besides that, the Roman Catholics used to keep the Bible away from the people, and not allow them to read it, saying that they needed the church to explain it. But besides this, the Bibles were then mostly in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; so that but few could have read them if they had had them. How thankful we in England ought to be that the Bible is not hidden from us! For a few pence we can buy and read God's holy book.

Well, Luther had found a Bible. It was in Latin, and he could read Latin. With the deepest emotion he turns over its leaves, and one of the first things that he reads is the beautiful story of Hannah and young Samuel. He is overjoyed. He has found God's book. "Oh," thought he "if God would but give me such a book for my own." But he must leave it, but only to return again and again as opportunities offered. The more he read, the more he wondered and admired. It was light — God's light — amid the darkness.

Thus God had brought His servant Luther to His book, the Bible. God had many a battle for His servant to fight; and for this he must have God's weapon, and be able to use it. Well, the Bible is the weapon God gives to His servants — it is "the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God" — and I have now told you how God put His own weapon into Luther's hands.

He not only valued the Bible himself, but as he discerned its value as God's book he recommended it to others. To a student who was laboriously studying the law, he recommended the law of God. "He who knows the text of the law thoroughly," said Luther, "will never go wrong. We must do the same, study the text of the Bible, and not busy ourselves so much with systems and commentaries.

At the spring head we find the purest water, and we see better with our own eyes than with another's."

About this time Luther became very ill. He had been up for his examination. He was successful and was now a Bachelor of Arts, but through excessive study his health had been seriously affected, and many thought he would die. He was a favourite with the whole University, and much sympathy was shewn towards the sick young man, and many came to see him. One, a venerable old man, had observed the attention of the young student, and he now came to visit him. To him Luther deplored that he was soon to be summoned away. But the old man replied, "My dear bachelor, take courage! you will not die this time. Our God will yet make you His instrument in comforting many others. For God lays His cross upon those whom He loves, and those who bear it patiently gain much wisdom." This comforted Luther, and he often remembered it afterwards. It was as a word from God to his soul.

Chapter 3.

Luther a Teacher — A.D. 1505.

Luther soon recovered and resumed his studies until 1505, when he was made Master of Arts. The University of Erfurt was now the most celebrated in Germany; and to be Master of Arts was no mean honour. Luther was duly installed with all the pomp usual in those days; there was a procession by torchlight and a general rejoicing.

Luther began now to teach philosophy, though he continued his studies, turning his chief attention to the law according to the special desire and purpose of his father concerning him. But, as we have said, God intended Luther for His servant, and the law must not be his study. To this end God made him unhappy and unsatisfied with all his learning and with all his studies. His conscience would not let him rest. He knew too much of God's hatred to sin, and too much of what would be the penalty of sin unless he were a recipient of the grace of God. Could he honestly say he believed he was a recipient of that grace? He was compelled to answer, No; he could not. Then how could he be happy? What would studying to be a lawyer do for a guilty conscience? No. He must seek by all means to obtain a good hope of eternal life. But at present his alarm was to be increased.

One morning a report was raised that Luther's friend Alexis had been murdered. Luther hastened to ascertain the truth of the report. Alas, it was true: the young man was dead. "What would become of me," thought Luther, "if I were thus suddenly called away?" He could answer the question only with groans, and fearful misgivings filled his soul. But God was leading him on, and he must yet have deeper trouble of soul.

It was still the year 1505, and Luther paid a visit to his parents at Mansfeld during the vacation. He returns to the University, to pursue his study of the law. But when only a short distance from Erfurt he was overtaken by a dreadful storm of thunder and lightning. A thunder-bolt fell close to his side, another might end his existence. He falls on his knees in the greatest agony of mind. What if his time has come! and he unprepared! How can he meet judgment? How can he meet God? He takes it as a call from God, and he makes a vow that if God delivers him from the threatened death he will devote himself entirely to His service.*

{* It is said by some that his friend Alexis was travelling with Luther at this time, and that the thunderbolt that frightened Luther killed Alexis. But the account we give we believe to be the best authenticated.}

Alas, poor Luther, he knew not as yet the value of the blood of Christ that would have cleansed him at once from all his sins, and have given him the good and certain hope of eternal life he so much desired; but instead of this he thinks he must make a vow to serve God in order to be saved. We must not be surprised at this, for those were days of gross darkness, and Luther himself must go through it all in order to teach others afterwards God's true way of salvation and peace.

Well, Luther rises from the ground as a new man — not perhaps a new man in reality yet, but a man with a new object before him. The question now is, How is he to be saved? This must absorb all other questions for him. How can he appear before God? Can he go with his sins upon him? No: he must be cleansed; he must be holy. And how is this to be attained? He must seek it by all means in his power. He had desired learning, and the University had supplied it. He now desired holiness: where shall he obtain it? Ah, he thinks he knows. He will be a monk: he will shut himself in a monastery; he will keep his body under; he will pray and fast and deny himself. Thus he will be holy and attain unto salvation! He has heard of some who have attained to holiness in this way, and who have surpassed others. Yes, he will be a monk.

Poor Luther, how many a Sunday-school scholar in our days could have told him that this was not God's way to be saved; but that in believing on the Lord Jesus is full forgiveness and salvation. But, as we have said, those were days of gross darkness and this was supposed to be the best way to holiness and salvation, and poor Luther knew not as yet any better. Did we say "those days were days of darkness?" Yes, and yet in many a dark corner of the earth where the light of the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ has not yet come, this is still the way an anxious sinner would be told is the true way to find holiness and salvation.

One of Luther's friends (Rubianus) afterwards wrote to him, "Divine Providence foresaw what you would one day become, when on your return from your parents the fire of heaven struck you to the ground, like another Paul, near the city of Erfurt." Yes, both Paul and Luther were similarly arrested; but notice the difference. Paul is at once introduced to the Lord Jesus, whom he had been persecuting in His saints, and soon gets forgiveness and peace; but Luther knows Him not as yet, and he becomes a monk. This, though it left Luther still in darkness, was of immense value to him afterwards, inasmuch as it taught him the worthlessness of a monk's vow, and enabled him to deliver others from this great snare.

Luther enters Erfurt full of his vow, and is anxious that nothing shall turn him from it. He must have holiness, and this, he thinks, is the way to it. But how shall he break the news to his friends? He knows that all in the University will do whatever they can to prevent him from going and burying himself in a monk's cell. Still he believes it is God's call, and it must be done, and done quickly.

He invites his friends to his room for a simple meal and social reunion. They have music and singing and all are cheerful and happy. Luther himself seems to excite them to mirth; but at length he can control himself no longer, and he tells them plainly that he is going to be a monk — he is going to attain to holiness and heaven! They are astonished above measure. What, a Master of Arts bury himself in a cell! They urge and plead, and beg and entreat; but all is in vain. He must have holiness, and is not this the way? thought he.

That very night, to avoid further entreaty, and while his vow is fresh before him, he leaves his lodging, and repairs to the convent of the Hermits of St. Augustine. He leaves behind what earthly goods he has, taking with him only Virgil and Plautus, for he has no Bible.

He knocked at the gate, saying, "Open in God's name." "What want you?" asked the porter. "To dedicate myself to God," replied Luther. "Amen," said the porter; and he was at once admitted to his new but unknown home; and was separated from his parents, his friends, and the world at large. He believes he is now with God, and is not that enough? It was August 17, 1505. Luther would be at that time nearly 22 years of age.

The cell, it is so silent,

Secluded — light so dim —

Some hope to meet with God there,

And converse hold with Him.

The world they think is outside,

With all its sin and wile,

Yet find they've brought themselves in,

With heart deceitful, vile.

And when, in isolation,

Devotional would be,

That heart throws up its vileness,

And joy and comfort flee.

Chapter 4.

Luther a Monk — A.D. 1505-1508.

The monks were rejoiced to receive the young Master of Arts, and commended him much for his resolution of leaving the world.

But now came the painful duty of Luther's informing his friends, and especially his parents of the step he had taken. This he did promptly. His friends at Erfurt hastened to the convent to use their influence to induce him to change his mind, but no one was allowed to see him for a full month, that he might not be rescued. The blow was very severe to his father. He had designed for him an honourable secular employment, and he had pinched himself to provide for Luther's college instruction; and after advancing thus far, for all his hopes to be dashed to the ground was a severe trial. Besides he had known many who had become monks and had been ruined instead of being helped. His father wrote him an angry letter, and withdrew his love.

Some tried to persuade his father to look upon it as a sacrifice on his part to God; but he could not be pacified, and it was not till nearly forty years afterwards that his father freely forgave him. In 1544 a plague took off Luther's two brothers, and the then aged father, thus afflicted and broken down, asked God to bless his "disobedient" son Martin — disobedient for not studying the law and for entering the monastery contrary to his father's wishes.

Well, Luther is now a monk. Though the monks received him gladly, they could make no distinctions between him and his less learned brethren, indeed they seemed to delight to humble the Master of Arts. He must be door-keeper, sweep the floor, and clean the rooms. Poor Luther! what a change from being a lecturer in the University!

One day he stopped in his work to read a letter from his father, which was filled with reproaches, and he could not restrain a tear dropping on the letter, when he was startled by a harsh voice calling to him, "Idler, to your work!" He concealed his letter, and catching up the broom resumed his toil. "This is good for me," said he, "my pride must be brought down, destroyed. . . . Was not this that which I sought in entering the cloister? . . . . I would become a holy man, and where can I succeed if not here?"

As soon as he could he would steal away to his cell, and catch up a book: but the monks would soon be after him, saying, "This is how you waste your time! Come, come; all is not cleared up yet; there is the refectory, and the corridor, and the court, and other places besides. Then you will draw the water, and chop the wood. Do you think we tolerate idlers in the cloister?" Luther submitted. "I desire to learn humility," said he.

There was a Latin Bible in the convent, secured by a chain. This he would study whenever he could. But they drove him away, saying, "Come, come; not so much study! All a monk need know is to read the prayers. It is not necessary to understand them. The devil understands them, and flies away when he hears them. Learning and the fine arts are of no use. A man is useful to the cloister, not by studying, but by begging bread, corn, eggs, fish, meat, money." Then one would put a bag on his shoulder and bid him go and beg in the town. Luther obeyed, and went from door to door in the town where he had been known and respected. "O Jesus," said he, "Thou who wast God, didst humble Thyself, became a man, a servant, even to the cross! It should be an easy thing for me . . . . me a doctor . . . . to become a verger, domestic, scavenger, and even a beggar."

But this drudgery did not last long. The University petitioned the Abbot of the convent to release Luther from all such labours. This he did, so Luther again could give himself up to study. He had the works of the Fathers of the church; but these did not satisfy him. To the chained Bible he constantly resorted. Sometimes a single verse arrested his attention, and he meditated on it for a whole day. At other times he committed passages to memory, and thus stored his mind with the word of God. He also took to learning Hebrew and Greek, so as to be able to study the scriptures in their original tongues.

Still his aim was holiness and salvation. Amid his studies he would sometimes forget to say the regular number of prayers, and then he had to leave off his studies and repeat the full number. At times he was so absorbed in his devotions that he forgot his food, and many a day he had but a bit of bread and a single herring. Melanchthon, afterwards a friend of Luther's, said that in these days Luther went as many as four days without food — he may have meant without anything like a meal; at all events Luther himself long afterwards said, that if he had continued such a life much longer he must have been a martyr to his watchings, prayers, and other labours.

Poor Luther! with all his privations and all his mortifying the body, he seemed as far off as ever from a sense of holiness and an assurance of salvation. Though he had shut himself out from the world, he had carried his evil heart with him into the convent; and from thence evil would rise up and shew him that he was not holy yet; and while this was the case he thought he could have no assurance of salvation. He progressed, however, in this, that he began to learn what he was in himself. It was not the world now as an outward thing tempting him; but it was himself. What came from his own heart did not correspond with the holiness of God. Oh where could he find the remedy?

Those about him could only point to good works as the cure. "But what works," thought he, "can proceed from a heart like mine? How can I, with works polluted even in their source and motive, stand before a holy judge?" He could find no relief. If he detected in himself any sin, he would set to work with renewed energy to make amends for it in self-denial and privation. But all gave him no satisfaction when he had accomplished them. Thus he went on till he became little more than skin and bones. Like a ghost he wandered around the cloisters, making them echo with his deep sighs and his groans. But relief he found nowhere.

Once, being unusually depressed, he shut himself up and declined to see any one for several days. At length one of his brother monks, becoming alarmed about him, proceeded to Luther's cell: he knocked, but received no reply. He was the more alarmed, and burst open the door, when he discovered Luther stretched on the floor apparently dead. His friend tried to arouse him, but he remained motionless. He fetched some young choristers who began to sing one of their hymns, when Luther shewed signs of life, and gradually he recovered his consciousness. He had well nigh passed away; but he was God's man, and God had yet much work for him to do. But as yet he had no peace. He had not attained unto holiness and had no assurance of salvation.

About this time came Staupitz, "the Vicar General,"* to inspect the convent where Luther was. Staupitz soon observed the pale and haggard visage of Luther, and guessed what was the cause of his dejection. Staupitz was a Christian and had gone through a conflict similar to Luther's, but he had happily found rest and peace in the Saviour. He told Luther that all he was doing was useless. He pointed to the wounds of the Saviour as a cure for all Luther's sorrow — to the blood which He shed on the cross.

{* A Vicar-General was one who overlooked in church affairs and who inspected and regulated the monasteries. Henry VIII. made the Earl of Essex his Vicar-General.}

The conversations Luther had with Staupitz were of great value to him; still he did not find full relief, and one day he cried out, "Oh my sin my sin!" But Staupitz pointed out to him that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of real and great sinners, those deserving of utter condemnation. Staupitz could not remain with him: after giving him much excellent advice, saying, "Let the study of the scriptures be your favourite occupation," he presented him with a Bible, and took his leave.

Luther had been helped and instructed; but he was not delivered from the fear of wrath. At times he was as bad as ever, until his health quite broke down and he was brought to the gates of death.

An old monk visited him in his cell. He could not argue with Luther as Staupitz had done, but he knew his "Belief," and in that he found relief. In the Roman Catholic Church, as in the English Established Church, they have what is called "The Belief," and in it are these words: "I believe in the forgiveness of sins." This had been deliverance to the old monk; and he slowly repeated them over to Luther. Did Luther remember those words? Yes, he had said them hundreds of times. Did he believe them? "You must not believe," said the monk, "that David's or Peter's sins are forgiven: the devils believe that. The commandment of God is that we believe our own sins are forgiven."

Light at once broke into the soul of Luther. He had said for years that he believed in the forgiveness of sins; but had never seen till now that forgiveness was forgiveness. And of what avail to believe other people's sins were forgiven if he did not believe his own sins were forgiven? It was now GRACE that was exalted in his eyes, and as he believed that, he renounced his former thoughts of meriting salvation. He found in Christ what he had searched for so long in himself. He was delivered and found at least a measure of peace. With tranquillity of mind, his health rapidly returned.

Soon after this (1507) Luther was ordained a priest according to the rites of the Roman Catholic church. In the ordination service occurred these words, "Receive the power of offering sacrifice for the living and the dead." Luther at this time knew no better; but for any man to pretend to confer such a power, or to speak now of any other sacrifice than the "one sacrifice" that perfects for ever (Heb. x. 14) is perfectly shocking. Luther afterwards said, "That the earth did not swallow us both up was an instance of the long-suffering of the Lord." Luther's father was present at the ordination though he could not fully forgive his son, but reminded the monks that scripture enjoins obedience to parents.

Chapter 5.

Luther a Professor — A.D. 1508-1510.

Luther was soon to leave the convent for an enlarged sphere of labour. Staupitz (who had become a friend of Luther's since they met in the convent) had spoken of him to Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony,* and that prince invited Luther to be a professor at the University of Wittenberg.** Luther felt it his duty to accept the invitation. He quitted Erfurt in 1508.

{* The Elector of Saxony governed his own states and was one of the Princes of Germany who were entitled to elect or choose the Emperor.

** A fortified town in Prussian Saxony, on the Elbe. Many objects of interest, in connection with Luther and his friend Melanchthon, are carefully preserved in this place. The University was removed in 1817 and united with that of Halle.}

Now he had to teach philosophy, while his real desire was to unfold the word of God. "I am very well by God's favours," wrote he to his friend John Braun, curate of Eisenach, "except that I am compelled to give my whole attention to philosophy. From the moment of my arrival at Wittenberg I have longed to exchange this study for theology: but I mean that theology which seeks the kernel of the nut, the pulp of the wheat, the marrow of the bone;" meaning the true theology of scripture, and not the theology of the age. "However, things may proceed; God is God; man always errs in his judgment; but this is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide unto death." Thus did Luther evince his confidence in God; and indeed his study of philosophy proved to be of great value to him afterwards. When it was sought to set it up as an authority, he could pull it all to pieces and shew that it had no solid foundation. Scripture must be put in its place.

However, in the next year he became Bachelor of Divinity, and then he daily expounded the scripture to the pupils. This he did in such a clear and simple way that even some of the other professors used to mingle with the pupils to hear his lectures. Mellerstadt, who was sometimes called "the light of the world," was one of his hearers. "This monk," said he, "will put all the doctors to the rout. He will introduce a new kind of doctrine, and will reform the whole church. He builds upon the word of Christ, and no one in this world can either resist or overthrow that word, though it should be attacked with all the weapons of philosophers."

Luther, in coming to Wittenberg as a professor, had not ceased to be a monk. They set apart a cell in the convent of the Augustines in that city for his use, and there he spent many an hour over his Bible. One day, as he was reading the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans, he came to verse 17 and read "The just shall live by faith." These words arrested him. There was a new life possessed by some, and that new life was the fruit of faith. How simple, and yet how grand! It entered into his very soul with a flood of light, and, as we shall see, again and again it recurred to his memory in after days with new life and power.

Luther was next invited to preach in the convent pulpit, but he repeatedly declined. "No, no," said he, "it is no light thing to speak to men in God's stead." Staupitz however was not to be denied, and at length he carried his point. Luther began to preach. "In the middle of the square of Wittenberg," says D'Aubigné, "stood an old wooden chapel, thirty feet long, and twenty broad, whose walls, propped on all sides, were falling to ruins. A pulpit, made of planks, raised three feet above the ground, received the preacher." It was in this humble place that Luther began to preach. One has compared it to the stable in which our Lord was born.

The place was certainly not attractive, but the preaching was; indeed it created quite a sensation. His predecessors had often been ignorant men, some not Christians, and they had aimed rather to please the people, than to do them good. But Luther knew the value of salvation, and nothing less would do for him than to preach the gospel in the fullest and freest way he knew how. His hearers were astonished and arrested. The place was soon too small, and he was chosen to preach in the city church of Wittenberg. Luther had soon recovered from his dread of preaching and was now in his true element. He delighted to preach and expound the scripture; which was all the more striking as it was in strong contrast not only with what had been preached at Wittenberg, but what was to be heard in the thousands of churches scattered over the empire. In God's truth a light had sprung up amid the general darkness — a light from heaven, and Luther was the bearer of it.

Chapter 6.

Luther's Visit to Rome — A.D. 1510.

Luther was continuing his teaching in the University and his preaching in the city church, when he was requested to visit Rome on a mission from seven of the monasteries who had a dispute on some questions connected with their institution.

Now this visit to Rome was doubtless ordered of God, for it was of immense value to Luther. He was attached to the Roman Catholic religion: he must see and know Rome the centre of it. He had known this system of religion in its general character in Germany: should he not find it in its perfection and its purity in Italy and Rome?

He crossed the Alps and made his way to a monastery on the Po in Lombardy. This was a very rich convent and Luther was surprised at the great luxury in which the monks lived. They had taken the vow of poverty: what had become of their vow? The place was like a palace, and they fared sumptuously every day — yes, every day, but it should not have been so according to the rules of their church. On Friday the Roman Catholics should eat no meat, but in this rich monastery they had plenty on that day as on others. Luther protested against it. "The church and the pope forbid such things," said Luther. They were offended, and the porter gave him a hint that he had better leave the place.

He left and reached Bologna, where he was taken ill. Some have thought he must have been poisoned at the convent, but it is probable that it was the rich living that disagreed with him. But alas! he was again distressed in soul. He had not yet found settled peace through the blood of the Lamb. Again the passage "The just shall live by faith" came to his memory and brought relief. He rapidly recovered and proceeded, and at length came in sight of the city of Rome, when he was so overcome that he exclaimed, "Holy Rome, sanctified by holy martyrs and apostles, I salute thee!" When he had known the city better he called it by another name, as we shall see.

Luther was moved to find himself in the city where were enacted many things he had read of in the classics, but especially he thought of the place Rome had in the founding of Christianity and the sublime epistle written to the assembly therein.

He was a pious young monk and he visited many of the churches and monasteries, and every step he took caused him fresh grief and pain. He had expected to find Rome the centre of all that was holy and divine, but he found it unholy and corrupt. When he said mass, his fellow priests were impatient, gabbling over three while he said one, and then bade him, "Make haste, make haste; do have done with it."

His mission brought him into company with the higher clergy as they were called; but to his astonishment he found them as bad as the priests. Some were irreverent and indeed profane. Sitting at table, he was astonished to hear them joking with one another on subjects of the deepest sanctity; thus, in the mass they had said the wrong words to deceive the people: and this they related without a blush, supposing Luther to be one of themselves. But he was not one with them. What was mirth and jollity for them caused him the deepest pain.

"I was a serious and pious young monk," said he; "such language deeply grieved me. If at Rome they speak thus openly at table, thought I, what if their actions should correspond with their words, and popes, cardinals, and courtiers should thus say mass? And I, who have so often heard them recite it so devoutly, how, in that case, must I have been deceived!"

One day the pope had promised an indulgence for all who should go up some steps, called "Pilate's staircase," on their knees. Luther wished to have this indulgence, and he fell on his knees and began to ascend the stairs (which were said to have been miraculously brought from Jerusalem to Rome). Luther toiled on, when all at once a voice like thunder seemed to say to him, "The just, shall live by faith." He was arrested and terrified at his own folly, and at once he sprang to his feet. The stairs were not mounted, and the indulgence was not gained. But what need he of indulgences when God had said, "The just shall live by faith?" He had the faith; and in haste he turned his back on the stairs and the indulgence.

Thus this same passage was pressed home upon him again. By degrees he saw more of God's plan of salvation. As he afterwards said, he had been afraid of and disliked the expression "the righteousness of God;" neither could he love God who was so just; but light broke in, and "I learnt," he says, "how the justification of the sinner proceeds from God's mere mercy by the way of faith — then I felt myself born again as a new man, and I entered by an open door into the very paradise of God. From that hour I saw the precious and holy scriptures with new eyes."

Thus was Luther's visit to Rome blessed to his own soul, while it was of immense value to him to have seen what Rome really was as the centre of the Catholic religion. "If any one would give me a hundred thousand florins," said he in later life, "I would not have missed seeing Rome." He left the city in great grief and indignation.

Chapter 7.

Justification by Faith — A.D. 1510-1517.

Soon after Luther's return from Rome, he was invited to be a doctor of divinity. Luther greatly shrank from it, but his friend Staupitz insisted. "The Holy Ghost alone can make a doctor of divinity," exclaimed Luther. But it was of no avail, he must yield.

In October 1512 Luther was ordained by Andrew Bodenstein of Carlstadt,* and had to take this oath, "I swear to defend the truth of the gospel with all my strength." This was altogether an unscriptural proceeding, but we are merely relating what actually took place. Luther had truly said that the Holy Ghost alone could make a true servant of God. Quite so. But if the Holy Spirit had made him this servant, he needed not the appointment of man, except as to his place in the University: but Luther did not see this. His taking an oath too was all wrong. If God had appointed him to preach and defend the truth of the gospel (as doubtless He had) he was bound to do it; as Paul said, "Woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel" (1 Cor. ix. 16), but we never read of Paul taking any such oath as Luther took.

{* He was afterwards better known as Carlstadt, and was called by Melanchthon A.B.C. from the initials of his names.}

It was well that Luther had to defend "the truth of the gospel" instead of the Catholic or any other religion. Luther was thus bound to the scriptures. He studied them sedulously, and taught the truth as he himself increased in the knowledge of it.

The people still thronged to hear him preach. To those whose hearts the Lord had touched the truth he proclaimed was as a great light on a dark night, and they flocked to the church. There they might be seen bending with eager intensity to listen to what was to them new truth — truth which they could get in no other way, for they had no scriptures to which they could turn.

"The desire to justify ourselves," said he, "is the spring of all our distress of heart; but he who receives Christ as a Saviour has peace, and not only peace, but purity of heart."

"Faith in Christ strips you of all confidence in your own wisdom, and righteousness and strength; it teaches you that if Christ had not died for you, and saved you by His death, neither you nor any created power could have done so."

He was of great value too in the University, where so many young men were attending his lectures. "He refuted the error," said Melanchthon afterwards, "then prominent in the church and schools that men by their own works obtain remission of sins, and are made righteous before God, by an external discipline. . . . He pointed to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world."

All this, perhaps we think, is now well known; but then it was all newly-recovered truth, that had been hidden away from men for centuries, except as God Himself taught one here and there and saved them by His grace.

Hence we come to see the great work for which God had raised up Luther: it was to bring to light hidden truth, and especially the truth of justification by faith. Man had thought that it was to be obtained by works and by punishing himself. Luther thought so once, and, as we have seen, he nearly killed himself in his endeavours to attain to it. Now he knew better. Now he preached that "sin is pardoned on account of God's Son, and that man receives this blessing through faith."

We have called this recovered truth, and so it was, and Luther saw it to be so. He denied that what he taught was new truth. He said it was in the Bible. "Let any one read that book, and then say whether our theology is a new thing. For that book is not new."

The light that God had given Luther was yet to be further spread. He was directed to make a tour and visit certain monasteries, and wherever he went he made known what God had taught him. Among other places he visited Erfurt, where he had formerly opened the doors and swept the church. He had now authority to some extent to reform abuses; and of these he found plenty. He returned with a still deeper sense of the sad state of that which was called the church of God.

But if Luther had the light — and he had — it must make manifest what was being done in the surrounding darkness. We shall soon see what a contest this caused.

"What is the world? a wildering maze,

Where sin hath traded ten thousand ways,

Her victims to ensnare;

All broad, and winding, and aslope,

All tempting with perfidious hope,

All ending in despair.

Millions of pilgrims throng these roads,

Bearing their baubles or their loads,

Down to eternal night;

— One only path that never bends,

Narrow, and rough, and steep ascends

From darkness into light.

Is there no guide to shew that path?

The Bible! — he alone who hath

The Bible need not stray;

But he who hath and will not give

That light of life to all that live,

Himself may lose the way.

Chapter 8.

Sale of Indulgences — A.D. 1517.

In the year 1517 there was a great commotion in Germany. Certain persons were sent round the country from town to town to sell indulgences. It was done with pomp. Messengers were sent on to the magistrates of any town they visited, to announce the approach of the delegate from the pope. The monks, nuns, schoolmasters, etc., turned out to welcome the messenger, who, with flags flying, amid the pealing of the bells, was escorted to the church. Before him was carried his authority from the pope. In the church they put up a large cross, to which they attached the pope's heraldic arms.

One of those who conducted these sales was more famous than others because he effected more sales. His name was Tetzel, and he was now making his tour in Germany. He entered the pulpits, and addressed the people who flocked in great numbers to the church. Let us hear what he says.

"Indulgences are the most precious and sublime of God's gifts. . . . . Draw near, and I will give you letters duly sealed, by which even the sins you shall hereafter desire to commit shall be all forgiven you. There is no sin so great that the indulgence cannot remit it."

Tetzel told them that these indulgences were not only good for the living, but they would also purchase forgiveness for the dead. Would they let their departed parents and friends abide in torment?

"The very moment," said he, "that the money clinks against the bottom of the chest, the soul escapes from purgatory and flies free to heaven."

"O senseless people, and almost like to beasts, who do not comprehend the grace so richly offered! This day, heaven is on all sides open. Do you now refuse to enter? When then do you intend to come in? . . . . In the day of judgment my conscience will be clear: but you will be punished the more severely for neglecting so great a salvation. I protest that though you should have only one coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it, to purchase this grace. Our Lord God no longer deals with us as God. He has given all power to the pope."

Thus spoke the seller of indulgences. One shudders to write such horrible profanity, but it is necessary for the reader to know what was practised by the church of Rome, that he may shun it as he would the most deadly disease: yea, more; the disease may ruin the body, but this heresy would ruin the soul.

Thus, for money they gave a paper, sealed by the pope's seal, which they pretended would confer on the holder forgiveness either for his past sins or for his future sins: for the living or the dead! On the parchment were drawn large figures calculated to excite imagination and fear, such as the hand of Christ pierced with a nail.

The people had to confess their sins, which was soon over, and then they hastened to purchase the indulgence. And here they had to pay according to their rank in life, and according to their income. Indulgences for particular sins could also be purchased. Tetzel charged for perjury nine ducats, and for murder eight.

Only think of the crime of murder being forgiven (as they said) for less than £4! Could there possibly be a more solemn mockery and delusion to souls?*

{* Tetzel gave a murderer a note on which were written these words: "As I have the calling of saving all souls, and that N. N. has paid me what he ought, I declare him absolved from his crime, in virtue of the ability conferred upon me by the holy father, and I order everybody, ecclesiastics and laity, under pain of excommunication, not to follow up N. N. because of his murder, but to look upon him as entirely absolved."}

The money came in freely. It was counted in the presence of a public notary and duly registered. It was being collected, they said, for repairing the Cathedral of St. Peter's at Rome.

This crying evil was one of the first with which Luther had to contend. It is easily to be seen that if forgiveness of sins was to be bought with money, there was an end at once of all need of the gospel of the grace of God. But Luther was quite clear that forgiveness was only to be had through faith in the sacrifice of Christ. Therefore this sale of indulgences could be nothing but a lie and a cheat. "A monstrous traffic in the church," said Luther, "presumes to take the place of redemption through Jesus . . . . It was Himself that He gave — Himself. . . . . And a wretched mountebank dares, with bellowing voice, to tender his abominable licenses in the stead of Jesus Christ . . . . but, God willing, I'll beat a hole in his drum."

The good sense of the people in a measure opened their eyes to the fraud. "How is it," said they, "if the pope has really the power to forgive sins, that he allows any to be lost? Will he for the sake of money allow any to die unforgiven?" Still, there was much need of money, and the traffic went on under the stirring appeals of Tetzel.

To cover appearances Tetzel once posted on the church doors that at Easter indulgences would be granted to the poor gratuitously and for the love of God.

This was at Annaberg in Saxony, and among Tetzel's hearers was young Myconius. He had been taught by his father that "the blood of Christ is the only ransom for the sins of the world," and that "all things are freely given to us by God alone." Now that the indulgences were to be given, he would go and get one. "I am a poor sinner," said he, "and I need a free pardon." "Those only can share in the merits of Christ who stretch forth a helping hand to the church that is, give their money," said the indulgence sellers. Myconius asked what was meant by the offer of indulgences free that he saw posted up. "Give at least a grosch" (about three half-pence), said they. "I cannot," he said. "Only six deniers" (about a farthing), they plead. "I have not even so much," said Myconius. "Listen," said they, "we will give you six deniers." On this Myconius replied with indignation, "I will have none of the indulgences that are bought and sold. If I desired to purchase them I should only have to sell one of my books. What I want is a free pardon, and for love of God. You will have to account to God for having for the sake of six deniers missed the salvation of a soul;" for he believed in the efficacy of indulgences. "Ah, ah," said they, "who sent you to tempt us?" "No one," said Myconius; "the desire of receiving the grace of God could alone induce me to appear before such great lords."

He left without his indulgence. Their offer of them free had not been real. But he remembered what his father had taught him, and he said afterwards that "As I left these people, the Holy Spirit touched my heart. I burst into tears, and, with sighs and groans, I prayed to the Lord: 'O God, since these men have refused remission of sins because I had no money to pay; do thou, Lord, take pity on me, and forgive them in mere mercy.' . . . . I felt converted, transformed. What had before delighted me was now distasteful. To live with God, and to please Him, became my most ardent, my single desire."

In his case the refusal of an indulgence sent him to God, where he found both pardon and peace without money and without price. He became a Reformer and a friend of Melanchthon.

At another place the wife of a shoemaker bought an indulgence, and soon afterwards she died. It was the custom then for the surviving relatives to have prayers or a mass said for the dead, the payment for which helped to support the clergy. Well, in this case it was noticed that the husband did not ask for prayers or a mass, and he was summoned by the curate before the judge for contempt of religion.

"Is your wife dead?" asked the judge.

"Yes," said the husband.

"What have you done for her?"

"I buried her, and commended her soul to God."

"But have you not had a mass said for the salvation of her soul?"

"I have not: it was not necessary. She went to heaven at the moment of her death."

"How do you know that?"

The husband produced the indulgence, and there sure enough it was stated that the woman at death would not go into purgatory, but would go straight to heaven.

"If the curate pretends," said the shoemaker, "that after that a mass is necessary, my wife has been cheated by our holy father the pope; but if she has not been cheated, then the curate is deceiving me." Such an argument was unanswerable. The shoemaker was acquitted.

Others turned the sale of indulgences into ridicule. A Saxon gentleman who heard Tetzel's preaching at Leipsic went to him and asked if he could grant an indulgence for a sin he wanted to commit. "Certainly," said Tetzel; "I have full power from the pope to do so." Mark this reply. This was not simply a forgiveness; it was more strictly an indulgence — a liberty to commit sin! Can anything be conceived to be more horrible or further from godliness? "Well," said the gentleman, "I want to take some slight revenge on one of my enemies, without attempting his life. I will pay you ten crowns if you will give me a letter of indulgence that shall bear me harmless." This was too good an opportunity for Tetzel to let slip. Yes, he would do it, but not for ten crowns, he wanted much more than that. They struck their bargain at thirty crowns (about £3 15s.). The gentleman got his indulgence and went his way. Soon after, Tetzel left Leipsic. In passing through a wood between Juterbock and Treblin a body of men surrounded him and his party, gave him a beating, and carried off the chest of money paid for indulgences. Tetzel was indignant, and brought an action before the judges. The gentleman who had bought the above indulgence (for it was he and his servants, who had attacked Tetzel) produced it in court. The indulgence bore the signature of Tetzel himself, holding the bearer harmless. What could the judges say? Duke George was very angry when the case was reported to him, but when the document was produced he ordered the accused to be set at liberty. It appeared to be a joke, and was perhaps so intended; but it was a great deal more. Here was a man who had authority from the pope to give permission for any one to sin, and to go unpunished both in this world and in the world to come! If Tetzel had lost his life in the affray, would he not have paid the just penalty of his profanity?

As an instance of the shameful way in which the poor people were deluded and imposed upon, the following is recorded. Tetzel had been at Zwickau with his indulgences, but was about to leave, when the chaplains and their subordinates begged him to give them a farewell repast. Tetzel was nothing loth, but unfortunately the money was already counted and sealed up. But they should not go without their feast, so in the morning he had the big bell tolled; people ran to the church, supposing something important had happened. "I had intended," said Tetzel, "to take my departure this morning, but last night I was awaked by groans. I listened: they proceeded from the cemetery. Alas! it was a poor soul that called me and entreated to be delivered from the torment that consumed it. I have therefore tarried one day longer that I might move christian hearts to compassion for this unhappy soul. Myself will be the first to contribute, but he who will not follow my example will be worthy of all condemnation." Who could turn away from such an appeal? They knew not but that that soul was one of their relatives. The gifts were readily given, and Tetzel and his friends sat down to the feast thus provided for them by the poor of Zwickau!

How the question of the sale of indulgences came practically before Luther was as follows. It is the habit in the church of Rome for persons to go to the priest, and confess their sins. The priest, according to the nature of the sin, demands penance; and then on their complying he gives them absolution, or declares them forgiven. Well, it so happened that Tetzel in his tour came near to Wittenberg, and many went from thence and bought his indulgences. Some of these afterwards came to confess to Luther, who still acted as priest. He demanded of them repentance. But they said, No, they need do no penance, because they had purchased an indulgence. He told them plainly it was all a delusion, and he insisted on their ceasing to do evil, or he could not absolve them.

They hastened back to Tetzel, and told him that a monk had treated his letters with contempt. Tetzel was much enraged, and, to strike terror into the hearts of the people, he caused fires to be made in the streets and declared he had orders to burn the heretics who should oppose his work.

Thus was Luther fairly brought into conflict with the church of Rome. He did not wish it, but he could not see the people misled and cheated, and give his sanction to it. He believed God had called him to "defend the truth of the gospel," and he must speak out. He preached a sermon against indulgences, and plainly told the people they ought not to buy them.

But he must do more. He drew up ninety-five propositions, called "theses* against indulgences," and on a feast-day when there were great crowds flocking into Wittenberg, he nailed them to the church doors. We can give only one or two of them. They were in the rough style common to the age.

{* In Greek and Latin thesis, a position, from the Greek tithemi, to set. It is that which is set down as a proposition affirmed or denied.}

"Those who fancy themselves sure of their salvation by indulgences will go to the devil with those who teach them this doctrine."

"The true and precious treasure of the church is the holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God."

These theses soon attracted attention, and a crowd collected round the church doors. One who got near read them aloud clause by clause, and as he read the people freely made their remarks. Some called out "True, true;" others exclaimed "Heresy, heresy." Thus were men's minds stirred up and the question of indulgences was fairly discussed.

But the theses were not only put up at the door of the church, they were printed, and those who had flocked to Wittenberg on the feast-day returned with a copy of Luther's theses, and they soon became known, and spread all over the country and to Rome in a few days, causing a great commotion wherever they went. Who was this that presumed to call in question what the pope was doing by his agents? It was a poor monk, but a monk led on by God.

The theses were by many hailed with delight. They had sighed over the gross abuses of the traffic, but had not dared to speak out: they rejoiced that some one had the courage to do so.

Others, who did not condemn them, were alarmed; Frederick the Elector was very uneasy. Luther was in his dominions, and who could tell where such a fire once kindled might not spread to? The bishop wrote to him, begging him not to write any more on the subject. The heads of his own monastery came to his cell and entreated him not to bring disgrace upon their order. Luther's answer was noble: "Dear fathers, if the thing is not of God, it will come to nought; if it is, let it go forward." They were silent. To others who greatly blamed him he wrote, "If the work is of God, who shall stop it? If it is not, who can forward it? Not my will, not theirs, not ours; but Thy will, Thine, holy Father, who art in heaven."

Still so many and so loud were the reproaches cast upon Luther that for a time his heart failed him. He had hoped the truth of his theses would have commended them to many; but the few who at first commended them were soon silent, and nothing was heard but the reproaches of the opposers. He tells us of his fear and trembling. Who was he to be in contest with the authority of the church? He was greatly dejected — almost in despair.

Tetzel took up the controversy in a formal manner. He first answered Luther's sermon, and then issued some counter-theses against those of Luther. We give three of them.

"Christians should be taught that they should place more dependence in matters of faith on the Pope's judgment, expressed in his decrees, than on the unanimous opinions of all the learned, resting merely on the interpretation of scripture."

"Christians should be taught that the judgment of the pope, in things pertaining to christian doctrine and necessary to the salvation of mankind, can in no case err."

"Christians should be taught, that there are many things which the church regards as certain articles of the catholic faith, although they are not found either in the inspired scriptures or in the early Fathers."

Nothing can be more destructive of the faith than to insist that the pope cannot err, and to set his judgment above and independent of scripture. Yet this doctrine they plainly put forth.

But Tetzel would not be put down. He had a scaffold erected, and after preaching against Luther, and declaring "the heretic ought to be burnt alive," he cast his theses and sermon on to the scaffold and set them on fire.

After this Tetzel employed persons to distribute his own theses over the country and a number of copies were sent to Wittenberg. The students of the University loved Luther, and no sooner did they hear of the arrival of the messenger than they surrounded him, and by fair means or foul possessed themselves of all his copies — about eight hundred. They then posted bills saying that the theses would be burnt publicly in the market place at two o'clock. At that hour crowds came together, and amid exclamations of joy the papers were burnt. This was done altogether without Luther's consent, and he much regretted the act. It helped to widen the breach.

Luther was next attacked from Rome itself. Sylvester Prierias, master of the pontifical palace, wrote an attack against Luther. It most shamelessly set the teaching of the Roman church and of the pope above scripture.

Luther could not be silent when the scripture was thus contemned. He saw the pith of the whole controversy lay now in a small compass; it was, Is scripture to have the first place, or is the church and the pope? Luther exalted the scripture, and quoted from Galatians i. 8: "Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that we have preached unto you, let him be accursed." He closed with these words, "What if I were to lose my life? Christ still lives; Christ my Lord, and the Lord of all, blessed for ever. Amen."

Luther was afterwards attacked by Dr. Eck,* who hitherto had been his friend. This grieved Luther much, and he desired to be silent, but his friends constrained him to reply.

{* Dr. Eck was well known among the learned of Germany. He was a doctor of theology and chancellor of the University of Ingoldstadt; but his theology was that of the schools, and not of the Bible.}

In the year 1518 there was to be a general meeting of the order of the Augustines held at Heidelberg,* and Luther was invited. His friends strongly advised him not to go, fearing he would fall into the hands of his enemies, but Luther would not allow himself to be hindered from any path of duty. Here was a means of spreading the truth, and he must go. He arrived safely, and in order to bring before his brethren the questions then agitating the church he drew up some propositions (which he called "paradoxes") for public discussion. We give two or three.

{*An ancient city in Baden, situated on the left bank of the Neckar.}

"Man is not justified who does many works; but he who, without having yet done works, has much faith in Christ."

"The law says, 'Do this,' and what it enjoins is never done: grace says, 'Believe in Him,' and immediately all is perfected."

"The love of God finds nothing in man, but creates in him what He loves. Man's love is the gift of His well beloved."

Five doctors replied to Luther, but with moderation; all were interested and listened with attention, some were certainly helped and blessed. The truth was spreading. Seeds were then sown which sprang up after Luther had returned to Wittenberg. Among those who benefited by this discussion was Martin Bucer, who afterwards took a prominent place among the Reformers.

Chapter 9.

Luther in Conflict with Rome — A.D. 1518.

After Luther's return from Heidelberg he thought well to revise his original theses to make them clearer, and to modify some. These new theses he called his "solutions."

In some parts he was very bold. Thus he spoke of the pope: "I care little what pleases or displeases the pope. He is a man like other men." True words, but they must have sounded strange indeed to those who held the pope to be infallible.

He spoke of Christ thus: "It is impossible for a man to be a Christian without having Christ; and if he has Christ, he has, at the same time, all that is in Christ." True words; but they must have surprised those who held that no one could be saved without the absolution of the priest.

When Luther had completed his "solutions" he sent a copy of them to the pope, with a letter stating what had stirred him up to action.

But while Luther had been thus engaged, Rome had been preparing silently to attack him. A message was sent to the Elector Frederick requesting him to cease to protect Luther, at the same time alluding to the fidelity of the Elector to the church.

A diet was then being held by the Emperor* Maximilian at Augsburg, to which all the German States sent their representatives. The Emperor wished his grandson Charles (who was already king of Spain and Naples) to be proclaimed king of the Romans, and to be his successor as Emperor. Most of the Electors had agreed to the wish of the Emperor, but Frederick thought it wrong and would not yield. This offended the Emperor, who then to gain over the pope (who was also opposed to his scheme) wrote to him against Luther, promising to carry out anything the pope might order to be done in the matter.

{* Germany was governed at that time by

1. An Emperor chosen by the Electors.

2. Ecclesiastical Electors: 1, Archbishop of Mentz; 2, Archbishop of Treves; 3, Archbishop of Cologne. All these were arch-chancellors.

3. Secular Electors: 1, King of Bohemia, arch-cupbearer; 2, Elector of Bavaria, arch-carver; 3, Elector of Saxony, arch-marshal; 4, Elector of Brandenburg, arch-chamberlain; 5, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, arch-treasurer.

4. The princes of the empire, divided into spiritual and temporal. They each had a vote in the diet.

5. The prelates, abbots, and abbesses: the counts and nobles: each had a vote.

6. The free Imperial cities each had a vote.

Each state was governed by its own sovereign; he being Elector, duke, prince or bishop as the case might be.

The diets had the levying of taxes; enacting laws; declaring war; concluding peace. The Emperor could refuse his ratification, but could not modify the decisions of the diet. On August 6, 1806, the Emperor Francis II. abdicated the imperial crown of Germany, and declared the dissolution of the Germanic empire.}

The Elector also wrote to the pope, telling him that Luther was ready to defend himself before learned men, and to submit to their decision.

Luther was quietly going on with his duties at Wittenberg, waiting to hear the result of his letter to the pope, when on August 7 he received an order to proceed to Rome. Luther had looked for a blessing, but he was to be devoured, while Tetzel escaped. How could it be otherwise when the friends of the pope had set Tetzel to work?

All Wittenberg was in consternation. If Luther went to Rome it was clear he would never leave it alive; and if he refused to go, he was denying the authority of the pope, which all then held to be supreme.

On the next day Luther wrote to Spalatin,* asking him to use his influence with the Elector to have his hearing fixed for some place in Germany instead of going to Rome. The University of Wittenberg also wrote to the pope, begging the same favour.

{* George Spalatin, a man of wisdom and candour, was chosen by Frederick as his private secretary and chaplain, and teacher of his nephew John Frederick. Because of his excellent spirit he was made a confidant by the Elector. He was gained over to the truth, and became a staunch friend of Luther.}

Now the pope had been pleased with the Elector's refusing to sanction the scheme of the Emperor as to his grandson, and therefore he could well afford to please the Elector by letting Luther's case be tried in Germany instead of Rome. Thus we see how political and worldly matters were interwoven with matters touching the question whether Luther should continue to preach the truth or not, but God was overruling all.

On the 23rd of August the pope signed the order for Luther to be heard in Germany before his Legate. In this order Luther, unless he recanted, was to be seized and carried to Rome. But Luther did not know this until afterwards.

Just at this time there came to Wittenberg a thin young man to be a professor at the University. All were disappointed at his appearance, but his eloquence and his learning soon won him many friends, and among them none formed so lasting a friendship with him as Luther. This young man was Philip Melanchthon.*

{* Melanchthon's name was really Philip Schwarzerd, and D'Aubigné tells us that Reuchlin was so taken with Philip when a lad that he changed his name from Schwarzerd to Melanchthon. "Both words signify black earth, the one in German, the other in Greek. Most of the learned men of those times translated their names into Greek or Latin."}

The two men were in some things the very opposite. An historian has compared Luther to the positive, and Melanchthon to the negative agents in electricity. Luther was energetic and headstrong at times; Melanchthon was timid and gentle. They helped each other amazingly. Luther spurred on Melanchthon; Melanchthon restrained Luther.

Melanchthon was the very man Luther needed for other work. He was a much better Greek scholar than Luther, and Luther had been engaged in translating the New Testament into German, and now he had a companion who could give him very valuable assistance. With Melanchthon's help the work proceeded.

But this sweet and blessed labour was soon to be interrupted. A summons arrived for Luther to appear at Augsburg* and answer for himself. His friends were greatly alarmed. One and another wrote to him begging him not to venture on the journey. And Count Albert of Mansfeldt sent a message for him not to go, because certain nobles had bound themselves by an oath to waylay and murder him.

{* Augsburg is situated in a beautiful plain near the confluence of the Lech and the Werlach. It is now incorporated with the kingdom of Bavaria.}

Luther could not be moved. He said, "They have already torn to pieces my honour and my good name. All I have left is my wretched body. Let them have it: they will but shorten my life by a few hours." Confiding in God, he set out on foot.

From Wittenberg he went to Weimar; thence to Nuremberg. From here Link, preacher of Nuremberg, and Leonard an Augustine monk, determined to accompany Luther to Augsburg.

To whom shall we turn, O Lord,

But to Thyself on high?

Men threaten Thy work to mar,

To Thee for help we fly.

A present God Thou wilt be,

Each step along the way;

In ev'ry storm that can come

A shelter and a stay.

O give us strong faith to live

In faithfulness to Thee;

To lean on Thy strength, O Lord,

And conquerors we shall be.

Chapter 10.

Luther at Augsburg — A.D. 1518.

On the 7th of October, Luther arrived and at once sent to the pope's Legate* — by name Thomas De Vio, surnamed Cajetan, a cardinal of the church — notice of his arrival. He also sent to his friend Staupitz.

{* "Legate" is from Lego, to send: it means one sent by another, as an ambassador or representative.}

On the next day a stranger visited Luther — he came from Cajetan to "sound" Luther. His name was Serra Longa. He was a wily Italian, and hoped to have the credit of bringing Luther to recant. But Luther said he must be proved to be wrong, and unless they could do that he would not submit; but if they could prove him wrong he would be humble and obedient. With this, Serra Longa left him, full of hope.

But the friends, to whom the Elector Frederick had commended Luther, now came to him and persuaded him that it would be madness on his part to appear before the Legate before he had obtained from the Emperor a safe-conduct.* Luther said he did not think it necessary, but they insisted and set to work to obtain it.

{* A "safe-conduct" is a warrant of security granted by the sovereign of a country, to prevent the holder thereof being seized or molested.}

In the mean time Serra Longa returned to him with the message, "Come, the cardinal is waiting for you," and then he told Luther how to behave in the cardinal's presence. "You must prostrate yourself with your face to the ground. When he tells you to rise you must kneel before him; and you must not stand erect till he orders you to do so. Remember it is before a prince of the church you are about to appear." Alas! surely the apostle Paul would not have required or allowed such degradation from a fellow Christian! If the Legate required this, what would the pope want?

Luther refused to go without the safe-conduct, because of the advice of his friends. The next day was Sunday. On the Monday Serra Longa came again, declaring Luther had nothing to fear. A word of six letters, said he, would settle all. That word was Revoca, Latin for retract. But that was just what Luther could not say unless they proved him wrong.

"Where will you take refuge when all forsake you?" said Serra Longa.

"Under heaven," said Luther, looking upwards.

At length the safe-conduct arrived, and Luther appeared before the Legate. The reception was cold in the extreme, though Luther followed his instructions of falling, kneeling, and standing.

Luther broke the silence by saying that he appeared at the request of the pope, and the desire of his prince the Elector.

The Cardinal determined to assume a kind tone. He said, "My dear son, you have filled all Germany with commotion by your dispute concerning indulgences." He then told Luther that he must retract his error; must abstain from spreading his opinions, and must not again disturb the peace of the church.

Luther asked to be permitted to see the writing of the pope that appointed the cardinal to hear him.

This request greatly astonished Serra Longa and the many other Italians with him. They were so used to see persons filled with fear before the pope's legates that the boldness of Luther greatly astonished them.

De Vio told Luther he could not see the pope's brief.

"Deign then," said Luther, "to inform me wherein I have erred."

Again the Italians stared in astonishment. De Vio said, "My beloved son, there are two propositions put forward by you which you must before all retract. 1st, 'The treasure of indulgences does not consist of the merits and sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ.' 2nd, 'The man who receives the holy sacrament must have faith in the grace offered to him.'"

De Vio said he would prove them wrong from scripture; yet did not attempt that, but quoted what certain persons in the church had said.

Luther objected.

"The pope has authority and power over all things," said De Vio.

"Save the scriptures," said Luther.

They then came to the second point, the necessity of faith. On this Luther was very firm. "I will not yield that point, and by God's help I will hold to it to the end."

"You must this very day retract that very article," said De Vio, . . . . "or I will proceed to reject and condemn all your doctrine."

"I have no will but the Lord's," said Luther. "He will do with me what seemeth good in His sight. But had I a hundred heads I would rather lose them all than retract the testimony I have borne to the holy christian faith."

"I am not come here to argue with you," replied De Vio. "Retract, or prepare to endure the punishment you have deserved."

Luther saw it was no use continuing the discussion, and thought it best to answer in writing. "Do you wish," said De Vio, "that I should give you a safe-conduct to Rome?"

Luther took care to decline this. It would have been putting his head in the lion's mouth. He left the hall. On his reaching his lodging he was agreeably surprised to find his friend Staupitz had arrived. He advised Luther to answer in writing.

Staupitz, who was Vicar-General of the order of Augustines, proposed to Luther to disconnect him from that fellowship. This was for two reasons; one, that if Luther was condemned, it would save disgrace to the whole; and secondly, if the cardinal commanded Staupitz to insist on Luther's silence, he could now say that he had no control over him.

On the next day, again Luther appeared before the Cardinal. The Elector had sent two of his councillors — the knight Philip Von Feilitzsch and Dr. Ruhel — with instructions for them to see well after the safety of Luther.

Luther had written out his answer. He read, "What I have taught, I, to this hour, regard as right, true, and christian. Nevertheless I am but a man, and I may be mistaken. I am therefore willing to be instructed and corrected wherever I may have erred. . . . But I solemnly protest against . . . . that strange assumption which would oblige me to retract, without having convicted me of error."

"My dear friend," said De Vio, "I beseech you to abandon this useless design . . . . . retract: such is the pope's will. Whether it be your will or not matters little."

Luther said plainly "I cannot retract."

De Vio, however, would not let it appear that he could not refute Luther, especially before the respectable witnesses then present; so he began to talk, and argue, and quote opinions of others as fast as he could, without giving Luther the least opportunity to reply. Again and again Luther tried to speak, but on went the Cardinal as fast as ever. Staupitz now begged him to allow Luther to speak; but he would not, on he went with his harangue.

Luther saw it was no use attempting to reply, and at length he begged that he might be permitted to reply in writing. Luther's friends joined in the request, and at length the Cardinal consented.

He carefully prepared his answer. Luther denied that "the treasure of indulgences is the merit of the Lord Jesus Christ and the saints," which the Roman Catholics maintained.* Neither could indulgences consist in the merits of Christ alone; for they excused men from good works; whereas God quickened us to perform them.

{* They hold that this "treasure of indulgences" is given into the power of the pope, by which he can remit the punishment due to sin.}

On the second point, he maintained that there could be no justification but by faith. This was really Luther's great theme; nay more, his one great work was, as we have seen, to bring out clearly the truth of justification by faith. Therefore he could by no means give up faith. His opponents held that it was by works, and penances, indulgences, absolutions, and anything and almost everything but faith. Now Luther declared it was by faith alone.

One might perhaps ask, Why all this ado about one man preaching this truth. Why? The reason is that it entirely destroyed their system. If justification is by faith in Christ, there was no need of indulgences; and if there was no need of indulgences, there was no money coming for them. Besides it told in another way. If scripture was the first and last appeal as to what is truth, then the pope lost his influence, for he must be judged by the scripture the same as any other man.

This will account for why Luther could not be permitted to go on. In a word, he must be put down and silenced, or the pope and the whole system would be shaken to the foundation. Therefore De Vio must not give up the contest easily.

The Cardinal read Luther's reply, but told him that it was all in vain — he must retract.

Luther then shewed the Cardinal that even the constitution of pope Clement VI. did not say what the catholics said it did, and in which they boasted. But it was all to no purpose. The Cardinal only called out "Retract, retract."

Luther asked that his reply might be sent to the pope. This caused a moment's respite, when the Cardinal exclaimed, "Retract, or return no more."

Luther was struck with the words "return no more." He bowed and retired.

Peace filled his soul. By God's grace he had stood firm to the truth; he could leave results to God. Apart from this inward peace there was indeed enough to trouble him. All sorts of rumours were being reported to him, some declaring that if he did not retract he was to be seized and thrown into prison. But he trusted in God, and was at rest.

The Cardinal, on the other hand, was much disturbed. He saw no way out of the difficulty, and he was now sorry that he had not used milder means with Luther. So he sent off a messenger for Staupitz. "Try now," said De Vio to the Vicar-General, "to prevail upon your monk and induce him to retract. Really I am pleased with him on the whole, and he has no better friend than myself."

"I have already used my endeavours," said Staupitz, "and I will now again advise him humbly to submit to the church."

"You must give him," said De Vio, "proper answers from the scriptures."

"I must confess that that is beyond my power," replied Staupitz.

Staupitz then returned to Luther and begged him to make some concession.

"Refute the scripture I have brought forward," urged Luther.

"That is beyond my power," confessed Staupitz.

"Very well," replied Luther, "my conscience will not allow me to retract."

Luther then wrote to the Elector through Spalatin, "I have neither hope nor confidence in the Legate. I am resolved not to retract a single syllable."

He also wrote to Wittenberg, telling them the state of affairs; and stating how peaceful he felt amidst it all, feeling that his cause was that of "the faith of Jesus Christ, and of the grace of God," adding the memorable words, "I seem to feel that prayer is being made for me."

The Cardinal had promised to send to Luther in writing, stating definitely what he requested him to retract. As this did not arrive, Luther asked Dr. Link to visit the Cardinal. He did so, and found that the Cardinal had despatched Luther's answer to Rome by a swift messenger, and he was waiting the messenger's return.

These tidings filled the friends of Luther with alarm: they feared they would all be seized and imprisoned. Staupitz and Link left the town, and travelled by different routes, leaving poor Luther in the jaws of the lion as they feared.

The next day Luther did not hear from the Cardinal, so he wrote a humble letter to him, confessing that he had not conducted his case so meekly as he might have done. He asked that his cause might be submitted to the pope, for the church to decide what was to be retracted.

To this letter Luther received no reply, and his friends strongly urged Luther to draw up an appeal to the pope, and leave the town. For four days he had waited uselessly, he therefore resolved to write the Cardinal another letter, telling him that he should leave the place, reminding him of his orders to retract or not to appear in his presence again. This letter was not to be delivered to the Cardinal till after Luther had left. He also wrote an appeal to the pope which a friend promised to have posted up at the door of the Cathedral two or three days after his departure.

Thus all was prepared, and early before daybreak (being urged by his friends to use every precaution) he mounted a horse brought to the monastery without boots, spurs, or sword. Accompanied by a mounted guide, they proceeded in the dark through the city. An official, named Lange-mantel, had ordered one of the gates to be opened for them. They passed quietly through and were free. Once out of the city, they put spurs to their horses and were soon out of sight.

When the Cardinal heard of Luther's departure, he was greatly incensed. He had hoped to have brought the matter to some sort of a conclusion, but now all his expectations were banished. That Luther had thus escaped filled the Italians with rage. Such a thing as a monk being brought before a prince of the church, and not being humbled, or condemned, had never before been heard of. The Roman Catholic church was powerful in those days; but God and His truth were more powerful. This fact they had not yet learned.

To buy the truth and sell it not,

Is God's own word to us;

He freely sells, and sells to all,

Though empty be their purse.

Come buy the wine and milk, He says,

Without a price or cost:

Why buy ye that which is not bread,

By which your toil is lost?

Yet truth God gives, for it is far

Too precious to be bought:

It cost our Lord His life, and now

To us with life is fraught.

Then let us keep it — sell it not,

It is of heavenly birth:

To Him we owe our lives, ourselves,

And all we have of worth.

Chapter 11.

Luther and Miltitz — A.D. 1518.

Luther on his journey home saw a copy of the brief of the pope to the Cardinal in which he saw that he was already judged by Rome and condemned; and that the Cardinal had orders, unless Luther recanted, to seize and carry him to Rome. He was naturally filled with indignation, and he saw at once the great danger he had run. It was indeed God who had protected him.

The Cardinal next wrote to the Elector, giving his version of the conference, and requesting the Elector to send Luther to Rome, or at least to banish him from his dominions.

The Elector sent this letter on to Luther. It filled him with the utmost indignation. He was to be condemned without being proved to be wrong.

To know this was necessary for Luther, and was blessed of God. He had fondly hoped that when errors had been pointed out, the rulers of the church would have rejected them. He had yet to learn that they deliberately chose error and rejected the truth. Luther had learnt a good portion of truth: he had yet to learn what the church of Rome was. This he was learning by degrees. This letter before him was to this end. He saw that at all cost he was to be condemned, right or wrong, to save the church.

This stirred up his spirit and revived his courage. He wrote to the Elector, begging him not to send him to Rome. To banishment he would go if the Elector wished it.

The Elector wrote to the Cardinal, and told him plainly that it was unreasonable to expect Luther would retract until he had been shewn to be wrong. He also declined to send him to Rome or to banish him from his dominions.

Luther proceeded to draw up a report of the conference, that all might judge how matters stood. He felt sure that things could not rest as they were. A storm would surely be raised, and it might burst on him at any moment; so he set his house in order, ready to depart into banishment at any time if that was his path. But he was full of courage. "Having tucked up my gown and girded up my loins," said he, "I am ready . . . . God is everywhere." His thoughts turned to France.

A storm was brewing, and Luther was given to understand from the Elector that he had better leave Wittenberg. He prepared to go, but previously he called around him all his friends to a farewell repast. They met, and were enjoying each other's friendship, when a letter was brought in haste to Luther. It was from the court, asking why he was so long in going. All were filled with dismay. They could speak but little: they sat and wept. Still he felt his path was now to leave, but whither could he go? "Commend my soul to Christ," said Luther to his friends. While still lost in deep concern and thoughtfulness another letter was brought. He need not go. There was a new envoy from the pope, and he hoped all could be arranged.

Luther now published the report of the conference at Augsburg. The Elector had sent to ask him not to issue it, but the request came too late. Luther summed it up thus: "What a new, what an amazing crime to seek after light and truth!" This was judged to be a crime in those days; for the Catholic church would best flourish in error and darkness.

Luther saw clearly that nothing was to be gained from the pope, and instead of the matter being soon settled, he foresaw that the battle between truth and error had not more than begun; so, though he still styled the pope "God's Vicar on earth," he formally appealed from the decision of the pope to a general council of the church. This was on November 28, 1518. The matter must no longer remain a question between Luther and the pope; but the whole Catholic church must have the truth presented to it, and choose either that or error.

The pope however would not quietly let the settling of the question slip out of his own hands, so he despatched a new representative to Germany, who was to try and bring Luther to terms, or he was to bring him to Rome. For this latter purpose he was furnished with seventy "Bulls"* to post up in the various towns he passed through, so as to overcome all and prevent any from taking Luther's part. This new Legate was Miltitz, chamberlain to the pope, and canon of Mayence. Being a Saxon by birth, great hopes were placed in him to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. How little they understood that between truth and error — between light and darkness — there could be no agreement and no fellowship.

{*" Bull" is from the Italian bolla, a bubble, blister, seal, or stamp; or from the French bulle, Latin bulla, a boss and ornament on the neck. This name was given to the seal appended to the edicts or briefs of the pope, and in process of time was applied to the brief itself.}

Miltitz laid his plans discreetly. He heard such complaints against Tetzel that he summoned him into his presence; but the poor fellow (who had for some time been obliged to give up his traffic in indulgences) was afraid to come, though he made as an excuse that he was afraid of the adherents of Luther.

Miltitz hastened to have an interview with Luther; and by soft speeches they were enabled to draw up a paper, agreeing to:

1. Both sides were to be silent on the subjects in dispute.

2. A bishop was to investigate the matter, to point out the errors to Luther, who promised to retract them, and never more do anything to "lessen the honour or authority of the holy Roman church."

As we said before, Luther had received a large measure of truth but he had yet to learn what that church was to which he was attached. This he had not yet learned, or he never would have signed any such paper as that. As yet he was the servant of Rome.

Miltitz was delighted at his success, he invited Luther to a repast, where he appeared very friendly, and he kissed Luther at parting. Luther feared lest it might be "a Judas' kiss."

After all there was no real progress made in the matter. A bishop was to convince Luther; and if so, Luther was to retract. The battle had not yet been fought; it was only postponed.

Miltitz then proceeded to Leipsic, where he summoned Tetzel before him, and severely rebuked him, declaring that he had been the cause of all the evil. Thus the poor wretch who had served the church so zealously was now condemned. It was also proved that he had robbed the church of large sums of money; and in thorough disgrace he died in misery shortly afterwards.

Just about this time the Emperor Maximilian died, and the Elector of Saxony took the management of affairs until a new emperor could be appointed. This turned the current of events. The pope must now be friendly to the Elector, in the hope that he would oppose the election of the king of Naples as emperor. And for the time being Luther must be let alone, rather than give offence to the Elector.

Luther now began to study the Decretals of the popes.* This was of value to him, because these decretals gave him great insight into the sayings and doings of the popes. He was surprised, grieved, and confounded at what he read; and at length was obliged to ask himself if the pope were not Antichrist or at least his apostle.

{* This is a collection of the decrees of the various popes: it forms a part of the canon law of the Romish church.}

Miltitz discovered that he had not really obtained any victory over Luther, and he therefore laid a plan to decoy him into the states of the Archbishop of Treves under the pretence of the Archbishop's investigating his cause. Here he would be away from the control of the Elector Frederick, and could be dealt with as they thought proper.

Luther wisely declined to go, giving various reasons, without positively refusing. Just at this juncture Miltitz and De Vio repaired to Frederick, and announced to him that "the Golden Rose"* had arrived, a present from the pope to himself; which they hoped would be a favourable time to influence Frederick against Luther. But Frederick had now supreme power, and cared but little for the pope or his nuncios. The Archbishop too had reasons for not offending Frederick, and therefore he did not press his request; and so they agreed to let the matter rest until the next Diet.

{* "The Golden Rose" was deemed to represent the body of Jesus Christ. One was consecrated each year by the pope, and was given to one of the leading princes or rulers of the countries attached to the Roman Catholic religion. It was considered a great favour to receive one.}

While they waited for the Diet, the truth was rapidly spreading. Luther's writings were printed and reprinted and sold by thousands over England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and Spain. At this time there were but very few Bibles and Testaments, and people knew but little of their contents except what was read in the churches, and what was told them by the priests. Those were indeed days of darkness and error; and in every place where the writings of Luther came they were hailed with delight. Though not faultless in many respects, yet they contained a great deal of truth — and especially that truth, that great truth, that sinful man was to be justified by faith — simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and not by works and penances.

Chapter 12.

Luther and Dr. Eck — A.D. 1519.

The light and truth was to spread by other means. Dr. Eck took up the controversy at first with Carlstadt, and then with Luther. Both sides had agreed to be silent. Whether Luther was right in promising this is questionable — however he had promised it; but he was to be released from his promise by one of the pope's friends commencing the contest.

Another question was now taken up — a much more delicate one to handle without giving offence. It was no longer the right or wrong of indulgences — it was the power and authority of the pope himself. The Elector was in alarm and indeed all his court; for they could but see it was like stirring up a hornet's nest. Luther was calm and bold. He knew it was God's cause; and it must go on.

It was arranged for a public discussion to be held at Leipsic between Eck and Carlstadt. Leipsic is situated in the dominions of Duke George. Luther wrote to the duke, begging permission to be present and to take part in the discussion. This request the duke would not grant. He might be present as a spectator, but he must be silent.

The bishop of the diocese was in great alarm that such a question should be discussed in public, and he entreated the duke not to allow it. But the duke's answer was very cutting: "I am surprised to find a bishop holding in abhorrence the ancient and laudable custom of our fathers to inquire into doubtful questions in matters of faith. If your theologians object to defend their doctrines, the money given them would be better disposed in maintaining old women and children who at least might sew and sing."

Great commotion was caused at Leipsic by the arrival of those who were to take part in the discussion; and the more the theologians tried to stop the discussion, so much the more interest was taken in it by many. The students also were eager for it, already forming themselves into two parties; some for Carlstadt, and some for Eck.

No sooner did Eck learn that Luther had arrived than he hastened to him and said, "What is this? I am told you object to dispute with me." Luther told him the duke forbade him. Eck disdained to dispute with Carlstadt; he wanted a more noted champion, for he felt sure of victory. So he hastened off to the duke and begged him to give his permission for Luther to discuss with him. He assured the duke there was nothing to fear; he was sure of victory. The duke consented.

The first question was "Man's will previous to his conversion." It was between Eck and Carlstadt. The question really was this — Was man entirely lost in his condition and dead towards God?

At length Luther had to enter the lists against Eck, and, as we have said, the question was the supremacy of the pope.

Eck's first assertion was that the church must have a head.

Luther assented, but insisted that that head was Christ, and not the pope.

Eck then appealed to the Fathers; they had supported the pope.

Luther went farther back, and the Fathers then said all had equal rank. The Council of Africa had also said the same.

Eck quoted the passage, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." (Matt. xvi. 18.) St. Augustine had said that the rock was Peter, and the pope was his successor.

Luther shewed that Augustine had also said, and many times, that the rock was Christ. But he had higher authority than Augustine. Scripture said, "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." (1 Cor. iii. 11.) Peter himself calls Christ the chief corner stone and living rock, on which we are built up a spiritual house. (1 Peter ii. 4, 5.)

Eck was beaten, but not abashed. He resorted to the artful stratagem of alluding to Huss and the Bohemians. Did Luther hold with them?

Luther admitted that the Bohemians in separating "from unity with us" had done wrong. But he was soon sorry for what he had said; for Huss and the Bohemians were right on many points and held the same truths as Luther did.

When they next met, Luther at once eased his conscience by admitting that Huss and Wiclif had held some points of truth.

No sooner had he said this than nearly the whole hall was in a commotion. Were such arch-heretics as Huss and Wiclif* to be named with approbation in their hearing? The duke, in excitement, exclaimed "He is mad," and from that time he became the enemy of Luther and his work.

{* Wiclif was principal of Balliol College, Oxford. He declared the Romish church to be in error. He died 1387, but his remains were burnt by order of the council of Constance. Huss was a Bohemian reformer. He had a safe-conduct from the Emperor, but was seized notwithstanding. He was condemned by the same council and burnt alive in 1415.}

When the commotion had subsided, Luther maintained that the Greek church was as much a church as the church of Rome, and yet it had never acknowledged the church of Rome as being in any way superior to itself, nor that the pope was the head of the church.

Eck maintained that they were heretics because separated from the Roman church.

Luther maintained that the Roman pontiffs could not make articles of faith, as they had done. The scripture was the only authority for the Christian.

The discussion on the supremacy of the pope lasted five days. Then followed "Purgatory."* Luther up to this time admitted the doctrine of purgatory, but not exactly as his opponents did. It was by degrees Luther advanced in truth.

{* The doctrine of Purgatory, as held by the Roman Catholics, is that there is a place "in which the souls of just men are cleansed by a temporary punishment in order to be admitted into their eternal country, into which nothing defiled entereth." This is a doctrine entirely opposed to many clear statements of scripture. Notice, it says that Purgatory is for just men: scripture says of such "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John i. 7.) The Father "hath made us meet [fit] to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light." (Col. i. 12.)}

The question of indulgences came next. These Eck could not uphold. Other minor questions followed. Luther closed the discussion by extolling the scripture as the chief authority.

After this Carlstadt and Eck discussed for two days on the merits of man in good works.

The whole discussion had lasted twenty days. Doubtless both thought they had the victory. This was not the question of most importance. What was so striking was that for so many days learned and devout men could stand up and say so much against what the mass of people held to be impregnable. Against the church of Rome had been hurled not simply arguments and words, but facts had been elicited. The Roman Catholic church had professed to be universal, but Luther had shewn that the Greek church contained its thousands who never belonged to the Romish church; while against its assumption of supremacy had been quoted Fathers, and Councils, and above all, scripture. Decided fruits resulted from the discussion.

It was blessed too to Melanchthon. He now devoted his talents and energies more entirely to the scriptures. It was blessed also to Luther. He read the writings of John Huss, and found that Huss had held the very truths that he held and which he found to be the same that were taught by Paul and the other apostles. But in proportion as the light broke in, it shewed him the evil of that church to which he was attached, and the more was he in spirit separated from it.

Luther now having comparative repose, published his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He was anxious that the truth he had learned should be known by others. "Christ has given Himself for our sins," said Luther. Man was so bad that nothing less than such a sacrifice could avail; and with this, what need is there of all beside, or of all that pretends to add to this?

Luther was next occupied with the Lord's supper. The Roman church gave to the people the bread only, declaring that the body and blood of Christ were both present in the bread. The priests took the wine. Luther saw that the people should have "both kinds" as it was called, that is, the bread and the wine. He also saw that there must be faith in the one who received the supper. The true nature of the Lord's Supper Luther himself had not yet learned.

Dr. Eck was attacked not only by Luther but by others, until he was driven to desperation, and he determined to do all in his power to crush his opponent. For this purpose he set out for Rome. He would stir up the pope to take action against Luther and all who supported him. Luther foresaw that a storm would be raised, but he went on quietly with his work, trusting in his heavenly Father. "I commit everything to God," said he, "and give up my bark to the winds and waves."

Chapter 13.

Luther and the Roman Bull — A.D. 1520.

As the reader has been informed, the Emperor Maximilian was dead, and the Elector Frederick had held supreme sway until a new Emperor should be chosen. The time had now come for the election.

There were three candidates. 1. Charles, King of Spain, Naples and Sicily, besides holding Flanders and Burgundy. He was the grandson of Maximilian, and his age was about nineteen. 2. Francis I., King of France. 3. Henry VIII. King of England. There were objections to all three. Charles was already too powerful, and Francis and Henry were foreigners. It was then proposed that Frederick himself should be Emperor. This however Frederick declined. The Turks were threatening Germany, and Frederick thought a more powerful prince was needed than himself. He proposed Charles, and Charles was elected. This was the Emperor who would be called upon to crush Luther.

But while Eck was stirring up Rome, others were also doing all they could to further the object of Eck. Two Universities (Cologne and Louvain) condemned certain of Luther's writings; while others hunted for his life, declaring openly that to kill Luther would be no sin; and it is reported that one day Luther was approached by a stranger, having a weapon concealed in his sleeve. He asked Luther why he went about alone. "I am in the hands of God," said Luther, "He is my strength and shield. What can man do unto me?" The stranger turned pale and hurried away. Thus did God protect His servant.

The Elector of Saxony had a representative at Rome, who wrote to say, "I can get no hearing on account of the protection you grant to Luther." The Elector was not frightened, but returned a bold answer. "The doctrine of Luther," said he, "has taken deep root in many hearts. If, instead of refuting it by the testimony of the Bible, attempts are made to crush it by the thunders of the church, great offence will be occasioned, and terrible and dangerous rebellions will be excited."

Luther's eyes were becoming opened to the very great and deadly evils to which he was attached, and he saw that it would be wrong to say "Peace, peace," so as to let such evil reign. No, he must continue the conflict with renewed energy, "I despise alike the rage and the favour of Rome," said he. "Away with reconciliation! I desire never more to have any communication with her. Let her condemn — let her burn my writings. In my turn, I will condemn and publicly burn the canon law, that nest of all heresies."

Luther had gained many friends among those in authority and power, who now and again sent words of encouragement to him, offering to take up arms in his favour should it be needed. Luther's reply was, "I will depend on none but Christ alone."

Luther now published his book on "Good Works." It was necessary to set his hearers right on this point. It had been insisted that to preach faith was to discourage good works. No, said Luther, "the first, the noblest, and the greatest of all works is faith in Jesus Christ. From this work all others must flow. . . . A Christian who has faith in God does all with liberty and joy; while that man who is not at one with God is full of cares and under bondage. . . . Faith comes from Jesus Christ alone, promised and freely given."

Luther next published his "Appeal to his Imperial Majesty and the christian nobility of the German nation concerning the Reformation of Christianity." In this book he was very bold. "It is against the power of hell we have to contend in this struggle. We must set about the work, hoping nothing from the strength of our own arms, and depending humbly on the Lord." He then went on to shew the error of dividing Christians into "clergy" and "laity" — the "spiritual" and the "temporal." The pope could not make any man a spiritual man; and every Christian was a priest in God's sight, though all had not the same work to do.

He next proved that it was wrong for the priests not to be subject to the magistrates if they did wrong, quoting the passage from Romans xiii. 1 "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers."

All this was new doctrine — no, not new but recovered truth. In the church of Rome the pope was above kings; and if a king disobeyed him he would incite the people to oppose their king. The priests could behave as badly as they pleased, and no magistrate was allowed to touch them. Magistrates must report them to the higher clergy, as they were called, who punished the guilty priests as they thought proper; or if not the priests went without punishment. Luther shewed from scripture that this was quite wrong.

Luther proceeded further in this book to shew how the style and outward grandeur of the pope was entirely different from the condition of our Lord and of His apostles at the beginning. And to keep up this costly pomp Germany was being impoverished. In a multitude of ways the riches of Germany were being drawn away to support the pope. Luther could no longer call him pious or most holy; but "most sinning."

He proceeded to the subject of marriage. It is a rule of the Roman church that the priests must not marry. Luther quoted 1 Timothy iii. 2: Let the bishop be "the husband of one wife."

From this Luther proceeded to speak of other abuses, and called aloud that they should be remedied.

Never had the Germans read such a book. It was at once lifting the veil and shewing Rome in its true colours. Would the people of Germany continue to be the slaves of such a power?

Many in Germany answered to the appeal with an emphatic "No!"

Though the book was addressed to the christian nobility of Germany, it touched on many subjects in which all Germans were interested. This attached many to the Reformation who were not Christians, and the Reformation became political as well as christian, which afterwards bore evil fruit.

In the meantime Dr. Eck was at Rome, using all his energies to arouse her to action. The pope — Leo X. — was too fond of luxury and amusement to wish to be troubled; but the clergy, stirred up by Dr. Eck, clamoured until Leo felt compelled to listen, and after due deliberation a solemn Bull was issued against Luther.

A search was to be made everywhere for his writings, which were to be solemnly burnt in the presence of the clergy. Luther was at once to cease preaching, teaching and writing, and was himself to commit his writings to the flames. He had sixty days allowed him to retract, attested by two witnesses. Failing this, he was, with all his adherents, to be seized and sent to Rome.

Dr. Eck was the bearer of the papal Bull; but before he published it against Luther, Miltitz again sought to bring about a reconciliation, and for this purpose had a meeting with Luther at Lichtenberg.* There were as many as thirty who went with the Reformer, for they were sorely afraid that it was all a plot to get him into their clutches.

{* A town in Bavaria, in the district of Upper Franconia.}

The result arrived at was that Luther promised to keep silence for the future if his adversaries would do the same. How he could have promised to do this, believing as he did that he was doing God's work, is difficult to conceive. He might have quoted the memorable answer of Peter and the other apostles in Acts v. 29, "We ought to obey God rather than men."

Luther wrote again to the pope, still styling him "The Most Holy Father in God" though in his books he had styled him "most sinning." He told the pope plainly that the corruption of the court of Rome was "greater than that of Sodom or Gomorrah . . . . You know that Rome has inundated the world with everything destructive to soul and body. . . . There is no hope for Rome . . . . I tell you the truth because I wish you well." "Far from having conceived any evil design against you, I wish you the most precious blessings for all eternity." "I entreat you to restrain if possible the enemies of peace. But I cannot retract my doctrines. I cannot consent that rules of interpretation should be imposed on holy scripture. The word of God, the source of all liberty, flows, must be left free."

With this letter Luther presented the pope a little book, "The Liberty of the Christian." In this book Luther said "Faith unites the soul with Christ as a spouse with her husband. . . . . Everything which Christ has becomes the property of the believing soul." On the other hand, "From faith flows the love of God; from love flows a life of liberty, charity, and joy."

In the meantime Eck was hastening to Germany with the fatal Bull. But Rome had made a great mistake in choosing such a messenger. On the one hand many saw in it a production more of Dr. Eck than of the pope. Had not Dr. Eck been at Rome begging and praying for this? it was really his opposition to Luther; while, on the other hand, the clergy were offended in receiving the Bull from the hands of merely a scholar, and not, as usual, from some high dignitary of the church, and they were in no hurry to publish it.

Eck delivered his copies as he went along, and made his way to Leipsic, where it will be remembered he had disputed with Luther. But since then the truth had spread in that city, and the students, on hearing of the arrival of Dr. Eck, posted about the streets attacks upon him. They also made up a ballad ridiculing him, and went about the streets singing it. Threatening letters also reached him, so that he was glad to take refuge in a monastery from which he stole away by night.

At Erfurt the students tore up the copies of the Bull and threw them into the river, saying since it is a bubble, let us see it float." When Luther heard of this he said, "The paper of the Bull is truly a bubble."* Eck did not venture to come to Wittenberg, but sent the Bull to the prior; but the prior said that as he did not receive a letter from the pope he should not publish it.

{*For explanation of this, see the footnote in chapter 11.}

Just at this time an advocate for Luther appeared in the person of Ulric Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer. He was unknown to Luther but he had read his works, and he appealed to the pope, begging him to pause in his rupture with Luther, and begging him to submit the subject to just and impartial men — naming the Emperor Charles, the King of England, and the King of Hungary. This appeal was not listened to. The course of events rolled on.

Luther received the Bull condemning him. "It is Christ," said he, "who is therein condemned. I am cited to appear, not that I may be heard, but that I may recant. . . . Already I feel in my heart more liberty; for I now know that the pope is Antichrist, and that his chair is that of Satan." He proceeded to publish a tract "Against the Bull of Antichrist;"* in which he says "For aught I care, let them destroy my books. I desire nothing better; for all I wanted was to lead Christians to the Bible that they might afterwards throw away my writings. Great God, if we had but a right understanding of the holy scriptures what need would there be of my books? . . . . My strength and my consolation are in a place where neither men nor devils can ever reach them." That was in Christ in heaven.

{* Luther, with others, did not distinguish between being an antichrist, and the Antichrist. Rome was the former, and not the latter.}

In some places the Bull had effect. At Ingoldstadt the booksellers' shops were searched and all Luther's books were carried off. In some of the states of the Emperor, Luther's books were consumed on scaffolds erected for the purpose with great ceremony, to strike terror into the people.

In the Low Countries Margaret governed. "Who is this Luther?" asked she. "An ignorant monk," was the reply. "Do you, who are learned and so many, write against him? The world will surely believe a company of learned men rather than a single monk of no learning." But those learned men of Louvain raised an immense pile of wood to burn the writings of the ignorant monk, and numbers hastened to the spot, carrying their books, and cast them into the flames. The popish party were delighted, but afterwards found out that many of the books burnt were not Luther's but scholastic and popish books.

The count of Nassau, viceroy of Holland, was solicited to permit the burning of Luther's books; but he said, "Go and preach the gospel as purely as Luther, and you will have no reason to complain of any one." Thus was it proved how Luther's books had spread, and how the truth he taught had taken root in some even of the noble and the great.

But Luther proceeded to act. On the 17th of November he assembled a notary and five witnesses at the convent, and he then and there solemnly appealed from the pope to a general christian council. "He charges the pope with many and grave sins." And he calls upon the Emperor, the Electors, princes, counts, barons, etc., etc., to unite with him "to resist the anti-christian proceedings of the pope." This was soon printed and scattered over Germany, and found its way far beyond. Here again we see the movement was becoming political as well as Christian. Luther appealed to the heads of the states to resist the pope, irrespective of their being Christians themselves.

On the 10th of December bills were posted on the walls of the University, asking the people to come to the East Gate at nine o'clock. As the hour approached, professors, tradesmen, and students were seen wending their way to that spot. A pile of wood had been made which was soon set on fire, and as it blazed Luther stood forward and cast into the flames the "canon law," the “Decretals of the popes," the "Clementines," the "Extravagances," — some of Eck's and Emser's writings, and above all, the pope's Bull, exclaiming aloud, "Since thou hast afflicted the Lord's Holy One, may fire unquenchable afflict and consume thee!"

Luther referred here to the Bull, and not to the pope; but such an act as this we believe to be unworthy of Luther and the Lord for whom he fought. We are told that "We do not war after the flesh: for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds." (2 Cor. x. 3, 4.) This act partook too much of the character of warring after the flesh. They had burnt his writings: he in return would burn theirs.

One thing was now clear and certain, Luther was separated from the pope and the papal church! There was no retreat now; he must proceed and conquer, or die!

The next day Luther proceeded with his lectures on the Psalms. The hall was more than usually crowded. After his lecture he proceeded to speak of what he had done, and solemnly to warn his hearers against adhering to the doctrines of Rome. "As long as my life shall last," said he, "I for my part will never cease to warn my brethren of the wound and plague of Babylon; lest any of those who now walk with us should slide back like the rest into the pit of hell." By Babylon he of course meant Rome. People had shuddered when they saw him burn the Bull; but they were strengthened when they heard his preaching.

Luther's boldness encouraged others. Carlstadt raised his voice; and Melanchthon raised his. Timid as he was, he surpassed himself in appealing to the rulers of the land.

Luther now had a strong conviction that God had really chosen him to do a special work for Him. "Who knows," said he, "whether God has not called and chosen me for this very purpose, and whether they who despise me have not reason to fear lest they be found despisers of God Himself?" Bold language, but not too bold for any called of God to do any work for Him.

He was again charged with preaching novelties — new doctrines. He denied it. They were old doctrines, the doctrines of scripture; they had lain buried and unobserved for so long that men now called them new.

But while Luther was thus progressing in his work, all eyes were turned on Frederick, and all asked, Will he carry out the pope's Bull and expel Luther, or give him up to the pope? Just now Frederick was at Aix-la-Chapelle at the crowning of Charles. There was a large concourse of princes and nobles, and the pope had sent a special nuncio to present the Bull to the Emperor, and demand the crushing of Luther. The nuncio — by name Aleandro, a very learned man — proceeded to burn publicly Luther's books. He was told that this was no use. The doctrines taught by Luther were in people's hearts, deeply rooted; they did not exist in books only. No matter, he would burn the books and strike terror into the people.

He next appealed to the Emperor to condemn Luther. The Emperor drew back: he pleaded he had only just been elected, and without consulting the Elector and his own councillors he could not strike a blow at a section of the nation so numerous as this had now become.

The nuncio hastened off to Frederick, the oldest of the Electors, and demanded the punishment of Luther, or for him to be delivered up to the pope. Frederick said it was too important a matter to be hastily decided. He would communicate with the nuncio in writing.

This was an important crisis with the Elector. Would he give up Luther, or would he deny Rome? Luther saw that the work he was engaged in did not rest upon the power of princes, though they could greatly help or hinder the work. "It is not," said he, "to princes or pontiffs that the task is assigned of defending God's word. Enough for them if they can themselves escape the judgments of the Lord and His Anointed."

Frederick, on due consideration, told the nuncio that Luther's writings had not yet been refuted or shewn to be fit only for the flames; he demanded therefore that Luther should be furnished with a safe-conduct and permitted to answer for himself before a tribunal composed of learned, pious, and impartial judges.

It was in vain to appeal to the Emperor. Charles clearly saw that the cause of Luther might be of great use to him. If he wanted to please the pope he could shew zeal against Luther; but if the pope did not please the emperor, he would let Luther alone. Anyhow he had nothing to lose; he would use Luther as a tool to work out his own ends. But God was above all this merely human policy. He had work for Luther yet to do, and he would protect His servant till the work was done.

In the meantime the work progressed. Though the plague was raging at Wittenberg, new students were constantly arriving. Between five and six hundred daily listened to the truth as taught by Luther and Melanchthon.

Luther's works were also reprinted and circulated all over Germany by colporteurs. And this was done notwithstanding the orders of the pope that everywhere they were to be burnt. It is clear that the pope was losing his power over Germany; and in proportion to this the truths of the gospel were spread abroad and were read.

Chapter 14.

The Diet at Worms — A.D. 1521.

The question as to the toleration or condemnation of Luther had not been settled — it had only been postponed. At the Diet of Worms* held in January, this was one of the subjects to be settled.

{* Worms is a city of Hesse Darmstadt in the province of Rheinhessen, on the left bank of the Rhine, a few hundred yards from the river, and twenty-six miles from Mentz.}

The Emperor was sadly perplexed. He was indebted to the Elector Frederick for his crown, how could he offend him? On the other hand, Aleandro and his friends were constantly soliciting the Emperor to put into execution the pope's Bull. At length Frederick resolved to have Luther summoned to Worms and there he was to be heard in defence of his doctrines in presence of those who could discuss the points with him. The Emperor guaranteed that no violence should be done to Luther.

The Elector and Luther's friends generally were filled with fear and forebodings. They knew too well the stratagems of Rome to entrap its victims, and they feared that Luther would never quit Worms alive. Luther, on the other hand, never wavered; he took it as a voice from God, and go he would, if he was carried on a litter, for at the time he was but very weak.

But the Elector had written to the Emperor begging that he might be excused from bringing Luther with him. He feared that Luther's burning the pope's Bull would excite the pope's friends too much and endanger Luther's safety. On the other hand, Aleandro and his friends were in the greatest alarm. In travelling to Worms he had seen too well how public opinion was in Luther's favour, and he feared the Reformer's presence in Worms would only increase his popularity. Besides, he repudiated the thought that it was competent for any one to re-open and discuss questions already settled by Rome. It must not be. The result was that the Emperor wrote to the Elector, telling him to leave Luther at Wittenberg. His sixty days' grace had already expired, and he must bear the consequence of not retracting.

Luther alone was vexed at the decision. But matters progressed notwithstanding. The condemnation of Luther was urged again and again; but the Emperor and princes were all very slow in taking it up. Many saw that it would serve their purpose better to let it lie an open question. Aleandro was alarmed, and wrote off to Rome to try and arouse it from its apparent sleep. "Germany is falling away from Rome," wrote he; "Money, money, or Germany is lost!"

Rome arose and issued another Bull, condemning Luther unconditionally and positively, and all his adherents. The former Bull had a condition — if Luther did not recant — the time was now past, and he was EX-COM-MU-NI-CA-TED from the church of Rome by the pope himself. Thus the last tie was broken — Luther was free, free to be killed by any one, and despoiled of all his goods!

Thus assailed, Luther turned to Christ. "It is a glorious thing," said he, "that we sinners believing in Christ and feeding on His flesh, should have Him dwelling in us in all His power, His wisdom, and His righteousness; for it is written, 'Whoever believeth in me, in him I abide.' O wonderful abode! marvellous tabernacle, how far excelling that set up by Moses! . . . Often does the Christian stumble, and in his outward aspect all is weakness and reproach. But . . . a power lies hid which the world cannot know, and which yet must overcome the world, for Christ abideth in him."

Luther, having heard that it was in contemplation to call him to Worms, wrote to the Elector the following letter, worded so that he could communicate it to the princes, or to the Diet, with the hope of removing any wrong impressions they might have either of himself or of his work:

"I rejoice with all my heart, most serene Prince, that his Imperial Majesty is disposed to have this affair brought before him. I call Christ to witness that it is the cause of the German nation, of the Catholic church, of the Christian world, of God Himself, not the cause of a solitary, humble individual. I am ready to repair to Worms, provided only that a safe-conduct, and learned, pious, and impartial judges be allowed me. I am ready to answer for myself; for it is not in the spirit of recklessness, not for the sake of worldly profit, that I have taught the doctrine which is laid to my charge; I have taught it in obedience to my conscience and to my oath as a Doctor of the Holy Scriptures; for God's glory have I taught it, for the salvation of the christian church, for the good of the German people, for the rooting out of gross superstition and grievous abuses, the cure of innumerable evils, the wiping away of foul disgrace, the overthrow of tyranny, blasphemy, and impiety in countless forms."

In the meantime Aleandro had received the money he asked from Rome, and was now busy scattering it right and left wherever he thought influence was to be bought for the pope against Luther. Every day was the Emperor solicited and teased to condemn Luther; but he and his councillors still saw that it would suit their purpose better not to settle anything on the subject. At last the Emperor told Aleandro that he must appear before the Diet and convince the Diet that it was their duty to condemn Luther. This Aleandro undertook to do.

On the 13th of February, Aleandro stood before the Diet, and for three hours he argued and protested that Luther should be condemned. His charges against Luther were, "He sins," said he, "against the dead, for he denies the existence of purgatory; he sins against heaven, for he says that he would not believe an angel sent from heaven; he sins against the church, for he maintains that all Christians are priests; he sins against the saints, for he treats their venerable writings with contempt; he sins against councils, for he calls the council of Constance an assembly of devils; he sins against the secular power, for he forbids the punishment of death to be inflicted on any one who has not committed a mortal sin." How strange! not a word that Luther had sinned against God or the scripture! Aleandro called loudly for his condemnation.

His discourse, which was eloquent, had a decided effect upon the audience. But strange to say in attacking Luther, Aleandro had also attacked many friends of the pope, who saw so plainly the abuses that had crept in, that they were loudly calling for reform. So that a few days after, Duke George of Saxony, who did not agree with Luther, stood up in the Diet and proceeded to rehearse a long catalogue of grievances against Rome, or rather against the Romish priests and clergy in Germany. Their conduct was shameful, while they sapped the country of its wealth. Money, money, was their cry — everywhere and always their cry was money. Duke George saw the evils; but he saw not the remedy as Luther did. The Duke thought that Rome could reform itself; Luther saw that the only remedy was to bring in the light and truth. But this soon convinced him that Rome could not be reformed: it must be abandoned.

The Diet nominated a committee to inquire into these abuses, and they drew up a list of one hundred and one. The Diet therefore now, altogether apart from Luther, demanded reform. This encouraged the friends of Luther, who now appealed to the Emperor that Luther should be heard in the Diet in defence of his doctrines. Aleandro and his friends did much to prevent it, but at length the Emperor decided to summon Luther to Worms.

At Wittenburg Luther's friends were alarmed when the summons arrived; but nothing could deter Luther. He would set out at once. Three of his friends accompanied him — Amsdorff, John Schurff, a professor of law, and Peter Suaven, a young Danish student. His parting with Melanchthon was touching. "If I never return," said he, "and my enemies should take my life, cease not, dear brother, to teach and stand fast in the truth." Then committing his soul to Him who is faithful, Luther stepped into his conveyance and left Wittenberg. As he left them, many could not stay their tears. They too committed him to God. The eyes of Germany were on this man going to Worms; their hearts beat, and they wondered how it would all end.

Various were the rebuffs Luther met with on the road, but he attributed them to Satan's efforts to stop his going. At Naumburg he saw the messengers of the Emperor busy posting up bills ordering all persons to bring the writings of Luther to the magistrates. The imperial herald who conducted Luther asked him whether after such a sight he would go any further. "Yes," said Luther; "though I should be put under interdict in every town, I will go on."

At Weimar he met Duke John, brother to the Elector, who gave him money for his journey. From Weimar he went to Erfurt. He had written to Lange telling him of his journey: but as Luther approached the town he saw a troop of horsemen, but could not tell whether they were friends or foes. They turned out to be friends, come out to welcome him, and a larger crowd met him nearer the town. From Erfurt another joined the party. It was Jonas, a student of law, but a disciple of Christ, and afterwards a zealous preacher. Luther was received with joy and preached in the church.

In some places Luther's journey resembled a triumph; but the entrance of our Lord into Jerusalem, and what followed, was forcibly brought to his mind, and he knew not how it would fare with himself.

Of warnings he had plenty. "There are so many cardinals and bishops at Worms," said the people; "do return. They will burn you as they did Huss." Luther replied, "If they light a fire which would burn from Wittenberg to Worms, and even to the sky, I would pass through it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and confess Him my Saviour."

One day an imperial officer, dispersing the crowd, approached Luther and said, "Are you the man who has undertaken to reform popery? How will you manage it?" "Yes," answered Luther, "I am that man. I am depending on the Almighty God, whose word and commandment I have." The officer, moved, said, "Dear friend, you have told me something in that. I am one of Charles's servants, but your Master is greater than mine. He will help you."

Luther passed on. At Eisenach he was taken ill and was bled, but was better in the morning and went on. At various places he was over and over again told he would never escape; but nothing daunted or stopped him.

As he approached Worms the friends of the pope laid a plot to draw him aside for a few days (under the plea of settling matters by consultation), so that the time of his safe-conduct should expire, and then they could seize him. They told Bucer, Luther's friend, that if Luther entered Worms it would be all over with him; and Bucer hastened off to meet him. But Luther was not to be led astray. He said he was going to Worms, and if any wanted to see him, they must see him there. Spalatin himself began to be alarmed at the threats he heard, and he too, from a good motive, sent a message, begging him not to enter Worms, when Luther made use of that memorable sentence, "Though there should be as many devils at Worms as there are tiles on its roofs, I would enter it."

Some of the friends of the Elector went out to meet him, and a crowd waited at the gates of the city. It was with difficulty he could be brought to his lodging, so anxious were the people to see the man who had not been crushed by a pope's Bull, a thing never before heard of. After a few hours' rest, counts, barons, knights, etc., flocked in to see him.

He was summoned to appear the next day at four o'clock. At the hour the imperial herald went to fetch him; but the crowds were so dense that they could not proceed. The herald was compelled to take him through some private houses and gardens, and thus to reach the Diet. People even went on to the roofs of the houses to catch a glance of Luther. When they reached the building again they met crowds, and it was with great difficulty a passage could be forced. As he approached the door a valiant knight, George Frundsberg, said to him, "My poor monk, my poor monk, thou hast a march and a struggle to go through, such as neither I nor many other captains have seen the like in our most bloody battles. But if thy cause be just, and thou art sure of it, go forward in God's name, and fear nothing! He will not forsake thee." Encouraging words to one who needed them.

It was an august assembly. An Emperor, an Archduke, six Electors, twenty-four dukes, eight margraves, with a number of archbishops, bishops and prelates — in all, two hundred persons. Luther seemed over-awed at first; but a prince whispered, "Fear not them who are able to kill the body, and cannot destroy the soul." Another said, "When you are brought before kings it shall be given to you by the Spirit of your Father what you shall say."

Luther was conducted to a spot opposite the Emperor. A table was near, on which was a pile of Luther's books.

"Do you acknowledge these writings to have been composed by you?" was demanded of Luther.

Also "Are you prepared to retract these works, and the propositions contained therein, or do you persist in what you have therein advanced?"

Luther replied, "I acknowledge the books, the names of which have been read, to be of my writing; I cannot deny them." As to the second question he asked for time to reply. He was allowed till the next day.

On the next day Luther passed through deep exercise of soul. It seemed to him as though God had hidden His face from him; and yet he could say, "My soul is Thine. Yes, I have Thine own word for it. My soul belongs to Thee, and will abide with Thee for ever! Amen. O God, send help."

His courage revived, but the moment was really serious. "God or Caesar?" said he. "I said No to Tetzel; I said No to the Roman legate at Augsburg; I said No to the doctors in the hall at Leipsic; I have said No to the pope and have burnt his Bull. I have yet to say NO to the Emperor."

Again at four o'clock the heralds arrived and Luther was brought to the Diet. Once more he stood before the Emperor, and was told to answer the questions asked him yesterday. To the first he had already admitted that the books were his. To the second question, he said that he had written many books, some of which even his adversaries had found no fault with — these he could not retract. If he did so, he should be retracting that which all held to be truth.

Again, he said he had written some works against popery, exposing its evil doctrines and its wickedness. He could not retract these, or he should be strengthening the evil.

In the third place he had written books against individuals who had undertaken to defend Rome. He admitted that he might have used too much violence in his attacks; but he could not retract these, without sanctioning the impieties of his opponents.

As to the whole he said, "If I have spoken evil bear witness against me . . . . I implore you by the mercies of God to prove to me by the writings of the prophets and apostles that I am in error. As soon as I shall be convinced I will instantly retract all my errors, and will myself be the first to seize my writings and commit them to the flames." Closing with the words, "I beseech you with all humility not to permit the hatred of my enemies to rain upon me an indignation I have not deserved."

When he had done — he had spoken in German — he was requested to repeat it in Latin for those not well acquainted with German. This Luther did.

The Chancellor of Treves said he had not answered the question, "Will you, or will you not, retract?"

Luther said, "I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the councils, because it is as clear as noonday that they have often fallen into error, and even into glaring inconsistency with themselves. If then I am not convinced by proof from holy scripture . . . I neither can nor will retract anything. I stand here and can say no more. God help me. Amen."

"If you do not retract," said the Chancellor, "the Emperor, and the states of the Empire, will proceed to deal with an obstinate heretic."

"May God be my helper!" said Luther, "for I can retract nothing!" Luther withdrew from the Diet for them to deliberate. But he was again called in, and told he was not required to retract all his works. It was absurd to ask to be convinced by scripture: he was reviving what had already been condemned by the General Council of Constance. Would he retract any? Luther said he could give no other answer than he had already given. He could not retract.

It was late — all went to their homes. Two imperial officers conducted Luther. Some ran after him. "Are they leading you to prison?" they asked. "No," said Luther, "they take me to my hotel." All were excited, and wondered what would be the end of it.

When the reformer had entered his hotel the old duke Eric of Brunswick, previously an enemy to the reformer's doctrines, sent him a silver vase of Eimbeck beer to refresh him. Luther being thirsty, poured out some of the beer and drank it. "As this day Duke Eric has remembered me," said Luther, "may our Lord Jesus remember him in the hour of his last struggle." It is recorded that the duke on his death-bed called to remembrance the prayer of Luther, and he asked his page to bring the Bible and read to him. "The youth read the words of Christ, and the soul of the dying man took comfort."

For two or three days they discussed what was to be done with Luther. Just then the Emperor was desirous of pleasing the pope, and he therefore threatened Luther. Some advised that he should be at once seized in violation of the safe-conduct but even some of the friends of the pope exclaimed against anything so false. At last it was decided to give Luther three days, and any who liked could use their influence with him. The Archbishop of Treves undertook to try and mediate between Luther and the pope. They had an interview; but it ended as it began. His enemies did not attempt to prove him wrong by scripture; and he could not retract anything till they did.

After this, several attempts were made which ended in the same way. At length it was proposed to submit the question to a General Council: would Luther agree to that? "Yes," said Luther, "if the Council decide according to holy scripture." The Archbishop said this was absurd; and again it all failed. Luther was ordered to quit Worms and return to Wittenberg.

Luther afterwards gave a history of the whole affair in few words — thus: "Are these books of your writing? Yes. Will you retract them? No. Well, be gone! There's the whole history."

Soon after Luther left Worms, Frederick and several of the princes left also. The field was thus free for Aleandro, who did not hesitate to use this opportunity. He drew up an edict condemning Luther, and obtained the Emperor's signature. He immediately sent it to the printer, and spread it abroad everywhere. It was dated the 8th of May, but there is good authority for saying that it was not signed till several days later. By dating it the 8th it would make it appear to be drawn up while the Diet was yet sitting in full force.

Its very violence and falseness destroyed its force except among the extreme partisans of the pope. Listen to what it said of Luther: "He has shamefully vilified the unalterable law of holy marriage: he has laboured to incite the laity to imbrue their hands in the blood of their priests; and, defying all authority, has incessantly excited the people to revolt, schism, war, murder, theft, incendiarism, and the utter destruction of the christian faith . . . . In a word, and passing over many other evil intentions, this being, who is no man, but Satan himself under the semblance of a man in a monk's hood, has collected, in one offensive mass, all the worst heresies of former ages, adding his own to the number." Luther was to be seized wherever he was, and his books to be burnt. Whoever helped or aided Luther was also to be placed under the ban of the empire.

Chapter 15.

Luther at the Wartburg — A.D. 1521, 1522.

In the meantime Luther wended his way to Wittenberg. From Eisenach he went to Mora to visit his grandmother, his uncle, and other relatives. Here in peace and quietness he spent the evening, enjoying it the more after the noise and turmoil of Worms. In the morning Luther, with his brother and James Amsdorff started on their way to Waltershausen. As they approached a narrow defile a noise was heard, and in a moment five masked men, well armed and on horseback, surrounded the waggon. The driver was ordered to stop, and on his resistance he was felled to the earth. James Luther jumped to the ground and fled. Amsdorff was seized and held tight, while the others were getting Luther out of the waggon. He was at once set on a spare horse, and a cloak thrown over him; and the five horsemen hurried him away, leaving Amsdorff and the driver in the greatest consternation. Finding they were alone, they mounted and urged the horse to the utmost speed, spreading the news as they went, that Luther had been carried off by his enemies.

In the meantime Luther was hurried along in an opposite direction, the horsemen varied their route to prevent pursuit, and after long riding they ascended a hill and drew up at the door of a castle, which proved to be the Wartburg in the black forest on the mountains of Thuringia. He was conducted to an apartment where he was shewn the dress of a knight. This he was to wear for the future with a sword. He was to be known in the castle as Knight George.

Luther was safe. One who had carried him off was a nobleman Burkhard von Hund, lord of a neighbouring castle; another was John of Berlepsch, commandant of the Wartburg: the three others were a part of the garrison. They were his friends who had taken him away for safety till the storm which had been gathering should expend itself. But so well had the plan been carried out that none of his friends at Wittenberg or even the Elector knew for a long time where he was. Luther had been apprised beforehand that it would be better for him to be hidden for a time, but he knew not to what place he was going. He was now a solitary prisoner in the Wartburg. If he looked out of his window he saw a forest of trees. But he could look up, and by faith see God ruling over all.

When Luther arose next morning he remembered that he had to leave off his ecclesiastical dress. As he cast it aside he said, "Farewell, thou miserable cowl, that suffices in the monk's opinion to ransom from sin and from death! Farewell, proud robe, which they compare — nay, which they prefer — to the spotless robe and precious blood of Jesus Christ. Farewell." He dressed himself as a knight but he was the same Luther still.

Great was the consternation at the disappearance of Luther. His friends feared the worst and bewailed his loss. His enemies were in ecstasies. But this was soon cut short, for there arose such a cry of shame on the friends of the pope and even on the Emperor for their supposed treachery that many were glad to hide themselves from the wrath of the people. Aleandro, who had so pleaded for the destruction of Luther, now that he was destroyed as he thought was embarrassed and amazed. "The only way to extricate ourselves," said one, "is to light our torches and go searching through the earth for Luther, till we can restore him to the nation that will have him."

The edict that was obtained with so much labour from the Emperor, and which was to strike terror into Luther and his friends, was allowed to lie ineffectual in some places, and was torn to pieces in others. The absence of Luther, and the charges made against the friends of the pope averted, or at least lessened the power of the blow, except where the papal power was in full force.

Luther, or rather as we should now say, Knight George, was away from it all in quietness and repose. He was well treated and was allowed to walk about the fortress, but not to leave it. Here he had time to review the whole of his life. Was it his own self-will that had stirred up such a commotion, or was it God who had done it, and used him as His instrument? Was it an invention of his to teach that men were to be justified by faith, or was it not declared plainly in God's word, "therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God?" (Rom. v. 1.) As he meditated he was confirmed and strengthened. It was of God, and he was the instrument only.

But again he thought of the sad state of the church. "They will take advantage of my absence," said he, "and undo the work I have begun." And then he dreaded being charged with being a deserter. "Rather," said he, "would I be stretched on burning coals than stagnate here half dead."

At other times he was dejected and cast down. One day a cat stole into his room, and Luther saw how she sat and narrowly watched a bird, which hung in a cage at his window, ready to pounce upon it in a moment should it leave its place of safety. "It is thus," said Luther, "that the pope watches me, ready to pounce upon me if I go out."

One day a message came to Melanchthon at Wittenberg telling him that Luther was alive. His joy was great, but saddened by the thought that he was a prisoner somewhere. The news soon spread that Luther was alive; his enemies consoled themselves that if alive at least he was silent. But this did not last long. Luther must be at work with his pen, though he was not able to use his voice. Tract followed tract in quick succession; some were controversial, and others for the building up and instruction of the saints. He called the Wartburg his Patmos, in allusion to John being banished to the Isle of Patmos in Revelation i. 9.

But the confinement began to tell upon Luther, and his health declined. So they allowed him to take short walks outside the fortress, attended by a rough but faithful guard. Luther knew he ran the risk of being seized; but by degrees he was more venturesome, and visited the villages round. Of course he was always dressed as Knight George, with his sword by his side. One day they strolled into an inn, and Luther took up some books which lay on the table, and was soon engrossed in their contents. His guard called him away. This was not acting like a knight, who was not supposed to take great interest in books. At another time they visited a convent: when one of the monks recognized that the knight was Luther, and he called out with astonishment. They were soon in their stirrups and far away.

Luther being hidden, the friends of the pope thought it a good opportunity to revive the sale of indulgences. One who did this was Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mentz. Luther no sooner heard of this than his spirit was roused within him, and he resolved to condemn the iniquity. But previously he wrote to the Archbishop, telling him of his design, and saying that if he persisted in keeping this idol he should be compelled to hold him up to rebuke as he had already done the pope. The Archbishop — whether from fear or from conviction, we know not — wrote a kind letter to Luther, telling him that that which had caused him alarm no longer existed.

Luther's confinement was principally turned to good account by his using the leisure and quiet to make great progress in translating the scripture. He greatly desired to see the Bible translated into every language, but especially of course into German. "Scripture without comment," said Luther, "is the sun whence all teachers receive their light." "I will translate the New Testament into our mother tongue. Oh if this book could but be in the hands — in the hearts of all." Then "Luther must retire, and the Bible advance; the man must disappear, and God appear." How like the language of John the Baptist as to our Lord, "He must increase, but I must decrease." It is well if the servant can willingly retire when his Master appears.

While Luther was translating the New Testament he was again arrested by the doctrine of justification by faith. "If man is saved by faith and grace alone, what becomes of the monastic life," said he, "which is wholly based on the presumed merits of the monks? Monkery and salvation by grace are in flagrant opposition. . . . Monkery must fall. "Luther saw that to live a monk's life was simply one of idleness and uselessness; but to pretend to salvation in that way was a positive denial of the truth. Besides, "the monks are the pillars of the popedom," said he; "I will throw down these pillars. God has made nothing which Satan has not caricatured; and because it was God's will to have a nation of priests, Satan has made a nation of monks. . . . No," continued he, "I am not a monk; I am a new creature, not of the pope, but of Jesus Christ. Christ alone, Christ without a mediator, is my bishop, my abbot, my prior, my Lord, my Father, my Master; and I will have no other." Noble words! Would that thousands who profess to have outstretched Luther could say the same truthfully!

This was the commencement of Luther's war against the monastic vows. These were chastity, poverty and obedience. "Whatever cometh not of faith is sin," said Luther. "Whoever makes a vow of chastity, of service to God, without faith, makes an impious vow. We must utterly suppress all convents. There is only one order that is holy and maketh holy — namely, Christianity and Faith. All who possess the Spirit of Christ are priests of the living God." This latter is a great truth, often repeated but seldom learned. Luther put it forth to the Christians of Germany, and it was good the light of God's truth should shine forth. We would fain hope it penetrated many a secluded spot where the light of God's word had not yet reached.

But there were shades as well as sunshine in Luther's experience. While in the Wartburg he was at times tormented by what appeared to him to be a bodily appearance of Satan. It is recorded that one day while Luther was at his work of translating, he thought he saw Satan present in his room, walking round him with threatening attitude as if to spring upon him should his eye be diverted. At length Luther could bear it no longer, and taking up the inkstand he threw it at his enemy. The inkstand struck the wall and was broken to pieces. The keeper of the Wartburg points out to travellers the mark in the wall made by the inkstand.

But Luther's confinement began to be intolerable to him, and he longed to see his friends. He knew he ran the risk of falling into the hands of his enemies, but that did not deter him.

At the end of November he secretly quitted the Wartburg and set out for Wittenberg.

Various were the evil tidings that he heard during his journey, but he arrived safely. His friends were quickly called together. They were overjoyed at again embracing their friend, and they related to him the progress of the work. They had sweet intercourse together, had prayer, and he returned to the Wartburg.

The work had greatly increased, but so had the opposition to it. The Sorbonne, the great school of Paris, had deliberated on Luther's doctrines, and had condemned them as heresy, to be accursed. This was an important decision. It was not simply that Rome condemned Luther — the first University in France had likewise condemned him. Melanchthon replied, and vindicated the truth.

O Lord, the work we do is Thine,

So we can calmly wait,

And care not for the rage of man:

It all comes far too late.

Thy victory on the cross was won,

And leads to victory now;

Yea, in eternity 'twas planned,

And man is made to bow.

The truth of God must e'er prevail,

And work His sovereign will;

Then let us labour on, and aid

His purpose to fulfil.

Chapter 16.

The Reformation and Its Dangers — A.D. 1522.

After Luther's stolen visit to Wittenberg important events rapidly succeeded each other. There was then a bold monk named Gabriel Didymus who attacked the useless lives of the monks, and this he did with such effect that in one day thirteen monks left the monastery to seek a livelihood in any honest way they could find, and one married.

He and his friends next attacked the Mass, the Romish name for the Lord's supper. They found from scripture, as Luther had already said, that those who partook of the Lord's supper should eat the bread and drink the wine; whereas it had been the habit of the priests, as we have seen, to give the people the bread, and drink the wine themselves. As this was now seen by many to be unscriptural, a demand was made that the truth should be put into practice, and that the people should partake of both kinds as it was called. Carlstadt was Archdeacon, and he felt the matter to be so important and urgent, that on Christmas day — the year was 1521 — he took upon himself to say that the Lord's supper would be partaken of in two kinds, and he accordingly introduced it. It was then so novel, that the people were startled and afraid, so that only five partook of it. But many soon saw it to be right, and it became usual.

Satan however could not see such inroads upon his kingdom of ignorance and darkness without making strenuous efforts to oppose it, or to spoil what he could not prevent. There were some men at Zwickau (a town in Saxony on the left bank of the Mulde) who pretended to have revelations from God. They despised and repudiated the doctrine of always clinging to the Bible. Why should they not have direct messages from heaven? These they pretended to have. Nicolas Storch, a weaver, was leader. He declared that the angel Gabriel had appeared to him. He soon had followers. From these he chose twelve apostles and seventy disciples. The declaration was that they had now set up a new church of God. Their former baptism in infancy was of no avail; they exhorted their followers to be re-baptised into the new church.

Nicolas Haussman was pastor of Zwickau and he opposed these new prophets as they were called, and they were expelled from communion. This they cared little for. They would hold meetings by themselves. But disturbances arose, and some were sent to prison.

Indignant at this treatment, Storch and some of his followers repaired to Wittenberg. The students were just then unsettled by the changes already introduced, and were thus prepared to receive more new things. The prophets waited on the professors of the University, declaring to them that they were sent of God to teach the people. They had had special communications from heaven. Melanchthon asked one, "Who commissioned you to preach?" "The Lord our God," was the ready reply. Melanchthon and the other professors were alarmed and confounded. Who could say it was not true? But who could say it was?

One of the prophets remained at Wittenberg and went from house to house stirring up the people. The Elector Frederick heard of the commotion, and he too was at a loss to know whether it was of God or not. Luther also heard of it. He at once pronounced it to be of Satan, and said that he had expected it. But he begged of the authorities not to prosecute the people. Perhaps he thought if left alone it would die out of itself.

Carlstadt was now the great reformer at Wittenberg. He did not receive the prophets as from God, nor receive their doctrine of re-baptism. But he caught some of the enthusiasm, and declared that they must proceed with the good work.

The first thing he took up was images and image worship. He searched the scriptures and produced the passages against this practice, and proceeded to exhort his hearers not only to abstain from evil worship, but to prevent it. Thus appealed to by an Archdeacon, the people broke into the churches, and smashing the images, burnt them.

Carlstadt went further. He now despised learning. Those who listened to him as their tutor, were now exhorted by him to leave their learning and take up with some honest employment. Thus, alas! when men begin to throw of the shackles that have so long bound them, they require great wisdom to know when and where to stop.

The master of the boys' school also exhorted the parents of the children to fetch them away. God was revealing Himself to the prophets apart from learning. Of what use the learning then?

We can easily conceive how all these strange proceedings produced commotion and distrust in men's minds. What would come next? The friends of Rome at a distance were delighted, and did not fail to pronounce this as the fruit of the doctrines taught by Luther.

The real friends of the Reformation began to see things in a serious light. This new movement must be stopped, or great damage would be done to the cause of truth. But who was to do it? Melanchthon was too timid. The Elector was alarmed, but felt powerless. People instinctively turned their eyes to the Wartburg, and sighed and cried and demanded for Luther. He received pressing invitations to return to his work at Wittenberg, to this new work of determining plainly what was of God and what was of Satan.

Chapter 17.

Luther Returns to Wittenberg — A.D. 1522.

The call for Luther exactly answered to the stirrings of his own spirit. Yes, he would leave the Wartburg, and go to Wittenberg. On March 3 he quitted the castle, and in his knight's dress he started on his journey.

At Jena he was compelled to take shelter from a thunder-storm. He stayed at the Black Bear. In the public room he was sitting reading when two young men entered and sat down by the door. They were Swiss students who had studied at Basle, and were now on their way to Wittenberg. Luther invited them to his table and offered them a glass of beer. By their accent he detected that they were Swiss, and he asked them from what canton they came. "St. Gall," said they: "could you tell us where Dr. Luther is now?" "I know for certain," said Luther, "that he is not at Wittenberg. If you will be advised by me apply yourselves to the Greek and Hebrew, that you may understand the holy scriptures." He then asked them about Erasmus. The students thought it very strange that a knight should ask them about Erasmus, and tell them to study Greek and Hebrew. Luther asked them what was thought of Luther in Switzerland? Some extolled him, and some declared him a heretic.

The knight's cordiality put the students at their ease, and they greatly desired to know what book he had been reading. On shutting it, one ventured to take it up and look at it, when to his surprise he found it was a Hebrew Psalter. He said he would give his little finger to understand that language. "You certainly will have your wish," said the knight, "if you will take the pains to acquire it."

The name of Kessler was now called. This was one of these young men. The landlord told him that the knight was Luther himself. He hastened back and told his companion. But he thought he must have said Hutten. Just at that time two more travellers stopped at the hotel and entered the room. One of them laid a book on the table. "What book may that be?" asked the knight. "It is a commentary on the Gospels and Epistles by Dr. Luther," said the travellers; "it has only just appeared." "I shall get it shortly," said the knight.

Dinner being announced, the Swiss students drew back, but Luther invited them, saying he would pay the score. During the meal they were all struck by the remarks made by the knight.

One of the travellers declared that he would give ten florins for an opportunity to meet with and converse with Luther, little thinking that he it was who was before them.

They all parted company, and Luther went his way. He tarried next at Borne, and from thence he wrote to the Elector Frederick informing him of his return to Wittenberg. When the students reached their destination they discovered that the knight of the Black Bear was the veritable Luther. He recognized them and introduced them to the professors.

Luther was glad to see his friends, but was deeply pained at the state of things. "Luther is back" was soon spread abroad, "and is to preach to-morrow." The morrow came and the church was crowded in the extreme. All were anxious to hear Luther on the state of affairs.

He proceeded carefully with his discourse, saying how anxious we ought to be lest we needlessly offend any. But he came to the points at issue. "The mass is a bad thing." You say it must be abolished. Quite so, but let it be done in the right way. "Our first aim must be to win the heart; and to this end we must preach the gospel."

He preached again five times in the week, going over the various subjects of the destruction of images, the Lord's supper in both kinds, the abolition of the mass, etc., pointing out that right things must be done in a right way. He laid great emphasis on the solemnity of the Lord's supper, and warned those who ought not to have partaken of it, but who had done so.

This was a new work for Luther. Previously he had to arouse his hearers to energy and activity; now he had to quiet and calm the troubled waters of unholy zeal and fanaticism. The results were very beneficial. Gabriel Didymus, who had been one of the most violent, confessed he had been deceived. Carlstadt submitted for the sake of peace, but he was not convinced. He thought in reality that Luther was now stopping rather than helping on the work.

The leaders of the prophets were all away from Wittenberg while this went on. But Stubner, one of the prophets, returned, gathered his followers around him and prepared to combat the question with Luther. Luther did not care to meet them, but he consented to do so. Stubner made a statement that he proposed to restore the church and reform the world. "Of all you have been saying," replied Luther gravely, "there is nothing that I see to be based on scripture." The meeting became then very stormy, and angry expressions passed. It ended with no good result, and that very day the prophets left Wittenberg.

Comparative peace being restored, at least at Wittenberg, Luther with the aid of Melanchthon, devoted himself to finishing the translation of the New Testament. It was in a forward state, but needed revision. The printers were soon set to work, and on the 21st of September the New Testament was published in the German language.*

{* The Bible, or portions of it, had been translated into German before Luther's edition. The priests had discouraged their circulation, and their high price had placed them beyond the reach of the common people.}

The importance of this work cannot be overestimated. Every simple Christian in Germany could now read the word of God for himself, and could judge what doctrines and practices were of God, and what were not. The edition of three thousand copies was soon sold, and another followed in December. It has been estimated that by the year 1533 more than fifty editions had been printed. Nothing could be a greater proof of how the word of God was needed and appreciated.

The friends of the pope were greatly alarmed. The King of England (Henry VIII.) wrote to the Elector Frederick denouncing the work. Some of the princes issued orders for every copy to be delivered up to the magistrates, and it is said that in some places they were publicly burnt.

Only think what a system of religion that must be which can thrive only when the word of God is hidden! And yet in many ways we see the spread of that same system — Popery — in our own highly favoured land. Through the mercy of God the word of God is free here; but when the papal system cannot take away the Bible, it lays claim to possessing the exclusive power of interpreting it to the people.

As soon as the New Testament was published, Luther proceeded with translating the Old. People were so anxious to obtain it that he had to publish it in parts as he could get it finished.

Though Duke George had prohibited the sale in his states, yet thousands of copies of the New Testament were in circulation therein. The papal party saw that they could not stop the spread of the scriptures; people would have them, therefore they brought out one of their own. It is said to have been the same as Luther's, but altered here and there.

Melanchthon took an active part in the Reformation and published a treatise on doctrine, called Loci Communes, "Common places." This book Luther greatly commended, and it became a sort of standard as to the doctrines taught by the Reformers.

About this time King Henry VIII. of England wrote a book against Luther, and in defence of the seven sacraments.* He despised Luther and was severe in his language. Doubtless the age in which he wrote partly accounts for this, but could anything justify his calling Luther an "infernal wolf," "a venomous serpent," "a limb of the devil," etc.? The King sent his book to the pope, with the message that he was also ready to attack the adherents of Luther with the sword as well as with the pen. The pope was gratified with such attention, and he conferred upon Henry the title of "DEFENDER OF THE FAITH," which the kings and queens of England have maintained to this day, and which explains the letters F.D. or FID. DEF. found on our money.

{* By "Sacraments" are meant, holy or sacred ordinances pertaining to the church. The seven insisted on by the Church of Rome are 1, Baptism, to which they attach regeneration. 2, The Mass, the name they give to the Lord's supper, and which they say is an unbloody sacrifice. 3, Confirmation, which is said to impart full growth and perfect spiritual strength. 4, Penance. This is the punishment or privation which their church imposes upon those who fall into sin, or who are not obedient to their church. 5, Marriage. 6, Holy Orders; that is that they, and they only, have the power to appoint and ordain to every office in the church. 7, Extreme Unction. This is the anointing with oil any one who is dying (upon his confession) in various parts of the body, which is supposed to communicate the grace of God and ensure their salvation.}

The book was well received. Various editions were printed and many thousands were sold. The friends of Rome were in great joy that one so noble had so well taken up their cause.

Luther read the book, and felt irritated at the style in which he had been treated, as well as grieved that the truth should be attacked. He must answer it. He was exhorted not to answer, or to do it gently. Scripture — his own favourite book — said, "The servant of the Lord must not strive, but be gentle." (2 Tim. ii. 24.) Luther heeded it not. He was violent in the extreme as to Henry himself, but he manfully defended the truth that had been attacked.

The court attendants of Henry were greatly incensed when the reply was received in England, and Thomas More proceeded to answer Luther. He was even more insulting than Henry had been.

Henry now wrote to both the Elector Frederick and the Dukes of Saxony against Luther, exhorting them to extinguish "the cursed sect of Luther. Shed no blood if it can be avoided; but if this heretical doctrine lasts, shed it without hesitation, in order that this abominable sect may disappear from under the heaven." Alas! that such advice should have gone from these shores against God's servant.

Frederick and his brother replied to Henry that they were in expectation of matters being settled by a future General Council. In the meantime, by the spread of the scriptures and other books and by preaching, the truth was rapidly spreading over Germany.

In December 1521 Pope Leo X. had died suddenly, and Cardinal Tortosa, an old man, but "whom everybody regarded as a saint" had been chosen as his successor, under the title of Adrian VI. He lived in a very simple manner, and gave much to the poor. He admitted that a reform was needed in the church, but advocated its being done little by little.

In 1522 the Diet met at Nuremberg, when there was a great outcry for the death of Luther. But there was again the counter cry — The abuses in the church; when will you rectify the abuses? And a demand again arose for a General Council.

The pope was indignant at this, and his friends dreaded the voice of the people being heard in a General Council. The pope wrote a very angry letter to the Elector Frederick, and took up the dangerous ground that the priests should be obeyed although their conduct was bad, quoting the passage of scripture, "Whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do, but do not after their works," overlooking the fact that in this passage the scribes and Pharisees were in question, and what they said was the law as given by God; but the priests now ordered that which was not in scripture at all, indeed contrary to it.

We give the last part of the pope's letter. "In the name of the Almighty God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, of whom I am vicegerent on earth, I warn that thou wilt be judged in this world and be cast into the lake of everlasting fire in that which is to come. Repent and be converted. Both swords are impending over thine head — the sword of the empire and that of the papal authority." Notice the audacity and profanity of the pope calling himself "Christ's vicegerent on earth," a title which all the popes assumed, no matter how wicked they might be.

The Elector Frederick was thus threatened by the pope and the Emperor, from whom he also had received a most insulting letter. Frederick sent to consult the leaders of the Reformation. Though he greatly desired peace, he thought he might yet have to draw his sword in defence of the gospel, forgetting the passage that "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." (Matt. xxvi. 52.)

The Reformers wisely advised the Elector not to think of fighting. Still Luther was greatly moved. "The sword of civil war," said he, "is impending over kings. They are bent on destroying Luther; but Luther is bent on saving them; Christ lives and reigns, and I shall reign with Him."

Chapter 18.

Persecution Breaks Out — A.D. 1522-1525.

The threatened storm burst at length in some places. At Antwerp the truth had been received, and was preached. But the evangelical monks were obliged to flee. Henry Voes, John Esch, and Lambert Thorn were discovered and thrown into prison. Lambert Thorn was appalled at death, and begged time to consider what he would do; Voes and Esch faithfully confessed Christ. They were delivered to the secular arm, as it was called, and then to the executioner.

They were bound to the stake. The confessor drew near and said, "Once more we ask you if you will receive the christian faith?" "We believe in the christian church," said they, "but not in your church." Half an hour was allowed to elapse: it was hoped that the sight of the stake and the faggots would have appalled these young men. But no, they resolved to die for the name of Jesus Christ, and began to sing psalms. The fire was lit, and thus died, rejoicing, the first martyrs of the gospel in the time of Luther. Satan was again outwitted. He thought to stay the current of truth by stopping the voices of some; whereas it was the means of spreading it the more. Men saw that there was something real in such faith, and the confidence of the martyrs stirred up the failing courage of others. "Wherever Aleandro lights a pile," remarked Erasmus, "there it seems as if he now sowed heretics."

Luther was much moved. He thanked God for the courage of the martyrs. "I am bound with you in your bonds," said he; "your dungeons and your burnings my soul takes part in. All of us are with you in spirit; and the Lord is above it all."

Luther wrote a hymn on the occasion of their death, and soon that hymn was sung throughout the land. We give a translation: —

Flung to the heedless winds,

Or on the waters cast,

Their ashes shall be watched,

And gathered at the last.

And from that scattered dust,

Around us and abroad,

Shall spring a plenteous seed

Of witnesses for God.

Jesus hath now received

Their latest living breath —

Yet vain is Satan's boast

Of victory in their death.

Still — still though dead, they speak,

And, trumpet-tongued, proclaim

To many a wakening land,

The one availing name.

Persecution was further stayed for the time by the death of Pope Adrian. He was so "good" in the sense of being strictly moral that the Romans were overjoyed at his death, and suspended a crown of flowers at his physician's door, with the writing, "To the saviour of his country." The pope had been too strict with those who desired to do as they pleased, so that they praised his physician for not saving his life! Such was Rome.

Julio de Medici was the next pope. He was a very different sort of man from Adrian. There was no hope now of Rome reforming itself: he thought only of what would enrich himself. He despatched Cardinal Campeggio to Germany.

The Diet again met at Nuremberg in January 1525. The Emperor was incensed against the Elector Frederick, and determined to crush him. It was resolved that the executive powers of the empire should all be changed. This was a blow at Frederick. Filled with grief, he left the Diet.

Campeggio demanded of the Diet that the edict of Worms should be enforced against the Reformers. "And pray," asked some, "what has become of the memorial of grievances presented to the pope by Germany?" Campeggio said three different memorials had reached Rome, and they did not know which was the official one.

The Diet agreed to carry out the edict of Worms but added to it these words, "as far as possible," which left it free for some not to do it at all.

Moreover the Diet again pressed the necessity of calling a General secular Council, and at length in spite of Rome settled that this council should meet in November in Spire, "to regulate all questions of religion," and the states were to request their divines to prepare the various subjects to be discussed at that meeting.

The pope was much incensed, and he and Campeggio sought to sow discord among the German princes. If they would not be at peace with Rome, they should not be at peace among themselves. Campeggio called a meeting at Ratisbon of those he thought staunch for Rome, and sought to unite them together to form a league in her favour. They met, and resolved to do all they could to crush the Reformation. They proceeded at once to act.

At Vienna there was a citizen named Gaspard Tauber, who had written against the papacy. He was now seized, and ordered to retract. Whether he promised to do so, or whether they misunderstood him, is doubtful, but when he was summoned publicly to retract, he declared he would sooner die than deny the gospel. He was beheaded and afterwards burnt.

Another, at Buda in Hungary, a bookseller, was a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, and had distributed the New Testament and the writings of Luther. They bound the good man to a stake, and piled his books about him, and set them on fire. He died rejoicing.

At other places great and fearful persecution was carried on. Some were imprisoned, and some were hanged; and some of the preachers had their tongues nailed to posts, so that they might tear themselves away, deprived of the power to preach.

The case of Henry Zuphten is sad to relate. He had escaped from Antwerp and went to preach at Bremen, at a place called Mehldorf in the Dittmarches. The pastor at first tried to stop his preaching; but here he failed. He took his vengeance thereon. He caused the bells to be rung at night-fall and assembled the peasants, about five hundred. Then, to give them courage and stifle conscience, he tapped three butts of beer. When all were elated he led them on to where the good man slept. He was dragged out of his bed, and, undressed as he was, hurried through the streets in the frost and ice. They reached the heath, where they gathered the faggots and applied the light. But the wood would not burn, and for two long hours he stood there exposed to their fury. At length the wood was alight and they threw him on the pile, but he rolled off, when one with a club struck him dead. They then put him on the wood and he was consumed. Thus was killed this faithful man. His crime was preaching the gospel; and they who put him to death did it in the name of religion! It could not have been the religion of Jesus Christ.

Chapter 19.

Revolt of the Peasants — A.D. 1525.

While Satan was thus stirring up a fiery persecution in the Catholic states, he was also busy in another way among those nominally attached to the gospel.

We have already seen that the prophets, called also Anabaptists,* were troublesome before Luther left the Wartburg. These now again came into prominence, mixing with their creed certain grievances respecting the state. They drew up a declaration of twelve articles. They claimed a right to choose their own pastors, demanding also the abolition of small tithes and the taxes on inheritance; the right to hunt, fish, cut wood, etc. It is important to notice that this was not simply a movement for the sake of the gospel, it was mixed up with politics;with the question of hunting, fishing, etc., though strangely enough they put a passage of scripture to each of their articles.

{* This name is from ana again, and baptistees a baptist, and was given to them because they held that those who were baptized in infancy before they had faith, ought to be baptized again. These Anabaptists must not be associated with those now known as Baptists, though the latter also hold that faith should precede baptism.}

Luther and Melanchthon were questioned as to their judgment of the movement. The prophets professed to be moved by the Spirit; indeed this was their cry, "The Spirit, the Spirit." Both Luther and Melanchthon denounced it. Luther admitted that there might be some justice in some of their twelve demands; but he denounced the revolt as of the devil. "The christian conflict," said he, "is not to be carried on by sword or gun, but by endurance and the cross. Christ their Captain would not have His servants smite with the sword; He was hanged upon a tree."

It was of no avail. The peasants met in large numbers and took up any rude arms they could find to enforce their demands. They were opposed at Weinsberg in Wurtemberg by Count Louis of Helfenstein, and seventy of his men. But these were soon overpowered. They were surrounded by an army of pikes which closed in upon them. The wife of Helfenstein, a daughter of the Emperor Maximilian, with an infant at her breast, begged for the life of her husband, but none were spared, the infant being wounded in its mother's arms.

Thus had these fanatics, under the cry of "The Spirit," added murder to their revolt. It was one thing to be set at liberty from the thraldom of the pope, and another to believe the gospel, and be under the yoke of Christ. These people had thrown off the one, but had not bowed to the other.

Luther was cut to the quick. The enemies of the Reformation were loud in their accusations. Here was some full ripe fruit of his doctrines! This was through throwing off the power of Rome, etc.; while, on the other hand, the peasants would not listen to Luther. This grieved him much, but it proved they were not followers of him, and this was not a fruit of his teaching.

But the revolution spread rapidly. The people of the Black Forest chose John Muller of Bulgenbach for their leader. They went from village to village, proclaiming the twelve articles, and demanding the adherence of all the inhabitants. If any refused they were banished. Wherever the prophets went they smashed the images and the crucifixes.

Still the revolution spread. Counts and rulers were for the time compelled to side with the rebels, or fly from their dominions. And such was the success of the insurrection that they began to plan a new empire. Taxes were to be abolished; the Emperor was to be supreme ruler, but all other rulers were to give up their authority.

The Emperor drew the sword, and his general George Truchsess marched at the head of an army to oppose the peasants. On May 7 he repulsed them at Beblingen, and marched to Weinsberg, where the Count of Helfenstein had been murdered. This place he burnt to the ground, as a lasting memorial of the atrocities of the peasants.

The army of Truchsess was joined by that of the Elector Palatine and the Elector of Treves, and the peasants were everywhere routed. They were but ill armed, and the cannon of the army made rapid slaughter in their ranks. It has been estimated that fifty thousand were slain.

But while this was being done in Southern Germany, Munzer went to Mulhausen, and stirred up another revolt. Here again it spread rapidly. In the districts of Mansfeld, Stolberg, Schwarzburg, Hesse, and Brunswick the peasantry all rose.

The Elector Frederick was pained at the thought of taking up the sword, and indeed refused. But Philip of Hesse armed at once, and so did other of the surrounding princes. They quickly surrounded the peasants, who flew to a hill, and made a rampart with their waggons. Munzer had cast some cannons, but had not yet obtained any powder. The princes were loth to shed blood needlessly, and they therefore tried to come to terms with the rebels. But Munzer prevented this being done, declaring that if his followers held out they should that day see the mighty arm of God in the destruction of their enemies. Just at this time a rainbow appeared in the clouds, and the peasants, whose standard was a rainbow, believed that this was a token from God. Munzer also, to prevent the peasants giving in, cruelly put to death the gentleman sent peacefully to treat with them.

Such treachery drew forth vengeance. The army attacked the camp of rebels, who began to say, "Come, Holy Spirit." The cannon soon knocked to pieces their battlements, and made large gaps in their ranks. The peasants were not used to war, and fled in all directions, and hundreds were slain. The army entered Frankenhausen after the battle. A soldier had reached the top of a house where he found a man crouched down, hiding himself. "Are you one of the rebels?" said he: and seeing the man had a writing case, the soldier took it, and therein found letters addressed to THOMAS MUNZER. "Is that your name?" said he. "No," said the coward. But he was not believed. It was he — the Thomas Munzer who had stirred up the revolt. He was carried before Duke George and the Landgrave, whom he told he was justified in revolting because the princes opposed the gospel! Thus he added hypocrisy to his wickedness. He was beheaded, and the insurrection was quelled.

To the states of the Elector Frederick the war did not reach. In his states there had been neither executions nor punishment. The gospel had thus far prevailed.

It was necessary for two reasons to bring into Luther's history the revolt of the peasants. One reason was that though the friends of Rome on every hand declared that the whole calamity was due to Luther and the doctrines he taught, it is clear that the charge was entirely false. Luther preached and wrote against it all through, and more than once he left Wittenberg and went into districts where discontent was rising into revolt, and did all he could to prevent it.

The other reason was to shew how important it is to keep the distinction between spiritual and political freedom. It may be that many saw in throwing off the yoke of the pope nothing but the latter, it was right that they should be undeceived, and that they should learn that the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ is not of this world, but is righteousness, peace, etc.

But other troubles were in store for Luther. Before the revolt of the peasants had been quite put down, the aged Elector Frederick the Wise had breathed his last. Feeling his end approaching, he destroyed a will he had made commending his soul to the Virgin Mary, "the mother of God," and made another, in which he declared his belief that "he was redeemed by the precious blood of his beloved Saviour." His chaplain Spalatin was with him to the last. Strange to say, that though the Elector Frederick and Luther had had so much to do with each other, and had in a sense worked together, they had never seen each other except at a distance. John, the brother of Frederick, succeeded him as Elector of Saxony.

Chapter 20.

Luther Marries — A.D. 1525.

Just at this time it was that Luther married Catharine Bora.*

{* The Chronicles of Wittenberg contain the following items in the year 1525:

"xlii. Grosch. paid for Dr. Martin when, at the request of the Council of the district, he returned to Wittenberg from his Isle of Patmos."

"vii. Stub., xx. Grosch. for Dr. Martin, on the occasion of his marriage, taken from the treasury of the hospital."

"i. Stub., vii. Grosch., iii. Hell, for a Suabian hood, as a new year's gift to Dame Catharine Bora, wife of Dr. Martin."

"xvi. Grosch., vi. Stub. for a hogshead of Einbeck beer, for the use of Dr. Martin, on Tuesday after St. John."

"ii. Stub. xvi. Grosch. for wine taken by Dr. Martin from the cellars of the city."

A Groschen was equal to about three-halfpence; a Stuber, about a half-penny; a Heller, about a farthing. }

In the year 1523, the truth had penetrated a monastery of Nimptsch, near Grimma, and nine of the nuns resolved that they would no longer live there in uselessness and idleness. They wrote to their parents telling them of their resolution; but their parents refused to listen to them or to sanction such a step as leaving the convent. They thereon resolved to leave, and trust to God for guidance and to find a home for them. Two christian men offered their services, which were gladly accepted. The nuns quietly left the convent, and entered a waggon provided for them. But where should they go? They knew not. Well, they would go to Luther, and accordingly proceeded thither and drew up at his residence.

Luther was surprised, but pleased. He wished all the cloisters were emptied, but he declared that he had had no hand in these nuns leaving. Doors were opened in various families, and the nine found homes.

Catharine Bora was one of these nuns; she found a home in the house of the Burgomaster of Wittenberg. After a time Luther proposed to marry her. It was a bold step. For a monk it was forbidden; but forbidden by whom? The pope and the Catholic church. But God had spoken and said that "marriage is honourable in all" (Heb. xiii. 4), and "forbidding to marry" was a sign of the apostasy. (1 Tim. iv. 3.) Luther declared he would act the truths he taught, and on the 13th of June, 1525, he was married to Catharine Bora. Pomeranus, whom Luther called the pastor, pronounced the benediction.

The marriage of Luther caused tremendous commotion among the friends of Rome. It was setting their rules at defiance, and it brought down a shower of abuse on the heads of the married pair. A long time before, Luther had preached in favour of priests marrying, but he did not then intend to marry. But now his father pressed him, and he believed the time had come for his doing so.

He made constant prayer that he might be guided aright, and at length concluded it was God's will that he should marry. "By marrying," said he, "I shall break entirely with the institutions of popery. I shall encourage timid men to renounce their detestable errors. I will reserve nothing of my life in the papacy. If I take a wife, it is not to live with her long, for my end is near; but I wish to leave an unimpeachable confirmation of what I have preached here on earth."

Luther was forty-two, and Catharine twenty-six when they married. The marriage was a happy one. Luther had been the last to leave the monastery. He abode there after all the others had left, but now that he was married he left also, and sent off the keys to the Elector John. But John returned them to Luther, and made him a present of the monastery as a house for himself and his wife. Luther accepted it and went to reside there.

Catharine was very fond of her husband, and when he was dejected, which he still was at times, she would comfort him by passages of scripture. She thus became a true help-meet to him. He used to call her his Ketha, and at times My Lord Catharine.

They had in all six children, and their great desire was to bring them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

Luther thoroughly enjoyed himself in his family. When worn out with his work he would take his flute and sing one of the hymns he had composed for use in the church; or calling his wife and children round him they would all sing together. "There is nothing sweeter," he used to say, "nothing more beautiful than a happy marriage, where the husband and wife live together in peace and concord. It is the best gift of heaven next to the knowledge of God and of His word."

He was also fond of his garden, and when his brain was over-wrought, or he felt harassed by Satan, he would seek relief with the spade. But here his thoughts were busy. Bending over a violet he would say, "Poor violet, what a perfume you exhale; but how much sweeter it would have been if Adam had not sinned! How I admire your tints, O rose, but which would have been more brilliant but for the fault of the first man. Nature does not shew its ingratitude like man; for the murmur of the streams, the perfumes of the gardens, the breath of the winds, the rustling of the leaves, are so many hymns chanted to the Creator; whilst man, made after the image of God, forgets Him entirely since his sin!"

Luther was stern in his discipline with the children. On one occasion he would not allow his son John to see him for three days. His wife was distressed and interceded for the boy, and some of his friends did the same; but without effect. "I would rather my son were dead," said Luther, "than badly brought up. I will not forgive the boy until he has written me a letter humbling himself and asking for pardon."

On the other hand, he could fully enter into the thoughts and pursuits of his children. On one occasion he discovered that his servant had put up a net to catch the birds, so Luther wrote a complaint of the birds thus: —

"To our very dear lord Martin Luther, —

"We, the thrushes, chaffinches, linnets, goldfinches and other honourable birds, who will have to pass by Wittenberg this Autumn, take the liberty to inform you that one Wolfgang your servant has had the audacity, out of dislike to us, to set up a net in order to deprive us of the liberty of flying in the air, and of picking up from the ground the little seeds that God has given us. Moreover he seeks in this way to take our lives, we having never done him any harm. For this reason we pray you to restrain your servant from such acts.

"Given in our aerial abode, under the trees, with our ordinary seal."

"Behold the fowls of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them."

Luther was poor, but he did not speak of it except to laugh at it among his friends. But it grieved him when he could not relieve cases of need as he would have wished. One day a student came to him with a tale of poverty and distress. He called to his wife and told her to give to the poor man some money. "I have got none," said she, "not a farthing." Luther at once seized a gold cup and gave it to the student, bidding him sell it and relieve his wants. "A pewter mug will serve me," said Luther.

Luther's marriage was a great event in the Reformation. Men at first began to seclude themselves in dens and caves because of surrounding evil. They had a good motive but were mistaken in doing this. If Christians, their light was to be as on a hill, and not hidden as under a bushel. Others with less piety imitated them, until monasticism had grown up into a great but evil system. The three vows were easily taken; but, except the one of obedience, were not carried out. Luther had entered the convent in search for holiness; but he had seen enough to make him view with abhorrence any one, male or female, enter a monastery. He discouraged it in every way. He now sought to live in his family, among his fellow-christians, as one of themselves, and yet with their good as much at heart as ever, to spend and be spent for the cause of God and His truth.

Chapter 21.

Diets of Augsburg and Spire — A.D. 1525, 1526.

Soon after Luther's marriage the Emperor summoned a Diet at Augsburg. He had, on the clamour of the pope, prohibited the contemplated General Council at Spire, but now another Diet must be held. It met on December 11. But nothing was settled, except to continue to carry out the resolution of Nuremberg, and in the May following they would meet at Spire and go fully into the questions of "holy faith, public rights, and the general peace."

Philip of Hesse warmly espoused the cause of the Reformation. He felt sure that the Emperor was plotting mischief, and he solicited the Elector John and others to join in an alliance for self-defence if attacked. The Elector John received the proposition with reserve. This was caused by the adverse judgment of Luther and Melanchthon. Luther maintained that for the gospel we should trust in God only, and not in alliances and the sword. Melanchthon feared that an alliance would only hasten what they all dreaded. The Landgrave however was not to be put off. On the 12th of June, 1526, a meeting was called at Magdeburg, where the Elector, his son, Dukes Philip, Ernest, Otho, and Francis of Brunswick, and Lunenburg, Duke Henry of Mecklenburg, Prince Wolf of Anhalt, Counts Albert and Gebhard of Mansfeld, formed an alliance to defend God's "holy and eternal word" by their goods, their lives, their resources, and the arms of their subjects, at the same time declaring that they trusted not in their armies but solely in the Almighty power of the Lord, of whom they desired to be but the instruments.

Humanly speaking, and if the success of the gospel had depended on human means, this union had not been formed too soon; the friends of Rome vainly thought that in quelling the revolt of the peasants a deathblow had been struck at the Reformation; but instead of that they everywhere witnessed it raising its head with renewed life and vigour. It was evidently growing. It must be opposed, and no time so suitable as now before it could still further increase. Duke Henry of Brunswick, Duke George of Saxony, and the Cardinal Elector Albert had met at Halle and written to the Emperor to take energetic measures against "the doctrine of Luther." Henry of Brunswick was not satisfied with this: he would go and use his influence with the Emperor. He could not have arrived at a more opportune time. The Emperor had just concluded with Francis the treaty of peace at Madrid. Francis had offered to defray half the expenses of a war against either the Turks or the heretics, as Luther and his friends were called. The Emperor determined on energetic measures.

Luther saw the storm that was gathering, and he called on his friends to give themselves to prayer. "Let the people know," said he, "that they are at this hour exposed to the edge of the sword, and the rage of the devil: let them pray."

The Diet met at Spire* on June 25, 1526. The friends of Rome were full of hope. The friends of the gospel were not abashed. They requested to have a place for worship assigned them during the Diet; but this was denied. They therefore held meetings at their various houses.

{* An ancient town of Bavaria, situated at the union of the Spirebach and the Rhine.}

Again came up the question of abuses in the Romish church, and some of the friends of Rome were the loudest in pointing them out. The friends of the gospel need not trouble themselves about them; they had virtually left that church and all its abuses. The Diet formed themselves into committees to point out the abuses.

They drew up their reports, and great was the consternation when these reports were read. Never had the papal system been so freely handled. The abuses were plain and unmistakeable. There was no difficulty in making a list of them: the difficulty was not to make it too long.

In the meantime Spire was well supplied with tracts by Luther. They were circulated everywhere, and those who visited the town carried them away with them.

Rome for the time seemed to be slumbering, at least at Spire; but it now awoke, and as its cause was bad, it made up for it by noise and clamour. The friends of Rome demanded of Ferdinand, the Emperor's brother and who represented him, that he should insist upon the edict of Worms being enforced. Ferdinand took courage, and on August 3, published the decree drawn up four months previously in favour of the edict of Worms. Persecution was to begin at once.

The Elector and other friends of the gospel were indignant, and determined to leave the Diet; but on considering the date of the decree they saw less cause for alarm. It was dated, as we have said, four months previously, and at that time the Emperor and the pope were good friends. They had since quarrelled, and the pope afterwards even threatened the Emperor with excommunication. Charles wrote to his brother Ferdinand, "Let us suspend the edict of Worms: let us bring back Luther's partisans by mildness."

Thus did God allow these enemies of His truth to quarrel among themselves and the threatening storm dispersed. The Diet agreed to let each prince carry out in his own states that which he thought right, and "in a manner so as to be able to render an account to God and the Emperor."

Chapter 22.

The Sack of Rome — A.D. 1527.

In a few days the Emperor, who had been intent on crushing the Reformation, was enlisting soldiers in Germany to go to war against the pope! Thus had God in a marvellous way confounded the counsel of the wicked, and given his people peace.

The army led by that old General Frundsberg, who encouraged Luther as he went into the Diet of Worms, proceeded to Rome and spite of all resistance they took the city. They waited till midnight trying to get the pope to come to terms of peace; but it was useless. As midnight drew on the soldiers grew impatient, and disbanded, and commenced the event known in history as "the sack of Rome." The soldiers dispersed all over the city, and pillaged everything they could lay hands on worth their taking. The soldiers from Germany visited the churches, and carried off the chalices,* the pyxes, and silver remonstrances, and they clothed their camp-boys in the vestments they found in the churches. For ten days the "sack" continued; a large booty was collected, and from five to eight thousand victims fell by the sword.

{* The chalices were the cups used at the Mass; the Pyx is a box in which the Roman Catholics keep the consecrated wafer; a Remonstrance is a plate with an opening in the centre, in which the wafer is placed to be shewn (Latin remonstrare) to the people.}

Clement and his cardinals had taken refuge in the castle of Saint Angelo; but he was in great fear of being blown into the air by the invaders. And though he had formed an alliance with the king of France and the Venetians, and made the King of England preserver and protector, no one came to his relief. At length he capitulated: he renounced his alliance against the Emperor, and agreed to remain prisoner until Rome had paid the army four hundred thousand ducats, equal to £185,000.

This treatment of the pope made manifest the true character of the Emperor. At times he could talk of the sacred office of the pope, but in taking Rome he had treated the city in a way it had never before been treated, even by the Barbarians. This drew from the whole of Christendom a loud cry of execration upon the head of Charles, and then he declared that he did not know that his general was going to enter Rome. He and his court went into mourning, and he had prayers said for the deliverance of the pope! a deliverance which he could have effected at once by an order to his generals.

On the other hand, the friends of the gospel stood in amazement to see the judgment of God. Here was a man held to be most sacred, and a city revered by all the Catholics, yet by them he was imprisoned and the city stripped. The wrath of man was to have fallen on the gospel — it fell on the papacy. The Evangelicals could but say that it was the Lord who was fighting for them against their enemies.

"Leave to God's sovereign sway

To choose and to command,

So shalt thou wondering own His way

How wise, how strong His hand;

Far, far above thy thought

His counsel shall appear,

When He the work hath fully wrought

That caused thee needless fear.

Thou seest our weakness, Lord,

Our hearts are known to thee;

O lift thou up the sinking hand,

Confirm the feeble knee.

Let us in life, in death,

Thy stedfast truth declare;

And publish with our latest breath,

Thy love and guardian care."

Chapter 23.

Peace Disturbed — A.D. 1527, 1528.

This quarrel of the Emperor with the pope gave the churches rest, during which time the word of God was widely scattered, and the preaching of the gospel made progress.

In the early part of 1528 their peace was disturbed. A man named Otho of Pack, but called Pack for shortness, Vice-Chancellor of Duke George of Saxony, assured the Landgrave of Hesse that a secret league had been drawn up against the Reformers, and offered to shew him a copy of the document. For this purpose the Landgrave went to Dresden. Pack told him that he could not shew him the original, but produced a copy. It had all the appearance of being genuine. There were the arms of the State and the impression of the official seals. It was signed by King Ferdinand, the Electors of Mentz and of Brandenburg, Duke George of Saxony, the Dukes of Bavaria, the Bishops of Salzburg, Wurtzburg, and Bamberg. The Elector of Saxony was to be called upon to deliver up Luther with all his adherents. If the Elector refused, his states were to be invaded, and he and his heirs for ever dispossessed. The states of Philip of Hesse were also to be invaded. Philip paid to Pack four thousand florins, and agreed to make it up to ten thousand florins if he procured the original document. Philip took a copy and hastened away.

Full of indignation and alarm he went to the Elector John and informed him of the conspiracy, shewing him the copy of the document. The Elector was confounded. They resolved to arm at once in self-defence, and to call upon the other princes known to be favourable to the Reformation.

As soon as Luther heard of it, he and his colleagues wrote to the Elector, begging him only to act in self-defence, and to inform the Emperor at once of the plot. Philip strongly advocated not simply self-defence, but that the states of those who signed the document should be invaded. Luther and Melanchthon resorted to prayer. Philip of Hesse gave way, and waited to be attacked. In the meantime he sent copies of the document to Duke George, the Dukes of Bavaria, and the Emperor's representative. He asked the Dukes to renounce their wicked designs.

The Dukes were amazed, and declared that the document was an impudent forgery. Whoever had said that he had seen the original was a liar and a scoundrel. Philip saw at once that he had been deceived; and indeed he had: for the whole was now believed to be a forgery by Pack. He was obliged to fly from Duke John, and he came to Hesse. The Landgrave seized him, and cast him into prison. Envoys from various of the princes called him before them, when he maintained that the original had certainly existed at Dresden. The Landgrave banished him from his states, and he took refuge in Belgium. Duke George made a demand for him. He was given up, tortured, and then beheaded.

Luther, and many others, believed that though the document presented by Pack had been drawn up by him, yet that he had a foundation for it in the words and the intentions of the Catholic princes.

This unhappy affair greatly increased the ill feeling between the friends of the pope and the friends of the gospel. But no movement was taken until another Diet could be held. This was arranged to be held at Spire in March.

Chapter 24.

Protestantism — 1529.

Matters had greatly altered since the sack of Rome. The pope and Emperor were again great friends. A treaty of peace had been concluded on June 29, 1528, at Barcelona, based on the destruction of the heresy of Luther.

The Emperor wrote a threatening letter to the Elector John, and everywhere the friends of the pope proudly lifted up their heads. Now Luther and his heresy were certainly going to be crushed.

Melanchthon accompanied the Elector to the Diet; but they were met with frowns everywhere.

The arrangement of 1526 was declared to be annulled by the Emperor, and energetic measures were called for. The majority of the Diet tried to take a middle course, namely, that everything should remain as it was, but there must be no efforts made to spread the doctrines of the Reformation!

The friends of the gospel met together for consultation. How could they hide the light committed to them? Had not God said, "Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature?" Must they not obey God rather than man?

They decided to reject the proposition at all cost. But the friends of the pope were equally resolute. They called before the Diet the representatives of the free cities,* and threatened them. These disposed of, Ferdinand declared he would hear no more: the proposition must be made into a decree, and the friends of the Reformation must submit. The Elector John and those agreeing with him retired for consultation. But Ferdinand said that he had received his orders from the Emperor. "I have executed it," said he; "all is over;" and he left the Diet. They sent a message intreating him to return; but he refused.

{* Called Imperial Free Cities because they were not under the control of any of the German princes.}

The Reformers drew up a protest (from whence arose the name of PROTESTANTS), and presented it to the Diet. It spoke moderately, but firmly. They could not deny the Lord Jesus Christ or reject His holy word. This word is the only truth. The Lord's supper was "becomingly administered" in their states, and they could not enforce any edict against those who did this. They protested against any decree contrary to God or His holy word. The protest was dated April 19, 1529.

As soon as the protest was delivered, the Elector and his friends declared that on the morrow they would leave Spire (though they did not leave so soon). But before leaving, a deputation waited on Ferdinand, and presented the protest to him. He at first received it, but then desired to return it. The deputation declined; and Ferdinand insisted. At length out of courtesy the deputation received the protest from his hands, but boldly laying it on a table they left the room.

The Diet met again and ratified the edict as it had been previously proposed, irrespective of the protest. "All that remains for us to do," said Melanchthon, "is to call upon the Son of God," and he hastened back to Wittenberg much dejected.

Luther had not been at Spire, and had not drawn up the protest; and when he read it he did not think there was much force in it. But Protestants have often looked back to that protest with a sort of veneration. From that time to this the mass of those professing to be Christians have been divided into Catholics and Protestants. The Greek church, which took no part in the protest, is generally classed with the Catholics, though they are not Roman Catholics, nor do they acknowledge the pope.

The friends of Rome were now determined to root out the heresy of Protestantism. The pope loudly called for it, and the Emperor determined to carry it out. Philip of Hesse again thought of inviting all the Protestant princes into a league for self-defence. To be included in this league he named some of the Swiss. To this union Luther objected. We must now look at the reason why.

Chapter 25.

Luther And Zwingli — A.D. 1530.

Luther would have nothing to do with Zwingli. Zwingli was an eminent Swiss reformer, and he desired to be united with the German reformers. Luther's objection was principally because he believed Zwingli held erroneous doctrines on the Lord's supper.

The Roman Catholics hold that after the priest has pronounced certain words over the bread and wine, they become changed into the actual body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is called transubstantiation.* They also hold that both the body and blood of Christ are present in the bread which alone is given to the recipient, who thus partakes of the body and blood of Christ altogether independently of whether he has faith or not.

{*From trans, across, over, and substantia, substance — a change of substance.}

Luther did not believe this; for he believed that there must be faith in the receiver, and then along with the bread and wine there was the presence of the actual body and blood of Christ. This was called consubstantiation.*

{* From con, with, substantia, substance — the body and blood of Christ is with the bread and wine.}

Zwingli believed that there must be faith in the receiver; and that by faith he partook of Christ in partaking of the bread and wine which represented the body and the blood; but that the actual body and blood of Christ were not present. They were then called "Sacramentarians" by those who differed from them.

Thus was there this sad separation among these Christians. Luther charged Zwingli with heresy, and refused to have any communion with him. Indeed he was most violent, and his language shocking.

Unquestionably in this Luther was wrong. He had seen the doctrine in Carlstadt and the Anabaptists, and that had perhaps so set him against it, that he recoiled with horror from it ever afterwards.

The Landgrave however was not to be put off. Luther and Zwingli must meet and discuss the subject. All sorts of excuses were made, though indeed there was danger in their travelling to any place where they could meet. It was arranged they should meet at Marburg.*

{* A city in Upper Hesse, forty-eight miles south-west of Cassel.}

Zwingli set out, and by travelling by-roads, forests, and secluded paths he arrived safely, accompanied by a Hessian guard. Luther arrived the next day, accompanied by Melanchthon, Cruciger and Jonas. Philip invited both to the castle and entertained them well. Others were also invited — whose names have been handed down as Reformers — amongst them the more noted were OEcolampadius and Bucer.* Carlstadt begged to be present; but he was refused — it was supposed through Luther's influence.

{* OEcolampadius (whose name was Hausschein) was professor and preacher at Basel in Switzerland; Bucer (whose name was Martin Kuhhorn) was teacher of divinity at Strasburg: in 1548 he strongly condemned a compromise drawn up by the Emperor called the Interim, after which he came to England and taught theology at Cambridge, where he died in 1551. In Queen Mary's reign his remains were exhumed and burnt.}

Private conferences were held before the public one — OEcolampadius with Luther, and Zwingli with Melanchthon. There were other subjects in dispute; but the question of what is called the "real presence" was the chief one; that is, whether or not the body and blood of Christ are really present with the bread and wine at the Lord's supper.

On Saturday, October 2, they met, in the presence of Philip and his court, and a company of nobles, deputies, and theologians. Great interest was taken in the meeting, and great hopes were cherished of its success.

Luther and OEcolampadius began the discussion. They had been reminded that the object before them was to re-establish union. But Luther in a most determined manner declared, "I differ from my adversaries with regard to the doctrine of the Lord's supper, and I shall always differ from them. Christ has said, 'This is my body.' Let them shew me that a body is not a body. I reject reason, common sense, carnal arguments, and mathematical proofs. God is above mathematics."

OEcolampadius replied that the words "This is my body" were a figure, similarly to the words "that Rock was Christ," "I am the vine," etc.

Luther admitted there were figures in the Bible, but contended that "This is my body" was not a figure.

OEcolampadius quoted "The flesh profiteth nothing;" it was only that which we fed on spiritually and by faith was of any avail. This and a great deal more was said — the same being enforced by Zwingli. But it was all of no use. Luther had started with the resolution that he would always differ from them, and in such a spirit — an unteachable spirit, and a dogged determination to hold to his own opinion — he could not, he would not be convinced. On entering the hall he had taken a piece of chalk and written on the cloth that covered the table the words hoc est corpus meum, "this is my body," and when he was close pressed he would stand and point to these words. There was his answer; "The devil himself," he said, "shall not drive me from that."

Again and again they returned to the subject. OEcolampadius quoted another text, "We know not Jesus Christ after the flesh." (2 Cor. v. 16.) But it was of no use. Luther at length caught up the velvet cover on which he had written the words Hoc est Corpus Meum and held it before their faces. "See," said he, "see! this is our text. You have not driven us from it."

OEcolampadius saw it was of no use to continue the discussion, and was silent. The Landgrave, grieved at the thought that the conference should end thus, begged them to come to an understanding. Luther declared that there was only one way to do this — they must believe as he did. Zwingli was deeply moved and burst into tears.

Philip was loth to let them part thus. He still hoped that something might be done, and he invited them to his table. But it was useless. All ended in disagreement. They must part. There was a plague in the city, and all were anxious to leave; but most were loth to part without peace, if not unity of judgment.

"Let us confess our union in all things in which we agree," said Zwingli, "and as for the rest let us remember that we are brothers."

"Yes, yes," said Philip; "you agree. Give them a testimony of your unity, and recognize one another as brothers."

Zwingli, OEcolampadius, Bucer, and Hedio approached the German Reformers, and it was hoped they would part in love as brothers. But Luther repulsed them with the words, "You have a different spirit from ours." At length he agreed to own them as friends, but not as brothers and members of Christ's church! This was a fresh insult to the Swiss Christians; but they determined to receive this, if they could get nothing better. They would all be friends.

A list of Articles of Faith was drawn up; in all of which they agreed except as to the "real presence." Luther seemed melted. He had drawn up these articles himself, and in them he says, "both the interested parties shall cherish more and more a truly christian charity for one another so far as conscience permits." They part good friends. The articles are sent to be printed.

Luther left; but he felt very dejected; his faith was very low, he feared he should never see his wife and children again. He felt tormented as by an evil spirit. But he safely reached Wittenberg, his family, and his friends.

The result of the conference was that by the report being published, the Christians in Germany saw the doctrine of the Lord's supper as held by the Swiss, which had hitherto not been plainly before them, and many embraced it as the truth.

Chapter 26.

The Protestant Confession at Augsburg — A.D. 1530.

The friends of the Romish church were in great expectation. The Emperor was going to visit the pope: surely some real action would now be made against the Protestants.

This the pope tried to procure; but the Emperor saw it still answered his purpose to humble the Protestants by his friendship to the pope; and yet make the pope look up to him in hope that he might subdue the Protestants.

At this time he was courting the favour of the pope. He desired to be crowned by Clement VII. as King of Lombardy. This took place with great pomp at Bologna, on February 22. And the Emperor determined to assume another crown as Emperor of the Romans.

The pope anointed the Emperor with oil, presented him with a sceptre and then a sword, saying, "Make use of it in defence of the church against the enemies of the faith."

The Protestants feared that evil would result from this friendship with the pope. Melanchthon was filled with fear. Luther's faith revived. "Our enemies triumph," said he, "but ere long to perish." The Elector John proposed arming, and even preventing the Emperor from entering Germany. Philip of Hesse, young and headstrong, was overjoyed. Luther was consulted. He denounced it in toto. It was given up.

The time drew near for the national convention and the Protestants prepared before hand the draft of a confession as to what it was essential to contend for.

The Elector John had been threatened by the Emperor, and many feared for his safety if he ventured to Augsburg. But Luther infused courage into them by his own faith in God. He also composed a hymn for the occasion, which was sung by many and revived their drooping spirits. It said:

"With our own strength we nought can do,

Destruction yawns on every side;

He fights for us, our champion true,

Elect of God to be our guide.

What is His name? The anointed One,

The God of armies He;

Of earth and heaven the Lord alone —

With Him, on field of battle won,

Abideth victory."

It was thought best for Luther not to appear at Augsburg, but in order that he might be near at hand to be consulted if needs be, he was located at Coburg.

The Elector John was the first to arrive at Augsburg. The Catholics were surprised that he

ventured to come at all. He was followed by Philip of Hesse. They both succeeded in finding open doors for their preachers, and every day was the gospel preached to crowds of listeners.

This greatly provoked the Catholics, who also had their preachers; but the priests were not used to preaching, and the gospel of God they could not preach for many did not know it. So the Catholics appealed to the Emperor to stop the preaching. He wrote to the Elector requesting him to have it stopped. The Elector consulted his theologians. Some advised him to yield, but others exhorted him to refuse in the politest terms he could. He answered, "As to the demand to suspend our preaching, nothing is proclaimed in it but the glorious truth of God, and never was it so necessary to us. We cannot therefore do without it."

In the meantime Melanchthon was hard at work on the Confession. He laboured at it night and day. He wanted it to be mild but yet true. When finished it was sent to Luther, to mark anything he did not approve of. He marked nothing. He approved of it as a whole but the style was so different from his that he could not have touched it without spoiling it. He prayed constantly for the success of the cause of truth.

The Emperor arrived with great pomp, being met outside the city by all the Electors and princes. He took the first opportunity of demanding that the preaching should be discontinued, but the Protestants again declared that they could not yield. The demand was waived.

The next day was what is called "Corpus Christi,* when there is a procession, with a worshipping of the Host (the consecrated wafer) as it was called. The Emperor requested that the Protestant princes would join in this procession as usual. They declined to do so; but the Emperor insisted. He gave them till the next morning to decide.

{* Corpus Christi, "body of Christ," a festival of the church of Rome.}

They retired and called into counsel their friends. At midnight the Emperor, impatient, sent for their answer. "At present we require sleep," said the Elector, "to-morrow we will let you know." Spalatin was engaged in the night, preparing his answer. "The sacrament," said he, "was not instituted to be worshipped, as the Jews worshipped the brazen image. We are here to confess the truth, and not for the confirmation of abuses. Let us therefore stay away." This judgment confirmed the princes in their decision.

In the morning by seven o'clock they repaired to the Emperor. "In the things of God, the commands of God Himself oblige me," said the Margrave of Brandenburg, who spoke for all, "to put aside all commandments of men." He was ready to suffer death if that was the penalty. He then presented the declaration. "We will not countenance by our presence," it said, "these impious human traditions which are opposed to the word of God."

"If you will not accompany his Majesty for the love of God," said Ferdinand, "do so at least for love of the Emperor; and, as vassals of the Empire, his Majesty commands you."

"An act of worship is in question," urged the princes; "our conscience forbids it."

"His Majesty desires to see whether you will obey him or not," said Ferdinand. The Emperor quitted the hall, hoping the princes would follow, but they returned to their palaces.

The Emperor walked in the procession with a taper in his hand, his head shorn like a priest's. But comparatively few of the citizens fell into the ranks. This was the more to be remarked as it was in great contrast with what it had been at former times. The Emperor was greatly incensed at the opposition of the Reformers, and vowed to take vengeance in the Diet.

Again a demand was made to have the preaching stopped; and now, on consideration that the Emperor was master of the city, the princes gave way, but left themselves free to have it in their own palaces.

After various delays, and trying to condemn the Protestants unheard, the 25th of June was arranged to hear their Confession of Faith; the Catholics also were preparing one. Melanchthon had laboured hard to put it into soft words, and avoid giving needless offence. Over his work he feared and quaked, and was often in tears. He wrote to Luther asking him how much they could concede to the Catholics. "Concede to the Catholics? How much? We have already conceded too much," said Luther. He did all he could to cheer and encourage Melanchthon.

On the 25th of June all hastened to the Emperor's palace. It would hold but about two hundred, and it was soon crowded. Bayer began to read the Confession. They were ready, it said, to confer with the Emperor, to seek to restore "the sole true faith," because it was for "the sole and same Christ" they fought.

It then spoke of the Trinity, and the various topics usual in such confessions.

It continued, "We teach, moreover, that we cannot be justified before God by our own strength, our merits, and our works; but that we are justified by Christ, through grace, through the means of faith."

"We teach, at the same time, that this faith ought to bear good fruits, and that we must do all the good works commanded by God, for the love of God, and not by their means to gain the grace of God."

They acknowledged the christian church to be "the assembly of all true believers and all the saints."

It afterwards proceeded to deal with the abuses which were admitted to exist in the church, and to state what they believed were the remedies.

The Emperor had insisted that the preaching was to cease; but by this Confession not only were all the princes, but the Emperor himself sitting for two hours listening to the story of how man was to be saved, as well as to a detail of the abuses which many were so anxious to have covered up.

Many who could not gain admittance to the hall filled the corridors and listened at all the doors and openings. The full clear voice of Bayer enabled them all to hear. The papal legate had advisedly stayed away, so as not in any way to be compromised.

The reading of this Confession was an important event. If the Catholic princes were called upon to join the Emperor in prosecuting the Reformers, they could not now make it an excuse that they did not know what the Protestants held, nor be led astray, except wilfully, through the very erroneous statements of the Catholics. They had heard with their own ears what it was these Reformers were contending for, as well as what they contended against.

That the Confession was not perfect is not to be wondered at. Melanchthon was very studious not to give offence. But considering the times in which it took place, and the general darkness around, it was a wonderful thing for many to have sat and heard an amount of truth which they had certainly never heard before.

The reading of the Confession bore some good fruit. The Duke of Bavaria said to Eck, "You had given me a very different idea of this doctrine and of this affair. . . . Can you refute by sound reasons the confession made by the Elector and his allies?"

"With the writings of the apostles and prophets," said Eck, "No; but with those of the Fathers and of the Councils, Yes."

"I understand," said the Duke, "I understand. The Lutherans, according to you, are in scripture, and we are outside."

Several of the princes were gained over and the Confession did good in other places; for the Emperor sent copies to all the courts of Europe. It was translated into French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.

Luther wrote to the princes, begging them now they had presented their Confession to leave the Diet and go home. At present they waited to see what would follow. The Emperor would have yielded something for peace' sake; but the papal legate was soon at his elbow to prevent him making any concession.

"If you have money," confessed one of the Secretaries of State to Melanchthon, "it will be easy for you to buy from the Italians (the Papists) whatever religion you please; but if your purse is empty your cause is lost."

The Emperor Charles summoned the friends of the pope, and proposed the question: What reply could they make to the Confession?

Some advised that their best doctors should draw up a reply. Others advised that the Confession should be criticised and examined and then the subject be submitted to the Emperor for final decision. Others again advised that nothing should be done, but a demand made to carry out the edict of Worms.

Count Felix of Werdenburg offered to draw his sword, and to take an oath not to return it to its sheath till the overthrow of the stronghold of Luther. Another said the Confession had been written in black ink; if he were the Emperor he would answer in red — that is blood. Others advised a more moderate process. It was not simply Luther or Melanchthon, or a few monks; it was a question of princes and states they had to deal with. The majority ordered that a reply should be drawn up to the Confession. Men were at once chosen to do it. Eck and Faber, a friend of Erasmus, were the leaders.

In the meantime the Emperor raised the question whether the Diet, and the Emperor as its mouthpiece, were competent to decide in a matter purely religious. He consulted both sides.

"Yes," said Luther; "but he must decide nothing contrary to the word of God." This was really saying, No; let the word of God decide by the mouth of the Emperor.

The Catholics also said, "Yes; as guardian and protector of the church he could decide."

They waited for the reply of the friends of the pope. Luther said he could tell beforehand what it would be: "The Fathers, the Fathers, the Fathers; the church, the church, the church; usage, custom: but of the scriptures — nothing."

Melanchthon was filled with fear at the threats of war that reached him. The Emperor sent again and again for the Elector and Philip, which only increased Melanchthon's fear. He advocated reducing their claims to two points: the Lord's supper in the "two kinds," and the marriage of priests.

We may well ask what right had Melanchthon or any man to pare down the truth of God in this way? If their Confession was true, and they were told to "buy the truth and sell it not" (Prov. xxiii. 23), why not contend for it all? If not truth, why put it forward? But fear filled his soul, and he was desirous of a compromise. Luther was away out of hearing.

Melanchthon was told that if he thought he could bring about peace he had better try what he could do with the legate. Melanchthon wrote asking for an interview in a letter which could only proceed from one overwhelmed with fear — so contrary is it to the spirit of the Confession.* "We venerate," said Melanchthon, "the universal authority of the Roman Pontiff . . . . With the aid of God, we will remain faithful, even unto death, to Christ and to the Roman Church." Alas, poor Melanchthon! Where had he fallen to?

{* This letter is so contrary to the Confession also written by Melanchthon, that some doubt its authenticity but "the fear of man bringeth a snare."}

But Luther heard of the talk of "concession," and he wrote at once to Melanchthon, "There can be no concord between Christ and Belial.* As far as regards me, I will not yield a hair's breadth."

{* This is doubtless an allusion to the passage in 2 Corinthians vi. 15: "What concord hath Christ with Belial?" Belial is most probably wickedness personified; the wicked one, that is, Satan.}

Melanchthon visited the legate. He had heard that he would yield to them the above two points, and he went full of hope. Melanchthon did not see that if these were granted, and peace was thus restored, they would be placing themselves again under the yoke of Rome, who would soon enforce obedience. It was in effect trying to build up the things they had once destroyed (Gal. ii. 18), and Melanchthon was thus far making himself thereby a transgressor.

But God ordered it otherwise. Though Melanchthon had pared down the faith contended for to the two points, the legate would not consent to these. The Reformation was saved. Melanchthon retired, filled now with shame at the concessions he had made.

In the meantime the Confession had been sent by express to Rome, and the pope's answer had arrived. He would yield nothing, neither would he sanction either discussion or a council. He exhorted the Emperor to send at once an army into Germany and crush the Reformation. The Emperor saw more clearly than the pope the extent of the Reformation and he hesitated.

But Eck was now ready with his reply to the Protestant Confession. He sent it to the Emperor to look over privately. The Emperor was confounded. It filled two hundred and eighty pages, and it was so full of abuse and so far from the point that he, as a Catholic, was ashamed to have it read in the Diet. He sent it back, crumpled and torn, requesting them to make it shorter and more moderate.

This occasioned a delay of nearly three weeks, and Charles doubted if it would be a success after all. So they adopted the plan of privately attacking the Protestant princes separately in the hope of gaining them over. But it was without success.

The Elector was now threatened to have his states taken altogether from him if he did not yield. He fully saw his danger and for a time was filled with fear. But his faith revived. "It is God who made me Elector," said he, "me who was unworthy of it. I fling myself into His arms and let Him do with me what shall seem good to Him." The theologians rallied round their sovereign and told him that they did not wish him to risk the loss of his states and his crown for them. The Elector was moved by this; but declared, "I also desire to confess my Saviour."

On the third of August the modified reply of Eck and his helpers was ready. It agreed with many things in the Confession as to the Trinity, eternal punishment, etc., but on other points it would yield nothing. It asserted that man was not utterly lost: good works were meritorious. It contended for the Lord's supper being a sacrifice, and was to be in "one kind" only; the priests must not marry; and they denied that the church "was an assembly of the saints."

As Luther had said, these things were based on the Fathers and the church, and not on scripture. But it was held that the Protestants had been confuted and a demand was made that they should submit. Never were extreme measures so apparent. The Emperor would hear of no compromise; the Protestants must yield, or there would certainly be war. The Catholics negotiated with Italy for a regiment of light horse, and Henry VIII. of England promised to supply large sums of money.

To make all sure, and prevent any of the princes escaping from Augsburg, orders were secretly given, and on the night of August 6, there was a great commotion in the city, the imperial soldiers were hastening in all directions, which ended by guards taking possession of the gates of the city in the name of the Emperor.

The Protestant princes were again summoned before the Emperor and threatened. The Elector was told that his life would be taken and his states torn from him unless he agreed to their terms. The princes begged for time to reply. The Emperor had possession of all the gates of the city: prisoners as they were, what could they do? It seemed now they must be faithful to Christ, or face death.

But they were surprised that Philip of Hesse was not with them that morning. He was perhaps ill-at-ease and so stayed away. But news was soon brought to them that Philip had left the city, which on inquiry proved to be true. A little before the Emperor's soldiers had taken possession of the gates, Philip had made his way to one of them, disguised in a foreign dress. In a careless manner he rode past the guard without being recognized. Five or six of his attendants followed in the same careless manner at short intervals. Once fairly away from the city they put spurs to their horses and were soon far away. He had asked permission of the Emperor to leave but had been refused. He determined to wait no longer, and had thus slipped away, without bidding even his friends good-bye. When the Emperor put his soldiers at the gates, he made sure he had all the Protestant princes safe. But Philip of Hesse had escaped.

As soon as his flight was known in the city all was in the greatest commotion. Had an earthquake taken place there could not have been greater consternation. Those whose states were near to Philip's began to fear that with his known courage and promptitude he would soon have his army ready and be attacking them, before they could leave the city. All saw that it was a stratagem of war, in which they had been defeated, and those who had been the loudest to cry out for war, were now as anxious to avoid it.

The Emperor summoned the Diet at once — Sunday afternoon. He told them that Philip of Hesse had left the city. He hoped it had been unknown to the Reformers. The princes assured the Diet that it had been done without their knowledge; though they doubted not he had good reasons for going. They then reported that it had reached their ears that the Emperor's soldiers guarded the gates on account of them. They begged the guard might be withdrawn.

The Emperor made a lame excuse about two soldiers having quarrelled and a mob being raised, but orders were immediately given to throw open the gates. The lions were at once turned into lambs, and the fiercest of the friends of the pope were meek and hoped all might be settled.

A few Catholics and a few Protestants were now chosen to meet together in a more amiable way to see if they could not come to terms. This was exceedingly dangerous for the cause of truth. It sounded but reasonable that if Rome gave way on some points, the Reformers should also do the same, and thus meet about half way. The Protestant confession was taken up and gone through clause by clause, and what we should call shameful concessions were made by the Protestants. For instance, they agreed to acknowledge the pope as "supreme bishop of Christendom." At the same time they held him to be Antichrist, but they said they might be under him as the Jews were under Pharaoh!

When it became known what those few met in consultation were agreeing to, there was a bitter cry from their fellow Christians. "Better die with Jesus Christ," said they, "than gain the favour of the whole world without Him." On the day Luther heard of what was going on he wrote five letters, stirring them up to courage and faithfulness. He again declared it was an attempt to reconcile Christ with Belial; and he plainly told them that he would not be bound by anything they might agree to.

But the consultations really ended in nothing. The Catholics could only pretend to give up anything. The pope had declared he would not concede the two points, and without him they could not move. Melanchthon, in the hope of peace, was led to concede much, but immediately afterwards was ashamed of it. But God was above it all. He forbade and prevented any real union; and they separated as far off from each other as ever.

Philip of Hesse was informed of what was going on and he too was indignant at the concessions of Melanchthon. "If we are Christians," wrote he, "what we should pursue is, not our own advantage but the consolation of so many weary and afflicted consciences, for whom there is no salvation if we take away the word of God. . . . This is not the moment to yield, but to remain firm unto death. Baffle these fearful combinations of Melanchthon, and tell, from me, the deputies of the cities to be men, not women. Let us fear nothing: God is with us."

The Protestant princes were now desirous of quitting Augsburg; but the Emperor detained them to close up the Diet. The recess* was drawn up. It was insulting to the Reformers: it called them a sect and said "the Confession had been soundly refuted by the holy scriptures." They were to have till April of the following year (it was now September) to come to some arrangement with the pope, and this was only granted on condition that they should join the Emperor in a war against the Anabaptists and all those who denied "the real presence" in the Lord's supper. By this they hoped to divide the Protestants into two bodies and employ one against the other.

{* The "recess" (from the French recez) is a formal statement of the decrees of the Diet.}

The Protestant princes could agree to nothing so wicked. "We do not accept it," said they. Then the Emperor will seek counsel of the pope how best to root out "this sect and its new errors." The Diet is over — the princes leave; thankful that they had been able to remain firm before such fearful intimidations. In God was their strength.

The anger of Charles was great when he saw the princes leave, unhumbled, to pursue their former course. He wrote to the pope, "The negotiations are broken off; our adversaries are more obstinate than ever; and I am resolved to employ my strength and my person in combating them."

As we have seen, Charles had endeavoured to set one part of Protestantism against another; but the reverse of this took place. "We are one in the fundamental articles of faith," said the Swiss, "and in particular (notwithstanding some disputes about words among our theologians) we are one in the doctrine of the communion in the body and blood of our Lord. Receive us." The Saxon deputies opened their arms, and the Swiss and German Protestants were united.

Thus ended this Diet with its tedious delays — its consultations, its concession and its victories. The Catholics left, resolved to gather together their armies to enforce obedience to Rome; the Protestants, strengthened in their faith and with a determination to bow only to the word of God.

Luther had been all this while at Coburg. He was near enough to be consulted on all important points, and he was constantly looking out for letters from Augsburg, anxious to know how things were progressing; and was constantly writing to encourage and stir up the zeal of those who stood in the forefront. He longed greatly to be at Melanchthon's elbow to stay his hand at concession and to stir up his faith. On the whole he rejoiced as to the Diet of Augsburg. They had really given up nothing, lost nothing; whereas, on the other hand, their Confession had been read by thousands, the truth had thus been spread, and some were gained over to the gospel. Their enemies had seen it was not merely a question of opinions or private judgment which could be held to-day and given up to-morrow. The Protestants had declared that God had taught them the truth on which they must live, and on which, if needful, they would die. It also brought the scripture into prominence. It was no longer the Fathers, nor the Schoolmen, nor the varying decrees of councils, nor the contradictory decision of the popes; it was the living, the unalterable, the invincible word of the living God.

Chapter 27.

Attempts at Agreement — A.D. 1530-1536.

At the end of 1530 the Elector was summoned to Cologne to meet with others to elect a king of the Romans. Ferdinand, the Emperor's brother, was to be the king. The Protestant princes held a meeting, and thought it right to oppose the election. The Elector wrote to Luther for his judgment. "I am a child in the things of the world," said Luther; "I will pray, and entreat therefore that God may be graciously pleased to guide and direct you, as He has hitherto done." He thought the Elector ought not to oppose the election. Melanchthon gave the same advice.

The Protestant princes however protested against the election, in which they were joined by some of the Catholic princes. The Emperor explained that he had too much to look after: the attention which so many lands claimed defied the attempts of a single sovereign to discharge the duty, though it has been judged that his real motive was to secure to his own family the succession to the office of Emperor. The king of the Romans was not to be a king of Italy, as his title might seem to imply, but a sort of deputy Emperor; so that he would, as well as the Emperor, be over the princes of Germany. The Protestant princes had no desire for this. They declared that they could not own any one as over them except the Emperor himself. Nevertheless Ferdinand was elected king of the Romans without the sanction of the Elector and his friends.

The Protestant princes again met at Smalcalde* early in 1531. They had not separated when a message came from the Emperor requesting assistance from their states against the Turks, whose progress was as rapid as it was successful. The princes declared they were ready to bear a portion of the burdens of the empire; but complained that great violence had been used towards them. "Afford us protection," said they, "against further proceedings of the fiscal chambers, and we will render the required assistance."

{* Called also Schmalkalden or Smalcalden. It is a town in Hesse-Cassel, in the province of Fulda, at the meeting of two streams, the Schmalkalde and the Stine. It is ten miles north of Meiningen.}

The Archbishop of Mentz and Louis, prince Palatine, offered to act as mediators between the Emperor and the Protestant princes, which was accepted. Deputies from all these met together; but it was the old question over again of making concessions. The deputies from the princes would not enter into any such questions in the absence of the theologians.

About the same time the count of Nassau and the count of Nuenar visited the Elector of Saxony. They advocated a compromise, and expressed their suspicion that the Elector was inclined to unite with the Sacramentarians. But he declared in the strongest terms his rooted dislike to that body. And what, we may ask again, was there to call forth this great dislike of the Elector? Why those Christians denied the "real presence" of the body and blood of Christ in the Lord's supper. Thus, though after the Diet of Augsburg, the Germans and Swiss had agreed to own their oneness, yet there was really this animosity which should not have existed among Christians.

The counts requested the Elector to be present at a proposed Diet to be held in September. But the Elector dreaded a repetition of the contests at Augsburg. The threats that had been thrown out would make him require a safe-conduct before either he or his son could attend. Again, he could not agree to forbid the evangelists preaching the gospel; and he could not sin against his conscience by making a distinction between different kinds of meat. He also stated that if religion was to be a subject for consideration at the Diet, it would be necessary to have Luther and other theologians with him; for whom he should require safe-conducts.

Luther during all these questions was ever on the watch. He had lately published a book, "Martin Luther's Admonition to his beloved Germans," in which he shewed that if there were tumults and seditions, the Reformers were not responsible for them, for they advocated patience and submission even unto death.

"The most violent of our adversaries," said Luther, "are obliged to acknowledge that no article of the Protestant Confession opposes scripture or the rule of faith;" but certain ceremonies only and the decrees of the popes, who have imbrued their hands in the blood of many innocent confessors." Luther states three reasons against a religious war. One, was the close affinity there was between the gospel and the Protestant Confession: would they war against the gospel of God? The second, to carry on a war for Rome would be a re-establishing or strengthening all the worst abuses of the papal system; abuses which many of the Catholic princes were forward to condemn. Thirdly, to the purity of the doctrines put forth by the Protestants as compared with those put forth by the papists. Under this head he speaks of the doctrine of justification by faith, which he sees is really the object of all the persecution against them, but which the gates of hell will never be able to overcome.

When the edict of Augsburg was published, Luther put forth another paper taking up the various points. He shewed how private masses, which brought so rich a harvest to the priests, were contrary to the gospel, which was not to be bought and sold.

In answer to one who had attacked him he maintained that all Christians were bound to obey the powers that be; but that no one was obliged to obey the Emperor or any power if he commanded him to take up arms against true religion and justice; and he pointed to the example of St. Maurice who with ten thousand of his fellow-soldiers met death rather than obey the Emperor who desired them to do what they accounted unholy.

The Diet which was to have been held in September was postponed till the following year (1532), when a Diet was held at Ratisbon.* Again the Archbishop of Mentz and the Elector Palatine persuaded the Emperor to let them again try to bring about a reconciliation. He gave his consent, and on April 1st a meeting was called at Schweinfurt, a town of Bavaria on the bank of the Main. The deputies came with a more formal proposition from the Emperor, the principal items of which were:

{* A city of Bavaria, situated on the south bank of the Danube, opposite to the influx of the river Regen, from which its German name, Regensburg, is derived.}

The Protestants should not publish or teach anything not contained in the Confession of Augsburg.

That they should have no communication with the Zwinglians or Anabaptists.

They should make no attempt, under the plea of religion, to draw to their party the subjects of other princes.

That they should not allow their preachers to teach their doctrines beyond the boundaries of their own states.

That they should neither disturb the established ecclesiastical jurisdiction, nor attack the rites and ceremonies of the church.

That they should furnish succours against the Turks.

That they should obey the Emperor and the king of the Romans.

If they did all this and more besides, the Emperor and the king of the Romans would forget all past offences.

To these propositions the princes replied that the king of the Romans had been appointed contrary to all the rules of the Empire. To the other propositions they gave a general sort of consent.

Charles was anxious to have assistance against the Turks, so that he took the advice of the mediating princes, and proclaimed that "no person should henceforth be interrupted in the observance of his religion till the meeting of a council, or at least till the orders of the empire had provided some method for the healing of the wounds inflicted by the present disorders."

On the 27th of July the Diet of Ratisbon was broken up, and the princes hastened away to their states to summon their people to march against the Turks. As this was being done the aged John Elector of Saxony, departed this life. His son John Frederick succeeded him.

A bloody conflict was expected with the Turks, Soliman with his victorious army was at Gratz, a place in Styria; the Emperor with his army was in the vicinity of Vienna. There each watched for the other to make the attack. At length Soliman withdrew the Turks without venturing a battle, and the danger was over.

No sooner was Charles at liberty than he turned his face towards Rome, and consulted with the pope as to the proposed council. The pope by his nuncio wrote to the new Elector of Saxony, informing him that the pope agreed to a General Council, conformable to the councils held by the Fathers and under the direction of the Holy Ghost, providing that promises would be given that its decisions should be final. He would name the place of its meeting. It would be either Bologna, Placentia, or Mantua.

John Frederick was wise enough not to reply offhand. He told the messengers of the pope and of the Emperor that, as a numerous body of persons had taken part in the Confession at Augsburg it would not be seemly in him to answer without consulting them. A meeting was about to be held in June at Smalcalde, when the proposition should be considered, and a reply made to the pope.

At the meeting the pope's letter was taken into solemn consideration. They had asked for a General Council, and now one was offered to them. Could they accept it? They drew up a reply.

They thanked the Emperor for his determination for a Council, but they must qualify their acceptance of it. They needed a council, in which neither the power nor the influence of the pope should interfere with the due consideration of their cause, and whereat no attempt should be made to decide the points in dispute by the decrees of the popes and the opinion of the schoolmen, but only by the authority of scripture. The council should be held in Germany, as the Emperor himself admitted; and not in either of the three places named, which were in the states of the pope. They could not bind themselves to accept the decisions of the council as final, until they knew more of its constitution and its basis of deciding questions. They had noticed that the pope had said this council was to be held in conformity to former councils. But what did that mean? Some of the councils merely enforced what had been decided on by the pope. Judging that the pope really meant to entrap them, they said, "If the pope insists on pursuing his present purpose, we place our cause in the hands of God, who will defend His doctrine and the purity of His worship."

Thus spoke these princes to the Emperor, and through him to the pope, in behalf of the Protestants generally. The pope had named eighteen months as a probable period before the council could be called. But what might not take place during so long a period?

Luther however was busy with writing, preaching and lecturing, when a turn was given to affairs by the death of the pope Clement VII. in 1534. Cardinal Farnese, under the title of Paul III. was his successor.

He sent his minister Paul Verger into Germany to sound the Elector and his friends as to the council. The pope was desirous of the council, but it must be held in Italy, and be governed "by the rules of former councils." The Elector, said he, would consult with his friends before giving a reply.

Verger went to Wittenberg, and Luther was invited to have an interview with him. Luther was so thoroughly convinced that nothing good could be got from the pope that he was inclined to ridicule both the pope and his minister.

Pomeranus accompanied Luther. They were all civil and courteous to one another. The subject of the council was soon introduced. "I and my associates," said Luther, "are convinced by the Holy Spirit of the truth of our doctrine, and need no council to determine for us; but there are others who, ignorant and sorrowful and oppressed by tyranny, know not what they ought, or what they ought not, to believe. Let a council then be called: I will be present, though it should condemn me to be burnt."

The legate asked whether priests were ordained now in Saxony. "They are ordained," said Luther, "for the pope would not ordain them for us. And behold here sits a bishop (pointing to Pomeranus) whom we have ordained." Had Luther been asked for his authority, it would have been awkward: for certainly he could not have shewn his authority from scripture to ordain others.

They had further conversation, and Luther assured the legate that their opinion did not rest on the learning or wisdom of men; but on the firm and solid rock, the word of God, which should remain for ever, and yield not to the gates of hell.

The words and courage of Luther had a good effect on the legate. He found the Reformer and his work different from what they had been represented to him. He eventually became a minister in the reformed church.

The Protestant princes had called a meeting to consider and to reply to the message of the pope brought to them by Verger. It was firm but respectful. The council could not be held in Italy, unless the safety of those attending it were guaranteed. As former popes had punished the adherents to the reformed doctrine when they could, Paul III. ought not to be the judge. The pope himself rather needed to be judged. They desired an impartial tribunal, and one that would decide according to scripture.

But before this meeting broke up, an envoy arrived from the King of France. He was meditating a war against Italy, and was in hopes of gaining the assistance of the Protestant princes. What heartlessness and want of common honesty, for this man to make such a proposition to the Protestants — with his hands all bloody with persecuting their friends in France! He made the best excuse he could for the persecution he had been carrying on, and gave great assurance of his friendly feeling now. This same man afterwards shocked the whole of Christianity by forming an alliance with the Turks. The princes could place no faith in the king's repentance, and could form no alliance which might be construed into treason against the Emperor.

At the above meeting of the Protestant princes another ambassador also arrived. It was Fox, bishop of Hereford, and he came from Henry VIII. of England. The history of the Reformation in England must be sought, for the causes which had transformed so bitter an enemy to the Reformation, as Henry VIII. was, into a friend and admirer.* Fox told the princes that Henry was well disposed, not only to the Elector of Saxony, but also to the reformers and the Reformation. He exhorted them against any jealousy or schism among themselves to weaken their strength in the approaching council. If peace was restored it must be on the basis of scripture. He informed them of how the papal power had been destroyed in England, and exhorted them not to take part in any council which would only confirm the power of the pope and re-establish superstition.

{* See a companion volume: "Lights and Shadows of the Reformation."}

However Luther might at times seem to desire to confine the Reformation to spiritual matters, it associated itself more and more with politics. We have seen that he himself advocated the freedom of the nation from the pope's control, and now that the Protestant princes had formed an alliance and met together at Smalcalde — altogether irrespective of whether they were Christians or not — they were appealed to as a powerful political body both by France and England; and indeed it is credibly stated that the princes themselves had previously sent their ambassadors to both the above courts.

At the end of the meeting these Protestant princes were joined also by the Duke of Wurtemberg and the princes of Pomerania, together with the cities of Frankfort, Augsburg, Hamburg and Hanover.

It was at the meeting at Smalcalde that were drawn up another set of Articles of Faith, known as the "Articles of Smalcalde." They are said to have been written by Luther, and were similar to the Augsburg Confession, but bolder in language. Melanchthon qualified his subscription to them. He thought the pope might be acknowledged, provided he allowed the word of God to be preached in purity. But what pope ever did this?

Erasmus, a learned Dutchman, died soon after this (in the year 1536). He had long seen the follies and errors of the priests, and had very freely censured them, mostly in a sarcastic style, but had always managed to escape punishment, though he offended many, indeed he was caressed by kings and popes. It was said that "Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched it;" but Erasmus had never gone beyond pointing out errors and follies; he had not faith to follow the light or to suffer for Christ, though he valued the scriptures and published a New Testament in Greek and Latin (in 1516). He was solicited to attack Luther, but declined. Of him he said, "Luther has given us a wholesome doctrine, and many a good counsel. I wish he had not defeated the effect of them by intolerable faults. But if he had written everything in the most unexceptionable manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of truth. Every man has not the courage requisite to make a martyr; and I am afraid, that if I were put to the trial I should imitate St. Peter."

Chapter 28.

Insurrection of the Anabaptists — A.D. 1534, 1535.

The city of Munster* was now the scene of a seditious and bloody insurrection by the

Anabaptists. Bernard Rotman and John of Leyden** were the leaders. Rotman had begun to work in Munster as an evangelist; if he was then an anabaptist he was one secretly. But he was so successful in arousing the people that numbers rallied round him, and even the magistrates professed to believe in what he preached. The senate passed a sentence that the churches were to be for these preachers. The Catholics were alarmed and retired to a village near by, and appealed to the bishop for help. This help was sent, and they prepared to attack the town. They deemed it best to send a messenger first with a demand to the senate that the churches should be restored.

{* Munster is the capital of a province of the same name, and is situated on both sides of the small river Aa in Westphalia, Prussia; it was surrounded by a double mound and a moat until 1765.

{** His name was John Boccold, or Beukels, and he was a journeyman tailor of Leyden: but he was better known as John of Leyden.

The senate detained the messenger and in the night a body from the town of nearly a thousand surrounded the village and compelled the Catholics to come to terms; which were that six churches should be given up to the preachers, and many of the ancient rites were to be abolished as superstitions. We feel sure Luther would never have sanctioned such a step; his doctrine was that we must not take the law into our own hands.

Peace thus restored did not last long; the city was visited by John of Leyden, the well-known anabaptist. The senate proceeded to banish him from the city, but Bernard Rotman now avowed himself a believer in these doctrines, and again all was in confusion. The true Reformers however opposed him too, and it was hoped peace would be restored; but those who were banished had not left the town but lay hidden among their friends. The Landgrave of Hesse sent two eminent preachers, in the hope that truth would prevail over fanaticism. These challenged the anabaptists to prove their doctrines by scripture, but they much preferred talking of visions and revelations apart from scripture — a true proof of their not being of God.

The anabaptists worked secretly till many were won to their side, when they made an open attack upon the others. They also sent to the villages around begging all to flock to Munster, and by this means they became almost entire masters of the town. Certain men, said to be prophets, were under their guidance — they appointed a senate of their own, with a new form of government. The first order they made was that those who had money and property were to bring it to one place, there to be disposed of according to the decision of the prophets. John of Leyden pretended to fall into a trance and to have a revelation. In this revelation he declared he had orders to alter the law of marriage and now every Christian might have as many wives as he pleased. John immediately married three wives, and others followed his example.

This was opposed by many; but the fanatics carried everything before them. Being masters of the city, they put to death those who sought to oppose them. A new prophet arose, who had also had a revelation, in which John of Leyden was to be "King of all the earth," and he should go forth with an army to destroy all who refused to receive the new gospel.

John of Leyden said that he also had had a similar revelation, but that he had hesitated to speak of it lest he should be thought to claim such a dignity by his own testimony only. The people were filled with wonder at the tidings of such a double revelation.

John was no sooner proclaimed king than he put down the other rulers of the city, and sat on a throne in an open part of the city, dressed in splendid robes, and wearing a crown of gold, surrounded by his officers ready to judge any cases needing to be judged. A Bible was carried on one side of him and a naked sword on the other. He had money coined with his own image, and in all ways carried himself as king.

The bishop of Munster collected an army and besieged the town; but such was the strength of its fortifications that they could not take it. The surrounding states took up the matter and made an order for 3,000 infantry, and 300 horse. These were slow in being sent; but those who were mustered surrounded the town and it became threatened by famine; yet nothing could damp the ardour of the anabaptists.

One day John made a solemn assembly by sound of trumpet. About four thousand attended near the cathedral, for whom a meal had been provided. At the close of this, John passed through the ranks giving bread to the people, saying, "Take eat, and declare the death of the Lord." He was followed by the Queen who carried the wine. Thus did these wicked people profanely pretend to take the Lord's supper. After this John made them promise obedience. Then he declared that he had had an order from God that twenty-eight evangelists should go forth to preach the doctrines held at Munster.

Strange to say twenty-eight men were found willing to leave the city to fulfil this mission, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, they being doubtless themselves deceived. Where they went they were at once seized as rebels, and put to death. Only one of their number escaped.

The princes who had sent the army desired to save the city, and the officer addressed an appeal to them to surrender. Many would gladly have done so, but John watched everything narrowly and prevented its being carried out. He declared that Easter was approaching, and then their trials would be ended, and their efforts be crowned by victory.

In the meantime the famine sorely increased, attended by disease and sickness. One historian relates that they hunted for, and devoured, all the rats they could catch, and then they turned cannibals and ate those who died from famine, and even killed some of the children and ate them. Every day added to the deaths, though John himself still lived in plenty. One of his wives sympathized with the starving people, and ventured to question if he was right in living in plenty while others were starving. She was summoned into his presence, along with his other wives. They were warned not to be guilty of a similar indiscretion, and to strike terror into all, he had her kneel before him and with his own hand he struck off the head of the blasphemer, as he called her. Singing and dancing followed the execution! Thus these fanatics became a disgrace to our common humanity.

It was not till April, 1535 — when the city had been in the hands of the rebels over twelve months that any real efforts were made to take the city. A regular army was now placed under a general, who planned to take the place by assault. The city was again summoned to surrender; the people were eager for it, but John prevented them.

It was not till June 24 that an assault was attempted. Two of the inhabitants had escaped, who willingly told the soldiers the weakest part of the fortifications. In the night a few brave fellows gained a certain pass and climbed a rampart. The sentinels were killed, and a door being unguarded they entered the city. They were fiercely attacked, but managed to keep the foe at bay while they opened one of the gates and admitted the body of soldiers. A general onslaught followed. The people rallied round their king, but he was taken prisoner alive. Rotman threw himself into the midst of the conflict and fell covered with wounds. The fanatics did not long continue the conflict. Munster was taken.

Thus ended the reign of John of Leyden. He was taken before the judges, and after being carried from city to city in chains was brought back to Munster and condemned to a cruel death, his flesh being torn away with hot pincers. Two other leaders shared the same fate. His conduct had been cruel and atrocious, and he deserved death; but was such a manner of putting him to death worthy of a country calling itself christian?

Luther was, deeply grieved at the proceedings of the anabaptists. Their doctrine was certainly not his doctrine, though the Catholics insisted that this was but the fruit of that liberty of conscience for which Luther pleaded. None were louder than Luther in condemning the anabaptists, both in their doctrine and in their seditious practices. It is instructive to see how Satan damages the work he cannot stop, by attaching to that which is real his own followers in mere profession. If old prejudices are broken through by the gospel, he takes advantage of the desire for reform to break through all that men have held to be sacred, to accomplish his own ends of spoliation and death.

Chapter 29.

Darkness Amid the Light — A.D. 1540.

In 1540 a great scandal was brought upon the Reformation, and a great dishonour upon the Lord Jesus, whom the Reformers professed to follow at all cost. Philip of Hesse — who had been one of the principal champions for the Reformation among the princes, and who boldly blamed Melanchthon for the concessions he was desirous of making at Augsburg — now desired to take a second wife while his first was still alive, and living with him.

This caused a serious difficulty. Such an act was condemned in every christian country, and by the Catholic religion. Would the Reformers sanction such an acknowledged wickedness? We have seen that at Munster, John of Leyden had pretended to have a revelation from heaven to alter the law of marriage, and any that wished it could have several wives? This was universally condemned: how then could the Reformers now sanction such a thing in one who was believed to be one of themselves? Scripture made no difference between a prince and a poor man; but should not the prince, having espoused the cause of the gospel and the truth, have been a pattern to others in all purity and godliness?

Philip referred the matter to the Reformers, and in doing so tried to find sanction for his desire in scripture. "I have read," wrote he, "in the Old Testament that holy persons, such as Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon, had many wives, and yet all believed in the coming of Christ. Neither has God in the Old Testament nor Christ in the New, nor the prophets or apostles, forbidden a man to have two wives. . . . When St. Paul tells us so expressly that a bishop should be the husband of one wife, he would have laid the same injunction on the laity, had he wished that a layman should have one only also. . . . But let them not suppose that, because I should have another wife, I shall treat the first one ill, cease to live with her, or shew her less friendship than before . . . . let them then, in God's name, grant me what I demand, so that I may live and die cheerfully for the honour of the gospel, and as a good Christian. All which they ask that is just and reasonable I shall grant to them, even the property of the monasteries or similar things. . . . Further I only wish and ask for two wives. What matters it what the world says? We need not pay attention to it: we must look to God in all this, what He prescribes, prohibits or permits."

Luther referred the Landgrave to the divines at Hesse. But Philip was not content with this; he must have the judgment of the chief Reformers, Luther, Melanchthon, etc. This was a trying time for Luther. He had been bold against the priests and the pope and the Emperor, or rather — as he himself put it — against the work of Satan in these people. He had also been bold against the anabaptists, who, by the bye, had referred to the same passage in the New Testament (1 Tim. iii. 2) as Philip had: they for their many wives; he for his two. Would Luther be now as bold against one of his friends as he had been against the anabaptists? Let us see.

The Reformers met and drew up twenty-four articles; we can only give the conclusion.

"Your highness yourself sufficiently comprehends the difficulty there is in setting up a universal rule, or to give reasons for a dispensation for a particular case. We cannot publicly introduce and sanction as by a law the permission to espouse several wives. . . . We pray your highness to consider in what peril a man would be — convicted of having introduced into Germany such a law, which would divide families and engage them in endless lawsuits. That it please your highness to examine seriously the consideration of the scandal, labours, anxieties, sorrows and infirmities which have been presented to him.

"If your highness is determined to marry a second wife, we judge that it ought to be done privately, as we have said on speaking of the dispensation on which you ask; that is to say that there should be no person present but the celebrant and a few others as witnesses, who shall be bound to secrecy, as if under the seal of confession. Hence there will be fear neither of opposition nor of great scandal; for it is nothing uncommon for princes to keep concubines. . . . Thus we approve of it.

"Your highness has therefore in this writing not only our approbation of your wish in all the exigencies that may occur, but also the reflection which we have made of it."

This was signed by Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Corvin, Adam, Lening, Wintfert and Melander. These are the principal Reformers of Wittenberg and Hesse.

How was it that Luther and his co-workers overlooked our Lord's instruction on the subject? He expressly stated that Moses had allowed a looseness as to marriage because of the hard-heartedness of the Jews, but telling them that it must not be so among them, and that it was not so ordered of God at the beginning. (Matt. xix. 3-9.) God only created one wife for Adam, and speaks only of one in Genesis ii. 24. And in the New Testament a woman may marry a second husband only if the first be dead. (1 Cor. vii. 39.) Again and again two are spoken of as being one — the man and the wife — but never three. Indeed the thing is so plain, that though in Christianity they have differed on nearly every other subject, they have all and always agreed on this.

With this before us, and judging by the paper itself drawn up by the Reformers on the subject, with all its excuses and desire for secrecy, it is clear that they had not the boldness to declare the truth. It was a very serious fall of those who signed that paper, and forms a great blot on the character of Luther.

Philip of Hesse married his second wife, and used to go to church with both his wives, and unblushingly took his place between them, to the great scandal of every godly Christian when it became known.

Thus is man in his best estate but a poor failing creature! Not that there is any excuse for the Reformers: they were greatly to blame, but it exalts the grace of God in saving such as they, and (may we not say?) such as we.

Chapter 30.

The General Council — A.D. 1540-1545.

Every year had the subject of a general council been mooted and discussed. The pope seemed now to be anxious to have the council, but the Reformers saw plainly that he wanted to have it held in Italy, in order that he might make it do just what he pleased, so that in no sense would it be free to consider the questions pressing. The Reformers, too, insisted that scripture should be the standard of appeal: Rome could admit of no such thing.

Henry VIII. of England declared that as there was no hope of a free General Council, every prince should take upon himself the duty of reforming the church of his own country. "My kingdom is not of this world," said our Lord; and what had worldly princes to do with reforming the church? Christendom generally had long before grown into a great outward system half political, and half religious, so that it was difficult to distinguish the church from the world. The Reformation seemed to be a coming out from this, but it soon began to drift into a similar false position.

In October 1540 a conference was held at Worms, at which a legate from the pope was present, desirous of coming to terms of peace. Melanchthon and Eck began to discuss the points in dispute, and began on what is called "original sin," But they had scarcely made a good start, when the Emperor recalled his ministers, and the conference broke up.

In April 1541 a Diet was held at Ratisbon. Various conferences were held over the disputed points, and the Emperor put into the hands of those chosen to consult together, a book, supposed to have been written by a canon of Cologne named Gropper, and which it was hoped was so cleverly written that all could subscribe to it. It dealt with twenty-two of the chief points in dispute, and by often employing the very words of scripture and by dexterously explaining some things and softening others, the writer hoped he had hit upon the happy medium. But the Catholics declared the effort to be too favourable to the reform principles: they pronounced it to be heresy, and all the more dangerous because it was so cleverly disguised. On the other hand Luther, the Elector, and the more strenuous Reformers denounced the work as an impious compound of truth and error. Thus they were as far apart as ever. Truth could not be made to blend with error: God had forbidden the union.

Similar Diets were held from time to time; but they all ended really as they began. A free general council was asked for by the Protestants: it was promised by the Emperor, but it was the pope's aim to see that it either did not take place, or that, if it did, it should not be free.

In the meantime George of Saxony died. He had been one of the most strenuous supporters of the papacy, and an avowed enemy of Luther, since they first met. In his will he left his estates to his brother Henry and his two sons on condition that they remained faithful to the Catholic faith. As the end of George approached, deputies went to Henry, saying, Come and possess the treasures of your brother. "Your language," said Henry, "reminds me of the promise which the devil made to Jesus Christ, if He would fall down and worship him. No! you solicit me in vain. I cannot resign the possession of truth and religion for that of any temporal advantage." Henry had embraced the truth, and he could not accept the inheritance as a Catholic.

Still Henry believed himself entitled to the estates by natural right; therefore as soon as George died he took possession of Dresden and other towns in the dominions. Many in George's states had embraced the gospel, but had been prevented making any open profession on account of the rigour of their sovereign; but now he was dead they hailed with joy the Protestant Henry.

Luther hastened to Leipsic, to help on the work. The believers there had had but little instruction. He would devote his time and his energies to build up and instruct the faithful of that city.

In December 1545 the General Council so long looked for, and so long promised, opened its sittings — it was the famous Council of Trent. It soon became evident that the pope meant to carry everything his own way. He called his cardinals and appointed a certain number of them with others to watch carefully the movements of the council, and to act accordingly, and to see that nothing went wrong. He also desired that swift posts should be arranged between Trent and Rome that he might have the earliest information. The subject of reform was put off from time to time — discussing all sorts of subjects in preference to that: indeed, as was foreseen, the pope did just as he liked. The council was adjourned from time to time; but was professedly continued till December 1563, that is nineteen years; though at times there were present but a few Italian and Spanish prelates, and as a whole it became entirely a Roman Catholic council, and established what was to be and what was not to be the faith of that church. And to this council Roman Catholics now turn for a decision on any article of their faith.

Soon after the Council began to meet, Luther passed from the scene. We must take a glance at his declining years.

Chapter 31.

Luther's Old Age and Death — A.D.1534-1546.

Infirmities had been increasing upon Luther, but he steadily went on with his work as long as his strength lasted. He finished translating the Old Testament: it had been published in parts, but was issued complete in 1534. This was a great work. In itself it was a revolution. Every Christian could now read for himself all God had caused to be written; take nothing second-hand; know what was truth and what was not. On the other hand, all Germany could now read for themselves God's way of salvation. They had been taught that there was no salvation out of the Romish church, and the Romish priests were the door-keepers of that church: now they could see for themselves that of any one it was written, "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." (Rom. x. 9.) The word of God said, "He that hath the Son, hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God, hath not life." (1 John v. 12.) Union with the Son of God was life: not with the pope or anything of his. The word said, "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John ii. 1); and "If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John i. 9.) Not a word about confessing to the priest, nor penances, nor needing the priest's absolution. They could go direct to God and get His forgiveness.

It also corrected abuses. Instead of the pope being God's vicar on earth, he was never even once named in the Bible. The Lord's supper was certainly taken in "both kinds" in the days of the apostles: who had restricted it to one kind? The bishop is there said to be the husband of one wife (1 Tim. iii. 2), and there is to be no forbidding to marry (1 Tim. iv. 3); who then had invented the celibacy of the priests? And so of many other things. The light — the light of God's word — had appeared amid the darkness, and the common people could now meet the priests with a "Thus saith the Lord" in opposition to their constant cry of "Thus saith the church, or the pope, or the councils, or the Fathers." As the word of God became the authority, so all other authorities sank into their own littleness and vanity. With the Old Testament as well as the New they could contrast the Jewish dispensation with that of Christ, and be able to see how in many things Rome clung to the former in preference to the latter. In God's hands Luther had been the means of this light shining upon Germany. If he had done nothing else, this in itself was a great work.

Now he was getting old and infirm. He had worn himself out in his master's cause; still he taught, he preached, he wrote, but was sometimes so weak that he had to be carried to his home. He also commenced a revision of his edition of the Bible. He called around him the pious and learned: one with his Hebrew Bible, another the Greek, another the Latin, and by careful comparison they sought to make the translation more correct, a nearer transcript of what God had caused to be written.

Another work that Luther accomplished was to write a catechism for children, called "The Little Catechism," besides his "Larger Catechism." In his visitations he observed how very faulty were the schoolmasters in their religious instruction. Of course they could not teach what they did not know: but Luther was anxious that the light should also shine into the hearts of the little ones, so he wrote for them "The Little Catechism," and he afterwards rejoiced that lads and young maidens knew more of God and of Christ than many of the priests had ever known.

Three times had plagues broken out at Wittenberg (1516, 1527, 1535) when most who were able fled from the town for safety. But Luther on each occasion remained at his post: he visited the sick and administered relief and comfort. In 1527 even the University was removed to Jena, but Luther remained. "Lord, I am in thy hand," said he, "Thou hast fixed me here; Thy will be done." The plague was carried in the clothes and two of Luther's children were taken ill. "I am like a dying man," said he, "and yet I live." His children recovered, and at the end of the year he exclaimed, "God hath shewn Himself wondrously merciful to us."

In 1537 Luther was taken dangerously ill. He had travelled to Smalcalde, but had to take to his bed. Here the Elector John visited and comforted him. "The good God, our Lord," said the Elector, "will be merciful unto us and prolong your life." If taken home, the prince declared that Luther's wife and children should have his special care. He sent too in every direction for anything thought to be of any help for Luther's recovery. The Lord removed the disease, and Luther regained his health.

Luther felt for the people, and none were beneath his notice. There was a man named Hans Kohlhase, a sort of captain of banditti, and who attracted great attention. He had been respectable but had suffered a series of real or imagined injuries, without redress from the rulers, which so aroused his strong and vigorous mind that he became an outlaw and a robber, and joined with any who opposed the state. To this man Luther wrote and invited him to visit him secretly.

One day a knock came at Luther's door, and he thought at once that perhaps it was Kohlhase. He would answer the door himself. It was he. Luther conducted him quietly to his own room, and sent for Melanchthon and a few others. They heard the man's tale of his losses and injuries; and they promised to do what they could to have justice done to him. In the meantime he promised to abstain from all further violence. They sat with him till late at night, giving him good advice and in the morning he stole away unknown and unobserved. The exertions of Luther and his friends on his behalf were fruitless; and again he took to his robbery and violence. He was at length captured, and executed in 1540. Luther had done his best to reclaim and save the robber.

On September 20, 1542, Luther was called to a new trial. The grim "enemy" Death entered his dwelling, and removed his daughter Magdalen. During her illness Luther had prayed earnestly for her recovery. He said at her bedside, "I love her much; but if it be thy will, O God, to take her I shall gladly know her to be with thee."

As he saw her end approaching, he said to her, "Magdalen, my little daughter, thou wouldst gladly remain here with thy father; but thou wilt also readily go to thy other Father."

"Yes, dear father, as God wills," said the dying child. And she passed away.

Though Luther enjoyed much happiness in his family circle and among his friends, yet there was much within and without to loosen his hold of this earth. "The world is tired of me," said he, "and I am tired of it: we shall easily part, as a guest leaves his hotel not unwillingly."

In 1546 Luther was invited to Eisleben to assist in settling a dispute between the Dukes of Mansfeld and some of their subjects respecting some mines and land. Luther was related to some of the disputants, which was naturally a reason why he should not have gone; but the princes had confidence in him as a just and upright man, and he was chosen.

He set out with his three sons. His wife parted with him in sorrow: she had a sort of presentiment that she should never see him again alive. He wrote to comfort her, reminding her that God, was almighty. "Therefore rest in peace, my dearest Kate," said he.

Upon reaching Halle, he was so unwell that Dr. Jonas resolved to accompany him. In crossing Saale the water had so swollen that they were in great danger of all going to the bottom. However they crossed in safety.

At the frontiers of Mansfeld he was met by the Dukes and a number of attendants.

On the 17th of February his illness increased, yet he was enabled to walk about the room. At length he seemed struck with a thought: "I was born and baptized at Eisleben," said he; "what if I should remain and even die here!"

He supped and seemed cheerful. But after supper his illness increased, and he retired to bed. But about midnight he arose and walked about his room. He felt his end was approaching, and his friends were called around him. Then he prayed, saying: "O eternal and merciful God, my heavenly Father, I thank thee that thou hast revealed to me thy Son Jesus Christ, in whom I have believed, whom I have preached, whom I have confessed, whom I love and worship as my dear Saviour and Redeemer . . . . Though I must lay down this body, yet know I assuredly that I shall dwell with thee for ever, and that none can pluck me out of thy hands. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

He was silent. He was asked if he died in the belief of the doctrines of Christ as he had preached them. He gave an emphatic "Yes," and his spirit took its flight.

He was buried at Wittenberg. An inscription in Latin tells the visitor where the body lies.

He was only sixty-three years and a few months, but he had been worn out in his Master's service. "Often have I gone to him unawares," said Melanchthon, "and found him dissolved in tears and prayers for the church of Christ."

As we have proceeded with Luther's history his natural character for boldness and intrepidity have often been seen. His tenacity to what he believed to be true was another mark of his character, but which unhappily was as great when he was wrong as when he was right. Erasmus said also of him, "God has sent in this latter age a violent physician, on account of the magnitude of the existing disorders." But above his faults — and who is faultless? — we bless God for the grace given to him. Humanly speaking, again and again one and another would have given way and compromised the truth, but for the staunch and unbending zeal and energy of Martin Luther.

Above all, he was God's servant, raised up to do a special work for Him. It may be said that he was to blame in his behaviour to the Swiss Christians, and in the matter of Philip of Hesse's two wives. True. Also that he failed to restore to the church its heavenly character. True. But he brought to light the great truth of justification by faith, maintaining this truth in spite of all the opposition of the powers of darkness and the enmity of Rome. This of itself undermined the fabric of Rome. Priestcraft, penances, absolutions, indulgences all fell into the shade as faith arose in the horizon.

Another great work Luther was called to do for God was to give to the Germans the word of God in their mother tongue. It is true increased light and further knowledge of the original tongues have pronounced his work of translation to be faulty; but we doubt not he did it faithfully according to the light he had, and for which thousands heartily thanked their God. The scripture, as we have seen, was God's light that shone into many a dark corner, and judged and made manifest the gross darkness all around.

If it was a question of forgiveness, it said,

"The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John i. 7.)

If it was a question of justification,

"Being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Rom. v. 1.) "Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Eph. ii. 9.)

If it was a question of mediation,

There is "one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Tim. ii. 5.)

If it was a question of access to God,

"We have a great High Priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God. . . . Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace." (Heb. iv. 14, 16.) He "hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father." (Rev. i. 6.)

If it was purgatory,

"Giving thanks unto the Father which hath made us meet to be partakers of the saints in light." (Col. i. 12.) He "hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." (Eph. ii. 6.)

If it was the Mass,

"By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." (Heb. x. 14.) There is "no more sacrifice for sins." (Ver. 26.)

If it was confession,

"If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John i. 9; ii. 1.) "Confess your faults one to another." (James v. 16.)

If it was the Lord's supper in "both kinds," or the marriage of the priests, the scripture which Luther had put into the hands of all was equally plain.

Thus God raised up Luther to do a work for Him, and he did it. God took him home. We are not all Luthers; it may be none of us are. But, if Christians, we are God's workmanship. (Eph. ii. 10.) He has for each a work to do. When we have done it, He will take us home, or Christ will come to fetch us. (1 Thess. iv. 16, 17.) May we be so walking and so working as to please Him, and be found to be overcomers, in His strength, amid the surrounding evil, and at length receive that white stone of His approval, on which is written a new name which no man knows but he that receives it. (Rev. ii. 17.)

"I need no other plea

With which to approach to God

Than His own mercy, boundless, free,

Through Christ on man bestowed;

A Father's love, a Father's care

Receives and answers every prayer.

I need no human ear

In which to pour my prayer,

My great High Priest is ever near,

On Him I cast my care;

To Him, Him only, I confess,

Who can alone absolve and bless.

I need no works by me,

Wrought with laborious care,

To form a meritorious plea,

Why I heaven's bliss should share:

Christ's finished work through boundless grace

Has there secured my dwelling place.

I need no prayers to saints,

Beads, relics, martyrs' shrines,

Hardships, 'neath which the spirit faints,

Yet still sore-burdened pines;

Christ's service yields my soul delight,

Easy His yoke, His burden light.

I need no other book

To guide my steps to heaven,

Than that on which I daily look,

By God's own Spirit given;

And this, when He illumes our eyes,

'Unto salvation makes us wise.'

I need no holy oil

To anoint my lips in death,

No priestly power, my guilt to assoil,

And aid my parting breath;

Long since those words bade fears to cease

'Thy faith hath saved thee, go in peace.'

I need no priestly Mass,

No purgatorial fires,

My soul to anneal, my guilt to efface

When this brief life expires;

Christ died my eternal life to win,

His blood has cleansed me from all sin.

I need no other dress,

I urge no other claim,

Than His unspotted righteousness

In Him complete I am;

Heaven's portals at that word fly wide,

No passport do I need beside."

STEM Publishing : For the Young : Heroes of the Reformation

Heroes of the Reformation

The Story of Their Trials and Triumphs.

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C. 1895.

Contents

John Wicliffe

John Huss

Jerome

Martin Luther

Ulric Zwingle

William Farel

John Wicliffe.

At the time of which I am about to write, you, dear young friends, who are the children of many prayers, and who have been taught from your earliest infancy to lisp the sweet name of Jesus, can have little or no idea of the spiritual darkness that hung over our land. You have been accustomed all your lives to hear the bells ringing out all around you, calling you Sunday after Sunday to hear the Word of God. You have been taught sweet hymns, and sweeter texts, all about the saving love of our tender Saviour and you know that your confession of love to Christ would be received with the deepest joy and thanksgiving by your loving Christian parents.

But if you had lived in the thirteenth century how different would have been your lot. There would have been none then to gently lead you to the feet of Jesus, telling you of His free grace and dying love. If perchance your conscience was troubled about your sins, and you said in trembling tones, "What must I do to be saved?" there would have been none to answer lovingly, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." A shaven priest with austere countenance would perhaps have taken you by the hand and leading you to some dreary cell, would have shewn you a gaunt man, with haggard face and weary eyes, prostrate before a cross, and with the marks of the scourge upon his back. He would have told you that this man was doing his best by prayers and penances to reach at last the kingdom of heaven, and he would have advised you to go and do likewise. If, appalled by the sight, you shrank away, thinking to put off till another day your soul's salvation, a priest of quite another kind would perhaps have taken you under his care, and with a smile on his round red face would have told you of a far easier way to obtain the forgiveness of your sins. He would have whispered to you that the Church required money, and that by the payment of a certain sum he was able to forgive you all you had committed, or even would commit. The youngest of my readers would laugh to scorn such a thought, but in those days, from the king on the throne to the beggar by the wayside, there was scarcely one who would have dared to say, "God alone can forgive sins."

You will say, But how could this be! I will tell you. In all our fair land there was not a Bible written in a language that the people could understand, and so the sweet words of the Lord Jesus were unknown. Thus the people were kept in utter ignorance, under the power of priests and friars, many of them wicked men who kept the truth from the poor souls around them, that by so doing they might enrich themselves, and add to their own power. How early had those who called themselves the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ forgotten His words! He, the gentle lowly One, had said, "Ye are not of the world even as I am not of the world." He had taught them that he who would be greatest in the kingdom of heaven, must be the least.

At this time the whole of Europe was under the power of one man, who called himself the Vicegerent of Christ upon earth. He was named Pope Innocent III. He professed to have the disposal of the souls of all men in his hand, and the power to send them to heaven or hell at his will. Kings trembled before him, for he was mightier than all earthly kings.

King John was then reigning over England; and, having dared to oppose the will of this mighty pontiff, all England was placed under his terrible edict. The king had offended, and the whole nation must be punished with him! We, with the brightness of heaven's own truth shining around us, can have no idea of the terrors of such a sentence as this; but to the men of those days upon whom the doom fell, it meant that the gates of heaven were locked against them. All who died must wander wretched, unhappy spirits � in some doleful region until it pleased this dread Pope, who carried the keys, to open the gates and let them out. The whole country was plunged in the deepest gloom. The whole nation put on, as it were, sackcloth and ashes. Church doors were closed, lights on the altars were extinguished, bells ceased to ring, infants were baptized outside the church doors, the dead were buried in ditches and in fields; none dared rejoice, or eat flesh, or pay decent respect to his person or his clothing. King John braved this state of things for two years, but at last yielded to the will of the Pope. Craving an interview with the Pope's legate he humbly resigned "England and Ireland to God, St. Peter, St. Paul, and to Pope Innocent." He consented to hold his dominions in trust only to the Church of Rome, and to pay to it the sum of twelve thousand marks yearly. Taking his crown, he laid it humbly at the feet of the legate, who, to show the mightiness of his master, spurned it with his foot as a worthless bauble, and then stooping down, he placed it on the head of the poor craven monarch. Never in the annals of England's history was there a moment of deeper humiliation.

But God had not forgotten poor dark priest-ridden England. The darkest part of the night is just before the breaking of the morning; and before long God would raise up one who would dare, in the face of Pope, bishops, and priests, denounce this wicked system of Popery. A light was about to gleam forth that should never be extinguished, but that should broaden and brighten until the world should be bathed in its glow.

John Wicliffe was born in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the Manor house of the parish of Wicliffe, in the year 1324. Little or nothing is known of his boyhood, except that he was early destined for the Church, and received his first training at a seminary of the neighbourhood. At the age of sixteen he was sent to Merton College, at Oxford: he made rapid progress, and soon became noted for his learning. Fox says, "He was famously reputed for a great clerk and schoolmaster, and no less expert in all kinds of philosophy."

But it was a higher and a deeper teaching that laid the foundation for Wicliffe's greatness. Amongst the scholars of the day whose learning shed a lustre over the college was Branwadine; he had early been drawn to the study of the Bible, then written in Latin. His soul, weary of the empty philosophy of the day, had drank in the precious words of life. He rejoiced in the doctrines of free grace, and then, lifting the veil, he unfolded the way of life to the students who crowded round him with eager attention. Wicliffe was one of these students: and as he listened to the great master day by day, telling out the sweet story so new and strange, a light began to dawn upon him, and he learned to turn from all the wretched thoughts of the day, and seek only for truth as it was found in the Bible.

Just at this time the world was visited by a terrible pestilence, known in history as the "Black Death." It is said that "appearing first in Asia it took a westerly course, and swept on and on, carrying death and desolation everywhere. Even those who were on the ocean were not exempt from this awful disease. Ships were wafted to the ports silent and still, and all on board were found lying cold and lifeless." At last it reached England in one town only, as many as fifty in a day died, and were laid together in one deep pit. In London, Fox says, "the vehement rage thereof was so great, and did increase so much, that from the first of February till the beginning of May, in a churchyard then newly made in Smithfield, about two hundred corpses every day were buried, besides those which in other churchyards of the city were laid also."

This awful visitation "sounded like the trumpet of the judgment day in the heart of Wicliffe." Again he went to his Bible, not now merely as a scholar, but as a poor lost sinner seeking salvation. The shadow of death was all around him, and in an agony of soul he went to God crying, "What must I do to be saved?" Standing on the brink of the pit, he says he felt how awful it was to go down into the eternal night and "inhabit everlasting burnings." After much agony of soul peace came, and in the joy of his escape from an everlasting doom, he felt what a trifling matter the mere life of the body was, compared to the everlasting life he had received for his soul. This blessed assurance never left him, and clad in this armour Wicliffe went forth into the battle.

If we consider the conspicuous place that Wicliffe occupied in the eyes of the world, it is remarkable how little is known of the merely personal incidents of his life.

We know that he had a singularly sweet charm of manner, arising from a rare humility, and that he led a blameless life in an age of great wickedness. From his portrait that has been preserved, we can form some idea of his personal appearance. The broad calm brow bespeaks severity of character; the firm set, yet kindly mouth tells of firmness tempered with gentleness; and the keen dark eyes show great penetration. Altogether the picture is of a man of noble aspect and commanding mien, and quite agrees with all we know of the character of the great Reformer.

By this time Wicliffe had become bachelor of Theology, and the privilege had been granted him of giving public lectures in Oxford on the books of Scripture. The deep research needed for a work like this was of the greatest use to him, and he was becoming unwittingly prepared for his great life work � that of reforming the church.

The strength of Wicliffe lay in his fearless submission to the Bible. Turning away from all other teachers, and from the dogmas of the thousand years that had gone before, he placed himself, like a little child, before the Word of God, and bowed to the voice of God speaking to Him in its pages. And as he pored over those luminous pages light began to dawn upon him, and he began to perceive what a darkness there was hanging, like a black pall, over England, and how his beloved country was groaning under a bondage worse than that of Egypt. At this time the country was infested with monks of different orders, black, white, and grey, emissaries of the Pope, who combined not only to blind the eyes of the people as to the truth of God, but to fleece them of their gold.

The Pope, too, gave away all the richest livings (so-called) to foreign priests, who subverted the laws of the kingdom and devoured its substance. Heavy taxes were extorted from the people without the consent of the king, and sometimes this very money was turned against them, being sent away to support the war that the French were carrying on with us! You will understand this when I tell you the Pope himself was a Frenchman. And all this was done in the name of religion, by those who professed to be the followers of the gentle lowly Jesus.

What a horrible mockery must all this have appeared to Wicliffe, as he gazed at it in the light of Scripture. It must not be supposed that he saw the whole truth at once. It is God's way to lead on a step at a time, but if the first step be taken in faith, He will surely give light for another and another, until the whole path, at first so dark, and so surrounded with bewildering mists, becomes sun clear. So it was with Wicliffe, and as the fetters began to be unloosed from his own soul, and the scales to fall from his eyes, he longed to free his poor countrymen from the galling Papal yoke. And now, with all the earnestness of his great soul, we find him by lectures and by writings doing his utmost to open the eyes of those around him. He taught the barons and commons of England that the Pope had no temporal power over the people; at the most he only had spiritual. "The Apostle Peter," said he, "never exacted money from any. Why does this man? Peter only took freewill offerings. What right, then, has Pope Urban to extort money from us, whether we will or not? His duty is to give spiritual counsel, not to fleece us of our gold. I find not in Scripture that God gave Peter temporal power over the kings of the earth, yet this man makes himself king of kings."

Such were the doctrines that he taught everywhere, until all England was becoming filled with them, and the halo that had encompassed the Papal fabric during the middle ages began to wane, and men took courage to look into a system to which before they had blindly submitted. And so the soul of England began to bound upward.

It was just at this time that Pope Urban, not reading as he might have done the signs of the times, advanced upon England a most insolent demand.

You will remember that I told you in my last paper how poor weak King John, a hundred years before this, gifted away his kingdom to Pope Innocent III., and how he promised to pay the yearly sum of a thousand marks to him. For the last thirty-five years this sum had been discontinued, when now it was suddenly demanded by the Pope with an intimation that should the king fail to pay not only the annual tribute, but all arrears, he would be at once summoned to Rome to answer to his liege lord, the Pope, for his disobedience.

This was too much for a people who, although still submitting to Rome for its spiritual affairs, were beginning to feel very restive under these constant demands for money and subjection. It was too much, too, for King Edward III., the hero of Cressy and Poictiers, and with the laurels of his triumphs still fresh on his brow, to tamely submit to pay a thousand marks a year for wearing a crown that he was so well able to defend. No, the Pope had gone too far. Calling his Parliament together, the king laid the Pope's insolent letter before them, and asked their advice upon the matter. They asked for one day to consider the subject, which the king readily granted. On the morrow all Parliament assembled to consider the momentous question � Shall England, now becoming mistress of the seas, bow at the feet of the Pope? It was a great crisis: and it is with deep interest that we look back and scan the earnest faces of that assembly. Wicliffe was there, and it is to him that we are indebted for an account of the speeches.

And now it was that the great services of Wicliffe became manifest, for it is admitted by all that the sentiments expressed in Parliament were but the echo of his teachings at Oxford.

Without a dissentient voice, Parliament resolved to free England from the Papal tyranny, and an answer, short and decisive, was sent to the Pope. It run thus: "Forasmuch as King John nor any other king could bring his realm and kingdom into such thraldom but by common consent of Parliament, the which was not given, therefore that which he did was against his oath at his coronation, besides many other causes. If, therefore, the Pope should attempt anything against the king by process or other matters indeed the king with all his force should resist the same."

One man alone in the country stood up in defence of the Pope. A monk, whose name has not come down to us, boldly asserted that as the Pope was the vicar of Christ upon earth, he was the feudal superior of kings, and lords of their kingdoms. He maintained, therefore, that their obedience and tribute was his due; and further that King Edward had forfeited his throne by the nonpayment of the tribute. Then singling out Wicliffe by name, he challenged him to deny what he had advanced, thus proving that he knew full well who was the leader in this controversy. In spite of all the perils that made the task a hazardous one (for it was no light matter to defy the Papacy) Wicliffe boldly took up the challenge.

He did not at that time touch upon the spiritual power of the Pope, but contented himself by objecting to his temporal power. He pressed home the rights of men, the laws of England, and the precepts of holy writ. By all these he argued that the Papacy had no claim upon them as a country. "There cannot," said he, "be two temporal sovereigns in one country. Either Edward is King or Urban. We make our choice, we accept Edward of England and refuse Urban of Rome."

Perhaps in the whole of England's history there was not a moment of graver interest than this. The eyes of all Europe were watching with the deepest anxiety, this conflict between England and the great power that was seeking to reduce the whole earth to vassalage; and the decision of England was hailed with joy by all nations as a great victory won in the cause of religious freedom.

I have told you all this, dear children, because I want you to understand the means God used to free our country from these Papal chains, and how he was opening the flood gates so that a river of truth might sweep over our land, bringing joy and gladness to the fainting souls who would stoop and drink. At this day you are enjoying benefits and blessings which resulted from this great triumph; and it must not be forgotten that although King Edward and his Parliament were in the foreground, Wicliffe was the real champion for the truth.

The next great battle that Wicliffe was called upon to wage, was of quite a different kind. As he grew in the knowledge of the truth, we find that his merely political struggles gave place to battles for the truth of God. He began to perceive that the Papal spiritual power was utterly contrary to the Scriptures, and that if he would follow the one he must finally renounce the other. This decision was not come to without many sighs and groans.

One great crying evil was now beginning to force itself upon his notice, and roused his righteous soul to anger.

At this time England was swarming with monks and friars of different orders, known as the mendicant Friars. Upon these men the Pope professed to have conferred the power of forgiving sins; and with such a hearty good will did they perform their office, that criminals of the deepest dye flocked to them for remission of their crimes. They sold to such, indulgences, or "pardons," the money for which they spent in erecting palatial buildings, and in sumptuous tables. "The sum of all piety," said they, "was to obey the Pope, pray to St. Frances, and to give alms to the friars."

This unscriptural and corrupt system roused Wicliffe to intense opposition, for well he knew the great gulf that was fixed between salvation by the blood of the Lamb, and pardon by the Pope. About this time he published his "Objections to the Friars," and grandly does he preach in it the Gospel to them, and to his countrymen. "There cometh," says he, "no pardon but of God. The indulgences of the Popes, if they are what they say they be, are a manifest blasphemy. Think not that God has given the keys to Innocent of Rome; think not that the friar carries heaven in his wallet; think not that God sends His pardons wrapped up in bits of paper which the mendicants carry about with them, and which they sell for a piece of silver. Listen to the voice of the Gospel: "Ye are not redeemed with corruptible things, such as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, the Lamb without blemish and without spot." "Oh everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. Come ye, buy and eat, yea come buy wine and milk without money and without price." Thus did Wicliffe begin to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, and to proclaim liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.

Wicliffe was now beloved and reverenced by the people, and trusted and honoured by the king. As a proof of this we find his name placed second in the list of delegates, who were sent to Pope Gregory XI. in the year 1374. They were sent to him in the hope that a grievance that was growing almost intolerable might be remedied. They prayed that the foreign priests, who by the Pope's agency were occupying all the best livings in England, and draining the land of its wealth, might be removed, and that the king should have the power to appoint whom he would.

For two years these delegates were kept at Bruges, negotiating about the matter, but all to little or no purpose, for the Pope would give them no satisfactory answer. At the end of that time Wicliffe returned home, weary and disheartened at the poor result of this mission. But the time had not been wasted, and doubtless God had ordered his visit there so that he might see, with his own eyes, the iniquity of the Papacy. The nearer he came to the so-called sacred city, and the throne of God's high priest upon earth, the more his soul revolted from the avarice, ambition, and hypocrisy, that abounded there. He found this Rome to be a scene of false priests, clothed, not in the beauty of holiness, but in far other vesture. It was all a cheat and a lie; and this great true-hearted man, with his soul filled with indignation, came home to proclaim it so in trumpet tones, that rang through the land. In his public lectures he now spoke of the Pope as �Antichrist, the proud worldly priest of Rome."

Soon after his return from Bruges he was appointed by the king to the rectorship of Lutterworth, Leicestershire, and from his pulpit there, and from his chair in Oxford, he shrank not to oppose with boldness and eloquence, the blasphemous assumptions of the Pope. His sentiments soon began to find an echo in public opinion. The murmurs of the people became louder against the foreign monks, and not long after this the Parliament � well called the "Good Parliament" � proclaimed that the Pope should no longer have power to install his foreign favourites here, and that "no Papal collector or proctor should remain in England under pain of life and limb."

Great was the rage of the Pope at this measure, and loudly did he storm, but all to no purpose. England remained firm; and so was won a more lasting victory and one nobler in its efforts than that of Cressy or Poictiers.

Think not that Wicliffe could thus daringly oppose the Papacy without suffering. We read that, "The whole glut of monks and begging friars were set in a rage of madness, which (even as hornets with their stings) did assail this good man on every side." The Pope ordered his writings to be examined; and his doctrines, you may be sure, highly incensed the Papal court. If the world came to be of Wicliffe's opinion, farewell to the spiritual and temporal power of the Popes. Bulls, or edicts, were sent to England; one to the Archbishop of Canterbury, one to the king, and the last to Oxford. They were all of one tenor, blaming the English clergy for not having crushed long ere now this dangerous heretic, and commanding them to take steps at once to silence him.

But though they thirsted for his blood, God took care of him, and in a most wonderful manner preserved him from their hands.

You see he had a great work to do for God, and not all the power of earth or hell could touch him until it was finished. He came out from the furnace with garments unsinged.

Each time that he was brought before his judges, we are struck with the calm dignity of his mien. He was first called to appear at Our Lady's Chapel, in St. Paul's, to answer for his teaching. He did not stand alone, for the bold baron, John of Gaunt, and Lord Percy, Earl Marshall of England, pushed roughly through the crowd of monks that surrounded him, and took their stand by his side. If not on religious, on political grounds they then held the Reformer in high esteem, and they were determined to support him when he was before the tribunal of bishops.

"Percy," said Bishop Courtney sharply, more offended at seeing the humble rector of Lutterworth so powerfully attended, than at their rough passage through the church, "had I known what masteries you would have kept in the church, I would have kept you from coming in hither."

"He shall keep such masteries though you say nay," said John of Gaunt, gruffly.

"Sit down, Wicliffe," said Percy, "sit down, you have many things to answer for, and have need to repose yourself on a soft seat."

"He must and shall stand," said Courtney, still more chafed, "it is unreasonable that one on his trial before his ordinary should sit."

"Lord Percy's proposal is but reasonable," said burly John of Gaunt; "and as for you," addressing bishop Courtney, "who are grown so proud and arrogant, I will bring down the pride, not only of you, but that of all the prelacy in England."

To this menace the bishop made some hypocritical remark about his trust being not in man, but in God, when suddenly the church doors were burst open by an angry mob, demanding the release of Wicliffe. Their clamour drowned the voices of the bishops, and all was now in confusion and uproar. To proceed with the trial was impossible. The bishops, in a sad fright, hastily retreated, and Wicliffe, who had never spoken, quietly returned home. So the Lord delivered him from them.

It was not till a year after that he was again ordered to appear before Archbishop Sudbury. When the day came for his trial, an immense crowd besieged the doors of the palace of Lambeth, and when he appeared they opened reverently to allow him to pass. As many as could pressed in after him, and soon filled the chapel. The primate and his peers, not liking the appearance of things, were consulting together how they might best turn out or silence the intruders, when a messenger entered with a letter, the contents of which filled them with consternation. It was a message from the Queen Mother, forbidding the bishops to pass sentence on Wicliffe. The dismay of the prelates was unbounded, and the proceedings were instantly stopped. "As reeds shaken by the wind they became," said one who describes the scene, "and their speech turned soft as oil, to the public loss of their dignity, and the damage of the church."

In all the tumultuous assembly, Wicliffe alone stood in calmness and self-possession. A second time had the Lord fought the battle for him, and again he passed from his accusers uncondemned and unhurt.

But a time was coming when his powerful friends would fall back and leave him, and when God would train His servant to walk alone with Him. There comes a moment in the lives of all those who would be faithful to the Lord (it may come to you, dear children) when they feel painfully that their place is one of isolation and loneliness. The voice of Christ comes to them from over the dark, stormy deep, as it came to Peter, saying "Come;" and if they would be true, they must follow, though friends look coldly upon them, and loved faces grow strange and distant.

Wicliffe was soon to pass into a region unknown to the powerful friends, who loved him merely as a patriot; a region that bold, kindly-hearted John of Gaunt and Earl Percy could not enter, and yet it was a place where, of all others, the sublimity of faith could be displayed, for he walked alone there with his God.

Just before the time that Wicliffe commenced his great life-work � the translation of the Bible � he fell sick, nigh unto death. Unbounded was the joy of the monks. "Now," said they, "he will be overwhelmed with borrow and remorse for all his evil deeds," so they would go to him and receive his last message of penitence and sorrow. In a very short time his bedside was surrounded by shaven monks, exhorting him as one on the brink of the grave to make full confession, and express his deep grief for all the injuries he had inflicted on their orders. Wicliffe lay quite silent until they had made an end of their speeches; then, asking his servant to raise him on his pillow, he fixed his keen eyes upon them and said sternly, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the evil deeds of the friars." In dismay and astonishment, the monks rushed from the room, and soon his words were verified, for his sickness left him, and he rose from his bed to commence his most glorious work � that of giving to the English people the Bible in their own tongue. It was to the ignorance of God's will that Wicliffe traced the evils that afflicted our kingdom.

Pope Gregory, one of the greatest of Wicliffe's enemies, was just at this time stricken down by death, and the cardinals met together to elect another Pope. As most of them were Frenchman, the Roman people were fearful that they would again choose one of their own countrymen to fill the Papal chair. So with loud tumults and terrible threats, they surrounded the palace where the cardinals were assembled, and demanded that a Roman should be elected for their Pope. "Not a cardinal should leave the court alive," they said, "unless their demand was complied with." So to appease the mob, an Italian was chosen. However, the cardinals soon grew tired of this Pope, who proved to be a mean, selfish man, and fleeing to France, they declared their former election to be null, seeing it was made under pressure, and they now elected a Frenchman. So was created the great controversy that raged in Christendom for over half-a-century.

It was with feelings, almost of horror, that all good Catholics saw the Papal throne as it were divided, and two men, each of whom claimed to be the Pope. The great question that all felt called on now to settle, was Which is the true Pope? Into whose hand has God committed the keys of heaven and hell? Their souls' salvation hung, they believed, on the solution of this question.

The Christian world was rent in twain.

Popes were hurling curses at one another's heads, and torrents of blood were being shed by their devoted followers. In the midst of these thunderings of Papal wrath, the humble rector, Wicliffe, was forgotten.

Far away from this seething, surging ocean of contention, he retired, and in the midst of his beloved flock at Lutterworth, he sought the rest and quiet he so much needed.

Far off was the din of strife and battle, but the sounds broke and died away before they reached his peaceful rectory. And here, with God's fair country all around him, and forgotten by his enemies, he commenced his sublime work � the translation of the Bible.

Spring, with its fair flowers and sweet wild-voiced songsters, came and found him at his work; June's roses lived and died, and shed their crimson petals, and autumn's golden sheaves were gathered in, and yet he laboured on. Winter, with its frost and snow and red-breasted robins, came and went, and still the white-haired man bent unweariedly over his God-appointed task.

Four times the seasons rolled away before he rose, and said, "My work is done." We can imagine how great his joy would be, when he was able to place in the hands of his countrymen their true Magna Charta. He knew that this Book would be to them as a pillar of fire, leading them on into happy liberty. Yes, the long night of England was near its close, and its realms were about to be flooded with the glorious light of the scriptures, before which the ghostly terrors and superstitious fears of the people would flee away, as night phantoms before the beams of day.

It mattered not to Wicliffe what they did now with his body; they might rack or burn it as they pleased, but they could never extinguish the light that he had kindled.

But, although the translation was finished, there was still the laborious work of publishing to be commenced. There were no printing presses in those days, whereby thousands of copies could be produced in a very short time. All the copying had to be done by the hand, and such was the interest that Wicliffe's work created, that a hundred expert copyists came forward and offered their services in multiplying the Bible. Great was the joy of the English people, when, for the first time, they read the tender, loving promises of God in their mother-tongue.

Long had they been kept afar from Him, by priests and bishops, and now they learnt with exceeding gladness, that He had Himself made an open way to the divine mercy seat, and that even as a tender Father yearning for his children, He had devised means, "that his banished be not expelled from him." They needed not, as Rome had taught, the intercession of numberless saints, that were dead. There was but one Mediator, even Christ, and in that sweet name they found that they could boldly approach God's throne.

The blessed tidings sped with amazing rapidity. In humble cot and lordly hall the silent messenger entered, and often found a welcome; and broken hearts were healed, and wearied ones found rest. Great was the consternation of the priests when they discovered what Wicliffe had done. They had been hoping that the old man would soon die, and that his work would be stamped out, but now they saw that another Preacher was to take his place mightier than he; One that they could not bind nor burn. A great clamour was raised. He was called a heretic, a sacrilegious man, who had committed a crime unheard of in former times; for he had taken the sacred things of God, and had cast them before common men, like pearls before swine, only, said they, to be trampled under foot.

Again was he called upon to appear before his judges to answer for his blasphemous conduct. No great man or baron stood by him now. He stood alone, and with calm dignity faced his accusers. A vast company had assembled to witness his trial. With his venerable head uncovered, and with his steady searching gaze fixed upon his enemies, he commenced his defence and such was his rare eloquence and unflinching boldness, that he won the admiration even of those who were against him. He would retract nothing, and would neither crave nor accept acquittal at their hands. Such was the grand dignity with which he spoke, that he and his accusers seemed to have changed places. He was the judge, and they were at his bar. So smitten were they by his words that sped like arrows to their hearts, that they could neither move nor speak. "Ye are the heretics," said he in closing, "not I. With whom, think you, are you contending? With an old man on the brink of the grave? No! with truth � truth which is stronger than you, and which will overcome you!" And then he turned and left the court. His enemies had no power to stop him. Even as his divine Master at Nazareth, he passed through the midst of them.

But the time had almost come for the faithful servant to be called home.

The primate, the king, and the Pope were working together to compass his destruction. Wicliffe himself expected soon to receive a violent death. A "chariot of fire" he thought would carry him to the skies. But God had willed it otherwise. One fair Lord's Day morning, when he was surrounded by his beloved people at Lutterworth, the message came. They were all in the little rural church that Wicliffe loved so much. The little church, where, in the summer-time the fragrant breezes blew in through open windows framed in ivy, and where the birds' songs mingled with their hymns of praise. It was in the midst of this peaceful scene, and while he was in the act of blessing the bread and wine before administering the Lord's Supper, that the Voice came to him saying, "Come up hither." His grief-stricken brethren lifted him gently from the pavement where he had fallen, and carried him home to the rectory, where, ere the day closed, he quietly passed away. And so ended his noble life.

Through the appalling darkness of the middle ages, Wicliffe shines out like a star of the first magnitude. Well has he been called the day star of the Reformation, for with his rise the night of Christendom began to flee away.

There is very much of Wicliffe's life that I have been unable to touch upon. I have merely glanced at some of the leading features of his long life work. Much relating to his doctrinal controversies you would not be interested in, and could scarcely understand; but I hope I have said enough to enable you to think with reverential interest of one of God's greatest men.

John Huss.

Let us now transfer ourselves � in imagination � far away from the land of Wicliffe, to a little village in Bohemia, called Hussinetz. Here was born one whose name, even to this day, is spoken of with deepest love and reverence; for his voice was the first which dared to denounce the tyranny of the Papacy, and from his eloquent lips first came the message of redemption in Christ, through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.

John Huss was born in the year 1373, in a little cottage, just at the edge of the vast Bohemian forest. Its great pines rocked and swayed over his humble dwelling, and doubtless, their sad, wild music often mingled with his cradle songs. Close by, rolled the bright waters of the Molden river, and with nature in all her loveliness around him, he spent his happy, dreamy childhood.

His father died when he was quite young, so he lived alone with his mother. Though she was poor, she did all in her power to teach her only child, for we find that as soon as he had finished his education at the village school, she took him to Prague, to enter him at the University of that city. Hoping to find favour for her boy with the rector, she carried a present for him, which, unfortunately, she lost on the way. In great distress she knelt down on the road with her boy beside her, and implored God's blessing upon him. Her prayers were answered; but, ah! if at that moment the curtain of the future could have been lifted, how her mother's heart would have been pierced to have seen the way. His University career was one of great brilliancy. He was made Bachelor and Master of Arts, and Bachelor of Theology. After finishing his University course, he entered the Church, where he soon rose to great eminence. His fame even reached the Court of Winceslaus, and his Queen, Sophia, choose him for her confessor.

Huss was at this time a firm believer in the Papacy, but through God's great mercy ere long his eyes were opened, and he became one of its most zealous opponents.

We have seen how in England God had sent forth a skillful and laborious servant to till the ground, and, as it were, cast in the divine seed; but not in our country only was the great Husbandman preparing the soil; for lo! afar off in Bohemia the winter is past, and the great spring-time is come, and soon will He send forth His sowers to scatter the precious seed!

A blessed link binds England and Bohemia together, for we read in the book of the persecutions of the Bohemian church, "In the year A.D. 1400 Jerome, of Prague, returned from England, bringing with him the writings of Wicliffe;" and again, a writer of the 15th century says "that the books of Master John Wicliffe opened the eyes of the blessed master John Huss, as several reliable men know from his own lips, whilst he read and re-read them with his disciples."

It is from this time that the true career of Huss must date. He was appointed preacher to the Chapel of Bethlehem, and his sermons there formed an epoch in the history of Prague. Far removed from anything they had ever heard before, his words fell upon their wondering ears with a sound strange, yet sweet, and well might they say, "Never heard we such things before." Ah! he drew his sermons direct from the pure wells of Scripture. He gave them the words of the Lord in all the loving tenderness with which they fell from His divine lips. The tale which we call "the old, old story," in all its divine simplicity, was new to them. They had been fed by the priests on legends of the saints, stories of the fathers, tales of wondrous miracles and weeping virgins, any thing or everything, rather than the truth of God.

Like soft rain on arid ground fell the words of Huss on the hearts of many who were thirsting for something � they knew not what � to bring them peace. And no wonder that there was a great awakening, and that many believed, and were saved.

The moral condition of the people at this time was most deplorable. We read that "the king, the nobles, the prelates, the clergy, and citizens indulged without restraint in avarice, pride, drunkenness, and every profligacy."

Against this fearful state of wickedness Huss thundered his powerful sermons, not sparing any; against prelates, nobles, and clergy, he alike launched his bolts. A great clamour was raised against him, but the Queen, whose confessor he was, and who held him in great esteem for his holy, blameless life, protected him.

It was impossible for Huss, studying and constantly preaching the word, as he was, not to grow rapidly in the knowledge of the Scriptures, and ere long he found that the Bible must be placed before the authority of the Pope or of councils, and so almost unwittingly Huss had entered the road of Protestantism.

It was not long before Rome heard of what was going on at Prague, and Pope Alexander V. at once issued a bull commanding the Archbishop of Prague, to proceed against all who preached in private chapels, and who read the writings or taught the opinions of Wickliffe. Then a great collection of all Wickliffe's books was made, and upwards of 200 volumes beautifully written, and elegantly bound � some even ornamented with jewels and precious stones, showing how much they were prized by their owners � were piled up in the street, and were publicly burned, while the bells tolled dismally. But they could not so stamp out the divine work. After this wicked act we find Huss preaching with still greater zeal and earnestness. He now attacked the sale of indulgences, and other unscriptural proceedings of the Papacy.

Another mandate arrived from Rome. The Pope summoned Huss to appear in person to answer for his doctrines. All knew that to obey this command would be but to walk to his grave. The King, the Queen, and many of the great ones of Bohemia sent an embassy to the Pope, begging that Huss might not appear in person, and that his defence might be heard through another. In vain they pleaded; the Pope condemned Huss in his absence, and laid the city of Prague under interdict.

Again was enacted the same scene which took place in our own country, in the reign of King John. Prague was like a city stricken with a sudden and terrible calamity. Outside the closed church doors lay the corpses awaiting burial by the wayside, for the churchyards might not receive them. The images, which were supposed to guard and sanctify the streets, were laid prostrate on the ground, as though interceding for the wicked city, and sackcloth was thrown over them. The altar lights were extinguished, and everywhere were tokens of the terrible curse that was laid on the city that harboured within its walls the man who had dared to disobey the Pope's summons.

The poor superstitious people could not brave this state of things long; tumults soon began to disturb the peace. "Let us cast out the rebel," was the cry, "lest we perish."

There was nothing for Huss but to depart. He must leave the city where he had many friends, and not a few loving disciples, for he knew that his presence could but entail sorrow and calamity on them. So he went away, and found a place of refuge in his home beneath the sighing pines of Hussinezt. But think not that he was idle; he preached and taught in all the towns and villages round about that region. Great crowds followed him, hanging on his words; they could not but admire him, no less for his modesty than for his rare eloquence and boldness. "The church," said his hearers, "has pronounced this man a heretic and a demon, yet his life is holy, and his doctrine is pure and elevating."

In time things quieted in Prague, although doubtless, the calm was only at the surface. With an intense yearning Huss longed to return again to his Chapel of Bethlehem, the scene of so much divine blessing. The wish was granted him, and once more he stands with his beloved flock around him, who listen with hushed breath to the burning words that proceed from him. His banishment has but quickened his zeal, and more courageously than ever he denounces the tyranny that would suppress the free preaching of the Gospel. Up to this time Huss had no yoke-fellow in his work; he was quite alone; and often in sadness and melancholy, he yearned for the sweet solace of a companion of like spirit with himself. It pleased God to give him such an one, a friend, who became to him as Jonathan to David. Jerome, of Faulfisk, was a Bohemian knight. He had been at Oxford, in England, and there had received much truth from Wickliffe's writings. He was noted for his subtle intellect and fervent eloquence. He had, too, a fearless courage, and a lofty devotion.

From this time the names of Huss and Jerome were ever united, Although alike in their great qualities and aims, there were many minor points of difference between them that made them necessary to one another. Their love ripened, day by day, until it became "passing the love of woman," and so it remained, in sweet unbrokenness while life lasted. Even death did not keep them long apart, for "they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided."

If we cast our eyes round, and survey the state of Europe at this time, the picture is truly deplorable. Three popes were now reigning in Christendom, each claiming to be the rightful successor of Peter. Not only with maledictions and curses did the rival popes shine now to crush one another; they hired soldiers and swords, and by war and rapine each strove to become the greatest. As this could not be done without money, pardons and places in Paradise were put up for sale that they might obtain the needed gold. Europe was plunged into anarchy and confusion; piety consisted of nothing but a few superstitious rites. Everywhere was heard the clash of arms and the sighing of nations.

This melancholy spectacle had a very powerful effect on John Huss, and drove him to a still closer study of the Bible. Every day he saw more clearly how "the Church" had departed from her early model, not in practice only, but in doctrine. And now we find him not only striking at the abuses of the Papacy, but levelling his blows at its root and endeavouring with all his might to extirpate it, both root and branch together. He now wrote his wonderful treatise "On the Church," in which he brought out clearly that Christ alone was the invisible Head of the Church. This tract was followed by another, called, "The Six Errors," which was circulated far and near, and produced a profound impression throughout Bohemia.

Something else happening at this time helped to deepen the impression made by this tract. Ladislaus, King of Hungary, had brought down the wrath of John XXIII. upon himself, by giving support to Gregory XII. one of the rival popes. In great anger he (John) issued a bull, excommunicating (which means shutting out from heaven) King Ladislaus, and all his children to the third generation. We, read too, that the Pope also "commanded all emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, and men of whatever degree, by the sprinkling of the blood of Christ, to take up arms against Ladislaus, and to utterly exterminate him and his supporters; and he promised to all who should join the crusade, or who should support it, the pardon of all their sins, and immediate admission into Paradise, should they die in the war." This edict plunged Hungary into conflict, and Huss seized the opportunity of directing the eyes of his countrymen to the contrast between the vicar of Christ, and Christ Himself: the one who proclaimed war and bloodshed, and the gentle Saviour who taught a gospel of peace. The scandals around him raised his indignation and horror. It was hard to remain calm while he saw John XXIII., one of the most wicked men that ever wore the tiara, professing to open and shut the gates of Paradise, and scattering his pardons over Europe, only that he might kindle the flames of war and shed torrents of christian blood. Plainer and bolder, day by day, grew the speech of Huss, and the people became so incensed against the priests that they trembled for their lives. The Archbishop interfered, and again placed Prague under interdict, so long as John Huss remained in the city. Again the Reformer, fearing for his friends, withdrew to his native village of Hussinetz.

Another scene in the drama of the life of Huss was closed, and he was bidden to rest awhile before the opening of his last and sublimest one. He had left far behind him the strifes and clamours of Prague, and sweet and calm was his rest beneath the waving pines of his birth-place. His letters at this time show a mind full of that calm courage that springs from trust in God. He had no fear, for he was dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty. Here he had time to calm his mind and fortify his son by communion with his God.

He could with joy think that by his instrumentality, his native country, Bohemia, had been rescued from much spiritual darkness and he could trust in God that the light would broaden and brighten.

Never again was his voice to be heard in his favourite chapel of Bethlehem, and never more were his living words to stir the hearts of his countrymen. There remains but one more act for Huss to do � his greatest and most enduring � and now I must hasten on, though shrinkingly, to tell of his noble martyr death.

In the year 1413 Sigismund had ascended the throne of the Empire. I must tell you somewhat about him, for his name was destined to be handed down to posterity, along with that of Huss, but not with like fame. He was a sincere devotee, and the sight of Christendom, disgraced and torn asunder by its popes, moved him even to tears. The emperor studied long as to how these evils were to be met, and at last he hit upon a plan, and he resolved to make trial of it: it was a general Council. He resolved to call together the whole Church; all its patriarchs, cardinals, bishops and princes, and to summon before this august body the three rival popes, and then, by the authority of the Council, compel them to adjust their claims.

I cannot stay to give an account of this wonderful assembly that met on Nov. 1, 1414. From every kingdom and state, and from almost every city in Europe, came delegates to swell the great gathering. Men of princely rank and high dignity were there, and men of fame in learning; but of all that brilliant assembly there was none in whom we take such a deep interest as in John Huss, for he, too, had been commanded to appear before the Council. He had been summoned by the emperor, who had also pledged his kingly word that he should go and return in perfect safety. We shall see how he redeemed his pledge.

Some of Huss's most powerful enemies had preceded him to Constance, and now day and night were they working to compass his destruction. Twenty-six days after his arrival, in spite of the solemn written promise of the emperor that he should remain unmolested, he was seized and thrown into the prison of a monastery on the banks of the Rhine. Here the damp and pestilential air of his prison brought on a raging fever, which nearly brought his life to an end.

Deep was the indignation when the news of Huss's imprisonment reached Bohemia. In burning words did the barons indite a remonstrance to the emperor, reminding him of his promise, and demanding that he should vindicate his own honour and release their great countryman.

Sigismund, upon receiving this remonstrance, would have at once ordered his release, but the subtle men around him soon found means to make him alter his decision. They told him that the good of the Church demanded that he should keep this heretic a prisoner. They told him that the Council, by its supreme authority, could release him from his promise, and afterwards they made a decree "that no faith is to be kept with heretics to the prejudice of the Church."

Huss was now completely in the power of his cruel enemies. They examined his writings, and soon found plenty in them whereby to condemn him; and writing down what they had against him, they proceeded to the prison where he was lying, weak and feeble with the fever. He begged that he might have an advocate to defend himself, but this was denied him. After this Huss was removed to the castle of Gotelhen, on the other side of the Rhine, where he was heavily loaded with chains. At last, on the 5th of June, 1415, he was brought to trial. His books were produced, and he was asked if he were the writer of them. This he readily admitted. Then they found by his writings that he had transferred his allegiance from the so-called "Church" to God, speaking through His Word. This was his great crime. In the judgment of the Council he was in rebellion, for he had broken the bond of submission. It would take too long to tell you how he was dragged backwards and forwards, from prison to the Council, before he was condemned, unheard, to the doom of a heretic. He went through unheard-of sufferings, for after long sittings, listening to the attacks and reasonings of his accusers, he would be shut up in a tower, with fetters on his legs, and at night he was fastened up to a rack against the wall, hard by his bed.

Sigismund, who doubtless had at this time an earnest desire to save his life, caused the Council to draw up a paper, in which it was put to him that if he would withdraw his heresies his life would be saved. But it was in vain that they tempted the great Reformer. "He would rather," he said, "be cast into the sea with a millstone round his neck, than offend those little ones to whom he had preached the Gospel."

At last the day arrived when all the sorrows of Huss were to be terminated. The execution took place in a meadow, between the gardens of the city and the gates of Gotelhen. When he reached the place where he was to be burnt, the martyr knelt down and said, "Lord Jesus into Thy hands I commend my spirit." A mighty crowd surrounded him, and those near by said, as they listened to his prayers, "We know not what his life has been, but verily he prays after a devout and godly fashion."

And now he stands with his feet on the faggots, and wood piled all around him up to the chin. Again, at the last moment, the Marshal of the Empire approached, and for the last time implored him to save his life and recant. "What errors," asked Huss, "shall I renounce? I know myself guilty of none. I call God to witness that all I have written and preached has been with the view of rescuing souls from sin and perdition, and therefore most joyfully will I confirm with my blood that truth which I have written and preached." And so they left him to his fate. The fire was applied, and the flames blazed upward, and Huss began to sing with a loud voice, and while he was singing, the flame choked him, and so he died. Carefully were his ashes collected and thrown into the Rhine. And so they thought that he was vanquished. Never had the Council made a greater mistake. From the stake of Huss what blessings have flowed, and are still flowing, to the world. Being dead he yet speaketh; for, from the moment he expired at the stake, his name became a power which is speeding on the cause of truth, even to this day.

Jerome.

Now Huss, with noble steadfastness of heart, joyfully gave up his life in the cause of his Master, we have seen.

I must now tell you of Jerome, his loving and much loved fellow-labourer. They had been one in heart and spirit in life, and it pleased God that in death they should drink of the same cup of martyrdom

When the news of Huss's danger reached Bohemia, Jerome hastened to Constance in the hope of helping him. But he soon found that, without being of any assistance to Huss, he had placed his own life in danger, so with an aching heart he fled from the city that contained his friend. He had almost arrived at Prague when his pursuers arrested him, and he was carried back to Constance loaded with chains like a malefactor. On May 23, 1415, just about a month before the execution of John Huss, he was brought before the Council, and by them was condemned to be thrown into a dreary dungeon in a tower of St Paul. His chains were so placed that they did not permit of his sitting down; his arms were crossed behind his neck, and tied with fetters. This caused his head to bend forward, and gave him great suffering. So much did he endure that he became very ill, and his cruel enemies, fearing that death might snatch their victim from them, relaxed somewhat the rigour of their treatment. Yet for a whole year he pined in that dark noisome dungeon! In the meantime the Council had received a letter from the Barons of Bohemia, expressing their horror and indignation at the death of Huss. They were convinced that, although they had thrown his ashes in the Rhine, he was not done with; they saw clearly that a great storm was rising; already the threatening sounds of its thunders were heard. They dare not, in the face of what they saw around them, plant another stake beside that of Huss. It would, they perceived, be far better to induce Jerome to recant, and so they used all their power and subtilty to this end.

Poor Jerome, ill in body, week and depressed in mind, and cut off from all his friends, in a moment of weakness yielded to their solicitations. Like Peter, when he was out on the stormy deep, he took his eyes for a moment off Christ, and so like him began to sink in the waves. But do you think that Christ would let him be engulphed in the waters? Oh, no, He loved him too well for that. In an agony of mind Jerome reflected in his lonely prison on what he had done. He had submitted to the wicked Counsel; he had subscribed to the justice of the condemnation of his beloved co-worker, Huss; he had promised to live and die in the Catholic faith, and never preach anything contrary to it. He felt he had perjured his soul � and for what? Why to escape a short season of agony at the stake. But, he asked himself, could any bodily agony be greater than the anguish of mind he was now enduring? Where, now, were those sweet times of communion that he had been wont to have with the Lord, moments that had filled even his dreary dungeon with the glory of heaven? Where now was the peace that had flooded his soul, as he had thought of the loving "Well done" of his Master? All gone! All gone! He had turned his back upon his Lord. And then he thought of Huss, and his image would rise before him, constant and courageous to the last, singing while the flames rose around him, and he loathed himself as he thought of his own weak cowardice. "Oh God," he cried, "I am cast off out of Thy sight, but I will look again towards Thy holy temple," and as he cried his soul was filled with tender thoughts of his Saviour's love, and then he knew that this love was more to him than life. "I will never deny Thee again, my Saviour," we hear him crying; "life is nought to me without Thy smile of love. With my hand in Thine I can meet the Council, I can go to the stake. They can kill the body, but they cannot separate my soul from Thee;" and so he strengthened himself in his God. From this time his courage never failed him, and Jerome rose from his fall, a stronger man than ever. And now we must follow Jerome to his final trial. On May 26, 1416, he was brought for the last time before the council.

There was no sign of fear about him now. Although pale and enfeebled by long and rigorous confinement, his face was peaceful, and lit up with a noble courage.

Kneeling down in the presence of his enemies, before commencing his defence, he earnestly besought God to guard his heart and lips that he might not utter an unworthy word. Then he commenced his defence. It was a wonderful speech, and its power and eloquence filled even his bitterest enemies with admiration. Sometimes the pathos was so tender that his stony-hearted judges were almost melted to "dewy pity;" and yet it was not for life that he pleaded. The bitterness of death seemed to be passed for him. His eloquence was not to rescue his life from the stake, but to defend and exalt the truths of his Master.

It was impossible for him to close his address without showing the Council how bitterly he repented of his recantation. "Of all the sins," said he "that I have committed since my youth, none weighs so heavily on my mind, and causes me such poignant remorse as that which I committed in this fatal place, when I approved of the iniquitous sentence, recorded against Wicliffe and against that holy martyr, John Huss, my master and my friend. Yes! I confess it from my heart, and declare with horror, that I disgracefully quailed when, through a dread of death, I condemned his doctrine. I, therefore, supplicate almighty God to deign to pardon me my sins, and this one in particular, the most heinous of all. You condemned Wicliffe and Huss not because they shook the faith, but because they branded with reprobation the scandals of the clergy, their pomps, their pride, and their luxuriousness."

At these words the whole assembly rose in a tumult. The father shook with passion, "What need we of further proof?" cried they. "The most obstinate of heretics is before us." So they hurried him back to his dungeon and loaded him more heavily with chains than before and here he remained until he was brought out to receive his sentence, and to be executed. They took him to the spot in the meadow that to him was consecrated by the death of Huss, and here they tied him to the stake. While they piled the faggots of wood about him he sang joyfully "Hail happy day." The courage that sustained his heart, and the peace that filled his soul, never left him. His death was a slow, lingering one, yet his faith and joy never failed him to the last, for there was one "like unto the Son of God," in the flames with him upholding him until his happy soul sped away from the body of pain, and he had won the martyr's crown.

Martin Luther.

In a little cottage by the wayside in the small town of Eisleben, on Nov. 10th, 1483, the wail of a newborn babe was heard, and a father (only a humble miner) hung with proud delight over his firstborn son. When a great one of this world is born joy bells are rung, cannons are discharged, and rejoicings and splendours surround the cradle of the unconscious little one. Into the cottage of which I have spoken God had just sent one of His heroes; the greatest man of his age had stepped quietly upon the stage of life, but none knew it; there were no indications of the wondrous future that awaited him, yet hereafter the voice of this little child was to shake all popedom, his strong hands would make the proud edifice totter and fall for his tones, clear and sweet as the trumpets of the day of Jubilee, would ring through the earth, proclaiming the old gospel of free pardon through faith alone.

The mother of Luther, though only a humble villager, was a woman of superior mind and character, her sweet piety lent a graceful charm to her manner. How often the fear of God gives a refinement and delicacy to the manners which we look for in vain elsewhere. It was doubtless from his gentle Christian mother that Luther inherited the loving trustful part of his nature, for he had a heart ever yearning for human sympathy, and a mind ever planning largely for the happiness of others.

The ruggedness, the sternness of his nature, the lion-like fortitude which he likewise possessed in such a large degree, came, doubtless, from his father. His father was a grave, stern man, too stern, perhaps. No fault of the boy's was left unpunished from a mistaken sense of duty the warm-hearted impulsive boy was often punished with a severity that was not wise. And yet, methinks, there was a softness somewhere beneath this hard surface, and sometimes the tender heart of the father peeps out like a gentle flower from a granite rock, for we read that often the miner might be seen carrying his "little one" to school on his shoulders. At the age of fourteen years Martin was sent to a school at Magdeburg. Here the hardships and privations of his young life were increased. His master often flogged him. It was a maxim in those days that nothing could be done with children without a free use of the rod, and we can well imagine how the buoyant, boisterous nature of the lad often led him to transgress the strict rules of the school. He mentions one day being whipped fifteen times. Poor Luther, yet this was not all he had to endure. It was the custom at that time for the scholars of the town to be sent from door to door to beg their bread, so they used to go in small companies singing and asking alms of the burghers. Very often, instead of food, the hungry tired boys received cuffs and blows. One day Luther was perambulating the streets, stopping before its likeliest dwellings, and striving by singing his little hymns to woo the inmates to kindness. He was very hungry, more so than usual, but no door opened, and no hand was extended. He was in great dejection, and stood musing as to what would become of him. Alas, he thought, he could not endure these hardships much longer, he must return home and work with his father in the mines. Then farewell to all his bright hopes of a fair education, and the brilliant career he was anticipating. Luther little thought that at that moment God was preparing a home for him. A door near him opened, and a gentle voice bade him enter. It was Ursula, the wife of Conrad Cotta, a man of consideration among the burghers of Eisnach.

It was not the first time Ursula had noticed the young scholar. She had been struck by his fresh young voice when he sung in the choir on Sundays. She had noticed him, too, when he had been sent, with harsh words, from her neighbour's doors. Her gentle heart pitied him, and bidding him come in, she placed him at her own table and satisfied his hunger. Both she and her husband were won by the open countenance and sweet disposition of the boy, so they bade him stay with them; and from that time the boy had a home, and the worthy pair were to him as father and mother.

Here, surrounded by love and the sweet influences of a tender gentle woman, his young heart expanded like a flower in the sunshine. Penury and coldness had threatened to blight his powers, but now they awakened with fresh vigour, and he gave himself up to study with renewed ardour. Madame Cotta was very fond of music, and there was no better way in which Luther could repay his kind friends, than to sing to her while he accompanied himself on the lute. In this happy home Luther lived two years. In all his after life he never forgot the good Madame Cotta or the town where she lived. He was accustomed to speak of the latter as "his own beautiful town," and with reference to the former he would say, "There is nothing kinder on earth than a good woman's heart." He never forgot, too, how God had helped him when he had stood hungry, solitary, and heart sick in the streets of Eisnach.

Luther entered the university of Erfurt in 1501. Here the young student came thirsting for knowledge, to drink his fill. His father, perceiving his son's talents, wished him to study law, and he toiled harder than ever that he might support his son during his studies.

Luther was eighteen when he entered the university. With avidity did the young student drink in of the scholastic philosophy that was then in such great repute. Aristotle, Duns, Occan, and others, he studied. Doubtless they tended to the ripening of his understanding, and gave agility to his mind, and afterwards were of value to him in the discussion of subtle questions; but in all other respects it was a mere attempt to gather grapes off thorns, and figs off thistles. When he had been two years at his university, an event occurred which changed his whole future life. Always fond of books, he went day by day to the library of the university, and spent hours amid its treasures. One day, as he took down the books, he came upon one such as he had never seen before � a volume unlike all others. Looking at it with surprise, he found it to be a Bible � the Vulgate or Latin translation of the Holy Scriptures, by Jerome. He had never seen the Bible before. Certain portions the church had prescribed to be read, and these he had thought were the whole Bible. Great was his surprise when he found there were whole books and epistles which he had never seen before. As he read it seemed as though the very heavens were opening before him. Day after day he returned to the library and devoured some gospel of the New, or story of the Old Testament, rejoicing as one who had suddenly discovered a country fair and new. From this time a change came over Luther; the struggles in his soul commenced, which were destined never to cease until the old Luther had passed away, and the new Luther, born of the incorruptible seed, had taken his place. And from this new man came a new age � a new Europe. Long before, out of the Bible at Oxford, came the first dawn of the Reformation, and now out of this Old Bible at Erfurt came its second morning.

Luther took his first academic degree in the year 1503, and two years later he became Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy. A grand torch-light procession was given him in honour of this event. Already the miner's son saw a brilliant pathway before him, leading to fame and honour. He saw that even now he held no mean place in public opinion. As the nearest road to the goal of fame, he devoted himself to the bar, and began to give public lectures on the learned subjects treated of by the ancient philosopher, Aristotle. And where, in the midst of these intellectual fascinations, was the old Book upon which he had lighted with so much joy?

It seemed in danger of being well-nigh forgotten. But God would not have it so. Amid the excitement of his scholastic studies a sudden blow fell upon him which opened his eyes to the solemnity of eternity. He was brought to its very verge that he might gaze, as it were, over its brink. His bosom friend, Alexis, was suddenly snatched away by a violent death. His conscience, which the old Bible had awakened, but which had of late been sleeping, again awoke. "What," it said to him, "shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Again, still louder, the voice of God spoke to him. He was passing through the country on a visit to his friends, when a violent storm broke over him. The thunders rolled and the lightnings flashed in an awful manner. It seemed to Luther as though the great Judge had descended and was calling him to account. A flash of fire suddenly struck the place where he was standing; a terrible crash of thunder broke above his head, and Luther fell almost senseless to the ground, momentarily expecting death. In agony of mind he vowed to God that if He would spare his life he would devote it to His service.

The lightnings ceased, the thunders rolled away, and, rising from the ground, Luther pursued his way with solemn steps to Erfurt. But his vow, it must be fulfilled.

In those days devoting oneself to God was interpreted as meaning that you must enter a monastery � you must wear the monk's hood.

To Luther, the monastery was but another word for the grave. How could he, who was so well fitted to enjoy them, forswear the delights of love and friendship? How could he renounce the honour and glory he was so well able to win: nay, which were almost already in his grasp? But his vow had been made, and it could not be broken; and surely, he thought, the more the sacrifice I make, the greater will be my merit in the sight of God. But he must see his friends once more, and then �. So, without telling them of his purpose, he calls his friends around him. He trys to converse gaily with them; but surely there are tears in his voice at times, for in his heart he is bidding them a long farewell. He touched his lute, and regales them with the music he loves so well, and if the strain is sad and dirge-like, how can he help it, for is it not his own requiem that he is playing? The time comes for them to part � he sees the last one away, and then without a moment's hesitation, he walks straight to the Augustine Convent; he lifts the heavy knocker, its ponderous bolts are withdrawn, the door opens to receive him, and he enters.

And now surely that he has been admitted into the solemn cloisters of the monastery that he has heard spoken of as being so peaceful, calm, and holy, the pangs of his troubled conscience will cease. Here, afar from the world and its temptations, he will find rest for his weary soul. Surely God will accept the great sacrifice that he has made. So thought Luther. Did he find it so? Ah, no. Luther had to find out that there could be no peace for him out of Christ. His inward torments became day by day more unsupportable. He found that the convent bars had but shut him in with his conscience: and now louder, and still louder, became its voice. He knew not where to flee. "Where," he groaned, "shall I find a shadow from this great heat � where a shelter from this great blast?" He knew no holier place than the cell; yet with all his penances and prayers he became no holier, gained no rest. It was a bitter cup that Luther was drinking, but God was teaching the man who was to be the church's great reformer.

What a heavy burden is unpardoned guilt, and how impossible it is to find relief from it by these works of self-righteousness!

Again and again the poor monk came, as it were, to the door of heaven with his goodly sum of works only to find it closed. God was teaching the man who was to be the great apostle of justification by Faith � that heaven could not be bought by any sum, however great, but must be a free gift from God Himself.

Like a shadow he glided from cell to cell of his monastery, his eyes sunken, his bones protruding, his figure bowed to the earth. His crys and groans echoed through the long corridors of the convent. He became a mystery and a terror to his brother monks. His confessor tried to help him, but his wounds were too deep for his skill.

"'Save me in thy righteousness' � what does that mean?" asked Luther; "I can see how God can condemn me in His righteousness, but how can He save me in His righteousness?" But none could answer poor Luther. God was allowing great furrows of sorrow to be worn in his heart, but only that He might flood them with the water-brooks of life. And even now one is approaching the monastery who will bring relief to his broken heart! It chanced � but no, it was not chance � that just at this time Staupitz, Vicar-general of the Augustines of Germany, paid a visit to the monastery where Luther was groaning under his heavy burden of sin. He was a man of great piety; one who was trusting not to the church for salvation, but to Christ alone. His eye, trained to read the faces of those around him, fell on the young monk. He could not gaze on that broad brow, upon which was the shadow of a great sorrow, or mark the eye which told of much spirit anguish, without feelings of deep interest. He spoke to him with tenderness � such sounds were rare to poor Luther now, for the inmates of the monastery thought that his conflicts could only be accounted for by the influence of the evil one, and so had shunned him.

The words of love won his confidence, and he laid his whole soul bare before the vicar. Staupitz saw at once how it was. "Luther," said he in effect, "you are trying to stand before the Great Judge without a days-man. Turn your eyes away from your own wounds, your stripes, maceratings, and fastings. You can never move God by these. Look to the wounds of Christ � see there His blood flowing for you!"

"But how dare I come to Christ," said Luther, "till I am a better man?"

"A better man! It is sinners, not just men, Christ came to call." And so with skilful hand the vicar strove to turn his thoughts from himself to his Saviour. Like healing balm upon an open wound seemed the vicar's words to Luther's bruised spirit; he felt that light was beginning to pierce the cloud. Before the vicar left he gave him a Bible, which he received with unbounded joy.

Still Luther's faith was but feeble and flickering, and at times the clouds of despondency would gather round him, and his old conflicts would be renewed.

At last he was laid on a bed of sickness, and while he was there God used a very humble instrument to complete the work that the vicar had commenced. A poor old brother monk came to Luther's bed-side one day, and began reciting, with great earnestness and simplicity, the apostle's creed. Luther repeated after him in feeble accents, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins." "Nay," said the monk, "you are to believe not only in the forgiveness of David's sins, and Peter's sins, you must believe in the forgiveness of your own sins." The decisive word was spoken. As a flash of vivid lightning in the night time suddenly illumines the whole landscape, so the monk's simple words thew a flood of light upon the scheme of the Gospel, which had before seemed to Luther so incomprehensible. "Oh, God," he exclaimed in an ecstasy of joy, "I see it all now, it is not payment, but forgiveness." It seemed as though he were in a new world � his prison doors were open. God had removed his sackcloth from him, and girded him with gladness. "In that hour," says one, "the principle of popery fell from Luther's soul." To Christ alone now he looked for salvation, to the church he would look no more.

But although Luther had received life and peace, there was still much that he had to learn, and soon after this we find him being ordained as a priest.

Our picture will show what a gorgeous scene this was when Rome had full sway over men's hearts. What an awful perversion of the simplicity of the Lord's supper!

The ceremonies of popery still had a hold upon him, yet according to his light, with wholeheartedness he served his God, and remained some time in the monastery, under the training of God, and growing daily richer in the knowledge of Him.

And now the time has come for him to pass out of his cell � the cell in which he had fought a battle sublimer than the one he was afterwards called upon to fight before the Diet of Worms � and enter upon the work which God had in divine wisdom been preparing him to fulfil.

He was appointed to the post of Doctor of Theology in the University of Wittemberg; and passing from the monastery to the class-room with the open Bible in his hand, he was able to reveal the fountains of life to the eager students who surrounded him. How freely could he now communicate to others that which he learned amid tears, and groans, and anguish of soul. Such was the power and freshness of his words that crowds of students came to hang, as it were, upon his utterances. His fame went out into other lands. Flocks of students from foreign countries came to drink in of the heaven-taught wisdom of the Wittemberg professor.

Staupitz watched with lively satisfaction the career of the young monk. Why, thought he, should this man confine his light to the walls of a university? around him on all sides were multitudes who were endeavouring to satisfy their hunger on the wretched husks which the monks gave them to feed on. Why should not this man, who was so well able, minister to them the bread of Life? Why should not the living waters, so long dammed up, be let loose to flow again among the habitations of men? The vicar-general proposed to Luther that he should preach in public, and soon after this, Luther commenced his public ministry.

At an old wooden chapel in the centre of the public square, so tottering with age that it needed to be propped up on all sides, Luther first commenced his public ministry. And here, after the silence of centuries, rang out again the proclamation of free pardon for all sins through faith in Jesus Christ alone. With animated countenance, and kindling eye, Luther told out in thrilling tones the majestic truths that he had received from God, and the hearts of his hearers were filled with awe. Men wondered at tidings so strange and sweet, so refreshing and welcome. When the heart is full it is easy for the tongue to be eloquent, and day by day the fame of the preacher grew. From all the surrounding cities came crowds to hear him; the old wooden chapel became far too small for the numbers who flocked to it. The Town Council of Wittemberg now elected him to be their preacher, and gave him the use of the parish church. Once the Elector Frederick was among his hearers, and was delighted with the simplicity of his language, and with the weight of his matter. And now the Reformation was fairly launched. God had bidden it go forward, and man could not stop it.

But it was needful for Luther that he should learn another lesson. The Lord wished him to find out the vileness of that church which he still regarded as the church of Christ, and the dwelling place of holiness; and that he might learn it more surely, it was necessary that he should go to Rome. And so God opened up the way for him to go there. With heart swelling with strange emotion, Luther stands within the gates of, to him, the thrice holy city. What a disenchantment awaited him! What a deliverance from a spell that had too long held him captive! He would see Rome, not as he had fondly painted her in his dreams, but as she had made herself by her own corruptions.

It must not be forgotten that although Luther was converted, and resting on the Lord Jesus as the rock of his salvation, his knowledge was still very imperfect, for popery still extended its shadow over his mind. It was no easy thing for Luther to emerge from under that gloom, a gloom that had lasted for twelve centuries, and which is brooding, even to this day, over half of Europe.

And so we find that the first few days of Luther's stay in Rome were occupied in visiting the holy places, and saying mass at its most holy churches, and thus he was brought into contact with the priests. And now it was that he saw behind the scenes. With unspeakable pain and grief of heart he found out that these "holy" men were merely playing a part, and that in private they laughed to scorn the very rites which in public they celebrated with such a show of devotion. And if he was shocked at their levity, they were no less astonished at his solemn credulity. They jeered at him as a dull German; a poor thing without genius enough to be a sceptic, and without cunning enough to be a hypocrite. They were amazed, they said, to find such a fossilised specimen in the sixteenth century.

One day he was at table with some prelates who, thinking the German was as easy of faith as themselves, began to make merry over the clever way in which they deceived and befooled the people. When blessing the bread, and using the Latin words by which (as Rome teaches) the bread is truly changed into the flesh and blood of Christ, they would say, in Latin, "Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain," and then they said, "We elevate the Host and the people bow down and worship." In horror Luther listened, and in that moment the vail was torn from his eyes. He saw then that he must either give up Christianity or Rome. But what he had gained amid his groans and struggles in his lonely cell at Erfurt, could never be given up. That he had received from God Himself. It was from this Rome, with her mocking hypocrisy, her jeering impiety and shameless revelry, that he must turn away. And so from the clergy Luther turned; but even yet he thought her rites might be holy; surely, he thought, there must be some merit in visiting the shrines, something whereby he might nourish his piety and return home a holier man. Influenced by these feelings he went one day to the church of the Lateran. In it are the holy stairs which, tradition says, Christ descended when returning from the hall of judgment where Pilate had passed sentence on Him. It was said that the angels had removed these marble stairs from Jerusalem to Rome, and every one who climbed them on his knees would merit fifteen years of indulgence for each ascent!

While Luther was laboriously ascending the stairs, he was startled by a sudden voice, which seemed to him to come from heaven, saying, "The just shall live by faith!" In amazement Luther started to his feet. This was the third time that these words had been conveyed to his mind, and with startling power. Now they seemed to speak louder than ever. "What am I doing?" said Luther, "why am I striving to gain an indulgence from the church which can last me only a few years, when God has given me an indulgence that will last for ever?"

From this time the doctrine of justification by faith alone stood out before Luther as the one grand leading doctrine of revelation. He had done now with relics shrines, and altars; that one glorious sentence, "The just shall live by faith," had more efficacy in it, a thousand times over, than all the holy treasures Rome contained. This was the key that should unlock the closed gates of Paradise; this the star, the bright star, that should go before him and lead him to his Saviour's feet.

In words grandly characteristic of the man, Luther at this time recorded his purpose. "I Dr. Martin Luther," writes he, "unworthy herald of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, confess this article, that faith alone without works justifies before God, and I declare that it shall stand for ever, in despite of the Emperor of the Romans, the Emperor of the Turks, the Emperor of the Tartars, the Emperor of the Persians; in spite of the Pope and all the cardinals, with the bishops, priests, monks, and nuns; in spite of kings, princes, and nobles, and in spite of all the world, and of the devils themselves; and that if they endeavour to fight against this truth, they will draw the fires of hell upon their own heads. This is the true and holy gospel, and the declaration of me, Dr Martin Luther, according to the teaching of the Holy Ghost. We hold fast to it in the name of God. Amen."

This was what Luther had learned at Rome. Verily it was worth his wearisome journey thither. His stay did not extend over two weeks, but the lessons learned there would never be forgotten during his life. The year of his return was 1512. A few months after this he received the degree of Dr. of Divinity. On this occasion Luther took a solemn oath upon the Bible to study, propagate, and defend the faith contained in the holy Scriptures. And now he bade farewell to philosophy, and turned to the Bible as his great life work. Even yet he had no thought of separating himself from the Romish church; there were still some links that held him in bondage, and to find out how Rome herself severed these links we must turn our eyes a few moments to the history of the time.

The warlike Julius II., who was Pope at the time of Luther's visit to Rome, was now dead, and Leo X. occupied the Vatican. He was of the family of the Medici, and like them was distinguished by sensuality and voluptuousness, though graced by an exquisite refinement of manner. He was a lover of fine arts, and had a taste for letters. He was determined that his court should be the most brilliant in Europe. No elegance, no amusement, no pleasure should be forbidden to enter it.

You may be sure that this pontiff was burdened with no religious beliefs or convictions. To him the whole scheme of Christianity was a "gigantic fable." And he was wont to sneer and give vent to his scepticism in the words, "What a profitable affair this fable of Christ has been to us!"

And now Leo conceived a grand idea. His family had adorned Florence with its noblest edifices, and its glories were spoken of in all countries. Why should not he make his name famous and adorn the Eternal City by a pile more glorious than Christendom contained? But to execute such a project millions would be needed; how could the money be procured? His exchequer was empty, emptied by the vain shows and amusements of his court.

But surely such a magnificent conception must not be allowed to fall through from want of money. Could not he sell his pardons and indulgences? And so it was resolved to open a grand market for the sale of spiritual blessings. It was done, and very soon, as he expected, a river of gold began to flow into Rome.

The licence to sell these indulgences in the different countries of Europe, was disposed of to the highest bidder. The indulgences of Germany were farmed by Albert, Archbishop of Main and Magdeburg, a man as bereft of conscience and religion as the Pope himself. And now he began to look about for a suitable person to walk the streets of Germany, and to do his best to sell his pardons. He soon found a man in every way suited to his purpose. This was a monk of the name of Tetzel. He had been convicted of an odious crime, and sentenced to be put in a sack and drowned, but through powerful intercession, had been reprieved. He had the voice of a town-crier, and the eloquence of a mountebank. Such was the man that made progress through Germany, carrying a great red cross, on which were suspended the arms of the Pope. In front of the procession, on a velvet cushion, was borne the Pontiff's bull of grace, in the rear came the mules laded with bales of pardons to be given � not to the penitent of heart, but to those whose money was in their hand.

When he entered a city, Tetzel and his company went straight to the cathedral; then the cross was set up on the high altar, a strong iron box was placed beside it to receive the money, and Tetzel, in the garb of a Dominican Friar, began to set forth in stentorian tones the marvellous worth of his wares. "Press in now, press in while the gates of Paradise are open. Should that cross be taken down, the doors of heaven will be closed." "Indulgences," he went on, "are the most precious, and the most noble of God's gift's. Come, come while you may, and I will give you letters all properly sealed, by which, even the sins which you intend to commit, may be pardoned; and, more than this, indulgences avail not only for the living but for the dead. Priest, noble, merchant, wife, youth, maiden, do you not hear your parents, and your other friends who are dead, and who cry from the bottom of the abyss, "We are suffering horrible torments, a trifling alms will deliver us; you can give it, and you will not!" "At the very instant," he continued to his shuddering hearers, "that the money rattles at the bottom of the box, the soul escapes from purgatory, and flies liberated to heaven!"

These are some of the very sentences by which this wicked man strove to extort the money from poor deluded people, who firmly believed in the fires of purgatory.

And now Tetzel, in the course of his tour through Germany, has arrived within four miles of Wittemberg. And there, in the Market place, the great red cross has been set up, and the pardon-monger's stentorian tones are heard proclaiming his wares.

With grief and indignation did Luther witness the thousands that flocked to his standard, and very soon did he perceive the moral havoc that these so-called "pardons" were working. You must remember that Luther still believed in the power of the church to exact confession and penance from its flock, though not as a means to salvation. This he taught was to be had alone through the merits of the Saviour's blood.

One day, when he was sat at the confessional, some citizens came to him, and confessed having committed some thefts and other grave sins.

"You must abandon your evil courses," said Luther, "otherwise I cannot absolve you."

You may imagine his holy indignation and horror, when they told him that they had no intention of leaving off their sins, that there was no necessity for them to do so, seeing that the Pope had, in the person of Tetzel, pardoned these sins, and secured them against the punishment of them. And then, in the testimony of their innocence, they pulled out their indulgence papers, and shewed them to him.

Groaning in anguish of spirit at the way in which the poor creatures were being deluded, Luther could only tell them that their papers were worthless, and that they must repent and be forgiven of God, or perish everlastingly.

Refused absolution, and sore at losing their money, and also their hope of heaven, these people went back to Tetzel, and informed him that a monk in Wittemberg was throwing contempt on his indulgences. Foaming with rage, Tetzel poured out a torrent of abuse against the man who dared to make light of the Pope's pardons; then as a sign of what would be done with him, he kindled a great fire in the market place, with the threat that the Pope had given him authority to commit all such heretics to the flames.

Little heeding Tetzel's angry words, Luther continued his opposition more strenuously than ever. With all the grand unflinching boldness of his character, he condemned, from the pulpit, in the university, and at the confessional, these proceedings of Rome, denouncing them as a scandal to religion and a snare to souls. But this was not enough for him, he felt he must do still more to free his conscience.

One, day, on the eve of All Saint's Day, when the streets of Wittemberg were filled with pilgrims who had come to nourish their piety at the numerous shrines of Wittemberg, Luther issued from his home, and joined the stream of people who were flowing to the Castle Church, which stood by the eastern gate. Drawing from his pocket a paper, he proceeded to nail it on the church door. The strokes of his hammer soon drew a crowd around him, who pressed eagerly forward to read what was written thereon. And what was this paper? It was Luther's wonderful "Theses," consisting of ninety-five propositions on the doctrine of indulgence.

These propositions Luther undertook to defend against all who might choose to impugn them next day at the university. But none appeared.

In this wonderful paper, which was destined to be the means of bringing light and blessing to thousands, Luther took the opportunity of preaching a free salvation to all who would believe. He placed God's free gift in sharp contrast to the indulgence of Rome � the one to be had "without money and without price," the other to be bought with gold. He taught that the Pope's forgiveness, without God's was a mere cheat and delusion. And so taking the great prerogative of salvation from the church's hand, he gave it back to God.

And now the great movement of the Reformation is fairly launched, and is spreading onward with wonderful rapidity. The Theses were printed, and seemed to fall as thick as snow flakes all over Saxony. They were translated into Dutch, and read in Holland they were rendered into Spanish, and studied at the universities of the Iberian peninsula. "It seemed," as one has said, "as though the angels were their bearers," for even as far away as Jerusalem, copies were to be bought. Strange as it may seem, in four short weeks Luther's tract had become a household book, and his name a household word. Everywhere the Theses were the subject of converse and discussion. The feelings awakened by them were, of course, of a varied nature, but by very many they were received with great joy. Men were conscious of a great burden taken from their hearts. "While those," says Mathesius, "who had entered the convent to seek a good table and lazy life, or consideration and honour, heaped Luther's name with revilings, those monks who lived in prayer, fasting and mortifications, gave thanks as soon as they heard the cry of that eagle which John Huss had foretold a century before."

The historian, Kranz, of Hamburg, was on his deathbed, when Luther's Theses was brought to him. "Thou art right, brother Martin," he said upon reading them, "but thou wilt not succeed. Poor monk, hie thee to thy cell and cry, 'O God, have pity on me!'" Another old, priest of Hexter said: "Dear brother Martin, if thou succeed in overthrowing this purgatory, and all these paper-mongers, thou are truly a very great gentlemen." But, others, lifting their eyes higher, saw God's hand in it, and they felt he had come forth in answer to the groans of His burdened saints, to break their bonds in sunder.

Three years have sped away since Luther, with bold hand nailed his theses to the door of the Kirk of Wittemberg. But in those three short years what changes had taken place in the opinions of men, and indeed, in those of Luther himself. A light as fair as that which streamed in the beginning, on this dark chaotic world, had shone upon the moral blackness of that time. Gladness was flooding the hearts of men. Deep joy was breaking out on every side. How fair was the light! How gracious the drops that were falling from heaven upon a weary earth, for men afar and near were praising God for a recovered gospel.

In vain now did Tetzel cry his wares; pardons had become unsaleable. Shrines once thought so holy, were now forsaken. Nunneries and monasteries were emptying for men were learning now to turn to God alone for their souls' needs. In the direst alarm, the Pope and his counsellors sought to silence this monk who was working them such ill. But in vain they set their snares to entrap him, God took care of him; in vain they sent their cleverest men to meet and confound him with subtle arguments and theological skill. With his hand upon the Bible, Luther put them utterly to rout. One by one, they returned to their master discomfited. Pope Leo felt that something must be done, and at once, to stop the baneful course of this intrepid man.

He stepped into the arena and launched his final missal. A bull of excommunication was issued against Luther, by which (according to them) he was hurled from the church, and cut off from hope of heaven.

Harmlessly fell the bolt which once had power to shake the thrones of monarchs. The men of Wittemberg, with Luther at their head, took the bull and (as all unclean things were burnt outside the camp) burnt it, and with it, the books of the papal canon law outside the city. No mysterious virtue was in these Papal edicts. They blazed and crackled and sank to ashes like any common paper. Amid demonstrations of triumph, the procession reformed, and doctors, masters, students and townsmen gathered round the great Reformer, and led him back to the city.

But well Luther knew that one blow would not win the battle. Next day, when he was lecturing to a crowd of eager students, he told them that the burning of the Papal statutes was but a sign; the thing signified was the utter extinction of the Papacy. His voice grew solemn as he continued � "Unless, with all your hearts, you abandon the Papacy, you cannot save your souls. The reign of the Pope is so opposed to the law of Christ, and the life of the christian, that it will be safer to roam the desert, and never see the face of man, than abide under the rule of Antichrist. I warn every man to look to his soul's welfare, lest, by submitting to the Pope, he deny Christ. The time is come when christians must choose between death here, and death hereafter; for my part, I choose death here. I cannot lay such a burden upon my soul, as to hold my peace in this matter. I must look to the great reckoning, I abominate the Babylonian pest; as long as I live I will proclaim the truth. If the wholesale destruction of souls throughout Christendom cannot be prevented, at least I shall labour to the utmost of my power to rescue my countrymen from the bottomless pit of perdition."

On the 24th of March, 1521, the imperial herald arrived at Wittemberg, and put in the hands of Luther, the summons of the Emperor to appear before the Diet of Worms. A more brilliant assemblage than this, the first Diet of the young Emperor Charles, of Spain, had perhaps never been gathered together since the days of Charlemagne. It may have been his youth, for he was only twenty, together with the vast dominions over which he had sway, that helped to throw such a singular interest over him. From far and near came unprecedented numbers to his Diet. We read "that every road leading to Worms, displayed a succession of gay cavalcades � the electors with their courts, the archbishops with their chapters, margraves, and barons with their military retainers, the delegates of the various cities, in the badge of their office � all hastened to Worms." But a greater than Charles was to present himself before them, and a cause greater than that of the Empire, was to unfold its claims to their hearing. The time had come when Luther must bear testimony to the gospel, not at the stake, but on the loftiest stage the world can furnish. God had so willed it that emperor, lords, and barons must come to Worms, and there patiently wait and listen while the miner's son speaks to them.

"Will he come?" asked the members of the Diet one of another, when they had determined to summon Luther before them. Not for a moment did he hesitate, he knew that a higher than the Emperor had summoned him, and he was ready to obey. He knew that his safe conduct might be violated, as that of John Huss had been; he might be going to the stake, for many, he knew, were thirsting for his blood, yet he never wavered. There he would be able to bear testimony for the truth, as for the rest, he had no concern, he left the issue with God. "Fear not," he wrote to a friend, "that I shall retract a single syllable. With the help of Christ I will not desert the Word on the battle field." To others, he said, "I am called, it is ordered and decreed that I appear in that city. I will neither recant nor fly. I will go to Worms in spite of all the gates of hell, and the prince of the power of the air." Like wild fire the news spread through Germany, that their beloved Luther had been summoned to appear before the Emperor and his Diet. It was with mingled feelings of thankfulness and alarm that they heard. Thankfulness, that their cause � which they knew to be God's cause also � was about to be examined before so august an assembly, and fear, lest Luther should be sacrificed, and so many loving eyes and anxious hearts followed him as he left Wittemberg.

It was ten o'clock in the morning of the 16th of April when Luther saw the old towers of Worms rising before him. Sitting up in his car he began to sing a hymn that he had composed two days before, "A Strong Tower is our God." Away on the cathedral tower the sentinel descried the approach of the cavalcade and sounded his trumpet. At this signal of Luther's arrival, the citizens of Worms rushed into the street, and in a moment nobles, citizens, princes, and men of all nations mingled in one mighty throng to see the entry of the intrepid monk. Preceded by a herald Luther approached, dressed in his monk's gown. Although bearing traces of his recent illness, all who gazed upon him noticed the deep and settled calm of his eyes. The surging crowd, struck with the courage of the man who, contrary to all their expectations, had entered their gates, pressed around him to give him a hearty welcome. Looking round upon them as he descended from his carriage, Luther revealed to them the secret of his courage in the simple words, "God will be for me."

Weak after his recent severe illness, and greatly fatigued with his fourteen days' journey, the Reformer greatly needed rest. The next day, too, was before him; the most eventful, perhaps, of his whole life, but all were too anxious to see the monk to permit him an hour's repose. Princes, dukes, counts � friends and foes alike � besieged his hotel and crowded his apartments. As one relay of visitors were dismissed, another waited for admission. With calmness and dignity the miner's son received the brilliant throng. Unmoved he stood in their midst, hearing and answering their questions with a quietness and wisdom that filled even his enemies with wonder and admiration.

At last, far in the night, his crowd of visitors, so varied in rank, left him, and Luther was alone. Too excited and restless to sleep, he threw open the casement, and let the soft spring air fan his fevered brow; taking his lute he touched it and sang a favorite hymn, and then from his window he looked off out into the night. Below him the weary city was silently sleeping; away in the great valley he heard the roar of the Rhine as it poured out its floods; above him was the silent, fathomless vault of heaven. To it he lifted his eyes, as had often been his wont when in anguish of mind.

The midnight stars, always so dear to him, gazed down on him now like the faces of old friends; all else around him was so unfamiliar and strange. How it soothed his soul to see them now fulfilling their stately march so far above the tumult of the earth, and yet so far below the throne whereon sat a King infinitely greater than the monarch before whom he was to appear to-morrow. He gazed till a sense of sublimity filled his soul, bringing with it a feeling of repose. Turning away from his casement, he said, "I will lay me down and take quiet rest, for Thou makest me to dwell in safety."

Next morning, Wednesday, the 17th of April, at eight o'clock, Luther was cited to appear at four in the afternoon before his Imperial Majesty and the States of the Empire. With all the earnestness that marked his nature, the Reformer prepared himself to meet the coming strife, and kneeling before the throne of the eternal God, he poured out his prayers and supplications with groans that were audible outside his chamber door: and so he spent most of the time, until he rose to stand before the throne of Charles.

Accompanied by the Marshal of the Empire, and preceded by a herald, Luther set out for the Diet. But no easy matter did they find it to push their way to the town-hall, for the streets were filled with a denser crowd than that which had assembled the day before. Every window and house-top had its cluster of spectators, all eager to catch a sight of the Reformer. Arrived at the town-hall, they found the road so blocked up that the soldiers had to clear a way by main force.

As they were elbowing their way, and were now near the door at which they were to be ushered into the presence of the Diet, Luther felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He looked round to see the kindly face of George Freundsberg, a veteran well know to his countrymen for his gallantry and bravery.

"My monk, my good monk" said the soldier, "you are now going to face greater peril than any of us have ever encountered on the bloodiest field; but if you are right and feel sure of it, go on, and God will fight for you."

Hardly had these words been spoken, when the door opened, and Luther was in the presence of the august assembly.

Again came words of comfort to him. Passing through the throng of princes to take his place before the Emperor, a soft whisper reached his ear: "But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what you shall speak, for it shall be given you in that same hour, what you shall speak." To Luther it seemed like the voice of God, and came to him with soothing power; and so, with equanimity and composure, he advanced and stood before the throne of Charles.

"Never," says D'Aubign�, "had man appeared before so imposing an assembly. The Emperor Charles V., whose sovereignty extended over great part of the old and new worlds; his brother, the Archduke Ferdinand; six electors of the empire, most of whose descendants now wear the kingly crown; twenty-four dukes, the majority of whom were independent sovereigns over countries more or less extensive, and among whom were some whose names afterwards became formidable to the Reformation; the Duke of Alva and his two sons; eight marquises; thirty archbishops, bishops, and abbots; seven ambassadors, including those from the Kings of France and England; the deputies of ten free cities; a great number of princes, counts and sovereign barons; the Papal nuncios � in all, two hundred and four persons. Such was the imposing court before which appeared Martin Luther."

"The sun," says the historian Wylie, "was near its setting, his level rays pouring in at the windows and falling in rich mellow light on all within, gave additional splendour to the scene. It brought out in strong relief, the national costumes and variously coloured dresses and equipments of the members of the Diet. The yellow silken robes of the Emperor, the velvet and ermine of the electors, the red hat and scarlet gown of the cardinal, the velvet robe of the bishop, the rich doublet of the knight, covered with the badges of his rank and valour, the more sombre attire of the city deputy, the burnished steel of the warrior, all showed to advantage in the chastened radiance which was now streaming in from the descending luminary. In the midst of that scene, which might have been termed gay but for its overwhelming solemnity, stood Luther in his monk's frock."

Amid a deep silence John Eck, Archbishop, of Treves and spokesman of the Diet, rose and in a sonorous voice repeated, first in Latin and then in German, the following words: "Martin Luther, his sacred and invincible majesty has cited you to appear before his throne to answer two questions. First, do you acknowledge these books," pointing to a pile of volumes on the table, "to have been written by you? Secondly, are you prepared to retract and disavow the opinions you have advanced in them?"

"Most gracious Emperor," answered Luther, "the books are mine. As to the second, seeing it is a question which concerns the salvation of souls, and in which the Word of God is interested � I should act imprudently were I to reply without reflection. I entreat your Imperial Majesty, with all humility, to allow me time, so that I may reply without offending the Word of God."

Fondly hoped the members of the Diet that this request for time was a mere prelude to a retraction. "He is but breaking his fall," said they; "the heretic of Wittemberg is about to play the part of penitent at Worms."

Had they known a little more of Luther's character, they would have judged very differently. They would have known that this pause was the act of a man whose mind was thoroughly made up, and who, knowing that it was unalterably so, wished to make his avowal without haste, and in such a way that its full strength might appear, and that all might feel it to be irrevocable.

After a time of deliberation, the Diet granted Luther his request. At the same time to-morrow he must appear, and give to them his final answer.

Luther bowed, and instantly the herald was by his side to conduct him to his hotel.

The morning broke that was destined to be the most eventful one in Luther's life, and also in the history of the Reformation, and it awoke to find Luther a prey to the most tormenting anxieties and gloomy forebodings. There were moments when Luther, with his exquisitely strung and highly emotional nature, gave way to these feelings, and we shall err greatly if we suppose that it was a great intrepidity of spirit, or an iron firmness of nerve, that bore him up and carried him through these scenes of awful mental trial. There were times when the sense of the presence of the Lord, that shed such a divine serenity and strength into his mind, was withdrawn, and then difficulties and dangers would rise around his path like so many giants, he would feel himself forsaken, and a horror of great darkness would fill his soul.

And so did it befall him on the morning of this eventful day. The upholding power which had sustained him on his journey to Worms, seemed to be all gone, and Luther felt weak and feeble as a little child. It was not the thought that he would be condemned and led to the stake, that shook, so terribly, the Reformer on the morning of his second appearance before the Imperial Diet. It was something far more dreadful than to die, to die a thousand deaths. He felt the crisis had come, and he was powerless to meet it. He would falter at the Diet, he would wreck his cause, he would blast the hopes of future ages, and God's enemies would triumph. Let us draw near to his closet door and hear his groans and cries.

It is scarcely dawn yet; he has been a considerable while engaged in prayer. His supplications are drawing to a close; "My God," he cries, "My God, hearest Thou me not? Hidest Thou Thyself from me? Thou hast chosen me for this work, I know it well! ... Act then, oh God! ... Stand at my side for the sake of Thy well-beloved Jesus Christ, who is my defence, my shield, and my strong tower." After an interval of silence again we hear his voice, "Lord, where stayest Thou? ... Oh, my God! where art Thou? Come, come, I am ready .... I am ready to lay down my life for Thy truth....patient as a lamb, for it is the cause of justice, it is Thine ..... I will never separate myself from Thee, neither now nor through eternity ....And though the world should be filled with devils �though my body, which is still the work of Thy hands, should be slain � should be racked on the wheel ... cut in pieces ... reduced to ashes ... My soul is Thine ... Yes! Thy Word is my solemn assurance of it. My soul belongs to Thee! It shall abide for ever with Thee ... Amen! ... Oh, God, help me ... Amen!"

Thus, with strong wrestlings, Luther prayed. What a solemn moment! As we listen we feel as though we were nearing the precincts of the eternal throne and walking on holy ground. And did he plead and call in vain? Ah, no. Only that he might feel, and prove the better, God's own great strength and power, had he been allowed to feel his own great weakness. "When we are weak then are we strong," says Paul. And so Luther found it, for as he prayed the veil of darkness around his soul seemed rent. A light broke in upon him, and as he rose from his knees he felt, by the calm now reigning in his soul, that he had already received an answer to his cries.

At four o'clock the grand marshal and the herald presented themselves, and again, through crowded streets, conducted the Reformer to the town hall. But for hour after hour Luther was kept standing in the outer court, amid the hum and clamour of the multitude. Although this delay was well fitted to exhaust him, and to mentally detract and ruffle him, his tranquility never for a moment forsook him. Alone, in a sanctuary that the multitudes around him knew not of, he communed with his Lord. At last when night was falling and torches were being kindled, Luther was admitted into the hall. With perfect composure, and with an air of dignity, Luther stood before the Emperor, and with a calm steadfast eye gazed around at the assembled princes. Then the chancellor of the Bishop of Tr�ams, Dr. Eck, rose and demanded his answer.

In a full, firm, but modest tone Luther began his reply. The discourse occupied in all two hours, and as he proceeded with his eloquent and fervid discourse, "to their amazement," says Wylie, "the princes found that a change had somehow come over the scene. Luther no longer stood at their bar, they had come suddenly to stand at his. The man who, two hours before, had seemed to them the accused was now transformed into the judge � a righteous and awful judge � who, unawed by the crowns they wore, and the armies they commanded, was entreating, admonishing, and reproving them with a severe but wholesome fidelity, and thundering forth their doom, should they prove disobedient, with a solemnity and authority before which they trembled.

At the conclusion of this wonderful address, Dr. Eck again rose, and in peevish tones, and with a fretted air, said to Luther: "You have not answered the question put to you. We demand a direct and precise answer. Will you, or will you not retract?"

Calmly Luther replied: "Since your most Serene Majesty and your High Mightiness require from me a direct and precise answer, I will give you one, and it is this: I cannot submit my faith either to the Pope or to the councils, because it is clear as day they have frequently erred and contradicted each other. Unless, therefore, I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture so that conscience shall bind me to make acknowledgments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything contrary to conscience." And then, looking round on the assembly, he said, "Here I stand; I can do no other. May God help me, Amen."

As Luther ended his discourse in words which, in their courage and grandeur, are among the sublimest in history, a thrill, which after three centuries, communicates itself to us, passed through the august assembly, and a murmur of applause burst out in the Diet. Not, however, among its Papal partisans; they were silent in dismay. Well they knew that the monk's decisive "No," which had fallen like a thunder-clap amongst them, would sound forth from out that hall, and reverberate throughout the world, arousing christians everywhere to break the chains that had so long held their spirits captive, and to stand forth in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free. Rome had lost the battle, they knew it mattered not what they might do with Luther now. The fatal word had been spoken, the monk was the victor, to place him at the stake would only be to enhance his glory.

Filled with mortification, they bade Luther withdraw for a time, and during his absence the Diet deliberated. Could nothing be done? They saw a crisis had arisen, but what to do to meet it they could not tell. Again they would call him before them, and give him another opportunity of retracting. So he was called in and placed in front of the Emperor's throne, and asked to pronounce over again, now the third time, his "Yes" or "No." With simple dignity, his answer came �

"I have no other to give than that which I have already given."

"In the calmness of his voice," says the historian Wylie, "in the steadfastness of his eye, and in the lion-like lines of his rugged German face," the assembly read the stern indomitable resolve of his soul. The "No," could not be recalled. The die had been cast irrevocably.

"The Diet will meet again to-morrow, to hear the Emperor's decision," said Chancellor Eck, dismissing the members for the night.

Late as it was, crowds still lingered around, anxious to know what the end would be. "See, see," they cried, as Luther was led out between two Imperial officers, "there he is, in charge of the guard; are they taking you to prison?"

"No," replied Luther, "they are taking me to my hotel." So quietly they dispersed, and Worms settled down into silence.

When Luther reached his lodgings, faint and weary after his long mental exertions, a servant entered, bearing a silver jug filled with Eimberk beer.

"My master," said the bearer, presenting it to the doctor, "invites you to refresh yourself with this draught."

"Who is the prince," said Luther, "who so generously remembers me?" It was the aged Duke Eric of Brunswick, one of the Papal members of the Diet.

Raising the vessel to his lips, Luther took a long draught, and then putting it down said, "As this day Duke Eric has remembered me, so may the Lord Jesus Christ remember him in the hour of his last struggle." Not long after, when the Duke lay dying, he whispered to some one near, "Read to me from the Bible." Opening the book his young page read, "Whosoever shall give you a cup of cold water to drink in my name, because ye belong to me, verily, I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward." And the Duke remembered Luther's words, and so he in his turn was refreshed, when heart and strength were failing, with a draught from the Well of Life,

But we must pass on more hurriedly to tell of Luther's departure from Worms, for in spite of their earnest wishes to the contrary, the Papal party dare not but let him depart peacefully. Well they knew that from the most distant cities men were watching, with their hands on their swords, to see what would happen to Luther, and to have violated his safe conduct, as they had done that of the martyr Huss, would have been but the signal for civil war throughout Germany.

So on the morning of the 26th of April, Luther was allowed to depart, but scarcely had he gone, ere the Emperor fulminated his edict against him, placing him outside the pale of the law, and commanding all men, whenever the term of the safe conduct had expired, to withhold from him food and drink, succour and shelter, to apprehend him, and send him bound to the Emperor.

Meanwhile the Reformer was drawing near to his journey's end, the pines were getting fewer, and the hills were sinking into the plain. Very grateful to him after the stir and grandeur of Worms were the silent glades of the peaceful hamlets. He had reached a lonely spot near the Castle of Altenstein, when a troop of horsemen, wearing masks and completely armed, rushed suddenly upon him; one of them seized Luther, while others raised him to a saddle, and grasping his horse's reign plunged quickly with him into the forest of Thuringia. All day long the horsemen wandered hither and thither until the night began to fall, and then they began to ascend a mountain. A little before midnight they came under the walls of a castle that crowned its summit. Here, passing over the drawbridge, the cavalcade passed in, and the captive was led into an apartment where he was told he must make a sojourn of unknown length; he must lay aside his monk's dress, and attire himself in the costume of a knight, and be known only by the name of Knight George.

Not until the morning broke did the Reformer know where he was. As the first beams of the morning began to shoot their golden shafts through the forest glades, Luther looked from his casement, and lo! around him lay the well-known scenes that adjoin Eisnach. Further away were the plains round Mora, and beyond these still further away rose the vast circle of hills that sweep along the horizon. Then with joyful heart Luther knew that he was in the hands of friends, and in the castle of the Wartberg. Yes, God had in this wonderful way allowed Luther to be snatched away and carried off as by a whirlwind, none knew whither, from all the danger that was closing in around him. And here, in the peaceful silence of the Wartberg, we must leave him; leave him to learn the lessons that God had to teach him, and for which He had brought him hither, and to begin and end his great work � the translation of the Bible.

Ulric Zwingle.

In the south-east of Switzerland is the long and narrow valley of the Tockenburg. Here, in a quaint little cottage standing on a green meadow, its walls formed of the stems of trees, its roof weighed down with stones to protect it from the mountain gusts, and with a limpid stream flowing before it, was born about three hundred years ago, Ulric Zwingle. His father, Huldric Zwingle, was greatly respected by his neighbours for his upright character as well as for his office, for he was the bailiff of the parish. He was a shepherd, and his summers were passed in company with his sons on the mountains tending his sheep.

Day by day as the verdure mounted higher on the mountain sides, the shepherds with their flocks continued to ascend. As the long days of midsummer came, the herds would browse on the very skirts of the eternal snows, where a luxuriant herbage was nourished by the burning July sun, and the waters of the melting ice.

When the long night and the fading pasturage told them the winter was drawing nigh, they would descend by the same stages as they had mounted, and arrive at their home by the time the autumn winds were beginning to wail through the valleys. In such high-lying localities as the Tockenburg, little out-door work can be done as long as the winter, so wild and dreary, holds its reign on the mountain tops, and darkens the valleys with mists and tempests. Then the peasants, assembling by turns at each other's hearths, beguiled the long evenings with songs and musical instruments, or by brave tales of adventurous exploits. Many a story would be told of shepherds climbing the precipice to rescue some silly sheep which had strayed from the fold, or braving the furious tempest to save the life of a comrade lost in the snow.

Often, while the glare of the blazing firwood lit the room with its crimson glare, would young Ulric listen with kindling eye to such tales of valour, or to others and still more daring deeds, performed on the field of battle, where their fathers were wont to meet the spearmen of Austria, or the steel-clad warriors of Gaul.

Thus was the spirit of valour kept alive in the boy, and his brave, lofty, liberty-loving nature strengthened from year to year.

But in that little cottage was another who was destined to take a part in the training of the future Reformer, and this was the boy's grandmother. Often would she call him to her, and making him sit beside her, would tell him of heroes of a far loftier type than those who had shed their blood for their country. She would tell him of those mighty men of valour taken by God from the plough, the sheep-fold, or the vineyard, who drove back the enemies of the Most High with great slaughter. She would tell him of those grand patriarchal shepherds of old � Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob � who fed their flocks on the hills of Palestine of old, with whom the Lord God deigned to converse. Or she would take him to the cradle of Bethlehem, to the cross of Calvary, or to the open sepulchre from whence the glorious Redeemer had walked forth unharmed from the darkness of the tomb. Then she would tell him of the first missionaries hurrying away to tell the great news of the Gospel, of their persecution, of their fortitude under terrible trials, and often of their cruel death. Thus, day by day, was the young Zwingle trained for his future great task.

Doubtless the grand aspects of nature around him contributed their share in the formation of his character. It could not be but that the sight of the dashing cataract, and the towering mountain peaks, the sound of the torrents' roar, and the echoing voice of the mighty thunder helped to elevate his soul, and fill it with sublime awe.

With delight his father marked the amiable disposition and the truthful character of his son, for very early the fruits of the Spirit were manifested in him.

He saw, too, in him, manifestations of a lively genius, and soon perceived that he was fitted by nature for a higher occupation than that of tending sheep. When Ulric was eight years old it was found necessary to provide him with better instruction than could be found in his native valley. His father resolved to send him to his uncle, the Dean of Wesen, and place him under his superintendence.

And so one day the father and son climbed the green summits of the Ammon: and from these heights, for the first time, young Ulric caught his first glimpse of the world, lying around his native valley of Tockenburg.

The Dean loved the boy as though he had been his own. He sent him to the public school, but very soon the quick genius of the boy had enabled him to take in the slender stock of knowledge which the teacher had to impart, and it became necessary to send him to another school. His father and uncle decided to send him to Basle.

And now Ulric left behind him the white peaks of the mountains, and passed on to the fertile district of the Rhine.

Young Zwingle was very fortunate in regard to the master under whose care he was placed at Basle. He was a man of gentle temper and a loving heart; under his care his pupils made great progress, and very soon Zwingle distanced his schoolmates and stood abreast of his teacher. Again it became necessary to change his school, and now it was determined to send him to the most distinguished school at that time in Switzerland, that of Berne; and now, bidding adieu to the carpet-like meadows and gentle hills of Basle, Zwingle recrossed the Jura and stood once more in sight of the mighty peaks of the Shrikhorn and the Eijer, and, towering above all, the pearly summits of the Jung Frau.

Lupullus, the master under whose care Zwingle was placed at Berne, was accomplished beyond the measure of his day. He had travelled over Italy, Greece, and Syria, and had mastered the long-forgotten tongues of these celebrated countries. And while feasting his eyes upon their exquisite scenery, he had drank in the spirit of the Roman and Greek poets and orators, and so was well able to communicate the fervour of ancient liberty and philosophy to his pupils.

The genius of Zwingle rapidly expanded under such a master, and it was no wonder that in such sympathetic company, and with nature around him in its sublimest form, that his poetic vein was developed, and his style became marked for its classical and chastened beauty. He cultivated, too, his musical talents; and often, when weary with his intellectual pursuits, he would take his lute and soothe his tired mind with the beautiful airs of his native land, or wandering out along the banks of the Rhine, or climbing the mountains of the Black Forest, would awake the echoes with his tuneful horn. His frank, joyous, open nature soon drew around him a large circle of friends, among whom was Leo Juda, the most loved of all. He shared Zwingle's two master passions � the love of truth and the love of music, � and when the hours of labour were fulfilled, they would mingle the sounds of their instruments and voices in soul-stirring harmonies.

A covenant of friendship was formed between them that lasted till death.

It was by this loved friend that Zwingle was led to the feet of Wittembach, � one who was destined to exert no small influence over his pupil's future life.

Thomas Wittembach was a native of Bienne, in Switzerland, and a disciple of Reuchlin, the famous Hebraist. But he had a higher wisdom than any he could glean from man, for he had drank deeply at the fountains of divine knowledge. From his lips Zwingle first heard and received the wondrous and (to him) astounding doctrine, that "The death of Christ is the only ransom for our souls."

It was not long after this that the door was opened which ushered him into the arena of his great labours. At this juncture, the Pastor of Glarus died, and the people of Glarus, who were mostly shepherds, having heard of the repute of the son of their neighbour, the Bailiff of Wildhaus, sent an invitation to Zwingle to become their pastor. He accepted the invitation, was ordained at Constance, and arrived at Glarus to begin his work.

This took place in the year 1506, Zwingle being then in his twenty-second year.

"He became a priest," says Myconius, "and devoted himself with his whole soul to the search after divine truth, for he was well aware how much he must know to whom the flock of Christ is entrusted."

But yet, at this time, he was a more ardent student of the ancient classics than of the Scriptures, and it was now that he founded a Latin school at Glarus. The youth of the best families of his parish were sent to him, and were won over by him to the cause of letters and noble aims; and soon, in place of the gross licentiousness of manner that had � united with a fiery martial spirit � distinguished the inhabitants of Glarus, they became noted for unwonted refinement of style.

But now a pause came in his classical studies, for the men of Glarus with their cardinal-bishop at their head, marched out by order of their war-like Pope, Julius II., to encounter the French on the plains of Italy, and fight for "The Church." Ulric Zwingle was compelled to accompany them. And now it was that a ray of light found its way into his mind, and his eyes began to open to the abominations of the Papal system which, with its wars and intrigues, was bringing such misery and beggary upon his native land. Could such a system be of God?

Turning from the classic writers, whom he had so enthusiastically admired, but who were so powerless to help him now, the young priest placed himself before the Word of God, to see if he could discover there, God's mind upon the matter.

This study of the Word had a blessed effect upon Zwingle. From the gloomy wilderness of scholastic philosophy, with all its barrenness and confusion, he turned with delight to the smiling fertile fields of Scripture, and there found food for his soul.

"The Scriptures," said he in a burst of joy, "come from God, not from man, and even that God which enlightens will give thee to understand that the speech comes from God. The Word of God cannot fail; it is bright, it teaches itself, it discloses itself, it illumines the soul with all salvation and grace, comforts it in God, humbles it, so that it loses and even forfeits itself, and embraces God in itself."

And thus, like our own Wycliffe, Zwingle placed himself like a little child before the Bible, and submitted himself to its teachings; and so, while all was densely dark around him, the light of truth broke upon him direct from heaven.

While he was thus occupied in searching the Scriptures, and communicating its truths to those around him, he was invited (1516) to be preacher in the Convent of Einsiedeln. Its Abbot was a gentleman of rank, who cared nothing for the superstitious usages of the Church, and who in his heart had no affection for the mass, and who had dropped the celebration of it. The Convent of Einsiedeln was beautifully situated. It stood on an eminence close to the lovely town of Zurich. Near by were the noble expanses of water forming the lakes of Zurich and Wallenstadt. Their gently swelling banks were clothed here with smiling vineyards, and there with sombre pine forests. It looked down upon peaceful hamlets, where white villas enlivened the scene, while far away on the horizon the gleaming glaciers blended with the golden clouds.

To this lovely spot Zwingle retired but not to bury himself. In this convent was a shrine, which was the most famous in all Switzerland, for it boasted an image of the Virgin, which had the alleged power of working miracles.

At all seasons of the year parties of pilgrims could be seen toiling up the mountain side, carrying in one hand tapers to be burned in honour of "Our Lady of Einsiedeln," and in the other money to buy the pardons which were sold at her shrine. Deeply moved was Zwingle by the sight, and he saw now why God had brought him hither. With a heart bleeding with pity for them he told them that all in vain had they come this long journey, that they were no nearer God on the mountain-top than in the valley; that they were on no holier ground before the shrine than in their own closets; that they were spending "their money for that which is not bread, and their labour for that which satisfieth not." But Zwingle was not satisfied with reproving them for their superstition. He preached to them the Gospel; he spoke to them of Christ and Him crucified; he told them of the loving tender One, who had died for them, and who was waiting even now with yearning heart to receive them. One who wanted not their fastings, scourgings, and vigils, but who delighted in a "contrite heart." As "cold water" to one who is athirst seemed the preacher's words to many weary souls. Not in vain had been their toilsome journey. Such "good news" as this was well worth coming for and returning with a well of peace in their hearts they published abroad the strange and welcome tidings.

Ere long the well-worn pilgrim track began to be disused, the shrine to which it led forsaken, and so it came about that the chief stronghold of darkness in all Switzerland was converted into a centre of God's own light.

In 1519 Zwingle was chosen as preacher in the Cathedral of Zurich. At this time Zurich was the chief town of the Swiss Confederation, and every word spoken from the pulpit here had double power. Well did Zwingle know this, and he determined with the help of God, that His truth should be sounded out from this place, and resound to all the cantons; and faithfully and boldly did this intrepid man rebuke superstition, and preach the Gospel.

Soon the repute of his wondrous eloquence spread far and wide, and multitudes were drawn to attend his sermons.

Beneath him, crowding every bench, sat men of all ranks and conditions, and as the calm face of the ocean reflects the sky that is hung above it, so did the upturned faces respond to the varied emotions of the fervid preacher. With what delight did he tell out in simple, clear, yet earnest words, the story of a "free salvation" � a gift sent down from God to be received without money and without price! How thrillingly tender grew his tones as with winning words of love, he beseeched men in Christ's stead to be reconciled to God!

What strange, what wondrous tidings were these for the poor priest-ridden Swiss! Bending forward with intense eagerness, the audience drank in his words, and men were heard to say one to the other as they retired from the cathedral, "Glory be to God! This man is a preacher of the truth. He will be our Moses to lead us out of Egyptian darkness."

And so a fountain of new life seemed opened at the heart of Switzerland. Earnest students everywhere were poring over the pages of Scripture, and earnestly calling upon God for light to enable them to understand its meaning. And God heard their prayers: for thousands had their eyes opened to see Christ the Saviour as the all-perfect sacrifice for sin, and in their joy, unable to keep silence, they told out to others around the blessed truth which they had learned.

We have seen in another place how, at this very time, Rome had prepared a great market for the sale of indulgences or pardons for sin. And we have also seen how, while in Germany, she was sending out her hawkers, stamping her indulgence tickets, and fixing the price of sins, God was sending out His evangelists to preach the true Gospel of forgiveness without money and without price. And so we will find that in the same wonderful way God was preparing hearts in Switzerland to resist the tide of evil that was about to sweep over the land.

The sale of indulgences in Switzerland was given into the care of one Barnardin Samson, guardian of the convent at Milan. "He discharged his mission in Helvetia," says Gerdesius, "with not less impudence than Tetzel in Germany." Forcing his way through the snows of the St. Gothard, and descending along the stream of the Reuss, he and his band arrived in the canton of Uri. A few days sufficed to fleece these simple mountaineers, and the greedy troop passed on to Schwitz. As soon as Zwingle heard of their approach he set out to confront them. The result was Samson was obliged to decamp, and from Schwitz he went on to Zug. Here he set up his stage and displayed his wares, while crowds from the little towns on the lake came forth eager to purchase the Pope's pardons.

Samson continued his journey, filling his coffers as he went, until he approached Zurich. And now he heard that Zwingle was thundering against him from his pulpit in the cathedral. Notwithstanding this he pressed on, thinking, doubtless, that he would soon silence the preacher. As he approached, Zwingle waxed the bolder and plainer. "God only can forgive," said the preacher, with a solemnity that awed his hearers, "none on earth can pardon sin. You may buy this man's papers, but be assured you are not absolved. He who sells indulgences is a sorcerer like Simon Magus; a false prophet like Balaam; an ambassador of the king of the bottomless pit, for to these dismal portals rather than to the gates of paradise do indulgences lead."

When Samson reached Zurich he found its gates closed against him. Not in vain had the Gospel of the grace of God been ringing in the ears of the people. And with great thankfulness Zwingle saw Samson ignominiously sent away without selling a single pardon.

Not long after this another terrible visitant appeared in Switzerland, and was used by God to help on His own work. This was no less than the plague, or "Great Death." It broke out in the August of that same year, (1519), and spread from valley to valley with terrible rapidity, inflicting frightful ravages everywhere. What a mockery to the poor dying creatures seemed now the pardons which a few months back they were so eager to purchase! Soon it reached Zurich, and Zwingle, who had gone to the baths of Pfeffers to recruit his exhausted health, hastened back to his flock. Day and night he spent almost all his time at the bedsides of the sick, whispering words of life-giving comfort to many an agonised sinner's heart, and sustaining his brethren in the faith with holy cheer, while the cold waters of death were closing around them. At last he, too, was stricken down, and lay at the very point of death. While he was utterly prostrate, and with all hope of life taken away, he breathed forth this little hymn, so simple, and yet so full of faith and gentle resignation: �

"Lo, at the door

I hear Death's knock!

Shield me, O Lord,

My Strength and Rock.

The hand once nailed

Upon the tree,

Jesus, uplift,

And shelter me.

Willest Thou, then,

Death, conquer me

In my noon-day?

So let it be!

Oh! may I die,

Since I am Thine;

Thy house is made

For faith like mine."

And so we see him at the very point of death firmly trusting in the Gospel he had preached. God brought him to this awful test, and then, in His mercy restored him to health, and sent him forth, chastened, solemnised, and purified, to preach again this Gospel which he had found enough to sustain his own soul at the very portals of the grave.

It was a solemn moment when Zwingle and the citizens of Zurich again assembled at the Cathedral. They were only just emerging from under the awful shadow of the Great Death." Their beloved pastor had been given back to them from the very portals of the grave; most of them were mourning the absence of some dear one who had left a vacant chair at their fireside, and solemn deathbed scenes were still fresh before their minds. In the presence of all this how bright had shone this new gospel, this reformed faith, brought to them by their pastor! Chastened and subdued they listened as they had never listened on any other occasion, to words spoken by Zwingle with an earnestness never heard before. And now the Zurichers needed no argument to convince them that his words were true. They had seen how the old popish religion, with all its pomp and ceremonies, had failed them utterly at the moment of their souls' direct need. What could it do to sustain their souls at the point of death? Nothing. When the awful gloom of its shadow was upon them, lo! its lights had gone out, and they were left in utter darkness.

How different from this had they found the warm life-giving love of the Saviour. A love which, once received, penetrated the whole being, quickening, purifying, comforting, filling the conscience with peace, and the heart with joy.

The Cathedral, although a large building was too small for the crowds that flocked to it, and Zwingle laboured indefatigably to diffuse the life-giving doctrines for which their souls were craving, and God so caused his work to thrive that in 1519, in a letter to Myconius, Zwingle says that "at Zurich upward of 2,000 souls had been so nourished and strengthened by the milk of the truth, that they could now bear stronger food, and anxiously longed for it."

It was impossible that a movement like this could be confined within the walls of Zurich; and so we find that the light diffused from it soon began to radiate the mountain tops of Eastern Switzerland. The precious seeds of truth which were being wafted far and wide, were destined to take root and germinate, and many of the Helvetine cantons were at no distant day released from the debasing yoke of papal tyranny.

With intense interest did Zwingle perceive the rays of divine truth penetrating into his dear native valley of Tockenburg. To many there he was bound by the sweet associations of his youth, and by ties of blood and friendship.

Hearing the villagers were about to assemble to decide whether they should receive the new doctrine or continue in the faith of their fathers, he addressed a letter to them in which he said, "I praise and thank God who has called me to the preaching of His Gospel, that He has led you, who are so dear to my heart, out of the Egyptian darkness of false human doctrines, to the wondrous light of His Word." Then he goes on to earnestly exhort them to add to their profession of the Gospel, the practice of every gospel virtue, and thus bring glory to it and profit to their own souls. "This letter," says Wylie, "decided the victory of Protestantism in the Reformer's native valley. The Council and the community in the same summer, 1524, made known their will to the clergy, "That the Word of God be preached with one accord."

In 1525, Zwingle commenced his work of protesting against monastic establishments. He showed that these institutions were alike contrary to the laws of nature, the affections of the heart, and the precepts of Scripture. "To snore behind the walls of a cloister," said Zwingle in one of his sermons, "is not to worship God. But to visit widows, and orphans, that is to say, the destitute in their afflictions, and keep one's self unspotted from the world, this is to worship God."

"As melts the ice on the summit of the Alps when spring sets in," says Wylie, "so did the monastic asceticism of Zurich give way before the warm breath of evangelism." In June 17, 1523, the Council of Zurich gave permission to the nuns to return to society, and numbers quitted the cloisters for ever. The next year a resolution was passed to reform the monasteries. Fearing that the monks would offer resistance to the dissolution of their orders, the Council wisely decided to take them by surprise. One afternoon the members of the Council, accompanied by delegates from the various guilds, the three city ministers, and followed by the town militia, presented themselves in the Augustine monastery. Summoning the inmates into their presence, they told them that by command of their Council their Order was dissolved. The monks, taken by surprise, and awed by the sight of the armed men, yielded at once and so, without a struggle, the victory was gained.

Soon after this, Zwingle publicly married a lady of great beauty and noble character, Anna Reinhard, and this marked the completion of another stage in the Swiss Reformation, for by so doing he set at nought the unscriptural law forbidding ministers to marry. Many others took advantage of the change in the law as to marriage, among others, Leo Juda, Zwingle's friend.

And thus step by step, and very peacefully, the movement advanced.

Space will not allow us to follow Zwingle much further, or we could tell how he attacked the worshipping of saints and images, and how the time came when all the useless images were removed from their churches, and men came together to worship God without any of these idolatrous adjuncts. Still further than this did God's truth, through His servant Zwingle, advance. This led to the doing away of the popish mass, and to the people partaking of the Lord's Supper, in the simple way laid down in the Scriptures. This was first done on the Thursday of Easter week. The gorgeous altar was replaced by a wooden table covered with a white cloth, on which were placed two wooden plates of bread, and wooden goblets filled with wine. The words in 1 Cor. 11: 20-29 were read, prayers were offered, a hymn was sung, a short address delivered, and then the bread and wine was partaken of by those in communion.

"This celebration of the Lord's Supper," says Christoffel, "was accompanied with blessed results. An altogether new love to God and the brethren sprang up, and the words of Christ received spirit and life. The brotherly love of the first centuries of Christianity returned to the Church with the Gospel." "Peace has her habitation in our town," wrote Zwingle, "no quarrel, no hypocrisy, no envy, no strife. Whence can such union come but from the Lord, and His doctrine, which fills us with the fruits of peace and piety."

It would have been well if Zwingle had been content to serve his Lord by preaching the true Gospel and denouncing the errors of the papacy. But, alas, he was not. He forgot, or perhaps never knew, that our citizenship is not an earthly one, and that as a Christian it was no work of his to endeavour to set right that which he found so wrong governmentally. He did not see why the Protestant states should not resist, to the extent of the power which God had given them, the treacherous plots which were being hatched on all sides for the destruction of their faith and liberty. And so the Reformer who ought to have been a son of peace, took up the sword to fight for the maintenance of the truth which God had revealed through his word to him.

Thus it came about that Zwingle died on the battlefield.

On the 9th. of Oct. 1531, the five Cantons who disapproved of the Reformation declared war against Zwingle and his adherents, and on the 10th. the Zurichers received the alarming intelligence that a large army were marching towards them. About 700 men went out to meet them, Zwingle going with them as army chaplain. But although they fought we are told, with the bravery of lions, yet they did not succeed. They became entangled in a bog and were surrounded, and nearly all cut to pieces by the infuriated papists.

Although Zwingle was on the battle field he did not use the sword, but restricted himself to his duties as chaplain. While stooping down to whisper words of comfort to a dying man he was struck with a stone upon the head, and fell to the earth. Recovering a little he rose, but a spear dealt him a fatal stab and he lay bleeding to death upon the ground. "What matters it," he was heard to murmur, "they may kill the body but they cannot kill the soul." These were his last words. As he lay on the ground, his hands clasped and his lips moving in prayer, some of the camp followers who were prowling around came upon him. Seeing that he was dying, they said, "Do you wish for a priest to confess yourself?" Zwingle was past speaking, but he shook his head. "At least" they said, "call in your heart upon the mother of God." Again he shook his head. Curious to see who this obstinate heretic could be, one of them raised his head and turned it to the light. "It is Zwingle!" he exclaimed, letting the head fall. Now it happened that an African named Bockinger from Unterwalden, one against whom Zwingle had often had occasion to denounce for holding and teaching error, was near. "Zwingle!" cried he, "is it that vile heretic and traitor Zwingle?" and raising his sword, he struck him on the throat. Yielding to this last blow Zwingle died.

William Farel.

As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, during the dark night that shrouded Europe for so many centuries, a few lights appeared at intervals, raised up of God, to minister a little solace to the few faithful ones who wearily waited for the dawn. We have seen how Wickliffe, in the middle of the fourteenth century, appeared in England, and endeavoured, by spreading divine truth, to liberate his groaning brethren from the spiritual bondage of iniquitous Rome. We have seen, too, how, nearly half a century later, Huss and Jerome arose to do a similar work in Bohemia. A century rolled away, and then with the appearance of Luther came the partial emancipation of the church in many countries from the thraldom of popery.

In the account we are about to give of God's honoured and devoted servant, William Farel, we must turn our gaze for a short space to another scene of action. A new nationality has come to mingle in the great drama of the Reformation. France held, in the opening of the sixteenth century, a very foremost place among Christian countries. On its south and south-east was Switzerland, on its east was Germany, and on the north, parted only by a silver streak of sea, was England. At all these gates, as it were, the Reformation was waiting for admission. In the year 1510, we find the throne of France occupied by Louis XII. He had just assembled a parliament at Tours to resolve for him the question as to the lawfulness of going to war with the Pope � one who violated treaties, and sustained his injustice by levying soldiers and fighting battles. The answer of that assembly marked the moral decadence of the Papacy. "It is lawful not only for the king to act defensively, but offensively against such a man." Thus fortified by the advice of his parliament, Louis commanded his armies to march against the Pope. This is mentioned here as a symptom of the near approach of the new times.

"The river," says one, "which waters great kingdoms and bears on its bosom the commerce of many nations, may be traced up to some solitary fountain among the far-off hills. So was it with that river of the water of Life that was now to go forth to refresh France." It had its rise in a single soul. In the year 1510, a stranger visiting Paris would hardly have failed to mark an old man, small in stature and simple in manners, going the round of all the churches, and prostrating himself devoutly before the images and shrines. This same old man, steeped as he was at this time in darkness and superstition, was destined to be, on a small scale, to the realm of France what Wickliffe had been to England. His name was Jacques Lefevre. He was born at Etaples, a village of Picardy, and although now verging on seventy, was hale and hearty.

Wonderfully in this old man was the promise fulfilled, "At evening time it shall be light," for it pleased the Lord that he should not depart, until the eclipse of superstition had wholly passed from his soul.

As he was, as far as we know, the first man to emerge from the darkness of his native land, and as he was the instrument in God's hand for the conversion of the subject of our narrative, we think he is worthy of some share of our attention; we will describe him, then, in a few words. Lefevre was naturally endowed with a capacious intellect. There was scarcely a field of study open in those ages which he had not entered, and made in them great proficiency. His thirst for knowledge had led him to visit Asia and Africa, there to view all that the fifteenth century had to show. Returning to Paris he was, Erasmus tells us, the first luminary in the constellation of lights that at that time adorned the Theological Hall of the great Paris University. Yet with all his learning he was so meek, so amiable, so candid, so full of loving-kindness that it was impossible to know him and not to love him.

But even this man had his enemies, and they tried to insinuate that the man who had visited so many countries could hardly have escaped some taint of heresy. So they began watching him, but could find no fault with him; never was he absent from mass, and none remained so long on his knees before the saints as Lefevre. Nay, so superstitious was he, that this man, the most distinguished professor of the Sorbonne, might often be seen decking the statue of Mary.

Lefevre at this time formed the idea of collecting and rewriting the lives of the saints, and this, through God's mercy, was the means used to open his eyes to the truth.

When he had already made some progress, it struck him that he might find in the Bible materials that would be useful in his work. "Unwittingly," says Wylie, "he opened the portals of a new world. Saints of another sort than those that had till that moment engaged his attention, now stood before him � the virtue of the real saints dimmed in his eyes the glories of the legendary ones. The pen dropped from his hand and he could proceed no further."

As he continued to search the Word of God, Lefevre really found that the Church of the Bible was a totally different thing from the Church of Rome; the wondrous plan of salvation, the plan of justification by faith alone, came to him like a sudden revelation. He says in one of his works which is still extant, "It is God who gives us, by faith, that righteousness which by grace alone justifies to eternal life."

These words of Lefevre, surely Spirit-born, assure us that the dawn had broken on poor benighted France. It was a single ray, perhaps, but it had come direct from heaven, and was the harbinger of the flood of glorious light that was about to burst forth.

As the light of the truth of God which had entered Lefevre's soul banished for ever from his mind the gloom of monasticism, so he knew well that this light had not been given him to hide under a bushel; and he felt that at once he must, by God's grace, communicate it to his pupils around him.

Now of all places the Sorbonne was the most dangerous in which to proclaim a new doctrine. Centuries had rolled away, and none but the school-men had spoken there; and daring indeed would be the man who could proclaim in this, the citadel of scholasticism, a doctrine which if received would explode that which had been heard with reverence for ages.

Lefevre well knew the risks to which he was exposing himself; nevertheless, he went on to spread around the joyful tidings of salvation by grace. As may well be supposed, a great commotion was raised around the chair from whence proceeded sounds so new and strange. With varied feeling did the pupils of the venerable man listen to the new teaching. The faces of some were lighted up with joy, and they looked like men to whose eyes some glorious vista had suddenly opened, or as though they had unexpectedly discovered something for which they had long but vainly sought. On the faces of others, astonishment and anger were plainly written; and their knitted brows and flashing eyes plainly bespoke the anger of their souls.

The agitation in the class-room soon communicated itself to the university, and on every side were heard reasonings and objections. Some were frivolous, some were filled with blind prejudice and hatred of the doctrine; but some were honest, and in real earnest, and these Lefevre made it his business to answer, showing them that his doctrine did not give licence to sin, and that it was not new, but as old as the Bible. Mutterings of the distant storm were heard, but it had not burst; and meanwhile Lefevre, within whose soul the light burnt clearer day by day, went quietly on with his work.

It is well to mark that these events took place in 1512. Not until five years after this had the name of Luther been heard of in France: the monk of Wittemberg had not yet nailed his Theses to the doors of the Schlosskirk.

From this we see most manifestly that the Reformation, springing up at this time in France, did not come from Germany. Before Luther's hammer, as one has said, was heard ringing out the knell of the old times in Wittemberg, Lefevre was proclaiming beneath the vaulted roof of the Sorbonne the advent of a new and brighter age. The Word of God, like God Himself, is light; and from that source alone came the welcome day, which after a long dark night broke upon the nations in the morning of the sixteenth century.

Among the crowd of pupils who gathered around the chair of the aged Lefevre, there was one who is now especially to claim our attention. Between this scholar and the master existed an attachment of no ordinary kind. None of all the crowd so hung upon his lips as did this youth; nor was their one on whom the eyes of that master rested with so kindly a light.

This youth was William Farel. He was born among the Alps of Dauphine, at Gap near Grenoble, in the year 1489.

His parents, measured by the standard of that age, were eminently pious. Every morning as the sun kindled into glory the white mountains around his dwelling, the family were assembled to count their beads; and as evening descended, crimsoning and then paling the beautiful Alps, the customary hymn ever ascended to the Virgin.

As Farel himself tells us, his parents believed all that the priests told them, and he in his turn believed everything that his parents told him. Until the age of twenty he grew up with all the grandeur of nature around him, but with the darkness of superstition in his soul. A historian speaking truthfully of him says, "It would have been as hard for him to believe at this time that Rome, with her pope, and her holy priests, with her rites and ceremonies, were the mere creation of superstition, as to believe that the great mountains around him, with their snows and their pine forests, were a mere illusion, a painting on the sky, which but mocked the senses, and would one day dissolve like an unsubstantial, though gorgeous exhalation. 'I would gnash my teeth, like a furious wolf,' said he, speaking of his blind devotion to Rome at this period of his life, 'when I heard anyone speaking against the Pope.'"

It was his father's desire that he should devote himself to arms, but young Farel longed to be a scholar. Shut up though he was in the seclusion of his native valley, the fame of the Sorbonne had reached him, and he longed to drink his fill at this renowned well of learning. In 1510 he presented himself at the gates of the university, and was enrolled among its students.

It was here that young Farel became acquainted with Lefevre, and before long they were bound together in the bonds of closest friendship. Outwardly there were few points, one would have thought, to bring them together. One was old, the other young; one deeply learned, the other a mere tyro in knowledge; one enthusiastic, the other shrinking and timid; but beneath these external differences there beat two kindred souls. Both alike were noble, unselfish, and devout; and although living in an age rife with scepticism, their devotion was ardent and sincere. Often might the aged master and the young disciple be seen hand in hand visiting the shrines, and kneeling together before the same images.

But the time came when the spiritual dawn broke upon the soul of Lefevre and he now began to let fall at times words that told of the new light he had gleaned from the Bible.

"Salvation is of grace," would he say to his pupils, "the innocent One is condemned, and the criminal is acquitted; it is the cross of Christ alone that openeth the gates of heaven, and shutteth the gates of hell." With consternation Farel listened to these words. What did they mean? to what would they lead? If this were true, what use then were his visits to saints, his kneeling at altars? Had his prayers been uttered to the air? All the teachings of his youth, the sanctities of home, the beliefs learned at his parents' feet, rose up before his mind and appeared to frown upon him. Tossed with doubt and uncertainty, he longed to be back in his quiet home, where such thoughts might never torture him more. A crisis had come in the history of Farel; he must either press forward into the light with his beloved master, and become what the world called a heretic, or plunge back again into deeper darkness � but he felt he could never be the same as before.

Peace had left him; "the sorrows of death" and "the pains of hell" had taken hold of him and he felt he could not save himself. It was just when he was near despair that the words of Lefevre were spoken again in his hearing. "The cross of Christ alone opens the gates of heaven." "This is the only salvation for me," said Farel, "if I am to be saved it must be of grace, without money and without price." And so he immediately pressed into the portals that were opened to him by the blood of Jesus. The tempest was at an end, and he was now in a quiet haven. "All things," he tells us, "appear to me in a new light, Scripture is cleared up. Instead of the murderous heart of a ravening wolf," he says, "I came back quietly, like a meek and harmless lamb, having my heart entirely drawn from the pope, and given to Jesus Christ."

With soul at peace within, and with heart welling over with joy, Farel, now fully emancipated from the yoke of the Pope, went forth with his Bible in his hand to preach in the temples. Like Paul before him, he allowed all the zeal of his nature to be used for the God who had saved him; and he was now as bold and uncompromising in his advocacy of the Gospel, as before he had been in behalf of popery.

"Young and resolute," says Felice, "he caused the public places to resound with his voice of thunder."

But William Farel was not content with the mere preaching of the Gospel: he was studying the Word deeply for himself. There he found out how Christians in a great measure had wandered from the clear light in which God had placed them, at the time of the early formation of the Church, and how, by allowing themselves to become mixed up with the world, they had passed into such darkness that now they scarcely knew the difference between good and evil. "Grievous wolves," said the Apostle "shall come in amongst you, not sparing the flock." How true these words were, was manifest to Farel as he cast his eyes around. God's beautiful flock of sheep! How was it scattered! Instead of feeding in the green pastures and beside the still waters of God's own Truth, they were wandering away on the dark and dreary mountains of ignorance and superstition, being fleeced by the hand of cruel hirelings.

His heart yearned over those poor deceived ones; deceived by those, too, who professed to be their teachers sent from God. "Listen" he cried in his impassioned manner, as he stood amongst them, St Paul spake these words: Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.' This sentence is worthy to be written in all our hearts, being in truth spoken by God Himself, through the mouth of the holy Apostle. And this good personage was thus led to speak on account of the evil ways of heretics, who dared to preach what they could not prove by the holy Scriptures, who dared to set up their own reasons and opinions in the face of the fact that the things they taught were not to be found in the Scriptures at all. And in truth, all the ruin and down fall of men has always come from the same source � namely, that they persisted in adding to, or taking from the Word of God.

"You see that in the time of the holy Apostles, these teachers were not contented with the grace and truth which were fully and plentifully preached by Paul. They began to hinder the truth, and to hinder God's blessing � not by disapproving of the preaching of Jesus Christ, they approved of it, in fact, but they persisted in adding to that which God had commanded. They added to it those things which God had never commanded to believers in Jesus, but to the nation of Israel. It is true, these false teachers had some show of having the right on their side, because it was a fact that God did speak to Moses, and what Moses commanded was really by the order of God, and the Apostles themselves had observed those ceremonies. But the holy Apostle Paul, and God who spoke by His mouth, would give no ear to such excuses; he would not admit that Moses, to whom the Gentiles had never been given in charge, was to be ranked with Jesus Christ, nor that Moses was to be added on to Christ to give salvation and life. And not only does Paul say that the ordinances of Moses were unnecessary for believers; he goes much further, and says on the contrary, that all who teach such things are to be detested, and held as accursed � that they are miserable troublers of the church, and that any such ought to be entirely disowned; even should such a teacher prove to be an angel from heaven � such an angel should be held as accursed by God; for nothing is to be added, nothing to be diminished from that which God has said. His holy and perfect Word is to be kept pure and entire.

"The Apostle Paul says, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, that what he preached was to be proved by the Scriptures, and he says also, that all Scripture is written by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.

"If all could receive this pure truth, and give to Christ that honour which belongs to Him, and if the old fathers had, in every single matter, kept to that rule, there would have been no need now to write against evil doctrine, and to have such trouble to weed out of the hearts of men the things which have taken such deep root in them. On the contrary, all that is not contained in the holy Scriptures, all that has no foundation there, would have been held in abhorrence; and instead of writing as they did, with such affection, about the sign of the cross, and such like things, the old fathers would have opposed them, as not contained in the Bible; they would have firmly resisted every thing of the sort "......" We ought not to be," he went on to say, "as reeds shaken by the wind, but firmly established in Christ, knowing for certain that we have His Word for every thing, and thus the gates of hell shall never prevail against us.

"This is what God requires of all Christians, and admits nothing less in any who are members of the Body of Christ, sheep of the Good Shepherd. And he who does not know what to believe, nor whom he is to believe, who hears no difference between the voice of Jesus and other voices, who cannot distinguish between the voice of the Shepherd and the voice of the stranger, he does not belong to Jesus Christ as yet, he is not in Christ at all. It is no use to say, "I have always been used to believe and teach so and so," it is no use to say, "Our pastors and teachers teach us this and that," for custom without truth is useless. God never has approved, and never will approve of any thing but the truth, and He will judge us by that. The pastor and teacher must keep to the Word of God only, and feed the flock with that, otherwise he is a blind leader of the blind, and altogether will fall into the ditch.

"And now that things are come to this, that every thing is poison, except that heavenly bread, the Word of God, it is quite certain that whosoever attempts to feed upon other food than that, will be poisoned and die. The whole of popery falls at once, the moment we admit that the Word of God alone is the rule to guide us. Where then, is the authority for the mass, and such like services? Where is the authority for the consecration of altars and of churches? Where is the authority for using the sign of the cross? God has not commanded any of these things. And if we once admit that it is lawful for a man in any one thing, to command and order that which God has not commanded, where are we to stop? How are we to have any rule, if once we step beyond the plain Word of God? O that it might please God in His grace to open the eyes of men, that they may seek no longer to make excuses for any thing which is not to be found in the holy Scriptures; that they might believe, do, hold, and follow nothing that is not found there."

You may be sure that by such plain speaking as this, Farel made bitter enemies of the doctors and priests of the Sorbonne; yet there were some, who, taking his advice, went to the Scripture and found there a loving Saviour, and He who could save them without the help of saints, penances or fastings. Among these was Princess Margaret of Valois. She was the beloved sister of the King, Francis I of France, a woman of a sweet and gentle disposition. Another who received the truth was Bri�onnet Bishop of Meaux.

Great hopes were raised in the hearts of Lefevre and Farel by the conversion of these so-called great ones of the earth. All Paris, they hoped, would soon be turned to the truth. But not many mighty, not many noble, are called. And after the Gospel had been proclaimed for two years in Paris, the University after a long consultation on the subject of the Reformation, decreed that all Luther's books should be publicly burned in the streets. And so the great city refused to receive Christ, preferring rather to be subject to the Pope.

With a sad heart William Farel turned his steps from the city where they refused to hear the sweet sounds of a free salvation, and we next find him at Meaux, preaching everywhere, in the streets, the market places or wherever a place could be found.

The people crowded to hear him, and as the thirsty earth gladly drinks in the refreshing shower, so did many hearts drink in the life-giving words.

Come with me to the edge of this crowd, consisting chiefly of labouring people. They have just left for a little space their toilsome labours in the fields, the workshops and vineyards. Old age is there and youth, mothers with their babies in their arms, fathers with care worn brows, and backs bent with toil and labour. See how one and all listen with eager attention, while as the words of the preacher tell home, great drops fall from the eyes down many a rugged grief worn cheek.

Listen to his words. "What, then, are those treasures of the goodness of God, which are given to us in the death of Jesus Christ? Firstly, if we diligently consider what the death of Jesus was, we shall there see in truth how all the treasures of goodness and the grace of God our Father are magnified, and glorified, and exalted in that act of mercy and love. Is not that sight an invitation to wretched sinners to come to Him, who has so loved them, that he did not spare His only Son, but delivered Him up for us all. Does it not assure us that sinners are welcome to the Son of God, who so loved them that He gave his life, His body, and His blood, to be a perfect sacrifice, a complete ransom, for all who believe in Him; for he it is, Who calls to all those who labour and are heavy laden, saying He will give them rest. He it is Who spoke in His love to the wretched thief, giving him a place in heaven, saying to him, Verily I say unto thee this day shall thou be with me in Paradise. He it is, Who so loved and pitied His enemies, who hated Him unto death, that He prayed, Father forgive them for they know not what they do. And lastly, if we behold diligently, that death of Christ, there we see how the vail of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and why? Because that hidden place into which none might enter, was now revealed, and thrown open by the death of Jesus, so that all who believe have access and free entrance there � may go in boldly, in full assurance of faith � may come before the throne of grace, and find mercy and grace to help in every time of need. For He who is the Son of God, the power and wisdom of God, He who is God Himself, so humbled Himself as to die for us. He the holy and the righteous one, for the ungodly and for sinners offering up Himself that we might be made pure and clean. And it is the will of the Father, that those whom He thus saves by the precious gift of His Son, should be certain of their salvation and life, and should know that they are completely washed and cleansed from all their sins. And the Father, for the love of Himself, and not for the love of us, nor of our doings, our deservings, and our righteousness's (which are simply abominations � ) � He, the Father, saves us, and gives us eternal life. Yes, it is for the love of Himself, that His counsels may stand, to quicken and to serve those whom he has ordained to life, without any respect to persons. He sees nothing to cause His love in the sinner whom he saves � nothing in his works, nor his race, nor in his country, nor in any thing belonging to him. He pardons all his sins and transgressions on account of the work of His beloved Son. He gives the precious gift of His Son to the wretched prisoner of the devil, of sin, of hell, and of damnation. He gives him His Son because of his wicked lost condition; a sinner born in sin, and the child of wrath � a sinner in whom sin and rebellion against God live and reign. The gracious God, the Father of mercy, takes such as this to make him His child of adoption, to be His heir, joints-heir with Christ! He makes him a new creature."

In words such as these, Farel set forth with wonderful power the blessed truth of a full, free, and present salvation for all those who will receive it, through the saving blood of a crucified Saviour.

Strange, blessed news, for the poor priest-ridden inhabitants of Meaux, and numbers gladly opened their hearts to the sweet tidings of divine grace and love; and before long a little meeting was formed, and often when the toils of the day were over, these dear saved souls came together that they might search the Scriptures, converse of the wondrous, blessed liberty into which they had been brought, and sing and pray one with the other. Meek in spirit, loving in heart, and holy in life, they presented a blessed testimony to all around them.

But not long did these happy days last; bitter persecutions were commenced against them, Bri�onnet who had done so much for the spread of the Truth, recanted in the face of the stake, and the little flock had the unspeakable honour of furnishing martyrs, "whose blazing stakes," as an eloquent writer has said, "were to shine like beacons in the darkness of France, and afford glorious proof to their countrymen that a power had entered the world which, braving the terror of scaffolds and surmounting the force of armies, would finally triumph over all opposition."

But we must leave this devoted little company, to follow the footsteps of Farel, who, now that he was chased from France, turned his gaze towards Switzerland. He arrived there in 1526, took up his abode in Aigle, and there commenced his Gospel campaign, being determined to conquer to Christ, with God's help, the brave and hardy people dwelling amid the glaciers of the eternal mountains, as well as those who sunned themselves in the happy valleys and by smiling lakes.

Darkness, almost like that of Egypt, over-hung this place, but Farel carried with him a light that was able to dispel it. And how do you think he began? By brilliant sermons and thrilling discourses? No, he knew if he began in that way most probably he would not have been allowed to speak at all, so he took the name of Ursin, and commenced to keep a school. The little children of the village flocked to it, and he began to teach the little ones about Jesus; so tenderly and winningly did he speak, that many of the little ones received the Saviour as their own. Then they in their turn carried home the divine seed to their parents, and thus the blessed truth quietly and assiduously spread until many in the little villages were rejoicing in Christ. Then Farel threw off his disguise and told them who he was.

Great was the fright of the priests at this sudden, metamorphosis of the Schoolmaster, for well they knew who William Farel was. But without any hesitation, he now ascended the pulpits, and with bold look and burning eye, and voice of thunder, and with words rapid and eloquent, stamped with the majesty of truth he ploughed up the consciences of those who listened, and through God's mercy a great work was commenced

Not for long however was it allowed to go on. The cur�s were filled with wrath at this bold intruder who had dared to enter their quiet valley, and shake their ancient beliefs. A clamour was raised against him, and Farel was obliged to retire, thankful that at least, the standard of the cross had been planted, and that he had left behind him men whose eyes had been opened, and who would never again bow the knee to the idols of their fathers.

From this place Farel proceeded to Lausanne, and from thence to Berne. But in each of these places he was repulsed. Now turning northwards he made a short pause at Morat, and here, by the help of God, the victory of the Gospel was complete, and this important town embraced the protestant faith. An unseen but mighty power was with Farel, softening hearts and opening the understandings of men to receive the truth, and encouraged in heart, Farel pressed on hoping to win other cities and cantons to the gospel.

He now crossed the lovely lake and presented himself at Neuchatel. This place was peculiarly given up to popery. It had a great Cathedral with its full compartment of canons, priests, and monks, who, you may be sure gave the poor credulous people the usual store of pomps, dramas, indulgencies, banquetings and scandals.

In the midst of their devotions the people were startled by a man of small stature, red beard, glittering eye, and stentorian voice, who stood up in the market place and announced that he had brought a religion not from Rome, but from the Bible. The shaven monks could not speak for astonishment, but at last, when they had found their voices they cried with one accord, "Let us beat out his brains," "Duck him, duck him." In spite of their clamour, Farel proceeded with his preaching, and many opened their hearts to the glad tidings. Before long the whole city declared for the Reformed faith.

Having sown the seeds of divine truth here, Farel left them to fructify, and departed to evangelize in the mountains and valleys which lay around. The winter came on and cold, hunger, and weariness were his frequent attendants; his life, too, was in peril, almost every hour. Once he was seized and almost beaten to death. Nothing however could daunt the bold Reformer. At times he would mount the pulpit, even while the priest was celebrating mass, and such was the power of his eloquence, that sometimes the priest would strip himself of his stole and chasuble, while the congregation would demolish the altars, remove the images, and declare that Farel was speaking the Truth of God. In three weeks time four villages renounced popery.

Farel was far from resting satisfied with his spiritual triumphs in the little villages at the foot of the Jura. His eye was ever turned with longing towards Geneva. On his way there at St Blaise, he made a short halt and commenced to preach. He was cruelly set upon by the mob instigated by the priests, and almost beaten to death. "Covered with bruises" says a writer, "spitting blood, and so disfigured as scarcely to be recognised by his friends, he was put into a small boat, carried across the lake, and nursed at Morat." But his time had not yet come to depart, and in spite of his cruel wounds, he recovered, and in 1532 we find Farel's long cherished wish accomplished, and he is preaching the Gospel in Geneva.

With dismay almost bordering on despair the priests learned that the man had arrived in their midst, who, as they said, had passed like a devastating tempest over the Pays de Vaud. His track so far, they knew, had been marked with altars overturned, images demolished, and canons and monks, and nuns flying before him in terror. What were they to do? They must at once take effectual steps to put him down or all would be lost. So without loss of time Farel, was summoned before the Town Council. With angry looks and bitter words did the magistrates receive him, but happily for Farel he carried letters from their Excellencies of Berne with whom Geneva was in alliance, and whom the Council feared to offend. Thus protected the Reformer and his friend left the Council chamber unharmed.

This acquittal only the more aroused the anger of the priests and they met in council, and under pretext of debating the question, summoned the two preachers before them. Two magistrates were with them, "to see," says an historian, "that they returned alive," for it was known that some of the priests carried arms under their robes. The Reformer was asked by what authority he preached? Farel replied by quoting the Divine injunction, "Preach the Gospel to every creature." His meek answer was received with derision, and in a few moments the members starting to their feet, flung themselves upon the two evangelists, and commenced to ill-treat them. They spat upon them, pulled them about, struck them, "crying, come Farel, you wicked devil, what makes you go up and down thus? Whence comest thou? What business brings you to our city to throw us into trouble?" As soon as the noise had a little subsided, Farel answered courageously, "I am not a devil; I am sent by God as an ambassador of Jesus Christ; I preach Christ crucified � dead for our sins � risen again for our justification; he that believeth upon Him hath eternal life; he that believeth not is condemned." "He blasphemes; he is worthy of death" cried some. "To the Rhone, To the Rhone!" shouted others, "It were better to drown him in the Rhone than permit this wicked Lutheran to trouble all the people." "Speak the words of Christ, not Caiaphas," replied Farel. This was the signal for a more furious attack. "Kill the Lutheran hound," they exclaimed, Strike, Strike!" They closed round Farel, and one of the great Vicars servants levelled a gun at him, and pulled the trigger, but here again the Lord intervened for His servant, the pruning flashed, and the magistrates after a vigorous interposition rescued the evangelists.

Such, however, was the rage and enmity of the mob that Farel was obliged to flee the city. But although Farel's first essay was so unsuccessful it was not God's will that the good work should die out. Another and a gentler hand was to scatter the seed, � this was a young man, Fromont by name, of a gentle peaceful disposition. Him Farel sent back to the city where he had been almost torn to pieces.

"Fromont's appearance," says Wylie, "was so mean that even the Huguenots, as the friends of liberty and progress were styled, turned their backs upon him.'' Thus cast off and despised by all, what was young Fromont to do? "Recalling Farel's example at Aigle," the historian goes on to say, "he resolved to turn schoolmaster. He hired a room at the Croix d'or, near the Molard, and speedily his fame as a teacher of youth filled Geneva. The lessons Fromont taught the children at school the children taught their parents when they went home. Gradually, and in a very short time, the class grew into a congregation of adults, the schoolroom into a church, and the teacher into an evangelist. Reading out a chapter he would explain it with simplicity and impressiveness." Thus with a tender, gentle hand the young man scattered the Divine seed into hearts, and many were converted; and soon great crowds were seen pressing round him listening eagerly to his words. This was in the year 1532 and the good work went on apace. Two rich and honourable women were among the first converted; and their conversion made a great sensation in Geneva. Their husbands and many others were drawn to hear and embrace the Gospel.

Space would not suffice for me to tell how rapidly the good work sped although in the midst of much trouble and persecution; suffice to say, that, in only one year after the beginning of Fromont's ministry, Farel to his great joy, was allowed to return to Geneva, and he did not leave it until the city so dear to his heart had declared in favour of the truths of the Reformation.

Christian Privileges

Christian Privileges.

"They took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly." Acts 18: 26.

New Edition.

G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, London, E.C.

Contents.

Safety, Certainty, and Enjoyment

Salvation

Ye Must Be Born Again

The Blood of Christ

The Forgiveness of Sins

Cleansed from All Sin

Peace by Jesus Christ

Law and Grace Exemplified

The Advocacy of Christ

Christ as the Revealer of the Father

The Children of God

Our Identification with Christ

The Coming of the Lord

Do All in the Name of the Lord Jesus

What Is the Unpardonable Sin?

The Four Judgments

Not Under the Law

The Peace of God

The Two Resurrections

Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment.

If a Believer, Why not sure of Salvation

If Saved, Why not happy

"Which Class Are You Travelling?"

What an oft-repeated question! Let me put it to you, my reader for travelling you most certainly are from time into Eternity, and who knows how very, very near you may be this moment to the Great Terminus?

Let me ask you then, in all kindness, "Which class are you travelling?" There are but three. Let me describe them, that you may put yourself to the test as in the presence of "Him with whom you have to do."

1st Class. ? Those who are saved, and who know it.

2nd Class. ? Those who are not sure of Salvation, but anxious to be so.

3rd Class. ? Those who are not only unsaved, but totally indifferent about it.

Again I repeat my question, "Which class are you travelling?" Oh, the madness of indifference, when eternal issues are at stake! A short time since a man came rushing into the railway station at Leicester, and, while scarcely able to gasp for breath, took his seat in one of the carriages just on the point of starting.

"You've run it fine," said a fellow-passenger. "Yes," replied he, breathing heavily after every two or three words, "but I've saved four hours, and that's well worth running for."

"Saved four hours!" I couldn't help repeating to myself; "four hours" well worth that earnest struggle! What of Eternity? What of Eternity? Yet are there not thousands of shrewd, far-seeing men to-day, who look sharply enough after their own interests in this life, but who seem stone-blind to the Eternity before them? Spite of the infinite love of God to helpless rebels, told out at Calvary; spite of His pronounced hatred of sin; spite of the known brevity of man's history here; spite of the terrors of judgment after death, and of the solemn probability of waking up at last with the unbearable remorse of being on hell's side of a "fixed" gulf (Luke xvi. 26), man hurries on to the bitter, bitter end; as careless as if there were no God, no death, no judgment, no heaven, no hell! If the reader of these pages be such an one, may God this very moment have mercy upon you, and while you read these lines open your eyes to your most perilous position, standing as you may be on the slippery brink of an endless woe!

Oh, friend, believe it or not, your case is truly desperate! Put off the thought of Eternity no longer. Remember that procrastination is like him who deceives you by it, not only a "thief," but a "murderer." There is much truth in the Spanish proverb which says, "The road of 'by-and-by' leads to the town of 'Never.'" I beseech you, unknown reader, travel that road no longer; "Now is the day of Salvation."

"But," says one, "I am not indifferent as to the welfare of my soul. My deep trouble lies wrapped up in another word ?

Uncertainty;

i.e., I am among the second-class passengers you speak of."

Well, reader, both indifference and uncertainty are the offspring of one parent ? unbelief. The first results from unbelief as to the sin and ruin of man, the other from unbelief as to God's sovereign remedy for man. It is especially for souls desiring before God to be fully and unmistakably sure of their salvation that these pages are written. I can in a great measure understand your deep soul-trouble, and am assured that the more you are in earnest about this all-important matter, the greater will be your thirst, until you know for certain that you are really and eternally saved. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Mark viii. 36.

The only son of a devoted father is at sea. News comes that his ship has been wrecked on some foreign shore. Who can tell the anguish of suspense in that father's heart until, upon the most reliable authority, he is assured that his boy is safe and sound?

Or, again, you are far from home. The night is dark and wintry, and your way is totally unknown. Standing at a point where two roads diverge, you ask a by-passer the way to the town you desire to reach, and he tells you he thinks that such and such a way is the right one, and hopes you will be all right if you take it. Would "thinks," and "hopes," and "may bes" satisfy you? Surely not. You must have certainty about it, or every step you take will increase your anxiety. What wonder, then, that men have sometimes neither been able to eat nor sleep when the eternal safety of the soul has been trembling in the balance!

"To lose your wealth is much,

To lose your health is more,

To lose your soul is such a loss

As no man can restore."

Now, dear reader, there are three things I desire, by the Holy Spirit's help, to make clear to you; and, to put them into Scripture language, they are:

The Way of Salvation. (Acts xvi. 17.)

The Knowledge of Salvation. (Luke i. 77.)

The Joy of Salvation. (Psalm 51: 12.)

We shall, I think, see that, though intimately connected, they each stand upon a separate basis; so that it is quite possible for a soul to know the way of Salvation without having the certain knowledge that he himself is saved; or, again, to know that he is saved, without possessing at all times the joy that ought to accompany that knowledge.

First, then, let me speak briefly of the Way of Salvation.

Please to open your Bible, and read carefully the 13th verse of the 13th chapter of Exodus; there you find these words from the lips of Jehovah: "Every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck: and all the firstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem."

Now come back with me in thought to a supposed scene of 3000 years ago. Two men (a priest of God and a poor Israelite) stand in earnest conversation. Let us stand by, with their permission, and listen. The gestures of each bespeak deep earnestness about some matter of importance, and it isn't difficult to see that the subject of conversation is a little ass that stands trembling beside them.

"I am come to know," says the poor Israelite, "if there cannot be a merciful exception made in my favour this once. This feeble little thing is the firstling of my ass, and though I know full well what the law of God says about it, I am hoping that mercy will be shown, and the ass's life spared. I am but a poor man in Israel, and can ill afford to lose the little colt."

"But," answers the priest firmly, "the law of the Lord is plain and unmistakable 'Every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and thou wilt not redeem it, them thou shalt break his neck.' Where is the lamb?"

"Ah, sir, no lamb do I possess!"

"Then go, purchase one, and return, or the ass's neck must surely be broken. The lamb must die, or the ass must die."

"Alas! then all my hopes are crushed," he cries; "for I am far too poor to buy a lamb."

While this conversation proceeds, a third person joins them, and after hearing the poor man's tale of sorrow, he turns to him, and says kindly, "Be of good cheer, I can meet your need," and thus he proceeds: "We have in our house, on the hill-top yonder, one little lamb, brought up at our very hearth-stone, which is 'without spot or blemish.' It has never once strayed from home, and stands (and rightly so) in highest favour with all that are in the house. This lamb will I fetch." And away he hastens up the hill. Presently you see him gently leading the fair little creature down the slope, and very soon both lamb and ass are standing side by side.

Then the lamb is bound to the altar, its blood is shed, and the fire consumes it.

The righteous priest now turns to the poor man, and says, "You can freely take home your little colt in safety; no broken neck for it now. The lamb has died in the ass's stead, and consequently the ass goes righteously free. Thanks to your friend."

Now, poor troubled soul, can't you see in this God's own picture of a sinner's salvation? His claims as to your sin demanded a "broken neck" ? i.e., righteous judgment upon your guilty head; the only alternative being the death of a divinely-approved substitute.

Now you could not find the provision to meet your case; but, in the person of His beloved Son, God Himself provided the Lamb. "Behold the Lamb of God," said John to his disciples, as his eyes fell upon that blessed, spotless One, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." (John i. 29.)

Onward to Calvary He went, "as a lamb led to the slaughter," and there and then He "once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." (1 Peter iii. 18.) "He was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification." (Rom. iv. 25.) So that God does not abate one jot of His righteous, holy claims against sin when He justifies (i.e., clears from all charge of guilt) the ungodly sinner who believes in Jesus. (Rom. iii. 26.) Blessed be God for such a Saviour, such a Salvation

"Dost thou believe on the Son of God?"

"Well," you reply, "I have, as a condemned sinner, found in Him one that I can safely trust. I do believe on him."

Then I can tell you that the full value of His sacrifice and death, as God estimates it, He makes as good to you as though you had accomplished it all yourself.

Oh, what a wondrous way of salvation is this! Is it not great, and grand, and Godlike, worthy of God Himself ? the gratification of His own heart of love, the glory of His precious Son, and the salvation of a sinner, all bound up together? What a bundle of grace and glory! Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has so ordered it that His own beloved Son should do all the work, and get all the praise, and that you and I, poor, guilty things, believing on Him, should not only get all the blessing, but enjoy the blissful company of the Blesser for ever and ever: "O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together." (Ps. xxxiv. 3.)

But perhaps your eager inquiry may be, "How is it that, since I do really distrust self and self-work, and wholly rely upon Christ and Christ's work, I have not the full certainty of my salvation?" You say, "If my feelings warrant my saying that I am saved one day, they are pretty sure to blight every hope the next, and I am left like a ship storm-tossed, without any anchorage whatever." Ah! there lies your mistake. Did you ever hear of a captain trying to find anchorage by fastening his anchor inside the ship? Never. Always outside.

It may be that you are quite clear that it is Christ's death alone that gives safety; but you think that it is what you feel that gives certainty.

Now, again, take your Bible; for I now wish you to see from God's word how He gives a man

The Knowledge of Salvation.

Before you turn to the verse which I shall ask you very carefully to look at, which speaks of how a believer is to know that he has Eternal Life, let me quote it in the distorted way in which man's imagination often puts it. "These happy feelings have I given unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life." Now open your Bible, and, while you compare this with God's blessed and unchanging word, may He give you from your very heart to say with David, "I hate vain thoughts; but Thy law do I love." (Ps. cxix. 113.) The verse just misquoted is the 13th verse of the 5th chapter of the 1st epistle of John, and reads thus in our version: "These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God: that ye may know that ye have eternal life."

How did the firstborn sons of the thousands of Israel know for certain that they were safe on the night of the Passover and of Egypt's judgment?

Let us pay a visit to two of their houses, and hear what they have to say.

We find in the first house we enter that they are all shivering with fear and suspense.

"What is the secret of all this paleness and trembling?" we inquire; and the firstborn son in- forms us that the angel of death is coming round the land, and that he is not quite certain how matters will stand with him at that solemn moment.

"When the destroying angel has passed our house," says he, and the night of judgment is over, I shall then know that I am safe; but I can't see how I can be quite sure of it until then. They say they are sure of salvation next door, but we think it very presumptuous. All I can do is to spend the long, dreary night hoping for the best."

"Well," we inquire, "but has the God of Israel not provided a way of safety for His people?"

"True," he replies, "and we have availed ourselves of that way of escape. The blood of the spotless and unblemished first-year lamb has been duly sprinkled with the bunch of hyssop on the lintel and two side-posts, but still we are not fully assured of shelter."

Let us now leave these doubting, troubled ones, and enter next door.

What a striking contrast meets our eye at once. Peace rests on every countenance. There they stand, with girded loins, and staff in hand, feeding on the roasted lamb.

What can be the meaning of all this tranquillity on such a solemn night as this? "Ah," say they all, "we are only waiting for Jehovah's marching orders, and then we shall bid a last farewell to the taskmaster's cruel lash and all the drudgery of Egypt!"

"But hold! Do you forget that this is the night of Egypt's judgment?"

"Right well we know it; but our firstborn son is safe. The blood has been sprinkled according to the wish of our God."

"But so it has been the next door," we reply; but they are all unhappy, because all uncertain of safety."

"Ah!" firmly responds the firstborn, "but we have more than the sprinkled blood, we have the unerring Word of God about it. God has said, 'When I see the blood I will pass over you.' God rests satisfied with the blood outside, and we rest satisfied with his word inside."

The sprinkled blood makes us safe.

The spoken word makes us sure.

Could anything make us more safe than the sprinkled blood, or more sure than His spoken word? Nothing, nothing.

Now, reader, let me ask you a question. "Which of those two houses, think you, was the safer?"

Do you say No. 2, where all were so peaceful? Nay, then, you are wrong.

Both are safe alike.

Their safety depends upon what God thinks about the blood outside, and not upon the state of their feelings inside.

If you would be sure of your own blessing, then, dear reader, listen not to the unstable testimony of inward emotions, but to the infallible witness of the word of God.

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me hath everlasting life." (John vi. 47.)

Let me give you a simple illustration from everyday life. A certain farmer in the country, not having sufficient grass for his cattle, applies for a nice piece of pasture land which he hears is to be let near his own house. For some time he gets no answer from the landlord. One day a neighbour comes in, and says, "I feel quite sure you will get that field. Don't you recollect how that last Christmas he sent you a special present of game, and that he gave you a kind nod of recognition the other day when he drove past in the carriage?" And with such like words the farmer's mind is filled with sanguine hopes.

Next day another neighbour meets him, and in course of conversation he says, "I'm afraid you will stand no chance whatever of getting that grass-field. Mr. ? has applied for it, and you cannot but be aware what a favourite he is with the Squire ? occasionally visits him," etc. And the poor farmer's bright hopes are dashed to the ground, and burst like soap-bubbles. One day he is hoping, the next full of perplexing doubts.

Presently the postman calls, and the farmer's heart beats fast as he breaks the seal of the letter; for he sees by the handwriting that it is from the Squire himself. See his countenance change from anxious suspense to undisguised joy as he reads and re-reads that letter.

"It's a settled thing now," exclaims he to his wife; no more doubts and fears about it; "hopes" and "ifs" are things of the past. "The Squire says the field is mine as long as I require it, on the most easy terms, and that's enough for me. I care for no man's opinion now. His word settles all!"

How many a poor soul is in a like condition to that of the poor, troubled farmer ? tossed and perplexed by the opinions of men, or the thoughts and feelings of his own treacherous heart; and it is only upon receiving the word of God as the word of God that certainty takes the place of doubts and peradventures. When God speaks there must be certainty, whether He pronounces the damnation of the unbeliever, or the salvation of the believer.

"For ever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven" (Ps. cxix. 89); and to the simple-hearted believer His Word Settles All.

"Hath He said, and shall He not do it? or hath Ire spoken, and shall He not make it good?" (Num. xxiii. 19.)

"I need no other argument,

I want no other plea,

It is enough that Jesus died,

And that He died for me."

The believer can add ?

"And that God says so."

"But how may I be sure that I have the right kind of faith?"

Well, there can be but one answer to that question; viz., "Have you confidence in the right person; i.e., in the blessed Son of God?"

It is not a question of the amount of your faith, but of the trustworthiness of the person you repose your confidence in. One man takes hold of Christ, as it were, with a drowning man's grip. Another but touches the hem of His garment but the sinner who does the former is not a bit safer than the one who does the latter. They have both made the same discovery; viz., that while all of self is totally untrustworthy they may safely confide in Christ, calmly rely on His word, and confidently rest in the eternal efficacy of His finished work. That is what is meant by believing on Him. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me hath everlasting life." (John vi. 47.)

Make sure of it then, my reader, that your confidence is not reposed in your works of amendment, your religious observances, your pious feelings when under religious influences, your moral training from childhood, and the like. You may have the strongest faith in any or all of these, and perish everlastingly. Don't deceive yourself by any "fair show in the flesh." The feeblest faith in Christ eternally saves, while the strongest faith in aught beside is but the offspring of a deceived heart; but the leafy twigs of your enemy's arranging over the pitfall of eternal perdition.

God, in the gospel, simply introduces to you the Lord Jesus Christ, and says: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." "You may," He says, "with all confidence trust His heart, though you cannot with impunity trust your own."

Blessed, thrice blessed, Lord Jesus, who would not trust Thee, and praise Thy Name

"I do really believe on Him," said a sad-looking soul to me one day, "but yet, when asked if I am saved, I don't like to say yes, for fear I should be telling a lie." This young woman was a butcher's daughter in a small town in the Midlands. It happened to be market-day, and her father had not then returned from market. So I said, "Now, suppose when your father comes home you ask him how many sheep he bought to-day, and he answers 'ten.' After awhile a man comes to the shop, and says, 'How many sheep did your father buy to-day?' and you reply, 'I don't like to say, for fear I should be telling a lie.'" "But," said the mother (who was standing by at the time), with righteous indignation, "that would be making your father the liar."

Now, dear reader, don't you see that this well-meaning young woman was virtually making Christ out to be a liar, saying, I do believe on the Son of God, and He says I have everlasting life, but I don't like to say I have, lest I should be telling a lie." What daring presumption!

"But," says another, "how may I be sure that I really do believe? I have tried often enough to believe, and looked within to see if I had got it, but the more I look at my faith, the less I seem to have."

Ah, friend, you are looking in the wrong direction to find that out, and your trying to believe but plainly shows that you are on the wrong track.

Let me give you another illustration to explain what I want to convey to you.

You are sitting at your quiet fireside one evening, when a man comes in and tells you that the stationmaster has been killed that night on the railway.

Now, it so happens that this man has long borne the character in the place for being a very dishonest man, and the most daring, notorious liar in the neighbourhood.

Do you believe, or even try to believe, that man? "Of course not," you exclaim.

"Pray, why?"

"Oh, I know him too well for that!"

"But tell me how you know that you don't believe him. Is it by looking within at your faith or feelings?"

"No," you reply, "I think of the man that brings me the message."

Presently a neighbour drops in, and says, "The station-master has been run over by a goods train to-night, and killed upon the spot." After he has left, I hear you cautiously say, "Well, I partly believe it now; for to my recollection this man only once in his life deceived me, though I have known him from boyhood."

But again I ask, "Is it by looking at your faith this time that you know you partly believe it?"

"No," you repeat, "I am thinking of the character of my informant."

Well, this man has scarcely left your room before a third person enters, and brings you the same sad news as the first. But this time you say, "Now, John, I believe it. Since You tell me, I can believe it."

Again I press my question (which is, remember, but the re-echo of your own), "How do you know that you so confidently believe your friend John?"

"Because of who and what John is," you reply. "He never has deceived me, and I don't think he ever will."

Well, then, just in the same way I know that I believe the Gospel; viz., because of the One who brings me the news. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God that He hath witnessed of His Son. He that believeth not God hath made Him a Liar; because he believeth not the witness that God gave of His Son. (1 John v. 9, 10.) Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. (Rom. iv. 3.)

An anxious soul once said to a servant of Christ, "Oh, sir, I can't believe!" To which the preacher wisely and quietly replied, "Indeed, Who is it that you can't believe?" This broke the spell. He had been looking at faith as an indescribable something that he must feel within himself in order to be sure he was all right for heaven; whereas faith ever looks outside to a living Person, and His finished work, and quietly listens to the testimony of a faithful God about both.

It is the outside look that brings the inside peace. When a man turns his face towards the sun his own shadow is behind him. You cannot look at self and a glorified Christ in heaven at the same moment.

Thus we have seen that the blessed Person of God's Son wins my confidence. His Finished Work makes me eternally safe. God's Word about those who believe on Him makes me unalterably sure. I find in Christ and His work the way of Salvation, and in the word of God the knowledge of Salvation.

"But, if saved," my reader may say, "how is it that I have such a fluctuating experience, so often losing all my joy and comfort, and getting as wretched and downcast as I was before my conversion?" Well, this brings us to our third point; viz.,

The Joy of Salvation.

You will find, in the teaching of Scripture, that while you are saved by Christ's work and assured by God's word, you are maintained in comfort and joy by the Holy Ghost, who indwells every saved one's body.

Now, you must bear in mind that every saved one has still with him "the flesh;" i.e., the evil nature he was born with as a natural man, and which perhaps showed itself while he was still a helpless infant on his mother's lap. The Holy Ghost in the believer resists the flesh, and is grieved by every activity of it in motive, word, or deed. When he is walking "worthy of the Lord," the Holy Ghost will be producing in his soul His blessed fruits ? "love, joy, peace," etc. (See Gal. v. 22.) When he is walking in a carnal, worldly way the Spirit is grieved, and these fruits are wanting in greater or less measure.

Let me put it thus for you who do believe on God's Son:

Christ's work and Your Salvation stand or fall together.

Your walk and Your Enjoyment stand or fall together.

When Christ's work breaks down (and, blessed be God, it never, never will), your salvation will break down with it. When your walk breaks down (and be watchful, for it may), your enjoyment will break down with it.

Thus it is said of the early disciples (Acts ix. 31), that they "walked in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost."

And again in Acts xiii. 52: "The disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost."

My spiritual joy will be in proportion to the spiritual character of my walk after I am saved.

Now do you see your mistake? You have been mixing up enjoyment with your safety, two widely different things. When, through self-indulgence, loss of temper, worldliness, etc., you grieved the Holy Spirit, and lost your joy, you thought your safety was undermined. But again I repeat it ?

Your safety hangs upon Christ's work for you.

Your assurance upon God's word to you.

Your enjoyment upon your not grieving the Holy Ghost in you.

When, as a child of God, you do anything to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, your communion with the Father and the Son is, for the time, practically suspended; and it is only when you judge yourself, and confess your sins, that the joy of communion is restored.

Your child has been guilty of some misdemeanour. He shows upon his countenance the evident mark that something is wrong with him. Half-an-hour before this he was enjoying a walk with you round the garden, admiring what you admired, enjoying what you enjoyed. In other words, he was in communion with you; his feelings and sympathies were in common with yours.

But now all this is changed, and as a naughty, disobedient child he stands in the corner, the very picture of misery.

Upon penitent confession of his wrong-doing you have assured him of forgiveness; but his pride and self-will keep him sobbing there.

Where is now the joy of half-an-hour ago? All gone. Why? Because communion between you and him has been interrupted.

What is become of the relationship that existed between you and your son half-an-hour ago? Is that gone too? is that severed or interrupted? Surely not.

His relationship depends upon his birth.

His communion upon his behaviour.

But presently he comes out of the corner with broken will and broken heart, confessing the whole thing from first to last, so that you see he hates the disobedience and naughtiness as much as you do, and you take him in your arms and cover him with kisses. His joy is restored, because communion is restored.

When David sinned so grievously in the matter of Uriah's wife, he did not say, "Restore unto me Thy salvation," but, "Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation." (Ps. 51: 12.)

But to carry our illustration a little farther. Supposing while your child is in the corner there should be a cry of "house on fire" throughout your dwelling, what would become of him then? Left in the corner to be consumed with the burning, falling house? Impossible!

Very probably he would be the very first person you would carry out. Ah, yes, you know right well that the love of relationship is one thing, and the joy of communion quite another.

Now, when the believer sins, communion is for the time interrupted, and joy is lost until, with a broken heart, he comes to the Father and confesses his sins.

Then, taking God at His word, he knows he is again forgiven; for His Word plainly declares that "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John i. 9.)

Oh, then, dear child of God, ever bear in mind these two things, that there is nothing so strong as the link of relationship; nothing so tender as the link of communion.

All the combined power and counsel of earth and hell cannot sever the former, while an impure motive or an idle word will snap the latter.

If you are troubled with a cloudy half-hour, get low before God, consider your ways. And when the thief that has robbed you of your joy has been detected, drag him at once to the light, confess your sin to God, your Father, and judge yourself most unsparingly for the unwatchful, careless state of soul that allowed the thief to enter unchallenged.

But never, never, NEVER, confound your safety with your joy.

Don't imagine, however, that the judgment of God falls a whit more leniently on the believer's sin than on the unbeliever's. He has not two ways of dealing judicially with sin, and He could no more pass by the believer's sin without judging it, than He could pass by the sins of a rejecter of His precious Son. But there is this great difference between the two; viz., that the believer's sins were all known to God, and all laid upon His own provided Lamb when He hung upon the cross at Calvary, and that there and then, once and for ever, the great "criminal question" of his guilt was raised and settled, judgment falling upon the blessed Substitute in the believer's stead, "Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree." (1 Peter ii. 24.)

The Christ-rejecter must bear his own sins in his own person in the lake of fire for ever. Now, when a saved one fails, the "criminal question" of sin cannot be raised against him, the Judge Himself having settled that once for all on the cross; but the communion question is raised within him by the Holy Ghost as often as he grieves the Spirit.

Allow me, in conclusion, to give you another illustration. It is a beautiful moonlight night. The moon is at full, and shining in more than ordinary silver brightness. A man is gazing intently down a deep, still well, where he sees the moon reflected, and thus remarks to a friendly bystander: "How beautifully fair and round she is to-night! how quietly and majestically she rides along!" He has just finished speaking, when suddenly his friend drops a small pebble into the well, and he now exclaims, "Why, the moon is all broken to shivers, and the fragments are shaking together in the greatest disorder!"

"What gross absurdity!" is the astonished rejoinder of his companion. "Look up, man! the moon hasn't changed one jot or tittle. It is the condition of the well that reflects her that has changed."

Now, believer, apply the simple figure. Your heart is the well. When there is no allowance of evil the blessed Spirit of God takes of the glories and preciousness of Christ, and reveals them to you for your comfort and joy. But the moment a wrong motive is cherished in the heart, or an idle word escapes the lips unjudged, the Holy Ghost begins to disturb the well, your happy experiences are smashed to pieces, and you are all restless and disturbed within, until in brokenness of spirit before God you confess your sin (the disturbing thing), and thus get restored once more to the calm, sweet joy of communion.

But when your heart is thus all unrest, need I ask, Has Christ's work changed? No, no. Then your Salvation has not altered.

Has God's word changed? Surely not. Then the certainty of your Salvation has received no shock.

Then what has changed? Why, the action of the Holy Ghost in you has changed, and instead of taking of the glories of Christ, and filling your heart with the sense of His worthiness, He is grieved at having to turn aside from this delightful office to fill you with the sense of your sin and unworthiness.

He takes from you your present comfort and joy until you judge and resist the evil thing that He judges and resists. When this is done communion with God is again restored.

The Lord make us to be increasingly jealous over ourselves, lest we grieve "the Holy Spirit of God, whereby we are sealed unto the day of redemption." (Eph. iv. 30.)

Dear reader, however weak your faith may be, rest assured of this, that the blessed One who has won your confidence will never change.

"Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." (Heb. xiii. 8.)

The work He has accomplished will never change.

"Whatsoever God doeth it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it." (Eccles. iii. 14.)

The word He has spoken will never change.

"The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever." (1 Peter i. 24, 25.)

Thus the object of my trust, the foundation of my safety, and the ground of my certainty, are alike Eternally Unalterable.

"My love is ofttimes low,

My joy still ebbs and flows;

But peace with Him remains the same,

No change Jehovah knows.

"I change, He changes not;

God's Christ can never die;

His love, not mine, the resting-place;

His truth, not mine, the tie."

Once more let me ask, "Which class are you travelling? " Turn your heart to God, I pray you, and answer that question to Him.

"Let God be true, but every man a liar." (Rom. iii. 4.)

"He that hath received His testimony has set to his seal that God is true." (John iii. 33.)

May the joyful assurance of possessing this "great salvation" be yours, dear reader, now and "till He come."

WHAT transports then will fill our heart

When Thou our worthless names wilt own;

When we shall see Thee as Thou art,

And know as we ourselves are known;

And then, from sin and sorrow free,

Find our eternal rest with Thee.

Salvation.

"The salvation of your souls." ? 1 Peter 1: 9.

"Work out your own salvation." ? Phil. 2: 12.

"Now is our salvation nearer." ? Rom. 13:11.

The above scriptures show that the word salvation, as used in the New Testament, has more than one meaning.

The first speaks of believers having received the salvation of their souls, which salvation is as complete now as it will be when they are with the Lord in glory.

From the second believers learn that they are to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in them both to will and to do of His good pleasure; that is, by the power of the Holy Spirit of God in them they are to refrain their "feet from every evil way." (Ps. cxix. 101.) The Christian starts with the salvation of his soul. He is not told to work out that. It was wrought out by the Lord Jesus when He died, "the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God." (1 Peter iii. 18.)

The third refers to the glory that believers will enter into when they are caught up to meet the Lord in the air. (1 Thess. iv. 16, 17.) It was in view of this that the apostle said, "Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." (Rom. i. 16; Phil. i. 19; Heb. v. 9; ix. 9, 28.)

Ye Must Be Born Again.

When Nicodemus went to our Lord for instruction, he was met instantly by the solemn word, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John iii. 3.) It behoves therefore every anxious soul to consider this searching divine word; because we at once learn, that whatever the anxiety of soul ? earnest desires, profession of faith ? if there has not been wrought this great change, the "new birth," there is no life in the soul, and consequently no salvation.

Who was it then to whom the Lord addressed these words? We learn only half the truth when we answer, Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; for, in fact, this tells us nothing beyond his name and official rank, and these things have no weight before God, and no significance for the seeking soul. It is in the connection of the third chapter with the second that we shall find the real answer to our question. We read, "Now when He [Jesus] was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast-day, many believed in His name, when they saw the miracles which He did. But Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for He knew what was in man. But" (as it should be read) "there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews," etc. (John ii. 23-25; iii. 1, etc.) There was thus a number of Jews who believed on Jesus when they saw His miracles, and Nicodemus was one of that number. But Jesus did not commit Himself to them, because He knew what was in man; because, in fact, their faith was nothing more than a natural conviction, wrought by the evidence of the miracles, of the truth of the claims of Jesus. There was no bowing of heart before God in all this; there was nothing more than a natural or intellectual belief in the name of Christ. When therefore Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, no doubt in quest of something more, and expressed this belief, "Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him," Jesus answered him at once by stating the necessity of being born again. It was as if He had said, "You may believe in me as a divine teacher, and yet be lost. You must be born again before you can enter into the kingdom of God."

We thus get a most solemn warning, as well as a needed caution. The warning is, "Beware of being satisfied with a profession of belief in Christ." The caution is, Never forget that everything is useless if you have not been born again. You may be most earnest, most religious, a model of activity, in high repute for sanctity of life, or for works of usefulness, and yet be a lost soul; for unless you are born again, you cannot even see the kingdom of God."

Why then must a man be born again? The answer to this question brings us to a most important part of our subject. We have already shown that all men are sinners; but it is not only that they are sinners, but they have an evil, corrupt, depraved nature; and this incurably corrupt nature is the tree which produces all the evil fruits of sin. The acts of sin reveal the character of the nature; and this nature is totally unfit for God's presence. This is the purport of our Lord's words in this chapter, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." (v. 6.) All therefore that we are as natural men, as children of Adam, is flesh; and in this flesh there dwelleth no good thing. (Rom. vii. 18.)

"Are we to understand that all men, without exception, are thus totally corrupt, hopelessly evil?"

"Yes. Such is the verdict of God upon human nature. 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh.'"

"But is it possible, for example, that all the noble deeds recorded in history, or all the kind, generous, and beneficent actions which we meet with in daily life, are all these done by those who have a totally depraved nature? Surely there must be a difference ? degrees in our natural condition; for how is it possible to class such actions with open and flagrant sins?"

It matters not what may be the outward character of the actions of men, whether such as will elicit the applause or draw down the condemnation of their fellows; for as long as they proceed from men who have not been born again, they are nothing but evil in the sight of God, for a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. "For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes." (Luke vi. 43, 44.) The word of God is most explicit on this question. "The carnal mind" (the mind of the flesh) "is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God." (Rom. viii. 7, 8.) It is thus, as Luther said, not a question of doing, but of being; not a question of the character of actions, but a question of nature, and this nature God declares to be flesh, and the flesh is nothing but evil in His sight, and consequently "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption." (1 Cor. xv. 50.)

Herein therefore lies the necessity of being born again. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh. . . . Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." (John iii. 6, 7.) This necessity is universal in its application. It concerns every one born into this world, the dutiful, obedient child, as much as the prodigal son; the active, zealous philanthropist as much as the convict in his cell. For the flesh is flesh, and cannot enter the kingdom of God. There must therefore be a new nature and a new life; for if there be not these, whatever a man's moral repute, he will be for ever outside of the kingdom of God.

How then must a man be born again? This, in substance, was the question of Nicodemus. "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" (John iii. 4.) This question, rigidly construed, means undoubtedly, How is it possible for a man to be born again? But our Lord, in His answer, does not notice it in this form, but points out the way in which a man is born again. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." (v. 5.)

(1) Water. Much difficulty has been occasioned by special attempts to wrest the meaning of this symbol. Ritualists of many shades have persistently endeavoured to support their false teaching of baptismal regeneration from this passage. But if we confine ourselves to the Scriptures, we shall find that the difficulty will disappear. Now it is very evident that Nicodemus should have understood what our Lord meant; and if he did not, that he was expected to understand. For when he replied, "How can these things be? Jesus answered and said, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?" (John iii. 9, 10.) And if we turn to one of the prophets (with whose writings Nicodemus, as one of Israel's teachers, should have been well acquainted), we shall find a distinct foreshadowing of this teaching of our Lord. Speaking of the future restoration of Israel, the prophet says, "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you: and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them." (Ezek. xxxvi. 25-27.) Here we have the same conjunction of the water and the Spirit, and a radical change following upon its application; for nothing less than this can be implied by "a new heart." Not only so, but the water in this passage is used in the most familiar of all senses to the Israelites, in connection with cleansing. With this passage then before us, what, we ask, is the import of the water? Turn to Psalm cxix. 9, and we get this question: "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word." We read also in the New Testament of the "washing of water by the word" (Eph. v. 26); again, "Now ye are clean through" (or because of) "the word which I have spoken unto you." (John xv. 3; read also John xiii. 5-41.) The water therefore is a well-known symbol for the word of God. Hence we find the Word constantly associated in other passages with the new birth. "Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth." (James i. 18.) "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the Word which by the gospel is preached unto you." (1 Peter i. 23-25.) The apostle Paul makes an allusion to the same thing when he says to the Corinthians, "In Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel." (1 Cor. iv. 15.) The word of God, preached in the gospel, is the first means of the new birth which our Lord here sets forth under the type of water.

(2) And [of] the Spirit. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth." (John vi. 63.) "The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." (2 Cor. iii. 6.) The Spirit acting in and through the word of God quickens dead souls, and they are born again.

The Word cannot do this in and by itself; nor does the Spirit of God act alone, but He wields the Word as the instrument, so that by it He may bring souls out of death into life, producing in them both a new nature and a new life. Many illustrations of this might be collected from the Scriptures. Take the most prominent of all ? that afforded by the day of Pentecost. The crucifiers of the Lord Jesus were gathered round about Peter and the other apostles. Peter proclaimed the word of God to them, and said, "Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ." (Acts ii. 36.) At the beginning of the chapter we read of the descent of the Holy Spirit; and it is said of the apostles that "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." Peter was therefore speaking in the power of the Spirit, and that same Spirit clothed the word of God with mighty power, and the effect was that a multitude were born again, the change wrought upon them being indicated by the fact that "they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter, and to the rest of the apostles, Men [and] brethren, what shall we do?" (v. 37.) So it is now when men are born again. It is always through the Word, by the Spirit of God. There is no other way.

Dear reader, have you been born again? You surely, with this testing word before you, can have no difficulty in answering the question. If you are, your whole soul will go out in thanksgivings to God for the gift of His only begotten Son. If you are not, let me again warn you that it matters not what you are besides ? you may be a good son or daughter, a loving husband or wife, a kind father or mother, and yet, not being born again, you are outside the kingdom of God, hopelessly undone and lost. Will you be satisfied in this condition? What had been the consequence if the bitten Israelites had refused to look to the serpent of brass, saying, "We may perhaps recover"? They would have died in their anguish and their sin. And so if you refuse to look to Christ, to believe in Him (Heb. xii. 25), instead of having eternal life, you will for ever perish. But if you bow to this divine necessity of being born again, acknowledging your true condition before God, and look to Christ in simple faith, you will immediately pass from death unto life.

ALL that we were ? our sins, our guilt,

Our death ? was all our own:

All that we are we owe to Thee,

Thou God of grace, alone.

Thy mercy found us in our sins,

And gave us to believe;

Then, in believing, peace we found,

And in Thy Christ we live,

The Blood of Christ.

Supposing now that those of whom we speak ? "anxious ones" ? have bowed to the judgment of God upon their condition, their immediate concern will be to know by what means they can obtain the pardon of their sins. The blood of Christ is the only way by which the guilt of sin can be removed. "Without shedding of blood is no remission." (Heb. ix. 22.) Herein lies the necessity for the death of Christ; the need, in fact, for the whole work of redemption. And hence it is of the first importance that this truth should be rightly understood.

We have already pointed out that death has "passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." (Rom. v. 12.) Adam first incurred the penalty through his disobedience to God. He had been warned not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (Gen. ii. 16, 17.) Adam disregarded the divine command, and fell under the awful sentence of death ? the penalty which God had annexed to disobedience. Thus "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." (Rom. v. 12.) There is therefore no difference; all alike are sinners; and hence every child of Adam's race is subject to the penalty of sin, which is death. Yea, death already reigns (see Rom. v. 13-21) over the whole human family; every individual member of it (saving those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ) being under the righteous judgment of death because of sin. "But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom. v. 8.) He "so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John iii. 16.) Being rich in mercy, He sent His own Son to die, "the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." (1 Peter iii. 18.) Just as when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, God provided a lamb to be offered up in his stead, that Isaac might be rescued and live (Gen. xxii.), so God has provided a Lamb to be offered up in the sinner's room and stead ? "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." (John i. 29.) This is the secret and meaning, in this aspect, of the death of Christ. He died as the sinner's substitute, bore the sinner's judgment, expiated the sinner's guilt.

The marvellous efficacy of the blood of Christ, as meeting the sinner's need, flows from the character of His person and the nature of His death. His blood is the symbol of His death, of His life poured out; for the life is in the blood (see Lev. xvii. 10-14), and hence His blood cleanses from sin, because of the value of His death before God in the sinner's place and behalf. God has condescended to teach us this by type and illustration, as well as by direct statement. Look at the Israelites in the land of Egypt on the passover night. God was about to execute judgment upon the land of Egypt; and when once He began to deal in righteousness, Israel was as much amenable to the penalty of sin as the Egyptians. How then spare the former when the latter were to be judged? "I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord. And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt." (Ex. xii. 12, 13; also vv. 21-23.) The ground (mark it well) of difference on this night between Israel and Egypt was the blood. It was not what Israel was in comparison with the Egyptians, but it was the blood that stayed the destroyer's hand ? the blood on the outside of their houses; for the Lord had said, "When I see the blood, I will pass over you." The blood of the lamb ? for the lamb had been slain ? cleansed them typically from guilt, so that God could righteously spare Israel while He righteously destroyed Egypt. The same lesson is taught by the great day of atonement, of which we have the record in Leviticus xvi. For Aaron was directed to sprinkle the blood of the bullock and of the goat of the sin-offerings, both upon the mercy-seat and before the mercy-seat, where God dwelt between the cherubim; "for on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord." (Lev. xvi. 30.) All these things were but shadows of the efficacy of the blood of Christ. Thus we read: "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us" (1 Cor. v. 7); and again, "Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by His own blood, He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" (Heb. ix. 12-14.) Accordingly we are taught, that "the blood of Jesus Christ His [God's] Son cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John i. 7.)

We may, then, now point out distinctly the teaching of Scripture as to the blood of Christ in relation to sin. (1.) It is the only means of cleansing from guilt. This is the divinely-appointed and the divinely-given way. It is therefore exclusive of all other methods. "Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord God." (Jer. ii. 22.) "If I wash myself with snow-water, and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me." (Job ix. 30, 31.) It is only the blood of Christ which can make the sinner whiter than snow. (2.) It is the blood in and by itself alone which possesses this efficacy. There cannot be any addition to it. It is not the blood and something else. Add to it in any way, whether by feelings, prayers, penitence (all of which have their proper place), and you mar its cleansing power. (3.) God has provided the blood. It was He who delivered up His Son to death. This provision for the sinner's need is one therefore entirely of God's grace, and consequently a provision outside of the sinner altogether. God in His infinite mercy, and because He so loved the world, provided the Lamb for the sacrifice and now the precious blood of that Lamb avails for every one who believes. (John iii. 16.) There is no limit whatever in its application, excepting in the sinner's unbelief. It is provided for all, and every one may be the subject of its blessed cleansing power through faith.

Beloved reader, you have confessed your need of cleansing; and God has provided that which alone can meet your need. Do you ask, But how am I to obtain the application of the blood to myself? Solely and entirely by the obedience of faith. Let us go back to the passover night. (Ex. xii.) It was not enough that the lamb was slain, and that the blood was in the basin; but the Israelite was directed to sprinkle the blood for himself upon the lintel and the two side-posts of his door. With the bunch of hyssop in his hand, the sign of his humiliation before the righteous judgment of God, he sprinkled the blood, thereby confessing his own desert of death, and his faith in the blood as the means to avert the stroke of the destroyer, of sheltering him from the wrath of the Righteous Judge. So now. The Lamb has been provided, and slain; His blood has been shed. But the fact of His blood-shedding does not secure your safety. The question is, Are you under the shelter of the blood? Do you again ask, How can this be? By bowing in humiliation, like the Israelite, before the judgment which God has pronounced against sin; that is, by taking the place of a sinner, and by looking to the blood of Christ to secure you from the righteous doom and meed of sin. The moment you do this, the blood of Christ is upon you in all its value, between you and judgment, sheltering you completely and for ever from the consequences of sin; for the blood has met and satisfied all the claims that a holy God had against you. For God hath set forth Christ a propitiation through faith in His blood. (Rom. iii. 25.) There is therefore absolutely nothing for you to do; not even have you to gather the hyssop and sprinkle the blood. You have simply to believe the word of God, to look in faith to the blood already shed, as the only means of protection from death and judgment, and God instantly sees you as covered with all its efficacy and value ? cleansed from guilt and whiter than snow. Delay not, then, to seek the protection of the precious blood of Christ. At midnight the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt; and as suddenly and unexpectedly will judgment overtake the rejecters of Christ, "for when they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them . . . and they shall not escape." (1 Thess. v. 3.) To-day, then, hear the entreating voice of the love of God, which bids you to flee from the wrath to come, and to "behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." (John i. 29.)

To Him that saved us from the world,

And washed us in His blood,

Called us to share His glorious throne,

As kings and priests to God;

To Him let every tongue be praise,

And every heart be love!

All grateful honours paid on earth,

And nobler songs above!

The Forgiveness of Sins

All forgiveness is founded on the blessed work of the Lord Jesus. Without the work of Christ, a holy and just God, yea, a God of truth, must have held man to be what he really is ? a guilty sinner, who must be judged according to his works; and we know beforehand from His word that there is none righteous, no, not one. The love of God, great as it is, so great that for us He did not spare His Son, could not say that sin was not sin, or that He was indifferent to good and evil; for He is not, and in His own nature cannot be; and if He judges, and makes man himself answer for what he has done, He must judge him righteously.

Besides, we are alienated from God in heart and mind, and so really already lost. I do not now mean finally, nor that we cannot be saved out of that state; but if we can, it is because Christ came to seek and to save that which was lost. Judgment, if we come unrepentant, unbelieving, before the judgment-seat of Christ, will be according to our works, and therefore to condemnation; for all have sinned.

But God is love ? "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." God has thus anticipated, in grace, that day of judgment. The same blessed Son of God, who will as Son of man sit on the judgment-seat, and judge the quick and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom, has already, before that day, come as a Saviour, and died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and "he that believeth on the Son of God shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be condemned." Solemn as that warning is, I shall not say more of these last. The statement is plain enough and solemn enough without adding anything to it. They die in their sins, and are doubly guilty; they have not only sinned against His holiness, but despised His mercy.

Supposing now we do really in heart believe in the Son of God, with a faith wrought in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, and a conscience which feels the need of grace and forgiveness; for that is the great point ? a faith which has wrought true repentance, that godly sorrow and sense that we have deserved to be condemned which make Christ and His grace and His work precious to us. I suppose we have been all brought up to believe in what is written of the blessed Lord Jesus as a divine history; but that is very different from believing in Him as meeting the need of an awakened conscience.

But supposing I have this true faith in Him, then it behoves me to be able to say what He has done for me.

He has died for our sins according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. xv. 3); He has borne our sins in His own body on the tree (1 Peter ii. 24); He died, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. (1 Peter iii. 18.)

So that here is our question: Supposing I have true heart-faith in Him, Christ having thus died for me, what is the effect or efficacy of His death for me?

I have a perfect and eternal forgiveness and redemption according to the glory of God. I do not speak of those who neglect this great salvation; they are doubly guilty; but of what the value of His work is for those who have really a part in it. "Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: and by Him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses." (Acts xiii. 38, 39.) "In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace." (Eph. i. 7.) "Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God." (Rom. iv. 25; v. 1, 2.) "By the obedience of One shall many be made righteous." (Rom. v. 19.) "Whom He justified, them He also glorified." (Rom. viii. 30.) "By His own blood He entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption." (Heb. ix. 12.) And its effect is complete ? "How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?" (v. 14.)

But is this valid for ever?

We have seen that it is eternal redemption, that it purges the conscience from dead works, and gives peace with God; but Scripture is more explicit. Christ is always at the right hand of God, and has presented His precious blood to God. It is always before His eyes; but Scripture is very explicit on this point ? "But this [man], having offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down at the right hand of God." Not like the Jewish priests, standing continually at the altar offering sacrifices which could never take away sins. (Heb. x. 11.) He sat down because, for redemption and forgiveness, He had done already the whole work; for (Heb. x. 14) "by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." He sits there at the right hand of God till His enemies be made His footstool; then He will come to deal with them in judgment. But all is done for His friends; that is, true believers, and He has sat down, having finished the work, so that those who come by it have no more conscience of sins. (v. 2.) "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will impute no sin." "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered." (Rom. iv. 7, 8.) And is it only some of them? No, that were useless. "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth no sin;" and the Holy Ghost testifies of it clearly in that same chapter from which we have quoted, "And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." (Heb. 10: 17.) And so plainly does He put it that He declares that "where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin." (v. 18.) So that, if all were not completely pardoned and effaced, there could be no remedy.

The more we consider it the more plain it is. Christ is the Judge, and if now I can say by faith, He has loved me and washed me from my sins in His own blood, how can He, when I stand before the judgment-seat, impute to me the sins He has Himself borne and put away? He would be denying the value of His own work, which is impossible.

Again, if we are believers, we are raised in glory (1 Cor. xv. 43); nay, Christ shall Himself come to bring us to Himself ? "Who shall change our body of humiliation that it may be fashioned like unto His body of glory." If Christ comes to fetch us, and puts us in glory, where is the place for raising any question then about our sins? And this is clearly said in John v. 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation [judgment]; but is passed from death unto life."

Is it because God is indifferent to their sins? Impossible! But He has given His Son for us. Christ has borne them already, and cannot impute them to those who believe in Him and in the Father who sent Him in love. We know that the Lord says, "If ye do not believe that I am he, ye shall die in your sins." (John viii. 24.) But if we believe in Him we have the forgiveness of our sins, not of some to be condemned for the rest. "Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more," because "by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." And we possess the blessedness of this word ? "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man to whom Jehovah will not impute sin." Hence repentance and remission of sins were to be preached in Jesus' name. The Christian has a new life from Christ, and this will show itself in his walk. He is born of the Spirit, and the faith in Christ by which he has forgiveness makes Christ everything to him, as it is written in Colossians iii.: "Christ is all, and in all" ? the "everything," that is, of our hearts, and He is our life.

But I now confine myself to redemption and forgiveness.

There is, then, a forgiveness identified with redemption and the abiding value of Christ's blood, so that our sins are none of them imputed to us: God remembers them no more. We have part in this through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and the door by which we enter is repentance toward God, which faith in the word of Christ always produces. We have our eyes opened, we are turned from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, and we receive remission of our sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith that is in Jesus. (Acts xxvi. 18.)

Under the Old Testament, among the Jews, this full forgiveness was not known; they got a kind of absolution for each sin they committed; they were shut out from entering into the holiest by the veil, which hung before the place where God revealed Himself. Thus in Hebrews ix. it is written, "The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing." But we learn, when the real work of which all these things were figures was accomplished in the death of the Saviour, that the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom (Matt. xxvii. 51); and we are exhorted (Heb. x. 19), in virtue of the work of Christ and the remission of our sins (vv. 17, 18), "having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh," to "draw near with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience." That one work done once for all, never to be repeated, and effectual to give peace to the conscience, is the ground on which we have eternal redemption, full forgiveness, so that God remembers our sins and iniquities no more; an entrance into God's presence, and a part in the everlasting inheritance of God's children in glory.

This great difference in the state of believers before and after the death of the blessed Lord is celebrated by Zacharias at the birth of John the Baptist, Christ's forerunner. "To give knowledge of salvation unto His people, by the remission of their sins." (Luke i. 77.) So the repentant thief went straight into paradise with Christ; so to the repentant woman in the city that was a sinner the Lord said, not only, "Thy sins are forgiven thee," but, "Thy faith hath saved thee." (Luke 7: 48-50.)

There is then for faith a present but eternal forgiveness, founded on Christ's bearing our sins in a work which can never be repeated, its value never diminished, nor anything added to it. God has proved His estimation of its worth in setting Him who did it at His right hand in glory, where He was with Him as Son of God before the world was. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission." This cannot be repeated. "Christ is not entered into holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us: nor yet to offer Himself often . . . otherwise He must often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the consummation of ages He hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment; so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time apart from sin unto salvation." Those whose sins were put away the first time, He comes to take into glory, as to them having no more to do with sin, which He put away the first time.

FORGIVENESS, 'twas a joyful sound

To guilty sinners doomed to die:

We'd publish it the world around,

And gladly shout it through the sky.

'Twas the rich gift of love divine;

'Tis full, effacing every crime;

Unbounded shall its glories shine,

And know no change by changing time.

"Cleansed from all sin."

1 John i. 7.

"Shall we not be perfectly holy when we are cleansed from all sin?" This is a question often asked by some who imagine that they can be gradually cleansed from "inbred sin," until at last there is no sin left in them, and they have reached a state of perfect holiness or sinless perfection.

They quote that precious word in 1 John i. 7 ? "The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin" ? and say, "Does not that verse show that we can be cleansed from all sin?"

Of course it does, thank God; and what is more, if you are under the efficacy of that blood you are "cleansed from all sin" now, and so is every true believer, even the babe in Christ, and that from the first moment that he took refuge in the blood.

"But," some will say, "if that were the case, if I, for instance, were cleansed from all sin, I should not feel sin in me as I do, and should never give way to temptation."

To such we would reply, You are confounding the work of Christ for you with the work of the Spirit in you, and you do not understand what Scripture means by cleansing by the blood.

Let us therefore look at one or two passages which explain it, and may God interpret His own word to us, so that we may get rid of our own thoughts, and have the truth.

Now in Leviticus xvi. 30 we read, with reference to the great day of atonement, "On that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord;" and on examining the chapter we find not only that the people did nothing, but that the priest, who did everything for the people, did nothing to the people; he did not even sprinkle the blood upon them, and yet he made atonement for them, and cleansed them, and they were clean from ALL their sins before the Lord. Ah! there is the point; they were clean before the Lord, not in themselves, and that is just the meaning of the verse already quoted ? "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." It is before the Lord, before a holy God. It cannot mean that we are clean in ourselves; for in the very same chapter (v. 8) it says, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

"But," you say, "do we never read of the blood being sprinkled on the people?" To be sure we do, and in Heb. ix. x. we see the meaning of it. Did it not cleanse them? Yes, it cleansed them, but in what respect? Did it cleanse their natures? No, it cleansed their consciences. The blood of bulls and goats could only satisfy for a time, but the blood of Christ purges the conscience completely and for ever, so that the worshippers once purged (no repetition, remember) have "no more conscience of sins." Mark, it does not say "no more consciousness of indwelling sin," but "no more conscience of sins." The conscience no longer charges with guilt, because all the guilt has been imputed to the One who died in my stead, and He is risen and gone into heaven "by His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption," and "by one offering perfected for ever" (as regards the conscience) "them that are sanctified."

The cleansing virtue of the blood may be further illustrated by referring to Numbers xxiii. 21, where God compels Balaam to say, "He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath He seen perverseness in Israel," and that at a time when they were as perverse as could be in themselves; but the blood was on the mercy-seat, and God's eye rested on that blood which spoke to Him of a perfect sacrifice for sin, and therefore He would not allow the enemy to curse, or even to accuse, His people, though He chastened them for their faults as a people who ought to have been as holy in their ways as in their judicial standing. Of course all was typical and imperfect under the law, but now it is absolutely and eternally true that God does not impute sin to those who are under the shelter of the blood of Christ.

But perhaps you will say, "What about Psalm li. and Ezekiel xxxvi.? Surely we get the thought of being 'inwardly cleansed from sin' in such scriptures as these?" Well, it is quite true there is such a thing as inward cleansing; but where that is attributed to the blood it has reference, not to the nature, but to the conscience, which is only thoroughly cleansed or purged when the blessedness is enjoyed of the man "whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered," and "unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity" ? a blessedness which David described in Psalm xxxii. and longed for in Psalm li., but which could only be fully known when Christ had accomplished the work of redemption.

When, however, the psalmist prays, "Create in me a clean heart, O God," and when the prophet Ezekiel speaks of what the Lord will do for restored Israel in the latter day, "then will I sprinkle clean water upon you," etc. (Ezek. xxxvi. 25-27), we have brought before us the cleansing power of the word of God, and this is typified by water not only in Ezekiel, but also in John iii., and many other parts of Scripture.

The word when applied by the power of the Holy Ghost does create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us. When first a man is brought under the life-giving power of the Word he is born again ? "of water and the Spirit;" an entirely new life and nature, holy and sinless, is imparted to him, and those whose hearts were hard as stone, "alienated and enemies in their minds by wicked works," are reconciled to God.

This is a very different thing from saying that the old nature is purified or rooted out, either all at once or by degrees. Such a thought is foreign to Scripture, in which you cannot find a single instance of any one professing to have attained to a state of sinless perfection, or teaching the possibility of it. On the contrary we read, "I count not myself to have apprehended" (Phil. iii. 13); "I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members." (Rom. vii. 22, 23.) The old nature remains unchanged and unchangeable, side by side, so to speak, with the new nature ? "The mind of the flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be" (Rom. viii. 7); "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." (1 John i. 8.) And indeed the folly of those who have so deceived themselves will sooner or later be manifested, and often has been made evident by an outburst of passion, a display of pride, or a grievous fall.

Do not, however, suppose for a moment that we contend for a constant state of bondage or a fruitless struggle against sin. Far from it. "Sin shall not have dominion over you" (Rom. vi. 14): "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh." (Gal. v. 16.) But the flesh, you see, is there to lust; for as long as the Adam-life lasts the Adam-nature remains in us; but when the Christ-life has been grafted into us, and the Holy Spirit has taken up His abode in us, we have liberty and power to cultivate the Christ-nature, and so to have our "fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life."

Thus by watchfulness, dependence, and subjection to the Word, keeping the eye on Christ in glory, and keeping the foot on the old man by the power of the Spirit, made good to us through Him who ever liveth to make intercession for us, "whose grace is sufficient" for us, and whose "strength is made perfect in weakness," we may seek to "walk even as He walked," and thus to be as clean through the Word in our daily walk as we are through the blood "before the Lord."

"In many things we all offend" (though we have no excuse for it), and "there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not." (Eccles. vii. 20.) But "if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." (1 John ii. 1.) And He who washed His disciples' feet still washes our feet to keep us in communion with Him by the constant application of the Word, reminding us of the cost at which He has purchased us, even His own precious blood once shed, and which never loses its value.

Peace by Jesus Christ.

Acts 10: 36.

If you are enquiring how "peace with God" is to be procured, the holy word of God answers, "Not by works of righteousness which we have done" (Titus iii. 5), but by believing on the Son of God, who came "preaching peace to all" (comp. Acts x. 36; Eph. ii. 17), having made it "by the blood of His cross." Again: "Being justified by faith, we have (now) peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ." Rom. v. 1. And the Holy Ghost has proclaimed, by the mouth of the apostle Peter, that "there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." Acts iv. 12. But perhaps, dear reader, you are ready to say, "I do believe on the Son of God; I believe that He came into the world, took our nature upon Him, and died upon the cross for sin, and was raised again the third day, and that there is no other name by which a sinner can be saved, but His name." Well, this is a very sound confession as far as it goes; but are you in the enjoyment of the results of all this? If you really believe all this, then you possess eternal life, and divine righteousness. 2 Cor. v. 21. He that believeth on the Son of God hath eternal life; and again, "By Him (Jesus) all that believe are justified from all things." Acts xiii. 39. For one to say that he believes all this, and yet that he does not know his perfect justification before God, is a complete contradiction. If I am amongst the "all that believe," I am assuredly "justified from all things." God says so, and therefore I am bound to believe it, and rejoice in it. The completeness of the justification is founded upon the completeness of Christ's work. Faith owns this, and the soul is filled with joy and peace. I know that my sins are forgiven, and my conscience gets rest. It is deeply important to see that we are privileged to know the forgiveness of our own sins. There are many who, every first day of the week, declare their belief "in the forgiveness of sins," and yet who would regard it as presumption for one to say he believed in the forgiveness of his sins. "We know that we have passed from death unto life." 1 John iii. 14.

Is it presumption to take God at His word? God hath said, "He (no matter who) that believeth on the Son hath (now) everlasting life." John iii. 36, v. 24; 1 John v. 12. Mark, it is not said, be shall, or may, have it, but he "hath" it. "Because ye are sons, God hath, sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, [nothing less than] Abba, Father." Gal. iv. 6. Is it not far greater presumption "to make God a liar"? (1 John V. 10), which you are doing, if you are not rejoicing in the knowledge of the forgiveness of your sins. Jesus Christ did not come to put us in the way of making peace for ourselves; He came to make peace, and to give it to us as a free gift, "without money and without price." Isaiah 55. May this blessed message of "peace and good-will" be published far and wide, that sinners may hear and live.

But let it never be forgotten, that though the grace of God, that brings a full and free salvation, has appeared to all men, yet wherever it is received it teaches to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Titus ii. 11, 12. If we are not showing out the latter, we may rest assured we do not fully understand the former. Living faith in the living Son of God, crucified for sin, and risen, is the grand source and root from which all good works must spring, and whatsoever work or religious service springs not from this is selfishness ? an abomination in the sight of God no matter what we ourselves or others think of it, God has said, "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." Rom. xiv. 23.

May you, dear reader, have this precious faith; and may "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your heart and mind through Christ Jesus." Amen.

Law and Grace Exemplified.

Deut. xxi.. 18-21, and Luke xv. 11-32.

In looking through the various laws and ordinances of the Old Testament, we cannot fail to observe the intense spirit of holiness which they breathe; the most trifling ordinance, apparently, was calculated to impress Israel with a sense of holiness. God's presence in their midst was ever to be the spring of holiness and separation to His people. Hence we read in this passage of the book of Deuteronomy, "So shalt thou put away evil from among you." And again, in the ordinance of the manslayer, we read, "Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel." (Num. xxxv. 34.) God's dwelling-place must be holy; and "without holiness no man shall see the Lord." There can be no alteration in this. Dispensations may change, but God, blessed be His name, can never cease to be "the holy, holy, holy Lord God of Israel;" nor can He ever cease to make His people like what He is Himself. Whether He speak from amid the thunders of Mount Sinai, or in all the gentleness and grace of the blood-sprinkled mercy-seat in the heavens, His object is still the same; viz., to make and keep His people holy.

Very different, however, is the mode of acting in the law, from that which we find in the gospel. In the law, God was calling upon man to be what He desired him to be; He set before him a high and holy standard, no doubt, but yet a standard to which man could not attain. Even though he might aspire most ardently after what the law set before him, yet, from the very fact of what he was, he could not attain to it. All his efforts were based upon the unholiness of a nature which was perfectly irrecoverable. The law was like a mirror, let down from heaven to show to all who would only look honestly into it, that they were, both negatively and positively, the very thing which the law condemned and set aside. The law said, "Do this," and "Thou shalt not do that;" and man's only response, uttered from the very depth of his nature, was, "O wretched man that I am!" In short, the law, like a plumb-line, measured the human character, and showed out all its crookedness and imperfection. It was not, by any means, its province to make the sinner better. No; its province was to reveal his sins, and put him under the curse. "The law entered, that the offence might abound." And again, "As many as are of the works of the law are under the curse." This is very plain. Have anything to do with law, and it will prove you to be a poor, helpless sinner, and put you under the curse. It can really do nothing else, so long as God and man, holiness and sin, continue to be what they are. We may seek to confound law and grace, in our ignorance of the true genius of each; but it will prove, in the end, to be most thoroughly vain. As well might we seek to cause light and darkness to mingle, as to make law and grace combine. No; they are as distinct as any two things can be. The law can only point out to man the error of his ways ? the evil of his nature. It does not make him straight, but only tells him he is crooked; it does not make him clean, but only tells him he is defiled. Nor was the law designed, as is often imagined, to lead sinners to Christ. This idea is founded upon an erroneous quotation of Galatians iii. 24. It is not said, "The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ," but "the law was our schoolmaster unto (or until) Christ." The words "to bring us" are in italics, and do not appear in the original. This is important, as helping my reader to understand the nature, object, and scope of the law. How could the law bring a man to Christ? All it did for him was to shut him up under the curse; his finding his way to Christ was the result of quite another ministry altogether. The law acted the part of a schoolmaster from the time it was given until Christ came, by keeping souls under a restraint from which nothing could deliver, save the spirit of liberty imparted through the gospel of Christ.

However, by a simple comparison of the two scriptures which stand at the head of this paper, we shall have a very striking proof of the difference between the law and the gospel. The case presented in each, is that of a son who was disposed to do his own will and enjoy his own way. This is no uncommon case. The prodigal desired to have his portion, and to be away from under the eye of his father. But, ah how soon he was called to learn his folly! When he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want." Just so; how else could it be? He had left the only place in which all his need could be supplied, even the father's house. He had made his portion and the father's to be separate things, and hence he was compelled to learn that the former was capable of being exhausted. We can get to the bottom of all human circumstances and resources. There never was a cup of human or earthly happiness ? be it ever so deep ? ever so abundant in desirable ingredients ? which could not be drained to the bottom. There never was a well of human, or earthly refreshment, of which it could not be said, "He that drinketh of this water shall thirst again." Not so, however, with the cup which redeeming love puts into our hand ? not so with the wells of salvation from which the gospel invites us to draw. These are exhaustless, eternal, divine. As the countless ages of eternity roll along, God's cup shall be full, and His wells shall send forth their streams in immortal freshness and purity. My reader, how sweet ? how ineffably sweet ? to partake of these!

But the prodigal "began to be in want." And what then? Did he think of the father? No. So long as he had any other resource, he would not think of returning home. "He went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine." This was terrible. Thus does Satan crush the spirits of his votaries. Every one who is not walking in communion with God and subjection to the gospel of Christ, is thus engaged in the service of Satan. There is no middle ground. Reader, whom are you serving? Are you serving Christ or Satan? If the latter, oh, remember the end! Remember, too, the Father's love ? the Father's house. Remember that God does not will the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from his evil ways and live. This you may learn from the prodigal. The moment his necessities led him to think of returning home, that home was open wide to receive him. And, observe, it was simply his need that caused him to say, "I will arise and go to my father." It was not any longing desire for the father's company, but merely for the father's bread. Many are vainly looking within for some rising emotions of affectionate desire after God, not knowing that our very necessities, our very miseries, our very sins, render us suited objects for the exercise of divine grace. Grace suits the miserable, because the miserable can magnify grace.

And here we have arrived at a point at which we may appreciate the contrast between our scriptures. How would the law have dealt with our prodigal? The answer is simple. "Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; and they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear." The law could speak of nought but judgment and death. Mercy was not within its range, nor at all in accordance with its spirit. "The soul that sinneth it shall die," was its stern language. And again, "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them."

But how does grace deal with its object? Oh for hearts to adore our God, who is the fountain of grace! "But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." In short, the mode of treatment is the very opposite. The law said, "Lay hold on him;" the gospel said, "Embrace him;" the law said, "Stone him;" the gospel said, "Kiss him;" and yet, be it remembered, we meet the same God in both. The God of Israel speaks both in Deuteronomy and in Luke; and, moreover, we must remember what has already been stated; viz., that we trace the same object in both, which is, to give full deliverance from the power of evil. The stone of judgment and the embrace of love were both designed to put away evil; but, ah! how much more fully was the latter in sympathy with the divine mind than the former. Judgment is truly God's strange work. It was far more congenial to Him to be on the neck of the poor returning prodigal than to be within the enclosure of Mount Sinai. True, the prodigal had nothing to commend him. He had proved himself to be all that the law condemned. He had been "a glutton, and a drunkard," the rags of the far country were upon him, and were the law but to take its course, instead of the affectionate embrace of love, he would have to meet the stern grasp of justice, and instead of the father's kiss he would have had to meet the stone of judgment from the men of his city in the presence of the elders. Hence we see the contrast between law and grace; it is most striking.

But here let us ask, How could all this be? How can we reconcile the marvellous difference in the principles of acting here set before us? Whither must we turn for a solution of this apparent contradiction? How can God embrace a poor sinner? How can He shield such from the full action of justice and the law? In other words, how can He be "just and the justifier"? How can He pardon the sinner steeped to the lips in iniquity, and yet not "clear the guilty"? Where, my reader, shall we find an answer to these questions? In the cross of Calvary. Yes; there we have a precious, a divine reply to all. The Man nailed to the tree settles everything. Jesus bore sin's tremendous curse upon the cross. He exposed His own bosom to the stroke of justice; He drained to the dregs the cup of Jehovah's righteous wrath. "He bore our sins in His own body on the tree." "He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Was not this a vindication of the law? Did ever the words, "So shalt thou put evil away," fall with such impressive solemnity upon the ear as when the blessed Son of God cried out from amid the horrors of Golgotha, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Oh, never, never! All the stones that were ever cast at offending sinners, all the penalties that were ever inflicted, yea, we shall proceed further, and say that the eternal punishment of the wicked in the lake of fire could not afford such a solemn proof of God's hatred of sin as the scene on the cross. There it was that men and angels might behold God's thoughts of sin, and God's thoughts of sinners; His hatred of the former, and His love for the latter. The very same act which shows out the condemnation of sin shows out the salvation of the sinner. Hence the cross, while it most fully vindicates the holiness and justice of God, opens up a channel through which the copious streams of redeeming love can flow down to the guilty sinner. "Mercy and truth met together, righteousness and peace kissed each other," when the Son of God offered up Himself as a sacrifice for sin.

And if it be asked, What proof have we of this? What solid ground of assurance have we of the full forgiveness and perfect acceptance of the believer? The answer is, Resurrection. Jesus is now at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens; and there, moreover, on behalf of the believer. "He was delivered for our offences," and, could we go no further than this, we might despair; but it is added, "He was raised again for our justification." Here we have full peace, full emancipation, full victory. When God raised Jesus from the dead, He declared Himself as "the God of peace." Justice was satisfied, and the sinner's Surety was set down at God's right hand; and all who, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, believe in His death and resurrection, are looked at in Him, and seen to be as free from every charge of sin as He is. Most marvellous grace! Who could have conceived such a thing? Who could have thought that He, who is "the brightness of God's glory, and the express image of His person," should come down and put Himself in the sinner's place, and bear all the wrath, curse, and judgment due to sin, in order that the sinner might be set down in the very presence of God, without "spot or wrinkle or any such thing," so that God might be able to say of him, "Thou art all fair; there is no spot in thee"? My reader, was ever love like this? Truly we have here love in its fountain, love in its channel, and love in its application. The Father is the eternal fountain, the Son is the channel, and the Holy Ghost is the power of application. What divine completeness! What perfect peace! What a solid resting-place for the sinner! Who can raise a question? God has received the prodigal, has clothed and adorned him, killed the fatted calf for him; and, above all, has given utterance to the words, "It was meet that we should make merry and be glad" ? words which ought to dispel every shadow of fear and doubt from the heart. If God can say, in virtue of the finished work of Christ, "It is meet," who can say it is not meet? Satan may accuse; but God's reply is, "Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?" In short, the soul that believes in Jesus is lifted into a perfectly cloudless region, where, it may be truly said, "there is neither enemy, nor evil occurrent;" and in that region we can see no one so exquisitely happy in the divine results of redemption as the blessed God Himself. If the prodigal could possibly have retained a feeling of doubt or reserve, what could have so effectually banished it as the father's joy in getting him back again? Neither doubt nor fear can live in the light of our Father's countenance. If we believe that God rejoices in receiving back a sinner, we cannot harbour suspicion or hesitancy. It is not merely that God can receive us, but it is His joy to do so. Hence we not only know that "grace reigns through righteousness," but that heaven rejoices over one repenting sinner. "Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift!"

GRACE is a mine of wealth

Laid open to the poor;

Grace is the sov'reign spring of health,

'Tis life for evermore.

Of grace then let us sing!

(A joyful, wondrous theme!)

Who grace has brought, shall glory bring,

And we shall reign with Him.

Then shall we see His face

With all the saints above,

And sing for ever of His grace,

For ever of His love.

The Advocacy of Christ.

1 John ii. 1.

The question often arises in the minds of the Lord's people, especially of those who are young in the faith, "What is to be done if we commit sins after we have been saved?" Many a child of God has said, "I know that I have believed in Christ, and see that my sins were put away by His blood; but what troubles me is the sins I commit now, and what am I to do with them?" The direct answer to this question is found in 1 John ii. 1, 2, "My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and He is the propitiation for our sins." This is clearly written to believers, for the apostle addresses them as "my children;" that is, those who have been born of God. And again, "We have an advocate with the Father," as it is only those who are born again who can call God their Father.

The first thing for us to see is, that, as believers in the Lord Jesus, all our sins are put away before God by the one offering on the cross, as we get fully brought out in the epistle to the Hebrews; because till this is seen there must always be confusion in the mind, confounding our knowledge of forgiveness of sins with the work of Christ that put them all away when they were all future. In Hebrews x. 11, 12, 14, we read, "And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: but this Man [Christ], after He had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God. . . . For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." The priests, under the law, stood and offered "oftentimes the same sacrifices, which could never take away sins," therefore their work was never done; but this Man [Christ] offered one sacrifice, and "for ever sat down on the right hand of God." Do you see, dear reader, that there is only one sacrifice for sins, and that there never will be another? So that if all your sins were not put away then, they never can be, for Christ is not going to die again.

People often say, "I know that my sins were put away up to my conversion;" but Scripture never speaks in that way, When did Christ bear your sins? On the cross. Did He bear a part of your sins, or did He put them away up to the day of your conversion? No; if He bore one, He bore them all when they were all future, when you had committed none of them; for, blessed be His name, He offered the "one sacrifice for sins," and then "for ever sat down on the right hand of God." This word "for ever" is not that which is used for everlasting, but it has the sense of continuously, uninterruptedly, never to rise up to offer another sacrifice or to complete the work; and the reason that He is so seated at the right hand of God is, that, "by one offering He hath perfected for ever (same word) them that are sanctified." He has perfected us for ever, therefore He has sat down for ever. The value of His one offering, which put away all our sins, is for ever; therefore He has nothing more to do throughout eternity with regard to the putting away of the sins of those that believe in His name.

Of course, when a soul is first awakened by the Holy Spirit, it could only be past sins that are brought to his knowledge, and that he knows are forgiven; but then, when we get the knowledge of forgiveness, we see that the work that put our sins away was accomplished when they were all future, and the value of that one sacrifice was not only up to the day of our conversion. Now we see the One that did the work "for ever sat down on the right hand of God," because He has perfected us for ever by that one offering; and God says, "Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." (Heb. x. 17.) Forgiveness of sins is the common portion of all Christians, as we read in 1 John ii. 12, "I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake." There would be no sense in saying our future sins are forgiven, for we have not committed them, and we ought not to contemplate sinning in the future; but we can always say, as Christians, as in Colossians i. 14, "In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins."

But many have thought, "If we have the 'forgiveness of sins,' why do we read, in 1 John i. 9, 'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins'?" There is another sense in which Scripture speaks of forgiveness; when a child of God has sinned, and his communion has been interrupted, and he confesses his sin, he gets forgiveness, not in the sense of non-imputation, as in Rom. iv. 7, 8, but of communion and joy being restored, which had been interrupted by the sin. The above verse (1 John i. 9) is a general statement, and would apply either to a sinner first coming to God and confessing his sins, and so getting forgiveness once for all on the ground of the death of Christ, or to a child of God who has sinned and confesses, and gets forgiveness as a child by the Father. The one might be called justifying forgiveness in the case of the sinner; and the other, Fatherly, or governmental, forgiveness in the case of a saint; and it is very important to distinguish between the two.

Christ as the Revealer of the Father.

God has been pleased to reveal Himself in various ways and under different characters in every age and in all dispensations. Before the cross He had made Himself known to Adam, to the patriarchs, and to His people Israel; but it was not until Christ came, and had glorified God on the earth, and finished the work which had been given Him to do, that all was told out, that the Father-name of God could be fully revealed. Ere this, clouds and darkness were round about Him; but as soon as atonement had been made by the death of Christ on the cross, the veil was rent, and believers could thereafter be set down in the light as God is in the light. All distance and concealment were now abolished, and all that God is, together with the name of Father, was fully displayed. Christ Himself, Christ as the eternal Son, but as the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us (John i. 14), was Himself the revelation of the Father (John xiv.); but until the descent of the Holy Ghost there was little, if any, power on the part of those before whose eyes the revelation was passing to apprehend it. There were a few anointed eyes who beheld His glory as of an only begotten with a Father, but John the Baptist knew Him not, except by the appointed sign of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon Him, and even Philip had to be told, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

Practically therefore there was no knowledge of God as Father until after Pentecost. This will be plain to the reader if we trace a little the successive revelations of God which were made to His people in the Old Testament. To Abraham, God said, "I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect" (Gen. xvii. 1); to Moses, "I AM THAT I AM: and He said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you" (Exodus iii. 14); and when He entered into distinct relationship with His chosen people, it was under the name of Jehovah, and that was ever His covenant name with Israel. Search indeed the whole of the Old Testament Scriptures, and not even the word father will be found more than five or six times as applied to God, and in most of these cases it is used rather as indicating the source of existence than as implying relationship. All the Old Testament saints were undoubtedly born again. This is to be insisted upon, for without a new life and a new nature they would not have been able to converse with God; but it is equally true that they never knew God as Father, and therefore that they could not be in the enjoyment of the relationship. One word from Scripture definitely and conclusively settles this point, "Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." (Matt. xi. 27.)

It is then abundantly proved that God was not revealed as Father before the advent of Christ. And passing now to the New Testament, it will be seen, as already stated, that Christ Himself was the revealer of the Father, and that it is in the Gospel of John He is presented to us in this character. In the very first chapter of this gospel it is said, "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." (v. 18.) Not only, indeed, does this scripture inform us that the only begotten Son declared the Father, but it also teaches that none other but Himself could have done so, and this because of the position He ever occupied ? the place of intimacy and communion which He ever, and He alone, enjoyed, as marked by the words, "in the bosom of the Father." This place He never left; He was in it (for it is a moral expression) as much when He was the Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, as when He possessed the glory which He had with the Father before the world was; and on the cross itself He was still there, for He Himself said, "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again" (John x. 17) ? His death in obedience to the commandment which He had received, supplying as it were a new motive for the expression of His Father's love. Later on in the gospel, we find one of His disciples permitted to lean on His bosom, and this same disciple was the chosen vessel to unfold in his gospel the eternal Sonship of Christ ? Christ as divine; and this in some measure may aid us in understanding that none but He who was ever in the bosom of the Father could unfold Him in this character and relationship. In divine things it is ever true as an abiding principle, that we can only tell out to others that which we ourselves know in our own souls. If we are not in the power of the thing spoken of, our words, clear as they may seem to be, will convey but little significance. The Lord Himself laid down this principle when He said, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen." (John iii. 11.)

Let us then enquire in what way the Lord revealed the Father. He Himself has answered the question. "If," said He to the Jews, "ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also" (John viii. 19); and again, speaking to Thomas, "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him. Philip saith unto Him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of" (from, literally) "myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake." (John xiv. 7-11.)

WELL may we sing! with triumph sing

The great Redeemer's praise!

The glories of the living God,

Revealed in Jesu's face.

The love of God it was that sought

From sin to set us free;

That gave the Son, whose precious blood

Has wrought our liberty.

In Him we read the Father's love,

And find, eternal peace;

We meet in Him a Saviour-God,

And fear and terror cease.

Then gladly sing, and sound abroad

The great Redeemer's praise;

The glories of the living God,

The riches of His grace!

The Children of God.

Gal. iii. 26.

We have already seen that Christ as the Son was the revealer of the Father; and as soon as the Father is declared it is of necessity that there should be those who are in the enjoyment of the relationship; in other words, the Father must have His children. Accordingly we find the family in the very same gospel that contains the declaration of the Father's name. There are, it may be said, three notices of it to which we may call attention.

The first is contained in chapter i.; but we turn now to that found in chapter xi. After the resurrection of Lazarus the Jewish authorities assembled together for consultation. They could not deny the miracle that had been wrought; but, shutting their eyes to its divine significance and their consequent responsibility, and caring only for their own selfish interests and advantage, they determined to rid themselves of the One who so disturbed their peace, and who was making so many disciples. They thought in their wicked counsels only of themselves; but God was behind the scene over-ruling their thoughts, and was about to make their wrath to praise Him in the accomplishment of His own eternal counsels of grace and love. He thus used the mouth of Caiaphas to prophesy that Jesus should die for the Jewish nation, this being God's purpose from eternity; and to that prophecy the Spirit of God added another in order to embrace the full character of the death of Christ, by the hand of John, who writes, "And not for that nation only, but that also He should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad." (John xi. 49-52.) We thus learn that not only was the heart of God set upon His children, but that also the death of Christ was requisite ? requisite for the glory of God as for the redemption of His people, as the foundation on which the Spirit of God could, through the entreating message of the gospel, go out into every land, and gather in one by one those who should constitute the Father's family, and as such be heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. As the Father could only be fully revealed by the life and death of Christ, so likewise the children could only be sought out, found, and gathered through that death.

The second reference is in chapter i. 12, 13, and points out the way in which we become children ? the only possible way ? and this must be entered upon more fully. It is stated at the very outset in accordance with the character of the gospel. In the three preceding gospels ? generally termed the synoptical gospels ? Christ is presented to His people for acceptance, and we see Him rejected in the course of the narrative. This is true of all three, though there are characteristic differences. In John, on the other hand, Christ is introduced as already rejected. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." The world was ignorant (knew not God, as in 2 Thess. i. 8), and the Jew rejected Him (did not obey the gospel, as also in the scripture cited). Hence we find a fuller display in John of the person of Christ, and the introduction of the cross with its blessed teachings at the commencement (chap. iii.) instead of waiting for the historical relation at the close. We have therefore, following immediately upon the statement of His rejection, a class indicated who received Him, and who in receiving Him received power (right or authority) to become (to take the place of) the children of God; and then, to dispel all uncertainty as to the nature of the change thus wrought, it is added, "Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." (v. 13.) It is a divine and sovereign operation effected by a power and through agencies outside of man, and with which man, though he may be the subject of their energy, can have nothing to do.

But the consideration of this will lead us back to the very fountain-head of the existence of the children of God. They are born of God. In chapter iii. the Lord tells Nicodemus, that "except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (v. 5); and here we find another truth, that those who are born again through these instrumentalities are brought into relationship of children with the Father. Combining then these scriptures, we shall have before us the whole truth of the process by which the family of God is formed.

Its origin is in God Himself; and this same apostle tells us another thing, not only that believers are born of God, but also that their blessed place and relationship flow from the heart of the Father. "Behold," he exclaims, "what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons (children ? tekna) of God" (1 John iii. 1); so that the very fact of our being children is the expression of the Father's heart. He desired to have His children for His own satisfaction and joy; and if we add another scripture, we shall see that in a past eternity He formed this blessed counsel of grace. "Having," as St. Paul writes, "predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the Beloved." (Eph. i. 5, 6.) We cannot dwell too much upon this outflow of the heart of God, on the fact, we repeat, that our being children is but a simple consequence of the Father's love. And when in connection with this we consider what we were, the state we were in, our utter alienation from God, the bitter enmity of our hearts towards Him, we shall in some measure enter into the meaning of John's cry, "Behold, what manner of love!" Yea, it is love unspeakable, unbounded, and divine, having no motive for its expression except in that blessed heart whence it has flowed. Well indeed might we be humbled before it when we think that we ? once poor sinners of the Gentiles ? have become its object, and have been brought into its enjoyment, and that for eternity.

FATHER! we, Thy children, bless Thee

For Thy love on us bestowed;

Source of blessing, we confess Thee

Now, our Father and our God.

Wondrous was Thy love in giving

Jesus for our sins to die,

Wondrous was His grace in leaving,

For our sakes, the heavens on high.

Now the sprinkled blood has freed us,

Hast'ning onward to our rest,

Through the desert Thou dost lead us,

With Thy constant favour blest.

Our Identification with Christ from the Cross to the Glory.

I want to ask you to look at a few scriptures which unfold to us with great clearness and simplicity our identification with Christ from the cross to the glory.

We often find, in course of conversation, that people do not know the difference between "sin" and "sins." Were you asked what the difference is, perhaps you would say, "'Sin' is singular, and 'sins' plural." Such an answer is frequently given, but that is not what Scripture means by "sin" and "sins." Sin is the evil nature we brought into this world; sins are the things which that nature is guilty of committing. Sin is like a crab-tree, and sins the fruit that appears on it. It is just as much a crab-tree if it has only one crab-apple on it as if it had a thousand. When you are clear as to the difference between sin and sins, you will find that the Epistle to the Romans will help you in a remarkable way. The first part of Romans, from chap. i. to v. 11, is about sins we have been guilty of. From verse 12 of chap. v. it is a new subject, and the question of sin is taken up, not "sins." In chap. vi. sin is mentioned seventeen times; "sins" not once. Death is also presented in one form or another seventeen times in the same chapter. The moment the Holy Ghost mentions sin, He mentions in connection with it death! Why is this? Because nothing short of death would meet what is due to sin ? nothing but the death of Christ.

Have you found out that your evil nature is so bad you cannot make it any better? "Oh, no!" you say. "I pray, fast, and do all kinds of things to improve it!" Well, have you succeeded? You know you have not. If Satan has not stupefied your conscience with some of his opiates, you will have to own, like the woman in the gospel, that you are nothing better, but rather grown worse. Perhaps another says, "I have tried, and I find that I cannot make it any better." Like the man in Mark v., it cannot be kept bound with chains, or tamed, no matter what restraint you put it under. And this just proves the incorrigible badness of the first Adam nature. Now we come to a second question, more startling than the first, Have you found the flesh to be so bad that it cannot be made any worse? "No." Well, you will have to own this to be true if you bow to God's word. "Where is your scripture for it?" you say. In Rom. viii. 7. The natural mind ? the mind of the flesh ? is "enmity against God."

For 2500 years, from the time Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden, man was on his trial, and became so bad that God had to sweep him away by the flood. Afterwards He put man under law for 1500 years, and finally sent His Son, when they said, "This is the heir; come, let us kill Him." God had said, "Thou shalt not commit murder," and they murdered God's Son, the Saviour of sinners. With that deed the world's probation ended, and man, guilty and lost, is only awaiting the hour of judgment.

Why the cross if man could be made better? Why the propitiation for sins and substitution for sinners if the flesh could be improved? It is an awful, solemn demonstration of the fact that the flesh cannot be improved; it was brought to an end judicially in the death of Christ. "Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin." We were the serfs, vassals, slaves of sin ? tyrannized over by it, but we have died to sin in the death of Christ.

Rom. vi. 6 is the broad statement of the fact that our old man is crucified with Christ; Gal. 20 is the soul individually believing it, planting the foot of faith firmly on the magnificent fact, and getting out of it all that God intends. It is intensely individual, the soul making it its own. It is true of all believers, though not enjoyed by all. A man may have a fortune left him of ?500,000 a year, but if he does not believe it he may go on trying to eke out a miserable existence on ?1 a day. The fortune is his, but he gets no enjoyment from it because he does not credit the fact. "I am crucified with Christ nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2: 20) ? is just the soul saying, "I believe what God says about me in Romans vi., and I live in the enjoyment of it."

A crucified man is a man come to an end on a cross of wood. I am crucified, and now I have a new life, entirely outside and apart from Adam, a life that he had nothing to do with. God utterly ignores my standing in the first man Adam, and does not recognize me in it. (Rom. viii. 9.) If I am a child of God, I am before Him in Christ. Christ is my life. "This is the true God and eternal life," and Christ lives in me. I feel how great a thing it is for any of us to be able to say, "I am crucified," yet I am alive; I have got life, I am a living being, "yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Well may we ask, What manner of persons ought we to be? And, in regard to our practical life, what is to come out? Simply what is in Christ ? one ceaseless flow, in all our words, our work, our ways, of Christ, because He is in us. It is intensely individual. Can you look up to heaven and say, "He loved me, and gave Himself for me"?

When preaching in Ireland, I once mentioned that verse, and a young lady said to me, "if only that had been pointed out to me years ago what I might have been spared! I thought that I had to love Him. I tried one thing and another without success; but when you were preaching in my brother's cottage you said, 'He loved me.' I can rest there. I was incapable of loving Him, but He was capable of loving me. He has done it, and I believe it." Is your faith anchored there? Do you believe it?

I don't know that I need say more on the first point, but pass on now to the other identifications with Christ. The first is in death; we, "our old man," are crucified with Christ. If you accept that, you will never think you can make the old nature better. The people who do are to be pitied. If you had a piece of land, and sowed it with seed, and got no crop, what would you do? Get fresh seed. Then supposing you got no crop the second time, what would you do? Get fresh seed again. And supposing there was no crop the third time, after you had manured and husbanded the land in every way, you would say, "I will waste no more seed upon it; it is bad ground, and produces nothing." That bad ground is the old nature. Don't sow a thought, or word, or look upon it; for God has set it aside as a worthless thing. Why then should you try to get any good from it?

The flesh is incorrigibly bad, and the only remedy is to reckon yourself to have died "unto," not through sin, or in sin, but "unto" sin. (Rom. vi. 11.) You have died, and now you are risen. God reckons it true of you, and if you want to be in the power and enjoyment of it, you must reckon it true as well. Did you notice that little word "also"? You will get no blessing if you don't reckon with God. Now I pass on to the second. You are dead. What do you do with dead people? Bury them out of sight.

Having died, and been buried out of sight at Christ's burial, and buried with Him by baptism, which is a figure of death, we are raised with Him, and that brings us to our third identification.

In Romans man is looked at as alive in sins; in Ephesians ii. he is "dead in sins," in the lowest possible condition. Think of God coming to us there. We are quickened with Christ; it is a most wonderful thing! Not only is Christ quickened, but I am quickened too. In connection with the first Adam you come in for death, judgment, and condemnation; in connection with the last Adam you have life, righteousness, and glory. I don't ask you if you fully understand it. Who does? But we can just pause and think over such a love to you and me, not more true of the oldest than of the youngest, not less of the youngest than of the oldest; we are quickened with Christ.

Fourthly, "we are raised with Him." (Col. ii. 12.) We are risen with Christ. (Col. iii. 1.) There is the life of the believer who has died in the death of Christ ? "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God," Did God ever say that of anybody before the death and resurrection of Christ? How could any one have died with Christ when He had never died Himself? That is a characteristic of Christianity. It was not known, and was never true before Christianity, that our life is hid with Christ. Do you believe that you are raised together with Christ? That is the point. Would it not have power over you if you believed it? What a power to separate from the world! I long for the Holy Ghost to apply it, and make it good in our words, our walk, our ways, and our lives. We are resurrection men and women ? not risen as to our bodies; for that we wait till He shall come, and take us to Himself; but we are in resurrection life now.

How am I to prove that I belong to the resurrection family, that I am a child of resurrection? "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above." Why? Because we are dead; our life is hid with Christ, and this is the practical effect of it.

Eph. ii. 6: "Raised us up together;" that is, He has raised up Jew and Gentile. "And made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." "We are seated." That is our position, not standing, but seated in restful enjoyment of our present blessings in Christ.

You will find the sixth, seventh, and eighth identifications all in one verse ? Rom. viii. 17 ? "And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together." "Co-heirs," or "heirs together." Think of that. It never says that of the archangel; never does God say of any of the heavenly intelligences that they are heirs together with Christ. But we, poor Gentiles, who were afar off and not nigh, think of it ? we are heirs with Christ.

"I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me." (John xvii. 23.) The same love that the Father bears to His beloved Son is the love with which He loves us. "All things are yours." Why? Because ye are Christ's. Life, death, etc., all things are yours, because you are heirs together with Christ. Don't talk about your poverty; you are richer than the archangel ? heirs of an inheritance in which the archangel will never share: we are heirs with Christ. We don't half count up our possessions and blessings through being one with Christ. We have received the Holy Ghost and everything in Christ. Now it is only as you are consciously enjoying your oneness with Christ in the heavenlies, by the Holy Ghost in you, that you will be proof against the attacks of Satan against the truth. May God give us to hold the magnificent fact that we are one with Christ ? co-heirs.

Every child of God taught by the Holy Ghost accepts what the Father says about him in the first six; but when we come to the seventh ? "suffering with Christ" ? people begin to question, Why must we suffer? Why should we make ourselves singular, and bring down suffering on ourselves by being peculiar? "All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." Just in proportion as we represent Christ, we shall be hated by the world as He was. Are we so living as to represent Christ by the power of the Holy Ghost that people can say of us, "There is a man representing Christ"? That is what we get in Phil. 1: "To me to live is Christ." Nothing but Christ; feeling nothing that touches self, only what touches Him. How many there are who cannot bear a word! They are exquisitely sensitive as to what touches self; but when anything is said touching Christ, they feel it no more than would a marble statue ? they are not touched at all by it.

"Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer for His sake." It is a real gift. The apostles rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer for Him; and in Heb. xi. we get, "Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt."

Are you going to shirk rejection with a rejected Christ? You will never have such a moment again; you are left down here to share in His rejection. "If we suffer we shall also reign with Him." Suffering and reigning go together. Many kick vehemently against this, but you don't know what a loss it is not to get it. It is a real gain to suffer for Him. On the road to glory we are left down here to share His path, and to say ?

"Master, we would no longer be

Loved by the world that hated Thee."

Can you say ?

"I'd not have joy where He had woe,

Be rich where He was poor"?

Have you got hold of these words ? "They are not of the world"? It is true. God give us to accredit it!

Lastly, "glorified together." What an end to the chain of our identifications with Christ! What a prospect! When I hear saints talking of their trials and troubles, I say, What are they in comparison to glory? Who has ever been through what Paul went through, and what does he say? "I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed." Everything you can see is passing away. Are you living in the changeless, eternal things which are yours? You are going to be glorified together with Christ.

"We two are so joined,

He'll not be in glory, and leave me behind."

He will not be in glory alone. Look at Rom. viii. and see those five links stretching from eternity to eternity. Think of it. "Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate . . . whom He did predestinate, them He also called: whom He called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified." There it is, a wonderful chain, hanging from side to side of the throne, beginning with foreknowledge and ending with glory. Do you believe it? Are you in the enjoyment of this truth? Receive it on the authority of God's word, and then you will have the enjoyment of it, and power to carry it out.

Now let us just go over these eight points of identification:

1st. Crucified together with Christ.

2nd. Buried together with Christ.

3rd. Quickened together with Christ.

4th. Raised together with Christ.

5th. Seated together in Christ.

6th. Heirs together with Christ.

7th. Sufferers together with Christ.

8th. Glorified together with Christ.

This last is our sure unfailing prospect, and we were never so near the glory as now. A few more steps through the trackless, waste, wild, howling wilderness, and then the Father's home.

"And how will recompense His smile

The sufferings of this little while."

The Lord give us to live in the enjoyment of the wonderful things which are to be ours throughout eternity, for His name's sake.

The Coming of the Lord that which Characterizes the Christian Life.

Notes of an Address.

I purpose to take up a subject which I feel to be deeply important ? the coming of the Lord Jesus and to take it up, not proving it as a doctrine, but showing that it was originally a substantial part of Christianity itself. The groundwork is Christ's first coming, and His atoning death but when we look beyond the foundation, then we see that the coming of the Lord Jesus is not merely a bit of knowledge, but a substantive part of the faith of the church of God, and that on which the moral state of the saints, and indeed of the church of God, depends. You will see, in going through the passages which I will now quote, that it connects itself and is mixed with every part of Christianity, characterizes it, and connects itself with every thought and feeling of the Christian. A person could not read the Scriptures with an unprejudiced mind without seeing it.

I take conversion. People say, What has that to do with the Lord's coming? That is part of what they were converted to, "to wait for God's Son from heaven" This waiting for God's Son from heaven characterized their conversion: they were converted to serve God surely, but also "to wait for His Son from heaven." (1 Thess. i. 10.)

The Christian's position as to the coming of the Lord is, that he is waiting for Christ to come according to His promise. People say He comes at death. I reply, Do you make death the same as Christ? If this were the case we should have Him coming hundreds of times, whereas we only read of His coming twice. (Heb. ix. 28.) Shall I tell you what will happen when Christ comes? Resurrection! This is quite a different thing from death. The coming of Christ is, for the saint, to be the end of death ? exactly the opposite. I believe nobody can find a trace of the thought in Scripture that Christ comes at death. Instead of Christ's coming being death, it is resurrection; we go to Christ at death, it is not Christ who comes to us. Blessed it is "to depart and to be with Christ." "Absent from the body, present with the Lord." But I am to show that this thought of the coming of Christ mixes itself with and characterizes every part of Christian life.

In the first place we have it in conversion, as already said. They were converted to wait for God's Son from heaven. I will turn to other passages in support of it, but I will go through Thessalonians first. In the second chapter of the first epistle, at the end, the apostle speaks of what his comfort and joy in service were. He had been driven away by persecution from the midst of the Thessalonians, and writing to them speaks of His comfort in thinking of them. But how? "For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at His coming?" He cannot speak of his interest in them and joy without bringing in the coming of the Lord Jesus. Again, as regards holiness: "The Lord make you to increase and abound in love . . . to the end He may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints." (1 Thess. iii. 12, 13.) As to the death of a saint, they were so thoroughly looking for the Lord that if a person died they thought he would not be there ready to go to meet Him. They were wrong in this, and the apostle corrects their mistake. But now people say, when a saint dies, We shall go after him, we shall follow him. Here there is not a word about it. Suppose I were to go and say to a Christian now, who had lost some one dear to him, "Do not be uneasy, Christ will bring him with Him," he would think me wild, or find it utterly unintelligible and yet that is the way the apostle comforts them. Them also which sleep through Jesus will God bring with Him. (Chap. iv.) He then shows the way He will do it. "We which are alive . . . shall not prevent them which are asleep." "Prevent" is an old word for anticipate or go before. The first thing the Lord will do when He descends is to raise the sleeping saints. He is going to bring them with Him. If they have fallen asleep in Him, their spirits will have been with Him meanwhile; but then they will receive glory, be raised in glory, be like Him, as they had been like the first Adam, and going to meet Him in the air, will be for ever with Him; and when He appears He will bring them with Him, and they will appear with Him in glory. You get it in a general way in the fifth chapter, where he desires their whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. This hope then is a part of the Christian state in every aspect. Conversion, joy in service, holiness, a believer's death, the goal of blamelessness, all are connected with the coming of the Lord.

Turn now to Matthew 25. The wise virgins take oil in their vessels, but they all go to sleep and forget that the Bridegroom was coming. But what I have specially to inquire here is, What was the original calling? The statement, clear and positive, is, that they went out to meet the Bridegroom, but while He tarried they all slumbered and slept ? they all forgot His coming, the wise as well as the foolish. But at midnight the cry is heard, "Behold, the Bridegroom!" The thing that roused them up from their sleep was the cry, "Behold, the Bridegroom!" The original object then of the Church was to go to meet Him who came; but even true believers forgot it. And, further, what awakes them from their sleep is their being again called out to meet Him at His coming. Then you get in "the talents" the same thing in regard to service and responsibility. He takes His journey and tells them, "Occupy till I come."

Another very striking fact as to this truth is, it is always presented as a present operative expectation. You will never find the Lord nor the apostles speaking of the Lord's coming, with the supposition that it would be delayed beyond the life of those to whom they spoke. It might be at cock-crowing, or in the morning; but they were to be waiting for God's Son from heaven. In the parables referred to, the virgins who went to sleep were the same virgins as those who awoke up. The servants to whom the talents were entrusted were the servants who rendered an account of them at His return. We know centuries have passed; but He will not allow any thought of delay. "In such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh." "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching." Again, what was the cause of the Church's ruin? It was, "My Lord delayeth His coming." It was not saying, "He will not come;" but "He delayeth His coming." Then the servant began to beat the men-servants and maid-servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; and this brings on his judgment. If the bride loves the Bridegroom, she cannot but wish to see Him. Her heart is where He is: When the Church lost this she settled down to enjoyment where she was; she got worldly; she did not care about the Lord's return.

Turn now to Luke 12, and you will find how this waiting for Christ characterizes the Christian, and therewith the serving Him while He is away. "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." They were to have their loins girded, their lights burning. Such was the characteristic of a Christian. They were to be as men that waited for their Lord, to open to Him immediately; their affections in order and full profession of Christ, but watching for their Lord's return. It is not having the doctrine of the Lord's coming. The blessing rests on those who are watching, "like men that wait for their Lord." "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching." They must be girded, and have their lights bright while He is away, and watch for His return; and then He makes them sit down to meat, and girds Himself, and comes forth and serves them. Now they must be girded, and watch; our rest is not here. "But," says the Lord, "when I have things all my own way, you shall sit down to meat, and I will gird myself and come forth and serve you. I will make you enjoy all the best that I have in heaven, and I will minister it to you; only be found watching."

Christ is for ever in grace a servant according to the form He has taken. He is girded now according to John 13. They would naturally think that if He were gone to heaven in glory there was an end of His service to them; but He tells them, "I am going away; I cannot stay here with you, yet I cannot give you up; but as I cannot remain on earth with you, I must make you fit for me in heaven. 'If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.'" It is water here, not blood. "He that is washed needeth not, save to wash his feet." Life-giving conversion, as well as salvation, is fully wrought; but if we pick up dirt in the way, even as to communion and the walk, grace and advocacy are there to wash our feet and have us practically fit for being with God where Christ is gone. Growth there is or ought to be; and as to the unchangeable cleanness of the new man, this is certain. But if I have not been watchful, I shall pick up dirt in my path. I cannot have this in heaven, nor in communion with what is there; and the Lord says in effect, "I am not going to give you up because I am going to God and glory, and so I must have you in a state suitable to that, and washed as you are (though not all, for Judas was there), keep you fit, restoring you when you fall. But you must be watching while I am away."

It is a comfort to me to know that all the virgins woke up in time, and I believe all His saints will wake up before the Lord comes. The difficulty to the heart in looking around is that so many do not receive it. But the true service of the Lord is connected with watching. That is the state to which the blessing and the heavenly feast are attached. Then you find another thing ? serving while He is away; and the result of this is, "Of a truth I will make him ruler over all I have." It is far better to eat, as is said of Israel, of the finest of the wheat, and that in the Father's house; but if we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. With the serving in His absence, I get the ruling; as the heavenly feast with watching. The Lord then goes on to what we had in Matthew, the saying, "My Lord delayeth His coming."

What the Lord is pressing as to watching and serving is, "I am coming again. You must be watching for me, as men that wait for their lord." That was to be their character as Christians. Supposing all the people in this town were actually watching, waiting for the Lord from heaven, not knowing the moment He would come, do you think the whole town would not be changed? A person once said to me that if everybody believed that, the world could not go on at all; and the Christian cannot, in a worldly way.

If people were waiting for the Lord from heaven, the whole tone and character of their life would be changed. I may have the doctrine of Christ's coming, when I am really not looking for Him; but I should not like to be heaping money together when the Lord comes.

Turn now to Philippians 3. Paul was running a race. "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before." And how does he speak of Christ at the close of that chapter? "Brethren, be followers together of me . . . for our conversation" (our living association) "is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ," etc.

The Lord's coming affects all the truths of Christianity. Christ is not now on His own throne at all. He is sitting now, according to the word in Heb. 10 (and also in Psalm 110), at God's right hand, sitting on the Father's throne, as He says Himself in the promise in Laodicea. He has settled the question of sin for them at His first coming, and they have no more conscience of sins; they are perfected for ever. And to them that look for Him shall He appear a second time without sin unto salvation. He is expecting in the heavens till His enemies be made His footstool. Why does He say "His enemies"? Because He is sitting down after He has finished all for His friends; that is, those that believe in Him. Have all your sins been put away out of God's sight? If not, when will it be done? (1 Peter ii. 24.) That you grow in hatred of them all ? all right! But if they are not borne and put away on the cross, when will it be done? Can you get Christ to die again? Can you get anyone else to do it? If it is not done, it will never be done at all. Beloved friends, if the work is not finished, it will never be done at all. But it is done, and therefore He says, the worshippers once purged "have no more conscience of sins. . . For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." (Heb. x. 2, 14.)

If you look now at Col. 3, you will find the same thing in its full result held out as our hope. "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory." The first promise He gave the disciples when going away was His coming again. "Do not be troubled, I am going to prepare a place for you. Do not be uneasy, I cannot stay with you, so I must have you up there with me" and the first thing is, "I will come again, and receive you unto myself." It is not one by one by death, but by resurrection for the dead, and change for the living, His actual coming to receive them, raised or changed, to be with Himself where He was gone, and like Himself, that we shall be in glory with Him.

Again, at His departing from His disciples left down here, what was the last they saw of Him?

They saw Him go up before their eyes, and the angel said to them, "Why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus . . . shall so come in like manner." His coming is wrought into the whole texture of the Christian life.

What is Scripture's last word? "Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus." in the same way you get it at the beginning, with warning and threatening, Jesus Christ, Faithful Witness, the First-begotten, etc. "Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him." "I, Jesus, have sent mine angel," etc. "I am . . . the bright and morning star." Now I get what these saints who were watching, and those only, see. There is no star to be seen when the sun is risen; they see the morning star while it is yet early dawning, for the night is far spent, the day is at hand. Here He calls Himself "the root and offspring of David; the bright and morning star. And the Spirit and the bride say, Come." If the bride has got the sense of being the bride of Christ, she must desire to be with the Bridegroom; there is not proper love to Christ unless she wants to be with Him. Abram said of his wife, "She is my sister;" then the Egyptians ? the world ? took her into their house. I just add that you get here the whole circle of the Church's affections. "The Spirit and the bride say, Come; and let him that heareth say, Come." That is, the Christian who has beard the word of his salvation joins in the cry. Then those who thirst for some living water are called to come. The saints of the Church can say, though they have not yet the Bridegroom in glory, that they have the living water, and so call, "Let him that is athirst, come," and then address the call universally, "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." This they have, though not the Bridegroom. What I find then is, that in the word of God the thoughts and feelings and conduct and doings and affections of Christians are identified with the coming of Christ. Take all these things, and you will find that they are all identified with the coming of the Lord.

Take the first epistle of John, chapter 3, "Behold, what manner of love," etc. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is." Beloved friends, we are "predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son." This is what God has purposed for us. When are we to be like Christ in the glory? When He comes. It is not when a person dies, and the spirit goes to be with Christ; for then he is like Christ when Christ was in the grave; and I do not want to be like Christ when Christ was in the grave. But if I die, I shall be like Christ as to that, but this is not what I want, though blessed in itself. I want to be like Him in the glory. When will that be? When He comes He will change our vile bodies, and fashion them like to His glorious body; so here it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but when He shall appear we shall be like Him. (Phil. iii. 20, 21; 1 John iii. 2.) Now mark the practical consequences upon the man that has been in his faith brought up to God's purposes. "He that hath this hope in Him, purifieth himself, even as He is pure." I know I am going to be perfectly like Christ in the glory, therefore I want to be as like Him as possible down here. You find here again what the Holy Scriptures are explicit in teaching, that holiness also is always referred to conformity to Christ in glory. I shall have that likeness to Christ in glory, and nothing else is my standard. You will find one passage already quoted, "To the end He may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all His saints." The perfection of the Christian is to be like Him when He comes. What again I find as to a Christian's body in 1 Cor. xv. is, "It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory." We have the blessed assurance that accompanies true assured hope of the first resurrection and its results.

We shall be perfectly like Christ when we are raised from the dead. We give an account of ourselves, but it is when we are like the Person to whom we are to give an account. The full efficacy of His first coming has been lost, and therefore people are not comfortable when thinking of His second coming. But for the saint "Christ is the first-fruits, then they that are Christ's at His coming." Is Christ the first-fruits of the wicked? Surely not. Just as Christ's resurrection was the public testimony of God's approval of Himself and His work, the resurrection of the saints will be a testimony of God's approval of them as in Him. As we find in Luke xx. 35, 36, "They which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: neither can they die any more: but are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection."

Could anybody show me a single passage about a general resurrection? There is no such thought in Scripture. You get the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew quoted for it, that the goats and sheep represent the two classes; but He has come in His glory down here. He is not sitting on the great white throne: before this heaven and earth flee away. Here He is come, and sits on His throne. When He does come, and sits there, He gathers all the Gentiles ? the nations ? to judge them. It is the judgment of the quick or the living. You have three sets of people, not two; and you have nothing of resurrection. You have sheep, goats, and brethren. (Matt. xxv. 40.) So far from its being a general resurrection, there is no reference to resurrection at all; it is quite a different subject. Further, the only question is, How have they treated His brethren? The ground of judgment does not apply to ninety-nine out of a hundred of those who are to be judged, if it were a general judgment. Those that have had the testimony of the kingdom before He comes to judge the quick will be treated according as they have received God's messengers, but such only are in judgment.

And now the point I return to is, that the coming of the Lord influences and forms the whole life of the Christian. You cannot separate anything in the whole course and ways of the Christian from the coming of the Lord Jesus; and there is but the first coming, and the second coming. He has appeared once in the end of the world, and to them that look for Him shall He appear the second time unto salvation. It is true that He comes and dwells in us; but we speak with Scripture of actual coming. If you take holiness, or service, or conversion, or ministry, or a person who has died, they are all connected with Christ's coming. He warns them to be found watching.

I might quote other passages, but I have quoted enough to show that the Lord's coming is connected with everything in the Christian life. When we see Him as He is, then, and then only, shall we be like Him, according to God's purpose. And now I only ask, Are you waiting for God's Son from heaven?

His bearing the sins of many is the only ground of hope for any sinner; that is, the finished work which enables us, through faith, to look for Him when sealed by the Holy Ghost. Then, I say, what am I waiting for? I am waiting for God's Son from heaven. Can you say, "I am watching for Christ"? I do not know when He will come. "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord, when He cometh, shall find watching." I do not ask you, "Do you understand about the coming of the Lord?" To wait for Him was the thing they were converted to. The thing that woke the virgins up was, "Behold, the Bridegroom!" Are you actually waiting for God's Son from heaven? Would you like Him to come to-night? Peter explains the delay. He says His long-suffering is salvation, not willing that any should perish. What would you think if He were to come to-night? Would it just be what your soul was looking for? People think that it would stop the gospel to be waiting for God's Son from heaven. Did the acceptance of God's testimony about the deluge stop the preaching of Noah? Far from hindering, it was what gave edge to all. May the Lord give us to be ready, when He comes ? found watching for Him.

"Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus." Col. iii. 17.

"Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him." (Col. iii. 17.) Here I get the whole course of everyday life. There are constantly difficulties that I find in passing through this world. I say, Ought I to do this thing or that, or not? I am uncertain as to the right course, or I may find great hindrances to doing what I think to be right. Now, if ever I find myself in doubt, my eye is not single; my whole body is not full of light, therefore my eye is not single. God brings me into certain circumstances of difficulty until I detect this. It may be something that I never suspected in myself before which hinders me from seeing aright; but it is something between me and Christ, and until that is put away I shall never have certainty as to my path. Therefore "whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus." This will settle nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand. If you are questioning whether you shall do a thing or not, just ask yourself, Am I going to do it in the name of the Lord Jesus? It will settle it at once.

Thus if a person says, What harm is there in my doing such and such a thing? I ask, Are you going to do it in the name of the Lord Jesus? Perhaps it may be something of which you will answer at once, Of course not. Then it is settled at once. It is the test of the state of the heart. If my eye is single, if the purpose of my heart is all right, I get here what settles every question ? it tests my heart. I wanted to know the right path, and it is as simple as A B C. If my heart is not upon Christ, I shall endeavour to do my own will; and this is not God's will. There is the constant uniform rule which clearly judges every path and circumstance. Am I simply doing it in the name of the Lord Jesus?

But what do I find with it? "Giving thanks to God the Father through Him." In another place it is said, "In everything give thanks." (1 Thess. v. 18.) Where my heart can take Christ with me, my mind is on God, and I can say, "He is with me," even if it is tribulation. I have got the path of God, I have got Christ with me in my path, and I would rather be there than in what is apparently the fairest and pleasantest thing in the world. As it is said in Psalm lxxxiv., "In whose heart are the ways of them."

This chapter (Col. iii.) begins with the great truth, that we are dead and risen with Christ ? the judgment of the old man absolutely and completely, and our reckoning it practically to be dead. People have talked about dying to the flesh, and of its being a slow death, etc., which is all nonsense. It is a simple fact that is true already; and if I died with Christ, I shall live with Him. It is the power of this that works in my soul. The root of all Paul's doctrine is, that we have been crucified with Him (Rom. vi. 6; Gal. ii. 20), and have died with Him (Rom. vi. 8); and it is not now we who live, but Christ that lives in us. Then Christ becomes the object of this life. Having laid that ground ? that the old man is put off and the new man put on (Col. iii. 9, 10), which is Christ ? he draws the consequence of the blessing in which we stand, and the fruits which spring from Him; and then there is this simple but blessed rule for him that is in earnest ? to do nothing but what can be done in the name of the Lord Jesus.

One great thing here practically put before us is this ? Christ is all. He is in all; but this is the great thing we have to look to, Is He practically all? Can you honestly say, Though a poor weak creature, notwithstanding that, I am not conscious of having a single other object in the world but Christ? You find many difficulties, you are not watchful enough, your faith is feeble, you know your short-comings; but can you, notwithstanding all this, honestly say, I have no object in the world but Christ?

First, the root of all is Christ as the life; then we pass over to the outward conduct in the man's walk. And let me remark, that while a person may be walking outwardly uprightly and blamelessly, it may be very feebly as a Christian, and without spirituality. You will find many a true Christian who has Christ as his life, and nothing to reproach him with as to his walk, and yet is not spiritually-minded. (Rom. viii. 6; 1 Cor. iii. 1.) You talk to him about Christ, there is nothing that answers. There is, between the life that is at the bottom and the blamelessness that is at the top, between him and Christ, a whole host of affections and objects that are not Christ at all. How much of the day, or of the practice of your soul, is filled up with Christ? How far is He the one object of your heart? When you come to pray to God, do you never get to a point where you shut the door against Him? where there is some reserve, some single thing in your heart, that you keep back from Him? If we pray for blessing up to a certain point only, there is reserve; Christ is not all practically to us.

O MAY Thy Spirit guide our souls,

And mould them to Thy will,

That from Thy paths we ne'er may stray,

But keep Thy precepts still!

That to the Saviour's stature full

We nearer still may rise,

And all we think, and all we do,

Be pleasing in Thine eyes.

What is the Unpardonable Sin?

Amongst the many devices employed by Satan to discourage souls, and lead them astray, is that of beguiling them into the thought that they have committed the unpardonable sin. It is sad indeed to see the distress into which some are plunged through listening to this suggestion of the wicked one. But, before proceeding to say a few words in the endeavour to help those who may be in this painful condition, we would earnestly remind them of Satan's real character, as declared by the Lord Jesus Christ: "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." (John viii. 44.)

Now, as long as men are careless and worldly, living without God, Satan leaves them undisturbed in the enjoyment of the pleasures of sin; but the moment the soul becomes awakened to its responsibility to God, and the cry of the heart has gone forth, "What must I do to be saved?" than he does his utmost to hinder them from coming to Christ, to blind them to the abounding grace of God, and to make them believe that they are too sinful to be saved.

In order to understand the passage which treats of the unpardonable sin, we would invite our readers to carefully consider the whole context. Christ had been casting out unclean spirits, when "the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth He out devils. And He called them unto Him, and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end. No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house. Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation: because they said, He hath an unclean spirit." (Mark iii. 22-30.)

Any careful reader of the foregoing passage may see at a glance what the unpardonable sin is. It is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. And in what did the blasphemy consist? We are distinctly told, in verse 30, that it was "because they said, He hath an unclean spirit." That is, these wicked scribes said that the Holy Ghost was the devil. Horrible wickedness And does not your soul, beloved reader ? you who may be sorely troubled about this sin ? revolt at the very suggestion of such a thing? How, then, can you have committed it? Those wicked men saw the work of the Holy Ghost before their very eyes, and yet, in their blindness and wickedness, ascribed it to Satan, saying, "He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth He out devils." But did you ever see the Lord cast out devils, and say of Him, "He hath an unclean spirit"? Surely you would never allow the thought that He wrought miracles by the power of Satan, or that the Holy Ghost was Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. Again we ask you, then, How can you have committed the unpardonable sin? Impossible! It is simply Satan's lie to make and keep you miserable. Foolish soul, listen to him no longer; give him no place; resist him, and he will flee from you. (Eph. iv. 27; James iv. 7.)

But if Satan find that you are beginning to see through, and to escape from his snare, he will very probably change his tactics, and suggest, as he does to some, that if you have not blasphemed the Holy Ghost you have at least sinned against Him. But what saith the Scripture? We nowhere read that sin against the Holy Ghost is not forgiven; or who could be saved? For is not all sin against Him, in that the Holy Ghost is God? And all sin is against God; and God forgives all manner of sins and iniquities. Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is the alone exception. Of every one that believeth He says, even the God that cannot lie (Titus i. 2), "Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." (Heb. x. 17.) Again, "It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth?" (Rom. viii. 33, 34.) And again, "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." (Rom. iv. 8.)

Matthew xii. 31, 32 might still present a difficulty to some troubled soul. We read, "Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

Another and more exact translation of this passage is as follows: "For this reason I say unto you, Every sin and injurious speaking shall be forgiven to men, but speaking injuriously of the Spirit shall not be forgiven to men. And whosoever shall have spoken a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this age nor in the coming one."

We see then, from this, that speaking injuriously of and speaking against the Holy Ghost are the same as blaspheming against Him, which we have already sought to explain.

Some tried one, however, may say, "But, oh, I feel I've grieved the Spirit so often!" Well, that of course is wrong. It is sin, but not blasphemy. Where does God say that grieving the Holy Spirit is an unpardonable offence? Can Satan quote or misquote a scripture for that? What does the word of God say? "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." (Eph. iv. 30.) Now God gives the Holy Spirit to those that believe. "After that ye [or having] believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise." (Eph. i. 13.) The Holy Spirit takes up His abode in the body of the believer. "Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" (1 Cor. vi. 19.) And He is the abiding Comforter. (John xiv. 16.) He does not come and go; but once He dwells in the believer, He remains with him. We are sealed unto the day of redemption. If we sin, we grieve the Spirit, but He does not leave us. It does not say we are sealed until we sin, or even until we die, and our bodies go to corruption, but until the day of redemption. If we should die (or fall asleep), He ceases to dwell in us ? on the earth, of course ? and our bodies do go to corruption. But what the Scripture says (and it is all-important to keep close to it) is, "Whereby ye are sealed unto [or for] the day of redemption;" that is, the coming of the Lord. (Rom. viii. 23; Phil. iii. 20, 21.)

David as a godly Jew could rightly pray, "Take not thy Holy Spirit from me." (Ps. li. 11.) But since the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, at the day of Pentecost (Acts ii.), once He makes the believer's body His abode, he is sealed till the day of redemption. It is on the ground of this very truth that we are exhorted not to grieve Him. What can be more miserable than to live in a house with a person who is grieved with your ways, and who is constantly showing his disapproval of them. And how unhappy the state of a Christian who is grieving the Spirit by lax and unholy walk and ways. He is the Holy Spirit, and is grieved by all unholiness. Knowing, then, that He dwells in us, how careful, watchful, and prayerful this should make us, that we should not grieve Him, but that rather we should be filled with the Spirit (Eph. v. 18), have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts (Rom. v. 5), and be filled too with all joy and peace in believing. (Rom. xv. 13.)

If we grieve the Holy Spirit of God, then, He does not leave us, but at once makes us sensible of His grief, and our failure and sin. Communion is interrupted and joy lost, to be restored only through the advocacy of Christ and the confession of sins. (1 John ii. 1, i. 9.) But our salvation, thanks be to the God of all grace, is eternal. (Heb. v. 9.) And when a soul is sealed, it is on the ground of the infinite worth of the finished work of Christ, the value of which ever abides in its lasting efficacy before God. Hence we are sealed for the day of redemption.

There is one more passage which we may connect with our subject, as it sometimes troubles souls. It is in 1 John v. 16, 17, and speaks of a sin which brings down the chastisement of God upon the offender. God deals in government as well as in grace, and one of His children may so commit himself that, though the subject of grace, he may be taken away from the world in the government of God.

In 1 Cor. xi. 28-32 we have a confirmation of this. Christians at the Lord's table were committing grievous sin, and partaking of the supper unworthily. Hence they were eating and drinking judgment to themselves. The hand of God was heavy upon them in consequence. "For this cause," says the apostle, "many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world."

And now, dear reader, if you are one that hitherto has been harassed and perplexed by the onslaught and fiery darts of the wicked one, and thinking that your case is hopeless, we would earnestly entreat you to heed no longer the lie of the arch-enemy of your soul, who belies the character of God, but rest in child-like simplicity of faith upon the sure word of God. "The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." (1 John i. 7.) Listen to the word of Christ, in one of the very passages that has been troubling you, "Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men." (Matt. xii. 31.) Mark it once again, the only exception is the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, and this you have not committed. The false accusation comes from the father of lies. Heed him. not. God has said, "Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more."

1 Corinthians 10: 13.

WHEN Satan appears

To stop up our path

And fill us with fears,

We triumph by faith;

He cannot take from us,

Though oft he has tried,

The heart-cheering promise, ?

The Lord will provide.

He tells us we're weak,

Our hope is in vain,

The good that we seek

We ne'er shall obtain;

But when such suggestions

Our spirits have tried,

This answers all questions, ?

The Lord will provide.

The Four Judgments.

Notes of a Lecture.

The subject of the four judgments is taken up with a desire to help those who have been lately converted, and who have confused thoughts about judgment. Some think that all are going to be judged together at the end of the world, but we learn from God's word that there are four distinct judgments; and this is not a theory of any particular school of theology, but the teaching of the Holy Ghost in the word of God.

The first judgment is passed. Christ bore it on the cross. It is most blessed to see that. He "His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree." (1 Peter ii. 24.) He there "suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God," who now justifies every one that believes on the Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Peter iii. 18; Acts xiii. 38, 39; Rom. iii. 26.)

In John v. 24 we have a positive statement as to the fact that we shall not come into judgment. The word translated "judgment" in verse 22 is exactly the same as that rendered "condemnation" in verse 24, and damnation in verse 29. The changes were made by the translators to avoid repetition; but the word in each case should be judgment.

Verse 24. This is a golden chain, composed of five golden links.

"Heareth my word." Have you heard it? It makes dead souls live.

"Believeth on Him that sent me." Do you believe on Him that sent Christ?

"Hath everlasting life." Have you got everlasting life? Perhaps you say, "I don't know I should like to know." "Do you believe Him that sent Christ?" "Thank God, I do." "Then you have everlasting life." It is a present thing; and as to the future, do not be afraid.

"Shall not come into judgment." Christ says so, and He never contradicts Himself.

"Is passed from death unto life." God will not bring two persons into judgment for the same thing. Christ has borne the judgment. It is a thing of the past, behind the Christian's back, borne 1800 years ago; and there is but a step between him and the glory.

There are five more links in Rom. viii. 29, 30. "Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate . . . Whom He did predestinate, them He also called: and whom He called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified." When we see Him we shall be instantly transformed for all eternity into His own blessed likeness. (1 John iii. 2.) Imagine, when we are raised in glory, Christ putting us before the judgment-seat to see if we are fit to be in glory. If Christians saw how they were going to be raised they would never think of being judged, because they will be raised in glory. (1 Cor. xv. 42-57.)

We will now turn to the second judgment. In Romans xiv. 10 it is declared that all shall stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. Who are all? Every one, saved or unsaved, in the world. It does not say that all will stand there at the same time, or for the same purpose. As to believers, the question of everlasting life is settled for eternity: the question of rewards will be settled before the judgment-seat of Christ. (2 Cor. v. 10.) Believers will stand there first, before Christ's appearing; but unbelievers at the great white throne, after the millennium, and just before the end of the world. If the thought of standing before the judgment-seat terrifies you, it shows that you are not established in the grace of God, and the sooner you get good ground under your feet the better. Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord. (Ps. cxliii. 2.) He has entered into judgment with our Substitute. Is He free from sins? So are we. Is He free from death? So are we. Is He free from judgment? So are we. When before the judgment-seat to have your works judged, before whom will you stand? Him who is your life, your righteousness, your peace.*

{*"We have to remember that at our appearing before the judgment-seat we are already glorified." (1 Cor. xv. 51, 52.)}

In 1 Cor. iii. 8-17 it is a question of reward. Marvellous honour! Deep responsibility! When the apostle preached Christ he laid the foundation, and the different characters of service are put in the order of their preciousness in God's sight.

Gold, silver, and precious stones all stand fire, but the three others will burn ? none of them stand fire. There may be a beautiful building, a fine stack of hay, a great stack of stubble, but they will all burn up. Man is manifested already. The works will be made manifest; the day will not declare him, but his work. It will be revealed by fire, by judgment of a searching character.

We have first (v. 14) a good man and good works, and there is a reward. Eternal life, forgiveness, salvation, righteousness, glory, the Holy Ghost, are all gifts. You will have glory with Christ as sure as He has it; that is no reward. But look to your work. Are you building according to the pattern in the Bible, or according to your own thoughts? A builder might build a most beautiful house, but if not guided by the architect's plan it would be condemned. You may get the praise of men, but if you are not building according to the divine Architect's plan your work will be condemned. A good man does good work, and he gets a reward.

Next (v. 15) we get a good man and bad work, and it is all burned up. He may have made a great show ? erected a large building, a large stack of hay, a larger stack of stubble; he is a good man, but has worked according to his own thoughts. Get your plans from the divine Architect, and take care to let no man come between your Master and yourself. This is a good man, but his work all goes, yet the man himself is saved out of the very fire that consumes the whole of his work. See to it that you are working according to the wonderful ways of God laid down by the Holy Ghost in Scripture. Suppose salvation was by works, this man must go to the lake of fire; for he has not a shred of good works left; but away he goes to glory through sovereign grace. We do not work for salvation, but from love to our Master. Salvation is by grace, not by works.

Rev. xxii. 12: "My reward is with me." Again we see that the second judgment is no question of life ? that is a settled thing ? but of rewards.

1 Cor. vi. 1-3. There is a good deal of misconception as to this scripture. It simply means that the saints of God were going to law before the unjust instead of before the Church of God, and they were told to let the saints arbitrate. Why? Because the saints are going to judge the world. It is a common idea in Christendom that the saints are going to be judged with the world, but they will be there as judges quite a different thing. What a wonderful honour. It is most solemn. Think of Christ coming to take His saints to glory, and coming back with us to judge the world ? dear ones, perhaps, who are part and parcel of ourselves, but who are finding their joy here. All saved people in this dispensation are saints. In Jude 14, 15 we find that Christ is coming back with ten thousands of His saints. How could He come with them if He had not fetched them first? He will fetch us first, then there will be the great tribulation. Then, when we have been with Him in the Father's house for a period of time, He is coming back, and we are going to be associated with Him in the judgment of the world.

The third judgment is at the introduction of the millennium. Millennium is a Latin word, and means a thousand years. In Rev. xx. "thousand years" occurs six times. The Lord is coming to fetch His people; then a thousand years will roll between His coming with His people to reign over the earth and the end of the world.

Joel iii. 2, 9-14; Matt. xxv. 31-46. Here they are all living people. Nations always mean living people. This is the judgment of the living, when Christ comes back with us.

Let me ask you, Where do you get the doctrine of a general resurrection and general judgment in Scripture? How could this be a general judgment when they are all living people, and there is no resurrection? It is not the judgment of the dead, but of the living.

Three classes are mentioned ? "sheep," "goats," and "my brethren." The sheep are saved Gentiles; the goats, those who have rejected the Lord Jesus Christ's own Jewish brethren, and their message. It is not the great white throne. When that is set up there is no mention of Christ's coming, because He has been there reigning over the earth a thousand years already. Christ might come to-night and take His own blood-bought people to glory; and you who are unsaved might live through the tribulation, and be here to be judged when Christ comes with His saints. (2 Thess. i. 7-10.)

We have looked at three sets of scriptures ? the first proving that one judgment is past, the second showing that believers will not come into judgment, and the third that, instead of being judged with the world, they are going to judge the world.

Rev. xx. 11-15. The fourth and last judgment is of the dead. The thousand years will have rolled their course, the millennium will be over, the great white throne will be set up. There will be nothing there but judgment and condemnation. All who stand there will be those who are dead in trespasses and sins ? the ungodly ? and they will be judged according to their works; and every one will leave the great white throne to go to the lake of fire.

What effect ought this to have on us? May God use it to make us see what manner of people we ought to be! We were never so near to Christ's second coming as we are to-day. May it give a colour to our work and ways!

Dear unsaved one, whilst He is waiting for us, and we are waiting for Him, look to Him, come to Him, receive Him by faith, and you will be saved; you will have rest, and will be a child of God, and ready to go to Him; or if Christ comes first you will be ready to meet Him, and to go to be with Him for ever, and if left in this poor world a little longer it will be to live and labour for Him who loved us and gave Himself for us.

"Not under the law."

Romans 7.

In this chapter the apostle first of all establishes the great principle that the believer is "dead to the law." Then he describes the workings of a quickened soul, which, knowing that the "law is spiritual," still feels "under the law," and is therefore compelled to exclaim, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

Now, dear friends, let me ask you, "Am I, or is my state, the object of faith?" No; surely not. Faith never makes what is in my heart its object, but God's revelation of Himself in grace. If we stop half way, and see nothing but the law, it will just discover to us our condemnation, and prove us to be "without strength." If God allows us to know enough of the law, and of the experience described in this chapter, to show us what is our true state, that is just where grace meets us.

It is not that the conflict here spoken of will not continue; grace could not be known at all where conflict is not known (Gal. v. 17); the unconverted only are without it; but that which will not continue when grace is fully known, is that bitterness of spirit in which, while the conflict is going on, the person judges of himself, seeing the law to be "spiritual," but himself "carnal, sold under sin." The love of God is not realized as his own, and therefore this causes him to cry out, "O wretched man that I am!"

It is quite clear that while there is this experience felt, there is not simple faith in God's grace ? there is not a clear view of what God is towards me in Christ; for when the soul apprehends that ? when the faculties of the new man are exercised on their proper object, there is perfect rest. And though there is still conflict, yet the soul is at peace ? the battle is not ours, but the Lord's.

But how am I to know what is God's mind towards me? Is it by judging of it from what I find in myself? Surely not! Supposing that I even found good in myself, if I expected God to look at me on that account, would that be grace? There may be a measure of truth in this kind of reasoning; for if there be life in my soul, fruit will be apparent; but that is not to give me peace any more than the evil that is in me is to hinder my having peace. That, too, is true reasoning where the apostle says, "The law is spiritual; but I am carnal. . . O wretched man that I am" but there is nothing of grace in it.

But does the certainty of grace take us out of all trouble? No; I am not at all denying the fact that there is, and, while we are in a sinful body, that there ever must be, conflict going on between the flesh and the Spirit. But then it is a very different thing to have this conflict going on in the conscious certainty that God is for me, because I am "under grace," to having it in the fear that He is against me, because I am "under law."

If I see evil in myself (and this I always shall whilst here, in the root, even if it be not manifested in its fruit), and if I think that God will be against me because of it, I shall have no strength for conflict, but be utterly cast down ? groaning as to my acceptance. But if certain that God is for me, the consciousness of this will give me courage and victory; nay, even enable me to say, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." In the confidence of the love and grace of God, I can ask Him to search out all my evil, what I otherwise dare not do, lest it should overwhelm me with despair. God is for me, against my own evil.

The apostle speaks (chap. viii.) of the "carnal mind" being "enmity against God;" but then God, in the gift of Jesus, has brought out this blessed truth, that when man was at enmity against God, God was love towards man ? our enmity was met by His love. The triumph of grace is seen in this, that when man's enmity had cast out Jesus from the earth, God's love brought in salvation by that very act ? came in to atone for the sin of those who had rejected Him. In the view of the fullest development of man's sin, faith sees the fullest manifestation of God's grace. Where does faith see the greatest depth of man's sin and hatred of God? In the cross and at the same glance it sees the greatest extent of god's triumphant love and mercy to man. The spear of the soldier which pierced the side of Jesus only brought out that which spoke of love and mercy.

The apostle then goes on to show that those once at enmity with God, are now become His heirs; and that the knowledge of this is founded on the knowledge of grace ? "Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again," etc. Grace first makes us children of God, and then gives us the knowledge of it, and that we are heirs of God.

But what is the extent of this grace towards us? It has given us the same portion that the Lord Jesus has. We are "heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ." It is not only certain that grace has visited us, has found us when we were "in our sins," but it is also certain that it has us where Christ is ? that we are identified with the Lord Jesus in all but His essential glory as God. The soul is placed thus in the consciousness of God's perfect love, and therefore, as it is said in chapter 5, "we joy in God."

I have got away from grace, if I have the slightest doubt or hesitation about God's love. I shall then be saying, "I am unhappy, because I am not what I should like to be." But, dear friends, that is not the question; the real question is, whether God is what we should like Him to be ? whether Jesus is all we could wish. If the consciousness of what we are ? of what we find in ourselves, has any other effect than, while it humbles us, to increase our adoration of what God is, we are off the ground of pure grace. The immediate effect of such consciousness should be to make our hearts reach out to God and to His grace as abounding over it all.

It is better to be thinking of what God is, than of what we are. This looking at ourselves, at the bottom, is really pride ? a want of the thorough consciousness that we are good for nothing. Till we see this we never look quite away from self to God. Sometimes, perhaps, the looking at our evil may be a partial instrument in teaching us it; but still, even that is not all that is needed. In looking to Christ it is our privilege to forget ourselves. True humility does not so much consist in thinking badly of ourselves, as in not thinking of ourselves at all. I am too bad to be worth thinking about; what I want is to forget myself and to look at God, who is indeed worth all my thoughts. Is there need of being humbled about ourselves? We may be quite sure that will do it.

Beloved, if we can say (as in chapter vii.) that "in me, (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing," we have thought quite long enough about ourselves; let us then think about Him who thought about us with "thoughts of good, and not of evil," long before we had thought of ourselves at all. Let us see what His thoughts of grace about us are, and take up the words of faith, If God be for us, who can be against us?"

O LORD, Thy love 's unbounded ?

So sweet, so full, so free ?

My soul is all transported,

Whene'er I think on Thee!

Yet, Lord, alas! what weakness

Within myself I find,

No infant's changing pleasure

Is like my wandering mind.

And yet Thy love's unchanging,

And doth recall my heart

To joy in all its brightness,

The peace its beams impart.

Yet sure, if in Thy presence,

My soul still constant were,

Mine eye would, more familiar,

Its brighter glories bear.

And thus Thy deep perfections

Much better should I know,

And with adoring fervour

In this Thy nature grow.

Still sweet 'tis to discover,

If clouds have dimmed my sight,

When passed, Eternal Lover,

Towards me, as e'er, Thou'rt bright.

The Peace of God.

Phil. 4: 7.

Peace is our portion. There is a "counsel of peace" (Zech. vi. 13) which belongs to us, an assured peace; peace indeed in the midst of present trouble, but still God's peace. If it were not God's peace, it would be good for nothing. I may, it is true, have my spirit much disturbed, and know trial of heart, but still I have a title to perfect peace amidst it all ? not only peace with God, but peace concerning every circumstance, because God is "for us" in it all.

Had not man been in rebellion against God, there would have been no need for "the counsel of peace." Adam in paradise needed it not. But man has rebelled, and, though its modifications may be various, rebellion against God is still the characteristic of the unconverted heart. Such was his rebellion, that peace between man and God seemed impossible. But now, wondrous grace! we see that there is not only peace, but a "counsel of peace" ? thoughts of God concerning peace, thoughts which Jesus alone could meet ? "Lo, come to do thy will, O God." (Heb. x. 9.)

Supposing God had made peace with Adam, the peace could not have lasted; the enmity in the heart of man, or that produced by the power of circumstances thwarting his will, would very soon have broken it again. Look at Israel. They were placed in outward peace with God, owned as His people, favoured in every way, and yet what was the result? continual murmuring on their part, constant rebellion. As to moral peace with God, they had scarcely undertaken to keep His law, than they set up a golden calf to worship, and thus failed directly. And it would always be the same. It must be so; for the very will of man is altogether wrong. "The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." (Rom. viii. 7.)

But now "the counsel of peace" is between God and Jesus, instead of man, and hence security. It is not merely peace, but "the counsel of peace." The word "counsel" implies deliberate purpose. What solidity must there be in that peace which. God had a "counsel" about, and all the engagements of which the mind of Jesus fully entered into and accomplished.

I have said that peace is our proper portion as the children of God ? peace both as to sin, and as to circumstances. Now, it is true that the latter we have not outwardly yet; but God is taking up all that concerns us, and has taken upon Himself to make "all things work together" for our good; and the knowledge of this gives peace (if we will use our privilege) in all circumstances, be they ever those of trial, perplexity, and sorrow. Was it not so with Jesus? Who can be tried so as

He? "Consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds." Yet He had always peace. And so might we. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee." (Heb. xii. 3; Isa. xxvi. 3.)

But then it is most important to see that "the counsel of peace" is entirely between God and Jesus. The moment we begin to rest our peace on anything in ourselves, we lose it. And this is why so many saints have not settled peace. Nothing can be lasting that is not built on God alone. How can you have settled peace? Only by having it in God's own way. By not resting it on any thing, even the Spirit's work, within yourselves, but on what Christ has done entirely without you. Then you will know peace, conscious unworthiness, but yet peace. In Christ alone God finds that in which He can rest, and so is it with His saints. The more you see the extent and nature of the evil that is within, as well as that without and around, the more you will find that what Jesus is, and what Jesus did; is the only ground at all on which you can rest.

Our peace is established in what He did, and "the counsel of peace" is "between them both." Jesus has accomplished that which God purposed towards us.

In order to this, it was needful that He should "bear our sins;" and this He did as the "sin-offering." "He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." (2 Cor. v. 21.)

In the sacrifices, when the offerer laid his hand upon the head of the victim, there was in that act the complete identification of himself with the victim. Now there are two great characters in the sacrifice of Christ ? the one that of the burnt-offering; the other, that of the sin-offering. We lay our hands on Him as the "burnt-offering," thus identifying ourselves with Him. "Accepted in the Beloved," all His perfectness, all His "sweet savour" unto God, is ours. But then, as to the "sin-offering," it is just the reverse; the hand laid upon the victim, it became identified with my sins, charged with my guilt.

Well, beloved, the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus had this double character. He has completely accomplished the purpose of God, all that which was in "the counsel of peace." This "counsel of peace" was not between me and God, though I have, as the fruit of it, the enjoyment of the peace. I had not to do with it in any sense; it was "between them both." All is done, and Jesus, both the accomplisher and the accomplishment, has sat down, in proof that all is finished, on the throne of God. (Heb. x. 12-14.)

But, then, in order that we may have the enjoyment of these things, He is acting in another way as priest. Having the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us, we consequently see many things in ourselves contrary to Him ? many things that would hinder fellowship with God. Now here it is that the present ministry of Christ comes in. We need His priesthood in order to maintain our communion with God; we need Him in our daily sins, as it is said, "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." We need the presence of perfect righteousness on our behalf before God, and He has ever before His eyes, and that "for us," the accomplisher of "the counsel of peace" ? "Jesus Christ the righteous."

Here then is "the counsel of peace" which was purposed between God and Jesus. Here, and here only, have we peace. If ever our souls have any idea of rest except in that which is the perfect rest of God, if ever we are looking for peace anywhere else, be it where it may, we have got out of God's way of accomplishing peace, off the ground of this "counsel of peace." He has not called us into "the counsel;" it is that which is entirely independent of ourselves ? "between them both" ? accomplished and everlastingly sure. Nothing can ever touch it. God has publicly owned His acceptance of Christ's work by seating Him at His own right hand. The Holy Ghost is sent to witness to us that Jesus is now "on the throne of God," having "by one offering perfected for ever them that are sanctified."

We may have a great deal of trial (we know we shall) ? trial from circumstances around, trial from within, exercise of conscience and the like; but still we have the perfect certainty of God's favour; "and if God be for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. viii. 31.) With Paul we may reckon, because of His having given Jesus for us, along with Jesus upon everything. This is the true way to reckon upon His kindness. "Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Phil. iv. 6, 7.) Observe, he says, "the peace of God." Again, the word is, "Be careful for nothing." If one single thing were excepted, God would not be God. Well, if exercised and troubled in spirit, tempted to be "careful," let us go to God about it. Our wishes may possibly be foolish wishes, still let us go and present them to God; if they are so, we shall very soon be ashamed of them.

LORD, while our souls in faith repose

Upon Thy precious blood,

Peace like an even river flows)

And mercy, like a flood.

The Two Resurrections.

A Better Resurrection.

The Resurrection of the Just.

The Resurrection of Life.

This is the First Resurrection.

The Children of the Resurrection.

Heb. xi. 35; Luke xiv. 14; John v. 29; Rev. xx. 5; Luke xx. 36.

The resurrection of the saints at the coming of the Lord is distinct from the resurrection of the wicked; and the coming of the Lord is itself the hope of the Church.

The idea that Christians generally have, is that of an indiscriminate resurrection; the righteous and wicked being, as it is supposed, to be raised at the same moment, and that moment absolutely at the end of time ? after the millennium ? at the close of the entire course of God's dealings with this earth on which we dwell. This was the idea, which Martha, the sister of Lazarus, had. Desolate and sorrowful through the loss of her brother, our Lord, to comfort her heart, said to her, "Thy brother shall rise again." What was her reply? "I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Martha's faith as to the resurrection was exactly that of the bulk of professing Christians now; true, doubtless, as far as it goes, but stopping far short of the precious fulness of truth revealed in the word of God respecting it. There is indeed to be a resurrection; and that resurrection is to be at the last day. But "the day of judgment," "the day of the Lord," and, I would add, "the last day," each expresses, not a literal, actual day of twenty-four hours, but a lengthened period. The "last day" begins before the "day of judgment" ? "the day of the Lord" ? but it seems to us to embrace the whole period from the coming of Christ to receive His saints, to the time when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God the Father; when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. The resurrection at the last day embraces thus the resurrection both of the righteous and the wicked; but this does not in any wise prove that they are both at the same moment; and we shall see just now from the plain testimony of Scripture that they are not only distinguished from each other, but separated by an interval of a thousand years.

The first passage to which I would refer you is Luke xiv. 14, which simply distinguishes these two resurrections as to their character. Our Lord having exhorted those with whom He was sitting at table, when they made a feast, to call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind, proceeds to enforce the exhortation thus: "And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be, recompensed at the resurrection of the just." Would any one, not previously possessed with the prevailing notion, gather the impression from this passage that the resurrection of the just and that of the wicked was an indiscriminate event? Would not the natural impression of the passage on any unprejudiced mind be, that the resurrection of the just is an event perfectly distinct? ? "thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just."

In Phil. iii. 10, 11 the apostle represents it as his great endeavour, his arduous, his continual endeavour, to know Christ, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death, "if by any means," says he, "I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." But if the only resurrection be an indiscriminate resurrection both of righteous and wicked, a simple act of God's power, apart from all questions of spiritual condition and character, how could it be Paul's solicitude "by any means" to "attain unto the resurrection of the dead"?

In John v. 28, 29 we have another important passage, in which our blessed Lord distinguishes between the resurrection of the righteous and that of the wicked. "Marvel not at this: for the hour is corning, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation." Here our Lord speaks of two resurrections, distinguishing them by the sources from whence they respectively flow, and by which they are thus respectively characterized; life in the one case, judgment in the other. "The resurrection of life" and "the resurrection of judgment." "Yes," you may perhaps be saying; "but both are in one hour." I anticipated this objection when I referred to the passage; and it is as much to meet this objection that I ask your attention to the passage, as to show you the positive proof it contains of the doctrine we are considering. "The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth." People infer from this that all rise together. And this would be a just inference, if the word "hour" meant a literal period of sixty minutes. But if you look back to verse 25 of this very chapter, you will see that the word is used in quite another sense. Jesus had been speaking of the quickening of dead souls, how he that hears and believes has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment (or condemnation), but is passed from death unto life. He then says, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live." The hour is coming, and now is. It had commenced when our Lord spake. There is an "hour" in which the Son of God is quickening dead souls ? the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live. How long has this "hour" lasted? It had begun when Jesus spake thus; it has not terminated yet! Already do we know this "hour" of quickening dead souls to be of more than eighteen hundred years' continuance. For anything, therefore, that the word "hour" proves to the contrary, the "hour" in which Christ will quicken dead bodies might last as long as this present "hour" in which He is quickening dead souls. The passage before us does not determine how long the period is. It teaches plainly that there is a "resurrection of life," and a "resurrection of judgment." There is an "hour" coming, in the which both these will be accomplished; and we read, in the immediate context of this passage, of another "hour" which has unquestionably lasted for nearly two thousand years. What the period actually is that intervenes between these two resurrections we have to learn elsewhere in Scripture; and in another passage we are plainly told that it is one thousand years.

It is in Revelation xx. that we learn this. We find there that the duration of the "hour" in the which these two resurrections take place is one thousand years. The resurrection of life is at the commencement, the resurrection of judgment is at the close.

"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season." People say that this is figurative language; and it is granted that it is so, at once. No doubt the key of the bottomless pit, and the great chain in the angel's hand, and the binding of Satan, and the setting of a seal upon him, are all figures. But what are they figures of? Are they expressions without meaning because they are figurative? Or is the meaning necessarily uncertain and indefinite? What do they all teach us, but that Satan will be forcibly restrained, and that in his own abyss, for a thousand years? So restrained that he shall deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years are fulfilled. What difficulty is there in understanding the force and meaning of figures like these?

"And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection." Observe these last words, my brethren "This is the first resurrection." There may have been figures employed in the passage; no one questions it. But when the Holy Ghost is pleased to interpret the figurative language He has employed ? when He is pleased to tell us what it means ? are we to evade the force of all He says, by making His interpretation figurative also? "This is the first resurrection," is the Holy Ghost's explanation of the figures or symbols by which it had been set forth. "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years." Nothing can be more evident than what the simple, definite impression of this language would be on any mind not prepossessed with thoughts of another character. The way in which it is commonly sought to evade the plain, obvious meaning of the passage is by explaining it thus: that the resurrection of the martyrs, which John beheld, denotes a revival of the principles for which they suffered; that, having suffered death for Christian principles, the revival, and universal spread and ascendency of these principles, is set forth by the symbol of those who had been beheaded living and reigning with Christ a thousand years. Such is the popular interpretation of this passage. But it breaks down at every point. Those who have been beheaded are those who reign. Are they principles or persons that have been beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God? Then again, supposing that the reign of principles might be set forth by the resurrection and reign of those who had been martyrs for them, how are we to account for their priesthood? "They shall be priests of God and of Christ." As one has said, in substance, somewhere, "You may speak of the reign of principles; but can you make principles into priests as well?" Then again, "on such the second death hath no power." What is the second death? It is explained in verse 14 to be "the lake of fire." And could there be any question of the second death, the lake of fire, having power over Christian principles? The lake of fire is for the punishment of evil persons; and it is one element in the blessedness of those who have part in the first resurrection that "on such the second death hath no power." Then further, the first resurrection is so linked in this chapter with what all admit to be a literal resurrection of dead bodies at the end of the thousand years, that you cannot explain away the one without explaining away the other. When John has witnessed the vision in verse 4, which is explained to him in verse 5 to be "the first resurrection," we are told of certain who have no part in it; "but the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished." In the verses which ensue we have a rapid glance at the events which occur when the thousand years are expired ? Satan is loosed ? the nations are again deceived ? fire comes down from God out of heaven and destroys them ? the devil who had deceived them is cast into the lake of fire, where the beast and the false prophet are (having been cast there alive a thousand years before, see chapter xix. 20); and then what follows? "And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works." Is this figurative too, my brethren? If so, where is there Scripture authority for the doctrine of the resurrection at all? And if this be not figurative, why should the account of "the first resurrection at the beginning of the chapter be set aside as figurative? If it be allowed, which it must be, that the resurrection of the wicked dead at the close of the chapter is a literal, actual resurrection of dead bodies, on what principle can it be maintained that the first resurrection at the beginning of the chapter is figurative, and denotes the revival of dead or dying principles? What says the Holy Spirit? "This is the first resurrection." "But the rest of the dead lived not again," etc. The rest of the dead what? ? principles? ? or persons? Surely the "rest" must bear some relation to those from whom they are distinguished. If it be a revival of principles which constitutes the first resurrection, "the rest of the dead who live not again till the thousand years are finished" must be principles also. And if it shocks you to trifle thus with God's holy word ? if it be certain that the dead who are raised and judged before the great white throne, are dead persons, not principles; then is it equally certain that the first resurrection is a resurrection of persons too. If the first resurrection be one of principles, then must the second also. If the second, that before the great white throne, be a resurrection of persons, the first must be a resurrection of persons likewise. Nothing can be more evident and simple than this.

This chapter, then, demonstrates that there is an interval of at least a thousand years between the resurrection of life and the resurrection of judgment. "The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment." That "hour" lasts a thousand years; the "hour" in which Christ quickens dead souls has already lasted more than eighteen hundred years. The "hour" in which He shall raise dead bodies commences with His coming to change His living, and raise His sleeping, saints; it closes with the resurrection of the wicked dead, and their judgment before the great white throne ? "the resurrection of judgment." I commend the whole chapter (Rev. xx.) to your patient, attentive, and prayerful perusal in your closets before God.

THAT bright and blessed morn is near

When He, the Bridegroom, shall appear,

And call His bride away.

Her blessing then shall be complete,

When with her Lord she takes her seat

In everlasting day. Rev. iii. 21.

The days and months are gliding past,

Soon shall be heard the trumpet's blast

Which wakes the sleeping saints.

The dead in Christ in glory rise,

When we with them shall reach the skies

Where Jesus for us waits.

What wonder, joy, and glad surprise

Shall fill our hearts as thus we rise,

To meet Him in the air; 1 Thess. iv. 17

To see His face, to hear His voice,

And in His perfect love rejoice,

Whose glory then we'll share,

O may this hope our spirits cheer,

While waiting for our Saviour here;

He'll quickly come again. Rev. xxii.

O may our hearts look for that day,

And to His word responsive say,

Lord Jesus, come. Amen.

Our Father's Will: Being a Short History of the Text of the New Testament

Our Father's Will

Being a Short History of the Text of the New Testament.

"The word of our God shall stand for ever."

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square.

[Apology is made for the inaccuracy of the quotations in cursive Greek. We do not have the tools for writing Greek punctuation, breathing, diacritic and subscript marks in html. The letters themselves should be accurate.]

Contents.

Introduction

No need for alarm

The various forms of Evidence

The Material of the Greek Manuscripts

The Style of Writing

Causes of Variations

List of Greek Copies

List of Uncial Manuscripts

Cursive Manuscripts

Lectionaries

The Fathers

The Versions

Age and Families of Manuscripts.

The Editor at work

Review of a few passages

Various Readings in the Revelation

Printed Greek Testaments

The Order of the Books

Divisions of the New Testament

Headings and Subscriptions to the Books

The Canon of Scripture

The Authorised Version of 1611

Verbal Inspiration

Introduction.

There was once a large family — a very large family — of several generations, all descended from one common father. He was very great, and he had enormous possessions, which he had bequeathed to various branches of the family.

Some years since — though the various descendants were in possession of and enjoying their several estates — a strong desire arose to possess a more correct copy of their father's will. Communications were made with different branches of the family in various places, inquiring into the subject.

They discovered that the original writing was lost, but various copies existed. These were collected together, and compared, but the family were surprised to find that no two copies exactly agreed. At a cursory glance they were found to agree in the main. The estates of A were not given to B; nor the estates of B to C, etc. And some of the family thought that as the copies agreed in the main, there should be no further search.

Others thought it best to say nothing about the various differences. It might unsettle the minds of some of the younger members of the family, who were happily ignorant of their existence. If they heard of these differences they might doubt of the execution of the original altogether.

Others were startled at the discovery, and asked, Do we hold our estates only on a tenure that will not bear investigation? Pray let us endeavour to get at the real truth. If these differences exist, let us know the full extent of them. Although the few copies we have may not differ in the main, further search may bring to light greater differences. We are building for the future upon the supposed stability of our titles; we must know whether these titles are good. Nothing now will satisfy us but a thorough and searching inquiry.

Others took another line. They did not doubt of the stability of the titles to their estates; but they desired to read the heart of their great father. He had not only given them estates, but he had expressed his interest and affection for them. They desired to get at his very words — to enter into his affection for them, and to understand his thoughts of love concerning them.

Others also greatly desired to read his very words that they might better understand his wisdom. He had given them the benefit of his great insight into the character of men and things, with cheering encouragement on the one hand, and solemn warnings on the other. They feared lest anything should be lost, even what might appear to some to be the least.

Others knew that their great father had spoken to them a good deal about himself, and they were convinced that they should endeavour to obtain every word he had said.

Thus for these and other reasons it was judged to be highly desirable that a very extensive search should be made for copies of the will; that those found should be carefully compared, and all the alterations noted. They should endeavour to account for the alterations; and above and beyond all they should endeavour to ascertain what was the exact wording of the will.

With these objects, one here and another there set diligently to work at their task. The task was indeed laborious: they obtained many copies and proceeded to compare them carefully and note all the differences.

But they were soon struck with the fact that some copies were much older than others, and the older they were, the nearer they were to the original, and so were of course the more valuable.

But of some it was no easy matter to judge the age. It was known that at a certain period the style of writing had been decidedly changed. This fact led to the division of the copies into two distinct classes; but as to which was the oldest in each class was not so easy. The material on which the document was written was scrutinized, and every little variation in the writing noted that would in any way throw light upon its age.

There were also other branches of the inquiry. One was this. It was ascertained that in certain documents, written by some of the family, they had given extracts from the will: and some of these turned out to be of an early date. These were of great value, because they proved what was in their copy of the will at the time the quotation was made.

Further, it was ascertained that some of the family had journeyed into foreign parts, and had settled there, and for their benefit the original will had been translated into foreign languages. On inquiry, it was ascertained that some of these translations had been made very early. These were of great use, as they shewed what was in the translator's copy when the translation was made.

With all these and other materials the labour became immense. All had to be compared, and the variations carefully noted; the documents being separated and valued according to their various ages.

The next step was to endeavour to ascertain the cause of the variations. In many places it was, purely accidental. The writers had in some places mistaken one word for another. In others, words were accidentally omitted; and in others, words were added. In other places the alterations appeared to be done purposely. Apparently the copier had thought he could improve the wording, without perhaps thinking of the importance that would be attached to the identical [original?] words of this famous will.

Now the ascertaining of the cause of the variations was at once the means of removing a great many of them as variations. They were ascertained to have been accidental alterations, and were dismissed accordingly. But this would not clear up all. In some the preponderance of the evidence was overwhelming for one reading over another so as to settle indisputably which was correct, and this decided many questions. Still, a few remained in which it was difficult to decide which was the word actually used in the original.

On the whole, the result was highly satisfactory. The investigation has stamped an absolute certainty upon the will. Not a single point of importance is left in doubt or is surrounded by difficulty, and there remain only a few places where the actual words cannot be ascertained.

The family have great cause for thankfulness. Their estates are sure to them: they can read the heart and learn the intentions of their great father to them in his own words: they can profit by his wisdom, by his instruction, and by his warnings. And all this not simply in generalities, but in his own words. As if he was now speaking to them, they listen, and they hear his accents of love, and they learn himself. Thus are they happy and are blessed.

This will is the word of God. This family is the saints of God.

All scripture was given by inspiration of God, and it was written; but the original has been lost. There are many copies in existence; but they all more or less differ.

There have been and are men who have spent the best part of their lives in comparing the various copies: they have duly considered the value of each, and have carefully sought to discover the true text as it stood in the original.

The above is in no sense an exaggerated account of the history of the text of the New Testament. For many years the question lay entirely dormant. It was not until the year 1514 that the printing of the first Greek Testament — the Complutensian — was finished; but before it could be printed, the question had to be considered, "What copy shall be taken?" And although it was known that the manuscripts differed, yet, the fact that there were in existence a great many Greek copies was not known, and the nature and the extent of the variations had not then been fully ascertained. What copies were actually used for that edition is not now known, but they must have been comparatively few.

Other printed editions followed in rapid succession, by various editors, each one referring, as he had opportunity, to an increased number of manuscripts, with the various other sources of evidence. By degrees all evidence began to be valued, and to be used for deciding on the true text of that which God had caused to be written.

But, as we have intimated above, this caused alarm in the minds of some Christians, and they felt it their duty to protest against the making public the variations in the Greek manuscripts, judging that it was unsettling scripture, and, as John Owen called it, an attempt "to correct the word of God." Dr. Whitby was another who felt alarmed at that which was being brought to light. We can give them and others credit for their zeal for God's word, but they were certainly mistaken, as we hope to make plain as we proceed with our inquiry.

No need for Alarm.

We have seen how important it is that we should endeavour to get at the true text of "Our Father's Will," or, in other words, of "the word of God," though our present inquiry will only embrace the New Testament, and we have briefly glanced at the difficulties which have stood in the way.

Many have supposed that to procure a Greek Testament was to procure a copy of the true text as God caused it to be written; but, of course, a printed copy must have been made from some other copy; and it may have been copied from some one manuscript, or it may be a copy of what some editor (who has compared many manuscripts) judges to be the true text. Thus we are led back to the manuscript copies, and, as we have said, there are many of these, and no two of them are exactly alike.

This at first sight may seem to be a great calamity, throwing a doubt upon the blessed word of God, but on a closer investigation this will be seen not to be so. Of course, God could have preserved for us a faultless manuscript, but He has allowed it to be otherwise; the New Testament has gone through the various perils that any other old writing has been subject to, though with this difference, that it has been watched over by its living Author.* God, of course, could by a continued miracle have preserved to us the very copies that were written by the inspired penmen; but He has not done so. Who could have held them, and what would other Christians have done without them? As it is, all, scattered over the known world, had copies of the original from the first.

{* It has been estimated that in the writings of Terence, a book not nearly so large as the New Testament, if existing copies were examined with care equal to that bestowed upon the New Testament, at least 50,000 variations would be discovered.}

Besides, the New Testament has now the indisputable stamp of antiquity upon it. It is known, apart from the manuscripts of the New Testament, that, say, in the fourth century Greek was written in a particular manner, and it is known that various changes gradually took place in writing that language, (points, accents, and breathings being introduced,) until the same passage written in the fourth century, and written in the tenth century, do not look like the same language. Well, we have portions of the Greek New Testament, believed to have been written in the fourth century, and then each century after, with those very changes introduced as they are known to have been made. To those who value external evidences, there cannot be a stronger proof that the New Testament was written soon after the time of our Lord; indeed, the evidence is so strong, that we are not aware that it has ever been called in question, even by the most sceptical.

And, further, as one has said, "It is a good providence and a great blessing that so many manuscripts of the New Testament are still amongst us; some procured from Egypt, others from Asia, others from the Western churches. For the very distance of places, as well as numbers of the books, demonstrate that there could be no collusion, no altering, nor interpolating one copy by another, nor all by any of them."

It is important, too, to see that the variations in the manuscripts affect none of the great doctrines of Christianity. The divinity of Christ, His spotless life, His atoning death, His resurrection and ascension, all remain untouched. The fall of man, the glad tidings of salvation, the eternal security of the believer, and the eternal punishment of the unbeliever, all remain intact. The descent of the Holy Spirit, and the second advent of our Lord, remain unshaken. Indeed, as the same writer has said, "even put them [the various manuscripts] into the hands of a knave or a fool, and yet with the most sinistrous and absurd choice, he shall not extinguish the light of any one chapter, nor so disguise Christianity, but that every feature of it will still be the same." (Bentley.)

Yet there is the fact (and it must be remembered that by speaking of it we do not create it — it is the same, whether we know it or not) that there are hundreds of Greek copies, and no two of them are exactly alike. Any one complete copy would give us all we need for salvation; but, as we have said, because the New Testament is from God, we want to know every word. All He does, He does perfectly. He caused the book to be written, and the right words to be used; and surely it is a laudable desire for us to seek to have the very words He caused to be written.

Such is our desire, and such was the desire of certain zealous men who have spent many a long year in poring over old manuscripts, using various means to bring to light what, in many cases, had become invisible to ordinary eyesight. They are called editors. Let due honour be given to those who have devoted the best part of their lifetime to these arduous duties.

We cannot do what they have done; and if we had all the materials at hand, not one in a thousand is qualified to duly weigh all the evidence for and against a reading, giving to each its proper weight. But God bestowed gifts suited for such a work on one here, and another there; and they have laboured diligently, and have told us what they believe are the words which God caused to be written.

The Various Forms of Evidence.

Of course, age is that which gives value, in a general way, to any evidence. Then the evidence is divided principally into four divisions.

1. The existing Greek Manuscripts.

The earliest copies date in the fourth century, and then run down to the time of printing, in the fifteenth century; so that, from the time each of the books of the New Testament was written, till the fourth century, there is a blank, as far as Greek manuscripts are concerned, but which period is in a measure bridged over by other evidence.

For fifteen centuries the word of God was handed down by the use of the pen; and although there were such persons as writers who were paid for copying manuscripts, there can be no doubt that many hundreds of copies of the New Testament were made by the monks in their cells, after the monastic order came into existence. Whatever abuses were connected with that order — and they grew to be many and serious — this good was done by them. Amid changes and revolutions, they preserved the sacred writings, and perseveringly increased their numbers by the use of the pen.

It has been thought by some that the monks introduced the decoration of manuscripts; but this is not correct, it came early in vogue. Jerome, in the fourth century, complained that too much space was occupied with the ornaments. It began with ornamental initial letters, which were increased in size, until they became very large; then they had long ornamental pendants, and some made to trail along the bottom of the page also, thus occupying three sides of the page. Some of these ornaments were elaborate works of art, interspersed with rich colours and gold.

Strange as it may seem, it is yet true, that the ornaments to the early manuscripts form strong evidence as to the corruption of the Romish church. In the decorations to the early manuscripts by the monks there is no trace of the worship of the Virgin, the invocation of saints, purgatory, etc.; but when we come to the eleventh century and onwards, these and other corruptions are all interwoven with the ornaments executed by the monks. Thus, though good work was done in the cloisters, as the monks came to be corrupt, they left their "dirty finger-marks" upon the copies they made.

Some manuscripts were written entirely with letters in gold and silver. One of the Gothic versions of the New Testament is written in silver, with the initial letters in gold. It was executed about the fifth century, and is now preserved in the royal library of Upsal. It is known as the "Codex Argenteus," the silver copy.

2. The Versions; that is, the early translations of the New Testament into other languages.

These in a measure bridge over the period between the writing of the books of the New Testament and the Greek manuscript. While the earliest Greek manuscript is of the fourth century, the earliest version is of the second century, the Syriac being the oldest. The Thebaic dates in the third century, and others in the fourth.

The use of these Versions is great, not to tell us the meaning the various translators attached to certain Greek words (though they are also useful for this at times, but), because they tell us what was in the Greek copy at the date the translation was made. For instance, each early Syriac version lets us know what was in his copy in the second century, and of course his copy must have dated still earlier; so that we get by this means within, perhaps, a hundred years of the date when some of the Epistles were written.

That the Versions have come down to us more ancient than any Greek manuscript is perhaps owing to the violent persecution commenced by the Roman emperor Diocletian, who made a special point of demanding every copy of the sacred scriptures, on pain of death. All that were obtained were burned.* This persecution extended A.D. 303-312, and it has been seen that our earliest Greek copies date in the fourth century, so that it seems doubtful if we have any that escaped that fiery persecution. When peace was restored to the church, the copies would have been rapidly increased.

{*Those who gave up their copies were called traditores, "deliverers up." This is doubtless the origin of our word, traitor.}

3. The Fathers; that is, the early writers in the church, who quoted scripture in their writings.

It may be thought that these are open to suspicion, on account of the early heresies that crept into the church; but it must be remembered that, as we have seen, the New Testament was translated very early into other tongues, and was thus widely circulated, so that if a man had quoted scripture falsely, he would surely have been detected, and put to shame. We are not aware that any were charged with doing this; they rather sought to explain it away in some manner. It is true that in some cases the Fathers may have quoted scripture, as we often do, from memory, but this may be often detected and guarded against by a careful comparison.

In the Fathers we get to a date yet earlier than any version. We reach up to some who are believed to have been instructed by the apostles personally, and who came into contact with many who had seen our Lord. The few who are accredited to have lived in the time of the apostles, called Apostolic Fathers, and who are referred, to as quoting scripture, are,

1, Clement, supposed to be the one named in Philippians 4: 3

(now called Clement of Rome, to distinguish him from Clement of Alexandria).

2, Polycarp, martyred A.D. 169.

3, Barnabas, first or second century.

4, Ignatius, martyred A.D. 107.

Thus we see that we have the gaps, in a measure, filled up. The Fathers go back to the first and second centuries; the Versions to the second and third centuries; and the Greek Manuscripts to the fourth century.

4. The Lectionaries; that is, the manuscript service-books used in the church, which consist of portions of scripture. Some contained portions from the Gospels only; and others, from the Acts and Epistles.

Of the Lectionaries alone there are some hundreds, and they have as yet received comparatively little attention. The other three branches of evidence have been used freely. And though, as we should naturally think, the Greek manuscripts have the greatest weight, yet the Versions, and the quotations from the Fathers, must by no means be neglected, some of these, as we have seen, being older than any Greek manuscript that is spared to us. None of the Lectionaries are older than the eighth or ninth century, and carry, of course, less weight.

The Material of the Greek Manuscripts.

The first thing is the material on which the copies were written. In the word itself we read (2 John 12) of "paper and ink." This alludes most probably to the papyrus of Egypt. This was known to have been used before the time of Christ; but being frail and brittle, it did not endure the ravages of time. The specimens now in existence owe their preservation to being buried in tombs or ruins of cities.

The rolls found in the tombs had been placed under the arms or between the legs of the deceased, and sometimes on the stomach. There seems to be no doubt that these rolls were considered somewhat like passports to bliss. In the collection of Trinity College, Dublin, there is a papyrus which contains a rubric to this effect, as interpreted by Dr. Hincks: "If this book be recited on the earth, and this chapter be put in writing upon a person's coffin, he shall be manifested in the light with all the honours due to him: when he goes to his house he shall not be turned back; there shall be given to him bread, liquors, and the choicest meats on the altar of Osiris; and he shall go to the fields of Aalon." From this we learn that the delusions of Satan not only embraced the quieting of the conscience for time but extended to a hope of eternal bliss. How blessed to be delivered from his delusions!

There was a good trade done in the funeral papyri. Many are preserved which prove that they were prepared beforehand, and a blank left for the person's name, which in some cases has been filled up evidently by a different hand from the body of the writing, while in some cases the name was not inserted from some cause, and the blanks remain to this day.

This papyrus was made from an Egyptian plant. Underneath the coarse exterior rind of the plant lie a number of successive thin layers of the inner cuticle, about twenty in number. These were separated from each other, and two of them pasted together transversely, then pressed, dried, and polished. By joining the leaves together they were made into a long roll.*

{*The "paper reeds" in Isaiah 19: 7 is not now considered to be the best translation. It is rendered "The 'meadows' by the brook," etc.}

There are no manuscripts of the Greek Testament now in existence on the papyrus, (except a few leaves containing a portion of 1 Cor. 6, 7.) nor in the form of rolls; but this particular form explains the "book" referred to in Revelation 5. It will be noticed that this is said to be "written within and on the back side." It was usual to write only on one side of the roll, which was placed on two rollers. One was held in each hand, and by gradually unrolling with one hand, and rolling up with the other, the entire manuscript could be read. It was the duty of the librarian to re-roll them ready for the next reader, as of course they could only be read one way. But it occasionally happened that the whole writing could not be got in on one side, and in that case a portion was written on the back. The roll in the Revelation, being written within and on the back, pointed out the full revelation God was going to make of His future actings.

Another point of interest is that the book had seven seals, and the breaking of each seal was followed by a further revelation. This is easily explained by the above roll. As we may say, a portion was written, rolled up, and sealed; another portion written, rolled up and sealed, and so on to the seven. By opening one seal a portion of the roll was able to be read, containing the first revelation: then another seal presented itself, which had to be broken open before the second portion could be read, and so on. It was God's seven-sealed roll, containing seven revelations.

Further, in 2 Timothy 4: 13, we read of the "books" and the "parchments." The oldest copies of the Greek Testament now in existence are written on vellum or parchment, and the three oldest of them are remarkable for the beauty of the vellum on which they are written, later copies being on that which is thicker and coarser. The Codex Sinaiticus is believed to be written on vellum from the finest skins of the antelope or ass, and the pages are so large, that it is estimated the skin of an animal would not furnish more than two leaves. This will give some idea of the value of sufficient parchment to form a New Testament. The name "parchment" is supposed to have been derived from Pergamos, where it was first made.

Paper made of cotton is believed to have been invented about the ninth century A.D. There is a Lectionary in existence, written on vellum, of about that date, but in which two leaves are inserted on paper made of cotton, and which appear to have been written on by the same hand as the vellum. About the twelfth century a much finer paper was made of linen: when highly finished it much resembled vellum.

The supply of papyrus was abundant from the Egyptian market during the early part of the Roman empire, but on the complete division of the empire this supply was in a measure stopped, the intercourse with the East being both difficult and irregular. This led to a revival of the practice of rubbing out from the parchment anything that was not valued by the owner in order to put thereon what he desired to commit to writing, or it might have been done simply as a matter of trade, clean parchment being always saleable.

Unfortunately, as we say, some portions of the New Testament have been served in this way. The word of God has been rubbed out, and something comparatively worthless written in its place. In some instances a third writing has been placed on the same parchment. In 1476 one of the early editions of the Clementine Constitutions was actually printed on a parchment from which the writing had been erased.

But fortunately this erasing has not been thoroughly effected, so that the parchment still shews in faint outlines the original writing, which often, by great labour, and sometimes by chemical means, has been deciphered.

To comprehend the process of restoration it must be understood that there were two methods employed by the ancients in effacing the original writing — the wet and the dry. The first consisted in moistening the surface of the parchment, washing it with a sponge, and rubbing it with pumice stone. Of the dry there were different forms: either the entire line was scraped away with a broad tool or blade, or the operator followed the course of each separate letter and obliterated each in succession with the point of the tool. The ink again was of three kinds metallic (which was that commonly used), vegetable, and mineral. And as the action of the ink, whatever may be its composition, was not entirely confined to the surface, it is found that even after the superficial trace of colour has been partially or entirely removed, its unobserved presence may still be detected by careful scientific treatment.

The method frequently adopted by Mai was simply to wash the page with an infusion of galls, and expose it to the action of light and air. This was in many cases successful; in other cases however it blackened the parchment so that neither the first nor the second writing could be read.

The more recent mode is to carefully wash the parchment with water, then dip it in diluted Hydrochloric acid, and finally in Potassium ferrocyanide. This in many cases has proved entirely successful. (Encyclopedia Britannica.)

There is at Paris a famous manuscript of this description, which contains large portions of both the Old and New Testaments, over which have been written some works by St. Ephraem the Syrian. It is called the Codex Ephraem.

Such manuscripts are called rescripts, "written again," or palimpsests, "scratched or scraped again."

We give a specimen of one of these rescripts. It will be seen that in this case the leaf had been folded in half, and the second writing placed transversely. In other cases the two writings run in the same direction. Here only a portion of the original is covered by the second writing; but in other places and in other rescripts the entire original is covered. This, however, will shew how difficult it is to read the first where it is covered by a second writing, and in some places the original is much more indistinct than in our copy, being read in places only with great difficulty. The most difficult to read are those re-written line upon line, where the characters blend and run into one another.

Facsimile of a rescript from the Codex Nitriensis showing part of Luke 20: 9, 10.

Our specimen is from the Codex Nitriensis. It was brought from a Nitrian monastery in Egypt, and is now in the British Museum. It contains large portions of Luke's Gospel, which are judged to have been written in the sixth century. These have been written over in Syriac by Severus of Antioch, against Grammaticus in the ninth or tenth century. The specimen contains a portion of Luke 20: 9, 10, and in the common Greek type reads thus: αμπελώνα, και εξέδοτο αύτόν γεωργεις, και απεδημησε χρύνους ίκανούς. και εν καιρώ (a vineyard, and let it out to husbandmen, and left the country for a long time. And in [the] season).

The ink that was used for the earliest of the manuscripts has not stood its colour during the lapse of ages. It has often turned brown, or a sort of red, or become very pale. On parchment the ink does not sink into the material so much as on paper, and in some places it seems to have peeled off altogether; yet even there the text can sometimes be made out by the indentation left in the vellum, the writing having been made apparently by a metal pen (called a stylus, used for writing on tablets covered with wax). The coloured inks have maintained their colours better than the black. The ruled lines by some sharp instrument are also still visible in some places. These ruled lines and columns enabled the copies to be written very regularly, some having almost the uniformity of a printed copy, and which has led some to suppose the letters must have been stamped instead of written.

In the papyrus scrolls the lines were very short, so as to be the more easily read as they were unrolled; but, when books instead of scrolls began to be made, the writing gradually took the form of longer lines. The Codex Sinaiticus is the nearest in appearance to the papyrus copies, having four columns on a page; the Codex Vaticanus has three; and the Alexandrinus has two. This however cannot be taken as a sure criterion of age, as manuscripts with three columns have been discovered as late as the eighth and ninth centuries. We believe the Codex Sinaiticus stands alone in having four columns. The length of the lines may be seen in our specimen on page 28. Four columns made a good size quarto page, which was the usual form for the earlier copies, a few being in folio, and some in octavo. The sheets were folded into small sections of a few leaves, each section being numbered on the first or last page.

The Style of Writing.

For about the first ten centuries the copies were written all in capital letters, called Uncials, and afterwards in the small letters called Cursives. The word 'uncial' is supposed to be from uncia, an inch, not that the letters were really an inch in size (though in some copies the initial letters are over half an inch); 'cursive' is from cursus, a running, because the letters run together as in common writing. These two styles of writing divide the Greek manuscripts into two great classes; but of course it was desirable to fix the date of each copy as nearly as could be in its class. Though we have no cursive Greek manuscript earlier than the tenth century, yet that style was used for common purposes long before. It is even found in the Herculanean rolls in places where apparently rapidity was sought rather that elegance.

Greater attention has been given to the uncial copies with the view of fixing the date of each. "By studying the style and shape of the letters on Greek inscriptions, Montfaucon was led to conclude that the more simple, upright, and regular the form of uncial letters; the less flourish or ornament they exhibit; the nearer their breadth is equal to their height; so much the more ancient they ought to be considered. These results have been signally confirmed by the subsequent discovery of Greek papyri in Egyptian tombs, which vary in age from the third century before the christian era to the third century after that epoch, and yet further from the numerous fragments of Philodemus, of Epicurus, and other philosophers, which were burned [buried?] in the ruins of Herculaneum in A.D. 79. The evidence of these papyri indeed is even more weighty than that of inscriptions, inasmuch as workers in stone were often compelled to prefer straight lines as better adapted to the hardness of their material, where writings on papyrus or vellum would naturally flow with curves." (Scrivener.)

The Rosetta stone, now in the British Museum, and supposed to have been executed in the second century before the christian era, contains, besides the hieroglyphics, the record in Greek uncials, which gives a good specimen of the style of writing at that period, as it was done on stone. Its letters differ little from the specimen we are about to give from a Greek manuscript, except in the formation of three or four of the alphabet. The Rosetta stone does not divide the words, and has no breathings, accents, or marks of punctuation.

Further, the upright letters are more ancient than those written leaning, and the absence of any larger initial letters shews high antiquity. in nearly all the copies letters are huddled up together at the end of the lines in smaller characters, or the words contracted, in order apparently to get in each line as much as was in the copy used. This can also be seen in the specimen we give.

We will now shew the reader some of the difficulties that presented themselves in attempting to decipher the early Greek manuscripts. These will be more easily perceived by a facsimile of one of the manuscripts. This is copied from the Codex Sinaiticus. It is John 6: 14, 15.

Facsimile of John 6: 14, 15 from the Codex Sinaiticus

Being written all in capitals would not have created any difficulty, but the practice of running the words on together without any spaces between them certainly did. And besides this, the words were often divided at the end of the line without any regard to syllables, and without any mark to shew that the word was divided.

We give the passage in modern Greek cursive characters divided into words, shewing also where the words have been divided at the ends of the lines

ησεν σημειον έλε-

γον' 'ουτός εστιν

αληθως 'ο προφή-

της 'ο εις τον κόσμω

'ερχόμενος'

'Ις ουν γνους 'οτι

μέλλούσιν έρχε-

σθαι καί άρπάζειν

αύτόν καί άναδι-

κνύναι βασιλέα

φεύγει πάλιν είς το

όρος μόνος αύτός.

As nearly as it can be put into English, it would stand thus (disregarding for the present the corrections by a later hand). The reader will see how difficult it would be to read a book printed in this style.

HEDIDASIGNTHEY

SAID•THISIS

TRULYTHEPRO

PHETWHOINTOTHEWORL

ISCOMING•

JSTHEREFOREKNOWINGTHAT

THEYWEREABOUTTo

COMEANDSEIZE

HIMANDTOPRO

CLAIMKING

ESCAPESAGAININTOTHE

MOUNTAINALONEHIMSELF•

Now it is easy to see that, when copies were made, mistakes might occur by dividing some part wrongly into words. This may be well illustrated by an anecdote, which though well known will bear repeating. An infidel, lying on a bed of sickness, to sustain himself in his infidelity, wrote on a piece of paper

GOD IS NOWHERE.

His child coming into the room, her father asked her if she could read what he had written on the paper. She began to spell the words: G, O, D, GOD — I, S, IS — N, O, W, NOW — H, E, R, E, HERE — God is now here. It was used to her father's conversion, through the grace of God. It well illustrates the fact how that by dividing a word in a different place the sense may be entirely altered.

And where the meaning is not entirely changed it may be altered by the division of the letters differently. To take an instance that has occurred we may quote Acts 17: 25. Along with the different division of letters, a letter was sometimes added or omitted to endeavour to make good sense.

The letters stand thus KAITAΠANTA, which have been divided thus:

ΚΑΙ ΤΑ ΠΑΝΤΑ and all things

ΚΑΤΑ ΠΑΝΤΑ in respect of all things.

There can be no doubt the first is the correct reading.

Sometimes one letter was also changed for another, or perhaps it could not be well deciphered. Thus in 2 Thessalonians 2: 13 are the letters ΑΠΑΡΧΗΣ. These have been divided thus:

ΑΠ' ΑΡΧΗΣ from [the] beginning

ΑΠΑΡΧΗΣ [the] firstfruits.

There can be no doubt that the first is the correct reading.

Added to this was another difficulty, namely, the habit of contracting the words. For instance, instead of writing JESUS in full, they would at times write the first and last letters, with a line over the top to shew it was a contraction: thus JS; or in Greek ΙΣ (as it is in the fifth line of our specimen). But it might be in some cases that the line drawn over the letters was not so thick as were the letters, so that with the age of the manuscripts the line would become invisible, though the letters remained visible. In that case, these letters would naturally be taken to be a part of either the word that went before or the word that came after, or a word in itself, the copyist making the best sense he could.

In other cases they judged differently as to what the word was which was contracted. Thus in Romans 12: 11, there stands in the Codex Sinaiticus ΚΩ, which some have judged to be ΚΑΙΡΩ, season, "serving in season;" and others have judged it to be intended for ΚΥΡΙΩ, Lord, "serving the Lord." Without doubt the latter is right.

Another difficulty was occasioned by single letters being omitted and a line drawn over the top to shew the omission (as at the end of the fourth line of our specimen); but the letters might be visible yet not the line, and the omission be thus overlooked.

In some cases, the letter Θ, because of the line in the centre becoming invisible, was taken for Ο.

Perhaps the most important and trying question brought about by this means is in 1 Timothy 3: 16: "God was manifest in the flesh." Here the word for 'God,' contracted, is ΘΣ, but in two of the principal manuscripts (A and C) it cannot be told with certainty whether they were originally as above, or ΟΣ, 'who' — 'who was manifest in flesh.' It will be at once seen that the variation may have been brought about by the two short lines becoming invisible. א reads ΟΣ, but has been altered by a later hand to ΘΣ; P has ΘΣ.

In other cases the similarity of letters caused variations when age made them indistinct. Thus Α, Λ, Δ; Ϲ (the ancient form of Σ) Ο; Є, ϴ, etc.

Another point that added to the difficulty was that there were in the oldest copies few if any points. There are three in our specimen, but in other places they are entirely omitted. This also was a cause of passages being read differently, especially when the letters were not divided into words.

Another difficulty, and which has caused great labour, is that most, if not all, the older manuscripts have been altered from time to time by various correctors, and as age gives value to the writing, it is of importance to ascertain when these corrections were made. The style of the letters has to be carefully studied, and the colour of the ink, and which one is over another. By these means these correctors are classified into first hand, second hand, etc., often called by 'primâ manu,' 'secundâ manu,' etc., or, in short, p.m., s.m. Thus A would stand for the original of a manuscript. A1, or Ap.m. would be the first corrector; A2, or As.m. would be the second corrector, and so on. The corrections of the first hand may be sometimes as ancient as the original, and by the same hand.

To give an idea of the labour caused by these correctors, we may state that Tischendorf after careful study, considers that in the Codex Sinaiticus there are not fewer than ten different hands. All these had to be studied, and a relative value set on each, and, above all, to endeavour to find out the original readings.

By referring again to our specimen the reader will see two of these corrections. In the ninth and tenth lines the words και αναδικνύναι (and to proclaim) have dots over them, and in the margin the words 'ινα ποιησωσιν (that they may make) written to replace them. Again in line 11 the word αυεχωρησεν (withdrew) is intended to take the place of φεύγει (escapes). Both these corrections are judged by Tischendorf to have been made by the corrector whom he calls Ca (about the seventh century), who may be said to be the seventh who went through the manuscript to correct it after it was written. This corrector often altered the manuscript in a way that made it agree with the common text we now have. Both the above corrections did so.

There is one thing peculiar in the first of the above corrections, namely, that the writer in adding the word INA in the margin only wrote the last two letters, and used the last letter of the line as it stood for his I, drawing a line through the Δ that preceded it. Such a thing as this had, of course, to be carefully noted, for if the word originally written had made sense without the Ι it might be thought to have been added by the corrector: in this instance the dots over the Ι prevented any mistake.

It is supposed that each manuscript had a comparer, sometimes the original scribe, who compared the manuscript with the copy after it had been written, and a corrector who revised the manuscript, perhaps by a second copy. This was useful and necessary labour to ensure accuracy. Some copies have a note at the end saying by whom and where it was revised. After this of course the manuscript might fall into other persons' hands who might have the opportunity of comparing it with a third copy, and so on, until a copy had passed through perhaps a dozen correctors, which, as we have seen, gives great labour to distinguish the various hands, and assign a date to each as near as may be.

Now though all these difficulties may appear to be disadvantages, on the other hand they are, as we have already seen, an unanswerable proof of the antiquity of the New Testament. Suppose, for an instant, that the oldest copy we have at present had no such marks of antiquity, the sceptic would say that it was a modern invention, there was not a single proof of its early existence, such as they had for the writings of Homer and others. But this he cannot say. The oldest copies shew undoubted proofs of antiquity. In the old papyrus Greek manuscripts the letters are all capitals, not divided into words, with no points, no accents, no breathings. Well, we have copies of the New Testament with all these and many other marks of antiquity, written too on a material only used of such quality and texture in very early ages. God has caused that such copies should be preserved down to this our day, which no one has or could call in question as being the genuine monuments of antiquity.

Causes of Variations.

Besides the dangers that existed of mistakes being made in copying the ancient manuscripts, because of the way in which they were written, we must point out how other mistakes arose where the copy was not indistinct.

A large body of variations come under the head of what are called Itacisms [a name probably from the interchange of eta (η) for iota (ι)]; that is, a change of vowels; as ει for ι, and aι fοr ε. This may have been caused by a different pronunciation coming into use; or from some copies being written from dictation; or from mere preference of spelling a word in a different manner. Thus a great many of these variations may be dismissed as of no consequence, and indeed they cannot be called various, (or different) readings, being only a different mode of spelling a word; in a similar way to which some prefer to write honor for honour, color fοr colour; or, as another class of words, wroth for wrath; spake for spoke, etc.

This however does not account for and dispose of all the cases where only a single letter has been changed. When we remember that the inflexions of nouns and verbs are effected in Greek (as other languages) by a change of some part of the word itself, the alteration of a single letter may materially alter the sense of the passage.

Take for instance Matthew 23: 32, different copies read

πληρώσατε aorist imperative active, 6 'fill ye up.'

πληρώσετε future indicative active, 'ye will fill up.'

By one letter the sense is materially altered. Without a doubt the first is the right word.

In Matthew 10: 19 different copies read,

λαλήσετε future indicative active, 'ye shall speak.'

λαλήσητε aorist subjunctive active, 'ye should speak.'

In Romans 5: 1, a serious difference occurs by the alteration of a single letter:

'εχομεν present indicative, 'we have.'

'εχωμεν present subjunctive, 'we should have, or 'let us have.'

A similar alteration occurs in 1 Corinthians 15: 49: 'we shall bear' or 'let us bear.'

Also in Hebrews 12: 28: 'we have grace,' or 'let us have grace.'

Sometimes the sense is altered by such variations and sometimes it is not.

There are also many variations where two or three letters are different, some of little consequence and some more material.

There are also mistakes from two or three letters being added or omitted at the ends of words, which may seem to us singular mistakes, but which were easily made when there were no spaces between the words: thus in Luke 7: 21,

έχαρίσατο βλεπειν, 'he granted to see.'

εχαρίσατο τό βλεπειν

The first line would stand thus in the old copies: ΕΧΑΡΙΑΤΟΒΛΕΠΕΙΝ, which has been copied as above, and divided into three words, where there were but two. The sense is not altered.

In Matthew 16: 18 there are the words

και πύλαι, 'and gates.'

και αι πύλαι, 'and the gates.'

The latter is incorrect, being merely an error of the copyist.

In Revelation 14: 8,

παντα έθνη, 'all nations.'

παντα τα έθνη, 'all the nations.'

Here the latter is correct, the article being omitted by mistake.

Some such errors occur only in two or three copies, leaving no doubt as to which is the true reading.

Other variations have been caused by the similar appearance of words, especially when they were written in capitals. Thus in Mark 5: 14 we have ΑΝΗΓΓΕΙΛΑΝ, 'announced,' for ΑΠΗΓΓΕΙΛΑΝ 'told;' and in Luke 16: 20 ΗΛΚΩΜΕΝΟΣ for ΕΙΛΚΩΜΕΝΟΣ, both 'being afflicted with sores.'

Many variations occur by the transposition of words, but which in most cases do not affect the sense. The words Jesus Christ are often changed for Christ Jesus. Doubtless most of these are through carelessness and with the thought that it was of no consequence so long as both words were inserted, indeed some might have thought it an improvement if they read of 'Jesus Christ' in one verse to make it 'Jesus Christ' in another to make it uniform. But surely God does not make a difference without a reason. Without doubt there is a reason why Jesus is put before Christ in some places and after it in others. It is for us to discover why it is; certainly not to alter what God had caused to be written.

Another class of mistakes has been caused by omissions. Whole words or sentences have been omitted. These mistakes have been caused sometimes by what has been called Homoearkton, or similar beginnings, which may be illustrated thus:

Blessed are the poor in spirit:

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn:

for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek:

for they shall inherit the earth.

Suppose a person was copying the above and he had read off the first two lines, when he had written them in looking to the copy again his eye might catch the third 'blessed' instead of the second, and he would write the third clause, and omit the second altogether. Thus in Hebrews 2: 13 there are two clauses commencing with και παλιν, 'and again,' two copies in existence omit the part after the first καί παλιν, the eye having gone to the second by mistake.

Another class of mistakes are called Homoeoteleuton, similar endings; that is, where two lines end with the same word, or there are two words of which the end letters are the same, the eye in returning to the copy catches the second word instead of the first, and omits the piece in between. Omissions from similar endings are much more frequent than from similar beginnings.

An instance of this is in 1 John 2: 23, which stands in our Testament with the last half of the verse in italics as not being in the Greek; but it is in many Greek copies (except the word 'but') and is undoubtedly genuine. Its omission is believed tο have occurred because both clauses end with the words τoν πατέρα έχει, 'has the Father.'

Another class of variations are generally believed to have been caused in this way. Some one reading his Greek Testament made a remark in the margin, intending it only as a note (a practice which is common with some people). But when a copy was made from that Greek Testament the copyist, supposing the note in the margin to be a part of the text which had been left out by mistake, would forthwith insert it as a part of the scripture. This is perhaps the explanation of the clause added in 1 John 5: 7, 8. It has often been a difficulty to understand how additions could be made to scripture: omissions might occur, as we have seen; but who would think of adding to the word of God? Well, additions may have been made in the manner above suggested. It is certain that comments were made in the margins, and it is quite possible they found their way into the text by mistake.

1 John 5: 7, 8, would stand thus if read without the words in brackets: "For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, the Holy Ghost; and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth], the Spirit, the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."

This may also account for single words being added. Such, for instance, as the word "unworthily" in 1 Corinthians 11: 29, which some believe to be an addition; the word being supposed to be an 'explanation' placed in the margin, and from thence copied into the text. Some of the oddest MSS omit the word.

Another source of various readings has been caused by dividing the gospels into portions to be read in the churches. If a portion commenced by "And he said," they would alter this into "And Jesus said," so as to make it apparent who was speaking. This accounts for the addition of the words "And the Lord said" at the commencement of Luke 7: 31. Instead of commencing "Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation," they made it begin, "And the Lord said, Whereunto," etc.

In those days there was perhaps no copy of the scriptures in an assembly but that which was publicly read; and from a good motive these alterations were made to render the sense more intelligible to the hearers. Still they are alterations, and have to be corrected in order to be exact.

Another source of many vexatious variations is the attempt to make the Gospels harmonize, as it is called. Thus, if a scribe in copying one of the Gospels had noticed a particular passage, and in copying a second Gospel he noticed a passage similar, but different, he would perhaps think that they ought to be both alike and so would alter the second. Some persons may have compared the Gospels one with another in a more systematic manner and made alterations; and some of the alterations may originally have been marginal notes. In some way or another many such alterations have been made in the Gospels. Of course they are only in some of the Greek copies; and we have other Greek copies by which to correct them. We need point out only one or two of such alterations that have crept into the Authorized version.

The last two words of Matthew 9: 13, "to repentance," have been added, probably from Luke 5: 32. The words, "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots," have been added to Matthew 27: 35, doubtless copied from John 19: 24.

Thus the harmonizers have done a great deal of mischief. For the most part they did it innocently, for but few have seen that the differences in the gospels were of God; but it was doing mischief; for God caused the gospels to be written as it pleased Him, and with a wise purpose. It is for us to ask for wisdom to discover what the purpose is, and not to alter them as we please.

Another mistake made was to alter the quotations from the Old Testament in the New, generally by adding to them.

Thus in Luke 4: 18 the words "to heal the broken in heart" is an addition of this sort. And in Romans 13: 9 the words "Thou shalt not bear false witness" are also an addition. Some doubtless thought that the quotations would be better if made fuller, and so to rectify what they judged to be omissions they added the pieces named.

These many causes of variations will give the reader some idea of the actual state of the manuscripts still in existence. Thus having many manuscripts is a great blessing; because they correct one another. A variation may be in a few copies only; and there may be abundant evidence to prove that it is not the correct reading. Everything is very earnestly to be avoided that in any way unsettles the word of God; but carefully and prayerfully attending to the variations is not to unsettle the word of God, but to settle it. It is surely not the work of every one nor of many; but it is the work of those whom God has gifted and called to the work. We enter into their labours and reap the fruit. Still it is important to know that everything respecting the word of God will bear the fullest investigation, when set about in a right and reverent spirit. Nothing has to be avoided; nothing to be hidden. The word of God has come to us through the various vicissitudes attending ancient books in general; each manuscript has its mistakes, which are corrected in a similar manner as in other books, by comparing copy with copy. But, as we have seen, its Author lives and has watched over and preserved His book from the beginning.

List of Greek Copies.

The Codex Sinaiticus. As this is the last-discovered Greek manuscript of great value, we give its history. The finding of it is remarkable. Professor Tischendorf was travelling in 1844, under the patronage of the king of Saxony, in search of manuscripts. At the convent of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai, he espied in a waste paper basket some odd leaves of vellum, which turned out to be a part of the Old Testament in Greek. The style, etc., convinced him that they were of very early date, and so were of great value, and yet here they were placed in a basket of waste paper, destined to light the fire in the stove. These were readily given to Tischendorf, and consisted of forty-three leaves. He learnt that there were more of these leaves but, on his telling the monks that probably they dated back as far as the fourth century, they were immediately taken away, and he was only allowed to copy one leaf more than he had already.

He carried away the forty-three leaves, and published them in 1846, under the name of the "Codex Frederico-Augustanus," in honour of his sovereign's name, Frederick Augustus, of Saxony

In 1853 he again visited St. Catherine, but could not obtain any tidings of the leaves he had previously seen, and so concluded that some one else had been more fortunate than himself, and had carried them off. In 1855 he published the two leaves he had copied. These were also a part of the Old Testament — indeed, he did not know at that time that there was any but the Old.

In 1859 he again visited the East, and again tarried at St. Catherine. He had been there five days, and was thinking of leaving, when, on taking a walk with the steward, the conversation turned on the Greek Old Testament, and on their return to the convent, the steward brought from his cell a bundle of leaves, wrapped in a red cloth, such as is used for that purpose in the East, and shewed them to Tischendorf. The scholar now saw that there was not only some more of the Old Testament, but the entire New Testament. This was a great deal more than he expected, or had hoped for. He had to be exceedingly cautious not to let his joy be seen, lest the precious pages should again be taken from him. For very joy he could not sleep all night, and copied out during the night the Epistle of St. Barnabas, which was added at the end of the New Testament.

Nothing would satisfy Tischendorf but to copy the whole, and he at length obtained permission to do this. The manuscript was carried to Cairo, and there he was allowed a few leaves at a time, and had two to help him to copy. But this was uncertain and unsatisfactory work, and Tischendorf began to think how he could best contrive to get possession of the manuscript. He told the monks that it would be a fit and valued present to the Emperor of Russia, who was now his patron and theirs. This they concurred in, but just then the See of Sinai was vacant, and until a successor was appointed, the gift could not be completed. However, after some opposition, he procured the loan of the manuscript for the purpose of having it correctly copied.

He carried it to St. Petersburg, and the Emperor of Russia, at a great expense, had an elegant edition printed, in commemoration of the thousandth anniversary of his kingdom. Cheaper editions were also published, that none might be debarred the privilege of knowing its contents. It proved to be one of the oldest, and so one of the most valuable, of all our Greek Testaments. It is called Sinaiticus, because it was found in the convent at Mount Sinai.

This manuscript contains all the marks of extreme age: namely, the fineness of the vellum, the four columns in a page (in imitation of the papyrus copies), the absence of larger initial letters, the absence of accents and breathings by the first hand, few points, etc.

To add to the interest of this volume it may be named that after it had been introduced to the public, a man named Constantine Simonides came forward and declared that it was not an ancient manuscript at all, but that he himself had written it comparatively lately; that it was with no object to deceive, but being a good penman he had made the copy at the request of his uncle. His tale was so plausible that he found some who gave it credit, and the savants were not a little laughed at that they could have been so easily deceived in judging of the age of a manuscript. But the savants declared that they were not deceived. Every fresh examination of the relic convinced them that it was what they believed it to be. There was the fineness of the vellum, the various hands that had corrected it, the difference in the colours of the inks, etc. Besides, from what could it have been copied? for it agreed in every particular with no other copy in existence. All this was confirmatory evidence. The rebutting evidence as given by Simonides as to when and where it was written, etc., also would not bear investigation. Dates did not agree; persons declared they never knew such a man, etc. Scholars could come but to one conclusion, that the man was false and the copy was a true relic of antiquity. It was supposed that he made the declaration out of spite to Tischendorf, because he had exposed an attempt Simonides had made to pass off a spurious manuscript.

Dr. Scrivener tells the following anecdote of this same Simonides, which also well illustrates the fact that some who are used to examine old manuscripts seem intuitively to know an old copy from the best imitation. Simonides went with manuscripts to Mr. H. O. Coxe, librarian at the Bodleian. "He produced two or three, unquestionably genuine, but not at all remarkable for age . . . . he then proceeded to unroll, with much show of anxiety and care, some fragments of vellum, redolent of high antiquity and covered with uncial writing of the most venerable form. Our wary critic narrowly inspected the crumbling leaves, smelt them, if haply they might have been subjected to some chemical process; then quietly handed them back to their vendor, with the simple comment that these he thought might date from about the middle of the nineteenth century." Simonides made his exit from Oxford, but succeeded in deceiving one less wary.

Codex Alexandrinus (A). This important manuscript was given by Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, to Charles I. of England. It was placed in the British Museum in 1753, where it is now exhibited, in a glass case, in the Manuscript room. This manuscript also contains the Old Testament. The New Testament is complete, except Matthew 1: 1 to 25: 6; John 6: 50 to 8: 52 (two leaves); 2 Corinthians 4: 13 to 12: 6 (3 leaves). It is in quarto, about 13 inches by 10, having two columns on a page. This differs from א and B in having larger initial letters, and it has, the Ammonian Sections and the Eusebian Canons, complete.* Scholars are pretty well agreed in fixing its date in the fifth century. Because of its importance it has been published in full.

{*These will be explained as we proceed.}

Codex Vaticanus (B). This valuable manuscript is in the Vatican Library at Rome (whence its name). It is mentioned in the earliest existing catalogue (1475), but how much sooner it was in the library, or what is its previous history, no one knows. As to age and value, it stands about on a par with Codex Sinaiticus, some giving the Vatican copy the preference, and some the Sinaitic. It is a quarto volume of 146 leaves, ten and a half inches by ten. It has three columns on a page. Its total want of larger initial letters, the fineness of the vellum, and the absence of the Ammonian Sections, point out its antiquity. A later hand (judged to be about the eighth century), has retraced nearly the whole of the manuscript, who, made alterations, adding initial letters, breathings, accents, and points.

The manuscript has been kept with great care too great a care, for those who would have collated it well were not allowed. In 1810 the manuscript was found at Paris, and could have been collated by Hug, but he let the opportunity slip. It had been collated by others, but by no one thoroughly, at least the collations did not agree. Tregelles, in 1845, attempted a new collation, going armed with a letter from Cardinal Wiseman. But he says, "They would not let me open it without searching my pocket, and depriving me of pen, ink, and paper;" and the two attendants (clergymen) kept up a loud conversation and laughter to distract him, and if they thought he looked at a passage too long, they snatched the book out of his hand. Tischendorf was more successful. Cardinal Mai had published an edition, but very inaccurate, and in 1866 Tischendorf succeeded in convincing the pope of this fact, and obtained leave to examine the manuscript for fourteen days, of three hours each. He published an edition, presumedly more correct than any previous. The pope has since also published an edition. The manuscript contains the Old Testament as well as the New. The New is complete down to Hebrews 9: 14, but contains the Catholic Epistles, which were placed after the Acts.

Codex Beza (D). This contains the Gospels and Acts only, and those imperfect in places. This manuscript is in the New Library at Cambridge. It was presented to the University by Theodore Beza, whence its name. It is both a Greek and Latin copy, each filling the page, the Latin being on the right hand. The copy is remarkable in having readings which do not agree with any of the other ancient uncials, and the Latin has less agreement with the Vulgate than any other. Of the curious readings may be named the following, which occurs after Luke 6: 4: "On the same day he beheld a certain man working on the sabbath, and said unto him, Man, blessed art thou if thou knowest what thou doest; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed, and a transgressor of the law." Its date is assigned to the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century. It has been published in full. It is a quarto volume, 10 inches by 8. It has only one column on the page.

Codex Claromontanus (D of Paul's Epistles). This bears a resemblance to Codex Bezae, and gives both Latin and Greek (the Greek being on the left hand page). It contains the whole of Paul's Epistles, except a few leaves. Its letters are square and regular, with initial letters but slightly larger than the others. The breathings and accents now in the copy were certainly added by a later hand. Though resembling Codex Bezae in appearance, it is considered a far purer copy and worthy to follow the four great uncials. Its date is fixed at the sixth century. It was edited by Tischendorf in 1852, who judged that it had been corrected by nine different hands. It is a small quarto, and has only one column on the page.

Codex Ephraemi (C). This is a palimpsest, and is in the National Library of Paris, on account of which it is often called the Paris Rescript. Over the writing of the New Testament had been written some Greek works by St. Ephraem, the Syrian Father, of A.D. 299-378. The chemical agents applied to the vellum have turned some of it dark brown and black, rendering the deciphering very difficult. It is in a single column on a page, has initials of increased size, and its letters are a little smaller than A or B. Its date is assigned to the fifth century. It being odd leaves only of the original manuscript, it contains but portions both of the Old and New Testament; the parts preserved of the New extend from Matthew to Revelation. This has been published in facsimile.

It would be out of place to give a detailed account of all the various uncial manuscripts. We have described the few great authorities (Aleph A B D), and also C, which is equally valuable, but of which we have only fragments. There are other fragments of great value. We add a list of the principal manuscripts for reference, giving the portions of the New Testament contained in each, where the copy now is, and the century to which its date is referred. Some of those named are merely fragments — in some cases a few leaves only; and in other cases, where more complete, it must be remembered that leaves are missing here and there, so that in no case can a manuscript not named for a reading be taken necessarily against the same, as the part in which the variation occurs may be wanting.

It must also be noticed, that, on account of the quantity of parts of the New Testament, the same letter is given to two or three different copies; thus E in the Gospels refers to one copy, in the Acts to another, in Paul's Epistles to a third. So that it must be remembered what part of the New Testament is under consideration before it can be ascertained to what copy E refers. The importance of this will be at once seen by referring to B. In the Revelation B refers to a copy dated the eighth century; but in any other part of the New Testament it refers to one of the earliest copies we have.

Another disadvantage is that different editors give different names to the same manuscript. Sometimes one is named after the place where the copy is, and sometimes by the name of the person to whom it once belonged, or who introduced it to the public. Thus A is called by Tischendorf Codex Oxoniensis because it is now at Oxford, but by English editors it is called Tischendorf III.

It must also be observed that some few of the manuscripts are now referred to by different letters from what they once were. See Codex Angelica Bibliothecae under the letters G and L in the following list.

List of Uncial Manuscripts.

א Sinaiticus. Whole of New Testament. (St. Petersburg.) Century iv.

A Alexandrinus. The whole. (British Museum.) Century iv. or v.

B Vaticanus. Matthew to Hebrews, including Catholic Epistles. (Rome.) Century iv. or v.

Vaticanus 2066 (or Basilianus). The Revelation complete. (Rome.) Century viii.

C Ephraemi, a palimpsest (often called Paris Rescript). Portions of the whole. (Paris.) Century v.

D Bezae (Greek and Latin) . Gospels and Acts. (Cambridge.) Century v. or vi.

Claromontanus (Greek and Latin). Paul's Epistles. (Paris.) Century vi. or vii.

E Basiliensis. Gospels. (Basle.) Century viii. or ix.

Laudianus (Greek and Latin). The Acts. (Oxford.) Century vi. or vii.

Sangermanensis (or Petropolitanus). Paul's Epistles in Greek and Latin. (St. Petersburg.) Century xi. Judged to be a copy of Claromontanus (D).

F Boreeli. Gospels. (Utrecht.) Century ix. or x.

Augiensis. Paul's Epistles. Latin and Greek, (Cambridge.) Century ix.

Fa Coislinianus. Fragments of New Testament. (Paris.) Century vii.

G Seidelii Harleianus, or Wolfii A. Gospels. (British Museum.) Century x.

Angelicae Bibliothecae, or Passionei. G in Acts and Catholic Epistles, and J in Paul's Epistles. (Rome.) Century ix. (Now called L.)

G. Fragments of the Acts. Century vii.

Boernerianus. Paul's Epistles, in Greek and Latin interlinear. (Dresden.) Century ix.

H Wolfii or Seidelii. Fragments of the Gospels. (Hamburg.) Century ix.

Mutinensis. Acts. (Modena.) Century ix.

Coislinianus. Fragments of Paul's Epistles. (Paris and St. Petersburg.) Century vi.

Tischendorf II, a palimpsest. Fragments of the New Testament. (St. Petersburg.) Century vi.

Ib Same as Nb.

K Cyprius. The Gospels complete. (Paris.) Century ix.

Mosquensis. Catholic Epistles and Paul's Epist1es (known from Matthaei's collation). Century ix.

L Regius. The Gospels. (Paris.) Century viii. or ix.

Biblioth. Angelica A. Acts, Catholic and Paul's Epistles. (Rome.) Century ix. (See G.)

M Campianus. The Gospels complete. (Paris.) Century ix.

Ruber (also called Uffenbachianus). Fragments of 1 Corinthians and Hebrews. (Hamburg, etc.) Century ix. (Named Ruber from its red ink.)

N Purpureus, or Vindebonensis. Fragments of Gospels (in various places). Century vi.

Petropolitana. Fragments of Galatians and Hebrews. Century ix.

Nb Musei Britannici, a palimpsest, two Syriac works being written over the Greek. Portions of John. Century iv. or v.

O Fragments of Gospels (some at Moscow). Century ix.

O and Ob. Fragments of 2 Corinthians and Ephesians.

P Guelpherbytanus A, a palimpsest. Portions of Gοspels (Wolfenbuettel.) Century vi.

Porphyrianus, a palimpsest. The Acts, all the Epistles, and Apocalypse. (St. Petersburg.) Century ix.

Q Guelpherbytanus B, a palimpsest. Portions of Luke and John. (Wolfenbuettel.) Century v. or vi.

Papyrus. Parts of 1 Corinthians 6, 7, on papyrus, the only fragments remaining on this material. Century v.

R* Nitriensis, a palimpsest. Fragments of Luke. (British Museum.) Century vi.

{* This is not the R of Griesbach and Scholz, nor the R of Tischendorf, 1849, but what is now referred to as R.}

S Vaticanus 354. The Gospels complete. (Rome.) Century x. This is the earliest dated manuscript, being written A.D. 949.

T Borgianus I. Fragments of Luke and John. (Rome.) Century iv. or v.

Twoi (From Woide). Fragments of Luke and John. (Supposed to be a portion of the same manuscript as Τ.)

Tb, Te, Td. Fragments of Gospels. Century vi. and vii.

U Nanianus I. The Gospels complete. (Venice.) Century x.

V Mosquensis. The Gospels to John 7: 39. (Moscow.) Century viii. or ix.

Wa, Wb, Wc, Wd, We. Separate Fragments of the Gospels.

X Monacensis. The Gospels. (Munich.) Century ix., x.

Y Barberini 225. John 16: 3 — 19: 41. (Rome.) Century viii.

Z Dublin Rescript. Portions of Matthew. (Dublin.) Century vi.

Γ Tischendorf IV. The Gospels. (Oxford and Petersburg.) Century ix.

Δ Sangallensis. The Gospels complete, except John 19: 17-35. (St. Gall.) Century ix. This copy has an interlinear translation in Latin, not the old Latin, but Jerome's, altered, and is of no independent value. Judged by some to be a portion of Codex Boernerianus, G of Paul's Epistles.

θa, θb, θc, θd, θe Fragments of the Gospels.

Λ Tischendorf III. Luke and John. (Oxford.) Century viii or ix.

Ξ Zacynthius a palimpsest. Portions of Luke. (Bible Society, London.) Century viii.

Π Petropolitanus. The Gospels. (Russia.) Century ix.

Cursive Manuscripts.

As has been already explained, the uncial manuscripts may be said to date from the fourth century to the tenth, though some are actually later than this; so also the cursive manuscripts, in the common running hand, date from the tenth to the sixteenth century, the two branches overlapping each other somewhat.

The cursive copies, complete and in parts, are so numerous that it would be useless, in such a work as this, to give even a list of them. They number in all about 1600 copies, though perhaps not more than twenty-five contain the whole New Testament.

They are referred to by the various editors by the figures 1, 2, 3, etc., as well as by the small letters, a, b, c, etc., which at once distinguishes them from the uncial copies for which the capital letters are always used, as may be seen in the foregoing list. Those referred to by a, b, c, etc., are mostly those collated by Dr. Scrivener, and are sometimes referred to thus Scr. a, Scr. b, etc. He collated many cursive manuscripts, and where all, or nearly all of those available for any part of the New Testament agree in a reading, editors sometimes express this by Scr.'s Mss. The manuscripts referred to by figures are those collated by Scholz and others. As with the uncials, so with the cursives the same figure does not always refer to the same manuscript. Thus one manuscript is called 35 in the gospels, 14 in the Acts, 18 in Paul's epistles, and 17 in the Revelation; so that it must be always remembered what part of the New Testament is under consideration before it can be known with certainty what Greek copies are referred to.

When we come to consider the families of manuscript, it will be seen that a cursive copy may be of great value. The great mass of them may be but duplicates of other manuscripts, while some are found to be far from this. On a few of the cursives special value has been set, and this not because of their date, but because they are believed to contain a more ancient text than that of the great mass. Thus, Tregelles who seeks to form a text from ancient evidence alone, quotes in the Gospels cursive manuscripts 1 (tenth century), 33 (eleventh century), and 69 (fourteenth century). In his list of authorities he places these before several of the later uncial manuscripts, though of earlier date than the above cursives.

A short notice of two or three of the cursive manuscripts will not be without interest. The first is

No. 33. This has been called "the queen of the cursives," because of containing, as is supposed, many of the most ancient readings where the manuscripts differ. Its name is Colbertinus, and it is now in the National library at Paris. Though it is number 33 in the Gospels, it is number 17 in Paul's Epistle, and number 13 in the Acts and Catholic Epistles. It has not the Revelation. It is on vellum, in folio size, and is judged to belong to the eleventh century. It had been shamefully neglected, so that the damp caused some of the leaves to stick together; and on separating them the ink from one page adhered to the opposite one, and can only now be read by the set off on the wrong page. In some places portions of a leaf have decayed away entirely, yet what was on these Places can sometimes be read by this set off.

No. 38. This is a copy of the Apocalypse, and is supposed also to contain many ancient readings. It is on cotton paper, and of the thirteenth century. It is valuable because of the comparative scarcity of manuscripts of the Revelation.

No. 1. This is a manuscript at Basle. It contains all the New Testament except the Apocalypse. It is supposed to be of the tenth century, but is judged by some tο be of a mixed character; and that while its gospels are of great value, all the rest is not equally so.

No. 69, called the Codex Leicestrensis because of belonging to the city of Leicester. This contains the whole of the New Testament, with numerous parts missing. This is written in folio, both on parchment and paper, having two of the former then three of the latter alternately. It is attributed to the fourteenth century, but is remarkable for containing many variations from the common Greek text, and thus not being a mere copy of the mass of manuscripts has had the more attention. Though it is 69 in the Gospels, it is 31 in the Acts and Catholic Epistles; 37 in Paul's Epistles; and 14 in the Apocalypse.

No. 61. This is called Montfortianus, because it once belonged to Dr. Montfort, of Cambridge: it is now at Dublin. It contains the whole of the New Testament, but is judged by some to have been originally different manuscripts and not all of the same date. It has acquired interest by containing the famous passage in 1 John 5: 7, known as the Heavenly Witnesses,* and is believed to have been the identical copy which caused the passage to be inserted by Erasmus in his Greek Testament, and thence into the authorized version. It is written on paper, and is judged to be as late as the sixteenth century. It is 61 in the Gospels; 34 in the Acts and Catholic Epistles; 40 in Paul's Epistles; and 92 in the Revelation.

{* See chapter 'Causes of Variations'}.

This must suffice for the cursive manuscripts. As we have said, they are 1600 in number, and all are more or less valuable: many of them have not been thoroughly examined, and thus their intrinsic value is in a great measure unknown. Of course, as a class, they rank below the uncial copies, but in some places they add material evidence for or against a reading.

Lectionaries.

These resemble the lessons read in the synagogues from the Old Testament. As early as the fifth century, Euthalius divided the Acts and Epistles into lessons to be read on various festivals, to which the Gospels were afterwards added. Shorter divisions were subsequently adopted by the Greek church. To make these divisions easily accessible the copies of the New Testament were marked in red ink where the lessons begun, where they ended, and what portions were to be omitted.

This led to manuscripts being written especially for this purpose, which were called Lectionaries to distinguish them. These would contain some passages more than once, and be arranged according as the festivals fell; other parts would be omitted altogether. Some contained the Gospels only, and were called Evangelistaria; others had the Acts and Epistles; and others Paul's Epistles only.

Though these books were introduced among the Latins as early as the fifth century, it is believed they were not adopted among the Greeks until the eighth. Some are extant in uncial characters, though it is believed lectionaries were continued to be written in this style after the cursive writing came into use.

One copy is described as containing lessons for every day in the year, with services for "the holy week," the great festivals, and saints' days, with gospels set apart for special occasions.

To make the ordinary manuscripts available for use, a list of lessons was added to some copies. These were called Synaxaria and Menologia. Scholz published copies of such lists in his Greek Testament, taken from some Paris manuscripts.

As has been already intimated, the commencement of the lessons were often altered to make them more intelligent to the hearers (such as substituting "Jesus said" for "He said") yet some of the Lectionaries are of considerable value.

Of Codex z, Dr. Scrivener says, "Besides the gospels in full, several portions of which are always written more than once in an Evangelistarium, this copy is remarkable for containing among the services for the holy week, four passages from the Septuagint version (Isaiah 3: 9-13; 52: 13 — 54: 1; Jer. 11: 18 — 12: 15; Zech. 11: 10-14;) and four from the Pauline Epistles (Rom. 5: 6-10; Gal. 6: 14-18; 1 Tim. 6: 11-16; Heb. 10: 19-31.) . . . . Few copies of the Gospels contain more numerous and interesting, yet minute variations from the printed text than Codex z but in many places it stands almost, often quite alone. Thus the patient student will find it a document of singular importance, well meriting his best attention." The portions named above will give the reader some idea of what were selected as "Lessons" in those early days.

The Lectionaries are generally classed with the cursives, and referred to by small letters (Scrivener's x, y, and z; for instance, are lectionaries, though x is an uncial), or by figures: Lec. x., or Lec. 1, being quite sufficient to distinguish them from anything else.

The Lectionaries are also interesting as shewing that at that early date the reading of the scripture in public was a constant thing. According to the Apostolic Constitutions two lessons out of the Old Testament and two out of the New were read every Sunday. And if a sermon followed it was nothing else but the exposition, says Cave, in his Primitive Christianity, "of some part of the scriptures which had been read before, and exhortations to the people to obey the doctrines contained in them, and commonly were upon the lesson which was last read, because of that being freshest in the people's memory."

The Fathers.

The evidence to be gathered from the Fathers is of great value. Doubtless they at times were satisfied with giving the sense of a passage as is often done now, but it is beyond dispute that they often made direct quotations from their copies of the scripture, which is surely good and weighty evidence as to what was in the copies from which they quoted. This too increases in weight when we remember that the Fathers date back to the second century — some being undoubtedly associates of the apostles, being about two centuries earlier than any Greek copy now remaining to us.

Further, some of the early Fathers are known to have had their attention called to variations even then existing in the manuscripts. Thus Irenaeus argues that the number of the beast in Revelation 13: 18 should be χξς (666) and not χις (616) as it was in some copies. He attributes the difference to an error in the copyist, and adds, "To those who have done this simply and without evil intention, we suppose pardon to be granted by God." This proves that he was not indifferent to the true readings of scripture in the second century.

Origen also (in the third century) writes, "It is now manifest that the diversity of the copies has become great, whether from the carelessness of certain scribes, or from the rashness of some who make corrupt emendations, or also from those who in emendation add or take away what they think fit."

Marcion, to serve his own evil purposes, attempted to make a new gospel out of the Gospel by Luke. He altered and cut out what he pleased. This caused the Fathers Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Ephiphanius to compare carefully Marcion's gospel with that by Luke and point out the alterations.

These things naturally caused the Fathers to exercise the greater care and watchfulness over the text of the word of God, and would have caused them to be the more cautious in making their quotations. Some of them may have fallen into errors themselves, but they wished to pass off as orthodox, and did not attempt to alter the word of God as Marcion had done.

It will be manifest from the above quotation from Origen that the state of the various manuscripts shewed similar variations to those we now have, yet we may fain hope that as then the copies were nearer to the originals and had thus been copied much fewer times, the variations were much fewer in number. Care is needed, as has been stated, to ascertain whether the Fathers quoted the exact words in their copies, or gave the general sense only. Where a quotation is the former, and where it is supported by good Greek copies of the New Testament now available to us, and perhaps by early versions, it undoubtedly has great weight.

For reference, we give a list of the principal Fathers, the date when they died when not otherwise stated, and the contractions under which they are generally referred to. The names in italic are Latin Fathers.

{*From Scrivener's Introduction.}

Ambrose Bishop of Milan, A.D. 397 (Ambr.)

Ambrosiaster, the false Ambrose, perhaps Hilary the Deacon of the third century, (Ambrst.)

Ammonius of Alexandria, 220 (Ammon.)

Andreas of Crete, 7th century (probably not the same person as)

Andreas Bishop of Caesarea, 6th century? (And.)

Arethas Bishop of Caesarea Capp. 10th century? (Areth.)

Arnobius of Africa, 306 (Arnob.)

Athanasius Bishop of Alexandria, 373 (Ath.)

Athenagoras of Athens, 177 (Athen.)

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 430 (Aug.)

Barnabas, 1st or 2nd century? (Barn.)

Basil Bishop of Caesarea, 379 (Bas.)

Basil of Seleucia, fl. 440 (Bas. Sel.)

Bede the Venerable, d. 735 (Bede.)

Caesarius of Constantinople, 368 (Caes.)

Canons Apostolic, 3rd century (Canon.)

Cassiodorus, 575 (Cassiod.)

Chromatius Bishop of Aquileia, 402 (Chrom.)

Chrysostom Bishop of Constantinople, 407 (Chrys.)

Clement Bishop of Alexandria, fl. 194 (Clem.)

Clement Bishop of Rome, fl. 90 (Clem. Rom.)

Constitutiones Apostolice, 3rd century (Constit.)

Cosmas Indicopleustes, 535 (Cosm.)

Cyprian Bishop of Carthage, 258 (Cypr.)

Cyril Bishop of Alexandria, 444 (Cyr.)

Cyril Bishop of Jerusalem, 386 (Cyr. Jer.)

Damascenus John, 730 (Dam.)

Didymus of Alexandria, 370 (Did.)

Dionysius Bishop of Alexandria, 265 (Dion.)

Dionysius (Pseudo-) Areopagita, 5th century (Dion Areop.)

Ephraem the Syrian, 378 (Ephr.)

Epiphanius Bishop of Cyprus, 403 (Epiph.)

Eusebius Bishop of Caesarea, 340 (Eus.)

Euthalius Bishop of Sulci? 458 (Euthal.)

Euthymius Zigabenus, 1116 (Euthym.)

Evagrius of Pontus, 380 (Evagr.)

Fulgentius, 5th century (Fulg.)

Gaudentius, 4th century (Gaud.)

Gregory of Nazianzus, the Divine, Bishop of Constantinople, 389 (Naz.)

Gregory Bishop of Nyssa, 396 (Nyss.)

Gregory Thaumaturgus Bishop of Neocaesarea, 243 (Thauma.)

Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, 605 (Greg.)

Hieronymus (Jerome), 430 (Hier.) or (Jer.)

Hilary Bishop of Poictiers, fl. 354 (Hil.)

Hippolytus Bishop of Portus, fl. 220 (Hip.)

Ignatius Bishop of Antioch, 107 (Ign.)

Irenaeus Bishop of Lyons, 178; chiefly extant in an old Latin version (Iren.)

Isidore of Pelusium, 412 (Isid.)

Justin Martyr, 164 (Just.)

Juvencus, 330 (Juv.)

Lactantius, 306 (Lact.)

Lucifer Bishop of Cagliari, 367 (Luc.)

Marcion the heretic, 130? (Mcion), cited by Epiphanius (Mcion-e), and Tertullian (Mcion-t.)

Maximus Taurinensis, 466 (Max. Taur.)

Maximus the Confessor, 662 (Max. Conf.)

Methodius, fl. 311 (Meth.)

Nonnus, fl. 400 (Nonn.)

Novatianus, fl. 300? (Novat.)

Oecumenius Bishop of Tricca, 10th century? (Oecu.)

Origen, b. 185, d. 254 (Or.)

Pamphilus the Martyr, 308 (Pamph.)

Peter Bishop of Alexandria, 311 (Petr.)

Photius Bishop of Constantinople, 891 (Phot.)

Polycarp Bishop of Smyrna, 166 (Polyc.)

Primasius Bishop of Adrumetum, fl. 550 (Prim.)

Prudentius 406 (Prud.)

Rufinus of Aquileia, 397 (Ruf.)

Severianus, a Syrian Bishop, 409 (Sevrn.)

Socrates, Church Historian, fl. 440 (Soc.)

Sozomen, Church Historian, 450 (Soz.)

Suidas the lexicographer, 980? (Suid.)

Tatian of Antioch, 172 (Tat.)

Tertullian of Africa, fl. 200 (Tert.)

Theodore Bishop of Mopsuestia, 428 (Thdor. Mops.)

Theodoret Bishop of Cyrus or Cyrrhus in Comagene, 458 (Thdrt.)

Theophilus Bishop of Antioch, 182 (Thph. Ant.)

Theophylact Archbishop of Bulgaria, 1071 (Theophyl.)

Tichonius? the Donatist, fl. 390 (Tich.)

Titus Bp. of Bostra, fl. 370 (Tit. Bost.)

Victor of Antioch, 430 (Vict. Ant.)

Victor Bp. of Tunis, 565 (Vict. Tun.)

Victorinus Bp. of Pettau, 360 (Victorin.)

Vigilius of Thapsus, 484 (Vigil.)

The Versions.

By The Versions are meant the early translations of the New Testament from the Greek into other languages. These are valuable, inasmuch as they let us know what was in the copies used by the various translators. Being translations they are not available, as may readily be understood, for every minute variation. In places where there are only shades of meaning they may not avail; but where the sense is materially altered, or where important words are inserted or omitted, they are of great weight. They go back too to the second century, thus in a measure bridging over the gap formed by the distance of our present Greek copies from the time when they were written.

Another disadvantage is that some of the early versions can be read even now only by comparatively few others being obliged to be content with Latin translations of the same. The Syriac, Egyptian and Aethiopic have but few readers. In minute points this naturally increases the difficulty.

We cannot suppose that such a book as the New Testament would be translated in those early times by anyone who did not value its contents, and therefore we may conclude that according to the light a translator had he faithfully performed his work.

We may start with the Latin copies, and these, as with the Greek, gradually shewed many variations, which went on increasing until the time of Jerome, who set to work thoroughly to revise the Latin translation. This naturally divides the Latin copies into distinct parts, namely, those before Jerome's revision and those after he had completed his work.

Latin Copies before Jerome.

These have been at times referred to under the names of the Old Latin and Italic. The latter name was given to those ancient documents because they were naturally supposed to have had their origin from Italy. But this has now been proved to be a mistake. Mr. Westcott says, "As far as we can learn, the mass of the poorer population [of Rome] — everywhere the great bulk of the early Christians — was Greek either in descent or speech. . . . When Paul wrote to the Roman church he wrote in Greek; and in the long list of salutations to its members with which the Epistle is concluded, only four Latin names occur. Shortly afterwards Clement wrote to the Corinthians in Greek, in the name of the church of Rome. . . . Justin, Hermas, and Tatian published their Greek treaties at Rome. The Apologies to the Roman emperors were in Greek. . . . Even farther West Greek was the common language of Christians. . . . The first sermons which were preached at Rome were in Greek: and it has been conjectured with good reason that Greek was at first the liturgical language of the church of Rome."

Those who have examined minutely the language used in the Old Latin copies declare that they must have originated in North Africa. But inasmuch as the old copies do not agree, the question has arisen whether when in Italy they began to use Latin copies, did they make a new translation (or were indeed several made) or did they adopt the one already made in Africa? Those able to decide such a question have come to the conclusion that new translations were not made, and that all the variations found were rather alterations made to the original African version. Of course copies may have been compared with Greek manuscripts differing from those from which the original was made, and alterations made accordingly, or some one understanding both Greek and Latin might have thought in places the Greek was but defectively represented, and attempted to improve the same. Certainly many alterations were made, until they made a formidable array in the time of Jerome in the fourth century. The term Italic is now given to only a portion of the Old Latin.

The following is a list of the Old Latin copies. It will be seen that some of them are not separate copies, but refer to the Latin that accompanies some of the Greek copies. These, or some of them at least, are not considered to be the Old Latin version, already spoken of, but are simply old in age. Italic letters serve to point out the Old Latin copies. We give their names also, as single copies are often referred to by their names. Of course from their great age all are more or less defective.

a. Codex Vercellensis. Contains the Gospels, and dates in the fourth century. It is considered to be one of the most valuable of these copies. It is preserved in Vercelli, and has been published by Bianchini.

b. Codex Veronensis. Contains the Gospels, and perhaps dates a little later than a. This is also a good specimen of the Old Latin. It has been published by Bianchini.

c. Codex Colbertinus. This contains the whole of the New Testament, but only the Gospels are the Old Latin, the other parts being a copy of Jerome's version. Although it dates the eleventh century, it is considered to be one of the best copies of the Old Latin. It was published by Sabatier.

d. Codex Bezae. This is the Latin which accompanies the Greek copy D, and is considered of comparatively little value. In some places however it does not agree with its Greek companion, and in these places it is of some value. It contains the Gospels and the Acts, and is of the sixth or seventh century.

d. Codex Claromontanus. This is the Latin text of the Greek copy D of Paul's Epistles. It ranks higher than the Latin of Codex Bezae. It is of the sixth or seventh century.

e. Codex Palatinus. Contains the Gospels, but with many parts deficient. It is of the fourth or fifth century. It contains a mixed text: in some places having the old version, and in others Italian revisions.

e. Codex Sangermanensis. This contains Paul's Epistles. It is the Latin text of the Greek copy E, but is considered to be but a copy of Codex Claromontanus, and not an independent witness.

f. Codex Brixianus. This contains the Gospels, and is of about the sixth century. Augustine had spoken of an Italian text, and this would seem to be a good specimen of that to which that Father refers, though it actually dates after him. It thus shews the revised and altered text rather than the original version. It was published by Bianchini.

ff. Codex Corbeiensis. Contains the Epistle of James.

ff1 and ff2. Codices Corbeienses 1 and 2. These contain portions of the Gospels, and consist of a sort of mixed text. They have been published by Bianchini.

g. Codex Beornerianus. This is the interlined Latin text to the Greek copy of Paul's Epistles G. Tregelles describes it as "barbarous in the extreme," and only occasionally of any critical value.

g1 and g2. Codices Sangermanenses. These contain the Gospels. Both have been collated by Sabatier. They both contain a mixed text. "Very ancient."

gue. Codex Guelferbytanus. Fragments of Romans. Sixth century.

h. Codex Claromontanus. It contains the Gospels, but the Gospel of Matthew alone is the Old Latin, and that in a measure mixed, the rest being Jerome's. It is of the fourth or fifth century.

i. Codex Vindobonensis. Contains fragments of Luke and Mark of about the fifth century. It is said to be a good specimen of the Old Latin, unaltered.

j. Codex Sarzannensis. This contains portions of John's Gospel and is of the fifth century. Its text is peculiar.

k. Codex Bobbiensis. Contains portions of Matthew and Mark, of about the fifth century. It contains many ancient readings, but in other places has been altered.

k Codex Bobbiensis. This consists of only a few leaves, containing fragments of the Acts and Catholic Epistles.

1. Codex Rhedigerianus. Portions of the Gospels of the seventh century. Its text is mixed.

m. From a "speculum." This is a remarkable work for the age (the sixth or seventh century). It contains a large number of christian doctrines as heads, under which are arranged quotations from the Old and New Testaments without any note or comment. The quotations are generally African as distinguished from Italic. It is remarkable also in containing twice the disputed passage of 1 John 5: 7, known as "the heavenly witnesses."

n. Codex Sangallensis. The Gospels; of the fourth or fifth century.

o. St. Gall. Fragments of the Gospels; of about the seventh century.

p. St. Gall. Fragments of the Gospels; seventh or eighth century.

q. Codex Monacensis. The Gospels; of the sixth century. An important copy.

r. Codex Frisingensis. Paul's Epistles; of the fifth or sixth century.

s. Codex Mediolan. Fragments of Luke.

s. Codex Bobbiensis. Fragments of the Acts, James, and 1 Peter, of about the fifth century.

δ. The interlinear Latin of Cod. Δ.

The Latin of Jerome. — The Vulgate.

This revision came about by the solicitation of Damascus, Bishop of Rome (A.D. 366-384). We have seen that revisers had been busy at work before this, and it was not an unholy desire to obtain a more correct translation, and one that should carry weight with it, and stay farther revisions.

Jerome procured the best ancient Greek copies he could, and doubtless had the pure African Latin text as well as that now called Italic. In A.D. 384 he had finished the Gospels; and the rest of the New Testament followed. Many years after he was still engaged on the Old Testament.

Jerome did not do his revision very uniformly, making alterations more freely in some parts than in others. In his Commentaries he speaks of some emendations which he preferred, but which, for some reason, he did not put into his text.

The effort to make a new translation of the scriptures was even in those early days not without its dangers. Jerome's New Testament was a revision; but his Old Testament was a translation from the Hebrew, the Old Latin of the Old Testament having been made from the Septuagint. This Augustine advised him not to do, fearing the change would have a bad effect on the mass of the people; and related to him the following instance "A certain brother bishop of ours, when he introduced the reading of thy version in the church over which he presides, something attracted notice on the prophet Jonah, which thou hadst rendered in a manner very different from that which was habitually familiar to the minds and memories of all, and which was consecrated by use through such a succession of ages. Such a tumult arose among the people, especially from the contention of the Greeks, and from their vociferating a charge of falsification, that the bishop was compelled (it occurred in a city) to require the testimony of the Jews. But, whether from ignorance or malice, they replied that in the Hebrew copies there was found the same that the Greeks and Latins had, and used. What next? Why the poor man was forced, after much danger, to be willing to correct this as though it had been false in order not to remain without the people.*

{* Tregelles, in Horne's Introduction.}

The reader will no doubt be curious to know what could have caused such a commotion. It would appear that one word especially attracted the attention of the audience. The passage being read was that referring to the "gourd." From this the Old Latin (made from the LXX) was cucurbita 'gourd,' which Jerome (he translated from the Hebrew) replaced by hedera, 'ivy.'

But to resume: As might be expected, when Jerome's version began to be copied variations appeared, until there were again many differences. From time to time some attempted to restore the original text of Jerome, but it was the copy of the scriptures (except what scholars might have had here and there) available in Western Europe during the middle ages — say for a thousand years — and becomes thus of great interest. In course of time some attempted (as Erasmus) to form new translations to take its place. Robert Stephens made an endeavour to restore Jerome's text, and in 1528 printed an edition, which was followed by even better editions; but as then the Greek text began to come into prominence, a mere translation began to lose its value.

The Roman authorities however sought to have an authorized edition of the Vulgate, and under Sixtus V. an edition was published in 1590, and all printed Latin Bibles after that were implicitly to follow this version. But, as one has well said, there is no royal or papal road to Biblical criticism, and so it turned out that this guide to all others had to be corrected with the pen in some places, and in others a piece of paper was pasted over, containing a correction or a totally different reading, and even this was done so incorrectly that one copy did not agree with another. The edition had to be recalled.

In the meantime Sixtus V. had passed away, and, in two years after, another edition was published under Clement VIII. In several hundred places this differs from that of Sixtus V., though to this day, in order to save the credit of the papacy, the title page bears the names both of Sixtus V. and Clement VIII. The Catholic edition is often called the Latin Vulgate: Jerome's revision has also the same title; they must not however be confounded, for they are not one and the same.

It is commonly thought that the Roman Catholics have grossly corrupted the word of God; but this is not borne out by unprejudiced examinations as far as the Vulgate is concerned. Bentley says that though those who revised this edition were unequal to the task, and not able to judge correctly as to the age and value of manuscripts, he did not discover anything 'dolo malo,' by evil artifice. It is declared to be substantially the version of Jerome; but still with many alterations, the changes being always for the worse!

There are a few good copies of Jerome's version in manuscript.

Codex Amiatinus (am). This copy contains both the Old and New Testaments, in one volume, is in very good condition, and with but few defects. It was written about the year A.D. 541. The New Testament is printed in full with Tregelles' Greek Testament, and is judged to be the best manuscript of Jerome's version.

Codex Fuldensis (fuld or fu). This is also counted to be of the sixth century. It contains the whole of the New Testament. Lachmann gives the variations of this manuscript in the Latin appended to his Greek Testament.

Codex Forojuliensis (for). This is a very good copy of the Gospels of the sixth century. It is stated that Mark's Gospel was removed from this copy and taken to Venice and there passed off as the actual copy of Mark's Gospel. written by himself! Of course it only imposed upon those who did not know that Mark wrote his gospel in Greek instead of Latin.

Codex Augiensis (aug). This is the Latin portion of the Greek copy F of Paul's Epistles. The Hebrews is in Latin only. It is a good copy of Jerome's version, modified in places.

Codex Toletanus (tol). Contains both Testaments in Gothic characters. It is judged to be of the eighth century.

Codex Harleian. (harl). Contains the Gospels. It dates about the seventh century. An important manuscript.

There are other copies, but they are only fragmentary.

Syriac Versions.

The Syriac is mentioned as a distinct language in 2 Kings 18: 26, though it is supposed to be alluded to as early as Genesis 31: 47, where the heap of stones was called by Laban, 'Jegar-Saha- dutha,' and by Jacob 'Galeed,' the former being Aramaean or Chaldaean (the same family of tongues as the Syriac) and the latter being Hebrew: both mean "heaps of witness." The language is still preserved as their sacred tongue in several Eastern churches.

It is pretty generally admitted that the New Testament was translated into Syriac as early as the second century. Eusebius says that Hegesippus speaks of quotations from 'the Syriac;' and Ephraem the Syrian in the fourth century speaks of 'our version,' which had evidently been then long in use.

1. This version is called the Peshito, which is interpreted to mean simple, but which some take to mean "faithful." It has been called "the queen of versions," as being the oldest and best, and is declared to be a most excellent translation. It was long since translated into Latin for the use of those who could not read Syriac. It has since been translated into English. The pure Peshito wanted 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the Apocalypse.

The Curetonian Syriac. This copy was discovered in the British Museum by Canon Cureton. It contains the following fragments of four gospels: Matthew 1: 1-8: 22; 10: 32-23: 25. Mark 16: 17-20. John 1: 1-42; 3: 6-7: 37; 14: 10-12; 16-18; 19-23; 26-29. Luke 2: 48 - 3: 16; 7: 33 - 15: 21; 17: 24 - 24: 44. It is found not only to be a different translation from the Peshito (though others judge them to have had a common origin) but also to have been made from a different text. It is judged to be of the fifth century. It has been published by Dr. Cureton with an English translation.

The Philoxenian Syriac. This is stated to have been made by Polycarp, and was revised by Thomas of Harkel in the year A.D. 508 (and is sometimes quoted as the Harclean version). The translation is very literal, to the destruction of Syriac idiom. This version has received considerable attention from some one, being marked with asterisks and obeli. It is supposed that when an addition was thought to be needed an asterisk was put, and when a part was to be omitted an obelus was placed; the corrections being placed in the margin. It is a matter of question whether these various corrections were made by comparing this version with the older Peshito, or with various Greek copies; they may indeed have been made from both sources. It is necessary in quoting this version to distinguish between the version itself and its marginal corrections. This version contains all the New Testament except the Revelation.

The Karkaphensian Syriac. It is not known from what this Codex took its name, and it is supposed to be the same as Syr. Vatican 153. It is dated A.D. 980, but may have been copied from an earlier translation. It contains the same as the Peshito, but in the following order: Acts, James, 1 Peter, 1 John, Paul's fourteen Epistles, and then the Gospels. The translation closely resembles the Peshito, but is not simply a copy of that recension.

Besides the above, there are copies of a later Syriac version containing the parts missing in the Peshito.

There is also a Lectionary of the Gospels, in Syriac, called the Jerusalem Syriac, because of its peculiar dialect. It bears the date of A.D. 1030, but is supposed to have been copied from a translation of the fifth or sixth century. It differs from all of the above, and abounds in barbarisms.

Egyptian Versions.

Various names have been given to the Egyptian versions. At first only one version was known, and then it was called the Coptic; but when other copies were discovered, and one was traced to Lower Egypt, the term Coptic did not apply, seeing that name is from Coptos, a city in Upper Egypt. Sahidic was another name applied to the version of Upper Egypt; but now other terms are used for both Upper and Lower, the version of Upper Egypt being called Thebaic (or Sahidic), and that of Lower Egypt Memphitic (or Bahiric).

As Christianity spread, the desire for the scriptures in the vernacular tongue naturally arose, and there is good reason for believing that certainly not later than the fourth century the New Τestament was translated into Egyptian dialects.

1. The Thebaic Version. This is considered to be the more ancient of the two, and has been set down by some as belonging to the second century. It abounds in Greek words, and is set down as an unpolished dialect, the language of the common people, but it is thus all the more valuable in some respects. There are several manuscript fragments in this dialect.

2. The Memphitic Version. This is the dialect of Lower Egypt, and is judged to have been made when the language became more refined, and that it eventually superseded the Thebaic version in ecclesiastical uses. There are many manuscripts containing portions of this version.

3. The Bashmuric Version. This is in another dialect from either of the above, and is an independent translation.

The Gothic Version.

This was made by Ulphilas, bishop of the Goths, in the fourth century. He was an Arian, but it has not been ascertained that this caused him to corrupt the scripture in his translation (except perhaps in Phil. 2: 6). The scriptures were too widely spread for this, and any such dereliction would be sure to have been discovered; the Arians rather contented themselves with interpreting the scriptures in a way that would seem to support their error.

One famous copy of the Gospels is called the Codex Argenteus, because is was written in silver with some parts in gold. It has many defects, but some of these have been supplied from other manuscripts. Other copies also supply Paul's Epistles (with defects) except Hebrews. The Acts, the Catholic Epistles and the Revelation are also missing.

The Armenian Version.

An attempt was made to make a translation of the New Testament in the Armenian language from the Syriac; but in A.D. 431 a copy of the Bible in Greek was obtained from Ephesus where the Council was held; and with this the work was recommenced; but the translators found that their knowledge of the Greek language was too imperfect to accomplish such an important work, and therefore three of them repaired to Alexandria to acquire the language. On their return they commenced their third translation. It dates therefore the fifth century.

The question naturally arises as to how far this translation has reached us unadulterated. Certain Armenian editions have been printed, but in 1668 an edition was published which contained the disputed passage of 1 John 1: 7, which raised a suspicion that the original translation had been corrupted. Dr. Rieu, of the British Museum, endeavoured to clear the text of its alterations putting the various readings in the margin. Dr. Rieu says that out of eighteen manuscripts used by Zohrab, a former editor, only one (written in A.D. 1656) had the above disputed passage.

The Aethiopic Version.

A Text of this was published in Walton's Polyglot with a Latin translation. An edition was also issued by Mr. Platt for the British and Foreign Bible Society, for use by the Abyssinian church. In doing this Mr. Platt consulted such manuscripts as were available to him. Mr. Prevost of the British Museum has compared this edition with the one in Walton's Polyglot and noted the variations, which compilation forms the materials available for Biblical purposes.

Later Versions.

The versions besides those above named are of comparatively recent date and of much less critical value. Still as they are sometimes referred to by Editors, they may be named.

1. Arabic Versions. It has been a disputed point whether these have been taken from the Greek or the Latin; one version is supposed to have been made from the Egyptian. Nothing certain is known of the dates.

2. The Slavonic Version. The oldest known manuscript is A.D. 1056, though printed editions may have referred to earlier ones.

3. The Persian Gospels. These are of recent date (one is A.D. 1341) and are of no critical value.

4. The Gregorian Version. This was published at Moscow in 1743, and is considered of little weight.

5. The Anglo-Saxon Gospels. These are more interesting than useful for textual criticism. They were made from the Latin in one or other of its forms.

6. The Frankish Version of St. Matthew.

The Age and Families of Manuscripts.

We have stated that a manuscript is naturally of more or less value according to its age. This needs a little further consideration. We can easily understand that the more ancient a copy is, the fewer hands it has passed through, and the nearer it is to the original. We will try and illustrate this by a diagram.*

Diagram

{*It may perhaps be necessary to caution the reader that in this diagram the letters A, B, C, are used merely to shew that from one original manuscript there may have issued three separate and independent streams or families. The above letters in no way refer to the particular manuscripts generally referred to as A, B, and C.}

Suppose that Μ represents the copy of Mark's Gospel that he wrote. This was copied by A, who in copying made a certain number of mistakes. A was copied by A1 and A2, each of whom copied those mistakes of A (where they had no means of correcting them) and made more mistakes of their own. Then if A2 was copied by two others, each following the mistakes in his copy and making more mistakes of his own, we can understand that the farther a copy was from the original the more mistakes we might expect to find, and the less weight would be attached to it. But mistakes did not multiply in the same ratio as the copies were removed from the original; because the errors began to be found out, and were corrected by different hands before further copies were made. Thus, as we have seen, the Codex Sinaiticus (though classed among the earliest of our manuscripts) had passed through the hands of nine or ten correctors. So that we do not find the later copies so incorrect as otherwise we should do.

Another question arises as to how far each copy can be treated as an independent witness. This will be understood by looking again at the diagram. Mark's gospel was copied by A who made some mistakes, but it was also copied by B, who also made mistakes, but not the same mistakes that A made. Now we can easily understand that all the copies made from A might be free from the mistakes B made, and all the copies made from B, might be free from the mistakes that A made. And if we suppose that A was carried into one country, and B into another, the readings of the one would be the less mixed up with the readings of the other. This will illustrate what is called time theory of recensions or "families" of manuscripts. All that were copied from Α are of one family and all that were copied from B are another family. The importance of this is that A1, A2, up to A7 are not independent witnesses as to the mistakes A made. They copied his mistakes without knowing it. And therefore to say I have seven witnesses to prove that B is wrong would not have the weight of seven independent witnesses, for they are merely copies of one witness (A).

Thus to correct A we want B or its family; and to correct B we want A or its family. And when copies are found to be members of a family they do not form separate and independent witnesses, except as to mistakes made by each individual; but must be sometimes treated as one witness and not as many.

Then, later on, one person might have a copy of the A family and also a copy of B family, and correct one by the other, and thus would be produced copies that were not strictly A nor B, but had some peculiarities of both. This is what is actually found in the Greek manuscripts; and indeed this exists to such an extent that some have doubted the existence of separate and distinct families altogether.

On the other hand, some have thought that there were several different families; but they are now mostly confined to two, called "Alexandrian" (or Eastern, from the city of Alexandria), and Constantinopolitan (or Western, from the city of Constantinople). Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus would be the former, and Codex Alexandrinus the latter in the Gospels (notwithstanding its name); though it is said to belong to the other family in the Epistles.

As has been said, there is a break in the classification of manuscripts about the tenth century. From the first to the tenth the uncial copies (those written all in capitals) were in use; after that the cursives (those written in the ordinary Greek, not in capitals) came into use: and it has been a serious question as to how far attention should be paid to the cursives as evidence. Some pay no attention to them, considering that it is best to pay attention to the uncials only; and indeed some almost discard the later of these, attempting to obtain a true text from the older uncials only.

Now without questioning that the older a copy is the more valuable it is as a witness, it is important to see that some of the later copies may be right and of great value where the older copies differ. For instance, by referring back to the diagram, we have spoken of Mark's gospel being copied by A and B; but suppose it was also copied by C; and although C has been lost, yet we have some that have descended from that copy, but in cursives only. Now suppose that A and B differed in a reading (as the two families named often do), the reading of C, though only a cursive, may be of great value in determining which is right; especially if it was found not to belong strictly to either of the above-named families. Thus a person who confines himself to the earliest Greek copies will miss this class of evidence, because he pays no attention to the later uncials and the cursives.

It may be compared to a trial in a court. It almost always happens that some witnesses are much more valuable than others, but a wise counsel calls all he has; the evidence of all being needed to make his case complete. On the contrary side all are also called. But it often happens that some little thing from one of the non-important witnesses, as some might have been supposed, gives the key to a right judgment, or adds material weight in coming to a conclusion.

So it would seem in judging of a reading, it is not right to judge by a few witnesses only, and shut out a great many. It may be that one of those shut out gives the key to the true reading, being confirmed by one or more of the uncials, by ancient Versions and Fathers.

Before leaving the subject of "Families" of manuscripts it must be noted that each Family has been sought to be discovered not simply by mistakes, but by peculiarities in spelling, grammar, etc., of which the Editors make out lists, but some of which at least have had to be abandoned after having been made. It is sufficient for our purpose to state how the principal manuscripts are now generally arranged. The following has been drawn up by Tregelles: to which we add א.

Alexandrian:

א Β Ζ

C L 1 33

P Q T R Π N R

X Δ 69.

Constantinopolitan (or Western)

A

K Μ Η

E F G S U V Γ A

The manuscripts are placed in the above order as a sort of genealogy of each Family; but anything like scientific accuracy is not claimed for the above. D stands alone. The Latin is classed with the Western.

The Editor at Work.

Those persons are called Editors who, with whatever evidence is at their disposal, study to ascertain, wherever the Greek manuscripts differ, what the text was originally.

The reader will have seen that such a work was necessary, and this not simply for important alterations, but for those more minute. To make this more obvious we will examine in detail the small portion copied from the Codex Sinaiticus given in our specimen in the chapter 'Style of Writing'.

1. It omits ο 'Ιησους, reading, 'he had done,' instead of 'Jesus had done,' as in the common text. Tischendorf, Tregelles and Alford also omit 'Jesus.'

2. It omits óτι, 'that,' 'they said, That this is,' etc. This word is often omitted in the translation, but generally found in the Greek. The Editors retain the word.

3. It reads είς τον κóσμον ερχόμενος, 'into the world is coming.' The common text, confirmed by the Editors, places the words, ερχόμενος  είς τον κóσμον. The sense is not affected.

4. It reads καί αναδιχνυναι βασιλεα, 'and to proclaim [him] king.' The common text reads

ίνα ποιησωσιν αυτόν βασιλεa, 'that they may make him king.' The Editors adopt the common text, except that they leave out aυτον, 'him.'

5. It reads φεύγει, 'escapes.' The common text has ανεχώρησεν, 'withdrew,' which is adopted by the Editors, except Tischendorf, who prefers 'escapes.'

6. It reads μόνος αυτός 'alone himself.' The common text, confirmed by the Editors, transposes the words. The sense is the same.

Thus in this short piece there are six variations from the common text; in five of which we may say the Editors judge the Codex Sinaiticus to be incorrect and the common text to give the true reading. And this is so notwithstanding that this Codex is one of the oldest manuscripts we have; indeed it is declared to abound with mistakes, which of course have to be corrected by other manuscripts, as already explained.

To judge therefore of the true text in every detail is no easy task; the reader will have had a glimpse of the immense amount of evidence that is now available for an Editor of the Greek Testament. As we have seen, it is not everyone's province to attempt such work; and it is only those who have a special gift for such labour should approach it.

To most persons such a mass of evidence would be bewildering in the extreme; and in some cases, instead of all the witnesses being either for or against a reading, some may give a third reading, and some a fourth. To give each particle of evidence its own proper weight, and no more; to see which are independent witnesses, and which are only repetitions; to see how the age and family of each affects a question — are some of the points that have to be decided, and borne in mind all through.

The Editors have made for themselves, or adopted from others, certain rules for their guidance, which rules they call canons. We give a few of them, as they are given by various Editors.

1. No conjecture, without manuscript authority, is ever on any consideration to be entertained.

2. Though Versions and Fathers are of little authority when they differ from the Greek manuscripts, yet when the Greek copies of equal weight differ from each other, those have the greatest weight with which the Versions and Fathers agree.

3. The mere number of witnesses does not decide, but their age must be considered, and also whether they are independent witnesses, or merely copies of one another.

4. Where two readings have equal weight, the most difficult is the correct one; for we can easily conceive of a difficult passage being altered into an easier one; but it is presumed no one would alter an easy one into a difficult one.

5. Of two readings a shorter one is mostly preferable to a larger one; the tendency being in difficult cases to attempt to explain the meaning by enlarging the sentence.

6. In difficult readings, that one is generally preferable which will account for the others, or from which the others can have been taken.

7. In judging of a reading, attention must be paid to the style of the writer; it being judged that each writer had a style more or less peculiar to himself.

Other rules have been laid down by various editors, but perhaps it is not too much to say that not one has kept strictly to his rules. Every variation had to be tried upon its own merits, scarcely any two being exactly alike.

Perhaps the most difficult part of an Editor's work is touching internal evidence. Where there is a great preponderance of external evidence for a reading, internal evidence would not be allowed a voice; but where the evidence for and against a reading is very nicely balanced, it becomes a serious question how far internal evidence may be called into question, and also what may be called internal evidence. For instance, Dr. Scrivener, in describing such cases of difficulty, says, "By internal evidence we mean that exercise of the reason upon the matter submitted to it, which will often prompt us, almost by instinct, to reject one alternative and to embrace another."* In other places he speaks of "common sense" as greatly helping to decide such questions. With all deference to the indefatigable doctor we cannot help thinking this very dangerous ground. We cannot find any such thing set up as a guide in the New Testament.

{* Six Lectures on the Text of the New Testament.}

On the other hand, we doubt not a person in such difficulties should duly weigh the context, and see if any light could be thrown upon it therefrom. Here, of course spirituality would be of the greatest value. He who can enter best into the spirit of the passage will have an immense advantage over one who cannot.

But there is also this difficulty in deciding by internal evidence, that there is nothing to shew for it. The reasons that may operate in one mind may have no weight with another. We may expect that if the Holy Spirit leads one intelligently to a decision, it will commend itself to other Christians who also have the Holy Spirit as their teacher and guide; still there are degrees of spiritual intelligence, and what may be quite clear to one may be beyond another.

But the majority of variations have to be considered by external evidence; internal evidence only having a voice when the external is more or less nicely balanced.

Perhaps the reader will get a better idea of the work that has been done for him by looking at a few passages, and seeing the evidence for and against the readings.

Review of a Few Passages.

1. Mark 1: 2. This variation will illustrate the fact that mere numbers of Greek copies (even if uncial) will not always outweigh a smaller number of greater weight.

The common Greek text reads "in the prophets;" and the variation gives "in Esaias the prophet."

For 'in the prophets,' there are A E F H K M P S U V Γ Π (twelve Greek uncials).

For 'in Esaias the prophet,' there are א B D L Δ (only five).

Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford and Wordsworth all adopt the latter reading. It will be seen by turning back to the Families of Manuscripts (a previous chapter) that nearly all in favour of the common text are Constantinopolitan, and the four others (omitting D as neither) are all Alexandrian; to which may be added the two important cursives 1 and 33, also of the same family.

Besides the above, there are for the common text the Philox. Syriac and the Aethiopic versions, and Fathers Chrysostom and Photius.

For 'Esaias the prophet' there are the Latin copies, the Peshito and Jerusalem Syriac; the Coptic, Gothic, and Armenian versions; and Fathers Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Basil, Titus of Bostra, Victor of Antioch, Severianus, Jerome and Augustine.

In this case we doubt not that the three great uncials א, B, and D have decided the question with the Editors, the reading being supported by the Latin and Peshito versions, and so many of the Fathers.

2. Mark 16: 9-20. The question involved here touches the importance of retaining or rejecting a long sentence of eleven verses. Some copies close the gospel with the words "for they were not afraid" (ver. 8), an ending which would strike every person, one would think, as very strange and undignified. Still of course such questions must be decided by the evidence.

What makes this instance a little more embarrasing is that some copies have another ending differing also from the common text, and one copy at least has both endings. Thus, L gives, at the end of verse 8, "And this also is somewhere extant: 'And they briefly announced all that was bidden them to Peter and his company. And after this also Jesus Himself from the east even to the west sent forth through them the holy and incorruptible proclamation of eternal salvation.' And this also is extant after 'for they were afraid,' and then follow verses 9 to 20 as in the common text.

There can be no doubt that the shorter ending given above may be dismissed as without authority; though it is found in a few copies of minor weight; the only real question is, are verses 9 to 20 to be retained or rejected?

The evidence for the passage is A C D* (three of the great uncials) E F G K M S U V Χ Γ Δ; all the cursives; the Cureton, Peshito, Jerusalem, and Philoxenian Syriac; the Memphitic, some copies of the Old Latin and the Vulgate, with later versions. The passage was known to Irenaeus in the second century; to Hippolytus in the third; and to Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Augustine, and Chrysostom in the fourth.

{* D contains only a portion of the passage, being defective from verse 15.}

Against the passage are א B (two of the great uncials). In B after verse 8 there is a large blank left (which is quite unusual in this manuscript), as if the passage was in the copy from which B was taken, but was left for further consideration as to whether or not it should be inserted; the passage being marked with an asterisk in some copies. So that B is sometimes claimed for the passage rather than against it. Why was the blank left, if there was nothing to fill it in the copy from which Β was taken? L has already been mentioned as containing two endings. The Old Latin k gives a loose translation of the note in L, which note is also found in some of the versions.

With so much for and so little against, one might well wonder why any one could advocate its expulsion. One reason is that it was doubted by some of the Fathers. The earliest one is Eusebius, who in forming his canons for harmonizing the Gospels (hereafter to be considered) found a difficulty in reconciling the resurrection as given in Matthew 28: 1 with that in Mark 16: 9. Eusebius says some copies end the gospel at the words "they were not afraid." "At this point, in nearly all the copies of St. Mark's Gospel, the end is circumscribed. What follows, being met with rarely in some, but not in all, would be superfluous, especially if it contained a contradiction to the testimony of the other evangelists. This [any] one would say if he deprecated and would entirely get rid of a superfluous question."

Others of the Fathers have also written disparagingly of the passage, but their testimony is most probably but an echo of what Eusebius had stated.

Strangely enough, some of the Editors who have not ventured to cut out the passage take a sort of middle path, and admit the passage as scripture, but hold it to be a subsequent addition and not by St. Mark, alleging that the style is not that of the evangelist. But mere style of composition is very uncertain ground on which to judge of the genuineness of a passage, especially in so short a portion.

The passage is omitted by Tischendorf, and marked as doubtful by Alford, upon what, we must think, is most shallow evidence. The passage is unquestionably genuine.

3. Luke 14: 5. This is a variation in which the evidence is nearly equally divided. The common text reads, "Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit?" The variation reads 'son' for 'ass.' This reading of 'son' is startling, and seems so strange an association that Dr. Scrivener says "common sense" forbids even a moment's hesitation as to which to choose. Let us look however as to how the evidence stands.

For "ass:"

א (one of the four great uncials) K L Χ Π Greek uncials,

A host of Greek cursives,

The Memphitic and Jerusalem Syriac,

Three of the best copies of Old Latin (a, b, c) and two others,

The Vulgate, Armenian, Aethiopic versions.

For "son:"

A B (two of the four great uncials) E G Η M S U V Γ Δ Greek uncials,

A host of Greek cursives,

The Peshito, Cureton, and Philoxenian Syriac,

The Thebaic and Persic versions,

Three of the Old Latin (e, f, g),

Some Slavonic manuscripts,

Titus of Bostra, and Clement of Alexandria of the Fathers.

C is defective here, and other copies and versions read differently from either of the above; one (D) having 'sheep or ox,' and one 'son or ox or ass.' There can be no question that the evidence for 'son' is very strong. A and B belong to two families, and where they agree in a reading it is mostly judged to be the true one. And further, the Canon No. 4 would apply here. Unquestionably 'son' is the more difficult reading: we can the better suppose that 'son' has been altered to 'ass' because of the difficulty of the former, than that any would alter 'ass' into 'son.' Of course it may have been a mistake in a copyist; but in the old copies it stands thus: ONOC for 'ass,' and YIOC for 'son,' two words which are not very much alike. Of modern editors Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford, and Wordsworth choose 'son;' Griesbach chose 'ass,' but marked 'son' as probable.

If 'son' is adopted, it would be in the sense of 'if a son fell into a pit, or even an ox;' but there is no word for 'even;' it is simply 'a son or an ox.' Tregelles refers to Deuteronomy 5: 14, where the sabbath is binding on two classes persons, headed by 'son,' and animals, headed by 'ox.' Our Lord takes the two heads, and says if either fall into a pit on the sabbath it would be rescued.

It is perhaps best to consider the reading as doubtful, though the five Editors named above give 'son' without any such limitation.

4. John 5: 3, 4. This is a question of admitting or rejecting the moving of the waters by the angel, commencing with the words "waiting for the moving of the water" (verse 3) and the whole of verse 4.

The evidence is not exactly the same for the whole passage; some copies which omit the words in verse 3, retain verse 4.

For the words in verse 3 there are A2 D; for verse 4 A; for both portions, C3 F G E I K L M U V Γ Δ; the mass of the cursives; the Latin, Peshito and Jerusalem Syriac, Armenian, and Aethiopic versions; Tertullian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Cyril, and Augustine of the Fathers.

Against the portion in verse 3, A1 L; against verse 4, D; against both portions, א B C1; a few cursives; the Cureton Syriac, the Memphitic, Thebaic, and some of the Old Latin versions.

Two theories have been started. One, that the passage is a gloss, or a series of glosses, written by persons in the margins of their Testaments, from which they have found their way into the texts, some taking one, and some another, and some all. It is supposed the glosses were added because of something being needed to explain why the people waited in the porches, and in what way the waters were troubled.

On the other hand, it has been supposed that the passage was originally in the text, but was omitted by some as too strange an occurrence to be true.

The passage is omitted by Tischendorf, Tregelles and Alford, but we think without sufficient authority. It is found in some of the earliest of the versions, and is in the great majority of manuscripts. If it had been an invention we cannot but think that the inventor would have accounted for the troubling of the water in some other way than by the descending of an angel. To insert marginal notes to try and explain doctrines is a very different thing from inventing a story of such a supernatural visitation.

5. John 7: 8. In the passage "I go not up yet," some omit the word 'yet.'

For the word are B (of the great uncials) E F G H L S T U V X Δ Λ; the mass of cursives; the Peshito, Jerusalem, and Philoxenian Syriac, the Thebaic, a few Old Latin, and some of the Vulgate.

Against the word are א D (of the great uncials) K M Π; four cursives; (Jureton's Syriac, the Memphitic, the best of the Old Latin (a, b, c, e, etc.), the Vulgate, Armenian and Aethiopic versions; Epiphanius, Chrysostom, and Cyril of the Fathers.

A and C are both defective here.

This is one of the passages on which the infidel Porphyry attacked the truth, alleging that our Lord said He would not go, and yet went. Jerome answered the objection; but it is evident that in the copies they had, there was no word 'yet,' or it would have been referred to.

Both readings have very respectable external support. It is hardly a variation that could have occurred accidentally, because it is ούπω 'not yet,' or ούκ 'not,' and not simply the omission of a word. Here Canon No. 4 would come to our assistance. Unquestionably the 'not' is the more difficult reading, and while preferring to mark it as doubtful, we fear the 'not yet' has been substituted to remove the difficulty.

6. John 7: 53 — 8: 11. This is the well-known record of the woman taken in adultery, and is another instance where a whole passage of several verses has been called in question.

Here it must be conceded at once that the preponderance of external evidence is against the passage; but it is just one of those instances where mere weight of evidence may give way to the many witnesses.

As we have already seen, many copies were used for reading in the congregation, besides the Lectionaries which were specially written for that purpose, and it has been suggested that this passage might have been judged to be a tolerance of immorality, and be omitted on that account. In the Lectionaries it is placed to be read on the days set apart to penitent women. In some Greek copies the passage is put at the end of the Gospel, and in others it is put at the end of Luke 21.

This shifting of the passage into various places is, we think, evidence rather in its favour. Where did the passage come from originally if not written by John? And if he did not write it, why was it not at once expunged? Instead of this, in some copies where it stands in its right place it has marks apparently to point it out as doubtful, while in others it is banished to other places by men who, though rash, were not wicked enough to take it from the word of God.

The actual evidence for the passage is D (one of the great uncials), E F G H M K S U Γ Λ also uncials, being marked as doubtful in E M S Λ. Over 300 cursives, in some being marked as doubtful, and in about ten being put in a different place. Some of the Old Latin, the Vulgate, Arabic, Persian, Jerusalem Syriac, Aethiopic, and many copies of the Memphitic versions. Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, of the Fathers, and the Apostolic Constitutions.

Against the passage are quoted א A B C (of the great uncials) L T Χ Δ. Of these A C are defective here, but by a careful calculation of the space the passage would occupy they are quoted as not containing it. In L and Δ there are spaces left after 7: 53, and in Δ the copyist had begun to write 8: 12 but drew a line through the words he had written. About fifty cursive copies omit the passage. Some of the Old Latin, the Cureton, Peshito and Harclean Syriac, and the Armenian versions omit it. The early Fathers are silent on the passage. Against the passage must also be named that in the manuscripts which contain it there are many variations, D having a sort of abridged form of the narrative.

That the passage was expunged because it was thought to give a licence to sin, is not what is thought now simply. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) and Nicon (century x.) both give this as the reason why the narrative was excluded. But to go further back we find that Tertullian (died A.D. 200) was very strong on the question of adultery, and devoted many pages to prove that if committed after baptism, it admitted of no pardon. The bishop of Rome had issued an edict that the sin of adultery and fornication were to be remitted on the guilty one's repentance. This drew forth a sharp rejoinder from Tertullian. "Where," said he, "shall this liberality be posted up? On the very spot, I suppose, on the very gates of the sensual appetites, beneath the very titles of the sensual appetites. . . . Far, far from Christ's betrothed be such a proclamation? She, the true, the modest, the saintly, shall be free from stain even of her ears. She has none to whom to make such a promise; and if she have had, she does not make it; since even the earthly temple of God can sooner have been called by the Lord a 'den of robbers' than of adulterers and fornicators. . . . Whatever authority, whatever consideration, restores the peace of the church to the adulterer and the fornicator ought to come to the relief of those who repent of murder or idolatry." The reader will surely see how such a passage as the one in John's Gospel would stand in the way of one of such unbending sternness.

On the whole we think good reasons can be assigned for the passage not being found in many copies: the quotation from Tertullian clearly evinces how hard a lesson it is to learn what grace is. His treatise is quoted to prove that the passage was not in his copy of the Testament, or he would have referred to it when speaking on the subject. Perhaps so; but it also shews for what reason the passage may have been expunged: for we must believe either that it was added or expunged by some one. We have seen why it may have been the latter, but we know of no motives that could have induced any to add the passage. It may also be noted that in one copy (Codex Veron.) some one was so anxious to get rid of the passage that he tore out the leaves which contained it, though in doing this he had to destroy what preceded and what followed it.

Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford all omit the narrative; Griesbach marks it as doubtful, and Wordsworth inserts it in his Greek Testament, but does not believe it to be canonical, a mode of action which strikes us as singularly inconsistent.

One thing which seems to have weighed with the critics is, that the style of the Greek in this portion is judged to be different from John's writings generally. But, as we have remarked. on the passage in Mark 16, this is very unsafe ground for rejecting a passage.

We believe the passage to be genuine, and to have a divine stamp upon it which has never been found in any human production. Who could have discovered such a way out of the apparent dilemma in which our Lord was placed? Grace triumphed in a marvellous way.

7. Acts 8: 37, "And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."

This verse is omitted by most modern Editors. Of the five oldest Greek copies, it is omitted from four (A B C א), and the other (D) is defective here. Η L P and many cursives also omit it. Most of the ancient versions also omit the verse.

On the other hand, E inserts the verse, with many cursives, some of the Latin copies, one of the Syriac, the Armenian, and the Arabic versions. It is quoted by Irenaeus in the second century, by Cyprian in the third, and by Jerome and Augustine in the fourth.

As we have said, the verse is omitted by most modern Editors (Wordsworth retains it). Alford accounts for its insertion thus: "The insertion appears to have been made to suit the formularies of the baptismal liturgies, it being considered strange that the eunuch should have been baptized without some such confession." On the other hand, it has been argued that because of infant baptism this verse was sought to be got rid of by those who had loose ideas of the inspiration of the scriptures. The preponderance of evidence is decidedly against the passage.

8. Acts 13: 19, 20. The common text reads, "By lot. And after that he gave [to them] judges, about the space of four hundred and fifty years." Some copies read, "By lot about the space of four hundred and fifty years. And after that he gave judges." It will be seen, by comparing the two readings, that it is but a transposition of the words; yet one that alters the sense materially. The one passage says they had judges for four hundred and fifty years; and the other that the judges were given after the four hundred and fifty years. The question of the judges existing for this period has always been a difficulty with those who have studied the chronology of the Old Testament; indeed one may say that volumes have been written on this point; but the variation removes at once the difficulty: yet the question is, was the variation made to remove the difficulty, or was it there originally?

For the common text there are D2 E H L P; the Aethiopic version.

For the variation there are א A B C; the Vulgate, Memphitic, Thebaic, and Armenian versions.

D1 does not transpose the words, but, though otherwise like the common text, it omits the words 'after that,' so that it is claimed as a witness rather for the variation than the common text.

Here the Canon must not be forgotten that the more difficult text is often the correct one; still this must not be pressed too far. If the variation were an alteration made in the original, it would scarcely have found its way into four of the great uncials, embracing both the Alexandrian and Constantinopolitan families. This reading is adopted by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Wordsworth, and we think it is most probably the correct reading.

9. Acts 16: 7. The common text reads "the Spirit suffered them not." Another reading is, "the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not."

For the common text there are H L P, many cursives, one copy of the Vulgate, and the Thebaic versions; Chrysostom and Theophylact of the Fathers.

For the words "of Jesus" there are א A Β C2 D E; nine or ten cursives; the Vulgate, Aethiopic, some of the Armenian, the Syriac and Memphitic versions.

The latter reading is adopted by nearly all modern Editors, and we believe rightly. All the great uncials are in its favour; and we think the words "of Jesus" are a great deal more likely to have been omitted (because of the seeming strangeness of the expression in this connection) than that they have been added.

10. Acts 20: 28. The common text reads, "To feed the church of God which he hath purchased with his own blood." At first sight the readings here are very embarrassing. Some copies read the church of the Lord; others 'of Christ;' others 'the Lord Christ;' and others 'the Lord and God,' etc. But all may be dismissed as without any weight except the readings 'of God,' 'the Lord,' and 'the Lord and God.'

For 'God' we have א B; about 14 cursives; the Vulgate and Philoxenian (text) versions.

For 'Lord' there are A C1 D E (the Latin versions of the last two agreeing with the Greek), about 16 cursives; the Memphitic, Thebaeic, Philoxenian (margin) and Armenian versions.

For 'Lord and God' are C3 H L P, more than a hundred cursives; the Slavonic version.

What makes this variation of importance is the latter part of the sentence, "which he hath purchased with his own blood." The question is, does this refer to God, or the Lord, or the Lord and God? At first sight the word 'Lord' would seem to be more appropriate, because of the thought of 'the blood of God;' but this may be the key to the variation. If the early Christians staggered at such an expression, they might have attempted to soften it by altering 'God' into 'Lord.' And others, finding some copies read one way and some the other, combined the two into 'the Lord and God.' The external evidence is very nearly of equal weight for 'God' and for 'Lord,' as will be seen above; but unquestionably 'God' is the more difficult reading; we can see no reason why this should be substituted for 'Lord,' whereas the converse is probable.

The Fathers come in here to help the solution. Both Tertullian and Ignatius use the expression "the blood of God," which they would scarcely have done had they not had this apparent sanction from scripture. Basil the Great and Epiphanius also use the word 'God.' Others of the Fathers differ.

We believe the common text to be correct; though it has been judged that the harshness of the expression may be softened in the translation; and instead of "which he hath purchased with his own blood," it may be rendered "which he hath purchased with the blood of his own."

11. 1 Corinthians 3: 14. This will illustrate the intricate questions an Editor is called upon to decide. The common text reads "If of anyone the work abides;" which a variation alters to "If of anyone the work shall abide." It will at once be seen that there is here only a shade of difference in the meaning, yet it has to be decided as to which is the best reading. This is an intricate question, inasmuch as the first is μένει, and for the second μενεί; and seeing that all the great uncial copies have no accents except those supplied by later hands, none can be called as witnesses. And though Versions and Fathers may give definitely one or other of the tenses, yet whence did they get what they give, seeing that the uncial copies, from which all must have emanated, decided nothing?

Still Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Alford, and Wordsworth all decide for "shall abide."

12. 1 Corinthians 11: 24. "This is my body which is broken for you." Here the question is whether the word 'broken' should be retained or omitted.

For the word 'broken' א3 C3 D2 E F G K L P; 37, 47, and nearly all cursives; Peshito and Harclean Syriac, one Armenian and Gothic versions; Βasil, Damasc. Oecum. and Chrysos. of the Fathers. D1 may be also claimed for the word 'broken,' though it gives a different Greek word (θρυπτόμενον).

For the omission of the word are א1 A Β C1; 17; one Armenian; Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, and Fulgentius of the Fathers.

Though the four great uncials omit the word by the first hands, and form thereby a strong evidence against the word, it is on the other hand supported by later hands of א, C, and D; and the Peshito version. The Liturgies of the fourth century also retain the word.

The passage has evidently been tampered with: while the four uncials give no other word in the place of 'broken,' D', as we have seen, supplies another Greek word; the Vulgate, with Cyprian and Ambrose, gives 'delivered' (tradetur); while the Coptic and Armenian have 'given.'

The word may have been left out or altered because it was thought to clash with John 19: 36 "A bone of him shall not be broken;" but we cannot see that it clashes with this: in some of the sacrifices the bodies were divided, but a bone was not broken; in the Psalms too we have strong expressions; such as "all my bones are out of joint:" the broken bread too prefigures the broken body. Christ took bread, broke it, and said, "This is my body." On the whole, we should prefer to mark the reading as doubtful.

Various Readings in the Revelation.

The book of the Revelation in the common Greek text — from which was made in the main the English Authorized Version — having been edited from very few manuscripts, more various readings have been introduced by the Editors into this book than elsewhere. This has been occasioned by the discovery of further evidence. We give therefore a list of the principal of these various readings, and the authorities for and against them. It will be seen that in some places the weight of evidence is overwhelming for the amended readings; indeed in some instances we have been obliged to say "? any manuscripts," because no Greek copies are known to exist for such readings.

It must be remembered that of the Revelation the uncial manuscripts are even now comparatively few in number; still we have א A C of the great uncials, and B of the seventh century (which must not be confounded with B of the Gospels), and P of the ninth century. There are nearly a hundred cursives, varying from the tenth century. No. 38 is esteemed more valuable than many. The Syriac of the Revelation is about the sixth century (the Peshito and the Cureton Syriac not having the Revelation). C, it must be remembered, contains only portions of the book, namely, Revelation 1: 1 to 3: 19; 5: 14 to 7: 14; 7: 17 to 8: 5; 9: 16 to 10: 10; 11: 3 to 16: 13; 18: 2 to 19: 5.

The authorities for each reading will easily be understood by referring to the foregoing pages. The order is 1, Uncials; 2, Cursives; 3, Versions; , Fathers. Vulg.-ed. refers to the printed Vulgate of Clement viii.; Vulg.-am. to the Amiatinus manuscript.

Chapter 1: 5. "Loved," P; many cursives; the Vulg. Memph. Arm. and Aeth. versions; Andreas, Arethas of the Fathers. "Loves," א A C B; many cursives; the Syriac.

"Washed," B P; some cursives: Vulg. Memph. Aeth.; Arethas. "Freed," א A C; some cursives; Syr.

Verse 6. "Kings and priests," P; some cursives. "A kingdom, priests," א A C; some cursives; Vulg. Syr. Merph; Areth. Victorinus. B has "a palace, priests."

Verse 8. "Beginning and ending," א 1; some cursives; Vulg. Memph. Omit, א2 A C B P; many cursives; Syr. Arm. Aeth.; Areth. Ambr. Primas.

"The Lord," one or two cursives. "[The] Lord God," א A C B P; most cursives, and versions and fathers generally.

Verse 9. "Of Jesus Christ," some cursives. "In Christ Jesus," B; nearly fifty cursives; some of the Vulg. Syr. Arm.; Areth. Primas. "In Christ," A and one cursive. "In Jesus," א C P; one cursive; some of the Vulg. Memph.; Orig.

"Testimony of Jesus Christ," א3 B; some cursives; Memph. Arm. Syr.; Areth. Primas. Omit Christ, א1 A C P; some cursives; Vulg. Aeth.; Dion.

Verse 11. "I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and," P; some cursives; Arm. Omit, א 1 A C B; some cursives; versions generally; Areth. Primas.

"Which are in Asia," ? any manuscripts; Memph. Omit, א A C B P; cursives generally; Vulg. Aeth. Syr.; Andr. Areth. Primas.

Verse 18. "Amen," א 3; most cursives; Syr. Areth. Omit א1 A C P; a few cursives; Vulg. Memph. Aeth.; Iren. Orig.

Chapter 2: 5. "Quickly," B; most cursives; Syr.; Andr. Areth. Prirnas. Omit, א A C P; Vulg. Memph. Aeth. Aug. Jer. Vict.

Verse 9. "Works and," א B; most cursives; Syr. Arm. Areth. Omit, A C P; some cursives; Vulg. Memph. Aeth.; Primas.

Verse 13. "Thy works and," B; most cursives; Syr.; Arm. Andr. Areth. Omit, א A C P; one or two cursives; Vulg. Memph. Aeth; Jer. Primas.

Verse 15. "Which thing I hate," P; a few cursives; Arm. "In like manner," א A B C; many cursives; Vulg. Syr.; Areth. (P has both readings.)

Verse 20. "A few things," one or two cursives; Vulg. Omit, A C B P: many cursives, and versions generally. א reads "much."

"That woman," א C P; many cursives; versions generally. "Thy wife," A B; many cursives; Syr.; Andr. Areth. Cypr. Primas.

Verse 22. "Their deeds," A; some cursives; Arm. Memph. Aeth.; Cypr. Primas. "Her deeds," א C B P; many cursives; Syr. Areth. Tert.

Verse 24. "And to the rest," ? any manuscripts; Vulg. Omit "and," א A C B P; cursives and versions generally.

Chapter 3: 2. "God," one or two cursives; Arm. "My God," A C B P; cursives and versions generally.

Chapter 4: 11. "O Lord," one or two cursives. "O Lord and our God," A B; many cursives; Syr. "O Lord our God," P; some cursives, and versions generally. "O Lord, the Lord and our God," א

Chapter 5: 4. "And to read," some cursives; Arm. Omit, א B P; many cursives, and versions generally.

Verse 8, "Harps," many cursives; Vulg.; Cyp. Primas. "A harp," א A B P; many cursives, and versions generally.

Verse 9. "Redeemed us," א B 2; many cursives; Vulg. Memph. Arm. Syr.; Hipp. Cyp. Omit "us," A; Aeth. one or two cursives.

Verse 10. "Made us," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed.; Areth. Made them," א AB; many cursives, Vulg.am. Syr. Arm. Memph. Aeth.

"Kings," B; cursives generally; Syr. Arm. Aeth.; Andr. Areth. "A kingdom," א A; Vulg. Memph.; Cyp. Primas. Fulg.

"We shall reign," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed.; Primas. "They shall reign," א P; some cursives; Vulg.-am. Memph. "They reign," A B; some cursives; Syr. Andr.

Verse 14. "Four and twenty," ? any manuscripts; Vulg. ed.; Primas. Omit, א A B P; many cursives; versions generally; Andr. Areth.

"Him that liveth for ever and ever," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed.; Primas. Omit, א A C B P; cursives and versions generally; Andr. Areth.

Chapter 6: 1, 3, 5, 7. "And see," א B (B omits in verse 3); and omitted by A C P, with other authorities for and against in each place.

Verse 17. "His wrath," A B P; most cursives; Memph. Arm. Aeth.; Andr. Areth. Primas. "Their wrath," א C; one or two cursives; Vulg. Syr.; Fulg.

Chapter 8: 7. "Angel," some cursives; Vul. Memph. Arm. Aeth.; Andr. Primas. Omit, א A B P; many cursives; Syr.; Areth.

"Earth," a few cursives; Memph. Add "and the third part of the earth was burnt up," A B P; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Aeth. Arm.; Andr. Areth.

Verse 13. "Angel," P; some cursives; Arm.; Vict. "Eagle," א A B; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph. Aeth.; Areth.

Chapter 9: 4. "Only," a few cursives. Omit, א A B P; many cursives; Syr. Memph. Arm. Aeth.; Andr. Areth.

Verse 13. "Four," B P; most cursives; Vu1g.-ed.; Andr. Areth. Cypr. Omit א 3 A; Vulg.-am. Syr. Memph. Aeth. א1 reads "a voice from the golden altar."

Verse 18. "Three," two or three cursives. Add "plagues," manuscripts and versions generally.

Chapter 10: 1. "A rainbow," א3, P; some cursives. "The rainbow," א 1 A C B; many cursives; Areth.

Verse 5. "His hand," A; a few cursives; Vulg. "His right hand," א C B P; many cursives; Syr. Memph. Aeth. Arm.: Andr. Areth. Primas.

Verse 7. "Should be finished," B; some cursives. "Was finished," א A C P; many cursives; Memph.

Chapter 11: 1. "And the angel stood," א 3 B; many cursives; Syr. Arm.; Vict. Omit, א1 A P; many cursives; Vulg. Aeth. Memph.; Areth.

Verse 2. "Within," א; a few cursives; Vict. "Outside," A B P; many cursives; Vulg. Memph. Arm. Aeth. Syr.; Andr. Areth. Primas. Ticho.

Verse 4. "God," a few cursives; Arm. "Lord," א A C B P; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph.; Hippol. Areth. Vict. Primas.

Verse 8. "Our Lord," one or two cursives. "Their Lord," א3 A C B P; most cursives; versions generally; Orig. Andr. Areth. Primas. א 1 reads "the Lord."

Verse 17. "And art to come," a few cursives; Vulg-ed. Memph. Arm. Omit, א A C B P; many cursives; Vulg. am. Syr.; Areth. Cyp. Primas.

Chapter 12: 12. "The inhabiters of," a few cursives. Omit, manuscripts and versions generally.

Verse 17. "Christ"? any manuscripts; Vulg-ed.; Primas. Omit, manuscripts and versions generally.

"I stood," B P, most cursives; Memph.; Andr. Areth. "It stood," א A C; a few cursives; Vulg. Syr. Aeth. Arm.; Vict. Tichio.

Chapter 13: 7. "Tribe," a few cursives; Memph. Arm. Add "and people," א A C B P; most cursives; Vulg. Aeth. Syr.; Andr. Areth. Iren. Primas.

Verse 17. "Or the name," a few cursives; Vu1g.-ed; Omit "or," A B P; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Memph. Arm. Aeth. Syr.; Hippol. Andr. C reads "the mark of the name;" א "the mark of the beast, or his name."

Chapter 14: 1. "A Lamb," P; some cursives; Arm. Andr. "The Lamb," א A C B; many cursives; Memph. Syr.; Orig, Meth. Areth.

"Having," P; one or two cursives. Add "his name and," א A C B; cursives and versions generally.

Verse 3 "As it were," A C; a few cursives; Vulg. Omit, א B P; many cursives; Syr. Memph. Arm. Aeth. Syr.; Orig. Meth. Areth. Primas.

Verse 5. "Before the throne of God," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed. Omit, manuscripts and versions generally.

Verse 13. "And their," B; many cursives; Andr. Areth. "For their," א A C P; a few cursives; Vulg. Syr.; Primas.

Chapter 15: 2. "Over his mark [and]," a few cursives; Andr. Areth. Omit, א A. C B P; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph. Arm. Aeth.

Verse 3. "Saints," ? any manuscripts. "Nations," א 3 A B P; many cursives; Memph. Aeth.; Andr. Areth. Cyp. "Of [the] ages, א 1 C; a few cursives; Vulg. Syr.

Verse 6. "In . . . . linen," (א) (B) P; many cursives; Vulg.-ed. Arm. Syr. With a . . . . stone," A C; two or three cursives; Vulg.-am.

Chapter 16: 1. "Vials," P; a few cursives; Μemρh. Aeth. "Seven Vials," א A C B; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Arm.; Andr. Areth. Primas.

Verse 3. "Angel," B; many cursives; versions generally. Omit, א 3 A C P; a few cursives; Vulg.-am. Aeth.

Verse 4. "Angel," a few cursives; Syr. Μemρh. Arm. Omit, א A C B P; many cursives; Vulg. Aeth.

Verse 5. "O Lord," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed. Aeth. Omit א A C B P; the cursives; Vulg.-arn. Syr. Memph. Arm.

Verse 7. "Heard another out of the altar," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed. "Heard the altar," א A C P; cursives and versions generally.

Verse 8. "Angel," א; some cursives; Vulg.-ed. Arm. Memph.; Andr. Primas. Omit, A C B P; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. th.; Areth.

Verses 10 and 12. "Angel," some cursives; Memph. Omit, manuscripts and versions generally.

Verse 14. "Of the earth and," one or two cursives. Omit, א A B; cursives and versions generally.

Verse 17. "Angel," א 3; some cursives; Vulg.-ed. Omit, א1 A B; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr.

"Of heaven," B; many cursives; Arm.; Andr. Areth. Omit, A; few cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph.; Primas. "Of God," א.

Chapter 17: 8. "And yet is," ? any manuscripts. "And shall be present," A B P; cursives generally; Arm.; Hipp. Andr. Areth. Primas. א 1 has "And shall again be present."

Verse 16. "Upon the beast," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.ed. And the beast," א A B P; the cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Memph. Aeth.; Hipp. Primas.

Chapter 18: 2. "Is fallen, is fallen," A; some cursives; Vulg. Syr.; Hipp. "Is fallen," א B; many cursives; Memph. Aeth.; Primas. Areth. Ρ reads "Is fallen" three times.

Verse 3. "Have drunk of," P; many cursives. "Have fallen by," א A C B; some cursives; Memph. Aeth.

"The wine of," א B (P); many cursives; Syr. Memph. Vulg.-ed. Arm.; Hipp. Areth. Ticho. Primas. Omit, A C; Vulg.-am.

Verse 6. "You," some cursives; Vulg.-ed. Omit, א A C B P; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Aeth. Memph.; Hipp. Cyp.

"Unto her," P; some cursives; Syr. Memph. Aeth. Omit, א A C B; many cursives; Vulg.; Hipp.

Verse 13. "Cinnamon," א3 B, many cursives; Vulg.-ed. Memph. Arm.; Primas. Add "and amomum,"* א1 A C 2; some cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Aeth.; Hipp.

{*"A precious ointment made from an Asiatic shrub, and used for the hair." — Alford.}

Verse 14. "Goodly are departed," one or two cursives. "Goodly are destroyed," א A C B P; most cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph. Aeth.; Hipp. Primas.

Verse 20. "Holy apostles," C; a few cursives; Vulg.-ed. Arm. "Saints and apostles," א A B P; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Memph. Aeth.; Hipp. Areth. Tich. Primas.

Chapter 19: 1. "And honour," a few cursives; Memph.; Areth. Omit, א A C B P, many cursives; Syr. Vulg. Arm.

Verse 6. "God," A: a few cursives; Memph. Arm. Aeth. "Our God," א3 B P; many cursives; Vulg. Syr.; Areth. Ticho. "God our Lord," א1

Verse 17. "Supper of the great God," a few cursives; Arm. Aeth.; Andr. The great supper of God," א A B P; most cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph.; Ticho. Primas.

Chapter 20: 9. "From God," א3 B P; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph. Arm. Omit, A; a few cursives; Primas.

Verse 12. "God," one or two cursives; Andr. "The throne," א A B P; most cursives; versions generally.

Verse 14. "Second death," some cursives; Vulg.-ed. Arm. Memph.; Primas. Add "The lake of fire," א A B P; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Aeth.

Chapter 21: 2. "John," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed. Omit, א A B P; cursives and versions generally.

Verse 3. "Heaven," B P; most cursives, and versions generally; Andr. Areth. "The throne," א A; one or two cursives; Vulg.; Iren. Aug. Ambr.

"[And be] their God," A P: some cursives; Vulg. Syr.; Iren. Ambr. Omit, א B; many cursives; Memph. Arm.; Areth.

Verse 7. "All things," one or two cursives. "These things," א A B P; most cursives; versions generally.

Verse 10. "That great city, the holy," some cursives. "The holy city," א A B P; many cursives; versions and fathers generally.

Verse 24. "And honour," B; many cursives; versions generally. Omit, א A P; some cursives.

Chapter 22: 1. "Pure," some cursives; Arm.; Andr. Areth. Omit, א A B P; some cursives; versions generally; Hil. Ambr. Ticho. Primas.

Verse 6. "Holy prophets," a few cursives; Arm. "Spirits of the prophets," א A B P; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph.; Primas. Areth.

Verse 11. "Let him be righteous," two or three cursives; Vulg.-ed. Arm. Aeth. "Let him practise righteousness," א A B; many cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Memph.

Verse 12. "Shall be," B; many cursives; Andr. Areth. "Is," א A; a few cursives; Syr.

Verse 14. "Do his commandments," B; many cursives; Syr. Memph. Arm.; Cyp. Tert. Ticho. "Wash their robes," א A; a few cursives; Vulg. Aeth.; Ath. Fulg. Primas.

Verse 19. "Out of the book," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed. Amb. Primas. "From the tree," א A B; most cursives; Vulg.-am. Syr. Aeth. Arm.; Andr. Ticho.

Verse 20. "Even so," many cursives. Omit, א A B; some cursives; versions generally.

Verse 21. "Our Lord," a few cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph. Arm. "The Lord," א A B; many cursives.

"Christ," B; many cursives; Vulg. Syr. Memph. Arm. Aeth. Omit, א A; one or two cursives.

"You all," ? any manuscripts; Vulg.-ed. "All," A; Vulg.-am. "The saints," א "All the saints," B; many cursives; Memph. Syr. Arm.; Andr. Areth.

Printed Greek Testaments.

We have seen that there are many Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, which all differ more or less from each other. We have also glanced at the sort of work an Editor had to do in judging as to the true text where the manuscripts differ. We have now to look at the principal editions that have been published.

1. The Complutensian Edition. This was the earliest printed Greek Testament. It was edited by Cardinal Ximenes, Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, in connection with his university at Alcala (Complutum). The printing of the New Testament was finished January 10, 1514, but the rest of the work (it embraced the Old Testament as well as the New) was not completed till 1517. The Cardinal died soon after this, and the work was not published till about 1522, though Leo X. authorized its publication in 1520. It is not now known what Greek manuscripts were used for this edition.

The Complutensian was printed in a remarkable style. Not only was the text given in double columns in Greek and Latin, but the words which corresponded in both languages were marked with the same letter, to assist those who understood either of the languages. The Greek had no breathings and the accents were according to a unique and fanciful system. The Latin had many contractions and was the modified Vulgate then in use.

We give a specimen in modern type.

βιβλος b γενεσεως c Ιησου

Liber b gnatiois c iesu d christi

d χριστου e υιου f δαυιδ g υιου

e filii f dauid g filii h abraá.

h αβρααμ. i αβρααμ k εγεννησεν

i Abraá k genuit l ysaac. m Isaac

τον l ισαακ m ισαακ n δε

n at o genuit p iacob. q Jacob

o εγεννησε τον p ιακωβ. q ιακωβ r δε

r aut s genuit t iudam: u et x fratres

s εγεννησε τον t ιουδαν u και

y eius. z Judas a autem

τους x αδελφους y αυτου. z ιουδας

b genuit c phares d et e zaram

a δε b εγεννησε τον c φαρες

f de g thamar.

d και τον e ζαρα f εκ της g θαμαρ.

Matt. 1: 1-3.

2. The Editions of Erasmus. Between the printing and the publishing of the Complutensian Edition Erasmus was solicited by Froben, a printer of Basle, to edit for him a Greek Testament. The request was made April, 1515, when Erasmus was in England, and the whole work was finished by February, 1516. He did it in reckless haste, as he says himself, to meet the views of Froben in order to publish it before the Complutensian Edition. He had none of the best Greek uncial copies, but used various cursives that were at Basle. One of these, embracing the Gospels (now called No. 1) was a valuable copy, but which he was afraid to follow where it differed from his other copies.

Erasmus inserted Acts 8: 37, though it was only in the margin of one of his copies; and stranger still he inserted in Acts 9: 5, 6 σκληρον σοι προς κεντρα λακτιζειν. τρεμων τε και θαμβων ειπεν κυριε τι με θελεις ποιησαι και ο κυριος προς αυτον, "It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord [said] to him." Erasmus apparently added this from the Latin Vulgate alone, for it has not yet been found in any Greek manuscript. Yet, strange to say, it has been retained, and is in our Authorized Version. The Greek manuscripts, instead of the above passage, have merely the word αλλά, 'but,' reading, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest; but arise," etc. On the other hand Erasmus omitted the passage in 1 John 5: 7, known as "the heavenly witnesses," because it was not in any of his Greek copies, though it was in the Latin. This brought a great storm of indignation upon him, and he promised that if the passage could be found in any Greek manuscript, he would insert it in future editions. It was found in a Greek copy, and Erasmus inserted the passage in his third edition in 1522, though now considered by almost all Editors as spurious. Erasmus published fine editions, making more or less alterations in each. To shew how badly off he was for Greek manuscripts compared to what Editors are now, it may be named that he had only one manuscript of the Revelation, which wanted the last six verses. These he had to re-translate from the Latin into Greek. As may be supposed, he used certain Greek words which are not in the best Greek manuscripts, if in any at all, and yet these have been retained and have influenced our Authorized Version.

3. The Editions of Stephens. Stephens was a printer at Paris. His first edition appeared in 1546. He says it was based on manuscripts found in the Royal Library, but it is evident that he followed the Complutensian and the last edition of Erasmus more than his manuscripts, copying his predecessors in some places where, as far as is now known, all his manuscripts were against him. In only about 37 places he departed from both the Complutensian and Erasmus's editions. Stephens's third Edition (1550) was his principal one, in which he gives in his margin various readings from fifteen different manuscripts. Still in this edition in places he alters from his former editions, and against all his manuscripts, to more uniformity with Erasmus. This is the edition that has been usually printed in England — the Greek text in common use. Stephens's fourth edition (1551) was the first that was divided into verses.

4. The Editions of Beza. His first edition was in 1565, but his third edition (1582) was his principal, though he had later editions. They were mostly a copy of Stephens's edition of 1550, being altered in places without apparently always good authority.

5. The Elzevir Editions. These editions were published in 1624 and 1633. They are mostly copied from Stephens's editions of 1550, corrected in places from Beza's editions. In the second edition they profess to give the text received by all, which is often referred to as the "textus receptus." This is the text commonly reprinted on the continent, though, as we have seen, the edition of Stephens 1550 is the common text in England.*

{*Some say that Mill's edition is the common text of England. But Mill copied Stephens, without any intentional alteration, though in a few places he seems to have adopted the variations of the Elzevirs without intending it.}

At this point there was a pause. Additional manuscripts came to light and some began diligently to collate the various differences. The common text had obtained a sort of standard, so that some were content to collect the material by which to correct the text; others became bolder and used the material in altering the text.

6. Mill's Edition, 1707. Mill gave the text of Stephens, but was remarkable for the material he gathered together, which shewed where the text might be corrected. He laboured for thirty years on his work, and died soon after its completion.

7. Bentley. This great scholar lamented that the text of Stephens should stand uncorrected as it did. He began to collect material for a critical edition and issued a prospectus, in which he aspired to great things, but died before he could accomplish his object, if indeed he had not found before he died that the difficulties were greater than he had expected.

8. Bengel. The pious Bengel, as he is often called, took great interest in the exact words of the New Testament, and collected as many of the variations of the manuscripts as he could. In 1734 he published his Greek Testament. It was mainly the common text, for he did not insert (except in the Revelation) any reading that was not to be found in some printed edition. The various readings he gave in the margin, and the authorities for and against, at the end of the book. Persons had become so accustomed to the common text that even the marginal readings exposed him to the bitterest attacks; and one of his opponents, curiously enough, requested him to admit that the various readings were given by inspiration, in order to meet the necessities of various readers! Bengel was the first to form the Greek manuscripts into "families."

9. Wetstein. Wetstein had been employed by Bentley to collect material for his proposed edition; but on his death Wetstein continued the work on his own account. He greatly increased the amount of material. His Testament was published in 1751-2. It was still the common text, with his proposed alterations at the foot, but which were not many. His principal work was to collect the material; but he shrank from or did not know how to use it when gathered.

10. Griesbach. After Bengel, Griesbach was the first to arrange the evidences systematically, and then seek to make a good use of them. His principal edition (his second) was published in 1796-1806, with a statement of the authorities; and a manual edition in 1805. He adopted the bold plan of altering the text from that commonly received, wherever he thought the evidence in hand warranted him in doing so.

He elaborated the system of families, arranging the manuscripts into three divisions, and then sought to deal with each division as one witness. The families were the Alexandrian, the Western, and the Byzantine. The text as given by Origen he took as the basis of the Alexandrian, and placed here the ancient copies A B C, L of the Gospels, the Egyptian and some other versions. The Western family was represented by D of the Gospels and Acts, and here he placed those which contained a Latin as well as Greek text; the Old Latin and Vulgate; and quotations in the Latin Fathers. The Byzantine embraced the great mass of other manuscripts, the Versions, and the Greek Fathers. This last family had less value with Griesbach than the other two.

Where two of the families agreed in a reading that decided its reception. Though laying aside the common text, he seems to have had a leaning towards it in cases of difficulty. His work was elaborately done, for he was not content with simply receiving or rejecting readings, but also inserted others, marking them as 'very probable,' and others as 'probable.'

By referring back to the chapter on Families it will be seen that more recent Editors do not class the ancient copies A and B in the same family, and now restrict themselves to two families instead of three.

11. Scholz. He published his Greek Testament in 1830-36. He is thought to have adopted a plan the very reverse of Griesbach, judging the Byzantine family to have the greatest weight; but he abandoned his principle before he died. His principal work however was to collect material, and it has been judged that he had nearly double the quantity that was possessed by Griesbach; but he did his work so badly that his readings, unless confirmed by other collators, cannot be relied on.

12. Lachmann. His principal edition was published in 1842-50. He was perhaps the first to set wholly aside the common text as of any weight, and to edit a text independent of that generally received. He endeavoured to confine himself as much as he could to evidence not later than the fourth century (not that he strictly kept to this date), which was to shut out a great deal of valuable evidence. Yet in many places he adopted readings which have since (with further material) been judged by other editors as the true ones. Scrivener describes him as "earnest, single-hearted, and a true scholar both in spirit and accomplishments."

13. Tischendorf. This scholar laboured for more than thirty years in collecting material and editing works bearing on the scriptures. His seventh edition (1856-9) is preferred by some to his eighth edition (1865-72), as he is thought to have made a sort of pet of the Codex Sinaiticus because he discovered it, and let it bias his mind against the best readings in some places. His Greek Testament gives the most elaborate collection of all available evidence, both for the readings he adopts and for those of the common text. Though some may differ from him in judgment as to the true readings in some places, most accord to him the first place as a biblical critic. He lived to finish his eighth edition, except the prolegomena.

14. Tregelles. For about thirty years this Editor laboured in collecting material and editing his Testament. The Gospels appeared in 1857 and the Revelation in 1872. He confined his attention almost exclusively to ancient copies. Illness prevented him quite finishing his last part, and he died soon after its issue.

15. Alford. In his commentary he publishes a Greek text, not remarkable for anything peculiar. In the majority of readings he goes with Lachmann, Tischendorf, and Tregelles.

16. Wordsworth. This Editor's Greek Testament is principally remarkable for its conservatism. He believes that God overruled the common Greek text (which has stood for three hundred years) and that it ought not to be departed from unless on good and sufficient authority. He therefore retains many readings which Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles and Alford agree in rejecting.

There have been many other editions of the Greek Testament, but these are the principal. And there is one by Doctors Westcott and Hort in preparation.

We hope, in considering the Authorised Version, to be able to give some practical hints in the use to be made of these Editors in determining the text.

The Order of the Books.

We now turn to a few subjects of interest connected with the arrangement of the books, with their various divisions, etc.

It becomes a natural and an interesting question as to how far, and in what way, importance is to be placed in the order of the various books of the New Testament.

As each book was written separately, of course the writers had no hand in placing the several books in one volume. As to their being placed at all comes under the head of the "Canon of the New Testament;" we are now merely considering the order in which they stand in our Testaments.

Some, considering the order of the books to be of God, have endeavoured to draw certain lessons from the way in which the contents of one book follow another as to their agreement, or their contrast, the gradual development of truth, etc. It becomes important, therefore, to see what light the history of the text throws upon the subject, and to ascertain the order of the books in the early copies of the New Testament.

In general, we may say that the early manuscripts do not place the books as we now have them, but generally in this order:—

The Gospels.

The Acts of the Apostles.

The Catholic Epistles (so-called).

The Epistles of Paul.

The Revelation.

We say "generally," for there are deviations from this order, and as many copies are only portions of the New Testament, we cannot gather from them the order of the whole. Codex Sinaiticus (א), with three or four others, places the Epistles of Paul before the Acts.

It is not easy to ascertain how the books became arranged as in our present order. If we refer back to the original copies of the common printed Greek text, we find our present order both in Stephens (1550) and the Elzevir (1624). But if we go farther back to the first printed Greek Testament (the Complutensian), we find the above order, namely, the Catholic Epistles placed before those by Paul. But inasmuch as this latter was not published until after the edition by Erasmus (this scholar having the honour of editing the first Greek Testament given to the church), the order of Erasmus — which is the same as in our Testaments — was afterwards followed, rather than that of the Complutensian.

If we come to details, we find that the old Latin copies generally put the Gospels in the order of Matthew, John, Luke, Mark. In the Codex Βeza (Greek and Latin) they are also in this order. In Greek copies generally they are in the order we have them. In the Syriac of Cureton they stand Matthew, Mark, John, Luke. Jerome, in revising the old Latin for his version, transposed the Gospels into the order of the Greek, in which we may say they have become fixed. In one manuscript the Apocalypse comes after the Gospel by John; and in two or three others the Gospels come at the end. But these are isolated cases.

We give a list of the books as they stand in the four oldest manuscripts, that our readers may have the earliest evidence before them.

By these lists the reader will see how the four oldest Greek copies differ in the order of the books. Not one has the same order that we have now. Those who first printed the New Testament, if they had had these copies, would have been perplexed as to which to follow, but they did not then possess them, and, as we have seen, how they determined the order is not now known. By examining these lists it will be seen that the principal transposition is by placing the Catholic Epistles before the Epistles of Paul, instead of after them; in transposing the Acts; and in putting the Hebrews before Timothy, instead of after Philemon. The four copies agree in this last with some of the cursives.

Codices.

Sinaiticus (א).

Alexandrinus (A).

Matthew

Matthew

Mark

Mark

Luke

Luke

John

John

Romans

Acts

1 Corinthians

James

2 Corinthians

1 Peter

Galatians

2 Peter

Ephesians

1 John

Philippians

2 John

Colossians

3 John

1 Thessalonians

Jude

2 Thessalonians

Romans

Hebrews

1 Corinthians

1 Timothy

2 Corinthians

2 Timothy

Galatians

Titus

Ephesians

Philemon

Philippians

Acts

Colossians

James

1 Thessalonians

1 Peter

2 Thessalonians

2 Peter

Hebrews

1 John

1 Timothy

2 John

2 Timothy

3 John

Titus

Jude

Philemon

Apocalypse

Apocalypse

Codex Vaticanus (B) agrees with A as far as Hebrews, after which all is lost.

Codex Ephraem (C) may also be said to agree with A; 2 John and 2 Thessalonians are lost.

Since the time of the first edition of Erasmus (1516), there can be no doubt that the order we now have has been very generally received and followed. How far this was overruled by God, doing so for the purpose of instruction (had we wisdom to discover it) is for the reader to judge; we are simply giving a sketch of its history. The Acts seems to follow more appropriately the Gospels than in any other place; and in the above lists we miss the Hebrews falling along with James and Peter; the former written to "the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad," and the latter to "the strangers scattered," etc. (the "dispersion"), which are brought together in our present order.

Divisions of the New Testament.

We are all familiar with the ordinary chapters and verses in our Bible, but these are comparatively a recent addition. When Paul wrote an Epistle, he would naturally write it without divisions of any sort, except, perhaps, breaking it up into paragraphs. The Gospels were doubtless written in the same style.

But though our modern chapters and verses are not found in the oldest manuscripts, yet they possess other divisions which we have not now. There were at first divisions marked in the margin, breaking a book into portions. But in these divisions the manuscripts do not agree. For instance, in the Codex Vaticanus, Matthew is divided into 170 parts, Mark 62, Luke 152, John 80, etc. It will be seen that these portions are much shorter than our chapters. By whom they are made is not known.

In the Codex Alexandrinus, and others, Matthew is marked for 68 divisions, Mark 48, Luke 83, and John 18. These are supposed to have been done by Titian, a disciple of Justin Martyr. These were called τίτλοι, titles, probably because each division had a title to it. Other portions were called κεφάλαια, divisions or chapters. It is supposed that these divisions embraced the first attempt at a "harmony" of the Gospels, that is, a system by which one continuous history could be read by taking a piece from each of the Gospels that appeared to relate to the same event or the same discourse, and reading them together; or simply for reference.

But these attempts gave place to a fuller system, by Ammonius of Alexandria, who, taking Matthew as his standard, drew up a table to form a "harmony," marking portions of the other three Gospels alongside each portion of Matthew, which he judged to refer to the same part of our Lord's life. These are commonly known as the Ammonian Sections.

This system was again attempted to be improved upon by Eusebius, whose plan is known under the title of Eusebius's Canons. It would appear that he used the divisions of Ammonius, and worked them out into a yet more elaborate system. He arranged the divisions into ten classes: thus,

I., those portions contained in the four Gospels.

II., those contained in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

III., those in Matthew, Luke, and John.

IV., those in Matthew, Mark, and John.

V., those in Matthew and Luke.

VI., those in Matthew and Mark.

VII., those in Matthew and John.

VIII., those in Mark and Luke.

IX., those in Luke and John.

X., those in one Gospel only.

The canon was arranged thus, which meant that the portion marked in Matthew 8 corresponded to the portion marked 2 in Mark, and to 7 in Luke, and to 10 in John. The passages, as marked, stand thus:—

Matthew

Mark

Luke

John

8

2

7

10

11

4

10

6

Matthew 3: 3

Mark 1: 3

Luke 3: 3-6

John 1: 23

Matthew 3: 11

Mark 1: 7

Luke 3: 16

John 1: 15

On referring to the Testament, the reader will see that the first line speaks in each of the Gospels of the saying by Esaias, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord;" and in the second line to John's saying that one mightier than he was coming. These references, therefore, correspond, as nearly as may be, to the references in the margins of our Testaments. Thus, at this early date — the fourth century — did the readers of the Gospels have this advantage of reference from one Gospel to another; and though such a system is generally called the harmony of the Gospels, it is useful in pointing out the characteristic differences of the Gospels, always remembering that those who formed these lists (whether ancient or modern) were liable to mistake, and to place two passages together which have no real connection.

These Canons are useful to us for another purpose, namely, to determine the age of the manuscript. As Eusebius did not draw up his canons until the fourth century, no manuscript containing them can be earlier than that date, unless, of course, they have been added by a later hand, but which can nearly always be detected.

If the reader will turn back to the printed specimen of the Codex Sinaiticus (chapter 'Style of Writing'), he will see in the margin these letters, NA, with a Δ underneath them. The Δ points to IV. of the Canon of Eusebius, which (as will be seen above) stands for passages contained in "Matthew, Mark, and John;" and NA stand for the Ammonian section 51. It stands in the Canon thus:—

John 51; Matthew 150; Mark 67;

which points out Matthew 14: 23b-27; Mark 6: 47-50; and John 6: 16-21. Tischendorf believes that these marks have been added to the Codex Sinaiticus by a later hand, though, for other reasons, the manuscript is dated the fourth century.

Most of the Greek manuscripts have these sections and canons, though some have only the Ammonian Sections, and in some they are left incomplete. They are inserted in coloured ink. Eusebius says vermilion, but they are sometimes blue or green. They have been copied into the modern printed editions of the Greek Testament of Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Wordsworth; and the last-named gives the Canon of Eusebius in full in his first volume.

The Acts and the Epistles were also divided into portions, but they appear to have been done at a later period. By the printed copies, it does not appear that the Codex Sinaiticus has divisions of any sort, except in the Gospels. The Codex Vaticanus has divisions marked throughout, but which are not found in the Codex Alexandrinus, nor Codex Ephraemi, of the fifth century.

Divisions were made in the fifth century to the Acts and Epistles, by Euthalius, deacon of Alexandria, but it is supposed that he adopted them from copies already so divided. The Apocalypse was divided still later.

Thus the copies remained, marked in different manners, or not at all, until about A.D. 1248, when an index of words was attempted for the whole Bible, by Cardinal Hugo, and then the books were divided into the chapters which we now have; and these again were subdivided (or rather marked in the margin) with the letters A, B, C, etc. These chapters were adopted in the Latin Vulgate, and became afterwards common in Greek manuscripts and printed copies.

Still there were no verses. Long before this there had been stichoi, στίχοι (called νersus in Latin manuscripts); but they appear to have been rather lines than verses, when an attempt was made to arrange the manuscripts into a sort of poetry, yet without measure or rhyme. Thus, at the end of 2 Thessalonians, the Codex Sinaiticus has στιχoν ρπ, "180 stichoi, or verses" (the manuscript has really 291 lines), none of these are marked in the margin, and it is not easy to see to what the 180 refers; other manuscripts put the number at 106.

It was Robert Stephens, the celebrated printer and editor of the Greek Testament, who, feeling with others, that for reference shorter divisions than those of Cardinal Hugo were needed, set to work to divide the chapters into short verses. This he did on a journey from Paris to Lyons — it is supposed at the various places at which he rested. Our present verses are the result of his labours. They were first published in Stephens's Greek Testament, 1551, and from thence copied almost universally.

There is still one other branch of the subject demanding a word, namely the divisions into paragraphs. We suppose we must say that the ancient Greek manuscripts have no paragraphs; not that they have no breaks which might have the appearance of paragraphs, but they have not this significance. Take, again, the specimen of the Codex Sinaiticus (chapter 'Style of Writing'), it will be seen that the sixth line stands out a little into the margin. Letters standing out thus occur very frequently, and often follow a short line, which has every appearance of marking a paragraph. But here it is at verse 15 (of John 6), where, we suppose, no one makes a paragraph. On the other hand, the common Greek text has a paragraph at verse 16, where Codex Siimaiticus has none. It has also one at verse 22, where Codex Sinaiticus has none. Codex Sinaiticus, however, has an apparent break at verse 23, where no one makes a paragraph.

Now this is not only interesting to us as students of scripture, but it has this importance, that we learn that none of the divisions of the New Testament have any authority. The divisions into chapters, paragraphs, and verses have all been made by man; God may have overruled it in the main, but it is believed that in some places better divisions might have been made, because the present ones destroy the connection. For instance, the last verse of Revelation 11 belongs to chapter 12. It would be better for chapter 11 to end with verse 18. Again the verses of Romans 8: 33-35 would have been better divided thus: "It is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth? | It is Christ that died . . . . Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"

The arrangement of the chapters and verses is not now attempted to be altered, on account of its use for reference, but each editor of the Greek Testament has to make paragraphs as he thinks best.

A paragraph Testament is best for common use as we are all too apt to read by verses or chapters, instead of the Gospels by sections, and the Epistles as letters. But the reader must understand that even in paragraph Bibles the paragraphs have no authority: the editors are not at all agreed as to where they should be placed. A spiritual-minded reader will be the best judge in such a question.

Headings and Subscriptions to the Books.

As nothing connected with the New Testament is without its importance, we devote a short chapter to the above subject.

As in other things, so in even the headings to the books, do the various manuscripts differ. As a rule, the more ancient the copy, the shorter the heading, the tendency being evidently to enlarge. Perhaps we shall better arrive at a true judgment by giving the headings of a few of the older manuscripts. It must be remembered that א A B C D are the oldest copies, and E F G, etc., more recent, but all we name are uncials.*

{*See 'List of Uncial Manuscripts' for these.}

Matthew. According to Matthew א B; Gospel according to Matthew C E K M S U V. Subscription. According to Matthew B; Gospel according to Matthew A D E H K U V; D adding "ended."

Mark. According to Mark א B F; Gospel according to Mark A D E H K L M S U. Sub. Gospel according to Mark א A C D E H K L U; D adding "ended;" According to Mark B (after 16: 8, omitting the rest of the chapter).

Luke. According to Luke א B F; Gospel according to Luke A C D E K L M S U X. Sub. According to Luke B; Gospel according to Luke א A2 C D K L S U; D adding "ended."

John. According to John א B; Gospel according to John A C D E F G H K L M U Χ. Sub. According to John B; Gospel according to John א A C D E G H S; D H adding "end," or "ended."

Acts. Acts א; Acts of Apostles B D. Sub. Acts of Apostles א B; Acts of the holy Apostles A E H L.

Romans. To [the] Romans א A B C; Epistle of the all-holy Paul the Apostle to [the] Romans P; Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle Paul to [the] Romans L. Sub. To [the] Romans א A B C D G P; G adding "ended;" P adding "Epistle of Paul." Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle Paul to [the] Romans, written from Corinth, by Phebe the deaconess L; B2 D3 P add "written from Corinth."

1 Corinthians. I to [the] Corinthians א A B C D F G P; P adding "Epistle of Paul;" F G adding "begun" (άρχεται); First Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle Paul to the Corinthians L. Sub. I to [the] Corinthians א A B C D F G P; D adding "ended" (επληρωθη); F G adding "ended" (ετελέσθη); I to the Corinthians, written from Philippi, by Stephanus and Fortunatus and Achaicus and Timotheus K L; B2 P add "written from Ephesus;" D2, "written from Philippi Macedon."

2 Corinthians. ΙΙ to [the] Corinthians א A B D F G K; D F G adding "begun." II Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Corinthians L. Sub. II to [the] Corinthians א A B D F P; D F adding "ended;" B2 P adding "written from Philippi;" Second Epistle to [the] Corinthians, written from Philippi of Macedonia, by Titus and Luke K; L omitting "of Macedonia."

Galatians. To [the] Galatians א A B D F G K P; P adding "Epistle of Paul;" D F G adding "begun;" Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle Paul to [the] Galatians L. Sub. To [the] Galatians א A B1 C D; D adding "ended;" Epistle to [the] Galatians ended F G; To [the] Galatians, written from Rome B2 K P; End of the Epistle to [the] Galatians, written from Rome L.

Ephesians. To [the] Ephesians א A B D F G K P; P adding "of Paul;" D F G adding "begun;" Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Ephesians L. Sub. To [the] Ephesians א A B D K L P; B2 P adding "written from Rome;" K L adding "written from Rome by Tychicus;" Epistle to [the] Ephesians ended F G.

Philippians. To [the] Philippians א A B K; so D F G, adding "begun." Epistle of the holy (P "all-holy") Apostle Paul to the Philippians L P. Sub. To [the] Philippians א A B K; so D F G, each adding "ended" (as in 1 Cor.); Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to the Philippians L; K L adding "written from Rome, by Epaphroditus."

Colossians. To [the] Colossians א A B K P; so D F G adding "began;" P adding "Epistle of Paul;" Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Colossians L. Sub. To [the] Colossians A B1 C K P; so D F G each adding "ended" (as in 1 Cor.); A adding "from Rome;" B2 P adds "written from Rome;" Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Colossians L; K L adding "written from Rome, by Tychicus and Onesimus."

1. Thessalonians. I to [the] Thessalonians א A B K; so D F G adding "begun;" I Epistle of Paul to [the] Thessalonians P; First Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to the Thessalonians L. Sub. I To [the] Thessalonians א A B1 K; so D F G, each adding "ended" (as in 1 Cor.); I Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Thessalonians L; A B2 K L adding "written from Athens."

2 Thessalonians. II To [the] Thessalonians א A B K; so D F G, adding "began;" II Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Thessalonians L. Sub. II To [the] Thessalonians א A B K P; so D F G, each adding "ended" (as in 1 Cor.); Second Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to [the] Thessalonians L; A B2 K L P add "written from Athens."

1 Timothy. I To Timothy א A K; so D F G, adding "begun;" I Epistle of Paul to Timothy P; First Epistle of Paul to Timothy L. Sub. I To Timothy א A D P; A adding "written from Laodicea;" P "written from Nicopolis;" D adds "ended;" I Epistle to Timothy, ended F G; First (L adds "Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul") to Timothy, written from Laodicea, which is the chief city of Phrygia of Kapatiana (not Pacatiana, as Authorised Version) K L.

2 Timothy. II To Timothy א A D F G K P; D F G adding "began;" P adding "Epistle of Paul;" II Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to Timothy L. Sub. II To Timothy א A C P; so D F G, adding "ended;" A adds "written from Laodicea;" P, "written from Rome;" Second (L adds "of the holy Apostle Paul") to Timothy, ordained first bishop of the church of the Ephesians: written from Rome when Paul was brought a second time before Nero Caesar of Rome, K L.

Titus. To Titus א A K; so D F G, adding "begun;" Epistle to Titus P; so H, adding "of the Apostle Paul;" The Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to Titus L. Sub. To Titus א A C D F G K P; D adding "ended;" F G adding "Epistle ended;" A adding "written from Nicopolis;" P, "written from . . . .; "Epistle of the Apostle Paul to Titus H; so L, putting "holy Apostle;" H K L add, after "Titus," "ordained first bishop of the church of the Cretans, written from Nicopolis of Macedonia."

Philemon. To Philemon א A; so D F G, adding "begun;" Epistle of Paul to Philemon K L P; L adding "holy Apostle." Sub. To Philemon א C D K P; D adding "ended;" P' adding "written from Rome;" K adding "written from Rome, by Onesimus a servant;" Epistle of [the] holy Apostle Paul to Philemon and Apphian, master of Onesimus, and to Archippus, the deacon of the Colossian church: written from Rome, by Onesimus a servant L.

Hebrews. To [the] Hebrews א A B K; Epistle of Paul to [the] Hebrews P; written from Italy, by Timotheus: the Epistle to [the] Hebrews M; Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle Paul to [the] Hebrews L. Sub. To [the] Hebrews א A C K P; K adding "written from Italy by Timotheus;" A adding "written from Rome;" P adding "written from Italy."

James. Epistle of James B K; Catholic Epistle of the holy Apostle James L. Sub. Of James B; Epistle of James א A; End [of the] Catholic Epistle of the holy Apostle James L.

1 Peter. I of Peter B; I Epistle of Peter א A C K; I Catholic Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle Peter L. Sub. I of Peter א A B; I Catholic Epistle of the holy Apostle Peter L.

2 Peter. II of Peter א A B; II Epistle of Peter C K; Second Catholic Epistle of the holy Apostle Peter L. Sub. II of Peter א A B; catholic of Peter C; Second Epistle of the holy Apostle Peter L.

1 John. I of John A B; I Epistle of John א K; Catholic Epistle of the holy Apostle John L. Sub. I of John א A B; I Catholic Epistle of the holy and all-praiseworthy Apostle and Divine John L.

2 John. II of John א B; II Catholic Epistle of John K; Second Epistle of the holy Apostle John the Divine L. Sub. II of John א A B; II Epistle of John L.

3 John. III of John א B; III Epistle of John C; Third Epistle of the holy Apostle John L. Sub. III of John א A B; III Epistle of John C; III Epistle of the holy Apostle John L.

Jude. Of Jude א B; Epistle of Jude A C K; Epistle of the holy Apostle Jude L. Sub. Of Jude א B; Epistle of Jude A; Catholic Epistle of Jude C K; Epistle of the holy Apostle Jude L.

Revelation. Revelation of John. א C; Revelation of the Apostle and Evangelist John P. Title of A has perished, and these are all we have of the ancient uncials of the Revelation. Some of the cursives read, "Revelation of the holy Apostle John;" others add "the Divine." Sub. Revelation of John א A.

From the above it will be seen that the word "Catholic," to what are known as the Catholic Epistles, is not to be found in the oldest manuscripts. Also the copies differ as to where certain of the Epistles were written, and, of course, some cannot be correct. Paley says that six of the subscriptions in the Authorized Version are false or improbable — 1 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, Titus. In some copies at the end of an Epistle, along with the subscription, was added the heading of the next Epistle. This prevented anything being intercepted between the two.

The Canon of Scripture.

Having said that everything connected with scripture will bear the fullest investigation, we must not conceal the fact that with some of the earliest copies of the New Testament there were placed other writings or epistles besides those now contained in our New Testament. And a very natural question is, if we take chiefly the old Greek copies for our guide as to the true text, how is it that we do not also take them for a guide as what is called the "Canon* of scripture;" that is, what books should be deemed to be scripture, and what should be excluded?

{*'Canon,' in the Greek and Latin, signifies 'a rule or standard by which other things are tried.' (Paul uses it in this sense in Gal. 6: 16, and Phil. 3: 16.) We commonly apply it to what we believe to be the true and complete list of inspired books. If our list is true and complete, it tries and condemns all others. We say our books are canonical and others are spurious or apocryphal.}

In the first place we must look at what books were placed with the early copies of the New Testament. They are as follows

א Codex Sinaiticus. With this copy were placed the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas; only a portion of the latter remains.

A. Codex Alexandrinus. With this were placed the Epistles of Clement of Rome. At present only the first Epistle is remaining, and a small portion of the second. The first Epistle is supposed to be a genuine work of Clement, but great doubt is entertained as to the second.

Codex Vaticanus. The latter portion of this manuscript is lost; therefore we cannot tell what was or was not appended to it.

Codex Ephraemi. Only portions of this manuscript remain, and will not help us.

Codex Bezae. This also consists only of fragments of the New Testament.

D. Codex Claromontanus. (D. in Paul's Epistle, not in the Gospels) contains Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocalypse of Peter.

Now it will be seen from the above that of the early Greek copies which are complete all contain additional books, though of those which have other writings appended to them, no two copies agree in selecting the same books. Neither do those few here named comprise nearly the whole of the rejected books. There are about a score of different "Gospels," a dozen "Acts," a dozen "Epistles," and four or five "Revelations." Of the mass of these we suppose there can be no doubt among sober Christians as to their being uncanonical though most of them profess to have been written by one or other of the Apostles or their immediate successors.

Of course Barnabas may have written a letter or epistle, without in any way intending it as an "inspired" epistle. Indeed it seems to bear internal evidence of this; for he twice says that he had written 'to the best of his ability,' which is not in any way the language of one professing to be inspired.

Clement of Rome too may have written letters without dreaming of their ever being thought to be a part of scripture and being bound up with the New Testament.

The use others have made of these letters is another thing, but for that the writers may be in no way to blame.

Still the question arises why do we reject them, and how has the canon of scripture been formed? To this the common answer will be that the church determined the canon. But we must say that we do not consider this a sufficient answer, and it gives rise to the questions: When did the church settle it? Was it the church that settled it? and was the church in a fit state to settle such a question?

The church of Rome says that we cannot know what is scripture and what is not, except as that church tells us. After it has decided we can know but not before.

But if this were so, we should be obliged to receive the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, for the church of Rome has declared that to be canonical. This we cannot do.

And if we turn from the church of Rome, whence are we to turn for the church to decide such a question? If we go back before the church of Rome set up its claims, all is uncertain and in confusion.

We have seen that other epistles were placed along with the scripture; but besides this there is proof from the early fathers that Clement's epistles were read in most of the churches on the Lord's day, and that they were universally received. And also that the Shepherd of Hermas was read in many churches.

But the question becomes more serious if we appeal to the early church; for it is no longer a question of a few epistles, which we hope to prove to be spurious, but as to whether some of the real epistles are scripture or not: for while some received the spurious, they refused some parts of what we hold and maintain to be inspired.

We are not sure that any of our received books were omitted from any of the Greek copies, because many of them are only in fragments; but the early Syriac (the Peshito) did not contain 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. And it is the judgment of some of the best writers that the Old Latin copies did not contain all the books now received.

The following give some of the early fathers, and two of the Councils, who have given lists of the books of the New Testament.

Origen, A.D. 210. Is doubtful of James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John.

Eusebius, A.D. 315. His catalogue agrees with our Testament, but he says the Epistles of James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation, were doubted of by some.

Athanasius, A.D. 315. The same as ours.

Cyril, A.D. 340. Omits the Revelation.

Council of Laodicea, A.D. 364. Omits the Revelation.

Epiphanius, A.D. 370. The same as ours.

Gregory Naz., A.D. 375. Omits the Revelation.

Philastrius, A.D. 380. Omits the Hebrews and the Revelation.

Augustine, A.D. 305. The same as ours.

Jerome, A.D. 382. Speaks doubtingly of the Hebrews, but admits it.

Council of Carthage, about 400. The same as ours.

It will be seen that the majority give the list the same as we now have it in our Testament; but it appears a poor and unsatisfactory thing if we have nothing more substantial than this to rest our faith upon, as to what is scripture and what is not.

And if we come to the great Reformers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we are not much better off. Erasmus denied the apostolic origin of the Hebrews, 2 Peter, and the Revelation, but left their canonical authority unquestioned. It is doubtful what Erasmus would mean by this, for he might have meant by "canonical" that which was ordered by the 'canons' of the church; for he was very anxious not to break away from the church of Rome. It would have been better if he and others had referred to God, and said distinctly whether they believed that the books were from God or not.

Luther spoke disrespectfully of the Hebrews, Jude, James, and the Revelation, and set them aside at the end of his version. Melanchthon is believed to have sided pretty much with Luther. Carlstadt also had his list of doubtful books. Calvin doubted the authenticity of 2 Peter, James, and Jude. We will quote his words as to Jude, as a specimen of how this good man treated some parts of scripture: "Though there was a dispute among the ancients respecting this epistle, yet as the reading of it is useful, and as it contains nothing inconsistent with the purity of apostolic doctrine, and was received as authentic by some of the best, I willingly add it to the rest." As to whether it was of God or not, seems never to have entered the Reformer's mind.

Now, though we cannot refer back and say that the church, or those who seemed to be pillars in the church, have always counted our present list of books to be authentic, yet we can say that very early the list was completed as we now have it, and was believed to contain all the New Testament scripture, and nothing but the scripture; and, further, we doubt not that this has been the judgment and conviction of the great mass of Christians for centuries, altogether apart from any order of council that it should be so, and altogether beyond the doubts that any might attempt to throw upon any one of its books.

We doubt not this conviction has been of God. How very few could enter into the questions that have been raised as to the canon of scripture, but they are in no wise troubled about it and rightly so; they believe that God caused the book to be written, and they call it — all of it — the word of God, rest their faith upon what it says, and lay open their consciences to what it enjoins.

The question indeed is simple if we start with God. He caused a volume to be written. Can we suppose that He would be more indifferent than any human author would be as to whether any that He wrote was missing? or, on the other hand, whether anything should be palmed off as His which was not His? Surely not. No human author would allow this, and sure we are that God has not allowed this; but that He has in His wisdom caused all that He has had written to be collected together, and all that was not inspired to be rejected.

Faith then — faith in God — makes us certain, as to the canon of the New Testament, and we need no external evidence to prove it.

Here we might well let the matter rest, but in order to complete our sketch we would ask our christian readers to take a view of the beautiful symmetry of the New Testament. The four portraits of our Lord in the four Gospels — Son of David, Servant, Son of man, Son of God; the giving of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost; and the founding of the church in the Acts; Epistles on doctrine, the standing of the Christian, practical ordering of the church, the hope of the individual Christian in expecting his Lord, and his practical walk in the meanwhile: some addressed to various churches, and some to the Jewish converts who had peculiar difficulties to overcome, but containing principles necessary for all. Pastoral epistles for individual guidance when failure had begun to set in; and lastly, a prophecy of coming events, carried on to the end of time.

Is there any one of the books we could spare without leaving a deep chasm? Not one. Is there anything we need to be added? Nothing. There is no place to put it. Its symmetry is perfect. It cannot be added to; it must not be tken from. It is of God. Let us receive it with thankful confidence, and bow to its authority.

We may also profitably compare it with the Old Testament, and this all the more convinces us that but one mind runs through the whole; that one Person is the author of it all. And this is the more to be admired, when we remember that in some cases the writers were entirely unknown to each other, and many hundreds of years elapsed between the parts being written; yet there is no clashing, no variance, but a beautiful harmony running through it all. True it is that we need anointed eyes to see its beauties; but this should in no way discourage us, but rather urge us on to seek that anointing, that we may be able to see, and seeing to admire, that which is surely and emphatically the handywork of God.

We will, however, let our readers glance at two or three of the epistles which were bound up with the New Testament and read in the churches; and. we confidently believe that they will instinctively perceive that they are not a part of scripture.

The Epistle of Barnabas.

This is supposed to have been written by the companion of Paul, and is quoted by Clemens, Alexandrinus, and by Origen, apparently as scripture. Eusebius and Jerome also judged the epistle to be genuine, but not a part of scripture. It is now, however, much called in question whether it was written by that Barnabas.

We quote Barnabas as to the scape-goat: "How, then, ran the commandment? Give your attention. Take two goats of goodly aspect, and similar to each other, and offer them. And let the priest take one as a burnt-offering for sins [the Cod. Sin. reads 'one as a burnt-offering and one for sins']. And what shall they do with the other? 'Accursed,' says he, 'is the one.' Mark how the type of Jesus now comes out. 'And all of you spit upon it, and pierce it, and encircle its head with scarlet wool, and thus let it be driven into the wilderness.' And when all this has been done, he who bears the goat brings it into the desert, and takes the wool off from it and places that upon a shrub which is called Rachia. . . . Why, then again, is this? Give good heed — 'One upon the altar, and the other accursed;' and why the one that is accursed crowned? Because they shall see Him then in that day, having a scarlet robe about His body down to His feet; and they shall say, Is not this He whom we once despised, and pierced, and mocked, and crucified? . . . . But why is it that they place the wool among thorns? It is a type of Jesus set before the view of the church: that any one who wishes to bear it away, may find it necessary to suffer much, because the thorn is formidable, and thus obtain it only as the result of suffering." (Chap. vii.)

Now it may be, as to the scarlet wool on the goat, that Barnabas only followed the Jewish traditions, but he does not quote it as that (for he writes against the Jews), and he says "How ran the commandment?" Then he is quite wrong in saying one goat was for a burnt-offering, or a burnt-offering for sins. Both goats were a sin-offering, and had nothing to do with the burnt-offering. These things and the fanciful interpretation of the wool on the thorn stamp it emphatically as not being inspired, and not a part of scripture.

Barnabas writes concerning circumcision:— "Abraham, the first who enjoined circumcision looking forward in spirit to Jesus, practised that rite, having received the mysteries of the three letters. For it saith, 'And Abraham circumcised ten and eight, and three hundred men of his household.' The ten and the eight are thus denoted — Ten by I, and eight by H. You have Jesus [that is the first two letters in the Greek for Jesus, 'ΙΗΣΟΥΣ]. And because the cross was to express grace by the letter T, he said also 'Three hundred ' [that is, in Greek, T stands for 300, I for 10, H for 8 — in all, 318]. He signifies, therefore, Jesus by two letters and the cross by one. He knows thus who has put within us the engrafted gift of His doctrine. No one has been admitted by me to a more excellent piece of knowledge than this, but I know that ye are worthy." (Chap. ix.)

Surely this is trifling with scripture. And taking the last sentence of the quotation as true, we may dismiss Barnabas as not to be named along with scripture, wondering the more how it could have been placed in the same book with the word of God and how it could have been read in the churches.

The Epistle of Clement.

The first Epistle of Clement was written to the Corinthians, apparently on their consulting him amid great dissension in the church: he writes thus severely:

"It is disgraceful, beloved, yea, highly disgraceful and unworthy of your christian profession, that such a thing should be heard of as that the most stedfast and ancient church of the Corinthians should, on account of one or two persons, engage in sedition against its presbyters. And this rumour has reached not only us, but those also who are unconnected with us; so that, through your infatuation, the name of the Lord is blasphemed, while danger is also brought upon yourselves." (Chap. xlvii.)

A great deal is said about repentance, love, and good works; but sacrifices to be offered at Jerusalem by the high priest are strangely interwoven with the exhortations. In chapters xl. and xli., under the heading of "Let us preserve in the church the order appointed by God," is the following:

"These things, therefore, being manifest to us, and since we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it behoves us to do all things in order. He has enjoined offerings, and service to be performed, and that not thoughtlessly or irregularly, but at the appointed times and hours . . . . Those, therefore, who present their offerings at the appointed times, are accepted and blessed; for inasmuch as they follow the laws of the Lord, they sin not. For his own peculiar services are assigned to the high priest, and their own proper place is prescribed to the priests, and their own special ministrations devolve upon the Levites. The layman is bound by the laws that pertain to laymen . . . . Not in every place, brethren, are the daily sacrifices offered . . . . but in Jerusalem only . . . . that which is offered being first carefully examined by the high priest and the ministers already mentioned. Those, therefore, who do anything beyond that which is agreeable to His will, are punished by death. Ye see, brethren, that the greater the knowledge that has been vouchsafed to us, the greater also is the danger to which we are exposed."

As we have said, this is placed under a heading as to the order appointed by God in the church. And Clement writes the above to the Gentiles at Corinth. One has only to compare it with the Epistle to the Galatians to see how entirely unscriptural it is.

When speaking of the "ministers in the church" he speaks of bishops (or overseers), and deacons, being appointed and says, "Nor was this any new thing, since, indeed, many ages before it was written concerning bishops and deacons. For thus saith the scripture, in a certain place, 'I will appoint their bishops in righteousness, and their deacons in faith.'" (Chap. xlii.)

This is doubtless intended for a quotation from Isaiah 60: 17 from the LXX, but altered by Clement to suit his purpose: for the LXX reads, "I will make thy princes peaceable, and thine overseers righteous." The absurdity of quoting this passage to prove that bishops and deacons were not a new thing, must be obvious to all our readers.

As an emblem of the resurrection, Clement relates the heathen fable of the phoenix living five hundred years, and then rising again as a fresh bird from its own ashes. And then says that God "even by a bird shews up the mightiness of His power to fulfil His promise." (Chaps. xxv., xxvi.)

Surely these extracts are sufficient to prove that the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians is not inspired, and forms no part of the word of God.

The Shepherd of Hermas.

This is divided into Visions, Commands, and Similitudes. We give the substance of one of the Similitudes, that our readers may perceive how entirely different it is from scripture.

"Seest thou this vine and this elm? 'Sir,' said I, 'I see them.' This vine, saith he, is fruitful, but the elm is a tree without fruit. Nevertheless this vine, unless it were set by this elm, and supported by it, would not bear much fruit, but lying alone upon the ground, would bear but ill fruit, because it did not hang upon the elm: whereas, now, being supported upon the elm, it bears fruit both for itself and for that. See, therefore, how the elm gives no less, but rather more fruit, than the vine . . . . This Similitude, therefore, is set forth to the servants of God; and it represents the rich and poor man.

"I answered, 'Sir, make this manifest unto me.' Hear, said he, the rich man has wealth; howbeit, towards the Lord he is poor: for he is taken up about his riches, and prays but little to the Lord; and the prayers which he makes are lazy and without force. When, therefore, the rich man reaches out to the poor those things which he wants, the poor man prays unto the Lord for the rich; and God grants unto the rich man all good things, because the poor man is rich in prayer, and his requests have great power with the Lord . . . . They are, therefore, both made partakers of each other's good works. Whosoever, therefore, shall do these things, he shall not be forsaken by the Lord, but shall be written in the book of life. Happy they who are rich and perceive themselves to be increased: for he that is sensible of this will be able to minister somewhat to others."

Of this writer Origen says, "I fancy that that Hermas [mentioned in Romans 16: 14] is the author of the tract which is called The Shepherd, a writing which seems to me very useful, and is, as I fancy, divinely inspired [!]"

In dealing with the spurious books of New Testament times, it is well to remember the introduction of Luke's Gospel, which seems to imply that there were false accounts even then in existence: "Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which, from the beginning, were eye witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed." There being many (and they must be spurious because many, for God had caused only three others to be written, and John's is very generally believed to have been written later), he would write one, by which Theophilus might be certain of the things he had been taught.

Another reference in scripture to spurious writings is in 2 Thessalonians 2: 2: "That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand."

Here the apostle intimates that they may have been troubled by some message or letter purporting to come from him which he had not sent, and warns them not to be troubled by any such things.

In the end of the same epistle Paul says, "The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write." (Chap. 3: 17.)

It was the custom of Paul to employ an amanuensis to write his epistles, see Romans 16: 22 (the Galatians he wrote himself: Gal. 6: 11), but at the end he wrote a few words with his own hand, or, we suppose, signed his name, that it might be a token to them of its genuineness. (See 1 Cor. 16: 21; Philemon 19.)

Of the other pretended epistles besides these we have named, there is not one but is manifestly not of God.

Some mention events that happened a long while after the pretended author's death. Thus for instance, in the "Constitutions of the Apostles," there is reference to the controversy about the re-baptism of heretics, which did not arise till the third century.

Some mention persons that did not live until long after the pretended author's death. Thus the book under the name of Hegesippus (who lived in the second century), mentions Constantine and Constantinople which could not be before the fourth century.

The Questions and Answers under the name of Justin Martyr, mention Irenaeus and Origen, who both lived after his time.

There are, however, still one or two points to be cleared up touching the canon of the New Testament. The first is in Colossians 4: 16, we read, "When this epistle is read amongst you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and that ye likewise read the epistle from Laodicea."

This last sentence, "read the Epistle from Laodicea," has given rise to the thought that Paul had written another Epistle to Laodicea which was to be passed on to the Colossians after being read at Laodicea, in the same way that the Epistle to Colosse was to be passed on to Laodicea. And if so, what has become of that Epistle? and is the canon of scripture complete without it?

In the first place it must be noticed that the word does not speak of an Epistle to Laodicea, but "the epistle from (εκ) Laodicea;" and may refer to

1. The Epistle to the Ephesians, which, perhaps, was being circulated from one to another, and was coming to Colosse, from Laodicea.

2. It may refer to a letter written from Laodicea to Paul, stating things of general interest, a copy of which Paul sent on to Colosse for them to read; or it might be a letter evincing a certain state of things at Laodicea which Paul judged would be well met by his letter to Colosse being read there also; and so Paul not only requested them to send on his Epistle to Laodicea, but also thus shewed them in fellowship the reason for his so doing.

3. It may have been an epistle written by Paul to Laodicea, and which was coming from thence to Colosse, a letter of general interest, but not inspired, and which was not intended to form a part of scripture. There is no reason for believing that we have all the letters that Paul wrote, or that all he wrote were inspired.

In none of these cases would the canon of scripture be touched, which is the point under consideration; and here we might be content to leave the matter but that there is in existence the copy of a letter entitled "The Epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans," which some have contended ought to form a part of scripture.

We give a copy of this epistle, from an old manuscript at Padua in Venice, that the reader may judge whether such an epistle is at all likely to have been written by Paul; not that the wording is not generally correct and scriptural, but that on the whole there seems no special point or object in it; indeed, it is supposed to be merely a compilation of portions of the epistles by Paul gathered together and made into a separate letter. By the side of the epistle we give the places from which the extracts may have been taken.

The Epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans.

1. Paul an apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, to the brethren which are at Laodicea.

[Paul an apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ," etc. (Gal. 1: 1.)]

2. Grace be to you, and peace from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

[Grace be to you, and peace from God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ." (Gal. 1: 3.)]

3. I thank Christ in every prayer of mine, that ye continue and persevere in good works, looking for that which is promised in the day of judgment.

["I thank my God upon every remembrance of you . . . for your fellowship in the gospel, from the first day until now," etc. (Phil. 1: 3, 5.)]

4. Let not the vain speeches of any trouble you, who pervert the truth, that they may draw you aside from the truth of the gospel which I have preached.

["There be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ," etc. (Gal. 1: 7.)]

5. And now may God grant that my converts may attain to a perfect knowledge of the truth of the gospel, be beneficent, and doing good works which accompany salvation.

6. And now my bonds, which I suffer in Christ, are manifest, in which I rejoice and am glad.

[My bonds in Christ are manifest." (Phil. 1: 13.)]

7. For I know that this shall turn to my salvation for ever, which shall be through your prayer, and the supply of the Holy Spirit.

["For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ." (Phil. 1: 19.)]

8. Whether I live or die; [for] to me to live shall be a life to Christ; to die will be joy.

["Whether it be by life or by death, for to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." (Phil. 1: 20, 21.)]

9. And our Lord will grant us His mercy, that ye may have the same love, and be like-minded.

["That ye be like-minded, having the same love." (Phil. 2: 2.)]

10. Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have heard of the coming of the Lord, so think and act in fear, and it shall be to you life eternal:

["Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, .... work out your own salvation with fear." (Phil. 2: 12.)]

11. For it is God who worketh in you.

["For it is God who worketh in you." (Phil. 2: 13.)]

12. And do all things without sin.

["Do all things without murmuring, etc., v. 15, that ye may be blameless." (Phil. 2: 14.)]

13. And what is best, my beloved, rejoice in the Lord Jesus Christ, and avoid all filthy lucre.

["Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. (Phil. 3: 1.)]

14. Let all your requests be made known to God, and be steady in the doctrine of Christ.

["Let your requests be made known unto God. (Phil. 4: 6.)]

15. And whatsoever things are sound, and true, and of good report, and chaste, and just, and lovely, these things do.

["Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report," etc. (Phil. 4: 8.)]

16. Those things which ye have heard, and received, think on these things, and peace shall be with you.

["Those things which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen — do, and the God of peace shall be with you." (Phil. 4: 9.)]

17. All the saints salute you.

["All the saints salute you." (Phil. 4: 22.)]

18. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.

["The grace of our Lord Jesus be with your spirit. Amen." (Gal. 6: 18.)]

19. Cause this Epistle to be read to the Colossians, and the Epistle of the Colossians to be read among you.*

["And when this Epistle is read amongst you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and that ye likewise read the Epistle from Laodicea." (Col. 4: 16.)]

{*From Jones, On the Canon of the New Testament.}

The reader will see by the above how very improbable it is that Paul ever wrote such an epistle as this professing to be from him to the Laodiceans.

Another passage that has been thought by some to allude to a lost epistle is 1 Corinthians 5: 9 "I wrote unto you in an epistle not to keep company with fornicators." The first word is έγραψα, the aorist indicative, 'I wrote,' but some translate it 'I have written' — 'I wrote unto you in the epistle (εν τη επιστολη) not to mix with fornicators.'

The first question is what epistle is referred to? Does the passage refer to some part of this First Epistle, or does it point to an epistle sent before this First Epistle? Some refer to verses 2 and 7 of this same chapter as being the parts alluded to but they do not seem to be sufficiently to the point to justify the language "I wrote to you not to mix with fornicators." It is to be noticed that in verse 11 we have the same word for 'wrote' with the addition of 'now.' "But now I wrote to you," or "now I have written to you." Others think that verse 9 refers to a former epistle, and verse 11 to the present one; and they would translate the former 'I wrote,' and the latter 'I write,' 'now I write' (though the two words are precisely the same: the aorist). Others refer both verses to a former epistle, taking the word 'now' in the sense of 'this is my meaning.' And others refer both verses to the present epistle.

It should be observed that in the Second Epistle (2 Cor. 7: 8), there are the same three words as in our verse 9: εν τη επιστολη, 'in the epistle,' and these, by the context, clearly refer to the First Epistle: why, therefore, may not the same words in the First Epistle refer to one still earlier? Supposing this were so, let us see what would be involved.

The conclusion might hastily be formed that an epistle was lost, and the canon of scripture not complete. But let it be noticed that the same Greek word is sometimes used for a 'letter' as is used for an 'epistle' (see Acts 9: 2; 2 Cor. 3: 1), so that the references in 1 Corinthians 5 may refer to some letter which Paul wrote to the Corinthians, but which was not inspired and is not preserved as a part of scripture. As we have seen before, there is no reason to suppose that all the letters the apostles wrote have been preserved to us. All they wrote to form a part of "the word of God" are preserved, but they may have written much more than what was intended to form a part of scripture (see 1 Cor. 16: 3), as, in a similar way, our Lord did many things which are not preserved to us in the Gospels. (John 21: 25.) To this we need only add that there is in existence another Epistle to the Corinthians, said to be by Paul. It was not apparently known to the early Fathers. One thing is certain, it cannot be the letter above referred to; for in it there is no caution not to associate with fornicators — the subject is not touched upon. It is further proved to be a forgery by this sentence, "I, from the beginning, did teach you the very same thing which I received from the former apostles, who had constant conversation with the Lord." This is directly the opposite of what Paul said of his ministry. See 1 Corinthians 11: 23; Galatians 1: 12; Ephesians 3: 2, 3.

This is all we need say on the canon of scripture. In taking up the writings of the Fathers, one is struck with the strong contrast there is between "the word of God," and the writings of even the immediate successors of the apostles. While one grieves at what appears such a declension, on the other hand it is well that there should be a deep line of separation between that which is "the word of God," and that which is the writings of men.

It is indeed surprising to find human writings attached to the scriptures, and that they were read in the churches. The formation of the canon of scripture was doubtless a work of time, and great respect was naturally shewn to those who had been companions of the apostles; but it must not be forgotten that long after that canon was settled, passages from apocryphal books were read in churches, as indeed in the Established Church of England — read, as the Prayer Book says, "for example of life and instruction of manners," but not "to establish any doctrine." And this, after so many years, is more surprising than that it should have been done before the canon was settled.

To revert again for a moment as to the settlement of the canon. It may suffice most to say that all Christians, all over the world, receive the canon as we now have it. Or a Christian can base it on faith, and say, "I believe that God caused the book to be written, and that He has preserved it to us intact. He has told us that it must not be added to nor taken from." (Rev. 22: 18, 19.) And, as one has well said, "this method of faith — the simplest and the shortest for establishing the certainty of the canon — is also unquestionably the most beneficial and the surest;" (Gaussen) and, we add, it is the only method that is suited for the simple and unlettered Christian, while we believe it is the only solid ground for the learned.

The Authorised Version of 1611.

We now turn to our venerable Authorised Version, with a view to ascertain, as far as we can, from what Greek text it was taken, and also to see what light all that has come before us throws upon the question of its integrity. We will first glance at the original preface.

The translators feared that their work would be evilly spoken of, for no one had ever sought to do any good for the people, but had been maligned: "Whosoeuer attempteth any thing," said they, "for the publicke (specially if it pertaine to Religion, and to the opening and clearing of the word of God) the same setteth himselfe vpon a stage to be glouted vpon by euery euil eye, yea, he casteth himselfe headlong vpon pikes, to be gored by euery sharpe tongue."

But this did not daunt them: they well asked, "What pietie without trueth? What trueth (what sauing trueth) without the word of God? What word of God (whereof we may be sure) without the scripture?"

They had profound reverence for the scripture "The originall thereof being from heaven, not from earth; the author being God, not man; the enditer the Holy Spirit, not the wit of the apostles or prophets . . . the form, God's word, God's testimony, God's oracles, the word of truth, the word of salvation, etc. . . . happy is the man that delighteth in the scripture, and thrice happy that meditateth on it day and night."

But how could men meditate upon what they could not understand because of being in an unknown tongue? "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain that we may look into the most holy place."

But then the question was raised, Was there any need of a new translation, seeing the Bible was already in the English tongue? "Hath the church been deceived, say they, all this while? Hath her sweet bread been mingled with leaven, her silver with dross, her wine with water, her milk with lime?" On the other hand, others said, "Why do they now mend it? Was it not good?" The translators explain that they had no desire to find fault with any of their predecessors, but thought it good to go over the same work again to seek to make it more perfect. As secular books had been gone over again and again, "What ought we not to bestow upon the vine, the fruit whereof maketh glad the conscience of man, and the stem thereof abideth for ever?" They did not seek to make a good translation out of a bad one, but "to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against."

They tell us that they translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and the New from the Greek; but do not tell us what Greek text they used. This we can only arrive at by comparing it with the Greek texts then in existence.

Of other matters they then speak. The first point is in favour of marginal readings in points of difficulty, rather than giving one sole interpretation.

The next point is that the translators refuse to be bound in any way to translate the same Greek word by the same English word, even when the sense is precisely the same. They defended their diversity very curiously: "For as it has been written of a certain great philosopher, that he should say that those logs were happy that were made images to be worshipped: for their fellows, as good as they, lay for blocks behind the fire! so if we should say, as it were, unto certain words, Stand up higher, have a place in the Bible always; and to others of like quality, Get ye hence, be banished for ever, we might be taxed peradventure, with St. James's words, namely, To be partial in ourselves, and judges of evil thoughts . . . . niceness in words was always counted the next step to trifling."

They commend the reader to God and to the Spirit of His grace, which was able to build them up further than the translators could tell or think; and thus warn their readers: "If light be come into the world, love not darkness more than light; if food, if clothing be offered, go not naked, starve not yourselves."

From other sources we ascertain that the following were among the rules laid down for the guidance of the translators:

"1. The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit.

"2. The names of the prophets and the holy writers with the other names in the text, to be retained as near as may be, according as they are vulgarly used.

"3. The old ecclesiastical words to be used: as the word church not to be translated congregation, etc.

"4. When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most ancient Fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place, and the analogy of faith.

"5. The divisions of the chapters to be altered either not at all, or as little as may be, if necessity so require.

"6. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.

"7. Such quotations of places to be marginally set down as shall serve for the fit reference of one scripture to another.

[Then follow rules as to how the work was to be apportioned out to different translators and finally revised.]

"14. These translations to be used, when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible viz., 1, Tyndale's; 2, Matthew's; 3, Coverdale's; 4, Whitchurche's (i.e., Cranmer's); 5, The Geneva."*

{* Anderson's "Annals of the English Bible."}

It will be seen that the above rules do not give any intimations to the translators as to what Greek text should be taken. And indeed there was the less need for any such instructions, seeing that the Greek texts then in vogue differed little from one another; and anything beyond them was but little known at that time. Still variations were known to exist, and it is a little surprising that no mention was made as to what text should be used.

As to date, the Authorised Version came in between the editions of Beza and those of Elzevir, but it is clear that the translators did not keep strictly to any one text then in existence; for whereas their version mostly agrees with the edition of Stephens 1550, in some places they chose Beza's text in preference.

It will have been seen from the above that the Authorised Version was rather a revision of the Bishops' Bible, than an entirely new translation. Now the Bishops' Bible was made by Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, assisted by some fifteen known scholars, and published in 1568, about thirty years before the last edition of Beza's Greek Testament; so that there can be no doubt that the translators of the Authorised Version referred to the editions of Beza; but as to why they chose his readings in some places in preference to those of Stephens 1550, we are quite in the dark; and it may be that in other places they simply followed the Bishops' Bible.

That they did not adopt Beza's text to the exclusion of Stephens's is also evident, for where the two texts differ they adopted about a score of Stephens's readings; and, strange to say, in some places they agree with neither Stephens nor Beza.

We will refer to these places with an endeavour to ascertain what could have guided the translators.

Matthew 2: 11. A.V., "they saw," with Complutensian and the Bishops' Bible. Stephens and Beza have "they found." Stephens had "they saw" in his margin, and this reading has been fully confirmed by the researches of modern editors. The Vulgate has invenerunt, "they found."

Matthew 9: 18. A.V., "a certain ruler," with Comp. and Vulgate. St. and Beza omit "certain." Modern editors are divided as to its insertion.

Matthew 10: 10. A.V., "staves," with Complutensian. St. and Beza, "staff." Stephens had "staves" in his margin, but this reading has not been conclusively established by further evidence.

Mark 4: 18. St. and Beza have (a second) "these are" before "such as hear the word." Comp. omits the words; but the translators may have thought the sense complete without their repetition.

Mark 5: 38. A.V., "and them that wept," with Erasmus and Vulgate. St. and Beza omit 'and,' but all modern Editors add it.

Mark 9: 42. A.V., had "these little ones," (with Comp. and Vulgate), but modern editions have 'these little ones.' St. and Beza omit 'these.' Modern Editors are divided as to its reception.

Mark 15: 3. A.V., "but he answered nothing," with Comp., Stephens 1546, 1549, and Bishops'. But St. 1550, Beza, and modern Editors omit the words.

Luke 3: 31. A.V. had "Menam" (with Erasmus and Bishops'), but modern editions have 'Menan' St. and Beza have Μαϊνάν, some Editors Μεννά.

Verse 35. A.V., "Heber," with Erasmus and. Bishops'. St. and Beza have 'Eber.' Editors are divided. It is only the difference of breathing in the Greek Ε.

Luke 12: 56. A.V., "of the sky and of the earth," with Comp., Vulgate, and Bishops'. St. and Beza "of the earth and of the sky" with all modern Editors.

Luke 20: 31. A.V., "the seven also, and they left," with Erasmus and Bishops'. St. Beza omit 'and' (reading 'the seven also left') confirmed by all modern Editors.

John 8: 6. A.V. (with Comp., Stephens 1546, 1549, and Bishops') had "as though he heard them not," in common type (put in italics in 1769). St. 1550 and Beza and all modern Editors omit.

Acts 7: 16. A.V. had 'Emor,' with Erasmus and Bishops'; but now it is printed 'Emmor.' St. and Beza have 'Εμμoρ, but most modern Editors Έμμωρ.

Acts 8: 13. A.V., "Miracles and signs," with Erasmus and Bishops'. St. and Beza, with best modern Editors, "signs and miracles."

Acts 27: 29. A.V., "we should have fallen," with Comp., Vulg., and Bishops'. St. and Beza, "they should have fallen." Stephens had the reading of A.V. in his margin, and it has been fully confirmed by modern editors.

Ephesians 6: 24. A.V. omitted "Amen" (with Vulgate), but it is added in later editions. St. and Beza, with most modern Editors, omit the word.

2 Timothy 1: 18. A.V., "he ministered unto me," with Vulgate and Bishops'. St. and Beza, with all Editors, omit 'unto me.'

Philemon 7. A.V., "joy," with Comp., Vulgate, and Bishops'. St. and Beza, 'return thanks' instead of 'have joy,' the word for 'return' or 'have' remaining unchanged; but 'joy' is confirmed by all subsequent Editors.

Hebrews 12: 24. A.V., το 'Αβελ, "than that of Abel," with Erasmus. St. and Beza τον 'Αβελ, reading "than Abel."

2 Peter 1: 1. A.V., "Simon (Σίμων) Peter," with Comp. and Vulgate. St. and Beza, "Symeon (Συμεoν) Peter," with all modern Editors.

1 John 3: 16. A.V., "love of God," (with Comp. and Vulgate); but afterwards printed "love of God." St. and Beza, with all Editors,. omit 'of God.'

Jude 12. A. V., "feast with you," with Comp. and Bishops'. St. and Beza, with all Editors, omit 'with you.'

Revelation 11: 4. A.V., "the two candlesticks," with Comp. St. and Beza omit 'the;' but all modern Editors add the word.

Revelation 17: 4. A.V., "was arrayed," with Comp., Vulg., and Bishops'. St. and Beza omit 'was;' but niodern Editors add the word.

Revelation 18: 1. A.V., "another angel," with Comp., Erasmus and Bishops'. St. and Beza omit 'another;' but modern Editors add the word.

Verse 5. A.V., "have reached," with Comp., but St. and Beza have "followed." All modern Editors agree with the reading of A.V.

Revelation 19: 18. A.V., "both free and bond" (with Comp.), but later editions "both free and bond." St. and Beza omit 'both;' but modern Editors add the word.

Revelation 21: 13. A.V., "and on the west," with Comp., Vulg., and Bishops'. St. and Beza omit 'and,' but modern Editors add it.

It will be seen that the translators in two of the places named may have followed the margin of Stephens, and in the others, the Complutensian, the Vulgate, or the Bishops.

In the main, however, the translators followed Stephens and Beza; but Beza had copied Stephens for the most part, and Stephens had copied Erasmus. This latter fact is striking in a few places. For Stephens in his edition of 1550 in some places abandoned his former text and all his manuscripts, in favour of readings given by Erasmus, and these were mostly retained in our Authorised Version.

Mill quotes the following instances of this going back, not to manuscripts, but to the printed edition of Erasmus:

Matthew 2: 11: 'they found,' instead of the correct reading, they saw:' already alluded to, as not being following by the Authorised Version.

Matthew 3: 8: 'fruits,' wrongly, instead of 'fruit.'

Mark 6: 33: 'the people saw,' instead of 'they saw,' the correct reading.

Mark 16: 8: 'they went out quickly;' 'quickly' should be omitted.

Luke 7: 31: 'And the Lord said,' omit the four words.

John 14: 30: 'the prince of this world,' instead of the true reading, 'the prince of the world.'

Acts 5: 23: 'the keepers standing without,' omit 'without.'

James 5: 9: 'lest ye be condemned,' instead of the true reading, 'lest ye be judged.'

In all the above cases more recent researches have proved that Stephens made a mistake in leaving his manuscripts: they were right, and Erasmus wrong.

It might naturally have been supposed that as Beza had additional manuscripts, his text would have been purer than that of Stephens; but this is certainly not the case in all places. Romans 7: 6 is a remarkable instance of a false reading in Beza, and which found its way into the Authorised Version, although right in Stephens 1550. Beza gave αποθανόντος which makes the passage read that the law was dead; αποθανόντες is the right reading, and this makes the persons to have died: the difference is doctrinally of great importance. The false reading, though supported by no Greek manuscript and by no version, was copied into the Elzevir text.

This will help us in the consideration as to whether the Authorised Version needs revision. There are two things that must never be confounded. First, what are the true Greek words that ought to be translated? and, secondly, how are they to be translated? Our question is concerning the former only, and not the latter. While all speak highly of the Authorised Version as a translation, most admit that in this it may be improved in some places. The grave difficulties are, who are to make the alterations, and how much is to be altered, so that the work shall commend itself to Christians generally?

But our subject is the text to be translated. The above passage in Romans 7: 6 ought to convince any person that in some places a purer text ought to be taken. If our readers will also turn back to the variations in the Revelation, they will see that some of the readings in the Authorised Version have, as far as we have any means of knowing, absolutely no manuscript authority whatever. Surely such passages ought to be altered. But in many places the sense may not be affected; and if the text is to be altered, the grave question is, who is to do it, and do it in such a way that it shall, as in the translation, commend itself to all Christians? This is a much more difficult question than the translation of the text after that is fixed on. The translation may perhaps be amended to commend itself to most; but as to the text, only few are at all able to judge as to where the text needs altering, and will naturally cling to their time-honoured New Testament. If portions were left out, and others added, we can easily see how many good Christians would look upon the work with the greatest abhorrence, if not designate it as the work of Satan!

While this is being written, as is well known, there is a Committee of learned men revising the Authorised Version of the scriptures. Of course, they will have to consider both of the above questions; but we fear that of the two, their choice of text will be that which may give the least satisfaction, as it is undoubtedly the most difficult. Whether this revised translation will ever become the Authorised Version of this country remains to be seen.

But our readers will naturally expect that we should give them some sort of finger-post to guide them through the apparent labyrinth of the various readings shewn forth in uncials, cursives, versions, and fathers. First, let us repeat what we said at the commencement, that though there are thousands of various readings, they do not touch one of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. All these remain intact; still, as we need and desire to know the very words of our God, we should value every help that would lead us to a more correct text. To attain this we know of no better plan for the general reader than to be guided by the united judgment of the various editors. There have been men who have laboured diligently and faithfully in the task of discovering what was the text of the New Testament as God caused it to be written at the first. These laid down certain rules for themselves — one taking this path, and another that; but in many cases they all arrived at the same conclusion. Where this is so, we consider that the student of scripture will be safe in taking their united judgment as decisive for a reading.

As to the editors to be taken we should not advise going further back than Griesbach, and even since his day a great mass of evidence has came to light. Scholz may be omitted, for, as we have seen, he rejected his own plan of action before he died. We should say, take Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford, Green, and Wordsworth; and Westcott and Hort when published.*

{* The reader will find the readings of most of these editors in both Greek and English in the "Englishman's Greek New Testament" (Bagster).}

Of course we should recommend this for private study, and not for public use. We see no difficulty in the Authorised Version being used in public, as the Septuagint was used by our Lord and His apostles even where it is not an exact translation of the Hebrew — and only corrected where absolutely necessary. By this means we shall preserve the familiar and forcible language of the Authorised Version, and still be furnished by the above, together with some good new translation, which may also confirm the text to be used, with all we may need to arrive at a true text, and the translation of the same.

Verbal Inspiration.

We have still to consider the subject as to how far the variations of the manuscripts touch the verbal inspiration of the New Testament.

Many Christians fully believe that the very words of scripture are inspired; that is, that not simply the sense of scripture was directly from God, leaving the various writers to choose very much their own words, but that God also caused the writers to use His own words.

Without entering at any length into the question of inspiration, it may be well just to quote two or three passages that bear upon the verbal in spiration of scripture.

"Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." (Mark 13: 31.) "The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and are life." (John 6: 63.) "He that is of God heareth the words of God." (John 8: 47.) "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled." (Matt. 5: 18.) These passages may suffice, when taken with the passages usually quoted for the inspiration of the whole of scripture.

But those who disbelieve in the inspiration of the words of scripture, say, "Of what use is your belief in verbal inspiration, when we are not sure that we have the very words God caused to be written? The hundreds and thousands of variations in the manuscripts destroy your theory, or render it useless."

Now, in the first place, we must insist upon it that there are two separate and distinct questions to be considered — questions which should not be allowed to interfere with one another.

The first question is — Did God so control the writers of the scriptures that they wrote His words? We say, Yes. We have quoted some passages that speak of "words;" and we must hold this truth firmly. To give it up is to allow the thin end of the wedge of scepticism to come in between us and God as to His word. What distinct thought can we have, in speaking of a jot or tittle of the law not failing, if it is sufficient to consider its general sense? And how are we to arrive at the sense of scripture except through the words used? We consider that a Christian must hold with "verbal" inspiration, or he virtually gives up inspiration altogether at least in a way that is at all worthy of God, in giving us an infallible guide amid the surrounding darkness and error.

Now, if this point is once settled, it greatly simplifies the other, namely, "Have we a correct copy of that which God caused to be written?" Suppose for a moment I am obliged to say, "No, we have not a correct copy;" that in no way touches the other point, namely, that there were correct copies once. And if I believe that there were such, I naturally say, "I wish I had a correct copy." But, on the other hand, I have nothing to wish for if I deny that there ever were copies of "the words of God." If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, gave only the sense of what God intended them to write, I have that in almost any Greek copy: why search any more? Why spend years of labour, and thousands of pounds, to get at that which never existed, namely, "the words of God?" I may labour diligently to get accurately what Paul wrote; but of what use is it, if, when I have arrived at it, I have Paul, and not God, except as to the general sense? This I have already in the common Greek text, and in the Authorised Version.

Thus we see that by believing in the verbal inspiration of the scripture is given the impetus to search after a correct text; but it surely is not worth the time and labour, if I have nothing to gain but the words of those who were merely the instruments. It is because God caused the writers to use His words that gives us the earnest desire to have a correct copy of these very words.

Now, with this desire before us, we must candidly admit that we may not have every word God caused to be written; that is what we desire and labour for. But if we have not every one, we have nearly all; there are places where we have not yet been able to say with certainty that we have the exact words. In some places the weight of evidence for two or more readings is so nearly balanced, that it is not for any one dogmatically to say what it was in the original.

As we have seen, the various readings do not touch one of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. These all stand out in their full lustre, as they came from the finger of God. But because it is the word of God, we want to know the words He used in every place. We do know them in the main; in thousands of passages there are no variations worth speaking of, nothing to disturb the commonly received version which has been in use in the church for so long. With the exceptions that have been named, we have the "words of God" as given in the New Testament. On these we hang our souls' salvation, and in these is the hope set before us, of soon seeing our blessed Lord, and being with Him, and like Him, for ever.

This is "Our Father's Will:" let us receive it devoutly; believe every word of it; and seek to obey it in all things.

Four truths Every Christian Should Know About Salvation

Four truths Every Christian Should Know About Salvation

E. C. Hadley.

Many believers are frustrated and troubled about their walk, sometimes doubting their salvation because of so much failure in their lives. The following four truths about salvation should be helpful to anyone with such thoughts.

Truth 1: Forgiveness

When we come to the Lord Jesus as sinners and accept Him as our Savior, God forgives our sins and justifies us because of the shed blood of Christ (Rom. 3: 23-26).

When Jesus was on the cross, our sins were laid on Him and He took the punishment for them. There is no more judgment for sin for all who accept Christ as their Savior. Every sin that comes into our lives has already been judged and punished when Christ died for us on the cross (Isa. 53: 5-6; Heb. 9: 28; Heb. 10: 12-14).

Perhaps someone might say, "If that is true it does not make much difference whether we continue to sin or not." But it does make a tremendous difference, because there are three other truths to consider about salvation.

Truth 2: A New Nature

When we accept Christ as our Savior, God not only forgives us and justifies us, but He also gives us a new (divine) nature. We are born again_we become God's children (1 Peter 1: 23; James. 1: 18; 2 Peter 1: 4). This new nature loves God and hates sin; it makes us desire to live without sinning and makes us feel miserable when we do sin. No born again Christian can be truly happy in sin.

But someone asks, "Why do I do sinful things if I have a new nature? I really do not want to do them, but even with all my good intentions I eventually give in and do them again."

We not only have a new nature that hates sin, but we also still have the old (sinful) nature that loves sin. There is a conflict going on within us. The old nature wants to sin but the new nature wants to please God.

Besides this, we have consciences which tell us that what the new nature wants is right, and what the old nature wants is always wrong. But we find all too often that the old nature, with its desires and lusts for sinful things, is the strongest in time of temptation. It carries us away captive and we do those things which our new nature hates and our consciences denounce.

After it is all over we regret it and resolve that we will never do it again. However, it just seems as if we don't have any strength to resist temptation. What is to be done? Here is where the third truth of salvation comes in.

Truth 3: The Holy Spirit

When we accepted Christ as our Savior and were born again, God gave us His Holy Spirit to live in our hearts (Eph. 1: 13; Gal. 4: 6). This Holy Spirit pours out the love of God in our hearts and causes us to feel the peace of Christ in our souls. As a result, we are happy! (Rom. 5: 1-15).

But when we give way to sin, the Holy Spirit is grieved. He cannot give us joy, because that would encourage us in those sinful things which He hates. He is one with God the Father and Son in His hatred of sin and love of righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4: 30).

The Holy Spirit is given to us not only to pour out the love of God in our hearts. He also gives us power to say "No!" to the desires of the old nature, and to yield ourselves to the will of God, doing those things that please Him. "Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh" (Gal. 5: 16).

It is just like Peter walking on the water. As long as he was counting on the Lord to hold him up, all went well; but the very moment he noticed that the wind and the waves were rough, he became afraid and began to sink. In our Christian experience we must count on the Lord to hold us up each step of the way by the power of His indwelling Spirit (Matt. 14: 24-31; John. 15: 4-5).

Truth 4: Fellowship

Salvation brings us into fellowship with God. There is a happy feeling between God as our Father and us as His children. We can enjoy hearing what He has to say to us by His Spirit through His Word. We feel free to talk with Him about all our troubles, just as a child is free with his earthly father whom he knows loves him. He makes us happy by his smile.

However, when a child disobeys, he knows his father will be displeased. Instead of a smile he has to experience discipline. The relationship between father and child has not changed, but the fellowship and the happy feeling between them has been broken.

So it is with our heavenly Father. When we sin we are still His children. It is also true that Christ already took the judgment for that sin; it has been put away by His sacrifice on the cross. But fellowship with our Father and with our Savior is broken and the Holy Spirit is grieved. The Father has to rebuke us for our disobedience and perhaps even chasten us, especially if we continue in it.

If we come to Him with confession, humbled because of our sin and disobedience, then we can experience His forgiveness as a father forgives his child. Fellowship is restored and we feel free and happy in His presence again (1 John. 1: 9).

So then, when a child of God sins he is not lost, because God has accepted him on the basis of Christ's sacrifice for our sins. Neither is his relationship with God broken. He is still God's child and God is still his Father. But his fellowship with the Father is broken, the Holy Spirit is grieved and he is subject to the Father's chastening. When he is humbled about his sin and confesses it to his Father then fellowship is restored.

There is one thing we lose by sin that can never be restored. Christ said that a cup of cold water given in His name would never be forgotten (Mark. 9: 41). He is going to give a reward for everything we do to please Him. Therefore, if instead of giving way to sin we had been obedient and done something that pleased Him, we would have received a reward in heaven.

But now that reward is lost because we have lost the opportunity to gain it. That is an eternal loss, since every reward Christ gives in heaven is an eternal reward.

This should make us careful not to lose the opportunities we have each day for faithfulness to the Lord. If we let them slip by, both the opportunities and the  rewards are lost forever.

We will have all eternity to rejoice in the rewards for our victories, but we have only the present moment to win them. There are no victories to be won in heaven — they must all be won now or never.

You can have a happy life

You Can Have a Happy Life.

E. C. Hadley.

Index

Burden of Guilt

Dealing with Guilt

Seeking Peace

Obedience Needed

God Working

Peace of Mind

About Our Fears

Confessing Our Sins

Joy of Forgiveness

Path of Peace

Following the Shepherd

Adjusting Our Attitudes

Peace Assured

Trusting God

Provision of Prayer

Value of Thanksgiving

Example for Us

Learning from Him

Finding Rest

His Power

His Will

Searching Self

His Chastening

Examples of Chastening

His Purpose

Unselfish Service

Power over Sin

Happy Living

"These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full." John 15: 11

Why are so many Christians restless, worried and unhappy, even though the verse above tells us clearly that this is not what God intends for His children? In this booklet, we hope to address this question to discover God's remedy so that we might be able to say with Paul, "I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content" (Phil. 4: 11).

BURDEN OF GUILT

One of the basic causes of unhappiness is a sense of guilt that burdens the conscience and robs the soul of peace. Before we can have true happiness there must be peace with God.

If there are any doubts about our peace with God, there can be no settled peace in the soul. If we are to succeed in finding peace, and the happiness that results from it, we must begin with this question of guilt and how it can be removed.

Guilt destroys happiness and peace. It breaks down self-esteem and robs us of self-confidence. How can we trust ourselves when we know that we have done many wrong things? We may try to run away from our conscience by pursuing earthly pleasure, or we may attempt to quiet its voice by reasoning that times have changed, and that now "everybody does it."

Still, there is that uneasy feeling that something is not right. We instinctively know that God has not changed and that sin never ceases to be sin. No matter how much we try to repress the guilty feeling, it is still there — making us restless, uneasy and fearful.

Coupled with a sense of guilt is a consciousness that we deserve to be punished. This increases our fear. God, who knows all about this, has said: "Be sure your sin will find you out" (Num. 32: 23). We cannot have peace and true happiness until the question of our guilt is settled in a way that is just.

Our God-implanted conscience, part of the moral nature of man, makes us feel guilty when we have done something wrong. It also makes us realize that we deserve punishment. Some try to ease their guilt by joining a church and getting involved in religious activities, but they know deep down that this will never bring peace.

DEALING WITH GUILT

Guilt produces a fear of God whom we know we have offended, and a fear of the punishment we instinctively know we deserve. There is only one way to lift this depressing sense of guilt and fear. It is through justification by faith in the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. In the epistle to the Romans, Paul deals directly with the question of our guilt and God's answer to it. There we read that all the world is guilty, but God provides the means for our justification: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus  -  that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3: 23-24, 26).

In that same epistle, we also read of the results of that justification: "Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ  -  And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation" (Rom. 5: 1, 11).  God's way not only lifts the depressing load of guilt but also gives us a consciousness of God's love that produces joy.

The guilt that once made us tremble at the thought of judgment now becomes the means by which we measure the love of God, who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us. The memory of our guilt, becomes a wellspring of thanksgiving to God who redeemed us and justified us.

How can a guilty soul have peace with a holy God? The only answer is through the blood of the cross: "Without shedding of blood there is no remission" for sin (Heb. 9: 22). On the cross, Christ was made an offering for all our sins, and He bore the punishment due our sins (Isa. 53: 4-6, 10). This suffering and death of Christ are the only grounds upon which a righteous God and a guilty creature can be at peace.

SEEKING PEACE

Once a sinner acknowledges his sin, his first concern is how to obtain peace with God. But the great question is not, "How can a sinner make peace with his God?" It is, "How can a holy, sin-hating God make peace with this sinner?" God accomplished this by giving His Son as the sacrifice for sin: "Having made peace through the blood of His cross" (Col. 1: 20). It is not by any effort of the sinner that peace is made; God has already made peace through the blood of the cross.

Peace with God does not depend upon our feelings. We may deceive ourselves into believing we will come out all right in the end. But such false peace is the fruit of unbelief, for God plainly states, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3: 23). The only way to true peace is repentance; the Bible says, "Unless you repent you will — perish" (Luke 13: 5).

The first step to true peace then is to accept this fact. The next step is to believe God's evaluation of the sacrifice of Christ: "Who  -  when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high" (Heb. 1: 3). Peace is an accomplished fact; and God is so satisfied with that sacrifice for our sins that He has placed His Son at the right hand of His own throne in glory to prove it.

God always sees the believer as clothed in all the merits of that sacrifice, which washed away all his sins once for all and obtained eternal redemption for him (Heb. 9: 12). Therefore, God's attitude of peace towards the believer is unchanging because the sacrifice upon which it is based is perfect. However, the measure to which the believer enjoys it may vary greatly. If we get self-occupied we may lose the sense of it. We can only enjoy it as we rest in full assurance of faith in the sacrifice of Christ.

We may know that God is at peace with us through Christ and still not have a sense of the peace of God ruling in our hearts. Sin may bring us under the chastening hand of God. In chastening, He is only seeking to deliver us from those things which are robbing our souls of the enjoyment of His peace. (See Heb. 12: 5-11.) He chastens in love, not counting us as enemies, but always as His well-beloved children.

OBEDIENCE NEEDED

The conscience enlightened by the Word of God demands obedience to God who loves us and has redeemed us. If we do those things which displease Him, or if we leave undone things He wants us to do, our conscience accuses us and inward conflict results. We have no peace because we cannot quiet the voice of our conscience.

Besides the conscience, every believer in Christ also has the Spirit of God abiding in him. (See Rom. 8: 9, 15; Eph. 1: 13; Gal. 4: 6; 1 Cor. 6: 19.) One activity of the Spirit of God is to bring to our hearts the love of God, and to show the things of Christ to us (Rom. 5: 5; John 16: 14). Both give joy and peace to the soul, but "the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another" (Gal. 5: 17). The constant effort of the Spirit of God is to oppose the flesh and prompt us to do the will of God in obedience to the Word of God.

If we yield to the flesh we throw ourselves into conflict not only with our conscience, but also with the Spirit. On the other hand, if we yield to the Holy Spirit and to our conscience, He gives us the strength to do the will of God. And what happens then? Instead of inward conflict, we are in harmony with God, His Word, and His Spirit; and consequently we enjoy a deeper sense of His love and a fuller measure of His joy and peace.

When we walk in obedience to God's revealed will, we enjoy His love shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (1 John 4: 9; Rom. 5: 5-8). Then we can say, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8: 31). Trouble may be all around, but we will not fear because Psalm 4: 8 tells us: "I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; for You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety."

If we are disobedient, the peace of His presence will be lost and our conscience will accuse us while the Holy Spirit convicts us. When the Word of God is neglected, the soul does not enjoy peace. The power of God, which gave the heart confidence while walking with Him, will now work to humble us.

We will meet with disappointment. Plans will be overthrown. Things we thought would be sweet to the taste become bitter. He uses circumstances to make us taste the bitterness of disobedience and to break down self-will. His chastening hand is felt.

GOD WORKING

How graciously God works to bring us to our senses! Waywardness not only dishonors Him but also robs us of joy and peace. If God allowed us to continue in the path of disobedience, we would eventually have to reap the consequences. But in love, He lets us feel His chastening hand and uses circumstances to break down our rebellion to His will. Proverbs 3: 11-12 tells us: "My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor detest His correction; for whom the Lord loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights."

A loving Father may have to chasten His child for his own good. The child may doubt the motives of the Father, but the child's inability to discern the Father's purpose does not change the Father's love or methods. If the child had more confidence in his Father, he would believe Him — even though unable to understand. This makes it easier to yield to the Father's will and obtain peace as well. Confidence in God is necessary to enjoy peace.

The Holy Spirit speaks to our heart and conscience, through chastening and the Word, to bring us to confess waywardness and turn again to the paths of righteousness: "Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Heb. 12: 11). Humbled "under the mighty hand of God" (1 Peter 5: 6), the soul is once more able to walk in the path of righteousness and reap its peaceable fruits.

If we learn the lesson of God's chastening, we acquire peace. If we keep His commandments, we gain even more, because "in keeping them there is great reward" (Ps. 19: 11). "Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart! — Great peace have those who love Your law, and nothing causes them to stumble" (Ps. 119: 2, 165).

PEACE OF MIND

"These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16: 33). When we read the account of the mock trial of our Lord, one thing really strikes us — Him standing peacefully in the midst of that mocking, hypocritical mob. How could He do it? He gives us His secret in John 16: 32: "I am not alone, because the Father is with me."

He was in perfect submission to His Father's will, whatever the cost. He was with His Father throughout the ordeal, and so His peace was never interrupted. His Father's plan was perfect and His faith looked on to the glorious results of that wonderful plan: "For the joy that was set before Him (He) endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Heb. 12: 2).

Now He has overcome the world and sat down in the glory. All power in heaven and earth is given into His pierced hand. What peace for our hearts and minds! He has a perfect plan for each one of His own. Let us trust Him then, knowing that His will is best. When we walk with Him, there is blessing and peace in our future: "I will never leave you nor forsake you" (Heb. 13: 5).

Why do we complain about our circumstances when His pierced hands are guiding us and His infinite wisdom has planned the future for us? Either we don't trust Him or we don't want to go the way He is taking us. Our deceitful heart manifests itself by not trusting Him who died for us and into whose pierced hands all power in heaven and earth has been given.

For our own good, we must surrender to Him. The Potter is forming a useful vessel. Should the clay rebel when it feels the pressure of His fingers as He molds, turns and shapes it on the spinning wheel?

Trust in Him: "These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace" (John 16: 33). Our circumstances may not change, our sorrows may not be removed; but if Christ is brought into our grief, we will be able to say with the psalmist: "You shall preserve me from trouble; You shall surround me with songs of deliverance" (Ps. 32: 7).

His wisdom cannot err. His power cannot fail. His love can never change. Even His direct dealing with us is for our deepest spiritual gain. Knowing this should lead us to say in the midst of sorrow, pain, and loss: "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (Job 1: 21).

ABOUT OUR FEARS

One of the greatest hindrances to peace and security is fear — of sickness, accidents, death, job loss, financial trouble and so on. How can we have inner peace in a world full of injustice, conflict and uncertainty, where life is one long struggle for existence?

Job confessed that even in his great prosperity he was harassed by fears: "The thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes" (Job 3: 25-26).

If we had a father who was very wise, had inexhaustible resources, and would do anything for our good, wouldn't that calm our fears and give us a sense of security? As a child of God we have all this in our heavenly Father.

If He invites us to cast all our cares upon Him, because He cares for us (1 Peter 5: 7), why then can't we turn our fears over to Him? Is it because we are afraid He will let us down? Is it because we are not willing to submit our wills to Him? Are we letting the devil get the best of us by making us feel we would be the losers if we completely surrendered our lives to Him?

We cannot leave God out of our lives and have freedom from fear. In the deep recesses of our souls we know that God exists and has almighty power. If we are not giving God His rightful place, we will have fear even though we may refuse to admit it. Denying God produces fear. It's as simple as that.

Fear is the painful sensation that danger threatens. The danger may be real or imagined, but the fear is real. Anxiety and worry are forms of fear. Anxiety is fear of anticipated danger. Worry is a brooding over these anxious fears.

Fear, anxiety and worry sap our energy and undermine our peace of mind. They are like weeds that grow and crowd out the flowers in our garden of happiness. Where do these weeds come from? Is there no way of getting rid of them? Has God left us with no way to cope with them?

CONFESSING OUR SINS

The Bible traces these fears to their real source and gives us the only effective remedy: "God is love  -  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love" (1 John 4: 16, 18). Nothing will cast out fear like confidence in God's perfect love. Since love has blotted out all our sins through Christ's sacrifice on the cross, we can be sure that God has forgiven them and will never again hold us accountable for them.

An accusing conscience, that says that punishment is due us, is one of the major causes of anxiety, fear and worry. Genesis gives us the first record of fear that man had. In the Garden of Eden, after he had eaten the forbidden fruit, the Lord said to Adam: "Where are you?" Adam's response was, "I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked" (Gen. 3: 9-10). He was afraid because he knew he had sinned and deserved to be punished.

Down deep we know that sin deserves punishment, and that there will be no deliverance until the things that are troubling our conscience are cleared up in a way that is satisfactory to God.

When our conscience is troubled, we may try to forget our sins. It is natural to push them out of our mind or repress them altogether. But we can never really succeed, because deep in the unconscious mind the memory of them keeps surfacing in one form or another.

We may not be fully conscious of the fact that sin and self-will are the cause of our anxious fears. It is so easy to deceive ourselves and make ourselves believe that someone or something else is responsible. However, we will never get rid of our fears or have any real peace until we admit the truth and get things right with God.

A young lady, brought up in a Christian home, began to do things that her conscience condemned. Unwilling to admit them and confess them to God, she began to persuade herself first that God didn't care, and then that there was no God. For several years she claimed to be an atheist. But the sin in her life gradually developed into anxiety and fear.

She finally felt like she was losing her mind and ended up in a mental hospital. Many remedies were tried, but no relief came until she faced the fact that she was trying to rule God out of her life. Once she confessed her sins and surrendered to God, she was able to leave the hospital with her anxieties and fears gone and her mind clear.

JOY OF FORGIVENESS

We have to be conscious of God's forgiveness and His perfect love to have our fears cast out. But we can't have confidence in Him until we are sure we are forgiven. We can't have this assurance while we are unwilling to confess our sins to Him: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:8-9).

There are three steps we must take to really get rid of anxiety and fear:

1. Recognize the sin that is at the root of our anxious fears.

2. Believe that God really does forgive our sins when we confess them.

3. Put our sins, along with the anxiety and fear they produce, out of mind. Whenever they do come to mind again, instead of feeling anxiety, we will be reminded and thankful that God has forgiven them all.

When we take these three steps, we will be able to say with the psalmist, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want  -  I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me  -  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps. 23: 1, 4, 6).

A little child awakened by a storm cries out in fear. His father comes and takes him in his arms. Soon the child is asleep again. The storm has not ceased but the child's confidence in his father gives him a sense of security and removes his fear.

PATH OF PEACE

What comfort and peace would come if we would just cast ourselves fully on Him and willingly let Him plan our life! His plan is infinitely better than anything we could ever work out for ourselves. His plan embraces all the details of our life here, and also has in view our eternal happiness.

What comfort to have Him as our Shepherd, Caretaker and Friend — to be able to say, "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want." (Ps. 23: 1). Rest and satisfaction belong to the believer who is willing to trust and follow the Shepherd: "He leads me beside the still waters" (v. 2). The storms may rage around us, but when we are close to Him, we are at peace. If we are in a place of unrest, we can be sure He has not led us there, though He may let us pass that way to teach us how bitter it is not to listen to Him.

Are we listening to His voice in our daily life? Are we following Him step by step regardless of how rough the road? He says, "My sheep hear my voice — and they follow Me" (John 10: 27). What a comfort to have such a Friend going all the way with us in every trouble, great or small.

What a path the Christian is called to follow! The Almighty Creator and Sustainer of this vast universe gave His life for us and now ever lives to comfort, counsel, guide and lead us. How is it that we let Satan get our eyes off Christ and rob us of our peace, giving us unrest and fear instead?

Satan wants us to doubt and fear. Will we yield to him or to the loving hand of God? Which path will we follow? That of sight that sees only the storm upsetting our plans, or that of faith that sees our Good Shepherd's loving hand guiding us into a fuller communion with Himself?

Are we in trouble? Do we fear tomorrow? Are we sick, sorrowing or in debt? Dear child of God: Christ died for us! Do not distrust His love. By these very trials He is working out for us a deeper joy and happiness than we could ever have any other way.

Paul triumphantly shouts in the midst of great troubles and distresses: "We do not lose heart  -  For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Cor. 4: 16-18).

The language of faith is brave because the eye of faith does not let the things seen occupy the mind. They are seen only as the elements that God is using to develop a richer, fuller spiritual life in us. We must keep our eye on Him who will lead us into  peace and out of fear.

Certainly, there are trials in the path of faith, but each trial is a door to richer joy and peace in Christ. Don't shrink back at the entrance. If we do, we will find that there are greater trials in the path of unbelief, which are always bitter and disappointing in the end.

Christ endured the cross for us. If He sees fit to lead us through trying times, He will sustain us so that our joy will be richer for having endured the trial. As Paul met new trials, his eyes were on the "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" that would come to him because of them. He was not looking at his troubles in the light of the present, but in the light of the future eternal results.

If our heart is not at peace, what do we think we need to make it so? Write down what it is and take a good look at it. Now honestly ask, "Would its attainment restore the peace and quiet we want in our soul?" Satan wants us to think, as Eve did, that what God has withheld is something to be desired. (See Gen. 3: 1-6.) Be sure that peace for our soul is found in our willingness to let God have His way in our circumstances.

FOLLOWING THE SHEPHERD

The Shepherd is waiting for us to follow Him. We will gain nothing by murmuring and rebelling against His purposes; we will only make our misery greater. But, if we yield to Him, then He will fill our heart with joy and peace. If there is failure and sin, we must confess it, and believe that He forgives it according to His promise: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1: 9).

What comfort for the weakest child of God who is submissive enough to trust Him: "You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You  -  In YAH, the Lord, is everlasting strength" (Isa. 26: 3-4). To the extent that we are able to do this, we will have a steady peace which changing circumstances cannot take away.

It is a great thing to be persuaded by the Lord's love. The Lord of heaven and earth loves us with an everlasting love, which fills the heart and casts out fears. There is no other remedy. We do not need to say, "I am resolved in the future to do better." That would be leaning on self. Don't do it! Just say over and over again: "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. All His resources are mine. I can lean on Him."

But if we refuse to hear His voice, His blessings will be far from us and we will have nothing but self to fall back on in the shifting circumstances of life. Whether we admit it or not, when we are out of touch with the Shepherd, we are in trouble. Is there anything then that we cannot submit to, if it is the will of Him who sacrificed Himself on the cross for us?

ADJUSTING OUR ATTITUDES

It is not circumstances that make us happy or unhappy, but our attitude towards them. We are always striving to control our circumstances, and are able to do so to some degree. But many circumstances are beyond our control. Our tendency is to become discontented or even bitter when things do not go the way we want them to go. We act like children, crying or sulking or throwing a tantrum when we can't have our own way.

On the other hand, some are able to make the best of what can't be changed, by adjusting to their circumstances. Paul said: "I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content" (Phil. 4: 11). A Christian knows he is a beloved child of God, and that His Father has all circumstances under control, allowing only those things that are for our greatest good: "We know that all things work together for good to those who love God" (Rom. 8: 28). This is true, without qualification.

We are able to face whatever circumstance comes up and say with  assurance: "My Father has a lesson for me to learn. He has a blessing for me in this. He's giving me a golden opportunity to exercise patience, submission, faith and confidence in Him as His child."

Read the life of Christ in the Gospels. Look at the circumstances He passed through. They were surely not what the natural man would like: fleeing for his life to Egypt as a baby (Matt. 2: 13-14); working as a carpenter in the despised town of Nazareth (Mark. 6: 3; John 1: 46); having nowhere to lay His head (Matt. 8: 20); called crazy by His friends (Mark. 3: 21); called a demoniac by the crowd (John 8: 48). What scoffing He endured! But He received all these circumstances from His Father's hand and found in them an opportunity to manifest His divine nature.

Now each child of God has been made a partaker of that same divine nature (2 Peter 1: 4). He has Christ as His life. So all the circumstances we are passing through are God-given opportunities to let Christ take over and live out His life through us. This is exactly what Paul meant when he said, "For to me, to live is Christ" (Phil. 1: 21).

This should be the Christian's attitude toward the circumstances of life. And what a different outlook it gives to everything! No longer are things seen by human standards as trying and distasteful. They are now golden opportunities to develop our spiritual life as "children of God  -  in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights" (Phil. 2: 15). Even afflictions when looked at this way become an occasion for thanksgiving: "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you" (1 Thess. 5: 16-18).

A positive Christian attitude brings true contentment to the child of God. All things are viewed as coming from the tender hands of a loving Father and are opportunities to learn valuable lessons in self-control, patience, faith and obedience, while gaining a rich blessing. Outward circumstances don't make us happy or unhappy, but our inward attitude towards them and towards God in them. Song writer Bill Gaither puts it this way:

I found happiness, I found peace of mind,

I found the joy of living, perfect love sublime,

I found real contentment, happy living in accord;

I found happiness all the time,

Wonderful peace of mind,

When I found the Lord.

PEACE ASSURED

"The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4: 7). Who does not desire such an experience: the perfect peace of God Himself filling our hearts and minds? But why just desire it when we can have it? It is there for every child of God who wants it enough to meet the conditions.

Our Creator is the only one who fully understands the workings of our minds and all those feelings that well up in our hearts. Some of us have more emotional stability than others and do not swing as far and as often between extremes. Yet how few really know much of the perfect peace so necessary for true happiness. No matter how much or how little we have experienced this sweet peace, we want more.

If we are hungry and neglect to eat the food God has provided to satisfy hunger, we can't blame others if we starve. Neither can we blame others if we are unhappy but don't make use of God's provision for happiness. The whole fault lies in us. It is important that we face this squarely; otherwise we will never make use of God's provisions.

In Isaiah 26: 3 we read His first provision, which is trust: "You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You." In Philippians 4: 6-7 we find the other two, which are prayer and thanksgiving: "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

These three things — trust, prayer and thanksgiving — can give peace of heart and mind only to those who have full assurance of salvation. Many have assurance of sins forgiven; they know they are saved and have no doubt about their eternal security through the finished work of Christ. Yet they are often unhappy because they do not have that peace they desire and which God intends for them. They are neglecting these three simple tools.

TRUSTING GOD

What hinders us from trusting God? To trust Him we must first surrender ourselves to Him. No child can trust his father while walking in self-willed rebellion against him. Neither can one confide in God while walking in disobedience to Him.  We know that He will not help us with something that is contrary to His Word.

Our failure to believe that God's way is always best makes it hard to yield fully to Him and trust Him with all our heart. With distrust comes lack of confidence. With lack of confidence comes restlessness and unhappiness.

When Satan talked Eve into believing that God was withholding something good from her, she began to distrust God.  He had told Adam that if they ate the forbidden fruit they would die (Gen. 2: 17). But Eve looked at the forbidden tree and decided that it was "good for food  -  pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise" (Gen. 3: 6). She relied on her own judgment instead of yielding to God's. What unhappiness she plunged herself into!

Today this is still the root cause of all the unhappiness in the world. Keep this fact clearly in mind: If we want happiness and peace we must stop thinking we know better than God what will make us happy. We need to be willing to yield to Him and let Him have His own way with us. His infinite love and His infinite knowledge assure us that He knows what is best for us. His infinite power guarantees His ability to make it happen.

We cannot let our thoughts go astray; we must keep them on Him. Isaiah 26:3 tells us the Lord will keep us in perfect peace if we keep our minds on Him and keep trusting Him. Why let our thoughts run wild with anxious fear? The Lord has all things under control. He is, after all, the One who is above all and able to change all; and He wants to do what is for our greatest good. If we trust Him completely and keep our thoughts on Him, we will have peace of heart and mind.

Notice in the Psalms how often David talked to himself about God's care for him when he was cast down and harassed with fears. He was taught by God to do this, and was inspired to write these experiences for our encouragement. For example, when depressed and fearful he wrote:

• "Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall yet praise Him, the help of my countenance and my God" (Ps. 42: 11).

• "I was brought low, and He saved me. Return to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you" (Ps. 116: 6-7).

• "The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?  -  Though an army may encamp against me, my heart shall not fear  -  For in the time of trouble He shall hide me" (Ps. 27: 1, 3, 5).

• "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You  -  In God I have put my trust; I will not fear. What can flesh do to me?" (Ps. 56: 3-4).

We can never go wrong if we follow David's simple method of exhorting our own souls. It is not only psychologically correct, but also scripturally sound. We need to learn these verses and repeat them over and over again when we feel depressed, fearful or discouraged. Doing this will work wonders for us just as it did for David and many others who have followed his example. It will help to keep our minds fixed on the Lord instead of on our feelings or circumstances.

PROVISION OF PRAYER

Prayer is a wonderful provision of God to ease our burdens, tensions and fears, and restore peace to our hearts and minds. The value of prayer as a vital factor in a life of peace and happiness can never be overestimated. (See Phil. 4: 6-7.)

When we speak of the relationship of prayer to happiness, we are not talking about a few minutes spent each day repeating a stereotyped form of petition. Scriptural prayer is pouring out our hearts to God in simple childlike trust: "Trust in Him at all times, you people; pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us" (Ps. 62: 8).

A school child comes to his father and says, "Father, will you help me solve this problem? I don't understand it." From this honest, simple request we can learn seven simple steps that govern effective prayer:

1. The child is conscious that he is in the presence of another person.

2. This person has the ability to solve his problem.

3. There is a relationship that the child is sure of — he's talking to his father.

4. He has confidence that his father has a personal interest in him and his problem.

5. He openly confesses his need for help with the problem.

6. He states his problem as clearly as he can.

7. He confidently waits on his father to show him the solution.

When we take these same seven steps and apply them to our prayer lives, they become simple rules for effective prayer:

1. When we pray, visualize in our souls that we are addressing a Person who is just as present as any earthly father could be.

2. Think for a moment of who He is and of His infinite power, wisdom and ability to understand and solve our problems.

3. Be conscious of our relationship with Him: He has made us His children; He is our Father.

4. As our Father, He has a very personal interest in us and our problems — more than any earthly father ever could. If He gave up His dear Son to die on the cross for us, we can be sure He is ready to give all that we need for our good.

So often we believe our prayers will be answered only if we do something to merit an answer. Since we know deep down that we have not been faithful to God, we feel we don't deserve what we are asking for. Therefore, we don't have confidence that He will answer. We must change our thinking.

Never ask anything on the grounds of personal merit, but simply on the grounds of our relationship with a loving Father who takes a personal interest in us. After all, by His grace He made us His for eternity. The Lord Jesus said: "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" (Matt. 7: 11).

5. Since we are relying on our Father's personal interest in us, and not our merits, we can freely confess our ignorance, our inability, and even our failure to Him. If there is any guilt weighing on our conscience, we should confess it to Him and get the burden lifted. He is more than ready to forgive, for He already settled the account when He gave His Son to die on the cross for us. Thus we can have confidence as we present our problems to Him. (See 1 John 1: 9.)

6. Tell Him what our problems are as honestly as we can. So often, when we don't really understand our problems, talking them over with our Father helps us get a clearer understanding of them. The very act of putting our problems into words gives us a clearer picture of them. Then too, telling Him about them gives Him an opportunity to give us a clearer picture of what our real need is.

He invites us to bring our requests to Him, but we are not telling Him something He does not already know. In fact, He knows them better than we ever will! By unburdening our hearts to Him, we get in touch with Him about them.

7. Confidently expect that, because of His personal interest in us, He will give us the solution to our problems at the right time. This attitude opens the way for Him to lead us into the right solution, or to solve our problems through divine intervention.

The invitation to bring our requests to God — "in everything by prayer and supplication" — does not necessarily mean long hours spent on our knees pouring out our hearts in prayer. While quiet times are important, we cannot overstress the importance of constantly talking to God about everything during our daily activities.

This is what is meant in 1 Thessalonians 5: 17: "Pray without ceasing;" and in Ephesians 6: 18: "Praying always." Habitually referring everything to our Father in the midst of our daily routine keeps us in touch with Him so that His peace can keep our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

VALUE OF THANKSGIVING

If we are sad and depressed, we need to try thanksgiving. If we are discouraged and feel like complaining, we must try praise. God tells us in His Word that we should be found "giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph. 5: 20). Let's discover how we can do this.

The prophet Jeremiah was greatly depressed as he listed many things that weighed him down: "He has set me in dark places  -  He has hedged me in so that I cannot get out  -  He has made my paths crooked" (Lam. 3: 6-7, 9). In all, he named some thirty complaints about his desperate circumstances, ending on this sad note: "My strength and my hope have perished from the Lord" (Lam. 3: 18).

He felt as though he was hopelessly sinking under his burdens. But then his thoughts suddenly turned to God and he broke out with another thought altogether: "This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion  -  therefore I hope in Him" (Lam. 3: 21-24). What a change! And that's always the way it is when we turn to God in our troubles. We find there is so much to thank Him for.

We should take all our sorrows to the Lord, and give Him the opportunity to show us why these things are in our life; but we should never leave His presence without thanking Him for all our blessings. This will surely turn our complaining into praise, and our depression into rejoicing. Paul made no mistake when He wrote, "In everything give thanks." He knew what was needed to lift us up. The unconverted have nothing to fall back on in times of trouble. But we have the eternal God with unlimited resources who takes a personal interest in us.

How sad to see so many confused and burdened Christians disregarding the Lord's gracious offer: "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11: 28). How grateful we should be, knowing that He will sustain us when we come to Him with all our burdens. We should even thank Him for our troubles, since they bring us closer to Christ and are stepping stones to a higher spiritual plane. (See 2 Cor. 12: 7-10.)

Some of us bring our burdens to the Lord, but are still weighed down with them, because we do not heed the Lord's simple instructions to give thanks in everything. If we did this every time we talked over our troubles with the Lord, we would find our souls uplifted by the awareness of our many blessings. We remain preoccupied with our troubles, when instead we should go on our way rejoicing because we have a loving Father who never fails His children. Praise and thanks work wonders.

EXAMPLE FOR US

If the Lord Jesus exhorts us to give thanks in every situation, He is not asking us to do something He Himself did not do. We should never forget that He was tested in every point just as we are. When He was tested by that unrepentant generation, even after all His labors of love and mighty miracles, notice how He reacted: "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth  -  for so it seemed good in Your sight" (Matt. 11: 25-26). And in Luke 10: 21, where the same incident is recorded, we find it also recorded that "Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit."

As always, in these trials He saw His Father's hand and heard His Father saying, "This is from me." He recognized that His Father had power over heaven and earth, so He willingly bowed to His ordering of these painful circumstances, giving thanks. If we yield to our Father, we too will find great relief from distressing circumstances and also find renewed strength in our souls.

If we are not inclined to answer and say, "Thank you, Father," it only proves that our own wills are not surrendered to His. We don't want Him to have His way with us, and so we fret and complain, making ourselves still more miserable.

Don't forget that in all circumstances, we respond to God who is speaking to us through them. Our response may be, "Thank You, Father, for so it seemed good in Your sight." Or we may say, "Father, I won't thank You because I don't want what seems good in Your sight." We might be thinking, "I would never say such a thing to my heavenly Father." But if we fret and complain about our circumstances, our response has no other meaning than that to God.

When we learn the Lord's secret of rejoicing in adverse and painful circumstances, we will find rest for our souls. His delight was in His Father's will. We too will find happiness when we give up our will for His. But we must try it to see what a wonderful change it will make. Our painful circumstances may not change, but we will see a rainbow in the cloud and hear a song in the night.

Perhaps our Father has ordered our difficult circumstances just to teach us to yield to Him and say, "Not my will but Yours be done." If this is the case, when His end is achieved in our lives, He will alter our circumstances accordingly.

The Lord found peace in the midst of trials by submitting to them and thanking His Father for them. We will find peace too if we do likewise. There is no other way. We cannot get peace by worrying or complaining. The more we yield our will to His, the more we will find the peace and joy of Christ in our souls.

LEARNING FROM HIM

When the Lord says, "Learn from Me," it is as if He were saying: "I know what I am talking about. I am your Creator who became your Redeemer. Don't be deceived by your own reasoning or by the opinions of men. Learn from Me, and you will find rest. My yoke is easy and my burden is light. But the yoke of self-will and sin is heavy with conflict and bondage."

Would our loving Creator and Redeemer deliberately make it hard on us if we surrender our will to His? Of course not! As our perfect example, Jesus submitted to the Father when He said: "Father  -  not my will, but Yours, be done" (Luke 22: 42). We are called to do likewise: "I beseech you  -  present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God" (Rom. 12: 1-2).

Our will, if not surrendered to God, is self-will. And self-will is the root of all the sin, misery and unhappiness that has ever come into our lives. Don't be deceived: it is not Satan, other people or our circumstances that bring about unhappiness in our lives; it is self-will. But God's Son came into this world to do His Father's will in love for us that we might have rest and happiness. A will surrendered to God is the gateway to happiness.

FINDING REST

To have a happy life, it is essential to be at rest. In explaining the way to find this rest, our Lord says: "Come to Me  -  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me  -  and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light" (Matt. 11: 28-30).

The One who asks us to take His yoke upon us, gave us an example when He submitted to His Father's will saying, "Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God" (Heb. 10: 9). To find rest we too must surrender our wills to God's. That's what it means to "take My yoke upon you." Have you ever seen a yoke of oxen? When they are yoked up, they submit their will to the master.

Sin is the cause of all unhappiness in God's universe, and the root of all sin is self-will, or substituting our will for God's. Not only does this bring us into conflict with our Creator, but it also creates a conflict within us.

A child of God receives a new, divine nature when he is born again. This divine nature loves God and hates sin. The Christian also has the Spirit of God dwelling within him. For these reasons, inner conflict arises when a child of God yields to self-will and sin.

When we make something, we have the right to govern its use. Likewise, God has a right to say what we should do, because He has created us. When we buy something, it belongs to us. God has purchased us with the blood of His Son: "You are not your own  -  you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's" (1 Cor. 6: 19-20). When a child is born, he is expected to obey his parents. When a person is born again, God expects obedience from him (John 3: 3; 1 John 5: 18; 1 Pet. 2: 1-2).

We cannot disregard God's threefold claim over us — as His creation, His possession and His children — and expect inner peace. We must recognize God's rights. Therefore, if we exert our self-will in rebellion against God's will, inner conflict results.

HIS POWER

The power of God is so overwhelming that it should strike terror in the soul that is out of harmony with Him: "Even the demons  believe — and tremble!" (James. 2: 19). The power of God causes them to tremble. The legion of demons that possessed the maniac of Gadara trembled when Jesus commanded them to depart from him, because they knew His irresistible power (Luke 8: 31). Only man is foolish enough to try to persuade himself that he has nothing to fear: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Ps. 53: 1).

Paul knew of this latent fear in the heart of men and he used it to awaken them to their need for the gospel: "Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men" (2 Cor. 5: 11). There is an unconscious fear of God in every human being regardless of how ungodly he is or how much he tries to suppress it. Man's cursing, swearing and statements of unbelief are an effort to drown the innate fear of God that is troubling him because he knows he is out of harmony with God.

No one can ignore the power of God and expect to have peace: "God is greatly to be feared  -  and to be held in reverence by all those around Him" (Ps. 89: 7). It is this inherent fear of God latent in every human soul that Christ appeals to when He says, "I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!" (Luke 12: 5).

He goes on to couple this fear of God's power with a sense of confidence in God's care for them: "Are not five sparrows sold for two copper coins? And not one of them is forgotten before God. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows" (Luke 12: 6-7).

The Lord continues to develop our sense of security with these examples of God's care: "Consider the ravens  -  God feeds them  -  How much more value are you than the birds?  -  Consider the lilies  -  If then God so clothes the grass  -  how much more will He clothe you  -  Your Father knows that you need these things  -  all these things shall be added to you" (Luke 12: 24, 27-28, 30-31). What a comfort to experience God's awesome power over us and His care for us. Elizabeth Cheney wrote:

Said the robin to the sparrow,

"I should really like to know

Why these anxious human beings

Fear and fret and worry so?"

Said the sparrow to the robin,

"Friend, I think that it must be

That they have no heavenly Father

Such as cares for you and me!"

HIS WILL

It is a self-evident truth that God's power is always subject to His will. If we are sure that we are His, then we can be sure that He is working out His will for our present blessing and our eternal good. He has irresistible power to carry out His wonderful purpose concerning us. With this in view then, let's look at three statements about God's will for His children.

First, in Ephesians 1: 4-5, we learn what God's will was for us even before creation: "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will."

Who could ask for a higher place than to be His sons brought into His eternal favor? Could anything be more blessed than this? Angels are creatures before the Creator, but we are beloved sons of our Father. And all this because it was the good pleasure of His will.

Second, we know His purposes concerning us in the ages to come from Ephesians 2: 4-7: "But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ  -  that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus."

Here God reveals that in the future, His will is for us to discover the exceeding riches of His grace. Surely, God could not give anything greater than this! Why should we fear His power when we know the good pleasure of His will concerning us? His power, in fact, is our guarantee that His purpose concerning us will be accomplished in due time.

Third, in Romans 8: 28 we find His purposes revealed in the events and circumstances that touch us in our daily lives: "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose." Should we dread His irresistible power and sovereign will when we know that He is making all things work together for our present and eternal good?

How narrow-minded of us to complain about our circumstances in the face of such plain statements! What a shameful way to treat our God who has willed such marvelous things for us! We cannot have peace in our soul when self-will and a refusal to submit reveal our distrust in God.

Remember, we are fighting in vain when we fight against God: "Woe to him who strives with his Maker" (Isa. 45: 9). Putting our trust in the One "who works all things according to the counsel of His will" (Eph. 1:11) is the happiest thing we can ever do.

SEARCHING SELF

Can we pray this practical prayer from our heart? "How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand  -  Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Ps. 139: 17-18, 23-24).

If we search, we will find that God, in His great love for us, will show us both what is causing our trouble and what is hindering our peace. Thinking about His will for us should bring great peace. And thinking about His power should assure us of His good purposes concerning us. However, if we are not submissive, we should tremble, because we will discover that self-will leads to grief.

The children of Israel were self-willed, and great sorrow resulted: "'Woe to the rebellious children,' says the Lord, 'who take counsel, but not of Me, and who devise plans, but not of My Spirit, that they may add sin to sin; who  -  go down to Egypt, and have not asked My advice, to strengthen themselves in the strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt!'  -  The Egyptians are men, and not God  -  When the Lord stretches out His hand, both he who helps will fall, and he who is helped will fall down; they all will perish together" (Isa. 30: 1-2; Isa. 31: 3). Now, contrast this to those who love and do His will: "Great peace have those who love Your law, and nothing causes them to stumble" (Ps. 119: 165).

HIS CHASTENING

It is foolish to think we can have happiness and peace while showing disrespect for God's power to chasten us: "For whom the Lord loves he corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights" (Prov. 3: 12). As His children we should never disregard His authority. He is training His children: "If we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world" (1 Cor. 11: 31-32).

How foolish to ignore His will and expect to have peace! We know we can't break His natural laws and expect to get away with it. If we touch a live electrical wire we will get a shock. If we take poison we will suffer the consequences. Just as there are natural laws that operate in His physical creation, so there are moral laws that operate in His moral creation. We cannot ignore one any more than the other and expect peace and prosperity. It is foolish to try.

In fact, many of God's moral laws have both a moral and a physical effect. For example, anger not only produces unhappiness but also effects the functioning of our vital organs. The worry, anxiety and tension that follow a fit of rage make us feel miserable and depressed. One hour of worry can cause more physical exhaustion than a whole day's work. How many people are nervous, irritable and tired all the time simply because they are breaking the laws of God governing their moral being!

But apart from these laws which have a uniform effect upon both body and soul, there is also a direct dealing by God resulting in discipline, correction, chastening, and training for the practical holiness of His children, as well as for their peace and happiness: "Whom the Lord loves He chastens, and scourges every son whom He receives  -  Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (Heb. 12: 6-7, 11).

We should be aware that God's hand is behind everything that affects us in our bodies, our souls and our circumstances. It is surprising how many of God's children go through life oblivious to this important fact. No wonder we drift along making so little spiritual progress and having so little real peace. If only we were more interested in learning the lessons and reaping the benefits of His chastening, how much misery we could spare ourselves and how much happier our lives would be.

God never wants to harm His children. He wants to deliver us from those traits that are harmful and develop those habits that produce peace and happiness. For example, if we are inclined to be proud, God may allow someone to make a derogatory remark about us for our own development. But if we do not recognize this as God's discipline for our correction, we are likely to get angry and say or do something we may regret later. However, if we see how God is delivering us from pride and giving us an opportunity to show a Christ-like spirit of meekness, forbearance and grace, His chastening will make us happy and peaceful.

God is always teaching us to renounce pride, hatred, anger, irritability, resentment, jealousy, envy, worry and anxiety, because these make us miserable and unhappy. He uses circumstances to give us the opportunity to develop the Christ-like traits of meekness, humility, gentleness, goodness, patience and self-control, because these produce peace and happiness.

God's chastening allows us an opportunity to renounce self and develop that new nature we have as His children. If we yield to His chastening and cooperate with Him in it, the results will be inner peace and happiness. If we ignore His discipline and decide to rebel, our Father may chasten us through sickness, accident, loss or some other providential means. He loves us too much to allow us to go on in self-will which robs us of peace, joy and fellowship with Him. God cannot make His children happy while they ignore "that good and acceptable and perfect will of God" (Rom. 12: 2).

EXAMPLES OF CHASTENING

The Bible is full of examples of God's chastening. In the case of Jonah, God used a great storm, an east wind, a beating sun, a great fish and a worm to chasten and discipline His rebellious prophet (Jonah 1: 4, 17; Jonah 4: 7-8). God has all things under His hand, and can use something as insignificant as a worm for chastening when He so chooses.

He used leprosy when chastening Gehazi, Miriam and King Uzziah (2 Kings 5: 20-27; Num. 12; 2 Chr. 26: 16-19). The sword, revolt and adultery were used with David (2 Sam. 11-12). Storms, famines, sickness, locusts, wars, and so on were repeatedly used by God to chasten His people for sin and rebellion. In 1 Corinthians 11: 30, Paul states that many were weak and sick, and some even died under the chastening hand of the Lord because of their sinful conduct.

An example for us today is that of a young woman dying from cancer. As a child, her godly mother taught her to know the Lord; but after her mother's death she drifted far into the world. Her battle with cancer brought her to the point where she could say: "My suffering will soon end in death, but the Lord has been speaking to me through it. I know why I had to suffer, and it has resulted in happiness." After a few weeks of peaceful suffering, the Lord took her home. Only the Lord knows how much suffering she might have been spared if she had surrendered to Him sooner.

While God uses sickness, accidents, and other trying situations to chasten His children, we must never conclude that God is disciplining us only because of sin. (This was the mistake Job's friends made regarding his suffering.) The Lord often uses sufferings and trials to draw us closer to Him. He may seek to strengthen our faith by putting us in situations where we have to depend upon Him.

When others are suffering, it is never wise to think that God is chastening them for wrong doing. We are not to judge; that's God's business. However, when we are being chastened personally, we should ask God whether He intends it as correction, training for usefulness, or character development. If we do not get in touch with Him about His purpose, and cooperate with Him, we will not gain the happiness and peace He intends for us. Remember, God's dealings are a reality, and we will suffer great loss if we pass over them lightly. On the other hand, they will contribute greatly to our peace and happiness if we take them seriously. We can brighten our testimony for Him by cheerfully accepting our trials.

HIS PURPOSE

No matter what our circumstances, there is no reason to become upset or discouraged, because God is ordering them for our good (Rom. 8: 28). This is the blessed truth that God wants His children to grasp. With a surrendered will and a confident heart, the child of God should be able to take everything from his Father without fretting or fighting. Instead, we should look for the benefit in it.

Let's make a mental list of all the things that upset us. Are others hurting our feelings? Are our surroundings getting to us? Do we seem to be battling against overwhelming odds? Are we nervous, tense and unhappy? Doesn't the God who allowed these circumstances also have the power to change them? Then why doesn't He? Because we know He does not send trials just to see us suffer, we can be sure that He has some lessons for us to learn.

How did Christ act in the circumstances of his life? Was he upset by them? No, He took them from his Father with a  submissive heart, as an opportunity to display His own divine nature. Now He is abiding in us by the Holy Spirit as our source of power and strength for daily living. We need to let Him take over and live His life through us so we can find His peace and happiness. Like Paul, we want to be able to say, "For to me, to live is Christ" (Phil. 1: 21).

Nothing will give such peace and happiness as a life lived in conscious harmony with our heavenly Father's plan for us. Let's yield our lives to God and view our circumstances as ordered for our good. Let's see in them a God-given opportunity to live in harmony with His purposes for our lives. If we do this, we will experience His sustaining power and His peace. Our circumstances may never change, but our lives will take on new meaning that will make for peace, happiness and a life worth living.

UNSELFISH SERVICE

A self-centered person never serves others unless there is something in it for him. But how different is the service of the child of God who finds true satisfaction and happiness in doing unselfish deeds. His good deeds are a source of joy and a spontaneous expression of his new nature.

Every born-again child of God has been made a partaker of the divine nature. This new nature is implanted in the believer by God's Spirit through the Word. It finds its greatest pleasure in helpful service to God and man. The believer can only be happy as he lives this kind of life.

Why did God redeem us by sacrificing His own Son? Why was Christ willing to die for our redemption? Because His own nature found its pleasure in unselfish love and service to others. A child of God partakes of this same divine nature and so unselfish service makes him happy. But a self-centered life depresses the believer and makes him miserable and unhappy.

We can only be happy when we act in accordance with our new nature which always finds its greatest pleasure in unselfish service to God and to man. But to understand why a true child of God is often unhappy, we must remember that we have two natures with opposite tendencies: a new, divine nature that we have received from God when we were born again; and our perverted, fallen nature that we have received from Adam by natural birth. To the extent that we yield to the natural, we will be unhappy.

POWER OVER SIN

Sin is destructive to happiness because it conflicts with the divine nature of the believer. It produces a humiliating sense of defeat. When we do things that our conscience condemns we feel miserable. We may try to forget about it but that is no solution to our difficulty. Power over sin is the only thing that can make us happy. But how can we get that power?

Before he learns the secret of victory, every born-again believer commits sins that he hates but seems powerless to overcome. Here is Paul's description of this struggle that leads to finding victory in Jesus: "For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells — For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God, according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God — through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin" (Rom. 7: 18-25).

There are three laws spoken of in these verses. The law of God is that revelation of His will for man. The law of the mind is the working of the new nature in every born-again soul that delights in the will of God and hates sin. The law of sin is the working of the old nature that always wants to have its own way in opposition to God's will. These two natures — the divine nature that every Christian receives from God, and the sinful nature derived from Adam by natural birth — are entirely opposed to one another. One loves and clings to sin, while the other loves and desires to do the will of God. Struggles result, and the believer is sad whenever he gives way to sin.

This experience of struggle and defeat, often prolonged for months and even years, is very humiliating and painful. But it brings the believer to realize two things: that there is no good thing in him by nature; and that even after he has been made a partaker of the divine nature he has no power in himself to carry out the will of God.

While learning these painful truths, of our utter sinfulness and powerlessness to combat sin in our own strength, we often cry out in desperation as Paul did: "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Rom. 7: 24). We have to learn that if we are ever to get the victory over sin, the power has to come from a source outside ourselves.

As soon as we look outside for a deliverer, we discover Jesus Christ as the answer to our agonizing cry, "Who will deliver me?" He is the only One who can set us free from both the condemnation and power of sin.

HAPPY LIVING

Much of the misery of this struggle with sin is due to the conscience continually condemning the believer for giving way to sin. But the great and glorious fact of the gospel of God's grace is that though our conscience condemns sin, God never condemns us, because He sees us in Christ, who has already paid our penalty for sin on the cross. So we are free and beyond condemnation and judgment: "There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8: 1).

The life we now have flows down from Him, its fountain and source, into our souls. "Because I live, you will live also" (John 14: 19), are His own words to us. Our response is: "Christ  -  is our life" (Col. 3: 4). This is the great soul-delivering truth of God. He does not see us in our old nature any more. He is done with that and sees us only in the new life we have in Christ. And He has given us His Spirit to dwell in us, to develop His new life in us and to give us His power over sin.

So Christ is the answer to all of our struggles. We must stop trying to overcome the sinful tendencies of our old nature in our own strength and begin to let Him work in us that deliverance and victory over sin we so much long for. Likewise, we have no power to produce fruit, even though in our new nature we long to do so. What relief from our misery when we come to the end of ourselves and begin to trust Him. When we realize our powerlessness and look to the Lord, He gives victory over sin and produces fruit that brings joy and peace.

Christ gave us a simple illustration of how this works: "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15: 4-5). Where did the branch get the power to produce such wonderful fruit? Not from itself, but from the vine which sends its invigorating sap flowing into the branch to produce fruit.

Never lose sight of the great fact that Christ is the answer for every trouble. Without Him we cannot overcome. The more we keep in touch with Him the more fruit we will produce. Without Him fruit bearing is impossible. Without Him we will never have true and lasting happiness. He is the source of all joy. In Him we can have a happy life!

"These things I have spoken to you,

that in Me you may have peace.

In the world you will have tribulation;

but be of good cheer,

I have overcome the world."

John 16: 33

Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment

Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment.

G. Cutting.

"WHICH CLASS ARE YOU TRAVELLING?"

What an oft-repeated question! Let me put it to you my reader; for travelling you most certainly are travelling from Time into Eternity, and who knows how very, very near you may be this moment to the GREAT TERMINUS?

"Which class are you travelling?" There are but three. Let me describe them that you may put yourself to the test as in the presence of "Him with whom you have to do."

1st Class — Those who are saved, and who know it.

2nd Class — Those who are not sure of salvation, but anxious to be so.

3rd Class — Those who are not only unsaved, but totally indifferent about it.

Again I repeat my question — "Which class are you travelling?" Oh, the madness of indifference, when eternal issues are at stake! A short time ago, a man came rushing into the railway station at Leicester, and while scarcely able to gasp for breath he took his seat in one of the carriages just on the point of starting.

"You've run it fine," said a fellow passenger. "Yes," replied he, breathing heavily after every two or three words, "but I've saved four hours, and that's well worth running for."

"Saved four hours!" I couldn't help repeating to myself — "four hours well worth that earnest struggle! What of eternity? What of eternity?" Yet are there not thousands of shrewd, far-seeing men today, who look sharply enough after their own interests in this life, but who are stone blind to the eternity before them? In spite of the infinite love of God to helpless rebels, told out at Calvary, spite of His pronounced hatred of sin, spite of the known brevity of man's history here, spite of the terrors of judgment after death, and of the solemn probability of waking up at last with the unbearable remorse of being on hell's side of a "fixed" gulf, man hurries on to the bitter, bitter end, as careless as if there were no God, no death, no judgment, no heaven, no hell. If the reader of these pages be such an one, may God this very moment have mercy upon you and while you read these lines open your eyes to your most perilous position, standing as you maybe on a slippery brink of an endless woe.

Oh friend, believe it or not, your case is truly desperate. Put off the thought of eternity no longer. Remember that procrastination is like him who deceives you by it — not only a "thief, but a murderer." There is much truth in the Spanish proverb, which says, "the road of 'By-and-by' leads to the town of 'Never'. " I beseech you unknown reader, travel that road no longer. "Now is the day of salvation."

But, says one, I am not indifferent as to the welfare of my soul. My deep trouble lies wrapped up in another word:

UNCERTAINTY

i.e. I am among the second-class passengers you speak of.

Well, reader, both indifference and uncertainty are the offspring of one parent — unbelief. The first results from unbelief as to the sin and ruin of man, the other from unbelief as to God's sovereign remedy for man. It is especially for souls desiring before God to be fully and unmistakably SURE of their salvation that these pages are written. I can in a great measure understand your deep soul trouble, and am assured that the more you are in earnest about this all-important matter, the greater will be your thirst, until you know for certain that you are really and eternally saved. "For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul."

The only son of a devoted father is at sea. News comes that his ship has been wrecked on some foreign shore. Who can tell the anguish of suspense in that father's heart until, upon the most reliable authority, he is assured that his boy is safe and sound. Or, again, you are far from home, the night is dark and wintry, and your way is totally unknown. Standing at a point where two roads diverge, you ask a passer-by the way to the town you desire to reach, and he tells you he thinks such and such a way is the right one, and hopes you will be all right if you take it. Would "thinks" and "hopes" and "maybes" satisfy you? Surely not. You must have certainty about it, or every step you take will increase your anxiety. What wonder, then, that men have sometimes been unable either to eat or sleep when the eternal safety of the soul has been trembling in the balance!

To lose your wealth is much,

To lose your health is more,

To lose your soul is such a loss

As no man can restore.

Now, dear reader, there are three things I desire by the Holy Spirit's help, to make clear to you; and to put them in scriptural language, they are these:-

1. "The way of salvation.," (Acts 16:17).

2. "The knowledge of salvation." (Luke 1:77).

3. "The joy of salvation." (Psalm 51:12).

We shall I think, see that though intimately connected, they each stand upon a separate basis; so that it is quite possible for a soul to know the way of salvation without having the certain knowledge that he himself is saved, or again, to know that he is saved, without possessing at all time the joy that ought to accompany that knowledge.

First, then, let me speak briefly of

THE WAY OF SALVATION

Please open your Bible and read carefully the thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of Exodus; there you find these words from the lips of Jehovah — Every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt NOT redeem it, THEN THOU SHALT BREAK HIS NECK: and all the firstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem."

Now, come back with me, in thought to a supposed scene of more than three thousand years ago. Two men (a priest of God and a poor Israelite) stand in earnest conversation. Let us stand by, with their permission, to listen. The gestures of each indicate deep earnestness about some matter of importance, and it isn't difficult to see that the subject of conversation is a little ass that stands trembling beside them.

"I am wondering," says the poor Israelite, "if there cannot be a merciful exception made in my favour this once. This feeble little thing is the firstling of my ass, and though I know full well what the law of God says about it, I am hoping that mercy will be shown, and the ass's life spared. I am but a poor man in Israel, and can ill afford to lose the little colt."

"But," answers the priest, firmly, "the law of the Lord is plain and unmistakable — 'Every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck.' Where is the lamb?"

"Ah, sir, no lamb do I possess."

"Then purchase one and return, or the ass's neck must surely be broken. The lamb must die or the ass must die."

"Alas? then all my hopes are crushed," he cries, "for I am far too poor to buy a lamb."

While this conversation proceeds, a third person joins them, and after hearing the poor man's tale of sorrow, he turns to him and says kindly, "Be of good cheer, I can meet your need;" and thus he proceeds: "We have in our house on the hilltop yonder, one little lamb brought up at our very fireside, who is 'without spot or blemish.' It has never once strayed from home, and stands (and rightly so) in highest favour with all that are in the house. This lamb will I fetch." And away he hastens up the hill. Presently you see him gently leading the fair little creature down the slope, and very soon both lamb and ass are standing side by side.

Then the lamb is bound to the altar, its blood is shed, and the fire consumes it.

The righteous priest now turns to the poor man, and says: "You can freely take home your little colt in safety — no broken neck for it now. The lamb has died in the ass's stead and consequently the ass goes righteously free, thanks to your friend."

Now poor troubled soul, can't you see in this God's own picture of a sinner's salvation? His claims as to sin demanded a "broken neck" i.e. righteous judgment upon your guilty head, the only alternative being the heath of a divinely approved substitute.

Now, you could not find the provision to meet your case; but, in the person of His beloved Son, God Himself provided the Lamb. "Behold the Lamb of God", which taketh away the sin of the world." (John 1:29).

Onward to Calvary He went, "as a lamb led to the slaughter," and there and then "He once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." (I Peter 3:18). "He was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification." (Rom. 4:25). So that God does not abate one jot of His righteous, holy claims against sin when He justifies (i.e. clears from all charge of guilt) the ungodly sinner who believes in Jesus. (Romans 3.26). Blessed be God for such a Saviour, such a salvation)

Dost Thou Believe On the Son of God?

Well, you reply, I have, as a poor condemned sinner, found in HIM one that I can safely trust. I DO believe on Him. Then I tell you, the full value of His sacrifice and death, as God estimates it, He makes as good to you as though you had accomplished it all yourself.

Oh, what a wondrous way of salvation is this) Is it not great and grand and Godlike — worthy of God Himself? The gratification of His own heart of love, the glory of His precious Son, and the salvation of a sinner, all bound up together. What a bundle of grace and glory) Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has so ordered it that His own beloved Son should do all the work and get all the praise, and that you and I, poor guilty things, believing on Him should not only get all the blessings, but enjoy the blissful company of the Blesser for ever and ever. "O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together." (Ps. 34: 3).

But perhaps your eager inquiry may be, "How is it that since I do really distrust self and self-work, I have not the full certainty of my salvation?" You say, "If my feelings warrant me saying that I am saved one day, they are pretty sure to blight every hope the next, and I am left like a ship storm-tossed, without any anchorage whatever."

Ah, there lies your mistake. Did you ever hear of a captain trying to find anchorage by fastening his anchor inside the ship? Never. Always outside.

It may be that you are quite clear that it is Christ's death alone that gives SAFETY, but you think that it is what you feel, that gives CERTAINTY.

Now, again take your Bible, for I wish to say a little about how a man gets

THE KNOWLEDGE OF SALVATION

Before you turn to the verse which I shall ask you very carefully to look at, which speaks of how a believer is to KNOW that he has eternal life, let me quote it in the distorted way that man's imagination often puts it. "Those happy feelings have I given unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life." Now, open your Bible, and while you compare this with God's blessed and unchanging Word, may He give you from your very heart to say with David, "I hate vain thoughts; but Thy law do I love." (Psa. 119:113). The verse just misquoted is the thirteenth verse of the fifth chapter of the first epistle of John, and reads thus in our version:- "These things have I WRITTEN unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that we may KNOW that YE HAVE eternal life."

How did the first-born sons of the thousands of Israel know for certain that they were safe the night of the Passover and Egypt's judgment?

Let us take a visit to two of their houses and hear what they have to say.

We find in the first house we enter that they are all shivering with fear and suspense. What is the secret of all this paleness and trembling? we inquire; and the first-born son informs us that the angel of death is coming round the land, and that he is not quite certain how matters will stand with him at that solemn moment.

"When the destroying angel has passed our house," he says, "and the night of judgment is over, I shall then know that I am safe, but I can't see how I can be quite sure of it until then. They say they are sure of salvation next door, but we think it very presumptuous. All I can do is to spend the long dreary night hoping for the best."

"Well," we inquire, "but has the God of Israel not provided a way of safety for His people?"

"True," he replies, "and we have availed ourselves of that way of escape. The blood of the spotless and unblemished first-year lamb has been duly sprinkled with the bunch of hyssop on the lintel and two side-posts, but still we are not fully assured of shelter." Let us now leave these doubting, troubled ones, and enter next door.

What a striking contrast meets our eye at once! Joy beams on every countenance. There they stand with girded loins and staff in hand, enjoying the roasted lamb.

What can be the meaning of all this joy on such a solemn night as this? "Ah," say they all, "we are only waiting for Jehovah's marching orders and then we shall bid a last farewell to the task-master's cruel lash and all the drudgery of Egypt."

"But hold. Do not forget that this is the night of Egypt's judgment?"

"Right well we know it; but our first-born son is safe. The blood has been sprinkled according to the wish of our God."

"But so it has been next door," we reply, "but they are all unhappy because all uncertain of safety."

"Ah, " responds the first-born firmly, "but we have

MORE THAN THE SPRINKLED BLOOD, WE HAVE THE UNERRING WORD OF GOD ABOUT IT. God has said, 'WHEN I SEE THE BLOOD I will pass over you.' God rests satisfied with the blood outside, and we rest satisfied with His word inside."

The sprinkled blood makes us SAFE.

The spoken word makes us SURE.

Could anything make us more safe than the sprinkled blood, or more sure than His spoken word? Nothing, nothing.

Now, reader, let me ask you a question. "Which of those two houses was the safer?"

Do you say No. 2, where all were so happy? Then you are wrong. Both are safe alike.

Their safety depends upon what God thinks about the blood outside and not upon the state of their feelings inside.

If you would be sure of your own blessing, then, dear reader, listen not to the unstable testimony of inward emotions, but to the infallible witness of the Word of God.

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me HATH everlasting life."

Let me give you a simple illustration from everyday life. A certain farmer in the country, not having sufficient grass for his cattle, applies for a nice piece of pasture-land which he hears is to be let near his own house. For some time he gets no answer from the landlord. One day a neighbour comes in and says, "I feel quite sure you will get that field. Don't you recollect how that last Christmas he sent you a special present of game, and that he gave you a kind nod of recognition the other day when he drove past?" And with such words the farmer's mind is filled with high hopes.

Next day another neighbour meets him, and in the course of conversation, he says, "I'm afraid you will stand no chance whatever of getting that grass-field. Mr. has applied for it, and you cannot but be aware what a favourite he is with Squire — occasionally he visits with him, etc., etc." And the poor farmer's bright hopes are dashed to the ground and burst like soap bubbles. One day he is hoping, the next day full of perplexing doubts.

Presently the postman calls, and the farmer's heart beats fast as he opens the letter; for he sees by the handwriting that it is from the Squire himself. See his countenance change from anxious suspense to undisguised joy as he reads and re-reads that letter.

"It's a settled thing now," exclaims he to his wife; "no more doubts and fears about it. The Squire says the field is mine as long as I require it, on the most easy terms. I care for no man's opinion now. His word settles it."

Now many a poor soul is in a like condition to the poor troubled farmer — tossed and perplexed by the opinions of men, or the thoughts and feelings of his own treacherous heart! and it is only upon receiving the Word of God as the Word of God, that certainty takes the place of doubts. When God speaks there must be certainty, whether He pronounces the damnation of the unbeliever, or the salvation of the believer.

"Forever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven." (Psalm 119: 89): and to the simple hearted believer HIS WORD SETTLES ALL.

"Hath He said, and shall He not do it? or hath He spoken, and shall He not make it good? (Num. 23:19).

"I need no other argument,

I want no other plea.

It is enough that Jesus died -

And that He died for me."

The believer can add -

"And that God says so."

"But how may I be sure that I have the right kind of faith?"

Well, there can be but one answer to that question, i.e.: Have you confidence in the right person? — i.e. in the blessed Son of God? It is not a question of the amount of your faith but the trustworthiness of the person you repose your confidence in. One man takes hold of Christ, as it were, with a drowning man's grip; another but touches the hem of His garment; but the sinner who does the former is not a bit safer than the one who does the latter. They have both made the same discovery, viz.: that while all of self is totally untrustworthy, they may safely confide in Christ, calmly rely on His word, and confidently rest in the eternal efficacy of His finished work. That is what is meant by believing on HIM. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me HATH everlasting life." (John 6: 47).

Make sure of it then, my reader, that your confidence is not reposed in your works of amendment, your religious observances, your pious feeling when under religious influences, your moral training from childhood, and the like. You may have the strongest faith in any or all of these and perish everlastingly. Don't deceive yourself by any "fair show in the flesh." The feeblest faith in Christ eternally saves, while the strongest faith in anything else is but the offspring of a deceived heart — but the leafy twigs of your enemy's arranging over the pit of eternal perdition.

God, in the gospel, simply introduces to you the Lord Jesus Christ, and says, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." "You may," He says, "with all confidence trust His heart though you cannot with impunity trust your own."

"Blessed, thrice blessed Lord Jesus, who would not trust Thee and praise Thy name!"

"I do really believe on Him," said a sad looking soul to me one day, "But yet, when asked if I am saved, I don't like to say Yes, for fear I should be telling a lie." This young woman was a butcher's daughter in a small town in the midlands. It happened to be market day, and her father had not returned from market. So I said: "Now suppose when your father comes home you ask him how many sheep he bought today, and he answers, 'Ten.' After a while a man comes to the shop and says, 'How many sheep did your father buy today?' and you reply, 'I don't like to say, for fear I should be telling a lie.'" "But," said the mother (who was standing by at the time, with righteous indignation, "that would be making her father a liar."

Now, dear reader, don't you see that this well-meaning young woman was virtually making Christ a liar, saying, "I do believe on the Son of God, but I don't like to say I am saved lest I should be telling a lie," when Christ Himself has said, "he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life"! (John 6:47). "But, says another, "How may I be sure that I really do believe? I have tried often to believe, and looked within to see if I had got it, but the more I look at my faith the less I seem to have."

Ah, my friend, you are looking in the wrong direction to find that out, and your trying to believe but plainly shows that you are on the wrong track. Let me give you another illustration to explain what I want to convey to you. You are sitting at your quiet fireside one evening, when a man comes in and tells you that the stationmaster has been killed that night at the railway. Now, it happens that this man has long borne the character in the place for being a very dishonest man, and the most daring and notorious liar in the neighbourhood.

"Do you believe, or even try to believe that man?"

"Of course not," you exclaim, "I know him too well for that."

"But tell me how you know that you don't believe him? Is it by looking within at your faith or feelings?"

"No," you reply, "I think of the man that brings me the message."

Presently, a neighbour drops in and says, "The stationmaster has been run over by a freight train tonight, and killed on the spot." After he has left I hear you cautiously say, "Well, I partly believe it now for, to my recollection this man only once in his life deceived me, though I have known him from boyhood."

But again, I ask, "is it by looking at your faith this time that you know that you partly believe it?"

"No," you repeat: "I am thinking of the character of my informant."

Well, this man has scarcely left your room before a third person enters and brings you the same sad news as the first. But this time you say, "Now, John, since you tell me, I believe it."

Again, I press my question (which is, remember, but the reecho of your own), "How do you KNOW that you so confidently believe your friend John?"

"Because of who and what JOHN is," you reply. "He never has deceived me, and I don't think he ever will."

Well, then, just in the same way I know that I believe the gospel, viz. because of the One who brings me the news. "If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which He hath testified of His son . . . He that BELIEVETH  NOT GOD HATH MADE HIM A LIAR: because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son." (I John 5:9, 10). "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness." (Rom. 4:3).

An anxious soul once said to a servant of Christ, "Oh sir, I can't believe!" to which the preacher wisely and quietly replied, "Indeed, WHO is it that you can't believe?" This broke the spell. He had been looking at faith as an indescribable something that he must feel within himself in order to be sure that he was all right for heaven; whereas faith ever looks outside to a living Person and His finished work, and quietly listens to the testimony of a faithful God about both.

It is the outside look that brings the inside peace. When a man turns his face towards the sun, his own shadow is behind him. You cannot look at self and a glorified Christ in Heaven at the same moment.

Thus we have seen that the blessed Person of God's Son wins my confidence; HIS FINISHED WORK makes me eternally safe; GOD'S WORD about those who believe on Him makes me unalterably sure: I find in Christ and His work the way of salvation, and in the Word of God the knowledge of salvation.

But if saved, my reader may say, "How is it that I have such a fluctuating experience — so often losing all my joy and comfort, and getting as wretched and downcast as I was before my conversion?" Well, this brings us to our third point, viz.

THE JOY OF SALVATION

You will find in the teaching of Scripture, that while you are saved by Christ's work and assured by God's word, you are maintained in comfort and joy by the Holy Spirit who indwells every saved one's body.

Now you must bear in mind that every saved one has still within him "the flesh," i.e. the evil nature he was born with as a natural man, and which perhaps shows itself while still a helpless infant on his mother's lap. The Holy Spirit in the believer resists the flesh, and is grieved by every activity of it in motive, word, or deed. When he is walking "worthy of the Lord," the Holy Spirit will be producing in his soul His blessed fruits — "love, joy, peace," etc. (See Gal. 5: 22). When he is walking in a carnal, worldly way, the Spirit is grieved, and these fruits are wanting in a greater or less measure.

Let me put it thus for you who do believe on God's Son:-

Christ's Work and Your Salvation

stand or fall together.

Your Walk and Your Enjoyment

stand or fall together.

If Christ's work could break down (and blessed be God it never, never will) your salvation would break down with it. When your walk breaks down (and be watchful, for it may) your enjoyment will break down with it.

Thus it is said of the early disciples (Acts 9:31), that they "walked in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost."

And again in Acts 13:52 — "The disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Ghost."

My spiritual joy will be in proportion to the spiritual character of my walk after I am saved.

Now, do you see your mistake? You have been mixing up enjoyment with your safety — two widely different things. When through self-indulgence, loss of temper, worldliness, etc. you grieved the Holy Spirit and lost your joy, you thought your safety was undermined. But again, I repeat it -

Your safety hangs upon Christ's work FOR you. Your assurance upon God's word TO you.

Your enjoyment, upon not grieving the Holy Spirit IN you.

When as a child of God you do anything to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, your communion with the Father and the Son is, for the time, practically suspended; and it is only when you judge yourself and confess your sins that the joy of communion is restored.

Your child has been guilty of some misdemeanor. He shows upon his countenance the evident mark that something is wrong with him. Half an hour before this he was enjoying a walk with you around the garden admiring what you admired, enjoying what you enjoyed; in other words, he was in communion with you, his feelings and sympathies were in common with yours.

But now all this is changed, and as a naughty, disobedient child, he stands in the corner, the very picture of misery.

Upon penitent confession of his wrong-doing you have assured him of forgiveness, but his pride and self-will keep him sobbing there.

Where is now the joy of half an hour ago? All gone. Why? Because communion between you and him has been interrupted.

What has become of the relationship that existed between you and your son half an hour ago? Has that gone too? Is that severed or interrupted? Surely not. His relationship depends upon his birth; his communion, upon his behaviour.

But presently he comes out of the corner with broken will and broken heart, confessing the whole thing from first to last, so that you see he hates the disobedience and naughtiness as much as you do, and you take him in your arms and cover him with kisses. His joy is restored because communion is restored.

When David sinned so grievously in the matter of Uriah's wife, he did not say, "Restore unto me Thy salvation," but "Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation." (Psalm 51: 12).

But to carry our illustration a little farther.

Supposing while your child is in the corner, there should be a cry of "House on fire!" what would become of him then? Left in the corner to be consumed with the burning, falling house? Impossible.

Very probably he would be the very first person you would carry out. Ah, yes, you know right well that the love of relationship is one thing, and the joy of communion quite another.

Now, when the believer sins, communion is for the time interrupted, and joy is lost until with a broken heart he comes to the Father in self-judgment, confessing his sins. Then, also he knows he is forgiven, for His word plainly declares that "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9).

Oh, then, dear child of God, ever bear in mind these two things, that there is nothing so strong as the link of relationship; nothing so tender as the link of communion.

All the combined power and counsel of earth and hell cannot sever the former, while an impure motive or an idle word will break the latter.

If you are troubled with a cloudy half-hour, get low before God, consider your ways; and when the cause that has robbed you of your joy has been detected, bring it at once to the light, confess your sin to God your Father, and judge yourself most unsparingly for the unwatchful, careless state of soul that allowed the thief to enter unchallenged.

But never, never, NEVER, confound your safety with your joy.

Don't imagine, however, that the judgment of God falls a whit more leniently on the believer's sin than on the unbeliever's. He has not two ways of dealing judicially with sin, and He could no more pass by the believer's sin without judging it than He could pass by the sins of a rejecter of His precious Son. But there is this great difference between the two, viz. : that the believer's sins were all known to God, and all laid upon His own provided Lamb when He hung upon the Cross at Calvary and that there and then, once and forever, the great "criminal question" of his guilt was raised and settled — judgment falling upon the blessed Substitute in the believer's stead, "Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree." (1 Peter 2: 24).

The Christ-rejecter must bear his own sins in his own person in the lake of fire forever. Now, when a saved one fails, the "criminal question" of sin cannot be raised against him, the Judge Himself having settled that once for all on the cross; but the communion question is raised within him by the Holy Spirit as often as he grieves the Spirit.

Allow me, in conclusion, to give you another illustration: It is a beautiful moonlight night. The moon is at full, and shining in more than ordinary silvery brightness. A man is gazing intently down a deep, still well, where he sees the moon reflected, and remarks to a friend standing by: "How beautifully fair and round she is tonight; how quietly and majestically she rides along!" He had dust finished speaking when suddenly his friend drops a small pebble into the well and he now exclaims: "Why the moon is all broken to shivers, and the fragments are shaking together in the greatest disorder."

"What gross absurdity!" is the astonished rejoinder of his companion, "Look up man! the moon hasn't changed one jot or tittle; it is the condition of the well that reflects her that has changed."

Now, believer, apply this simple figure. Your heart is the well. When there is no allowance of evil, the blessed Spirit of God takes of the glories and preciousness of Christ, and reveals them to you for your comfort and joy, but the moment a wrong motive is cherished in the heart, or an idle word escapes the lips unjudged, the Holy Spirit begins to disturb the well, your happy experiences are smashed to pieces, and you are all restless and disturbed within, until in brokenness of spirit before God, you confess your sin (the disturbing thing), and thus get restored once more to the calm sweet joy of communion.

But when your heart is all unrest need I ask, Has Christ's work changed? No, no! Then your salvation has not altered. Has God's Word changed? Surely not. Then the certainty of your salvation has received no shock.

Then, what has changed? Why, the action of the Holy Spirit in you has changed, and instead of taking the glories of Christ and filling your heart with the sense of His worthiness, He is grieved at having to turn aside from this delightful office to fill you with the sense of your sin and unworthiness.

He takes from you your present comfort and joy until you judge and resist the evil thing that He judges and resists. When this is done, communion with God has again been restored.

The Lord make us to be increasingly jealous over ourselves, lest we "grieve the Holy Spirit of God, whereby we are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4: 30).

Dear reader, however weak your faith maybe, rest assured of this, that the blessed One who has won your confidence will never change.

"Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and FOREVER" (Heb. 13: 8).

The work He has accomplished will never change. "Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be FOREVER: nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it" (Eccles. 3: 14). The word He hath spoken will never change.

Thus the object of my trust, the foundation of my safety, the ground of my certainty, are alike ETERNALLY UNALTERABLE.

Once more let me ask, WHICH CLASS ARE YOU TRAVELLING? Turn your heart to God, I pray you, and answer that question to Him.

"Let God be true, but every man a liar" (Rom. 3: 4).

George Cutting

"Canst thou by searching find out God?"

"Canst thou by searching find out God?"

Henry Wilson, Inkongo.

CANST thou by searching find

The Almighty God? Can puny man

Take in the One who was ere time began,

With his own finite mind?

I use a microscope, and scan

A tiny parasite,

Brought to the light

Of my research and vision as a man;

Yet is that tiny mite

Unable quite

To understand that I not only see

And know it, but control its destiny.

So it would seem that puny finite man

Can never scan

Or know the mighty God, who fills eternity.

Some say God can be found

In Nature; and 'tis true indeed

We there His wisdom and His might can read,

And see His skill abound.

The tiny animalculae,

More wonderful by far

Than man's inventions are,

Display His handiwork with certainty.

Each plant that grows

Most plainly shows

The imprint of a wise Creator's hand,

On viewing which amazed and awed I stand.

But 'tis His work, not God Himself I see,

Nor can it be

That viewing Nature only I shall understand.

Behold the starry sky!

What human mind can comprehend

Where the beginning is or where the end

Of such immensity?

What do the many names convey?

The 'Serpent' shining bright,

The 'Cross,' emblazed in light,

The 'Crown,' the 'Wounded Conqueror,' what are they?

Again I stand amazed;

The mind is dazed

Before the sky's expanse, so great, so wide:

And yet one's longing rests ungratified;

And life's hard problems and its deepest need

Remain indeed

Unsolved, unmet. The heart is not thus satisfied.

Turn now and view with me

A group of humble men gathered around

A central One, for in that One are found

A lofty majesty,

Surpassing wisdom, gentleness,

A knowledge of men's needs,

A tenderness that heeds

The faintest cry of sorrow or distress.

Then Philip speaks this word-

'Show us the Father, Lord,'

And thus the Lord replies with voice serene

'He that hath seen Me, hath the Father seen.'

O wondrous, glorious mystery, that God,

The eternal God,

Has revealed Himself in this our earthly scene.

Then onward to the Cross,

Displaying God's great love to you and me,

Behold the Lord, advance unflinchingly,

Unmoved by shame or loss.

But, risen now at God's right hand,

Upon His glorious face

God's glory we can trace,

And seeing Him, our hearts can understand.

He knows our every need,

And He can read

Even the longing we can scarce express,

And knowing, 'tis His great delight to bless,

The weary heart can find in Him its rest,

And, fully blest,

Be filled with heavenly peace and joy and happiness.

While He is still away,

His people here are left to set Him forth,

And show His glory and His matchless worth,

And God Himself display.

We well may own with grief and shame

How much we fail to show

God's nature here below,

And how we do dishonour to His Name.

Yet let us fix our gaze

On Him, whose rays

Will brighten, change us, cause us now to be

More like Him, so that all around may see

In us a little of that radiant light,

And glory bright,

Which we shall bear throughout a glad eternity.

The Authority of the Word of God

The Authority of the Word of God

Biographical Note

James Boyd

Contents

Explanation

A Personal Testimony

The Holy Scriptures

The Necessity for a Revelation

The Fall

Is Jesus God?

The Unchanging One

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

The Cross

Propitiation

The Resurrection

God's Great Gift

The Love of God

The Love of the Father

The Love of Christ

The Love of the Brethren

The Son of God and the Scriptures

The Man of God's Counsels

The Son of Man

In Christ

The Heathen

Abiding in the Doctrine.

(Scripture Truth 1932, vol. 24, p. 24.)

Correspondence.

"The evil, of which we are warned in 2 John, seemed to be in going forward; that is, adding to the revealed thoughts of God things that are not plainly in the text. This would set forth a Christ, not the Christ of God, but a Christ after the mind and heart of man. The Christ of God is One who has come in flesh, a real man in flesh and blood, otherwise He could not have made propitiation for our sins. But apart altogether from what we might deduce from the denial of this holy and all important truth the Word of God is plain and definite (John 1: 14; Heb. 2: 14). The man who does not confess this great truth of the incarnation has not God. But he who abides in the doctrine hath both the Father and the Son.

"Anyone if even a little acquainted with the Word is not likely to deny body, soul and spirit to our blessed Lord. But supposing this were denied it would be easy to turn to Luke 23: 46: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, He said, Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit: and having said this He gave up the spirit." In Matt. 26: 38 He says: "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." In Hebrews 10: 5 He says: "A body hast Thou prepared Me."

"But out of this another question is raised, and that is, Was His body the same as any other human being? To this question the Scriptural answer is, No; His was holy. Another important truth to keep in mind is that He was begotten of God. He was God's Son. Even if He could be viewed as Man only, which I should deny, He still was Son of God. Nothing of this was true of any other man." James Boyd.

Explanation

The Author of these papers is now with the Lord and will write no more, but it is thought that he might yet speak to some through their publication. They are a selection from many that appeared from his pen in the monthly magazine Scripture Truth.

The Scriptures were the very Word of God to James Boyd; he had a remarkable grasp of the truths they teach and could express in robust language what he had learnt from the Word, as this volume proves. His uncompromising attitude towards error; his love for the Lord Jesus, his Saviour; his delight in the grace of God that had changed him from an atheist to a child in the family of God are all expressed in these papers and give them a permanent value.

A Personal Testimony

From my earliest days I was of a sceptical turn of mind. I wanted everything brought to the bar of human reason, not realizing how utterly deceptive the reasoning of a mind away from God must be. Had I been able to face the fact of my natural aversion to all that was of God I would not have trusted my mind in the things that concerned my relations with Him. I might have seen that any natural antipathy to a report must always exercise a hindrance to faith in it. Though brought up in a godly atmosphere I absolutely turned away from all so-called places of worship when I left home, and I left home very early in life. To argue the question I was more than willing, but to sit quietly and hear the unfolding of the grace of God was more than my pride of heart would endure.

I wanted, still want, everything proven. It is plain enough that a mind like that can only be caught through a sense of need. It betrays a hardened condition of soul, as well as a haughty spirit. It is not that I was at any time indifferent to the great question of a future state. The very opposite was the case. The question was ever uppermost in my thoughts. Indeed, I never could well understand how any one was able to shelve such a momentous consideration. I ate my food without raising questions about how it could be converted into blood, bone, and muscle; but to the Bread of Life I was able to raise more objections than any one who took an interest in my soul was able to meet. For this reason I have said that such a person can only be caught by his need. To my daily bread I had no objection, but the Bread of Life was not palatable: I had no appetite for it. I should have been thankful could I have been assured either of the favour of God, or of annihilation as the alternative; but no one could assure me of either.

The kind of gospel to which I was accustomed was of a very legal type, and though Christ was spoken of as the alone Saviour of sinners, peculiarly enough and to my mind unreasonably, I was given to understand that I had my part to do. This part was never clearly defined; and bewildered by this mixture of Judaism and Christianity, I drifted into the region of practical infidelity. I had no light, and judged every one else to be in the same darkness as myself. But an aching void was in my heart which all the pleasures of the world were unable to satisfy.

At length, through the solicitation of a servant of God, I was led to take up the Scriptures and read them, though as far as the text goes I was by no means ignorant of them. But there came right home to my soul the feeling that if the Book was of God it could be like no other book that ever was written, and that I could not read it without knowing that it was His Word, that is, if it was. As I read, I said to myself, No one on earth knows me as I know myself, but the Author of this Book knows me a great deal better than I know myself. I felt that God was speaking. I found myself under His omniscient eye, and I fell at His feet. The hammer of His Word had broken the hard rock to pieces.

Then came the moment when a measure of pure gospel broke upon mine ear. It met every need of my soul. It was just the thing which suited my sinful state. It was not "The Divine within me answering to the truth of God," as some have put it; but it was the need of a poor sinner's conscience met by the blood of Jesus, and the need of the heart met by the love of God. What rest it gave! To me it was like sight to the blind, like bread to the hungry, like water to the thirsty, like clothes to the naked. It needed no proving. I would not have crossed the narrowest street in the city to have had the Scriptures proven to be the Word of God. What soul in the warmth and light of the noonday sun would waste his time listening to a debate as to whether or no there is such a thing as the sight of the eyes. As far as I was concerned I felt I was in contact with the living Christ, and that God is love.

Before this I knew that my conduct was not what it ought to be, but this was as measured by a human standard, now I saw that what would do for men would not pass with a holy and righteous God. It was no longer a question of human frailty, or of mere mistakes, but of absolute rebellion against God and His Christ. But He who had loved me and had given Himself for me was now my righteousness in the presence of God, so that it was no longer the query as to what I was for God, but rather what Christ was for Him. This gave solid and lasting peace. By His work on the cross He made an end of my sins, and, as after the flesh, the man that had committed the sins, and into a new and eternal relationship was I brought, and made conscious of that relationship by the power of the Holy Spirit who shed the love of God abroad in my heart.

Has this all been a dream, an illusion, an ignis-fatuus and baseless phantasm of a sick brain? If it is, I am to be pitied, for I have been under it for over half a century, and the sweetness, joy and delight of it have steadily increased from the first day until now. Are sight, hearing, feeling, life, love, existence, delusions? Are people conscious that they are alive in flesh and blood? Have they any fears that after all they may not be alive but dead? Would anyone thank you for stopping him on the street and assuring him that he was alive? You say, That would be absurd. So it would, but believers in the Lord Jesus are by the quickening power of God in the life of Christ, and have the Holy Spirit dwelling in them. Is this life, then, which they have in the power of the indwelling Spirit, not as real as is the life of flesh and blood? James Boyd.

The Holy Scriptures

"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God." 2 Timothy 3: 16.

The Holy Scriptures are like no other writings. All other writings have had their origin in the mind of man, and with the conviction and expectation that the mind of the reader shall be able to grasp the meaning of that which is written. But this is not at all true of the Scriptures. It is not only not assumed by the writers of Holy Scripture that the mind of man will be able to seize the thoughts therein recorded, but its inability to do so is very distinctly affirmed (1 Cor. 2: 14; Eph. 1: 17; Col. 1: 9; Luke 24. 45). The Holy Spirit, who inspired the writers, is the only One who can enable us to understand that which He has caused to be placed on record for our instruction in the mind of God.

Therefore a mere study of the Word, however necessary it be to study it, is not of itself sufficient to place us in possession of the thoughts of God. It is necessary that we should read it, pay attention to all that it brings before us, believe it even when we do not grasp its meaning, and meditate upon its precious utterances; but this should be done in prayerful dependence upon its gracious Author, and in distrust of our own natural reason, which is always infidel, and always infidel just because it is our reason, the reason of fallen flesh, which ever revolves in its own blind orbit, excluding every ray of light divine.

This should not discourage the student of the Bible, but rather the opposite, for I would point out the true and only way of gaining knowledge; also where, and how it is to be found. It must be found in the Word, for it is there, and nowhere else; and there should be the utmost confidence in it as a revelation from God. Attention must be given to its most minute details, for there is nothing unnecessary placed on record, nor shall we therein find any vain repetitions crowding its pages. Neither must we imagine that any question has arisen amongst His people, unforeseen by Him, since upon Him, who knows the end from the beginning, it is impossible for the enemy to deliver a surprise attack. Every assault of the wily foe; every twist given to its evident meaning by the stubborn sectarian, who would compel it to lend its support to his miserable counterfeit of the truth; every dogmatic display of isolated texts, wrenched away from their proper connection in order to turn the heart from the living Christ in heaven, all was foreseen by the Author of this wonderful Book, and ample provision made for its detection and exposure.

It is a sharp sword for the human conscience, of which the devil himself has often felt the edge. It is a light that lays bare the secret chambers of the heart of man, and manifests its deceitful intentions, with all its bitter enmity against God; but at the same time it reveals the heart of God in all His fathomless love to the guilty. It guides the footsteps of the pilgrim through this wilderness where there is no way, and discloses before his heavenward gaze that celestial home, in which there is fullness of joy, and where pleasures for evermore reside. In its spontaneous praises, melody made by the heavenly hierarchs and the myriads of redeemed are heard; and amid the rumbling of the thunders of its wrath can be detected the wailing of those who have passed beyond the borderland of hope and have entered into regions of despair. It gives us a glimpse into the eternity that is past, and also directs our forward glance to the rest of God, and to the day when all things are made new, bathed in the glory of redemption.

The characteristics of the children of the devil it faithfully delineates, and describes minutely those of the children of God. The plottings and the drivellings of the human mind are therein recorded, as are also the counsels of eternal love. The folly of the creature; the wisdom of the Creator; the way of falsehood, the way of truth; the way of righteousness, the way of sin; the way of life, the way of death; the way of man, the way of God; all is therein recorded for our enlightenment and eternal blessing; and happy is the man whose confidence is in its heavenly origin, and whose heart and mind are well stored with its precious truths.

Its blessings are health-imparting, exalting, and enriching, and its anathemas are blasting, bewildering, abasing, and impoverishing. Obedience to its precepts purifies the soul, and rebellion against its commandments hardens the heart, benumbs the conscience, and deadens the sensibilities. It criticises its critics, judges its judges, makes liars of its calumniators, and for ever justifies its friends. It will have the last word at the last day, and from its sentence there shall be no appeal. It is a well-spring of living water in this arid waste, and living bread in this famine-stricken land. It makes the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and the dead to live. In the might of the Spirit it is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword; piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. God has magnified His Word above all His name; and as to the one who despises its testimony, good were it for that man had he never been born.

Therefore am I far from discouraging anyone who would seek to study the contents of this wonderful Volume. God has given it to us in His marvellous grace, and He would have us approach it with fear and trembling ? not because we are not free from its anathemas, for, through the grace of God and the blood of Jesus, every believer is justified from all things and set in new and eternal relationships with Him in Christ ? but because of its holy and sacred character. There is no condemnation in its pages for the believer in Christ. His redemption by the blood of Jesus, his relationship to God, and his eternal security, occupy a large place in that sacred Volume; but just because it is a revelation of God, it is to be approached with holy reverence, and not with the lightness with which one may take up any other book.

The Necessity for a Revelation

"Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God." Romans 10: 17.

It is late in the history of the world to be going into the question of the origin of a Book, which began to be written about four thousand years ago, and the writing of which extended over half that time; but late or early, the question seems with some people to be still undecided, and open to debate; and certainly the antiquity of the dispute does not in the least lessen its importance, neither does it tend to diminish the ardour of the combatants, nor the interest of the onlookers.

It is a question which no thoughtful person will ever relegate to a secondary place in man's pursuit of knowledge, for the tremendous claim made by the Book itself, causes the question of its title to that claim, to take the precedence of all others. Nor are men really able to treat the question with indifference. The sang-froid which characterizes some who profess to have settled the matter in favour of thick darkness, as opposed to a revelation from God, bears the stamp of being only skin-deep, and not the outcome of honest conviction.

It scarcely needs to be asserted that the leaders of the world bear the Book no goodwill, but rather the opposite, and therefore has it been subjected to ceaseless hostility, and to a criticism more fierce than that which has fallen to the lot of any other writings. It has been, and is, more fervently loved, and more intensely hated, than all the rest of the world's books put together; and the strange thing about its history is, that the house of its supposed friends is the place where it has been most sorely wounded. Those who have been foremost in their protestations of zeal in the service of its Author have shown themselves to be its worst enemies, and in their custody it had to remain for ages "a prisoner in bonds." How it survived the persecutions to which it was exposed, is almost as great a miracle as is the way in which it was given to man.

Thank God, the days of its incarceration are over, and it is free to tread its pathway of blessing throughout the wide world. In the days of Luther a moral resurrection took place through the grace of God. The German monk who eventually shook the throne of the proud bishop of Rome, saw in the dim cloister, through its sacred page, a light above the brightness of the sun; and when his voice arose heralding in the ears of men, the life-giving words of the dusty roll, the wheel of the papal chariot became scotched for ever, the powers of darkness were alarmed, and hell stood aghast before the boldness of this daring man. The power of God made itself felt, and the tiara trembled on the brow of him who trafficked in the souls of men, as he saw the hope of his gains vanishing from before his eyes. Men began to speak their minds more openly, the priestly bondage under which they had groaned was no longer discussed in whispers, and even kings began to breathe more freely, for the epistle of the apostle to the Romans now clung at the throat of the Italian prelate. Such is the power of this most wonderful Book.

It declares itself to be of heavenly origin: the very words of the living God, breathed into the hearts and minds of His servants, and penned by them as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. No other communications on earth make such claim to universal homage. The writers dive away back into the past eternity, before sun, planet, or attendant satellite gleamed forth upon the brow of heaven, and bring to light the secret counsels of the eternal Father. It shows us those counsels worked out in time by the eternal Son, in the power of the eternal Spirit, until the final result of all the activities of the triune God bursts upon our vision in a new heaven and a new earth, crowned with the glory of the tabernacle of God, in the midst of redeemed creation, in which righteousness shall dwell for ever.

It tells us of the beginning of all things, of the fall of the devil, of the fall of man, of God's gracious dealings with the latter when fallen, of the love of God, of the death of Christ, of His resurrection, of His session at the right hand of God, of His coming again, and of the subjugation of everything to Himself.

It leads the heart and mind into things unseen, and regales the soul with unutterable delights in the sanctuary of eternal love. It opens up before our vision the blackness of darkness, the God-forsaken region of despair, where ceaselessly rage the tempests of almighty wrath. It brings to light the corrupt God-hating heart of fallen man, and the infinite and holy love of a Saviour-God. It guides us to the fountain of all good; and shows us, but brings us not nigh, the source of evil. It describes the ceaseless conflict between these two opposing forces adown the black history of a fallen world, until the day in which the battle is brought to a conclusion by the triumph of good; and the heavens and the earth are purified from the presence of evil, which finds its place, with the Devil who brought it into existence, in the lake of fire, the eternal abode of that "liar" and "murderer."

It declares that God is love. Creation presents Him as infinite in wisdom and power, but we see evil rampant around us, and man beneath its merciless hoof. There are traces of His goodness everywhere; and in the midst of its unutterable woes, gladness of heart visits the most unfortunate. But the fact that the griefs of the human race are so freely interspersed with innumerable joys, only makes the puzzle of man's existence all the more intricate and difficult of solution. If it were all evil one would be in measure justified in attributing the creation to the caprice of a demon, and were it all good the aspersion of the true character of God would be unpardonable; but to find these two principles everywhere, and mixed together in a struggling and hopeless m?l?e, with evil ever apparently triumphant, is bewildering to the finite mind.

The woes of the human race are beyond the possibility of exaggeration, and seem to rise up at every turn as a witness against the notion of infinite goodness; for if God be all powerful, how is it that for so many millenniums His creature has been left in this corner of His creation to welter unpitied in his wretchedness? Can the Creator be indifferent to the woes of His creature? Who can tell us? Is there no voice from Him?

I am certain if there is no revelation from God, there is no God. But the whole universe around me bears witness to the reality of a Creator, and although the visible things do not contain the secret of the nature of Him who brought them into existence, there is enough of evidence borne by them, to convince every intelligent being that He, without whom a sparrow cannot fall to the ground, could not leave His poor creature without some ray of light as to how he stands with respect to His holy and righteous will.

The idea of a universe such as surrounds us, without a Creator, is to me unthinkable; and that man should be brought forth to fall a prey to his wretched lusts, and to grope his weary and painful way to the grave in suffocating gloom, squabbling with his fellows about questions upon which none can boast of having one ray of light, and which never can be solved, is just as unthinkable. I find myself so formed that I am unable to get away from the idea of a Creator, and One with whom I have to do; I am also impressed with the fact that my Maker is beneficent, for of this I see abundant traces on every hand; and I am sure of this also that He has not left man in any clime without witness as to His beneficence. I have tried to get away from the thought of a Being with whom I had to do, and I have not been able; I have done my best to get out of my mind the conviction that He has spoken, and in this I have been likewise unsuccessful. Where, and how, He has spoken, is another matter, but spoken He has, of this I am convinced.

Man must have some light, and God will give it to him, even though he is certain to be unfaithful to it. Without testimony I am sure God will never leave him. I am not at present saying from whence such thoughts came to me; I am only speaking of the way I seem to be impressed as I look around me, and meditate upon that which I see taking place on the earth. We would be worse off than the beasts had we no light from God, for they are not burdened with the terror of having to do with Him, and we are. The question is not, Has God spoken? but, How?

I shall be told at once that it is not by the Bible. But I must ask, Why not by the Bible? Shall I be met with the stereotyped objection that it is full of contradictions, and is altogether wrong as to the plan of the universe; that it makes it geocentric, and has spoken of the earth as a plain. It has done nothing of the kind. It is so carefully written, that its statements never jar upon the mind of the most advanced scientist, not do they cause the most illiterate to move in the direction of astronomical discovery. But may I ask, what impression does the universe convey to the mind of the ordinary mortal, as he looks abroad into the starry night from his cottage door? Will he not conceive of the earth as a flat plain, and the dome of heaven as a hemisphere, resting upon the rim of the earth? Could He who is infinite in wisdom have made the visible things no other way? The truth is that the heavens and the earth are so ordered that moral impressions are conveyed to the mind. Everything away from earth is upward and above man, and man is made to look upward to God who has His dwelling-place in the heavens. The Bible has a way of its own, by which it leaves these impressions undisturbed. If it gave other impressions, and taught the Newtonian theory, we might with some show of reason conclude that the God of creation is not the God of the Bible. I am not attempting to prove by this, that the Bible owes its origin to the Creator, I am only showing, that if the Bible leaves undisturbed the impression that creation itself gives to the naked eye of the ordinary observer, that is no proof against the divine origin of the Scriptures.

There are many other objections advanced by the infidel mind of man, but they are all equally worthless, and have been disposed of again and again. Man naturally hates the light, and this is why the Bible is ever the great object of attack. But though man may, and does, hate the light, it has come into this dark world for the salvation of his immortal soul. What other light has he which shows him God fully declared? He is of few days and full of sorrow, and in the end has to submit to death, and where it will land him he knows not. It is a foe fronted with terror, blind to the sight of misery, deaf to all entreaties, and dumb with regard to where it conducts its victim. It has been in the world for nigh six thousand years, and men know as little about it to-day, as they did at the beginning. Men hope it will lead to something better than the present life, but what proof have we that the region into which it leads, is not more replete with horrors than is the one out of which it conducts us? Were it an angel of light sent to escort us into a scene of joy and endless tranquillity, would its aspect be so full of terrors, or its weapon so dreaded? Surely not. We need some light from God, for death gives us no reason to suppose that, however bad it may be here, it is any better beyond. A beneficent Creator will not leave His creature without testimony. A revelation is a necessity both for His glory and our blessing; and this revelation we gratefully recognize in the Scriptures.

The Fall

"By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin." Romans 5: 12.

No other book has ever received a similar amount of attention at the hand of friend and foe. The contentions concerning its sayings have been continuous, cruel, and sanguinary. Hell has stormed at it, earth has hallooed after it, and fires have been kindled with the parchments upon which it was written; but its lovers have succoured it, sheltered it, cherished it, studied its pages, imbibed its life-giving utterances, and with the precious volume clasped within their trembling hands, and its heavenly truths engraven upon their hearts, they have passed away from earth into the presence of Him of whom it speaks. It has been loved with all the love of the human heart under the influence of heaven, and it has been hated with all the hatred of the soul under the influence of the abyss of evil. On its account men have ever been ready to kill, or to be killed. The world will not have it, and yet it remains in it. The more it has been persecuted, the more it has multiplied and grown.

In defence of its sayings the hearts' blood of thousands has been freely poured forth. Its followers have been counted the offscourings of the earth, and have been murdered without mercy. They have been reckoned by the world as sheep for the slaughter, cast out among the unclean, the lawless and the transgressors; hunted among mountains, dens, and caves of the earth, and slaughtered wherever they were found. But when the world was finished with them, God came out and wrote their epitaph, and it reads thus: "Of whom the world was not worthy."

Like Him of whom it testifies it finds itself in a world hostile to its teachings, and therefore is it despised and rejected of men; but like Him it passes onward in its unostentatious pathway of mercy, "Doing good, and healing all oppressed of the devil, for God is with it." Into an evil world it has come, but were the world not evil it would have no mission here. Had man remained as God made him such a revelation would have been unnecessary, for when he was made he had all the light needful to maintain him in the relationship in which he was placed with his Maker. But fallen man must have light beyond what was required for an innocent creation, if ever he is to be recovered for God.

But the wiselings of to-day will not believe that man is fallen. If he is not fallen he must be as God made him, and if he is as God made him I fail to see how he can be improved. Yet those who contend against the truth of the fall are the people who are loudest in their demands for such legislation as will enable them to set about improving the race. Could I be led to believe that God made man as he is, I would have to discard the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, and substitute in His place an evil being. It is impossible to entertain the idea of a Creator, and have any other thought than that everything created by Him has been created for His pleasure. And indeed this is just what Scripture teaches: "For Thy pleasure they are, and were created" (Rev. 4: 11). Therefore if there has been no fall, and men are as He made them, and consequently just in the condition in which He takes delight, and if He takes delight in them as I see them, what kind of a Being is He? Men make things in which they can take delight, and by which they may be served, and no man will intentionally and premeditatedly make anything that will be a grief to his heart. And I am sure the Creator will not. Therefore He must be understood by the state, the moral state, in which His creature is created.

Now the heavens are said in Scripture to declare the glory of God (Ps. 19), but the earth never. Looking upward at the heavens with our natural eyes everything appears to us in the most perfect order. There is no confusion there, no conflict between the heavenly bodies, everything moves in the most perfect harmony together; there is no trespass committed by one inhabitant of the blue expanse against its neighbour; there is no noise of contending forces; one spirit seems to permeate the vast heavenly host, and all is peace. But when we turn to earth it is hell let loose. A pandemonium of discord jars upon the ear. Violence and corruption are seen everywhere. Scenes of horror fill the vision, and groans of despair grate upon the ear. Hatred, falsehood, outrage, murder, and suicide, stalk naked through the land. Pestilence, famine, hunger, nakedness, and death, cause the shriek of anguish to drown the revelry of gladsome day, and rend the bosom of the black-browed night. And I am told man is not fallen!

We are told that man is just as he should be at the present moment of his history, but that he will not ever be thus. He is struggling upward, and the goal is within measurable distance. Is it? From my observation of the progress things are making I should say he is struggling downward, and making very rapid progress in his descent. That men are better educated than they were a century ago is not in question. Possibly the poor eat better, and are better clothed also; but that men are more moral, that they love one another better, that they are more law-abiding, that they are less selfish, that they are more faithful in their relations of life, and that they are more to be trusted than they were a century ago, I do not believe. Take away the steam engine and the dynamo-electric machine; dispense with railway, telegraph, and telephone, and with all the trappings of the present century civilization, and have a good look at society, and you will find little to boast in above the savage.

We are told that nobody believes the Genesis account of the fall. One often wonders what kind of company these Bible critics keep. I think I might safely undertake to find some thousands of people who have never questioned it; and these are not men who readily take things for granted. It is asserted that the offence committed by Adam in the garden of Eden was of too trivial a nature to entail such consequences. But this seems to me to be a very superficial and foolish kind of reasoning. I fail to see that it could have made any real difference what test it might have pleased God to apply to man. The gravity of man's offence is not to be estimated by the intrinsic value of the article purloined; there was nothing in that at all. He might have eaten of that tree as well as of any other had it not been forbidden. The interdiction against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ought not to have been difficult for Adam to observe; it was not a heavy rent to pay for such a large estate. He was the vice-regent of God upon earth, made so by his indulgent Creator, and the tree which was forbidden to him was the witness that the earth and the fulness thereof were the Lord's, and that Adam was not sole proprietor. The tree became a test of his loyalty to his Creator. The tribute demanded from him was a mere bagatelle, but this very fact made his transgression all the more inexcusable.

Had the toll demanded from the creature been a heavy tax upon his resources, compassion for the rebel would have been more pardonable, but the trivial tax upon such enormous wealth brought to light the hidden secret of the rebel's heart, and the creature is manifested in his attempt to grasp Divinity itself. This was the bait which the arch deceiver of mankind dangled before the eyes of his victim, and which tempted him to transgress the commandment. Why should he have desired to be on equality with God? He should have had confidence enough in the goodness of his Creator to have enabled him to refuse such a bait.

But I need not waste words in bringing the gravity of the offence of Adam into light; the reader knows his own natural heart well enough to be conscious of the fact that, if he were able to bring its desires about, no one would occupy the throne of the universe but himself. In this world every man seeks to get all the power into his own hands, and had he the throne of the world it would not satisfy him, he would want the throne of the universe also. This suggestion instilled into the heart of Adam by the devil will reach its culmination in the "man of sin," who will allow no one to worship any god but himself. He will take the place of God upon earth, and will put to death all who resist his blasphemous pretensions (2 Thess. 2 and Rev. 13).

But in spite of man's denial that he is in a fallen condition, and in spite of his claim to be something, he is really ashamed to come out in the truth of his condition. We shelter ourselves from the inquisitiveness of our neighbours, and resent every attempt made by them to scrutinize our affairs. It may be nothing but idle curiosity prompts them to get near to us, but it is not because we know this that we so strongly resent their advances, and determine to hold them at arm's length. Were we certain they could not find anything discreditable about us, we should not be so upset by their unmannered curiosity. Were everything that could be known about us creditable to us, we would be glad to be manifested before the assembled universe. But we shrink from exposure because we are unfit to be seen as we really are. This is very strange, especially as we know that others are no better than ourselves. They shrink from our penetrating gaze as timidly as we do from theirs.

But the knowledge of this does not help us, or make us bolder, for each of us has got his own secrets, of which he is rightly ashamed. Like Ham we are ready to sneer at the nakedness of our neighbour, but we are all very careful, when in our senses, not to babble into the ear of the world the secrets of our own guilty lives. My neighbour does not know me as I know myself, and I am determined that he shall remain in his ignorance. We keep our respective distances. I do not pry into the thoughts of his heart, and I expect the same consideration from him. This is all "fig leaves." We are very pleased to find that people do not walk about in their naked hideousness; and should one of us expose himself in his moral degradation, we feel it to be an offence against all that is becoming, and insulting to society. Each person is at liberty to think whatever he pleases, and he may do what he pleases, as long as it does not injure his neighbour, but he must be careful that it does not get abroad. He must wear the "fig leaves," or become ostracized from society.

Some of these haters of the Bible cannot understand any intelligent person continuing to believe in the fall of man as it is taught in Genesis. We are told that the legend was in existence as oral tradition long before Genesis was written. How it could be otherwise I am at a loss to know, and were it otherwise the fact would go far to prove it mere fiction. That the human race could be ignorant of the fall until Moses wrote the account of it is inconceivable. It was bound to travel with the posterity of Adam down the centuries. No doubt it would lose nothing by the telling in its travels, and therefore is it found in distorted forms in various countries, but in Genesis we have it in its simple naked truth.

We are told by some that it is scarcely alluded to in the Old Testament writings. Why should it be? Where was the need for constant repetition? It is referred to, however, but had I found it very frequently referred to by the prophets, it would greatly have depended upon the setting in which I found it, whether my suspicion as to the writers' faith in it would not have been aroused. Indeed it is seldom referred to in the New Testament, and when it is referred to, it is not hard to see the writer takes it for granted that those to whom he writes do not question the fact. It has no need to be proven in a world like this.

The difficulty with the philosophers of the world seems to lie in the fact that, whether man be fallen or not, his moral state is far from being satisfactory. As a general thing God is either altogether left out, as regards the theories of these men, or everything is God, whether it be man, bird, beast, reptile, or spunge. A God who is objective to His creation, neither of them confess. The evolutionists have got the whole creation upon a ladder whose top and bottom are both alike enveloped in impenetrable gloom. What he came from and what he is to arrive at are wrapt in obscurity. They think man is advancing toward a perfect state, but what that state is to be they know not. Some of us are quite certain that man is retrograding. That those who call themselves Christians are on the down-grade, no one will question who reads the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and believes it to be a true account of the state of things in the Church at the beginning.

That men in these Islands are better governed than they were in the middle ages goes without saying, but if the crowd were let loose to-day, who would not tremble for the consequences? The deeds of the French revolution, if not worse, would be repeated. I fail therefore to see how men are better morally. I may be told that the fact that good laws exist is in itself a proof of a better moral state. I cannot accept it, for men do not make laws for themselves but for their fellows. Those who make them are often found guilty of breaking them. The lustre of the world is artificial; what is natural is corrupt. Under an apparently well ordered community smoulders a veritable hell of horrible rebellion, and this the powers that be will learn one of these days.

Those who think they see God in everything are, in their own imagination, themselves God; and the fall is the incarnation of God in nature, so they tell us. This mysterious Power, which is themselves and the spunge, and all that lies between in the way of life, is finding expression in the universe, and they tell us that it is only as we read Him in the universe that we can know anything about Him. God, we are told, can only know His own capabilities as He is confronted by opposing forces, therefore He creates the forces that He may become known to Himself. If I could so degrade myself as to accept such a horrible idea, I would be very much interested to know what He thinks of Himself, when He sees Himself in the universe! Is this great mysterious Power contemplating Himself in the battlefield, where men, who know not why they are pitted against one another, maim and murder until their feet slip in the hot red heart-blood of friend and foe? I wonder what the "god" of these men's imagination thinks of himself as he looks at the violence and corruption which fill the earth, and at nature foaming at the mouth and "red in tooth and claw with ravin"!

How strange it is that man will have anything as a god, rather than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The reason, surely, is that if I confess Him, I must myself go down in the dust in His presence, and confess myself to be a poor, fallen, unworthy sinner, dependent upon His mercy and grace for my salvation. Pride has no place in the presence of the true God, and therefore must the proud heart of man be ever in deadly hostility to Him. Blessed be His name, He can so work in His grace in our hearts that we are made to acknowledge the truth of the Book which discovers us to ourselves, and, turning to Him in the judgment of ourselves, to leave the decision of our eternal welfare in His own hands.

Is Jesus God?

"If David then call Him Lord, how is He his Son?" Matthew 22: 45.

If we think of the Scriptures as a revelation given to us from God who cannot lie, and if we have them as He gave them to us, we cannot give harbourage to the notion that the smallest untruth can be found therein ? or any statement which, taken in its connection, would be calculated to leave a false impression upon the mind of the reader. Were it possible that an honest seeker after light could be deceived by them ? were it possible that they could lead the soul who trusted them as the truth of God into darkness and error, they would prove themselves to be but the corrupt production of the fallen mind of man, and valueless as a guide to the knowledge of God. They would bear witness against themselves as not the offspring of One who cannot lie, but of one who was both a liar and a murderer.

And if we think of them as written to the poor and the illiterate and not to the wealthy, the wise, and prudent, we shall not expect them to be full of dark sayings and mysterious theories, couched in great swelling words, to be understood by none but clever and educated minds. The gospel is preached to the poor, and as far as that which relates to the universal testimony of the grace of God is concerned, nothing could be more simple. True, the deep things of God can only be known by those who have the Spirit, but that is not because they are very learned, nor because they require colossal intellects to grasp their meaning, but because they relate to things which lie outside the circle in which the natural mind of man exercises itself.

The Scriptures are the only light we have with regard to the knowledge of God, and we must either take them as they are, or reject them altogether. They speak of all the relationships in which man is placed, whether in Adam or in Christ, and dilate upon the responsibilities connected with these relationships in such a way that nothing is overlooked, disregarded, or epitomized; and whether we understand the things of which they speak, or whether we do not, the language in which they are set before us cannot be held to be bewildering nor capable of double meaning. In them the trumpet gives no uncertain sound, and there, without a jar, from pipe and harp breaks forth the glorious music of eternal truth (1 Cor. 14: 7, 8).

As far as it is necessary, and indeed as far as it is possible for us to know the One in whom we live and move and have our being, we have Him placed before us in the written Word. If He is not learned there, where can He be learned? Not in the material universe, not in providence, not in the state of this world, for everywhere we turn we are confronted with contradictions; and had we nothing else than these we should be compelled to dwell in darkness and uncertainty. The world is now almost six thousand years old, and though it has made immense progress in the knowledge of the resources of nature, it has made none in the knowledge of God; indeed, it knows less about Him to-day than it did in its infancy (Rom. 1: 21-25).

The history of every testimony committed to man has always been down-grade. The Antediluvian, Noahic, Judaic, and Christian dispensations tell the same tale. Departure from the living God, corruption of His truth, darkness and chaos, followed by the intervention of God in judgment, mark each successive dealing of God with men. Nor will any future dispensation be otherwise. Everything will prosper in the hands of Christ, and during His reign there will be no failure in the government of the world, for everything undertaken by Him will be fulfilled to the glory and praise of God, but that reign, however beneficent it may be, will not change the hearts of men, for at the close it will be seen that nothing but a leader is necessary to rouse the whole earth into revolt against the authority of the Lord.

There is an innate aversion in the human mind to everything that is of God; though, of course, this solemn fact is known only to those in whom the grace of God has wrought. The truth has been persecuted since the world began, and against Christ, who was the embodiment of that truth, the powers of darkness stirred up, and brought into evidence, that aversion in a way hitherto unknown. From the beginning He was God's testimony, and therefore has He ever been the object of attack. His atoning work, His miraculous birth, His spotless nature, His real manhood, His Deity, His resurrection are openly denied in that which professes His name, and Christendom is at present fast drifting back into heathen darkness. And it is on this account I seek to draw attention to the answer furnished by Scripture to the question at the head of this paper ? "Is Jesus God?"

Apart altogether from the answer given by Scripture to this momentous question, one can very easily understand that were one person both God and Man, such an One would be, by the very nature of His being, beyond the understanding of men. Indeed, God Himself, apart from incarnation, is beyond our understanding, for the creature never can perfectly comprehend the Creator. It is our privilege and joy to know Him in His nature, so that we can say God is Love (1 John 4: 16), and this is the highest knowledge the creature can possess. But as to essential Deity, it is beyond the ken of man. He dwells in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen, nor is able to see (1 Tim. 6: 16). We know Him in the way in which it has pleased Him to declare Himself, and that is in His infinite love; but in His essential being, and in the mystery of His wondrous existence, we know nothing, can know nothing, and need to know nothing. What He has in His grace caused us to know fills our cup of happiness to overflowing.

But what must be the mystery of incarnate God? One truly Man, born of a woman, advancing in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men (Luke 2: 52); omniscient (John 2: 24, 25; Luke 11: 17; John 16: 30), yet limited in knowledge (Mark 13: 32); the Upholder of the universe (Col. 1: 17; Heb. 1: 3), yet in weakness here (John 4: 6); Creator (John 1: 3; Heb. 1: 10), yet taking a place in creation (Col. 1: 15). How could such contradictory attributes be reconciled by the finite mind of man, or by the mind of any creature, whoever he may be?

But this is just what the Scriptures assert as regards Jesus: "No one knoweth the Son, but the Father" (Matt. 11: 27). And though the reference to this text may be ridiculed as but a refuge for an unreasonable dogma, it is nevertheless the teaching of Scripture, and the only conclusion that a reasonable mind can come to regarding such a Person. The Father is said to be declared, and that in the very passage which tells us that no one knoweth the Son: "Neither knoweth any one the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him." We are never said not to know the Father, for this knowledge is the portion of even the babes in Christ (1 John 2: 13); but though we may come to the full knowledge of the Son of God, so far as He has been revealed (Eph. 4: 13), there are mysteries about His person which are impossible for us to know; hence we have, "No one knoweth the Son, but the Father." Indeed, were this statement absent from the page of inspiration, our reason would compel us to admit what it asserts, and of ourselves we would come to the conclusion that such a Person was unknowable by the creature. Seeming contradictions, which are matters of revelation, we can well believe, but not one of them can we understand. Indeed, it is little that we do know perfectly, possibly nothing at all, for our knowledge of the very simplest things is very limited.

But if we know that every question that was between us and a holy and righteous God has been gone into and settled to His satisfaction and that we have been brought into new and eternal relationships with God in Him who bore the judgment which rested upon us on account of our sins, and if that love of God which was declared in His death has been shed abroad in our hearts, and if we know the Father, and are able to take account of ourselves as the children of God, and confidently look for the coming of Christ to take us to the home He has prepared for us in the Father's house, we shall be very happy; we shall also be very thankful for the revelation He has so graciously given to us, and we shall be careful to approach that revelation with the reverence that springs from the knowledge of the holy character of that love that has made known to us everything that is for our good, and who has also given to us the Holy Spirit, in order that we may be able to enter into the deep things of God, so far as they are revealed.

That Jesus was a Man every true Christian will confess ? a real Man ? as truly a Man as was Adam or any of his race. A Man with spirit, soul, and body. A Man so like every other man in Judea that, as He sat by the well of Sychar, the woman who came to draw water took Him to be an ordinary Jew, resting from His journey, and waiting upon some one to come and draw a little water to quench His thirst. But "Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee," marks Him of as very different from all other men, as does also "that holy Thing" (Luke 1: 35), and Him "who knew no sin" (2 Cor. 5: 21). Still, that "there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus; who gave Himself a ransom for all" (1 Tim. 2: 5), settles the question of His manhood both in humiliation and also glory.

Nothing could be more plainly stated than the fact of the existence of Jesus previous to incarnation. He says, "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world" (John 16: 28); again, "The glory which I had with Thee before the world was"; and, "Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world" (John 17: 5, 24); also, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8: 58); again in John 6: 38, "I came down from heaven"; also verse 62, "What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before?" I might quote many other scriptures on the same subject, but any one of these is quite sufficient to prove the existence of Jesus before He was born into this world.

Now what was He before He became Man? What say the Scriptures as to this? In Philippians 2 the Holy Spirit of God carries us back to the point of departure, when He began that journey of humiliation which ended in the death of the cross. And what was He before He took the initial step upon that downward path? He was "in the form of God." Now, no one who was not God could be in the form of God, for the only other form we know of is that of a servant. A servant should have no will of his own; all his actions proceed from the will of another. But God acts from Himself, from His own will, without reference to another. Authority, dominion, and might belong to Him. The form of God is incompatible with that of a servant; indeed, the word here is bond-slave. Hence, when in the form of God, the act of emptying Himself and taking the form of a servant is viewed as proceeding from Himself: He "emptied Himself, taking a bondsman's form." It could not be otherwise, for He was under no other authority or obligation.

This is not true of any creature, for the most exalted creature is by the very fact of his creation a servant, and nothing but a servant. But the moment this glorious Person takes upon Himself the form of a servant obedience characterizes His every act: "He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." While in the form of God His every action must proceed from His own will; He could be neither influenced nor controlled by anything external to Himself; but when He became a servant everything is changed. His acts are as consistent with the form of a servant as they were with the form of God. For a creature to leave his first estate is to apostatize, but this the Son did, for to no one was He responsible.

But this emptying of Himself was not in any way the renunciation of Godhead, which could not be, but the giving up of the whole position that appertained to Godhead, and the becoming a servant to the Godhead for the Godhead's glory. This was not done by the Father, who remains in His eternal status and position unchanged. It is true of the Son only, who came to do the Father's will, and who did it at all cost to Himself. Tested to the very uttermost, His obedience was perfect. He took a servant's form, in order that He might do the will of God; and He did that will so perfectly that, in the judgment of God, no other place than the highest in the universe would he an adequate answer to the work which He accomplished. And this place He has as Man and the Servant of the Godhead.

John also, in the first chapter of his Gospel, carries us back before incarnation, right into eternity itself, that we may behold One who had no beginning, the Word, who in the beginning was, and was with God, and was God. And God, of course, He must be if He had no beginning. Next, "All things were made by Him." Then we have, "The Word was made flesh." Then John the Baptist's testimony is, "He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for He was before me." He declares the Father, and baptizes with the Holy Ghost. In chapter 2 He turns the water into wine, and thus manifests forth His glory; speaks of raising up the temple of His body when men have destroyed it; and knows what is in man. Chapter 3: He "came down from heaven." Chapter 4: He is omniscient ? tells the woman of Samaria all that ever she did. Chapter 5: He "makes Himself equal with God," and must be honoured even as the Father is honoured. But I need not go over more passages from this Gospel.

In Colossians we have the same statement made as in John 1. He is the Creator of all things, visible and invisible, and in 1 John 5. 20 He "is the true God, and eternal life."

But I will come to His Name. His name is Jesus, which means Jehovah the Saviour. And the reason He has been given this name is because "He shall save His people [Jehovah's people] from their sins." He is the object of angelic worship (Heb. 1). He is addressed as God by God upon the throne. He is the Creator: "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of Thine hands: they shall perish; but Thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail."

Need I quote more scripture? Surely not. The Word of God presents Him as a Man, a true, real Man, begotten of God, born of the Virgin, Son of God as begotten in time, and Servant to the Godhead. But the same Word of God presents Him as God over all, Eternal, in the form of God, acting from Himself without respect to any other authority, the Creator, Preserver, eternal Son with the eternal Father. Neither His Godhead nor His Manhood shall ever be given up. From the standpoint of the creature's finite mind innumerable mysteries and apparent contradictions connect themselves with His Person: for "no man knoweth the Son, but the Father." But the believing, subject soul knows very well that in connection with such a Person apparent contradictions must exist, and he is prepared for them: for indeed His person is just like His love, it surpasses knowledge.

The Unchanging One

"Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever." Hebrews 13: 8.

How cheering, refreshing, and establishing it is to be brought into contact with One who is infinite in goodness, grace, righteousness, holiness, and love; and who never can be different to that which, at our earliest introduction to Him, we found Him to be: One upon whom the lapse of ages leaves no mark of change! Such is Jesus, the subject of this Epistle, in which the old order, like a dissolving view, melts from before our vision, leaving to fill the scene that which is new and eternal, radiant with the glory of God.

And how often has the passage at the head of this paper spoken peace to the soul disquieted by the capricious and changeful nature of the selfish principles of fallen man who no longer ago than yesterday may have been brimming over with evidences of most tender affection, and to-day may, in spirit and deportment, have become as cold, cutting, and severe as the January east wind. It has ministered comfort, consolation, and encouragement to thousands perplexed and weary with the ever varying condition of things with which we are compassed in this world of restlessness, confusion, envy and falsehood. It presents to the shipwrecked and hopeless mariner an island of peace in the midst of a turbulent and treacherous ocean. It is a shelter for the battered and toil-worn wayfarer, alone and lost in the pathless and storm swept wilderness. It is an invulnerable citadel, into which the besieged and war-broken may retreat, and thus escape the anguish which is invariably the lot of those who foolishly trust their happiness to the vicissitudes of a world in rebellion against God and agitated by the fell destroyer of the human race.

How good it is to be brought to the knowledge of this changeless Jesus! He came into this world, which was without moral foundations, that man should have a firm rock upon which he might plant the foot of faith, and be assured that amid the crash of everything that seems stable in the universe, it could not be shaken. He came to illuminate the benighted vision with the gracious light of God, and to warm into life the cold dead human heart with the holy love of God. See Him at the well of Sychar, and hear Him speak of the gift of God to a poor sinful creature, for whom no one else had a word of comfort. There He is the Giver of the living water, which alone can give satisfaction to the thirsty soul. See Him in the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7), the Creditor in the midst of His debtors, speaking only of forgiveness.

See Him at the grave of Lazarus, the Resurrection and the Life, mingling tears of sympathy with those of the two bereaved women, before His almighty voice awoke the echoes of the dull domain of death and Hades, and called back the dead man to life. See Him amid a multitude of publicans and sinners, and hearken to the words of grace which proceed out of His lips, until you hear the throbbing of the heart of God, as He enfolds in the arms of His immortal love a prodigal come back from the far country, naked except for those rags which bore witness of his rebellious and disgraceful career. See Him in the temple and synagogue, and in the streets and lanes of the city, and hear Him tell in the ear of devil-deceived men and women the grace and love of God.

See how He feels for the diseased, the demon-possessed, the blind, and the broken-hearted, until you learn what those mean who say: "Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." See Him amid the gloom of Golgotha, dying for the ungodly, and praying for His murderers; and as you contemplate Him, "stricken, smitten of God and afflicted," may you be able to say: "He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed" (Isa. 53). And then think of Him as the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Oh, the deep, deep blessedness of knowing Him ? learning Him in His pathway down here, and knowing that He is just the same blessed, living, lowly, gracious Saviour now that He is on the Father's throne. May both reader and writer get to know Him better every day of our pilgrim journey through this world, until we see Him face to face in courts of light.

But consider the setting of this short, simple, peace imparting sentence. In verse 7 we are exhorted to remember them who had (not have) the rule over us, who spoke to us the word of God. They have gone from our midst. Their voices are no longer heard amongst us ministering the living Word, but we are to call them to mind; and considering the issue of their conversation we are to imitate their faith. Then in verse 9 we are warned against those who would introduce divers and strange doctrines. Between that needful exhortation and this very wholesome warning we have the brilliant and comforting truth shining like a silver star: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever."

Whether it be the Gospel to the world or ministry to the saints, Christ must ever be the subject (Rom. 16: 25; Acts 28: 31). He is the living Word, the spirit of all Scripture. It was Christ the apostles preached and taught, and there is nothing else for saint or sinner to-day; and He never changes. John, writing to the babes, says, "Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning" (John 2: 24). The devil brings in novelties, and the human mind loves them and revels in them. And just because men love them, they flatter themselves that they are parts of the truth, but alas, they are but "sporting themselves with their own deceivings." That which turns away the heart from Christ is a snare of the devil. We are told we must not hold too obstinately to old forms, but must advance with the times; but the whole truth has come to light in Jesus, and there is no change in Him.

It is affirmed by men of science that signs of decay are visible in some of the heavenly bodies. The sun seems to be giving evidence that he has passed the meridian of his years; the moon is a defunct world, and the earth is in the sear and yellow leaf. This is just what Scripture tells us in those remarkable words which were addressed to Jesus, when in the sorrow of His soul He drew near to the gates of death, stricken for the transgression of believing sinners: "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of Thine hands: they shall perish, but Thou remainest: and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed" (Ps. 102: 25-27; Heb. 1: 10-12). Peter tells us that the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, the elements melting with fervent heat, and that the earth also and all the works that are therein shall be burned up, but that we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness (2 Peter 3).

The nature of the change which will pass over the universe has not been revealed to us, we do not need to know it. We are confident, however, of this, that He who built it at the beginning to serve His purpose, and Who in infinite wisdom allowed the enemy to defile it with the stain of sin, is able to cleanse it from the presence of that which is so hateful to Him and so ruinous to the creature, and to fill it with light and blessing, and make it the abode of righteousness. To accomplish this, and to set man in new and eternal relationships with God, He laid down His life. The Creator is the Redeemer. He who stooped down to know what human weakness was, and who had His days shortened, is the same One who then, as now, was upholding all things by the word of His power. What creature mind could compass such a thought? No man knoweth the Son.

But not only must the material universe undergo a change, a much greater change must pass over man himself. The old order no longer occupies us; angels, Moses, Aaron, the tabernacle, the sacrifices, the covenant ? in a word, the whole earthly order disappears before the face of Jesus, and we are exhorted to abandon the shadow for the substance, types which pass away for realities which abide for ever. And for this state of things a change must take place upon us. We are heirs of a kingdom which cannot be moved; but except a man be born again he shall never see it (John 3). Man must have a new nature, as born of God, or perish for ever.

The wonderful thing about man is that he can be changed. I do not for a moment doubt that God, who knew the end from the beginning, and had His counsels formed with regard to all His works before He put in operation His creative power, so made man that he could be changed in the whole principle of his being. We are not told anything about angels to lead us to suppose such beings capable of being changed. Some of them have fallen away from God, and an opportunity of salvation does not seem to be granted to them. Man is the creature chosen of God in whom His workmanship of grace is to be displayed. What He has wrought as a Saviour will be brought to light in ransomed human beings.

And what a change He is capable of making in His rebellious and ruined creature! Hear what He says to the headstrong, intractable Simon Peter: "When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not" (John 21: 18). And what made that change? Age? Never. As to nature it is ever true: "The child is father of the man." That change was wrought in Peter in the school of God, and by Him who Himself changes not.

And consider the insolent overbearing Saul of Tarsus; that proud, self-righteous, Christ-hating Pharisee. Wolfish in his nature, and getting the first taste of blood at the martyrdom of Stephen, he ever after seeks to satiate his ravenous appetite with the slaughter of the sheep of Jesus, until met on the highway of his merciless career by Him before whose subduing power nothing is able to stand. What meekness, gentleness, patience, tenderness, and lowliness were wrought in this striking subject of the grace of God! What ceaseless solicitude for the salvation of the lost! What care for the flock of Christ! What devotedness to that holy Name once so hated and persecuted by him! And this wonderful change effected by Him who is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever!

And has not the reader, as well as the writer, come under the changing influence of this changeless Person? From that throat, which was once an open sepulchre is exhaled the perfume of immortal love. That mouth, once "full of cursing and bitterness" is now replete with blessing. That tongue, long accustomed to "deceit," now spreads abroad the word of truth and life. Those lips, which once concealed the deadly "poison of asps," are now pregnant with life-imparting grace. Those feet, once "swift to shed blood," now "shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace," run joyfully in the pathways of mercy. A new power, that of the Holy Spirit, has taken possession of the earthen vessel, the members have become instruments of righteousness, the will of God is done, and the soul finds eternal rest. The glory of the Lord, with all its life-giving and attractive power, shines full upon our hitherto benighted hearts, and we become changed into the same image (2 Cor. 3).

The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ

"For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich." 2 Cor. 8: 9.

The Spirit of God directs us in the Holy Scriptures. It is there we learn of Him who is our life. It is there that heavenly life is portrayed before our renewed minds and hearts; and it is there we are assured that that life is our own. It is seen in perfection in Him, unadulterated by the intrusion of sinful flesh, for in Him there was no taint of evil; but whatever it may be mingled with in our practical ways, by our forgetfulness to keep the judgment of the cross upon our rebellious wills, it is ours by the quickening operation of God, and we have, in God's account, no other life. And all the exhortations, injunctions, and commandments are to give direction to that life, in order that in its own spotless purity it may be reproduced by us in this evil world.

And it is just the transcendent qualities of this life that the Apostle labours to bring to light in these Corinthians, to whom he writes this epistle. He would have them think of the poor Jewish saints away in Jerusalem, and not only to think of them, but to send them a thank-offering, seeing the Gospel had come out from them to the nations of the earth. And to stimulate that which was of God in them Christ is brought forward as their great example. "For ye know," he says, "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be rich."

This was not some new doctrine he was bringing under their notice, which they had never before heard of. It was not a thing they did not know, for he tells them they did know it. But though they had heard of it when the Gospel had been first proclaimed in their ears, they required to be reminded of it. We are, alas, too much like Pharaoh's chief butler, who forgot the service rendered to him by Joseph, and left him languishing in the prison, while he enjoyed the favour of his royal master.

We need to be constantly on the watch lest we forget the One who has so greatly befriended us. We know His grace. We heard of it first in the Glad Tidings, of which He is the subject; and it was that grace that attracted us to Him at the first. And how often since then we have told Him:

"We know the grace that brought Thee down,

Down from that bliss on high,

To meet our ruined souls in need,

On Calvary's cross to die."

Yes, we know it, but let us not forget it. And may it have all its own wondrous power over our poor forgetful minds and hearts

"Though He was rich." Think of those riches. Men imagine themselves wealthy when they have grasped a little more than others of the perishable treasures of earth, the possession of which is often their ruin bodily and spiritually. But who could rightly estimate the wealth of the Creator Himself? And all things owe their existence to Jesus. What wealth of glory, dominion, power, and blessing was His! What dignity, majesty, greatness, grandeur, magnificence! What unspeakable happiness, immaculate affections, goodly fellowship, in light unto which no man can approach! There, in the serene, secure, unassailable unparagoned, and ineffable sweetness of the Father's love, He had His eternal abiding-place! That home of infinite and unparalleled delight, where love eternal is met by love eternal, in the infoldment, reciprocity, and intransmutability of its own infinite and deathless nature! A scene into which no creature curiosity could penetrate, nor imagination call into existence, but best described in the words addressed by the Son to the Father: "The glory which I had with Thee before the world was"; and, "Thou lovest me before the foundation of the world" (John 17: 5, 24). And yet for our sakes He became poor!

And into what depths of poverty did His grace cause Him to descend! At His birth He was laid in a manger, while the great people of the earth, who were but the work of His hands, and in addition to that rebels against God, poured noisily and haughtily into the comforts of the inn, where there was no room for Him; an early indication that the heart of this great world would be found securely locked against the entrance of this heavenly stranger.

Later on He could say that the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had roosting-places, but that He had nowhere to lay His head. There was to be no brightening of His circumstances. From a human standpoint the way before Him seemed to darken into impenetrable gloom. The barrenness of desert places, the loneliness of Olivet, the silence of Gethsemane: these all were privileged witnesses of the Man of Sorrows. Bethany alone sought to make up for the carelessness and base ingratitude of a thankless and hypocritical nation; but the very solitariness and extreme isolation of that sweet and hallowed spot became, on this account, the greatest witness of all to the utter poverty of Jesus, for it was all He had down here. And it was all for our sakes

But the terrible and unparalleled nature of that poverty must draw its grim, terrific folds still more closely around this lonely Man. The arid waste of man's indifference to the precious dews of heavenly grace, shed with such lavish hand in word and work upon a crushed and degraded people, must to its utmost boundary be trodden by those weary feet, whose every movement preached to deaf and disdainful ears the Gospel of peace.

For love, sown with prodigal extravagance, He must reap hatred. The desertion of many of His professed followers He must with sorrow of heart witness. The treachery of one of His most intimate followers, who with hypocritical kiss betrays Him to His enemies, He must bear in silence. Another, who professed the greatest devotion to Him, He must hear denying Him with oaths and curses. The plight of the rest of His poor disciples, like sheep in the presence of the wolf, beats in upon His breaking heart with merciless severity. He gives His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that plucked off the hair, and He hides not His face from shame and spitting. And it was all for our sakes!

But the depths of poverty that were yet to be explored by this Divine and blameless victim open up before His soul with a terror that infinitely excels all that the imagination of man has ever pictured. A horror beyond all human thought appalling confronts this lonely Sufferer. Nailed to a gibbet, numbered with transgressors, surrounded by the rude Roman soldiery, His cross girt about by a mocking, insulting, blaspheming, howling rabble, He looks for some to take compassion, and finding none, He turns to God, and by Him He is abandoned. Horror heaps itself upon horror; but this, the greatest horror of all, overtakes Him in the midst of His deep distress and anguish of soul. This is the climax of that poverty which began in the manger at Bethlehem. Here the lowest rung in this fearful ladder of humiliation is reached. Here the bottomless is bottomed. Poverty reaches its limit, a limit without a limit. Betrayal, desertion, denial, ingratitude, reproach, spend their utmost and most merciless fury against the Son of God. In the barren, weary, wintry waste of a God-hating world, impaled upon a gibbet, without a disciple, without a sympathizer, without a friend; in the unutterable loneliness of abandonment by earth and heaven and with a heart broken by reproach, the storm of divine wrath against sin beats with infinite power upon His defenceless and thorn-crowned head. And it was all for our sakes!

"That ye through His poverty might be rich." This was the cause of His wondrous journey from Bethlehem to Golgotha; from the manger to the gibbet. The grace of His heart was the fount from which flowed forth all this down-stooping; this self-forgetfulness; this self-abnegation; this renunciation of uncountable riches; this self-abasement; this unmurmuring acceptation of the servant's pathway, with all that was involved in it; this submission to the cross, the wrath, the judgment due to sin. It was all undertaken, and patiently borne, that we through His poverty might be rich.

And O, what infinite wealth has come to us through His great poverty! We have been enriched in righteousness, in eternal life, in holiness, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, in sonship, in the possession of all things, in union with Christ, in fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ, and in the hour of His coming again to find our eternal home with Him in the Father's house, where we shall see Him as He is, and be like Him, to the eternal satisfaction and delight, not only of our hearts, but of the heart of the Father and the Son.

But in Philippians this grace of the Lord Jesus is presented in another way. It is not what He has done for our sakes, but for the Godhead glory, but with a similar object in view is it brought to our notice, that is, as our great example. "Let this mind be in you." What mind? The mind that was in Christ Jesus. The grace that came to light in Him down here is to be a mighty power in our souls, reproducing Him in this world out of which He has been rejected. He was full of grace and truth, and of His fullness all believers have received. Hence that grace is to give character to our lives down here. It is to be operative in our souls.

How has it come to light in Him as presented here? This is most beautifully brought under our notice. "Who being in the form of God." Here, first of all, we are privileged to contemplate Him in the outward position and semblance of God; the embodiment of might, authority, majesty, supremacy, and everything else that belongs to God. Yet not counting this a position to maintain at all costs, but necessity having arisen for the intervention of One mighty enough to undertake a work for the glory of the Godhead, He divests Himself of this outward form, and takes the form of a servant.

Here He stands in opposition to the first and fallen head of the human race, who, though created by God and placed as His servant in a very exalted position, grasped at Divinity, and fell headlong under the power of death. Jesus when in the form of God empties Himself, taking a bondsman's form, taking His place in the likeness of men. And this is the mind that is to take possession of us.

Then, having been found in fashion as a man, He humbles Himself, becoming obedient unto death, and that, too, the death of the cross. When He took the form of a servant there was no unreality about it. When He was in the form of man He was just as truly a servant, as when in the form of God He was truly Master. And as obedience ? unquestioning, uncomplaining obedience ? is what is due from every servant, so was He obedient to God in all relations of life. He says, "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of Him that sent me" (John 6: 38). And this He did perfectly without any respect for the consequences to Himself. He uttered no word but that which was given Him from the Father. He did no work but that which the Father gave Him to do. He went nowhere but at the express command of the Father (John 3: 34; John 12: 49; John 10: 32; John 6: 57).

In Him I learn man's true place as set in intelligent relationship with God. Humility of mind, and unqualified obedience to God, regardless of where the path, marked out by God for my feet to tread, may lead to. The will of God is to be done irrespective of the consequences. There must be no murmuring, no complaining. We are not to reason why we are led in certain directions, nor why we have been plunged into circumstances that are both difficult and painful. All we require to be assured of is, that these things are God's will for us. The issues are entirely His concern. "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."

In Corinthians what He did is said to have been all for our sakes. Here in Philippians it is all for the sake of the Godhead. But, as I have already intimated, we learn in both cases the effect God would have this grace produce in us, which came so perfectly to light in Him. I learn in Philippians that I am to place myself at the disposal of God, and to tread the path He has marked out for my feet, regardless of where it may lead; and in Corinthians the saints are, under God, to be everything to me, and for them I am to lay down my life. But for all this we must draw from the inexhaustible supply of grace that is found in Himself.

In the answer of God to this self-sacrificing life of Jesus we learn His infinite appreciation of it. "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Here we have His estimate of the devoted, faithful, self-sacrificing spirit in which that work was undertaken, and carried through to the finish, without the slightest semblance of regret that it had been undertaken, or of failure in the accomplishment of it. "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams" (1 Sam. 15: 22).

What an example for us the Son of God is! May we keep our eye steadily fixed upon Him, and may we be ready at all times to pass unsparing judgment upon the slightest departure from the path marked out for us, whether that path be with reference to obedience to God, or love to His people. These are difficult days, and to be here for His pleasure we require to be "strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus."

The Cross

"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." Galatians 6: 14.

It has been truly said, there is nothing like the cross. It stands and shall stand for ever, in all its solitary greatness and grandeur, in the centre of the circle of eternity, the wonder of every intelligent creature, and the pillar upon which is indelibly inscribed the evil and the hatred of the fallen being, and the goodness and love of God. Out from amid the dim shadows of the past it looms upon the vision, in all its brightness and blackness, truth and treachery, sunshine and shadow, faithfulness and falseness, righteousness and sin, judgment and mercy, compassion and cruelty, love and hatred. By its light the heart of heaven is revealed, and the deepest depths of the abyss of evil are discovered. The blessing and the curse there lift their voices together.

There welters foul the inky sea of human guilt, and there the unsullied ocean of divine grace swallows up everything with its swelling tides. Nothing in the past can compare with it, neither can anything in the future arise to rival it.

There appears the greatest sin that man ever committed, and there is the mightiest display of infinite mercy on the part of God that ever came to light. It is the place where man was tested in every spring of his moral being, and it is where the compassions of God were sounded to their depths. It is where the hostile fallen creature lifted impious hand, and struck at his Creator with deadly intent, and it is where the answer of the Creator was given in unspeakable and infinite love. It is the witness of wickedness impossible to be exceeded by man, and it is the evidence of favour which God Himself could never repeat. The volume of wrath, curse, judgment, and woe which encircled Golgotha, not the regions of the lost could enclose; and heaven itself shall not be vast enough to circumscribe the love, the grace, and the mercy which have been there expressed.

There the whole question of good and evil has been gone into, solved, and settled for ever. There all the forces of good and evil were gathered together. There sin rose up in all its power against God, and there God came out in judgment against sin. Never before had the rebel creature dared so much. Never before had sin so behaved itself in the universe of God. Its opportunity had come: the Son of God was in the hands of sinners. All hell was moved. The fit moment had arrived to cast off the restraint of heaven. The raging of the nations, the plotting of the Jews, the malice of the world, all were directed against Christ. They will not have this Man to rule over them. The infernal forces were rallied. The principalities and powers mustered all their might for the final combat. The infernal regions sent forth their last warrior, and the whole phalanx of wickedness prepared for this desperate encounter, in which quarter was neither to be given nor taken, and by which the victory for good or evil was to be finally decided.

"Man's hour."

Jesus speaks of it as man's "hour" (Luke 22: 53). From the fall until that hour man had been held in check by the restraining hand of God. Previous to this he had been mercifully prevented from carrying out the full thought of his heart. He had corrupted the earth, filled it with violence, shed innocent blood, broken the law, worshipped demons, slain the servants of God, and hated Christ come into the world in grace and love. But his enmity had been under the control of God, and he was prevented from doing all that he felt inclined to do. Moved by the causeless hatred of his hard and godless heart, he had been often ready to stone Jesus, but somehow he found himself unable to carry out his murderous intention. But now his "hour" was come; the limit which had been assigned to his wrath was removed; the avenues through which his evil nature was to show itself were thrown open; the bit and bridle, which had in measure been a check upon his impious goings, were cast aside. He felt for the first time in his fallen history what real liberty was, as far as freedom from the intervention of God went. From divine control he is free and unfettered, and the universe must be spectators of the use to which his liberty is to be put. Alas, for poor man! His liberty was his ruin, as it ever is. Like the Gadarene herd of swine, his race was down a declivity, reckless, rapid, ruinous; and it was the same power which drove both to destruction.

What characterized man's "hour" was the "power of darkness," he must be guarded by the power of God, or driven to destruction by the devil. What did his liberty profit him? In his freedom he was the tool of the devil. Proud, ambitious, rebellious, and devoid of confidence in Him who had sent His only begotten Son to save him, he would look after his own happiness. He objected to God's concerning Himself about him. He would go his own way, and take care of himself. Horrible insanity! It was, in one sense, true that he had never before been as free, but yet, in another sense, it was equally true he never had been such a slave: his very freedom threw him completely into the hands of Satan.

The malice of the Jew astonished the pagan governor, and the vacillation and cowardice of Pilate have astonished the world. In the betrayer the treachery of the human heart comes so terribly into evidence, that even natural self-respect abominates the deed; and so loathsome is the action, even to the man who committed it, that when it is consummated, his very existence becomes intolerable to himself, and in despair he goes out and hangs himself.

Ere man's hour had dawned, lanterns and torches and weapons, borne by men of strength and determination, were to Peter little more than rotten wood, but when that hour had really set in, the innocent question of a maid belonging to the high priest's palace, which would have placed him in his right relation to Jesus, fills him with indescribable terror; and this son of Jonas, pre-eminently courageous at other times and a real lover of the Lord, denies that ever he knew Him, and that with oaths and curses. The other disciples, though also boastful on the Mount of Olives, are now nowhere to be seen. The disciple whom Jesus loved is with his Master at the trial, but is there under the patronage of the high priest (John 18: 15). It was man's hour, and the power of darkness, and no one could stand then except in the might of God. What an hour it was!

Every type of humanity was there, and every human soul insane in his enmity against the lowly Sufferer. We see Pilate subjecting Him to the indignity of stripes, though compelled to confess he had found in Him no fault at all; Herod with his men of war setting Him at naught, crowning Him with thorns, and bending the knee in mockery before Him; priests, whose place was intercession, judging and accusing Him; the law, which He had honoured and magnified, turned against Him with the object of destroying Him. A robber is preferred to the One who with lavish kindness had showered benefits upon the people, and a murderer is chosen rather than the Prince of Life. For the bread He fed them with, they repay Him with buffets; and for the healing of their sick, they requite Him with a languishing death upon the cross; and for the words of grace which fell from His blessed lips, they heap anathemas upon His thorn-crowned head. What was the meaning of it? Not one of them could have given an intelligent answer to the question. In that "hour" the high priest's palace was truly pandemonium, for there the council of demons was convened.

Man was controlled by a power of which he knew nothing. He had cast off God who had hitherto restrained him for his good, and now he is under the control of one who drives him headlong to destruction, but in a way which, after all, is the way he rejoices to travel. Terrorized by his fears, inflamed by his lusts, maddened by his hatred, carried away by his pride, hardened in conscience by familiarity with sin, pitiless in his dealings with everything divine, and all his fallen, cruel, and corrupt lusts and passions wrought upon and lashed into fury by the influences of hell, nothing will satisfy him but the humiliation, agony, and death of Him who had gone about doing good and healing all who were oppressed of the devil. It was man's hour indeed and it was an hour of unrestrained wickedness.

"The power of darkness."

The spiritual world comes to light in the material. We hear no trumpet blast from the prince of darkness; no rattle of artillery wakes the echoes of Zion; no thunder of demon-driven chariot of war shakes the midnight cloud; no martial tread of troops in armour clad salutes the ear: yet never since the creation of the worlds was there a moment in which spiritual forces were so agitated. The abyss of evil poured forth its myriads. Golgotha swarmed with forces innumerable; but no more noise was made than is made by the planets in their courses around their fiery centre. The roar of their thunder, if heard at all, is heard in the false and baseless accusations made by Israel's rulers, and in the howling of the ignorant and brutal rabble, who surged around the palace of the high priest, crying, "Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him! Crucify Him!" and in their ribald jests and rowdy blatter as they hurry to the place of execution.

It has been said that hell laughed, but it is not quite correct. In the estimation of the powers of evil it was no doubt a triumph to have man so thoroughly blinded to the fact that he was committing soul-suicide, but laughter was, at that moment, far from the heart of him who was directing the battle against God and His Christ. Hell has never yet been able to laugh, nor will it ever be able. Hell has been too busy hitherto to have time to laugh, and it has never been so confident of victory as to hold the enemy in such supreme contempt. God laughs at the impotence of man and hell combined, for He is omnipotent and can never know defeat. But Satan has too often seen his plans frustrated and his wisdom checkmated, and his power annulled, to be able to have the laugh of God. At the cross no one laughed but man, the guilty, giddy tool of the devil, and his merriment was all indulged at the expense of the infinite sorrow of the Son of God, his Saviour and his Friend.

The Sorrow of Jesus.

And how great was His sorrow! It is said the higher you go in creation, the sensations of pain are ever more acutely felt, and the lower you go down they become gradually less distinctly felt. But what must it have been to the Firstborn of all creation, to Him who felt everything perfectly! There was nothing hard or callous in the blessed sensitive nature of Jesus. He felt to the utmost every indignity that was heaped upon Him. He was the song of the drunkard, despised and rejected of men, laughed to scorn, insulted and derided by those for whose woes His compassions knew no bounds. His betrayal by Judas, denial by Peter, desertion by His followers, wounded Him to the quick of the soul. In such calamities men are often supported by their pride. Ingratitude, insult, and blow, are often endured with an apparent equanimity that is surprising. It may be that within, the heart is like a furnace of fire, but a haughty spirit and indomitable will batten down the hatches upon the inner workings of the soul, so that there is no escape for the fury that rages inwardly. But in the meek and lowly Jesus pride had no place. No vengeful feelings needed to be suppressed; no angry spirit required to be controlled. "He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth" (Isa. 53). He says, "I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting" (Isa. 50). In Psalm 22 we hear Him recounting all His enemies, and pouring the burden of His griefs into His Father's ear. "Bulls of Bashan" were there; "Dogs" had compassed Him about; the "Assembly of the wicked" had enclosed Him; there was the "Lion's mouth" and there were also the "Horns of the unicorns."

As I have intimated, all the evil of the universe was drawn together against Him. Satan was there in all his might, man was there as his willing instrument of wickedness, God was there in judgment against sin, and the holy Sufferer was there, made sin, and dealt with by God as sin deserved. The fountains of the great deep of divine judgment were broken up, the windows of heaven were opened, and the mighty tempest of wrath, and curse, and vengeance against sin beat upon His devoted head. He sank in deep mire where there was no standing. Like Jonah, only in spiritual woes, He went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about Him for ever. Deep called unto deep at the noise of God's waterspouts, all the waves and billows went over Him, the waters reached to His soul. But all His infinite and unutterable woes are embodied in that cry, which was wrung from His heart amid the three hours of thick darkness: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"

But there, and then, every evil principle was judged. Satan was discovered as the prince and god of the world, and his power was for ever broken. The wisdom of the world was seen to be foolishness with God; it had never arrived at the knowledge of Him, and when He was revealed before its eyes it knew Him not. Man was seen to be incorrigibly wicked, and at heart a hater of God. God was declared in perfect goodness and love on behalf of man, in spite of the hostility with which it was met by those whom it had singled out as its objects. Jesus was there, the obedient One, glorifying God even when abandoned by Him. He had come to do the will of God, and let the cost be what it might to Himself, He would not be turned aside. It is not for the creature to find fault with the Creator; it is not for the servant to dispute the wisdom of his master's will; it is not for man to call in question the ways of God: and the place of a servant, and man, Jesus had taken, and He was perfect in all. To Him be everlasting praise

The Glory of the Lord Jesus.

At that cross the Son of Man was glorified (John 13: 31). There the offering was parted in pieces, the springs of His moral nature were all laid bare, and nothing but infinite perfection was brought to light. Not a pulse in His whole moral being but beat true to Him who sent Him. In Him there was found no selfish consideration, no estimating of things by the way in which they affected Himself. With Him everything was viewed in relation to God. The work given Him to do was done without a murmur. There were no reasonings and disputings found with Him: "That the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do" (John 14: 31). Blessed, perfect Master and Lord.

Before He took the place of a servant, before a body was prepared for Him, He knew what was involved in it. He knew all beforehand. He fully understood the dread weight of that judgment, which He gave Himself to bear, before ever He was made in the likeness of men. He was well aware that to take the form of a servant meant that He must obey without question every commandment which He received; but at all costs the will of God must be done, and therefore, He, "being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" (Phil. 2: 6-8). How brightly the moral glory and excellency of the Lord Jesus shine amid the darkness of Golgotha. Let me remind the reader that there betrayed, denied, deserted, beset by a lawless world which was influenced by the power of darkness, mocked, insulted, and above all, forsaken of God, He stands absolutely ALONE; and in that hour, and when alone, He bore up in might divine the pillars of the moral universe, and laid a basis upon which they could be established, beyond the possibility of ever again being shaken by any enemy of God.

And God was Glorified in Him.

His righteousness was established, His holiness maintained, His authority respected, His truth vindicated, and His love declared. That dread battle between the forces of good and evil was fought out in the cross of that lowly humbled Saviour, who gave Himself that all might be there and then gone into and settled to the glory and praise of God, settled never to be opened again. The conflict is over, the powers of evil crushed. God has triumphed.

Every enemy has been smitten. God has wrought righteousness, and the field is His. The devil has been annulled, death destroyed, sin has been dealt with, our sins put away, our old man crucified with Him; the ground has been as completely cleared of every enemy as though no enemy had ever existed. The cleansing of the heavens and the earth from the presence of evil is now only a matter of detail, angelic power will be able to accomplish that (Rev. 12: 7-9; Matt. 13: 49, 50). The moral question has all been settled in the cross of Jesus; and the believer is now identified in life and nature, relationship and favour, with the One who stood, in that terrible hour, faithful to God.

The nature and character of God have, with respect to evil, been vindicated and cleared. The fact that the creature is the author of it, and that it remains with him, is placed beyond all question. That good is alone with God, that He is good; and that He has ever dwelt in goodness, grace, and love toward man has been abundantly proved; as it has also been demonstrated that the man after the flesh, of the order of Adam, the fallen head, would not have God in any character in which He might present Himself. But the cross is the end of that man judicially before God. His trial came to an end there. He was proven to be, in his very nature, enmity against God, and now no longer is the man of that order, and in that standing, in any relationship with God; he has been already condemned and set aside judicially.

But the cross has also been the crucible in which the moral worth and excellencies of the second Man and last Adam have been tested to the very uttermost, and where the blessed fact has been established beyond all dispute that in Him there was no dross, no substance offensive to God, but everything in the highest degree acceptable. From that cross such a sweet savour went up before God as has effectually taken the place of the obnoxious odours arising from a corrupt world. God has been glorified in the spot where He was dishonoured, and the gain to Him, through the cross of His Son, has been infinitely greater than all the loss He had sustained through the first and erring head, as well as through the wickedness of all his descendants.

And our place, portion, and relationship are all in and with this exalted Christ, risen from the dead. He is our life. We are to be in His image. His Father is our Father; and His God is our God. The love, and grace, and favour in which He is, we are in also; for we are graced in Him. "As He is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4: 17). May we follow in the footsteps of that blessed apostle and disciple who could so truthfully say, "What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: that I may know Him" (Phil. 3). And also, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world" (Gal. 6). The person and the cross of Christ were everything to him: may they be everything to us.

Propitiation

"Jesus Christ the righteous: He is the propitiation for our sins." 1 John 2: 2.

To us, who are by nature Gentiles, the whole fabric of Scripture authority hangs upon the truth of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If He is not risen we are in our sins, and all that have placed any hope in Him in past dispensations have perished (1 Cor. 15). But if the resurrection of the Lord Jesus witnesses to the truth and greatness of His person, it also bears witness to the perfection of the sacrifice which He offered to God.

The Death of the Believer.

We know but little of all that the death of the body involves, and it becomes those who feel that they are justly liable to it, to speak of it with that reverence with which it should be treated as the judgment of a holy and righteous God. Short of the coming of Christ it is the most blessed thing that could happen to a believer, for it is "to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5: 8); but this does not alter the fact that it was brought into the world by sin, and that it is sin's wages, and the just conclusion of a life which is in its nature enmity against God. Thank God we have a life in Christ which is beyond its power. Were it not for this it would be an unparalleled calamity. Through the mercy of God it is gain to the one who has Christ as his Saviour (Phil. 1: 21).

As to the second death, the mighty witness to that is Golgotha. Had there been nothing there but the cruel death of crucifixion, most thoroughly would it have been proven how little that holy Sufferer was in the power of His own exhortation to His disciples, when He told them, "Be not afraid of them that kill the body" (Luke 12), or when He said that he who did not hate his own life could not be His disciple (chap. 14). In a book published not so long ago it is said, "Many a British soldier has died as brave a death as Jesus." If it were only a question of being undaunted in the presence of death, why not say, "Many a murderer"? There was not anything, nor could there be anything of the nature of bravery or heroism in the death of Jesus. He, though the Creator and upholder of everything, had taken the place of the servant to the Godhead, that the counsels of the Father should be fulfilled, and this involved the meeting of God about the question of sin.

Hence the "strong crying and tears" in the garden of Gethsemane. No heroism comes to light in that lonely hour, when beyond the torrent of Cedron He encountered the powers of darkness, and entered into conflict with him who had the might of death. All that He was to meet in the three hours of darkness on the summit of Golgotha was anticipated in spirit, when the sorrow of His soul told itself out in a sweat of blood, which in great drops sprinkled the ground upon which He knelt in supplication to the Father.

The State of Men and the World.

I have already pointed out a fact which is patent to everybody, and that is, that man is an evil being. This requires no proving; the state of the world proves it to the hilt. And the strange thing about it is, that the life of each man is largely taken up with laying the blame of the state of things at his neighbour's door. The rich blame the slothfulness and improvidence of the poor, and the poor blame the avariciousness and niggardliness of the rich; and the verdict of every human being is, that the world is hard, selfish, and cruel, and to be cast upon its mercy is a fate too terrible to be expressed in words. Men may go on with their inventions, which are supposed to decorate the system of things down here, and ameliorate the condition of the human race; but death goes on with his work, and hearts go on breaking, and people go on murmuring against one another, and violence, oppression, falsehood, and corruption characterize everything ? and after this the judgment.

Has God done anything to meet this state of things? Some tell us men are working out their own salvation; others, that mankind is a kind of mirror in which God (which is the Universal Life) is contemplating Himself; others, that He is doing the best He can, experimenting as a potter with the clay, making vessels, scrapping them, and always improving; but the theories advanced to quiet the consciences of men, and lead them to destruction, are almost innumerable.

What do the Scriptures say?

"God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). This is the life spoken of in the gospel; a life in relationship with God known in the love of His heart; a life untainted by sin, selfishness, lust or pride; a righteous, holy, spotless, divine life. What a burst of sunshine, comforting, health-giving, life-giving! How powerful to rejoice, and gladden the heart! How priceless and how peace-imparting, compared with those pretentious sparks struck from the atheistical brain of men grovelling in their native gloom; those wretched ignis-fatui which allure the unwary multitude to destruction

But before this life could be communicated to man there was the question of sin to be gone into; for it lay between God and the blessing of the fallen creature. This is the way things are presented in Scripture. The judgment of sin, which lay upon the sinner, the righteous Judge could not ignore. He could not treat it as of no account: it must be atoned for; the judgment which was its due must be borne. If the creature be made to bear it he is lost for ever; he could never come out of it; God would lose His creature, and the devil would gain a victory.

This cannot be. But from whence is the relief to come? Man is under sin, the slave of the devil and of his own lusts, without strength, wandering in darkness and error, and in his nature enmity against God. Can God do anything on his behalf? Can He intervene as deliverer, and at the same time maintain His righteousness, holiness, truth, and majesty? That He will not act arbitrarily in moral questions, so as to upset and overthrow all the trust that His elect, holy, and intelligent creation have in Himself, can well be believed of a Creator who is supremely good. If these questions, which affect the very foundations, as well as the structure of the moral universe, have been raised, they must be settled in a way that will bring a sense of security into the heart of every created intelligence who desires to be faithful to his Creator.

God's Intention.

And these questions have been raised ? sin has raised them. And though it would have been easy enough for God to have cast man from His face, and left him to the consequences of his rebellion, there was that which never would have been brought to light, which the blessed God intended should be the supreme joy of every heart, and the subject of worship and of song through eternal ages; and that was His unspeakable love. The fall of man furnished the occasion of bringing this to light, and in the way in which God has taken to redeem His creature ? the only possible way ? every moral question has been gone into and settled to the glory of God, and to the peace and assured confidence of every faithful heart. And that way has been by the cross of His Son, who gave Himself a ransom for all, that a way of salvation should be opened up for all; and thus have the kindness and love of God to man been expressed. But let us see if this is a new idea, belonging only to that which has been called the gospel age, or whether it has been testified beforehand in prophetic writings.

God's Way Announced.

No sooner did the fall of man take place than a Deliverer is announced; but He was to be a suffering Deliverer; Satan was to bruise His heel. He was to break the power of the fell destroyer, but in doing this He was to feel the might of the adversary. The next thing we find is, that it is God who provides clothing for the nakedness of the sinner. He clothed Adam and his wife with coats of skins. The one who dies for man becomes his covering under the eye of God. "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning" (Rom. 15: 4).

When we come to Abel we have the approach of man to God; and here we see that there must be on the part of man the acknowledgment of the righteousness of the judgment which lies upon him, and he must approach in the strength and excellency of the victim which dies in his stead. Abel comes in this way, and is accepted; while Cain's altar was the denial of all this; neither to him nor to his offering had God respect. The offerer is identified with his offering.

The acceptance or rejection of the offering means the acceptance or rejection of the offerer. How important therefore it is to have a perfect sacrifice (Genesis 4).

The Meaning of Atonement.

The word atonement, which is the word found in the Old Testament, as propitiation is found in the New, means simply to cover. It is first used in Genesis 6: 14: Noah was told to pitch (cover) the ark within and without with pitch. It is used again in Genesis 32: 20: Jacob said he would appease Esau with a present; his fault would be covered by the present. We have it in Ezekiel 16: 63: God there speaks of a time when He would be pacified toward the children of Israel for all that they had done. When Israel had sinned in making the golden calf, Moses said he would go up to the Lord to try and make atonement for their sin (Ex. 32: 30). It is not difficult to gather from these scriptures the meaning the word has in the Old Testament. The offence is put out of sight by the offering. An equivalent is rendered to the aggrieved party which covers the cause of aggravation.

The Blood in Egypt. (Exodus 12).

The deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt preaches to us the same gospel. God was about to execute His righteous judgment upon the Egyptians, and took the firstborn as representatives of all the people. But the Israelites whom He had set Himself to deliver were equally subject to the judgment which He was about to inflict upon their enemies. How was He to pass over the one, and destroy the other? Anyone would tell us, He could easily do that, as He is omniscient, and could make no mistake that would imperil His people. But He was about to leave upon record something for our instruction, and we must, in reading the account, keep this in mind. He instructs His people to take a lamb, and to kill it, and to strike its blood upon the lintel and door-post of their houses; and He says, When I see the blood I will pass over you." The blood of the lamb met the eye of the destroying angel, and was the witness to him that the judgment which he was executing had preceded him; the firstborn had died in the death of his substitute. Paul says, "Christ our passover has been sacrificed for us."

Why did God take this way of delivering His people? Wherefore this crimson stain upon lintel and door-post? When He sent the plague upon the cattle He required no mark, by which to distinguish those belonging to His people from which belonged to the servants of Pharaoh. It was the same during the plague of thick darkness: no sign directed the cloud where to settle. Why all this to-do in connection with the last act of this terrible drama? Let my reader hear what those have to say who know what it is to be sheltered by blood: "Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood" (Rev. 1); "Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood" (Rev. 5: 9); "Redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot" (1 Peter 1: 19). This is the foundation of all blessing, the keynote of every song that shall thrill with its glorious melody the glad heart of redeemed creation, and that throughout all eternity.

The Great Day of Atonement. (Leviticus 16.)

The great day of atonement, which was held in the seventh month, is full of instruction. We see that almost all things were by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood was no remission (Heb. 9: 22). At the same time we are given to understand that the sacrifices had in themselves no intrinsic value, therefore they were of yearly occurrence. Thus, while typifying the sacrifice of Christ, they were in great contrast with it; for by one offering He has perfected for ever them that are sanctified (chap. 10: 14). It was impossible that the blood of beasts could take away sins; a better sacrifice was needed for that. Therefore there was a remembrance of sins every year; and the conscience of the worshipper, instead of being taken up with the grace of God, was altogether occupied with the sins he had committed. Such a state of things was not pleasing to God, whose desire was to have man in His holy presence without a shadow of fear in his heart, and therefore He found fault with that order of things (Heb. 8: 8).

The Death of Christ.

In the tabernacle God was shut up within the veil: on His part there was no coming out, and on the part of man there was no going in. Now the veil represented the flesh of Jesus (Heb. 10: 20), therefore when on earth He spoke of His body as the temple (John 2: 21): God was within the veil in the body of Jesus. On the cross this veil was rent. The death of Christ was the rending of the veil. And this came to light in the type; for the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom (Matt 27: 51). In the execution of the judgment of sin upon the cross, all that God was came to light. His righteousness was there declared, but His love also was brought to light. God has come out to man in perfect love; and now man can go in to God by that way which has been dedicated through the veil. And by that precious blood we have boldness for entering; for it is not only the witness to us that our sins are gone, but it is also the great witness of the perfect love of God to us; so that, not only are our consciences purged, but our hearts are won; and God's presence, which we so much dreaded, has become our eternal home; and nowhere in the universe are we so welcome.

Moreover, the work of the cross has glorified God, and that in a way in which He never could have been glorified had that work not been done. His righteousness, holiness, truth, majesty, authority, and above all, the love of His heart to us has come to light; and every attribute has been vindicated, and maintained by the obedience of His beloved Son to the death of the cross. No one could have done such a work but a divine person; neither could anyone have taken such a work in hand but the One who gave Himself for us. Who could suffer the abandonment of God, and glorify God when abandoned by Him? To be forsaken of God for a single moment would be the eternal ruin of any created being. But Jesus could stand when absolutely alone, and when from no quarter was sympathy or support forthcoming. And therefore God has highly exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of heavenly, earthly, and infernal things; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2).

I may be asked what justice I see in making a righteous person suffer for the unrighteous. I would only reply that this is not a question of righteousness, but of grace and love. What righteousness is there in one person paying another's debts? None; it is all a matter of pure grace on the part of the one who does it. But there is no making about it; it was a matter of divine counsel. The Triune God is One in all that is done. Counsels belong to the Father, the Son is the One who accomplishes the Father's will, and the Spirit is the One by whose power everything is accomplished. The Son was as delighted to come as the Father was to send Him; and the Holy Spirit has His delight in working the pleasure of God in the hearts of believers.

This is the way things are presented in Scripture, and one mind pervades the Book. Christ is the subject from beginning to end; but we have His sufferings foretold, from the very first intimation of deliverance by Him. And the Holy Spirit who moved holy men to write the prophetic word never loses sight of the sacrifice of Jesus. On the one hand, His resurrection is the witness to us of the greatness of His person; on the other hand it is the witness to us of the perfection of the sacrifice which He offered for our sins. God has accepted the sacrifice, and the soul who comes by that sacrifice is accepted in all the value of it.

The Resurrection

"Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father." Romans 6: 4.

As the authority of Scripture hangs upon the truth of the Person of Jesus, so does the truth of His Person hang upon the fact of the resurrection. It was by the resurrection from the dead He was declared Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness (Rom. 1: 4). The power by which He passed through this evil world, untainted by its defiling influences, was the power by which He offered Himself without spot to God, and by which He proved Himself victorious over death and the grave. One who has to do with death must attest his power over it, or it will attest its power over him. He must annul its might, and come back scathless from its gloom, or it will hold him prisoner in its strongholds of corruption, and thus declare its superior prowess.

From the entrance of sin into the world all who descended into those impenetrable and mysterious regions of fear had to remain there. In a few isolated cases the might of God was exhibited in bringing back again to life upon earth those who had fallen into the clutches of the fell destroyer, but such were never placed beyond the reach of the terrific foe. They were bearers of what might be likened to a "ticket of leave," the time limit of which having expired they were once more compelled to enter the land of shades. We read of two men who escaped altogether the fate common to the sons of Adam. By the intervention of God on their behalf they were translated to heaven that they might not see death, and thus became witnesses of the hidden resources of God, which He could put forth for the complete deliverance of the people of His choice. With these two exceptions all in Adam died, and in death they remain.

Death is to man the most appalling evil that can come upon him; it is the most heartless and horrible mischief which one man can inflict upon another; and it is the most severe sentence which the law of the land can inflict upon a criminal. Satan has said that a man will give all he possesses for his life; and he is very well acquainted with the way in which men regard things which refer personally to themselves. Those who enjoy a fair share of the mercies of the present life, and to whom death seems far distant, may be found discussing the dissolution of the earthly tabernacle with a certain amount of calmness; but let the dread shadow of the grim monarch fall across their threshold, and you will find their tranquillity brought to an abrupt and speedy termination.

We seem never to become accustomed to its ravages. Familiarity with its silent footfall has not enabled us to hold its presence in contempt. It is to-day the same hideous, hateful, horrible invader of hearts and homes as it was at the outset of its reign on earth. He who guides it upon the track of his neighbour is branded as most wicked, and he who invites it to his own embrace is held to be insane. To the appeal for mercy it is deaf; to the question as to whence it comes it returns no answer; as to why it strikes it is dumb; as to whether it conducts the vital principle of its victim it has no information to convey to the unhappy and brokenhearted mourner. It strikes out from impenetrable darkness; and is only known by the certainty of its aim, and by the violence of the blow which needs not to be repeated. It has no more respect for the autocrat upon his throne than it has for the peasant in his humble cot, and it is equally dreaded by both. Its heart is harder than the flinty rock, and the only music it has ever heard is the lamentations which arise from the souls of those who feel the burden of its iron sceptre. It is swifter than those who flee from it, and stronger than those who stand up to contend against it. It is the monarch of all evils, and is either the executioner of a righteous governor, or the pitiless slave of a being who revels in murder.

But after all, is it indeed a foe which has never known defeat? Has it proved itself victorious in every engagement? Has no one risen up on behalf of man with might enough to grapple with this terrific monster and lay in ruins his apparently impregnable fortress? Has no one been able to track him to his lair, and heap destruction upon the head of the destroyer? Is there no one to deliver us from this ruthless enemy of mankind? If not, our lot is indeed deplorable.

That it is a terrible evil none but a dreamer will deny, and when it is denied no one will believe in the sincerity of the person who attempts to minimize its horrors. It has been designated by every name that the ingenuity of man can invent, from "a bend in the road" to "annihilation," all to relieve it of its hideous and repulsive appearance; but bitter death, call it what you will, is still the "King of terrors." It is the just conclusion of a life of rebellion against God. And this is the very thing that makes it so terrible. Why should human life be so beset with sorrow? and why should the way out of it be so fenced with terror? Without the Gospel of the grace of God the present life is an enigma incapable of solution.

Here the Scriptures come to our relief, and set before us the Son of God as our almighty Deliverer. In grace He goes down into death to break its power. That He might be able to die He took flesh and blood: "Forasmuch as the children were partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Heb. 2: 14, 15). Again we are told: "For since by man came death, by Man came also the resurrection of the dead" Cor. 15: 21). It is impossible that such a person as the Son of God could be held by the cords of death. We should not require to be told that death must give way before such a glorious Personage. That Jesus came into death is a matter of profane history; that He came out of it is not. If He was compelled to remain there He was no stronger than any other of the human race.

There is nothing so persistently kept before our minds as resurrection ? I may say death and resurrection. We have it every twenty-four hours set figuratively before our souls. The day declines, and noiseless night advances and wraps an unconscious world in her inky mantle. The morning breaks, night vanishes, the song of birds is heard, and man arises from his sleep refreshed, the toils of yesterday forever gone. The seasons run their course, the winter comes, the flowers are dead, the leaves fallen, the trees are bare, snows mantle the earth, and desolation broods over a lifeless world. The spring appears, the winter frosts and snows are gone, nature awakes, the daisies deck the field, the budding woods are full of life, and everything beneath the azure dome of heaven with bounding pulse, and bright brow, and gladsome heart, instinct with life, gives witness to the God of resurrection.

But when we come to the Scriptures, we find that from the entrance of sin into the world, resurrection is the hope of fallen man. Adam and Eve are no sooner brought under the power of death than they are made to hear of a Deliverer, One who was destined to bruise the head of their fell destroyer. Still they have to take their sorrowful journey down to the dust out of which they were taken. Where then would their deliverance come in? Of what value was a Deliverer to those who were compelled to submit to the penalty of their offence? How could they be made to profit by this Deliverer? As far as we know they knew nothing of a state of bliss for their spirits apart from the body. And even if they did, how could they be in the favour of their Creator, and in the enjoyment of that favour, while their bodies lay under the judgment pronounced by God on account of their transgression? There was only one way by which their deliverance could be effected, and that one way was by resurrection.

I may be told that I am taking the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and that this is begging the question. I am taking nothing for granted. I am simply putting before the reader the things of which Scripture testifies, and the setting in which the things borne witness to are placed. A Deliverer is announced to those who are told they must return to dust, and I see no way in which they could hope to benefit by that Deliverer except on the principle of resurrection. If the whole matter recorded in the early chapters of Genesis be but the imagination of the writer, then the idea of resurrection must have had such hold upon his soul that it never occurred to him there might be a doubt as to it in the mind of the reader.

Enoch the seventh from Adam is translated, not passing through the article of death; another proof that resurrection is the way of deliverance for man: man is to have his body in his perfectly delivered state. Enoch has his body, and shall have it for ever; for I suppose no one imagines that death still lies before him, and if he is to have his body it is unreasonable to suppose other men can be blest without theirs. If we are not to have our bodies in our eternal condition, what confusion must arise from translation. I may be told Enoch never was translated. I have not affirmed that he was; I am speaking from Scripture. But I do affirm this, resurrection was in the mind of the writer of the book of Genesis.

Abraham and Sarah are childless until nature becomes withered and dead, and then God tells him that his seed shall be as the stars of heaven or the sand upon the sea shore for number, and Abraham read in this promise the character of the God who had appeared to him, the God of resurrection. This faith of the patriarch had a severe test applied to it when he was told to offer up this child of promise as a burnt-offering upon Mount Moriah; but his faith rose up strong in answer to the demand which was made upon it, and he bound his son upon the altar confident that God, would raise him from the dead. It is the same God of resurrection who is preached in the Gospel to-day, but brought to light in raising up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.

It is brought before us typically in the dividing of the Red Sea, through which Israel passed out of Egypt into the wilderness; and in the parting of the waters of the Jordan, through which the same people came into the promised land. The Red Sea was not the usual way out of Egypt, neither was it necessary for them to cross the Jordan to come into Canaan. But just as death and resurrection were in the mind of him who wrote Genesis, so also was the mind of the writer of Exodus filled with the same idea. Then we have the budding of the rod of priesthood; the dry, dead staff which was laid up before the Lord, buds, blossoms, bears fruit, and thus witnesses that priesthood must be established upon the basis of resurrection.

At the cleansing of the leper the live bird let loose into the open heaven, bearing upon its wing the red stain of its identification with the one killed over running water in the earthern vessel, also Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones, set forth the same principle of divine operation. The fact is, if in reading the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is expunged from the mind the Bible is a book of unrivalled contradictions. That great principle pervades every sentence uttered by prophetic lip from the entrance of sin into the world.

Could anything be plainer than that resurrection was that which was the hope of the One who speaks in Psalm 16? "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell (sheol), neither wilt Thou suffer Thy holy One to see corruption." Here is One who goes down into death in the utmost confidence that the power of God will not allow His soul to abide in sheol, nor His flesh to see corruption. The apostles of the Lord tell us that this Psalm refers to the Christ of God. He could not be held by that dread power. By going into it He broke its might. Does not the whole heart and soul of the reader rise up in praise and thanksgiving to God for the victory which He has gained, gained at such infinite cost, but nevertheless gained on behalf of poor things like ourselves that we might no longer be in bondage to Satan on account of the fear of it.

As I have already indicated, resurrection is, according to Scripture, a great witness to the glory and greatness of the person of Jesus. During His earthly career, instead of being as every other man under the power of death, He is seen to have power over it, for at His word it was compelled to deliver up its prey. But above all, His own resurrection furnishes the most complete evidence of His dignity as Son of God. When Moses smote the waters of the Red Sea they became parted hither and thither, their power was broken, and when Jesus smote the waters of death in His own death upon the cross their power was broken; His resurrection is the witness to this stupendous fact.

"He hell in hell laid low,

Made sin He sin o'erthrew,

Bowed to the grave, destroyed it so,

And death by dying slew."

The witnesses to this mighty victory are overwhelming, and I do not therefore marvel at men, who wish to get rid of the fact, and yet do not feel that they can safely impute deceitful practices to the disciples, suggesting all sorts of theories which they consider sufficient to account for their belief in the event without it being really true. But I would like to ask these men a very old question: "Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead"? Had fallen man been the one declared to have gained such a victory, it would have been very reasonable to doubt it, but as it is declared to have been brought about by the power of God I see no reason to question it. No doubt the enemy would desire to treat the report as a fable. He is not likely to foster the notion in men's minds that his stronghold has fallen before the assault of the Son of God, but the witnesses are so many and of such unquestionable integrity that not to believe the fact is a terrible evidence of sheer self-will.

Paul tells us that Jesus was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once. After that He was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all He was seen of Paul himself. Luke tells us in his Gospel that He appeared to two of them on their way home from Jerusalem to Emmaus; and was made known to them in the breaking of bread, the symbol of His death; that He ate and drank with His disciples, and that when they thought it was a spirit they were looking upon, He invited them to handle Him and see, telling them that a spirit had not flesh and bones, as they saw He had. Next, he tells us that He led a company out as far as Bethany, and that while, with uplifted hands, He blessed them, He was parted from them and carried up into heaven (Luke 24). And in what a pure and guileless atmosphere of holy affections this short history of the victory of God is enshrined. Never in the universe has appeared the liar who could set the baseless inventions of his corrupt imagination in such a framework of tender grace and evident piety. Had I no other testimony than that which is furnished by the writer of the third Gospel I dare not question the glad tidings of the overthrow of the king of terrors.

And Paul tells us he saw Him on his way to Damascus, when he thought to wipe out the blessed name of Jesus from under heaven. That this remarkable convert was neither a deceiver nor a liar is evident from the whole spirit of his writings. Whatever else was true of him he was conscientious, and was certain that he had seen the Just One and heard His voice. Was he mistaken? Was it the effect of sunstroke? Was it hallucination, or some insane wandering of his excited mind? That he was a man with determined will is not to be questioned, but that he was nervous, hysterical, mentally deranged, and subject to hallucinatory attacks, no one who studies his profound, pure, and wholesome disquisitions will be willing to admit. What insight into the mysteries of God he possessed, things which eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor which ever entered into the heart of man ? things which God has prepared for those who love Him. What an immense grasp of his infinite subject, what profound reasoning, what ability for anticipating the cavillings of the corrupt human mind, what terrible earnestness, what self-abnegation, what deep piety, and what boundless affection for the souls of those to whom he writes. And all this resulted from that visitation which he encountered on his way to Damascus.

And yet some of the leaders in Christendom tell us Paul never saw the risen Jesus at all, and neither did His disciples, for such a thing as the resurrection never took place. And how do they know? They do not know. They are servants of his who desires to keep poor man in the dark as to his own defeat. And yet they call themselves Christians, at least some of them do, while they deny the foundation upon which the whole truth as to Christianity rests.

It was not in this way the apostles of our Lord instructed their converts. They gave them to understand that a lie was a lie, and that a lie against God was the greatest of all lies (1 Cor. 15). They tell us: "If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ: whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised: and if Christ be not raised your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished."

This is wholesome doctrine compared with the corrupt ethics which the leaders of the people, to-day, seek to foist upon us. How can the truth be respected in secular things when the religion in which they attempt to instruct the people is founded on a falsehood, which is by them justified, and declared to have been concocted or connived at by the Saviour of the world? If I could not believe in the resurrection I should abandon the profession of Christianity as a system of unparalleled deceit, hypocrisy, and soul-destroying error.

God's Great Gift

"The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." Romans 5: 5.

The greatest gift God has conferred, or can confer, upon His beloved people is that of the Holy Spirit. A vast inheritance is ours, which is beyond the ability of the most powerful mind to grasp, and which baffles the most prodigious imagination, for what mind is able to grasp the vast inheritance of God? And we are heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ. But the earnest of that inheritance is the Spirit of God, and the earnest is greater than the inheritance itself.

This great gift was in promise for His people in the past dispensation. And in the day in which God will recover His earthly people from among the heathen, He says that He will sprinkle clean water upon them, so that they shall be cleansed from their idols; a new heart also He will give them, and will put a new spirit within them. But He also says, "I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them" (Ezek. 36: 25-27). That will be a wonderful day of blessing for Israel, and bright with the glory of God.

But the Lord also speaks of this great gift on the eve of His departure out of this world, and gives His disciples to understand that they would be better off in the possession of the Spirit than they were in having Him corporeally in their midst. While He was here upon earth, He could only be said to be with them, but when He should be glorified and the Spirit here He would be in them. He says, "At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you" (John 14: 20).

He could not be given until Christ was glorified, because the new order of relationships and blessings for man were not brought fully to light until redemption was accomplished and Christ set at the right hand of God. The Spirit was not promised in connection with Adam, either innocent or guilty, but with the new sphere and order of things which lay in the purpose of God before the world was. He is given in connection with the determination of God to head up everything in Christ, and to set up the poor fallen creature on the ground of redemption, and in His own power before His face, in the light of His love revealed in the person of His beloved Son.

Think only of the intimacy with God into which this wonderful gift brings the recipient of it! I need not ask a saint of God if he thinks anything could exceed the holy familiarity with the Father and the Son into which we are brought by this unspeakable power, which has taken possession of our bodies on behalf of the Christ of God, but I would ask if anyone thinks such a favour could be equalled. The question is asked by the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 2: "What man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man that is in him?" There can be only one answer to such a question, and the answer is, No man. Had I the spirit of another I should know all about him. I should know him as well as he knows himself. There would be none of his thoughts, feelings, or affections hidden from me. Nothing of that man would remain a secret from me. But we have got the Spirit of God. What for? That we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Could we not know them without the Spirit? No: for they are things the eye has never seen, nor the ear ever heard, nor the imagination ever pictured. But the Spirit knows them. He searches all things, yea the deep things of God. There is nothing hidden from the Spirit, nor is there anything hidden from the one who has received the Spirit. The very babes in Christ are said to have an unction from the Holy One, and to know all things (1 John 2: 20). The depths of God are known to the Spirit, and we have received Him that we might know these depths.

By Him we become acquainted with the counsels of the Father. By Him we are enabled to enter into the greatness of the revelation God has made of Himself in Christ. By Him we are in the enjoyment of the love of God that was declared in the cross of His Son, for by Him it has been shed abroad in our hearts. By Him we know that we are children of God. By Him we are enabled to address God as our Father. By Him we are able to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. By His power we are made free from the law of sin which works in our members, and by His power we are enabled to produce righteousness. He is also the power for all worship and service. In fact He is the power of all our relationships with God, for He is the power of the life we have from, and in, the risen Christ. How very thankful we should be for such an unspeakable gift! Were we able to communicate our spirit to another person there is not a soul on earth to whom we would give such a gift, for we do not wish people to know us too intimately. We are too evil to wish to be well known. But God desires us to know Him, that all our delight might be in Him; and the better we know Him the more closely do we draw to Him, and the happier we are; but the better we know men in their natural condition the more we recoil from more than a very limited degree of familiarity with them. With Him who knows us best we are most at home, and that we might find our home in His presence He has bestowed upon us this gift of His Holy Spirit.

But if we contemplate for a moment the greatness of the gift He has given for us, we shall not be so much surprised at the gift He has given to us. To take our place under the judgment due to us on account of sin, He has given His only begotten Son. This is beyond everything else that He has done on our behalf. Nothing greater could He have done. It is in this that the whole extent of His love toward us has come to light. It is there we learn it. Surely all His dealings with us spring from the great love of His heart toward us. But it is not in His care for us in our pilgrim pathway, not in the mercies that we daily experience, not in His tender grace to us, meeting our every need, and giving us abundant proof that we are ever in His mind, and that He ever does the best thing possible for us; but it is in that cross, and in that cross alone, that we are to learn the greatness of that love that is just as deep and wide and boundless as is the heart from which it springs. It is to that cross, and to it alone, that we shall look back from an eternity of unspeakable happiness, as the one, solitary, unique place where, from the hitherto pent-up fountain of the heart of God, flowed forth in infinite volume that love that chose such worthless things as we for its objects.

What a day it will be for us when we stand in the Father's house in the likeness of the Son of God; when as we look around on that glorious company nothing but Christ shall meet our eye, for, as regards us, the counsels of the Father will all have been fulfilled, and we shall be just that which He purposed we should be before the world was. But not that which shall meet us in that house, not our circumstances there, not the glory in which we shall find ourselves, not the wealth, magnificence, and splendour of that palace of delights will we gaze upon as the mighty witness of the love of God to us, though every bit of it will be designed by the wisdom, and fashioned by the hand of love; but from that circle and sphere of everlasting pleasures we shall cast our minds backward to that lone and cloud-swathed Golgotha, swept with the tempest of devouring wrath, but radiant with love that, as we sometimes sing, no tongue could teach, nor thought be able to reach, for there alone has it had its perfect expression. From the crown of that lonely mount the living light shall fling its deathless rays throughout the whole vast universe of blessing, waking up everlasting praises to the Father and the Son.

Can we, as we contemplate that love, wonder that He who gave His Son to die our death and save us from our woe, should give His Holy Spirit to us? Surely not. Seeing He has given up to the judgment of the cross His well-beloved, we need not be surprised at anything He may give us after that, for "He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8: 32). In the light of that cross must all His dealings with us be estimated.

But as the gift of His Son was the only thing that could meet our deep need, as sinners, so was the gift of the Spirit the only thing that could meet our need in view of the position given to us in divine counsel, for it is only by that power we can occupy that place. "What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price" (1 Corinthians 6: 19). Therefore, "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Ephesians 4: 30).

The Love of God

"God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son." John 3: 16.

The Scriptures speak to us of the love of God, of the love of the Father, of the love of the Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the love of the brethren; and though all this love is divine, and not the affection which is natural to the creature, nevertheless it is the same love that we find in the man who is born of God as that which is in the Persons of the Godhead; for he is, by virtue of this heavenly birth, a partaker of the divine nature. But the direction this love is described as taking in each of these divine Persons and in the brethren is very different. Neither the Father nor the Son are said to love the world, but God is; neither is the Father said to love the church, but Christ is. And all this is full of interest and instruction. I would therefore, by the help of the Holy Spirit, attempt to point out to the reader the way in which the Scriptures present this love in connection with all in whom it is said to be active. Let us first examine what is said as to the Love of God.

In John 3: 16 we get this love presented in all its greatness and universality. It is a love that no man had hitherto been called to contemplate in such fulness, power and blessing. It is a love that rises above every barrier thrown up to stem its invincible current. It is a love that no angel knew, and a love that no creature could declare. By an angel the intervention of God for the deliverance of the oppressed sons of Jacob could take place, and by angelic tongue could the duty of man to love God be declared; from out of the midst of devouring fire, and from blackness and darkness, could angelic voice utter the claims of God; but to bring the love of God to man, so that we might be able to say, "We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love" (1 John 4: 16), was beyond the power of the highest created intelligence.

The fall and ruin of the head of the human race furnished the blessed God with an opportunity of retiring upon the counsels of His eternal love, which involved new relationships for man, and a new life by which these new relationships could be enjoyed; a life that was no more in Adam innocent than in Adam guilty: eternal life, the life that is in the Son of God, a life that could never be defiled by sin, and that could never come under the power of death.

But if men were to possess this life, and if they were to stand in these new and eternal relationships with God, it was necessary that satisfaction should be rendered to God for the dishonour done to Him by sin in this evil world. It was necessary that our sins, and the evil and corrupt nature that produced these sins, should be met by the unsparing judgment of a holy and righteous God. It was necessary that One should give Himself for us, should stand in our room and stead, should bear our blame, suffer the consequences of sin by being made sin, in order that the majesty, authority, and nature of God might be vindicated and glorified, for apart from the accomplishment of this no way of salvation could be opened up for guilty man.

Who was there in all the universe of God whose love for our guilty race was strong enough to induce him to intervene on our behalf? and who, even supposing the love existed, had the ability to take up the work of our deliverance? Not certainly any of the creatures of God, for, for them to have manifested compassion towards us, would have been treason against their Creator and Governor; but even had they desired, and had it been right and agreeable to God that they should so desire, they had not the ability to accomplish anything.

No one could help us but the One against whom we had sinned, and it took Him to put forth all His power to bring about our deliverance. Nothing less than the death of His only begotten Son could enable Him righteously to take the place of a Saviour toward guilty man.

What mere creature could undertake such a work as that of redemption? Who could stand in the presence of incensed Deity, and bear the brunt of wrath's terrific storm broken loose against sin? Who could answer to God for the rebellion of His apostate creature, and stand in the breach when He was giving expression to His righteous judgment and holy abhorrence of that of which the devil was the author and man the willing slave? No mere creature could do this. None but the incarnate Son could enter into this awful question with God.

But why not let man perish for ever? He preferred the service of sin, the darkness of alienation from God, the rule of the devil, to any renewal of relationships or acquaintance with God. Why not take hold of the earth, and shake the apostate race out of its corrupt lap into the lake of fire, and leave him thus to the eternal consequences of his mad rebellion against his Maker? Why trouble any more about such a good-for-nothing creature? Why, for no other reason than that it had pleased God to set His heart upon man. He was not constrained to intervene on behalf of His creature by any good that He saw in that creature, nor by any object external to Himself, but just because it was His pleasure to take up such a sinner and make him a vessel of His praise.

The sinful and utterly lost condition of man put God to the test in a way in which He had never before been tested, and in a way in which He never can be tested again. If God loved man, the state in which man was as a rebel sinner put His love to a test that no one, had anything been known about it, would have believed love capable of bearing. But that love proved itself to be well able to answer to the demand made upon it "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

That love has opened up a way of salvation for the lost, and the report of that salvation, and where all are to find it, is proclaimed world-wide. God would have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth; and the Mediator, whose death was the witness of that love, gave Himself a ransom for all, and all are called by the gospel to make haste and avail themselves of that salvation while the day of salvation lasts.

In the heart of the believer that love is shed abroad by the Holy Ghost who is given to us (Rom. 5: 5). We are made conscious that it is our present portion. To the way in which it has come to light the Holy Spirit ever directs our attention: "For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly "; and in contrast to the greatest exhibition of human love, which has occasionally caused men to lay down their lives on behalf of those who had shown them kindness, the love of God was expressed to us in the death of Christ when we were yet sinners.

In the 1st Epistle of John this love of God is viewed in connection with a circle narrower than the whole world. In the Gospel its aspect is universal, but in the Epistle it is confined to the family of God. We read in 1 John 4: "In this was manifested the love of God toward us," and "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us"; and in chapter 3 "Hereby perceive we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us." But in the Epistle, as in the Gospel, whether it be to us, or to the world, the death of Christ is that in which it has been declared.

We get another beautiful reference to this love in Ephesians 2. There we are contemplated as dead in sins. Not a movement of our hearts Godward. We are said, as Gentiles, to have been "without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world." Such was our state as sinners of the Gentiles. Also, ruled by the prince of the power of the air, fulfilling the desires of flesh and mind, and by nature children of wrath, everything that was loathsome and abominable to God.

This is what we were under His eye: "But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ." What a marvellous intervention of the power of the living God, moved by the wonderful love of His heart! And not only has He quickened us, but quickened us in the life of Christ; and also raised us up and made us sit in Him in the heavenlies; and that, too, in order that He might, in the ages to come, show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.

From this love there is no separation. Once it is believed ? once it gets into the heart in the power of the Spirit ? it is there for ever. The Apostle says: "I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8: 38, 39). In the first verse of this chapter we are in Christ, and in the last verse the love of God is there, so that where the love of God has got its eternal resting-place, we have got ours through grace; therefore, until Christ can be separated from that love we never can be; and as nothing can separate Him from it, nothing can separate us.

It is this love which casts out all fear from our hearts, and gives us boldness for the day of judgment. We are loved with the love of which Christ is the Object ? "as He is, so are we in this world"; and we know that that love will never be thoroughly satisfied until it has us, like Himself, in glory. It is that love which has predestinated us to be conformed to His image; therefore, in the day of judgment we shall be like the Judge, our very bodies fashioned like His; ourselves not the subjects of judgment, though our works shall be. Then we shall receive loss or gain for all that we have done upon earth. Where we have been faithful we shall be rewarded, and where we have been unfaithful we shall suffer loss; but before ever we appear there we shall have been already glorified.

I turn to another passage of Scripture: "Ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God" (Jude 20, 21). In these days in which evil abounds, such as is depicted in this short Epistle, the tendency is to be unduly occupied with it, and the soul is in danger of coming under the power of it. Here is the antidote to all that. The natural and healthful element of the child of God is this love declared in the gift of Jesus; and in this love, in the worst days of the history of the church, it is our privilege to keep ourselves, and we are exhorted so to do.

May the Lord Himself direct our hearts into the love of God.

The Love of the Father

"The Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved Me." John 16: 27.

If we examine the way in which the Father's love is presented in Scripture we shall not find the thought of sovereignty connected with it as we find connected with the love of God; nor, indeed, shall we always find it to be set upon the same objects. God is said to have loved the world, the Father never. The Father has a world of His own outside of which His affections are not said to travel. It is a world, or sphere, or order of things, not yet brought to light; but it exists in His counsels, and is of Himself. This present world is not of Him. All that is in the world is lust and pride, and it is not of the Father, but is of the world (1 John 2: 15, 16). With the love of the Father we find the thought of complacency, delight, satisfaction. His love is confined to things which are grateful to His nature. The Son is said to have been the Object of the Father's love before the foundation of the world (John 17: 24). And when upon earth, as He was about to take the place of public testimony for God, the Father's voice is heard declaring His delight in Him. This voice from heaven was a witness of the pleasure the Father took in the first thirty years of the Son's sojourn here below. Again, on the mount of transfiguration, we are privileged to hear the same powerful testimony rendered by the Father to the place the Son had in His blessed affections.

Jesus Himself says: "The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand" (John 3: 35). The Son had the love and confidence of the heart of the Father. The Father could confidently put everything into the hand of the Son, knowing that everything would be faithfully held for His glory. Again, He says: "The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth" (John 5: 20). And "what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise" (v. 19). In this way the Father came to light in the Son, and in Him He was glorified. How dear the Son was to the heart of the Father no creature mind shall ever be able to understand.

In John 10: 17 we read: "Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I may take it again." His obedience and His love to the Father carried Him down to death, even the death of the cross; and there was laid a firm foundation upon which could be established the eternal counsels of the Father; and having laid in the blood of His cross this firm foundation, He in resurrection gives effect to those counsels to the glory of the Father. He says: "Glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee" (John 17: 1). And because of this wholehearted devotedness to His glory the Father's heart goes out to that blessed Son of His in infinite love.

There is nothing of the nature of sovereignty or grace in all this, for here there is a reason for the love of the Father lying outside of Himself; a reason existing in the Object of that love; the excellence of His person, and the obedience which comes to light in His lowly life on earth, calling forth that love as One perfectly worthy of it, however infinite it be. And how readily the Father responds to the claims of the One who presented Him with such a motive for love. He says: "Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong; because He hath poured out His soul unto death: and He was numbered with the transgressors; and He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors" (Isa. 53: 12). And "wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth: and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2: 9-11). The blessedness and excellence of the Son is beyond all creature thought, and indeed it is a joy to us that it is so; nevertheless, it is also a joy to us that there is One who fully estimates His infinite worth: it is not, blessed be God, unknown.

But we also are objects of the love of the Father. Jesus says: "The Father Himself loveth you." It is not merely that we are called to contemplate the love which the Father has to the Son, though this would be an unspeakable privilege; but we are to know ourselves as objects of that love. But even as regards us this love is not presented in its sovereign character. The Lord gives a reason for this love being lavished upon us, though surely we have no claim to the least of His favours. And yet if the Father loves us there is a reason why: "The Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God" (John 16: 27). There is something in us which draws out the Father's love to us. It is something which is of the Father Himself, and which He implanted there. It is not what is natural to man at all, and it was not natural to us. The natural man sees no beauty in Jesus. By the natural man He is always despised and rejected; but "they shall be all taught of God," and "every one therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto Me" (John 6: 45). This affection that is in our hearts for Jesus has been begotten by the teaching of the Father, and to His heart it is exceedingly precious. In this world, that is hostile to the Son, the Father finds us lovers of Jesus, and by this, if I may so speak, the heart of the Father is profoundly affected.

Feeble fellow-believer, you love Jesus. Perhaps you say your love is so weak, and your ways are often so wilful and crooked that you hesitate to speak of your love for Jesus. You feel He is worthy of so much, and you render to Him so little. Yet you do love Him. Possibly you wonder why every one does not love Him, for, as regards yourself, you feel you must love, reverence, and confess Him, even if by doing so you stirred up the wrath of the whole world against you. Well, is this nothing to the Father? Can He be regardless as to the attitude assumed by you toward the Son of His love? Impossible.

God loved you when there was nothing lovable about you. He loved you because of what was in Himself. But the Father loves you because of what is in you. He has found something in you in which His heart has unbounded delight. What is it? Nothing but the little spark of love to His Son, which He has kindled there for Himself. Here, where His Son has suffered every ignominy that the profligate heart of man could invent, you are found on His side, lifting up a feeble testimony in His favour, and the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Him, and have believed that He came out from God.

There is nothing so precious to the heart of the Father upon earth as that little spark of love to Christ which has been kindled by Himself in the souls of His saints. Where this is not, darkness and death reign. And the Father loves to cherish this little vital spark, and by the power of the Holy Spirit fan it into a mighty flame. Satan would seek to quench it, and upon it the world has a baneful influence; but "we love Him because He first loved us," and the better we know His love, the more shall we love Him; and if we love Him we will show this love by keeping His commandments, and treasuring His word in our hearts; and if we do this Jesus says we shall be loved of the Father, and both Father and Son will make their abode with us (John 14: 23).

We read these things in the Holy Scriptures, and we treasure them as the sayings of Jesus, but what do we know about them experimentally? Can the reader say: "Ah, I know what that means. I know what it is to have the Father and the Son dwelling with me. I know something of the joy that springs from having these divine Persons as my honoured guests." But if we find that we have not embraced this unspeakable privilege, and if we have to confess that we know, in an experimental way, little or nothing about it, are we to continue in this condition of spiritual destitution? Are these pearl gates which are even now swung open that we may enter into the joys of the Father's house, before we leave this scene of lawlessness, darkness, and death, to remain unused by us as though we had no right of entrance or as though they were guarded by cherubim and a flaming sword? Surely not.

Worldliness increases on every hand. Almost every day brings to light some apparently spiritual Samson falling under its deadly influence. The atoning death of Christ is scoffed at, and to His words those who profess His name are becoming stone deaf. His saints who have received much light boast of it as an intellectual attainment, and attempt to turn the edge of the Spirit's sword against Christ's members. And all this has come to pass because we have not kept the commandments of Jesus, treasured His word, and been more in company with the Father and the Son. The Lord says, speaking of the religious enemies of the gospel: "They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor Me" (John 16: 2, 3). This is what is lacking to-day, the knowledge of the Father and the Son. I do not mean to infer that any true believer is without this knowledge, but what I do mean is this, I fear we have not these divine Persons as our continual guests. We know forgiveness, and, like Martha, we may be cumbered about much service; but what do we know about the unutterable sweetness of entertaining in the secret of our own souls the Father and the Son?

Oh, how infinitely sweet it is to sit down alone, or to walk in solitude apart from every other human being, and let the Father and the Son draw near to us, as Jesus did to the two sorrowing disciples on their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus, that we may breathe for a little moment the very atmosphere of heaven. What a health resort we shall find this to be.

And all this remains for us to-day as truly as ever. Everything may have become corrupted ecclesiastically. That house which was intended for a house of prayer may have become a den of thieves, but all these things remain for the individual as certainly as though there was no failure at all. The writings of John are intensely individual, and the privileges opened out to us in them are not dependent upon the faithfulness of the Christian company. If no other in the whole world enjoyed these things I may. To-day they are the portion of the overcomer. And there is much to overcome, but there is infinitely more to be entered into and enjoyed.

How unspeakably sweet it is to go through this world with the sense of the Father's love keeping the heart. If the reader does not enjoy it, then I would entreat him to go in for it, for it is his privilege as a child of God. May both writer and reader know it better.

The Love of Christ

"To know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge." Eph. 3: 19.

The love of Christ is said to surpass knowledge, and the more we meditate upon it the more we become conscious of our utter inability, even with the aid of the Holy Spirit, to seize the immensity of that infinite, self-sacrificing, knowledge-surpassing love, which led the eternal Son from the eternal Father, and the form of God to take a bondsman's form, being made in the likeness of men, and to subject Himself to the contempt, rejection, scorn and derision of His rebellious creatures, and in the end to take the place of the Sin-bearer, suffer the forsaking of God, and give up His life upon a malefactor's gibbet. It was a journey of love, from the highest heights to the lowest depths, unpunctuated by one backward look, one moment of hesitation that might suggest uncertainty, or reluctance to go forward; no complaining word escaped those lips, through which only the voice of the living Father made itself heard; no curse was hurled against the heads of those that accepted His favours and in the end clamoured for His crucifixion. One word from His lips would have brought more than twelve legions of angels against His miserable, thankless, and wicked antagonists, but that word was not spoken: "He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth" (Isa. 53: 7).

No terror that rose up in the pathway of that love could turn it aside from the goal to which it was steadily advancing. Beset by every sorrow, anathematized by the leaders of the nation, regarded as mad by His relatives, misunderstood by everybody, friendless and afflicted He pursued His pathway of unspeakable love, though the woes that encircled His lonely Person steadily increased, until they reached their culmination in the cursed death of the cross, and the abandonment of God; and there that love, that for the space of thirty-three years had made this valley of death redolent with its odours, poured forth in infinite volume and in omnipotent power its everlasting and unutterable sweetness: love to His Father in the first instance, but love also to all given to Him of the Father.

The unapproachable light in which the Godhead dwells contains its own unfathomable secrets; but the things that are revealed belong to us, who have received the Holy Spirit in order that we may know the things that are freely given to us of God; which things have been spoken to us in words taught by the same Spirit. We can therefore be in the full light of the revealed will of God, and more than that we know nothing; nor into unrevealed mysteries have we any desire to penetrate. The light that the sun gives us is all that we require for light and health. A little more might be destructive to us, so the revelation that God has made to us is all that we need for our eternal happiness, and the subject mind desires no greater revelation, but only to know that revelation better.

The revelation that we have of God conveys to us the great truth that He is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; three persons, yet one God, and God is love. This is what He is in His nature, what He is in His very being. There is nothing but love between those Divine and Eternal Persons. "Thou lovedst Me," says Jesus to the Father, "before the foundation of the world" (John 17: 24). "God is Love" is the only absolute appellative that is used of the supreme Being; and what a wave of infinite happiness and indescribable joy overwhelms the soul as we meditate upon the marvellous fact that love is the nature of the One with whom we have to do. That "God is light" the Word also declares, but we are also said to be light, and therefore I take it that light is a more relative term, and not so absolute as love.

But as my object is at present to meditate a little upon the love of Christ, I must seek to engage the reader's attention with One of these Divine Persons in His manifestation here upon earth, the Son divested of the form of God, and clothed in the form of a Servant; no more to exercise authority as a despot, accountable to no higher power for His actions, but to be under the authority of another, and to do the will of the Father that sent Him. What a change of circumstances! How wondrous to behold the Creator of the worlds in the form of a Servant, a Man amongst men; in outward form not distinguishable from other men, thus in order that He might accomplish the will of the Father!

By the way in which we have the truth presented to us in the Scriptures we learn that counsels belong to the Father (Eph. 1: 3-14); the Son becomes Man, in order that through Him those counsels may be fulfilled (John 17); and the Holy Spirit is the power by which all are brought to pass (Acts 10: 38). In proof of each of these statements many other texts of Scripture might be adduced, but they can be easily found by the reader, and this exercise will be full of both interest and spiritual profit.

The presence of the Son here upon this earth in humiliation is the witness of His love to the Father. Those eternal counsels of love were as dear to His heart as to the heart of the Father; and in the laying of a foundation upon which all those counsels could be righteously fulfilled He knew all the horrors that such a work entailed. But such was His great love to the Father, such His infinite desire that those counsels should have their fulfilment, such His delight to do the will of the Father, He would go through all those horrors, let the cost to Himself be what it might.

And having become a Servant He will be a Servant for ever. The descent from the form of God to that of a servant may be immeasurable, His lowly birth humiliating, His death upon the cross ignominious, His descent into hades dishonourable in the extreme; but it was the hand of the Father that had marked out that path for His feet to tread; and He also knew that beyond the reproach, and the shame, and the gibbet, and the darkness, and the forsaking, and the death, there was for Him "Thy presence, where there is fulness of joy, and Thy right hand, where there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. 16: 11). Therefore for the joy that was set before Him He could endure the cross and despise the shame (Heb. 12: 2). His words when going to that cross were: "That the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do" (John 14: 31). In His great love to the Father, and that the Father might be glorified, even to the giving up of His life He did everything that could be done upon earth, and then asked to be glorified, in order that He might still glorify Him upon the platform of resurrection. And when all those counsels of love have been fulfilled, and when every enemy has been subdued, His subjection to the Father shall be as eternally perfect, and His love as undiminished as it was when tested by the death of the cross.

But how can we speak of the Father's appreciation of that self-sacrificing love of His beloved Son? We can only estimate the delight that the Father has in Him, as we are able to estimate the place of exaltation given Him of the Father. He could say when here below: "Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might take it again" (John 10: 17). Because of that mighty work that He accomplished to the Father's glory, and at His commandment, He has been highly exalted, and a Name given to Him which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of heavenly, earthly, and infernal beings; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2: 9-11). The Son has loved the Father above all else, and His love has been proven, by His taking the place of a servant, and becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; and the love of the Father to the Son is proven, by the place which as Man He occupies on the Father's throne, and by the fact that the Father is determined that His Son shall have the same honour as Himself from every intelligent being; for all must honour the Son, even as they honour the Father (John 5: 23).

But in His becoming man, and in all the work that He has done, as well as His present activities on our behalf before the face of God, we see His love for those given Him of the Father. It is our privilege, as individual believers, to take up the words of the apostle into our lips, and confess: "He loved me, and gave Himself for me"; and as part of that wondrous organism of which He is the Head, rejoice in the fact that He loved the church, and gave Himself for it. Whatever He did, He did for the glory of the Father, but He did it no less for our eternal blessing. "Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage" (Heb. 2: 14, 15).

It is with holy adoration that we draw near in contemplation of His taking the form of a servant, and being found in fashion as a man, for the glory of the Godhead, and that the counsels of the Father might be carried out; but that He should set His affections upon such rebellious worms of the dust as we all are by nature, this is just where we lose ourselves in utter bewilderment, for it surely surpasses knowledge. Perhaps it is not always that we are in the blissful contemplation of its glory and its infinity, but when the reality and greatness of it breaks with overwhelming power over heart and mind, we begin to realize that though we know it, and rejoice in its quickening beams, and that with a joy unspeakable, its sweetness, its vastness, its marvellous mystery, can never be fully known.

The blessed God has graciously given to us the power of speech, by means of which we can express the thoughts that rise up in our creature minds. We speak of eternity, infinity, and such-like words, but these terms are much more the expression of our own creature limitations, our utter ignorance of the things we know to be realities rather than an exposition of the things themselves. It is thus with the great verities of revelation, things that are much more to be felt and enjoyed than to be set forth in human parlance. When we think of eternity we have the thought of endless duration of time; and when we think of infinity, that which has not bounds or limits is before our minds. But what know we of either? May I not also ask, What need we know? We know that the love of Christ is our sure and lasting portion: ours while we have our being, and that its magnitude is beyond all our ability to grasp. And we know that it is not only the little of it that we can grasp that is ours; it is all ours. It has all been lavished upon us, and it is all ours to be enjoyed.

We know "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich" (2 Cor. 8: 9). What amazing down-stooping on His part we see in His advent into this world! What marvellous self-abnegation! From form of God into form of servant, from despot to slave, from omnipotence to infant weakness, from the adoration of angels to the contempt of men: love incarnate in a world of incarnate lust!

"Come now and view that manger,

The Lord of glory see,

A houseless, homeless stranger

In this poor world for thee."

Love brought Him there ? sovereign love. He had come forth from the Father, and was come into the world. He had come forth from riches, and was come into poverty. He had come from the throne of the universe, and was come to a manger where the cattle fed. He had called the creation into existence by the word of His power, He was now in that creation in the form of a creature. He had been accustomed to give commandment, now He must hearken to, and execute, the behests of Another. In His presence seraphim veiled their faces, now must He meet the proud and persecuting stare of His rebellious creatures. How altered are the circumstances of the Lord of glory!

See the poverty into which His love has brought Him! An outcast in a manger! A stranger in His own world! His delights had ever been with the sons of men (Prov. 8: 31). And now He is with them, and in their likeness, beginning where man begins, come of a woman, born into the world, love come down to heal sin-ruined souls. To the human eye the expression of weakness, but really the Upholder of the universe, which is the work of His own hands. Here under the protection of the Father, never to use His own power for His protection from insult or injury, but ever to commit Himself to Him that judges righteously; well knowing that His career upon earth must begin in a manger and close on a gibbet, while all His history between must be marked by the scorn, derision, and persecution of His rebellious creatures.

But is it not just this that has endeared Him to our hearts? It is in the evils that beset His path that we see His infinite moral perfections brought to light. We know Him where He is on the throne of the Father, but it is in His sojourn down here that we have learned Him. His present circumstances are very different to what they were in the days of His flesh, but there is no change in Him. He is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever" (Heb. 13: 8). At is He who was here that we look forward to see face to face, and to be with at His coming again.

But it is His lowly grace, His poverty, His meekness, that has attracted our hearts; because all this shows us the extent to which He was willing to go to make us His own. And what else, O Lord, could have won our heart's affections? Not the worship of angels; not Thy works of mighty power; not even the Father's voice from the opened heavens. These wonders might have awed and terrified our creature souls, but they would not have led us to confide in Thee. No!

"We cling to Thee in weakness,

The manger and the cross;

We gaze upon Thy meekness

Thro' suffering, pain, and loss."

Thou didst speak words the like of which never before had saluted the ears of men. They expressed that which lay in Thine own heart of unfathomable love for such as we know ourselves to be. They came through Thy lips warm from the bosom of the living Father, where Thou hadst Thine everlasting dwelling-place. As had been traced on the two tables of stone that which man should be for God, so Thou didst trace on the dust of this world that which God was in grace for man. And also Thou didst manifest in Thy lowly life the order of man, and the only order of man, that can live for ever in relation with God.

Surely Thou art all-powerful. Thou knowest all things, and Thou canst do all things. There is nothing too hard for Thee. But it is to Thee in weakness we cling ? the deep weakness of the manger, and the deeper weakness of the cross; yet the Upholder of all things in both manger and cross as Thou now art on the throne of the Highest. What unfathomable mysteries surround Thy holy Person!

Only the Father knows the Son (Matt. 11: 28). It is utterly impossible for our creature minds to fathom the mysteries of the incarnation, nor should we have the least desire to do this. We should be perfectly satisfied with the revelation given to us, for all that the creature could receive, even with the aid of the Holy Spirit; is given to us in the Holy Scriptures. Not to frankly enter into that which is revealed is to greatly hinder the growth of our souls, and to attempt to go beyond the Word is to wander into dangerous error. But God would have our souls enlightened and nourished by the Word of truth. He would have us grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Therefore, while we must be careful not to go beyond the limits of Scripture, we must just be as careful not to allow our natural timidity to rob us of that which is vital to the welfare of our souls. Let us search the Scriptures diligently, but let us search them prayerfully also, and in distrust of our natural minds in whatever form they may assert themselves.

I make bold to say however, that the soul who has not learned the excellencies of Christ as manifested in His lowly life, has never yet learned them. It is the humbled Christ that has won our hearts. The way in which He entered this world and the way in which He went out of it, shall never be forgotten by His redeemed people. Whatever else we may have learned, these are the great verities that have won our affections. And the brightest hope we have is to be with Him who ever had His delight with the sons of men, and who in infinite grace, though He was rich, for our sakes became poor; in order that we through His poverty might become rich. May He be daily the study of our souls and the great light and joy of all our hearts.

The Love of the Brethren

"We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." 1 John 3: 14.

The love of the saints to one another is no less divine than is that of the Father and the Son. This love is one of the great distinguishing marks of the children of God. Of this family there are two characteristics which unfailingly declare their lineage, and these are righteousness and love. As lawlessness and hatred of the brethren mark the children of the devil, as do righteousness and love of the brethren mark the children of God. In 1 John 2: 29 we read, "Every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him"; and in chapter 3: 12 we read, "Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous." Then we have in chapter 4: 7, "Love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God."

The ability to take the place of children of God is only the portion of the saints of this dispensation. We have this place by the Father's call (1 John 3: 1), we have it as a right given to us by Christ (John 1: 12), and we have it in the witness of the Spirit (Rom. 8: 16). But "born of God" itself is not dispensational. It was true from the commencement of the activities of the grace of God in this fallen world, and for an example of one born of God the Apostle goes back to Abel; his works were righteous, and "Every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him." If we find a man practising righteousness or loving the brethren we know that that man is born of God. He is not a mere child of Adam, nor is he of the devil, but of God. Every one brings forth after his kind, whether it be the devil, fallen man or the blessed God Himself.

It is of the utmost importance to see that these characteristics are the outcome of the divine nature, the nature of the children of God. They are not qualities which can be put on or imitated by the mere child of Adam. Righteousness here is not what the world calls honesty, which is only measured by men's dealings with one another. This may be rightly enough called righteousness, but it is not that which is spoken of here. Abel's righteousness is seen in his taking his rightful place in the presence of God. In himself he is nothing but a guilty sinner, but this he most fully admits, and he approaches God in the way opened up to him in boundless grace. It is in a man's dealings with God more than in his dealings with men that his righteousness or lawlessness becomes apparent.

Nor is love mere natural affection, a thing found sometimes stronger than death amongst men; and not only amongst men, but even amongst the lower orders of creation. As originally formed, man was set in intelligent relationship with God, and in an unfallen state his affections would have happily flowed in the channels dug for them in the wisdom and goodness of his Creator; but as fallen they have burst all bounds, and at the direction of corrupt and lawless flesh, they wander where they will regardless of the consequences. This shows man to be at the level of the irresponsible beast of the field, if indeed not at a lower level.

The notion of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man is not new, but lately it has been brought into more prominence than heretofore; and indeed it might truthfully be said that the great mass of professing Christians are fighting their battles under this banner. But such a notion has no place in the Word of God. No one is a child of God apart from the new birth. This is hinted at, perhaps I had better say figuratively declared, in the Old Testament; and the Lord seems to infer that Nicodemus should have known it. He says, "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3: 3). And when the unbelieving mind of the Pharisee raises questions regarding this mysterious operation of the Spirit of God, Jesus says, "Art thou a teacher of Israel, and knowest not these things?" Ezekiel had said, "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh (Ezek. 36: 25, 26). It is to such words as these the Lord evidently refers when He says, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."

In the past dispensation man was under probation, and while this was so it would not have been consistent to have plainly declared his hopelessly lost condition, which the reference to new birth does; because if man is so hopelessly lost that he must be born again, when this verdict is given his trial must be concluded. Therefore, while it was always necessary from the fall, if man was to be in right relationship with God, while his trial was running its course it was only hinted at; but now that the resources of God put forth to influence the flesh in right ways have been exhausted, the plain truth as to the incorrigible wickedness of the flesh is declared, and the necessity of new birth is frankly insisted upon.

This new birth is produced by the Word of God, which is incorruptible, living and abiding. On earth everything perishes but the Word of God. The Jew is grass, the Gentile is grass--all flesh is grass, and the glory of man the flower of grass. The grass withereth and the flower of it passes away. What, then, remains? "The Word of our God shall stand for ever" (Isa. 40). This Word has been brought to us in the gospel (1 Peter 1: 25), and by it the believer is born again. His life and nature are divine.

Therefore the one born of God does not practise sin but righteousness. Had he nothing but the divine nature he would be utterly incapable of sinning, for that nature cannot sin. But as long as he is in this world he has also the old nature of the flesh, and it can do nothing but sin, and in this nature he is liable to act, and will do so if he be not watchful. When we are glorified there will be no more need for the vigilance that is now necessary. We will then be like Christ, and free from the presence of the flesh, and failure will be a thing of the past.

But the One who is begotten of God loves Him that begat. We love the Father and the Son, and we love the brethren. It is natural for us to do so. That which the law, by all its threatenings, could not get from the mere child of Adam, God has gotten by His work of grace in our hearts. The law demanded love from man, but never got it. But God has got it by the revelation of His great love to us in the death of His only begotten Son: "We love Him because He first loved us." It is not because we are compelled to do it by threatenings of wrath. This never produced love in any human heart. Terror it did produce, but not love. Love begets love where that love is appreciated; and when the love of God, as it has been brought to light in the death of Jesus, is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us, we love Him.

It may be that we feel our love so feeble that we are almost ashamed to say anything about it at all. This may be all right, for when compared with the infinite love of God, feeble indeed it must ever appear. Still, we love Him, if we are born of Him; and well He knows it, for He searches the heart and knows all that is there. And we also know it, however we may bewail its feebleness. Peter could appeal to the omniscience of the Lord at a time when his actions were sufficient to raise doubts as to the reality of his affection for Christ in the minds of his brethren. He says, "Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee" (John 21: 17). It is well to have to do with One who knows the most secret thoughts of the heart. He knows us even better than we know ourselves, and this is a great comfort. He has not to wait until we make known to Him our inmost thoughts. He knows what is there, for every bit of good that is there is there by the working of His fathomless grace. And it is there even before we are aware of it ourselves. It is a great surprise to all of us when we first come to the consciousness of our readiness to stand in the face of the whole hostile world in confession of Christ. Those born of God may seem to the eyes of the world either too contemptible to be taken seriously, or, like a few noxious weeds, to be taken up and given to the flame; and they, if they think of themselves at all, will only regard themselves as cumberers of the ground; but the enjoyment of the favour of God gives them a sense of superiority above all the power and glory of the world.

The love of the children of God is self-sacrificing. We are told we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren; that is to say, all the children of God should lay down their lives for one another. The One in whom that love has been expressed laid down his life for us; therefore we should lay down our lives for one another. It is the love of God that is in the hearts of His children, and that love came to light in the death of Christ; and if God so loved us, we are told, we also should love one another. We would be most likely to say, we should love Him; but we never find love to God demanded in Christianity. Under law God says, "Thou shalt love Me"; and, "Ye are cursed if ye do not." But under grace God says, "I love you, believe it and live."

The test of that love being in us is our love to the children of God. We might say that we love God, but it is that which is of God in the world that tests us; and if we love not our brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen? (1 John 4: 20). We may go about looking for love from our brethren, and murmuring because we do not seem to get as much of it as we would desire, but this is a sad state to be in, and manifests a heart not in the enjoyment of the love of God. Love is the very life of the children of God, and is the spring and fountain of all their activities. It is the new commandment. It was the thing that was true in Jesus when He was upon earth, and is now true in His own in the power of the Spirit (1 John 2: 8).

In this we are to be imitators of God, and walk in love as Christ also has loved us, and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour. As His children we are to come out in His moral characteristics, and become known to be the disciples of Jesus, as He says, "By this shall all men know that ye are disciples of Mine, if ye have love one to another" (John 13: 35). No teacher but Himself ever taught this, hence those who love one another are known in this world as His disciples.

How far above the plotting and working of the enemy God has shown Himself to be. Satan, no doubt, considered he had accomplished something that would act as an eternal vexation to the Creator, when he overthrew the creature in transgression, who was made in His image and likeness. But he little knew the wisdom and might of Him whose implacable foe he had become. That evil has been made the occasion of Satan's everlasting downfall, and of infinite and eternal glory to God. Through infinite grace fallen sinners have been brought to know the Creator in His nature, and to stand before Him in the relationship of sons. Earth has been lost, but heaven has been gained, and all the glory belongs to God; and blessed for ever be His name, we can say God is love. May we be kept in that love, and may we grow in the divine nature, and be better able to imitate Him whose name is Love. Nothing but love is of any value under the sun, but it must be divine love, the love of God, the love of the Father, the love of the Son, and the love of the brethren. Without this nature, which in us is the result of new birth, all else is worthless.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love,

I am become as sounding brass,

Or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy,

And understand all mysteries,

And all knowledge;

And though I have all faith,

So that I could remove mountains, and have not love,

I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,

And though I give my body to be burned and have not love,

It profiteth me nothing.

Love

suffereth long,

is kind,

envieth not,

vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

doth not behave itself unseemly,

seeketh not her own,

is not easily provoked,

thinketh no evil,

rejoiceth not in iniquity,

rejoiceth in the truth,

beareth all things,

believeth all things,

hopeth all things,

endureth all things,

never faileth.

Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13).

The Son of God and the Scriptures

"The second Man is the Lord from heaven." 2 Cor. 15: 4.

"The Scripture cannot be broken." John 10: 35.

As regards ourselves, who are by nature Gentiles, the whole fabric of Scripture authority rests upon the basis of the greatness of the person of Jesus. The Answer of my faith to the question: "What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He? must regulate my thoughts regarding this all-important subject. And as a matter of fact, I find that the way in which people do answer this question makes all the difference as to their ideas of inspiration. I never knew a man sound upon the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, who harboured the least doubt in his mind regarding the divinity of Jesus; neither have I ever known any one who looked upon Jesus as the Creator incarnate, and who relegated the Bible to a lower place than the Word of God. I am sure it will be found that these two convictions are inseparably connected, and that where any one of them is not welcome, the other will refuse to enter.

One who has recently apostatized from the faith of Christianity questions if we ever would have heard of the Old Testament had it not been for Jesus; and though it may be very difficult to say what might, or might not have been, had the light of the gospel of Christ never reached us, we certainly would not have had any real faith in it apart from the Son of God. We have received the Holy Scriptures solely through faith in Him. He has authenticated to us the writings of Moses and the Prophets; and the writers of the New Testament declare their epistles to be the commandments of the Lord (1 Cor. 14: 37); and that not only the thoughts, but the words in which those thoughts were conveyed to us, were words chosen by the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2: 13).

If these statements of theirs, which lay claim to such authority, are falsehoods, then they are the most wicked falsehoods ever told to men, for they are lies against the living God; and as they concern the most important matters with which the human race has to do, they are the inventions of soul-murderers. These statements of the avowed followers and servants of Jesus are accompanied, on the one hand, with the promise of eternal and unspeakable blessedness for the believer; and, on the other hand, the most terrible consequences of unbelief are announced as hanging over the head of the impenitent rebel; and all these things are placed before the reader in language which is absolutely simple, natural, unstrained, and bearing no resemblance to that which rises from the frenzied imagination of crack-brained zealots. If what they affirm of their words and writings be not true, they were a crowd of wicked and bad men, and they can be believed in nothing. And yet we owe to those men all that we have ever heard of Jesus; and my knowledge of men gives me the most perfect assurance that such a person as He of whom they testified could not be created in the mind of a child of Adam.

His story touches the most tender chords of the human heart, and His moral excellency so mightily appeals to the soul of the faithful disciple, that his most blissful moment is when he is at the feet of this adorable Person as a worshipper. So great is Jesus, so morally different from every other human being, so completely free from all the unworthy motives which govern others, so gracious, guileless, gentle, meek, lowly, compassionate, merciful, self-sacrificing, righteous, holy, harmless, good, so completely unique in all His characteristics, and so unlike man, as we know man, in every solitary way, that some have questioned if such a person ever really existed.

But if His disciples invented Him, they must have travelled for their conception outside the sphere in which the thoughts of men revolve; and if they ever took such a journey, we have to ask ourselves what power it was which carried them into those hitherto unexplored and unknown regions of purest thought, and imprinted upon their imaginations the moral glories with which they decked Him of whom they spoke as the Son of God.

If Jesus were an invention of those who called themselves His disciples, then His disciples were not ordinary men, for they have certainly gone beyond all that can be understood by men of the world. Leaving this world, after having revealed the Father, Jesus has to say, "O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee" (John 17: 25); and again, "They have not known the Father, nor Me" (16: 3). The Father cannot be known by a mere child of Adam, nor can the second Man be known by the first. There is no analogy between the Father and the world, nor between the man made of dust and the Man out of heaven; both Father and Son are beyond the ken of the men of this world.

The gods of the heathen are by the makers of them indued with passions such as men have; they are morally like men, but with greater strength. And if I take the heroes of the novelist, pride and self-reliance are the prominent features, for these are the characteristics in which men delight, but not one of them is like Jesus. There is nothing in common between men, as I know man, and the Son of God. It is only in the Bible I can find Him. How is this? If those fishermen of Galilee invented Him, how is it that no one has been able to invent another who can be compared with Him? and how is it that now that He has been invented, He is so little understood that the greatest minds on earth, even when well-intentioned, cannot reproduce Him? Their frequent attempts have been at best but miserable caricatures. Apart from the holy anointing, the indwelling Spirit of God, no one can know the Father and the Son.

Read the best written life of Jesus ever produced by the uninspired pen of an unregenerate man, and then turn to the four Gospels, and see if it is not an emergence out of thick darkness and the domain of death, into marvellous light, and the radiant sphere of everlasting life. As you read the nine beatitudes which introduce the sermon on the mount, you are made to feel as though a door were opened in heaven, and the whole atmosphere about you at once becomes redolent with the perfume wafted from the paradise of God; then pass on until you hear the bells of heaven pealing forth the welcome of a returning scape-gallows, who in broken utterances sobs out his repentance into the gracious ear of a Saviour-God, and you must feel that all this is outside the sphere in which the thoughts of men revolve, and that you are made to listen to the pulsations of immortal love.

When you have finished with this, if you ever can finish with it, turn to John 13 and behold the grace of that lowly Son of God, doing the most menial service for His disciples which it is possible for one man to perform for another; and listen to those counsels of grace, wisdom, and holy love which fall from His blessed lips upon the ears of His humble followers; and follow Him until He is done speaking to them, and turns His eyes up to heaven, and pours into the ears of His Father His desires for them, and for all who will believe on Him through their word; and hear Him demand on their behalf, as One who has a righteous claim upon the wealth of power, and grace, and love, which in the Father dwell. Then follow Him to the judgment hall of the Roman governor, and hearken to the leaders of His earthly people howling for His heart's blood; and follow the crowd to dark Golgotha, and behold Him who made the worlds led as a lamb to the slaughter, nailed to a gibbet as a malefactor, and that between two robbers; and watch to the close, until He is taken down dead, while darkness enfolds the land, and under your feet you feel the earth reel beneath the weight of the corpse of Him who was its Creator, while the rocks are rent and the graves are opened; and if, after witnessing these things, you can flatter yourself that Jesus was a man like other men, or that such a Person either was, or could be, the invention of His disciples, you have a way of judging and arriving at conclusions unknown to me. From the benighted heart of the pagan centurion who had charge of the crucifixion was wrung the confession: "Truly this Man was the Son of God" (Mark 15: 39). May the reader's heart be at least as impressionable.

This is the glorious Person who has authenticated to us the Old Testament, of which He is the Subject, as He is also of the New. As to Israel, the law was given to them by Moses, and accompanied by such visible manifestations of majesty and terror on the part of God, that its divine origin could not by them be called in question; and as to the prophets, their word was proven to be of God by the sanctity of their lives, by its harmony with that which was given through Moses, and by the signs and wonders with which God was sometimes pleased to send it forth; though generally speaking, the prophets who after Moses were used of God to build up the canon of Scripture, do not seem to have been miracle workers. Men like Elijah and Elisha, who were characterized by miraculous manifestations, have not been used to put anything on record, though their words and works and manner of life have been recorded by others. The Jewish Scriptures were well authenticated to the people.

But we Gentiles were outside all those special dealings of God. We were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world" (Eph. 2: 12). We have come into this rich inheritance through having to do with God revealed in Jesus. He came to His earthly people in fulfilment of the promises made to the fathers, but they rejected Him, and slew Him with the sword of the Romans. God raised Him from the dead, and in answer to the prayer of Jesus from the cross on their behalf (Luke 23: 34), offered to send Him back to them if they would repent (Acts 3: 20). The stoning of Stephen was their answer to this, and closed the door of hope to the nation; therefore devout men made great lamentation over his death, for in his grave every hope of Israel after the flesh was buried.

Then the Gentiles come up for blessing before God, and the persecutor of the Church is converted and sent to them. The perfect revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God in whom the Jews boasted, came in the Word made flesh, so that believers from among the Gentiles find themselves linked up in the worship of the true God with Abel and all the faithful from his day until the coming of Christ. In this way we have a title to the Old Testament as well as to the New, and to us the two volumes become one Book, both equally inspired of God; the authority of the old established for us in the submission of Christ to every jot and tittle, though a better thing has been brought in by Him, for the Old was but the demand, whereas the New is the supply.

The subtle way in which men who call themselves Christians put before the public theories which are in direct antagonism to the plain statements of Scripture, is a plain proof of their determination to undermine in the thoughts of men whatever bit of confidence they may still possess in the Bible as the Word of God. If they would tell us plainly that they had abandoned Christianity as a useless encumbrance in the pursuit of knowledge, one might be grieved and sorry for them; but they would not be sailing under a false flag, neither would their ways fill one with the same measure of disgust and loathing.

I may be told that these men think there is much in the Scriptures that is really valuable, and therefore they do not feel justified in casting them aside as altogether useless. But if the Bible be not the word of God, and if Jesus be not a divine Person, and if we have no revelation from God, and if the apostles were a set of deceivers and knaves?. But here I am interrupted at once, and reminded that the writers are considered to have been good and true men. Are they? Did Jehovah say to the prophets the things which they spoke to men as His word? Was the burning bush a fact in the life of Moses? Jesus said it was, but was it? Is the Exodic account of the deliverance of Israel from the power of Pharaoh true? What about the passage through the sea? the desert? the manna? the water out of the rock? Whose Son was He who said: "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness"? (John 6: 49).

Did Jesus work the wonders which are recorded of Him? They are recorded by the Evangelist, that we should believe that He is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing we might have life through His name (John 20: 31). Is the greatness of this Person built upon a foundation of falsehood, and is it upon a raft of lies against the living God we are to float into the harbour of eternal life? Did these good and true men who wrote the Gospels and Epistles concoct the baseless wonders with which they accredit Jesus, and leave them on record encased in a framework of piety as hypocritical as false? This is not what I should expect from men who are good and true.

And yet they do commend themselves to the conscience of all men as both good and true. No one can question that they believed the things which they have put on record. And how could they have been deceived? They were not men easily convinced, and the deeds were not done in a corner. They were neither credulous nor easily imposed upon, and though their persistent unbelief was failure, and had to come under the rebuke of their Lord, it gives additional weight to their testimony, which they gladly bore for His honour and for our eternal blessing, when the last cloud of unbelief at length yielded to the gracious influence of that eternal day, which broke upon their souls as they stood beside the empty grave of Him who could not be holden of death.

The Man of God's Counsels

"We see Jesus . . . crowned with glory and honour." Hebrews 2: 9.

It is impossible to connect the idea of chance with any of the ways of God. Not even a sane man will commence a work without having in his mind the image of that upon which the labour of his hands is to be employed. A man may not be able to perfect his idea; he may find, as his work proceeds, that it will not answer the purpose for which he intended it, and therefore he may have with reluctance to abandon it; he may even learn something in the midst of his toil which may cause him to make considerable alterations, so that the thing when finished is very different from his original conception. This comes from being unable to grasp at the outset every detail connected with the subject in hand, and everything that will be necessary to do, in order to arrive at perfection.

But this can never be the case as regards the activities of God. It is impossible to think of Him as limited in wisdom, skill, or understanding. He must be infinite in every one of His attributes. The man who thinks otherwise, if any such man exist, can have no true thought of the Creator in his soul. Man is only a finite being, and, as I have suggested, while he proceeds with his work, new ideas strike his mind, for though perfection be his ideal, he can never arrive at it. He does not know the power and value of the elements with which he has to work, neither does he perfectly know their relation to one another, nor always the result of certain combinations; hence he is ever astonishing himself with his new discoveries, and bringing out new inventions.

Not so God. The Creator can learn nothing from His creation. The universe is the conception of His infinite mind, and it is impossible that He could receive any instruction from it. "The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath He established the heavens. By His knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew" (Prov. 3. 19-20). Who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been His counsellor? or who hath first given to Him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? for of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever" (Rom. 11: 34-36). He has not, as some suppose, been from the outset doing the best He can, contending with the inroads of evil, meeting the adverse power to the best of His ability, and ever, through the growth of intelligence, improving upon the past. "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself" (Ps. 50: 21), is the charge He makes against the wicked, and it is a charge of which all are guilty who have not learned Him in Jesus.

It is impossible for me to imagine the Creator forming a universe like the one of which I form a part, without having distinctly before Him its whole history, and the ultimate result of all His activities in connection with it. His plans must all have been formed before He began His work; and when we come to Scripture this is just what we find. The Book of those counsels is alluded to more than once (Ex. 32: 32; Ps. 40: 7; Ps. 139: 16). We have counsel, promise, choice, and purpose referred to again and again; and the central object in all those counsels is the Man who was predestined to give effect to them. As Adam was the man set upon the footing of responsibility, and who, failing to fulfil that responsibility, fell under the power of evil; so Christ is the Man of divine counsel, who upholds everything by the power of God. It was ever the thought of God to set up all things in His own power. Nothing can stand but that which is upheld by the might of God.

If this be kept in mind, it is easy to see that the Man of God's counsels must be a divine person. No creature is capable of maintaining himself in blessing on the principle of obedience, and none but a divine person could carry out the thoughts of the Godhead. Christ is not a development of the race of Adam. He is not the best man of that race that ever lived, or the most perfect that ever walked the earth. He is not of the old order at all. He is the "last Adam," and the last Adam is not a mere improvement upon the first. The first man was of the earth, made of dust: "the second Man is out of heaven." The first Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam is a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15). The first had his origin from earth; the second had His origin from heaven. The first man was made to bask in the goodness of God; the second had His place in the bosom of the Father. There are mysteries in connection with the Son which no creature can fathom: "No man knoweth the Son but the Father"; but that, on the divine side, He was equal with the Father is fully revealed in Scripture and that, on our side, He was Man is just as strongly insisted. He is spoken of as "The Man that is My fellow, saith the Lord of Hosts" (Zech. 13: 7).

A recent writer, who for a little while made a great stir in the religious world, tells us that the truth about the person of Jesus is to be the great question for religion in the near future. The truth is, it has been the great question since the hour in which He took His place in public testimony for God. The Baptist bore testimony to Him as the Son of God, the thong of whose sandals he was unworthy to loose (John 1). The Father also bore witness to Him, opening heaven upon Him, and saluting Him as His beloved Son, in whom He had found His delight (Luke 3: 22). The Old Testament bears witness to the greatness of this wondrous Personage. Isaiah speaks of Him as the One whose rebuke dries up the sea, and makes the rivers a wilderness; who clothes the heavens with blackness, and makes sack-cloth their covering; and yet One to whom Jehovah had given the tongue of a disciple, whose ear He had opened to hear as the instructed, who gave His back to the smiters and His cheeks to them that plucked off the hair, and who hid not His face from shame and spitting (Isa. 50). He is the object of the worship of angels (Ps. 97, cf. Heb. 1: 6), saluted as God upon the throne (Ps. 45), addressed as the everlasting Creator of the heavens and the earth (Ps. 102), and yet called up from the depths of death to sit upon the right hand of God, until His enemies should be made a footstool for His feet (Ps. 110).

Now it is true that "No man knoweth the Son but the Father" (Matt. 11), yet there is a way in which He is to be known by His people. It is life eternal to know the Father, and Jesus Christ His sent One (John 17: 3), and believers are all to come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God (Eph. 4: 13). There are mysteries about this Person that no creature mind can grasp, and it is exceedingly dangerous to allow the human reason a loose rein in the contemplation of such a sacred and profound subject. When we think of the "fulness of the Godhead" inhabiting a human body, a divine Person for thirty-three years confining Himself to the limits of a man, yet never less than the omnipotent Creator, we become convinced that in such a contemplation the imagination of man can have no place, and that to move a single step one way or another without divine support would be to court disaster, land us in the depths of error, and expose us to the attack of the enemy of our souls. We are only safe when we keep close to the revelation we have of Him in the Scriptures of truth. That He was, and remains, a Man, these Scriptures affirm; that He is the Creator is also affirmed, and that He was always fully conscious of who He was is also maintained.

The truth about His person may be the question in the near future, but as I have already said, it is as old as His advent into the world. Jesus put the question to the Scribes: "What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?" and discovered them to be without any true light on the point. They had no higher idea concerning Him than that He was the Son of David; but the fact that David had in Spirit called Him Lord was more than they could understand. This was the question of the day for the Jews, and it was because He bore witness to this truth that they condemned Him to the death of the cross (John 19: 7). It is also the question of to-day, and it will be the question until the day of His manifestation in glory. Believers can say: "We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This (Person) is the true God, and eternal life (1 John 5: 20).

During the time in which the first man was under probation, and while, by every trial to which he was subjected, it was being clearly demonstrated that he was utterly untrustworthy and unprofitable, the positions of trust in which he was placed ? which tested his ability to hold the position for God ? shadowed forth the offices which would be taken up by the second Man, and fulfilled to the glory and praise of God. Hence for two reasons the trial was never repeated. When God committed to man a position of trust and he failed to hold it faithfully, he had no second opportunity. In the first place, the trial was perfect, and the circumstances under which the trial took place were always most favourable to the probationer. To have given a second occasion would have been to admit that something had been overlooked in the first, which should have been kept in mind, and that because of this, the evidence was not quite conclusive. In the second place, in all those prominent men in the past dispensation, to whom positions of trust were committed, Christ was being shadowed forth; and this being so, no more was required than that the picture should be drawn, and the position indicated; when this was done its purpose was served, and it disappeared.

This explains things which often seem inexplicable to the superficial reader of Scripture. Men are sometimes installed in a position of dignity and trust with as much ceremony as though they were to abide in it for ever, and in connection with this position an order of things is established with as much care, exactitude, grandeur, and glory as though it were never to be shaken, and the next thing we are called to witness is the complete collapse and ruin of everything, and the announcement of something fresh seals its complete and final rejection. It was but a picture drawn by the Spirit of God to illustrate a position which the Man of God's counsels would one day take up and maintain to the honour of God. Hence Christ is the One set forth in such men as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, Solomon, Nebuchadnezzar, and many others, for in every one of these men was set forth some position, office, or headship, which would be filled by the One whom God had in reserve, and who was to come to light when the worthlessness of the first man would be perfectly demonstrated. In the dispensation of the fulness of times (Eph. 1) all these men will be seen to have been figures, as Adam was, of Him that was to come (Rom. 5: 14). He will hold for God everything in which these men failed.

Fallen Adam was head of the old fallen race; Christ is head of the new righteous race. Adam brought in sin and death; Christ brought in righteousness and life ? Adam through his disobedience; Christ through His obedience. Adam's act of disobedience had its bearing toward all men in the way of condemnation; so the obedience of Christ, proved in His death, has its bearing toward all in the sense of justification. Sin and death came in by Adam, and have their bearing toward all men; and righteousness and life came in by Christ and have reference to all. If all are lost in Adam, God has raised up a righteous Head for men, so that all may be saved in Him. He gave Himself a ransom for all, for God would have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2). Therefore the Gospel is preached world-wide that men may turn to God through Christ and find salvation. Christ is to be everything to every man ? wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption Cor. 1: 30).

But then it should be understood by all, that if Christ was to take up the position of life-giving Head toward all men, the question of righteousness cannot be ignored. There was the question of sin between man and God, and who could touch it? Christ will not ignore all the rights which God has over His creature. Even between men satisfaction must be offered to the offended party before right relations can be established. It may be the offended party is magnanimous enough to forgive everything, but relations thus established are never of the happiest or most lasting nature. There must be a basis of righteousness if confidence and quietude of soul are to exist undisturbed for ever. If this be so with regard to the relations of men with one another, how much more is it true with respect to our relations with God, seeing that the slightest friction between us and Him would make every thought of God a terror to us, and our very existence one of utter misery.

In the Book of divine counsel, to which I have already referred, we get brought to light, not only the One who was to accomplish those counsels, but also the fact that a body was to be prepared for Him. The sacrifices and offerings belonging to the law were valueless to take away sins, therefore if the will of God is to be done a sacrifice of infinite value was necessary. This was furnished by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ (Heb. 10: 10). In the Psalm (40) which speaks of this Book, and of the Accomplisher of the will of God, we have this wondrous Person crying out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, and heard in resurrection, when His feet are placed upon a rock, and a new song put into His mouth. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives us to understand that one reason for His taking a body was, that through death He might destroy the Devil, who had the might of death, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage (Heb. 2: 14, 15). Another reason given was, that we might be set apart to God in the value of that offering (chap. 10: 10), our consciences perfected and our hearts won, so that we might be at home in the presence of God. His death is the basis of all blessing, and is the foundation upon which will be built up the whole fabric of the new heavens and the new earth, a universe secure from the invasion of evil.

The Son of Man

"What is man, that Thou art mindful of him, or the Son of Man, that Thou visitest Him" Hebrews 2: 6.

To prove that a God of infinite goodness is not the author of this world in its present state requires no elaborate argumentation, nor does it make any demand upon the least ratiocinative ability. It is everywhere, and in everything, abundantly manifest that a beneficent Creator would not voluntarily give His creatures, whom He has endowed with intelligence, affections, sensitivity, accountability to Himself and to his fellows, into the darkness, the distress, the sufferings, the sorrows, the woes that are the portion of the whole human family.

There must be some terrible reason for the state of things we find in this world ? the pestilences, the horrors of war, the hatred, the murders, the corruption, the fear of death, the silence of heaven, the shrinking from the grave to which all are hastening, and the dread of something after ? these evils cry out against our attributing to a benevolent Creator the invention or origination of such a woeful state of things.

Yet even on this earth we have indications, many and varied, that it is a beneficent Creator who watches over the history of the earth's generations and teeming multitudes. The sunshine warms and comforts our bodies, and between its kindly influence and the rain from heaven the hearts of men are filled with food and gladness. The seasons come round in their appointed courses, and fulfil their several functions of mercy. Under the night-cloud man lies down to rest, and his weary frame becomes thus refreshed and ready to answer to the demands of another day. And all this bears testimony to the goodness of God, and is given that men might feel after Him, and find Him; for He is not far from any one of us; for in Him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17).

Thank God for His Word, the revelation He has given us concerning Himself. Where would we be without it? Would we be able without it to pick out of all His ways with us the witnesses of His faithful and generous care for our welfare, and, in spite of the innumerable evils that afflict our souls, to encourage our hearts in such a sense of His desire for our welfare that we would put out the hand of faith in the midst of the surrounding gloom, that it might lay hold upon His?

No: we require this precious revelation of Himself which He in His infinite love has given us, that by it we may be made wise to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3: 15-17). And how beautifully this revelation sets before us the great thoughts of God, and how all His purposes, even before the beginning of His works, centred upon man. Man whom we supposed He had neglected, and to whose sorrows He was indifferent, is supreme in the eternal thoughts of God.

But for almost six thousand years men have groaned under the oppression of the enemy, and as far as any public display of power is concerned it is all in the hands of the enemy, and deliverance seems as far off as it was at the beginning. Man is still under death, still dominated by sin and the devil. Through what mighty man is the deliverance of the oppressed to be effected?

We are, blessed be God, left in no doubt as to this. Almost the first words that fell upon the ears of our fallen parents from which they could derive any hope were those that were spoken to the serpent that deceived them: the Seed of the woman was to bruise his head. Adam could effect nothing. His own deliverance, as well as the deliverance of any of his posterity, depended upon the Seed of the woman. Not Adam, but the Son of Man is the One whom God has made strong for Himself (Ps. 80: 17).

He is to be supreme in the universe of God. Everything is to be put under His feet. The only exception to this is God Himself. He is to be pre-eminent in every department of the universe, for this is the decree of God from all eternity. Around Him all the thoughts of God centre. He is the object of all prophetic scripture. The prominent men in past dispensations were only figures of Him, shadows of the Man that filled the vision of God.

When the Psalmist looked up into the heavens and contemplated the work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars which He had ordained, the littleness of man came before him, and he wondered that God took such account of him. But if the littleness of man filled the vision of the Psalmist so that he was forced to exclaim: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" it was Christ that filled the vision of the Spirit: not Adam, but the Seed of the woman, the Son of Man, the object of divine counsel, and He saw everything put under His feet; and though this is not manifestly so yet, the same Spirit fixes our attention upon the Man in heaven, who is crowned with glory and honour, having tasted death for everything. If we see not yet all things put under man, we see the Man under whom everything is to be put, and we see Him in the highest place in glory.

We find a most interesting reference to Him in the eighth of Proverbs. There, speaking as Wisdom, He says, "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old . . .: then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him; rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my delights were with the sons of men."

Now when we come to the truth regarding the greatness of the Son of Man we find that He is the Creator Himself: all things were made by Him (John 1; Col. 1; Heb. 1). And yet He is viewed here as "by" the Creator, when He made the heavens and the earth. The reason of this, I have no doubt, is that He is there viewed solely as the Man of God's counsels, and that He was the object or purpose with regard to creation; and everything was made with regard to its being taken over by this Son of Man who gave direction to the whole character of the work. "As one brought up with Him" is translated in the Revised Version: "A master workman" (v. 30), and it has also been translated: "His artificer." The meaning, I am persuaded, is that everything was created in view of Christ taking it under control as Man on the ground of redemption.

For we must keep in mind, as I have said, that He is Creator, and that He made the universe and all that is in it for Himself (Col. 1: 16); and when it became necessary for the glory of God, and for the fulfilment of divine counsel, that He should take the place of Leader of the salvation of the many sons that God was bringing to glory, and when it was necessary for the exigencies of that glory that redemption should be wrought, He tasted death for everything: "For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." Therefore the One who created everything has tasted death for everything, that everything might be placed on the ground of redemption to the glory of God.

His sufferings were first of all for the glory of God; that in the creation where God was so dishonoured through sin, sin might receive its judgment, and that when and where sin would receive its judgment God would be glorified, not only in every one of His attributes but in His very nature. In the second place, He suffered the suffering of death in order that the devil, who had the power of death, might be annulled, and that deliverance might be effected for those who, on account of the fear of death, had been all their lives subject to bondage. In the third place, He suffered to make propitiation for the sins of those who were to be His companions in the day of His glory. And in the fourth place, He suffered, being tempted, in order to be able to sympathize with our weaknesses, and to be able to succour us when we are tempted (see Hebrews 2.)

In the Old Testament, and in the New, by all the writers except Paul, the use of the title "The Christ" connects, as far as my memory serves me, the Saviour with the people of Israel. I know that the woman of Samaria connected the Christ with the world but though this be true, the Lord had already told her that "salvation was of the Jews," and the salvation of the world really depends upon Jehovah's resumption of relationship with His earthly people. To this great truth the prophets bear abundant testimony, and so also does the Apostle of the Gentiles in Romans 9: 12-15.

But under the title of "Son of Man" He is not viewed in connection with any special family upon earth. It is a title that speaks of universal headship and blessing. At the same time we must keep in mind that the application of this title to the Saviour and the order of things that are connected with it do not set aside, disarrange, or alter the conditions of blessing that are brought before us under the title of the Christ. It is simply that the title Son of Man extends the field of vision to the utmost limits of the universe, including all that is brought before us in the titles "Son of Abraham," "Son of David," "King of Israel," "The Christ," or any other.

In the Gospels, rejected by the Jews, He will not allow Himself to be called the Christ, but tells His disciples that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the priests and elders of the people; and be delivered to the Gentiles, who would expose Him to every indignity, and in the end put Him to death. To Nicodemus He testifies that — "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up," not for the sake of Israel only, but that "Whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." The title Son of Man carries with it universal power and blessing.

But not only must the Son of Man come under the suffering of death, but He it is who breaks the power of death, for since by man came death, by Man came also the resurrection of those that are dead (1 Cor. 15: 21). If man in the person of Adam brought in death, the Son of Man has broken its power and brought about resurrection in the power of God.

But the first to be raised is Himself: He is Firstborn from the dead (Col. 1: 18), and God has set Him far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under His feet, and given Him to be head over all things to the church which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all. (Eph. 1: 20-23).

And all that are His who have passed away from earth shall be raised in His likeness, for He is the pattern of the redeemed family. He will raise His sleeping saints in glory, and change the living along with them into His own image: for we shall bear the image of the heavenly Man.

And because He is Son of Man all judgment is committed to Him; and the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth: they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation (John 5). He has authority everywhere. And He has a right to this authoritative position in the universe: first, because He created it; second, because He redeemed it; third, because for the glory of God He was humiliated in the sight of it.

What a multitude of varied glories cluster around this title of Son of Man ? the Man of divine counsel, the Architect of all creation, the Creator Himself, the Seed of the woman, the Son of Abraham, the Son of David, the Man whom Jehovah has made strong for Himself, the Destroyer of the power of death, the Resurrection and the Life, the Bread that came down from heaven and which gives life to the world, the One who shall bruise the head of the devil, the Judge of living and dead, Lord of angels, Lord of living, Lord of dead, Lord of all, the One under whose headship everything in the universe shall be gathered together ? yet obedient to death, and that the death of the cross; made sin, a curse, the song of the drunkard, a worm and no man; mocked, derided, buffeted, abused; His face marred more than any other man's, His form more than the sons of men; groaning, sighing, weeping in a world of sin and rebellion against God; despised for His grace, hated for His love, martyred for the truth; He drank the vinegar and gall of human ingratitude, and the bitter chalice of divine judgment against sin; rejected by the Jews, crucified by the Romans, betrayed by a friend, denied by a disciple, abandoned by His followers, forsaken by God. Whose sorrow ever equalled the sorrow of this Son of Man?

But shall not the glory be equal to the sorrow? Yea, God hath highly exalted Him, and hath given Him a name that is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of heavenly, earthly, and infernal things, and that every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father (Phil. 2: 9-11). Every one must honour the Son as the Father is honoured (John 5: 23). Well may we prostrate ourselves in His presence and rejoice as we confess Him.

In Christ

"There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." Romans 8: 1.

This is the grand and glorious conclusion arrived at by the Holy Spirit, after having traced, for the benefit of the Roman saints, the manner and result of the intervention of God on behalf of His poor creature, who in his natural and responsible condition lay helpless and undone under sin's cruel slavery, and subject to the infliction of eternal wrath.

In Adam there was nothing but death and condemnation for the sinner. The head was fallen, and all the race was of necessity also fallen. Far off from God, ungodly, transgressors, rebels, enemies, children of wrath, are some of the terms employed in the Word of Truth to set before us the terrible nature of our natural condition as in the first and fallen Adam. In the abominable corruption of the flesh we wallowed, with no confidence in God, suspicious of all His gracious advances on our behalf, preferring darkness to light, hatred to love, curse to blessing, war to peace, earth to heaven, the creature to the Creator, even the oppression of the devil to the sway of infinite and eternal love. We were at a distance from God, and at that distance we were determined at all costs to keep ourselves. We would not seek Him, and should He come out as the seeker after us, every corner of the universe would be ransacked for a hiding-place. If we looked backward dark was the history of the world, dark and deceitful our own personal history, darkness lay upon everything around us, and before us loomed the blackness of darkness for ever. Without God we were miserable, and the thought of God made us ten times more miserable. Our money was given for that which was not bread, and our labour for that which did not satisfy. We snatched occasionally a momentary pleasure from the indulgence of our carnal appetites, but our seasons of depression were terrific, and the thought of having to meet God and to render account to Him was intolerable. As hell and destruction are never satisfied, and the grave and the barren womb never say, Enough; so was the bottomless pit of our corrupt nature ever demanding fresh novelties supplied from the hell-invented markets of a godless world, and so were we finding that the whole universe would be of itself insufficient to fill one human heart.

What could it be for a soul away from God but unhappiness? No creature is sufficient for himself, nor indeed is the creation itself sufficient for the creature set by God in intelligent relationship with Himself. God alone can suffice for the heart of man; and woe, unutterable woe, must be the portion of those who, having said to God, "Depart from us," shall be compelled to hear Him in the day of judgment say to them, "Depart from Me, ye cursed." The souls that will not have Him in time need not expect Him to have them in eternity.

But for the soul in Christ there is no condemnation. The condemnation has been borne by Him in whom I am placed before God. The sins, the sin, the judgment, the death, and the slavery to sin ? all are gone, and "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." New relationships, new hopes, new life, new objects, and new power have come to pass in and through Him who is my righteousness, my life, and my salvation before the face of God.

In Him I am of God (1 Cor. 1: 30). I derive my new moral, spiritual existence from God: I am born of Him. Nothing of Adam enters into that which is in Christ. They are two different orders of men. One made of dust, the other out of heaven. The cross is the end of my connection with the former ? "I am crucified with Christ" (Gal. 2: 20). There I have been brought to an end judicially. I could not have been mended, therefore have I been ended. Apart from law I was lawless, under law a transgressor, visited by God in grace in the person of His Son I was a God-hater, ungodly, a rebel sinner, an enemy of God. Such was the flesh. Such it is, for it is incorrigible. Such was I. Such is the flesh still in me. But I am not in it, thank God. "Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be the Spirit of God dwell in you" (Rom. 8: 9). I am of Christ's order.

"The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," and not "the law of sin in my members," is now the principle and power which regulates my conduct on my way to glory. "What the law could not do" God has done; not by mending the old ? that could not be done ? but by ending for me the whole condition of flesh, and giving me the Holy Spirit to rule, regulate, guide, and empower the inward man, so that I might walk after the Spirit and fulfil the righteous requirement of the law, and thus "adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour."

In Christ is new creation (2 Cor. 5: 17). There "old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new"; new nature, new life, new relationships, new affections. And all these things are of God. The man in Christ is of God, and everything connected with him. In Adam is old creation: old, fallen, sinful, defiled, dead, and lost. In Christ is new, and "as He is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4: 17).

"Of such an one will I glory" (2 Cor. 12: 5). It is well to know that to them that are in Him there is no condemnation; but that does not exhaust all that there is in Christ. We learn this to begin with; but we have in Him an inexhaustible wealth of blessing that will never be all learned while we are upon earth. Who could fathom the bliss of being "holy and without blame before Him in love?" or fully estimate the dignity and delight of being before the Father's face, as sons along with, and in the likeness of, His Son? We read these words in our Bibles, and we believe them too, but we may well ask ourselves what power they possess over our souls.

Paul boasted of the man "in Christ." He tells the Philippians that if any one thought he had whereof to boast in the flesh, he himself had more. And when he had for a moment decorated himself with these virtues, that the Philippians might get a look at what he was in the flesh, he tears them off, and in utter disgust throws them upon the midden of corrupt fallen humanity, counting them dung that he might have Christ for his gain and be found "in Him." When arraigned as a prisoner before King Agrippa, in the presence of Festus, the chiliarchs and great men of the city, the sense of the dignity of his place in Christ does not for a single instance fade from his heart and mind. Confronted with all the pride and pomp of royalty, the awe of authority, the glitter, glamour, and fascination of a gaudy, voluptuous court, and with a charge of inciting the populace to riot hanging over his head, he answered the haughty monarch, who, scoffing at his attempt to get at his seared and benumbed conscience, breaks forth into that expression which many have taken to be the language of a soul on the point of surrender to Christ, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian," in those words which so forcibly set before us the way in which his soul entered into the infinite wealth of blessing that was his in Christ: "I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds" (Acts 26: 29).

It has often been remarked that he does not say, "Such as I shall be when glorified," but "Such as I am." Dragged out of the temple by the multitude, who sought to murder him, rescued by the military, bound with two chains, almost torn to pieces by Pharisees and Sadducees, once more forcibly taken out of their violent hands by the soldiers, brought before Felix as a "mover of sedition" and "a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes," and thrown again into prison, where he lay for two years. To be brought in such a state as all this must have reduced him to, into the presence of such magnificence and dazzling splendour as shone that day in the court of King Agrippa, one might have thought his apparently wretched and miserable condition would have so pressed itself upon his spirit that all the enthusiasm produced in him by his new-found faith would have died in his soul. But no. The happiness that was his in Christ, the dignity of his heavenly calling, the favour of God, the knowledge of the Father and the Son, all that God was to him, all that Christ was, the love of God declared in death, the joy of bearing in a small measure the reproach of Christ, of suffering shame, blows, and imprisonments for His name, the privilege of confessing Him before these haughty rulers, as well as before the meanest of the creatures of God ? these sweet and glorious considerations made good to his soul in the power of the divine Spirit exalted him and maintained him upon an elevation as far above the garish circle that surrounded Agrippa as heaven is above earth.

He pitied them. And indeed they were to be pitied. Their rank, their glory, their greatness, the honour paid to them by their inferiors what availed it all with death at their elbow, and a hopeless eternity looming in front of them? They were now having their "good things" (Luke 16), and Paul his "evil things," but Paul's evil things were infinitely better than their good things. His evil things were the reproach of Christ, and that was greater riches than the treasures of Egypt. Miserable, from a human standpoint, was his lot. His property, his reputation, his distinction in the flesh, his scholastic training, his easy circumstances, his liberty ? all were gone, and his life was in peril. What more is needful to be added to make the picture of utter desolation complete? And yet his soul's desire for king and courtier was, that they might come to be as he at that moment was. Marvellous man! How deeply he had entered into the blessedness of the man in Christ.

Another thing I would notice in connection with this subject before bringing this paper to a close. We have the believer in Christ in Romans 8: 1, and the love of God in Christ in the last verse of the same chapter. There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ, neither is there any separation from the love of God, for that love is there also. In unfathomable grace God has brought us to Himself in Christ, and set us before His face in all the value of that work wrought by Christ, and in all the acceptability of His person. But it is in Christ that the love of God has had its full and blessed expression, and it is in Him also it has found its eternal resting-place.

The Heathen

"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right." Genesis 18: 25.

The question of the heathen, who have never been favoured with the message of the grace of God, will naturally arise in the mind of the reader. That they will never have to give account to God for the way in which they have treated a gospel which they have never heard goes without saying. It is a principle of Scripture that where little has been given, little shall be required; but to whom much has been given, from him much shall be demanded (Luke 12: 48). The heathen can only have to give account for the way in which they have treated whatever light they may have had given them of God. The difficulty which arises in the minds of men in connection with their accountability to God has its origin in the fact, that in the heart of each lurks the latent desire to at all costs justify himself. It is natural to him as a sinner, and is a great proof of his fallen condition.

Surely the Creator has a right to do as He pleases in and with His own creation. If man has not answered the purpose for which he was created, God must please Himself as to how He shall deal with him. He may condemn him without giving him any opportunity of salvation, as He has done with fallen angels; or He may act toward him in the way of grace, as He does to men generally; or He may save him by His sovereign mercy, as He does the elect; and who can call His ways in question? He made man, to begin with, and His rights over him are supreme. He can kill and make alive, and He does so without consulting His creature. The whole universe is completely in His power, and it must be so, for it is the work of His hands. The fallen sinner may rebel against His decrees, and attempt to grasp the authority which can be His only, but whether as an object of mercy or of wrath he must learn that the fear of the Lord is the thing for him to cultivate, for this is true wisdom.

It is important to get right ideas of God. I do not mean only in His grace, which must be learned in the gospel, but as a Creator. "Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest Thou? or Thy work, He hath no hands?" (Isa. 45: 9). I have not yet come to consider what God makes, or what He does with what He makes; I am only seeking to show, that if you allow the idea of a Creator at all (and a man must be mad who does not), you must allow that He has a right to do just as He pleases; to make what He pleases, and to do that which He pleases with the thing that He has made. No one ever yet gave God this His rightful place but Christ, who, having taken the place of man, maintained that place consistently, to the glory of God, from the manger to the cross. He held Himself here at the disposal of God, and though He did not sin, neither was guile found in His mouth, yet He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. That it was the will of God was a sufficient explanation of every circumstance in which He found Himself.

I have dwelt long upon this principle, because of its importance in our consideration of God's ways with men in His dealings with the world. That no man has been, or could be, clothed with unlimited authority, and be so free from outside influences that he could carry out the desires of his heart I suppose no one will question. Many considerations conspire together to prevent the greatest despot from working out the conceptions of his evil mind. There is the fear of degrading himself in the eyes of others, or of how the thing may recoil upon his own head. There are always outside influences at work which prevent men having their own way completely. Were it not so, a man with unlimited power would destroy the whole human race, and end all by the destruction of himself.

But God cannot be brought under any influence whatever. And yet man's thought of God does not rise higher than himself: "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself" (Ps. 50: 21). Naturally we think of God as an evil being, and fear to have to do with Him. Being evil ourselves we cannot take in the thought of a Being supremely good: we think of Him as niggardly in the dispensing of His benefits, and vindictive in the execution of His judgment. The god of man's conception is a demon, an evil and cruel being, endowed with the same kind of passions as himself, and influenced, in all his ways with men, by selfish considerations. To come to know God in Jesus is to be brought out of darkness into marvellous light.

Another thing I would say before referring to the light Scripture gives us as to the heathen. Nothing can be perfectly known by the creature. This is so self-evident that I need do no more than mention the fact. The creation itself is beyond us. I know that it exists. I see it, feel it, am part of it. I see the relation which certain things bear to others. The sun, moon, and stars appeal to my senses as the handiwork of an all-wise, almighty, and supreme Being, and from them I drop down to the consideration of a globule of water or a grain of sand. But what do I know of these things? What are they made of? I may be told water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. But what are these gases? I may know a great deal about created things, how they will behave under certain conditions, the uses I may be able to put them to; but what they are in themselves I know not. The Creator does, but the creature cannot know what the creature is. We know all that is necessary for us to know, or perhaps I should rather say, we are capable of knowing all that God deems good for us to know. May we be content with this.

Had man remained in innocence he would not have needed a revelation from God. It was when he sinned this became necessary, and he gets it at once. God has never yet left any of His creatures without witness regarding Himself. Man being like a planet out of his orbit, nothing remains for him but destruction, unless he can be recovered and brought into right relationship with his Centre. When man wheeled wilfully out of his appointed course, His Creator at once intervened, and pointed the way back to righteousness, peace, and salvation. Abel took that way, and found it paved with the favour of Jehovah; Cain refused it, and became a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth. Cain had all the light that Abel had, but he was unfaithful to it; and the whole antediluvian world was not less favoured, though with few exceptions the testimony of God was scorned.

There does not seem to have been any practice of idolatry until after the deluge. It may have been the tradition of the fallen angels which Satan took up, by which to ensnare men, and entice them into demon-worship. Anyhow, almost immediately after the flood mankind fell into idolatry, and idolatry is demon-worship (1 Cor. 10: 20). The idol itself is nothing, but what is behind the idol, and which fills the heart and mind of the worshipper, is a demon. The gods of the heathen are evil beings, and the worship of demons became universal after the flood.

It was not any lack of testimony on the part of God, which brought about this state of things, but the hatred of God natural to the human heart. We have the downward career of the sons of Noah into the moral quagmire of corruption brought graphically before the vision of our souls in the first chapter of Paul's epistle to the Romans. They sinned against the light which they had from God, and they were, the Apostle says, "without excuse." They had all the light possessed by Abel, Enoch, and others, and these had found it sufficient to guide their footsteps back to the Source of life and happiness; and indeed they were still more favoured, for they had seen by the intervention of God in the deluge how well He was able to deliver the godly, and judge the rebellious. Added to this they had the testimony of creation, the visible things bearing testimony to the invisible. The eternal power and divinity of the Creator comes to light in the works of His hands, leaving those who bow down to the idol without excuse.

This is just as true to-day as it was then. The heathen have the heavens declaring the glory of God, and the firmament showing His handiwork: day uttering speech unto day, and night unto night teaching knowledge. There is neither speech nor words, yet is their voice heard through all the earth, right to the extremity of the world (Ps. 19).

There are also evidences of His goodness in the fact that He gives sunshine, rain, and fruitful seasons, "filling our hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14). The object of it all is that men might feel after Him and find Him, for He is not far from any one of us (Acts 17). Man has gone far from God, and his great desire is always to increase the distance, but God has not gone far from man. The distance lies in alienation of heart and mind, and therefore man being a God-hating sinner, the distance to which he has gone is immeasurable; but God pursues him in the grace and love of His heart, ready to fall on his neck and cover him with kisses (Luke 15) the moment he, in the sorrow of his soul, turns round and begins to feel after his Creator, whom he has so heartlessly abandoned.

We are told by Paul (Acts 17) that the times of this ignorance God winked at (overlooked, or dealt with in no special way), but left man to the testimony of the visible things, against which he sinned grossly and provocatively, while wallowing in every abominable pollution that suggested itself to his corrupt and devil-deceived heart. He had sufficient testimony given him by God to light his way back to Him from whom he was gradually drifting farther and farther away; but to this he paid no regard, for the service of Satan was connected with a licence for the flesh, which the idea of a holy and righteous God forbade. Because of this, the service of their fell destroyer was considered easy, his bondage was delightful, God was forgotten, and darkness reigned supreme.

It has been thus from the beginning. The testimony of God by Noah was despised, the law was trampled under foot, the prophets were stoned, and those who foretold the coming of the Messiah were murdered. And has it been any better under the gospel dispensation? The Jews despised it, it went out to the heathen and there few believed it, and in Christendom, which is supposed to be the result of the preaching, comparatively few believe it with their hearts. Men seem more concerned about what is to be the fate of the heathen than they are about their own souls, or about the multitude around them, who, with the gospel ringing in their ears, go heedlessly down to a lost eternity.

The state of the heathen is brought forward by many to discredit the Scriptures. They foolishly imagine that because they have had no testimony of the grace of God presented to them, they cannot be held amenable to the judgment of God. But this conjecture arises from the erroneous idea that men shall be judged for the rejection of the gospel only. That men shall be judged for the rejection of the gospel is true regarding those to whom it has been preached, but all men are amenable to the judgment of God, whether they have heard the gospel or not.

We are told in 1 Thessalonians that the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with the angels of His might, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. This will take place at His appearing, and is spoken of as the judgment of the living. It is "When He shall come." Here we have two classes of people upon whom the judgment falls, namely, them that know not God, and them that obey not the gospel.

But in Romans 2: 12-16 we have a very plain statement made by the Apostle referring to this very question. He says, "As many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law . . . in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ." The Gentiles sinned "without law," the law was never given to them. They shall be judged by the light given by creation, natural conscience, and the goodness of God manifested in His providence. They shall perish: they have been altogether unfaithful to the light vouchsafed to them. The Jews to whom the law was given shall be judged by it. Christians are not supposed to come into judgment. If they were truly that which they are by profession they would not come into judgment, for in Christ the believer is already justified from all things. Still because of the unfaithfulness of those favoured with such abundant light, the time has already come when judgment must begin at the house of God (1 Peter 4: 17).

Judgment will be according to privileges enjoyed. Therefore the soul who has heard the gospel and rejected it shall have the heaviest sentence; the Jew comes next in responsibility, as having the law, priding himself in the possession of it, and dishonouring the Lawgiver by the breaking of it. Last and least in responsibility come the heathen, who have had neither law nor gospel. He who knew his Master's will, and did it not, shall be beaten with many stripes; but he who knew not, and yet did commit things worthy of punishment, shall be beaten with few stripes (Luke 12: 47, 48). The judgment of God will be according to truth against such as do evil: "To them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality (or incorruptibility), eternal life: but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; but glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile" (Rom. 2: 7-10).

That the Judge of all the earth will do right there ought to be no question in any mind; but whatever He does the wisdom of the creature is to submit himself to it. The creature cannot be the judge of his Creator. In the way in which the Creator has been pleased to declare Himself, in that way both reader and writer must come to know Him. I take the perfect account which He has given of Himself in the Word of truth; I contemplate Him in His love, grace, righteousness, holiness, power, wisdom, majesty and might, and my heart is filled with thanksgiving that I have found Him to be such as the gospel reveals Him, and such as my natural heart never for a moment thought Him to be.

I think of Him in His mercy on the one hand, and in His judgment and wrath on the other, and I am not terrified before Him, for I see nothing even in the lake of fire inconsistent with His holy love. He has come to light in Jesus: there His heart is revealed, but from those lips from which rivers of grace flowed forth, there came the testimony of a judgment which in its severity turns the most terrible utterances that ever burned upon prophetic lip into tides of mercy. His enemies had to say "Never man spake like this Man," and surely no one ever did, for no one knew what He knew. When He spoke, the breathings of the heart of God were heard, but mingled with it all the tempests of eternal wrath broke upon the ear. He brought everything to light. The heart of God, the heart of man, the heart of heaven, and the heart of hell. All is in the light now, and men everywhere are seen to be without excuse, and all will find Him justified when He speaks, and clear when He judges (Ps. 51: 4).

Notes on Genesis

Notes on Genesis.

E. L. Bevir.

Biographical Note

London: G. Morrish, 20, Paternoster Square, E.C. 1900.

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding? Job 38: 4.

Contents

Genesis 1

Genesis 2

Genesis 3

Genesis 4

Genesis 5 - 9

Genesis 10, 11

Genesis 12, 13

Genesis 14 - Abraham, Lot, and Melchizedek.

Genesis 15 - 21

Genesis 22 - 24 - The Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Call of the Bride.

Genesis 25, 26 - Ishmael and Isaac.

Genesis 27 - 32 - Jacob and Esau; Israel.

Genesis 37 - 48 - Joseph

Genesis 49 - Jacob's Last Prophecy

Preface

The following "Notes on Genesis" have been reprinted from Helps for the Poor of the Flock. Several of my friends have expressed a wish to have them in a succinct form.

In reading them over, I see nothing that I wish to change. I have no pretension to add to many valuable notes on this wonderful book nor is there any startling novelty. I cannot, however, but hope that the main subjects of Genesis, which are strictly followed in these Notes, may be of help to many who study the scriptures with a view of discovering in them the glory of Christ, and of growing in the knowledge of Him.

In the marvellous history of the first ages, God's grand principles in His ways with men, His counsels, and His full triumph over evil, become visible to us, as in a divine speculum [mirror].

E. L. B. Valence-sur-Rhone, November, 1899.

Genesis 1.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

It is a happy thing, in such a day as ours, to receive by faith the divine account of the formation of the heavens and the earth.

A believer receives God's word in his heart; and his mind is certainly satisfied at the same time, for the mind would be sadly tortured if it had to conceive a universe without a Being who had formed it.*

{* I suppose that the very grossest materialist would admit that there is force acting in the universe; and if he be pushed to it, must he not admit that it is either outside of the molecules of matter or inside them? Which is more likely? That one supreme will and power formed the worlds, and set them rolling; or that all the atoms suddenly agreed by interior force to collect, and then to keep to the laws of gravity?}

The first verse stands by itself, and the gulf or interval between it and the second is greater than we can imagine. The beginning, if we had to count the time back to it, is very remote; but the great thing to observe is that it is the beginning. Ages and ages ago, there was a beginning. It may be said: "We cannot understand what creation is;" to which I would reply: "I believe you; and if you try to account for it in any other way than God created, you will surely go wrong." Faith receives it, and the heart and mind rest in Him who never had any beginning, in the eternal Son, by whom all things were made, and for whom all things were made, in whose power all things are subsisting. In the beginning was the Word; and our hearts delight to think of the eternal deity and Godhead of Him, whose almighty power was exerted at the creation. "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they exist, and were created!"

And here let me warn the reader against a fault that is very common; that of misunderstanding the purpose of the scriptures. The Bible is not a book of astronomy or cosmography, but one that deals with the hearts and consciences of the inhabitants of the earth. It gives us a faithful history of the earth, from this point of view; and the "heavens" here are the first heaven; that is, the atmosphere. It is no question of the relative time of creation of other globes; but the beginning of this earth's history.

The history of what should take place on it (the earth) forms indeed a wonderful part of the divine book, and of this we shall have cause to speak. I am only calling attention to the fact that we have here the earth and its atmosphere before us; God created them in the beginning.

?

And now I again call attention to the interval between the first and second verses.

We are often told that millions and billions of years must have elapsed during the formation of the earth's crust, to say nothing of what happened before. There is ample room for all this between the first and second verses; ages and ages ran out. The second verse brings us to an important point in time, when the work of forming the present state of things upon the earth's surface began.

It is not revealed how the "without form and void" state ensued, but let us be careful not to confound it with the first verse. A state of convulsion and chaos came on, and from the midst of it the present creation began; the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.

The creation of light should fill us with wonder; and it is well to notice that it was called into existence before the great luminaries are mentioned.

Light is invisible in itself, but makes everything visible; it is so defined in Ephesians 5: 13. It is more than the "offspring of heaven firstborn," for it is the very image-name of God Himself. God is light.

The passage is without doubt alluded to in 2 Corinthians 4: 6, which should be rendered "the God who commanded the light to shine out from the midst of the darkness has shined in our hearts, in order to make resplendent the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

No scientists can explain how the vibrations, to which they call our attention, began; nor indeed can they get beyond the hypothesis of undulations, supposing "ether." The simplest believer sees in the creation of light the exercise of the power of Him who can call everything into existence, and who has caused His light to shine in our dark hearts (which were as cheerless as the murky surface of the earth in Genesis 1: 2), for the shining out of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

And God saw the light that it was good ? there is a division between light and darkness, as great as that moral separation which we find in the New Testament between the two. It is well to call things by their right names; and I think that if we wish to study the scriptures, we must get a new dictionary, for God's categories are not the same as the scholastic ones. What God calls "darkness" (that is, man's state), the world calls "light," boasting of its illumination. Men who are morally blind seem to delight to exclaim: "We see!"; and again in 1 Corinthians 1, God calls "power" and "wisdom" what the world calls "weakness" and "folly."

God called the light Day; and the darkness He called Night.

Simple and clear as this is, we shall find, all through scripture, the constant recurrence of "light" and "darkness"; and in our day we cannot be too careful to walk as children of the light. Believers are light in the Lord; and it has often been remarked that though it cannot be said of them that they are "love," which is absolute and implies sovereignty, yet they are described as "light" in the Lord. The fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth; and it is good when things are called by their right names, If there be a diligent walk according to the light, the unfruitful works of darkness will be manifested and carefully avoided by the children of God.

The second immense fact in creation was the formation of the firmament, which divided the upper from the lower waters. This firmament* is the visible heaven, the atmospheric expanse; and this prepares the earth for the following glorious events that were to take place upon the globe.

{* Perhaps it would be better to put "expanse;" literally the "stretched out (space)."}

On the third day the separation of the waters from the dry land preceded the latter's being adorned with every kind of tree, herb and grass, each of which should bring forth fruit and seed according to its kind.

On the fourth day, the great luminaries which were symbols of established power and order were made for signs, for seasons, and for days and years. Notice that the word "made" (ver. 16) is not the same as "created." (Ver. 1.) It is not said that sun, moon and stars were created at the epoch of verse 16, but that they were constituted lights to the earth at that time. Although the Bible is not a treatise on astronomy (for it treats of moral subjects far higher than the stars), yet its language will be found to be singularly correct, and we shall never find any confusion between the acts of creating things and placing them in their order. The word of God never denies the exact sciences, as they are called (that is, that 2+2=4, etc.), but it gives us what is infinitely higher. What would be the value to us of having a full knowledge of mathematics (the abstract relations of time and space) if our hearts were void of the love of God as known in Christ?

Birds, beasts, and fishes now follow, full of vitality; the sphere over which the first man was to rule is peopled with living creatures.

But on the sixth day we find an act of creation very different to all that had preceded. Notice that in verse 26, it is not "Let the earth bring forth," as in verse 24; this is a fatal blow to what is known as "evolution."

There is nothing more distinct than the formation of man, and the difference between man and mere animals. To the infidel, who says, "Man (the first man) is an animal," we could say: "Certainly; but he is much more besides. If you mean to say that he is a mere animal, you are suppressing the greater part of the truth." There was a solemn consultation before the formation of this singular and moral being, man. It is Adam, the first man, but he is a figure of the last Adam, of Christ, who was to come; he was made in the image of God, and after His likeness.

He was to represent God's glory in the place which he occupied as head of the creation; and he was morally like God in so far that he was good and free from evil. Alas! how soon was this likeness lost!

Man has a heart and a conscience such as never can be found in the most developed ape or elephant. Let us leave his mind (though no mere brute has the same faculties as a man), and speak of what constitutes him a moral being. It will be said that Adam had not a conscience till he fell, and this is true ? we are anticipating ? what we have, up to the end of the third verse of the second chapter, is man made in the image and after the likeness of God and set over all His works. I should like to leave to my reader the pleasant task of pondering over "image and likeness," and the peculiar place at the head of the creation; we shall have more to say later on of man's relation to God.

So far, we have a solemn act of creation, after deliberate counsel, of a being very different from the brute, who is in the image and likeness of God and should represent Him, having dominion over His works.

Everything was very good in the six days of creation. Notice that there is a special act of creation for man (ver. 27); and that this word (created) is not always used in the other cases, though it is found in verse 21.

And now comes the Sabbath, God's rest. We must not let this pass without carefully remarking it. God rested on the seventh day from the work which He had made.

God's rest is a very great subject in the scriptures; and in general, it is but little understood. It is well to look at it, as it is first presented to us here in Genesis. God could rest when all the works of this creation (of Gen. 1) were complete. I suppose that there is always the thought of satisfaction in the work, and of the absence of anything that could disturb the repose.

The rest described here did not last long (Heb. 4: 3, 4); God's rest upon this earth has been interrupted for nearly six thousand years. I trust that it is not a digression if we say a few words as to the Sabbath; it is the beautiful figure of God's rest which is still to come, where He shall find His own joy and repose amongst His own redeemed ones. No sin, nothing contrary to the nature of Him who is love and light shall ever enter that peaceful scene, illuminated by God's own glory, where His own shall enjoy His rest. How different from some sensual paradise, where eternal idleness is to be the reward, Allah being really as far off as ever!

It is very important to understand that in Hebrews 4 it is God's rest that is spoken of, and not merely ours. It has been well said that God could not rest in a world of sin, and we have in John 5 the blessed fact of the Father and the Son both working; the mere form of the Jewish Sabbath was worth nothing. That the blessed Spirit is working too we have abundant evidence, and there can be no Sabbath upon this earth until God shall put things upon the footing of Zephaniah 3: 17, "He will rest in his love." Zion shall be delivered, and the whole earth blessed.

But we Christians look higher than the earthly part of the kingdom; and, in the midst of toil and sorrow, of difficulty and effort, we wait with longing for that day, when we shall enter into the rest of God. How stimulating to us is the thought of God's resting in the midst of His own, as we go on through this scene of trouble and unrest. May we strain every nerve in the race, with hearts full of His peace, till we also shall have ceased from every painful effort and trial, to enter into His rest!

We may pause a little here to contemplate the rest of God.

Genesis 2.

At verse 4 of chapter 2 another view of the creation and of man's place in it is given to us; and here we have God, under the name of Jehovah Elohim, entering into relation with responsible moral beings.

The seventh verse is very important, for it is never said of the mere brute that God breathed into his nostrils; and this is what is meant by a "moral being," that is, one who is in direct relation to his Creator, one whose true dignity is obedience to Him, and dependence upon Him.

Let us suppose the very wisest sheep-dog that could be found (and we must admit that some of these animals are very astute), it will be at once felt that the creature could not be subjected to any such trial as that which was applied to the first man ? Adam. I mean, in a few words, that Adam was in a very different position, and in himself very different from the most sagacious brute.*

{* I recollect a very good answer being given at Geneva to some would-be opposers, who were reasoning about dogs' minds. "All very well," said an old Christian, "but did you ever see a dog express contrition for stealing what was not his own?"}

Then we have some of the most wonderful pictures in God's first book.

The garden and its two trees; the river; the naming of the creatures; and the woman.

The beautiful garden of Eden possessed two pre-eminent trees, of which we shall have to speak again. Whatever may have been the beauty of all the rest, these two trees are the ones upon which we should fix our eyes, for everything depended upon them. The tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil; this second tree was a very dangerous one to man. I merely would notice the two; as for the rest of the garden, one may form a faint picture of it perhaps, but I think that poets have utterly failed to describe it.

A garden planted by God, with the river running through it, and flowing off in four directions, gold and precious stones ? all this speaks of order, fertility, and wealth. We shall allude to these things again, my great desire now being to call attention to the head (Adam) of the well-ordered creation, for we shall see that all depended upon him; and it will be well to notice the height of his earthly glory and the extent of his sway, before we come to the history of his fall. He is here the figure of Him who was to come; the figure of the last Adam, head of the new creation.

We may learn much by thus contemplating for a moment the first man as he came out of the Creator's hands, and was put into his place at the head of Eden.

We are apt to make light of the fall in our day, when people make light of everything, and I wish to look at the height of this great column (Adam) before endeavouring to say anything of the crash of its ruin.

The naming of the animals is an important thing; for the man's supremacy as viceroy is evident. He was allowed to give names to every beast and bird; his universal jurisdiction was established; and then comes the one more act of the Creator, the one more creature, last but not least, who completes this exquisite picture.

She must not yet go by the name of Eve (that comes later on); but is called woman, Isha made out of Ish. Here is a name that cannot fail to rivet every one's attention.

How blessed (far away from crabbed scribes and Pharisees who had perverted things, Matt. 19: 8) to rise to the original intention of this extraordinary creature, and to see that the very first thought of her is to be a help* to man.

{* I must leave to some of my learned friends to develop this remarkable expression ezer k'neg'do: I should try to translate it, "A help that answered to him;" literally, "as over against him."}

How blessed to get to the very fountain head of everything, and to have God's own thoughts. "In the beginning it was not so" would stop all the reasoning of Pharisees, of Mahomet, and of all others who have given us their thoughts about woman, and we come to the simple truth of God's mind, that a creature was to appear who should complete and correspond to the lord of the creation.

And now comes one of the most beautiful figures in this book of divinely-drawn pictures.

Others have spoken of it in far better language than mine. The trance of Adam, the formation (literally building) of Eve from his own rib, and his delight when God brought her to him, "bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh."

I would ask you not to go to Milton for this, but to take it as it is here in all its perfect typical beauty. Then you will behold with adoration, death coming upon Christ, the last Adam, of whom the first was the figure, the church formed,* and the delight of His heart when she shall be presented to Him, and He shall see in her that which corresponds perfectly to His own glory as the Man of God's counsels.

{* I merely notice the fact; there is really nothing in the church, as the new creation, but what is derived from Christ Himself.}

He gave Himself for her, and the pains of death being passed, she rises, and soon shall be manifested with Him, herself the pleroma (fulness) of Him that filleth all in all.

Genesis 3.

The fall and utter ruin of Adam is but little understood.

I had wished, if possible, that his place at the head of the creation were clearly presented, so that the catastrophe might be rightly estimated. All depended upon him who was made in the image of God; if he, the head, fell, all must go with him.

I once heard, in Tuscany, of an edifice, so contrived by the architect, that the whole was practically resting upon one pillar; if this fell, the whole building fell with it. We shall be occupied, not merely with the terrible crash and ruin, but with several important moral features that accompanied it; the change from the preceding state of things is very sorrowful. From innocence to distrust of God, to lusts, disobedience and dishonour ? the distance is not easily conceived, and spoken of but too lightly on all sides!

The subtle enemy deceived the woman, and the man had not strength to refuse her ? they fell. How many things are found in this short history ? the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life . . . . dishonour, misery and nakedness! and whence come all these? Whence indeed, but from the first step of all, when the enemy succeeded in causing distrust of God in Eve. No fig-leaves nor any other leaves (however cleverly stitched)* can hide fallen man's nakedness from God, and this our first parents knew instinctively (they had acquired a conscience) when they tried still further to hide themselves from Him in the cool of the day.

{* The unsuccessful attempts to hide one's misery have no doubt often struck the judicious reader; the human heart is desperately wicked, the nakedness before God is the same, whether under a Pharisee's robes or a common tunic ? a pontiff's purple or a friar's sackcloth.}

There are three immense subjects that now come before us Sin, death and the conscience.

Sin had entered into the world by one man. Sin existed before, as we learn from Ezekiel 28, which gives us the account of the fall of "the anointed cherub;" of him who became enamoured of his own beauty, who fell, and who has acted ever since in dire opposition to God.

The important thing in Genesis 3 is the entrance of sin into the world; that is, upon this earth. Then death is God's judgment upon man, and when this is understood, it is seen how serious a thing it is; if we are to measure man's distance from God, we must admit that death alone is the measure. This is of the very highest moment in a day like ours, when every effort is made to reduce death to the fact of ceasing to exist upon the earth. It is an immense thing when the fact is apprehended that God's judgment is pronounced on the first man Adam, and upon all his race.

Notice, carefully, that the conscience is the knowledge of good and evil. Jehovah Elohim said: "Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil." It is not the measure of good and evil, as some people teach, and the natural conscience could never serve as a guide to the real path of life. Besides the falling away from God, there was a vast change morally in man, that should capacitate him, through redemption, for great things.

The latter part of this passage (Gen. 3) will bring us to God's gracious intervention both in present government and in ultimate blessing to the creatures whose fall is narrated in the former portion; how blessed to perceive God overcoming evil with good!

The question: "Where art thou?" must be answered, and no excuses can avail. In announcing the bruising of the serpent's head by the seed of the woman, God did not make a promise to Adam (as many pretend), but announced a future deliverance, as well as the judgment of the enemy himself.

Let us look for a moment at the two great facts connected with God's intervention to bless man.

1. His present government and care of the fallen creature.

2. His resources in the last Adam through whom a new order of things should be brought in.

There is one great remedy, in God's present government, that enables man to go through his part in this present life, and that is work. There is to be the sweat of the brow, whilst the thorns and thistles* are growing; there is to be labour. As I write these lines from a country where the soil is being sadly neglected and towns crowded with (so-called) intellectual workers, I would call attention to the fact that God's great remedy for actual misery is eating bread with the sweat of the brow, and I doubt if there be any other panacea for the ills that flesh is heir to.

{* It is pretended, in what is called consecrated ground, to have taken off the curse. I have sometimes asked those who speak thus: "Why do thistles, thorns, nettles, etc., still grow in your consecrated cemeteries?"}

But we have another subject here, and several facts, at the end of chapter 3, join to make it clear to us.

The man was driven out of Eden, but at the same time we have a distinct view of the accomplishment of God's counsels through redemption, and of another order of things in the future, where all should be based upon a firm foundation. The second Man comes into view.

Notice that the Lord God Himself made coats of skins for the guilty couple; covering founded upon sacrifice. Also it is to be remarked that Adam called his wife Eve (Khavah, "the living") in the face of death, and here we must recognise faith in him.

The way of the tree of life was closed by the cherubim with the revolving sword, blazing in every direction; and here we must say one or two words. There could be no way to the tree of life for man in his sinful state; and in order that Christ should become the Tree of life for us, He must fully meet all the responsibility of the first man ? this He did, blessed be His name, upon the cross. The grain of wheat, unless it died, remained alone; there was life in Him, but to bring us into it, He must die. The blessed Lord met all the terrors of the flaming sword that kept the way of true happiness; and He is become for us the Tree of life. In Revelation 22, there is no mention of the tree of responsibility, whilst the Tree of life, with perennial fruits, is in the midst of the street of that great city, the holy Jerusalem. Blessed is the prospect to all those who have part in the new creation. I call the reader's attention to this, that it is not:

". . . . loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat."

It is not restoration to Eden, but entrance according to God's counsels into His heaven, in and with His Christ, the last Adam, blessed for ever!

He tasted death for everything; He, risen and glorified, is the source of everlasting joy, peace and worship in that sphere where no serpent, no dog, no magician, nor any other cause of trouble shall ever enter! To Him be everlasting glory!

Genesis 4.

Life outside of Eden began with a fratricidal murder.

Eve, like most mothers, thought much of her firstborn, Cain; but he proved to be not that acquisition that she supposed. It will be well for us to read attentively this well-known story, so that man's religion may appear to all in its true light; there is a great "revival" in the present day of Cain's religious service, and we shall do well to keep quite away from it.

It is natural to man to approach God with the fruit of his own labour in his hands. Such a feeling is deep in human nature; and whatever traditional idolatry may have come in, or even fetishism, there will be found, I believe, in all men, naturally, the desire to present some fruit of their own labour to God.

East or west, north or south, you will find this at the very bottom of men's hearts. I was once shown a mosque of alabaster, built by an ambitious tyrant, who had hoped thus to propitiate Allah at the end of his days; and an opulent London merchant once told me, as the highest merit, that he had built a church for his country men in a foreign country. All these kind of votive offerings spring from the desire to approach God with the work of one's own hands, and, like Cain's first offering, they can never be received by God.

It may seem to some superfluous, but I cannot let such a subject pass without calling attention to the fact that at the present moment there is a great effort in some quarters to revive, in a peculiar way, the service of Cain. It is natural to man's heart everywhere and in every time ? but I mean in a special manner, that in the very places where evangelical truth had been known, the religion of Cain is being taught. Look at England!

Abel was born outside Eden and was of a fallen race, as Cain his brother; it was his offering that made him acceptable. How wonderful it is to find a man at the very beginning of history, who draws nigh to God through death! May we not well suppose that God Himself had made known to this first family of mankind that there was no other way of approach? (Compare chap. 3: 21 with chap. 4: 7.)

Abel confessed by his gift the fact of being under the judgment of God; the death of the victim evidently preceded the presentation of the fat, and this latter part of the sacrifice foreshadows the excellency of Him who said: "Lo, I come to do thy will." The fat may be looked upon as the consecrated will of Christ ? His own worth as devoted to God. (He could say: "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again.") Happy are they who know a little of His value, who spoke thus; and who know what it is to be accepted in Him! Surely we shall never be weary of this glorious subject. God speaks to our souls by this clear antediluvian voice of Abel, of His appreciation of Jesus. Might we know more in our service of the offering and "the fat thereof"!

But the true nature of religious man becomes but too evident in the sequel. Cain will not listen to the voice of God. I suppose that there can be no real doubt as to the force of "sin lieth at the door." It means that a sin offering* was lying (literally crouching) at the door.

{* Sin and sin offering are the same word in the text (chattath); the meaning here is that Cain had not far to go if he wished to find a sin offering. It was as though the animal were crouching at the very door; there was a remedy in the case of his failing to approach God in the proper way.}

Cain obstinately followed his own way, and the mind of the flesh is enmity against God. The murder of Abel is the downward direction of man's will, if insubjection to God be the upward. He slew his brother, because his works were wicked and his brother's righteous. There is grand talk in our day of "religious toleration;" but the bent of man's natural mind would tolerate neither God's goodness nor those who have known it.

I believe we enter but little into the murderous character of the world we are in; people are killing each other as I write this.

" What hast thou done?" These are the words addressed to Cain, and his heartless answers to God shew us a man without consciousness of the evil he had committed. He wished to escape the consequences of his sin, but that is a very different thing. I recollect visiting a prison where I met many hardened ruffians, who would have liked to be released, but who had no true penitence.

Cain, a marked man (for God set the mark upon him so that he should not be slain), went out of God's presence in this state. A man with a hardened conscience built the city which was called after his son; that city which so clearly represents the whole kosmos. (that is the ornate system known as the world), and where all the arts and sciences are cultivated, but God excluded.

Music, metallurgy and agriculture. Stringed and wind instruments, iron and brass work, and much cattle. I shall never forget being for about five minutes in one of the chief bazaars of the East, and seeing the wealth of nations by the soft light of oil lamps: Damascus steel, Persian and Indian silks, jewels, and the finest polished gold, brazen work, and spices. My feeling was that I should like to get out of it, and why? Is there anything wrong in the arts and sciences? No; but because I felt that there was no place there for God or for Christ.

Cain and company have put up on their huge workshop: "No admittance" to God. Jesus Christ is excluded from the world (John 7: 7), and your place and mine, christian reader, is outside of it.

We may for the moment have to work materially at any art that may serve as our gagne-pain; it is a good thing to have work to do. But the heart, the soul, of the Christian is surely outside of the huge town, where political economy without God is practised; and instead of claiming the land as his own, he would rather accept the grave of Abel, and wait, though still on a blood-stained soil (stained, alas! by blood of far higher value than Abel's), till He, who is the resurrection and the life, shall come to take him to the Father's house.

Cain, as a type, as a vagabond and wanderer on the face of the earth, represents the Jewish nation, guilty of their Messiah's death.

Genesis 5 ? 9.

In looking at the part of the divine oracles that follow Cain's history, there are two great things that will occupy us: ?

1. The state of the antediluvian world, leading up to the Deluge.

2. The cataclysm itself, and its effects.

I should like, in this brief paper, to consider the former of these two subjects; that is, the state of the earth before the flood.

The universal reign of death must be noticed. There is something very striking in the line of long-lived patriarchs, from Adam to Noah, and the final, "and he died," attached to each short history. Death was reigning, a sure proof of sin having come into the world.

The sixth chapter brings us up to the flood. The population of the old (antediluvian) world multiplied with a portentous mixture of good and evil, and monsters* were the result.

{* I must again refer to learned friends for the translation of Nephilim. Is not Nephil similar to pelor, a monster? The title is applied to Canaanite giants in Numbers 13 later on, and these too were evidently of monstrous build.}

But it was not merely a time of gigantic births; evil had developed itself to such an extent that the earth was full of violence and corruption. The heart of man comes into view here, and we see its true character still further explained by our Lord in Matthew 15); an impure but fertile source of evil.

What a study is the antediluvian world; physical monstrosities, and the inner heart of man! Notice that as yet there was no established government, and the human race had run into violent and corrupt practice ? that is, into advanced socialism.

I have little doubt that many of the traditions of mythology were founded upon what took place before the flood; but whatever "the mighty men of old" and the "giants" may have been, I believe that the most important thing of all is the exposure of that moral monstrosity; "every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was evil daily."

Noah found grace in the eyes of Jehovah in the midst of all the lawlessness of that time; and we are brought to that point in early history, where an end must be made of all flesh. It is one of the most serious facts in Genesis. The ,end of the whole race had come before God; there must be a complete destruction of man and beast; God's judgment must fall, and the curtain be drawn down on this part of the earth's, history.

But we must notice one other man before we speak of Noah. Amidst the increasing lawlessness and prolific evil of the antediluvian age, Enoch walked with God. There was a man who followed a path of true piety amidst the violence and corruption of his time, who was separate from the spirit of the age, and who so vividly felt the necessity of approaching judgment, that he exclaimed: "Behold, the Lord has come* amidst his holy myriads, to execute judgment against all; and to convict all the ungodly of them of all their works of ungodliness, which they have godlessly wrought, and of the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him."

{* elthe. The need of Jehovah's intervention was so felt by the faithful man that he seemed to see the event, in his mind's eye, by anticipation. Compare Luke 10: 18.}

This man was Enoch; he walked with God during three hundred years, with active faith, and with the divine approbation. (Heb. 11.) We may safely suppose that the ungodly sinners who surrounded him did not much approve his walk; and the most wonderful part of the life of this extraordinary man was its end. He was translated that he should not see death; he was not found, he disappeared from the midst of an advanced age (advanced in ungodly presumption) and went up to be with God.

There can be little doubt that we have in Enoch a figure of the christian's (or, if you please, of the church's) path on earth and translation to heaven.

Noah represents rather those who will pass through the great crisis of the earth's history (the impending judgment), and inherit the earth when the great tribulation shall have passed.

In both these men we have an example of active faith. The first one walked as seeing God's glory, its moral requirements, and imminent judgment; the second prepared for and went through the judgment itself.

Noah passed through the deluge in safety, in the ark which God had commanded him to make. He, and seven others, were saved through water, and there is really no other way of being saved. The water washed away all trace of the old world and of the man that made it what it was; it all disappeared with its giants and men of renown, and the ark that rode on the waters of death represented that deliverance which we know through the death and resurrection of Christ. (See 1 Peter 3: 18-22.)

If Enoch represents (as he undoubtedly does) the church of God, walking as a stranger here, and going to be with the Lord, Noah is the figure of the earthly people, who shall pass through the great hour of trial at the end, and come into possession of the millennial earth.

The great thing to notice in Noah, oracularly warned of the coming catastrophe, is his simple obedience to the voice of God. The dimensions of the ark were given ? the window, the door, and different decks; and Noah made everything according to what was commanded.

We know from 2 Peter that he was a preacher of righteousness, and we may well notice the long-suffering of God, ever slow to execute judgment, up to the very moment of closing the door of the ark.

A certain analogy may certainly be drawn between Noah's time and our own; and it is, to say the least, a serious thing to be living in a world of which it is said by One who never prophesied in vain: "As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of man; they ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all."

What is the character of your life, my reader, in a world where the most careless are often heard to say: "After us, the Deluge!" ? it is a serious question?

The Flood

Many wish to ignore the flood. The end of the world is never a very pleasing subject to a vast majority of its citizens; and we are living in a day when people speak of the science of "teleology," that is, the science of explaining the end of the world as we should like it to take place. It is really no science at all.

These people would seek to ignore the great fact of the deluge, that is, of God's intervention to put an end to a world whose iniquity had come to a climax; just as they refuse to believe that the present world will be burnt up. (See 2 Peter 3.) They deny that the whole world was drowned under God's judgment; they refuse the prophecy of a general conflagration.

This, however, will take place, notwithstanding all the insurance companies against fire.

?

And now let us look at the divinely-inspired account of this great act of God.

The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and sudden opening of the windows of heaven were the miraculous execution of God's purpose to destroy the life of all creatures upon earth; it is a serious lesson ? the end of all flesh had come, and after long patience, the sentence was carried out.

There may be interest, no doubt, in the fragments of history that have come to us through the mythology; the flood of Deucalion and other tales, founded upon one great fact; but the important thing for us is to have this immense catastrophe clearly before us, so that we may bow to the just acts of a righteous God, and accept this judgment on the whole human race.

Had it been possible to see the globe after the forty days and forty nights, one huge ball of water would have been descried with one ark floating on a sea without shore. The whole earth was drowned.

We must read the remarkable verses in 1 Peter 3: 20, 21, to learn the true lesson of the floating ark. God had shut up Noah, with all that should form the nucleus of the new earth; and as the flood clearly represents the death of the world, so must the preserved few pass through the waters of death to inherit the postdiluvian blessing. So we (believers) pass through death, of which baptism is the figure, in order to enter into the light and joy of the Lord's presence in resurrection; there is no other way into it.

It is a deep, a terrible experience to go through that element in which all human* life must perish; to know what association with a risen Christ is, in a state of things for ever secure from judgment, is none the less happy.

{* I mean, of course, of the first man, that is, of all those who are descended from Adam and Eve.}

Judgment shall fall upon the present age, as it fell upon the antediluvians; our Lord Himself announces it, and it is well to keep in view that which is coming upon the earth. (Matt. 24; Luke 17.)

The cessation of the flood, and the events that accompany it, are full of interest. The account of the dove and the raven, of the sacrifice and blessing, and of the rainbow are here before us, and merit attention.

The dove could not remain upon the earth until all the effects of judgment were past; and then comes the burnt offering presented to Jehovah. We must notice that whilst He graciously received the sacrifice and blessed Noah and the new earth through it, He again announced that which had already been said as to man's heart (compare chap. 6: 5 with chap. 8: 21) ? its imagination is evil continually.

No act of judgment in God's ways in government can ever change the heart of man. All depends upon the value of the offering, and surely in this, as in every other holocaust, the graces of Christ offering Himself in perfect devotedness to God are before us.

"Jehovah smelled a sweet savour; and Jehovah said in his heart, I will not curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."

The faithful Creator keeps the covenant made with Noah till the end of the earth's history in its present state. There was a lengthening of a day in Joshua's time, and in the time of Hezekiah, when the shadow receded upon the dial; but the course of nature was not interrupted.

It is a great thing in the present day to be taught of scripture to know God as Creator and Sustainer of all things. The interest is all the greater for us who believe, because we know that it was by the Son that the energy of creation was displayed, and that He upholds all things by the power of His might. (John 1; Col. 1; Heb. 1; Rev. 4.)

All glory be to the blessed Lord Jesus!

The giving of the sign to Noah after Jehovah had blessed the renovated earth, and put the sword of government into the patriarch's hands, is very much to be noticed.

It is like a new beginning, the family are blessed and put at the head of the new state of things; and the principle of government, that is, of the magistrate who beareth not the sword in vain, is introduced into the earth that had run riot in violence and corruption before the deluge. Whoso sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for man was made in God's image.

The beautiful rainbow shines out upon the dark clouds. How barren a thing is science, and what a wretched explanation of the phenomenon! I do not mean that the exact sciences are not useful in the present state of things, nor to deny that 2 + 2 = 4, nor the mathematical laws of optics.

No person in his right mind will deny the reflection and refraction of the sun's rays through the rain drops; but, I say, what a barren thing it would be for our souls if we saw nothing in the rainbow but the laws of the angles of incidence, etc., and the doctrine of light waves!

Some one said that phenomena speak to the heart and conscience, whilst science speaks to the intellect. It is so; and God would speak to our hearts and consciences in the rainbow. His faithfulness shines out in perfect colours in the token which He displayed, where man's

heart portended trouble, and where the sombre clouds of His righteous anger were still hovering.

In the Revelation (chap. 4), where all heaven is preparing to judge the earth, which has grown old in iniquity, and which has not profited by the lesson of the deluge, we see again the rainbow around the throne, where He, the Creator and Judge, is seated. We need not be surprised at the homage rendered to Him, who in the very midst of His strange work (judgment) remembers mercy and the covenant He has made with creation.

Let us look with admiration, awe and grateful thanksgiving at the seven bright colours of unfolded light in God's rainbow! The clouds may darken as we pass through a condemned world, but our hearts can go up to Him who is light and can sustain the faith of His own in His own way.

Genesis 10, 11.

There are two things that come before our notice in Genesis 10 and 11.

1. The generations of the sons of Noah, and

2. The tower of Babel.

As to the first subject, I would recommend any who are assailed by ethnological infidels, to keep to Genesis 10, comparing the names of the sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth with the further development of their tribes in the prophetic and other parts of the divine oracles. A humble student of scripture will have a more simple and correct view of the nations of the earth than all the great ethnologists put together.

Noah's unhappy fall became the indirect means of a very general prophecy as to the three grand races.

"Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." It is not necessary to go very far amongst the sons of Ham to understand the fulfilment of this.

"Blessed be Jehovah, God of Shem and Canaan shall be his servant." There was to be a special revelation made in that family, and relation established.

God shall enlarge* Japheth. The huge and audacious family of Japheth went East first of all, and then came West in numerous migrations: it forms the great mass of the Gentiles. "God shall tabernacle in the tents of Shem," I think will include all His ways in Israel and the very advent of the Messiah.

{* I need not call the studious reader's attention to the force of enlarge. The word Japheth and "enlarge" are from the same root.}

Some one has very rightly said that Genesis 10 is a survey of the races; and that we must not bring time (chronological arrangement) into it.

The grand divisions are: ?

Of Ham ? Ethiopians, Egyptians, Libyans, Canaanites.

Of Shem ? Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Lud and Syrians.

Of Japheth ? the Celtic family (Gomer), the tribes to the north of the Caucasus (Magog), Medes, Greeks, Tibareni, Moschi and Thracians ? generally the Indo-Europeans.

?

The building of the tower of Babel forms a memorable epoch in the history of mankind. It was a huge association to construct a temple of fame.* It was the centralising of human forces, bricks cemented with slime.

{* It is a wrong and almost puerile idea that this great building was made to rise above and defy the waters of another deluge; the attempt was "to make a name" (Gen. 11: 4) , that is, to establish man's glory independently of God.}

The character of Babel (Babylon) may be seen all through the Bible, whether in the great Chaldean city, in a material way, or in the vast spiritual system of the Apocalypse. I believe that the Book of Genesis gives us its essential character: independency of God and utter confusion.

In Zechariah 5, the vision of the woman compressed into the measure with a mass of lead and carried into the land of Shinar, represents the principles of Babylon, that is, wickedness to be established on its own base, in the latter days. The tower of Babel was never finished, Babylon (the city) is a mere cluster of sand mounds, the great religious Rome shall fall; but the spirit of Babel, that is, of man's will, independent of God, acting in a system, will go on until it is finally judged.

The brick-making and building enterprise prospered until God Himself interfered to check the presumptuous folly of the human race. His judgment smote them just in the very point of their pretensions; they were aiming at independent unity, and God condemned them to be scattered, with a hopeless confusion of tongues.

They left off building their city. When God comes in, man's operations always come to a sudden standstill; and so it will ever be.

We must carefully remember the name of Babel, for it will be useful to us further on. "Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because Jehovah did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did Jehovah scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."

Their rallying point and centre became a point for centrifugal scattering, in all directions, of the earthly tribes; so completely did Jehovah confound their designs in one single moment.

The account of the dispersion of the builders gives us then a great insight into God's ways; He will permit human association and labour to construct an apparently permanent centre, independent of Him, a tower of Babel ? and then with one breath so upset the whole attempt, that all Babel building becomes vain. To see clearly the declaration of independence in the building of Babel is a great help to the understanding of God's ways with men, for it must and shall end in utter ruin.

May we, who know God's true Centre, be kept near enough to the Lord to be walking every step in the true spirit of dependence; so will our own individual joy be great, and so shall we be preserved from scattering and centrifugal forces!

Genesis 12, 13.

A new phase in God's ways toward men appears in the call of Abram. It was the first time that God had called a man out of his country and kindred, and we must observe attentively this going forth of the patriarch.

Two things are patent in this call: one, that the state of the earth was so bad that God's witness must come out of it, and be a stranger and pilgrim here; the other, that God is sovereign in His election, and that He alone knows why He chose to call Abram rather than any one else.

It is a new beginning, and the sovereign will of God alone can explain it. When Abram finally took the step and left Haran (where he had halted), Jehovah appeared unto him and said: "Unto thy seed will I give this land."* It has been justly remarked that then Abram is seen with a tent and an altar.

{* It is well to distinguish chapter 12: 7 from the preceding promise of making a great nation of the patriarch. I transcribe a note that may be a help to many. "The promise (chap. 12: 7) is repeated only in chapter xxii, during Abraham's history, and then to the seed alone the promise of his posterity and of the land to him and to his seed is often repeated. It is to this promise given to Abraham in chapter 12 and confirmed to the seed in chapter 26, that the apostle refers in Galatians. The earthly seed, on the contrary, was to be numerous. The translation of Galatians 3: 16 should be: Now to Abraham were the promises made, and to his seed.' And in the following verse, not in Christ, but to Christ. He was the seed of promise." (Synopsis, J. N. D.)

It may be useful to notice the first call of God, and the going forth from idolatrous Chaldea; and then this second part of the life of the called man ? this is his worship, and his shifting habitation in Canaan (having no firmer hold to the soil than that of tent-pegs).

The first call had preceded the stay at Haran, and we know that Abram had gone forth, not knowing whither he went, but as called by the God of glory, and as having at the end of his course, visible to faith, the celestial city, which hath foundations made and constructed by God Himself. It is not that there was anything, intrinsically, in the idols and images (graven and molten) of Ur of the Chaldees; but there was, behind the representative figures and shapes, the power and craft of demons that had taken possession of the earth, since Babel. It is not the hideous form of Artemis of the Ephesians, or of Juggernaut, that is to be feared, but the fierce, enslaving evil spirits that are behind the eidolon, and which have such power over men. Abram was called out from demon worship, to know the God of glory who has prepared a city for His elect. There is nothing, except the call of God, that can deliver a soul from idols. What a striking fact, what a sight for all, is that of a man coming forth, in simple faith, to live in a tent (for it has often been shewn that he received nothing actually, but all in promise), a true stranger upon an earth of idolaters!

But in chapter 12: 6 there is something more. The Canaanite was still in the land; that is, a figure of Satan's present power with his auxiliaries ? he has not yet been driven out.

Abram was not called to drive out the Canaanite, but we find his altar to Jehovah on the very ground of the wicked nations, his tent likewise. A worshipper and a stranger in the very place where the Canaanite was flourishing ? an altar with the ascending smoke of accepted sacrifice in the very face of the enemy ? it is a wonderful sight. We may well travel back in spirit to the tent pitched between Bethel and Hai, and bless Jehovah, who could thus sustain the pilgrim father and his household in the true spirit of adoration, there, where the adversary's stronghold was; for what could be more dark or terrible than the reign of the demons in Canaan?

O christian reader, is your tent like that of the elect man, pitched near Bethel? Is your family free of the world and of idols, and have you a distinct sense of worship? Abraham called on the name of Jehovah; do you call on the name of the Father?

Let us look well at this extraordinary picture on the hill to the east of Bethel, and take a lesson from the faithful pilgrim worshipping and calling upon the name of Jehovah!

?

The southern journey of Abraham was not at all so felicitous. It ended by the famine driving him down into Egypt; and we must admit that as Abram got into lower latitudes, he got into a lower state.

Egypt represents the world with its resources, and it is not said that God commanded Abram to go down there; indeed He could have sustained His servant in a famine as well as in plenty.

Abram and Sarai got at once into a false position in Egypt. The woman, fair to look upon, was taken into Pharaoh's house; and if we think of the two together, they represent both the place and the acting of God's elect, gone down into the world. The woman represents the position, the man the conduct (it has been said) in such a case; and I have no doubt that this is quite a right view of the figure.

If, later on, the church goes down into the world and into Pharaoh's house, what are you to expect but sad inconsistencies and a conduct that is not upright?

I suppose that each believer who has gone to the world for relief in time of famine, has had a similar experience. Abram was in very prosperous circumstances in Egypt, and had sheep, oxen, he-asses, menservants and maidservants, and she-asses and camels; but with all these secular riches, he had one thing beside which spoilt all ? a bad conscience.

It is no real consolation to a man who is unhappy in his heart and mind, to have he and she-asses, camels, and servants. Where was Sarai? What had become of those happy hours when he and his family were worshipping Jehovah, and living according to the light of their calling? Not all the treasures of Mizraim, not all the flocks and herds could ever fill the aching void that there was in Abram's heart.

We have felt the same, no doubt; but however much we may have failed, it is a happy thing to know that God will not allow His chosen one to remain in the world. Abram was brought up out of it, and Egypt was plagued; and this is a very simple fact, and quite enough to keep us from settling down in a false position, in a world which, after all, is to be destroyed.

Morally judged already, the time is no longer far off when the execution of God's just wrath shall put an end to the pretentious age in which we are living, and to that whole system, of which the flourishing kingdom of the Pharaohs was but a part and type.

Genesis 14.

Abraham, Lot, and Melchizedek

The choice of Lot has been so much spoken of and so often followed, that it may seem superfluous to allude to it; however, we must notice carefully this part of the history.

Abraham's whole life is divided, in Genesis, into three grand portions: chapters 12 ? 14; 15 ? 21; 22 ? 25: 10; notice carefully these divisions, attentive reader, for I shall have to allude to them again.

In the present part (chaps. 12 ? 14), we have the call of Abraham, his steadfastness in contrast with Lot's choice, and his meeting with Melchizedek after the defeat of the confederate kings.

Chapter 13 brings us back to Abraham's altar, to the happy position in which he was at first; and almost immediately we have Lot's choice of the fertile plain, which was like the garden of Jehovah, and like the land of Egypt. I can quite understand the impression that such a smiling valley would make on a man's mind (through his eyes); for if any of my readers have ever looked upon a vista of budding vegetation, orange and citron trees and bananas, crowned with feathery date-palms, as one may see in the Delta, he will comprehend the meaning of "like the garden of the Lord" and "like the land of Egypt."

Lot saw this verdant plain, and the lust of the eyes was too much for him; soon afterwards he was in it, and his tent pitched in the vicinity of one of the most wicked places under the sun. Ah! how often have we seen a similar picture; the fairest landscape inhabited by exceeding great sinners. Look at the bay of Naples!

It is then that Jehovah confirms His promise and call to the true pilgrim father; after the separation from Lot, the Lord speaks to Abraham, revealing to him the extent of the blessing accorded to a true stranger on earth. Our hearts rest in peace in the shades of Mamre with an altar built to the Lord, far away from the ambition and busy hum of the cities of the plain.

Ambition and the true spirit of the world soon spew themselves in the form of war. This is one of the great delights of the nations; I mean, fighting. We hear universal disarming of the Gentile powers spoken of, but we may be assured that such a thing will never really take place whilst the world is in its present state.

A battle fought in the vale of Siddim, which was full of slime-pits, five kings against four ? there is a glorious occurrence! Lot had to pay for his civic rights, and found himself dragged off into captivity and all his goods confiscated.

Abram's intervention in this case is that of one who could help a worldly man in trouble, without getting into the world himself; he would accept nothing at all from the king of Sodom, not even a bootlace! It should not be said that the cities of the plain had enriched the man whose altar smoked to Jehovah in Mamre; he, the separate man, could come in with divine resources (for he fought with real household troops, in the Lord's service) and deliver the oppressed, without taking anything from the world. There is such a thing as saving people with fear, snatching them out of the fire, hating even the garment spotted by the flesh; and in this spirit did Abraham deliver his unhappy nephew from the confederate kings.

But we have another personage brought before us here, another king more truly majestic than the king of Sodom. Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, appears unto Abraham. Lot, I believe, never saw him.

I suppose we all understand what Melchizedek's action represents; that is, his bringing forth the bread and wine after the defeat of the confederate kings. There can be no doubt but that he is the figure of Him that was to come, the true Priest after the order of Melchizedek, the glorious Christ of God, King of righteousness, and King of peace, who shall come with blessing and refreshment to the whole earth after the final rout of the confederate kings.

He, Jesus Christ our Lord, shall come forth in that day, and His kingdom shall be established in power, in righteousness, and in peace. He shall be King and Priest upon the throne!

But we have more to consider in this splendid apparition to Abraham. We cannot pass by so glorious a person as Melchizedek without looking at that which the scripture says of our Lord, in the present time.

It is for us to know the true Melchizedek; for us, as being now a heavenly people, separated from this world, and on our way to God's rest. It is of Christ as Priest according to the order of Melchizedek that the Holy Spirit speaks in the Epistle to the Hebrews. If we have a true pilgrim spirit, and, like Abraham, are really separate from Sodom and those who live in it, we may study this interesting subject (that of Melchizedek); if we are worldly, I am afraid we shall not be able to understand much about it.

It was when Abraham was truly separate from the world, and when he had suffered in rescuing Lot, that the king of righteousness and of peace appeared to him.

There are but three allusions to Melchizedek in the whole of the scriptures. The first is here, in Genesis 14; the second in Psalm 110; and the third in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In the second of these (Ps. 110) our Lord's present position is clearly maintained, that is, His session at the right hand of Jehovah until His enemies be made His footstool.

He is then constituted, by an oath, High Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek; and this is referred to in Hebrews 5, 6, and 7, where our Lord's present attitude and ministry are largely developed.

The whole order of priesthood has been changed, and before the time comes of the manifestation of the true Melchizedek, we (believers) know Him glorified in heaven, able to save completely those who approach by Him to God, always living to intercede for them. It is a happy thing when Christians really begin to understand what our Lord's present place as Priest is; when, instead of contenting themselves with knowing that His power and interest are always exerted in their favour, they know Him as having sat down on the right hand of the throne of the greatness in the heavens.

To know Him thus, as minister of the holy places and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord has pitched and not man; to know Him as the One who now maintains our hearts in the knowledge and enjoyment of heavenly things, before we actually arrive in heaven, this is to know Him as Priest after the order of Melchizedek.

A true separation from the world will always be found to accompany the knowledge of a glorious Christ; if ye are reproached in the name of Christ, blessed are ye, for the Spirit of glory and the Spirit of God rests upon you.

There is a calm expression of dignity and glory on the part of the royal priest who met Abram; and the patriarch himself bears the traces of dignity and glory in his reply to the king of Sodom.

"I have lift up my hand unto Jehovah, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth, that I will not take from a thread even to a shoe-latchet, and that I will not take anything that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich: save only that which the young men have eaten, and the portion of the men which went with me, Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre; let them take their portion"!

These are the words of a truly independent man his walk had been one of separation and of obedience to God's will. He was a man whom the world never could have approved, as it approved Lot and gave him a place in the gate of Sodom a man who walked according to the light that God had given him, and who, knowing the resources of the Most High, could come forth from his interview with the priest of the Most High, with all the fitting manners of one who had met a royal priest. He refuses the world's help without any pretension, and declares in simple and powerful language the glory and riches of the God upon whom he depends.

This is a very striking part of the history of the patriarch Abram. The three figures stand out before us in bold relief.

Lot, who deliberately chooses a path which is of a far lower order than the one to which God had called him. A man who belonged to God, but whose heart could not get above the well-watered plain of Sodom. "An enlightened believer," the world would have said. "An unfaithful saint," saith scripture.

Abram, who chose to be with God and who was infinitely happier with Him in Mamre than he could have been without Him, no matter how beautiful might be the garden. Abram, the man of faith and true to his calling, who suffered in the path of separation, but was able to deliver Lot, and with his heart full of the glories of the Most High God, could decline to receive anything from the king of Sodom.

Melchizedek, the type of the glorious Christ. The sudden apparition of this great man upon the scene, his majestic service, his receiving tithes from Abram, his blessing the patriarch in the name of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth ? all these glories point to the still higher glories of our Lord, who shall come forth in His time to bring blessing to the earth, and who is known to us now as the minister of the sanctuary, a High Priest for ever according to the order of the royal priest and king.

Genesis 15 ? 21.

There is a prophetic revelation made to Abraham in the beginning of chapter 15. It is the word of Jehovah coming to him in a vision.

In a vision, I think very often the true state of the heart is expressed, and there was evidently in Abram's thoughts a difficulty that had never been solved. "I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward," Jehovah said, and Abram replies: "Adonai Elohim, what wilt thou give me?" There was no hope, no natural possibility of an heir, and Abram asks for an explanation.*

{* It is often remarked that the human mind, if it is at all active, is sure to say, "Why?" "What?" "How?" Its natural state is that of asking the reason why. I trust that it is not detracting from the patriarch, the great man of faith, to point out that questions arose in his mind, as in those of others. God is His own interpreter, and happy are they who wait quietly upon Him.}

God reassures him, and he believes God's word, The whole passage gives us a prophetic account of the way in which Jehovah would carry out His promises, and that notwithstanding all the shadows which appear as the sun is setting and the deep sleep and darkness coming upon Abram. What a tale of God's power, of man's weakness and of darkness and light in the covenant made with the father of believers! In this case, it is the prophetic view of the earthly people, the going down to Egypt, the coming out when the iniquity of the Amorites should be full, the bright lamp after the smoking furnace, and ultimate glory and dominion of the twelve tribes.

It is just the kind of vision that one in a reasoning state of mind might expect to see; though it ends well.

But in chapter 16 it is not merely looking at one's own heart; Abram listens to Sarai, and condescends to follow her advice, and we hear nothing of his faith upon this occasion. It was not faith to listen to Sarai; and the result of their expedient was not satisfactory. Ishmael was born, and the very first description of him, "He shall be a wild-ass* man," his hand against every one, and every one's hand against him; a trouble rather than a help. It is not that God has not had mercy on the Arabs ? indeed, Ishmael's descendants receive a blessing in chapter 17; but it must be confessed that they have been very troublesome since Ishmael disturbed Abram's household, up to the present day. You might as well try to tame the wildest animal, as to induce the Bedawee to live peaceably.

{* This is the literal meaning of verse 12. May I remind the reader that an Eastern wild ass is a very fine animal, unlike the unfortunate Western asses. It is an indomitable, high spirited animal, as any who have had to do with the onager tribe will say.}

Notice, too, that Hagar was an Egyptian, and the result of mixing the seed of the promise with the world is Ishmael, the untameable wild ass.

This is what comes of listening to Sarai's advice.

The following chapter gives us quite a different aspect of the man of faith. It is a more complete bowing to God, or rather setting aside of man in the presence of Him who comes to bless His own according to His own thoughts. There is no asking why or what, there is no consultation with Sarai, but Abram falls upon his face before the Lord, who blesses him. Abram and Sarai are transformed (larger vessels) into Abraham and Sarah, and circumcision is commanded.

The destruction of Sodom, and the coming of the heir according to promise, and the expulsion of the bondmaid's son ? these grand truths now are brought before us, and complete this phase of Abraham's history, up to the end of chapter 21, where a little millennial scene again appears.

Much has been said as to the great fire of Sodom, but the narrative does not lose much by being again considered. The great lesson for believers is that of being near enough to the Lord, and in the true sense of the heavenly calling, in a word, high enough upon the mountain, to be out of the mists of Sodom, and to be able to intercede for those who are down in the plain.

The out-of-the-world air of the hills is the only one that a true Christian can breathe; and it is a happy thing when not only heavenly truths are known, but the soul itself braced up in the intimacy of a communion where not only Jehovah does not hide from Abraham His thoughts, but where the Paraclete makes known the glories of the Son, of Jesus in the Father's presence, and things that concern His place in the divine counsels are known in an atmosphere that is not of this world.

The plain of Sodom lay below. Well watered and fertile, none of its inhabitants dreamed of fire and combustion, security seemed to cover the whole valley of the Jordan.

But the man of faith saw the impending ruin, and, himself in quite a different world, could pray for those over whom the judgment was suspended.

How little did the inhabitants of the cities of the Plain think that the end was near! The night was passed, and Lot dragged out of the doomed place by God's own mercy and power ? the sun had risen as usual, when God rained fire and brimstone upon Sodom ? when sudden destruction fell upon all that valley. It is a picture of a still more terrible conflagration (2 Peter 3), when all shall be burned up. Happy, thrice happy they who are outside the spirit of the age, and able to enjoy, in the Spirit's power, the joys of a heavenly company in a heavenly sphere; able at the same time to intercede for those who are in the low-lying city, and who ought to be out of it.

It is not enough to be outwardly separate from the ways of Sodom, Pompeii and Herculaneum, but the Lord would have us near enough to Him to have His mind in the last days of the great town of vanity; I mean, to occupy the place of Abraham, rather than that of Lot. The full grace of God, by which we have been called into the intimate relationship of children, being thus far nearer to Him than Abraham, the friend of God, cannot be too highly prized.

And now we come to the birth of Isaac, the heir; and the expulsion of Ishmael and Hagar.

Abraham's failure in chapter 20 is over-ruled by God's mercy; and the inheritance is preserved by the bondwoman's son being cast out. The two things cannot subsist together, that is, law and grace; and happy they who have really understood the force of: "Cast out the bondwoman and her son"!

The spirit of untamed flesh was but too patent in the naughty young Arab, and his mocking Isaac was the signal for his being suddenly expelled from the family where God's grace was known in the true heir. The teaching connected with this is as important for us as it was for the Galatians, and I trust that "Ishmael" has been driven out by every one who reads these notes.

After this Abraham appears in his true position to Abimelech, a contrast with chapter 20, and plants a grove in Beersheba, calling on the name of Jehovah, the everlasting God. It is a millennial picture, the Gentiles coming into blessing, through God's chosen family on earth.

Notice, that in the meantime Ishmael had married an Egyptian, and had learned to shoot arrows.

Genesis 22 ? 24.

The Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Call of the Bride.

We are now come to the third and last part of the life of Abraham, and the whole passage (chaps. 22 ? 25) is pregnant with the grandest truths.

Let us begin with the sacrifice of Isaac. It has been noticed that the great lesson of death coming upon every human hope and prospect is largely taught in figure in the Old Testament. Those who have to do with God and His counsels must pass through death. It is not merely in this case the shadow of death, as the horror of great darkness in chapter 15, but here Abraham is called upon by God to take his only son upon whom his heart is set, and to plunge the sacrificial knife into him with his own hand.

We are never tired of this wonderful narrative, and as we read it, we seem to see the little company start (for the patriarch's alacrity answered at once to the trial) and pursue the long dusty journey towards Moriah. Abraham alone could understand and draw nigh to the God of glory in this supreme act, and as soon as the mountain appeared upon the horizon, he told his servants to wait.

They could understand nothing of the worship that was to take place; they must stop behind with the ass.

"Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Elohim Himself should provide the lamb.

Abraham was a man after God's own heart. One touch of the Giver's infinite thoughts, "thine only (one) Isaac," found a ready echo in the man who had been often in the presence of the God of glory. The prompt obedience in accepting death upon Isaac his only hope, his beloved son, proved that God's thoughts were his thoughts on this occasion, as well as his faith in a God of resurrection.

We feel ourselves the need of a worshipping spirit as we approach Mount Moriah; once there, we are far away from men and their ways, on the ground of faith and of God's holy will and thoughts, we look with wonder on Isaac, received* from the dead in a figure. We may worship indeed as the ram smokes upon the altar, a holocaust to Jehovah the Provider. Our hearts go on to the infinite sacrifice of the Son: "In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen "

{* "Got back, when he might have been lost for ever." See the note in loco in the "New Translation" (third edition).}

We may worship indeed with the father of the faithful and with the lad, dead and risen (in figure) beside him.

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The blessing pronounced upon Abraham on Mount Moriah is quoted both in the Epistle to the Galatians and in the Hebrews. It is very important to understand the true force of Galatians 3: 16: "But to Abraham were the promises made, and to his seed." The Holy Spirit refers here to Genesis 12 and 22 that is, the promises were first of all made to Abraham (in Gen. and then to Isaac (in Gen. 22), who is the type of Christ risen..

The promise was confirmed to Christ, as represented in Isaac, received from the dead in a figure and thus full blessing flows out to the Gentiles.

The allusion to the oath in Hebrews 6 shall leave to the reader's careful study, for the Holy Spirit is there bringing believers to understand what their present full connection with heaven is, in Him who has entered within the veil as forerunner ? the stability of God's word confirmed by an oath.

And now we approach quite a new subject, but which depends none the less upon the death and resurrection of Isaac.

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In chapter 23 the death of Sarah is recorded. Abraham buys the field of Ephron, to be the cemetery of the faithful, and this is all that he ever acquired as a true possession on the earth. Sarah disappears, and an entirely new figure comes upon the scene ? Rebekah, the bride of the dead and risen Isaac.

One of the most complete and beautiful figures of the Old Testament unfolds to us here that which should take place later, when the church should be called out and brought across the desert to the true Isaac, the risen Christ.

"Beware lest thou bring my son thither again." (Chap. 24: 6.) The bride must be called out from the world, whilst Christ is personally standing aloof from it.

Each time we read this passage, so fertile in marvellous events expressed in wonderful language, we discern fresh glories in the divine oracles. The pictures of Christ and His church, and the clear aspects of His love to her ? and of her love to Him ? are drawn by the Holy Spirit Himself.

Without attempting to follow out the details of this narrative, let us notice a few grand features of the present calling out of the church.

If Eliezer's journey be taken to represent the activity of the Holy Ghost, there was at the same time a providential work. God should send His angel before the man to prepare the way, and when God prepares the way all goes well; everything happens at the right moment. We may notice, in all times, an outward and providential work that accompanies the inward action of the Holy Spirit.

The great fact before us is the calling out of the bride for the heavenly Man. It is Jehovah Elohim of heaven who had called out Abraham, who now directs everything in the finding and bringing home of the destined companion to the dead and risen Isaac.

The scene unfolds itself before us. Eliezer, entirely pre-occupied with the thoughts and will of his master, the weary camels at evening time, the true spirit of prayer and dependence, the coming forth of the damsel at the right instant ? all these things bring out conspicuously the harmony of God's outward providence with the activity of His own counsels, unknown but by the blessed Spirit.

"I being in the way, Jehovah led me to the house of my master's brethren."

The nose-ring and bangles of gold spoke of the wealth of Isaac; but the great question was whether the bride would follow the call, and there could be no delay of any kind until the answer was given, "I will go."

All Eliezer's thoughts were concentrated in the carrying out of the divine errand; and he could not rest until he had told Isaac all the things that he had done.

Happy are they who know the present activity of the blessed Spirit of God; thrice happy they whose hearts are formed by His action! The moment is very near when the bride shall be presented to the Lord Jesus Christ. Isaac went out in the field to meditate in the evening, and saw the camels coming, and Rebekah at the sight of her lord, Eliezer's master, covered herself. "He loved her."

It is well, no doubt, in all figures, not to go beyond what the Holy Spirit would teach us; but may we not see in this a special application to our day?

The time is close at hand when the true Isaac shall come forth, when the full and final accomplishment of the words, "The Spirit and the bride say, Come," shall take place.

The glorious heavenly Man will take the church to Himself, and His divine love shall be satisfied. She, on her part (covered, for all that she has is of Him) shall answer to all His glory!

May we understand more fully what the bride's heart really is as answering to the love of Christ!

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Now we come to the end of Abraham's life. He might well have sung, "Nunc dimittis," as every other true servant of God at the end of a happy course. I shall ask the reader not to put chapter 25 in chronological sequence to chapter 24, for that is not the real force of the conjunction; the "then again" of the A.V. is unfortunate.

This sums up the patriarch's life, giving an account of his descendants, carefully marking Isaac as the true heir.

His body lies buried in the cave of Machpelah, having obtained witness through faith, awaiting the moment of the resurrection, when he shall be made perfect with us, for whom God has foreseen a still higher blessing.

Genesis 25, 26.

Ishmael and Isaac.

Ishmael represents the flesh with great religious privileges, which make no real change in the flesh's true nature.

It is not for nothing that I have already called attention to the fact that Ishmael learned to be an archer, and married an Egyptian woman.

The two symbolic facts are very easy to understand. The use of the bow always represents war and fighting; and a formal alliance with the world is taught in the marriage with the Egyptian. The world and the flesh go together, and the whole is covered with a great show of religious privilege. An unbridled life, for Ishmael roamed the desert, the profession of arms and an Egyptian wife ? this is the one who from his boyhood mocked at the holy seed.

His rapid development and establishment in power is given to us in a few verses. (Chap. 25: 12-18.) The twelve princes, his sons, all of them heads of the leading Arab tribes, with their towns and castles, speak to us of what the "religious world" was in those remote ages; whilst Isaac and the true posterity of Abraham were dwelling in tents, these grand lords had their towns and castles. If I say that they were religious, it is because they had great privileges of which they were well aware; but the world and its vain glory, the restless flesh and its mischievous activity (bows and arrows) were to be found in this numerous family. Long before Mahomet collected and made these wandering tribes more religious* than ever, the pride of man's heart was to be seen there ? outside the true knowledge of God, whatever the privileges might be.

{* I am not using the word in a good sense, but in that of self-imposed human rules of theology in which the natural heart of man delights. "There is no god but Allah, and ? is his apostle."}

I trust that every judicious reader will understand that I am looking at Ishmael in a symbolical light, and not speaking merely of the man himself. Do you think that we have really got rid of "Ishmael, the son of the Egyptian Hagar"? It is a happy thing to be outside the towns and castles and in a tent with the God of glory.

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It has often been said of Isaac that his life does not stand out upon the inspired page, like that of his father.

There was no violent break with his kindred, as in Abraham's case; he was born in the very line of blessing, and filled the place of the true heir. The chief events that are mentioned in his life, I think, are his being offered on Mount Moriah, his building the altar in chapter 26 and the blessing of his two sons. This last-mentioned fact is recorded by the Holy Spirit in Hebrews 11.

What we have before us now is the contrast between the flesh and its religion and power (on earth as seen in Ishmael), and the true pilgrim and patient heir quietly waiting upon Jehovah.

There can be no doubt, I think, that Isaac's life is far less brilliant than Abraham's, and we have seen more recent instances of children of eminent believers who have received truths for which they never had to fight, and have never stood out so well as their fathers; yet Isaac's life was a life of faith, and in looking carefully at it, the true blue colour appears and it forms a proper link in the patriarchal chain.

We must look at this man as the dead and risen witness to God's power. He was received from the dead in a figure. We have considered him already as a type of Christ; now let us admire in him a true believer. It is impossible that he could have come down from the mountain where he had been both victim and worshipper, without having the feeling of having passed through death. Of course, I am only speaking figuratively; and I suppose that he had always a distinct recollection of the uplifted knife. He began his career as one alive from the dead, and though there be not the same energy in him as in his father, yet he fulfilled a life of faith.

In Gerar, no doubt (chap. 26), there was want of confidence in the Lord, just after Jehovah had assured him of His protection ? and want of energy in keeping the wells of water (those fresh springs which should be jealously kept). But there is the building of an altar to the Lord, the confession of His name, and the pitching of the tent under the shadow of the Almighty; it is then that the Lord's power is felt, and the Gentiles own it. They confess that Jehovah is with him. (Ver. 28.) There was a man living in a tent outside the ordinary course of the world, and it was felt that the Lord was with him; the power of Jehovah's name was there.

Chapter 27 is never read without our feeling thoroughly ashamed of Rebekah and Jacob (and, I trust, of ourselves too, for we have sometimes resorted to wrong expedients); we feel ashamed of human nature and its crafty and selfish ways. But though Isaac does not shine here as he should, and though his call for venison is undignified ? yet we must not lose sight of him as a man of faith.

It is said that by faith he blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.

Putting aside the ignoble conduct of the mother and son, and the feebleness of the father, we are ushered into the presence of the Lord, upon the ground of faith. "The things to come," if properly studied, will be found to include God's ways with the people of His promise (Israel), and the remarkable position of Edom (see ver. 40) in his antagonism to the elect people of God. The prophets give to us an ample development of these future things, and Obadiah especially unfolds Esau's character.

I would recommend a careful study of all the prophets where Israel and Edom are mentioned.

To sum up, we have a man of faith, dead and risen, known as having the Lord with him, and seeing out into futurity.

May we never think of Isaac without endeavouring to enter into God's mind for us as pilgrims. Death and resurrection, God's presence with us, and a true outlook into glory!

Genesis 27 ? 32.

Jacob and Esau; Israel.

Inlooking over the well-known history of Jacob and Esau, I wish to point out some of the more important events; a few remarks as to Israel, after Jacob's happy transformation, may be edifying to our souls.

The first appearance of the twins upon earth was portentous; the promise that the elder should serve the younger must have excited wonder even before the former was laid hold of by the heel. Had Jacob waited patiently, the promise would not have been encumbered by conditions. (Chap. 27: 40.)

Esau is the natural man of the earth, full of the scent of the field, a rough hunter ? and profane.

Jacob's deceitful character and moral obliquity are but too evident, and his ways needed many years' discipline in God's school; but he was not profane. In his worst moments there was always the fear of God at the bottom.

Esau gave up his birthright for a momentary advantage, and took two Hittite wives; and these two facts are a sufficient proof of his reckless and godless mind.

If we trace through the Bible the history of Edom, we shall always find the same features, whether in the refusal of passage to Israel in the desert, whether in Doeg, or in the Herods ? we shall always find the profane and gross worldly element together with opposition to God. Mount Seir is the stronghold of the flesh, the citadel of godless man; but Edom should be pulled down from his eyrie (see Obadiah) and at his end should be dislodged from his high perch and brought low. And so shall all proud thoughts and pretentious strongholds of the flesh be laid in the dust!

The history of Edom answers (so far as a godly mind requires) the question of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. We must not confound the promise that "the elder should serve the younger" with the words of Malachi, where God's hatred of Esau was consequent on his profane ways. It is never said that Esau was hated before his birth; though it is true that Jacob was chosen, in sovereign counsel, before the two brothers appeared upon the scene.

The profane world, which has not been left without certain religious privileges, will be judged according to its conduct; Edom's ways were hateful to God, and at the very end of the prophetic word (in Malachi) we have this expression of the divine mind.

There are several stages in the discipline of Jacob. He had to learn that other people could tell lies as grossly as he, and that the only true standard was in Jehovah. Then he had to be delivered from the world and from every earthly object; he must be thoroughly broken, so that when at last, a lame man leaning on a staff, he could look forward to the future glory, he was fit to go there himself. The end of his life always seems to me like a bright and calm sunset after a day of thunder and lightning, showers and storm. His final prophecy gives us a tranquil and happy outlook into the future where all blessing is secured to the twelve tribes in the person of the dead and risen Christ. That he should be the vessel of such a revelation at the end of his course is a sure proof of the effect of God's discipline.

Let us very briefly review the life of Jacob and mark the stages of progress in the soul at each succeeding phase of discipline.

He started, when he fled from Esau's wrath in chapter 28, with a different purpose to that of his grandfather Abraham, who began and ended his course as a true pilgrim.

Jacob, though he feared God, was not prepared to take the true place of his calling, as a pilgrim and a stranger, and it is evident that he was not at his ease when he awoke after the vision of the ladder near Haran. (See ver. 17.) The place was rightly named Bethel, but how much must transpire before he should come to that point (Bethel) in a fit condition to walk with the God of Abraham!

How many in the present day resemble Jacob in this ? that they are in the place of a call of God to which their state of heart does not answer! Their call is very different to that of Israel; it is far higher, it is heavenly ? but I believe the analogy to be real, and you will find many "Jacobs" of this kind. You will constantly meet people whose whole life has been one of discipline before they really learned what their true calling was ? that is, if they ever did learn it.

Indeed, Jacob's first prayer at Bethel was far from being creditable to one who was to inherit the blessing of Abraham. (See chap. 28: 20-22.) We do not find in it any adequate expression as to God's mind; but Jehovah had other thoughts than of merely accepting Jacob's tithes! (Ver. 22.) He was to have far more glory out of him!

I pass over the whole story of Jacob and Laban. He had to learn during this long period of labour and trial that the God of Bethel (see chap. 31: 13) was his only true friend, and alone able to help him against the crafty Syrian. It was something to hear Jacob confessing the name of the God of Abraham and the fear of Isaac (chap. 31: 42), and then again at the end of the chapter "the fear* of his father Isaac" seems to have been uppermost in his mind. The sense of God's faithfulness and of His holy majesty were deepened in Jacob up to this point. He had increased exceedingly in cattle, servants, camels and asses (all of which disappear at the end), but I doubt if he had made much more progress than that of increased confidence in God and fear of Him.

{* It is a strong word, implying dread and reverence, see, for instance, Exodus 15: 15.}

It will be said that this was something; and indeed it was ? but he had much more to learn.

Chapter 32 contains a deeper lesson. The man had to be thoroughly broken, and the events here recorded tend to this. The dread of the meeting with Esau and his struggle with the Wrestler left him in a better state to learn more. He was lamed for life in receiving the name of Israel, and though he still needed to be corrected and judged, yet this was a turning-point in his history.

At Shalem, Jacob could dedicate his altar to El-Elohe-Israel, but he fell again into his old ways of acquiring wealth, and we may well be assured that Abraham never would have bought a field (unless for a patriarchal cemetery)! The trouble which came upon Jacob here was another blow; and now we come to several steps in the right direction.

God calls him to Bethel, and this arouses him; he begins to act consistently, he buries all the idols and profane jewellery of the household. I believe that if a similar thing were done in many a house where "high truth" is professed, there would be great blessing. Many a Christian's house needs to be cleared of false gods and bangles. God is with Jacob after this, and the terror which oppressed him in chapter 34: 30 has vanished; it is God's terror that keeps in awe his enemies.

But the most terrible blow of all was yet to come. He comes up to Bethel and the name of Israel is confirmed to him ? but he must lose Rachel! The one true love of his heart must go! It is to this that he touchingly alludes when he says: "There Rachel died by me." (Chap. 48: 7.) It was the climax of God's ways with the man, the last great stroke that was to bereave him of the one he loved. Generally speaking, a man who has never loved in this way is not worth much; and when the fatal blow comes, it will either drive him to despair or else (through God's sanctifying grace) bring him down to calm dependence upon Him who alone can satisfy the soul.

Many a one who reads these lines will say that they have had a deeper knowledge of our blessed Lord ever since that day when their first and last love was taken from them.

And so it was with Jacob! The rest of his life was the life of Israel. In the history of Joseph and Benjamin, in the appearing before Pharaoh, in the last prophecy,* we have to do with a man of God.

{* I purposely reserve chapter 49 for another occasion. It requires a careful examination. If the Lord allows, it shall either follow directly upon the present paper, or after "Joseph."}

In the blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh, we see an intelligent saint guided by the Spirit of God.

Nothing could be more wonderful than the calm dignity with which the patriarch speaks to the great king of Egypt, and blesses him in conscious superiority. It is a superiority that is divinely given, there is no pretension or pride.

The love of wealth had gone he "adored leaning upon the top of his staff." The emblem of a true pilgrim was found in his hand at last, when, freed from all worldly hopes and having lost all earthly desires, he could declare plainly that he sought the heavenly country.

And not only so, but his last testimony rings out clearly with the knowledge of Him who was not ashamed to be called the God of the patriarchs. The glories of Christ shine in Israel's last recorded speech, and the power of the Mighty One of Jacob makes itself felt ? "from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel."

No Egyptian tomb for Israel! He sleeps with the pilgrim fathers in the tomb of Machpelah, awaiting the full accomplishment of the counsels of the God of glory!

Genesis 37 ? 48.

Joseph

Let us leave the last prophecy of Jacob till the end and look at the fourth great patriarch, Joseph.

I would wish especially to look at Joseph as the one who was delivered from prison and death and exalted; the type of Christ in His sufferings and universal sway. It may be useful to notice the ways of God in disconcerting opposition and awakening interest, in order to bring forward the man of His counsels.

What varied characters rise up before us; the unscrupulous sons of Israel who sold their brother, Potiphar's naughty wife, the forgetful butler, the pensive king ? these people all appear and have their part in the story and unwittingly accomplish Jehovah's will!

A careful study of what is said of Joseph in Psalm 105 and in Acts 7 will repay the reader.

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In the beginning of the history (in chap. 37), it is easy to discern the figure of our Lord's position in the midst of Israel, and the wickedness of the Jews in putting Him to death.

Joseph was his father's favourite, and at the same time the depositary of divine counsels, for his dreams (so little approved by his brethren) had revealed to him God's intentions.

The whole account of his descent into the pit and of his imprisonment may be taken as an illustration of the sufferings of Jesus; but we must notice that our blessed Lord did truly go down into death ? He tasted death for everything.

The whole picture of the fortieth chapter is full of interest, and takes us to the banks of the Nile. The great king stood by the river, and we seem to behold the seven well-favoured and the seven wretched kine rise out of the ancient river (that parent of prodigies), and the devouring of the former by the latter. The seven full ears of corn, and the other seven, blasted and sere, that came and ate them up.

The discreet man who should govern Egypt throughout the famine was found in the person of him who could explain the dream; and we have at once a type of our Lord Jesus, as the One who was raised from the dead, that He might take His place at the head of the universe, to be even now over the house of God. The time is fast approaching when we shall see all the glories of our Saviour, when He shall take His great power and reign.

It is a very happy thing when the type is followed out, so that the peculiar blessings which flow from our Lord's exaltation are known. Every knee must bow before Him, as before Joseph the cry was heard: "Bow the knee!" It is for us to know the present value of the name that is above every name, and (as Asenath the bride*) to enter into our present relation with the glorified Jesus, before the day shall come for His manifestation to Israel.

{* It was not without some interest that I once looked on the ancient obelisk at Mataria (the site of Heliopolis, or On of Genesis 41). This ancient relic must have been standing when Joseph went to the city to claim his bride.}

Let it not suffice us to know of our Lord's exaltation as a positive and historical fact, but let us really bow to Him in everything! How simple, yet how blessed for us in the sense of His power and glory, though we see not yet all things put under Him. Faith acts in quiet certitude, and delights to know that everything is in the hands of the true Joseph. Great as will be our delight in that day when He shall be publicly manifested, let us not put off till then the enjoyment of the power of His glory. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed! Blessed are they who can look up to the highest heaven and see Jesus crowned with glory and honour, and in the midst of an unjust world, where each day brings forth fresh trouble, rest in the security of His exaltation, learning, too, daily to do the things that please Him.

Let us think of Asenath and of her position. May we know, by the Holy Ghost, the Father's love in all its present reality! If this be going away from what is strictly our subject, it is none the less important. Let us keep near to Joseph whilst the famine lasts; that is, to our blessed and exalted Lord ? though great may be the dearth around us!

But we must go on to the latter part of the history to learn God's ways with His earthly people at the end.

The twelve tribes must be brought, through great exercise, to repentance; and the final blessing must come upon them from the riches of the glory of the heavenly Christ. He will not only bring all nations under divine authority, but He will lead Israel into the full enjoyment of their portion under Jehovah ? and before this can be accomplished, they must go through the deep trial and exercise of heart that leads to repentance.

It is very interesting to trace God's ways in the conduct of Joseph towards his brethren. Judah and Benjamin are the two who find themselves in the deepest trouble; and Benjamin, before the trial of the cup in the sack, had the greatest portion allotted to him.*

{* I suppose that there can be no doubt that Benjamin represents strength upon earth in Israel; this will be more apparent, perhaps, in reading Jacob's last prophecy.}

Judah and Benjamin go through an hour of searching trouble, and this evidently prefigures the fierce trial of the Jewish remnant (for those whom we call Jews now are of Judah and Benjamin) that will precede the final restoration of the twelve tribes.

When Judah repents, that is, when he begins seriously to feel the crime committed against Joseph, Benjamin being too in danger, it is a picture of what will happen in the last days. The prophet Zechariah throws much light upon Judah's ultimate repentance; and I suppose that no one could read Genesis 44: 28 without feeling that the narrator of Jacob's words felt his own guilt. Compare the preceding exercise in chapter 42: 21.

It is when Judah and Benjamin are thus put to the proof that Joseph makes himself known to his brethren, and declares to them the riches of his position as head of the Gentiles. So shall the glorious Messiah, in the last days, make Himself known to the whole earthly people of God, when the Jewish remnant shall have passed through the peculiar and terrible trial that is in store for them. All Israel shall be saved.

Thus Joseph is a full and perfect figure of the exalted Man through whom all God's counsels shall be accomplished; and it is important for us to notice the grace that is displayed in this beautiful and extraordinary type. Grace is manifested to the sons of Jacob, who so little deserved it; and if we (Christians) have a higher place as forming that favoured and heavenly company that shares the honours of the true Joseph, we have all the more opportunity of knowing the heart of Christ. If Asenath represents our place and relation with Jesus glorified, let us not be slow to learn the peculiar treasure of His love!

All future blessing to the twelve tribes is on the ground of pure grace, for all had been lost through the rejection of Christ; it has been aptly remarked that when God appeared to Israel on His way to Egypt (chap. 46), He spoke as the God of his father without speaking of the (forfeited) promises made to Abraham.

The one whose feet had been made fast in the stocks, and who had felt the iron of the dungeon, is the revealer of God's ways, the governor of the world, the gracious restorer of his brethren. One is never tired of reading the story of Joseph.

May we know more and more of the present grace and power of the glory of Him who is exalted at the right hand of the Majesty on high! May His interests be ours, and His love fully known!

However great might be the glory of the great administrator of Egypt, his heart did not forget the people of God, nor was he unmindful of the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His very bones should not rest in any Memphitic mausoleum, but should be carried to Shechem.

So the glorious Christ. Whatever may be the extent and splendour of His universal sway, He will not forget Israel and the holy land, and the portion of the earthly people will be abundantly made good out of the endless riches of His heavenly glory.

Genesis 49.

Jacob's Last Prophecy

I have left Jacob's last words to his sons till the end, so as to conclude with a comprehensive view of God's counsels and ways in Christ, with Israel and the nations, in the past, present and future.

It is a complete historical prophecy in which we see, as in a mirror, God's account of men illustrated in the twelve tribes; the great lesson in it being the setting aside of the responsible man (the first man), and bringing in Christ. All true blessing, whether heavenly or earthly, must come through the second Man; and if the final blessing of the earth be here in view, it is none the less important to see that all must come through Christ, after the utter failure of the responsible first-born sons of Israel.

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Jacob gathers together the twelve sons, with the purpose of announcing what shall happen to them in the last days; he speaks as "Israel their father" that is, as a man of God in the true form of a prophet.

Reuben's fall is conspicuous, and then Simeon and Levi follow. In the first case, it is corruption; in the second, violence. These are always the two chief forms of evil. In these three men, we have a picture of the ruin of those who were in a responsible place, as being God's chosen people on earth. It represents the moral downfall of the twelve tribes, in spite of their privileges.

Lust, cruelty and self-will! What a terrible portrait of man in his natural state! Yet this is his true character; and their digging down walls with violence, their wrath and anger, led to their scattering. (Vers. 6, 7.)

Have we well understood that, in whatever way the first man (that is, man in his natural state) is tried, in whatever circumstances he is placed, he will surely come to ruin, and bring everything to ruin? This is the great lesson to be learnt from the case of Reuben, Simeon and Levi; the house of Jacob was thoroughly compromised by their scandalous behaviour.

But in verse 8 we have God's purpose. Judah was brought forward, when all Israel was in a state of ruin; and God's king was anointed when all was lost. (Read carefully Ps. 78: 67-70.) Judah is the Royal tribe according to God's thoughts, and our Lord Himself is represented as the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

Shiloh should come, and unto Him should the gathering of the peoples* be.

{* Note that it is peoples (ammim), not merely people. It is not goi'm (that is, the nations considered merely as heathens), but as being blessed under and with Israel.}

Historically we may see, so far, the accomplishment of God's purpose in the appearing of the true king of the house of David, at our Lord's first coming. But vengeance should be taken upon His enemies before the kingdom could be set up, His clothes must be washed in the blood of grapes. (Compare Matt. 21: 1-9 with Isa. 63 and the vers. 10, 11, 12 of our chapter; in the first case the King of the house of David was recognised for one moment in Jerusalem.)

But our Lord must go away and leave the house desolate until the time should come for Him to appear again in power to destroy His enemies.

And in the meantime, have we not a true picture of Israel whilst they are driven out of their country and scattered in verses 13, 14?

Zebulun and Issachar represent the Israelites in their commercial attitude towards the Gentiles, as we know them at the present time. The shoulder is bowed to bear, there is the service to tribute. (We must admit that the Jews have paid more taxes than any other nation.) It is the long history of the settling down of this extraordinary nation in the Gentile countries, during which time they contrive to collect most of the capital that the world can give.

A strong ass, couching down between two well-filled sacks!

And what does this commercial success lead to? Nothing good! Apostasy! Dan, the idolatrous tribe, represents the apostate Israel in the latter day. Dan is like a viper that bites the horse's pastern behind, diabolical treason against the Most High.

This brings us at once into the last days, and to make this fact more striking, we have at this point of the prophecy the well-known cry of faith ? in the remnant of Israel. "I have waited for thy salvation, O Jehovah! "

Any diligent reader of the psalms and prophets will recognise at once the expression of the faith of those who cry constantly: "How long, O Lord?" They know that there will be an end to the trial, and that God has not forgotten them, long as the trial may appear. They wait for His salvation; they persevere to the end, so as to be saved.

And now comes quite a different series of names, with a glorious ending to the history that had begun so badly.

Verse 19. "Gad, a troop shall overcome him; but he shall overcome at the last."

Is not this, in sum, the history of Israel, and indeed of man?

The troop overcame the people; they were ridden down by the enemy, they have been trampled upon for a long time ? but now the deliverance is to come.

Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Joseph and Benjamin! These names are associated with the breaking of chains and the bringing in of liberating power.

The Shepherd, the Stone of Israel, makes good His triumph for the glory and welfare of His own.

Asher and Naphtali represent plenty and power brought in by. Christ; for Joseph represents Christ in resurrection, as Benjamin in the victory over all enemies.

Joseph is the heir, the fruitful bough. The archers had wounded him, he bears the marks of their arrows; but his own bow and arms have been made strong by the Mighty One* of Jacob.

{* Please to remark this title of verse 24. It is Avir. It is a good thing to study the energy of God's might as exemplified in Joseph, the great type of the risen Christ.}

The blessings of Joseph are included in the wide sweep of the circle of God's inheritance ? "the utmost bound of the everlasting hills." Joseph, once separated from his brethren, comes out crowned with all favours and honours. A bright day for Israel when the true Joseph shall reign; a happy day for Asenath, Joseph's bride. O day beyond all thought when all the diadems on the head of Christ shall shine over the nations!

Benjamin concludes this wonderful passage. The power and authority of Him who shall reign in righteousness are to be seen in Benjamin ? and here the magnificent prophecy closes. It is complete.

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Now, my reader, we have come to the end of these brief notes on Genesis. We have been together, as in a garden, where God's ways with men are wonderfully arranged before our view. The fall, the deluge, the happy simplicity of communion in the patriarchs, the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah; Babel, and dispersion, and wilful man showing himself ever more independent of God ? these things have been before us.

Have you lingered for a moment at the terebinth grove near Mamre, where Abraham spoke with the august strangers, of whom One was more than august? Did you see the vision on the banks of the Nile, and listen to the words of the interpreter just brought from prison? Did his subsequent glory fill you with admiration? Did you trace the hand of Him who is discerned by faith as being most surely present "when he is most invisible," and who carries on His plan of overcoming evil with good through all the varied phases of the earth's history ? the antediluvian world, Babel, Sodom, Egypt?

If so, I am more than satisfied. It is not without regret that I now close these most imperfect notes, and the (imaginary) communing with every one who shall read them. May the God of grace and of glory give us to understand His thoughts in His Christ through all that we have studied in this wonderful book!

Colossians

A Short Summary of the Epistle to the Colossians

By A. P. Cecil.

The Epistle to the Colossians is a kind of link in the chain between the truth brought out in the Epistle to the Romans and that to the Ephesians. There are two positions in which man in the flesh may be looked at, namely, alive to sin and dead to God. The Epistle to the Romans takes him up in the former view, and brings in the death of Christ; firstly, to justify him before a holy God, and secondly, to give him deliverance from his old master, sin, and out of his state as a child of Adam, Christ risen being his new standing before God. The Epistle to the Ephesians takes him up in the latter view, not alive to sin and under responsibility in that condition, but dead in trespasses and sin. God who is rich in mercy by the power of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, quickens him together with Christ, outside the dead condition of the world and unites him with Christ in glory and all the other members of Christ on earth. Thus the body of Christ was formed and exists now in union with the Head, seated in heavenly places in Him.*

{*This is the Assembly, and with the other aspect of it, which is the House, is the only Church mentioned in Scripture. There is no such thing in Scripture as the Church of England, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc. The word for Church is "ecklesia", which signifies "Assembly" - see Eph. 1: 22; 1 Tim. 3: 15). A.P.C.}

The Epistle to the Colossians unites these two aspects of truth in chapter 2: 11. Verses 11, 12 take the former aspect, that of Romans; verse 13, the latter, that of Ephesians, though it stops short of the position in heavenly places. The former view we have put off the body of the flesh, or old man, in Christ's death. We have been buried with Him in baptism, in who* also we are risen together through the faith of the operation of God who hath raised Him from the dead. Thus far though the Christian is brought into perfect liberty, standing in life in a risen Christ, and having the Holy Ghost as the power of life, he is now seen as baptised by the Holy Ghost into one body. In other words, he is now united to Christ in this corporate position. Baptism by water is thus the sign of identification with Christ in His death and burial; Christ coming up out of death, giving him, the believer, a perfect standing in life. Verse 13 carries on into Ephesian truth - that is, we are not only raised together out of death in Christ, but quickened together with Him in union, God having forgiven us all trespasses. The difference between the Epistle to the Ephesians and that of Colossians is, that in the former Epistle the body is seen seated in heavenly places in the Head, the body being the fullness of Him that filleth all in all. In the latter the body is seen on earth, full of the life of the Head (see Col. 1: 29) but in danger of letting go the Head. The whole truth consequently is to show that in Christ up in heaven dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and to press upon the believers at Colosse the necessity of holding the Head. The Person of Christ consequently is largely dwelt on, that in Him were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, in order that they might be guarded on the one hand from Gentile philosophy, and on the other hand from Judaizing ritualism, the Rationalism and Ritualism of the day. Thus whilst the unity of the body must remain under all circumstances, yet the responsibility of the members to hold the Head is clearly brought out. Every true assembly is thus exhibited as hanging on the Head, as dependently as an individual Christian is hanging every day upon Christ. When this is the case, no man is seen but Christ only, and the body receives nourishment from the Head.

{*I might read, "Wherein also ye are risen with Him." - "Wherein" in that case would refer to baptism. The former, however, seems most natural. Verse 11: "In whom ye are circumcised"; verse 12: In whom ye are risen together". A.P.C.}

The Epistle

Colossians 1.

But now as to the Epistle itself. After thanking God for the hope laid up in heaven for them, and mentioning their faith and love, he prays up to verse 11 in reference to their walk, after that, exhorting them to give thanks to the Father for their perfect standing (verses 12-15). The Person of the Son is then dwelt on, His work, and the ministry both of the Gospel and the Church, which brings the saints into a place where it is said of them, "Christ in you the hope of glory." After praying that they might acknowledge this mystery, he points them to the Person of Christ, in whom was hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and exhorts them as they had received Christ Jesus the Lord, so to walk in Him. In Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead in a body. He then brings out their full position as complete in Him, to guard them from Jewish ordinances on the one hand, and Gentile philosophy on the other. They are seen in this perfect position on earth, and waiting for their life in heaven to appear (see chapter 2, 3: 1-4).

From chapter 3, verse 5 to the end, the truth is applied to their walk and practice, ending up with various salutations from various servants of the Lord. The epistle was to be read in the assembly of the Laodiceans, thus bringing out their danger likewise of not holding the Head, being satisfied with knowledge without Christ.

But now as to closer details. Paul was an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timotheus joins with him in addressing the saints and faithful brethren in Christ Jesus which were at Colosse, giving the usual salutation to the assemblies of grace and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

(v.3) They give thanks to God and the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, always praying for them, (v.4) since they heard of their faith in Christ Jesus, and their love to all the saints, (v.5) for the hope that was laid up for them in heaven. The word of the truth of the gospel was the means of their hearing it, (v.6) and this gospel had come unto them, causing fruit to abound since the first day they heard it, and knew the grace of God in truth. This hope mentioned by Paul in these opening verses gives the character to the epistle which that to the Ephesians does not get.

The Ephesians epistle looks at the saints as already seated in Christ in heavenly places in Christ. If they are in such a position they are above hope, they are already there in Christ. He is only waiting until the time when all things are put under His feet; and we are waiting in this aspect for the same thing (see Eph. 1: 10, 18).

Here the saints have a perfect earthly standing but looking up to heaven where Christ their life is looking forward to the time when He should personally appear (see Col. 3: 1-3). Thus it was a hope laid up in heaven, for Christ was there and He is our hope (1 Tim. 1: 1). Whilst in Ephesians it is the body of Christ who is in heaven; here it is Christ in you the hope of glory. Thus all earthly hopes (whether as to a glorious kingdom on earth being set up, as a Jew might dream of, or of the conversion of the world to Christ, with all its learning and philosophy) are entirely cut away. Christ is rejected of earth and accepted of heaven. The only hope for them was a heavenly hope. (vv. 4, 5) Faith, hope, and love are all brought forward in beautiful proximity, and love to all saints regulated (in verse 8) by the character of the Spirit of God. It is love in the Spirit. (v. 9) Love begets love, and causes the apostle to pray for them that they might be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. Philosophy and human wisdom were doing their utmost to hurt them. They needed the wisdom of God as opposed to this. (v. 10) Knowing God's will they would walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; (v. 11) for this they needed strength, according to the power of His glory (for they were in a world of enmity) and patience, and longsuffering and joyfulness would be the result. I cannot walk worthy of the Lord unless I first know His will. The result of this walk is both fruitfulness in good works, and increasing in the knowledge of God; for this I need daily strength by the way, and in doing so I learn patience and longsuffering; rejoicing in tribulation, too (v. 12) and thanking the Father all the way (for what precedes is the walk), that He hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light (v. 13) that he hath delivered me from the power of darkness and hath translated me into the kingdom of the Son of His love, (v. 14) in whom I have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Before ever the Christian begins to walk he is put into this perfect place which is unalterable. (v. 12) He is a new creation in Christ; Christ is his meetness; (v. 13) Satan no longer reigns over him, for he is taken out of his old Adam condition and standing, as relating to the world, and translated into the kingdom of the Son of Gods love; (v.14) besides this he has redemption, the forgiveness of sins; Christ outside him, Christ inside him, and sin condemned.* What a portion!

{*Compare Col. 1: 12-14 with Eph. 1: 4-7. There is a great similarity between these two passages, though the former comes short of the fullness and distinctness of the latter. We are there set in a holy nature in the presence of God in light. We are adopted as children and graced in the Beloved. We have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. A.P.C.}

For their walk, prayer is needed; for their standing and position he urges them to praise (see verses 9, 12). But all is worthless for both without the Person in whom they have everything. (v. 15) He is the image of the invisible God. No one hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him. Still God's Being is true, though no one hath seen Him, or can see Him, for Christ is the express image of His Person (Heb. 1: 3). But this as shown forth in Man, He is the Firstborn of every creature, not in time, indeed, but in dignity, (v. 16) for by Him were all things created. In time He was born in the virgin's womb as a creature, holy and without spot; but He existed as Son before, for He created all things whether in heaven or earth; whether, thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers all things were created by Him as well as for Him; for as Man He will be the Centre of the new creation.

(v. 17) He is before all things on earth, He is before all created angels in heaven, and He upholds all things by the word of His power. (v. 18) But besides this, He is the Head of the body, the Church, and this is connected with resurrection. God's elect, who were born again and justified, lived in all ages, and Christ will bring them into blessing by His power. But as to a body, a bride, the last Adam stood alone, in the midst of a ruined creation, till the cross. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12: 24). The Lord was this Corn of Wheat. Instead of gazing on a beautiful creation lately formed by the hands of the Creator, like the first Adam, He gazed upon a wilderness, the fruit of man's sin. He was surrounded by wild beasts, led on by Satan to crucify Him. But after having been fully tested and tried, and found perfect He slept, and from His body, through His death, was formed in resurrection a second Eve who was to be for His praise and glory throughout the ages of eternity (compare Gen. 2: 7-25 with Eph. 5: 25-32).

He is the beginning, the First-born from among the dead; the church is united to Him as come out from the dead and sat down in heaven, so that in all things He has the pre-eminence. Thus He is the Divine Son, the First-born of every creature, born in time indeed, but in dignity, having the priority as Creator; He is before all things and He is the Head of the body. (v. 19) All fullness dwells in Him. In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.

So much as to His Person, now as to His work. (v. 20) He has made peace for enemies by the blood of His cross; He was the divine Peace-Offering, perfect, so that God could accept Him as a sweet savour (see Lev. 3), and the fruit is that all things, whether in heaven or earth, not only the new creation in the Church, but all Old Testament saints that have died, as well as those who shall be saved after the Church is gone, with all the millennial saints, as well as all other things.* (v. 21) But not only will all creation be reconciled to God by Him who is the Firstborn of every creature on the ground of His work, but also you Colossians the representatives of the Church, once alienated and enemies in mind by wicked works, already path He reconciled. But what is the only way for an enemy to be reconciled? (v. 22) He can only be presented through death, the divine peace offering having died. Thus enmity by wicked works is at an end and we enter into peace and acceptance, in Him who is a sweet savour, and finally shall be presented holy, unblamable, and unreprovable in His sight, (v. 23) if we continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel. (It is believers that enter into God's rest - Heb. 4: 3, we are made partakers of Christ if we hold on the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end (Heb. 3: 14). Our position in the heavenlies as united to Christ by the Holy Ghost is not entered into here. We know from other passages that the believer as united to Christ, is safe for ever.) (v. 23) The gospel on the ground of the Son's Person, the Firstborn of every creature, and on the ground of all His reconciliation of all things, goes out to every creature, and Paul was the minister of it. (v. 23) The effect of receiving this gospel was to make them a new creation, and to introduce them as baptized by the Holy Ghost into the body of Christ. (v. 25) Paul is also a minister of the Church, and as such suffers for the saints, and fills up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ in His flesh for His body's sake, which is the assembly. This ministry was a dispensation of God for the completion of the Word of God. (v. 26) The Church was a mystery hid from the ages and generations, and only now made manifest to the saints (compare Eph. 3: 4-9). God would make known to them what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which was Christ in them the hope of glory. This was the mystery of Christ, a body, a new creation formed out of Jew and Gentile on earth, outside the flesh entirely, for the cross had put an end to it. Being on earth there was the hope of glory in front. (v. 27) This Christ Paul preached, warning and teaching every man in all wisdom, so that each might be presented perfect in Christ Jesus.

{*Things under the earth, namely the fallen angels, and the damned are here left out. When the subject is subjection to Jesus as Lord, they are added. (compare Phil. 2: 10, 11.)}

Thus in this chapter we have two aspects of the Person of Christ dwelt on. (v. 15) 1st, He is the First-born of every creature; 2ndly, (v.18) He is the Head of the body, the Church. We have two reconciliations, two aspects of His work (v. 20) 1st, the reconciliation of all things to Himself, that is, things in heaven and earth, and 2ndly, (vv. 21, 22) you Colossians representatives of the Assembly of God. We have lastly two aspects of ministry, 1st (v. 23) the ministry of the Gospel which goes out to very creature, and 2ndly, (v. 25) the ministry of the Assembly or Body, which only includes the saints. The aspect of the Assembly in Colossians is - Christ in you; the aspect of the Assembly in Ephesians is - in Christ. The apostle is satisfied with nothing less than the presenting every man perfect in Christ.

Colossians 2.

He labours for this, and with regard to those especially at Colosse and Laodicea, who had not seen his face, he has great conflict (v. 2) that their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of God the Father of Christ. He was not at all satisfied with a sinner being simply saved and reconciled. Such might have full assurance of faith, like the Thessalonians (see ch. 1: 5), having received the gospel, not in word only, but in power; or like the Hebrews having a purged conscience, and so having boldness to enter into the holiest (see chap. 10: 22). Others like the Hebrews, too, might have the full assurance of hope. Knowing that Christ their Forerunner, was entered within the veil, and that one day He should come out again (see Heb. 6: 19, 20); but with regard to the Colossians, he would have them filled with the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God. Nothing less than this would keep them going forward regardless of the hindrances of human wisdom, and philosophy, and tradition. The cross was the leveller of all such ideas. A new man formed in resurrection of whom they were a part, was no formed. This was the body of Christ, the mystery, which had been hid from ages and generations, but now made manifest.

(v. 3) But what was the Body apart from the Head? It was true the life filled the Body of which they were members, and so it was Christ in them the hope of glory, but this life was the life of the Head. In Him were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Without the Head where was the Body? Human philosophy and wisdom had no place in Christ. He was all to them. (v. 4) There was great jealousy manifested by the apostle as to this, for men with enticing words were trying to put human wisdom between them and Christ. (v. 5) His spirit was present with them, and thus he could joy in all He saw of their order and faith. His practised eye could, however, discern something wanting. A Christian might say, Why do you want more? See what perfect order there is, and what faith. Ah, but they were in danger of letting go the Head; and so he exhorts them that (v. 6) as they had received Christ Jesus the Lord so to walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him established in the faith, as they had been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. That Christ in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge they had received. Thus they had all these treasures. Christ was in them. Walk flows from this. A baby is born, receives life, and then learns to walk, but he walks as it were in the life which he has received. (v.7) This Christ they had received was a Christ that died; they were to be rooted, as it were, deeply in Him, bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, and so they would be built up in Him. A root is planted underneath the ground and that was where Christ was laid, and He still has the marks in His body in heaven. He is the propitiation. A building is built up above ground. This is Christ in resurrection. (Compare Rom. 6: 4, 1 Cor. 3: 9). His life was to be manifested in their mortal bodies. So would they be established in that faith which they had been taught, and abound in thanksgiving. (v.8) The philosophy and vain deceit of the Gentiles, and the tradition of Judaism, which had now become the rudiments of the world, were all antagonistic to the development of this life. It was not a heavenly Christ, but life in the flesh. (v. 9) In Christ dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, (v.10) and they were complete in Him. The wisdom and power of the princes of this world only crucified the Lord of glory, so their wisdom ran parallel with a dead Christ. But the Colossians' Christ was a living heavenly Christ. (v. 9) God's fullness was in Him, dwelt in Him bodily. What did they want with human philosophy. He was the Head of all principalities and power, having a right and title to it as the First-born of every creature, and they are complete in Him who was the Head of the body. (v. 11) There was a better circumcision than Israel's circumcision in the circumcision of Christ. It was a circumcision made without hands, putting off the body of the flesh by it. What was this but the cross. (v. 12) Then they had been buried with Christ in baptism, the outward sign of identification with Christ under the dark waters of death, in whom also they had risen together through the faith of the operation of God who had raised Him from the dead. This was as to life in the flesh. Death and burial was applied to it. (v. 13) But as before God they had been dead in their sins, but now they not only had a position before God in Christ raised out of the dead, but God had quickened them out of death together with Him; God having forgiven all trespasses. (v. 14) All ordinances now that were against them, and contrary to them, Christ had taken out of the way, nailing them to His cross. (v. 15) And as to all principalities and powers, infernal or human, He had triumphed over them at that very same cross. For He had taken away all claims these powers had over man, and rose triumphant over them all.

(v. 16) Thus about questions of meats and drinks, holy days, the Sabbath and new moons, no one had a right to judge them. (v. 17) they were the shadows which ended when the substance came. When I am standing at the corner of a street waiting for a friend to come, and the sun is shining behind him as he comes to the corner, the first thing I see is his shadow. I have the body, the Person and I am occupied with Him. Oh, what a Person! Where is room for meats and drinks, and the Sabbath, etc.? Christ lay in the sepulchre on the Sabbath day. All life and power is in Him, not in the shadow, and our Lord's day shows forth this. (v. 18) Besides their danger from Jewish rites and ceremonies, there was a gnostic philosophy mixed up with it, which pretended to be humble and worshipped angels, intruding into those things which they had not seen, vainly puffed up in their fleshly mind, and not holding the Head. (v. 19) They were in danger from all these things, for if anything came between them and the Head, it was like a bough falling over a telegraph wire, it hindered communication between them and the Head. The Head was the Source of all nourishment to the body; the joints and bands were the channels and knitted together the whole body, so if communion was uninterrupted, it increased with the increase of God. Ala& if the Colossians felt the loss of communion in their day, what must it be now the devil has come and divided the people of God from one another; when the truth of the one body is denied , and so many children of God are standing up for division instead of unity? What hindrance there must be to communion when the people of God are joined to the world, and when they prefer a combination of world and Church to the acknowledgment of the membership of the body of Christ, however few may own this ground? The most holy and separate feel it most, and bear the sin on their own hearts before God. No one in however right a position he may stand, has any right to boast; the sin is his own, however individually he may be clear from it, for he is a member of the body. Will not my foot feel it if my hand is paralysed? Will not the true-hearted children in a house feel it if the house of their father is put in disorder by intruders? So it is with the Church of God. Still those who are pure in heart will take heed that nothing comes between them individually and the Head; they will walk also and hold communion with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart; why? (v. 20) because as to all those things other professors are delighting in, they see they are dead to them. They have died with Christ from the rudiments of the world. How then, as though living in the world, can they be subject to its customs and ordinances? (v. 21) Touch not, taste not, handle not (v. 22) after the commandments and doctrines of men. All that man commanded ended in the crucifixion of God's Son, according to the will of God. Now the Christian has taken sides in favour of His Christ who has died. He has died therefore to faith out of the world. (v. 23) There is indeed a show of will worship in these things. There was apparent humility and neglecting the body, not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. The cross of Christ thus ends all philosophy and wisdom of men as well as all ordinances and Judaising ritualism. All will worship is here forbidden as of the flesh. Christians have no right to worship God as they like. The Word of God is the sufficient rule as to this.

Colossians 3.

A risen Christ is all that remains, risen out of death and sat down on high, and they risen with Him. If that was their position, Paul besought them to seek those things which were above where Christ sat at the right hand of God: (v. 2) they were to set their affections on things above, where Christ sat at the right hand of God, not on the things on the earth, (v. 3) for they had died and their life was hid with Christ' in God, He was their life. (v. 4) He would soon appear, and when He should appear they would appear with Him in glory. How secure is the Christian! as to death and judgment, it is behind him; he has died with Christ. As to his life it is hid with Christ in God. No one therefore can pluck them out of God's hands. As to the future, it is certain glory. When He shall appear they shall appear with Him in glory. In the first chapter their hope was laid up in heaven. Here it is their life. Thus, as to their standing, all was perfect, they were now waiting for the glory - they were not in the flesh at all. As to that they were dead with Christ. Christ was their life, outside flesh. (v. 5) Nevertheless the flesh was in them, so they were to put to death its members. Notice not the members of the body, they were to be yielded to God (see Rom. 6: 13). Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and ye are not your own (1 Cor. 6: 15, 19, 20). It is here the members of the flesh. What are they? Fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil lusts and covetousness, which is idolatry. Everything which man covets is an idol. I have died with Christ and risen with Him in order that I may put it to death. To put to death" is a very different thing than from to die". The one is done once and for ever, the former is a daily thing. The children of Israel did not cross the Red Sea or the Jordan twice. Nevertheless they had to learn themselves afterwards and had great struggles and conflicts. These members of the flesh in activity cause the wrath of God to come on the children of unbelief. These Colossians had also formerly lived in them. But now are not only the outward gross sins to be put off, but also anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy speaking, and lying. All these things belong to the old man which they had put off. Now they had put on the new man which was daily renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that had created him. In this new creation there is neither Greek nor Jew, uncircumcision or circumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ all, and in all. They had put off the old man, and they were daily called to put off his deeds; they had put on the new man, once and for all, and now they are called to put on his fruits, there are bowels of mercy, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, forbearance towards one another, if any had a quarrel against any, as - Christ forgave them. But love was the chief thing. It was the bond of perfection. Gifts might abound (see 1 Cor. 12), but without love they were worth nothing (ch. 13). The peace of Christ, too, should rule in their hearts; whereunto they were called in one body; outside in the world was enmity and hatred - inside was peace and love. The word of Christ too, shall dwell in them and whatever they did in word and deed, they were to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. What precious thoughts of God! The forgiveness of Christ is our model. The peace of Christ is to rule our hearts. The word of Christ is to dwell in us rightly. Singing and joy is the result. The three first fruits of the Spirit come out here - love, joy, and peace; but it is the love of Christ, the joy of Christ, and the peace of Christ.

All the relationships of life remain, and the Lord's name introduced to sanction them all.* If it were wives, they were to submit themselves to their own husbands, if it were husbands, they were to love their wives; if it were children, they were to obey their parents - it was well pleasing to the Lord. If it were fathers, they were not to provoke their children; if it were servants, they were to obey, not looking to men for their approbation, but as fearing God. All these duties towards one another were seen and noticed by the Lord, and He would give the reward. There is no respect of persons with the Lord.

{*Jesus is connected with salvation; Christ with union in the body. Lord is responsibility.}

Colossians 4.

Lords were to give their servants what was just and equal for they had a Lord in heaven. They were to walk in wisdom redeeming the time towards those without in the world. Their speech always with grace, seasoned with salt, so as to know how to answer every man. Different servants of the Lord are mentioned at the end. There are commendations to each, except Demas, who afterwards forsook Paul. Tychicus was a beloved brother and faithful fellow servant; Onesimus, a faithful and beloved brother; Aristarchus, his fellow-prisoner; Marcus was to be received (Act 12: 35; 13: 13; 15: 37-39). Justus also was mentioned. All had been a comfort to Paul. Epaphras was a valued servant who had laboured much for them in prayer that they might stand perfect and complete in the will of God. Archippus was to take heed to the ministry he had received from the Lord and fulfil it. etc.

Christ and the Assembly

Christ and the Assembly being papers issued as a supplement to Scripture Truth.

The Central Bible Truth Depot, 5 Rose Street, London E.C.4.

The Mystery.

Christ and His Church — J. T. Mawson

The Present Practical Result of the Truth of the Body of Christ — J. Green

The Riches of the Glory of this Mystery — H. J. Vine

The Mystery in Practice — J. W. Smith

Power to Apprehend the Truth — H. J. Vine

Prayer in Relation to the Mystery — J. Green

The Sufficiency of Christ Triumphant for the Entire Need of His Body on Earth — J. T. Mawson

The Secret of the Dispensation — F. B. Hole

"That the Gentiles should be of the same Body" — D. Brown

Correspondence — J. T. Mawson

My Brethren.

In the Midst of the Assembly — H. J. Vine

John 20. — J. Green

The Assembly as seen in Hebrews — A. J. Pollock

"My Brethren" — J. T. Mawson

The Mystery — (Poetry) J. Boyd

The Life of the Assembly.

Life — J. T. Mawson

Love is of God — J. Boyd

Joint Partakers of God's Promise — H. J. Vine

Living Stones and Priests — J. Boyd

"Behold! I, and the Children" — J. W. Smith

Paul, and the Mystery — J. B.S.

The Holy Spirit and the Assembly.

The Glory of God and Jesus — J. T. Mawson

The Holy Spirit in Relation to the Church — J. Green

Membership and Fellowship — F. B. Hole

"The Holy Spirit of Promise" — H. J. Vine

Gatherings of Assembly Character — H. J. Vine

Apostolic Fellowship — F. B. Hole

The New Interest and the New Power — J. B. Stoney.

The Spirit's Work in the building up of the Assembly — A. J. Pollock

The Assembly in Function.

The Supremacy of Christ — J. T. Mawson

One Loaf; One Body — F. B. Hole

Ministering to the Lord in Assembly — H. J. Vine

When Ye Come Together — J. Green

The Cross of Christ — J. T. Mawson

The Open Meeting and its Abuse — H. P. Barker

More about the Open Meeting — J. T. Mawson

"Tarry One for Another" — F. B. Hole

How to Conduct Oneself in God's House — H. J. Vine

Correspondence — (Part 2) J. T. Mawson

The Lord's Supper — J. T. Mawson

The Leaven — J. Green

"One Flock, One Shepherd" — H. J. Vine

Eph. 2: 21. — A. J. Pollock

The Mystery

“Wherein He hath abounded towards us in all wisdom and prudence; having made known unto us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself: that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth: even in Him: in Whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will." (Eph. 1: 8-11.)

Surely no one could read the opening verses of the Ephesians and be indifferent to what follows. Could anyone say I am eternally enfolded in those wonderful statements; I am one of those who have been blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ; chosen in Him before the foundation of the world; made holy and without blame before the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in love; predestinated to the adoption of children; made accepted in the beloved One; redeemed and forgiven according to the riches of God's grace, and yet I am not interested in God's purpose and thoughts?

The exceeding riches of God's grace thus made known to us must command our earnest attention and awaken reverent enquiry. Especially as He treats us now, not as servants, but friends, and proposes to let us into His eternal secret, that which lies nearer than all to His heart, what He is going to do for His own Son.

It is as though He said to us, "I have forgiven you and set you free from all anxiety about your sins, and redeemed you from the power of the great enemy, and now I want you to enter into My thoughts; I want to unfold to you My purpose for the glory and joy of My own Son, and according to this purpose I have also given to you a part; you are necessary to the carrying out of it. So I have taken you up according to the riches of My grace, setting you free to contemplate the mystery of My will; having abounded towards you in all "wisdom and prudence," giving you the capacity for understanding and enjoying it all by the power of the Holy Ghost."

This is so exceeding abundantly above all that we could have asked or thought, that if we do but see with the eyes of our hearts the glory of it, all indifference as to it will perish for ever; and in self-forgetting and adoring service, we shall seek to comprehend with all saints the blessedness of it, and to labour in prayer and word and doctrine that the truth of it may not remain a dead letter to us, or to any of the saints.

Christ and His Church.

Introductory.

Before the lips of our Lord first uttered those two words, "My church," words which impress us with the preciousness of the church to Him as being His own peculiar possession, He asked His disciples, "Whom do ye say that I am?" Peter answered at once "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." The truth as to His Person must come out, for there could be no church apart from that, for it is formed upon and will be filled with what He is. But in this connection it is important that we should rightly grasp the significance of this episode in the revelation of the truth. Peter had not arrived at the truth by the exercise of his natural wits, or through any education he had received in the schools of men; nor can any other man; the scribes and Pharisees were far more intellectual and educated than he, and they neither discerned nor confessed the truth as to the Son of God. Nor had he gathered it from his study of the Old Testament prophets, though they all spoke of Christ; nor from the preaching of John the Baptist, though he was a faithful messenger, going before the face of the Lord's Anointed. He had received it from the FATHER - name of perfect grace, unknown to saints and sages of dispensations past, however exalted their privileges; hidden even now from the wise and prudent of the earth, but revealed unto babes. And it was from HEAVEN that the Father had revealed it. It was a heavenly revelation, the fruit of unmeasured grace which the name Father implies. This great revelation upon which so much hangs, was not made because of any merit in those who were chosen to receive it; and it connects itself, not with prophecies regarding the kingdom which are earthly in character, but with heaven and the counsel of God's will, by which all who were to receive it were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world.

We cannot pass over this passage of Scripture lightly; it arrests us by its blessedness, and certainly we must learn what lies under the simple statements here given if we are to have any true understanding of the truth of the church. WE BEGIN WITH THE PERSON OF CHRIST, this is fundamental, there could be no church apart from Him; but what we would at this point emphasize is, that it is His Father in heaven who reveals what He is that the church might be. It is not what He will be as Son of David, that is set forth in the Old Testament; or even as Son of man, His glory in this position is also spoken of in those indispensable prophecies; but, Who is this Son of Man? He is the Christ, the Son of the living God. It is upon this revelation of Him that the church is brought into being, built up and completed; and every other glory which is His will manifest itself fully in relation to what He, the Christ, is personally with the Father. It is the Father's work to make this known, indeed we might, speaking with reverence, call it His own special and chief activity; but does not this shew what a world of ineffable love is here opened up to us, that had never been opened before, where the counsels of the Father for the glory of the Son are unfolded, and into which none can intrude. Only those chosen for it by surpassing grace may enter here.

Our deep conviction is, that we shall make no progress in the knowledge of the truth of the church if we fail to understand this, so that we make no apology for seeming repetition. It was not as Elohim - the strong One (Gen. i. 1.) that God made this revelation to Peter, or as Jehovah - the self-existent One, (Gen. ii. 7.) or as El-Shaddai (Gen. xvii. 1) the Almighty, all-sufficient One, but as the FATHER of our Lord Jesus Christ, - "My Father," as He said. All that had come out in former days He is and will ever be; but it is not here a question of His attributes, His power, faithfulness or sufficiency, but what He is in His very nature. This could not be known to us by any work of His hand in creation, but only by the revelation of Himself by the only begotten Son that dwelt eternally in His bosom. So that we have first - the Father revealed in and by the only begotten Son, Jesus our Lord; and then the truth as to this glorious Person revealed to our faith by the Father; one can easily see that this must eventuate in fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ for all who respond to this revelation. Thus all truth hangs together.

Again we insist that it is the FATHER IN HEAVEN who reveals it. It is made to us upon earth, but it is from heaven, it is heavenly in character, and lifts us above the earth, and carries us into a range of things about which the prophecies that have to do with earth have nothing to say. The great majority of even pious Christians have not grasped the force of this, but the importance of it will be seen as the truth is developed. Then further, the way in which Christ is revealed is as victorious over death - He is "the Son of the living God." This revelation from the Father in heaven looked onward and carried the thought of resurrection with it. Immediately the Lord speaks of His suffering and death and resurrection; the truth is placed upon that platform, outside man in the flesh, with his ambitions, hopes and activities, which all lie shattered and dissolved at the touch of death.

So that we have at the first mention of the church in Scripture, the Father's activity - fulness of grace; the revelation He makes is a heavenly one, and it is of Christ, who would establish His church outside all the schemes and failures of man in the flesh against which all Satan's power and subtlety is directed in vain. It is invincible. This by way of introduction.

Christ the Glorious Head.

The mystery which is unfolded in the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians is Christ and the church, not the church without Christ, nor yet Christ without the church. Christ is the Head and the church His body. Consequently, though the church is in this blessed unity which is formed according to the purpose of God and by the might of His Spirit, its place is the subordinate one, as every body is subordinate to its head, and its blessedness and importance lie in the fact that it is the body of Christ, united to Him, the living Head in heaven.

We begin with Christ, whatever place of favour or testimony the church has now, or of glory it will have hereafter, it has by virtue of the fact that it is united to Christ, hence the necessity of beginning with Him. In doing so, the affections of the heart are brought into activity. One might say, "I am not particularly interested in the truth of the church," but none who have been redeemed by the precious blood of Christ will say, "I am not interested in Him," and in occupation with Him we are led naturally to be interested in that which He loves and nourishes and cherishes.

He is the Son of the living God. We are carried at once to John's Gospel by this declaration. Of this Gospel Augustine said, "John . . . deservedly compared to an eagle has opened his treatise as with a peal of thunder; he has raised himself not merely above earth and the whole compass of the air and heaven, but even above every angel host and every order of the invisible powers, and has reached even to Him by Whom all things were made, in that sentence, "In the beginning was the Word." It is with this Person we have to do and with Him we begin:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made" ( John i. 1-3). Here is the glory of His Person - As to His Being, He is eternal in the Godhead, as to His power and handiwork, He is the Creator of everything that exists.

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, ver. 14.

Here is the greatness of His condescension made manifest in His incarnation, for His humanity was not in form merely, something put on, as one would put on a garment for a certain purpose and then cast it off again when that purpose was accomplished, but it was a reality. He became an actual man, and this He will never cease to be.

"We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten with the Father" (verse 14). "The only-begotten which was in the bosom of the Father" (verse 18). Here we reach that which baffles description or explanation, nevertheless, it is revealed to us and we may at least say this of it, that in this epithet we learn the infinite worthiness of the Lord to be the eternal object of the Father's love, and His capability of responding to the full to that love, and as such He has come to declare it to men.

"Full of grace and truth." And of this "have all we received, and grace upon grace." Here is declared His absolute suitability to the entire need of man. Coming from the highest height of God's glory as the revelation of it, He stooped to the deepest depths of man's need to remove it.

Space fails us even to recount the matchless range of glories that shine upon this first page of John's Gospel, and we pass on to "I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do" (John xvii. 4). Here is the perfection of His life and the completeness of His work.

“He said, It is finished: and bowed His head and gave up the ghost . . . and one of the soldiers pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and water" (John xiv. 30-34). Here is the one great sacrifice, by which He did the will of God and redeemed and perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

"The same day at evening when the disciples were assembled . . . . came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you." (John xx. 19). Here is His triumph over the power of death and the introduction of His disciples into a sphere of peace - afterwards to be known as His assembly - of which He would be the all-sufficient Centre and Head.

The Gospel of John closes with the statement, that if all the things Jesus did and said were written the world would not contain the books that would be written. This in the judgment of the critic is hyperbolical language; we claim that it is the sober statement of the truth inspired by the Holy Spirit. Remember the greatness and glory of the Person; endeavour to conceive the character of the revelation that He made in His works and words, and then say whether this could be told in books.

Who, for instance, discerns fully, and could write truly, except the Father, the glory of the Son of God as displayed in the first miracle in Cana of Galilee; when He found man in his brightest social circumstances, his marriage day, a failure, for the wine ran out; but produced for him out of the water of purification, typical of death, the wine that could not fail; the best brought out last. Is not this the glory of the last Adam, who, out of His own death, shall bring forth the wine that makes glad the heart of God and man; shall roll back the tide of darkness and death brought in by the first Adam; remove from this creation the groans, disappointments, failure and loss; the vain reaching out on the part of man for what appears to be substance but is only shadow, vanity, vexation of spirit; and fill it with the wisdom and knowledge of God? Every cry hushed, every desire satisfied, everyone at rest, and God glorified through it all.

And who discerns fully the glory of that last miracle, which can scarcely be read without tears, when our adorable Lord, rising from His agony and sweat of blood in Gethsemane, was confronted by His eager, ruthless foes. One of them, Malchus, a slave of the high Priest, must have offered some gross insult to the Lord, and Peter, indignant and impetuous, drew the sword he carried and smote off his ear. Thus nature acted, thus man displayed himself, thinking he served his Lord. But Jesus, e'er His wonder-working hands were bound by His hardened captors, quietly touched the severed ear and healed it. What absolute goodness; what invincible mercy; what tender compassion; could this be written in books? Such divine goodness overcoming such appalling evil will have its place in the days of His glory when He shall fill all things; and every other ray of His glory seen by the Father's eye when He trod that lonely pathway, which "led only to the cross," will shine forth there.

It used to be said of a spiritually-minded minister of the Word, There is a book in which all would be written, for nothing that Jesus did or said could be lost, and that book is the church; it will be the lesson book of the universe. And this is true. The Father is writing in this book now by the Holy Ghost. For of the saints, who are the body of Christ, it is said, "Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart," and the divine intention is "that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly-places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Eph. iii. 10, 11). The church, as we shall see, is the transcript of Christ. This is where "the mystery which from the beginning of the world had been hid in God who created all things by Jesus Christ" comes in. (Eph. iii. 9). And we would remark that it might be thought that we have gone outside the range of our subject in bringing into it the glories of Christ as unfolded in the opening of John's Gospel, but this verse, and the fact that the creatorial glory of Christ is connected with the same subject in Colossians justifies us in so doing.

The purpose of the mystery is to fill the universe with Christ, and this will be done by the church.

1. Christ - the full revelation of God in manhood, the display.

2. The Church - the vessel for the display.

3. The Created Universe - the sphere of the display.

Yes, God intends that Christ, who fills His own heart, shall fill the universe, and this will be glory, and one part of the mystery now is that 'Christ is in His members the hope of glory' (Col. i. 27.) - God intends that the One who in the narrow compass of 33 years, in lowliness of life and obscurity, beset with every conceivable hostility of evil, fully declared His name, and revealed His nature in such a way that the world cannot contain the books, shall Himself be revealed in the fulness of His incomparable worth to every intelligence in the vast universe; and His body is the chosen vessel through which He will do it; and this not only in the dispensation of the fulness of times, but, unto the ages of the ages God will have glory in the church by Christ Jesus. (Eph. iii. 21.)

How the Body Was Formed.

Now the question arises how, and by what means has the church, which is the body of Christ, the vessel for the fulfilment of the counsels of God, been brought into being for the accomplishment of this great purpose.

First. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone: but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit." John xii. 24, shews the necessity of the death of Christ that there might be brought into existence the "many grains" like Himself, for the members of His body must be of the same order and nature as the Head.

Second. "The Holy Ghost was not yet given because that Jesus was not yet glorified" ch. vii. 39, shews the necessity of His exaltation and glory if the Spirit was to be given; and the body could not be formed apart from the gift of the Holy Spirit. "Nevertheless, I tell you the truth," said the Lord to His disciples, "It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you."

The first chapter of Acts records the ascension of Christ to the glory, the second chapter records the descent of the Holy Ghost from that spot upon His disciples on earth; and the unity of the saints in one body starts here and cannot be divorced from these two great facts — a Man at the right hand of God, and the Holy Ghost come from thence to earth.

Let us consider these great facts. The first is described in Ephesians 1 in most wonderful language. "The working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the Head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all."

He has not only gone to heaven, but the exceeding greatness of God's power has carried Him there from the very depths of death, and set Him in indisputable supremacy above every created power, and this, mark it well, in relation to His body, the church. Now a work commensurate in greatness with the raising up of Christ must be done in order to raise His body up, unite it to Him, fashion each member of it after His likeness, and fill it with Himself; and that work is being effected in the second great fact, the coming of the Holy Ghost to earth to indwell every member of the body of Christ.

We would press home upon our readers, the character that these facts give to the body of Christ, of which they each form a part. It is heavenly and not earthly; it is of the "last Adam," who is the Lord raised from the dead, and not of the first man who is of the earth, earthy. We have heard the fact of the heavenly character of the church derided and it is little thought of by the bulk of christians; hence we press it; it ought not to need pressing, for there are many passages of Scripture which state the fact in so many words. But it ought also to be clear, that if we are members of the body of Christ, who is not on earth but in heaven, and if we have been formed into His body, not by any earthly organisation devised by men, but by the indwelling of the Spirit from heaven, we must be now heavenly; however poorly we make it manifest, this is what we are in the thought of God.

Christendom acts as though Christ were accepted on earth; hence we have aims for world-power in Rome, the church and the state united in Episcopacy, politics rampant in Nonconformity. The solemn fact is refused that Christ was and is rejected by the world. We have briefly considered His glory and perfection in John's Gospel; consider now His rejection by the world, His humiliation and shame.

"One of the officers struck Jesus with the palm of his hand" (John 18. 22).

"Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged Him" (John xix. 1).

"The soldiers plaited a crown of thorns and put it upon His head, and they put on Him a purple robe, and said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote Him with their hands" (vers. 2, 3).

When the chief priests and officers saw Him, they cried out, saying, "Crucify Him, crucify Him."

But they cried, "Away with Him" (verse 15). "They crucified Him, and two other with Him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst." Need we continue? Does not that centre cross upon which hung the Author of life, the Father's sent One, declare to the universe that the world dominated by Satan would not have the Son of the living God? Consequently God has raised up His Son, and with like energy and exceeding grace He is gathering out of the world the members and uniting them to the glorious earth-rejected, heavenly Head. The members cannot be part of Christ and be of the world that rejected Him at one and the same time; they cannot be diverse from the Head; they must be as He is. So they are God's ecclesia, an assembly of out-called ones, no longer of the world out of which they are called. But if you call out a number of people without a purpose or centre you have a rabble, that was not the purpose of God when He commenced to call out His church. He unites them each by one Spirit to one Head and forms an indivisible organism, instinct in every member of it with the life of the Head, to be under the dictation of the Head and to manifest what He is.

Christendom has departed from this and become a rabble; setting up heads of its own choosing; going its own way; section warring with section; a veritable babel. How could it be otherwise when it denies its heavenly origin and turns from the Head in whom all the fulness of the Godhead dwells and seeks instead the help of men and the world that rejected and crucified Him. And there is no deliverance from this but by the truth as to what God has established. For this reason we are endeavouring to present the truth to our readers.

But let us, not fearing repetition, consider what this means. The Holy Ghost from heaven takes possession of a company of men upon earth; one Spirit in each individual in that company, forms them by this indwelling into one body; but having come from the exalted Christ, He unites them all to Him, so that now they form the body of the Man who is out of death and exalted in heaven. He is their Head there, and they being His body are to be expressive of Him here. The Head must direct the members of His body: His thoughts, His graces, His manners, His very life have now to find expression in them. This is outside entirely what man is naturally, for Christ has passed through death and is out of it; it is outside also all the springs of earth, for He is exalted in heaven; hence it can only be done in the Holy Spirit's power, but the members of the body of Christ have not to seek Him, for He dwells in them for this very purpose. This is an entirely divine conception, but it is a blessed reality to be entered into consciously by every one of us. It is such a reality, such a fact established in the invincible might of the Holy Spirit that no power of the enemy can destroy it; such a reality that when Jesus arrested Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road He challenged him with the question, "Why persecutest thou ME?" The Head and the body are one. And the Head directs the body; the members need no self-appointed leaders, they are to look to their Head for direction, and to be descriptive of Him where He is in the very scene of His crucifixion. What a victory for God is this! What an overthrow for the devil is here disclosed! He thought to rid the world that he dominated of Christ, living a life of lowliness and obscurity; he has been foiled by the wisdom God, for now the exalted, heavenly Man is here in His body; it is His epistle, known and read of all men; it is here maintained by the mighty power that has come from Him at God's right hand. Its destiny is the place where He is, meanwhile it is descriptive of Him where He was rejected, for Christ is in you the hope of glory.

On this line lies unity, to seek it on any other can only fail, but this is outside all failure, it is the unity of the Spirit. And if we see the truth and appreciate it we shall welcome the precious exhortation, coming as it does from the prisoner of the Lord.

"I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. iv. 1, 2, 3).

J. T. Mawson.

The Present Practical Result of the Truth of the Body of Christ.

The idea is current in the minds of many Christians, that the truth concerning the church viewed as the body of Christ, has little practical bearing on life and conduct. Yet it must be evident to a serious thinker that so stupendous a fact as that Christ has a body on earth, of which He is Head in heaven, could not but have an important and searching effect on the walk and ways of those who receive it in the full assurance of understanding.

It was the revelation of this great secret which had been hidden in God that absolutely changed the life of Saul of Tarsus. The words, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou ME," revolutionized him. The greatness of this fact governed all his after ministry, and caused him deep anxiety of soul, and continual prayer to God, that those who had received the gospel, might be interested in this further truth. He knew its importance, and knew also that if this central pivot on which the present activity of God turns was lacking, nothing else could be in right adjustment.

1. Let us consider it first of all in relation to the understanding of God's will and purpose for the present period of Christ's rejection from the earth.

The body of Christ consists of all believers whether Jew or Gentile by birth, brought on to a new platform before God in Christ risen, and livingly united to Him by the Holy Spirit. They thus become joint heirs, a joint body and joint partakers of the promise, the purpose and the glory; the final result being the display of the exceeding riches of the grace of God and glory brought to Him in the church by Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of ages.

The present result where this is received in the obedience of faith, is worship and praise to the Father of glory, and at the same time the heart is turned away from the many purposes which occupy the minds of men in respect of the world and its nations, and is engaged with the only thing that can hush the groan of creation, namely, the manifestation of the sons of God, in the likeness of, and with their exalted Head. The coming out of the church from heaven having the glory of God, is His centre of administration for the dispensation of the world's peace. Through His body Christ will rule all things and receive the homage of all the nations of the earth. The knowledge of this will produce a great result in delivering the Christian from the projects of the rulers of this world, and leagues of nations, which after all are doomed to failure from their inception, because they are not framed for the glory of Him whom God delights to honour. One who is instructed in the mystery of God will have very good reason indeed for abstaining from participation in the politics of men, for his politics are in heaven, from whence he awaits the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, with eager anticipation.

2. In close connection with these things is the right understanding of the Scriptures of truth. The knowledge of the special calling of the church is the key to the treasure house. The purposes of God for His earthly people Israel are then seen to have been suspended, until the time when the new heavenly family shall have been completed and translated to heaven. God is now calling out of the world a people for His name and afterwards will return and build again the tabernacle of David which is fallen down and will set it up. If this is not grasped, the prophets have little or no meaning to the mind, and there is the desire to apply their writings to the church, with the result that their true connexion is lost, and the dispensations of law and grace are confused. From this cause has arisen the mixture of Judaism and Christianity, supplemented by human devices, which is everywhere in evidence. The church is the vessel of grace, formed in the world but no more of it than is its Head in heaven; heavenly in its origin, its character, its portion and its destiny; and the Christian that is so instructed will be one who can bring out of the treasures of God's Word, the old things and the new. Such intelligent perusal of Scripture is surely a very practical and blessed thing.

3. None can contemplate the present condition of the church without seeing that great confusion exists, and the reason is not far to seek. From very early days in the history of the church, believers have failed to hold the Head, and consequently have supplied the lack with other heads of their own devising. Popes and cardinals, kings and archbishops, with the whole clerical system have been perpetuated. Churches, chapels and Christian gatherings of all kinds are anxious to have some one appointed to whom they may look for guidance and who shall undertake the responsibility of their affairs. So far has the truth that all direction and supply flows from the Head to each of the members as He will, been departed from, that many cannot understand how Christians can meet together for worship or edification without someone to preside over the meeting or be its leader. The reason is that Christ has not His place in their minds as Head, or if they hold this in theory it is thought not to be applicable in practice. The consequence is that instead of bearing witness to the unity of the body, the Church is scattered and divided, sectarianism is rampart and the sheep follow each other instead of the Shepherd. Let it not be imagined that this state of things can be remedied by any outward arrangement, for no recovery is possible unless the place of the Head is recognized. We have not to make a unity but to acknowledge that which is already established by the Holy Spirit, and to depart from all that is inconsistent with it. To be a member of the body of Christ is so great an honour, that one who realizes it will decline all other memberships, societies, guilds, unions, syndicates and companies. Such things are the resort of men who conscious of their individual weakness, seek strength to safeguard their interests and maintain their place in the world. The saint and the church have their resources in Christ and need none other. In Christ and the church are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; the source of all is in the Head, the supply is to the members, and neither religious associations, philosophical societies or nationalistic combines, can add anything to him to whom Christ is all. But if any practical result is to follow, this truth must be acted upon, and Christians must be found gathered together to the name of the Lord alone and owning His sole authority. Where this is done even though but by two or three, how great is the blessing, and how rich and full the stream of grace which flows in abundant supply from the Head on high. In this lies the Divine answer to the confusion, for any who will take such a path, in all lowliness and meekness forbearing one another in love.

4. Then in relation to the coming of the Lord; how many and various are the ideas that are afloat upon this precious theme, yet how simple and heart-affecting does the subject become when the place of the church as the body and bride of Christ is seen. At once it becomes an imminent hope, making heaven a reality to the soul, and earth but a shadow. Yes, He is coming for His church, that where He is she may be also; He is coming to present her to Himself a glorious church without spot of defilement or wrinkle of age; He is coming that He may be glorified in His church and admired in all them that believe; He is coming for the pearl upon which He set such value that He sold all to possess it. What bridal affections are produced by considering these things! No hour of Jacob's trouble is her lot; no time of tribulation that shall come upon all the world to try them that dwell on the earth. She has no place on earth during the day of the world's judgment, for the day of grace which called her into life will have ended, and for her the joy of the presence of the Bridegroom on high will have come. Below the storms of judgment will be sweeping over the guilty world; above in heaven, the marriage of the Lamb, the bridal robe, the hallelujah song.

5. Then again the truth of the church as the body of Christ is the great preservative against the evil doctrines that abound in Christendom. Where many are tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine and cunning craft of the enemy of souls, the heart that rests in the knowledge of union with Christ, abides in the steady calm of truth as it is in Him. Such an one needs no novelty in spiritual things, nor desires to intrude into the spirit of the world. Neither is he entrapped in the spider webs which men spin from their imagination, nor is he bewildered by the forced interpretations of Scripture with which such ideas are bolstered up. The conclusions of science falsely so-called cause him no anxiety as to the foundations which rest in God, because holding the truth in love he grows up into Him in all things, which is the Head even Christ, and these things attract him not. The heart that is possessed by heavenly affections will be satisfied only with that which can minister of the excellency of Him who is at God's right hand.

6. Lastly as to individual walk, we need but to turn the pages of the epistles to Colosse and Ephesus, to see how Christian behaviour and practice is developed in the knowledge of Christ as Head of His body. To walk worthy of the calling, to walk apart from the vanity of the human mind, to walk as children of light, in love, and circumspectly to carry out the relationships of life, after God's thoughts; these epistles as well as that to Philippi show how these things can only be lived out as the life of Christ expresses itself through the members of His body here.

The truth of the mystery was given to Paul to complete the Word of God. It is the centrepiece which gives harmony and arrangement to the whole circle of truth, without it all is unfinished and no true connection is seen. Only so can any life find its true purpose and mission as it sees its place as set in the church in relation to Christ and all saints. Worthwhile indeed to have the lowliest place in such a glorious purpose, where each member needs every other and each partakes of the measure of grace from Christ. Every member is necessary to the Head, in order that He may express in the whole the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him which created him.

It awaits the day of glory for the full display of this, but even now it is wrought out in measure in those to whom God after the deep desire of His heart, makes known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

The above remarks have been based upon the following Scriptures: -

Acts ix. 1-9; xv. 14-17. Rom. viii. 19-21; xvi. 25-27. Eph. i. 17-23; iii. 1-21; iv. 1-16, Col. 1. 23-29; 2: 1-19. 2 Thess. i. 10-12. Rev. xxi. 9-27 which will well repay prayerful and careful study.

James Green.

"The riches of the glory of this mystery." (Col. i. 27)

We are told that God would make known to us the riches of the glory of the mystery, and we are therefore definitely encouraged to seek by the Spirit to apprehend somewhat of the costly treasures of wisdom and knowledge which are graciously stored up for us in this, and which await those who will take possession of them in faith. Were we not assured of this in God's Word, the very greatness of these exalted and holy things might well deter us; and a false idea of humility might have easily prevented our entering upon the path to this wealthy abundance; or, it may be, a sense of our own unworthiness. Seeing, however, that those who are addressed were once sinful, disobedient children of wrath and deserving God's judgment, but have now redemption in Christ, the forgiveness of sins, having been delivered from the authority of Satan and brought into the favour of God; - seeing that those who are utterly unworthy and sinners in themselves are thus addressed and blessed, having heard and believed the gospel concerning God's Son, and consequently become members of the body, the assembly, of which Christ is the Head; - we, who have learned our own sinfulness and God's redeeming love in Christ, may, having no confidence in the flesh, enter without presumption or irreverence into these things which God would indeed have us know. May we have grace and energy to do so!

1. The mystery itself has been revealed. It never could have been known otherwise. 2. It has its own distinctive glory. 3. God desires that we should know the riches of this. The apostle to the Gentiles laboured with great combat of spirit in relation to it, toiling according to the inworking power of Christ, that the saints might be brought to the full knowledge of it, and not be deluded by other things which are not after Christ. We may well therefore be deeply in earnest about the matter for ourselves. Its importance to-day cannot be over estimated. Deceptions and delusions in religious circles abound, but the truth which is according to Christ Jesus our Lord, known and practised, is sufficient to preserve us in the way of life and blessing for the pleasure of God.

1. The Mystery.

The riches which we have before us are immediately connected with the mystery. It will therefore be necessary to say a little as to this. In contrast to the ages previous to the redeeming work, resurrection and exaltation of Christ, the mystery is now revealed.

Silence was kept as to it in the times past, but it is now made manifest for the obedience of faith (Rom. xvi. 26). It was hidden from ages and generations, but is now declared to the saints of God (Col. i. 26). This mystery we are told was "hid in God" Himself previously (Eph. iii. 9), therefore the revelation of it cannot be found in Old Testament times, or before the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit. That it is now made known in our day should profoundly affect us.

The above three Scriptures which speak of the mystery show the care with which this divine secret was guarded from time immemorial until the day the gospel of God's saving grace came to us. The gospel however, is not itself the mystery as Romans xvi. 26 shows. It is now made manifest with a view to obedience, - called "obedience of faith." Colossians i. 26 tells us that it is now made manifest to the saints of God, and that the truth was specially given to the Apostle Paul to minister it to the Gentile believers, and thus to complete the Word of God. Ephesians 3: 9 speaks of it being made known now to "the sons of men," having been revealed not only to Paul the special minister of it, but to "His holy apostles and prophets in the power of the Spirit." What then is this wonderful mystery which God has so graciously made known in our day after keeping it a secret so long? Our Scripture (Eph. iii.) tells us. Going beyond and far above all the great and glorious promises of God made in the past to the nation of Israel; a higher and vaster range of glory, which is not of Old Testament promise, but which is according to eternal purpose, believers from among the Gentiles are made one in Christ with those from among the Jews, becoming thus in Him, who is exalted by God above every dignity and intelligence in the universe, heirs together of the reserved inheritance in glory, - a united body in Christ, the assembly, - and joint partakers of the life which was promised in Him before the ages of time, now made known in the glad tidings. (Verse 6).

Such thoughts did not enter the Jewish mind. The Jew expected according to the promises, that Israel as a nation should have the supreme glory in the world, in a system of nations subservient to her, with her King, her Messiah of David's line, in her midst, but it never entered their minds that from among themselves and from among the nations there should be an out-calling, the ek-klesia, united to the Christ rejected by them and exalted to God's right hand over all things, nor could it be known until it was revealed by God Himself.

Supremacy on earth belongs to Israel and will yet be theirs, when the nation is clothed with Christ; but this cannot be until the body, the assembly, is glorified with Christ her Head in heaven, and Israel has repented of the guilt of having rejected and crucified Him. Revelation xii. opens with a symbolic vision of her glory which follows. She is clothed with the sun; supreme power is vested in her, for the Lord is her everlasting light. The moon is seen beneath her feet: all derived authority is received from Israel in the earth. On her head is a crown of twelve stars, which speaks of the administration being hers in bestowed perfection. The Man Child who is to shepherd all the nations is of Israel (verse 5), for truly "salvation is of the Jews" as the Lord Himself said, for He came of them after the flesh, and He is the Saviour of the world to bring in blessing and order and glory. Nevertheless, the mystery has in view not only this, but the centering up of all things in the heavens as well as upon the earth in Christ, and the filling of all things by means of the assembly, the body, which is "the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." This is according to eternal purpose as we said, and rises far above the glorious promises to Israel. God has now made known the very mystery of His own will, according to His own good pleasure which He proposed in Himself (Eph. i. 9).

The Head of this system of divine greatness is already glorified, and those who are members of His body are united to Him by the Spirit given. At present they are heirs of the inheritance of glory; soon they shall actually inherit. They are already in the body; soon they will be exalted along with the Head. His life is theirs now, and when Christ who is their life shall be manifested then shall they also shine out with Him in glory.

Much of the wisdom of God is shown through Israel, but now through the assembly there is made known the all-various wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord; and that, not to men, but to "the principalities and authorities in the heavenlies." This was in view even in the creation which He called into being at the beginning, though He did not reveal the secret till Christ had secured redemption, and was set as Head over all things to the assembly. It is therefore said "now" as contrasted with the past when the mystery was kept secret, and not in contrast with the future, for it has an abiding sense according to "eternal purpose." The perfect display of God's wisdom is secured, - "all-various," or "all variegated," - a word only found here in Scripture, and used of the magnificent blendings of colour in a masterpiece of art. To bring the failure of the assemblies into these verses is to mar the teaching in this connection. To dwell upon the divine grace and love and power and wisdom seen in Christ and the assembly according to the purpose of God will rightly affect us.

In chapter 5, after speaking of Christ and the assembly in the past and present, and looking on to the future, to the time when Christ will present her to Himself all glorious for the joy of His own heart, it is said, "This mystery is great but I speak as to Christ, and as to the assembly" (32), - having added for our present help, "We are members of His body; we are of His flesh and of His bones." What rich comfort and cheer this gives us now, even before the end is reached! Not only is union ours in the precious sense of Bridegroom and bride, but unity, - members of the body of which Christ is the glorified Head, - one with Christ! How can we praise Thy grace, Lord Jesus, as our hearts desire to do?

"Ascended now in glory bright

Life-giving Head Thou art;

Nor life, nor death, nor depth, nor height,

Thy saints and Thee can part."

In closing these remarks as to the mystery itself, we feel constrained to mention the intense and rapid progress of another mystery, which, in the sphere of Christendom is sweeping onward like a destructive flood; it is called "The mystery of iniquity" or "lawlessness" (1 Thess. ii. 7). It was at work even when the apostles were on the earth. It has been working in opposition to Christ, and the assembly acts as a restraint, but when that restraint is removed at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ for the assembly, it will rush forward, carrying off those who "received not the love of the truth that they might be saved" (ver. 10). May the truth we have spoken of, - in the love of it, - so fill our hearts that we may be kept above all religious workings in opposition to it, "preserved in Christ Jesus," where all that is good and perfect is ours.

2. The Glory of the Mystery.

Before we speak of the riches of the glory of this mystery, we must seek to grasp, as the Holy Spirit enables us, the special distinction, or glory of the mystery; for these riches, though they are to be displayed in the universe as the outcome of the mystery, are not exactly called the riches of the mystery, but the riches of the glory of it. The difference has not been observed sufficiently, but it is important.

The glory of the mystery is that which is distinctive of it when compared with other circles of blessedness in the universe of God. Creation has its distinctive glory. ISRAEL HAS HER OWN GLORY ALSO. It is the same with the mystery. The thoughts of an Israelite, from every part of the kingdom, turned instinctively to Jerusalem. Even Daniel during the captivity looked thitherward, and prayed with his window open towards the city. Nevertheless, it was because of the city, and the throne of Jehovah, the ark, of the Lord of all the earth, and Jehovah's own presence there, that a peculiar distinction was given to the city and kingdom of Israel above all others. The glory of the Lord had been seen to fill the temple. Sacrifices had been offered; the magnificent building had been reared up; and when the priests and Levites "praised the Lord, saying, For He is good, for His mercy endureth for ever: that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord: so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of God" (2 Chron. v. 14). What other nation or kingdom was so honoured? What other people had God so nigh unto them? What other city was so privileged? What house or temple was filled with the cloud of Jehovah's presence? - And there was the ark which contained the stones of testimony given miraculously at Sinai, when the glory of the God of Israel appeared before their eyes; when there was seen "under His feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness." Six days the glory of the Lord abode upon mount Sinai. "The sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire."

Moses exhorted them to keep the statues and judgments which God had given them, saying, "This is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations" (Deut. iv. 6), for it would be recognized that thus they were distinguished from others. We know, however, that they failed utterly, but when God presently takes them up again according to the new covenant, it is said, "The Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to Thy Light, and kings to the brightness of Thy rising" (Isa. lx. 2, 3); again, I will glorify the house of My glory. Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as doves to their windows?" (8). "The nation and kingdom that will not serve Thee shall perish" (12). "They shall call thee, The city of the Lord, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel" (14). "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting Light, and thy God thy glory" (19). "Yea, I will be the glory in the midst of her saith the Lord" (Zech. ii. 5). Messiah will be known by her then. She will have returned to Him. Like Thomas, they will own Him as their Lord and their God when they see Him. He will be known and owned at Jerusalem by all, and "the Lord shall be King of all the earth" (Zech. xiv. 9).

This constitutes Israel's glory, but the glory of the mystery transcends this altogether. Great and glorious indeed the former is, but the latter surpasses it in its vastness and outshines it in its splendour; rising far above the heights of Israel's exaltation, and outreaching the widest ranges of her dominion, the glory of the mystery glows with the richest radiance, and blesses the beholders of it with its abiding beauty and universal brightness. It outranges all national glory, for that which is according to God's eternal purpose must necessarily extend beyond His greatest promises for time. Indeed, it might be said that the mystery and its glory, even as we know it now, partakes of the nature and character of "eternity." Oh! that we might value this more than we do!

As we have seen, Israel is to shine in national supremacy on earth, because of her Messiah, in the sight of all other nations of the world who will be blessed through her. The assembly is the body of Christ, - not a nation under Messiah, but a living organism, a vital system, one with its glorious Head, - united to Him who is the Head of all principality and power. It is for the universe. It will be through its immediate and intimate association with Christ at God's right hand, and its oneness with Him, through power, redemption, resurrection, and the gift of the Spirit, the divinely provided means for the blessing and ordering of all things, - as it is said, "the fulness of Him who fills all in all;" and it is also for the eternal pleasure of God, that there might be to Him "glory in the assembly in Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of the ages." The One whose body the assembly is first went down into the depths before He ascended as Man into the transcendent heights where He now is. "He that descended is the same who has also ascended up above all the heavens, that He might fill all things." From that exalted position He has given gifts for the calling out and building up of the saints who are to share with Him in His heavenly glory, holy and without blame before God in love, dwelling with Christ as His companions and brethren, and reigning with Him as His bride when He fills the universe with glory.

"What will it be to dwell above

And with the Lord of glory reign?"

How far all this transcends that which will give Israel her distinctive place on earth words are scarcely adequate to express; but, as the heavens are higher than the earth; and the vast universe far outspans the world; and the thrones, lordships, principalities and authorities in the heavens surpass in greatness and majesty those on earth; so the distinctive "glory of the mystery" excels that of Israel, magnificent and glorious though that be, as we have seen. Israel will be in immediate association with the Messiah, King over all the earth; but the assembly will be united to Him, a new creation in Himself when all things in the heavens as well as upon the earth are centred up in Him. Oh! glorious beyond telling is this! Eternal praise and glory be to Him whose love counselled it, whose grace saved us in view of it, and whose Spirit made it known to us!

Seeing, then, that the distinction of both, flows from the way in which Christ Himself is known, for a fuller understanding of "the glory of the mystery," we need to say a little concerning the pre-eminence which is His in all things, as "Firstborn of all creation" and as "Firstborn from among the dead." The former distinction became His when He came into the great creation which He had made. The reason given for this is "because by Him all things were created" (Col. i. 16). How could the Creator have any place less than the first when He was pleased to honour that creation by coming into it? The latter distinction is His in relation to the assembly which is a new creation in Himself, - a pearl being the symbol of it used by the Holy Spirit. The symbol is deeply interesting and instructive; a pearl is not a creation in the original sense, but rather the beautiful outcome of irritant trouble in the original creation; and, therefore of it, but yet separate from it, - a new creation, with powers of iridescence, which exhibits the colours of the rainbow of the first creation with a soft and exquisite perfection, which can be found nowhere except in the pearl brought up from beneath the deep waters, and taken out of the fish's shell. As having the glory of Firstborn from among the dead, our Lord Jesus Christ is the Head of the body, the assembly. Now mark the reason given for all this, - "That He might have the first place in all things" (Col. i. 18).

If we reverse the order therefore of these two distinctions, and meditate upon them before God in the Spirit, we shall see how it is that the distinctive glory of the mystery is related to the glory of Christ, the Son of the Father's love, according to the eternal purpose which centres in Him, for the blessing and order of the wide creation. We see Him pre-eminent, first in every part, in every position, in every place, - "in all things," and, His body glorified with Him, so that the assembly thus honoured, stands because of Him, and as subject to Him, in that distinctive place which, as a new creation in Him, is used for the blessing of the wide creation of which He is also the Firstborn. This then is the glory of the mystery which God hid in Himself till the Head of the assembly was glorified. What a distinction it is! Oh, that we could speak of the glory of Christ, the Son of the Father's love, in His resurrection, redemption, reconciliation and administration better, and so show more clearly the "glory of the mystery" with all the greatness and loveliness which He bestows upon it.

"In His blest face all glories shine,

And there we gaze on love divine."

3. The Riches.

We have seen that the mystery, which was so long hidden, but now made known, is distinct from the promises to Israel, which involve their supremacy under Christ in a world-system of nations; for it is formed in Christ of those who are called out from the nations, from Jews as well as Gentiles, all of those being thus called out becoming unitedly heirs of the universal inheritance in Christ, one body in Him, His assembly, and together partaking of the life promised by the gospel in Christ Jesus. The glory of this mystery has also come before us; and we have seen that this distinction transcends that of the nation of Israel, when she is exalted under her once rejected Messiah; for the assembly which is His body and His bride is not simply distinguished in association with Him for the earth and for time, but for heaven and earth through eternity sharing in His glory when as Head over all He fills all things.

We will now consider the riches which result from the glory of this mystery. This would seem to be altogether beyond us had not God graciously made it known; as we read, - "The riches of the glory of this mystery among the nations, which is Christ in you the hope of glory" (Col. i. 27). Here then we are distinctly told what these vast riches are, - Christ in us the hope of glory! - Christ, in whom, we are told in verse 19, "all the fulness of the Godhead" dwells: - in us, not now apart from those who form His body, but livingly in them; - the hope of glory. The glory is always in view in the truth of the mystery, which is according to God's purpose of love before time began, which was revealed in time after the Head of the assembly was glorified, and which after time ceases shall be for eternal blessing universally and glory to God in the assembly in Christ Jesus.

To aid our understanding of these riches we will again refer to Israel. We spoke of their national blessing and glory, and great were the riches connected with that glory. In David and Solomon, the high priest, and the temple filled with the glory of the Lord, we see the heading up of the nation's blessing. What great riches flow from this! - first for the nation, then for their Lord and God, and finally for the world. We purposely name them in this order, for God must necessarily first bestow the riches before there could be any responsive return to Himself, or any outflow to others. He is the gracious, generous, and glorious Source of all.

When the stores of riches described in 1 Chron. xxviii. and xxix., were gathered together for the temple, David turned to God, and said, "Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is Thine: Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted as Head above all. Both riches and honour come of Thee, and Thou reignest over all . . . All things come of Thee, and of Thine own have we given Thee . . . O Lord our God, all this store that we have prepared to build Thee an house for Thine holy Name cometh of Thine hand, and is all thine own." Furthermore, Solomon anointed, is a special type of Christ; and, in this connection we have that remarkable word, - "Solomon sat on the throne of the Lord;" and it is also said of Him, "I will make him My firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth" (Ps. lxxxix. 27). This plainly points on to the glorious Firstborn of Colossians i. God said to Solomon, "Wisdom and knowledge is granted unto thee; and I will give thee riches and wealth, and honour, such as none of the kings have had that have been before thee." In a pre-eminent way "wisdom and knowledge" are stored in the mystery. God gives all first, "and Solomon passed all the kings of the earth in wisdom and riches."

The temple and all the wealth was given back to God. The glory of the Lord filled the house, and fire came down from heaven and consumed the vast offerings which were offered to God. The people bowed themselves to the ground and worshipped the Lord. The king and all the people bowed their hearts before God and worshipped the Lord. The king and all the people offered sacrifices. Solomon offered twenty-two thousand oxen and an hundred and twenty thousand sheep! The priests waited on their offices, and the Levites praised the Lord with their instruments of music. They sounded their trumpets, and all Israel stood before the Lord when the house and its riches were dedicated, continual offerings to their Lord and God were to be offered up as a sweet savour to Him there.

Moreover, the fame of Solomon, Israel's king spread abroad, and "all the kings of the earth sought the presence of king Solomon, to hear His wisdom, that God had put in his heart." The queen of Sheba said to him, "It was a true report which I heard in mine own land of thine acts, and of thy wisdom, howbeit the one half of the greatness of thy wisdom was not told me: for thou exceedest the fame that I heard." To the ends of the earth the rich benefits of Solomon's administration should have flowed out, making his God known, His statutes, and His judgments, through Israel. This will be so when the true Solomon holds the sceptre.

It is to be noticed, that, in the epistle to the Ephesians, which speaks most of the mystery, the city, the household of God, the temple in the Lord and the habitation of God are spoken of. In a far higher sense than the earthly type, all things will be centred up in Christ for the administration of the fulness of times (Eph. i. 10): and the "greater than Solomon" whose riches are unsearchable and whose wisdom is divine shall fill all things in heaven and earth. He is the hidden Wisdom which God predetermined before the ages for the assembly's glory, - "God's wisdom in a mystery" (1 Cor. ii. 7). Of Him it is said in Proverbs viii., "Whoso findeth Me findeth life" (35); and again, "Counsel is Mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have strength. By Me princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth. I love them that love Me; and those that seek Me early shall find Me. Riches and honour are with Me; yea, durable riches and righteousness. My fruit is better than gold, yea, than fine gold, and My revenue than choice silver." Christ, in whom all fulness dwells, is in us, and He is our life. "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall we also appear with Him in glory." He shall come to be "glorified in His saints, and to be admired in all them that believe:" but He is in us now already, the hope of glory. It is this which constitutes the riches of the glory of the mystery. The wealthy stores of Solomon's day were mostly gathered during the times of testing and trial and conflict of David's day. We are told that the present trial of our faith is much more precious than gold, and will be found to praise and honour and glory in the day of Jesus Christ. It must be in mind that He in us the hope of glory, and God has given to us surpassing riches in Him. Like David we can say, "All this great store cometh from Thee. All the praise and the honour and the glory are Thine."

The riches of redemption are very prominent in the two epistles which unfold the mystery.

1. The riches of God's grace (Eph. i. 7).

2. The exceeding riches of His grace (ii. 7).

3. The riches of the glory of God's inheritance in the saints (i. 18).

4. The riches of His glory (iii. 16).

5. The unsearchable riches of Christ (iii. 8).

6. The riches of the glory of the mystery (Col. i. 27).

7. All riches of the full assurance of understanding to the full knowledge of the mystery of God; in which are hid "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (ii. 2, 3). It is in the mystery that this complete store of wisdom and knowledge is found. Nowhere else has God confided it, and the whole treasury is there, - "All the treasures!" Why then should saints of God turn elsewhere, to philosophies and vain deceits? Christ is enough? Yea, more than enough for the assembly. He is in us. Anything that turns the mind and heart from Him is a delusion, however good and interesting it may seem. After telling us of these treasures, the Apostle at once exhorts, "As therefore ye have received the Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him, and assured in the faith, even, as ye have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving;" adding that all the fulness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily, and "ye are complete in Him, who is the Head of all principality and authority." The Godhead fulness is in Him, and we are filled full in Him! How wonderful! How glorious! How exceeding are the grace and love and power of God which has brought it to pass!

The grateful and thankful heart finds relief and rejoicing in the presence of such magnificence to know that our God and Father receives a rich response to such lavish wealth which He has bestowed upon us. Of His He receives. Abundant offerings were rendered Him in Solomon's day. Offerings of thanksgiving, praise, worship and adoration in a higher way are His as the result of the glory of the mystery. Blessing and honour and power are ascribed to Him for ever and ever, and there shall be glory to Him in the assembly in Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of the ages. Time and space forbid, even if we were able to do so, to expatiate on these responsive riches which shall be His from us for ever, and even now as in assembly our grateful praise and worship flow in Spirit and in truth.

And then, there is not only the filling of our own hearts with Christ, and the uprising response as we bring Him before our God and Father who gave us such an unspeakable gift, but the overflow for the blessing of others. Isaiah, looking on the reign of righteousness on this earth, said, "Behold a King shall reign in righteousness, and a Man shall be as rivers of water" (xxxii. I, 2). When our Lord Jesus Christ thus reigns in Israel, through His administration these waters of refreshment and blessing shall flow out for the blessing of the world. When, however, the assembly is glorified with her exalted Head the vast universe shall reap the riches of administration. Heaven as well as earth will benefit; thrones, lordships, principalities and authorities, visible and invisible now shall all receive of the riches of that glory, and every creature shall bless and praise His holy Name. Surely this, known and rejoiced in, will affect us now. As our hearts are full of Christ, the Son of God, there will be an overflow to others around us; for the divine order is, - Christ in us first; responsively offered to God in praise and worship next; and then the overflow for others. May this mark us more and more. Note the climax of the fifteen "Songs of degrees." Beginning with a cry of distress (120) we rise step by step to the heights of blessing (134). Then we "bless the Lord" in the sanctuary, and from that holy and happy place look outward and say, "The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion." Blessed ourselves, we bless our God and Father, and then seek the blessing of those who are outside.

We are nearer than ever we were to the ripened fruition of God's eternal purpose; the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ for His well-loved assembly draweth nigh; all glorious and holy she shall soon be presented to Himself, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; His love shall be satisfied in the dearest object of His heart; we shall be satisfied in Himself and His eternal love; glory supreme shall shine in unfading splendour; but He Himself will be our everlasting Light and Joy. What shall we say to these realities, beloved brethren? Shall we not answer to them in our walk and ways and words, by being more and more conformed to His moral glory now? As these riches are the joy and rejoicing of the heart, the rusty and corrupted mammon of this age will count little with us; grace will be ours to refuse anything that would tarnish for our souls the riches of the glory of the mystery. All our walk here will be affected and our path shine brighter and brighter till the perfect day; all our ways will be ordered in relation to Christ and His interests, and all our words will become more gracious and health imparting. Nothing short of perfection in Christ will be before us. If it be otherwise, then our interest in the riches of the glory of the mystery is not of the Holy Spirit of God but of mere religiousness. Our love for Christ and all His own will be strengthened and deepened, for Christ loved all and gave Himself for all; yea, He loves all even now with an unchanging love. Our hearts therefore say with the apostle, "Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruption" (Eph. vi. 24).

H. J. Vine.

"The Mystery" in Practice.

"So is Christ." (1 Cor. xii. 12). We cannot to-day see, in actual form, our Lord Jesus Christ, as did the Apostles and others when He was on earth, because He has, gone to the Father, and has sent down the Holy Spirit as the other Comforter and as the blessed Agent of all the grace of God here below.

We shall, thank God, "see Him as He is" and be like Him, when He comes again; but, though He is personally invisible, we are aware of His presence on earth in that wonderful structure called His body.

This we know is composed of all the children of God, (and only such) who believe on Him during the time of His rejection, to the moment of His return. These have been quickened by the Spirit of God, by whom also they are united to Christ in glory as members of His body, and thus formed into one perfect and divine unity; so united that in describing its absolute completeness the Scripture says, "So also is Christ." The two, Christ on the one hand, and His members on the other, in this mystic unity are so identified as that one name, that is "the Christ," covers and denominates both. Just as, it may be remembered, in describing the type of the human family, in Gen. v. 2, we read, "Male and female created He them, and called their name Adam" - the woman was merged in the man, even as she was also, "of his bone and his flesh." "So also is the Christ."

Now this, though spiritual and mystic, is surely not invisible. Each of its members, great or small, has its own place to fill in the whole, each is a "member in particular" and none can fulfil the functions, or do the work of another. All are interdependent and under the control of the Head, just as the human body acts in its varied members in perfect organic harmony and order; and it is used, in our chapter, as an illustration. This takes the truth of the "Mystery of Christ" out of the region of mere theory, and presents it in a truly practical light.

The blessed Head on high is ever active on behalf of His members. How dear to Him we cannot tell. He loves them to the end. He described them to Saul of Tarsus as though they were Himself. "Why persecutest thou Me?" How perfect the identity; how close and inseparable the tie!

But this implies similar activity on the part of the members, in relation to each other. "Hence," if one member suffers, all suffer." Do we appreciate this touching fact as we should? "If one member be honoured all rejoice?" - or this? What mutual affection, regard, sympathy, and unselfish consideration, if so. What withering up of mere party or sectarian animosities there would be. But the church as the body of Christ has lost, in leaving her first love, those family, nay those corporate affections that shone in fervent reciprocity in early Pentecostal days. Iniquity abounds and love waxes cold.

Albeit the unity of the body remains intact. No power of evil can break or mar that unity. "For by one Spirit are we all baptised into one body . . . and have been all made to drink into one Spirit." Could unity be more perfect. Could the proper articulation of co-membership be better secured? Need the ear say, in jealousy, because I am not the eye I am therefore not of the body, when the ear though less beautiful, can perform in its own province, that which the eye cannot? Each is necessary in its place.

Far less may the eye say to the hand, in unbecoming pride, I have no need of thee, for the eye, spite of its glory, cannot do the essential, if lowly, work of the foot. Such an idea in the body natural, were folly; though, alas, possible and actual in the body spiritual.

These members, these gifts, have been set in the church by God Himself, and each is placed by Him in the sphere intended.

But what a marvellous organism does the body of Christ thus present to us! How divine the conception! How profound the statement: - "So also is the Christ."

But, secondly, if we turn to Eph. iii. we find that the mystery of Christ affects a wider field than the body itself. This unity is to be viewed as an exhibition of the manifold wisdom of God, by principalities and powers in heavenly places, the wonder of the ages, the vessel of the surpassing riches of His grace in His kindness to us through Christ Jesus. There we find what are called, "the unsearchable riches of Christ," and there are to be seen, if eyes are only divinely open, the administration - the practical and visible operation of this mystery.

In Chapter iv. of the same epistle we see the operation itself, first of all the kind of spirit that is absolutely necessary in those who would endeavour to keep the unity, not indeed, of the body, but of the Spirit, with whom that body is so closely allied, animated, and sustained in vigour.

And so we have gifts from an ascended Christ for the perfecting of the saints of whom the body is composed, till we all come in the further unity, that of the faith to the "measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." How practical in every sense is the mystery of Christ, as it is now revealed by apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

This is proved, thirdly, in the epistle to the Colossians, by the agony of soul through which the Apostle passed, when in prayer for that assembly and others. The riches of the glory of the mystery, hidden for ages but now revealed, is "Christ in you the hope of glory." It was the coping stone to all the revelation of God; it completed the Word of God.

In the mystery of God, he tells us, are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; and to be possessed, therefore, of that treasure the soul is put on guard, intelligently against the mental seductions of the foe, such as philosophy, the traditions of men, circumcision, all that militates against the cross, the worship of angels, an abuse of the body which panders to fleshly pride - things which could have no existence, not be allowed, if the fulness of the Godhead bodily, in a risen Christ, and His headship as the ascended Man, were truly held.

In 1 Cor. xii. the mystery has for its object the mutual care of the members; in Eph. iii. the enlightenment of heavenly principalities and powers; and in Col. ii. the preservation of the saints from the intellectual attacks of Satan and the world.

This is all intensely practical, the importance of it causing such conflict to the Apostle, who was specially appointed to be the minister of the church.

No wonder then finally, that in Romans xvi. 25. he regards it as essential to the establishment of the believer in the truth of the gospel, of which it is the complement; and although, without the knowledge of it, the believer may be justified, yet He lacks an apprehension of Christianity proper, and his work cannot but be defective.

J. Wilson Smith.

****

A person is walking in the Spirit when Christ is the paramount object to him. Then the eye is single, and the effect is, the body is light, luminous is really the idea. It is a wonderful thing, that in the place where my Lord was rejected I am to come out in the light of my Lord.

Power To Apprehend The Truth.

The might of divine power is in constant energy on behalf of those who are saved by grace, and who are sealed by the Spirit. In Ephesians 1: 19, it is called the surpassing greatness of God's power towards us who believe; - the power by which the Lord Jesus Christ was raised from among the dead. In chapter 3: 20, the power is said to work in us, and according to that power, God "is able to do far exceedingly above all which we ask or think." As regards its operations then, this mighty power is both towards us and in us.

Those who are Christ's co-heirs, members of His body, and partakers of life in Him, are, notwithstanding the exalted favour and blessing which has been bestowed upon them, entirely dependent upon God's power for the needed strength to apprehend by the Spirit the vast range of glory of which Christ is the Centre; and which according to the precious truth of the mystery, they share with Him in a most intimate way, as His body and His bride. This strengthening is also needed, that Christ may be dwelling in the heart through faith, and that founded as to our character and rooted vitally in the love of God, we may increase in the knowledge of the love of Christ; which, nevertheless, however great our enjoyment of His love may be, still surpasses knowledge; for like Himself, it is infinite; but though we are dependent, thank God, we are so upon One whose resources are exhaustless, whose power is immeasurable and whose grace and love towards us are illimitable.

How this encourages our hearts therefore to seek His face in regards to these great things, - the greatest things in some respects! Fallen man, in his fleshly state, has neither the mind nor the power to enter into them; nor could "the natural man," even at his best, apprehend them, for "they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. ii. 14.); but those who have redemption in Christ through His blood have the Spirit, so that "we may know the things which have been freely given to us of God." Paul felt that the saints at Ephesus needed divine strength to apprehend these things. He therefore prayed, - "I bow my knees to the Father" on your behalf, he told them (iii. 14). We also need to pray for ourselves if we are to rightly apprehend the truth. The apostle desired strength in "the inner man" for them.

This inner man, which every saint of God has, is the result of the work of God in us. It is contrasted with the "outward man" (2 Cor. iv. 16); and it is "renewed day by day" as we walk with God. In the exercises of the seventh of Romans, the believer makes the discovery that he has this inner man which delights in what is of God (22), though the principle of sin still causes him distress. It is in the inner man therefore the Father is asked to grant strength by His Spirit in Ephesians iii. 16; and that according to the riches of His glory. Every family in the heavens and on the earth receives being from Him, - He is the Source of all. How vast then are His riches! With what confidence we may ask to be strengthened according to them! We need to do so if we are to prosper in divine things! It is no question of earthly matters or the circumstances of our pathway here. We are dependent upon the Father of mercies in regard to them also; but this has to do with things that abide in glory and blessedness for ever. Those who minister these things likewise need to pray for those to whom they minister, lest their labour be in vain. If Paul bowed his knees to the Father in regard to them, we do well to do so.

Nor should we allow the mistaken thought to deter us, that it merely effects our own advance in the great things connected with the mystery of Christ and the assembly. It is not simply this which the true heart desires, surely, but that God should be glorified, even as the apostle concludes his prayer, "But to Him that is able to do far exceedingly above all which we ask or think, according to the power which works in us, to Him be glory in the assembly in Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of the ages. Amen."

H. J. Vine.

Prayer In Relation To "The Mystery."

"The mystery" belongs to a range of things which is purely spiritual, which therefore the Holy Spirit alone can reveal, communicate and give power to discern. Hence the exceeding importance of prayer in connection therewith, for ourselves, and for each other. There are two great reasons for this intercession; firstly, that a state of soul may be produced which shall be receptive of the divine communications; and secondly, that protection may be afforded from the Satanic agencies which seek to nullify and obscure this revelation of God. Urgent at all times, even in the church's brightest days, it is still more so in those that witness its far departure from the first love which was once its glory and testimony.

The revelation of God can never fail; His purpose that it should be known must be satisfied; and although many, alas, may turn from the truth and give ear to fables, or short of this may be indifferent to what God would make known; nevertheless, the Holy Spirit will find hearts to whom He can confide the truth. Herein lies the need of prayer which in the divine economy is a mark of the pulsations of spiritual life, and the opening up of channels of supply to the other members of the body of Christ. By such means the Holy Spirit works in order to produce the bridal affection which is the true response of the church to her coming Lord.

The importance of prayer in relation to "the mystery" is amply set forth in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. In Rom. xvi. 25-27, his heart turns to God for the power, that would establish the saints (to whom he had communicated the gospel) in this further truth, without which they would not be fully furnished for the service of God, the glory of Christ or the blessing of man. In Col. ii. 1-3 the prayer of the apostle reached to an agony of conflict for all who had not seen his face in the flesh, that such a soul condition might be produced in them by the comfort of the love of God, that there might be such knitting together in love, so that all the riches of the full assurance of understanding of the mystery might be theirs. In chapter iv. 12 of the same epistle, one of Paul's companions was like-minded. Epaphras was one who laboured fervently in prayers, that the saints might stand perfect and complete in all the will of God. Is there not searching power in such an example that should reach our consciences, yours and mine beloved readers? In Eph. i. 16-23 Paul prayed that the saints might know the exceeding greatness of the power of God, which had taken Christ out of the lowest place in death, and had set Him in the highest spot at His own right hand, as Head over all things to His body the church. He desired that this great and glorious fact might possess their souls, for then they would seek supply and direction from no other source. Again in Eph. iii. 14-21, he prayed for that which the Father alone could accomplish by His Spirit, viz., that Christ should so dwell in their hearts, that they might be firmly established in His love, so that they might look out upon the greatness and grandeur of that eternal secret now revealed, of Christ and the church, His body, by which glory shall be brought to God by Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of ages.

Thus we have:

God's ability to establish, in Romans.

God's desire and will, in Colossians.

God's power and love, in Ephesians.

Do we need ought else? here are matters which may well cause us grief and shame that we have thought so much of human agencies, and neglected to draw by prayer upon the resources of God, by which alone 'the mystery' can be known and maintained.

Brethren, do we value these matters above all earthly things? do we estimate aright their great importance for the glory of God, the heart of Christ and the joy of the saints? if so, Let us pray.

James Green.

The Sufficiency of Christ Triumphant for the Entire Need of His Body on Earth.

J. N. Darby has beautifully written, "Christ never fails, and there cannot be a want in Christ's church without there being an answer to it in Christ's heart." Yes, and how blessed, how full of comfort it is to know that His heart not only discerns and feels and responds to every want, but that His love is not an impotent love, but that He has triumphed over the whole power of the enemy in order to meet the needs of His church from His exalted seat of glory! This comes out in Ephesians 4.

"But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore He saith, when He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. (Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things) (Eph. iv. 7-10).

He once stood a Man upon earth, come down from Godhead's fullest glory to deliver men from the bondage of a great foe. He met for Himself first of all all the subtlety and power of that foe, for He had to be tested Himself. How could He deliver others unless He were able to stand free Himself. In the wilderness He was tempted, and triumphed, and Satan left Him for a little season. Having failed to bring Him beneath his yoke by his wiles and allurements he returned and confronted Him with all the terrors of darkness and death in Gethsemane. How little we understand that conflict which caused the sweat of blood to fall from His sacred brow to the earth! We can only stand by and wonder, but our wonder deepens to adoration as we hear Him say to His Father. "O my Father, if this cup may not pass from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done."

Thus He proved Himself to be invincible before the whole force of the enemy, but thus far He stood alone, and He had become Man to deliver men from Satan's captivity, and to do this He had to descend into the lower parts of the earth, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone." He had to go into judgment and death; to meet the great oppressor in his own stronghold and there destroy his power, as David tracked the lion to his lair that had robbed his flock of a lamb; and this He has done, that "through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver those who through fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage" (Heb. ii. 14). Now He has ascended up far above all heavens that He might fill all things. He has travelled in His conquering might from the lowest spot in death to the highest point in glory, having made Himself master over the whole dominion of darkness, the captivity in which men had been held captive. So could He say to John, "I am He that liveth and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore. Amen; and have the keys of death and hell." It is as Man that He has gone up; His exaltation from the side we are viewing it is in virtue of an accomplished redemption and the overthrow of Satan's power. He glorified God His Father; and as Man He fought for men and His triumph has been gained for men, the deliverance is for them, little though they care about it; and the announcement of it is sent out to them by the evangelists that the exalted Christ has given to them, though we have sadly to ask, "Who hath believed our report?" Sad it is that men love their captivity rather than the glorious liberty into which He can bring them.

But if men at large despise the gifts He has given for their blessing, and spurn the blessing which might be theirs through belief of the truth, nevertheless the great purpose of God for this present moment is being carried out, and the gifts are enumerated, "and He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers" (Eph. iv. 11). They are given the building up, the blessing, and the completion of His body. They are given, "for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" (Eph. iv. 12).

The apostles and prophets are those who laid the foundation. They abide for us in the Scriptures which contain the inspired words. The evangelists, pastors and teachers still abide. How solemn yet how blessed the position of any and all who are such! How needful that they should be in close contact and communion with the Head of the body so that their communications to the saints who form it may be from Himself to His members. The purpose is, says J. N. D., that "the assembly, and each one of the members of Christ, should be filled with the thoughts and the riches of a well-known Christ, instead of being tossed to and fro by all sorts of doctrines brought forward by the enemy to deceive souls."

Yet while there are special gifts, every member of the body has his own special gift, for, "unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ."

Christendom has spoiled everything, and few now look only to the Head for the giving of gifts for the needed ministry to the saints; few indeed recognize Christ as the One all-sufficient Head of His assembly. The majority walk by sight and must have some visible authority to which to turn, and whether this be pontifical, episcopal, presidential, congressional, or what not, it is all in principle the same, and correspondingly the loss is great.

Oh that there might be an awakening on the part of the saints of God, who are the body of Christ, as to the complete adequacy of Christ to maintain His own assembly; there would follow the abandonment of every human organization that has grown up in Christendom; the turning away from every worldly device for the furtherance of God's work; tradition would cease to enthrall, precedent would no longer guide, but Christ would be all. What power and blessing and liberty would be the result for all who did this. Their part would be the one that Peter found when he left the boat to walk on the water to go to Jesus. "If it be Thou," all he wished to be assured of. Then he stept forth out of everything to which a man might cling, to learn that none but Christ to whom he stept forth could maintain him, but that He was altogether competent. Let us go forth unto Him, He cannot fail us; evangelists, pastors and teachers may fail, every member may fail in the exercise of that gift that Christ has given to them, but Christ the Head abideth the same. Times and circumstances change, hence we cannot act upon precedents, or rely upon tradition; we have no need to, for the power and wisdom and care of the Head is equal to all changes, and every crisis; His Name, His word, His grace, His direction are all we need.

"When human cisterns all are dry,

Thy fulness is the same;

May we with this be satisfied

And glory in Thy name."

No good in creatures can be found,

All, all is found in Thee,

We must have all things and abound

Through Thy sufficiency."

How full of beauty, are verses 15 and 16. "But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." Commenting upon them, J. N. Darby says, "The Christian is to grow up according to all that is revealed in Christ, and to be ever increasing in the likeness of his Head; using love and truth for his own soul — the two things of which Christ is the perfect expression. He is our pattern; and our pattern as having overcome, and as having ascended to heaven, our Head, to whom we are united as members of His body, there flows from this Head, by means of its members, the grace needed to accomplish the work of assimilation to Himself. His body, compacted together, increases by the working of His grace in each member and edifies itself in love.

This is the position of the assembly according to God, until all the members of the body attain to the stature of Christ. The manifestation, alas! of this unity is marred; but the grace of its Head to nourish and cause its members to grow, is never impaired any more than the love in the Lord's heart from which it springs. We do not glorify Him, we have not the joy of being ministers of joy to each other as we might; but the Head does not cease to work for the good of His body. His faithfulness is glorified in our unfaithfulness without excusing it."

Does not the heart stir at the thought of being a means of supply from the living Head to ones fellow-members! To have a part in the nourishing and increase of the body, to its development to the full likeness of Christ! What a favour, what a high honour is this! This is brought within the reach of the feeblest member of this wonderful body; and if these few pages, put together in fear and trembling, and many prayers, result in any being stirred up in these things to fulfil those functions which are proper to them as being members of this body, then will those who have laboured be abundantly compensated, for in this the Lord will be glorified and His saints truly edified.

J. T. Mawson.

The Secret of the Dispensation.

The word dispensation occurs twice in our common version of the epistle to the Ephesians, - viz., chap. i. 10 and iii. 2. In both cases the Greek word so translated is one which means the law or arrangement of a house. Being closely allied with the word for steward it is sometimes translated stewardship. Speaking in general terms we may say that a dispensation is that regime or ordering of affairs which God is pleased to institute at any given time.

Ephesians i. 10 looks on to the glorious regime to be established in the coming age which will have as its crowning characteristic the gathering together in one and heading up of all things in heaven and earth in Christ. In connection with this there has been a secret, "the mystery of His will," as verse 9 shows; though the secret is now an open one to "us," i.e. His saints of this dispensation. This coming age is the theme of many a glowing Old Testament Scripture which must have warmed the heart of saints living in pre-christian times, and which still fire and animate our hearts to-day; still it will be found that such Scriptures view the age as being that of Messiah's glory, with Israel gathered under Him as the head of the nations, and the Gentiles ordered and blessed subordinately to Israel. Only in very rare instances - as Hosea ii. 21 — is the heavenly sphere alluded to. God's will as to it however embraced more than earthly things. He purposed in Himself according to His good pleasure a wider and more wonderful unity of glory. Not only all things on earth - including Israel and the nations, but all things in heaven, - including the church and angelic hosts, are to find their unifying Head in Christ. No Old Testament saints would have divined that secret, though it is fully made known to us.

That dispensation is future, but in chapter iii. 2, we have a present dispensation, and one far more limited in its scope though far more intimate as to its character. The apostle speaks of it as "given me to you-ward" - that is, he was the steward of it as far as the Gentiles, such as the Ephesians, were concerned. This being so, and bearing in mind how utterly lost and hopeless the Gentiles had been, as stated in chapter ii. 12, it is easy to see that it is indeed a dispensation of the grace of God; the coming age will be rather the dispensation of His glory.

This dispensation, too, has a secret connected with it - a secret, that is, from the standpoint of all who lived previous to the death and resurrection of Christ, the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, and the subsequent passing of the period of transition and the revelation of God's first thought in connection with the church. At the time of writing the Ephesian epistle the secret had been divulged by the Spirit to apostles and prophets (verse 5), though it was revealed independently to Paul (verse 3), and he alone was the steward of it as regards the Gentile saints (verse 2).

What is this special secret of the dispensation now revealed to us? Only three passages furnish us with its details, though others allude to it. The three are Ephesians ii. 9-22; iii. 6; and Colossians i. 27. That the first of these three Scriptures is an unfolding of the mystery is proved by verses 3 and 4 of chapter iii. where the apostle appeals to that written previously as showing his knowledge of the subject. It is worthy of note, by the way, that he calls this passage previously written "a few words" though it is the longest and fullest passage of the three. This shows us that it is a condensed summary of the matter, and we may expect to find in it great fulness and depth.

The secret of the dispensation has then to do with God's work among the Gentiles by which an election from amongst them is brought, equally with an election from amongst Israel, into the fulness of blessing in Christ. Both come in on equal and identical terms, and not only so but also upon a footing and into relationships which are altogether new.

These things being of the very essence of the matter we first point out, how they are stated in this Scripture.

(1). Both Jew and Gentile are made one, "the middle wall of partition" and "enmity" being abolished "in His flesh" i.e. by the death of Christ. (verses 9 and 15). Both are reconciled "in one body" (verse 16). Both have access to the Father by one Spirit (verse 18). This warrants us in saying that both come in on equal and identical terms.

(2). They do not, however, come in upon the old footing as propounded in the law given to Israel. It is not that Gentiles are now to be admitted to the share in Israel's standing before God. The blood of Christ has made them nigh in Christ Jesus (verse 13). His death is indeed the efficacious ground of it, but by it He has made "in Himself of twain one new man" (verse 15). Both are brought to God in one body, but it is as reconciled by the cross (verse 16); both have access to the Father but it is by one Spirit (verse 18) and not by ordinances as of old. It is evident then that both are brought in on a new footing. The old fleshly Adam standing in which both shared is set aside, the national standing as the people of Jehovah which belonged exclusively to the Jew is also set aside, and the election from both comes in "reconciled by the cross," "one new man," "in Christ Jesus."

(3). The relationships into which they come are far beyond any in which Adam stood even in innocence, and equally beyond Israel's national relationship with Jehovah. They are not one nation but one body (verse 16), approaching the Father, (verse 18) rather than Jehovah. Further, such are "of the household of God"; built into that which is destined to be "an holy temple in the Lord" and "builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit as a present thing (verses 19-22) .

This then is the secret of the present dispensation stated in few words. Ephesians iii. 6, gives us the same in fewer words; and Colossians i. 27, presents the same great theme in even fewer still, but from a different standpoint, when it says that "the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles," is "Christ in [or among] you [i.e. Gentiles] the hope of glory." The prophets had predicted that the Messiah should be amongst His people on the basis of redemption, and that earthly glory should be established in connection with it; but that Christ should be in, or amongst, an election from the Gentile world was an unheard of and amazing thing, awakening the liveliest expectation of His ultimately shining forth in a glory of yet wider dimensions.

Other Scriptures there are, which though not exactly or directly referring to the mystery yet throw additional light upon it. The whole of 2 Corinthians iii., for example casts light on Colossians i. 27.

These other passages we must however pass by, our present object being to reach the practical bearing of all this truth upon the lives of the saints who compose the church.

The whole of Ephesians iii. save verse 1 is in the nature of a digression. About to write instructions as to their behaviour the apostle evidently felt it needful to enforce them by a statement of his peculiar authority in regard to such as themselves. He had not merely knowledge of the mystery by direct firsthand revelation from the Lord, but authority, since the dispensation or "house-arrangements" in respect to all mentioned in the latter part of chapter ii. was, as far as Gentiles are concerned, given to him (verse 2). Of it he was made a ministering servant (verse 7), his work as such being to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to make all see what the fellowship (or administration - J. N. D's translation) of the mystery is. He not merely enunciated the newly revealed truth in its terms but saw to it that in practical fellowship or administration the truth was exemplified amongst and carried out by the saints, so that whether nationally Jews or Gentiles they were together, altogether above and apart from the racial and religious animosities which characterized them by nature, in the happy recognition and consciousness of the new footing established in Christ, and the new relationship with the Father, with Christ, and with one another, in the power of the Spirit of God. There was then a practical expression upon earth, of that which is the real secret, the great characteristic thought of the present dispensation, and thereby to heavenly powers, the manifold wisdom of God was displayed. The unity thus established in the church between Jew and Gentile still abides before the eyes of the heavenly powers and still shows forth God's wisdom, for there has been no splitting of the church into a Jewish section or a Gentile section. Cleavages there have been, alas! - almost without number - setting forth all too clearly before heavenly eyes the folly of man, but none of them have been along the lines of that original great fissure removed so wonderfully by the wisdom of God. We are speaking, remember, of the fellowship of the mystery and not of the vital oneness of the body.

Then, is recorded, verses 14 to end, that wonderful prayer of the Apostle, in which he asks for a mighty work of the Spirit in the inner man of these Gentile saints that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith, and that with all saints they might enter into the fulness of these wonderful things. A mighty work within indeed needful if these erstwhile worshippers of Diana were to be lifted in their own soul's knowledge and enjoyment to the level of these serene and holy things while still they lived in Ephesus and trod its streets. No less a work is needed within ourselves.

Chapter iv. 1 picks up the thread from chapter iii. 1 and the apostle commences his practical instructions in the tenderest tone, yet with all the weight and authority of chapter iii. behind him. The great business of these Ephesian saints and of ourselves is to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called. A superhuman task indeed! which is only possible as the apostle's prayer is fulfilled in us.

The central point of endeavour is to be the keeping of "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." The "unity of the Spirit" was and is an actual subsisting fact. We did not make it, nor can we break it, but in the actual wear and tear of daily life and walk, we may keep it or we may let it go. The exhortation is that we keep it in the uniting bond of peace. Verse 3 is then the main exhortation of the passage, verses 4 to 6 enforce the exhortation by reminding us how unity is the outstanding feature of Christian life and profession in all its departments. Verse 2 gives us the all important moral features in the strength of which alone can the main exhortation be carried out in practice.

A brief consideration of how all this must have appealed to the Ephesian saints may help us. The assembly in that great city was predominantly Gentile (ii. 2; iv. 17), though with a Jewish strain in it (Acts xix. 1-7; xx. 21), hence there was ample scope for friction and trouble. Yet peace between them had been established in Christ (ii. 9-15) and the uniting effect of that bond was to be felt in their endeavour to keep the unity of the Spirit - so called because the one Spirit is the vital and animating principle of the one body into which they had been called.

The keeping of the unity calls into exercise four great moral characteristics: -

1. Lowliness. That mind which is the exact opposite of the mind of Adam. He would exalt himself; the lowly mind goes down as Philippians ii. shows. This is most essential, and particularly important for the Gentile in his dealings with the Jewish saint. The remembrance to which the apostle called them in chapter ii. 11, 12, was calculated to produce it.

2. Meekness. The opposite of the pushful self-assertive spirit. Again very important for the Gentile since there was the divine order even in connection with the gospel of "to the Jew first and also to the Gentile."

3. Longsuffering. The patient and long-continued acceptance of personal discomforts or even wrongs, a thing only possible to one of a lowly and meek spirit.

4. Forbearing in love. Intimately connected with the third, and its complement - the love that bears with that which might offend in others, instead of seeking redress by violent methods.

All these things would be much called for on the part of the Gentile in his dealings with the Jew. By legal training and the hereditary instinct of centuries the latter carried within himself the tendency to take the narrow, self-centred, legal view of things; the matters mentioned in Acts xv. and in Romans xiv. show this. Nothing but long-suffering coupled with the love that beareth all things would enable them to abide together in peace.

That the Jew would equally need these things in his relations with his Gentile brethren goes without saying. Indeed, experience shows that the disposition to push things to extremes and let go the unity of the Spirit is more deeply ingrained in the narrow Jewish type of mind than in the large Gentile type. These four excellent features were indispensable on both sides.

They are not less indispensable for us to-day but more so if it were possible. At the present moment difficulties and points of cleavage as between Jew and Gentile do not exist, yet with the lapse of centuries the very fact that the church is a unity established by God is largely lost sight of, whilst the essential character of that unity as set forth in chapter ii. 9-18 is recognized in even less degree. Never did we need in deeper measure the apostolic affirmation that "there is one body and one Spirit" and the exhortation "to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

Some of our readers who have for long been "gathered on the ground of the one body" may regard such remarks as superfluous as far as they are concerned, but we are persuaded that they are not so. The tendency to overlook the fact of one body and one Spirit reaches our minds in many subtle forms.

Take a case in point: - Certain believers, and therefore members of Christ's body, become awakened by the Spirit of God through the Scriptures to those parts of the circle of truth that concerns the church, its position, privileges, and destiny, together with its responsibilities, as the witness on earth for Christ during the period of His rejection and absence; and in order to practise what they have learned they withdraw from many religious organizations of purely human origin, and revert to the simplicity of that divinely instituted through the apostles. All this is done in simple fidelity to the Word of God without thinking of themselves at all, but as the years pass and the energy of faith somewhat declines, self-occupation re-appears, and the question of what position they themselves now hold as a result of so acting is raised in many minds. Nothing now will be easier than to assume that by their forsaking a man-made position and occupying the ground of the church according to the Scriptures they have thereby acquired a renewed corporate status, which is all their own and in which other Christians do not share.

The subtlety of this idea may be seen in the fact that it is very possible to entertain it whilst strongly insisting on the truth of "one body." This latter may be proclaimed and contended for, and yet people may so idealize it in their minds as to see nothing inconsistent with it in the idea of another "body" - especially when this other "body" lies within the true "one body" which the Spirit originally formed.

Thus very easily we may take for granted in our minds what has no existence in God's mind as revealed to us in His Word. After all there is one body and one only. It therefore should go without saying that we should have nothing corporate outside the one corpus, and even the fact that certain members of the one corpus revert to the truth of that one corpus, after centuries of diversion from it, does not reincorporate them as a small inner corpus within the one corpus. ONE body God has made, and never more than one will He entertain, whatever we may do.

We pursue this no further, but merely remark two things: First; we have not been combating a mere notion, an abstract idea of no practical consequence. This thought, if entertained, leads to consequences in conduct, and especially what we may call assembly conduct, of great gravity. Second; we emphasise the fact that we have been speaking of that which is corporate and not that which is collective. God does indeed entertain the idea of a collective life and testimony and that in days of failure and ruin, and He clearly sets it before us in such a Scripture as 2 Tim. ii. 22. The gist of the forgoing remarks is that when those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart, are most ardently following righteousness, faith, love, and peace, they acquire no special corporate status by doing so. They have a corporate status truly, but it is that of members of the "one body" originally instituted by God.

Having thus briefly considered our present day need of the apostle's affirmation "there is one body and one Spirit" it only remains to point out the exhortation which the Apostle founded upon it. In religious circles unity is all the rage, yet the "unity of the Spirit" is unthought of, and to come closer home - how shall we keep the unity of the Spirit if we have in our minds this second lesser unity of which we have spoken? To say the least there will be some occasion when the claims of the two unities will clash, with the almost certain result that we yield to the claims of the smaller, yet more tangible, "body" of our own creating, as against the claims of the larger and less realizable "body" of God's creating.

And then the spirit and manner in which the unity is to be kept! Here is the mind of Christ, and it is to be exhibited in the members of His body. These are not things to be passed on in a hurry so as to meet some disuniting crisis, but things to be wrought into the fibre of our souls by the Holy Ghost. We need them always. They are as necessary in carrying out a solemn Scripturally ordained act of excommunication, or of departure from the iniquity of a Hymenaeus or Philetus, as in confirming Christian love to a once sinning but now repentant saint.

Lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbearance in love. Surely a marvellous quartet of Christ-like graces! Almost, we might say, a condensed summary of Cor. xiii. Possible for us only as love, the divine nature, is produced in our hearts. We stand convicted. Here has been the failure. Here must be the recovery. May God work it in us by His Spirit.

F. B. Hole.

"That the Gentiles should be of the same body."

The mystery takes us to the height of God's counsel, and the unfolding of this constitutes the top stone of Paul's ministry.

For the creation of a superstructure in which every attribute of God is called into activity, and His nature finds a display in the supreme blessing of the subjects of His love, it was necessary that there should be a sure and immutable foundation. It was essential that in the exercise of His love, according to His counsels of grace, no question could possibly be raised as to His righteousness in so acting.

That foundation was well and truly laid at Calvary, where Christ secured the glory of God and maintained all His righteous claims in respect of those His grace would call. "Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good pleasure in man." If we are to progress in the apprehension of this "great mystery," it is also essential that in our souls too, the foundations as to the righteousness of God be well and truly laid.

These two thoughts: the foundation in righteousness and the top stone in glory encompass the ministry of the Apostle Paul.

The mystery is referred to in three epistles: Romans, Colossians and Ephesians.

At the end of Romans (Rom. 15), after he has laid bare the foundations in the gospel of God, the apostle quotes four Scriptures, selected in divine and unerring wisdom, from various parts of the Holy writings, bearing on Christ's place among the Gentiles. The first is, "For this cause I will confess to Thee among the Gentiles, and sing unto Thy name" (verse 9). Confessing among them indicates that He has taken up their cause, and that He has them with Himself in the perfection of an accomplished redemption. But He also sings among them to God the Father. He has got beyond the narrow confines of Israel, and, no longer "straitened," Christ reaches the height of His joy, and, with gladness of His heart, He sings among the objects of His everlasting love.

And what is the consequence? "Rejoice ye Gentiles with His people." And again, "Praise the Lord all ye Gentiles, and laud Him all ye people." And again, "There shall be a root of Jesse, and He that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, and in Him shall the Gentiles trust."

These Scriptures clearly shew that though the mystery was not made known in the Old Testament Scriptures, yet God would prepare those who had faith for this widening out beyond this, and for the gathering together the Gentiles in righteousness, peace and joy. But, passing on to the Colossian epistle, the great present purpose of the gathering of the Gentiles, the forming of the one body, is developed.

We read of the "saints to whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of the mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you the hope of glory." He not only confesses among them, but, marvellous thought, He is in them now and they are to be associated with Him in glory. Christ is in them the hope of glory.

In Ephesians we are in the noontide splendour of the purpose of God. Time does not limit the horizon. But we learn that this marvellous creation of divine wisdom and skill, the new man in Christ, is according to the purpose of the ages which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In one verse (chap. iii. 6), we have a highly concentrated description of the mystery: "that they who are of the nations should be joint heirs, and a joint body, and joint partakers of His promise in Christ by the gospel" (N.T.). Three things come before us here: the inheritance; the body, - the complement of Christ; His promise in Christ Jesus, outside of all dispensations. The immensity of this must appeal to every spiritual saint, affording an adequate subject for the contemplation and study of our adoring hearts and minds always.

Two thoughts, however, stand out pre-eminently in connection with this great unfolding; and they are these: God has got a habitation, and Christ has got a bride. The latter is the crowning point of the whole divine scheme, and is the most thrilling feature in this great mystery. It is concealed in Paul's prayer at the end of chap. 3, where the apostle sets the top stone to his ministry in leading up the saints to the spiritual affections of the bride - "that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts." Where a man dwells he is at home. In chap. 1, we see Christ trusted; we also see Him seated here - supreme thought! He is at home! And where? In the heart of His bride! United to Him in that blissful relationship, we survey with tense interest, the vast sphere of His glory, and knowing the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge we are filled to all the fulness of God.

May God grant us to know better His portion in the assembly in Christ Jesus in which there shall be glory to God unto all generations of the age of the ages. Amen.

D. Brown.

Correspondence.

The Unity of the Spirit.

W. H. D. writes as follows: -

"You may be sure I hailed with the greatest pleasure the announcement of the Quarterly Supplement, and have read it with deep interest. But I must confess to a shade of disappointment; I am at a loss to understand quite what the four contributors have set before themselves as the object of their writing; what in point of fact is the precise effect they wish to produce upon their readers.

"They enlarge much and most justly upon the extraordinary wonderful blessings and destinies that God in His grace has designed for those who believe His witness from among the Gentiles, that vast multitude, His church, which He has gathered out during this 2,000 years to a heavenly in contrast to an earthly portion, and they rightly insist that the heavenly destiny of the church separates its interests entirely from the course of this world. But there seems to be a tendency to fix the mind so entirely on the heavenly side as to lead to the feeling, if not the thought, that the earthly side is not so material. J. T. Mawson prints Eph. iv. 1-3, in large capitals at the end of his article, but he does not appear to lay any stress on the point of the exhortation, which is, to keep the Spirit-made Unity in the uniting bond of peace; this surely applies to earth only, for in heaven there can be no need."

We had hoped that the exhortation of Eph. iv. 1-3, being printed in capitals at the end of the paper referred to would show that we do lay great stress upon it; this was certainly our purpose in thus giving it prominence.

We welcome this criticism from the pen of a valued correspondent, whose letters always give us food for thought; especially so, as generally what is expressed by one is thought by many. The object we have in view in this publication is to bring afresh before our brethren in Christ the truth of the assembly which is so precious to Christ, and which holds its unique place in the purpose of God. To Ezekiel, it was said, "Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall shew thee; for to the intent that I might shew them unto thee art thou brought hither: declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel." (Ezek. xl. 2.) Then the house which was to be God's dwelling was shown to Him in all its parts. And the impression to be produced upon the people is clearly stated in chapter xlii. 10. "Thou son of man, shew the house to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities: and let them measure the pattern."

This is the effect we desire to produce upon our readers and ourselves; as we go over the truth of Christ and the assembly we want to feel with them before the Lord how inconsistent are the ways of the vast majority of those who through infinite grace have their part in the one assembly with the pattern that is shown us of it in the Word. We want to set the truth before them so that they may measure the pattern, and in exercise of soul give heed to the exhortation, which our correspondent desires to have emphasized. We know of no way by which the saints of God can be delivered from false positions and false ways and false doctrines but by the ministry of the truth. "Ye shall know the truth" said the Lord "and the truth shall make you free." It is by ministering the truth that we shall help others, and, by acting upon it ourselves, and here we have to confess with shame much failure; few can link their manner of life with their doctrine, as could the Apostle Paul. Yet however imperfectly we carry out the truth; however far our feet lag behind what our eyes see; yet this is our desire, to understand the truth better, to minister it more clearly and in the power of the Holy Ghost, and to walk in it and be under the influence of it more truly with all saints.

The first part of the exhortation which our correspondent thinks we fail to emphasize is the first exhortation in the epistle to the Ephesians, and consequently of first importance. The apostle, as the Lord's prisoner, suffering bonds for His name's sake and for this special revelation from the Lord of which He was the special steward, beseeches us to walk worthy of the vocation set before us in the earlier chapters; we cannot know it unless we read them, we must not come to the exhortation of chapter iv., except through the teaching of chapters i. ii. iii. As we learn them we measure the pattern. And the exhortation of Chap. iv. is to be consistent with what we have learnt. In those chapters we learn where God has set us: abounding towards us in all wisdom and prudence, and, according to the mighty power that raised up Jesus from the dead and set Him as Head over the whole universe, He has raised us up who were dead in trespasses and sins, to satisfy His own great love. Saved by His grace, we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which He hath before ordained that we should walk in them. We were once without Christ, aliens from the Commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

1). Yet from that hopeless afar off place we have been made nigh in Christ Jesus by the blood of Christ. That is the new position.

2). Jew and Gentile are brought together, and Christ has made of these twain in Himself one new man. That is the new man in the new position.

3). He has reconciled us unto God in one body by the cross. That is the new unity, not of ordinances but of life.

4). And both have access to the Father through Him by the Spirit. That is the new favour, for what favour could be greater than to have access to the Father, the source of all glory and grace.

5). We are now fellow-citizens with the saints. That is the new dignity, but not only have we our part in a city where is maintained a polity which is entirely of God, but we are of the household of God, where His secrets that lie behind His administration are known and where His very character must be maintained. A new responsibility surely attaches to that.

6). In the Lord they are builded together an habitation of God through the Spirit.

These things are all included in our present vocation of which we are exhorted to walk worthy; and this can only be done as with the absence of pride which is the chief characteristic of the flesh, we walk in lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering bearing with one another in love. This is the life of Christ in practical manifestation and only in this life can we walk worthy of our vocation which is in Christ. The Spirit also has His part in this. "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." Diligence is needed for this, but of what sort? It is not enough to say, "We are all believers, let us obliterate all differences and walk together." That would be comparatively easy, for to do that we should only have to drop all prejudices that keep saints apart, or make compromises in regard to them. The unity of the Spirit means more than that; in this the man from whose carnal will all prejudices spring is obliterated by the cross, he has no place in it. We speak here of the man after the flesh, the old man, who showed himself in the Jew as a proud and intolerant bigot, and, still shows himself in that way in many who profess to take very high ground; and who showed himself in the Gentile in lawless will and unrestrained licence. That man has come under God's judgment in the cross, and has no place in the unity of the Spirit. God has displaced him as being utterly useless and profitless for His purpose, and has created in his place the one new man.

Our quotations from Ephesians ii. prove this. It is "in Christ Jesus that we are made nigh by the blood of Christ." He has abolished the enmity in His flesh. i.e. His dead body on the cross. It does not say that we are reconciled to one another, but it does say what is greater and higher, that both Jew and Gentile, between whom the greatest hostility existed are reconciled to God in one body by the cross.

The unity of the Spirit is inclusive of all who are in Christ and exclusive of all that is not of Him, and in the endeavour to keep this unity we also must be both inclusive and exclusive. We must be exclusive first of all in regard to the man that brings in dissension and division, and that man we find very ready to assert his will in ourselves. The more we walk in the truth of the cross of Christ as to ourselves the better able shall we be to walk in the grace of Christ towards those who are His. Let us measure the pattern, and learn the truth, we are "in Christ Jesus;" "in Himself;" reconciled to God "in one body," and are "a holy temple in the Lord."

In endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit we do not form a new unity or build a new church, but walk in the truth of that which already exists, though so little seen. "All saints" must have their place in our affections for they are all in the unity of the Spirit. Christ is the centre, all saints are the circumference, and the Spirit the binding power. "There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling." There is set forth the vital unity that can never be dissolved and into which no failure can come. What we earnestly desire is to know more of that and keep the truth of it in a practical way, not in conflict one with the other, but in the bond of peace, the peace which belongs to the assembly of God.

Our correspondent continues: -

"Much space is taken up with setting forth the glories and the graces of the Lord Jesus, and none too much, no one can go far enough in that direction much less too far; but it must be remembered that what He asks for is not honour and praise in word only but in deeds "If a man love Me" He says "he will keep My words," and the thing He said of old time still holds good "Obedience is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams." I notice the expression "bridal affection" occurs once or twice, but the Lord never asks for that; it is a different kind of love He seeks from His redeemed. In another quarter one hears a good deal of this and one is not surprised. Not he that offers the loudest and highest laudation "is he that loveth Me" is what He says, but "he that hath My commandments and keepeth them."

As to these closing words, we remark that the saints at Ephesus were charged by the Lord with having departed from "first love," that we take it to be bridal affection. And when the bride in unison with the Spirit cries, "Come, Lord Jesus," that will be the sweet expression of bridal affection, for which He is looking from His church. But our correspondent is right in pressing that the test of true love to the Lord is the keeping of His word. This is the one and only test. May we all be exercised as to how far we are proving that we love the Lord. To keep His word and not deny His name, will cost us something, but the compensation is great. His command is that we love one another, this stands first of all, and it is deeply significant that the one assembly that receives the fullest commendation from the Lord in Rev. ii. iii. is Philadelphia - which means, the love of the brethren. May we all be Philadelphians in this respect.

J. T. Mawson.

"My Brethren."

"In the Midst of the Assembly."

Who is in the Midst of the Assembly?

The answer to this question determines for us the nature and character of the gathering; and seeing it is our Lord Jesus Christ Himself - as Hebrews ii. 12, tells us - the One who is exalted above all as Heir of all things, we may well marvel at the honour which is thus bestowed, not upon angels, but upon men; men, once fallen and sinful; now saved and sanctified by and for Himself, and for the service of God. The glory of this grace is indeed divine, and only by the enabling of the Holy Spirit can we speak at all rightly of this wonderful phase of the truth of Christ and the assembly.

We have had prominently brought before us the corporate side of the truth connected with the mystery. There are also the collective and vital aspects of it. The very first which the Holy Spirit names in Ephesians 6, is heirship; for believers in Christ Jesus from amongst both Jews and Gentiles are brought into oneness of heirship - "fellow-heirs," or "joint heirs," as it reads. This is collective rather than corporate which is named second - "A joint body." Precedence is often given to the latter probably because of the comparatively recent revival of the precious truth of the body of Christ. The truth of heirship needs reviving also, for the place which the risen Lord has with His brethren and co-heirs is little appreciated because little understood. The grace and glory of it would profoundly affect the assembly were it apprehended in the power of the Spirit. It would impart a rich sense of divine grace, and give a character of true dignity to all gatherings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The very thought of being associated with such an One as He is, through His own redeeming love, would make us esteem supremely

"That love which gives not as the world, but shares,

All it possesses with its loved co-heirs."

As our hearts rejoiced in this, true reverence and humility would mark us also, because it results from His own work and not ours; "for both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare Thy Name unto My brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praises unto Thee. "This church" (properly "assembly") is composed of those called "His companions," "His brethren," and "joint heirs with Christ."

The Heir And The Heirs.

The inheritance which those who belong to Christ's assembly are heirs to is said to be eternal; and, unlike that into which God's earthly people entered, the Israelites, it is incorruptible, undefiled and unfading. When Christ presented Himself to the leaders of Israel, at the city of the great king, as having right to the earthly possession, they said among themselves, "This is the Heir; come, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours." This gives us some insight into the importance of this question; and we will therefore use the analogies and contrasts of Israel and her inheritance to aid in the understanding of that which we are heirs to as belonging to the assembly of God. We will seek to carefully examine this.

The coming Heir to the glory of Israel's inheritance was pointed on to all through the Old Testament Scriptures. In Him all was to be headed up. They were to possess all in their Messiah, the Anointed One. They were to inherit nothing apart from Him. In Him was to be their portion of blessing, - their King, Priest and Prophet. Israel will yet come into the wealth of the promises made to their fathers, but meanwhile, Christ is "Head over all things to the assembly," and all our blessings are in Him in the heavenlies. In Deuteronomy xvii. and xviii. we are told what was to mark Israel's King, Priest and Prophet, and what was to be His relation to God's people. In view of the extremes of autocracy and democracy, seen in various nations, it would be interesting to compare them with the mind of God made known in these Scriptures, but that would divert from what is immediately before us. The king was to be of God's choosing (xvii. 15). He was to be "one from among thy brethren" and not "a stranger which is not thy brother." He was to write a copy of the law himself and read therein all the days of his life, "that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren." David was chosen and anointed of God, and David treated those who inherited with him as brethren, yet they rightly honoured him and addressed him as "lord, the king." David, however, failed in many ways, and only in our Lord Jesus Christ is to be found the perfect answer to God's mind in this respect.

The priest also was one from among "his brethren." He ministered in the name of the Lord his God (xviii. 7), the Lord was his portion, therefore he had no earthly inheritance among his brethren.

It is said of Christ, if He were on earth He would not be a priest, a heavenly priesthood is now His, and God is His portion; nevertheless, we read, "Such an High Priest became us" (Heb. vii. 26). We need none other, for God Himself recognizes Christ alone now. Then as to the prophet we read, "I will raise up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, (Moses) and will put My words in His mouth; and He shall speak unto them all that I shall command Him" (Deut. xviii. 18). Especially in the gospel of John is the fulfilment of this prophecy in the Son of God related. He spake God's words to those He graciously called His brethren. "The words which Thou hast given Me I have given them" He said. "Hear ye Him," the voice from heaven commanded.

The anointing oil was poured upon king, priest and prophet. The Anointed One is Christ. It is the meaning of His Name Christ. All the three offices centre in Him, and He holds these in relation to His brethren and co-heirs. When He has His rightful place in the midst of Israel they will inherit all the rich promises and, glories which have been given to the nation; but, meanwhile, the assembly is brought into relationship with Him on new and higher ground altogether. Those who form the assembly are called from amongst both Jews and Gentiles; and, through the work of Calvary, are brought in Christ to be His co-heirs in "a new creation" as we shall see. Both Israel and the assembly inherit on account of the redemption which is secured in Christ through His blood, but the nature and extent of that which they are heirs to differ in a great degree. Psalm 20 gives us the sufferings of Christ first and then the glories to follow. He Himself was forsaken of God, and suffered when there was none to help. "Many bulls have compassed Me" He said, "Strong bulls of Bashan have beset Me round." His heart melted in the midst of His bowels. The assembly of the wicked enclosed Him; they pierced His hands and His feet. They parted His garments among them, and cast lots upon His vesture. He was brought into the dust of death. His cry to God to save Him, however, was heard, and He was raised from among the dead. If He was forsaken of God as none other, He was nevertheless raised again by Him as none other. Therefore He said, "I will declare Thy Name unto My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee" (Ps. xx. 22). This is the verse cited in Heb. ii. 12. Later in verse 25 He speaks of praising Him in "the great congregation." This is clearly a further thought; and again He speaks of "all the kindreds of the earth" worshipping before Him (27). The blessing is wholly the result of Christ's atoning work; and the heirs inherit, be they earthly or heavenly, on the ground of that work.

In Hebrews i. 2, our Lord Jesus Christ is said to be the established "Heir of all things." Who can tell the glorious range of this inheritance? The Holy Spirit comprehensively speaks of it as "All things!" In Hebrews vi. 17 we read of "the heirs of promise." God makes known to them the unchangeableness of His purpose, that they might have strong encouragement. He confirmed His word by an oath, swearing by Himself since there was none greater to swear by. How secure therefore is that to which believers are the heirs! Faithful is He that promised. All shall be fully accomplished in the most minute and in the most complete sense. Then in the midst of the assembly of co-heirs Christ shall sing God's praises in triumph and victory.

Christ And His Brethren.

We have seen how the truth of heirship and the relationship of brethren go together. It is so both in connection with Israel and the assembly, though in a new and higher way for the latter as we have said. This will become clearer to us as we proceed. First, however, we must observe, there is a certain use of that precious expression of relationship - "My brethren" which applies to both, and also to the heavenly relationship which is ours with Christ, the Son of God, somewhat distinct from assembly relationship simply. This also we shall see presently.

When the Lord Jesus came to take up the whole question, we are told, He did not take hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham; and "it behoved Him in all things to be made like to His brethren" (Heb. ii. 17). That shows the marvellous grace of Christ, and gives us a view of the wide extent of this grace, - "the seed of Abraham." Faith on their part is of course taken for granted, and also His work of redemption. We will now follow the way Scripture presents Christ and His brethren step by step, and observe in what manner those who are thus designated are associated with Him. By noting carefully the distinctions we shall the better understand our own place in the assembly in the midst of which He sings; and, as surrounding Him, His brethren and co-heirs, we shall respond in fuller measure to His immeasurable grace and love.

Psalm xxii. 22 comes first. He there speaks as the One Who is raised from the dead, Whose work upon the cross is finished, and of those who are the fruit of that work, - He calls them "My brethren." He declares to them God's name, - Jehovah's name; and in the midst of them, - "the congregation," He utters His praise. Christ's brethren here spoken of could not be limited to the assembly, the body of Christ, as we know it to-day. It is striking that this verse is cited with others which are true in connection with the believing remnant of Israel in Heb. ii. 12, 13. The Holy Spirit uses it in the epistle to the Hebrew brethren, as having application today rightly. To see this interesting overlapping explains many Scriptures which if confined to the assembly, the body of Christ, confuses the mind, because the word is not rightly divided in so doing. Even His Jewish disciples, before they were baptized by the coming of the Spirit into one body, He spoke of as His brethren. This will be so again after the assembly is glorified with Christ, and believers from among the Jews continue "the testimony of Jesus" as Revelation shows. Precious to them also will be the sense of this relationship, for a new nature will be theirs too, even though their hopes do not rise to the same height as that which the joint-heirs of the mystery of Ephesians iii. know through divine grace. To them will be declared God's name, and in their midst shall His praises be sounded, by Him Whose strength was weakened in the way, and Whose days were shortened; Who, nevertheless, as Hebrews i. and Psalm cii. tell us, laid "the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of His hands." He shall "declare the name of the Lord in Zion, and His praise in Jerusalem" (Psalm cii. 21). This will take place when the Anointed introduces the national blessings of Israel. The joint-heirs of the assembly are not called to national blessing, but, according to the mystery, out of the nation of Israel and out of the other nations of the Gentiles also, to inherit assembly blessing in Christ Jesus.

Before we speak of this, however, we will notice how the synoptic gospels confirm what we have said. When they came to the Lord Jesus and told Him that His mother and His brethren, desired to speak with Him, He lifted the relationship on to moral ground, and stretching forth His hand toward His disciples, He said, Behold My mother and My brethren. He tenderly maintained natural relationships to the very end of His days in the flesh, but the establishment of an abiding relationship which death could not destroy was ever before Him. Therefore He added not limiting it to the disciples of Israel - Whosoever shall do God's will the same is My brother (Mark iii. 35; Matt. xii. 50). The gospel of Luke connects the relationship with hearing the word of God and doing it. This again would take in those who are of the assembly to-day as having the full revelation of God as well as the remnant of Israel to whom a more limited revelation is made. Of both, the Lord could say, My brethren are those who hear the Word of God and do it (Luke viii. 21). When He returns from heaven, and comes to the earth as the King, and sits on the throne of His glory, the faithful remnant of Israel have a very near and special place with Him. Before the assembled nations, among whom they have borne testimony after the translation of the assembly to be with Christ in glory, the King declares them to be His brethren (Matt. xxv. 40). What an honoured association is theirs! The brethren of the King of all the earth! Doubtless they will designate Him as their Lord and their King, and not indulge in the unwarrantable familiarity which is often used in speaking of our Lord and Saviour to-day; nevertheless, the glorious relationship is indeed theirs through His atoning sufferings, death and resurrection. The work of God in them has written His law in their hearts as well as in their minds, and they all know the Lord. To them His grace, love and glory are known as the Anointed of God. He is King, Priest and Prophet: they are His brethren and co-heirs. In Him they are blessed and inherit their earthly portion.

The Lord sits upon the throne as King and Priest, (Zech. vi. 13), and as Prophet He declares the name of Jehovah to them. The Lord, the King is in the midst of them and they shall see evil no more (Zeph. iii. 15); yea, the Lord their God in the midst of them is mighty. He will rejoice over them with joy, resting in His love, and joying over them with singing (17). And even if the name of the Father and the heavenly relationship remains to be declared to those who are joint heirs according to the mystery, nevertheless, Psalm cxlv. - David's, the Beloved's, Psalm of praise - shows the high note which will resound in their midst. That Psalm really ends the Song book of Psalms, for the five following are resultant bursts of Hallelujahs, all beginning and ending with "Praise ye the Lord!" Hallelujah! And no wonder. The Beloved's praise begins thus, "I will extol Thee, my God, O King; and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever," and ends, "Let all flesh bless His holy name for ever and ever." There is, however, designedly no doubt, one note missing. It is contained in the Hebrew letter N. The Psalm is alphabetically ordered, and uses every letter, of the twenty-two in the Hebrew alphabet in regular sequence, save that one. This is clearly shown in the original, which is an acrostic. Does it not indicate that the heavenly note is to be heard only in the midst of the assembly, where not only Jehovah's name is declared by Christ, but also the Father's? It is there, above the national ground altogether, that those who are the co-heirs and brethren of Christ, know the exalted privileges which are theirs as joint-heirs according to the mystery which was kept secret from the foundation of the world, hidden in God Himself.

The Singing.

We have spoken of the high and honoured association into which the co-heirs of Christ are brought, through divine grace, and through the redemption work of Calvary, and especially of that which will be enjoyed by those of the nation of Israel who are the brethren of the King. Now the mystery connected with Christ and the assembly involves co-heirs, - not as belonging to the nations or Israel, but as called out of the nation of Israel and out of the Gentile nations also, to become one as thus called out, as we have already indicated; and the relationship which is theirs as brethren of Christ is not so much with Him as King therefore, but rather as the Son of God. Both are spoken of as Christ's brethren as we have pointed out, but on different planes. The latter is an entirely new and heavenly association. This we shall see. It is here in the midst of the assembly the very highest note is sung, for to them the Son declares the Father and utters His praise. To the former Jehovah's name is declared, but not the Father's.

Matthew is the gospel of "the King," and we have already observed, He shows us the King's brethren. Again in the last chapter, when Christ was risen, the angel said to the woman, Go, tell His disciples. - (Mark the forming of the assembly, the body of Christ, by the coming of the Holy Spirit, had not then taken place, for Pentecost was not yet) - When the Lord met the same woman He said, Go, bring word to My brethren. In His commission to these brethren, He tells them to make disciples of all the nations, also that He would be with them to the completion of the age (20). The kingdom character of this commission is plain, and its time limit goes beyond that of the assembly, for the assembly, Christ's body, will be taken away before the completion of the age; and after its translation from earth to heaven the testimony of Jesus will be carried on still. It is this overlapping during times of transition that has to be understood before the word of truth can be rightly divided, and before the special place which the out-called co-heirs have to-day can be rightly appreciated, according to the truth of the mystery concerning Christ and the assembly. Moreover, although it broadens our view of the brethren of Christ, it nevertheless safely secures us from the Laodicean character of the worldwide brotherhood movement which is developing so quickly and so popularly. The truth preserves the saints in Christ Jesus, whereas Laodiceanism shuts Him outside in His true character. It professes His name, but shuts the door in His face, and vainly boasts in its self-sufficiency.

How cheering and beautiful is the application of Psalm xxii. 22 by the Spirit to us to-day in Hebrews ii. 12! What a privilege and honour to be associated with those to whom Jesus declares the name of God! How rejoicing to the heart to be of that assembly of co-heirs and brethren in the midst of which He sings such a song - the praises of God! What music gladdens the souls of those who hear the joyful notes of such singing! It is never to be forgotten that the singing is His, Who, in the first part of Psalm xxii. is described as the One Who endured the suffering of Calvary. The Sufferer has become the Singer in the midst of those who reap the results of His redeeming work. There was no suffering to compare with His, and the singing of Jesus is incomparably beyond the sweetest singing that ever reached the mortal ear. Its rich melody has never been heard and never can be heard by those who are still dead in offences and sins. It is in the assembly's midst Jesus sings. There He can express the grace and melody that fill His heart in all the ineffable blessedness of the God whom He knows so well. It is there He utters His glorious praise.

We must now pass on to that which is peculiar to the out-called assembly. In doing so, however, we will just notice the striking use which the Spirit makes of Isaiah and his two sons presenting themselves before God - a beautiful type of Christ and the remnant of Israel - "Behold I and the children which God has given Me" (compare Isa. viii. 18, and Hebrews ii. 13). This is applied to the assembly now, for it indicates the relationship which is ours also, and which we are about to speak of. This intensely interesting Scripture explains many similar passages when it is discerned rightly. In the gospel of John the Spirit unveils for Christ's brethren the full revelation of God as "FATHER" in the Son - "the only begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him" (i. 18). In Psalm xxii. 22 and Hebrews ii. 12 it is "GOD" who is declared. Of course it is God also in John, but in the fullest revelation of Himself as Father, and as bringing us into a new and special relationship with Himself, not simply as the brethren of Messiah, the Christ, but as associated with the risen Son of God; for after He had secured eternal redemption through His death and resurrection, He sent the message of this new relationship - a relationship never before made known - saying to Mary, "Go to My brethren and say to them I ascend to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God" (John xx. 17). To what an elevation of glory and love does this bring us! Such grace and dignity in relations of deep affection could never have entered the highest thoughts of the most exalted creature in the whole of God's universe! The brethren of God's beloved Son! His Father ours! His God ours! We have said that this is somewhat distinct from assembly relationship simply, and that is correct: but we must bear in mind, those alone who are of the assembly, and who are the "joint-heirs" of the mystery, are given to know and rejoice in the endless blessedness and love of this new relationship, as they sing:

"His Father and our Father,

His God and ours Thou art,

And He is Thy beloved,

The gladness of Thy heart."

To enter into the full meaning of this, we must appropriate, in faith and in the Spirit's power, the plane of Christ's resurrection and ascension with which it is connected. Mary desired to hold the Lord on the old plane, but He said to her, "Touch Me not, for I have not yet ascended to My Father." Then He graciously declared the new relationship, and when He appeared in the midst of His own, bringing the peace of His victory over sin and death with Him, the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. What singing would fill their hearts with melody and grace then! A singing that could scarcely be sung for the very intensity and sweetness of its experimental depth! A singing that we might fear to spoil by our expression of it! Nevertheless, Jesus has said, "I will sing!" Rich is His singing of God's praises as we have seen: surpassingly so His singing of the Father's in the midst of His co-heirs and brethren as the Son of God.

He says to the Father, Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me, and the glory which Thou hast given Me I have given them! (John xvii. 22, 23). How supremely this arises above all else. Oh, may our hearts enter into the truth of it, in the power of the Spirit ungrieved; and may we be sensitive as to allowing anything in ourselves that would spoil our appreciation of all this divine love and life and glory with the Father and the Son. Words seem to fail as we try to speak of it. In the beautiful type of the Father and Son, we read that Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac, and sent his other sons away eastward that they should not inherit along with him. (Gen. xxv. 5, 6). It is in contrast to this that the grace and love of Christ shine out. He brings others to share all He possesses as His loved brethren and co heirs. Soon God's purpose will be brought to full fruition, and then, actually conformed to the image of the glorious Son of God, we shall unhinderedly and eternally be able to speak His praises as, we would, for whom God foreknew, He "predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He should be the firstborn among many brethren" (Rom. viii. 29); and in the midst of them, who shall tell the gladness of His heart? Who shall attempt to describe the singing which He then sings in the midst of His co-heirs and brethren? The Holy Spirit alone can give us any sense of its harmonies for it is altogether divine.

In closing, however, we would challenge our hearts. Since these things are so, beloved brethren in Christ, what should mark those who are called to such great realities, - such holy and heavenly intimacies, such glory and grace? Avoiding the Babylonish corruptions of a worldly Christendom, and the seductions of antichristian teachings, let us pursue the path of God's will by following Him Who sanctified Himself that we might be sanctified through the truth; by dwelling in faith in nearness to the Son prove the vital reality of His Word to the Father - "And the world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee, and these have known that Thou hast sent Me. And I have made known unto them Thy name, and will make it known, that the love with which Thou hast loved Me may be in them and I in them" (John xvii. 25, 26) - for this is the present portion of the brethren and co-heirs of the Son of God, while they wait and watch for His coming again to receive them to Himself, and to take them home to dwell with Him in the Father's house for ever,

Where eternal love abounds,

And the sweetest song resounds.

H. J. Vine.

John 20.

"Oh that I knew where I might find Him!" (Job. xxiii. 3). Such words were used by Job as he sought to reason with God as to the cause of his sorrows. Have you, beloved fellow Christian, ever had a similar enquiry arise in your heart as you considered the present condition of the church? Amidst the strife of tongues, the diverse arrangements of men, the forsaking of the truth, the evil teachings that despise the Word of God and dishonour the Son of God, do you long to find Him whom your soul loveth? Maybe you have proved Him again and again in secret help and yet you have a longing that is unsatisfied. Can it be? Is there any place where He meets His own, where His voice alone is heard, and where He makes known all things that He has heard of the Father to those He calls His friends? Yes, there is. Let us trace in this chapter the steps by which Mary of Magdala found it. It was yet dark as she wended her solitary way to the burial ground, hoping to bestow some fresh token of her love upon the body of Him who had been all in all to her, but even this was denied her. She found greatly to her surprise an empty tomb, but she found not Him. The living One was not amongst the dead. True, she saw a remarkable sight, a vision of angels. She heard them speak to her, but such things did not fill the aching void in her heart. He was absent and she had not even the consolation of knowing where the loved form lay. "Tell me where Thou hast laid Him and I will take Him away" was her request of the One she mistook for the gardener. She was looking in the wrong place, seeking the living One amongst the dead, yet it was all very precious to the heart of Him she sought. He values every yearning of the soul for His presence. Alas, that many like the disciples accept the seemingly inevitable, and not finding Him in the circumstances where they expect, turn to their own circle and concerns, and what they might have known remains unknown. But love will not thus rest. Mary has no place of rest if she finds not the One her soul loves. Homeless, yes, but it brings her nearer to the joy of His company, for it is to the homeless heart He comes, reveals Himself, calls by name, draws out the response of affection, 'Mary,' 'Master.'

But not alone was she to enjoy His presence. There was something better in His mind for her. He was going to lead her to know Him in the midst of His own, "Go to my brethren and tell them." Not until the work of the cross was complete could He use such words, or bring His disciples into the blessedness of His own relationship. Yes, "tell them I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God."

We may trace in the gospel narratives how our Lord was occupied on that resurrection day, as to one and another. He personally revealed Himself and then left them, awaking in their hearts new desires, in order that they might be drawn together that same evening to talk of Him who was risen. It was the testimony of His resurrection that brought about their gathering together.

The door was closed. The careless world of Pilate was outside, the religious world of Caiaphas and the Jew outside, and within those who loved His name were met together, with fear and joy and sorrow all mingling. To them the Lord came, in fulfilment of His own word "where two or three are gathered together to My name, there am I in the midst of them." Mark the condition. "The doors being shut, then came Jesus and stood in the midst." All else but His name was excluded, none but Himself filled every eye, every ear was attentive to the words He spake. Peace calmed all unrest and fear; Love, told forth by His hands and side; Life, communicated in the Spirit's power; Service, as they were sent forth from thence to bear His name. Such is the blessed pattern of the Christian assembly, how very different from that which fills Christendom with ritual and ceremony. No ordering of man was seen on that evening, not even the apostles had planned what should take place. There were just His own who loved Him, and He was present in the midst. They needed nought else. How the Lord loves to control such a company, whether then or now. The heart that has once tasted the blessedness of such a gathering will desire no other. But there was one man who was not with them when Jesus came, and could not believe it possible that his Master had been there either. Alas, there are many like Thomas who refuse to believe that the Lord manifests Himself without human arrangements, and although their souls are grieved at the giving up of the truth on every hand, seek Him not in His own appointed way. They go on without ever knowing the blessedness of the meeting place where He reveals the Father's name to His brethren. Nor do they know how He leads the worship in spirit and in truth which the Father seeks. Beautiful services may be carried out, and the most ornate arrangements be made, oratory and music may lend their aid; but God is a Spirit and those that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. Dear reader, if these remarks produce any exercise in your soul, rest not content until you have found Him where He loves to be in the midst of those who refuse everything else but His peerless name.

J. Green.

The Assembly as Seen in Hebrews.

The very object for which this unique epistle was written would not lead us to expect very much to be said about the assembly, though it leads up to its threshold. Certainly nothing is said of the mystery — the church which is Christ's body, Himself the living Head in glory set in relation to it, and very little is said about the assembly. It is more hinted at than anything else. But the little that is hinted at is very beautiful and instructive.

A simple perusal of the epistle reveals the fact that it was addressed to believing Jews, who had begun well, who had "endured a great fight of afflictions," who had taken "joyfully the spoiling of their goods," but who were in danger of going back to Judaism and of casting away their confidence. The reason for this was that they had not advanced in the things of God, they had remained spiritual dwarfs. When the time had come that they should have been teachers, they had need to be taught which were the first principles of the oracles of God, and had need of milk and not of strong meat. They were babes, when they should have been men and were unskilful in the Word of righteousness.

And this condition flowed from a feeble apprehension of Christ. Naturally in such circumstances truth as to the mystery or the assembly would not be expected. But that the assembly is mentioned is just because it is in relation to Christ; and His fulness is ever beyond our feeble apprehension, and our place and privilege in Him beyond our entering in upon and enjoyment.

The epistle begins, without any formal introduction, with the word God. No name of the writer is given as in every other epistle in the New Testament. This forms an arresting exception.

Adolf Saphir, himself a converted Jew, has beautifully pointed out that the great point in Hebrews being the glory of the Person and work of Christ as entirely superseding the shadows and bringing in the glorious substance, every name that can be suppressed is suppressed. For instance, if the object of the Holy Spirit is to present Christ as the Apostle of our confession the name of the writer is suppressed, even if he were the Apostle Paul, as seems likely, though we should respect the anonymity of the writer as chosen by the Holy Spirit. When the name of Moses is introduced necessarily as the apostle of the types and shadows it is to contrast his position with the far more glorious place the Son of God has as the apostle of our confession. Moses was a servant, faithful in all his house; Christ is a Son over His house. Who would give up the Son for the servant?

Again, Aaron is brought in as the High Priest of the types and shadows. Christ, the High Priest of our confession is brought in in contrast. Aaron and his successors were not "suffered to continue by reason of death." They passed away. Their little day was soon run. But Christ "continueth ever because He hath an unchangeable priesthood." He is made a priest after a superior order, even that of Melchisedec, "not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life." Who would give up a permanent Priest for one of uncertain tenure?

Then again in quoting Scripture we are not given the names of the writers from whose books, etc., quotations are taken. The formula is given in one instance, "One in a certain place testified," but generally speaking the quotation is given direct without any indication of its source, save that it is Scripture, coming with all its plenary authority.

When it is necessary for the sake of establishing a point in chronology as in chapter iv. after using the words, "He spake in a certain place" (verse 4;) "And in this place again" (verse 5;) we have the sentence, "Again, He limiteth a certain day saying in David" (verse 7). Notice the writer carefully avoids saying that david said it, but that god spoke it - God spoke it in David.

This all helps us to see that we can have no right idea of the assembly, nor can we take up with power and intelligence our assembly position till Christ has His own place in our affections and spiritual intelligence. As Matt. xvi. so beautifully points out there must be the revelation made by the Father of the Person of Christ, "the Son of the living God" in order that upon the confession of Him and upon the foundation of His own Person Christ should build His indestructible assembly.

Priesthood was the common privilege of the saints of God addressed in this epistle, yet such was their carnality and backwardness, that the unfolding of the truth was so ordered as to bring them to this point: -

"Having therefore brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say His flesh; and having an High Priest over the house of God; let us draw near" (Heb. x. 19-21).

They had not entered in as yet, but it was all the time their place and portion. To enter in in the Spirit's power would have been to have entered intelligently and practically into the assembly. The High Priest presupposes under priests - the very name, High Priest, presupposes a divine system.

The assembly was indeed a necessity for the Christian, for outside of it was only a Judaism which had rejected, and still rejected Christ, and heathendom the table of demons. Thus they were exhorted not to forsake the place where alone Christian blessings could be found.

The whole book furnishes the idea of a divine system of which Christ, as High Priest, is Head and Director. If we speak of Christianity as that divine system we have in mind that which the truth forms, and not the corrupt system which Satan has succeeded in introducing by the bringing in of bad materials in relation to persons, and doctrines in relation to teaching, and which is described by the coined word - Christendom.

The idea of the Tabernacle that God should dwell among His people is carried on, as it is designed to be, into the antitype. So, after the glories of the Person and work of Christ are described in chapters i. and ii. we read that

"Both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctifieth are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren." (Chap. ii. 11).

The sanctifier and sanctified are all of one. Just as Aaron and his sons were all of one, of one stock, of one sanctuary occupation, of identical interests, so, as antitype answers to type (as far as a meagre type can answer to a glorious antitype) Christ and His people are all of one. This is a new creation, a resurrection scene as far as we are concerned. What a message given by the Lord to devoted Mary on the very day of His resurrection,

"Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father: and to My God, and your God." (John xx. 17).

What a sudden and glorious outshining of what was hidden in the heart of God for His own, and now made possible by the death of the Lord Jesus on the one hand, and the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit on the other!

So we follow from Heb. ii. 11 just quoted:

"Saying, I will declare Thy name unto My brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto Thee." (verse 12).

There we get the person, the Lord Jesus: the new circle, "my brethren," the church the occupation, praise, and the object of it, God Himself.

Thus without the truth of the assembly being elaborated, we get it, in this remarkable way. So great is Christ's thought towards His own, that immediately the glories of His person and work are set forth we get the wondrous truth of Christ in the midst of His assembly, singing praises to God, the Leader of the sanctuary service; then that being so the writer follows on with his theme, the superiority of the antitype over the type, of the substance over the shadow, of the source over the channel, of Christ over Moses and Aaron, leading up to the exhortation of the believer to draw near, even into the holiest of all.

How blessed to see all this! How affecting! How delivering from the system of men and from his earthly and worldly religious organizations.

"Let us go forth therefore unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach" (Heb. xiii. 13).

A. J. Pollock.

"My brethren."

"Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God."

In the whole range of revealed truth there is nothing higher or more blessed than that which is declared in these words of the Lord Jesus. Those men whom He called "My brethren," were the sons of men when He found them - Simon son of Jona, and James and John the sons of Zebedee, and so forth, - sinners every one of them; lying under the judgment of death, for death passed upon all men, and so upon these men, for that all have sinned. And yet here is this glorious resurrection chapter, they are sons of God, and to them is given the life, nature and power proper to that exalted relationship. They stand associated with Christ in this relationship which none could claim but He, a relationship which He enjoyed to the full in all the perfection of His own worthiness. No angel knows it, or ever will, but those men knew it; it was theirs, according to the purpose of divine love, and it is ours also, according to the same unalterable purpose, it is the place and portion of all who are of Christ's assembly or church - each one of such can say "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons [children] of God" (1 John iii. 1).

This is the relationship into which the risen triumphant Head and Leader of His church brings all His own. We do not now speak of the church as the body of Christ, that is but one aspect of it. As the body, the church has been formed for the manifestation of the graces of the Head of it now, and of His glory hereafter. It has this special relation to Christ; it is the vessel in and through which He displays the fulness of His wisdom and knowledge to every created intelligence; there is more in it than this, but this we believe is the chief thought in it. As the body of Christ, Christ presents through it all the treasures of divine wisdom and knowledge man-ward and creation-ward so that the will eventually be filled with the glory of God, and unto Him will be glory in the church in Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end.

But under that wonderful designation "My brethren" the assembly appears in another aspect. It is collective and not corporate, it is not in the first place for the display of glory before the universe, though that will have its place when the sons who are joint heirs with Christ come into the inheritance with Him (Rom. viii.), but it is for the joy and satisfaction of the Father's heart. The Father comes first. He must ever be first.

It may be said that here we ought to speak of the family and not the assembly, but as we proceed with the subject we think it will be clear that the truth of the assembly has its place in this connection. In that wonderful 8th. chapter of Proverbs, wisdom speaks, and we have no difficulty in seeing that wisdom can be none other than the Son of God, for He is God's resource, the One by Whom every problem in the universe is solved - Christ, the power and the wisdom of God. "The Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old" we read, bringing to mind the opening of John's Gospel. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God," and the 1st. of Hebrews, "by Whom also He made the worlds." But there was something deeper, fuller and more blessed than that which was displayed in creation. Before any of these things in which God's power and divinity are displayed existed, wisdom says, "Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight rejoicing always before Him." "Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world," are the wonderful words that were addressed to the Father by the Lord in John xvii. They explain this passage in Proverbs viii. What joy and what delight, what love, surpassing all human comprehension, do these words unfold! But wisdom continues, "Rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and My delights were with the sons of men." Again one must turn to the New Testament, and there we learn that the Father and the Son are one. Their object, work and joy are one. That which delights the Father delights also Jesus Christ, whom He sent into the world; and the sons of men in whom wisdom delighted before there were any of them are the subjects of communion between the Father and the Son, and of the intercession of the Son with the Father. Hear His own words.

"I have manifested Thy name unto the men which Thou gavest Me out of the world: Thine they were and Thou gavest them Me; and they have kept Thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever Thou hast given Me are of Thee. For I have given unto them the words which Thou gavest Me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from Thee, and they have believed that Thou didst send Me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which Thou hast given Me; for they are Thine. And all Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine; and I am glorified in them."

These wonderful statements made first about the first disciples of the Lord are true also of all who have followed them, they were all "chosen in Him before the foundation of the world."

But notice that not only are the sons of men spoken of as the Lord's delight, but the habitable part of his earth also. Evidently there was to be a suitable dwelling place on earth where the Father and the Son could delight in and with these who were brought to know them.

Creation was not this. Adam was made in the image and likeness of God, and most wonderfully endowed, and he was placed in a garden made habitable for him by God's own goodness, but God's delight in him was soon spoiled, nor was that garden a habitable place for man and God for long, for sin came in, and the trail of the serpent defiled that Paradise, so that it was impossible that God should dwell there, and the man also was turned out of it.

It is helpful to see that wisdom does not say my delights are with man, had the passage read thus we might have supposed that Adam unfallen was only meant, and that when he fell Satan had triumphed over God and for ever robbed Him of His delight in men, but it is the sons of men in whom wisdom delights. God would take up the sinful sons of that fallen head and by His own power and wisdom make them such as He could delight in.

Nor did Israel and the land of Canaan yield any truer satisfaction than Adam and Eden had done. That land was surely made a habitable place for the chosen people, for it was a goodly land, flowing with milk and honey, but they did not make it a habitable place for God. "Israel" we read, "was holiness unto the Lord, and the first fruits of His increase." Yet God said to them, "I brought you into a plentiful land, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered ye defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination." (Jer. ii. 7). But when Israel failed and Canaan became an abomination God was not defeated, hence we read, "How shall I put thee amongst the children and give thee a pleasant land?" Here are these two things again - the sons of men brought into relationship with God, and the habitable part of His earth - but the question is asked how could these wayward men of Israel, how could any of the wayward sons of men be brought to answer God's thoughts in a place where He could dwell with them? God's own answer is, "Thou shalt call Me, My Father; and shall not turn away from Me." (Jer. iii. 18). It is evident that God could only secure men for Himself according to His own desire by bringing them into this wonderful relationship with Himself. In the knowledge of Him as Father their hearts would be satisfied, and so they would be secured for ever for God's own satisfaction. It is this that seems to be hinted at in this remarkable statement.

If we come back to John's Gospel we find the way in which this is brought about. First we hear the Lord Jesus saying to the woman of Sychar, "The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in Spirit and truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship Him." (John iv. 23). We cannot worship One Whom we do not love, and we cannot love One Whom we do not know, and we cannot know God unless He is revealed to us. For "no man hath seen God at any time." So that none could tell his neighbour what He is in the full blessedness of His nature, but, "the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him." (John i. 18). And now being fully revealed, all may know Him from the greatest to the least, and this knowledge is eternal life.

It is as the Father, name of infinite grace and love, that God desires to be worshipped, and as neither angels nor men knew Him in this way they could not worship Him. But the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, came to reveal Him in all the fulness of His love, and in Christ we see the Father seeking worshippers, not among angels, but among the sinful, unhappy sons of men.

Three great steps had to be taken by the Lord if God's end had to be reached, and it is interesting to see that these three steps were first revealed to women.

1. He must come into the world.

2. He must go into death.

3. He ascend again to the Father.

The First Step.

That the first of these great steps had been taken was revealed to the woman of Sychar (John iv.). What a need was hers! She was a woman with a sinful past, an empty heart, and a hopeless future; true picture of all who are outside the blessing that Christ has opened up. The Lord met her where she was and revealed Himself as the Giver of the living water, which should not only be in her a well of perennial satisfaction, but should spring up to its Source, the Father, and so yield satisfaction also to Him.

There had to be a probing work to fit her for this, as there must be with us all, and this work the Lord accomplished until He had brought her to the point where she confesses that Christ was her only hope. "I know" said she "that Messias cometh, which is called Christ; when He is come He will tell us all things." The Lord's response, "I that speak unto thee, am He," changed her life, and sent her to witness to the men of the city that Christ had come. "Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did, is not this the Christ." He searched the sinner and revealed Himself as the Saviour. So the men of the city say, "We have heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world."

We become familiar with the great truths that are revealed to us in the Word, and consequently they often lose their greatness in our eyes, yet how wonderful it is that the Son of God should come into the world, and should come as the Saviour. Two things made this necessary, first, that God might be revealed, second, our need of salvation. It was God who sent Him not to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved. More than thirty times in the Gospel of John the Lord speaks of Himself as being sent into the world by the Father. He glories in it, and so shall we if we understand it. No angel could have fulfilled His mission, He only could make the Father known, and the Father sent Him to do this. The only begotten Son shone as the light in the darkness, He came near to men full of grace and truth, seeking for them in their misery, to take them out of it and lead them to His Father. David cried: "O send out Thy light and Thy truth: let them lead me . . . . Then will I go unto the altar of God, my exceeding joy: yea, upon the harp will I praise Thee, O God, my God”. But David could never have imagined that God's light and truth would come forth in the person of God's Son, in order to lead multitudes to the Father Himself. But this has happened, and in it our souls do greatly rejoice.

The Second Step.

But the revelation that He made of the Father would have been in vain, if He had taken no other steps than this. He must die. This was the second step. This fact was plain to Mary of Bethany. She alone of those who followed the Lord had perceived this. The disciples thought that they were following Him to the throne and kingdom, and to the outward senses it looked like it when multitudes of Jews followed Him because He had raised Lazarus from the dead. They were carried away by the temporary enthusiasm of the Jews which led them so far as to meet the Lord with loud hosannas. But Mary understood, and brought forth her alabaster box and poured its costly contents upon His feet. For His burying she had kept it. How long she had kept it we know not, but there it was to be brought out at the right moment. She honoured Him, owning His kingly glory by her act, but she knew that notwithstanding all that glory, He Himself was going into death. The relationship in which His own were to stand with Him before the Father could not be after the order of natural life, that life was forfeited by every sinner, none could abide in it except Christ who was sinless, and if He had chosen to live He must have lived alone, for "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone." Even Lazarus, who was raised from the dead into the old natural life, must die again. If death were to be removed Christ must die; if those who were under its power were to be delivered from it He must pass into the depths of it, for only by coming where we were could the Lord come into definite contact with us, and this He has done. His love to us, and His Father's will carried Him into death in His search for those whom He would bring forth out of death to be His brethren and worshippers of the Father.

The Third Step.

But the third step had to be taken, He must go to the Father; and for this He was constantly preparing His disciples from John 13 onwards.

We come now to our resurrection chapter, in which to Mary Magdalene was revealed the full and glorious truth. When she realized who He was she thought that the old relationship, that of an earthly Messiah in the midst of an earthly people, was to be resumed. Hence His words, "Touch Me not." He must ascend to His Father. The new relationship was to be a heavenly one.

Psalm xxii. records for us the path of sorrow that the Lord trod in the fulfilment of the will of God and also of His triumph. And there we learn what was foremost in His mind; for when heard from the horns of the unicorns and brought out of death He exclaims, "I will declare Thy Name amongst My brethren, in the midst of the congregation will I sing praise unto Thee." These very words of the Lord are quoted in Heb. ii. where we learn that the congregation in the midst of which He sings is the Church, and in the Church His brethren also are. The Church is the habitable place for God upon the earth to-day, in it He can rejoice; those who form it "are builded together for a habitation of God through the Spirit." (Eph. ii. 22); and the brethren of Christ are the sons of men in whom He delights. So that at last He has His habitable place on the earth, and the sons of men in it.

But the Church is here only for a while, the brethren that form it are partakers of the heavenly calling, but in the fact that it is here, we see the triumph of Christ. Oh, that we understood it better. Consider that wonderful description that is ours - "Holy Brethren." two words are found in Ps. xxii. There, in giving the answer to His own question, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" the Lord says, "But Thou art holy." This is the very nature of God, and this is the nature that is ours as those who are sanctified and one with the risen Christ, our Sanctifier; and we are His brethren, those of whom He spoke when He said, "I will declare Thy Name unto My brethren." Nature and relationship all according to God! And this is His assembly, His Church, that which is of Himself. Where the Father's name is known, where Christ triumphs in His own, and sings the praises of God. If God of old inhabited the praises of Israel, how much more will He dwell in this higher and perfect praise! How blessedly habitable must that place be to Him in which His Well-beloved, raised up from the dead, sings in the company of His brethren.

Think of those men who for fear of the Jews had hidden themselves in the upper room in Jerusalem; they possessed neither dignity nor renown before the world. And they cannot have been proud of each other; but we read, "Jesus came and stood in the midst." What a change that made! He had called them His brethren. What a dignity that gave them! How honoured, how honourable in this new relationship and association with Christ were these sons of men, now the sons of God! And Jesus was supreme in that new circle. And where He is supreme there the assembly is. He is the great Leader of the many sons, the Firstborn amongst many brethren. He has so blessedly accomplished the will of God that even now He can present to His Father those in whom the Father can delight.

Surely there is in this side of the truth that which ought most blessedly to engage our hearts and minds, and make us with purpose of heart to seek to enter into the joy of it, and seek to be in the state of our souls just that which we are in the thoughts and purposes of God. No higher place could be given us than this, we cannot by effort enter into it. It is ours, given to us in sovereign grace, and the Spirit has been given to us also that the place may be known by us experimentally and in power.

J. T. Mawson.

The Mystery.

Great is the mystery hid during ages,

Secret of God made known unto all.

Hitherto hidden from seers and from sages,

Teachers of ethics, the great and the small.

Concept inscrutable,

Purpose immutable,

Matchless, divine.

Told now to men of God,

Writ now with pen of God,

Line upon line.

Glorious conception of wisdom eternal,

Marvellous thought for our glory designed,

Wonder unspeakable, searchless, supernal,

Counsel supreme of the infinite mind.

Ere shone a star or sun,

Ere were His works begun,

Ere this creation:

Born was the thought of God,

Project and plan of God,

Man's exaltation.

Eye has not seen those things, ear has not heard of them,

Never has fancy the fringe of them reached;

Never to creature was uttered a word of them,

Till by the Spirit the gospel was preached.

Then in its glorious might

Broke forth the living light

Darkness assailing:

Then from the heights above

Shone forth the thought of love,

Then the unveiling.

This to establish on stable foundation,

Needed the infinite work of the Son,

Righteousness satisfied - His exaltation

Tells of the worth of the work He has done.

Fortresses stormed and spoiled,

Dark machinations foiled,

Crushed their activities;

Smitten hell's sources dread,

Captive fell forces led

Into captivity.

Back from the battle saluted victorious,

See Him enthroned on the right hand of God,

Head over all things created, and glorious,

Centre and Sun of the universe broad.

Head of the Church, for which

He, in His grace so rich,

Suffered such sorrows,

Bore on the cross of shame,

When smote the sword of flame,

Infinite horrors.

Part of Himself His loved members on earth are,

Part of Himself, His own flesh and His bone.

They in this world's estimation no worth are,

But they will sit with Himself on His throne.

Then at the great decree,

When men must bend the knee

Lord Him confessing,

They shall what love has wrought

Learn, and the power that brought

Into such blessing.

One with Himself! Then our part is none other,

Than to be with Him where ever He be;

Not for the ages eternal another

Wish we to think of, to hear, or to see.

Bands all unbreakable! Love all unspeakable,

Told when He died.

His in His love unknown,

His, ay, His very own,

Body and bride.

James Boyd.

Life.

It is plain to all who have eyes to see and hearts to understand that the world is in darkness, i.e., in ignorance of God. And the blame for this condition of things lies entirely at its own door, for "the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not." (John i. 5). And this is not said to be because men cannot perceive the light that shineth, but because they won't, for they love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil (John iii. 19); they are wilfully in the darkness; consequently they lie under condemnation. This condition can only be described as death - moral and spiritual death. It is alienation from the life of God, it is bondage to sin; it is active hatred of God; it is subjection to the wicked one, for "the whole world lieth in the one (or wickedness)" (1 John v. 19); it is but the prelude to "the second death," i.e., severance from God.

No writer in the New Testament describes the world in such terse and uncompromising language as John. He sees it in its native blackness; a sphere in which the Father has no place, as witness the casting out of His sent One; the stronghold of the devil in his fight against God; he sees it by the light of the Father's world in which he dwells, and as inspired by the Holy Ghost he writes what he sees, and well it is for us to consider his words, that we may understand out of what we have been delivered, and what grace has made us in contrast to it. It exists in darkness, in death, under condemnation, in active enmity against God; wilfully sinful, lying in the very lap of the devil, it is his nursling; it is the barracks and the battle field where he trains his army of men to resist and fight against every rightful claim of God over them.

But John describes, also, what we might well call another world, composed of those who are said to be "born of God," and as described by John there is not a feature in common between the two. Those who have entered this world by Divine generation have the light of life and do not walk in darkness; they are of God and not of that wicked one; they love God and one another; they shall never come into condemnation, and over them the second death shall have no power, they have passed into life out of death; their dwelling-place is a sphere of life and light and love. Death is characteristic of the world in which sinful men please themselves, life is characteristic of the world in which those who are born of God dwell.

The first mention of life in John's Gospel is in chapter i. 4. Speaking of the eternal Word by whom all things were made, he says, "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men" and the last mention of life in the Epistle is, "This is the true God and eternal life." He is the first and the last, we must begin with Him, nor can any know what life is or enjoy it except in Him.

We cannot define what life is, but when we see it in manifestation we are able to tell the nature of the creature, person or being, whose life it is, and the life of God has been manifested in the world so that we may know His very nature. The Word who was God and with God poured forth from Himself all created life. He was the originator of every system and character of life in the universe, His own all powerful word was sufficient to do this, for He spake and it stood fast, but when we read, "In Him was life" something more is meant. "All creation was made by Him but it does not exist in Him. But in Him was life, in this He was in relation with a special part of creation, a part which was the object of the thoughts and intentions of God. This life was the light of men, it revealed itself as a testimony to the divine nature, in immediate connection with men - for 'this life was the light of men' - as it did not with respect to any others at all." (J. N. D).

There is no light for men apart from the incarnate Word. Men have no light in themselves, though they may become lightbearers, and shine as lights in the world when the word of life has its place in their hearts, but naturally they have no light, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?" (Job. xi. 7). "The world by wisdom knew not God." (1 Cor. i. 21). "The god of this world hath blinded the eyes of men that believe not." (2 Cor. iv. 4). But if God, for the great love that He has towards us, is pleased to reveal His own life to us, that surely shall be light to us, and we shall want no other; that surely shall dispel the moral darkness that enshrouds our fallen nature, unless indeed, our case be entirely and eternally hopeless. This revelation of Himself has come to pass, not in creation but in incarnation, not by works of power in the physical spheres, but in the lowly life of Jesus. And this manifestation of the life of God in the world has brought into being the new world of which we have spoken. The Creator was in the world, a man in the midst of it, but it did not know Him. He came to those to whom in former days He had committed His oracles, but they received Him not, and yet the manifestation of the life was not in vain, the light of it was effectual, for Jesus could say, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and the prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight." (Matthew xi. 28). And these babes "were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." These form the new world, the new circle, having a most blessed centre, and a well-defined circumference - in the world but not of it; enlightened and vitalised by Him in whom life is; God Himself from whom the life has flowed forth, being the object of the whole circle and every soul in it. "He is the Fountain and the Focus of life; it issues from Him as its source and returns to Him as its object." (Liddon).

To contemplate the One in whom this life is is the first business of all who belong to this new world, they cannot know what their life is unless they do. "We beheld His glory," said the apostle, and again, "the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness and shew unto you that eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us" (1 John i. 2). It was not our privilege to be with Him, as were those wonderfully-honoured Galileans, and actually see Him, and hear Him, and handle Him, as He tabernacled amongst them, but what He was, and is, has come forth in words, as He Himself said, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." (John vi. 33). And the disciples recognized this when they said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." And because the life that was manifested abides in the words He spoke we do not walk in darkness.

"In Him was life, and that life was the light of men" and this was the true Light which shines for all, but its blessed life-giving rays could not have reached us, quickening our souls into life, apart from the death of the Life-giver. It is well to be constantly reminded of this fact. He came from God, even the Father, to bring those who believe on Him into life, to share, in fact in the life that He manifested, but it could not be apart from His death. Hence when first the term "eternal life" is used in John's writing, which seems to be the way this life is described when it is a question of its impartation to men, it is in connection with the death of Christ. So we read, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." (Chapter iii. 14, 15). This was because death lay upon us, sinful men, as the judgment of God; and sin could only be expiated and death removed by the death of the Son of Man, made in the likeness of sinful flesh, yet entirely holy and true. This has taken place, and while demonstrating the condition of sin and death in which men were it is also the great proof of God's love, in this His nature has been fully revealed.

"Inscribed upon the cross we see

In shining letters, 'God is love.'"

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

God made Himself manifest in that great gift, and what light is this to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, who looked upon God as their foe, as some tyrannical being who only created them to crush them! Life, and light, and love are inseparable. The life is the light of men for in it is declared the love of God. "God is light," and "God is love."

We proceed no further with this side of the subject as it is ably dealt with in the following paper, but turn to that which is our purpose in this paper, namely the practical outflow of this life which has been given to us, and into which we have been called. The reception of this life is individual, as the Lord said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation but is passed from death unto life." (John v. 24). And the maintenance of the life must be individual also, and this is by feeding upon Christ who gave His flesh for the life of the world. His death is efficacious; His love is infinite; the expiation He has made is total, absolute, perfect. To appropriate that by faith brings us clear of all that separated us from God, and it becomes the food upon which the new life that is ours lives. But having eaten His flesh and drunk His blood, and finding these to be meat and drink indeed we dwell in Him and He in us. In Him is this new life, and all who have it are in Him; He is the centre of this new circle of divine life and binds it altogether in one. So that we must consider others who are there. We are in relationship with Him and with the Father, but with all others also who are in this sphere of blessing.

It is wonderful to see how when the light had fully shone in the world and the darkness rejected it, and men began to plot His death, the oneness of His own is brought into prominence. The first intimation of this occurs in chapter x., where He declares that He must give His life for the sheep that there might be one flock and one shepherd. Then in chapter xi. we learn that He must die that "He should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad." In chapter xiii. when Judas had gone out and He could look upon them as one in the life into which He brought them, He gives them the new commandment which should keep them in practical oneness. "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." His is the measure and manner of the love wherewith we who are in His life are to love each other, and so it will be as His life finds expression in us. We have been brought together into one flock, one family, one assembly - brethren of Christ, that this love might have occasion to develop and flow out one towards another. This could not be in isolation, and everything that divides the children of God one from another hinders the development and outflow of this love. Love binds us together, it is the flesh in its lust and pride, and the devil in his perpetual hatred of all who are of God that scatter and divide.

Coming to Paul's side of the truth we find that we are to "walk in love as Christ also hath loved us, and given Himself for us," but that simply means that the life that is ours now in Him is finding its normal expression. And the necessity for this amongst the saints of God is clearly set forth in 1 Cor. xiii. while the beauty of it is also disclosed for us. Love is of God. He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and this never fails.

In Colossians iii. we find this same life - for there is no other - showing itself in the saints as one body. "Christ is our life;" Hence we read:

Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; and whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him."

This is the character of the life we are to live for "the little while" that Christ is hid in the heavens, and so take His place in the darkness, blameless and harmless the sons of God, without rebuke, "in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world: holding forth the word of life." For Christ now, and like Him morally, because living in His life; with Him soon in His Father's glory, when we shall be altogether like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Then the purpose that was His as far as we are concerned, that brought Him forth into this world will be fully and for ever realized.

J. T. Mawson.

Love is of God.

Beloved let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."

There is no subject with which we occupy ourselves when we are together so much as love. When we approach God, we have to speak to Him continually about His love. If we seek to encourage one another in the knowledge of God, we have to speak of love, because God is love. We have no such thought of God naturally. We think, like the wicked servant, that He is hard and unkind. That was the thought we had in our unconverted days. What an awakening it is to our souls when we learn that God is love, when our eves have been opened, and we have been turned from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God, when the Holy Spirit has shed abroad in our hearts the love of God! What a marvellous light it is, the light of the perfect revelation of God by the Holy Spirit that He has given to us! We are partakers of the divine nature, because we love Him. The love that first loved us has got a response in our hearts. The Lord says, "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love to one another." Why? Because there never was any leader amongst men who taught love but Himself. There is no system of religion but Christianity which has love for its very life. No one lives to God who does not love Him. Peter says, "Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth unto unfeigned love of the brethren." That is the way it works out. The practical effect is love to the children of God. See, says the Apostle "that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently." He desires that we might be more in the enjoyment of that love, and that we might be able to express that love to one another. Paul says, "Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." (Eph. iv. 32.) How is it that he can speak to us in that way? Because in the second chapter of the epistle we are said to be quickened with the life that is in God. There is no life there anywhere but in God. "God who is rich in mercy for His great love wherewith He has loved us" has stepped into the realm of death, and "has quickened us together with Christ." Hence we are to be imitators of God, as dear children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us. John speaks a great deal about love. What was true in the Gospel in Christ is now true in the saints, as presented in the Epistle. He says, "He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself to walk even as He walked." How did He walk? He walked in love. Then he says, "Brethren, I write no new commandment, but an old commandment, which ye have heard from the beginning." Christ never altered the character of His teaching. He taught the same thing from the beginning to the end, and He is teaching the same thing to-day, so that we are asked to let that abide in us which we have heard from the beginning. The old commandment was that we should love one another. He says he does not write a new commandment and again he says he does write a new commandment. How is that explained? It is the new commandment when you come to the epistle. It is the old commandment in the Gospel, because in the Gospel it is only found in Christ; in the epistle it is found in us.

John would encourage us. He says, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God." All natural affections are of God. Natural love is of God, and in spite of the fall it has been preserved in the hearts of human beings, otherwise the world could not exist. But when he says, "love is of God," he meant it is His nature. It is divine love which has been manifested, the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, so that we love Him. Our love to Him, and to one another, is only just the faint springing up of that love that has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit of God. Love is of God, and he that loveth has God's nature. What does that mean? He is born of God. More than that. He knows God. We know men. We have no difficulty about that, because we are men, and we know what men are. We do not know what angels are, fallen or unfallen. We could not give any account of them. If we wanted to approach an angel, or get a favour from him, we should not know how to address him. We should not know how to affect him at all. We know how to approach men, and we know how to approach God. We know God. He that loveth is born of God. God is his Father. He is a child of God. God knows us perfectly, He knows all those that are His. He knows the one that loves, but the one that loves knows God. What a wonderful thing that we in the midst of this world of darkness, can say, "We know God." Not only do we know Him, but we know Him a very great deal better than we know ourselves. We sometimes think we know ourselves very well, but after all, most of us who are converted to God would have to say, "We never conceived the depths of evil that lay in the flesh as we do now that we have been brought to the knowledge of God." You cannot tell so well how things are in the darkness as you can in the light. We are brought out of darkness into God's marvellous light, and there we see things as they really are. I say our knowledge of God is greater than our knowledge of ourselves. It is only as we know God that we do know ourselves. It is a wonderful thing, but it could not be otherwise that our knowledge of God is always in advance of our knowledge of ourselves.

"In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him."

It is not a mere sentiment we have in our hearts. It is not anything we have conceived ourselves, some idea that may be baseless. It has had its most perfect manifestation. Naturally, we should put verse 10 before verse 9, and supposing one was preaching the gospel of the grace of God, it might be right to do so. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." When we are awakened to a knowledge of our sinfulness, it is that we want removing. We want our sins forgiven, but John, speaking of what divine life really consists in - because love is the nature of the life - says, "In this was manifested the love of God towards us, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him." It was not merely that He had compassion on our lost and ruined condition, but it is rather that God might have something out of us. We must be brought to God. He must have us. He must possess us, not only that He might have His own pleasure in meeting our deep need, but that we might live to Him. He would possess us in that way, because if He has got our affections He has got us. If you get a man's affections, you will get the man. If you get God's affections you get God, and if God gets hold of your affections, He gets hold of you. He sent His Son into the world that we might live through Him, and live to Him in a new life, in the life of Christ, who lived perfectly for Him. "In Him was life." The Jews thought it was in the law, and it would have been there for them, if they had been able to fulfil their obligations, but they were not, and instead of finding life in the law, they found death. Here is One in whom life is. They had thought it was found in the Scriptures, as the Lord says, but He tells them, "They testify of Me." The Scriptures pointed to Him as the One in whom life is. "But you will not come to Me, that you might have life," He had to say to them. In Him was life. The tree of life was here in this world when Jesus was here. God sent Him into the world that we might live through Him. There was the necessity of His death, but I am only stating what He was when He was here, irrespective of His death. He was the One in whom life was. As to whether it was available for men or not apart from His death, that is a different matter, but it was in Him. So He says in John vi., "I am the living bread that came down from heaven." He was the bread of God that came into the world, that a man might eat thereof and not die. We must begin by the appropriation of His death. He had to die in order that we might be able to appropriate Him, that He might be made available for us, but the object of God in sending Him into the world was that He might possess us wholly for Himself. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us." We do love Him now, but that is not where we are to see and know what love is. We are not to look at the saints to see love. We are to look at God. There you have the source of it. The love that saves comes down from heaven. It does not rise from our hearts to God; it comes down from God's heart to us. "He loves us," and it is in the death of Christ that the love of God is seen in all its greatness and glory. No creature can measure it, because no creature can measure the death of Christ. If you can measure what it was for the Eternal Son to lay aside His Godhead glory and come down into this world in humiliation, and become obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, then you would be able to measure the love of God. We could not possibly measure the death of Christ, because it is of infinite value, and God alone knows the value of it, but if we could measure it, we should be able to measure the greatness of His love. We can do neither, for the one is as great as the other.

Then he comes to the application of it. "Beloved, if God so loved us." What then? Naturally we would say that we ought to love Him, but it is not put that way here. "We ought also to love one another." Whom did God love? He loved us. He loved the brethren. What will that love do if it gets into my heart? It will do the same thing that it did in the heart of God. It will turn towards God's children. It does not say we ought to love God. The law said that. Here it says, "If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." That is our obligation, but is it a law of liberty? Every saint of God in the world is precious to our hearts. We may get under the power of the world, and the flesh may become dominant, so that this love may not be seen, but at the bottom of our hearts, and in the heart of every believer there is love to all the the children of God. But here love is practical. "Let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth." What is the good of secret love? "Open rebuke is better than secret love." What is the good if it lies only in my heart, and is not manifested towards anybody else? It is of no value to anybody. God's love was in deed and in truth. The commandments of God in the New Testament are infinitely beautiful, and most encouraging. Take for instance what the Lord says to Peter. Peter says, "How often shall my brother trespass against me, and I forgive him - until seven times?" The Lord says, "I say not until seven times, but until seventy times seven." There is no limit to our forgiveness of one another. Is that a tremendous demand upon us? No, it tells me that what God is seeking is to make Himself manifest in us. Hence, if He says there is to be no limit to my forgiveness of my brother, that means there is no limit to His forgiveness of me. I have only to act towards others as He has acted towards me. If we love one another, God is seen in us. We read in John 1, "No man hath seen God at any time." What is the answer to it? "The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." The answer to it in the Gospel was Jesus; the answer to it in the Epistle is the saints. "By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another." If we love one another practically what will be the effect of it? Everybody will say, "These people are disciples of Jesus." Why so? Because nobody ever taught it but Himself. They have been in the school of Christ. Every avenue in which the love of God has run in Christ will run in you and me. If we love one another the saints will get their share of that love. If we are going on with God the saints get it, and the world gets it. The world hears the Gospel, and we rejoice when the Gospel is preached. We help those who preach it, if we cannot preach it ourselves. What is the spring and fountain of all that? All these energies proceed from the nature of God, which we have, for God is love. The love is perfected in us, and there is nothing lacking. Wherever you go saint and sinner are met by the love of God, for "we have seen, and do testify, that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world."

"Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Christ, God dwelleth in Him, and he in God." But what is God? God is love. He dwells in love, and love dwells in Him. "He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him." Then we have, "Herein is, not our love, but love with us made perfect, that we may have boldness for the day of judgment." The love of God reached us when we were in our sins. When we believed the Gospel, that love was shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us, and nothing can separate us from it. It is with us day and night, and that love of God will keep step with us through our whole wilderness journey. It will never abandon us for one single moment. It will keep step with us right through until at last it will have its satisfaction in that day when we shall be changed into the likeness of Christ Himself. Then love will have its satisfaction. It began with us when we were sinners. It is always ours, and all its power is always at our disposal. When we are in the glory like Christ, then the love of God, which has been with us all the way through, will be perfectly satisfied. "Herein is love with us made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment." When the day of judgment comes, we shall be like Christ Himself, we shall be like the Judge. We have boldness for the day of judgment, because "As He is, so are we in this world." If we are before God in all that love and favour and grace that rests upon Him, if that is the love and favour that rests upon us, then we may be perfectly assured that when the day of judgment comes, we shall be like Him, because as He is, we are now. It is a marvellous statement. It may be very difficult for us to take it in, but there it is. Is He in the love of God? So are we. We are supposed to know it now. We do know it in a way. By and by the world will know it. When we appear in the same glory as Christ, the world will say, "After all what was preached here was true. The Father sent the Son, and He has loved those people as He loved His own Son." "That the world may know that Thou hast sent Me, and hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me." Do we believe that we are treated by God exactly as Christ would be treated in the same circumstances? It is a marvellous thought. We need to carry it really to the Lord to have it made good in our souls. We hear these things so often that our familiarity with them seems almost to breed contempt. They have not the power over our souls that they ought to have, or as perhaps they had the first time we heard them. They ought to have infinitely more power over us every time we hear them, but we are such foolish things, and so wayward. We get so occupied with seen things, that we do not live in the power of these unseen things.

There is no fear in love - no terror. Perfect love casteth out fear. The perfect love of God gets in, and fear has to take its flight. The love of God casts out fear. "We love Him, because He first loved us." When we did not love Him at all, when there was not one spark of love in our hearts towards Him, He loved us with all His heart. He loved us with all His heart when we hated Him with all our hearts. That is the thing that will get right into our souls that it may be the life of our being. Then we will go through this world as different people to that we would go through it if we had not it in our hearts. He goes on to say, "If a man say, I love God, and hate his brother, he is a liar." John does not mince matters. He that loveth not his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? If I see God in a man, if I see the divine nature there, and my heart does not go out to him, you may be quite sure it does not go out to God. If a man did not love Christ, who, perfectly manifested God upon earth, it only proved he did not love God. Your brother is the one who has the divine nature. You see it in him, and if you do not love Him in your brother, you will not love Him in Christ. If you do not love Him in Christ, you will not love Him in heaven. This is the commandment, that he who loves God, love his brother also. It is not a grievous commandment. It is not a commandment of which we are afraid. It is not a commandment we do not wish to obey, or to which we would close our ears. It is a commandment we love to obey, if we only keep ourselves in the enjoyment of that love, and the power of God's Holy Spirit, then the saints will get all the benefit of that love, and we will be greatly blessed ourselves, for "If a man love Me, be will keep My words: and My Father will love him, and we will come unto Him, and make our abode with him."

James Boyd.

Joint Partakers of God's Promise.

In connection with the truth of "the mystery" the thought of the oneness of all the saints in Christ is strikingly prominent. In Ephesians iii. it is specially conspicuous, for we are told there, that the mystery which was previously hidden, but now made known, reveals that all are "(1) joint heirs and (2) a joint body and (3) joint partakers of God's promise in Christ Jesus by the glad tidings" (6). This verse shows that all the saints, according to the mind of God, are one collectively as "joint heirs," one corporately as "a joint body," and one vitally as "joint partakers of His promise in Christ Jesus." In all three aspects oneness is insisted upon by the Spirit of God in relation to the mystery concerning Christ and the assembly.

In our papers on this most important subject, we spoke of the central fact of the mystery, - the corporate aspect, and of the riches of the glory of it. We then considered the primary part of this great truth, - that of joint heirship. The third and final fact now remains to come before us. May God graciously help us in our meditation upon it. His promise in Christ Jesus, of which the beloved saints of God are joint partakers by means of the gospel of His grace, must be exceedingly blessed, for it is hall-marked by divine permanence and perfection, as everything in this relation connected with Christ and the assembly is, for it is according to His eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The dewy loveliness of it must abide in all the freshness of youth eternally. The bud, the blossom, the beauty, the bloom and the fruitful benefits may disclose their varied treasures, yet all develops and enlarges from the same vitality already participated in from the beginning. That handsome Prince of noble mien and generous mind, has still the life-blood flowing in his veins of which he partook when a babe. Right and admirable growth there has been, but potentially all was there from the first. It has but found the suitable and essential means of expressing itself by proper stages of growth. Fundamentally the original principle remains the same however, and without it the development were impossible. Of our blessed Lord, the King of glory, the Originator of life, it is said, "In the beauty of holiness from the womb of the morning, Thou hast the dew of Thy youth." In Him it abides in eternal perfection; and of His bride, the assembly, it is said, after sharing in His Kingdom glory for a thousand years, - she comes "as a bride adorned for her husband." In lasting freshness and responsive love she is still beautiful and pleasing to Him whose glory she is. Like her beloved Bridegroom she retains eternally the dewy loveliness of youth, along with all that she has gained since He first made her His.

The "Joint Partakers."

The redeemed from amongst the Jews and from amongst the nations are the joint partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus, and the gospel is the means by which they are called into it. Unlike Israel of old, who partook of special privileges through their natural birth as belonging to that nation, the rich blessings of the mystery are ours now through the call of God in the glad tidings of His grace; for the "preaching" is "according to the revelation of the mystery, as to which silence was kept in the times of the ages" (Rom. xvi. 25). It is in Christ Jesus we jointly partake of the precious promise of God. This involves a new standing for us altogether outside of Judaism and the distant ground on which the nations stood, having "become nigh" in Christ Jesus by His blood. A new state is also ours, for "if any one be in Christ there is a new creation, the old things have passed away; behold all things have become new: and all things are of God Who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ." The old standing and the old state have no place there, "for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation."

We are told in Ephesians 2 that Christ has broken down the middle wall of enclosure between Jews and Gentiles, making both one, and becoming Himself the bond and peace of the joint partakers. The old enmity which had existed between them He has annulled in His flesh, reconciling both to God in one body by the cross, where the enmity was slain when He died for all. The Jew spirit however still asserts itself where this truth has not been learned experimentally. Where new creation in Christ Jesus is not known in power, religious pride, pettiness and rancour appear. So also does the Gentile love of lawlessness with impatient and impetuous energy show itself insubject to God's order. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the truth should be known in experimental power by the joint partakers of the promise of God; for it is said in regard to the new creation in Christ, "As many as walk by this rule, peace upon them and mercy" (Gal. vi. 16). They are created into one new man in Him where He is our peace, therefore oneness is to be known by the joint partakers in gracious reality: unity will necessarily be sought in a practical way, according to the instincts of the new nature which is ours, and the one Spirit who indwells all, for none of us are independent of the other joint partakers. In Ephesians iv. 3 we are exhorted, because of contrary influences which are not of the Spirit nor of the new man, to use diligence to keep "the unity of the Spirit," - in a practical manner, - "in the uniting bond of peace." Only the real are embraced in this unity, and only the true joint partakers can respond truly to the exhortation. Others may appear to do so, but it is in the very nature of the joint partakers to ever seek practical unity according to the truth. Nor will their desires remain unanswered, for at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ all will be completely assembled to Him.

Judah and Israel were held together in practical oneness under David, the anointed of God, as joint partakers of the blessings secured in Him for the nation; but even in His days the divisive spirit showed itself in "a man of Belial." "He blew a trumpet, and said, We have no part in David, neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: every man to his tents, O Israel" (2 Sam. xx. 1). The seed was sown that day: and though the evil work was stayed there and then, nevertheless it bore its bad fruit long after, for we read in Rehoboam's reign that the people answered the king, saying "What portion have we in David? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O Israel: now see to thine own house, David" (1 Kings xii. 16). So Israel departed, and the break between Judah and Israel was made. In contrast to this, the true joint-heirs surely say, All our portion is in Christ Jesus as also is our inheritance eternally, let us abide in Him! We are all joint partakers of God's promise in Christ Jesus by the gospel.

God's Promise.

There are many promises of God, and we are told that they are all confirmed and established in Christ, the Son of God; - "for whatever promises of God there are, in Him is the yea, and in Him is the amen, for glory to God by us" (2 Cor. i. 20); but it is a special promise which is in view in the truth of the mystery, not "promises," but a specific, distinct "promise." It is not plural, but singular. Just as in Eph. iii. 11 we read of "the purpose" which centres in Christ, so this is also something distinctive. It has the stamp of eternity upon it as all the essentials of the mystery have. The inheritance of the joint heirs is eternal, the body of which we are joint members is eternal, and the promise in Christ Jesus is likewise. It was given before the ages of time: it will endure beyond the ages of time: but it is ours in Christ Jesus now, the "Spirit of promise" being already given to us; and He is the power by which divine realities are experimentally enjoyed.

The law proposed life for man, but it was unable either to give life or secure righteousness from man in the flesh. We are told, "It was weak through the flesh" though in itself "holy, just and good." Do and live, it said to the sinner of Adam's race; but the sinner could not do, therefore the holy law of God could only condemn him, and "the commandment which was for life, was found," says the apostle, as to himself, "to be unto death" (Rom vii. 10). Had there been a law which was able to give life, "then indeed righteousness were on the principle of law" (Gal. iii. 21); but before the law, yea, "before the ages of time" God had promised life for man. That promise is in Christ Jesus, therefore He must come where we were to free us from sin and death, that we might have life in Him. The law, as we have seen, said, Do and live. The Lord Jesus, when we could do nothing, died that we might live, - died that the promise might be ours actually, - died that we might be joint-partakers of it in Him. How great the grace of God to give such a promise! How wonderful the love that brought His beloved Son to die to secure it for us! How marvellous the wisdom that devised the plan! All glory to God.

It is of promise, therefore it is not of law; and yet the fact of it being mentioned in connection with the law indicates what was in the thoughts of God for us; so also did the first tree which is named distinctively in Scripture - "the tree of life!" This was not forbidden like the other tree, but after man fell he was governmentally placed beyond its reach, and the giving of the law, rightly understood, brought home to man, his sinfulness and his own incapability to obtain eternal life. He was shut up to God, and He found a way for us to "partake" of that which was in His heart for us before the world was, through the death of His Son; so that He could say, of the one who appropriated His death in faith, life was his, - "He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life."

This life in all its infinite preciousness knows no decay or ending. Promised before the ages of time, it abides beyond the glorious days of the Kingdom and dominion of the Son of Man; far beyond the days of millennial magnificence, right on through the ineffable blessedness of the eternal state when God is all in all. Yet even now it is ours in Christ Jesus. It is ours by the grace of God. It is ours by the gift of God: If "the wages of sin is death" - rightly and justly - nevertheless, "the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. vi. 23). That gift cannot be measured; it is beyond every human estimate or definition, but thanks be to God, it is ours through the act of divine favour.

We are told in Ephesians iv. 17-19 of those who are alienated from it all, - "estranged from the life of God." What a contrast they are to the joint partakers of God's promise! They walk in the vanity of their mind, - and what foolish vanity it is! The seat of all true balance in man is submerged in darkness, - "being darkened in understanding." Ignorance of all that is right before God and man enslaves them, although they may profess to be wise. Grossness and hardness of heart leads them to "cast off" every refined and even proper natural feeling; and as a result they abandon themselves to lasciviousness, while unsatisfied lust leads them more eagerly to work all manner of uncleanness and greed, for such are still joint partakers of the life of "the old man which corrupts itself according to the deceitful lusts." The joint partakers of the mystery have put off the old man and put on the new, and in contrast to the other, it is created in "truthful righteousness and holiness." Life according to God is known here. His promise is realized here. His gift is enjoyed here. The life which is in Christ Jesus is partaken of by the saints of God. Therefore to abide in Christ is all important for us, and to let the word of the glad tidings which called us into it abide unspoiled in us; for "if that which ye have heard from the beginning abides in you, ye also shall abide in the Son and in the Father. "And this is the promise which He promised us, eternal life" (1 John. ii 25).

"In Christ Jesus."

In two other passages the Spirit of God speaks through Paul of this promise in Christ Jesus besides that which we have considered in Ephesians iii. 6. The eternal character and nature of it are shown in both (2 Tim. 1; Titus 1); and in each scripture the glad tidings are also mentioned as the means of its being made known to us, according to the commandment of our Saviour God. In the first, when failure was spreading widely amongst those who professed the faith of Christ, the apostle falls back upon the changeless promise of life, and holds even his service "according to the promise of life, the life which is in Christ Jesus." Other things may alter and men may fail, but this abides, for it is ours in Christ Jesus, as God Himself promised. It is termed, "The promise."

The apostle seeks to strengthen Timothy in his trying path by this truth. Seven times he speaks of what is "in Christ Jesus" in this second letter. The truth of Ephesians is specially indicated. All is secure eternally in Him he seems to say, therefore be encouraged, - "be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus." Even the glad tidings which call us into these rich blessings were getting into disrepute, but Paul exhorts him to "suffer evil along with the gospel according to the power of God" and then with gracious and tender thoughtfulness he reminds him that He "has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages of time, but has been made manifest now by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who has annulled death, and brought to light life and incorruptibility by the glad tidings." How cheering and stimulating is all this! In Christ Jesus all is ours and all is secure eternally, and the gospel of divine grace makes known the triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ over death and corruption for man, so that life and incorruptibility might be now his through faith in Him.

In Titus i. the Holy Spirit adds, in regard to the promise of eternal life, that the One who made the promise could not fail of its accomplishment in regard to the elect, for He says, God "cannot lie."

What a comforting limitation of holy perfection is this! and then the eternal life for which we have the sure and certain hope to enter upon in all its fulness at the return of our Lord Jesus Christ is already manifested in the word of the proclamation of the gospel, and that, as we are told in Titus i. and Romans xvi. 26, "according to the commandment of the everlasting God."

The life therefore is ours now in Christ Jesus. It is "the gift of God" in Him to us (Rom. vi. 23). There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and there is no separation from the love of God which is in Him (Rom. viii. 1-28). Divine grace and power have set us, through Christ's death and resurrection, where the eternal promise is already the portion of the joint partakers. In view of all that God has done for them in and through Him they have good reason to "boast in Christ Jesus," and to join with the apostle when he says "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ" (Eph. i. 3). It is of God that we are in Christ Jesus for His everlasting glory and our present and eternal blessing.

"By the Gospel."

The means by which we have been called into this is the gospel. It is the instrument which God has used. He has called us in His grace by the glad tidings, and He has saved us. Our works had no place in the matter, for the very best works done by man out of Christ are called by the Spirit "dead works." No deeds of ours could have given us a new standing in Christ Jesus before God, in a new and living state; but having heard the Word of the glad tidings, and received it in faith, we "passed out of death into life." Aaron's family might enjoy a place of special nearness to Jehovah through their natural birth, but this has no place in connection with the mystery of Christ and the assembly. Not by natural birth or family privileges but by the gospel are we brought into these vital realities. "In Christ Jesus ye who were once afar off are become nigh by the blood of Christ."

The gospel is that which God uses in the power of the Spirit. Of old, God's earthly people entered into possession of the land by conquest, but that of which we speak is ours through no prowess of our own. It is by the divine and effectual call of the glad tidings which we have believed. Truly the experimental and practical enjoyment of our rich possession involves energy on our side, but that is another matter. Official appointments gave men under the old covenant great advantages, but this does not count here. The apostle of life, John, it is striking to notice, does not speak of these things. He does not even call himself "an apostle."

How wonderful indeed are the glad tidings of the grace of God to-day! They call us into blessings of the most exalted character - blessings that are abiding — eternal!

They call us into a fellowship which is above every other known in heaven or earth by the favoured of God, - "the fellowship of God's Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." They give us a hope which is greater than any other, - conformity to the image of God's Son in heavenly glory, "the hope of the gospel." Little wonder then, when failure abounds on all hands, that these glad tidings are attacked so severely. Nevertheless, God's Spirit is here, and will maintain the preaching of the word in divine power till the end, - "the Word of God is not bound;" with royal grace it hastens onward to complete its glorious mission; nor will it cease to do so until the last of the joint partakers of God's promise in Christ Jesus according to the mystery receives its glorious message. We may well therefore, like the Philippians of old, as fellow partakers of the benefits of the glad tidings, be found "labouring together in the same conflict with faith of the gospel"; "standing firm" in "one spirit" and with "one soul"; watching at the same time that we conduct ourselves "worthy of the glad tidings of the Christ;" and showing practical fellowship with those who faithfully proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ.

Soon the message of grace will have accomplished its task, and all who share in the eternal riches of the mystery will be glorified with the Head of the assembly. His fellow heirs and brethren, the fellow members of His body, the assembly, and the fellow partakers of the promise in Him will be all together then as one with Himself where He is! The promise given before the ages of time will be known in all its actual fulness; the life manifested in Him when here on earth will be enjoyed in suitable and glorious surroundings then; the eternal life for which we hope, but which is ours now by God's gift, will be entered upon unhinderedly; the oneness of those who are joint partakers now will be seen in a glorious unity; and then "when Christ who is our life shall appear," we also shall shine forth with Him in splendour and glory. Lord Jesus, hasten that day! We long for its brightness and beauty, and, above all to see Thee, its Centre, and its Sun.

"Lord, haste that day of cloudless ray, -

That prospect bright unfailing;

When all shall shine in light divine

And glory never fading."

H. J. Vine.

Living Stones and Priests.

1 Peter ii. 4-9.

Perhaps there is no form of evil we so easily slip into as that of clericalism. I do not mean elders or deacons, who were from the beginning, appointed by the apostles, or by men like Timothy or Titus who were commissioned by the apostles to do this (Acts vi. 3; Titus i. 8). These cannot be appointed to-day, for we have neither apostles nor their delegates, but where we find men who have the qualifications for such offices, it is our privilege to recognize them. This is nothing but godly church order; but to attempt to put them into office is another matter.

There are two reasons for the insidious way in which clericalism has crept into the church of God, and for the hold it has got upon His people. One is that saints are so busily engaged with the things of this world that when they come together they feel themselves unable to take up the service of the sanctuary, and they are relieved if they can find anyone willing to approach God on their behalf. Another reason is the desire on the part of some to occupy a position of honour, and to be of some importance in the assembly of God; and this is considered by them adequate compensation for the extra burden by this means heaped upon their shoulders. This soon develops into a paid ministry, a priesthood, and popery. Such are, if you believe them, the clergy (Greek kleros). They are lords over God's kleron, and monopolize the name that rightly belongs to all believers.

All believers, whoever they may be, are the lot, heritage, kleros, of God, separated to Him out of this world, purchased by the precious blood of His own Son, born of God, possessing His life and nature, priests holy, and priests royal, and all these things are as true of the babe in Christ, as they were of the apostle himself, for this we are taught in the first and second chapters of this epistle.

And all these things were true of those believers whom Peter here addresses as "newborn babes." They had not made great progress in the knowledge of God, but they were the fruit of His testimony, as rendered in this evil world. Every one of them had a living link with the living God; for His word had got into their hearts, and had taken deep root there; and the word when it gets rooted in the heart, is the link between the soul and God. It was this, from Abel down to this present day, and it shall be while this world lasts, for there can be no other link with God. It is the revelation of His grace and love, the light of the knowledge of Himself in the heart of the believer. It is the incorruptible seed, and it lives and abides for ever. Where that seed is, there is the vital spark of divine life; and where it is not, there is moral death. The word of truth is that by which we are born again (James i. 19); and the word of truth is the gospel of our salvation (Eph. i. 13).

Now the gospel is that which has turned us to the Lord, He whom the Spirit of God here calls "a Living Stone," a stone rejected of men, but chosen of God, and precious. We have an early intimation of this in Matt. xvi. 13-18, where Peter is said to confess Jesus as the Son of the living God. This was a definite revelation of the glory of His person made to Peter by the Father; and our Lord says "Upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." This power of life that was in Him was manifested in His resurrection: He could not be bound by the cords of death. By dying He annulled death, and by the same act He broke the might of him who ruled over man, holding him in bondage by the fear of that which was the expression of the judgment to which man was liable on account of sin.

Now to this Living Stone we come. The believer is a living stone by the life-giving power of Christ. He is of the same nature as the rock upon which this glorious edifice is being built. Everything in this building is of the same nature, from the foundation to the top stone. The stones are instinct with the life of the Son of God, and by Him are they put in their places, and the whole building is growing to a holy temple in the Lord (Eph. ii. 21). Here the hand of man does not appear. Here can enter nothing that defiles. The Lord Himself is the builder, and therefore is everything secure. I have no doubt that when it is revealed in the day of the glory of Christ, it will be seen to be the Holy City, that comes down out of heaven, having the glory of God. Then the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and the nations of them that are saved shall walk in the light of it.

It is being builded of living stones; not like the temple that Solomon built, which, though the wonder of the world, was built of stones cut out of the natural rock; all lifeless material; this house is instinct with the life of the Son of the living God.

But the stones that compose the building are the priests who offer the sacrifices. Every stone in the building is a priest and qualified to offer sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. But as the building is a spiritual house, so are the sacrifices spiritual. The temple in the past dispensation was a material house, and the priests were a carnal priesthood, and the sacrifices were of a carnal order also. Here everything is spiritual, everything divine, everything pulsating with the life of Christ. Every stone in the building is radiant with the love of God. The house is resplendent with His grace, His righteousness, His holiness, His faithfulness, His truth. The temple built by Solomon was glorious, but the temple being built by the greater than Solomon has a glory that excelleth.

And the priests are the stones that compose the building, and they are the aggregate of the redeemed of this dispensation. They have boldness to enter into the holiest. They can draw near, not at stated times only, but at all times. And their sacrifices are spiritual. They draw near to present Christ to God. As the Israelite brought his offering to God, whatever it may have been, it was typical of Christ, so does the priest of God in this dispensation draw near to God with Christ upon his lips, to tell Him what He has learned of Him. He may be but a babe in Christ, and may have as yet learned little of the glories of his Saviour, but such a sacrifice is ever welcome to God. His offering may be small, like two young pigeons in the old order, but it is acceptable to God, because it is Christ. He may have learned much about His Redeemer, and may be able to present that which in the past might be represented by a bullock, but it is no more acceptable than the smallest presentation of Christ. A man rich in faith brings a large offering, and a poor man brings a small offering, but both speak in the ears of God what they know of the same Person, and both are acceptable, for Christ is precious to God, and also, through grace, to us. And this priestly service is to go on continually, not only when we come together, and not only when we retire into our chamber and shut the door, but at all times, and in all places. We can always draw near to God, and we shall always find a welcome.

There is another character of priestly service spoken of in verse 9, that is, a royal or kingly, priesthood. We are kings as well as priests. Melchisedec was both, and so is our Lord and Saviour, Jesus. We also are both, and in the meantime, before the day of reigning comes, we exercise this priestly service by showing forth the virtues of Him that called us out of darkness into His marvellous light. We are to come out down here in the heavenly characteristics of Christ. These are to be displayed before the men of this world. On the one hand, as holy priests we present Him to God; and on the other hand, as kingly priests we present Him to the world. With God this meets with acceptance, but with the man of this world it meets with utter rejection, and awakes persecution from the haters of Jesus. We have been called out of darkness into His marvellous light, and in His light we are to shine in this dark world. But the light is always hated, and therefore we are not disappointed if we meet with the same kind of opposition that fell to the lot of our Lord, for He has said that if they hated Him, they would hate us also. But next to being saved, to suffer a little for Christ is the greatest favour He could confer upon us.

May we be thankful for our privileges.

James Boyd.

"Behold! I and the Children."

Many years ago, when I was but young in the faith of Christ, I was crossing the Atlantic to preach, by the help of God, the gospel which was precious to my own soul, and the saving value of which I greatly desired others to know; feeling that, be the nation what it might, it consisted of but two classes, the saved and the unsaved - "the children of God" and "the children of the wicked one" - the "wheat and the tares," spoken of by the Lord in Matt. 13.

I longed earnestly that all might be saved, might taste of the grace of God, and become His happy and holy children, and as I was meditating on the blessedness of their relationships, I began to compare it with other relations in which the children of God stand toward Him.

Children they are to begin with: they are also saints; then we find sheep of Christ and members of His body, and also the house of God, composed now, as it is, of living stones. That is, we have a family, a flock, a body, and a house, where, indeed, in the fullest sense, all is, or should be, vital. The first of our two classes - the saved, may, in the days of Christianity, be regarded as consisting of these four component parts; that is, each saint is a child of God, a sheep of Christ, a part of the house and a member of the body of Christ, and each has the privilege and the responsibility of these varied relationships. Let us consider that of the family.

First, the whole human race is (we read in Acts xvii.) the offspring of God "who hath made of one blood all nations of men." That is, God is Creator, and, in a secondary sense, Father of the whole family. Man was made of the dust and God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. "The first man is of the earth (the dust) earthy" (1 Cor. xv.) and to dust he returns. We do not read of any such infusion of breath into the nostrils of lower animals. Special attention was given to man as the destined head of creation. Hence when we reach the end of the long genealogical tree of Luke iii. we read the words: - "Adam which was the son of God," or more correctly: - "Adam which was of God." Mark these words; man came directly and immediately from God. Just as Seth was "of Adam," so Adam was "of God." The degrading theory of evolution from a lower animal - a gorilla, an ape or a toad, has no place here, nor should it have in the conception of him who was created in the image and likeness of God.

No, Adam, man, was "of God." That was his origin; and, though fallen and marred in every way by sin, he still retains that image. We are low enough morally in all conscience, let us not lower ourselves further. Our origin was high - inferior only to angels, let us endeavour to realize it, and act more worthily of it.

Second. Children. This signifies relationship. To be a child there must be birth. There is no such relationship in mere adoption - no consanguinity, no participation in nature or life. Affection there may be, but that is all. Hence, God's children must be "born of God." This alone forms the family. Let no one presume to think, as alas, so many do to-day, that they are the children of God who have never been "born again," nor "taught of God," nor drawn to Christ by the Father - Let no mistake be made here. You cannot claim God as Father, nor truly address Him as such, unless you are His child. We are not children of God by creation but by grace; and, in this view, the popular idea of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man is an absolute delusion and a most mischievous error. The chasm existing between the children of God and those of the wicked one cannot be bridged by the efforts of statesmen, politicians, philanthropists or dreamers. Such well-meant efforts are a mere waste of time. There must be a change of nature effected by the Spirit of God - a new birth. This dream of the brotherhood of man was little understood by the first two brothers that ever lived, nor has the spirit of it developed during the intervening centuries, as the merciless cruelties of recent wars declare.

But the family of God, nevertheless exists. The precious relation between God and man as Father and child, that are made such by the grace of that Father, the cleansing death of the Son, and the work of the Spirit within - this is a fact placed beyond all dispute, and made visible in the life and conduct of all those who are commanded to be "imitators of God as dear children." They love one another. This did not Cain, who, in a passion of jealousy slew his brother, proving that he, spite of his offering, was "of that wicked one," while Abel in virtue of his requisite offering, obtained witness thereby that he was righteous, and therefore on the divine side of the chasm. He was clearly a child of God.

The children of God have His nature, and that nature must express itself. They are "taught of God to love one another," and that not merely in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth; and this love is the strongest proof of their relationships with God. Oh! that the love of the 1st Christian century were but half as strong in the 20th; still thank God, spite of the abounding iniquity of the day, we do love one another, and desire the good and blessing of the whole family of God. We "love as brethren." The family is the circle and sphere of love. And how? "For God is love" - How much might be written on this fairest feature in the divine family! The Apostle John dwells on it continually, his great theme being the display of the nature of God in love, first in His Son and then in the family: whilst giving equal force to the exhibition of His character in righteousness. He states that "God is love," and also that "God is light."

How can you explain the mystery of a man, for the first quarter or half of his life, being a God-hater and a persecutor of His children, like Saul of Tarsus, and then, for the rest of it, being a lover of God and of His people. It is a miracle. Yes, but it is the miracle of new birth. It is the mighty moral change that transfers the man from being a child of the wicked one to that of a child of God, and, thank God, such a miracle is not uncommon - it is God's work. Is this change necessary for the enjoyment of future blessings? It is absolutely necessary. Heaven would be a positive and intolerable hell to a child of the wicked one. He would (if he could enter) find not one element congenial to his nature or taste. He hated God and His holy ways on earth; nor could he love them in heaven. Oh! it is well and happy even now to be a child of such a God and Father, but what will it be, soon and forever, in yonder house of love and light and glory - all secured for us by the death and resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Third - "Sons of God." We need not treat of angels, who are so-called in one or two passages, seeing that they do not belong to the race of man; but, while the relation of children flows from the nature of God by whom they were begotten, the position and rank of sons is given them on account of the Spirit of His Son who now dwells within them - now - in these days of Christianity and the presence of the Holy Ghost on earth. The children are raised from a condition of non-age (minors) to that of full-age (majority) as we read in Gal. iv. They can cry by that Spirit, "Abba Father" after the pattern of the Son of God Himself when in the dark shades of Gethsemane.

"If children then heirs - heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ," true, but note the inevitable consequence: - "if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be glorified together" (Rom. viii. 17). Co-heirships in glory means companionship in suffering and testimony till the glory itself shall come, and then the whole blood-bought family, in all its members, shall be "conformed to the image of the Son that He may be the firstborn among many brethren," then shall He say: - "Behold I and the children which God hath given Me" - all are in the same relation - "My Father and your Father," albeit He and they - the "I" and the children given to Him - differ so widely. What a family when all shall resemble, the Son of God - conformed to His image - He the chief foremost - most glorious! What a family when all shall be in the Father's house - at home - in the presence of Father, Son and Spirit; where evil, sorrow, death and Satan are displaced for ever by good and holiness and joy and life divine!

"Where deceiver never can enter,

Sin-soiled feet have never trod,

Free - our peaceful feet may venture

In the Paradise of God."

J. Wilson Smith.

Paul and the Mystery.

It was as a prisoner at Rome that Paul wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians. Some say that it was a circular letter: whether it was so or not is of secondary importance, its great interest to us is that in it we have the fullest opening out of the great mystery CHRIST AND THE CHURCH. If Israel, God's earthly people, were once the centre of all His ways here, now, the church, the body of Christ, is infinitely more so. The Apostle, severed from every link that would connect him with Israel, is now conducted by the Spirit to apprehend fully, and in practical detail, the secret of God, which had been kept secret from the foundation of the world. Cut off from everything he valued on earth, he can now contemplate in a cloudless atmosphere the full beauty and grandeur of the great mystery.

There are two great things peculiar to the mystery: one is that we all - Jew and Gentile - are raised together and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ; the first thing is that we are heavenly; and the second is, that in the same power which raised Christ up we are raised up. That is a power entirely outside and beyond everything of man; and resulting from it, there should be, because of this power working IN us, a growing up to Him, the Head in all things; and this with absolute and decided victory over all the power of the devil. So that there is not only the height to which we are raised out of all here, but the immense moral superiority in which all are placed now on earth, the very place in which we were alienated from God. We are brought to the greatest heights (for God hath made us to sit together in heavenly places in Christ, Eph. ii. 6), by the greatest power, (His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, Eph. i. 19, 20), and because we are heavenly, we are competent to be descriptive here of Christ, from the highest circle, the assembly, down through the various relationships of life to the very humblest conceivable, the condition of a slave, and at the same time, superior to the wiles and the power of the devil. This the latter part of the Epistle brings out.

How entranced the Apostle must have been as all this by the Spirit came before him with inspired words. Surely he would justify God as to all the discipline he had been subjected to, in order to make him a vessel fit to impart the greatest communication ever made to a man. We little understand all the pains, as I might say, which the Lord takes with us to render us in any measure suited for His work.

J. B. Stoney.

"The Glory of God and Jesus."

"But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7: 55).

"The glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God", and a man upon earth full of the Holy Ghost, unafraid of that glory and in living union with the Man exalted there - this was the revelation of an entirely new order of things, a heavenly order of things, which can only be known on earth by the Holy Ghost who has come from that glory. Let us diligently seek to understand this - and it is only by the teaching of the Holy Ghost that we can understand it - then we shall understand Paul's gospel and "the mystery" of it (see Eph. 6: 19; Col. 1: 25-27).

The truth of the assembly, the body of Christ upon earth, really commences with this that Stephen saw. His eyes were turned away from the world; he probably never was held by the gross things in it, but he had had his part in the religious side of it; but now we see him separated from it, the temple, the priests, the learned leaders of the Jewish system, all have faded from his view; even an earthly kingdom with the divine Messiah at its head is surpassed and entirely eclipsed by that which now enthralls him - the glory of God, and a Man at the right hand of God. This wonderful revelation is the more arresting in that the Man who could stand at God's right hand, in the presence of that glory before which the highest angels fall prostrate with covered faces, was the One whom the world had judged to be only worthy of a malefactor's cross, but it is not that which we wish to emphasize here. It is the fact of the glory of God and Man being in absolute consonance. We know that that Man was "Christ, who is over all, God blessed for ever" (Rom. 9: 5), but that is not the point of this passage. The Lord is spoken of by His personal human name. It was JESUS whom Stephen saw, the One who was born in the manger at Bethlehem, who died upon the cross of Calvary, who was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, and who had ascended bodily to that glory. He was and is for ever absolutely agreeable to that glory, nay, altogether necessary to it, and that this might be known the heavens were opened, and Stephen, full of the Holy Ghost, saw by the power of the Spirit that to which he had to bear witness ere he died, and that which was to be the beginning and body of all Paul's ministry. The glory of God has found a Man; apart from this the purpose of the glory in regard to men could never have been fulfilled, and itself must have remained hidden from the universe for ever. That Man is Jesus, who loved us and died for our sins, and consequently we cannot be indifferent to this great fact. Our hearts are glad because of what this means for our Saviour; we have often considered Him as the despised and rejected of men, "the shame of the cross and Jesus" we often think of together, but now it is "the glory of God and Jesus"; we cannot but be glad and rejoice as we consider this.

This is only one side of the new order of things which here comes to light, and yet we must dwell further upon it, for everything takes character from it. We must not confine our thoughts of the glory of God to the place of exaltation into which Jesus has gone, that is described as "the right hand of God"; there is much more in the expression than the thought of locality. It is the shining out of what God is in His very nature. The expression has its own special significance. Moses desired to see the glory of God, but the time had not then come for it, though God gave to His servant a partial revelation of it, proclaiming His name as merciful and gracious.

These two qualities are an integral part of that glory, as the prominent place that they occupy in the Epistle to the Ephesians proves; but the glory of God - the full display of His nature and ways - could not be revealed until He had a Man in whom it could shine forth and who could maintain it in all its radiance, undimmed and untarnished by any failure for ever. That God has secured this now is proved beyond doubt by the fact that He has thrown open the heavens and shown to us "the glory of God and Jesus".

The other side of this new order is more surprising and, perhaps, more difficult to grasp, but just as real and true. It is that the Holy Ghost has come down from the exalted Man, our Lord, bringing with Him the full knowledge of the glory of God, for He is the Spirit of that glory, and that He now indwells believers on the earth and unites them in a vital union with Christ who is exalted at the right hand of God. Stephen is a pattern of this, for he was not only a witness to what his divinely-anointed eyes beheld, but he became descriptive of Christ in the midst of the most adverse circumstances. It was not in the fact that his face shone like an angel's that he was descriptive of Christ, for the glory of an angel is not the glory of God, and his face shone in this manner before he looked up steadfastly into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus; but it was in that most wonderful grace that made him pray with his last breath, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge". Thus was the life of Jesus made manifest in his mortal flesh. But this could not have been had he not been a member of the body of Christ, and he could not have been that had not the Holy Spirit come from Christ to make him so. What else but Christ, morally, could the Holy Ghost bring from heaven? Nothing. What other business has He but the displacement of self and the forming of Christ in the lives of those whom He indwells? None. And Stephen is the pattern of it. In him we see a man upon earth brought into perfect accord with the glory of God, and this not only in the fact that the glory of God and Jesus filled his eyes objectively, but that the life of Jesus was formed in Him subjectively, and manifested itself practically in the very world out of which Jesus had been cast.

Stephen may have been an amiable man or the reverse, it matters not; what he may have been naturally had no place here; he was full of the Holy Ghost, and Stephen was displaced and Christ shone out. "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Beholding the glory of the Lord he was transfigured into the same image.

But the Holy Spirit who filled Stephen did not dwell exclusively in him. He dwelt in Stephen because he was a member of the body of Christ on earth, and every believer in the exalted Lord Jesus is equally a member of the body of Christ; and, consequently, the Holy Ghost dwells in each and all. And the body is to be descriptive of Christ. This is the great theme of the Epistle to the Colossians, and to this end we who "were sometime alienated and enemies in our minds by wicked works, now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present us holy and unblameable and unreproveable in His sight" (Col. 1. 21, 22), i.e., in the presence of that glory we are as Christ is, for we are part of Him, and He is in us as His members, and consequently we are to be as He is in the place where He is not. Nothing in which men can boast or contribute can help the body of Christ. The best that man can produce belongs to the world that is passing away, for the glory of man is as the flower of the field. But the assembly, which is His body, has its origin in and takes its character from the glory of God; the Man who is entirely agreeable to that glory is its Head and life; and the Holy Ghost who has come from that glory is its unwearied power. And we are looking for the glorious day when the work of the Holy Ghost in the Church will be finished, and when it, as the holy city, shall descend out of heaven from God, having the glory of God (Rev. 21. 10, 11). That which she will be then, when her light shines forth like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal, is being formed in her now by the Holy Ghost. She is being fashioned according to the glory of God and the Man who is at the right hand of God, and while failure proclaims itself wherever the eye turns in that which professes the name of Christ on earth, there is no failure in this work of the Spirit; and there shall yet be displayed to the universe the triumph of God in His counsels of blessing, and He shall have glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. J. T. Mawson.

The Holy Spirit in Relation to the Church.

The right understanding of the place which the Church fills in the ways and purpose of God, depends upon the knowledge of the special activity of the Holy Spirit in connection therewith.

It must be plain to even a superficial reader of the Old Testament, that the Spirit is constantly referred to as the active agent and power in whatever work God undertook. Creation was brought to pass by the energy of the Spirit, whether the starry universe above, "By His Spirit He hath garnished the heavens" (Job 26: 13); or earth beneath, "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Gen. 1: 2). When God would save the world of Noah's day from the consequences of their sin and folly, His Spirit strove with men (Gen. 6: 3). If a man like Bezaleel was called to do some special work, such as the construction of the tabernacle, then he was filled with the Spirit of God in wisdom and understanding, in knowledge and in all manner of workmanship (Ex. 35: 31). Others there were like Gideon (Judges 6: 34), Amasai (1 Chron. 12: 18), Zechariah (2 Chron. 24: 20), with whom the Spirit clothed Himself for the time being, that He might witness through them. Yet again, a Samson is suddenly thrust forward by the Spirit on various occasions, to execute deeds of valour against the enemies of Israel. By the same action of the Spirit a Saul is caused to prophecy, or a David enabled to govern. But in all these cases the Spirit acted upon men from the outside, and used men for His purpose without reference to their inward moral character; no more striking instance of this can be found than that of Balaam (Num. 24: 2).

Then, after the kingdom was established and slowly sank into corruption and decay, the action of the Spirit changed, and He definitely took the line of the Spirit of prophecy, the testimony of Jesus the Messiah, revealing beyond the dark night of Israel's sin, the bright morning of God's purpose for them and the world-wide blessing that would ensue. Nevertheless, these revelations did not extend beyond the earth. The peculiar work of the Spirit in connection with heaven, which was to fill the long interval until these things should be accomplished, was a secret hidden in God. With the returned remnant of Judah, the Holy Ghost was the Spirit of encouragement amidst circumstances of opposition and depression (Hag. 2: 5). "My Spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not." Then followed a period of silence for about four hundred years, to be broken by the raptured utterances of holy men and women announcing by the Spirit the advent of the Christ of God. In due time He came, conceived by the Holy Ghost, and when the hour of His service arrived, publicly sealed by the same Spirit. Now for the first time there was a Man on earth to whom the Spirit was given without measure. In Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead, consequently His words were the words of God; they were Spirit and they were life; all He did was done by the Spirit, and to say otherwise was to blaspheme against the Holy Ghost. At last came the closing scene of Calvary, when in the shedding of His precious blood, He through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, the Holy Ghost thus witnessing that the redemption price was paid, His work was done. But the wondrous story does not end, for His resurrection declares Him to be the Son of God with power. By the Spirit of God He is raised from the dead, and on His ascension to heaven, a new era, the Spirit's day, begins. It commences in heaven, for Christ having ascended in victorious power leading captivity captive, receives gifts in the man, according to Ps. 68: 18. As really and truly a Man in the glory of God as when here on earth, He receives of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost (Acts 2: 33). At His baptism the Holy Ghost descended upon Him in relation to His personal excellence; none could share in this: but as man in heaven, redemption being accomplished, He received the Holy Ghost that He might shed forth the same upon His redeemed on earth. It was, in fact, the prelude to the fulfilment of His word to them; "Ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost, not many days hence" (Acts 1: 5). It was this act which distinguished the Church in its formation and calling from all that had gone before. There was now a Head in heaven and a body on earth, made one in the power of the Spirit: but we must examine this more closely.

During the ten days that followed the Lord's ascension, the disciples were drawn together by their common interest in the facts of His death and resurrection. They were a company of individuals, the remnant of Israel, separated from the nation by their faith in the Messiah, but they were not incorporated into one body in which each would be members one of another in union with the Head. On the day of Pentecost the prophecy of Joel, which has a millennial bearing, was antedated, and the pouring out of the Spirit which took place constituted the baptism with the Holy Ghost; the result being that by one Spirit they were all baptized into one body (1 Cor. 12: 13). It is important to observe the significance of this giving of the Spirit. It was the act of the risen Head in heaven in the exercise of the office foretold by John the Baptist, "He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost". As in baptism there is an immersion in the element of water, so this initial company of believers was, so to speak, submerged in the Holy Ghost, brought absolutely under new direction and control, and received a new name, "the Christ" (1 Cor. 12: 12), for they had become one body with the Head above. The signs of the Spirit's presence were wind and fire; wind is a fitting symbol of the liberty of the Spirit unfettered by human control, while the cloven tongues of fire set forth that the Spirit could rest upon each on the ground that judgment had been accomplished, and that henceforth Jew and Gentile in one body had access through Christ by one Spirit to the Father, to offer praise and worship, in spirit and in truth. A beautiful illustration of this inaugural baptism is in Psalm 133. The precious ointment was upon the head of Aaron, but it went down to the skirts of his garments; when Christ received the anointing of the Spirit as Man in heaven it was shed forth upon all His own, so that the feeblest member was reached by it, nevertheless, it was still upon Himself the Head. In this lies the force of the Scripture "He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit" (1 Cor. 6: 17). There could be no repetition of this initial act; the one body was formed, there could be no other, and to it believers have since been added by the sealing of the Spirit. Sealing must not be confused with the baptism of the Spirit. Sealing is individual, baptism is collective. When a believer receives the Holy Ghost, the seal of his faith in Christ, he is brought into that one body which was inaugurated at Pentecost.

Another result was consequent upon the coming of the Spirit; those who formed the one body became also the dwelling place of God. God the Holy Ghost was in personal presence, not an influence exercised from a distance on certain occasions, but actually present and abiding. Note the twofold action in Acts 2: 2, 3. Filling all the house where they were sitting, and resting upon each one of them. The first indicated that God had again a house on earth, even as when the glory filled the tabernacle, or the temple which Solomon built. But here was now no material building made with hands, but a temple of living stones having Christ for its foundation and inhabited by the Holy Ghost; maintained by Divine power in the midst of a hostile world, until at the coming of the Lord it shall be translated from earth to heaven. The second was the announcement that as members of Christ's body they had all been made to drink into one Spirit, the Holy Ghost was not only dwelling amongst them, but abiding within each as our Lord had promised: "He dwelleth with you and shall be in you (John 14: 17). What a blessed unity! who that realizes it in the smallest measure would wish to substitute for it the patchwork devices by which many seek to hide the present broken condition of the Church. The various efforts on foot to produce some outward unity, are at best the seeking for some compromise in which each sect shall be able to maintain their sectarian differences under the cloke of outward conformity, and in the process, alas! every vital truth is being given up, and men are found usurping the place which belongs alone to the Holy Ghost. What, then, is the path in which the Spirit would lead the members of Christ in this day of confusion? Not, indeed, to make a unity, but to acknowledge the union which He formed at Pentecost; not to seek a fresh baptism of the Spirit, but rather grace to walk in the power of that which has been bestowed; to cast away the things which have caused the disruption and scattering, and to allow the Holy Spirit to gather to the Name and authority of the Head all who acknowledge that Name alone. The Holy Spirit has never departed from that first inauguration at Pentecost. He asserts as clearly as ever to-day, there is one body, one Spirit, one hope of our calling (Eph. 4: 4). The Lord's Supper is the continual expression of it. "The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, one body, for we are all partakers of that one loaf" (1 Cor. 10: 17). All the members of the body have part in this, and none may be excluded, except those who in doctrine, or practice, or ungodly association, are found inconsistent with the holiness of the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, which the Holy Spirit is here to maintain. Should any such be excluded from that which it is their privilege to do, it should be grief and sorrow to the other members of the body, for being one body and having one Spirit, the members should have the same care one for another, suffering with those that suffer, and rejoicing with those that are honoured. This will suggest the consideration of how much help and ministry is lost, in failing to maintain the truth of the Headship of Christ. He has set gifts in the Church, given them not to a part but to the whole. These gifts are distinct; there are various services and operations, yet none are opposed, but intended rather to work together for the edifying of the body of Christ; because the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God, operates all things in all. Alas! how easily we let slip the brightest and the best things, and in mistaken zeal build closed houses which shut away from one another those who are members of the same body to their own loss and the loss of those who dwell not with them. God changes not His purposes; the day of manifestation will sweep away the wood, hay, and stubble of human devices, and reveal the workmanship of God. Then shall we adore the marvellous grace of Christ, who, as Head of His body, has amidst all the failure sanctified and purified His Church, by washing of water by the Word, that He might present it to Himself glorious, holy, and blameless, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing. This is His side; if the contemplation of it causes us to be ashamed of our side, may we consider our ways, and seek grace to walk together more worthy of the calling wherewith we have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, bearing with one another in love, using diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit.

James Green.

Membership and Fellowship.

The baptism of the disciples with the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost marked a new departure in God's ways; entirely new things were then and there established. In the first place the "one body" became an accomplished fact. Secondly, the Apostle's fellowship came clearly into view. Membership is in Scripture connected with the former, not with the latter.

Between the one body and the Apostle's fellowship the closest connection exists, yet are they quite distinct and distinguishable things. The one was, and is, a fact of a spiritual nature only to be apprehended by faith, the other, a fact of an historic nature, though based upon spiritual realities, capable of being apprehended by ordinary powers of observation, at least in its beginnings before human failure had marred it.

The one body is an actual existing fact on this earth. It is the body of Christ, sometimes spoken of as His mystical body, though incorrectly as we believe, since the word mystical tends to infer that it is something lying in the region of pure theory, or something hidden in the heavens, and thus to obscure the fact that it is an existing thing on this earth. This truth is clearly seen in 1 Corinthians 12, where we find members feeble or honoured, suffering or rejoicing, as the case may be. These experiences are actual, not theoretical, and are clearly upon earth and not in heaven.

The one body was formed by the baptism of the Spirit: this 1 Corinthians 12: 13 shows. Seeing that this baptism took place on the day of Pentecost it may be wondered why the fact was not revealed, and stated in Acts 2. But a very essential feature is that the body embraces both Jews and Gentiles, and hence it was appropriate enough that the revelation of the fact should wait until Gentiles too were baptized into the body. In Acts 2: 15-17, Peter treats the reception of the Spirit by the Gentile Cornelius and his friends as a baptism of the Spirit, and it was after this and through Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles, that the truth was revealed, though the body had existed from the day of Pentecost.

The fact that, though the one body existed from Pentecost, its existence was not recognized apart from the subsequent revelation as to it, which revelation, like all others, needs faith for its reception, just proves what we previously asserted, viz., that the one body is a fact of a spiritual nature only to be apprehended by faith. That three thousand souls had on the day of Pentecost received the new teaching of the Apostles and, consequently, consorted with them in their society and fellowship, was a fact of another order, capable of being apprehended apart from faith.

In 1 Corinthians 12 the salient point as to the body is its oneness, and this oneness is based upon the truth that it is formed by one Spirit, and is therefore of an organic nature with nothing of the artificial about it. The one body is therefore the fruit of an act of God. It is His workmanship. We did not make ourselves children of God. We were born "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1: 12-13). Equally so, we did not make ourselves members of the body of Christ. That, too, was not of the will of man but of God. It comes, therefore, under that declaration which applies to all God's works of a spiritual nature, "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever" (Ecc. 3: 14). No human opposition nor failure can touch it. It abides to-day.

And its unity abides to-day: this can be said with equal certainty. The multiplied divisions of Christendom have not in the least affected it, though they have grievously marred the fellowship which was so fair in apostolic days. "There is one body." Those words are as true to-day as when penned to the Ephesian believers.

Let us, then, again emphasize this oneness. There has been but one body all through the ages, and there are not two, in any sense whatever, to-day. It is very necessary to ponder this in all its bearings lest, in some subtle sense, which we hardly discern, we do after all entertain the thought of more than one. Some who firmly believe in one body, and would utterly repudiate the thought of two opposed bodies, which might be expressed diagrammatically by two circles side by side, might yet be very inclined to contend most stoutly for the same thought in a guise which might be expressed by two circles, one large and one small, the smaller within the larger especially if in the diagram the circles were not concentric, and the centre placed in the middle of the little one.

Into this one body are "we all" baptized (1 Cor. 12: 13). Here all saints are in view - all who have received the Spirit of God. The body in its universal aspect is before us. The words with which verse 12 closes - "so also is Christ" - prove this. The body is identified with and bears the name of the Head, but, then, that is the body viewed universally and not in any restricted or local sense. Elsewhere, however, the body is viewed locally in this Epistle, as, for instance, verse 27 of chapter 12. In this verse "the" should be omitted, and we read, "Now ye are body of Christ, and members in particular". That is, the whole assembly in Corinth, comprising every Spirit-sealed person in the place, bore that character. In chap. 12: 17, the local aspect of the one body is also evidently in view.

When, therefore, we view the Church as the one body - the body of Christ - we are considering it as set by an act of the Spirit of God, in pursuance of the Father's counsels, in certain relations with Christ: relations which involve a very high and wonderful place of privilege, and, further, which are intended to profoundly affect our lives, and particularly our behaviour one to the other. In other words, proper Christian fellowship is largely, though by no means exclusively, carried out in the light of the truth of the one body.

The Apostles' fellowship of which we read in Acts 2 was of course proper Christian fellowship. It came into evidence on the day of Pentecost through three thousand souls receiving the Apostles' doctrine, and that doctrine was the Apostles' as received from the Lord Jesus Christ. "I have given them Thy word" were His words as recorded in John 17. The full character of the fellowship, however, hardly appears to have come out at once. We turn to the Epistles for that.

In the Corinthian assembly true fellowship was gravely imperilled. Corinth was second only to Athens in its love of philosophies with their attendant schools of teaching, and the tendencies prevailing in the world crept into the Church. This resulted in their forming parties, or schools of opinion, around favourite teachers, parties which, if unchecked, would have developed into open divisions. Four things, indeed, seem to have marked the Corinthians, which successively and progressively mar true fellowship:

1st. Worldliness (chaps. 4: 8, 5: 1, 2, and 6: 11-18 in the second Epistle).

2nd. Men far too prominent in their thoughts to the obscuring of what is of God (chaps. 1: 20, 3: 21, 4. 6).

3rd. Schools of opinion formed round the teachings of certain of these men (chaps. 1: 12, 3: 4).

4th. A tendency with the leaders of the parties to evolve peculiar and distinctive doctrines, even false ones (chaps. 4: 6, 15: 12).

Confronted with these evils the Apostle Paul in his two Epistles sets before them as a corrective the true character of Christian fellowship. He alludes to it three times, in chapters 1: 9, 10: 16-22, and 13: 14 of the second Epistle.

In the first place it is the fellowship of God's Son. It is not here "with" but "of", that is, the fellowship is formed around Him, He is its unifying centre; and upon it His character is impressed. 1 Samuel 22 may be taken as an illustration. From the time of David's sojourn in the cave of Adullam a fellowship began to gather about him. It was his fellowship. It was not Abiathar's, though Abiathar by a combination of circumstances was brought into it. David was its unifying centre, and his character was stamped upon it. Abiathar or any other of David's followers might have been laid low by one of Saul's javelins, and the fellowship have remained unimpaired, but had David been smitten to death the fellowship would have been at once dissolved.

In the second place the character of Christian fellowship is determined by the death of Christ, of which the loaf and the cup in the Lord's supper are the symbols. His death was not only the highest expression of His love, but also the consummation of the breach between Himself and man after the flesh, and man's world. By His death, His fellowship, which is that of the Apostles, stands disconnected from Jewish sacrifices and fellowship as much as from that of heathen idolatry, as 1 Corinthians 10 shows.

In the third place it is the communion or fellowship of the Holy Ghost. Not only have we all been baptized into one body by the Spirit, but we "have been all made to drink into one Spirit". Every one called to the fellowship of God's Son has drunk of the living water of which John 4 speaks, and, consequently, has within him that well of water springing up to eternal life. Christian fellowship is not, therefore, merely an association which finds its centre in an outside Object, even when that object is so great and glorious as Christ; it is one which also palpitates with an inward spring of vitality and power in the Spirit of God. Here were the Corinthians making little circles round various teachers which should throb with admiration of the teacher in question. To such, the Apostle says, "the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all". He had previously told them "All the saints salute you, and bidden them "Greet one another with an holy kiss". Did they respond? Anyway, to get away in mind from the confined and stuffy atmosphere of sectarianism into the fresh currents of the Spirit is a blessing indeed.

The Apostle John in his first Epistle supplements the above by telling us of the vast range of spiritual treasure which is held in common by all those brought into the Apostle's fellowship. The Apostles started with the knowledge of the Word of life, and of the life itself which had been manifested to them in Him. Thus their fellowship was with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. All this they gladly communicated to all brought into their fellowship, so that they, too, might hold it in common with themselves, and share in the fullness of joy which it brings. It is clear, therefore, that Christian fellowship does not consist only in an association of an outward kind, but involves also the most blessed intercourse and mutuality of Divine knowledge and affections which all are brought to share with the Father and the Son, and with one another.

For a brief moment at the beginning of the Church's history there was perfect agreement between the membership of Christ's body and the fellowship of the Apostles. The truth that was of a spiritual nature and only to be apprehended as revealed to faith, found an accurate representation whereby it was displayed before men. We do not, however, travel far into the Acts of the Apostles before we find discrepancies between the two appearing, and soon there are to be found a number within the circle of the Apostles' fellowship, whose membership of Christ's body was open to question. We refer to the Judaizing teachers of Acts 15: 1. In Galatians 2. 4, Paul alludes to these as "false brethren unawares brought in". Notice they were "brought in", and hence he calls them "brethren" , but he stigmatizes them as "false" .

"Brought in" - to what? we may well ask. Not into the body of Christ, for the Holy Ghost makes no mistakes in His actings, and that is His work. Brought into the circle of apostolic fellowship yes; for even while Apostles were still personally on earth, errors of reception were committed, and the circle of their fellowship - the visible Church on earth - was no longer a faithful transcript of the one body of Christ.

Now that we are near the end, with the Church's home-call before us, it is important for us to remember that all the failure and break-up so sadly manifest, is only in the sphere of fellowship - the sphere of membership remains untouched. It is also important for us to remember that the responsibility rests as much as ever on every saint, to walk according to the Apostles' fellowship, though the only way in which we possess the Apostles to-day is in their writings - the New Testament. To commence to deal with how this may be done would carry us beyond the proper limits of the present article.

F. B. Hole.

The Holy Spirit of Promise".

The work of the Holy Spirit of God finds a large place in the Epistle to the Ephesians. This might be expected where the mystery concerning Christ and the assembly is so prominent, for the Spirit's special mission in the world during the present period is immediately connected therewith.

He is designated "that Holy Spirit of promise" in chapter 1: 13; and twelve times is He spoken of in this epistle. His present service in securing the assembly, the body and bride of Christ, for her living Head in heaven is shown, and that in accord with God's eternal purpose in Christ.

That purpose concerning His beloved Son filled His heart and mind before the ages of time; and, though to the natural eye it appears otherwise, He works all things in regard to it: "according to the counsel of His own will" everything is resolved in relation to that unalterable purpose, for the deep joy of His own heart, and for the glory and satisfaction of His Son.

The Holy Spirit has come. Eternal redemption having been obtained in Christ through His blood, He seals those who believe in connection with the exalted Object of divine counsel, and gives them a foretaste of the glory to which they are going, while He comforts, cheers, and strengthens them on their way, ministering the unsearchable riches of our Lord Jesus Christ and His surpassing love to their expectant hearts. Christ is the glorious Object in view in all the Spirit's work, just as He is also of the purpose and counsel of God, and He becomes the one pre-eminent Object of our hearts too, as the Spirit is unhindered and ungrieved within us.

Neither ourselves nor the Spirit are to be objects for us. It is His pleasure to show us the things of the Father and the Son. The Lord Jesus said, when speaking of His coming, "He shall glorify Me, for He shall receive of Mine, and shall announce it to you"; adding, "all things that the Father has are Mine".

When Abraham counselled concerning his son, his eldest servant undertook the journey to a distant land to obtain a wife for Isaac. His whole mission and work had the son in view, and that according to Abraham's purpose. The rich gifts of "jewels of silver and jewels of gold and raiment" would impress the fair damsel: the golden earrings, and the golden bracelets with the other precious things, would tell her of the wealth to which Abraham's son was heir. The words of the unnamed servant, too, would extol the object of his service, and one whom she had never seen would become endeared to her as she journeyed to join him where he was.

The Spirit has also brought to us the jewels of divine grace, the silver riches of redemption - the golden treasures of righteousness - and the precious things of the excellencies of Christ. He tells us, too, of Himself, of His glory and His love, and so wins our hearts for the Son of the Father, that it can be said of us - before we see Him face to face —"Whom having not seen ye love; in Whom though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye exult with joy unspeakable and filled with the glory ".

As we have previously seen, the mystery in the first place speaks of Christ's co-heirs; secondly, of the fellow members of His body; and thirdly, of the joint partakers of life in Christ. When Rebekah came to Isaac he dwelt at "Lahairoi", at the well of "the, living one". There she shared in all that was Isaac's. As one with himself she partook of the same inheritance and of the same life. At the end of the Bible the Spirit shows us the bride of Christ - one with Him in glory - one with The Living One. Everything is seen to be marked by life in the energy of the Spirit. The Book of Life is there. The Fountain of life is there. The Tree of life flourishes there. The pure River of water of life flows there; and meanwhile, before the Bridegroom calls her, the Spirit and the bride say to Him, Come! She longs to see Him! Then, turning earnestly to those still "dead in trespasses and sins", she says, "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely"!

Life and the Spirit are found together in the Word, and both are the portion of those who belong to Christ. Indeed, it is said in Romans 8: 10, "The Spirit is life on account of righteousness". This is ours to know in divine power now, before the glorious day to which we are hastening onward. Therefore we may well allow our glad notes of praise to resound along the heavenward road

"Now by grace the Spirit's given,

Here to us these themes belong;

Let us sing the song of heaven;

'Tis our everlasting song!

Endless life in Christ possessing,

Let us praise His glorious Name,

Glory, honour, power and blessing,

Be for ever to the Lamb!"

The Spirit and Christ's Co-Heirs.

The first mention of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians speaks of His sealing the co-heirs (chapter 1: 13, 14). This sealing is individual, but it is in view of what is collective. Each one who hears the Word of truth, the glad tidings of salvation, and believes in Christ, is immediately sealed with the Spirit of promise. It should not read, "After ye believed", but "having believed ye have been sealed".

The Spirit is here designated "The Spirit of promise" because the heirs and the inheritance are before the mind. His coming was often foretold. He is yet to be poured out on "all flesh" ( Joel 2: 28). We have an example of it in Acts 2; but only one hundred and twenty were then baptized by Him. This was extended necessarily to Gentiles who believed (see Acts 11: 15); nevertheless, there is no repetition of this baptism now as some seem to seek after.

By the gift and baptism of the Spirit at the beginning both Jews and Gentiles who received Him were made one. That was according to the truth of the mystery — fellow-members of the same body. Since that time He seals individuals (thus, too, they are vitally brought into the one body), and He gives them a foretaste of what is to come, when He will pervade all, for He is "the Earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession". In God's own time the inheritance will be actually possessed by Christ and His co-heirs. They have the firstfruits of the Spirit now, as being indwelt by the Spirit of promise; and these co-heirs are the sons of God, the brethren of Christ; therefore, because they are sons, the Spirit of God's Son has been sent out into their hearts, crying, Abba, Father (Gal. 4: 6). In Ephesians 2: 18, their liberty of approach to the Father is said to be by "one Spirit", for though He graciously seals us individually as the sons and heirs of God, yet, what is collective is in view as we have said. Christ presents them with Himself before the Father. They are one with Him, and He is not ashamed to call them brethren. His own Spirit - the Spirit of God's Son - is in their hearts. All this subsists vitally.

Now, though the sealing of the co-heirs comes first in Ephesians, because the marking off of those who are to form the assembly is in view; yet, it is well that we should notice other things in connection with the work of the Spirit.

The preaching, which calls sinners out of darkness into this marvellous association, is by the Holy Ghost sent from heaven"; and those who believe are "born of water and the Spirit". Scripture tells us that the water is the Word, and this is made operative in those who hear in faith by the Holy Spirit. A new nature is the consequence, and this delights in what is of God, in contrast to the old nature which finds pleasure in fleshly lusts. The love of God, too, is shed abroad in the heart, the love which was manifested when Christ died for us, "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord", the love which God commends to us.

Moreover, the Spirit abidingly indwells those who believe. He is the power by which they enter into, and do, those things in which the new nature delights. The truths of Scripture become living and real to them, for the same Spirit who inspired the one indwells the other. This explains the fact that such understand what the most educated students of Scripture, if unconverted, fail to grasp. Those who have the Spirit may be guided into all truth, but those who are in the flesh, still unsaved, cannot know these things. The normal way of the Spirit is to teach us through the inspired writings. He brings them home to us by ministry or by private reading of the Word of God.

We have said, the Object in view in all His service is the Son of God, for He is here to glorify Him before our hearts. Even in the ministry of the truth of Scripture, He leads our thoughts to the One who is Himself the Truth personally. He may bring many things before us; and, when grieved, give us a sense of what we have done to so grieve Him; but, normally, His gracious work is ever to lead us to the Son of God, giving us to know His personal glory and love, and the portion which is ours with Him as His co-heirs.

The mystery itself was revealed at the first by the Spirit to the apostles and prophets. He is the Unction of 1 John 2: 20, by whom we know all things. It is He also by whose power we are strengthened in the inner man so that Christ, the Centre and Sun of the coming glory, might dwell in our hearts through faith; so that the surpassing love of Christ may be our present portion. He it is who enables us to wield His sword - "the sword of the Spirit" - in the conflict with the powers of darkness, who would rob us of the enjoyment of our part with Christ. It is by Him we are maintained in the spirit of prayer and supplication; and in Him the kingdom of God is known - its righteousness, peace, and joy. How needful, therefore, is it for us to heed the exhortation, "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption".

He would ever keep the Object of His mission, and the true Object of our hearts, before us; but the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh. Those who are the sons of God are led by the Spirit, and the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in them as they walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. It is the Spirit who witnesses with our spirit that we are the children of God; and "if children, heirs also: heirs of God and Christ's joint heirs: if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him" (Rom. 8. 17). He is already glorified at God's right hand as Head of the assembly, and

"The Spirit doth unite

Our souls to Him our Head,

And forms us to His image bright,

While in His steps we tread".

The One Spirit and the One Body.

We learn in Ephesians 3: 6, that the unifying of all believers into one body is the second part of the mystery: called out from amongst Jews and Gentiles they are made one. Chapter 4: 4 teaches us, "There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling". The "one Spirit" is named again in chapter 2: 18, in regard to our access to the Father; also in 1 Cor. 12: 13, in reference to the fact that "by one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bondmen or freemen, and have all been given to drink of one Spirit". This emphasizes the vital unity of all true believers, and the power by which this unity subsists.

Throughout all the present period the Spirit maintains this vital organism, whatever failure may come into the professing assemblies of Christ: during the time of Christ's rejection, of His bodily absence from the world, of His exaltation at the right hand of God as the Head of the assembly, the Spirit never fails in His gracious work.

When Christ ascended to the Father, the Spirit came down at Pentecost upon about one hundred and twenty believers who were gathered together in one accord at Jerusalem. That was the beginning of the body, the assembly. It was the baptism of the Spirit. From that moment it could be said, "There is one body and one Spirit". It could not have been said previously, for redemption had not been secured, and risen life in and for man was unknown. Moreover, the Head of the assembly, the body, was not exalted, nor the Spirit given. Both were necessary for the forming of the one body and the uniting of it vitally to its glorious Head. It is said of our Lord Jesus Christ in resurrection, "He is the Head of the body, the assembly, who is the Beginning, Firstborn from among the dead". The assembly could not have been in being before this.

The truth of the one body was not unfolded till long after Pentecost, though the body was itself there. The truth was given to the apostle of the Gentiles to minister. There had been national dealings with Israel, and individual dealings with Abraham and others, but nothing of a corporate nature before Pentecost. Such a thing as the members of one body being vitally united together by the Spirit to a living Man in heaven was not and could not be previously known. The very gifts which are peculiar to the present dispensation are for "the edifying of the body of Christ" (Eph. 4: 12). They had no existence till Christ was ascended to God's right hand. Those, too, which are in the assembly itself derive their diverse abilities and operations from the Spirit given at Pentecost.

The importance of the peculiar and special constitution of the assembly needs to be better understood, and the functions of the members of the body in the Spirit's power also. "All these things operates the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each in particular according as He pleases. For even as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of the body, being many, are one body, so also is the Christ. For also in the power of one Spirit we have all been baptized into one body" (1 Cor. 12: 11-13). This aspect of the truth not only preserves from clericalism, but also from independency; for all the members of the one body are necessary; and where the Spirit is unquenched collectively He manifests His activities through the members for the profit of all. If all the gifts in the assembly were thus happily in function there would be oneness and yet diversity in ministry, and the distinct operations of the Spirit therewith would be for the comfort, cheer, and blessing of the whole.

The apostle Paul often refers to himself as the persecutor of the assembly. He, above all the others, became its devoted servant for Christ's glory after his conversion. Then, we are told in Acts 9 the assemblies had peace; being edified and walking in the fear of the Lord, they increased through the comfort of the Holy Ghost. Where the Spirit is unhindered in His gracious and encouraging work, prosperity in the assemblies is sure to be present. He is called the Comforter, also the Spirit of Truth. He leads, He guides, He teaches, and He glorifies Christ. He is in us and with us, nor does He leave us even when we grieve Him, for we are sealed by Him unto the day of redemption. May we therefore have grace and solicitude to see that no hindrance exists on our side. May we be self-judged, and free in heart and mind to be led and guided by Him.

In speaking of the gifts named in Ephesians 4 we said they had the edification of the assembly in view. The first two named had to do with the foundation; the second two (for they are not three) with the continuation of the work. We are distinctly told that "the apostles and prophets" laid "the foundation" (Eph. 2: 20). These were given from Christ ascended, and have no connection with Old Testament prophets. The "evangelists" and "shepherd-teachers" are the two gifts remaining to-day, and will remain till the work is complete. There is also, as we have indicated, the functions of the body for its self-building up, through the working in its measure of each member and part, and thus it makes "the increase of the body to its self-building up in love ".

There is still one body and one Spirit to-day: one living organism energized by the Holy Ghost: every member is livingly joined to the exalted Man, the Head of the assembly; and it is to Him we are to grow up in all things, as we await His coming again, for

'Tis thence - now Christ is gone on high,

Redemption's work complete -

The Spirit brings His glory nigh,

To those who for Him wait".

The Spirit and the Life.

We have spoken of the Spirit of promise and the co-heirs also of the one Spirit and the one body; and it now remains for us to consider the Spirit and the life.

We saw that, primarily, the truth connected with the co-heirs was individual, but that the collective was in view, according to the first part of the mystery of Christ and the assembly. Likewise that the corporate aspect of the truth was contained in the second. In that which is now before us we have the vital side, according to the last part of the mystery.

The assembly could have no being at all apart from life in Christ Jesus. This is a fundamental matter, as Ephesians 4: 17-25 shows. Either we are altogether "alienated from the life of God", or we are of "the new man" and "members one of another", partaking together of divine life. The Spirit is the power of this new life; therefore progress in every grace is to be expected; nevertheless, we either have life or we have not.

The Holy Spirit is so completely identified with this life, that in the first part of Romans 8., where the truth of freedom from the law of sin and death is prominent, He is Himself said to be life. Not only is the mind of the Spirit "life and peace" in contrast to the mind of the flesh which is "death"; but, we are distinctly told, "The Spirit is life on account of righteousness". A new principle of life in Christ Jesus, the risen Man, which makes free from the old principle of bondage, is ours. This new principle is called, "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus". Eventually, at the coming again of our Lord Jesus Christ, the very bodies of the saints will be "quickened", made alive, raised or changed (for quickening covers both) "on account of His Spirit" which dwells in us. Freedom from sin and death will be actually and altogether enjoyed then. Spirit, soul, and body will be blameless, and glorious too, for we shall be like Christ in scenes of incorruptibility, immortality, and glory, where the Holy Spirit pervades all in heavenly perfection.

Even now, those who partake together of life in Christ Jesus, are variously spoken of as having "eternal life", "passed out of death into life", "quickened with Christ", "alive from the dead", "living stones," etc. At the present time such are built together in the Lord, we are told, "for a habitation of God in the Spirit" (Eph. 2. 22). What cannot be found in a house of lifeless material God finds in this living structure. There He receives heart response to the "great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins" (chapter 2: 5); "worship in Spirit and in truth" rises to Him in that habitation of divine life and love.

In this connection the Spirit is spoken of as being in us, and as "springing up into everlasting life", like water rising to its source's level. In the death of our Lord Jesus Christ the "great love" of God has been fully told out: its manifestation is seen at Calvary's cross; and those who appropriate the death of Christ in faith have eternal life (John 6: 54). The love and the life go together; and worship flows from the knowledge of God's love, and of the One whose love it is. The Spirit sheds abroad that love in the heart, therefore worship rises responsively to God in life and love by the Spirit in His habitation, in the house of God. He dwells in the praises of His own. These are grateful and melodious to Him, for all subsists in vitality and love.

It is there also that His glory is known. All within speaks of it, for all is in Christ. The tabernacle is the type. Every board of it was covered with gold, speaking of Christ being our righteousness. The blue, the purple, the scarlet, and the fine twined linen tell of His heavenly, royal, and human glories. It was set up on sockets of silver, speaking of the redemption ground on which God's living habitation now rests in Christ, through the blood of the cross. The oil, too, as well as the blood, had its place in relation to the tabernacle. The anointing oil indicates the Spirit of God. He it is whose gracious ministry brings the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ, before us. He glorifies Him and shows His things to us. These things are seen by those who dwell in God's habitation in the power of the Spirit. The natural eye sees them not. Creation and Horeb show God's glory in a measure - His power, His divinity, and His holiness, but

"ALL His glory shines resplendent

In the person of the Son,

Jesus Christ His well-beloved,

Who redemption's glory won".

Moreover, we are told, "The Anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you" (there was no natural light in the Tabernacle, it was provided by the oil). "The same Anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him". There is no need to turn elsewhere. Eternal life is here. The Father is known, because the Son has declared Him, and the Spirit leads us into the deep reality of it all. The Anointing teaches us. God is known in His sanctuary. This could hardly be said of creation simply, in the same way and measure.

The Spirit is often associated in Scripture with "living water", "springing water", "rivers of water", "running water", "breath", "wind" and "oil" or "unction". Movement is characteristic of the Spirit. He is called "the eternal Spirit". We do not get the names "eternal Father" or "eternal Son" in the Bible. The truth of the eternal Father and the eternal Son is abundant in Scripture, though not the designations. Figures of love, grace, and strength and glory are associated with these. The flow of the Spirit carries into the current of eternal realities. Fruit, too, is produced in living grace amongst those who are the subjects of His work. Mere religionists and others may try to imitate this to-day, but there is an entire lack of the heavenly and pious character of the other, even though austere rules are observed to produce it. The fruit of the Spirit which is "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, fidelity, meekness, self-control", against which there is no law - is borne with becoming grace and for the honour of God. Love is necessarily first, and it is striking that joy should be the second named. "Full of joy" and "full of the Holy Ghost" go together.

We are exhorted to be "filled with the Spirit" (Eph. 5: 18). If we are filled thus the right condition and the right Person will be characteristic of us. To be full of the Spirit is the very opposite of being full of ourselves, our joyful feelings, or anything else. Our joy will be full indeed, but the Son of God will be before us, for the Spirit glorifies Him when He is unhindered. He will direct our gladdened gaze to Him and His things. Nor are we filled like a lake, or like the dead sea which has no outlet. The living grace of the Eternal Spirit flows into our rejoicing hearts that it may flow out as "rivers of living water": to all around the refreshing and vivifying waters are to flow: "Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and chanting with your heart to the Lord; giving thanks at all times"; and to "whosoever will" the water of life is to be free: to the weary and the fainting, to the heavy laden and burdened; to the lost and the sinful, to the "dead in trespasses and offences" the fresh, living, bountiful rivers are to flow out: the word of life is to be gladly proclaimed in the gracious energy of the Spirit.

H. J. Vine.

Gatherings of Assembly Character.

During special seasons of revival, and the various activities which accompany such times, there is usually present the danger of being carried to extremes, so that the safe ground of the faith is practically forsaken, and that which is designated by the Spirit of God, "the pillar and base of the truth," is either neglected or abandoned altogether. That is the danger.

Until they were well disciplined, and seasoned by experience, the British army in France lost largely through the zeal and energy of keen soldiers whose valour often carried them too far, taking them beyond the limits set by military wisdom, and so putting themselves out of touch with support from the base of operations.

It is of the utmost importance that the present truth of Christ and the assembly should therefore be understood by us; otherwise, even our zeal in service may put us practically beyond the direction of Headquarters; and we may carry others with us to disaster, even when we think success is attending our aggressive campaign as we pierce far into the enemies' lines.

It is right to "fight the good fight of faith". We are told to do so. But the base must be well established, and the communication lines maintained intact. To abandon gatherings of an assembly character, where the presence of the Lord in the midst is known, is to court defeat; showing, shall we say, either ignorance or independence of God's present order.

The Assembly.

Our Lord Jesus Christ said, as He looked forward to the present time, "I will build My assembly" (Matt. 16: 18). He also indicated that the schemes and attacks of Satan would be directed against it; but, He gave us this assurance, "The gates of hades shall not prevail against it". We should, therefore, be encouraged, and remain true to that which shall come through in triumph and victory, as being loyal to Him who is engaged in the construction of His assembly, allowing no wile of Satan to turn us aside.

This building is in progress now. Having secured eternal redemption by His sufferings and death at Calvary, Christ ascended to God's right hand and gave the Holy Spirit to be in us and with us till His return. We are, therefore, thus formed into one - "built together for an habitation of God in the Spirit"; and upon "the foundation of the apostles and prophets" (whose teaching is still the groundwork of the assembly), the building being fitted together in Jesus Christ the Corner Stone, "increaseth to a holy temple in the Lord" (Eph. 2: 21).

It cannot be gainsaid that this glorious work still goes on, for the Holy Spirit Himself in the above Scriptures tells us so; but we may ask the question, Why is the assembly being thus builded? The answer is quite plain. In the future God is going to have a universal metropolis, where His Throne will be, with Christ as the Centre. This is the assembly, "the bride, the Lamb's wife". At the present time the material is being gathered together and fitted for the day of glory; and it becomes, meanwhile, as we have seen, an habitation of God in the Spirit. In the past, before Christ ascended to God's right hand, this building did not exist at all. The dealings of God with the nation of Israel and the other nations and peoples (who are to be ranged under the King of kings and Lord of lords in the millennium) are in abeyance till the assembly is complete, and till it is glorified with our Lord Jesus Christ. It is now being prepared for that glory.

The Head of the assembly is already glorified; and the assembly is not only the house of God, it is also the body of Christ. Over all things Christ is exalted as Head, and He holds this headship in relation to the assembly. He is Head over all now, though it is only apparent to faith. In the future it will be seen publicly that this is so; and the assembly which is His body, complete then in glory, is the fullness of Him who filleth all in all (Eph. 1: 23).

At the present time the assembly as Christ's body is said to "grow up to Him in all things who is the Head, the Christ; from whom the whole body, fitted together, and compacted by every joint of supply, according to the working in its measure of each one part, works for itself the increase of the body to its self-building-up in love" (Eph. 4. 16). Mark, this is no question of gift, but of each member fulfilling its function in the body which is the assembly. To neglect this for any other sort of religious activity is a very serious matter. Nothing furthers this "increase of the body" like gatherings of an assembly character.

As to the past, before the Head of the body, the assembly, was glorified, there could of course be no body on earth united to a Man in heaven at all. That is a self-evident fact.

When our Lord Jesus Christ ascended on high, in view of filling all things, He gave gifts to men. These, we are told, were given for the "edifying of the body of Christ, until we all arrive at the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God". A definite end is in view. The work of the ministry at present is for that purpose. This refers to the exercise of gift very specially; but it is important to see that even in this case the prosperity of the assembly is the object. Where, then, is the loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ on the part of those servants who are indifferent to gatherings of an assembly character?

The gifts are enumerated in Ephesians 4: 11. In the past - before the Giver of them, the exalted Man, gave such gifts - they clearly did not exist. The new work, in relation to the glory which is yet to be manifested, is that for which our Lord Jesus Christ gave them to men. It is for those who are thus gifted to be true in their work to Him who gave them for the edifying of the body, the assembly.

We have spoken of the assembly as the house of God and as the body of Christ, and of the ministry, and of each in relation to the future, the present and the past. We will now consider what is the Scriptural ground of gatherings of an assembly character.

The Ground of Gathering.

In the first intimation of the assembly, in Matthew 16 we are told that the rock foundation of Christ's assembly is "the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matt. 16: 16, 17) as revealed by His Father who is in the heavens. That is the ground upon which it is constructed as a whole. All gatherings which partake of the character of the assembly also find their ground in who and what He is, as we shall see.

Fellowship is involved in such gatherings, and all true believers are "called into the fellowship of God's Son Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Cor. 1: 9). If the upbuilding or edification of the assembly be in view, we are reminded that the Foundation already laid is "Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 3: 11).

"The Church's one Foundation

Is Jesus Christ her Lord."

If the gathering be for prayer then it is said, as an abiding fact, by our Lord Jesus Christ, "where two or three are gathered together to My Name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. 18: 20). This covers a wider field than prayer simply, though it is in connection with prayer that the words were spoken. The Name of Christ is the ground given here. The Name speaks of who and what He is. Those gathered know this. They are gathered "to His Name", and He Himself is in the midst of them thus gathered.

In the last book of the Old Testament, when failure abounded, we read that those who feared the Lord got together, and the theme of their meditation and conversation was "His Name"; what He is became everything to them. That brought them together, and made their gatherings seasons of delight both to themselves and to the Lord who hearkened to what they said of Him. It is the same to-day! In Himself perfection is found by those that fear the Lord, although unrighteousness marks "organized religion", which professes His Name.

If the gatherings be for thanksgiving, for praise, or for worship - to "offer up spiritual sacrifices" - to exercise the functions of the "holy priesthood" - we are told that such offerings are "acceptable to God by Jesus Christ". We draw near to God "by Him": He is the One by whom we approach. In Him we have boldness, and He it is also who is the Stone, elect and precious, the Foundation of those who sing the songs of praise in Zion. He is the chief Corner-Stone likewise. He first suffered in the outside place to sanctify the worshippers by His own precious blood, and then passed in to the near place in God's own presence. "BY HIM therefore", it is said, "let us offer the sacrifice of praise continually to God, that is the fruit of the lips confessing His Name" (Heb. 13: 15).

Gatherings of an assembly character are "to His Name" and "in His Name". It is as He is known that the true ground of gathering is understood. We ourselves - the saints, the assembly - could never be the ground. The assembly is builded by Him, and upon Him, and in Him. It should be noticed that the Philadelphian character of the assembly, which goes right on till the Lord's return, is faithfulness to His Word and His Name. What is involved in that Name - who and what He is - may be entered into more by some than others, and this will greatly affect the tone of the gatherings. Those who thought upon His Name in Malachi's day would increase in the knowledge of it; and now it is fully revealed, and the Spirit is given, therefore we should advance much more in the excellent knowledge of its preciousness. Moreover, those who are of His assembly stand in relationships to Him which were unknown to these godly saints of Old Testament times as we have shown.

The recognition of this will greatly enhance to us the wonderful privileges which are connected with gatherings of an assembly character of to-day, for He who is Lord of all, exalted to God's right hand in glory, is known now to the assembly as its Head and its Bridegroom. They are united to Him by the Spirit as His body, and they are brought into union with Him as His bride. Indeed, the truth of the one body should affect all our gatherings of assembly character now. Twelve loaves on the table in the Temple might remind the priests who drew near that the twelve tribes were always represented before God, but the one loaf on the table of which we partake to-day reminds the worshippers in the presence of God that all true believers "are one loaf, one body" (1 Cor. 10: 17). This should never be lost sight of.

However much the assemblies may have been corrupted, the Scriptures are enough for us. They are able to "fully furnish" us. The Spirit who inspired their writing is in us. He leads us into the truth, and He forms us into one body. He is here, moreover, to glorify the Son of God. We have no authority to form religious gatherings after our own ideas. Necessity is not enough, as some say. We are told in 2 Timothy 2 to follow righteousness, as having departed from iniquity. This must necessarily involve our coming together in a right way - "with those that call upon THE LORD out of a pure heart".

All instructed believers will admit that the final words of the Bible have in view the close of the assembly's history in this world. It is there we are told of a special ministry of Christ "in the assemblies" in view of His return (Rev. 22: 16, 17), with the result that true believers are awakened to invite Christ to come - "The Spirit and the Bride say, Come!" These "assemblies" then are found at the end! Who therefore could think of giving up gatherings of an assembly character? Nay, rather let the word of exhortation be heeded as never before, as we draw near to the return of our Lord Jesus Christ - "not forsaking the assembling (complete assembling, i.e. of all the saints) of ourselves together, as the custom is with some; but encouraging one another, and so much the more as ye see the day approaching" (Heb. 10: 25).

The Value of Such Gatherings.

This question has been raised. One would otherwise be exceedingly slow to propound it or answer it. Their value to those who are saved by God's grace cannot be estimated. It is so vast. Scripture shows us also that such gatherings are of priceless value to God Himself. There is glory to God in the assembly in Christ Jesus eternally, and the praise that rises to Him now brings glory to His holy name.

As to ourselves, first of all, we are kept in the sense of the love of Christ when we are together in assembly to remember Him in the great expression of divine love, when He died for us. Then there is also the building up of our souls in the things of God; the edifying of the saints in the truth. This takes place in ministry when we are together in assembly character as nowhere else. Special addresses and preachings, important though they be, cannot do what the other does for us. Even prayer and thanksgiving in such gatherings are edifying, we are told in 1 Cor. 14: 12-19. All the Scriptures are open to those who thus meet together. A great part of them are closed to those who do not. Ignorance of these is freely admitted by many who follow the religious meetings of expediency which abound in Christendom, to the neglect of the order given in the Word of God for the coming together of the saints.

The truth thus learned sanctifies us, and by it we become partakers of the divine nature. The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth when unhindered, and we are liberated from the influences of the world which is made up of lust and pride. We are filled with divine joy in a deepened knowledge of God as He is made known in His beloved Son, and He becomes the rejoicing of our hearts as He manifests His presence in the midst of those gathered together. What words can express the riches of the glory of this? Our gain is beyond telling! It is not simply that we ere freed from the oppression of Egypt, but we are brought into the wealth of the land of God's promise in Christ according to His eternal purpose, as the Spirit brings the glory of Him who is the blessed Object of that purpose before our glad hearts.

Moreover, in the exercises connected with such gatherings we are being prepared for the coming glory of which we have spoken. The trial of our faith in regard to this will be found to praise and honour and glory in that day. To miss these exercises means to miss a great deal for the time of His glorious reign. In Ephesians, where the saints are viewed as set in the land in Christ, we are told of the conflict which goes on in relation to this. The hosts of darkness seek to get us to give up in our souls the heavenly ground on which we are set in Christ, but we are told to "stand", not in our own strength, but as "strong in the Lord". The gain of all this is great indeed.

We are not, however, to think only of the value of gatherings of an assembly character to ourselves. Are we not told that the Father seeks worshippers? Where does He receive worship in Spirit and in truth as He does from those who are redeemed by the blood of Christ and indwelt by the Holy Spirit when assembled together? The vast creation cannot render this to Him as they do! It is said, Let all the angels of God worship Him. They do this, but they have not the same Spirit of relationship, nor do they yield the same character of worship as the redeemed. Even our growth in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is furthered in such gatherings, is not only of great value to us but to God also. We are told that "a wise son maketh a glad father". As we grow in wisdom we minister to the pleasure of God. Is not this an incentive to us to seek to promote each other's spiritual advance - for His sake? The praise and honour, and glory too, of which we have spoken, found as the result of trial of the faith of these wise sons in the day of Christ's glory, will be of great value in His holy sight.

These gatherings not only promote that which is of surpassing value to us, but, we repeat, that which is of value to God, who is ordering all things at the present time in view of the day when everything in the heavens and upon the earth shall be headed up in Christ, the glorious Centre of all. To gather around Him now prepares us for that day, when the assembly which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all, shall be glorified together with Him. He fills our hearts together now in His presence before that time, when He will fill all things. We learn now something of the order which is pleasing to Him, and in the precious knowledge of the Father and the Son, the high privileges of eternal life are enjoyed already.

"Brought to rest within the circle

Where love's treasures are displayed,

There we drink the living waters,

Taste the joys that never fade."

When in Israel, that which typifies our gathering to Christ's Name was maintained, all prospered; when the exercise Godward of the priesthood, which drew near to Him at the place of His Name, at the temple, was in full function, there was prosperity, peace, and blessing to the uttermost bounds of the kingdom. This gives some idea of the value of assembling together to the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Such help in the outgoing of the light and the truth more than is usually understood. "Bring in" and I will "pour out" is the order (see Mal. 3: 10).

In conclusion, we would emphasize the importance of having no pattern before us less than that which is given by the Holy Spirit in Scripture as to the assembly. If we yield to other ideas we shall not be following righteousness, however near the original they may seem. We have no authority to forsake the path of God's will made known in the Word. There it is said by the apostle John, "He that knows God heareth us: he who is not of God does not hear us. From this we know the Spirit of truth and the Spirit of error" (1 John 4. 6). More are affected by the latter spirit than they are aware of. If we love God we love His children, and shall desire to gather with them. If we do not, where are we? It is written, "Everyone that loves Him that has begotten loves also him that is begotten of Him". He loves God's children, and how can any do this and deliberately avoid gathering with them before the Lord?

We are doubtless nearing the return of our Lord Jesus Christ! That longed-for day is swiftly approaching! Not only do we see signs in the nations and in the awakening of national hopes in Israel, but the revival of the ministry of Christ Himself and His love, as foretold, shows this. At that glorious time all the saints of God will be gathered together to Him in the air, as we are told in 2 Thessalonians 2: 1, where we are besought to be unshaken in view of it - "by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our complete assembling unto Him". This word "complete assembling" is used in one other place, Hebrews 10, as we have already pointed out. There we are exhorted not to forsake the "complete assembling" of ourselves together, as the day of His return approaches God would not have just some of them, but all true believers assembling around the Lord. Then, as He Himself and His love fills every heart, that precious Scripture shall be fulfilled - "The Spirit and the Bride say, Come".

"Spirit and bride with longing voice, say, come;

Yea, Lord, thy word from that bright home, is,

'Surely, I will quickly come!'

E'en so, Lord, come."

Meanwhile, gatherings of an assembly character are to be maintained, and will be, even as the Word of God, which never fails, shows. To deliberately neglect these, therefore, is a very serious matter, whatever the pretext may be.

Henry J. Vine.

Apostolic Fellowship.

The Apostles' fellowship, as we have seen in a previous paper, did not long continue in its original power; yet it is quite evident that for so long as any of the Apostles remained on earth a considerable measure of power was present, and a proper discipline was largely exercised.

It is worthy of remark that discipline is connected with the church viewed as a fellowship, though it should be exercised in view of the fact that the Church is the body of Christ, and the house of God. The latter truth particularly bears upon it, inasmuch as "Holiness becometh Thine house, O Lord, for ever" (Psalm 93. 5), yet if discipline be exercised so that the holiness and order of God's house be maintained, it is exercised in the sphere of practical fellowship. Offending saints were dealt with in apostolic times by their fellow-saints even to the extreme penalty of "putting away" from amongst them, so that no vestige of practical fellowship remained; yet no pretence was made of such offenders being cut off as members from "the body", nor removed as stones from "the house". All action in such connections lies in the hands of God alone. The only sphere where saints are competent to act is that of fellowship.

Passages that bear upon discipline in the assembly occur in several of the Epistles, and a careful examination shows that they divide under several heads.

There is first of all apostolic discipline. This peculiar form of it is hinted at by Paul in 1 Cor. 5. 3-5, and alluded to further in 2 Cor. 10: 2-10; 13: 2 and 10. An example of its exercise is given us in 1 Tim. 1. 20. A further threatening of its use is found in 3 John 10. Acts 5. 1-13 may also be cited as an historic account of such action. This, the most powerful form of discipline, has closed with the departure of the Apostles.

Secondly, there is that form of discipline which may be exercised by a servant of the Lord acting as an apostolic delegate - such as Timothy and Titus - or by a bishop or elder duly appointed. (1 Tim. 5. 20; Titus 1: 9-11; 3. 9-11.) "Rebuke before all"; "convince"; - stopping their mouths; - "Reject". These were actions taken under authority duly bestowed, and therefore autocratic - if one may so put it. This form of discipline also hardly exists to-day.

Thirdly, there is assembly discipline, or at least discipline of a collective nature. This may be exerted in varying degrees of severity. 1 Thess. 5. 14, gives us, perhaps, its mildest form: "Warn them that are unruly". Stronger action is contemplated in 2 Thess. 3. 6. If warning did not suffice they were to 'withdraw' themselves from such a disorderly brother. He was to be shunned and avoided and made to feel how the saints condemned his disorder. Again, in verse 14 of the same chapter a still severer form of discipline seems to be indicated. Some disorderly brother might aggravate his position by disregarding the Apostle's word, and with such "no company" was to be kept. Yet, even so, as verse 15 shows, he was to be admonished as a brother, and not put in the outside place of excommunication as an enemy. Rom. 16, 17 indicates action of a similar character to above. Then there is 1 Cor. 5. 9-13, and here we have the extreme limit of assembly discipline. In each of these cases the responsibility to act rests on the 'brethren' - on the assembly as such - and not on individuals of gift or authority.

Fourthly, there is that action which becomes incumbent upon the faithful believer however humble, when and if disorder supervenes generally in the Church as a consequence of Scriptural discipline ceasing to be exercised. 2 Tim. 2. 16-21 speaks very definitely of this. The responsibility to "depart from iniquity" always rests upon all who name the name of the Lord, and that in every shape and form, for verse 19 is the statement of a universal principle.

The case in point, however, which gave rise to the statement of the principle, is that of Hymenaeus and Philetus, and their very grave perversion of the truth concerning the resurrection. It was error of a fundamental nature calculated to overturn everything. The foundation of God was, indeed, sure and beyond their reach, but they overturned the faith of those who fell under their influence (v. 18). The faithful believer can have no compromise with this, and the illustration of a large establishment with its many vessels with their various uses is brought to enforce the necessity of purity both personal and in associations - that is, both inside the vessel and outside too. This passage, be it noted, is not addressed only to Timothy, in his authoritative position in the assembly, but to all. It is "every one" (v. 19) and "a man" (v. 21).

The question has been raised: - assuming the above to be correct, how are we to account for there being no trace of any such action, either by Timothy or other faithful men during the early centuries of Church history?

An answer is furnished by 1 John 2. 19. Writing a quarter of a century after Paul's farewell letter to Timothy, John tells us of the anti-Christian teachers who plagued the Church even in apostolic days. "They went out from us", and thus they revealed their true character. The first inroad of "grievous wolves", (Acts 20. 29) was repulsed by apostolic energy and the faith of the saints; and throwing off their sheep's clothing the wolves retired discomfited.

They are still seen as outside in 2 John 7–11, and being there a faithful saint, though a woman, is not to give them a foothold even in her house. Looking on to the last days, Paul prophesied that this sort would creep into houses and lead captive silly women; but the faithful woman of 2 John is to keep her door shut and withhold her salutation, inhospitable as it might seem. She was to resolutely decline fellowship down to the smallest detail.

The Epistles do not close, however, without giving us a warning as to the abuse of discipline within the sphere of Church fellowship. 3 John 9-10 shows that very early the adversary sought to discount godly discipline, destroying its force and effect, by a gross caricature through one Diotrephes. This man committed himself and others to three things. First, he would not receive the stranger brethren who had gone forth for Christ's name's sake, taking no support from the world. Second, he cast out of the Church those that would - and apparently did - receive them. Thirdly, he would not receive the Apostle John himself, apparently because he supported the stranger brethren, and disapproved of and condemned his highhanded proceedings.

So much for this short survey of apostolic instructions as to discipline in the assembly.

With the close of the apostolic writings we leave the sure ground of divine inspiration for the uncertain sands of human history. We may do well to step, in our minds, straight from A.D. 96 to A.D. 1921. Not that we would for one moment belittle the gracious movements of the Spirit of God through many different servants of Christ through the centuries, but we believe it will conduce to a clearer apprehension of the bearing of Scripture upon the present situation, and also enable us to avoid historic details which may be open to question, if we do so.

If, then, we ourselves had been but recently converted, and were just rejoicing in the discovery, from the Scriptures, of what the Church is in the thoughts of God, and of the nature and characteristics of Christian fellowship as originally instituted and regulated through the Apostles, what would be our first impression? Would it not be that the religious organizations - with which the majority of our fellow-Christians are connected - bear little or no resemblance to the apostolic model? And what would be the first question which would arise for solution? Would it not be as to whether we were bound to continue in such unscriptural organizations or whether, on the other hand, there were any apostolic instructions which would authorize the ordinary believer without gift or office in the Church to clear himself by separating from them? The passages quoted above in connection with Scriptural discipline, under the fourth heading, would soon satisfy us as to this. If in certain contingencies the individual believer was not authorized to act, all true believers ought to be presumably still in the "parent Churches" of east and west, Greek and Roman respectively, except they had been individually excommunicated by those bodies; a protesting and persecuted minority without doubt, but still there!

Finding ourselves, however, outside, the next question would be as to what Scripture authorizes us to do? 2 Tim. 2. 22 supplies the answer. We are to earnestly pursue the things pleasing to God along with others who "call on the Lord out of a pure heart". It is evidently supposed that there will always be such.

We may be tempted to think the instructions of this verse very meagre for such a situation as is suggested, but are they as meagre as first sight might suggest?

"Follow righteousness", i.e., what is right. Well, what is right under such circumstances? First, to humbly and brokenly confess the failure, and not make believe that things are all right when all wrong. Secondly, to recognize that God always starts with what is right. He never, like man, experiments with the imperfect at the beginning, gradually advancing to the more finished production. Hence the way of faith, the right way, is always to revert to God's original thoughts and institutions as far as may be practicable. In the last years of Israel's history as a nation the Lord recalled them to "the old paths" and "the good way" ( Jer. 6. 16). It is not otherwise to-day.

We have no authority to construct anything, to organize fresh "Churches" on an improved basis as compared with what we are outside of. Nor have we authority, if we revert to the order of the assembly as established by the Apostles and revealed to us in the Scriptures, to aim at producing a more select assemblage of saints than ever the apostolic assemblies were - an eclectic company of extra choice souls - and to institute a more rigid and searching discipline, and narrower tests than Scripture intimates to attain that end. A very tempting thing this under the circumstances, and specially appealing to many earnest Christian people with a tendency to pay more attention to their own subjective consistency than to the great objective claims of CHRIST and the Church.

We are, however, authorized, we repeat, to go back to that which God instituted at the beginning; but having done so we cannot of course claim to be the original institution; at best we can only be some saints who revert to its principles, and walk according to them.

A further question now arises. Assuming that, stirred by the Spirit of God some saints are walking together according to the original instructions of the Word of God, and therefore enjoying fellowship which is apostolic in its character - what are the features which would mark it and them?

It would begin by embracing all saints as to the principle of it, and welcoming all saints, not Scripturally disqualified, as occasion might arise; though in practice it is possible that a very small percentage of them might enter into and enjoy it. The mass might remain quite unexercised as to it, and content with their various religious organizations. This is a matter of very great importance, and no fellowship which overlooks or repudiates this feature can be apostolic in its character, but must be essentially sectarian.

There would be observed the discipline which Scripture enjoins. As to morals (1 Cor. 5), as to doctrine (2 Tim. 2. 17-21), and as to association with evil (2 Tim. 2. 21 and 2 John 9-11), action would be taken in the fear of God according to the Word, ever remembering that as we must not fall short of, so we have no authority to go beyond what is written, inasmuch as what is written is sufficient to make the man of God perfect or complete, "throughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Tim. 3. 16, 17).

Further, such fellowship would be enjoyed in the light of the whole truth as to Christ and the Church, just as of old the Apostle's fellowship was founded on their doctrine. This would be a corrective to the tendency always present to regard fellowship as a matter of voluntary association, to be taken up or laid down according to one's personal likes or dislikes. It would also preserve from tendencies either in the direction of an independent congregationalism or that of a Romish metropolitanism. Let the truth as to the church being God's house, and the body of Christ, in its widest or universal aspect, be firmly held, and the former becomes impossible. Let truth as to the body of Christ in its local aspect be seized and the latter tendency is checked. Both of the Corinthian Epistles in their introductions throw valuable light on this. The first is addressed primarily to the Church of God at Corinth, but linking with them in a secondary way all saints everywhere. The second is again addressed primarily to the local assembly at Corinth, but secondarily to all the saints in the surrounding province of Achaia. Here, then, we have first the local assembly, the primary sphere of all practical fellowship with its responsibilities of discipline and the like; secondly, the surrounding assemblies of the province, the first to be affected when any breakdown occurs in the local assembly; thirdly, the whole Church everywhere, the ultimate boundary to which such breakdown may extend its influence.

Again, we may safely say that any fellowship truly apostolic in character would be free from the assumption of being what it is not, or of possessing powers not within its reach. Any lofty claims to a Church position, or power not shared in by other believers who may not have had light to separate from unscriptural systems, would be very destructive of apostolic simplicity and reality. We must continually remember that at this late hour in the Church's history there is no prospect of saints being more than a feeble remnant, adhering with some degree of fidelity to God's original thoughts. The official side of things has lapsed. If men with the qualifications of an elder or bishop are to be found, we may well be thankful and submit to such, but no power of official ordination available for us to-day is delineated in Scripture.

The last feature we would mention is this: If and when difficulties and mistakes occur in the midst of such as walk in apostolic fellowship, they should become an occasion for a fresh experience of the unchanged resources of the great Head of the Church and His Spirit, and there should be no attempt to grapple with them by purely human, and much less by worldly, means.

Difficulties and mistakes will most certainly occur. They occurred in apostolic times, and it is worthy of note that though the Apostles were armed with special powers of discipline to deal with such, they used those powers very sparingly, and only in the most grave and obstinate cases, as we have previously seen. The more excellent way even for them was that of pastoral care and oversight whether in person or by letter as in the case of the Corinthians and Galatians. To the Apostle Paul the intervention of the Lord, caring for His own interests in His assembly, was a thing to be counted on and expected. Compare Gal. 4. verses 11 and 20 with Gal. 5. 10. His confidence as to them was "through the Lord". How much violent action amongst saints - action if not actually opposed to Scripture, at least beyond Scriptural limits - would have never taken place if the faith which makes Christ on high, and the Spirit here below living realities to us, had been more in exercise? Then saints would have been content to act within the limits that Scripture assigns them, and count on the Lord by His Spirit present in the Church to act for His own glory as to anything beyond.

In all that has been advanced above there is nothing new so far as we are aware, and it is a fact that some ninety years ago not a few saints of a godliness and power hardly known in these days began to walk together in fellowship of this kind. It is also a fact that as time elapsed and faith and spiritual energy declined, there has been a tendency to depart from fellowship of an apostolic character, towards one of sectarian narrowness or unscriptural breadth. This has greatly complicated matters, and largely obscured the practical blessedness and simplicity of the truth.

The truth, however, stands together with the responsibility of every saint to know it and walk according to it. Just as in years gone by it was the path of faith, in the presence of the ruin of the professing Church, to revert to the truth of Scripture and walk in obedience thereto, so is it to-day in the presence of the further failure amongst those who have essayed so to walk.

Some have spoken as if the failure on the part of those who have set out to walk in fellowship of an apostolic order, has rendered any further attempt to so walk abortive, and shut us all up to a kind of helpless acquiescence in what can by no means be defended from Scripture. We venture, on the contrary, to affirm that the door of repentance (Rev. 3. 19), of faith, and of first works (Rev. 3. 20) - "hear my voice" is faith and "open the door" is first works - is open even in the extreme end of the dispensation; and that if failure occurs ten times over, and the situation becomes far more involved, yet there will never be any valid reason against a simple return to the truth of Scripture. Want of faith or courage upon our side alone will hinder.

Casting a prophetic glance forward Paul commended the saints to "God and the word of His grace" (Acts 20. 32). Such is our resource to-day. We need but faith to discern His mind and courage to obey.

F. B. Hole.

The New Interest and the New Power.

Every one gets what he values. Mary Magdalene had simple and undivided affection for Christ, and she was the first to see Him on the resurrection day; then she gained intelligence. If I have true affection for the Lord - if my heart is right - I am sure to become intelligent sooner or later. Mary goes about His interests; she no longer has fear of losing Him; she is now in association with Him, and His interest is hers. We are in association with Him, in unchangeable relationship to Him. Oh, that we might be alive to this. And what should occupy us now? Christ's own treasure. Our souls want to know better that Christ's interest - His Treasure - is on earth. What are His saints - His assembly - to us? First, what are they to Him? The answer to that question will decide for us what they are to us if we are devoted to Him.

The Holy Ghost is the new Power, and the only power for this new interest. You can carry on the testimony with the new power, but with nothing else. Any human resource is a hindrance. The enmity of the world is aroused if you refuse its help, but you can only maintain the interest of Christ by the new Power on earth. Here it is that we have failed; we have found resources in the world in one shape or another instead of leaning solely on the Spirit of God.

J. B. Stoney.

The Spirit's Work in the Building Up of the Assembly.

We purpose taking up this subject very briefly, God helping us, as it is unfolded in the Epistle to the Ephesians.

James tells us that the body without the spirit is dead, referring to the human body and the human spirit. In the same way the Spirit of God is necessary for the life, activity, and manifestation of life in the Body of Christ. But the body of Christ is likewise spoken of in Ephesians as the household of God, a holy temple in the Lord, God's dwelling place and shrine, His assembly on the earth.

It is as the Holy Spirit is active in the assembly, that the mind of God will be expressed by the assembly. The assembly is not a machine, but a living intelligent organism, made up of the intelligence and life of each member of it; it is as response is made to the Spirit that God's mind for the assembly can be carried out. How vastly important our subject is, and how feeble must our best attempts be to state it.

It is by the Spirit that the assembly is brought into existence, and by the same Spirit the assembly is maintained.

The Holy Spirit of Promise.

The Lord in those memorable chapters in John's gospel - chapters 13-17 - spoke much to His loved disciples, ere He left them, of the coming of the Holy Spirit consequent on His going to His Father. In Acts 1: 4 we are reminded that the early disciples did not receive the Holy Spirit one by one, but that they were commanded to assemble themselves at Jerusalem there to await the promise of the Father, the blessed Holy Spirit of God. It is of the utmost importance that it should be seen how the Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, as it clearly proves that our individual responsibility as Christians flows from our corporate position as part of God's assembly. The Spirit came and formed the believers into one body - Christ being the Head in heaven, the believers, the body on earth.

Once the assembly is formed individuals are added one by one, but they are added to the assembly, and not merely indwelt as individuals. That we are indwelt is blessedly true, and consequent on believing on Christ, receiving the Gospel of their salvation, believers are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise; sealed, claimed by God for ever for Himself; the Holy Spirit betokening what character He would impart to those sealed, the earnest of our inheritance, the living proof, the taste of the believer of what will be His portion in God's presence for ever.

Access by One Spirit to the Father.

In Ephesians we need to follow carefully the 'we' of the Jewish believers and the 'ye' of the Gentile believers. It was no new thought to the Jew that he was in relation to God. The tabernacle and temple services constantly kept this before him in typical fashion. But it was a new thing for the Gentile to be brought into blessing equally with the Jew.

That the Gentile believer should be blessed equally with the Jewish could only be brought to pass in and through Christ, and that by an absolutely new range of blessing affecting them both. Christ's death brought the law to an end as a MEANS of life. No one ever maintained life before God on the law principle. Yet the moral law is never set aside, and in Christianity love is the mighty controlling power, "love is the fulfilling of the law" (Rom. 13. 10), and it is by the Spirit's power "that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." But the believer is not under law, though as led of the Spirit he fulfils its righteousness. So great is the breakdown of the flesh, that only in NEW creation can man be blessed, and in new creation "there is neither Greek nor Jew" (Col. 3. 11).

In Christianity we come into new creation and therefore with new relationships. Not the least of these is that of sons to the Father. To have access to the Father means that those who have access are sons. If I have access to the King I have access to him who is a father, but to have access to him as father I must be his child. So in Christ Jesus all - Jew and Gentile - are brought nigh by His precious blood. He is our peace, not only settling every question that lay between us and God, but doing it in such fashion, and blessing us with such blessings that go far beyond settling variance between us and God, blessings of an entirely new and positive nature and connected with the purpose of God, that the middle wall of partition is broken down, and of Jew and Gentile in Christ one new man is made.

It is said there was a wall of partition in the court of the temple, pierced with gates, which admitted a Jew, but which meant death to a Gentile, if he ventured to pass through. How sweet that all restraint is gone, and that Jew and Gentile are lifted into heights that are outside of every feeling of racial animosity and pride, so that we read, Through Him [Christ] we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father" (Eph. 2. 18).

The Mystery of Christ Revealed by the Spirit.

Again is emphasized the wonderful place the Gentile has as well as the Jew in Christianity. This mystery was not made known in other ages, and was revealed by the Holy Spirit to the holy apostles and prophets.

Judaism was exclusive, and treated the Gentile as an alien from the commonwealth of Israel and stranger to the covenants of promise, which indeed he was. But Christianity has altered all that no longer will the Jew in this dispensation enlightened by the Gospel look to Jerusalem as the centre, and earth as the sphere of his blessing. The believer looks to Christ in glory and finds his true home in the assembly on earth. Consequent on Christ taking His place on high and sending the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, believers are fellow-heirs of these spiritual blessings: members of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ by the Gospel. But stress in this passage is laid on the fact that Gentiles (see Eph. 3. 6) were admitted to these privileges as much as the Jew.

How formative must these thoughts have been in the souls of the believers, and as they met in the exercises of the assembly how they must have put a deep mark on their worship. No wonder that the Apostle Paul glories in his commission to proclaim "among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ" (Eph. 3. 8).

* * * *

"Strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man". (Eph. 3. 16).

Here we find the Apostle bending his knees in prayer to God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, that the believers might according to the riches of God's glory, "be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man" (Eph. 3. 16). Evidently the Apostle realized that the presentation of the truth in set terms would not effect God's purpose, that only as the Holy Spirit in mighty power gives perception to the believer through deep exercise of soul can such be attained.

And for what did the Apostle desire this strengthening of the inner man? It was that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith - wonderful truth - that rooted and grounded in love they might be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length, and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. Mark that expression, "with all saints". How the Spirit throughout the Word emphasizes that Christianity is not an individual thing! It puts the believer into relation with the whole, and spite of failure this is still true, though failure renders the expression of it very difficult.

We are not told what the breadth and length and height and depth are. They define that which is indefinable. They measure that which is immeasurable. When we have said what we can about them we have said very little. We are on the edge of a vast ocean of divine purpose and love.

Breadth - it takes in all saints.

Length - it stretches back to distant ages when God, before time began, purposed us for blessing in Christ; it stretches forward to coming ages, when throughout eternity the saints will be in all the blessing and fullness of these purposes in Christ.

Depth - this reminds us of all the distance and shame and suffering the blessed Lord went through in order to open up all this righteously and give effect to God's wonderful scheme of blessing.

Height - we look up and see Him, who went into the lowest depth, now in the highest height of glory, and the believer made to sit in heavenly places in Christ.

The love of Christ - that which made all this possible to us, and introduced us into it - that love which went into death itself, and which passeth knowledge, infinite, eternal, divine. What exercise for our hearts! No wonder the heart of the Apostle, surcharged with divine joy, has to find relief in doxology and worship.

The Unity of the Spirit.

The believer is bid to endeavour "to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. iv. 3). This is a unity the Spirit makes, a unity we cannot make or break, though as individuals we may fail to answer to the practice of it. That is to say it is explained that "there is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling" (Eph. 4. 4). If I am a Christian I am linked up with every other Christian as a member of the body of Christ. This is a unity I cannot make, nor can I by any action of mine cease to be a member of that body, cease to be linked up in life with Christ, the Head, and the members of His body, of which I am a necessary and integral part.

But remember there is not only one body but also one Spirit, and it is well to keep these two thoughts together. The body without the Spirit is dead, and it is only as the Spirit is active and has His way with us that the body is effectual in carrying out the mind of Christ for it. It is in seeking to be under the Spirit's guidance that we shall endeavour to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Lowliness and meekness and long-suffering and forbearance in love are qualities the Spirit would produce in us to this end. How happy if the seven ones in Ephesians 4. 1-6, have a large place in our thoughts, and we adjust ourselves by the Spirit's power in relation to them.

"Grieve Not the Holy Spirit of God" (Eph. 4. 30).

We must refrain from lengthy comments or else the space at our disposal will not nearly suffice. There is so much fullness in the Word, and the theme is tempting.

Suffice it to say that once the doctrinal part proper of the epistle is passed the Apostle puts right practice before the believers on the ground of their having put off "the old man, corrupt according to the deceitful lusts", and having put "on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and holiness". These exhortations to truthfulness, industry in providing means for sustenance and the help of others, purity of speech, are based on the ground that the believers were members of each other (see Eph. 4. 25). Let it be observed the believer is "sealed unto the day of redemption", that is, till Christ comes to claim His own at His coming. We cannot grieve the Spirit away - what a comfort and stay! - but we are exhorted not to grieve Him. May we pay heed to this.

"Filled with the Spirit" (Eph. 4. 15).

To be "filled with the Spirit" does not mean that one believer has more of the Spirit than another, but that the Spirit has more of one believer than another. That is to say, one believer may be walking carelessly, going on in a cold worldly state, and the Spirit of God is grieved, and not free to fill the heart with the blessed things of God. On the other hand, a believer may through yielding to the Lord in his life have such a filling of the Spirit that it can only find expression in praise and worship, "making melody in your heart of the Lord" (Eph. 5. 18). Here we get the Spirit of joy and praise.

There is a teaching abroad that makes this filling to be a subsequent thing to the gift of the Spirit to the believer, and to be brought about by a special act of surrender and faith, and that the believer who has thus, as they say, received the baptism of the Spirit, lives on a higher plane than the ordinary Christian. We are assured that this teaching, whilst it is often the outcome of a sincere desire to be heavenly minded, is mixed up with erroneous teaching that in the end fixes the attention of the believer upon his attainments instead of on Christ and His glories.

"Praying . . in the Spirit" (Eph. 6: 18).

Note the earnestness of this exhortation. "Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication FOR ALL SAINTS". And, further, that Paul might make known boldly "the mystery of the gospel".

Doubtless we are right to pray about our temporal needs and difficulties, but those who get no further than that don't touch this. This is expressed as the heart sees the vast field of truth concerning Christ and the Church, the Head and the Body, the heavenly relationships of the believer with the Father, that such prayer for oneself and "for all saints" is made. Do we know anything of it?

We have practically only pointed out every place where the Holy Spirit is mentioned in this wonderful Epistle to the Ephesians. Space forbids anything but the most meagre and inadequate comment, but if the reader is led to study this subject first hand and meditate upon it, we are assured that great blessing must be the result.

How can I be connected with a system which is allied to the State, or with a system seeking a place in this world, or with a system substituting man's ordering of the assembly instead of God's, if I lay hold of the wonderful truth of the Spirit's work in the building up of the assembly? May God give every one of us faithfulness to Him, subjection to the headship of Christ and dependence on the Holy Spirit. It is the praise of God and not that of men that really counts.

The Supremacy of Christ in the Assembly.

If the saints of God are to be gathered together, according to the thoughts and will of God, it must be by the truth and power of God. The truth is in Christ and the power is in the Holy Ghost, and apart from these there is no assembly of God at all.

No one will deny that the truth and power of God are unchanged, and are as able to gather the saints together now as in the first century of the Christian era, and it will be readily admitted by every thoughtful person that to knowingly introduce or be satisfied with any substitute for them is to despise them, and Christendom abounds with such substitutes. This must be displeasing to God, and while He is wonderfully patient with our ignorance, He cannot sanction or give His support to anything but that which is from Himself. God will only stand by that which He formed at the beginning, and if we are to have His approval and support, we must come back to that, and every truly exercised Christian will say, "I want nothing except that".

When God formed His assembly at the beginning, and gathered His saints together into "the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord", He was not experimenting, as some seem to think, but He was displaying, in what He did, His manifold wisdom. His truth, sufficient for His saints until the end, was fully revealed, and this abides; men may have departed from it, believing in their folly that they can improve upon it; His blood-bought saints may be indifferent to it, or be satisfied to go on in ignorance of it, but God does not change His truth because of this. It abides the same, and any who seek in lowliness of mind to carry out His thoughts, will most assuredly have His approval and support.

We propose then to consider the character of the gatherings together of the assembly as they are set before us in the Word. 1 Corinthians is the Epistle to which we naturally turn, and the 9th verse of chapter 1 sets very definitely before us the character of our fellowship together. "God is faithful, by whom ye were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord".

The assembly at Corinth, when gathered together, was not a voluntary gathering of believers, each claiming his right to be there because he was a member of the same body, much less was it a free assembly in which every one had a right to take part in ministering according as his impulses led him. There were those at Corinth who took this view of the matter, and these are corrected by the apostle, especially in chapter 14. The assembly is supposed to bear this character by many to-day, but their conception of what the assembly is, is very far from the truth. Nor was it a gathering together of a select, or selected company of believers, who had attained to a certain standard of knowledge, or who saw eye to eye as to certain lines of truth, or followed certain leaders, or adopted certain systems of teaching. That sort of thing began to show itself in that assembly, but it was most sternly rebuked in this inspired Epistle. There are those who would make it this to-day, and who have gone so far as to say that it is necessary now for us to choose our company. The former is the introduction of the principles of democracy into the assembly, and is a challenge to the truth of the assembly. The latter is pharisaical and sectarian in the extreme, and if possible is more destructive of the truth than the other. The former tends to lawlessness and disorder, and the latter to pride and bondage.

No one has any rights in the assembly but Christ; that is fundamental to the truth of the assembly, and of every gathering having an assembly character. Where it is not acknowledged the assembly is not. It is our purpose in this paper to press upon our readers that the assembly is Christ's own circle, the sphere in which He is to be supreme, and where His rights are to be maintained. It has been formed on earth by the Holy Ghost for this very purpose. Every loyal heart will acquiesce in this, and rejoice that such a circle has been formed on earth, and desire to be intelligently in it, and the more so because when Christ came into this world His every right was refused. The princes of this world, we are told in this very Epistle, crucified the Lord of Glory. Let that title, given to Him here, come before us in all its greatness, and we shall begin to realize the dignity of the assembly of which through grace we form a part, and the necessity of ever yielding to the Lord His rightful place in it.

Our minds are carried back, as we consider this title, to Isaiah 6, where the prophet saw the Lord sitting upon the Throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. There the sphere that bore His Name was filled with His glory, and the seraphims stood before Him, with covered faces and feet, and cried one to another, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts". It is this same Person of whom John speaks in the 12th chapter of his Gospel, when he sadly records the fact that when the Lord of Glory came to His own, they had neither eyes to see Him, nor ears to hear Him, nor hearts to understand or appreciate His person or mission (John 12).

As we consider His personal greatness, and acknowledge that every sphere in the universe should be subject to Him, and yet see how completely He was refused by men, how His every right was denied, it must be a cause for joy to us, that now He has a circle upon the earth in which His rights are acknowledged and His name revered.

He has been raised from the dead, and on the resurrection day He gathered together the company of His disciples whom He loved and who loved Him, and stood in the midst of them, showing to their enraptured eyes His hands and His side, which had been wounded to death for them. There we have a pattern of the assembly when gathered together. Was there one in that circle that would have talked of his own rights on that memorable evening? Would they not gladly and unitedly acknowledge His rights who was their Lord indeed, and His alone? "Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord."

When the assembly is gathered it is a circle formed upon earth in which Christ's supremacy must abide unchallenged, or it loses its character and ceases to be for His pleasure. It is a circle where Christ is all and in all, and the Holy Ghost dwells in that circle to maintain in it the rights of Christ. We read that no man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Ghost, and that we believe means that all who thus call Him Lord are subject to Him. We must remark here, that the Lord is not spoken of as Lord of the assembly, which is His body, but as Head to it: the Epistles to Ephesus and Colosse unfold this side of the truth. But that He is Lord in the assembly when it is gathered together is as plain as can be in this 1st Epistle to Corinth. His Lordship is the most prominent truth in the Epistle, as will be easily seen by tracing out the number of times in it that this title is given to Him.

From what sorrow and disaster would the saints of God have been saved if they had remembered that the things that are written in this Epistle "are the commandments of the Lord" (1 Cor. 14. 37) and had been subject to these commandments. Has anyone else a right to command in the assemblies of His saints? Certainly not! If it is His circle, He only has rights there, and the place of every one whose privilege it is to be there is that of subjection to Him. What blessing, what continuous streams of blessing would flow to the saints if His supremacy were owned by all, for He exercises His authority in perfect love. He, the one perfect, all-wise Administrator, administers the fullness of God for the blessing of His own when they are gathered together in His name.

Those who are called and gathered into this fellowship are a sanctified company. They are "sanctified in Christ Jesus", as 1 Cor. 1. 2 tells us; and Hebrews 2. 11 confirms this. There we read, "He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren"; and though in Corinthians, saints are not viewed as the brethren of Christ, nor is the Lord presented as Lord in Hebrews 2; yet what is interesting is that there He stands in the midst of those that are sanctified, and here in the Corinthian Epistle it is the sanctified ones who come together in His name; in the midst of them He is. These sanctified ones are not left to choose their own company, they are each chosen and called of God. The sovereign call of God sets aside the will of men.

These are the two things we desire to specially bring to the consideration of our readers: (1) That the assembly is Christ's own circle, and that this should be owned gladly and practically when it is gathered together; (2) That it is composed of those who are sanctified in Him, that is, set apart for His pleasure, to be at His disposal, separated to Him. All true believers are called to this - they are all saints by calling, and sanctified in Christ Jesus; and they call on the name of the Lord, that is, they own His Lordship. God grant that it may be done in greater reality.

It is not difficult to discern where these great truths are operative in the soul; the marks are lowliness of mind and subduedness of spirit. Alas! we have suffered much from just the opposite. We have known men professedly acting in the name of the Lord, set aside His commandments, and act in His sphere not according to His Word, but according to their own wisdom, which is folly; we have heard them talk of principles and seen them apply them to the hurt and scattering of the saints. We have to confess how little the truth has been in power anywhere; how often it has been held in terms, and how little it has been carried out in practice.

An important question and one that exercises many is, whether it is possible now to act upon the truth as it is presented in this 1st Epistle to Corinth? In some quarters it is definitely denied that we can: that since it is impossible now to gather the whole assembly together in any place, it is presumption for any to endeavour to act upon the full truth as to assembly gathering. We believe that to take that ground is to haul down the colours and surrender the fort. Jude's Epistle was written for days of widespread apostasy, and in it we are exhorted to "contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints", and surely that includes the whole faith, in which 1 Corinthians has its part. Paul's 2nd Epistle to Timothy was written to help us in these very days in which we live, and there Timothy is told to hand that which he had learned from Paul to faithful men, who would be able to teach others also; surely the truth given in 1 Corinthians had its place in that which Timothy had learned from Paul; and if anything that Paul taught, as having received it from the Lord, has come down to us, it has been committed to us that we might hold it fast as the testimony of the Lord, practise it, and pass it on to others. They are not faithful men who faint and surrender the truth or any part of it because of difficulties, and innumerable difficulties will beset us if we are determined to be faithful men; but in this good fight we shall be only the successors of Paul, and the grace in Christ Jesus that strengthened him to this end will be at our disposal.

"When ye are gathered together." Three times in the Corinthian Epistle we read of the saints there being gathered together:

1. "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together" (1 Cor. 5: 4).

2. "When ye come together therefore into one place (1 Cor. 11: 20).

3. "If therefore the whole church be come together into one place" (1 Cor. 14: 23).

It is impossible to gather the whole assembly in any place together now, and this being so it would be nothing less than presumption for any company of Christians to claim to be the assembly of God in any place; yet it is still possible for even 'two or three' to gather together in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and as they do so, being subject to the truth, their gatherings will have assembly character.

The first of these three gatherings together is special, and most solemn. At Corinth, it was the calling together of the assembly in order to clear the Name of the Lord from complicity with evil. It was for the maintenance of the holiness of His name. It ought not to be difficult to see the necessity of this at the beginning, and it is surely as necessary to-day. The fellowship to which God called His saints at the beginning was a holy fellowship, for God is holy, and it originated with Him, and we can form no new fellowship; to do so would be to ignore that which was from the beginning; subjection to the Lord carries us back to that. Our Lord's Name is holy, for He is "the holy and the true". The Spirit of God who has formed the assembly and by whose power it only can exist is the Holy Spirit; and the faith which we are to hold together is "our most holy faith", so designated for days of apostasy such as these are. Hence evil must be judged and put away, for even Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us. Our sin and evil were judged in the Person of our Substitute at the cross, not that we might think lightly of sin and evil, and tolerate it in ourselves and each other, but that we might accept that judgment of it, and be henceforward righteously and practically free from it, keeping the feast with sincerity and truth.

In such matters as these zeal has often outrun knowledge, and care is needed that in them the Word is the guide, and the only guide. Tradition, precedents, policy, and all those things that have so large a place in the ways of men, should have no place here; "the commandments of the Lord" alone are to lead us.

It should be clear that, if a wicked person is "put away from among yourselves", for any to hold to such a person, is to be a partaker of his wickedness. Suppose one is rightly rejected for evil conduct, or for the denial of the truth as to Christ, which is more serious a thousandfold, though not so considered by the majority of Christians - it should be clear to all, that any who persisted in expressing fellowship with such an one must be one with him, and so one with his evil deeds. 2 John tells us that this is so, and surely all ought to see this; and moreover, those who hold to one who is rightly rejected must share his rejection. Fellowship would have no force otherwise. There can be no neutrality, no compromise in such matters as these. All who desire to be consistent with the fellowship into which God has called all His saints, must be zealous as to this; there must be a coming together for this purpose when necessity calls, or the character of the Lord is ignored, and the truth of assembly gathering gone; and the only way, where there is indifference to the presence of evil, is separation, after due patience and grace, for any who would still "Call on the Lord out of a pure heart" (2 Timothy 2: 19-22).

The second of these gatherings of the assembly (chap. 11) brings out the love of the heart of the Lord. So much has been written on the Lord's supper, and as we hope to take it up in detail, if the Lord will, in a future paper, we refrain from comments here.

The third of these gatherings is not the least important, for it was designed to promote the edification of the saints, and this surely is imperative if they are to fulfil the will of the Lord; in it comes out the wisdom of the mind of the Lord. The difference between the gathering together of the assembly in chap. 14 and that for the Lord's Supper in chap. 11 is that in the latter the assembly ministers to the Lord, and in the former the Lord ministers to His assembly by the Spirit through His servants, and we are not prepared to say which is the more important of the two, for assuredly both are indispensable to the joy and glory of the Lord, and for the edification and joy of His saints. The two are interdependent upon each other, they are the normal gatherings together of the assembly. It is evident that at Corinth this gathering was greatly abused. Unspiritual men thought more of the display of their own powers than of the edification of the saints and the honour of God's Name, hence there is given this long chapter of reproof and instruction. When the Lord was on earth He maintained in all His ways the honour of God's holy Name, and those same ways yielded a constant stream of blessing to those who came to Him. His assembly should be descriptive of Him. Those who are gathered in His Name should bear His character, consequently there should be these two things constantly maintained - the honour of God's Name and the blessing, not only of those who form part of the gathering, but even of the unbeliever who comes in (verses 24, 25).

Let it be noted that though the carnality of the Corinthians turned these gatherings into profitless and disorderly meetings, the remedy was not their abandonment. Instead, the Apostle instructs them as to what became them when so gathered, and we should do well to carefully and prayerfully consider these "commandments of the Lord".

Gatherings together of the saints of God according to instructions given in this 14th chapter have largely ceased. They come together to-day for the Lord's Supper, for prayer, for the reading of the Scriptures regularly, but not for meetings of this sort. It is true that there is no meeting more capable of being abused than this; ought it then to be abandoned and something else that man can control substituted in its place? Is it not as incumbent upon us to come together in this way and for this purpose, as it is to come together for other assembly purposes? Is the Lord still the one Lord? Is His Word enough for our guidance still?

But where such gatherings are held, there is often great disappointment in them. A correspondent, who is no mean judge as to things spiritual, writes: -

"If we go to a large meeting [of this kind] we find much time taken up by men who lack spiritual substance. I was at -. The chief feature was the unseemly haste of men whom God never intended to speak. . . . The general subject was 'power'. One almost heard the creaking windlass as with aching back the waterman raised the driblet of water from Jacob's well. Scripture presents the artesian well. What a contrast!"

That such a report should be possible is deeply humiliating, and should cause general exercise of heart. The reason for such a state of things is, we believe, lack of faith in the Lord and of subjection to Him. If saints when gathered together were conscious of their interdependence one upon the other, of the importance of true ministry, and of the indispensability of the Lord for this, there would be more waiting upon Him. Better by far to wait upon Him for one hour and have half an hour devoted to profitable ministry than "one continuous stream of orations all day. Prayer non est and the ministry fourth rate", as our correspondent describes another meeting of this sort.

What a different story would be told if there were more of that which marked the saints of God in Malachi's day - the fear of the Lord; if saints gathered together in the sense that they were gathered by God's call, and that the Lord was in the midst of them, that they were not there to act as they pleased, but that they were in Christ's own circle in which He directs by the Spirit as to what pleases Him. This is a matter about which much prayer is needed, and self judgment and confession of failure. We urge upon our readers the necessity of a revival in our souls of the sense of what the assembly is to Christ; what it must be to Him to have His saints gathered together in His Name so that He can manifest Himself to them. We believe that this will only be through much exercise of heart and waiting upon the Lord, and, above all, the keeping of His commandments, by which we prove our love to Him who is our Lord.

Is it not an evidence of lack of faith in the Lord that such gatherings are now only held on special occasions, if they are held at all, and when large numbers are able to come together? Is it not evident that this was one of the usual regular gatherings of the assembly locally, and consequently held as often, at least, as the gathering together for the Supper of the Lord?

We ask these questions that exercise in regard them may be produced.

J. T. Mawson.

One Loaf: One Body.

When saints endeavour to walk according to the truth of the church as set forth in Scripture, and thus come together in practical fellowship according to the apostolic pattern, we must not expect that they will be left in peace. The adversary of God and His people is too watchful and untiring for that.

More to be feared than open and gross breaches of God's trust or order are the more subtle deviations from truth and simplicity which spring up almost imperceptibly in the course of years, and entrench themselves in people's minds or ever they are aware of them; until finally the deviation becomes accepted as the original main road of truth, and is tenaciously contended for as such.

By way of illustration we mention three specific matters which have come under our own observation.

The first concerns the truth of the 'one body '. The chapters in which this truth is alluded to are Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 10, 12 to 15; Ephesians 1 and 4; Colossians 1 and 2; and if these be carefully read and considered, it will be found that the bearing of this truth is in the direction of unity, love, consideration, mutual forbearance, and the like, and that nothing in the nature of church order and discipline stands connected with it. Ephesians 4. 1-4 may be taken as summing up the apostolic application and bearing of the truth in question.

We have, however, lived to see a very different use and application of it. Years ago, when believers walking according to the truth of Scripture somewhat increased in number, and groups of them were found in many parts, it was recognized that the truth of the unity of the body, equally with other truth, should regulate their dealings with one another as much as it would have done, if instead of being a small and insignificant remnant they had been the whole church in their various localities. From this it was deduced - rightly as we judge - that in such matters as cases of discipline, or other assembly acts, the local gathering acted for all, and hence its actions were bound to be respected unless evidently contrary to Scripture. The unity of the body was thus rightly invoked to prevent independency, and consequent confusion of action.

Of later years this last-named ecclesiastical application of the truth of the one body seems in many minds to have been so magnified out of all proportion that it has quite eclipsed the primary application as Scripture presents it. With some it seems now to be regarded as the truth itself, instead of a secondary application, which is deduced from Scripture, rather than plainly stated in it.

Hence in some difficulties that have arisen an altogether disproportionate amount of effort has been expended in trying to show that this or that group of saints is 'off ' the ground of the one body by reason of their having made some false ecclesiastical step, such as the non-recognition of a judgment, or act of some other meeting, and the like.

Moreover, by the magnifying of this secondary application to the obscuring of the primary, the truth of the unity of the body has become the great ground of excommunication or rejection, rather than that of reception. Who, for instance, has heard of a meeting receiving some one and then demanding that all other meetings shall receive him under penalty of being regarded as 'off' the ground of the one body? Such dealings are always entered upon in order to produce acquiescence in acts of excision or rejection.

Thus, by over emphasizing the secondary, the primary force of the truth is overlooked, indeed is nullified. Similar cases by which the Word of God was made of none effect were common in the time of our Lord, as the Gospels show.

The above naturally leads one to inquire whether there may not be a further misconception underlying this diversion of the truth from its proper setting. We submit that one such misconception entertained by not a few is the assumption that the fact of saints gathering in the light of the truth upon the ground of the one body confers upon them a corporate status, distinct from that which belongs to the church as a whole.

Certain parts of Scripture contemplate the breakdown in the professing church, and indicate our path and resources in view of it. Such are Acts 20; 2 Tim. 2; 2 Peter; and 2 and 3 John. What have these to say, bearing upon this point?

They make it clear that though wolves would enter from without, and there would be no safety in the elderhood (i.e., rule as originally established by God) within, yet God and the Word of His grace are always available: that no matter how high the tide of evil might rise, the foundation of God would stand sure, and faithful men be found able to teach others; and not only so, but that to the end there would be some calling on the Lord out of a pure heart, if only a few: some who love the truth, and have a good report of the truth itself. There is, however, no hint that such faithful souls by so doing acquire any special corporate status. They may enjoy much collectively which they would not as single individuals; but corporately they have nothing apart from the whole body of Christ.

Indeed, whether in the Old or New Testaments, when once an institution of God fails it does not appear that at some subsequent date He grants any renewed or special incorporation to any fragment of the whole, however godly or enlightened the individuals composing it may be. It is always a case henceforward of individual faithfulness, together with a reverting in heart to the original status, in which status the faithful individual has part by reason of his forming part of the original institution, and not because he may take up with others a true remnant position.

Notice, for instance: -

When Israel made the golden calf, they could only proceed from that point as upheld by the individual faithfulness of Moses (See Exodus 33. 12 to 17).

When in the land and Joshua dead, they rapidly fall away. Revivals were granted, but always in the power of individual faith and action. "When the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge [it does not say, then the Lord was with the people], and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge" (Judges 2. 18).

When after the captivity some returned from Babylon, they were evidently led by the faith and energy of individual men of God, such as Zerubabel, Ezra and Nehemiah. Under the influence of these men they began brightly, afresh embracing God's thoughts as to all Israel, and holding themselves as connected with such. See for example Ezra 6. 17; 9. 4-15. It was just because later they began to arrogate to themselves a special position far more exclusive and lofty than Israel's original calling that they developed the frame of mind that prepared them to reject the Messiah when He came.

In the New Testament the truth of the mystery was committed to Paul. He was also the "wise master-builder" who not only laid the foundation, but afterwards in his Epistles treated of matters connected with order, discipline, and administration in the churches. It is especially striking, therefore, to find that in his farewell Epistle to Timothy he addresses simply a faithful individual, and that he designates the aggregate of faithful individuals, not by a phrase which indicates any special corporate status as belonging to them, but by one which indicates their moral character. "Them which call on the Lord out of a pure heart."

The position of a remnant, then, in all dispensations is an individual one. The present moment is no exception. Saints who in later years have rallied to the truth and met on the ground of the one body have not acquired any special corporate status by so doing; at best they have been but faithful individuals walking in the truth. The fact that they have no status beyond the original status of the church, which all the saints share with them, does not give them licence to disregard any part of the truth. Though individuals they are responsible to be governed by assembly truth, because by all truth.

The third thing to which we now refer is the fact that the cup and the loaf of the Lord's supper are linked with the oneness of the body. The cup and the loaf represent the blood and body of Christ. In 1 Cor. 10 they are spoken of as the communion of His blood and body rather than the representation of it, inasmuch as "we being many are one bread, one body"; and hence not only is there the thought of our identification with the death of Christ, as the Jew is identified with his altar, or the heathen with demons, but also the thought that we are all so identified together as one body, for as it adds, "we are all partakers of that one bread" (verse 17).

It should be carefully noted that these words simply indicate that the partaking of the one loaf in the Lord's supper is the expression of that unity, and therefore may be appealed to as the sign or proof of it. It does not mean that our eating of the one loaf is the cause of the unity. We say, for instance, "It will be fine to-morrow for the barometer is rising", and by this we mean not that the barometer produces the fine weather but that it is the sign of it. So our common participation in the one loaf is the sign and setting forth of the fact of our being one body.

This is important, because the almost certain result of believing that saints who meet upon a Scriptural basis thereby obtain a special corporate status will be to connect the Lord's Supper and its communion with that "inner circle" instead of with the whole body; making it thus the expression of 'our' fellowship instead of proper Christian fellowship. This in its turn creates a tendency to the exclusion of people from the Lord's supper apart from the authority of Scripture, because they do not please us, or are out of harmony with the aims we are pursuing, or for other similar reasons.

If an individual sits down and partakes of the Lord's supper, he is thereby recognized as a member of the one body and as fit for Christian fellowship; no such point is raised as that of whether all can agree with all his views and actions. This is pretty clearly indicated by verses 23 to 29 of 1 Corinthians 10.

It is a striking fact, and one for which we beg careful and special attention, that the very chapter which most enforces the fact of fellowship or partnership in connection with Christ's death and His table, does not close without dealing with matters in which liberty for the exercise of individual conscience and faith is claimed. A clear proof this that the extreme view of fellowship which makes all in it responsible for and identified with every individual act, has no foundation in Scripture. We are not, of course, supposing views and acts that challenge the truth.

If one contemplated breaking bread with saints assembling in a certain place, in view of the foregoing, it would be a pertinent question to ask - Do you wish me to regard myself as thereby linked up with an association which you have formed, and committed, so to speak, to your platform; or is it that you wish to receive me as a member of the body, that is, linked up with the association which God originally formed, and committed to identification with the death of Christ?

In practice a great deal hangs upon this. In the one case it is just sectarianism, though the members of the sect may be very enlightened and commendable. In the other case it is walking, so far at least, in the truth.

F. B. Hole.

Ministering To The Lord In Assembly.

The first king of Israel fought with mistaken zeal for the freedom of God's people from their enemies and to establish their national supremacy, but he became himself an oppressor. The second king, David, fought from a different point of view altogether. He would not rest till the centre was established where offerings according to God's mind could ascend to Him. Long before, it had been revealed that the Lord desired this (see Deut. 16. and elsewhere), but until David's day it was altogether neglected. He, however, succeeded in this, and prospered also in that which Saul failed with fleshly earnestness to accomplish.

The place of Jehovah's name became the centre of the nation where continual songs and sweet savour offerings arose in fragrant meaning to the Lord, for they foreshadowed the present time when worship in spirit and in truth should rise to the Father, who was seeking those who should thus worship Him (John 4. 23), the new and "holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 2: 5).

As long as the offerings were abundant at the God-appointed centre, Israel triumphed to the uttermost bounds of her kingdom; and whenever a revival took place, the doors of the Lord's house were opened for ministry to Him. The principle is the same now. A Person, the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, is the Centre as well as Head of the assembly, and as we 'draw near' together and 'offer up' that which the Father seeks, there will be prosperity in the work of the Lord around. "Bring in and I will pour out", said the Lord in days of great failure (Mal. 3. 10), and such "a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it"; others would therefore get the overflow!

That which typified worship was commanded in the Old Testament. The real worship and "the true worshippers" are found in the New Testament; but though the Father's heart desires this, it is not now commanded. Its precious and rare sweetness could not thus be produced. It rises responsively. We do not here seek to answer the oft-repeated question, What is worship? but only to indicate one of the highest, if not the highest, practical functions of the assembly.

Supplication, prayer and intercession seek from God, but worship ministers to Him. So do thanksgiving, praise, blessing and adoration. At the institution of His supper the Lord "gave thanks". Thanksgiving is, therefore, characteristic of the remembrance of Himself, also praise, blessing, worship and adoration as the power of the Holy Spirit is unhindered. What rich fullness would thus mark the worship of the assembly! It will be so in glory for ever when all things are centred in Christ. To further this now is surely the aim of every true servant of the Lord.

Some have esteemed it a waste of time and labour, but the thought betrays a lack of the true knowledge of our God and Father, and a serious disregard of that which He seeks. When Mary lavished upon the Lord the costly ointment which filled the house with its pleasant perfume, some one thought it waste and that it ought to have been sold and used for the relief of the needy (John 12. 5)! To be found in the company of such an one is extremely undesirable. Surely the One who was thus ministered to was worthy of it! yea, of even more costly ointment still if it could be found! The best and most precious is His due. May we have grace and power by the Holy Spirit to give Him more as His love and glory fill our glad hearts.

Behold that glorious scene around the throne in heaven! The Lamb is seen there, and that "as it had been slain"! A new song concerning His worthiness and His redeeming blood sounds sweetly from the assembled throng. Innumerable multitudes then utter His praise, and the saints fall down and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever (Rev. 5). The Spirit of Promise gives the earnest of this in the assembly now.

In closing, let it be noticed that it was when the Lord Himself was being ministered to, that the sending forth of blessing to the needy sinners of the Gentiles took place by the hand of a most extraordinary servant of Christ. In Acts 13 we are told that this took place in the assembly at Antioch - "They were ministering to the Lord". It was then that Paul was separated for the work to which he was already called of God. Who can measure the extent of the blessing which followed? or number up those who have been reached as the result of Paul's subsequent service? Yet he in his abundant labours ever afterwards sought to establish such in Christ Jesus, that there might be glory to God in the assembly in Him (Eph. 3. 21) .

H. J. Vine.

When Ye Come Together.

It is of the first importance for the right understanding of any portion of Scripture, to observe the setting in which it is placed. Many a difficulty is solved by this alone. The question has been raised as to the possibility of having a meeting such as is alluded to in 1 Cor. 14 at the present time? It is a serious thing that in the denominations of Christendom such a meeting rarely or never takes place. Human arrangements and control are substituted for the free action of the Spirit of God. But then the fact of the presence of the Divine Spirit in the Church has been so lost sight of, and the will of man has become so paramount, that no wonder that the conclusion prevails, that a gathering with no visible president, leader or chairman, must result in confusion, and be without profit or point. Yet it is evident in reading this chapter that the meetings of early Christians were framed on the model here set forth, and that the result, when not abused, was to edification, teaching, comfort and a sense of the Divine presence, which is certainly lacking in gatherings formed after the pattern on which the world transacts its concerns.

In correcting the disorder which was present amongst the Corinthians, the apostle does not suggest to them their need of a presiding leader, but rebukes the lack of spirituality whereby the liberty of the Spirit was made an occasion for the flesh to assert itself.

That we may obtain an answer to the above question let us turn back to the 10th chapter and discover, if we can, the conditions under which such a meeting can be held with profit to those who come together, and above all, glory to the name of our Lord.

In chapter 10 ver. 15, the apostle addresses himself to wise men, for one who does not truly belong to Christ has no part in this matter. He reminds them of the precious ordinance that the Lord has ordained, in order that the import of His cross may be kept vividly before the hearts of His own. Paul has before him, first of all, the significance of the act of partaking, rather than the order in which the supper is partaken of. He, therefore, places the cup before the loaf, for he has in his mind the fellowship of the one body, the body of Christ, the church, and this could have had no existence at all, unless the blood of Christ had been shed. The cup is the communion or fellowship of His blood, the loaf the fellowship of His body. Both these fellowships, His death and the one body, belong to all Christians, the two things are fundamental, and without them no gathering is Christian in the true sense of the word. Christian fellowship depends upon the cross, where flesh, and sin, and all that belongs to man in the flesh, has been judged and condemned. When this is apprehended the confusion, to which the Corinthians were prone, is disposed of entirely.

In the latter part of chapter 10 the impossibility of connecting the Lord's table, characteristic of Christian fellowship, with the table of demons which marked the heathen, or the altar connected with the Jew, is demonstrated. For Jew and Gentile had banded themselves together to crucify the Lord of glory, and the presence of that Lord is in the midst of those gathered to His Name. The moral principles of each abide, the self-righteousness, exclusive ritualism, and superstition of the Jew, and the will of man expressing itself in the broad rationalism of the Gentile. Alas, for the confusion of these things with the name of Christ in the professing Church. It is this which writes upon it the name of 'Babylon'. Is there any path for true hearts but to heed the command of the Lord, "Come out from among them, and be ye separate saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you" (2 Cor. 6. 14-18). In chapter 2 is unfolded the place which the Church has in relation to Christ; He is its head, it is formed of Him, it is for Him, it is under His authority, it is one with Him. The relation of the man to the woman in God's order of creation is used to illustrate these truths. Then follows the partaking of the supper, the remembrance of the unsearchable love of Him who gave His body and blood, the loving response which He has made it possible for us to give to Him for the gift of Himself.

Thus far we have seen four conditions for a Christian gathering; the Cross of Christ, the Body of Christ, the Authority of Christ, and the Love of Christ. These things are on His part to us, but we need also to recognize that which has been given to be on our side to Him, that is, the Holy Spirit, and love, chapter 12 gives us the first, and chapter 13 the second.

In chapter 12 the Spirit of God is seen indwelling the one body, and imparting to each member gifts according to His own will. There is a variety of manifestations but all to profit and all in marvellous unity, the figure of which is the human body. All is divinely tempered together,

The members act not for themselves but for the good of the whole. How wonderful must be such a meeting where the Spirit thus controls, and flesh is silent. For the flesh is subtle, and only too ready to find occasion for boasting even in the gifts of the Spirit, and to produce pride, and jealousy, and envy. Therefore something else is needed if edification and profit are to result, and that is an atmosphere in which the Spirit can work, and which can only be produced when He is ungrieved, that is, Love. Chapter 13 tells us that without it all, gift, speaking, sacrifice, is nothing. Love is the great essential, for it is the character of Christ reproduced in the saints. Well may chapter 14 open with the exhortation, "Follow after love".

These are the things which make such a meeting as is described in chapter 14 possible. Seeing also that these conditions are God's gifts from above, there is no need to despair because of our failure, and to seek human resources. The fullness of God waits for a subject heart, captivated by the love of Christ, and it is His delight to lead such into His own joy when gathered thus together, even if it be but with little strength.

To know His presence in the midst is the next thing to seeing His face; hence chapter 15 tells of the precious truth of resurrection and the power whereby the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed at His coming. The truth of God's assembly abides, and Christ is faithful to all who keep His word and deny not His name. To such He will manifest Himself.

James Green.

The Cross of Christ.

As the children of Jacob had to date their beginning as a nation in relationship with God from the Passover night when the lamb was sacrificed for them, so must we in our thoughts continually go back to the Cross of Calvary where Christ, our Passover, was slain for us. We could have had no existence as the children of God, or members of the body of Christ, apart from that cross of sacrifice. There could have been no assembly at all to gather together, and we should have remained for ever the children of wrath, if Jesus had not died. But now we live, and the life that is given to us is eternal life; but we owe it all to the death of our Saviour. We are to be gathered soon, the whole multitude of God's children, into heaven's cloudless joy; but then, as now, we shall date our knowledge of God from the cross, and we shall discover our origin there, and like the sound of many waters our grateful praises shall roll upward, and for ever, to the Lamb that was slain.

Consider Him coming forth from His eternal glory, from the glory which He had with the Father before the world was made: see Him take the place as a Man amongst men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: follow His footsteps along that road upon which no human eye smiled, for it was neither approved nor understood by men - that pathway that "led only to the cross"!

What great purpose was it that set His face as a flint in that way of sorrow? It was the Father's will, and what was that will? It was that we might live; that He might gather His saints together as His assembly now, and have us as His "many sons" in glory hereafter, all conformed to the image of His dear Son, that He might be the Firstborn amongst many brethren. And nothing less than the cross could make this possible; His incarnation amid the lowly surrounding of Bethlehem's manger was not enough: His life of service and sorrow amid the need and misery of men was not enough: His prayers, His works, His tears were not enough. His agony and sweat of blood in the shades of Gethsemane were not enough all these had their part in the unfolding of the heart of God, and in the making known of His own deep perfections; but if guilty men were to be pardoned, if dead sinners were to live, if He was to build His assembly, if heaven was to be filled with "a multitude of sons", Jesus must die. For "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit".

It was death as the judgment of God that He endured, the penalty of sin. Two things met at the cross - our sins, and the judgment of God. Our sins - not as we see them and measure them, but as God knew them and saw them in their exceeding sinfulness, and those sins were laid on Jesus, nay, more, He, the Sinless One, was made sin for us, made sin that in His own sinless Person He might bear to the uttermost the judgment of God against sin, and herein lay His sufferings, unmeasured and immeasurable. It was this that made Him say in the garden, "If it be possible let this cup pass from Me", and upon the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me?"

Little wonder then that we make the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ our boast and glory, strange that we should ever forget it. How great was the love that moved Him to endure the cross! Love that each of us can take to himself as his very own, and say, "The Son of God loved me, and gave Himself for me". He loved His assembly and gave Himself for it.

J. T. Mawson.

The Open Meeting and Its Abuse.

The subject of the open meeting and its abuse is not of my choosing. Our good editor, feeling its importance, has particularly requested me to deal with it.

I must confess that I do so with hesitation and reluctance. It is always easier to indicate an abuse than to suggest a remedy. Still, it is the act of a coward to turn from a task because of a disinclination to perform it. So counting upon the indulgence of the reader, we will, Bible in hand, approach the subject.

What is meant by "the open meeting"? The question is not unnecessary, for what is familiar to some must not be regarded as intelligible without explanation to all. We use the term 'open meeting' in contrast with meetings for the preaching of the Word (whether to saints or sinners), meetings convened by any servant of Christ for the exercise of his own ministry, or where he ministers, either alone or with others, by invitation of those responsible for such meetings. In the strictest sense of the word, the 'open meeting' is not one specially convened for prayer, or for any other defined object, but is one in which all assembled wait on the Lord for guidance as to who shall take part, whether in prayer, praise, or ministry of the Word.

That such was the character of meetings held at Corinth in apostolic times no careful reader of 1 Cor. 14 will have the hardihood to deny. And the possession of miraculous gifts, far from being essential for such a meeting, seems to have contributed (where those who possessed them were not guided by the Lord) to the abuse and consequent confusion which were even then apparent. If God was the Author of the liberty that characterized these assemblings of the saints at Corinth, He certainly was not the Author of the confusion that resulted from their abuse.

The weekly meeting for the Supper of the Lord, though for a defined object, is, we believe, rightly left 'open' for the leading of the Lord. It is particularly liable to abuse by those who come with thoughts of their own blessing, rather than the remembrance of the Lord, before their minds. Such will often give out an unsuitable hymn, or give thanks in a way hardly in accord with the simple object for which the meeting is held. The remedy is, of course, a greater sense of the Lord's presence (for where even but two or three are gathered together in His Name, there is He) and a better understanding of the purpose for which we assemble to break bread, viz., the remembrance of Himself.

But probably what the editor had in his mind when asking for a paper on "the open meeting" was the largely attended meetings held in various centres on special occasions: Bank holidays and other days when freedom from ordinary occupations enables the Lord's people to come together in one place from surrounding localities, usually for two meetings, with tea between.

Such meetings are particularly liable to abuse. And the abuses generally arising are of four kinds: -

1. An unseemly haste in rising to minister, a competition for the platform in which those who know what it is to wait on the Lord for guidance and opportunity will decline to take part.

2. Unsuitable speakers taking part, with no result save to weary and depress their unfortunate hearers. Such often are the readiest to rise, thus shutting out those who are really able to edify the gathering.

3. Inordinate length on the part of some, selfishly appropriating time which common courtesy, to say the least, would lead them to leave to others who might, equally with themselves, feel that they had a message from the Lord.

4. The treating of 1 Cor. 14. 29 as if it were a dead letter. How are these abuses to be remedied?

To begin with, it is a question whether "the open meeting" is the most suitable for occasions like these. The assembled company is composed of persons from various localities. Generally a large number of young people, with Christians from the denominations are present, and not infrequently unconverted persons. It is not, strictly speaking, an 'assembly meeting'. The majority present are there by invitation from those in local responsibility, and are, for the time being, their guests. It is, therefore, the established custom in many cases, that those who address the assembled company should do so by invitation; two or three speakers both afternoon and evening. This, of course, is not guarding against abuse of the open meeting but doing away with it altogether. It is quite within the competence of those who arrange and convene meetings on these special occasions to decide whether they should be 'open', or be addressed by chosen and invited speakers.

If it be decided that the meetings should be open let them be so in a genuine way. Let not the conveners write north, south, east and west to invite their favourite speakers on the assumption that they will speak. Anything that savours of unreality is abhorrent, not only in the sight of God, but to all right-minded persons. Pretence of any kind is to be deprecated. Does it not seem to border on insincerity to profess to have 'open' meetings and yet invite special speakers from a distance?

Presuming that a genuine open meeting is to be held, it might help to guard against abuse if one of the conveners, or an elder brother, were at the very commencement to say a few words to the following effect: -

"Brethren and sisters, we are here to wait upon the Lord, for Him to do with us as pleases Him. If we count on Him, we may be sure He will not disappoint us. Let us really wait on Him. Any brother who rises to speak with unseemly haste necessarily discounts whatever he has to say in the minds of those who know what Divine guidance is. And let none imagine that because his heart is warm with some precious truth he is, therefore, called to minister it. There may be a hundred brethren present with hearts burning with desire to impart to others what they themselves enjoy. They cannot all speak. The Lord has His way of making His guidance and pleasure known. Let us wait on Him. And let there be consideration for one another. For one brother to speak for forty minutes is a trespass, since it may shut out one led to speak equally with himself. And let us remember the exhortation of 1 Cor. 14. 29. If in the days of miraculous gifts it was ordained that the prophets should 'speak two or three' how much more necessary is this wise provision in days like these?"

That such an exhortation would carry weight is highly probable. That it is called for none will doubt. We have known a brother, after an opening hymn, rise to pray and then immediately, without sitting down or waiting even for a moment to see if anyone else may be led to minister, proceed to open his Bible and speak. We have known such to speak for the best part of an hour, making it impossible for others - who may have received a word from the Lord to minister - to speak.

When an opening exhortation, such as that suggested, remains unheeded, what is to be done? The writer remembers that at a certain meeting to commend a newly-married couple to the Lord, an elder and respected brother stated that it was the express desire of the saints that the meeting should be mainly for prayer, and that it would have to conclude within the hour. Yet, in spite of this, two brethren from a distance spoke, one after the other, for forty-eight minutes, so that not a single brother in the assembly where the bride had lived, and where she was known and esteemed, had an opportunity to raise his voice in prayer to God for her and her husband in their new path. If ministering brethren do such things, can we wonder if lawlessness prevail among those whose knowledge is perhaps less?

What remedy have we?

The answer would seem to be: Either abandon the 'open' meeting, save for local occasions, monthly fellowship meetings, and the like; or let the principles of the 'open' meeting be explained from time to time, and those who transgress be expostulated with in a firm, but kindly and brotherly way.

Above all, let there be prayer by those who feel the seriousness of the abuses referred to, that there may be greater intelligence given as to the nature of 'assembly meetings' and what is involved in the presence of the Lord. His love and faithfulness, His gracious forbearance and readiness to help may always be counted on.

H. P. Barker.

More About the "Open" Meeting.

Considerable comment has been made, both favourable and otherwise, on a paper that appeared in the last issue of the SUPPLEMENT, entitled "The Abuse of the Open Meeting." We are sure that such a paper was needed, and also that it by no means exhausted what ought to be said on the subject. It dwelt chiefly on the side of the conduct of those who take part in ministry at these gatherings together of the saints of God, but there is the other side also, the conduct of those who are gathered together. Seeing that they are the many, and those that minister are the few, they must exercise by far the greater influence on such gatherings.

Those that minister, if truly led of the Lord to do so, "speak unto men to edification, and exhortation and comfort" (1 Cor. 14. 3), or as it has been well put, "they build up, stir up, bind up." And the responsibility of such is very great. If they give forth something of their own they surely do it in self-sufficiency; and they ignore the Lord as the great Administrator in the assembly, and the presence of the Holy Spirit as the only power for true ministry. Hence, not only is the time of all gathered wasted, but the character of the gathering is set aside; the voice of men and not the voice of the Lord is heard, and the saints of God miss for the time being the direction that they should have for that special moment. We need only to carefully consider all this to see how serious a matter it is to take part in such gatherings, and what dependence on the Lord should characterize those who do so.

But what of those who come together for ministry? The way in which they come and the object before their minds in being present will most surely greatly affect their gathering together. The meeting that we are discussing, which is described in 1 Cor. 14, is a gathering having assembly character, and as such the Lord is there, for those gathered are there "in the name of the Lord Jesus." Faith in this great fact is of the very greatest importance, apart from this, these meetings must degenerate into mere voluntary gatherings of believers, at which it would be far better to arrange beforehand who should speak, so that all might know what to expect. This is a matter that concerns every individual, for if the gathering is an assembly gathering it means that "the King holds Court." It means that we are together because it is the Lord's wish and according to His ordering, not because we like to meet our brethren, or like to hear ministry, but because the Lord calls us into His presence; it is Himself and His will that is prominent and not our brethren and our likes.

If His Majesty the King holds a Court, they are very privileged people who are invited to be present, and they deem it a high honour; how much more highly honoured are they who are invited to the court of the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, for nothing less than this is every assembly gathering. Every one attending court at the King's invitation must be there in court dress according to the regulations. And so all who come into the presence of the Lord should be exercised in coming to be there according to His thoughts; not surely in a legal frame of mind, but self-judged, and with preparation of heart by the Spirit to meet Him who is so glorious and yet who is known to us by the love that led Him to die for us. If all who come together are thus prepared, how different will be the atmosphere created, and how free will the Lord be to reveal Himself. We are talking now of all present, from the oldest to the youngest, and not of those who minister only. If invited to take tea with a friend, we would endeavour to be neat and clean, and to conduct ourselves in his house in a fitting manner, recognizing him as the head of it, and our host. But how often do those who are "called saints" gather in the Lord's presence slovenly in mind and spirit, without due preparation of heart, having never looked into the glass of His word in their homes, or sought His presence in their chambers before coming, and so are totally unfit to speak to Him in His circle, or hear His voice when He speaks in His own place. We urge upon our readers the need of much thought on this side of the question, for herein lies the cause of unprofitable and powerless meetings. Every individual member of Christ's body present at such meetings is either a help or a hindrance, and none can escape the responsibility that rests upon them.

Having come together we must recognize, not that so many or so few gifted men are present, and that our time of profit will be great or small in consequence, but that the Lord is there, and the Holy Spirit. If the Lord's presence is realized, songs of praise will surely rise from united and glad hearts to Him, and quiet and confident waiting and expectation from Himself will mark all present, and He will not disappoint those that wait upon Him. The ministry given will not be something that has been laboriously prepared for the occasion, as though this were a matter of individual service, but it will be fresh and spontaneous, because from the Lord for the moment; and five words given of that character will be better than ten thousand drawn from memory, for they will be the fresh springing up and flowing forth of living water, and not the pumping up out of a stagnant pool.

When should these open meetings be held? This is an important question. In some places they are held once a month, or once a quarter, or once a year. But if we take our guidance from 1 Cor. 14. shalt we be satisfied with this? Is it not clear from that chapter that such meetings were the regular gatherings of the assembly, and were held certainly not less often than those for the taking of the Lord's Supper? They were not special occasions held when Paul or Apollos could be present, but the ordinary every-week meetings of the local assembly. If we take up these meetings at all, ought we not to take them up in this way? What warrant have we for taking them up at all if we are not prepared to take them up according to the Scriptures? It is said that there is neither faith nor power for such meetings now, but if there is faith and power for the gathering together of 1 Cor. 11, why not for that of 1 Cor. 14? It is the same Lord that presides at both gatherings, and faith has to do with Him, and it is the same Spirit who is present at both, and all power is in Him.

Much failure evidently marked this special meeting at Corinth, but the apostle did not tell the Corinthians to cease to hold it because of this, but he instructed them as to how to conduct themselves in it. The chapter is there in the God-breathed Scriptures for our instruction also, and is specially said to be the commandments of the Lord, it would be a sad thing if it became a dead or useless chapter to us because of lack of faith on our part.

J. T. Mawson.

"Tarry one for another."

The Evil of Individualism.

Just as it is necessary to avoid sectarianism if we would walk in fellowship after the apostle's pattern, so is it also needful to shun individualism, which is in some respects the opposite extreme.

To clear away possible misapprehensions, let us again affirm that we fully accept the oft-repeated statement that in days when the outward unity and order of the professing church has broken down, the path of faith becomes an individual one; by which we mean it is a path which must be entered upon and maintained in the energy of individual faith. 2 Timothy 2: 19 to 22, is clear evidence of this. The responsibilities and privileges there enforced lie upon "every one," "a man"; and the whole passage is addressed not to a church but to Timothy, a faithful individual; and consequently, when verse 22 is obeyed, those thus pursuing righteousness, faith, love, and peace, are only individual members of Christ's body who are walking together in the truth.

All that we fully grant, and yet it must also be maintained with equal clearness that such members of Christ's body who are thus together will only walk in the truth as they are governed by it in its entirety. To ignore the truth as to the Church of God will not do.

Let us assume that such a gathering of saints exists before us. We would then point out to them that, in the first place, they must not assume to be what they are not. They are not the Church, nor are they a church, in the sense of being a corporate body with a constitution of its own. They are simply members of Christ's body (which is the Church) who aim at gathering together and walking according to its original constitution.

But, in the second place, we should point out that the break-up and failure which has supervened has in no wise relieved them of the responsibility to walk according to all that Scripture indicates as the will of the Lord for His Church. We are not at liberty, if we would obey and please Him, to assert our individual action, or judgment, or ministry, to the over-riding of practical fellowship in these things, whether it be the individual person or the individual gathering of saints.

The believers at Corinth, as the Apostle Paul wrote to them, were carnal, and walked as men, consequently they had fallen into sectarianism by forming schools of opinion round favourite leaders. It is equally plain that they also were asserting themselves as individuals in a wrongful way, and that this individualism was working havoc in their midst. We will now point out the evidences of the working of this false principle as we have them in the First Epistle.

In chapter 10 the question of association with idols and idolatry is being discussed. The apostle begins with the history of Israel as the professed people of God, and shows how ruinous such association had proved in their case. This leads up to the exhortation of verse 14. From verse 15 onward the apostle appeals to them on the ground of that which is set forth in the Supper of the Lord. The true character of the cup and of the loaf is that they indicate Christ's blood and body; and moreover of His blood and body they are the communion or fellowship. We all share in that one loaf as one body (verse 17), not as so many individual believers. Here we have the Supper of the Lord viewed in its abstract nature and bearing, and individualism is clearly excluded in connection with it.

In chapter 11: 17, the apostle carries his corrective ministry further, and turns to mistakes and abuses which were amongst them in their actual comings together - their assemblies. We must distinguish, of course, between the church at Corinth and their actual assembling together in that character. Throughout this article we use the word "church" for the former and reserve the word "assembly" for the latter. The saints at Corinth gathered together sometimes in connection with the ministry of servants of the Lord - to listen to Apollos and receive help through him, for instance (Acts 18. 27) - these meetings were not "assemblies" in the sense in which we now use the word, i.e., actual convenings of the church as such in subjection to their risen Head acting by His Spirit in their midst. The church might thus meet in assembly for discipline (chap. 5), for eating the Lord's Supper (chap. 11.), for ministry to edification, exhortation and comfort (chap. 12, and 14. 1-5), for prayer and worship (chap. 14. 9-17).

First of all, then, in connection with their assemblies, he turns to the parties which existed among them and which were clearly visible when they came together "in assembly" (verse 18), (see N.T.). This sectarianism may result in select parties of a very rigid and exclusive sort grouped round the chosen teacher or preacher, but evidently it is, after all, closely connected with individualism, inasmuch as it springs out of an exaggerated sense of the importance of the individual who is made the centre of the party. It ends in saints "holding" the party leader instead of "holding the Head."

In verse 20 the apostle turns to the assembly for eating the Lord's Supper. Here there were grave abuses existent, but we are now only concerned to point out that in eating what they professed to be the Lord's Supper they were really eating "every one . . . . his own supper" (verse 21). They so individualized that sacred memorial that it became a scene of unseemly disorder, every one acting for himself. Hence the apostle's injunction in verse 33, "Wherefore, my brethren, . . . tarry one for another."

All this is extreme and horrifying, and would be utterly inexcusable if occurring now that we have the Word of God in our hands in a way that the Corinthians had not. Still we have to watch against subtler workings of the same thing. We do, indeed, break the bread and drink the cup individually, but we do so as those who belong to the one body, in keeping with the one loaf of which we partake.

In chapter 12 the gifts or manifestations of the Spirit are in question. These were found in different members of the body as the Lord in His wisdom was pleased to ordain, but they were given to individuals in view of the whole. "To each the manifestation of the Spirit is given for profit" (verse 7, N.T.) and that profit the profit of the whole body as the subsequent verses show.

Now if the gifted member is to sink himself, his self-importance which would naturally be fanned by the possession of a gift, and the self-pleasing which might guide him in the use of it, he must be thoroughly under the sway of Divine love. Hence the magnificent chapter 13 which comes in as a parenthesis.

Chapter 14 picks up the thread from chapter 12 and gives us a glimpse of the Corinthian assemblies for ministry, prayer and praise. The individualist got up and, speaking with an unknown tongue, he edified himself (verse 4), whereas the Divine purpose in the assembly was that the Church should be edified.

Verse 26 is very illuminating. In their assemblies every one of them had a psalm, a doctrine, a tongue, a revelation, an interpretation. The following verses give instructions regulating the use of these gifts, and from these verses, and verse 31 in particular, we gather that there was nothing wrong in each of them having something to contribute; since all might prophesy one by one - not on one occasion, doubtless, but there was liberty for all as the Lord might direct on different occasions. The trouble rather lay in that individualism that led them to degrade the Lord's Supper into each eating his own supper. They degraded that which was the assembly of the Lord where He ruled and directed by His Spirit into a free and easy meeting of a lot of individuals each with his own ideas and his own little bit which he eagerly desired to throw into the common pot.

The difference between the assembly in function as directed by the Lord and the individualist meeting of the Corinthian stamp can be likened to that existing between a fine-woven linen bed-spread and a patchwork quilt. The Bible itself consists of 66 books written in different epochs by different men. Yet a Divine unity pervades it because written under inspiration of the Spirit of God. A similar unity of ministry or prayer or worship will be discernible in the assembly as controlled in its activities by the Spirit of God, and the more so controlled the more it will be discernible.

So completely was the Spirit of God to be in control in the assembly that if a prophet were on his feet, presumably having arisen as controlled by the Spirit, and a further revelation were made to another prophet sitting by, the earlier speaker was to at once accept it as a signal that the time had come for him to stop; and resuming his seat he was to give place to the other.

Under the existing conditions of one-man ministry, and liturgical forms and customs, which hold sway in the religious organizations, all this part of Scripture has been reduced to a dead letter. But it is sadly possible to have gatherings of saints apart from such restrictions and with freedom of ministry, and yet for it to only result in meetings of this individualistic Corinthian type. Indeed it must so result unless we are prepared to keep before us the truth of the church in its practical fellowship and working. No assembling together of saints to-day, we repeat, can be more than the gathering of a few of the members of Christ's body, but so gathered they must act in the light of the whole truth of the church if they would be obedient.

In concluding our brief review of the Epistle, we might note that the use of discipline and exclusion mentioned in chapter 5 also involved assembly action. Apostolic energy and action is indeed prominent in verses 4 and 5, for as yet the consciences of the Corinthians were asleep, but the final action to be taken in verse 13 was of an assembly character.

The Second Epistle shows us that such action was taken, and that "the many" or the mass of the saints put their hands to it (chap. 2: 6). They were so stirred to zeal by the First Epistle (see chap. 7: 11) that the great mass of them came together and solemnly put the offender away from their midst. To-day, alas! saints are often so lethargic that only a few come together to act if such a sad occasion arises and the punishment is inflicted of "the few" rather than "the many."

If we now consider for a little how these apostolic corrections and instructions apply to-day, we shall be quickly aware of how much need there is of attention to the instructions of chapter 14. It is still possible for a few saints to gather together on "assembly" lines though only a fraction of those comprising the church in their town. Thus assembled they may break bread, or pray, or wait upon the Lord for ministry through two or three of His servants what we call an "open meeting." Are we free from individualism on these occasions? By no means. How often do we notice thanksgivings and particularly hymns of praise and worship, quite excellent in themselves individually considered, yet obviously quite out of keeping with what has gone before or what follows, complete misfits if judged from the standpoint of the Spirit's action in the assembly! How often times of prayer when the same petition is voiced again and again by various brothers, seemingly forgetful that the first who was led to ask it did so as the mouth-piece of those present, to be ratified by all saying "Amen" at the end of his requests; and that therefore, save in exceptional cases, such constant repetition is needless since all have already asked it! How often again is there that tendency to coming together, each having his hymn, his prayer, his Scripture portion to be got out at all costs!

Further, we have to beware of the individualism which takes a form which has been sometimes spoken of as "independency." This may take the form of an individual saint asserting himself, his judgment, his actions against the assembly where he is found, or the form of an individual assembly acting in complete indifference to, and as having no connection with, other assemblies equally walking in subjection to the same Lord.

Here some may at once object that we find but little in Scripture as to these errors. We grant it. The case of Diotrephes (3 John) bears upon it, but generally speaking these troubles are such as have afflicted the church in these later centuries. Apostolic authority acted as a check on that form of individualism at the beginning. We have become more exposed to it in these last days, when saints have essayed once more to walk according to the truth but without apostolic authority in their midst other than the apostolic writings, and even without an appointed elderhood as at the beginning. Their position is similar to that of the Jews who returned to Jerusalem under Zerubabel, Nehemiah and Ezra, who had no king and a very imperfect priesthood. These externals they had lost, and it would have been folly, if not worse, to have assumed power they did not possess in ordaining a king and more priests for themselves. The loss of these externals did not, however, exempt them from obedience to the whole law.

Hence to-day, we submit, we have special need of grace and wisdom in this matter. We have no wish to hinder the servants of the Lord, but they must remember that they are members of Christ's body, and if they profess to be walking, with as many as are available, in a path of obedience to the whole truth of the church, they must bear these things in mind. That which is right for the individual is clearly right for the individual gathering of saints also. We must carefully avoid, therefore, the position of independency that is commonly called "Congregationalism."

It is perfectly certain that failures have often occurred in the past both with individual saints and individual gatherings as to these very things, and if the Lord come not for a while they will occur again. "What then," it will be asked, "are we to do?"

Our responsibility is to act under the Lord, that is, in obedience to His word. Powers of discipline still remain to the saints collectively, as indicated in Romans 16: 17 and 18; 1 Thessalonians 5. 14; 2 Thessalonians 3. 6, 14, 15. Even in the very flagrant case of Diotrephes, the apostle contents himself with threatening action if and when he came. He did not urge Gaius or Demetrius to attempt strong counter-action themselves. Individualism or independency is not to be met with counter-independency. The spirit of division cannot be overcome, according to God, by the spirit of counter-division. If in mistaken zeal we attempt so to meet it we always run the risk of making the remedy worse than the disease, and of swallowing a whole camel in our endeavours to strain out the gnat.

In writing the above we bear fully in mind that a time may come, according to 2 Timothy 2. 16-21, when individual action is not only permitted by Scripture, but actually enjoined. That time is when evil, having come in, is of such a character as to overthrow faith, by attacking the foundations. Then, assuming that it gets beyond all assembly action, the individual must act for himself in faithfulness to his Lord.

We owe our position, if indeed we do gather to the Lord's Name, to such individual action in faithfulness to the Lord. In the position we are bound to act as governed by the whole truth as to the church and the apostle's fellowship, and not act on an individualistic basis. If by reason of unfaithfulness the position be abandoned or corrupted, then once more individual action according to 2 Timothy 2 becomes incumbent upon us in order that a place according to God may be taken up, and personal purity maintained.

We have one more application to make of the truth which is before us. A good deal has been said and written during the past fifteen years as to the unscriptural character of "circles of fellowship." In so far as such "circles" are of the kind which says "I am of Paul," etc., or formed to champion some special truth or truths, we quite agree. Yet we must not forget that there was a circle of fellowship in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. In the early morning it consisted of about 120 names, by night-fall it was expanded to over 3000. That circle of fellowship was "the apostle's fellowship."

Later on at Corinth the Divinely-formed "circle" was imperilled by sectarian "circles," not yet openly separated from each other, but parties formed within the church, the fruit of their carnal condition. In this connection 1 Corinthians 11: 18, 19 are very illuminating. "Among you," says the apostle, "there must also be sects." There was no such must in the case of the Ephesians or Philippians, where the prevailing state was one of spiritual freshness and power. If saints walk in the flesh, fleshly tendencies must be manifested. But on the other hand such fleshly manifestations only serve to throw into relief such as faithfully adhere to what is divine and thus are approved of God. There were evidently some in Corinth who would not range themselves under any of the party standards.

Now it is more than likely, when the "Paul" and "Apollos" and "Cephas" parties were forming themselves at Corinth, and some of the more spiritual and faithful souls were declining to join in their movements, that to the careless or worldly-minded onlooker they only appeared to be forming a further party. But even if they found it difficult or impossible to prove they were not, and thus vindicate themselves, they were approved of God and in the view of the inspired apostle. With that they had to be content.

While, therefore, we have no more desire to form "a circle of fellowship" than we have to form "a church," we suggest that it may be well to find out first of all exactly what is meant by people when they use the term "circle of fellowship," and secondly that we should make very certain that the proposed remedy for the "circles" of fellowship, against which protest is raised, is not that of each individual being allowed to form his own circle of fellowship. Otherwise we are only practising Corinthian-like individualism under a new guise.

We do not want "a circle" of fellowship, but fellowship we do want. It is a precious treasure. Let us be careful, therefore, lest as an old proverb puts it, we "throw away the child with the bath-water." Human ideals often incrust themselves upon the truth. In discarding the incrustation it is all too easy to let slip the truth. Rather let us "tarry one for another," as Scripture enjoins.

F. B. Hole.

How to Conduct Oneself in God's House Which is the Assembly of the Living God.

The above words are given to us by the Spirit in 1 Timothy 3. 15, where we are also told that the assembly is "the pillar and base of the truth." It is where the faith of God's elect is found, where the faith which was once delivered to the saints is maintained without deduction or addition, without the giving up of the latitudinarian or the going beyond of the newfangled. The truth finds its witness and support in the house of God which is His assembly, nor can it be found elsewhere.

It is no question of the strength or of the weakness of those who are of the truth, but of the truth itself. When the great apostasy takes place in Christendom (as the Spirit has expressly foretold) those who belong to the assembly of the living God will remain still "the pillar and base of the truth." It is this which we are to recognize, and in it we are to know how to conduct ourselves. There may be and are numerous religious organizations, but those who are of the faith have to do with the truth and with those who are of it; there may be and are many men who have messages to-day, but the One who is the Truth personally said, "I have come into the world that I might bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears My voice" (John 18. 37). The Lord Jesus spake these words when the question of His Kingship was raised by Pilate. The 1st Epistle to Timothy keeps this in view.

God's House.

In the house of a monarch, in a royal household, courtly conduct is rightly expected. Those who share the privileges and dignities of the King's palace are to behave themselves in reference to the regal inhabitant of the house. This is not easily appreciated in these days of extreme democraticism. Just so in regard to God's house; unless we have a true sense of God's greatness and glory we shall lose the proper appreciation of the conduct which becomes the house, the assembly, which is God's habitation. Let the true knowledge of God in Christ be reverently maintained in the soul, corresponding behaviour will then result in reference to Himself and to those who form His house - "the assembly of the living God."

One has often read of a royal household falling into disrepute by their bad behaviour, and of men rising up against them. We are to see to it that God is rightly represented before others through those who are of His house. "Great is the mystery of godliness" we are told, and its effects are very wholesome towards others. It is this aspect of the house which is prominent in the 1st Epistle to Timothy.

In 1 Peter 2. 5 the house is viewed as the place where spiritual sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise are offered to God: in Hebrews as that over which Christ is, as Son, the High Priest by whom we approach: in Ephesians it is God's habitation in the Spirit. The aspect in 1 Timothy, as we have said, is rather that which represents God in the world - "the pillar" as well as "the base of the truth"; "and confessedly the mystery of piety is great. God has been manifested in flesh." 1 John gives us the royal family in the house - all are born of God; speaking metaphorically, all have the sang bleu the Divine nature is theirs. They dwell in God and God dwells in them. They know the Father and the Father's love. They are the children of God, and the world is unable to take cognizance of them as such, for they dwell where the unregenerate cannot enter, though in the duties of this life they may know them well enough.

In the assembly, then, the presence of God is known. Thanksgiving and praise ascend to Him there. The Lord Jesus Christ is the One by whom we draw nigh; and it is the Spirit who gives our hearts to rejoice in the love and in the relationships which are ours. Glory and strength are in His presence: honour and majesty are His. Holiness becomes His house for ever, while they that dwell there shall be still praising Him. In His presence is fullness of joy - and John writes "that our joy may be full" - at His right hand are pleasures for evermore. It is the place, too, where the truth is found, as we have said, and where the witness to it is also maintained in practical piety and true reverence for the presence of the living God.

Behaviour in it.

How different is all this to what characterized the descendants of God's people in Malachi's day, and to that which so largely obtains now. In Malachi 1. 6, God asks, Where is Mine honour? and again, Where is My fear? for by their behaviour they showed they did not reverence Him; yet they said, Wherein have we despised Thy Name? They had no right sense of their departure from God. Their offerings were polluted, and "the table of the Lord was contemptible" in their eyes! How appalling was their state! Still they expected pay for the smallest services in connection with God's house (verse 10). They profaned His Name. They said, "The table of the Lord is polluted, and the fruit thereof, even His meat, is contemptible"; also, "Behold what a weariness it is!" and they "snuffed at it"! How keenly must the Lord have felt all this - "the great King, the Lord of hosts, whose Name is great among the nations"! Judah, the royal tribe, profaned the holiness of the Lord (chap. 2. 11). They wearied Him with their words. Yet they said, "Wherein have we wearied Him?" when they said, "Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delighteth in them"; again, "Where is the God of judgment?" (17) They robbed Him of the offerings which were His due. Nevertheless He said, Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in Mine house, and an overflowing blessing shall be poured out (chap. 3. 10). Still their words were stout against Him. They said, It is vain to serve God, and they called the proud happy.

What a picture of unrelieved sadness this would be, did we not read of those who truly honoured and feared the Lord at that very time of general declension. They spake often one to another, and without attempting to put others right they "thought upon His Name." They honoured it, and behaved according to that Name, conducting themselves according to the holiness, greatness and grace of it (verse 16). To such it is said, "Unto you that fear My Name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His wings" (chap. 4. 2). So to-day it is said, "I Jesus have sent Mine angel (Malachi means My messenger, or angel) to testify to you these things in the assemblies. I am the Root and Offspring of David, the bright and morning Star." The testimony in the assemblies at the end is to Himself and to His coming again, and this results in the Spirit and the assembly saying to Him, Come. The truth is found with such at the close of the assembly's history on earth, and what becomes the house of God marks them, although they may be surrounded with a similar state of unreal profession as beset those that feared the Lord in Malachi's time.

A House of Prayer.

It is of the last importance, therefore, for us to further what will help in the direction of the positive things that are found in the presence of God, whose house those who hold fast are, and these things should be treasured and upheld by us. We have named several of them here, but there are also supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings. The Spirit of God exhorts to this "first of all" in 1 Timothy 2. It is also said, "I will therefore that men pray everywhere" (verse 8). Looking back over nearly half a century two men, marked by this, leave the impress and fragrance of God's presence on the spirit. The first, not a religious official, but a pious believer, always prayed before leaving a house at which he called. Young and unsaved I was nevertheless convinced of the reality of the living God, whom he addressed in faith. The second, known soon after God called me by His grace, always proposed prayer when we met, when we parted, when we entered on the Lord's service in the open air or in halls or in visiting. He did indeed "pray everywhere," as the "men" of God's house are instructed to do. More than words this habitual dependence on God brings Him near to our souls, for as we draw nigh to Him He draws nigh to us.

Isaiah spake of God's house of prayer in which men should be joyful (Isa. 56. 7). The Lord Jesus said it should be "called the house of prayer" (Matt. 21. 13; Mark 11. 17; Luke 19. 46). Merchandise, however, had invaded its holy precincts then, and it obtains even more extensively now. They made it a den of thieves, and the Lord "cast out them that sold therein and them that bought." By-and-by He will "send forth His angels and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt. 13. 41).

In the Epistles, written to those who compose the house of God, unceasing prayer is earnestly urged. Some say, It is impossible to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thess. 5. 17). God does not exhort us to do the impossible. Some cease to maintain prayer. We are told not to cease, but to continue with all perseverance in spite of every opposition. In relation to the house of God, "kings and all who are in dignity" are to be remembered, "that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all piety and gravity" (1 Tim. 2. 2). This is all the more remarkable for the truth of eternal kingship had just been emphasized by the apostle, as he said, "Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen" (chap. 1. 17). Majesty, glory, honour and incorruptibility in this house of prayer are borne up. The elevating effect of it is surely very great, but in this day of degrading and profane principles the truth can only be upheld through Divine grace and power. Intercession, prayer, supplication and thanksgiving are therefore an imperative necessity.

In our day there is always One who intercedes. In Isaiah's day it was said, Truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and the Lord saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no intercessor (Isaiah 59. 16). Thank God, His beloved Son at His right hand "ever liveth to make intercession"; and thank God also for His house, where prayer is still maintained. This is good and acceptable in God's sight we are told; for He would "have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time." All are therefore to be prayed for, and "kings and all that are in authority" particularly, by those who belong to the house of God.

God is There.

Those who are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ and have been born again by the Word, coming to Christ - the man-rejected Stone, the accepted of God - are built up a spiritual house, and they are for a habitation of God in the Spirit. All our conduct is therefore to be ordered in view of the great fact that the living God dwells in His house.

Even in regard to the behaviour of one believer towards another the apostles used this truth to exhort them accordingly. To the Thessalonians who had been called out of idolatry and uncleanness it is said, "He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man but God, who hath also given to us His Holy Spirit" (1 Thess. 4. 8). To disregard any brother, and overstep his rights, is to do wrong against God, who dwells in those who are His. It is wholesome and elevating to regard each other rightly, and not to think carelessly of the saints of God. This is no difficult matter where the love of God is known. The children of God love because they are first loved by Him, and every one that loves God loves him that has been begotten of Him, and we know that we love the children of God "when we love God and keep His commandments" (1 John 5. 2).

"In Thine own house there love divine

Fills the bright courts with cloudless joy;

But 'tis the love that made us Thine

Fills all that house without alloy."

Twice in the Scriptures we are told that "God is love," and where the knowledge of His greatness, glory and majesty is cherished this most blessed fact will be valued rightly, for the more we see of His infinite majesty the more wonderful will this love appear to our worshipping hearts, and this will govern our conduct in the house of God which is the assembly of the living God, for it is such an One who is there.

When our Lord Jesus Christ appears in Divine splendour and glory His greatness will then be seen publicly. This is kept before us in 1 Timothy so that corresponding results may be produced in us now. That appearing, it is said, shall show "the only Ruler, the King of those that reign and the Lord of those that exercise lordship, who only has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen, nor is able to see, to whom be honour and eternal might. Amen" (chap. 6. 15). Timothy is reminded of Christ's witness before Pilate concerning kingship, and is exhorted therefore to be true and to "keep the commandment spotless, irreproachable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ." Christ is "our hope" (chap. 1. 1). He will bring everything right. Meanwhile prayer is to characterize the house of God, as we have said. Men are to pray everywhere, being in a suited state for God's holy presence. Women are to dress modestly and learn in quietness. Overseers are to be irreproachable in their own homes, and ministers also.

True piety is to mark all. Elders are to be honoured as fathers, and elder women as mothers, the younger as sisters with all purity. Pious aged widows who are destitute are to be cared for, and the younger are to give "no occasion to the adversary in respect of reproach." Elder brethren who lead in divine things are to be honoured doubly, specially those labouring in word and teaching. Servants are to honour and render profitable service to their masters. The rich are to be liberal. False-named science is to be avoided, while righteousness, piety, faith, love, endurance and meekness are to be pursued.

These things are to be seen and learned in Christ, who is the image of the invisible God; and as they mark us increasingly God will be in measure correspondingly made manifest in those that compose His house. His character will be represented in His assembly, which is "the pillar and base of the truth." God is true, and the truth expresses what is true; therefore the possession and witness and maintenance of the truth are necessary if God is to rightly be represented before men. This is what is in view in 1 Timothy. The assembly of the living God is for that purpose, in the aspect of which we have spoken. What an honour to be called to make Him known in all our conversation and conduct! May we appreciate it more highly.

Offerings to God.

We cannot close, however, without saying a few words as to what is for Him alone and which He alone can rightly value as to that which is offered to Himself in His house as to the "spiritual sacrifices" which ascend to Him, "the fruit of the lips" which He esteems so highly - the praise, thanksgiving and worship which the knowledge of Himself and His redeeming love produce in our hearts, and which the Holy Spirit enables us to render when we are free from self-occupation.

As we said the house of God in Hebrews is that over which Christ is as Son, the High Priest by whom we draw nigh. He saves completely from every hindrance - "to the uttermost" - those that come to God "by Him." Having Him as "a great Priest over the house of God," we are exhorted to "approach with a true heart" (Heb. 10: 21). All access is through Him (Eph. 2. 18) and by Him, and we are told also to offer the sacrifice of praise "by Him." To ignore this way of Divinely-appointed order in God's house is a serious matter, and to set religious officials in the place of Christ, as is often done in Christendom, is far from right conduct in the assembly of the living God. We are instructed in 1 Peter 2. 5, as to offering up "spiritual sacrifices" in a "spiritual house," but we are distinctly told that they are "acceptable to God by Jesus Christ," and not by anyone else. The Father finds pleasure in those who come thus before Him through His beloved Son.

" From our guilt His blood has freed us,

'Tis through Him our souls draw nigh;

And the Spirit, too, has taught us

Abba, Father, thus to cry."

We may therefore come boldly into His blessed presence, and, rejoicing before Him, give Him our united praise and worship, blessing His Holy Name together. "Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty; give unto the Lord the glory due unto His Name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness," it is said. How wonderful that we can give to Him! Nothing in ourselves and unworthy too; yet set with the mighty by God's rich grace, and enabled to offer to Him in the beauty of holiness, in the beauty that is ours in Christ through His redeeming work at Calvary. The gift of God's love to us is immeasurable and unspeakable, nevertheless we can respond to His infinite grace by giving to Him again, saying, "Of Thine own do we give Thee." May He receive that which gives Him pleasure in increasing measure from those who belong to the house of God which is the assembly of the living God.

H. J. Vine.

Correspondence:

Having invited correspondence we consider it only right that our readers should have the benefit, if any, that may arise from it. It is with some hesitation, however, that an endeavour has been made to meet the difficulties raised in the following letter; but as they are, alas, very common difficulties, they cannot be ignored, and it may amount to moral cowardice to shirk them. Others may be able to give clearer and more definite help; if so, the pages of the Supplement are open.

"Dear Bro, - I have recently received a copy of Scripture Truth with the Supplement No. 5. I am delighted with these papers, the teaching is so clear and Scriptural. They arrived at a very opportune moment, for it is not long since I found my way outside the religious systems of men, and I have since been through much exercise of soul in seeking to walk in the right path for God's people. I therefore gladly accept your invitation to send questions to your magazine. There are some questions which are troubling me greatly. I wish now I could express myself plainly enough for you to understand my difficulties. However, I will try to do so."

Divisions.

"First, with reference to fellowship. I found in this city three different companies of believers claiming to be gathered to the Name of the Lord, but each in separation from the other, inter-communion being strictly forbidden."

It is plain that in apostolic times only one assembly was recognized in one city, or to put it more correctly, the assembly in each city was viewed and addressed in its unity and oneness. When cliques and sects began to spring up in any one of these assemblies, as at Corinth, they were unsparingly condemned by the Holy Spirit in the Word (see 1 Cor.). They were an evidence of a rampant carnality and not of a higher spirituality as the sectarians thought. If the germ or bud of division met with God's rebuke at the beginning, the fully developed and vicious fruit cannot have His sanction now. Hence we have no difficulty in concluding that the state of things which you deplore in your city is wrong, radically wrong; it is contrary to the truth and Christ dishonouring; it could never have been if there had not been disobedience to the Word. There may, of course, be just cause for separation. If a company of believers in any place refused to judge known evil, either in morals or doctrine, as directed by the Word, it would be, we believe, incumbent upon those who desired to be faithful to the Lord, after due patience, to separate from them, for to do otherwise would be to say holiness and truth are of little account; consequently the name of "the Holy and the True" would be denied and His Word not kept. But such separation would be the last resource, after all efforts to exercise the consciences of the company had failed. Cases of this kind have arisen in the history of the truth, and it would not be right to characterize those who so separated as sectarian, they have simply stood for holiness and truth against complicity with evil and error. "Let every one that nameth the Name of Christ depart from iniquity . . . but follow righteousness, faith, love, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart" (2 Tim. 2. 19-22) would be sufficient warrant for such action, and enough also for the guidance of all who in every place call on the Name of the Lord, for what is done according to the truth and in the Name of the Lord in one place, would surely satisfy all who love the truth and hold to that Name wherever they are found. The one Head will direct all His members in unison, and there is one body and one Spirit.

We need not say that such a course must always be deeply serious, to cause a separation where one heart and one mind should prevail at the bidding of some leader, or because of some difference of judgment, or of the interpretation of some passage of Scripture is to be guilty of the gravest of sins, because it is sin committed in the holy circle of the Lord's interests. This we know has been done, causing widespread confusion, and stumbling many of the saints of God. The condition of things spiritually that made this possible is our common shame; but those directly responsible for these difficulties will have to answer to the Lord for their self will and independence of Him. All who would walk in the truth must surely decline to recognize separations of this sort, for they are contrary to the truth. You may say that all this does not help you in your difficulties, but it will, we trust, at least, direct your exercises in the right channel, so that you will not waste your time weighing the claims of one company against another, but weigh all in the light the Word gives for such conditions, and that may result in many others being exercised about a state of things that must be displeasing to the Lord.

Independence.

"I walked alone for some time, then was received into the fellowship of so-called -- Brethren. I longed for an expression of the unity of the church, but here I learned that although there were three meetings of these Brethren within a radius of a few miles, they were not in fellowship with each other; the City meeting had separated from the other two meetings some years ago, and the breach was not healed. This caused much confusion. The meetings would not receive from each other locally, yet the assemblies in the Eastern States received brethren from all of the assemblies here. A case actually occurred where two brethren from the meetings at variance here were on a visit to the Eastern States, and were both received on the same Lord's Day in one assembly, but returning home they could remain in separation from each other. I was much concerned on the question of unity in discipline and other matters, and soon withdrew from his meeting."

Do not let the desire for an "expression of the unity of the church" control you. That unity exists and will be fully expressed when the New Jerusalem - the bride of the Lamb - comes out of heaven having the glory of God. Meanwhile it is not expressed, though we may act in the faith that it is no mere doctrine but a reality - "There is one body and one Spirit." If an expression of the unity of the church is your one thought, Rome will claim to express it, but she is the great harlot.

But an expression of unity, or to more correctly express our thought, unison is much to be desired, but if it is gained at the expense of the truth the gain is an incalculable loss.

But while we cannot find a full expression of this unity in these broken days, it is altogether another matter to deny it in practice, and the state of things that you describe is clearly a denial of it, and confusion. It all arises from the the idea of independent assemblies, that each must act for itself regardless of what may happen elsewhere, and this is the principle of congregationalism, and not of the church of God.

One Scripture that would prove that all who are subject to the truth would act in unison is 1 Cor. 1: 2. The directions and commands that the Lord sent through Paul to the assembly at Corinth were for "all that in every place call upon the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours." Hence unity of discipline would be secured, for no one would assert that the Lord would direct an assembly in one place to act in one way, and direct another somewhere else in the opposite. As Head of the body He will move all who are subject to Him in one direction, and the one Spirit is here to give force to that direction. The one Lord administering in each assembly will produce one mind in all. Hence there will be unity in discipline and in everything else. It does not follow from this that one assembly must have the approval of all assemblies before it takes any necessary action. But that what it does is so clearly according to the Word that all who are subject to the Word will recognize the leading of the Lord and gladly acquiesce.

Official Oversight.

I was afterwards received into the fellowship of another company which I learn was once in fellowship with what was called the 'Needed Truth' party. The principles of that party are still practically maintained in this meeting. Your article on 'Apostolic Fellowship,' in SUPPLEMENT 5 has caused me to think very much. I have fears that I might have swung to an extreme, and that 'Needed Truth' principles are but a reflex of the Romish Metropolitanism mentioned in your article. Could you therefore enlighten me as to whether there is Scriptural ground for the assertion that all meetings in a city should form the one local assembly? In all cases of discipline, etc., these meetings act as one, and they have one united oversight."

It is clear, we believe, from Scripture, that all saints in any given place are looked upon as one assembly, even though through difficulties as to distance, etc., they were not able always to meet in one place. The Epistle to the Galatians was written to assemblies in a province, and they are addressed as one. They had come under the influence of error and were being swept away as one, and the apostolic letter was to call them back as one to the truth.

There is no Scripture for an official oversight to-day. Bishops, elders and deacons were appointed when the church in the house character was in order. But these were not appointed by the assemblies, that is another principle of congregationalism, but by the apostle or his delegates. No

word is given to us as to the continuation of this, and the apostle, in his farewell to the saints, did not commit them to the oversight but to God and the Word of His grace. The Lord is faithful and will raise up and maintain faithful men who shall have the moral qualities that fit them to care for the saints and their needs, and such will be recognized by all who are subject to the Word. But the appointing of an oversight is going beyond the Word. We must look for what is moral and not official in these days.

The Use Of The Word "Church."

Again, when in Scripture we read the expression 'The Church of God,' does it only refer to the local assembly or has it a more comprehensive meaning?"

The designation "church," or "assembly" as it should be, is used in the Word for the local assembly and also for the whole body of Christ upon earth. The first time it is used (Matt. 16. 38) it has in view the whole assembly without any reference to locality, and every time that it occurs in the Epistle to the Ephesians it is used in this way.

It is of the greatest importance that the truth as to its oneness and completeness should be understood, otherwise it will not be possible to act in the truth of it in the local assembly.

Worship.

" I would like further to mention the question of 'worship.' In this city there is a large meeting. I have always felt strangely attracted to this meeting, but withheld from seeking fellowship because of several things that I cannot get clear about. The order of the worship meeting drew me very much. These brethren maintain that there is certainly a Divine order in the worship meeting. Could you tell me, therefore, if it is a mistake to address our God and Father in prayer before the breaking of the bread? It is maintained that the Lord Jesus should be addressed personally until the act of remembrance is past. It is then He conducts the assembly in Spirit to the Father's presence in the Father's House, sings praises in the midst of the assembly, and declares His Father's Name to His Brethren. It is claimed there is no worship until we come to this phase in the meeting. That other meetings that do not maintain this order, only keep the Passover and cannot rise to the height of privilege there really is in the Lord's Supper."

To have rules and regulations in the conduct of meetings for which there is not Scriptural warrant is the sure badge of a party, no matter how intelligent those who compose it may be. Moreover it means that the authority of the Lord and the guidance of the Holy Spirit are set aside, and you will be able to realize the seriousness of that. Further, since the standard set is a high one, and must be attained to regardless of the state of the assembly, nothing but insincerity can ensue, and true worship - worship in spirit and in truth ceases, for that cannot be arranged and directed by us, it must be spontaneous and free.

Nevertheless we believe that where the Lord leads there will be order, and since the object of the coming together is to break bread in the remembrance of the Lord in His death, this should be, and will be, where things are right, the first and chief thing. The heart and mind of the assembly, as guided by the Holy Ghost, will certainly dwell upon the Lord in death, with accompanying adoration to Him, but it would be a bold thing to say that the Father has no part in this, and no note of praise or word of worship should ascend to Him in connection with it. To whom did the Lord give thanks when He instituted the Supper? To the Father, surely. Then the Father may be addressed before the Supper.

The expression, "The act of remembrance is past," jars upon our mind. It is well that no time should be wasted, and that the Lord's Supper should be eaten early in the meeting, since it is for this we come together; but even here the principle contained in the words, "Tarry one of another," would prevent undue haste. Yet the whole meeting is a remembrance of that that we shall never forget even in heaven, and there is no true worship that is separated from the death of Christ. The blood was ever in the Holiest.

We believe it is utterly wrong to say that not until the Supper is eaten does the Lord lead us into the Father's presence. The expression itself is unscriptural. What is said is, "I will declare Thy Name unto my brethren in the midst of the assembly will I sing praises to Thee." We are in the presence of the Father when we assemble, if we do it rightly, for His presence is the home of the brethren of Christ. And the Lord is there to make the Father a reality as the Father to us, for this is what declaring His name means. We should have from the beginning a sense of the Father's love and favour in our hearts, and it is thus that we look back into death, the death of Christ, and there learn the greatness of His love (1 John 4. 9-19). To say there is no worship until after the bread is broken is to say what is not true, you may worship individually in your own room, and there may be assembly worship in any meeting of the assembly. No one can keep the passover now. The Christian feast is the Lord's Supper, and to make a certain standard of intelligence necessary for this, as these friends of yours are doing, is to spoil it. Love is the quality needed. Love to the One Who died for us, though the more intelligent we are the better, if love is maintained.

Light.

"I do earnestly hope you will enlighten me on this question, having observed the order mentioned I sometimes feel distressed in our worship meeting at what appears to be confusion. I know the Holy Spirit will lead the assembly in that order which is pleasing to the Lord. But it is thought by these brethren, who really seem to have remarkable intelligence in the mind of the Lord, that those meetings which do not observe this order are not according to the Truth. They say the Lord will only give light to that which is according to His Name, and this question of order is light given for these closing days."

We should advise you to beware of those who talk much about "fresh light," and "light for closing days." We must remember that Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, and we may be easily deceived. The Word is enough. To that Word of grace we are commended by the great apostle of the Gentiles, and John said, "He that is of God heareth us."

Baptism.

"One more question as to baptism. Is an assembly right in refusing fellowship to any who have not received believers' baptism?

To make believers' baptism - by which is meant the immersion of believers - a test of fellowship, is to make a narrower test than the Word and to form a Baptist sect.

"Dear brother, I do hope you will help me with these questions. At present I am away in the loneliness of the Australian bush, many miles from the address given at the head of this letter. I have been away some weeks now from the fellowship of meetings. But these questions have given me much thought, and after receiving the Scripture Truth direct from England, I felt impelled to write to you. You may not have time to answer me personally, but I am assured a little ministry on these questions would be very helpful." A.G.K.

It will be a great joy if we are able to help you and your earnest friends who are searching the Word. One closing word we would say. In avoiding all error and all sectarianism, and in taking the separate path that the Word indicates, be sure and walk in love towards all the saints.

J. T. Mawson.

The Lord's Supper.

Notes of an Address on 1 Corinthians 11. 23-26.

The Lord's Supper, which is the one feast of the assembly of God, stamps upon that assembly a wonderful character, and marks it out as being in complete contrast to the world while still in it. If we have learnt in any measure the meaning of it we are greatly favoured of God; if we have not learnt its meaning we do not understand the blessedness and character of the assembly at all. We cannot consider it too often; it is an inexhaustible theme, and that because it presents our Lord to us in the fidelity and invincibility of His love. The occasion of its institution emphasizes this; it was on

The Same Night In Which He Was Betrayed.

This is arresting, and we must pause and consider why the supper is identified with this blackest of all black nights. Had Paul been left to his own wisdom to give an account of the institution of the supper he would most probably have connected it, as we should have done, with the crucifixion. He would have said, "It was on the night before the crucifixion that the Lord took bread." But that was not the way in which he received it from the Lord, nor was he so inspired by the Holy Ghost to write it.

It was on the night of the betrayal. The betrayal is the background that throws into bright relief the love that moved the Lord to give to us the supper that we might have it until He comes as a memorial of His death for us. The betrayal was very definitely in the Lord's thoughts; how keenly He felt it we must surely feel, as reverently we consider Him in that solemn hour. "One of you shall betray Me," He said to them (Matt. 26. 21). "One of you that eateth with Me shall betray Me" (Mark 14. 18). Then in Luke 22. 21, after they had partaken of the supper, His words are recorded, "The hand of him that betrayeth Me is with Me at the table." And here in 1 Cor. 11 though now in the glory of God, the Lord does not forget this; it was on "the same night in which He was betrayed" that He took bread and gave thanks. There was base treachery in the inner circle and this caused Him the deepest pain. Jerusalem He loved, but it had never professed to love Him. It had always despised Him, proudly asking, "Who is this?" When His love took Him to it to spend laborious days in the midst of it, it offered Him no welcome, or rest, or home. It left Him friendless on its streets, with no place to lay His head unless He sought it on the Mount of Olives. He felt this, and only His touching lament and tears can tell us how keenly He felt it. But in this inner circle He surely could find consolation and rest! These disciples of His, the "you" to whom He loved to speak, they surely would be faithful to Him; for one and all of them had protested oft and again their love to Him! No, He cannot rest even here, for having gathered them together He says, "one of you shall betray Me." Treachery within was a hundred-fold worse than hatred without, and this treachery was well calculated to discourage and destroy a less than perfect love. But He rose up above it all and in connection with it all He instituted the supper which was to be to all His own, as long as ever they needed it, a memorial of His love that no failure on their part could destroy.

I am sure that none who are truly and vitally the Lord's could do what Judas did; he was a child of the devil, and the devil was in him; nevertheless he was in that circle, he was one of the "you," and he had received the same tender consideration at the Lord's hands. He had been in that best of all company, and had had the best of training and circumstances, but this only brought out the worst that was in him, and proved that the flesh is incorrigibly bad. And the flesh in Judas was no worse than the flesh in Peter and John, and you and me, and the lesson that his treachery should teach us is that we can have no confidence in the flesh. Then in what and whom may we place our confidence? In instituting the supper the Lord replies, "You may trust in Me." For the supper tells us of love that carried Him unto death for us.

"What love with His can vie?" "One of you shall betray me," said the Lord, and the disciple whom Jesus loved seemed to enter into the full meaning of it all, for he reclined upon Jesus' bosom. It was as though He said, "Lord, I cannot trust my heart, or depend upon my love to you, but I can trust Your heart and I can find perfect rest in the love that beats in Your bosom for me." And the supper invites us, and encourages us to act as he acted, so that we also may call ourselves "the disciple whom Jesus loves." The love of Christ is not measured by our response to it, it does not change as ours changes, but it will continue in all its strength "till He come." What a resting place is His bosom! What solace and joy His love yields! and that it might be ever fresh before us the supper has been given to us; and that we might clearly see that it is not a love dependent upon our faithfulness it was instituted on the night of the betrayal - the same night.

This should give us confidence in gathering together to partake of it, and should teach us that the joy of the feast springs altogether from what He is in the greatness of His love, and that our fitness and title to partake of the feast rests upon the value of His death which we recall in it.

That then is the setting; see now how He acts in it.

He Gave Thanks Unto God.

Behold Him in the midst of those disciples, lifting heart and voice in thanksgiving to God, His Father, with the bread in His hands which was to be to them the symbol of His body given in death for them. He gave thanks as their Leader and Head; they were those whom He would call "My brethren" when He had overthrown the power of death; they were to be the beginning, the nucleus, of that assembly in which He would raise a perpetual song unto His Father, and theirs. So now in the midst of them He gives thanks, and the thanks must have been for His death and the great results of it. He looked beyond the cross and beyond the tomb, and measured the favour, immeasurable to all but Himself, in which His assembly should stand with Him before the Father as a result of His one offering, and with this in full view He gave thanks. That act stamped upon the assembly its first distinctive feature, it is a thanksgiving company and the Lord's supper is an eucharistic feast - a feast of thanksgiving. In this the assembly of God - that which God has called out of the world - stands in vivid contrast to the world. The world does not and will not give thanks; "neither were thankful," is one of the charges that God brings against the heathen world in Rom. 1. 21, and it is not the least item in the heavy indictment drawn up against apostate Christendom in 2 Tim. 3. 2. But the saints of God can and do give thanks, from their hearts they can cry with exultation, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

It should cause us much exercise that we give thanks so feebly, and that often murmurings and repinings take the place of praise. We are not living up to our character and privileges when this is the case, and the reason of it is that we have lost the sense of the favour in which we stand, or have never known it. Nothing is more calculated to restore to us a sense of this favour, or teach us what it is, than the Lord's supper, the feast of thanksgiving. For in the death of our Lord the heart of God was fully declared. His love flowed out there towards us without any reserve, and that when we were both dead and guilty, as we read in 1 John 4. 9, 10: "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son, to be the propitiation for our sins." Hence our sins removed, and our souls quickened into life, what can we do but adore and thank Him Who is the source of it all?

Our thanksgiving is commensurate with the sense of God's favour in our souls, the more fully we enter into this the fuller our thanksgiving will be. It is feeble at the best, yet it is to me a most cheering and comforting thought that a perfect thanksgiving has entered the Father's ear; for when the Lord gave thanks He did so as fully knowing the favour in which His own would stand with Him. That perfect thanksgiving abides, and I delight to think that when the saints of God come together they do so in all the fragrance of it.

He Brake The Bread.

Having given thanks, thus giving God the first place, He brake the bread and gave it to His disciples, saying, "This is My body given for you, this do in remembrance of me." It was to keep powerfully before them His own personal love to them, and in partaking of this broken bread the assembly responds to that love and shows its devotion to Him. I speak of it, when it is done, not as a matter of form but with hearts moved by His love to grateful adoration. In this again the assembly stands out in contrast to the world; it is a company devoted to Christ whom the world despised and slew. I know of no better illustration of it than that of Joseph of Arimathea. The Lord hung dead upon the cross; all the world had followed its princes in crucifying Him; then stepped forth Joseph and identified himself with that dead and dishonoured body. It was as though he said, "The world hates Him but I love Him; the world has slain Him but I claim His body even though it metes out the same treatment to me." So we, when we partake of that broken bread, identify ourselves with the dead body of Christ, for as far as the world knows and cares He is still dead; the world's last act against Him was to rend His side. We know that He lives in resurrection life and power; but we recall Him as He was, and identify ourselves with His death.

His body was given for us. His love led Him to sacrifice Himself on our behalf; it is upon this that we dwell, and dwelling upon it our souls are bound the closer to Him. The cup also He gave to them, for the two elements complete the symbol of the Lord's death - His body given and His blood shed "for you;" "in remembrance of Me." Here is His love, here is our response to it.

We Are One Bread And One Body.

In partaking of the supper the assembly declares itself to be one body, for all partake of one bread. There is unity in the assembly, and only there. It is a unity of life formed by the Holy Ghost, and by His power it will be maintained until the assembly appears in glory without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing. Here also the assembly stands out in contrast to the world. There is no unity in the world, it is characterized by sin and discord and disintegration. One class in it may combine to defend itself against another class, but there is no vital unity, no true cohesion. This can only be found in the assembly, for it is still true that "There is one body and one Spirit." Outwardly we do not see this unity. The flesh and the devil have wrought sad havoc in the ranks of those who are one in Christ; and the cliques and sects and parties, which are our great shame, deny this blessed and indissoluble unity in practice, yet the unity exists in spite of all the outward denial of it, and it is well to dwell on this side and to hold fast to this truth that "we being many are one bread, and one body; for we are all partakers of that one bread." This is part of that faith once for all delivered to the saints, and we are called upon to earnestly contend for it.

"Till He Come."

We show the Lord's death by eating the bread and drinking the cup "till He come." We announce the fact that He has died in the world and that we hold to Him who has died. It is said that after James II. was driven from the British throne, at royal banquets when the toast "The King" was honoured, his secret adherents drew their glasses across the finger bowls, meaning by that act "we drink to the king across the water." What they did by stealth we do openly - "we drink to the King across the water" to Christ our earth-rejected Lord; we are identified with the death of Christ, and though men may be indifferent, angels behold us in this act of responsive love, and learn that Christ has not died in vain.

We link His death with His coming again and that coming again is our hope and joy. The assembly is a community awaiting the return of the absent Lord, the heavenly Bridegroom. Here again she stands out in contrast to the world, for that which is to her "that blessed hope," is that which will fill the world with alarm; that which will be the consummation of all our hopes will be the overthrow of all its schemes and the blasting of all its ambitions.

Here then are some of the distinctive features of the assembly of God that plainly prove that it is not of the world but of God.

It gives thanks to the Father.

It is devoted to Christ.

It is one united body.

Its great hope in the coming again of the Lord Jesus.

May these things be seen more definitely and practically by us all for His Name's sake.

J. T. Mawson.

The Leaven.

1 Corinthians 5.

The Apostle Paul, in this chapter, alludes to a gross case of immorality, which had taken place (verse 1) and was unjudged in the assembly at Corinth (verse 2). He himself had a very definite judgment about it (verse 3), but he desired that the matter should be the subject of assembly action, in conjunction with his own apostolic authority (verse 4), the name and power of Our Lord Jesus Christ being connected with their gathering together, in order that the offender might as a wicked person be put away from among themselves (verse 13).

It is important to notice that such a judgment must of necessity meet with the approval of godly conscience in every assembly. The sin was evident, and the saints at Corinth were exercising the Lord's power in His assembly, that the holy name of the Lord might be vindicated. These things would show that their action was in relation to the whole church in every place. The man so dealt with was unfit for communion in any Christian assembly. For such reason alone can this extreme discipline be used, and under such conditions alone can the act of an assembly be ratified in heaven. Verse 5 seems to go beyond anything that assembly action could do, apart from apostolic authority; for it involves, unless he repents, the death of the guilty person, who nevertheless being a believer in Christ would yet be found saved in the day of glory. Verse 6, "Your glorying is not good."

They were going on as if all was well, yet with this corruption in their midst; how deadening to the conscience is unjudged sin. The apostle then states a principle of great importance, "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump." The sin of one affected the whole assembly in Corinth. Here the leaven was immoral conduct, in Gal. 5. 9, where he repeats the statement, the leaven was evil doctrine, its result would be the permeation of the entire mass, unless its action was stopped, otherwise it would eat as doth a gangrene (2 Tim. 2. 17). In this case the saints were to purge it out from their midst, to express their judgment of it, by refusing Christian company to the guilty brother. In the spirit of self-judgment, that his sin was the guilt of all, they were so to act that they would be a new lump, unleavened. Then is brought forward the fact which should touch the affections in the deepest way. The judgment of sin had fallen upon Christ for them.

What stronger motive could be adduced, for holiness and purity of walk, than that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. To allow personally or collectively that which is contrary to His cross, that for which He took our place, and suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, would indeed be the deepest treachery, and the worst of all sins, the sin against love. Therefore we are to keep the feast, apart from leaven in any form (verse 8), a reference doubtless to the seven days which followed the Passover, during which leaven was not to be found in the houses of the Israelites (Ex. 12. 18-20). This feast of unleavened bread is typical of the present period. Leaven is always a type of evil; the apostle speaks of it here in three forms: (1) The old leaven; (2) The leaven of malice; (3) The leaven of wickedness; and contrasts it with that which is unleavened, sincerity and truth. It is well to have these three forms distinctly in our minds. The old leaven is the character of the old man, the natural product of the virus of sin derived from Adam. Its actions are detailed in verses 10 and 11. With this the Christian must have nothing to do, he must be unleavened, having put off the old man with his deeds, and having put on the new man, the character of Christ. The leaven of wickedness, while including the immoral deeds referred to, goes farther, for it is seen in contrast with truth, and is characterized by false doctrine subversive of the truth. This leaven, in fact, lay at the root of the Corinthian trouble, as well as of the Galatian. Their manners were bad, the evil communications had made them so (chap. 15. 33). The corrective for this was to know the truth, God and the word of His grace. But besides these two forms of leaven there was another, more subtle but equally sinful, the leaven of malice. In seeking to avoid bad conduct, and evil doctrine, we are ever in danger of allowing injurious thoughts, of using hard speeches, and making false accusations, against those who are fellow members of the body of Christ. With the most laudable desire to maintain the truth sectarianism may be fallen into, the malicious character of which is manifested by manner of speech as much as by action. To avoid this leaven, it is most necessary, if we desire to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, to regard our brethren in relation to that unity, to put away all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil speaking with all malice, and to be kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven us. To seek restoration and healing, and to be followers of God as dear children.

Malice may be defined as speaking of others with intent to injure or depreciate them, bearing a grudge. Its root is pride; the soil in which it grows is prejudice; its stem is self-exaltation, and its fruit is the hypocrisy of the Pharisee. Hence it is contrasted with sincerity, the quality of being generous and transparent, esteeming others better than ourselves and readiness to go along with the lowly. The Pharisee in Luke 18 was malicious, his speech betrayed him, he trusted in himself that he was righteous and despised others; the publican was sincere, his words bore witness to it. The boastfulness of those who amidst the Corinthian schisms said they were of Christ (1 Cor. 1. 12, and 2 Cor. 10. 7) to the exclusion of others, exhibited one of the worst fruits of the leaven of malice, for it accredited a party with a position, that could rightly only belong to the whole. In conclusion the comment of Robert Leighton on 1 Peter 1. 22., is worth quoting. "Seeing ye have purified your hearts unto unfeigned love of the brethren," he says, "How few are there that have truly maliceless hearts and find this entire upright affection towards their brethren." Who of us is there that does not need the rebuke?

James Green.

"One Flock, One Shepherd."

John 10: 16.

The Spirit of God used the apostle Paul to direct the attention of the saints to the vital aspect of Christ and the assembly under the eloquent figure of the Head and the body, and He also gave to us through John a vivid illustration of the same truth in the beautiful representation of the Shepherd and the flock.

There is one Head and one body; there is one Shepherd and one flock. The first being an essential unity subsisting in one vital organism, the second an essential oneness in life also, sheep being necessary for a shepherd even as a shepherd is necessary for a flock. It is striking to observe the apostle Paul himself indicated that the assembly and the flock are to be identified as one (Acts 20. 28), when he warned the elders of Ephesus regarding similar perils to those we read of in the tenth chapter of John.

The body receives protection and direction from the Head, so also does the flock from the Shepherd.

It is therefore necessary for the members to hold fast the Head as we are told in Col. 2, and for the sheep to follow the Shepherd. This being experimentally true of us we shall be preserved in Christ Jesus where Divine love is known, and be united together unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding to the full knowledge of the mystery of God, for this is contained in both the figures to which we have referred. Just as it is said in Ephesians that those who are called out from the Jews and out from the Gentiles become "one body" in Christ according to the truth of the mystery, so also it is said in John 10 that "other sheep" as well as those of the Jewish fold are called to form the "one flock."

The Shepherd And His Sheep.

Divine love has been shown towards us in the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Divine power is manifested in His resurrection. In these two relations He is spoken of first as "the good Shepherd" and secondly as "the great Shepherd." In 1 John 3. 16 it is said, Hereby we have known love, because He has laid down His life for us; and He Himself said, "I am the good Shepherd; the good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep." (John 10. 11). Our sins necessitated that death if we were to be saved from perishing eternally, and elsewhere we are told that Divine love is commended towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Rom. 5. 8). His death was the great expression of the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There is, however, power as well as love energizing on our behalf, and both in accord with the righteousness and holiness of God, to bring to glorious fruition His eternal purpose in Christ Jesus. We read in Eph. 1: 19 of "the surpassing greatness of His power towards us who believe, according to the might of His strength in which He wrought in Christ in raising Him from among the dead." That was the manifestation of Divine power, and in Heb. 13. 20 we are told that the great Shepherd of the sheep, our Lord Jesus Christ, was brought again from among the dead by the God of peace in virtue of the blood of the eternal covenant, therefore the present care for us of our great and exalted Shepherd is based upon His atoning death at Calvary. The good Shepherd died to save us, the great Shepherd lives to care for us. Power is exercised on our behalf in love which has fully expressed itself in Christ Jesus, therefore He could assure us that no sheep of His can ever perish.

We have said that we have both protection and direction in the Shepherd, amidst the aboundings of evils and perils in Christendom to-day. Nothing but fatal callousness could make us entirely indifferent to them and to the provision of Divine love and power for us in Christ the great Shepherd of the sheep. Unless we feel the one we shall not appreciate the other. In any case the dangers exist, and God has not left us in ignorance concerning them. Let the one who carelessly wanders from the flock of God heed this word of the Holy Spirit before it be too late. "Your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour"; also, "Men shall arise speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them." Violence and deception are both at work.

It is true that the one who abides in Christ can say, "I will fear no evil," but that is because he follows the Shepherd with the flock, and not that he is indifferent to what he does not fear. The Lord led Israel like a flock through the wilderness, but Amalek smote the hindmost of them. Our Lord Jesus Christ protects all His own to-day, but it must be remembered that a shepherd gathers the sheep together for this. They are a flock and they themselves flock together. That is in their very nature and it is proved in their so doing. We speak now of what is normal of course. This is specially true when the sheep have a sense of some peril at hand. A fox in a field is enough to cause them to run together; and, with the lambs inside the closed circle, they turn their faces to the foe. The wolf is used by the Lord in John 10 and by the apostle Paul in Acts 20 to illustrate the cruel nature of the men who trouble the flock of God to-day.

The danger from such is very real, they seize upon individuals wherever they can, and then proceed to scatter the sheep! The Shepherd cares for and gathers the sheep; the wolf troubles them and scatters them. The distinction may be easily observed by the feeblest lamb. Thieves are also spoken of so that we may be forewarned as to those who come for unrighteous gain. Such are ready to commit any act of deceit, violence or destruction to attain their selfish ends and to secure their ill-gotten spoils. The good Shepherd gives all for the sheep; these take all they can from them. He enriches them that they might be together in life and health; they enfeeble them. The hireling too is pointed out by the Lord as a cause of weakness; pay is pre-eminent in his thoughts; no Divine love has place in his heart; he does not truly care for the sheep, therefore he flees when danger appears. The good Shepherd dies for them, and as the great Shepherd He never leaves or forsakes them: the hireling flees at the sight of a foe and forsakes the flock he has no real love for, because he is no more and no less than an hireling.

In all this we learn the importance of simply trusting to the one Shepherd of the one flock. Protection is found in Him, and direction also. He not only preserves us, but He directs us to refreshing streams and nourishing pastures, where we can be built up together in our most holy faith and abide in the happy enjoyment of His unchanging love. Paul warned even elders of the danger of drawing away souls after themselves. The Lord directs us into the fields of Divine abundance, and care is needed lest any should turn the sheep from following Himself and from flocking together around Him.

Sheep Marks.

There are certain marks by which the sheep of our Lord Jesus Christ can be distinguished. Religion is no guarantee that we are His, for those to whom He said, "Ye are not of My sheep," were bigoted religionists, associated too with the place of Jehovah's name. It was in the temple when Jesus walked in the porch of Solomon, that He told these cold professors of religion this. "It was winter" in more senses than one. They were celebrating a religious feast, and they surrounded Him, asking questions of unbelief, and He to Whom their whole Bible pointed said, "Ye are not of My sheep." They were strangers to the faith which works by love. At heart they were unbelievers whatever their mental process of reasoning may have been.

In contrast to these the Son of God tells us what are the marks of His own sheep - "My sheep" as He calls them:

(1) They "hear My voice" (John 10: 27). His Word in the Gospel has reached them in the power of the Spirit, and in this way His voice has livingly become known to them.

(2) "I know them." There is nothing haphazard in this matter of eternal import. In view of the corruptions and imitations of the faith the real are comforted in 2 Tim. 2. 19 with this same fact: "The Lord knoweth them that are His."

(3) "They follow Me" He further says. This is encouraging for those who are perplexed by the rival claims of sects and parties and their leaders. The sheep of Christ simply follow the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and He gives them what none other could give, as He says,

(4) "I give them eternal life." We may be able to explain this gift in a very limited measure, but it is ours nevertheless and it is not simply life in eternal blessedness, for it involves also the knowledge of the Father and the Son.

(5) "They shall never perish." Tried as they may be on their journey to the Father's house, not one of the flock, however, can be lost, thank God, for Jesus said:

(6) "No one shall seize them out of My hand." The thief may come, the wolf may scatter, the hireling may flee, but the Shepherd's hand of omnipotence holds every one safely. Moreover,

(7) "No one can seize out of the hand of My Father." In the Son's hand we are perfectly safe, and in the Father's hand we are equally so we are doubly safe, if it be necessary so to express it, for we belong to both the Father and the Son.

In addition to these seven marks, we are told in verse 4, The sheep follow Him because they know His voice. A contrast is given in the next verse, which those who waste their own and others time and energies in dealing with the vapourings and teachings of strangers, would do well to consider: "They will not follow a stranger, but will flee from him, because they know not the voice of strangers." The importance of this should be thoroughly grasped. It may be said, Some have been known to follow evil teachers and leaders. But the Lord said His sheep do not follow them, and do not know them! On the other hand they flee from strangers. Those, therefore, who do follow them cannot be His sheep. We speak of course of what is characteristic, and not of some sudden impulse from which a true believer will be recovered. Rome educates its students as to what is considered error by that system, but Christ's sheep "know not" the voices of strangers, and it is a serious mistake to try to make them know, and to be wise as to such. Rather should we encourage and edify each other in that which is good, till we all arrive at the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, the great Shepherd of the sheep.

It is true that He knows all, and that they know Him as well as His voice, nevertheless they may increase in the knowledge of Himself, and this should be furthered. Knowledge has a great place in the 10th chapter of John as being true of the sheep of His pasture. Jesus said, "I am the good Shepherd and I know those that are Mine, and am known of those that are Mine, as the Father knows Me and I know the Father, and I lay down My life for the sheep." How blessed for the sheep to be gathered around the same glorious Object as that which fills the Father's heart with ineffable pleasure! He is enough our minds and hearts to fill! When He spoke to those who were not of His sheep, and told them that none could pluck any of His own sheep out of His hand nor out of His Father's hand, adding, "I and My Father are One," they took up stones to cast at Him! It is the grace of God which gives His own a different Spirit, and draws them together around the One they rejected, for, as we said before, sheep flock together. This is one of the important marks which must not be forgotten. There is something wrong when a sheep is seen alone by itself in the field.

Fold or Flock?

How are the sheep of Christ held together? The question is one of momentous importance. It has been raised in various forms and terms for long centuries, and ecclesiastical conflicts have furiously raged in regard to it times without number. The question may have been put in a scholarly manner or in a simple upright fashion, and arguments may have been advanced with the display of erudition or in the forcefulness begotten by the sense of right against wrong; nevertheless, the matter to be settled is simply this, Are Christ's sheep held together by ecclesiastical hurdles in an organized fold, or simply as a flock under the hand of the omnipotent Shepherd? Many subtle disputations may be advanced according to the tendencies and inclinations of those who enunciate them and the quality of their abilities to reason them out, for we are Divinely informed, "God made man upright, but He has sought out many "abstruse reasonings" as the word "inventions" is better translated; and, seeing that this is so, the more trustfully we bow to God's own Word regarding this important matter the safer shall we be; for true safety lies only in accepting what the Word of God says as to it. The arguments of the human mind with its varied bias — whether against or apparently for that which we are told in the Bible — have proved themselves to be untrustworthy, and in some cases their prejudicial dogmas have become hateful even to the most tolerant of men, and despicable to the most considerate.

Influenced probably by the idea that a fold was an absolute necessity for sheep the translators rendered John 10: 16, "one fold, one Shepherd," whereas it is now well known to be "one flock, one Shepherd." The two ideas are quite different. The first makes the Shepherd insufficient for the flock; the second simply states His all-sufficiency. The wrong translation has always been an enormous stronghold of the Romish system, and it is still the plea of sectarian ecclesiastics where ignorance of the Word prevails. One said to a servant of Christ known to me, "You must have a fold." "Very well," answered my friend, "have your fold," and now read John 10: 3, where we are told, the Lord Jesus Christ "calls His own sheep by name and leadeth them out"! What have you left in your fold after He does that? Not one of His sheep! Doubtless the fold refers to the religious system of Judaism, but the principle of out-calling remains; the very word translated church, ecclesia, means that! Ever since the out-call of Abraham, God has acted in that way.

When the apostasy and corruptions of Christendom, foretold in Scripture, reach their organized fruition in Babylon the great, it is imperatively commanded by a voice out of heaven, "Come out of her, My people, that ye have not fellowship in her sins" (Rev. 18. 4)! God's people so addressed are doubtless Jews. They are properly "His people," and the flock of God, the assembly, will have been previously translated from earth to heaven like Enoch of old. We speak, however, of the principle; and before that day, even now, we are instructed to separate from iniquity and vessels to dishonour, so as to flock together after the Lord Himself (even as we read in 2 Tim. 2) and "pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace, with those that call on the Lord out of a pure heart." Unless we had the Word of God for all this we should be in a fearful dilemma, but He has given us in the Bible all the guidance we need, and His grace is abundant, while the great Shepherd is sufficient for the flock without man-made folds. It was an earnest preacher, in whose name a large fold was made after his death, who himself said, "Let names and sects and parties fall, and Jesus Christ be all in all." He is enough for the flock truly.

Faith is required to accept this, but what have we without faith? By faith we stand! Christ dwells in our hearts by faith! Without faith it is impossible to please Him! Folds suit those who walk by sight. They are pleasing to men who prefer lifeless forms to living energies, and to those who choose legal rules instead of the Spirit's power. Even in the addresses to the seven assemblies in Rev. 2, 3, those who have ears to hear are bidden to heed what is said to all seven, wherein are found self pleasing, Christ exclusion, dead profession, worldliness, immorality, and satanic doctrines and practises. Faith and the Spirit's enabling are necessary therefore to follow that which is according to God's will when such iniquity abounds in Christendom. God, however, has foretold it all for the preservation and guidance of the flock of His pasture, so that they may still follow the Lord together without distraction.

Each one may still say to the Lord the great Shepherd of the sheep, "Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me." In spite of the evils we have named, they may still rejoice that their cup runs over, as they follow Him together. Nothing will ever force Him to give up those for whom He suffered, bled and died. None can pluck them from His hand or from the Father's hand. Each one can look forward to the end of the journey with confidence and say, "I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."

Then shall we see His face

With all the saints above,

And sing for ever of His grace,

For ever of His love."

One Flock.

We pointed out that just as in the epistle to the Ephesians we have the truth of the mystery made known, that those whom God calls out from both Jews and Gentiles become one body in Christ, "joint heirs, and a joint body, and joint partakers of His promise in Christ Jesus by the Gospel" (Eph. 3. 6), so in John 10 we have the same truth made known in relation to the one flock, for we are told that our Lord Jesus Christ leads "His own sheep" out of the Jewish fold, and brings the "other sheep which are not of this fold," but who hear His voice when He calls, and consequently there is one flock formed of both over which He is the one Shepherd. Each figure gives us the truth of the oneness of the saints in life and nature, the former, however, being a corporate oneness, whereas the latter is collective. Both, however, are vital, and remain true notwithstanding the failure which was foretold and which is so evident in Christendom.

Now although each figure involves oneness, and also as another has expressed it togetherness, nevertheless the idea of religious organization is foreign to both, for the body is an organism with all its members vitally united together, and a flock is made up of sheep who because of their very nature flock together. An organization may lose many of its members and yet remain intact, but this is not so with the body of Christ. A fold would still be a fold even if the sheep were outside of it and only goats remain within; the one flock of Christ is not a fold nor goats of His flock. Some say, "True there is one flock but there are many folds." Yes, there are many folds, but there is no instruction given in the Bible for men to make them. The flock is the result of the work of God Himself. What would happen if man-made hurdles were thrown down? The sheep would flock together after the Lord alone.

Others say, "See how the sheep are scattered! Look at the divisions in Christianity! You must have a fold to hold them together!" Such reasoning is common enough amongst earnest and well-meaning men, but it is very bad reasoning all the same. Nor has the oft-tried remedy of the fold proved successful. It has turned out contrariwise: it has hurdled off sheep from sheep and helped forward the scattering. Moreover the scattering was foretold by the Lord in John 10, and in the same chapter He told us what was the only remedy - Himself, the Shepherd of the sheep. His voice is heard, He brings them together, He knows His own sheep, they know their Shepherd, His hand and the Father's hand hold all safely, and one flock without a fold is divinely secure.

The Old Testament indicates the same thing. Ezek. 34 speaks of the sheep of that day being scattered, but the Lord said, I will deliver them out of all the places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. I will feed them. I will save My flock and they shall be no more a prey, and "I will set up one Shepherd over them and He shall feed them" (23). "Ye, My flock, the flock of My pasture are men, and I am your God, saith the Lord God" (31.) There was no one shepherding them, for those that should have done so "fed themselves and fed not the flock." Just as in our day, however, there were not only those who fed themselves, but those that scattered the flock abroad, and the Lord Himself alone could gather the sheep. In the history of Christendom this process of scattering has been in evidence from the days of the apostles, not that the Lord ever ceases to care for His flock; nevertheless ruthless men have fulfilled His words in this work of cruelty under the guise of zeal and religion. Nevertheless the "one flock" is always in the care of the Lord. He watches over them all and the feeblest is not overlooked by Him. The flock may suffer from direct enemies, self-seekers and false friends - this was foretold by the Lord - but in Him they have all that is necessary for them.

In Jer. 31, the chapter of the "new thing" and "the new covenant," whilst not excusing the bad men who have scattered the sheep of Israel, the Lord shows that He has Himself been behind it all for good, and calls to the nations to see that they are not out of His care, saying, "He that scattered Israel will gather him, as a shepherd doth his flock. For the Lord hath redeemed Israel and ransomed him from the hand of him that was stronger than he. Therefore shall they come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd; and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all." They shall "flow together!" Take the hurdles away! that is what the one flock will do! Let the scatterers cease their scattering! The sheep will flow together to the goodness of the Lord! The good Shepherd knows His own sheep and they know Him. Let the hindrances disappear, and the liberated sheep - the one flock as we have said - will happily flow together and flock around the One who gave His life for the sheep.

There is but one flock, and they bear the sheep marks we have spoken of. Even though the sheep be scattered there is still the one flock. They may be distressed and suffer, as we have seen, but they do not seek the hurt of others. It is not God's mind, however, that the sheep should be separated from each other, but that they should be together. We see this in the truth of Christ and the assembly as well as in the Shepherd and the flock. We are to endeavour to keep the unity of the Spirit in the uniting bond of peace, for there is one body and one Spirit. The sheep are to follow the Shepherd together, and it is natural for them to do so, because of their life and nature. Moreover, in view of the approaching day of the coming again of our Lord Jesus Christ we are exhorted not to forsake the "complete assembling" of ourselves together.

"I know my sheep."

We are writing that the saints of God may be encouraged to gather together according to the truth, that they may meet in assembly and know the Lord Himself in their midst. It is always possible, of course, that goats and hirelings and even a thief may be present, but the sheep have protection and direction in the great Shepherd. They look to Him. They follow Him. Moreover in Ezek. 34. He says, "I will judge between cattle and cattle, and I will set up one Shepherd over them, and He shall feed them" (22). This principle of the Lord judging His people is found all through the Bible. In Hebrews 10 from which we have already quoted, it is stated again in verse 30. The exercises through which we pass are to educate us to simply trust in Him.

Those who belong to the Father and the Son find rest in the knowledge of the omniscience of the great Shepherd. He knows His own sheep: He knows their names; He knows themselves. This truth is given for our comfort and direction also in 2 Tim. 2, as we have pointed out. There may be false doctrines taught, unrighteousness practised, and vessels of dishonour at hand, nevertheless "the Lord knoweth them that are His"; the foundation of God standeth sure. Therefore, in spite of others, the real are exhorted to follow that which is good "with those that call on the Lord out of a pure heart." The pure or sincere heart in calling on the Lord characterizes the true sheep, and it is the Lord Himself upon whom they together call. Therefore let such be found in assembly around Him according to the Word of God. We cannot correct others mistakes, but surely the sheep can follow their Shepherd together instead of being hurdled off from one another or led astray by biased men.

Nor must we be hindered when some turn away to the mire of the world, for Scripture supposes this. They may have been washed in the waters of religion, figuratively speaking, and remain still unclean in their nature. The sheep are clean animals, but some are not sheep, they are unclean. 2 Peter 2. 22 speaks of such turning back like a dog to his own unclean vomit, or like a washed sow to her rolling in the mud. These things are foretold so that we should not be deterred from going on together after our Lord Jesus Christ, growing in grace and in the knowledge of Himself, and finding all we need and more in Him, ever remembering that He knows His own perfectly. The foreknowledge of God overlooked none of the sheep of Christ. They were "elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father," and, indeed, they were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1: 4). So perfect is the Divine knowledge of the flock, we read, "Whom He has foreknown, He has also predestinated to he conformed to the image of His Son, so that He should be the Firstborn among many brethren." That is the end in view, for from eternity to eternity they are known to Him. "But," this Scripture reads on, "whom He has predestinated these He has also called." The time arrived when the call of grace reached each one, and that in an effectual manner.

From this time a work of Divine grace and power in the sheep gives them a nature and capability to know the great Shepherd, the Son of God. He said, "I know My sheep and am known of Mine." blessed this is. They know His voice and they know Himself. One could say, The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me. The good Shepherd gave His life for the sheep, and they know Him. They know not the voice of strangers, and they do not follow them, for they have the Lord Jesus Christ to follow. Twice in John 10 He says, I am the good Shepherd. First in connection with laying down His life, and then as to what He is in Himself (John 11: 14). Outwardly in His work, and inwardly in Himself, He is good. The sheep have tasted indeed that the Lord is good, and they know Him.

The character of this knowledge or intimacy is also exceedingly blessed, for the Lord Jesus said, I know My sheep and am known of those that are Mine, "as the Father knows Me and I know the Father" (N.T.). How wonderful! Of course this does not state the measure of the intimacy which exists between the sheep and the Shepherd, for they could never reach to the same measure that exists between the Father and the Son, nevertheless it is true that the same character of intimacy is theirs with Him. Great indeed are the grace and power and love which brought this about and made it known to us. To know the Son of God, the great and good Shepherd of the flock as the Father knows Him and He knows the Father! Who could have imagined such exalted blessedness? - yet so it is! - the sheep of His flock know Him thus! We might have said with one of old, Such knowledge is too wonderful for me! but His grace and power and love have produced by God's Word and Spirit a nature in the sheep divinely fitted for this marvellous privilege. The knowledge of God's things and God's Word has a great place in the Bible, and the word "know" often occurs in John 10, but what can compare with that of which we have spoken?

Lord Jesus Christ, what grace is this,

Which gives our hearts to know

The Fountain of eternal love

Whence living waters flow?

The Father's well beloved Son,

Wellspring of grace divine,

Thou giv'st our hearts to know Thyself

And we are ever Thine.

In closing may we not challenge our hearts and ask, Do we respond to the grace and love which have made us one with all the saints of God? Do we meet often in assembly with our fellow-members of the body of which our Lord Jesus Christ is the glorious Head? Do we flock together with the sheep of God's pasture? Do we seek to be completely assembled together as the day of Christ's return draws nigh? In simple words, Do we walk according to the truth that there is one body? Do we gather in the truth that there is but one flock? Do we put into practise the truth of the mystery that all the saints are "fellow-heirs, and of the same body, and joint-partakers of His promise in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 3. 6)?

Eph. 2. 21.

"In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord."

In the previous part of the epistle, the Christians - Jew and Gentile are looked at as the one body of Christ, "the fulness of Him that filleth all in all" - that is to say, it looks at the Christians in their heavenly association.

But in the verse before us we have the Christians looked at as "an holy temple in the Lord." The figure is changed. This sets before us the great truth of God dwelling in the midst of His people on this earth. But not only does God dwell but the word temple carries the thought of a shrine, a dwelling place indeed, but connected with the thought of holiness, because of who it is that dwells. It becomes a sanctuary, a sphere of priestly activity, a place of worship - a place made by the persons who compose it, not by stones and mortar. "God . . . dwelleth not in temples made with hands" (Acts 17. 24).

It is this thought that is so largely not recognized nor acted upon by Christians. The building is "fitly framed together," that is, Christians are not so many individuals, who can pick and choose their associations, but God sets us in relation one to another with the view of being His dwelling place on earth.

The apostle Peter runs parallel with this when he writes: "Ye also as lively [living] stones are built up a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2. 5). One stone cannot make a building, nor do stones choose their own place. Each stone finds its place according to the mind of the Divine Architect.

This idea runs right through Scripture. Did God redeem Israel out of Egypt simply to relieve them of intolerable bondage? Nay, it was to bring them to Himself, and even the tents of the "common" people had to be pitched in a certain order round the tabernacle, and holiness became them in their ways.

Did God demand the half shekel of silver - the redemption money, when He numbered the people, and that was an end of it? Nay, the half shekels produced over one hundred talents of silver which was used in connection with the tabernacle, principally as sockets for the boards, again emphasizing the same truth.

There is great energy as to appropriating personal blessings, if we may so put it, and great activity in serving others, in Gospel effort, whether in home or missionary spheres (would there were still more of this), but if Christians generally sought to enter into the sense of God dwelling in their midst, of taking up what is, after all, the highest privilege of the Christian, that of their priesthood, how different things would be. Service in other directions would not lose, but infinitely gain. It is this taking and maintaining of assembly ground that is of such vast importance.

We have no choice in this. The responsibility is ours, whether we like it or not, but in taking it up we find that our privilege is so immense that responsibility becomes a matter of joy. A married man has responsibilities towards his wife, but if these were irksome and distressing it would speak little for his love. If love is as it should be his responsibility is his privilege, his joy, his delight. So with divine things.

Lastly the building "groweth." Grow is a word that is only rightly applicable to that which has life. A child grows, a plant grows. In all its stages a child, a plant is complete; development may add size, and qualities latent in the child or plant become patent, but we never think of either at any stage as incomplete. So God's temple is ever looked at as complete, yet growing; but surely the end is in view when the last stone shall be added, when the whole ransomed church of God, whether as we say triumphant or militant, whether the saints are passed away or living, shall be caught up by the summoning shout in the air, and God shall be still in the midst of His people.

It is not a little remarkable that whilst the word "temple" is used in Rev. 21. 22 in connection with the church in millennial display when we come to the fixed eternal state we get the word "tabernacle." "Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people" (Rev. 21. 3). The last glimpse we have is that of God dwelling among His people for eternity. May we anticipate that day by seeking to take up the Divine thoughts even now, so giving God and His Word in this connection a true practical place in our lives. What a change in association this would make with multitudes of Christians.

A. J. Pollock.

Ministry for the Church of God

Ministry for the Church of God.

Addresses and Readings on Various Scripture Subjects. If anyone can give a date for this series of meetings please inform STEM - it would seem to be between 1918 and 1935.

Edinburgh: J. K. Souter & Co., 2 & 3 Bristo Place.

Contents.

Christ and the Bride — Hamilton Smith

Christ Jesus our Hope — H. J. Vine

"Waters to swim in" — J. C. Trench

The Path of God's Pleasure — Inglis Fleming

The Claims of God — Jas. Boyd

Prosperity and Power — W. Bramwell Dick

The Mind of Christ — A. G. Taylor

The Fellowship of God's Son — J. T. Mawson

Companying with Christ — James McBroom

Setting Forward — S. Elvin Aziz

Faithful Men — Wm. H. Westcott

The Lord's Twofold Claim upon you — John T. Mawson

The Love of Christ — James Green

Christ Magnified — F. B. Hole

Reconciliation — H. J. Vine

Notes of Readings —

Ephesians 1

Ephesians 2 & 3

Ephesians 4

Ephesians 5

Ephesians 6

Editors' Notes.

Gatherings for Reading and Ministry of the Word were held in the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, in the Autumn.

Large numbers attended and all realised the Lord's presence, and felt the power with the words spoken. A general wish was expressed that the ministry then enjoyed should be available for not only those who were present, but specially for others who were not so privileged, and the present volume is issued in answer to this desire.

Shorthand notes were taken by two Christian friends and after revisal are now sent forth with the earnest hope that glory may be brought to the Lord therefrom, and blessing to His saints.

In some cases addresses delivered will not be found here, no notes having been made of some of the earlier meetings.

The remarks of various brothers are embodied in the questions asked and the answers given, in the Notes of Readings. And it is to be observed that some statements are included in order that they may have fuller consideration, the editors not taking responsibility for every opinion expressed. All must be judged by the Word of God.

Inglis Fleming, Robert Whyte.

Christ and the Bride.

(Revelation xxii. 16-21).

Hamilton Smith.

In these verses we have the formal conclusion to the Book of Revelation and the fitting close to the whole Word of God. Three great themes are presented: ? First, and foremost, the Lord Jesus is personally brought before our souls; then we have the Church in relation to Christ as the Bride; and finally, we have a gospel message to the wide world. It is of these great subjects I would speak a few words.

I think it is clear, from Scripture, that at the end of every dispensation the ministry the Spirit of God brings before the Lord's people is one that, in a special way, directs the eye and heart to Christ Himself. In this connection I would refer to John the Baptist. It was said of John that he should be great in the eyes of the Lord, and what constituted him great would be the fact that many of the children of Israel would "he turn to the Lord their God." Other prophets had turned the people back to the law they had transgressed, to the Sabbath they had broken, to the sacrifices they had neglected, or to the Temple they had desecrated, but when John the Baptist came the nation had entirely broken down, and the dispensation was about to end. Hence he turns their hearts to the Lord Jesus Christ ? the One that was coming. And so John, the Evangelist, having presented the ruin of the Church in responsibility at the beginning of the Revelation, turns our hearts to the Lord Jesus Christ ? the One that is coming at the end of the Revelation.

In the course of this Book there pass before us many wonderful visions of coming glories ? the glory of the Millennium, the glory of the new heaven and the new earth, and the glories of the holy city ? but finally we are left alone with JESUS. What indeed would all these glories be without Jesus, beloved brethren? And how should we reach these glories or get through this wilderness world without Jesus? So at last these visions of coming glories pass away, and we are left alone with Him. He Himself speaks. As it is written, so blessedly, "I JESUS."

In the course of this Book, angels have spoken, trumpets have sounded, the voice of a great multitude has been heard, but when all are silent, Jesus speaks. He must have the last word. Hence this closing passage begins with the words, "I Jesus," and it must touch our hearts that the Lord presents Himself by His personal name "Jesus." In the Revelation, the Lord passes before us under many titles, presenting His varied dignities, as King of kings and Lord of lords, as the Word of God, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, but at the close we come to the Name that is above every name, the name "JESUS." The name that is individually so precious to all our hearts. And may we not say that of all the Names He wears there is none so precious to His heart? It was the one name He had to die to make good. Had He not died He still would have been the King of kings and Lord of lords, and the other titles would have been His, but if He is to wear the name of Jesus ? the Saviour ? He must go to the Cross to verify it. It is the name He came into the world with, Thou shalt call His name JESUS." It is the name He passed out of the world with, for over the Cross it was written, "This is JESUS." It is the name He ascended to glory with, for the angels said to the disciples, "This same JESUS, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner." And it is the name He still wears in glory to-day, for in this last passage He is speaking from the glory and says, "I JESUS."

Moreover, the Lord presents Himself in three different ways, first as "the Root" of David; then as "the Offspring" of David; and lastly, as "the Bright and Morning Star." Not only is He the Offspring of David, but He is the Root of David. Solomon was indeed the offspring of David, but never could it be said of Solomon that he was the root of David. As the Root He is the source of all vitality and life; the One that secures a life of blessing for God's people, whether earthly or heavenly. Job can say, "There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again . . . though the root thereof wax old in the earth . . . yet through the scent of water it will bud and bring forth fruit." So Israel as a tree has been cut down, but the root remains, and hence final blessing is secured for Israel and the world.

Moreover, Christ is the Offspring of David. He is God's anointed King, the Heir to the throne. The world's great aim is to get rid of all thought of God, and His King, in order that man's will may be carried out without restraint. Nevertheless, God says, "Yet have I set My King upon My holy hill of Zion." As the Root of David He is the source of all blessing, and as the Offspring of David He inherits all the kingdoms of the world, and secures the blessing.

But further, Christ is seen as the Bright and Morning Star, and as such He is presented in relation to the Church. The Old Testament closes by presenting the Lord Jesus as Sun of Righteousness, but at the close of the New Testament He is presented as the Morning Star. The day is coming when the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in His wings. He will chase away the darkness and end the sorrows of earth, and as such the world will see Him, but they will never see the Bright and Morning Star. When the sun arises the stars go out. It is the privilege of the waiting Church to know Christ as the Bright and Morning Star before He shines forth as the Sun of Righteousness.

Three passages of Scripture present the Lord as the Morning Star. First in 2 Peter i: 19, we read, "We have also a more sure word of prophecy , whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts." Peter wrote his epistle in a dark day. He warns of the approaching apostasy. He sees that men will arise who will deny the Lord that bought them. But, in the presence of these false prophets, Peter reminds us that we have the "sure word of prophecy" to guide us as "a light that shineth in a dark place." But he tells us that we have more, for we have the "Day Star," and there is a great difference between prophecy and the Day Star. Prophecy is like a lantern; it lights up the darkness; but the Day Star does a great deal more, it tells us that the day is coming. The Morning Star is the harbinger of the coming day. Prophecy exposes the condition of things around, and warns us that judgment is coming upon all the evil, but the Day Star tells us that the day of glory is coming. The end of all prophecy is this, to bring all to see that Christ is the only hope, and so link the heart with Him as the coming One. Prophecy, tells us the hopelessness of everything here, and fixes our hopes and affections upon Christ, and when this end is reached, prophecy has done its work and the Day Star has arisen in our hearts.

Then there is a second passage that speaks of the Morning Star. In Revelation ii. 28, we hear the Lord speaking of it to the overcomer in Thyatira, I will give him the Morning Star." All spiritual and moral darkness is found in Thyatira, but the overcomer has the light of the Morning Star. Before this, the Lord said to the overcomer, "To him I give power over the nations." But if this were all that He gave would it satisfy the heart? Even if you had power to rule over others would it satisfy? No, indeed! And so the Lord says, as it were, "I will give him something else, not only power over others, but I will give him an object that will have power over him, will give him the Morning Star." Nothing will satisfy us in truth but an absorbing object that holds the heart by the power of love, and there is no object in all the great universe of God that is great enough to absorb our affections and hold our hearts but JESUS, the One that is coming ? the Morning Star.

Then when we come to the last passage (in Revelation xxii. 16), we have a word added. Not only is the Lord Jesus the Morning Star, but He is presented here as "the Bright and Morning Star." And when we see Him as the coming One, our only hope ? the One who alone can set the Church right, Israel right, and the world right ? then indeed, the Bright and Morning Star has arisen in our hearts.

Passing now to the next great truth in this passage, we see the immediate result of this beautiful presentation of Christ is that the Church comes into view in an exceedingly interesting way, for here the Church is spoken of as the Bride, as we read, "The Spirit and the Bride say, Come." This is the proper response of the Church under the control of the Spirit to the presentation of Christ as the Bright and Morning Star.

It is important to remember the different ways in which the Church is viewed in Scripture. First it is presented as the Body of Christ, then as the House of God, and lastly as the Bride of Christ.

Much has been said of the Church as the Body of Christ and as the House of God ? and rightly so, of course ? but it would almost seem that the aspect of the Church viewed as the Bride of Christ has been somewhat overlooked.

It is interesting to recall how the truth of God has been reinstated to us. We all know how that great vessel Martin Luther was used in the early part of the sixteenth century to restore the great truth of justification by faith: then in the early part of the last century, there was the gracious recovery of the true Scriptural thought of the Church. In that revival of truth the first aspect of the Church that came before God's people was that of the Body of Christ. Later in the century the Church as the House of God came more prominently into view. But if we read the written ministry of those days, I think we shall find comparatively little as to the Church seen as the Bride of Christ, and I would suggest that possibly the Holy Spirit has waited for these last days, just before the Lord's return, to give greater prominence to this aspect of the Church.

When we think of the Church as the Body of Christ, we should probably all admit that the leading thought is, that in it the fulness of the Head is to be set forth. For this thought we should turn to the closing verses of Ephesians i., where we read of Christ the Head, and "the Church which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in". In the Church as the Body of Christ there will be the full setting forth of the fulness of the Head.

Then, as the House of God, we know the Church, as such, is said to be the pillar and base of the truth and in it God dwells that through it He might make Himself known in grace to the world.

But when we think of the Church as the Bride of Christ there comes before us the amazing thought that, in the Church, God has purposed to secure an object that is entirely suited for, and worthy of the love of Christ. We do well to pause and take in this great thought. We can easily see that in the Lord Jesus there has been disclosed to us an object that is suited to, and worthy of all the love He will ever receive from His people, but the wonder is, that in the Bride God secures a people that will be perfectly suited to, and worthy of, the love of Christ: It is not simply that He is the object for the satisfaction of our hearts, but that in the Church viewed as the Bride there is found an object for the satisfaction of His heart.

As the outcome of the purpose of God, and on the ground of the death of Christ, God can take up lost creatures such as we were, and so mould and shape and form us that at last we can be presented to Christ all glorious, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, perfectly suited for Christ to love, and hence, an object in which His heart will find eternal satisfaction ? "He shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied." This, as I understand it, is the great thought in the Church viewed as the Bride.

As showing the importance of this aspect of the Church, it is deeply interesting to see that it is the first view of the Church that is presented in picture in the Old Testament. We know that in the formation of the woman and the presentation of Eve to Adam, as recorded in the second chapter of Genesis, we have a picture of Christ and the Church. We are left in no uncertainty as to this for the apostle Paul quotes Genesis ii. 24, in Ephesians v. 31, and immediately adds, "This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the Church,"

And mark, brethren, this picture of the Church as the Bride of Christ comes into view before the fall brought sin and death into the world: That is to say, the instant creation was completed God says, as it were, "I will tell you the great secret of My heart, I will tell you why I have brought this creation into being, I am going to secure out of it an object to satisfy the heart of Christ." It gives us a sense of the importance of the Church, viewed as the Bride of Christ, in the mind of God when we see that Genesis opens with the Bride and Revelation closes with the Bride. In Genesis we have the Bride in picture and in Revelation the Bride in fact. With this thought God brought the creation into being, and throughout the long ages God has never given up His thought; and here at last, in spite of all ruin and failure on the part of man, we see the Bride at the close of the dispensation coming into view, and according to the mind of God, for she is seen controlled by the Holy Spirit on earth, with her affections set upon Christ in heaven: presented at the end of her wilderness journey alone with the Holy Spirit looking up to Christ in the glory and saying, "Come."

Thus this closing passage of the Word of God first presents Christ and His glories, and then the Church as the Bride in right relation to Christ. And when the Bride can say "Come" to Christ she is ready to turn to the world around and say, Come." And first she turns to those that hear. "Let him that heareth say, "Come." The fact that they hear is a proof that they are believers, but that they are invited to say "Come" would show that they are not in the conscious joy of bridal relations to Christ. Then the witness is borne to those who are "athirst," Needy souls who would fain partake of the blessing, but doubt the grace of Christ. To such the Bride can say, "You are welcome, Come." Finally, there is the world-wide gospel appeal, "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely," The Lord Jesus "gave Himself a ransom for all," and hence He has the right to appeal to all. The invitation is to "whosoever will," Should it not touch our hearts that the last message that comes from the lips of the Lord Jesus is a message of grace from Christ in glory to a needy world.

Then we have two solemn verses ? solemn for all of us, but so intensely solemn, in view of the attacks of the Modernists upon the Word of God. We write numerous books and pamphlets seeking to expose in detail this terrible evil, but God will not stoop to argue with such: He dismisses them with two verses. They may deny every vital truth of Christianity, but in so doing they "take away from the words of the Book," and this alone seals their doom.

Then, in response to the Spirit and the Bride saying "Come," "He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly," And if, beloved brethren, our hearts are turned to Christ, if we think of Him as He presents Himself to us in His personal name of JESUS, if we think of Him as the Root and Offspring of David, if we know Him as the Bright and Morning Star ? the Harbinger of the day of glory ? then surely our hearts will respond, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus "

Finally, we have the closing touching words, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all the saints." And we need these words, for though the Lord is coming quickly, yet He may tarry for an hour, a week, a month, a year, even a few years; but be it so, we shall have the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ with us until the end. And this grace is "for all the saints," for thus it should read. It is not simply with "you all," which might confine the grace to some particular company; it is for every saint on earth. And if the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with us, we shall find that whatever difficulties or trials we may have to face, His grace will be sufficient. Hence, when we read, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all the saints," we can surely add from our hearts, "Amen,"

"Christ Jesus Our Hope."

H. J. Vine.

When you pray, dear brethren, about a meeting, and in the presence of God are led to read and consider the very two Scriptures that have already been read in your hearing, and unknown to yourself, the other servant labouring with you has also been led to the same Scriptures, would you then allow yourself to be turned away to some other Word to speak from, or would you conclude that the Spirit of God desires to have these themes specially brought before us to-night? I feel it is to be the latter, so I will read from the same chapters and present them perhaps from another aspect.

First of all, 2 Peter i. 16-21; Revelation xxii. 7, 12, 20 to end. When speaking of a theme like this, beloved brethren, conscious as we are of the near return of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary for us to have the Scriptures themselves as the basis of all we say concerning our blessed Lord and His coming again, and not that which might rise in our own imagination. We find Peter is conscious of what men would say in the latter days, ? that many of these things are fables ? that many of these things are invented by pious-minded men ? but the apostle here assures us that they had not followed "cunningly devised fables." They had given to them a vision of the kingdom glory, as well as the glory of Christ's relationship with the Father. This confirmed to them the prophetic Scriptures. But he desired us to understand there is nothing fabulous about it at all. Moreover, beloved brethren, in these last days how good it is for us to be brought back to the inspired Volume, and discern what we can speak of so surely as that which the Spirit saith. Having the Spirit of God dwelling in us we can reverently approach the writings of the Spirit, and having the capability given by the Spirit to understand these writings, we shall not be shaken by the attacks of men against them. I thought as the closing words of the Book were brought before us to-night, what an encouragement it is to all true believers to see the golden threads of divine truth appearing all through, from Genesis to Revelation. We have the thoughts of God in connection with Christ and the Church set forth in that marvellous type of Adam going into the deep sleep and the rib taken from his side. Then we behold the woman who is to share with him in his supremacy over all. Thus we see in Adam and Eve a type of Christ and the Assembly! the "great mystery" (Ephesians v. 32)! bone of His bone, flesh of His flesh! And then, as we pass through the marvellous Volume and come to the close of Revelation, we see Christ and the Church in glory. There she is ? the Bride, the Lamb's wife; and she is the outcome of His own death, of His going into the deep sleep, but now sharing in His supremacy.

But if you look again at the Genesis of the Book of Inspiration, and behold Isaac with his father, a type of Christ risen, who had been received back from the altar, in figure from death, and now there he is with his father! The nameless servant goes to the distant land, between the two rivers (after having taken counsel with the father of Isaac, swearing with his hand under his thigh) faithfully carrying out his mission, bring back one who was to share in the position, wealth, and love of Isaac. Isaac did nothing save receive her as the result of the father's counsel and as the result of the work of the nameless servant, pre-figuring the Holy Spirit. And, as we travel on in the Book, we find at the close the Bride of Christ, not only as the outcome of His death, but also of eternal counsel and of the Spirit's mission on earth.

Now let us observe another fact in Genesis. Look at Jacob, the servant. For the one who was to share with him, he serves; but the seven years of toil were only as a few days to him for the great love he bore to her: and, oh! brethren, let us be careful when we speak of the work of our Lord Jesus Christ, or His death, and not speak of it simply as tasting the article of death. He had to toil, He had to suffer, and oh what He endured tongue cannot tell. He even died to make us His own. He served that He might have us with Him, but He went through it with a heart full of love for us, and all His toil, we may reverently say, was undertaken willingly for the great love He had to us, and for the joy which was set before Him. And so we see the Church sharing with Him in the glory as shown in Revelation xxi., where John is taken up to a great and high mountain to behold the heavenly City, the Bride, the Lamb's Wife.

But, beloved brethren, there are other aspects. Let us go a little further back. Let us begin where we did this afternoon. God causes the light to shine out of the darkness, when the Spirit had moved upon the face of the deep, ? God said; "Let there be light," and light was. Then when you follow the light right through to the end of the Bible in Revelation, again you find the glorious day reached when the light will be that of the glory of God, and the Church, the Bride, the Lamb's Wife, will be fully capable then of radiating that light to the nations on the earth, so that all the nations will walk by that light which streams from the Church in glory. It should not read quite "the nations of them which are saved," but simply, "the nations shall walk by its light," because it will be a question of the millennial blessing, and the nations set up in proper governmental order. God will cause the light for guidance and government, to shine from the glorified Church in heaven. We, brethren, have a wonderful day before us! Would to God, while rejoicing in the marvellous grace that has taken us up to be the associates of the Lord in His glory, that meanwhile, it might take such a hold on us that we might go through this little time of schooling here as diligent scholars, learning our lessons well, knowing that the trial of our faith will be found in that day to praise and honour and glory. Oh, that we might keep so near the Lord, that we might not lose the lessons we should learn in our present pathway in view of the glory to come.

Again let us refer to Genesis. God made Paradise, where Adam and Eve were placed, but soon to that Paradise sin and death came, and the whole thing was spoiled; on the other hand, the thoughts of God are not going to fall to the ground. Travel again to the close of the Book. There is the Church in glory, and there the Tree of Life is seen in the midst of the Paradise of God. No sceptical scholar need come and tell me that the Book is not inspired. We find out by the Spirit what God has before His mind and as we read through the Bible we find that everything eventually comes out it, magnificence and glory in "Christ and the Church."

A river flowed out in four main streams from the Paradise in Eden, but sin spoiled it. Those flowing waters were soon tainted through man's corruption and fall. But come once more to the last chapter of God's Book and there is "Christ and the Church." The City, the Paradise and the Tree of Life are there, and the water of life is seen flowing out from the throne of God and of the Lamb, which is now set in the heavenly Jerusalem, there firmly and stably fixed for ever, and forth flows the river of the Water of Life, blessed be God, as pure and bright as crystal. Not one thought of God will ever fail. All will come out in abiding glory and splendour, and, praise God for His grace, we are going to be there! As the outcome of His death; Christ shall have His Body and His Bride with Him in glory. As the outcome of the Father's counsel, the Son's completed service, and the Holy Spirit's coming. Christ shall have us there with Him. It is a grand thing to look onward in faith!

Nothing cheers my heart so much as the precious word which comes after. In that day of glory His servants shall still serve Jesus. There will be no weariness in it and we shall not be groaning in bodies of humiliation then. We shall be like Him, and to serve Him will be the joy of our hearts. His servants will still serve Him, but it is this which is so cheering, "We shall see His face." What a sight! ? To see the face of Jesus! That Name is sweeter to us to-night, I am sure, after what we have heard than ever it was! "I, Jesus," Jesus! Did it not bring the knowledge of forgiveness of sins to us at the beginning? Why was He called Jesus, Jehovah-Saviour? Because He should save His people from their sins; and, thank God, before He saves His own people, Jehovah's people, before He saves Israel, He has saved us! "It is a faithful saying," says Paul to Timothy, and don't let us lose sight of it, ? "and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." Through that Name, blessed be God, is preached the forgiveness of sins; and we love that word where He does not say, "your sins are forgiven you because you believe, or because you trusted in the Lord," ? but, "Your sins are forgiven you for His Name's sake." For the Name's sake of Jesus: Just as if God said, "I could not but forgive your sins for the Name's sake of Him who has glorified Me.

Some of us tried all sorts of things to get salvation ? religion, reformation, good works, etc., ? but one day we discovered the fact that God's Word is true when it says, "Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved (Acts iv. 12). I heard of a man teaching that salvation is in the Church. There may be preservation in some measure for those already saved, but salvation is in none other than Jesus, as this Scripture tells us. Paul said, "Salvation is in Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy ii. 10).

How sweet is the name of Jesus! Right at the close we hear Him say to our hearts ? to the heart of the Assembly ? "I Jesus," recalling us to Himself and assuring us of His great, present, personal care of us. That name is our standard, too, for service. It is good to meet servants who go forth for the Name, taking nothing of the Gentiles (3 John 7). There are some away in South America, in Africa, and in other lands; some in Spain, in Portugal, and other countries; aye, and some in Britain, going forth "for the Name." Not lowering the standard, not begging from the unconverted! It is their honour, and joy too, to honour "the Name." They reverence and love it: They think too much of it to use it for begging from unconverted men! If one is here unconverted, my advice is, get saved to-night! Trust Jesus now! Then you can put your hand as deep in your pocket as you wish, and you will have the honour of "giving to the Lord" ? of giving to Him through whose Name forgiveness and salvation are received! The Name to be owned by all eventually.

The knees of all the intelligences in heaven and on earth shall yet bow at the Name of Jesus, and of the intelligences in the infernal regions too ? in the realms of the lost ? yea, of all the intelligences in the universe. At the mention of the Name of Jesus every knee shall bow! And then, for "the glory of God the Father," every tongue shall confess the universal lordship of JESUS! Through grace we have already confessed Jesus as Lord.

As we have seen, it is near the close of God's Book we read, "I Jesus, have sent Mine angel to testify unto you these things," ? not in the world quite ? but, "in the assemblies" ? that there might be maintained in the assemblies the truth concerning Himself ? His official and personal glories, for He says I Jesus "am the Root" ? before David, ? David's Offspring ? after David, ? the one involving His deity, the other His humanity: Then we have the Morning Star, as we have so helpfully heard, in connection with the Assembly. If you studied the present matters of world government you might lose heart as well as communion with God. You would say, Things are going all wrong! But, as we see Jesus, as we know Him, we have the key to the whole situation, because as Son of David and Son of Man He will take up all government questions as well as those relating to the Assembly. The Son of God, the Bright and Morning Star, is the Assembly's hope, and He will settle all our difficulties. But, meanwhile, let us grow in the knowledge of the One who can do it! If I were looking for His assembly which He is building to-day, I would look for those who have the revelation from the Father of Himself ? those who confess Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, for He, as the Son of Man, builds His assembly on this, the Father's revelation to the soul and this confession of Himself. Where Jesus is thus known and owned, His Assembly is. It is being built by Himself upon the revealed truth concerning Himself, as Peter confessed Him in Matthew xvi. 16. It was Peter, too, who wrote, "We have not followed cunningly devised fables: we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Peter i. 16). He and others were "eyewitnesses," They saw in the Holy Mount the shining forth of His glory ? of His Majesty! They saw Him in His humiliation ? His lowly life; the gentle and meek One, walking here, but says Peter, too, "We beheld His majesty!" It shone above the brightness of the sun. His garments were white and glistening. On Monday evening, brethren, we were praying that He would show Himself to us in His glory so that we might be strengthened and fitted to meet rightly what obtains here in this world at the present time. In regard to kingdom and government His majesty was shown ? they beheld His glory. It was a divinely given foresight of "the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ," the Root and Offspring of David. Peter, however, speaks of Him here also (as nowhere else, except in the confession of Matthew xvi.) as God's Son. He says, we heard such a voice when He received honour and glory from God, the Father, and the voice came from heaven on the Holy Mount, it was uttered by the excellent glory and said, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I have found My delight!" On the one hand we have His kingdom glory, and on the other His personal glory with God the Father; the second being indicated in the voice from "the excellent glory." You remember the bright cloud came upon them and the voice came from the bright cloud. If He be David's Son in connection with kingdom glory, He is also God's Son; and He who will take the government upon His shoulders is revealed to us in His own personal glory as Son of God. By the excellent glory He is there singled out, so Peter can say, "The prophetic Word" ? the Old Testament, was "made surer" ? for so the Scripture should read. It is not that it was not always sure, but having seen Christ's glory shining in the miraculous way we have spoken of, and having heard God the Father's voice distinguishing Him so wonderfully, the Old Testament which points on to Him, was made surer to them by this manifestation of His glories ? both kingdom and personal. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, when He rose from the dead, made the hearts of those who heard Him burn within them when, out of all the Scriptures, He expounded unto them the things concerning Himself. And so here, "the prophetic Word" is "made surer" by the sight of His glory. It might be said, we have seen the King; we have seen His glory; His majesty; and we have heard Him distinguished personally as the Son of God by the excellent glory. Now, therefore, you do well to give good heed to the "prophetic Word," because as we heard already, it is as a lamp that shines where obscurity is. Up to a certain point, Take heed! that is, until the One who is the great theme of that Word arises before you, and oh how glorious when that One fills our hearts ? when His beauty shines before us! And though we are in the midst of the darkness ? the great apostasy which is reaching its culmination, but which we should not dwell on ? we are led to the glory side, to the positive side of the truth by the Spirit ? to the good. In passing, just a word as to this. We are told to be wise concerning what is good. We greatly need, in these days when men think they are clever if they know about something evil, to heed Paul's word, "Be simple concerning that which is evil, and Wise concerning that which is good." Those who help are those who show us the good, and all the good of our God is in Christ for us, and we are in Him.

We have spoken of the Bride, the Light, the Paradise, the Tree of Life, and the River of the Water of Life. We have seen how all is to be established in abiding glory. Genesis is fruitful in Revelation! Foreshadowed in the beginning, the substance is at the end. Now when we come to Exodus, God sets up a Tabernacle on the ground of redemption from Egypt, and He is in the midst. But it failed at Shiloh through man's sin. Nevertheless, when we come to Revelation xxi., we behold on the very verge of Eternity the Tabernacle of God with men! His thoughts will not fail! Not one design of His shall fall to the ground They will be carried out and established "in Christ and the Assembly" when the full glory of eternal redemption is displayed.

Just one more step, to encourage us as to the perfections of the inspired Volume and as to the One who designed all. Over Jordan, in the land, the city was set up, ? Jerusalem, the place of Jehovah's Name was built! But there was no river. Failure and breakdown overtook this earthly Jerusalem! But in Revelation xxi., the holy city, new Jerusalem, shines forth as a Bride adorned for her husband, and the river of the Water of Life flows out in eternal blessing! God Himself will carry out all that He has counselled, therefore, Christ and the Assembly are seen in everlasting blessedness and glory, and the river of God's pleasure flows on for evermore.

God grant, then, we may be cheered and encouraged, and that we may grow in the knowledge of the Bridegroom, our Lord Jesus Christ, and that we may understand Him better! He is David's Son, but also David's Lord. He is Israel's hope, the world's hope and the hope of the Assembly, ? "Christ Jesus, Our Hope!"

"Waters to swim in."

J. C. Trench.

In turning to Ezekiel xlvii. 1 to 12, it is to the younger people here that I desire specially to address myself.

Just before this chapter we have elaborate descriptions, measurements, and ordinances of the Temple, to be erected in view of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to reign over His earthly people Israel and the setting up of His Kingdom. And we have in the vision seen by the prophet a description of the waters which will flow out from beneath the House of God, towards the east, in increasing volume until they reach the Dead Sea, resulting in the "healing" of that Sea. These living waters flowing produce life and blessing where they go and also fruit-bearing trees of all varieties of luxuriant growth, where previously all had been barrenness and death.

The waters, it will be noticed, find their spring in God Himself, and flow from under His dwelling place by the south side of the altar ? which indicates that the love of God could only reach this world by way of the Cross (which the altar typifies) where our blessed Lord by His atoning death made a righteous channel for the love of God to flow down.

Jerusalem, where shall stand the Temple, is separated from the Dead Sea by about twelve miles in a direct line east which there reaches the northern bounds of that sea. The man with the measuring line measured 1,000 cubits, and the waters at that point were ankle deep: then he measured another 1,000, and the waters were up to the knees: then again 1,000 more, and the waters were up to the loins, and finally, when he had measured the fourth thousand cubits, they were so deep he could not pass over them, "the waters were risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over."

Then the man that had conducted the prophet so far, caused him to return to the brink of the river. "Now when I had returned, behold, at the bank of the river were very many trees on the one side and on the other. Then said he unto me, These waters issue out toward the east country and go . . . into the sea (i.e. the Dead Sea) which being brought forth into the sea the waters shall be healed."

And he is told that it should come to pass . . . that wherever the waters should come there should be life, and a very great multitude of fish because these waters (from under God's House) should come there, "for they shall be healed, and everything shall live whither the river cometh . . . their fish shall be according to their kinds as the fish of the Great Sea exceeding many."

The Great Sea is the Mediterranean, and we know from Joel iii. 18 and Zech. xiv. 8, that there will be a great valley created between the Mediterranean and Jerusalem, and thence to the Dead Sea, which accounts for "Great Sea" fish being in that wonderful day, found in the Dead Sea.

Now read the 12th verse, and notice that along the banks of this glorious river, "all trees for food shall grow, whose leaves never fade, nor the fruit be consumed" (endless supply), "and they shall bring forth new fruit according to the months." Why? "because their waters issued out of the Sanctuary," Note well this statement.

So far for the passage we are considering. But it is the application to ourselves spiritually that is important, and I would now refer you to the Gospel of John for the antitype to-day. For whilst our chapter speaks of physical and material changes for the earth, you can see from Revelation xxii. 1-7, that very much the same figures are therein used to describe the spiritual blessings and glories in the new Jerusalem ? the Lamb's Wife ? the Church, in the millennial day.

Let us now trace the water in John's Gospel. We shall find its spring in John iii., where our Lord tells Nicodemus that there must be new birth to see or enter into the kingdom of God. He must be born again, born of water and of the Spirit.

Now it would be well that all of us should understand clearly as to new birth. This is the necessary start, and it is very blessed not to have a doubt as to one's having really been born of the water and the Holy Ghost. But let us not be satisfied with just being born, for it is only the start. Shall I say just "ankle" deep? The ankles suggest walking, and we cannot begin the Christian walk until born again. Many seem to be satisfied with just being converted, and do not make much further progress. Now again let me press that this is merely the start, though a very blessed one.

Turn now to chapter iv., the next chapter, where we read of the woman at the well of Sychar. She was in character the exact opposite to the man in chapter iii. The Lord had to administer some pretty hard blows in dealing with the proud Pharisee, to show him that however fair religious "flesh" might appear, no amount of sanctimoniousness could make "the flesh" anything but "flesh," and "they that are in the flesh cannot please God."

The Lord uses very different treatment with this poor, degraded Samaritan. He disarmed her at once by putting Himself, as it were, under an obligation to her by asking her for a drink of water, which, by the way, we do not know that He received. She was amazed that a Jew would have any "dealings" with such as she, and the Lord soon showed her that He knew something worse about her than her Samaritan origin. But He attracts her by saying, "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldst have asked of Him and He would have given thee living water." "From whence," saith she, "hast Thou that living water? The well is deep, and Thou hast nothing to draw with." And the Lord replied, "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give Him shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into eternal life."

Now surely this phase of the water is more advanced than what we have been considering in chapter iii. Here it is, no doubt, eternal life in the power of the Spirit of God, because in chapter vii: 20, where "living water" is again spoken of, we read "this spake He concerning the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive, for the Holy Ghost was not yet given because that Jesus was not yet glorified."

John iv. does not speak of the Holy Ghost's indwelling, but of life received in His power, a fountain of living water springing up into its source, eternal life.

The Samaritan worship (always false) was not only now to be set aside, but even proud Jerusalem, with its divinely authenticated services was to cease, for God was seeking worshippers in spirit and in truth, and as the "ankle" deep water suggests a move towards God, this further development of it, the enjoyed spring of divine love in our hearts, suggests waters up to the "knees" and we prostrate ourselves before Gad in adoring worship. Let us not be satisfied with anything short of a heart flowing over in praise to our adorable God and Father.

Then she leaves her waterpot, forgets all about what she came to the well for, and goes off to the men in the city to say, "Come, see a man that told me all that ever I did. Is not this the Christ?" and the river of mercy flowed freely for some days in Sychar and many believed.

Now let us look briefly at John 7. Here we find that the Lord would not go up to Jerusalem to take part in the Feast of Tabernacles, which was the last feast in the year, and the only joyful one. He always went to the Passover Feast, which was to gain its fulfilment in His death, but the Feast of Tabernacles awaits what it was typical of, viz: the re-assembling of Israel when nationally converted and gathered back into their own land, owning the Lord Jesus, whom they murdered, to be their Messiah and King. The Lord could not take part in this Feast, for He, who alone could give it reality, was rejected by the Jews.

But at the last day, the great day of the Feast, He went up and cried, "If any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink: He that believeth on Me . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." Thus He exposed the shallow hypocrisy of the whole scene, and invited the many unsatisfied formalists to come unto Him for living water and then out of their very inmost souls would flow rivers of living water. That is surely the spring of all true testimony of Christ Himself to the world.

In chapter iv. the water flows up to God in worship, and here in chapter vii. it flows out in ministry to man. How can we have anything to impart unless we continue to draw water from the wells of salvation Here, then, we have water up to the loins, and if we are to serve God in spreading the fame of our blessed Lord and seek to lead others to Him, we need to gird up our loins as it were for service.

And now, finally, let us turn to John xiii., which gives us the wonderful climax. In this scene, we are told that the Lord was aware "that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, and having loved His own which were in the world He loved them unto the end. Then, during supper, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He was come from God and went to God, He riseth from supper and laid aside His garments and took a towel and girded Himself. After that He poureth water into a bason and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded."

What He was about to do was symbolic of the service He would enter upon when He had left the world and gone to the Father. What He did they could not know at the time, but they would know hereafter.

"If I wash thee not thou hast no part with Me," He says to Peter (verse 8), and again, "He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit" (verse 10).

The bathing took place in chapter iii., so to speak, then they were washed all over, never needing repetition, but what the Lord was teaching them in chapter xiii. was, that to enter into the heavenly joys revealed in chapters xiv. to xvii., and to have communion with the Father and the Son would be impossible unless there was separation from all defilement. This the Lord provides for by His ministry at God's right hand, in the first place by His priestly services to prevent our going wrong by His sympathy and His intercession, which the Epistle to the Hebrews unfolds; but if, in despite of all He does as preventive, we sin, then the other ministry comes into action, and He has to apply the water of the Word to our consciences to bring about conviction and restoration.

So that the water in John xiii. is the cleansing process from defilement in the believer's ways and walk to fit him to enter into the heavenly blessings and joys discovered by the relationship we are brought into as children of our God and Father, whom the Lord Himself reveals to us, together with all the blessed things associated with Christ in the new place He has entered into, and that we may enjoy by faith, and by the ungrieved Spirit's power.

"Strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God."

Here we may assure ourselves are waters that cannot be passed over ? waters to swim in ? and the result will be what we have in John 15, namely, the fruit-bearing displayed in connection with the river of living water flowing down from its heavenly source by way of the Cross to us, and leading us in varying measures to be found bearing fruit for the Lord, for "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit, so shall ye be My disciples."

Then may we all be encouraged to press on, "not as though we had already attained, either were already perfect, but to follow after, if that we may lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of us," and so continue until He comes.

The Path of God's Pleasure.

(Psalm xvi.).

Inglis Fleming.

This is "Michtam of David," one of the "golden psalms" of David ? one of those "fine gold." psalms which refer to our Lord Jesus Christ.

The first verse, "In Thee do I put my trust," is embodied in Hebrews ii., "I will put my trust in Him," and the closing verses were quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost, as speaking of Christ's death and resurrection.

Thus we know that the Psalm has direct reference to our blessed and adorable Lord.

I have turned to it to engage your thoughts for a little with something of the grace of Him whose glories we have been considering ? with something of that moral glory that shone out in Him in all His blessed goings in that path in which Jehovah delighted.

What was it to God that in such an arid, desert scene as this, there should be one track across it where He was perfectly honoured. Where, in all His way, the Son glorified His Father for whose glory He had come, and thus was found the perfectly dependent man in the world. "From the womb of the Virgin to the throne of God," as some one has said, we find Him brought before us for our soul's delight, that in some way we may have the Father's thought of Him in whom He found all His good pleasure.

He is "over all, God blessed for ever," but presented before us in this precious portion of the Word of God, in His Manhood here for the worship of our hearts.

If we look at the verses now in more detail we may see His moral excellencies shine forth in surpassing beauty.

The first verse presents Him as the Trustful Man, perfect in His confidence in and dependent upon Jehovah.

In the second verse He is viewed as the Lowly Man. Read verses 2 and 3 thus: ? "As to Jehovah, thou hast said, Thou art my Lord, my goodness extendeth not to thee. As to the saints that are in the earth, they are the excellent in whom is all my delight." We see Him here as the lowly One, speaking out of that place which he had taken saying, Thou art My Lord, My goodness extendeth not to Thee."

As to the saints we find Him as the Gracious Man. He would link Himself with these saints, these godly ones, a little remnant in Israel as they took their first right step in owning their ruin and need at the waters of baptism. Our Lord, who was the sinless, peerlessly perfect One, would identify Himself with them. But then, at once we find Him singled out by Heaven. The Father's voice is heard saying, "Thou art My beloved Son in whom is all My delight." And we can say of that same all-glorious Person, He is our beloved Saviour, and in Him is all our joy."

We turn from ourselves and all that we have discovered ourselves to be and we find our rest, our delight in Him in whom the Father delights. Shall we not take comfort from this, beloved friends, that we who believe are like them, numbered among "the excellent of the earth" in His sight, and among His loved ones, "His own which are in the world" to-day.

Not any limited few, not any section of that company in any limited fellowship, but all "His own" are "the excellent of the earth" in His judgment. And do not our hearts go out to them, to all "His own," with that love of which we were hearing in Ephesians this morning ? to embracing "all saints" in our prayers?

In the fourth verse we see Him as in His temptation the Separate Man. He gave sin and evil a wide berth indeed. In that dread temptation where Satan would at length have Him bow and worship him; "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, Him only shalt thou serve, get thee behind Me, Satan," is His stern reply. He would have nothing to do with that which is false.

And you and I are called to tread a separate path, and do not let us shrink from it, beloved. We are all in danger; but Christ can keep us, and seeking His company in prayer and meditation and loving His Word we shall be maintained in true separation to Himself. And it is this He values. Someone has said that mere outward, physical separation from the world is nothing worth, and a mere legal separation because of what this one or that one will say, is nothing worth, but separation to Christ ? your heart taken up with Him, His Father and our Father delighted in, that separation is what God looks for and that which He values in His own. We see it perfectly in our Lord Jesus Christ. He found all His heart's joy in His Father.

He is the Satisfied Man in verses 5 and 6. "Jehovah is the portion of Mine inheritance and of My cup; Thou maintainest My lot." (How different from the "portion" in Psalm xvii. 14). He found His meat in doing the Father's will; He was here for the Father's pleasure and for the Father's glory. He could say, "I came down from heaven not to do Mine own will but the will of Him that sent Me." "Jehovah is the portion of Mine inheritance." That is future. "And of My cup." That is present. He knew whether in the future or in the present what it was to have Jehovah as His only, His all-sufficient portion.

And you and I are privileged, beloved friends, to follow in His steps (alas! how far off and how feebly we do so). We are called "to live unto God." The heart will have an object and "self," now being judged, God Himself, manifested in His grace, revealed in His Son, becomes the object, the all-satisfying Object for our hearts.

And then we find Him saying, "The lines are fallen unto Me in pleasant places, yea, I have a goodly heritage." As to its outward circumstances, we know that our Lord Jesus was "the Man of sorrows," the grief-acquainted One, but, inwardly, He had joy in the accomplishment of His Father's good pleasure. There were the pleasant places in that lonely pathway. Was not that a pleasant place to Him at Sychar's well, where He might pour heaven's fulness into an impoverished heart, where He might unfold to that Samaritan the story of the Father seeking worshippers, and so fill her heart that leaving her water-pot, she will hasten to bear witness of Him. It was a pleasant place indeed. And such we find again and again as our souls peruse with delight the Gospel story in the four evangelists. Joy was His, meat was His, in doing the Father's will, whatever that will might be, and so shall it be with you and me, beloved, as we, through grace, follow Him in His blessed pathway.

Then in the seventh verse we find Him the Worshipping Man, saying, "I will bless Jehovah who hath given Me counsel," You get that note of worship in the Gospels. We hear His telling forth of praise as in Matthew xi. "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight." He pours out His soul's delight before the Father, and this in circumstances that were so contrary; circumstances where all seemed opposed to Him, and when His ministry seemed to be a failure. It is "at that time" the Lord Jesus turns with thanksgiving to the Father.

Then, as the Devoted Man in absolute devotedness in verse 8. "I have set Jehovah always before Me." Unswerving, unfailing, in faithfulness, we have His course depicted before us in the pages of the evangelists. How unlike to what any of us can say.

As the Rejoicing, Hopeful Man we find Him in verse 9. "Therefore My heart is glad, My glory rejoiceth, My flesh also shall rest in hope." If in some way thus we have traced the Lord, as seen in this Psalm, from the earliest moment of His earthly journeyings, if His baptism, His temptation, His blessed service, His devotedness in life , have been before us hitherto, we come now to the Cross, to dark Calvary, and to that sepulchre in Joseph's garden , and we hear Him say in His perfection, "My heart is glad, My flesh also shall rest in hope, for Thou wilt not . . . suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption." "Thou wilt show Me the path of life" ? a path that led down into death, but out into the glory; into that sphere where is fulness of joy at His Father's right hand and the pleasures for evermore. We know Him now as the Glorified Man at the right hand of God. "We see Jesus . . . crowned with glory and honour." So we have followed Him in that wonderful pathway, and admire and adore in His presence.

* * *

Some may say now, "That is a beautiful life in truth, but it is not for me to follow." So I want to add a few words concerning this before I close.

As you trace the path of the Lord Jesus in the Scriptures, and you see His moral beauties and excellencies shining out in life and in death, dear believer, you are entitled to say, "That is my life."

Christ who is our righteousness is also our life, as we read, "When Christ who is our life shall appear."

All that you have had part in in Adam as fallen, all that volume of your history, so dark, so sin-marked, so spoiled, has been closed in the death of the Lord Jesus, and you live now before God "in Christ," and Christ lives in you for manifestation here. It is that which we find in Galatians ii. 20, where the apostle Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ." "Christ liveth in me," All that I was as Saul of Tarsus has been brought to its close in judgment at the Cross; I have been crucified with Christ. "Nevertheless, I live" ? I am a living man ? "but no longer I ? Saul of Tarsus ? but Christ liveth in me." It is the apostle expressing personally for himself that which was good in his own soul, that which is our proper Christian position. "Our old man has been crucified with Christ." The only life we are to know, and the only life God recognizes is Christ as our life, and God works in every one that something of Christ may be expressed in us day by day; that there may be something of the grace that shone out in Him shining out in each one of us in the power of the Holy Spirit. And so you find as to service the apostle saying, in Romans xv. 18, "I will not speak of that which Christ hath not wrought through me." All that which he valued was that which Christ wrought through him. Some of you younger men may say, "What can I do for Christ?" No! Put it like this, What can Christ do through me?

I would like to ask you in view of this, are you the Christian you might be? (The rifle kicks as I fire it!) Am I? Am I the Christian I might be? Am I a Christian in the divine thought for one? I know I am a believer; I am justified from all things, I am saved by the grace of God, but am I the Christian I should be? Am I the Christian God would have me be? Am I the Christian I might be by the power of the Spirit of God, treading in Christ's steps? And as we own that we are not, shall we not turn to Him and say, "Lord, make me just what Thou wouldst have me to be"?

A young man electrified a prayer meeting as he prayed, "Lord, make a good job of me." Will you pray that prayer? You may not in those words, but will you pray it from your heart this afternoon, "Lord; work Thine own work in me and through me for Thy pleasure and have one here for Thy will alone?"

Do you say, "I have tried to do it and failed?"

Yes! we may say this all of us. But Christ can make you a success.

In Florence there is a wonderful statue by Michael Angelo. It is of the stripling David taking the sling and the stones. That statue is formed of a block of marble upon which another sculptor had done some work, but who had set it aside as valueless. Michael Angelo saw that stone and he took it in hand and formed a most beautiful sculpture. So Christ can take you in hand this afternoon and by His grace He may take me also. Some of us have only a few more steps in the desert to tread, if our Lord tarry, while some of you young men, if the Lord will, have life before you. What shall that life be? Shall it be a lost life, just plunged in mere commerce and pleasure? Is that worth while? Put yourself in Christ's hand that He may form you for His pleasure, so that out of your life there may be something of His grace shining, something of His activities, through you in blessing to others; redounding to the glory of God. So, in some measure, shall we follow Christ's steps in the path of God's pleasure. God make it so with all of us, for His Name's sake.

The Claims of God.

James Boyd.

I desire to say a few words on the subject of the claims of God, the claims that God has over every intelligent being on earth, claims that are wickedly denied by the men of this rebellious world. People seem to think that they are left here in this world just to please themselves, and that they are not answerable to the great Governor of the universe. Their bodies, their tongues, and all their members are their own, and thus the claims of their Creator are altogether denied. Now I turn for light regarding this to the Holy Scriptures, and I read from verse 15 to verse 22 of chapter xxii. of the Gospel of Matthew.

I do not intend to speak of all that we have here, but only to refer to the hypocritical question of the Pharisees and to the answer of our Lord. I notice in Scripture that our Lord does not usually answer questions, but rather does He answer the man who asks them. He knew what men were. He knew in what hearts and minds the questions originated, and it was to the state of the questioner that His answer appealed, and not to the question merely. So it was in this instance. These men ? He calls them hypocrites ? were now in the presence of the Searcher of hearts, from whose eyes there was no hiding. "Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight; but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do" (Hebrews iv. 13): He knows our hearts better than we know them, and He knows what prompts questions better than the questioner himself does.

He asks to be shown the tribute money. And they brought unto Him a penny. He says: "Whose is this image and superscription?" They say it is Caesar's. Why then ask if he should have it? Every man has a certain right to his own. The answer to their question was stamped upon the coin. Why should not Caesar have his own? "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's."

But that is not all. He lets them know they are to render to God the things that are God's. If the coin bore the image of Caesar, and therefore, was his, on whom was the image of God stamped? It was stamped at the beginning upon man, and in spite of the fall it has not been altogether effaced. The image and superscription of God are still discernible. Man was made in the image and likeness of God. No, I do not mean that skeleton of yours, with its load of human flesh, sheltering something that death cannot touch. Infidels tell us that Scripture represents man as in God's image, and that man is framed much after their ancestors that lived among the trees of the wood. I do not mind in the least whether a man's skeleton is, or is not, like that of a gorilla, a chimpanzee, or a dog-faced baboon; God has made him in His own image and likeness, and this is moral, not physical. Man has been set as centre and head over a system that has been subjected to him, and upon which are his fear and his dread. Not only this, but he has been endowed with an affectionate regard for all that have been placed under his dominion. In this way, and not as to his physical frame, is man the image of God.

Man is God's, for he bears His image. And the Lord says: "Render unto God the things that are God's." Had these men rendered unto God the things that were God's they would not have had the image of Cesar on their money. Everyone here belongs to God. Perhaps you say you are not a Christian ? you make no profession of religion. That matters not, you are His creature, you are in existence to serve Him, and woe betide you in the day of judgment if you have not done it. You may reply to this that it does not seem very like the Gospel, that you supposed we were all to be saved by grace. You are, if you are saved at all, but saved or unsaved you exist for the service of God. If you are still in your sins you are not rendering to God that which is God's. You are robbing Him. You are God's and you claim yourself. You have no right to yourself, for you bear His image and superscription. People murmur a great deal because they have to render to the nation that which belongs to it, but if they did not pay tribute they would soon be before the judge; and as to God, all must give account to Him. "As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me, and every tongue shall confess to God." Why? Simply because we belong to Him, and are responsible to serve Him. We must give account to Him. We should render to God the things that are God's. We are made in His likeness. He put His stamp upon us. It is upon every man. How could we then with the tongue bless God, and curse the man made in His likeness? Or how refuse to give ourselves over unto His will, seeing that He has an indisputable claim upon us?

There is another reason why we should lay ourselves at His feet, and that is because He has bought us. I turn to 1 Corinthians vi. 19. I am well aware the epistle is addressed to believers, but what is said here is true for saved or unsaved. He says, "Ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price: therefore, glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's." The Lord has bought this world and all in it. He bought it for the sake of a treasure that lay in it, but He bought it; it belongs to Him on the ground of purchase. Even though you may be a disbeliever in the Gospel, still you are His ? His by the right of creation, by the fact that you bear His image and likeness, and also by the fact that He bought you with a great price. He tasted death for every man: Do you admit the claim He has upon you, or do you "deny the Lord that bought you"? If you do deny Him you bring upon yourself swift destruction (2 Peter ii. 1). May you admit the righteous claim He has upon you, and escape the judgment to be measured out to the rebellious!

Let us turn to Romans xii. It is to believers the Word is addressed here. He says: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." The mercies ? or compassions, of God are set before us in the first eight chapters of this epistle, and this reference is to those compassions. There is a verse in Psalm cxviii: to which I would turn your attention for a moment ? verse 27: "God is the Lord, which hath showed us light: bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar." The light is in the first eight chapters of the epistle. There we get the intervention of God on our behalf, that we may be delivered from sin's dominion, so that we may be able to yield ourselves ? our members ? our bodies to the service of God.

The light has shone upon our benighted souls ? marvellous light ? the light of the revelation of God ? and by this light we have got the salvation of our souls. Our souls have been emancipated from the bondage to the power of evil under which we lay, and now we are exhorted to take up another order of service ? service to God. When the light of God enters our souls in the power of the Spirit, our souls are set free for God's service. We are to render to Him intelligent service. The point in this passage is not that it is reasonable that we should serve God on account of the compassions which He has shown us, but that our service should be characterized by the knowledge of His will whom we desire to serve. And this sacrifice is holy, acceptable, and living. It is not a dead sacrifice, like the bodies of beasts slain at the altar in the past dispensation, but a life devoted to His service. And it is in this way we prove how good and acceptable and perfect His will is.

The apostle beseeches. It is not a command with a curse attached to it in view of possible disobedience. It is an appeal to those who have obtained infinite mercy to enter upon a new career of unspeakable joy and happiness. It is an exhortation to those who have not only been bought, but who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ to "render unto God the things that are God's." The power of sin, Satan, law and flesh, can dominate us no longer. We have come under a new control, and it is not only that we have power to yield ourselves to God, but the desire of the renewed mind is to walk in the pathway of His will. It is a service of love. We have been brought into new and eternal relationships with God, and we rejoice to know that He is willing to accept of our very imperfect service.

Now what would be the effect of our presenting our bodies a living sacrifice to God? In answer to this question I would ask again, what effect does He desire His Gospel to produce in us? Is it not that in this world, out of which His Son has been rejected, we may be exponents of the grace that perfectly shone out in Him? That the light of God that was radiant in His person might be continued during the time of His absence? He set forth God in His true character before the eyes of men. He was the perfect expression of the invisible God. This is what is meant by His being the light of the world.

And this is the way by which we have got to know God. I believe in God by Christ: I do not believe in Him by nature, astronomy, or geology, but entirely by Christ. God not only sent His Son into this world that we might live through Him, but He raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory that our faith and hope might centre in Him. God has not only become the object of our hearts, but the all-controlling object. We delight to do His will. Our bodies are brought under His gracious control, and thus Christ is reproduced in us down here. We walk as He walked. You say, that is a very high standard. But would you not prefer a high standard before a low one? What name has been placed upon us? What superscription has been written upon our foreheads? Christ. That is the holy name that has been placed upon us. Even the world has thus designated us. They called the disciples of Jesus Christians, when at Antioch the Gospel was first preached. Christ is continued in His people down here.

How is that to be brought about in us? It will be brought about in us if we render to God that which is God's; in other words, if we present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, our intelligent service. I turn to Paul's epistle to the Philippians, and there I find the great desire of the writer was to have Christ magnified in his body, whether by life or death. He was about to appear before the Roman emperor, the power before which his Lord had once appeared, and in the presence of which He had witnessed a good confession. He was in prison for Christ: The devil had been allowed to place him there, but had defeated himself by so doing, for now there were, more preachers than ever before. This was encouraging to the suffering apostle. But he also counted on the prayers of the Philippians and on the Spirit of Jesus Christ, in order "that in nothing he might be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death." This was the only thing that seemed to cause him any concern. He calls it his salvation to be delivered from everything of self ? either his natural cowardice or his courage, and that nothing but Christ would be exhibited by him. Christ had been before this tribunal, and was condemned to the cross, now these rulers and judges were to find this same Christ in the body of Paul. He was not concerned regarding their sentence upon himself. "That Christ may he magnified in my body, whether by life or death." Let what God will befall me, only let Christ be seen in my body. This was the only thing he seemed anxious about, it was all his salvation and all his desire.

Now if the Philippians were to occupy themselves with the Gospel, there was to be no strife and contention between themselves. He desires them to be all of one mind, but that the mind of Christ: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." When in the form of God He emptied Himself, and when in fashion as a man He humbled himself. Here, where every man was seeking to exalt himself, Christ was humbling Himself. here everyone seeks to rise above his fellows, does his best to get into a position of exaltation, and that by fair means or foul. What a world it is when viewed in the light of the incarnate Son of God! What must the holy angels think of it! We were born into it, and have grown accustomed to it; just like people brought up in filth; they do not trouble about it, it has become their natural element. Put a person into filthy surroundings who has been brought up in cleanliness, and he will be miserable.

Jesus was "obedient unto death." That was the mind that was in Him. With Him, no one but God was worthy of the slightest consideration. What claim had the death of the cross ? or any other mode of death upon Him? None. He gave Himself up to the will of God: "I come to do Thy will"; and He did it. With Him there was no reasoning, no repining, self-seeking, no murmuring. He says: "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." He takes the place of deserving nothing, as being unworthy of the least consideration: "I am a worm, and no man." God alone is to be considered. He has a just claim upon us: We belong to Him. Whose image has been stamped upon us? God's. Then let us render to God the things that are God's.

What should characterize every human being? Obedience. Therefore, the apostle exhorts the Philippians: "As ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God that worketh in us, both to will and to do of His good pleasure." What about Christ? He was obedient unto death. All that He said and did was the outcome of the will of God. What about us then? If we do the will of God we shall be practically Christ over again. This is walking as He walked, and this is the way to have Christ magnified in our bodies.

Turn to chapter iii. The apostle is in the first part of the Chapter speaking of the effect upon his life of the knowledge of Christ. He speaks of the excellency of that knowledge, and of the power that it had over him. It made him throw every fleshly decoration that he had possessed (and he had more to boast of than any man) on the rubbish heap. He counted what he had lost, after the flesh, as useless encumbrances in view of what he had found in Christ. Then he looks forward to the day in which Christ will put forth His almighty power to subdue everything to Himself, and He says that our Saviour shall change our bodies of humiliation and fashion them like unto His own body of glory. Then we shall no more require exhortations, for His servants shall serve Him, see His face, and have His name upon their foreheads. In the meantime, let us keep well in mind that our happy and eternal privilege is to render to God that which is God's.

Prosperity and Power.

(2 Samuel xiii. 4).

W. Bramwell Dick.

"And he said unto him, Why art thou, being the king's son, lean from day to day?"

I think we have been feeling during these meetings that the Spirit of God has been seeking to lead us on very practical lines, and very particularly so in the ministry that we have had the last two nights. We have been made to feel how He is pressing upon us the question as to what response there is on our part to all the precious truth that He has been pleased to make known to us; and I want for a few minutes, as the Lord may help me, to use the striking and arresting question in this Scripture by way of seeking to press that question still further home upon my own heart and upon yours. That there is leanness I don't suppose any one of us will question. We realize that, do we not, when we meet each other as individuals? and we notice how very little response there is when the Lord's name is mentioned, and when the precious things of God are spoken about. We feel it sometimes when we are gathered together week by week in what we usually speak of as a prayer meeting, and which perhaps, sometimes is a prayer meeting more in name than reality. We are conscious of it still more, perhaps most of all, when we are privileged to be gathered together around our blessed Lord on the first day of the week, and when sometimes such gatherings are little more than what we might call testimony meetings. We thank God that our sins are forgiven, and that some day soon we are going to be free from our woes, our pains, and our trials, and we are going to be happy in heaven with Jesus. We are made to feel how little there has been of that which was presented to us yesterday from the 4th. chapter of John ? that worship that the Father seeks; and that brings such joy and delight and satisfaction to His heart. In the case of Ammon there was no excuse for his leanness, and therefore it is, I suppose, there seems to be almost a tone of reproach in the question that is asked him, not simply, "Why art thou lean from day to day?" but, "Why art thou, being the king's son, lean from day to day?" It suggested that it was a shame to one in his exalted position that leanness should characterize him. I presume he had at his command all that he wanted, and, having that, it was quite evident there was something that was sapping at the root of his physical constitution that made him, though a king's son, weak and lean. Beloved brethren, you and I are favoured, through Gods infinite mercy, with most precious ministry, written and oral, and above all, we are favoured with the sacred Word of God ? that we hold in our hands, and we have the Holy Spirit of God. Yet, with all that, have we not got to ask ourselves the question, why are we ? in the favoured circumstances in which we find ourselves, ? so lean?

Is it not possible that there is something that is sapping at the root of our spiritual constitution, and is making us, though children of God, sons and heirs of glory, who have been invested with all the wealth of heaven, and with blessing that it will take us all eternity to explore, lean? I now ask you to turn to a brighter picture and read Judges viii. 18 and 19: Then said he unto Zebah and Zalmunna, What manner of men were they whom ye slew at Tabor? And they answered, As thou art, so were they; each one resembled the children of a king. And he said They were my brethren."

This is a much brighter side. Gideon was not, strictly speaking, a child of a king, and yet they were able to say to him, each one of his brethren was like himself, and they "resembled the children of a king." Gideon found himself in circumstances not unlike those in which we find ourselves to-day. He was surrounded by the enemies of God and of His people, represented by Midianites and Amalekites, and those who were opposed to God and to the people of God. Gideon maintained a path of separation in the midst of all that. That is rather an old-fashioned word, is it not ? SEPARATION? I remember, when I was younger than I am to-day, I used to go to meetings like these, and I heard the beloved servants of God ? and there were giants in those days ? ring out that word "separation" with no uncertain sound; and it was not only that they rang out the word with no uncertain sound, but there was that power behind it, that one felt the men who exhorted us to separation were men who knew a thing about it themselves. I am afraid it has dropped out of our vocabulary, and we have to ask ourselves whether the reason is not probably that it has fallen largely out of our practice.

But here was Gideon, and he, as I have said, seems to have maintained a path of separation. He was very, very much affected by the circumstances in which God's people found themselves. You go back to chapter vi. in this book, when the angel brought a message to him, and we find how he seems to have been well nigh overwhelmed as he thought of the people of God in the sad plight in which they were as the result of their own sin and rebellion against God. But there is something very fine said about Gideon, he threshed wheat in secret, notwithstanding all that was going on around him (verse 11). Notwithstanding all, that might be called, the unfortunate circumstances in which he was, he threshed wheat, he threshed it in secret; and I think we can infer something more from the 19th verse of chapter viii., he shared it with his brethren, with the result that his brethren were like himself, they "resembled the children of a king." It is a good thing for us to know the secret of threshing wheat in secret. Some one said yesterday at our Bible reading, "We do not read the Scriptures in order to give out," and that is perfectly true. If we read the Scriptures, only to give out, it will be a poor thing, but if we read the Scriptures, if we are threshing wheat, there will be one inevitable result, we shall want to share the wheat with our brethren. I find it a happy thing as I go up and down, and sometimes a brother comes to see me, or I call at a house and get into conversation with a sister, and they say, "You know I was just reading a certain portion this morning, and I saw so and so in it," and they give me some sparkling gem, and I thank God for it. I am changing the metaphor somewhat, but that doesn't matter. They share their wheat with others. That is what is meant, is it not, when Paul exhorts his son in the faith, Timothy, that he should give attendance to reading? And the result of his giving attendance to reading would be that his profiting should appear unto all (1 Timothy iv. 13-15). God give us to know a little more, in the midst of all the failure and the break-up with which we are surrounded, amidst circumstances that may be calculated sometimes to depress us, may He give us to know something more of what it is to thresh wheat in secret, and then to share it with our brethren. Some one may say, "What exactly are we to understand by threshing wheat?" Let us turn for a closing Scripture to the New Testament. (Hebrews iii: 1), "Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus." A very excellent translation puts the word "confession" instead of "profession," and renders the last clause, "Consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Jesus." If we know something of what it is to consider "the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Jesus," then we shall know something of what it is to thresh wheat in secret, there will be one inevitable result, that is, we shall want to share the wheat with our brethren. If we consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Jesus," the first effect will be that we ourselves shall become increasingly like Him, and the second effect will be, as we seek to share the wheat with our brethren, they too, with us, will be made more and inure like that glorious Person.

In the first chapter, as we know, we have Him brought before us as the Apostle and our eyes are directed to Him in all the preciousness, all the excellence of that glory here He ever dwells. He is "the brightness of God's glory, the express image of His Person; He who upholds all things by the word of His power," and you and I are called upon to consider Him As we seek to consider the greatness, the majesty, the glory, the excellency, the power of God's eternal Son, what an occupation is that for our hearts!

Then we come to the second chapter, where He is presented as the High Priest. If we view Him in chapter i. in all the excellency and majesty of that glory that ever was, is, and ever shall be, His: now the Spirit of God in chapter ii., conducts us in His downward path, as He stepped off that throne eternal into manhood, came down into this world, went lower and still lower, and "tasted death for everything" ? we travel from the highest height to the lowest depth, and we consider Him in that wonderful path that the last speaker has just been bringing before us, the lowly, the homeless, the friendless, the penniless Stranger; the One who was here only and wholly and altogether for the will of God ? we consider Him, and we find some precious wheat to thresh there.

Then we follow Him upward as Man, as He ascends from the lowest depths, He "who tasted death for everything," we see Him, as Man, pass through the opened heavens, and, taking up the language of chapter ii. 9, with glad, rejoicing, triumphant, worshipping hearts, we exclaim, "We see Jesus, crowned with glory and honour," and we consider Him there. We have got some precious wheat to thresh in that, have we not?

Then we find in this verse that the saints of God are addressed in a wonderful way. We are not going to speak in general about the saints of God this afternoon, though we know that it is true of all saints. We are going to be selfish enough for the moment, to think of ourselves gathered here in this hall, for it is only thus that we shall get the sweetness, the freshness, the power, and the benefit of it, "Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling." Oh, my beloved brethren, we want to realize a little more of what this means. Someone has said that "As Apostle, He brings us up to the height of our calling, and as High Priest, He maintains us there." What a calling it is! "Holy brethren." "But," some one may say, "I don't feel holy." I don't suppose you do. If you said you did, no one would believe you, but God says you are holy, and God takes account of us as "holy brethren," and "as partakers of the heavenly calling." Children of a king! We are something a great deal better than that. We have a calling that is much more exalted than that of the children of a king. We have been brought into intimate association and relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ, that of those whom He is not ashamed to call His brethren, and we are taken account of as "holy brethren." Not only that, but "partakers of the heavenly calling." We may be surrounded by the Midianites and Amalekites, but we may realize in the midst of it all, that we are "partakers of the heavenly calling," and thus we are outside of the whole system of things down here. Do not say "That is all right in theory, but it is difficult to work out in practice, and what we find here is, as I have already said, quoting the words of another, "We have the Apostle to bring us up to, and we have the High Priest to maintain us at the height of this wonderful calling." All these glories, His Godhead glory, His glory as Man, the glory of redemption, the glory that He has at the right hand of God to-day, He who has been exalted "above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come" (Eph. i. 21) ? they are all centred in Him whose name is Jesus. Does not that stir our hearts? Our precious Saviour, Jesus. God's eternal Son, Jesus. Our living, loving Lord. Our eternity is going to be spent in considering Jesus. It is our privilege to-day to consider Jesus. May God bless us, and may God grant we may be kept by His grace in a day such as this to thresh wheat in secret ? not to be lean, but to be like the children of a king, if we use the word of the Old Testament. To be in New Testament language, like those who are "holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling," yea, to be like Jesus now, as we shall be when we see Him face to face.

The Mind of Christ.

(Isaiah lv. 9; Luke ix. 18-22; 43-56).

A. G. Taylor.

I have it very much impressed on my spirit to read these Scriptures to you this afternoon. Not that I am able to say very much about them. It is good for us to get God's thoughts and to see how very different His thoughts are and Christ's thoughts are from what our thoughts are. How often do we find our thoughts are like the thoughts of the disciples of old. Frequently we are fault-finding, censorious and hard with others who are seeking to do the Lord's will just as much as we are. How the Lord had to rebuke His disciples for their thoughts in this matter. Should it not touch our hearts as we read His beautiful words to them. How He was seeking to put them on the right line, the line of grace that He, Himself, was on. "The Law was given by Moses, Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ." Beloved, as we pass along, let us see to it that we don't do anything or say anything to discourage or hurt our brethren in Christ.

We are too apt to look down on other Christians and inclined to think that when they are doing things that we don't do, that they are doing evil. We make a great mistake in thus thinking of them, and we do well to constantly and continually look to what the Lord Jesus Christ says and how He taught His disciples.

I just wanted to make these remarks because I feel if we cannot say anything to encourage and help our Christian brethren who, perhaps, are not walking as we judge they ought to walk, let us say nothing to discourage, nothing to hurt, nothing to harm, but let us seek to be here having the mind of Christ, acting as Christ has taught us to do, and doing as He would have us do.

The Fellowship of God's Son.

(1 Corinthians i. 9).

J. T. Mawson.

There is a great deal of exercise as to Christian fellowship, and surely it is much to be desired, for we have all been called into one fellowship, and that fellowship is the fellowship of God's Son. The epistle that brings it before us is the second of Paul's epistles as given to us in the Word. In Romans we are set right with God, and following on that there should come this exercise as to Christian fellowship, in which we are set right with one another. First, the basis of everything laid in righteousness, that is Romans, and then each one of us brought upon that righteous basis to be together in holy, happy fellowship, according to the truth. It is well for us to consider this very full verse at the opening of this epistle which speaks to us of Christian fellowship. We are told it is the fellowship of God's Son. We cannot understand its character unless we consider and understand Him, for it takes it character from Him, God's Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. This fellowship could not be in those Old Testament days, for God's Son had not been revealed, and men, even men of God, broke down and failed, there were none of them who could found a fellowship according to God's mind. We often turn back and think of them, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon ? all of them broke down somewhere. God could form no fellowship out of what they were. But when God's Son came there was a Person here who was altogether for God, who never broke down.

There has been one Person here, who entered His life of responsibility in dependence upon God, and in absolute obedience to Him. He never turned aside one hair's breadth from the will of God, and always, in every word He spoke, in every thought He thought, and in every act He did, He was delightful to the heart of God, His Father. Blessed for us, indeed, to contemplate Him, who was found in absolute and full concert with the Father's heart. Communion between Himself and His Father was continuous. He was fragrant in all His ways. He was always in harmony with heaven. As we consider Him, the path of light He trod, how blessed, how wonderful it is to us! We are conscious of failure and break-down, but what a comfort, what a joy, to turn back and contemplate Him and be able to say, The Father has found His fullest delight in a Man, here on earth! I know He was more than Man. That is not the side I am speaking of to-day. He was here as the full revelation of God, and He could not have been that if He had not been God. He came forth as the Son to make manifest in the darkness what God is. That was one side: It is the other side I would dwell upon. He was here as a Man before God, fulfilling the will of God in all His ways. In Him the Father's will was done on earth, and if we would know what man is according to the thought of God, if we would see what God's intention for man is, we must look at that blessed Man and study Him, and as we study Him we know what pleases God.

But our Lord was alone on this earth. He said, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone." In His life-time He trod a solitary path. Nobody walked that path with Him ? He had to tread it alone. Nobody shared His delight in His Father's will. There was no one to enter into His feelings. Nor could there be, unless He imparted His own life to them. "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." He went into death that we might live in His life, and that God might call us into His fellowship, that He might put us together before Him, where His Son stands, that we might be brought into concert with Him where He is in heaven, and might tread the path that He trod where He is not now. He died and rose again that He might gather together in one the children of God that are scattered abroad, and found a fellowship, the life and power and principles of which, are heavenly and not of the world. What could be greater than this? It is usual for men to desire to rise into some sphere or circle above that in which they were born, and if a man is made a peer of the realm he thinks it a great honour; if he is invited to Court, or called into fellowship with royalty, he is elated. But what is this into which we are called? It is not the fellowship of the noble, or the fellowship with royalty. We are lifted above men as we know them, and above angels also, up into the fellowship of God's Son. And the fellowship will not be understood unless we understand Him.

We cannot enter into it in its power and blessedness unless we come under His influence. So often do we make it ecclesiastical and thereby spoil it, and hedge it round with our rules and regulations, and limit it to our poor notions of what it is. It is not our fellowship, but the fellowship of God's Son, and in that, the first thought is of relationship. We are brought into that blessed relationship He stands in, and the first thought in that relationship is love. The Father loveth the Son, and the Son responds to the love without reserve. That we should all most readily accept. But is there not another thought in it? You get it illustrated in the way Paul speaks of Timothy. He spoke of Timothy as "My son, Timothy," and then you remember he said of him, "As a son with a father he has laboured with me in the Gospel." Timothy was in full accord with Paul, there was oneness of mind and thought. It is a great day in a man's life when he can change the style of his business. Up to a certain point it has been David Cameron. Then the day arrives when he describes the firm as "David Cameron & Son." He has some one of one mind with himself, some one in concert with himself. Some one who will take counsel with himself, who will carry out his thoughts, and rightly represent him when he is absent, not as a servant, but as a son. It seems to me the thought comes in in connection with God's Son. Such He was when here upon earth, and it is God's purpose that that should be continued here, and He has called us to be in the continuation of that, so that here on earth now, there should be something in full accord with the mind of God. Grace has wrought in us with this end in view, and we have been sanctified in Christ Jesus. But we must come under subjection to Him. He must direct us, and He is Jesus Christ, our Lord; unless we are subject to Him, of course, we are going our own way ? each doing what he thinks right, and there will be no unity or fellowship, but if we know what it is to be subject to the Lord, each one of us, then everything becomes simple. It is instructive, in this epistle to the Corinthians, to see how the Lordship of Christ is pressed. We have the Lord's table in chapter x., we have the Lord's Supper in chapter xi., we have the Lord as the one Administrator in the 12th., and the 14th. closes with words something like this, "If any man among you thinketh himself to be spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things we write unto you are the commandments of the Lord." We must all own His Lordship. But how may we know where and how He will direct us? We get it in the Word, the things written therein are the commandments of the Lord. We have also spiritual sensibilities. It is a very blessed thing that, having received the Spirit and the divine nature, we have spiritual sensibilities, and these are developed by the Spirit who dwells in us, and they answer to the Word of the Lord, and when we hear the Word these spiritual sensibilities, if we are in a good spiritual state, and not carnal like the Corinthians, answer to the Word, and blessed indeed it is, when we find ourselves desiring, not only to hear the Word. but to do it. But we must be subject to the Lord Christ, as the One raised up from the dead and exalted, and now the great Administrator, the One in the place of authority, the One to whom we have bowed, the One whom we own as our Lord, and from whom we may draw all the grace and guidance we need in this fellowship which is His.

These first three chapters of 1 Corinthians are helpful. In chapter i. towards the end, we get the basis upon which we stand and are kept in this blessed fellowship to which God has called as. You get the cross of Christ brought before us. The cross of Christ in that character of it that removes all that that cannot be built in and fitted in to this fellowship. The cross is the condemnation and removal of the material that won't do for God. So we find no flesh should glory in His presence. Flesh brings in discord, for its root principle is self-exaltation, it glories in its own distinctions and powers, every man against another. It does not give glory to God, it wants it all for itself. But we are to glory in the cross of Christ. The cross of Christ is that in which we see the power and wisdom of God, and by the cross God has brought to an end the wisdom of the wise and everything in which men can boast. One way in which the flesh showed itself at Corinth was in the formation of parties and the boasting in leaders, and this is a subtle snare, more destructive to fellowship than what is flagrant and gross.

We must glory in the Lord, then, with one heart and voice, we show what fellowship is. And that we might glory in Him, we are told what He is made unto us. God has made Him to be to us who are in Him and are of God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption. Everything we need is in Christ. Blessed things these are, they cover everything we need as before God. The cross of Christ is the basis of it all. It brings us together on to common ground. Suppose the most learned man in the land comes into this fellowship, he comes in in the same way as the most illiterate man, and the cross is the end of all he can boast in as of the flesh. And he gets something better than he could bring. We are now in something greater and better and more glorious than the best man has got. It is the fellowship of God's Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, and He is the Administrator to us of what God is as well as the pattern to us as to what the fellowship is.

Then the power comes out in chapter ii. The Spirit has been given, and in connection with the Spirit of God we have the subject matter of our fellowship ? the Spirit of God has come to show unto us the things of God, these things are not understood by the natural man. The natural man understandeth not the things of God. He cannot enter into this fellowship. That is why we have so much Modernism to-day. It is the natural man boastfully claiming that he can find out the things of God. Man thinks he can by searching find out God. He won't receive God's revelation to him. He won't take the place of a little child: He won't acknowledge that if he is to know God, God must reveal Himself.

It is not here man's mind investigating, he has his own sphere in which he may pursue his investigations, but in the sphere of God's things there must be revelation, and the Spirit of God reveals to us what eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. and what has never entered into the heart of man. But these things, the things that God hath prepared for those that love Him, He reveals them to us by His Spirit, for "the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God." And the power of the fellowship, and the intelligence by which we understand the substance of it, is in the Spirit of God, the cross of Christ is the basis of it ? the death of that blessed Person, the Son of God, who laid down His life for us, that is the basis, the intelligence and the power of it is the Holy Spirit.

When we come to chapter iii. we find it is all for God. Ye are God's building: Ye are God's husbandry, Ye are God's temple. Ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's. What a blessed thing to know the Son of God was here and He was all for God! What joy, what delight, what wealth for God in that blessed life! And the devil was determined to get rid of it, and he worked upon men, until in a frenzy of passion they took that blessed Person and put Him to shame and crucified Him, and at last He lay in the silent tomb. Did the devil think he had got rid of what pleased God, and that He would never again have anything of that sort on earth? Did the devil think he had banished from this world everything for God? 1 Corinthians iii. shows us there is a continuation of that blessed life in which everything was for God, now, and you and I, beloved saints of God, are brought into this fellowship that God might have His delight in us. Ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's. In His wisdom, God having baffled all the force of the devil, and all the subtlety and the wisdom of the devil, has something on earth in which He can find His delight ? the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. A spiritual condition is necessary on our part if we are to live and act together in fellowship, as partners together in the things of God. He would put us in concert one with another, but we cannot be in concert one with another unless we are in concert with God, and we cannot be in concert with God unless we are subject to the Lord. His mind must control us. As we are put into concert with the Lord we shall be in concert one with another, and not only will God's heart be delighted, but we shall know the power and the blessedness and the joy of the fellowship into which we have been called.

We look on Christendom and see numberless fellowships and much failure, and we are apt to get discouraged, to have the heart taken out of us, and say. Well, is it any use any longer seeking to walk in fellowship according to the truth? But we have this for our confidence and encouragement that God is faithful. We may have failed; we may have broken down, and with shame of face we have to confess that break-down is everywhere, but God is faithful, and, beloved saints of God, the God of Pentecost, the God that Paul knew, the God of the Ephesian epistle, is the God who abides to-day in His mighty resources, and those resources are in Jesus Christ, our Lord Himself, and we may turn to Him and find His resources to be enough for us. He has not abandoned His present purpose for us, and we should not abandon it either.

The Lord grant that we may be content to learn of Him, God's Son, and be subject to Him, Jesus Christ our Lord, and then we shall walk together in happy fellowship.

Companying with Christ.

2 Chronicles ix. 1-12; Matthew xi. 25, 26.

James McBroom.

I have heard again and again since coming here, in our conversations, the statement that this is a day when the whole moral tone is lowered. In varying words the idea has been pressed again and again, and the question is a serious one for every one of us as to how the moral tone is to be raised. I have often said that in the first epistle to Corinthians, the writing of the apostle was to raise the whole moral tone. If Christ gets His place with us and one part of our lives is elevated, the whole soul is elevated. But then, how is it to come about? I feel as I stand here to-night, after all that the Lord's beloved servant has put before us, much cast on the Lord, and it brings before my heart the peculiarity of the Book of God, and of the things of God, because, after all that has been told us, there still remains something to be said, and after all our meetings are finished, if the Lord tarry, there will still remain something to be said. As each of the servants of Christ finishes his ministry for the moment one feels as though it were the last word was said, but after all, each of us can dip his tiny vessel into that which is unfathomable and inexhaustible. Not only these meetings, but all the meetings and all saints down the ages to the end of time, will continue to draw waters from the wells of salvation, and will find in them inexhaustible comfort and encouragement, to the praise and glory of God. Then there is a way I think God has marked out for the elevation of the moral tone, and I feel, if you will bear with me, that we lose sight of it to a very great extent, and my point tonight, is to endeavour, in the presence of my Master and His beloved people, to point out what He would put before us as the right way to raise the moral tone, and that is, that we should know more of His company and know more of the blessedness of "going in." In doing that, of course, I am necessitated to open it out, but what I would begin with is this: that with all the effort that is put forth to-day in Christendom, there is great need that we should cultivate more communion with the Lord. Every honest mind will admit that the tendency with us is to leave out the first great essential.

If we are to be true followers of Christ we must know Him, and spend time in the presence of our Lord. Therefore I repeat again, the first thing is, that, if we are to come out, we must be intimate, we must be in the intimacy of His affection inside. Before I go into that, my impression is that we, the people I look upon to-night, are part of the most favoured people in God's creation. To refer to it, in relation to the day in which we live, we all admit that the Church period is the time of the full revelation of God, the time when there is a Man sitting up yonder who, blessed be His holy Name, is much more than a Man. The time when that Man sits there is the grandest period in all time.

Until He went there the Old Testament could not be unlocked, what marvellous treasures lay enfolded there till Christ was glorified. Like the sun in the heavens, which blazes forth in the whole space of the solar system, filling it with light and heat, so the Man, Christ Jesus, has gone up on high that He might fill all things. He who is the Sun of righteousness, radiates forth in the moral desert, making many hearts glad with the blessing of God. God orders history, prophecy, promise and type in view of Christ, and the moment He takes His place on high, redemption accomplished, the Holy Ghost comes to shine on that blessed Book. Until then there could not be the unfolding of the treasures of God. Whoever could have known the typical meaning of the story of Adam and Eve until Ephesians 5 was written? Who could have known the meaning of the story of Joseph and his brethren until Christ was in glory? Who could have unfolded the first seven chapters of Leviticus until Christ was there? Whoever could have pointed out the wealth of those blessed, eternal verities that lie hidden in the pages of inspiration until Christ was in heaven? You say, why emphasize that? I will tell you. I emphasize it because of this, when Christ took His seat up there, not only was the revelation of God complete, but there was an answer to it in a Man at His right hand. On the one hand, He came out to declare God and make known His heart of love, and on the other, to take up a place before Him by redemption on behalf of those who were the subjects of His eternal thoughts. Job had thought He lived at far too great a distance from His creation to take notice of His creatures, or, as some thought, that great Being in the heavens was striding through creation to see how He could deal out sufferings to His creatures. No, brethren, Christ came here to unfold the heart of God. But there is more. The One who has declared God (John xvii.), is the One, blessed be His Name ? who has gone in in answer to it all, and if you tell me something of the greatness of the revelation, I will tell you that that shows more and more the greatness of the Man who answers to the revelation. But in connection with that I want to associate it thus: not only are we living in the time when the grandest things God ever made known to man are spoken of and when God presents Himself, so to speak, in a great mirror, that we may see all His character, nature, and being, and when we can read Him in that Man. But there is something more. Not only are we living in that day, but we are favoured at the end of the dispensation when the Lord Jesus Christ has recovered for His Assembly, the unfoldings of the counsels of God. I think I see at the end of the dispensations of Scripture something like this, hard times, dark times, but I see also, that the Lord comes out in the revelation of His will in a special way to those who seek Him at such a moment. In the twentieth century, when the forces of evil are gathering themselves together for the last, great, closing drama of the ages, the Lord Jesus Christ, our adorable Head, has brought out for us the full unfoldings of His truth, so that we, and all who form His Church, might be fitted to stand in the presence of those forces that are thus massing themselves for the final conflict. Things get so bad at the close of a dispensation that the professing people of God may be found doing the enemy's work. "His own" people lent themselves to Satan in crucifying the Lord. So it is to-day. We find the leaders in the professing church in Satan's hands denying all that is fundamental in the holy Book of God. We all know these things are true, and now in the light of it all, what I want to insist on is, that if we are face to face with the worst of the worst, we are brought into the best of the best. If He who sits in heaven, our glorious Head, has unfolded the truth of the revelation of our heavenly calling, of being sons of God, in association with Himself, it is that we may answer to it in the presence of Satan's worst. Not only do we see sonship unfolded in the Word, it is declared to us in perfection in His own Person. Sonship is an eternal relationship brought into Manhood by incarnation. The eternal Son becomes Man, brings it here, and sets it before us. On account of His death and resurrection, the Holy Ghost comes down from heaven to lift sinners like you and me out of our sins and the sin state and make us sons of God. We were under Satan's power, living at a distance from God, hateful and hating one another, but a Divine Person comes down, the Ascended One sends the Holy Ghost, to bring us into association with Himself as sons. I say this: we are at the end of the dispensation, and if we glance back upon the centuries, none of our forefathers had the light we have from God to-day, I repeat, therefore, we are the most favoured people on earth. As faithful men of God have been quoted, men whose faith we all surely desire to follow, we must see to it that the truth brought to us may be valued. There has been recovered for us by our glorious Head, through men of God of the last century, the whole truth of God. We need to wake up to this, the truth of the unity of the Body, the truth of being united to the Man at God's right hand (and if I am united to Him there every saint is also), and in view of that it is possible for us to have acquaintance with Christ in glory. An old servant years ago gave an address you may find it to-day ? and he gave the title to it "Acquaintance with Christ in glory." Can I be acquainted with the glorified Man? Yes, thank God. But if so, I am out of the fashion here. It cannot be possible for us to be in the fashion, maintain status, and position here, and at the same time have intimacy with Him whom the world refused. It cannot be possible to have part with Him, it cannot be possible to be in the enjoyment of association with the Soon of God if we are going on with the system that crucified Him. So in the Scriptures read I just want to show you the importance of the journey of the soul from this world to where He is. It has been well said, and as you all know, there are Christians who read the Bible and get their lessons as coming from God; they say their prayers, learn the Scriptures, but there are others again that seek to read the Scriptures and to go into where the Scriptures came from.

I have read an illustration in the Chronicles, but the New Testament is full of it. If you read Hebrews x. you go into the holiest of all, to where Christ is, and if we are to be workers, devoted, faithful, Christlike ? it is in touch with Him as going in and being at home there, there, acquainted with Him in the blessed intimacy of a soul at home in His presence. One has seen it in men who should be the happiest of the happy, grovelling and complaining, we may see people whom God has made His sons for eternity and enriched with every blessing in Christ, who should be walking through this world like princes, burdened with the care of this world. Is this not because they are not in the enjoyment of the company of the Lord Jesus Christ? So I read these two Scriptures to say a word on the elevation of the moral tone. I don't think there is any intelligent Christian looking for the recovery of the Church as a whole. The whole tone of Scripture, in its bearing on the present moment, is "See to thyself." If you do this you will not only put yourself right, but you will be a saviour to somebody else, and there is nothing so blessed as that. That is true service. We have to see to ourselves, and if we do so there will be a moral influence, a spiritual power that will characterize us that will be able to bring in a little of Christ to suffering saints of God.

And so, in this woman who heard of Solomon in a far country ? it cost her something to make the journey ? we have the illustration of a person who makes the journey to Christ to sit down in His presence and company, and have His mind about everything. And, hence, if we do so, there is what the apostle call "formation." You cannot shut your eyes to the fact that in much of the work of Christendom there is a lack of men after the character of Christ. What we want is character, for conduct springs from character, and the character Scripture gives us is the character of another Man, the Lord Jesus Christ, and hence, what we want is to be formed, and if we are formed it is the result of a Divine Person coming down here to form us after Christ.

And now she comes to him, and we see that all her difficulties, all her hard questions, are answered by Solomon. Go farther back a moment to the case of Joseph and his brethren. They came to Joseph; they didn't know him, but he knew them, they were speaking about what they had done to him, but they didn't know they were in the presence of Joseph. There I judge we have the record in figure of the experience of the soul before it comes to the knowledge of peace with God. But here we have in figure one who comes into company with the glorified Christ and sees Him in all His present glory, Himself the centre of it all, not content with merely reading about Him but going to where He is. "When she saw the wisdom of Solomon, the house he had built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants." The New Testament tells us we can see ? that the eyes of your heart being enlightened (Ephesians i.), and before you see, before you go in, John xvi. shows us we have a guide to lead us in, even the Spirit of God. "When He is come He will guide you into all the truth." A vast and unexplored territory lies before as that we may go in and enjoy the fulness of what belongs to Christ. The Holy Ghost is given to lead us into all the grandeur of that which belongs to Him. If we are to answer to the claims of God and stand to-day in the presence of an ecclesiastical system that is lending itself to corruption, if we are to stand in a world which is shutting out God, and in a time when the apostasy of Revelation is in evidence all around, how is it to be if it is not in the enjoyment of something better? I might illustrate it in this way. A good father and mother, the parents of a child, who see the state of things going on around in the world, what do they do? They strive to make home better than what is outside, it works with the exactitude of law, that the way to be delivered from anything is to get something better, and wise parents, in connection with all the merriment and attraction the devil is presenting the present age with, know that the only way to save their child is to have something better in the home, far better. The only way to be delivered from what is going on in this world of sinfulness is to be in the enjoyment of all that Christ can give in a scene of heavenly bliss. The testimony of God is here, and the only way is to be a man of resource, in constant touch with the source; to be inside. I ask you, young man, do you accustom yourself to go into the presence of God, to go in and sit down in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ? Not because you want something, nor because you need anything. It is the instinct of the Christian to pray, the necessity of our souls to pray, but I ask you this, do you accustom yourself to go inside, into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ? If you do, it will stamp an impress, the heavenly impress on you, and you will be able to go out with that impress and you will not be afraid if you are out of fashion, not up-to-date in the ways of the twentieth century, and your language and your walk will be clean in character because we cannot help being influenced by the company we keep. And so notice it says, She saw the meat at the table. God who created the heart knows how to satisfy it, and the wonderful favour He puts upon us is that we share with Him in His food. The Bread of God is He who comes down from heaven to give life. Your soul needs food. There are depths in the human heart that nothing in the world can ever satisfy. Make Christ the object of your life and perfect satisfaction will be yours. Everyone is seeking for something ? politics and one thing and another. I have said, politics for the politician, military tactics for the soldier, money for the misers, and everything else, but Christ for the Christian. Cultivate that going in and sitting in His presence, and you will see the meat at His table, there is everything to satisfy the desire of the heart. I am thinking of Psalm xxxvi., abundantly satisfied with the fatness of Thy house." I wish I could make it clear, the thought I have before me. To study to be imitators of Christ is a great thing, beloved brethren. We are getting nearer the end, and it is almost the only thing necessary, because we have all so much knowledge in one way and another, and our hearts are needy. We need food for our hearts and the ministry of Christ is what is needed.

But turn to the Gospels and see Him there. I see in the Old Testament something that tells me of the food of His table, yes, and the sitting of His servants, and the abundance of His house. Truly it may be said of "His own," "Happy are Thy men."

You know what the Lord says about "the men whom Thou gavest Me? The Father's love-gift to the Son ? the men that He favoured. O, the heavenly favour that shines on us. Are we to give it up cheaply? How is it to be maintained? By organisation, companies or bands, or societies, or anything? How is it to be maintained? There is a way in the nature of things ? God's way, and that is, that it must be maintained by living in touch with the source, and if we are to be maintained, if we are to come out in the place of our responsibility ? whether as to every-day life or business, or whether in connection with the testimony of Christ here in the world ? how will it be maintained? Only by the blessedness of having the company of Christ.

And so here we are in type in the true Solomon's house. It speaks of our being made companions of Christ. He speaks of saints as His brethren in John xx., the Spirit of God describes them as His fellows in Hebrews i., His companions in Hebrews ii and He calls them His friends in John xv. If that laid hold of us, that we are the friends of Christ, and that all these holy and endearing relationships are ours, surely we would not live a life of worldliness here. Whether do you desire a place, where Christ is refused or where He is received? If that dawned on us it would materially alter the character of our lives, we would not be going on with the tinsel of this poor callous world. I appeal to you to-night to seek to spend more time in the company of Christ.

Then, as I said, in the Gospels, there comes before us a Man of a different order. God has been so delighted with Him that He is determined to perpetuate His generation. In studying that holy life we see every detail gilded with the colour and character of heaven, whether in the domestic circle or among men, the village, the town, the city or country, all was for the delight of God. He came down from heaven not to do His own will but the will of Him that sent Him. Your will and mine, as natural men, is not in line with our duty, the fall estranged us from God, but in Christ the will of God was His delight and pleasure. The Holy Spirit is here to form you and me in His nature, in His love, in His relationship, and the flesh which comes in opposition to that is to be kept in the place of death. Are these things great realities or is it a little story we are telling that is pleasing to the ear? May God our God, as a result of these meetings give us to be more at home in these blessed divine things ? make us more careful about the company we keep. Christ died to have our company, and He wants it now, and that is before all our service. If you give Him your company your service will be coloured by that, which to the true heart, is a very precious reality. Oh, dear brethren, we are living in solemn times, when often the very bearing of the preacher is the denial of the testimony he speaks about. What is to be done? Keep in the company of Christ. We have access to the very source of all good and blessing, and we can be at home in the company of our adorable Lord and Master. We can trust Him in all His perfection. There is one Man who has brought glory to God and He is accessible to everyone of us to-night. The revelation of God with all its fulness is set forth in Him at the same time as approach to God on man's behalf is made good also.

If we keep the impress of Christ laid upon our hearts by the Spirit we shall hear His blessed voice, and be well pleasing to Him. There is often on the part of the saints, a morbid resignation in facing difficulties, and a feeling that all this is a necessity, but it will be all right when we get home. It is blessedly true that it will be all right then, but the Lord would have us in the sense that it is all right now, and if we seek His company our souls are kept in the enjoyment of all that which is to come out when He comes. May we be kept there for His Name's sake.

Setting Forward

Deuteronomy viii. 1, 2; Numbers xxi. 11.

S. Elvin Aziz.

The passage in the book of Deuteronomy describes God's tender care and gracious dealings with His people Israel in the wilderness; and the other, in the book of Numbers (they have no connection apparently) makes a statement from which we learn that Israel "set forward," and began to make a real advance in their journeys and they pitched their camp in a place called IJE-ABARIM. If you consult a map of the journeys of the children of Israel you will see the new position they have taken, Israel had now arrived at a new stage in their history ? a transition stage ? that is to say, their wanderings in the wilderness had come to an end. Miriam, the prophetess, has passed away, and Aaron, God's Priest, the brother of Miriam, also lays aside his official garments and passes out of this scene (Numbers xx.), so Israel are set free to go forward, and make real progress towards their objective (the land of promise) unhindered and unhampered. They are now on the border of Moab, "towards the sun-rising." What had happened that they have suddenly come to this place? They wandered aimlessly for no less than thirty-eight years in mid-wilderness, going backward and forward to Kadesh-Barnea two or three times. Now there are only a few months left for them to finish up the fortieth year to enter into their possessions.

Beloved, friends, it is very important for us to notice that there are two significant facts in the history of Israel which give the key to the situation, and reveal the secret of their being able to go forward.

The facts are these,

First, the brazen serpent.

Second, the new order which came into existence, through the death of Aaron.

I will make this plain by giving a brief summary of the truths set forth in the previous chapters.

The book of Numbers is pre-eminently the wilderness book, and gives the walk and service of the saints in the wilderness. The first ten chapters are the preparatory chapters, they tell us in the first place that they were numbered; they were taken account of individually, as we are taken account of in Christ Jesus. Secondly, that separate places were appointed to them in relation to testimony, that is, to the Ark of the Covenant. All their places were assigned so that the Ark of the Covenant must take the very central place, and all their tents should be so arranged as to surround and safeguard the interests of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of the Testimony. In the taking account of them, God was preparing for Himself a people of His own choosing. In Exodus xix. He says, "I brought you unto Myself," and so He could come and dwell in their midst, and appropriate them for Himself. No other place could satisfy God's heart, and no other place can he His, that is the central place, the place from which He can act, from which He can govern and direct the movements of the whole camp, for the pillar of cloud rested upon the Tent of Testimony, and not upon anything else. Therefore, the Israelites were required to keep their eyes steadfast upon the tent of Testimony so that they might, at a moment's notice, when they saw the cloud lifted up, be able to move and march. And so the first thing is God taking the central place, and the next thing is the appropriation of the people to Himself, so that they should defend the Ark of the Covenant. You may naturally say what was there to defend; who were there to contest the right of this large army of the Israelites passing through their borders; what was the object of having warriors in the wilderness? Well, there were the Amalekites, who might attack the Ark of the Covenant. We read that not only were some numbered as warriors, but there were those who were numbered as Levites, to carry the Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of Testimony. Upon these minute details I don't wish to dwell long, but what I want to present is this, that the Lord in the first ten chapters sets forth one great truth, that He will have nothing of man or his will, in connection with the Tent of Testimony or in the arrangement of the Camp. And from this you will see that God had a place in the midst of His people, surrounded by them, and they were to defend the Testimony.

The forces being marshalled and the Camp being arranged in perfect order, according to the mind of God, they left Horeb for Kadesh-Barnea. The journey being of eleven days, they did it in three stages. God was leading them through this wilderness, not only to show how good and gracious He was towards them; but, also to show them the utter worthlessness and incapability of flesh to do anything for God. That was the great truth that God was teaching them, from the 11th. to the 17th. chapter. Here you will notice the various features of Israel's unbelief and their downfall.

Until they came to Mount Horeb there was no Ark of the Covenant. And it was God's purpose that they should learn something about the Ark. The first thing was, they murmured against God, and fire came down from heaven, and then we read that Moses interceded on their behalf, and the fire was quenched. They lusted again for flesh, and Jehovah gave them quails and while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere, it was chewed, the wrath of God was kindled against them, and the Lord smote the people with a very great plague. This was at Kibroth-hattaavah. Here they found the graves of lust. Then we read of the jealousy on the part of Miriam and Aaron, because of the authority placed upon Moses. And when you come to the 13th. chapter it is the climax of the great unbelief of Israel. The land of promise was before them, they could have easily crossed over, but they did not do so because of their unbelief. Oh! beloved friends, if there is one thing that is our formidable foe, it is unbelief. The Epistle to the Hebrews (chapter iii.) very clearly sets forth two great enemies ? one is sin and the other is unbelief. And therefore, Israel could not enter into the land because of unbelief. When we come to the rebellion of Korah, it culminated in the religious apostasy of the worst type. After this we find that Miriam and Aaron pass away and a new priest is installed, in the person of Eleazer, after the order of resurrection. He was the priest on the ground of resurrection. According to the ordinance of the Red Heifer, we notice, that Eleazer was to witness the sacrifice; it was to be slain before him. And because he was the one who was going to succeed Aaron, Moses took Aaron's robes, or priestly garments, and placed them upon this man, Eleazer, who was to take his place. He was a new priest altogether, of the order of resurrection. You will now see that there is a new company, a new priest, a new sacrifice, and a new leader ? the old order had passed away and a new order had come into existence. Oh beloved friends, you see that God's principles and God's ways in the Old Testament are the same as His ways in the New. His mode of deliverance might be different, but the ways of God do not differ at all. Everything is going to be set upon resurrection ground, and everything of the old man must pass away. And now a word as regards the 21st. chapter, where the brazen serpent is set up. What does the brazen serpent mean? It is a symbol of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a type of the cross of Christ. It was God's answer to the perverseness of flesh, which proved incorrigible, there was nothing for it except to be condemned and put away judicially before God, in type I mean. It also meant the bringing in of a new life, and they "shall live." God judicially removed the very cause of that from which they were suffering, for He imparted new life, new vigour, in their hearts and in their souls, so that they may go forward, and no longer to be aimlessly wandering backward and forward. They were hindered, they could not advance because they were held back by the flesh, and until the flesh was set aside and removed, they could not go forward. The apostle Paul distinctly tells is that these things happened to Israel for our admonition, that we might learn lessons from them. We shall not make progress in spiritual things and grow in grace if we have not come to the brazen serpent, where the old man is set aside judicially. And if we are going to make advance in spiritual things we shall have to feed on Christ. The wilderness provision for God's people was manna, food that came from heaven. That is what we need. Unless you eat His flesh and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Eating and drinking, symbolically, mean appropriating Him.

May God help us to set forward, to feed on Christ, and to become strong and stalwart in our most holy faith.

Faithful Men

Wm. H. Westcott.

"Thou, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, that they may be able to teach others also" (2 Timothy ii. 1, 2):

In connection with this passage, I read in Exodus xxv. 10-11, 13, 21-22: The ark was made of shittim wood. In studying the tabernacle, the ark is that which suggests the Person of Christ. The shittim wood represents His humanity, the Son of God come down here as Man. I take the pure gold to represent that perfect suitability to God which was and is found in Christ, perfect suitability to the glory of God. In the ark was to be put the testimony which the Lord gave to Israel. The two tables of stone, or "the testimony," showed that what God required was perfect love toward Himself and perfect love toward men. These things are seen in Christ in all their completeness, and are fulfilled in Him alone. Upon the ark was placed the mercy-seat, of which I do not now speak particularly. Christ, in the presence of God, is the One in whom God's testimony is from first to last preserved intact. As to the wanderings of the children of Israel, when they left Egypt they turned eastward to Sinai, and from Sinai they turned northward to Kadesh-Barnea. From thence, they went southward to the shores of the Red Sea, and again turned northward to the plains of Moab; finally they went westward into the land. But whether they turned east or north, south or west, the testimony of God was preserved intact in the ark. There was no abatement of God's standard, and His eye rested upon that which, in the type, maintained that standard at its full height. You may wonder what that has to do with the Epistle to Timothy. But no one can read the second epistle without noticing how that again and again in the midst of all the frightful failure spoken of, there are certain things that are preserved intact in Christ Jesus. Israel, the people of God, in the course of their journeyings, at times seem to be turning their backs upon their true and proper direction, as when they turned southward to the shores of the Red. Sea. Nevertheless, the ark, with its testimony inside, preserved everything for God in perfect suitability to Him.

In this 2nd Epistle to Timothy we have seven things preserved for God, and for us, in Christ Jesus. In chapter i. we have "life which is in Christ Jesus." What a comfort for us, what security, what suitability for God, that the life which God in grace has made ours is secured and set forth in Christ Jesus. Then, lower down, in verse 9, "His own purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus." Further, in verse 13, "faith and love which is in Christ Jesus," and in the verse which I read in chapter ii., "the grace that is in Christ Jesus." Further on, in verse 10 of chapter ii. "the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory," and then, "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus," in verse 12 of chapter iii., and finally, "faith in Christ Jesus" in verse 15. You have the testimony preserved in the ark. Christ's perfect suitability to the glory of God secures everything for His people, whatever their changing experience may be.

Now, as to the condition in which we are found in these last days, turn back to chapter i. 15. You will notice that Paul says, "This thou knowest, that all they which are in Asia be turned away from me," a very serious state of things when we remember the peculiar place that was given to the apostle Paul in the Christian economy. He is the one to whom was committed the administration of the mystery, and who was constituted pre-eminently minister of the Gospel. For these Christians of Asia to turn away from Paul meant decline from, and the surrender of, the teaching of Paul. In chapter ii., verse 16, you find "Shun profane and vain babbling, for they will increase unto more ungodliness." If men turn away from the full truth of Christ and take up with profane and vain babblings, these things spread like a canker.

Then in chapter iii. it says, that "in the last, days difficult times shall come," and, in verse 5, there would be found "a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof," and in verse 13, "evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." There is the intensifying of evil as time goes on. Finally, in chapter iv., verse 3, "the time will come . . . when they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables." We seem to have reached this 4th. chapter. In journeying through the Church period, from the day of Pentecost until the return of the Lord, a long period has elapsed, but these are the last days. One need hardly stop to speak of it, but it is unquestionable that people are turning away their ears from the truth, and what they offer us in the place of the truth is "fables." We marvel sometimes to see the writings and hear of the speeches of some of the cleverest men of today in our Christian profession; we marvel that they descend to such profanities and frivolous ideas, but they are turned from the truth to fables, and the professed people of God love to have it so.

Now, in these two epistles to Timothy, what has struck me is this, that a great deal seems to be connected with Ephesus, and the teaching of Paul, which reaches its highest unfoldings in the epistle written to the Ephesian saints. In order to see what I mean, will you turn to the first epistle, chapter i., verse 3. "besought thee to abide still at Ephesus . . . that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine." We shall see in a moment what doctrine it was they had received; but he wrote these words to Timothy, Who was his on child in the faith, and who was true to him, of whom he wrote, "I have no man like-minded." He was willing to part company with this close follower and imitator of him, and to leave him at Ephesus, because he saw the coming in of that which would corrupt the very best bit of Christian. work we find in the New Testament. Then, a little further on, in verses 10, 11, of that chapter he speaks of the "sound doctrine according to the glorious Gospel (the Gospel of the glory), of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust." Further, in chapter iv., verse 16, he says to Timothy, "Take heed unto thyself and unto the doctrine; continue in them for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee." That is, Timothy, by personal continuation in that teaching which he had received from the apostle, would not only be preserved himself in the midst of all the growing corruption, but would become an instrument in the hands of the Lord for delivering others from it too. Then, see the second epistle, chapter i., verse 15. Time had elapsed between the first and the second epistles, not much perhaps, but Paul draws attention to the fact that by this time, beside those who were teaching evil doctrines, the whole of the saints in Asia had turned away from him. They were giving up the truth as he presented it at Ephesus. Again, in chapter ii., verse 2, it says, "The things that thou hast heard of me, the same commit thou to faithful men, that they may be able to teach others also." Even then there had come in the necessity to call for faithful men.

Now, if you are going to have faithful men, they must be faithful to something. I have suggested that at the back of all he says in the first and second epistles, you have the doctrine or ministry of the apostle as unfolded in all its breadth and length in his epistles, and crowned by the blessed truth embodied for us in the epistle to the Ephesians. In order to test what there is around us we need to have some definite understanding, more or less large, according to our measure, as to what this teaching of the apostle was. I would just like to refer briefly to the stages in which the truth of God has been unfolded to us, as written by Paul in Romans, Corinthians and Ephesians. I hope not to weary you.

In the epistle to the Romans you have the individual brought out from this sinful world, his guilt covered, and propitiation made so that he can be brought to God in a manner suitable to the divine glory. You have him set up in this world for the will of God, and brought to know God in such a way that, not only is there peace and deliverance, but the will of God becomes a positive delight to his heart. Beloved fellow-Christian, is there not a danger of our wasting a lot of time, and squandering a great part of our lives in doing our own will because we do not understand God's will, and because our hearts are not definitely and intelligently committed to it. I commend the Epistle to the Romans to everyone that wants to get on in the things of God. Therein you have the laying of the foundation in the soul of the believer of the holy work of God. Note that first of all, the individual is blessed and set here for God's will. Then, at the end of the epistle, we are introduced to the fact that we, being many, are one body. The subject is not opened out, but the fact is stated in the way of an illustration. It shows we are not all alike, and it is not intended we should be; but every one ? in that mould in which the grace of God has cast him ? is to be here definitely and positively for the will of God. This adjusts us in our relations here as responsible men, living in this world; the one thing that governs our life and conduct is the will of God.

In the epistle to Corinthians, the very first verse links on with the preceding epistle in this way, that Paul is an apostle by the will of God. But he talks in this epistle not exactly of individual, but of collective responsibility ? collective responsibility viewed in connection with the locality in which each one of us lives. Let me turn to verses 1 and 2 of chapter i., because it may be important in connection with our subject of this afternoon. "Paul . . . unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called saints, with all that in every place call upon the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, both their's and our's." I suppose that is all based upon the truth which we find in Romans. But notice again, "With all that in every place, etc." Locality is before his mind; but not only Corinth. The instructions given in this epistle were not given only to the Corinthians, not only to Christians in that locality, but apply equally to every locality wherever there are Christians. Moreover, they are to "all that call upon the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord," in that locality ? that is, they are not addressed to any select number only, any tiny community, any part of the Church of God; but the whole Church of God in any locality; all Christians in the town or city are instructed according to what we have in these two epistles to the Corinthians. Thus, no one can say, "That is out of date." Jesus Christ is Lord still. He abides, thank God, and all that is committed to His keeping is in safe keeping. The testimony is hid in the ark and nothing can take it out; the standard is irreducible.

Wherever Christians are, in that locality these instructions hold good. In a double way uniformity is to be secured in the administration of the Assembly; namely, first by the written instructions of the apostle, inspired as he was by the Holy Ghost, which remain to us for our guidance down to the end; and, second, it is to be secured by the unchangeable and universal Lordship of Christ; we call on the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. I think this important in connection with our subject this afternoon for this reason; the idea of several independent assemblies in one city is very widely held; and perhaps increasingly held, and is attractive to many people because of the way in which they escape exercise the one with the other. The result is a spirit of independency which is gravely opposed to the maintainance of that fellowship into which our faithful God has called us (see verse 9). The epistle is directed to every locality where there are Christians, and to all the Christians in that locality, so that that which is instruction for one meeting in a city is instruction for every meeting in that city. They are united by one common Lordship for all matters of administration,

This applies to binding and loosing also. Now we are in days of brokenness, and we cannot get back to the re-constitution and re-construction of that which, outwardly at least, has tumbled to pieces, but if we are to be faithful men this is what we are to be faithful to. I fear many drop out of testimony in regard of that very thing, and that there is not that subjection to the Lordship of Jesus, not that attention to the instruction of the apostle which the Spirit is here to produce.

In Corinthians, then, you get instruction for the saints in connection with the locality in which they stand. Wonderful it is to study all the detail of it; but ? not to linger over it ? turn to the Ephesian epistle. It is different from Corinthians in this way, that it speaks of what Christ is, and what the Assembly is, according to the counsels and purpose of God. That is not its local order and administration, seen to be governed by the written Word and revealed will of the Lord; rather is it the viewing of the Church of God from the standpoint of God's eternal counsel and that which He has wrought in the saint in view of it. I will briefly refer to One or two things that seem to be salient features in it, so as to help in a more detailed study.

The Epistle to the Ephesians is the crowning ministry of the apostle Paul; he unfolds to us there the counsel and purpose of God. He says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," etc. Observe carefully the Name of the One with whom the blessed God connects Himself in Ephesians i. 3. The central thought in that wonderful name is, of course, Jesus. We know Him. Have we not often sung, "How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds, in a believer's ear"? Here it is not exactly in our ear; we are introduced in this verse to "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not so much what we think of Jesus, but what God thinks of Him and what God has set forth in Him. In Acts ii. we are told, "God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye crucified, both Lord and Christ." Both His Lordship and His Christhood are brought into view when we use the full name, the Lord Jesus Christ. I ask fellow-Christians not to use that name indifferently and thoughtlessly, but seek to consider what is unfolded in it; viz., that the One who bore the Name of Jesus here is now exalted by God's right hand, and at His right hand is made both Lord and Christ. It was the sphere where He is thus owned on earth into which those, on the day of Pentecost, were introduced. By their baptism they came under the Lordship of Jesus and into that circle where the fulness of blessing connected with His Christhood was available for them. This Person is the One in connection with whom God now speaks. His eye is upon the One who, in His life and death here, and in heavenly glory now, is found covered with pure gold; in every place and circumstance, and under every condition, in absolute suitability to the glory of God. He, and not Adam, is the One in whom we see the divine pleasure. He is the One upon whom the eye of God can turn with unchanging delight, and in whom the testimony of God is abidingly preserved. This speaks to our hearts; we are encouraged, and drawn to share God's delight in Him. God, then, is presented here as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This I commend to you as the first great theme. With His eye upon that holy and blessed, and now glorified One, it is as though God turns round and says, What can I withhold? What is there that I may not do in connection with Him? The apostle, in intelligent response to that which God had bestowed, says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ." The heart of God is opened without reserve, and all the wealth and resources of God in grace are opened too, so that every spiritual blessing is unreservedly poured out upon us and secured for us because God loves Jesus. It accounts for everything you find in the epistle.

Now, when you come to look at what follows, because of our being in Him, it is impossible to compass all the glories of Christ that are referred to. You turn your eye on a clear night to the sky and you see some stars that are unquestionably prominent. They are visible by their own light to the naked eye, and you can distinguish them. But you turn your eye on the milky way, and there is such a collection of glories that the mind cannot conceive their number. You cannot possibly speak of everything in detail. But here and there are great constellations that stand out and our eye notes them. In connection with Ephesians you get a milky way of celestial glories opened out in connection with the counsels of God and the delight of God in Christ.

However to look at just one of them, see verse 9. After speaking of the blessing God has bestowed, he says, "Having made known unto us the mystery of His will," etc. That is, the second great theme, that comes out in this epistle, the Headship of Christ. First of all, the fact that God has found a Man in whom everything is suitable to His glory and in connection with whom His heart has found rest and perfect complacency, and on account of whom He can open His heart in immeasurable blessing; next Christ is referred to and distinguished as Head over all things in heaven and in earth. We must distinguish between "Christ" and "the Christ." Some of our black Central African friends used to marvel when we told them that the same sun which shone in their country shone in our distant land of Europe. Said one to me, when journeying from village to village. "I cannot make the sun out ? it seems to rise in a different direction every-day," he could not place himself. He had no compass, and when the sun rose it seemed always to rise opposite from where he thought it would. He said, "I have always had the impression that every fresh place we went to had a sun of its own." After all, it was the same sun everywhere. If we study the sun we see this ball of fire coming out of the horizon in the morning and taking its journey across the sky. Some inquire as to its movement and constitution, its revolutions and its spots, and puzzle their brains over the material of which that sun is composed. That is studying the sun by itself. Another may study it as it is known to be, the centre of a great solar system, this marvellous system in which we find ourselves. This earth is a planet in it; other planets revolve around it; the comets move in relation to it; the sun is the centre of this huge system. it is the same sun which we were considering before, when we were examining its own individual make-up; but then we considered the sun by itself. Now we think of it in relation to that whole system in which it moves, and as the centre around which the planets, etc., revolve. If you think of Christ, He is always the same Person, but "Christ" personally may be studied in His own personal glory; but when you read of "the Christ" it seems to be more Christ in connection with the whole system that revolves around Him and the whole universal system of blessing. All things are to be headed up in the Christ in heaven and in earth. It includes the mystery of the Church and a great deal more beside, but if we read of "the Christ," it is Christ in relation to all that is His.

The third theme is the Spirit. That is in itself such a vast subject in the epistle that I can only commend it to your notice. If a person wanted a theological study he should sit down and make Ephesians his study for life. If you take up the subject of the Spirit of God alone in this epistle, the various themes suggested in connection with Him are a profound theological education. I hope our beloved brother who follows me this evening, may be able to set Christ before us in some such way, that our hearts may be drawn out to Him in bounding affection ? but one just looks at the outline of things in Ephesians to see what it is we are to stand for, and be faithful to, in second Timothy days.

Then, not only is there the Spirit of God, the competent Person to undertake the making good in our souls of everything God has substantiated in Christ, but you have the Church, presented in so many different ways in connection with Christ that, as I was saying, you see a milky way of glories, yet cannot speak of them all.

Another thing is power. In chapter i. of the epistle you find power toward us. The apostle prays to God that He might make known to the saints the greatness of His power to usward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ. All God's power wrought in Christ, and took Him from the lowest place in death, where He had gone that He might make it possible to fulfil the counsels of God, up to the right hand of God. That same power is in operation now in order to take us out of things here just as death and resurrection would take a man out of things hate. The mighty power of God is to usward in order to give us this mighty uplift, that we might apprehend Christ in the place where He has gone. The Church already sees Him there, Head over all things. The Church, which is His Body, is to be enabled to be in full accord with Him, though still down here.

Then in chapter iii., the power is seen to be working in us. The Holy Spirit sets the Christ in the hearts or the saints, giving effect to all the counsels of God, enabling us to apprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of those counsels, and to know the love of the Christ which passeth knowledge, that we might be filled unto all the fulness of God.

Then, finally, in chapter vi., we have the mighty power from us, that can enable us to stand against the wiles of the devil.

In the midst of all the enemy's wiles and the saints' weakness, the apostle says to Timothy ? this promising young man, eminently gifted, and desiring to get on, yet weeping because he saw the state of things around ? "Thou, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus." It carries us back to the teaching of the apostle, to "the things which thou hast heard of me." We do not of course attain to teach others in five minutes. But would you not like, dear fellow Christian, brother or sister, to be numbered among the faithful, faithful to the full light God has given us as to the Christ (because, of course, Christian sisters can be faithful too). Would you not pray to be numbered among these faithful ones who, while maintaining the whole truth which God has taught us, are able to teach others also? Right down to the very end we should be able to stand in all the good of that which is revealed, in spite of the slide-away on every hand. May God grant this to be the case with us all. Every line of the truth remains true in Christ, and we may give nothing up.

The Lord's Twofold Claim Upon You.

Mark x. 17-22; John vi. 66-69; 60-63; xx. 26-28; xiv. 1-3.

John T. Mawson.

May the Lord deeply impress upon our souls that solemn line of things that has been before us, that we may, from this time forward, as never before, be rendering to God that which is God's. As long as Adam did that in the garden, he was blessed; and all was well. But he refused God's claim ? God who had made Himself known in His goodness as the Creator to him, and when he refused God's claim and listened to the devil whom he did not know, and who had never done him any good, then instead of the blessing came the curse, and instead of life came death, and as every man has followed in that foolish, self-willed way, death has passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Every man born into this world, except Christ, the Holy One of God, refused the claim of God and was a sinner.

When God created man, stamping upon him His own image, He did it with a great purpose in view. His delights were with the sons of men and He had great things in store for them, but it seemed as though His purpose was to be frustrated since man, having refused God's claim, had ruined himself and was found lying under the power of death, a poor, disobedient, self-willed dupe of God's arch enemy. What was to be done? God was not baffled. He had eternal life for men who had brought themselves, by their sin, under the power of death ? something greater than they had lost by their folly.

But how was that life to be reached? How was that life to be secured? The story is a wonderful one. From Godhead's fullest glory came our Lord. The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father was found here in the manger at Bethlehem, a little babe. That blessed Person had come to show us the will of God; He had come to tread the path that our feet should tread; and He had come to be eternal life to us. There it was, the will of God manifest in Him; no other will moved Him, but God's will, and there is God's claim upheld by Him, for in Him was eternal life for us; everything that God could desire in Him; everything that we could need in Him ? the only begotten, full of grace and truth. He showed forth the path of God's will. That is one reason why He said to men, "Follow Me." The path of life is the path of God's will, and if we would tread that path of life we must see it in Him and follow Him.

But there is another point of view from which we may look at this word of the Lord, "Follow Me." It was the Divine claim. He claimed the men whom He thus addressed. He was here in lowliness and meekness, going down even to the death of the cross, yet He was, notwithstanding, God over all. His feet trod the narrow, filthy sheets of those Eastern cities, yet they were the feet of God. He was the Creator of all things; in His own blessed Person He was God over all, and so He had a right to every one of His creatures, and He put in His claim. And in Him God claims men, and all who own the claim have eternal life. He said to the rich young ruler, "Follow Me." Own My rightful claim upon you and eternal life shall be yours. This man had got many things which other people covet. He had a good reputation; he had riches; all that which made life comfortable and made something of him, but there was evidently in his soul a sense of need. "What lack I yet?" he said, as Matthew's Gospel records. "Good Master," he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" He felt there was something out of the range of sight and sense, that his earthly goods did not supply. Up to that time he had been moving in a circle of which he himself was the centre, a material sphere, and it had not satisfied him fully, but there was a sense in his soul that outside of that sphere there was something that he had not grasped, there was eternal life, if only he could add that to what he already possessed he would have nothing more to wish for. So he says, "Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" The Lord first of all put before him the Commandments, God's will as the Creator, for His creatures upon the earth, which, if they kept them, would be life to them. Every one of us has failed in that just as this young man had failed, although he didn't know it. Having failed on that road another was opened up to him. "Go," says the Lord to him, "and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor." Oh! that tested him. I have no doubt the Lord laid bare that which was at the root of what held that young man to the sphere in which he lived ? self was his centre; riches were his idol.

The Lord did not say that to others; He said it to him. Yet, has it no application to us? There are people who imagine that their riches, or something that they possess naturally, will be of use to the Lord, and if they brought these things and threw them into His cause, how greatly that cause would be advantaged. The Lord does not ask for those things. He does not want them; it is YOU He is wanting. He could give to you a hundred-fold more of all those things if that would be good for you. It isn't that that He is seeking; it isn't what you possess that He wants, it is YOU. Beloved friends, the Lord would put in His claim in regard to, every one of us. Above father and mother, wife, husband, or children, His claim must stand; it must be first, uncompromised, absolute. And in making that claim He declares that He is God, for none but God has sovereign and absolute right over us. It is you He wants. He says, "I want you for Myself, and you need Me for yourself."

"Come," He said to the young man, "follow Me!" There is wonderful music in that word "COME"! The wooing note enters into it and the Lord is saying to us tonight, "COME." A crisis was reached in the life of this rich young ruler, a crisis I believe has been reached in the lives of some of us here. And the Lord is saying to us "COME." "You have filled your life with other things; and you have not been satisfied; you believed in Me long ago, but I haven't got you yet; you have trusted Me as Saviour, but I have not possessed you yet, and I have a right to you. Come.

Thus He would talk with us. His words are easily understood. Isn't it a blessed thing that the greatest Divine verities are presented to us in words that children can understand. Why, that babe of a few months knows what you mean when you say, Come. If you stretch your hands out to it, and put the meaning of the word into your tone and smile, it knows what you mean, and will respond if it can trust you. To us the Lord stretches out His hands, and He says, "Come, come, follow Me" ? HIMSELF. The engrossing Object of the heart, the Pattern, Guide, Leader ? displacing self and every other claim if we withhold ourselves from Him, it matters little what else we yield to Him, we are withholding from Him that which is His, and our lives are not righteous lives. Once, our whole lives were lived without reference to Him. "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way." And it was just there that we came face to face with the infinite, the unspeakable love of God. "The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. All that self-pleasing, that denial of the Divine claim, all that doing of our own will instead of God's, brought the blessed Son of God into the place of shame and death.

The young ruler reached this crisis in his life; and he refused the Lord's claim. He made his decision. He turned back again into darkness from the light to which he had come. He returned again to that circle of which he himself was the centre; away from the One who had rightly claimed to be his Centre. "He went away grieved for he had great possessions." We may he sure that the heart of the Lord was grieved. Oh, who can tell the grief that filled the heart of the Lord as He saw that young man choose earthly wealth to eternal life, and himself and his own will rather than Christ and the claims of God. How, beloved Christians, shall we treat this claim of the Lord? We have Gospel meetings in which we earnestly desire to bring sinners to decision for Christ ? shall not this meeting take somewhat of that character in regard to us? What shall the answer be to this claim; this Divine claim on the part of the Lord?

What sort of path was it that the Lord trod? It was a path of rejection; He had to go into death. That comes out in chapter vi. of John's Gospel in a very definite way. The will of God is declared in that chapter. "This is the will of God," says the Lord Jesus in answer to those people's questions, "that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent." The will of God and eternal life are inseparable, to refuse God's will is to tread the way of death. Then He presents himself as the bread that had come down from heaven. It is not only that He has a Divine claim upon us, that He needs us because we belong to Him, but He is indispensable to us. Scotland is the land of cakes, and great is their variety, but you can do without them, but not without bread; bread is a necessity. You can do without dainties, but you must have bread, it is fundamental, and the Lord says, "I am the Bread of life," an absolute necessity to life. He presents Himself like that. Do we know Him as the One who is absolutely indispensable to us. The One, blessed be His name, on the other hand, who is all-sufficient ? but do we know Him as indispensable to life itself.

How was He as the bread of life to be appropriated by us, who, when we saw Him, desired Him not? He changes the figure, and He speaks of His flesh and His blood. He had to die. The One who came from heaven had to go into death, and He went into death that He might communicate life to us; yes, to us, who had forfeited life because we had refused the claim of God, because we had refused the will of God and done our own, He came down into death for us, to die our death; to suffer our judgment, that He might communicate to us that which was the will of God for us, eternal life, a life that sin and death can neither spoil nor touch. And He says, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you," but the one that eateth the flesh of the Son of Man, and drinketh His blood, hath eternal life."

It was a hard saying to these Jews that gathered about Him and to some who professed to be His disciples. It is a hard saying to-day ? it was never a harder saying than it is to-day. You find a great number of His professed disciples here in Edinburgh who find it a hard saying. They don't like the death of Christ as the way of life and blessing, they would like Christ without a cross; they would like a Gospel without blood. They will not own that death lies upon them because they are sinners, and can only be lifted by the death of the One who never sinned. They are saying what the Jews said to Him when He hung upon The cross ? "Come down and we will believe on you" ? leave that cross behind; leave the suffering behind; be silent as to sin and its judgment, abandon the cross, we will believe on you. We know that if He had come down from the cross, it would be no use believing on Him. What use would He have been to us if those hands He stretches out to us were not nail-pierced hands? Apart from the cross He would have been our Judge, He could not have said "Come" to any one of us. There is no Gospel without the blood. We come to the cross; we come to His death, we eat the flesh and we drink the blood of the Son of man, and we find life through His death.

But what can that mean? Well, that which we eat becomes part of us; we appropriate and assimilate it; it is something that cannot be taken from us. Somebody may break into your house and steal some precious possessions that you have locked up in a very strong safe; that which you prize most and which you are keeping in the greatest security, as you think, may be taken from you but nobody can take from you that which you have eaten; that has become part of yourself, that is in you, and nobody can take it from you. But how do we eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man? It is by faith and in love that we do it.

What does the death of Jesus convey to you, dear Christian? Of course, it means that by His precious blood those sins of deepest dye have been washed as white as snow before God; all the guilt of your life-time has been obliterated. Blessed be His name! It means He bore the judgment for you. But why did He do it? He came to do the will of God; He manifested His love of the Father by going to that cross ? and at the same tune He showed out the love of God to us. But more, "The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me." That was why He did it. Feed upon that ? let that become the food of your soul, and you will realize that His claim upon you presses from another point. He has the right to put in His claim because He is God, but He has got the right that love gives, and the greatest verity that God has brought to light in His universe is this, that self-sacrificing love has got an absolute right to the loved object. That is demonstrated in the only instance of Solomon's wisdom that is given to us ? the mother and the child. You remember the story. Two women claimed one living child, one wanted it because it was her own, she loved it, the other wanted it out of envy and spite. "Bring a sword and divide it," said the king. "No," cried the true mother, "do not destroy it. I will sacrifice myself, and all my feelings for its sake, I will suffer, but it must live." "Give it to her," said the king, "the love that would suffer for it has the right to it." And all the power of the king's throne was behind the decision to give effect to it And this is a great truth for us to-day. Self-sacrificing love has got an absolute right to the loved object. You see self-sacrificing love in the cross of Christ, and He who sacrificed Himself there has got a right to you and me.

The rich young ruler turned away from Him; all these professed disciples had turned away from Him, they couldn't bear the hard saying and then He turned to the twelve and said: Will ye also go away?" And Peter, speaking for the rest of them says, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" Who is there beside Thee? ? "Whom have we Lord, but Thee, soul thirst to satisfy?" To whom shall we go? "Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that Thou art that Christ, the Holy One of God." They had watched the One in whom God's will was manifested; the One who was life and health to them; the One whose words were the words of eternal life, and they wanted none but Himself. Happy men!

But if we follow Him as they did, to where will He lead us? He said to these people who were turning away from Him, who were caviling at His words: "What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before?" He was rejected here below; the world wouldn't have Him; and He said, "The Son of Man is going back to the place from whence He came." He has gone up there; He is not rejected up there; He has been received and enthroned up there, and the question is, beloved Christians, are our hearts in the world that rejected Him, or in heaven that has received Him? Is He our treasure in that brighter sphere? The young ruler refused to have treasure in heaven, because he would not let self go and the world go. We are not going to be as foolish as he was. Our hearts surely have followed Christ where He has gone. He is enthroned in brightest glory; soon everything will be put under His feet; soon every will opposed to God's will be broken and crushed, but not yet. "Not yet do we see all things put under Him."

This is the "not yet" time, but in the "not yet" time, what have we? A cross here ? a treasure there! A cross here ? Christ there, and our hearts separated to Him, bound up to Him there. We have not seen Him, but we know Him and love Him, and gladly own His claims over us, surely, as Thomas did. The Lord said to Thomas ? Thomas with the materialistic, unbelieving heart; Thomas that would believe nothing he couldn't feel or taste or see ? "Come, Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing." When Thomas saw the wounds, the wounds that in His love His Lord had suffered for him, he prostrated himself before Him and cried, "My Lord and my God!" Could he ever claim himself for himself again? If we come to that point, can we claim ourselves for ourselves? When we come to that point, must there not be this complete surrender; this yielding of ourselves to Him. The One who was wounded unto death because of His love to us is our Lord and our God. Here we see His two-fold claim upon us, and we cannot deny Him. If the glory of His Person, and the greatness of His love, dawns upon our souls, we shall be with Thomas, at His blessed feet, saying, "My Lord, and my God!"

What is the end of the road upon which He leads us? "In My Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself: that where I am there ye may be also." When we turn our backs upon the earth, heaven is prepared for us. If we follow the Lord Jesus Christ, that is the end of the journey, "In My Father's house are many mansions." The normal Christian's life is to share His rejection here, and that is the place to which He will bring us. He says, don't think that there in heaven there is no room for you; don't think there is only room for Me there. There is room for you there. If that had not been so, I would not have asked you to follow Me. If I had not had something infinitely better to offer you than the earth can give you, I would never have said to you, Follow Me. I ask you to follow Me because in My Father's house are many mansions. There is a place there for you, and I love you so much I will not send an angel for you, I will not send a servant, I will come Myself. Nobody shall receive you into that place that I have prepared for you but I Myself. That is the destiny, that is the goal, that is the end to which He is leading; to that place He will bring all who have owned His Divine claim. He says, Follow Me; own My claim; I am all that you need; everything is in Me that is lacking in you ? Come! come! follow Me!

May those words, pressing upon us as they do the Divine claim, be in our hearts in such power to-night, that every one of us may respond and say, "Lord, by Thy grace, that is the path for me; I fully and gladly own Thy Divine claim over me, and the claim that love that passes knowledge has given Thee!"

The Lord grant that it may be so for His name's sake.

The Love of Christ.

(John xv. 9-17).

James Green.

Let us start our evening meeting with the passage that came before us in the reading this morning (Ephesians 5: 1 and 2), connecting with it John 15: 9-17. Could anything be more precious to our hearts than these words of our Lord Jesus Christ? As we read them let the circumstances under which they were spoken, hold our hearts. He had just left the upper room where He had instituted the Supper, which was to be a continual reminder of His searchless love, and now, in company with His disciples, He has passed outside the city wall, and is treading the moonlit valley road which leads across the Kedron to Gethsemane. Beyond that He knew there was the betrayal ? the mock trial ? the cross, but ere He enters the garden where His holy soul is to be bowed under the awfulness of the cup He is about to drink, we hear Him speaking: ? "As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you: continue ye in My love." If our blessed Lord were here amongst us to-night, might He not be saying the same in regard to that which He has brought before us in these meetings. Has He not spoken to us of His love that His joy might abide in us, and that our joy might be full? adding also ? "This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you."

As we have listened to the things that God has brought before us by one servant and another, we have sat under the shadow of our Lord Jesus Christ with great delight, and His fruit has been sweet to our taste, and now we are going back to the trivial round and the common tasks of life ? soon to be separated one from another. But I am sure that I am expressing the thought of every heart in this hall to-night when I say, that there is a great desire in us that our lives and ways should be different from what they have ever been before. These meetings, beloved saints, are solemn in this respect, that they will not leave us the same as they found us. They will leave us either more dull than ever to the claims of God, or by His grace, with our hearts more warm and tender, more susceptible to His touch; more yielding to His gracious dealings, more purposeful to keep His commandments.

Might I just at the outset, allude to what I think is the great and subtle danger that may beset any of us, and if we know ought of the awful treachery of our own hearts, we shall admit it. There are things that hinder us from entering into and living in the path of God's will and having the joy with which He would fill our hearts. Let me allude for a moment to the incident recorded for us in the 16th. chapter of Matthew's Gospel, when, you remember, our Lord was about to speak for the first time to His disciples of that which was very dear to His heart ? His Church. He was about to tell them of how He would build it on Himself, the Son of the living God, and before He did so, He uttered these words of warning to them, "Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees" (Matthew xvi. 6-12). And if you look up the parallel passage in Mark's Gospel, (viii. 15), you find that He also added "Beware of the leaven of Herod." Now I think that one or other of these three leavens may take such a subtle hold of our hearts, as effectually to prevent us entering the blessedness into which the Lord would lead us, and spoil the joy and communion of our hearts with Him, I believe that the three things are included in what the apostle John calls the Pride of Life. We may escape the lusts of the flesh; we may escape, by His grace, the lust of the eyes, but the pride of life is a deadly and a subtle snare. What I see in the leaven of Herod is worldly pride ? pride of being something in this world. It may be position; it may be more of this world's goods; anything that gives us a place in relation to worldly things would come under the designation of the leaven of Herod, But it is the subtle working of this of which we have to beware, for we may think that the cause of God will be advanced by the adoption of some of the world's methods and resources. Earthly position and influence may count for something with us, and we be unaware that these things shut the door upon the activities of the Spirit of God, and sap the joy of the Lord in our souls. The working of this leaven brought about the ruin of the early Church, and later on, spoilt the work of the Reformation.

The leaven of the Sadducees is intellectual pride, exalting itself against the revelation of God. It was never more in evidence than at the present time. Men are venturing to criticise the Word of God, intruding into things which they have not seen, vainly puffed up by their fleshly mind, and seeking to find out God by the specious deceit of human learning and a false philosophy. Although, through grace, we may escape this leaven in its grosser form, we need to beware lest an evil heart of unbelief ensnare our feet, and rob us of our portion. Full and absolute surrender to the full authority of the Word of God is our only safeguard.

Or again, the leaven of the Pharisee is religious pride, that which seeks a place, not in the world, but amongst the saints of God; that which would exalt in a religious way, and surely there is nothing so terrible in the eyes of God as to take the Church of God ? that which cost the life-blood of His own beloved Son ? and use it as a platform for the exaltation of man in the flesh. It is easy to see the havoc wrought by this in the profession of Christianity, but none of us is immune from this deadly poison. The root error of the Pharisees was their love for tradition. Our Lord's comment on this may be lead in Mark vii. 1-13. It produces first of all, spiritual blindness, secondly, an exaggerated idea of ourselves; and lastly, the tradition of the elders has a greater place with us than the pure Word of God, which, where it commands, only brings forth lowliness, meekness, long-suffering, and forbearance in love.

One thing only can preserve us from this leaven, viz., the love of Christ. Pride of any kind or sort cannot exist in the soul that is filled with the love of Christ. And thus we may well ask our hearts to-night as to how far we are abiding in His love. Beloved saints, has Calvary taken possession of your souls? Think of that great servant of God as he wrote those words, "The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me." Let us individualise ourselves in the presence of that love for the moment as did the apostle, as though there were none other for whom Christ died. He died for you: He died for me. "See from His head, His hands, His feet, sorrow and love flowed mingled down" ? for you and for me! But it was not only that He might save our individual souls that He loved us so and gave Himself ? He loved the Church and gave Himself for it. How wondrous it was in His eyes, that pearl of great price! He saw its beauty, He estimated its value to Himself, and in view of that, to have it for His own, He went and sold all that He had and bought it. Yes, He loved the Church and gave Himself for it.

But let us return to the 15th. chapter of John's Gospel. On the surface of things, John does not speak of the Church, but the words of love with which that Gospel is filled express the very heart of the love of Christ for His Church. Paul speaks of the greatness of the position; the place, the structure, the eternal glory, but the beloved apostle John, who rested his head upon the bosom of our blessed Lord, sets forth the love that fills the Church, the love of Christ which passes knowledge. And the Lord speaks here wonderfully of it. He says, "As the Father hath loved Me, even so have I loved you." That is His love for His Church. Yes! Loved as the Father loves Him! Do we not stand amazed in the presence of such words? Can you measure the Father's love to the Son? Twice in this Gospel he speaks of the Father's love to Him very specifically. In chapter iii. verse 35 ? "The Father loveth the Son and hath given all things into His hands." He speaks again in chapter v. verse 20 ? "The Father loveth the Son and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth." Yes, and that is the love wherewith the Lord loves His Church; a love that will not rest content until He has given to His Church all that He possesses; a love that communicates all the deep secrets of the Father's counsels made known to Him. What intimacy!

He will have us there in the glory with Him; there in all the bright radiance of that heavenly scene; there before the Father's face; there as the very love-gift of the Father to Him; but, at what a cost! Here He says, "Greater love hath no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friends." He speaks of it in that way, because He values and counts upon our friendship for Him. He tells us of how He laid down His life. Could there be a greater claim upon us, to do whatsoever He commands? A beloved brother brought before us last night, the supreme title of the Christ that He bears. And I think there is nothing so enhances the claim of Christ upon us, as to think that He who bears the highest, greatest, and most glorious title that could be bestowed upon a Man ? the Christ of God ? stooped so low as to bear our sins. View Him, the Lord of glory, where He is in that bright and excellent majesty. He left the heights supreme and came down to Calvary in death to lie, that He might have us for Himself. He laid down His life for us.

He tells us here in these verses what He values, shall I say, in return for that love. Well, one hardly likes to put it like that. But surely when we think of the condescension of the love that stooped so low for such as we, we can only say, as Saul of Tarsus said, when he was captivated by the love of Him whose face he looked upon in the glory ? "Lord, what would'st Thou, have me to do?" Do you not feel that you would like to do something that would please Him? For love ever desires to be doing. He is higher than the heavens. What can we do for Him? He tells us in this very Scripture. "This is My commandment" ? "I will tell you what you can do for Me. Further, I will put it in the very strongest way, I will command you." It is the command of infinite love, leaving us with no option but to obey. Angels fly at His bidding, they do His commandments ? Michael, the archangel, yields swift and certain obedience to the voice of His word.

And shall we he neglectful or find excuse for not obeying when He commands us, not simply by the word of command, but by His own most infinite love that gave Himself, saying, "This is My commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you." But, Lord, is not the demand too great? How can we love one another as Thou hast loved us? Yes, but that is His command He does not say as much as, but after the same character. How has He loved us? He has loved us by going beneath all that we were that He might lift us into His love. And you and I, beloved saints, are to think of the members of His Body, of those for whom He died, wherever they may be on this wide earth, as objects very dear to Him, and to love them not in word only but in deed and in truth. Let us confess our poverty in such love. He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.

He gives us here in this passage some reasons for loving the brethren. Commencing at the 12th verse He says, "Ye are My friends." We are to regard each other as friends of Christ. And if He has laid down His life for each one of us, what a wonderful regard we should have for all saints, lovingly desirous of sharing with them all the riches He has given us in Himself. They, with us, one all to the purchase of His precious blood. Of this we are reminded whenever we partake of the Supper of the Lord, for it is the fellowship of His blood. But then, all saints are also one Body, precious to Him; those whom He considers necessary for the bringing out of His glory; those whom He has gathered out from the wreck and ruin of this world to adorn that glory and to be the objects of His love. Surely that is a powerful motive for loving one another. Again He says, Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you." Why, He has brought us into the same love wherewith the Father loves Him, and He has communicated to us the very thoughts of the Father's heart. Failing to abide in this love, the saints of God have been scattered every one to his own, and our communion together of the things that Christ has revealed to us of the Father's has been sadly interrupted. What a wonderful thing it would have been if the saints had been kept together in the Father's love. Alas, the enemy has wrought only too successfully in scattering, and the effect of that has been that we are impoverished, and in result, must deplore the leanness that we heard of yesterday afternoon.

Then He says in the 16th verse ? "Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you." Do you think He has repented of His choice? Oh, no! But there are some of the saints very far away; and it is only too true that many of us are cold and many of us are worldly, and many of us are occupied with anything but His love, and yet ? yes, you know ? that underneath it all we are His. Is He disappointed with His choice? No! We may well sorrow over such poor returns to His love, nevertheless, every believer in His precious name is a part of His choice. And for what has He chosen us? He says, "I have chosen you and ordained you, that you should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain." He has chosen us that there might be reproduced in us the very likeness of Himself, to remain for eternity.

What is it that delights the Father's heart? It is that which presents to Him the image and likeness of His beloved Son. Does not this put love to the saints upon the highest level and provide the most powerful motive for loving one another? If, instead of finding fault with each other, if instead of holding our brethren aloof, we would recognize that they are the very choice of Christ, and chosen that His image should be reproduced in them, would we not carry to them the words of His love? Would we not seek them? Would it not be our great desire ? not to hold them at arm's length ? not to ignore them so that we scarcely know whether they are well or ill ? but to carry to them the blessed words of Him who loves them and has chosen them that they might he like Him? As we go forth from this place to-night, may our hearts be more deeply affected by that infinite love of Christ for His Church, and may we yield ourselves to Him in order that His love may flow through us to all the saints of God wherever they can be found. You say it is difficult to find them; difficult to get at them. It is difficult to get at them, and I rather think, that when the apostle says in the last days difficult times shall, come, he alludes to the difficulty there would be in getting at the saints. But you can reach them, in the first case as he did, by the way of prayer. The shortest way is up through Him who is upon the throne of glory, and He has wonderful ways of doing things if we will only yield ourselves to His hands and let Him use us, in His own way. But do we really pray for all saints?

We have come pretty much to the end of things in the history of the Church, and at the end of every dispensation things become very individual, that is to say, you must start at home; you must begin with number one. If others will not follow, at all events you must start in this most blessed pathway. So in the xivth. chapter of John, verse 20, the Lord says, "He that hath My commandments and keepeth them." What does that mean? Have them on our bookshelves? Shut them up in a box? Lock them up in a cabinet? Memorize them? It means much more than that ? it means to keep them so that we do them. Do you think that the Lord takes pleasure in those that are simply hearers and misers of His Word? Nay, it is doing that He looks for, and by that He measures our love for Himself. If He gives a commandment, He gives a commandment to be done, and if He gives a commandment, you may be very sure that there is grace for you to fulfil it. We need not look at our own resources ? our resources are in Him. "He that hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me."

I think it was said this morning that the Lord does not tell us to love Him ? no, but He tells us something else, He tells us to love each other, and in so doing, we love Him because all the saints, whoever they may be, are members of His Body; we are part of Himself. The weak, the feeble, those greatly instructed in the things of God or those who have only learned the very elements of it, all are loved with "that great love, that rests on Him in those bright courts above," and that which you and I do to them, we do to Him. Yes ? "He that hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me" ? that is the way to love Him, by loving one another. And look at the result. As you read this verse ? does it not put a thrill through your soul? "He that hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me: and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him" ? I will pour out My affection upon him. You are acquainted with the way a mother loves all her children ? yes, but sometimes, just to show how pleased she is with some small act of obedience, she takes the little one in her arms at bedtime and just loves it. That is the special intimacy of love, the children know what this means. That is what the Lord wants to do with you and me. He wants us to do as He commands, and His commandments are not grievous, then lay our heads upon His bosom and let Him love us and tell us of the Father's love, and show Himself to us. "will love him and will manifest Myself to him."

Yet further, He goes on to say (verse 23) "If a man love Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." The word that reveals the Father's heart, opens the eternal home of love in which all the saints have part, and gives the capacity for loving all saints, yea, puts us under the obligation of so doing. "We ought to love one another" (1 John iv. 11). Beloved saints, I cannot explain it ? I can only say to you I long to know it, don't you? to know the abiding love of the Father and the Son ? to be brought into those Divine affections ? the Son's love to the Father; the Father's love to the Son, and then rooted and grounded in love, able to comprehend with all saints the height, the length, the depth, the breadth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, and so to be filled into all the fulness of God. That is His desire for us. It is magnificent. The world surges around us the darkness deepens, but here is the sanctuary of peace, light in our dwelling. Here is that which will lift us into the joy of His own heart. "These things have I spoken unto you that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full."

May He send us forth from this place in this joy, keeping us as we go to the various places in which we are set ? the home, the business, and the places of service for Him ? with this love filling and flooding our hearts and flowing forth, so that as He shall give the opportunity and direct, we may feed His sheep, shepherd His lambs, and follow Him until He shall come.

Christ Magnified.

F. B. Hole.

I will ask you to turn to an Old Testament Scripture ? Psalm cxxxii. 1-9; 13 to end. I shall read also the two succeeding Psalms.

There are various ways of reading the Psalms. You may read them prophetically, and that with very great profit, for they are highly prophetic. You may read them to find Christ prefigured, and there is always great profit in this. Again, you may read them in a historical way, for many of them are dated for us, and that, too, is profitable. To-night, it is in that historic way that I want to speak of Psalm cxxxii.

I must, therefore, speak to you a little about David and his experiences, for this Psalm throws the greatest possible light upon why it was said of David that he was a man after God's own heart, in spite of his glaring defects, in spite of his most atrocious sin. I wonder if you have ever noticed what David is led to say of himself in chapter xxviii. of the first book of Chronicles. I will read from 1 Chron. 28: 4, "Howbeit, the Lord God of Israel chose me before all the house of my father to be king over Israel for ever: for He hath chosen Judah to be the ruler; and of the house of Judah, the house of my father; and among the sons of my father He liked me to make me king over all Israel." Do you know anybody else in the Bible of whom it is said that God liked him? Yes, you may say, there are many. We have just been hearing about love; why, the love of God flows out to all! Ah, but there is a very great difference between God loving and God liking. Of course He loved David, but He liked David. "He liked me." It would be a very fine thing, dear friends, if one great result of our meetings here were this, that we are conformed more to His thoughts, that so we may become the kind of people that God really likes.

Now God likes a man who is of the stamp that you have recorded in this remarkable Psalm. And what it shows us is this, that from the very outset of his history, David was a man who seized the Divine thought and made the Divine objective his objective, so that all his life was centred in one great overmastering passion, one great desire. Here in this Psalm you are taken behind the scenes and shown the secret spring of the things that David did.

He had, as the first verse reminds us, many afflictions, for David was raised up of God in a very dark day. It was not the beginning of a new dispensation, but still it was the beginning of a new movement of God's Spirit in the midst of Israel. The old order of things had come down with a crash; the Priesthood had most miserably and disgracefully failed in the godless sons of Eli; the Ark had been treated as a mascot ? brought down into the camp of Israel with a superstitious idea that, if they brought down this sacred vessel into their midst, the luck would turn in their direction. The Ark of God, the precious kernel of that whole typical system, all else was the shell, it set forth Christ enshrined as the heart and centre of all God's thoughts. They took this precious kernel of the whole system, and brought it down into their midst as a kind of charm to turn the battle tide in their favour. And God would have none of it, and, in His just anger, He let His glory pass into the enemy's hands. Once among the Philistines, He vindicated His glory, and finally, afraid of it, the harassed Philistines sent the ark back, although that did not relieve the Israelites of their responsibility. Then, further, even godly Samuel had sons far inferior to himself, and the people got tired and they said, "Make us a king" ? we don't want to be peculiar any more, give us a king. And God let them have a king, in His wrath.

Saul came on the scene as the man chosen to be the deliverer of His people from the Philistines who were treading them under their feet. A giant fellow he was, but instead of defeating the Philistines, his days were spent in chasing and harrying David, and David was plunged into deep afflictions. And what was the great overmastering desire that marked David, think you? He was being chased over the land of Israel, hunted as a partridge upon the mountains. Then it was that "He sware unto the Lord; he vowed unto the mighty God of Jacob."

It was not surprising that under such circumstances David should aver to the Lord and utter a vow. The surprising thing was that he did not vow, "If the good Lord will grant me a decent house to live in, where I can be free from this everlasting maltreatment on the part of Saul and his men, if He will give me a decent little cottage and a comfortable bed to lie on, then I will serve Him most devotedly the rest of my life" ? anything for a peaceful and quiet life! Instead, he vowed, saying, "Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house, nor go up into my bed; I will not give sleep to mine eyes or slumber to mine eyelids, until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob." So David, when he was being hunted over the mountains does not think of himself at all: it is the Ark of the Covenant and the glory of his God. The Ark had been lost; where it was nobody seemed to care. God had lost His place in the midst of His people, and it is far more important, said David ? young man though he was ? that God should have His place than that I should have my place. Far better that God should have a habitation, where He shall go into His rest, than that I should be free of my tormentors and enter into my rest. Oh, David, well done! Instead of self being the centre of your thoughts, you are a man that cares for the glory of God. You are a man that is able to seize what is the Divine thought, and to say, "Look, if that is God's objective, then by His grace, it shall be my objective, and I will not give myself any rest until the Lord, who has been set aside and dethroned from the midst of His people, shall be enthroned and shall have a resting-place for Himself and for His Ark."

You may say to me, now translate that into the language of modern experience. Well, we live in a very dark day, when God is still being set aside: a day in which man is going forward at a great pace and Christ is being ousted from His place. We live in a day, when the professing church has practically dethroned from the place which is ostensibly His. No place for the Lord. Some years ago we were hearing a great deal of how the nations wanted to have "a place in the sun." All around us men are fighting for place. One of the saddest things I think I ever heard was the saying of a man who shall be nameless. He said, "Well, I am very thankful that God has given me a place amongst the brethren." If I should name him, I should name a man who wrought much mischief in the interests of Christ. A place ? a place for himself ? a little place amongst the brethren, or a little place in another circle! Oh, that is the natural tendency of all our hearts. It was not David's mind. If you are to be the kind of man or woman that God likes, you will not be seeking your place, but a place for the Lord. You see, the Church of God is really the place for the Lord in the enemy's land. "On this rock I will build My Church: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Thank God, that is true, the Church has been left down here in the scene of Christ's rejection, under the charge of the Spirit of God, and thus put into communication with heaven, so that Christ may still be represented in the place of His absence, and that He might have a place, as the Heir of all things, in the Church which has been given Him out of this rebellious world. Oh, alas! alas how little is Christ considered! Men talk about their plans and their schemes and their doings and the advancement of their causes, and there is no place for the Lord. Are we not all of us more or less guilty in this thing? God grant that it may be our great and increasing desire, that He may have His place.

Now see how it worked out in the case of David. He says, "We heard of it at Ephratah" (verse 6); the "it" plainly being the Ark of the Covenant, and at Ephratah," indicating that it was very early in his history, in his boyhood days, at the old home. Then he says, "We found it in the fields of the wood." I understand that "the fields of the wood" is just a translation of the name Kirjath-jearim. That is exactly where he did find it. You can turn up 1 Chronicles xiii. 6, and see. He heard of it as a boy at Ephratah; he found it at Kirjath-jearim, and there he carried out his vow. We turn to the early chapters of the second book of Samuel, that is what we find. As soon as Saul was slain, David came to the throne. First Judah owned him, then the people came to him, and at last he became king over the united nation. Then David made war upon the Philistines, and immediately after he had overcome and smitten them with great slaughter, he said, "Come, we will get the Ark." As soon as there was a possibility of a place for the Lord he said, "Give the Lord His place." He began by making a mistake, but in spite of the mistake he finally brought the Ark back to Zion, which was the appointed place.

Now, it was not merely David's choice. We might think, from the 5th verse, that it was, and we might say, "Well, can we not find out a place for the Lord; are we not at liberty to choose any place which seems nice and convenient to us?" No, no! David found the place that was God's place ? you will find that very clearly in verse 13. After he brought the Ark back, David says, "Arise, O Lord, into Thy rest; Thou, and the Ark of Thy strength." "For the Lord, hath chosen Zion. He hath desired it for His habitation. This is My rest for ever: here will I dwell: for I have desired it." David found the place of the Divine appointment, the place that the Lord had chosen, and to that place for the Lord he brought the Ark of the Covenant.

We are sometimes too much occupied with David's mistake, but in spite of the mistake the vow was fulfilled. So with Peter. Peter had a desire that was right enough. "Lord," he said, "I am ready to go with Thee both into prison and to death." There was self-confidence. Yes, but there was very genuine love! Peter had to be rebuked; Peter had to learn his feebleness; and when he had learned it then, as recorded in the last chapter of John's Gospel, you have the Lord telling Peter that he should do, in the power of God, what in his own strength he miserably failed to do. The people of God often seize a Divine thought, and then they attempt to do it in their own strength. Moses did. He knew he was to be the deliverer of the people, and he slew the Egyptian, but God had to give him forty years quiet waiting at the back of a desert; held on the leash by God until he was fit to be sent. He was well broken in when he went back; so well broken in, that he came back the meekest man in all the earth, and in perfect surrender to the will and power of God. So with David, when he brought the Ark up into its place.

Now, I appeal to you all, young men and young women especially, have you got hold of the Divine centre? Have you seized the Divine objective? Is God's thought going to be your thought? Is Christ the supreme object? If you are going to be such a Christian, then it will be said of you, the Lord likes you. Is the result of our meeting together here in Edinburgh going to be for every one of us greater devotion to the Lord? Oh, for the exaltation of Christ! Oh, that Christ may be seen! That is it.

Well, there are certain great results that flow from this. The Psalm does not close without revealing to us what flows from God's objective being made man's objective, and that is, that there is most evident blessing. At the end of the Psalm you have the Lord accepting what David did, saying in fact, "David, you have done the right thing; you have brought the Ark into the right place." The Lord immediately adds," I will abundantly bless her provision: I will satisfy her poor with bread." Emphasize in your thoughts for one moment those two words, "I will bless." "I will satisfy." The blessing into which Christians are brought is soul-satisfying blessing. How few satisfied people there are! Never was the world so full of objects of art and of delight; never were there so many charming and beautiful things, and yet men to-day are more absolutely dissatisfied than they ever were. Every body has a grievance; everybody is ready to grumble. Are we Christians, I should like to ask, marked by soul satisfaction? Do you, where you work, in the circles where you move, give people the impression of one who, not like the majority of folk, has reached satisfaction. Oh, when God blesses and when our souls are fully in the enjoyment of His presence, we become satisfied. We have read, perhaps, of those great cyclones that sweep over tropical lands. Somewhere in the centre of those terrific hurricanes there is a great calm. There is a devastating wind for hours, followed by a deep calm for ten or twenty minutes, and then the wind begins to rage in the opposite direction. That means that the centre of the cyclone has passed over our heads. The tumult of the world is like the cyclone. The devil himself is the source of it, but at the centre there is a calm. To have the soul centred on Christ, God's Son, means blessing and it means satisfaction.

We pass on and we come to Psalm cxxxiii. If Psalm cxxxii. is the Psalm of the Ark, that is, of Christ the central Object of all God's thoughts and ways, Psalm cxxxiii. is the Psalm of the Ointment, that is, of the Spirit, who has descended from our exalted Head. Now in this Psalm you have not blessing but unity. We have been dwelling upon the Spirit, and the unity of the Spirit is strikingly pictured in this Psalm. "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" Is it not so? Do we not experience the pleasantness of it. I think we do. But some may ask how this very desirable thing, this very rare and precious unity, is to be produced. It is the experience of most of us that there is nothing easier than to get disunity ? so many minds, so many thoughts ? for people are all various; all taking different angles of vision; all seeing things from a different point of view! Well, the Psalmist begins to explain what unity is like.

First of all it is like the precious ointment upon the head, that special ointment which was appointed according to Divine directions in Exodus. It was poured upon Aaron's head in his consecration, and it ran down, say the Psalmist, "upon the beard; that went down to the skirts of his garments." This ointment that began at his head diffused itself to the very extremities of his robes, to the very fringe. Now unity is like that. It all begins from the Head. It all begins, mark you, from the priestly Head ? not the kingly head, for it was not like the ointment that was poured on David. The ointment that was poured on the priestly head ran down on the priestly garments. We, through grace, are constituted a spiritual priesthood, and put into touch with the great exalted Priest in heaven, and the Spirit and the grace of our Priestly Head, flowing down upon us diffuse themselves among us, and so produces unity. All begins with Christ at the right hand of God, though it comes down to the utmost skirts of His garments here on earth.

Then the Psalmist changes the figure, and turns to the realm of nature. It is like the dew of Hermon. The four following words are in italics and should be omitted. It should read, "The dew of Hermon that descended upon the mountains of Zion." Hermon was a very majestic mountain, the loftiest peak of Lebanon, and the Israelite would, on a clear day looking northward, see its snow-capped peak glistening in the heavens ? a lovely sight. And the dew of Hermon comes down upon the comparatively insignificant mountains of Zion. Christ is Himself the apex of all God's glory, and upon the humble hills, representing His people, the dew descends. When everybody is viewing things in relation to Christ; when the supreme question is, not what I think, but what Christ and His Word, as the authority in the midst of His people; when everybody is zealous that Christ should be in His proper place, what copious dew descends upon us from Him. Unity is to be found in proportion as the grace of His Spirit is upon us.

And then we turn to Psalm cxxxiv., the last of the Songs of Degrees. And if Psalm cxxxii. is the Psalm of the Ark, Christ the centre of all God's thoughts and ways; and cxxxiii. is the Psalm of the Ointment, the Spirit's gracious influence from the exalted and glorified Head, producing unity; Psalm cxxxiv. is the Psalm of the uplifted hands, or, as we can say, the Psalm of the uplifted heart. "Behold, bless ye the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord" ? evidently His priestly servants, because it says "which by night stand in the house of the Lord," and thus you have worship. Now, no earthly sanctuary have we, but still we are constituted a spiritual priesthood.

The world walks in the feeble light of Science. The torch of philosophy is burning, but it is very dark and the light does not penetrate far. Man has his little lights and is well pleased with the little toys that he has himself created, but the night persists, and Israel, who has rejected her Lord, remains silent. She has not a word of praise. The poor Jew talks about building his university to show us how he can diffuse his light, but he has nothing to give us, nothing in the way of light, nothing of praise to offer to God. You and I are brought into this priestly place, and whilst it is the night of Christ's rejection, I think we can see the first dawning of the day. We, who are privileged to stand in the sanctuary by night, may lift up our hands and bless the Lord.

It is a great privilege to be called to serve the Lord in these dark days. We are poor feeble folk indeed if we measure ourselves by the great men before us. If we read Hebrews xi. how small we feel, yet we are, at the end of this dispensation, called upon to stand for the interests of Christ just before He comes again, called to keep the light burning, and in the sanctuary to lift up our hands, giving praise and worship to Him. "Behold, bless ye the Lord all ye servants of the Lord, which by night stand in the house of the Lord. Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord." Oh, how rich the praise that goes from our hearts when Christ is the Object of all.

At this point we may be inclined to think, well, that is the top note; you cannot get any further than that. But the story does not end with the uplifting of our hands to God. The last verse says, "The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion." The matter stands thus: we give the Lord our praise, and the Lord says I will roll it back in blessing The Lord blesses and always has the last word. The last word of the Songs of Degrees is this. It is not the climax when we praise in the sanctuary of God.

Would the Lord need the praise of such little creatures as we when He has the praise of ten thousand times ten thousand angels? Yes, there is a sweet note of praise from His saints that will excel amid the praise of creation. There is nothing to be compared with the sweetness of the song of those who by His blood have been redeemed. Nobody can preach the Gospel, except those who have been saved by grace. It was an angel who came to Cornelius and said, "Send for a man named Peter." He might have said, "Oh, angel, to save time, why not tell me yourself?" The angel could not do it. No one can do it except having been a sinner, he has felt the rapture of being redeemed. So no one can praise like the redeemed saint, and we must lift up our hands in the sanctuary and bless the Lord, and as our praise rolls upwards, God rolls it back in blessing.

All began with David as a stripling, putting his affection upon God's interests, and saying that it was much more important that God should have His place than that he should be comfortable. May we be marked by the same thing. May Christ be magnified, magnified in our body, magnified in His people. If Christ be magnified there will be unity and worship; praise and worship to God, and blessing still rolling back upon God's people.

Reconciliation.

H. J. Vine.

Romans v. 10, 11; xi. 13-15; 2 Corinthians v. 17-21.

Four times, beloved, we have "reconciliation," as such, spoken of in the New Testament, and the very fact that it crowns the first great division of the Epistle to the Romans, shows its importance. For when we reach this 11th verse ? the mountain peak of the first part of this epistle ? we see it shining with that crowning truth ? "We joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation!" And in chapter xi., verse 15, we are told that the casting away of the Jews is the "world's reconciliation." Not that the world is yet brought into reconciliation, but, in its bearing, it is not confined to once-favoured Israel, nor to the remnant called from among Israel, but it is towards the world! There we see the width of the thought of reconciliation from God's side at the present time! But when we come into the 5th. chapter of second Corinthians, we read of the "ministry" of that "reconciliation," ? that which, at the present time, is maintained by God; and then the "word" of that "reconciliation" given to the apostles in view of our being brought into all the joy and the blessedness of this wonderful reconciliation.

It is important for us to recognize this, brethren. You may depend, the place given in Scripture to this truth shows that God would have it made good in power in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, so that the joys of reconciliation may be ours! The prodigal would rejoice when he came home from the far country and was brought inside for his father's joy and delight, clothed in his presence in the best robe, with the ring on his hand, and the shoes on his feet. I know it is joy on the divine side which that 15th. chapter of Luke shows ? the chapter of divine merry-making ? giving the joy of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, but then there is also our side in the presence of the Father; therefore, the believer is suitably received where the Father's merry-making is known, where the feasting, the music, and the dancing tell of the rich fulness of the reconciliation and of the joy of God over the one who is brought nigh! We prayed recently that we might taste a little of the fatness of God's house, that we should ? as was called attention to yesterday afternoon ? be as those who are of God's royal family, and not be lean! If there be great provision made for the regal families of earth, we may be sure that God's provision for the heavenly royalty is not limited! And how good it is, at times like these, when we are together, to be led into some of the abundance of God's house. Aye, "and they that dwell" there ? because there is no reason why we should not dwell there, in spite of all the breakdown and failure in Christendom ? it is said, "will be still praising Thee!" God will be praised! and He would have us in the good of that which He Himself has provided! It is not proposed for us to go and put Christendom right. Do we think we are going to put that right? Are we so proud that we think we can do what the apostles could not do when they were on earth? No, beloved brethren, but, thank God, inside the house at the present time there is abundance for us in Christ, so that we may be kept above the breakdown and the failure.

Now, let us see first of all what cannot be reconciled. Oh, how we have learned that lesson ? haven't we? Yes, we have learned experimentally that "sin in the flesh" cannot be reconciled to God. It cannot come into the rich provision that is known inside in the power of the Spirit. Some, however, instead of settling that matter in communion with God in their souls, are trying to find joy in the things of the world. And then, after all, it is a poor, trifling affair, the little bit they do get. Oh, God desires us to be in the deep satisfaction of reconciliation. What is needed to-day is inside ministry, that, by the Spirit, we may be so in the blessedness of what is ours before God, we are glad to leave alone these poor, worldly trifles. No, sin in the flesh cannot be reconciled! Moreover, the mind of the flesh is not subject to the law of God! It is enmity against God! Let us take this home to ourselves. It is not subject, "neither indeed can be" (Romans viii. 7). We might say this without any lack of reverence, God Himself could not make sin in the flesh or the mind of the flesh "subject to the law of God," ? He could not do it! Did He not deal with man in the Old Testament during all those long centuries of probation, and prove fully for our edification that man in the flesh was incapable of being reconciled to God? Sin in the flesh is neither forgiven nor reconciled, it was "condemned" utterly in the sacrifice of Calvary. But not only can sin in the flesh not be reconciled, neither can the spirit demons ? Satan himself, their chief, and all his hosts, are incapable of reconciliation. They fell, and there is not one word that I know of in the Bible to show that ever there was a proposal to reconcile them to God. I know the Universalist says the "all things" of Colossians i. 16 and the "all things" of verse 20 both embrace the universe; but it says, "all things" "in" the heavens and "upon" the earth, whatever positions of dignity are named there ? these will be reconciled! But the fallen spirits, whether great dignities and intelligences of mighty power, as Satan himself, or menial demons, are irreconcilable; therefore, their part will be eternally with all those who go in the way that ends where the devil and his angels go ? outside the scene of joy, happiness and blessedness for ever ? in the lake of fire. Neither sin nor Satan is ever reconciled to God.

But then, you ask, "Who are reconciled?" Glory be to God, poor sinners like ourselves, who were once enemies, far from Him! Yes, those that had sinned against Him, those who were enemies, are "reconciled to God by the death of His Son." Brethren, we would not be here in the communion and holy joy of God's favour to-day if that were not true. But how could a holy God ? how could One whose throne is established in justice and judgment ? bring a guilty sinner, an enemy, into reconciliation for His own joy and for His own pleasure? ? how could He do it? He had resource for this in His beloved Son. He had Christ, and so we read, "Him who knew not sin He has made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Him." That is how God could bring it to pass! That, if you notice, remarkably enough, ends the 5th. of second Corinthians. I often used to wonder why it came in there so abruptly, but it is just explanatory of how God could have us righteously in the blessedness of this reconciliation. He could only do it by making His Son sin upon the cross, who knew no sin, and through that, opened the way whereby, in perfect consistency with divine holiness, we could be there as the very "righteousness of God" in the full joy of reconciliation!

I love that word "reconciliation." ? Don't you, beloved brethren? God did not need to be reconciled to us, but we needed to be reconciled to Him, and His grace has brought us to receive the reconciliation Christ's death secured. You may depend it means all the best you know even in the natural sphere; but then, learning it in God's way, it will make us, shall I say, happier saints as we understand it intelligently. It is a great day for our souls when, by the Spirit, we see that we are in God's presence suitable to God's own holy character, and naturally, when we take our place in His presence with spiritual intelligence, He gets more thanks and praise then, brethren! He gets more worship! The meetings take on a very blessed character as we are before Him intelligently in the joy of reconciliation! For, if you notice, when He speaks of this reconciliation ? whilst saying they are sinners and enemies who are reconciled ? He indicates that there is a lot more in it than simply individuals being reconciled.

We read of being reconciled "in one body" in Ephesians 2. In the 5th. chapter of Romans He speaks of our receiving "the reconciliation." What is that? Oh, you say, I am reconciled as a sinner who has believed. Yes, thank God, so are all true believers! But what is this reconciliation? ? what is this wonderful thing here spoken of? Well, it is something like salvation, and yet there is a difference. You see someone saved, and he says, "Thank God, I am saved." Well, he has good reason to! but then, he may be making more of his salvation ? of the deliverance itself ? than of his Saviour. The salvation which is ours to-day "is in Christ Jesus" our Lord. It is a grand thing to be set up in "the salvation which is in Christ Jesus!" That salvation, mark you, brethren, is ours, in every part of it. We have that salvation as regards our souls in the first aspect; and, day by day, we are proving it livingly, it may now be in Edinburgh especially, in its second aspect; and presently we shall experience it in its third aspect ? when our Saviour from heaven will change our bodies of humiliation and fashion them like unto His own body of glory! It is ours! ? the salvation which is in Christ Jesus ? covering the past, the present and the future.

And it is the same with the reconciliation. We have received it, but there are three great aspects. Take redemption, ? you have again the same thing. Through redemption, it says in Romans 3, "We are justified freely." Mark, that is how God does it! ? "through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus!" Well, this redemption in Christ Jesus also has three parts. We possess it, thank God, in regard to our souls; but then, we have not got it yet as regards our bodies. We are still in bodies that are connected with the first creation. We have the firstfruits of the Spirit now, but we are still in bodies linked with the first creation, and that is how it is we have very bright saints often groaning. I was sitting beside one awhile ago, a very happy saint, but groaning. There will be no groaning in heaven, brethren. It says, "We groan within ourselves." Now! Even Paul did. And so do all who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, why? Because we are waiting for the second aspect of redemption ? "the redemption of our bodies!" And if the Lord came this afternoon, He would wake every sleeping saint, and the living ones would all be changed, and, in a moment, we should all be in glorified bodies The third aspect is also yet to take place, as we were seeing in the reading on Ephesians, when "the redemption of the purchased possession" takes place. The full redemption which is in Christ Jesus is ours, and we, as believers, have been redeemed, but we wait, as we have seen, the redemption of our bodies and of the inheritance of the purchased possession, which He is going to take up in redemption power and fill the universe with redemption glory.

It is similar as to reconciliation. We were reconciled when we were enemies, through Christ's death which put all our sins away ? through the death of God's beloved Son ? through what He did upon the cross! We have that part of reconciliation ? "we have been reconciled!" But then, brethren, not only are we before God as reconciled, but we have received in faith as a whole "the reconciliation!" It goes a step further than our being reconciled to God as individual sinners. We have that in Romans. Now in Ephesians ii., as we said, we see that we are reconciled to God in one body by the cross. Many thank God for their individual blessing, but they are missing this side of it ? "reconciled in one body to God." We were saved when we were redeemed by the blood of Christ, and we were also reconciled to God, ? not only to go to heaven by-and-bye, but even "NOW" are we reconciled in one body to Himself. I believe, beloved brethren, one of the most precious things on earth at the present time for us, is that the reconciled of God should be together before Him in the truth of being one body. I shall not then be in a meeting saying, "Oh, I won't take part because so and so is here!" I shall not be looking at someone in the flesh, ? James so-and-so, or Thomas so-and-so ? no, brethren, leaving distinction in the flesh behind, we shall be there in the sense of our being one body, in a new creation in Christ, reconciled to God by the cross, where sin in the flesh was condemned. If I am in communion with God I shall be there in the joy of reconciliation.

And, being reconciled in one body to God, walking together simply in the truth, presently we shall prove the third aspect of reconciliation; and then, on the ground of that same work on the cross, we shall see all things reconciled to God ? all things in the heavens and upon the earth, whether they be "thrones or dominions or principalities or powers," ? whatever they are ? all will be reconciled, for the fulness was pleased to dwell in Christ, in view of the reconciliation which we have already, and in view of the reconciliation of all things eventually, on the ground of peace having been made by the blood of His cross. You may be sure, beloved brethren, this reconciliation is a glorious thing, and faith has received it. So Paul speaks to the Romans, "We joy in God through our Lord Jesus, by whom we have now" ? before the fulness of it is seen in splendour and glory ? "received the reconciliation!" What does all this result in? "JOY IN GOD!" We are to be a joyful people, going through the world in the joy of these great things ? of this vast wealth which is ours! I thought it was very helpful last night the way the truth came out. We need it in these days. We need inside ministry too, or faithful men will soon disappear. Faithful men are needed as regards the truth, and happy men enjoying the bounty of our true Solomon's table.

In Ephesians i. we have the administration that flows outward from the fulness that is in Christ, but in Colossians i. we have the reconciliation, which is inward, and so, as we have seen, we are told we are reconciled to God now. We don't shrink from it, do we? Who loves us like God? ? the holy God, against whom we sinned. We had done the sinning, but He devised the plan to put all our sins away, and so we read, God delivered our Lord Jesus Christ for our offences and raised Him again for our justification (Romans iii. 25). It was God who did that. "Therefore, being justified by faith" ? faith in whom? Faith in God! ? faith in God who delivered Jesus and raised Him again! So "we have peace" ? but with whom have we peace? "We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." And then, what do we rejoice in the hope of as we stand in His grace at this present moment? "We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God!" We are going to be there for His praise and for His eternal pleasure.

Do we truly rejoice in hope of the glory of God? An old saint was very ill. She was a quiet, peaceful old saint, perhaps lacking a little of the spring seen in some, but she was a godly soul, and a brother who was visiting her said, "Well, sister, you are very ill!" "Yes," she replied, "but I am quite resigned to go whenever God calls me." "Oh," said the brother, "are you resigned to go to heaven? Suppose I went down to Annie there in the kitchen, and said, Annie you are going to leave the kitchen, you are going to say good-bye to the servant's place, and you are going to be adopted into the family. You will be provided for accordingly, and you will take meals in the dining room, and you will sit in the sitting room, and use the drawing room ? What would you think of Annie if she answered ? "I am quite resigned?" But that is just the way some speak of going to glory! No, "we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God," says the apostle, and even now we have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is given to us. God commendeth that love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. We see its commendation at the cross. We see its manifestation in God sending His Son. In Romans 5 we begin with faith in God and peace with God follows. The grace of God, the glory of God, and the love of God, as reconciled to God, are all ours, and "we joy in God," for we have "received the reconciliation."

Then, as we said, in chapter xi., we see the world-wide bearing of reconciliation to-day. It is called there, "the world's reconciliation." In contrast to Israel's past place of favour, at the present time, God has come out to the Gentiles and Israel is meanwhile set aside. It is worldwards to-day! Then, in chapter v., Corinthians 2, we read of a new creation in Christ, it is not simply that man should be a new creation, but "If any one be in Christ there is a new creation," the old is gone ? "Old things are passed away," and we are now where "all things are become new, and all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ." Surely we are wealthy indeed, and we should be full of joy in the Holy Ghost. Well, you say, Paul had plenty of sorrow! Yes, he was "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." They say the best nets are well loaded down at the bottom ? that may speak of being sorrowful. But it would be a bad job if the nets were only loaded at the bottom! They are well corked at the top too! ? "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing!" We are to rejoice with joy unspeakable, being full of the glory to come. The "ministry of reconciliation" spoken of in this chapter was given to servants like Paul, and, in a way, might be confined to the apostles; Paul magnified his ministry; but, thank God, brethren, it is in our hearts, and we can tell each other about it. We may not be Pauls or Peters, but we are brethren, and we can talk to our brethren in Christ about these glorious things that are ours through divine grace. John does not say, "I am an apostle," but he does say, I am "your brother," and he wrote that our "joy may be full." The great truth is that God Himself came down in grace! ? there is the truth as regards reconciliation ? He was in Christ, "reconciling the world to Himself." It all began from God's side!

Look at that sinner in the 7th of Luke! She came from the street to the Saviour's feet. But the Lord told Simon, "To whom little is forgiven the same loveth little. She loveth much." God gets response when His love in Christ is received. He was here reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning their offences unto them. Did the father say anything to the prodigal about his sins? Well, the repentant prodigal came back full of his sins. But what did the father say about them? Not one word! He fell on his neck and kissed him! That is His attitude. Here He was in grace to reconcile, and not to reckon to men their offences. He also put in the apostles "the word of that reconciliation" as well as the ministry of it, and they entreated on Christ's behalf, "Be reconciled to God." No one loves as He does, brethren, and yet He never sacrificed one atom of His holiness, He never lowered the standard of His righteousness, but He has brought us into His favour where His love can flow out freely. God loves with a perfect love, God is love, and we are received to Himself, for His own good pleasure, for His own delight. Then the ground of it is, as we have said, and repeat again in closing, "Him who knew not sin He has made sin for us, that we might become God's righteousness in Him."

Presently, grace will place us in the full blaze of the glory in the hope of which we have rejoiced. It says, in symbolic language, in Revelation xxi., "The city lies four-square." It is all of gold ? pure gold ? transparent gold ? a gold that we have never yet seen! This would be laughed at by a mere scholar, but those taught by the Spirit understand the symbols of divine righteousness and glory in the golden city. Its length and its breadth and its height are all equal! It is a man's measure, but it is the angel's. Yet it is the "measure of a man." That city of God shines with the glory of God, and its shining is like to a stone most precious, clear as crystal. Having "become God's righteousness" in Christ, the wonderful triumph of reconciling grace will then be fully manifested to a gladdened universe. On the inside, we are for the good pleasure of the heart of God, and on the outside for the display of His righteousness to the praise of His glory: on the one side are known the deep joys of "the reconciliation," and on the other is seen "God's righteousness" in manifestation.

Notes of Readings.

Ephesians 1.

There are three things with which we should now be well acquainted; they are the counsels, the ways, and the acts of God. He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel." To the saints of this dispensation He has made known His counsels. His counsels are counsels of love, and are all that He purposed to accomplish for His own glory, and to establish for ever upon an unshakeable basis. His ways are traceable only in Christ, and embrace the whole of His activities from the foundation of the world until the bringing in of the new heaven and new earth. His acts are His public dealings with men upon earth in connection with His government.

I think Moses got to understand that everything put into the hand of man must result in failure, and that all God's ways with our rebellious race tended to the introduction of that Man ? "the Man Christ Jesus." He plainly told the people. "The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren; like unto me; unto Him shall ye hearken" (Deuteronomy xviii. 15).

It is impossible to think of God as beginning to act in making worlds and various orders of beings, human and angelic, without having some wonderful purpose before His mind. And we cannot but believe that all His activities within the universe must be for the fulfilment of that purpose.

This epistle to the Ephesian saints places before us in a very special way those counsels, and the work of God with a view to their fulfilment.

In the epistle to the Romans the activities of God are presented more as meeting the need of sinful men. Man is there viewed as the active slave of sin, and requires deliverance from that thraldom, in order that he may be free to serve God. Therefore, his loathsome condition is depicted in all its hideousness; His justification in the power of the blood of Jesus; his deliverance from sin by the condemnation of sin in the flesh, and by the gift of the Spirit. But even this leads up to the "called according to His purpose," for whom He called, them He also justified, and whom He justified, them He also glorified.

It is very encouraging for us surely, that, since God is good and everything He does must therefore be good, every eternal thought of His must be carried out and fulfilled. He is love, and all His thoughts are thoughts of love; and by His ways He carries out His thoughts. When He began to work all His counsels were formed. During the history of His operations nothing was added and nothing needed to be revised. From the outset He has gone on quietly and steadily, carrying out His original intention; making everything to serve His purpose ? the fall of man, the entrance of sin and death, and the murder of the Christ: For everything fallen and unfallen has to serve to the perfecting of the end He has in view. If the objects of His counsels were helpless sinners, He found for them an eternal redemption. The work that met the deep need of our souls is the basis upon which the counsels of His love shall be fulfilled.

Is there not more in redemption than meeting the fallen condition of sinful man? Has not God's own nature been manifested in the work of redemption?

Surely: but it was man's lost condition that gave occasion for the doing of that work. There would have been no need for Christ to die had men not been sinners; but this very fact gave God the occasion to manifest His love and lay a basis of righteousness on which His counsels shall be fulfilled.

What is "the volume of the book" in Psalm 40?

The book of divine counsel. God knew very well that the man He would make out of dust would fall at the first attack of the enemy, and the counsels of God were in harmony with that fact. While it is true that by means of the lawless hands of the Romans the Jews had crucified the Christ, it was also true that He was delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.

There was sin before man sinned?

Yes. The devil sinned from the beginning. Sin came into the world by one man.

The death of Christ would be in relation to the sin question, when or wherever?

That is so. But after all it was for the blessing of man that Jesus died, and that by redemption God would be glorified.

Would it be when man fell that the whole universe was involved?

The whole universe seems to require reconciliation, but before man fell sin had defiled the heavens where Satan has his seat. Reconciliation of all things in the heavens and the earth is on account, not only of the defiling of the creation, but on account of the perfect manifestation of God. The fulness of the Godhead dwells in Christ in order that all things should be reconciled to Itself. To be placed in relation with God as revealed in Christ does not seem to me to be the same thing as to be set rightly in the presence of the Creator. The former is blessing of a much higher order. I think it is important to emphasize the blessing of men. The incarnation itself, apart from our blessing is the great witness of the interest of God in man.

The epistle begins with a note of worship in relation to our spiritual blessings. Would you name some of them?

They are all that we possess in relationship with the Father and the Son. Sonship itself is the highest blessing, for thus are we taken into favour "in the Beloved." There are a great many blessings of a spiritual nature spoken of in the Old Testament along with the earthly blessings with which Israel shall be blessed on the earth; but while Israel shall partake of these under the new covenant on earth, we have all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ.

Then would you say you have the topstone reached here in the glory of God?

Yes, in the first six verses. There is nothing greater in the epistle, nor in Christianity. Union with Christ is an unspeakable blessing, but it is union with Christ as Man. Here we are viewed as in direct relationship with the Father. We are sons before His face.

Then it has a peculiar relation to those who form the Assembly as Christ's Body?

Yes. I think this high character of blessing is introduced first of all, because nothing can be united to Christ but that which is of Christ; that is of His life and nature, His kindred. Eve was taken out of Adam, and the bride of Isaac was of his kindred; so we are of the kindred of Christ, "all of one" with Him, and therefore fit to be united to Him.

Do you say that in verse 5 it should be "sons" not "children"?

It is adoption. Verse 4 and 5 refer to counsel. Of course they have a present application, for we are in Christ now, and as in Him, "holy and without blame before Him in love"; and we have also received adoption, or sonship (Galatians iv. 5). Still, in another sense we await "adoption, the redemption of our body" (Romans viii. 23). Then we are already taken into favour in the Beloved. We are also blest with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. Still we await the fulfilment of the eternal counsel, though, as having the Holy Spirit we can anticipate things that we can only have in perfection when we are glorified. The things we have now, and which we enjoy in some measure, we have in Christ; but when we are glorified we shall not only have them in Him, but with Him.

Is it necessary for our hearts to be at rest in the sense of His love, before we are able to enter in any measure into the counsels of God and enjoy them.

Yes, indeed; and to be well instructed in the word of righteousness, otherwise we cannot take strong meat such as we have in this epistle. You will find plenty of good, pious people who are very shy of the counsels of God. They prefer milk to solid food. They seem not to be able to view everything as in the hand of God. They prefer to have some hand in their own salvation. Even their faith is supposed to be some work of merit of their own whereby they become entitled to salvation. Such require instruction in the word of righteousness; that is, the righteous foundation upon which the soul is placed in relationship with God.

All this that we have here is for our blessing, but also for the glory of the One who blesses?

Most surely. There never can be any other purpose before God than His own glory, because when His counsels were brought forth there was no one whose blessing needed to be considered. His counsels were before all His works, and therefore, there was no one to take into consideration except Himself. But He has been pleased to create myriads to be spectators of His glory, and others to share the glory that can be shared by the creature. He has bound up our blessing with His glory. And as we have it in this chapter, "That we should be to the praise of His glory," and as the hymn has it: ?

"O mind divine, so must it be that glory all belong to God,

O love divine that did decree, we should be part through Jesus' blood."

I think you said that unless we were instructed in the word of righteousness we could not enter into these things?

That is so. The word of righteousness is set forth in the Epistle to the Romans, and in spite of the amount of attention that has been paid to it, it is an epistle that is little understood. We make so little progress that the term "dull of hearing" might well be applied to us. The fault is certainly not in the Spirit of God, but in us. Romans and Ephesians are the only two epistles written by Paul to the assemblies in which he does not associate another with himself. The former is occupied with the compassions of God, and the latter with His counsels, though His purposes are touched in Romans and His compassions in Ephesians.

Would you say a word as to "the mystery of His will"?

It is simply that which was not revealed in Old Testament times.

What connection has that with verse 10?

Then there will be no mystery about it. Christ will be manifested as Head over all things, and as the One of whom all who had previously been set by God in prominent positions were figures. In a way, you get this in the Old Testament, though if you take the eighth Psalm you will, I think, be compelled to say you would not have taken the things in the heavens to be included in the "all things" that are said to be put under the feet of the Son of Man. The Psalm says, "Thou hast set Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under His feet." But it immediately adds, "All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas." I do not think that anyone would be likely to gather from that that every created thing in the universe would be gathered under the Son of Man. We now know that everything in heaven and earth is to be put under this Son of Man.

You said that God had ever His own glory before Him; but how do we come in?

It was for His glory that He took us up out of our wretched condition as sinners, and in the day of display we shall be to the praise of His glory. He did not bring about the fall of man, but He allowed it to take place. The "riches of His grace" are seen in His dealings with us viewed as lost sinners; "the glory of His grace" is witnessed in the exalted position in which He has set us in Christ. By His kindness to us in Christ Jesus the exceeding riches of His grace will be displayed in the coming. All that God can do for our eternal blessing He will do. God is love and His counsels are counsels of love. His only begotten Son is the Man of His counsels, and only by the death of that Son could those counsels be fulfilled.

The blessings that are ours are infinitely beyond all that we grasp, even with the revelation that has been made to us, and by the Spirit that has been given to us. We are unspeakably better off than we should have been had we remained in innocence. I am not sorry I was a poor, sinful, fallen creature; had I been anything else I never could have said of the Son of God, "He loved me, and gave Himself for me." To see Christ glorified ? to see everything made subject to Him ? to hear the voices of the angels celebrating His praise ? to join in the song and shouting of the sons of God brought to glory ? to fall at His feet and own ourselves captives of His love: the joy of that hour no tongue can tell.

What do you take "the fulness of times" to be?

The Age to come, in which all the ways of God in the past will be seen to lead up to the placing of everything in the universe under the Headship of Christ. Shadows were cast in the past dispensations by means of men placed in high positions of responsibility. Christ will take all up that has been foreshadowed, and a great deal more also, for all things in heaven and upon earth will be taken up under His headship, and will be faithfully maintained to the glory of God. And in Him we have obtained an inheritance, "that we should be to the praise of His glory."

Would it not be well to speak a little of the blessing of sonship that is brought to us as the fruit of eternal counsel, and speak a little of what follows as to inheritance? God is greater than what we have as inheritance?

That is just where the prayer of the apostle comes in. He prays for them, "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him: the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what the greatness of His power to usward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead." All these things are known as we know God. His calling, and the intimacy and glory of it are only truly known as we know Him. And as we know Him we can grasp a little what this wonderful administration will be, because it will take in, not only the kingdom over all under heaven, but all in heaven itself.

Do you mean that our relationship to God as sons is higher than the inheritance?

Man is always greater than his possessions. Your inheritance is beneath you ? you look down at it ? you look upward at your blessings. The hope of His calling, that is above all else; the inheritance is less than this.

Could we say a word about the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Himself?

It may be difficult to say much about it. Wisdom calls to the sons of men and Says, "Behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you" (Proverbs i. 23). This I think, is the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge ? rather full knowledge of Him, as it ought to be here in Ephesians.

Is the knowledge of Him here the knowledge of God or of Christ?

The knowledge of God, I should think, but the better we know Christ the better we know God, for it is in Christ God is made known. The hope of His calling can only be truly known as we know Him that has called us, Who is He before whom we are to be holy and blameless; and also to stand in relationship with Him.

Is the inheritance only connected with this world?

No, it is all things ? this world and all else.

What are the conditions necessary to the reception of the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Himself?

Holy desires to enter into the deep things of God. The apostle could ask this for them because he knew them to be true to the centre and circumference of Christianity: they had faith in the Lord Jesus and love to all the saints. People who are sectarian in their thoughts could not possibly enter into these things.

Let us have a word on the rest of the chapter.

The power that is active toward us to place us at the height of God's calling has been exhibited in the resurrection of Christ, and in placing Him in the exalted position He now occupies, and giving Him to be Head over all things to the Church, which is His Body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all. And this same power is working in us and has so wrought that we can be said even now to be seated in Him in the heavenly places. From this glorious position the whole inheritance shall be easily taken for God.

Ephesians 2, 3.

Why does the apostle emphasize the fact that he was a prisoner of Jesus Christ in the first verse of chapter 3?

That the nations might know the interest that God had in them. But perhaps we should look for a little at chapter 2. We have not touched that. The first fourteen verses of chapter 1 set forth the purpose of God; then, from verse 15 to the end we have the prayer of the apostle, at which we looked for a little yesterday; and then from verses 1 to 10 of chapter 2, we see that mighty power of God, which was exhibited in the resurrection, at work to place us in the position which was given us in His counsels. Already we have our position in Christ, but soon we shall have that place with Him. Then from verse 11, he exhorts them to remember what they were as once nations in the flesh, and what they were now in Christ. At that time they had been afar off, without promise, without hope, and without God. But now, "in Christ Jesus they were become nigh by the blood of Christ," He says that Christ is our peace. When speaking of Gentiles, and of their privileges he says, "your," but when speaking of what was distinctively true of all saints, he says "our." "He is our peace," peace with God, and peace between Jew and. Gentile.

What do you mean, by peace between Jew and Gentile?

It takes two to quarrel. He has made both one. He has broken down the middle wall of partition, "the law of commandments contained in ordinances," in which the Jew gloried and which distinguished him from the Gentiles, in order that He might make in Himself of the twain one new man, who would be neither Jew nor Gentile, thus making peace: In this new man neither Jew nor Gentile has any existence.

Can you tell us what is meant by "one new man"?

One new man is the truth concerning all saints of this dispensation viewed abstractedly as in Christ. In this man there is not the Jew and the Gentile, nor is there the bond and the free. Such a man only exists in Christ. Reconciliation comes in here also. "That He might reconcile both to God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. Both are reconciled to God, and to one another.

Is the new man referred to divine nature?

In the flesh, you have here on earth, Jew and Gentile. In Christ there is neither, but those who had been Jews or Gentiles, now in a new condition of being, in the life and nature of the risen Christ, without one element of the old order of man, either fallen or unfallen, in their being ? in Christ and wholly of God. Such a man never was heard of before. But to understand the truth concerning this man you must learn it in Christ and view the saints as in Him, apart from their complex condition down here, in which we are connected with the old order by mortal bodies. Here there are those who can be viewed in their pilgrim life as Jews and Gentiles, male and female, and in the epistles the saints are in this way addressed. But if you view saints as in Christ you cannot have such distinctions. Paul says He will glory of a man in Christ, but of himself he would not glory except in his infirmities. And yet he was the man in Christ, although he speaks as if he had another man than himself under consideration (2 Corinthians xii.). The characteristics of this new man are set before us in the life of Jesus upon earth, and these are displayed in our mortal bodies while here below: We have the cross for all that is of the old man.

Are you looking at all saints on earth at the present time?

Yes, but of course, the "one new man" takes in all saints of this dispensation. The Body of Christ takes them all in. But to get the truth of what we are as members of the one Body, we must strip them of all that in which they appear down here as children of Adam. Of that Body we are now members as truly as we shall ever be, but we must not introduce here what we are as in the flesh.

Would it help if a little was said as to life and position?

We were all dead in sins, but by the life-giviug power of God we were made to live. "God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love where with He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ . . . and hath raised us up together, and make us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." We are in the life in which Christ lives, as risen from the dead, and we have been set down in Him in the heavenlies. The earth is all right for the children of men if they could keep it; but it would not do for the children of God, or the members of Christ's body:

Would this be the settlement of all kinds of strife among us if we entered into the truth concerning the new man

Surely, if our walk were in the Spirit. We may come to that in chapter iv.

What is reconciliation?

Being brought into right relations with God.

Would it come of the two thoughts of life and position spoken of here?

Yes. There is only one way of being in reconciliation. The cross has made an end of the flesh, and the believer is in the life of Christ. The old man could not be reconciled to God. Now the apostle goes on to say, "Through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. This is the greatest privilege of all. This is all what is true of Gentile believers, and is contrasted with what they were by nature.

Why is the foundation here the apostles and prophets, and in other places Christ?

Christ is the Rock in Matthew 16, as Son of the living God, the living Stone in 1 Peter 2. I suppose the reason we have the apostles and prophets here is because they were employed by the Lord in the ministry of the word by which the structure has been brought into existence. Christ is the Builder in Matthew, living stones come to Him as Lord, and are built up into the spiritual house. This is not completed. No one is said to dwell in it. The saints are the stones that compose the building, and they are also the priests who offer the spiritual sacrifices.

Would you say that this part of the chapter presents a wonderful range of things established by God in virtue of the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ?

Surely, And is it not a great thing for the youngest of us when the power and blessing of it dawns upon the soul?

It is indeed.

Is not that which represents God's house here largely a system of lust, evil, sin and death?

Your reference is to verse 22. But there it is not so much what is vital that is before us, but profession, which may be holy or corrupt. It is largely corrupt to-day.

Referring again to Matthew 16. In Matthew He is the Foundation Rock, here He is the Chief Corner Stone?

You see the rock and the foundation are two different things. In every house it is so. We speak of a house built upon a good foundation, though we have not in our minds that any part of the house is the foundation ? it is builded upon a foundation. Again we speak of the first part of the house as a foundation which we lay, not what we lay it upon. We speak of the foundation in two ways.

What is the chief corner stone?

I do not know, unless it be for strength and beauty.

In 1 Corinthians, Jesus Christ is the foundation.

That is a different thing. There He is the foundation laid in the souls of the saints. I do not think you will ever get two Scriptures exactly the same. One may help you a little with respect to another, but you will find that each is in its own setting, from which it is not to be removed, and that it presents a different phase of the truth.

Why is the third chapter introduced at this point in the epistle?

It is introduced in a parenthetical way, setting forth the mystery and Paul's administration of it. The fourth chapter is the continuation of the second, but it was necessary that they should know the special ministry that was committed to him, by means of which the Gentiles should be joint heirs, and a joint body, and joint partakers of His promise in Christ. This mystery was committed to him, though the mystery itself had also been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the power of the Spirit.

And in speaking of this he brings before us that which is vital in the habitation of God?

Yes; only I do not think the administration is going on at this present moment. It was committed to one man, who perfectly carried it out. He was the one specially chosen of God to bring in the Gentiles, and without them the mystery is not complete.

Would you say a little more as to what that administration was? The Church was set up by the Holy Ghost at Pentecost?

That is true, and I do not doubt the mind of God was to bring in the Gentiles; but according to this chapter you could not have the mystery until the Gentiles were brought in, for that is the mystery ? the Gentiles joint heirs, joint body, and joint partakers of His promise in Christ.

Now, leaving the administration, will you tell us what the mystery is?

You go back to chapter ii. for that. It is Jew and Gentile one, in the body of Christ.

Would not the administration of the mystery include the actual gathering together of the saints on the ground of it?

We see the apostle did thus gather them.

Were not the local assemblies to be the expression of Christ? Was not that included?

Surely. There were difficulties about receiving the Gentiles, but the truth ministered by Paul had the effect of settling that difficulty. All believers are gathered on that ground now, whatever practical differences may exist ? all are in the one body.

That is not what I mean. Are we not to gather together on the ground of the Assembly?

If you mean when we come together into one place we certainly are. But if you have not the thought of the house how are you to exercise discipline?

Discipline belongs to the house, not to the body.

A word on verse 10?

The reference there is to the inhabitants of the heavenlies, who observe the ways of God on earth with His fallen creature man, and with unspeakable interest contemplate the wisdom of His ways; but now, in the gathering of souls out from both Jew and Gentiles, and bringing them together under the headship of Christ, see the all-various wisdom of God. Peter speaks of the desire of the angels to look into the grace that had come to the Jewish believers, but in the Assembly, as gathered under Christ and as part of Himself, there are brought to light the eternal secret of their Creator, and a wisdom that surpasses all that they had previously witnessed.

This mystery was the secret of the Creator, hence the whole creation had some reference to the mystery. When the Assembly has its place in glory it will be a blessing to the whole creation. It is the Body of Christ, and it is His Bride. It is part of Himself. By means of our bodies we give expression to our whole mind and thought; and as He is Head over all things, His Body must render marvellous service in illuminating, comforting, cheering and rejoicing the whole redeemed universe. The rays of the sun enlighten, warm and vivify the whole solar system. His rays reach the darkest corners, and light up all places. They from their glorious centre. Christ will do everything through His body. Through it He will give expression to Himself. That is what a man has a body for The tree of life is in the holy city, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.

How was this mystery brought into existence?

By the Gospel. The Gospel that Paul preached included the mystery. He speaks of the mystery of the Gospel.

In 2 Timothy Paul speaks of "my Gospel," my doctrine." Is the distinction there?

The Gospel includes everything. I admit there are ways of viewing it as that which is declared universally to men ? repentance and remission of sins, but it is all to lead up to the mystery. The apostle laboured "to present every man perfect in Christ Jesus,"

There is no halting place in the Gospel. If you speak to a man about his soul, what you have before you is that he may be presented perfect in Christ.

This touches our hearts. Would you go on to say that the Gospel is the presentation of God Himself?

Yes, as revealed in Christ.

Would you say that all His activities have been for His own glory and that of Christ?

Surely. All glory belongs to God.

Do not these prayers show the desire of the apostle for the growth of the saints? For, having unfolded the truth, he has to bow his knees that a state to receive it might be brought about in them.

The one who ministers the Word should not imagine that he can effect anything in the hearer. He can present the truth as he knows it, but only God can bring it home in power to the soul. No man can accomplish anything.

Do you not think that the lack of prayer may affect all kinds of ministry? And is not this our danger?

Not a doubt of it.

Will not ministry bring to pass all that is necessary in the saints?

It is brought about by ministry, but if the one who ministers desires the soul-prosperity of his hearers, he must accompany the Word with prayer. Here Paul says: "I bow my knees." He does not say this regarding his prayer in chapter 1. I do not say he did not bow his knees in his first prayer, but he does not say so to the Ephesians. I think he desires to impress upon their hearts the greatness of the subject he is dealing with. The first prayer is to the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is to the Father, of whom he says, "Every family in heaven and earth is named," The name "Jehovah" took in but one family in Israel, the name "Father" takes in all families in the universe.

"Strengthened" "in the inner man"?

The outward man has nothing to do with this. Samson was strong in body, but that will help no one here. The inner man must be strengthened by the Spirit of the Father. This shows us that our affections must be engaged with the things brought before our spiritual vision here.

What is the immediate object of the strengthening?

That we may be fully able to apprehend with all saints the vast sphere of divine counsel radiant with the glory of redemption, in which every saint in this dispensation shall, as a member of the Body of Christ, have part with Him who is the supreme Centre of that world of glory.

"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith" ? What is that?

Christ in your affections.

What is the force of that expression ? the Christ?

The Anointed.

Does it involve the mystery?

No!

Is it a title that belongs to Him?

I do not think the article has much to do with it. In Luke xxiv. our Lord says, "Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory." And similar statements are made in other places. This cannot mean Christ and the Church. In 1 Corinthians xii. 12, we have, I suppose, the mystery ? Christ and the Assembly, but I do not know that we have it anywhere else. Throughout the Acts it is nearly always "The Christ," but it seems to have become, by use, a personal name of the Lord, and the article, therefore, is left out.

And should not "dwell" be emphasized? Some seem satisfied to have a visit, but He wants an abiding-place there.

You may be sure that we dwell in His heart; and He has died that He may have a place in ours.

Why is the expression "in love" so often used?

Because God is love, and to be rooted and grounded in love is to have our roots in the revelation God has made to us. It is wonderful how much you apprehend of the things of God when your heart is deeply in the enjoyment of His love. You are then intelligent in the things of God. Unless this is so, you read the Scriptures and get nothing out of them.

You may enjoy things beyond your ability to give expression to them?

Yes. It is not the one who is best able to talk who is most in the enjoyment of God's revelation. What a wonderful finish to this prayer: "Glory to God in the Church by Christ Jesus unto all generations of the ages of eternity," We shall learn there things better on our knees.

Ephesians 4.

Would you say a word or two on the divisions of this chapter?

The first few verses relate to our walk with respect to the calling, then we have the gifts given from the ascended Christ for the ministry and building up of the body of Christ, and from verse 17 to the end, the exhortations with regard to our walk, that it may be in harmony with the privileges into which we have been brought.

Could you break the unity of the Spirit?

Practically, yes. It is already broken

Could you break it vitally?

No, because it is the Spirit.

What is the unity of the Spirit?

It is the oneness of the Spirit of God.

Would you mind helping us, so that we may see what you mean, because we have always been taught a little differently?

So have I, but I think it is simply the oneness of the Spirit ? In 1 Corinthians 12 a similar thought is set before the saints. There are various gifts but "the same Spirit." One prophesied, another spoke with an unknown tongue, another had gifts of healing; but all was by the same Spirit. It was not different spirits at work. Now in Christendom, one might reasonably suppose there were a thousand different spirits at work, because we are not in the least in practical unity. I know what has been said on the subject, and have no special objection to what is said, but I cannot see it in their way.

But does not unity convey the idea of a formation?

Not always I think. You get in this chapter: "The unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God." You would not call that a formation. This is the way in which I view the statement, I do not press it. It will be the same thing in the end whatever way it may be taken.

Does the unity of the Spirit contemplate Jew and Gentile?

Yes. Through Christ by one Spirit we both have access to the Father. Still, it is not Jew and Gentile that trouble us to-day, but Gentile and Gentile. Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, has been said to be maintaining in a practical way the unity that the Spirit has formed on earth, but I do not think so, though I greatly regard the opinions of some who have said it.

What is the force of keeping the unity of the Spirit?

It is walking in such a way that it will be evident that we are both energised by the one Spirit. If two saints are quarreling, like those two sisters in Philippi, some other spirit is at work in one of them ? perhaps in both. To keep this unity we require to walk in self-judgment, in lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love. The beautiful characteristics of Christ are to come out in us.

There must be the comprehension of the unity of the Body connected with it?

It goes on to that. There is one Body and one Spirit.

So the flesh would be the difficulty?

That is just the difficulty. We shall not need these exhortations when we are in heaven, but here the flesh is in all of us, and we sometimes forget to walk in self-judgment, and the practical unity, is broken on the spot.

Would you not say that to keep the unity of the Spirit is to keep in practice what exists in fact?

That is true, but you can find that all opened out in the writings referred to, but you can also find just the other thing too, that it is more the one mind of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit can only have one mind, and it is not that we are to have one mind simply, because that might not be His mind, but we are to have the Spirit's mind. There is that which the Spirit formed at Pentecost, and we are surely to walk in the light of it. It is our privilege and responsibility to walk in the light of the whole revelation of God. There is one Body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling, and the knowledge of these great truths has a powerful influence upon us to produce unity; and unity will assuredly be produced by them if we walk in the judgment of that which has no part in them ? the flesh.

Will you say a word on these three unities in verse 4?

The "one Body" is, of course, the Body of Christ, formed by the baptism of the one Spirit, who unites all the members of the Body together, and is the bond that makes one that vessel, of which Christ is the living and vitalizing power. The "hope of your calling" is one also, and refers to verses 4 and 5 of chapter 1, but this in verse 18 is said to be His calling, because the apostle would have the greatness, the glory, and the blessedness of the calling to have a powerful effect upon the saints to draw their minds and hearts heavenward. Here the calling is said to be ours, because he desires it to produce in us down here a practical unity.

Is it to bring divisions to an end?

Yes, for if the fleshly will is excluded there is nothing to divide about. There cannot surely be dissension where there is only one Body, one Spirit animating that Body, and one hope of glory before every heart?

Is there any hope of such a practical state being brought to pass before the Lord comes?

That it is the mind of the Lord is evident by the fact of its having a place here in the Word; but whether it will ever be seen again on earth we cannot say. It certainly will be at His coming, but then we shall all be glorified.

What about these other unities?

These take in a wider circle to-day, I think always did.

Are these necessarily vital?

No, they are not. As far as true believers are concerned, of course they are. But this takes in the sphere of profession, and for a very long time the sphere of profession has been much larger than the vital sphere. There is one Lord. None could be a Christian even in name, who refused to acknowledge Christ as Lord. There is also one faith, which all profess to acknowledge as God's revelation.

And would you say baptism brings all into that circle?

Yes. No one is rightly in the Christian circle, the circle in which Christ is confessed as Lord, unless he has been baptized.

You would say that Cornelius was in the first circle one Body, one Spirit, one hope ? by the gift of the Spirit, but came into this second circle by baptism?

That is so. In the first three you could not bring the Lord in as such, for He is not Lord of the Body, neither could you leave Him out in the second, for He is Lord of the individual, the object of faith, and the One in whose name people are baptized.

And the one faith is the common faith?

Yes: the revelation of God.

In the third circle, what is meant by the expression "In you all"?

That is vital: the Father is above everything, through everything, and in all believers. It does not mean that all are in relationship with the Father in a vital sense, but God has been revealed as Father, and He is supreme, omnipotent, and vitally in all true believers.

Do I understand the first circle to be the Church, and the second profession?

The first is the Body, the second the House, and the third the Universe, the last sentence coming back to what is vital, "In you all."

This last expression in verse 6, "in you." Does that only apply to believers?

That is all.

Not to any other family?

I would not say that. I think it will be true of all believers.

Is the term characteristic?

It is life and nature. There are many things stated in the epistles that are true of others also. The apostle always had before him those to whom he was writing.

Say a word on the gifts ? what is this in verse 7?

That is grace given to every one of us. Every member of the Body has some function to perform, and grace has been given in the wisdom of the Lord, for all that we may have to do. The grace is given according to the measure of the gift of Christ, according to the measure of His giving. Though every one has some service to engage in, and requires grace for the carrying of it out, yet it is not necessarily gift for the ministry of the Word. This is found in verse 11: But these gifts are persons. There are no apostles in "the Body," Those gifts in verse 11 are "in the Assembly," but the Assembly viewed more as the House than the Body. In Corinthians xii., the apostle has been speaking of the members of the Body in function, but when he comes to the gifts he says that God has set them "in the Assembly."

In verse 7, is the gift there grace itself?

Certainly. The verse says so. We require grace for the exercise of every service we have got to perform.

Is it for servants?

Yes: but we are all servants.

In writing to Timothy, Paul says: "Stir up the gift that is in thee." Was that a particular gift?

Yes: it was a gift for the ministry of the Word.

Has not the Assembly been endowed by Christ from on high, and of that endowment every one of us partakes?

I do not think so. I know it has been said, but I believe it to be a mistake. The administration of the Lord Himself is continued right through the whole of this dispensation, and everything comes directly to us from Himself. Paul got nothing from the Assembly: He says, "When it pleased God . . . to reveal His Son in me" (Galatians i.).

Does the Lord give directly now?

Yes. As I have already said, Saul received everything directly from the Lord; and that was some time after the supposed endowment of the Assembly. The Lord might use an apostle to confer a gift on a disciple, as He used Paul to confer a gift on Timothy, but the Assembly had no hand in it. The Lord, not the Spirit, gives the gifts.

Are we warranted in saying the gifts in verse 11 go right on to the end?

The apostles and prophets were at the beginning, and shall continue to the end, for we have their ministry in the New Testament, though they themselves have long ago fallen asleep. The other gifts are, I do not doubt, continued from our exalted Head.

Are we right in looking to the Lord to raise up gifts?

Absolutely. Our privilege is to look to Him for everything that we see to be necessary for His interests.

Would you press that there should be exercise in each one as to what his gift is?

Everyone who has received a special gift from the Lord should have no difficulty regarding what that gift is.

Why is it to "men" the gifts are given?

I suppose angels do not require them.

Where do you get gifts to the Assembly?

Here: He gave some apostles and others for the perfecting of the saints.

What difference do you make between the Body and the Assembly?

The Assembly is the Body, but it is also the House, and we must gather from the connection what special aspect of the Assembly is before the mind of the writer.

Then, you would say, the gifts are for the building up of the Body?

Yes. The great object of the evangelist is to build up the Body. These gifts are under the direction of the Lord Himself and every one who puts himself under the direction of the Assembly has lost sight of the Lord.

What is His "leading captivity captive"?

Taking the whole power of the enemy out of his hands; leading captive him who had held man captive, and using them whom He has delivered from the grasp of the foe to deliver others.

Is it right service when the Assembly is lost sight of?

No. The servants object in ministering the Word is to present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. But all who have received the Spirit are in the Assembly. If the Gospel is clearly preached, all who believe it receive the Spirit. The servant may bring into the House by baptism of water, but into the body he cannot bring anyone. Still, as I have said, if he preaches a full Gospel, the one who believes it receives the Spirit and is in the Body.

Who does the work of the ministry in verse 12?

The gifts given by Christ.

Do you mean the shepherds and teachers?

Not only they, but all the gifts. We have the apostles in the Scriptures written by them. But while the Body itself is edified by these gifts, there is also the work of the ministry by lesser gifts than apostles, and whose labour is not so distinctly with those who compose the body.

What is the unity of the faith?

The faith as a whole. We learn it in its various parts, but there comes a time when the great edifice of God's revelation is seen as a distinct whole.

Is it the same as "one faith"?

Yes. We learn the compassions of God, and the word of righteousness in Romans; the order of God's House in 1 Corinthians; and the carrying out of divine counsel in Ephesians; but we need to be able to take in all these various parts as one whole.

Would you connect the gifts with the ascended Lord, and the members of the Body with the Head?

Yes. Whatever gift a man possesses he is responsible to the Lord for the way he uses it. You could not speak of Him as Lord of the Body; He is Head of it.

Will you give us an outline of the rest of this chapter?

In verse 16, we see the whole Body, from the exalted Head, fitted together, and connected by every joint of supply to the working in measure of each one part, works for itself the increase of the Body to its self-building up in love. Love, which is the divine nature, is that which nourishes and cherishes the Body so that it increases, as is said in Colossians, "with the increase of God." Here, as it says, "in love," there is no need to bring God in, for "God is love." This is not viewed here as the result of the ministry of the Word, but as the healthy action of the Body itself, assimilating that which it receives from the Head ? it edifies itself in love.

From verse 17 we get exhortations based upon the privileges set before us in the part we have been looking at. They were not to walk as the Gentiles, who are alienated from the life of God, that life with which we have been made to live. God has quickened us together with Christ, and this reference is to that glorious fact, to which our attention is called in chapter 2. Therefore, the characteristics of this heavenly life are to be exhibited in us here on earth. These we have seen exhibited in Jesus here below. The truth of all that is of the life and nature of God shone out in Him who was God manifested in this world of sin, and, in the school of Christ, Jesus is the One set forth as our example. For this, the old man must be put off, and he has been, at least professedly, and the new man, who is created after God in righteousness and holiness of the truth has been put on.

Why the change from Christ in verse 20 to Jesus in verse 21?

Because the truth has been set forth in Jesus, without regard to His relations with others. It is His personal name. Christ is not quite His personal name, though it seems to be often used that way in the epistles. But Christ is our Head, and He teaches us to come out in the life of Jesus. We have put off the old man and put on the new; therefore, we put off falsehood, which is one strong characteristic of the old man; and having put on the new man we speak truth with our neighbour, for we are members one of another. The Holy Spirit is not to be grieved. Until the redemption of the purchased possession we are sealed by Him. We are called to be imitators of God, but as it was in Christ God was declared, we keep our eye upon Him.

Ephesians 5.

Could we have a little help on the way to be more practically in the power of these things?

By walking in the light of Christ, who has given Himself for us, and in the power of an ungrieved Spirit. We are to be imitators of God as dear children, and walk in love as Christ also hath loved us, and given Himself for us as an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour. We can only imitate Him as far as we know Him, but in Christ He has been perfectly revealed; hence our eye must be fixed on Him.

What do you mean by "perfectly"?

Perfectly declared in Christ as far as creatures could know Him. We could not know Him in His essential Being. He is the invisible God. In Christ His nature has come to light. It is clear we could not know God in the perfect way in which He knows Himself. It is our unspeakable privilege to know Him in the way in which He has drawn near to us.

Is that not in His essential Being?

No, but in His nature and attributes. I do not think any one believes we could know God as God knows Himself. It would be no comfort to us to imagine He could be comprehended in all that He is by such creatures as we are, or by any creature. But all that He is He is for us, because He has associated us with Christ, His Son.

In John i. 11, does there seem to be any limitation to that: "The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him"? Would you limit that?

No. I think the Son declared the Father as far as the creature could be made to take in the declaration.

But is not the name of God different to that of Father?

Yes. God brings in the thought of responsibility, Father, that of grace and relationship. The Son is the Image of the invisible God. In Hebrews He is said to be "the effulgence of His glory and the expression of His substance," or essential Being, but I do not think that goes farther than nature. And there is what He is as dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen, nor is able to see. If He were known absolutely there could be no hindrance of approach to Him.

You speak of light unapproachable, but we are spoken of as children of light?

We are children of the light that came to us in Christ, for that light has brought life to our souls, it has produced a generation of God upon earth. We are children of the revelation that has come to us in Christ.

Is it true that the glory that Moses saw was the glory of the Lawgiver in that character, and that we see the glory that excelleth in the face of Jesus?

Yes; but it was not pure law in that case; there was a mixture of grace with it; otherwise Moses would not have answered as he did: "Let my Lord, I pray Thee, go among us; for it is a stiff-necked peoples and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for Thine inheritance." He declares Himself in goodness and mercy and forgiveness.

Why does it say "light in the Lord," not in Christ?

To say we are light in Christ would be to say we are always light, whatever our practical state might be. "In the Lord" introduces the idea of responsibility and we can only shine in the light derived from Him. The moon and planets get their light from the sun, and the Lord is our Sun.

In connection with chapter 6, following on what you say, "walk in love," does it not mean that being imitators is produced in that way?

I rather think we walk in love because we are imitators of God. He is before us in Christ, who is the manifestation of God, and in this way we get hold of Him in His true character, and imitate Him in His pathway of love down here. And that is a sweet savour to God.

Is this sacrifice not atonement?

It made atonement; but that is not the way in which it is presented here, but as an example for us.

What is light in contrast with truth?

Light is that which makes manifest. Christ was the light of the world because He declared God, and therefore, everything was seen as it was by those who had eyes to see it. Truth is that which sets things forth in their true character, and in their right relations to one another. Light manifests all things as they exist, but in this evil scene, in which everything, was out of order, the truth was seen in Christ, for He was the perfect expression of all things in their right relation to God, and therefore to all else.

Is it not remarkable that in John's Gospel He speaks of Himself as the Light, but when He gathers His own in the inside place in the upper room, He drops that word and speaks of Himself as the Truth?

The light is the revelation of God, and whoever receives that light by faith in it has got the knowledge of God in grace and love. The light is for men that are in darkness. Where the light is received the darkness is dispelled; then the soul requires instruction in the mind and will of Him with whom he is set in entirely new relationships: he wants instruction in the truth; and in turn, he becomes a light in the midst of this world's darkness. Light shows me things as they really are, but when I know the truth I see how different everything on earth is to that which it should be. So that the truth may be said to be light. "Thy Word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path" (Psalm cxix. 105). The light of the Gospel shows one how thoroughly under the power of Satan he has been. Christ is both the truth and the light. They are very near akin.

"Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." Is that the same?

Yes. A man asleep is in darkness. "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee" (Isaiah lx. 1). This will be the word to Jerusalem one day. Spiritual sleep means that your affections are dormant; and you have sunk to the level of those dead in sin.

What is the evidence of being, filled with the Spirit?

"Speaking to yourselves," and praising and blessing God.

Is that normal Christianity or something special?

Normal. Melody in the heart to the Lord is sweet music. You cannot get that out of an instrument: Some get impatient because others have not good voices. Every voice is good if it comes from a heart full of love to God.

How do you differentiate between the normal of this chapter and the Acts?

"Filled with the Spirit," is normal, but if one is to do any special line of service for the Lord with relation to the Lord's things, then the Spirit takes complete control, so that all he does and says is of God. The Lord gives him all the power he requires, and that power is by the Spirit, the Spirit has complete control.

Can a man be filled with something else than the Spirit?

He might be filled with himself.

Is to be filled with the Spirit here connected with singing?

Yes, certainly.

Not audible singing? It is to God in the heart?

No: "with the heart." It rises from the heart. I do not see how you could sing in your heart. It must be audible.

May I ask in connection with the melody, as to whether being filled with the Spirit is limited there, because it goes on to giving thanks and submitting ourselves to one another?

True, Christianity cannot be approached except in the power of the Spirit. You take the tabernacle; it was sprinkled with blood and anointed with oil, indicating that the true tabernacle with which we have to do would be placed on the ground of redemption and in the power of the Spirit. You cannot engage in the service of God in any way except in the power of the Spirit. It brings a heavenly colour into these things, so that a saint will come out as a father, husband, or wife, in a new way. The husband loves his wife, not as Adam loved Eve, but as Christ loved the Assembly; and the wife takes her example from the Assembly in subjection to her husband; and fathers bring up their children in the discipline and admonition of the Lord. For all this we need to be in the energy of the Spirit. We walk according to the rule of new creation in the old creation relationships, "In Christ" is new creation.

Will you open that out a little?

"In Christ" is entirely a new order of man, but down here we are in old creation relationships, and the question is, How are we to walk in these? Well, we are not to take pattern from the world. We are not to walk after the flesh. We are like people in a foreign land who bring there the customs of their native land, and who refuse to follow the trend of things in the land wherein they are strangers.

Would you say that in our life in this world we are brought into a system which God has specially in view in Christ glorified, and in the Holy Ghost down here?

While we are on earth we are connected with that system, but not "in our life in the world." Flesh and blood has no part in that system. It is an out-of-the-world condition of things, and can only be entered in the life of Christ and in the power of the Spirit, but it greatly influences our human life down here. Christ was never other than heavenly, but He was in relationships that belonged to flesh and blood, and in these He walked perfectly to the pleasure of His Father. He is no longer in these relationships.

What relation has this to the unfolding of the counsels of God in the earlier part of the epistle?

These exhortations set before us the character of walk becoming those who are the objects of these counsels. Our walk is to be in the power of an ungrieved Spirit, and we are to make progress in the knowledge of Him who has called us. The knowledge of our heavenly relationships affects our ways in all our earthly relationships. If rightly taken up, earthly relationships are no hindrance to our spiritual growth, but rather a help.

Why is it that the husband is exhorted to love his wife?

One reason is that he might fail in doing so. She is not told to love him, because love is ever on the descending line. She is told to be subject to her husband, for he is her head. In Christianity we are not told to love God but to believe in the love He has to us.

As Christ is Head over all to the Church, and we are to grow up to Him, might not this line of things in chapters 5 and 6 be included in the fact that you have Christ before your mind, and even in the earthly relationships to grow up to Him? I thought, in connection with our understanding of that verse ? "grow up unto Him in all things" ? we sometimes limit it to the abstract spiritual things of the Assembly. But it includes all those earthly details, so that Christ being before us, His impress is left on the ordinary details of life?

To grow up to Him in all things is in all that is revealed in Christ. In all earthly relations we are to set Him forth. But the measure in which we can do this depends upon our growth. We are heavenly people, and here in the life of Christ, and we must be ourselves wherever found. We are not heavenly men in one place and earthly men in another. Christ was always Himself in all relationships of life.

Ephesians 6.

Then even entering upon this conflict we are to be strong, not in ourselves but, in the Lord?

Yes. We have no strength for this holy war. The power of God acts through us. To Joshua's challenge to the man with the drawn sword in his hand: "Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?" the answer, practically, is for neither: "But as Captain of the Lord's host am I now come." The battle is the Lord's, and must be fought in His strength: we are weakness itself.

Why do we get fighting at the close of this epistle?

Because the enemy is in possession of the land given to us of the Lord. We have got the position there in Christ, but we are not there yet ourselves. There are three ways in which the people of Israel can be viewed as typical of Christians. In the wilderness, where all the men fell who came out of Egypt by Moses; on the east of Jordan, where in the land of Bashan, two and a half tribes made their home; in the land which was God's thought for all. Those who fall in the wilderness are unbelieving Christians; those who make their home on the east of Jordan are worldly Christians; and those who settle on the west of Jordan are the faithful who enter into the purpose of God Those who settle on the east of Jordan are real believers, who never rise up to the height of the calling of God, those who enter the land and make it their abode do. Still, the two and a half tribes had to fight and help their brethren to possess the land, though they did not take up their abode in it.

Are those in conflict for the truth of the Gospel fighting?

Yes: and all who preach the Gospel; and some of them fight better than those do who take heavenly ground. Every saint on earth is in this conflict, and for success in it we must put on the whole armour of God.

The wiles would be something like the cunning of the Gibeonites?

Yes; though I suppose all the attacks of the devil are of the nature of wiles. Wiles and fiery darts are all that are mentioned here. There are blessings, or rather territory, that we may possess that does not lie quite over Jordan. Israel had for an inheritance from the Red Sea to the Euphrates. The land of Bashan was theirs, but the land on the west of Jordan was to be their place of abode. Our blessings are given to us in the heavenlies, and we should go over to possess it; but some of us are content with enjoying salvation, deliverance from sin's dominion, and such like, without laying hold of our heavenly calling. As far as their practical lives are concerned they seem to be men of the world, though really no more of it than those are who stand for their heavenly position. You will sometimes find such men forward and fearless in conflict with infidels.

Would you say a word about loins girt about with truth?

It is the loins of the mind that are referred to. We are not to allow our minds to be occupied with everything that meets our eye. They are not to be wandering all over the place, but to be girded up so as not to hinder us in the conflict. There is a great deal in the world to engage our attention if we allow it, things perhaps, that are not in themselves wicked, but which would hinder our view of the heavenly inheritance and weaken us in the battle.

Why is this first?

Because it is that which is the chief thing to maintain. You see this armour is not like the armour people used to wear in the field of battle, which was made for them by the armourer, and was put on when they were about to fight. This armour is put on from the inside like the feathers of a fowl. It all refers to practical state. Therefore, if the loins are not girt about with truth, you will never have on the armour of righteousness, for this is practical righteousness; and if the mind and affections are set upon the things of this world your own will, and not the will of God, will characterize you, and that is sin; your heart will be condemning you, confidence in God will be lost, and your vital parts will be vulnerable. If the armour is on we walk in a calm and unperturbed spirit. Our heart reposes in the love of God, and in the peace that results from a walk in harmony with His revealed will. The grace that has come to us in Christ is in our hearts, and our feet are shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace as the result.

What are the fiery darts?

I know not. There are such things, but we have the shield of faith as a guard against them. Perfect confidence in God will preserve us from them. We can say: "If God be for us, who can be against us? "If we have the first three pieces of the armour upon us, the shield of faith will not be wanting. The darts are fiery, and thrown with a fierceness that is appalling, but confidence in God is a perfect defence. "In God have I put my trust."

Next, there is the helmet of salvation. The helmet here is not the hope of salvation as in the word to the Thessalonians. God had not appointed them to wrath, but to obtain salvation ? salvation from the wrath to come. But in Ephesians you are already saved, for you have got your place in Christ in the heavenly places. Here you have the salvation of God as a helmet upon your head.

Why is the helmet for the head?

Because the head is a very vulnerable place, and requires protection in the battle.

In what sense is the Word of God the Sword of the Spirit?

It is the only weapon in the panoply of God. It is for offensive warfare. All the other pieces of the armour are for protection. The Sword is that which no evil power can withstand. But it can only be used in the power of the Spirit. Young men are said to be strong, and the Word of God abides in them, and they have overcome the wicked one. Our Lord met the devil with it in the desert, and he fled before it.

Is it not important to distinguish between the mere quotation of a text of Scripture, and the speaking of that, word, which is God's Word for the moment to that particular person?

Still, one would be most certain to use a passage of Scripture ? the Lord did. It must be the Word, for the devil, for sinner or saint. It brings conviction to the hardened sinner, meets the need of the awakened conscience, sets at rest the troubled heart, builds up the saint in the knowledge of God, and defeats the devil; but nothing of all this apart from the Spirit's use of it.

Is there time to say a word on prayer?

Prayer brings in the power of God. We are to pray at all seasons, with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching unto this very thing with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints, and for the servant who seeks to make known the mystery of the glad tidings, that all such may have utterance given to them.

Is it not a mistake to distinguish between the saints of God? We often hear the expression, "Bless Thy gathered saints."

The saints are all one, and the apostle says we are to pray "for all saints." Besides, there are no saints who can be spoken of as always gathered. They are gathered when they are gathered; that is, when they meet together. I know no other gathered saints. I have heard people say they have been gathered forty years. I have thought that was a long meeting.

Messiah the Prince

Messiah the Prince

An Outline of Matthew's Gospel

by Laurence Laurenson

Editor of "Loving Words."

Contents

Foreword

Section 1. — Matthew 1, 2.

The Genealogy and Birth of the King

Section 2. — Matthew 3, 4.

The Forerunner Introducing the King and the Kingdom Presented

Section 3. — Matthew 5, 6, 7.

The Laws of the Kingdom

Section 4. — Matthew 8, 9.

The Dignity of the King and the Characteristics of His Mission

Section 5. — Matthew 10, 11, 12.

The King's Messengers, the King's Message, and the King Himself Rejected

Section 6. — Matthew 13.

The Outward and Inward Aspects of the Kingdom in the Absence of the King

Section 7. — Matthew 14, 15.

Man's King and Man's Character Contrasted with God's King

Section 8. — Matthew 16, 17.

A Prophecy of the Church with a Glimpse of Kingdom Glory

Section 9. — Matthew 18 — 23.

The Characteristics of those who enter the Kingdom, the Responsibility of those connected with it, and God's way of bringing Men into it: The King presented, and the Leaders of Israel morally judged

Section 10. — Matthew 24, 25.

The Great Prophetic Outline. The King's Dealings with the Jew, the Church, and the Nations

Section 11. — Matthew 26 — 28.

The King goes into Death and Judgment, in order that His Followers may enter into Life and Glory

Section 12. — Matthew 28. Resurrection, Victory, and Joy

Notes and Outlines

Foreword

The four Gospels present to us an inexhaustible theme in Christ and all that was revealed in Him during the brief years of His earthly sojourn. We may go even further and affirm that each several Gospel is inexhaustible in the fulness and depth of that aspect of the Christ of God which it places before us. Hence the many and various expositions of the Gospels which have seen the light of day and proved of profit to their readers.

In this book a new unfolding of Matthew is placed in the reader's hands. The author does not address himself to the learned, but rather to the ordinary believer who may not have access readily to the larger and more exhaustive expositions already published, and who might not be able very easily to digest their contents if he had ready access to them. To such readers — and they are very numerous to-day — this book will, we trusty prove full of instruction, suggestion, and spiritual help. May it be prospered in its mission to this end. F. B. Hole.

Section 1. Matthew 1, 2.

The Genealogy and Birth of the King

In seeking to grasp the contents of any book it is necessary to be so conversant with its subject matter as to be able to go over it in outline in our own minds.

If this be true of the writings of men, how much more so of the Word of God? This is not the difficult matter it may appear at first sight, and there are several ways it may be arrived at. In studying Matthew's Gospel, for example, if we take one leading thought or incident from each chapter, or section of the book, other related facts will naturally group themselves round these to complete the picture. And it will be found that the various events are so linked together in a divine order that the heart is led on from Matthew 1 to Matthew 28 in ever-increasing enjoyment of all the varied truths presented to us in this Gospel, so full of instruction pertaining to the Kingdom of Heaven.

It is worth noting at the outset, that in the Scriptures themselves we are more often urged to search and meditate thereupon, than merely to read. And the reason is obvious. They have to do with the heart. In twenty-two different ways, in the twenty-two sections of Psalm 119, the Psalmist expresses the attitude of his heart toward the law of God. He "Believes it," "Keeps it," "Rejoices in it," "Declares it," "Loves it," "Hides it in his heart." If the reader will make a complete list, his profiting will be great.

In some such way let us endeavour to approach the study of the Gospel before us.

Beginning, then, with Section 1, Matthew 1 and 2, we get as leading thought, in Matthew 1, The Genealogy of the King; in Matthew 2, The Reception He met with.

We are arrested at the very outset by the differences between the Gospel of Matthew and the other Synoptic Gospels. There is a fulness and a wealth of detail in the introduction in this Gospel which is wholly absent in Mark: while in Luke quite another series of events is placed before us, equally minute in detail, but all given with divine wisdom and in keeping with the end in view.

If we arrange the early incidents in the first three Gospels in parallel columns we shall see these differences at a glance: —

Matthew Mark Luke

1 * * Visit of Angel to Zacharias.

2 * * Visit of Angel to Mary.

3 Visit of Angel to Joseph. * *

4 * * Birth of John.

5 Birth of Jesus. * Birth of Jesus.

6 * * Angel's Visit to Shepherds.

7 * * Shepherds' Visit to Bethlehem.

8 Appearing of the Star. * Presentation in the Temple.

9 * * Departure to Nazareth.

10 Visit of the Wise Men. * Annual Visit of Joseph and Mary to Jerusalem.

11 Presentation of Gifts. * (Abiding at Bethlehem.)

12 Joseph warned by the Angel. * *

13 Flight into Egypt. * *

14 Return to Galilee. * Dwelling in Galilee.

15 * * Visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve years of age.

16 Preaching of John. Preaching of John. Preaching of John.

Two things mark the language of Inspiration, what it includes, and what it excludes. Surely it necessarily excludes every shadow of error. Nothing but what is absolutely true could find a place if the Spirit of God inspire the record, and, in spite of all that men may say to the contrary, nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the Four Gospels, where, amid all the differences, there are no contradictions. Then, as to the former, the facts given in any Scripture will be in relation to the subject of the writer. Thus Luke writes of the Lord Jesus specially as the "Son of Man," and so gives, as will be seen above, in large detail, everything needed to be known of His parentage, human birth, and childhood — perfect from every standpoint.

Mark, writing of Him as the devoted "Servant of God" and of men, omits everything of this, and introduces, at the very outset, His Messenger, John the Baptist, preparing His way before Him. Then He Himself is at once seen entering upon His public ministry.

But in our Gospel, He is presented as "The King," and thus everything narrated is in connection with His kingly character.

Turning forward again for a moment, we see Him in John's Gospel as the "Son of God." Luke tells us that He became the "Son of Man," and Mark says that He took the lowly place of the "Servant" of all. But Matthew declares that, nevertheless, He was "God's Anointed King," who will yet sit upon the throne of His father, David, and sway a mightier sceptre than either David or his princely son, Solomon, ever dreamed of.

Ezekiel presents this wonderful "fourfold" in striking and symbolic imagery in Chapters 1 and 10, and again we see it reproduced in the vision of the Seer of Patmos (Rev. 4), where the order of the manifested characteristics is that of the Four Gospels.

Matthew represents Him as the "Lion" of the tribe of Judah.

Mark sets forth the patient service symbolised by the "Calf" or "Ox."

Luke describes the perfect "Man" — yea, the Pattern Man, able to sympathise, to succour, and to save.

John tells of Him as the Heavenly Stranger upon the earth — the "flying Eagle" being an apt picture, for He was "Come from God and went to God" (John 13: 3). "He was with God, and was God" (John 1: 1).

But a king must be able to trace his descent in the royal line, and this is placed before us at the very outset. He is the Son of "David the King," and thus the Heir to David's throne. He is the "Son of Abraham," and thus Heir to, as well as Fulfiller of, all the Promises. Matthew carries down the line of kingly succession from Solomon. Luke traces that of Nathan to Mary, and, however widely they may have diverged during the thousand years that lay between, both meet again and are completed in "JESUS who is called CHRIST."

There are many genealogies in the Old Testament, but only one in the New. The genealogies of the Old Testament lead to Him in whom everything centres, and from whom everything begins, for He is the Head of the new creation, the First-born from among the dead.

But we find Him here born into this world, a Man among men; nevertheless, He was Emmanuel. The sign promised 700 years before by the prophet (Isa. 7: 14) was fulfilled, and the character of the One so born declared. He was "God with us," and God come down in grace. And we naturally ask, What reception did He meet with? and what were the condition of things in Israel's land when He thus presented Himself?

Over 500 years had passed away since Ezra, by the decree of Cyrus the Persian, had led a little remnant of the people back from Babylon to rebuild the shattered fortunes of the nation, after the terrible overthrow by Nebuchadnezzar, which began about 606 B.C. It was but a small proportion of the many thousands who had been carried away, but their hearts were towards the land of Israel, and the Lord had blessed and multiplied them greatly. The intervening years had been times of varying fortunes for the little hierarchical state. The Persian monarchy, which had been the means of their restoration, had been overthrown by Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., and Palestine then came under the power of Greece. Daniel had described, in few words, the character of the "mighty king" and the break up of his kingdom, "divided towards the four winds of heaven" (Dan. 11: 3). This was an event of much political importance to Judea, for it found itself — as it will be in a later day — the bone of contention between the king of the South, Egypt, and the king of the North, Syria. The first hundred years of this period the land was under the power of Egypt, and though ill-governed at the best, it had not reached the depth of suffering measured out to it during the Syrian oppression. The terrible cruelty and madness of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 B.C.) has seldom been equalled in the world's history. The ruling passion of his wicked life was hatred to the Jew and the religion of Jehovah. On one occasion he captured the city of Jerusalem, slaughtered 40,000 of the inhabitants, sacrificed a sow upon the brazen altar, and erected a statue to Jupiter in the Temple courts. This brought matters to an issue. Under Judas Maccabeus and his brethren the War of Independence began, which resulted in Judea once more becoming a free state in 161 B.C.

Rescued thus from Syrian oppression, it was wisely ruled by the Maccabean family for over one hundred years, but it then fell under the power of the Romans, about 60 B.C.

Herod, an Idumean, first appointed by the Romans as tetrarch, became king in 31 B.C., and aimed at creating an independent monarchy in his own family.

The sceptre had departed from Judah.

Such was the political condition of the Lord's land when the Messiah was born. A usurper, supported by Gentile power, was reigning in the land, and the people loved to have it so. There is a wonderful analogy between this and what prophetic Scriptures reveal as to His Second Coming. Then the Antichrist will be on the throne, and he and his supporters will think to treat the King come in power as before had been treated the King come in grace, only to find that He will "break them with a rod of iron," and "dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel" (Ps. 2: 9).

But when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and when the tidings reached the guilty tyrant who sat upon the Jewish throne, he "was troubled and all Jerusalem with him." The men of the city had already made their choice. They were on the side of Herod — not on the Lord's side.

The Scribes, intelligent in the Scriptures, as far as the letter went, knew, or should have known, many things about the Coming King. The prophets had clearly pointed out: —

1 When He would come (Gen. 49: 10).

2 How He would come (Isa. 7: 14).

3 Where He would be born (Micah 5: 2).

But they had no heart for Him, and as to the mass of the nation, there was neither love nor loyalty to God's King. Yet we learn from Luke's Gospel (Luke 2: 38) that there were still the hidden ones, even in Jerusalem, who looked for redemption in Israel; as there will be in the day of His power, to whom He will appear as "the Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings" (Mal. 4: 2).

But if there was no heart for Him in Jerusalem, and no room for Him in Bethlehem, a testimony was to be raised up from among the Gentiles; and "wise men" — wise, surely, in every sense of the word — divinely led, seek Him, recognise His divinity, worship Him, and present to Him their threefold gift, "gold, frankincense, and myrrh."

When the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon she brought "gold and spices." In a coming day, when the kings of the Gentiles come to worship the glory of the Lord in Jerusalem, they will bring "gold and incense" (Isa. 60).

In neither the historic nor the prophetic Scripture is there any mention of that which is here connected with these two things, namely, "myrrh." Why is this? Is there not a threefold meaning in their gifts? In the Babe of Bethlehem they saw the One who was "born King of the Jews," and to Him, as such, they presented the royal offering of gold. But there was the recognition in the frankincense that He was more than man — that He was the promised Saviour; and the myrrh spoke of that of which the wise men could have but dim vision, and that was, that before He sat upon the throne of His glory He "must suffer many things . . . and be killed and raised again the third day" (Matt. 16: 21).

And even while but a child, to escape the wrath of the false king, the true King has to flee unto Egypt, and be there till the death of Herod, that the prophecy might be fulfilled, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son" (Hosea 11: 1). Thus the Lord began where His people began, but how different their pathway from His?

When the call came to Joseph to return, he is instructed to go into the "land of Israel." Twice in Chapter 2 we have this title; and yet at the moment the land was only a despised province of the Roman Empire. But few of the men of Israel dwelt in it. The Gentiles ruled it. A mixed race from the East dwelt in one of its chiefest cities, Samaria; and Galilee, its largest province, was densely peopled with a purely heathen population, a few poor Jews residing amongst them.

Yet in spite of appearances God recognises the land by its true title. It is God's land for His people, and He will yet vindicate their rights and make them good.

But when they returned they found another usurper filling the throne, and Joseph, with the holy Child Jesus, turned aside to dwell at Nazareth. At the very beginning of His pathway He had been the rejected One; now He becomes the despised One. Even the upright Nathanael shared the popular prejudice — if it was only prejudice — that Nazareth of Galilee could produce no good thing. It was the most despised town of the most despised province of a despised land.

Thus at the very outset of His pathway of lowly grace the Lord knew what it was to be "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" (Isa. 53: 3),

Section 2. Matthew 3, 4.

The Forerunner Introducing the King; and the Kingdom Presented

The second section of our Gospel begins with the Message of the Baptist. A convenient synopsis, round which other thoughts can be gathered, will be: —

1 The warning of John.

2 The work of Christ.

3 The witness of the Father.

A full generation has passed away since the close of Matthew 2. King Archelaus, after a wicked reign of ten or eleven years, had been banished by the Romans. Judea had ceased to retain even the semblance of a monarchy, and is now under Roman procurators, of whom Pilate is the fifth, in a descending scale of wickedness.

Doubtless the Visit of the Wise Men, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Glory Song, and the Virgin Birth had been long forgotten. The glint of the glory had died from the plains of Bethlehem: the angels had long since gone away again into heaven, and so far there seemed little promise of that "peace on earth" of which they had so sweetly spoken.

But Heaven again breaks the silence. "In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, 'Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.'"

Apart from the imperial glory of the world, as seen at Rome, apart from the religious system of men, as seen at Jerusalem — John was found in the wilderness; that arid tract of desert land on the west of the Dead Sea, extending northwards to the Jordan. His food and his raiment marked him out as one apart from common men.

Luke has given us his previous history.

John has given us his testimony to the Messiah. Matthew here gives us his message.

The warning words of John reach even the lifeless professors at Jerusalem. Pharisees, and even Sadducees, come to his baptism.

The message he brought was the nearness of the long-expected. Kingdom, and the importance of a moral preparation for entrance thereinto.

Every instructed Jew knew what the prophet Daniel had said as to the Kingdom to be set up by the God of Heaven, but they had little knowledge of the condition of heart which entrance into that Kingdom demanded. Even Nicodemus (John 3) failed to see more in it than a mere paradise regained for man, as man, upon the earth. The new birth, the essential qualification for even the Jew to enter into and enjoy the promises of God for His earthly people (Ezek. 36: 26) had evidently been totally lost sight of, since even one of their best-instructed rulers was ignorant of it. And so the Lord has to say to him, "Art thou a Master of Israel and knowest not these things?" (John 3: 10). Hence the importance of John's warning word, "Repent" — a total change of heart and mind was imperative if men would enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

We shall find this term — Kingdom of Heaven — about thirty-three times in this Gospel, and nowhere else in the New Testament. Five times we get "Kingdom of God" (Matt. 6: 33; Matt. 12: 28; Matt. 19: 24; Matt. 21: 31, 43), where "Kingdom of Heaven" would not convey the intended meaning. Other Scriptures speak of "the Kingdom of the Father" (Matt. 13: 43); "the Kingdom of the Son of Man" (Dan. 7); "the Kingdom of the Son of His love" (Col. 1: 13); "the Everlasting Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 1: 11).

All, of course, refer to the rule of God; but why these varied designations? As we have already noticed, Matthew alone uses the term, "Kingdom of Heaven." Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he was writing as a Jew to Jews. Any hope of an earthly kingdom was fast passing, if it had not already passed, away. The little gleam of royalty, manifested for a moment, under the king of nonnative stock — Herod — had faded, and a deeper bondage still, all thinking men saw before them.

Under these conditions, the coming Kingdom is announced as the Kingdom of Heaven, for the kingdom on earth is in hopeless ruin. And it is striking to notice that in no other book of the Bible do we read so often about Heaven as in Matthew. We are forcibly reminded that, in spite of the failure of His people and the enmity of His foes, yet the God of Heaven has taken up the question of the earth, and that He will, even here, work out, in His own time and way, His gracious purposes of blessing for His redeemed people, and glory for His beloved Son.

The Rule of God, then, under this title, was familiar to the Jew. It was spoken of in the Law. Had that law been obeyed from the heart, the promise was that their days would be multiplied and be "as the days of Heaven upon the Earth" (Deut. 11: 21). The Psalms bore witness to it. The Seed of David would endure for ever, and "his throne as the days of Heaven" (Ps. 79: 29). The prophets, in more definite language still, describe Him, who became the Son of Man, receiving that Kingdom and glory which should never pass away (Dan. 2: 7).

This Kingdom John announced as being "at hand." The King was here; but, the King being rejected, it assumed the "mystery" form (Chap. 13: 11) which it still bears in the absence of the King.

By comparing Matthew 11: 11 with Matthew 16: 19, we learn that the Kingdom of Heaven had not then commenced, and, indeed, it did not do so until the Lord had taken His seat on high. Then Peter, having received "the keys" (Chap. 16: 19), unlocked the door to both Jew and Gentile, and although the favoured nation refused their King, and with Him, the "days of Heaven upon the earth," yet it is now given to the believer to know, in a deeper and fuller way than Israel ever will, the Rejected One; and every day may, to the Christian, be as the days of Heaven upon the earth. May our hearts enter into it more and more, and be more engaged with Himself, while we wait for His Coming.

"The Kingdom of God" occurs five times in our Gospel. It clearly expresses a different idea from the above. It has been described as "the exhibition of the ruling power of God under any circumstances." It was thus manifested when the Lord was here. So He could say (Luke 17: 21), when unbelievingly asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming, "the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you." It was there represented in His Own Person.

At the day of Pentecost, and afterwards, those born from above, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit's power, exemplified in themselves the same blessed character of that heavenly rule, as seen by its fruits of "righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost" (Rom. 14: 17). This is the divine aspect.

But this term is also applied to the human side, or the Kingdom as seen in the hands of men, as Luke 13: 19-21 shows: "It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it;" and again he said, "Whereunto shall I liken the Kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened." Here we get its external appearance and internal condition: an overgrown abortion, sheltering much that is evil. An adulterated mass permeating much that is good. Such is Christendom to-day. Evil men allowed, and evil doctrines accepted, have produced the condition so vividly pictured in the above Scripture.

The Kingdom of the Father and the Kingdom of the Son of Man will be a development of the Kingdom of Heaven, and will be seen when the present mystery form is at an end.

The Kingdom of the Son of Man will be the rule of God, seen in the hands of His Son, in the coming day, when the Kingdom is set up in power in the earth. Then the redeemed people will say, "Jehovah our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth" (Ps. 8: 1). He will assume the Lordship lost by Adam, and it will be exercised by Him in righteousness, both in blessing to the godly and in judgment upon the transgressors. The Father's Kingdom, on the other hand, applies to the heavenly side. It refers to things above, as the other refers to things below. The Kingdom of the Son of His love is our present place in grace: that circle of which Christ is the centre, as He is the centre of the Father's affections, and the One around whom the Father delights to gather the objects of His love — even us who were once in the Kingdom and under the power of darkness.

If the last is our present place in grace, the Everlasting Kingdom is our future place in glory. The Apostle there (2 Peter 1: 11) is giving instruction as to the future glory of the Kingdom manifested before the eyes of men. They — the Apostles — had seen His glory in the holy mount. Peter prays that believers may have an abundant entrance into the Kingdom in which that glory will be displayed.

So the Kingdom was announced as being "at hand," but there was something else. The "axe" was at the root of the tree of Jewish profession. Very soon the Master of the vineyard would have to say, "These three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?" (Luke 13: 7). Barren for many a long year, the final test was now presented. Messiah rejected would mean the nation cut off. Nevertheless, there was blessing for all who truly repented, for He baptized with the Holy Ghost — grace and salvation: as well as with fire — judgment and condemnation.

It is of the utmost importance to be clear as to the meaning of these two statements. They define, what we might call, the two extremes of the Lord's ministry, and everything connected with the present day of grace lies between. The presence of the Holy Spirit is that which marks the present age. He is with and in the believer. He has been pleased to take up His dwelling, and make our bodies His temple (1 Cor. 6: 19), and the sanctifying influence of His presence should be seen in our daily lives (Gal. 5: 25). He dwells in the Church; and His presence here is also a proof of the world's guilt, for He is here because Christ is absent (John 16: 10), and Christ is absent because men slew and hanged Him on a tree (Acts 10: 39).

But the "Age of the Spirit" will pass: the day of grace will come to a close, and when the Lord comes the second time, His dealings with the wicked and the oppressor will be with "fire" — the stern and unsparing, righteous judgment of God. So it will be then. "They shall gather out of his Kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (Matt. 13: 41-42). It is the certain result of rejecting the Gospel, and it would be well if every Gospel preacher had this solemn truth deep in his heart as he proclaims the grace of God. For in proportion as grace is known, so surely will judgment be executed, if the offered grace be rejected. There can be nothing else. The threshing floor is purged, the wheat and the chaff each assigned to its proper place.

But, further, there is the Witness of the Father, and this is very beautiful. The Lord enters upon His public ministry, and His first action is to come from Galilee to Jordan, to be baptized of John. No wonder John "urgently forbade" Him. Just a short time before (John 1: 27) John had declared himself unworthy to do the meanest office for that Wonderful Person whom he was announcing, and lo! here was that same Person taking His place among those who had gone down figuratively into the waters of death, confessing their sins. The Spirit's first work in the heart of the sinner is Repentance — self-judgment and confession of what we are. This brought the remnant to John's baptism, and thereby separated them from the guilty mass of the nation. It was no question of confessing sin that brought Him there. God forbid. Something else He instructs us in. "Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness." Righteousness brought Him, where sin brought the people. He, the only righteous One upon the earth, associates with Himself those who sought after a moral preparedness for Messiah's Kingdom. "And, lo! the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him: and, lo! a voice from heaven saying, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'"

Beautiful testimony from Heaven of the only One upon the earth who was the Object of Heaven's delight. In Genesis 6 God looked down and dealt in judgment. Here God was come down in grace. In a coming day He would lay down His life for the sheep.

But now, after the Anointing and Sealing of the Holy Spirit, the first step on His pathway to the Cross was to meet and overcome the one whose great object was to turn Him aside from that pathway.

Scripture is silent as to what took place during the "forty days" — period of perfect testing. It was clearly something that we could not enter into; therefore it is not revealed. But the three forms of temptation at the close of that period, and the way in which our Lord overcame the tempter, are written for our instruction. For we, too, are called upon to "overcome" even as He overcame (Rev. 21), and the promise to the overcomer is that he will sit with the Faithful and True Witness upon His throne. The two weapons the Lord used — the Shield of Faith and the Sword of the Spirit — we may use also. Indeed, we are instructed to lay hold of them in order that we may "quench all the fiery darts of the wicked" (Eph. 6: 16).

The first temptation is a question of circumstances. Can we trust God for daily need?

In Matthew 6 the disciples are led on to realise that they can rest in a Father's love and knowledge of their daily needs. Here the Lord exemplifies this principle of simple dependence. He would wait on His Father's guidance, and — using the "Sword of the Spirit" — He chose the right word to meet the enemy. "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Deut. 8: 3).

If the first temptation was a testing of self, the second would lead to a testing of God. Cast Thyself down and see if God will be true to His word or not. This was to instil doubt into the mind, instead of unwavering trust in God. Just what Satan succeeded in doing in Eden. The whole point of the argument in Romans 8 is that God is for us. To test or question it would be to show our own faithlessness. Israel did so in the wilderness, and said, "Is the Lord among us or not?" (Ex. 17: 7).

But the Lord again replies in the very words of Scripture, and uses a plain word to confute what Satan had misquoted and misapplied.

In the third temptation it was a question whether the things of this world are to be received from Satan or from God. Doubtless Satan had some dim knowledge that the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them would not always be his to give; that, as the first man had lost them by yielding to temptation, so the second Man might be tempted to acquire them by the same easy path. But in this case the kingdoms of the world are presented to the eye of One who has had the testimony of the Kingdom of Heaven, has seen the opened Heaven, and, as a Man upon the earth, listened to the Father's voice of approval and delight.

In proportion as the same heavenly vision fills our souls, so will the things of the world lose their attraction for us also, for our hearts will be where our treasure is, with Christ at God's right hand.

We have next to consider what the Lord met the tempter with. David of old could say, "By the word of thy lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer" (Ps. 17: 4), and here the Lord shows how that same word can be used to foil every device of the enemy. David had five smooth stones in his scrip. Only one was needed to slay the giant — type of him who was here in the presence of David's greater Son. The Lord might have drawn His arguments from the five books of Moses. He uses only one — Deuteronomy — and from it selects the weapon that both exposes and defeats the foe. "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve" (Deut. 6: 13; 10: 20). And here let us also notice that which is of the utmost importance. The Lord quotes the very Scripture that met the case in hand. So there is guidance and instruction in Scripture for the believer, for every circumstance, or difficulty, that may arise in his pathway, but he must know where to find it. We must make it our business to be so well acquainted with the Holy Word of God as to be able to bring out at the moment the needed truth for the time of need.

"Then the devil leaveth him." Satan was defeated. Thank God, he is a defeated foe. He may roar, but he cannot rend; he may deceive, but he cannot destroy.

In closing this section let us notice seven beautiful things, manifesting the grace and power and glory of our blessed Lord: —

1 The voice of the Father points Him out as the Object of Heaven's delight.

2 The descending Spirit abides upon Him as the Son of God, whom "God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto."

3 Angels delight to minister unto Him, as once before they had heralded His birth.

4 Satan flees defeated from the presence of a Man in the wilderness. Four thousand years before he had triumphed, with the same temptations, over a man in a garden.

5 The Lord becomes the light to them that sit in darkness — Galilee of the Gentiles — that part of the outskirts of the nation which was most despised by the religious leaders. There, the Lord, rejected at Jerusalem, goes in grace and gathers to Himself a people who owned His claims and obeyed His Word.

6 He begins His wonderful mission, and its divine character is marked at the very outset by His victory over disease, death, and the devil. It is the powers of the world to come in the hands of the King. Lunacy destroyed the mind; palsy destroyed the body; demon-possession destroyed both; but Jesus healed them all.

7 Then He is seen attracting to Himself the hearts of men. Nets, boats, relations, and calling — all are left to follow the Lord Jesus. The most powerful attraction set before the soul is not "I ought," or "I must"; but the fact that One has gone through this world before us: attracted our hearts out of it to Himself, where He now is on the throne: given us His place before the Father (John 17: 14), and now He expects us to fill His place before the world.

We are not of the world. Let us show it more and more in Christ-likeness day by day.

"His Cross behind: His Home before.

Himself to-day, and evermore."

Section 3. Matthew 5, 6, 7.

The Laws of the Kingdom

*****

An Outline of the Interpretation and Application of Matthew 5: 1-12

Text.

Verse 3.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Poor = humble. Derivation from beggarly — in the sense of having nothing.

The Believer has nothing in this world.

Parallels.

Isa. 57: 15. "The High and holy One . . . I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a poor and contrite spirit."

Isa. 66. "To this man will I look . . . that is of a poor and contrite spirit."

Promises.

"Theirs is the Kingdom."

Inheritance WHEN the wicked — the proud have been cut off.

Mal. 3: 15. "NOW we call the proud happy."

Mal. 4: 2. "BUT unto you that fear My name the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings."

Warnings.

Mal. 4: 1. "BUT the day cometh that shall burn as an oven, and all the PROUD . . . shall be as stubble."

Isa. 2 "The DAY of the Lord of Hosts shall be upon every one that is PROUD."

The Great Example — Christ.

2 Cor. 8: 9. "HE who was RICH, for your sakes became POOR, that ye through His poverty might be RICH."

Phil. 2. "He made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a SERVANT."

*****

In Matthew 4 we saw the King triumphing over all the powers of Satan. The devil is defeated, and his works — disease and death — flee before the Divine Healer.

The fame of the Lord Jesus being thus spread abroad, He now (Chaps. 5-7) announces the Laws of His Kingdom and begins to unfold the great moral principles upon which it is founded.

We have to keep in mind that the Kingdom of Heaven is not Heaven, nor, properly speaking, in Heaven. It is the rule of Heaven on this earth (Deut. 2: 44; Deut. 7: 13-14). As we have seen, both John and the Lord Jesus announced that happy time as at hand, but, alas! the nation of Israel rejected both the King and the Kingdom. Hence the Kingdom in power was deferred, and we have now the Kingdom in mystery. We shall find the teaching as to this fully developed in Matthew 13.

But here, at the very outset, the Lord begins by describing the characteristics of those who belong to the Kingdom. It is the exact opposite of what men upon the earth manifest. Indeed, it is the opposite of what they either look for or expect. To be meek, merciful, or pure in heart necessitates a regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, and this is assumed to have already taken place in His hearers, for He is teaching disciples. The pronouns "they" and "ye" in Matthew 5: 1-12 may indicate the time to which the promises apply. Taking the list of "Blesseds" in their order, the promises in verses 1-10 will be literally fulfilled to those who find their lot in the latter day when "transgressors are come to the full" (Dan. 8).

In that day the men of pride will be exalted, and the poor in spirit — the godly remnant of the nation, who wait for Jehovah — will be counted as the offscourings of all things. But the Lord will hearken and hear, and in His Book of Remembrance their names shall be written, and they shall be His when He makes up His jewels. Then, "the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be as stubble. . . . But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings" (Mal. 4). And the meek — they shall inherit the land (of Israel) when the wicked have been destroyed out of it. The Reign of Righteousness will satisfy those that hunger and thirst after righteousness; and the pure in heart — they shall see God. The rewards and promises in this section are connected with the coming Kingdom, but, of course, while this is true historically, nevertheless, in its application, every believer, in every dispensation, should manifest every trait of the beautiful life of blessing outlined by the Lord, and by so doing, prove to all that they are indeed the children of the Kingdom.

In verses 11-12 we read, "Blessed are ye and great is your reward in Heaven." Here the Lord addresses His disciples there present. This would be true of them, and of every true disciple through all time. Later on, in His teaching, He gives them the principles that would mark them out as heavenly men upon the earth, and also make manifest the secret of the world's hatred. "If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." . . . "If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also. But all these things will they do unto you for my name's sake, because they know not him that sent me" (John 15: 19-21). So we have the double result of being true to Christ in the day of His rejection, and that is, persecution here and great reward in Heaven. It is the heavenly side of the Kingdom.

But it is well to note that He who spoke these words was the only One who ever became the perfect Examplar, in all things, and has left us His example that we should follow in His steps. This will be better seen if we arrange any one of the "Blesseds" in tabular form, as on page 25. It is a most helpful and profitable study. Every longing after the rule of God in righteousness will be found fully expressed in both Prophets and Psalms. It was that to which the godly of that dispensation looked forward, just as the coming of Christ is the hope of the Church to-day. Coupled with the promises there are also, as ever, the warnings of Jehovah against those who oppose His power and despise His grace.

But believers are also the "salt of the earth" and the "light of the world." There is a twofold meaning in this. Salt is used in Scripture as a figure of God's rights, or the righteous principles of God's dealings with the earth. It is this we see expressed in the judgment on Lot's wife and the Vale of Sodom which became the valley of salt. Disciples "salt" the earth by maintaining these righteous principles and standing for the rights of God in a world that refuses to recognise either God or His rights.

The other figure used is "light." They were "the light of the world." As the first conveys the thought of righteousness, the second speaks of grace. Light shines for others and before others. It may be a guiding light or a warning light, but it is there for the good of others, and so should believers be in this world.

But coupled with the figure there is also the warning. The salt may lose its savour, and the light may get hidden. In both cases they become useless for the purpose for which they were intended. It was a warning to those whom He addressed, and to disciples of every age, and we do well to remember that we can only be "kept by the power of God unto salvation."

Then we come to something that probes the inner man. The Lord brings the light of Heaven to bear upon the motives of the heart, for "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" (Prov. 23: 7). Violence and corruption marked the ways of man from the fall (Gen. 6); but every trace of either in the child of the Kingdom must be dealt with in unsparing self-judgment.

Under the old economy we find that the law laid down the principle, in righteousness, "An eye for an eye" (Ex. 21: 24), thereby restraining the wrath of man. Otherwise he would have demanded two eyes for one, in vengeance. But here an entirely new principle is introduced. "I say unto you that ye resist not evil." It is the very opposite of nature, which loves to avenge itself. It is different from righteousness, which measures out even-handed justice. It is the beautiful spirit of grace, manifested in all perfection in Him who "when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not." Even so the disciple should be more than righteous: he should be gracious, and while walking through this world, it is better to lose his "cloke" than give up those lovely principles of grace that mark him out as one who belongs to Christ.

But again the Lord introduces something higher still — indeed the highest standard possible. The standard for the new dispensation is nothing short of that of the character of the Father Himself. His ways are to be our ways.

To review our chapter shortly: It begins by showing what kind of people enter the Kingdom.

What the actions and character should be of those who take part with a rejected Saviour now.

Then the law is brought to bear upon the motives of men, showing that corruption and violence are the two principles of evil that govern the natural heart.

That salvation from the consequences of sin must be had at all costs. If eye, hand, or foot hinder, it must be "cut off."

That the righteousness needed must be more (i.e., of a different kind) than that of the Scribes and Pharisees; and that when this salvation is known, it so moulds the heart that the believer is passive under all kinds of reproach and injustice.

That tribulation and injustice only open the way for the activities of love seen in returning good for evil — the marks of the new dispensation, and of the children of the Kingdom.

Matthew 6 opens with the great principles of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting — right relationships with our fellow-men, with God, and with self. These are the righteousnesses of saints — the positive outcome of a life which has all the springs of its moral being in God Himself.

God is revealed to us as the giving God. He gave His Son (John 3: 16). Christ gave Himself (Eph. 5: 25). God loveth a cheerful giver (2 Cor. 9: 7). We do well to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20: 35); and believers are instructed to "labour that they may have to give to him that needeth" (Eph. 4: 28). The importance of this cannot be over-estimated. We are in a world of need, both material and spiritual, and the heart that knows the grace of Christ will be a heart that has learned the secret and the joy of giving. "The liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand" (Isa. 32: 8). There is ever the danger that through unfaithfulness in "that which is another man's" (Luke 16) we may lose "that which is our own." In other words, we lose the enjoyment of those heavenly blessings which are properly ours in proportion as we are unfaithful stewards of the bounty God has entrusted us with here.

Next we come to "the prayer that teaches to pray" — when and how it was to be used. Unlike the vain repetitions of the heathen, or the ostentatious display of the hypocrite at the street corner, the disciple is to seek the secret place and deal with his Father there.

Doubtless the form of words here given was intended to guide disciples before the Holy Spirit was given, but every word of the Lord was necessarily perfect; and these various petitions express the need of disciples in a way that only the Lord Himself could teach. No doubt fuller development was given when further truth was made known, and the time was coming when, instructed by the Holy Spirit, they would ask "in the name of Jesus" and receive that their joy might be full (John 14: 13).

This knowledge of their new standing in Him they could not have before the cross, and therefore could not pray "in His name." But in the meantime they were brought into all the conscious and enjoyed knowledge of relationship with a Father who loved, cared for, and watched over them day by day.

After the acknowledgment of the relationship into which they were brought, and which is expressed in the words, "Our Father," there are six petitions setting forth in order: —

Reverence. Rule. Obedience.

Dependence. Restoration. Preservation.

It will be noticed that the first three are Godward, and the second three are manward. Also that the last three deal with the present, the past, and the future.

No greater compass of truth could possibly be brought within the bounds of so few words. Then our Lord goes back to the fifth petition to enforce the principle of Christian forgiveness. We shall meet with an even fuller development of it later, but here it is laid down as the basis on which God deals with His children in government. We may be smitten (verse 39), wronged (verse 40), sinned against (verse 41), despised (verse 44), hated or persecuted (verse 44). How are we to meet it? By asserting our rights and demanding apology and reparation? The world would do so, and it would be considered right in the eyes of the world. But, "No," says the Lord, "forgive men their trespasses." And more, it is not that the Christian walks through this world a merely passive or impassive sufferer. The very suffering he may be brought into only brings out the spirit of Christ, who was Himself, the perfect exponent in His own history of His divine teaching, and who is our perfect Example. So the Apostle could say, "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves" — the first thing nature thinks of. But here is the divine way, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head." "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good."

Fasting involves the setting aside of self. And not only self looked upon as connected with the evil within; but it is the setting aside of the claims of nature itself in order to have to do with God. It is a recognition that there are spiritual things on hand of deeper importance than even rightful claims of the body. And then there is a wider sense in which the believer goes through this world abstaining from everything in it. He is "anointed" and "washed." His heart is right and his life is right. He does not appear "of a sad countenance," for the joy of Heaven fills his heart while upon the earth, and the Father who seeth in secret rewards him.

The more we value the things of earth, the more care and anxiety we create for ourselves in acquiring and retaining them. And if these things become our "treasure" — that on which the heart is set — alas! for us, for our hearts will be earthward instead of heavenward. We may procure locks and bars sufficient to defy the modern burglar, but the thief, Time, will ultimately steal ALL. He will steal them from us, and us from them.

If, on the other hand, Christ in glory has become the hope and object of the heart, then both the treasure and the heart will be above, and we shall be known as heavenly men upon the earth. By and by we shall reach our native land, enter the eternal home, and dwell in the Father's House, to go no more out. Even here we have a foretaste of it all — forgiveness, sonship, and everlasting life. Thus, in whatever circumstances we may be, our hearts can be in perfect rest. God has chosen us out of the world. He is carrying us through the world, and His object is to conform us to the image of His Son. Meantime we rest in the sense of His knowledge and of His love, that knows and provides for our every need.

If Matthew 6 gives us, principally, right relationships with God our Father, Matthew 7 begins with what should be the relationships of believers among themselves. Having been brought into the Kingdom and into relationship with the Father, we are to manifest righteousness by consistency of walk (verses 1-6). We must judge ourselves, but we may not judge each other. The judgment of others here spoken of, is that censorious criticism which "sets at nought" our brother (Rom. 14: 10), and is really closely allied to evil speaking. We have an outstanding instance in the Old Testament how God regards it, in the case of Aaron and Miriam who "spake against Moses." And Jehovah rebuked them in words pregnant with meaning" Were ye not afraid to speak against my servant" The very fact that any one slips into this only shows that they "have a beam" in their own eye.

Confidence in the Father is next seen — expressed in genuine asking, earnest seeking, and urgent knocking. This is coupled with the certain answer of grace, and illustrated by the response of even the natural man to the requests of his children.

When the subject of supplication is introduced there is an increasing urgency in the instructions, marking out the one who is in earnest, and there is a need-be for it; for there is no aspect of the spiritual life which Satan is more opposed to than the hidden life of prayer. We have all the power of Satan out to hinder and prevent our dependence upon and communion with God, and we do well to remember it. The Lord recognises it. Do we? It would seem as if promise (John 15: 7), and precept (1 Thess. 5: 17), and illustration (2 Kings 4: 33), and example (Dan. 6: 10), and exhortation (Eph. 6: 18), and warning (Matt. 26: 41), were all enlisted to enforce and press home the important truth that "men ought always to pray and not to faint." We are in an enemy's country and must keep the communications open with headquarters. We are in an element which is fatal to spiritual life, and must therefore draw all our supplies from above. "I will therefore," said the inspired apostle, "that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath or doubting" (1 Tim. 2: 8).

But Christianity is marked not only by what men are to believe. The true outward test of it will be what they do; and the practical results flowing from a true knowledge of the Father will reflect His character among men; and thus we shall carry out the golden rule, and do as we would be done by.

The entrance to the Kingdom is next spoken of under the figure of a "strait gate." There must be purpose of heart to separate from the crowd, and take an individual path at all costs. David had it (Ps. 17: 3), Daniel had it (Dan. 1), and Barnabas exhorted the young believers of Antioch to seek after it if they would make progress in the new life. There is no middle path here, and no middle place hereafter. The issues are simple, if inexpressibly solemn. A good start — the strait gate entered, the narrow way trodden the end, everlasting life. Conversion and Regeneration are the doors of entrance. Holiness marks out the pathway that leads from the strait gate to the gate of pearl. And few there be that find it. But for grace no one would.

On the other hand, wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction. Everything agreeable to the flesh and pleasing to the eye may be carried through the wide gate and taken along the broad way, but the pleasures of Sin are but for a season, and the end is — Hell.

But the devil has many devices, and a very favourite one of hoary antiquity is the "false prophet." The first false prophet we read about in Scripture was Satan himself, and his first effort — in which he was very successful — was to challenge the truth of God's Word.

This is still his strong point, and there are many men in Christendom to-day doing his work. "Wolves in sheeps' clothing." Unconverted men, with a profession of Christianity and a show of learning, using their abilities to endeavour to throw doubts upon the inspiration, authenticity, and authority of God's Holy Word. Short and simple is the test given to detect them. "By their fruits ye shall know them." The world may admire and applaud. The disciple turns away. From such he gets neither joy for his heart nor food for his soul. "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" What the thorns and thistles are in the natural world, these are in the spiritual. And the Lord, in closing, sums up the whole field of profession, by showing that the truly wise man hears, obeys, brings forth good fruit, and continues; while the mere professor, building his house on the sand, sees his house and his hopes swept away together. Many hear the sayings and do them not — a proof of their indifference and insincerity. But here, doing the sayings of Jesus is likened to building on a rock, and proves that the inward springs that govern the moral nature have been reached by the truth.

Section 4. Matthew 8, 9.

The Dignity of the King and the Characteristics of His Mission

The Gospel takes up a lost sinner in order to make him like Christ. It gives him: —

A place in His favour.

A prospect of His glory, and

A power to bring him there.

It finds him guilty and brings him pardon.

It finds him lost and brings him salvation.

It finds him helpless and brings him power.

We shall find this illustrated in the very beautiful section of our Gospel we are now entering upon, for it shows us all the activities of the power and grace of Christ meeting and defeating all the malignant power of Satan — meeting and supplying all the deep, deep need of sinners. It is really the gospel of the Kingdom introduced with a manifestation of the powers of the age to come (Heb. 2: 5). We must not confound it with the present gospel of the grace of God. The gospel of grace might come to a poor sufferer on a sick-bed with saving power for the soul, but the body is not necessarily benefited thereby. On the other hand, we find every individual brought in contact with the Lord on earth, blessed both in soul and body. It was a proof that He was there, acting in the power of the coming Kingdom, out of which, in a coming day, when it is set up upon the earth, every trace of Satan's power, and all the effects of sin, will be cast for ever.

To-day it is the Kingdom and patience of Christ we are to manifest, till He comes again. We can imagine Peter had before him these various scenes detailed in Matthew 8 and 9, when, in Cornelius' house, he declared how "God had anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed with the devil: for God was with him" (Acts 10: 38). He was indeed the "Man approved of God by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him" (Acts 2: 22).

The Spirit of God, then, in these two chapters particularly, sets the Lord before us as the One who had come to destroy the works of the devil. In Matthew 5 He went up into a mountain, and we are instructed as to what men ought to be. In Matthew 8 He came down from the mountain, and we find out what men are.

But in the midst of it all we see the Lord moving in the calm dignity of grace and power, dispensing healing and blessing to all who were brought to Him. And it is interesting to notice here that out of all the cases of individual blessing recorded in our Lord's ministry, nearly all were brought to Him by others. Only of some six or seven is it said, "they came." Surely here is another incentive to those who know the Lord to seek to bring others to Him. "Andrew first findeth his own brother Peter." "Philip findeth Nathanael" (John 1: 41-45).

The various miracles in this section are evidently grouped together for a special reason. By referring to Mark we find that Peter's wife's mother was healed long before the leper. May the reason for this not be that these striking miracles are placed before us here in a moral order, and designed to show the power and grace of the King in the face of the strongest opposition Satan could bring against Him; designed also to show us the results of sin, which works havoc both in soul and body.

In the eighth chapter, then, we have: —

1 Grace forgingin sins.

2 Grace calling sinners.

3 Grace bringing joy.

4 Grace raising the dead.

5 Grace restoring the diseased.

6 Grace opening blind eyes.

7 Grace unloosing the tongue of the dumb.

Seven notable proofs of Jehovah's presence among His people in power and blessing.

The first miracle in Matthew 8 is that of the leper. "There came a leper." He came, confessed the power of the Lord, and was cleansed. Then he was instructed to go to the priest. The priest had before pronounced the man unclean. Now he is called upon to pronounce him clean, and in doing so to proclaim the fact that there was One in their midst who was more than man. The King of Israel (2 Kings 5) had to say, when appealed to in Naaman's case, "Am I God, to kill and to make alive?" Leprosy was known as a disease beyond the power of man. Only God could heal the leper. Here, then, was a leper healed, and the priest was bound to announce it, and offer the prescribed offering for the occasion (Lev. 14). It was a positive proof of Messiah's power.

But in the second miracle it was a Gentile who got the blessing, and there was no question at all in the mind of the centurion of either the grace or power of Christ. His faith counted upon both, and thereby the Gentile, outside the scope of promise, honoured the Lord, and was rewarded. In commenting upon this faith, the Lord points out, in marked contrast, the unbelief of Israel, and foreshadows the rejection of the nation till the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

Next we find the Lord in Peter's house; and, taking the fever patient by the hand, he lifted her up (Mark 1). Surely she might well remember that hand-clasp. And the hand of weakness grasped by the hand of power, might well become a ministering hand henceforth.

Referring again to Mark, we learn that this miracle was wrought upon the Sabbath day, and then "when the evening was come" — that is, when the Sabbath day was past — "they brought unto him many that were possessed with demons, and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick." Man's day was setting in darkness and sorrow. Earth's sinking sun saw only suffering humanity, but the Lord brings grace for the guilty, salvation for the lost, and deliverance for the captives of sin and Satan.

"Oh I with what various ills they met,

Oh with what joy they went away."

The Lord then sets out to cross the Sea of Galilee to the land of Gadara, originally inhabited by the tribe of Gad. And this long and, as it proved, dangerous journey is undertaken with the object of bringing deliverance to two men possessed with demons; but the occasion of the crossing became also the occasion of testing two would-be disciples. The Lord's answer to the first is very striking. "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have their nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." There was room and a home on earth for that which men think of little value. There was a place for that which men count even injurious, but the King of Glory was a homeless Stranger. Peter's fisher coat might afford Him a rough pillow while crossing the lake; but the Son of Man had not where to lay His head. And here for the first time we get this new title He applies to Himself. It spoke volumes to Israel, could Israel have understood, for He did not become the "Son of Man" until He had first become the "rejected Messiah."

If the first follower was hindered by worldly position, the second was hindered by worldly ties, and neither can be allowed before the claims of Christ. The beginning of all discipleship is unquestioning obedience produced in the heart by love in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Lord might have prevented the storm; He allowed it, and that for two reasons. The disciples had to learn what manner of MAN this was who was with them, and the second was that HE was the One to whom to turn in every difficulty. Doubtless their seamanship had often been tested in days gone by on that same lake, but here was evidently something out of the common. They saw nothing before them but disaster, and although the Lord was with them, and though they had witnessed His power so often before, yet they "were afraid." They had not yet learned to trust Him wholly. The Lord first reproves them for their fears, and then delivers them from their dangers. One has said, "He did not chide them for disturbing Him with their prayers, but for disturbing themselves with their fears."

What comes out in the closing half of our chapter is the power of Satan, seen in three ways: (a) Over the elements, in his attempt to raise a storm that would destroy the Christ of God Himself; (b) over two men so under his power as to be worse than the wild beasts of the earth; (c) lastly, over a people so blinded by sin that when One was present in grace and power to bless, they "besought him to depart out of their coasts." And the Lord does so.

Matthew 9 shows some of the characteristics of the wonderful mission that brought the Son of God to earth. It was not only a question of delivering from the effects of Satan's power, but removing the cause which gave him that power over men. And so when the Lord saw the faith of the friends of the palsied man, doubtless reflected in the heart of the man himself, He responds in the first place, not by healing the man's bodily disease, but by touching what was deeper, the disease of the soul — He forgave his sins. Which brings out this, that here in His own city — Capernaum — where many of His mighty works had been done, the Scribes saw in Him only a man, and dared to say that He was a blasphemer.

At Matthew 8: 34, His works were rejected: here His divine person and heavenly origin is despised, and later in our chapter the leaders of the people commit the unpardonable sin by ascribing His acts of power to Beelzebub. Such is man by nature, even at his best. Everything was leading up to His rejection by the nation, and the nation's rejection by Him.

But not only is He the Forgiver of Sins. Grace brings sinners into His own presence — yea, even to the table with Him; just what the same grace is doing to-day to all who own their guilt and accept His mercy.

The call of Matthew is an occasion where we see the activity of grace in the heart of one who has become a recipient of it. From Mark's Gospel we learn that Matthew was so enraptured with the grace that had deigned to call a poor publican like himself, that he made a great feast in his own house; and a great company of publicans and sinners were gathered together to meet with Jesus. And there was great joy in that house, for the blessed ones were in the presence of the Blesser, and in the realisation of what the Psalmist experienced when he said, "In thy presence is fulness of joy: at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. 16: 11).

The Pharisees raise the question of fasting, but the One who alone was the source of all true joy was in their midst: how unseemly, then, to be occupied with that which was an expression of sorrow.

The Lord next develops the principle of this new thing in the two short parables which follow. The "new cloth" and the "new wine" are the principles of sovereign grace, as opposed to the old covenant of legal righteousness.

Israel of old was under a covenant of works, but, when Christ came, the end of that economy came with Him. Henceforth God was dealing with men in pure unmixed grace. The publican and the sinner were nearer the Kingdom of God than the ceremonially perfect Pharisee, who boasted in his own righteousness and despised others — nearer because they owned their badness, instead of boasting in their fancied goodness. Neither would it do to mingle these two things. Law and grace cannot be blended. The Galatians tried to mix them, and were soundly rebuked by the inspired Apostle. Christendom is doing it to-day, and the result is that the terror is taken from the law by the effort to pare it down to meet men's failures, and all the sweetness is taken from the grace of God by a system of works which tries to earn His favour.

Rightly understood the holy law of God must ever be a source of terror to unholy man, for under it there is no hope for him at all. It demands righteousness from man, without giving him power to produce it. It exposes and condemns his sins, without providing any way to remove them.

Grace, on the other hand, is the sweetest sound that ever reached the sinner's ears, for it deals not at all with what he is, but with what God is: God, who gave up His Son unto death, and that for the ungodly, Christ who redeemed him from the curse of law by being made a curse, and now the Holy Spirit of God come down to make good in his heart these precious truths and lead him into the enjoyment of all the boundless privileges grace has heaped upon him. There can neither be deliverance nor worship until grace is known and enjoyed.

Next in order we have the case of one who was dead, of one with an incurable disease, of two who were blind, and of one who was dumb. Could any addition be made to this sum of human misery? Could the works of the devil be more manifestly displayed? And all this in the midst of the Lord's own nation of Israel. And, figuratively, it is a picture of Israel; and the mighty works the Lord did in their midst, for individuals, form a type of what He will yet do for the nation, when He sets His hand, in a coming day, to recover and restore His ancient people.

But what we have specially to notice at the close of our chapter is this, that the Pharisees and rulers of the people, after all that they had seen of His works of power, and after all that they had heard of His words of grace, gave it as their considered opinion, "He casteth out devils through the prince of devils" (verse 34).

The King was definitely rejected. The blind men (verse 37) acknowledge Him as "Son of David," and by David's greater Son they are healed: but it was done "in the house" apart from the multitude; and when healed they were charged no longer to proclaim Him as such. His relationship was now no longer that of "Son of David" to the nation, but the wider one of "Son of Man" to the multitudes who were "scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd."

From this standpoint the Lord begins another circuit of Galilee, and in patient grace we find Him going about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. We have before noticed that the expression "Kingdom of Heaven" is found only in Matthew; and only in Matthew do we get "Gospel of the Kingdom," and that thrice repeated (Matt. 4, 9, 24). Here was the cure for all the ills that afflicted Jehovah's land; but, alas! Israel refused the Gospel of the Kingdom then, as sinners to-day refuse the Gospel of Grace. And there never was grace like the grace of Christ. He was moved to compassion by the sight of the fainting multitudes, and He would have His disciples to share the same compassion for the lost as moved His own heart. With this motive they would pray with a sense of the urgency of the need, and this need is as great to-day.

The three short commands, "Pray ye," "Look ye," "Go ye," are intimately connected. Can we truly obey one without obeying all?

Section 5. Matthew 10, 11, 12.

The King's Messengers, the King's Message, and the King Himself Rejected

It is very important to be clear as to the teaching of this section of our Gospel in order rightly to understand the whole. It records the events that lead up to, and introduce the change of dispensations following the rejection of the Messiah.

In the first place the King's messengers go out with the King's message. The nation rejects the messengers and refuse the message. John, the forerunner, is imprisoned. The people that rejected both John and the Lord are likened to children who would respond to the voice neither of mirth nor of mourning. The pride and worldliness of Tyre and Sidon would meet with a less severe judgment than the cities of Galilee which had seen His mighty works. But though rejected by the people and their leaders, yet the weary and heavy-laden would come to Him and find rest; and as the Sabbath was intended to be a sign of a kept law, He exposes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who professed to keep the Sabbath and yet rejected the Lord of the Sabbath. Their only reply to His words of grace and acts of power was to hold a council against Him, how they might destroy Him. Henceforth it was all over with the nation. The new thing was announced according to prophecy. Judgment would go forth to the Gentiles who were outside the scope of Jewish promise, in the darkness of heathendom and the prison-house of the devil. The result would be the "new song to the Lord" and His praise to the ends of the earth (Isa. 42: 1-10). The Pharisees desire a sign, and get two, which showed them, could they only have seen it, that they would be condemned by the faith of those who had both less light and fewer privileges. Jonah did no signs, and Solomon's wisdom was not to be compared with that of Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

But looking a little closer into details we find that Matthew 10 opens with the mission of the twelve. At the close of Matthew 9 they were instructed to pray for labourers to be sent forth, and here we find them being sent forth themselves. The disciples now become apostles — sent ones. Hitherto they had been following with the Lord, as disciples; now they go forth for the Lord, as servants, and the chapter is full of the deepest practical instruction for every servant, now, as well as then.

In the first place we get a list of the names of the twelve, and here only Matthew is called "the publican"; it is as if the writer desired to express his appreciation of the grace that could take up a poor publican and number him among that select company — the Apostles of the Lamb.

The Lord then instructs them as to: —

1 The sphere of their mission.

2 The persons to whom the message was sent,

3 The character of the message, and

4 Its evidences.

It was a purely Jewish mission of Jewish apostles to the Jewish people, and, this being so, neither Samaritan nor Gentile has any part in it.

This should make it clear to all that this mission of the twelve had nothing in common with the present Gospel of the grace of God which goes out to all, world wide, without exception or distinction, consequent upon the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. But here the apostles are instructed to go only to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel." They were as sheep having no shepherd, or even in a worse position still, according to Zech. 11: 5, as a flock of slaughter The nation had reached the period when "their possessors (the Romans) slay them and hold themselves not guilty: and they that sell them (the Herodians) say, 'Blessed be the Lord for I am rich': and their own shepherds (the Pharisees) pity them not." Such was Israel's miserable plight when the Lord Jesus appeared, God come down in grace to deliver, proclaiming as "at hand" that Kingdom which had been so long promised through the prophets. But in spite of all He said, or did, or was, the King — the true Shepherd of Israel — was rejected, and what the prophet Zechariah had foretold now took place. "I took my staff, even Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I might break my covenant which I had made with all the people" (Zech. 11: 10). The whole chapter is of great interest in connection with this portion of our Gospel.

The character of the message and its evidences bear further testimony that it was the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy. That the Kingdom was near was evidenced by the powers of the coming age having been conferred upon, and now to be manifested by, the King's messengers. Four things they were instructed to do: —

Heal the sick.

Cleanse the lepers.

Raise the dead.

Cast out devils (demons).

In short, disease, death, and the devil would yield to the power of Jehovah exercised by His servants, as they will again do in a coming day, when Jehovah is Judge, Lawgiver, and King, and "the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick" (Isa. 33: 24). But to apply such a scripture to the present dispensation only betrays ignorance of the ways of God. The man who bases on this for so-called faith healing is equally bound to raise the dead; and his failure should convince him of his folly.

But their mission would be in no wise accepted by the nation. Indeed, the Lord warned them that they would find themselves as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore their dependence was to be upon God Himself. Their Lord had been persecuted and rejected; so would they be. The Person of Christ, the people of Christ, and the Word of Christ, are three things that the world hates. Satan and the works of Satan it can tolerate; for, alas! the evil heart of man understands them; but, when One came from God with power to deliver, the only answer the world had was "crucify Him." The Master was called Beelzebub, so would the servant be.

It is important to note that this mission is looked upon as continuous, right on "till the Son of Man be come" (verse 24). No doubt it was interrupted at the Cross, and from then until the Church period is over, it will continue to be so. But when the Church is rapt to the glory, Messiah's messengers will again go forth with the Kingdom Gospel, and Messiah Himself will appear to establish His Kingdom in power, as we shall see more fully in Matthew 25.

But in the meantime, and until that day of power, the disciples would be in the place of testimony for a rejected Lord, and therefore hated by the world, and it is beautiful to notice how He fortifies their hearts against the world's opposition. In the first place: —

They were the objects of the Father's care. If that care extended even to the unimportant sparrow, how much more to the confessors of Christ? And so intimately are they known to Him that even the very hairs of their heads were numbered — nothing could really harm them. Again:

Their faithful testimony here would ensure honourable mention in the day of glory. It is one of the ways of God with His children here, that we are often delivered from occupation with present things, by having the light of the future turned upon them. So Paul reckoned that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to be revealed (Rom. 8: 18). For if we suffer, we shall also reign with Him (2 Tim. 2). The Cross-bearer here is going to be Crown-wearer by and by.

But there is further encouragement for them of a different character at the close of the chapter. only one Servant was ever able to go on in a path of unceasing rejection, and that was the Master Himself. He had to say: "I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain; yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God" (Isa. 49: 4). His path, uncheered by earthly smiles, led only to the Cross. But for these servants, if some rejected them, there would be those who would receive their testimony, and the receivers would be blessed of the Father and inherit the Kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world (Chap 25).

We can see clearly, as we study these chapters, how Israel was now on her last trial. In her past history she had turned to idolatry, from the living and true God. Elijah's accusation was a true one when he said: "The children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword." Bitter captivity, as they had been forewarned, had followed fast upon their sin; but grace had again intervened, and a remnant of the nation was once more in Israel's land. Now, it was no more a question of broken laws, neglected altars, or persecuted prophets; but a question as to Messiah Himself. Jehovah — Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us — become, in grace, the Servant, although the very King of Glory. He was in their midst; and, if He was rejected, there only lay before them the last Roman captivity, as foreshadowed by Daniel's devouring "beast" (Dan. 7), Jerusalem's desolation, as foretold by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the Kingdom of God taken from them, and, finally (Messiah having been rejected), the Antichrist would be accepted, and so bring upon the nation the great tribulation, the time of Jacob's trouble, before the Lord returned in power and glory.

The study of this chapter is of the utmost importance, in order rightly to understand the ways of God with men.

Matthew 11 lays bare the springs of evil in the heart of man, that could reject both the grace and power of Messiah, as shown in Matthew 10 by His messengers, and His own gracious ministry (Chap. 11: 1). The wicked king, the "idol shepherd" — Herod — had imprisoned the faithful and fearless Forerunner. In the gloomy dungeon of Macherus, John, brooding alone in his bondage, would seem to have questioned whether, after all, his own mission had not been a failure. Where was the Kingdom he had announced, and what proof was there that the King was really present? Hence the questionings of his spirit found utterance in the inquiry, "Art Thou He?"

The Lord replied to His dying witness by acts of power and words of comfort. When the disciples of John had departed, the Lord praises the devoted constancy of His servant. John was no weakling — no "reed shaken with the wind." King's courts were not familiar places to him, and the smiles and frowns of kings were matters of equal indifference. lie was "more than a prophet," for he was honoured by being the immediate messenger of Jehovah. Himself. But the Lord marks the change of dispensation by announcing that the least in the Kingdom of Heaven, as sons of God, had a nearer relationship than even John — "no greater" servant of woman born. Prophetic testimony had been since Abel downwards: that was now ended, and Messiah Himself was present, of whom all the prophets had spoken: and this fact made the sin of the age — the rejection of Jesus — the greatest it was possible for man to commit. Tyre's worldliness and Sodom's immorality were eclipsed by the unbelief of the cities of Galilee.

Turning from them, the Lord in verses 25-30 reveals the divine purposes and counsels whereby "the babe" (the true disciple) is instructed into the deep things of God. Here our Gospel touches on the main subject developed in the Gospel of John — the revelation of the Father and the Son. The Lord returns, as it were, back to the eternal purposes of God. If the throne of David was denied Him by the nation, all things were given Him by the Father, and He alone could reveal the Father to His own. The ineffable Godhead glory of the Father could only be revealed by the Son. But that He could reveal it, proved His own Personal Deity, for who but God could reveal God? Further, a knowledge of the mystery of the divine Son of God incarnate — His Being and Person — very God, and yet a true Man upon the earth, could be known only by the Father alone.

This One then calls to Himself the weary of every class, and clime, and nation, in order to give them rest. Here only was rest to be found, for He alone could lay the foundation upon which every purpose of God in grace to the world was to be established.

Not only was rest of conscience to be given there was also rest of heart to be found but the last is only promised upon the ground of discipleship. To learn of Him: to be yoked with Him: to be meek and lowly like Him — is there a power in earth or hell that can disturb or distract the soul that has entered, in a practical way, into these sublime and heavenly truths?

In Matthew 12 we find Messiah's messengers an hungered, even in Messiah's land, so thoroughly had their Master been rejected. Walking by the side of the corn-fields, the disciples pluck the ears of corn and eat them, which was allowed by the law (Deut. 23: 25). The Lord then uses the opposition the Pharisees made to this, to show them, both in teaching and practice, that every link with God, for that generation, was now completely severed. What were mere forms of godliness, when the Son of God Himself was despised? In the nation's history, in days gone by, there had been a time analogous to the present. David, the true king, was rejected and fleeing for his life. The people's king, Saul, was on the throne, and God's king was an exile. On the Sabbath day (compare Lev. 24 with 1 Sam. 21) David and his followers did eat of the shewbread, which pertained only to the priests, and were blameless. But what the Pharisees did prove by their opposition was their own inconsistency and guilty rejection of divine power, made manifest before all. And this would ultimately be the cause of their own rejection by God Himself, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

Following upon the next miracle of healing the man with the withered hand — apt picture of Israel who should have been strong for God, and was not — the Holy Spirit directs attention to the true Servant, and His beautiful characteristics as described in Isaiah's glowing page.

1 He was the Chosen One.

2 The Beloved.

3 Filled with the Spirit.

4 The One who would show judgment to the nations.

5 Patient and Tender.

6 Finally Victorious, and

7 The One in whom the Gentiles would trust (Isa. 42).

Henceforth it is no longer a question of blessing to Israel only; the gracious service, in the hands of the Perfect Servant, the "Son of Man," now assumes a wider aspect, and there is final blessing for the whole earth.

In Isaiah 5 the prophet describes what God had done for the nation, and what the nation had failed to be for God. The six "woes," in the same chapter, describe the sad result "because they had cast away the law of the Lord of Hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel" (verse 24). But the True Servant "shall not fail nor be discouraged till he have set judgment in the earth, and the isles shall wait for his law" (Isa. 62: 4).

One other miracle the Lord works about this time, as if to show conclusively His divine authority: There was brought unto Him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and He healed him insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw. We have had blind eyes opened and deaf ears unstopped, but here both together, in one subject, are brought before us as a picture of where the nation now was, led on by their blind guides, refusing either to see or confess their own Messiah in their midst. The people might say, "Is not this the Son of David?" but the foes of Christ charge Him with being the minister of satanic power, and thus commit the sin of sins by blaspheming the Holy Spirit of God.

Even after the Cross, the first martyr, Stephen, had to charge home upon their conscience the same terrible guilt, "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost" (Acts 7: 51).

The Lord goes on to show: —

That Satan did not war against himself.

That the Kingdom of God was among them.

That the "strong man," Satan, had been bound, and

That "his goods," the souls of men, could now be set free.

However, that generation was judged. It was a corrupt tree and could not bring forth good fruit. Being evil, their words were idle and evil, and for every idle word they would come into judgment. Their fathers in the wilderness had spoken against Jehovah in their midst in power, and His anger was kindled. Here Jehovah was in their midst in grace, and as their fathers had done, so did they.

It is remarkable, how that after all the mighty works the Lord had done among them, the Pharisees should still demand a sign, and it is also well to notice that out of the forty-six recorded miracles of our Lord, no less than thirty-three were wrought in Galilee. No further sign would convince them, but the Lord gives them two that would condemn them. Jonah, up from the depth of the sea, type of Christ risen from among the dead, and preached in grace to the Gentiles, was the first. But if Messiah was cut off, what hope for that generation? And the fact that the men of Nineveh received and bowed to the voice of the prophet, while the men of Israel refused the voice of One greater than Jonah, would add tenfold to their condemnation.

The second sign was the attractive power of the wisdom of Solomon for the heart of the Queen of Sheba. The fame of this wisdom (1 Kings 8) produced something in her heart beyond the mere repentance of the Ninevites. It had the effect of bringing her into the presence of the king; and the result was that every desire of her heart was satisfied. How much greater was the One in whose presence they were? The One who had given to Solomon his wisdom, and his riches, and his glory, was in their midst, but they saw no beauty in Him that they should desire Him.

And then the Lord passes to the end, and with sad and solemn words, in parabolic language, describes the present and future history of the nation.

Of all the various forms of evil with which Satan has sought to lead men from God, no form seems to have been so successful as idolatry. We do not know that it was in the world before the flood. Then the devil wrought through the unbridled passions of men, left to the freedom of their own lusts. When the sword of justice was put into the hands of Noah and his sons, restraint was put upon physical violence, but moral evil thereupon blossomed unchecked. Because men did not like to retain the knowledge of the true God, and because they must have a god of some kind, at the instigation of Satan, they made gods for themselves, and attributed to these idols all the evil passions that filled their own hearts. Soon idolatry had filled the whole known world; and God, in electing grace, had to call Abram entirely out of his father's house, in order to become the "father of the faithful." Yet how successfully the "unclean spirit" carried on his operations, even amidst the chosen seed, may be seen when we find idolatry tacitly allowed even in Jacob's household, in the wilderness openly indulged in, and publicly provided for under the reign of Israel's wisest king, until God, through His prophet, had to warn, in the days of Manasseh, what the result would be. And very soon afterwards Jerusalem was "wiped as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down" (2 Kings 21: 13).

From that day till the present moment idolatry has been unknown among the Jews. The "unclean spirit" went out, and the house was left empty, swept, and garnished. It was not that evil under other forms was not among them, but idolatry was not there. Nevertheless, the Lord says that in a coming day, a sevenfold spirit of evil — idolatry and worse — will take possession of the guilty generation. Man himself will usurp the place of God, and demand and receive that adoration and worship which is only due to God alone. Both "the beast" and his "image" will be worshipped, and that by men and by a nation of the highest intelligence upon the face of the earth. There is no form of evil that men, in spite of all their boasted civilisation, will not indulge in, if left to the control of Satan and the desire of their own wicked hearts.

But when man has reached his lowest, God comes in, and He will take a hand in the affairs of Israel, and of the earth, in judgment, and "destroy the men who destroy the earth" (Rev. 11: 18).

This chapter should be studied in connection with that beautiful section of Isaiah 49 — 53. In Isa. 48 Israel, who should have been the servant of Jehovah, is charged with obstinacy and treacherous dealing, and formally set aside. In Isa. 49 the True Servant is announced, and after His mission to Israel, He has to say, "I have laboured in vain, and spent my strength for nought and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God. . . . And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my Servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the ends of the earth" (verses 4-6). There would then be blessing, not for Israel only, but for all nations. This was now beginning to be fulfilled, but the Cross had to come in before there could be blessing for any.

Isaiah 50 deals with the Blessed One upon the earth: His life of obedience to God and suffering at the hands of men. "The Lord God hath opened mine ear and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back. I gave my back to the smiter, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair. I hid not my face from shame and spitting" (verses 5, 6). In Isaiah 51 the day of redemption has come, and there is a threefold call to the remnant to "hearken," and the promise that the days of mourning are ended and those of joy and gladness begun. The cup of trembling is taken out of her hands, and Jerusalem is exhorted (Isa. 52) to awake and put on her beautiful garments. Then Jehovah turns (Isa. 53) to contemplate His perfect Servant, upon the earth, in all His wonderful pathway of dependence and devotedness to the will of God: of rejection and suffering at the hands of men.

But there was still a deeper depth. Expiation, atonement, and propitiation could only be through blood-shedding and death, and He became obedient unto death, "wherefore God also hath highly exalted him" (Phil. 2). His work is above every work: His name above every name.

As one result of that work, Israel's blessing is secured upon the ground of sovereign grace, and, in the bright millennial day (Isa . 54), she is invited to break forth into singing. She is no longer Lo-Ami (not my people), but her Maker is her husband, the Lord of Hosts is His name.

It seems hardly necessary to add that the prophet, after describing "the sufferings of Christ," goes on to describe "the glory that should follow." He necessarily passes over the Church, which was a mystery then hid in the counsels of God, but to be revealed after the Lord had taken His seat on high.

But all this was consequent upon the rejection of the Messiah, and coming back again to the close of Matthew 12, we find (verse 46) that the Lord now, in figure, breaks the last earthly link with Israel after the flesh. Everything of the old economy was over. The Jews might boast of having Abraham for their father, being Moses' disciples, having the law, and the prophets but prophets, priesthood, law, or kingdom was now of no account before God. The abuse of these privileges only rendered their guilt the deeper. In short, this chapter brings us to the close of the moral history of the nation.

But new relationships of a spiritual character were about to begin, and these would be manifested by: —

1 Following Christ.

2 Hearing the Word of God.

3 Doing the Father's will.

Section 6. Matthew 13.

The Outward and Inward Aspects of the Kingdom in the Absence of the King

The Bible is a book in two parts. The Old Testament has to do with the earth. It is the mind of Heaven revealed to man upon the earth to fit him for the earth.

But man closed his ears to the voice of God, disobeyed the divine will, and made himself unfit for the earth in which God had placed him. Eden and innocence were lost by Adam. Canaan and liberty were lost by Israel. Happiness and holiness have been lost by all because of sin and disobedience.

Hence the New Testament has to do with heaven. It reveals the mind of God as to how men, who had made themselves unfit for the earth, might be made fit for heaven itself through the Gospel.

The portion of our Gospel which we have so far been considering has had to do with Israel, still dealt with on the ground of responsibility. Messiah was presented for their acceptance or rejection, as men upon the earth; and, as we have seen, He had been rejected. Accordingly, at the close of Matthew 12, the Lord announces new terms of relationship — even that which was of a spiritual character. "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother," and the same day He went out of the house and sat by the seaside.

Then follows the most remarkable series of parables given in any of the Gospels. Their number — seven — is in itself suggestive. We meet first with this number in Scripture in Genesis 2, where the seventh day is called the "Sabbath" from a root meaning to be "full," "satisfied," or "perfected." So God rested on the seventh day. His work was perfected. Nothing could be added to it.

These seven parables then set forth in symbolic language, systematic order, and historical sequence the moral characteristics of: —

The origin,

Outward progress,

Declension, and

Consummation

of the Kingdom of Heaven as seen in the hands of men. At the same time, they also disclose the true inward and hidden aspect of that Kingdom in mystery, God's husbandry, God's building — against which neither the wickedness of men, the assaults of Satan, or the powers of hell can prevail.

Thus we see unfolded before us: —

1 What Christ does.

2 What Satan does, and

3 What men do.

Parable 1

The object of the opening parable is to show: —

1 The way in which the Word of the Kingdom is introduced.

2 The hindrances it encounters, and

3 The results it achieves.

The sower is the Lord Himself. He is no longer seeking fruit from Israel, but He is beginning in the world at large a new work of grace, which, like the good seed, will reproduce itself.

But, as there were obstacles in the way of the seed, so there are hindrances to the operations of grace.

The devil, the world, and the flesh oppose: —

1 Some of the seed fell "by the wayside." Here we have pictured that condition of heart which is, alas, but too common wherever the Gospel is proclaimed. There are hearts so careless and indifferent that they fail to see either their danger in rejecting the Gospel, or their blessing in receiving it. And in addition to this there is the enemy without who is ever ready to take advantage of the condition within. He catcheth away the word. These are the Hard-Hearted.

2 Again, some of the seed fell upon stony places where there was not much depth of earth. Two things are said of these. They had no depth of earth, hence no root, and when the sun was up they withered away.

In His interpretation (verse 20) the Lord says of these here represented that they received the word with joy, but when persecution arose they were offended (stumbled). Joy, though a very important part of Christian experience, is not usually the first result of the Spirit's work in the soul. If the conscience be ploughed up there will be deep exercise as to sin, and joy will only come when the sin question is settled. Hence we gather that there was, on the part of those spoken of here, no real knowledge of either sin, self, or grace, and so no ability to continue when persecution arose for the Word's sake. In short, they are the Faint-Hearted.

3 "And some fell among thorns." Here the ground is already occupied with something else, and something also which is indigenous to the soil. The thorns were there before the seed fell amongst them. So much so that Matthew takes no account of the apparent growth of the seed at all — only of the thorns, and Luke notices it only to show that the flourishing condition of the thorns choked the seed.

The Lord shows here the utter impossibility of producing fruit for God while the heart is occupied with the world, and in Luke the whole circle of worldly influences is represented its cares, its riches, or its pleasures. The three combined, or any one of them, may so fill the heart that the Word of God, though falling on the ear, and even being tacitly consented to by the mind, may yet produce no saving faith in the soul or fruit in the life, because there is no purpose of heart for God and no break with the world.

These may be classed as the Half-Hearted.

Yet, in spite of all the opposition of the devil, the flesh, and the world, the Word accomplishes the most remarkable results.

4 Some fell on good ground and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold. Is the difference to be accounted for on the ground of fidelity or opportunity? The Lord does not here take up the question, but other scriptures show that both will be taken into consideration in the great Day of Rewards.

But the disciples understood none of these things until the Lord opened out the meaning before them. To disciples it had been given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom; and the Lord's interpretation of the "sower" and of the "tares in the field" would, no doubt, instruct them in the meaning of all parables.

Broadly speaking, the results of the sowing are such as follow the preaching of the Gospel in all ages and among all nations. Some are "good ground" hearers, and produce good fruit. Many, alas! are careless, and whether the hindrance be the devil, the world, or the flesh, they bring no fruit to perfection.

Parable 2

But in the next parable we have a further development of the history of the Kingdom, as committed to the hands of man, and four things follow: —

1 There is carelessness on the part of those who should have been watchers.

2 The enemy no longer "catches away" that which was sown. He adopts a new plan, and sows tares among the wheat.

3 The servants get instructions for their guidance under the new conditions, and

4 The Lord shows what is in store for both "wheat" and "tares" at the end of the age.

The Book of Acts reveals to us how very early in the history of the Church Satan began his operations of introducing the "children of the wicked one" among the "children of the Kingdom." And though faithfulness on the part of Peter was able to detect and expose Simon Magus (Acts 8: 21), yet such godly care and watchfulness soon, alas! disappeared, and evil men crept in unawares, just as the Lord here foretold.

The servants, however, in the parable were prompt to appraise the evil at its true value when it showed itself, and they seek instructions from the Lord for wisdom to deal with it. And here we must note carefully the Lord's interpretation of the parable to understand rightly the force of the instructions He gives them.

The field is the world — the kosmos. Here the word "world" indicates the sphere where the Word of God goes forth. In verses 39, 40 it indicates the space of time allowed for its dissemination. It is no longer a question of the land of Israel and a testimony to Messiah inside, with no appeal to Samaritan or Gentile outside of it, but the scope of the operations of grace will be world-wide, and the Kingdom of Heaven will be open to all without exception or distinction.

The good seed are the children of the Kingdom. There is here a historical as well as a moral development. It is not a question of seed to reproduce itself as the result of a sowing, but it deals with what has been produced and is now in evidence in "the field." The "children of the Kingdom" are there, as was to be expected. But there are also the "children of the wicked one," wholly unexpected on the part of the servants who knew not the forces of evil at work, though unseen by men. It is the beginning of the "mystery of iniquity." Of those who bear the name of Christ, but have not the Spirit of Christ — unconverted and unregenerate, yet in the field of Christian profession, the Lord says, with solemn emphasis, that they are the "children of the wicked one."

The servants have a suggested cure for these unexpected conditions, but the Lord shows them that their method is not the divine way. Penal judgment in divine things is never committed into the hands of men. The "tares" are in the Kingdom, and are to be allowed there until the "harvest." Evil men are not to be put out of the Kingdom, which could only be done by putting them to death.

Rome, interpreting "the field" to be "the Church," though in plain contradiction to the scripture, and which it is not, has endeavoured to root out those whom she branded as "tares," and thereby made herself responsible for the blood of fifty millions of the saints of God. Protestantism has gone to the opposite extreme, and with a spirit of latitudinarianism utterly regardless of the claims of Christ or the holiness of the House of God, has allowed all kinds of men and many forms of evil doctrine to enter the professing Church, arguing that as there were "tares" in the "field," so there would be the unconverted in the Church — a right premise, but an utterly wrong conclusion.

How important it is to divide rightly the word of truth (2 Tim. 2: 15).

Continuing His instructions the Lord unmasks the cause of this condition of things: —

The enemy that sowed them is the devil. For reasons beyond our ken, Satan is allowed to carry out his plans to the apparent disorganising of the plans of God. It was so at Eden, and his apparent success ended in man's expulsion from the paradise of God. In the post-diluvian world, although the original curse was partly removed and violence was no longer allowed to fill the earth to the same extent as before the flood, yet Satan was ready with something else to take its place, and mankind in the mass very soon became wholly given up to idolatry. No sooner was Abraham called out from his own country to be a stranger in the land of Canaan, than we see the wiles of the enemy under another form, and the son of the bondwoman is foisted into the place of the true seed. Foiled again in this, we trace the workings of the old serpent in the hatred of the ten brethren against Joseph, the uprisings against Moses, the grievous departure from God when in the land, the revolt of the ten tribes from the house of David, and the rapid declension of both kings and people from the ways of God, until He removed both Judah and Israel out of their own land because "they mocked the messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against his people till there was no remedy" (2 Chron. 36: 16).

When Israel, for the time, is set aside, and the Kingdom of Heaven introduced, the enemy, alert in evil as ever, is ready with an imitation of that which is real. But the Lord brings the light of the future to illumine what is dark in the present, and He tells His disciples that the enemy's success is only for a time. Both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest, but at the harvest — the end of the age everything will come out in its true colours It cannot be too often repeated that it is not the end of the world that is in view here, but a definite moment in the dealings of God with this world, and from other scriptures we learn that that time will be just before the setting up of the Millennial Kingdom. It must be carefully distinguished both from the coming of the Lord for His people (1 Thess. 4), which takes place shortly before this, and also from the Judgment of the Great White Throne (Rev. 20), which does not take place until a thousand years afterwards.

When the Lord comes for His people it is a question of the righteous being taken out from among the wicked.

Here it is a question of the wicked being taken out from among the righteous.

At the Judgment of the Great White Throne, there is no separation at all, for all alike have died in sin, been buried in sin, and, raised again unrepentant and unforgiven, are alike cast into the lake of fire — solemn thought!

But here the Lord takes the character of Son of Man, and as such He deals with the earth. He will come to deliver the faithful, judge the ungodly, purge the earth, fulfil to the suffering ones of Israel every promise of Matthew 5, and introduce the long promised Kingdom in power, and in glory, and in universal blessing according to Isaiah 60 and Zechariah 14.

Further, this scripture tells us how this will be done: —

The Reapers are the Angels. — There will be angelic ministry in that day, such as heretofore the world has only had glimpses of. Under the old economy the angels were, if we might so say, in the place of rule (Gal. 3: 19). In the present day of grace they are seen in the place of lowly service to the children of the Kingdom (Heb. 1: 14). But in the coming day will be seen the angels of His power as the executors of the judgment of God upon evil, and evil men.

Just as the husbandman gathers together the useless tares, and binds them in bundles with the ultimate object of their destruction, so evil men will be found at the close of this age banded together against the Lord and against His people, and as such their confederacies will be dealt with by the Lord. Their solemn end is the furnace of fire, where there is "wailing and gnashing of teeth."

Then will be seen the final triumph of the ways of God, and the crushing failure of all the wiles of the devil. The wickedness of men, the malice of Satan, and the fruits of sin will all be fully exposed, righteously judged, and eternally punished.

The triumph of the Lord Jesus Christ over all authority and power will be manifested.

The righteousness of God will be vindicated.

The redeemed will be brought into all the blessings of the New Covenant of Grace (Ezek. 36), and Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.

Parable 3

Parable 3 (verses 31, 32) brings out a further development of world principles in the outward aspect of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Not only would there be a mingling of wheat and tares — of mere professors with the children of the Kingdom — but here we are given to see that that which began as a small thing in the earth, and was to be heavenly in its character, as it was in its origin, would become a great "tree in the earth" — ever a symbol of world power — under whose branches the "birds of the air" — servants of the wicked one — would find a lodgment. It is what corresponds to the Pergamos period of the history of the Church (Rev. 2: 12), and historically would doubtless begin with the Empire of Constantine the Great, A.D. 312. When Christianity ceased to be the persecuted, despised, and down-trodden confession of the few, but, embraced by the Emperor of the Roman world, received world-wide patronage and protection one, among many, of the evil results was that the way to become powerful in the world was to become great in the Church. Immediately "grievous wolves" (Acts 20: 29) entered in, not sparing the flock. The professing Church became a great world power. It was no longer thought necessary for the bishops to fulfil the conditions of 1 Timothy 3. They would much rather sit on "thrones" drawing ample revenues, dispensing the "patronage of the Church" to their own advantage, and, alas! sometimes be found eating and drinking with the drunken (Chap. 24). This is no exaggerated picture, as every student of. Church history will admit. Take either the earlier times or the later. Perhaps it was more marked in the fourth century because it was a new thing. Up till that period, to be an outstanding man in the Church was to be a mark for the shafts of persecution. After Constantine, it became a position to be coveted by the man of the world, for it brought with it money and fame and worldly influence.

In short, the Kingdom of Heaven in the history of its administration by the hands of men, became a great world power, affording lodgment for much that was evil (the "birds of the air") instead of maintaining its heavenly character of separation from the world, holiness before men, and lowliness before God.

Parable 4

The next parable lays bare the inward principles which were at work, unseen, but pregnant with power, and that, alas! a power for evil.

It begins in the Thyatiran period when the "Woman Jezebel" (Rev. 2) is allowed to teach and seduce and, historically, it will have its complete fulfilment in Babylon (Rev. 17) when that which is merely hypocrisy and false profession will have passed beyond the Laodicean stage and become wholly satanic and abominable — the leaven hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.

There is a certain definite area supposed in the "three measures" inside of which the "leaven" works. Leaven being everywhere else in Scripture a type of that which is evil, we must so expect to find it here, and only thus can we have an orderly and progressive setting forth of the subject dealt with.

Just as former parables have shown the "children of the wicked one" in the Kingdom, so here we have shown to us that which fills their hearts. They are those "who receive not the love of the truth" (2 Thess. 2: 12). "They will not endure sound doctrine" but "shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned to fables" (2 Tim. 4: 12). They are men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith (2 Tim. 3: 8). Let anyone but look round to-day and he will see how rapidly things in Christendom are hastening to the above consummation.

Think of some only of the great and rapidly increasing cults of evil doctrine in our midst to-day, such as Spiritism, Eddyism, Russellism, and many others. Then consider that these rapidly growing organisations are being recruited from the ranks of those who once made a profession of Christianity but are now apostate therefrom.

Then, in the various so-called "orthodox" denominations, see the indifference of many, and the opposition of some to the very cardinal doctrines of Christian truth. For example, take the Inspiration of Scripture. How loosely men talk and write of the "mistakes" of Moses, the "contradictions" of the Synoptists, or the "errors" in the later Scriptures, "understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm" (1 Tim. 1: 7). They have not hesitated to bring their irreverent and unregenerate minds to pry into the sacred mystery of the Son of God come down in grace; and teachings are received without protest, derogatory alike to His Holy Person, His finished work, and His divine glory.

These are but illustrations of the corrupting form of the leaven at work at the present moment in that which bears the name of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Here, then, in these three parables we have set forth a developing and an increasing growth of evil, both externally and internally, in that which professes to represent the rule of heaven upon the earth. At the beginning, a few tares among the wheat, at which the servants are surprised. Then a great tree instead of a lowly mustard plant. And, again, a leavening process by the evil doctrines of men, instead of the truth as "the truth is in Jesus" (Eph. 4: 21). And at this stage, these things are accepted as matters of course. There is apparently no one now so much in the mind of the Master as to inquire: "Didst thou not sow good seed in thy field?"

In view of these startling and wholly unexpected (on their part) developments, well might the disciples say, "Declare unto us the parable of the tares in the field."

Verse 36 begins the second section of the chapter. In the house the Lord expounds the parable to His disciples. As we have seen, the just judgment of God will clear the ground for the reign of righteousness to begin, and the wicked will no longer be allowed to remain in the Kingdom, or even on the earth. They will be cast — solemn thought — into a furnace of fire. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.

Parable 5

The next two parables are of special interest. The action of the narrative is no longer occupied with the development of events within the Kingdom either for good or for evil. It is no question of what men may either do or teach; but the mind and heart are centred upon the ONE who, in wonderful condescension and marvellous grace, became the Finder of the treasure and the Seeker of the pearl. As we get occupied with Him, we feel at once that we are in a different atmosphere. We no longer stand, as it were, on the plains of Moab, contemplating Israel as a "stiff-necked people" (Num. 22), but We are beside the prophet on the "high places." It is no longer what the people are for God, but what God is for His people, and in spite of all Israel had been He could say, He had not "beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel" (Num. 23: 21). In the very beginning, or ever the earth was, that Blessed One could say, "My delights were with the sons of men" (Prov. 8: 31). In grace, and with satisfaction He views His people as grace will ultimately make them. His earthly people, redeemed Israel upon the earth: His heavenly people, a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.

The Kingdom in the hands of men had been shown to be mingled with that which is unreal, united to that which is earthly, and permeated with that which is evil. As such, all that was false and unreal was fast hastening on to judgment. It was necessary that the disciples should now see what was real and true, amidst all the confusion. To them it was given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Let us note here that the character of the figures is now changed. It is no longer, as at the introduction, "good seed" that could reproduce itself. Nor is it a "sowing" where darnel might be mingled with the wheat. Much less is it that which might become contaminated with evil men or evil influences externally as in the "mustard seed," or corrupted by false and satanic doctrines internally as in the "three measures of meal." But here we have a definite precious deposit of intrinsic excellence, and which, though hid in the earth, could not be defiled by the earth.

The figures are few and simple, and other Scriptures accurately guide us in the interpretation.

The field is the world. The Finder of the treasure and the Purchaser of the field is the Lord Himself. No other interpretation is possible. Who but He could purchase such a field? Who but He had anything to "sell" at all commensurate with the value of the object to be acquired, for in the field there was a treasure for which possession of the field was sought, and which was of infinitely greater value than the field itself.

In Exodus 19, in that wonderful personal interview between Jehovah and His servant Moses, He could say, "If ye will obey my voice . . . ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me, above all people that are in the earth." Now we know that Israel did not obey that voice; but where Israel failed, grace triumphed on the ground of redemption; and we have already seen what God could say of His people in the plains of Moab, even when Satan had them, as he thought, at a disadvantage. How much more will this be evident when Psalm 135

"The Lord hath chosen Jacob for Himself,

And Israel for His peculiar treasure.

Blessed be the Lord out of Zion

Which dwelleth at Jerusalem,

Praise ye the Lord."

But before all, or any, of this could be accomplished, He, the gracious Finder of the treasure, had to buy the "field" itself at the cost of all He had.

There is, however, a wider application. There can be no blessing for either the earth, Israel, or the Church, apart from the death of Christ, and just here comes in one of the special points of this parable. The Lord Jesus by His death has purchased all mankind. This truth is of world-wide application, and on this ground His messengers can go forth and proclaim an accomplished work on the ground of which men are besought to be reconciled to God.

The world to-day is still ruled over by the usurper Satan, and men love to have it so. The Lord when on earth spoke of the devil as the "prince of this world," and after the Lord had been rejected and crucified, Scripture calls Satan the "god of this world." In other words, men are willing to accept from Satan both their rule and their religion, hut it will not always be so. There is the earthly side as well as the heavenly side of the Kingdom. The earth, already purchased, will in that day be redeemed, and suitably prepared for the dwelling-place of saved Israel, under the New Covenant, and the nations who inhabit the millennial earth, for there shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.

Parable 6

But a further figure is required to set forth the unity and the beauty of those who compose the heavenly side of the Kingdom. This is found in the "One pearl of great price." And remark here that, in the previous parable, the finder of the treasure bought the field that contained it. But here the merchantman seeks to secure the pearl only. There is no question of its surroundings. The pearl is taken out entirely from the place in which it was, in order that it may become wholly the delight of the heart of the finder. The parable without doubt marks the special place which the assembly occupies in the counsels of God and in the mind of Christ.

It is impossible to overlook this, and almost impossible to overestimate it. There are four remarkable ways in which the saints of this dispensation are looked at in the New Testament.

If it is a question of relationship, they are called "children of God" (1 John 3: 1).

If it is a question of responsibility for God upon the earth, they are looked at as the "House of God" (1 Tim. 3: 15),

If it is a question of nearness and unity, they are spoken of as the "body of Christ" (1 Cor. 12: 12).

If it is a question of their affection and of their participation in His glory in the day of display, when all the ways of God in grace with men will be manifested, then the company of redeemed ones are brought before us under the striking figure of the "Bride of Christ" (Rev. 19: 7-9).

These are four different aspects of the assembly of God, but all setting forth in a remarkable way the place of nearness, relationship, and affection which the Church occupies. Here it is a question of its unity and beauty, hence the figure of ONE pearl of great price — loved, sought, and purchased. "Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish" (Eph. 5: 26-27). "To her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen clean and white" (Rev. 19: 8).

May there be the practical answer in the life and walk of every redeemed one, to that position of wondrous blessing in which grace has placed us, and in which in the day of glory we shall be displayed. We may well adore the grace that sought, the love that suffered, and the power that triumphed over all the forces of sin, death, and Satan: and the day is fast approaching when the full results of His mighty work will be manifested before the universe; and, at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow to the glory of God the Father.

Parable 7

Still another similitude was needed to show the disciples the course of events at the close of that mysterious dispensation of the Kingdom of Heaven in the absence of the King, and this the Lord furnishes under the figure of the draw-net cast into the sea, and gathering of every kind. And in order to grasp the point of this, the closing parable, we need to keep in mind what has gone before.

At the beginning we see the Son of Man coming forth as the Sower. The results of the sowing are then given, and the general effects in the hearts of men. Next, the enemy is seen at work introducing the tares among the wheat; and this knowledge becomes a guide to the servants under the new and unexpected conditions. The next two parables give the developments of the foregoing conditions — evil men and evil teachings waxing worse and worse. But following these, Parables 5 and 6 show that which is hidden and real and that which the Lord's heart is set upon; whether the saved remnant of His ancient people under the new covenant, or the Church which is His Body — both are before Him — and every event in His dealings with men and nations is leading up to a complete fulfilment of all the irrevocable counsels of God on their behalf.

But there is still the question of the nations of the earth: manifestly the Kingdom of Heaven in its widest sense must include Israel, the Church, and the saved nations of the millennial earth. What events will lead up to, and what will ultimately determine the final separation of the "good" from the "bad"? This the Lord sets before us in His closing parable. And note here that, although there is a close similarity between this parable and that of the "tares," there is by no means a repetition. There the point and object of the teaching is, as already remarked, instruction for the servants for present need, in the light of the future, in what was to them an unexpected condition of things in the absence of the King. Here it is the grand results of the operations of grace, and the final assignment of every one to his own place, either in the Kingdom of Heaven, or — solemn thought — in the furnace of fire.

The figures employed are few and simple, but divinely expressive: —

A draw-net.

Cast into the sea.

"Every kind" gathered within its sweep.

When full, drawn to shore.

A sorting process, and

A separation.

The figure employed is of a net of the largest kind known or used by fishers. Where suitable circumstances permit, it may be as much as half a mile in length. Hence in its immense sweep it "gathers of every kind" — that is, of every species.

When, then, is the net cast, and of what is it a figure? Are we not reminded by it of Mark 1: 1 "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God," and also of verse 37 of our chapter, "He that sowed the good seed is the Son of Man." But while the casting of the net would seem to synchronise with the beginning of the Gospel, yet the net itself is of wider application than the Gospel as we understand it. May it not correspond to all the dealings of God with men from the time the Kingdom began to be preached until the time when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and before Him are gathered all nations. Cast into the "sea" (of the nations) would seem to indicate the worldwide scope of its operations. No longer Israel only, or even professing Christendom, but every nation under Heaven to whom, in a future day, the Gospel of the Kingdom will be announced. Thus, from first to last it may well be said to gather of every kind. It is evident that the "servants" do not draw the net. It is drawn when "full," and it is equally evident that it is not "full" yet, else the gospel day would be over indeed. The ending of this solemn scripture is given more fully in Matthew 25. It is the sessional judgment of the Son of Man. They "sat down," conveys the thought of orderly and deliberative selection. The "good" gathered into vessels. The "bad" cast out of the net. It is the final sorting out of those who had heretofore been going on together; alike perhaps in profession, but unlike in reality; and only the Lord Himself had omniscience and authority to decide.

Just as the Jew, according to the Mosaic law, (Lev. 11: 9) separated the contents of his net, the "clean" from the "unclean," so, the Lord says, will it be at the end of this age. And this will be done by angelic ministry (verse 41). The wicked are cast into the furnace of fire. The righteous are safely preserved for the Kingdom, and they enter into all the blessings that accompany and follow the introduction of the reign of righteousness over the whole earth in the day of Messiah's glory.

What a wonderful unveiling of divine counsels these seven parables present. Fortified with this knowledge of the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, the believer can calmly survey all the varied phases which the great "harvest field" may present. He rests assured that, however contradictory things may appear, yet in spite of all the wickedness of evil men and all the opposition of Satan, God will assuredly bring to perfection every purpose of His counsels for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

How far the disciples "understood all these things" we do not know, but we may rest assured that when the Holy Spirit came down He would bring all things to their remembrance and guide them into all truth.

They already had information, in all its full and varied details, in the Old Testament Scriptures, as to the glories of the Kingdom, and what it would be in the day of its display. That which was "new," as to the Kingdom in the absence of the King, He had now taught them. They were to regard such knowledge as a precious thing to be "treasured," and "brought out" when occasion required. Just as an householder becomes a dispenser of good things to his guests, so were disciples to be in a world that knew not the grace of Christ.

Section 7. Matthew 14, 15.

Man's King and Man's Character Contrasted with God's King

The Holy Spirit in Matthew's Gospel delights to group events in, what we might call, a moral order, instead of a strictly historical order, and the result is that we get striking contrasts between the ways of God and the ways of men which we might otherwise overlook. It is so in the two chapters now before us.

But to go back for a moment to the last section, not the least remarkable thing in that remarkable chapter is that everything is viewed as in the absence of the King. But why was He absent? Departure from God and blindness of heart led the nation and its rulers to reject their King come in grace and power, as witnessed by His mighty works. And not only so, but the close of the chapter shows Him as the prophet of God despised and rejected in His own country. They might own His wisdom and His works of power. These they could not gainsay. But unbelief prevented them from sharing the blessings grace was willing to impart. Could unbelief go further than to see in Him only the "Carpenter's Son"? Nicodemus long before, with perhaps fewer opportunities of judging, had seen in Him "a teacher come from God," and owned that God was with Him. Of His own countrymen, it is said, "they were offended (stumbled) at him."

Now, at this point (Chap. 14) the Spirit turns back to recall events which had taken place previously, that is the circumstances connected with the murder of John, and to set before us THE Two KINGS.

CHRIST, in His compassion, power, and grace.

Herod, in his cruelty, lust, and pride.

In Matthew 15 we get the two hearts. The heart of man with its seven streams of incurable evil, and the heart of Christ yearning to bless, whether it be the poor of the flock in the land or one poor Gentile at the utmost borders of Israel.

In Matthew 14, then, we get in a short historical setting a vivid description of the moral corruption of things in Israel's land. Shortly, the case was this. Herod Antipas was a son of Herod, miscalled "the Great," of Matthew 2. He was the wicked son of a wicked father. At the death of Herod I. the kingdom was divided by the Romans, and Herod Antipas became "tetrarch" of Galilee, with the courtesy title of "king." He married a daughter of Aretas, King of Arabia, but afterwards made guilty overtures to Herodias, his brother Herod Philip's wife. Nothing loth, the profligate wanton responded, and the two were living in open sin.

The righteous reproof of the fearless prophet rankled in the revengeful heart of the wicked woman, and, when the opportunity arose, she was ready to embrace it, in order to satiate her hatred. Herod, in spite of his conscience, became a pliant tool in her guilty hands.

Herodias' daughter danced, and John the Baptist died.

Let a man but start on the downward road, and the devil is never at a loss for some one to put a hand on his back to push him on. So it was with Herod, and in such a setting Israel's ruler is shown to us. An oppressor, an adulterer, a proud boaster, and a murderer; and yet the king. It reveals how the very foundations of virtue were gone, and utter moral and spiritual corruption ruled in the kingdom of men. What marked Herod's dance, and every similar dance since, was the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life; and the end of these things is death.

Herod's case is a warning to all of the danger of trifling with the voice of conscience. Led on by the wiles of the devil, the hardening process grows apace, and a man soon finds himself performing actions, which a short time before he would have shrunk from with horror. Hazael, when warned by the prophet Elisha, could say, "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this great thing?" (2 Kings 8: 13). Yet the very next day ambition led him to take the first guilty step in his downward career by murdering his master.

At the beginning of John's ministry we read that "Herod was the friend of John and kept him safe" (Mark 5: 20, R.V.). He believed John to be "a just man and a holy," and this made his own actions all the worse, for they were done in the face of light. But it is one thing to give an outward assent to truth, while continuing in the practice of sin: it is another thing to have truth in the inward parts, changing both life and actions. The latter Herod never knew. He loved his sins. John's stern reproof was his last warning. Henceforth he became "that fox," and it was the Lord Himself who so entitled him (Luke 12: 32).

In his short history we see man in sin and under the power of it. Man in his folly rejecting the last warning of the prophet of righteousness. Possibly John was the only man with sufficient moral courage to point out to Herod "all the evils which he had done" (Luke 11: 19). Then, again, the moral weakness of the man comes out in his "fear of those that sat at meat with him." In short, Herod was what every man is by nature, afraid, before his ungodly companions, to do the right, but not ashamed to do the wrong.

What a remarkable contrast comes out in the man sent from God whose name was John.

His ministry was short, his message was short, his life was short; and there is little said about his history, but that little brings out in a wonderful way the lovely character of the Forerunner.

How beautiful is his humility! "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness" (John 1: 23). "The latchet of His shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose" (Mark 1: 7).

How great is his faithfulness! "Think not to say within yourselves we have Abraham for our father" (Matt. 3: 8).

How absolute is his separation from the guilty nation and its more guilty leaders! "He came baptizing in the wilderness" (Mark 1: 4).

How unflinching is his courage! and how tender his compassion for the poor and needy (Luke 3: 11).

In every aspect of his character we see reflected some of the many beautiful traits which came out in perfection in his blessed Master. The Lord could say of him that he was "a burning and a shining light"; that "among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist" (Luke 7: 28). But immediately after describing the elevated and outstanding position filled by the great Forerunner, the Lord adds the remarkable words, "He that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he."

John was rejected and slain. His Master was about to be treated in the same way, but the result of the Lord's atoning death would be to introduce a new order of things in Christianity, founded upon redemption and the purgation of sins, wherein would be manifested greater grace, fuller privilege, and more intimate nearness to God than ever could be known under the old economy of which John formed the last — if the greatest — prophet.

Everything in Judaism spoke of an unrent veil, and therefore of distance from God. Everything in the Kingdom of God is founded upon accomplished redemption. The VEIL is rent, and we have liberty to draw near. Yea, more, we are privileged to dwell where He dwelleth. Many believers, alas! are ignorant of this, and therefore they neither have settled peace in their hearts, nor yet can their lives present a consistent testimony.

By comparing Mark 6, Luke 9, and our present Scripture, we find that the mission of the twelve, sent forth in Matthew 10, expired about this time, and they returned to tell the Lord "all things both what they had done and what they had taught." John's disciples just about the same time come to Jesus also. These brave men for it requires courage to take sides with an apparently defeated man had boldly gone into Herod's dungeon to recover the outraged body of their martyred master, and with hearts full of grief had piously performed the last rites for the one they loved.

Now they come and tell Jesus.

Christ's disciples come to Him with their mission of success.

John's disciples come to him with their mission of sorrow.

There is a precious lesson here for disciples still. Whether it be success in service or sorrow in life, He is the One to confide in, and by so doing we shall find rest unto our souls. May we daily practice it till the changing scenes below end in the unchanging bliss of His presence on high.

The Lord's answer was to take them apart with Himself into a desert place near the city of Bethsaida on the shores of the lake. Doubtless the object was to seek opportunity in this seclusion for more intimate counsel and instruction for the disciples. But in any case the privacy was soon invaded by the multitude, who, at least, believed in His power, and were in earnest to secure blessing, for they brought their sick to His presence.

"And Jesus, moved with compassion" — nothing can exceed the beauty of this and what immediately follows. The Lord had just heard of, and doubtless sorrowed over, the death of John. At Nazareth, at the outset of His ministry, He had been met with open violence (Luke 4). On His recent visit to His own city of Capernaum He had been treated with rude contempt, yet nothing could stay the outflow of heavenly grace. He had compassion on the multitudes and healed their sick. It was the perfect contrast to Herod slaying the prophet.

And not only is His grace brought in in contrast to Herod's cruelty, but in the next few verses it is contrasted with the disciples' helplessness in the face of the needs of the multitude. It was not only that the disciples could not meet that need, but they could not even trust the Lord to do so. "Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?" He said to Philip, "and this he said to prove him, for he himself knew what he would do" (John 6: 5-6). Philip and the other disciples had come to an end of themselves, but, alas! not to a beginning of faith in their 'Waster, so their ready advice was to send away the multitudes. But He said, "Give ye them to eat," and they discovered that their whole resources were five loaves and two small fishes. Five barley loaves and two small fishes AND Christ were, however, resources enough for any number, had the disciples but known it.

Many disciples to-day are like what the disciples were then. They are ignorant of the resources of faith at their disposal, for they have never drawn upon them. The Christian life to them is a valley of Baca all the way, without any "wells," and seldom any "rain." Like the widow of Sarepta, they have only a handful of meal and a little oil, not nearly enough for themselves, much less to share it with others. But the day the widow went out to gather two sticks to prepare her last meal, and then die — that day was the beginning of a new life and a new experience. The word of the Man of God in the gate changed her objective. "Fear not," said he, "make me a little cake first" (1 Kings 16). Grace would lead her gently at first; and doubtless the prophet's cake grew larger as the woman's faith grew stronger But from that day she discovered that she had inexhaustible resources, and henceforth the famine was over in her experience. Her own needs abundantly supplied, she became a dispenser of blessing to others; and this is exactly what the Lord expects His children to be to-day. And having the "meal" and the "oil" (Christ our life, and the Holy Spirit the power of it) though living in a world of dearth and drought and death, we can and ought to be channels of blessing to others. "As Thou hast sent me into the world, SO have I also sent them into the world" (John 17: 18).

But there is also the dispensational view of this chapter. The miracle of the "five loaves" is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. It is here a foreshadowing of what was spoken in Psalm 132. What marks the governments of to-day is that the people provide for the King. When Messiah reigns the King will provide for the people, and there will be neither grinding poverty, oppressive taxation, nor discontent. In our chapter we have an Edomite ruling in the land, and he a poor slave of the Romans, as well as a usurper and an oppressor. The true King is in the desert, but there He demonstrates His resources and His grace according to prophecy, "He shall satisfy his poor with bread."

The disciples embark. The multitudes depart. The Lord goes up into a mountain to pray.

Prayer expresses two things — dependence and submission. These two things come out everywhere in the life of the Lord as Man below. He was pre-eminently the Man of Prayer and the Pattern of Prayer.

On at least fourteen different occasions do we read of the Lord "alone praying."

1. At His baptism, "Jesus also being baptized and praying" (Luke 3: 21).

2. At Capernaum, at the beginning of His ministry, "Rising up a great while before day" (Mark 1: 35; Luke 5: 167).

3. On the occasion of choosing the twelve apostles (Luke 6: 12).

4. After the miracle of the loaves (Mark 6: 46).

5. Before Peter's confession of Him as the Christ (Luke 9: 18).

6. On the mount of transfiguration (Luke 9: 28).

7. When He taught His disciples to pray (Luke 11: 1).

8. When He raised Lazarus from the dead (John 11: 41, 42).

9. The prayer in view of His sufferings (John 12: 27).

10. The Lord's prayer (John 17).

11. His intercessory prayer for Peter (Luke 22: 32).

12. The prayer in Gethsemane before His sufferings (given in Matthew, Mark, and Luke).

13. His prayer for His murderers when nailed to the Cross (Luke 23: 34).

14. At His death, giving up His Spirit to His Father (Luke 23: 46).

But in Matthew's Gospel the only recorded occasion of prayer (with the exception of Gethsemane) is in the chapter before us, and it is in keeping with the dispensational character of this Gospel. Rejected as King, the Lord has gone on high as Intercessor, and in the "fourth watch" He will come forth to succour and to save the distressed and storm-tossed remnant of Israel.

But there is also the present application. The Lord is on high. He is there executing His present service of grace, as our great High Priest and Advocate. He is praying for us, for while we are in this world we are in a scene of danger. The business of the world seeks to engross us. The pleasures of the world seek to attract us. The associations of the world seek to annex us. The opposition of the world seeks to hinder us. So we need the grace and power which He alone can impart. And He is watching over His people with that very end in view. "He saw them toiling in rowing" (Mark 6: 48). But whatever the difficulties, and however contrary the winds may be, we can depend upon His watchful eye, powerful arm, and loving heart. "Light and truth" shall go before us (Ps. 43). "Goodness and mercy" follow after (Ps. 23). And the moment is fixed and may be very near when He will come to receive us to Himself, as later He will appear for the deliverance of His earthly people, whose hearts, turned to Him in repentance, will joyfully receive Him with songs of thanksgiving. The apostate nation was soon to cry, "Crucify him, Crucify him." In the coming day the converted remnant will say, "Lo, this is our God: we have waited for him" (Isa. 25: 9).

But meantime the question is, "Can you walk on the water?" Peter did. We want to be more occupied with his success than with his failure. Affection for his Master led him out of the boat. Faith in his Master made him superior to nature. "He walked on the water to go to Jesus." The Red Sea and the Jordan were divided for Israel, as later, the same river was divided for the prophets Elijah and Elisha. But nowhere is there such a scene as this. It is a picture of a Christian walking through a world where everything is opposed to him, supported by power from on high. But the great point of the lesson is, that it is only as so supported, and only as depending on that support, that he can so walk. "Hold Thou me up," said the Psalmist, "and I shall be safe" (Ps. 119: 117). And this Peter proved in his extremity, when he prayed the prayer that never fails to be answered on the spot" LORD SAVE ME."

If the beginning of Matthew 14 shows the works of men to be evil, Matthew 15 shows why they are so. The reason is, the heart is wrong. "Out of the heart proceed." Here we have hearts unveiled: verses 1-21 describe the heart of man, and it is seen to be incorrigibly evil. From verses 22-39 we gather something of the grace that was in the heart of the Lord Jesus. We see Him bringing blessing to one outside the circle of promise, healing all oppressed by the devil, and providing in the desert for "so great a multitude."

But the Jerusalem Scribes and Pharisees who had followed the Lord into Galilee, seeking to catch something out of His words that they might accuse Him, had no eyes and no heart for grace such as this. They made the common mistake that exterior things will do for God, and forgot that Satan can use even a religious system as a power for evil. The Lord showed them that their hollow formalism had led them into the much more serious evil of hypocrisy, proving from their greatest prophet, Isaiah (Isa. 29: 13), that the tradition of men had led them into a course of action in direct contradiction to the Word of God. The subject is more fully developed in Mark 7. The gift (Corban) given to enrich the priest, instead of being employed to provide for the needs of relations, was only one of the "many such things they did." And although by doing so, they were disregarding the ties of nature, yet the priests, by their traditions, pronounced them to be free.

The moment men's opinions are brought in as a standard, there is distinct danger. Priestcraft, whether in Judaism, Roman Catholicism, or Protestantism, is ever fain to hark back to tradition to buttress up its own unscriptural positions; and thus its votaries are insensibly led to minimise the authority of the revealed mind of God over the conscience. May God save us all from such an insidious evil. It is an immense thing when the soul is guided by the direct Word of God alone, owning no intermediary whatever between itself and God.

The Lord next shows the cause of this condition of things, and takes occasion to charge home the fact of sin by the terrible exposure of the heart of man given in verses 19, 20.

Man's moral centre is the heart. Out of it proceed seven streams of deadly evil, showing the inward moral pollution which the history of fallen man, from Cain downwards, has abundantly proved to be true.

Now, this exposure is the very thing the natural man is averse to. His desire is to cover up everything under a fair show of religion and keep the evil out of sight. Hence the Pharisees were offended, and so is the natural man still. He will not believe that man is lost. Education, culture, environment, morality, surely these things can elevate and ennoble the man. That is the creed of the moralist to-day, just as it was of the Pharisees of old. But God says, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh," and nothing will do for God but a new creation. "Ye must be born again."

The Lord, after exposing the human heart, manifests the Divine love in the heart of God for sinners by walking over twenty miles to meet and bless one woman for whom Satan had done his worst. And here was a remarkable case. A "woman of Canaan" accosts the Lord and claims blessing from Him as the "Son of David." Now as Son of David, His relation to the Canaanite could only be judgment, for they were the race Joshua was commanded to root out of the land because of their terrible iniquity. But the incident is doubtless inserted here to show the only ground on which any of us can get blessing, and that is on the ground of free grace alone, for we are, as she was, but "sinners of the Gentiles" (Gal. 2: 15). And so grace wrought in her heart until she was led to take the only place she could really lay claim to. Then mark the blessed result. She owned she deserved nothing, she would be thankful for anything, and she got everything her heart desired. Such are the ways of grace.

The faith of the Gentile may well be placed in contrast to the unbelief of the Jew. This woman owned His authority by calling Him Lord, and she prayed what we might call a companion prayer to that of Peter in Matthew 14; and, as in Peter's case, the answer was graciously given immediately.

And now the Lord, making a circuit round the extreme north of the land, continues His ministry throughout the region of Decapolis, on the east of the Sea of Galilee. This country was formerly inhabited by the half tribe of Manasseh, and at this time abounded with Gentile residents. The mixed population was looked upon with the greatest contempt by the southern Jews of Judea proper, who considered them a degree still lower than even Galileans. Yet even among these were found some of the poor of the flock, and to them the heart of the Lord went out in compassion. And so engrossed were they with His miracles of healing and His wonderful teaching that they abode with Him three days; and, after witnessing all His wonderful works, they might well exclaim, as Mark tells us, "He hath done all things well." Any food they may have brought was now exhausted, and the Lord proposes to His disciples the question of feeding the multitude before sending them away. At once the disciples see the difficulties, without seeing the resources. Did we not know something of our own hearts we should here be surprised. How shortly before had they seen the previous miracle of the multiplied loaves. Yet here their faith is not one whit greater. Still in patient grace the Lord continues to teach them as to the resources that were in Himself to meet every need for their service. Almost reluctantly, it would seem, they give the information that they have seven loaves for themselves, and a few small fishes. It is enough. With His blessing added, they will be able to supply the hungry multitude with enough and to spare. The feast began with seven loaves, and ended with seven basketfuls. The previous miracle (Chap. 14) was a proof that Messiah was present in the midst of His people according to the prophecy of Psalm 132, and the "twelve baskets" was indicative of perfect testimony to that event. The present miracle (Chap. 15) was a proof of the long-suffering grace of the Lord, that, though rejected by the nation, He still carried on His mission of mercy in their midst. It also looks on to millennium times, and the "seven baskets" speak of divine completeness and ample provision for every need.

There is much practical instruction in this section of our Gospel. In it we are taught, both by precept and example, man's utter ruin, morally and spiritually. Man's actions, prompted by his sinful fallen nature, are only evil continually. That which is of the flesh is flesh, though we are slow to learn it. But when the lesson is truly learned, we say with the apostle, "I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth NO good thing." Now the soul is prepared to take sides with God against the flesh, and that is the first step in Christian liberty.

But not only is the evil heart of man exposed. The grace of Christ shines forth in greater beauty, if that be possible, against the dark background of a graceless world. He walks through it in moral dignity and holy separation. He is seen as the Heavenly Stranger upon the earth, feeding the hungry, succouring the needy, compassionating the despised ones, healing the sick, and bringing blessing to those who were afar off. This section begins with man's utter ruin and ends with God's perfect grace.

Section 8. Matthew 16, 17.

A Prophecy of the Church with a Glimpse of Kingdom Glory

"When the fulness of time was come, God sent forth his Son . . . that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba Father." But even this, great and blessed though it is, is only preparatory to the supreme revelation that God has made of Himself, and to the place of blessing into which believers of the present time are introduced. This is set before the Ephesian saints as the mystery of His will now made known through the apostle, that in the dispensation (or administration) of the fulness of time He might gather together all things in one, in Christ. And then Paul prays that the saints may be brought into the knowledge of the position in which grace has placed them. His desire for them is that they might know: —

The hope of His calling.

The riches of His grace, and

The greatness of His power.

God has put all things under His feet, and given Him to be Head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all. To the Apostle Paul it was given "to complete the Word of God," and until the revelation of the mystery of the Church, the body of Christ, His counsels could not be fully known.

A glimpse of this wonderful subject comes before us in the section of our Gospel which we now reach. In it we have: —

1 The revelation of the Person of the Christ.

2 The confession of His Divinity by Peter.

3 The promise of the new thing — the Church — which He was about to build.

4 A glimpse of His glory as the One who would be the Administrator for God — Head over all things.

5 The Foundation on which everything would rest in righteousness.

We find here (Matt. 16: 1) that Pharisees and Sadducees for the first time join their forces against the Lord. Bitterly opposed to each other both in their politics and their faith, they were united in their opposition to the Lord, and come to Him here only to have their ignorance and wickedness exposed. The solemn thing here is, that there is no longer either teaching or exhortation for them. They seek a sign and get a warning. Able to discern the face of the sky, they were unable, because unwilling, to discern the presence of the Lord in their midst, and if He was rejected, disaster (foul weather) must assuredly follow. The sign of the prophet Jonah could only add to their condemnation. He was, in type, a man out of death, preaching to the Gentiles, but before what that typified could take place, the nation of Israel must be set aside till the fulness of the Gentiles should be come. "And he left them and departed," as very soon He would leave the guilty nation, and that by the way of the Cross then, risen out of death, send the glad news of salvation and blessing far hence to the Gentiles.

But even the disciples had much to learn. They could not easily free themselves from the evil doctrines of the Pharisees, nor yet from the opinions of men as to the person of the Master.

This point the Lord is about to make clear to them, and in Matthew 16 there comes before us, in the first place: —

The revelation of the Person of the Christ.

Leaving the Sea of Galilee, the Lord journeyed with His disciples to the coasts of Caesarea Philippi. There, in that place of Gentile influence and display — for there Herod the Great had built a royal city in honour of the Emperor — He proposed to them the two great questions which laid bare the hearts of the men of that generation, and the heart of every man and woman since: —

1. "Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?"

This, the first of these two questions, brought out two things. And taking the latter and more important first, He asserts that He is the Son of Man.

He was that sublime Person whom Daniel the prophet had portrayed on his mystic page, as coming to the Ancient of days and receiving "dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom which shall not be destroyed" (Dan. 7: 14).

He had been rejected as Messiah. He would now take up His title of "Son of Man" and bring in blessing for all the earth.

Every title given to the Lord is of the deepest significance, whether in connection with His official, essential, or acquired glories, and they are ever used in a discriminating way. There are at least 350 such titles, and more might be found by the diligent student. In Matthew 16 we have (1) the Lord rejected as Messiah, (2) confessed by Peter as Son of Me Living God, and (3) soon to return in glory as Son of Man. Under this last title, as we have seen, He will dispense blessing world wide. Meantime He demands of His disciples what "men say" of Him, in order to demonstrate that the wisdom of men is but folly with God.

All alike are forced to own that He is some Great One, and their opinions range from the prophet of fire to the prophet of sorrow, but -none are able to see in Him the Sent One of God. This faith alone can discern; and when He demands an answer from His disciples to His second question: —

2. "Whom say ye that I am?"

Peter, taught of God, can answer, unhesitatingly, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

It is faith's unchanging answer to the question of the ages made good in the experience of every true believer.

This confession of Peter's is twofold.

By "The Christ," (Heb.) Messiah, (Eng.) the Anointed One, Peter is led to declare all the official glories which centred in Him as Man upon the earth. He was "The Woman's Seed," the Root and Offspring of David, the Son of Abraham, the Son of David, the Shepherd of Israel, and the Blesser of every Nation.

But in addition to what the Lord was as the Sent One of God, there was also revealed to Peter something of the personal and essential glories of the Eternal Son. He was the Son of the Living God. Peter, taught of God, is led to declare something of that divine mystery as to what the Lord was in His Person, Nature, and Being in relationship to God the Father. This is more fully developed in John 1, Phil. 2, Col. 1, Heb. 1: —

"In His Existence — Eternal."

"In His Nature — Divine."

"In His Person — Distinct."

He was the Word in all eternity — the Eternal Son of God.

This revelation to, and confession by, Peter gives occasion for the Lord to reveal now, for the first time in Scripture, the secret of the ages — His Assembly. He was about to begin a work of which nothing had ever been revealed to saint or prophet in Old Testament times (Eph. 3: 4, 5; Col. 1: 26) Under the new economy believers, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, would be builded together for a holy temple in the Lord. They would be "The Body," "The Bride," "The City." They would be holy and royal priests to God now, and co-heirs in the regal glory of the coming day. This building would be His work alone (Acts 2: 47), and would be founded on what He was as Son of the living God, according to the confession made by the apostle.

No wonder, then, that the "gates of hell" — all the adverse powers of the unseen world — would not prevail against it. To destroy her, Satan has used his utmost endeavour; the greatest of earthly powers have exhausted all their resources; but the true Church of God continues to triumph over every foe, and continues to point dying men to her risen, living, and glorified Lord, her Head on high, with whom she is united by the Holy Spirit.

The Father calls, the Spirit unites, the Lord builds; and not man, angel, or demon can hinder that constructive work of the Son of the living God the formation of His Church, which is, while in the world, the "pillar and ground of the truth."

Following on Peter's confession, we get Peter's commission. To this warm-hearted disciple was given the "Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven." That is to say, in figurative language, that into that new economy about to begin on earth, Peter would have the honour of introducing both Jew and Gentile, as we find later in the history of the Acts he did (see Acts 2 and Acts 10). And further, we learn from Matt. 18, that this same power of "binding and loosing" was afterwards conferred upon the whole company of the disciples.

But we must keep in mind that it was the "Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven" that were given to Peter; not the keys of the Church (if there be such), in spite of all that either Anglican or Romanist may say to the contrary. In the Book of Acts, Peter preached Jesus as "Lord" and "Christ," both titles distinctly connected with the Kingdom of Heaven, and by these names of authority he commanded the Jews to own His rights, bow to His claims, and be baptized in His Name (Acts 2). Similarly, in the centurion's house, after Peter had learned the great lesson that all earthly distinctions of clean and unclean had been abolished, and when he had seen the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Gentiles, he commanded them to be baptized in the Name of the Lord (Acts 10: 48).

Peter's ministry never goes beyond this. To another servant was committed a further revelation as to the mystery of the Church, and Paul, immediately after his conversion, began to preach Jesus as "The Son of God" (Acts 9: 20). This is the first time we get this title in Acts (Chap. 8: 37, it should be noted, is, according to the best authorities, not in the original text).

But, returning to our chapter, we here find (Matt. 16: 21) a striking dispensational change. The disciples are commanded no longer to testify of Him as the Messiah. As such He had been rejected. For Him there was to be at this time no national recognition of His just rights and divine authority. Instead of a Crown, the nation was about to give Him a Cross. Instead of a palace, a grave. "From that time forth began Jesus to show unto his disciples that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day (verse 21). Only on the ground of death and resurrection could there be either earthly blessing for the Jew, or heavenly blessing for the Christian; and, had Peter known this, he would never have taken upon him to "rebuke" the Lord as he did. Israel will be associated with Him in the day of earthly glory. The Church, on the other hand, will be associated with Him in heavenly glory, but meantime she shares with Him in His earthly rejection. We have this lesson to learn in a practical way, and so the injunction to every disciple to take up his cross and follow Jesus. The man with a cross on his back being led to the place of execution was finished with the earth for ever. So the figure is here used of the Christian's relationships to things of the world. The believer is dead to sin (Rom. 6: 11), dead to the law (Rom. 7: 4), and dead to the flesh (Rom. 8: 9); but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 6: 11), and, in the power of resurrection life, he stands fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made him free. He shares with Christ now, in His rejection, as he will share with Him, by and by, in His glory. The world, under Gentile rule, crucified the Son of God, and is fast going on to judgment. The Kingdom of Heaven, in the hands of men, is fast hastening to that terrible climax when it will be seen to be a "cage of every unclean and hateful bird" (Rev. 18: 2, compare Matt. 13: 32). But before that moment arrives, when "the whole will be leavened," the Lord Himself shall descend (1 Thess. 4), and His waiting Church will be called up to meet Him in the air. Even so, Come, Lord Jesus. Afterwards, as the Son of Man, He will come in the glory of His Father, with His holy angels, and then shall He reward every man according to his works. A glimpse of this Kingdom glory the Lord was now about to give to the three disciples specially chosen to be witnesses of it.

It is a feature of the dealings of God with His people, that He often delivers them from present things whether it be the sufferings, the trials, or the glories of earth — by bringing in the light of the future. So with Stephen amidst his murderers: so with Paul, who counted present sufferings not worthy to be compared with the glory that should follow. On the other hand, Moses was enabled to forsake the glory of Egypt and endure as seeing Him that is invisible, and when the disciples were becoming occupied with the magnificence of their earthly temple, the Lord dispelled their illusion by setting before them the startling truth that the time was near when not one stone would be left upon another.

The disciples here, had had their first lesson in Cross-bearing. The Lord was now (Chap. 17) about to give them a glimpse of the time when the Crown-wearing would begin. The Father had revealed the glory of the Son to their minds. He was now about to reveal it to their eyes. Later on (2 Peter 1: 17) Peter would set the glory before the eyes of suffering saints as salvation ready to be revealed at the appearing of Jesus Christ," reminding them also, that he himself had already been an eyewitness of that glory when with Him in the holy mount.

And with the Lord were seen Moses and Elias, talking with Him (as Luke tells us) of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem. These two blessed men, already in their glorified bodies are talking with the Lord Jesus upon that very subject — His death — on which their present blessing was founded. And so when at home in the glory, the very delights of Heaven will only cast our minds backwards with ever-increasing awe and wonder to THE CROSS on which the Lord of Glory died. There was laid in righteousness the foundation upon which all the grace and glory of God will be displayed, whether in righteously saving sinners of the Gentiles, or righteously gathering out of His Kingdom all things that offend and them that do, iniquity, and casting them into a furnace of fire.

These two honoured servants were also doubtless representative of those, who, in the coming day will "shine forth as the sun" (Chap. 13: 43). Moses, a type of those dead and raised again at the first resurrection; Elias, of those translated without tasting death, which will be the happy experience of those "who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord" (1 Thess. 4: 15). And, in addition, there were present in this display of Kingdom glory, the three chosen disciples, typical surely of the nations who walk in the light of the city (Rev. 21: 24). The men of the earth will be blessed upon the earth, under the reign of righteousness of the Son of Man.

Well might Peter say, "It is good for us to be here," and well had he said no more. Yet Peter's mistakes only bring fuller revelations, and the Father's voice is heard in testimony to the Son.

The mental attitude of the devout Jew was summed up in the words, "we are Moses' disciples"; and nothing but the voice of divine authority could convince the disciples that a "greater than Moses was here." The glory cloud overshadows the mount. Moses and Elias depart, and the Son of Man descends from the mount — to suffer. He might have ascended to reign, but how then could the Scriptures have been fulfilled?

It is interesting to notice that at the four lowest points, if we may so say, to which the Lord went in grace, we get Heaven's appreciation visibly expressed. Thus, at His humble birth, the angel host came down with the message of peace and goodwill. When He took a place beside the repentant remnant and went down into the waters of. Jordan, Heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon Him. At the close, when He bowed His head in death, and it seemed as if the enemy had triumphed after all, then we read of rending rocks, and quaking earth, and opening graves. And so here, though finally rejected and disowned as King of the Jews, yet Heaven owns Him, and the Voice of the Father proclaims Him as, "My Beloved Son," adding the expressive words, "Hear Him."

Peter, in haste to honour the heavenly visitors, would put all on the same level, but he had to learn what Christendom has not learned yet, that the day of both Lawgiver and Reformer had gone by. What could law do for lost sinners? Only condemn them. What men need is regeneration, not reformation — "Ye must be born again."

And in the "Beloved Son," there would be a revelation of God far and beyond any yet given through Old Testament servants, however great these may have been. In Him, God would be known as Father, and to know the Son would be to know the Father also.

Coming down from the mountain the Lord warns His disciples to "tell no man." Further testimony to His Messiahship could only add further condemnation to those who deliberately rejected Him. The shadow of the Cross was fast darkening across His pathway. A few short months, and all that was written of Him would be fulfilled. But the vision would be a stimulus to the disciples' faith in view of the fact that they would soon be compelled to he the helpless witnesses of His Crucifixion; and the conviction was being gradually forced upon their unwilling minds that there would be no throne for Him in Jerusalem at this time at least. Their great object now was that He should escape that Cross of which He had so recently spoken. Hence their unwillingness to accompany Him on the last journey to the city (see John 11).

The hope of the earthly glory was dying out of their hearts. The dread that He might be taken and slain oppressed them. Faith in the word He had spoken that He would rise again, had, as yet, no place in their hearts. But deep and true affection for their beloved Master comes out in the few simple words in verse 23 — "They were exceeding sorry."

Now, as they tried to reconcile Old Testament prophecy with this new teaching as to His death, they ask a question which gives occasion for the Lord to open up Scripture both for them and for us: —

"Why then say the Scribes that Elias must first come?" If the Son of Man is to be slain, where is the mission of Elias, who is to come as the restorer, before the great and terrible day?

And the Lord shows them that in the spirit and power of Elias, John the Baptist had come, fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy of a rejected and suffering Forerunner, introducing a rejected and suffering Messiah. Malachi's prophecies will yet be fulfilled by the prophet of fire, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come; and more signal success will attend his mission in the days of Antichrist than ever attended it in the days of Ahab, great though that was.

But, best of all, immediately following it the conquering and glorified Lord Himself will appear — no longer now as the Star of Bethlehem, but as the Sun of Righteousness "with healing in his wings." What promise of fulness of blessing is contained in that one word — healing. It is just what this poor earth stands most in need of, after centuries of sin and strife, ruin, and want, and war.

But if disciples on the mountain top were learning the secrets of Heaven as to the glory of the future, disciples in the plains below were face to face with the power of the devil. If those in the mount saw the King in His beauty and had visions of God, those below saw but the results of Satan's handiwork in the case of the lunatic son, sore vexed.

Now, so far. the believer of to-day is in both these positions. On the mountain top the Kingdom glory is present to faith, but as to experience, we meet with the power of Satan in evidence in the world every day. He has been defeated, but he is not yet expelled from the scene of his usurpation. And we do well to mark that the cause of the disciples' failure to cast out the demon was their want of faith. This, on the other hand, brings out the deeply important principle that the man of faith is superior to all the power of evil. If it be the world in its ways, or its influence, or its oppression — "this is the victory that overcometh the world — our faith" (1 John 5: 4) If it be the direct assaults of Satan, he can be resisted, if we be "steadfast in the faith" (1 Peter 5: 9). Here the disciples at the foot of the mountain were out of touch with the Lord above, and there was failure on their part, as there must ever be for us all, under like conditions. Neither is it any guarantee that because a man overcomes at one time, he may not fail before the same difficulty on another occasion. These same disciples had doubtless met cases just the same before (see Chap. 10). Why, then, had they failed here? Because, there they went in the power of the Master, here they went in their own power. "Why could not we cast him out?" they ask. Later on they would learn the great lesson of John 15: 5, "Without me ye can do nothing." The two grand principles, against which all the power of Satan is harmless, are prayer and fasting; for prayer brings God in, and fasting puts flesh out, and where there is self-emptiness, and divine fulness, there will ever be overcoming power.

The closing incident in Matthew 17 really comes within the scope of the next section, but we notice it here in order to keep within the present arrangement of chapters. It is also a beautiful introduction to that which characterises the next portion of our Gospel. For while the believer is placed by grace in the highest possible position as a child of God, even while here, yet the same grace enables him to walk through this world seeking no place in it, and accepting no place from it, other than the place given to the Lord Himself — that of being both despised and rejected. And just in proportion as he is true to the Lord, so will he find that the world will treat him as it treated his Master. Here we find that this truth is developed as the outcome of Peter's hasty assumption that the Lord, as a good Jew (for Peter's appreciation of the Lord here rises no higher), would necessarily pay the temple tribute.

But the Lord takes occasion to teach Peter three lessons.

First, that when the kings of the earth levy tribute, they take it from strangers: their own children are free.

Second, that He, though He was the Son of. God and Lord of the temple, yet claimed no right and demanded no place, but maintained His position of lowly grace, and was willing to be treated, even as the kings of the earth treat "strangers," as indeed He was — the Heavenly Stranger upon the earth. And

Third, He would associate with Himself, His followers, providing for them at the same time and meeting every need of their pathway.

Here, as in other places, our Gospel testifies to the eternal power and Godhead of the Lord Jesus. The following list might be greatly extended.

1 His power over Satan (Chap. 4: 4).

2 His power over disease (Chap. 4: 23).

3 His power over demons (Chap. 4: 24).

4 His power over the elements (Chap. 8: 26).

5 His power to forgive sins (Chap. 9: 6).

6 His power over death (Chap. 9: 24).

7 His power to increase the provision (Chap. 14, 15).

8 His power over creation (Chap. 17: 27).

9 His power to foretell the future (Chap. 24: 25).

10 All Power in Heaven and in earth (Chap. 28: 18).

Now all this is very blessed, for it shows that all the power of God is for the believer now, as to the difficulties of his pathway, and it is a matter of individual experience in a scene where everything is against him.

But when the Kingdom comes in manifested glory, then will be seen the full display of all that of which we have had but glimpses.

If it be a question of Satan, the accuser of the brethren, he will be bound for a thousand years (Rev. 20: 2).

If it be a question of evil men, they will be gathered out of His Kingdom (Chap. 13: 41).

If it be a question of disease, "the inhabitant shall not say 'I am sick'." (Isa. 33: 24).

Then Creation itself will undergo a remarkable change: the very nature of the wild beast will be transformed, until the wolf and the lamb shall feed together (Isa. 65: 25).

Under present conditions, the peoples of the earth are taxed to maintain their kings but in that day the order will be reversed. The King will maintain His people, according to the prophecy of Ps. 132: 15.

Thus, then, the believer walks through this world in the conscious knowledge that he belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven: that when the Son of Man comes again in power and great glory to establish His rights over the whole earth, he will come with Him, and reign with Him. Surely in the light of these heavenly truths, we may well walk through this world as those, who, though in it, are not of it, for we have been saved out of it and are here only to witness for our absent Lord in this the day of His rejection.

Section 9. Matthew 18-23.

The Characteristics of those who enter the Kingdom, the Responsibility of those connected with it, and God's way of bringing Men into it: The King presented, and the Leaders of Israel morally judged

We have now reached, in the history of our Gospel, the last winter of our Lord's ministry here below.

By comparing the other Gospels, we find that much patient service and gracious teaching were crowded into these few closing days.

At least two visits to Jerusalem were made between this time and the day when the last journey began. From Galilee He went up privately (John 7) for the Feast of Tabernacles, which took place in the seventh month of the Jewish sacred year — Tisri, corresponding to our September October and the narrative in John's Gospel, Chapters 7-9, details the events which then took place.

The ever-increasing enmity of the Jews led Him to retire from the city at this time, but from John 10: 22, we learn that He paid another visit to Jerusalem at the Feast of the Dedication, which was held in the month of Chisleu, or about the beginning of December. When the Jews again sought to take Him, He went away beyond Jordan into the place where John at first baptized, and there He abode (John 11: 46).

This period would seem to correspond with that of Matthew 19: 1, and here, "in the wilderness of Judea" (Chap. 3: 1), the Lord spent the few remaining months of His earthly sojourn.

Let us follow Him with reverent footsteps and share in the precious ministry of the Kingdom vouchsafed to all who drew near.

If Matthew 17 gives us a glimpse of Kingdom Glory, Matthew 18 reveals to us something of the moral atmosphere that should exist in that Kingdom into which men are born from above.

The Lord shows that meekness, grace, and forbearance should characterise the disciple, even as these, and every other grace, shone forth in perfect display in the Master. In our chapter we have this teaching developed, and it is further enforced by the parable of the two debtors, and the discipline measured out to him who failed in grace in his dealings with his fellow-servant.

The broad outlines of Matthew 18 are: —

1 The Way into the Kingdom (verse 3).

2 Unsparing Self Judgment as to Walk and Ways (verse 8).

3 The Spirit of Grace to be manifested by every child of the Kingdom (verse 15).

4 The Centre of Gathering (verse 18).

5 The Great Lesson of Forgiveness enforced (verse 22).

6 And Illustrated (verse 23).

The Lord's teaching is ever both formative and corrective, and both are needed by the believer.

"All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Tim. 3: 16). Of this, surely, apostles stood in need; and in these closing counsels the Lord was fitting them for the position they would have to fill when He was no longer with them in the flesh. Then, with opened understandings, and the indwelling Spirit to bring all things to their remembrance, they would be able to bring forth from their treasures things both new and old.

In the present case (Matt. 18: 1) the disciples had apparently been unable to settle among themselves the ever-recurring question as to what qualification entitled a man to be great in the Kingdom of Heaven. Their minds were ever hankering after earthly greatness, as men in the flesh, and so far, they seemed to have grasped divine things in but a very feeble way.

In correcting their mistaken ideas, the Lord begins at the very foundation, and shows that so far from ambition and self-seeking giving them a high place in the Kingdom, these things would prevent them altogether from even entering into it. The very first essential would be to lay aside all these and be converted. Not, of course, that the disciples were not converted, but it is the broad principle of entrance with which the Lord is dealing. To manifest the new nature, men must have the new life, and this truth needs to be enforced to-day, as much as ever it did, if not more so. There never was a time when the foundation truths of the Gospel were more insidiously attacked than at the present moment. Men point to the life of the Lord Jesus as our example, while denying the necessity of His death as an atonement for sin. Such teaching is deadly error. That perfect holy life, apart from that vicarious death, could only show the sinner the extent of his failure, and add to his condemnation. Moreover, far from being able to imitate it, he is unable even to take the very first step, for he has no desire to do so. They that are in the flesh cannot please God. Every blessing for man must begin with the death of Christ; for, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. The Lord might have stepped back into the glory from any point of His earthly pathway, but if so He would have been in that glory alone as far as the sons of earth were concerned. But "the Son of Man must be lifted up." There must be a work done for us, and we "must be born again." There must also be a work done in us, and all is brought about by the sovereign grace of God alone.

This, then, is Conversion, and everything in Christianity begins here. Let us mark it well. The character of one thus born again, the Lord illustrates by the little child. The child is simple, loving, forgiving, truthful, trustful, and humble. All this should come out in the character of the one who is turned from Satan to God; from sin to holiness. David's mighty men were great in the earthly kingdom according to their great deeds in war and in the overthrow of their foes. But in the Kingdom of Heaven the very opposite of this subsists. The truly great in this wonderful new dispensation are marked by the spirit of meekness, gentleness, and faith. And as these very characteristics would naturally lead the one who manifested them to be oppressed by the world, the Lord immediately warns as to what would be the fate of those who so "offended" them. And so it will be, though the world little realises it. If it could be said of His ancient people that He "kept him as the apple of his eye" (Deut. 32: 10), shall His care be less over us?

Next the subject of self-judgment is dealt with in the most solemn way possible. It is a question of responsibility in the Kingdom to manifest the character of the King. Nothing short of "Be ye holy for I am holy," is to be the believer's standard, and in order that nothing of flesh may come out in our ways, the very beginnings of sins in our members are to be checked.

Doubtless the Kingdom is here viewed in its broadest aspect, and men are looked at on the ground of their outward profession. If a man is walking in the ways of his heart and in the lust of his eyes, there is no proof at all that he is converted, and though in the Kingdom by profession, there is no assurance that he may not end in hell-fire.

The place occupied by children, in the economy of grace, the Lord next illustrates, using the child He had called to Him in verse 1 as an object lesson.

Even disciples might think lightly of children, and despise them; and in the kingdoms of earth they have little weight. But the Lord lifts the veil for a moment and gives us a glimpse into the unseen. "Their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in Heaven." They are not innocent, neither are they hardened in sin. But they are lost, because come of a fallen race; yet the Son of Man has come to save them, and it is not the Father's will that one of them should perish. The joy of the shepherd expresses the delight of the Great Shepherd, and His joy in saving the lost. Lost because Adam sinned. Saved because Jesus died.

In verses 15 to 20 we next get the most important guidance as to the course of action to be taken when sin is manifested in another. The early part of the chapter instructs as to personal holiness Here the question is, "If thy brother trespass [against thee]." The last two words are of doubtful authority here, while their place and importance in verse 21 will be seen later. Here it is the broad aspect of a brother "sinning." What then? Love, not law, is to be set in motion, the object being the recovery of the erring one, that the name of Christ may not be dishonoured in the world.

But, oh, what grace is needed here. To go to such a one in the spirit of self-righteousness and superiority, will only tend to harden him in his sin. The "meekness and gentleness of Christ" (2 Cor. 10: 1) are required by the under shepherds in a very special way when they have work like this to do. And they have need also of the apostle's exhortation, to consider themselves, lest they also be tempted (Gal. 6: 1).

But progress in the path of departure is not easily checked. It is possible that the individual personal dealing of the one who alone knew of the sin may be disregarded. If so, it becomes necessary to take "one or two more with thee, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established." With the failure of these, if they fail, the privacy of the matter ends. Sin cannot be ignored. The holiness of God's house demands that it should be dealt with. "If he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church." Here the importance of the witnesses come in. They are able to give a faithful report of every word, said both to him, and by him, and by their testimony every word is established. If he neglect to hear the Church, the Church, as the custodian of the rights of God on earth, will have to deal in righteous discipline with the unrepentant one, and no longer accord him the place his sin has unfitted him to fill. "Let him be unto them as an heathen man and a publican." And this action of the assembly will be ratified in Heaven, either in "binding" the sin upon the guilty one, or in "loosing" him from it, when there is evidence of true repentance and restoration of soul to God.

Now, in all this, the Lord is speaking anticipatively. In Matthew 16 He had spoken of "My Church," but there the expression comprises every believer from Pentecost to the Coming. Here, for the first time in scripture, we get a local assembly mentioned, and connected with it are the foundation principles upon which such a gathering rests.

1 Its CENTRE of gathering is the Lord Himself. Believers are gathered "unto His name."

2 LOVE is the ruling principle in the intercourse of its members, one with another; and

3 HOLINESS characterises its testimony in the world, to ensure which, the Lord promises His Presence, His Authority, and His Approval of what is done in His Name.

Mark the grace that condescends to be "in the midst" of the "two or three," so gathered. Encouragement in prayer is in the same connection, for be it remarked that all Answered prayer is Conditioned prayer. Mark 11: 24; John 14: 13, John 15: 7, John 16: 23, 24; 1 John 3: 22, further develop this deeply-important subject.

Peter's question in verse 21 gives occasion for the Lord to bring out in the most beautiful way the absolute superiority of grace over every form of evil. You cannot offend a truly gracious man, for he refuses to take offence. You cannot take down "a truly humble man, for he is already down. All that may be done against such a one, only the more brings out the grace that is in him, and the more others seek to do him evil, the more he desires their good.

And this not "seven times" only, but without end. Jewish Rabbins had said that forgiveness was to be extended three times to the repentant brother. Peter is willing to extend it seven times, but the Lord says in effect, "How great is the restoring grace of God, and how often has it been extended to you? If you are in the sense of that grace, manifest it to others without any limits. If he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him" (Luke 17: 4).

But there is the other side. If grace be not manifested, God will deal in government with the one who so fails, and in the end, it may be shown by his final and eternal condemnation, that he was never in the Kingdom at all, except on the mere outward ground of profession only. This the parable of the Unmerciful Servant teaches us.

It will be noticed that in this section (Chaps. xviii to 23) there are four different kinds of parables. Five parables in all.

1 The Unmerciful Servant (Chap. 18) teaches us Responsibility in the Kingdom.

2 The Labourers in the Vineyard (Chap. 20) teaches us that God is Sovereign, and maintains His rights as being such.

3 The Two Sons, and the Wicked Husbandmen (Chap. 21) declare the setting aside of Israel; and

4 The Marriage of the King's Son (Chap. 22) shows God's way of bringing men into the Kingdom.

Our chapter deals with the first of these subjects. But it may be well to notice at the outset, before looking at this great object lesson of Forgiveness, that there are three aspects of Forgiveness in Scripture: —

1) Forgiveness for Sinners, or Eternal forgiveness, is received, and should be enjoyed by every believer. But many do not enter into it. Some hope for it. Some think that they were once forgiven, but may lose it again. Others suppose they are partly forgiven. God says, "I write unto you children, because your sins are forgiven you for His Name's sake" (1 John 2: 12).

GRACE provides it. The BLOOD procures it. The SPIRIT proclaims it. FAITH appropriates it. Because God has spoken, I am sure.

Three things follow: —

1 It produces Happiness. "Blessed (happy) is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered" (Ps. 32: 1).

2 It produces LOVE. "Much forgiven, the same loveth much" (Luke 7: 47).

3 It produces holy fear. "There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared" (Ps. 130: 4).

2) Forgiveness for BELIEVERS, or restorative Forgiveness.

When we were converted, we were received into the family of God and became children. Confession of our many failures restores to us the joy of forgiveness, and we remain happy children. Instructions to railwaymen are that "when a train breaks down, report to headquarters." So must we. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1: 9).

3) Governmental Forgiveness is what the parable in this chapter deals with, and closely connected with it is the supreme importance and necessity of forgiveness by believers of each other. Any other attitude is contrary to the whole spirit of Christianity, and there is no evidence that the man who cherishes an unforgiving spirit is a Christian at all. Having been forgiven our "great debt," we ought to forgive each other without limit. To do otherwise is to grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

But there is also the dispensational aspect of this parable.

"The King" is God. The "Great Debtor," Israel. "The Debt," all the privileges and blessings they had received from God ever since they became a nation. For the "taking account" compare Matthew 3: 10. The axe was then at the root of the tree. The "patience" following first on His three years' ministry among them, and again on His prayer for them on the Cross — "Father, forgive them" — was extended down to Acts 7.

The "hundred pence" debtor may represent the Gentiles. The attitude of the Jew towards the

Gentiles and towards God is shown in many passages in the Acts. Compare Chapters 7: 51, 13: 45, 14: 2, 17: 5, 21: 27, 22: 21, 28: 28, and it is finally summed up in 1 Thessalonians 2: 15: —

1 They killed the Lord Jesus.

2 And their own prophets.

3 They persecuted the Apostles

4 They please not God.

5 They were contrary to all men.

6 Forbade to preach to the Gentiles, and thus they filled up their sins so that wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. In the words of the parable, they have been "sold" — cast into the prison of the nations, as they are to this day, and will be until the time spoken of in Isaiah 40, when the punishment of the guilty nation will be completed, her warfare accomplished, and her iniquity pardoned.

There is here indeed a solemn warning to every servant, in every dispensation to walk in love, humility, and lowliness; forgiving from the heart every one his brother their trespasses.

Two words give the secret of the unmerciful servant's failure. He "went out" from the presence of his Master. In a spiritual sense this will always mean failure. To abide in the light is to abide in communion with the Father and the Son. May this ever be our happy experience, and so shall our "joy be full." Matthew 19 may be divided into four parts: —

1 Marriage.

2 The Little Children.

3 Creature Goodness; and

4 Discipleship.

Here we come, in the first place, to the Lord's teaching as to the relationships of nature which had been established by God Himself, and which, being of divine origin, and being ordained "from the beginning" must necessarily continue to exist in the Kingdom.

The Pharisee's question — "Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause" — was put with no desire on their part to accept from Him an authoritative ruling on the subject, but only to entrap Him into taking sides in the great "divorce controversy" then raging. A school of Jewish Rabbins were busy endeavouring to undermine the law of God, given through Moses, and provide scope for the carnal passions of men to work unchecked. The door had been opened wide enough to allow of "many causes" instead of the one, but all so trifling that the Lord refuses even to take notice of them. So may we. The great point is established that marriage, as originally instituted by God Himself in Eden, subsists in the kingdom on earth; and if the man and the woman act according to the spirit of that kingdom, there will neither be the occasion nor the need for separation between them.

It is God's order for man in nature, and it is an evidence of the greatest human love. But it is more. It is a type of the most wonderful thing in the universe, and that is — Christ and the Church.

The Pharisees endeavour to quote Moses against the Lord, but He at once shows them that Moses, instead of condemning Him, condemned them. Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered — not commanded — her to be put away. Here, as on another occasion, Moses, instead of becoming their vindicator, becomes their accuser and judge. "There is one," the Lord says, "that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust" (John 5: 45). It is ever a dangerous thing for a sinner to take his stand upon the law, which can only expose and condemn him with no power to pardon and forgive.

Now, the disciples' comment on this teaching brings out another phase of wrong-thinking. The Pharisees would have marriage with all the licence that their loose morals craved for. The disciples, if marriage was to be without these liberties, would argue that, "it is not good to marry." But this was to contradict the very words of God. At the beginning He had said, "It is not good that man should be alone," and this ruling still exists. Christianity may produce in some that which is beyond nature, and for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake a man may have a special gift so to abide.

Nothing is more illustrative of the tender grace of the Lord than His attitude towards the little ones, and nothing can be more encouraging for all who have to do with such, be it either parent or teacher. He had already taught (Chap. 18) that what should mark the one who was in the Kingdom was that which did mark the child. Here the further truth is revealed, that such are in the Kingdom. Who brought the little ones to the Lord we are not told, but it is clear that having come themselves they had faith to bring their children also. And this faith the Lord honoured. They sought that He would put His hands on them and pray. He did more. He took them up in His arms, put His hands upon them, and blessed them (Mark 10). Not only was He willing to invoke the blessing; but, being Himself the Blesser, He was able to bless. So it ever is where there is real faith. "He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think" (Eph. 3: 20).

But if the Lord graciously responded to the claims of faith, the Spirit of God, on the other hand, gives us to know His attitude towards even His own disciples when they misrepresented Him. They rebuked those who brought the children. He rebuked them, and so much was the spirit they manifested opposed to the spirit of the Kingdom that, as Luke tells us, "He was much displeased" (Luke 18). Still seeking for honour and place, they thought to find it in being the disciples of so great a Rabbi. Alas! how little they knew as yet either His true greatness or that spirit which marks the truly great. This lesson He was now about to teach them (Chap. 20: 26). But before that they got an object-lesson as to the real value of all earthly things, be it either riches or rank, and as a result, there had to be in their case a revaluation of values in the light of Heaven, if they would arrive at that which was the current coin of the Kingdom.

The Rich Young Ruler to whom we are now introduced was no common man. As far as this world went he had everything that it values, and he was everything that it respects.

He was a religious man, a ruler or judge among the people. He had money, friends, position, and influence. He did all that the law commanded, as far as he understood it, and he was sincere in thinking that by the deeds of the law he could enter into life. In short, he is set before us as the best that nature could produce, but the Lord has now to show him, and us too, that nature's best is not good enough for God. To do so He brings the true inwardness of the law to bear upon his heart and conscience. If he really loved his neighbour as himself, why not share with him in all he possessed? Put in this way, the idol of riches in his heart is exposed, and in spite of what he professed his failure is manifest, for "he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen" (1 John 4). And this young man had professed to love both God and his brother.

Verse 21 is not the Gospel; it is the Lord exposing the young man's heart to himself. The Gospel is not "give up" this or that, but take Christ, and with Him pardon, forgiveness, and life; peace, power, and joy.

But with Him also the Cross; and, at this saying, the rich young man was very sorrowful. Treasure in heaven doubtless he would receive, for the "Good Master" had said it. But treasure in heaven was far away, and to him but visionary. His own riches on earth seemed to him both real and tangible, but alas! he forgot the thief of time who would ultimately steal both them from him and him from them.

"And Jesus beholding him loved him" (Mark 10). It is one of the most interesting stories in the Gospels: also one of the saddest. Instead of owning himself condemned by law and casting himself upon the mercy of Christ, he clung to his rank and his riches, with all that they cost him, and all that they lost him, "and went away grieved, for he was very rich." So will it be with every one who shuns the narrow path of following Christ. To suffer with Him here is to reign with Him in Kingdom Glory hereafter.

Now the thought of the disciples was that riches was a sure mark of the favour of God, and that they at least supplied the means of doing good. If no one was "good," and riches — the means of doing good, not only valueless, but in themselves a positive hindrance — "who then could be saved?" The Lord's answer is emphatic, No one. On the ground of human merit, a camel might sooner pass the needle's eye than a rich man, trusting in his riches, enter the Kingdom. But with God all things are possible. Grace makes no account of what man is, either at his "best" or his "worst." Salvation is of the Lord.

Peter, doubtless seeing the young man going away preferring his possessions to Christ, ventures the question, "We have left all. . . . What shall we have therefore?"

In His reply the Lord gives some of the most precious encouragement as to discipleship, coupled as ever with that which will guard it from the abuse of human merit.

This we have in the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. The apostles had done what the young man had been invited to do. First, then, the Lord says, that, as to His immediate followers, the disciples, they would be princes in the Kingdom. And all, at all times, and in all places, who prefers the name of Christ above what is dear to nature shall receive an hundredfold here, and life everlasting hereafter. He had already told them of the persecution and suffering they would have to endure by becoming His followers. Now He reveals to them something of the glory that should follow. And even here more friends would be raised up to them for Christ's sake than ever they had lost for their own sakes.

The day of Kingdom Glory is the time of recompense, and nothing done for Christ will be forgotten by Him in that day.

But along with this cheering promise goes another line of truth intensely solemn, and that is that "the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." (1 Cor. 3: 13). And the gain or loss of that day will be in accordance with the character of the work done in this. May the thought have due weight with each one of us, so that everything be done in the light of the judgment-seat of Christ, and all our ways below may meet with His approval. Peter, perhaps, put a value on his boat and nets which they never possessed, and we are all in danger of doing likewise. But Peter had forsaken them to follow the Lord, and nothing is little in His eyes where the motive is true love to Himself.

Only lest we should go to the opposite extreme in self-righteousness and be tempted to put our own value upon our own work, we get the Parable of "The Labourers," in which the further truth comes out that God is Sovereign, and will do just as He pleases; and that what He pleases to do is right. Self-righteousness may lead a man to estimate himself as "first," but, if so, the true estimate may show that he is last of all. This the parable develops, and shows that rewards in the Kingdom will be in accord with the principles both of sovereignty and grace There are five groups of labourers: —

1 The First Company go into the vineyard early in the morning, having agreed for a penny a day.

2 The Second Company go into the vineyard at the third hour, depending on the promise of the householder.

3 and 4. The Third and Fourth Companies go into the vineyard at the sixth and ninth hours on the same terms as the second.

5. The Fifth Company go into the vineyard at the eleventh hour with no promise at all, if we omit, with the best authorities, the last clause of verse 7.

It is a manifold picture of sovereign grace: God continuing to come out unceasingly, in order to bring men into the place of blessing; and not only so, but to give them the honour of serving Him: give them grace to serve; and then, and beyond all, reward them for the service that His sovereign grace has enabled them to fulfil.

"So when even was come the Lord of the vineyard said unto his steward, Call the labourers and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first." And when the eleventh hour labourers came, they received every man a penny. And when the first company came they also received every man a penny. People argue that all were rewarded alike. But not so. The point of the parable is, that all were rewarded. Not that all were rewarded alike. There is a great difference between a penny a day and a penny an hour. Nevertheless, what right had the first to murmur? They had been dealt with in perfect righteousness. They had received what they bargained for, and what had they to do with the value of other men's service? That lay with the goodness of the householder. If all reward be a reward of grace, as it is, that reward can only be measured by the sovereign grace of God alone. If He make the last to be first who shall question His ruling? Many who thought themselves to be first may be seen to be last, and many who came in late may get a first place. The dying thief came in at the eleventh hour surely, but his one short hour of witness to Christ was given at a time when all had forsaken Him.

We must ever keep in mind that the Parables in general deal with Kingdom truth on the broad lines of profession. There will be no murmurers in the day of glory. Whatever the penny may have meant to the first group in the parable, it certainly means no place in the Kingdom for those to whom the parable applies, and it is equally certain that love for the Master had no place in their hearts. It is a scriptural principle that "the labourer is worthy of his hire." But, on the other hand, if he work for his hire only, it proves him to be merely a hireling who has never known what the true spring of service really is. How beautiful it is to compare with this what the apostle knew to be the compelling power in all true Christian service. "The love of Christ constraineth us: because we thus judge that, if one died for all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they which live should not live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them and rose again" (2 Cor. 5: 14, 15).

We may well pause here for a moment. This parable dealing with service, and God's rights in rewarding it according to His own sovereign grace, are the closing words, given by our Evangelist, of the Great Servant, before setting out on the last sad journey to Jerusalem.

His holy life of devoted service had been marked by obedience to the Father's will and love to the souls of men. He was the Dispenser of blessing wherever He went, and men wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth. Yet in spite of all this perfect display of heavenly power and grace, He had to say, "They hated me without a cause."

Now He is on the way to the Cross, and once again He takes the twelve apart by themselves in the way, to give them the third recorded lesson as to His rejection and death; and to prepare them for what must now be to them the shattering of all their hopes. For even yet their eyes and hearts were filled with visions of an immediate earthly reign, and to secure first places there, James and John endeavour to forestall the others.

This self-seeking appeal for the Sons of Zebedee gives opportunity for the Lord to bring to light the things of the spirit. He had come as the Messiah, bringing blessing for Israel, and had been rejected. Laying aside His rightful claims as Israel's King, He had then announced Himself as the "Son of Man" — a wider title which declared His rights world wide, and therefore spoke of blessing for all. But before there could be blessing for any, the Lord must die, in order to lay the righteous foundation on which all the purposes of God might rest secure.

All this the disciples were as yet ignorant of. But before that day of display came, He had something to give to His followers. It was suffering. They were slow to learn that this was the highest honour they could have from the world. So are we. Knowing not what it involved, they said, in answer to His question, "Are ye able to drink of the cup that I drink of?" "We are able." Circumstances would very soon test their pretensions. And yet if at one time it had to be written — "They all forsook him and fled" — the Spirit is careful to record of them on another occasion, that "they departed from the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name" (Acts 5: 41).

But if the Sons of Zebedee were full of themselves, the ten, when they heard it, were full of indignation. They wanted to put the two down, perhaps only in order to put themselves up. But again the patient grace of the Lord shines out. He called them around Him, not for rebuke but for instruction. He, the Son of Man, the Lord of all, had become a Servant, and gone to a lower place than it was possible for any one else to reach. They were not to imitate the rulers of the nations, but to follow Him. So should we. If you want to be great, go down. If you want to be greater, go lower; and the lower we go, the nearer we get to the Master "who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." His service here was leading Him on to that supreme act of self-surrender — laying down His life for the sheep. Now in the glory His service of love still continues, though in another character. He is there as our great High Priest, and His priestly service is able to maintain us in the light of the presence of God, and in the sunshine of His love every moment.

Soon the day of Kingly service will come, when He will come forth to serve; and we shall be with Him and like Him as He is. What a day of blessing will it be when such a King reigns in righteousness.

May the contemplation of such love produce in each of us the Christ spirit — which seeketh not his own, and is ever ready to lay down life itself for the brethren. "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister (hired servant), and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant (slave)." The man in whom self is least in evidence is the man who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Passing through Jericho the two blind men are met, and healed. They hail Him as "Son of David," follow Him, and become witnesses to His power. It is fittingly the last-recorded miracle of healing in Matthew's Gospel, and it is a dispensational picture of the time when the "blindness" that has happened to the nation will be done away, and the remnant will recognise and acclaim their rightful King that cometh in the name of the Lord. This the multitude now do, according to the prophecy of Psalm 118. When they reach Bethphage He sends for the ass and the colt, both doubtless used by Him in succession, according to Zechariah 9: 9. Matthew alone mentions both animals: typical they are, no doubt, and, with many similar things, it looks on to the day when the remnant of the nation will be brought into blessing under a King come in power.

But the meek and lowly One is about to be rejected, and the next verse of the prophecy (Zech. 10: 10) remains unfulfilled until the day when He comes again riding upon the "white horse" (Rev. 19). The procession reaches the brow of Olivet, and the city bursts upon their gaze. Just in front, on the other side of the Kedron Valley, shining in all its recent adornment, stands the Temple — the Holy House, as the Jew so fondly called it, soon to be left desolate, and in a few short years become a prey to consuming fire. To the left, on the Hill of Zion, lay the "City of David," recalling all the glories of their greatest ruler. And here was David's Royal Son, surely, thought the disciples, now about to assert both His authority and His power.

But, see, the King weeps! (Luke 19). It is no scene of triumph His eye rests upon. The inconstant multitude will soon change their cry of acclamation to cries of derision. Jerusalem, knowing not the day of her visitation in grace, will soon bitterly realise that the day has come for her visitation in judgment. Yet still His heart yearned over them. How often would He have gathered them as a hen gathereth her brood under her wings? — "I would: ye would not."

Ascending up from the Kedron, they enter the Temple, probably by the East gate, "and the whole city was moved." But, alas! however moved, they knew Him not. They can only ask, "Who is this?" And the voices that acclaimed Him at Olivet as "Son of David" can now only reply, "It is Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth." He had reached the city, not to reign, but to die.

"And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple" — it is the evening of the First day of the week — and when He had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, He went out into Bethany with the twelve (Mark 11). Not till next day — Monday — as Mark tells us, did He cleanse the temple. Matthew, as we have seen, groups the incidents in keeping with his subject, and so we have together, the withering of the Fig Tree, the Parables of the Two Sons, and that of the Wicked Husbandmen, teaching so plainly the setting aside of Israel, that even the Pharisees understood it. And let us notice that neither of these two parables is said to be a "likeness of the Kingdom of Heaven." That new thing begins consequent upon the rejection of Messiah, and so we have in order, in Matthew 22, the Parable of the Marriage of the King's Son, showing God's way of bringing men into that Kingdom. The Jews would not come. The Gentiles will, as we shall see later.

"Now in the morning (Monday) as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, 'Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever.' And presently the fig tree withered away."

Here we have both a miracle and a parable. It is the only miracle other than that of blessing the Lord ever performed. And as to the parable, if we connect it with the parable in Luke 13, we shall find that three years of patient cultivation had been spent before the word went forth, "Cut it down." The Lord's ministry of patient grace had continued for a somewhat similar time, but now it was over, and Israel's day had gone by. As to the action itself, it was symbolical, and for the instruction of disciples. So must we understand the teaching consequent thereupon. They would nowhere have to do either with a literal fig tree or a literal mountain. But, as God's planting, Israel was the "fig tree"; and as a power in the earth, Israel was the "mountain." The day came, in apostolic service, when an apostle was led to utter the warning, "Behold ye despisers, and wonder, and perish" (Acts 13). And again, "The Salvation of God is sent unto the Gentiles" (Acts 28). Even after the crucified and risen Lord had gone back to the glory, one last message of mercy was sent again to His earthly people, through Peter, and after their rejection of it, and the murder of His witness, Stephen, Israel was indeed cast into the sea of the nations. She had proved conclusively that, in her history, there had neither been fruit for God, nor power among men.

But there is more. In verse 22 there is the most unqualified assurance that all things would be given to the man of faith. So accustomed are we to the little faith (often no faith) of our own hearts, that, when we find such a statement as this, we are tempted to explain away the power of it. But there it stands for believers of all time. The twelve were about to be parted from the Master upon whom they had relied in every emergency. He now connects them with all the power of God on high which they were to lay hold of, by faith, for their service; assuring them that, to the man of faith, all things he asks, he shall receive.

When He reached the Temple, He cleansed it, as we have noticed, and at once begins what we might call His closing public addresses. For His last words of encouragement and instruction to His own we must look elsewhere, but Matthew gives us very full details of the public ministry of these two busy days. The nation was hearing the voice speaking in grace, which it would not again hear, until that same voice speaks in judgment in a later day. But now it was only a question of setting forth in symbolic language the state to which the blindness of the leaders had brought the nation.

The outline of the Temple addresses is as follows: —

1 The Jews refuse to obey God (Parable of the Two Sons).

3 They refuse to bring anything to Him (Parable of the Vine-dressers).

3 They refuse to accept anything from Him (Parable of the Marriage of the King's Son).

4 Grace refused goes out to the Gentiles (The Second Invitation to the Marriage Feast).

5 Their political bondage turned on what they had failed to be for God (The Tribute Money).

6 Sadducean difficulties are shown to he the result of Sadducean infidelity (The Woman and Seven Husbands).

7 The law exposes the motives of the heart: till that is right everything must be wrong (The Lawyer's Question).

Let us look into these things in a little more detail. The Lord no longer replies to the cavils of the elders, except to bring truth to bear upon their consciences. They ask Him for His authority. Had it not been displayed before their eyes in acts of power, which proved that it must be heavenly in its origin? But now, would they answer His question, "John's Baptism, was it from heaven?" He had been a burning and a shining light and they had been willing for a season to rejoice in that light (John 5: 35). Their national pride had gloried in a prophet being raised up amongst them, as so often among the fathers of old, but their self-righteousness had prevented them from accepting his testimony to Messiah. John had been murdered and his Master they had rejected. Hence their difficulty. Rather than own their sin, they refuse to answer. Then the Lord brings their moral state before them in the parable of the Two Sons.

Open opposition to the father, followed by repentance, marked the first. False profession, unrepented of, marked the second. Open sinners were converted by the preaching of the fearless Baptist and brought into the Kingdom of God. Self-righteous Pharisees saw no need for repentance.

In the next parable a deeper principle is touched upon. The nation was not only in a state of malevolent neutrality, it was in a state of active opposition to God and His ways of grace. Israel had been likened to the vineyard of the Lord, as they very well knew from their own scriptures (Ps. 80 And according to Isaiah 5 everything had been done for it that the care and forethought of the husbandman could do. Indeed the prophet had challenged the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the men of Judah on this very point. And what? — "When I looked that it should bring forth grapes it brought forth wild grapes." Then the Lord shows from their dealings with His servants, the prophets, what their moral history had been, until that moment when their hearts were fully exposed by the presence of the Son Himself in their midst, and their diabolic counsel among themselves was "This is the Heir, come let us — kill Him." It is no question of ignorance. He is known, and when known, hated. So trenchant and convincing is the argument that they are forced to answer the question — "When the Lord of the vineyard cometh what will He do?" God was about to take a hand in the affairs of men. What will happen to those who up to that time had been the custodians of the Kingdom of God: of whom were the fathers, and to whom were the promises? "Did ye never read in the Scriptures: The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner." He was the Stone of Israel (Gen. 49), the Tried Stone, the Precious Corner Stone, and the Sure Foundation (Isa. 28). But to Israel He became a Stone of stumbling, and a Rock of offence (Rom. 10). Nevertheless, though disallowed of men, He was chosen of God and precious, and on Him the spiritual house is now being builded, and he that believeth on Him shall not be confounded (1 Peter 2). If they who stumbled at the Lord come in grace would be "broken," what could happen to those with whom He had to deal in judgment, but that they should be "ground to powder" (compare Dan. 2: 35). It is the inevitable end of all who would contend with God.

Then He tells them that the "Kingdom of God" should be taken from them. It is the last time we have this term in Matthew, and it marks in a very specific way the difference between it and the Kingdom of Heaven. The Jews, entrusted with the revelation from God, owned Him as their King, and were in His Kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven was the form the Kingdom of God would take, consequent upon the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ to the right-hand of God on high.

The Kingdom of God, then, taken from the Jews would be given to a "nation bringing forth the fruits thereof." This, doubtless, has a twofold meaning. Peter, writing to believers, could say, using no doubt Old Testament forms of speech (Deut. 10: 15), "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light" (1 Peter 2: 9). Then, in a coming day, it will be said to Israel, in the sublime words of the prophet, "Arise, shine, for thy light is come . . . thy people shall be all righteous, they shall inherit the land for ever" (Isa. 60: 1-21). But meantime it is proved conclusively that men under the best of conditions could produce nothing for God. Not only so, but in addition to abusing the servants, they murdered the Son. Enmity could no further go. What will God do now? Can grace meet such a condition as this? Verse 1, Matthew 22, answers the question. It is no longer a question of what man has done, but of what God is doing; and the Lord hereupon gives a similitude of the new thing, and God's way of bringing men into it, under the form of the parable of the Marriage of the King's Son. And here a further startling development of evil is seen. Men not only refuse to bring anything to God: they also refuse to accept anything from Him. This is a true picture of the natural heart, and a very humbling truth indeed. But for sovereign grace, not a single soul of Adam's race would ever be in the glory of God.

"A certain king made a marriage for his son:" The world dishonoured the Son. God will have Him to be honoured. The world gave Him a low place. God will give Him the highest place that heaven affords. Every knee must bow to Him, and those who will not bow in grace shall bow in judgment. The Lord puts the divine counsels in true perspective. The proper "point of sight" is not so much man's need, as God's glory, and while the convicted sinner naturally views the Gospel from the first standpoint, the believer should seek to see things from the last.

The Marriage Feast sets before us the way grace goes out either to Jew or Gentile; and along with that there is the response it meets with. As to those that were bidden, "they would not come."

A second invitation manifests the indifference of some and the malevolence of others. The agricultural and mercantile classes (verse 5) are singled out from the remnant (verse 6), who slew the servants. These last would fittingly represent the leaders who were ever the first in persecution.

In the first invitation we have the ministry of the Apostles before the Cross. In the second, the preaching of the Apostles after the Cross, and until the death of Stephen. "Repent ye therefore and be converted," Peter could say, "that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshment may come from the presence of the Lord" (Acts 3: 19, R.V.). But they repented not. Instead of their sins being blotted out, their city was burned up as the parable had forewarned.

Now, the call of grace can go out to all, without exception or distinction. It is no longer, what man is, but, what God is. A praying Lydia, or a jailer steeped in sin, need, and alike receive, the same grace. From the "highways" the servants gather both "bad and good," and the wedding is furnished with guests.

But something more was needed. The glory of the King, and the honour of the King's Son, demanded that there should be not only acceptance of the King's invitation, but fitness for the King's presence. This the "Wedding Garment" supplied. It was needed by the guests, and provided by the King. Hence there was no excuse for the man without it. His "best" would not do for the King, neither will man's best do for God. Only as a sinner is clad in God's righteousness, can he stand before Him, and God's righteousness is Christ Himself. The measure of the believer's standing is nothing less than Christ risen. Wonderful truth. How little we enter into it. But there could not be Christ risen, until He had first gone into death. Apart from that atoning death to which He went down in grace, He must have been alone in the glory. But, blessed be God, risen out of death, He became the First begotten from the dead, and the First born of many brethren. The prodigal's highest aspiration was the place of a hired servant. But nothing less than the robe and the ring and the feast would satisfy the heart of the father.

The close of the parable looks on to the end, and the judgment is solemn, final, and eternal. It is the end of every mere professor — outer darkness and untold woe. Oh that men would be warned in time. Notice that the word translated "servants" in verses 3, 4, 6, 8, is not the same as that used in verse 13. The first (bondservants) refer to those who go forth with the Gospel. The second (ministers) refer to the angels who are the executors of His judgments. These two things are never confounded.

The later half of the chapter brings out the folly of the three great classes of the nation, in their endeavour to "entangle him in his talk."

The Pharisees were the religionists of the day, the descendants of the patriotic men who had so nobly supported the Maccabees in the War of Independence. The Herodians were those who, in their endeavour to perpetuate the national existence at any cost, were willing to give up the national faith, in order to support the anti-national Idumean succession of the family of the Herods. These two classes, whose principles were diametrically opposite, and who hated each other with age-long hatred, agreed together to tempt the Lord. With divine wisdom, and grace combined, the Lord meets these men. Showing them that He knew their thoughts and thereby exposing them to themselves, He sought to deliver them from the snare of Satan into which they had fallen. Had the rights of God been rendered to Him, Caesar and his legions would have had no power in their land. The reply was unanswerable, but though they marvelled, they did not believe.

The hypocrisy and infidelity of the Sadducees are next exposed. As to creed, they denied everything that the Pharisees believed. The law of Moses, as they expounded it, had to do only with the earth. There was no future life. Now they come to the Lord, apparently anxious to settle a question about the resurrection, when the very fact of the resurrection itself they denied. Could hypocrisy go further? The Lord showed their difficulties arose from two sources. The first was their ignorance of their own scriptures, and the second was their ignorance of the power of God. Slow to own the first, they are equally slow to ascribe to God that power which belongs to Him by sovereign right, and thus they perish in their own folly. Unbelief is ever ignorant. "By faith we understand."

But here comes a lawyer. He is a learned scribe, and everything that is to be known about the law he knows. The One who was among them in a love that went far beyond law keeping he knew not. His question, however, "Which is the great commandment in the law?" brings out God's standard for men upon the earth, a standard from which he has fallen, alas, how far. The mission of the prophets was restorative, and intended to bring the people back to the ways of God. But they only added to their guilt. The law they had broken, and the prophets they had slain. Law knows nothing about producing conditions in which its righteous precepts can be displayed. That awaited a later revelation. Only when a man is born of God, can he display the character of God. Then, the flesh set aside, the righteous requirements of the law are fulfilled in those who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit (Rom. 8: 4).

These three questions asked and answered, the Lord next propounds to them the question of questions: — "What think ye of Christ: Whose Son is He?"

Earlier in our Gospel (Matt. 16), a somewhat similar question had been asked of disciples, and answered in a way that spoke of spiritual enlightenment and intelligence in the ways of God. Here there is only the darkness of unbelief. As David's Son, He had presented Himself to them and had been rejected. The day was coming when they, as His enemies, would be made the "footstool of his feet."

And so the tempters, confounded in all their tactics, withdraw from the conflict, and the disciples and the multitude listen to the summing-up of the righteous Judge (Matt. 23), before whom the hearts of all are exposed.

But first of all He sets up the Scribes and Pharisees, not as an example, but as a warning, whose works the disciples were to avoid. Whatsoever they taught from the law was to be observed, for the age of law was not yet closed. God still recognised that order which He had ordained, however much men had abused it. So the Lord speaks of them as "sitting in Moses' seat," that is — continuing his teaching. As such they were in the place of responsibility — before God, and would be held to be so. As the principles that governed their lives are exposed, we can only exclaim with the prophet, "The heart is deceitful above all things: who can know it?" And the answer is: — "I the Lord" (Jer. 17: 9). Here we get that which appeals to the natural mind.

Imposing on others what we refuse in ourselves (verse 4).

Wrong motives in service (verse 5).

Spiritual pride (verse 5).

Outward appearances (verse 6).

The applause of men (verse 7).

Deference from the world (verse 7).

Surely all of these are out of place in the character of the disciple of Christ, and yet how much there is in every heart to which these things appeal.

Such things were not to be among believers, and the Lord next puts His finger, as it were, upon the beginnings of things, which, if allowed, would produce the very same thing in Christianity as they had done in Judaism. Hence —

1 They were to avoid the principles of the Rabbi who sought to form a school around himself. Their Instructor was Christ, and His word their sole authority and unerring guide.

2 Nothing was to be allowed that would weaken their sense of relationship to God as their Father.

3 And there was to be no leadership, apart from the leadership of Christ Himself. One is your Master, Christ, and all ye are brethren.

Alas, how these three great principles have been ignored in Christendom, and the result has been that things are as we see them to-day. Sects and parties have been formed around men, which must ever be wrong, or around doctrines which may, in themselves, be right, but the True Centre — Christ — has thereby been ignored, and the Sole Authority, the Holy Word of God, has been set aside for the traditions of men.

The great moral principles of Christianity are again enforced in three short apophthegms: —

1 The greatest among you shall be your servant.

2 The self-exalted one shall be abased.

3 The humble minded shall be exalted.

He could say, "I am among you as he that serveth," and it could be said of Him, "Therefore hath God highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name" (Phil. 2). The first man in the pride of his heart sought to go up. The Second Man, in the grace of His heart, went down, even to the dust of death.

The Seven Woes that follow (for verse 14 is of doubtful authority) disclose not only the condemnation of the leaders of Israel, but why they are condemned.

Tradition played so large a part in their system that by it the Word of God was made of none effect. Indeed, it was made to mean the very opposite of what it said, and thus the light to them became darkness, and what was darkness, that, it follows, they held to be light. A single illustration will make this clear. Under the ceremonial law, creeping things were pronounced unclean. Yet no one was admitted a member of the Sanhedrim who did not possess sufficient ability, or rather ingenuity, to prove by many reasons that creeping things were clean. Well might the Lord say of such that they were hinderers in the way of life, neither entering the Kingdom themselves, nor allowing others to do so.

Those whom they succeeded in proselytising, reproduced only the positive evil of their teachers.

All righteous principles were set aside by vain casuistry, and they could so arrange the "Corban Oath" (see Mark 7) that they made their own gain out of the temple gold. To fill up the Corban treasure, men were taught to break the fifth commandment. His own teaching on vain swearing had already been given (Matt. 5: 34), and it is well to compare it with what we have here.

In the third woe, He had condemned their corrupt teaching. Here, in the fourth, He condemns their corrupt practice, and, in the next, we get, under a correct exterior, the corrupt affections of the natural heart. Again, they were more anxious to appear right before men, than to be right before God. It was outward paint to cover inward pollution. The grass grown green on the sides of the volcano snow lying white on a manure heap.

The last woe is more comprehensive still in its sweep. It looks both backwards and forwards. Their fathers had killed the prophets. They professed to abjure their fathers' deeds by building tombs for the slain, but both their hypocrisy and wickedness would be exposed by the way they would "kill, crucify, and scourge" the "prophets and wise men and scribes" of the new dispensation. This can be followed out in the short forty years that remained of their national history. Much of it is recorded in the Book of Acts. We need not further pursue it here. But it is well to notice how Christendom has copied, and indeed far surpassed in extent, the persecuting spirit of the Jew of old. It is believed to be a fair estimate that the Apostate Church of Rome is responsible for the blood of fifty millions of the saints of God. Well, truly will it be said of her that she is "drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (Rev. 17: 6).

The Lord, having now finished His public ministry, by convicting and condemning the leaders of Israel, seems, as it were, to cast His eye forward to that time when, God's patience being exhausted, the just judgment which grace alone had restrained, would fall. As He views it, the love of His heart for the guilty city again overflows.

What love indeed is here? In the very place where prophets had been slain, and where He was about to die, He would have "gathered her children together as a hen gathereth her brood under her wings." "I would — ye would not." It is the mystery of the perverted will. And because of it their house would be left desolate, as it has remained until this day, and will so remain until the remnant, converted and brought into blessing on the ground of the New Covenant of Grace, shall say, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord" (Ps. 118). Then the Stone rejected by the builders of the past day will become the head Stone of the Corner, and the temple choir of redeemed Israel will chant the National Anthem,

"O sing unto the Lord a new song,

For He hath done marvellous things.

His right hand and his holy arm

Hath gotten him the victory.

The Lord hath made known his salvation:

His righteousness hath he openly showed

In the sight of the heathen.

He hath remembered his mercy and his truth

Towards the house of Israel.

All the ends of the earth

Have seen the salvation of our God" (Ps. 98: 1-3).

Section 10. Matthew 24, 25.

The Great Prophetic Outline. The King's Dealings with the Jew, the Church, and the Nations

There are many wonderful things about the Word of God. No other book is like it in this, that it has a Divine Author. God has spoken. What He says must be true, authoritative, and final. It can be subject neither to revisal nor development, for the Author is infinite and All-wise.

Then again it does what no word of man can ever do in the same way — it speaks to the conscience. Men address their words to the intellect, the emotions, or the imagination. God speaks right home to the conscience. He deals with the foundation questions of man's sin, and God's righteousness, and so unconverted men hate the Book because they love not its Author.

Yet another most wonderful thing about the Bible is that it tells of the future. Other books tell of the past, or give details of current events, but when the line of the present moment is reached, all beyond it becomes mere idle speculation.

God's Book with graphic touch, and precise definition, gives an outline of the course of time, from the time that time began, until the time when time shall be no longer. It lifts the veil that shuts in the future from mortal ken, and shows us the glories of the ransomed around the throne of God, and the awful fate of the lost in that place where hope never comes. We can know about the end of time with just as much certainty as we know about the beginning of it, for the same word has revealed both.

With this assurance of faith, then, let us draw near and listen to the words of the Lord Jesus, as recorded for us in these wonderful chapters. He here takes the place of the Prophet of God, according to what was before spoken of Him by Moses: —

"I will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren . . . and I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him" (Deut. 18: 18). It was a solemn moment in Israel's history when He went out and departed from the temple. Never more would His voice be heard in its courts. Never again would His feet stand within its gates. Jerusalem had rejected her King, and the things that belonged to her peace were hid from her eyes.

The temple was that in which the Jew of that day made his boast. Even disciples were still occupied with its glories, and the Lord, to deliver them from the influence of things seen, brings in the light of things as yet unseen. Doubtless it was with something of dismay that they heard of the day of distress so soon to overtake their "beautiful house," and they waited only for a more convenient season to learn more about such a startling event. That occasion soon presented itself. Leaving the temple and the city, they take their way towards Bethany, and when sitting on the slopes of Olivet, it may be to rest after climbing up from the Kedron Valley, the disciples come to Him, eager for information as to the solemn events of which He had but darkly hinted, as they left the temple courts.

With this object they put to Him the three great questions: —

1 When shall these things be?

2 What shall be the sign of Thy Coming?

3 What shall be the sign of the end of the world (age)?

The Lord, in replying to their questions, gives them, as is ever His wont, instruction and guidance far beyond what they had asked for. And in the present section of the Gospel we have an outline of events beginning from the moment then present, and carrying us on to that time of blessedness for the earth, still future, when "the King shall sit upon the throne of his glory," and the Kingdom will no longer exist in mystery, but will be seen in manifestation, and "everything that hath breath shall praise the Lord," according to Psalm 150: 6.

The prophecy divides itself into three distinct parts, which we must carefully distinguish, if we are to profit by our Lord's teaching: —

1. The First Part has to do with the Jew (Matt. 24: 1-41).

1 His Trials (Matt. 24: 9).

2 His Temptations (Matt. 24: 24).

3 His Deliverance (Matt. 24: 31).

2. The Second Part has to do with Christians (Matt. 24: 42 — 25: 30).

1 As Ministering (Matt. 24: 45).

2 As Waiting (Matt. 25: 1).

3 As Working for their Absent Lord (Matt. 25: 14).

3. The Third Part has to do with the Gentile Nations (Matt. 25: 31-46).

1 As Receiving (Matt. 25: 34); or

2 As Rejecting the King's Messengers (Matt. 25: 41).

It will be seen at once that the first part of the prophecy carries us right on to the "coming of the Son of Man," taking no notice of the Church period, which must necessarily lie within its bounds. Having done so, the Lord turns back to deal with the Christian position, not so much in relation to "times and seasons" which have to do with the earth, but giving instead an outline of what the motives which govern Christian profession are, whether real or unreal; with the necessary teaching connected therewith. And this is as we would expect, and is on the lines of all prophecy which, strictly speaking, has to do with the earth, and an earthly people. So Peter says the prophets "spake of the sufferings of Christ — and — the glory that should follow." To them the mystery of the Church had not been revealed, and the disciples here were in a somewhat similar position. They are looked upon representatively, as the followers of Christ, in His absence, and at His return to the earth.

Let us notice further that Matthew does not give us, except in a general way, the Lord's answer to the first question — "When shall these things be?" — that is, the overthrow of their temple and polity. The answer to this is given very fully in Luke, see Matthew 21: 12-24, and is in keeping with the line of truth he is presenting. As a Gentile, writing to Gentiles, Luke shows the results of Gentile invasion of the land, which was, in its immediate consequences, the destruction of both temple and city by Titus, 70 A.D.

But here the Lord sets first before the disciples what would be the state of the world after He left it, and what would be their own condition in it. As to the nations of the earth, they would not only hate the disciples, but they would hate each other. Wars and rumours of wars would be the result. The King of Peace rejected, peace will never again find a home on earth until He returns. Famine follows war. Pestilence follows famine. And not only are these dreadful results seen as the effects of men's sin, but inanimate nature itself seems to respond to the universal unrest.

Such would be the condition of things in the absence of the King. They would be the "beginning of sorrows." In addition to the persecution from without, there would be that which would cause them even greater suffering than the physical torments to which they might be subjected — many would be false to their profession. The persecution of the world tests the reality of the professor. Many such are offended, and instead of standing firm as confessors of Christ, they become, alas! betrayers and haters of those they once professed to love and serve.

With minds in such a condition the words of the false prophet find ready reception, and, turned aside from the truth, many are deceived thereby. The deadening effect of abounding iniquity is also seen in another way — the love of many waxes cold. Ephesus is not alone in this. Who is there among us who has not experienced it? Grace alone can keep.

Many deceived: many offended: many disheartened.

Many false Christs: many false prophets: many betrayers.

Every art of Satan is here laid bare by the eye of Omniscience, and the encouragement is added to the faithful that he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

We are introduced in verse 14 to something which marks in a special way the time of the end. "This Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations: and then shall the end come."

We must not confound the Gospel of the Kingdom with the Gospel of the grace of God. These are two distinct lines of truth as we shall see.

We get the Kingdom Gospel first mentioned in Matthew 4, where the Lord Himself began to preach it, and along with it went the healing miracles which marked that dispensation. Again, in Matthew 10, we find the proclamation more widely extended by the twelve apostles, still with the same signs following, but with the definite injunction to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As we have seen, Israel rejected both the Kingdom and the King, and with the ascension of Christ to the right hand of God on high, the "good news" is now of a different character. It is no longer a call to Israel to repent and be converted in order to be ready for an earthly reign, but it is a command to all men everywhere to repent, because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness. Before that day comes, God, in the operations of His sovereign grace, is saving sinners out of the world, and uniting them to Christ in heavenly glory; uniting them also to one another as well as to their Head on high, and forming the Church which is His Body. When the last member has been gathered in, the Lord Himself shall descend, and we shall ascend to meet Him in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord (1 Thess. 4). This is the "Blessed Hope" set before the believer now, and we shall rejoice in the Hope, just in proportion as our hearts are occupied with the Person of our risen and glorified Lord on high.

But none of these things are developed in Matthew's Gospel. They were still future, and could only be spoken of in type and figure, as we shall see.

What we now know is that God is saving souls out of this world in grace, and the day is coming when He will establish a Kingdom in this world in power, and the preacher who is taught in the word will not fail to declare both these precious truths.

Here in our Gospel, then, we have reached a period beyond the rapture of the Church, and just before the "end." In spite of all the opposition and persecution of the world, there will be an evangelistic revival, such as this world has never yet witnessed. From restored Israel will go forth foreign missionaries, with something at least of the zeal and devotion of the greatest and most successful foreign missionary that this world has ever seen — the Apostle Paul. And their message will be, "Ho every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters" (Isa. 55: 1)." The Lord. God which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, yet will I gather to the gathered ones" (Isa. 56: 8). "Also the sons of strangers that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord . . . even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for my house shall be called an house of prayer for all people" (Isa. 56: 6-7). The Lord had reminded them of this prophecy when He cleansed the temple (Matt. 21: 13). Its fulfilment awaits the day when He shall sit as a Priest upon His throne. In short, there will be a world-wide testimony to a coming Messiah. Christendom has never accomplished this with the Gospel of the grace of God. In spite of the utmost self-denial and self-sacrifice on the part of very many devoted servants of Christ, whose efforts have been beyond all praise, yet it is a fact that Christendom, in modern days at least, has never succeeded in evangelising more than half of the known world. And the opinion of those best able to judge is, that the heathen nations of to-day are increasing faster than the present missionary activity can overtake. It is a humbling thought for all of us, if so it be.

But the Lord now goes on to say that when this has been accomplished, the "end" shall come. It is no question of the world being entirely converted. That it will not be so, other scriptures clearly prove. But the testimony goes out, and in Matthew 25 we shall see what the results of accepting or rejecting that testimony will be, to the nations then upon the earth.

Of what "end" does the Lord here speak? Clearly not the end of the world, as many teach, and as we shall endeavour to show later; but the end of the "age" about which the apostles had inquired in verse 3. That "age" would expire with the expiry of the period spoken of by the angel to Daniel the prophet (Dan., Chap. 9: 24) as "seventy-sevens," beginning (as we know from the same scripture) at the 20th year of Artaxerxes in the month Nisan, B.C. 454. As every careful reader knows, that period is divided into three parts. "Seven weeks," "Three score and two weeks," and "One week ": and it began at the restoration under Nehemiah, when the commandment went forth to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. Seven "sevens" (forty-nine years) of "troublous times" passed, during which the city and state were being laboriously reconstructed in the midst of many enemies. Another three score and two "sevens" pass, and again it is the month Nisan (April), 29 A.D. The Messiah of Israel presents Himself as her King, but instead of receiving the Kingdom He is cut off and "has nothing." Instead of sitting upon His rightful throne He is cast out to lie in a borrowed grave.

Evidently the seventieth "week" is still future, and two reasons out of many will show it:

1 In Daniel 9: 24, the angel gives the prophet to understand that at the end of the last week, six things would be accomplished, and the sorrows of Jerusalem and its people be over. These six things are set out in detail in the text referred to; none of them are yet accomplished, and Jerusalem's sorrows only began after the Lord was crucified.

2 In Daniel 9: 27, we learn that the prince that shall come shall confirm a covenant with (the) many for "one week." This "prince" is clearly not Messiah, for when He came, He was "cut off ": it is as clear that it is not Titus who is referred to; for when he came, instead of making any covenant with the Jews, he destroyed both their city and their state. The whole of Daniel 9: 26 is fulfilled between the end of the sixty-ninth and the beginning of the seventieth "week." It is the great "interval" during which the mystery of the Church is brought to light, and when that period is over, times and seasons referring to earth will again begin to run their predestined course. The "coming prince" and the "last week" is still future. This "week" will be divided into two parts. Verses 4-14 of our chapter, while giving a description in a general way of the world in the absence of the King, will really find their complete fulfilment in the first half of the "week." Verses 15-28 describe the events which take place in the latter half.

These we now have to consider.

Just as the making of the "Covenant" marked the beginning of the first half of the week, so the breaking of the "Covenant" marks the beginning of the latter half of the "week." This event, according to Daniel 9: 27, 12: 11, is followed by the taking away of the daily sacrifice, and the setting up of the "abomination that maketh desolate." Our Lord refers to this in verse 15 of our chapter, and also connects with it another thing, and that is — the great tribulation.

If we set out these events in order we shall find that the latter half of the week is marked by seven important occurrences:

1 The Covenant confirmed by the Roman prince with the mass of the Jews is broken by him.

2 The antichrist arrogates to himself the titles of Christ, and endeavours to manifest the power of Christ.

3 The ordered temple services are interrupted.

4 The abomination that maketh desolate (or astonisheth) is set up in the Holy of Holies.

5 The Great Tribulation begins, as the result.

6 The Testimony of the "two Witnesses" continues during three and a half years.

7 The faithful remnant who remain true to God, and refuse the mark of the beast, are persecuted and slain.

In the midst of this "time of trouble," the great arch-enemy, Satan, is abroad in the earth (Rev. 12: 12), and true to his character as the Deceiver, he at once raises up false Christs and false prophets to deceive, if it were possible, the very elect (verse 24). His two great masterpieces of evil we get in Revelations 13. The one a "beast" out of the "sea" — the political unrest of the nations — and heading up in himself all the forces of infidelity and militarism which, though prominent now, will then be all but universal. He will be the finished product of man's will as opposed to God: the super-man, in whom wicked men will find a chief so much superior to themselves in wickedness that they will fall down and worship him. He will both blaspheme God and persecute His saints. And, as his henchman, he will have the "beast" out of the "earth," who, although he may have "two horns like a lamb," yet betrays his Satanic origin by speaking like a dragon. Under his sway idolatry is again introduced into Jerusalem. The unclean spirit returns to his house, and in his company seven other spirits more wicked than himself. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Matthew 12: 45. One very subtle form of the coming idolatry will be this — the worship of a living man. Such a thing had been foreshadowed in the history of King Darius, Daniel 6: 7. Here we have it full blown. And what makes the delusion more strong is that the false prophet has power to give breath (not life, as in the common text) to the image of the beast, so that it shall be able to speak, and to cause those who refuse their homage to be killed. The "fiery furnace" will be seven times heated again, and so fierce will be the persecution that it will have to be written "Blessed are the dead" (Rev. 14: 13). But God is over all. A limit is ever set to the power of evil — "He shall continue forty and two months" (Rev. 13: 5). At the end of the latter half of the last week the judgment of God descends, and the beast and false prophet, "these both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone" (Rev. 19: 20).

In the midst of this terrible persecution disciples are warned not to be deceived by those who say that Christ has come in secret. Before the dread event of that coming, all the powers both of nature and government seem to lose their wonted control, as the symbolic language of verse 29 would (seem to) indicate, and instead of any secret coming, His appearing would he like a lightning flash, sweeping with dazzling intensity across the vault of heaven from the east unto the west. "And they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."

Now has come the day of deliverance for elect Israel, and of vengeance for their oppressors. God has taken in hand to "destroy them that corrupt the earth," and just as Israel had been "spread abroad as the four winds of heaven" (Zech. 2: 6), so will they be gathered from the four winds. The "great trumpet" shall be blown (Isa. 27: 13), and the outcasts shall be gathered, converted, and purified to worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem. Scattered by the oppressor because of their sins: regathered by angelic power, according to the free and sovereign grace of their covenant-keeping Jehovah.

The rapidity with which the events move which lead up to all this, is doubtless taught by the "parable of the fig tree" — ever an emblem of the nation. As leaf and fruit appeared in rapid succession, so would the Lord hasten the day of deliverance for the people of His Covenant.

And there is a needs-be for His solemn assurance in verses 32-34. "Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled." Now, some at least of those who listened to His words, and many of those to whom they would be repeated, would see the city and land swept clean of its inhabitants — "wiped as a man wipeth a dish; wiping it, and turning it upside down" (2 Kings 21: 13); and they might well be tempted to think that all was over for the nation — and the promise unfulfilled after all. "Not so," says the Lord; "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." We have only to look around to see the confirmation of that word. The prophet Hosea, who flourished in the days of four of Judah's greatest kings, 800 years before Christ, had said, "The children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim" (Hos. 3: 4). It may be that speaking as he did in the palmy days of Judah's history, few believed his words, but so the Jews abide to-day. Having neither a king nor the hope of one, unable to sacrifice to the true God, yet so far they are preserved from image worship. With all genealogies lost, no one can lay claim to wear the priestly ephod wherewith to ask counsel of God; neither do they seek after oracular responses of lying spirits, through teraphim, as their fathers did of old. But to the same prophet was given the promise that "afterwards shall the children of Israel return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king; and shall fear the Lord, and his goodness in the later day" (Hos. 3: 5).

Amid all the changing scene of time the word of the Lord endureth for ever.

Three things come out in the next section of our chapter (verses 36-44): —

1 The Day of the Coming of the Son of Man is known only to the Father.

2 The Coming will introduce a time of discriminative judgment for living men upon the earth: "taking," as in Noah's flood in judgment, or "leaving" upon a redeemed earth for blessing.

3 To the men of the earth, the Coming will be as that of a thief in the night, unexpected, and unprepared for. [Hence the necessity for disciples to watch, for their Lord was coming, and as "Son of Man," coming to the earth. The world might say "Peace and Safety" when the dark cloud of "sudden destruction" was just lowering over it, but they were no longer in darkness, that that day should overtake them as a thief (1 Thess. 5: 3, 4).]

We turn next to consider the three parables which have to do with Christianity. Strictly speaking, they do not contain any outline of prophetic events, but deal rather with the moral condition of things which will obtain, as well as with what ought to obtain, on the part of those professing to be the Lord's servants in His absence.

Three things confirm the view that the Lord is here speaking of Christianity: —

1 The Coming for which believers are here enjoined to wait, is the Coming of the LORD. The title — Son of Man — which He takes in connection with the earth, does not occur in any of the three parables under consideration. (The best authorities omit the last clause of Matthew 25: 13.)

2 No "times or seasons ": no synopsis of earthly events: no signs, preparatory or introductory, are anywhere mentioned. The absent Lord is coming for His waiting people. It is the outline of truth more fully developed later in 1 Thessalonians 4 and other scriptures of the New Testament prophets.

3 No Old Testament prophecy in connection with this subject is quoted in any part of the section, and this is as we should expect, for no such prophecy exists. Many prophecies — at least three hundred — speak of the Coming of the Messiah, His rejection, and death. And again, many glowing pages picture the glory of the Kingdom established under the King in power. But the period of the Kingdom, in the absence of the King, during which the Church is formed, is nowhere spoken of in the Old Testament. Of what would transpire in this period the Lord here speaks to His disciples, using language they were able to understand, and yet in such a way that further light would enable them to comprehend more fully the deeper things of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The first parable then, Matthew 24: 45-51, deals with the servant in his Lord's Household. He is placed there for the express purpose of giving them meat in due season. Why, of the three parables, does this come first in order? Is it to show that the Lord's interest in His people down here holds the first place in His heart? The thrice repeated injunction to Peter in John 21 to feed the flock, shows at least the importance of the position of the household servant. He may be a "faithful and wise" servant, or, on the other hand, he may be an "evil" servant. The condition of things is still viewed here, as in all the parables, on the ground of profession. But the servant is in "the house," and on the ground of responsibility. As such he will be dealt with when his Lord returns.

His commission is from the Lord.

He is responsible to the Lord.

He will be rewarded by the Lord.

Taught in the Word himself, he is to teach others. He is to "give them meat in due season." If in the mind of his Master, he will provide the "sincere milk of the word" for the "babes," and "strong meat" for those of mature age. He will be blessed at the Coming of his Master, if found so doing. But there is more. The Lord adds that "he shall make him ruler over all his goods." We shall get further light here by comparing this with Revelations 2: 26. The promise to the Thyatiran overcomer was power over the nations. The apostasy of Thyatira will mark the time of the coming, and the servant found true to his master, in time of peril, will by his master be promoted to power in Kingdom glory.

But there is another side, as there is in all the parables. The hope of the coming was, alas! soon lost, and those who should have been "faithful and wise" became unfaithful and evil. Then, again, connected with the loss of the right spirit came the assumption of the wrong position and fellowship with the wrong company. He is found "eating and drinking with the drunken."

Morally, this is a complete inversion of true service, as defined by the Lord in Matthew 19, where, as we saw, the two great principles that actuated the true servant were love and humility. Here it is exaltation of self and oppression of others. And it is not difficult to trace the progress of this spirit in the history of the professing Church through the ages. Even in the days of the Apostles men were found who "loved to have the pre-eminence," and they soon had many followers. But the Lord is not unmindful of the interests of His people, and He will recompense. The "evil servant" is a hypocrite, and, in the day when the Lord judges, his place will be appointed with such.

We must not confound the coming in verse 46 with the coming in verse 50. The faithful and wise servant is living in the expectation of his Lord's return. All his service is performed in view of that-to him-longed-for moment. To the evil servant, the coming is an event both unexpected and undesired. It carries us back to verse 37, where the wicked, whether open foes or false professors, meet their doom at the hands of the Son of Man.

The next parable opens in a somewhat remarkable way, by indicating a particular time when the Kingdom of Heaven would be likened to "Ten Virgins." That time was clearly some period near the end of the age, when the various events would have transpired, of which the imagery of the parable treats. It contemplates the history of the Kingdom, not in a forward view, as in Matthew 13, but is, as it were, a backward view over its history from the time when the Ten went out on the ground of profession, until the moment when the Five went in to the marriage feast.

The great subject of the parable is readiness to meet the Bridegroom. The chief business of the household servant in the last parable was occupation with his Lord's interests. Here pre-eminently the great thought is occupation with the Lord Himself. May we all know more of it in a practical way day by day. The Coming of the Lord is the Hope of the Church, and therefore necessarily the hope of the individual believer, and it is from this latter standpoint it is looked at here.

The imagery of the parable is extremely simple, yet divinely expressive.

"Virgins" — Separated ones, from a Greek root to "set apart."

"Lamps" — Profession.

"Oil" — The Holy Spirit.

"Vessels" — Hearts.

"Bridegroom" — Christ.

"Sleeping" — Unwatchfulness. The hope of the Coming lost to the Church for many ages.

"The Midnight Cry" — Is this truth restored.

The first thing that the Lord emphasises is that the ten Virgins "went out" to meet the Bridegroom. And this is another proof, if such were needed, that He is here contemplating the heavenly calling of believers of the present dispensation. In no sense could the Jew be said to be called out of the world. Indeed, the world was, and is yet to be, the sphere of his blessing. But to His own the Lord could say, "Ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world; therefore the world hateth you" (John 15: 19). When the Church lost that "called out" character and gave up the Hope of her heavenly calling, she began to fraternise with the world. When she came down to the world's level, the edge of the world's hatred was blunted, persecution ceased, and the Virgins "slumbered." Very soon even real Christians became like the world, and the world took on a profession of religion and became like the Christians, as we see in Christendom to-day. The result was that the precious truth of apostolic days, dear to the heart of every persecuted saint — the nearness of the Coming of the One he loved — was lost to view. Christians were at home in the world and did not need Him. Mere professors did not want Him. True and false, they all slumbered, and finally slept.

But an explanation of the promise was needed and easily found. It was taught by those who wanted to prophesy smooth things, that He "often came." So He came at the fall of Jerusalem, or at the Reformation. So He comes at death, and will come at the "day of judgment." How any one of these comings — if we may call any of them such — agrees with the Bridegroom character of the Coming of the Lord Jesus, it would be difficult to say.

The turning point of the parable is the Midnight Cry: "BEHOLD THE BRIDEGROOM!"

Evidently it is the Spirit preparing His way by means of watchmen raised up for the purpose.

Is the midnight cry and the recovery of the doctrine of the coming, so long lost, one and the same thing? If so there is this difficulty that in the parable, after the cry, the awakened foolish Virgins were too late to procure oil for their dying lamps. But we could not carry the simile into history or else we should have to say that it is now too late for the mere professor to be saved; which, thank God, is not the case. May it not be, that, even as, after the Lord was crucified, risen, and ascended, there was still the lingering of grace over Israel, according to Peter's testimony in Acts 2; so it is to-day. The Bridegroom has been announced, yet the long suffering of our God, which is salvation, induces Him to tarry yet a moment longer before the trumpet sounds. If this be so, how near is that moment? He is, as it were, on the way, and may arrive at any moment. May our loins be girded about, and our lights burning, and we, like unto men that wait for their Lord (Luke 12: 35).

When the awakened foolish Virgins realised that even the possession of trimmed oilless lamps was not sufficient preparation for the Bridegroom, they further manifested their foolishness, by going for oil to the wrong place. So it is, and so it will be in Christendom. Mere professors may hold even the truth of the Lord's Coming as a mere doctrine or creed, which never influences either their hopes or their ways. They will learn, alas! when too late, that nothing but saving grace in the heart communicated by the Holy Spirit Himself can fit any soul for the Coming of the Lord; and the great point of the parable is preparedness for that coming. The great essential for the Virgins was oil. The one thing needful for all is the Holy Spirit in the heart. "If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his" (Rom. 8: 9). "They that were ready went in with him" — it is the heavenly hope realised. The Bride is not mentioned. Co-related truths are never all stated in one parable. In Matthew 22 we have a parable dealing with the condition of the Guests. Here it is a question of the Corning of the Bridegroom. In Revelations 19 we get a glimpse of the Bride in her bridal array, and in Revelations 21 we again see her, but now it is the day of display. "And the door was shut." Five little words, yet of the most solemn import. To-day they come to all as a warning. Some day soon they will express an accomplished fact, with tremendous realities for all. Some will be shut IN, with the Lord they have loved and longed for; in the presence of the Father, and in the Father's House.

"Oh I what a Home, but such His love

That He must bring us there."

"And the door was shut." Some will be shut OUT from all the joys and all the glories of the heavenly home, and shut out for ever. To the impassioned prayer, "Lord, Lord, open to us," the answer is, "I know you not." Scripture knows nothing of a "second chance," or "larger hope." These are vain ideas conceived only in the minds of foolish men, who love sin too much to turn to God now in the day of His grace, and so fall into the snare of Satan, to the loss of their souls.

Is the reader a mere professor only? If so, oh, be warned in time, for the Coming of the Bridegroom is nigh, even at the door.

"Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour" (verse 13).

One other parable was needed to express yet another aspect of Christian profession during the absence of the King.

He has gone into a far country, and the question is, "What are His servants doing for Him in His absence?" In the first parable of our chapter He takes the title of "Bridegroom," and every thought connected with that is of love and affection. It is pure grace on His part without any thought of merit on the part of the loved one, and that is one aspect of truth. But here He takes another title, that of "Lord." He was "the Lord of those servants" (verse 19). As such, they were under His authority, and it was to Him that they should render an account, on His return, for the "goods" He had committed to their trust. We do well to remember that this is before each one of us. "Wherefore let us labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be acceptable to Him" (2 Cor. 5: 9, R.V.).

In the parable the servants receive, in varying amounts, goods from their Lord to trade with in His absence. It is grace going out to others, and by those who have received gifts from their risen Lord so to serve Him. The parable is similar to that in Luke 19, only there, the great point is the Christian's responsibility according to his opportunities. There, all received equal amounts, but produced different results, for which they are rewarded differently. Here they receive different amounts, and secure different results, but the good are rewarded each cent per cent, because both were alike faithful to the amount of their gift. Here it is the sovereignty of God. In Luke it is the responsibility of man.

The talents, then, were given to be used for the Lord, not for the glory of the servant. We are in a world of need, and there are souls to be won for Christ. Just as a business man is in business, to do business, so should the Christian be here for Christ. The Lord Himself could say, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business" (Luke 2: 49), and He was the Pattern Servant.

We may gather from the Lord's teaching that every believer has some talent imparted to him according to his "several ability," and that it is expected of him that he will use that gift or talent for the Lord's glory. Now, ability may be either natural, or acquired, and, if acquired, may also be developed in proportion as he seeks diligently so to do. This, taken in connection with the injunction to Timothy to stir up the gift that was in him, would show that by diligent and faithful exercise of our talents and abilities, both the vessel and the talent it contains will alike increase, the sphere of service widen, and the blessing extend. This should be the desire of every servant — the object in view ever being the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, even a believer may allow his gift to lie dormant, and through mere slothfulness either of body or mind, neglect to equip himself for the service and opportunities that may lie just at hand. A man cannot "do the work of an evangelist" unless he goes where souls are to be found. The Word of Christ cannot "dwell richly" in a saint unless he make it his study. No Sunday school teacher will succeed unless he seeks diligently, earnestly, and prayerfully to learn the Book he has set out to teach. To speak a word in season to him that is weary, we must be ever drinking from the Living Spring. There are ever very practical lessons to be learned when the Lord is the Teacher. No one teaches like Him.

But the possibility is counted upon here, as in all parables, of a man taking the place of a servant who never knew the Lord. There is no question at all of the "wicked and slothful servant" being a Christian. He was not. His words, his actions, and his end abundantly prove it. But the Lord uses the case, and the end of the mere professor, to warn of the possible danger a real Christian is exposed to in this matter. The man hid his talent in the earth, instead of using it for his Master, and it may be possible that for some the "earth" is a greater snare than the "world." A Christian man may have no desire for the world's concert rooms or theatres, and yet allow his business concerns so to engross his heart and life that every moment is devoted to the things of earth, and he can find neither time nor interest for the things of the Lord. It was the man with one talent that proved false to his trust, and it may be safely assumed that men of this class compose the majority of the servants. Outstanding "five talent" men are but few; hence the warning in the parable extends to the greatest number. We are tempted to think that because we can do but little, that little left undone will not matter. But not so. The sons of Merari bore the pins and cords of the Tabernacle, and their service was just as important as that of the sons of Kohath, who bore the sacred vessels.

We have next to consider the Lord's relationships to the earth in His character of "King." He has already been before us as "Bridegroom," and "Lord," and if, as the Bridegroom, He touches all the springs of the heart's affections, so as Lord, He reminds us of the salutary truth that we belong to Him. He has bought us with His Blood.

But nowhere in Scripture is He spoken of as King of the Church. He is the King of Israel and the King of Nations: when He reigns, "all kings shall fall down before him, and all nations shall serve him. Men shall be blessed in him, and all nations shall call him blessed." Well might the Psalmist, as he considered that Glorious One, of whom Solomon in all his glory was but a faint type, exclaim, "Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things. And blessed be his glorious Name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his glory" (Ps. 72). The introduction of this day of blessing for a groaning creation is now set before us.

"When the Son of Man shall come in his glory and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats" (Chap. 25: 31-32).

It is no question of a general judgment at the "end of the world," as so much of the current theology of the day would teach, but which scripture nowhere warrants. If it be compared with the judgment of the "Great White Throne," it will be seen that the subjects, test, time, place, and sentence are all different. Far from there being only one judgment spoken of in the Bible, there are at least seven: —

1. The Judgment of the Cross: the basis of every blessing for man.

2. The judgment Seat of Christ: the manifestation day for every believer (2 Cor. 5: 10).

3. The Judgment of the Living Nations upon the Earth (Matt. 25: 31).

4. The Judgment of the Great White Throne, when earth and heaven have fled away (Rev. 20: 11).

5. The Judgment in the House of God: the Father dealing in Government with His own (1 Peter 1: 17).

6. The judgment by the Assembly, as to that which is in keeping with the Name of Christ (1 Cor. 5: 4).

7. The Judgment of ourselves, by ourselves, so as to allow nothing in our ways inconsistent with Christ's death (1 Cor. 11: 28).

Here, in our Gospel, however, we have the details of the picture of which Matthew 13: 41-44 gives the outline. It is the deliberative, sessional judgment, by the Son of Man of the living nations upon the earth at His appearing. The passage links up with Matthew 24: 31. The Lord takes up the thread of events in connection with the earth and pictures what will take place after the upheavals of the "last week." At His appearing He has destroyed the beast and the false prophet, taken, as it were, in red-handed rebellion against Him (Rev. 19; 2 Thess. 2: 8). He is now about to put right the place they had put wrong: to measure out judgment to their self-deluded followers: recompense to the faithful of the earth who had been true to the Hope of His Coming, and introduce the righteous nations into all the blessings of the millennial Kingdom, of which Psalm 72 gives so glowing a description.

What, then, is the condition of things upon the earth just before the Son of Man appears, and who are its occupants? The Church has been called away to meet Him in the air (1 Thess. 4), and with the Church, the Holy Spirit, whose operations of grace will, after that period, assume a new form. Men of the world little realise how much the world owes to the presence of the Spirit of God now. He is that restraining power who is preventing the outbreak of the powers of evil. When the Spirit is taken out of the way, evil will come to a head, under a man so wholly possessed by the spirit of Satan, that Scripture knows him as the Man of Sin (2 Thess. 2: 3). Ten different names are applied to him, clearly defining both his origin and his character. He is called: —

1 The Man of the Earth (Ps. 10: 18).

2 The False Prophet (Rev. 19: 20).

3The Antichrist (1 John 2: 18).

4 The Beast from the Earth (Rev. 13).

5 The Son of Perdition (2 Thess. 2: 3).

6 The Man of Sin (2 Thess. 2: 3).

7 That Wicked [One] (2 Thess. 2: 8).

8 The Idol Shepherd (Zech. 11: 17).

9 The King (Dan. 11: 36).

10 One Coming in His Own Name (John 5: 43).

It is the revealing of this Person that brings matters on earth to an issue. To-day, the question is — For Christ, or against Him? Then the question will be — For Antichrist, or against him? The mass of the Jews will be "for him." Having come in his own name, he will be received by them as the Lord forewarned them (John 5: 43). Apostate Christendom, taking pleasure in unrighteousness, and having refused the love of the truth, will believe "the lie" and find themselves in the same unhappy company. It is a most solemnising thought, that, when the Lord comes for His people, the day of grace for Christendom will be over for ever. Sudden and rapid will be its development into the "Babylon" of Revelations 17, and as swift will be its overthrow at the hands of the Son of Man.

In addition to the nation of the Jews gathered back to Palestine in unbelief, and apostate Christendom in European and other lands, there will also be the vast masses of the hitherto unevangelised heathen nations. How will the solemn events of the time of the end affect them? To answer this question we must turn to Romans 11. See the whole chapter. The argument there is, that Israel, rejecting Christ, was rejected. Israel rejected, blessing thereupon flowed out to the Gentiles. God visited them to "take out of them a people for his name" (Acts 15: 14). "Now," says the apostle, "if the fall of them, (the Jews) be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness?" (Rom. 11: 12). In other words, Israel's fall brought blessing to the Gentiles, and Israel's restoration, when the Lord comes back, will bring double blessing — "life from the dead."

This blessing these nations are offered in the proclamation of the Kingdom Gospel of Matthew 24: 14, and Revelations 14: 6; and the acceptance or rejection of the King's messengers ("My brethren") fixes their place and title to life, or condemnation.

But the King's commendation of the righteous here (Matt. 25: 34-36) brings out another thing. Those who had heralded the tidings of the Coming King had done so in the face of the greatest difficulties. Antichrist's followers had accepted the "mark of the beast" (Rev. 13), and were content with the great pseudo-religious-social system introduced by him. They wanted neither God's King, nor God's righteousness. So hunger and thirst, banishment, nakedness, and prison lay before the evangelists. With these servants the King here identifies Himself, even as with another persecuted company, when He arrested their persecutor, Saul of Tarsus. And those who ministered to their necessities hear, with joyful wonder, that what they had done was reckoned by the King even as if done unto Himself.

And now we reach the time when the promises in Matthew 5 will receive their complete fulfilment. "Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (verse 34). Now, the mourners are comforted; the meek inherit the earth, and the merciful obtain mercy. The day of regeneration has come, and they go into life eternal.

But there is the other side. He gathers out of His Kingdom all things that do offend. It must be so, for righteousness is about to reign. During the present day of grace righteousness suffers because evil is predominant. In the eternal day it will dwell. Every stain of sin will then have been for ever eradicated.

But here, not only is there the company on the right hand — "the sheep"; but there are also those on the left hand — "the goats." And the remarkable thing about the latter is that their judgment, as here set forth, is simply on the ground of what they had not done. It would seem as if they had tried to take a middle course between the "for" and the "against." They had not been among the followers of the "beast," taken in high-handed rebellion against the King, and slain with the sword (Rev. 19: 21). Nevertheless, neither had they identified themselves with His cause and with His servants. They had seen the servants both persecuted and slain, and had extended neither succour nor sympathy, thereby showing the state of their hearts. Is not the lesson here, that, in divine things, there can be no middle ground. Men are for the Lord, or against Him, as He has already declared.

Solemn and sad is their doom. They had done the devil's work by abstaining from the work of God, and they find their place in "everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels." "These shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal."

It is well to note that every mark of the moral condition of the later day is with us now. Superstition and infidelity are as rampant in Europe to-day as ever they were during the dark ages. In addition, men of the world are binding themselves together into all kinds of "associations" and "brotherhoods" to further their own selfish ends. And, sad to say, many Christians are voluntarily joining themselves up with such, thereby both slighting their heavenly calling and participating in the "unequal yoke." In a coming day the "beast" will grasp the reins of all such confederacies, and use them for his own ungodly ends. Mark the fidelity of the coming witnesses, who will rather give up life itself than compromise their testimony by receiving the mark of the beast. The Father's Name on their foreheads will bring persecution and death here, but life and glory hereafter.

Well will it be with us if our every gift, every power and every hour, be consecrated to Him alone, who, in grace, hath called us to be for Him, in a world that is still against Him.

Section 11. Matthew 26 — 28.

The King goes into Death and Judgment, in order that His Followers may enter into Life and Glory

What feelings of awe and wonder must have filled the hearts of the disciples, as they sat on the green brow of Olivet, in the dusk of that April evening, and listened spell-bound to those prophetic utterances which fell from the lips of the Master. With words of startling imagery He had unrolled before their gaze the scroll of time, right up to that moment when — the "Times of the Gentiles" ended — His feet would again stand upon that same mount. The sorrows of earth: the glories of Heaven: the unutterable woes of hell, had been revealed to them, by the One who alone could reveal them. And when He ceased, their minds might well be arrested by the contemplation of the solemn events of which He had spoken.

But His next words were more arresting still.

"Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover, and the Son of Man is betrayed to be crucified" — that which they had so long feared, had come at last. Their Master was about to die. And with saddened hearts they rose up and pursued their way to Bethany.

The next day (Thursday) until the evening, seems to have been spent here by the Lord in seclusion and retirement. We may not seek to enter into that which occupied His mind during this — the one day of repose in all His public ministry. But with reverent and subdued hearts let us follow the narrative of that which is revealed.

On this same day, it would appear, His enemies in Jerusalem were busy plotting His death, not like the dignified and responsible authorities of an ordered state, in open Council Hall, but plotting in darkness, in the high priest's house, like a company of lawless brigands. So are Israel's rulers here set before us.

And now our Gospel goes back to tell us of another meeting, which had been held four days previously (see John 12) in Bethany, in the house of Simon the Leper. In point of time, this feast had taken place on the evening before He rode into the city; but Matthew frequently groups the events of his narrative so as to present arresting contrasts to the reader.

Here we have two gatherings, both occupied with the Lord Jesus. The first, a gathering of His foes, thirsting for His blood. The other, a gathering of His friends, longing to lavish upon Him the tribute of their love. Only two feasts that we read of were ever made to the Lord. The first we get recorded in Matthew 9 and Luke 5. There a great company of publicans and sinners had gathered around Him for blessing, and blessed they assuredly would be. Here, it is a company of believers gathered in type on resurrection ground. Lazarus, who only a few weeks previously had been raised from the dead, was one of them who sat at the table. And Martha, busy as of old — served. But Martha's spirit is mellowed and ennobled with the passing years. She is no longer the critic of others, as we first find her in Luke 10, and doubtless the Lord's eye here rests upon her with approval. This feast is not in her own house. She might have claimed the place of a guest at the table, beside her brother; yet such is the humility of her mind, or shall we say, the activity of her temperament, that she prefers to be among them as one that serveth. If the disciples had not learned the lesson, she had.

The Church of Christ owes much to the patient, hidden, unselfish, devoted service of sisters like Martha. Their service may be unrequited and unacknowledged on earth, but "the day" will disclose it, and the reward is sure.

Lazarus is in the place of communion, but Mary alone enters in spirit into the "fellowship of His death." The King is going into death and judgment that His followers may enter into life and glory. She pours the precious ointment on His head. She anoints the King, but it is for His burial. These three were in the circle of closest intimacy with the Lord, and it would be unwise to appreciate the one at the expense of the other. Communion, service, and worship they assuredly typify, and these three things make up the sum of all true Christian life.

So far the disciples had learned none of all this. But we must not forget that, historically, they were still on the road to Jerusalem. They had not yet seen the reception He met with there; neither had they as yet heard the words recorded in verse 2 of our chapter. Visions of earthly glory may still have been before them, with themselves in places of honour as almoners for the King. John's Gospel shows us that the spokesman on this occasion was the betrayer; and one sinner destroyeth much good. Alas, that real disciples should have manifested the Judas spirit, where, by closer intimacy with their Master, they might have exhibited that of Mary, and shared in the blessed memorial of the one who "did what she could" (Mark 14).

For Judas nothing was of value that could not be turned into money. Christ Himself, to him, was only an object whereby he might add to his ill-gotten gains. For half the cost of the ointment or less, he was willing to betray his Lord — himself a deceived tool of the devil, before he became a willing tool of the priests. Such is the danger of trifling with temptation. From that time he sought opportunity to betray Him.

This opportunity Judas found on the evening of the Passover.

The Passover is a subject of the deepest interest, and it is all-important to get a right view of the truths taught thereby. It is God's starting point in all His ways of blessing.

God is essentially holy. Man is essentially sinful, and the question was — How can a holy God righteously bless a sinful man?

Adam — a sinner and forgiven — where was God's righteousness? Adam — a sinner and punished — where was His love? But in the Cross, of which the Passover was a type, every attribute of the character of God is displayed, and all the deep, deep need of sinful men fully met.

The Passover spoke, in the first place, of the just judgment about to descend upon every house in Egypt not sheltered by the token of the blood. God was seeking sinners to slay — not to save. The Blood on the lintel stayed the stroke of justice, for it showed that death, in type, had already been there. They were sheltered. Inside the house, and under that shelter, they partook of the lamb roast with fire. It was identification with the victim, and thus a confession that death was deserved. Sheltered by the blood and sustained by the feast, Israel marched out of the land of bondage. God was known to them first as a Judge, whose claims had been righteously met in the death of another, and then as a Saviour-God, whose power and grace were now free to flow out towards them without measure and without end.

The death of the Lord Jesus not only fulfilled every type of the old economy, but brought in blessing far beyond what Old Testament saints could have dreamed of. The supper is not a type of His death, as the Passover was, for in His death the type is fulfilled. It is a memorial of dying love. The shed blood in the sacrifices of old spoke only of a remembrance of sins. The Blood of Christ declares the glorious truth that now there can be remission of sins. The sins are gone, and the believer is brought to God.

The bread broken, and the wine poured out, speak of Christ in death. We remember Him in the place of death, where He has been; but we know Him now alive for evermore. And further, we do this in expectation of seeing Him again — "till He come." The Coming of the Lord is what we wait for. This feast is a testimony to the world that we take our place with the Lord of Glory whom the world crucified. In the presence of God, of angels, men, and demons, we "show the Lord's death till he come." The blood is shed for "many." If Israel reject Him yet the blessings procured by the Cross will flow out world-wide, and Gentile aliens will become, through grace, partakers of the heavenly calling. Luke records the Lord's touching request, "This do in remembrance of me." His people are ever on His heart. He would have us never to forget His dying love. Four things come out in connection with this feast of love: —

1 The Word of Christ — "This do."

2 The Work of Christ — "In remembrance."

3 The Person of Christ — "Of ME."

4 The Coming of Christ — "Till He come."

When He comes the Supper will cease.

The Passover is unlike the Supper in this: It was to be "observed as an ordinance for ever" (Ex. 12).

And in the coming millennial day, the Passover feast will be celebrated with greater solemnity than has ever yet been seen. The bullock, which speaks of fullest intelligence, will take the place of the passover lamb, and living waters will go forth in abundance from the threshold of the house, nourishing the tree whose fruit is for meat, and whose leaves are for medicine (Ezek. 45).

Then, again, the Supper cup is the blood of the new Covenant. The old Covenant was a covenant of works, and the blood in Exodus, which sealed it (Chap. 24: 8), was a sign of death for the Covenant-breaker, as Israel has proved to their sorrow. The New Covenant is also with Israel, but the shed Blood in connection with it, speaks, as we have seen, of remission, instead of remembrance of sins, and Israel through it, will be brought into blessing on the ground of sovereign grace alone.

Believers today are blessed exactly on the same ground, but with this difference, that with Gentiles there was no Covenant relationship, yet all that Israel will receive as the earthly people, we shall receive in a richer, higher, and fuller way as a heavenly people, and this, too, before Israel's day of blessing is introduced.

The day is soon coming when He will drink the cup in a new way, with His own in the Father's Kingdom. Then, indeed, will have come the time of which the prophet spake — "He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied" (Isa. 53). At His Table we respond to His desire, remember His death, return His love, rejoice in His presence, and our hearts beat high in the prospect of soon seeing Him again (John 16: 22).

But men are ever ready to abuse what grace provides, and Christendom, by making this memorial into what they call a "sacrament" (from the Latin "sacramentum," the Roman military oath), and defining it as an "outward and visible symbol of an inward and spiritual grace," have largely lost the true meaning which the Supper is intended to convey. Not only so, but the first error has led to others, Transubstantiationists believe that, at the word of the priests the bread and wine changes its substance and becomes the very body and blood of Christ. Such is Romanist ignorance, darkness, and blasphemy.

Consubstantiationists believe that with the bread and wine there is present the body and blood of Christ. Such is the error which one man, otherwise greatly used of. God, has brought into the Lutheran Church. Consecrationists believe that before there can be a "real communion" the bread and wine must be "blessed" or "consecrated" by the ordained "priest" who officiates.

Thus, what was intended by the Lord to be a loving remembrance of accomplished Redemption, has become, in the minds of many, mystified into what they call a "sacrament," or a "means of grace." Ritualism has taken the place of reality, and man has usurped the place of the spirit of God. Others, alas, who profess to love the Lord, ignore His last request by neglecting altogether this wondrous privilege of the saints.

May we take heed to the apostolic injunction,

"Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is" (Heb. 10: 25).

In the Gospels, then, we get the Supper Instituted; in the Acts we get the Supper Celebrated; and in the Epistles we get the Supper Expounded.

"And when they had sung an hymn they went out into the Mount of Olives."

The Jews at their Passover Supper were in the habit of reciting Psalm 113 and 114 after the "first cup"; and then, after the "third cup" — called the "cup of blessing" — they sang Psalm 115 to 118. If the Lord here used the same psalms, how well they would apply and be fulfilled in Him —

"The sorrows of death compassed me,

And the pains of hell gat hold upon me:

I found trouble and sorrow.

Then called I upon the name of the Lord;

O Lord, I beseech thee,

Deliver my soul.

God is the Lord, which hath showed us light:

Bind the sacrifice with cords,

Even unto the horns of the altar" (Ps. 116: 3-4; Ps. 118: 27).

And now He goes forth to Gethsemane's sorrow. But before entering the garden He warns the eleven that they were about to meet a time of testing which flesh and blood would not be able to bear. All would be offended in Him. The shepherd smitten, the sheep would be scattered. But what a word for their hearts, had they but had faith, even as a grain of mustard seed — "When I am RISEN AGAIN I will go before you into Galilee."

Peter's history here comes before us as a warning against self-confidence. And we have to mark that neither love nor knowledge is sufficient provision against the power of the enemy. That Peter loved his Master with all the true warm love of which his impulsive and affectionate nature was capable is certain (John 21: 15). That he knew Him to be the Christ of God is equally certain (Matt. 16: 16). But let us be less occupied with Peter's failure than with the lesson for ourselves arising therefrom. And that is, that if the first of the Apostles needed a strength beyond his own in the hour of trial, how much more do we need it?

Taking with Him the three disciples who had stood with Him at the bedside of Jairus's daughter and there witnessed His power — who had followed Him to the Holy Mount, and there witnessed His glory, He went a little farther, and, counting upon their human sympathy, said unto them, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here and watch with me." Alas, they prove as unsympathetic towards His sufferings as before, they had been irresponsive to His glory. Just here the secret of all the failure comes out. A prayerless life is a powerless life. There can be no standing for God, where there is no dependence upon God; and if there be no going forward in the Christian life there is certain to be failure and backsliding. So Peter found to his cost. At the close of the chapter he gets his own moral weakness disclosed to himself, by the One who alone could restore, strengthen, and forgive. Peter is seen (verse 33) self-confident, (verse 40) sleeping, (verse 51) rash, (verse 56) cowardly, (verse 70) bold in denying his Master. Inside the high priest's house there was the good confession of the Master; outside there is the thrice-repeated bold denial of the disciple — "I know not the man."

And yet, as if torn two ways, love makes him linger near. The cold, weary hours of the April morning creep slowly past. 'Peter is sitting with the servants and warming himself beside their fire (Mark). Suddenly, what would be to others a common and unimportant sound, reached their ears. But to Peter, no thunder-burst could have been more appalling. In letters of light, his every word, motive, and action of the last few hours rose before him, and turning away from himself with utter loathing, he rose up, went out and wept bitterly. What a fall! What repentance, and what grace that could produce such a recovery! It is here we get a true insight into the real character of this great-hearted disciple whom we have learned to know and love.

But to return. Verse 39 — "And he went a little farther, and fell on his face and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt."

Now He is alone with the Father. The moment was near when even God would forsake Him, and He would be alone, as no one ever was before, or could be. Separate from men because of what He was — the Holy One of God — He, on that Cross of shame, would he separated from God because of what He had voluntarily become — the Sin-bearer.

No human eyes witnessed that scene in Gethsemane. No human ear listened to that cry of sorrow. Matthew, who wrote this account of it, was not even among the favoured three, who were the nearest to their Lord. The Holy Spirit of God alone inspired the record, and, in revealing the details of this solemn scene, surely He had something for us to learn therefrom. It is clearly the anticipation of the Cross. But if this is the anticipation, what must the reality have been? Shall we ever know? He knew, and spread it all out before His Father. The thrice-repeated prayer could not be heard. The Son of Man must be lifted up. As the Holy One, we see Him shrinking from becoming the Covenant-Victim, yet as the Obedient One, He receives the cup "from His Father's hand." Our sins had filled it. Satan presented it But here He looks past all these, and in perfect communion with His Father says, "Thy will be done."

The prophetic utterances of Psalm 22 had already given the exercises of His soul, in view of, and upon, the Cross; as Isaiah 53 had spoken of Him as the great substitutionary Victim — the Lamb led to the slaughter.

In Psalm 22: 2, He speaks of a prayer that is not heard, but Hebrews 5: 7, referring surely to this same solemn moment, tells of Him "offering up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, to him that was able to save him from (literally, out of) death; and was heard, in that he feared." And saved out of death He was; and in resurrection life, and power "he became the Author of eternal salvation, unto all them that obey him."

Returning to the three disciples, the Lord found them asleep and, addressing Peter, He said, "What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation." The gentle rebuke might well have been a warning to Peter. Not many hours had passed since he had vowed to die with his Master. Might he not, then, be expected to watch with Him? But if he refused to profit by the Lord's instructions, he had to learn by his own bitter experiences, what the flesh is even in an apostle. So will it be with all who enter the school of God.

The traitor comes. The Lord, having passed in anticipation through all the awful agony and sorrow of the Cross, is now calm in the presence of the ruffian mob.

Oh, what a scene is here! Judas in his treachery. Peter in his rashness. The shrinking disciples The priestly hirelings. The Lord Jesus in divine dignity in the midst. One word from His lips and twelve legions of angels would have taken the place of Peter's faltering sword. But it was their hour, and the power of darkness.

The chief priests in the high priest's house sit in judgment, not to find the truth, but to find false witnesses. And even here their search is vain, for though many are called, yet none agree. Before the priests the Lord is condemned because of His own confession that He was the Son of God. But on their part, Caiaphas's question itself was only a cover for their hypocrisy. His death they had long ago decided on, and any means to reach that end was acceptable in their eyes.

The Lord, as ever, gives them truth beyond what they desired to learn. The day was coming when they would see Him, as "Son of Man," sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven. At the moment, the power seemed to be on their side, and they would use it to the full.

No sooner has He been unjustly condemned than His judges step down from the bench to spit in His face (Mark), while the servants buffet, blindfold, and mock Him. It is neither the rude soldiers of the governor, nor the Gentile executioners here. It is the leaders of Israel that are so brought before us. They are seen seeking false witnesses: condemning the guiltless and setting an example in hatred and cruelty. The Son of Man thus stood before the leaders of Israel. What a moment when the leaders of Israel shall stand before the Son of Man.

Matthew 27 opens with "all the chief priests and elders" united in the awful sin of delivering up the Son of God to the Gentile power. Thus the greatest guilt falls upon those who had the greatest light. So Peter, in Acts 3, charges home their guilt upon them. Having condemned the guiltless, they now seek to colour their unholy proceedings with a show of legality, and deliver Him bound into the custody of Pilate.

Meanwhile, if they are not seized with remorse, Judas is. He brought back the wages of unrighteousness, and confessed his sin to the priests instead of to God. Satan, having finished with his dupe, insults him before destroying him. "What is that to us?" is their sneering answer to his conscience-stricken cry. Casting down the money he had sold his soul to acquire, he hastens, bent on self-destruction, to carry out the will of the devil. And now the hypocrisy of the human heart is here laid bare, as lately was its cruelty. The priests, with the money, purchased a burying-ground for strangers; but the public voice which is often keen to detect the motives of public men, gave the field its rightful name "Aceldama" — "The Field of Blood." Such their city and land soon became. And, alas, the whole world; for the guilt of Innocent Blood rests yet upon the world where the Lord of Glory died.

"And Jesus stood before the governor" — the presence of the Lord exposes the motives of every heart, and here we have next unfolded before us the heart history of a man scheming to retain place and power in this world, and utterly infidel as to the next. The policy of the priests, in bringing Him to Pilate, was to secure the intervention of the military power, and so shift the odium of the crime from their own heads, to that of the Romans. Pilate easily saw through their hypocrisy, and very soon arrived at the conclusion, which he held all through the closing scenes, that "it was for envy they had delivered him up." Finding no fault in Him, Pilate from henceforth sought to release Him. But though strong in brute force, Pilate was wholly lacking in the true strength of moral principle. To release the Lord, Pilate must first placate the priests, in order to secure his own position with the cruel and suspicious Tiberius at Rome. Three attempts were made without avail. First, Pilate declares, "I find no fault in him." Then he offers to release Barabbas. And lastly, as if in the endeavour to assuage their thirst for blood, he declares himself willing to scourge the One whom he had thrice declared to be innocent. Such is the righteousness of man.

But no man goes to hell unwarned. For the Roman of that day, the old "gods" of the Pantheon were "dead." A less virile and still more degrading superstition held them in bondage. Signs and omens were their guiding lights, and voices from the mystic land of dreams held powerful control over their minds. And God used what was perhaps the only avenue left open to that man's conscience, through the message sent to him by his wife. Her urgent entreaty but added to his indecision and increased his guilt, without giving power to do what he knew to be right.

Pilate's next shift was to send the Lord to Herod. And now the two Kings are together God's King and Man's King. We have already seen the character of man's king in Matthew 14 Here his acts are in keeping with his character. "And Herod with his men of war set him at nought, and mocked him, and arrayed him in a gorgeous robe, and sent him again to Pilate" (Luke 23: 11).

One more effort the governor made, but it was answered by the fierce cry, "If thou let this man go thou art not Caesar's friend" (John 19: 12). It was their last argument, and it prevailed. To retain the favour of Caesar, Pilate knowingly condemned the Innocent. That Pilate, after all, lost that favour, history, which we have no reason to doubt, records. And shortly afterwards he followed Judas on the same road to self-destruction. His mockery of hand washing was a feeble attempt to conceal his weakness and shift the guilt of his crime, but it was enough to induce the priests to invoke the consequences of the awful crime upon themselves and their children. That God in righteous government took them at their word, their history conclusively declares.

What a revelation of hearts is here, and all against the Son of God.

The leaders persuading the people to choose a felon.

The governor yielding up to death the Innocent.

The king of Israel mocking Israel's Messiah.

The people willing to accept any one if only the Lord is condemned, and finally accepting the responsibility of slaying the Prince of Life.

Now Pilate scourges the One he had thrice pronounced innocent. The soldiers gather round to satiate their cruelty with a sight of His sufferings. Here it is not the Jews that surround Him. The soldiers of the governor had little in common with the servants of the priests, but they were alike in this — the natural cruelty of the human heart, led on by Satan.

He is (1) stripped; (2) scourged; (3) buffeted; (4) mocked; (5) spit upon; (6) crowned with thorns; (7) crucified. Sevenfold sufferings measured out to the Holy Son of God by the guilty sons of men.

The Jews demand His blood. The Gentiles shed it. And psalm and prophecy is fulfilled as they gather round His Cross to insult the Holy Sufferer. Even the guilty robbers can forget, for a moment, their own agonies, to add to His.

But to continue the narrative of our Evangelist — let us notice here how God overruled all the malice and mockery of men for the fulfilment of prophecy and a testimony to His Son, the very opposite of what they intended. Matthew records that they put on Him a scarlet robe, and by that kingly colour they thereby declared that He was the King of the Jews. In Herod's palace He was arrayed in a "gorgeous" (white or shining) robe, thereby testifying to His sinless character. The priests and scribes who had followed might stand and "vehemently accuse" Him. He was arrayed before them in that which spoke of perfect innocence. Mark and John, again, tell of a purple robe. All are divinely suited to the way in which the Lord is brought before us in the different gospels. John tells us that He was the Son of God. Mark says that He became the Servant. But blessed be His name, the Son who became the Servant will in a soon-coming day be known as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. His Imperial character, expressed by the purple, will then be manifested to the whole universe.

And so again at the Cross, Pilate wrote a title — was it not this time to mock the Jew, instead of mocking the Lord? —

"This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." So the complete title read, but each of the evangelists gives that portion suitable to his subject. They may be compared as under: —

This is Jesus * the King of the Jews (Matt.)

* * * The King of the Jews (Mark)

This is        * *The King of the Jews (Luke)

* Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews (John)

Such was man's part.

But "from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour." God draws a veil of darkness round the scene when the great question of ATONEMENT is taken up.

The bitter cry from that darkness, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" expresses a forsaking which He, the Holy Victim, could alone measure.

As we contemplate this most solemn scene we can only bow our hearts and worship.

It has been well said, that the Cross is the centre of two eternities. The past eternity, if we may so speak, looked forward to it. All eternity to come will look back. In it God was fully displayed as Light and Love. His righteousness was so vindicated that His mercy might flow out unhinderedly. By it we are brought to God. "He is the propitiation for our sins." God's holy nature has been glorified. God's perfect love can now be lavished upon those who have been reconciled to Him by the death of His Son.

The Great Work of ATONEMENT is God's wonderful provision whereby all this may be accomplished (Lev. 16).

God has been pleased to present this to us from different standpoints: —

1 The propitiatory character of the death of Christ provides the ground where God can meet the sinner in righteousness (1 John 2, Rom. 3).

2 The expiatory character of the death of Christ meets our guilty condition. We were sinful, and sin must be put away (Heb. 9).

3 The substitutionary character of the death of Christ meets our responsibility. We were condemned, and Another must take our place and bear our judgment (1 Peter 2).

4 The redeeming character of the death of Christ meets our state. As slaves of sin and Satan, only a mighty ransom could deliver us. We are now no longer slaves, but sons, with the spirit of sons, and waiting for the redemption of the body (Rom. 8; Rev. 5).

Here at the Cross every question is raised and settled. God's glory is righteously vindicated. Man's need is fully met. Satan's power is for ever broken.

But — to complete the mighty work — it remained but for Him to die. Death followed sin; and, taking the sinner's place, He met the sinner's doom. But He went into death in order that He might destroy him that had the power of it — that is, the devil. He was already the Victor over him. Now, by the assertion of His divine power, He dismissed His Spirit and died. He had power to lay down His life and power to take it again (John 10: 18).

There are seven utterances on the Cross, somewhat in the following order: —

1 "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23: 34).

2 "Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in paradise" (Luke 23: 43).

3 Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani (Matt. 27: 46).

4 "Woman, behold thy Son!" (John 19: 26).

5 "I thirst" (John 19: 28).

6 "It is finished" (John 19: 30).

7 "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23: 46).

The Prince of Life has gone into the domain of death. Great results will certainly follow, and they begin immediately.

The number of separate striking incidents which are grouped together within the sixteen closing verses of this wonderful chapter is remarkable.

The first and immediate result of the Lord's death was the rending asunder, from top to bottom, of the temple veil. And this event was coincident with the offering of the evening sacrifice at the ninth hour. Our Evangelist records the fact. Another inspired apostle gives us the divine commentary thereon. Never more need another innocent lamb bleed under the sacrificial knife. The true Lamb of God, the great Antitype of every sacrifice, had died, and now, for the believer, there is remission of sins, instead of their remembrance (Heb. 10: 3-14).

The temple, as is well known, was divided into two parts. Into the first went the priests daily. In the second, or Holy of Holies, there was, in Solomon's temple, a manifestation of God in the Shekinah glory. Man durst not go in, and God did not come out. But now the rent veil spoke of the fact that God, through the death of the Lord Jesus, was fully revealed, without a veil, either to hide or separate. And further, there is also what that death has done for the believer. It has fitted him for the presence of God in light. And so, to refer again to Hebrews 10, we are fitted to draw near. We are invited to draw near, and we have a Great High Priest to maintain our souls ever in the place of conscious nearness. THE BLOOD is the foundation of our every blessing.

Nature itself seemed to have its part at this sublime moment. Quaking earth and rending rocks were doubtless only the agencies employed by the mighty hand of God to open the graves of the saints, but they testify to the solemn character of the events which are taking place. And Scripture is careful to state that it was after His resurrection that the saints themselves arose.

There is also the effect upon the Gentile centurion. All the synoptists record it, but only Matthew includes "those that were with him." Our Evangelist, as we have frequently seen, often indicates the widening out of Kingdom blessing far beyond the narrow bounds of Israel, and here for the first time we have a Gentile company convinced and confessing, "truly this was the Son of God" (verse 54).

Let us pause here, and contemplate for a moment the condition of things on the evening of this day of days in the world's history.

It is between the hours of four and six o'clock (our time). A dead Christ, refused by His nation, betrayed by one of His own disciples, murdered by the Gentiles, hangs upon a gibbet. His few followers, in whose breasts hope and fear had alternated during the week gone by, now find themselves with every hope gone, fear crushing out their courage and despair filling their hearts. Only one of them — the one who had lain in His bosom, now stood by His Cross.

But if disciples fail, there are others who do not. The women that followed Him from Galilee, are, at the beginning, seen "afar off" (as we should expect) from that scene of horror: but later, it would appear ( John 20), draw as near as the javelins of the Roman guard would permit. Faith may have died out of their hearts, but fear found no place there. Love — never stronger than when its object is most in need — is what characterises them, and the Spirit of God so describes their devotion. They would watch by His body until the stone concealed it from their sight.

And now, to prepare for their "high day," the priests desire Pilate to order the removal of the bodies from the Cross, doubtless to be cast into a felon's grave. But again prophecy was to be fulfilled to the letter. "His grave was appointed with the wicked, but he was with the rich in his death" (Isa. 53). They might break the legs of the others, but "a bone of him shall not be broken" (John 19). After the witness of the blood and water, which flowed from His spear-pierced side, God took care that no indignity should he offered to Him in death, who had so perfectly glorified God in His life. And just as one professed disciple had been bold in denying Him, so now a secret disciple becomes bold in confessing Him. Love for the Lord overcame the fear for his fellows. And Nicodemus, another rich man, shares in this most privileged service. If John 3 be Nicodemus's Conversion, and John 7 his Confession, here surely we have his Consecration. In open face of His enemies, in the time of their seeming triumph, these two devoted men identify themselves with their crucified Lord.

Joseph's new tomb receives His body. Love laid Him there. Hatred sealed the stone and set a watch. The women who had followed Him from Galilee, and who had waited at the Cross, to see, as they thought, the end, wait still to see the place where He was laid.

Three of the Marys are here there are four mentioned in the Gospels — and Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward. Salome also is here with all her high hopes for James and John, which hopes now lie buried in His tomb. And so perhaps with them all. Nevertheless, oh, how they loved Him!

But two of the Marys are singled out beyond the others — apart from the others. The great stone has been rolled to the door of the sepulchre. Joseph and the others have departed to their own homes, but "there was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting over against the sepulchre" (verse 61).

It is the gathering dusk of the Friday evening. We shall meet them again in the glorious dawn of the third day morning, once more wending their way to the same spot, to be the first to hear from angel lips the heart-gladdening words, "He is not here: He is risen."

But if Joseph's tomb received His body the priests would make sure that it should remain there. With this end in view they request from Pilate that means be taken to "make it sure." Pilate said unto them — was it again in mockery? — "Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can." What words are adequate here? Imagination itself fails to cover the ground between the opposing forces. The puny power of the priests on the one side: on the other the almighty power of God. Man striving with his Maker.

Nervously, tensely apprehensive of that "third day," in spite of their apparent triumph, the priests are now as anxiously considering the question of how to keep a dead Man in the grave, as but yesterday they were scheming how to slay Him.

But God overrules all for the glory of Christ. The world will demand proofs of His resurrection. His enemies will supply them abundantly. So again the servants of the priests visit Golgotha. They affix the official Great Seal of the Sanhedrim to the stone covering the door of the sepulchre. They set a watch — a watch of soldiers — of the best soldiers in the world — a watch of Roman soldiers, and depart to keep their "high" Sabbath, while the Lord of the Sabbath lies low within the tomb.

Surely death, the sealed stone, and the soldier guard can be jointly trusted to keep their prey secure. The seeming triumph of Satan is complete.

Section 12. Matthew 28.

Resurrection, Victory, and Joy

The great apostle of the Gentiles, in restating the foundations of Christian truth, emphasises three great cardinal facts: —

1 That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

2 That He was buried.

3 That He rose again the third day (1 Cor. 15: 1-4).

"If Christ be not risen," argues the apostle, "then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." "But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept."

Our Evangelist gives us the historical narrative with which these truths are connected. The first and second we have already considered. The third comes within the scope of the present chapter. Matthew 28 is the Victory Chapter, and it opens with all the pomp and circumstance connected therewith. Triumph is its keynote, joy its dominant, and all power its climax. Man might set his seal upon the grave of Christ, but here God sets His seal upon the work of Christ. Having gone down under all the wrath of God and exhausted it, He is raised from the dead by the glory of the Father.

Spite of stone, and seal, and soldier guard —

"Up from the grave He arose

With a mighty triumph o'er His foes, Hallelujah."

Of what use, then, all the scheming and planning of the priests? Much. They provide proof positive to the world of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The believer has, of course, another set of proofs which other Scriptures fully develop. But let us look at those His enemies supply.

The Lord had so frequently foretold His resurrection, that, although His disciples ha .d forgotten it, yet His enemies could not. Hence all their plans to prevent it. That He was dead before being taken down from the Cross, is proved by Pilate's refusal to allow the Body to be removed until assured by his own centurion that the Lord was already dead (Mark). The priests also testified to the fact when they demanded the watch — "He said, while he was yet alive." Now they knew He was dead. Again, they themselves, or by their servants, sealed His body in the tomb; and further, they drew a cordon of sixty soldiers round the sepulchre. Yet, notwithstanding all the precautions taken by the Jews to prevent it, early on the morning of the third day the stone was rolled away and the tomb was seen by all to be empty. The frightened soldiers announce it. The priests confess it. Fifty days afterwards the disciples proclaim it throughout the city, and the priests never once challenge their veracity.

In our chapter we have two different accounts of how this event took place, one by His friends and another by His foes.

Let us look at the latter first. Early in the morning some of the watch, fleeing from the terror of the angelic presence, entered the city to report the extraordinary event to their employers. The question now before their third council was no longer — How to keep Him in the tomb, but — How to conceal the admitted fact that the Lord was risen. Boldly they will attempt the impossible. In the face of a rent veil the priests invent the lie. In face of angel and earthquake and empty tomb the soldiers disseminate it. They told the truth to the priests. Bribed, and taught by the priests, they lied to the people — "His disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept." The words of the priests so evidently carry their falsehood in their face that the Evangelist does not trouble to refute them. Neither need we. But it is well we should mark this: There is no fact of history more credibly attested by human evidence than the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Therefore, when anyone, be he open infidel or religious "professor," denies this fact, he also denies with it the value of evidential testimony to all other facts of bygone time.

Nothing can be more conclusive than the way in which that great master of logic, the Apostle Paul, marshals the proofs of the resurrection for the Corinthian doubters; and the testimony of 500 witnesses cannot easily be overthrown. See the whole passage, 1 Cor. 15: 1-8. There is: —

1 The testimony of the Scriptures (verses 3, 4).

2 The testimony of Cephas (verse 5).

3 The testimony of the Twelve (verse 5).

4 The testimony of about 500 brethren (verse 6).

5 The testimony of James (verse 7).

6 The testimony of all the Apostles (verse 7).

7 The testimony of Paul (verse 8).

A sevenfold chain of evidence, convincing and conclusive. Modernism, when it denies the fact of the resurrection, proclaims itself to be not only infidel, but illogical. Scripture exposes both its wickedness and its weakness.

But let us return to the narrative of inspiration.

Very early on the morning of the first day of the week, the two Marys again seek the one spot on earth round which their affections centre. So far as their knowledge went, their visit could only result in "seeing the sepulchre." Did not the stone conceal the grave and the guard defend it? But early though they went, a visitor had been there before them who could brush these things away as the mists before the morning sun. The angel had come from the land of light, and brought with him some of the characteristics of that land. His countenance was like lightning and his raiment as white as snow. We are going to that land, and it is our privilege to have the light of it in our hearts even now. That which brought fear to the keepers, brought joy to the women — deeper in that it was so wholly unexpected, and to still further deepen, as they would learn later, all that the resurrection meant to His followers.

And they in turn are commissioned to carry the message to the disciples. This portion is very beautiful. The angel, in calm dignity, sitting on that which had covered an empty tomb. His very presence, without any exertion of power, is sufficient to overcome the guard. His intelligence in the mind of the Lord is as marked as his activity in the service of the Lord. He could instruct the women, and through them, the disciples, where to go to meet the Lord. Another Scripture describes angels as ministering spirits sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation (Heb. 1: 14). And even the Lord Himself, when on earth, was frequently the recipient of their ministry. On one occasion we read of an angel from heaven strengthening Him. The thought of the Creator and Lord of Angels being strengthened by an angel, gives a wonderful glimpse of the real manhood of our blessed Lord. Their mission of service to believers is often mentioned in the New Testament. We find them in Matthew 18 watching over the little ones. In Luke 15 we read of them rejoicing over the repentant ones. In 1 Corinthians 11 they are present with the worshipping ones; and in Luke 16 they are seen bearing the spirits of redeemed ones to paradise. Thus they are represented in the present age as the ministers of God's grace to believers: in the coming day they will be the executors of His judgment upon the guilty.

But if the presence and message of the angel filled the hearts of the women with mingled fear and joy, Another was about to meet them who would banish fear from their hearts for ever and communicate to them, in His soul-inspiring word of greeting, something of the joy that filled His own heart on that glorious morning.

"And as they went to tell his disciples, behold Jesus met them, saying, All hail."

We are so accustomed to be occupied with our needs, and to rejoice in our blessings, that we are in danger of failing to enter into His joy. And yet it is only as we enter into His joy that we perceive the basis on which our highest joys rest. He had to say, before the Cross, "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished" (Luke 12: 50). Now, on the further side of the Cross and the grave, standing on resurrection ground, He can associate with Himself, in resurrection life, those on whom His love has been set from all eternity. Redemption's work completed, nothing intervenes to hinder all the love and grace of His heart flowing out to His own, in order to bring them into the place of established relationship with the Father and conscious nearness before Him: and not only so, but giving us a nature that enjoys the light of His presence, knowing that the glory of that light only manifests the perfection of our standing, which is nothing less than Christ Himself.

Doubtless but little of this could be known by the women in our chapter, but the great point here is, that they had found the One who was the centre of their heart's affections, and "falling at his feet they worshipped him." Here is the first essential of all worship, and the greater the love, the higher the worship.

The Lord confirms the angels' instructions; but by changing one word, He adds a link of precious intimacy which never could have been known before the Cross. It is no longer "my disciples," but "my brethren." Disciples they still were, of course, but He was about to declare the Father's Name to them, according to the prophecy of Psalm 22: 22, and from henceforth become the Leader of their praises. The congregation of them that praise Him has but a small place in the world to-day, but the day is fast nearing when He will be the Centre of the Great Congregation, and "all the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee" (Ps. 22: 27).

At the Cross the foundation was laid of which this will be the glorious consummation. On that first Lord's day morning the keynote was struck of that universal song of praise which will fill the redeemed earth. It will be expressed in the language of Psalm c., and men will learn, according to the theology of the psalmist, that Jehovah is God, and that Jehovah is good. Even "the creature itself will be brought into the glorious liberty of the sons of God" (Rom. 8: 21).

All this is intimately connected with the presentation of Kingdom truth in Matthew's Gospel. The disciples are instructed to meet Him in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. The nation and its capital city no longer represent God's centre upon the earth. A Kingdom is about to be instituted, the scope of whose operations will not be confined to one nation, but will go on expanding and increasing until every nation under heaven be brought under its beneficent sway.

But before following the company into Galilee, it may be well to notice the ten different appearings of our Lord, to His disciples, after His resurrection. They are as follows: —

1 To Mary Magdalene alone (Mark 16; John 20).

2 To the women returning from the sepulchre (Matt. 28).

3 To Simon Peter alone (Luke 24).

4 To the two disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24).

5 To the Apostles at Jerusalem, Thomas being absent (John 20).

6 These first five appearings all took place on the first Lord's day.

7 Eight days afterwards to the disciples, Thomas being with them (John 20).

8 To seven of the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias (John 21).

9 To the disciples in Galilee (Matt. 28; 1 Cor. 15: 6).

10 To James alone; time and place unknown (1 Cor. 15).

To the disciples at Jerusalem, on the day of the Ascension (Luke 24; Acts 1; 1 Cor. 15: 7).

By comparing 1 Corinthians 15: 6 with verse 10 of our chapter it would seem that the appearing in Galilee was to the whole company of the brethren, and that the occasion was the institution of the Kingdom in world-wide character. Matthew began his career as a disciple by gathering in a "great company" into his own house. He is now to learn from the lips of the Lord that the blessing is to extend to every house under heaven, the scope of Kingdom blessing being nothing less than "all nations," in contrast with the mission in Matthew 10, which extended only to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel."

But how much needed was this word of encouragement — "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." The disciples could not be ignorant of the fact that, all the powers of the world, backed by the power of Satan, were against them, as they had been against their Master, and they needed to be reminded that their Master was the Victor over every foe. He had already said to them, as another Gospel tells: "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16: 33). And the same apostle who records the fact gives us later the key of the overcoming life: "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even your faith" (1 John 5: 4). The man of faith, walking in faith, is invincible. Satan has no dart strong enough to pierce the shield of faith. The world has no allurement sweet enough to attract the heart that is filled with the love of Christ. The world is an enemy's land, but Satan, the prince of it, is a defeated foe, and ALL POWER is in the hands of our risen Victorious Lord. Oh, that every young believer would firmly grasp at the very outset of his Christian pathway this great and inspiring truth — the LOVE and POWER of Christ are both for ME, to-day, and all the days, until I see His face.

Now we get, in closing, the Great Commission. It will be noticed that each of the Gospels give this in different terms: the superficial reader may think, in contradictory terms. But not so. A little closer attention will show that all four are required to express the different aspects of the great work of grace that began in the world at Pentecost, is going on to-day, and will continue all the days, until the consummation of the age.

Beginning first with John's Gospel (John 20: 21), we have brought before us the Person who sends, and the fact that the disciple goes forth with the message of grace in the same manner, sent by the Lord, as the Lord Himself became the "Sent One" of the Father, "full of grace and truth." He came, suffered, died, rose again, showed them His hands and His side, became the Door, that by Him "if ANY man (no longer Jews only) enter in he shall be saved (John 10). Judaism knew nothing of this. It was a new and wondrous truth even to Apostles, and were we less familiar with the Gospel sound, it would be the same to us.

In Luke we read (Luke 24: 46-49): "Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things."

Here we get the foundation on which the proclamation rests, coupled with the moral condition produced by the reception of the testimony.

Mark sets before us, in few words, the responsibility of the hearer, with the results of either the acceptance or the rejection of the gospel of grace. "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned" (Mark 16: 16).

Returning now to the Commission as given by our Evangelist, we find that Matthew carries us onward to the grand climax of all the ways of God in grace, with men. The Father's Name is revealed, and "all nations" are to be baptized — no longer into John's baptism, as in Matthew 3, or even Messiah's baptism, as in John 4 — but "in the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost." The whole wide world is the sphere of the testimony, and the day is coming when the Commission will have been executed, the Testimony received, and "they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord" (Jer. 22: 34). "For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea" (Hab. 2: 14).

Till that moment the King, though absent in Person, has been, is, and will be present with every servant, in the face of every foe, every day, and all the days until the "end of the age," when "He shall appear the second time without sin unto salvation." Then —

"Kings shall fall down before Him,

And gold and incense bring.

All nations shall adore Him —

His praise all people sing.

Outstretched His wide dominion

O'er river, sea, and shore,

Far as the eagle's pinion,

Or dove's light wing can soar."

Notes and Outlines

1. Matthew 1.

1. CHRIST AS MESSIAH.

1. Introduced as "Son of David," and, as such, Heir to the Throne of David. Compare Psalm 89: 29: —

"His seed will I make to endure for ever, and his throne as the days of heaven."

2. Also as "Son of Abraham," and, as such, Heir to all the Promises. Compare Galatians 3: 16: — "Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ."

"In thee shall all nations be blest" (Gal. 3: 8).

2. NOTE THAT THE GENEALOGY is divided into three parts, and traces His descent from His kingly ancestor, David, and the Receiver of the Promises, Abraham.

1 Abraham to David — Promise.

2 David to the Captivity — Declension.

3 The Captivity to Christ — Darkness.

3. FOUR WOMEN are introduced, and show God working out His purposes of grace in spite of man's wickedness and folly.

1 Thamar — The Sin of Man.

2 Rahab — The faith of the Gentile laying hold of the promise of God.

3 Ruth — The grace that can set aside the claims of Law.

4 Bathsheba — The blessing God can bring out of even the failures of His people.

2. Matthew 2.

THREE Companies found in this chapter.

THREE Effects produced by the presence of the Lord Jesus.

1. HEROD HEARD AND WAS TROUBLED.

Herod was an Idumean, and therefore a usurper. He had no legal right to the throne of David. He was the type of man's King — Satan, the usurper.

2. SCRIBES HEARD AND WERE INDIFFERENT.

The Scribes were the doctors of the Law, and knew the sacred writings so well that they could tell the king at once where the Lord was to be born, but they did not trouble to go and see.

1 They had the Scriptures, but believed them not.

2 They had a measure of light, but loved the darkness.

3 They had the "key of knowledge" (Luke 11: 52), but were ignorant of the ways of God.

3. THE WISE MEN HEARD AND REJOICED.

1. They found the "One born King of the Jews," worshipped Him, and presented their gifts.

2. Three things mentioned: 1, gold; 2, frankincense; 3, myrrh. Gold — their tribute to His essential Divinity. Frankincense — offered to Him as God manifest in flesh. Myrrh — emblematic of the suffering and death into which love led the Holy One of God. In a future day they will bring "gold and incense" but no myrrh. Compare Isaiah 60.

3. Matthew 3.

1. THE WARNING OF JOHN.

A new dispensation is beginning; therefore repent in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. No time to lose: it is near.

1 Repent because men are sinners.

Repent because sinners cannot enter without a change of heart.

Repent because the kingdom is at hand.

2 Repent "because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge" (Acts 17: 31).

Just now He wants to bless. The goodness of God produces Repentance. This goodness is expressed in the Gospel.

2. THE WORK OF CHRIST.

1 A Converting work. "He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost" — Laid hold of by the Spirit for blessing NOW.

2 A Separating work. If blessed now, separated from the world and saved from its doom. If Christ is rejected now, then, when "He baptizes with fire," the sinner will be separated from God for ever.

3. THE WITNESS OF THE FATHER.

1 As to His Relationship — "My Beloved Son." The Believer, through the wonderful grace of God, is brought into the same relation- ship (1 John "Now are we the Sons of God."

2 As to His perfect life below — "In whom I am well pleased." See 1 Peter 2: 21, and compare 1 Timothy 4: 12, "Be thou an example."

4. Matthew 4.

SEVEN MARKS OF CHRIST'S GLORY AND POWER.

1 The Voice of the Father.

2 The Descent of the Spirit.

3 The Ministry of Angels.

4 His Power over Satan.

5 His Authority over Disease.

6 The Light to them that sat in Darkness.

7 The attraction for the hearts of men.

1. THE POWER OF CHRIST to Defeat the Devil.

Satan presented Three great Temptations — "all that is in the world."

Before these our first parents and every other son of Adam's race had failed. But Christ was tempted and emerged victorious. Compare 1 John 2, "The Lust of the Flesh" — what can I get? "The Lust of the Eye" — what can I see? "The Pride of Life" — what can others see in me

2. THE POWER OF CHRIST to Attract the Heart.

Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John FOLLOWED JESUS.

1 The secret of the attraction — LOVE.

2 The object of the attraction — HIMSELF.

3. THE POWER OF CHRIST to introduce Blessing and a new order on Earth.

1 By the preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom which was at hand. Men to repent and get ready to enter.

2 By undoing the evil Satan had done. Annulling the power of the devil, and delivering his lawful captives.

5. Matthew 5.

1. The Lord describes the characteristics of those who enter the Kingdom coupled with the Blessings they will enjoy in the day of EARTHLY DISPLAY.

Characteristics.

1 Poor — Entrance to the Kingdom.

2 Mourners — Comfort.

3 Meek — Inheritance.

4 Hungerers after righteousness Satisfaction.

5 Merciful — Mercy.

6 Pure — See God.

7 Persecuted — Joy.

2. Contrast the last of the "Blesseds" with the first, where the pronoun is "they." Here it is "YE," and great is your reward IN HEAVEN.

When Persecuted for CHRIST'S SAKE, Three things follow: —

1 We are drawn nearer the Lord.

2 We get a deeper sense of His love and power.

3 We shine more brightly before the world.

3. Vv. 13 and 14 show what the True Believer is In the world and To the world.

1 SALT — That which Preserves. So the disciples were to stand for the rights of God.

2 LIGHT — That which Reveals, Guides, or Warns. So Grace was to go out from disciples to a lost world, heedless of its danger and doom.

The Warning. — The salt may lose its savour.

The light may be put under a bushel.

6. Matthew 6.

THE PRAYER THAT TEACHES TO PRAY.

Contains Six Petitions following the Invocation. Three of the Petitions are Godward; three are Manward. The last three deal with the Present, Past, and Future.

THE INVOCATION: OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN

Teaches us To Whom to pray. The thought of FATHER implies Relationship, and so we are reminded of the Cost of making this possible, through Death and Resurrection. With this before us we say "OUR FATHER," and we ought to say it

HUMBLY because it is God who is our Father, LOVINGLY because God is our FATHER,

WITH ASSURANCE because GOD IS our Father,

HOPEFULLY because All POWER is His,

REVERENTLY because He 1S in HEAVEN.

1. HALLOWED BE THY NAME.

The NAME declares the measure of the Revelation.

To ADAM — THE LORD GOD Creator Relationship.

To ABRAHAM — GOD ALMIGHTY Power For Him.

To MOSES — JEHOVAH — The Eternal, Self-existing, unchanging, Covenant-Keeping One.

To CHRISTIANS — FATHER — Relationship and Love.

2. THY KINGDOM COME.

Three things in every well-governed Kingdom.

1 SECURITY — Compare Believers Present Position — "They shall never Perish."

2 LIBERTY — Compare Believers Present Position — "Ye shall be free indeed."

3 PLENTY  — Compare Believers Present Position — "ALL Spiritual Blessings."

3. THY WILL BE DONE.

Seen in perfection in the Lord Jesus.

Should be seen in Believers.

Will be seen in the Coming day of display

When, all usurpers put down,

THE RIGHTFUL KING Will reign in RIGHTEOUSNESS.

7. Matthew 6.

THE PRAYER THAT TEACHES TO PRAY (continued).

4. "GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD." — Present.

The Rich who are able to buy, or the Poor who must condescend to beg, equally need to pray this petition. God has provided once for all, all the minerals men may need but for our Daily Bread we depend on the Daily Faithfulness of a Covenant-Keeping God (Gen. 9: 9) in giving annually seedtime and harvest with unfailing grace.

1 So we ask with the knowledge of His Power to supply.

2 And we ask with a Sense of our need.

The object. — Continue us in life to glorify Thee.

5. "FORGIVE US." — Past.

The sense here is Restoration: in order that we may continue in Communion with a Father who always acts in grace.

So we too must act in grace to others — "as we forgive." Forgiveness means to "Let off." The Sinner should be "detained" and "punished," but God is ready to forgive.

1 Christ died to make Forgiveness Possible.

2 All need Forgiveness.

3 We are commanded to Preach Forgiveness in His Name.

6. DELIVER US. — Future.

Expresses the need of being kept from Satan's Power. Not to be tried as Job or Peter, lest we may become more like Peter than Job.

Paul's beautiful and Confident testimony.

He Hath delivered (Col. 1: 13).

He Will deliver (2 Tim. 4: 18).

See also He Doth deliver (Psalm 97: 10).

8. Matthew 6.

"SEEK YE FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD" (Ver. 33).

1. "SEEK" a Divine Command.

Because by nature men are astray and lost. This lost condition shows itself in two ways: —

1 Opposition to God (Illustrate, Pharaoh).

2 Indifference to God (Illustrate, Gallio).

2. "FIRST" a Definite Time.

Remember now . . . in the days of thy youth (Eccl. 12: 1).

In the morning of life.

Because seeking "other things" first

1 Grieves the Spirit.

2 Hardens the heart.

3 Sears the Conscience.

3. THE KINGDOM OF GOD — a Particular thing.

"The Kingdom of God" is opposed to the "world of Satan."

The World is going on to Judgment.

The Believer is going on to glory.

Each one is either in God's Kingdom or in Satan's World.

"What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world

And lose his own soul?"

4. OTHER THINGS shall he added — a Sure Promise.

Be not anxious for to-morrow.

Your Father knoweth your need.

"My God shall supply all your need" (Phil. 4: 19).

9. Matthew 7.

In Matthew 6 we learn "How to give."

In Matthew 7 we learn "How to get." Men say "get to give." God says "give to get."

The Grace of God enables the Believer to do so.

He manifests the Grace by practising the "Golden Rule."

This can only be done in the

1 Power of the New Life, by those who have

2 Entered in at the STRAIT GATE.

THE LORD SAYS THERE ARE

Two GATES.

1. The Strait Gate. ENTERED by Conversion "Strive." Only those in earnest, The Few, find it.

Two WAYS.

"The Way of life."

"The Way of the Lord."

"The Way of Good Men (Prov. 2: 20).

"The Way of Wisdom" (Prov. 4: 11).

"The Way of Truth" (Ps. 119: 30).

"The Way of thy Testimonies" (Ps. 119: 14).

"I am the Way" (John 14: 6).

Two ENDS.

The END of your faith.

The SALVATION of your Souls.

LIFE ETERNAL.

9. Matthew 7. — continued.

Two GATES.

2. The Wide Gate. Entered by Rejecting the Saviour and Turning away from the Cross. Held in it by —

1 Chains of Sin.

2 Fear of Men.

3 Power of Satan.

Two WAYS.

"The Way of Death" (Prov. 14: 12).

"The Way of Sinners" (Ps. 1) .

"The Way of a Fool" (Prov. 12: 15).

"The Way of the Evil Men" (Prov. 2: 12).

"The Way of Darkness" (Prov. 13).

"The Way of the Wicked" (Prov. 15: 9).

"The Way of Destruction" (Rom. 3: 1 6) .

Two ENDS.

The Great White Throne.

The Judgment.

Condemnation.

The Second Death.

10. Matthew 8.

THE DIGNITY OF HIS PERSON.

1. THE LEPER: Picture of the DEFILEMENT and HOPELESSNESS produced by Sin.

1 He knew he was a leper. "All have sinned."

2 He heard of a Saviour. Good news to him: The Gospel is good news to sinners.

3 He believed in His Power.

4 He received the Blessing.

2. THE PALSIED MAN: Picture of the HELPLESSNESS Produced by Sin.

1 We CAN do nothing. The Work to be done completely beyond our power. Satan to be defeated — Death overcome — Judgment borne.

2 We NEED to do nothing, for the work is done. The hatred of man brought out the love of God. "I will come and heal him." "He came to seek and to save."

3. THE WOMAN SICK OF A FEVER: Picture of the UNREST produced by Sin.

"No Peace, saith my God, to the wicked" (Isa. 57: 21).

"The Way of Peace have they not known" (Rom. 3: 17).

BUT Christ Made Peace (Col. 1: 20).

Christ Brings Peace (John 20: 19).

Christ Preaches Peace (Eph. 2: 17).

Christ Is our Peace (Eph. 2: 14).

Illustrate

A Purchased Peace (2 Kings 15).

A National Peace (1 Kings 5).

A Universal Peace (Isa. 9).

11. Matthew 8.

THE DIGNITY OF HIS PERSON.

"Man's Day" sets in darkness and sorrow (verse 16). When earth's sun was sinking, suffering humanity came to Christ and experienced all the grace and power of God. That power which works through the "night" and in the "morning" will display all the divine and glorious completion of His purposes of love and mercy.

Man's day — "Morning and Evening."

God's day — "Evening and Morning" (Gen. 1).

1. THE LORD PURPOSES TO CROSS TO THE OTHER SIDE and two men are tested.

1 The first is hindered by the world.

2 The second is hindered by his relations.

The foxes had holes.

The birds had nests.

Christ had nowhere to lay His head.

A man's foes shall be they of his own household.

He that loveth father or mother more than ME is not worthy of Me.

2. DISCIPLESHIP — "His disciples followed Him" (verse 23).

The beginning of discipleship is obedience produced in the heart by the power of love.

We "obey from the heart" because we love.

So we have a chain of four links: —

A heart full of Love is a heart full of joy.

A heart full of Joy is a life full of power.

A Life full of Power is a mouth full of praise.

A mouth full of Praise is a Life full of FRUIT.

12. Matthew 9.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS MISSION.

1. THE FORGIVER OF SINS (verse 2). The sin question must be faced first, when Men are brought to God.

Sins either put away or punished.

Sinners either forgiven or judged.

2. THE RECEIVER OF SINNERS (verse 10). God hates sin but loves sinners. Satan loves sin hut hates sinners. Christ died to save sinners. Holy Spirit pleads with sinners.

3. THE BRINGER OF JOY (verse 15).

Joy the normal condition of Christianity.

A Man who is Forgiven, Justified, Delivered from Satan's Power and on his way to Heaven OUGHT to be happy.

Illustrate: Matthew; Great Feast; Great Company; Great Joy (Luke 5).

4. IN THE BRIDEGROOM'S ABSENCE (verse 15).

The disciples will "fast."

Our attitude to the world now.

We go through it, being

"Not of it" and taking nothing from it.

BUT "I will see you again, and your hearts shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you" (John 16: 22).

13. Matthew 9.

1. THE GIVER OF LIFE (Janus' Daughter raised from the dead, verses 23-25).

Sinners are "Dead in sins" (Eph. 2: 5).

Believers are "Dead to Sin" (Rom. 6: 2).

Believers are Dead to the Law (Gal. 2: 19).

Believers are Dead to the World (Col. 3: 3).

BUT Alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 6: 12).

2. THE GIVER OF LIGHT.

Sin Blinds the mind to the things of God (2 Cor. 4: 4).

Men are blind to their danger, to their need, and to the beauty of the Lord Jesus.

The Gospel of God is sent to "open their eyes" (Acts 26: 18).

Christ is the "True Light" (John 1: 9).

Believers should walk in the Light (1 John 1: 7).

And be the Light of the World (Matt. 5: 14).

3. THE GIVER OF SPEECH.

Unloosed Tongues Confess Jesus as Lord (Rom. 10: 9).

Show forth His Praise (Ps. 51: 15).

Talk of all His Wondrous Works (Ps. 105: 2).

Speak of His Majesty (Ps. 145: 5).

Worship God (Rev. 4: 10).

14. Matthew 10.

In Matthew 10. The King sends forth His Messengers to announce the Coming Kingdom.

The Lord is presented in a threefold way —

1. As Son of David; 2. Son of God; 3. Son of Man.

1. THE LORD JESUS as Son of David and David's rights.

Messiah come and the Kingdom announced.

The defeat of Death, Disease, and the Devil, will mark the Kingdom when established in power. Righteousness will Reign, and there will be world-wide Blessing.

2. THE OPPOSITION to both Messiah and His Kingdom

(1) By the Rulers; (2) By the Men of that Age.

This opposition was manifested in a threefold way.

1 Against the Person of Christ.

2 Against the People of Christ.

3 Against the Word of Christ.

3. THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER'S CARE.

1 Raises the Believer above the fear of men.

2 Makes him a Confessor.

3 Makes him a Cross-Bearer.

15. Matthew 11.

Matthew 10 is the King in long-suffering grace sending forth the twelve apostles to all the cities of Israel to work miracles, while He continues to teach, so that there is blessing for both the souls and bodies of men.

In Matthew 10 — The Kingdom is announced with signs of Power.

In Matthew 11 — The nation rejects the King.

In Matthew 12 — The King rejects the nation.

1. JOHN'S QUESTION "Art Thou He?"

1 The Lord bears testimony to John.

2 The Lord's works bear testimony to Himself.

3 John, a faithful witness suffering for Righteousness sake.

2. THE NATION'S ATTITUDE.

1 Indifferent to the Call of Grace (The Lord's Ministry).

2 Careless as to the warnings of danger (John's ministry).

3. THE NATION'S FUTURE.

Judgment greater than that visited —

1 Upon the sensuality of Sodom, or the Pride and Worldliness of Tyre and Sidon.

2 Because the Jews had rejected the ministry of the Lord Himself.

4. THE CALL OF GRACE — "Come unto Me.

To Me the Rejected One, but

1 The One to whom ALL THINGS are delivered.

2 The Revealer of the Father.

3 The Giver of True Rest.

16. Matthew 11.

Two Invitations — "Come" — "Take."

The Rest given is the result of Coming to Christ as a lost sinner and getting forgiveness.

The Rest found is the result of "taking the yoke of Christ" — that is, accepting the place on earth which He took in grace — "the lowly subject One."

1. ALL YE THAT LABOUR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN.

A universal Invitation. Sin is like a heavy burden.

1 It burdens the Conscience with Guilt.

2 It burdens the Heart with Grief.

3 It burdens the Mind with Regret.

4 It burdens the Body with Disease.

2. I WILL GIVE YOU REST.

A Definite Promise.

1 Rest from Sin, from Doubt, from Fear.

2 Rest of Conscience because

3 Peace with God.

3. TAKE MY YOKE UPON YOU AND LEARN OF ME.

Yoke — picture of Fellowship.

Grace calls believers to have fellowship with Him.

"Learn of Me" — a Divine Teacher.

"Mary sat at Jesus' feet and heard His Words."

4. YE SHALL FIND REST to your souls.

"I have learned" — Paul (Phil. 4: 11).

17. Matthew 12.

The Pharisees raise the Sabbath question, and thereby only expose their own pretentious hypocrisy, because, while professing to keep the Sabbath day, they condemned the Lord of the Sabbath.

The Sabbath rest was a sign of the Law of God perfectly kept; but in rejecting Christ they had broken every link with God.

1. This gives occasion for the Lord to announce the only principle upon which men can be blessed. "I will have mercy."

Mercy for Sinners. Grace for the Unworthy. Pardon for the Guilty. Salvation for the Lost.

— Through a Crucified Saviour.

2. The man with the withered hand is an illustration of a man who got blessing on this ground. Also of Israel as a nation — withered and fruitless. Only the Power of God could restore.

3. The Pharisees first Counsel to destroy Him.

His Enemies plot His destruction.

He continues His works of blessing.

BUT, for the nation, the day of Grace was over.

He charged them "not to make Him known."

18. Matthew 13.

Seven Parables setting forth the

(1) Origin; (2) Progress; (3) Declension; and

(4) Consummation of the "Kingdom of Heaven" in the absence of the King.

1. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE WORD OF TRUTH by the Lord Himself, but giving no final results. These are developed in the six following parables. "The Word" divides the hearers into Four Classes: Hard-hearted, Faint-hearted, Halfhearted, Honest-hearted.

2. THE TARES: Evil men and evil teaching introduced by the devil. Nearly all false teaching spring from two sources: —

1 Denying that Christ was really God. — Ebionism.

2 Denying that Christ was really man. — Gnosticism. Both had their origin in the first century. They are with us still.

3. THE MUSTARD TREE.

An abnormal growth. Christendom has become a great world power with root in the earth; instead of maintaining the separate heavenly calling.

Roman Catholicism aims at becoming a great temporal power.

Protestantism aims at becoming a great political power.

4. THE LEAVEN. Every reference in Scripture to leaven shows that it is always a type of evil. Here it indicates the evil and unscriptural teaching which has been introduced, and is permeating the whole of professing Christendom.

5. THE TREASURE. Something valuable, to be sought, purchased, and guarded.

6. THE PEARL. Something beautiful and precious, to be displayed.

7. THE NET. The solemn events which take place at the end of this age. The Church wrapt to glory: the net drawn, and the mystery finished.

19. Matthew 13.

The chapter opens with a parable introducing the Lord Himself as the "Sower," and goes on to give six similitudes of the Kingdom. These show the new aspect the Kingdom would assume in the absence of the King. Christ, come in grace to establish it, is rejected. The word of the Kingdom is sown in the hearts of men, and they are left with it in Responsibility.

The First parable gives Four Results in Four Classes of Hearers.

1. THE WAYSIDE, or THE HARD-HEARTED.

Hearts are what we make them. Pharaoh hardened his heart before God hardened it.

Word not even retained in the heart.

Birds, type of Satan, catch away that which was sown.

Here the power of the devil prevails.

2. THE STONY GROUND, or THE FAINT-HEARTED.

Mere profession without conscience work. Eager to be in the forefront when Christianity is popular. When Persecution comes, eager to be somewhere else.

In this case the world prevails, and it is manifest that there has been no reality.

3. THE THORNY GROUND, or THE HALF-HEARTED.

The importance of definite decision. In this case it is absent.

The Word is entertained, but other things come in, in greater place. "The cares" or "the deceitfulness of riches," and so the flesh prevails, and the word is "choked."

4. THE GOOD GROUND, or THE HONEST-HEARTED.

Understanding hearts understand the meaning of the Gospel and its relation to themselves.

"Keep" the Word — Faith.

Bring forth Fruit — Works.

20. Matthew 13.

The Second Parable is that of The Tares among the wheat.

The Lord sows the Good Seed of the Gospel.

Satan sows Error. He introduces the Imitation among the real.

1. The Unwatchfulness of Christians allowed it. "While men slept." First mentioned is "Simon the Sorcerer" (Acts 8).

2. Both are to grow together until "the harvest." To "The Servants" is committed the precious ministry of blessing through the Gospel.

To the Angels (verse 49) is committed the dread service of being executors of judgment.

The Beginning, Course, and End of the Two Classes may be traced as follows: —

Those Represented by "The Good Seed."

1 Receive the Gospel — God's good news.

2 Believe the Truth —

About God.

About themselves.

3 Live for Christ —

A new object.

A new centre.

4 End in the Kingdom.

Their place there will be according to their faithfulness here.

Those Represented by "The Tares."

1 Ignore the Gospel — Unbelief.

2 Believe Error —

Minds must believe something.

3 Live for self, the world, or Satan.

Every life lived for something.

4 End in the "burning," solemn reality — and He who knew declared it.

21. Matthew 13.

The Son of Man sows the "Good Seed" —

That which was capable of Reproducing itself.

The Evil One sows "Tares" —

That which is fit only for the fire.

The Third Parable is that of The Mustard Seed.

The Smallest of Seeds: The beginning of the Gospel.

Became a tree: an abnormal growth.

Birds of the Air: picture of the powers of Evil.

Lodge in its Branches: Evil men no longer outside, but within the sphere of profession.

The Fourth Parable is that of The Leaven.

Evil principles at work, morally corrupting the whole mass.

Of the Pharisees — Hypocrisy (Matt. 16: 6).

Of the Sadducees — Infidelity (Matt. 16: 6).

Of Herod Worldliness (Mark 8: 15).

The Old Leaven — Sensuality (1 Cor. 5: 7).

The Fifth Parable is that of The Treasure Hid in a Field.

"The Field is the world" (verse 38).

Treasure hid in the field.

Only One knew of its Presence.

Something valuable and precious.

Picture of Believers as Christ sees them.

To possess them, He buys the "field" — the world.

The day is coming when He will take possession.

22. Matthew 13.

The Sixth Parable is that of The one Pearl of Great Price.

If the "Treasure" conveys the thought of something valuable, the one Pearl conveys the thought of something beautiful.

His love in seeking Believers looked at in their oneness as the Church (Eph. 5: 25).

The Price He Paid (Phil. 2: 5-8).

What He Purchased (Eph. 5: 25).

His object in purchasing (Eph. 5: 26).

The day of display (Rev. 19: 7).

The Seventh Parable is that of The Net cast into the Sea.

The point of the Parable is the Drawing of the net.

Attention is directed to events at the end of this age.

Then "good gathered into vessels." God calling out a people for His name now (Acts 15: 14).

Three things mark the end of the age—

The Midnight Cry.

The development of the Apostacy.

The gathering of the Jew to Palestine in unbelief.

23. Matthew 14.

In Matthew 14 we have the Two KINGS —

Herod in his sin. Christ in His grace.

The actions of Man and the actions of the Lord.

What marked Herod's dance (Mark 6) was the "lust of the eye" and the "lust of the flesh."

BUT the Lord Jesus on the mountain top illustrates the present position of the Saviour in relation to His Own.

1. HE IS PRAYING FOR US. Because we have an enemy, and we need to realise that he is sleepless, alert, cunning, relentless, cruel.

1 He tempts us (1 Thess. 3: 5).

2 He accuses us (Rev. 10: 10).

3 He assaults us (1 Peter 5: 8).

But the Lord said, "I have prayed for thee."

2. HE IS WATCHING OVER US.

"He saw them toiling and rowing."

"Light and Truth" go before (Ps. 43: 3).

Goodness and Mercy follow (Ps. 23: 6).

The Lord is thy Keeper (Ps. 121: 5).

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil (Ps. 121: 7).

3. HE IS COMING FOR US.

In the "Fourth" Watch He Came.

Compare Matthew 24. The faithful and wise Servant was "ready to open" immediately.

Note three things about Peter's Prayer (verse 30) —

It was an urgent need — Save.

It was a personal need — Me.

Only the Lord Jesus could meet it — Lord.

24. Matthew 15.

In Matthew 12 (verse 54) we find the Lord renouncing all earthly ties. In Matthew 13 He opens to His disciples the form the Kingdom would assume in His absence. In Matthew 14 the opposition develops into open hostility, and we see man's King taking away men's lives — the Forerunner is slain — but God's King saving men's lives.

Matthew 14 shows men's works to be evil. Matthew 15 shows WHY they are evil. The reason is — the HEART IS WRONG.

Matthew 14 shows the two Kings. Matthew 15 shows THE Two HEARTS.

The heart of man with its Seven Streams of Evil (verse 19).

The heart of the Lord Jesus in bringing blessing to all.

Note FOUR Points —

1. THE FORMALISM OF THE PHARISEES.

A mistake all men make.

Thinking a correct exterior will do for God.

Satan can use even a religious system as a power of Evil.

But the Lord brings home to the conscience.

2. THE FACT OF SIN.

"Out of the heart proceed." Hearts produce Evil because hearts are Evil.

Men think lightly of Sin. They deplore its fruits.

God speaks solemnly of Sin. He exposes its roots.

Sin separates from God, now, and produces unhappiness.

Sin fills the heart with selfishness and produces oppression.

Sin separates from God eternally and produces eternal misery.

Before it could be put away Christ must die.

When men cover their sins, God uncovers them.

When men uncover their sins, God covers them.

3. THE FAITH OF THE GENTILE. She felt her need.

Her need brought her to Jesus. She owned she deserved nothing.

She would be thankful for anything. She got everything.

4. THE FAVOUR OF CHRIST.

The Lord returns to Galilee and shows His grace in

Feeding Four thousand with Seven Loaves.

Feeding Five thousand (Chap. 14) was a proof that Jehovah-Messiah was present.

This Miracle was a proof that, though He was rejected by the nation, He still continued His works of mercy in their midst.

25. Matthew 16.

Matthew 15 closes with Grace to one who had no hope but in Grace. The Central thought of Matthew 16 is the revelation of the person of Christ.

1. WHAT OTHERS THOUGHT ABOUT HIM (verse 13). The Pharisees and Sadducees, blinded by the devil, reject Him. Of such, beware.

The men of the age with their opinions and speculations — John, Elijah, or Jeremiah, but consciences unreached and hearts unattracted.

2. WHAT GOD-GIVEN FAITH SAW IN HIM.

Peter's personal confession — Thou art

THE CHRIST — the official glory of His Person — the Promised One — Seed of the Woman — Seed of Abraham — Son of David — Sun of Righteousness — Fulfiller of every Promise of God.

THE SON of the LIVING GOD — His personal glory The Divine, Eternal, and Lifegiving Word (Phil. 2), (Col. 1), (Heb. 1), (1 John 1).

3. WHAT HE WAS ABOUT TO DO.

"I will build" — My Church.

Its Foundation "upon this Rock" (1 Cor. 10: 4).

Its materials (1 Peter 2: 5).

But before this could take place the presentation of the Kingdom had to be set aside and the Cross brought in.

4. WHAT WOULD MARK THOSE WHO FOLLOWED HIM.

Self denied.

The Cross taken.

Christ confessed.

Eternal reward in the Coming Kingdom.

The Man with the Cross on his back has finished with the World.

The Man with the World on his back has evaded the Cross.

26. Matthew 17.

Matthew 16 is the Revelation of the Church; Matthew 17 is a glimpse of the glory of the Coming Kingdom.

At the four lowest points of our Lord's humiliation we get confirming proofs of His Divinity.

1. His Birth. 2. His Baptism. 3. His Temptation. 4. His Death.

Having been rejected by the nation, and confessed by Peter, God manifests Him in the Centre of the Shekinah glory cloud as the "Beloved Son."

1. MOSES — The Law Giver.

But the result was a broken law and a condemned people.

No hope for sinners under law.

2. ELIJAH — The Reformer.

But Reformation cannot help sinners.

Because the past exists.

There must be Regeneration.

"My Beloved Son" is The "Transformer."

Men say "John," or "Jeremiah," or one of "the prophets."

God says, "My beloved Son, hear Him."

He brought the best news that ever came to earth. He now takes the supreme place.

4. "BE NOT AFRAID."

Men by nature are "afar" and "afraid."

Before Peace of Conscience, the

Question of Sin has to be settled.

Before there can be peace of heart, the

Question of Circumstances has to be settled.

"Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of."

27. Matthew 18.

"IN THE MIDST" (verse 20).

1. "IN THE MIDST" for Atonement (John 19: 18).

1 The Cross brings out —

2 The Love of God.

3 The Devotedness of Christ.

4 The Malice of Satan.

5 The Hatred of Man.

6 The Righteousness of God.

7 The Awful Nature of Sin.

The Guilt of the World.

2. "IN THE MIDST" for Peace and Power (John 20: 19-23).

1 The first thing a believer wants to know is peace.

2 The first thing a believer wants to experience is power.

3 Christ made peace.

4 The Blood Cleanses. The Holy Spirit brings Power.

3. IN THE MIDST FOR GUIDANCE (Matt. 18: 20).

One Condition on which He vouchsafes His presence, "Gathered in MY NAME."

1 The work of Christ brings us all our Blessings.

2 The Person of Christ brings us all our Reproach.

But — "If reproached for the Name of Christ, Happy are ye" (1 Peter 4: 9).

4. "IN THE MIDST" for Judgment (Rev. 5).

Christ on the throne.

The Rejected One of Earth Exalted in Heaven.

"Seven Horns" — Divine Power.

"Seven Eyes" — Divine Discrimination.

"Seven Spirits" — Divine Intelligence.

Note the Various Thrones: —

1. The Throne of Holiness (Ezek. 10); 2. The Throne of Grace (Heb. 4); 3. The Throne of Glory (Matt. 25); 4. The Throne of Judgment (Rev. 20).

28. Matthew 18.

FORGIVENESS IN THREE ASPECTS.

1. FORGIVENESS for Sinners — Eternal Forgiveness.

Many not clear on this elementary doctrine.

Some hope for: some think once forgiven.

Some suppose partly forgiven.

God says: "Whosoever believeth shall receive" — "Your sins are Forgiven for His Name's sake."

Grace provides: The Blood secures.

The Spirit proclaims: Faith appropriates.

Because God has spoken, we are SURE.

Because we are sure, we are HAPPY.

THREE THINGS FOLLOW.

It produces Happiness — "Blessed" (Ps. 32).

It produces Love — "Loveth much" (Luke 7: 47).

It produces Holy Fear — "That Thou mayest be feared" (Ps. 30).

2. FORGIVENESS FOR BELIEVERS, or Restorative Forgiveness.

Confession as sinners brings Eternal Forgiveness, and we become children.

When our walk breaks down daily Confession keeps us happy children.

"He is faithful and just to forgive."

More often than Peter's "seven times."

Though Eternally forgiven, yet we may suffer

Governmentally if we do not forgive others.

Therefore "Be kind one towards another . . . forgiving one another."

The "unmerciful servant" failed in the spirit of forgiveness because he "went out" from the presence of the Master.

29. Matthew 19.

In Matthew 19 the Lord recognises and owns all that is lovely in Nature, but goes on to show that the best of Nature will not do for God. "ONE is good."

1 Marriage God's own institution from the beginning, but abused by the lusts of men.

2 The little children — an illustration of the spirit which characterises the Kingdom.

3 The Young Ruler — not far "from," but not in the Kingdom.

1. THE INVITATION OF LOVE.

"Suffer the little children to come unto me."

The Invitation, designed to rebuke the pride of the disciples, expresses the love of Christ.

2. THE RECEPTION OF GRACE.

"He took them up in His arms" —

The place of safety.

Divine shelter from every foe.

"He blessed them" (Mark 10).

The Condition of Happiness and Eternal Joy.

3. THE CONDITION OF ENTRANCE.

Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10).

The little child is simple — we must believe God. The little child is trustful — we must rest on His Word.

The little child is humble — we must come down.

30. Matthew 19.

THE YOUNG RULER.

The most interesting of all the Gospel stories — also the saddest. He was really in earnest to KNOW. But not really in earnest to DO.

No common man.

Looked up to as a leader of morals.

If he was not right, who was?

Yet he felt he was not right. He was not sure about Eternal life — therefore unhappy.

And all he WAS, HAD, or DID, failed to bring happiness.

1. (1) He was a religious man — A Teacher, a Ruler, a Judge.

(2) He had youth, money, friends, Position, influence.

(3) He did all the second table of the law required. But all failed to bring happiness. The reason was, he was making two mistakes.

2. (1) He did not know himself.

Did not believe he was a lost sinner.

Did not realise that he needed a Saviour.

Looked to the Lord only as a Teacher.

(2) He did not know God.

Was trying to establish his own righteousness.

Desired to know what to do.

3. PETER'S QUESTION.

Peter, anxious to know, whether what the young man went back to, or what they were going forward to, was best, asks —

"What shall we have?"

That which the young ruler missed and one hundredfold more.

31. Matthew 20.

The Son of Man Betrayed: The close and reward of three years of devoted, self-denying, gracious ministry.

That grace had been

SEEN IN WHAT HE WAS.

The Divine Son of the Living God (Chap. 16: 16).

The Word made Flesh (John 1: 14).

The True Light (John 1: 9).

The Revealer of the Father (John 1: 18).

SEEN IN WHAT HE SAID.

"Never man spake like this man."

"The gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth."

SEEN IN WHAT HE DID.

Feeding the Hungry.

Healing the Sick.

Raising the Dead.

All His miracles were "grace" miracles.

JAMES AND JOHN desire High Places in the Kingdom. But learn that it is better to suffer here, and

Leave Results and Rewards — to God.

CHRISTIANS suffer

Because Satan is prince of this world.

Early Christians rejoiced in suffering.

WHAT enables the Christian to suffer?

They "See Him who is invisible."

They have the Holy Spirit's power within.

Illustrate — Peter, before and after the Cross.

32. Matthew 21.

This chapter begins with the presentation of the King to the nation. Their responsibility for His rejection is established, and the measure of their guilt filled up.

1. THE KING PROMISED.

1 The Men of Faith (Gen. 3; Jude 14) looked forward to Him.

2 The Men after the flesh persecuted them that were after the Spirit (Gal. 4: 29).

2. THE KING PROPHESIED OF (Gen. 49).

Three thousand five hundred years pass and God announced —

1 How He would come (Zech. 9: 9).

2 How He would be received (Zech. 13: 6-7).

3. THE KING PRESENTED (Matt. 21).

1 The nation "at a place where two ways met" (Mark 11: 4).

2 Every hearer of the word at the parting of the ways.

4. THE KING PERSECUTED.

1 The Nation reject and Crucify their King.

2 God rejects and scatters the nation.

5. THE KING PROCLAIMED (Ps. 2).

1 Crowned with many Crowns.

2 Ruler over every nation.

Four Crowns for Believers —

For those who LIVE for Christ: The Incorruptible Crown (1 Cor. 9: 25).

For those who DIE for Christ: The Crown of Life (Rev. 2: 10).

For those who WATCH for Christ: The Crown of Righteousness (2 Tim. 4: 8).

For those who CARE for the people of Christ: The Crown of Glory (1 Peter 5: 4).

33. Matthew 21.

A Short Synopsis of the Section, Matthew 21-25.

Matthew 21-22. — His Enemies morally judged and silenced.

Matthew 23. — The Eight Woes that would fall on the guilty Leaders.

Matthew 24 — 25. — Instruction for the disciples into the truths of the Kingdom.

Matthew 21. — Begins with the Fulfilment of Zech. 9: 9. But the Leaders can only ask, "Who is this?"

The Three Parables following, with that of the "Barren Fig Tree" in Luke 13, teach the definite setting aside of Israel.

1. The Fig Tree:

The Nation in Profession: No Fruit. Compare Ex. 19: 8, "All that the Lord hath spoken we will do," with 1 Thess. 2: 15, 16. What they did.

2. The Two Sons:

No reality — Lip service only.

The Leaders proved worse than the publicans (Luke 7: 29).

3. The Wicked Husbandmen:

Open opposition.

Refused to bring anything to God.

In Matthew 22, Refuse to receive anything from God.

4. The Sure Foundation Stone:

1 Falling over the stone: Christ in Humiliation.

2 Falling under the stone: Christ in Glory and Power (Dan. 2).

Refer to Genesis 49, Psalms 118, Isaiah 28, Matthew 21, Ephesians 2, 1 Peter 2:

34. Matthew 22.

Note the intimate connection between Matthew 21 and Matthew 22, though teaching different truths —

Matthew 21 — "The Vineyard" is Judaism to the Cross.

Matthew 22. — "The Marriage Feast" is the Announcement of the Kingdom.

The First gives the Attitude of Men to God.

The Second gives the Attitude of God to Men.

The First is God dealing with men in Responsibility.

The Second is God dealing with men in Grace.

Not now God requiring in Righteousness, but God displaying the riches of His grace. No longer man's ways to God, but God's ways to man.

1. THE MARRIAGE.

The central thought.

Honour for the King's Son.

"Far above . . . every name that is named" (Eph. 1: 21).

2. THE INVITATION.

First Announcement — by the Apostles before the Cross.

Second Announcement — to Israel at Pentecost. Third Announcement — world wide — "Bad and good."

3. THE CONDITIONS.

The Gospel produces what suits God.

The fitness for the feast was not their best, But the Robe of the King's providing.

4. THE JUDGMENT fell because there was — Indifference to the King's Provision, and thus Dishonour to the King's Son.

35. Matthew, Matthew 24, 25.

THE GREAT PROPHETIC SECTION OF THE GOSPEL.

Scripture speaks to men in many ways. To the unconverted, it brings a warning of coming wrath and an offer of present mercy. To the Believer, it brings instruction and guidance for the way. To the Disciple, it comes as a revelation of the mind of God as to His present and future purposes.

These two chapters are divided into THREE SECTIONS

Matthew 24, verses 1-44 — THE JEW.

His Temptations: Trials: Deliverance.

Matthew 24: 45 to Matthew 25: 1-30 — THE CHRISTIAN.

As Ministering: Waiting: or Working

For his absent Lord.

Matthew 25: 21-16 — THE GENTILES.

As Receiving, or Rejecting

The Kingdom Messengers.

THE JEW.

1. HIS TEMPTATIONS.

The True Messiah having come and been rejected, False Christs arise to deceive many.

Note. — The Jew is warned against false Christs. Christendom is warned against false Spirits (1 John 4: 3).

2. HIS TRIALS.

Wars and Rumours of Wars.

Danger for their land. Personal tribulation, the Jew is to escape from: The Christian is to glory in.

3. HIS DELIVERANCE.

By the Judgment of Antichrist, the reign of Christ, and the wicked taken out of the earth for Judgment. The Christian looks to be taken out of the earth for blessing.

36. Matthew, Matthew 24, 25.

THREE PARABLES REFERRING TO CHRISTENDOM.

1 The Good and Evil Servants illustrate what should, and should not, be our attitude towards each other.

2 The Virgins illustrate what should, and should not, be our attitude towards the Lord Jesus.

3 The Talents illustrate what should, and should not, be our attitude towards the world.

1. THE FAITHFUL AND WISE SERVANT.

1 Honoured by his Master (Chap. 24: 45).

2 Loves his Master's interests (Chap. 24: 45-46).

3 Cares for his Master's Household (Chap. 24: 45-46).

4 Rewarded by his Master at His Coming (Chap. 24: 47).

2. THE EVIL SERVANT.

1 Has no love for his Master. His heart wrong.

2 Oppresses his fellow-servants. His actions wrong.

3 Associates himself with the world. And thus renounces his heavenly calling.

4 Shares the doom of the hypocrites To which class he belonged.

37. Matthew 25.

THE PARABLE OF "THE VIRGINS"

In the Parable of the "Ten Virgins" there are Seven important points.

1. CHRIST'S COMING AS THE BRIDEGROOM.

Some deny it — Opposition to the truth. Some ignore it — Indifference to the truth. Some "love His appearing" — True affection. In the 260 Chapters of the New Testament the Coming is mentioned about 300 times.

Some expect Him, and because they expect Him, they trim their lamps and go out to meet Him.

2. THE TARRYING.

Its effect upon the Church (1 Thess. 1: 9, 10), and upon the world (2 Peter 3: 3).

The reason for it (2 Peter 3: 9).

3. THE MIDNIGHT CRY.

The "cry" goes forth at darkest period. World grows dark in proportion as divine truth (light) is rejected.

4. THE COMING REALISED.

Not the "end of the world."

5. THE MARRIAGE.

Picture of complete happiness (Rev. 19: 7).

The Christian will be happy hereafter, and should be happy here.

6. THE SHUT DOOR.

Inside — Life: Light: Joy Salvation.

Outside — Death: Darkness: Sorrow: Despair.

7. THE VAIN APPEAL.

The Result of Opportunities Neglected.

Warnings Slighted.

38. Matthew 25.

THE PARABLE OF "THE TALENTS" — SERVICE.

The Holy Spirit, Who is the power of the new life, enables the believer to enjoy the presence of God, and TELL OF CHRIST to others.

Judaism only produced one man (Jonah) who became a missionary.

In Christianity every man should be a missionary.

Every Servant has some talent.

This Parable illustrates its use, or its abuse.

1. THE IMAGERY EMPLOYED, and its meaning.

1 "A Man" — The Lord Jesus.

2 "Travelling" — His departure from this world and present period while He is in Heaven.

3 "Talents" — Gifts given by the Lord.

4 "Servants" — All who make a profession of Christianity.

2. THE GOOD SERVANT is marked by

1 The Sense of Responsibility "Thou deliveredst to me."

2 His Faithfulness.

3 His Devotedness.

3. THE EVIL SERVANT is marked by

1 What he thought of his Master.

Wrong thoughts, which led to Foolish Actions.

2 What he did with his Money.

Used for Earth what should have been Devoted to the things of Heaven.

39. Matthew 25.

THE SEVEN JUDGMENTS OF SCRIPTURE.

1 The Lord Judges (1 Cor. 11: 32) — Correction.

2 The Assembly Judges (1 Cor. 5: 12) — Discipline.

3 We Judge Ourselves (1 Cor. 11: 28-31) — Self-Examination.

4 The Judgment of the Cross — Atonement.

5 The Judgment Seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5: 10) — Reward for Faithfulness.

6 The Judgment of the Living Nations (Matt. 25.) — Preparation for the Kingdom.

7 The Judgment of the Great White Throne (Rev. 20: 11) — Condemnation.

Our Chapter deals with No. 6.

It is the fulfilment of Ps. 2, Acts 1: 11, etc.

When the Lord came the first time, He was cut off and had nothing (Dan. 9: 26). When He comes the second time

He will vindicate His rights and

Judge in Righteousness.

Historically these events take place immediately after the "Warrior Judgment" of Rev. 19.

THREE COMPANIES are manifested —

1 "THE SHEEP": Those who received, believed, and befriended the Kingdom Messengers.

2 "THE GOATS": Those who refused the Messengers, Ignored their sufferings, and Rejected their testimony.

3 "THE BRETHREN": Jewish Messengers of the Coming Kingdom, who complete the testimony of Matthew 10: 23.

40. Matthew 26.

THE LAST PASSOVER (Refer to Ex. 12).

In Egypt God took in hand to settle the Sin question. But before executing Judgment, He made Provision for righteously delivering His own. This was done through THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB. Notice six things: —

1. THE LAMB SLAIN: Death must enter every house.

But for the Israelite, a substitute was provided.

2. THE BLOOD SPRINKLED: It was not enough that the Lamb was slain. There must also be the obedience of faith, and personal identification with the shed blood, which was put outside for the eye of God to see.

3. THE PEOPLE SAVED: No question of what they were.

The Blood on the lintel was their Security.

The Word of the Lord was their Assurance.

4. THE FEAST INSTITUTED: A Feast speaks of Joy.

Egyptian bondage was past for ever.

They were going OUT of Egypt saved by the LORD.

Outside, death and Judgment.

Inside, a saved and happy people.

"Unleavened Bread" — Holy separation from Evil.

"Bitter herbs" — The memory of what they had been redeemed from.

5. HOW IT WAS TO BE OBSERVED:

With Girded Loins: Redeemed for Service.

Shod feet: Ready to march.

Staff in Hand: Outside support. Pilgrims here.

6. WHY IT WAS TO BE REPEATED: To keep in memory the LOVE, POWER, and GRACE of their Deliverer.

They were a Redeemed, Separated, Dependent, and Expectant People.

41. Matthew 26.

THE FIRST "SUPPER OF THE LORD."

The Central point of Christianity is the Lord's Supper, because it has its origin in the love of the Lord for His own, and His desire that their love to Him might never grow cold.

"Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end" (John 13: 1).

1 His OWN by Gift of the Father.

2 His OWN by Purchase of Blood.

These He gathers around Him on the dark night of betrayal.

They knew of the foe without.

Now they hear of a traitor within.

Suspicion of each other, uncertainty, and unrest fill every heart.

HE SPEAKS OF PEACE, for He was about to

LAY DOWN HIS LIFE to procure it.

Now He institutes the Supper in

Remembrance of His dying love.

It speaks of THREE things: —

1. THE WORK OF CHRIST: His body broken. His blood shed.

He died for our Sins. He gave Himself for us.

In the presence of God, angels, demons, and a hostile world,

WE SHEW THE LORD'S DEATH, by which

He glorified God, Defeated Satan, and Put away Sin.

2. THE PERSON OF CHRIST.

The Work of Christ meets the Conscience.

The Person of Christ meets the Heart.

His Work brings us all our blessings.

His Person brings us all our Joy.

3. THE COMING OF CHRIST (1 Cor. 11: 26).

To take us out of the place of testimony.

To take us into the place of glory.

42. Matthew 27.

1. THE SELF-CONFIDENCE OF PETER: Ignorant of what he was.

Verse 58. Wrong Position: "Followed afar off."

58. Wrong Company: "Sat with the Servants."

74. Wrong Testimony: "I know not the man."

2. THE GUILT AND FATE OF JUDAS.

The Greatest Sin ever Committed.

The Greater the privilege, if neglected, the Greater the Condemnation.

The traitor's reward purchased a Field of Blood.

The Death of Christ made a City of Blood, and a Land of Blood, and a World of Blood.

3. THE LORD BEFORE CAIAPHAS.

The False witness and the "Faithful Witness."

The Criminal on the Bench, and

The Judge at the Bar.

Christ given up to Death, and

The Nation of the Jews given up to Blindness.

4. THE LORD BEFORE PILATE.

Jew and Gentile agree to condemn the Just One.

Three times Pilate declares —

"I find no fault in Him" (John 19).

Pilate's wife's advice: "Have nothing to do with that Just Man."

No Man goes to hell unwarned.

Pilate rejected the warning, and

Condemned the Just.

43. Matthew 28.

THE RESURRECTION AND ITS RESULTS.

FOUR THINGS worthy of note: —

An Open Grave: Christ Risen (Matt. 28: 6).

An Open Heaven: Christ on the throne (Acts 7: 56).

An Open Heart: Christ Believed on (Acts 16: 14).

An Open Mouth: Christ Confessed (Rom. 10: 9).

1. TERRIFIED KEEPERS.

The Folly of Men.

The Failure of Men.

The Fear of Men.

2. REJOICING BELIEVERS.

1 The Foundation of Christian Joy is the Finished Work, and the Resurrection of the One who did it.

2 The Secret of Christian Joy is

The love of Christ,

Realised by "continuing" in His love (John 15: 9-11).

3. THE VICTORIOUS LORD.

God glorified, and the basis laid in righteousness for all the Counsels of God to be fulfilled.

The Power and love of God Vindicated.

Satan defeated.

Sin Put away.

The Power of death Broken.

The Resurrection is a matter of the fullest joy to the believer, but it should be a matter of the greatest dread to the unbeliever —

Because "God hath appointed a day in which He will Judge the world," and the Judgment is committed to the One who has been raised from the dead.

Letters and Papers

Letters and Papers

by the late

Theodosia A. Viscountess Powerscourt.

edited by the Rev. Robert Daly, A.M.

Rector of Powerscourt, in the Diocese of Dublin

London: Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly.

William Curry, Jun. and Co. Dublin.

MDCCCXXXVIII.

Dublin: Printed by John S. Folds, 5, Bachelor's Walk

Preface.

In offering the following Volume to the public, it is, perhaps, necessary that I should prefix a few words, to state what the reader is to expect, and what he is not to expect, in these Letters and Papers. He is not to expect anything in the character of religious gossip; any anecdotes of, or remarks concerning, living persons, with whom the writer had intercourse. Those who had the privilege of receiving Letters from the late Lady Powerscourt, know well that she delighted to dwell on much higher subjects than the actions, or opinions, of her fellowmen. If every thing she ever wrote was submitted to the public eye, it would be, perhaps, a subject of surprise to some, how very little was said about other persons in her extended correspondence. But, in the following selections, I have studiously omitted every thing in the least degree personal. Those, therefore, that shall take up this Volume with the hope of reading Lady Powerscourt's opinions of this person or that person of this or the other movement, in or out of the Church, will be disappointed. I trust that these pages will furnish no food that would gratify such appetites. Had the correspondence, from which it has been my part to make selections, afforded such materials, I should never have been the instrument of making them public. But that eminent disciple of our blessed Lord, whose Letters are now printed, with a hope and prayer that they may tend to the edification of the Church, lived in a higher atmosphere; inhaled herself, and breathed forth, a purer air. She, of all the Christians I have been privileged to know, came nearest to that which she has, in such strong uncommon terms, stated to be her idea of a Christian: "Not one who looks up from earth to heaven, but one who looks down from heaven on earth". She appears to have ascended a high and holy eminence, and from thence to have looked down upon those earthly scenes, with which too many are entirely engrossed, living up to that high spiritual requirement of the Apostle, "Set your affections on things above, and not on things on the earth, for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." Those who take up this Volume may expect to find the language of a heart thus lifted up above the world, the free and unrestrained breathing of a soul whose "conversation was in heaven;" who was "raised up, and made to sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus."

The only thing which induces me to publish the following Letters and Papers, is the conviction that they express the sentiments, and experience, and heaven taught spirituality, of one who had made more rapid advances in the divine life, than is ordinarily found in the Church below. I thought that this candle, which the Lord had lighted, should not be hid under a bushel, but put on a candlestick, that it might give light to all that are in the house. There will be found original and strong thoughts, clothed in original and strong language: indeed the strength of the language may sometimes startle some of those who read these Letters, and may be such, that had the writer revised them for publication, she might have, perhaps, somewhat softened her expressions; but, as Editor, I did not think myself authorised, even if I had felt disposed, to do so. In truth, (whether erroneously or not,) I like those strong expressions: I would not wish to alter one of them: they bring back to my recollection, the image of the strongest mind that I ever met in any woman: they help to remind me of that which was her peculiar characteristic, uncommon masculine strength, combined with the extremest feminine gentleness: they help me to apprehend the power with which she realized those important subjects about which she wrote; and I am not without hope that, through the blessing of God, they may be made instrumental to convey the same reality to others.

Whilst I believe that all intelligent readers may derive benefit and edification from these pages, I conceive they may be especially profitable and comfortable to mourners; to those "who are afflicted or distressed in mind, body, or estate." Lady Powerscourt was one acquainted with grief. She had had severe and heavy trials; and she was thus, in a peculiar way, fitted to sympathise with all tried Christians. She was enabled "to comfort those who were in any trouble, with the comforts wherewith she herself had been comforted of God." When she knew of any of her friends being in trial, she seems to have felt herself especially drawn to write to them a "word in season". Therefore many of the Letters in the collection are addressed to mourners, and will, I trust, be found comforting and strengthening to those who are in similar circumstances.

There is one subject which occupied much of Lady Powerscourt's attention, which does not appear in the following pages, as prominent as many of her religious friends might have expected, and that is, the subject of prophecy. She was known to have very deeply considered it, to have conversed with those persons who were most remarkable for their study of it, and to have consulted the books which have been written on it; and, above all, to have read the Scriptures with much deep attention to the subject and yet, very little on prophecy appears in her correspondence. Lest any persons should think that, in making the selection, I have thrown aside Letters on the subject, I think it right to state that I have been myself surprised to find how little, upon this interesting subject, has been left among her papers. I had expected to have found much clear statement of the result of her deep consideration of prophecy; and though she should have stated that which did not agree with my views, I should have published her's, and allowed those interested in the subject to exercise their judgment thereon. I should certainly not do what some persons, whom I esteem, have done, — publish the sentiments of another, though at the time considering them erroneous, on the fundamental principles of the Gospel but I would publish the sentiments of another on the future prospects of the Church, though in those sentiments, I thought the writer was mistaken; because I consider the first subject to be vital, and that error on it is essentially dangerous. I do not so think of the other subject. I consider the whole Church of Christ to be much in the dark with regard to prophecy, and more or less in error concerning it; and that the best way to correct the error, and attain more light, is to encourage free discussion upon it. In order to reach the end, it is essential not to mistake as to the way. It is not equally essential to form correct anticipations, as to what shall be found at the end. Those who are on the way shall reach the end, and then all their mistakes concerning it shall be corrected.

I feel myself called upon to return my thanks to the correspondents of Lady Powerscourt, for the kindness and confidence with which they have entrusted me with her valuable Letters. They will see, I trust, that I have not violated their confidence. I have selected according to my best judgment; I have altered nothing, and corrected little, except when necessary to make the sense clear, which will often be indispensable in publishing from an uncorrected manuscript. I have been obliged to omit some very beautiful letters, on account of the recurrence of the same sentiments and expressions in other Letters. It appears to have been frequently the case, that some scriptural subject, with a suitable train of thought, was very deeply impressed upon Lady Powerscourt's mind; and she recurred to that subject and train of thought, in writing to her different friends, at the same time, in different places. I have generally omitted the Letters in which the sameness of thought was observable; but I have sometimes admitted a repetition, where I must otherwise have rejected a Letter, in other respects valuable, or have made omissions which might have rendered the sense less clear. I hope her correspondents will excuse me for the omissions, and the readers for the repetitions they may observe.

As my object is simply to present to the Church the sentiments of the writer, which appear to me to be likely to promote edification, I have omitted even the names of the persons to whom the Letters were addressed; and I have abstained from prefixing to this Volume any thing in the way of a memorial of the departed writer. It would be impossible to write any biographical sketch of her that is gone, without stating particulars as to those that remain, which might give them a publicity which would be distressing to their feelings. I send, then, the Letters before the public, without any recommendation except their own intrinsic worth. I publish them, not because they were written by my dear departed friend, but because, in my judgment, (not unprejudiced, I admit,) they appear to be in themselves such as ought to see the light.

I have added, at the end, a few Papers, which seem to have been her private exercises on scriptural subjects. They will show how deeply she considered, and how powerfully she reasoned, upon the word of God. It may, indeed, be said of her, that her "delight was in the law of the Lord, and in his law did she meditate day and night."

It only remains that I should commend this Volume to the blessing of Him, "without whom nothing is strong — nothing is holy". He was pleased to make the writer of these Letters a very signal monument of His grace. She bore witness to His grace in her life, and by her life; and I pray, that He may vouchsafe to allow her, "though dead, yet to speak," to the edification of His people, and to the glory of His holy name.

Powerscourt Glebe, April, 1838.

Letters.

Letter 1.

... 1821.

I am glad to hear you have a good opinion of ... I almost envy any one a strong feeling of sin, but I am sure our wise and tender Father knows best how to measure that out to us, in proportion as He sees us able to bear it; though it seems sad not to grieve at offending such a Lord. It gives me much pleasure to hope there are ... in this house seeking him, whom, I trust, I at least desire to be dearer to me than all the world. It is cheering to see even a Christian's face. I do not expect to go to ... either Wednesday or Thursday; but perhaps the less of these enjoyments we have, the more shall we long for an eternity of them, when all foolish worldly gossip, which weighs us down now, will be over for ever.

Yours, most sincerely,

T. A. HOWARD.

Letter 2.

Dear Mr ...,  I return the sermon with many thanks; I am greatly obliged to you for it, and particularly for your kindness in saying I am heartily welcome to it. I trust the Lord may bring me, and all dear to me, to the blessed state which the sermon describes that of a Christian to be. I must also thank you for your little prayer at the end of your note, you have not one in your parish who needs it more. You say you hope I sometimes offer one for you; it would be strange if it was only sometimes, but if you knew what my prayers are, you would beg to be left out. Indeed I am not satisfied on that head; for some weeks I have not been able to pray at all, and seldom to read (I mean in private), and it is more wretched than I can say. Perhaps if you are not engaged, you will be kind enough to send me a few lines to say, if you ever knew this to be the case with any of whom you had hopes, and what you think is the cause of it, for I suppose it must be my own fault. I sometimes fear the Lord's Spirit will not strive with me any longer. I hope you will excuse my troubling you about myself; but there is no peace, while the Lord hides from us the light of his countenance. It will be a happy time, when we shall have done with this body of sin.

Yours, most sincerely,

T . A. HOWARD.

Letter 3.

...I have just been reading two such sweet verses, 12th and 13th of Col. 1, and almost fearing such great things cannot be intended for such a log; however, the thought of being a partaker of that inheritance is sometimes very sweet, and I believe I may as well enjoy the thoughts of it here, even if I never do arrive at it...

Letter 4.

London, April 9th, 1823.

My dear ...,  I hope you will not think my long silence a mark of ingratitude for your goodness in writing to me so long and kind a letter, but between ... illness and ... I have had but little time to myself, and that little I know you would rather I should give to the Bible, than to you. Besides, I wished to be able to tell you that ... was quite well, which I think I can say, thank God, now. His illness has been a very trying one, and more tedious, from its having been so much on his nerves. But the Lord has only brought us in view of great misery, that we may feel more dependant on him, and the more watchful to be ready for every thing. I wish I could say this was the effect it has had on me, or that anything ever moved this cold stony heart. Indeed I have long been in despair about that, and often wished to speak to you on the subject; so much so, that I had resolved to visit you the morning before we left Powerscourt, but thinking that perhaps you would consider me troublesome and very full of self ..., and as you proposed writing, I determined I would postpone asking your advice, till I had the pleasure of hearing from you, and I think you deserve a scolding from me, for you must have remarked how much I had fallen away from the Lord, for I did not try to hide it, and you know you should have spoken to me about it. But it is only wonderful that I am not more unhappy; for I do not think I have any feeling of any sort on the subject remaining, or hardly any care whether I have part or lot in the matter. I have not felt particular harm from moving about, for I could not be worse, than I was before leaving Ireland. I had nothing to lose. I often fear my name has been blotted out from the book of life, and that the Lord is weary of entreating me to accept all the blessings of the Gospel. I know you will set about comforting me, but it is not that I want; what I feel is an apathy, and indifference, whether one of the promises belongs to me or not. Oh, If you knew the difference of my feelings from this time last year, you would think the same as I do ... I was so happy in him then, that I thought I could never be moved — the Lord, of his goodness, had made my hill so strong. I remember telling ... that, let events turn out as they might, my happiness was ensured; even if shut up for life in a dungeon, I could be nothing but happy, with the prospect of being one with my Saviour. But He hid his face from me, and I have been troubled. I find I can do without anything but Him; but having once tasted his love, everything else has lost its sweetness. I feel now that I care for nothing: not for the things of another world, and I am sure, not for the things of this. Instead of running to my Bible, as a hungry man to his food, I read it as a task. Prayer is no more my sweetest pleasure, but a duty which I feel glad to have over; and when I go to it, I have nothing to say to my Lord. The contemplation of Heaven used to be so sweet, it made everything earthly appear as nothing. Now I do not feel it would give me the least pleasure, to hear that I was to be there tomorrow. Oh, if you knew how unmoved my heart is at all the wonderful means of grace I enjoy, one beautiful sermon after another. I feel none of the delight I once used at seeing a Christian walk into the room. Instead of loving to hear them talk of the Saviour, I am at a loss for something to say; indifferent, totally so, about the souls of others ... I am in an awful state. I could tell you a great deal more, but it would be only tormenting you. I tell you this much, not expecting you to understand my case, for I do not suppose there ever was such another, but that you may not think me interested in all those things, for which I feel 60 little. I know you can do nothing for me, but this I hope you will do — strive hard for me, strive hard for me in your prayers: I owe you more than I can say, humanly speaking, and I would not write to you this way did I not feel you are the only person who feels for my soul, as I feel for it myself, for we have both to give an account of it. This I can say, you are pure from my blood. Oh! may I still be your joy and crown of rejoicing in the last day; and may all your instructions not cast me deeper into hell. At other times I think I used to look at religion too much as a pleasure, and that having lost her with whom I used to enjoy this pleasure, it has lost much of its delight ... How very full of self you will think me, but I want your advice, and your constant earnest prayers, I was sorry to hear you had such a bad cold. I hope you have recovered your voice for this week, and that you have not given up your trip to London. We have been so much shut up by Lord P.'s illness, that I have not been able to hear many good preachers on week days, but hear Mr ... regularly on Sunday. Last Sunday I went to Mr. Howell's church, whom I liked very much, though his style is rather odd. He says very strong things, lowering the creature, and exalting the Saviour...

Forgive this long letter, and believe me,

Very affectionately and gratefully,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 5.

September, 1823.

Dear Mr ...,  I should have answered your kind letter before this, had I anything to tell you that could have given you any gratification. But alas! I have been as desolate within as without. My earthly husband hid from me, my heavenly one I cannot find; and Satan hard at work tempting me to say what is this black thing I have done, which makes my Father so angry with me. But oh my dear Lord, let him not rule within: quench his fiery darts: show me that I deserve far worse, even all the wrath of an offended God. But Jesus has "borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." These trials are only blessings to fill up that which is behind of his afflictions. I am also tempted to think, that I cannot be his, for I feel none of that comfort his children always feel, and I used to find in the hour of trial ... Jonah doest thou well to be angry? I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned grievously against him. Oh dear Mr ..., you do not know, what it is to lose one so dear, so very dear; I can only compare it to the tearing asunder all the strings of the heart. Then such a gloomy prospect here the rest of one's life. After watching him day and night with so much anxiety, anticipating the joy of being allowed again to be with him; all at once so unexpectedly to have my hopes dashed from me, was what I did not think for some days, I could have borne, because I forgot that as my day so should my strength be. In any other loss I have had, I never could pray for the bodily life of my friend, but in this to which no other loss can be compared, night and day, I could not help entreating the Lord to spare me the heavy blow. I really did think he meant to answer me, and hoped against hope, till the last breath left that dear body ... But I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that in very faithfulness thou hast afflicted me — I must wait to know and see why it is, till I know as I am known. That it is unspeakable love, I have no doubt, because he who has sent it is no new friend, but a tried and precious one; and when it is good for me He will allow me to see that this God is Love. But oh I tremble when I look at my rebellion, and ingratitude, throughout it all. I have had much to show me myself this last year — to dig up the mud hid under the smooth surface. How it will astonish you — astonish angels, when the book of my sins is opened, except they are so blotted out with blood as to make them illegible.

I do not suppose there could be a stronger lesson of the vanity of every thing earthly than to look at me last year and this. The prospects of happiness I seemed to set out with! And now where are they? A living monument that man in his best estate is altogether vanity — and see how my heart, without my knowing it, was on earth. I could not have thought one who professes to believe in the joys of heaven, and had tasted the realization of them by faith, could so mourn, as one without hope, could so willingly call him back again. But I shall say no more, for these complaints only grieve my God, and annoy you. But, indeed, I am at times greatly oppressed, and feel this evening as if there were a parcel of devils within tearing me different ways, and refusing me any rest. I beseech you pray for me, and write to me,

Your unalterably affectionate

And grateful friend,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 6.

February 18, 1824.

... How I shall long to join you all above. I fear I need patience, and find it hard to reconcile my mind to the possibility of my living three times as long as I have lived yet. When I look back upon a few months, and remember the happiness I used to feel when I expected my dearest love and ..., to spend the evening at ... and to have a little reading, I can hardly persuade myself that I am the same person. Two now in possession of what they then, blessed be God, enjoyed by faith, and I left alone. — But I forgot — r determined never to murmur again. It needs a great stretch of faith sometimes, when the enemy comes in like a flood, to believe that God is as much at peace with me through Christ, as with those already above; that Abraham now in glory is not safer than I am. Is that presumption, do you think? What a precious name, a strong tower, into which if we run, we shall be safe. Were I left to myself I should run from it. I would not trust myself to his word, but seek to save myself from danger. But almighty love arrests me, pulls me in; and then rewards me for coming. How much in those words, "are safe," to think we are safe from every thing! No evil shall ever touch us, evil at the end, or evil on the way. All paved with love; "all things shall work together for good." I have got the promise of all others I want — "let thy widows trust in me." I once wished there was a richer, sweeter promise to widows, but I believe it requires to be brought into different circumstances, in order to feel the force of different promises. For the Lord knew that none so suited widows, as these few words. In looking round the wide world, so filled with wickedness, and seeing one has to pass through it alone, one would fear every step one took so unprotected and forlorn, only for this promise. With this "when I am weak, then I am strong." It is not like him to invite us to trust in him, and then let any evil come nigh us. If his everlasting arms are underneath, I "shall dwell in safety alone." Let there be rebellions, revolutions, persecutions, earthquakes, anything, every thing, "let thy widows trust in me," should be enough. I know my tabernacle shall be in peace. Sweet to think that the eye of the Lord is upon us, to deliver our soul from death. It seems to me, as a nurse keeps her eye upon her child lest it should destroy itself, or as a keeper keeps his eye upon his poor lunatic, "the Lord is thy keeper." Then unbelief jumps up and says, how do you know all this is for you? Then I do not know what to say, but "my Master told me so." His Spirit witnesses with my spirit. He has given me the earnest of the spirit. To those who believe he is precious, and I think he is precious to me — "a bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me." Oh that I could keep close to him; I want to be fixed on the rock. My grief is, that the waves of sin and the-world give me so many shoves off it. Will not you pray for me, for I greatly need it; and will you not write to me, and exhort me with purpose of heart to cleave unto the Lord; and tell me if you think me presumptuous, or going wrong in any way. That old serpent is so cunning. Will you forgive me for speaking so much of myself, but speaking of what He can do for me, magnifies the power of his grace, more than if I was to speak of it with regard to any one else upon earth.

Yours with Christian affection,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 7.

... All creation seems to be travailing to bring forth some mighty event, and poor Ireland is coming up in remembrance before God. Oh what are we, to be able to look any thing, every thing in the face, and know assuredly without a peradventure, that all is, shall, and must, work together, for our everlasting good; that had we sense, it is just what we should order for ourselves, to have fresh comfort in every fresh putting forth of his omnipotence, for this God is our God. Though even the earth should be shook to its very centre, though we might feel outwardly the curse of sin, yet no evil henceforth for ever can befall us, we shall only behold, and see from out of the cleft of the immoveable rock. From thence we may boldly challenge distress, persecution, etc. etc. our dwelling is the Most High. We may be thrown like a shuttlecock, from self to Satan, and back from Satan to self, till weary of both; but neither sin, self, or Satan, shall or can ever reach our lives, for they are hid with Christ. Because he lives we shall live also. What a happy confidence in such a world, to be able to look up, and say, my Lord and my God, and to know also the Captain of our salvation as our bosom friend. Whilst engaged in calling in his people from North, South, East and West, he does not forget those already within the fold, but comes and whispers them in the still small voice of his word; tells me, I shall never be forgotten, let his works be ever so stupendous; tells me, he cannot live in glory, and leave me behind; that the angel can no more swear, that time shall be no more, till the last of his elect shall be sealed on their foreheads, than his truth can fail. I think there is a danger in these times of the feelings being so kept alive by excitement, as to lead us to forget, that as we have received Christ, so we ought to walk in him, built up as well as rooted; stablished in the faith ...; so eager for the battle as to forget our armour. I trust you remember us, that you are often present with us in spirit, and pray without ceasing that we may stand complete in all the works of God, that he may set us as lights on a hill, by the splendour of our walk, illuminating many from the kingdom of darkness unto the kingdom of God's dear Son; that we may walk worthy of our high calling in all lowliness; that we may see in a degree with the eye of God, that we may live but for one end, that we may occupy till he come, reaching forward towards the prize, running the race set before us, looking unto Jesus; that we may have nothing to do with any pursuit or happiness ending in time; neither entangled with the cares, nor intoxicated by the fascinations of the world; and that every action of our lives may declare plainly, that our kingdom is not of this world. Pray that for us, and I will pray, that the answer may rebound into your soul...

With sincere Christian affection,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 8.

January, 1826;.

I have to thank you for your other kind long letter. There is a certain drawing out of heart towards those who care enough for us, as to point out in what way we may be grieving our Lord. Your accusations, I fear, are quite just, and I hope I may have your prayers, that I may be enabled to walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing. I think it is in the Lord, we are told to rejoice, a joy which can be felt while sorrowing, a good cheer in tribulation. I sometimes sit in astonishment why my cup should run over with this blessing, and I have more when the heart is brought low to receive it, than when it is (which is often the case) intoxicated. own I feel sometimes cast down and desolate, but not unhappy. I have had a deep, a very deep wound; the trial has been very severe; but how should I have known him as a brother born for adversity, without it. How should I prize him as my strength, if I am not sometimes left to feel my perfect weakness. The heart is too selfish not to drop a tear sometimes, but I hope no longer a rebellious one. The wound is closed, but very little bursts it open. The marble must be allowed to melt a little, but only enough to send to that good physician, who maketh sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth, and his hands make whole. I understand these lines,

"Cry and groan beneath afflictions,

Yet to dread the thoughts of ease."

However, if it is more to his glory, that I should take pleasure in the many blessings left in this world, dreary as it may seem through the glass of affliction, "behold I am here Lord," if to be kept low — even so. May I only be able to lay this soul as helpless on the great "I AM." And I can assure you, however appearances may contradict it, I have much joy and peace in believing, find life a flux and reflux of love; Jesus is precious to me. I find his banner of love extended over Edinburgh; his promises here also, are as honey dropping from the comb. There is not one on earth I desire but him; he is all my hope and all my salvation; and I can go on with confidence, knowing he can never deny himself or say "I never knew you," for he testifies not only that he knows me, but that he loves me, by enabling me to say, "thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee."

Sometimes we appear such insignificant grasshoppers that it is hard to conceive that he can think of us and our foolish concerns; at other times one feels of such immense importance, that one wonders that Christians can live like other people, such as when we read of the burst of joy from the heavenly host, and find this the sign that their Lord whom they adore has become a despised babe, and all, because peace is brought to earth, and good will to man. Peace seems just what we want here, purchased by his blood, left as his legacy. What simplicity there seemed to be in his words after his resurrection. He seemed to enjoy the travail of his soul, when distributing his peace. May he impart largely of it to your soul, and while recommending the inexpressible treasure of his word to others, may you be enabled yourself to feed on it, by faith with thanksgiving. May he empty of his fulness into all our bosoms, and enable us by using, to show we value the privilege of drawing near to him, to tell him of fear the world cannot allay, of wants the world cannot satisfy, of blessings the world knows nothing of.

Your affectionate,

T.A. Powerscourt.

Letter 9.

... Is your happy soul still lifted up? able in His light to walk through darkness? I know the dreary waste that lies before you. How his dear, dear company is missed — how tasteless and insipid every thing appears — how you want that affection which entered into every trifle which concerned you — how you want an adviser, a protector, such a companion — one to weep when you weep — to rejoice when you rejoice. I know well what it is to lie down at night and say, where is he? — to awake in the morning and find him gone — to hear the hour strike day after day, at which you once expected his daily return home to his too happy fire-side —  and find nothing but a remembrance that embitters all the future here. Oh my poor, poor ... if I cannot feel for you who can? — who so often partook of your happiness? — sweet precious time I have been allowed to enjoy with you both, but past. However, it is well that you have another to feel for you. If I know the meaning of the word sorrow, I also know of a joy a stranger intermeddleth not with. How tenderly our compassionate Lord speaks of the widow! as a parent who feels the punishment more than the chastened child. He seems intent to fill up every gap love has been forced to make; one of His errands from heaven was to bind up the broken-hearted. He has an answer for every complaint you may ever be tempted to make. Do you say you have none now to follow, to walk with, to lean on? He will follow you and invite you to come up from the wilderness leaning on him as your beloved. Is it that you want one to be interested in all your concerns? Cast all your cares upon him, for he careth for you — a protector? Let thy widows trust in me —  an adviser? Wonderful Counsellor! Companion? I will not leave you comfortless; I will come unto you; I will never leave you, nor forsake you; I have not called you servants but friends; behold I stand at the door and knock, if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in unto him, and sup with him, and he with me. — One to weep with you? In all their affliction he was afflicted; Jesus wept. When you lie down — safe under the shadow of his wings, under the banner of His love. When you awake — still about your path and about your bed. It is worth being afflicted to become intimately acquainted, and to learn to make use of, the Chief of ten thousand — the altogether lovely — the brother born for adversity —  the friend that sticketh closer than a brother — the friend of sinners. Pray write often to your poor sister; tell me every thing that interests you; do not let the children forget me...

Letter 10.

My dear Mr ...,  Though he was a shining light by whom God was glorified, yet, I think, in him more than in others the power of God was manifested in the inner man; the mind that was in Christ was stamped on him; every disposition led captive to Jesus. But it required to live with him, and see him in every turn of life, to know how beautifully the Spirit was moulding him into the image of his Master. It appears to me, there were four graces peculiarly striking in his character, some of which you have mentioned.

First, his entire forgetfulness of self in every thing, (this was very remarkable), accompanied with a watchful attention to the wishes of others, a tenderness to their feelings, a fitting of himself into their prejudices, and, as far as he could, entering into their pursuits, so as by any means to win some.

Second, most striking trait, which I believe you have mentioned, but which those who knew him but little did not perceive, was a loathing of himself, as if he really felt sin a burden; but, at the same time, the most happy and simple confidence of his safety in Christ. It often reminded me of Isaiah 59. 19. He seemed to feel the evil heart as a flood which would overwhelm him, was not the soul continually directed to Christ crucified as to its resting place.

Third, is what you have already expressed much better than I can; such a thirst for truth upon every subject as enabled him to lay aside prejudice, and every impediment in the way, and made it visible that to reach and receive it was his object.

Fourth, we may say, the cause of his being so unlike his natural man, was his mind being kept in a continual turning to Christ, as the element in which he delighted. He was alive to spiritual subjects, should they be brought forward at any moment. Though zealously engaged in controversy with the enemies of truth; though enjoying with gratitude his social happiness; though necessarily occupied in much and different business, he was enabled to live alone, and seemed to have learned the difficult lesson of using the world without abusing it; like the needle, which may be turned from the pole by superior force, but when let loose, returns to its proper position; so with him, when the pressure of business was taken off his mind returned to his rest in God.

I fear, were I to say all I thought of him, I should draw a perfect character, for love covered all faults; and after all, the various graces of the Spirit were so blended, it is difficult to say which was most predominant. It might truly be said of him, that he adorned the doctrine of God his Saviour in all things. It is difficult, when speaking of a character so beloved, to exalt the Saviour, not the creature, to leave an impression that sin was all he could call his own; all that was lovely, the comeliness which Christ put on him.

This is a long note, but you know it is the property of women to multiply words, and express little...

Yours truly,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 11.

... 1826.

... I think dear ... death was made a great blessing, which I fear has only taught me one painful lesson, that a blessing does not necessarily follow an affliction. I need not repeat, (for the Lord has already proclaimed it so loudly by sending affliction line upon line, affliction precept upon precept,) that no one needs trial more, no one needs so much of the Bible as I do, and on none do both tell so little. It requires all the energy of God to bend my will to his; and while it may be sometimes hard to be content with outward providences, it is still more hard to feel resigned to be what one is, not to wish for another's spirit, another's disposition; to be resigned to lie as a bit of clay in his hands without dictating the best way of being formed into a vessel fit for the master's use; satisfied with good as well as evil, knowing that what he has undertaken he is able to perform; hard to feel resigned to dishonour him, whom we adore, all our lives; to love His presence above every thing else put together, and yet, continually, by our own folly and neglect, lose it for trifles which we most despise; very hard to be resigned to oneself; to be ever worshipping, and placing, this Dagon in the temple of our beloved, and to be haunted by it wherever we go. I do think one chief part of our happiness hereafter will consist, in our having done with wretched self, God being all in all...

...Altered as that spot has been these last two years, I expect to find it still more so on our return. I did value more than I can utter that dear dear saint's visits; the prospect of them cheered the time of his absence; and even all unpleasantness was removed from all secular affairs by the interest and part he always took in my concerns. However, there is always but to the Christian. But now I hope to be cheered, in expecting the coming of the "altogether lovely," to be upheld by the interest, and part, he takes in all that concerns me. And if I know myself, my ambition is to live simply to His glory; to be a burning and a shining light, only that the splendour of my walk may bring glory to His name, to glorify him in spirit as well as body, which are altogether His, paid for by him. Soon we shall see him really ours; soon shall we join the company of the just made perfect, know, and perhaps be able to tell them, how every rough blast of human woe has hastened on our little bark to shore. In the mean time, may our Lord's blessing and presence, so interwoven with our comforts, rest upon you and ...

I am always a great egotist in my letters to you, because I fancy you feel an interest, at least, in the spiritual feelings of all your flock. Pray, write soon, and do not think, while you are writing, that you are losing time. I hope your throat is better. You have not the privilege of being afflicted for yourself alone, but for our consolation and salvation. My love to all who care about me.

Believe me my dear Mr ...

Yours, with true affection,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 12.

Powerscourt, 1st February, 1826.

My dearest ...,  So I must write and receive no answer; that is very hard indeed; if I thought, or could think, it could possibly give one moment's comfort to an afflicted saint, I should be more than resigned; how sweet it would be to be a cup of consolation in the temple of our God. Well! if I have not that privilege, I hope to be a vessel of mercy through eternity. Yes, the poor sinner would not, if he could, be saved any way but as he is. Our proud nature at first rebels against being objects of pity, we should prefer having salvation as those who had no need, rich and increased with goods; but when forced to throw down our arms of rebellion, and come as beggars, wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, then we feel it is such a blessedness to be objects of pity to a God full of compassion, that we glory in our infirmities, because they bring us in contact with Him for every thing, food, clothing, etc. The greater our necessities the more we have to do with Him. How well you must know Him! How often he has strengthened you upon the bed of languishing! How he has made all your bed in your sickness! How often he has enabled you to carry your weak soul in the arms of faith, and lay it down on this resting place; His precious word, a bed of consolation stuffed with sweet and precious promises. I think the believer even while in the furnace, at the moment of experiencing that his trials are not joyous but grievous, feels so convinced He is doing all things well, that he would not have it otherwise, had he his choice; and such a desire has the new man to be made partaker of his holiness, to enjoy the peaceable fruits of righteousness, which these exercises produce, that he turns, and kisses the rod, saying Amen, deal with me as with a child. The poor world may have a reprieve here from suffering, but the child of God may not, would not if he might. Happy confidence, He will not lay on us one unneedful stroke, for as a father pitieth his children, etc. Happy confidence, he will not keep back one needful stroke, for he scourgeth them whom he loves, that he may receive them, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth. Is it not strange that the moment he is acting most the part of a parent, is just the moment we are most apt to forget we are his children; he tells us, we forget the exhortation that speaks to us as unto sons. It is pleasant, as he takes these precious relationships on himself, to take his at his word, and plead them before him; sweet to look up and say, Abba, Father; to leave all temporal concerns in his hands, because "our heavenly father knows we have need of them;" reminding him it is a father's part to provide for the want of his little ones. When we come to make known our spiritual wants, to remind him it is a father's feeling, to be willing to give all within his means; and, even, when we sin against him, depart, backslide, return base ingratitude for love, out of this depth, to whom shall we naturally look, but to our parent? As the prodigal, when confessing he was not worthy to be called his child, begins his sentence with "father." No, nothing can change this relationship. "Though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not, thou, O! Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer; thy name is from everlasting." He will spare as a man spares his own son that serveth him; even though forced to speak against his dear son, his pleasant child, He earnestly remembered him still — his bowels were troubled for him; he could not help having mercy; and he will lead us also; cause us to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight way, wherein we shall not stumble — for he is a father to Israel; he will put on us the best robe in his wardrobe — the righteousness of Christ; he will give his greatest gift as a token of his love — his holy Spirit; he will cause us to be shod with the gospel of peace; when tempted to doubt his faithfulness, he points to David's feeling when crying out, O! Absalom my son, my son, would to God I had died in thy place; and appeals to our hearts, if David could have afflicted Absalom willingly; he points to what his servant Moses has left on record is to be expected from that parent, (Num. 11. 12.) that he should carry his sucking child in his bosom, and reminds us, by taking that relationship on him self, he has bound himself thus to act, and he will carry us in his bosom to the land of promise, and we shall not halt till He is wearied, nor fall till He stumbles; none shall pluck us out of his hands, till the arm of Omnipotence fails from weakness; no lion shall overtake, no enemy overcome, while the -everlasting arms are underneath, and the banner or love above. This is your portion and mine, dear fellow pilgrim. "Lord what is man that thou shouldst magnify him, that thou shouldst set thine heart upon him — that thou shouldst visit him every morning, and try him every moment;" and this to such as we, who require a fresh exercise of mercy every moment to keep us out of hell; yet, even here, to know while feeling a weight of sin pointing to the very heavens, that there is a heap of mercy reaching into the heavens, "built up for ever;" that neither past sin shall condemn, for his mercy is from everlasting; neither shall future, because his mercy is to everlasting, they have all been laid on him — carried off into the land of forgetfulness, never to be laid on us again, until east meets with west. Under the old dispensation, remembrance was made of sin every year, because, and to show, that the blood of bulls and of goats could never take away sin; but now, the very declaration so often repeated, that sin shall be remembered no more, proves the blood of Christ sufficient to cleanse from ALL sin. May we every day dive deeper into this unfathomable love, every day increase in the knowledge of this love that passeth knowledge, till filled with the fulness of God, moulded into the mind that was in Christ Jesus; and when he shall open his casket and display his treasures, may we, and all dear Christian friends, whom I long to see again in the flesh, be found among those who spake often one to another of his dear name, who thought upon it.

If such the views which grace unfolds,

Weak as it is below,

What rapture must the Church above

In Jesus' presence know!

when time shall be no more — the bustle past. By the by, what insignificant names our God uses when speaking of this life: — grass, flower, dust, wind, shadow, a leaf going to and fro a weaver's shuttle;... Scatter my good wishes around, particularly to ...

Believe me dear ...

Very affectionately yours,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 13.

12th May 1826, Antrim Castle.

My dear friend — I put off writing till I should arrive at Powerscourt, expecting then to get a frank as my letters are not worth postage, but I can refrain no longer, thanking you and your dear sisters for your very great kindness to my children, etc. It was doubly gratifying, because any kindness shown to me, must be for my Master's sake. How manifestly His only aim is our happiness — witness, "this is my commandment, that ye love one another." We may well, then, trust it in his hands, who spared not His own Son. May we not lie like the helpless sheep on the shepherd's shoulder, content for him to carry through prosperity as well as adversity; through life, as well as death? Not only is our path already marked out by infinite wisdom and love, but has been trodden by the man of sorrow; be it ever so rugged, we still have the sweet comfort of tracing in it the footsteps of the Captain of our Salvation; every need-be pang, then, is but an echo from the inner sanctuary — "If ye suffer with Him ye shall be glorified together;" and as he entered the everlasting gates, triumphantly crying, "He is near that justifieth me, who shall contend with me?" So may his poor weak followers walk, saying, "who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect?" No one I think, who reads the Bible, can hesitate whether or not, it was written by one who knowing every distress, into which every believer from the beginning to the end would ever be brought, could provide a word in season for each, or whether or not, the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in that man, who, inviting all who labour and are heavy laden to come to him, could promise rest to their souls. And do we not need every consolation laid up, word upon word, promise upon promise. In order that our comfort may abound, He has so graciously left us dependant one upon another, and provided so many relations calculated to support on our way to him, and, yet, as if to show they all concentrated in one, he takes to himself the name of each. I love to think of him as a Father, for it is written, "What son is he whom the Father chasteneth not." And the heart feels assured that his tenderness will neither spare too much, nor will our rebellion prompt him to say, "Let it alone." While the compassion manifested in the very chastisement proves, as words cannot, that he does not afflict willingly, but as a father pitieth his children so he pities us; yet, to think with all this, that I should ever murmur! I who may well say, his love to me is a wonder to myself; and this too, while having tasted of his trial, I can, in a degree, sympathise with him, for I do think, he is never more wounded in the house of his friends than when they murmur. Nothing seems so to overcome his forbearance with the Israelites. O! then, dear ... may we be able to say under every circumstance to the full extent of the words, "The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want," resigned to live, or resigned to die, resigned to prosperity, or resigned to adversity, only, "Father glorify thy name."

To live is Christ! am I resigned to live

When Christ is with me, holds me by the hand,

Follows my footsteps, watches by my bed,

Bids the warm tear of grateful exultation,

Washing the stain the tear of sorrow leaves,

And makes some evil seem so like to good

I scarce can call it by another name.

I hope I am resigned the harder task to bear-

The plague of a rebellious heart,

To bear to wrong the Being I adore,

To love Him and yet forget Him, to desire

His Presence, more than all the things of earth,

And yet neglect and lose it for their sakes,

To seek for holiness and find but sin,

To war against myself and long to be-

Yet feel I am not-what my Maker is.

To die is gain! am I resigned to die?

IT IS NOT SO; that cannot be the word,

That speaks the Christian's feelings when she hears

The distant sound of her Redeemer's foot

Hasting to fetch her to her Father's throne;

When the first beam from heaven's unclosing gate

Falls on her path, to light her to her home,

And angel's voices vibrate on her ear

Preparing songs to greet her welcome there.

Could you see the heart turned inside out as God sees, you would join in exclaiming unworthy, unworthy; may it be written as of Ephraim of old, "his iniquity is bound up, his sin is hid." I trust my visit to Edinburgh has given me a spur in hasting unto the coming of our Lord. I do not feel friendship the same as I once did. I used to feel my pleasures here were increased. Now I feel my tale is told, and ties of friendship are drawing towards an hereafter, while we are only left in Satan's kingdom, for the Lord to finish his work in us and by us. For this end it seems to me, we should watch, the old serpent's aim to resist, and Christ's to further; the aim of the former seems to he to drive closer and closer to self, and even when his hopes are frustrated of getting the believer to fall down and worship this idol, he strives with it to muddle his comfort. Does not the aim of our dear Lord seem to be to give strong consolation to those who have fled for refuge to the hope set before them? Let us then further this end, not only by opening our mouths wide for ourselves, but by declaring on the house-top what is whispered in our ear in the closet, and by testifying to our poor fellow pilgrims, that in our experience we have found, "faithful is he that hath promised."

Some of my friends accuse me of writing very uncomfortable letters; but I say, if you want to hear of me, you will find my future life folded up in that verse, "all shall work together for good," and only let me speak of my beloved. But this I must say, although I have quarrelled with evidences, one is now staring me in the face, in the love I feel towards you, dear ... it is such as a stranger intermeddleth not with.

Yours, dear friend, with cordial affection,

T. A. P.

Letter 14.

Glenart, October 1827.

My very dear sister in the Lord — Is it not true that we are very often a wonder to ourselves, think of my having a friend in the world. that I believe would not think a letter from me troublesome, yet that I can be one or two months, only intending to write, even though by doing so I might hope for a letter in return! I trust you open that door for many, into which if any enter, they are saved. I hope you are able to go in and out yourself, finding rich pasture. O! that our hearts were always bubbling up, boiling with this matter, like wine which hath no vent, ready to burst its bottles, constrained to speak about our King. O! that He so dwelt in our hearts by faith, that out of their abundance, our speech might be as spikenard sending forth its pleasant smell, ointment pouring forth his name, that this good treasure, this mine of wealth might be continually emptying itself in consolations into our own bosoms, and enriching all around. But who is this King! that we should leave all other subjects to speak of him? the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in our battles, the Lord of Hosts, the King of glory. — My Lord, who sits at the Lord's right hand, till every evil in my heart shall become his footstool. — The King, who in spite of the heathen raging, the kings of the earth standing up, the rulers taking counsel against him, shall be set on the holy hill of Sion. — A King who has come to his people in a chariot paved with love. — A King with many crowns, the most radiant, the most becoming of which, is the one he received in the day of his espousals, Cant. 3.2. — A King whose greatest glory is his bride, that he has overcome and new created the sinner, betrothed and united himself to such for ever. — A king who in the day of the gladness of his heart shall stretch forth his hand to you and me, and say in presence of men, angels and devils, "come ye blessed of my Father," etc. — A king who has himself prepared the kingdom, who by the love tokens he distils on us day after day, viz. by his dispensations, and his consolations, proves he has considered our frame, knows what will satisfy, even to enter into the joy of our Lord, who having prepared a kingdom that will satisfy!!! is now preparing us for it. — A king who has enriched his church by his poverty, nourished it by his riches; in a word, Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. Say, dear friend, have we not volumes to unfold respecting this king; why then so often do we spend our time, while in company with our fathers' children, talking on subjects we despise and consider trifles; is it not because out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks? Alas! how grievously have I to accuse myself on this point; m nothing do I feel so dependant, and when I do speak, how many double triple motives; how often seeking self instead of Jesus, proved by silence before those who dislike it; how often ashamed of him, how often irritated when opposed; how often playing with the subject; how little feeling what I speak; how humbling; how astonished you would be, did you know me; all the love of angels and saints put together, could not have patience with me. . He alone could silent stand, and wait to show his love. Surely it is no hard demand is required only to be loving subjects, and how gracious where he demands this; He does not call on us to love an unknown friend, but with his own pencil has drawn for us the object to be loved. Two questions are natural when called to give our affections. 1st. What sort of person is he? 2nd. What is his mind towards me? Let us hear what answer God has given. What sort of person? "chiefest among ten thousand," "fairer than the children of men," "altogether lovely," "as the apple tree among the trees of the wood," not only "the first born of every creature" but "the image of the invisible God, the brightness of his glory, the express image of his person," even God himself, who made and upholds all things in heaven and earth. What does Peter say, when he was the witness of his majesty? What does John, when he saw him standing in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks? Every knee bows to his name, every tongue shall confess him Lord, for He is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, this is our King. But what is his mind towards us? "full of grace and truth;" out of his fulness ever emptying grace upon grace. His words to us are powerful, to overcome by love, a sharp two edged sword, yet as the sound of many waters, "most sweet" , as lilies dropping sweet-smelling myrrh; "never man spake as he spake," gave his enemies testimony; for they "wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth." This is your beloved, and friend, as well as king, who has grace poured into his lips on purpose to speak a word in season to the weary; blessed weariness which brings a word from him; sweet to have our beloved, our king; comfortable to be able to say, my Jesus reigns; with what confidence we may lay ourselves back in his arms, and say "undertake for me;" blessed to be one with him whom God has blessed for ever; blessed to have our salvation and his glory bound up in the same bundle. Blessed to know he has gone through every class in our wilderness-school. Are you satisfied with this King? for he is your King for ever and ever, may our repose in him answer the question. Are you contented to have him, and leaving all others to cleave only to him? for this beloved is yours, and you are his; may the devotedness of our affections, lives, and words, answer, "Lord thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee." And O may we be kept from acting as one who is ashamed of his choice.

"Rather may this our glory be,

That Saviour not ashamed of me."

My eyes are not at all better, though at times more comfortable; the last fortnight I have suffered much with them, and a lump has appeared upon the good eye, but I trust it may go away again without making me quite blind; at all events I have a light that shines in darkness, that nothing can take from me; in his light shall I see light, even see him who is invisible.

Believe me, my very dear friend, now and ever your warmly affectionate sister in everlasting bonds,

T. A. P.

Letter 15.

Powerscourt, 26th July, 1828.

My very dear friend — I do not know where you are, but I think you must imagine, I have bade an eternal farewell to everything below, so long have I been answering your letters; but there is one you may write to, who will be sure to answer immediately. Our life should be, I conceive, a continual interchange of care for peace. I saw some of your friends in London; we hoped to see ... but it seems to have been a false report that she was coming to London. Oh! reality, reality, how immense all before us, yet how we shrink from apprehended evil, though we know Him too well to take one single want out of his hand. His will, nothing but his will... We have a wonderful advertisement of a physician, from the Spirit of truth, "who healeth all thy diseases;" we who know something of the plague of a human heart, can understand in a measure how great the undertaking. He says himself "come unto me all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He must have foreseen every weight his people ever should be burdened with, when he undertakes to give rest to all, and truly he does, for he himself carried all our sicknesses. Can he heal hearts wounded with guilt and care? wounded with rebellious murmuring at his dispensations, and coveting what he has withheld, delighting in broken cisterns, as though they were the fountain of living waters? Can he heal hearts of wandering and distracted maniacs; maniacs ever engaged in taking poison? Can He heal the bruises of our falls, the dislocations of our backslidings, wounds corrupt through foolishness? It is written, "who healeth all thy diseases;" it made little difference in the days of his flesh, what the disease was, that was brought to him, palsied, maimed, blind, deaf, possessed, dying, dead. Then let us come in the simplicity of sickness, in the helplessness of want; to trust is to be healed, to touch the hem of his garment is to be whole; but let us keep touching him, for virtue is ever coming from him; he waits to apply all the virtues of heaven's dispensary to our case whatever it be; he is master of that disease, we have all his promise, all his skill, all his power, all his love; his skill is infinite, his compassion boundless; though ascended to heaven, he has left his heart on earth; he gives US all his attention, as if there was none else to think of on earth. He requires but one thing, to take all he has prescribed, BITTER as well as SWEET. Dear ... let us put a blank into his hand for time, and for every thing, confident that with him he has freely given us all things. Is there one thing we would keep back? Let that be just the thing to commit with most anxiety; we need the substance of things hoped for, to be put in the scale of judgment and conscience, against the things of time; then as surely as substance outweighs shadow, so surely must we judge of things accurately, till all our sorrows shall be left behind; and from the Jerusalem above, we shall be able to trace his hand leading us by ways we knew not, to the manifesting and magnifying of his faithfulness and grace. Then shall we see how contemptible were all our fears, when omniscience which foresaw, omnipresence that prevented, and omnipotence that laughed them to scorn, were on our side. Let us get well acquainted with our physician; let us take lodgings in his neighbourhood; let us see him every day; let us hide nothing, but open to him our whole case, and say as David when under his care, "let me hear what God the Lord will say to me;" and let us venture on his testimony, who declares him to be our peace, for "he forgiveth all our sins, and healeth all our diseases." Mr. Howels said one day, speaking of this beloved physician, where was Jesus educated? where did he graduate? He was educated in the Lazar-house of human suffering, and he took his degree in the infirmary of the human heart — whenever he visits a patient He says, this sickness is not unto death; He is not only the physician, but he is also the medicine of the soul. History tells us of a queen who, when her husband was wounded by a poisoned arrow, extracted the venom with her own lips, at the risk of her life. Our physician has done more — He has extracted the poison of sin, which the bite of the serpent infused into our constitution, at the expense of his life. He has carried all his human sympathies into heaven, and He never ceases to exercise them; we can sometimes look back upon a scene of suffering, or of trial which was exquisitely painful at the time, but there was no diminution of sympathy in the breast of our physician. The trial was appointed or permitted in Love; and we shall soon see that it formed part of a merciful design which was superintended and tempered by the physician himself. Dear ... how well you know him, since he is just suited to our need. Have we not cause to glory in our need then? nor can I wish anything for you, but that you should be exactly in the state this letter shall find you, for "he performeth that which is appointed" for you. He who appointed life and glory to be the end, has also appointed this condition, that affliction, for the way. He has predestinated us to be conformed to the image of his Son, that He may have the pre-eminence in all things; therefore "He makes all things work together for our good, for He is of one mind, and who shall turn him? What his soul desires, that He does, therefore we know we shall be like him when He shall appear. If you are in darkness, light is sown for you; you are still on the way to perfection, learning not to make idols of your feelings, treading in his steps, who was made perfect by suffering, and who never travelled with such velocity to perfection, as when He cried out "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me." I long to hear from you again; tell me what you think of dear ...

Believe me, my very dear friend,

Truly affectionately yours,

T. A. P.

Letter 16.

Glenart, 1827.

My dear Mrs ...,  I have many apologies to make for having so long neglected answering your inquiries, but thought should I defer it until my arrival here, I might be able to have a comfortable few moments' intercourse with you on paper; not but that I might at ... but those who are cumbered about much serving, or fancy they have much to serve in, are especially cumbered when leaving home for a few days. Blessed to have our thoughts and joys not only "packed up," but gone before. Well to have all our riches in moveable goods, that like the present Jews, we may be ready to be off to Jerusalem at a moment's warning. I cannot answer your question till I talk to you a little about our dear, dear, friend. Stop! are we sure He is our friend? yes, for he is the friend of sinners. His name is the refuge of the oppressed — the helper of the needy, no particular need specified, for be it what it may, He has a help, even himself. In the world, tribulation, (oh how deep a word,) in me, peace. No oppression too trifling, no need too great, He who is our refuge, knows our frame; He knows the disorder of every little nerve, can cause even a voice or a step to be an oppression — so foolish the oppression, as hardly to allow it to ourselves, yet may we run from it, and hide ourselves in him, a refuge even from ourselves. What can be our need when our help is the God of Jacob, a covenant God, who keepeth truth for ever; when our hope is in him who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them? How beautiful the 146th Psalm, where we see, His greatness consists in being just fitted for the oppressed, the hungry, the prisoner, the blind, the bowed down, the stranger, the fatherless, yes, and the widow. You ask me if I have read Romaine on Canticles? No, never! but the Spirit has, I think, expounded to me some of the verses when doing his office as Comforter, and I sometimes think none can so enter into the emphasis of feeling expressed in that book, as the widow, for none so know the preciousness of any blessing, as those who have lost it — how much more that blessing, without which even paradise was not complete; and if when all was peace, and joy, and love, man needed one to bear his part in bliss, Oh! how much more when care and sorrow fill our hearts with anguish and our eyes with tears. Who can so value that everlasting is, and am, as one who is every turn forced to remember, my beloved was mine, and I was his; yet happy helplessness, blessed difficulties, which bring to our assistance such a helper. There is hardly, I believe, a name implying poverty and want in the creature, and strength for this poverty in himself, that he does not take — father, brother, friend, prophet, priest, king, physician, help, health, refiner, light, life, counsellor, guide, anchor, sanctuary, all in all, our portion for ever — but the most wonderful endearing and sufficient, is this, the husband of his church, or rather the bridegroom, (his name in this sacred song) for the marriage supper of the Lamb is not yet come, the bride not being yet ready. Speaking lately to ... of those verses you mention, this verse seemed to me particularly sweet. "Who, is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved?" True, the church is in the wilderness, but it is only for an appointed time; her place has been prepared of her God; she is fed, she is not forgotten, she is on her way up, and she has a strong support. (Rev. 12. 6.) Her very situation makes her feel protection, support, and consolation needful, but it is in order that she may trust for all in her beloved, and in doing so, find perfect peace; for "in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength;" her very helplessness forces her to prove his faithfulness, power, and tender watchfulness. The stronger she leans, the more she knows of Him in whom she has believed, and if her sense of infirmities had not obliged her to have recourse to foreign strength, never could she have learned to say, "most gladly will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me". "Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in necessities, etc., for when I am weak, then am I strong." But while every thing around is saying, "arise, this is not thy rest," how marvellous that we need afflictive line upon line, precept upon precept, to remind us we are in the wilderness, so heavily we go to reach eternal joys. Oh, how dull we are in learning difficult dependant lessons! how many rebukes, chastisements, reproachful looks, we learn from our patient Master, before we can be persuaded to accept of happiness in leaning on him! Surely, the malignity of sin is no where so visible as in the bosom of the child of God. Satan sins not in spite of light, love, and knowledge — redeeming love. It is truly humbling, that nothing less than God can make us understand what is plain, desire what is good, avoid what is evil; how much more so is it, that at the very moment our judgment tells us, there is but one path of pleasantness and peace, at the moment conscience is convincing us how grievous and bitter a thing it is to depart from our God, when past experience with an enlightened understanding unite in exclaiming, "To whom shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life; even at that very moment, nothing less than an Almighty spirit can make us will, not to forsake the fountain of living water which we have tasted, and to hew out with labour, to our misery, cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water. Oh! let us beware of our first neglect of our Lord. Our beloved can bear any thing better than neglect. Let us with John, lean on the bosom of Jesus; there learn love, as he learned it. Thus shall the mind be in us that was in Christ; for love is the fulfilling of the law. I did hear something lately unbecoming a Christian, of ... and in dwelling on it, I hope to benefit myself; for it is a point, alas, I particularly fail in, as, no doubt, you have observed. I mean, speaking severely of God's children, forgetting that he that toucheth them toucheth the apple of his eye; that words aimed at them, pierce him; that all is laid at the charge of that cause for which we profess to live, and to be willing to die. I think we should be very sure of an action, before we speak of it, which we do not consider commendable, and not then unless for good...

Letter 17.

October 23, 1827.

... Often, often has Satan stopped my way, not only by the idea that those I spoke to might think I practised what I said, but because I found hid in some chamber of imagery a desire that they should think so; but at last I found out the idea came out of Satan's opiate box. Some lessons we do not learn till after long experience, such as these: — First, we are not to do evil that good may come. Second, when sin lies heavy on our conscience, we are to force ourselves into the presence of God — not skulk from him, etc. Third, we are not to flee from Satan, but resist, in order that he may flee from us; blessed to be under the Lord's teaching, to be trained up by him in the way we should go, to have Jesus representing God to us, representing us to God, to have Jesus interceding for the sinner with God, to have the Spirit interceding for God with the sinner. Blest to be rising in his school, though every class presents a more difficult lesson. Blessed to have a waste heart, to feel it a wilderness, a desert fitted to receive and rejoice in such promises as this, (true with regard to us though stolen from Jews,) "The Lord shall comfort thee; he shall comfort all thy waste places; he will make thy wilderness like Eden, thy desert as the garden of the Lord," "Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody."...

Letter 18.

May 30, 1828.

... In what a ruinous heap is all God's work, once declared to be very good; from the top, to the bottom of creation, from the lion, to the spider, each carrying on the history of Cain and Abel; man most like Satan of all, for instance, slaves. And shall it be always so? Shall this be Messiah's conquest? that his saints are to take flight and leave his handy work to be destroyed? What a triumph to Satan to sweep away in his destruction that lovely work of six days, on which Jehovah looked with delight, over which "Wisdom" rejoiced and delighted — the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy! No! let creation groan and wait a little longer for the redemption of the body; for then shall the purchased possession be redeemed, then shall be the restitution of all things. Then shall the sons of God, whose sonship is now questioned, be declared to be the sons of God with power, by the resurrection of the dead even as their elder brother before them. Now, their life is hid with Christ in God; but when he shall appear, they shall appear with him and like him in glory — our life shall be manifested. "Then shall the earth bring forth her increase, and God, even our God, shall bless Israel, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God!" Mark the adoptions spoken of in Scripture: — National, which, though it does not secure salvation, brings into particular relationship and consequently, subjects to greater judgments. Personal adopt-ion, which does secure it, that spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father, and if children, heirs, etc. And third, manifested adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body, (Rom. 8.) But I had better stop, as there is neither beginning nor end to the subject. I will only add, "Time is short;" other nations may have other opportunities; but Ireland, having received national adoption now, now is the time to cry aloud, "come out of her (Babylon,) come out of her, come out of her, my people," and may the testimony be borne of us which was said of a great sinner greatly pardoned, "She hath done what she could." It is said, "as many as are led by the Spirit of God they are sons of God;" then, since we are sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty, we are led by the Spirit. What a gift is this Spirit! The Comforter, which shall abide with us for ever. Not only shall He teach us things freely given us of God, but He shall seal us his — an earnest of our inheritance — will not suffer sin to have dominion over us; shall dwell in us as a well of water springing up into everlasting life — upwards, in love, joy, peace; overflowing, scattering round, in long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance; what better confidence can we have that we are his, than having been delivered from the spirit of bondage, and given the spirit of adoption; his Father our Father; his God our God — doubly dear? And though He leads us in the midst of the paths of judgment, yet, while teaching us to profit, He shall prove to us, He is leading to the land of uprightness in the right way. And after all, the sum of happiness we find, even in the new Jerusalem, is this, "I will be his God and He shall be my son." Let us, dear friend, among those we live, every day, hour, moment, walk as children of light. Oh, what difficult preaching is this! Let us drink in largely every morning of the unction of the Spirit, which the busy bee (not the wasp) knows how to sip from the garden of the Lord; that through the day we may breathe out the atmosphere of heaven all around; we have a right to wear a sweeter smile than even angels wore; and since suffering displays the riches of our inheritance, may we not bless him, if our lot should be among the exercised in soul...

Letter 19.

25th May, 1828.

... There is only one enemy we cannot escape, though our whole lives should be a running from it — monster self: I am quite weary of this heart — Satan's workshop — always going on hammer, hammer, hammer, stealing every grace given, to manufacture into some adornment for the idol self. It reminds me of Newton's description of an oratorio. Oh! what will it be to have an innocent satisfaction in ourselves! Yet, let us not shrink from, but penetrate every nook and corner of our hearts with the eye of Jesus, while, at the same time, we view him, let us learn the meaning of words out of God's spelling-book; we so blunder over our lessons, taking sorrow for joy, joy for sorrow, happiness for misery, misery for happiness, expecting beauty and perfection, where He has left us only for discipline — we hardly get above ground. It is under-ground-work here, our roots taking a firm grasp of the rock of ages, in order to our springing up and flourishing in the courts of the house of our God. I think the most humbling description of human nature is being "haters of God;" and his word says, If haters of God — lovers of death — we hate excellence, because, it is excellence, and we hate him in his creatures, be they ever so accommodating or prudent." They hated him, for what cause? Because He delivered them who were his enemies; because he went about doing good; because He offered life to whoever would; and, how careful his apostle Paul was, that when hated, it should be without cause. Freely He received, freely gave. How desirable, could the world have no just point on which to fix their enmity against Christ in us; if we so unfolded the mind that was in Christ, as, at least, to do the part of the law, bring them in guilty; if we were fleshly tables, living epistles. What a proof of the divinity of Christ, that he gives testimony of himself being the Son of God, for surely, He was a righteous man; none but himself could have gone through life, pursued by every different class, trying each to catch him in something; yet, all forced to confess at the end, they could find no fault in him. And have we not miracles, also, to confirm the witness? You and I now speaking with delight about our once hated Lord! — greater miracle than, "Lazarus come forth!" I have also been thinking what a proof' of the divinity of Scripture it is, that we find an answer provided for every error, a consolation for every wound, especially in the book of Psalms, that gospel in prophecy; it seems to me as if God had provided a text for every experience his church ever should want, took them, and as it were, shook them together in a bag, and left them there to be drawn out, that each might fit himself; for instance, that verse so consoling to so many: (Ps. 27. 10,) "When father and mother forsake me, then the Lord taketh me up;" coming in unconnected with any thing before or after. I have much more to say, but as I dare not wait any longer, I must conclude; I shall tell you all by and by — a joyful wondrous story, such as angels love to hear — as beautiful a similarity, yet diversity, in the spirits, as in the bodies of each — all singing the same song, yet, each having a page of his own, to fill up the volume of faithfulness. My answer to your question about prayer will be found in the following texts: (John, 14. 13. Matt. 28. 18. 2 Cor. 12. 8, with the 9th verse,) "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son." "And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." "For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me." "And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee." I give you two questions in return. How shall the Christian get the little good from another Christian, that is in him, without imbibing of the much evil? And how far should the Christian fit himself into the prejudices of the ungodly, without letting them lose sight of his being one of a separate and peculiar people?...

Letter 20.

July, 1828.

... I was truly rejoiced to hear of the Lord's goodness to you. I cannot only thank him for displaying himself faithful, but, that it has been shown in faithfulness to you. You say nothing of your little gift from the Lord. Those two texts go well together: "She remembers no more her anguish for joy," etc. and, "forget not all his benefits." It is written of all creation, that it is travailing in pain, and soon shall it be said of it, "She remembers no more the anguish for joy, that a man is born into the world." His dealings here are but displays of his riches of glory on his vessels of mercy, afore prepared for glory. Let us be on our guard against this snare of Satan's, seeking to know more than others, but may every truth, as revealed, sink deep! The grace I have been praying for of late has been patience, for I think it a grace much wanting in the church, for its want can be as much from indifference, as from too ardent a longing for the appearance of Christ —  patience expressing repressed longing. It seems to me to be a grace made up of two — hope and experience — realizing hope, repressed by experience of wilderness love. It was worth parting with, all for, and truly, it marks how unworthy present suffering is to be compared with future glory; when even it is light compared to the heaven it yields here; (yes, I can even say so now, though brought through a furnace, in the flames of which it would be impossible to feel it, even the furnace of another's affliction; and that another — the beloved of my heart.) It is comparatively easy to believe, that it is worth parting with all, to have the soul translated from darkness into light; but, faith often fails in making us feel that it is worth parting with all for the loosing of bonds, with which, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we are too often, though children yet, bound; and why is this? Because of the selfishness of our religion. It consists in high ideas of our own safety, instead of God's glory; and never can we run in the ways of his commandments until our hearts have been set at liberty. What a promise we are given with which to face the world: "All things shall work together for our good" — a promise not to be trampled under foot. Many things in themselves would be evil, but, I think, his watchfulness is seen, in so making his providences to meet, as to burst in blessings on our head, and like his other works, one means works many ends; one providence does not bring one blessing, but a string — tribulation, patience; patience, experience; experience, hope, etc. Yes, and so exactly does it fit the case of the believer, that one trial shall as much suit the particular need of all concerned, as if sent alone for each. Oh! the Christian is a wonderful creature — impossible to sink him! The deeper he is plunged, the higher he rises. Do pray for me, that I may be given the grace of patience. How often the apostle Paul makes mention of this grace! In praying for the church, it was, that they should be directed "into the love of God and the patient waiting for Christ." In giving thanks, it was for their "patience of hope," as well as "work of faith" and "labour of love;" while he speaks of it as the fruit of their being strengthened with all might by his Spirit. If the furnace of affliction so made the first believers need exhortation to patience, how much more should the church now need it, when she is thrown into the furnace of prosperity. It strikes me, it is often before sending tribulation, that a spirit of search into prophecy is poured out, that the church may not only be found on the tip-toe of expectation, when the arm of the Lord shall be stretched out, as if no strange thing had happened to her, but also, in the attitude of hope; it being, when we hope for that we see not, we can most patiently wait; and in this the mercy of the Lord, I think, is often manifested to individuals, as well as to his body the church. Before sending a trial, He makes the need of it to be so felt, that the believer even desires, what, at the time, is most grievous and dreaded — so much is desire of conformity to the Lord and his inward presence above every other desire. Let us not, then, forget to take for our helmet the hope of salvation; we need it, though children of light we need to be driven to the light; so heavily do we go to reach eternal joys, so continually are we manifesting our molish natures, preferring to grub into our own hearts, and hide ourselves in the dark, instead of running in his steps, who was also sustained in his race by patient hope; "For the joy set before him." We learn the secret of being able to run, in the kind exhortation to lay aside every weight on him who is at our right hand, that having our eyes lifted up from every thing that can distract, our feet disentangled from all that besets, our eyes may be steadily fixed, while running through the vista of time, on the light at the end — every care giving us a shove, till our whole weight is proving the immutability of our firm anchor. The poor world thinks we are imposing much on ourselves in giving up the pleasures of sin. But, oh! how easy the Christian finds this in comparison to walking on the good of life, counting it dross, that the affections may more tightly grasp Him, who alone can satisfy the longing soul, and fill the hungry soul with goodness... You may well say she writes seldom, but when she does, she sends a volume. Well, I will leave you with this precious text, Ye are not your own; we have no right to ourselves! He is the best judge how we can best serve him to his advantage; our highest excellency is subserviency to him; our highest pleasure, serving him, though, in so doing, we are wasting ourselves...

Letter 21.

Dec. 28, 1828

... I think there is much spoken of, in Scripture, of God's riches, as if too much for God to contain within himself; comprised in him it cannot be witnessed; therefore has He set us apart, has "before ordained us," from the beginning chosen us, "prepared us," "even us," as vessels of mercy, in which to show forth the riches of his grace, in the riches of his mercy now, and the riches of his glory hereafter. Sweet thought! our being now vessels of mercy, (because of the great love wherewith He loved us,) evidences that He has set us apart, to display in us the riches of his glory! by nature fitted to destruction, vessels of wrath, but having emptied all this on the head of our Jesus, He has now put Jesus at the bottom of the vessel, therefore, we run over with loving kindness and tender mercies. How the thought, that this is God's end should keep from doubts; the more He gives, the more grace now abounds over sin; the more shall be seen his riches in glory! has He not abounded towards us? predestinated — accepted — called — justified — in him glorified — sins all forgiven — quickened — strengthened — begotten again to a lively hope of an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away — made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light — our portion, Christ within us — all things working for good — our enemies defied by omnipotence — our shield interposing himself between the redeemed soul and the destroyer — (Exodus 12. 23.) The Lord will pass over the door, and Jehovah the deliverer, will not suffer Jehovah the destroyer to come into your houses to destroy you. Leaping forward to deliver, "as the mother birds hovering over their young, so shall Jehovah, God of Hosts, protect Jerusalem, protecting and delivering; leaping forward and rescuing her" (Louth's translation of Isaiah, 31 . 5 . ) — spreading over his cherubic wings, or wings of covenant love, a fourfold presence of the most excellent animals, (Ezek. 10.) — the ox, first of tame beasts; man, first of creation; the lion, first of wild beasts, and the eagle, first of birds, uniting in one body and spreading their wings, on both sides. This is expressly said to be a representation of the God of Israel. They guided the wheels of providence by infinite wisdom; for their whole body, their backs, their heads, their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about; this, says the prophet, is the living creature that I saw by the river Chebar. Of this vision we have a description in the 1st chapter, and He there calls it the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. The ox is considered as an emblem of the Father, the lion and man, which are always united, (Ezek. 1. 10.) of the Son, taking our nature into personal union with the divine, and the eagle of the Spirit, expanding his influence in all the work of God. This was the mystic figure placed in the holy of holies above the ark. There they all looked down with delight on the memorial of a dying rising Saviour's work, when the priest ministered there on the day of atonement. Thus we see the design of the term, "dwell under the wings of the cherubim," was but another expression for abiding under the care of a reconciled God and Father, in Christ Jesus, where is perfect safety and heavenly bliss, (Dr. Goode,) propped up with sweet and precious promises, fulfilling all the good pleasure of his will, and the work of grace with power; that we may be vessels fitted for the master's use; why? "That in ages to come, He may show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness towards us," "when He shall come to be glorified in his saints," He glorified in us, we glorified in him. And what means this word glory? It quite puts me out of breath, the thought of all that is before us. Wonderful creatures! brittle earthen-ware, yet not broken by all the knocks of tribulation flesh is heir to, in present things, or things to come; though not hidden up, but held out in the midst, to the inspection of men, angels and devils, to the praise of the glory of his grace, for held by his almighty power; and surely it shall not a little add to the glory of his abundant mercy, and the display of the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and long suffering, that He shall thus hold his vessels of mercy without fainting or being discouraged, until He ushers them into his presence more than conquerors! Which vessel should you like to be? gold, silver, wood, or earth? I think the worse the material, the more the ability of the workman is seen in forming it for the king's use.

I had a new thought on the book of Job, which book I have been hobbling through in the morning to the family, but did not get my thought, till the last chapter. Though I have not been able to find any commentator agree, I cannot help thinking it was intended to shadow forth the Jewish people. The adventures of one individual are not intended to occupy all ages; so loving a spouse as the church could not be satisfied in continually conversing with her beloved, concerning the adventures and sentiments of a stranger, when she has such an overflowing fulness to express in her own feelings, and in her admiration of her beloved. Nor was it like David, to call on all generations to tune their instruments, only to sing of him. It seems to me the Lord often brought his Prophet into circumstances which should explain the dark sentences he caused them to utter, yet was this explanation but a dark veil, through which it was difficult to perceive the mysteries within; but we having the gospel lamp, may penetrate the darkest recesses of his providence and grace, and find our Immanuel behind each; and surely that wisdom must be divine, which as in the book of Psalms, and Job, is so fruitful in language, as at one and the same time, to express the situations and feelings of the writer, the situations and feelings of the Lord, and the situation and feelings of his church, and each individual believer, to the end of time. But I think Elihu fixes the book of Job, as referring to the Jews. By the way, to be a prophet was no light matter; yet did they consider it worth going through all for. And I hope your dear husband, in counting the cost, thinks it worth learning the consolations of scripture by experience, that others may find it good, if he should be afflicted; for in this view, it is no light matter to be a minister of the consolations of the gospel, for I believe the Lord still explains the meaning of words by his providences; and a greater than all, thought it not too much to be tempted in all points, that He might be suited to his people in the midnight of adversity, as well as the noon-day of prosperity. But to return to Job — do you not think the amount of Job's restoration to happiness, strikingly coincides with the promises respecting that church. What have Christians ever been casting against that afflicted church, but just what Job's friends brought against him? that they are cast off for ever, because of their sins. What has been and is the Jews warm contention? Job's to his friends; that they are not such sinners, not so rejected; man's taunts have been in vain to humble them; they manfully contend that they are not in punishment for their sins; servant upon servant was sent to them; at last God sent his only begotten Son, but still they would not be humbled; they rejected all admonitions, and so they shall, till God appear to take his cause into his own hands; then humiliation will be their first movement towards Him, "they shall look on him, they have pierced, and mourn." Then shall they say, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee, therefore, I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes." Then, shall be manifest that God's thoughts towards them, have been "thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give them an expected end;" and "they shall call on him, and go and pray unto him, and He will hearken," then shall be seen "the end of the Lord, that He is very pitiful and of tender mercy." My reasons for thinking Elihu means Christ are these: — 1st. Because the meaning of the word Elihu, is "God is he." 2ndly. He says, he stands in God's place as a day's-man. 3rdly. When God commands Job, in chap. 42. 8, to pray for his friends, that they may be accepted, Elihu is not mentioned, as if he needed it not. Now if you think it worth while, look for these references — God is against those who contend with Job, Zeph. 2. 8-11; Isa. 51. 22, 23. — 8th v. Job a blessing to his enemies, Zech. 8. 13; Ezek. 34. 26; Isa. 66. 21; he did speak right in that he was not cast off. — 9th v. Job is accepted, Jer. 30. 17, 18,19, 20; Ezek. 20. 40-42. Isa. 65. 18, 19. — 11. v. Job is enriched by his friends, who come to him, now that he is restored to prosperity, Isa. 60. 1, and 10, 12, 13. He had double for the blessing of the Lord, that it is which makes rich, Isa. 40; Mal. 3. 10, 12. Isa. 60. — 14 v. everlasting joy shall be on their head . — 15th verse, he gave his children an inheritance, Psalm 45. 10. Is there not something remarkable in the name of Job's daughters, Jemima, the day; Kezia, pleasant cassia or fine spices; Kerenhappuch, beauty; in that day emphatically called, the day of the Lord, shall he come down into his garden of spices, his presence shall cause his spikenard to send forth the smell thereof, Cant. 1. 12. Then shall he indeed say to the daughter of Jerusalem, "thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee." — 16th verse, when Job was restored, he lived to be a great age, Isa. 65. 2O. — 17 verse, we find the blessing coming upon Job, that Eliphaz said belonged to the afflicted righteous, chap. v. from 17th verse to end. Tell me if you agree. Perhaps you will say, you have filled your letter with what is not applicable to me. "Truth Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the master's table." Oh how many crumbs of comfort thus prepared, and spread out for the children, may we dogs pick up, and nourish ourselves with. But I must think of finishing; I hope the length of this letter will satisfy, if not weary. It would be sweet to me, to be a stream of comfort, making up the Lord's desire, that your peace should be as a river, emptying itself into the ocean of his glory! surely were we permitted to be a rivulet of consolation, to any afflicted child of God, and one drop in the ocean of his glory, we should not have lived in vain. It is very sad about your schools, very trying, but it is well to have our trial, God's cause. Look at Isa. 40. 28-31, and the connection between the possessions of Jehovah, and those offered to the acceptance of his waiting children. How kind, he gives us a way to express our affection to him! "if you love me, keep my commandments;" for love is restless till it communicates what it feels to its object. May your faith have such substance, as that you could take the promises in your finger, and handle them, (as an old woman described Mr ... words to me, the other day,) may He often look forth at the window, showing himself to you through the lattice, (glimpses of Him in those providences, most calculated to exclude him,) ... . may you daily more see that there is enough in Jesus to meet all your wants, be what they may; while feeling there are hidden depths within of iniquity, may you know and remember there are depths in Jesus' love, your eye has never yet seen, your ear has never yet heard, your heart never even conceived of: but God sees it! In short, may the God of hope, fill you with all joy and peace in believing, and make you abound in hope, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

Your sincerely affectionate friend, bound up in the same bundle of life...

Please tell ... that the little book he left me to read, smells of Satan's dispensary.

Letter 22.

Dec. 18, 1828.

My dear Mr ...,  I enclose you what I promised, but I have since thought it was very conceited of me to offer to send you what I remembered. I send you a sermon remembered by another lady, who does not murder them quite so much. There are some sweet consolatory ideas in it.

When God takes up the lesson and the rod, how differently he teaches from man. Truths which we have been accustomed to repeat, and feel In some degree, with what force they come home, when taught by experience. When I look back upon this time last year, how weighty are those words, "all is vanity," not merely an expression. In drinking of the bitter cup, called "LIGHT AFFLICTION, one feels with a weight no tongue can express — what must be the miseries of hell, when this is but a spark from it; what must be the evil of sin; the emptiness of this masquerade of a world; the sufferings of Christ; the happiness of heaven; God's hatred of sin; his love to the sinner! May he grind them more and more into my heart, so that I may never again be entangled or intoxicated with these baubles; but may he clasp me so close to himself, that there may be no room, for a cloud to pass between me and the light of his precious countenance! Pray let us soon hear from you; for I sometimes fear lest the Lord should remove from us our candlestick, not because we do not prize it enough, but for valuing the stick too much. May he teach us, without that the difficult lesson, that "Christ is all." I will fill up the rest of the paper with a short extract from a letter which I received from Mr. Howels, which I think you will like.

Your sincere and grateful friend,

T. A. Powerscourt.

After speaking on the Lord's prayer, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, he adds: "One idea more before I conclude — you and I are immediately interested in the prayer of Jesus, ' Father, forgive them.' In answer to that prayer, a gracious Providence once watched over us while sinning, ignorant and thoughtless of what we were doing. In answer to this prayer, we were delivered from the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son. And did he feel so intensely, and pray so earnestly, in the midst of his own better sufferings, for his enemies and murderers, and will he forget his friends now, he is seated on a throne of bliss, in the zenith of his glory? Infinite eternal impossibility!! We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. His intercession comprizes all the love of his Deity, all the worth of his atonement, all the love and sympathy of his humanity, perpetually sounding ill God the father's ears, ' Father, forgive them.'"

Letter 23.

1829.

My dear Mr ..., Many thanks for your very welcome letter; we all rejoice to hear such good accounts of your throat. I fear Irish air is the cause of all the throat complaints. ... is now attacked with it, and ordered to England for his health. To him, as well as to you, it is the greatest trial could be sent; but the Lord generally sends a trial where it will be felt. I believe our usefulness does not depend upon pursuing a line marked out by ourselves, but in giving him just what he has need of from us; — in patience, as well as in faith, followers of those who inherit the promises. I rejoice to hear so good an account of ... she must be a nice Christian from your description. Of course, you heard of poor ...'s end. ... says their only comfort is, that he died in such an enlightened state; but though there was graciously a straw to lay hold on, I trust that none dear to me may ever be taken, without more undoubted evidence. Oh! that it was to be a warning to all sportsmen.

I suppose you will see and hear dear Mr. Howels and ... You will find them full of the times, and horror of emancipation. Such great things are spoken on one hand of the evil, and on the other hand of the good of these conversions of opinion, that either one side must misunderstand Scripture, or the other be wonderfully blind. May we not, by taking the beast unto our bosom, thrust out God; and blasphemy being found on our forehead, have to take our lot with Babylon? It is lamentable that there seems to be no Christian voice raised up in the midst of so much infidelity. Every principle of error seems to have its representative in a professed Christian senate, while Christianity is the only mute, and apparently indifferent, spectator. The way that Mr. Irving's, and Mr. Howels' petitions, are ridiculed, shows that the Word is still foolishness to the Greek. Nevertheless, it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent." "For God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, to confound the wise; yea, things that are despised hath God chosen." But I am forgetting that it is one of the signs of the times, that ignorant people, such as I am, set themselves up to judge upon such matters. It is the privilege of women, to have nothing to do with politics, but to stand and admire man's ignorance, and God's facility in bringing about his purposes. The question with us seems to be, How shall we, in serving our generation before we fall asleep, testify against the crying evils of the church, as well as the world? Since He must at all times, have some to bear him faithful witness, how shall we be among this privileged set? Since He has shown his love in trusting his cause to ours, lent us volumes of his library for the perusal of the world, surely it is an interesting question, How shall we be faithful to our trust? I hope you have been considering this point, that we may have a little pillar of truth raised up in this valley with "love," inscribed upon it. This reiterated command, "love," so trampled under foot, seems to express every thing demanded of the church; to exhibit it in the greater union of the body — in more diffusing around the heavenly atmosphere, in more demonstrating it in action. With good intentions, many are ignorant. We forget the assembling of ourselves together, and need to be exhorted to love and good works, and so much the more as we see the day approaching. Faithful parochial ministers content themselves with the work of an evangelist, neglecting their most difficult duties. To preach the gospel, is necessary for all; but surely there is strong meat, and there are precepts, which suit not the world. The strong meat of experience, being exposed to ridicule, prevents its benefit, by stirring up jealousy. The precepts either must open to the world the wounds of the church, or the probe not be deep enough to benefit the believer. You must watch, warn, exhort, prove from Scripture, errors in spirit, errors in life; and, though last not least, we must make each others wants and sorrows, as well as the church's, our own: so that the answer to each should multiply the thanksgivings of all, and redound to the glory of God. Surely, we should not find so many Christians of the world, if one half of the Bible was not necessarily left out of the pulpits. I believe the fault lies more with the church than with professors, that Christianity is so much more profession than confession. We strive to live our doctrines, instead of confounding the world by the contradiction of our walk and our belief. It seems to me this is the fault of the Walkerites. As the world cannot explain the seeming contradiction of doctrine and precept in the Word, neither should it be able to do so in the believer. While trampling works under foot, should we not live as though to be saved by works — boasting in our liberty, yet under law to Christ? We wear Christ too like a loose garment, to be put on and taken off as convenience offers — denying him, by not confessing him; not as lights, which hypocrites fear to approach, lest their deeds should be reproved. I hope you are lifting up your voice against these things in ... for religion and the world are comfortably walking arm and arm there. Perilous times, when Christians have time to play with idols; have time to feast the world; to nestle themselves as the world; to go rounds of formality; have time to pick faults in their neighbours, their brethren; have time to amuse themselves in religious dissipation; have time to talk to be admired; to listen to contradictory opinions, each proved from Scripture; while the misgiving of our own opinions, through a perceptible mixture of error and prejudice, keeps us picking our steps through slippery paths, instead of running in the way of God's commandments. Certainly, times of persecution, are times of prosperity to the church; — Satan is not asleep — and is more to be dreaded when undermining by expediency than when openly destroying; deceiving, if it were possible, the very elect. Times of persecution will only admit of drawing up every faculty of the soul to one point. How splendid the grace of patient waiting in persecuted Christians! If times of trouble are about to come, how friendly to make us feel our need, that when they shall come we may not be staggered. Love almost calls for it, in the painful suspicion of disfiguring His cause whom we do love. Faith cannot live settled: she must hold her life in her hand; must point to Jesus, and lead the way; be in the attitude of patient waiting; must be a bird of passage, refusing to build her nest in so cold a clime. In these days of deception, may the Lord sift, thrash every principle, rummage our hearts, and lead in the way everlasting. May our souls be enabled, in looking to his second appearing, to bound forward; and may we be given, in deed and truth, a "Love," which shall engulf pride, and haughtiness in ourselves, and all disagreeableness in others-this God-like grace.

Dear Mr... has been all but taken from us. I did not in the least expect his recovery. May we bear the rod and be enabled to read this providence! It is, I think, one of the beauties of God's works, that while we labour to effect one end by many means, He with the utmost facility effects many ends by one means. This is striking in his providences. When he sends an affliction, it is so exactly suited to the case of all concerned, as to seem purposely sent for each; and when he shakes his rod over his children, surely it means a gracious call. We tremble when we enter into the cloud often; but there comes a voice from the cloud saying, this is my beloved Son, hear him; — and what can Jesus' word declare but, see how I love? Do pray that this visitation may be attended with good to those near him. Nothing can withstand his power. No heart is too hard for him. This is our comfort for ourselves, "He is greater than our hearts;" and his love is as great as his power, without measure and without end.

The District Society goes on flourishingly. All satisfied in hearing you are to be the treasurer, for they know you. Great lesson for us, let us be satisfied in deposing body, soul, and spirit, in the hands of Him, who has undertaken to lose nothing the Father has given him to keep, but to raise it up at the last day. Surely he will return all, with a rich premium. Let us not dishonour him, by questioning what He is doing with our deposits, for we know the man....

Yours, with true affection,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 24.

... 1829.

My dear Mr ..., Though I hope to see you in a few days, I must write a line, just to assure you, it has been neither want of gratitude, affection, or value for your letters, which prevented my not placing you in my debt long since; for there are few things would give me greater pleasure than seeing a letter brought in directed by you. We are now some miles nearer home than when we parted. It cannot have been for nothing our Father has been separated from us for these months. He has been proving and trying us in some way to do us good at our latter-end, and surely, we have been proving and trying Him. I have met with much Christian love, for Christ's sake. I have seen in different Christians different beautiful features, to make me desire to see every feature united in the great Original. I have heard deep, high, sweet, experimental truths from dear Mr. Howels. I have heard some future prospects from ... and have had humiliating lessons in others, how even the most spiritual need the everlasting, quickening, and almighty energy of the Eternal Spirit, to preserve perpetually from earthly idolatry; while in myself, dependant weakness has now feelingly convinced me, that in my preservation, a miracle is momentarily witnessing, I am a child of God. And shall not Jesus himself very soon show me how this and that, and that and this, like a Mosaic, have been needed to form us into the image of our God? I now hope to return to occupy till my Lord shall come, or send for me. I feel very pleasant that I have done with life, have learned to read through the glow spread all over it "all is vanity" — to feel the buzz about, as the buzzing of flies about a dead corpse. My tale being told already, I would not be as my poor sister here ... beginning life under the delusion, that happiness is to be found in it; yet, it is vain to say, till God teaches that every dream of happiness below the sun is but a picture, painted and varnished by Satan, involving in it his original lie: "God's word is not truth." In giving us himself, I believe, He has given us all God can give, and surely it is the triumph of faith, while feeling we have not what we think we need, still to rest confident, that with him, He has given us all good things... Oh! what a thing it is, dear Mr..., even for this life, to have a hope full of immortality. — How sweet for you to have been made the communication of this bud of happiness to one destined to tribulation — the unfolding of which has been so unspeakably sweet and sustaining! Though still bound with the bondage of corruption, what a thing to be prisoners of hope! — of a hope that will never make ashamed, for happy is the man whose hope the Lord is! for his eye is upon them that hope in his mercy, and even in DEATH he shall have hope. How Scripture always pushes us forward for happiness! In defence, our helmet is to be hope; our attitude, waiting for his appearing; our happiness, rejoicing in hope; all seems expressed in one verse, "We know not what we shall be — we shall see Him —  we shall be like Him." May we be enabled to keep our eyes steadily on things invisible; may every care give us a shove, till our whole weight is cast upon our immutably fixed anchor! I desire to be as a meteor passing through time, not left a moment longer than the Lord has need of me. The world thinks the Christian is imposing much upon himself, in giving up the pleasures of sin; but how easy the Christian finds this in comparison to walking on the good of life, counting it dross, that his affections may more tightly grasp Him, who alone can satisfy the longing soul, and fill the hungry soul with gladness. — Whatever the name, the character, the relationship, He vouchsafes to take, He excels in that point all others: —  "Fairer than the children of men." Is He a father who cannot refuse his child's petition? — "How much more will your heavenly Father give good things to them that ask Him." Is His tenderness compared to a mother? "She may forget, yet will not I forget thee." A brother? — "One that sticketh closer." A friend? — One whose friendship passes the power of expression, for the utmost bound was passed while yet enemies. A husband? — One that can say, even after we have "gone after many lovers," yet return again to me. A prophet? — One that "spoke as never man spake," "was in the counsel of the Father from eternity." A priest? — One that has sat down on the right hand of Omnipotence — "continueth for ever" —  "hath an unchangeable priesthood" — "able to save to the uttermost" — "ever lives to make intercession" — one, and the only one who becomes us; for He excels all priests, in that He is "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, higher than the heavens." Is He a king? — "King of kings, and Lord of lords!" A shepherd? — "The good Shepherd." A light? — "The light of the world" —  "The Sun of Righteousness!" Food? — "The bread from heaven that gives eternal life." Water? — "The fountain- of living waters, of which if man drink, he shall never thirst again." A tree? —  "As the apple tree among the woods." If in heaven? — "Who in heaven can be compared to the Lord?" If on earth? — "Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the Lord?" Then, what is He to the church? — As the bridegroom in comparison of all others, and not only does He excel, but in her estimation, He must increase while all others decrease, for "He that cometh from heaven is above all" — "This God is our God for ever and ever." May He, dear Mr ... fill you more and more, with joy and peace in believing, and may you abound in lively hope, through life, and in death! This is, believe me, a very sincere prayer, and one often put up for you,

By yours very affectionately,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

And, no doubt, you will find by and by, that the means used for communicating to you some of the graces of the Spirit you possess, has been these prayers.

Letter 25.

15th February, 1829.

My beloved friend,  I have long been wishing and intending to write to you since I heard of your overturn, but as Mr. G ... told me you were almost well, still I wanted to be able to sit down and write a long letter. I wish you to tell me the particulars, that I may join in praise. I have so much felt, and do feel, the great privilege you allow me in remembering me in your dear little meetings, it is the sweetest blessing you could give me. Oh! do not pray for my body, but that I may not misrepresent His truth in my life. Well, that little fall was yours, among the inventory of His laid-up gifts. What we want is, to be taught to make use of the promises. Too apt to be satisfied with enjoying his word in reading and meditating on it, then to go our way and forget it till the next stated time returns; it is then, well to get scratches from little briars and brambles on the way, to be sent for healing to "it is written," — to be made feed on the promises all the way; thus to have our appetite whetted, that He may fill the hungry soul with goodness. It is not His will we should merely draw upon our bank of consolation for large sums which we think it worth drawing for, but to return again, and again, for every shilling, for ever sixpence of comfort; for, sweet thought, we cannot trouble him. How much is implied in that short sentence, "I shall not want." Why? because He wanted all. I shall fear no evil in walking through the dark valley on account of his presence, because He cried out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? We shall triumph in confidence in the midst of our enemies, because He was reproached and despised of the people, "a worm and no man;" and I know (not hope) I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever, because He has said, thou hast heard me. Sweet to know the whole flock are under the same guidance, that in experience of His watchful tenderness, we may be able to say of others under every circumstance, they shall not want — the 22nd Psalm, the ground of the confidence expressed in the 23rd. How safely we may leave ourselves in such loving hands. He is our treasure; let us deposit with him, body, soul, and spirit, for we know him. He has promised to lose nothing which the Father has given into his hands, but to raise it up at the last day. Let us not seem to suspect, by questioning what He is doing with our deposit, but rest satisfied it shall be restored abundantly enriched, on the morning of the resurrection. Then shall we not refuse to be found among the oppressed and despised, who have followed him through evil report, as well as good, since the path of sorrow, and that path alone, leads to the land where sorrow is unknown! I have been thinking lately of angels. What a subject of humiliation they should be to the believer: alike in one thing — both hearken to the voice of his word; unlike in state, unlike in service. The believer nearer, dearer, his "bride;" where sin aboundeth grace having much more abounded. Yet, how much more ready they are in their service: their beauty seems reflected on earth in their deep humility; witness their joy at the raising of sinners to a superiority to themselves. How different the Jew at the reception of the Gentile! How different the Gentile at the promised glory of the Jew! How different from the elder brother at the return of the prodigal! Hear their thunder clap of hallelujahs: "Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace towards men." In what haste would the twelve legions have descended to the aid of the Lord, had He, in his agonies, demanded their service; but preferring the sympathy of his children, He looked for pity from them, but there was no man; for comforters, but there were none — they were heavy with sleep. Were angels now told, "inasmuch as ye do it to one of the least of these my brethren, ye do it to me," would they move so heavily to feed him when hungry, to give him drink when thirsty, to take him in when a stranger, to visit him when sick and in prison? Above all, were they sent with glad tidings of great joy? No, they would fly as Gabriel to Daniel, as the angel to take a cake to Elijah. At the beginning of thy supplication the commandment came forth, and "I am come" — the commandment given at the beginning; He came before the end! But there is one office they cannot render the church; they are unfit for comforters; having known no sorrow, they cannot sympathize. This is our privilege; the most honourable service in the temple below; we are cups of consolation in his hands, who emphatically came to bind up the broken hearted. No vessels but vessels of mercy can contain this cordial; and as every blade of grass shines with the splendour of a little diamond globe, when the sun arises after a night of dew, far surpassing the grass at noon day; so shall the tears of this night of time, throw a lustre over the believer, when the Sun of Righteousness shall appear in the morning of the resurrection — far surpassing those "who excel in strength, that do His commandments, hearkening to the voice of His words." They know the bliss of power — we the happiness of weakness; — what it is to lay the hands of weakness on I am; to glory in infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest on us, to carry the helpless soul in the arms of faith, to rest on sweet and precious promises. I have heard it told through one who was present at the shipwreck of the Kent, as a remarkable circumstance, that every mother in their imminent peril, as if by instinct, turned to her youngest child and clasped it in her arms. So does the Lord to the helpless believer. Will any say, that those children, who exulting in strength were left to themselves, were more safe than the helpless infant whose life depended on the parent's life?

Maternal love alone

Preserves them first and last;

Their parents' arms, and not their own,

Were those that held them fast.

Blessed be God, he loves not according to our desert, but according to our necessity. Blessed be God, it is not written, his blood can cleanse from all the evil we see, but what He sees... Many chambers within are unopened yet to us; we see but through the crevice; yet his blood gets entrance, and drowns all. May we be given grace, dear sister, in the Lord, to leave him the steering of our little bark; to trust Him with every wind that seems against us; to go straight as an arrow on our way, believing He will not leave us to ourselves. May He keep us from weakening the hands of others by our example. Though deserving, He should plead against us with His great power, may He put strength into us, and enable us to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts. —  Crucifixion cannot but be painful; but whether crucifixion or amputation, under any circumstances, be appointed to us, may He make most legible in our lives, "Lord thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee." Let not us alone be silent in praise, when our theme is so great — that when John was given to hear the hallelujahs of such as were living continually in his presence, witnessing unceasingly the unbounded wonders of his perfections whose name is Love, all was swallowed up in this one song — redeeming love. And shall redeemed sinners be silent? All his works praise in obeying — go, and they go — come, and they come. To the sea He says, go so far, there let thy proud waves be stayed; foaming mountains high, there it stops. The firmament showeth His handy work. We can best glorify Him in trusting Him. Let us venture, then, to be confident. Goodness and mercy shall follow us, like as the river from the rock followed the Israelites all through the wilderness. Whatever is sent it is goodness and mercy; and this goodness and mercy but the earnest of future joy, the embryo of our future inheritance — an enjoyment by faith of promises there to be fulfilled. We are children of promise —  heirs of all the promises. Children of light, waiting for the morning! My dear ... may your light shine more and more to the perfect day. Affectionate love to your dear sisters, and all who love me in the Lord. Pray write very soon, and believe in the sincerity of

Your very affectionate sister in hope,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

Letter 26.

Dublin, 17th April, 1829.

... Indeed my very dear friend, had I for a moment an idea you could have been so ill, I should not have waited for an answer to my letter, could I also have conceived mine of any possible comfort. I can only say, I can sink into the very dust, that my Lord should make use in any way of so vile, so wretched an hypocrite. He has indeed shown you great and sore trouble, yet in the midst of the trouble, how loving to allow you to testify that his comforts have refreshed your soul: surely we are left without excuse in our unbelief; yet whenever He leads us to the brink of the waters of tribulation, we tremble and shrink as much from entering, as though the waters had not before parted, and become a wall of support and consolation on either side. How blessed to be under a dispensation of mercy which God has as it were set apart for mercy. We find out our hankering after self-righteousness, from our fresh astonishment every day in being treated so differently from what we expect and feel to deserve. How often arc we dictating by our fears to the Lord, but He is better to us than all our fears, in the midst of judgment remembering mercy. "Hear ye the rod and him that appointed it;" often He seems to shake the rod over his children, but is unable, if we may so speak, to inflict the blow. May we go softly all our days, seeing our comforts are held by so slender a thread; may it teach us to rejoice with trembling. David was greatly distressed, but David encouraged himself in the Lord his God; so arc we often distressed with outward things, and ever have cause from inward things. Such sunk hearts, so weighed down to earth, after all they have learned of earth, all they have learned of Jesus; often it seems as if we had all to learn over again. "So foolish and ignorant are we, even as beasts before him" — yet let us encourage ourselves in the Lord our God; encourage ourselves in his character; encourage ourselves in his compassion; he will not shut up his tender mercies in anger, but will shut us up in his tender mercies, for his compassions fail not. Let us say of them: this is my hiding place, here will I nestle from sins, temptations, falls, and ingratitudes. —  Feeling his tenderness to be that of a jealous God, we are too apt to go to him, as to a tender jealous friend, keeping back what is likely to grieve love. —  But no! Our Jesus is not like an earthly friend even in this, there is no loosening his love by suspicion. He knows all our baseness, yet loves unto the end! therefore let us go tell him all; even those feelings we would hide from ourselves, let us drag out before him, and pour out our complaints of ourselves into the bosom of our master. Often we find ourselves shrinking and crying out at the very thought, that in very faithfulness he will afflict, at the very moment we are saying, soberly and steadily,

"Less than thyself will not suffice,

My comfort to restore;

More than thyself I cannot crave,

And thou canst give no more."

Strange mixtures we are! We may confess all, for he is our hiding place, who can sympathize with the shrinking of the flesh from the Father's will, without laying it to want of love; for he has said, "Father save me from this hour."

We may trust his compassions. We may throw ourselves into his lap saying, "undertake for me." "Let me fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercies are great." The same God now, as had an eye to the sparing of even the cattle, in withholding judgment from Nineveh. — Sweet to have our will sunk into his, who is so slow to anger, so ready to forgive, that when his prophets lost all patience with the people, so as to make intercession against them, yet even then, could he not be got to cast off this people whom he foreknew, for his great name sake, because he had made them his people, neither will he now. — He has engaged for that. — May he grant that our joy in restored blessings, may be abundant in Christ Jesus. May our love be as greedy of love as his is; may he be our end in joy, our end in sorrow; may we be able to say, "To live is Christ"; may he not suffer us to abuse his wonderful mercies; but may sin and weakness have the effect of driving us to Him, without which, the expenditure of every twig in his rod would be of no avail. — O let us not be as his people of old, after every mercy stiffening our necks, hardening our hearts, casting his law behind our backs, and provoking him more and more: but let our conversation be as becomes the Gospel of Jesus Christ, standing fast in one spirit, striving together with his people for the faith of the Gospel. I can say of myself in utmost weakness, the spirit is willing that He should answer this prayer, and not spare the rod because of our crying; but may He pity, for the flesh is very, very weak. Behold here I am, let him do what seems to him good. — I desire to say this in spirit, as well as with the mouth; in feeling, as well as judgment: Lord make me desire to be able to say it. Let us thus, dear friend, encourage ourselves in the Lord our God, not terrified by our adversaries, but praising him. He gives us, not only to believe, but to suffer for him, and with him; and for his rich answers to prayer, for making known such a Lord to encourage ourselves in, may we so loudly shout hallelujah from the hiding place of his compassions, as shall make the vaults of Satan's kingdom ring with the name of Jesus. Farewell my beloved sister in the Lord...

... Very affectionately Yours,

Dear...

Theodosia Powerscourt.

"And there came a cloud and overshadowed them, and they feared as they entered into the cloud; but there came a voice out of the cloud, THIS IS my beloved Son — HEAR HIM".

Letter 27.

Paris, 26th April, 1830.

... Ever since I heard of your illness, and the Lord's mercy in sustaining and restoring, I have been intending to write to bless the Lord with my very dear sister, and ask for some words to strengthen my faith, in detail of your cup having run over in the hour of need. Is it not, indeed, the bleating of Messiah's sheep "I shall not want?" "shall not want," because the Lord is our shepherd; "shall not want," because our shepherd is the Lord! Our shepherd, the all-sufficient! nothing can unite itself to him, nothing mingle with him; nothing add to his satisfying nature; nothing diminish from his fulness. There is a peace and fulness of expression in this little sentence, known only to the sheep. The remainder of the Psalm is a drawing out of this, "I shall not want." In the unfolding we find repose, refreshment, restoring mercies, guidance, peace in death, triumph, an overflowing of blessings — future confidence, eternal security in life or death, spiritual or temporal, prosperity or adversity —  Time or eternity. May we not boldly say, "The Lord is my shepherd;" for we stand on the sure foundation of the 22nd Psalm. How can we want when united to him! we have a right to use all his riches. — Our wealth is his riches and glory. — With him nothing can be withheld. Eternal life is ours, with the promise all shall be added; all He knows we want. Our shepherd has learnt the wants of his sheep by experience, for He was himself "led as a sheep to the slaughter." — Does not this expression, dictated by the spirit, imply a promise, and a full promise, when connected with his own words, I know my sheep: by what painful discipline He was instructed in this knowledge, subjected himself to the wants of every sheep, every lamb of his fold, that he might be able to be touched with a feeling of their infirmities. The timid sheep has nothing to fear; fear not want, fear not affliction, fear not pain; "fear not," according to your want shall be your supply — "The Lord is my portion," saith my soul, therefore will I trust in Him; does the silly sheep cry to be kept from want? it may well be answered, ye know not what ye ask; it knows not of what it would rob itself in receiving the supply provided for that particular want. In the midst of danger, we have no cause of alarm, we have been taken hold of by Omnipotent love, "shall never perish." "It is the Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." All to be expected of a shepherd, shall be found in one, who so loved us, as to lay down his life for us. Dear sister, have you a want, keep it not, carry it to Him, it shall be on the mercy-seat to be considered; in due time shall be written on it, "to be provided for." Have you a want for any dear to you? He has promised you shall not want; if your demand is not exactly answered, you shall receive something better; it shall be satisfied. His fulness is as much at our disposal, as if in our own hands. He keeps it in himself, that every blessing may be richly doubled. Moses said to the children of Israel in the wilderness, "the Lord thy God knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness those forty years. The Lord thy God hath been with thee, thou hast asked nothing.'' Our wants are fathomless! our help infinite! none but God can tell the uttermost a God can do. Oh let us, who are the sheep of his pasture, give him thanks, and show forth HIS praises by venturing on this confidence. There is no want to his flock; the young lion may lack and suffer hunger, but the good shepherd's helpless, foolish sheep, shall not want any good thing. He is our shield against every foe, he is our guide in every danger, no good thing can he withhold — Grace now! glory hereafter! But it is you must tell me these truths, for you bring them fresh from the furnace. How blessed when he takes his bit of clay, and forms it into a vessel fit for the master's use, especially if he choose for us to be a vessel of consolation to his little ones. We like the office, but we do not wish the forming: for we can only comfort with the comfort wherewith we have been comforted. Oh! what a blessing, we are not left to ourselves, that when we drag the skein of our life into the most desperate tangles, mercy will sit down patiently to unravel ... What a blessing to be allowed to fall in every possible way, that self-opinion may come tumbling down, and that we may learn to leave our righteousness behind, and come to Jesus in our sins, instead of leaving our sins behind, to come in our righteousness; and how blessed we are, not allowed to appear to others what we really are, full of pride, vanity, selfishness, selfseeking. Oh! what motive within motive, deceits, hypocrisies, lying in our very representations of Christ! we desire all should read, I am comely. Is it so with you?

Letter 28.

Powerscourt, October, 1828.

My dear friend — The church's husband hath not where to lay his head; the wife always takes the place of her husband. If such is the character of Christ's church, can that system be right, which expressly encourages the opposite practice? Lord instruct me, I am a fool. As to this trade, and that trade, being supported, let the dead take care of the dead; our business in life is not to keep the world a going, but to manifest the christian's glorious hope. Each book treats of its own subject, and is not to be blamed for not instructing in all. We are living epistles, but from God's library, to teach a particular subject; and oh! what a glorious subject! we have nothing to do with the world; we cannot live too differently. Your sister says, this is Satan's kingdom; surely then we are not needed to uphold his system. Poor ... is in grief about her sister, left in India a widow; but how kind of Him to afflict us to try our faith; we talk of the promises, but how different to make use of them! how difficult to take Him at his word without an evidence; how merciful to be so let into the secrets of his love, that he does not suffer us to walk smoothly down the stream of time, but sends large and rough billows to dash us on the promises; sweetens our bitterness, and embitters our sweets. This should be the christian's elevation, to walk on the promises. The more we are forced to prove them, the more highly favoured, because our ideas of things are not according to this world. It is a great thing really to trust Him through thick and thin, believe our sorrow is our joy, our misery our happiness. He deprives us of provision for earthly affection, that these affections going in search of their object, may take a grand grasp of Him, the archetype, the fountain of every excellency; all love in comparison is but the rivulet to the ocean, one limited to the nutshell of a human heart; the other immense, as the infinite mind of Jehovah. Let us then use our privilege, dear friend, and launch our souls upon the promises of Him, who means what He says. With affectionate love to your dear sister

Believe me very affectionately yours,

T. A. P.

Letter 29.

Brussels, Dec. 15, 1829.

We have been here six weeks and have had no improvement in any art but patience; worth coming all this way to learn that; thus the Lord lays His plans for us, calls us sometimes into the wilderness to speak comfortably, admits this world to be tribulation, does not make light of it, tells us not to expect any thing else in it, but gives two famous recipes for patience under it, "rejoicing in hope," "instant in prayer." I trust my faithful heavenly friend has been pointing out to me of my faults. The instrument with which He probes the wound, is so oiled with love, it heals in wounding. I have been thinking, my dear sister, time is so short, it would be better could we throw all our powers into straining every nerve for His glory, in the situation in which He has placed us, instead of losing time in doubting whether we are in the right situation. These doubts prevent the gratitude He expects; for there is a right side in every thing; there must be, because it is His will that "in every thing we should give thanks." There is a blessing, I am persuaded, in every snare, could we cherish and make use of the blessing, and roll the snare on him. May He put a new song in my mouth, even thanksgiving to our God. Tell me what you have been thinking of? and what state religion is in where you are? This town is in a sad state, wholly given to idolatry, because Roman Catholic; three English churches, but no gospel. The French Walloon minister we hear is very good, but the town is full of English who could not understand him. All I can find we are sent here for, is to pray for them, and that is not little; a day spent in prayer is a truly profitable day, its usefulness ceases not with the day. Let us then be Phebe's, seek to carry cups of consolation to the church; she carried a large cup to Rome. If we ask any thing according to His will, we may believe we have the answer. It is His declared will — He wills not the death of any, but that all should be saved. We have not because we ask not. Do we indeed believe He is soon coming? Would it be found out by a beholder? Are we so fitted into those precepts which, put together like a mosaic, make up the image of Christ, as to force lookers on to say, "I would see Jesus?" He does not mistake either what is for our good or for His glory. I have discovered He has locked up my happiness in the concave of His shield, to shelter it from being subject to the influence of any creature. Why should those mourn at anything here, who are reconciled to the Judge of all the earth? who have access to Him at all times, and friendly intercourse with Him; whose hope is founded on His love, and look forward to seeing Him, as a long tried friend; whose very tribulations are turned into blessings, and not only so, but also have God for their God, who understands to bless them according to His name — God? All belonging to Him is ours; as that dear letter said. I have had great delight in the remembrance of that letter, I have searched into Scripture on the subject and have been refreshed; if you have heard from her on communion with the Father, or the Spirit, will you not send me the letter? I shall return it quite safe, His power is ours — none shall pluck us out of his hands. His wisdom — for all things shall work together for our good. His holiness — for sin shall not have dominion over us. His justice —  for He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. His faithfulness — because it secures the fulfilment of all his promises. His eternity — "because He lives we shall live also," so shall we be for ever with the Lord, "my Lord and my God." Every sin should increase our trust — seeing it proves to us in the most convincing manner, that He is absolutely necessary. Weakness is ours — since it forces us to live by faith on one mighty to save. The drying up of earthly streams makes us cleave to Him who is all in all, prevails on us to find happiness in His fulness. Every thing around rings in the ear, go to Jesus. It is an unspeakable blessing in such a world to be able to see anything coming straight from Him without any second cause between; it would keep us very patient thus to possess the soul; we know He has a design in all He does; the more grievous the dispensation, the more certainty of its need; what He does, we know not now, but shall know hereafter. His purposes are ripening fast, unfolding every hour. Even in the consequences of sin, as in David's case, it is not said the child fell sick, but the Lord struck the child, and it was very sick. The child of the man after God's own heart! he prayed, he entreated, yet was refused; yet he says, "call on me in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." "Yes, he shall deliver in his own way; and whatever be the way, in that thing we shall glorify him!" "I wound and I heal." The hand pierced for us, alone can wound tenderly, alone can heal perfectly. It is almost worth having a wound, to prove how tenderly He heals. Has he not taught us much this last year? Oh! how he spares, when we deserve punishment. How gently he deals; shakes his rod over us, to bring us to our senses. Often the very dart he uses to inflict a wound, in order to pour himself into it, is the very sin He desires us to hate; while his still small voice whispers, return unto me for I am full of compassion, slow to anger, and repent me of the evil, which seems to threaten. I have learnt that I am a learner, because a fool — must sit to receive, instead of give, comfort; learnt utter dependance for every comfort for myself; for every thought! have no stock to use; learnt more of "any thing with thy smile, any thing but thy frown;" learnt vanity of resolutions, which cries out beware; learnt insincerity of motives, much more, how many ends he gains by one means.

Let us, dear Mrs... occupy diligently till He comes, in the situation He has placed us in. Though we give our bodies to be burned, though we give all our goods to feed the poor, though we speak on these subjects as angels having all knowledge, in these all shall we utterly be condemned, without "give me thine heart." Happy consolation! He will never be weary of our complaints! He loves us when we weep, as well as when we smile. He loved Mary's tears — they spoke volumes to him. Soon shall these trifles be thrown away as children's toys. God looks upon our follies, as a wise man upon his infant, with loving pity. Soon our tale shall be finished, and the history of our lives put by in the library of God, as an old volume of his faithfulness. Soon we shall see him face to face, know as we are known. Soon prophecy shall be all fulfilled! "Every plant which my heavenly father hath not planted," shall be rooted up; but the little grain of love, scattered by his own hand, in our hearts, shall flourish in the courts of the house of our God, for ever and ever. Hallelujah! Soon, soon; why tarry thy chariot wheels, why so long transplanting from thy nursery, into the paradise above?...

Letter 30.

... 1830.

My dear Mr ..., Many thanks for your very welcome letter, though it does give so sad an account of that blessed town. The Sun of Righteousness did shine on me so splendidly, when there, I can never think of it but as a green pasture. Good shall come out of this seeming evil, to the church. Oh! that we loved her, as the Wise and All-powerful loves, and we never should suspect what He is at in his permission of evil. How beautiful the machinery of grace! How one part acts with another! How glorious will be the discovery at the end!

While man uses so many means for one end, God brings about so many ends by one means. One, that having made prayer the channel of conveying his blessings, that in blessing, He may bless many —  strengthen faith — awaken gratitude, and bring glory to his name as a hearer and answerer of prayer. Expect to find my soul being saved has been in answer to some prayer, in some part of the world. It can be said of bountifulness in prayer, as well as alms, "the administration of this service, not only supplieth the wants of the saints, but is abundant also by many thanksgivings unto God." Then let us thus return them liberally. It would be very sweet, could we see every thing in the light of Christ, with reference to him — that as Joseph and Benjamin were dear above all the children of Jacob, because children of Rachel, so the church might be dear to us above all that is called dear, because dear to Christ. That peace should be precious to us, not so much because happiness in itself, as because it breathes "by my bruise ye arc healed." This I should think would be one good in the study of prophecy. To see every thing with reference to Christ, instead of seeing Christ with reference to ourselves. If dwelling on a crucified Saviour is valuable to the soul, in lifting us out of self; surely, dwelling on a glorified Saviour must be doubly so, in giving a far greater lift. A suffering Jesus, though full of consolation, reflects back on our wilderness troubles, and under-curse state; a glorified Jesus, darts us forward to the time when all tears shall be past for ever, in his glory and our own. The most wonderful thing to me in this town is one, I fear too stale to you for me to indulge myself in dwelling on — namely, that I am of God, while most of those around are in the arms of the wicked one. — Wonderful to receive this message, morning after morning, "thy sins, which are many, are forgiven!" — Wonderful to have so patient a Teacher! — Wonderful, a day is coming when I shall be satisfied with myself; without pride! But passing wonderful, that "He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself!" etc. Mr. Howels had this text last Sunday. He remarked from it that the desires of God's children, when good for them, will surely be answered. Job said, "Oh! that my words were written, graven in the rock;" but he had above his desire, more than he asked or thought. Had that been granted, all the elements would have waged war against and erased it. But the Rock of Ages descended; had it engraven in his bosom, which nothing shall ever efface, but it shall be read by all, time without end. He said, "Redeemer" and kinsman were the same; spoke of him as kinsman in avenging the death of his brother, on his murderers — He pursued, and overtook the enemy on Calvary; also as raising up seed to his brother, in uniting himself to humanity, which before had none. A rose never so sweet as when bruised and squeezed. When the rose of Sharon was bruised, and trampled on, the fragrance filled every breath of heaven. —  When Christ came, the bosom of Deity was opened for our perusal. Either Christ is God, or the worst in hell — reprobation the child, not the parent of sin. In marriage, the maiden name is annihilated — the church's maiden name, not blotted out, but annihilated — no longer known by it; so any believer who has but one grain of grace, has no right to be called ungodly; henceforth his name is "the Lord our Righteousness." He introduces schism into our corruptions, and thus makes them destroy themselves, and each other; and out of each fall rises a grace, as the phœnix out of its own ashes. The woman clothed in the sun — the believer clothed in his God for ever. He, a shield, interposes himself between us and every enemy. What can penetrate infinity and eternity? By and bye, we shall see all the evil from which we have been shielded. How often, that we do not know, have we been carried past them, as children over whose eyes you put your hand while carrying them across, that they may not see the danger. The poor are shielded from riches — the rich from poverty...

Yours most affectionately,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 31.

...1828.

My dear ..., I am glad to hear you are in our neighbourhood, though grieved for the cause. But why?

Trials make the promise sweet;

Trials give new life to prayer;

Trials brings me to His feet,

Lay me low, and keep me there.

Then let us enjoy our wilderness blessings: —  here, ruffled peace. Future joy, and joy yet future, we shall have eternity for. Only for a few moments joy in sorrow; calm in a storm. Then I will rather wish you joy, that by the pressure of his dear hand, He thus keeps up in your mind — "Behold! how I love you." How needed it must be, when compassion wounds, when love chastens. The Lord "has need" now, not of your strength, but of your weakness. What a day is before us! when we shall be able to adore his faithfulness without the teaching of it by a crossed will, and disappointed prospects; when we shall be able to know the sweetness of confidence, without trust; humility, without pride to humble; the fulness of his presence, without a waste heart; the sympathy of our Comforter, without sorrow; the gentleness of our physician, without pain; the tenderness of our nurse, without sickness; yes, and even the abounding of grace, without sin.

"For ease should I praise! but if only for this,

I should leave half untold the donation of bliss;

I praise thee, I bless thee, my King and my God,

For the good and the evil thy hand hath bestow'd."

I write to let you know that (as your mouth is shut, and perhaps you would like to indulge your ear,) Mr... will lecture at two o'clock this day.

Yours, dear Mr... very sincerely,

For the truth's sake,

T. A. Powerscourt

Letter 32.

Powerscourt, 11th February, 1829.

My dear friend, I have been much arrested of late by Acts 5. 12 - 14. Just what believers should be among men. The question is not, shall we put out this or that person from our society; but shall we not so live, so speak, that no man who was not in reality durst join himself to us? Oh! what perilous times these for the church. We see the merciful wisdom in the necessity of persecution and tribulation, to keep the church in the world. She is in prosperity, when in persecution. Satan is not asleep; is more to be dreaded when undermining by expediency, than when openly destroying; deceiving, if it were possible, the very elect; leading them to do his works with plausible motives, and in spite of most sincere hearts; wishing to correct a false idea prevalent in the world — namely, that all religion consisted in living differently from others. The church has now ended in living in strict conformity to the world; so that, in preventing the mistake, she has become unfaithful to her trust, by misrepresenting Christianity, and presenting a false likeness of her Lord; reconciling, indeed, the world, in a great measure, to that which, if faithfully represented, it never could be reconciled to; therefore testifying against herself in the very reconciliation. Is not this the cause why Christianity is so much more profession than confession? ... Though scattered abroad, we are not scattered abroad preaching the Gospel; we have sallied forth into the world, walked among its children, stood, and at length sat down amongst them, stretched out our hands to the world, and, consequently, it has stretched out its hand to us; and now we are walking comfortably arm in arm. Did we not meet them in luxuries, they would not meet us. Did our conversation and deportment testify against them, they would soon bid farewell to us. Perilous times when Christians have time to play with idols ... A dear friend says, "The church is become so satisfied with her widowhood as to cease to look out for her Lord." Such are we. Times of persecution will only admit of drawing up every faculty of the soul to one point. How splendid the grace of patient waiting in Rutherford, and other persecuted believers. Love almost calls for troublous times, in the faithful suspicion of disfiguring HIS cause whom WE DO LOVE. The more rejoicing there is in the Lord, the more the idea grieves. How often we feel this in individual cases, in the toleration of one's family; how less burdensome often their rejection would be, though they are still so dear. That this is the evil state of things, is evident to all. It is little use mourning over it; but the question with us is, how shall we in serving our generation before we fall on sleep, testify against these evils? For since he must have some in every time to bear Him faithful witness, how shall we be among this privileged set? Since he has shown his affection in trusting our love, (by lending us volumes of his library for the perusal of the world,) surely, it is a most interesting question, how shall we be faithful to our charge? Is not the answer briefly expressed in his own reiterated command, so trampled under foot — Love; to exhibit it in the greater union of the body; in more diffusing around this spirit, this heavenly atmosphere; in more demonstrating it in action. How He entreats, as to this grace; upon what a basis He grounds the entreaty — if ye love; how unlimited He leaves it — "as I have loved you." Self-denying love — "though rich, for our sakes became poor," etc. Devoted love — "gave himself for us" — "kindly affectionate" — "courteous" — "having compassion one of another" — "weeping with those that weep, rejoicing with those that rejoice" — "if one member suffer, let all suffer" —  "not minding our own things, but every man the things of another" — "walk in love, as Christ loved you" — the same love will be well pleasing, a sweet incense — "condescending to those of low estate" —  "consider one another, to provoke to love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, and so much the more as ye see the day approaching;" showing meekness, gentleness, faithfulness, forbearance, long-suffering. It appears to me, if each body of Christians were to aim more at this, in action, word, and spirit, in each separate place, the world would be more convinced by this oneness, than by using methods of expediency to be of use to them; such as religious parties, etc. Hypocrites would be more ashamed of putting on Christ as a garment of fame; while believers would be fitted into him more closely, as a garment bound round with the bond of perfectness — the badge of discipleship.

It seems to me faithful parochial ministers now content themselves with the work of an evangelist, neglecting the most difficult part of their office —  heart searching work ... The minister should watch over, warn, exhort, point out from Scripture errors in spirit, and errors in life, and, though last not least, the body should make each others circumstances, as well as the church's interests, more its own; so that the faithfulness shown to each individual would multiply the thanksgivings of many, and redound to the glory of God. It would be sweet to have this pillar of truth, with love inscribed on it, erected in different parts of the country, in the parish of every faithful minister. I would especially enforce on myself, that outward demonstrations of love are far easier than the spirit — our real want is more of the spirit; without this, all endeavours to love, to show humility, spirituality, would be a mimicking Christ, a carcass without a soul. Nothing seems so likely to place in a state of expectation and looseness to the world, as keeping the eye on his second coming. It enables the soul to bound forward, as the struggle which Satan has made to maintain erroneous views on this subject is sufficient proof. I would also enforce on myself, that to give money is the least gift we have to give in token of love. Love, while producing self-denial, also produces generosity in every way in which we can possibly show kindness. Love is not always counting its pence. Then, dear friend, let us behold, as in a glass, every day more of the glory of God, till we are changed into his image. Let us get heat, by living near the furnace of love. May he mellow our hearts into his own spirit! May the fountain poured in overflow to all around! Have we not been loved? Do we not love? Are we not in the light? Are we not the subjects of his petition, "that they may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee?" Perhaps my poverty in this grace, makes me feel the need of it so much in the church. May my want lead to more earnest prayer, to be enabled to "love unfeignedly with pure hearts fervently," "in deed, and in truth," "as ourselves;" not love proceeding from duty, but love that shall produce duty; "as brethren," to those we live with, as well as those we occasionally meet! Is not this godlike grace endeared by being his command, his last, shall I say only command, given when his own feelings and agonies were forgotten in anxiety to comfort his sorrowing disciples? Is it not the embryo of his future kingdom? Alas! my leanness, my leanness! Yet I often think we do not enough wonder at the grace already bestowed. There is so much evil within, we fear to look in even at his grace, and we see it so mixed up in others often, we cannot separate it from the creature; but yet a little, and all his handywork in us shall be shown to his praise and his glory. Every receiver of a cup of cold water shall stand up to witness to it; we shall not recognise ourselves, (Matt. 25. 37.) Till that day I put by my hallelujahs, except for this, that there shall be a day in which I shall be able to praise him. I expect in that day to have much, oh, how much! of his faithfulness to tell you — a joyful, wondrous story, as wonderful to myself, as it shall be wonderful to you. I have thus poured out to you my sentiments, not only to have your opinion, if all this is a fancy of my brain, but if not, for you to try and induce the ministers with whom you have influence, to set an example to others in these perilous days. Pray write soon, and exhort me in that in which you see me most wanting.

Yours, in the sincerity of Christian affection,

T. A. P.

Letter 33.

Powerscourt, 7th April, 1829.

My dear friend — Tell ... with my love, that the people imagine a vain thing, and the rulers, in taking counsel against the Lord; for He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, and shall deride them by setting his King upon his holy hill of Zion. Nothing shall retard his approach and glory. Each event shall as surely hasten it, as days, and months, and years, bring on eternity.

I hope you sometimes think of me when you go in before the Lord. Oh! you have much to ask for me; and how blessed would be my necessities to you, could they keep you but a moment longer in communion with the Friend of Sinners! Thus might our infirmities, as well as our graces, be made blessings to our friends.

Yours, my dear friend, in Him who is our all in all,

T. A. P.

Letter 34.

Powerscourt, 24th July, 1829.

My dear friends must think me dead and buried; yet you see I am revived. I long to hear from you again; what a sad spirit seems to be exhibited in many parts of ... ! such a spirit, so much seen in the writings of those who stand up for our glorious prospects, seems to do more against the good at which they aim than all their writings can do for it, at least on this side the water.

Is not the old covenant completely abolished, instead of remaining to be executed? Will you tell me if you think this conclusion just, which I have come to on the subject? Covenant just means God's plans fixed in eternity, being unfolded in the promises, and confirmed by sacrifices. God's great purpose from eternity was, that an inheritance should be possessed by Abraham and his seed, in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed. A promise to this end was given in Eden, renewed to Abraham, then to David. The whole arrangement of the Jewish ceremony called the old covenant, or arrangement, were the same promises handed down by types, instead of word; the confirmation of these promises was Christ's sacrifice, of which the smoking furnace and burning lamp were types, like as were the sacrifices. An ordinance of confirmation, relating to the same promises, is still kept up in the Lord's supper; which, while reminding in His sacrifice of the security of God's promise, by repeating as often as we partake of it, "until my coming again," still carries us on to his appearing a second time, without sin unto salvation, when shall be the execution, and full operation of this everlasting, ever new, covenant! I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts, etc. I will sprinkle clean water upon them, (Exodus, 36. 23.) I do not see any difference between covenant and testament; for a will is simply the promise of a free gift, with the promise well secured. The will may be made and secured many years before it is executed. Will you take the trouble of pulling this to pieces? I was going to say much more, but have not time. — May He who hath mercy on you, lead you by springs of water — may He guide you wherever you go this summer — may He lead, He who leadeth Joseph like a flock, He who leads the blind by a way they know not, He who will not overdrive his flock, but gently lead the heavy laden — may He go with you and before you. You cannot go from his presence, whatever labyrinth you may get entangled in; He shall so shine forth as to make it a plain path. In the multitude of strange notions that surround, He shall lead you in his truth; in the multitude of sins, He shall lead you in paths of righteousness; in the midst of mortality, He shall lead you in the way everlasting, ever leading to the Rock that is higher than you.

I leave you in His safe keeping, and remain, though a silent, yet a very sincere and hearty friend,

T. A. P.

Letter 35.

Brussels, 2nd March, 1830.

My very dear friend — How is your sister? had no idea she was so ill. How much you must both have suffered! I put off every post writing, hoping to give you an answer about ... but I cannot wait longer, for I really wish to hear you are both delivered from your troubles. What a comfort to remember there is a great meaning in glorifying God, and that He does use his creatures for that end! There was a great meaning in all your dear sister suffered, and all you suffered in her; to be purified in the furnace of another's sufferings is difficult, it shall be found to his glory at his coming! The world thinks us insignificant creatures; but, oh! how important all we do, all we say. Nothing is trifling. We are a spectacle to the invisible world, &c; the subjects of competition between powers of light, and powers of darkness — pillars on which Christ's kingdom is sustained in Satan's world, temples of promise, therefore houses of prayer, habitations of the spirit. When we pray to be spared a trial, it may well be answered, "ye know not what ye ask," — we know not of what supplies we should thus deprive ourselves. Yes, we are a people to be wondered at. How extraordinary that we should be marked ones, and that all should be forced to see that our kingdom is not from hence, and that our hope is laid up in heaven!

That is very superficial which is only learnt by rote, we must come into the school of experience in order to learn by heart. Alas! what idolatry, what mockery, what mummery around me. May He quickly come, and set all things in order, for this confusion is the earnest of hell!

Tell your dear sister, with my sincere sympathy and affectionate love, I remember her to the All-sufficient. Pray write soon to your very affectionate friend,

T. A. P.

Letter 36.

Paris, May, 1830.

My very dear friend — Truly I feel for your fresh trial, one peculiarly trying to you: how graciously He has taught you to bend under it! One sermon from himself is worth a thousand from any man. Never so sweet is it to be raised up, as when He has cast down. Are we not given to drink largely of refreshment, and consolation from the Comforter even in the desert, to lie down in our field of promise. "When he giveth quietness, who then shall give trouble?" Enemies may surround, but our Shepherd is near; enemies may be in ambush, but the shepherd is on the watch. But could we only recount our repose and refreshment — should we not leave half untold the donation of bliss? Is it not blessed to be able to sing of judgment as well as mercy? Surely it is among our chiefest blessings that it has never yet been said of us, "let them alone." Israel was blessed, while God brought down their heart through heaviness, for they cried unto the Lord in their trouble. Israel was blessed, while they slew them: then they sought him, and remembered God was their rock, and the high God their Redeemer. The sorest word ever spoken to them, I think, was "why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more." But though silly sheep still, though still straying, counting the cost, we can say, "seek thy servant." Cannot we testify that love has rebuked, and chastened again and again, when we have turned aside? Has he not been unwearied in preserving our faith? Though Satan has been permitted to sift, his grain of wheat has not fallen to the ground; though cast into the furnace, the refiner has sat over his treasure, because to him the trial was precious. When sin has separated between Him and us, where idols have scattered our thoughts here and there, has He not been bent on restoring? has he not yearned over his Ephraim? Sometimes He almost breaks the heart with such a look as He gave Peter; sometimes he overcomes by passing by iniquities; sometimes by feeding with the rod and judgments. But of this we may rest assured, blessed thought! He will restore, till we can say in the spirit of him who was dumb before the shearers, "any thing with, thy smile," any thing but thy frown? I think at other times the soul feels so conscious of ingratitude and baseness, that its own convictions suppose displeasure in the Friend of Sinners, which needs a strong expression to prove it otherwise. At such times it is not sufficient to know He is a friend, we need a smile to infuse confidence. The conscious prodigal expects a rod, his father runs, "falls on his neck and kisses him." We cannot long read the volume of his providence, it appears to me, without experiencing this dealing; for He delights to expose the soul's proneness to expect dealing according to desert, by sparing when we deserve punishment, and in the midst of judgment remembering mercy. Alas! how slow we are in learning not to turn from, but flee to Jesus in our extremities, as our hiding place and guide. Satan's constant aim I think seems to be, to lead from the simplicity which is in Christ —  Christ's to restore us to it, and lead us in it. I believe we are only wise in giving ourselves up to his guidance, and in following whithersoever He leads. Followers of a crucified One, we must expect a thorny, though a trodden path; but He will not leave till He has satisfied, yea, satiated the hungry soul with goodness. His glory is bound up in us! his name is in us! I suppose you have seen... since his return, who has told you all about this place. Infidelity is horrible in the world, more boldly confessed I should think than formerly. Much good here, and nice preaching; simple, joyful, marrow of the Gospel, though not much deep experience. We need to have the enemy met in the avenues within, and overcome with a text. This is where Mr. Howels excels. Tell me some things he has said of late in his sermons.

Yours in truth and faithfulness,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

Letter 37.

Paris, June 8, 1830

My dear friend — I should be pained, indeed, if you were to consider I have not often, often, thought of, and deeply felt with you in your last most trying, most peculiarly afflictive visitation. I have remembered you, where alone I could be useful; and I doubt not, you have received some sweet drops of cordial from His faithful messenger. I trust now, as of old, you can say, "It has been good." You have had an experience of his tenderness, which you would not be without, and we know little of. He allots you the most favoured place in his church on earth, to glorify Him in the fires. Behold, how He loves! What a reality ill the promises when learnt in the furnace! What pains He takes in your education! How bright He means you to shine! My dear friend, I have also most gratefully to thank you for the trouble you took for me in the long instructive and interesting letter you last wrote. I have, also, considered your fresh trial, and seen the hand of the Lord in it. Oh! is it not well for us that the cup of consolation is not in our hands? There is One who holds it, yes, holds it for you; and though he mingles the bitter ingredient of sickness and trial, yet, there are drops from the fountain of everlasting love mingled to sweeten the draught; and it has been sweet; yes, I know it has, and wait to hear it from your own mouth in a very few days, if the Lord conduct us in safety. My God does all things well. We cannot see it, we cannot feel it, but He has said, therefore, in spite of sense, faith shall see and faith shall feel, "He does all things well." "If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons." Mr. Howels says, A father's heart is not wholly seen till it descends in tears on the rod of chastisement — he knows where to chasten, where the heart feels the rod. Sometimes he sends a rod which is light to ourselves, while a whip of scorpions to others. He also knows when to strike; takes the best opportunity of correcting us the best way; often takes to the edge of a precipice to show us the abyss down which he could dash our hearts till they might shiver to pieces at the bottom; and this, perhaps, when we are complaining of something else, some providence or dispensation. He just shows what he is able to do, to humble and chasten at the moment we require. He cannot mistake as to the matter, manner, time, or place; all selected by infinite wisdom. Oh! "He doeth all things well." Infinite love is in the arrangement. There is the love, pity, vigilance, tenderness, anxiety, sympathy, caution; the whole head, the whole eye, the whole heart of a Father at work. None but a Father can tell the feelings of a father, when, indeed, He chastens, not for the indulgence of his own temper, but for the good of the child He loves. And who can tell what the refinement, exaltation, perfection of paternal feeling is in the bosom of him, who so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son? That Father who spared him not, but gave him up for us — How shall He not with him give all things? How unsearchable must be the love of God to his poor sinful worms where the paternal feelings for Jesus, as to the infliction of sufferings, were (if it be not presumptuous to say) sacrificed to save his people from suffering? Oh! when we so much need the rod, shall we faint under or despise it? May it be sweet to us in the apprehension of faith, however bitter in the feeling of sense. Till I have the pleasure and profit of seeing you and your dear sister, please Providence, believe in the sincere affection and sympathy of a true friend in Christ,

T. A. P.

"Now I beseech you for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that you strive together with me, in your prayers to God for me, that I may come unto you with joy by the will of God, and may with you be refreshed. The God of peace be with you."

Letter 38.

Powerscourt, 21st August, 1830.

My dear friend — I was most truly grieved not to find you in London when I passed through. I counted that I should have had four days of your society, and could not help dropping a few tears of disappointment on receiving your note. I wonder if we shall ever meet again. Mrs... is dying. Her's is a happy lot; but, that of her devoted husband, experience tells me, will be a long, long, black and sad one; but in His light, no doubt, we shall walk through darkness. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light to me. It is well to have reality brought before us, to be forced even for others to seek out the promises. We discover ourselves so secure, ingenuity and unbelief cannot find a hole for doubt to creep in. He has provided for every case, and thus proved ours has been foreseen. I love to take the promises out of Christ, to see them lodged in his experience for our use; to remember He earned the fulness treasured up in him — his unsearchable riches. I believe his sympathy to be quite beyond any thing that has ever entered into our hearts. He had a power of receiving his people's feelings into his own bosom, so as to wipe, as it were, their very tears. This sensibility united with his purity, brought forth a remorse, a stinging of conscience more piercing than that of David when he said, "I have sinned." More bitter than that of Peter, when "he went out and wept bitterly." It is an argument with some, that as He could not feel remorse for sin, it is vain to seek to prove that He was in all points tempted like as we are. I believe He could with truth say, "Thou knowest my foolishness, my sins are not hid from thee." I believe in Peter's denial; He felt his ingratitude as a man, and the abhorrence of his sin as God, which wrought within him so grievous a wound. He could well say, "My wounds stink, and are corrupt through my foolishness." Likewise, in his tears over Jerusalem, there was a remorse as to his own, who should crucify Him, as well as compassion for those who should remain in impenitent unbelief, which enabled him also to say, "mine iniquities are gone over my head as a heavy burden; they are too heavy for me." How mysterious his sufferings. They appear more so every day, especially when we remember, that there is a depth of truth in every word He uttered, as expressed in the Psalms.

Thank your dear sister for her letter. You cannot think how much I enjoy both your letters. They are streams from the Fountain of consolation helping to make up my river of peace, consequently drops in the ocean of his glory. How blessed, that when He says it is his will, that his people should have strong consolation, He has ordained it should be communicated through his members!

I want very much to know how far I am to take the promise, "If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not." I find it quite a common idea, that when I ask for bread, I may be given a stone; for fish, I may be given a serpent; that his "liberally" means to let me run into all sorts of error. His "not upbraiding," to deliver me up to the guidance of Satan. At least, I think, it is the same thing to say, I am not to consider what I learn in the study of Scripture, with prayer, the teaching of God.

Believe me, dear Friend,

Faithfully and affectionately yours,

T. A. P.

Letter 39.

Probably, 1830.

... It is said when He comes, shall He find faith in the earth? but while taking shame on this ground to ourselves, in having so badly used the talent entrusted to us, let us rejoice that the church is not invisible to her Lord. If it is true of Jews still beloved for the Father's sake, how much more may we say, still beloved for the Son's sake; still is He the head and husband of his church, the Saviour of the body; still does He love her, for whom He gave himself; still does He sanctify and cleanse her; still does He look forward to presenting her to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, holy and without blemish; still does He love her as himself; still nourish and cherish her as members of his body, his flesh, his bones; still does he cleave to his wife, for they two are one spirit. He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. As individuals, we are sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty — as a body, the church, — His celestial bride, (see Rev. 21. 9.) "This," says the apostle, "is a great mystery!" all said of the terrestrial bride, glorified Jerusalem, is true of her spiritually, "Jerusalem from above." Though no individual, or body of individuals, is infallible, yet does infallibility dwell in her, inasmuch as all possessed of His mind, possess an infallible teacher; though no individual or body of individuals is omnipotent, yet does omnipotence dwell in her, inasmuch as a God of power inhabits his people; therefore the gates of hell shall not prevail. What a mysterious subject is Jesus' knowledge as man, an interesting subject! I dare say I before wrote to you on the subject. There is a knowledge which He possesses from everlasting to everlasting, which has been ever perfect admitting of no increase, by which His scrutinizing eye flies through earth and hell, penetrating the bosoms of the lost; but His knowledge as man in which He grew as He grew in years, by which He "knows his sheep," implies love. Love brought Him into our school, led Him through every class in that school. Love educated Him into the knowledge of death and the grave. —  With this love, He embraced the individual temptations of all his family, so as to be able to say to all, "Come unto me, and ye shall find rest." This knowledge includes sympathy, for He remembers every lesson learned under the rod — without this knowledge, He could not hold the reins of government, nor present millions every moment to his Father. — By this knowledge, He pursues the lost with mercies, till they cast themselves into the pit of destruction. — By this knowledge, He is familiarly acquainted with all our necessities, and has experienced how we stand in need of his covenant in all its fulness, and all its perfections every moment, all his grace, all his love, all his truth, all his justice. We experience his knowledge, in the aptness by which He applies all He can confer, to our multiplied intricate cases, making us at the same time capable of receiving all He has to give. Sometimes we are reminded of his knowledge, in his noticing our sins, either by throwing into our faces the sparks of hell, as when He looked at Peter, or sometimes by tenderly kissing them away, as when three times asking, "Lovest thou me?" — But He learnt in order to communicate! We may hunger and thirst, for we shall at length be capacitated to receive all the treasures of wisdom, a knowledge hid in Him for us! Angels have no such capacity — "I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it, that," etc. etc. We desire the knowledge of our master, yet refuse the same discipline, but we are learners — we are not ambitious enough. He expects us to learn with the celerity of instinct. — Let His discipline teach us what now to expect — to be giants in knowledge. Jesus was once an infant; He attained his size, because He eat his food, "grew in wisdom." There is something sweet in spelling out of a book, the leaves of which were cut by Him! In his school we must learn most painful lessons of dependance — sometimes be almost flayed alive to keep us from worshipping ourselves. In his school (I mean the one in which He was educated) we shall learn in every difficulty to turn to the Father, as an infant in its mother's arms, at the approach of danger hides itself in the bosom of its best friend, and is happy. In his school, we shall get knowledge to learn to live, to learn to ward off ALL the fiery darts of the wicked with the shield of faith, to learn to walk on the waters in the trials of life, to walk on burning coals in its prosperity, to learn to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing no evil, for his rod and his staff comfort. From the meekness and lowly heart of our teacher we shall learn the docility of learners, the bleating of Messiah's sheep, "I shall not want." How the Lord labours to get us to believe that as He is, so are we! Was not the glorified body of Jesus standing at the right hand of God in the light of the highest, when the apostle declared, "Our vile bodies shall be fashioned like to His?" see Rev. 1. 16; Matt. 17. 2; then Matt. 13. 43. See Him as he is, and be like Him! John 14. 3-6. "enter into joy of Lord," John 17. 22; Rev 3. end — "so shall we be ever with the Lord," never tainted with sin, never clouded with sorrow, where death shall have no name, and falsehood be unknown. We shall not long have to write or speak, our eyes will be occupied fully — our ears in ever new delight: God alone will be able to satisfy glorified ears.

Your very attached Friend,

T. A. P.

Pray write soon, and empty out the full of your heart, the evils, the good, and the affections. How I love those dear creatures you are with! I hope your time may be as agreeable as mine with them.

Letter 40.

17th July, 1831.

My very dear Sister in a happy family. — We wait with much anxiety to hear from you respecting your husband. We have heard he was very ill. May you have fresh mercies to recount of our faithful God. Oh! how dependant we are on Him! how many vulnerable points! poor triflers that we are! how soon He can bring us into reality and make us real! I trust you may not have had cause to blame me, etc. etc. Whatever is, whatever has been, whatever shall be to you, is well. May you have faith to see it, in all the wanderings you may yet have before you, in this vain, this dark howling wilderness; and when we cannot unriddle, may we learn to trust.

Yours faithfully, and with much sincere affection,

T. A. P.

Letter 41.

... 1831.

You have no doubt heard of the death of our dear ... after five days illness; typhus fever, so short a time did he enjoy what he was so happy in being spared! Vanity of vanities! His poor wife is every day expecting her confinement, but altogether satisfied with her Father's determination concerning her; love sent it, not only love for time, but for eternity. Can love injure? Yes, in time, for a benefit through eternity. How true, "life is but a vapour." Every thing which tends to aggravate a trial seems more loudly to speak the amazing love which sends it — deep love — when he smites it is to wound, to cause pain, not for His pleasure, but for our profit. It is "through much tribulation we must enter the kingdom." They on whom the Lord most bestows trouble here, will shine most brightly in the kingdom — polished stones fit for the royal diadem; — tribulation of every kind — not merely persecution for the Lord's sake, but tribulation; and who partook of all so much as the King of glory? The troubles incident to humanity, Jesus made his own, all were appropriated by Him, found in the cup He drank of, and were the essence of the baptism which he was baptised with — to which cup and baptism we are invited. This love threatened to send her last year into the upper chambers of our Father's house, and has actually called him; and if the Lord comes not, though she will not see Him with these eyes till then, she will soon also leave these vaults, and ascend to the house top. What an advantage he has over us I Another sheaf housed, another witness added to the cloud around. It was in ministering to the bodily wants of the poor he took his fever. How full of wonder all His church will be, when at the last the manifold wisdom of God shall be exhibited in the individual and collective salvation and glory of his people.

Most decidedly your, loved in the Lord and in the flesh,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

Letter 42.

My dear Mr ...,  How does your throat get on? I fear not better. This is just what we need — these little changes — to be taught to make use of the promises. Too apt to be satisfied with enjoying His word, while reading and meditating on it, then go away and forget it till the next stated time returns; therefore, it is well to be scratched on the way with little briers, that we may be sent for healing to "It is written," to be made to feed on promises all the way; He creates an appetite for this divine food, then fills the hungry soul with good things — sweet to have a care that we may cast it on Him. I believe it is not his will, we should merely draw upon our bank of consolation, large sums we think worth drawing for, but He wills we should return, again and again, for every shilling and six pence. We cannot trouble Him, and surely, never does he deal more tenderly, than when expecting us to trust, in things about which, He has made no agreement, for no greater proof is there of affection than to confide in love ... We know the Lord! therefore can leave ourselves to Him without asking for an explanation till the day of hallelujah. This much we are sure of, every cup our Father puts into the hands of his children must be a cup of blessing, because more or less, the communion of the blood of Christ, it infuses health before we drink, therefore given with Him, every curse is turned into a blessing, every blessing kept from being a curse. I cannot pity you in being shut up, for you have so large, so beautiful a field of meditation to walk in — Christ crucified — Christ applied — Christ glorified! He hath done great things for us! Great things are spoken of us! Oh, may we be enabled to keep his end in view simply as our end; namely, his glory. For so admirably has He interwoven his glory and our happiness, that while our happiness constitutes his glory, his glory constitutes our happiness; and never shall we know what true satisfaction is, till we cease to fight to be gods, and take our place as nothing, till self is lost in the "all in all" of God ... Excuse this long letter, but I was reading, that it is our Father's will his children should have strong consolation, and I thought it would be a nice thing to be a rivulet of comfort, helping to make up your peace as a river, and thus be also a drop in the ocean of His glory...

Yours very truly,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 43.

My dear Mr ...,  I heard yesterday you were not well. I hope it is nothing more than cold, and that you have not laid in your hoarseness for the winter, not only for our sakes, but it must be a trial to the friend of the Bridegroom, to be unable to nourish and comfort his friend's bride, especially, when, in entrusting him with so precious a charge, during his absence, He has manifested such a confiding affection, "lovest thou me? Feed my sheep." Well, you have one more difficult task, than, either defending, or supporting her — that is, comforting her. She so often asks, "Watchman, what of the night? Why tarry the wheels of his chariot?" She so often complains "The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me." She so often needs to be reminded, that He has indeed left this message with you for her, that "the mountains may depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee," — "I will never leave thee," and to be urged — "Though He tarry, wait for Him, for He will come, and not tarry." May you be much cheered in contemplating the day of the Bridegroom's return, when you shall restore your precious charge, when your joy shall be fulfilled, in hearing His voice, and receiving "Well done, good and faithful servant," etc. How I should like to be a minister...

Very truly,

T. A. P.

Letter 44.

March 3rd, 1831.

My dear Mr ...,  I have been dwelling a good deal lately on the sweetest of all subjects — our union with Jesus. It is a holy and mysterious subject, but since our teacher is one who searcheth the deep things of God, is it not our privilege to venture under his guidance into all revealed, even into the most High; to walk about and consider this our habitation, and call all within, our own. Whatever declares the identification of Jesus with us, also witnesses to our identification with him. He was educated and disciplined in every thing. He was taught by the Spirit; led the path of faith, not only for our sakes, but our inheritance. We have an interest in his person, as well as in his office and character. We must live in God, inhale his breath, for like the sun, we can only know him by his own influences proceeding from himself. How holy would be our walk! how much of the atmosphere of heaven we should diffuse around, if we always came forth into the world, from the secret place of the most high, as our abiding place. What a field of delight this opens to us in the anticipation of our own loveliness, full of grace and truth, like Jesus! heirs of all the wealth of him who is God — precious in itself, doubly precious from being his. But not only future delights, but present privileges; for united to him, though a beggar in rags, yet in graces is not the believer this moment, our dear Brother in embryo? I speak not of Jesus our Lord, as God over all —  the "I am," or "my fellow," neither as "the Word," who was "in the beginning with God," "by whom all things were made;" who came out from the Father, to testify what he had seen and heard. But the union which, as Jesus of Nazareth, He possessed when anointed with the Holy Ghost, and with power. He went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed, because God was with him, which is expressed (it seems to me) in, "we are one," "the Father in me, and I in him." It having pleased the Father, all fulness should dwell in him, even all the "fulness of the Godhead bodily," which oneness He declares, we shall know at that day. This union, whatever it is, is ours. "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." He that keeps his commandments — whosoever confesses that Jesus is the son of God — he that dwells in love — he that loves his brother, God dwells in him, and he in God — "We will come and make our abode with him," "Christ in you," and in "that day," this oneness shall also be known, for "ye shall know in that day, that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you!!!" From this union seems to flow every other blessing. Being members of his body, of his flesh, and his bones — "joined to the Lord," therefore "one spirit," the same things which are true in God, are also true in us, who are Christ's. Oh, what a world of glory is opened to us in these words, "my beloved is mine, and I am his!" Nothing can separate us from Jesus. Nothing extracts Jesus from the cup presented. Laden with him every event must be full of love, though perhaps blessings in disguise. He gives to drink of his own cup of blessedness, and glory. The grain of wheat having fallen into the earth, taken root in the depths of hell, we have sprung up in him. If exposed to the same blasts, we also enjoy the same refreshing dews, the same enlivening sun. Possessed of his nature we shrink, as the sensitive plant, from the touch of sin, but with him shooting up into the very heavens, we drop into the Father's hand, the tender grapes of his choice vine. "All our fresh springs," are in him.

Your description of all the dear Christians at ... is lamentable; sad, very sad, the members should be so unlike the head; and this alas! is too true of us all. The transcript of the Spirit, though executed with exquisite nicety, is scarcely perceptible through the thick veil of flesh that covers it. It seems no longer true, "no man ever hated his own flesh." Whether we look at the want of his power in his church, or of the fruit of his Spirit in his members, still are we inclined to ask, has the Spirit of the Lord fainted? Is He exhausted? where is he? Query, is not this quarrelling among the children of God, the natural result of want of communion? The religion of Jesus especially enforces and cultivates union. Satan's wiles seem set at the dispersion of the members. So that now the principle is almost denied, and Christianity merely a business between God and the soul — and where it is sought, it is usually only union of sects — must not then, the graces which are the fruit of love, want cultivation? "suffereth long, is kind, envieth not, vaunteth not itself, etc." In this how entirely Satan has succeeded in the Roman Catholic religion. Each has his own prayer to say, they do not seem to know there is such a thing as united prayer. I heard a minister say the other day, he thought his business was to convert souls. From scripture it seems to me, a minister's chief business commences instead of finishes, when a soul is brought to life, and for this how much more is needful, than the public congregations. However for such dead souls, is not storm better than stagnation? I am sure the evil is not in differences of opinion, for this is the necessary result of increase of light, but our evil is more, that we cannot allow another to see things differently from us. But we are in a warfare, and though not receiving wounds from the flesh in the shape of persecution, we must be receiving them from some quarter. The flesh still wars against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, because still contrary one to the other, and if in the spirit, we must feel it so, from wounds without or wounds within. Most painful, if from the flesh of a beloved brother or sister. But does not this even turn to us for a testimony? and does it not give opportunity of showing, that the flesh is subdued, by loving, and persevering to love through all? If in every rub, our concern is for his glory having suffered, surely we shall then strive to disappoint Satan in our brother. All would be much easier to endure, if instead of taking it as from this sister, or that brother, we could take it as from our common enemy, the flesh. Wounds, one from the other, seem more now, our appointed trial of faith than open persecution, and had we not this, we might forget we were in a conflict, and put off our armour, therefore in these wounds let us not wonder, as though "some strange thing happened, but rejoice in being by any means partakers of his sufferings", for if this whole dispensation is not the day of the church's; fasting, a day of temptation, and suffering, how could the promises of being partakers in the glory of a suffering Saviour be ours? To suffer with him and to be glorified with him, seem closely connected. There is something sweet, in being pruned by a wounded hand, and oh! when we feel the drowsiness of our affections, our proneness to depart from him, and to be satisfied at a distance, have we not cause to be over head and ears in love with trials? that He should be so jealous of our friendship now, to force true happiness upon us, in spite of ourselves, to drive us to his strength, to live upon his promises, and lay our head upon his breast — He is not satisfied his tried children should be common Christians — He considers us — and if He says, "prove me my child," it is that He may introduce us into the innermost chambers of his faithfulness. No doubt in a short time, we shall know much of this, but persecution is the Christian's halo, and trial his triumph. He is called to glorify the Lord in the fires. It is a noble thing to be accounted worthy to suffer shame for Christ's sake. What soldier would flinch from the combat, when his captain is gone before him in the forefront of the battle? What soldier of Christ is he, who having the assurance of victory, and honour, accounts it a privilege to be out of the field? Are we not called to suffering? are we not chosen as witnesses to his resurrection, in being above, far beyond its sting? Let us expect a succession of trial, and suffering — to have just to post fast, from trouble to trouble. In our God, we are able. As the spirit of prayer strives to be heard, and the spirit of thanksgiving breaks forth into singing, so does the spirit of martyrdom delight in the sphere of action. We are superior to the power of death. Death, in his own domain shall acknowledge us risen. We have overcome the grave, and are set down with Christ our Lord, in the glory of the Highest. How jealous we should be, to show forth his active, as well as passive graces, while left in an enemy's ground! There is nothing else to live for. I feel that a desire to have been more spent, and to have suffered more for my beloved Master, in this theatre of his humiliation, is the only thing, could make me hesitate, in my longing desire to be with Him, who is, and has been, so abundantly with me. But we are such creatures, God cannot accomplish his will, or allow us our heart's desire, without severe discipline. Every day afresh, He has to pursue us out of self. The old man must be kept low, emptied out, to enable us to be filled, with the fulness of God. Oh! to bid an eternal adieu to self; as a tormentor! Oh, to be able to be nothing! This is my idea of the height of glory. We are everlastingly grappling at his honour. In the secret, lower chambers of the heart, we devise means to rob him of this, his due — then we know not how to wear it. The robe of glory was never made to fit us. We carry it with the most absurd awkwardness. Thinking ourselves something, we become perfectly ridiculous. In these fearful days, I should fear much for myself, were I not able to take a full, strong grasp of his promise, "If any man lack wisdom," etc. I cannot think when I ask bread, He would give me a stone. Did I not think my teacher as faithful as He is infallible, there is no book, I should so fear to handle as the book of God. Left in any degree to ourselves, it would be as the plunging into a sea of errors. Such is the poison of the human mind, it requires all the wisdom, and energy of omnipotence to prevent our salvation becoming our destruction. May we be in earnest, may we live while we live — may we know more of that love, which will take a brother's failings to a throne of grace, while throwing over them a cloak of charity — which will fix on his grace in a brother, and render thanks for it — which will be faithful in reproof, as well as jealous in defence. May the beam be more and more extracted from our own eyes, that we may see fewer motes in our brother's. I do not know what to say for writing so long a letter.

Faithfully and affectionately yours,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

Letter 45.

1831.

My dear Mr ...,  I have a feeling about me, that I have left something undone; and the only thing I can think of is, that I have been so long from home, and have not written to you. I suppose you have all been going on as usual, at least Mr... from whom I heard lately, does not say any thing to the contrary. We hope to be home the beginning of next week. I am sure you were much shocked at the death of dear Mr... It was a striking lesson to the whole parish, so soon after rejoicing with him. It is a loud voice to us, "up and be doing." The time is short, and very uncertain. He is safely, and very unexpectedly, housed in the Lord's barn. There was much that was lovely in his character; a laying aside of self, and his own pleasures, and pursuits, to be of use, and comfort to others, was especially striking. As doing this from duty is rather irksome to those to whom the attention is shown, therefore, I think, to seek to have formed in us the mind which was in Christ, is better than to seek to imitate him. Does it not seem that the world is breaking up? Does not Satan seem to be arranging his forces, so as to be ready for the battle of Armageddon? How we should be bespeaking strength for the day of trial. I cannot help thinking we also shall have trial, though not to partake in the despair and desolation of the last end. Does it not seem that the end brought about by the man of sin — the last Pharaoh — Dragon incarnate, will be the demonstration of our patience, and the faithfulness of Him who will keep us from falling? Are we not told under the 5th seal, that martyrdom shall continue until the hour of God's vengeance? More martyrs, therefore, are to be slain; for the blood of God's servants is not yet avenged — judgment must begin at the house of God. Matt. 24. 22, says, that unequalled tribulation shall be shortened for the elect's sake, while every declaration of Christ's being come, is a falsehood. It seems to me that the verses 15 and 28 of Luke 24. prove the destruction of Jerusalem not to be the entire fulfilment of this prophecy. Mark, in chap. 13. seems to says, that it is, after the Gospel has been preached in all nations, brother shall betray brother, etc. It is said of this time, "Here is the patience of the saints." Blessed then the dead, that die in the Lord; oh what a time! shall we see it? Surely we need to count the cost, to put on the whole armour of God, that we may enter boldly into the battle, since our enduring will be for our Captain's honour, and to the proof of his power. It seems the church must walk in the footsteps of her Lord. It will be terrible to be betrayed by one's own child, by one's familiar friend — to see the name of Jesus almost eradicated — the worship of a devil set up — we ourselves assaulted with Satan's most cunning, because last, snares; and if to pass through his experience, to drink indeed of his cup, and be baptized indeed with his baptism; our hearts may be poured out like water, we may sink in deep mire, and our Father's face be hidden; for unless these days be shortened, no flesh could be saved, but for the elect's sake these days shall be shortened, for then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. The Lord tells us to watch and pray, that we may be accounted worthy to escape, what is coming on the earth, etc. It cannot mean a prayer to die, for there is a great promise to them who endure to the end, those who overcome. Does there not seem to be two distinct destructions spoken of, Babylon, and the Beast? But how blessed to be among those whose sufferings will be full of hope! Does it not seem from the types, that His people are to be delivered not from, but out of affliction. He knows how to deliver us out of temptation. We are witnesses of His resurrection. He was only the first fruits. We are superior to all the power of the enemy. He died through weakness, but was raised in power. To this power we are united. What a triumph over death it will be, in his own domain (when as it were, death shall be let loose on earth,) the gathering up of his saints! What a thunderclap of hallelujah, when all the prayers of all saints for our poor world, long, long laid up, shall all be answered in one event!!...

... Ever most affectionately yours,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

Letter 46.

April, 1831.

Dear Mr ..., I write to accuse you of want of love; — our Master's badge of discipleship, who is love. — His last and dying command. — No doubt you will agree with me that all the Gospel, as well as law, is contained in that word love. How much we need to be led into the height, depth, length, and breadth of his own word. Is it not poverty of love makes us crave the spirit, and forget the practice? is it not the same poverty enforces the practice, neglectful of the spirit? Oh! that all the church would unite, in each putting, at least, one stitch in that rent mantle, with which the apostle enjoins us to cover a multitude of sins. — Oh that we could more decidedly pluck out the beam from our own eye, that the mote in our brother's might appear less! Oh that we more honoured the spirit, in giving credit to the principles of those who love the Lord in sincerity, and by our faithfulness more drew upon those principles. It seems to me the nature of love is twofold. — First, it is given to excuse, instead of accuse. Second, it is equally jealous in covering and detecting evil — covering it from others — detecting it to the individual concerned. Pardon me for saying, it seems to me you have failed towards me in both these points — Christian love, where God's glory is the simple motive, no doubt would lead us to consider others, both in feeling ourselves bound to give thanks, and to glory in what God has done for them, and also in carrying the blind, maimed, halt and infirm, in the arms of faith, to place them at the feet of Jesus. My accusation is, I have heard from two or three quarters that you have brought me forward as an example of inconsistency in having ... Is that all you saw inconsistent!!! I do not write to justify myself. I can "lift up my face unto God;" neither do I profess to act for man's judgment. But was it consistent, was it Christian love to condemn, unheard, not to point out by word or letter this evil in your sight? Was it being jealous over God's glory, to be so little jealous over my walk? Alas! how little sympathy of conscience, how little help we meet in our most difficult paths! nevertheless, though overlooked at the time, since pointed out, I confess the appearance inconsistent. Do not, dear ... think me offended; I am not in the least so, but should be glad you were to continue using my example if it can be of use; but my motive in writing is to prove to you by this your failure, how much we need mercy one from the other, as to our consistency, and how ill we can sustain judgment. If not falling on one side, we are on the other. A deep sense of "Behold, I am vile," will settle us in our right place, as respects God, others, and ourselves; truly we are given to totter in our own conceits, as a stick balanced on a man's finger falls either to this side or that, we are ever going, going, but blessed be God, never quite gone, because the finger is Omnipotence. Let us pray that in striving to represent, we do not altogether misrepresent, the lowly walk to which our high vocation calls us.

Yours, dear ...

With sincerity, etc. etc.

T. A. P.

Letter 47.

Powerscourt, February 18, 1831.

My dear friend — I was indeed surprised to hear of ... How little similitude exists between the members and the Head; and this, alas! is too true of us all. The transcript of the spirit, though executed with exquisite nicety, is scarcely perceptible through the thick veil of flesh which covers it. It seems no longer true — "No man ever hated his own flesh." Whether we look at the want of power in the church, or of the fruit of the Spirit in the members, still are we inclined to ask, has the Spirit of the Lord fainted? Is He exhausted? Where is He? "Now when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not, until I have shown thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come." But we are in a warfare; this is the battle hill; and though not receiving wounds from the flesh, in the shape of persecution, we must be receiving them from some quarter. The flesh still wars against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; and if in the spirit, we must feel it so from wounds without, or wounds within. Most painful, if from the flesh of a beloved brother, or sister. But does not even this turn to us for a testimony? And does it not give opportunity of showing, that the flesh is subdued by loving, and persevering to love through all? Wounds one from the other, seem now more our appointed trial of faith than open persecution; and had we not these, we might forget we were in a conflict, and put off our armour. Therefore, let us not wonder at these fiery darts, as though some strange thing happened to us, but open our bosoms to receive of his suffering, and rejoice in being counted worthy of being partakers of them by any means; for if this whole dispensation were not the day of the church's fasting, the day of his temptation and suffering, how could the promise of being partakers in the glory of a suffering Saviour be ours? To suffer with him and to be glorified with him, how closely connected! Dear friends, take this as from the Lord, even as you do. He is pruning with a wounded hand; and, oh! when we feel the drowsiness of our affections, our proneness to depart from him, to be satisfied at a distance, have we not cause to be "over head and ears in love" with trial, that He should be jealous for our friendship now; so force true happiness upon us in spite of ourselves, so drive us to his strength, to live upon his promises, and lean our heads upon his breast? He is not satisfied that we should be common Christians. Oh! bless him and kiss the rod. He is considering you. Let us leave ourselves to him. If He says, prove me, my child, it is that He may introduce you into the inner chambers of his faithfulness. If he places you in difficulties and perplexities, it is that He himself may expound his promise in your experience: "I am your shield, your exceeding great reward."

"Venture on Him, venture wholly.

Let no other trust intrude;

None but Jesus can do helpless sinners good."

We are all too apt to feel that had we some other race to run than the one set before us, we could go lightly, and run swiftly. Now I feel impeded by the weight of being called queen of a castle; and imagine, could I lay it aside and have nothing, then I might run with more patience after the Crucified. I am inclined to say, in your race you have no misgivings of conscience; you feel assured that you are just as He has placed you! Thus He sets a race before each, and gives a sufficient remedy for all, "looking unto Jesus." But I know the sorrows of your mind, and pray that balm may be poured into the opened wound. May your spirit be kept above with Jesus, and the spirits of the just! Look forward. That new song requires our parts to complete the harmony. He could not be satisfied with the travail of his soul, until he had worked out our salvation. Oh! mysterious Jesus, teach us thy works and plans. Let our hearts pant after thee as the harts after water. Create a thirst which nothing shall satisfy but the fountain of eternal love. See the velocity with which the needle flies to the magnet when it gets within distance; so shall we hasten to our magnet, our Beloved, as we approach him. Then, to be delivered from the noisome pestilence within, to rise from among the pots, and to be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, will draw forth such hallelujahs! May He make us what He would have us to be; give singleness in the eye, and fidelity in the conscience! I hope you or ... will soon be able to write, and tell us how you have decided.

Believe me, yours very affectionately,

T. A. P

Letter 48.

Powerscourt, 14th May, 1831.

My dear friend — I have wondered at all you have told me. Oh! all the foundations are out of course! What disorder, what confusion on all sides! what sin, what misery! Nehemiah would not accept the service of the Lord's enemies in building the temple. Does not the world stand to the believer in the same place, as the Gentile to the Jew? Are we to permit them to have common cause with us in his work? Are we so to declare that the Lord's servants are not sufficient for his work? Surely they would be, if as devoted as Satan's servants. Are we to cringe to the world for its influence, its wealth, its labour? The world is not less dangerous now; not less an enemy to truth, than when Christ prayed his people should be kept from its evil. False friends arc the worst of all enemies; wolves in sheep's clothing. But where is the world? If all are Christians, there is no world. What a state of disorder and confusion we have got into! All our precepts necessarily thrown overboard. We are enjoined to closest union with Christians; distinct separation from the world. We cannot exercise the latter with those we professedly acknowledge brethren; we cannot exercise the former with those with whom we have no sympathy; all being shut up to profession. None profess, while in conduct we give every day a lie to our profession, in judging those who profess to profess. The church and the world are like tumbled drawers. May the great Head of the church, the King of the universe, quickly come and put all in order! What a glorious destiny awaits us! how the dwelling on it should humble us! "When Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into his hand, and that He was come from God and-went to God, He laid aside his garment, took a towel, girded himself, and began to wash his disciples' feet." Pray let me hear what you do. It is refreshing to hear now and then of his faithfulness in guiding you continually. It is well to trace his footsteps through the dark and hidden providences with which we are exercised. Depend upon it, He is leading by a right way to the city of habitation. Though the path may not be clear, his faithfulness is — "I know in whom I have believed." Oh! the peace of being brought in sincerity and truth, to lie back in his arms, saying, "undertake for me."

With true affection,

Yours in our real hope,

T. A. P.

Letter 49.

Powerscourt, 2nd September, 1832.

My dear friend — It is long, very long since I have heard from you. I hope you will not therefore refuse to write to me a very long letter, and tell me all your present sentiments and experience, and what the Lord has been instructing you in the last year. I know it is goodness and mercy which have followed, but it strengthens faith to hear the hows, and the whens. As for me, to all appearances, I have been going on in a quiet sameness, yet never, I believe, has the Lord been more dealing with me, exposing me to myself, and bringing me low, than during the last year. I have learnt some very bitter lessons, because I am a great dunce. I should be glad to know what you think concerning reigning with Christ. Do you think it is for all, or only for martyrs? I have been thinking a good deal on the subject of late. It seems to me that the reason why it belongs to this dispensation to reign with Him, is because this is the dispensation of martyrdom; the fast days of his church, because of the absence of her bridegroom. Rest at any time seems a mere accident. "Sheep appointed to the slaughter;" "the offscouring of all things;" "bearing about the body of the Lord Jesus;" "always delivered unto death," — this is the character of these promised days of tribulation. It is still his hour of temptation. Acts, 1. 4, 5. Luke, 22. 28. When God would heat his furnace to the height for an example of faith to the end of time, what did he prepare? Not suffering of the body, but the furnace of affliction, "thine only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest." It does not seem to me to signify so much what the trial is, as the coming out of it, saying, "Lord, thou knowest that I love thee." I conceive we are all given opportunity of this martyrdom. It seems distinguished from the suffering which we have in common with the world, in that it is a suffering for principle, a trial of faith, a voluntary preference of suffering in the flesh, to denying Christ in any wise. It is a denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily, a cutting off a right hand, a plucking out a right eye, rather than offend. Oh! how many secret martyrdoms are thus endured unknown to man, but precious to God! Now, I do believe, never was there a time that this doctrine (the connexion between reigning and suffering) would bear less to be overlooked, or required more to be brought forward; for truly, there is such a thin,, as refusing martyrdom, even as much as if we were to turn from the stake. I speak from experience. The Lord wants proofs, not words. After Peter, much distressed, answered, "Lord, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee;" Jesus answered, "prove it." I believe there is such a thing as even the believer's being so allured, so led captive by things of sense, as for even the mighty argument to be overpowered, "If ye love me keep my commandments," — and that many Christians under the conviction that their souls cannot be lost, live in the indulgence of unlawful gratifications, rather than go through the torture of the whole heart being drawn and quartered. But, surely, if the millennial reign of Christ be a particular reward to Him for his sufferings, as "Son of man," "Son of David," distinct from the everlasting glory, those only who have partaken with Him, shall reign with Him. Do tell me what you think of this; for it seems to me that though there are now many saved Christians, there are but few reigning ones, — "rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings, that when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy," — "if ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye, for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you," — "if we die with Him we shall live with Him," — "if we suffer, we shall reign with Him," — "we ourselves glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure, which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God for which ye also suffer," — "to them that overcome" are the royal promises given, "to him will I give power over the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers, even as I received of my Father". "I will give him THE MORNING STAR." "Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown," — "I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God, and I will write upon him my new name," — "him will I grant to sit with me, on MY THRONE," etc. And "if children then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we maybe also glorified together," — "that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made comfortable unto his death, if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of or from the dead." — "Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance that they might be partakers of a better resurrection." When asked by the mother of Zebedee's children, for the highest places for her sons, when they should come into his kingdom, He answers, "Ye know not what ye ask; are you able to drink of my cup, and be baptized with my baptism?" Therefore the disciples rejoiced, that "they were counted worthy to suffer," — "that they were given not only to believe, but to suffer." Do not think from this that I would make light of the all-prevailing principle of Love, and wish to go back to rewards; no. Get the heart, and you have got the man. Love makes drudgery divine. Love cannot help itself, it outruns and leaves law far behind. The question is not what must I do, but what may I do? In grieving its object, love grieves itself. This is the secret spring of the believer's actions, which makes him often pass in the world as an enthusiast. Love will stop at nothing; it takes up its cross and travels after its object over every mountain and hill of difficulty. It was this strengthened Mary, when the soldiers quaked with fear; it was this kept her hovering round the sepulchre, when all the disciples went to their own homes. Love desires all to be partakers of its own bliss; it overleaps human opinion; it runs on with an unceasing cry, "what shall I render for such benefits?" "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." But I mean that all arguments the Lord has used are needful, so dead often is even love, in sleep from continued lullabies of the flesh, and opiates from the devil. What poor empty creatures we are! I am quite out of conceit with myself; such tossings to and fro, such ebbs and flowings, sometimes lifted up to heaven, sometimes sunk into the depths; the soul fainting within because of trouble. Satan is so watchful and well experienced when and where to assault the soul with most effect. He delights to get a soul into heaviness through manifold temptations; and it is not always easy to find patience in the assurance that for these there is a needs be; and though we know each tossing draws us nearer the land of our inheritance, sometimes faith fails when "for many days neither sun nor stars appear, and no small tempest lies upon us," yet how often are these things for the purpose of lightening the ship, or perhaps for the trial of our faith, or for exposure of our little faith. But though the end be useful, the exercise is not less painful; and it is humbling, (therefore it is good), it is humbling, to have the question put home, where is now your faith? Nevertheless, how often in these things our gratitude is called forth, to him whose love and faithfulness have not failed, when our faith and hope have failed, that, though forced to acknowledge "my foot slipped," we can also add, "thy mercy, O Lord, held me up." The gold of the sanctuary must be tried before accepted; and it is thrown into the fire, not because it is of no value, but because it is so precious. What a sad state poor Ireland is in! But we are above every thing of Satan's working. From the secret place of the Most High we can look down and smile; our enemies are all conquered by that spirit in Christ's humanity which dwells in us: so we are more than conquerors. With love ...

Believe me, dear friend,

Affectionately yours,

T. A. P.

Letter 50.

June, 1832.

My precious friend — What excuse can I make to myself for my long silence? I should like much to hear from you all that is in your mind ... told me you wanted my thoughts on the ... tongues. What are my thoughts? Are they the Lord's thoughts? Come, and see. As to these dear creatures, I say not a word; I dare not; but if in any thing I be otherwise minded from his truth, God will reveal even this to me. Yes, let us not be more unbelieving as to that promise than any other; He has undertaken to lead. Let us but keep the eye of faith on His eye. It still appears to me, that we should not expect gifts now. One difficulty with me was Eph. 4. 13; but when I compare it with 1 Cor. 12. 28 verse, I find all miraculous gifts excluded, in the one to continue, while mentioned in the church then at Corinth. It may be objected, He would not give such minute directions concerning what was to cease, yet He does on other subjects; for example, about meat offered to idols. Another difficulty with me was 1 Cor. 13. 10; that which is perfect not being come; that which is in part must continue. But I observe, that tongues are left out, when explaining what was in part (9th verse.) Again, Mark 16. 17. If you turn to I Cor. 15. we find He was seen of five hundred brethren, then of all the apostles. It seems, when He appeared to the twelve was the time which is mentioned in Mark, after which He ascended; and when He appeared to the multitude, was the time mentioned in Matthew, where no mention is made of the miraculous signs. See Luke also, and Acts. He was with the eleven when He ascended. If this is so, may not the miraculous gifts have been given on the introduction of the new dispensation, even as Moses was given power at the introduction of the former, to show it was from God; as our blessed Lord said, in healing the man sick of the palsy, "that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, I say unto thee, arise, take up thy bed and walk," etc. It is not said that more than the apostles received the gift on the day of Pentecost; and does not Paul say, "the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience in signs and wonders and mighty deeds?" He does not mention that these are the signs of ministers, 2 Cor. 6. etc. May it not have been poured out on the apostle to communicate by the laying on his hands? I see but one instance without the laying on of hands, and that is the case of Cornelius, "as on us at the beginning," as a sign from God, and of his having called the Gentiles. Also Paul tells the church of Rome, he desired to go to them to impart to them some spiritual gift, that their faith being strengthened by this, his might be by theirs. Also, see Rom. 15. 18, 19. I do not think history would be satisfactory; we may judge even from the variety of opinions, and different views of things now. But good historians, who have studied with that view, say there is nothing satisfactory. Ireneus says in his days there were miracles, but he only says so from the authority of another, not from having seen them himself. Have you read ...? What do you think of his views? His books on Second Advent and Revelations? Tell me, especially, what you think about all not reigning with Christ? You know there is so much to say to you, there is no use in saying any thing. What do you think of the world? "These things must first come to pass, but the end is not yet." "See that ye be not troubled."

I sometimes long so much to hear from you, but cannot get leisure to sit down to write you a long letter, without neglecting something that seems at the moment quite necessary. We estimate, I believe, very badly, what is, or is not, for God's glory. I, every day, see more and more how His glory is only to be found in simply obedience. When we settle our own plans, we go too much on current opinions; and thus often deprive ourselves of much blessedness, both in our own experience, and the good done. So it was with Peter, when he said "thou shalt not wash my feet." He intended well, was full of love and zeal, and surely the answer given him well suits us. Though we may not see his end, let us simply obey, and what we know not now, we shall hereafter, when the Master Builder has brought forth the head-stone with shoutings, "grace, grace." Soldiers do not question, why this, or why that? The general has the place and end before him: the soldier has only to stand when desired, and go when commanded; let each take his own way, and all is confusion. Oh! how sadly ignorant we are of His will and mind, because so sadly ignorant of Scripture! we work, work, work, all in the dark, till night breaks in upon us, and we find we have been spending our strength for nought. In these times we need to be imbued with truth, instinctively to recoil from error and embrace truth. Either light is so bursting in, or else darkness so thickens, or perhaps both, that there is no time to take this, and take that, to examine; we arc through ignorance at our wits' end, "tossed about with every wind of doctrine." "Teach us." Then give us courage to act, not only in opposition to the opinions of the world, but with all humility, in opposition to the opinions of Christians. You ask me what I have learnt lately. That none but God could know and endure me; that the discovery of me will make even devils stand aghast! it is quite true. He has been leading me in ways I knew not, though I might have known them; and though I am altogether weary of myself, He has not fainted, nor is He discouraged yet. The hottest of all furnaces in which He tries faith, is that heated with our own sins. Oh! what sweet truths He often whispers to His saints from behind clouds! till sometimes they almost dread the thought of ease — yet the ear of faith is too often stunned by the roaring of the thunder, while under the cloud, hears not, till the small voice follows. The path of each is just the kindest and best, that Love and wisdom could devise when sitting in counsel upon it before the world was! He makes our wants occasions by which to enrich us. He seldom calls His child to descend into trial, but we find He has been in it beforehand, therein depositing unsearchable consolations, and we come up enriched, invigorated and purified. May it be so, dear friend, in your experience. He is saying in each providence, "drink, oh! drink abundantly, oh! beloved!"

Yours in much attachment,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Are not the Roman Catholics going on in a very strange way? Prepare us for whatever thou art preparing for us! When in Dublin I went to see for the last time, dear ... his end expressed the same as his life — I have proved, and "I know in whom I have believed." Remember me cordially to your dear husband.

Letter 51.

... I have laid your verse before Mr... and Mr... for what am I to answer it? This is Mr...'s answer (Matthew 5. 19.) "The most desirable thing would be first to discover a fixed determinate meaning of the phrase," the kingdom of heaven," but I fear this is not easy. The two ways of explaining it are: First, as the Christian religion itself, or the spiritual and invisible power by which it is maintained in the heart. Secondly, as a kingdom yet to be set up in the literal acceptation of the word, of glory and power; and now I quite incline myself to the latter signification, and that any other use of it is only this transferred, as we know is commonly done with terms that are of wide and extensive signification. A great part of Christ's office consisted in his introducing a new religion, which religion it was necessary for all to adopt and profess, who looked for entrance into his destined kingdom. There may be some difficulty in interpreting all the particular passages in which the phrase occurs upon this principle, and the passage before us may be an instance of this. But, nevertheless, I conceive that it would be established by any patient examination of the Scriptures on the subject. It may also be difficult to determine, when it is used in its proper, and when in its transferred signification. I will therefore give an interpretation which will meet both. First, he who falls into such misconstruction of Christ's doctrine, as to esteem lightly himself, or to teach others lightly to esteem the precepts of God in the smallest particular, shall have the lowest rank of felicity in Christ's kingdom. Secondly, if it refers to the religion, then I think it means that all they of the kingdom of heaven (whose characteristic it is to cleave fast to the pure law of God without men's glosses) shall have such a teacher in no estimation, shall not seek or follow him. In which sense you see I take the kingdom of heaven, to mean those who have had their heart's eye purified to discern the real nature of the kingdom which is to be set up. I cannot offer you any thing better than this; but one thing is plain, and herein may we be exercising ourselves day and night, to hate every crooked way, and to esteem all his precepts concerning every thing to be right."- So much for Mr... now for Mr...'s "kingdom of heaven in this passage, and every other, means the visible church, that is, all baptized persons!" Now I have filled almost all my paper, and left little to tell you how goodness and mercy have been following me. I feel a great desire to send you a full account of my dear ... : because you ask me, if we had answers to prayer, and because it would express to you, that I believe you are interested in what concerns me. I will write out extracts of some letters for you. When you read them, you will not be surprised that this unexpected, miraculous, satisfactory conversion, and answer to my many prayers, should have filled my heart with joy unspeakable, almost to the exclusion of every other feeling. How could I do any thing else but rejoice when I realized the welcome, he was receiving, when ushered into the midst of the heavenly host, at the very moment they were rejoicing with Jesus, that he, who had been dead, was alive for evermore! I seemed also to hear the music and dancing as he drew near the house. And every step in the affliction was so thoughtful! so very faithful! such distinct answers to prayer! such an evident struggle with Satan for that dear prodigal! but the accuser was disappointed; the body was delivered to him, that the spirit might be saved. His light afflictions worked for him a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. He dealt with him as with Job, diligently covered his poor body with sores, but could not touch his life, till from his Lazarus-body angels carried his spirit into the bosom of the covenant! The good Shepherd laid him on his shoulder, after seeking him out! then causing him to know his voice, he carried him off triumphantly to heaven! We never were so near. Formerly there was a great gulf between. Now we are united in one; a little thin veil of flesh between, which just prevents us hearing, and seeing, one another; but very soon and very easily will it be torn asunder. And can we not wait, dear friend, for that day, since we know in whom we have believed, and are persuaded He is able to keep all we have committed to Him, not to be lost, but to be restored, richly restored, in that day? He is sleeping in Jesus, I dwelling in Jesus; he tasting rivers of pleasure, the streams whereof make me glad. We never understood each other before. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for." He is removed from our family, but received into the family of God, into Jesus "of whom the whole family of heaven and earth is named," — and dirty and soiled as the prodigal was found, "by riotous living," yet is Jesus not ashamed to call him brother, for He has had part with the children, that He might taste death for every man. "He that sanctifieth, and they who are sanctified, being all of one." How refreshing, in the middle of the 5th chapter of Luke, in the middle of so many proofs of his godhead, to find Him withdrawing into the wilderness to pray: he needed to receive, and what an argument against what Satan often puts before us, that because we are engaged about some useful business, some charitable work, we may put off prayer: this is our weakness. I fear you are very unhappy about ... to be separated from him when ill —  how painful! but remember how precious is his body to the Lord; it has been purchased as well as the soul — not his own, not yours, but the property of Jesus. Oh! we have not entered at all yet into the fulness and freeness of His love. Each day teaches that we knew nothing of it the day before, and when we shall come really to behold it, we shall find we knew nothing at all. We come to him with so much suspicion, so much as if He were loath to give, so much as if he were looking for some excuse to get out of His promises. We have no idea of His longings to bless. How He only wants some excuse — how he is the first mover in every mercy. "In ages to come shall appear the exceeding riches of His grace in his kindness towards us in Christ Jesus." Pray on, trust on, very dear sister! Blessed to know the character of Him with whom we have to do. Pitiful, tender, full of compassion, waiting to be gracious, keeping mercy, plenteous redemption. It is enough if there be willingness in us for anything which is of the Father; his very office proclaims "I will." Now let us rise, trust Him for more and more, glorify Him; thus expect largely, He is willing!!! It is not Jesus in humiliation, but Jesus in glory, beseeches us to receive all fulness treasured up in him for us. All we see and admire in him, not a cry we send up to him, but is a prayer from him to us to receive what we ask him to give. There is no sound but comfort in the voice of Jesus. No sovereign act comes spontaneously from Him yet but is mercy, though it may involve judgment to some. He was bent on mercy to Israel when Pharaoh crossed his way; yet how he strove with Pharaoh; how often Pharaoh hardened his own heart, before God did so finally and judicially; yet even then was it but to carry on his designs and determinations of mercy! How a message was sent to him first, then three plagues before they touched him materially, and every plague calculated to bring him to repentance. Lay your dear ... on the lap of prayer, and all is well — see all His providences in the light of the rays which shine from the new Jerusalem, then we see them in their true colour. "Father of lights, in whom is no variableness;" this is his disposition. An act of love may be very kind, but there is no security for the future; but when the disposition is love, unchanging love, all must be loving, because he is love; all must be wise because he is wisdom ... Powers are at work, let us nestle into the bosom of a Father! Ireland may have to be put into a strait waistcoat; the church may go mad; but Jehovah is always in His right mind, always knows what he is about. May He, my dear friend, lock you up in the concave of his shield.

Most affectionately yours,

Theodosia A. Powerscourt.

Letter 52.

Powerscourt.

My dear Mr ...,  I sit down to write to you, not with the hopes of suggesting any comfort, for I know by experience that it is He alone who maketh sore, who can bind up; He alone who wounds, whose hands can make whole. But I cannot help telling you how deeply I feel for you, and ... Few have had more cause to weep for themselves; therefore few ought to be able to weep so sincerely with others, or to tell them of that comfort, whereby they have been comforted of the Lord. Oh, indeed at such moments, this world is a sad, sad, blank. All seems mysterious, confused — desponding. The devil suggests questions and rebellious feelings, which at other times, we should shudder at the very idea of; and we almost say "I do well to be angry." Is this your case, dear Mr...? or can you, through the cloud, so perceive the smile, not only of peace, but of affectionate tender love, in the countenance of that Father who holds the rod, as to be constrained to run into those very arms which chastise. Oh, how blessed you are if enabled to take this comfort and are spared the agonies, I was permitted to feel for a while, when with all the promises I could feel no comfort in believing them to be all mine; but found I could not grasp at them in my own strength, but needed the support of the same spirit as sustained Christ on Calvary. Never, but for the books of Job and Jonah, could I have believed that my tender Father could stand by, see it all, and yet wait to be gracious to such a wretch. But "faithful is he who hath promised:" — "He will not leave you comfortless." It is in faithfulness He has afflicted you. Because you are his son He deals with you as He has dealt with his Son. Even if shut out from sensible communion with Him, so was he, whose only support was, that He could still say, "my God." No affliction at the time seems to be joyous; but wait on the Lord, He will comfort your heart. I know He will. That Comforter, who made up for his bodily presence, is still all-sufficient to make up for your dear child's. If we could but see one glimpse of his love in these afflictive dispensations, if we knew now, as we shall know hereafter, we should indeed say, "Our Jesus has done all things well." No metal on earth is of sufficient value to show how precious to Him is the trial of your faith, as it shall be to his honour and glory, at the great day. Oh! what a great need-be there must have been for this blow, when He could so chastise his beloved ones. Not one pang could be spared; for he sits Himself as a refiner over his fire to temper the heat, and he feels every anguish with you; not like the pity of a friend who never knew what sorrow was, but the sympathy of Him who was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," who experienced all we can possibly feel, that he might be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and succour us when tempted.

Ah, what lessons our dear Lord is now teaching you, lessons which angels can never learn, teaching by heart, which was perhaps only known before by rote. When He takes up the lesson we find none can teach like a parent. How differently we read "all is vanity," — "oh, that I had wings like a dove." How it shows us what must be the odiousness of sin, and the greatness of the Saviour's love to the sinner: ... What hell must be, when this one spark from it is sufficient to make us rejoice for ever in having escaped it. How unspeakable and incomprehensible must be the weight of glory, when the Holy Spirit can call these light afflictions in comparison, not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us. And does it not also teach us to sympathize with our dear Lord, in his sufferings, when we cannot even taste his bitter cup, without foreign strength; while Father, Son, and Holy Ghost seem united in comforting us: — cordials at hand for every woe, in the exceeding great and precious promises wherewith they comfort us. He could say, I looked for some to have pity upon me, but there was none; for comforters, but found none. Alas! I believe there is even in the mind of the believer, something which disposes him to turn to things of time and sense, though his judgment is convinced of their insufficiency to make him happy. One thing after another must be cut off, which binds us to earth, and it may be, the strings of our heart almost broken by the operation, but the Lord is determined to separate us from sin. I do believe He has purchased these afflictions for us, as well as every thing else. Blessed be his name, it is part of his covenant to visit us with the rod, little as we may be worthy of it! May we be enabled to wait for the issue. He says, with power, "give me thine heart." How shall I give up any part of it?

"He breaks our schemes of worldly joy,

That we may seek our all in Him."

And can we quarrel with him for so loving us? He who could say for us, "Reproach hath broken my heart, I am full of heaviness, my tears have been my meat day and night." Oh! that I could say any thing that could be of any comfort; but all I can do is, to try and tell you what He has been to me in my troubles. He seems (if I may so speak) to have watched every opportunity in which I should be most likely to feel my loss, as if it were to fill up the gap with his precious presence. Have I in the rebellion of my heart said, I have no companion, I am left quite alone? He has spoken to me so sweetly in his word, that in spite of myself, I have been forced to say, He is enough. Have I said, I have none to open my mind to? He has led me to, "then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; Thou shalt cry, and He shall say, here am I." — Have I said, I have lost the kernel of all my earthly joys, I have lost my husband? He has led me to, "Thou shalt call me Ishi, and shall call me no more Baali." — Have I said, I am left an unprotected creature in the midst of a wicked world? He has led me to, "Let thy widows trust in me." — Or, a foolish creature with no adviser? He has led me to, "His name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor!" "I will guide thee with mine eye." — Or has it been, I have no prop to lean upon going through this dark howling wilderness? He has shown me where the church is represented "coming up from the wilderness leaning upon her Beloved." And He is the same now, and I doubt not, but He is saying to you, why weepest thou? why is thy heart grieved? am not I better to thee than ten children? I believe it to be his love expressed in a peculiar manner. Peace unspeakable can be enjoyed in the midst of tribulation; the soul is able to realize the joy hereafter, and pant for it, as at no other time; and he is made more acquainted with himself and his Saviour, which I believe is the only real happiness after all.

Then to draw the veil and look at her as she is; your prayers fully answered: Are you regretting that she is not left to know more of the woes of this unhappy world? Was it not for the Lord that you were bringing her up? was it not your first desire for her, that she should be found in his narrow way: and what is that? "Much tribulation." How far she has left you behind: perfect in the praise you are only learning to lisp. A child's death seems to be the triumph of redemption: — left on Satan's kingdom for a short time as if to laugh at his power. He did not think it too much to give his Son to be made miserable for you: will not you give him your child to be made unspeakably happy? You would not wish her back only that she might speak to you, and you to her. Could you form an idea of the reception she met with when ushered into the presence of her Saviour and her God? could you see the wisdom and love which fixed the period of her existence here, you not only would not part with one pang, but would delight in the dispensation. By faith you are enabled to say, "ALL IS WELL"; and if a voice could reach you from the everlasting, would it not re-echo back, "ALL IS WELL"? No longer any distress; not one distracting thought, but peace reigning for ever — love the everlasting theme; — love to Jesus, who is very near also her weeping friends; who walks with you in the furnace; who puts under you his everlasting arms, and, in a few short years, will bring you to meet her, know her, and be happy with her for ever; "so shall ye be ever with the Lord."

I fear I have been tormenting you sadly; pray pardon me; and do not answer me if painful to you. Pray give my love to dear ... Tell her how sincerely I feel with you both; but she has still a husband, and you a wife. Oh! value that treasure while you have it. Do not say you are bereaved, while you have one to live for, to mourn with you, and to whose sorrows you may add by over much grief. May you be long, long spared that unparalleled blessing! May Jesus now lift up on you his countenance, that in his light you may walk through darkness! May sad remembrance not draw your spirit down to earth! May faith pierce the cloud of sorrow, and keep your happy soul above, rejoicing in that bliss which will soon be yours! A little while, and you will behold Jesus, and find him really yours for ever; a little while, and you shall join the just above; a little while, and you shall see how this rough blast of human woe has hastened your little bark to shore. May you know more and more of the value of the balm of Gilead, more than you ever did before, and be able to say,

What thou canst, without thee I am poor;

With thee rich, take what thou wilt!

Yours, dear Mr...

With Christian affection and sympathy,

T. A. Powerscourt.

This came, though veiled in darkness from above,

A dispensation of eternal Love.

He who perceived the dangerous control,

The heart-twined spell, was gaining on thy soul;

Snatch'd from thine arms the dangerous decoy,

To give the brighter hope, and purer joy.

Oh! see how soon the flowers of life decay,

How soon terrestrial pleasures fade away!

This star of comfort, for a moment given,

Just rose on earth, then set to rise in heaven.

Turn back thine eye along the path of life,

View thine own grief, and weariness, and strife;

And say, if that which tempts thee to repine

Be not a happier lot by far than thine.

If death in infancy had laid thee low,

Thou hadst escaped from pain, and sin, and woe.

The years thy soul the path of sorrow trod,

Had all been spent in converse with thy God

And thou hadst shone in yonder cloudless sphere

A seraph there, and not a pilgrim here.

Oh! it is sweet to die, to part from earth, —

And win all heaven, for things of little worth.

Then, sure, thou wouldst not, though thou couldst, awake

The little slumb'rer, for its mother's sake.

No ill can reach it now, it rests above,

Safe in the bosom of celestial love.

Its short, but yet tempestuous way is o'er,

And tears shall trickle down its cheeks no more.

If bitter thoughts and tears in heaven could be,

It is thine infant that should weep for thee!

Letter 53.

Brussels, June 1st, 1830.

... May the Lord's blessing be on this step! and though the path to glory must still be a path of tribulation, yet much may be done to aggravate, much to alleviate, in this tender tie. — But the Lord only knows what is before us all. — Happy to know He is our Shepherd, therefore, happen what may, we may boldly say, I shall not want. —  And what an immensity is contained in that short text! — The greater our necessities, the more his all-sufficiency gains utterance, so as to force us to glory in our necessities. I hope you will write very soon, and tell us every particular about your dear sister. I trust you may be able to say she is better. — Yet, is there any thing in this world you would offer her in exchange, for what you desire to keep her from. Oh no! there is but one concern, are we really on our way to Him? When the curtain shall drop on the dearest friends, forced at length to give up their hold, shall it, indeed, be, "I fear not, because Thou art with me." Though the subject does not seem very appropriate to matrimony, yet, as in the midst of life we are in death, it would be well for us all, at all times, to strive to keep in view this end of our existence, this solemn thought, we have to die. It would be well to try to realise how we shall feel, standing alone with Jesus in that untried, unknown somewhere. There is nothing ugly in death to the believer. I have been lately called in expectation to face him. There is an honesty in his countenance, which while terrifying the ungodly infuses such a holy confidence into the child of God, that he will conduct in safety to Jesus. We are left to the single thought of how we shall meet him. Had we no other motive, what a powerful one is this to cultivate an intimacy with him now, to prove Him; to make Him our secret keeper, our bosom friend; that when we meet, it may be meeting one "whom, not having seen, we have loved!" And having proved His faithfulness all along the paths of righteousness, we may not feel a suspicion of His deserting in the last step of faith. To the believer it cannot be a dark valley; for there is no need of sun or moon where the Lamb is the light thereof, and His rainbow is thrown over it. Oh, what rich feasts "the dogs" may gather from the crumbs which fall from the children's table! — I mean how richly we may partake of promises addressed to the Jews — see Isaiah 43. He has redeemed us, he has called us by name — He has not spared his only Son for us, we are His; so precious in His sight, therefore honourable; and he loves us, has CREATED us for His glory, therefore to us also He says, "fear not;" again, "fear not, for I am with, thee." What shall we be called to this year? to pass through the water, to wet our feet with the uncomfortable cares, perplexities, disappointments of this life: fear not Israel! Prince with God! I am with thee, the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel (thy property,) thy Saviour — what have we then to fear? Only remember all through the year, "I am with you"...

Letter 54.

Brussels, Feb. 23, 1830.

... Blessed portion her's! The crown without the cross! Oh, does it not make us love that Saviour who extracted all the bitter, and left her only a cup of love? Dear ... you do not, you cannot wish she had staid in such a world (that you might look at her, and talk to her,) where pure happiness is only to be found in the ocean of tribulation, through which you now all wade — "She came to show how sweet a flower in Paradise would blow." — Now she is safely locked up in the casket of her God, to he brought forth when he shall open his jewels. Ah! I have not lived in this world many more years than she has; and I can tell you God meant what he said, when He gave one promise for this world —  "Much tribulation." There is a depth of meaning when "The Truth" speaks, which we must learn by deep experience — the meaning of words is only taught in the school of affliction. We think it worth travelling the path of sorrow only for the earnest of what remains for her: the earnest alone is far, far beyond all your fondest desires could have heaped upon her. Treasure up these choice moments, when enlightened by the furnace. The vanity is made legible, which the finger of God has imprinted on all below. How near it brings another world, that one of ourselves, brought up with you, exchanging with you every desire and interest, should now be there. The object is only removed from earth to heaven round which your affections were entwined, that your hearts may be drawn up, instead of downwards. Yes! we need these realities to make us real. We are believers in profession; we are atheists in lives. We must live for eternity, we must be what we seem to be! While our Bridegroom tarries, we either slumber in stupidity, or dream in sleep the greatest nonsense possible, even of earthly happiness; while our very disappointment in not finding it, testifies to our unbelief. We need continually to be thus roused, that casting off our works of darkness we may at the Bridegroom's call, be found clothed in light.

"We've no abiding city here,

Then let us live as pilgrims do;

Let not this world our rest appear,

But let us haste from all below."

One has said, "they pass best over the world who trip over it quickly, for it is but a bog. If we stop, we sink."...

Dear, dear Mr... He has indeed suffered much. Ah! but he is now privileged in being called before he leaves Satan's kingdom to exhibit in living words, before those to whom he has long recommended his Lord, that there is in him a spring of consolation, the world knows nothing of? It was seeing this in his mother that first arrested the great Cecil in his career of infidelity. Lying one night in bed, he was contemplating the case of his mother. "I see (said he within himself ) two unquestionable facts. First, my mother is greatly afflicted, in circumstances, body, and mind; and yet I see she cheerfully bears up under all, by the support she derives from constantly retiring to her closet and her Bible. Secondly, that she has a secret spring of comfort, of which I know nothing; while I who give an unbounded loose to my appetites, and seek pleasure by every means, seldom or never find it. If, however, there is any such secret in religion, why may not I attain it, as well as my mother? I will immediately seek it of God." He instantly rose, and began to pray. May he be given faith, to glorify his faithful God in the fires. May not his excess of grief bring up a false report of Him, who has answered so tenderly his many years' prayers, and even given him to hear it from her own mouth, — yet a little, and he shall see how blessed she is! How preferable to have her safely locked up in a bosom of love, he has proved, he can trust, before him, to leaving her in a world of woe and temptation after him. It is no light thing to profess love to a "jealous God," — It shall be tried, because much more precious than gold that perisheth. He vouchsafes to tell us the trial shall be found to His praise, honour and glory, at his appearing; needful to Him; needful to us! Sometimes it is purified in the bleeding of another's heart. We can talk, we can suffer, we can do, we can die; but one thing, says Christ, thou lackest — prove me paramount to your dearest idol. — How you must miss her in every turn, in every thing you do — but the end of all things is at hand! Let faith take her stand on Mount Zion, and look on present things with a retrospective view. — A hill looks different from the top and bottom. — Do not look at the way — you know Him who has engaged to carry you through; you shall go from strength to strength. —  The furnace shall be heated, proportioned to your faith; but He is the refiner, who swept the house, sought out and rejoiced over his bit of gold; you shall not be lost, for His name is in you. He sends you word, "Behold I come quickly." Let hope spread out the wing of contemplation, fly over all between, anticipate your meeting with your betrothed husband, and your re-union with the family of God! so that joy and sorrow may be alike swallowed up in the rejoicing of hope. — No regret in that wedding — nothing but joy. Oh! when He sets about blessing, He shall satisfy, for He blesses like a God — you shall be satisfied with him: He shall be satisfied with you, for the day of the gladness of his heart was the day of his espousal to his church. (Can. 3. 2.) — You shall enter into the joy of your Lord, satisfied with the way you have been brought — satisfied with the provision of your Father's house — satisfied with his likeness in yourself. Shall not the first words this family shall express one to the other be, "Was it not worth all." — "It was a true report." — "The half was not told." He has said all possible to raise our expectation to the highest. — Surely it is not like him to put us off with a trifle. "Oh, how great is the goodness thou hast laid up, etc." Our universal song, "Worthy the Lamb" — our particular song, "Our Jesus hath done all things well." Is this indeed ours, and will you lament? — is this your dear sister's, and will you repine? Oh no! let the rest of your life be one expression of gratitude for his having snatched one so loved from the very jaw of the lion — for having translated her from the kingdom of darkness, into the kingdom of God's own Son — for having chosen her in him before the foundation of the world — for having written her name in the Book of Life — for having dissipated every doubt of her peace in Jesus — for having so gently carried his lamb- in his bosom — for having followed her with goodness and mercy through the valley, till safely housed in her Father's home. Whether we sleep or wake, we live together with Him; we lie upon the same bosom, and you shall find it filled with love. When experiencing his sweetness, let it remind you what He must be to her; let every tear whisper "Faithful is He who promised." Look at your dear father's sorrow and remember, He who holds the rod has said, "As a father pitieth his children, so He pitieth you." Time is so short, see how short, do not spend the little moment in only lamentation: you are called to glorify your God in a manner you shall not be able to do, all through eternity. The morning cometh! do not sleep as do others! Be a light, by holding forth the Word of Truth; let it be legible in you, "Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth." I do not attempt to express what I feel for dear ... and all; that would be poor comfort; but I have reminded One of you all, who needs no reminding; who is peculiarly with you at this moment — a present help in time of trouble. He draws near in his own time, with consolation which He alone can give. "In your afflictions He is afflicted" — enter into this truth, till it shall spread abroad in your heart a peace passing understanding...

Letter 55.

Bushy, October 1835.

... I trust this may be a fresh link to heaven, being received from heaven; if not, it will not be his fault, for he intends blessing, full blessing in all his gifts. Any thing let down in the white sheet to us, cleansed of God, a resurrection gift, is no more common or unclean, if we have grace to receive it from heaven instead of earth. How happy is Jesus, rejoicing in the joy of his people; He learnt to weep with those that weep; that He might be able fully to rejoice with those that rejoice. So should we, his people. If we had more of church feeling, less of individual feeling, the joy of each would make us more happy than the one rejoicing. How happy must we then be! and Jesus loves to see us happy. He sorrowed, that we might rejoice; it is the best recompense we can give Him, for what could He have done more for us than he did? He came, that we might have life! He spoke, that our joy might be full! We are not united to a broken heart, but to a heart which has been broken, full of the tenderest sympathies; but every sympathy filled with life. He stood as the recipient of death — He learned the word thoroughly, and now must have all the glory. Every thing may be to us the communion of the body of Christ, on which we may feed by faith with thanksgiving. May you find it so in your dear little one! To every thing there was a meat offering, to be ate by the holy priest in the holy place, because most holy; to them belonged every dedicated thing. It is a difficult lesson to learn, but a great one to have learnt — that the fear is, not our loving earthly objects too much, but of loving them wrongly; that God's object is not to destroy the affections, but to direct them, as Mr... remarked. The poisoned pottage is a description of the natural heart of man: the moment the prophet poured in the meal, it is, "pour forth, there is no harm in the pot." The moment the relation between the heart of God and man is perfected, the moment the handful of meal is thrown into the heart of the saint, the command of God is to pour forth all these relations. There is a master principle put into these relations which governs them; there is not less power in them, but a new will in them; our affections ascend through the heart of Jesus; the heart of Jesus is a filial heart, and when our affections are lodged in this heart, they become filial also; there is but one will, all one. I think I have remarked that in entering on a Christian life we think much of how we believe, how we do, how we suffer, but we take love as an easy enjoyment. Now it seems to me, however difficult to believe, to labour, or to suffer, nothing is so difficult as to learn to love. Nothing so dangerous as to love wrongly. Nothing will through our course give us so much suffering, because it is heaven, which knows no law, but the spirit of God let loose on earth. It is life in close contact with death. Dear ... open wide your hearts to this fresh stream from heaven, keep it pure, that there may be a continual reflection of love, to the gladdening the heart of him, who was joyless, the man of sorrows, that you might receive your little one, and love him without fear ... today while it is called today labour, exhort one another, be up and doing — tomorrow we shall see him! and all his saints with him. No yesterday, but the cross of Jesus; no tomorrow but glory; no today but Christ, the day of Salvation! To me to live is Christ, may it be so with us all. I believe I desire nothing else but to be used as He will for his glory. I know that I desire to desire nothing else; but oh our will, our will so often pretends to be his, there is so much to learn in that verse, applied to ourselves "when thou wast young", when first setting out "we gird ourselves, and walk where we will", we are long before we learn to stretch forth our hands, (so expressive of leaving ourselves to another, ) and let him gird us, and carry us where we would not...

Letter 56.

July 16th, 1833.

My dear Mr ..., Oh, what a relief! when He will appear on the heavenly hill! to set all in order! with the same delight and readiness, as hitherto He has shown in his work of redemption. Love still moves quickly towards its object; runs while yet a great way off; hastens to heal the backslider; to receive graciously, to love freely! with every temptation, makes a way to escape; while yet praying, hears; is a very present help in trouble; hides but for a little moment; longs after us, (Phil. 1. 8.) With the same alacrity He is coming; not a moment will He delay beyond the appointed time! If love could say of suffering, "It is my meat, and drink," for the joy set before him, what a joy He will have in coming to receive his own "to himself, that where He is, there may they be also." No sooner shall the strong voice, and mighty cry be heard, "Babylon is fallen, is fallen," than shall follow another cry from heaven — "come out of her my people." He waits for the last signal, when, immediately after the tribulation, shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven; when the last elect shall have been born into the world, and fitted for glory, He will be found ready; and as though too impatient to wait till earth is prepared for his reception, we shall be "caught up to meet him in the air." He remembers He has jewels in Babylon; He will gather them for his crown when about to visit the earth as King. He will come — He will not tarry — to welcome his bride; for his last message to her, which she treasures, and ever carries in her bosom, was, "behold, I come quickly!" "Make haste then my Beloved, and be thou like unto a roe, and to a young hart, upon the mountains of Spices." Prophecy alone can keep us in impatient patience, even in the spirit of Lot. Indifference to the evil was not ready — his children had to be dragged out, and he waiting for them. A mixture in the evil is not ready — some of his children were left behind. A heart in the evil is not ready — his wife looked behind. It must be a spirit vexed with surrounding ungodliness. May we be among the sighers and criers, not among such as love to have it so. The more God has lost his witness in the world, through his people's unfaithfulness, the more, surely, we should labour individually, to let his truth shine out in us. May He, in order to this, take care of his little precious seed, sown in the barren soil of our hearts, all nigh choked! May He descend into this, his conservatory, and in the stillness and seclusion of it, with all his own tenderness and skill, root up every weed, and dress about his lovely exotics, which He brought from heaven to earth, even all the graces of his Spirit. May He cause them quickly to burst forth in splendid bloom, and rich verdure, to bless and praise him. Dear Mr... do not cease to pray for the most needy of the Lord's saints. I have written too much about myself. It is doing to you, as I should like to be done by. Please write without delay...

Very affectionately, yours,

T. A. P.

Letter 57.

Lough Bray, November 26, 1833.

... You see, much loved brother in the Lord, what an unconquerable correspondent I am; but you know we shall very soon meet, never to part again. This is our privileged time of labour, and only what may be considered in that light is our lawful occupation; but this is among the labours of love, at least should be, for I think we should have a conscience neither to speak in vain, nor write in vain. I wish you were, indeed, coming over to us. Much as I have written to you, I do not feel to know much of your internal man, either your outward or inward exercises. Do write me a history of your life from the beginning to your present trials, and joys, and blessings from without. Then write and tell me all your inward experiences from the beginning, and whether now you are a happy believer; if you have unclouded faith and realizing hope; whether the joy of the Lord is your strength. And do not leave out little things, because, it is such things show me your confidence in my interest in and affection for you. I feel it is for this reason, that the Lord loves us to take our little things to him. I like to be told all that concerns, even down to the kitchen maid, and stable boy; for what are we here but to suffer one with another, even now in a sense to judge the world, or to be the communicator of blessings to the world from above. Will Jesus strengthen? It is mostly through a saint. — Will He comfort? It is through a saint. —  Will He sympathize? Again it will be usually through a saint. We are losers, when in our pride we refuse to be dependant one upon another. Dependance is the Christian's proper position, therefore, for his happiness; and it was, no doubt, a new pleasure Jesus learnt, as a creature, both dependance on the Father, so beautifully shown throughout, and dependance on his creatures. They ministered to him, He looked for pity from them, (the most humiliating thing we can receive). Oh! if we lived as members of Christ, and members one of another, each saint would discover a prop in his fellow saint. Such seemed his intention in a church. — His wisdom saw that our necessities so required, and, therefore, provided — his thoughts towards us being mercy and love; but we marred his intention; nevertheless, is it not beautiful to see, even in our wants, how well He understands us; it brings the conviction, that when He shall set about satisfying, how well He will understand it. "When I awake in his likeness, I shall be satisfied." No, nothing else will ever do. We have by faith seen the glory of our risen Lord. Nothing can satisfy us but resurrection. To the end, we go on in some shape believing Satan's lie, that we can find good here in its present state — but the thing is impossible. It must be but repeated lessons of disappointment, because Satan has defaced our God from his creation, therefore in it destroyed our enjoyment. Nothing but resurrection is worthy the gift of a God, or worthy for us to receive — being risen, united with Jesus in his resurrection. The best testimony we can give Satan that the whole is ours by right and title, is to receive no part from him. To refuse to have any thing to say to it, till we receive it redeemed from its lawful King, who has paid the redemption price. The things of the world and the things of the kingdom must be for ever and absolutely distinct. One from beneath, the other from above; one of Satan, the god of this world, the other of the Father, the reward he has prepared for his Son, proportioned to his sense of merit, in the work of his Son, risen Lord of a risen creation. For a little moment, even while merged in the curse, his works now appear often lovely, but quickly are we reminded that Satan rules. Our proper position is, therefore, as those that wait till the manifestation of the sons of God, when creation shall put on its beautiful garments, its resurrection robes, its robes of glory, to welcome its King of kings. Well for us, as little as possible to know any thing after the flesh; for this world's strength is defiance of omnipotence — its wealth, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life: —  its wisdom, rejection of Him who was the whole wisdom of God: — its affections, friendship with the world which is enmity with God: — its glory, having succeeded in turning out of it the Prince of life. Life rejected, life turned out, — its glory! it is nothing but a sepulchre, death, and all comprehended in that awful word; a beautiful ruin that attracts the eye, but when we look in, — the sepulchre of Jesus. — But our hope!!! had any of the princes of this world known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory; destruction and death have only heard the fame thereof with their ears. Blessed thought! There is nothing which belongs more to the resurrection, than hope; therefore, Satan so fights against the second advent. "Begotten again to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." It is in the power of this hope, which is the power of the resurrection, that we can alone mount up with wings as eagles, be dissociated from all around, and stand aloof from all below. I think this truth also, brings strongly to the mind now, that every good gift is from above, and comes down to us from the Father of lights, it is "wisdom from above" — new will, new affections, new taste, new understanding, not the old sanctified. May we, dear brother and friend, have power to digest these truths, so that health and strength may be by them diffused through our spiritual system — may we be as the living among the dead, maintaining his right and his cause in the hour of his rejection... I am writing, as you see, not from Powerscourt, but from Lough Bray, a little fishing cottage over a lake embraced in high mountains, of majestic, threatening appearance, seeming to defy the approach of any evil to the children of the Most High. The invisible things of God, even his eternal power and God-head, are clearly seen from the creation. To us it has a voice, i.e. "it is all yours," all this majesty and greatness; for, as the mountains stand about the lake, even so mercy embraceth us on every side. It is a lone spot, three miles from Powerscourt, up the Glenchree mountains, where I used to visit the Roman Catholics; our nearest neighbour is the priest. People who judge only by sense, say, we shall be shut up by snow and starved, not able to get help in illness, — that we shall die of cold, inflammations, etc. — be murdered by the Roman Catholics, — but I have an answer for all, "Let thy widows trust in me ... When Jesus saw the multitude following Him, he turned and said," He that forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple." Yes, the true disciples must take the shame of the many professors. We know our hearts to be separated from these trifles; therefore we think the outward expression of it of little moment; but did we declare plainly that our kingdom is not from hence, that we seek a city, so many whose hearts are not separated, would at least count the cost. "They seek to carpet the way to heaven." It is therefore I have taken a cottage in the neighbourhood, to make the principle more clear. But it is all His doing; I held back as long as I could; I said, impossible; but He pushed me to it, shut me up to it, then made darkness light before me, crooked things straight, and do you think He will fail me? "They shall receive a hundred fold more in this life, and in the world to come."

It is a foolish thing to resist conscience, better to do an hundred other foolish things, for they at least express our sincere desire to the Lord to follow Him, at any cost; and he that does his will shall know of his doctrine, while the resisting of conscience, brings us to a stand still.

Letter 58.

My dear brother in the Lord, — Which is most wonderful, for a moving mass of sin to be accounted holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, or for one who knew no sin, to be treated as a mass of sin? Is it really so? Has the offended really endured the infliction of the law for the offender? Has the infinite space between God and the sinner been filled by himself? Has He really taken bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, to enable Him to stand in the gap? and not only so, but does he now put himself into the attitude of a beggar to implore sinners to be reconciled to Him? Can earth show a more wonderful a more stupendous mystery? Yes. The sinner refusing to be reconciled!! Hear, oh heavens! and give ear, oh earth! and learn the manifold wisdom of God, in his tender compassion. Yet what an unspeakable blessing, that all doubt of willingness lies on our side. No danger of his pleading with his great power against any who come, be they ever so far off. Though Ethiopia but stretch forth her hand, still He will in no wise cast out. Though we go, have gone, and do go, to the furthest boundary of sin, sorrow, remorse, anguish of spirit, hardness of heart, unbelief, ingratitude, backsliding, still it is written, "He is able to save to the — uttermost — uttermost — ALL that come unto God by him." Yes, we are precious to him; He has valued us at the price of his own precious blood. We carry about in our body as a casket, a pearl of great price to Jesus, one of the pearls belonging to his crown of glory. Let us treasure it, let us not trifle with it, let us not cast that to swine, which is to be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, to make up a royal diadem in the hand of our God. Yet among all the wonderful truths which are almost too good to be believed, the one we first mentioned seems to me the most so. —  That inasmuch as our surety has been treated as we deserve, so are we altogether as our surety deserves; that as God loves Christ, so he loves us; that in the court of justice we are one and the same, we shall be argued about, as though we had done and suffered all He has. Do we ask, how much are we one with the second Adam? just as much as we are one with the first. Let us allow ourselves the full strength of this belief, so that every recollection we are forced to of our oneness with the first Adam, may remind how closely we are united to the second. It is no more with us, is God angry with me? But is He angry with his Son? Not, — shall he condemn me? But shall he condemn my surety? Not, —  shall any abomination, and ingratitude pluck me out of his hand? but shall it pluck Jesus? Surely that robe is sufficient to hide us altogether, which was made to his dimensions. How out of character for the believer to take delight or interest in that to which we are dead, "how shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein?" "reckon yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ;" and being "risen with Christ, let us seek those things which are above where Christ sitteth." The bustle of life should be no more to us than the buzzing of flies round a corpse. Since the Father reckons us one with his Son in his death, let us reckon ourselves one with him in our life; one in what he loves, what he desires, what he abhors. In return for a love many waters cannot quench, all He asks, is "love." Oh! may we ever remember that though we give all our substance, time, talent, any thing, and yet keep our hearts for idols, it will be utterly condemned. Now it is time to thank you for your three welcome letters. It is pleasant to write to one who proves he values a letter. I suppose Mr... told you he left us at P... at least if you touched on so insignificant a subject: and gave you a lesson that while man proposes, God executes; that while the lot is thrown into the lap, the whole disposal thereof is of the Lord. Sweet to lie passive in his hands, and know no will but his. We are now settled at ... ready to receive you when you come. I wish we were able to offer you a bed, but the only house we could get, is a little nut-shell, a nice little baby-house, very clean and new. You will have to come side-ways through the hall, and up the stairs. The three drawing-rooms would all go into the one in ... the fog of London is as stupefying, as the wind of Edinburgh is bracing. If you do not make haste, I shall be in a stupefaction before you come.

My purpose is to hear Mr. Howels, Sunday morning and evening, and Mr. Wilkinson, Tuesday morning.

Letter 59.

London, May 8th, 1833.

... I am now going to allow myself the pleasure of writing to you, dear and kind friend in Jesus. We do not communicate much on the way; we shall have more to tell at the end — a joyful wondrous story, such as angels love to hear. — Then shall all our trials of faith be to His honour and glory! What intense interest, therefore, must be each trial of faith to the invisible world. Many are our expressions of love to our God, and most valuable to him are those expressions; but He is a jealous God, words are not sufficient. Again and again, the anxious enquiry comes, "lovest thou me more than these?" Till tried, we know not how little faith we have. Faith must be put in the scales with something very near our hearts — yes, with what is nearest, for it still must be "more than these." The furnace must be heated in proportion to the increase of our faith. Is it, because God willingly afflicts? No, but the trial of faith strengthens; faith consumes its dross. The trial is precious to God — more precious than gold, because it shall endure. It is his riches, his treasure, precious to him is it to have proof from his child —  "Lord thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee." Is not every painful providence a messenger direct from the throne to our hearts — a ministering spirit sent forth to the heirs of salvation? It brings this message — now I will put home the question in a way that shall be felt. Are we ready to say, I could have borne any thing but this? Then let us remember the greatest compliment God can pay us, is to heat the furnace to the utmost. He is, in fact, then saying, "great is thy faith." Little furnaces are for little faith; and is not trial valuable, even to earthly affection? Do we not seize every opportunity to give proof to expressions of love? Oh! let us count the cost when we say, we believe. It is a word of deep meaning in the dictionary of God. Paul's belief was ready to do, but what was the answer, "Thou shall see what great things thou shall suffer for my name sake." It has been so from the beginning. We would not be without that trial of which all the church have been partakers. We would not that He should be so indifferent to our love, as never to question us about it, or desire an evidence of it. Does He not ponder each? He takes all into consideration. What would be felt in one, would not in another. Nevertheless, while it must be felt, He pledges his faithfulness, that with each temptation He will make a way of escape, that we may be able to bear it. He will never try us above what we are able to bear. Though it may seem that we are shut up on every side, He knows how to deliver! What a trial to Isaiah, when sent to tell the people of Israel, that their hearts should be made fat, their ears heavy, and their eyes shut, lest they should be converted and healed! What a trial to Abraham to go out of his country and from his kindred, and come into a strange land, not knowing whither He went! What a trial to Noah, to be mocked and regarded as a fool while building the ark, according to the command of the Lord! How Isaac's faith was proved in Jacob; how Jacob's was in Joseph; how Moses' was in choosing rather to suffer affliction, esteeming the reproach of Christ great riches. What a trial to forsake Egypt under the wrath of the king! When we seek to place ourselves in the condition of each of these sufferers, and consider every accompanying feeling, how it makes our trials say to us, "Oh! ye of little faith!" Gideon! Barak! Samson! Jephtha! David! Samuel! — Yet out of weakness were they made strong! Words quickly said, but what suffering! — in "mockings, scourgings, bonds, stoned, sawn asunder, tempted, slain with the sword, wandered about in sheep's skins and goat's skins, destitute, afflicted, tormented!'' Truly, "of whom the world was not worthy." Oh! what meagre Christians! Should we draw back if such were our prospects? May He not say, where is your faith? Let us love the prospect, clasp it to our bosom, as a token of his love. When standing as we expect, among the great multitude escaped out of great tribulation, would we be found alone without this family particularity? Does it not distinctly pronounce that name which includes all blessedness — "my Son." When Abraham shall tell of his Isaac; Isaac, of his Jacob; Jacob, of his Joseph; David, of his Absalom; Jeremiah, of his dungeon; Peter, of his stripes; John, of his banishment; Paul, of his perils, wearinesses, watchings, hunger; his thorn in the flesh; his buffetings of Satan: shall we be content to have nothing to bring forward to his praise, honour, and glory? for it shall not be forgotten, God is not unrighteous to forget our love for him. Hezekiah was left of God to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart. — God let the nations loose against Israel to prove them. — He allowed false prophets among them to prove them. — He sent them manna to prove them — brought them to the waters of Marah to prove them. — He led them forty years in the wilderness to prove them — to know what was in their heart; for while "the fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold, it is the Lord that trieth the hearts." And "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation." Let us then, dear brother, welcome every trial. In them we shall prove our God. How full of compassion his approaches at such seasons! He comes with all the tenderness of one who knew that he was about to wound a heart he loved. Have you ever marked his gentleness when bringing a painful message? How He usually calls by name, Abraham, Abraham — Moses, Moses. He tells us why I have called you by name, because you arc mine. His own sheep "He calls by name." As many as He loves he rebukes, but He would have us understand it to be a rebuke of love. Now we arc "a spectacle to angels and devils;" let us not bring up a false report of our God. — Let it be seen that "tribulation worketh patience, patience experience, experience hope;" yea, that we can "glory in tribulation," for "we know the end of the Lord, very pitiful, and of tender mercy" — let us trust him without an explanation. When let behind the scenes in the case of Job, how we feel a desire that Satan should be disappointed. — Then let us glorify the Lord in the fires. — Satan will be as disappointed in us, for Job was not a whit more beloved. Let Jesus' "strength be made perfect in weakness," it is the glory of this dispensation. Abraham's faith has been to God's glory; the will was accepted as the deed. Heb. 11. 17; James 2. 21. We may rest assured, that the day is coming when the bitterest dealings shall be to us the sweetest. Every trial of faith in Hebrews 11. was some affliction. Let us accept tribulation as the boon we are most unworthy of. If we were without tribulation, of which all are partakers, then were we not children. Rather let us bless him — Oh, let us bless him, that He has not pronounced that which would be indeed the desert of our rebellious hearts. — "Let them alone." But why do I write so to you. I hope you are in no trouble. — What is it? for I asked the Lord to let me write that, which would be just what you needed: and I have written this. — Ah! if you need it not now, you have needed it, and you will, if you stay long in this world of sin.

I have been looking at Abraham's trial of faith; it must be to us important to dwell on, as it is proposed as the pattern of faith to the end of time. —  If to be the pattern, God must have sought for the most trying proof; and in it, does not God seem to say, behold my love: for God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, etc. How touchingly this same trial is described in Judges 11. 30, etc. How we read, "in this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world:" have we not in this a proof, that the sacrifice of God in slaying his Son, (to speak after the manner of men,) was the utmost pang the Divine mind could devise; for it was the one chosen as a pattern of faith to the end of time. God would thus, it seems, sustain us in all our minor trials, by an apprehension of his own love embodied in that of Abraham, by setting him up before us as the Father of the faithful, and pattern of faith. He would check our doubts, of his willingness with his only Son to give all things, seeing that in Abraham not sparing his beloved Isaac, He asked no more: while he would also draw out our love and gratitude, that our requirement is not our first-born, for our transgression; that having been done for us at an expense of love set forth in Abraham, we have only, to "LOVE MERCY, and to walk humbly with our God!"

The fire was in the father's hand, and also the knife, when to Calvary they went both together. The transaction was all between these stupendous acts fulfilling, while foolish man gazed on with unmeaning gaze. Blessed to have such a wise, as well as loving God to undertake for us. Let us lay aside every weight, asking no questions, looking at no consequences; let not unbelief say, how shall I stand the trying day! but let us "run with patience the race SET before us, looking unto Jesus." It may be a difficult race; let us be bent on it; if faint, yet pursuing; let us lay aside, cast on His omnipotent shoulder, every hindrance, that might impede our progress, or make our bold resolute willingness falter. We often forget that it is the race of faith we are running. We ought to appear deranged to the by-stander, for to the mere looker-on, the cross is "foolishness." Every weight of sense must be put out of the way; I believe that holy bold resolution in this, will do much in keeping us steady. Often we see nets spread before us in our path, and though it is written, "in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird," yet so does man excel in folly even the beasts of the field, and birds of the air, so infatuated, that we run into our favourite snares with our eyes open, though perhaps determining not to be held, but to struggle out of them; present weakness not being sufficient to correct confidence in future strength; till our feet are entangled, our race impeded, and we discover too late, that the God of strength has refused to accompany us into the snare, has been left behind, and we stand alone against the enemy. Oh! that we were wise. Oh! that we had grace to be resolute to turn aside from pits, into which our weakness has fallen again and again, and our faith has well-nigh been drowned. — The wise man speaking of temptation, (which is true of all temptation,) says, "avoid it, pass it not by, turn from it and pass away," how wise not to parley with the old serpent, for his arguments are most ingenious; to resist, or else flee from him. May we examine ourselves in this. May we see to it, that nothing impedes our race, weakens our faith, or prevents our obedience. We have before us the majesty of that love which set its face stedfastly to go to Jerusalem, in perfect acquiescence to the will of the Father. Let us be honest with ourselves and in earnest with God. Let us treasure no Babylonish garment however goodly. Let us sanctify ourselves, for if there be an accursed thing hid in our hearts, we shall not be able to stand in the day of trial; we lose much time in our progress by needing such repeated lessons on each truth. When we should have been wise, we are still found fools. He has said, whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, he cannot be my disciple. We are following a crucified one!

We remain here till the end of May — further I see not. Oh! for simplicity in discovering His will, and submissiveness in following. This is a lesson some are long in learning, I have been all my life talking of it, but always following my own will except his was mine...

Letter 60.

Lough Bray, September, 1834.

My beloved friend. — It has not been indeed because of the want of a heart to write, that I have not done so long since — but my father, at whose bidding I desire to move, did not say go, till this moment, and you know you would not hear from me but as his scribe. God grant me thy words, and thy thoughts, that this may be to us both, an ordinance of thine own! I have with gratitude heard good accounts of your dear ... from different quarters, which I shall rejoice to have confirmed by your own hand. You know one of the explanations of his OWN name is, "keeping mercy." -

"Thou alone couldst silent stand,

And wait to show thy love."

I so feel for our young people now. I feel more for my ... than your ... It was wisely ordered that through persecution and tribulation we should enter the kingdom. They have the misfortune of seeing Christianity in their parents and friends, which causes them to set out with a low standard. Oh! I feel this; how different our conversation, from what we would that they should consider the Christian's calling! so that the very respect and esteem, it is desirable that they should entertain for us, is against their whole future life; and inasmuch as it is below, and different from, the way in which we set out, so in proportion will their Christianity in some years be below ours. This, with many other things, shows me that even in this relationship we must be resigned to decrease, and let the Lord be all! We often think it is for their good, and the Lord's glory, that we desire to be identified in their minds with the gospel, but our very disappointment when we fail, proves it to be secretly a desire of obtaining for ourselves that worship which is its due and effect. I desire to be willing they should be able to discover both grace, and nature, in me, that my inconsistency may not detract from its glory; and I desire also to be able, now that they have come to full reason, and the Lord has taken them up, I trust, to let go my dominion and too great anxiety over them, and so prove that not for myself, but for Him, I have watched over them. How difficult it is, dear friend, to be only for Him in this world, especially in our service towards them we call our own. We are ready to be interested even for the Lord's work, because the bit he has given us, instead of, because His. Still self, self — we need a heart large enough to embrace the universe, yet contracted enough to lend all its energies and sympathies to each case, "diligently to follow every good work," elastic hearts! ... I believe you expected I was to have more leisure up here, than at ... quite the contrary, I never had so little leisure or time for communion, in my life! not because of the change of place, but more from the loss of ... besides, new situations bring new duties and new trials.

"Joy to find in every station

Something still to do or bear."

Yet never once have I regretted the step I took, but find new, unlooked-for mercies every turn. In my former situation were large trials to meet, large temptations, needing large supplies of grace, opportunities to draw these supplies; my work, when coming down from Him, more spiritual and direct, more out of the reach of the little foxes that spoil the vines, less intercourse, except spiritual, with others. I feel that formerly there was in me but an outline of the image of Christ, now He would fill it up with the graces of the Spirit; He would, but I find when he demands their use, I have none of them. Blessed be his name for bringing me into circumstances to draw them out! He saw I desired to come down, and he will do it; his own work shall be to humble — we need no more time for communion than He allows, he can be learnt in the most servile works, and the most common providences, as much as in the word, if we have eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to understand, which is also needed for the word. Oh! it is not the word, but his blessing, which is the guide and teacher of the heart, and happiness comes not from our measure of knowledge, but from our measure of subjection — to live in his presence "in the heavenlies," is one lesson, but to find his presence in every duty, to live on Him in them, is a further lesson; we are apt to look with panting heart for the time of communion, as if our retired time was the time of communion, but to walk with God is to dwell in communion, to have the soul stayed on Him. I have also been learning that it is an abiding sense of weakness which is our safeguard, not strength even from above; and many a tumble we shall have, before we have an abiding sense of weakness, and yet we need the Spirit of power to meet the fiery darts of the wicked one, a shield from which they will rebound. The Lord will be prevailed with, but it must be through wrestling; poor Jacob, his trials began from the moment he received the blessing. I am indeed the most inexcusable of all creatures, if I am not thankful and contented, as you would say, could you see ... so much for self. Am I ever to see you here? The 25th of this month our time is up here; I have not yet ascertained whether it be the Lord's will for us to continue yet some months; if He has nothing for us to do, I pray not; though it is just beginning to be very lovely. The questions you asked me, I take for granted you have long since answered to yourself. You have, no doubt, heard of dear ... happy removal — she sleeps in Jesus, and though he suffers severely, was able to give her up with outstretched arms. I hope you enjoy more every day, even as I trust I do, the promises handed down to us, through the experience of Christ in the psalms, He seems to lay open his heart filled with our necessities, that out of his experience, we may draw of his fulness. Our promises having lighted upon his head, they descend to the skirts of his garments, we have thus not only the word, but the example of his faithfulness in our own every case, whatever it may be; and this seems the great argument used by our Lord throughout them, as his voice in the church, — "In the world ye shall have tribulation, but I HAVE OVERCOME"; for example, in the 3rd Psalm, the believer cries, "how are they increased that trouble me?" And Jesus answers; "I cried, and he heard me out of his holy hill." Again, he says, "ten thousand of the people, have set themselves against me round about;" Jesus says, "arise, save, for thou hast smitten mine enemies," etc. Again, the body lies down to rest; Jesus says, "Fear not, I awaked, for the Lord sustained me." In a word, "now is Christ risen and become the first fruits of them that sleep." How precious among all the hallelujahs of heaven, that our cry is heard out of his holy hill; yes, even our sigh! There seemed in Him on earth, such a wonderful mixture of condescending humility, and divine authority, one can hardly comprehend what it was about Him, which made all the people walk quietly out of the temple, to their own great loss, — and yet did not prevent the blind and lame coming to Him, at the very same time into the temple, as if there was an attraction towards Him to want and necessity, and a repulse to Pharisaic hypocrisy — as if the one felt a right to Him and to the temple. What was it made them submit to his thus with authority calling the temple "my house?" Could they not all have risen against this one poor man? What made all the city moved, was it so wonderful for a poor man to ride in on a borrowed ass, without even a saddle? Yet, not more striking was the display then of the wisdom of this world, contrasted with the wisdom from above. The chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that Jesus did, and heard the miraculous hosannas of the children, and were sore displeased; while the babes and sucklings acknowledged in spite of them all, the great mystery of godliness. Dear Friend, I sometimes tremble at the resemblance between the Church now and then. The mass holding evangelical doctrines are so like the Pharisees! The knowledge of Scripture so much like their wisdom, sore displeased if any thing is believed beyond the beaten track, or not received through the set teachers. Would that my knowledge was not like theirs, a searching of the understanding; I desire the wisdom of babes and sucklings which can only be a communication of the Spirit. How little by searching we can find out God! His work is on the spirit, not on the head. When he brings down, when he brings us to dependance and quiet waiting on him, then He will teach us himself. He upbraideth not. The only time we read of his upbraiding ("oh fools! and slow of heart to believe.") we immediately read, He himself began from the beginning to the end of Scripture to expound to them all concerning himself, and never fainted nor was weary till their eyes were opened. Blessed stupidity that brings us his wisdom. It must be in due time, He will impart; we are too impatient. He brought his Son, will He not bring us each truth as we can bear it? What a cluster of graces James shows us to be contained in that one word, wisdom. Yet all in him, in whom are all the treasures of wisdom for us. Not only will he not upbraid, but he invites us to receive, in commanding us to ask, and that we may not doubt his willingness, we are reminded that in him who so loved us, there is no variableness neither shadow of turning. Let us ask, without doubting, and we have; for this wisdom, in him for us, is full of mercy and without partiality. It can only be received through faith, and acts by faith. I believe it is quite different to have faith for the whole, and to have daily faith in our every day little walk; yet I believe we need even for this latter, only a single eye, and to be little in our own eyes. Much wisdom we now need in these difficult times. Christ says, "as the Father hath sent me into the world, even so have I sent you." Oh! that we could so be in this dirty world! our clean spirits not even spotted by it! did He not stand in it only for the purpose of blessing, intent on finishing the work GIVEN HIM to do? This was his meat and drink, because his Father's work, but dispatching it with all expedition in order to be off again to the Father, "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again, I leave the world and go to the Father." The work dear, because the Father's, therefore not dearer than the Father's presence. To do our business (works of faith, labours of love, patience of hope) as one in a shower of rain. Our risen hands must not touch any thing below, accursed in Satan . All is ours: yet touch not, taste not, handle not, till made fit to be presented by the Father to his risen ascended Son; till the purchased possession is redeemed, faith must act as to the things of this world, as Cecil expected from his child when he threw her toys into the fire. It is not our dispensation to sanctify evil, but forsake it; to set forth our portion to be in the heavenlies, in the midst of the earthly; the apostle tells us to know our calling; alas! we have fallen beneath it...

Letter 61.

Powerscourt, 18th May, 1834.

My dear friend — I think I have seen more clearly this last week than before, the Davidical reign, which is to precede the Solomon one. I think the descent from the heavens, the gathering up of the saints, and the return of the Jews, will synchronize, and that there will be a great sifting in the land, before Israel is visited in the wilderness, and afterwards brought back. Do you see whether the ten tribes shall be gathered together first, and restored together, or whether they shall come from different parts in different ways? It is evident, as seems to me, that they will be found idolaters. I agree with you, so far, that our Lord's conduct before Caiaphas, showed he did not literally mean to offer him the other cheek, but I think it did show that we are to bear injustice, and not exercise power in our defence. Oh! look at him — "then they did spit in his face and buffetted him, and others smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, prophesy," etc. How they "laid to his charge things which he knew not." Yet, what do we hear of Him who could have called for legions of angels? "Jesus held his peace." I quite agree with you, that martyrdom is not always outward suffering; or always from or through man. I believe all are given opportunity of martyrdom, because, this is the dispensation of martyrdom; but I do not think all suffering is included. It seems to me, that in martyrdom, there must be, necessarily, a choice — a good way without suffering, a better way with suffering. I believe it can be refused, and that they will be sufferers who do refuse. To what you say about the Psalms I can heartily say, "truth." It is the book, of all others, we could not do without. It testifies to the heart that it is of God. There we find, the master of the feast has kept the good wine to the last. There, before the chosen depositories of his sighs, the man of sorrows spreads his consolations, saying, drink, yea, drink abundantly, oh beloved. How often in the Psalms the Father's dealings with Him, are his ground of consolation as to his church. May we not so consider him, when ready to faint in our minds?

Affectionately yours, dear friend,

T. A. P.

Letter 62.

November 18, 1834.

My dear Mr …,  I trust your throat is improving, and that it is not a crop of care laid in for the winter. What various ways He has of educating us, to enable us to bear the weight of glory He has laid up for us. One part of the explanation He gives of his own incomprehensible name is, "keeping mercy." Blessed assurance! we shall never be tempted above that we are able to bear. I have been looking at this, in the case of Abraham. Had the Lord been a moment sooner in his command to stay the trial, Abraham would not have been entitled to all the blessed results of "Seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me." Had He been a moment later, Isaac was gone. The sitting of the Refiner over his furnace is so precious. He did not seem to be heeding Abraham, when for so many days they went both together to the mountain — when he allowed the altar to be built — the wood laid — Isaac bound; yet, his compassions only waited for the very nick of time to manifest themselves. The same with poor Hagar, though her sin brought her to her extremity. She had sown to the wind, why not let her reap the whirlwind? She sowed upon a bed of flint, she had only to expect to reap a crop of troubles. But, no; she was friendless, comfortless — it was enough — He could not forsake the poor destitute. He went out to look for her. He found her in the wilderness. He comforted her with kindness, because the Lord had heard her affliction. There is something so tender in —  "The angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, what aileth thee, Hagar? fear not, for God hath heard the voice of the lad." This was enough; "He hath heard." — Is it not so with us, often surrounded by providences, which seem ready to overwhelm, and crush our faith altogether, so that we know not how to overcome? Like as thrown adrift upon a stormy sea, surrounded by storms, and shoals, and rocks, through which we cannot steer, and we feel totally unable to escape; yet, our little bark is carried safely along; we cannot tell how, except that, the fact that it is so, is proof enough to the heart, that there is, and must be at the helm, an almighty, though unseen, hand; — which conviction throws us to cling afresh with every wave, to this sure hold, and thus we expect to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. David had fainted but for this; not till at their wits end, they cried unto the Lord, and He heard. So shall it be with all our trials and temptations; like Abraham's knife, they are messengers from the throne to the heirs of promise. Let us welcome them. Let us love the cross. It is a faithful friend, so far, but no further, though as near consumed as Isaac —  the knife stretched out. When the carpet shall be turned, at which He works, we would not have been without the bitterest trials; the more bitter the more certain of its blessings, because we know his heart is toward his little ones. And what a reproach to us is that word to Abraham. Seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son,"(as it were,) I can trust thee for all — I can enter into the richest friendship. — The friend of God. — I can confide in thee. — I can unbosom myself unto thee, — "Seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me." And is it wonderful He should afterwards expect us to trust, that He will, "with him," give all things, when He has not spared his Son, his only Son, but gave him for us? Dear Mr... pardon my thus indulging myself in writing to you. You know I could not send the paper empty. It may not be just now applicable to you; yet, can it ever be inapplicable to hear from experience, "Faithful is He who hath promised, who also will do it." And truly, I can set to my seal, that He speaks truth when He promises it shall be through much tribulation we shall enter the kingdom; — that I have found extremity to be His opportunity; that He knows our souls in adversity; that He is a present help in times of trouble; it is then, when the soul is outcast, and there is none to feel, none to help, or deliver, then it is Jesus draws nigh, spreads out his arms of consolation, and embraces the believer on every side. Yet a little — his messengers shall have finished their work; faith have been made perfect, and at his presence and bidding, sorrow and sighing shall flee away. "Make haste my Beloved." "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick." Absence is absence, and we can never be at rest till we are united to him for ever. It is not enough that we are now secure of him, and that He does love, and will love us to the end. We know it. We value his love-tokens, we have our confidence fixed not in them, but in himself — his trustful character. Nevertheless, we cannot do without Him. It is His presence we want; — not only by faith, but in his arms, to say, "My Beloved is mine and I am his."

Very affectionately yours, in His love and truth,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 63.

... 1834

... I was distressed to read yours in such low spirits, and to find even in outward things you are not as comfortable as we wish: yet, dear ... you have every thing. I know you are so convinced of this, you would not alter the smallest circumstance, nor put one ingredient into your cup if you could. And have you not a right to be satisfied, when you POSSESS GOD? Oh! how well for him to deprive our earthly affections of all nourishment, that they in vain going in search of their object, may take a grand grasp of Him, who alone can fill every nook and corner of the heart.

"... Ah, how base was I

To quit the pillow of eternal peace,

And seek repose among the thorns of time."

See how he yearns over your heart as a jealous God. He says, how can I give it up? my temple where I delighted to dwell and show forth my glory — my portion. He seems sometimes to plead thus, "I set my love upon thee when thou wast in thy blood, and I followed thee to do thee good; I delivered thee out of the mouth of the lion; I have put thee among the children; I have betrothed thee to my Son; made thee joint heir with him; have given thee all my promises; have enabled thee to rejoice in them; have watched thine extremities as my opportunities; have delighted over thee to do thee good; have been a present help in time of trouble; have made all thy bed in thy sickness; when cast down I have whispered, I am thy great salvation;" when desponding, have whispered, "I am Jesus;" when inclined to say, how shall I stand the trying day? "I have answered, thou shalt see that as thy day, thy strength SHALL be"; and if that had been too little, "I would, moreover, have given thee such and such things." Judge, I pray you, what could I have done more than I have done. Hast thou not felt satisfied, when from the bottom of the heart, thou hast been able to say, "There is not one on earth I desire but thee? Yet, alas! now all this availeth me nothing — so long as one wish lies ungratified." Is this the answer of faith, to Him who spared not his only Son, but gave him up for you? Is it not unkind? does it not grieve him? He has a human heart — witness his feeling Peter's unkindness. It was sharper than any nail, any thorn, when at the very moment of receiving sentence of death, he heard the crow of the cock. Let us not force him to give the reproachful look which cost Peter so many tears. Much we need faith to be tried — for, humbling though it is, yet even the believer finds it very difficult to conceive, that God speaks truth. Though the promises are ours, our portion in which we do delight; yet how difficult to make use of a promise, to see such a substance in "things hoped for," as to esteem afflictions with the people of God greater riches than any, or all the treasures of Egypt. We often find out how little we believe his word concerning futurity, in our little faith in his word as to present vanity; how little we believe things that are not, to be what they are, by discovering how much we believe things that are, to be what they are not. But He is teaching us the meaning of words, sweetening our bitternesses, embittering our sweets, that we may understand present happiness to be present unhappiness; and present unhappiness to be present happiness; as Pollock says,

"Attempt! how monstrous! how surely vain

With things of earthly sort — with aught but God,

To satisfy and fill the immortal soul.

Attempt! — vain inconceivably! attempt

To satisfy the ocean with a drop:

To marry immortality to death;

And with the unsubstantial shade of time,

To fill the embrace of all eternity!"

Then let us thank him for cutting one string after another, which binds our balloon of faith to earth; that being let loose, it may be wafted above every mountain of vanity into the regions of reality. Now, dearest ... remember your high calling; you are not intended for such beggarly elements as the bliss of this world. He does not think that worth offering you, which he throws to the world. Let not an heiress of a throne in the new Jerusalem, waste one sigh on not being allowed to nestle in Satan's kingdom. Let us pursue intently the business for which we are left here, that we may hasten to be gone. We are living epistles, lent to the world from God's library, to teach a particular subject — to manifest the Christian's glorious hope. Satan grins with delight in getting your pages so blotted over with sorrow that works death, as to render this glorious truth illegible. We have so few years, perhaps days to stay; and surely, if we shall have one regret on the borders of that inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that passeth, not away, (where friends shall meet to part no more,) it will be, that every moment of our short existence has not been gathering glory to Him, during the only space through eternity, in which the church shall be privileged to preach to principalities and powers in heavenly places, the manifold wisdom of God; on this (to angels) wonderful text, "Cast down, but not destroyed, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, poor, yet making many rich, having nothing, yet possessing all things." — Blessed be his name for so letting us into the secrets of his love — secrets He never whispered to angels: though I sometimes think some of these volumes of faithfulness (believers' lives) are so tragical, that when read aloud hereafter, even the angels must drop a tear. — Yet, "hallelujah!" Oh, sing it loud, greatly beloved; for behold how He loves you! not even with the common love to his children; he has not suffered you to walk smoothly down the stream of time; but by large and rough billows has dashed you on the promises. — This is the Christian's elevated station, to walk on the promises, leaning through thick and thin on this sustaining staff, — "I know the Lord;" every blessing is preserved from being a curse, by having this label "with Him." Every curse with the same label becomes a true blessing. And shall he not "with Him give us all things?" Sweet to have a care by the casting of which on him, we may prove, He cares for us. Sweet to have something dear, by the giving up of which we may give Abraham's proof, we care for Him. Let us then be Nazarites indeed, separated from the dead, not touching that which might lead to evil; a burnt offering; all the baubles and idols of time, cast into the furnace, on which we offer up body, soul, and spirit. I shall end with an extract of an exhortation of dear Mr... in a sermon preached here. "We have found a pearl of great price, for which we may well sell all. If we would know the full happiness that belongs to them that are in Christ, we must present ourselves without compromise, take up our cross, and follow Christ, deny ourselves and follow Him whithersoever He goeth, actuated by a real and scriptural conviction on our conscience, that we are in the right way; we should boldly and manfully follow God our Saviour, and then when our affections arc solely surrendered to the Author of our being, we shall receive a rich and abundant recompense, being filled with all the fulness of God. Oh! my believing friends, that our hearts were more open to the immensity of the privileges, to which the great Head of the church has called us. Oh! that we could feel more, what is the nature of that high and heavenly vocation wherewith we are called, that we knew more the full meaning of being his peculiar people, his chosen generation. The Christian church is the moral representation of God, in this dark and benighted world; it is called to manifest the divine glory in the face of Christ; it should be practically embodied in their spirit, and in their life, that the world may take knowledge of them, that they have been with Jesus; and beholding the practical influence of the Gospel on them, may see there is something real and substantial in the religion of Christ's everlasting kingdom. We are called the sons and daughters of the Most High; would to God, we all felt by our own personal experience, — how impossible it is to know the extent of this immeasurable blessing. Then we should be able gladly to cut off a right hand, or pluck out a right eye, for his sake. May God show us the vanity of every object the world holds dear, and may He tear away the veil, with which the god of this world clothes these objects to hide their nakedness, that we may see the world as it is. May the light of eternal glory throw a rich flood of knowledge over our understandings, that his glory may fill the largest capacities of our soul, that we may prove Him under every circumstance, to be the pearl of great price."...

Letter 64.

January 28th, 1835.

Poor dear ..., how much you must have gone through! yet, has it not endeared Jesus; made you feel more the value of "my beloved is mine," and "I am his," and "who shall separate me from this love?" No, I do not think any expectation of future good satisfies for the denial of a present desire. I believe it will be only subjection, and the resignation of the will, that can bring peace; and it does bring peace to the humbled under the mighty hand of Him who, we feel certain, "careth for us." No position of the mind is so blessed, or so happy to ourselves, as, "I behaved and quieted myself as a child weaned from its mother." "My soul is as a weaned child." Therefore is the arm of the Lord's discipline to subdue us; and blessed be God, "He is able to subdue ALL things to himself." The surrender of the spirit after a struggle, brings more real happiness, than would the possession of the good, struggled for; but it needs many a struggle, and many a victory. I believe the only thing is to resign ourselves immediately to God, and give ourselves to him to crucify our affections, and desires.

Dear Sister, I believe the life of faith is a thing very few of us attain to, we have much rejoicing in our security, because of the election, and promised preservation of a crucified Saviour; — we have bright anticipations of his coming again with his saints, but we have a gap between; even the whole of this dispensation; — Jesus, and the resurrection; — The risen, everlasting, more abundant life we receive because of union with him; — his death and resurrection; —  the spirit of God within us, constituting us sons of God; — one with our elder Brother in all his sufferings and privileges; — we know I think little of this; at least I know little of this, in its death and in its life; — the continual crucifixion and death of the flesh, because we are dead; — the letting the Spirit work, whose work is to subdue, in order to his life being manifested in us; — in order to his graces being able to flourish within. — Oh! it is a resurrection life we possess, and therefore must possess it through death, and if we would know the heavenly nature of this life, we must die, die, die. It is immortality; — it is spiritual; —  it is heaven; "the kingdom of heaven," the Lord calls it; there must be a complete separation from mortality, from flesh, from earth. And only in proportion to death, will be the enjoyment of life. —  What attainments we might be given! How we might be blessed! What blessings we might be made, if we had but courage to yield ourselves as victims to the Spirit of God. If we would deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow the man of sorrows, the solitary Jesus. We should never regret it; holy and salutary exercises! a bringing down to our proper position; not only not expecting any thing from beneath, but refusing it: not satisfied with the good part, but choosing the better, because we know the times, that "the night is far spent and the day at hand," therefore let us not be making provision for the flesh and its enjoyments, but putting on our armour of light, preparing for the battle. Let us so show our feeling for the church of Jesus, as to seek to present in our lives that which it most needs. Let us show plainly we seek a kingdom, that our kingdom is not from hence. Let us show plainly that we are one with the Lord from heaven; that we wait for Him, who has delivered us from the wrath to come; that we have crucified the flesh with its affections. Let us deliver ourselves to death, that the life of Jesus may be more manifested in his body, the church; if we love his appearing, our solicitude must be about his church, not about ourselves. We shall grieve most, that our sin is a blot in his church. We shall feel the sins of the body, as our own; for we are members one of another. Oh may he give us this, to see such a substance in things hoped for, as to make every thing else appear in its naked nothingness, and so be satisfied to wait to receive all good "with Jesus." If we are waiting for him, we are also waiting for his saints, for they shall come with him. It is enough of argument for the Apostle, quite conclusive, — Jesus is to come, therefore those who sleep in him, must come with him. As if a thought of separation between Christ and its members could not be. Do not think, love, that I have learned this lesson. No, but I am seeking to lay myself low, to be crucified. May we be counted worthy of this experience, for "if we through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live," and perhaps after being conformable to his death, and knowing the power of the resurrection, even the power of an endless life, we may be admitted to taste of fellowship in his suffering. Amen, amen. What more can I desire for you dear ... than discipline and sufferings in his hands? and surely you shall have with it "I will not leave you comfortless."...

Letter 65.

April 5th, 1832.

My  dearest ..., I hope you do not think, because silent, I have forgotten you and dear ... I have, indeed, been intending to write ever since I left you, but am so terrible a procrastinator, that before the pen got on the paper, I had lost your direction, you having moved to some new place. But I have not been unmindful of you in your many trials. Poor ... so many trials coming upon her at once. I trust she has been upheld, and that her health has not suffered materially; yet, the Lord has mingled much mercy in the cup. What a faithful God! What a hearer of prayer! What confidence it gives for the future! Though we may have many to plead with him for, yet, not too many for his grace, for "He is rich in mercy to all that call upon him." We never hear of his refusing to heal the body of any one taken to him in faith; and why? that "we might know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins," (Luke, 5. 24.) ... Where is Lady ... Poor thing, what an upset for her in one moment! Yet, dear ... we need all the discipline our tender Father sends. How patient He is in sending so many chastisements, that our perverseness has not long since wearied Him out; that we have not forced him yet to say, "Let them alone." I believe there is nothing we are so undeserving of as affliction; yet, still He sends afflictive line upon line, afflictive precept upon precept, and each so exactly suited to the particular character and particular feelings of each individual. It is very touching to read Israel's wilderness mercies, and wilderness perverseness, with application to ourselves. It helps to bring us to believe his simple declaration, in spite of appearances, that "all things work together for good." How little it could have appeared so, when He turned the hearts of their enemies to hate his people, and to deal subtlely with his servants. He brings us out into the open wilderness, that He may have opportunity of manifesting this love, in spreading over us his protecting power, and fitting himself into our every want. He never calls us to descend into any trial, but we find He has been in it before us; that He has therein deposited his unsearchable wealth, so we come up enriched. How often "waters gush out of rocks" to us. We meet his consolations where least we expect, even where it seems impossible; and in the many dry places which we meet in our march to the city above, He makes waters run, even to give drink to His people, His chosen. "This rock was Christ." And why all this? Because He remembers his promise to Jesus, our surety; and because He would purify to himself, a peculiar people, zealous of good works. Yes, the whole course of nature shall be changed before He can fail in the least promise to the most insignificant child. What a mercy that we have a God of truth to deal with! without exaggerations, with equivocation! that we have only to cling to his naked promise, and to glorify him simply in obeying him...

Letter 66.

December, 1834.

... How pleasant it is to live for an end, and for an end so worthy of our life! that "whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord; so that living or dying, we are the Lord's." And in the mean time, what great lessons He is teaching us, even the knowledge of himself; and He is disciplining us not only for our place in the church below, but for the place in the kingdom, for which He designs us in futurity. When the mother of Zebedee's children asked him for the place, on his right hand and left, in his kingdom, He answers, "are ye able to drink of my cup and to be baptized with my baptism?" as much as to say, "The path of sorrow, and that path alone, leads to the land where sorrow is unknown." We have taken up our cross to follow the crucified One. We are to count the cost. To expect any thing else is unbelief. We have been signed with the sign of the cross, as a token that we are to fight under his banner. Our capacity of enjoyment, because the proper condition of a creature, consists not in liberty, but in learning dependance and submission. If we knew it, it is happiness we are called to, in being required to be dependant one upon another. It will be so hereafter. We are called to nothing but what would be happiness, could we submit to it. Pride is our misery, our greatest enemy. Blessed be his name! He promises to resist it. Dependance and submission seemed a new happiness obtained by our blessed Master as a man. Not only did He submit to his Father, but see how He leaned on his brethren. "He looked for some to have pity upon him." "What, could ye not watch with me one hour?" "He came to his own, and his own received him not." "I am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop." "I looked on the right hand, and there was none; and on the left no man cared for me." "Refuge failed me; then said I unto the Lord, thou art my refuge and my portion." Having to rule and reign with Christ, we must come to the same school to learn to govern. He was educated in our necessities. Whence comes all the sympathy we experience day by day, but because He suffered, being tempted? Oh! yes, let us have patience. — "Let patience have her perfect work, wanting nothing;" for "the coming of the Lord draweth nigh."... I do not know if you will care for this, but I think you ought to care for all that concerns the glory of our beloved Lord. We need large hearts, not only large enough to hold your small house, or your parish even, but to hold not only the universe, but all the kingdom of heaven — to hold God, and with him all dear to him. What a largeness! all dear to Him, who so loved the world as to give his only begotten Son, etc.! Do you ever pray for me? I pray for you. It is so pleasant, and so profitable to talk to the Lord about our friends — we send them sweet messages of love, by a faithful messenger. We do not know its sweetness till we try it. It is time well spent, to talk to him of them, to talk to them of him. We deprive ourselves of much real happiness by not living in heaven. Believers should be but as variegated lamps, hung out to lighten the feet of passengers from the kingdom of darkness. Our kingdom is not from hence. We should be looking at earth as from heaven, instead of looking at heaven from earth; as though present things were already past, and future things already present; and so they soon will be, for "the fashion of this world passeth away."...

Letter 67.

... 1835.

... I should like much to know what you now think of all things around us. The worldliness of the church has been carried to such an extent, it seems to me that there is no alternative, that we must choose either to belong altogether to the heavenly, or altogether to the earthly kingdom. The serving two masters makes our path an unhappy one; the limit becomes uncertain, and different in the minds of each, as to our permitted path on either side, and we who believe become responsible for the much profession, and more hypocrisy which exists. Could we stand on more holy ground, there would be less ambition to be found on it. There is much, seemingly, to be said for the things of this world being sanctified to heavenly uses; yet I cannot help feeling more and more assured every day, (though my foolish thoughts are little worth,) that a divorce must take place, that God and the world cannot be joined — that it behoves us to make plain that we are the risen ones, by our portion not being in any degree from hence; — that we are not struggling upwards through mire and dirt, but we are as let down from heaven; we take our stand in the kingdom of heaven, looking from above at earth, not from earth at heaven. And the less the body of' Christ is such, the more jealous should we be to attain it individually; because the wheat is mixed with the tares, therefore should we be the more desirous, that a distinction should be seen for the glory of his beloved name. I have been thinking of late, that one evil effect of our little apprehension of our present life being a risen life, united to the Lord from heaven, is a forgetfulness that the constant enjoyment and power of that life, will be in proportion to the mortifying and death of the natural life. I do not know if you will think me wrong, but it seems to me to be a mistake I have been under, with many believers, and therefore, why I have attained so little, that I have expected death would be in proportion to life, instead of life in proportion to death. The work of the Spirit after entering his temple is to subdue, in order to the flourishing of his grace within; that our part, instead of rising up against things which seem contrary to us, is to let him work, and to join with him against the evils which most easily beset us. So our very evils become nails in the hand of the Spirit by which to crucify the flesh. For though, like Adam and Eve, we are ever ready to accuse circumstances or natural dispositions, yet is the failure all our unbelief. We must be conformable to his death, before we know the power of "his resurrection, and only in proportion to our mortifying the deeds of the body through the spirit," can we live. The path of humiliation is a happy experience; and He is able to subdue all things to Himself, blessed be his name! and every conquest in us, is a witness to Satan that he is overcome, and shortly shall be trodden underfoot. Pardon me for trespassing so long on your time, but I feel you are peculiarly loved of the Father, and I could not forbear.

May the voice of the loving, longing, heavenly dove, calling for her mate, be alone heard from our consecrated hearts! May the Holy Spirit so perpetually sound there the name of Jesus, that it may be as ointment poured forth over every intention, word and action!

Believe me with affection yours,

In the hope of the kingdom,

T A Powerscourt.

Letter 68.

August, 1835.

... I hope you are learning how to love. It is difficult to do, and difficult to suffer, but there is nothing so difficult as to love as a Christian. In proportion as a thing is good used rightly, so in proportion is it evil, abused. Eve was Adam's acme of blessing; therefore, abused, she became his greatest curse. May your husband and child not be resting places for your heart, but channels to and from God! then will they be blessings indeed, far more assimilating to Christ than having the heart pent up into itself. How like Christ we should be, if we would learn diligently in all our lesson-books, instead of being such dunces!...

Letter 69.

December, 1835.

O, my poor dear, dear ..., Indeed, I do feel for you. Such short-lived happiness! Oh! what a weight of glory must there be, if these afflictions are not "worthy to be compared" to it! May He give you out of the depth to say, it is all love! To believe it to be so, is very hard: — "blasted my gourd, and laid it low." This is the way I answer prayer for faith and grace. It is good to learn the meaning of words out of Christ's lesson book. He learned it by the things which He suffered. Oh, dear sister, we are God's treasure! We often said all is vanity; often, that this is not our home. No, no; we belong to God, and are only here to be fashioned for him. He will not have us mistake it. He is a jealous God. His is not foolish tenderness. Oh, no, blessed be his name! He loves too much to spare one necessary pain. He loves too much to give one unnecessary one. He as a refiner sits over his furnace. Wait, and you shall see that this is just the thing in life you would not be without. And he is not lost, he is only gone before. Heirs together of the grace of life. Blessed word! and without you, he cannot be made perfect, the Scripture says. He therefore will wait for you on the bosom of Jesus. Surely you would not have him rather with you, only that you might speak to him, and hear him speak to you. You are together, inasmuch as you are dwelling in Jesus, the same life in both, the pulse of which beats in the heart of Jesus. You have communion, for his thoughts are all about Jesus. When Moses and Elias appeared, they were speaking about Jesus. Much loved sister, you are about to enter into realities of consolation you have never imagined to be in God. I seem to see you stepping down into a deep through which I have been wading; and it is saying, very, very little, to say I feel for you; I pity you; I almost tremble for you, but that is not all; I can tell you I would not exchange what I have experienced of Jesus there, though it was the survivor died. I would die a thousand deaths, rather than not have gone through all. I would not part with one pang, though still often smarting under it. I mean to say, dear ... that seeing things in the light of eternity, you have not only reason to bless God for him, for his certain, undoubted happiness, but to bless him for what he is about to teach you, through long days, and longer nights, of sorrow — lessons for eternity, which none but God can teach; only to be learned in this world; joy in sorrow; a calm in the midst of a storm.

May the God of peace be with you! He will —  I know he will. He will not suffer you to be tried above what you are able to bear. — To be confined after he is gone! Oh, how wonderful that grace which is able to sustain! "Let thy widows trust in me."

I took this verse; I set my seal to it. He has never failed them that trust in him. Pardon so much. You will, perhaps, not be able to read it: but I felt unable to keep back, as though Jesus entitled me to enter the house of mourning.

Your very affectionate and afflicted sister,

T. A. Powerscourt.

Letter 70.

5, Stephen's Green, February, 1835.

The religion of Jesus is a life of humiliation. It will not do to play with it for our own name and praise. If we surrender ourselves to his holy guidance, it will, it must be, a life of severe discipline. We have, blessed be God! one fixed desire which He has placed in our hearts, and he is faithful in working towards that, though it be by the upsetting and opposing of our will and affections: it is a deep work, a work in earnest. Have we counted the cost? Let us not be willing to lose any part of our reward by our fooleries here — let it be a full reward. You know, love, we are dead with him, and are risen with him, therefore our life is no longer from beneath, but from above. — The life we have, is that spirit he obtained for us in His resurrection, when He became a quickening spirit, the second Adam; being united to him in his resurrection as well as death, we partake of his new, his more abundant life ... If we set ourselves in truth against our own evils, really opposing them guilelessly with God, we shall have a world of watchful occupation within, as the Spirit's servants. What havoc even of our amiabilities, what self-renunciation, and all this is necessary to a life of love: earthly affections concentrate the heart after all upon one self: charity is a dissemination of the affections through the body, the church: ... Why do we live in this poor, dying way? Why so much in the flesh, when we are citizens of the heavenly city? We forget how completely heaven and earth are separate; therefore what suffering there must be in the dissociation! because we live too low in spirit, we neglect to live lower in flesh. "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life shall find it." — It will be present reward. Do, dearest, raise the church of Jesus where you are by so loving Christ; show there that it is not talk, or even basking in the promises, but "if any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me;" so shall we be able in love to serve one another, to lay down our lives for the brethren. Do you see any marks of our dear Lord's near approach on the continent? Surely, there is a little noise about Jerusalem to be heard. I see every thing here declaring it — all minds seem driven to one point — prayer, which must precede his arrival. No refuge for Christians in the midst of conflicting opinions, but prayer; no place of safety for them to meet, but on their knees; no ground where they can extend the hand of fellowship to another brother, but prayer. Yes, we are on our way to our Isaac. — Many a jolt the camels give us, but our guide goes before, saying to all opposition, "hinder me not till I get to my master." Flesh would say, "let me a little longer enjoy this loved association to earth:" "no, hinder me not," says our faithful guide, the servant of Jesus, the Holy Spirit. Let our willing hearts answer, "I will go," leave all now known; and at the report of the messenger, leave all to be his for ever:

"Brushing with hasty steps the dew away,

To meet the sun upon the upland lawn."

May this be our hearts! May we when we go forth into the world estimate every thing according to the measure of the weights we use, when in our closets we "count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of his glory."...

Letter 71

... 1835.

... How could you say that you feared to express your kind sympathy? I feel most grateful to you. She is, indeed, no common loss; but we shall see her again! We wait not alone for Jesus; we also wait for all his saints with him. If we can wait for him we may well wait patiently for them. We shall see them first, though we expect him so very soon. And the next time we meet, we shall be both on our way to see Jesus at last. And He ... Was He not the object of our fondest desire, about whom only we met to take sweet counsel, though dear, very dear to one another? She was humble — He has, therefore, given her more grace, for it is far better "to depart and be with Christ." Truly, she possessed all here, that was calculated to draw her down, as though she possessed nothing.

The moment Jesus shall come to awake out of sleep that dear body, now lying as a seed in his garden, of which He keeps the key, she will rise up quickly a glorious body to his delight and glory. "Earth shall cast forth its dead, and they who dwell in dust shall awake and sing" — whilst even the tears of this night of sorrow shall sparkle in the light of his glory, as the dew of herbs. Oh! dear brother, what a hope is the resurrection! What a rich grape for Jesus to have left, and for us to possess in the midst of death, is HOPE! its energy is marvellous, reaching forth to that within the vail, to a risen Jesus, to a life beyond the reach of death. Death is no where so ashamed, as in the dying chamber of a believer. — There the victory is felt. Weakness, mortality, corruption, all proclaim, "as she has borne the image of the earthly, so shall she bear the image of the heavenly." Yes, precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints. And we who remain unto the coming of the Lord, we are not less blessed, for we may still a little longer suffer with Jesus. We may still hasten his coming, for He waits. Faith viewing things in this light, sees a thousand years as one day. Today, then, let us be diligent, that tomorrow we may be found of him in peace, waiting. For, doubtless, He shall come again, bringing his sheaves with him!...

Letter 72.

March, 1836.

My very dear Mr ..., I fear I shall not be able to go to you this time; and as I have to leave next Monday, I do not like to propose your coming here, though I should be so very glad to see you. You said you had something to tell me I ought to know; what was it? I should like much to hear something about yourselves. I am taking pleasure in the thought that the Lord does not need a courageous heart; but expects our heart to be ever failing, that He may glorify himself in such! Flesh and heart failing is just what He wants, for it is in weakness his strength is made perfect. May we but give him all! The whole. of this dispensation is contained in that little word, ALL. His all is himself, heaven, and earth! Our all, two mites. Dear Mr... is it not strange that I am still here, and she taken? It makes me feel gone too. We were sisters all our lives. Somehow I feel like something that should not be here; yet, I am nearer to her, and more in communion. than when on earth; for do not we dwell within the vail? then there were two bodies to hinder, now only one. I am living where she is — in abiding at home, I am with her; before we had to leave our home, to speak of it on earth. How kind of the Lord to have let us look at one of his exotics, that we may follow after! It is a great secret the apostle teaches us, when he tells us, He forgot the things behind. To rest in the things behind is to sit down in Satan's enchanted bowers, in the flesh. There was no resting place provided in Christ's race —  pressing forward, pressing forward, "faint, yet pursuing." Very dear friend, this presses on my spirit to be in earnest, as we never were before; our time is very short; let us not lose it in looking back, time enough for that hereafter. It is such a calling we are called to, how diligent we should be! We live in very peculiar days, in which Jesus is much dishonoured by his own children, because neither cold nor hot. We are afraid of being desperate Christians. Oh! let us be desperate. The church needs extremity; a great tug out of the world; to be in earnest as in the days of Ezra. We have talked long enough now about, how much?. He has had long patience. Now is our opportunity, or never; the time past of our life will suffice to have lived according to the course of this world, or in seeking to sanctify the world; now let us testify against it, that it is evil...

Letter 73.

Cecil Street, Limerick.

Beloved friend, — What am I, or what that I can say, that you should think of me at such a time, to ask me to write? I wish I could know how you found ... for I know not whether you will be even able to read this when you receive it. What a journey you must have had, yet from ... letter I trust the worst was over. May it be blessed to ... and may God's faithfulness be shown out to his praise and glory! Your last letter distressed me much, and I was longing to write ever since. Only I had so many that should come first, that I lost all courage. Very sure I am, God was not that hard God, Satan was suggesting to you; and sure I am that He is always more ready to receive you, than you to go to Him. But I know how we can be so unkind and ungrateful, because such had been exactly my own experience, before the time I received your letter. Oh! I believe, the church must go through the hour and power of darkness. Blessed those who are counted worthy to bear the burden and heat of the day, who can endure! We see the agonies of temptation in our beloved Master, and how earnestly He did beseech his church, (or its representatives,) to watch and pray against their hour of temptation; not only watch but pray, not only pray but watch; not by running into temptation, knowing the spirit was willing; but that ye enter not into temptation, because the flesh is weak. Have you dwelt much on the wonder of being friends to Jesus, and the condition of friendship? "If ye do whatsoever I command you," in that readiness of obedience as to be prepared for the discovery of any thing in the opening out of his mind; then He will keep nothing back in faithfulness. He has received nothing for Himself alone, all fulness is treasured up in Him for His church. Why do we not know more of his mind? Because not obedient to the light already given. Why not more manifesting Himself to us? Because we are not obedient. Why not dwelling more fully in us? Because not obedient. These all following obedience, while friendship finds it as impossible to refuse, as love to receive payment. Therefore, whatever his friends ask, they shall receive; and why not, when He first gave Himself?

Letter 74.

My dear Mr ..., (JND) I cannot let your kind note go without my thanks, and acknowledgments, though seeing you, or hearing from you, always makes me sad for the remainder of the day. Not that we are separated for ever; — oh! no — I shall yet be a very great joy to you, and I joy to believe it. In the day of his appearing, I may have many masters, but can have but one Father. It is sweet to think of the nearness and inseparable union of believers. Being each united to Jesus, they must be to one another; and all Satan can do, he cannot separate them. The life which runs in them is the same, the pulse of which beats in the breast of Jesus — crumbs of the same loaf. As long as the question is, who can separate from the love of Jesus? it is, who can separate from one another? In waiting for Him, we wait for his saints; for they shall come with Him, and the Lord's supper is his yea and amen, to these blessed, blessed promises. We are not sailing into port, alas! as one family, embarked in one vessel; yet we are all united as shipwrecked together, and though one may be on one board, and another on another, yet we are all making to, and shall surely arrive on the same shore — not seeking our own safety by sinking our neighbour's board, but helping one another with all the energies of love...

Believe me, dear Mr ... the most affectionate, and most grateful friend you have in the world after all.

T. A. P.

Letter 75.

June 21. 1836.

My dear Mr ..., Truly, it is a great reality to be a Christian! He knew little what he was saying, who proposed to follow our beloved Master whithersoever he should go. Well might Jesus urge it upon him- to count the cost of his "whithersoever;" but it was not this world and himself, but Himself in exchange for all that could be desired here below — not only its superfluities, but its necessities; not only its necessities, but its dearest affections. Blessed, if while holding these subjectively, He stands out disunited from every thing else, the supreme of our hearts. If God fills our embrace, every thing else is lost — swallowed up in Him. How little we have the mind of Jesus, about his Father's glory; we let his cause wait our convenience. All went to their own homes, Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. We are called in wonderful days, therefore is ours a responsible calling. In days when the Lord's people are attempting, what the Lord could not do, to bring the world with them, by walking arm-in-arm with it, He calls upon his true-hearted ones, for courage to give a tug upon the other side. We need to be reminded that our calling is heavenly; that we are from above: that henceforth we are to know nothing after the flesh, because all things are become new; that we are to have as little to do with those who crucified the Lord, as those who are alive from the dead, for our habitation is within the vail; our life is hid with Christ in God. In times past, we lived according to the course of this world; in times past, we fulfilled the desires of our mind. But now we are quickened, raised up — citizens of heaven, and to walk worthy of this calling in all lowliness. How sad to love Him, and yet love him so little! It seems an insult to that love which gave ALL for us, to say we love, and yet stop to calculate about giving all to Him, when our all is but two mites; His all, heaven, earth, eternity, himself. Better not to love at all; better to be cold than lukewarm. We may well be sick with him, in hearing the precious promises delighted in, only as allowing in unfaithfulness. We have not even honourable feelings about his having trusted his whole cause, his Father's glory, to our faithfulness, having so unguardedly, so unconditionally, thrown himself upon our love! May it not be so with us, but may we be able to endure hardness in this hour of his necessity! May we go very softly, and be kept from entangling ourselves with the things of this world, that we may please him who called us to be soldiers...

Very affectionately and gratefully yours, always,

T. A . P

Letter 76.

Powerscourt.

My very dear brother — I thank the Lord for allowing me, this morning, the sweet employment of writing to you. You know my time is not my own, having been bought with a price to be my Master's servant; and a blessed service it is — perfect liberty. But you know a servant's time is not his own; they must go where he calls, and do as he bids. This has been the cause of my long silence; for, indeed, I have had it in my heart to write to you, night as well as day, especially when you gave me some hints of not feeling for you. I am sure, I do not feel as I ought to feel for any of the saints, because of selfishness; yet I trust I do feel with you, and wait to see the loving tenderness of the Lord. In this I find a difference between Christ's sympathy and his people. They, when they want to be dissociated from all below, seek to harden themselves against the feelings and sympathy of human nature. He left open all the feelings and sympathies of human nature, received pain, laid bare his breast, while passing on before the sheep, that the bleeding of his wounds might serve as balm for the wounded brother; yet was he dissociated from all below. What account from your dear son? Mrs... told me he was better. It was pleasant to see her; it brought me back to Scotland — her dear Scotch voice. I wonder you never come over to see me, the passage is so easy — my English friends repeatedly come over, but you know the Scotch had always all head, and no heart. But, no! this is not the time for enjoyment — I forgot — I should be sorry, very sorry, were you to come, having nothing to do, but to see me — sorry that money and time should, in one sense, be wasted on me, though in another sense, if for my benefit, it would not be wasted. I believe the whole life of a Christian, Christianity, the life of heaven on earth, is love —  the love to serve one another. It is a most interesting life when really entered into — it is incompatible with the sustaining of rank and station; it must be down, down, for it exalts the treasure, not the grace. Jesus did not hand down his blessing, but became poor, that he might, through his poverty, make us rich. It must be service, watchful, diligent, alive to the wants of others; its spirit is surrender — surrender of every good; our comforts. Like our Master, we must gird ourselves and stoop down, if privileged, to wash the saints' feet, if allowed to communicate not only temporal, but as our great Priest, (who is now seeing us) dispensing life-giving, spiritual refreshment. This was a glory he obtained, and never will part with — to be our servant. He loves it: even when coming again, he is represented as making his people sit down and coming forth to serve. What poor, wretched servants we are, forgetting continually we are not our own; squandering his goods! Surely were we the masters, such servants should long since have been packed off. Pretending that our time and all are his, and yet engaging also with the enemy.

"All that I am, all that I have,

Shall be for ever thine;

Whate'er thy wisdom bids me give,

My cheerful hands resign.

Yea, tho' I might make some reserve,

And duty did not call;

I love my Lord with such a love,

That I would give him all."

It is a strange, treacherous domination of the god of this world, to be able to have the Lord's servants sent below for his work only, and that the wages he allows them is the gilded dust and baubles of the world, (which they know to be only death.) We must have a different kind of Christianity, dear brother, in these days of profession; not satisfied with the excellent way, but following the more excellent. That there is so much profession without confession, must be laid at our door; for we have not given them to see outwardly, what we do believe inwardly. We have thought it enough that the heart should be right, therefore our representation of truth has contradicted the declaration of our blessed Lord, "these things ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone." Our blessed Lord did not come to judge: nothing but gracious words proceeded out of his mouth, but the light in Him convicted each conscience. How beautifully is this evidenced in the 8th of John! After the grace of 7th chapter, 37th verse, — the acknowledgment in the 46th verse of the same chapter; — the mercy shown in the beginning of the 8th, — all seemed to produce nothing but conviction; — then, as if explaining it all, he declares 12th chapter, 8th verse, "for the poor ye have always with you, but me ye have not always." It either acts repulsively, or draws us, as we see in the woman of Samaria; now she tried at first to turn it off to idle questions, till she surrendered her heart to be searched by the light. I only mean to say, ye are now the children of light, walk as children of light: light maketh manifest; all things reproved are made manifest by light, but it must be pure, heavenly light, which has no fellowship with darkness, but a continual reproving of it. This is our calling, my dear brother; our prospects are bright: seeing you look for such things be diligent, and so much more as you see the day approaching.

Letter 77.

10th November, 1836.

... I comfort myself, that the first stone of Babel destroyed itself by its confusion. The gates of hell cannot prevail against the church — He will work, and who shall let him. It is his glory "out of the bitter to bring forth sweetness." And by the very confusion, He will bring forth order. What was the order doing which did prevail? only building Babylon. If the faithful are ever found in the position of the wise virgins, trimming their lamps, expecting their Lord, there must be a separation from those who are only discerning that they have no oil. If saints are ever thrown out from the mass of professors, the church must be as a basket turned topsy-turvy, and that is confusion. Iniquity abounding, causing the love of many to wax cold, is surely one of the signs of the times of the end. May we be found faithful!

There is much, moreover, in the church's confusion to call out our gratitude, I think. Is it not, in a measure, the consequence of increased light, of the quantity of neglected evil which the light meets in the heart, because of the quantity of neglected truth? We setting ourselves up as judges of God; saying, this truth is profitable; that, of no moment; whereas, all truth must be necessary, if given — it may not be necessary for justification, but necessary to transforming us into that mind of Jesus into which we are predestinated, that He may be "the first-born among many brethren." We like to repose in the promises of safety so freely bestowed, and so that I am happy, I have communion with God, I have peace, I escape sin by getting to heaven at last — all is well. What is the glory to me separate from I, myself I? surely my salvation is his glory — Is it not so, dear brother? Then if another comes forward, leaving that behind, (perhaps too much,) and speaks of His glory as to be attained in the day of His coming, or His glory as witnessed by his body, the Church, now in the midst of Satan's kingdom; or if His glory be desired in more conformity to his image, in more simple and entire obedience to his commands, there is an immediate jealousy, as if the Cross was forgotten. Too long has the Cross been made the end, instead of the foundation of our cause — because we are saved, we are to go on; not, because we are saved, to sit down and rest. This seems to me the chief cause of all the want of love among the dear children of the same family. It is not that they do not love; they do love. My heart tells me they do love all — it is the more they love the less they are loved, because the Spirit dwelling in them is love — it is not that love is less than formerly, but love is more tried than formerly, and evils, which we thought we had not before, having been found by the entrance of the light of truth, we find ourselves full of envies, jealousies, suspicions, and we find that while thinking we were only seeking Jesus, we have been living and seeking self — Oh! how I have lived to prove this — and sometimes think, dear brother, we may never meet again, or perhaps even you may put me down among the dangerous ones. But is it not most precious in the midst of all to know that our Beloved is the beloved of the Father, is the friend that sticketh closer than a brother? — There our hearts meet in Jesus — the only resting place; mine Elect in whom my soul delighteth. He loves us, in connection with him He loves. He loves Him, in connection with us. "Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again." — The fulness which fills God, the perfection which satisfied God, may well fill and satisfy us — He can supply every need, and every out-going of the poor heart — His children need not be pent up, and withered in self; the heart finds its out-goings in the Beloved. He is one we never shall be ashamed of loving. — There are two things necessary for happiness — perfect satisfaction in the one loved, and perfect confidence in his perfect satisfaction in us, with a love which will secure a continuance in the same, without fear of any new discovery turning aside — these we have to perfection in Jesus, and only in Jesus — The more we know him, the more we must be satisfied with him, and go to him with confidence for counsel, depending on his wisdom, in whom are hid all treasures of wisdom; and the more we know him, the more we feel able to take to him every little trifle, because sure of his interest in us; the only one who can give all his heart to each. This is our Beloved — this is our friend; and, blessed be his name, he is a tried and faithful one, not only in loving to the end, but in holding us by his mighty power in tender jealousy as His, to the end — when he causes us to set out in security, desiring to be His only, He is prepared for us to be often led to deal very treacherously, he is prepared for us to be often seduced by Satan's lie, that there is good in every thing forbidden; though most base in us to be deceived, because if we would but abide in his heart, read circumstances by his love, in place of his love by circumstances, it would be enough to assure us a thing was evil, that it was not given. Yes, He is prepared for the foolishness of our poor earthly hearts, and He stands in the majesty of his own perfection, long and often, and patiently, answering Satan's objections and seductions with — "Mary hath chosen that better part which shall not be taken from her." Had He left us to ourselves, how often would a deceived heart have turned us aside. How often should we have put evil for good, and bitter for sweet. — Our flesh makes great cries, but with long suffering patience. He, as one who hears not, puts all these prayers aside, and keeps in steady faithfulness to our original desire, the uncalculating surrender of our first love, because he stands in a sense of his own superiority over all, in the confidence of being able to satisfy the desire of every living thing. — Oh, it is a precious thing in this tempestuous world to wrap ourselves up in a sense of His unchangeable love, His inexhaustible grace, — to be able to meet every event with, "I know and believe the love He has to me," and so credit the apostle's assurance, "all things are for your sakes;" — deeply sensible of our undeservingness, as chief of sinners, receiving all as grace, returning him all glory. Is it not his nature to bless? Has he not in Jesus's human heart formed for himself, as it were, a recipient for the fulness of love — His love. — If he has placed us in the one whom he delights to bless, is it not that precious ointment may descend ever to the beloved. May we then cleave to the beloved of the Father, and get grace for grace! May we be resigned to our portion — "all spiritual blessings in Christ." What a proof in Balaam, that all must be grace from beginning to end? while the future glory of God's people, and the future destruction of the nations of the world, even both were full in view; his heart was so cleaving to the dust, that the former was nothing to him, while he was refused rewarding the latter. Surely then, if chosen, it is grace; if chastened, it is grace; if humbled, it is grace; if not revolting, it is grace...

Letter 78.

August, 1836.

...

If you want rest, die with Him.

If joy, ascend with Him.

If you want to suffer with him, descend again with him into the church — it will break your heart in pieces for you. — We wait for a glorious time! It is a testimony to the indwelling of God's Spirit, this unsatisfied longing for the very order and beauty which he has appointed. It is a continual witness to the heart, both that nothing here can satisfy, and also that He knows our wants, and is able to satisfy. May He now give an earnest in causing to descend his shechina of glory — his new Jerusalem (as it were) in all its harmony, and order into the ... He that follows me, shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life How pleasant to feel to be getting into the taste of Christ, and an increasing distaste to the wisdom of this world, and to be able to covet and admire the simplicity of foolishness! — Oh, that we could lose our reputation for every thing, and be the offscouring of the church, as well as the world! then we should be safe — any thing to get hid out of this world's cruel kindness. — When I see how saints are spoiled, oh! I tremble, and wish I could hide myself from even the love of Christians ... Let us keep our eye on the Lord; while gazing on him we are changed. — Many snares we have in church and world, but there is one remedy, "Looking unto Jesus," this lets out self, and lets in God. May we more and more know that we are really nothing, and so live in Christ, as to live above every thing else! Be patient, the day draweth nigh when Jesus in his beauty shall be manifested, when he shall unfold it to us, and we in it all; when he shall delight and present all the members of his body, one and the other, and will joy to see them rejoice together. The Lord keep you in patient continuance of well-doing! Surely, if we desire to be shining lights, we must be first burning, and we shall neither be burning nor shining, unless sometimes snuffed. There was a golden snuffers provided in the temple. — Is not gold the emblem of Divinity? May my God make me willing to be nothing, expecting to be the refuse and offscouring of all things! — May he shelter our feelings, and shelter our affections! they are too keen for such a world; they need to be sheathed in himself, embosomed in him, till the time when they shall be able to expand to the creature, without idolatry, without a wound, without a sorrow.

Be not weary of afflicting — snuff the candle, if needful — only let it be with thy golden snuffers. Lord, come down into thy chambers in this heart! Is it not thy habitation through the Spirit? purify then for thyself — clean it out, fumigate it. May the incense of thy sacrifice ascend, as a sweet odour, taking away a contaminating influence, which without this is ever ascending. "The throat is an open sepulchre!"... Furnish it with all fit for the Master's use, that it may be a castle worthy of thyself. — Give me faith, give me the wings of faith, to dwell in the secret place of the Most High, and leave my body and all my entanglements with thee. On earth we can get rid of cares by leaving them, when we leave them in hands we can trust. — Though we see it not, goodness and mercy are folded up in the darkest events, which by and by we shall see in his light. May we walk as citizens of the land of uprightness, sit upon the throne of his approbation — keep human opinion as footstool! Shall we fear to step down into the depths of faithfulness? Shall we even desire to walk through waters only to the ankles? Can we doubt that according to our day He has strength laid up? Has he not promised, "from strength to strength?" — When we pray, if possible, let this cup pass from me — may not He answer, ye know not what ye ask? — we know not what we should be depriving ourselves of — Let us wait and show forth in a body of humiliation, graces which we cannot in a body of glory. Do we speak without meaning, when we say that we desire to live to His glory? He desires not empty expressions. — Do we really desire but one thing, His glory?

Letter 79.

Bushy, Enniskerry, December 5th, 1836.

Dear ..., ... I fear you think me very ungrateful for so long neglecting to answer your kind letter — a word of exhortation from you always does me good; and, indeed, we need every help to keep these heavy souls on their way. — It is a great gift to be able to speak a word in season — "How good it is!" Solomon says, "As apples of gold in pictures of silver." Jesus learnt it. I believe it is by little things, the children are fed; He gives us our meat in due season. In this way I have often found letters special and precious means of grace, and I believe they would be more so, and no loss of time, did we more write in faith, and more live each day upon what may be prepared for us by the Spirit of God. When present with a person, we may try to make a thing applicable, or be tempted to do so — when absent, if their case is met, it seems more that the Lord has considered the case, and sends his message through his scribe, while it cheers the heart of the writer in passing. There is truly in the ways of God with his own children, and when the Spirit finds a Mount of Olives in our hearts, to pour forth his intercessions in, we must be let into many also of his secret dealings with the family of heaven. It was not, I trust, because I have not thought of you, or spoken about you to the Lord, that I have not written; above all, I have asked him, if in any thing you are ignorant of yourself, to search you out with his candle of truth, and discover it to you in his own tenderness — but who am I to speak of others? TRULY, of sinners I am chief; I am persuaded there will be no specimen brought forward of his tried patience with any member in his blessed family, so bright, as his long suffering forbearance with me; thus shall I also be to the praise of the glory of his grace.

I do not know whether you have been in ... or ... I long to hear of one, and love to hear of the other. — No doubt you have found blessing, wherever you are, and humbling; for that seems his business with us in which we give him no help. — What insignificant creatures we are, and how ridiculous we look when we clothe ourselves in robes of glory! They were never made to fit us; we cannot fill them; and yet, how self works through every thing! Often a little thing discovers this to us, how we have been speaking for, and seeking self, while apparently and intentionally we have been even jealous for Jesus. I feel that the children of God have very much, indeed, to detect this in themselves. If it is really our dear Lord we are seeking, we shall be willing for him to be glorified, in ourselves being hated, as well as loved — willing to be misinterpreted, and misunderstood — willing to be the dark back ground, in the image we present, if it throws out more his light as the object on which the eye may rest. How often we think in our communion with others, we are rejoicing in their response of love to Jesus, when some hint against ourselves will turn the current, and so expose to our hearts, our self-idolatry. I am not certain that this has ever been your experience, but I am sometimes quite disgusted with myself, to find I can steal his gifts and graces, to deck up this household God; seeking also to sustain a good opinion of myself, while verily knowing neither good nor evil. We ourselves are witnesses how difficult it is for us to let Him rule and guide his church, in finding how difficult to let Him rule ourselves — against palpable evil we co-operate with him, but in seeming good we are often seeking different ends, and working different ways; so when we get a view of how each member is striving against the Spirit, it leaves little surprise that the church is found in opposition, treasuring a quantity of things He can have no communion with, so quenching his willing gracious light; her confession of weakness is only in words, for her only true confession would be delivering herself up to him, to will and to do in her of his good pleasure, even all the good pleasure of his will. I believe if He ever blesses us as a whole, it must be by first humbling us to submit to be blessed at any cost, and to let the Spirit take his own place, casting down every high imagination, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ...

I do not feel to have any particular call to any place, except an anxious desire in all places to be preserved by his grace from hindering his work. — He can use me any where for the saints in prayer. "Mary, who bestowed much labour on us," I covet. Have you been led much into Scripture of late? much into the holy of holies?... Is it not most precious, in the midst of all, to know that our Beloved is a friend, who sticketh closer than a brother — that he is the beloved of the Father — the father's meeting place with our hearts, His only resting place in all he has created, and we in him our only resting place, and He in him — that He loved us for his sake, and loves him because he laid down his life for us. The fulness which fills God, the perfection which satisfies God, may well fill and satisfy us. He is a supply to every need, and every out-going of the poor heart. — He is one we shall never be ashamed of loving, one we shall never be disappointed in loving; no fear of any new discovery turning him aside; his interest extends to every little trifle, while his counsel is, all the treasures of wisdom. He is prepared for us often to deal very treacherously, and to be often deceived by Satan's lie, that there is good in forbidden fruit; yes, he is prepared for all our foolishness. —  He turns to Peter and says, "Lovest thou me? feed them." He turns to the Father and says, "Lovest thou me? bless them." Oh, it is precious in this tempestuous world, to wrap ourselves up in a sense of his unchangeable love, his inexhaustible grace, and be able to meet every event with, "I know and believe the love he has to me," — and that "all things are for my sake." May we have grace to cleave to Jesus, and be resigned to have for our portion "all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ." Balaam's heart was still on the earth while looking at its destruction, and God's glory — All is grace from first to last. — What an honour to be counted worthy to stand in the crisis! —  the honour to which all Scripture from the beginning has been looking; — the winding up of time. — Let us bear in our bodies the last blows of the flesh, —  let us manifest in our mortal bodies that Jesus is alive, — let us be willing to endure all things for the elect's sake, — let us put by our play-things, because the world is in flames. — Why creep about in this deadening atmosphere of falsehood, instead of ever abiding in the region of truth and reality? Why are not our visits to earth only as messengers of mercy to dress the wounds of the Church — to glorify Him by finishing the work he has given us to do? sent of Jesus, even as he was sent of the Father. And while seeking to be worthy of the name put upon her, may she remember that it is not of herself the bride is to speak, but her object, her subject, her delight, her hope, her only resting place is her Beloved — the bridegroom of her heart.

Papers.

Genesis 22.

There are two things to be remarked in this most touching portion of Scripture. 1st. God's motive for, and manner of thus trying Abraham. 2dly. The way in which Abraham receives it. Many were Abraham's expressions of love to his God; and most valuable were those expressions. But God is a jealous God; words are not sufficient. Faith must be put to the trial. Again, and again, the question will be put: "lovest thou me more than these?" Till tried we know not how little faith we have. Faith must be put in the scales with something very near our hearts; — yes, with what is nearest; for it still must be, "more than these." The furnace must be heated in proportion to the increase of our faith. Is it because God willingly afflicts? no; but the trial of faith strengthens faith, consumes its dross. This trial is precious to God, more precious than gold; it is his riches, his treasure; and precious to him is it to have proof from his child, "Lord, thou knowest all things, thou seest that I love thee." We know not the intense interest which every trial of faith produces in the invisible world; or how these light afflictions are not merely now precious, but shall be to his honour and glory at the day of his appearing. Abraham was the father of the faithful. There must be an exhibition of faith worthy his name, for a pattern to them who should hereafter believe; if only to part with something of no value, of little worth, what thanks? could not even the heathen so? Remember this in every providence, every trying providence. It does not speak God's love changed, but it is a messenger direct from the throne to your heart, a ministering spirit sent forth to the heirs of salvation — it brings the message, I will put you to the test now, I will put home the question in a way that shall be felt. Arc you ready to say, I could have borne any thing but this? then remember the greatest approbation God can give us, is to heat the furnace to the utmost. He is in fact saying, "great is thy faith," little furnaces are for little faith; and is it not valuable even to earthly affection, do we not seize every opportunity of giving proof to expressions of love? Think how dear must Isaac have been to Abraham; God gave him this son, after an hundred years' desire. In his death all God's promises and blessing, not only to himself; but to the world, must be entombed. He had been accustomed to look upon Isaac as his peculiar treasure; not only a beloved son, but a token of good from his covenant God. When we hear that it was "very grievous" to Abraham to cast out Ishmael, how much more to slay Isaac; yet after he has long enjoyed him, just come to an age when even in natural providence a common bereavement of him would have been most grievous, God determined to put his faith to the test, and prove whether still it would not stagger, but being rich give Him glory; how often we think we value the gift only for the sake of the giver, till God exposes us to ourselves, by demanding his gift. Oh! let us count the cost when we say we believe, it is a word of deep meaning in the dictionary of God. Paul's belief was ready to do, but what was the answer, "Thou shalt see what great things thou shalt suffer for my name sake." It has been so from the beginning; you would not be without that trial of which all the church have been partakers, you would not that He should be so indifferent to your love, as never to question you about it, or desire an evidence of it. How full of compassion His approach to Abraham! He comes with all the tenderness of one who knew he was about to wound a heart he loved; and is it not so with us? Have we ever marked his steps, his gentleness when bringing a painful message? It is to be marked by every attentive observer of his providences. "Abraham," I have somewhat to say unto thee, "I have called thee by name;" why? because thou art mine; He, as it were, beckoned him into the wilderness saying, "come, let us reason together," that in the end he might speak comfortably.

Verse 1. Every thing to aggravate, to draw out Abraham's feelings in the wording of this command, nothing to be discovered after, all laid out before him; Son, only son, thy son Isaac, the son of thy love, the son of promise: when promising him he said, ch. 17-19, "Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed, and thou shalt call his name Isaac, and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him."

Verse 3. "Early," no hesitation — no time lost in murmuring — simple immediate obedience is faith — no questions; he obeyed because commanded. Prompt obedience is expected, "I made haste and delayed not to keep thy commandments." In Abraham's faith, we see nothing is too difficult for love — we also perceive there is a love that excelleth the closest, most endeared tie, love that constraineth, not that which goes to the task, as though saying I do it because I must. Flesh murmurs; self-will repines; self-indulgence rebels; but faith looks up for the promised strength, and by it conquers — stops the mouth with a hush, "be still, and know that I am God." Let us look at Abraham saddling his ass, rising early, walking three days with his knife in his hand, taking his last look at his Isaac, and learn to count it all Joy, should we also be deemed worthy to attain to such grace, even though it be through fiery trial. The cross is the only way to the crown; if for a proof, if for benefit, it must touch something most valued; withered must be every gourd, torn away every prop, every thing of which we would say "This same shall comfort me."

Verses 5, 6. When going up with Abraham and trying to realize his feeling at this moment, let us not forget that we are told it is a figure. The love of the Father is the origin of all the work of Christ; this is kept before us in this figure, the love of the Son is often erroneously considered as pacifying the wrath of the Father. The Father laid it on him, and because it was laid on him by the Father, because it was the Father's will, it was his meat and drink to suffer it, until finished. "The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." It pleased the Lord to bruise him; and Abraham was to be a pattern of faith to the end of time, therefore must the most trying proof be sought for, and in it God seems to say, behold my love, for God "so loved the world," etc. — the same trial is touchingly described, (Judges 11-30. etc.) Now we read (1 John 4, 9, 10,) — "In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his Son into the world that we might live through him," etc. Here we have proof that the sacrifice of God in giving his Son, (to speak after the manner of men,) was the utmost pang the Divine mind could devise, for it was the one chosen as a pattern of faith to the end of time. God would thus, it seems, sustain us in all our minor trials, by an apprehension of his own love, embodied in that of Abraham: by setting him up before us, as the father of the faithful and pattern of faith. He would check our doubts of his willingness, with his only Son, to give all things: seeing that in Abraham's not sparing his Isaac, He asked no more; while he would also draw out our love and gratitude, that our requirement is not our first born for our transgression; that having been done for us at an expense of love set forth in Abraham, we have only to "love mercy and to walk humbly with our God." The fire was in the Father's hand, and also the knife, when to Calvary they went both together. The transaction was all between them. Stupendous acts were being fulfilled while foolish man gazed on with unmeaning gaze, but was as little admitted into the secret wonders of the transaction as the young men who remained with the ass were with Abraham and Isaac's; and in all they saw must it have been as contradictory to mercy, as opposed to common sense. Abraham laid aside every weight, asked no questions, looked not at consequences, said not, how shall I stand the trial? but "ran with patience the race set before him, looking unto Jesus," It was a difficult race — but he was bent on it. if faint, yet pursuing, and any hindrance that might impede his progress, and make his bold, resolute willingness falter, he laid aside.

He was running the race of faith. To a bystander he might have appeared very unfeeling; nay, he must have appeared deranged. What a lesson not to judge by the understanding! The cross is to the mere looker-on "foolishness." We have also in Isaac a view of the majesty of that Love which set its face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, that rebuked Peter with "Thou art an offence unto me," because he would dissuade him from it; neither moved by contradictions, ingratitude, or feeling, we see perfect acquiescence in the will of his Father. It was the vengeance of God which sore afflicted his righteous soul, he endured the malignity of man with pitying love. In this figure, therefore, let us see Jesus bearing his cross, and going forth to Golgotha.

Verse 7. Here we have the property of a child. In one point, there is a resemblance between a servant and a child. It is the part of both to obey, not to consult, plan, argue, or direct; but in this there is a difference, — it is a child's privilege to ask the parent's reason, still remembering it is the parent's privilege to refuse to give it, without the child's obligation to obey being altered. In this simple address, "my father," all confidence is expressed. Abraham's silence thus interrupted, must have ploughed up every parental feeling within. Abraham seemed not to have courage to tell him.

Verse 8. Much seems contained in the answer, probably more than Abraham was aware of; observe "will provide himself" — here is our blessed security, that He did provide it for himself: therefore is he called the Lamb of God; though he cried to him, God spared him not, but laid him on the altar with his own hand, and sacrificed him; why? that we might live. The language of flesh would have been, but what becomes of his promises? If Isaac is taken, where is the promise that in his seed should all the earth be blessed? The language of faith is, God can provide himself a lamb. Trust him to accomplish his own promises, only obey. Sense is ever questioning, oh! but if so, and so, this and that will happen, which God cannot mean. Faith answers, what He has promised he is able to perform. This command of God could not have been more confounding, more opposite to all Abraham could have expected from the promise; this is faith. To act when all is clear to our senses, is sense, not faith; to act upon God's word, is faith; we do not enough consider this in our daily walk, and difficulties. It is not our part to seek to bring about God's prophecies or promises, we understand not the ways of the Lord. He brings about his own purposes, in the most contradictory ways. It is our prudence to leave the management to Him, who sees the end from the beginning. Let us not mar his work, but submit; we may, being sons, ask to understand our Father's will, never is it our place to think for Him. Did he fail? Did he not provide a Lamb without blemish or spot, fore-ordained before the foundation of the world? "In due time Christ died," etc. As the Lamb of God, does he appear in the midst of the throne, while the 10,000 times 10,000, ever put their seal to this word, crying out, "worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, riches, wisdom, strength, honour, glory and blessing." As I before said, we have in this transaction the Father's love, and the Son's love in the work of redemption, even as both are set forth in the 53d of Isaiah, end of 4th and 6th verses. Of the Son, it is said, in the 7th, 9th, and 12th v. in conformity with what we hear Him saying, John, 10. 18. "No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." He humbled himself, he suffered himself to be bound, though they had no power over him; like Samson, he could have burst their bonds, yet he was bound, led away, delivered to Pontius Pilate, the governor. He was obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, (Phil. 2. 8.) Because this commandment he received of the Father.

Verses 9 and 10. Abraham built the altar, Abraham laid the wood in order, Abraham bound Isaac, his son; Abraham laid him on the altar, on the wood, and Abraham stretched forth his hand and took the knife to slay his son. Abraham's faith by this was justified; when he took the knife and stretched forth his hand, the deed was done! He was not one who only says he has faith. See James 2. 21.

Man's extremity is God's opportunity; — he knows our souls in adversity, is a present help in time of trouble; when there is none to hear, none to succour, Jesus then draws near, spreads out his arms of consolation, and embraces the believer on every side. Example, John 9. 34, 35. Also Hagar, Gen. 16. 5, etc.; 21. 9, etc. and though her affliction was the effect of her own sin, she sowed to the wind, and it was just she should reap the whirlwind; she sowed upon a bed of flint, and had no right to expect to reap but a crop of cares, yet the Lord meets her with a promise; and oh! how all-powerful to heal is a promise when spoken home by Him who has been instructed to speak a word in season to the weary! So it was with Abraham, he sees himself surrounded by a Providence ready to overwhelm and crush his faith; he knows not how it can be overcome; but he knew his God, and that God was not unmindful of Abraham; he was so intent upon him that he was ready at the very nick of time; his compassions waited to manifest themselves while seeming to have no regard. The three long days Abraham was walking up the mount, though he seemed left alone to his griefs and perplexities, yet the eyes of the Lord were upon the righteous, and by works Abraham's faith was made perfect. This trial was but a messenger to the heir of promise at God's command it came — at God's command it departed; and though the knife was stretched out, yet at his presence and bidding, sorrow and sighing fled away. We have a strong lesson in this, what real good and real evil mean, the very same act may be one moment evil, and the next good.

Verse 14. Meaning the Lord will see to it —  in this mount, or in the extremity, the Lord will see to it. Or, perhaps, the very name of the mount was to be a continual remembrance, that God would provide for himself a lamb for a burnt offering. See examples of extremities, 2 Cor. 1. 8, 10; Dan. 3. 17; Ps. 22. 4.5. This is comforting for others, as well as ourselves. It was customary to call names in remembrance of help received in time of need. Gen. 16. 13, 14. — Thou God seest me — Beer-lahai-roi. Ex. 17. 15. — When the Lord helped against Amalek — The Lord my banner —  Jehovah-Nissi. 1 Sam. 7. 12. — When the Lord helped against the Philistines — Eben-ezer — the stone of help. We think it strange to see the man of God setting value on worldly honour and riches, because God says they are evil; but it is less surprising to find the man of God sinking under trial, when God says it is good? If we believe, should we not hail it, should we not clasp it to our bosom, as a token of his love? When standing as we expect among the great multitude escaped out of great tribulation, would we be found the only one without this family particularity? When standing at the close of life, and taking a retrospect in his light, will not trial be that in which we shall with most distinct emphasis be able to distinguish that name in which all blessedness is included — my son? Heb. 12. 7. Let us accept tribulation as the boon we are most unworthy of. "If ye were without chastisement, of which all are partakers, then are ye not sons." Rather let us bless him. Oh! bless Him that he has not given that which would be indeed the desert of our rebellious hearts, i.e. "Let them alone." For us to be able to run the race of faith, every weight of sin, like Abraham's, must be put out of the way — laid aside. Holy, bold resolution, in this will do much in keeping us steady in our race. Often we see nets spread before us in our path, though it is written, — "In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird;" yet so does man excel in folly, even the beasts of the field, and birds of the air, that we run into our favourite snares with our eyes open, though, perhaps, determining not to be held, but to struggle out of them; present weakness not being sufficient to correct confidence in future strength, till our feet are entangled, our race impeded, and we discover too late that the God of strength has refused to accompany us into the snare, has been left behind, and we stand alone against the enemy. Oh that we were wise! oh that we had grace to be resolute! wise to turn aside from pits, into which our weakness has fallen again and again, and our faith well nigh been lost. The wise man speaking of temptation, says, "Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it and pass away" — parley not with the old serpent, for his arguments are most ingenious; resist, or else flee from him. Hearken not to the voice of this charmer, charm he never so wisely; let us examine ourselves in this, see to it that nothing impede our race, weaken our faith, or prevent our obedience. Let us be honest with ourselves, and in earnest with God. Let us treasure no Babylonish garment, however goodly; let us sanctify ourselves, for if there be an accursed thing hid in our hearts, we shall not be able to stand in the day of trial; we lose much time in our progress, by needing such repeated lessons in each truth; when we should have been wise, we are still fools. We also learn in this Scripture how little life there is in faith, till that faith is called into action; though faith may be absolute, and love ardent, yet how many tests it needs, before we really love what we believe. God requires many proofs of love before He will confide in us as friends; it was so with Abraham; but when he, indeed, found he would not withold his son, his only son, He calls him the friend of God; then upon the soul thus brought under his will, He rises with healing in his wings, enters into the richest friendship, unbosoms himself, says, "I am thy shield, thy exceeding great reward;" while all the efforts by which faith has been made perfect, what have they been? Just so many opportunities of blessedness, whatever the travail. It must have been so to Abraham. In him we have verified, that no temptation shall take the servant of the Lord, above that he is able to bear; but with every temptation shall be a way of escape, that he may be able to bear it. He knows exactly the moment to help; His time may be a protracted time, it may be three such days; circumstances may be aggravated to the utmost, for he is a surgeon that will not lightly heal over a wound, but must get to the core; therefore is the knife so often used, after knife. He does not the work by halves, his work is perfect; his child may be tempted to think himself a mark for his arrow, one may so swiftly follow the other, so nigh to overwhelm. We may be ready to cry out, "Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?" but, Deut. 32. 36, "the Lord shall judge his people and repent himself for his servants, when he seeth that their power is gone." This is His way, has been His way, and will yet be His way, because "His compassions fail not." He visits, He brings low, only because needful, to enable us to receive the happiness he has provided; so has been his way with his people Israel, among whom his providential dealings have been chiefly exhibited, Micah 4. 10. Let us then in this portion, as well as every other of God's word, "Behold the Lamb of God." And may the Father of Glory give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation, in the knowledge of himself! Let us look unto Jesus: he has taken the curse and wrath out of our sufferings, even though called to pass through a burning fiery furnace. Is it not Almighty love which calls to it? not to hurt, but to try; to give happy proof of the soundness of that faith which is his own gift. He would have us know that faith, trusting in His tried word, is invincible. He would bring us to the experience of the Psalmist — "Thy word is tried to the uttermost, and thy servant loveth it." In Abraham, God's word was tried: the trial proved its truth, and increased his confidence in its truth, and so confirms ours also in beholding, "He that believeth shall never be confounded." May we grow daily in this faith of our father Abraham, and so prove ourselves Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise, having "put on Christ, in whom is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus."

Psalm 22.

A well-known writer has said concerning David, the inspired writer of the Psalms, "his place in the church was to hand down an organ, to express the feelings of every individual of God's people, through time; therefore was his education and discipline suited to this end. He was prepared of God for the work he accomplished, and thus it was that one man brought forth that vast variety of experience, in which every soul rejoices to find itself reflected. John the Baptist, being to be used for rough work, was trained in the rough desert. Paul, being to be used for contention and learned work, was trained at Gamaliel's feet. Daniel, being to be used for judgment and revelation, was trained in the wisdom of the East. Joseph, being to be used as a providence to Egypt and his father's house, was trained in the hardest school of Providence; and every one in God's church has been disciplined by God's providence, as well as furnished in nature, for that particular work for which the Spirit of God designed him. Therefore had David that brilliant galaxy of natural gifts, that rich and varied education, to fit him for his high office. His harp was full strung, and every angel of joy and sorrow swept over the chords as he passed; but the melody always breathed of heaven, and such oceans of affection lay within his breast, as could not always slumber in their calmness. For the hearts of an hundred men strove and struggled together within the narrow continent of his single heart. We would especially mention those called Penitential Psalms, for they discover the soul's deepest hell of agony; and though by no means defending his backsliding, even out of his evil much good has been made to arise. Had he not passed through every valley of humiliation, and stumbled upon the dark mountains, we should not have a language for the soul of the penitent, or an expression for the dark troubles, which compass the soul which fears to be deserted of its God. Let us remember the part he had to act was a difficult one. The shepherd, the hero, the friend, the outcast, the monarch, the poet, the prophet, the regenerator of the Church, and the man — the man, who played not into these parts by turns, but was the original of them all; and let us remember that until an individual, however pure, honest and honourable he may have thought himself, and been thought by others, discovers himself to be utterly fallen, defiled and sinful in the sight of God, a worm of the earth, and his soul cleaving to the dust, and bearing about with it a body of sin and death; and until for expression of his utter worthlessness, he seeks those Psalms in which David describes the abasement of his soul, — yes, and can make them his own, that man knows nothing of spiritual life; for the heart must break up, be contrite and broken, to be the abode of the High and Holy One, who inhabiteth eternity."

But in all the Psalmist's discipline, we find not the experience here expressed. The words, as in the other Penitential Psalms, leave David behind, and carry on the mind to David's antitype. There is a loving confusion between David and Messiah in this book: and with the head all the members are closely united, — they cannot be separated. The believer cannot sing His praises or triumph, but he must take himself in as a part, and be embraced in his glory.

Let us drink deep into this book, and we shall find ourselves linked to the spiritual David by a thousand tender ties; for every line breathes of Messiah, and every sentiment leads to him. In c very thought he has a share — "Alpha and Omega, beginning and ending, first and last" of the soul's delight. Were it not for the Book of Psalms, we should know little of the mental sufferings of our blessed Lord; for except when wrung from him on the cross, and in the garden of Gethsemane, when, looking for some to have pity, he cried out, "my soul is exceeding sorrowful;" and it was with expressive silence he went through all, as a lamb taken to the slaughter, or as a sheep dumb before the shearers. We might have supposed, that being God, he could not feel as man; but it is in the Psalms we peculiarly discover this incomprehensible truth. — He was as perfect God as perfect man; as perfect man as perfect God. It was this marvellous combination of majesty and weakness which the prophets enquired and searched diligently into, not being able to comprehend beforehand the "sufferings of Christ and the glory which should follow." He made himself dependant on God and dependant on man; yet infinite power was displayed in the sufferings of Christ, in sustaining his humanity. Jesus is essentially the Son of God, not officially so, —  officially he is a servant. The worship of Messiah is a personified perfection of Deity. The Saviour was a volunteer in all his sufferings and temptations. Did man put himself into temptation, it would be a sin. The Saviour, in becoming our security, took upon himself all the consequences of our sin: sin separates the creature and Creator; sin disposes man to hate and fight against his God. Sin makes the creature the enemy of the Creator. O ye who trifle on the precipice of destruction, this truth will be experienced in all its energy and bitterness in hell! devils tormenting the lost, the lost tormenting each other. The bosom of the Saviour is now open — flee, flee, flee from the wrath to come.

There was a remarkable similitude, and yet a striking contrast between the first and second Adam. Adam was type of Christ; as Lord of all, he was monarch of the earth; in consequence of transgression he forfeited all, hence the cause of the Saviour's life being a life of suffering and shame. He was treated as we deserved, therefore denied a cup of cold water when he cried, I thirst. The contrast is also striking between the first and second Adam. The first, in Eden, with nothing to want, became a prey to all. The second, in the midst of want, triumphed over all. He gave his enemies every advantage that he might trample them under foot; he fasted forty days and forty nights, it is emphatically added, afterwards he hungered. Who can calculate the sufferings implied in these words? Read the siege of Jerusalem; read of mothers eating their own children. What must have been their sufferings, before a mother could kill her child, then eat it? This was his at the moment the Devil said, "If thou be the Son of God," etc. Our poor finite understandings can have but faint ideas of the only suffering on earth which could satisfy for sin; but hereafter, perhaps, he will himself explain it to His children. This we know, never was there such a sufferer either in kind or degree. The holiness of his nature aggravated it to the highest pitch; hell, which is separation from the Source of happiness, was raging in his holy bosom the moment he uttered these mysterious words, 1st verse. His sufferings at that moment exceeded that of the lost, they are separate from One they hate; He from One still loved. This is not complaint, but the expression of love seeking its object. There was no complaint at the insults or malice of devils or men, but love must everlastingly travel after its beloved. Here is the law honoured in its curse; all our enemies tried him to the uttermost; every thing the arch enemy of God and man could do to fill his holy soul with horror was done, v. 14, 15, 16, and all these the effect of our sin. His love was put to the severest tests, yet in proportion as the necessity of his people expressed itself in ingratitude, weakness, and enmity, so in proportion his love seemed to gain utterance; it was entirely unconnected with any thing in man. He chose not His people for anything in them; so nothing he discovered could turn him from his purposes of mercy. It was only "if be possible," let this cup pass from me — extreme love, and extreme misery met in this expression; the same love which brought him down, carried him through his path of sorrow; his whole life was an emptying of this principle from furnace into furnace — yet "having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them to the end," not because ignorant of what was in them, not because the remembrance had been blotted out, but at the very moment when his disciples forsook, denied, betrayed Him, in the midst of this he laid down his life, "loved us and gave himself for us." We have an High Priest who knows well how to enter into the feelings of the tried, even the inmost recesses of the bosom, and administers most effectual relief. Jesus learned God to perfection — Jesus learned man to perfection. Every avenue of attack is opened to him; how to meet his people's enemies in them, and how to overcome — Jesus learned sympathy to perfection. He threw his heart from the zenith of glory into the bosom of his people, and is able to be touched with a feeling of their infirmities. He estimates all their sufferings by his own, so as not to lay on them one unnecessary feather.

In the 17th verse, we find how keenly he felt the conduct of the bystanders. The simple remark made by the evangelist is, these things the soldiers did; while all the complaint we hear from him is "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do;" and if the conduct of the soldiers, how much more that of his disciples, pained him. In psalm 69, we read, "reproach hath broken my heart. I looked for some to have pity on me, and there were none; for comforters, and I found none." Instead of complaint, we hear from him the only excuse he could offer, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Were it not for the psalms, we should know nothing of this — when tracing his conduct to his disciples at the end, we hardly need to be told by the apostle, that having been tempted in all points, He was full of compassion; — we cannot but be struck with the delicacy with which he seemed to touch every feeling which might be excited to pain — how sensitively he felt all their infirmities and weakness — how exquisitely and continually alive to all the amiable, though too often painful, feelings of the human heart; how patient with their prejudices; how he seemed to shrink from wounding them, as if in so doing he must wound himself — when broken hearted with his enemies, he turned to his friends — what condescension, how entirely human! he placed himself in a situation to be ministered to by his own creatures, and sought for comforters among poor weak sinful men! He remembers we are dust — he only asked for pity — only to watch — they could not; well might he say with surprise, "could not ye watch one hour?" Had it been the world, it would have been different, but ye, my disciples, my friends, whom I have been watching over continually — only one hour! Oh, how little can we do for our Lord; and when we attempt, how different to what he does for us! Alas! human nature is still like itself, drowsy and sleepy about its best interests; but blessed be God! he is, and only is still like himself — while they slept, he was awake, not only awake, but in agony for their souls; — yes, we have a living Head to direct us, filled with all the wisdom of God — we have a human heart to sympathise, filled with all the compassions of Jesus. In casting the soul on One mighty to save, we have the consolation of reposing on a bosom which having sighed for itself, is full of tenderness for us, for "though a son, yet learned he obedience by the things he had suffered." It is on the cross of Christ we see reality in God's hatred of sin, and his love to the sinner. We hear of this stupendous mystery, God manifest in the flesh, too much as a tale that is told — we set about seeking an interest in it too much like a child's play, but we cannot dwell long in Gethsemane, or on Calvary, without feeling, there is a reality in sin, a reality in justice, a reality in purity, a reality in love. This is the central point round which perfection rallies, and from which perfection emanates — never are we in so right a mind, as when faith is meditating on the Redeemer's humiliation; or hope contemplating the Redeemer's glory. Let me ask, do we really believe all this, that Christ trod our earth, really suffered, exhausted the cup of wrath, drained it to the dregs, bore all the misery which is the essence of the curse, was besieged by sorrow, was in an agony, his heart broken, his spirit distracted, and oppressed? and why? For the joy set before him of bringing many sons to glory. This was the prospect which brightened his dark and dreary path of humiliation. Some mourn, needing a friend into whose bosom they can pour their sorrows. Here is Jesus: mourner in Zion, he learned your sorrows on Mount Calvary — now his business is, "showing mercy." Perhaps some will say, but I have brought myself into such difficulties by sin, you can have nothing for me. Yes, I have, Messiah is alive! The man of sorrows holds the rein of government, He says, "little children, sin not; but if any man sin," etc. Truth never drives to despair, but like a skilful general surrounds the enemy. The command is sin not; but must the believer be overcome if he does fall? no, the Spirit points to Jesus.

In the 21st verse of this psalm, it is testified thou hast heard me, and verse 24, and the concluding part goes on to show the happy results of these sufferings, the restoration of Israel and conversion of the whole world to God. Verse 27, "To him every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father." But the 22nd verse seems a peculiarly interesting one. It is that voice, which at the beginning said, "Let there be light and there was light." It is that voice, which once shook the earth, and yet once more will shake both earth and heaven. It is that voice which in agony exclaimed, "My God, my God!" — which "in the days of his flesh offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears to Him who was able to save him from death." "Thou hast heard me," exclaims the Great Shepherd of the sheep, when, by the God of peace, the pacified Divinity, brought again from the dead; and now in the celestial temple, in the height of Mount Sion above, he proclaims with a voice powerful as that of many waters, yet sweeter than all the music of angels or redeemed harps, "I will declare thy name unto my brethren." How he shall declare his Father's name to his brethren of the church triumphant; — how in the midst of them he shall lead the hymn of thanksgiving, we cannot tell; but this we know, the whole of his mediatorial administration is a declaration of his Father's name to his brethren on earth, and a hymn of praise to him as the God of salvation. Is he not daily, hourly, continually in "the word of the truth of the Gospel," in the ordinances of his appointment, in the efficacious operations of his Spirit, proclaiming the name of his Father more plainly than it was before proclaimed? "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty," — has yet set forth his Son a propitiation through faith in his blood; — the Just and the Saviour, Just and justifier of him who believeth in Jesus. Does he not in these inspired Psalms which refer to the exercise of Messiah the conqueror, even in the church below, everlastingly sing the praises of him who has given him the victory? and does it not well become us his brethren, to listen with attention and faith to the declaration which he makes of the name of his Father and our Father, his God and our God, and to join with him in his eucharistic song? This is the exercise of heaven, and were we more habitually engaged in it, it would convert earth into the porch of paradise. It is a touching remark of the inspired author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in reference to the subject we have been adverting to, "He is not ashamed to call them brethren." These words are a very striking, though indirect proof of the Divine dignity of our Lord and Saviour. For a mere man, a partaker of human nature in its present corrupted state, to be ashamed to call his fellow man brother, however dignified might be the station he occupied, would be intolerable haughtiness. — But it is a condescension in Him to call us brethren. Well might he be backward to own such a relation to us — a perfectly holy man, as he was, might be ashamed to call guilty, depraved men, brethren. People are commonly shy in acknowledging their relationship to those, who have incurred the displeasure of government, lest they should be involved in difficulties and disgrace. But though He knew full well that the acknowledgment of such a relation to us, traitors, should involve him in a serious responsibility, that he would be laid hold of as the "goel," the kinsman, redeemer, yet he is not ashamed to call us brethren. Persons possessed of high honours, or looking forward to them, are often ashamed to acknowledge connexion with the poor and mean; but He, the destined Lord of the universe, hesitates not to say to us, "I ascend to my Father and your Father." But it is the Divinity of his person which chiefly magnifies his condescension in calling us brethren. That the only begotten of God, that God over all, blessed for ever, should not be ashamed to call us dust and ashes, sinful dust and ashes, "brethren," is a mystery of condescension which eternity itself will but imperfectly disclose to the enlarged minds of the spirits of the just made perfect — and yet there is a sense in which we may safely say he has no reason to be ashamed, when he calls us brethren; in Heb. 11. it is said, God is not ashamed to be called his people's God, seeing he has prepared for them a city. — These words seem to imply, that if God had not prepared for his people a portion, worthy of himself, suitable to his infinite greatness and benignity, he would have been ashamed to have called himself his people's God. But the portion he has provided is altogether worthy of him, and therefore he is not ashamed to be called their God. There are persons who behave so unkindly to those related to them, they should be ashamed every time their relationship is mentioned. It is not so with our elder brother — He has acted the part of a kind brother: He humbled himself to the condition of his brethren, and will never rest till he raises them to a place with him on his throne. Surely we, whom he calls brethren, should not be ashamed to call him brother; if he is not ashamed of his relationship to us, we should not be ashamed of our relationship to Him; and yet, how often do we think and feel, and act as if ashamed of him. — In one point of view we may well be ashamed, for our conduct has often been any thing but brotherly to him — our behaviour to him has often been what no mere human fraternal affection would have tolerated; yet we can do nothing which can so offend as to distrust his love. —  When we have acted a part unworthy our relation, let us not turn away from him, for to whom can we go but to him: let us look to Jesus, and we shall see in his countenance what Peter saw, deep disapprobation, but tender pity, unutterable love, something that says, "Is this thy kindness to thy friend, return to me, for I have redeemed thee;" and in spirit we shall rush into his arms, and weep in his bosom.

Psalm 23.

This Psalm, like most other promises and prophecies in the Old Testament, is to be applied literally to the Jewish people, still "beloved for their Father's sake," and spiritually, to the Christian church. On examination we shall find Christ was also the Shepherd of the Old Testament; and it is in this character they wait for him, though they know it not. For proof of this a few texts will suffice, Jer. 23. 3, 4; Ezek. 34. 23, 24. Micah. 5. 2. This is yet to be fulfilled by him, born in Bethlehem Ephratah, when the chief Shepherd shall appear; therefore is the cry of Israel. Psalm 80. 1. "Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that feedest Jacob like a flock; thou that sittest between the cherubim, shine forth." "They shall lie down in green pastures," Isaiah, 49. 9, etc. also Jer. 31. 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 32. 36, 43. Observe how sovereignly he comes down with his mercies, not because of deservings, but necessities. This shall be for his name's sake, that it may not be polluted among the heathen, his name is in them. See Ezek. 20. 14, 22, 44, fulfilling the 3rd verse. Hosea 14. to end, Micah. 7. 8, 9. Take it literally, it is applied to the Jews, v. 18, 19. When the Shepherd shall shine forth, (Psalm 80.) then shall they feast in the midst of their enemies. Isaiah 25. 6, 8. But as applied spiritually to the believer, there is a peace and fulness of expression in this little sentence understood only by him. The whole remainder of the psalm is but a drawing out of this "I shall not want." In the unfolding we find, 1st, repose and refreshment. 2nd, restoring mercies and guidance. 3rd, peace in death. 4th, triumph and overflowing blessings. 5th, future confidence and eternal security either in life or death, spiritually or temporally, in prosperity or adversity, in time or eternity; for standing on the sure foundation of the former psalm, the suffering, resurrection, and promise of Christ, the believer can boldly say, "The Lord is my Shepherd." The believer shall not want, because his shepherd is the Lord. The believer shall not want, because the Lord is his Shepherd. His Shepherd is the All-sufficient, nothing can unite itself to Him, nothing mingle with Him — nothing add to His satisfying nature — nothing diminish from His fulness. His treasury of gifts has been dearly purchased when he has paid the uttermost farthing. When justice, who held the key of mercy, said enough; when by the blood of the covenant, the Father became debtor to his Son, the Father presented to him His church. Like the good shepherd he went forth into the regions of darkness to search his sheep, and seek them out; found her in the depth of hell, yet loved her there as he never loved before; (for his love gains utterance from his people's wants,) she, and only she, rose with him. The shepherd brought his sheep on his shoulder through the grave and gate of death triumphantly exclaiming, "O grave, where is thy victory?" The grain of wheat fallen into the ground died and brought forth-much fruit. The rolling away the stone from the door of the sepulchre was, as it were, the signal of the load of sin being rolled away which kept shut in his treasury of gifts. Neither is he ever weary of the wants of' his little flock; for each gift, each supply, is a declaration of the Father's satisfaction in the soul's travail of his beloved Son. Being united to him, quickened with him, his church cannot want, she has a right to use all his riches, her wealth is his riches in glory. With Him nothing can be withheld; eternal life is hers with the promise that all things shall be added, all He knows she wants. The Shepherd has learnt the wants of his sheep by experience, for He was himself led as a sheep to the slaughter. This expression being dictated by the Spirit, implies a promise, it is a full promise, when connected with his own words, I know my sheep. He was disciplined by most painful lessons into this knowledge; He subjugated himself to the wants of every sheep, every lamb of his fold, that he might be able to be touched with a feeling of their infirmities; therefore is the bleating of Messiah's sheep, I shall not want. Timid sheep, fear not want, fear not affliction, fear not pain, "fear not;" according to your want shall be your supply. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I trust in him. When the silly sheep cries to be kept from want, it may well be answered, ye know not what ye ask; it knows not of what it would rob itself, in the supply provided for that particular want. His flock in the midst of danger have no cause to fear. They have been taken hold of by Omnipotent love. My sheep, says Christ, "shall never perish," etc. "It is the Father's good pleasure to give them the kingdom." All to be expected of a shepherd, shall be found in this Shepherd, who so loved as to lay down his life for his sheep. Have you a want, keep it not, carry it to him — it shall lie on the mercy-seat to be considered; in due time shall be written on it, "To be provided for." Have you a want for any dear to you, He has promised, you "shall not want." If your demand is not exactly answered, you shall receive something better — your demand shall be satisfied; his fulness is as much at your disposal as if in your own hands; He keeps it in himself, that every blessing may be received richly doubled —  Moses said to the children of Israel in the wilderness, "The Lord thy God knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness these forty years, the Lord thy God hath been with thee, thou hast lacked nothing" — your wants are fathomless, but your help infinite, "None but God can tell the uttermost a God can do;" you who are the sheep of his pasture, give him thanks and show forth his praise, by venturing on this confidence; there is no want to his flock — "The young lion may lack and suffer hunger," but the good Shepherd's helpless foolish sheep shall not want any good thing. He is their shield against every foe, He is their guide in every danger, no good thing can be withheld —  grace now, glory hereafter. But let us proceed to see how the Spirit unfolds these words; how his sheep shall go from strength to strength, till they appear before God in Zion. In the 2nd verse we find they possess food, drink, repose, and refreshment. What is the pasture of the soul, is it not the bread of life? we see here the pasture is the sheep's repose — Christ is the soul's rest, He is a field of promise; therefore, as expressed in the Canticles, this bed is perfumed with myrrh, aloes, cinnamon; waters of refreshment flow in this pasture, even the "pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb;" "the streams whereof make glad the city of God." There shall be in you, says Christ, "a well of water springing up into everlasting life." This, adds the apostle, "spake He of the Spirit, which those who believe in him should receive." Sheep lying in a green pasture, on a hot summer's day, near a clear flowing stream, is ever a refreshing sight. The believer who rests in Christ shall drink largely waters, and refreshment, and consolation from the Comforter, even in the desert. There is a sweet quietness expressed in this verse, Christ's flock shall not eat in haste, as if in dread of the devourer — "He that believeth," the Scripture says, "shall not make haste." "When He giveth quietness, who then shall give trouble?" enemies may surround, but the Shepherd is near; enemies may be in ambushment, but the Shepherd is on the watch. — It is He makes lie down, it is He leads by still waters. But were his sheep only to recount the repose and refreshment, they would leave half untold their donation of bliss. No, the believer can sing of judgment as well as mercy, verse 3 — for He reckons it among his chiefest blessings, that it has to him never yet been said, let him alone. There was hope for Israel, while God "brought down their heart through heaviness," for "then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble." There was hope while He smote, for then they sought him, and remembered "that God was their rock, and the High God their Redeemer." But the sorest word ever sent to Israel was, "Why should ye be stricken any more, ye will revolt more and more?" Christ's sheep, still silly sheep, left to themselves will still stray; but from afar they cry, whatsoever the cost, seek thy servant, for I forget thee not. — Believer, has He not restored your soul again and again? When you have turned aside, has not love rebuked and chastened? Has He not been unwearied in preserving your faith? — Though Satan has been permitted to sift, has his grain of wheat fallen to the ground? —  Though cast into the furnace, has not the Refiner sat over his treasure? — When sin separates between you and him, when idols scatter your thoughts here and there, is He not bent on restoring? Does He not yearn over his Ephraim? Sometimes He almost breaks the heart with a look, as He gave Peter; sometimes He overcomes by passing by iniquities; sometimes by feeding with the rod and judgments. Rest assured He will restore, till his sheep, in the spirit of him who was dumb before his shearers, can say, "Any thing with thy smile, any thing but thy frown."...

But, alas! how slow are his sheep to learn in their extremities not to turn from, but to flee to him, to hide them, and to be led in the way of righteousness. — "Cause me," says the Psalmist, "to know the way wherein I should walk; teach me to do thy will; lead me into the land of uprightness." Christ says, "I am the way." The apostle says, "As ye have received Christ, so walk ye in him." It is Satan's constant aim to lead from the simplicity which is in Christ. — It is the Shepherd's to restore, to lead in that path, blessed thought! The Shepherd leads, though often by paths we know not, till he brings into the path of righteousness, for he has trod the path of faith before us. The good shepherd, as the gospel of John says, goes before his sheep, meets the enemy first; they follow in his footsteps, therefore must they expect a thorny, though a trodden path; but their Shepherd is with them — His presence makes darkness light; crooked things straight. — The silly sheep are only wise in giving themselves up to his guidance, and in following whithersoever he leads. He will cause to walk in a straight way wherein none shall stumble to hurt, for he rejoices over his people to do them good. If they fall He lifts them up; if they sit in darkness, it is enough, He is near; He pleads their cause; He executes judgment for them; He will bring them forth to the light, and they shall behold his righteousness. What they know not now, they shall know hereafter; all their sin shall be cast into the sea, as a great stone to be found no more. He delighteth in mercy, and will not leave till he has satisfied, yea, satiated the hungry soul with goodness. His glory is bound up in their bundle of life "His name is in it." For thy name's sake, says David, lead me and guide me. — Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Deliver us, purge away our sins, for thy name's sake. Therefore is the way of righteousness in the midst of the paths of judgment.

But more — plenty, security and triumph are also expressed in the 5th verse. Anointed is frequently read "making fat," as the original word in this place may be translated; and is so in the margin, implying cheerfulness, strength or gladness. It is also used as well-looking, prosperity, Psalm 22. 29, a sign of health and peace of mind, so as to cause to flourish: this is expressed in feeding among enemies. This spiritual feast cheers, gladdens, makes the heart run over with joy, makes the soul flourish The anointing of God is poured over, shed abroad in the heart, is an unction which enriches. This is the oil which ran down Aaron's beard, and makes glad the countenance. What is it which thus enriches and fattens the soul? Feasting, drinking abundantly of the cup prepared of the Lord. David says in another psalm, "The Lord is the portion of my cup," therefore it is this cup which runs over with blessings, Christ being the portion. We find in it many precious ingredients. — His life — "Because I live, ye shall live also." His love — "As the Father loveth me, so have I loved you". His friendship — "I have called you friends." His wisdom — "Made to us wisdom." His righteousness — "Made to us righteousness." His fulness — "All that I have is thine." His sorrows — "If the world hate me, they will also hate you." His strength — "My strength is perfect in weakness." His peace — "My peace I leave with you." His joy — "These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy might remain with you, and your joy might be full." This is the present portion presented in the believer's cup of blessedness; one only ingredient is kept back. — Absolute rest. "That if love draw not, restlessness may toss into his breast." Having a life which none can touch, his sheep feed in the midst of enemies, "go in and out, and find pasture." The believer's security in the midst of enemies is no presumption, for it rests not with himself, but in the covenant-engagements of the Trinity; we have this forcibly demonstrated, John, 6. 37-40. It is well to study these four verses; they combine all doctrine; election; — the willingness and irresistible power of the Son, in saving all those elected of the Father — calling; — perseverance through faith; called and preserved, in order to be raised at the last day. All this, through grace, not merit, and to the end of glorifying God-man. The Father gives a people to be saved, wills it. The Son comes down from heaven for the express purpose of accomplishing this will; promises, and his word is truth, in no wise to cast out any, to lose nothing committed to him, to raise up all such at the last day, "and I will raise him up at the last day." The Spirit prepares these vessels of mercy for this end — and how? By bringing them to Christ; taking of the things of Christ, and showing them unto them, so that their eyes being opened to his loveliness, they embrace, and are persuaded of the truth as it is in Jesus, and in the midst of the world, flesh, and devil, the Spirit preserves through this belief. The Father gives his elect to the Son to save; the Son gives this his "Father's gift" to the Spirit to educate, by leading back to Christ; he glorifies not himself. Christ keeps, by casting them in supplication on the Father; "Father keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me." Each person in the Godhead thus becomes debtor to the other, in consummating the bliss of God's chosen people. We must follow the believer into all the intricacies of his experience, before we can understand the full meaning of the word no wise, how impossible to weary or tire out his love by all our backsliding and ingratitude; "no wise" and "uttermost" are two words the believer takes his life to learn; not one has ever outstretched his uttermost, or wearied out his no wise. The examples of his word, as well as truth of his oath establish this, notwithstanding appearances and feelings; the soul of the believer is never even retarded in its progress; every event, and every state, as surely forwards its course, as years, months, and days, bring on eternity. Remember it is the Father's will, not against his will, that his people should be saved; so undeniably his will, that when nothing else would do, it pleased the Lord to bruise his own Son, and put him to grief, that his soul making an offering for sin, the pleasure of the Lord might prosper in his hand. In these four verses we also find the mark of his sheep, the only mark required: "All that the Father giveth me, shall come to me; and him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out." No ifs, no buts, no ands, no peradventures. The covenant is "ordered in all things and sure," for the glory of the Eternal has interwoven itself into the safety of his elect people. Thus, in the midst of enemies may his people triumph, "man's extremity is God's opportunity", — the greater our want, the deeper we shall drink into this cup of consolation, for you "shall not want." He laid up help for each, therefore he can say to every sheep ye "shall not want." There is not only enough, but overflowing. Enemies that surround wonder! To them it is a secret, often they wish to worry the Lord's little flock, but every attempt is baffled — they cannot find out the believer's peace — some strive with cutting words as with a sword to wound — but he hides in his pavilion from the strife of tongues — words aimed at him, pass him by, reach the upper sky, pierce the Shepherd, who receives each into his bosom, to be answered for. "Saul, Saul," cried Jesus from heaven, "why persecutest thou me? I am Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest." "He that toucheth thee, toucheth the apple of mine eye." Lions roar around, wolves prowl about — but his sheep feast quietly, are strengthened and refreshed with the cup of salvation; their joy, no man taketh from them; their cup runneth over; because supplied from on high, from him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we can ask or think, while he cries, drink, yea, drink abundantly, oh beloved. This blessed flock have not only present happiness, but the experience of present promises gives security for future ones — "I am come," says the good Shepherd, "that they may have life, and may have it more abundantly" — joy in sorrow is their present promised lot, therefore is the sustaining joy of hope a pledge of the satisfying fulness of sight. The Lord's supper when rightly observed is a feast in the midst of enemies, so it was to the disciples in the midst of persecution. It expressed in action every doctrine of the gospel, and believed, brings corresponding joy. I would also observe from this verse, security is the open door to every blessing. If not secure, in the midst of enemies, we can neither be refreshed, invigorated, or nourished by our feast — constant terror will cause leanness of spirit — faith void of security, (if such can be called faith) opens but a crevice of the door — life may be communicated through this open crevice, but security of faith, or faith stripped of self-righteousness, throws it open, so that his gifts rush to overflowing into the believer's soul.

Verse 4. — The shadow of death seems to express that the gloomy darkness of hell overcasts it. Job, speaking of the grave, calls it "the land of darkness and the shadow of death — a land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadows of death without any order, where the light is as darkness." Luke, speaking of spiritual darkness, represents it as sitting in the shadow of death. We have each to face death. There is an honesty in that monster's countenance, which makes him the king of terrors to the ungodly, but infuses a holy confidence into the believer, and leaves in him such assurance of being safely delivered up, that his thoughts arc released from contemplating death, to the joyful anticipation of meeting his Beloved. Do you ever realize what will be your feelings in passing through that vail which separates from the unknown: when the curtain shall have dropped on all below, and all around is reality? Much is contained in these words, Thou art with me. This is the rainbow of light thrown across the valley, for there is no need of sun or moon, where covenant love illumines; but we must find His presence superior to any joy here, if we wish to find it superior to any terror there. Like Enoch, we must walk with God here, if we desire Him to walk with us there. We must find him all, in the midst of all, if we would find him sufficient, when possessed of nothing. We are in a world in which we know not what a day may bring forth; we may have to pass through rivers of tears, furnaces of temptation, or it may be only waters of perplexity and cares. Be it what it may, he says to the children, "Fear not, I am with thee: when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee: and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burnt, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee, for I am the Lord thy God, thy Saviour." True, this promise is given to the Jews, but the dogs may eat of the crumbs that fall from the table; for he has redeemed us, he has called us by name, we arc his. Not Ethiopia, not Egypt, but his own Son has he given; he has created his people for his glory. "Though I walk in the midst of trouble," says David, "thou wilt revive me, thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me." God is in the generation of the righteous. The Lord said to Jeremiah, "Be not afraid, but speak; hold not thy peace, for I am with thee." So said he, on leaving his apostles, "I am with you always, even to the end." His name is "Emmanuel, God with us." Do you know the sweetness, the security, the strength, of "Thou art with me?" When anticipating the solemn hour of death, when the soul is ready to halt and ask, how shall it then be? can you turn in soul-affection to your God and say, "There's nothing in death to harm me, while thy love is left to me?" Can you say, "O death, where is thy sting?" It is said, when a bee has left its sting in any one, it has no more power to hurt: death has left its sting in the humanity of Christ, and has no more power to harm his child. Christ's victory over the grave is his people's. "At that moment I am with you," whispers Christ, "the same arm you have proved strong and faithful all the way up through the wilderness, which has never failed, though you have been often forced to lean on it all your weakness." "On this arm," answers the believer, "I feel at home, with soul confidence, I repose on my Beloved, for he has supported through so many difficulties, from the contemplation of which I shuddered. He has carried over so many depths, that I know his arm to be an arm of love." How can that be dark, in which God's child is to have the accomplishment of the longing desire of his life; how can it be dark, to come in contact with the light of life? It is His rod, His staff, therefore they comfort. Prove him — prove him now, believer; it is your privilege to do so. It will be precious to him to support your weakness; prove that when weak, then are you strong; that you may be secure, His strength shall be perfected in your perfect weakness. Omnipotent love must fail before one of His sheep can perish; for, says Christ, "none shall pluck my sheep out of my hand," "I and my Father are one;" therefore we may boldly say, "yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me."

But in the last verse, is put forth another effort of faith, not only in death, but through life: surely, says the believer, "goodness and mercy shall follow," even as water from the smitten rock followed Israel all through the wilderness. There is no promise of being delivered from this or that terrible event; but still into every want, every sin, goodness and mercy shall follow. When he falls, it shall be but into the arms of mercy. "I shall not greatly fall," says the Psalmist, "for the Lord upholdeth with his hands, mercy embraceth on every side." However afflicted, the child of God can say, goodness and mercy have pursued, goodness and mercy sought me out — goodness and mercy afflicted —  goodness and mercy sustained — goodness and mercy shall follow into my Father's house . Here is the climax of it all, to "dwell in the house of the Lord for ever." Christ has said, "in my Father's house are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you." The beauty and accommodation of that house shall be according to His means, His taste, our necessities. When we are about to visit a person's house, our expectations correspond with our knowledge of the proprietor; when we receive a friend to our house, it is customary to give ourselves to please them, our aim is their profit and pleasure, all the pleasure our house affords is brought forth for that end. So in our Father's house, we shall have intercourse with the owner, may I say, He will give himself to our happiness. Oh! what powers are in Him when he sets about blessing; when his aim is to bless, he blesses like a God; all that his house affords shall be brought forth, while the mind of the Great Original, as an unfathomable mine of wealth, shall be an ever-constant, ever-new delight. There is a vast difference in his visits to us here, and our being received into his habitation to go no more out. "In his presence is fulness of joy, at his right hand there are pleasures for evermore." This is what we cannot conceive; while in the flesh, joy destroys itself, immediately intoxicates; so frothy is the mind, it could not bear much even of spiritual joy. "The breath of heaven might swell the sails to inflation, and endanger the vessel, did not our Captain add the ballast of trials to steady her, and cause her to go on her way softly and with security." But when we shall behold his face in righteousness, when we shall wake up after his likeness, we shall be satisfied. Oh! what a burst of truth shall then rush upon the mind, when we shall be like our elder Brother, full of grace and truth; even in the believer, now falsehood is interwoven; never till then, shall the creature find in the creature a rose without a thorn. When the door shuts in the children with their Father, the enemy in vain shall knock; sighing even shall flee away. What a thought for his children! We shall be really there! as certainly as that now we are sitting here, we shall "sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God." What manner of persons ought we to be? Shall we all meet in our Father's house? before we again meet, we may have all experienced what it is to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. Shall we all be able to say, goodness and mercy followed? What a thing to be able to face such a world, with "surely goodness and mercy shall follow me," etc. even till mortality is swallowed up of life.

If often, often, while girded with sackcloth, mourning has been turned into dancing, what shall it be when the mourner in Zion shall put off sackcloth, and shall be girded with gladness? Do you desire a map of the way to your Father's house? Take this little psalm; He presents you with this picture of the good Shepherd with his sheep. Faith believes all to be goodness and mercy, when we cannot see — "we walk by faith, not by sight."

The End.

"Thou remainest"

"Thou remainest"

Biographical Note

A selection of papers setting forth the excellency and sufficiency of the Lord Jesus Christ,

by J. Wilson Smith.

London: The Central Bible Truth Depot, 5, Rose Street, Paternoster Square, E.C.4,

Contents

1 The All-sufficient One

2 God's Present Ministry

3 Christ the Creator

4 "A Saviour Jesus"

5 The Angels and the Magi

6 "Never man spake like this man"

7 "Jesus wept"

8 The Son of God

9 A Word to the Weary

10 "Jesus the Son of God"

11 Christ Our Pattern

12 The Cross of Christ

13 The Risen Lord

14 Christ's Priesthood

15 "The coming of the Lord draweth nigh"

16 The Bridegroom

17 The Coming King

18 King of Kings

19 "My Glory"

20 Praise

21 Bridal Affection and Brotherly Love

22 "For the sake of the Name"

23 The Last Psalm

24 Loves Retreat

Foreword

The following papers, with two exceptions, have appeared at intervals in "Scripture Truth"; consequently, my eye was always one of the first to scan them. They were all received with thankfulness and read with profit and refreshment, not because the writer of them is one of the best of friends, and most faithful of yoke-fellows in the Lord's service that I know; nor because he writes with a clearness and charm which few can command — both are true — but because his theme is always Christ.

For more than half a century he has proved and sung the truth of those precious words: —

"O Christ, He is the fountain,

The deep sweet well of love;

The streams on earth I've tasted,

More deep I'll drink above."

Hence he writes, not worn-out platitudes, nor of untried theories, but of a Person, well-known, out of the fullness of a heart that finds its joy in the Lord.

He discovered in early life as a young army officer with great ambitions, that our Lord Jesus Christ was enough for his soul's salvation; a brighter and better portion than the brightest and best that the world could offer; and through life's joys and sorrows he has found Him to be enough — the never-changing, ever gracious, infinitely tender Saviour, Master, Lord and Friend.

It has been his joy through the changing years to serve the Lord in the Gospel, and to see many, very many, gladly follow the One whom he preached; and now in old age, having stood beside the open graves of most of the dearly-loved fellow-labourers for Christ of his vigorous days, and of one nearer and dearer than all, unable as formerly to tramp the open roads telling out the glad Evangel, he still rejoices in the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord, and would turn our thoughts to Him Who "dieth no more"; and, with this end in view, he gives us this little volume with its appropriate title,

"Thou remainest."

May God, even the Father, richly bless it.

Yes, the servants of the Lord come and go; the ruthless hand of time changes everything beneath the sun; the world itself grows old, but Christ abides; and He is sufficient for all the vast needs of His saints on earth until He comes again; and then shall He still abide, the all-satisfying and eternally glorious object of the heart of His church — the Lamb's wife.

And this I know well is the present joy and certain hope of the author.

J. T. Mawson.

Everlasting Glory be,

God and Father, unto Thee!

'Tis with joy Thy children raise

Hearts and voices in Thy praise.

Thine the light that showed our sin,

Showed how guilty we had been:

Thine the love that us to save

Thine own Son for sinners gave.

Called to share the rest of God

In the Father's blest abode,

God of love and God of light

In Thy praises we unite.

Gladly we Thy grace proclaim,

Knowing now the Father's Name:

God and Father, unto Thee

Everlasting glory be!

"Thou remainest"

The All-sufficient One.

(Ps. 102: 26, and Heb. 1: 11).

Two wonderful words indeed, and worthy of the deepest appreciation. They refer to One who is placed in connection with creation in its widest extent, the heavens and the earth, but which, while transitory and perishable, leaves Him unaffected by their removal. He "continues still," and this is the signification of the word "remainest." It is not exactly His essential and eternal existence, but it is that, while associated with that which passes away, He abides. The truth is that while His hands had made these things, that He was their Creator, and, by and by, He will "fold them up and they shall be changed," He is "the same." His years fail not.

But He is no distant Deity, no disinterested spectator of anything His hands have made. He regulates as truly as He created. If, for some good reason He sees fit to dissolve His handiwork, He has most certainly the perfect right, as well as the power, to do so. Yet He Himself remains! And, if so, shall not His continuance be the guarantee of something greater and better — of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness? That He remains is the hope of that creation of God of which He is "the beginning" (Rev. 3: 14).

Hence His all-sufficiency. He can both build and destroy and then build again. He can occupy every moral sphere and fill every spiritual vacuum. In Him all fullness dwells. He who was in the form of God and thought it no robbery to be equal with God, assumed, in wondrous grace, the form of a servant and the fashion of a man. Such was the extent of His incarnation. He was an actual man, like ourselves in all things except sin, leading a true and perfect human life — a Man amongst men, in order to present God to us as He, the Son eternal, only could, and win our confidence toward God if such a thing could be done, but going down to death, so as to annul its power, remove its sting and gain a glorious victory over it — "death, even the death of the cross!"

Mark the stages in His condescension. From Godhead to manhood, thence to servitude, thence to death, and that (oh grace inconceivable!) the death of the cross — the most ignominious, agonizing, shameful death of all! Well may we sing: —

"We love Thee for the glorious worth

Which in Thyself we see,

We love Thee for that shameful cross

Endured so patiently."

But He is risen from the dead and highly exalted. We can sing: "Thou remainest." He "remaineth" in view of a ruined creation, and He remaineth in view of a disintegrated church. He is the hope of both and "the bright and morning star" of His assembly. He is her all-sufficiency — her resource, her centre to-day, as at all times. He is "the same" in days Laodicean as He was in those of Ephesus. He is God's "Amen" to-day, maintaining, in undiminished power, all the counsel and purpose of God, spite of the fearful drop from the bright apostolic period to the present nauseous condition of the church's faithless testimony. He is on the wrong side of the door of the profession of His name; so that He urges the purchasing of gold and clothing and eye salve, to expel its dross, and cover its nakedness, and enlighten its blindness. Outside He knocks, and seeks admission to the willing heart; for spite of the church's palpable degradation, He "remaineth" as "the Same."

Conditions may possibly change outwardly, and "difficult times" characterize these closing days, but He changeth not. And hence the Second Epistle to Timothy, foretelling as it does these very days, presents to us, not so much the House of God as a well-ordered system, but Christ Himself as the foundation which stands steady, be the collapse of Christendom what it is. "Remember," it tells us, "Jesus Christ . . . raised from the dead." He remains as the HEAD; let us hold it fast; as LORD, let us obey His word; as the only CENTRE of gathering, let us gather to His all-sufficient name; as the still REJECTED CHRIST, let us humbly cleave to Him and His cross; as the soon-coming BRIDEGROOM, let our hearts, in all the glowing affections of a faithful bride cry: "Even so, come, Lord Jesus."

He "remaineth" as THE HOPE OF ISRAEL — the nation of His choice and favour — but long driven out of its land, scattered, peeled, persecuted because of its sins, but never forgotten of Him, but rather "beloved for the fathers' sakes," to whom the promise of earthly blessing was made. The Deliverer will yet "come out of Zion and turn away ungodliness from Jacob," and reinstate the nation in the Land promised it of old. For "the gifts and calling of God are without repentance" (see Rom. 11).

Then, finally, if we descend to the necessities and cares of the individual Christian, can we not say that when all else is gone, the hopes dashed, the chair vacant, the poor feeble heart crushed, the eye dimmed with tears, and the soul desolated by waves of sorrow, He remaineth the Comforter, the resource, the peace-giver, the abiding Friend, who Himself proved, in deep and true experience, all the sorrows of our pilgrim path, so that He is able to succour and sympathize with us.

That He remaineth "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever," may not be the highest of His many glories, but it is not the smallest of those great dignities which make His sacred name precious to His saints in all generations — as their dwelling place, their hope, their refuge, their power and their victory.

As such, how worthy He is of all our gratitude, thanksgiving and praise. That pen is made of gold which writes of Him; the ministry which has the all-sufficiency of the Lord Jesus Christ, whether as Saviour, Lord, or Head of His body, for its primary theme is assuredly the ministry of the Spirit of God. His own closing command was: "Believe also in Me" — given just ere He went to the Father, suggesting, as it does, all that is contained in the fact that He remaineth.

If that be true no change of passing conditions need agitate the spirit of His people, or affect the steady labour of His servants. His grace will not fail.

God's Present Ministry

It seems to me that, in a gracious superiority to all the petty conflicts and jarring voices of the day, the Spirit of God continues to unfold the glories of the Lord Jesus Christ to the hearts of His blood-bought people everywhere. For this is ever His ministry. "He shall take of Mine" (said our Lord in John i6.), "and shall show it unto you." This ministry proceeds throughout the centuries, be they dark or bright; and, in thus bearing witness to our rejected Master; the Spirit of God works continuously. He will not be hindered by the power of sin or Satan. He is God. Now this is full of encouragement, and happy it is, in days admittedly dark and difficult, to trace His working, and to discover that the enemy is far from having things all his own way.

We are too prone, alas, to regard the triumph of evil and get under its power. This is depressing. It is not faith in God, but the result of looking at things seen and temporal with consequent feebleness.

"We walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Cor. 5), and God would have us regard "the work of His hand," and in so doing be strengthened. Now there is no question in the minds of those who have taken the trouble to appraise events, that during late years there has been an unprecedented ministry of Christ, both as to the value of His death and resurrection, and also of His personal glories, whether as Son of God or Son of Man. He has been the theme and subject-matter, as never since apostolic times, of His more intelligent servants everywhere. Christ has been preached with a fullness unknown for long, and this, it is needless to say, is the direct and blessed work of the Spirit of God.

That He was loved and cherished, and followed by many a faithful heart through ages dark and cruel, we can easily trace. The page of history sparkles with the devoted lives and martyr-deaths of hosts to whom Christ was more precious than all things here. Of these the world was not worthy. They paved the way amid the darkness of their surroundings for the light which shines on us to-day — a light so little appreciated!

The glorious Reformation (so called) was that work of God which drew universal attention to the work of Christ, and of our justification by faith thereby. This poured a perfect flood of light over the face of Christendom, and made the Word of God a new Book to countless numbers. It was the dawn of a holy liberty, and a death-blow to the corruptions of Rome. But what need to hold fast that which we have! What need to stand fast in that liberty and to hold to the Word of God! But then, is our liberty everything? Can we feed on our own personal emancipation alone? Does the knowledge of justification (however precious) suffice for the soul? Has God no further revelation?

He has! What is redemption without the Redeemer, or salvation without the Saviour? What is the servant without his Lord; or the church without its Head?

Nay, what is Christianity without that Christ who, on ascending to the right hand of God, sent down the Holy Ghost to baptize into one body all who believed the gospel, and to be the power of life and testimony in the saints till Christ shall take all hence to be for ever with Himself in the Father's House?

Absolutely nothing! As well have the solar system without the great and all essential orb of day. This were impossible. "A pleasant thing it is to behold the sun," and a far greater pleasure it is for the saints of God to hear of the deep, boundless glories of His eternal Son!

I am bold to say that these glories have been, and are, the specific testimony of the Spirit of God during the last and undoubtedly closing years of this dispensation. The best wine comes last although contained in the original "firkin." The Word of God has His Son for the highest theme.

Nor do I doubt that this ministry is having the present effect of reuniting at least the hearts of great numbers of saints who see in it something beyond traditions and mere ecclesiasticism, something that will eventually bind their hearts and minds and tongues together in common and eternal adoration in heaven.

Pity, a thousand times over, that such adoration should be broken up into fragments to-day by the unhappy "shibboleths" and warring factions into which the church is now divided! But, thank God, to-day will quickly pass, and then and for ever one all-commanding Object will fill our gaze, and bring about that concentration on Himself, who is the One Shepherd of the one flock and the Head of the one body, which in our every heart we so ardently desire, and which, amid other things, He died to accomplish.

He "died for our sins" indeed, but, notice, He also "died to gather together in one the children of God which were scattered abroad"; and the fulfilment of this is certain. That unity is bound to be brought about; only may each of us seek, in his prayers, and ways and associations, to give personal effect to it now.

How cheering, how stimulating the truth! This is, most assuredly, part — and a very great part — of the ministry of the Spirit of God to-day.

Christ the Creator

That which gives special interest to "creation" is that, in Scripture, it is attributed to Christ — the Lord.

No doubt, speaking in the abstract, it is viewed as the work of God, and so we read in Gen. 1: 1, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," but in the same chapter (ver. 26) it is said, in sacred colloquy, "let us make man," indicating co-operation on the part of the Holy and omnipotent Godhead; for each Person in the Godhead is God; and, hence, in the creation of the highest creature on earth, we find a consultation between those Persons, which was not taken in the production of any lower part of it. Man was created in the image and likeness of God, and was placed in sovereignty over all His works.

"God created!" Let that formal statement be clearly apprehended. There was, and there is what Scripture calls "creation." There is "the whole creation" and its "beginning" (2 Peter 3). The fact is stated with the utmost simplicity and with a naturalness that bespeaks absolute truth. No lengthened explanation, no wordy elaboration to meet the incredulity of man is given.

The thing itself is so inconceivable, that no other solution is possible but that "God created." That profound, but entirely satisfactory record, suffices for faith, and is, at once, the simplest and the only key to "creation." It is "by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God." Speculation and cosmogonies may fade in this light.

Very well, creation is the work of the Godhead, but, in particular, it is that of the Second Person, as the Scriptures, when giving assignment, invariably declare. And therefore, if that be so, the work of creation, in its omnipotence, its design, its intricacy, its minuteness, its continuance, its perfection, becomes to the Christian a matter of deepest interest. Our Lord Jesus Christ is Creator! Wondrous fact indeed, but when cordially admitted, the further and much greater work of redemption becomes more glorious in our estimation; for, if every detail in the former were perfect, how could a flaw or defect be found in the latter? A perfect Creator is also a perfect Redeemer, and vice versa as well.

These two facts are placed in juxtaposition in Col. 1: 15-18, "For by Him [the Son of God] were all things created that are in heaven and in earth," and not only created "by Him," but "for Him" — a most significant statement surely, and one which throws creation into an extraordinary place of importance, viz., for the special purpose and enjoyment of the Son of God — the Christ; and again: "He is before all things," necessarily so, if "by Him they were created;" and, lastly, "by Him all things consist." They subsist, they are maintained in existence by His power and will. These "all things" depend, both for their origin and support, on the will and pleasure of the Son of God.

He is also, as risen from the dead, Head of the body, the church — the Redeemer — pre-eminent in all things. The same two facts present themselves to us in Heb. 1 and 2; we read in Heb. 1: 10, "And thou, Lord, in the beginning [mark that word] hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thine hands "hands of the universal Creator; while, in Heb. 2: 10, we find Him qualified through sufferings to be the Leader of His people's salvation, and also their Deliverer from the fear of death by having annulled the power of the devil. Blessed Saviour! Or, again, in Heb. 1: 3, He who upholds all things by the word of His power, has made expiation for the sins of His people, and has sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high. What rich qualifications are His! Finally, if in John 1 He is seen as the Lamb of God — the sin-bearer, so too is He revealed as God — the Word — by whom were all things made, and without Him was not anything made that was made. He was indispensable in creation from beginning to end; and when He shall fold up, as a vesture, all that He had made — change it, and cause it to perish, He, withal, shall remain, and prove Himself to be "the same" — "the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth," and the worthy Co-Recipient of the glad homage of "every creature in Heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea," as they ascribe "Blessing and honour and glory and power to Him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb for ever and ever" —

The power of earth's Creator

Gives glory to Thy Name.

The love of earth's Redeemer

Enhances still thy fame.

Creator and Redeemer

Almighty Saviour Lord,

The power and grace that saved us

For ever be adored.

"A Saviour, Jesus."

One of the most resplendent crowns

which shall rest on the head of our Lord Jesus Christ is that of Saviour. Beside His name none other is given under heaven whereby men must be saved (Acts 4: 12), and so we read: "He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God" (John 3: 18). The refusal of His name is fatal. We may well thank God for that name as we remember how that He "so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16). May we lay hold of the fact that the heart of God the Father is the fountain-head of the river of saving grace; thence it flows in measureless fullness over a world alienated from God, so that all and any who are conscious of their lost condition may, by faith in His Son, become the recipients, here and now, of all that grace can give — possessors of everlasting life! But this grace must reach us on grounds of absolute righteousness. The throne itself would be outraged were its just claims not perfectly met and satisfied; and seeing that this could never be accomplished by the creature already powerless and guilty, it must be rendered by One fully competent to do so. Him we find in the Son of God! He is the divinely provided ransom. God Himself has provided a lamb for a burnt-offering. Here, then, we start. This is our foundation; it is solid and sure, and clean outside all that is of man. We can freely speak of a Saviour-God! He loved and He gave, and the given One came willingly to do all that was charged ' upon Him. But if this should be on the side of God, what is there on that of man? There is, alas! only the sin that necessitated grace so boundless.

Sin? Yes. And what is sin? Its nature is questioned to-day. It is vainly explained away; but none the less it remains in its undiminished virulence and universality. Neither has philosophy, nor civilization, nor education, nor science, nor any human device that the clever brain of man has invented, removed sin from the heart, or its dire consequence of death, and the grave, and the judgment beyond, from the race of fallen, guilty men. There it is, as patent and potent to-day as ever; so that he who denies it is blind, or worse.

Let us get on to this bed-rock truth, else salvation means nothing and a Saviour is a mere sentiment.

God declares that "all the world is guilty before Him" (Rom. 3: 19), that it "lieth in wickedness" (1 John 5: 19), and that "Satan deceiveth the whole world" (Rev. 12: 9). The cross was its moral judgment (John 12: 31). So much for the mass; but, personally, "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." The power and poison of sin are rampant in every department of life, in every sphere and circle and bosom. These vast cemeteries bear mighty witness. "Death has passed on all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5: 12).

What, then, is sin? It may be seen in a thousand aggravated and sickening forms, from murder to a thought of foolishness (Mark 7: 21, 22); but notice, "the movement of a heart in opposition to the will of God is sin." Who can escape here?

Hence the Lord said to certain accusers, "Let him that is without sin first cast a stone at her" (John 8: 7). Needless to say no hand dare cast a stone. Every man was guilty of some sin; none was, nor is, nor can be "without sin."

The crying need of the day is a true sense of sin, and therefore of humiliation and repentance before God. Always so, but perhaps more truly now than ever; and if so, woe to those who minimize the gravity of sin and its certain and eternal judgment.

This clears the way for God's salvation. And what is that? Nay, who is that? It is Christ Himself! "Mine eyes have seen Thy salvation," said Simeon as he held the infant Redeemer in his arms.

Never can that salvation be understood until it is seen to be embodied in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, as dead, and risen, and glorified.

His death was necessary for expiation, and His blood alone, but fully, can cleanse from sin.

His resurrection from the dead was also necessary as proof of the work of atonement done, and no more sacrifice required. By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified (Heb. 10: 14).

And His ascension was necessary, that He might send down the Holy Spirit to give effect to His work, and seal for eternal blessing the souls of all who believe. Oh, lay hold of the deep meaning of the words "one offering." Let that offering stand before your eye in its absolute all-sufficiency. Think who it was that was offered! Remember the cup He drank and the curse He bore! Ponder the love that led Him into such fathomless depths! View Him as the sinless Son of Man who obeyed to the letter, and who alone glorified God where all else had failed! Smite your breast as you behold the sight of Calvary! Learn the love of Christ that passeth knowledge! See the whole awful question of your sins and sin, your guilt and state, settled in His death, so that you, delivered from every thrall and fear, at cost so infinite, might love Him in return, and serve and follow and worship Him, until, by His side, you see the crown of your salvation on His glorious brow for ever.

The Angels and the Magi

Is it not remarkable that, in comparing the two chapters (Matt. 2 and Luke 2) which give us an account of the earliest days on earth of our Lord, we find that the effect produced by the angelic announcement of His birth in Luke 2 was very small? It appears not to have affected the people of Jerusalem in the least.

The shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, were the immediate recipients of that wonderful communication from heaven.

Having heard the message of the angel of the Lord — "Unto you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour which is Christ the Lord" — they heard also a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men," and were so stirred in heart as to go at once to Bethlehem in order to see the thing which the Lord had made known to them. They saw, and made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. They published it generally.

Never had child been born under such auspices, nor introduced by such angelic acclamation, but their declaration was unnoticed. The wonderful saying which the shepherds made known abroad fell on ears dull and apathetic. The public effect was nil. No one appeared to care.

Shepherds! Who would listen to them! They were poor ignorant men, visionaries of some wild delusion. Had the priests and the scribes carried the report there might have been some reason in hearing it. But shepherds — announcing a Saviour born that day, even Christ the Lord, and He, too, lying in a manger — impossible, incredible, and only to be ignored.

The story was so unlikely! A Saviour, the Christ, Jehovah, born and lying, forsooth! in the manger of some cattle-shed, swaddled there in circumstances of palpable poverty! Never! A palace would be too mean for such a one! The highest dignities that earth could proffer would be unworthy of the Christ, the Saviour; but that Saviour, the Lord, Jehovah, cradled in a feeding-trough staggers conception.

Yes, the mystery of the grace of the Incarnation has always done so. Nature and reason stand bewildered. The story is either true or false. It is either the greatest act of humiliation (save, indeed, the cross) or the wildest piece of imagination that ever entered, or could enter, the brain of man. Indeed, such an invention is utterly inconceivable.

Ten thousand thanks be to God, the Manger of Bethlehem, ennobled by the presence, in infant form, of Christ the Lord, stands out in all the certainty of a fact divinely attested, and accredited by faith!

But in spite of the common indifference, we find some Simeons, and Annas, and others, even in Jerusalem, who were in expectation of redemption. Anna spake of the Redeemer to all such, and Simeon took Him into his arms, and blessed God that he had now seen His salvation.

Thus we see that the hearts of a few (alas, that there should have been so few!) were prepared to welcome the Lord. But so ever. God has wrought by minorities all along the line and made them His vessels of testimony and triumph. Study these minorities; there are many of them. Consider Noah and his seven; Gideon and his three hundred; Daniel and his three; Paul almost alone. Such minorities saved (as we say) the situation. God uses vessels that lean on Him; and such was the remnant of whom we are speaking, be they poor and unlettered shepherds, or people but little known to the world around them. "The secret of the Lord," we read, "is with them that fear Him; and He will show them His covenant" (Ps. 25: 14). So in this case.

But when, a year or more afterwards, there came wise men from the east (Matt. 2) to inquire in Jerusalem for the King who had been born, guided as they were by a star which mysteriously, silently, but surely announced His birth, "Herod," we read, "was troubled, and all Jerusalem with Him."

The advent of a Saviour, proclaimed as it was by the hosts of heaven, created little or no interest, but that of a King — one born as such — in distinct rivalry to Herod and his superior, the Roman Emperor, caused trouble everywhere.

The messengers were but men — their guide a star; their nationality Gentile; and yet with credentials so meagre their testimony was universally accepted. They were reputed, Gentiles albeit, as wise men, astrologers — Magi — men who read the heavens and their portents. These, therefore, were witnesses far more reliable than illiterate shepherds would be; and so their message told. The city was troubled, from the King downwards. "Where is He," they asked, who is born King of the Jews?" King, and only King, was their statement. Saviour and Lord they know not. The star signalized only a King — where is He?

Herod, fearful of his rival, appealed to the scribes for help. They turned to the Scriptures — that infallible guide, when truly understood, to eternal facts which are beyond the ray of a star, or the conception of man.

"Bethlehem," said the scribes; "for thus it is written by the prophet, ' And thou Bethlehem art not the least among the princes of Juda, for out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule My people Israel '" (Micah 5: 2). Thus did these scribes quote the prophet; they mentioned the "Governor," but they saw fit to leave out the wonderful words which follow: "whose goings forth have been from everlasting," (or, as it is in the margin "from the days of eternity"). They concealed the fact that this King was the Lord, Jehovah!

The wise men proceed to Bethlehem, being again led by the star, and coming to the house to which they are directed, they find the young child and Mary, His mother, and present to Him their treasures — gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They fall down and worship Him.

But being warned of God as to the cruel intentions of Herod, they depart to their own country by another way. Their visit had caused disquietude and trouble in the city. Such was its effect. No King but Caesar was wanted there, least of all that King who had been born at Bethlehem, whose goings had been "from the days of eternity." And so Herod, the mere creature of Caesar, wreaks vengeance on all the children of Bethlehem from two years old and under, hoping to destroy his rival "King."

That King had, however, been carried to Egypt, and not only placed there beyond the power of Herod, but that another Scripture should have its fulfilment — otherwise impossible — viz., "Out of Egypt have I called my Son" (cf. Hosea 11: 1). Ponder the words. The Son of God called out of Egypt suggests the beginning of a totally new history for Jew and Gentile, on the proven and utter breakdown of both before God. The Saviour — Christ the Lord, of Luke 2, is the blessed Son of Matthew 2. The Saviour is the King, and the Saviour-King is also Jehovah and Son of God. Wonderful harmonies, truly!

"Never Man Spake like this Man."

John 7.

Never! This encomium was absolutely true!

Officers had been sent by the chief priests in Jerusalem to take this wonderful Speaker, and bring Him to them from the Temple, where He had been boldly stating His mission, whence He came, and who He was; but the statement was so pronounced, so definite, so unequivocal, that, envious as they were of His fame, and fearful of His rivalry, they could devise no other plan of silencing Him than by force. Hence the charge given to the officers.

They went, intending, doubtless, to obey the orders of their masters, but before attempting to apprehend Him, they listened to His words and became deeply interested. They heard Him say to the unbelieving crowd: "Ye shall seek me and shall not find me, and where I go ye cannot come." These words, no doubt, struck them: they announced a Personality and opened out a wisdom and a superiority to circumstances, which at once placed Him, in their minds, above the level of ordinary speakers. Here was one who knew clearly what He was about, who spoke with calm authority and proclaimed an independence unknown to others. He thus asserted a right to speak and to command the hearing of all. Had such another speaker ever been heard in the Temple? Never.

What man was this? Needless to ask, for He had just made a sufferer of thirty and eight long years perfectly whole; and who could do that but God? That lowly Man who thus spoke in the Temple under the frown and threat of Jerusalem's rulers was in fact their promised Messiah — Son of Man and Son of God. His mighty works proved His Person.

No wonder that the officers were fascinated! Instead of finding a noisy declaimer of Roman or other government, they were brought face to face with a speaker so calm, so dignified, so uncompromising and yet so bold, that they were more than overawed. They felt themselves powerless to carry out their orders. The superiority of that presence, the majesty of that Person, forced them into admiration of Him. Further, they heard Him say: "If any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water."

"If any man thirst" — and who, in this weary world, does not thirst? A universal thirst is proved by a universal discontent. That word is written big in the bosom of every individual of every class and nation on the face of the earth — a thirst that nothing can slake but this wonderful "living water" given by the Son of God. There is to be found, as many have proved, an abiding satisfaction that leads them to eschew the overtures of a world that can never satisfy.

"If any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink." That is all; but the result is glorious, for he shall not only be personally satisfied, but rivers of living water shall flow from Him for the refreshment of this weary, barren, hopeless world. What a miracle, but how true, as the blessing of these two thousand years has proved!

"Come unto Me and drink" — that is all. But the secret is in that "Me."

No religious festival can slake this thirst — the thirst returns, as we can testify.

No service, no ordinance, no priesthood, no imposition of hands, no human benediction, no power of man nor angel can give the "living water" which satisfies for ever. They who drink thereof are "born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." They come, as thus born, to the Son of God. They drink, they are satisfied, they become channels of wide and generous blessing to all around. Again, what a miracle!

And whoever had, before, heard such words?

It was the voice of Him who, on another day, said to His captors: "I am He" words so uttered that they who heard them went backward and fell to the ground; but not so here. His voice which by and by "shall shake not the earth only but also heaven," but on this occasion His accents were those of grace and mercy and compassion for the thirsting souls of men.

The officers returned alone to their masters, who at once said to them: "Why have ye not brought Him?"

They could assign no reason. He made no resistance, nor did His followers, and yet bring Him they could not. All they could say was in this truest of all confessions: "Never man spake like this man."

They thus admitted that they had been overcome by His words themselves. They were "spirit and life"; and, their inherent and resistless power restrained them from carrying out their mission. His hour had not yet come.

"Are ye also deceived?" replied the Pharisees; "have any of the rulers believed in Him?" Impossible that any but the ignorant could do that.

Not a single ruler? Yes, one, and Nicodemus speaks out, who, in the shades of night, had heard the words of the lowly Speaker, had been spellbound by them, and had been drawn from his darkness into a knowledge of the love of God in the gift of His Son, of the substitutionary work of the Son when lifted up on the cross, and of eternal life through faith in Him.

To Nicodemus, as to the officers, "never man spake like this man" — no, nor acted, nor moved, nor suffered, nor sympathized, nor loved, nor died, nor was raised by the glory of the Father to be Saviour, Lord and Head like this Man, and to receive in heaven eternal adoration from myriads of worshippers, who are indebted to Him for the work He did, and the words He spoke.

"Jesus Wept."

There was sorrow in Bethany, death had entered one of its houses — the only one, in all probability, where the Lord found a welcome — and had removed a dearly-loved brother. Hearts were crushed and broken. A very tender tie had been snapped and mourning had taken the place of joy.

"Why this blow?" might have been the unspoken language of the two bereaved and desolate sisters. Had the Lord only been there, they felt sure that their brother would not have died. He, who loved all three, would have spared them the sorrow through which they had passed. His healing power had been so often shown that, had He only come in time, this disaster might have been prevented.

Now, however, it was too late. The Lord had allowed, for some inexplicable reason, known to Himself alone, the precious days to slip away; and when, in an apparently tardy response to their message, He had come at last, not only had death done its work, but the dead one was buried. Surely the Master had failed, on this occasion, in the display of the sympathy which was one of His most lovely traits.

How little did the sisters know the deep meaning of that delay. It was not occasioned by lack of love, or care, or consideration, but by a vastly superior motive, viz., "the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby" — the glory of God and of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, is the supreme object in the universe. Everything must subserve the glory of God — Father, Son and Spirit; and, to this undivided glory, the proud or fearful, or self-seeking heart of man must bow, and, in bowing, find rest and peace and assurance.

He who walked in the light of day knew exactly when to take His journey back into Judea, and to Bethany and its broken hearts.

He who said: "I am the resurrection and the life" was quite as able to raise one from a four days' state of death as He was to prevent him from dying. He who had just given eyesight to a man who had been born blind could certainly have caused that even Lazarus should not have died.

But there was to accrue to the Son of God a greater glory than that. He was to be seen as the giver of life, not now to the gentle child of Jairus, who had just expired; nor to the only son of Nain's widow, who was being carried to his grave, but to one whose body was already yielding to corruption and had become putrescent. The glory of God is all-various in its working, but it has the welfare of His creatures as one of its objects.

The glory of the Son of God was seen in His absolute obedience to the Father's will; but, while expressing itself in the raising of the dead, and the bestowing of life, and life eternal too, it proved itself in the exhibition of the fullest, tenderest, human sympathy.

Did He not suffer in order that He might fill the place of High Priest, and, as such, minister timely help and strength and comfort to His needy dependent, sorrowing people here? Most assuredly!

See, then, when He had found His way to the grave, and had witnessed the dire effects of death on the bleeding hearts around, we read . . . and, let the words of this, the shortest and perhaps, the most profoundly significant, verse in our Bible, sink deeply into our memories: "Jesus wept!"

He wept who was "the resurrection and the life"! He wept who possessed all the power of God and the warmest sympathy of man. Yes, "Jesus wept." He who was ever in the form of God is seen here in that of a servant. His service was one of love.

On that sympathy we can always count, for He is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

"Jesus wept! those tears of sorrow

Are a legacy of love;

Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,

He the same doth ever prove:

Thou art all in all to me,

Weeping One of Bethany."

And recently hearts innumerable have been torn, crushed and bleeding. Loved ones have fallen on fields of battle. Desolation has covered the face of the earth. Each country has shed its tears; on all hands there are widows, orphans, sisters, parents, brothers and friends who have mourned and wept. But behind the inscrutable wisdom that has allowed a convulsion so awful, there is, at the same time, a gracious and sympathetic support richly ministered by the ascended Lord who gives the assurance that, if the one He loved may not be restored, as was Lazarus, yet He says: "Thy brother shall rise again," for in the fullest sense "whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." That is, there is no death, as such, for the Christian. He is "absent from the body and present with the Lord." Death is annulled for such; while on the other hand, "he that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live," for "life and incorruptibility are brought to light by the gospel."

Here we may find our richest consolation. Can you picture a more lovely sight than the sacred Weeper of Bethany? There He stands, at the grave-side in moral touch with its mourners, not in a spirit of cold superiority as might have become death's victor, nor even in the aloofness of Him by whom all things were made, but in the full pathos of One who, while Creator and Sustainer of all, cherished a heart of tender human pity.

We repeat the words: "Jesus wept." May I ask the afflicted and sorrowing if they can find no comfort in those tears, no solace in that sympathy, no Friend that sticketh closer than a brother in this best of all friends, no compensation in His love, no pillow for the heavy head, no resting-place on His puissant arm, no one to occupy the empty chambers of the stricken heart — One better than the best and dearer than the dearest? What a triumph for faith when HE is thus known and loved!

It gives glory to the Son of God when the bereaved and broken heart finds all its satisfaction in Him. He will be everything to us in our bright eternity, and this He may be in our present but brief period of sorrow and loss.

The Son of God.

"He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." — Matt. 16: 15, 16.

—

The significance of this question put, by the blessed Lord to His disciples must be apparent to the reader. At that moment a crisis had been reached in His testimony, by the only too evident refusal thereof on the part of the leaders of the nation. He had come to "His own," and, now, in the panorama of His life, as presented in this first Gospel, we see that "His own received Him not."

He had been announced by the Baptist, the herald of the kingdom, in terms of charming interest; and the wise men had been attracted from the east by the finger of God to do Him homage. He had proclaimed in the mountain, the holy principles of the kingdom; He had wrought miracles of mercy on every hand; He hid bidden the weary to find rest in Himself — the Son of the Father; He had, as Son of man on earth, pardoned sins; He had, as the promised Messiah, opened the eyes of the blind; He had been, owned as Son of God by Satan, whom as "the strong man" He had bound, and, as the stronger, was able to spoil his goods; but, withal, He had been proudly rejected, even where His greatest works had been done. There was no national repentance. This sin and that of His rejection went together.

As to the common opinion regarding Him, He might have been John the Baptist, or Elias, or Jeremias, or one of the prophets: that was all! Unconcern, on this vital point, marked the mass. This "greater than Solomon," both in wisdom and works, was ignored. He was despised and they esteemed Him not. Nevertheless, it was their Messiah whom they thus rejected. How blind, how culpable they!

Then it was that He asked of His disciples the question: "But whom say ye that I am?" He could surely count on some hearts which would respond to it, for there must ever, in days the darkest, be those in whose hearts God is working, for He never leaves Himself without witness; and accordingly Peter made answer: "Thou art the Christ [the Messiah] the Son of the living God."

But this rich and true confession was by no means the fruit of the natural mind. Such knowledge does not originate in the heart of man. It was communicated to Peter, said the Lord, by "My Father which is in heaven." It was necessarily a direct revelation.

But there it stands, in its eternal value, to command the faith of every one who professes the name of Christ. Let the words "the Son of the living God" carry their due weight with every believing heart and conscience, and call forth the adoration that is meet.

"Whom say ye that I am?" Not only Jesus of Nazareth; nor alone the Christ known to us on high, seated, as Man, on the throne of the Father, Head over all things to the Church, which is His body, but as "Son of the living God," over whom death had no power, nor could it hold Him. May this supreme glory of His infinitely glorious Person engage the attention of His saints increasingly. Let us remember that we live in a day when that Person is, in one way or another, disparaged.

The holiness of His humanity is denied on one hand, and the truth of His deity is assailed on the other; but, in this question and answer, "whom say ye that I the Son of man am," and "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," we have both facts stated as equally true — "the Son of man" and "the Son of God." Hence it becomes us to cherish both His perfect manhood and His essential deity. And it may be very fairly questioned if He can be worshipped aright, unless this relationship be owned. My soul, dost thou truly recognize in thy once dying Redeemer, who bought and washed thee from thy ten thousand sins in His blood, the veritable Son of God? If so, then prostrate thyself at His feet, and magnify, adore, and worship Him.

When on the Mount of the Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John were privileged to hear the voice from out of the cloud saying, "this is My beloved Son, hear Him." That voice Peter, never forgot: nay, "we have not followed cunningly devised fables," he wrote (in his second epistle) "when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eye-witnesses of His majesty." He received an indelible impress of the glory of our Lord as the beloved Son on the Mount, even though, in his written ministry, he treats more of "the Christ" than "the Son."

James early earned a martyr's crown (Acts 12.), so that we have no ministry from his pen: but the writings of John are replete with the moral glories of "the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father." And how we love those writings! How they enrich and call forth the adoration of the soul!

Then, if we refer to Paul, we find that his very first text in the Damascene synagogue, as soon as the scales had fallen from his eyes, was that "Jesus is the Son of God!"

This was the first note of his lovely song — the first tribute to the glory of Christ in his testimony. It formed the backbone of all the rest. Hence the extraordinary and Spirit-owned (as Spirit-given) power of his ministry. That ministry was manifold; it covered the Gospel as it had been made known, in a special way, to him; and then he writes of Jesus being "declared to be Son of God with power . . . by resurrection from the dead," so that not only the resurrection of our Lord, but His deity as well, give colour and character to the apostle's gospel (see Rom. 1: 4).

So, too, it covers his ministry of the Church; for in his Epistle to the Ephesians, in which he treats of the Church as the present vessel of the grace and purpose of God, he speaks of the gifts of the ascended Christ, as having for their object "the perfecting of the saints, the work of the ministry, the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4: 12, 13).

Here the knowledge of the Son of God is the acme of all spiritual attainment, and the grand object of the Spirit of God in the edification of the body of Christ. "Whom say ye that I am?" is still the great question for heart and conscience. That knowledge is clearly the deepest and most profound, as well as the initial, in the whole revelation of God: for, on the glory of His person the value of His atoning work depends. The issues for eternity, whether as regards glory or judgment, depend on the person and work of the Son of God.

Along with the knowledge of the Son is that of the Father, and this is "eternal life" in its full Christian or present aspect, even as we shall, when in glory with the Lord, enjoy it in absolute fulness for ever.

May the Spirit of God give us fresh unfoldings of the Son of God day by day.

A Word to the Weary

Let me quote the verse from which these words are taken: "The Lord God hath given Me the tongue of the learned [the instructed] that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary" (Isa. 50: 4).

1st. Who speaks the word in season!

Who is that "Me" who is instructed by the Lord God for a service so precious and so deeply needed?

It is He who (as the same passage states) asks the question: "Is My hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver? . . . I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering."

In His hand is all that power. He can redeem; He can deliver; He can darken the face of the sky; in His hand is omnipotence — a truly wonderful Person is He!

And yet He it is who is qualified to do a service so infinitesimal as to drop a word of comfort into the ear of the weary. What vast extremes are in His service!

He who covers the heavens can comfort a poor weary heart here below. And He does!

2nd. How did He acquire this ability?

How, in what school, did He receive this learning? How comes He to act in sympathy and to feel the sorrows of His afflicted people? The answer is given us in Hebrews 2 and 5. There we read that He "took part in flesh and blood"; He became incarnate; He stooped from Godhead glory into the fashion of Man; as man He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. He who had hitherto commanded, who "spake and it was done," now learns obedience in suffering, as each of the four divinely-given biographies of His perfect life makes known to us; it was in this school — that of weariness and weeping, of hunger and poverty, of contact with every phase of human misery and woe, the tears of the doubly bereft widow and the desolated home of Bethany, the painfully visible effects of sin and the groan of a convulsed creation — . in this familiar school and not in the unruffled dignities of heaven He learned the art, rare and precious, of sympathy and of speaking a word to the weary. His sympathy is the result of dearly-bought experience, and is, therefore, ever efficacious.

He is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. "He was tempted in all [note the word] points like as we are, yet without sin" — i.e., sin wholly absent.

3rd. The word spoken is Seasonable.

His word to the weary is spoken, we read, "in season." That is, He knows the exact moment when to whisper into the wearied ear, and just when to support the breaking heart.

It was in a moment of physical crisis in my own career, that I learned the meaning of His rod and staff comforting me. I had, till then, attached the idea of support to that staff. Now, I discovered that there was also "comfort." So says the charming pastoral psalm, where we find the sheep drifting down through the valley, but, even there, comforted by the shepherd's rod and staff! Yes, but this makes the dreaded valley a very easy journey when you find that such comfort is yours in it, and that beyond its shadow is the House of the Lord for ever!

Christ's ministry is always seasonable, never out of season. It may not assume an audible form, as it oft-times did in days of old, as, for instance, to Abraham, Moses, the prophets, or to Paul, once and again, but in some sweet and suitable way by the Word, or otherwise — a psalm, a hymn, or a spiritual song — the patient service and comfort of the living Lord, is proved by the weary.

4th. Who are the weary?

Well, such a question is superfluous to-day. . . . Who is not weary?

"And they shall be weary. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah" (Jer. 51: 64) — a striking statement at the close of this significant prophecy, but not very dissimilar from the "groan" of Romans 8. Wearying and groaning are, did we only allow the fact, the chief features of humanity to-day. The frivolity of nature can only be accounted for by its insensibility. The awful fact is that "the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not," and this diabolic obfuscation of mind, on the part of all such, is the reason of this sad phenomenon. Did every one feel as he should that he "must give account of himself to God," how different would be his thoughts and habits! But "God is not in all his thoughts," and hence the trifling.

But not so is the weary. To him God is real, and needed, and obeyed, and loved. He follows in the blessed steps of his Master and Lord. He realizes the contradiction to God on all hands. He is oft-times weary, rightly so, and he it is who receives and enjoys "a word in season" from Him who, has power to redeem and to deliver, as well as to cover the heavens with blackness, or do what He will in the armies of heaven.

"Jesus the Son of God."

These words stand out bold and clear as a statement of the Spirit of God which allows no kind of qualification. They bind together the humanity and the deity of our Lord. They present, in blessed union, His lowly name as Man and His divine title as God.

Their setting is exquisite. We read in Hebrews 4: 14: "Seeing then that we have a great high priest, which is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession."

The enormous difficulty of maintaining the Christian profession, in power, is only too well known by the true believer. He has a profound sense of his own spiritual weakness and tendency to yield to the foe, so that he values, all the more, the care and support, the sympathy and succour of our Great High Priest, who hast left us in an adverse world, has passed through the heavens, where, none the less, He sustains us in the path of faith, and who comforts us in all the tribulation of our heavenward journey. He is possessed of all power. We are to make a constant use of the throne of grace, in order to receive, thence, the grace and mercy needed for each and every exigency and trial. We may connect the mercy with the name of Jesus, and the power with the Son of God.

A wonderful combination of words are these: "Jesus the Son of God"! It is not "Jesus the Saviour of sinners," nor "Jesus the Christ," nor "Jesus the Head of His body the church," but "Jesus the Son of God." He comes before us in Deity.

But this dignity had already been noted of Him in the first chapter of this epistle. There we read that "God has spoken to us by the Son" (in Son); that He is the brightness of His person; that He upholds all things; that He made expiation by Himself, and then sat down on high; that He receives the worship of angels; that He is saluted as God; that He created all things, and will, by and by, cause them to pass away, while He remains the same. He is God the Son as well as Son of God, Creator and Sustainer of all things. This prepares us for our Spirit-given phrase: "Jesus the Son of God."

How glorious His priesthood! How able is He to carry His people through, and how full of encouragement to them to hold fast their profession. He met their sins by expiation; He meets their infirmities by priesthood; but, whether in the work of expiation or in the execution of priesthood, it is in each case "Jesus the Son of God." For God He always was, and God and Man He ever remains.

I need hardly say, however, that this Epistle to the Hebrews is not the only scripture which, in definite terms, declares His deity. If, in an ordinary biography, the writer happened to state, but once, that his subject was a scion of nobility, the reader would unquestionably accord him that distinction; but if the writer repeated the same statement and gave, at the same time, varied and incidental proofs of it, all uncertainty would be removed from the mind of the reader.

Further, if other and separate biographers, who, on account of the distance of time could not possibly have written their different books together, stated the same fact, then, surely, there could be no room for disbelief. "At the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established."

First, in the very earliest chapter of Genesis we have an intimation of the plurality of the Persons in the Godhead. "Let us," we read, "make man in our image, after our likeness." The statement is significant even though we are not given anything beyond the fact of plurality. But, here and there in the Old Testament, which rather teaches the unity of the Godhead than its trinity, we discover the existence of those three divine Persons who are explicitly, and purposely, and fully revealed to us in the New Testament.

If we turn to Psalm 110, spoken "by the Holy Ghost" (Mark 12: 36), we find the words: "The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on My right hand"; in Micah 5: 2: "A Ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been of old, from everlasting"; in Zechariah 13: 7: "My Shepherd . . . My fellow, saith the Lord of hosts."

In the pages of the New Testament the declaration is full. To acknowledge it is highest bliss; to deny it is fearful sin; only how necessary it is to apprehend the Godhead of our Lord Jesus Christ, as indeed His manhood in its essential sinlessness, in a spirit of becoming reverence and lowly grace. Controversy thereon should be eschewed, and the simple and yet majestic truth accepted. Reason is beggared here. Revelation is worthy of the highest exercise of reason, and that is faith in what God has declared. For nothing is so rational as faith in God. "Jesus the Son of God" must be allowed to stand before the bowed and adoring heart, in all the dignity, glory, majesty, and deity, of His Person as "God manifest in flesh."

In the close of the Gospel by Matthew we have the formula of Christian baptism. It is to be in the name of "the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" — the Godhead in Trinity, and each Person is to receive equal honour in this initial rite. The dignity of Each is the same, as is the honour to be accorded. It will be remembered that, in the synoptic Gospels, the accounts of the baptism of Jesus are practically similar. "My beloved Son" is the salutation of the Father in each. In the Son the Father had found His pleasure. So in the Transfiguration, He was again spoken of as the beloved Son, and was to be heard as such. It is still "Jesus the Son of God."

The fourth Gospel introduces Him in deity — "The Word was God"! But the same Word "became flesh" — a brief, decisive statement of what we call the "Incarnation" — and, as such, He dwelt among us "full," thank God, "of grace and truth"; and, as "the only-begotten Son, which is [mark the word — it signifies subsisting there ever, and that as Son] in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." How complete! Who but the Son of that bosom could adequately declare or express the Father? None but He! And so, in John 10, He affirmed that He and the Father were one. In John 8. He pronounced the eternity of His existence in saying: "Before Abraham was I am." Later on, Thomas confessed Him as both Lord and God.

Passing on to Paul, once the inveterate hater of the name of Jesus, the very first thing he did after conversion was to preach in the synagogues: "Jesus, that He is the Son of God" (R.V., Acts 9: 20), and this initial text was only developed and emphasized during the course of his Christian ministry; for the Christ he ministered as Saviour, Lord, and Head of the church was also "the Son of God who loved him and gave Himself for him" — "God manifest in flesh" — "over all, God blessed for ever." His highest theme was the deity of Jesus.

Then Peter in his second epistle tells how he had been an eye-witness of the magnificence (is the word) of the Lord Jesus as seen on the holy mount, when he actually heard the voice of God the Father saying: "This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Hence, to him, after such a vision, the glory of Christ, and His coming kingdom, was no "cunningly devised fable." It was a mighty and all-controlling fact.

Finally, John, in closing his general epistle, says: "We know that the Son of God is come . . . and we are in Him that is true. This is the true God and eternal life."

Thus the deity of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is abundantly confirmed throughout the length and breadth of the Word of God. Such is the Great High Priest of our profession.

Christ our Pattern

The Christian is enjoined to follow the steps of Christ. He is not commanded to speak as He did of whom it was said: "Never man spake like this man" (John 7: 46); nor to do the works of Him who said: "If I had not done among them the works that none other man did" (John 15: 24), for, both in words and works, He held a place absolutely pre-eminent. He was the truth, and all He said was infallibly true. He "went about doing good, for God was with Him," and miracles of mercy followed where He went.

The Christian is not commanded to do miracles, like his Lord, but he is exhorted to "follow His steps" (1 Peter 2: 21). This he is bound to do. It is his duty and pleasure to trace out his Master's footsteps and to place his own feet in them. This is the truest form of discipleship.

Let it be very clearly understood, however, that no one can imitate the Lord Jesus Christ until he is consciously reconciled to God on the ground of redemption. The imitation of Christ on the part of one who has never been "born again," nor, therefore, a child of God, is impossible. The attempt must be a total failure; and the more honest that attempt the greater will be the disappointment. It were a thousand times easier to paint the rainbow on canvas than for man, as such, to exhibit in his life the moral features of Christ.

No, a man must have not only new desires, but a new nature and a new power, that of the Spirit of God, who alone can so minister Christ to the renewed heart that it seeks His image and also conformity to it.

It is by the Spirit of the Lord that such an one is "changed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3: 18). And may I say that no change is so complete and exquisite as this.

Think, for instance, of a Saul of Tarsus — the chief sinner, changed into the image of the Lord Jesus!

Think of the same change being effected in any of us who have learned our natural loathsomeness — that we should bear that image — fully in the glory itself, but gradually and increasingly now while on our journey to it! What a wondrous power this supposes; but, just as surely as the Spirit of God dwells in the believer, so does this process of sanctification proceed, though assuredly not to the eye of the believer himself. Others can notice the progress of the Christian as he moves on "from glory to glory." He becomes more like his Pattern. Wonderful fact! Nor will the process cease until he shall be "conformed to the image of the Son, that He may be the first-born among many brethren." They shall remember Him who shall be the Chief of all.

"Christ also suffered for us" — there He stood alone, for none but He could take our place under the judgment due, nor exhaust its awful sentence, when He was "made sin for us"; but beside making atonement in death, "He left us an example that we should follow His steps." Here He is not alone. Not one of His loved and blood-bought people but should follow His steps.

Some may follow them more faithfully and closely than others, but He tells us that His "sheep hear His voice, that He knows them, and that they follow of This is the one distinguishing mark of all His sheep. They follow Him.

It is remarkable that the word "example" here, is found nowhere else. It means a "copy or underwriting." It is not the same as that of the Apostle when he charged the saints at Philippi to be followers together of him and "to mark them which walk, so as ye have us for an ensample"; nor again when he urged his son Timothy to be "an example of believers." In these cases it is a "type," but here it is a "copy." That is, our Lord Jesus Christ is the standard, and no lower one will do.

Can we, then, reach this standard here below? Certainly not; but still, "Every man that hath this hope in Him [the hope of being like Him when He shall appear] purifieth himself even as He is pure" (1 John 3: 3). Again, we have the universality of the process. "Every man" addresses himself to reach that perfect Standard.

Needless to say that He holds a place far beyond the reach of man. He is "the true God and eternal life" (1 John 5: 20); but here we are dealing with the standard of purification and the Pattern — the copy for our imitation. Men speak of high ideals; could any ideal exceed this?

And what are the steps we are to follow? They are to be traced from the time when, in the midst of the doctors, He said: "Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?" to that when, that business perfectly completed, He cried: "It is finished," bowing His blessed head and giving up His Spirit to the hands of His Father.

What a study! What an example! Our passage in 1 Peter gives us a summary of the steps in four bold negative statements: —

1. "Who did no sin."

2. "Neither was guile found in His mouth."

3. "Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again."

4. "When He suffered He threatened not."

Mark, in these He left us an example; and how we are rebuked as we view Him absolutely clear of the failures to which, alas, we are all so prone.

And then, in deepest confidence, "He committed Himself to Him who judgeth righteously." If the other statements presented His life negatively this gives us the constant repose of His soul in a positive way. His vindication was of God. Are we in the habit of making this committal? We gain a victory when we do so; for there the battle ends. His whole life was submission, hearty and unquestioning, to the will of the Father. This was His yoke. It was easy. And when we, through grace, bow unmurmuringly to that will, we, too, prove the yoke to be easy and the burden light.

But there must be reality. The headline must be copied, and the example imitated. The most beautiful (only beautiful) steps have been imprinted on this more than desert waste, by the holy and sacred feet of the Son of God, leaving behind them the plainly visible signs of the one path that is pleasing to God, and that which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, each and every child of His should pursue.

"The Lord is Himself gone before,

He has marked out the path that we tread.

It's as sure as the love we adore,

We have nothing to fear nor to dread.

"There is but that one in the waste

Which His footsteps have marked as His own,

And we follow in diligent haste

To the place where He's put on His crown."

Yes, He has gone on high. We behold with unveiled face His glory there. Every ray of it is lovely; it wins the heart; it separates from earth; it changes him who beholds into "the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord." The transformation is marvellous but divinely simple. The Potter fashions the vessel as it seems good to Him, and the skill of the Potter is seen in His work.

Beloved, may we set our hearts on acquiring a much greater likeness to the Lord Jesus Christ who is our Pattern as well as our most precious Saviour.

The Cross of Christ

The cross of Christ is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful fact in the universe — the most beautiful in its display of perfect love, but the most hideous in its expression of human enmity and wickedness. It is the meeting-place of the grace of God and the guilt of man. There these two opposing forces came into direct collision. There we see God and there we see man, fallen man. There we see, not only the love of God to man, but we learn His justice in dealing with evil — His righteousness in the treatment of the sin that could not have otherwise been atoned for, but in the death, under divine judgment, of the holy, spotless Son of God — the willing victim of Calvary.

Let it be seen that, in order to vindicate His character, and to clear His throne of the possible charge of complicity with sin, it was necessary that God should deal with that awful question in a way so judicial that it might be settled, finally and definitely, to the silencing of every accusing voice for ever. The flood had only done so in measure, loud though its protest was. The victims slain on Jewish altars, though types of a greater sacrifice, "could never put away sin."

Nay, a Victim of infinite value alone could meet the infinite demerit of sin, "The Son of man must [note the word] be lifted up." The payment must equal the debt, and the amends must be commensurate with the penalty. Who can pay the penalty? Neither man nor angel! The Son of God alone!

Now, mark, if infinite demerit demands an infinite substitution, it follows that the substitution refused — that is, Christ rejected, then infinite — that is, eternal judgment is the necessary alternative. Terrible fact!

It is either acceptance by faith of the substitutionary death of the Son of God, and full salvation; or the heartless rejection of Him and eternal punishment — one or other. Thank God that "the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth from all sin"; but to tread that blood under foot is to incur a doom sorer than "death without mercy." Who can face such a doom? But, in the cross, God's righteousness is declared as fully in the equitable justification of the believer, as is shall be in the condemnation of the sinner.

He is "just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus." Hence the glorious moral value of that wondrous cross! Unless its voice be heard and understood the soul can never really know God. Then, why is the cross so proudly shunned, or why should it be a stumbling block? Just because it is the fullest exposure of man. It condemns him root and branch. It shows that his very "righteousnesses are as filthy rags," and that the whole world is running in opposition to God, saying by its triple condemnation of Christ, "Crucify Him," "crucify Him," spite of its polished letters in "Hebrew, Greek and Latin." Therefore your attitude towards the cross determines your relation toward God. You cannot esteem the cross if you love that which it condemns. If you "love the world you are an enemy of God."

But this thorough exposure of man in his lost condition and hatred of God is only one aspect of the cross of Christ. The other is God's perfect way, in purest grace, of meeting the whole question of sin, wherever its poison may have spread, and of carrying blessing to man in his deepest guilt. Divine and glorious solution!

God incarnate becomes the willing victim in order to expiate sin by being "made a curse for us"! Could any conception be more marvellous? And so we read in Colossians 1 that it is by "the blood of His cross" that all things in heaven and on earth (but only there) are to be reconciled; and thus, He, whose precious blood was shed thereon, shall be seen as "the Lamb of God" who taketh away, in its vast and vile entirety, "the sin of the world."

No miracle like the cross of Christ! Then, if the cross be of such value to God, what is it to His children? Can anything surpass its worth? They who witnessed it "smote their breasts." The Roman centurion exclaimed: "Truly this man was the Son of God." The sweet story of Calvary has captivated the hearts of myriads, and turned them from sin and Satan to God and life eternal; while the courts of heaven re-echo the notes of praise for ever. There is no fascination like this wondrous cross. The world may bewitch, and by its allurements enslave its votaries, but: —

In thy cross I saw a beauty

Far outshining all I knew,

There Thy love's surpassing lustre

Won my heart, and bound me too.

Now, oh! Lord my heart is spell-bound,

Charms and fascinates my gaze.

The Risen Lord

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" — Luke 24: 5.

There they stood at the edge of the empty sepulchre — a group of true-hearted but perplexed and disconsolate women!

They had brought, at early morn, ere the busy world was astir, their already prepared spices and ointments.

But the tomb where the body of their Lord had been laid was empty; hence their bewilderment.

They had seen Him in death, and had marked "how His body was laid." But what now? That body was gone — how, where?

As they were much perplexed thereabout, two men stood by them in shining garments, who said to them, "Why seek ye Him that liveth among the dead?" (Luke 24: 5, marg.).

"Him that liveth"! What could that mean to these downcast women? He whom they sought was not there, but was risen! The sepulchre was empty; the spices and ointments were useless; but if He were alive again, the power of death had been broken, together with all that could signify.

A living, risen Christ — that is the starting-post of vital Christianity! Christ risen from the dead, having annulled the power of death and the grave, having broken the power of Satan and made atonement for sin — that is its mighty foundation!

"He is risen" — that is our paean of victory! "Him that liveth" — that is our everlasting strength and consolation!

Now see the immediate effect on these very women. We read that "they came and held him by the feet and worshipped Him" (Matt. 28: 9). Their perplexity gave place to worship, and their desolate hearts were filled with gladness.

"Rabboni," cried the weeping Mary, when she heard Him call her by name.

"My Lord and my God," said the unbelieving Thomas, when generously invited to thrust his hand into the spear-riven side.

"The disciples," too "were glad when they saw the Lord" (see John 20).

Oh! it was the dawn of a new day, the beginning of a new creation, the closing up of types and shadows, the presence of the glorious Antitype in actual resurrection form, visible, tangible, accessible, gracious as of old, and exactly "the same" as "yesterday," when He wept and suffered and sympathized, and as, thank God, He will be "for ever." The blessed Leader of Salvation had been made perfect — thoroughly fitted and qualified by suffering — for His new place as such.

See the effect on Stephen, the lovely protomartyr of Christianity. He was full of the Holy Ghost who had been sent down by the living, risen Christ after His ascension to heaven, and consequently, in the power of this glorious indwelling Spirit, he cried: "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God"! (Acts 7).

What a vision! But how thoroughly in order.

We know the sequel; he was stoned to death, but passed away in deepest peace, saying, like Him on whose face he was gazing, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." He "fell asleep" like a wearied child rocked in its cradle. Death was, as we said, annulled, shorn of its sting and terror. See the effect on John in Revelation 1. He had fallen prostrate in the visible presence of the Son of Man, as He walked, judicially, amid the seven golden candlesticks. There he lay, but on him was laid a gentle hand, while a well-known voice said: "Fear not, I am He that liveth and became dead, and behold I am alive for evermore"!

Enough; fear fled, the seer arose, the apocalypse followed full of terror to the world, full of comfort to the true and faithful church.

It is still the risen, living, and coming Christ.

Notice, "Because I live, ye shall live also," are His precious words in John 14. With Him we are "in safeguard," indeed, as David told one of his trembling followers.

As certainly as He lives on the other side of death, so shall each and all of His beloved and believing people. For He is their life. Hence we read in Hebrews 7: 25: "He ever liveth to make intercession for us." Such is the present activity of His life in glory — our High Priest and Intercessor.

"He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep."

Oh! there is succour, sympathy, care, consideration, love in that tender heart up there on the throne! He has felt our pangs; He has shed our tears; He has known our sorrows; He was made like us in all things but sin; He calls us His brethren. He is the star and sun of the Christian life!

A creed, a rule, a form, a system, a kingdom, a heaven! Oh, more, infinitely more is our living, loving, tender, holy, faithful Lord! It is everlasting life!

No marvel that Paul could write of and crave for "the surpassingness of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord." It surpasses and eclipses all beside.

This knowledge is no fable, nor myth, nor imagination.

The Christ of God and of Christianity is a living Person — truly God and truly Man — the Son of the Father, the Redeemer of men, the risen, glorified Lord and Head of the church, who appeared once to put away sin by His own sacrifice, who is coming shortly to call His own to be for ever with Him in the Father's house — those whom He loves to the end, and who will appear again in judgment and power and glory.

Beloved, it is ours to-day, during His rejection, to learn His personal worth — to set our hearts on this one thing, so that we may bear the stamp of Christ upon us in the reproduction, in our poor frail bodies, of His beautiful life of love and holiness. This is the truest fruitfulness and greatest joy. Let us bathe our souls in the pure waters of John 14, 15, and 16, until we can better appreciate John 17.

"Lord Jesus, make Thyself to me,

A living, bright reality."

Christ's Priesthood

"We have not an high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities." — Hebrews 4: 15.

It is only in the Epistle to the Hebrews that Christ is definitely spoken of as Priest — "the High Priest of our profession;" but, if intercession belong to that office, as it surely does, we read in Romans 8: 34 "It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us."

Mark, His intercession is His present exercise in heaven, as the result of His death and resurrection. These, completed to the glory of God and the settled peace before Him of all who believe (in present justification and filial relationship), furnish the ground of this precious intercession — of Priesthood.

By no means does intercession add to our security as believers. That is assured already; nor does it move the heart of God toward us, as though we needed reconciliation. "For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life" (Rom. 5: 10). The death of the Son of God, sent of the Father in infinite love, effected our complete reconciliation; the life of that Son, in present glory and power, secures our salvation from every menace.

We start our Christian course as reconciled, and made secure for ever, by that which has been done for us in the death and resurrection of the blessed Lord; but we have to pursue that course in conscious weakness and dependence. We need an arm on which to lean and a heart as faithful as it is kind in which to confide day by day.

This we have fully in our great high Priest. His intercession is active for us before God; and His succour and sympathy are continually realized by His tried and tempted people here below.

If the Spirit makes intercession in us with groanings which cannot be uttered, so does our faithful Lord intercede for us on high.

Little we know how indebted we are for those intercessions!

Little did Peter appreciate that his Master was praying for him, so that, when the temptation came, his faith should not fail; or how that intercession was answered when, having failed, he "wept bitterly." His faith, thus, was kept in life, though, in order to learn his lack of dependence, he himself was allowed shewed to fail.

"If any man sin," we read in 1 John 2, "we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous."

It is advocacy with "the Father" because relationship is supposed, and confession is made to the Father on the part of the offending child, so that his offence is forgiven, and he is "cleansed from all unrighteousness." Advocacy is therefore subsequent to intercession. This is for sustainment, that is for restoration, so that communion may be full and unclouded. Advocacy is distinct from intercession, which properly has to say not to sin or failure, but to infirmity and need.

Hence we are told to "come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy [pity] and find grace for timely help" (Heb. 4: 16). A more lovely expression could not be found for the tried and needy pilgrim than "the throne of grace." It signifies the omnipotence of compassion — pity all powerful!

The words are derived, I gather, from chapters 1 and 2. In Hebrews 1, having made expiation, Christ sits down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; while in Hebrews 2, He is presented as a merciful and faithful high Priest. Hence we may speak of a mercy that is majestic, and of grace enthroned! And all this for those who feel their own personal inability for one step of the way.

Is not such living compassion predicated in John 13-17? We have the feet washed in 13; "another Comforter" in John 14; slavery exchanged for friendship in John 15; "good cheer" in face of a hostile world in John 16; and the most wonderful intercession in John 17. Surely we may discover all this in the present priesthood of our Lord. And were not His "learning obedience" when here below, His "strong crying and tears," and His death itself His qualifications for that office? Did He not reach perfection by the things He suffered? He alone can best sympathize who has passed through the sorrow; and so we read of His being a "Man of sorrows" before we read of His soul being made "an offering for sin" (Isa. 53). His perfect life as Man preceded His expiatory death on the cross. Now He is highly exalted. "We have such an high Priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens" (Heb. 8: 1). Nor did He glorify Himself to be made an high Priest. That He did not, but the title lay in the unique dignity of His person: "He that said unto Him, Thou art My Son, to-day have I begotten Thee," said also, "Thou art a Priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec" (Heb. 5: 5, 6). His title lay in His personal glory as Son of God; His qualifications lay in the sore ordeal of His perfect life of sorrow among those who had proved the bitterness of the results of sin in its myriad forms. He was apart from sin, but not from tears, nor hunger, nor thirst, nor weariness. He went into death itself to complete His path of perfect obedience, and, at the same time, to atone for sin, and to overcome all the adverse power of Satan.

He is free now to exercise, in the place of divine power, the functions of a merciful and faithful high Priest toward all who come unto God by Him. He ever liveth to intercede for them, and is able to save them to the uttermost — for ever!

All thanks and glory to Him!

"The Coming of the Lord draweth nigh."

Now that the church is rapidly nearing the Home-call and the longed-for moment, when the Lord will fulfill His promise of coming again and receiving us to Himself, so that where He is we may be also, does it not become us to raise our thoughts and enlarge our expectations in view of the mighty translation that must be so near at hand?

"Hope deferred," we read, "maketh the heart sick," and there is more than the possibility of that sickness so depressing the spirit that hands begin to hang down, and knees to become feeble.

Not, however, that the Lord delayeth His coming; for, what seems long to us is not so to Him, to whom a thousand years are only a day; but as time is the great test of endurance, so, as weary years drag on, we become impatient and ready to droop. So it was with Israel in Egypt when the deliverance expected at the hand of Moses failed to reach the suffering people as quickly as they had hoped. But the mills of God, in grinding slowly, did their work on Pharaoh in His own good time, if not in that of Israel.

So, again, when the people had lost sight of their leader when receiving the "lively oracles" on the fiery mount, becoming impatient, prepared to return to Egypt, saying, "As for this Moses we wot not what is become of him," the sickness of deferred hope had stricken them.

For a like impatience of spirit, King Saul forfeited his crown.

The loss of patience and of hope is the sign of coming collapse; and against such a thing we, to-day, must contend.

Never was a day so truly full of hope; never was the coming of the Lord so near; never, throughout these dreary centuries, was there a time when, with yearning hearts turned heavenward, the church of God, as a concrete whole, should be looking thence for the Saviour — the longed-for Deliverer — to accomplish, in a moment, that glorious translation, according to the power (a wonderful power indeed) whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself (Phil. 3).

Let our earnest gaze be heavenward while our hearts, more than ever, await their divinely implanted craving of seeing Him face to face.

"How will our eyes to see His face delight,

Whose love has cheered us thro' the darksome night."

Oh! but the night has been dark and drear, and the road steep and long, and the bride of His heart is weary and travel-stained! She feels His absence; she longs for Himself; she finds no home here below; she pants for the ineffable joys of the Father's House — its rest, its comfort, its love and light; its full unison of heart and hand; its sacred circle undivided for ever; its immunity from every form of evil, its unfettered enjoyment of full spiritual power in such worship as shall be to the glory of the Father and the Son for ever!

Gladsome prospect!

But is the longing all on her side? No, no, most surely not. It is stronger far on His.

Consider His closing words to her as He says, "I am the bright and Morning Star" herald of day and of Home!

A star so long hidden from view by the shades of night, breaks at length in the distant sky to cheer the weary watcher and tell him that his vigil is over. That star is the star of morning! The night and its testing is past; no need for patience and hope now

"The eye at last beholdeth

What the heart hath loved so long."

The expectation is gratified; the heart is at rest. And that star calls Himself a "bright" star!

But why "bright"?

Just in order to place Himself in contrast with the signal failure of that profession of His holy name which has, alas, sunk down from its pristine power and separation to God (as we see in the Acts of the Apostles) to a condition so nauseous that it has to be utterly ejected, as we read in the address to Laodicea.

Whilst He remains "bright," the profession has dropped into fearful moral pollutions until He can only describe it as wretched, blind, and naked.

To this profession He is nothing but the Judge, and it is doubly guilty before Him; but to the bride He appears, at the soon coming close of her long and tremulous vigil, as the Star of the Morning, as bright and glorious and unchanged as ever!

How bright her prospect; how bright her hope; how bright the Star of that hope!

To Him "the Spirit and the bride say 'come.'" And our hope, so long deferred, will, very soon, give place to sight, and our feeble faith to glad fruition.

Meanwhile, as the shore is nearing, and the perils of the voyage are almost over, may we say the one to the other, "Be of good cheer, for I believe God that it shall be even as it was told me."

"Let not your heart be troubled . . . I will come again."

The Bridegroom

"He that hath the bride is the bridegroom" (John 3: 29).

The Bridegroom's possession of the bride is absolute and exclusive, for the relationship is inviolate, none may interfere.

Other ideas may present themselves, those of fitness and affection, but this is the chief. The bride is the absolute and inalienable property and possession of the bridegroom. And such possession carries its own peculiar joy to his heart. He sees in her an helpmeet for himself, his counterpart, his intelligent and loving co-partner who can not only share his joys and sorrows, but who feels that they are her own. Union produces identification, there is perfect community of interest, there is full reciprocity of wish and action, and that on account of the existing union between the two.

Now, Christ is presented, amid other relations, as the Bridegroom, and the church — not the individual saint — is spoken of as His bride, His wife. Given to Him of the Father, purchased by His precious blood, and the object of His special affection, she is His peculiar property, and belongs to Him alone. She is, par excellence "His own." He loves her to the end. As in the case of ordinary marriage a man shall leave his father and mother, the otherwise strongest of links, and shall cleave unto his wife. For this is the original institution as ordained by the Creator, and intended by Him to be maintained in all the sacredness of the tie. It is under His authority as Creator, and is to be disregarded at the peril of the offender. He shall "cleave unto his wife." This was the divine decree in the brief day of innocence, when discord was unknown; it is the decree of God to-day, when sin, alas! has created such a host of difficulties, but when, at the same time, grace is well able to make the tie as strong and tender as at first. Oh how admirably does Christ make good His part in this mystic union. How true and tender, how patient and faithful is He!

Now, as to the reality of this relationship let us look first at Matthew 22. There we read of a certain King who made a marriage for His Son, and who sent forth His servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding. This is, no doubt, the gospel-call. The servants are sent out to invite to a wedding. They share in the joy of the King and of His Son. They are in that exquisite secret. They have before them not only the happiness of the guests, but they have the gladness of the Bridegroom. He is a poor evangelist (it may be said in passing) who has only the good of the sinner before him. To have that is well, but to have the joy of Christ in His coming nuptial day is far better. Let us realize the value of souls increasingly, but let us also have that day clearly in view, and think of the pleasure that the Son shall have when He shall survey His fair and glorious bride "unblemished in His sight." This is a wondrous stimulus to the servant in his oft-weary labour, viz., that he can beget such joy to his Lord. The grand object of the gospel should fill his heart with its infinite gratification to Christ.

Then in Matthew 25 we have the "midnight cry" which awakens all the sleepers, wise and foolish alike, and leads, consequently, to the definite and final separation of the two companies from each other. That cry is, "Behold the Bridegroom." It implies His advent no doubt, but attention is drawn, not so much to that, as to Himself — the one commanding theme of the Spirit of God.

Of the bride nothing is said here, for all interest centres in the Bridegroom, and it is the preaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whatsoever character or glory, that produces the greatest effect and leaves the deepest impression.

Elsewhere it is, "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world;" or only, "Behold the Lamb of God;" or again, "Behold the Man." Here it is, "Behold the Bridegroom!" And at length He comes, and they that are ready go in with Him to the marriage — to the moment of His joy — and the door is shut. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus!"

Now let us learn from 2 Corinthians 11 the sanctifying power of this truth: "I am jealous over you," says the Apostle Paul, "with a godly jealousy, for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ."

This beautiful simile is in keeping with all that has preceded. Paul had the grand design of the gospel before him — the marriage of the King's Son. His consuming desire was to present the church all pure and chaste, detached in heart and life from the snares of Satan and the power of evil, to Christ, as to "one husband." He laboured for fidelity on her part to the rightful claims of this one Husband that she might respond, in all her ways, creditably to such a relationship.

Could any appeal be more affecting? He saw the seductions around, and he pleaded for the exercise of those sacred affections which should ever burn in the bosom of the faithful bride, and express themselves in her conduct.

Then Ephesians 5: 27-32 gives us the result in the presentation to Himself of that church which Christ not only gave Himself for, but which He also sanctified and cleansed, with such infinite patience all her journey through, that she is seen at last "glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but holy and without blemish." It is the bride that is here depicted. She is seen to be the product of the work of Christ from the cross right on to the day of presentation. To Him she owes all her beauty.

We pass on to Revelation 19: 7-8-9, to "the marriage of the Lamb" — the consummation of all! "His wife," we read, "hath made herself ready; and to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white, for the fine linen is the righteousness of the saints." She is credited with such, and is granted thus to be arrayed — pure and bright, and made ready for the nuptial day. The joy on each side is complete.

Then a thousand years pass away, and she is seen in the figure of a city (Rev. 21: 2-24), descending out of heaven from God, but still prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. Time leaves no scar; the wrinkle once effaced, never returns; the bridal beauty remains. The city is resplendent, the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. Defilement is excluded for evermore. Glorious prospect!

Arise, Thou bright Morning Star, bright Herald of the day, and touch the chord which will cause "the Spirit and the bride" to say, in deep and rich union, "Come" to Thyself, the longed-for heavenly Bridegroom — Thou "conspicuous among myriads" — Thou "altogether lovely" who hast won the affections of these myriads by a love which, for them, has passed through death's dark waters and sin's heavy judgment, and which lives on to-day and for ever; nor shall it rest until Thy blood-bought bride is with thee in eternal glory. Again, "Even so come, Lord Jesus."

"From the dateless timeless periods,

He has loved us without cause,

And for all His blood-bought myriads

His is love that knows no pause.

Matchless Lover!

Changeless as the eternal laws."

The Coming King

We find in Scripture that God deigned frequently to reach the attention of people by means of dreams. Many instances could be adduced. Now, however, we have in the Scriptures the full unfolding of His mind, so that dreams, having that for their object, are unnecessary. There is enough in the Book of God to give complete intelligence to every willing heart as to all that is connected with our spiritual well-being for time and eternity, as well, surely, as to very much more than our personal well-being.

If people only knew the value of the Bible, they would prize it much more.

A mighty king of Chaldea, Nebuchadnezzar by name, had a wonderful dream. He saw, in vision, an image — great, excellent, terrible! It stood before him. Its head was fine gold; its breast and arms were of silver; its belly and thighs of brass; its legs of iron, and its feet part of iron and part of clay!

There it stood — silent, mysterious, significant!

Such a statue, composed of material so heterogeneous, had never been unveiled to mortal vision before.

No ordinary dream this, and none of the wise men of Babylon could relieve the affrighted monarch of the terror of that dream.

God had sent it, and God alone could explain it to him.

He who sent the dream fitted and sent the man to give the explanation.

Daniel, the devoted, godly captive, was entrusted with the dream and the key. Giving all credit to God, he told the king the wonderful secret — a secret of the ages!

Would that the politicians, and the statesmen, and the rulers of to-day would attend to the disclosure of this ancient dream!

An image of gold, silver, brass, iron and clay: these are four kingdoms, coming in succession — from the gold of that day to the incoherent iron and clay of our own. It is easy to see them — Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome — the last being protracted, and its influence being felt universally to-day.

There stood that image, whose form was terrible, containing such elements of wealth and power, such stores of gold and of iron! How puissant, how resistless! No wonder the king was troubled, or that "his sleep brake from him" (Dan. 2: 1).

Such a problem must be worked out. But, notice most carefully, we read: "Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet . . . and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone which smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth" (Dan. 2: 34-35).

That was the greatest wonder of all! What could this mysterious stone, cut out without hands, be?

The image was smitten, ground to powder, and displaced by the stone. Marvellous stone! It becomes a mountain and fills the whole earth! The chaff of the threshing-floor is replaced by the stone which smote the image.

Yes, ye politicians, and statesmen, and empire-makers, who are engaged in tasks so enormous and so complex, and for which ye are sacrificing time, talent, brain, muscle, fame, and fortune, see ye not that ye are but building together that which shall become the chaff of the summer threshing-floors, while there is suspended overhead the Stone which is bound to pulverize your gigantic labours and bring them all to dust?

Mark: — "In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: . . . but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever" (Dan. 2: 44).

When?

When the kingdom in mystery, as known to-day, shall give place to the kingdom in might — then!

To-day the kingdom of God is in moral and spiritual power; soon it will be in visible actuality.

To-day the church awaits her Lord for the meeting in the air at His coming. Thereafter the Stone shall fall, and grind, and crush to powder, as, like a mountain, it fills the whole earth, and "the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ" (Rev. 11: 15).

He is wise who devotes his attention, not to "the chaff of the threshing-floor," but to the Stone, and the kingdom, and the King. For, as surely as "the gold" of Babylon has passed away and its place can hardly be discovered, so shall "the iron and the clay" of the present moment be dissolved as well. These kingdoms are evanescent, God's kingdom shall stand for ever.

The King, hidden to-day in heaven because of His rejection and death here, is made known now in richest grace as Son of God and Saviour, Advocate and Great High Priest, Head too of His body the church, but soon to appear with her in glory; and then, as the Stone cut out without hands, but introduced and established by the power of God, to reign in absolute monarchy and in perfect wisdom, power, and righteousness.

Such a King and such a kingdom have never yet been known; but, as certainly as "the chaff of the threshing-floors "shall be swept away, so shall this mighty Stone fill the whole earth and "stand for ever."

King of Kings

"King of kings" and "Lord of lords" —

O how rich these glorious words!

Titles high and boundless fame

Now enhance the Saviour's name.

Him who once was crowned with thorn,

Crowns of glory now adorn;

Jesus sits upon the throne,

Hosts His triumph gladly own!

Sweet it is to see Him there,

Centre of the glory fair,

Sweet our highest praise to bring,

Bow before the heavenly King!

Now within the Father's house,

There we know Him and rejoice;

Glad that He, e'en now, should share

All the Father's glory there.

Soon will He appear again,

Then His saints with Him shall reign.

Echo far the glorious words,

"King of kings" and "Lord of lords."

"My Glory"

John 17 stands alone. It is the language of the Son as He addresses the Father on His own behalf and on that of the apostles and those who should believe on Him through their word. None but He, the Son of God, and both Shepherd and Advocate, could have breathed such a prayer. It was in no sense a pattern or model for the use of others, as was that which He gave to His disciples on an earlier day when He said to them, "After this manner pray ye."

There is no such injunction here, nor could be. It is the language of a faithful steward who recounts His work as done and well done. "I have finished," He says, "the work which Thou gavest me to do," speaking in anticipation of the moment, so near at hand, when He should loudly and triumphantly cry, "It is finished." On this ground He claims restoration to the glory which He had with the Father before the world was — a glory which He had never forfeited, a place which He had left in order to glorify God on earth in perfect manhood. He justly claims reinstatement in that place and in that glory which He had never dishonoured during His period of suffering here below. The defilement of earth had not affected Him. The water rises pure as ever to its level in the heavens.

Who but He could speak after this fashion? The prayer is therefore peculiarly His own. How worthy of our deepest meditation! What a privilege that we should be permitted to hear its sacred accents and to listen to the intercourse which passed between the Son and the Father at such a moment. Of the twenty-six verses of our chapter He spends but five on Himself; then follows eighteen which are occupied with the good of others, expressing as they do the most intense solicitude for their preservation from the evil of that world which He was about to leave, but wherein they were purposely left to fill His place in testimony and to exhibit the very unity of life and nature that existed between Himself and the Father. These verses, too, should be our constant and prayerful study. They will greatly enhance our appreciation of the Father — the holiness of His name, the sense of His preserving care, the blessedness of our relation to Him as children, and also the character of the world through which we are passing, its essential evil, its hatred of the Son, its ignorance of the Father, its absolute and hopeless alienation, even though grace may work in it, from all that is of the Father. How a clear sense of all this would, and should, draw together in holy separation from it those who love the Father and belong to the Son as given Him of that Father! Oh! for a deep realization of this new life, its meaning, the blessedness of the links that bind all the precious children of God together in relation with each other and the Father and the Son I What a conception! What a fact, and what a testimony! All will be gloriously accomplished ere long; and in the visible and indefectible display of this divine unity the world, so incredulous to-day, shall yet know that the Father sent the Son, and that, wondrous to say, He loved us (even us) as He loved the Son!

These eighteen verses — with all their wealth of interest, and their more than prayers for the preservation and unity of all His believing people — over, the blessed Lord, the Son loved of the Father — observe, "before the foundation of the world," and able, assuredly, on the ground of such a love so strong, so eternal — may well assert, in verse 24, His will as to those very people. Given of the Father, and purchased by His own precious blood, He may surely affirm His title to them. He may demand His personal gratification as to, first, their being with Him, where He is; and, second, that they should behold His glory — the glory given Him of the Father.

Just as a bridegroom would find pleasure in conducting his bride through their common home and in pointing out to her his varied possessions, so now the desire of the Lord is that those who had seen and shared His sorrows and who had, like Himself, been refused by the world should behold His glory. How great the difference! We have seen His cross, now we are to behold His crown!

That they may behold my glory! Not now the "moral glory" of chapter 1. — that of an only-begotten Son with a Father, for this had been beheld, as we know; not now that of the Mount when He received from the Father honour and glory, for this, too, had been witnessed, but the glory given to Him as the result of His atoning death and suffering, a glory millennial indeed, but surely more extended than that, just as the effects of Calvary extend infinitely beyond the confines of time or the sceptre of the Messiah.

Nay, He seeks, and how rightly, His own gratification in the full and unreserved exhibition to "His own" of the glory which for ever shall be His God-given compensation for His anguish and agony, His obedience unto death, the death of the cross, here below. How richly deserved! "Father, I will," He says — it is no prayer, but the assertion of the same will, which in a few moments, was to be set aside for that of the Father and the necessity of the cross, when He prayed in the shades of the garden: "Not my will but Thine be done" — here He wills that those given Him of the Father may be with Him where He is, and why? "That they may behold My glory which Thou hast given Me." Yes, His gratification indeed, and as truly ours — mutual, eternal! It is His longed-for prospect and ours! And so soon, please God, to be realized! The "will" of verse 24 exceeds prayer, or petition, or demand. It is a claim. Demands had preceded; this, fully in accordance with the good pleasure of the Father, is a righteous title to those who are "His own" on the basis of everlasting love. The result is sure.

Verse 24 stands by itself. The two which follow are a beautiful summing up of the whole; the world is seen in its awful moral distance; the Father and Son are viewed in fullest intimacy, and the Father's name revealed perfectly to the highly favoured company which knows and possesses the love of the Father and the indwelling of the Son. Wondrous grace indeed. Oh 1 for hearts to worship and adore!

Praise

"The race of God's anointed priests

Shall never pass away.

Before His glorious face they stand,

And serve Him night and day."

A truer stanza was never penned. It was written some three hundred years ago; if true then it is true to-day.

The business of the priest is, first and foremost, to praise. He may have other sacred occupations, but praise is the chief.

"God inhabiteth the praises of Israel" (as we read in Ps. 22: 3). Praise is His becoming environment. "Blessed are they that dwell in thy house, they will be still praising thee" (Ps. 84: 4). Praise is their delightful and constant employment.

When a tribe was chosen to lead Israel across the desert, from sea to river, Judah was selected, and Judah means "praise." Alas that the harpers failed in their song!

Praise was the paean of Jehoshaphat ere he fought his battle.

Stones would cry out if praise were restrained.

Prison walls only elicited praises when Christ's priests were, for His sake, placed in the stocks.

"Worthy is the Lamb" is the praise that reverberates throughout the wide vault of heaven. All is praise.

No, this race is immortal. It survives time with its thorns and hindrances, it shall continue for ever. It shall never pass away.

As surely as God has given His Spirit to a single soul — no matter when, or in what day or dispensation — that soul is hereby bound to sing His praise.

That Spirit is the pledged proof of blessing, and how can anyone be blessed without, subsequently, giving thanks and praise to the Blesser.

No doubt the fuller the light the deeper also the praise. The early notes of Ephesians 1. are a great advance on anything we find in the Old Testament; but, whether Old Testament or New, praise is the very life of the saint. Who then are God's "anointed priests"? Are they a special and distinctive class? Are they marked off from others by any external attire — anything that places them in a caste peculiar to themselves?

What is the anointing, the consecration, whereby their priesthood is assured? It is the reception of the Spirit of God. All who can truly cry "Abba Father," who can thus consciously address God, these are anointed; they have received His Spirit, and this is true of every child of His — every Christian to-day. They are a "royal priesthood" so that they should show forth the praises of Him who hath called them out of darkness into His marvellous light. The Christian community, the whole blood-bought family of God — the entire church of Christ, should be marked and distinguished by this grand special feature that, here and now, they show forth praise for the grace bestowed on them.

The apprehensions of all may differ, gifts may be diverse, but the one thing that declares the anointing is praise. That which God has done for His saints calls for their praise. Look at the Book of Psalms and see how it ends with a long, loud, lovely Hallelujah — a grand outburst of praise on the part of His redeemed and delivered people.

Quite true praise is not worship, but it is more than prayer and more too than thanksgiving.

We utter in prayer our wants, we give thanks for the gifts of God — His mercies and goodness; we praise Him for that which He has done, is doing and will do for our blessing — all this is in language articulate and audible, possibly, to the intelligence of men; but worship being the absorption of the soul in its glorious Object — the Father and the Son, may be beyond all possible expression. "The elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth for ever and ever" (Rev. 5: 14). What they said (if anything) we are not told.

Such worship! How little do we understand it! What a terra incognita it is to the majority of the children of God! But what a field for our increased apprehension, ere we find ourselves in the Father's House on high where our absorption in God fully revealed — Father, Son and Spirit — shall be eternal and complete.

Praise, on the other hand, as the true and simple acknowledgment of our being placed already in His "marvellous light" is the becoming language of every saint of His to-day.

But may it be cultivated diligently. May we charge our sluggish, selfish, grovelling hearts to live more in the bright, blessed region of praise to our God and Father as belonging to that "race of priests" which shall never pass away.

"Whoso offered praise glorifieth Me" (Ps. 5o. 23).

Bridal Affection and Brotherly Love

There never was a time when the affections of the church toward the Lord, as Bridegroom, should be more earnestly and diligently cultivated than the present moment.

His coming is drawing, we believe and hope, very near. With a deepening desire "the Spirit and the bride say, Come," as the day of union approaches. The bride bids Him welcome, as moved to do so by the animating Spirit to whom is known the mind of the Bridegroom. The desire is reciprocal; and if so, how fervently should the affections of the bride flow out to Him who not only loved her and gave Himself for her, but who shall presently come for her in person, and take her to be with Himself where He is for ever — "a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but holy and without blemish" (Eph. 5: 27).

Could anything be more seemly than such affection? Was it not departure from "first love" that originated the gradual fall of the church from days of pristine devotedness and zeal to the present state of Laodicean luke-warmness, worldliness, and widespread infidelity? And shall we not seek, at least individually, a return to that early love for our Lord Himself which at first made everything of Him and His sacred interests, while the world, with its snares and blandishments was a thing of naught? What but a deep appreciation of the love of Christ made the early church so separate, so holy, so devoted and the fire of those affections that burned up the attempts of the imitators, and endured the rage of opponents? The spring of love for the Lord was then supreme. He was everything to her — His bride — and she was, and, thank God, still is, everything to Him. He is the same, be the changing years what they may. "He loved them to the end."

And has there not been, for many years now, a gracious rekindling in the hearts of His saints of love for the Lord Himself? Has there not been a ministry of the Spirit which has had that, the chiefest of all ministry — the love of Christ — for its object, and a preparing of souls, not for an event, however blessed, but for the actual, personal coming of the Lord Himself?

This, I think, is undoubted. It can be traced through every cloud, and should be cherished in face of every opposition.

Let us remember that our Bible closes with the words: "Surely, I come quickly," and that the immediate and glad response is, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus." It is a beautiful close! It is the golden promise that was purposely given to cheer the heart of the bride through the, to our experience, long period of the Lord's absence; and not only to cheer her heart, but to test her allegiance and fidelity to Himself. We know, alas! the result, how the church has failed, but how that, spite of all, His love abides unaltered, while His promise is on the very eve of fulfilment. Hence, on these grounds alone our love for Him, our true, holy, and bridal affections should centre increasingly on Himself.

What more comely, more suitable, more sanctifying?

Then, along with the development of such affections, there should be also that of brotherly love.

We need only turn to the First Epistle of John in order to learn the immense place which love to our fellow-Christians holds in the life of the true believer.

In 1 John 2: 10, we read that "he that loveth his brother abideth in the light." He is no longer in darkness, for "the light" is in his home, and love to his brother proves that he is there.

Further, in 1 John 3: 14: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." Thus we learn that love to our brethren is an absolutely essential mark of brotherhood in the divine family. It is the patent proof that we have passed out of death unto life. Not to love your fellow-Christian is, de facto, to hate him, as Cain hated and slew his brother, because, spite of his sacrifice, his works were evil and himself the same. He was not right with God, nor therefore with his brother. He stands before us as a fearful beacon. Then, again, in verse 23 of the same chapter we read: "And this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, as He gave us commandment." Mark the last word. It is His "commandment" that we should love one another. It is therefore our bounden and sacred duty that we should do so. None more binding nor obligatory; it is just as essential as is believing on the Son of God. Do we realize this duty? Do our renewed affections flow out not only to the Lord, our heavenly Bridegroom, but equally to each and all of God's beloved children. We are to love one another, as He has loved us (John 15: 12). If only we did so, how soon would our strife and folly and divisions come to an end, or be happily reduced to a minimum.

But more (1 John 4: 7, 8), "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God; he that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love." Two facts: first such an one is born of God — He possesses the divine nature; and, second he knows God. Not to love is not to know God (solemn thought indeed), for God is love. If the blessed God has been made known to the soul at all, He is known as love, and He has proved His love by the gift of His only begotten Son, that we might live through Him; and, yet again, that He might be the propitiation for our sins. How blessed! What pure and undeserved grace! How forceful the conclusion: "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another."

Hence, to love is the proof of being in the light; it is the consciousness of having passed from death unto life; it is the highest obligation of one Christian to another; and it is the reproduction and expression of the nature of that God who is love.

This is brotherly affection! How sacred! How necessary! How essential!

But, mark, in 1 John 5: 2 we find the salutary statement: "By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments."

Let this be noted: we only, and in truth, love His children when, first, we love God and keep His commandments. Our affections must be governed by the will of God, so that they may be of a nature divine, and not merely human; but all the deeper, purer, and more fervent on that account, as they flow forth to all His children.

May we cultivate all these precious affections in view of the near coming of the Lord, and also of the nature we possess as the children of God.

"For the Sake of the Name"

Quote the above words from the Revised Version of the Third Epistle of John.

The Name! What name? "Because that for the sake of the name they went forth," writes the beloved Apostle.

In this brief, fervent letter three names are mentioned: that of Gaius, that of Diotrephes, and that of Demetrius, whilst certain others are spoken of as "strangers," but are unnamed.

Yet, with a significance which should command all attention, allusion is made to some one of whom "the name" is deemed sufficiently descriptive. It is clearly assumed that merely the word "name" calls for no elucidation. This is quite intelligible. If "the day" had a meaning of profound signification to some who thought of a moment which would bring a world-wide victory to their arms — "the day" which was whispered, and spoken of, as a secret, but which, having come, would exhibit the result of long years of expectant toil, how much more did "the name" pass as a watchword in the ranks of those early

Christians who were the honoured subjects of the Apostles' ministry? That name stood pre-eminent with them; but shall it not do so to-day?

As to the three men mentioned by name in the letter.

First, of Gaius we read that he enjoyed more prosperity of soul than of body; but spite of physical infirmities, he walked in truth and charity, and thus caused great joy to the heart of the Apostle, who had, indeed, no greater joy than to hear that his "children [in the faith, no doubt] walked in truth." But Gaius was a lover of hospitality; his charity was witnessed publicly. He maintained, in equipoise, the balance of truth and love — not love at the expense of truth, nor vice versa. He exemplified, in practice, the "better way" of 1 Corinthians 13. He was a fine specimen of an all-round Christian. No wonder that he gladdened the heart of the Apostle!

Second, Diotrephes comes before us, but in a deplorable contrast to Gaius. His sole object was self-exaltation; he loved to have pre-eminence (mark the word) in the church refusing the Apostle himself and the brethren — the "strangers" referred to above, who "went forth for the sake of the name," forbidding those to receive them who would do so, and casting them out of the church. This is that Diotrephes! In him, cold, stern, hard officialism; rank, rigid ecclesiasticism, and a kind of papal tyranny combined with the zeal of a Jehu, outweighed the grace, patience, meekness, and lowliness that should characterize a servant of Christ. For such an one the Apostle had no regard. He would remember his deeds. He turns quickly away from thinking of Diotrephes; and, in his gentle style, he writes: "Beloved, imitate not that which is evil [let not the high-handed, merciless, inconsiderate ways of such an one be copied] but that which is good" (kind, profitable, beneficent); for, notice, "He that doeth good is of God [let these words sink into our consciences], but he that doeth evil hath not seen God." So much for Diotrephes!

Third, Demetrius. What of him? He carried "a good report of all, and of the truth itself." Happy Demetrius! Like the elders of Hebrews 11 his record was good. The truth had his name on its pages; the Apostle found pleasure in the very thought of him; he adorned the doctrines of Christ.

Each of these men had his history; but what of the mysterious name which exerted so great an influence over these "stranger" brethren who went forth expressly and solely for its exaltation, and under its exclusive authority, at all cost to themselves? What of its omnipotence, its charm, its all-sufficiency, its infinite magnetism over heart and mind and hand and foot — the name that captivated, that saved, that delivered, that constrained, that separated, that entranced, that controlled without a rival, that commanded, and that obtained obedience unqualified? What name was that?

It was not that of an apostle, nor of a church, nor of a school, nor of a mission. It favoured no party, nor clique, nor section, nor division. All such things were annihilated in the immensities of that name.

"He shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father [Father of eternity], Prince of peace" (Isa. 9: 6).

"God hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of JESUS every knee should bow, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2: 10, 11).

Now we understand why these devoted strangers "went forth." They had come under the spell of that name. It meant, first, their complete salvation — their purchase at a price incalculable —../../site/authors/Biographies/pollock.html even His precious blood. They were slaves no more; they were Christ's free men and servants. He was their Lord and Master, their leader and commander, their treasurer and source of supply. From Him they had received and held their commission. They owned His absolute pre-eminence. These were some of the brethren whom Diotrephes would not receive! Then he should receive his own judgment. He may not be imitated. Happy it is to turn to a large-hearted, loving, and truthful Gaius; or to a record like that of the upright Demetrius, and seek to follow their faith while honestly and before God loathing the spirit of the wilful, place-seeking, domineering Diotrephes; or to tread humbly in the self-denying, devoted footsteps of the strangers and brethren who went forth, independently of man, simply and wholeheartedly "for the sake of the name."

It is just possible that this epistle was the last inspired writing. Anyhow, it is striking that the expression "THE NAME" should have such prominence. For these last days are, alas, witnesses of a vast Babel of party names; sects are distinguished by the names of men, of doctrines, of places, to our common shame, all of which would, if the supremacy of "THE NAME" were but owned, sink into their own miserable nothingness, as, thank God, they certainly shall, when, as the rising sun outshines all lesser luminaries, that Name which is above every name shall obliterate for ever the petty names and designations to which we attach so much puerile importance to-day. Oh! that the Spirit of God may magnify before the hearts of all the children of God the worth and glory and power and excellency of "THE NAME." It gives its outline to the Philadelphian.

The Last Psalm

"Praise ye the Lord."

1. Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.

2. Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.

3. Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.

4. Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.

5. Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

6. Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.

The long voyage is over, and the harbour is reached; the roar of the storm gives place to the music of the haven. We have gained the end, the victory, the song.

Praise, and only praise, resounds on every hand. The voice of the enemy is silenced and his power is broken. The murmur of the wilderness is heard no more; its weary discords, its sobs, its pains, its sorrows, have given place to the glad "Hallelujah" of God's presence. Every heart is happy, and every mouth is filled with song. We are reminded of the parable of Luke 15, and the glad home where is received the once prodigal, its satisfaction and its music; only here the scope is wider. It is Israel replaced in its own land, in the joy of the kingdom, and in the presence of the King. The long night is over; the nation has received double for all its sins; its warfare is accomplished; iniquity is pardoned; it is the time of its "comfort." And what more befitting than such a song! What more comely than that instruments of music, the sweetest, the clearest, the loudest, should be employed to celebrate the praise of Jehovah?

There is now "no evil occurrent." The Lord is king, and His name is one, and His subjects are blessed. "Happy is the people that is in such a case; yea, happy is that people whose God is the Lord." They give heartfelt expression to their joy. In the six short verses of our beautiful closing psalm we have praise thirteen times. And what music! What harmony!

The heavenly sanctuary is invoked to sing praise to God (ver. 1); not a voice in those glorious courts on high may be silent. They have their own exquisite song to sing in the glories of the Father's house, and in the knowledge of Father, Son, and Spirit fully revealed.

Then, again, "the firmament of His power" must reverberate with His praise. Not a being amid all these higher principalities but shall swell the chorus of His praise; while they who can sound trumpet, or psaltery, or harp, or timbrel, or pipe, or stringed instruments, or organs, or loud cymbals, or high sounding cymbals, shall also praise the Lord! Lovely orchestra, indeed, when each instrument of music emits in perfect and willing harmony the rightful praises of the Lord!

How glad the choristers, how sweet the song! But, in order to ensure the universality of the song, and to gather into its joy every intelligent being, the call is made: "Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord." Breath, the breath of life, the the faintest ability to articulate anything, let such, and all such, praise the Lord. Hallelujah!

What a conclusion! "Still praising" as ages roll. Happy service now and for ever on the part of the ransomed of the Lord.

Love's Retreat

Here would I ever be,

Close to His side,

Who in His love for me

Willingly died.

Here would I ever lie,

Down on His breast,

Proving so tenderly

Heaven's own rest.

Here would I ever fall,

Down at His feet,

Gladly to share with all

Love's fond retreat.

Thus shall my spirit have

Calmest repose,

When on life's stormy wave,

Or amid foes.

Till my glad lip shall wake

Heavenly song,

And the bright morn shall break

Cloudless and long.

Then, Lord, my theme shall be

Only Thy love,

And in Thy Father's house,

Heaven above,

I shall Thy beauty trace,

Vision sublime,

There see Thy wealth of grace,

Glory divine.

Moses - The Man of God

Moses — The Man of God

G. André

ISBN 0-88172-134-4

Published 1990 by

BELIEVERS BOOKSHELF INC.

P. O. Box 261, Sunbury, Pennsylvania 17801

About the Author

Is it possible to combine a fruitful Christian life with a successful business career? For many years, Mr. André has worked for an international company. However, his first love has been to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. While principally involved in Bible camp work in his native country for a number of years, he has maintained a keen interest and involvement in the work of the Lord worldwide.

Mr. André has preached the Word of God both orally and with his pen. Although the many books he has written are better known in French, German, Italian and some other languages, an increasing number of them are being translated into English. They are available from Believers Bookshelf, Inc.

Contents

Preface 5

1. Childhood, Youth, Calling 6

1. The parents' faith 6

2. The choice at the age of forty 9

3. The vision at the age of eighty 12

Thinking things through 16

2. In Egypt — The Deliverer 17

1. Failures 17

2. Who are they that shall go? 20

3. The Passover 23

Thinking things through 27

3. First Steps in the Wilderness — The Shepherd 29

1. Deliverance at the Red Sea 29

2. Bitterness at Marah 32

3. The lessons of Rephidim 34

Thinking things through 36

4. At Sinai — The Mediator 38

1. Receiving the law — The lawgiver 39

2. The crisis of the golden calf 42

3. The tent of meeting — The intercessor 45

Thinking things through 49

5. From Sinai to Kadesh 51

1. Eyes in the wilderness 51

2. The burden of all this people 53

3. Bitter disappointment at Kadesh 55

Thinking things through 59

6. Thirty-eight years in the wilderness 61

1. Meekness and humility 62

2. Tension at Meribah 68

3. Alone at Pisgah 70

Thinking things through 74

PREFACE

Numerous young people in Switzerland and other parts of Europe have been blessed by the ministry of this book. Presented first in lecture form in a camp setting, its influence and usefulness greatly expanded when it was printed in French, then in German.

Now by the help of God we are privileged to present this ministry in English. It should be especially useful for study by Bible classes, youth camps, Sunday Schools, etc., because of the discussion questions provided at the end of each chapter.

With appreciation for the diligent work of Daniel K. Dreyer in translating this book into English, we commend it to the prayerful study of young and old.

“. . . Moses verily was faithful in all his house as a testimony” (Heb. 3: 5). “Take, my brethren, the prophets who have spoken in the name of the Lord for an example “ (James 5: 10).

Grant W. Steidl. June 1975

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

Many editorial changes have been made in this second edition. Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the New Kings James Version, Copyright 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Grant W. Steidl, March 1990

J. N. Darby's Synopsis of the Books of the Bible and C. H. Mackintosh's Notes on Exodus and Numbers will help the reader to a deeper understanding of this outline of the life of Moses. It is recommended that the Scripture passages listed under each chapter heading be read carefully before proceeding into the chapter itself.

About the book…

Moses was born in a period of great stress and persecution by Pharaoh upon the children of Israel. But Moses' parents had great faith in God and so could commit their beautiful child to His care and keeping. Many lessons can be learned by Christian parents today from the example of Amram and Jochebed.

What prompted Moses to forsake the riches of Egypt for the reproach of Christ?

Why did God allow a great man like Moses to spend 40 years on the back side of the desert?

Learn from Moses' handling of disappointments and discouragements how you can and should react to distressing circumstances.

The author, in his own straightforward manner, makes many applications from the life of Moses, his personality, his training and his instruction in the path of God, that will benefit all who will read this book with a desire to please the Lord.

Chapter 1

CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, CALLING

1.  THE PARENTS' FAITH:

Hebrews 11: 23; Acts 7: 20-22; Exodus 2: 1-10.

Amram and Jochebed, according to Exodus 6: 18-20, belonged to the tribe of Levi and to the family of the Kohathites. It was a family which in the future would perform such important duties in relation to the tabernacle.

Three children at this point are mentioned in the word of God: Miriam — probably ten to thirteen years old at Moses' birth; Aaron — three years older than Moses (Ex. 7: 7); and Moses.

According to Pharaoh's decree, issued shortly before the birth of Moses, the Israelites were to cast into the river every son that was born. Only the female infants were to be kept alive. What an exercise of soul it must have been for Jochebed during the long months prior to the birth of the child! Would it be a daughter whom she would have the right to keep?

The child came into the world and it was a son; but not an ordinary boy. By faith his parents discerned in him a special beauty. Acts 7: 20 reveals that he was “exceedingly lovely” (literally “beautiful to God”). Hebrews 11: 23 expressly emphasizes that it was because the child was beautiful that his parents hid him.

There was no room in the world for this one whom God singled out from birth as special for Himself. Centuries later, there will be no room at Bethlehem for the Child Jesus. King Herod will try to slaughter Him as Pharaoh tried to destroy the child Moses.

As then, so today faith adheres to the One whom the world despises, the One who in the eyes of faith is “more beautiful than the sons of men.”

Moses' parents were not afraid of the king's edict. For the first three months they did everything they could to keep the child hidden. Yet the moment arrived when this was no longer possible. With what care the mother prepared the ark of reeds, plastered it with resin and pitch, put the child in it, and placed it near the bank of the Nile River. There Miriam would keep watch on him from afar.

For a few years the children of Christian parents are under the special influence, protection, and care of their mothers. Then the moment comes when they must be exposed to the outside world through school and contact with other children in the neighborhood. Knowing very well that she cannot keep her treasures with her for ever, a Christian mother will be careful to take every possible precaution to prevent her child from becoming exposed to harmful influences during this new period. Above all, she will need faith to commit him to the care of the Lord who is able to keep him.

How marvelous the answer to the confidence expressed by Moses' parents! The hand of God appears in every detail: the selection of the place and hour at which Pharaoh's daughter comes down to bathe in the river; her compassion at the sight of the child; Miriam's presence of mind; and the kindness of the princess who delivers the child to his own mother for the first years of his life.

At home Moses will remain under the training of his parents — “The child grows.” Later on he will be in the royal place where the daughter of Pharaoh will bring him up “for herself” (Acts 7: 21). Moses, instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, will become mighty in his words and deeds just as Jesus was mighty in deed and word, in Luke 24: 19 and Acts 1: 1! Also, Moses knows the pleasures of Egypt.

Which of the two educations will prevail? Will it be the one imparted during the few years at his father's home where Amram (whose name means “God of thy father” Ex. 3: 6) and Jochebed assuredly did not neglect to speak to Moses of the Lord and of His promises to His people? Or will it be the one provided at the court? Will the many years at the court erase even the memory of what Moses had heard in his parents' home?

Is not this problem still very prevalent? Christian parents endeavor to bring up their children for the Lord instructing them in the Word of God. They also take them to Sunday school, to the meetings, and to special occasions for further teaching from the Word. On the other hand, the influence of studies, apprenticeship, and/or professional training will certainly be felt; and it will cause a young heart to forget what it had received at home from the parents unless there is personal and living faith in the Lord Jesus. The case of King Joash demonstrates that a faith based exclusively on training vanishes when the supporting influences disappear.

2.  THE CHOICE AT THE AGE OF FORTY:

(Exodus 2: 11-15; Acts 7: 23-29; Hebrews 11: 24-26).

When Moses had reached the age of forty it came into his heart to visit his brethren. He went out to them, looking on their burdens. Certainly he had not learned at the court of Pharaoh that these despised Hebrews were his brethren; still less that God had made promises about them (Gen. 15: 13). However, the teaching received from his parents was still deep-rooted in his heart.

The day of decision arrived, it seems, when he was to be officially called “the son of Pharaoh's daughter.” Moses refused! (Heb. 11: 24). We may well imagine that the reaction of the princess (about which the Word of God says nothing) was terrible. Moses' renunciation involved immense loss in terms of an honored position, material advantages, riches and “delights.”

Similarly, we live in days when we must be able to say “no.” Joseph's action in Genesis 39: 10 illustrates this. In a situation where a wholehearted decision to cling to the Lord was required in order to refuse, break off, and go away from temptation, he triumphed by God's grace.*

Even if we are never called to renounce all that was refused by Moses, we can be sure that we also will face tempting circumstances. Some material advantages of this contaminated world will have to be declined so that they might not stand in the way of our fellowship with the people of God — even if such a decision involves a measure of self denial.

This takes more than the negative side of renouncing. Moses “chose.” What did he choose? “To suffer affliction with the people of God.” Although our level of decision may not reach to that of Moses, we also will find many opportunities to choose in favor of those whom the Lord loves.

The Word says that the “pleasures of sin,” as real as they may seem, are only for a time; “but he that does the will of God abides for eternity” (1 John 2: 17). Moses' renunciation and choice would later confer on him the authority necessary to ask others, especially his own people, to do the same in their measure.

Hebrews 11 gives us some insight into the heart of Moses and reveals to us the secret that prompted his faith. He did not choose by sheer force of will or through asceticism, but because he “esteemed” the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt. The museum of Cairo and the tomb of Tutankhamen prove that no little wealth was meant by these riches. However, that which pertained to Christ (although no doubt only in figure) had more value for Moses' heart than everything else; it was a greater treasure!

Moses thought that his brethren would certainly admire his self-denial and devotion to their cause. As Acts 7: 25 says, “he supposed that his brethren would understand that God would deliver them by his hand.” What terrible disappointment! “They did not understand.” The very Israelite whom he was reproving for wronging his neighbor “pushed him away.” What was the good of having “refused,” “chosen,” and “esteemed,” if this was the result?

Fearing Pharaoh, Moses fled to Midian and sat down near a well. There the most bitter reflections must have weighed on his mind, but he did not lose courage. As he witnessed the vexations to which the daughters of Reuel were exposed, he did not remain engrossed in his own pain but came to their help. Thus he remains in character a deliverer and a servant.

How was all that possible? Hebrews 11 reveals it: “He looked to the reward.” His eyes were not cast in the direction of the immediate future with its lost advantages and ongoing afflictions. Even at the well of Midian and in the depth of distress, his actions prove that faith was enduring in his heart. He was looking farther ahead and higher up. In fact, the path which he had begun to walk was to lead him to the song of triumph at the Red Sea, to the revelations of Sinai, to the glory reflected on his face, to the intimate relationship with the Lord on Pisgah, and finally to the glorious appearing on the mount of transfiguration.

There is another side to this account. Before going out to his brethren in Egypt, he did not consult the Lord. The Lord's time had not yet come for the people nor for Moses. It was in his own strength that Moses was going, and this way did not exclude the fear of men. On the contrary, “he turned this way and that way” (Ex. 2: 12).

However, in Midian under quiet conditions and alone with God, he would be trained as a shepherd, just as Jacob and Joseph had been trained before him and as David would yet be trained. Moses' faith was real and deep, but he needed to pass through God's schooling.

3.  THE VISION AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY:

(Exodus 3 and 4; Acts 7: 30-35).

“The time of the promise drew near which God had sworn to Abraham” (Acts 7: 17). Years of silent training had forged the instrument. For Moses, the wilderness of Midian was what the prison had been for Joseph, what Cherith and Sarepta would be for Elijah, and what Arabia would be for Paul.

If in our lives God sometimes allows periods such as these that we cannot understand — if sickness or other circumstances interrupts our work and we are put aside, should we not use such seasons to feed more closely on the Word and to learn in the school of God what we would never learn in the activity and turbulence of our normal lives? Such periods can be wasted on vain regrets or in scattered and futile endeavors; but if we use them wisely, they will form the foundation for blessed service on behalf of the people of God.

God is now about to reveal Himself to Moses and call him to the service for which He had been preparing him from birth. How extraordinary and unique is the moment when a soul feels the presence of God and His holiness in a special way; when he hears His voice distinctively! Such a vision will mark his entire existence from then on, and render it fruitful or sterile according to the response made.

“Come now therefore, and I will send you” (Ex. 3: 10). The moment of God has arrived. Formerly Moses wanted to go without waiting for God's time, but now he is about to hesitate. God does not say “Go” but “Come.” It is with Him, in His company and fellowship that Moses is sent. However, Moses is not disposed to respond. He brings before God four successive objections:

Who am I?...I am unable...I am not prepared...I will not know how to act. How many similar excuses have arisen from generation to generation in the hearts of those whom God was calling? “I will be with you” is the peremptory and clear answer which should suffice for every servant. A Gideon, a Jeremiah, the apostles at the feet of their risen Lord, Paul in prison, and how many others have heard this answer and have made the happy experience of the preciousness of God's presence in the way!

For Moses, however, this promise was not sufficient. He raises another objection: “The sons of Israel will say to me: `What is his name?' What shall I say unto them?” Full of gracious condescension, God then reveals himself as the One who ever is: “I am that I am.” Before, in, and after time, He ever remains the Word which “in the beginning . . . was with God” — Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and for ever.

Every necessary instruction is given to Moses but still he is not satisfied. Pleadingly he says: “But behold, they will not believe me” (Ex. 4: 1). God then gives him three signs through which his mission is to be accredited:

(1) The staff changed into a serpent which Moses can take by the tail. This is an illustration of the power which God imparts to His instrument in the presence of the enemy.

(2) Moses' hand that becomes leprous when placed into his bosom and then afterwards is made pure. This shows that God alone can heal the leper and purify the sinner.

3) The water of the Nile (the source of life for the Egyptians) that is changed into blood. This is a proof that judgment is about to come upon this rebellious people.

Moses, however, is still not willing to go: “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since You have spoken to Your servant” (Ex. 4: 10). Earlier when he went out of Pharaoh's court, Moses had been mighty in words, but the years spent in the wilderness taught him the small value of this natural ease of speech. The Lord tells him: “And now go, and I will be with your mouth, and will teach you what you shall say.”

Once more Moses raises an objection, though with more moderation this time (v.13). Compelled by the Lord's anger, he finally yields; he goes and asks his father-in-law's permission to leave and go back to Egypt, and prepares his return. It seems, however, that he delays in Midian and again the Lord must remind him to “Go, return to Egypt” (Ex. 4: 19).

On the way God gives him instructions, and also brings to his attention a secret and deep obstacle — a small sin perhaps, but God sees everything and allows nothing in His servant that is contrary to His clearly revealed Word. As a concession to the Midianites, probably to Zipporah, Moses had not circumcised his son. Now amid the dust and confusion of the caravan, alive with people and animals, Moses becomes ill and is about to die. Zipporah discerns in it — and rightly so — the judgment of God, and hastens to perform the neglected rite of circumcision. Moses is restored in soul and body, and goes to meet Aaron. Together they will carry out the work for which God is sending them. In all likelihood, Zipporah goes back to her father. She will join Moses again at the mountain of God (Ex. 4: 25).

What would have become of Moses, had he not obeyed on that supreme day of his life when God called him? No doubt, he would have remained in Midian, an unknown shepherd of whom we would never have heard. Israel would have remained in the bondage of Egypt; or rather God would have used another instrument to deliver the people.

Compelled by the faithful call of God, Moses answered. Through the years, he grew in the intimacy of the one whom he had learned to know as the God of grace who had appeared to him “in the bush” (Deut. 33: 16).

THINKING THINGS THROUGH

1. Describe some of the circumstances which God arranged to preserve Moses in spite of Pharaoh's commandment.

2. Do you face decisions in your life similar to those faced by Moses when he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter?” What do you learn from his example that will help you to make the right decision?

3. Why did God allow a great man like Moses to spend forty years of his life in obscurity, tending sheep?

4. Consider again the four objections raised by Moses when God would send him to deliver the Israelites. How do they compare to objections you may have been using to resist God's will in your life? What is God's answer to these objections?

Chapter 2

In Egypt — The Deliverer

(Read Exodus 5 to 12; Acts 7: 35-36; Hebrews 11: 27-28)

1. FAILURES

At the burning bush Moses had received an immediate mission that was perfectly clear: “Bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt” (Ex. 3: 10). God had not concealed from him the obstacles he would face: “I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a powerful hand. I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all my wonders which I will do in the midst thereof; and after that he will let you go” (Ex. 3: 19-20). There in Midian God had even given Moses to understand that Pharaoh's resistance would be terrible, compelling Him to take the extreme measure of killing his (Pharaoh's) firstborn son.

Arriving in Egypt, Moses and Aaron gather all the elders of the children of Israel who accede to the message, bow their heads and worship (Ex. 4: 29-31). Feeling quite encouraged, they go to Pharaoh and ask him to let the people go and celebrate a feast to the Lord in the wilderness. Pharaoh's insolence soon reduces their courage, but they still try to say to him: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us: let us go, we pray thee, three days' journey into the wilderness …” (Ex. 5: 3).

The royal rebuff is explicit: “Why do ye, Moses and Aaron, wish to have the people go off from their works?Away, to your burdens!”

Instead of alleviating the people's burden, this first interview only makes it heavier still. Part of the Israelites must scatter about the country and gather the straw necessary to make brick; yet the same amount of bricks is required each day. Therefore, a reduced number of people must work all the more in order to fulfill the requirements. The officers of the children of Israel try to complain directly to Pharaoh without going through Moses and Aaron, but this only makes matters worse.

It is easy to understand Moses' distress at that hour, one of the darkest in his life. The Lord has not delivered the people at all through him.On the contrary, the people are oppressed more than ever and those whom he wanted so much to serve reproach him severely. What should he do?Should he once more give up, leave the people to their fate, and return to Midian?

Moses is at the end of his resources. Nevertheless, his faith stands fast (Heb. 11: 27). In his deep distress he returns to the Lord (v. 22) and pours out before Him his affliction. Like so many times later on, he experiences the grace of his Lord who does not rebuke him. On the contrary, He reveals Himself still more to him.

Is there not an important lesson for each of us to learn through the misfortunes, disappointments and trials of this life?One person works hard to pass an examination and yet fails. Another tends a loved one with great devotion, and yet this loved one is taken away by the Lord. Still another tries to bring a soul to Christ, but Satan seems to hold that soul still more firmly in his shackles. What is to be done? We must not yield to depression but rather pour out our supplications before God as the Psalmist did — and then rely on His grace. He will not fail to reveal Himself still more to the soul that seeks after Him, and He will carry the matter to its conclusion.

At the beginning of Genesis, God had revealed Himself as the Creator: Elohim — Deity in the absolute. With the patriarchs He had assumed essentially the name of the Almighty — the one who meets all the needs of those who are pilgrims of faith and strangers on the earth. To Moses at this decisive hour, God reveals Himself as the Eternal God (Jehovah, or Yahweh) — the God of the covenant who looks after His people; the God who does not change and who acts in time according to what He is in Himself and not according to the merits of those favored ones on whose behalf He is operating (Ex. 6: 2-8).

Having regained confidence in his mission, Moses goes back to the children of Israel, but they do not listen to him because of their heavy bondage. The Lord does not wait for another entreaty from His servant. He immediately strengthens his faith and orders him to go in and speak again to the king. Moses objects again: “The children of Israel have not heeded me. How then shall Pharaoh heed me, for I am of uncircumcised lips?” The Lord then gives Moses and Aaron commandments for the children of Israel, and for Pharaoh that he might let the people go out of Egypt (Ex. 6: 10-13; Ex. 7: 1-5).

Moses and Aaron, fully confident in God's promises (for they “persevered, as seeing Him who is invisible”) go to the king. They acquire increasing boldness and authority during the entire time of the plagues upon Egypt, being strengthened in faith through the display of their God's power. Moses increasingly gains the upper hand, being fully aware that he speaks in the name of the Lord who spreads out “his strong hand and his outstretched arm” in favor of His people.

2.  WHO ARE THEY THAT SHALL GO?

(Exodus 8: 25-28; Ex. 10: 8-11, 24-26)

There are signs for the people of God, and plagues for the Egyptians as the judgments of God come down upon the land. Seven times Pharaoh hardens his heart (look it up for yourself), and seven times the Lord hardens the heart of Pharaoh.

Pharaoh begins to yield a little, however, so that the Lord might withdraw the poisonous dog-flies from the land, and proposes to Moses that they go and sacrifice to their God “in the land.” Immediately Moses answers: “It is not right to do so, for we would be sacrificing the abomination of the Egyptians to the LORD our God … We will go three days' journey into the wilderness and sacrifice to the LORD our God as He will command us” (Ex. 8: 26-27).

This illustrates the first snare of Satan — that those who worship God do so in the world and as mixed with the world. How successful Satan has been in bringing about such a condition in Christendom: In many Christian congregations, probably in the most important ones, believers and unbelievers mix together in the same “religious service.” As to the leaders, some of them no longer have faith in the Word of God or in the redeeming work of the cross.

In order to worship truly, a definite separation is necessary. There must be “the three days' journey into the wilderness” — a picture of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Pharaoh, harassed by the successive judgments which ravage his country, later yields still more. He calls Moses and Aaron and precisely asks the following question: “Who are they that shall go?”

Moses answers: “We will go with our young and our old; with our sons and our daughters, with our flocks and our herds we will go” (Ex. 10: 8, 9).

This, however, is not the way in which Pharaoh understands it, and again he sets a new snare before the servants of God: “Go now, you who are men, and serve the LORD.”

In some countries today young people can attend a Christian meeting only from the age of eighteen; in other countries one can present the gospel only to those over twenty-one. Even among Christians in countries which enjoy liberty, the enemy strenuously endeavors to induce parents not to take their children with them to the meetings; or he persuades them to think that attending Sunday School or other special meetings for the young is too taxing for them! The enemy's tactics have not changed. He knows very well that youth is the favorable age to turn to the Lord, for then the entire life becomes oriented toward Him to be lived for Him.

Nehemiah 12: 43 describes a day of worship and rejoicing when all the people — not only the men but also the women and the children — were happy to be gathered in the presence of the Lord. When on the other hand, it was a question of listening to the reading of the law, Ezra spoke “before the congregation, of men and women and all who could hear with understanding” (Neh. 8: 2).

Does this not teach us that we should all come to the worship meeting, including our children as soon as they are old enough to remain quiet? The oft-cited excuses about household chores and schoolwork should not prevent this. As for the meeting for Bible study where the Word of God is explained and studied, do not the Scriptures instruct us to bring along “all who could hear with understanding”? (Here understanding refers to natural intelligence, not the renewed intelligence which can exist only through conversion).

In the face of Moses' categorical refusal of his offer, and in order to avoid a further judgment of three days of darkness, Pharaoh devises still another solution. He says: “Go, serve the LORD; only let your flocks and your herds be kept back. Let your little ones also go with you” (Ex. 10: 24). Moses, however, knows very well that if the flocks and herds are left behind, the heart of the people will be drawn back again to Egypt. Hence he answers: “You must also give us sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God. Our livestock also shall go with us; not a hoof shall be left behind.”

Let us be careful to keep our hearts from clinging unduly to the material possessions which God has entrusted to us. They could become a hindrance to the worship which the Lord expects from us. As Luke 16 teaches, the “unrighteous mammon” is entrusted to our management, but our hearts should not become attached to it as a treasure. It must always remain at the Lord's disposal to be used according to His will.

Because Moses himself had earlier refused the riches of Egypt and chosen the reproach of Christ, he now had all the more authority to urge the people to place everything that they had at the Lord's disposal.

3.  The Passover

(Exodus 12: 1-28; Hebrews 11: 28)

The Epistle to the Hebrews emphasizes that Moses celebrated the Passover “by faith.” His parent's faith had been necessary to first hide him and then expose him on the river. Then at forty years old, his own faith was manifested through the choice that he made. Again he displayed this faith in “holding fast” in Egypt, despite the king's anger.

Why was faith necessary for the Passover? Pharaoh had nothing to do with it. At this point it is not faith acting in the presence of the enemy or under difficult circumstances, but it is still the same faith. It was not the enemy but God that was to be faced in judgment. During the nine preceding plagues the people had remained spectators, and beginning with the fourth plague had actually been protected in the land of Goshen. But now the people must act — and this in accordance with the Word of the Lord to Moses. Faith was required as to what God had said.

The people were just as guilty as the Egyptians, and even more so because their responsibility was greater. As other portions of Scripture reveal, they had indulged in idolatry in spite of some knowledge of the Lord; and in a considerable measure they had abandoned their God. If the destroying angel must pass through the land and kill all the firstborn, why should he spare the Israelites? After all, God's justice acts without respect of persons.

Only the blood of a spotless victim — a type of One who would come later — was able to shelter the people from the judgment. The Lord reveals this to Moses and Aaron (Ex. 12: 1-20), who in turn instruct the elders of Israel. Moses' faith is an inspiring example: “The people bowed their heads and worshiped … and did as the Lord had commanded” (vv. 27, 28).

Abel's sacrifice demonstrates that the blood of atonement was necessary to come near to God. Genesis 22 presents the thought of substitution: Abraham offered a ram as a sacrifice instead of his son. The offerings of Leviticus, through the placing of the offerer's hand on the head of the victim, express the identification of the one approaching with the sacrifice. (In the sacrifice for sin, the offences of the guilty one pass onto the victim, whereas in the burnt-offering the merits of the victim are credited to the worshipper.)

In the Passover, the individual appropriation of the sacrifice is perfectly stressed: “Every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household” (Ex. 12: 3). Moses did not offer one lamb for the entire people; each family had to slaughter a victim, the blood of which was to shelter them.

So it is in the gospel. Jesus is “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world” (1 John 2: 2). The value of His work in the sight of God enables God to offer His forgiveness to the whole world.

Other passages show just as clearly, however, that whereas the value of the sacrifice of Christ is sufficient for the whole world, only those who accept it through faith are made beneficiaries of His work. In Romans 3 the righteousness of God is manifested “toward all, and upon all those who believe.” Only those who believe are justified “through faith in His blood.” Likewise John 3: 16 teaches that God loved the world, but only those who believe in the Lord Jesus have life eternal. John 1: 12 says that those who receive Him are given the right to be called children of God. Romans 10: 9 says that “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” It is a matter of personally and individually accepting and confessing the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

According to the Passover instructions, the blood of the lamb is put on the two outside doorposts and on the lintel of each house. The family gathered inside the house eats the Passover lamb with the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs. The family does not see the blood and assess its value but the Lord does. He declares categorically: “When I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you” (Ex. 12: 13). Likewise, the repenting sinner who comes to the Lord Jesus is unable to assess the value of His blood; God alone does that. It is because of this blood He forgives and receives. The one who receives the Word of God as being true finds his certainty in the declarations of God's Word. He cannot explain it, but he knows that “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1: 7).

THE PASSOVER NIGHT

(Exodus 12: 42)

For Israel, the months began with each new moon; they were lunar months. Since the Passover took place on the fourteenth day of the month, the Israelites went out of Egypt on the full moon. In the evening they ate the lamb; their loins were girded; they were ready to leave. “At midnight … the LORDstruck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt … So Pharaoh rose in the night, he, all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Ex. 12: 29, 30).

One can understand the bewilderment of the Egyptians, each one rushing out of his house and telling the sad news to his neighbor; and then hearing his neighbor reporting the same calamity. With Pharaoh at their head the Egyptians drive Israel out of the land. The people, according to the instructions of the Lord to Moses (Ex. 11: 2, 3) ask from the Egyptians silver and gold, a well-deserved compensation for all their years of hard work and bondage.

Throughout the night, from various parts of the land of Goshen, the columns get under way “according to their hosts.” Their immediate goal is to reach Rameses and Succoth. Six hundred thousand men on foot with their families, plus a mixed multitude that went up with them — from two to three million souls, beside all the cattle that accompany them.

What a moment for Moses! When he was forty years old, he had wanted to give his brethren “deliverance through his hand” and now the time has arrived. After the tension caused by the successive plagues and the drama of this eventful night, a new life was to begin. The Lord had displayed His power and fulfilled His promise.

No doubt a feeling of deep gratitude was arising in the heart of His servant. Considering the problems which would soon assail him, what responsibility rested upon him! He had to lead this great multitude through the wilderness — a desert which he knew by experience — up to the promised land. The immense task that God had entrusted to him was just beginning.

THINKING THINGS THROUGH

1. Describe some of the discouragements and trials Moses faced as he went back to Egypt and talked with his brethren and with Pharaoh. Why did God allow these?

2. How does God deliver Moses and Aaron from their discouragements? What is the best way for us to get deliverance from our discouragements?

3. How would you apply to your own life the four compromises proposed by Pharaoh to Moses?

4. How did the passover differ from all the other plagues upon the land of Egypt? Does the passover have a personal application to your life?

5. Suppose yourself to be a firstborn son of an Israelite on the passover night. Describe in your own words the dramatic events of that night.

Chapter 3

First Steps in the Wilderness — The Shepherd

Psalm 77: 20

The last verse of Psalm 77 reads: “You led Your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” Certainly, during the crossing of the Red Sea and through the wilderness Moses assumes this character of a shepherd.

The psalm further emphasizes: “Your way was in the sea, Your path in the great waters, and Your footsteps were not known” (v. 19). Such was the experience of the people. For them, the way of God was incomprehensible. It took them through deep waters — not only those of the Red Sea, but those of the successive tribulations which were intended to test their faith. The psalmist, however, adds: “Your way, O God, is in the sanctuary…” (v. 13). What God intends for His own is indeed constantly before Him and is perfectly made known by His wisdom and love, even when it seems to them to lead them through deep waters.

1.  DELIVERANCE AT THE RED SEA

(Read Hebrews 11: 29; Exodus 13: 17-22; Exodus 14)

From the starting point of Rameses and Succoth the people had reached Etham at the edge of the wilderness. Normally the shortest route would have passed northwards through the land of the Philistines. God, however, was not willing that His people should face war during their first steps in the wilderness. He rather chose to lead them by His own path to Sinai.

But first the pillar of cloud led them to pitch their camp at a place as unsuitable as possible from the standpoint of safety. It hemmed them in between the mountain and the sea, leaving no exit except the way they had just come.

After a few hours, this sole exit was occupied by Pharaoh and his host: “…the children of Israel lifted their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them” (Ex. 14: 10).

Will Moses now lose the marvelous deliverance that God had wrought through his hand? He is not worried. Rather he stands fast by faith as seeing Him who is invisible.

The people, however, are not entertaining the same feelings. A great fear fills them and they cry out to the Lord. In their hearts they reproach Moses and rebel (Ps. 106: 7). Panic-stricken they exclaim, “it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than that we should die in the wilderness!”

This produced the first crisis in the relationship between Moses and Israel. It would be followed by many others. Assured of the deliverance of the Lord, Moses inspires the people with his faith: “The LORD will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.”

The enemy, however, does not let people escape easily. Even today when one has placed his trust in the blood of Christ for forgiveness of sin, Satan tries to instill in that person doubt, unbelief, and uncertainty about salvation. His aim is to fill us with affliction and doubts instead of with joy in our Lord's accomplished deliverance.

Only the Word of God can give certainty as to salvation. Redemption is secured through the work of Christ. Since He performed the work that was required, we need not worry. The certainty of our salvation derives, through faith, from the declarations of the Word of God. We are called to behold “the salvation of the LORD” and to stand still, resting fully on the many passages of the word such as Romans 8: 1: “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus”' and John 3: 36: “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life.”

Still another effort of the enemy is to keep those who are saved in the “world system” and under its grip. How many Christians, although washed in the blood of Christ, remain morally wrapped up in the world — in Egypt? They actually comply with Pharaoh's injunction: ”Sacrifice to the Lord your God in the land.”

God, however, wants to have His own truly for Himself. So at night He opened a pathway for Israel through the stormy sea. The people “went through the midst of the sea on the dry ground; and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.” Hebrews 11: 29 states very precisely: “By faith they passed through the Red Sea.”

In this incident, faith characterized the people as a whole, whereas the earlier accounts in Hebrews 11 emphasize only Moses' faith. It was no trifling matter for them to start walking between those two walls of water which at any moment could cover them. It required trust in the word of the Lord through Moses.

“Toward the morning” the Lord threw the army of the Egyptians into confusion. As dawn broke, the sea resumed its strength, engulfing the enemy in its midst. “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Thus Israel saw the great work which the LORD had done in Egypt … and believed the LORD and His servant Moses.” On the shore of the Red Sea a song of praise arises, sung by every one of the children of Israel. It is the first song in the Bible.

Only the redeemed, conscious of their deliverance, can sing. The psalmist and the prophets will never cease celebrating this memorable event. Indeed, the song of the redeemed which arose from thousands of hearts in Exodus, resounds on up to the the book of Revelation. The song exalts the slaughtered Lamb, the One who is the eternal center of praises for all His own.

2.  BITTERNESS AT MARAH

(Read Exodus 15: 22-26)

Moses was acquainted with the wilderness — its aridity, heat and vastness (Ex. 3: 1). What responsibility faced him there! He must lead an entire people with their flocks and herds through that wilderness.

As for the people, their new-found faith is about to be put to the test. The same thing frequently happens in the life of new Christians. After a brief period, God allows trials to arise in order to demonstrate whether our faith is real; and whether we will or will not trust in Him.

One day, two days, three days are spent in the wilderness, and no water is found. Finally arriving at Marah, they “could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter.” The people murmur against Moses and he cries to the Lord. “And the LORD showed him a tree; and when he cast it into the waters, the waters were made sweet.”

In the types used in the books of Moses, wood usually speaks of the humanity of the Lord Jesus — that perfect humanity in which He always did the will of God, even up to the supreme moment of Gethsemane where He was able to say: “Not as I will, but as You will.”

If trials arise in our lives, the first lesson to be learned is to accept them as coming from God. In the path of faith, we must submit to His will, knowing that He wants what is good for us. We must try to understand the special lesson taught by the difficulties thus encountered. For example, someone has applied for a position and is refused. A young father devotes himself entirely to supporting his family and furnishing his new home, but sickness stops him. A longed-for invitation fails to arrive. Someone is disappointed by the friend on whom he relied. Faith rises above bitterness and disappointment, finding in the perfect sympathy of the Lord Jesus, the strength to accept as from God's hand the trials of the way that are so bitter.

At Marah, the Lord reveals Himself by a new name: “the Lord who heals you.” The waters become sweet. The healing of the Lord restores. Their next stopping point, Elim, illustrates refreshment and necessary food. And after that comes the manna, provided each morning for the needs of the people. What a marvelous experience!

3.  THE LESSONS OF REPHIDIM

(Read Exodus 17)

The purpose of this book is to understand what the Word of God says to us about Moses: his personality, his training, and his instruction in the path of God. Therefore, we cannot go into all the details of the wilderness and are omitting, among other, the chapter about the manna.

So far, everything has succeeded for Moses. Insolent and haughty Pharaoh has been overthrown. The Red Sea has been opened. The manna has met the requirements of the people. For the servant of God, however, it was necessary to further learn his helplessness again and again, and he learns this at Rephidim.

THE ROCK (verses 1 to 7)

At Rephidim there was no water. The people disputed with Moses and even spoke of stoning him. they said, “Why is it you have brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” Pharaoh had wanted to hold back the children and the cattle in Egypt, and now the people reproach Moses with having brought them out from there.

Entirely powerless before this unjust contention, Moses cries out to the Lord and says: “What shall I do with this people?” Now he will learn a new lesson — the very presence of God suffices for all the needs of His own. God says, “Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock.” In 1 Corinthians 10: 4 we read: “The rock was Christ.” The rock must be struck by the rod of Moses, the rod of authority and judgment, so that the waters — a picture of the Holy Spirit — might flow in abundance (John 7: 39).

Since Moses was personally attacked, he must now be personally honored. It is as He continues with dignity before the people in the presence of the elders of Israel that the water comes out of the rock for all to drink (v. 6).

AMALEK (verses 8 to 16)

Another obstacle arises during the march through the wilderness — Amalek. As a type of the flesh in us, Amalek attacks and harasses the people in the wilderness, especially the stragglers and the weak. There is the necessity to fight, but how?

This situation presents another new lesson for Moses. Joshua, a type of the risen Lord and of the Holy Spirit, is placed at the head of the people as they go out to battle. This is an illustration of Galatians 5: 17, “The flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.”

It is not enough, however, for Joshua to fight. Moses must go up to the top of the hill with the rod of God in his hand and intercede for the people. There he is not precisely a type of Christ, but of those who come near to God through Him to intercede either for themselves or for His redeemed ones.

Moses is aware of his own weakness: “And so it was when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed; and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.” But Moses' hands become tired. Is it not the same with us? Even if we have understood that the sole remedy for our infirmity is to persevere in prayer, we often are slack and lack constancy! Aaron and Hur come near and support the hands of Moses. Here Aaron is a type of Christ as Priest, “always living to intercede” for His own.

In his youth Moses wanted to fight: he killed the Egyptian. Now well on in years, he joins his brother and his companion in praying for the people of God.

The presence of God and the prayer of intercession — such were for Moses the great lessons of Rephidim.

THINKING THINGS THROUGH

1. Explain why God so quickly led the people to a spot where they were entrapped between the mountains, the Red Sea and the pursuing Egyptian army.

2. How does the pursuing Egyptian army illustrate the efforts of Satan against those who are newly redeemed by the blood of Christ? How should we respond to his efforts?

3. Can you think of an incident in your life similar to the Israelites' experience at Marah where the waters were bitter? How did the Lord make the bitter waters sweet and give healing in the situation?

4. Again and again, the problem facing the Israelites in the desert was lack of water. Why didn't God give them an abundant and visible supply? For example, what lesson did the Lord wish to teach Moses and the people at Rephidim?

5. What do you learn about prayer through Israel's battle with the Amalekites?Try to think of at least two practical ways in which you might improve your prayer life.

Chapter 4

AT SINAI — THE MEDIATOR

(The first year)

In the first month after their departure out of the land of Egypt, the children of Israel come into the wilderness of Sinai (Ex. 19: 1). Through Moses, the Lord gives them these remarkable words: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself” (v. 4). The unruly multitude that had gone out of Goshen was about to be formed into a nation (v. 6), complete with laws, worship, a center and a well-ordered army.

The first year of the exodus begins with the Passover and the Red Sea, and continues with God's care in the wilderness: the manna, the water from the rock, and the victory over Amalek. Then at Sinai the people receive the law and the statutes.

In its moral application to us, this first year refers essentially to our individual life: remission of sin, redemption, personal feeding of our souls, and our personal walk with the Lord.

The second year (Ex. 40: 1-17) starts with the erection of the tabernacle. It continues with the consecration of the priests, the offerings of the princes, the institution of the rituals, the arrangement of the camp, and the march in the wilderness. In contrast to the first year, it emphasizes the collective life of the people.

So it is with us. As believers we have not been redeemed to live and walk alone, but rather to be found in the company of his brethren. Christ died to “gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad.”

Already during the second year the people could have undertaken the conquest of Canaan, had they not lacked faith at Kadesh-barnea after receiving the report of the spies. In this sense, the additional thirty-eight years spent in the wilderness were not necessary at all; but Israel had to learn to know itself and to know God (Deut. 8).

1. RECEIVING THE LAW — THE LAWGIVER

Confronted with the majestic display of God's holiness, the people tremble (Ex. 19: 16). Moses himself (as Hebrews 12: 21 reminds us) was so fearful of the sight that he said, “I am exceedingly afraid and trembling.” Then God pronounces the ten basic commandments on which the moral law is founded.

The people are frightened and stand afar off. They say to Moses: “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.” They remain at a distance, but “Moses drew near.”

On another occasion, seventy of the elders of Israel go up with Moses to the mountain, along with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu; but Moses alone comes near to the Lord while the others stand back. As for the people, they must not even touch the mountain, much less go up with them. The sole information given about the vision of God as seen by the elders is that “there was under his feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and it was like the very heavens in its clarity” (Ex. 24: 10).

Finally, Moses goes up on the mountain and hears the divine communications. He spends six days on mount Sinai in the company of Joshua. On the seventh day Moses alone enters into the cloud and remains in the presence of God forty days and forty nights. At that time He receives the two tables, the statutes, and the instructions relative to the tabernacle.

On three occasions when Moses relates to the people the words of God, they answer: “All that the Lord has spoken will we do!” (Ex. 19: 8; Ex. 24: 3, 7). In no way, however, would they be able to keep the law. As Galatians 3: 21 says, “if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law.” By committing themselves with this rash promise to keep God's commandments, the people revealed that they really knew neither God nor themselves. Someone will ask, “Why then was the law given?” This question is answered by the apostle Paul in Galatians and Romans: “I would not have known sin except through the law.”

A child might easily promise to behave well and always obey his parents. God, however, will allow definite situations in which the child will find himself at fault so that his conscience might be reached. Would there be any real conversion without at least some measure of the conviction of sin? Some realization of one's own ruin? Some impression of the holiness of God?

When young Isaiah entered the temple, he exclaimed: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6: 5). Peter, sensible of the honor done to him, received Jesus into his boat; but after launching out into the deep and witnessing the miraculous “haul of fishes which they had taken” he understood that his passenger in the ship was God Himself. Then he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” (Luke 5: 8).

Likewise, we must place ourselves before the ten commandments and seriously examine whether we have observed each one of them. It is not enough to have refrained from stealing. The mere wish to steal is a transgression of the tenth commandment! Which young man can say that the lust mentioned in Matthew 5: 28 never arose in his heart? Are there many people who have never said “fool” to a brother or friend? (Matt. 5: 22).

When suddenly convicted by the Word, one of our young friends stated that he deserved hell since he had treated his brother in this way more than once. What should be said in answer to his confession? Something like: “That was not so serious. Your brother got on your nerves, and you got angry with him?” Certainly not! Every sin is serious according to the Word of God. The Lord Jesus condemns even slight anger at one's brother. Therefore each one of us deserves hell!

Of course. our young friend was trembling at this thought. At such a point, how marvelous it is to present the work of the Lord Jesus. He atoned for our sins, bearing them in His body on the cross. The chastisement that we deserve fell on Him. “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Gal. 3: 13).

2.  THE CRISIS OF THE GOLDEN CALF

(Exodus 32)

In making the golden calf, Aaron and the people did not really want to abandon the Lord. They rather transgressed the second commandment: “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; You shall not bow down to them nor serve them” (Ex. 20: 4, 5).

The human spirit always tends to materialize what is spiritual. It must have a visible form, an object that can be at least revered, if not worshiped. This was Aaron's problem. As he saw the golden calf, “he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD” (Ex. 32: 5). In their thoughts, Aaron and the people lowered the Lord to the level of the gods of Egypt, saying, “Here is your God.”

Idolatry always brings man down and leads him to disorder (v. 25), orgies and licentiousness (v. 6). Romans one shows this convincingly. Nothing is more serious than to associate the name of the Lord with idolatry.

What will be Moses' attitude in this situation?

(A) On the top of the mountain, the Lord informs Moses of what has taken place (v. 7-10). Putting him to the test, He proposes to consume the people and then make a great nation out of Moses. What an opportunity for him to be carried away by anger, and to accept this divine proposal! After all, the people have murmured so many times against him.

However, he has the interests of his God too much at heart to act in this way. Instead, he immediately beseeches the Lord, setting forth two decisive arguments for sparing Israel: (1) What would the Egyptians say if the people of Israel were annihilated from the face of the earth? They would boast, saying that God is powerless. (2) The Lord had promised positively to the patriarchs that He would multiply their seed and give to them the land of Canaan. What would become of the fulfillment of this solemn promise?

Is it not the same in our intercession for our brethren? On the one hand, we must remember the faithfulness of God, his promises, his righteousness toward Christ (“He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins”). On the other hand, we must think of the testimony which Christians bear before the world: “If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which does not lead to death, he will ask, and He will give him life” (1 John 5: 16).

(B) When Moses sees the calf and the dancing (v. 19), his anger burns and he shatters the tables of the law. This was righteous anger and not an outburst of carnal feelings. Scarcely had the law been given, and it was already transgressed. He takes the calf, grinds it to powder, scatters it on the water, and makes the children of Israel drink it. They must realize the gravity of their sin.

Likewise, if we have gravely failed, we must acknowledge it and confess it before God; but we must also feel deeply in our souls how serious sin is and how abominable it is to God.

Moses entrusts to the Levites the terrible mission of exterminating those who apparently had plunged more deeply into idolatry. Even their brethren, their neighbors, or their intimate friends must not be spared. Three thousand men thus perish. This stands in contrast to the introduction of grace on the day of Pentecost some 1500 years later. As the gospel is preached on that first day of a new dispensation, three thousand souls are brought to the Lord (Acts 2).

(C) By the next day, the tumult and anger have subsided. Will Moses now say: “Yesterday I became angry, but the evil was not so serious?” On the contrary, he speaks again with deep feeling: “You have sinned a great sin.” Having pondered the matter in his innermost heart, he goes up again to the Lord, declaring, “Perhaps I can make atonement for your sin'' (v. 30). He does not reveal what means he will use to do this, nor is he even sure that this means will succeed.

Bowed down with grief before the Lord, Moses acknowledges that the people have committed a grave sin. He adds: “Yet now, if You will forgive their sin ...” He is not able to finish his sentence for he knows well that God cannot forgive without atonement being made. Hence he expresses what he has secretly conceived in his heart: “If not, I pray, blot me out of Your book which You have written.” He thus offers himself as a propitiation for the people. He has not yet learned what the psalmist will declare later: “None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him” (Psa. 49: 7).

And yet, the Lord forgives. However, He cannot accept that Moses should suffer for the people: “Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot him out of my book.” If the Lord seems to bear with sin, it is because He has before Him the future coming of Another One who will offer Himself in sacrifice for sin. Through Christ, He will set forth a mercy-seat, so that He might be just, and the Justifier of the one that has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3: 24-26). It was possible for God to endure in absolute righteousness “the sins that were previously committed” (that is, those committed during the entire period of the Old Testament) because He had before Him the perfect Victim who would be manifested in His own time.

Thus God will be just and He will also forgive. He will be faithful to His promises (Ex. 33: 1) while also maintaining His glory as to the Egyptians. In His “government” however, He will have to chastise His own; He withdraws His presence from their midst (Ex. 33: 3).

3.  THE TENT OF MEETING — THE INTERCESSOR

(Exodus 33: 7-11)

After the sin of the people God departs, saying “I will send My Angel before you” (Ex. 33: 2, 3). Upon hearing this disturbing word, the people mourn and strip themselves of their ornaments.

What is to be done under these circumstances? The camp had been abandoned to confusion. The presence of God was withdrawn. Moses, however, had already received on the mountain the instructions to build the tabernacle; the habitation of God was to occupy the central place and the tribes were to camp all around it.

Since the people are in utter confusion, Moses realizes that it is no longer possible for God to dwell among them. Will it then be necessary to renounce every manifestation of the divine presence for those who fear the Lord? Moses takes a tent and pitches it for himself outside the Camp, far from the camp, and calls it the tabernacle of meeting. “And it came to pass that every one who sought the Lord went out to the tabernacle of meeting.” So it was, whenever Moses went out to the tabernacle, that all the people rose, and each man stood at his tent door and watched Moses until he had gone into the tabernacle” (vv. 7, 8).

Thus there were two categories of persons: those who were seeking the Lord and went out of their tents; and the others who only looked afar off from the entrance of their own tents.

Do we not have a similar instruction in Hebrews 13: “Let us go forth to him without the camp, bearing his reproach”? Christendom, because of its confusion and errors, resembles in many ways the camp of Israel. Like the godly Israelites who went out to Moses, it is possible for us today to go forth out of the camp; and in recognition of 2 Timothy 2: 19-22, to meet simply to the name of the Lord Jesus. We can do this with full confidence in His promise of Matthew 18: 20: “Where two or three are gathered together unto my name, there I am in the midst of them.'' Since everyone does not obey the Lord's commandment, only a “remnant” gathers around Him; but this remnant can fully rely on the promise of His presence.

“And it came to pass, when Moses went out to the tabernacle, that the pillar of cloud descended and stood at the entrance of the tabernacle, and the Lord talked with Moses.” The entire people could recognize that the presence of the Lord was manifested there, and no longer in the midst of the camp. In that outside place Moses, the faithful servant, could find a communion which he had never known before. The Lord speaks with him “face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.”

Moses then intercedes for the people on the principle of grace, a new principle at this point. Being aware of himself as the object of God's favor, he beseeches the Lord to extend His grace to the entire people. He receives the marvelous answer: ''My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” This, however, was not enough to satisfy Moses. Since he had found grace in the eyes of the Lord, he intercedes that God might go with the people as well as with himself. Finally the Lord yields to his prayer: “I will also do this thing that you have spoken; for you have found grace in My sight” (Ex. 33: 17).

The Vision Of Grace

Moses, deeply encouraged by this intimate relationship with his God, fervently prays to see the glory of His face. However, the moment has not yet arrived for the knowledge of the glory of God to shine in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4: 6). Therefore, the Lord must say to His servant: “You cannot see my face; for man shall not see Me, and live.” Although the Lord cannot yet reveal His glory, He declares: “l will make all My goodness pass before you.”

Thus placed in the cleft of the rock and alone in the sanctuary of God's presence, Moses receives a new revelation of God whom he has so faithfully followed until now. At the bush, he had learned to know Him as the one who does not change: “I am that I am.” In Egypt, God revealed Himself to him as “The Lord, the God of the covenant.” At Sinai, he received the law from “the righteous and holy God.” In the cleft of the rock, however, he learns to know the very nature of the One who is love: “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy unto thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Ex. 34: 6, 7).

Later, in the secret of the temple, young Isaiah will learn to know the grace which takes away his iniquity and makes propitiation for his sin. In the vision at Horeb, Elijah will hear the soft and gentle voice which will touch his heart. In the temple at Jerusalem, Paul will see the One who sends him to the nations far off. And alone in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea and flooded with the light of the resurrection morning, Mary of Magdala will fall at the feet of her risen Savior.

One may well understand that after coming down from the mountain, Moses is no longer the same. He now has in his hands the tables of the law. They are not shattered this time, but placed intact into the ark, a type of Christ. He no longer comes chastising the culprits and spreading terror in the camp. The skin of his face shines, reflecting the goodness and grace of which he had caught a glimpse. He had “spoken with Him.” Aaron and the people, afraid at first, come near to him and Moses puts a veil on his face. The time had not yet come for the glory of grace to be fully revealed. Even today the veil remains on the hearts of the people of Israel (2 Cor. 3: 15).

However, God has shone forth the knowledge of His glory in the face of Christ. All of us who know the Lord Jesus can contemplate with unveiled face this glory of the Lord. We can be transformed according to the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit (2 Cor. 3: 18).

Have we not noticed the details of this remarkable verse? “We all . . . are transformed?” It is not now as it was with Moses the privilege of one particular man or the prerogative of some eminent servant. This marvelous vision is there for all. There is no longer any veil . . .but one must have the time and a heart to contemplate it.

THINKING THINGS THROUGH

1. Explain how Israel's first year in the wilderness illustrates the individual Christian life; and how their second year illustrates the collective Christian life.

2. Pick out one feature from the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai which especially impresses you. Tell why it impresses you.

3. What was God's purpose in giving the ten commandments?

4. How does the Golden Calf incident illustrate the meaning and results of idolatry? Is it possible for a true believer to be guilty of idolatry? Explain your answer.

5. Describe Moses' reaction to the Golden Calf incident. Note his intercession, his righteous indignation, his decisive judgment on the people, his self-sacrificing concern for them. What is your response when other Christians sin and publicly dishonor the Name of the Lord?

6. What practical lessons do you learn from Moses' pitching the tent of meeting outside the camp? What were the two opposite responses of the people to his action?

7. Review the various ways in which God revealed Himself to Moses: at the burning bush, in Egypt, at Sinai, and in the cleft of the rock. How did these revelations change Moses? What revelations have we had from God's Word that have changed our lives?

Chapter 5

FROM SINAI TO KADESH

(The Second year)

On the first day of the first month of the second year after the children of Israel had left Egypt, the tabernacle was set up (Ex. 40: 2). Different events occurred one after the other: the consecration of the priests, the offering of the princes, the celebration of the Passover. On the first day of the second month Moses proceeds to number the men “that go forth to military service” (Num. 1: 3).

Finally, on the twentieth day of the second month of this second year, the cloud over the tabernacle begins to move. The children of lsrael leave the wilderness of Sinai, for the first time following the commandment of the Lord about journeying. Six tribes preceded the ark and the sanctuary, and six tribes formed the rear-guard.

1.  EYES IN THE WILDERNESS

(Numbers 10: 29-36)

Fundamentally the cloud directed the movements of the people (Num. 9: 15-23). When the children of Israel were to strike camp, the priests blew the trumpets (Num. 10: 1-8). The Lord had provided everything, and His presence accompanied Israel.

Why does Moses wish for some human help in the person of his brother-in-law, Hobab? Being a Midianite, he would, of course, be well acquainted with the wilderness and the places where to encamp. It can further be said that Moses seemed to have his welfare in mind, insisting on letting him share in “whatever good the Lord will do to us.”

Actually, Hobab will not precede the people and find the place to encamp. The ark itself, proceeding out of its normal place in the midst of the tribes, will go before them “in the three days' journey” to search out a resting place for them! The movement of the cloud ratifies that they are to move, thus manifesting the divine presence. This is God's gracious answer to the persevering intercession of Moses, despite the lack of confidence in God which he displayed in asking for Hobab's assistance.

Is it not the same with us? In John 10 the Good Shepherd puts forth His own sheep and .”he goes before them.” The sheep follow Him, because they know His voice. This precious experience of knowing that “He goes before” can be made at any age.

If you are facing an unknown stage in your life: a new period of studies, a sojourn abroad, another course of professional training, remember that “He goes before.” Trust Him and rely on Him. The ark leaves three days in advance so there is no need to hurry. It is enough to quietly follow the way He opens. “Whoever believes will not act hastily” (Isa. 28: 16). May we avail ourselves of the promise made to the psalmist: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with My eye” (Ps. 32: 8). We get this instruction from the word of God, applied in practical fellowship with the Lord.

2.  THE BURDEN OF ALL THIS PEOPLE

Numbers 11: 10-17; 24-29)

Numbers is the wilderness book; it is also the book of complaints. How many times the Israelites complain, weep and wail! In our chapter “the people complained...the people cried out to Moses ...the mixed multitude who were among them yielded to intense craving; so the children of Israel also wept again...Moses heard the people weeping...every one at the door of his tent.”

One can understand how these constant complaints (which brought on Israel the chastisement of the Lord) could overtax the patience of their leader. So Moses pours out his complaint before God: “Why?...Why?...they weep all over me...I am not able to bear all these people alone, because the burden is too heavy for me.”

Exodus 18 tells how Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, advised him to obtain some help in administering justice by providing able men: chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens. His counsel was that these men judge the people at all times and bring only the great matters to their chief. On the one hand, Moses would “stand before God for the people, so that (he might) bring the difficulties to God.” And on the other hand he would teach them the statutes and the laws. Moses followed this advice, taking it as from God (Ex. 18: 23). In Deuteronomy 1: 9-18 he recalls the incident without adding any negative comment. A counterpart to this might be found in 1 Corinthians 6: 4.

However, in Numbers 11 it was not a matter of dispensing justice or hearing problems. It was rather Moses' feeling of being overwhelmed with the burden of his responsibilities. Certainly God was able to give Moses the means necessary to carry out his charge, and He had instructed him to lead lsrael.

Today, in the light of the New Testament, one must acknowledge that it is not God's intention for His people that only one man assume responsibility for the entire service of the local assembly. The decision of Acts 15 was not reached by one apostle, however prominent, but by the apostles and the elders, with the concurrence of the whole assembly (v. 22). According to passages such as Philippians 4: 3 and Colossians 4: 11, Paul had several “fellow laborers” whom he sent here and there, or who accompanied him on his journeys.

Passages such as 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4 show that each member, every joint, has his/her particular service in the body of Christ; and that all work together for the advantage of the entire body. The Lord alone imparts through the Spirit various gifts, not only the fundamental ones of shepherd, evangelist or prophet, but also every kind of work and function to be performed in the body. All do not have the same qualification, but all the members must equally care for one another: “As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Peter 4: 10).

Hence, even if it was not proper for Moses to complain to God in this way, we can think that God answered him in grace by giving the seventy elders to assist him in carrying the burden of the people. And Moses did not take it in the wrong way. When Joshua wanted to prevent Eldad and Medad from prophesying in the camp, Moses replies: “Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord's people were prophets and that the LORD would put His Spirit upon them!” (Num. 11: 29). Moses did not at all wish to be the sole channel of the Spirit of God.

First Corinthians 12: 21 reminds us that “the eye cannot say to the hand, `I have no need of you'; nor again the head to the feet, `I have no need of you.' Each of us has received from the Lord a service to perform, and we cannot abandon it to somebody else. Neither should we despise or try to imitate the function which God might have entrusted to others. All are called in dependence on the Lord, to be “joined in the work and laboring” (1 Cor. 16: 16 JND) in a spirit of submission and mutual esteem (Phil. 2: 4; Rom. 12: 3). This is not collaboration as understood in a human organization. Rather, it is cooperation in a living organism, each member operating at the place assigned by the Master (Eph. 4: 16); and particularly today in the scope of 2 Tim. 2: 19-26.

3.  BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT AT KADESH

(Deuteronomy 1: 19-46; Numbers 13 and Numbers 14)

“It is eleven days' journey from Horeb by way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea” (Deut. 1: 2). A few days would suffice to reach the frontier of Canaan. Yet, more than thirty eight years after the departure from Sinai we meet the people at Kadesh-barnea again (Num. 20: 1). So today, the spiritual progress of a soul can be rapid, but often many years are wasted through lack of faith, vigilance, and love for the Lord.

This is just what happened with the people of Israel. As the starting point for the conquest, Kadesh-Barnea was situated at the frontier of Canaan. Moses mentions it in Deuteronomy one. After the “great and terrible wilderness” which they had crossed, the lsraelites had only to move forward fearlessly and take possession of Palestine. As Moses said, “You have come to the mountains of the Amorites, which the LORD our God is giving us. Look, the LORD your God has set the land before you; go up and possess it, as the LORD God of your fathers has spoken to you; do not fear or be discouraged” (Deut. 1: 20, 21). In these words one can sense all the relief felt by Moses. He had brought the people through the different stages of the wilderness up to the frontier of Canaan. Just a few more efforts, and through God's kindness he would soon be able to lay down his heavy burden and enjoy rest.

Why then was the course of events different?

(A) The people conceived the blameable wish to send spies to examine the land. Was it not enough that God had declared to them that it was a country flowing with milk and honey, and that He would accompany them in their conquest of it? No, they want men to examine the land on their behalf and bring them news about it. Numbers 13 describes how the Lord accedes to their request and tells Moses to send out spies. In this way, He tries the people to see whether they will trust Him or not.

(B) The people wrongly accepted the majority report of the spies. True, these men reported that Canaan was as God had promised: “The land...truly flows with milk and honey” (Num. 13: 27). However, they quickly add that the people dwelling in the land are strong; the cities are walled and very great. They discredit the land and completely discourage the children of Israel from conquering it.

Caleb protests boldly: “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.” The following day. Joshua joins him, insisting that Israel must not “fear the people of the land, for...the LORD is with us” (Num. 14: 9).

Will Israel listen to the disheartening declarations of the ten, or to the two men of faith who, trusting the Lord, assure them of the victory?

How is it with us? Are we among those who recommend “the land” or those who hold back souls from following the Lord? Are not criticisms, detractions, depreciation of the ministry of the Word, negligence in attending the meetings, and so many other insinuation elements which discourage our brethren from possessing the spiritual blessings given by God? Let us, like Joshua and Caleb, rely on God to take possession of what He has given us, and incite others to do the same.

(C) The people listen to the ten spies. During the entire night they lift up their voice, crying and weeping. In the morning they reject Moses and prepare to appoint a captain who will lead them back to Egypt. They further declare that Joshua and Caleb should be stoned.

What a terrible hour for Moses! It may have been the darkest hour in his life. How many times had he not interceded for this people? He had even offered himself for them as a propitiation for their sin, if this had been possible. With faithfulness and constancy he had led them up to the frontier of the promised land. Now they reject him and want to return to Egypt. He falls on his face before the entire assembly, painfully aware that the promised rest is about to be forfeited.

The Lord puts his servant to the test by again proposing that He destroy the people and make of Moses a nation greater and mightier than they. Moses, however, would not accept to enter the land alone, sacrificing his brethren and the glory of God (v. 16). He beseeches the Lord to forgive once more “according to the greatness of Your mercy, just as You have forgiven this people from Egypt even until now” (v. 19). “Then the LORD said: I have pardoned, according to your word.”

Moses, however, will have to submit to the discipline that will strike Israel on account of their unbelief. The entire generation that came out of Egypt will perish in the wilderness. What a faithful servant is Moses! He accepts rather to be thirty-eight years in affliction along with the people of God than to witness their destruction and himself be honored. He bows down, submitting to the suffering which he has not deserved. He will see the bodies of his companions fall one after another and die in the arid solitude. As he sees it at this time, only four will survive the thirty-eight more years in the wilderness and enter the promised land: himself, Aaron, Joshua, and Caleb.

Several of the people seem to reconsider: “And they rose early in the morning and went up to the top of the mountain, saying, `Here we are, and we will go up to the place which the LORD has promised, for we have sinned!'” (Num. 14: 40). However, they are persisting in their own strength. Moses rather submits to the divine discipline and remains in the camp. Then, as he expresses with deep melancholy in Deuteronomy 2: 1, “...we turned and journeyed into the wilderness of the Way of the Red Sea, as the LORD spoke to me.”

Making all due allowance, do we not at times face the same experience? Must we not also humble ourselves and bow under the hand of God who disciplines His people, even if personally we have had no direct part in the fault that brings divine chastisement upon us?

THINKING THINGS THROUGH

1. Describe the camp of Israel as they left the wilderness of Sinai. In what ways do you see God's concern for them, His desire to be among them and lead them?

2. How is the functioning of various members in the body of Christ illustrated by the distribution of Moses' responsibility among seventy of the elders of Israel? What is your place and function in the body of Christ?

3. What factors prevented the Israelites from going in to possess the promised land when they first arrived at the frontier town of Kadesh- Barnea? What was the result of their failure to possess the land at that time?

4. What are some of the ways in which we hinder one another from possessing our land of spiritual blessings in Christ?

5. How does Moses' great heart for God and for the people of God shine forth once again at Kadesh-barnea?

Chapter 6

THIRTY-EIGHT MORE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS

In Deuteronomy 2: 14-15 we read: “And the time we took to come from Kadesh-Barnea...was thirty-eight years, until all the generation of the men of war was consumed from the midst of the camp.” A choice had been made at Kadesh by these men; they did not have the faith to go up and conquer the land of Canaan, as Caleb and Joshua had urged them to do. Frightened by the enemy, they had renounced God's desire for them to possess it.

Regarding salvation or the daily walk, there are decisive days in life when we too are confronted by a crossroads. Will we really decide for the Lord, adhering to Him and giving Him the first place? Or do we still want to enjoy the things of this world a little longer? The broad road will lead us far away from fellowship with the Lord. For the lsraelites there was no return, no recovery. Under the government of God, the face of the wilderness was strewn with their graves.

We will not take time to consider the various incidents recorded in the Word which occurred during these long years. However, three of them may retain our attention as marking more particularly the character of Moses. These are: the criticism by Miriam, the rebellion of Korah, and the tension at Meribah.

1.  MEEKNESS AND HUMILITY

(A) In The Face Of Miriam's Criticism

(Numbers 12)*

Miriam, the older sister of Moses, had come out with him from Egypt. She had led the choirs of the women in the song of triumph after the Crossing of the Red Sea, and had no doubt acquired an important position within the family and among the people because of her age (Micah 6: 4).

Now however, Zipporah** (who had left Moses for a time) reappears (Ex. 18: 2). Now that Moses has a wife again, Miriam can no longer have the same place as before. As easily happens under such circumstances, Miriam starts to criticize her brother, speaking against him and belittling him. She wins Aaron over, and together they ask insinuatingly: “Has the LORD indeed spoken only through Moses? Has He not spoken through us also?” (Num. 12: 2).

How many times, even among us, do envy and jealousy cause criticism and slander? 1 Peter 2: 1 teaches us that we must lay aside all envyings and jealousy if we want to be fed by the pure milk of the Word; if we want to come near the Lord and worship Him. The account in Numbers 12 emphasizes the seriousness of these faults.

Furthermore, Miriam and Aaron, blinded by their self-importance, refuse to acknowledge the place given by God to Moses. “And the Lord heard it” (Num. 12: 2). Someone may think that he has whispered a critical word only in the ear of a brother or sister, advising him or her not to tell it to anybody else. Let us remember that the Lord has heard it and will hold us accountable.

Moses probably knew the criticisms that Miriam was spreading against him. However, as the Word of God says, he was very meek, “more than all men who were on the face of earth.” Humbly he kept silent, just as his Master would do in a future day. When we become the objects of criticism or even slander, should we not also leave it to God? He will bring everything to light at the right moment, and will not allow any bad effect beyond what He deems advisable for his servants.

“Suddenly” the Lord intervenes, calling Moses, Aaron and Miriam to the tent of meeting. Perhaps Aaron and Miriam imagine that what had just happened with the seventy elders will now take place with them. That is, the Lord will take of the Spirit which is on their younger brother and place it on them. If this is what they think, their eyes will soon be opened. The Lord summons Miriam and Aaron to appear alone before Him. Undertaking Moses' defence, He says: “Why...were you not afraid to speak against My servant Moses?”

We may well underline this verse in our Bibles so that we might take care not to do the same. Criticisms against the servants of God, against their ministry, and against their behavior are so easily expressed!

“So the anger of the LORD was aroused against them, and He departed. And when the cloud departed from above the tabernacle, suddenly Miriam became leprous, as white as snow.” She must suffer the consequences of her failure. Moses intercedes for her, a fresh proof of his love and humility; but the entire people will know the chastisement that has struck the prophetess who had not been afraid to criticize her brother. During seven days she is to be excluded from the camp; and Israel cannot journey until Miriam is healed and received back into the camp. Regretting a fault is not enough. We must feel deeply within ourselves its gravity in the eyes of God, if not in those of men.

Let us emphasize the attitude of Moses who prays and intercedes for his sister, just as Job did for his friends, and as John invites us to do if we see a brother sinning. Matthew 18 teaches us to go and see such a brother and try to win him. If this move although made in the humble spirit of footwashing as described in John 13 — remains fruitless, two or three brothers must be taken along in order to try to recover the guilty one. It is only after the second visit has failed that one must tell it to the assembly, and then only if the case is sufficiently serious. Evil must in no way be spread abroad. Let us not forget how much Miriam suffered for it.

(B) In The Face of Korah's Rebellion

Numbers 16 relates the most serious difficulty faced by Moses during the forty years in the wilderness. Korah, a Levite of the family of the Kohathites, becomes puffed up. Rallying two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly to himself, he intends to seize religious power. He boldly asks, “Why is the priesthood reserved for the family of Aaron? Why do the Levites not have access to it? Since the entire assembly of Israel — all of them are holy and the Lord is in the midst of them, why do Moses and Aaron lift themselves up above the congregation of the Lord?”

It is not only in our days that an alleged zeal for the holiness of God's assembly is used as a pretext to put oneself forward and to gain influence!

Dathan, Abiram and On of the tribe of Reuben also attack, so to say, the civil authority of Moses, saying, “Is it a small thing that you...should keep acting like a prince over us?” (v. 13).

The double rebellion grows to the point of involving the whole assembly (v. 19). What will Moses do? As at so many other times, he falls on his face (whereas Korah exalts himself) and leaves the decision to God, saying, “Tomorrow morning the LORD will show ...whom He chooses” (v.5). On the one hand Moses relies on the decision of God to confirm the position which He has given to each one; on the other hand he waits until “to-morrow.” He does not want to act hastily in spite of the gravity of the situation. He would rather allow Korah and those with him enough time to repent.

The ingratitude and rebellion experienced by Moses might have caused him to go away and leave the people to their fate. He stays however, aware of the responsibility involved in his God-given position. He keeps his position of authority without losing his spirit of grace and humility.

Is this not the first lesson that we must learn from this chapter, that is, to acknowledge the position imparted by God to each one of his people? In the body of Christ the members do not all have the same function. God has placed each one in the body as it has pleased Him. None can say to the others: “We do not need you.” Members who seem less important cannot think that they therefore do not belong to the body.

The Levites, as Moses emphasized, occupied a privileged position. They could come near to God in performing the service of the tabernacle (v. 9). Why then should they also want to assume the priesthood for themselves? If God has entrusted it to the family of Aaron, should they not acknowledge this special position? And if God has invested Moses with authority, must not His decisions be obeyed with all submission?

Today it is not quite the same since all believers are priests. However, The Word of God does mark out some as elders and some as leaders to be obeyed. Those who labor in the Word must be highly esteemed in love. It is important for us to first discern the place of personal service which the Lord has entrusted to each of us. Then in dependence on Him, seek through His grace to faithfully fulfill that place without trying to encroach on the ground entrusted by the Lord to others.

Faced with the insolent attitude of Dathan and Abiram, Moses once more places himself in the hands of the Lord (v. 15). The day after, Korah gathers his two hundred fifty men. As they all offer incense together at the entrance of the tent of meeting, thus acting as priests, the Lord again threatens to destroy the entire people (v. 21). Moses, however, intercedes for them, and the Lord spares them on condition that they depart from the tents of Korah, Dathan and Abiram. Because the case is so serious, God cannot show mercy. A simple exclusion from the assembly is no longer possible for these men. One must depart from them and leave them to their fate.

These men learn nothing from the situation. On the contrary, they stand in the entrance of their tents with their wives, their sons and their little ones, defying the entire assembly. Suddenly, the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up! Fire from the Lord also consumes the two hundred and fifty men who offered the incense. Thus the entire people must learn that only the intercession of Moses — a type of Christ — was able to keep them from perdition; They also must know that God's judgment does not spare the guilty ones who do not repent.

As with the incident of the golden calf, order is not yet restored by the following day. The whole assembly again murmurs against Moses and Aaron, saying that they have killed the people of the Lord. A plague breaks out and would have destroyed them all, had not Aaron taken a censer upon Moses' instruction, and stood between the dead and the living. Thus, the plague is stayed. The incense speaks of an offering, the sweet odor of which would ascend before God. It is a perfect figure of the Victim who alone can save from eternal death those who trust in Him.

This time 14,700 people die. This shows how serious it is to continue to rebel after God's judgment has been clearly declared.

God, however, wanted to confirm openly the priesthood of Aaron. Hence, He gives a sign to clearly designate the one whom He has chosen. It is not a sign of death like the fire which consumed the two hundred fifty men, but a sign of life. The rod of Aaron, placed in the sanctuary together with the rods of the princes of the twelve tribes, alone buds forth, bearing flowers and fruit. Thus, Aaron is a type of that other Priest, “...Who has come, not according to the law of a fleshly commandment, but according to the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7: 16).

2.  TENSION AT MERIBAH

(Numbers 20: 1-13)

It is now the fortieth year in the wilderness. Since the incident of the spies in the second year, the people have been roaming about and have finally gathered again at Kadesh.

At this time, Miriam dies and is buried.

Once more there is no water. How will the new generation, raised in the wilderness, react? They know the law and the statutes, they have celebrated the Passover, and the tabernacle is dwelling in their midst. One may understand the murmurings of those brought up in Egypt, but the younger generation had heard the teaching of Moses. They were the object of his care. They saw the glory of the Lord so many times in the wilderness. Will they not behave better than their fathers?

Not at all. The human heart remains the same and again murmurings,reproaches, and questions are raised, this time from the new generation. Moses and Aaron fall upon their faces, not before the congregation as on other occasions, but “at the entrance of the tent of meeting” (Num. 20: 6 JND). The glory of the Lord appears to them, this time not to consume the people but to use grace. Such grace would be shown on the basis of the priesthood, confirmed through the life manifested in the rod of Aaron.

The Lord gives Moses precise instructions: he must take “...the rod from before the LORD” (Num. 20: 9) — the rod that had budded forth. He must gather the assembly together and speak before them to the rock. Moses takes the rod as the Lord had commanded him. The two brothers gather the congregation before the rock.

It is a moment of tension, irritation, and indignation for Moses whose career will be broken down through his ill-considered action on this occasion. He says to them: “Hear now, you rebels! Must we bring water for you out of this rock? Then Moses lifted his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod.”

Had Moses' faith decreased? Had he become somewhat tired of the prolonged ingratitude of the people? Whatever the case might be, he lacks the faith that would enable him to simply speak to the rock. He wants to use authority in striking it with his rod. He thus disobeys the Lord's precise order to only speak to the rock while holding in his hand the rod of grace connected with the priesthood.

Grace alone was able to introduce the people into the land. Neither authority nor the rod of judgment could do so. The whole incident is a picture of Christ who would be offered only once. Even if Moses was unable to understand the entire import of his gesture, it still was a serious matter to strike the rock a second time.

“Then the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron, `Because you did not believe Me, to hallow Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this congregation into the land” (v. 12). In our eyes, the divine sentence seems to be out of proportion to their fault. However, the Lord holds more responsible those who have received much, especially his servants (Luke 12: 48).

Several times Moses beseeches God to revoke his sentence, but the divine decision remains inexorable (Deut. 3: 25-26). The old servant of God recovers communion and intimacy with the Lord, but under the divine government, the consequences remain: “You shall not go over this Jordan.” A similar thing occurred with regard to David and Bathsheba's child.

3.  ALONE AT PISGAH

(Deuteronomy 34)

A short time after the contention at Meribah, Aaron, along with Moses and Eleazar, must go up on mount Hor. There Moses strips his brother of his priestly garments and puts them upon Eleazar, his nephew. “Aaron died there on the top of the mountain. Then Moses and Eleazar came down from the mountain” (Num. 20: 28).

At the time of the golden calf, Aaron had been spared. When the fire of the Lord destroyed Nadab and Abihu for offering strange fire, Aaron had kept silent, aware that the fault of his sons was not as grave as his own had been. Once more he is spared. Now at the end of his life he must die, stripped of the garments that marked the high position to which he had been called. His faith, like that of his brother, had been defective at the critical moment.

For a few more months Moses will remain alone at the head of the people. His last year is quite occupied. The entire book of Deuteronomy is filled with his memories. As legislator, he briefly restates the ordinances, gives new instructions for the land, and makes his last recommendations to the people. In the presence of all the people he invests Joshua with the authority needed to assume the succession. He gives expression to the song which will remind Israel of the warnings of the Lord. Before dying he blesses the tribes one after the other, thus showing that he is aware of the future ruin of the people as well as God's resources for them.

Before leaving those whom he has served and led so faithfully, he pronounces these last words: “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut. 33: 27). In his prayer preserved in Psalm 90, he can say: “LORD, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.” Had not this communion, this intimacy with God, marked his career on earth from the burning bush to the plains of Moab? Alluding to such vital fellowship, the Lord Jesus will later say: “Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15).

The God whom the fathers had known, the God who had revealed Himself to Moses, was always the same. His eternal arms had carried him as He carried his people through all these years.

The last day arrives. Moses leaves the plains of Moab where the tents of the people were pitched, and slowly goes up to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah. His work is completed. He has led this nation through so many difficulties and obstacles up to the frontier of the land. He has also communicated to them the thoughts of God. Now his task is finished, although not in the way he would really have liked, since he cannot introduce Israel into the land. Unlike Aaron, he does not have a brother and a son near him to assist him in his last moments. Even his faithful Joshua who had accompanied him at Sinai has remained in the plain.

A greater One, however, comes near to him and lets him experience His presence and intimacy: “This is the land of which I swore to give Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, `I will give it to your descendants.' I have caused you to see it with your eyes.'” Abraham of old had walked “in the land through its length and its width,”. knowing that God would give it to his descendants (Gen. 13: 17). The men of faith of Hebrews 11 saw from afar the promised things, the heavenly land, and they embraced them. John at Patmos, aware of the ruin of the assembly (Rev. 2-3), saw the heavenly city, the Lamb's wife (Rev. 21).

At the thorn-bush, Moses had been alone with God on holy ground. There the I AM THAT I AM revealed Himself and constrained His servant to accept the mission being entrusted to him. At Sinai as lawgiver, he had been alone with the Lord on two occasions of forty days each. Then in the cleft of the rock, he had learned to know God's thoughts of grace.

How many times this leader, tired of the ingratitude of the people, had entered the most holy place to listen in the silence of the sanctuary to the voice speaking to him from off the mercy-seat? (Num. 7: 89). “And he spoke to Him.” Now on barren Pisgah at this supreme moment of Moses' life, His faithful and well known Friend is there near His servant.

After contemplating the good land which God will give to His people, Moses, alone, falls asleep. The Lord Himself buries him in the valley and no man knows his sepulchre to this day. God takes care of the body of His servant, just as later He will make sure that the body of His Son is given the right burial. The Epistle of Jude records a dispute between Michael and Satan about the body of Moses. God watches, lest the enemy might make of it an object of veneration and idolatry as he did with the brass serpent.

One day Moses did enter the promised land. On the mount of transfiguration, he saw in glorious humanity, the Face that had remained hidden at Sinai (Luke 9: 28-31). The purpose of this meeting was not to speak of the past and of all that had been involved in the journey through the wilderness. Neither was it to consider the remote future when the glory of the Son of God would shine in His kingdom. Rather, it was to speak of His death which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

In the Passover lamb and in the Levitical sacrifices, Moses had presented the type. Now the reality was there: Jesus was to be presented as the propitiation “that He [God] might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

The marvelous vision disappears; the cloud takes away Moses and Elijah until the day of resurrection; the disciples no longer see anyone but “Jesus alone with them.”

Moses — man of God, man of faith, deliverer, leader, shepherd, lawgiver, mediator, intercessor, prophet, and so frequently a type of Christ. This great figure of Moses remains before us unique and lonely so that considering the outcome of his conduct, we might imitate his faith (Heb. 13: 7).

THINKING THINGS THROUGH

1. Describe the unhappy situation in which Miriam and Aaron begin complaining against Moses because of his wife. How does this illustrate the strife and murmurings which can arise in an assembly?

2. What personal lessons do you learn from Moses' response (or lack of response) to the complaints against him?

3. Consider the rebellion of Korah and his allies against Moses and Aaron: their complaints, their presumption and God's judgment upon them. Why do you suppose the congregation generally sided with these rebels after all Moses had done for them? What can you learn from Moses about the right attitude towards those who show cruel and unjust ingratitude towards us?

4. Explain the difference between priesthood then and now. Considering this vast difference, what are the lessons we can yet learn from this rebellion against God's established priesthood?

5. Describe the incident at Meribah where Moses hit the rock. Considering the forty long years in which Moses had borne with this disobedient and rebellious people, we might excuse him for acting in anger and self-will, but how did God view it? Yet, what do the further references to Moses in the Bible reveal as to what God wants us to remember about His beloved servant? (Luke 9: 28-31; Acts 7; Heb. 3: 1-5; Heb. 11: 23-29; etc.).

6. Walk with Moses up to Pisgah and meditate there upon his last moments, alone with God. Such times with God had been the secret of his blessed and fruitful career, and his refuge in frequent troubles. How much do you know of time spent alone with God? Consider your daily schedule in the light of this vital necessity.

The Eternal Son

The Eternal Son

E. C. Hadley.

God is. His essential name in the Old Testament is Jehovah — the "I am that I am," the living, eternal, self-existing, unchangeable One, acting from Himself and according to Himself in all that He does.

Man's intelligence cannot understand it. It is folly to reason about Him. We would have to be God to comprehend Him. But it becomes us as His creatures to accept and hold fast in simple faith what He has been pleased to tell us in His Word about His eternal being.

In His essential being He is inscrutable and invisible to the creature, "dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see" (1 Tim. 6: 16). Yet it has pleased the Triune God to give us a revelation concerning Himself.

But here lies a difficulty. Human language is suited to express human relationships and things within the sphere of human conceptions and ideas and is therefore deficient to describe adequately the divine being of the eternal God and the uncreated relationship that must exist essentially without beginning or end between the three persons of the Triune God. Whatever expressions God uses to reveal to us these divine things must necessarily be couched in human language that we humans are liable to wrest and distort by reading into them our own human ideas if we at all attempt to reason about what God says about Himself and our pride of reasoning ever inclines us to do so.

But God has come in His sovereign goodness towards us in this our natural weakness. In giving us His divinely inspired statements about Himself He has not at all left us to our own reasoning powers to speculate about what He says; but He has made us partakers of His own divine nature which has a capacity to grasp divine things when revealed, and then He has given us His own Holy Spirit to dwell in us to interpret His Word and to enlighten our renewed understanding as to its true meaning. This is a great boon. But it is only as we lean not on our own understanding and have a submissive will and a teachable heart that He can guide us into all truth (John 7: 17; Prov. 3: 5, 6; 1 Cor. 2: 10, 12, 14; John 16: 13).

The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, because they are foolishness unto him. Neither can the child of God receive them by his natural reasoning powers. They are communicated to our intelligence by the energy of the Spirit of God when our understanding has been opened by the Lord to understand the Scriptures, and they must be received by faith. (Luke 24: 45; 1 Cor. 2: 12-14).

This is where many have failed in their comprehension of divine truth as touching the eternal God and the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son. They try to enter into the meaning of the Scriptural expressions by a process of human reasoning instead of abandoning all confidence in themselves and letting the Spirit communicate in His own power to their souls these divine and precious truths the Triune God has been pleased to give us in His Word concerning Himself.

This reasoning of the human mind about the Godhead has led to different errors by introducing certain elements that have to do with our human relations down here into their reasonings about the Godhead, but which evidently cannot be applied to that eternal, uncreated, unchanging and unchangeable relationship that subsists between the three persons of the Triune God.

The Word of God is decisive as to the eternity of Christ's being, "God was manifest in the flesh," "Whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting," "Before Abraham was, I am" (the eternal I am) (1 Tim. 3: 16; Micah 5: 2; John 8: 58).

But soon after the apostles' days the theory of eternal generation was brought out — that is that the Son of God as to His being exists eternally, but as a father is the source of a son he begets, therefore the Son of God exists as a sort of eternal or continual generation from the Father. This human theory, arrived at by introducing an element that has to do with the purely human relationship into their reasonings about the uncreated eternal relationship of the Godhead, actually deprives the Son of His co-equality with the Father and reduces Him to a derivative form owing His existence to the Father.

Today in Christendom there is another widespread error that also is the result of introducing another element of human relations into the divine, uncreated, essential relationship that subsists in and between the persons of the Triune God. They say that the term son implies "graded relations and relative inferiority"; and therefore they reason the term "Son of God" can only apply to Him as Man born of the virgin and can have no application to His pre-incarnate relationship in the deity. This terrible error robs Him of His pre-incarnate relationship as Son well beloved of the Father which is the keystone of the whole New Testament.

First it is not true that sonship even in human relations necessarily implies inferiority. Who would dare to affirm that Abraham was inferior to his father Terah or Moses to his father Amram or David to Jesse?

What then is the meaning of the term Father and Son when applied to the uncreated Godhead? There must be some reason why God chose these terms in speaking of Himself. We should carefully weigh the fact that nowhere in Scripture do we find Christ spoken of as a child of God. (In Acts 4: 27, the expression, "Thy holy child Jesus" is not the usual word for child in the Greek and should be translated "servant"). Child would imply immaturity and weakness. It is always Son of God. A son is of the same nature and essence as his father and in the normal relationship, the son is attached to his father and is the object of his father's deep affection and enjoys close intimacy with him. All this then is implied in the term Father and Son when applied to the Godhead-being of the same nature and essence and having deep mutual affection and intimacy.

"The Only-Begotton Son"

Then when we get the term only begotten we get the additional thought that He is the only one having this relationship to the Father and as such is the special object of the Father's deep affection and eternal delight. Take the account of Abraham offering up Isaac in Gen. 22, which is clearly intended to be a type of God sparing not His own Son but offering Him up for us all, what do we find especially stressed there, "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest" (v. 2; Heb. 11: 17).

This we see in the five passages where the term "only begotten" is used.

In John 3: 16, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life;" the Lord would definitely bring out in bright relief the immensity of God's love towards a guilty world in giving His only begotten Son, the One who was from all eternity the object of His deep affection and delight. To say that the term here "only begotten Son" is applicable to Christ as Man only and has no reference to the pre-incarnate relation of the Son to the Father in the eternal Godhead, dims at once the greatness of God's love to a guilty world that is clearly intended to be set forth in all its depth and fullness by the fact that the One He gave for a lost and guilty world is His only begotten Son, the One who dwelt from all eternity in His bosom as the object of His eternal delight. This is also very evident in 1 John 4: 9, "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him."

"We joy in our God, and we sing of that love

So sovereign and free, which did His heart move,

When lost our condition, all ruined, undone,

He saw with compassion, and spared not His Son.

"His Son, His delight, His loved One, He gave

The cross to endure, by dying to save:

Sure love so amazing, unmeasured, untold,

Since Him it has given, no good will withhold."

In John 1: 14, 18, it is His competency to reveal the Father that is enhanced in virtue of being in His eternal Person the only begotten of the Father, sharing with Him the same nature and essence and dwelling from all eternity in the Father's bosom as the eternal object of His heart's affection and in the intimacy of all that heart contains. Therefore He is fully competent to manifest to all that God is in His character and nature and to reveal His eternal love and purposes towards us.

The only other place is in John 3: 18, "He that believeth not is condemned already, because He hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." Here the terrible state and guilt of the unbeliever, hating the light and loving darkness, is brought out emphatically by his refusal to put faith in the name of the only begotten Son of God come in grace as the Father's love gift to a lost world, and he therefore is justly condemned.

The Truth Concerning the Eternal God

Can Only Be Known by Faith

It is the height of folly for man with his finite mind to try to reason and speculate about that which is infinite. Every time he attempts to do so he is sure to fall into some error by introducing some human idea derived from purely human relationships into his reasonings about the uncreated, eternal, unchanging and unchangeable relationship subsisting in the essential Being of the eternal Triune God, which is far above and beyond human relationships and lies away outside the scope of human reasoning powers to speculate about.

Just as "through faith we understand (without trying to reason it out) that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Heb. 11: 3) so also through faith we understand upon the authority of God's Word that this uncreated relationship of Father and Son and Holy Spirit subsists from everlasting to everlasting in the eternal Godhead without trying to reason it out. Even more, because of our unshaken faith in His divine Word we resolutely refuse to allow our finite minds to reason or speculate about these divine eternal things, knowing intuitively that our finite minds are utterly incapable to reason about that which is infinite. Yet how grateful we should be to God, our Creator, that He has given us a mind capable of accepting, when enlightened by His Spirit, as divine truth what He has been pleased to reveal in His Word concerning Himself, and to rejoice in this divinely given knowledge with hearts overflowing with praise and adoration and joyful abandon of all our being into His blessed hands, Who has manifested the immensity of His eternal love towards us in sending His only begotten Son into this world His hands had made that we might live through Him.

"Father divine, in grateful love

We bow before Thy face,

While for Thy gift unspeakable

Our souls o'erflow with praise;

Thine only Son, Thy heart's delight

Far back, ere time began,

Thou in Thy boundless love didst give

To die for ruined man.

"Father this mystery of love

Must all our praise excel:

No human, no angelic tongue

Its wondrous depths can tell;

For what were we that Thou on us

Such love shouldst ever pour?

We bow, and, filled with joy and awe,

Father and Son adore."

Plurality in Unity

The unity of the Godhead is declared repeatedly in Scripture. "Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah" (Deut. 6: 4, J. N. D. Trans.). "One Jehovah, and His name one" (Zech. 14: 9, J. N. D. Trans.). "I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside Me," "I am God and there is none else" (Isa. 45: 5; Isa. 46: 9). Yet that there is plurality in this divine unity of the Godhead is equally revealed from the first verse of the Bible on. In the Hebrew the Name for God is in the plural and the verb in the singular. "In the beginning God (plural) created (singular)" thus showing plurality in unity. And in Gen. 1: 26 we read, "And God said, Let us make man in our image." Here clearly plurality is revealed, each distinct in personality so that they can address one another, "Let us make man," and yet having one likeness and working together in concert to carry out one purpose, neither acting without the other.

In comparing Gen. 1: 2 with Prov. 8: 27-30 and Heb. 1: 2 this comes out all the more clearly in connection with creation and the reforming of the earth for man. "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." "When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass upon the face of the depth: when He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the fountains of the deep: when He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by Him as one brought up with Him (or, as His artificer, see margin of J. N. D.'s Trans.): and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him." "God...hath...spoken unto us by (in the Person of) His Son...by whom He also made the worlds."

Plurality in unity is here clearly revealed, each Person having a distinct personality and a distinct part and sphere of action in all that the Triune God does, yet not independent of, but in essential relationship one to the other.

For example, the Father sends the Son. This was a distinct act on the part of the Father. Yet the Son acts in His own proper Person in coming into the world. "I proceeded forth and came from God"; "I came down from heaven"; "I am come into the world" (John 8: 42; John 6: 38; John 16: 28). He did not however act apart from the Father but in full harmony and coordination with the Father's will and purpose in sending Him. "Neither came I of Myself, but He sent Me." "I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will but the will of Him that sent Me" (John 8: 42; John 6: 38).

So also when it comes to the Son assuming the form of a man, we find each of the three persons of the Godhead active in it. Christ speaking to God the Father says, "A body hast Thou prepared Me" (Heb. 10: 5). In Matthew 1: 20 we read that He was conceived of the Holy Spirit. Here we have God the Father and the Holy Spirit both acting in harmonious accord, in the forming of this holy humanity of our Lord. But the Son is also seen in His own proper action in taking up manhood into union with His Person. "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same." "He emptied Himself taking a bondman's form, taking His place in the likeness of men" (Heb. 2: 14; Phil. 2: 7, J. N. D. Trans.). And so in all the activity of the Triune God.

Being One in nature, substance and essential being, they love necessarily the same things and so have the same thoughts, will and purpose about everything, though each having His distinct part in activity and relationship in all that the Triune God does, but always working together in complete unison carrying out one common purpose and will. Thus of Christ, the incarnate Son, we read: "For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." "Believest Thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of Myself: but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works." "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." "And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee." "I cast out devils by the Spirit of God." "Who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God" (Col. 2: 9, John 14: 10; John 5: 17; Luke 4: 14; Matt. 12: 28; Heb. 9: 14). Each Person of the Godhead takes part in what He, the incarnate Son, does. (John 1: 14; 1 John 5: 20; 1 John 3: 8).

Dependent Man

In manhood He kept the place that He had voluntarily taken according to the divine purposes as dependent man doing all by the power of the Spirit, and yet the Father was in Him as the source of His words and deeds. But it was He, the eternal Son who was there in person in the form of a man. He was there in all of the divine power of His eternal being that created and upholds the universe. And He could say of those works of which the Father in Him was the source and the Spirit the power, "I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do." (John 17: 4).

It is a divine mystery where human reasoning is sure to stray if it tries to speculate or figure it out, but which faith rejoices to believe and finds therein the spring of eternal delight.

So if the Son takes a place of apparent subordination to the Father and the Spirit takes a place of apparent subordination to the Son, yet it is apparent only, for in fact, each is willingly doing His own part in conjunction and concert with the other two in carrying out one common purpose and will. All three are coequal in deity, essential in being and nature, but distinct in personality and in eternal unchanging relationship to the other and each having His own part and activity which He willingly does in carrying out one divine plan and purpose. Understand it we cannot, speculate on it we dare not, believe it we must, or else we make the divinely inspired Word of God a lie.

The Truth of the Eternal Sonship of Christ

Is a Vital Truth of Scripture.

We will now turn to Matt. 28:19. Jesus in giving instructions to His disciples, says, "Baptizing them in the Name (not names) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Here we have the Triune God revealed under one Name but this one name embracing three persons in divine relationship to one another as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This divine uncreated relationship, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is characteristic of the three in one and is essential to the eternal subsistence of the Triune God. The Father is and ever was and ever will be the Father in His essential being in the Godhead and so the Spirit is and ever was and ever will be that person designated as the Spirit, co-equal with the Father in deity but always and eternally in His person the Spirit. He cannot exchange His place and personal relationship as the Spirit with that of the Father nor can the Father exchange His place and personal relationship as Father with that of the Spirit in that eternal unchanging subsistence of the Godhead and this is also true of the Son. This is not cold logic nor human reasoning but holding in simple faith, without doubting or disputing, the plain and uniform revelation of the holy Scriptures. "I am the LORD, I change not;" "I am that I am" (Mal. 3: 6; Ex. 3: 14). Unchangeableness is characteristic of the Godhead The Godhead is what it is and unchangeably so. The Son has taken up manhood into His being so that there is a change in outward display and form but He has never ceased to be that He ever was and ever will be in His essential being in the Godhead, the Son.

This truth of the eternal Sonship is the basic truth underlying the full revelation of the Triune God in the New Testament. It is because He is the eternal Son co-equal in deity and one in nature and essence with His Father, ever dwelling in the bosom of His Father, knowing the full depth and extent of all His feelings, thoughts and purposes, that He could and did manifest the Triune God. "God manifest in the flesh, If He had been in any point inferior, or if there had been the least thought in the Father's heart or of the Spirit's that He did not know and fully share with them, He could not have manifested the Triune God.

This truth of the eternal relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is vital. To have three beings coequal in deity without relationship would be three Gods, not one Triune God.

In Becoming Man He Did Not Give Up His Eternal Deity nor His Eternal Relationship In the Godhead

We will look at some scriptures confirming this vital truth that He was Son in Deity before incarnation. But before doing so, it is well to look a moment at Phil. 2: 6, 7, "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men." J. N. Darby's translation reads, "Who, subsisting in the form of God . . . but emptied Himself, taking a bondman's form, taking His place in the likeness of men." W. Kelly translates it, "Emptied Himself, taking a bondman's form, being come in men's likeness." The emptying of Himself has to do only with the form He had. Emptying Himself of the outward majesty and glory of the Creator, having authority and never under command, He takes a servant's form and takes His place in the likeness of men to serve God and man in His obedience unto death. In doing this He in nowise gave up His essential deity or any quality or attribute of it nor did He divest Himself of His eternal and unchanging relationship in the Godhead. This He could not do. He could not empty Himself of what He was essentially in His being, but only of — the outward form. So we read, "Of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever." (Rom. 9: 5).

He Who Was Son in Deity Takes up Perfect Manhood into Union with His Person

He took up perfect manhood into union with His Person. His incarnation did not in the least detract from His eternal deity nor from His eternal relationship in the Godhead, but only gave to His humanity His infinite perfection. So in manhood He was Son as He ever was in that eternal, unchanging and unchangeable relationship which He had with the Father in the Godhead.

"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." "The Son of God is come." "The Son of God was manifested" (John 1: 15; 1 John 5: 20; John 3: 8).

The plain and simple force of such scriptures is that He was Son, the only begotten of the Father before He came in flesh, before He was manifested. It was the eternal Son that was manifested by coming into this world in the form of a man. He did not become Son by becoming man, but the Son became man in order to manifest Himself and undo the works of the devil and give us a full revelation of what God is in His moral nature and character so that we might know Him. He was God (the Son) manifested in flesh, so that in manhood as in deity He was ever the only begotten Son in the bosom of the Father (John 1: 18).

We will look at some more scriptures confirming this blessed truth of His eternal Sonship.

In John 17 we see Him standing in the midst of His disciples in the likeness of men. He lifts up His eyes to heaven and speaks to the Father. His words reveal His deep inner consciousness of the unchanging eternal relationship He had as Son with the Father before the world was. "Father...glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee.... And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." (Verses 1, 5).

Just a little while before He had told them, "I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father" (John 16: 28) There could be no Father if there was no Son. And here we see the relationship of Father and Son was there before He came into the world. In coming forth from the Father and coming into the world He, the Son, took His place in the likeness of men. It is this great fact of what He is in His eternal person the Son, that gave value to all He did as dependent Man. And it is just this great fact that He was God's own Son eternally, that brings out in all its brightness and depth the love of the Father in sending Him that we might live through Him. Take away the truth of His eternal Sonship and you take away the measure by which we know the fullness of the Father's love to us, and the great incentive we have for adoring Him.

"What was it, blessed God,

Led Thee to give Thy Son

To yield Thy well-beloved

For us by sin undone?

'Twas love unbounded led Thee thus

To give Thy well-beloved for us.

"What love to Thee we owe,

Our God, for all Thy grace?

Our hearts may well o'erflow

In everlasting praise

Make us, O God, to praise Thee thus

For all Thy boundless love to us."

The Father Manifests His Love In Sending His Son that We Might live Through Him

"In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him" (1 John 4: 9). Here clearly He was the only begotten before He was sent "into the world." It is just this great fact that makes God's love shine out in its fullness in sending Him.

"There all the saints of every clime shall meet,

And each with all shall all the ransomed greet,

But oh, the height of bliss, our Lord, shall be

To owe it all, and share it all, with Thee."

We have also Rom. 8: 3 and Gal. 4: 4, "God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh (of Christ made sin for us)" and "God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law." He was God's Son in His pre-incarnate relation with God when sent. Born of a woman in the likeness of flesh (of men) is the form He assumed in coming. To affirm that He only became Son in being born of a woman not only violates the language used, but what is worse robs these passages of their clear evident intention to emphasize the immensity of the love and grace of God the Father in sending His own Son, who was from all eternity the object of His deepest affection and delight and one with Him in nature and essence, to bear the judgment of sin in our stead. It is just this that gives force to what the Apostle goes on to point out in Romans 8, "If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8: 31, 32. See also Rom. 8: 38, 39).

God Creates the Worlds by His Son

Heb. 1: 2 is another passage that ought to settle fully any mind that is subject to Scripture as to Christ's eternal Sonship. "God...hath in these last days spoken unto us by (or in the person of) His Son by whom also He made the worlds." God created the worlds by His Son. He was in that relationship as Son at the time He created the worlds. Who could question this clear implication of this passage? Col. 1: 13-17 also says the same thing. "For by Him (the Son, see verse 13) were all things created."

Other passages could be cited, but these are ample to convince any person who is ready to accept in simple faith God's own divine statements without doubting or reasoning.

The Son of God in Manhood

One more passage may be examined with profit. "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (Luke 1: 35). This name is not a new one given Him but His eternal one confirmed. It is not said "shall be the Son of God" as this would indicate that He was Son only as man born of the virgin and was not therefore Son in pre-incarnation. But the passage says, "shall be called the Son of God." That name which was His from all eternity "the Son," He carries over into manhood so that even as to His holy human nature conceived by the Holy Spirit He is called Son of God. Thus He is the Son of God in manhood as He is and always was and always will be in deity.

The Son, in Taking up Manhood into His Being, Voluntarily Took the Place of Submission and Dependence

He took up humanity into union with deity in His Person; yet His incarnation did not in the least detract from His deity nor His eternal relationship as Son to the Father but only gave to His humanity His infinite perfection. Each of His two natures retained its own proper character without any confusion. His human nature as well as His divine nature possessed each their excellent characteristics and both united to form His glorious Person as incarnate Son. Scripture never divides the Person nor confounds the natures. They are united in His Person by a unique and inscrutable bond. He is the God-man He is God in all that God is and He is Man in all that man is, apart from sin. Such is the Son of God come in flesh — the God-man — that He might manifest the Godhead in the flesh and by His obedience unto death, even the death of the cross, might redeem us unto God.

As the incarnate Son He ever kept and will keep eternally (1 Cor. 15: 28) that place of a perfect Man in complete dependence, entire submission and implicit obedience to His Father's will and yet in it all He ever acts in His own Person as Son from eternity, who voluntarily took His place in manhood (being one with the Father in His will and purpose in it) that He might manifest unto us the Father and accomplish His will and the desire of His heart in our redemption to the praise of the glory of His grace. As incarnate Son He continually displays absolute submission to the will of the Father, yet this sacred service was and is equally the exercise of His own will, which was and always is uniform with that of His Father both in His deity and His perfect manhood.

Not Inferior to the Father in the dignity of His Person

"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work" (John 5: 17). They work together in perfect accord, each having His respective part in carrying out one unique divine plan.

"The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth" (John 5: 19, 20), and "I can of Mine own self do nothing" (Verse 30). Some say this could not apply to the Lord as eternal Son but only to Him as Man. But this is bringing in human reasoning. We must not confuse the dignity of His person with the place He has voluntarily taken in carrying out the divine purposes. The Son is seen in this chapter as coequal with the Father, quickening whom He will and judging all, but He is not acting independently of the Father nor is the Father acting independently of Him. The Father shows Him all He does and the Son does nothing without His Father. There is complete equality and oneness in purpose and thought in carrying out one common plan. The Son has voluntarily taken the form of a servant for accomplishing the divine purposes of the Godhead with which He is fully one. But this does not render Him in anywise inferior to His Father by doing so. We must not confuse the dignity of His Person with that place He has taken in full communion and oneness of thought and purpose with the Godhead in carrying out the divine purposes.

The Holy Spirit also now takes a place in the present dispensation that appears to be subordinated, He "proceedeth from the Father" and is "sent" by the Father and the Son. And having come, He does not speak of Himself but whatsoever He hears He speaks. His mission is to "glorify Christ" in receiving the things that are His and showing them unto us. (See John 15: 26; John 16: 13, 14). All such expressions as these appear to give a place of subordination to the Spirit as others appear to do to the Son but it is in appearance only and in respect to the place they have taken and the part they play in carrying out the divine purposes and not in anywise as to the dignity of their Persons. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are coequal in deity and all are one in thought, will and purpose though each has His respective part and sphere of action in the carrying out of the divine purposes.

A human example might help to see this more clearly. Three brothers undertake a manufacturing business as coequal partners and they sit down together and plan it out. By common consent, one is to take the general management of the business, the other takes the direction of the work in the plant and the third takes charge of the sales department. The general manager might appear to some to be in a place of superiority and the other two in the place of inferiority. But it is not so in reality. They are all coequal working together in full accord to carry out one common plan and purpose. The general manager would never think of his brother who is directing the work in the plant as his inferior. No part of the business is in reality inferior where what each does is essential to the success of the whole and all are working with that one purpose in view-the success of the business. So in this divine plan that the Triune God has purposed for the display of the Godhead glory and our redemption we cannot think of any part in it as being inferior where all the details are linked in one perfect whole. Though each Person of the Godhead has His respective part to do in carrying out of the whole, yet all is of co-equal importance.

The Son in carrying out His part took "His place in the likeness of men" (Phil. 2: 7 J. N. D. Trans.) but He did not in anywise surrender His coequality in deity nor the dignity of His Person in doing so. And as we see Him here in that perfect dependence and obedience that became the place He had taken, let us beware of thinking it was subjection by reason of inferiority. Indeed it is His unique glory that while there in that place of complete dependence He was as ever "over all, God blessed for ever" (Rom. 9: 5). "Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work" (John 4: 34). He had voluntarily undertaken that work with all that it entailed, including incarnation, and the cross, and was carrying it out with full delight of heart. It was His meat. He was absolutely one with the Father's will in it all. If He had been in the slightest degree inferior in His personal dignity to the Father in the Godhead, He could not have accomplished that work to the glory of the Triune God nor have manifested God here in the flesh It was His absolute coequality with His Father that gave its infinite value to all He did as the incarnate Son.

The Use of the Name God as Applied to the Three Persons of the Trinity

In Scripture the name God is often used as embracing all three persons of the Trinity especially in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament the Father alone is often addressed as God, while the Spirit and the Son are not addressed as God in this way. For example, "And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father" (Gal. 4: 6). This is not because of superiority in the Godhead, but rather because in the working out of the divine purposes the Son has taken His place as a servant and the obedient Man, and the Spirit takes the place as sent by the Father and the Son to glorify the Son. So in the place they have taken in the working out of the divine counsels they could not be called simply God in the way the Father is; though the Son is God and the Spirit is God, both coequal with the Father in deity.

In the working out of the divine counsels we see that God, the Father, is looked upon as the author and source of all things, the One who chooses, predestinates, calls and justifies and works all things after the counsel of His own will. (See 1 Cor. 8: 6; Eph. 1: 3-11; 2 Tim. 1: 9; Rom. 8: 28-33, etc.). The Son is looked upon as the workman or artificer by whom all things are made and upheld, the One in, by and through whom all the counsels of the Triune God are realized and made secure and the work of redemption is accomplished, and the One who, in coming in the flesh, manifests and declares and reveals God to man. (See 1 Cor. 8: 6; Eph. 1: 2 Tim. 1: 9; John 1: 18; 1 Tim. 1: 16; Phil. 3: 21, etc.). The Spirit of God is looked upon as the One who works directly in power upon and in the creature or created things. (Ps. 104: 3; Judges 14: 5, 6; Eph. 3: 16; 2 Cor. 4: 4, 10, 12-14; Rom. 8: 4-16, 26, etc.).

The Son Took up Manhood into Inseparable Union with His Person

It is well to note another point. Some would seek to distinguish in the Lord's actions and words that which is manhood and that which is deity. But this is indeed slippery ground. It leads inevitably into attributing a dual personality to our Lord, the one manhood the other deity kept distinct in separate compartments, so to speak, in His being. But this is purely human reasoning contrary to the way Scripture presents our Lord's Person.

Scripture never divides His Person into two parts, one human and one divine, but reveals Him as having taken up perfect humanity into union with His eternal deity so that they are united in one unique, inscrutable and indissoluble bond in His Person. While Scripture never confounds the two natures it never divides the Person. Even what He does in manhood is still the action of Himself, the eternal Son, who has of His own self, and without giving up His personality as eternal Son, "taking a bondman's form, taking His place in the likeness of men" (Phil. 2: 7, J. N. D. Trans.). It is He the eternal Son that is there as Man. It is this fact of His Person as the eternal Son of God, having taken His place as Man, that gives the infinite perfection of His unique Person to all that He does as incarnate Son. It is this indissoluble union of perfect manhood with eternal deity in His unique Person that constantly comes out in all that He does as God (the Son) manifest in flesh.

"No man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven." "What and it ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before?" (John 3: 13; 6: 62).

He unites in such complete union perfect manhood and eternal omnipresent deity that He can speak while calling Himself the Son of man, as having come down from heaven or ascending up (He, the Son of man) to where He was before or even say of Himself, while He was bodily present here on earth, "The Son of man is in heaven."

"I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6: 51). He speaks of Himself as the living bread come down from heaven and yet in the same sentence says that He, the One who came down from heaven, will give His flesh as bread for the life of the world. While the two natures, manhood and eternal deity, are clearly seen here in His Person yet it is impossible to separate them in His actions.

"Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree." "The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me." "Upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" (1 Peter 2: 24; Gal 2: 20; Heb. 1: 3). It was Himself, the omnipotent One, Who upholds all things by the word of His power, that gave Himself in sacrifice for our sins. He, the eternal Son, bare our sins in His own body on the tree — not the Man as man nor yet Deity as deity, though perfect manhood and full deity were there united in His Person. It was the Person who had taken up manhood into union with Himself that purges our sins by the sacrifice of Himself. Manhood and deity are both there clearly, but we cannot separate them in His actions or words.

And so we gaze upon that Man, sitting weary from His journey, on Jacob's well, asking for a drink of water in John 4 and we exclaim with Thomas, "My Lord and My God!" Who would want to rob Him of His Godhead glory, the glory of His grace, as we see Him there come to give those living waters to a weary sin-sick soul in the thirst of His own soul to bring her to share with Him His own everlasting joy?

We cannot reason these things out. They are beyond the reach of human reason to speculate about. But we can receive them in simple faith as glorious facts on the unquestionable authority of His divinely inspired Word, and worship and adore. Such worship and the devoted service that flows from it will expand our hearts and enrich our lives, but to speculate about His inscrutable person will shrivel up our souls and sap all true communion with God in His thoughts and delights in His Son.

"No man knoweth the Son (in the sense of understanding the union of perfect manhood and eternal deity in His Person) but the Father." But how blessed it is to believe it simply on the authority of God's Word. For here we have the revelation of God's eternal love to our souls and the sure foundation of eternal bliss together with Him. Almighty God, some dreaded potentate with invincible power, who, if we dared to resist Him, could crush us as a moth, and we, ignorant of His inner thoughts concerning us, would not know what He might do next — what terror this could be for our souls. But, oh, what joy, what eternal bliss, God is no longer for us an unknown and unknowable something. He has been manifest in the flesh in the Person of His eternal, only begotten Son full of grace and truth and of His fulness have we all received, and grace for grace.

"But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth: whereunto He called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thess. 2: 13, 14).

E. C. Hadley.

Peace and Joy in Time of Trials

Peace and Joy in Time of Trials.

E. C. Hadley.

The Purpose of Trials

Trials teach us submission to the Lord and deliver us from our own ways. They are God's way of developing patience in us. About the purpose of trials in our lives, James wrote: "My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing" (James 1: 2-4).

If everything went just the way we wanted, we would have nothing to be patient about. Patience requires setting aside our own will. Therefore trials show just how much we are willing to give up our own will to accept God's will for us.

What God Allows

We must never forget that, whatever our circumstances, God has allowed them for our good. God's choice for us sometimes seems very hard to bear. But this is because we are not fully surrendered to Him or because we lack confidence in His love and wisdom. God is either choosing the very best for us in what He allows in our lives, or else He deliberately chooses for us what He knows is not in our best interest. Would we dare charge God with the latter?  Never!

In His providential dealings with us He either orders or allows all that comes into our lives. He has the almighty power to prevent anything from happening, so if it happens, He has allowed it. Therefore, complaining is the same as saying that we know what is best for us better than God does, or else that God does not care enough to give us what is best. One is pure pride, the other is distrust of His motives.

Who's in Charge?

We sometimes think, "Doesn't the devil also have a hand in what happens to us?" That is very true, as we see in Job's case. But we also see how the devil could not go beyond what God allowed (Job 1: 12; Job 2: 6); and what He allowed He used for even richer blessing in Job's life than before.

The devil is powerless to do anything without God allowing it. He is only a creature, as are all his hosts of demons. God is above them, no matter how mighty they may be. So even if we see the devil's hand in what happens, we must not forget to see God's hand above the devil's. God only allows him to go as far as it suits His sovereign purposes, to turn it into blessing for His people.

The Long View

"All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose" (Rom. 8: 28), and that includes even what the devil is allowed to do.  Do not forget that God is working with a view to our eternal good and not simply with regard to this present time.

We so often look at things from a "here and now" perspective while God works with eternal results in view. God may choose a hard road for us, not because He delights in our suffering hardship along the way, but because of the eternal blessing it will bring us.

"Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress" (Ps. 4: 1 KJV). Distress is not sent from God for the sake of suffering but for the sake of  enlargement. In times of distress, God sympathizes with His own. Paul referred to Him as "the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation" (2 Cor. 1: 3-4). And Paul's troubles were not light, for he says, "We were burdened beyond measure — so that we despaired even of life" (2 Cor. 4: 8). However, with eternity in view, he refers to them as light afflictions "working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" (2 Cor. 4: 17).

Five Necessary Things

Five things are necessary to have peace and joy in time of trial:

1. Keep your mind on the Lord: "You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You" (Isa. 26: 3).

2. Keep in touch with God by prayer: "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Phil 4: 6-7).

3. Meditate upon the Word: "For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope" (Rom. 15: 4).

4. Yield your will to God: "Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness" (Heb. 12: 11).

5. Know that the Lord will sustain you: Last, but not least, let us not forget that even though our trials or circumstances may continue for a long time, the Lord says, "My grace is sufficient for you" (2 Cor. 12: 9).   He will sustain the soul that submits to Him and leaves all in His hands.

A Cause for Rejoicing

"In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom having not seen you love" (1 Peter 1: 6-8)

E. C. Hadley.

Needed Needs

Needed Needs

J. B. Stoney.

The circumstances in which we learn most are those which most expose our weaknesses. As a rule we are placed in circumstances which demand that which we are most defective in. We are set in such and such situations, not because we can handle them, or behave in them better than anyone else; but on the contrary, because we need to be invigorated by grace in the defects which they are fitted to expose. They disclose to us where we need grace, so that constantly we are failing where we are expected to excel. We are put there to cast us on the Lord, and to teach us that we can do nothing of ourselves.

If we could excel there, we should glory in our success, but when we find that we are placed in the very circumstances that, perhaps, more than any others expose our weakness, we then see that we have no hope of being able to stand or succeed, unless we obtain grace to do so. I am not placed where I could excel most, but subjected to those difficulties in which I can best know my need of grace, and best learn dependence.

If I could get on without grace, I should grow elated with myself. But when I find that unless the Lord maintains me I shall surely fail, then I am humbled as to myself while at the same time deepened in dependence which the demand of my circumstances has, in a way, forced on me; and having learned the blessing of dependence, instead of regretting the difficulties which made it necessary to seek help, I am the more cheered and encouraged to go on in them.

For learning or service every one is placed where there is demand on him. The boy at school is not in the easy circumstances of home or the playground. The horse in harness is not in the ease of being in the stable or at grass.

The situations we are subjected to are the ones in which we can best learn and be most useful. It is not because we have nothing to learn or nothing to do for others. If we had naught to learn, there would be no difficulty in the lessons required of us every day. The fact that there is difficulty in them proves that we are not proficient, and that it is necessary that we should be subjected to that which discloses to us what we require to learn, or to draw from us what we can render.

Your weakness is exposed that you may acquire strength, and having received of the Lord, you will then be called on to render unto others — to comfort others, as you have been comforted of God; so that whether learner or servant, you are always set in circumstances where there is exaction, and not ease. If the learner were to keep at the same lesson always he might feel his difficulty over, but so would his learning be over.

Are you learning? Are you useful? Whenever you are either, you will find that you are in exacting circumstances, and therefore not those where you are most at home and at your ease; but the more you turn them to profit, the more you are learning of grace, and the more useful you are in sharing what you have acquired.

Sanctifying Solitude

Sanctifying Solitude

J. B. Stoney.

For a saint to have solitude is of the deepest importance, because it is then the heart renews its acquaintance with the Lord Jesus who only has entrance into our most solitary retreats. When we are thoroughly alone and apart, He loves to be our companion; it is, so to speak, the time for Him to come, like the ray of light which permeates into the dark cavern wherever it can; and to the inmate of the cavern never was light more prized.

I believe there are two things learned in solitude that cannot be gained otherwise — one, that I see myself apart from everyone and everything, a very necessary matter; and the other, that I see the Lord in quite a peculiar light, in a singular and unique way, apart from everything and everyone. His individuality, blessed be His Name, comes out to me in solitude in a way it never does in a crowd.

Canticles gives you very much the idea of this: what one is oneself when quite alone, and what He is to one thus alone. When I am alone with Him, He obtains His singularly pre-eminent place, not as a Saviour, though He is that to faith; but He is known to the heart as the sun. He "rules the day," so that when all other objects are visible, He is still entirely pre-eminent, and the sense of His supremacy, well-known and well-sustained, is the most effectual resource for the heart all the day long, and abides with it through its most anxious encounters.

In solitude with Him, the value and resource He is to the heart is learned, and when busied in responsibilities, it turns to Him as the needle to the pole, or as the flower to the sun. Where the soul has acquired the sense of His sovereignty in its solitude, when it has to return to others and to duties, everything falls in relation to Him. He is first, and things and people assume and derive importance, not as to whether they are pleasing or otherwise, but as they relate to Him.

If you make the claims on you the sun of your system, instead of the Lord Jesus, whatever seems to come short throws your day into darkness, because the claims are not answered to as you desire them to be, and there is the sense of an eclipse. If the Lord were the distinct, known magnet to YOU, every responsibility would be less anxious, and you would fulfil each better, and instead of being saddened and disappointed, you would hear Him saying, "She hath done what she could," and with this, you would have a weight that would render whatever you did more appreciated.

It is not the amount one does, nor the consciousness of one's own usefulness which makes one happy in serving, but the assurance that one would be called on and used in case of need. Love never likes to see its object needing. It serves because it loves. Do not try to arrange your world with only a lamp in your hand; why, if you had a sun, all would be easy enough! It is in solitude with the Lord Jesus that one learns to find Him as the Sun. When the heart has found its rest and satisfaction in Him, it can turn to Him naturally and continually in every circumstance."

The Eternal Son of the Father

The Eternal Son of the Father

W. R. Dronsfield.

INTRODUCTION

Of late years, a doctrine has been formulated and taught amongst many Christians that has been termed the "Temporal Sonship" doctrine, as opposed to the orthodox doctrine of "Eternal Sonship". The hitherto generally accepted view that our blessed Lord and Saviour is and was the Son of God from all eternity, was challenged in 1929 by J. Taylor of New York when he was in England at a series of readings held at High Barnet. At first it was only said that Divine Relationships in eternity were unknowable, and therefore the Lord's Sonship before incarnation could not be affirmed, but soon by 1932 it was being boldly taught that the Lord's Sonship began at incarnation, and Eternal Sonship was directly denied.

This doctrine has been confined to those known as "Taylor Exclusive Brethren", at one time a very numerous company. It is resolutely refused by others also known as Exclusive Brethren and by well-known teachers amongst the Open Brethren. Owing to the sad break-up of the Taylor company, many individuals and meetings have been forced out of their original fellowship, and would dearly like to be able to share unity with the brethren who have never been in fellowship with J. Taylor. However, because they are still unable to affirm that the Head of the Church is the Eternal Son of God, they have been refused, or, knowing that they would be refused if they applied, they have never pursued the matter. It is with the desire to help any who may be confused on this issue, that this little book is written.

Right at the commencement, let it be stated that nobody has ever failed to confess that the Lord is an Eternal Divine Person, without beginning or end. It is not His personality but His eternal relationship as Son of the Father that is questioned. That the Trinity, three Persons in One God, has always had existence, is a truth held by all. Also we do not wish to evade the arguments advanced by the exponents of J. Taylor's doctrine. We assume they only have the Lord's honour and glory in their motives when they advance these teachings, but firmly believe that they are sadly mistaken. The only authority to which we can turn when the Truth is at stake is the Word of God. We will avoid as far as possible, therefore, using the support of human authorities.

Many, when they learn that the Lord's Godhead and Manhood are not apparently affected, regard the question as not of fundamental importance. They point out that the words "Eternal Son" and "Eternal Sonship" are not in Scripture, and therefore do not see why they should be required to use them. But many words that are not in Scripture are used to define scriptural doctrine. Where are the words "Trinity", "Divine Person", "Vicarious Sacrifice" or "The Fall" for example? Many formulae are used that are succinct statements of scriptural doctrine, but are not themselves in Scripture. It would be impossible to give exposition of Scripture if we could only confine ourselves to direct quotations. This excuse, used to avoid grasping the issue, is not tenable. Our aim in this book is to show that a fundamental issue is involved.

REASONS ADVANCED IN SUPPORT OF THE TEMPORAL SONSHIP DOCTRINE

Here are some of the main arguments of these teachers:

(a) A son is in a place of subjection to his father. Even when a son reaches a high position and state, he still gives honour to his parents. This is a principle found throughout Scripture. There can, however, be no subjection or obedience between Divine Persons as viewed absolutely in the Godhead; therefore the Lord's Sonship has only to do with His mediatorial position taken up in Manhood.

(b) The word "Only Begotten" refers to birth. There was only one time when He was born, and that was at the incarnation.

(c) "He is in the bosom of the Father" (John 1: 18). The word "is" does not imply an eternal state as in the name "I AM" (John 8: 58) but a present state. The word "in" is the Greek word eis which implies that He came into that state. Elsewhere in the chapter the past tense is used to describe Him in the Eternal Godhead (verses 1 and 2).

(d) Throughout Scripture the term "Son", "Son of God" is only applied when referring to the Lord in Manhood, and the position He then took up. To the simple objection that the Father must have had a Son in order to send Him into the world, it was pointed out that present relationships are often used to identify persons in events before the relationships existed. For example a man might say, "When my wife was a little girl". She was not his wife when she was a little girl, nevertheless he still refers to her as his wife. In John 17: 3, it is "Jesus Christ Whom Thou has sent", but He was not Jesus Christ before He was sent. In John 3: 13, the Son of Man came down from Heaven, but He was not the Son of Man before He came down. "Jesus Christ, the Same yesterday and to day and for ever" (Hebrews 13: 8). Here we have the attributes of Deity ascribed to the Lord under His human name and title.

(e) Scriptures used to support the doctrine are Psalm 2: 7, "This day have I begotten Thee", and Luke 1: 31, which it is claimed shows that the Lord was not called the Son of God until His birth.

Many have found it very difficult to refute these arguments in a convincing manner. Most of the followers of J. Taylor were persuaded to accept the new teaching. Those who took the lead did so with an acute intellect and knowledge of Scripture, and one may acknowledge that they appeared to have a genuine and reverent desire to honour Divine Persons. Some of those who rushed into print to oppose the doctrine seemed confused and caught off guard. For example, they asserted that the new doctrine was Sabellianism, which was not true. It was a new teaching (to them) and first the Scriptures needed to be searched to see if these things were so. We are convinced, however, that it was really a very subtle attack on the fundamentals of the Christian Faith. We must look beyond the dear brethren who taught the error and see the enemy at work. Satan was behind it, using godly men that he had taken unawares. In doing so, he effected the ruin of a portion of that great movement of the Holy Spirit in the last century which rediscovered the precious truth of God's assembly. It is one's desire, in producing this booklet, to present a case from Scripture that will convince of their mistake those who have imbibed the temporal sonship doctrine. Many an argument has been put forward in the past that seems conclusive to those who already accept the orthodox view, but very weak in the judgment of those who are opposed.

THE PROOF OF THE LORD'S DEITY

See John 5: 17-18. The Lord had just healed a man on the Sabbath Day, to the anger of the Jews. His answer to them was, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work", which appears to be the first time He said publicly that God was His Father. This condemned Him utterly in the eyes of the Jews, for they saw that by saying that God was His Father He made Himself equal with God.

Here we see that the Lord's Sonship demonstrated His equality with Deity — not His subjection as the followers of J. Taylor teach. Could it be that the Jews had reached the truth of His claim to equality by the wrong reasoning? No, the inspired words do not say that it was just what the Jews said, but assert plainly that He made Himself equal with God by saying God was His Father. The reasoning of the Jews was as correct as their conclusion.

Why did the Jews see this? Because in the Hebrew thinking, and in the Scriptures, a father is presented as being of the same nature as the one he begets. Here are a few examples:

There is the common term, "sons of Belial". Belial means "worthless", so the term "son of Belial" simply means a worthless person.

Joses was surnamed Barnabas by the apostles (Acts 4: 36), meaning "son of consolation", because he was by nature one who consoled for he was a good man who exhorted the brethren that with purpose of heart they would cleave to the Lord (Acts 11: 23-24).

The Lord surnamed John and James the sons of thunder.

Judas is called the son of perdition because he was by nature one that would perish. Perdition means perishing.

He called the Pharisees a generation of vipers because they had the nature of vipers. See also "children of light", "children of wrath", "child of the Devil", etc.

Every being begets after his own kind (Genesis 1). Therefore the Jews saw that if God has a Son, that Son has the nature of Deity. There is only One True Son of the same eternal essence as the Father — the Only Begotten Son.

But the objection will at once be raised, "If God has begotten a Son, there must have been a time when the Son was begotten, and therefore He has a beginning". This is quite wrong reasoning, for the right implication is exactly the opposite. If an eternal Father, without beginning nor end, begets a Son, that Son also must have neither beginning nor end; else He is not a True Son according to the Father's essence. God's nature is infinite, therefore His Son's nature is infinite.

We must abandon all reasoning from the finite. Every finite creature begets a finite creature with a beginning, but the Infinite begets the Infinite with no beginning. The word "Only Begotten" does not imply carnal or low thoughts of begetting, but implies equal nature. This is what the ancient orthodox teachers called "The Eternal Generation of the Son". The begetting is not an event of the past, however distant.

Let us not lessen the force of the word "Only Begotten" by saying that it might just be translated "Only" or that it means simply unique or uniquely precious. It means far more than that. It means that He is the only Son according to the Divine Essence. To justify this lessening of the force of the word "Only Begotten", the case of Isaac is put forward who is called Abraham's only begotten son although there were other sons. However, in God's eyes, Isaac was the only son. Abraham said, "O that Ishmael might live before Thee!" but Ishmael was not recognised by God, the covenant was not to be with him (Genesis 17: 18-19). On the other hand it has been stated, that because of the Septuagint use of the word "only begotten" for the Hebrew "only one" (jachid), that "only" is all that is meant by it. But the Septuagint is often an inaccurate translation and certainly cannot be cited as a greater authority than the New Testament itself. Those who have come to the defence of Eternal Sonship by denying that the real meaning of the Greek word monogenes is "only begotten", have actually obscured the issue.

But what then are we to say about all the other sons? Are there not many sons brought to glory? (Hebrews 2: 10). Are we not sons? (Galatians 4: 6). Are we not begotten of God? (1 John 5: 1, 18). Are not the angels called sons of God? (Job 1: 6/38: 7).

It is true that we are brought into sonship by the grace of God. We have been begotten of God as regards the new nature, when we were born again by the Word and the Spirit. This is the divine nature (1 Peter 1: 4). It is the nature of God morally — God's true nature from the moral standpoint, but it is not sonship according to essence. That is, we do not partake of Deity and thus become omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, etc. Only the Son has Sonship according to essence. From the moral aspect He is the Firstborn among many brethren, but from the point of view of Divine Essence He is the Only Begotten with no brethren.

As regards the angels, the Scripture insists that the Lord's Sonship distinguishes Him from them. "For unto which of the angels said He at any time, "Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee" (Hebrews 1: 5). Never has God called an angel His Son. Yet the angels are called sons of God in the book of Job. We suggest that this is because they had no progenitors and are all directly created by God to reflect His glory. In like manner the only man to be directly created by God, and not humanly generated, was Adam, and as he had no progenitor, he is called the son of God (Luke 3: 38).

We will now consider other scriptures that support this truth. Here it is necessary to find scriptures where the abstract concept of sonship is the subject matter. It is not sufficient to look at places where the name "Son of God" is mentioned because, as we have seen, it is common to identify a person by a name or title even when referring to occasions when the person did not possess that designation. All the scriptures which say that the Father sent the Son do not prove to those who hold the temporal sonship theory that the Lord was the Son before He was sent, because, they say, the Divine Persons were not known by any distinct names before the incarnation, and therefore can only be referred to by the names they took afterwards.

Hebrews 5: 8. "Though He were Son". There is no definite article before Son; it is characteristic, and the relationship of Sonship is the prominent thought. "Though He were Son, yet learned He obedience". As the Son, the experience of obedience was unknown to Him, and so He learned what that experience was by the things that He suffered. In this passage we see that the idea of obedience and subjection was foreign to His Sonship. This is the opposite to the doctrine of temporal sonship which maintains that His Sonship is to be identified with subjection. No, it is not as the Son that He learned obedience, but in spite of His being such. The reason a man is subject and inferior to his father in human relationships is that the son is always the junior, the father obviously being born first. To argue from this that the Lord's Sonship denotes subjection is plainly wrong for there can be no seniority between Divine Persons. It is another example of trying to understand the Infinite by a comparison with the finite.

Now turn to John 1: 14. The literal translation is "We beheld His glory, the glory of an only begotten with a father". The glory is that of the abstract relationship rather than that of the Person Himself, that is to say, the glory in this passage is specifically that of His Sonship. This glory shone through the veil of His flesh so that His disciples recognised it. It was His Divine glory.

This will be immediately challenged by those who deny His eternal Sonship. They will say that it is His moral glory, which He had as the Perfect Man. We will, therefore, test this by searching the Scriptures. When those who had to do with Him in His life here were constrained to confess Him as the Son of God, what made them do so? Was it His moral glory or His Divine glory? Let us look at the incidents involved.

(1) Nathanael (John 1: 49) confessed Him as the Son of God and King of Israel. It was His omniscience that opened His eyes. The Lord had shown that He knew some secret that only Nathaniel could have known.

(2) The disciples in the boat. (Matthew 14: 33). The Lord had just shown His Divine power as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, walking. on the water and stilling the wind and the waves. Here we have Him as the omnipotent One.

(3) Martha (John 11: 27). The Lord had just revealed Himself as the Source of Life. Only God is the Source of Life. All other beings receive their life through Him.

(4) The man blind from birth (John 9: 35-38). Here the man is told directly from the Lord Who He is. It is the man's reaction that is noteworthy as he immediately worships the Son of God showing that he recognised His Deity; for the Lord accepted his worship as offered intelligently. We can contrast this with the man in Matthew 19: 16-17 who said "Good Master". At once the Lord checked him, because he had ascribed something to Him that only applied to God, without realising that the One he was speaking to was indeed God.

(5) The Centurion (Matthew 27: 54; Mark 15: 39). Here the reasons for the centurion's confession are plainly stated. In Matthew it was due to the severe earthquake, the rending of the rocks and the opening of the tombs. In Mark it is specifically stated that it was due to the Lord's shouting with a loud voice just before He gave up His spirit. This was remarkable to the centurion who had no doubt seen large numbers of such executions. A man crucified gets weaker and weaker until he cannot speak above a whisper. Here was One who could shout with a loud voice just before He died, showing supernatural strength. It was, therefore, not His moral glory that convinced the centurion, but His Divine glory, as was the case in all the foregoing cases.

We will refer to Peter's great confession in Matthew 16: 16 and John 6: 69 later.

We are therefore fully justified in asserting that the Lord's Sonship denotes His Deity and does not pertain to His lowly dependence and obedience as the Perfect Man. A possible reason why some think that the glory of John 1: 14 is moral and not Divine, is the words that immediately follow: "full of grace and truth". We are sure, however, that the Authorised Version is correct in putting the clause "and we beheld His glory, the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father" in brackets. The words "full of grace and truth" refer to the statement before the parenthesis: "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us". The parenthesis is put in to show that in spite of the veil of flesh, the Divine glory shone through for His own to see. In saying all this we are not wishing to infer that moral glory is not included in Divine glory for "God is Light". The idea that we are opposing is that it was exclusively His moral glory as seen in manhood.

Many are convinced of the Lord's Eternal Sonship but do not rank it among the fundamentals. They point out that its denial may be sincerely done in the belief that it is something that guards the Lord's glory, and that it is not accompanied by any doubt as to His eternal personal Being. We, however, maintain that it is a necessary component of the Doctrine of Christ. To demonstrate this, we will refer to the early contention in the professing church when the greatest challenge to the Truth came from Arius, who denied the Lord's Deity.

Now Arius was not like the modern Unitarian who thinks that the Lord was a mere man. His system taught that the Lord was the first and greatest creature that God made, and the only creature that God made directly. To this great creature God gave the task of creating everything else, so all things, apart from Himself, were created by Him. He was God's representative, and expressed God to every other creature. As God's representative, He was entitled to worship, and as such was rightly addressed as God. One thing only Arius would not accept, and that was the truth that the Lord was of equal substance (or essence) to the Father. He said that he was of similar substance but not of equal substance to God.

These two expressions, "similar substance" and "equal substance", differing in Greek by only a single letter, became the great battleground on which the whole of Christianity depended. Athanasius was the great orthodox champion. Constantine the Emperor favoured Arius, and Athanasius had to go into exile. Only to the Scriptures did both protagonists turn. Every Scripture that showed that the Lord was God, that proved He is the Creator of all things, that showed He must be worshipped and honoured by creatures as though He were the Father, was accepted by Arius as agreeing with his system. What scripture then was left to prove that the Lord was of equal substance to the Father? Mainly the truth of Eternal Sonship — the bulwark of John 5: 18, that His Sonship proved His equality to the Father, because of His eternal generation.

At first the Emperor did not realise the vital importance of the controversy, and he issued an edict that as the words "similar substance" and 11 equal substance" were not in the Scriptures, the contention was to cease as being an insoluble question. This, however, was not obeyed. How like was Constantine's stratagem to those today, who say that as the term "Eternal Sonship" is not in Scripture, they will neither affirm nor deny the doctrine!

How right Athanasius was when he pointed out that although the difference between the contenders might appear to be small, yet really the difference was infinite! Truly the difference between the finite and the infinite is infinity, no matter how great the finite might be. How serious it is to take away this most important weapon of Eternal Sonship, which proves the truth of the Lord's Person!

Let us also notice the extreme importance that is placed in Scripture upon the confession of the Lord's Sonship. In 1 John 4: 15 it says, "Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God". Such a blessed spiritual result as this does not come, of course, from the repetition of a form of words but from the affirmation of the heart in complete awareness and acceptance of the confession's full implications. Many a time, representatives of the Jehovah's Witnesses — the modern Arians — have called at the front door, and to the question "Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?", they willingly give the answer in the affirmative. Does God dwell in them and they in God — these deniers of the Lord's Deity? Obviously not, for they do not affirm His Eternal Sonship, nor accept that it is essentially connected with His Deity. In their minds the Lord's Sonship had a beginning; not in incarnation but far back before any other creature had been created.

Peter's confession of Matthew 16: 16 also brings before us the great importance of this doctrine, for we find that it is the foundation rock on which the Lord builds His church. "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God". Because He is the Son of God He is God. The Father is the Living God, who has life in Himself, the Source of Life, so likewise the Son is the Living God and has life in Himself, the Source of Life. In Mark 8:29 and Luke 9: 20, the story of Peter's confession is given, but only the first half, "Thou art the Christ" is mentioned. Consequently there is no reference there of its vital importance as the foundation rock of the church. Without Eternal Sonship the foundation is missing. How solemn that some well-meaning brethren have so little understanding that they are tampering with the church's foundation!

ETERNAL SONSHIP THE PROOF OF GOD'S LOVE

We have been considering the Eternal Sonship as the supreme proof of the Lord's Deity. Now we would bring out the second important thing that Eternal Sonship demonstrates — namely the infinite love of God.

"God so loved the world. . ." How much? So much that He gave His only begotten Son. There is nothing that shows His love more.

But, of course, those who teach temporal sonship do not deny the infinite love that has ever existed between those Divine Persons that they say are now known as the Father and the Son. The Scripture is plain, "Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world" (John 17: 24). But though this love is not denied, the demonstration of it is denied.

How weak John 3: 16 would sound if the words "only begotten Son" were omitted, and the words "Divine Person" put in their place! Over and over again the love of God is measured by the fact that He gave His Son. He that delivered up His Own Son for us all, shall He not freely give us all things? (see Romans 8: 32). No gift can be as great as that.

In the very first mention of love in the Bible, the supreme sacrifice that the Father made in giving His Son is brought before us: "Take now thy son, thine only son ... whom thou lovest ... and offer him . . . for a burnt offering." (Genesis 22: 2). The love of the Father for His Son comes first, and typically the love of Christ for His Church is the second mention of love in the Scriptures (Genesis 24: 67).

The main point of the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Mark 12: 1-9) is that after the lord of the vineyard had sent his servants (prophets), he sent his son. "Having yet therefore one son, his well-beloved, he sent him last unto them, saying, 'They will reverence my son'." Does this look as though the one sent only became his son when he was sent? The objection is made, "It is only a parable". We acknowledge that a parable is not usually an allegory, but one cannot get away from a parable's main point in this way. The whole meaning of the parable stresses that the lord of the vineyard had sent the one he valued most because it was his well-beloved son.

We feel that it was terrible presumption to deny the validity of this demonstration of love to say, as it were, to the Father that His Son only became such after He had entered the world. We ask reverently, may this not have given great offence to both the Father and the Son? Is this not an explanation of the strange madness that splintered that company? Were they given up to be defenceless before the onslaughts of Satan? We urge earnestly that the seriousness of this error be not underestimated.

THE FATHER'S BOSOM

John 1: 18. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him".

This passage has always been taken by orthodox Christians to mean that the Son is eternally in the bosom of the Father, and therefore is able to reveal the inmost secrets of the Father's heart to His own. Those who deny Eternal Sonship, however, must teach that His dwelling in the Father's bosom had a beginning when He became a man.

Here we have the present tense used to deduce eternity, as it is in some other places in the Scriptures. The Lord said "Before Abraham was, I AM" and thereby showed that HE was eternal. If He had said "Before Abraham was, I was", it need only have meant that He was older than Abraham, but the present tense gives the sense of eternal existence — no beginning and no end. In John 8: 24, the Lord said, "If ye believe not that I AM, ye shall die in your sins". The insertion of the pronoun "he" in the A.V. is quite unwarranted. The context does not show that the Lord had said that He was anybody that the "He" could refer to. It is the assertion of His eternal Godhead. There are other similar passages.

Why then, argue the opposers, did John 1:1, which clearly refers to eternity, use the past tense. "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". One feels that the answer to this is that the inspired writing is taking us back to the earliest conceivable beginning of anything at all, and saying that the Word was already there. It is the past eternity here, and the future eternity is not in view. Where the thought of eternity without end as well as without beginning is brought before us, the present tense is used. Of course with God there is no past or future, but that is beyond our comprehension. For our finite minds the Holy Spirit uses words that are within our grasp.

Another objection centres round the preposition "in" which here is the Greek word eis denoting "motion towards", similar to our word "into" or "unto". If I say "I walked in the house" it indicates that I was walking in the house all the time, but if I say "I walked into the house", it indicates that my presence in the house was due to my walking into it. In English, I cannot say, "I am into the house", but in Greek that form of words could be used, and it would indicate that my present position in the house is due to my past moving into it. Consequently (say the objectors), the preposition eis shows that He is in the Father's bosom as a result of a past act of movement into it.

To this objection we answer that "eis" does not necessarily denote physical motion. When one believes in the Son of God (John 3: 16), the preposition "in" is eis. It denotes a movement of the heart or will. This eis of "in the Father's bosom" shows movement of the affections. We have here another example of the way these teachers reason from the finite when they are dealing with the infinite. If there is movement here it is the eternal movement of Divine affections. What could be a more beautiful or profound thought? Let us not dare to doubt that a Father's bosom has been the blessed portion of the Son for all eternity, His rightful and deserved place. As one has written "How fearful we should be, lest we admit of any confession of faith that would defraud the Divine bosom of its eternal ineffable delights, and which would tell our God He knew not a Father's joy, and would tell our Lord that He knew not a Son's joy in that bosom from all eternity" (The Son of God, by J. G. Bellett).

TWO TEXTS USED TO SUPPORT THE NEW THEORY

"This day I have begotten Thee"

We now come to certain texts which have been used to support temporal sonship. One of these is first mentioned in Psalm 2:7, "Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee". It is quoted three times in the New Testament Acts 13: 33, Hebrews 1: 5 and 5: 5. This sentence is taken up to show that the Lord's Sonship began when He was begotten on a certain day.

The usual interpretation by those leaders whom we should remember with respect (Hebrews 13: 7) is that this does refer to the Lord's incarnation when He was born in time, and that it speaks of the Lord's Sonship in manhood. These brethren never thought of it as casting a doubt on the Lord's Eternal Sonship which they regarded as true and distinct, not to be confused with the text. Some divided the text into two — "Thou art My Son" being His Eternal Sonship, and "This day have I begotten Thee" His Sonship in time. One would not contend with anybody who is satisfied with this explanation.

For those who may feel that this interpretation is not quite convincing, it may be as well to look at the passage more closely. It was not the interpretation made by the ancient orthodox scholars who lived before the so-called Brethren movement, for they regarded it as an affirmation of the Lord's Divine Sonship throughout.

Firstly, let us look at the second Psalm. Beginning with the time when the nations are raging against the LORD's anointed, it goes on to speak of the day when the King is established on the holy hill of Zion, ruling the nations with a rod of iron. We find that in this context the decree is made, "Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee". So "this day" in the Psalm appears to be referring to the beginning of His glorious reign.

Secondly, Acts 13: 33. This is in the context of the resurrection (verse 30). In verse 33, the quotation from the psalm is given to support the statement that God has raised up Jesus. Many think that this does not refer to His being raised from among the dead as in verse 30, but to His being raised high above all, but in either case it does not refer to His lowly birth in a manger.

Thirdly, Hebrews 1: 5. Here the quotation is given to show that He is so much better than the angels having obtained by inheritance a more excellent Name than they. Is this inheritance connected with His birth in manhood? If not, why is the quotation given here? Does it not fit in better if it has to do with the inheritance that is His Own by Eternal Sonship?

Fourthly, Hebrews 5: 5. Here it is connected with the text, "Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec". Melchisedec is seen (as a type) made like the Son of God, without father or mother, descent, beginning of days or end of life (Hebrews 7: 3). But the Lord by incarnation had a legal father, true mother, descent (genealogy) and beginning of days. To bring in a quotation which refers to the days of His birth, when the whole point is the eternal continuance of His priesthood does not seem right. It is His Sonship in eternity that is more suitable to the context.

So orthodox Christians have taught that this verse refers to "eternal generation", to which we have already referred; that "This day" or "Today" has the well known meaning (to them) of the Eternal Today, the ever present now, a decree declared by the Infinite God.

One leaves it to the reader to decide. We have shown, however, that it is a very inadequate reference to support such a revolutionary new doctrine as temporal sonship.

Luke 1: 35. "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God".

This verse is much used by opponents of Eternal Sonship. Attention is drawn to the words "therefore also", and it is said that the child became the Son of God by the Holy Spirit and the overshadowing of the power of the Highest. But the passage before us is indited with the perfect accuracy of the Holy Spirit, and the exact words need to be examined.

One of the points stressed by the ancient expositors is the term "Holy Thing". The adjective "holy" is definitely neuter, and "Holy Thing" is the accurate English translation. There must be a reason why it is neuter and not masculine, and the reason is that the perfect manhood conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary, was not a person in itself, but a nature. Though body, soul and spirit, it was personal only because the Eternal Person of the Son of God took it to Himself. It had no separate personality. This brings us to the heart of the mystery of the incarnation which no human mind can comprehend. Body, soul and spirit make up a person in every merely human individual, but in His case it was a nature, made personal only because He took it into His Person. He is One Person, not two. Everything that the Man Christ Jesus experienced was the experience of the Son of God. There were not two sons, but only one. Because of the overshadowing of the power of the Highest, that Holy Thing, conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, is rightly called the Son of God. He went through human experiences from birth to death, with human body, human soul and human spirit, yet the Person who did so was never anyone else but the Eternal Son of God.

This is a great mystery, and all the historic fundamental errors concerning His Person have been attempts to explain it in some measure. It is inexplicable. He is a real Man and true God in One Person. The two natures, manhood and Deity, are not joined together to form one nature, but are united in One Person. They ever remain distinct but are never separated. Their union is personal, not consubstantial.

Therefore, it is quite true that the Holy Thing born of the Virgin Mary could not be called the Son of God without the overshadowing of the power of the Highest, but neither His Eternal Person nor His Eternal Sonship changed at all at that time.

THE TRIUNE NAME

We believe we have written enough to show that the Lord's Sonship is eternally bound up with His Godhead. finally let us think briefly of the Triune Name of Matthew 28: 29, "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit".

The Name of the Father proves Godhead, for it shows that He is the Source of all (Ephesians 4: 6).

The Name of the Son proves Godhead for it shows that He is of the same essence as the Father (John 5: 18).

The Name of the Holy Spirit proves Godhead, for God is spirit (John 4: 24). The Spirit of God is the essence of God.

These three Names are One.

W. R. Dronsfield.

(Pub.: Chapter Two 1987. ISBN 0 947588 11 6)

The Incarnation of the Son

The Incarnation of the Son

W. R. Dronsfield.

There is no more profound subject than that of the incarnation; yet though unfathomable to the wisest, nothing is more enthralling to the affections of the Lords people. The wonderful truth is that One who is God Himself, while never ceasing to be God, became a real man, living amongst men on earth. The Holy Spirit has given us four accounts of that immaculate life. No creature could have thought up such unimaginable details: a perfect human life, yet with glimpses of the glory of His Person shining through the veil.  If any human intellect tries to add anything from its own thoughts, how hollow and confused it sounds! as the spurious gospel of Thomas demonstrates.

Though the incarnation is beyond our reasoning powers, there are certain truths about it which we can confidently affirm, because they are firmly based upon the Holy Spirits own account in the Scriptures.

(1) TRUE GOD

The Eternal Son of God became Man, yet He never ceased to be the Infinite Creator. He emptied Himself of His reputation.  His Manhood veiled His glory so that He did not receive the universal obeisance that was His due; yet He never ceased in His Person to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, upholding all things by the Word of His power.

(2) PERFECT MAN

He became a Man, entirely untainted by the fall. His Manhood was the same, in essence, as unfallen Adams, though, of course, there were differences. The main one was that His Manhood, though truly human, was joined to Deity in His Person, and therefore vastly glorified. Also Adam was innocent; that is to say he had no knowledge of good or evil. The Lord was not innocent, but He was holy. The Lord was in the midst of evil, but wholly undefiled by it.

(3) REAL MAN

He became a real Man, body, soul and spirit. When God created Adam, He breathed into him the breath (spirit) of life and he became a living soul.  The animals were also living souls, but they did not have life by receiving spirit from God. As well as being a living soul, Adam had a spirit. In his soul he had physical life and emotions; in his spirit he had reason and awareness of himself and God. He could have rational communion with God and give God pleasure by his fellowship. For this he was created. The subject of soul and spirit is a study in itself, and cannot be more than touched upon here.

The Lord took body, soul and spirit to Himself. He had a real body, visible and tangible, made of flesh and blood, capable of pain and suffering, but not partaking of the consequences of the fall. He was not subject to death as an inevitable event. He died by His own power.  The ageing process, which is a result of the fall, was not in Him. His body was perfect. Also, as having a soul, He had real human emotions but without any sinful tendency. In His spirit He had real human thoughts by which He could have, even as Man, perfect fellowship with His Father.

(4) ONE PERSON

The Son of God is One Person. The Son of God is the same Person as the Son of Man. Now we are beginning to come up against the inscrutable mystery. Men will argue that body, soul and spirit make a person. This is correct. Therefore (they say) the Son of God and the Son of Man are two persons in unity. No, certainly not! The Scriptures are dead against such an idea. The Person who is in the form of God at the beginning of the sublime sentence in Philippians 2 verse 6, is the same Person who was obedient to the death of the cross in verse 8. The subject of the sentence is the same throughout. There is no change of Person halfway.

We may shrink from saying baldly, God died. How can God die who has immortality and is the Source of life? The bare statement, God died, needs important qualification. Firstly, the One who died was God the Son, not the Father or the Holy Spirit. Secondly, He did not die as God, but in the Manhood He had taken. However, to qualify a statement is not to deny it. To say it was the Son of Man and not God who died, is to divide His Person and make Him two Persons. The fact is that God the Son became a Man for this very purpose, that He might die.  He did not cease to be God when He died. The blood that He shed was human blood, but it was the blood that He had taken as His own.  The Son of God shed His blood, and experienced death.  He who is God laid down His life for us.  It is the infinitude of His Person that produces the infinite atonement.

This is the marvellous thing that takes our breath away. A divine Person has been through human experience from birth to death. He who is God, remembers His human experiences from birth to death, and sympathises with us in our infirmities. One who is both God and Man feels for us for He has felt the same. What a great High Priest He is!

(5) TWO DISTINCT NATURES

The opposite error to saying that He is two persons is to say that His two natures have combined into one. It was an ancient heresy that the two natures, Manhood and Deity, merged together. For this reason the writer does not like the expression the God-man. It implies to him (though not to many orthodox Christians) that He is half man and half God. Such an idea must be resisted. He is wholly Man and wholly God. He possesses all the attributes and properties of real, unfallen, holy Manhood, and at the same time possesses all the infinite attributes and properties of Deity. The unity consists, not in the amalgamation of essence, but in the Oneness of His Person.

If we suppose an archangel becoming incarnate, a creature tremendously powerful but still finite, and by becoming incarnate having two finite natures (but natures very different), we would say, rightly, that such a situation was impossible. Here would be a baby, unable to do anything except to cry and suck, with no ability to talk, unable to understand a word his parents were saying; at the same time that person would be an archangel with tremendous power, not only able to understand the parents but knowing far more than they did. We would say, quite correctly, that it would be impossible for such things to be true in one person at the same time. Our finite judgment would be competent to come to such a conclusion. We would say that the archangel was only pretending to be a baby.

Of course, it is not an archangel but an infinite Person who has become incarnate. When we are facing the infinite it is right beyond our ken. We can make no judgment. Mathematicians tell us that both opposites and parallels meet in infinity. We cannot understand, and never will understand it, for we will never have infinite minds. But God has revealed it to us, and so we believe it.

The Lord grew in wisdom, yet was always omniscient, as we have seen. He said He did not know, and yet He knew all things. Yet it is very important to see that He could not make a mistake in what He said in Manhood; it would have been God who had spoken falsely and that would be a moral impossibility. To take human limitations is grace, but to take human fallibility would be to compromise Gods holy nature.

Lastly, let us consider Matthew 11:27: No man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him. Here we see that it is possible for a man to know the Father if the Son reveals Him to him, but, without exception, it is not possible for a man to know the Son. Why then, is the Son unknowable, but not the Father?  It is not the inscrutability of Deity, for that would apply equally to both Father and Son. Nor is it the inscrutability of divine relationships for if the relationship of the Son to the Father is unknowable, so would be the equivalent relationship of the Father to the Son. Clearly, it is the Incarnate Son who is unknowable. The Father, Himself, cannot explain this to us, for to understand the incarnation we would need to have the infinite understanding of the Father Himself.

W.R.D.

1 John 1: 14

2 Philippians 2: 7

3 John 2: 24-25; 21: 17

4 Matthew 8: 27

5 John 3: 13; Matthew 18: 20; 28: 20

6 That is to say, He had body, soul and spirit

7 Genesis 2: 7

8 Genesis 1: 21 & 24. (The word creature in the King James translation Nephesh should be translated soul as elsewhere).

9  1 John 1: 1-2

10 Hebrews 2: 14

11 John 10: 18

12 The Lord grew to maturity but this was not ageing in the sense meant here.

13 Matthew 26: 38; John 12: 27

14 Mark 2: 8; 8: 12; Luke 23: 46; John 19: 30 (dismissed His spirit).

15 1 Timothy 6: 16

16 Hebrews 2: 9

17 Acts 20: 28. (I believe the King James translation and most other translations are correct here).

18 1 John 1: 7

19 Romans 5: 10

20 1 John 3: 16

21 Hebrews 2: 17-18; 4: 14-16

22 Luke 2: 52

23 Mark 13: 32

The Altar of Ed

The Altar of Ed.

Joshua 22: 34.

J. W. H. Nichols.

The two and one-half tribes of Israel — Rueben, Gad, and the half tribe of Manasseh (Numbers 32) remind us somewhat of Lot, the earthly-minded companion of Abraham, who chose the well watered plain of Jordan, which appeared to him as "the garden of the Lord" and who failed to appreciate — as did Abraham — the call of God. Yet in other ways they were dissimilar, for it could not be said that, like Lot, their lives were formed by mixed principles, which led to unholy associations with such direful consequences, but they were evidently a people fully owning and wishing identification with those who obeyed the call of God, yet they were not prepared to walk in the power of it.

"The eyes of man are never satisfied" (Proverbs 27: 20), and Lot-like the tribes lifted up their eyes, "saw the land," and "behold the place was a place for cattle." (Num. 32: 1). But it was on the wilderness side of Jordan, and alas they evidently thought less of God's call to Canaan and the pilgrimage of their brethren, than present advantages. Abraham, their progenitor, knew nothing of that side of Jordan. Moses had not mentioned it, and when they left Egypt nothing short of the promised land was before them. But as they journeyed their earthly possessions increased, and they had much cattle. Evidently they reasoned, that since the plains suited their pursuit, nothing would be gained by crossing Jordan, and they, therefore, ask for an inheritance on the plain of Jordan and so came short of the call of God. There was no thought of giving up their portion as Israelites, no rebellion, but their cattle led them to seek what suited them, and so they remained on the wilderness side.

What a voice this has for us! How many true Christians there are who come short of appropriating their heavenly possessions! Like the two and half tribes, they have no thought of being untrue to their Christian position, but are content to know their salvation is secure, and settle down in congenial circumstances.

To Moses their proposal came with misgiving, it was so far short of the purpose of God made known while they were still in Egypt. "I will bring you unto the land concerning which I did swear to give it to Abraham to Isaac and to Jacob and I will give it to you for an heritage: I am the Lord." (Ex. 6: 8). He chides them and speaks of the way their brethren had been discouraged by the spies sent out from Kadesh Barnea, and the resulting forty years wandering in the wilderness. They repudiate all thought of alienation from their brethren, and signify their willingness to go with them to war until the land is possessed. In this they were unlike Lot whose conduct separated him from Abraham. They did not want to forfeit fellowship with their brethren, but they were not in the moral power of the call of God, something less than the land sufficed.

In Joshua 22 we find the sequel. All that was commendable in them Joshua recounts, but it is evidently with some misgiving; he blessed them, and sent them away, saying, "But take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, which Moses, the servant of the Lord, charged you, to love the Lord your God and walk in all His ways and to keep His commandments, and to cleave unto Him, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul." So they returned to the wilderness side of Jordan, and on settling down in their chosen possessions, we read they "built there an altar by Jordan, a great altar to see to" (Joshua 22: 10). But it was not the altar. They were far from the tabernacle with its ark of the covenant and accompanying mercy seat, of which God had said, "There will I meet with thee and will commune with thee." (Ex. 25: 22)

No altar, however "great to see to," could possibly make up for the loss of this. Upon their altar, they are free to own, no burnt offerings or meat offerings or peace offerings could be offered (verse 23) — it was simply to "see to," and lest their children should cease to fear the Lord, and as a witness of their place and portion in Israel.

All this shows, they had some fear that their desire to remain in the plain of Jordan might not bring unmixed blessing. We can never step out of the path of obedience without consequent spiritual loss. Israel, when they heard of the altar built on the other side of Jordan, gathered together at Shiloh to go up against their brethren, but on hearing the purpose of. it, and the avowed loyalty of the two and a half tribes, they were satisfied and returned.

What a lesson is here, for those who have eyes to see and hearts to understand. How many there are whose place and portion among the people of God cannot be questioned, who, however, are not prepared to take possession of their heavenly position, and so settle down in congenial surroundings, the wrong side of Jordan, i.e., know little of what it is to be dead and risen with Christ and are not found seeking those things which are above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God (Col. 3: 1, 2). Content to maintain their Christian profession in a religious world, where there is often "a great altar to see to," they come short of their heavenly calling, and often become world-borderers. All this inevitably brings corresponding loss — loss of present Christian joyfulness of joy of which the blessed Lord speaks in John 15: 11, and future, reward, when every bit of faithfulness and testimony will be remembered.

The Lord grant that writer and reader may not fall short, or desire less than our God-given heavenly position and calling.

"A Christian Conscience."

"A Christian Conscience."

Edification Vol. 8, 1934, page 212.

(Editor's Note:- The following extract impressed us as we read it. Feeling that it contains a very wholesome word of admonition, we ask our readers to give it their careful attention).

"This is my commandment, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you." — John 15: 12.

"My Commandment." So our Lord Jesus has commandments for His disciples! This reflection may cause surprise if we are uninstructed and unthinking. Grace and favour are the notions most easily connected with Him. It almost shocks to be asked to think of His having claims and making demands upon us. "Commandments" suggest Moses rather than Christ. Many have not learned that there is also "the royal law," "the law of liberty" (James 2: 8; 1: 25), "the law of Christ" (Gal. 6: 2). The need to know the Redeemer as our Lawgiver is a vital one. It is true, blessedly true, that we have been redeemed from under the law of Moses, but it is equally true, and also blessedly true, that we have been placed under law to Christ. It can never be too strongly emphasized that we have not been saved by law, but that glorious statement needs to be accompanied by another, namely, that we are saved unto law. License is, of all things, the most foreign to the spirit of the new life in Christ.

"My Commandment." Here our Lord speaks of one, elsewhere the word is plural, "My Commandments," (John 14: 15, 21). His commandments are many, scattered throughout the New Testament; sometimes spoken by His own lips; sometimes by the lips of His apostles. How many, I wonder, of our Lord's own commandments could the average Christian repeat? The commandments of Moses we know. The Decalogue is in the memory of us all. Why then this strange ignorance of Christ's commandments? Is Moses our Lord? Is it of more importance that we should keep the "law that gendereth to bondage" shall the "law of liberty"? Or, is mere morality the ideal of our Christian life? Can it be that we have not yet descried those heights of Christian sanctity which beckon us to their ascent? Such heights as, for example, are caught sight of in such commandments as, "Resist not evil", "Love your enemies"; "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth"; "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness"; "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Here are some summits in the range of Christian ideal, and it seems an utterly impossible position to be under the Grace of Christ and at the same time aspire to nothing higher than the law of Moses. He who gives us grace must also be allowed to give us His commandments.

It startles us when we realise that the conscience of Christians, frequently, is hardly a Christian conscience at all. Its light is, not Christ, but Moses. . . A Christian conscience, one fears, is surprisingly rare. The ready and crushing proof is in the open fact that transgressions of the Ten Commandments shock us, transgressions of the commandments of Christ stir us but little, if at all. A murder! Robbery! Adultery! We hold up our hands in horror. No one, of course, complains of such sensitiveness. It is right; it is good. But where is equal sensitiveness when the commandments of Christ are broken? Why are we not shocked when we meet a believer who stubbornly refuses to forgive the brother who injured him; or when two sit down to eat bread and drink of the same cup, but who have not spoken to each other since something happened years ago? and why are we not shocked when brother is angry with brother, or when believers, violating the law of their separation, hobnob with that enemy of Christ — the world? Is Sinai, then, of more importance in our eyes than Calvary? In which school was our conscience educated? Is there not urgent need that we should change its teacher, so that it may become truly a Christian conscience, sensitive to every commandment of Christ and shocked by every violation of the same?

Do All Believers Receive The Holy Spirit?

Do All Believers Receive The Holy Spirit?

A. J. Pollock

(Extracted from Scripture Truth Vol. 33, 1941, page 8.)

Yes, Scripture is abundantly plain on the point. How pointed is Romans 8: 9: "Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of God he is none of His."

If a believer has not the Spirit of God he is in the flesh, and "they that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Rom. 8: 8). That could not be said of any believer. Moreover the Scripture just quoted says, "He is none of His," that is, he does not belong to Christ at all. To deny the Holy Spirit of God to a believer is to unchristianise him, a very solemn thing to do.

Ephesians 1: 13, too, is a very enlightening Scripture. We read: "In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise." This Scripture makes it abundantly plain, that when a man or woman or child truly trusts the Saviour, that one is indwelt thereupon by the Spirit of God.

I remember being at a Bible reading years ago when an eminent servant of Christ was asked, "How long after receiving the gospel do believers receive the Spirit? May it be at once, or may it be after a lengthened period of time?" The answer was most satisfying. The servant of Christ replied, "It is not a question of time, but of order; first the gospel believed, then as a consequence the Spirit received." The illustration was used of the blow of a sharp sword and the cut resulting. You cannot reverse the order, the blow must come first and the cut follows. It is not a question of time, but of order; of cause and effect.

Receiving "the gospel of your salvation," surely means hearing and receiving a gospel that assures the one, who believes, that he is saved, that his sins are forgiven, that he is justified from all things through Christ and is. the possessor of eternal life in Him. Can anything be clearer?

It is striking that redemption and the indwelling of the Spirit are linked together. We read: "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Eph. 4: 30).

Furthermore, Romans 8: 11 links up the indwelling Spirit and the power of resurrection together in a remarkable way. "If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you." God raised Christ from the dead. The Spirit of God is given to the believer as the pledge that when the day of resurrection comes he will share in its triumph. The resurrection of the believer is linked up and flows from the resurrection of Christ. This Scripture, however, has the living saints in view. The saints, who have fallen asleep, will be raised. We know that from other Scriptures. The living saints will have their mortal bodies quickened; that is, if these saints lived on to the natural terminus of life mortality in their bodies would work on till death ensued. But the moment the Lord comes and shouts the summoning shout that moment their mortal bodies will be entirely quickened, that is every trace of mortality swept away, a spiritual body will be theirs, a new creation body, a fit vessel for the heavenly scene. If we have not the Spirit of God this promise would be null and void, and that cannot be.

When the Holy Ghost descended on the day of Pentecost the assembled believers "were ALL filled with the Holy Ghost" (Acts 11: 4). Notice the word ALL!

When the Apostle Peter preached his famous Pentecostal sermon, and his hearers were pricked in their heart, and asked what they should do, the answer given was, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost" (Acts 2: 3: 8). Notice the words, "every one of you."

In this Scripture the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit are linked together, the one following the other in sequence. There was no discrimination now.

In the interesting incident of the Gentiles coming into blessing in the case of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and his friends, we read, "While Peter spake these words the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word" (Acts 10: 44). Again there was no distinction between believer and believer. Notice the word, ALL!

One who is not indwelt by the Spirit of God, cannot be a member of the body of Christ. How the Spirit of God is emphasised in relation to the one body: "By one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been made to drink into one Spirit" (1 Cor 12: 13). Notice again the word, ALL!

Can we imagine one believer being outside the one body — Christ the Head in heaven; His saints the many members, the body on earth?

There is a remarkable case of disciples in Acts 19: 1-7, who had not received the Holy Spirit. To base teaching on an exception as if it were the rule is foolish. There can be no case like this now-a-days. The John the Baptist ministry is past and we live in the full light of the gospel of God. This incident we are about to adduce fell in a transitional period.

When these ten disciples were asked the question, "Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?" their reply was, "We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." They were then asked, "Unto what were ye then baptized?" They replied, "Unto John's baptism." Paul then said, "John verily baptised with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe in Him which should come after him, that is on Christ Jesus."

These disciples up to then had not heard the gospel of their salvation (see Eph. 1: 13). When they did hear it they were sealed by the Holy Spirit of God.

John, the Baptist, preached repentance, exhorting his disciples to believe on the One of whom he was the forerunner, even on the Lord Jesus Christ. "When they heard this, they were baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus." Then Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Ghost came upon them, and they spake with tongues and prophesied.

This interesting narrative showing the difference between John's baptism and Christian baptism, and how the one superseded the other, with all the implications involved, only supports what we have been adducing from Holy Scripture, that those, who receive the gospel of their salvation, receive as a consequence the gift of the Holy Spirit. To teach otherwise is confusion and the unchristianizing of believers.

But now for a few words of practical import. We, believers, who have received the Holy Spirit of promise, may well ask ourselves as to what use we make of this wonderful gift. Are we sufficiently impressed by the fact that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit of God? We are exhorted not to grieve the Spirit, or quench the Spirit, and walk in the Spirit, and manifest the fruit of the Spirit.

Alas! how many believers walk in a worldly carnal way and grieve and quench God's Holy Spirit. This we may well be exercised about.

This teaching that some believers have the Spirit and some have not, causes introspection of an unhealthy nature. We may be depressed, if we imagine we have not received the Spirit on the one hand; or elated, if we think we have received the Spirit in contrast to other believers. This is not of the Spirit of God.

To fasten on one Scripture and twist it to bear a meaning that contradicts the general trend of Scripture, and that occupies saints with themselves instead of with Christ is simply a device of Satan. May we be preserved from this, and seek in all simplicity of mind to walk in the Spirit.

The Sonship of Christ

The Sonship of Christ

R. F. Wall.

Pre-Incarnate, Eternal Sonship

There are a number of passages we can turn to that show the Lord Jesus was Son before the incarnation. In Hebrews 1 we read: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds” (Heb. 1: 1-2). It was by the Son, as such, that the worlds were made. Creation is also attributed to the Son in Colossians chapter 1, though there He is presented as the Son of the Father's love. Paul and Timothy give thanks to the Father, “Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son (Darby gives here, “the Son of His love”)... Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by Him were all things created” (Col. 1: 12-16). We have then, before the incarnation, the One who is the Son, God's Son, the Son of the Father's love.

We might also notice how Hebrews 1 and Colossians 1 distinguish these two aspects of our Lord's pre-incarnate Sonship. As God's Son He has the nature of God. In Hebrews 1 we read that God, “maketh His angels spirits.” That is their nature; they are spirit. “But unto the Son He saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.” The nature of the Son is deity; He is God. In Colossians 1 where He is presented as the Son of the Father's love the emphasis is more upon relationship with the Father and the love that belongs to this relationship. Both the relationship and the love of the relationship are shown to be present before creation. We see this in John 17 too. In verse 5 the Son praying to the Father speaks about the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, and lower down He speaks of the love belonging to this relationship: “Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory, which Thou hast given Me: for Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world” (John 17: 5, 24).

The pre-incarnate Sonship of Christ is also seen in this, that as the Son He is sent, and comes, from outside of the world, into it. In John 3: 17 we read that, “God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved.” In John 16 the Lord Jesus says to the disciples: “I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: For the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved Me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father” (John 16: 26-28). The sending of the Son does not imply that as the Son He was in any way inferior to the Sender. In Galatians 4 His being sent is put alongside the sending of the Holy Spirit. We read there that, “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law.” But just a verse lower down we read: “And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Gal. 4: 4, 6). The Greek word for sending forth is the same in both cases and in both cases the sending was of Divine Persons from heaven into the world.

There is another reference to the sending of the Son in 1 John 4 verse 9: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” The expression “only begotten” is a translation of the Greek word monogenees. This is derived from the Greek words monos, meaning only, or alone, and genos. Genos occurs 21 times in the New Testament and is variously translated1. It is rendered “offspring” (x3), “born” (x2), and “generation” (x1). But the Name “only begotten Son” cannot refer to the incarnation because this verse tells us that it was as the only begotten Son that He was sent from outside of the world into it. He was the only begotten Son before He came. What meaning then is to be attached to the expression “only begotten”?  The word genos is also translated kind, kinds or kindred (x8) and the writer believes this is its meaning here. The only begotten Son of God is of the same kind as God. He is of the same kind as God because He has the nature of God. And He is the only Son like this. We know that others are called sons of God. The angels are called sons of God and believers during this present dispensation of grace are called sons of God, but the only begotten Son is alone in having the nature of God in all its fulness. As the Son He has not only the moral nature of God but deity too.

1The references are as follows: KIND-Matt. 13: 47; Matt. 17: 21; Mark 9: 29; NATION-Mark 7: 26; Gal. 1: 14; KINDRED-Acts 4: 6; Acts 7: 13; Acts 7: 19; COUNTRY-Acts 4: 36; STOCK-Acts 13: 26; Phil. 3: 5; OFFSPRING-Acts 17: 28; Acts 17: 29; Rev. 22: 16; BORN-Acts 18: 2; Acts 18: 24; KINDS-1 Cor. 12: 10; 1 Cor. 14: 10; DIVERSITIES-1 Cor. 12: 28; countrymen-2 Cor. 11: 26; GENERATION-1 Peter 2: 9.

It is well known that the word monogenees2 occurs nine times in the New Testament. John uses the expression five times, only of the Lord Jesus. In Luke's Gospel it is used three times of only children. In Hebrews 11: 17 it is used of Isaac. While Isaac was not the only child of Abraham, he was the only child of his kind-he was the only child of promise.

The Sonship of Christ and His Incarnation

It is important to distinguish between the expression “only begotten” and the words in Psalm 2, “this day have I begotten Thee.” “This day have I begotten Thee” refers to the incarnation, as the New Testament quotations show (Psalm 2: 7; Acts 13: 33; Heb. 1: 5; Heb. 5: 5). But even in Psalm 2 the order of the words guards against the thought that the Son became such by incarnation. It is not said, “This day have I begotten Thee; Thou art My Son,” but “Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee.” This is consistent with what has been noticed already. In Luke 1, answering Mary's question how she could conceive in the womb and bear a son seeing she knew not a man, the angel says: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1: 35). In considering this verse the writer has found it helpful to keep Psalm 40 in mind: “Sacrifice and offering Thou wouldest not, but a body hast Thou prepared Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou hast had no pleasure: Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me) to do Thy will, O God” (Ps. 40: 6-8; Heb. 10: 5-7). The words in Psalm 2: “this day have I begotten Thee,” refer to the humanity of Christ. They refer to His human spirit and soul and body. But Psalm 40 shows us the Son, the One that was sent from heaven by God and by the Father, coming to take the body prepared for Him. The Eternal Son, having become incarnate, would “be called the Son of God.”

2The nine references are: ONLY-Luke 7: 12; Luke 8: 42; ONLY CHILD-Luke 9: 38; ONLY BEGOTTEN-John 1: 14; John 1: 18; John 3: 16; John 3: 18; Heb. 11: 17; 1 John 4: 9.

Before proceeding further it may be well to notice a passage in Revelation 2 where there is the greatest possible contrast between Christ as the seed of the woman, the Son of Mary, and Christ as the Son of God. In writing to the assembly at Thyatira John says: “These things saith the Son of God, who hath His eyes like unto a flame of fire, and His feet are like fine brass.” Thyatira represents the Roman Catholic system in its worst excesses. To this assembly, that gave (and gives) such a large and unscriptural place to Mary and thinks of the Sonship of Christ so habitually in relation to her, Christ presents Himself as the Son of God. As Mary's Son He is the Son of man, but as Son of God He is “the Ancient of days” (Dan. 7: 9, 13-14, 21-22; Rev. 1: 12-16).

It is true to say, and important to maintain, that the incarnation did not change the Person of Christ. He did not for a moment cease to be what He had always been. What did change was the position in which He, the Son, was found. Psalm 40 has shown us that He came to do the will of God. He came not to command but to obey. In Philippians 2 we see the One who is in the form of God taking the form of a servant, and becoming obedient unto death. What is of particular interest in relation to the present subject is the way that Scripture contrasts the Sonship of Christ with these two things; with servanthood and obedience. In John 8, where the word for servant or bondman is the same as in Philippians 2, the Lord says: “the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (Phil. 2: 7; John 8: 35-36). In Hebrews 3 we have a similar contrast. Moses “was faithful in all His (God's) house, as a servant” (Heb. 3: 5). According to Mr. W. E. Vine the word for servant here (therapon) “is a term of dignity and freedom.” Yet the very next verse contrasts the Sonship of Christ with this. “But Christ as a Son over His own house; whose house are we...” (Heb. 3: 6). The beginning of Hebrews 3 shows us why this contrast is made. “For He has been counted worthy of greater glory than Moses, by how much He that has built it has more honour than the house. For every house is built by some one; but He who has built all things is God” (Heb. 3: 3-4-J.N.D. Trans.). In Hebrews 5 we read that “Though He were Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered” (Heb. 5: 8-J.N.D. Trans.). Obedience was outside the experience of the Son. He had been the One who was to be obeyed. But now having come into the world He learned in His own experience the cost in suffering that obedience entailed. This verse shows us His perfect obedience, even unto the death of the cross.

A similar contrast between His Sonship and the position of obedience which He took at the incarnation is seen in His temptation by the devil. In Matthew 4 the devil twice addresses Him as the Son of God. He knew very well who He was, but he says: “If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The devil sought to induce the Lord to exercise His own power and will as God and had He done so He would have proven that he was the Son of God. The Lord answers in a way that shows He would not be moved from the position of obedience which He had taken: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:3-4). In the second temptation it was a question of showing that as the Son of God He was the object of the love and care of the Father. “If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down: for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee: and in their hands they shall bear Thee up, lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone” (Psa. 91: 11-12; Matt. 4: 6-7). It is striking that in the third of the temptations the devil doesn't address the Lord as the Son of God. There is a simple explanation for this. In the third temptation the devil calls on the Lord to worship him. But the Divine Sonship of Christ is connected with His Eternal Personality and deity. As the Son of God He is the One who is to be worshipped and the devil knew that very well. The Lord answers with words from Deuteronomy 6: 13: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.”

Later in Matt. 14, we find that there were those who did worship the Lord Jesus, and they worshipped Him as the Son of God. After the feeding of the five thousand (five thousand men, beside women and children) the Lord had sent the disciples across the sea of Galilee. A storm arose but Jesus came to them walking on the sea. When He came into the ship, the wind ceased, and “they that were in the ship came and worshipped Him, saying, Of a truth Thou art the Son of God” (Matt. 14: 22-33).

Those who desire to pursue this study may find the following listing from the New Testament helpful:

There are 47 references to the “Son of God” in the AV, and 42 in the JND Translation. The 42 references occurring in both Translations are as follows: Matt. 4: 3; Matt. 4: 6; Matt. 8: 29; Matt. 26: 63; Matt. 27: 40; Matt. 27: 43; Matt. 27: 54; Mark 1: 1; Mark 3: 11; Mark 15: 39; Luke 1: 35; Luke 4: 3; Luke 4: 9; Luke 4: 41; Luke 22: 70; John 1: 34; John 1: 49; John 3: 18; John 5: 25; John 9: 35; John 10: 36; John 11: 4; John 11: 27; John 19: 7; John 20: 31; Acts 9: 20; Rom. 1: 4; 2 Cor. 1: 19; Gal. 2: 20; Eph. 4: 13; Heb. 4: 14; Heb. 6: 6; Heb. 7: 3; Heb. 10: 29; 1 John 3: 8; 1 John 4: 15; 1 John 5: 5; 1 John 5: 10; 1 John 5: 12; 1 John 5: 13; 1 John 5: 20; Rev. 2: 18. The references occurring only in the AV are: Matt. 14:33-Darby gives “God's Son;” Luke 3:38 (referring to Adam)-Darby gives “of God;” Luke 8: 28-Darby gives “Son of the Most High God;” Acts 8: 37-Darby omits this verse; 1 John 5: 13-Darby omits the first reference.

There are 35 references to Christ as “The Son” (with no other words added which expand or describe that Name) and of these 33 occur in both the AV and JND Translations: Matt. 11: 27 (x3); Matt. 21: 38; Matt. 28: 19; Mark 13: 32; Luke 10: 22 (x3); John 3: 35; John 3: 36 (x2); John 5: 19 (x2); John 5: 20; John 5: 21; John 5: 22; John 5: 23(x2); John 5: 26; John 6: 40; John 8: 35; John 8: 36; John 14: 13; 1 Cor. 15: 28; Heb. 1: 8; 1 John 2: 22; 1 John 2: 23 (x2); 1 John 2: 24; 1 John 4: 14; 1 John 5: 12; 2 John 9. The AV has a reference to the Son in Hebrews 7: 28, but JND gives “a Son.” Darby has a reference to (the) Son in Hebrews 1: 2, where the King James Translation gives “His Son.”

In addition to the above there are 38 other references where Christ is called Son, and these include those occasions when He is called “My Son,” “His Son” etc. References which refer to His being Son of man, Son of David, Son of Mary etc. are not listed. There are 34 references common to both the AV and the JND Translations: Matt. 2: 15; Matt. 21: 37 (x2); Matt. 22: 2; Matt. 22: 42; Mark 12: 6 (x2); John 3: 17; John 17: 1 (x2); Acts 13: 33; Rom. 1: 3; Rom. 1: 9; Rom. 5: 10; Rom. 8: 3; Rom. 8: 29; Rom. 8: 32; 1 Cor. 1: 9; Gal. 1: 16; Gal. 4: 4; Gal. 4: 6; 1 Thess. 1: 10; Heb. 1: 5 (x2); Heb. 3: 6; Heb. 5: 5; Heb. 5: 8; 1 John 1: 3; 1 John 1: 7; 1 John 3: 23; 1 John 4: 10; 1 John 5: 9; 1 John 5: 11; 1 John 5: 20. References included in the AV only are Acts 3: 13; Acts 3: 26; Heb. 1: 2. There is also a reference in the JND Translation in Heb. 7: 28.

Some other designations (not included in the references above) are: “My Beloved Son”-Matt. 3: 17; Matt. 17: 5; Mark 1: 11; Mark 9: 7; Luke 3: 22; Luke 9: 35; Luke 20: 13; 2 Peter 1: 17. “Son of the Living God”-Matt. 16: 16; John 6: 69 (in John 6: 69 Darby gives “holy One of God”). “Son of the Most High God” or “Son of God Most High”-Mark 5: 7; Luke 8: 28. “The Son of the Blessed”-Mark 14:61. “Son of the Highest”-Luke 1: 32. “The Son of His love”-Col. 1: 13, JND Translation. “The Son of the Father”-2 John 3.

The Sonship of Christ as Seen in His Pathway

We have seen that the nature of the Son is deity. We have seen that He has an eternal relationship with the Father and that this relationship is a relationship of love. Each of these hallmarks of His eternal Sonship were seen in the Son in this world.

In John 5, having healed the impotent man on the Sabbath day, the Lord was confronted by the Jews. In verse 17 we have the words of the Lord Jesus Himself: “But Jesus answered them, My father worketh hitherto, and I work.” Verse 18 tells us what we are to understand from these words. It is not merely what the Jews inferred from them, but what John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote: “Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God.” This passage shows that the incarnation did not change the nature of His Sonship. Just as He was not one whit less God after the incarnation than before it, so His Sonship too was unchanged by it (See footnote on next page). John 10 shows this just as clearly. The Lord says: “I and My Father are one.” He is of the same nature, of the same essence, as the Father. The Jews knew very well what the Lord was claiming and they accuse Him of blasphemy, “Because that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God” (John 10: 30-33). As proof of His Divine and eternal Sonship the Lord there refers to the fact that He was sanctified and sent by the Father into the world, and that as having come into it He did the works of His Father (John 10: 34-39). These works showed that as the Son He has the nature of God in all its fulness. In John 5 we read that: “The Father loveth the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth,” and “What things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” (John 5: 19-20). As the Son He could be shown everything that the Father was doing, and as the Son He could do the same things Himself. But there is one work in particular which shows that the nature of the Son is deity: He gives life to the dead. “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will” (John 5: 21). It is this attribute of Deity that Paul refers to in Romans 1 in proof of the Divine Sonship of Christ: He is “Marked out Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by resurrection of the dead” (Rom. 1: 4 — J. N. D. Trans.).

The Lord Jesus has the nature of God in all its fulness, and as the Son He also has an eternal relationship with the Father. This relationship with the Father characterised the Son as come into the world. It didn't begin when He came into the world, and neither did it cease then. The relationship continued without interruption. On only one occasion in the Gospels does the Lord address God, and that is on the cross: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matt 27: 46; Mark 15: 34). At all other times He addressed God as His Father and this known and enjoyed relationship with the Father was the home of His heart. He referred to it in His first recorded words in this world. Mary and Joseph found Him in the temple and Mary mistakenly reproved Him: “Son, why hast Thou thus dealt with us?  behold, Thy father and I have sought Thee sorrowing” (Luke 2: 48). Was Mary forgetting that while legally Joseph's son, the Lord Jesus had been born “before they came together”? (Matt. 1: 18). The Lord answered with words to Mary's conscience: “How is it that ye sought Me?  wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?” (Luke 2: 49). The Father had sent the Son and the Son had come down from heaven, not to do His own will, but the will of Him that sent Him (1 John 4: 14; John 6: 38).

His last words upon the cross were addressed to the Father. While the Son was in the world, the Father who had sent Him had been with Him. He had not left the Son alone, because the Son had done always those things which pleased the Father (John 8: 29). Now that the work was done, and in the unclouded enjoyment of that same eternal relationship, it is to the Father that He sends away His spirit. “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, He said, Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit: and having said thus, He gave up the ghost” (Luke 23: 46). The Lord had been hanging on the cross for six hours, yet shortly before those words were spoken He had been able to declare, “It is finished,” with a loud voice (Mark 15: 25, 34; John 19: 30). How was this possible?  Mark tells us that: “When the centurion, which stood over against Him, saw that He so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15: 39). In John's account of the crucifixion we are told that “He delivered up His spirit” (John 19: 30). He had power to lay down His life and power to take it again. Even in the circumstances of His death His glory is manifested, and it is the glory of the Son.

This relationship between the Father and the Son was and is a relationship of love. As being one with the Father He can say: “All things that the Father hath are Mine” (John 16: 15). Yet as the incarnate Son all things are given to Him by the Father. That the Father gives Him all things is a proof of the eternal love of the Father for the Son: “The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand” (John 3: 35). In John 5 it is this eternal love of the Father for the Son that leads the Father to show the incarnate Son all things that He is doing: “For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth” (John 5: 20).

This love for the Son is also seen in the various ways that He is described. He is the Father's “beloved Son” (Matt. 3: 17; Matt. 17: 5; Mark 1: 11; Mark 9: 7; Luke 3: 22; Luke 9: 35; 2 Peter 1: 17), “The Beloved” (Eph. 1: 6), God's “own Son” (Rom. 8: 3, 32), and the Son of the Father's love (Col. 1: 13).

The Sonship of Christ in Relation to the Jews

The Sonship of Christ was a central issue with the Jews. We have seen from John 5 and 10 how He pressed it upon them in plain words. Later, in the counsel of the Jews, the high priest adjured Him by the Living God to say whether He was the Christ, the Son of God (Matt. 26: 63-64; Mark 14: 61-62; Luke 22: 70). His answer was “I am” (Mark 14: 62).

The Lord also pressed His Sonship upon the Jews in parables. In Matthew 21 He speaks about a certain householder who planted a vineyard. It is a picture of Israel nationally, planted by Jehovah (Jer. 2: 21; Jer. 11: 17). When the time for fruiting drew near servants were sent to receive of the fruit. Some were beaten, some were stoned and some were killed. Last of all the householder sent his son, saying, “They will reverence my son” (Matt. 21: 37). In Mark's Gospel it is added that: “Having yet therefore one son, his well-beloved, he sent him last unto them” (Mark 12: 6). But those to whom the son is sent reject him and as a consequence they are themselves rejected and judgment falls upon them.

In Matthew 22 there is a parable that is only recorded in that chapter. A certain King makes a marriage for his son. Those first bidden to the wedding refuse the invitation and others fill up their place. Matthew's Gospel repeatedly contrasts the dispensations of law and grace and this change of dispensation is shown to hinge on the rejection of the Son.

At the end of Matthew 22 the Lord refers to prophetic Scripture. When He had answered the contrived questions of the Pharisees, Herodians and Sadducees, He confounds the Pharisees with a question of His own: “What think ye of Christ?  whose Son is He?”  He refers to Psalm 110, and they cannot answer how, if He is David's Son, David should call Him his Lord, saying, “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on My right hand, till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool” (Matt. 22: 41-46; Mark 12: 35-37; Luke 20: 41-44; Psalm 110: 1).

What was the outcome of this presentation of His Sonship to the Jews?  His claims to Divine Sonship were utterly rejected. On the basis of His confession in the counsel of the Jews He was condemned to death (Matt. 26: 65-66; Mark 14: 63-64). When He was taken to Pilate the Jews said: “We have a law, and by our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God” (John 19: 7). He was mocked as He hung upon the cross. Those that passed by reviled Him, “wagging their heads, and saying... If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Matt. 27: 39-40). “The chief priests mocking Him, with the scribes and elders, said... He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him: for he said, I am the Son of God” (Matt. 27: 41, 43). If, as the Son of God, He has the nature of God in all its fulness, had He not power to come down from the cross?  If He has an eternal relationship with the Father and this relationship is a relationship of love, would He not be delivered?  Those that mocked Him supplied the answer, though they did so in unbelief: “He saved others, Himself He cannot save” (Matt 27: 42). As the Son He had power to lay down His life. This commandment He had received of His Father, and on this account the Father loved Him, because He laid down His life that He might take it again (John 10: 17-18).

This really brings us to another point. Since the coming of the Son of God into the world, all blessing hinges upon receiving Him as such. This was true of the Jews when the Lord was here. The man in John 9 who was born blind, had his eyes opened and worshipped the Lord Jesus as the Son of God. He typifies the remnant of the Jews (John 9: 35-38). We see the same thing with Saul of Tarsus. When “There fell from his eyes as it had been scales... straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that He is the Son of God” (Acts 9: 18-20). This testimony to the Jews as to the Sonship of Christ was continued in the epistle to the Hebrews. And the eyes of the remnant will be opened to this Personal and eternal glory of Christ after the church is taken to heaven.

At the beginning of John's Gospel we read of three days. There is one day, and then “The next day” (John 1: 29, 35), and then “The day following” (John 1: 43). The spiritual bearing of these days is this. The ministry of John the Baptist and of the Lord on earth is connected with the first day. What marks the second day are the features of Christianity. Christ is known as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and as the Son of God who baptises with the Holy Spirit (John 1: 29, 33-34). But what characterises the third day is the opening of the eyes of the Jewish remnant to the Divine glory of the Lord Jesus, even in the face of their long prejudice against Him. Like Nathanael towards the end of John 1 they will confess Him as the Son of God and the King of Israel (John 1: 43, 47-49).

The Sonship of Christ and Christianity

The Gospels by Matthew, Mark and Luke are largely occupied with the ministry of the Lord Jesus outside of Jerusalem and Judaea. They record the animosity of the religious leaders toward Him and also trace out the stages in His rejection by the common people. As this rejection becomes more and more apparent a new work comes into view. If He is rejected as the Christ it is upon Him as the Son of God1 that this new work is founded. In answering the Lord's question, “But whom say ye that I am?” Peter confesses, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee... upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16: 15-18). John's Gospel is more concerned with events in Jerusalem and Judaea. In this centre of Judaism He is rejected from the outset and we are occupied with this new work from the beginning (John 2: 18-21; John 3: 14-16; John 4: 23-24; John 5: 23-25; John 6: 53-57; John 7: 37-39 etc.). We might well call John's Gospel the Gospel of Christianity.

1In the parallel passages in Mark 8:27-9:1 and Luke 9:18-27 He is confessed as “the Christ,” but there is no reference to His being the Son of God or to the building of the assembly.

John's Gospel was written that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, we might have life through His Name (John 20: 31). Eternal life is connected with the knowledge of God, who is made known to us as the Father by the Son (John 17: 3; 1 John 1: 2; 1 John 5: 11). This revelation of God is brought before us in John 1 where we read that “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1: 18). This verse shows that there are Divine Persons within the Godhead and that these Divine Persons are in relationship with one another: they are Father and Son. Furthermore, this relationship is shown to be a relationship of love. The only begotten Son is in the bosom of the Father. This is how God is declared to us. It is not what God became, but what He has always been. The Holy Spirit is not mentioned here because it is objective revelation. He works in our hearts to give the capacity to receive the revelation (John 3: 5-8). The revelation itself is of God the Father by the Son.

This revelation is at the very heart of the gospel. God is “in the light” (1 John 1: 7). He no longer dwells in the thick darkness which concealed Him before Christ came (Ex. 19: 9, J.N.D. Trans.; 1 Kings 8: 12; Ps. 97: 2). It is in this light that our sin is exposed. There is at the same time the manifestation of all that can be known about God, and the manifestation of the truth about ourselves. Yet God is revealed as One who loves us and who provides for the need which He shows to exist. The Father sends the Son to be the Saviour of the world. (1 John 4: 14). It was in this that the love of God toward us was manifested, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him (1 John 4: 9). And when expressing the love of God to the world it is not said that God gave the Son of man, but that He gave His only begotten Son (John 3: 14-15). He gave the One who was the eternal and always worthy object of His love and delight.

Those that believe on the Son have eternal life. They receive it when they receive Him, for “He that hath the Son, hath life; and He that hath not the Son of God, hath not life” (1 John 5: 12). He is “that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 John 1: 2).

Just as the initial receiving of eternal life is bound up with the receiving of the Son, so growth in the divine nature is connected with the knowledge2 of the Son. In 1 John 2 it is this that marks the fathers, those who are spiritually mature. They know the Son, the One who is “from the beginning” (1 John 2: 13, 14). The gifts given by an ascended Christ have the same end in view: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect (full-grown) man” (Eph. 4: 13). There can be no advance from this knowledge, as the two references in 1 John 2 show (Verses 13 & 14). It is knowledge that is gained as we keep company with Him. Like the disciples of old we can see where He abides (in the Father's bosom), and abide with Him (John 1: 38-39). We can contemplate His glory, “a glory as of an only begotten with a father” (John 1: 14 — J.N.D. Trans.).

2In Matthew 11: 27 we read, “All things are delivered unto Me of My Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” The Greek word for “knoweth” is the same in both places (epiginõsko). Since the Father, who is not incarnate, can be known by those to whom the Son reveals Him, it does not seem that the Lord is here referring to the impossibility of the creature comprehending God (1 Tim. 6: 16). Rather, it is the incarnate Son who cannot be comprehended-it is impossible for us to understand how Deity and Humanity can be united in His Person. This is a great mystery (1 Tim. 3: 16). Such verses as these should not be used to deny or oppose what is revealed (Matt. 16: 16-17). The same word (epignõsis) is used in Ephesians 4: 13, “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

These and other verses show that the Sonship of Christ has a vital bearing upon everyday Christian living. It is certainly not an abstruse point of doctrine with which we need not concern ourselves. This is also seen in Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” The law did not give life and because of what we are according to the flesh, it was really a ministry of death and condemnation (2 Cor. 3: 7, 9). It set no object before the soul, apart from the obedience which it required, and it imparted no power in order that that obedience might be rendered. The verse here in Galatians 2 shows that these three things are connected with the Son of God. Paul had received Christ, the Son, and life in Him. And the Son of God was the constant and sustaining object of his faith. The love of the eternal Son of God was set on him, and Paul had a deep, present, consciousness of it. He had given Himself for Paul and having Him before his soul he was furnished with the power that enabled him to live such a victorious and exemplary Christian life.

The One who came from heaven and gave Himself for Paul and for every believer, is coming again. The life of faith will then be at an end. Are we waiting for His coming?  The believers at Thessalonica had “turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; And to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1: 9-10). Is there not a parallel between this verse and Galatians 2: 20?  The other references to the second coming in this epistle all speak about the “Lord Jesus Christ” or “the Lord” (1 Thess. 2: 19; 1 Thess. 3: 13; 1 Thess. 4: 15; 1 Thess. 5: 23). He has absolute authority and we are accountable to Him, but the reference in the first chapter seems to lay particular stress upon the Person who is coming. The love of the Son for them was such that there was no question of their being left in the world when the day of the Lord should be present (2 Thess. 2: 2, J.N.D. Trans.). He had delivered them from that coming wrath. Having Him as their object and hope, the One in whom the love of God and of the Father had been so perfectly manifested, they were kept in peace. We know from the second epistle that it was this hope that the enemy sought to shake, but Scripture clearly teaches that the saints will be caught away from the world before the hour of trial comes upon it (1 Thess. 4: 16-17; 1 Thess. 5: 2-5; 2 Thess. 2: 1-8; Rev. 3: 10).

In his epistles John shows a similar concern for those who were in danger of being deceived. It was not deception connected with wrong teaching about the timing of the day of the Lord, but what is even more serious, deception flowing from wrong teaching about the Person of Christ. Does not the apostle John insist upon the vital nature of the doctrine of Christ?  In his first epistle he especially warns the little children. “Who is a liar, but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?  He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: but he that acknowledgeth the Son, hath the Father also. Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father” (1 John 2: 22-24). In these verses we have again the same elements that we have seen before. He is the Christ, the Son of God and of the Father. Like the Thessalonian believers, the little children that John addressed knew that Antichrist was coming (1 John 2: 18a) but he warns them that, “even now are there many antichrists” (1 John 2: 18b). What constituted them antichrists was the denial of the truth as to Christ's Person. They professed themselves to be Christians while at the same time denying the revelation of the eternal God that has come to us in the Son. The safeguard of the little children was to abide in the teaching of the apostle's concerning Him. They were to receive no new, no novel teaching about the Person of Christ. The Unction (the Holy Spirit) which they had from the Holy One (the Lord Jesus) would enable them to continue in the Son and in the Father (1 John 2: 20, 24).

In his second Epistle John writes to “the elect lady.” She too was vulnerable. It was not the man, but the woman who was deceived by the serpent and John writes that “many deceivers are entered into the world” (1 Tim. 2: 14; 2 John 7). It was the doctrine of Christ that was to be the touchstone, and if those who professed to bring something brought not that doctrine she was not to receive them into her house: “Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed, is partaker of his evil deeds.” (2 John 9-11).

In closing let us call to mind again how the Sonship of Christ is interwoven with every strand of Christian truth. It is by the Son as such that God is revealed to us. “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1: 18). We receive this revelation when we believe the gospel and the gospel of God concerns “His Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 1: 1-3). Believing the gospel we are delivered “from the power of darkness,” and translated “into the Kingdom” of God's “dear Son” (Col. 1:13). Those so translated form part of the church that Christ is building on the unshakeable foundation of His own Person as “the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16: 15-18). While that building continues we are waiting for God's Son from heaven and while we wait it is our portion, like Paul, to live by faith, “the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me” (1 Thess. 1: 10; Gal. 2: 20). It is clear from these and many other passages that the Sonship of Christ is not peripheral to Christianity. Indeed, how can anything that is so vitally bound up with His Person be peripheral?  To maintain that it is so is to depredate His glory and to manifest that Laodicean spirit which is such a dishonour to Him. Christianity is centred in Christ, the Christ of the Scriptures, and any false idea we have of Him is not only fatal in itself, but will also (eventually) show itself in a wrong idea of Christianity, and in wrong practice (1 Cor. 15: 33).

May the Lord grant us a deepening appreciation of His glory and the desire to be faithful to His Name.

R. F. Wall.

Extract

Were you to apply the directions given for judging immorality to fatal error touching our Lord's person, you would have a very insufficient measure of discipline. False doctrine does not touch the natural conscience as gross conduct does. Nay, you may too often find a believer drawn away by his affections to make excuses for those who are fundamentally heterodox. All sorts of difficulties fill the mind where the eye is not really single. Many might thus be involved who did not themselves hold the false doctrine. If I accept the principle of dealing with none but him who brings not the doctrine of Christ, it will not do; for there may be others entangled by it. What is any individual, what is the church even, in comparison with the Saviour, the Son of the Father?  Accordingly, the rule laid down by the Spirit for vindicating Christ's person from blasphemous assailants or their partisans, is infinitely more stringent than when it is a question of moral corruption, be it ever so bad.

W. Kelly-Lectures on the Gospel of Matthew, page 324.

Christ Everything

Christ Everything

By the Editor of Scripture Truth before J.T. Mawson

In thinking over the Scripture, "as ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him; rooted and built up is Him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving" (Col. 2 : 6, 7), I was carried back in thought to my own real start  with the Lord. I had from my earliest knowledge of anything known the Gospel, but the time came when I definitely received Him — "You'll trust Him?" was the question put to me and I said "Yes." I remember the following day that the name Jesus was continually before me. I printed it in large letters and set it where I could see it continually. It was just Himself — not the blessing that I had received — but Himself.

I could not have explained it all then, but now I see that the Spirit of God had led me to Him, it was not belief in a text of Scripture, but the reception of a Person about whom the Scriptures speak, and He was very real to me. I realised a personal link between myself and the Lord and longed to remember Him in His death, but I was afraid to make my desire known. After much faltering, I awoke to the fact that I was losing time and slipping back for I was not keeping His word. I had not advanced in this desire beyond what was individual, it was simply the Lord's love to me and my response to His love, but so far it was very real — and it was Himself and my desire to keep His commandments.

Then followed the desire to serve Him. I felt that to serve Him who had done so much for me would be a great honour and I have no doubt that He then gave me a definite call to preach the Gospel. The opportunity came for me to preach, and I spent some days in careful preparation of a sermon on the wisdom of building on the rock and the folly of building on the sand. As I walked to the preaching room, 3 miles away, there rang insistently in my ears "Behold the Lamb of God" and all my sermon slipped out of my memory. I passed through an agony of exercise and the more so because on arriving at the meeting I could not find the passage of Scripture that I had studied so carefully. And still the voice continued within me, "Behold the Lamb of God."

It was time to begin and I was reminded of this by a brother sitting near to me. I picked up my hymn book and the first hymn that my eyes alighted upon was "Behold the Lamb, 'tis He who bore my burden on the tree." I was greatly comforted and felt that I could trust the Lord to give me words to speak upon the text "Behold the Lamb of God." While I spoke an old man of 74 who had been long anxious, believed the Word, and passed from darkness to light. I was greatly cheered and began to see the way of the Lord. It was as though He said by the exercise I had passed through, "If you are to serve Me you must speak about Me, you must begin with Me. I must be your theme." It was Himself again.

Zeal for the Gospel laid hold of me, and day and night my thoughts were filled with the Gospel and my service in it. On reading C. H. Spurgeon's very helpful and delightful "Lectures to my Students" I longed to get the help I felt he could give, that I might be more efficient in the preaching. But just then the Lord came in and led me one step further. A servant of God visited our town and in the first address that he gave he spoke on Matthew 18: 20, pressing the reality of the Lord's presence in the midst of His assembly. It was a revelation to me. It was not the brethren, whether nice or otherwise who made the meeting what it was, it was Him — He gave character to the place. If I went it was to meet Him in His own circle, where He gathered His own about Him according to His own divine right.

I shall never forget the light that this was to my soul. I had to get away from everybody to dwell upon it with the Lord. From that time I have been unable to understand brethren saying "I will not go to the meeting, if such and such a Christian is permitted there; or threatening to withdraw, if what they think right is not done. To me everything lies in the Lord being there, and if He is there I must be.

This was a great joy, but it soon involved me in further exercise, for, I had to face the fact of failure, I discovered that confusion and division had wrought much havoc in that which appeared to me so blessed and which I had considered to be above the failure of men. Moreover I discovered that even those who I believed held or, to the truth, had sadly failed in the way they had done it, and the spirit that had been displayed. That party spirit could have entered that sacred enclosure with such disastrous results was to me a heart-breaking surprise. I was greatly shaken and I wondered whether it would not be better to devote myself exclusively to the Gospel, and let all else go as being impossible to carry out.

But I could not do this. I had tasted me joy of Christ and His assembly; to that I felt I must cling, and I went a step further and learned that everything was established and secured in Him. I learnt this from 2 Timothy, and I found from that Epistle that I could hold fast that which I had learnt and that it would be as a light and guide to me in the perilous times; I had got the clue to the maze. It meant that I must turn my eyes from the confusion and be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, remembering Him, raised from the dead according to Paul's Gospel, and test things henceforth by His word and authority. It was Himself again as meeting the exercise arising from our great failure in the truth.

I can see how falteringly I have followed these things so clearly shown to me. Known only to the Lord and myself has been the continual failure in walk according to that which I see and know to be the way of truth. But to these things in His great grace He has held me, and how patient He has been. I realize that, in every recovery of soul that I have known, He has brought me back to the joy of these things. They abide and will so long as the Spirit of Truth abides on earth.

It is plain to me that everything depends upon Christ personally having His place. We are to receive Him, walk in Him, be rooted and built up in Him, every advance is in Him. We may have doctrine and fight for "principles" and maintain a legal separation from what is wrong, but if that is all we shall become withered ourselves and a menace to the peace of our brethren. We shall abound in thanksgiving as together we continue in Him.

There have been many crises in my life, too intimate, too sacred, to commit to writing, but I have found that if He has drawn near to me in them I have gained in spiritual substance, no matter what else I have lost, and I have feebly learnt that for my own blessing as for His glory He must be all and in all, He is the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, the Beginning and the End. He is this for God, and He must be this for every creature that is to be finally and eternally blest. This is the lesson that the Spirit of God is teaching us today. Happy will all those be who learn it.

Inclusive and Exclusive

Inclusive and Exclusive.

H. J. Vine.

It is important, in relation to the oneness of the saints of God, to understand the truth of the one body; to grasp in faith the fact of it. "There is one body." This is a fact whether we grasp it or not, but the Holy Spirit has given us the truth of it through Paul, in the Scripture, that we might be always kept in the sense of the necessity of every member of the body of Christ, for all are included in the body. Oh! that we may learn deeply and truly this blessed inclusiveness. That teaching of exclusiveness, which says that certain members are excluded on the principle of the one body, is not the truth of God. indeed, it is very serious error. That teaching which maintains that wicked persons (those characterized by lawlessness in word or way) are to be excluded from Christian intercourse is according to the truth. The difference between the two is very great. To use the truth of the one body for the exclusion of members, is to act ignorantly, to misapply scripture, and to injure the saints. To exclude wickedness and those characterized by it as unsuited to the holiness of God's house, is to obey the Word and to preserve the saints, but for the latter other scriptures are needed.

As to the inclusiveness of the one body, we are told, no member can say to another, "I have no need of thee" (1 Cor. 12: 21). Every member is necessary. Exclusion is not to be thought of. "God has tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to the part that lacked." And the reason for this divine wisdom and care is, "That there be no division in the body" (25)! Inclusiveness is the truth here. The teaching of the "one new man," and of access to the Father by "one Spirit" in Ephesians 2: 15-18 has the same end in view; as also has the fact that we are "joint heirs, and a joint body, and joint partakers" of God's promise in Christ Jesus. Indeed, the very gospel-preaching of Paul was ''according to the revelation of the mystery' (Rom. 16: 25); and the right effect of that would bring all the saints "to be likeminded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus; that ye may with one accord, with one mouth, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Wherefore," continues the Apostle, "receive ye one another according as the Christ also has received you to the glory of God" (Rom. 15: 5-7). In this way the oneness becomes practical in the love and grace of the truth.

For a Day of Failure.

The outward failure and breakdown as to this very truth amongst those Who claim to be the church, or of the church, could not be greater, but it was all foreseen and foretold in the Scripture, and provision has been made in view of the failure in the ministry given through John. So that those who are really "of the truth" may be preserved and maintained in fullness of joy, and according to the oneness of which we speak, in spite of the outward breakdown.

No outward divisions or separations are seen by John, among the living company of true believers on the Son of God, for whom he writes. His Gospel is written that they may have life (John 20: 31): his first Epistle that they may know they have eternal life (1 John 5: 13). He sees one family, all loved alike by one Father, indwelt by one Spirit. In the Gospel he sees one flock, all having eternal life, and all safe in the hand of one Shepherd. The flock is identified with the assembly by Paul's words in Acts 20: 28. It is true that here, as well as in John 10, the Holy Spirit foretells trouble from those who should succeed the apostles. Grievous wolves are spoken of, and also those who would speak "perverted things"; but the one flock, the true assembly, remains.

John 10 tells of the thief coming to steal, to kill, and to destroy; but the Shepherd, the Son of God, holds all His own in the hand of omnipotence. Unlike the thief, the good Shepherd came that His sheep might have salvation, liberty, and life abundantly. The wolf worries and scatters the precious sheep of Christ, and the hireling's heart is on his wages; he cares not for the sheep, and flees when danger comes; but the good Shepherd knows each sheep by name, and He loves each one with so great a love that He laid down His life for the eternal welfare of every one of them. Notwithstanding all the trouble the thief, the hireling, and the wolf cause, the one flock is safe, because it is in His hand, and in the Father's hand; and He has said: "No one shall seize them out of My hand," and "No one can seize out of the hand of My Father. I and My Father are one." Every sheep is included in the grasp of love and omnipotence. He speaks of inclusive oneness.

Those who are excluded in John's epistle exclude themselves-they go out. They apostatize (1 John 2: 11). In the third epistle of John, Diotrephes "cast out" the brethren; this treatment was meted out to the best saints. He could only cast out of the assembly where he had usurped the pre-eminence which belongs to Christ; he could not cast them out of that of which we are speaking. But it should be a warning to us to see to it that we have more than mere talk about assembly, which is dangerous; for even in apostolic days the state in this connection could be such that an apostolic communication could be refused; and even apostles themselves: "I wrote something to the assembly; but Diotrephes, who loves to have the first place among them, receives us not " (3 John 9). Certainly it was the work of an individual whose fleshly pride had made him Satan's tool, and who took and loved the first place among them. It is a significant fact that the only mention of the assembly in John's writings is in connection with this evil Diotrephesian conduct; doubtless this is to cast us back upon the living and inclusive oneness, to which prominence is given in his ministry by the Holy Spirit. The violent exclusiveness of Diotrephes was evil. It excluded the best. It is therefore said to Gaius: "Beloved, imitate not what is evil, but what is good. He that does good is of God" (11). That is the path which is surrounded by the abiding blessings of God.

Disciples Indeed

Disciples Indeed

"Will ye also be his disciples?" — John 9: 27; Mark 4: 35-41; Luke 14: 25-33.

Being Notes of an Address by A. Mace.

Publisher: G. Morrish.

It might be helpful if we look a little at the subject of christian discipleship. Discipleship is viewed in scripture in two aspects. It is looked at merely as a profession, and also as a great reality.

Have you ever marked in reading John's gospel, that there seemed to be a crowd round the Lord continually? In John 6 the throng leaves Him because He said, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." That was the point which tested them. But the Lord turns to the twelve and says, "Will ye also go away?" Then Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go, thou hast the words of eternal life." There you find two classes of disciples — the mere camp followers, who followed for the loaves and fishes, and those who followed for what they had found in Him, and though they might be, and surely were, searched and rebuked, still, they clung to Him.

What I want to bring before you is

REAL DISCIPLESHIP,

thorough going, out-and-out decision for Christ, and whilst I am conscious of what a very poor exponent I am of it, still, beloved friends, we have to face the truth, and it is very wholesome to see things as they are in scripture. Never lower the standard because you are not up to it. Far better to confess your failure, own that you come short, but say at the same time, that is what I want to be.

The Lord Jesus Himself was a disciple. Now, I would not like to say that without a word of explanation. In Isaiah 50 we read, "the Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary; he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learner."

The blessed Lord took the place of the disciple here on earth. That was how He got, as Man the tongue of the learned. "He wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learner." He thus becomes the pattern of what a disciple should be. In other words, He followed in the path of the Father's appointment. As the Father gave Him commandment, so He spoke, and He could say, "I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak."

In John 5 we read, "the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do." There you have the whole life of Christ. He never spoke from Himself, and never acted from Himself. His words were the Father's words, and His works were the Father's works. His ear was wakened to hear the Father's voice. He trod in that path, and therefore is the pattern of our discipleship.

Now turn to Mark 4: 35 again. "And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let us pass over unto the other side." Observe, it is "let us pass over." That is

DIVINE ASSOCIATION.

Christ has a company here in connection with Himself. Those walking in the path of the divine will form this company, and to them He says, "Let us pass over unto the other side." Unto what other side? Why to the gloryland, that is the other side. This is the world's, man's and Satan's side. We have heard that blessed One say, "let us pass over unto the other side." There is one thing that ought to comfort every Christian, expressed in these lines:-

"One sweetly solemn thought,

Comes to me o'er and o'er;

I am nearer the glory today,

Than ever I was before."

We are in the boat so to speak, the oars are moving, we are being rowed over, we are travelling on to it, we were never so near it as we are now, and perhaps we shall get there today. The Lord Jesus has connected His people with Him in this blessed path of discipleship. I hope there is no exception in this room. I hope that every one of us has been taken hold of by the Lord to be connected with Him in this way. It is not only to be in heaven when we die, but we are so linked with Him, that we are travelling under His leadership to the other side.

Now, what follows?

"WHEN THEY HAD SENT AWAY THE MULTITUDE."

This is the first thing to be done. Every one has his or her multitude. A person may be a Christian, yet not a disciple, a child of God, an old believer, and yet never have sent away the multitude.

I am speaking now of discipleship in its real character, as it is presented in Luke 14. I repeat, beloved friends, you can be a true believer, and never have entered this path of identification with Christ. The sine qua non, the essential point for it is, that you must send away the multitude, and so break with things. and hindrances here. It is no use saying things will drop off, they won't. I used to say that at one time, but I do not now. They do not drop off.

I remember once in Rochester, U. S., having to walk a considerable distance about the city with a number of silver dollars in my pocket, as heavy as five shilling pieces. I said to a friend, Can you change these into paper money for me? And I put my hand into my pocket, and gave him the silver dollars, and took his paper ones. Those heavy dollars would not drop out of my pocket, I had to put my hand in, and take them out.

In Hebrews we read of weights. Weights are not always sins. Suppose I read the newspaper for an hour every morning. I should consider it a weight, but not necessarily a sin.

I remember once seeing a man outside Watford station. He was smoking. I noticed him look at his watch, and then he suddenly began to run. Directly he began to run, he took the pipe out of his mouth. We never find out what weights are till we begin to run. Let a thing become a weight, and it has to go.

You may say very pretty things in prayer, but are you laying aside the weights? It is no good asking for this and that, and yet when He points out the weights you do not send them away; it is practical hypocrisy.

Beloved friends, you have a multitude, a social, commercial, or domestic multitude. The first thing is, to send it away. Whatever the hindrance, and there is no one in this room who has not some kind of a block under the wheel, send it away. It is no use to ask for more power. For example, some one is trying to push a cart up a hill, and he cannot move it. He calls for more help, and a number of people come along, and all try to push it up, but still it will not move.

Why, you say, they are all blind. You see in a moment what the hindrance is, there is a block under the wheel. What do you do? You just remove the block, and the thing goes along smoothly.

I am quite certain that there are hindrances in the Christian's history, things that hinder our getting on in the things of God. There is a multitude that you have never sent away, but be sure of it, if you are to be out-and-out for Christ, you must take it into the Lord's presence, wrap it up into a bundle, and write across it "dismissed."

God said to Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house." He did not do it. You notice it is, "the Lord had said unto Abram." It is in the past. Not till some time after did he send away his multitude. What was it? His relatives. Lot was a hanger-on. We see afterwards what he was, he was looking for the well-watered plains of Sodom. Abraham subsequently sent Lot away, and then the Lord said unto him, "Lift up now thine eyes . . . . northward and southward, and eastward, and westward, for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever." Then he was to walk through the land, to possess it. He was losing blessing, because he had not carried out the three-fold commandment, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house."

Beloved friends, I beseech you to let His blessed eye pass over you. In secret let Him point out what that multitude is, and have done with it. If ever there was a day when we needed to be for Christ, it is now. Our time is brief. The great delay, the great hindrance to souls getting on, is that God puts His finger on certain things, and we do not refuse them.

Now there is a negative and a positive action here. First, they dismiss the multitude, and then

"THEY TOOK HIM EVEN AS HE WAS IN THE SHIP."

How was He in this world? Born in Bethlehem's manger, a homeless wanderer, rejected from the very outset. They identify themselves with Christ, "they took him even as he was."

Israel did not take the manna as it was in Numbers 11. They "ground it in mills or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it," It is an awful chapter, a chapter of apostasy, in which they say, "make us a captain." They did not take the manna as it was. If we look around Christendom today, is it a rejected, crucified Christ that meets our eye in those who profess His name? I know He is the eternal God, but I am speaking now of His blessed path of discipleship. He went through this world, and He is my pattern. He was wholly for God.

Well, they are crossing over to the other side, and they meet with a twofold opposition, wind and waves. Wind is an emblem of Satan's power. Oh! you say, you told us the other day it was a type of the Spirit. So it is, my friends, and of Satan too. There are two hidden powers at work in this world, the Holy Ghost, and Satan — the prince of the power of the air. The wind is a type of them both. If there were no wind there would be no waves. The waves are people. It is the wind that puts the waves in motion, the devil behind the scenes, who sets up human opposition to that company, who are travelling to the other side.

Depend upon it, if we want to go on smoothly and easily the devil will let us alone. If you want a kid-glove easy-going Christianity, it is there for you to have. But if you are to be with Christ, you will meet with wind and waves. What do we know of waves and storms and clouds?

There were other little ships. You can go in them if you like, but we never hear of them again. The storm comes and they are gone. Very likely they made for the shore. You may be in one of them if you please. If you travel with Christ you must expect opposition. "All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." It will not be the inquisition or the rack, but it will be the go-by, and the opposition of even worldly believers.

I ask you, is it your desire and mine to be in that ship where Christ is? There is a beautiful touch just here,

"HE . . . . WAS ASLEEP ON A PILLOW."

This is the only gospel that mentions it. Mark is the gospel of the Servant. Did He push that pillow away? No. There was no monasticism, no asceticism in Him, He accepts the Father's provision, and goes to sleep in the storm. "Carest thou not that we perish?" they say. Oh! that miserable " we." His "us" took them in, their "we" left Him out. Perish with Christ on board! It only wants to be thought of for a minute. What ought Peter to have done? To have put his head on His bosom, and gone to sleep too. He did afterwards go to sleep in a storm. He slept between four quaternions of soldiers. He had learnt his lesson then, he could sleep in the storm at last. But now the end is reached, they get to the other side. And so shall we presently:-

"Safe to the land, safe to the land,

The end is this;

And then with Him go hand in hand

Far into bliss."

But, if there is one thing we shall regret, it will be that we did not go through the storms better. "He rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." He is the only One who can meet the power of Satan.

First we get the path itself — Christ's — then the opposition and the resources. The opposition is the wind and waves — the resources, "what manner of man is this?" Oh! how brief our moment here! Shall we trifle with it? May God give certainty and definiteness to our very desires, and may they be — Christ.

Now we will turn to Luke 14: 26. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Now, if the Lord had put in, cannot be a Christian, or cannot be a believer, or cannot be saved, beloved friends, who would get the blessing? But no. In Luke 14 there are two "F's," feasting and following. "A certain man made a great supper and bade many." He brings them there to feast. They feed till they are satisfied. Now, they come out to follow. We go in to feast, and come out to follow. In the feast, He meets all the cost. He provides everything. They have only to come, and partake of what He provides. But, what now? "There went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them, If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

There are seven things here, ending with "His own life also." That is the last thing that we bid good-bye to. Unless we hate these seven things, hate their influence, "he cannot be my disciple." That is, we do not suffer them to hinder discipleship.

You remember the man who said, "Suffer me first to go and bury my father." The Lord said to him, "Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God." As much as to say, If you are a disciple, He must be first. "Suffer me first to go and bury my father." No, that cannot be, for though we know that God has instituted all these relationships, and blessed relationships they are, yet the moment you enter into the path of following Christ, He says, I must be first. There are two things that make up discipleship,

BUILDING AND FIGHTING,

the sword and the trowel, only He puts the trowel first. "Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost?" Building the tower, I believe, is that secret work of God that goes on in your own soul, by which you are built up. You see, he sits down to count the cost. He estimated it. In the case of salvation, it cost Christ everything and me nothing, but to be a disciple, I have to sit down and count the cost.

It is the first of all necessities to be alone with God. We began to build when we were first saved. How much time do we spend in prayer and over the word, and do we tell Him everything? "This man began to build." We were not occupied with the building, but people looked on, and they saw the earnestness and bent of our souls. "This man began to build." Is it so today? Is there the same earnestness, the same searching of the scriptures as when we first knew Him? We have to build ourselves up in our most holy faith. It is what goes on between God and our souls in secret, that enables us to resist the devil.

If you are busy outside and slothful inside you will make shipwreck. You keep a feast without for other people, but you are starving within, Do not live on public meetings and addresses and fail to get alone with God, or you will become inflated and think you have things, that you have never really made your own before God. Some have more time than others I know, but depend upon it, we have all the time we want. If we want to do a thing, we do it. Perhaps it is 25 years ago since you began, perhaps more, well, go on. Barnabas had a bright start, he gave up everything for, Christ, did he sustain it, was he able to finish? "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off." Time tests us as Christians. It is not the first blush. We get to know things, we acquire a knowledge of Christianity, we receive certain truths, but unless they are made good in the secret of our souls, that tower will stop building, and all who look on will mock, saying, "this man began to build and was not able to finish."

Barnabas appears to have made shipwreck, not of Christianity but of discipleship. He and Mark sailed to Cyprus. That was where Barnabas came from. It is most important that we should seek God in secret. These are shallow days. It is there you get fed, there you get help, there you have to do with God.

I thank God for public ministry, but if you are living on it, sooner or later you will be an ignoble shipwreck. "This man began to build." Every Christian ought to sit down and count the cost, and beloved friends, when you thus sit down do not leave out all the blessing and the infinite resources God has for you. I believe it is far easier to be out-and-out than to be half-hearted, because you find all His resources at your disposal. Christ satisfies your heart. You may, and you will find difficulties, it is impossible to get on without them, but if you get into the "counting" house and deliberate, saying, I shall have to break with this and that, and you begin to put down the expenses, remember on the other side you have the Father's love, the presence of Christ and the power of the Holy Ghost, and that will keep you going on, and you "will grow up unto him in all things." Well, that is the inside. The next thing is,

A KING GOING TO MAKE WAR.

This is active, not passive. We are all supposed to fight. Depend upon it, we are all expected to be doing two things — building and fighting. Nehemiah and his companions held the sword in one hand, and the trowel in the other. They fought, and built the wall. They did not take their clothes off. They went on building, and they were ready for the enemy when he came. Do not suppose you are not to fight. Each one has to face the enemy.

"See the mighty host advancing,

Satan leading on!"

If you are to go against that mighty host, just lift your eyes to the glory and say, Can I? Yes. "I can do all things through Christ who gives me power." Never surrender your position. Never. "Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." show me a person who feeds in secret, and I will show you a person who fights in this great battle against the powers of darkness. But here is one who having fought, after a time holds out a flag of truce. There is a compromise with the devil. He started well, but the battle was too long and too strong, and he gives in and desires conditions of peace. Oh! may this never be said of you and me. You will get to heaven? Oh! yes, you cannot get anywhere else, if you are a Christian. It is not a question of getting to heaven, it is a question of this little brief interval when we have to build and fight. I urge you to use the opportunities. It is a most wonderful moment, to seek to be here for Him, to be disciples. The Lord enable us to keep up the building with God, the secret communion, that hidden life within, and then to start to do battle with the foe. God will show us what we have to do. It is a fight. It may be long, longer perhaps than we expected, but victory is bound to crown the effort of the soul that goes on with God.

The Lord help us to be disciples. Not one of us would like to say, I am one. But is that what you are set for? Is that your object, that as He is for you in the Father's glory, you want to be for Him here? Then get to Him, get on your knees before Him, and then come out to be for Him here against all the power of the devil. The Lord grant that each one of us may do so, for His name's sake. Amen. Alfred Mace.

The Old Paths

The Old Paths

J. Müller.

"Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where [is] the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.  But they said, We will not walk [therein]." Jeremiah 6: 16

"Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set." Proverbs 22: 28

"But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned [them];" 2 Timothy 3: 14

We live in the distressing times of the last days, during which the power of godliness would be enfeebled to the profit of external forms (2 Tim 3: 1, 5).  The danger for us lies in doing everyone that which is right in our own eyes (Judges 21: 25), in neglecting the testimony that God has confided to His assembly on earth (1 Timothy 3: 15).

The lines that follow recall some of the things that we have learned, in order to exhort us to walk together in the old paths for the rest of our souls and for the joy of Christ.

1. THE AUTHORITY OF THE WORD

The complete expression of the thought of God, the inspired Scripture has an absolute authority.  The rule of our Christian life as of the life of the assembly, it is the word of the grace of God; by it God builds us up (Acts 20: 32).  Obedience to the Word is the sole road of blessing.  There does not exist a formal text to answer every one of our circumstannces;  but the thought of the Saviour is always known by the heart (Prov 2: 10) and the conscience, in submission to the Scriptures.

2. THE BELIEVER AND THE TWO NATURES

Every human being born into this world is a lost sinner (Romans 5: 12); the evil is neither in the material itself, nor in the human organism and its faculties.  But in a man, descendant of Adam, all is misery and filthiness (Isaiah 1: 6).  God declares that that state is hopeless (Isaiah 2: 22).

By faith in Christ and His work, the believer receives as a gift of God eternal life, which is Christ himself (1 John 5: 11).  Having put off the "old man", the believer puts on the "new man" (Ephesians 4: 23).  He becomes a child of God (John 1: 12), and is made part of the family

of God (1 John 3: 1).

From that point on, the human being of the believer (spirit, soul and body), with all its faculties, carries in him two natures, that which is "spirit" and that which is "flesh" (John 3: 6).  The coexistence of the two natures in the believer involves an internal conflict between the flesh and the Spirit (of which the body of the believer is the temple).

If he is negligent, he can produce the sad "works of the flesh", instead of offering to God "the fruit of the Spirit" (Galatians 5: 19, 22).

3. THE HOUSE OF GOD ON EARTH AND THE BODY OF CHRIST

Each believer (born anew and sealed with the Holy Spirit) is a living stone in the house of God on earth (1 Peter 2: 5), as well as a member of the body of Christ.  That vital link of the body of Christ can not be broken, or even altered.  On the other hand, the initial thought of God with regard to His house on the earth has been lost by the unfaithfulness of man.  Christendom has become a great house where only "the Lord knows them that are His" (2 Timothy 2: 19).

The first characteristic of the house of God, temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3: 16) is holiness (Psalm 93: 5; 1 Peter 1: 15, 16).  Now that which is holy does not do away with defilement, and defilement always profanes that which is holy (Haggai 2: 12, 13).  Leaven (figure of moral or doctrinal evil) corrupts the whole mass (1 Corinthians 5.6; Galatians 5: 9).

Thus all believers who desire to be faithful to their Lord are called to separate themselves for Him (2 Timothy 2: 19, 21, 22) and to go forth unto Him (Hebrews 13: 13).  Those who call upon Him out of a pure heart then find themselves together in order to realize the promise of the Lord to be in the midst of them (Matthew 18: 20).

4. THE LOCAL ASSEMBLY — ITS NATURE AND ITS RESPONSIBILITIES

In a locality, those Christians, separated from iniquity and gathered to the name of the Lord, are — if they realize the thought of God with regard to His assembly — the local expression of the assembly, the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12: 12, 27).  Such gatherings of believers are not independent one of the other: their unity is that of the body of Christ, represented locally by each one of them.

Christ is the source of all the activity of the saints, Who works through the Holy Spirit, for the edification of the body, the assembly.

All the believers, members one of the other, are exhorted to "keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4: 3).

The local assembly is the sphere of the collective life of the saints.

It is there where worship is rendered to the Father and to the Son, there where is presented the prayer of the assembly.  There also the spiritual nourishment of Christ for His body is received (through the gifts).  Any activity exercised in a spirit of independence vis-a-vis the assembly can be blessed in the long run, even if it appears useful for a time.

The assembly possesses furthermore the prerogative of binding or loosing on earth (Matthew 18: 18).  An assembly decision, taken in the name of the Lord, in one place, by those who are gathered around Him, is ratified in heaven;  all the gatherings who represent the body of Christ

recognise it.  This practical solidarity of the assemblies is an essential truth.  It flows from their very existence.

5. THE TWO MINISTRIES OF THE GOSPEL AND THE ASSEMBLY

During the present period of grace, God calls (out of the world) a people for His name (Acts 15: 14).  The thought of Christ is of realizing the "increase of His body to the edifying of itself in love" (Ephesians 4: 16.  To this end, He gives some evangelists for bringing souls to Him, joining them to His body which grows in number.  He gives also some pastors and teachers in the assembly, for the perfecting of the saints; the body thus grows in the knowledge of Christ.

The apostle Paul was a servant of the gospel and servant of the assembly (Colossians 1: 23, 25);  his two minitries were exercised in harmony in order to accomplish the design of God.  In turn, we are invited to cooperate together in the two aspects of this work, "according to the effectual working by which every part does its share" (Ephesians 4: 16).

6. DISCIPLINE IN THE ASSEMBLY

The responsibility of the assembly is exercised in the sphere that the Word calls the "within" (1 Corinthians 5: 12), there where effectively the rights of the Lord are recognised, that is to say at His table.   The solemn authority conferred by the Lord to His assembly on earth ought to be exercised with fear, in seeking the mind of the Lord, and the profound conviction of His approval.  The assembly is not infallible; a decision, even if taken by the many (2 Corinthians 2: 6), can be erroneous.  He who feels himself to be the object of an injustice ought to commit his cause with confidence to the Lord (Psalm 37: 5, 6).

Humility, patience and softness of spirit are necessary for all.  The Lord will not fail to intervene when our "obedience has been fulfilled" (2 Corinthians 10: 6).

An assembly that refuses to judge evil by discipline looses its character as an assembly of God.  On the other hand, grace alone wins souls and picks up the fallen;  and discipline (where the purpose is always the healing of plagues) is precisely the prerogative of love.

The Word invites us to moderation in our judgements.  With regard to believers, the term "evildoer" is only employed for one who is in a persistant state of grave evil, moral or doctrinal.  The table of demons (1 Corinthians 10: 21) characterizes idolatry and cannot be applied to any Christian gathering.  The expression is applied by the apostle (with regard to things sacrificed to idols) to illustrate a very important general principle: to participate in a table involves communion with all that is in fellowship with that table.  Thus, many pious Christians are connected ecclesiastically with errors, without presenting the character of evildoer, and even less participating in a table of demons.  Still, despite the vital link that unites us in Christ, we cannot have communion with them at the table of the Lord.

7. THE SUPPER AND TABLE OF THE LORD

The supper is the precious remembrance of the death of the Lord during His absence (1 Corinthians 11: 26).  Each Christian ought to respond from his heart to the touching invitation of His Saviour.  At the same time, to partake of the one broken bread (symbol of the death of Christ, Man, in His body given for us) expresses on the earth the unity of the body (spiritual) of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:17).

The supper (the memorial) and the table of the Lord (the communion) are distinguished in Scripture but are inseparably tied together.  To respond to the desire of the Lord (in participating of the supper) implies the recognition of His rights over our personal life (1 Corinthians 11: 27-32) and in the assembly (at the table of the Lord).

There, the believers are subject to the discipline of the assembly under its various forms;  they are in practise "submitting to one another in the fear of Christ" (Ephesians 5: 21).

8. THE TABLE OF THE LORD AND THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT

To take the supper of the Lord in being gathered at His table is a collective act done in the consciousness that the saints gathered in assembly are a local expression of the entire body of Christ.

The Lord invites us then to receive at His table every believer sound in his walk and in the doctrine of Christ.  He who desires to approach ought nevertheless to be conscious of the path to which he commits himself, as also of the character of the collective testimony.  He enters into the domain where the discipline of the assembly is exercised.

This same truth of the unity of the body involves other practical consequences:

(a) No Christian can participate in the supper on his individual responsibility alone in evaluating his own state.  He is not free to break bread at his own will in any Christian place of his choice.

One brother alone has no authority for deciding who can participate in the supper.

(b) To receive a believer occasionally at the table of the Lord cannot be done except with great prudence, under the profound conviction of engaging the conscience.  This ought never to be the deliberate sanction of a state of independence of one who desires to keep liberty to come and go.

(c)Finally, an assembly gathered to the name of the Lord may not allow that the supper be taken by a person who presents himself  on his testimony alone.  The letter of commendation (2 Corinthians 3: 1) is the scriptural means of maintaining in practise fellowship among the assemblies.

9. THE GOOD OF THE FLOCK OF THE LORD

In times of decline, separation from evil remains the divine principle of the unity realized around Christ.  Gates to the city of Jerusalem were missing in the times of Nehemiah, as were also watchmen on the walls (Isaiah 62: 6).  Applying all to us in realizing this separation with sorrow and humiliation, let us think of the good of the Lord's flock;  let us preach grace, which attaches our souls to Christ, and directs the desire of our hearts toward Him, in awaiting His coming.

10. AN APPEAL TO OUR HEARTS

Well-beloved brothers and sisters, the Lord has revealed to us His thought with regard to the heavenly destiny of His assembly, but also with regard to its walk and its testimony on earth.  To keep the good deposit of these truths (2 Timothy 1: 14) is a charge that we are together invited to maintain (Malachi 3: 14).  Contrary to the thought expressed in the time of the prophet, there is profit in walking mournfully before God, and it is not vain to serve Him in fearing Him.

Have we not abandoned our "first love" (Revelation 2: 4) for Christ?  He calls us to repent, to "strengthen that which remains" (Revelation 3: 2), in keeping His word and in not denying His name (Revelation 3: 8).

Together, then, may we hear His voice, with a tender heart (2 Chronicles 34: 27), with a broken and humble heart (Psalm 51: 17), but confident in the resources of His grace and the full sufficiency of His name that gathers.

Jean Muller

Translated from the French by Richard K Gorgas and taken from the January 1994 issue of "le messager Evangelique," a monthly publication now in its 135th year.  Used by the author's permission.

Psalm 23. A Paean of Praise

Psalm 23. A Paean of Praise.

(A Bible Reading with A J Pollock, Hamilton Smith, W Bramwell Dick, J T Mawson, & E D (Dennett?). Extracted from Simple Testimony Vol. 35, 1918-19, page 143 etc.)

Psalm 23: 1.

P. V. W. APPROPRIATELY the translators of our English Bible labelled this psalm "David's confidence in God." God's grace it was that relieved us of the burden of sin; it supports us all along our journey, and teaches us to walk in God's ways.

Q. How far is the language of the psalm that of the Lord Himself in His pathway here?

A. J. P. Surely as a dependent Man (though "God over all blessed for ever" at all times), the Lord could adopt the language of Psalm 23, save on the cross itself, when His language was, "Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" rather than "Thou art with Me." But in all His perfect life down here He could surely adopt the language of this psalm. Remember "He restoreth my soul" is in the sense that rest or food restores, and not the recovery from backsliding which, needless to say, could never apply to the Lord.

Q. How far may a Christian employ the psalm as expressing his own experience? Does it not rather belong to Israel?

P. V. W. This psalm cannot be sung by Israel until she is restored. As the redeemed of the Lord, we anticipate Israel in this song of praise to our Saviour.

A. J. P. It is one of the psalms that the Christian can quote entire as his experience, for it describes a Person, and personal relations with Him. Dispensations may change, but Jehovah is ever the same.

"The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want."

Q. Who is the Shepherd?

H. S. The Lord, Jehovah. And Jehovah of the Old Testament is Jesus of the New. He is the forsaken Man of Psalm 22, the accepted Man of Psalm 24.

W. B. D. Psalms 22, 23 and 24 form a group presenting Christ as the Good Shepherd in death, the Great Shepherd in resurrection, and the Chief Shepherd in glory.

A. J. P. The connection is obvious. Psalm 22 gives us the Saviour, in His past activity; Psalm 23, the Shepherd in His present activity; Psalm 24, the Sovereign in His future activity.

H. S. In Psalm 22 His strength is "dried up like a potsherd"; in Psalm 24 He is "strong and mighty." In the former He is "a worm and no man," in the latter, "the Lord of hosts" and "King of glory." This is the One who is "my Shepherd," One who has descended first into the lower parts of the earth," "who has ascended up far above all heavens that He might fill all things." He has filled every position in which a man can be found, from the utmost distance to the highest glory. He has trodden every step between these vast extremes. With such a Shepherd we need fear no evil, nor wonder at any blessing He bestows.

Q. What thought is conveyed to the mind by the word "shepherd"?

W. B. D. It suggests solicitude, strength tenderness and, in the case of our blessed Lord, before everything else, self-sacrifice. Can we conceive anything more beautiful than the words of Isaiah 40: 11: "He shall feed His flock like a shepherd: He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom"?

Q. There must, of course, be the appropriation of the Shepherd as one's own, must there not?

H. S. It is one thing to speak of the Lord as the Shepherd, quite another to say, He is my Shepherd. The first is a matter of knowledge; the last, a question of experience. "The Lord is my Shepherd" is the language of one who has proved the Lord in the varied circumstances of his pathway and gladly submits to His leading.

E. D. To say "my" Shepherd is the language of faith; the word "my" is therefore the doorway into the psalm.

H. S. All questions as to our standing before God must be presumed to have been settled. I could not say, "my Shepherd" if I had a lingering thought that after all He may be "my Judge." "My Saviour" must come before "my Shepherd."

J. T. M. This Psalm is full of wonderful blessings, and all depend upon the first sentence. Think of the immensity of the grace that is in it, the love that has made it possible for poor, despised people, thought nothing of in the world, to say: The Lord is my Shepherd, I belong to Him and He is mine.

Q. This implies, does it not, that we are everlastingly safe?

J. T. M. To be sure. If you can say "The Lord is my Shepherd," then, on the authority of His own Word you can say, "I am everlastingly safe." Do you not remember how He said, "My sheep hear My voice . . . and I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand." The hand that broke the power of death, and that annulled the mighty power of the devil, is the hand that holds your soul secure.

Q. But on our part there must be a cleaving to the Lord, must there not?

J. T. M. Yes. We are exhorted to cleave to the Lord with purpose of heart. But it does not say, Cleave to the Shepherd, or to the Saviour. We are to cleave to Him as our Lord, another character entirely.

W. B. D. But our safety is not the only thing. He who can truly say "The Lord is my Shepherd" is entitled to add "I shall not want." To question the latter would be to doubt the former, and to have fears as to the efficiency of the Shepherd.

H. S. If we look at this world with its many wants and failing supplies, it is no small thing to say "I shall not want." But with a great Shepherd we can say great things.

E. D. We shall not want, not because we are sheep, but because He is our Shepherd. This conclusion flows not from what we are to Him, but from what He is to us.

P. V. W. What He is, has done, and is now doing, gives perfect rest to those that know Him. He has charged Himself with all our cares and needs-we shall not want. Both vagabondage and want have ceased for those represented in this psalm, because they have returned to the Lord.

A. F. P. The emphasis is on Lord, who by virtue of the sufferings of Psalm 22 is qualified as Shepherd, having proved faithful unto death; and also because of who He is the Psalmist can triumphantly say, "I shall not want."

W. V. B. The Psalmist seems to give a graphic review, under the eye of the Shepherd, of his whole life in the wilderness pathway, commencing from the moment of his realization that since Jehovah was his Shepherd it was impossible for him to want.

Q. But the children of God are often in want. Take Paul, for instance. According to Philippians 4: 11, 12, was he not sometimes in want?

W. B. D. Certainly; otherwise how could he say, "I shall not want"? If a child is hungry, it comes to its mother to have its want supplied. It knows that its want will be met, so that it can say, "I shall not want." When Paul had wants he turned to the Shepherd, confident in His care, and as a result He could say, "I have all things and abound."

REMARK. What we lack sometimes may not be good for us to have. It says, "They that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing" (Psalm 34: 10).

A. J. P. Paul might be in want of food, raiment, shelter and liberty. But the Shepherd supplies what is necessary to keep the soul at rest in whatever circumstances the sheep may be. Whatever might be Paul's privations affecting the outer man, the inward man knew no lack.

P. V. W. If we think of our many needs, both in our testimony for God and for the present life, He is (and we must learn to make Him so) our competence for all the way. With Him filling the soul's vision it is easy to say, "I shall not want." With Him on board, our little boat cannot go down, no matter how big the waves. It is the sense of the Lord's love and presence that gives the holy boldness in our psalm's expression, "I shall not want."

LOVE'S SWEET COMPULSION.

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters."

Psalm 23: 2, 3.

A. F. P. A sheep only lies down when satisfied. When it says "He maketh me," the idea is not force, but the result of satisfaction in consequence of the Shepherd's care.

W. B. D. The sheep is not here brought to green pastures to have need supplied, but because it has eaten well. Every want has been met, and amid peace and plenty, under the protection of the Shepherd, it lies down.

P. V. W. What a lovely picture of repose in safety! We could not thus lie down if the enemy were at our gates, and we were in fear of what might befall us. The soul is in sweet contemplation of Him who, having defeated the enemy and borne sin's judgment, becomes now the object of the soul's affection. Now, in LOVE'S SWEET COMPULSION, He makes His obedient sheep to "lie down."

H. S. Not only does He provide for our temporal needs, but He satisfies us with spiritual blessings. He would set me free from earthly cares to fill my soul with heavenly joys. He not only brings His sheep to pastures of tender grass, but there He makes them lie down. No hungry sheep will lie down in green pastures; the hungry sheep will feed in the pastures of tender grass, but the satisfied sheep will lie down and rest. So our Shepherd not only provides us with spiritual nourishment, but He fills our souls with satisfaction and rest.

J. T. M. Then He leads us beside still waters. The words are better rendered "waters of quietness," signifying peace, no matter what the circumstances.

W. B. D. It is what another has termed "a scene of satisfied desire."

A. F. P. Not only does the Shepherd satisfy hunger, but thirst also, by these still waters, as He himself said, "He that cometh to Me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst."

J. T. M. You may have to go through scenes of trouble; the storm may rage about you, and you may have your share of trouble. But the quietest life in regard to these things is not always the most fruitful; that is, those who have the least trouble in this world do not always yield the most glory to God.

Q. But what about the waters of quietness? How can we talk about waters of quietness if a storm is raging about us?

J. T. M. We have a lovely illustration of it in the case of the sudden storm on the Galilean Sea, when

"All but One were sore afraid

Of sinking in the deep

His head was on a pillow laid,

And He was fast asleep."

But why did not the disciples lie down beside Him? They would have been just as safe as they were when the great calm, at His bidding, stretched itself upon the waters. It does not matter what our circumstances are. If we can say, "The Lord is my Shepherd," we can have quietness and peace like that.

P. V. W. Everlasting goodness takes us by the hand and leads us beside the still waters. These waters were not always quiet, they were not so in the former psalm, but now He has stilled them for His own beloved sheep. When the waters came in unto His soul at the cross (Psalm 69: 1) they were a mighty flood. But these waterfloods are passed; Christ has stilled them; He has made them "still waters" for us.

H. S. Our Shepherd ministers refreshment to our souls. He leads us not by running streams that dry up, but the deep still waters of the well. We sometimes sing:

Is the wilderness before thee,

Desert lands where drought abides?

Heavenly springs shall there restore thee

Fresh from God's exhaustless tides.

Like Israel, who forsook "the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that could hold no water," we too often seek satisfaction in earthly things, only to find that all earthly springs run dry. If only we could trust the Lord, not only to save our souls, but to satisfy our hearts, He would lead us into the green pastures that never wither, and beside the still waters that never run dry.

"He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake."

P. V. W. This is not a once accomplished work, never to be repeated, but a present ministry of our Lord toward us. It is the expression of His care and thoughtful provision for every step of our journey through the world. "He restoreth" and "He leadeth."

W. V. B. The Shepherd takes the direction of the sheep entirely under His own supervision, conducts it the whole length of the pathway; nothing can harm it, for He is there. It is "He" and "me" all the way through. How touching are these expressions: "He maketh me," "He leadeth me."

Q. What is the thought of restoration in verse 3?

J. T. M. When it says "He restoreth my soul" it means, He invigorates my soul. He gives me spiritual tonics. They are not tonics that brighten you up for a few hours and then leave you more depressed than you were before. When the Lord invigorates us He makes us strong for that which is before us.

A. F. P. The sustainment is constant, giving strength to walk in the paths of righteousness.

Q. There is also the thought of restoration from wanderings, is there not?

W. B. D. If wearied, He lifts us up; if downcast, He encourages us; if wandering, He brings us back.

H. S. Alas! we often turn aside. And after a season of deepest spiritual blessing we are in the greatest danger. In Matthew 26 we find priests and scribes plotting to kill Jesus. But in the upper room all is quietness and peace. The Lord has been leading His poor weak and weary sheep into green pastures and beside still waters, and they close that time of sweet fellowship by singing a hymn. But the Lord warns them that that same night all would be offended because of Him, and every one would be scattered. Singing a hymn in His company one hour; offended and scattered the next. But if they wander, He restores. He restored Peter. How often we are like Him, and like Naomi who said, "I went out," but had to add, "The Lord hath brought me home again."

W. B. D. He who in verse 2 leads us beside still waters, in verse 3 leads us in paths of righteousness. Having led us in, He leads us out, that, satisfied with His provision, refreshed with His blessing, encouraged of Himself, we may walk here to His praise and glory.

Q. What is meant by paths of righteousness?

J. T. M. It was once true that all we like sheep turned every one to his own way. Then our straying feet trod the paths of unrighteousness. But now we have heard the Shepherd's voice, and as we follow Him obediently and adoringly we are walking in the paths of righteousness, for we are taking His way, not our own.

REMARK. He leads us beside the still waters for our sake, that we may be refreshed. But He leads us in the paths of righteousness for His Name's sake, that He may be glorified.

H. S. He leads us so to walk as to glorify His Name. That Name stands for all that is holy. He leads in paths that accord with His Name.

J. T. M. He does it; but He does not drive or drag, He leads. I watched a lady teaching her little boy of fifteen months to walk. She did not make him take long strides nor make him go fast. She shortened her steps to his, and went the pace that he could manage, and she knew it exactly. As I watched her, this verse came to my mind. That is how the Lord leads us. We may trust Him altogether, all the time, and for everything, and He will lead us in right paths for His Name's sake.

COMPANY IN THE VALLEY.

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me."

Psalm 23: 4.

W. B. D. This verse is full of cheer and inspiration. If it is a "valley," it means that there is something, or some place, above and beyond. If we "walk through," it indicates that we shal1 certainly emerge. And if there is a "shadow," it shows that the light of the scene beyond the valley is illuminating the darkness, cheering and beckoning us onward and forward.

Q. What is meant by the valley of the shadow of death?

A. F. P. It refers, I judge, to this world, where death abounds.

A. J. P. We can understand how, when David was being hunted from one place to another, that his experiences, never knowing when the bolt of death would reach him, would lead to such an expression. The valley of the shadow of death refers to the whole of our life down here. But the believer of this Christian dispensation can say in triumph, "Death is ours."

J. T. M. This world is just the sepulchre of Jesus, and the more faithful we are to the Lord, the more the world will be to us the valley of the shadow of death. The shadow of His death lies on the fairest prospects that present themselves to us here.

REMARK. In another sense, the valley of the shadow of death is the path we have to tread when death is actually in view, and perhaps even the path through death itself.

H. S. Speaking of it thus, the paths of righteousness may lead into the valley of the shadow of death. It was so with the martyrs. They suffered death rather than sin. But there is no need to fear.

Q. What is the particular "evil" referred to in this verse?

A. J. P. "I will fear no evil" simply means, "I will not fear evil." Evil, or harm, of any kind.

H. S. Four reasons are given in this verse why we need not be afraid.

(1) We are only "WALKING THROUGH" the valley. We do not fear when we enter a tunnel because we believe we are going through it, and that soon we shall reach the bright sunshine on the other side of it.

(2) It is only the valley of death's "SHADOW." When the Good Shepherd took His lonely way down into the dark valley it was to encounter the "substance" of death in all its terror, as the wages of sin. If the believer is called to go through the valley, it is but the "shadow" that he has to meet.

P. V. W. A shadow may frighten, but it cannot harm.

H. S. Sheep are poor timid things and easily frightened, even by shadows. We come now to another thing to silence our fears.

(3) If we pass the way of the valley we have COMPANY, and such company-the One who has already been through death's raging flood journeys with us. Well may we say, "I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me."

Q. Do we not find a striking illustration of this in the case of the three Hebrew youths in Babylon?

H. S. Yes: the path of righteousness led Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego into the valley of death, but the flames that encompassed them only unloosed their bonds and put them in company with the Son of God, according to the word that says: "When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned" (Isaiah 43: 2).

Q. What is the fourth reason given why we need fear no evil?

H. S. (4) Because of the Shepherd's rod and staff. The Psalmist says: "Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me."

J. T. M. When the Psalmist comes to the valley of the shadow of death, he changes the pronoun. Up to this point he has been speaking about the Lord; now he speaks to Him, showing how near the Shepherd is to the sheep. He says "Thou."

Q. What is the difference between the rod and the staff?

W. B. D. The rod may speak of power (compare Ex. 7: 10-12; Ex. 17: 5, etc.), or, as is generally supposed, of correction, while the staff is for support. But whether His power, His correction, or His support, all are for our "comfort" in difficult circumstances.

A. F. P. I have thought that the rod with its crook would be used by the Shepherd to help the sheep out of a ditch back into the path, or to restrain it from straying into danger. The Shepherd would use the staff to drive off savage beasts. In Palestine they were in the habit of carrying a club for this purpose. In other words, what comforts the one who has to pass through the valley is the Shepherd's power to direct and to protect.

P. V. W. All that the rod in the hand of Moses meant to the people of Israel (see Ex. 14: 16; Ex. 17: 5) Christ Jesus is to us now, He who opened the sea for our deliverance from a worse bondage than Israel's. The staff occupies a large place in Scripture, and is a symbol of support and strength. For us, Christ is the reality of what the staff implies, to sustain the Christian through this life. Every other staff, every other confidence fails. Christ is the true Priest-not encompassed with infirmities as Aaron-Who can carry His people through the whole journey to the end. He is God's wisdom and resource for us, in all circumstances and in all things.

THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over."

Psalm 23: 5.

Q. How does the Lord prepare a table for us?

A. J. P. The allusion is to the work of the Shepherd in finding out suitable pasture, and taking care that the sheep are secure from attack by serpents and wild beasts, the natural enemies of the flock. Surely it refers to the ministry of the Lord to His people, giving them the sense of His love and care so that it should be as a feast to their souls, and that in a hostile world like this.

P. V. W. The table is the place where the children sit down in their Father's presence and company to enjoy His prepared bounties.

W. B. D. There is not only the Shepherd's abundant provision for His own, but His VINDICATION of them. Surrounded by enemies who watch in order to see what it costs to be a Christian, and by reproaching us (if we give them cause) to malign our precious Lord, He anoints our head with oil, causing us ever to rejoice; and He makes our cup of blessing always to overflow.

A. F. P. The table prepared in the presence of enemies seems to indicate that He has made communion possible in spite of all the powers of evil. His being superior to all enemies is, I think, emphasized rather than the thought of the table.

H. S. Many of the sheep may never have to take the way of the valley, but even so, they will have enemies to face, and in the presence of the enemy the Lord can uphold His people. We have a Shepherd who can provide for, and sustain, His sheep in spite of all that man can do.

Q. What thought is conveyed to the mind by the anointing of the head with oil?

A. F. P. It suggests friendship, for did not Christ complain that Simon did not show this mark of friendship to him? (Luke 7: 46). The oil may well remind us that only the Spirit of God can make such friendship a possibility. The result is that the soul is more than satisfied, and there is the overflow.

W. B. D. For a practical illustration of this in real life, read Philippians 4. Then let us each look in the mirror and ask if there we see a present-day sample of it.

J. T. M. The Lord, spreading a table for us, makes us to feast. Then comes "the oil of gladness" that makes the face shine, joy. Then you have the overflowing cup.

A. F. P. The cup, I judge, simply indicates the soul's capacity, but surely the fullness to Over-flowing is the thought brought before us rather than the cup itself. The blessing is more than the soul can contain and runs over in worship to God, and in telling of His grace out of a full heart to those around.

"Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (v. 6).

H. S. With such a Shepherd, what other conclusion can we reach? The Lord goes before, the sheep follow after, and goodness and mercy bring up the rear. How blessed that goodness and mercy should follow behind, just where they are wanted, for there are weak, and sick, and lame sheep, which lag behind and follow afar off. Goodness and mercy will pick them up. If we cannot count upon the tender mercies of one another, this at least we know, the goodness and mercy of the Lord will follow us all the days of our life.

A. F. P. This last verse is the language of a heart fully persuaded of the never-failing supply of God's goodness and mercy every step of earth's journey, and of glory in the life to come.

Q. What is meant by "the house of the Lord"?

P. V. W. No doubt the Psalmist was thinking of an earthly kingdom and city, with God's dwelling-place and throne in the midst thereof out of which should proceed law and authority, and light and blessing for all the earth. But the hope of the Christian is above even this glory and blessedness.

REMARK. For the Christian, "the house of the Lord" is the Father's house.

J. T. M. The Psalm that begins with "The Lord is my Shepherd" would not be complete if it did not close with "I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." The one is the consequence of the other; they go together; they are twin statements.

W. B. D. Faith always looks forward, and we have THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH over difficulties without and failure within, as the believer exclaims, "I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever." HALLELUJAH!

W. V. B. What a Companion is Jesus! Food for my heart; Refreshment for my spirit; Restorer of my soul when I have wandered in a by-path; with me through the valley of the shadow of death; filling my cup to overflowing; His goodness and mercy following me every day, and I am going to dwell throughout all eternity with Him. HALLELUJAH!

H. S. This is the glorious end of a great beginning. For what can be greater, in this poor world, than to go through it with the Lord Himself for your Shepherd? And if He is indeed my Shepherd, it must follow that not only will He lead me through this wilderness, but will bring me at last into the glory where He Himself has gone.

The Holy Scriptures and Creation

The Holy Scriptures and Creation.

L. Gaussen.

(Extracted from Scripture Truth Vol 3, 1911, page 243-4.)

There is no physical error in the Word of God.... Examine all the false theologies of the ancients and moderns; read in Homer, or in Hesiod, the religious codes of the Greeks; study those of the Buddhists, those of the Brahmans, those of the Mohammedans; you will not only find in them repulsive systems on the subject of the Godhead, but you will meet with the grossest errors in the material world. You will be revolted with their theology, no doubt; but their natural philosophy and their astronomy also, ever allied to their religion, will be found to rest on the most absurd notions. Read, further, the philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity - Aristotle, Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero. How many expressions of opinion will you not find there, any single one of which would be enough to compromise all our doctrines of inspiration if it could be met with in any book of Holy Scripture. Read Mohammed's Koran, making mountains to be created "to prevent the earth from moving, and to hold it fast as if with anchors and cables." Read even the cosmogony of Buffon, or some of Voltaire's sneers on the doctrine of a deluge, or on the fossils of a primitive world. What might we not have been entitled to say of the Scriptures had they expressed themselves on the phenomena of nature as these have been spoken of by all the ancient sages? Had they referred all to four elements, as people did for so long a period? Had they said the stars were of crystal, as did Philolaus of Crotona? And had they, like Empedocles, lighted up the two hemispheres of our world with two suns? Had they taught, like Leucippus, that the fixed stars, set ablaze by the swiftness of their diurnal movement round the earth, feed the sun with their fires? Had they thought, like Philolaus, that the sun has only a borrowed light, and is only a mirror, which receives and sends down to us the light of the celestial spheres? Had they, like Anaxagoras, conceived it to be a mass of iron, and the earth to be a mountain whose roots stretch infinitely downward? Had they imagined the heaven to be a solid sphere to which the fixed stars are attached, as was done by Aristotle and almost all the ancients?

Open now the Bible. Study its fifty sacred authors, from that wonderful Moses, who held the pen in the wilderness four hundred years before the war of Troy, down to the fisherman son of Zebedee, who wrote fifteen hundred years afterwards in Ephesus and in Patmos. Open the Bible and try if you can to find anything of this sort.

No! None of those blunders which the science of every successive age discovers in the books of those that preceded it. None of those absurdities, above all, which modern astronomy points out, in such numbers, in the writing of the ancients, in their sacred codes, in their systems of philosophy, and in the finest pages even of the Fathers of the church. No such errors can be found in any of our sacred books. Nothing there will ever contradict what, after so many ages, the investigations of the learned world have been able to reveal to us of what is certain in regard to the state of our globe or of that of the heavens.

Carefully peruse our Scriptures from one end to the other in search of such blemishes there; and, while engaged in this research, remember that it is a book which speaks of everything, which describes nature, which proclaims its grandeur, which tells the story of its creation, which informs us of the structure of the heavens, of the creation of light, of the waters, of the atmosphere, of the mountains, of animals and of plants. It is a book that tells us of the first revolutions of the world, and foretells us also of the last; a book that relates them in circumstantial narrative, exalts them in sublime poesy and chants them in strains of fervent psalmody. It is a book replete with the glow of oriental rapture, elevation, variety, and boldness. It is a book which speaks of the earth and things visible, at the same time that it speaks of the celestial world and of things invisible. It is a book to which nearly fifty writers of every degree of mental cultivation, of every rank, of every condition, and separated by fifteen hundred years from each other, have successively put their hands. . . . Well, then, search through these fifty authors, search through these sixty-six books, search through these 1189 chapters and these 31,173 verses. Search for one single of these thousands of errors with which ancient and modern books abound when they speak either of the heavens or of the earth, or of their revolutions, or of their elements; search, but you will search in vain.

(L. Gaussen.)

[The above extract from a volume entitled "Theopneustia. The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures." By L. Gaussen may well lead every reader to purchase the book for himself. He will find in it rare treasure in a day when the inspiration of every scripture is so flippantly denied. (J. Wilson Smith.)]

Assembly Order

Assembly Order

A Bible Reading — 1 Cor. 12: 18-27.

Things New and Old, Volume One 1933

This paper is the substance of a reading at a Conference In Toronto, July, 1900 (now over thirty-two years ago). Messrs. S Ridout, B C Greenman, Enefer, and A E Booth were the chief speakers. The first three are with us no longer; they have been called Home. Their voices we shall hear no more in Bible readings. The reading had in view the correction of certain views and practices in the assemblies of an independent character. The reading was published in pamphlet form (now out of print) and is again printed that all our readers may benefit by it and consider afresh the truths contained therein. Guides may pass away, but Christ our Lord and the Truth ever abide. "Remember them that had the rule (guides) over you, men that spake unto you the word of God and considering the manner of their life, imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yea and forever." (Heb. 13: 7-8. R.V.)

B.C.Greenman.— 1 Cor. 12: 18-27. It is very important in reading a scripture like this to recognize the twofold application of it; that is, if we rejoice, as we do, in our blessed privilege as members of the body of Christ, we must also recognize the same unity as to the visible local representations of the body of Christ as there is between the individual members of it. Hence Paul says: "Now ye are the body of Christ," addressing the Corinthians, "and members in particular." He addresses them as though there were no other Christians in the world, and says: "Ye are the body of Christ." Would that each child of God would get into his soul the blessed sense of this — a member of that body, of which Christ is the Head, in which the Holy Spirit dwells. What honor that places upon us. A little assembly might say that we are set in this world to be a perfect representation of what the body of Christ is; a body ruled by the Head, and indwelt, every member of it, by the same Holy Spirit. We could not possibly think of a body in which the parts of it were at variance with each other except the head is wrong The Head being right all the members of the body are supposed to be governed by that Head and energized by the Spirit that dwells throughout it. That which has caused all the sad denial of this, practically and other wise, is a lack of knowledge as to the way this works practically. So, neglect in getting a letter of commendation shows ignorance or indifference. When leaving home, with the same care as a man gets his railroad ticket, he should get his letter of commendation from his brethren. He should not leave the place that he goes from without a letter of credit to the meeting that he goes to, and if we expect a fellowship worth anything to us, it should be a fellowship that we seek to maintain in all its integrity; and if we value it in that way, we expect others to value it likewise; because a thing that puts down all fences — a field that has no fence around it, is soon a common; and has nothing for anybody.

A.E.Booth.— I will read a verse giving the Church as the house. 1 Tim. 3:15.

B.C.G.— The thought added to the previous one is, that there the Church was presented as the body of Christ, and that truth must be maintained by all of us. In this, the Church is the House of God and we must maintain an order suitable to Him that dwells there.

S.Ridout.— Eph. 4: 2-4. That is, the unity of the Spirit is the unity which we are to keep in the bond of peace. There is a unity of the body, and the order of the house; and the power which is to make practical the unity of the body and the order of the house, is the unity of the Spirit. One thought; one mind; one principle; one truth; one government — one control throughout the body and throughout the house. The unity of the Spirit is a different thing from the unity of the body or the order of the house, in this that it gives us the vital principle in which we are to live and act as members of the body and as being in the house. As the body gives us the activities and ministries of the Church, so the house gives us the order and the government of the Church, but the unity of the Spirit gives us the oneness in ministry and the oneness in government. Whether we look at the Church as the body or the house, there is the oneness of the Spirit which we are to keep in the bond of peace. This requires lowliness, meekness, forbearance, but at the same time it must express itself identically wherever the house is or wherever the body is. That is a most important principle. The unity of the body always exists, but if we are practically to be a testimony to it there must be the endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit.

B.C.G.— As an illustration of what our brother has been presenting, there are two species of things in contrast with it which are found in Christendom. The one is the thought of union, which is not unity, which puts contradictory things together and just glosses that over with a union, the elements of which are not put together by the Spirit of God. That is man's substitute for a divine truth. If I cut off all the fingers of my hand and tie them together, that would be a union but it would not be a unity. The fingers would be together, but they are not together as united, running to the centre of the palm of the hand. If I took a piece off the tips of the taller ones, making them all of the same size, that would be another phase of things — uniformity. The Word of God does not present either of those things; it presents unity. There are differences of attainment; differences as to growth, but there is a unity which God forms, and He forms it with relation to Christ the Head, so that now, as God has given us a hand we have not any of us to make a hand; we have to keep one. God has given us the various parts of our bodies to maintain intact, and so He has formed the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit, and it is our business to keep the unity of the Spirit.

S.R.— As illustrating that in a very simple way: here we are together this morning from all parts, and soon we will have to be separated, bodily. We will suppose that we were to break bread this morning, or, what is the same thing, take some action as gathered to our Lord. Let us notice it — we are always at the Lord's table; not simply on Lord's day morning, but we keep the Passover seven days. That is, there is no time when we are not at the Lord's table. Our whole life is at the Lord's table, just as Mephibosheth was always at the king's table. Not that he was eating all the time, but his position was that he was at the king's table. Now, someone seeks, we will say, to minister, and it is not the truth of God; it is not for edification; then, of course, it fails to edify us as gathered here. I judge that we would say that ministry was more particularly connected with the body, just as government is more particularly connected with the house. You would say that if one's ministry is not edifying or is not true, he would come under the government of the house — that is, we would have to deal with him. Would we not, if some one came here and taught Unitarianism or something that denied Christ, would we not arise at once and put him from our midst? We would not go on with it at all. That is the order of the house, of course. If a person applied for fellowship who was not in a right state or held false doctrine or anything of that sort, we would not receive him. That is connected with our responsibility as members of the one body and as members of the house.

But now we separate. Have those principles changed in the least? Some of us go to western Ontario; some of us into the States; some of us to Nova Scotia, and all that. There is the same precious gospel; the same kind of ministry; the same application for fellowship. What would you do in any one place differently from what we have done as gathered together? Would not our act be identically the same if it were done in some local assembly as if it were done in this large and representative gathering? There is the application of the unity of the Spirit — the truth of the unity of the Spirit to the saints as gathered in various places; and if we are to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, it must be acting separately just as we would act were we all together and the act of the separate assembly representing the action of the Church of God — the action of the House of God, just as much as if we were all together in one large united meeting. There is no separation; in other words it is identical.

B.C.G.— The first is a thought which may be new to some — "we are always at the Lord's table" — are never seen distinct and severed from it. We are not always in the act of taking the bread and wine, but you see we, are identified with that. Read 1 Cor. 10, beginning at the seventeenth verse — "For we being many are one bread and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread. Behold Israel after the flesh: Are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar? What say I then? that the idol is anything or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is anything? But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partakers of the Lords' table, and of the table of devils." So he puts it upon them seriously: How can people who are partakers of the Lord's table — that is their every-day character — how can they rally themselves with what is the most distinct denial of that

S.R.— We ought to have it stamped upon us; we are people in this world who are identified with His name and His table.

Ques.— How can that be carried out practically, that we are always at the Lord's table?

B.C.G.— Having the sense upon us that we are associated with Him in that fellowship which is expressed at the Lord's table.

W.McC. — And in our practices during the week or any of the intervals between the time that we would be sitting at the Lord's table, actually partaking of the loaf and the cup, our associations and all should be consistent with the moral significance of the feast that we partake of, we should not be playing fast and loose with things as we see some. The authority of His name must be maintained there; so, as those who love the Lord Jesus Christ, we are bound to refuse any who are careless. We are the stewards of the Lord's table; we are to keep His name clear in relation to what is associated with it. So the very name, Lord's table, puts it upon us that we cannot be indifferent to the Lord's holy claim to it.

G.M.— To illustrate what our brother R.— said: A few weeks ago, I was very deeply and forcibly impressed, when I was at a place, that whatever I was doing there, though as an individual, I was doing for all, and it was not a question of any personal estimation of persons or liberty that I could have myself, but it was a question of all — the whole body.

A.E.B.— That is important. It would be nice if all the laborers would remember that.

S.R.— Acting not as individuals, but for all. That what was sought to be done was to carry out the Lord's interests for all His people, and that nothing inconsistent with that should be done.

A.E.B.— I wish all the laborers would just keep that same thought before them. In all our service, that we are to act for the whole, and especially where little gatherings are formed and the Lord's table is spread.

S.R.— Just there is a point of importance; the formation of new gatherings. It is a very important thing that new gatherings should be formed, but the table should not be spread in any place without, if possible, the practical fellowship of some gathering near by — at any rate, with the written fellowship. Let it be known that the saints are contemplating breaking bread, and seeking the fellowship of their brethren. I think some of the brethren here could give very interesting illustrations of how the neglect of that has worked harm, and how the observance of that principle has been for blessing.

B.C.G.— It would be just as imperative — it is just the same thing — supposing there were two or three suburban meetings here, that the same fellowship should be between them as if it were two or three meetings here in the city. The point is to recognize fellowship with each other, and if these little gatherings are formed, they should be formed in relation to those which already exist.

To follow up what we have been saying; when persons would ask us for some definite scripture with reference to it, I would like to call attention to two or three passages to show that there was not a diverse order as to assemblies in the earlier days, and there should be no more now.

1 Cor. 7: 17. Without looking at what was in the beginning, it says in the last part of the verse, "And so ordain I in all churches." That is, what the apostle insisted upon there he insisted upon everywhere. The arrangement of things was universal. He had not one order for Corinth and another for Ephesus. God's order he claimed was divine authority.

S.R.— Just with your finger on that verse, I would like to quote what has been said, "What has Ephesus to do with evil at Corinth?" How absolutely contrary to the word of God such an expression as that would be, which has been used and maintained as a principle of independency.

B.C.G.— The sixteenth verse of the eleventh chapter is in the same line. And this is the epistle of order in the house of God. This is what might be deemed an unimportant 'matter, but the apostle insisted upon it here, (and he would if he were here now), "If any man seem to contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God." That is, he could not yield to any man who wanted to set aside God's order.

W.McC.— Let us remember in studying first Corinthians that it was not confined in its address to the church of God in Corinth, but to "all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours"; so that its application is as much for us in the last days and last hours, and for every saint of God, as it was for them. That was a special remark that widened out to all; while we know that all Scripture is of universal application, in another way this has a special stamp upon it.

A.E.B.— "If any one think to be contentious, we have no such custom," — that is, we the laborers, nor the assemblies of God. There is perfect unity amongst the laborers, and perfect unity amongst all the gatherings. That is a very important thing.

B.C.G.— Here he has spent half a chapter upon such an unimportant matter, seemingly, as to how brethren should be distinct from sisters in the Church of God. But some have said that Paul says, if any one objects to that, he does not hold to this. If any one objects, we have no such custom — we yield. That is not true in the least. If any one is objecting and is contentious, why he is rejecting the universal custom of the laborers, of course, and the universal custom of the assemblies of God.

F.J.E.— That should be well taken notice of, because there has been a great misconception about that verse. It has often been quoted the way you have put it with reference to what you have stated just now in connection with the sisters.

S.R.— The apostle says in another place, "If any man will be ignorant, let him he ignorant." Such an one is still ignorant, that is all.

B.C.G.— Chapter 14, verse 33 is on the same line; and we know that is the chapter that regulates the ministry of the Church when it comes together. It is a sample case. After giving all these directions, he says the reason is, "For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace." In all the churches it is the same. How could the apostle say this — how could he vouch for the various gatherings if this were not so? It is not but that gatherings may differ in their spiritual condition, but there was but one order maintained. There was but one centre; but one order of the assemblies coming together. So he can speak for all the assemblies of the saints. Now this is specially to be noticed, for I was challenged more than once across the sea, and have been this side, as to this expression which has been used, as to the "Circle of Fellowship." A person said to me: I do not agree with what some of you American brethren say as to the Circle of Fellowship. Well, I said, if you can give us a better name to express a divine fact, we will be glad for any good name, because we know the name is but human but the thing is divine, and we do not want you, in objecting to the name, to do away with the thing. Here is a circle of fellowship — here is an order that the apostle can vouch for — that if you leave Corinth and go to Ephesus you will find it there too. So we have got to look into it to see what this order is. If we go to Ephesus, what ought we to do? We bear a letter from Corinth, we go to the same fellowship in Ephesus that we leave in Corinth; we are in the fellowship wherever it may be. Some people, for convenience or other reasons, do not put in their claim elsewhere, and they say they do not belong there for the time. That is not true. The day they land at the other place they belong there.

S.R.— Yes, and are under the discipline of that place — of the saints as gathered there. We, for instance, have been under the discipline of the assembly at Toronto for the last three days; subject to the discipline of the House of God as expressed in the assembly of Toronto of which for the time being we form part.

B.C.G.— In connection with that, then, if we had presented something here that the brethren were assured was a very evil thing, and they protested against it, and we still held to it, then the next thing, inasmuch as the order of the Church of God is but one, there should at once be an appeal made from us to those we came from. Why? because they are responsible — they sent us in a sense, or commended us; so that would stop any such mischievous notion as that we should deal with evil short and sharp and cut people off before those they came from have a full opportunity to identify themselves with the matter. If you are right in taking us up for something we have presented here, then the brethren, in deference to them should have an opportunity to act with you in all that is done.

F.J.E.— In connection with the circle of fellowship, would you say now that in view of the failure that has come in amongst those professing to be and actually gathered out to the name of the Lord, that that "circle of fellowship" is confined to those who are holding to the truth of God as it was accepted when the movement first took place?

B.C.G.— Certainly.

F.J.E.— That is to say, to take ourselves, for instance: Is it not confined to that "circle of fellowship" apart from other companies of those who are called brethren?

S.R.— Certainly. We cannot vouch for other people maintaining that which we do not know they are maintaining.

F.J.E.— If that is the case, we would say we are in the "circle of fellowship" on what ground? For what reason?

S.R.— To maintain the truth which we find in the Scriptures.

F.J.E.— Then that practically condemns the other circles.

S.R.— It does, unquestionably, brethren, and I do not believe we ought to have the slightest hesitation in saying that we are where we are by conviction, and that by God's grace we maintain in love and lowliness, but with all firmness, our separate position as gathered to the Lord's name in subjection to His word, and that we look on our dear brethren in the sects, and on our dear brethren who are not but who are practically forming sections in that way, we look on them all alike; we test them all by the word of God. Some have more truth; some have less truth, but none of them, for one reason and another — none of them can have that which commends them to us as being on the ground of God's word simply and only. The only way we can leave the ground we occupy is by conviction that it is wrong and unscriptural. That is the only upright and conscientious way that we can change our position — that it is not according to God, and take a position that is according to God, whether it be with some other company or if we have to stand alone.

W.McC.— There are some today who have the thought that the corporate testimony is gone, and that there is nothing remaining for Christians now, but individual Christian testimony. They do not set themselves — they do not intend to endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace; they do not recognize that there is any more responsibility, or at least that there is any more possibility of the children of God — the members of the body of Christ gathering together as such, and maintaining together the unity of the Spirit in the uniting bond of peace; they have given up that idea. They have expressed it in words like this: "Oh, your theory of the one body is exploded," and they point to the numerous defects among us to prove it. But that does not prove that we are cleared from the responsibility of still obeying the fourth chapter of Ephesians; that does not change the fact that God had made of twain one new man, so making peace, that He has joined Jews and Gentiles together by the baptism of the Spirit into one body. That fact remains, and will remain until Christ takes the Church out of the world, but as long as it does remain, we, as individuals are responsible to endeavor, collectively — every individual that sees the truth, is responsible with every other individual who sees the truth, to maintain that truth, to walk together in the uniting bond of peace. Ignoring this, many give up this endeavor — the endeavor which should arise from a firm belief of the truth as to this.

B.C.G.— That is a most mischievous notion; it is wider spread than we have any idea of.

S.R.— And it shows really that they have had their eyes on their fellow-brethren instead of on the Word of God and on the Lord Jesus Christ. They have been looking at one another; and if we have failed, then everything is gone.

F.J.E.— It would be wrong for me then, believing that I am where the truth is, to say to these other circles: Now let us come together; we are all wrong?

S.R.— Certainly. Why should I confess as wrong that which is the truth of God? There may be details which one would be glad to clear up, provided they were not understood as giving up the ground of God's truth.

A.E.B.— Another point as to this. Not only has the Scripture put us in this position, but certain circumstances in connection with our brethren have compelled it. We all know that our hearts' desire is not to be separated from them, but it is because they will not follow the truth, we have been forced into separation from them. And on the other side there are others from whom our hearts' desire is not to be separated but who take unscriptural, sectarian ground. So in that way I think that our consciences are perfectly clear before God as to practice.

F.J.E.— If I believe I am where the truth is, it would not be right for me to go to another company of brethren and say, Now let us get together; we are all wrong, and make a confession and see if we cannot get together again.

S.R.— That is going out to one of the cities. Leaving Jerusalem and going out to Ono. (Neh.6: 2)

B.C.G.— Except we have something to turn to in Scripture to tell us the principles that God established at the beginning have been rendered null and void by any failure of His people, we must go back and see what was that order that God established at the beginning, and we must aim definitely and continuously to carry out that order. We never can buy off from those things, and it is just the devil's trick to get us to excuse ourselves from responsibility and say: "everything is gone; we cannot maintain anything," which is to say that Christ is no longer head of His Church; His word is not sufficient guidance for us in all our pathways here, and the Spirit of God is not competency to obey the will of God. It is a surrender of everything.

S.R.— Speaking of going back reminds me of another thing that is very important. In the movements towards union that have been made, and which have brought such sorrow in some quarters, there has been a distinct refusal to go back to the start of the trouble. If I see aright in Scripture, the only way to get right with God and to get right with one another, is to go back to the root of the thing and judge that. Here is a division, for instance, which took place many years ago. They plead the statute of limitations and say, That happened fifty years ago; what do we know about it? Let us take things as we find them now. Here is a company of saints; they love the Lord Jesus, and their walk is right. Well, beloved, how about fifty years ago? If they love the Lord Jesus, and if their walk is right, is it such a hard thing to walk back fifty years with the Word of God in our hand, and say: Here was something said: here was a principle adopted that was contrary to the word of God, and it was wrong? We go back 6000 years. We take our Bibles and turn to to the first part of Genesis, and we say Adam and Eve sinned. We have no hesitation in saying this thing. Somebody might say: That happened 6000 years ago; what difference does that make? It is just as fresh to-day as it was then. And so a principle adopted fifty years ago and acted upon as the principle of fellowship amongst Christians is just as fresh to-day, and has got to be judged. If it is a right principle, dear brethren, you and l have got to go back those fifty years and confess before God our wrong in resisting that principle. If it is unscriptural, our brethren, no matter how dear they may be as children of God, no matter how nice their companies may appear, they must go back and judge that principle too, or there can be no godly basis of fellowship.

B.C.G.— We have definite Scripture as to that: the apostle speaks of some who walk in the way of Cain; so, though Cain is dead and gone, his ways are here yet. And the Lord tells the people who are rejecting Him, in the eleventh of Luke, forty-ninth verse. "Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute; that the blood of the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, it shall be required of this generation." The point which is of great value there, is this; that there was a people who never shed Abel's blood, who are charged with it; there were people who never shed the blood of Zacharias, but they were held accountable for it. Why? Because they identified themselves with the people who did it; We cannot get out of it; this principle of association is one of the most serious things possible, and if we learn it well and deeply it will root us out of things which people are so utterly careless about now. I give you one good example. When we were remonstrating with a brother whom we heard was associated with the Free Masons, and he said he was not much of a Mason — he scarcely ever went; just kept his name on the books by paying up his dues once in a while — we followed him up by this: that if he was a Mason at all, he ought to be a good Mason. It is a good thing for a man to be zealously affected in a good thing, and if it is a good thing he ought to get his brethren to join too. We would like to belong to a good thing. We sought to show him that he was identified before God with what Masonry was in God's sight. We said, Now, we will give you time to consider it duly, but if the Scripture says; "Love the Brotherhood," that shuts out every brotherhood but one; there is only one to which the definite article is applied, and that is the Brotherhood of the people of God; these are the devices of the enemy, for God is an exclusive God and says, I am God and there is none else. The brotherhood of His people is an exclusive brotherhood which shuts all other brotherhoods. Thank God, the dear man, after a good deal of exercise, decided to withdraw entirely from Masonry. Another way the devil has of holding a Christian is because he has insured his life, and has paid out a good deal of money to a society and he wants to get his money's worth.

Let us carefully discriminate. Supposing we say that is an unequal yoke; but it is an unequal yoke of a very serious nature. Here is another man who thinks he sees what a terrible curse intemperance is, and he sees the misery that it brings, and so on, and believing he is here partly to set the world right, he goes in with others in a temperance movement. It would be very ill-used judgment, and not weighing things properly to put those things down side by side as of equal gravity; while both are unequal yokes. Free Masonry is not only an unequal yoke, but it has most serious things attached to it, and we have to discriminate as to it.

S.R.— As to the principle involved, we must remember that each case has its details which render it distinct. We must take into account that discipline is by the priests, as you might say, and that, by the way, includes all the assembly; not the brothers only. The brothers may be the Levites and have their meeting, and get things in order so that the priests may examine the case and decide upon it, but the brothers alone do not settle cases of discipline. It requires communion with God, and discernment, which comes from communion with God, of the state of soul. But you see in the plague of leprosy there were all kinds of things; there was a freckle; there was a bald head; there was a boil — there were such things. There were things that speak of mere natural infirmities or the ebulition of nature which do not represent the deep root of leprosy or association with leprosy; so we have to use wisdom and discernment, and as our brother has pointed out, give the brother who is entangled in these things time, and let him understand that we are not standing with a pistol pointed at him, and counting, so to speak; — we are to give him time in that way, and have our arms about him and helping him out of the thing.

I would not say that life insurance was an immoral thing; I would say it was a distinct lack of faith. It shows a state of soul, but it is not exactly an unequal yoke with unbelievers; and being a question of faith, we cannot give people faith, but we can exhort them and counsel them; that is all. But in the case of the Christian identified with Free Masonry, we could not put it on that ground. That is a question of obedience and not of faith.

F.J.E.— There are many who join Free Masonry for the benefits that their wives and children may get, and themselves too.

S.R.— There are two distinct errors there. We must sympathize with one another in a want of faith, but not sympathize with each other in direct disobedience. A man might be tempted to insure his life, and we could ask God to encourage his faith; but if he associates himself with Free Masonry, put things before him showing him the extreme gravity of one in distinction to the other. Things are going to become more and more difficult.

It is the question of association that is the far graver question. And there is another thing about association that reaches a little more widely than that even; and that is that association by one who is clear individually with those who are not clear, which is worse than the association of a person who is not clear. For instance, if I, knowing the truth of God, associate with those, we will say, who are Unitarians, I am far worse than if one ignorant were to associate with Unitarians. One might say, These are nice people, and I do not accept their heretical doctrine of annihilation or whatever it might be; I repudiate that. Then I say to such a person, you are a great deal worse than a person who is blinded. You are in the thing with your eyes open. And so, personal clearness, if it is associated with evil, is worse than blindness associated with evil. So, when they say — We received this person as an individual; he is personally clear. I say, What? personally clear and yet associated with evil? What is his moral state, then?

B.C.G.— Some would like scriptures to look up, possibly. As we cannot consider them all this morning, and as this is a very important thing, and far reaching in its consequences, I would like to call your attention to two or three which you can easily remember. The thirteenth of Deuteronomy, and just note very briefly the points in it. It points really to a false prophet. That you could mark in ver. 1.

S.R.— One interruption at the beginning. It is frequently said: We object to this use of Old Testament Scriptures for New Testament saints. The apostles trod on this ground themselves. When the apostle was establishing an order amongst the Corinthians, speaking of the maintenance of God's servants there, he goes to the Old Testament for several Scriptures to prove it; and inasmuch as God has laid down there principles for the maintenance of what is due to His Name in connection with His people, those principles are never altered or changed in any dispensation. If you cannot find the same thing in the New Testament, it would be folly to go to the Old Testament for it. And that is exactly how the apostles did themselves, and we cannot teach any better. Is not the Old Testament the book of divine government just as the New Testament is the book of divine grace? I mean broadly speaking. And so when you get the principles of government you will find they are the same from Eden down to the pearly gates of Heaven itself. Government is always the same.

A.E.B.— Only they become clearer with revelation. The fifth Book, Deuteronomy, is the book of divine government — not simply law — law is part of it — so you go through the whole Book, and it is the book that opens up the government of God in a marvelous way.

B.C.G.— Here we have now amongst a number of other laws, we might say, principles which some reject and say: Some of these laws have passed away. But no moral principle ever passes away. It is true, that prohibition as to eating certain things which were ceremonially unclean, have passed away, but the underlying principles have not. We are to eat to the glory of God. Just as in this chapter, the first verse is their relation to the prophet, and they were not to listen to him, for he leads them away from God.

The sixth verse is their relation to a brother. The prophet in the Old Testament answering to the teacher in the New; the brother in the Old Testament answering to the brother in the New.

The twelfth verse: "If thou hear say in one of thy cities." And a city in the Old Testament would answer to a company — a shut in company of God's people in the New. A city had walls, and just as a city had walls so the assembly has its bounds, and the people outside are not in. That is sufficient. You can look it up with care; I take it they are easily remembered. The thirteenth of Deuteronomy is a sample case of how God called His people to refuse false testimony; not to go on in fellowship with one disowning His name, and that the same rule existing between brother and brother existed between city and city.

S.R.— In connection with the city, we might add 2 Sam. 20 from the sixteenth verse. You have one wrong doer in a city who embroils the whole city. The whole city is responsible for the presence of one wrong doer, and unless he is judged, the people of God must be against that whole city. From the sixteenth to the twenty-second verse. The whole tribe of Benjamin in the book of Judges were all guilty on account of evil-doers allowed among them.

B.C.G.— There is the principle announced in the thirteenth of Deuteronomy; the application is given in that chapter of 2 Samuel. In the thirteenth of 1 Kings we have this lesson emphasized for us in connection with the division. This is important. A division among the people of Israel, between the ten tribes and the two, and how God chose a servant of His who was in Judah — a man of God out of Judah to go down to Bethel to bear testimony against an altar there which was associated with idolatry. How was he to go? Sent by God, he was to go and bear his testimony against it, and then his practice must be like his testimony; what he said must be like what be did. See how serious the charge was. Eat no bread and drink no water there, nor come back by the way you went. Three pointed things: he was not to get any strength there; eat no bread. He was not to be refreshed there, and he was not to come back upon the same track, which would look as if he made a mistake in going there. He must come back another way. He goes and delivers the testimony faithfully, and when the king tempts him with great reward to come into his house, he says, openly and frankly, in the eighth verse — "If thou give me half thine house I will not go with thee, neither will I eat bread nor drink water in this place." He holds definitely to his original orders. I will do what I am told. And see how he was holding — "For so it was charged me by the word of the Lord, saying: Eat no bread nor drink water nor turn again by the way that thou camest." But now, the next thing we see an old prophet of Bethel finds out what has happened and goes out to him and tells him an angel has told him to go and get him back. Meantime the Lord's word seems to have weakened in this man's soul. He does not say as he said to the king, "I will not," but "I may not return with thee nor go in with thee" (ver.16). And he does not say, "It was charged me by the word of the Lord," but he says, "It was said to me." Now there is something in that. In the first case he realized under the solemn charge how he must not deviate a hair's breadth from it. In the second case that does not seem to have the same hold upon his soul and he goes back and dies under the judgment of God. And the eighteenth verse, "The old prophet said unto him I am a prophet also as thou art, and an angel has spoken to me by the word of the Lord, saying, Bring him back with thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water; but he lied unto him." He said he was a prophet too. I am like you — I am just like you; but then it was an angel only that spoke to him, so he said. Paul says: "Though we, or an angel from heaven." Not an angel — but the Word of God. The written Word of God is better than all the prophets' and all the angels or anything else it is just the simple Word of God. We must not trust an angel, against the Divine testimony. How careful we need to be as to all the commands of God. "Barnabas was carried away by their dissimulation." He thought a good deal of Peter, and when Peter just goes wrong, the whole thing was gone, if it had not been that the apostle Paul stood for God. Barnabas was carried away, so we have got to guard against those who are near and dear to us. If they do go wrong, we have got to keep to God's word.

S.R.— To not eat bread and all that, applies in many ways. People are put away from the Lord's table. If we have the truth as to the Lord's table, we know, that includes the whole life. But if putting away from the Lord's table means merely putting away from eating bread on Lord's day morning, that is not being put away at all. "Put away from among yourselves," is what the apostle says, "the wicked person." As to companies of the Lord's dear people, of course, they are not wicked persons, let us remember that; and God will never go with us in using stronger language than He does. Let us never do that. Let us treat in all love, in tenderness and compassion, those with whom we cannot be identified; but notice, "Not to eat bread there." Of course, that would be, primarily, not to break bread. We could not go and break bread with a company that is not clear. So we can only go and bear our testimony and then come back. As our brother said, not treading the same path twice even, — not making it an accustomed thing even, — just to go around and come back — just to circle through as bearing witness against a thing, in love, tenderness and in meekness, seeking to deliver souls, but not going on with their course.

Our Path and our Associations

Our Path and our Associations.

2 Timothy 2: 20-22.

F. W. Grant.

It is a very simple, and yet a very important thing, to realise that the path for each of us must be an individual one. Many may, in fact, be in company with us, but to be right it must be the identity of the path that brings us together, not in any wise the desire of companionship, save with One alone. If others walk with Him, then we shall be together; but this is not, and must not be, ever what makes the path for us; this must be before God, and with God alone.

It should be needless to insist upon it, but doctrine and practice, alas! may be widely asunder; and conscience may be at a much lower level than the theory (for it is then really that) of which we have got hold.

And there will be a great many delicate points to consider, which nothing but real nearness to God will enable us to have settled; for are we not members of Christ's body together, and not mere individuals? and does not this impose limits on the individuality of the path? Here we must answer, No; in no wise. It is by the careful preservation of our individuality alone that the church's welfare can be realised and maintained.

But our dissociations and associations are both prescribed for us in the text which heads this paper; and that in full view of the disorder which so soon came in and disfigured, and has never ceased to disfigure, the church of God on earth, while it has made the path of the true saint only more manifestly individual, as this scripture (speaks it. For if "in a great house" such as Christendom has now become) "there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour;" it results that only "if a man purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified and meet for the Master's use, and prepared unto every good work." Thus our associations, of which it is the fashion of the day to think so lightly, are put in the forefront here, as affecting our own spiritual condition and fitness for being used of God. There may be, and are, vessels to honour, which are mixed up with the vessels to dishonour, as we know, but you cannot say, according to this scripture (and "scripture cannot be broken"), that they are "sanctified and meet for the Master's use" while in such a condition. Sovereignly he may of course use them, as He can use a vessel to dishonour even, if He will; but that is a totally different thing.

Who can say, then, that a man's own condition may be godly, while in open-eyed association with ungodliness around? The second Epistle of John is no plainer than the second Epistle to Timothy is here. Both say we are responsible for, and partakers of, the sins of others, with whom we knowingly associate ourselves. Concord between Christ and Belial there cannot be — this will be granted. Then for half-hearted following, which would in effect unite them, toleration there cannot be. The fiftieth link with evil is as real an one as the first; and to maintain our link of fellowship with Christ, we must refuse the fiftieth as we would refuse the first. Dissociation is the first thing here enjoined, that we may be free to walk in that individual path with God to which the Apostle is here exhorting.

Now as to association on the other side, "Follow righteousness, faith, love, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart." How are we to find these? How are we to test the heart? Why, by their ways. And I find my companions as I walk myself in the path of righteousness, and faith, and love, and peace, to which I am called. Suppose I wanted to find the people going by a certain train to the next town, what more simple than to put myself in the train? Ourselves upon the road, we find the people that are upon the road, and it is the only practical way. The individuality of my path is preserved with distinctness, and that path it is which governs my associations, not my associations the path.

Now what am I to follow, if I may not follow people? I am to "follow righteousness, faith, love, peace." Leaders I may own, and rightly if, and only as, they can show me that the path they lead in has these marks. But I must be shown the marks or refuse the path, no matter what else may commend it to me. Nor will it do to take counsel with humility, and walk by the judgment of others, when God is bidding us hearken to His Word.

Now for the marks: the first is "righteousness." Here, as it is our own path that is in question, we cannot be too rigorously exact. We are under grace, blessed be God, is to our relationship with Him, and to be witnesses of that grace to others, but wherever our own path is in question it is no matter of grace at all; the first and peremptory demand we must make upon ourselves is, is it righteous? This will be as far as possible from leading to hardness as to others; for even from this side of righteousness we must take them into account. Exaction is not this, but its opposite. On the other hand, no real love to others will ever lead me to put my foot down there where I cannot be sure it is of God, or according to Him. "By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments." It must not even be doubtful if we are keeping His commandments; to doubt and do is to make light at least of disobedience; and if we should thus stumble, even in the right path, we should not ourselves be rightly on it.

We are to judge our own ways. If in this the judgment of others becomes necessary, the necessity is its sufficient justification. "Do not ye judge them that are within? But them that are without God judgeth; wherefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.

He was among themselves, and being among them their association with him gave sanction to his wickedness. Toleration was thus unrighteousness in them, and even to eat a common meal with such was this.

Righteousness is then the first requisite here, and the severity we have to exercise is upon ourselves rather than others. If it be really upon others we are sitting in judgment, we are not really righteous according to the standard of the kingdom of heaven I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow servant, even as I had pity on thee?"

Righteousness being secured, there is still further question. Not every righteous way is a way of "faith." Here then the path becomes still further narrowed. "Faith" supposes a having to do with God as a living God; with Christ the Shepherd of the sheep as a living Guide. It supposes, not a "king's highway," such as Israel might have had in passing through the land of Edom (Num. 20), but that trackless desert path which was God's choice rather for them; there where the pillar led, fire by night and cloud by day, that they might go, independent of nature, by day or by night.

A righteous path merely may, after all, be of the nature of the "fold," a hemming between certain limits, outside of which I may not be, but within which I may do my own will. A path of faith is a path which I recognise as God's for me, not my will any longer, save as following His. This makes it, looking from one point of view, as narrow as it can be. For as there can be but one step at any time, which He really has for me to take — one and no other — there is no permission for self-acting for a single moment. This for the legalist would be intolerable legality. Only grace can make it as broad a way as it is safe; for it is always broad enough for another to walk with us, whose presence is all for strength, for comfort, for satisfaction; and our own will means sorrow, defilement, and the ditch. Think of a way which eternal Wisdom has taken counsel of, eternal Love to mark out for us! Think of the eye of love never withdrawing its tender interest in the path we take! Would we desire it? Are we wiser, better, or more careful for ourselves, than He who counts every hair of our heads?

Yet a path of faith is just the one for plenty of exercise and searching of heart. It is one as to which more seldom than we think can one pronounce for another, and when the need for spirituality is absolute and necessary. "The spiritual man discerneth all things." He "discerns." It is not internal feeling or blind impulse which controls, but the knowledge of one whose mind and ways of thought are formed by the word, and who is in the presence of God, so as to be guided by His eye. This guidance infers present nearness and knowledge of Himself — the instruction of the word; but where the soul waits upon God, and occupies itself with Him, so as to see and interpret every look of His.

Faith then requires God's word to justify it, in a path whence self-will is absolutely excluded. It thus guards the "love," of which the Apostle next speaks, from being taken for the "liberality," so miscalled such on every hand. True love finds within the sphere which the word thus marks out for it, its amply sufficient field of exercise. "Seeking not its own," it teaches no soul to do its own will, or to show large-heartedness by setting aside, even for a moment, its Master's constant claim. It supposes no possible accomplishment of good to others by swerving from the good and the right way oneself; and this whether it be in one line of things or in another; "faith" having taught it, there is, and can be, no matter of "ecclesiastical policy," if you will, or anything else which affects His people in any way which He, who his thought of the covering of a woman's head, has not thought of and provided for. To swerve from His mind by way of accommodation to others, or for whatever purpose, would be but the unseemly "liberality" of a servant in things that appertain to his master — not liberality, but carelessness or worse.

Righteousness and faith however being maintained as to our course personally, "love" is next surely to be followed — safely under these conditions. Our hearts are to embrace not only the brethren, still less only those whom we find walking on the path with ourselves, but, as in "fellowship with the gospel," all men. There is nothing however in which we are so apt to make mistake as we are with regard to "love:" there are so many and subtle imitations. We like people who please us — who minister to our selfish gratification, and we call that "love." And if these are the people of God, this may help still more effectually to deceive us. How often does this kind of feeling betray itself by fermenting, on occasion given, into the most thorough animosity! True love, seeking not its is own, holds fast its objects with a pertinacity of grasp which never falls: "having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end." We may be forced to separation, forced to walk alone, forced to judge and condemn the ways of those whom nevertheless we cling to before God with desire which will not admit of giving them up even for a moment. Thus if judgment be passed, it will be expressed as the Apostle, "even weeping:" truest and most solemn judgment, where it is not that of an enemy but of a friend; and blessed they, who in the spirit of mourners find themselves thus in company with the "Man of sorrows."

We must be content here to point out the order, and the meaning of the order, in which "love" occurs in connection with our path. It does not form this (divine love has formed it for us, not our own): it is the spirit which is to animate us rather in the path — not the rails, but the motive power — and here, of course, love to God first, as that from which all other springs.

"Peace" closes the catalogue. It is the necessary issue to which all this tends. "The fruit of righteousness is peace." While love seeks the peace of the objects of it, and satisfies itself with what it finds in blessing for them. Every way peace is reached; and only here as the end of the rest — guarded and defined by what precedes it — can it be true or safe as an object to be sought after. Here it comes in seemly order and due place. May God grant us more attainment of it, such as it is here presented.